skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've never read an interview before which sounded like so much fun to be a part of!
Great recommendation, I'm looking forward to reading it. Hopefully this will fill in some obvious gaps in understanding I have on the subject.
Craig has made it pretty clear in interviews that he likes the UI the way it is and wants it to stay that way. Reading interviews of Craig and Jim also make clear they attribute a lot of their success to intentionally not providing features. For better or for worse.
Not clear from this article: are they really trying to charge/register to click a link to content that would have been provided for free if it had been linked from somewhere else? Doesn't that just defer their problem? Doesn't that mean there will just be other, more small-scale news aggregators and/or blogs that will serve as intermediaries?
Get rid of it. It's ridiculous and a cash cow for accounting and audit firms.

Enron et al would not have been prevented with these programs. The crooks who want to break the law will find a way. Meanwhile everyone else has to pay, and pay, and pay, and the laws don't stop or catch anyone.

The IPO market is the most visible casualty. But it is a drag on businesses of all sizes : there is no extra productivity gained in employing an army of people to go around and check everything ever done. You're paying people to do effectively nothing, just like Keynes' desire to pay one worker to dig a hole, and another to fill it up as way of making the economy work. All these people could be working in productive areas of the economy and increasing wealth for companies and nations as a whole.
real homeless folks don't have the "ummf" to clear 50k (the reason they are homeless); they get enough for a beer or whatever and they stop begging.
Don't write for "an audience". You have two main options on who to write for: yourself alone (i.e. a public diary) if you have the discipline to keep it up, or some specific person, e.g. your mom, your spouse, your officemate. Either way, don't worry about your readership. It'll come or it won't, but the surest way to be a bad blog that can't attract readers is to actively try to attract readers.

Good luck!
I know Craig personally, slightly, we've been on panels together. I also know Jim and Susan, been to their place in the city, hung out.

I'm old, 47, been in the valley for 20+ years. Seen a lot of shit, seen a lot of people get screwed over in stock options, seen the good and seen the bad.

What I'm trying to do is establish credibility (prolly didn't do a good job).
Whatever. You can listen or not.

Craig is good people. Really really good people. He cares, he does the right thing as much as he can do it. Craigslist could be at least 2 orders of magnitude more rich if they wanted to fuck you over. They haven't done that, they repeatedly try and take care of their users.

If you are unhappy with craig I pity you. Real life is going to fuck you.
I'd be curious to hear who uses SML? I learned it for a class, but never actually used it work/projects.
Have a look at the source:

<div class="utterance"><div class="name">Iwata</div>
<div class="message">In this interview, we're going...

I would have chosen "speaker" rather than "name", but this sort of attention is nice to see :)
Last time I checked there is no law preventing you from having multiple jobs/businesses in this country.
That's good for a few posts, but what happens if you run out of things to say? (or are you saying that I should only start a blog if I have lots of things to say?)
To know with who your political enemy is meeting? CEOs considering a merge (on a prominent law firm)? Police officers off-duty? People on the witness protection program?
This interview makes me wish that someone would write a "Video Game Designers at Work".
The Officer Is Real; The Badge May Be an Impostor
So you can know that the family down the street is on holidays (in Wallyworld!) and you can now rob their house?
Funny, when my phone was stolen sprint assured me that 'legally' they could not use the GPS info from the phone for anything but emergency purposes - not even to tell the police where my stolen phone might be.
>This is important. Remember, most people don't even know what a browser is. Internet Explorer is very cleverly named: people don't think they're opening a browser, they think they're opening the internet.

It is funny that you say this. Today, I'm visiting a friend and his family. His grandma asked his sister: "what is the internet."

And her response was pretty much: "it is simple. Let me explain. It is so you can do research for homework, watch videos, and read email."

Up until today, I've only heard of such ignorance about the internet, but never have I seen it.

My first thought was: "wow, it is like that HN submission about how if you ask a kid why the sun exists, their response would be, "to make things grow.""

