skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your points are all true but printed snail mail is still more mainstream then PGP encrypted e-mail.

Despite its age and the fact that it is grossly inadequate, snail mail still has a place in our society - at least for now.
Actually I'd like to add that this only works if I'm in the mood for it. But I feel the reason it increases productivity is because it keeps myself from thinking and finding other distracting things to do. The music I guess is a less distracting distraction. Obviously it may have varying effects depending on the person, and I have no doubt that for a person who has no problem focusing, music, unless classical, would probably have a deleterious effect.
Great font.
Ask HN: Alternatives to New Mogul?
With much love to nickb, I think it's clear New Mogul isn't coming back, or at least it's frequent downtime (latest is ~30 days now) kills community.

New Mogul is/was a Hacker News-style community for "Business, Finance, Quant, Management, Leadership News" using the same pg software.

Any alternatives?
OK, how did someone notice that?
How do people find these things? Does somebody religiously read the Google robots.txt?
Great professors still matter sure. The problem is that there are so many more resources for learning thanks to the internet. 50 years ago, a bad economics professor was still somewhat acceptable because the alternative was learning nothing about econ. But now, there are dozens of great economics books available for next to nothing on Amazon and dozens of really good econ blogs to follow. A decently motivated student can learn quite a bit from these resources.

A great professor will still raise above the competition and make an impact on their students but the poorer professors are a joke.
They did something similar last year. Edit: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-10-31-n76.html
Matt Cutts posted it on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/5301611018
And how did someone discover that?
It wouldn't surprise me if there are SEO people watching Google's every move for hints of changes in Google search. Though I'm not sure how robots.txt would apply.
In Barcelona (Spain) there is a similar service, called "Bicing"(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicing), which I use for going to work and moving through the city (30 euro/year). It allows me to save above 400 euro/year on metro/underground/bus tickets, while enjoying the trips.

About vandalism and bike maintenance: also there is vandalism, you can see stolen bikes parked in the middle of nowhere, some homeless using it for moving their things, etc. However, its impact, in my opinion, it's much lower that the shown in Paris. Most people in Barcelona, except some car drivers, LOVE the services, and treat the bikes with respect. Obviously, by its use, the bikes have to be repaired (tires, brakes, gears, seat clip, etc.), but the abuse is quite low.

The punishment for losing a bike is 200 euro, so I asume that it is what a bike costs.

As curiosity, there is a photo of the Bicing service into Joel's "The Duct Tape Programmer" blog entry (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/09/23.html)
Your opinions regarding Rand are not a justification to be insulting.

I enjoyed it as a novel, and find significant parts of the philosophy convincing, but I'm not going to fill my comment with insults that apply to you.

What would be better than insults is arguments. You haven't given any argument that someone who likes the book could find convincing. If you don't want to debate that's fine, then don't. But if you choose not to converse in a way that either side could change their mind, then you should at least be nice about it.
Yeah, I was inquiring about international mailing, but from what the footer says, it's only limited to the US.
Is this part of the descent to that place where reddit ended up? Or am I being a total killjoy?.
May be franchise your service to other HN'ers in other countries? :)
It's too bad that /tricks and /treats don't go anywhere :-/ (I even tried altering my user agent to "Kids")
sorry, i downvoted you by mistake :)
Okay I fixed it, sometimes it takes a couple times to warm the cache, I am new to google app engine not sure whats wrong yet.
"The problem with your argument is that there are huge sections of human knowledge in which we really don't know that much -- even experts. In fact, I'd wager there's a hell of a lot more stuff that's debatable than most people would be comfortable knowing about."

I don't see how this is a problem with my argument. I didn't claim that we should only discuss things about which we have complete information, I was instead suggesting that this community is so information-poor on this subject that we lack the tools to separate right from wrong or reasonable from unreasonable. I was also objecting to the claim of opinion as fact, which I find misleads (usually unintentionally, as often these opinions are believed to be fact).

