skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a reward mechanism. It's mere existence makes it valuable.. kind of like fiat money :)

But seriously, on the micro scale, earning a single karma point feels good because it means somebody appreciates what you said. On a macro level, it lets you compete with other people, and serves the same purpose that high scores in video games do. Humans respond very well to an abstract notion of wealth, and humans are naturally competitive.
Snobby and snarky at the same time! A profitable company can be located anywhere. Pittsburgh actually has a burgeoning tech sector (as rms will probably attest), and I hope this gives it an extra boost.
the question is not why does it cost so much, but rather, why do people still buy the ridiculously expensive popcorn!
Btw, we'd love to chat more with you about this. Please email zack@8aweek.com
Intel Delivers Eight-Core Platform
bandaids on a rotting corpse?
Don't invent, evolve
What would be the problem by having a downmod arrow for submission based on a karma threshold like for comments? It would allow users to filter by themself.
I'm sorry, my reply was really uncalled for. It's just that I always find it funny when someone echoes an idea almost exactly that they seemingly missed in the article. I think it's part of my assumption that the people on Hacker News actually read through an article before voting or commenting on it, but that could be changing (or I could just be wrong).
This is lame. I'd rather HN be a resource for people who actually do things, and not a therapy session for people who can find no other reason to do something than that they should "fucking doing it". For anyone with a soul, anything is more motivating than that.
can you share the urls for the same?
Where are the Y Combinators of the design/marketing worlds ?
just wanted to know if there are similar organizations that were incubating marketing or design teams and startups ? getting the two schools of thought (tech as well as design/marketing) together to interact would definitely make a good hackday wouldnt it ?

where art thou ? 8 )
Thanks for that. I wish I had it when I first started reading the article, because I quit about halfway through after I got "bad-UI fatigue". At this point, however, I'm still debating whether or not I want to take another 15-30 minutes to go back and finish going over it.
It's there to make me feel bad.
It's a reasonable idea, but I don't know if "public" is the best approach. Unless you meant "internally-public", in which case I think it's a pretty good idea.

Unfortunately, in most cases it is not simply employee laziness that drives people to waste time online, but a dull, non-challenging task which could be completed in an hour or two if it did not mean simply receiving additional work with no real benefit. In other words, I feel like the situations where it would be necessary would almost always be the same situations where the employee is actually acting rationally.
I'm not a big fan of the O'Reilly books on Python, but if you prefer the style of Learning Python, you can't really go wrong. Most of the basic Python tutorials teach more or less the same material, so you won't miss too much by choosing one tutorial over the other.

I personally recommend How To Think Like A Computer Scientist (http://openbookproject.net/thinkCSpy/). It doesn't cover everything in 2.5, but I think most of the stuff in 2.5 you're better off just reading the release notes after you have a basic grasp on the pre-2.5 stuff. You're going to be reading a lot of code to master the nuances of Python, and most of it is pre-2.5 Python, so you should know it well.

If you want to use that book, there's also assignments and projects available from UC Berkeley's self-paced Python course, CS 9H, at http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~selfpace/cs9honline/ if you want more structure.
Text Processing in Python
Natural Mathematics
Software Development's Evolution Toward Product Design
Shhh... I want to keep reading great articles.
The article has some really great examples, though it's important to note that this is not a new technique, but one that Moore's law has finally made relevant. More importantly, this works for the kind of design that humans are really bad at. The search space is really vast, there are no good techniques to manually find the optimum, and the output can be judged objectively.

I imagine it'll only become more powerful and widely applicable with time.
Experts hammer Web 2.0 security - Yahoo. News
thats awful
Slapvid morphed into Cloudant even before Demo Day and has yet to launch, although the GoDaddy domain park page is never a good sign.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/16/y-combinator-demo-day-t...
Pittsburgh has a very different tech sector than the valley because of the extreme lack of capital. The startups that get funded tend to be very grounded in reality.

