skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is somewhat interesting for noting why this is the case, eg fMRI observations showing that praying activates the same brain regions as used when chatting to friends.

Didn't read the original paper yet, but I'd like to see some research on how these beliefs may shift at different times. For example, someone might say it's wrong to steal on Monday, but on Friday they might embezzle some money while murmuring 'god helps those who help themselves', balancing it out with an hour or two of being a poor sinner on Sunday before deciding they've been forgiven at the end of it. Stories of large-scale financial fraudsters often reveal a pattern of 'doubling down' and increasing the fraud in an attempt to use the money as capital for a superficially legitimate scheme designed to yield a large profit and allow the return of the money they 'borrowed'.

Julian Jaynes theorized that consciousness as we know it today developed out of a kind of low-grade schizophrenia in which people internalized social mores as religious voices prior to the kind of self-reflection we take for granted today.
Really? I first came across the matchbox tic-tac-toe concept in Martin Gardner's Scientific American column as a teenager, and the first thing I did was some back-of-the-envelope calculations on how many boxes would be required for chess. If I recall, it was larger than the number of atoms in the universe.

Please don't tell me I'm unusual in this regard.
Wow, that's a huge improvement for Android Market sales figures in general. Just 3 months ago a top 5 app was getting $64/day http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=796685 and now #14 in travel is getting as much as $156.
Let's do Sivers the favor of precision in our language: he engaged in rational tax avoidance for a good cause. When you say 'tax evasion', it generally means the steps taken were illegal.
Researchers Build Artificial Immune System to Solve Computational Problems
Or just make sure you have an escape clause in your contract. Maybe the last designer actually was an idiot. I've found that if you behave like the doctor (in the article) it's often quite easy to steer the course of projects with even very difficult clients.
relative to the SF bay area? yes. (currently in chicago, moved from bay ~2 years ago)
Source: Google Is Acquiring AppJet, The Company Behind EtherPad (YC S07)
Apple has actually called us on a few occasions. I don't really understand how they have time to do so, considering that it still takes them so long to get to our app reviews, but it's a nice gesture.
Snap Circuits SC-300; for those asking about learning electronics 101 202
Prompted by a convenient truth.
WTF? Uh, you definitely are the creepy one if you think that... Weird.
"reforms should be praised and encouraged"

Which is just what this article does but this one experience is not necessarily evidence of any general reform. When the reforms truly lead to a better experience for all developers, there will be more praise - or at least not as much criticism. Both ends are necessary for progress to be made.
Amazon has positive product reviews; am not affiliated with either. Please be awared of choking hazards. Happy Holidays!
The presence of one expert + reasoning would put this in the top .01% of all blog posts, by my reckoning.
So they get a phone call about three20 usage, and I get a rejection? Beautiful.

Love the consistency.
I hope I'm not being an ass but this article annoyed me a bit. This guy came across very arrogant, self righteous and judgmental.

The following statements were just obnoxious:
- "Yes, but I have something he'll never have: enough."
- "I live simply. I hate waste and excess. I have a good apartment, a good laptop, and a few other basics. But the less I own, the happier I am. The lack of possessions gives me the priceless freedom to live anywhere anytime."
- "it throws off perspective. It makes people do stupid things like buy “extra” cars or houses they don't use - or upgrade to first class for “only” $10,000 so they can be a little more comfortable for a few hours."

A) I've never met nor heard of any billionaire who got where they were because they were chasing dollars. All of them started out by LOVING what they did and doing it extremely well. The market rewarded them for the value they created for society. The greater the value, the greater the reward.

B) Why is he implying that because of their success, the rich are incapable of appreciating the simple things in life? Why does doing that require owning just one nice apartment in NYC a nice laptop, a brand new prius

C) What business it is of his how other people live their life and how they choose to spend their money. Everybody needs to be like him in order to be as valiant and noble?

