skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with many of these ideas is that they can alienate users. For a content site, there are few options available for monetization beyond ads, which most of those points are variations of. I personally shy away from businesses that have advertising as a primary source of revenue.

For new business and services online, the site or service should built with a business model in mind, even if it does not launch with one. And the best business model is simple -- find something people value and charge them a fair rate for it. The hard part is figuring out what that is.
I'd agree with you in full, except for the fact that I just moved on to the Japanese version. She's still totally into that whole "I'll do whatever you want" thing, but she's even better looking. Hubba hubba.

Okay, maybe this analogy is stretching a bit...
Did they take class into account at all? That could explain some of the results. Or even if they did, and all of these stats have been adjusted for class, carryover from class stereotypes could still explain the results.
I feel like the author basically contradicts himself in the end. He talks about how there were plenty of "face books" at various colleges and how this idea is certainly not new. So why did Zuckerberg's Facebook get so big and popular wen the others are small and obscure? Execution, maybe?
In San Francisco there's a very successful grocery store called Rainbow Grocery that's a worker co-operative. I think this kind of thing can work well on this scale but I doubt it scales very well.
A worker cooperative has the incentive to maximize wage expenditures, which isn't exactly ideal for thriving in the marketplace. The traditional corporation's incentive to maximize profits is healthier from a competitive standpoint.
Good point, or you end up with situations like http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/7702913.stm

> When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed. Unfortunately, the e-mail response to Swansea council said in Welsh: "I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated".

That said, using Google Translate to make an initial translation should be fine, as long as you get someone who actually speaks the language to check it over before release.. For smaller projects, it's going to be easier to get someone check over a file, than getting them to manually translate hundreds of phrases
there should be a co-operative you can join to be able to get good legal backing so the little guy doesn't have to give in because nothing else makes economic sense. a legal system where by default "might makes right" is pretty scary. when the little guy rolls over to most demands from the big guy because he doesn't have the resources to fight, it completely distorts how a civil society is supposed to operate. you see this in many different fields and yet, very little has been done lately by the little guy to fight it.

sad.
I agree. It's just hard to find good headlight-worthy optics for DIY LED or Halogen lights. You always have to buy the whole package, always for $too.much from someone like Peter White, or the local bike shop.

Even my "good" headlight (15W, ~300 lumens by my guess) is just a stupid 6V MR11 bulb with a clear waterproof lens in a waterproof housing. No optics. It's just a farking accent light that can be bolted to a bike. Über lame.
FWIW, if you want simple (as far as concept & interface go anyway) check out darcs. It probably has the simplest, sanest and sexiest (CL) interface of all modern DVCS (Git, Mercurial, Bazaar, Darcs, …).

Plus because of the concepts behind it, cherrypicking is Simply Trivial.

Of course, the downside is that those concepts generate other issues.
There's a clear difference between sex and race when it comes to, um, sex. Conflating the two doesn't make much sense in this instance.
> It’s ironic that white guys are worst responders

Ironic means "surprising". When you just got done describing in detail how white males get the best response from all other potential mates, the fact that they respond the least is completely unsurprising.
Ask HN: Smalltalk in NYC
Looking to find people working with smalltalk in the nyc area. There is the nyc smalltalk users group but none of the topics are ever of particular interest to me so I've never gone. I suspect I'm not the only one.
I guess this is the upside of using a un.usual.ly dotted domain.
Different views on this same topic:

Martin Neil Baily: http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2009/0908_krugman_baily.as...

Barry Eichengreen: http://www.nationalinterest.org/PrinterFriendly.aspx?id=2127...

Mankiw linked to all of these (including Cochrane) on his blog a while back: http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/09/how-did-economists-ge...
> Is the SPEED of any revision control system ever an issue?

Yes, darcs used to have (and probably still has, though to a lesser level) an issue with merge times blowing up exponentially. Anyway stevejohnson took issue with the statement that Mercurial performed roughly on part with Git, you might want to take the issue up to him not davidw.
It was the biggest mistake I made. My usual tendency is to work alone but I learnt that only works for small projects. What I really need is someone to bounce ideas off, complement my skill set and occasionally fight with :)
I'd never try and do anything substantial alone again. Actually I'm looking for a co-founder so if anyone knows someone who's also looking http://ineedacofounder.wordpress.com
Does annual-based subscription really have that low of recurring rates? Seems like it would be a rather moot point => off-set by lower transaction fees for processing cards once per annum instead of every month.
I'm confused by all the talk of the word "racist." The article didn't mention the word "racist" in the title, and in fact the one time it talked about the word, it was to debunk a straw man suggestion that racism is a factor.