A lot of startups come up around UPMC in the medical devices area. The investors that are here are extremely practica/rigidl. There's such a small amount of capital that they can only invest in something that seems like a sure thing, like putting a patented design for a medical device into production. I can't blame them for that strategy, but it doesn't make Y Combinator style companies.

This is a list of companies that got seed stage funding in Pittsburgh in quarter 4 2007. http://www.popcitymedia.com/timnews/vcroundup1219.aspx

I do think that this program is good for Pittsburgh. It certainly can't hurt and it is costing Innovation Works so little to run that they can surely afford to do it indefinitely while operating a loss. They get money from the state in the type of post-socialist arrangement that I think is good for society. They have a nice incubator facility in the district of Pittsburgh where I would most like to have an office. It's a decent sized building in the district that has great coffeshops and lots of restaurants and bars.

If anyone from here is thinking of applying, send me an email...
I think that companies that do this program are unlikely to be connected to the investors that would encourage them to leave Pittsburgh. This program is great, except if you hit a dead end with the Pittsburgh investors and aren't profitable, you're done. In other words, a company capable of leaving Pittsburgh after AlphaLab probably didn't need AlphaLab in the first place.
it made me laugh out loud
This is my favorite appealing account of some people starting to use drugs; it's about a group of high class meth abusers in Denver.

http://www.westword.com/2003-09-04/news/72-hour-party-people
I think you're right because Big Tobacco is at the point where absolutely any mention of cigarettes, positive or negative, is better than nothing.
I am not a fan. It makes people feel like kids having there surfing habits posted. Would be better to make them feel empowered and responsible for their work. Though I guess thats not always possible...
I'm in favor most of the flag option. I understand how users with a high degree of karma can prove themselves worthy by virtue of what karma even means, but combining flags and the number of times downmodded creates a more level playing field for the process.
Facebook's execs take great pains, at every opportunity, to point out that they don't plan to do this and that they see Facebook as an ad-supported product.

I think that they think that charging for access would be a disaster
"If certain posts become popular its because people want to read them."
Why is reddit's content consistently horrible to the yc community? YC is not serving all people's needs in content - its serving a particular sector of users that expect knowledge/motivation from their content-browsing rather than humor/time-wasting.

Ycnews is figuring how much they should control because the fact is that if you don't have controls, the content and user base becomes like reddit. Also, the extreme degree of control that you suggest is so ridiculous that you're doing nothing but insulting a lot of hard work that people have done to find a good balance between being super-exclusive and open to everyone.
I think it's more "valuable" on your 'micro' (per thread) scale.
I see karma in the sense of politics. In the case of Hacker News, each person is given a vote on each of the submissions--essentially electing the best stories to appear on the front page.

This is a direct democracy, which has some shortcomings, particularly in voter apathy and the promotion of self-interests, where voters put their own needs before the needs of the whole. As the population of a direct democracy grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to accurately represent the will of the people (successful direct democracies usually emphasize consensus over majorities).

These problems are addressed in a representative democracy, where representatives are elected to vote in place of the people, as in the case of Congress or Parliament.

I believe that as online communities grow, voting systems begin to fall apart because the votes cease to represent the will of the community as a whole (the special interest groups take over the site). A common way website owners deal with this problem is by bringing in moderators or by somehow weighing votes based on some criteria, seniority or otherwise.

But I digress...

Karma is there to give people power over the direction of the community. Without karma, you would have no control over what you see, much like state-run media.
If you're posting here, presumably you know how to program already. In that case working through the free "Dive into Python" PDF really is the first step you should take. After the first seven chapters you should then be able to make do with the online docs (the remaining chapters cover specialized material like HTML parsing, SOAP calls and test based development which are, in my opinion, not the first thing you should be worried about when learning a new language).

"Learning Python" and especially "How to think like a computer scientist" are targeted towards people with very little programming experience. If that's you, my vote goes to "How to think like a computer scientist" (ymmv).
heh, I recently built a naive bayes analyzer that decides whether a text is from reddit or from ycnews. The assumption was that Reddit-like comments/stories were fluff and not worth reading.
Maybe we should focus on the underlying users that vote up fluff, and kindly inform them of the goals of ycnews community in content rather than focus on dealing with the fluff itself?
How about also changing the title and url of fluff links that have been taken over by intelligent conversation?

