skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The higher order unit (e.g. Bee Hive) for the humans is very compelling. But all n-th level units exhibit a pattern that is not immediately evident for the human group unit.

1 - Body. Every unit has a distinct physically cohesive component, that can symbolically be represented as a Circle.

2 - Nucleus. Every body has a distinct Center. (Queen Bee in the Hive.)

3 - Metabolic Network. Every unit is organized through the means of a metabolic network. (Bees use chemical signals.)

So if there is a 'higher' human, we need to identify these characteristic features. Of course, the cyber utopians would (plausibly) propose that it is machine mediation that will (finally) give rise to the higher human unit.

[edit/add: And Mystics, rejecting the black box model of Mind, would argue that meditation and group formation (e.g. Sufis and the Dance) that activates the higher man.]
Here's why the founder (and pg) thought it could thrive:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=801503
When you're forced to act as both infantry and general, sometimes you have to ignore your general duties for short periods of time so you can live long enough to the general again.
The flaw of Gerald Skinner's approach is that he makes an assumption that there is some kind of absolute abstract quality of a soccer team, whereas the quality of a soccer team is defined by their results in a tournament.
I think a group of humans can certainly be regarded as an organism in its own right. I think far too few people take this "new-age" concept of meta- or super-organisms seriously. However, evolution cannot work in the same way on such meta-organisms.

Intelligence and the emergent phenomena it creates (strategic planning, willful competition) will logically overshadow almost everything else in determining group survival for higher organisms.

I suppose one could make a different but related argument that because certain mood disorders seem to be linked to creativity and intelligence, and because those things confer group advantage (in developing competitive strategy), depression might indirectly provide group advantage.
Agreed. I often have to give people my UDID several times ... and then sometimes it still doesn't work.
Paid iPhone Games And Apps For Free Legally
iPhone application DRM is cracked and users actively share cracked iPhone applications and games but now here is something which lets you get paid iPhone games and applications legally for free - the only thing asked in return is that you post a honest review of that application at iTunes store.
Rather single minded response, I'm not sure what you are asking. To spell it out, asking who is paying his salary is to ask a number of questions (I think you've immediately assumed conspiracy):

- If it is the people/government are they getting their money's worth?

- If he's taking backhanders is it corruption?

- If it's neither of these what is the motivation for this sort of justice?

Perhaps I don't understand the make-up of the federal government in the US but it's presumably has to answer to the citizens.
Barry Diller: The Web Won't Be Free Forever (Video)
It's incorrect to assume that their motivations were to give consumers more for less. These quotations from that era paint a different picture:

"We are going to cut off their air supply. Everything they're selling, we're going to give away for free" - Paul Maritz

"We're giving away a pretty good browser as part of the operating system. How long can they survive selling it?" - Steve Ballmer
Palm Pre's New Strategy: Forget iTunes, Hello Wireless Amazon Downloads
Thanks for the great run-down! I had no idea that it was such a hot topic on HN when I submitted it, I know where my time is going today. ;)
Steel Bank Common Lisp's 10th Anniversary Workshop
Video of talk on Swarm
Interesting. I haven't heard of that before, I'll look into it. I doubt a comparison based on a first impression would be useful, though.
Holographic storage, phase-change memory coming soon
Why you get conflicting advice
This article gets several things wrong. First, it repeats the error that the netflix prize was a crowdsourced accomplishment. In the sense of "The Wisdom of Crowds" it was not. Crowdsourcing in that sense is the result of combining opinions or outputs from individuals acting independently. The combined teams in the finals of the netflix competition were not operating independently.

Additionally, Aaron Swartz in http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia does actual research to show who writes wikipedia, and it counters what Jimmy Wales says about who writes wikipedia.

But the author has a much better haircut than I and is unmistakably more handsome.
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I thought we weren't going to do any of N things articles anymore.

On the other hand, if Apple takes his advice, perhaps they will increase their market share over zune.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oRy-vM1OQs

Couldn't have said it better myself, including the "actually no maybe not" part when going into my pictures folder ;)

Even with 25GB versus 2GB, Dropbox is more popular.
If Craigslist charged $1, users would immediately flee to any new competing sites

People who post ads would, many of them. The question is whether people who read and answer ads also would, or whether the improved quality of ads would cause them to stay, making the competing sites unattractive due to the lack of an audience and finally forcing the posters to return to craigslist. This is what happened with ebay.

