skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday', you say, 'Fine, I respect that'. [...] I wouldn't have thought 'Maybe there's somebody from the left wing or somebody from the right wing or somebody who subscribes to this view or the other in economics' when I was making the other points. I just think 'Fine, we have different opinions'. But, the moment I say something that has something to do with somebody's ( [...] irrational) beliefs, then we all become terribly protective and terribly defensive and say 'No, we don't attack that; that's an irrational belief but no, we respect it'.

In what way is it irrational? I think the author conflates apparent lack of support with irrationality - the reason one shouldn't do the switch is that it is a type of work, it requires effort that would otherwise not be expended, Jewish scripture does not allow work on Saturdays, Rabbi's confirm that this is work. Rabbi's are inspired by God, God created us and inspired scripture and knows what is best.

Now we can pick all sorts of holes in that argument on lack of support. But it is a rational argument, it applies known (to the subject) facts in a logical manner to determine the true course to take.

You might argue that the premises are wrong, fine, but that doesn't stop the reasoning from being logical - if I tell you I'm wearing a green hat, then I ask you what colour of hat I'm wearing, you say green; but I'm not wearing a hat, that doesn't make you irrational it just makes you wrong.

The question of whether God exists is not a scientific question, so a better premise to attack would be that Rabbi's are inspired by God. "Rabbi's provide bad advice" might be a good first hypothesis - eventually we see that Rabbi's usually provide good advice, should we take that advice? Seems logical (within this limited discourse). Now that doesn't prove the premise we held true initially but it gives limited support to it and is of itself a good reason for listening to Rabbi's.

So, then we might consider why we are protective of the Jews belief that they shouldn't switch the light on Saturday. Well do we have scientific data which somehow shows his premises to be wrong? Financial data is relatively simple - did the pundits shares go up, etc.? I warrant that the reason we protect beliefs that we ourselves consider wrong (or in the authors case irrational (which I think is wrong!)) is because we don't have clear data. We belive they are wrong but can't readily show they are objectively wrong.

If one could flip to a "metaphysical indicators" page of the newspaper (! assuming we know its true) and look up "God: God is impersonal and does not require one to abide by any specific framework of laws except the Golden Rule" then we'd have a certain fact that we could rely on to demonstrate the falsehood of this Jews position.
The Smell of Paint
No good deed goes unpunished.
eBay is a great example of how charging money does not curve bogus, repetitive listings or fraud for that matter. A reputation system might go a long way and make people more accountable.
The Eleventh Commandment of Software Development
hey mikejuk, why do you keep posting just i-programmer.info links here in HN, can't you be more ingenuous and post some links that you really found good and would like to share with us, than posting links from the same place everytime, please !

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=mikejuk
Kaj's article's points on intuitive differences, especially his specific example of unconscious, intuitive theories of modeling, seem to be very relevant to differences of opinion on how to go about programming. See the recent debate on Joel Spolsky's "Duct Tape

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=840523
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=848263
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=848677
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=849462
It’s Not About The Duct Tape It’s About The People (And More)
Familiarity Breeds Friendship
Funny thing about competition, if the market is big enough and the competitors are good enough, there's plenty of room.

At TC50 Clicker demonstrated a product that has about every bell and whistle you can imagine. SetJam is stripped down to the bare essentials. I’ll let our users tell us what they need instead of deciding for them.

How about that, he's already found a classic way to differentiate. Sounds like a great starting point. I have a feeling they'll do well.
Considering the prevalence of todo-list and flashlight apps, it doesn't seem like the $99 is holding anybody back.
Love this quote from the article... I actually had to re-read it to make sure I got it right:

"If you’re an investor, I’m looking for a partner to help me make Clicker the Ask.com of online video guides. I think you’ll find SetJam is a real bargain!"
That was a great podcast and it had me thinking. But what had me thinking more is when I found out that Joel is also subverting journalism with his million dollar plus in yearly revenue job board: http://jobs.joelonsoftware.com.