For instance, that "programming is like sex" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=120816 article had good discussion in the comments and the title should have been changed to "what to do about fluff".
The everybody will put: date of birth = 1800
Yep. I lurked for about a year and then in the last ~2 months since I registered and started interacting, I've gotten almost 600.
XP to Vista to XP - a humorous rant of an angry user
Is Popularo going to be a Digg killer?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=112421
Eclipse Releases Its First User-Centric Identity Framework
10 quotes against work
how much stock (options) should I give to new employees/partners
I have a startup company that is fully privately funded. I am now in the process of involving more (technical) people. I want them to take risk (and reward) so that they will get heavily involved en get enthousiastic. Can you give me some pointers (to documentation) on what I should think of (how to come up with a reasonable offer, do's and don'ts etcetera).
Anyone so concerned with stats that does not work for HN is just looking for more places to waste their time instead of working on their hack/startup. This isn't your community; it's a website. You may think of it as your community but where will you be two years from now? Still wasting time on this site asking for stuff like this? No. Google "This too shall pass" for it is the lesson of life. Really - the post today, "Do It Fucking Now", applies here as well lol. Figure out what's important and do that; having stats on this site is not important in your or my life.
Digg to address censorship – sure they will
The requirements specification can pass from the customer/user (CU), to the customer's manager (CM), to a customer advocate (CA), to a business analyst (BA), to a project manager (PM), to a development team (DM) to the Developers. Well, a man with many masters is slave to none. Likewise for code.
Your objection here doesn't make any sense. Of course people could be spending more time doing work and less time on news.yc. But asking for stats isn't any better or worse than any other use of this site.

Obviously this site isn't a community to you, but it is to some people. It's also entertainment. I'd rather have stats on this website than watch whatever is on network television right now.
Stop spamming your blog.

Thanks.
Thanks for the insightful reply.
I've been following Paul Graham's essays for a while. I like most of what he writes. That led to finding out about the YCombinator, and although it wasn't for me, I liked the idea of it.

More recently, I came across news.yc when it got some exposure on Reddit, which I've become increasingly less interested in.

I thought, cool! People doing things. Stuff about the things people are doing. Stuff about how to do other things. I can dig this.

Then the last few days happened, and ... eh.

In the last week, I've:

Ground out a few hundred lines of ksh for a pretty cool in-house sysadmin package;

Developed a nifty JavaScript/CSS effect for a client website;

Worked out a wireless hotspot deal that might make my area pretty unique;

Started wondering whether Google's entry into health records systems has closed the doors on that market.

I'd like it if news.yc was about people doing things.
glad to see the people on hacker news are very cynical. keep up the good work in spotting bullsh*it
Learning Python is an excellent book. It is what I found most useful for learning the language. I bought and read many books, and this one is the best I found. Conversely, Programming Python sucks, even though both are authored by the same person. (LP is co-authored.)

The language docs from python.org are invaluable as a reference, which includes the tutorial. I invariably download the html tarball and put it on any machine I use for python programming.
Yes it does make me happy. With any luck, those who wouldn't find parenthood a source of happiness and joy won't breed.
It is that simple. If you can't do that then you've got more problems then a few people surfing some websites.
"basic human need for listening to stories that will not go away"

Absolutely. I just suspect that now that we have more options, we'll spend a little more of our time doing and a little less receiving. I have noticed that this is true for many people. It is, alas, not so true for many others.
>I like the idea of people being able to write their own formulas and share them. Especially in a forum like this :-)