Are people dragging their^H^H^H^H^H^H own^H^H^H other baggage into this discussion?
I spent the last 6 hours reading about kswizzle. I'm angry at you and also grateful. Or perhaps I don't know how to feel.
No, that won't work. You need to know what version someone started on. That's the bigger problem in finding migration data, to find out when someone joined up.

If someone started at version 4 and they've kept current all the way through to version 7 then that would be the kind of stuff we're looking for.

After all, the point I was trying to make was that it is very hard for people to upgrade across major versions, so plenty of them are stuck with whatever was 'hot' when they first started out.

The knowledge required for migrating drupal to a higher level version is a lot more involved than for building the website in the first place.
> I actually use git (the branches are really nice for some things)

FWIW Mercurial now has git-style branches (called bookmarks, hg's branches are different beasts)
The more I work with Flash the more I see glaring faults that will probably never be resolved:

-Lousy internationalization(showstopper language-specific input bugs have remained unfixed for a year+)

-Inconsistent API access(For example, you can load a Sound from a ByteArray, but not a Video.....), new features are arbitrarily exposed via one of the Flash IDE, AS3 APIs, and MXML and not necessarily the others.

-Default fonts fall back on system fonts. Hence many swfs render text incorrectly, sometimes illegibly, on platforms lacking the fonts they were built for.

-Major performance variations across platforms. Using lots of alpha transparency for your game? Then say goodbye to Linux, because alpha is absurdly slow on that platform. (Plus to rub salt in the wound, since there's no palettized, colorkeyed transparency, that's kind of the only option for most layered effects.)

I have this dim hope that the JVM will somehow reemerge as a strong browser gaming platform, as it has great modern languages and tons of libraries and infrastructure - putting it technically well ahead of any other option I know of, but MS played that crucial king-maker role for large-scale deployment of Flash early on; nothing points to that scenario ever happening for the JVM. So if you want to reach the largest gaming audience possible Flash is still going to be "it" for the foreseeable future.
I think there's a classic nature vs. nurture question here. Is there inherently something that causes people to be attracted to people who look like what they see in the mirror; or is it influenced by the media, your peer group, your parents, etc. Personally, I suspect the latter plays a much larger role, but I don't have any solid evidence to back that up.

And, let's face it, there's probably some degree of it just being easier. Your friends and your family are never going to give you any hassle about dating someone of your own race (). You're never going to have to worry about some bigot yelling at you, or worse, walking down the street. Is that sort of calculation racist? Probably a little, although of a mild sort.

In my mind, though, these sorts of mild racisms help to perpetuate the more serious manifestations. They limit interracial interactions; they perpetuate the myth that there actually is significant genetic basis for the concept of race; and they give comfort to racial-purity bigots.

The delicate thing here is to recognize this sort of feeling without beating yourself up about it too much. But, to start, just try to make the transition from thinking "I'm just not attracted to people who aren't the same race as me, and there's nothing wrong with that" to "I'm not attracted to people who aren't the same race as me, and I'm not really sure why that is".

() This probably applies to religion too.
Interesting to me: rate of reply seems inversely correlated with likelihood of reply. That is, if you're likely to reply, other people are less likely to reply to you.

My guess is that both of these things are correlated with social status. People with high social status are likely to be sought after (high rate of reply to their messages) and less likely to deign to reply (low rate of reply to others messages). It's well known that white males are perceived with highest social status, and black women with lowest, so these results make perfect sense in that context.
This is a case where I want to upvote you if you were being sarcastic, and downvote you if you were not. :)
Yes, it might be a good project. Are you aware of any other porcelains that have traction these days?
Pownce's failure had very little to do with it being "Twitter-like". It failed because it didn't solve a problem that real people had.

Launching a product that is similar to popular incumbents isn't a negative feature. In many cases, it can help your unique selling point. Mint: Quicken but online and great UI. Hacker News: Digg for startups. Digg: Slashdot by the people.
There is one very interesting example at a fairly large scale, the John Lewis Partnership which runs very successful major department store and food store chains in the UK. This is a real partnership, owned by the permanent staff (no public shareholders), with a written constitution which sets out how the management operates and how the employee-partners participate and share the profits.

A FAQ about the organization with copy of its constitution is online:

http://www.johnlewispartnership.co.uk/Display.aspx?MasterId=...
If I can see what a person is doing, I don't necessarily care what they call themselves.

However, in my experience, once a person has chosen to accept an overly-important title, their value to the organization is severely diminished.

What seems to happen is that people are first promoted to practical positions, like Manager. But after awhile, upper management figures out that they have too many managers. There's some unwritten rule that seems to prevent the layoff of managers. So they hold onto the over-promoted people; but out of some need to avoid bruising egos, they never suggest demoting them to where they would be the most useful. Instead, the managers are "reassigned", and a fancy new title is born.