Revenue for the job board was found here: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/how-hard-could-it-be-th...
Don't forget to recursion, author also joke about it. On the other hand it looks just like self propagation crap, nothing more.
Lose 20 Pounds in Less Than 4 WEEKS - Lose Weight Easier, FASTER,
Iter8r sounds unreal, could use some feedback
Communicating values: Show, don’t tell
I'm not surprised that the day has come where someone actually has to write this. Because, off and on, I've browsed through message boards frequented by writers, where there's a scam - the literary agent scam - that has become so standard that there's practically a manual for it. Google Dorothy Deering to learn more about it; anyone who ever thinks of writing a book or screenplay should read something like this.

The prevalence of people who claim to be "insiders" and who charge you money up front to be represented by them led to the coinage of Yog's Law: in publishing, money flows toward the author. Looks like we need the same rule for startups.

If you start a company or write a book, you'll have to pay expenses (Ramen and pencils) but you don't have to pay to be rejected by the marketplace. The market is happy to reject you for free, as many times as necessary for you to get it right. Be sure to take advantage of that offer. :)
eBay is a great example of how a reputation system does not curb bogus, repetitive listings, or fraud for that matter.
???

I haven't downvoted you, and if you were agreeing with me then the choice of words is...unusual.
I had a similar reaction: that he really had his "talking points" together.
Good catch!

I don't think it's a nice quote because it's about Clicker losing. Doesn't sound like a convincing pitch. The whole "let's not read the article because I might not like what I see" attitude also doesn't inspire confidence.

His honesty and frankness is cool, though.
Benefit of Great Depression: Life Expectancy Increased By 6.2 Years
Their methodology would make anything look flatter if it was covered a bigger area. I wouldn't be surprised if mountainous states like Colorado would look flatter than a pancake with their method. The mountains there are less than two miles higher than the valleys they rise from, which is less than 0.5% of the width of Colorado.
All sports are like this - they try and eliminate it with multi game playoffs, but you can't do that with intense games like this.
They got punished for making deals that locked Netscape out of the market by making OEM's pay more for including competitors products.
Most of the people I come in contact with don't even have the faintest idea what IE or Chrome is. They might complain that their "facebook" does not work anymore knowing nothing of the changes occurred to their browser. It's not relevant to the masses who is giving the browser. If Windows will continue to dominate the laptop/desktop market then it matters nothing if the browser comes from a different source because it is not the browser that costs.

Who wouldn't protect their own market share? I don't think any startupers will welcome a new thing that takes over their business slowly. When it's on a small scale it makes up a good story when it is global it's war. Good for the consumers though.
> ... if the market is big enough and the competitors are good enough, there's plenty of room.

... and if there are no big huge network externalities creating a winner-takes-all market.
Dynamically typed languages are automobiles and statically
typed are bicyles?? Not exactly a neutral comparison and
hypocracy in light of his complaints against the strong
vs. weak labels.

Good thing he didn't make it. Please read the article next time. Here's the relevant quote:

[Obsessively tracking type information in dynamic
languages] prevents a programmer from realizing the
benefits of dynamic typing. It's like buying a new car,
but refusing to drive any faster than a bicycle. The car
is horrible; you can't get up the mountain trails, and it
requires gasoline on top of everything else. Indeed, a
car is a pretty lousy excuse for a bicycle! Similarly,
dynamically typed languages are pretty lousy excuses for
statically typed languages.

The point the author is making is that some programmers may have been frustrated by dynamic languages because they didn't allow their programs to fail, i.e., with runtime type errors. I disagree with the author's point---I've never heard of anyone having that problem---but you've woefully misunderstood what the author says.
How to Get Speaking Gigs
Looks like it hasn't been updated for about a year.
Personally, I use stumpwm + conkeror + emacs + screen + emacs.wanderlust(for gmail imap).
as far as I know they already are for some categories.

