skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm just arguing against patents on software, not patents in general. Novels aren't protected by patents, yet people still manage to write books. Athletic training techniques aren't patentable, yet people still manage to innovate and share knowledge there. Recipes are only protected by trade secrets, yet people manage to innovate when it comes to food; people publish cookbooks, restaraunts come out with new dishes. Fashion designs are only protected by copyright, and yet fashion moves at a lightning pace. Mathematical and logical proofs aren't patentable, yet people still do mathematical research, and talk about it. And keep in mind that software patents weren't even recognized until the 1980's, and weren't widely granted until the mid-90's. The majority of the history of computing has advanced without patent protection.

I'm not sure why you'd think that software advancement would be hindered without patents, or that conversation would somehow die out. Patents for software are notoriously useless to read, and only an infinitesimal part of any system is patented anyway, and then generally only as a landmine against future competitors or to enforce mutually-assured destruction. The vast majority of an application's "secret sauce" is protected by trade secrets, not by patents, and copyright guards against the actual theft of resources. I don't think that patents in the software world really do much to open up what would otherwise be a trade secret, with the possible exception of things like compression algorithms. I think that's fundamentally different from how patents function in, say, the pharmaceutical industry, where patent protection does encourage sharing of information.
sarcasm woosh
can you get me an invite? i'd really appreciate it. drkrool--gmail--com
http://www.halfbakery.com/ -- actually it just collects ideas, but it's very entertaining. And who knows some of them might be good.
Another Ig Nobel went to Donald Unger, who for more than 60 years cracked the knuckles of his left hand twice a day, but not those of his right, to see if knuckle-cracking causes arthritis (it doesn't, in his case).

That is wonderful, he is a new hero of mine.
While this surely would be very very interesting I am scared about privacy.
This sounds a lot like some of PG's essays, where he tries to break something complex down into a few character traits. I wonder if the reactions here would be different if PG had written this, too.
It's got to be at least three weeks since I last saw a million dollar homepage knock-off.
>>Instead of withdrawing into my own space I try to engage as many people as possible - and as a result end up more refreshed

(Sniff, sniff... what is that weird smell? Ah! There is an extrovert on HN! Anyone got tar and feathers?)

I personally like people and get unhappy if I spend too much time alone. And yes, I might be in the wrong profession.

But despite having quite a social personality, I get tired from being with people -- not energized, like you extroverts. A majority @HN probably are introverts.

(And no, I don't really know or care that much about pop psychology, but this is quite an obvious difference.)
You've been Annie Hall / Marshall McLuhan'd!

[Edit for obscure reference: In film Annie Hall, someone criticises Marshall McLuhan in a line at the cinema, and he pops out from nowhere and says 'You know nothing of my work'. It's quite a famous scene.]
haha Thats from Remington Steele - I loved that episode.
Huge dinosaur eggs found in India - video
Capitalism creates an environment where both positive and negative traits can be materialized. Everyone agrees that altruism is better than selfishness in moral sense. However one must be quite civilized and have high quality of life and standard of living to exercise altruism. Those whose individual demands are not met simply cannot afford altruism. A financial system aimed at rewarding those who think of others (surprise!) exists right now. Those who have extra money, time or other resources can invest them in those who are in need through loans, grants and scholarships. I'm sure any innovative ideas in this area would be accepted by the HN community and society in general. This proves that the current society/economy is open for a change toward a more altruism-encouraging system.

Western society and morality is based on the relative tolerance to innate human desires and wishes in contrast to other cultures. That's why it has created a financial system that made the countries that chose it developed.

"Males have a desire to procreate, but rape is forbidden. We have a desire to promote the success of those with our genes, but discrimination is forbidden."

Morality restricts certain ways in which a human can fulfill their needs. However rape is not the only way to procreate and discrimination has very little to do with promoting the success of one's genes. Today's social and financial system is successful among other factors because it provides equal and legitimate ways to have sex or multiply for everyone.

We are at crossroads, we have opportunity to choose the way financial system would look like in the future and that's why it is especially important to understand why the current financial system is successful. It is, despite difficulties, which, for example led only to a 2% drop in US GDP growth rate in 2008 compared to 2005. The GDP is still increasing! You can have look at http://www.data360.org/dsg.aspx?Data_Set_Group_Id=353&co... (US GDP statistics) to see how stable economy is. These disturbances are annoying, but their impact on lifestyle is minor.

"Imagine saying, "You're so greedy!" Now imagine saying, "You're so giving!" It's a totally different feeling. Imagine a society that promotes the giving over promoting the greedy."

