skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That randomly drop, fits pretty well with some old advice to occasionally try something REALLY different, if only as a hobby or on a vacation, to help keep yourself flexible.
It doesn't always work. The city of Napoli in Italy also has its own system of "informal system of personal contacts and bribes" to get things done: yes, the Mafia controls garbage collection there, and for some time it looked like this:

http://images.google.com.au/images?q=Napoli+garbage

Market needs accountability and transparency. Bring the transactions to the surface and let the offers compete.
Isn't Amazon already the Wal-Mart of the web? If it isn't, who is? Exactly.
The actual algorithms wouldn't be useful, but the general idea of a "field" with a lot of local optima that you have to choose between or navigate around is a useful visualization to help you think about where you are going versus where you want to be going.
Feel safe if you're redirected to the twitter page to login, for that is OAuth.
In Michael Lewis' "The New New Thing", he describes how Jim Clarke, Netscape co-founder was up at 3AM scribbling math equations on how his mega-yacht could have a convincing CG nautical compass. The book has a picture of this crumpled napkin, which is fascinating.
It does provide liquidity.
Arrogance and greed will be the ruination of man, and the answer to your question is, "Yes, it would matter." I feel pity for someone who could be so out of touch from the world in which he or she came. There's much, much more to the world than humanity. Do yourself a favor: step away from your computer today and find some of it.
Yahoo Meme - Will it overtake Twitter ?
Yes, an email address to answer a frivolous online poll is pretty extreme.
Pittsburgh paper launches online charging scheme
There are loads. They want lots of money, no management bullshit, and respect - otherwise they'll just go do their own thing.
I don't consider myself experienced enough to give anybody advice on startups, but it seems to me that programmers should pick up non-CS skill-sets. That way, two things may happen.
- Your startup won't be a clone of about 500 other startups.
- You will be solving real-world problems for sectors who don't receive the attention of most programmers.

In other words, follow Octopart's lead.

I know this wasn't a review of your startup, I just don't think this survey idea has any viability anymore.
The pigs used to eat tons of organic waste. Now the pigs are gone and the rotting food piles up on the streets of middle-class neighborhoods like Heliopolis and in the poor streets of communities like Imbaba.

Um, when pigs eat organic waste, don't they usually produce other "organic waste"? Where did all of that go before?
Sending mail in aspnet
> I feel pity for someone who could be so out of touch from the world in which he or she came. There's much, much more to the world than humanity.

Right, but is there inherent value in the world outside of the subjective human standard? Like, is the world valuable beyond what people judge it to be valuable?

That's not such an easy question. Like, is turning a tree into some books a good thing? Trees are natural, books are not. Pumping oil out of the ground, burning it for electricity? This destroys the world, but enriches minds and saves human lives, and advances pursuits we deem valuable.

How about viruses - they're natural. Should we leave malaria and dysentery alone because they're natural? I say wipe them out, but you could carry that same logic into suggesting that we should chop down trees to build houses and print books, that we should burn fossil fuels for electricity and to create composites, that we should level areas of nature for the building of cities...

And mind you, I love nature. I spend a lot of time in it, and really love it. I consider myself a conservationist and hate wasting stuff. But that's because the world is good to us, and serves us. The parts of the world that are hostile to us - rabid animals, parasites, diseases - wipe all that stuff out. And the resources that can be converted into wonderful things we use - electricity, composites, circuits, computers, houses, transportation, and so on - well, convert it. I'll happily turn a gallon of oil into a few hours of electricity and some CO2.

Everything we judge "good" about the natural world is judged so because of our human standards, and because of how it relates and interacts with humanity. Without humanity, nature would not be good or bad by human standards. Trees and tapeworms and oil and rocks and water and ice are all of the exact same value to humanity if humanity doesn't exist, and if humanity does exist, those things are all of quite different values to us.
Background compilers do not need to perform heavy optimiztion, so can skip a lot of time consuming steps.
It looked pretty terrible to me. Um, congratulations on making a polling web site I guess??
What does the world think? Survey your friends, colleagues, customers and millions of Twitter users!