The fact that CL is already doing the thing that Godin just descended from the sky to tell us CL should do is, to you, evidence that this isn't 'unbelievably weak'? Will you start reading my blog if I promise to fill it with gems like "What if Google started matching ads with searches?" or "What if Amazon started up an affiliate program?"

For the record, I think Spolsky can be pretty unbelievably lame, as well. People have been talking about how CL should monetize for years.
> comparisons to fb might not be completely accurate since one of the founders, apparently had the idea for twitter when folks were updating their IM clients.

I had the idea for twitter back in 1998, but I didn't do anything with it, neither did the founder of facebook... Ideas mean nothing without execution.
Should airlines let passengers make calls via Wi-Fi?
Yay! That's what the world needs - more web spiders! "Please won't some spider please crawl my site!" is what every webmaster is screaming.
It seems unlikely that classified ad traffic drives job-hunting traffic. Does someone who is looking for a used fish tank stumble across an ad for an IT professional?

Not the way CL is organized.
I stopped reading when it said that "Portable Audacity" is a web development tool.
I love HN's community, but am always disappointed when there's an interesting design article that doesn't generate much interest. So, I thought I'd try my hand at solving that problem with Webdesignerd.

A couple of potentially interesting things:

* Points for articles and comments aren't shown until you vote (a potential solution for preventing mob mentality that's not quite as extreme as pg's weekend experiment)

* Using oAuth and OpenID exclusively for login (it's used only for login purposes, you set your own username after you signup). My thinking is this will curb spam accounts. Plus, it's amazingly simple to sign in with my Google account.

Anyway, just something I've worked on for a couple of weeks in my spare-spare-time. Feedback appreciated.
Isn't it an accepted journalistic standard of some kind to smooth out the many stutters and small grammatical mistakes everyone makes when speaking verbally? Exact, word to word transcriptions like this are actually a classic dirty trick for news organizations to try to embarrass politicians they don't like. (Ballmer does much better than most.)
I keep confusing it with OpenCV.
What is it? Is it just a list of links? Are the links updated often? I see no relationship between HN and that site. Maybe it's written in arc - is that it?
He had some good points. The Chrome/Android split I agree with him on - not sure what Google is doing there - but I wouldn't bet on it being a long-term mistake like Ballmer is doing. He also continues touting Windows and the Windows Mobile platform. That's obvious, but what are they actually doing to innovate or compete? He just talks about attack vectors to the behemoth that is Microsoft. I still think that Ballmer just fundamentally does not "get it".
Some words about real dropship wholesaler
I'm sure the popularity-contest data shows that FTP is used quite a lot. Gopher barely ever. So, "no" unless there were a "command line tools" checkbox on install that could be used to exclude it. I've never actually used the FF ftp (until you mentioned it) and didn't even know it was there - I only occasionally use ftp in a console, usually I'll use Dolphin or Krusader (KDE4).
Some questions about domain ownership
Greetings! Here are some rather paranoid questions on domain ownership. In the first place, what would happen if someone obtained your (say) GoDaddy's username and password and took over it by changing the owner, A-, and MX-records? (Be it by guessing, stealing, keylogging or what have you.) Would the Internet Archive serve as evidence that you have been the owner all along? If not, is there any additional (possibly in-person) step you can take, aside from being careful with you usernames and passwords.

Which brings me to the second issue. I guess that either the Internet receives bad publicity in terms of security or most computing environments are more robust than I would assume. But still, I would have thought that by now there would be, for example, an ultra-secure Live CD specifically designed to do your browsing for key sensitive issues, such as handling A-records. (Is there?) If you don't mind, what kind of preventive measure do you take? (No-script add-on? ??)

For the record, I'm far from owning a valuable domain. Just curious...