What does this have to do with the initial argument? Could you please point out where I disagreed with this?
WolframAlpha, Cuil, and Search Wikia got a lot more press than just from "rinky-dink[y] tech blog[s]."
Google apps and virtual reality integrated into a beer distribution game
It's not like this is revolutionary. Change "Mark Zuckerberg" to "Bill Gates" and "Facebook" to "Microsoft" and what you have is just about every article that was written about Microsoft's business culture in the early to mid-90s (back before everyone hated them)

Meritocracy, relative performance, individual incentives...these are all Microsoft innovations from decades ago. Kudos to Zuckerberg for taking note of a successful formula but credit still should go to Gates an co.
There's little to stop copyright holders from using the takedown provision in bad faith. Sure, they have to swear they believe the content is infringing... but how can anyone disprove that? And there are plenty of companies that seem to truly believe that there's basically no fair use of their content whatsoever.

You also forgot to mention that although the provider is supposed to restore the content within 14, they're also not allowed to do so any earlier than 10 business days. They have to give the copyright holder time to consider if they want to bring a lawsuit. So if I don't like, say, a negative book review you wrote, I can knock it offline for minimum two weeks with a single spurious letter.

There are many examples of copyright holders using the DMCA takedown in bad faith to silence critics.
cool idea
Can we add timelines in the goals somewhere ..and i feel popups need a bit of rework..it annoys a bit initially....
I'm still not sure I understand.

Based on your other comment here your not proposing a huge network of houses etc.

In which case the only difference with a mortgage (and changing mortgages) is a little less paperwork/legwork.

Or am I missing the point?
There is also autojump http://wiki.github.com/joelthelion/autojump
When I said "start with money" I meant that literally. That most people who inherit or are given large quantities of cash will tend to fritter it away since it doesn't have the value to them as it would to someone who worked hard to acquire it.

The track record of lottery winners tends to bear this out.
There is already variable cost living, its called hotels. They are properly priced for the current market.
someone whose company was acquired in order to get them into Facebook, will most likely have a different experience and quality of projects, than the average drone. + he's been there what...a month? he is still biased by the honeymoon phase.
I don't actually consider myself an extrovert. I was an extreme introvert in high school (hence why I'm a hacker now, I suppose), and even now I have default reactions to be introverted.

Hence why I suggested what I did :) When I'm tired from a long day of work, my brain tells me to go home and watch TV/surf the interwebs. I override this instinct and go and meet people - and generally do not ever regret it. I'm a closet extrovert? I don't know, I'm no psychologist.
Hyman Minsky argued exactly that for a long time, and he's only recently been taken seriously:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/13/...
> But we've all heard of the crazy girlfriend who dumps her (now ex-) boyfriend's stuff in front of the house after catching him cheating.

Why does that make her crazy ?
That description is actually pretty correct... even if fuzzy. Singularity is a (almost - apart from some loaders and sandboxes) fully managed OS. It comes with its own language (Singh iirc) that does communication through verified message passing. It's also pretty much running JITed .NET. You can read up on the details in specific documents, but the Singularity itself IS pretty much a research project on systems, languages and tools. It doesn't DO anything really.
Some people are against having a growing economy. Obviously the economy cannot grow indefinitely.
A lot of details like due dates, etc. are set up in the back end but haven't been exposed through the UI yet. I'm working towards that, should be soon.

I agree about the pop-ups, several people have mentioned how annoying they are. As per the suggestion of a previous commenter I'm going to set it up so that it is controlled by the user (i.e., they can select if they've had enough instructions after the first pop up or if they want to see more instructions). I think that will help.

On a side note, those pop ups should be seen rarely by the user once they've actually set things up (though I realize first impressions are critical).
This sounds just like my last start-up. It went to hell. We had a perfectly great (SaaS) product and a great team (5 employees - 1 founder, 1 programmer & myself, 1 salesperson/marketing, 1 human resources/finance.).

Things were great until after the second round of funding: The board basically took over:
- They forced us to increase to about 20 employees (within a few months).
- We hired former "big time" CEO/Presidents/Vice Presidents as our EVP's to help us grow fast.
- We were basically working 12 - 16 hours a day. I slept many times at work during data migration (which took for ever)
- We were taking more customers than we could handle which resulted in lawsuits because we could not deliver on time (even after postponement).

Finally (after 2 years) the board fired the founder, brought in a new CEO from "big time" company.
Needless to say employee moral died and I and the original employees were forced to resign (I was personally already on my way out).
Two months later at the collapse of the financial system, unable to get more funding, they filled for chapter 11 . Everybody got fired and also lost their shares, health insurance etc.

I now run my personal consulting firm and I am loving it. I actually get to see my son everyday.
Very timely. Just as I start work on a community site...

The point I came away with most from this was 'listen to your community'. I think that to an extent you really need to be a part of the community on your site for it to be successful.

I think PG & Hacker News are a good example of this...
I take issue with "and it can be shown that they knew it was false". If you're going to force a takedown of someone else's content, it's your responsibility to be entirely sure.
It's the classic quandary. Think of a term for someone who "does a little of everything". Did you think "jack of all trades"? Did you think "renaissance man"? Did you think something that's neither unambiguously positive nor negative, like "generalist"?