I dunno... maybe i'm being a bit extreme but I just cant stand it when other people go around self righteously preaching about how other ppl should live their lives.
Inefficiencies are what make you special
Eh. I get taxed fully for everything that gets paid to me. (That annual 5%.) That doesn't avoid taxes at all.

Only what will never touch my hands (direct from purchase-event to charity) avoids taxes.

So this was just a way of making sure as much of it as possible never touches my hands.

(As compared to passing-through me: taking it as income then giving it back out again.)
It's an improvement, although maybe not in the marketplace itself but in getting tons of free press coverage from winning the Google challenge.

Remember that "we will win a competition" does not make a good business strategy.
Google acquires AppJet/Etherpad
Paul Graham, the great grand-daddy of feeding bullshit to impressionable young hackers for the sake of recruiting

Had to laugh at that one :)
Well, you can't tell them. You have to lead them on a journey that ends with you both finding out.
>a fourth reason is an appalling lack of enforcement by federal and state agencies that are supposed to monitoring scientific misconduct. According to The New York Times, a new Congressional report shows that the FDA takes years to investigate researchers accused of scientific fraud, which means that many of these scientists remain eligible to conduct research

Riiight. Like the gov't's witch-hunt against a researcher, Thereza Imanishi-Kari, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Baltimore#Imanishi-Kari_c... , and documented more extensively in Kevles book, "The Baltimore Case".
This is really cool. I'm not even a huge Gmail user, but if I had one of these I think I'd use it more often. Maybe something like the Optimus Maximus keyboard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimus_Maximus_keyboard) could be made in this form factor to allow layouts to be made for keyboard shortcuts of many different websites?
Obligatory Henry Ford quote: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
Someone please give some leads for those who are unfamiliar with US health insurance system. I've been wanting to know how health insurance works for quite some time, but putting it off.
Identify the niche(s) that benefit from your service: real estate? restaurants? hobbyists? porn? Then go to where they hang out.
It seems this is a better (and confirmed) source: http://etherpad.com/ep/blog/posts/google-acquires-appjet
In a previous lifetime, I was a graphic designer working at the Field Museum in Chicago. Fresh out of college and my first task was to design a logo for a client. I was eager to please, and I came up with about 10 logo ideas. I showed them to the client and all hell broke loose. They basically wanted a "super" logo that combined all 10 ideas, plus their own ideas, and I found myself in a very awkward situation of trying to figure out how to tell them that's a really bad idea. After the ordeal was done, my boss said "Yeah, next time, only show them two."
Yes, being declined is the problem. I suspect it's more or less of a problem depending on what state you're in, though.
Oracle Feels Heat, Tries to Redefine Kitchen
Face Detection isn't enough to reliably detect faces
I suppose that could be the case, or maybe it's the fact that Verizon has sold nearly a million droids in the past month: http://gigaom.com/2009/11/30/droid-q4-sales/

Personally, I think it might be the latter.

Android Market sales were stagnant because very few people had Android phones. The floodgates are however opening and in this coming year I expect sales will grow tremendously when the dozens of new Android phones are launched.
Congratulations to the AppJet/Etherpad team. When I thought about your "exit" options, Google was at the top of the list. This doesn't surprise me given how talented you folks are and the real-time web expertise that Google needs more of these days.

It really really sucks to see Google shutting down Etherpad though. We used it at Poll Everywhere quite a bit for collaborative coding, now we'll have to find something else. Any chance you could convince Google to keep Etherpad around in some form?

sigh Google kills another innovative product.
On GitHub and how I came to write the fastest Python JSON module in town
Four techniques for saying "No" without your client knowing it:

1. Tell them how much something will cost. "Great idea! A live chat widget will cost another $20,000. What do you think?"

2. Make them prioritize. Pick things that you know are more important. "How should we prioritize that change compared to paid subscriptions and the Help system?"

3. Make them remember. Put it on the backlog and don't start it until they ask for it again.

4. Offer them alternatives. We once had a client who wanted native Excel exports of reports. We suggested either CSV exports or HTML table exports, which Excel can read.