We cannot separate external experience from self without effort, a bit of training, and some self awareness. Something the laymen rarely wants to do. Mistaking their initial reactions as true to the world, since it is apparently true to them. The internet experience is only one example of this.
Which is a good point. You very rarely see articles lamenting the lack of women in mining, or drilling, or trash collection.
Slow Internet meets its Waterloo
Gravedigging why the lucky stiff: Io Has A Very Clean Mirror
Sure. Since if privacy wasn't asymmetric, they could just look up who had robbed their house by checking whose GPS appeared there while they were away.
But wouldn't they also know when someone that didn't know was in the house?
"localhost" ne "local host"
Stop building lame mashups.
Where does equal opportunities fit into that view? Not at all, does it?
Learn.
Why LinkedIN Should Have A Virtual Currency
I'm looking for multiple, as in more than two, independent y-axis.
Yea Google is just giving the newspapers the tools they need to shoot themselves in the foot. Ball back in your court, Murdoch!
Sweetie Bracelet With Heart Charm
Couldn't newspapers do this before? I don't see why Google needs to be involved so that a newspaper can show a registration page when a user goes to their article (from Google) more than 5 times. They could implement this with or without Google.
There's a fictional account of this experiment in one of Neal Stephenson's books - Quicksilver I think. It's good.
That's true, but they couldn't continue to run with the skeleton staff they currently do (30 people I believe). It would fundamentally change the nature of the business.

I agree with you that money is not the primary motivation, but I think the choice is more complex than simply opting in or out of potential revenue.
The amount of energy that you pay for is dwarfed by air conditioning, certainly. But if we're going to talk environmental impact, you have to count all the other inputs, too.

It would certainly start out less economical, but I still wouldn't care to bet about the final outcome if everything is considered. To some extent it would depend on your accounting; "tons of carbon" isn't my personal favorite.
Hold on here, let's call a spade a spade. Your project has its own doofy .com name, calls itself "alpha", and was rolled out on a web site whose primary function is to connect people who are trying to launch online business ventures. So to wave the bloody shirt after Craig stated that RSS feeds for noncommercial purposes are golden, is a little disingenuous.

As others have pointed out, Craig's whole m.o. appears to be preventing people from building for-profit businesses on top of his site. Craig is anti-business. That's his prerogative. You obviously disagree with his philosophy, but a difference of opinion is not cause to go around calling somebody evil. He's done more good through his site and the $$ he generates off his site (which gets plowed into his foundation) than you, me and the next 100 people who read this combined.
I guess the ad revenue model isn't working for them online. I figured if it was going to work for anybody they would figure out how it would work for them. I mean, I thought that was a large part of their revenue model in the hard-copy word anyway. My paper has a heckuva lot of ads.
Yes, Real numbers are uncountable. Every real number can be expressed as the sum of decimal fractions, but not as a finite or regular sum of decimal fractions.
Time-Traveling Bird Shuts Europe’s Super Collider, Saves Universe
This is a goldmine.

"Assuming any real number can be represented using base 10 (this is of course false, since it is not possible to represent all real numbers in any given radix system)" So that bit in parens pretty much refutes his whole post.

And the tree: "One can traverse it sequentially..." Go depth-first or in-order and you'll never get off the left spine. Go breadth-first and you'll never get past the first level because the root has (countably) infinitely many children. This is actually a very intuitive argument for why the reals (oops I mean decimals) are not countable.

And the "refutation" of Cantor's argument of the reals is fun too. I've never read the original argument, but I always figured that you're supposed to jump over the entries i/j for which i and j are not relatively prime. They're easy enough to spot. I can't be 100% sure my logic is sound, but I'm sure this guy's isn't.
And they appeared because they have been tagged with some RFID device they haven't been smart enough either to not have it put in in the first place or to have it removed by a doctor?

I don't know about you, but I don't think anyone in their right mind (apart from Mexican politicians) would really want to have tatooes on their arms/embedded RFID devices in them.

And if smart crooks knew they were being tracked by their mobile phones you think they would be smart enough not to bring them to a place they decide to rob.
>The CS curriculum needs to be redesigned to be more applications-oriented and the major needs to be renamed to reflect that change.

They have those majors already, they're called "Software Engineering" and "Information Technology" at most schools.
As a random datapoint:
Back when I used bloglines, I had subscribed to some searches with them, and after a few weeks, it stopped working. Craigslist seems to block anyone who hits a given rss feed much.
But of course, this tells us that they are even worse than we thought, yet they still haven't released it so they must be even worse than that, and so on and so forth.
Sci-fi short story on this topic: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Hybrid Assembly - KEE Group USA
"The correct moves"? Hah. It's very easy to sit around armchair quarterbacking how you would run a site that gets about four orders of magnitude more traffic than the most successful thing you have ever created. (In fact, it appears to be something of a pastime among bored, underemployed web developers, cf. "You're Killing Me Zappos" or that one about the American Airlines web site.) I fail to see what authority you have to prescribe strategy to somebody who figured out a way to get 50 million unique visitors a month. Your assertions aside, there's not a shred of evidence that what you say is right, and that what Craig Newmark does is wrong.
Article is from 2005, and while I don't claim to be an expert, I've never heard of their new tequila Corazón. Maybe not as simple as they say.
Great, now Iowa has the same consumer level internet you can get in Japan.
True - for that, you could use scripted SVG.
XKCD Explained Explained Explained
Chọn kiểu tóc hợp với khuôn mặt
[Biquyet]Bạn có cảm thấy kiểu tóc của bạn làm cho gương mặt bạn trông mập hơn và quai hàm vuông của bạn trông rõ rệt hơn? Chìa khóa để tìm ra kiểu tóc phù hợp với gương mặt của bạn điều đầu tiên là phải tìm ra gương mặt của bạn mang hình dáng gì???
I agree with your point on dilution.