Sounds like a sales pitch, not a slogan. It's also too long. Just a thought.

Simply 'What does the world think?' might be better.
er, how does this data correlate to Maps?
Well, perhaps because some might be more interested in say digging in Egypt to undercover archaeological sites, or maybe they interested in being a doctor, or perhaps a lawyer, or maybe they would rather do research on how they can make machines think, or a million of other things which have not much to do with starting your own business, to start with anyway.

So will you now tell me why they should start a business instead?
I can understand why you might want people to enter an email address (for validation/more authentic results etc...) and if you're going to take that approach you sell it to your audience - tell them what the benefits are.

Also say that the email address requires validation. I put in a fake address and of-course my vote didn't get counted. If I knew up-front it was to be validated I probably would have entered a correct one.

Having said all that I don't agree with email validation. It doesn't ensure unique votes. Can you explain why you choose it?
I hate this "rockstar coder" thing. Whenever I see a job offer where they're looking for a "rockstar coder" I'm automatically repulsed, I always think the company is run by 2x year old fanboys who believe everything they read.

Who describes themselves as a "rockstar coder"? If you're young and realistic about it, you can't have enough experience to tell. Most good experienced programmers I know are modest people and would never describe themselves as "rockstars" and would never apply to such an offer.

This seems to be a way to get "arrogant coders" to apply...
Ahhhh - I knew something was off when it said that 24% of HN visits were from females. There was a recent popular poll on here about demographics that had something like 96% male.
Also some of your buttons perform JavaScript operations, some load new pages - with the same design and sitting next to each other. It's always best to be consistent and have some sort of icon or UI element to define which actions keep you on the same page.
Yet Apple like their "I'm a Mac; I'm a PC" stuff.
Yeah, that was probably who I was thinking of. Thanks for the link.
If you're looking to hire a good programmer, think of what good means to you and what specific skills your project needs and write them down. Writing "rockstar programmer wanted" is a hint that you can't even do that (instead you're pushing hype-speak), which sets off alarm bells. Also, at the end of the offer you can write something like: if this sounds interesting to you but you don't exactly fit the bill, you can still apply, but also attach an explanation why you're interested and why we should be interested in you.
Isn't that more like "the web of Wal-Mart"?
Well, one could measure Newsweek (5.95) versus New Yorker (4.99), and I think that if you ignore tabloids and very glossy magazines most news have the same price.
it's presented in 2d, so one would want a decent 2d user interface. the existing one (on that site) works well enough for me though.
Interestingly, one of the main criticisms I originally received was that you could vote without providing an email address!
Lots of mailboxes, and not just at apartment buildings, already have dropboxes: http://www.mailboxworks.com/AF_Outdoor_Parcel_Locker.html

You don't really need one for every room because not everybody is going to get a delivery every day. One for every 10 rooms would be enough most of the time.
They're both right, they're both wrong.

It hurts so much to see a sloppy reprisal too, which is why I must now attempt to make a sloppy one too.

In my mind this is the bit we need to be conscious of: Content has value, but the distribution method sets the price.

And that is why both slightly miss the point in my mind.

If we look at music (because it's a simple model with many distribution methods which helps create clear comparisons) we have this:

* A ring tone: £4.50 (ringtones-direct.com), midi file of 10 seconds.

* A CD album: £16.49 (HMV), average 10 tracks, £1.65 per track, full CD quality.

* A CD single: £1.99 (Tesco, if you can find singles), average 2 tracks, £1 per track, full CD quality.

* iTunes: £0.79 per track (lossy).

* MP3 .torrent: £0.00 per track (lossy).

* FLAC .torrent: £0.00 per track, full CD quality.

