skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Five Tips for Overcoming Burnout
I got proficient at the scrape method after about a week. Generally, this method involves more luck than skill and can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 15 mins to pick a lock. The pin-at-a-time method is much more difficult. I'm still not super good at that approach, but I don't practice as regularly as I should. They've got these clear plastic training sets you can purchase so you can see the tumblers move up and down. I never bought one, but I can see how they'd be useful: http://www.lockpickshop.com/PSTNX.html
"Actually the problem is that Google's apps are self-service, and this is not what enterprise customers are used to."

Having worked with numerous "enterprise" packages in various capacities, I can assure you that most enterprise software vendors offer something that only barely qualifies as "support" anyway. The difference is that Google isn't lying about their level of support,
I think we should leave things exactly as they are. Some of the best "how to do your app" discussions result directly from these "fluffy" posts. Whenever one of these shows up, the ensuing thread is usually very long with many hackers presenting many different opinions. It turns into a "community-based analysis and design session" with exactly the kind of people you'd like to have.

"This is what the up arrow should mean."

"This is what karma should be."

"This is how to get it to behave like..."

And we're all talking about OUR app, the one we all know and love. These are my favorite threads and one of the best ways to learn and get to know each other a little better.

What we already have is better than anything any one of us could have designed.

Keep the fluff coming (just not too much).

(EDIT: This was the 2nd comment posted. One hour later, there are 22 comments about OUR app. This is EXACTLY what I was talking about. Great thread!)
Switching editors is just as hard as switching languages
Thanks for the feedback. That's probably the most common issue people have mentioned and it's something we're going to address very soon.
AOL Is Really, For Real Ending Netscape Navigator
There are drivers for it, but I don't know how good they are.

http://www.wiili.org/Wiimote_driver
"BTW, startup founders use this type of understanding to prioritize ideas that have a better chance of success."

Can you elaborate what you mean? It sounds intriguing, but I don't fully understand it.
Zuckerberg looking for a #2
I found Seth Godin's The Dip had a nice way of determining whether it was worth continuing on an idea. He suggested that you imagine that you succeed completely in your execution: everything goes according to plan, you can deliver completely on your vision, all your assumptions are proven right. Now ask yourself:

1.) Has the world changed appreciably because of your success? Will people notice the difference?

2.) Are you now the best in the world at the particular mark you've chosen to make on the world?

If the answer to one of these is "no", you probably want to give up and try something else. Just because the answer is "yes" doesn't mean you should keep going (I've seen more startups killed because they couldn't build the product than because they built the product and nobody wanted it), but it's a pretty strong indicator that you're on to something. Technical problems have a way of being solvable if you get desperate enough.

These questions were a major reason I quit FictionAlley - as much as I liked the people involved and loved the community, it's hard to justify working on a plain old website used by a narrow subculture that legally has no prospective of revenue or buyout. They were a major reason I quit my last employer - the mission had changed from "revolutionize the financial industry" to "build products for keeping track of obscure SEC regulations", and we were using technology (Java & JSF) where there is no particular benefit to being the best in the world at it. It's why my startups is no longer maintaining Diffle.com, which was really intended as a "warm up" to get a feel for the industry. It's a major reason I'm sticking with our current plan, because I feel that if we can succeed in our execution, it's something fundamentally different from what's out there. I may have to reevaluate in 6 months though, since the competitive environment may change any time.
DVD on how to print with dye sublimation.
Click Fraud Keeps Rising, Up 15 percent in 2007
Not in every case. The quality of a network can decrease with added users if they subtract from the community.
Fixing Technology "Meetups" (Chicago and Elsewhere)
To be very blunt: I don't know, I'm just not convinced that two guys are going to go up against even existing open source systems... Not impossible, but I don't see it as easy unless you really have something up your sleeves.
You could write a fairly appealing account of starting to use any drug . . .
That is a pretty intriguing idea. Except you'd want to use points as the test, or it would break if you were a day off.
From the article: "It's plenty obvious that free commerce is not a zero-sum game. I go to the liquor store to buy beer. I buy five bottles of Staropolskie Zlote for about ten bucks. I value the beer more than I value the ten bucks -- else I wouldn't have given the clerk my money. The liquor store values my ten bucks more than the beer -- else they wouldn't have sold it to me. We both come away from the exchange happier: I have my beer, they have their money. We both get what we wanted. The world is, in fact, a better place after that exchange than it was before... at least for me and for the liquor store."

From the article: "One firm adds value by trucking the beer from the brewery to a port. Another firm adds value by shipping the beer across the Atlantic. A third firm adds value by shipping the beer across Canada, and yet a fourth firm adds value by providing a broad selection of beers in a relatively convenient place for my buying pleasure."