The question is not whether posting an ad is worth $1 to you, the question is whether having your ad read by enough people is - and for that to be true, enough people must find looking the ads on the site worth their time.
>the fact that they cover the country, and that everyone, even very non-technical friends of mine, know what it is

That's why after you build the free version, you name it something similar, eg: freelist or joeslist. Now people get the gist of what it is just from the name, you can't be sued for copyright and you're a valid competitor.

Craigslist is undoubtedly a useful service but it's trivial to implement and the only reason to use craigslist over some competitor is because everyone else uses craigslist. If you place a barrier to entry, you lose customers unwilling to pay. If you lose customers, you lose other customers.
Using Django's Syncdb outside of Django
It's a big deal when someone sends you an MMS from their phone and you have to deal with AT&T's awful retrieval site.

iPhone to iPhone is fine, because you both are using email, but when friends and family have unlimited MMS, but limited data/no email set up on their phone, it becomes a huge pain in the ass
I agree with you. I don't plan on offering the discounts very often -- my rates are already pretty cheap. It's more of a "thank you" discount, and it's intended to show potential new clients that we treat our existing clients pretty well.

I don't think most of my existing clients will expect me to continue offering a discounted rate. I've had several of them even tell me that I really ought to be charging a lot more.
The title given on HN is different from the original which is "Why Do Some Online Services Thrive?".
If the writer of this blog post got his way and stirred the masses to complain over not getting the new 'customer deals', then the service providers would simply take away the new customer deals. That'd be 'fair', right?

He was a new customer once. He got one of those deals himself. Now he's pissed that someone, somewhere else in the world is paying less than him for cable.

The only other outcome would be contracts - like with cell phone providers, you'd sign a 3-year contract or somesuch for cable, and they'd offer you another 'new customer promotion' if you resign a new contract when your existing one is up.

Attempting to make things 'fair' just makes things worse for everyone.
If anything they could be over funded. I wouldn't call them a gorilla unless they were someone big like Yahoo, Google, Microsoft or have proved themselves in the market over 6+ months.
Ask HN: Rate My Startup - TweetMapr
Dumb luck plays an even bigger role in American football though. In American football a small amount of turnovers can dictate the result of the whole game. It is way more unpredictable than even soccer, which has some 90 minutes of uninterrupted play where each team continuously tries to either hold or gain possession and make an attack.

Plus, soccer has more statistics than you'd realize: proportion of possession, number of corner kicks, number of crosses, number of shots, percentage of shots on target, possession per area of the field, etc.
I know its a little off topic, but every time I hear it mentioned I want to say something about it:

Rather than complain about the typos or inaccuracies on Wikipedia, fix them. I've had an account registered for a couple of years, and might put in a handful of small edits every few months. It adds up, and just complain about it like people tend to do doesn't help anything.
Well written article, very clear. Nice job.

The only thing that I do not like is that you would have to put some database field name in the controller to set data to the persistence instead of having a DataAccessLayer to handle it. The main problem is if in the future you refactor the persistence of change it, you will have to go to multiple place to be able to make everything work. I might be wrong... but at the first look, this is what I see. Oh by the way, do you always but your email address on each method of all your code :P ?
Its worth noting that Cyanogen has changed his work to comply with Google: http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/29/cyanogen-android-rom-modd...
You should absolutely prepopulate your site with data, IF:

1. The seed data is already public anyway.. e.g. It is public information who teaches at which schools.

2. The seed data adds value to your users.. e.g. Seeding with school and teacher data is useful, but adding school district demographics (even though publicly available) might be a waste of your time.

3. The seed information isn't too personal. By that I mean, can the information be used to harass the user. e.g. In your case, an teacher's work address is probably ok, emails and phone numbers are probably not. It's a judgment call - and the situation is obviously different for a site that lets people share information with teachers than for a site that lets people rate restaurants.

4. The seed data isn't too transient. In your case, probably not an issue, since school information doesn't change often.

So, my recommendation is to definitely seed. Don't expect new users to your site to be entering in all of this for you. And you can't launch a site with nothing to look at -- people won't return for a second look.
If you are not at fault, you are not at fault. If they could get away with pinning the blame on the other guy they surely would. So they have 0 legitimate reason to assume that your chances of being in another accident are higher than before, let alone 'much' higher.
Wireless sync is a good feature.

The other problems can be solved by allowing third-party apps. (But not the way Apple does it with the iTouch/iPhone; those third-party apps don't let you do anything interesting.)