A specialist is more valuable when you know exactly what you need someone to do. When you're looking for someone you can just sic on whatever needs help most, you want the generalist.

For what it's worth, I'd actively disagree with the recruiter there. A younger person can get a good level of competence in one thing quickly, but one of the most valuable roles is the experienced generalist that everyone can bounce ideas off of. Just having one person like this (and a culture that encourages this) can substantially improve results in many areas on many projects at the same time.
Even those non-US citizens who fly business class still have to go through the same line with the same stoic DHS servant asking the same questions they ask everyone in the same non-interested manner.
Not new. I quoted Moravec earlier in this thread. Check him out and his arguments about how closely connected computer speed is to complex AI behavior.

(I don't know how correct it is, but Moravec made the predictions decades ago and they seem to follow the development curves quite well.)
Makes you wonder how much they took in and how much of it is still left.
Interestingly (to me, at least), the foundation for IP law is different in the US versus the UK. In the US, they're not considered natural rights. The relevant clause of the Constitution is:

"The Congress shall have Power To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

In other words, intellectual property rights are artificial constructs that Congress is allowed to grant in order to promote progress.

In the UK, however, the case law works differently, and IP law is more of an outgrowth of the theory of natural rights that a person naturally has a right to whatever it is that they've created, be it something physical or something intangible.
Since when do you make music with Rock Band? Their PR may say otherwise, but I think they kind of lost the plot on the way to finger-DDR.
To clarify, this hosting company doesn't go out and buy houses to then lease out... they would vet the mortgage in the beginning (or a customer would go to the bank to get a pre-qualified mortgage, if those things are still given out by banks) and when the customer moves, the company assumes ownership of the house to lease out to other customers or sell as it sees fit... I guess that risk on the company might be too much to assume.
Quietly?

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1916286,00.... doesn't seem too quiet, and on the internets he's extremely famous.
Denver actually bailed out of a commitment to host the Olympics 30-odd years ago: http://denver.rockymountainnews.com/millennium/1012stone.sht...
Stanislav Shalunov: Will P2P change storage?
Too bad so much of Cuil's press was about the failure of its launch. WolframAlpha is a good way to get most of the functionality of Mathematica for free, but for many informational searches Google still easily beats it. What's the advantage of Search Wikia over Google?
"Smart" is a word you can drive a truck through.

"Smart" like Sam Walton? You betcha. As it should be

"Smart" like a Nobel prize winner? Nope, and Nobel prize winners shouldn't all be rich.

Smart can mean knowing things, discovering things, applying things, or a combination of all of those attributes and more.

In this case, the word "smart" is very misleading.
In academic CS speak "dependable systems" means "an OS that doesn't crash".
So people had come to visit Facebook, and Zuckerberg would make them wait while he did pushups?
Search Wikia is dead. It allowed random people to edit search results, like Wikipedia or Wikia does for articles.
(Us) Nerds don't like to move their body.
That's actually super close to where I live. Any reaction on BCL besides the price? Ignoring cost, what did you think of the space & amenities?
Eugene O'Kelly told an example of this story in "Chasing Daylight": flying from NY to Australia, to fly next to the head of a bank whose account he was trying to win but was unable to schedule a call to talk to.

But that was mostly possible because he had built up a relationship with the banker's assistant.
Credit Card Skimming Survey: What’s Your Magstripe Worth?
Not a problem, for the record I just used firebug to hide the background images and took a screen shot ;)
Well, you did not have to say yes to the job offer in the first place. Or next time join early.
You pretty much have your answer then. It's a useless/not understood feature.
A lot of places do/did this. IBM sales reps were subject to the 70-20-10 principle. 70% of people are average, 20% are above average and get bonuses and 10% are below average and are fired. It was brutal for morale and hurt productivity in a lot of ways.
With the number of users facebook has, there is no room for shoveling crap in the business model. Everything has to be done efficiently and with focus. The cool projects (according to me anyway) are dealing with the scale and the constant evolution of the site.
My ability to accept risk these days depends more on the downside than the upside. This was radically different 10 years ago. At that time I would have seen the opportunity to make an easy $10k and gone for it. If I lost the money, well I could always make more. These days I have a hefty mortgage and a family to support. Losing the 10k won't put us on the street, but it takes a big bite out of our safety net. It wasn't worth the risk, especially with the economy tanking.

