skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's OK to say the word 'fuck' here.

But I liked your series. It's inspirational to those of us who haven't made the slam dunk yet, even if you've traded in your entrepreneurial risk profile for that of a more conservative investor (a reasonable move, I might add).
With the increasing proliferation of freemium apps, digging for bargains is now a little harder, as you now need to dig into the app descriptin/reviews a little to see if it's a freemium app or not (I admit, I'm a cheapskate).

It'd be nice if Apple labelled applications that used in-app purchases accordingly, so you could filter on those. As it stands, the app developer usually does a decent job of putting warnings in the description, but not always.

Also, I'd be mad if I had paid for an app that moved to a freemium model (e.g. F.A.S.T.). There should be a way to support these users instead of asking for their money twice.

That said, the in-app purchase model solves the trial problem rather neatly (at least for a subset of applications). I've never written an iPhone application, but it seems like having 1 less application to manage (even if it's a trial version built from the same codebase) is a great benefit.
Well obviously you can believe that because there are people who do believe it.

As for your mathematically incompatible assertion, the way that the free market tends towards an equilibrium is because of feedback mechanisms that cause behavior change. However in the presence of a government subsidy the price signal of increased tuition does not necessarily cause decreased consumption. This breaks the feedback loop that is supposed to result in equilibrium.

This is a fundamental change in the mathematics of the situation, and can justify the belief that the market behaves in radically different ways in the presence of a government subsidy.
Personal Identity Portal (PIP) - Welcome
nope, because you only have to quit once and then you're set :-) but I liked the twist :-)
multiple database connections is going to be my favorite new feature:
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/multi-db/
Are you saying that "healthiest" means "highest nutrient/calorie ratio" (which seems like a very strange definition) or that the healthiest foods in some other sense (e.g., such that eating more of them tends to help you live longer) turn out to be precisely those with highest nutrient/calorie ratio (which even Fuhrman doesn't claim -- he says your diet would have too little fat if you tried to eat only those foods)?

It seems to me that trying to measure how "healthy" any given foodstuff is, is fundamentally misguided. A healthy diet is one that delivers the things you need in suitable proportions, and that can never be a matter of just eating more of one set of foods and less of another. Even that is an oversimplification; it may be better to eat some kinds of things together with others, or avoid doing so; or to eat some kinds of things at particular times, or avoid doing so. None of this stuff is anything like perfectly understood. Sure, there are some foodstuffs that we should almost all eat more or less of than we naturally want to because of differences our distant ancestors' environments and ours (e.g., we mostly like eating fat because when energy is scarce it's a good thing to eat, but these days in the affluent west this is hardly ever anyone's problem), but that's not really a matter of those things being "healthy" or "unhealthy", it's a matter of our calibration being imperfect.
Putting aside the egregious spelling and grammar errors (I assume English is not your native language), I fail to see your point.

Why [are so many terrorists male]? Why [are so many terrorists younger than average]?

These questions in particular seem to be fine. Questioning the pathology and psychology of dangerous radicalism is an interesting and worthwhile question.
NWO Global Economy Finance Failure
I tested CouchDB 0.8 recently on Ubuntu Jaunty. I was very much impressed by its read performance and how it used javascript.

However I found that insert latency was very poor, and it could only about 16 inserts/second. My apps are generally write heavy (bulk not an option) so I felt it wouldn't be the right fit for me.

I also managed to accidentally cause CouchDB to use all my memory a few times. The fact that this was even possible out of the box would make me hesitant to use it in production.
yes, nice write-up. Bonus: I wondered how he embedded the font Museo with javascript and I ended up learning about Cufón:

http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/
Maryland police has no legal juridistiction to subpoena things from Blizzard (situated elsewhere). The subpoena is more to be seen as a kind request for information.