And to be clear, I'm not talking about us not being steeped in theoretical economics, but rather that most of us couldn't answer questions which have factual, discoverable answers, such as how modern banking works, how money is created, what the role and powers of the Federal Reserve are, etc. These are questions with real, factual answers, but the way these things work is often incredibly complex and counterintuitive, and cannot be gleaned from a couple hours with an introductory book or Wikipedia.

And in case I'm coming across as being condescending, I'd just like to say that I don't consider myself to be an economist and I don't think it's reasonable for anyone to be an expert at everything.

"I've said it before: I don't think any topics should be off-limits as long as people can reasonably discuss them."

Agreed, and I have seen very few reasonable discussions of economics around here.

"Startups are full of people acting under intense pressure with incomplete information. As such, these topics are just little baby toys, artificial constructs of arguments that have little real impact on people's lives."

So, we may as well be debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

"Being able to have reasonable conversations about emotional and important things with incomplete information is something we should all strive for, not something we should be afraid of."

And forming or refining beliefs in the absence of information is something we should be afraid of, not strive for.
I see students every semester struggle with the p-value. Most can use it in a formula, but almost none could explain fluently what it actually means. I'm not sure how to make it more clear.
Derek Moeller has built an admirable alternative:

http://www.markenomics.com/

Thanks to Prakash for letting me know about Derek's site. 
NM fans
 (make that everybody) will also be interested in subscribing to Prakash's blog:

http://www.cloudknow.com/
It would be great if I can select a template for my mail.Definitely not on the landing page, it would clutter such a nice and clean page. May be a 'More...' option?
"But Cerf offered Rand an alternative: if she gave up 7 cents per copy in royalties, she could have the extra paper needed to print Galt’s oration. That she agreed is a sign of the great contradiction that haunts her writing and especially her life."

On the contrary, actually. The idea of artistic integrity is a _very_ central point of her preceding novel, The Fountainhead. The book's main protagonist, Howard Roark, is constantly refusing to compromise with his artistic vision.
"Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done. It is the act of an intellectual, of someone who believes that ideas matter more than lucre."

I don't agree that recognizing that money is a means to an end and is not to be put before that end disqualifies you from being a genuine capitalist, or that being a capitalist and an intellectual are mutually exclusive. I also don't agree with the subtle denigration of capitalism slipped in with the synonym "lucre."
Hardly an insult, really, when the reviews of Atlas Shrugged of its publication period got far deeper into the thesaurus to describe how terrible the writing really is.

Besides, that's his honest reaction to the text. Why throw a fit over somebody else's aversion to the novel?
I saw no vandalism and no problems at all when I used the service in Paris last month.
My uncle from Germany who visited me last month showed me his Garmin GPS -- it reported speed limits instantaneously. Anyway, tagging speed limits with roads is one of the less difficult things in computing turn-by-turn directions, I would guess. It's just a matter of getting the data from whatever branch of gov't that has it -- (out of curiosity - if anyone knows, do tell, who exactly would be queried for such data? And what would be the logistics of it? Only acquirable for a certain fee?).
Cute, but I was hoping the pumpkin was going to say:

λf·(λx·f (x x)) (λx·f (x x))
Google: We're not making Android hardware
Isn't this the exact use case for bitmap fonts?
Sometimes nerdy stuff are funny, not this time...
Casual discussions with doctors tells me that some number of them do not trust E-mail, see assorted problems with it (security, authenticity), and prefer to get and send physical documents.

You can argue over whether theses concerns are legit or solved problems, but at least people are unconvinced, or are otherwise reluctant to switch to digital.
This is correct. The limit appears to be 16gb to qualify for the (very large) discount.

http://www.itexaminer.com/microsoft-adds-to-atoms-restrictio...