Congratulations. You've discovered Pareto efficiency ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency ), the means by which goods are distributed.
I would not count on that. I have a hypothesis that the character of a site's comment threads is a time-delayed function of the top stories. If we want to keep the 14 year olds away, we have to ensure that the front page of News.YC looks boring to them when they come across it.
How Much Capital You Should Raise: VC’s Perspective
In my post, How Much Capital You Should Raise: Entrepreneur’s Perspective, I described the conflicting incentives that entrepreneurs face when deciding how much money to raise from VCs. VCs also face similar conflicting incentives:

Minimize portfolio concentration: Venture is an inherently unpredictable business. Markets can change, competitors can crop up and consumer preferences can evolve. This is especially risky for VCs since they never know everything about the companies that they are investing in (entrepreneurs know more about their companies). As a result, VCs are required to develop a diversified portfolio of investments to mitigate their exposure to any single company. This creates an incentive for VCs to minimize their investment in each company, building a large and diverse portfolio.

More @ markpeterdavis.com
Do Not Read From A Script
Not all CEOs are the charismatic leaders depicted in magazines. Charm alone doesn’t make a good CEO. However, a minimum level of confidence and a base level of interpersonal skills are usually required for CEOs to be successful. If you are a founder who does not have these traits, simply bring someone onto the team who does. Find your complement.

One symptom that demonstrates a lack of the core CEO skills is your ability to explain your business in your first meeting with a VC. If you find that you are so nervous that you need to write out all of your answers to every possible question in that meeting so that you can read your answers from a paper in the meeting, it is time to re-evaluate your role in the business.

To many, this suggestion may sound obvious. However...

Read more @ www.markpeterdavis.com
I agree.

Also:

While we may want to white list programming.reddit, there should be a way to keep off the fluff that prevails there. The fluff in programming.reddit are the "too popular" posts. We can flag the ones with too many points / too many comments. They scream "bicycle shed".
A lot of computer security and cryptography folks are into lockpicking.
One disappointing thing from the article is that they state that Hollywood loses billions a year to piracy - as if it were an established fact. Sure, there's billions of dollars worth of content traded via piracy, but it's debatable how many of those dollars were lost to Hollywood.

Otherwise I have to say this article is one more example of why I love The Economist. You'd never see a publication from, say, a Time Warner company chiding Hollywood for being stupid. I started reading The Economist in the 90's because it was the only news outlet that didn't have weekly in-depth coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial or Monica Lewinsky. I've never looked back.
A friend tried cyberbegging about 10 years ago. It appears to be more successful nowadays.
Really disappointed that he chose to focus on deploying on nginx instead of Apache which most people are probably going to be using
Can anyone tell me anything more precise than "it doesn't work?" What is the difference between the current format of the RSS feed and what it should be?
I can think of several reasons it won't work. Off the top of my head:

1) There are just so many shitty links and LOLcats out there that the chances a shitty submission to YC is also on the frontpage of reddit is very small

2) The problem with reddit is that the signal/noise ratio is so high, not that there are no good submissions that make it to the frontpage. For instance this http://drnicwilliams.com/2008/02/22/zero-sign-on-with-client... is currently on the frontpage of both reddit and YC.

There are much better ways of doing it than this proposal. For instance use a bayesian filter to measure the submitted site up against previous submissions with high ratings.
Every time I click on a link which is a PDF file, I feel like I stepped on a dog's poop. Replacing that with Flash is not the solution: give me just normal HTML, my browser deals with scrolling and zooming just fine, don't reinvent the wheel.

Besides, after I switched to Ubuntu as my primary desktop, I actually like PDFs more than Scribd's flash "black holes", because Linux has a much nicer, lightweight and fast PDF viewer that quickly opens in it's own frame without freaking up the browser. And Gnumeric with AbiWord deal with Office files just fine, thank you.

Yes, there is (unfortunately) a lot of data in "non-Web" formats like PDF, Word and Excel. But converting them into yet another proprietary and non-browser (and search engine) friendly "black box" is NOT the solution.

So now, in addition to PDFs, I must learn to avoid scribd links as well. My freaking hot keys won't work if the mouse cursor happened to be over one of those "flash holes", and scrolling is not as fluid and fast. Do we need _another_ startup to solve this problem now?
I don't use news.yc RSS so I can't speak to the problems, but here's a possibly-too-precise answer:

http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.yco...
This isn't "better" than Single Sign On; if anything, I would call it a complementary, not competitive, technology.

A client certificate is a statement of trust for a particular machine, not a user. They can be very useful when you want to do the equivalent of IP-address restrictions for access to a service, but want to support mobile systems and/or need stronger guarantees than simple IP checking provides.