(This is more "no" to features than to design decisions, but the principal is similar.)
Like Steering Wheel, but for Brick! No car needed!
The problem with his rationale regarding the very comic he's talking about, is that every body and their mothers think they got a clue about design, and that they know what is beautiful better than you . Most of us think that way, and that's what makes designing web sites such a painful job
Very upset to hear EtherPad is shutting down. I've used it a bunch (projected on a wall it makes a great collaborative note pad for BarCamp sessions) - will have to find a good replacement.
Oh no! My company totally depends on Etherpad to conduct phone screens. I'm not sure Google Wave is going to work as a replacement.

That said, congrats! Etherpad is an excellent product.
Video games are still very new. The people who grew up with the first consoles are what... 30 or 40 now?

Culture doesn't change over night. Give it a few more generations.
Well, that sucks.

I was psyched when I first read the subject, since I figured they'd be lending Google Docs their awesome text editor. Instead they're going to Google Wave, where the interface blows. Etherpad's lightyears more useful, more flexible, and more valuable. Blah.
Responses like this, while quite popular on reddit, hurt the overall quality of HN.
Please use permalinks, or older Hacker News threads won't make sense.
Congratulations to the Etherpad team. It's too bad that AppJet never took off more as a product; It seemed like it had a lot of potential. Etherpad was a lot of fun- I used it internally on a few projects, after seeing PG's demo with playback.

Hopefully you can add that feature to Google Wave while you're there; It was by far my favorite aspect of Etherpad. Even thought I can copy and paste my Etherpads into G:Wave, I can't keep the history, so that'll be gone forever in March, it seems.
See also http://www.rooijan.za.net/?q=ack_el - you can compare each from within emacs.
I was wondering what the competition between those two would be...I guess there won't be any!
> A number of ex-Googlers are AppJet executives, including CEO Aaron Iba, CTO J.D. Zamfirescu, and COO Daniel Clemens

Goodbye Google, hello Google again.
It seems like most of these guys came from Google in the first place, must be an interesting experience to leave a company, found a new company, and then have that company bought back. (I know it happens quite a bit)
Well deserved. Etherpad is one of those products that really impresses you. You guys have earned it. Cheers,
Congrats to the team, but it's a shame Etherpad didn't survive on its own IMHO. I thought premium accounts etc were coming?
Agreed. When Google Wave first came out part of me thought, "Shit, this could kill Etherpad". Then I tried Google Wave and realized that Etherpad was completely safe. I guessed wrong, Google still killed it.
On the other hand, if you can convince them that ssh keys are better than passwords, you might never get to the point where you have to say no.
this feels silly, but is this opening an area for a new startup to clone them? They'd only be down one exit option. Albeit a very big nice exit option, but there are obviously people that would use their product.
Well, hopefully the Etherpad guys will help Wave suck a little less ;-)
I love this blog. To use the author's words, it is about architectural conjecture, urban speculation, and landscape futures. It's an incredibly fun series of thought experiments. Geoff is certainly one of the more creative people I've come across. I recently pared my RSS reader down to four feeds. This is one of them.
That's kind of the point of the Long Now foundation. The point isn't building clocks, the point is that by building a clock which has a real chance of operating on such a timescale, you put yourself into a frame of mind where you start accounting for effects of your actions far into the future. The idea is to get you really, seriously thinking about how you are changing the world over the next million years.
While I am happy for the Etherpad team, this is still disappointing. The most useful aspect of Etherpad was its minimalism, so it is a shame to see it absorbed into bloatware.
The only thing that doesn't suck about this is that appjet consider it a good thing. I hope they get piles of cash from it.

I kind of wish I'd got the private network edition and a handful of perpetual licenses before they pulled the plug though.