I am looking very forward to Archos' Android-based media player. Currently looks rough around the edges, but it has great potential.
TweetMapr lets you easily share you location on Twitter. It's like the Twitpic model for location.

A friend and I have built this site over the last couple weeks and we have a list of planned features a mile long. I feel like we've gotten the basic stuff right and I would love to get some feedback from all of you.

We're going to support the new location info from Twitter, obviously, and allow users to post their location through a hashtag from any twitter interface. We're also working on an API for 3rd parties so if anyone is interested in integrating with us send me an email and we can start talking. bpollet at gmail.

I'd appreciate any feedback, Thanks.
Maybe sometimes you have to know when to focus on your product, and when to focus on your competitor's. What he said sounds pretty straightforward: they were busy, in a critical part of their business development, and he knew that looking at their knew competitor would just distract him from what his team was already doing.

He didn't ignore it altogether, he just waited for the right time.
To be fair to TechCrunch, embargoes are a dumb idea. If you don't want people to know about something until a certain date, don't tell them until that date.
"I suppose one could make a different but related argument that because certain mood disorders seem to be linked to creativity and intelligence, and because those things confer group advantage (in developing competitive strategy), depression might indirectly provide group advantage."
That's a great counter-argument. But could I refute it as a tautology: mood disorders->intelligence->group advantage->mood disorders (by genetic inheritance of successful - though mood disordered - group members?
@sadache I can appreciate how you feel. I've certainly posted hard work on HN plenty of times only to be criticized.

Regarding my reaction, it certainly wasn't meant aggressive, but it was a negative review. I appreciate you getting these two together for an interview, and their disucssion was awesome. So thank you for that, but as I said previously... your questions seemed to interrupt a good flow of conversation that Armstrong and Jones had for the sake of asking a question.

You asked several questions, asserting them in the context of scala. It would have been my personal preference to have JA and SPJ talk about the two languages (Erlang/Haskell) in relation of each other. A compare/contrast, pros/cons, from their perspectives.

Finally, these series of questions below, didn't yield information specific to the languages and the setup of the questions left me confused.

That takes us to a discussion about user's model. For me, as a user of Haskell, I have a mental model that everything is happening by the end. That's what the type system tells me - that everything is saved until the end.
Yes. This is in sync with how things happen, but sometimes it gets out of sync. It's the same thing with when you are dealing with processors. You are sending messages, but sometimes it's maybe not that cheap to send a message and also it hits barriers of using this mental model that you established. What do you think of this problem?
With any feature of the language, you define a mental model for the programmer, so that the programmer can reason about this feature. The implementation tries to get in sync with this mental model, but it's not always true. In some cases, it gets far from it. It's the same thing with processors, when you are sending messages. It's not exactly the same thing, because you need to copy or you don't need to copy. Sometimes it's not performant to do it that way, you do it another way. What do you think of this problem? The same thing with I/O, that as a programmer I think that is happening by the end, but it is actually happening on the fly, it's happening right away.

With all that said, I'm an avid infoq website fan and I do appreciate you getting this interview and your work. I apologize for coming across aggressive, as I certainly didn't mean too. (hence the :P)
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Interesting ... Maybe evolution doesn't follow a pattern? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction
Thanks for the comments.

Most of that code was copied from my framework, which is full of Doxygen comments, and I use my username in our subversion repository and my email address for the author of each method since several methods can have multiple authors.
You know, this is yet another thing why I really hesitate to start hacking for the iPhone, there are just so many hoops to jump through and being used to developing web apps this beta process just sounds insane...
I wonder why so many people are still putting up with all that.
Thanks hackoder. I'm looking forward to writing a nice long 'Thanks HN' post. But not before I have something to show. I am scared announcing my plans might make me less likely to accomplish them.
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Embargoes allow real journalists to do better research, to make sure they understand what they are writing about and to, in general, provide higher quality information than TC would ever consider doing.
Google wave starts rolling, picks up over 100,000 new riders
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Google purchased Android.
When I signed in I got:

"We're sorry, but something went wrong.
We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly."
Seriously - "show me the code." I like to listen to people when they're brilliant, even if they don't have great speaking skills.
The game would be pretty boring if the best team always won.

It's a game, it's meant for fun, it's not a science experiment.

By having it semi-random, you spread out then ups and downs.

Someone did an analysis of video games (posted on slashdot, but I can't find it), where they showed that the best video games don't have solid excitement all the way, but rather ups and downs.