The content has value in all formats, but the highest price is associated to the format in which the distribution is most directly controlled (phones, ring tones, and the DRM scheme on some phones which force the use of a DRM signed audio file), amusingly it's also the lowest quality representation of the content.

As the control over the distribution fades the price plummets until we reach bittorrents and the people doing the distribution where the price is zero, although clearly value is still there as it wouldn't be downloaded otherwise.

What neither argument made was the distinction that the price is set by the format and distribution and not by the content. The content has value, that is undeniable, but value != price and that is what so many find hard to resolve.

The NYT is widely distributed and tends to have a lower price than the Economist, which is still widely distributed but less so and has a higher price. Specialist journals distributed as part of memberships to societys have a very high price.

When I look at price, it's not the # of words that determines the price, it's nearly always the format and distribution method. The more control that can be exerted by the content owners, the higher they are able to set the price.

Disclaimer: I always write these things feeling agog at what I've read... I have not researched things specifically and have not published any papers to back up these assertions. Take them with a pinch of meh.
David, what particularly did you like about AOLserver?
Think of the pigs as lettuce->manure converters.
I agree that email validation is flawed in terms of ensuring uniqueness, so this is something I may drop and insist users create an account. One thing I have considered in the mean time is allowing registered users to hide non-signed in participants.
Do you think he's just trolling with the first comment about exclamation points?
I generally agree with you, however, from memory, I recall pg saying that entering a crowded market isn't necessarily a move that should be avoided. I think there's plenty of opportunities to beat established web sites by providing better solutions.
Shell script to enable Remote desktop on ubuntu
That'd be better. Make the default action when voting "vote as anonymous, unless logged in", and upgrade that anonymous vote to a registered one if the user decides to register after voting.

Also, having an account is not ensuring uniqueness either.
Is that hard to go to the Preferences menu to enable it? Ugh.
Good point. The business model for this site is to help small businesses survey their customers and employees which needs to be the focus for promo material like tag lines, FAQ etc. The objective is to grow a paying user base who survey people with little insentive to spoof their responses (like voting multiple times), which negates some criticism like 'why would anyone provide an email for a frivolous poll'.
Mobilink and Telenor, Thieves and Thugs
phdcomics is funny, but not if you're phd student =)
Project ‘Gaydar’: An MIT experiment raises new questions about online privacy
Looking at the exception log, this appears to have happened was when you tried to vote without providing an email address? I can't reproduce the error but will investigate further.
I mean that materials are theoretically cheaper because of the low exchange rate, and so is labour.
You are being pretty sloppy.

If you go to an actual bookstore (or library) and look at newsstand prices for, eg, Canteen or Dwell or Parabola or Foreign Affairs or New Left Review or Ampersand or 34th Parallel (or god forbid Science + Nature) and so on you'd have a harder time arriving at such a neat relationship.

Now, if you grouped by "content niche" and analyzed each niche separately you might find in some niches (like "news", specifically) a clean relationship like what you proposed.
Two reasons why the C64 was even better:

1. Us poor folks could afford one.

2. Everything the Apple IIe did, the C64 did better. Better games, better high res graphics modes, dramatically better sound, and more software (because it was cheap, it sold more units, bigger market share, more third party applications).

Bonus reason: The case was a third the size of the Apple IIe, making it much easier to haul over to friends houses.
Really Handy Visual Studio Open Source Plugins at Sourceforge
And it does not really matter anyway. You pay for most newspaper and magazines by looking at the advertisements, the kiosk price is just a way to keep up the quality of the audience (and the appearance of quality of the paper) so that advertisers will pay more.
Everyone that I know who is happy knows that:

Happiness is a choice you make every day.
Based on your description of the Apple IIe, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum was better still. Better high res graphics, similar sound capabilities (on the 128k model) and more software (at least in the UK).

Bonus reason: The spectrum was a fraction of the size of an AppleIIe, about the size of a small book. But the rubber keys did suck.
Does anyone have any idea on how "hard" it is to create software? The toll on a person who is "tearing it up", without break, for a year. Oh, and not for their direct benefit?