I also wish Microsoft had licensed Etherpad technology for use in Sharepoint - goodness knows, it could use the improvement. Google Wave must already have piles of web/ajax developers.
Confirmed: Google Acquires AppJet, The Maker Of EtherPad
Congrats, AppJetters!
Adwords, I suppose. Webmasterworld and the various SEO forums are probably good as well
Also see comments at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=977015
So, they had to leave Google to be able to create something Google wants enough to buy?

What does that say about Google going the way of Microsoft or $any-other-big-company?
Anyone know if more information will be released on the algorithms they use(d)?
Personally I find it very odd that you ask this here instead of simply doing what I think is the logical thing and asking your co-founders what they think is appropriate/inappropriate. This is just weird to me. They should know that you are not making enough money and so this should be a collective decision. This is weird.
I wouldn't worry. The article says that EtherPad share's some features with Wave but the main interest in their technology might be the ability to operate behind firewalls(?). EtherPad's text editing features will probably (hopefully) get rolled into Google Doc's text editor.
2000 to 2010. A Decade Of Wonders
I've missed Jotspot, now Etherpad. Just hope Google Wave will not be the next Google Sites.
Copied the text down here:

http://pastebay.com/74435
TechCrunch is claiming 8 figures, which would be a bit high for a simple talent acquisition. Seems like a talent+tech acquisition, more along the lines of FriendFeed than Parakey or Pownce.

Edit: Parent formerly read: "...Seems like PR spin. Instead of shutting down a startup and going to work for big.co and risk being called out as a failure, work out a deal with big.co to 'aquire' the startup then shut it down. Maybe we need a new word for a talent acquisition, where the startup is shut down and just acquired as a more optimized way of hiring. ..."
This article is a complete waste of time. It follows the same pattern as the exploitative "Violence is on the rise!" articles we see in the mainstream news.

There's no examination of the fact that the number of scientists has exploded, or that information sharing and public access to research are going through a revolution, and absolutely no consideration of the wider problem of the public's lack of understanding of science and the dismal state of science journalism.
Don't be selfish. Someone just had their hard work payoff; for me it's better to know they have been rewarded for their effort, instead of me just being able to use a nifty web app.

To the Etherpad guys: listen up! it goes like this, tonight, wherever you are, you're buying a round for everyone, capice?
Is it nicely done? Is it appropriate? I suppose I'd feel flattered first and then bemused followed by wonder - wondering all those things you mentioned. All in all, if the spirit is right, I'd embrace it. I think I would send a PM to the organizer asking if they wanted me to be involved in any way. That might be weird though.
Google’s Sidewiki extends blog-style comments to every piece of the web
They're shutting down etherpad. They can't have wanted it that much, surely :/ Maybe they just wanted the employees back, or wanted to kill potential competitors.
As it happens, anyone knew an Etherpad replacement or alternative?
Thanks for the discussion here. I wanted to just clarify - we take data integrity very seriously and actually checksum EVERYTHING. We assume that data might get mangled over the Internet, in memory, on disk, etc. Thus, we checksum each file on your computer and ensure that it is returned to you upon restore identically.

Our system also does self-healing: monitoring every file in the datacenter and if a checksum ever doesn't match (due to a cosmic ray flipping a bit on a harddrive), it automatically contacts your computer to request that bit of a file be backed up again.

Gleb Budman
CEO, Backblaze
Anyone hearing anything on their valuation? Have the details of the deal been disclosed?
What are the names of some of those projects?
Australian govt bullies scientist to alter a peer reviewed paper
This isn't surprising...people tend to project their own beliefs onto everybody, and unlike our fellow humans God doesn't give us any opportunities to disabuse ourselves of this notion.
If they tell us the $ figures, I am sure you will be motivated enough to discover the algorithms all on your own in an instant, or at least I would :-) High rewards have a tendency to induce epiphanies.

[Edit: Here is how I think it works, from my brief 2-day usage of it.

Comet: persistent connection between client and server.

First client connects to the server and creats a session. Server creates a "channel" with a file-handle/chan-id. Subsequent clients follow a URL to join the channel.