The problem is that finding a co-founder with the requisite skillset, motivation and personality match is hard...it's almost like finding someone to marry. However, I know need at least one. The sheer amount of work to be done makes it a necessity, especially while I'm finishing out my current contract as a consultant.

But until I find the right person, it's going to just be me, slogging away.
The speculation I'm seeing elsewhere is that this was 8 million pings sent by a much smaller number of survielled phones, with each sending pings every 30 minutes or whatever.

Anyway, the original blog post has much other interesting info, despite the probably inflated numbers in its title.
<http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2009/12/8-million-reasons-for-re...;
earlier discussion here, back when we were at only one level of meta: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=910512
sigh I wish every politicians approach to complex technical questions they don't understand was this rational.
Facebook removes regional networks, revamps privacy settings
One of the inventors of XML has a hard time reading s-expressions. Okay.
Stop reading about it, start doing it. You already know how.

I try to remind myself constantly that the icons of business and technology that I use as examples of extreme success probably don't spend much time on social networks.

HN is the last one that I frequent, and I've been cutting back my activity here too.
Navy NCIS Seasons 1-6
You know, I was playing with a couple scripts (mainly Markov chain implementation), that used Craigslist as a source for data. I got a good ways into it, and got a working model (I could generate text based on the handful of inputs I had set up for it). It wasn't until that point (I know, stupid) that I went back through all the ToS and realized I really couldn't do that.

Now, I know I might be able to get some where with them if I tried emailing them, and asked for the data I wanted. Then again, it sounds like I probably wouldn't. Either way, while the data was surprising well suited for what I wanted to do, it isn't really available, at least not in any way I could actually use it.

It makes me kind of sad every time I see someone do something like this. You've created something super cool, something with tons and tons of data. For what I was using it for (localized text samples), I can't think of a better, more complete place to find data from. But when you see something cool, something you never thought of/never thought was important enough to implement, and go out of your way to squash it, it makes the part of me that loves data feel bad about it. Craiglist has, at any given time, literally gigs of written text with all sorts of metadata on it. In the short bit I processed, I took all of the data from just a handful of boards, and ended up with over 150mb of data. Considering that most of that was <2 weeks old, They likely process up to a terabyte of data every year, with fairly good metadata on it. Seeing all of that only being used at face value seems like such a waste.

(As a side note, anyone with a bunch of written text samples, with information as to where each of them was written, I would really like to talk to you. Actually, that goes for anyone with any sizeable amount of data. Just because you don't see a use for it doesn't meant that there isn't someone out there who would absolutely love to get their hands on it.)
It would only be disingenuous if there was any kind of commercial aspect to the site as it stands. There was none, and "rolling it out" on HN is merely asking for feedback, not trying to sign up paid users.

In the email exchange I've had with Craig, not all of which I've posted, I've asked him to clarify on this point:

"Oh, and about being noncommercial. A bunch of the RSS mashup sites I've seen, like Craiglook, throw up advertising presumably to cover server costs or make a few bucks. If I didn't want to go that route, would asking for donations be acceptable ?"

In his response, he said he can ask. I said please do, and that was the end of it. So for CL to break things when there is absolutely no sign of commercial purpose is a little unnecessary in my eyes.
This comment is a giant logical fallacy.
I don't use LinkedIn much so maybe I'm missing something, but what exactly would people use credits for? Virtual currency has been very successful for games, but LinkedIn doesn't have any games.

If their developer program is successful and 3rd party app developers utilize virtual currency then it would make more sense (like what Facebook is planning with credits)
Ask HN- Could any one person have all of these skills?
I own a popular discussion forum that has grown over the past few years into one of the top resource sites for it's niche. I am looking to transition the site away from being just a discussion forum and more toward a full blown site, similar to one that a trade publication might have, with news, articles etc... I already have the base of traffic and now I want to serve them additional content and add new features.

I need to have a site built around the forum, or modified, to enable a quality interface, easy editing options, simple advertising interface, email marketing etc...