Supposedly the Win 7 license has no such restriction.
Because we're going to become socialists if he doesn't like it!!11!
And forming or refining beliefs in the absence of information is something we should be afraid of

I think this gets to the heart of our differences. I don't know things, so I ask people. Or I take up positions which others can criticize. As part of a discussion, I learn more. If modern banking practices are germane, educate me on them.

You, I think, seem to feel that there is some threshold of knowledge that one must reach in order to talk reasonably about something. I, on the other hand, acknowledge that more information is better than less, but that doesn't give me the freedom to not act on things. I learn by both conversing and experimentation.

There is a concept called "strong opinions, weakly held" You might want to look into it.

As a side note, the internet is full of folks spouting off about things they know little about. So is life. Democracy is built on the concept of average voters voting on policies about complicated matters. Either learn to deal with these topics as part and parcel of community life or prepare to be frustrated a lot.
Why throw a fit over somebody else's aversion to the novel?

Because it's often assumed that anyone who complains about the writing actually dislikes the politics and is bashing the writing as a disingenuous cover for that; and that anyone who claims to have enjoyed her novels for their own sake is actually promoting the politics and only talking the novels up to serve that end.

In short, debating the quality of Ayn Rand's writing as fiction is a proxy battle for the associated politics, and we all know how enlightening political debates on the internet can be.
"a more tedious, sermonizing, simplistic and unconvincing ... poorly disguised"

You don't see any insults?

Well I guess you wouldn't: you're the one who considered it appropriate to demean my comment as "a fit".

In any case, your argument about "honest reactions" being good defends my comment just as much as his. Yet you don't seem to be considering our comments equally valid. And I don't either, since it's just not true that all honest reactions make good comments.
And yet despite all of those factors, I'll be using Snail.

I have elderly family that greatly prefers getting physical letters to email. I also do a lot of foreign travel, where it's inconvenient and expensive to send letters.

Snail is a definitely niche product, and only useful in weird edge cases. However, you might be surprised how many people encounter those edge cases on a daily basis.
Wikipedia lists 9 1/2 manufacturers of buses currently in use in London:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bus_types_used_in_Londo...

(Not to dispute your main point though. The buses here seem to last pretty well.)
I also do a lot of foreign travel, where it's inconvenient and expensive to send letters.

Hence the suggestion that you use email.
What if you had one with both -- a normal bottle bin on one side, and a game on the other?
Not sure if anyone else noticed, but the Google homepage has also been updated for Halloween. I know, I know, I've got way too much time on my hands, but it's always fun coming across these gems.

Clickable link: http://www.google.com/ (look closely at the 'e')

EDIT: Well, that sarcasm came round full circle. There's actually a gem in clicking the logo itself. Well played, Google.
I believe in angels
YouTube - All Hope Is Gone - Slipknot (Lyrics Included)
Yeah, I think the point to this project was just to bring a classic TTY font into TrueType because it's a cool idea. I don't think there's a good reason for it :)
I think it's even simpler than that. She wanted something (more pages) and she paid for it. There's nothing even slightly uncapitalist about resolving a disagreement by paying to get your way. It's the epitome of capitalism.
Submitted because I want to apologize for suggesting, a week or so ago, that Google was crazy to be doing something that, it turns out, they aren't actually doing!

How not-crazy of them...
How many death threats has this service sent so far? There should be a counter for that at the bottom of the page.
Great write up and list, thanks for sharing, very interested Typinator. I might have to check that out soon.

We use a lot of the same tools. We ended up going with Presently over Yammer, but I bet we would be happy with either. It has been a great way to keep a remote team on the same page.
Toyota has had a long history with circular looms. Sakichi Toyoda invented the circular loom in 1906. The profits from his automatic loom business were used to start his son's automobile manufacturing company.
"... if she gave up 7 cents per copy in royalties, she could have the extra paper needed to print Galt’s oration. That she agreed is a sign of the great contradiction that haunts her writing and especially her life."

Nonsense. She may just as well have concluded that adulterating her work would have made it less potent and thus reduced its impact, resulting in fewer sales.