If the Maryland police had wanted to make more of an effort, couldn’t they have asked a court in Blizzard’s jurisdiction to issue a subpoena? (Also note that fleeing the country to avoid prosecution is a Federal crime, so the FBI could have gotten involved.)
Like the article said, most of that stuff they probably learned in flight school.
People who are inclined to be confused will be confused regardless. The rest of us already understand this point.
Oh boy is this what's going on Abu Ghraib? How you got that meaning from my post I'll never know.
Twitter API - Counting Characters
I see some parallels with insight as described in David Rock's talk at Google: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeJSXfXep4M
I think it is worth noting that many people here are the type to game the system, not out of right, wrong, self interest or whatever, but because the CAN. There is a certain amount of "how does this work", "how can i make it do what i want" and whatnot inside of all of us on this site. I'll admit to doing experiments that lead to "how to game hn" type knowledge (see some of my other posts on this thread).

There is also a natural law on the net -- as a site gains more importance, more people will try to game it. Its a sign of value. Eventually the gamers will gut it, and it will be time to move on. See slashdot and kuro5hin for notorious examples.

A final thought: there is always some amount of backchannel going on -- e.g. YC founders hang together. It is futile (even silly) to suggest that we pretend there is no backchannel, or to act as if there are not things happening outside the site.
Making Things Move with Clojure + Arduino
so you are saying that we should keep our revenue numbers secret not out of selfishness but because it's impolite to discuss money?

But then, I guess I'm just crass... I never understood why workers tend to keep their salaries secret from their peers; it seems to contribute to asymmetrical information distributions, in the employer's favor.
If that were the nature of the subsidy, then yes, that would break the tendency to return to equilibrium in the face of altered data. However, only a fraction of tuition is paid by the government, so there is still a significant price signal to the consumer.
Bad name, already used for a BSD flavor and Opera's debug thingie
That doesn't really solve the problem of rigged up-voting (it does solve the problem of blind up-voting of celebrity submissions).

I think removing permalinks from new submissions could help - the only way you could upvote new submissions would be to have them organically show up on your list. Still could be gamed though.

Might be too much trouble for what it's worth, though. It turns into a cat-and-mouse game.
Ah right, well that is clearly wrong. I thought you were asking a broader question.

Besides, I mostly wanted to give my anecdote ;)
Your statement doesn't make any sense. If the government gives anyone $30,000 to buy a car then this will wildly distort the car industry. Government subsidies have absolutely nothing to do with a free market.
Nationwide consumer confidence data lower than 72 forecast at 69
Off the top of my head...

1. Talk/show your user growth.

2. Blog about how you're all working full-time.

3. Hiring people. Usually (at least in self-funded companies) the more people you've got the healthier you are.

4. Talk about your server infrastructure and about how you just upgraded your servers / added more servers to keep up with the "amazing growth".

5. Be active on your blog. Talk up about your plans for the next year. If you've got plans for the next year... you're probably not going anywhere.

6. Keep producing updates to your product. Nothing shows the health of your company like continuing to release updates.
I/o ventures
And IDKFA would enable any panels you hadn't acquired yet.
With properly split testing, your individual UI won't change until there is a measurable improvement for a group using a UI other than yours. Of course this rarely happens in practice because there is typically a single UX person rather than a few trying different things.
Though controlling an RC heli with your iPhone is about as awesome as it gets, more interesting is the fact that it runs Linux and that they're releasing an SDK :) http://www.ardrone.org/parrot-ar-drone/dev/developers
Maybe they should sell led traffic bulbs with resistive wires to generate heat, like the rear-windshield defroster. They could be switched on during snow. Still saves a ton of money/energy.
I agree that there is a premium placed on mac products, but I would guess you are overstating it. I'd be willing to bet that the difference in price lies in the RAM. Apple uses DDR3 while most other manufacturers use DDR2. If you look on Newegg, you will see that there is a substantial price difference in the two (at least at my last check).
Excellent points, I think it is the second one you are making that I'm trying to avoid here.

The gamers here seem to be more approachable than elsewhere so I figured maybe there is a chance to make some of them think twice about rigging the system in the future.