Thanks and cheers,

ez77
This issue is much discussed here on HN. The links RiderofGiraffes kindly shared didn't include either HN thread that submitted the Scientific American article mentioned in the blog post submitted here.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=788259

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=795292

As I noted in each of those threads, the issue of connections between creativity and mood disorders has been studied at book length. The most authoritative of the several books on that issue is by psychologist (and mood disorder patient) Kay Redfield Jamison, author of Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament,

http://www.amazon.com/Touched-Fire-Manic-Depressive-Artistic...

and co-author of the definitive text on manic-depressive illness

http://www.amazon.com/Manic-Depressive-Illness-Disorders-Rec...

who has thought out loud in her writings over the years about whether treatments for depression that help suffering people may also deprive society of creative output. Her current thinking on the issue--and she takes lithium herself every day--is that the best-evidenced mood-stabilizing treatments for mood disorders are helpful to patients and increase rather than decrease their ability to contribute useful work product to society. Her co-author, Frederick K. Goodwin, M.D., is still deeply skeptical of some antidepressant medications (e.g., the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) because of their capacity for inducing mania in many bipolar patients.

P.S. The illness of game theorist John Nash, the subject of the wonderful book A Beautiful Mind, was almost surely manic-depressive illness rather than schizophrenia. At the time he was diagnosed, American physicians misdiagnosed about 50 percent of cases of manic-depressive illness as schizophrenia, because of the mistaken diagnostic criteria used in Freudian psychiatry. Patients started getting better sooner in America as their diagnosis and treatment improved based on ideas from Europe (Kraepelin's diagnostic categories), Australia (lithium treatment for mood disorders), and America itself (cognitive talk therapy as pioneered by Aaron Beck, a former Freudian who found out that Freudian views of depression were incorrect).

There seems to be a seasonal surge of interest in this subject on HN right now. Hm.
Looks like I wrote in prior to your submitting your post.

Anyway, I get nothing from it. Had you not posted that description, I wouldn't have even known that you could post links, vote, etc. I see "login & signup" but I think to myself, "For what?"

Suggestion: make it easier for someone new to the site to understand.
Where's Pat? (Culture wars at Intel)
Ha. I've used Audacity for iPhone dev - sound effects..

I would imagine the same would be true for adding sound effects to your web app...
searchyc.com - there have been at least 1,0294,498 posts asking this question before. Maybe go back to the folks who posted and ask them if they are still looking or have more specific advice?

http://searchyc.com/cofounder is likely a good place to start.

Good luck!
Why is DropBox Thriving?
Browsable archives.
If you believe webapps are the way of the future, then the browser stats are completely different. Then IE is a rounding error.

IE simply doesn't cut it with js speed/stability etc
I can verify that sentiment. I grew up in Illinois and now live in the foothills of the Berkshire mountains in Massachusetts in a little river side village nestled in a valley. I miss seeing the horizon and watching thunderstorms roll in from miles away. My in-laws here think its funny that we used to sit in the garage and watch storms roll in for fun.
I guess the fundamental point is that you should never be adding sound effects to your webs apps. Anybody who needs Audacity for web development is probably doing it wrong.
Yes but very few public companies care about 9 year perspective.
> "It's currently a terrible mess of JSPs"

Are you really talking about Rev? Because there is no Java anything whatsoever in Rev, and revTalk, the language, is completely unlike Java or JavaSCript.
professionals say this kind of thing in the belief that medicalization is a lesser evil than the prospect of young people killing themselves

Yes. Untreated depression is a huge cause of mortality among young people. Young people in developed countries don't die of much else besides traffic accidents (and at least some deaths of young people that are reported as traffic accidents may be misreported suicides).