That the reviewer believes conceding to accept less money in the short term contradicts capitalism betrays his or her understanding of capitalism.

Disclosure: I've never read any of Rand's writings.
The Name Of The Rose is a fabulously underrated hacker book.
Respond to what he wrote, not to what you've inferred him to have thought.
Hackpact - Toplap
I have a difficult time respecting Objectivism when I come from the camp of Phenomenology, having a bias on the importance of consciousness as part of understanding reality. In short, I think Ayn Rand is a crazy bitch.
My guess is that it was "leaked" by someone working at Google.
What was YC come to when !!11! comments are being upvoted?

Somewhat ambiguously pro-socialist as well. YC used to be Rand-friendly, and had a capitalist slant since the start. Has the population changed? Or is it just the hostile original link coloring who comes here?
Yeah -- the quoted comment reflects a remarkable ignorance of the intellectual content of Rand's novels.
I agree with you that there are a lot of people who are extremely valuable to an economy despite not having a degree. However I would suggest that a degree is still a good bar to have in place.

- The average quality of the with-degree pool is subject to a lower bound, which helps reduce the number of applicants to a manageable level. This is important because there are a lot of potential applicants out there, too many to humanly sort through in any kind of fair way.

- Getting a degree is mostly based on merit and effort. There are exceptions but in a great deal of the world a sufficiently motivated person can scrape together enough money to get a degree. I can't think of another verifiable discriminator that can be used worldwide where that can be said to be true.

Certainly in a European country where degrees tend to be highly subsidized (my BEng and MEng cost me less than $25k in total, all of which was covered by government loans) making someone get one before you look at them for immigration or some types of jobs doesn't seem unwarranted.
$ wget -U "Kids" http://www.google.com/treats
--2009-10-31 07:00:37-- http://www.google.com/treats
Resolving www.google.com... 64.233.169.105, 64.233.169.106, 64.233.169.147, ...
Connecting to www.google.com|64.233.169.105|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 404 Not Found
2009-10-31 07:00:39 ERROR 404: Not Found.

Oh well.
Very cool, as this was one of my biggest gripes about lists. I do hope that RSS for lists becomes a feature on twitter.com but this should work for now. Thanks!
I think the population has changed dramatically -- very slowly perhaps, but it definitely seems different than it was a couple of years ago.
I am getting lots of 400's for every 200 I suggest using with google reader should gloss over the failures till I van figure out what's wrong.
The point about Chrome OS also being a revenue-sharing OS is a very perceptive one. Existing Linux distributions already get significant revenue by shipping a customized Firefox with a Google search box. Giving a share to the manufacturer is the logical next step.

Revenue sharing seems to be a common evolution for many business models, where the infrastructure exists to support it.
Most governments other than the US charge enormous amounts of money for map data, with very tight restrictions on licensing. Many consider it a state secret, and won't sell the data at all.
I agree that signup should be painless, maybe just an email and verification, but I disagree with the short trial period. Maybe if your application is really trivial, one or two visits will work, but if it takes a while for the value to unfold, say with a collaboration or enterprise product, then the trial period should be longer. I would even advocate 60 days. A group or enterprise product requires a first adopter, who then has to recruit collaborators, and finally has to sell management. You dont want to cut this process short.
What's Going on at the Bay Bridge
Rand herself was famous for being insulting and dismissive, which I think is the main reason people react so strongly against her. In the introduction to anthem, she basically states that if you don't agree with her views on capitalism, then you are in favor of gulags and concentration camps. She, herself, leaves no room for middle ground, nuance, or civilized discussion. That isn't an excuse to resort to insults when talking about her, but if you are honestly wondering why people react so emotionally against her, it might have something to do with her assaulting other people's beliefs on such an emotional level.
Agreed. The conclusions from the reviewer in that section didn't make much sense to me either. I'm also glad to see that some people are actually focusing on the content of the submission instead of the usual politics. There are some interesting tidbits in the review (and no doubt the book as well).
Uncaught exceptions are caught by the D runtime code, and the appropriate message is printed.