In retrospect, my comment was poorly phrased since I had myself in mind as the "smart poor." Upon reflection I can see that it wasn't the lack of money that made me so willing to take risks without much of a buffer, it was the lack of responsibilities.
First impressions: Google's Wave is a Tsunami of Conversation
Ha! You sly dog.
Maybe. These policies can be a double-edged sword. It really depends upon how they are implemented. Most of the ranking systems - and it sounds like Facebook's - rely on the immediate manager to do the ranking and the manager has a lot of leverage. It can become arbitrary. It can often come down to how much your manager likes you (outside of your productivity) or managers protecting turf. Enron had a system like this for dishing out bonuses and it boiled down to nonstop political battles to get better ratings.
The vast majority of economists do not believe this to be true.
I see. In my experience people who take advantage of other people may gain in the short run but in the long run they always lose.

Most people I deal with are not stupid (and I prefer it that way). They can tell when they are being taken advantage of and would not put up with it. Dealing with them fairly, sometimes at my own expense, has worked in my favor in the long run.

But it makes sense that you be smart enough to know when you are being taken advantage of.
Schrödinger's virus
It is OK, relax. Breathe slowly. You don't need to come out of the closet if you don't want to... :-)

(Hrm, the min is -4 these days, right? Right?)
http://opensourcefunding.qrimp.com
"Loading..." Animated GIF Generator
Just found this, thought it might be come handy for other devs as well..
Yahoo kills Xoopit for Gmail. Great opportunity for a startup
I have been seeing a lot of these "Look at this forgotten/unknown economist who predicted/explained everything!" type of articles. Yes, they are probably almost always wrong, but how is everyone on HN supposed to know?
> The problem is misaligned incentives.

That's an appealing theory, but the only evidence produced to date that compares the performance of folks who got long-term compensation with those who got short-term shows that the firms that used short-term compensation did better than the ones that used long-term compensation.

http://causesofthecrisis.blogspot.com/2009/09/three-myths-ab...
If you've ever seen any of the comments on failblog/cheezburger etc, you'd realise that Hacker News isn't a good comparison.

Having said that Ben seemed like a nice guy when he had a drink with us in London last year.
Nothing. I was assuming that 100% of the pornography is copyright infringing and so the pornographer's union was correct in trying to DMCA it away, but I guess it is possible that there is CC licensed amateur pornography out there.
Google forces employee to disavow MVP status
There's a lot wrong with this statement, so I'll address the thing that sounds the least wrong.

Have you seen how in-depth the translations on Facebook are? I used Facebook Pirate for three or four months because I was so delighted at how many variable phrases they introduced regarding every small item on the page. It was as thorough a translation as I've ever seen online. (As an unrelated aside, Facebook supports the Konami code, which makes it the most mainstream geek site on the planet, and their Konami code triggers something wholly unexpected and hilarious.)

I don't know Facebook's employee breakdown, but remember that Facebook offers multiple products, each of which is a fairly complex offering. I can see their Photo app being worthy of a large interesting team; ditto Events, Notes, Video, their link sharing, their search (and doing search for Facebook sounds much more interesting than doing search for Google, because you get to play with so many concrete variables), their public pages offering, their iPhone application, and who knows what else they're cooking up. They've also got a unique graphic style that I'm sure a handful of people work on, and there's the usual stuff of marketing and advertising that's fun no matter where it is.

It doesn't seem completely insane to me that working for Facebook might be really fun, even as a grunt. Unlike Google, which always sounds like working there is 90% backend, Facebook has a lot of stuff that's immediately noticed by its users. It's one of the few big companies that I'd actively like to work for after graduation.
Robot fish could prevent crashes
Good mission statement: "We want to make you happy for a few minutes each day."

http://failblog.org/2009/09/30/thank-you-for-2-years-of-the-...
Whereas Google's "cool" projects involve, umm, finding new things to insert ads into.

With 20,000 engineers now, Google is as "cool" as HP or IBM.
Heh, like philosophers have never seen this argument before. Granted, it took a while to refute but none other than Immanuel Kant pretty much destroyed the ontological argument a long time ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument#Kant:_exis...
They have credit cards over there too you know :-)

Many people object to being in debt in principle. Yes, yes, I know you can pay off the balance every month, but clearly most people don't, otherwise credit cards would not be in business.

Also, for small-time ebay sellers and the like, the overhead in accepting credit cards is non-trivial.
To counteract potential assumptions: we may disagree, but I still upvoted your responses.
Hi Andrew,

I like your site and find your interviews generally insightful. However, must you shill for karma points? Not sure what others here think about it.
What I see in Ben is how much responsibility he takes for his failures and having to fire his employees. This was a very refreshing interview.
For those who are late to the party like me, here's a screenshot I found of the original farewell message: http://img18.yfrog.com/img18/2396/s8u.png

John was actually one of my college roommates, it's sad to see this come to an end like this.
Pomodoro - An Agile Approach to Time Management
Amazing demo reel of Palantir visualization UI
Palantir has done some amazing work building high quality, meaningful visualizations backed by big data. Really neat stuff, all in Java Swing!
Scheduling has vastly more to do with abuse potential than with preventing individuals from "gaining an unfair edge".