You are seeking a person in the upper percentile of intelligence, fluent in a specialized skill set and asking them to pull off some solo Death March that should require 5-10 people minimum, and for what, to be the "coder" while the idea man is running around with half-cent business cards with CEO in front of their name.

Assume this person _is_ this smart, maybe even smarter than you, most likely he too has realized its easier to be the idea man than to be the guy who has to do all the work.

Ergo the world is stuffed with idea men and suffers a dearth of doers.
This is perhaps less impressive than you would think. Watch some mathematical slight of hand: suppose for the sake of argument that 1% of Facebook has Dark Secret X and you have a DSXdar program which is 99% accurate.

Your program will, out of a sample of 100,000 Facebookers, identify 1,980 people as being DSX. Half of them (99% of 1,000 = 990) have DSX. Half of them (1% of 99,000 = 990) are not actually DSX.

The math is much more favorable for oracle programs which look for traits which are evenly split in the population. This is one reason why "An AI which reads your work and guesses your gender" works so amazingly well as a tech demo. (That program exists, incidentally, and is better than 80% accurate.) However, even supposing there were sufficient cues in a person's writing to tell whether they were e.g. left handed or not in the same fashion, a similar Oracle Of Lefties would be almost useless because you'd get too many misclassified righties in with your identified lefties.

On a related note, this is why a) you are not particularly recommended to get an HIV test if you're not at risk for AIDS and b) the first thing that will happen after an HIV+ result is scheduling another test.

On a totally different note, much of the worries of privacy experts with regards to Gaydar and similar programs don't require the AI to be functional to come to pass. "My sophisticated computer analysis says you're 83% likely to be a child molester." If you're already under suspicion, folks will not ordinarily say "Wait a second, lets see the study showing that this, in fact, actually works." They'll simply take the "expert"'s word at face value.

(See, for example, computer models of global warming. The big black box will spit out any answer you want from it -- want the answer that global warming is no problem at all? Turn off the "Assume that water vapor evaporation causes a vicious warming cycle" and, bam, you can crank your smokestack slider to the max and not have any problems. Yet folks don't routinely consider that prior to saying that "Global warming is a fact -- the UN reported that the scientists proved it.")
By "programmer", he apparently means "novice Windows programmer". I'm slightly offended.
Neat, apart from all the factual errors. Barn roofs being long gone after ten years? Garden vegetables "reverting to wild strains" after twenty years? Unlikely.
I think it's an honest comment. Uncalled-for exclamation marks really start grating on the eyes after a while.
Probably. Even more with the second comment (about double negatives).
Investors can be worse. Take the average public shareholder, they do nothing except hold the equity that was once created a long time ago. It's all about the money. "He who has the gold makes the rules." It shouldn't be like that, but that's way it can pan out.
RE All the talk of loaning/giving money to family/friends should one suddenly find themselves rich:

I have a long history of being a bleeding heart. I also come from an environment where "throwing money at the problem" is kind of the default mental model. So I've spent lots of time fantasizing about how I would improve the world/help people around me should I suddenly have money. Over the years, I have concluded that financial problems grow out of real problems, so in most cases just throwing money at the problem actually hurts a person's ability to solve the underlying real problem. If someone is convinced that "The Problem" is how much money they owe and you pay off their debts, it lets them off the hook for wondering if there is something about their lives they should change. (And in many cases, those debts will quickly pile up again because the cause of the debts was not resolved. My recollection is that about 2/3s of people who win the lottery are bankrupt 5 years later.)