Maybe the opposite, I don't know. Backchannels are fine as long as they're not abused, in this particular case I think the abuse is pretty obvious.

If you'd use your 'backchannel' to simply sharpen your postings and to use that to increase the chance of being judeged on merit alone that would be excellent. But to simply use it as a megaphone so you can drown out others that play by the rules is completely out of bounds as far as I'm concerned.
The problem with that distinction is that "programming text editors" basically have all the features of "IDEs".
CouchDB 0.8 is pretty old. If you tried the newest version your results might be significantly different.
Cloud Forensics using EBS Boot Volumes
I suspect most users (seeking interesting content) infrequently look at "new", and mostly stick to the front page.

Items already on the front page get voted up more because they are already on the front page.

The only stories that get on to the front page with the current algorithm are those that get a handful of votes very quickly (within first 10-20 mins).

Therefore, the story selection for the front page becomes a self-reinforcing loop. The combination of the algorithm prioritizing stories that get a few votes quickly, and the fact that new stories get reduced exposure, means, I think, that it's often random whether a story makes the front. Once it does, if it's interesting it will stay there and get a lot of votes (so that works) and if it's not it will drop off again quickly.

So the system is good at ranking stories that are already on the front page and keeping them there longer, but I think fails at selecting the best new content submitted. I often notice great items dropping off new that never got any votes or comments while there are less interesting ones that made the front.

Without wanting to suggest damaging the simplicity that makes it such a great site for surfacing interesting stuff, maybe there could be a sidebar or secondary area on the front page with a simple headline list of the lastest new submissions separate to the "hot" items, so that all users see what's coming in, rather than the subset who consciously go to "new" to look for new stuff to vote for.

Be interesting to know what the traffic difference is between the front page and "new" - that would determine if my theory had any merit.
I have occasionally done this, for stories that are of personal importance to me. I won't argue that it's absolutely justified, but there are a few reasons I can still sleep at night after doing it:

1) I love the HN community, and would never do it for a post that I don't think is of interest (for that matter, I wouldn't submit something that I don't think would be of interest in the first place, so maybe that cancels out).

2) It's never been more than about 2 votes, beyond which it floats or sinks on its own merits. Yes, it can be argued that a story floats or sinks on its own merits to start with, but there IS an element of luck - the 'new' page moves pretty quickly now. If a story is only "worth" 20 votes in its lifetime, what are the odds that one of those votes will happen when it's sitting on the new page at 1 vote? Asking for an initial boost doesn't put a story on the front page anymore, but it does guarantee that the community passes an actual judgement on it.

3) I don't abuse it (by my own definition of 'abuse' - whose else would I use?). I don't do it more than once or twice a year, and it's never for ego, karma, traffic to my blog, etc. It's for something that is personally important to me, and potentially useful to at least some members of the community.

There IS one thing that bothers me:

1) It can too easily be a slippery slope. "Just this once" or "just a bit" can too easily turn into "well, everyone's doing it", to the obvious detriment of the site.

Overall, I see it as asking a friend for a selfish favor. If it's done too often, or without giving anything in return, or without regard for the cost to the friend, then it's a problem. If it's done judiciously - give and take - it can be the basis for a stronger relationship.
Maybe we can mix in new submissions with top rated ones on the front page.
Indeed--private student loans are even available at comparable interest rates to federal loans. The main benefit to the student seems to be in grants, and in subsidized loans where the government subsidizes tuition while you are in school.
Anamnesis: "Reopen Last Closed Tab" Plugin for Safari on OS X
I'm no C programmer, but I love how clean the code is. Good work!
If you do read his Eat to Live book, it is cited with hundreds of references in the endnotes. I pulled a few dozen when I was near a university and they were fairly well supportive of his points.