The biggest problem with client certs, in addition to the "multiple users sharing a machine account" gotcha mentioned in the article's comments, is that there is no "logout" mechanism. I can't let someone else use my machine without logging out of the local account and in to another guest account, because the cert is always going to be presented.
No, thank you. I don't go to reddit anw.
Ok, I think I figured out what changed. Is it working now?
U.S. Post Office to Enable Wholesale Surveillance of Mail
The solution is way more simple. Since the stories are driven by the users, i would only allow a certain user profile to join. i.e hackers only.

The problem with digg and reddit is they allow anyone to join. In almost all UGC sites the users define the site. However if you define your users you define your site.
What test do you propose, other than self-identification, that would cut across every possible definition of "hacker"?
I wish I had access to such a great source of information when I was 14. I was just starting to become a competent programmer, and would have greatly benefited from the recurring messages in this site (like release early and often, I rarely released anything to anyone but a small circle of friends). I finally began to learn these principles through a lot of trial and error on my own in my mid 20's.

While I realize that the majority of users will be 20-40 year old web app creators buy don't alienate anyone. Going forward can we look to keep non-hackers away? I think everyone enjoys this community, let's not strangle the spirit of it trying to keep it from changing.
Rails acts_as_conference Slides
Ecommerce Affiliate Programs: A new funding model for a development focused organization
Your "solution" to the problem of a community-driven website is to stop making it a community-driven website and call in the administrators? Isn't that pretty much giving up?
I understand where you are coming from.

However, to me and to many others I know, "Hacker" is an ideal that we strive towards... an asymptote... (Stallman is there...Linus is there...I am not going to be there at least for quite some time. But I am trying hard.)
Sorry, I know there are thoughtful 14 year olds. I don't want to exclude them. I'm using "14 year olds" as shorthand for people whose mental age is 14. Basically, anyone, whatever their age, whose comments you can imagine being said by Beavis & Butthead.
Let me see if I've got this right: you want to open source your code so you can get a bunch of free bug fixes, QA testing, and positive press, and what you're offering in exchange is a crippled, deployment-size-limited version of your package for small teams and other open source projects?

Thanks, but no thanks.

It sounds to me like you simply don't have the resources you need to develop your system, and want to get a bunch of free labor from the OSS community without really opening your code.

If you're going to go open source, you're still going to need folks to do documentation, QA, and marketing. You're still going to have to plan and manage releases. Hell, you're going to have to fight an uphill battle convincing some managers they should pay you for anything when the base product is "free."

Plus, you're going to have a community just itching to fork your product and put you out of business at the first sign of you putting your bottom line ahead of their interests.

Do yourself a favor, and either scale back the scope of your project so it's something you can handle, or find the resources to staff up and finish the damn thing. Then decide if you want to open source the code base. Just don't expect something for nothing.
How do you pronounce "Pentaho"?
Seriously, he should be looking for a #1...
One of the things I actually worry about are the "attractive nuisance" threads about things like politics and economics that are actually pretty interesting, or can be, but often end up being fairly divisive and distracting. This, for instance:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121137

So far it's civil... But they're the kinds of things that end up drawing people into often lengthly, fruitless debates - they end up being philosophical differences that might be ok to discuss over a bottle of wine, but often end up badly on the internet...
Patent Troll Tracker
The Current State of BlackBerry Addiction: BlackBerry-Less In Chicago
A regex search engine for what?
Just wanted to get the feedback of the community of potential disruptive application of a regular expression based search engine before offering my prof. to start researching the subject.
Well, let's look at it from an investment perspective. Growing tech stocks trade at 20-50x earnings, but an especially hot or new stock can trade at 100x (I'll use that for Facebook). So for a $15B valuation at 100 P/E, they'd have to make $150 million in profit per year or $3/user. I don't think they're there yet (I think revenues are in that ballpark, not profits), but it's not unreasonable.

Of course 100x is an extremely high valuation multiple for a company based on fundamentals instead of speculation, so if they can't monetize, or if they stop growing, or if attrition goes up, then their multiple goes down and then they might have to make $6, $12, or $24 in profit/user/yr, which I'm pretty sure is unreasonable.

Moral of the story: we're all guessing. If they can monetize, then every doubter is wrong. If they can't, then every doubter says "I told you so."
how about being able to downmod submisions, or at least flag them as fluf? if enough users flag a post, (weighted by their karma) then that submission should be removed from the main page.
Another alternative is that when a URL is submitted, that URL is checked against other popular sites (Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Sphinn, etc). Then the submission is granted (or debited) points based on where else/how frequently it appears on other sites. Submissions from some sites might get points auto-credited on creation (based on how commonly submissions from that site have accumulated points in the past).

Submissions that link only to another Reddit post, and not the actual story would be debited even more severely (those of us that want to read reddit already go there).