For intractable personal problems, the odds are very good that the person with this intractable problem is very resistant to change and/or the problem itself is inherently difficult to overcome. In both cases, an easy way out of a portion of the consequences tends to undermine any hope they will buckle down and do the hard task of making the necessary changes. Also, paying off someone's debts inherently contains a judgement about how the money should be used. I have concluded that it would be better to just give someone money, no strings attached, no questions ask, no expectations, as a gift. And then not roll one's eyes and such when it isn't used the way one thought it ought to be. I have also concluded that if I want to help people address some serious personal problem, throwing money at the problem is not the way to do it. Some day, I might figure out how making money available could grease the wheels of progress towards a solution without causing all kinds of unintended negative side effects. Should I ever work that out in my mind, I might well found a charity. In the mean, I will share info and try to mind my own business.
Confusing post, your example is how there is not a zero-sum game. No doubt Shaw was talking about futures/options and his experiences with hedging rather than finance in general.
As I recall it, the 128k model of Spectrum didn't launch until the 8-bit era was coming to a close and 16 bit boxes had been out for a few years. The first-gen Spectrum was horrid (1k, worse than chiclet keyboard), though the second gen was acceptable (but not comparable to either of the 64 k machines in question). One could buy a C128D or an Apple IIc by the time the 128k Speccy existed, and those machines were at least comparable, and the Amige and Apple IIgs (or Macintosh) would blow the Speccy away.

Not saying Spectrums weren't awesome (I don't really know; the only one I ever owned was that 1k first-gen model with a 16k expansion; it was miserable), just that you kinda have to compare Apples to...umm...not Apples.

And, of course, the C64 is the bestselling personal computer of all time.

(I should admit that you're arguing with an 11 year old SwellJoe here...I loved my C64. And, crazy as it sounds, I also bought some C64s on eBay over the past few months for use in composing chiptunes. Thus, evidence indicates I might be mentally unstable with regard to the C64. Backing away slowly might be the best option.)
There's a 1960s version and a 1990s version -- probably one node for each
I filled in 'test' for name and got the message: "Name already used with a different email address!" and the results were shown.

Did I vote, or do I have to change the name and try again? What if it was my real name that is already used?
They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction.

Gay people have gay friends? Brilliant! Or did they mean the gender and sex of a persons friends. There's a big fat whopping difference here. One is much more impressive than the other.
It does, so the reasoning would be that if an asset is actively traded that provides an incentive to invest in it because you know there's a place to sell it if you want to.

This seems plausible, but of course, it comes at a cost. Part of that cost is that for smart people it can be more lucrative to trade something than to make something.
Why is it a strict 2D tree instead of a 3D mesh?
Seems odd that work done in 2007 is reported in the popular press in 2009 and yet the results are not available because the authors "are hoping to have it published in a journal." Google turned up nothing but more secondary references that don't mention a publication (http://tinyurl.com/nqy5zm).

If I am mistaken and the paper is available online please post the link (thank you).
Does anyone else remember a company called PollGround from one of the first YC rounds?
Forgot the most important one:

1. Completely open hardware, Apple encouraged hacking.

Contrast that with the iPhone and ... well ... sigh.
How about this for an incentive: The person who keeps himself healthier, reaps the rewards of a healthier life.
I agree he's got the wrong words, I think he is a programmer, but the author is probably writing this from first hand experience. I think he is saying if you're getting a developer to develop a UI for you, you better make sure they're able to design, even a little.

It would be foolish to think all programmers cannot design.
An Apple can be defined as the state-of-the-art PC :) maybe
It's a survey site... it seems to imply that I have to pay people to take my surveys/will get paid to take surveys... but the site gives absolutely no details on how this is supposed to work, or why I might want to do it (the FAQ answers what, not how or why).

The word Twitter also appears a lot, and I can't tell what connection this has to it. Do you have permission to use Twitterific's logo like that? Or even Apple's Mail logo?
Also, they were lettuce -> pork converters :)
Personas | Metropath(ologies) | An installation by Aaron Zinman
Can you cite a source that says walmart.com is using Amazon software? I'm not aware that walmart.com is running on any Amazon software.

PS: I work for Amazon and have a friend that works for walmart.com