Without the live editing, you can see how any write in one client's textarea can be sent to the server and broadcast to all the channel members.

To allow for live editing, server keeps a "buffer" for the channel, initially empty.

All clients have onKeyPress or similar keylogging javascript event handler. A client might do internal buffering, say up to N characters or up to an X terminator (space maybe)

At the start, the server sends a test packet to each client and sees how long it takes, for timing purposes, call the time it takes to get a PONG response L for lag. So in the future, when a client sends a text snippet, it's timestamped, and the server subtracts the lag to get the actual sending time.

On the client side, display is refreshed after server response. When you type something, it's being rendered by the browser, but once your buffered input is sent, and the server responds, the display is refreshed by client-side javascript, which also keep an internal "document text model".

The server sends updates to your client's text model, and the view is rendered from this model. This allows the server to do all text-rearrangement on it side, so javascript isn't tasked with sorting time-stamped strings.

Along with timestamps, each text segment is also ID'ed by user, this allows the rendering engine to assign colors to the text.

Just wild speculation after giving this no more than 5 minutes of thought and another 10 to type it.

]
Does anyone have any theories on why appjet never took off as a product?

Everytime I think about it, it seems like the perfect idea; save people the pain of setting up a server, hosting it, etc every time they want to make a web app.

Was it a bad implementation of this idea? Or was the idea just ahead of its time? Or was it something else?
I don't think anybody is being selfish, its bittersweet: Accolades for the AppJet team and disappointment that Etherpad will be killed.
Sorry for the edit, I decided I don't know enough about why Google would buy it to comment. I would think they have a good amount of talent/tech already working on wave.

Perhaps more a 'buy to kill potential competitor'?

Still sad to see Etherpad die :/
I'm talking from my experience of attending the most highly regarded mathematics undergraduate programme in the UK. There was basic programming training, but the emphasis was on the "basic". There was absolutely no emphasis placed on writing maintainable code. We (in fact "they": I didn't attend the classes) were simply taught some technical details of C. In fact I think the number of hours of teaching time was single figures.

Now I can't speak for the engineers at the same university. As far as I know they were given excellent training in C++. But simply, the mathematicians did not take programming seriously, so I'm not surprised of the low quality of the implemented models.
It's awesome for them that they're getting a big check from Google, but that has no relevance to me as an etherpad user.
Android Market sales will increase when they offer paid apps in more countries. I'm from Canada, and if I ever decide to get an Android device, I can't purchase apps from the market. What's up with that?
I think you're right... and the rep that the process gets comes from those 5% with problems, who are shouting at the top of their lungs (typing furiously?), while the other 95% are quietly and contentedly working on their next app.

My own experience with the app store has been smooth and uneventful; definitely nothing worth invoking Internet Rage over.
A syntax highlighting Wave code editing app would be hot.
That's like saying it's good when a band starts making music to make money instead of to make entertainment/for the love of music. It's great for them that they have profited from their effort (and they have the right to do so) but the ultimate goal of all this should be to make the world a better place in some way, not to make money. Creating a sustainable way to improve people's lives is the goal.
Congrats guys! Make cool stuff, and people have to pay attention.
Do you have a source for the 50% number?
Is it just me or does Google not promote these apps at all from within the Android Market itself? I'm looking for some menu option or banner that says "Check out these great apps", and am not seeing one.
Ask HN: How do you inform users of new features?
Recently I've been thinking about how to inform users of new features for a web app. How do you do it?
That's not the correct solution; the blog itself has perfectly good permalinks: http://nabeelhyatt.com/post/269124967/hi-my-name-is-mike-and...
I'd still prefer the (UK) government to be basing policy on flawed science than no science ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8334774.stm ).
Great points, #2-4 work in the enterprise world as well.
I can understand taking a pot-shot at lowered expectations.
I can even buy an argument that re-submission shouldn't require a re-queue.

But the phone call is still laudable service.
(assuming the client wasn't someone 'important')