You can declare functions as "nothrow", in which case the compiler will complain about any uncaught exceptions in the function body.
> tedious, sermonizing, simplistic and unconvincing

Astonishing. You weren't able to finish a long, wordy book describing a philosophy you don't agree with?

> She could have distilled her viewpoint into a couple of paragraphs

Wow, you mean as she did plenty of times, which you can easily find by doing a cursory search?

The idea that you shouldn't support your central thesis with as much evidence as you can muster is faintly preposterous.

I don't find Marx to be subtle or complex. I think his viewpoint can be summed up in one sentence, "From each according to ability, to each according to need." Nevertheless, I don't begrudge him writing many giant volumes of "tedious, sermonizing, simplistic, and unconvincing" supporting text.

Atlas Shrugged wasn't supposed to be subtle or reflect complex realities or any other thing you imagine is a requirement for being a great novel. It was written to express Ayn Rand's philosophy and obviously was hugely successful at doing so.
I suppose the reasoning behind this is the same as that behind the "fail whale" concept. Make sure that your clients/listeners know that the network is still live, its not completely gone.
The transaction costs in the real world are quite high.
Why aren't you charging money? Excuse me for being blunt, but this is seriously silly - your purpose is to find if anyone will pay, right?

Also, one feature I myself would pay money for is sha256 validation of the content of specified files (html, js etc). Since I'm using AJAX I don't really have a problem with dynamic content. I want to be notified when/if my site is defaced. I will pay $5/month and consider it a real bargain, if you have multiple monitoring locations to make it hard for defacers to serve selective content.
Next step is to properly hint it so that it will scale to different sizes. I kinda like the font, but its too big for real use. Kinda silly to vectorize the bitmaps when the font can currently still be used in one size.
What a brilliant idea! I suppose the lesson to learn from this idea is that by adding a bit of extra fun and reward you can improve user interaction.

Perhaps this is why fancy effects and AJAX are so often used to make a web page more enjoyable. They might make it more fun to use, but at the same time too much can have a negative effect.
Another one:

http://www.postalmethods.com/

I remember looking at these a while back, and I believe Postal Methods is more robust than either of the two you mentioned (and pretty cheap too).
Ask HN: Can you make a voting/rating system without logins?
Posterous has done well eliminating the login hurdle.

Has anyone been able to do this for a voting/rating site?

I've been thinking about this for my site BuyersVote.com. I let people do some actions (like start a new category) without logging in, but rating I haven't figured out how to avoid abuse without logins. Offering logins with OpenID (and rpxnow.com) reduces the hurdle significantly since people don't have to create a new account, they can use an existing one, but it's a hurdle none the less. Thanks for any tips!
As much as I don't like Marx, he's still more complex than that.

You may like to read _The Open Society and Its Enemies_ by Karl Popper. It is a strong critique of Marx (and Plato and Hegel). But it also goes into some detail about what Marx's views are (which is an important part of criticizing them). Marx was wrong, and can be criticized a lot more thoroughly than that brief summary of his views allows.

One thing your summary of Marx misses, for example, is his historicism: his ideas about being able to predict the future of society, in a scientific manner, based on history. This is a bad mistake: it's an attempt to legitimize prophecy and call it science.
17 Awesome Rich Text Editors
To read any text is to attempt to infer its meaning. This is English, not C.

I was mostly trying to suggest that, just maybe, it'd be a good idea to not turn the whole conversation into one about politics, but apparently that's inevitable. There seem to be a lot of people on HN whose feelings about libertarianism (either for or against) are a core part of their self-image, and that makes discussing anything related perilous.

See also: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html and http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/

In the future I think I'll just flag any article that mentions Rand and I encourage others to do the same, regardless of what they think of her ideas.