There was a study comparing weight loss and heart disease indicators between, if I recall correctly, Fuhrman-style diet to Ornish-style diet to AHA recommendations. I'll try to dig up the citation tonight.
Hey HN,
Got tired of waiting for Apple to add this feature, so I decided to try to implement it myself. This is my first attempt at Cocoa hacking, so please feel free to give me suggestions if I did something wonky. Also, the plugin is open-source, so please feel free to check it out for yourself.
Many of the interesting problems mentioned here can be alleviated in large part if a large part of the veteran participants here browse the new submissions

http://news.ycombinator.com/news

and upvote those that most contribute to the HN community's interests, as defined by the guidelines.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm sure some people ask for upvoting help from their friends, but I'm sure I don't, and most of the time I think I get a fair response from the (unknown to me) group of participants who either upvote or pass by my submissions. Random issues like at what time of day in what time zone I post probably make a difference, but I mostly don't worry about that.
I'll tell you why it's taking so long. Allan was hired by MacRabbit to create Espresso. ( http://macrabbit.com/espresso/ )

now after you download it and play for a while you will see that it's just an improved version of textmate or even it's textmate 2.0!!!!
Or we're not retarded, but still enjoy making a mockery of the concept of (A)GW often in the name of snark alone. "skepticism" optional even if implied by the mockery. Also, it was yet another wonderful snowy, cold day for a bike commute. This is the only time of year people give me a whole lane to myself.
I haven't read a blog post titled "The Wright brothers built the best plane ever" recently.
Funny, but I guess VC's are a little like serial entrepreneurs. Its ok to totally f up sometimes, as long as you get a couple big hits.
Good article, webpage could use work. The font is too small.
Toshiba's Cell 3D TV - 10x Times Faster than your PC
Tell HN : SparkFun Electronics $100 Give Away Tomorrow
Just a reminder that SparkFun's give away is tomorrow.

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/news.php?id=305
In MySQL case: switch from MyISAM to InnoDB or Falcon (ALTER TABLE table ENGINE=Engine, that's it).

What if you don't need transactions in PG?

Let's not forget MySQL has engines like MEMORY, ARCHIVE, BLACKHOLE (not to mention third party engines).
Beware. It isn't cool. It rehashes some awful mistakes that were made in the design of early Lisp languages - in particular dynamic scope.

It's a shame, as some effort has clearly been put in to making newLisp something that people can get up-and-running with very quickly. But with the language itself being broken, this effort is wasted.
Why Lisp is Awesome
Good post! When you think about it, most of these are brain-dead and so intuitive, that you'd think everyone follows them by default. Often, I see over-use of emphasis (italics, bold, or underlined) and abrupt font size changes without reason.
Bullet points, should ideally be in the page margin. Not indented.

Really? To me that's "ugly", as in "that's not how it looks anywhere, so it jumps out at me". The reason given in the linked text seems to be a design one ("it looks ugly") and not something to do with usability (which is a major goal of typography).
NT SIM - Home
Apparently I'm the only one who only saw a single CPU listed, with a hundred in the no price section?

Clicking update I get tons of:

Warning: preg_match() expects at least 2 parameters, 1 given in /var/www/paul.slowgeek.com/compare/cpu/update.php on line 19
{"name":"686 Gen","score":"267","rank":"718","search_name":"686 Gen"}
Warning: preg_match() expects at least 2 parameters, 1 given in /var/www/paul.slowgeek.com/compare/cpu/update.php on line 19
{"name":"AMD Athlon 1640B","score":"705","rank":"442","search_name":"1640B"}
Warning: preg_match() expects at least 2 parameters, 1 given in /var/www/paul.slowgeek.com/compare/cpu/update.php on line 19
{"name":"AMD Athlon 2500+","score":"423","rank":"567","search_name":"2500+"}
Sweet! I had given up on this ever appearing -- Seems that since someone came up with it before apple the fanbois have a hard time accepting that it may be a good usability feature. (top 2 responses: "But history already has that" and "I never accidentally close tabs", both of which ignore the part where i leave browsers open for weeks at a time because I'm too lazy to properly organize bookmarks)
BumpTop interface available on HP’s TM2 Tablet
How on earth is this self-congratulatory bullshit? Where's the logic in this statement?