At some phase, a "FoundRead" might become a "Digg", ie: it's fairly well understood that the majority of the News.YC user base knows of the site and goes there directly to consume content. But in the short term it would be credited points for most submissions.

This should have the effect of demoting submissions that are all over the net, and especially those that are just links to digg/reddit. It should also have the effect of causing people to dig harder and deeper for truly good content to post.
The article misses the entire point. Why aren't people watching TV, going to the movies, or buying DVDs as much? Because they are on the internet doing other things. This is a seismic shift they cannot change. They should embrace it not by putting the same old fare on a new medium, but by getting into new web-based businesses.

Faster horses couldn't have stopped the advent of the automobile. And people don't want the one-way communication of movies on the internet any more than they want it from the big screen.
Yep, the comments links are back in Google Reader. Thanks!

While this is good enough for me, if you'd really like to know the diff between the current feed and the "ideal" feed that works in the maximum number of clients, http://feedvalidator.org is a great resource.
Some people need to hear that it's time to quit, because they're invested in something that's a dead end. Just as you shouldn't throw good money after bad, the same can be said for your time (and your team's time).

The important part isn't who said it (in this case it happened to be me), it's the simple fact that sometimes, it's good advice. This was obviously not an original idea of mine. In fact I doubt if I've said anything original at all here; every time I think I've thought of something original, I seem to find myself reading a book by someone who's already thought a couple steps ahead of me a few weeks later (luckily, that's okay -- ideas need not be original to be useful).

I might have said "someone who needs to face the realities of extricating themselves out of a dead end project" instead of using the shorthand "what I've written" to avoid such confusion. I was not intending to come across as some know-it-all guru, and it is my fault if my words conveyed that impression (and they well may have).

* Also note that the first half of my sentence said that the questioner was not "somebody who needs to hear what I've written."

* I am assuming that you were being sarcastic with this last reply, which I felt was a safe assumption, but I can't really know, because I don't know you, and communicating via text is hell and we are prone to vastly overestimate our own comprehension of the other person's intent. My apologies if I screwed up.
I'm with parent. I do enjoy and learn a TON from this site but I doubt I would qualify for any sort of "hacker" title. I'm very much a H.I.T. (hacker in training).
When Good Isn't Good Enough
It's like the guy that sold the page for $1 per pixel. At least it's tongue-in-cheek cyber-begging.
May I suggest that fluff can be fought by NOT upvoting fluff links.
Honest question, do you really want to limit it to just hackers in (what I am assuming) you mean in the sense of "advanced software developers"?

I think (MHO of course) that by "hackers" you should include what I would call the "startup hackers", ie: people that also know how to "hack" business and not just PHP/ROR/etc.
Wow thats a cool term! I am going to call myself a "hitman" from now :-)
> Hacker" is an ideal that we strive towards... an asymptote...

I disagree with that. There can't be an asymptote because there's no upper bound. You strive toward infinity and "hacker" is just a mile marker along the way.
RSVP'ed!
Make those IR-LED glasses into stereoscopic vision glasses and the entire 3D effect is realized.
"Pen-ta-ho" - and that's direct from a Pentaho employee.
Help us rally together against our common enemy. Send us all to Reddit "by mistake" 10% of the time that we try to access Hacker News.

By the time we make it back here, we'll be so distraught by our unexpected exposure to the histrionic twaddle of our enemy that we'll be in the mood to impulsively downvote anything that even remotely resembles fluff on our "home turf."
True. From my point of reference, it at least seems like an asymptote.

The more I learn, the more questions I am coming up with - which seem to increase my mass as I accelerate. May be one day I might have a weird look on my face and be enlightened. ( Airport lady voice gently says "You have arrived" :-p )
I know how to do it. I'm not very good at it.
Yes, I was being sarcastic. Darn, I keep making that mistake.

Just like I was not being literal when I said "never". I was just trying to emphasize that too many give up too soon with an extraordinary (and apparently inappropriate) word choice.

You can never be too thin or too rich, either. Oh, never mind. (Oops, I did it again.)

Good arguments all around. I think we've pretty much beaten this one to death. I give up - gotta go fix that bubble gum submarine leak.
You could make the site invitation-only. In order to join, you have to be invited by a member. Each member gets one invite a year.

This is how Livejournal used to work, and it resulted in everyone knowing at least one other person, which was important for a community site.
There are lots of times that I wish that I could use the wildcard in Google inside word tokens instead of just between words in a multiword string, i.e. search on googl* to get googlefight and googling as well as the expected. It could be a powerful way of capturing a set of alternatives easily. But its utility is limited for search if the user needs to know the order of tokens in the search (i.e. searching on a single regex globally on the rendered page).

I'd like to see a regular search engine interface (tokens, strings of tokens, and an exception operator) with the ability to make any token in it a regex by surrounding it with a specific marker, like bang or slash.