But I've seen firsthand the big problem with this. After awhile, there are plenty of projects that require Just Programmers, and they are understaffed. You often have 3 or 4 figureheads (er excuse me, Chief Worldwide Technology Strategist Architect Artisan Leads), who you know possess the knowledge to help you, if they would only accept being Just Programmers. But they won't, because their job is some pointless paper-shuffling thing that keeps them far away from code.

If any of you is ever in a position where your title seems to be the most important part of your job, please do your organization a favor and either accept demotion gracefully or quit.
One might even say, well-controlled correlation implies causation. That's what experiments are for!
In the article, the most staggering bias was white women's preference for white men, but also the general preference of women towards white men.

Given that these stats are coming from the USA, I think our culture - television, movies, etc - provides us with ample images of white males in positions of success and power. Maybe this sways women's perceptions?
The Killer App for Google Voice: Personal Call Robots
I do enjoy Mankiw. I thought HN would appreciate the Cochrane article the most because IMO it was the best critique and because it resonates with PG's How To Disagree http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
When I try to think of how it might scale, I usually end up with small pieces.

* Eg, imagine a business model similar to YC bu relying on revenues of companies they helped create rather then exits. More integrated then I think YC is. A company where divisional managers are (or start as) majority owners of their division. They raise capital themselves (with help). They run their own game. Thinking about it, it sounds similar to research institutes. These businesses would need to mature at a relatively small size to make this resemble a coop in some way.

* A franchise is something like this also. Here (in Australia) there are a lot of franchises that aim to have <2 full time employees per franchise on average.

* Limited partnerships often scale.

* Some Israeli Kibbutzes were run like cooperative businesses or cooperative clusters of businesses.

* A traditional agricultural village may actually be some version of a cooperative.

The first one is interesting in concept. I don't think that tech startups are the best area to experiment. There is already plenty of expirementation going on with company structure and financing.
I don't have time to discuss the minute points of this essay so I will just point out a couple of incredibly obvious facts:

1. The chicago school economists were incredibly influential in the bush government to the exclusion of all other economists.

2. It all ended in disaster.

I think Krugman is correct in pointing out that there is something very wrong with the advice these guys were providing.
Really? Maybe I misread, but I got the impression the author was presenting evidence in favor of, not against, the "white women are racist" statement. The way it's expressed ("nail in the coffin") is admittedly confusing, but in what way could he be said to be debunking it?
I prefer Cochrane's critique as well. Krugman is one of the most overrated economists of our time IMO.
Justin.tv is looking for Programming Interns
Avi, I'll read it again, stand by for an edit

...

I just read it as saying that White Women preferred to respond to White Men. Maybe it's my lack of baggage on the subject, I don't associate "Preferring White Shmeckle" with "Racism."

To me, the word "racist" has all sorts of connotations around desiring a de-integration of society on colour lines, around various forms of employment discrimination, and around hate and fear. Expressing a preference when choosing a mate is not racism, nor is it particularly surprising.
Consumer-Developers and Contributor-Developers
Right. Black women were the "sweethearts", and consistently found to be unfortunate in all of the categories.

It also happens that black women are the only group I don't find attractive.

Does that make me a racist? Especially when black males' answer to "would you strongly prefer to date someone of your own skin color" was a resounding "Hell no"..

By the way, I've got one friend who doesn't like Asian women, and another who only likes Asian women. Go figure.

( I'm a white guy )
so couldn't you then take this and then target AS3 to say native x86 code, bypassing the Flash VM entirely?
IIRC there was an issue about an Aqua PLAF for Swing years ago.
Good ideas can often be subtle. Boiled down to utter simplicity the difference between facebook and myspace may seem to be tiny. But that's not the case. Another term for subtlety may be "precision". The difference between facebook and some other seemingly similar site may seem subtle but by the same token it may actually be a difference in precision, with facebook hitting a tiny target (a correct mix of complexly interacting features and design) that others missed.

You see this sort of importance of precision/subtlety everywhere. The difference between the best selling automobile and the 20th best selling automobile in the same class is often a long list of subtle, yet important differences. Also, what may seem like subtle, some might say inconsequential, differences on casual inspection may in fact be jarring, fundamentally important distinctions. The addition of 1 tablespoon of salt to a bowl of soup instead of merely a pinch changes the flavor dramatically, even though in either case the salt is only just a tiny, tiny fraction of the ingredients.
There is such a thing are reasonable defaults. This is an issue of command lines as interfaces and as tool integration points. You have reasonable defaults for both audiences. (My preference is the err on the side of the human interaction because CPU's are cheap)
There's a fair amount of this on the right, as well--a lot of your goldbugs and "Austrians" are, like Krugman, taking one side in a 1930's era doctrinal dispute and ignoring the last several decades of economics.