There is also a current database with the posts and the users and if there is a larger infrastructure created, then that database would need to be accessed by several new parts of the site in different manners.

I think I could afford to hire maybe one full time programmer at this time, while I handle all of the marketing, content creation, community management etc...

Is it possible to find someone who is a jack of all trades that can build out the infrastructure, figure out how the databases need to run and interface with different parts of the site, integrate them with an email marketing solution like Aweber, etc...?

The features that I am looking for for the website to have all include things that currently exist, from q and a to article display to commenting and rating, profiles etc... nothing too revolutionary or proprietary.

I have no technical skills whatsoever, I don't eve know basic html, and I need to know if this is the type of thing that could be reasonably expected of one person, or am I being too greedy in what I expect?

Assuming said programmer exists, is that a very rare skill set, or could any normal programmer working full time bang something like this out?

Also, what would an appropriate salary range be for a programmer like this if I offered no equity?

Would that range change substantially if I offered equity? Would my chances of landing someone good change?(The site is already profitable, although the profit would be eaten up by a programmers salary)

Finally, are there people I could hire to help me figure out the technical requirements I will have and to help me hire someone appropriate, since I am in no position to judge anyone's technical abilities?

Thanks a bunch
"Regional networks are hugely popular... so we've decided to remove them".
How to Publish a Magazine in a Day and a Half
Thank you for the life lesson luckydude, but I'd prefer an explanation from Craig or Jim themselves.
Why do people act so dismissive about what others achieve by comparing it (in a shallow manner I might add) to what other's have already done? Guess what, I've never used Kongregate and I've been addicted to games since I can remember. When it comes to potential addressable market, teh great internet is f---ing massive and users are not that loyal if a better solution comes along so who gives a damn. <Cue Facebook entrance>

In my humblest opinion a dismissive, thoughtless, knee-jerk comment more often than not suggests a reaction from a wantraprenuer. Exhibit B: TechCrunch comments. Whether it's fear, lack of confidence, or something else, they certainly don't realize - muchless value - execution, focus, and persistence.

Keep on truckin' HeyZap.
Google and NewsCorp Do the Fair Use Hokey Pokey
It's about time we got a decent location-based deal searcher. The website runs very smoothly for an initial release, and combines tech and business acumen :)

My suggestions may have already been previously suggested, but here they are
- Instead of saying "No deals around you, defaulting to NYC", you may want to look into something that implies that Postabon is on a nationwide rollout or that it's only available in NYC at this point. I'm in Chicagoland , and from the current message, I would just assume that Postabon is a failure in Chicago. Just a thought -- You may even want to embed (in the text of the webpage) something that asks the user to submit an email and/or state their location (pulldown of major metropolitan areas) if they are interested in receiving an email when Postabon launches in their area.
- Make the deals = bon equation even more obvious so that there's no way the user can miss it. I'm using Chrome, and the text blurb explanation isn't very catchy
I don't think Perl lost "It", but it did lose the Web.

There's tons of Unix back-end glue written in Perl, and I imagine tons still being written right now, but as a language for web-apps it just didn't get critical mass for some reason.

I think krf's comment might be part of the answer. I've had to do some mod_perl recently and the documentation is very patchy even now. I shudder to think what it might have been like 5 years ago.
"Fluorescents and Compact fluorescents produce horrible light as a result of the phosphor coating used to create white light." That's a bit of an overgeneralisation -- there's a significant difference between the cheapo tubes and, say, an OTT tube (just one, albeit excellent, example of a full-spectrum fluorescent).

The easiest, cheapest way to get a decent idea of the spectrum is to use a CD or DVD (we've all got at least one coaster at home that used to be a disk). The data side makes a great diffraction spectrometer. A common industrial-grade tube has great gaping holes in the spectrum; an OTT is indistinguishable from indirect skylight (the 6500K "north light" of the studio artist's dream). It's a bit disconcerting at first, probably because we're very much used to incandescent light indoors ("daylight" photographic incandescents might hit 4200K when they're brand new, and they're WAY blue compared to standard bulbs at around 2500-2800K) but it can hardly be described as "horrible".

LEDs aren't quite there yet -- at least none of the ones I've actually seen are. On the other hand, I fondly remember a time when LEDs could not be seen at all outdoors in daylight and drank power at a rate that would have left a plasma TV in an envious rage -- one had to duck into the shade and press eighteen or so buttons simultaneously in order to tell time on a thousand-dollar digital watch. The idea of using an LED (other than a laser) to illuminate anything other than itself was laughable around 1980; the spectrum problem and diffusion are trivial compared to the problems that have already been solved. It won't be long.