There is also the issue of subsequent degradation of a person's quality of life if depression is not treated when the person is young. Most twenty-somethings are resilient enough to get through quite a few episodes of depression and to stay employed and to stay in romantic relationships, but each depressive episode tends to cost a patient work productivity, intimacy with significant others, and other sources of personal reserves for the next episode. It is UNUSUAL for young people to have prolonged (days-long) episodes of depressed mood if they haven't had a parent die or something like that. That's an issue that should be looked into. Perhaps part of what is going on in this thread is that people are applying different criteria for using the term "depressed." Physicians have taken care in multiple research projects to develop diagnostic screening tools that standardize how much by way of depressive symptoms is enough to be of concern. If you have a concern, get the opinion of someone with clinical experience and see if you can go through life without repeated episodes of feeling worse (and doing worse) than you need to.
Yeah, it's on the list but I'd gotten so used to looking at it that I neglected it. Working on it now, thanks.
Heh short notice to fly from Adelaide.
First free chapters of sci-fi book The Quiet War for free
Actually, I was referring to people from Adelaide, meeting up in Adelaide. My mistake. There are very few startup related events, and it would be good to meet some fellow HNers.
What's wrong with Hibernate and JPA
Article kind of seems like linkbait - the author seems to ask the question "What makes an online service successful?" but of course doesn't provide any specific answers or really anything specific about Dropbox at all.

Surprise surprise, the same things that make an offline service successful are what make an online service successful too.
I agree.

The hard part about listening to negative feedback is knowing what to ignore and what to pay attention to.
So you're saying it's physically incapable for a small child to even be around an iPhone? I didn't know Apple had invented a person selective forcefield for their devices . . .
My prediction is that Google will not be able to beat Microsoft, and it doesn't help that they are smart or rich.

IMHO, their strategy to making OS irrelevant by having everything run from Chrome OS might not succeed in the end.

Just one example: Some time ago, I wanted to become more independent from MS and store my files online, so I started to use Google Docs. It's quite usable for home use, but currently, I switched back to my old Office 2000, with the difference that my files are not only on my harddisk, but I share them on the cloud with Live Mesh. This is a some kind of foreplay for the next year, when MS will come with Office 2010 and also Online office. So MS will have both the native windows client and the online application, while Google has only the later. I really don't see how they can compete here.

The danger for Google lies in the fact, that all their online assets are copy-able, and MS are slowly becoming able to achieve that.
If one thinks of evolution not in terms of human beings as the evolving unit but in terms of groups of humans, depression - caused by a feeling of inadequacy and causing isolation and eventual death of the depressed person - might be explained by an higher likelihood of group survival chances and gene pool preservation.
Fight the Viruses spreading through your facebook account.
End in site (...) for Yugoslav domains
Firstly, don't characterize competition as a 8MM gorilla, when they are a startup.

Even when they raised $8M in funding?

http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2009/09/15/clicker.com-launches...

I think the word startup is the one misplaced :)
TechCrunch seems to revel in the abandonment of accepted journalistic standards. Story embargoes for example.
"Your content is trapped in Sharepoint, but now you can use the APIs Sharepoint has had forever to get your data out and Google Docs' new APIs to put it in Google Docs instead so your data will be free from evil Microsoft lock-in!"

...? Hello? How come Google Docs' API counts so your content isn't considered locked in, but Sharepoint's doesn't?
When spotlife.com launched the demise of Camarades.com/ww.com was widely announced, spotlife was backed by heavyweights Logitech and Philips ($30M).

Spotlife went under many years ago, ww.com is still ticking along. Don't say it can't be done. Be prepared to put in a lot of time and effort though. And forget about finding external capital for the moment.
Even when they raised $8M in funding?

Yes. $8MM doesn't mean they have customers/users.
Melbourne is brilliant.

With all the banking (and money) in Melbourne, wouldn't it be the logical place for the startup ecosystem to thrive in Australia?

I really hope it does - if I ever go back to Australia, Melbourne is where I'd probably settle. It's one of my very favourite cities.
THE LAST DAYS OF THE POLYMATH
Things were going this way with the Nano on its original release. In the EU consumer products are supposed to be capable of lasting a minimum of 5 years, the Nano's on release were lasting months. Fortunately for Apple at the time, Jobs wasn't away and they weren't playing coy, they almost instantly changed the shipping to include a case and instructions that using it without a case can shorten its lifespan and then IIRC offered existing Nano owners a free case.

With Jobs gone Apple seems to be screwing up left, right and centre.