Maybe economics really has gone wrong in the past 40-80 years, and there's no salvageable content in all the research since then. But a lot of economists (particularly the behavioral school) are doing real empirical science lately, and I'd bet that they're likely to be onto something.
If you want to do some password research, you can still find the list on google cache.
I'm not sure about git vs hg, but I'd definitely say that the speed of git is a win vs svn.

For example, running status to see the state of the working directory. With svn it takes a couple of seconds on small repositories, and it can easily climb above ten seconds on larger repos. With git it very rarely rises above a second, even with a cold disk cache. The difference in speed is large enough that I find myself running "git status" far, far more often than I ever ran "svn status".

A more dramatic example is 'git bisect' which, when given a command, it will do a binary search on the repository to find the commit which caused that command to begin to fail (return an exit code of something other than 0).

Speed is a feature.
Why C# does not have Extension Properties
The fellow economist is a key figure in the school of economic thought that Krugman was attacking.
It is becoming common knowledge that the drug war is a total failure. I'll try to find some stats on the rates of apprehending supplies.
Correlation ≠ Causality.

There's no controlled experiment here. Just a bunch of data mining, with some variables controlled for.
What is that difference? It's ok to discriminate based on sex but not on race? Why or why not?
The previous post and this one both show the same Zodiac chart, which demonstrates basically zero correlation between sign and match score: http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/races_and_religions/Match-By-Zodi...

Hard to write a full on article about no correlation.
This year's Supercomputing conference will be held in Portland, OR
http://sc09.supercomputing.org/

Nov 14 - 20, 2009

Anyone on HN from Portland willing to volunteer? There will be a special job fair for student volunteers. Chances of you getting hired there is more than your university career fair.

Disclaimer: I'm volunteering for this event and I'm not a part of SC or SC'09.
for those who don't know Scott Wheeler = wheels on HN
Talk about an incoherent article.
See: Why have Cell Phones Flopped?

Reason: Apple hasn't made one yet :)
except for the economists who got it so wrong ;)
Austrians are not goldbugs. They're free market money advocates. A lot of them just happens to think gold would be the currency to emerge in a free market.

The debate being doctrinal seem to make the debate seem unimprotant especially when people don't know what it is about. The debate is about how to study the science of economics and the proper use of the scientific method. That's a pretty improtant debate that has been waging on for years.

Note: Edit to correct inaccuracy in the presentation of my comment's intention.
Exactly. This is about what you write, not where it's hosted.

Anyway, Canadians are safe, for now:

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/10/05/ftc-blogger-di...
Its not just his style, his content is generally suspect too. His articles tend to focus on really obnoxious and tired metaphors:
Metrics for pirates: http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2009/10/startup-metrics-...

Hard for a web 2.0 pimp: http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2009/02/its-hard-out-he....

And in general seems to be a big proponent of that really tired "Im a rockstar ninja coder because I write facebook apps in rails" attitude. ( http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2007/07/kottke-is-wrong.... )

For someone who is a self-styled "master of 500 hats", he could work to be at least a 5 or 6 in writing and text layout.
The part that caught my eye was the second sentence:

We’ve processed the messaging habits of almost a million people and are about to basically prove that [...] racism is alive and well.

That's basically the thesis for the rest of the post.
So it's equally ok to discriminate on child bearing abilities and race?

Hint: one of these attributes has a practical purpose in the perpetuation of human society, and the other does not.
I tweeted the other day about something similar. I think there are many cases where basic legal resource could save a lot of heartache.
For really "cookie cutter" situations, ideally there'd be something in-between pro-bono, and "make an appointment at my full rate."
A directory of cool lawyers, basically.
Jay Parkinson, MD is a cool medical doctor who is really trying to change medicine, and does appointments over the Internet for example, people could pay with Paypal. What if lawyers did the same?
http://jayparkinsonmd.com/
I had one semester of Haskell in school and thought I knew a thing or two about it. The last thing I attempted in Haskell was the game of blackjack. The two big problems there were user input, and the random numbers that were used to shuffle the deck of cards. Very quickly I had to combine two monads in my code to get anything going and I found it very confusing. It seemed like my entire program had become tainted with the non functional aspects.
The tutorials didn't really clear things up either, I'm trying Scala now and that at least seems like it will let me pull in the functional pieces where I can use them.
Austrian's and Goldbugs not the best comparison. Instead, I would say Krugman is the left's equivalent of the right's extreme supply-siders who assert that government revenues will increase relative to T0 for all decreases in tax rates (something that no well-respected economist currently says but many partisan's love to claim).
That would only apply to people who intend to bear children. What if you're childfree and intend to remain that way, beyond your childbearing years, or you've had a vasectomy/tubal ligation? By your logic, would it not then be ok to discriminate based on race?