Why is it that a guy who bothers to blog about the qualities he feels are crucial to Entrepreneurs' success should be accused of self-congratulation? Where's the ego trip? I don't see it.
It feels a bit strange to see Cuil mentioned.
I have a proposal. What if you could enter the URL of your blog(s), and that way any self-submitted content would start at 2. This would encourage more people from HN to write and answer comments, and would hopefully make the site better overall.

And probably you wouldn't be allowed to do this until 30 days after creating a new account, or else there would be some minimum karma. Or perhaps your blog needs at least 100 karma on its own before the URL is accepted. Either way, I think it would generally make the community better if some variant of this were enabled.
SUKSES DAN KAYA
Also, beware of trolls making comments like the above.

newLISP's "coolness" is a matter of opinion, not some sort of objective fact.

So the next time you hear someone telling you something "isn't cool, stay away from it", don't let them make up your mind for you.

Thankfully I didn't listen to the bullshit and discovered a beautiful language in newLISP, and today it's my favorite language to code in. Its dynamic scope goes hand-in-hand with its interpreted nature is what makes it so great for rapid web development.
Hm. I suppose it depends on who your users are. None of those things would convince me of your stability. My thought is that usually, the faster a business expands, the greater chance it has of overstepping itself and failing. For example, until now, my costs have been such that if I fuck up and loose revenue, I can pay for operating costs by getting a full time contracting gig. (I've been expanding, and I'm rapidly approaching the point where this is no longer the case. But there have been many times during the last five years when I have fucked it up and I have needed to rent myself out to pay for it.)

In other words, going full time prematurely almost killed my business, several times. I mean, I'm full-time now, but as far as stability of the business goes, me being full time adds quite a lot of risk. (It adds upside, too; I can get a lot more done, but it means that I have less room to pay for mistakes.)

Thinking more about this, I think part of the disconnect between what you say and what I think is that I am running a business that is in large part reselling services I rent from others. (well, I rent power and data center space, and then I buy servers, install software, and rent out a portion of the CPU/RAM/etc... but by far my biggest cost is power and data center space. I almost spend that much on hardware every month too, but that is only because I am growing. over the 3 year lifespan of a server, the power it consumes will exceed it's original purchase price, at least when it comes to what I pay for hardware and what I pay for power. )

The difference is in likely failure modes. If you have a webapp you can run on a single server (an 8 core/32GiB ram server is gonna cost north of $2K to buy, but you can host it for under $150/month, and 32GiB ram/8 cores can handle rather a lot of users.) you really only go out of business when you get tired of it. most people can support the $150/month server indefinitely, even if there is not any money coming in. On the other hand, uh, my hosting costs are large enough that if there was no money coming in, well, I'd need to get a contracting gig fast. As long as the webapp guy is making plans for next year, there probably will be a next year. On the other hand, the guy with the high overhead is likely going to relax when things are going well, and is likely to plan hardest when he can see failure.
When they move to T0 and attack you, the changes caused by this attack move forward to the present in a "time wave" - you see these changes and decide to intervene by moving to T=1 and ordering your troops to intercept their troops.

The effects of this also move forward in a time wave, which they can see approaching on a little summary at the bottom of the screen.

As you modify the past you use up "chrono-energy" limiting the amount of influence you can have.

See http://chronofrag.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=36 for some more time travel strategies.

See http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&q=achron+youtu... for some videos of achron.
I'd love to see Hacker News release who upvoted what, when - 'anonymized' if necessary (although I'm skeptical whether anonymization with a unique ID would truly be anonymous). The quantitative among us could mine the data for interesting things and vote-rigging would be exposed.

Any reason why this data couldn't be made public? There's an implicit social contract here - you don't expect the private to suddenly become public - but if that's a concern, we could get around this by just exposing the data from a publicly-announced point in the future.