The same it true here. If your team always won you would be bored pretty quickly.
The more I read articles like this, the more I start thinking my manic depressiveness is somehow cool. (If not even required for a successful entrepreneurial or creative career.)

At least it's a step above freak, I guess.
I found an article about Existential Depression in Gifted Individuals. It talks about this a bit. Part of what I took from the article is that gifted individuals have the capacity to appreciate things more than non gifted people. Therefore, when a depressing thing is being understood by a gifted person, it hits the person much harder than a non gifted because they can really understand all of what it means.

http://www.sengifted.org/articles_counseling/Webb_Existentia...
are no big huge network externalities creating a winner-takes-all market.

Facebook did not kill off other social networking sites and it's got far more externalities than most websites. Once the market is large enough you only need own a tiny slice to make a small profitable company.
There is no evidence Microsoft was ever ahead of its time with the possible exception of building a BASIC interpreter for the Altair.

Emphasis on "possible".
Scientists like Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and Neil deGrasse Tyson have done more for the public interest of science than any so called administrator, and oddly enough they tend not to impose their specific agendas in the process. If the "public" realized how much money goes into science vs how much money goes into the private military industrial complex they would be appalled. Or, perhaps the public is apathetic and "public interest" is merely a scape goat for the media. Someone, after all, must tell the public what they are interested in.
Of course he did. He did roughly the moral equivalent of redistributing MP3s, Google told him to knock it off, he did.
I don't agree that "tech people" never cared about content either. They believed it should be free. You only need to look at the USENET to see that many "tech people" wanted the internet to be an open repository of knowledge and was pretty anti-commercial (where adverts were considered rude).
Given their quick growth I'm curious to know what kind of marketing they did initially or what their main strategy was for getting the word out.
It's almost universal for VCs' legal fees to come out of the money they invest, though you don't have to pay unless the deal closes. Basically you just subtract these from the deal in your mind in advance.

Trevor and I were talking about this custom a few days ago. We think the purpose here is not to mislead startups so much as to mislead LPs. By taking the legal fees out of each deal, the VCs are able to make their annual management fees look artificially low-- or more precisely, to spend a larger percentage of a given management fee on partners' salaries.
I believe this is btilly's response to this request http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=818527

Thanks for obliging.
I don't generally comment on anything related to individual programmer's styles or programming methodologies; I think those are targeted more at inexperienced programmers that are still developing their technique.

That said, my personal take on things like this is that it defeats PHP's strengths in an attempt to make it behave like something it isn't. The primary reasons for coding web applications in PHP instead of Java, Ruby, or Python or what-have-you is speed and portability. Your code isn't compatible with PHP4 -- which a lot of servers are still running -- and you're spending an awful lot of code to duplicate functionality that's already built into PHP. You can already perform a query and get the results back and if you want to iterate over them, you have an array to step through. That would be maybe around 5 lines of code, and you wouldn't need comments explaining what it does because it would be clear and obvious. That's a lot less code for the parser to evaluate, and a lot less code for it to run, which will probably translate to being able to handle a lot more hits.

It would be interesting to load your code onto an app, and then load a simpler, more direct version that does the same thing, and see how their performance compares.

Nicely written article though.
It's almost impossible to charge $1 for something.
As soon as you start charging you need, a secure site, a credit card processor, accountants, lawyers, tax accountants, tax lawyers - repeat for each state/province/country/jurisdiction.

You go from a company with a dozen programmers enjoying what you do to a company of 1000s of employees making sure you have met the requirements for an out of state advertiser in Nowheresville Ak
I'll take a look at it, thanks.
[Update]
It looks to be working now, I think our host was having some problems. Please give it another try.
I had to tweet about this concept. Hope you don't mind.

http://twitter.com/rbanffy/statuses/4472177562
You're incredibly lucky, I usually have to restart Flash a few times a day and actually I spend more time in coding in Eclipse/FDT than using Flash itself.

It crashes occasionally after publishing or test-movieing, but far worse is as soon as I start doing anything stage/library/timeline related I'm almost guaranteed at least a few crashes before I'm done.
Ad-hoc testers using Windows Vista have a couple of obstacles to overcome.

Not only the default unzip problem the post mentions (I've found it's just simpler to give the Vista testers an ipa file instead), but also removing the provisioning profile from iTunes usually involves going into the local filesystem and removing the .mobileprovision files manually: http://denis.papathanasiou.org/?p=139
Android phones shipped with an Amazon MP3 store app. Not sure how this is any different.