I think this is a great idea. If all the relevant data were made available (most of it probably is) it could probably be implemented client side in something like greasemonkey.
P.S That is before the last chapters in which the books gets really interesting. But it'd be nice to have those projects in between chapters as you learn instead of at the end of everything.
Google Says I.P. Addresses Aren’t Personal
The Facebook Fatigue “Story” is Getting Tired
from which country this startup is working from?
Quality of videos is good...what is the delay between the time when video is sent to site and then time when it becomes live...
There should be. Why is this vacuous, sensationalist stuff making it to the top and staying there? Surely the Elders of News.YC have not pushed this to the top. Tell me that most of the leaders have abstained from this one.
OAuth — An open protocol to allow secure API authentication
48 points with a bullet. There goes the neighborhood.
The more karma you have, the more likely you are to reincarnate into something cool the next time 'round the wheel. Lots of karma=rock star. No karma=a snail.
Startup: File Destructor 2.0
As a Cory Doctorow fundamentalist, I believe that my high karma score will eventually allow me to own Disney World.

But it could be that it's just a crude mental hack that we substitute for all the normal social signals we get when we socialize in person. We can't smile, frown, applaud, backslap, suddenly remember a previous engagement, or cough pointedly here. Even a deliberate change of subject is hard to pull off when the posts appear in arbitrary order. All we can do is use karma.
Microsoft prepares workers for Yahoo takeover
NO.

The question should be restated: Can Popularo become a better community than Digg?

Digg is a community, not a technology solution. These two are different things completely. Popularo is trying to build a community, not a competitive technology. While I realize that communities can be competitive against one another (for example war), I don't see the two as competing for anything other than participation, which is something that is not exclusive to either.
I have the following question for those that are advocating a tech/statistical/mathematical solution: How many of you are individuals who are in the process of creating a startup in the hopes of getting YC funding?

The reason why I'm asking this question is because I had the impression that the articles here are more reflective of the VC/hacker roots of YCombinator (silly me!). I also feel that somehow alot of the up-votes for this perspective is reflective of the notion that if you complain to PG enough, he'll swoop in and fix things so that all is well. Hint: if you continue to have this attitude, then you will see your chances of getting YC funding (or even have them bat an eyelash at your application) decrease rapidly because your objection to "fluff" is so strong; do you really think anybody in their right mind would fund somebody who can't handle the "fluff"?!?!?!?!

I recognize that there are many who have been suggesting solutions that PG implement (and to his great credit he has pleased many of you by expanding the leaders list to 100 now!); but I also want to know if your energies would be better suited in actually finding articles that you like and submitting those (in other words, being competitive), and perhaps even EARNING karma points (which translates into recognition as well).

Not everything is solvable in code and not everything that you do not like is a "problem". I would argue that the diversity (which can be read as the mix of hard-core geekstuff along with fluff) is reflective of the VC/hacker roots of Hacker News. Or in other words: break out of the box and have a multifaceted view of the world.
Here's my definition: work is a necessary pain.
It's not really possible to introduce a Surowiecki-style "Wisdom of the Crowds" model to online news sites. In his book, James Surowiecki is very specific about what makes for a good "WOTC" poll, and what doesn't. In particular, he mentions cascade-effect where people tend to accept social proof about what is good or not, hence what is worth promoting on a social news site.

The question asked has to be very specific, and preferably incentivised to avoid flippant answers. "Guess the weight of this calf and take home some meat", in one case, or "Help find this missing submarine and get a case of champagne" in another. Social media sites have none of this, and they should stop invoking "Wisdom of the Crowds" in defence of their many eccentricities and aberrations. Google's internal futures market is much closer to what Surowiecki was writing about - it has incentives, it avoids publishing other people's votes prior to the outcome, and it asks specific questions.
Redhat gets nasty with DataPortability Workgroup - with funny cartoon
RedHat Loses, DataPortability (and we all) Win
Super-speed Internet satellite blasts off in Japan
I don't think anyone should take this article as a personal affront to their life choices. It's an interesting tangent in the broader field of psychology, just as Freakonomics is interesting the context of the broader field of economics.

Of course the greater part of caring for young children is unpleasant; it is not news that changing diapers sucks, that trying to get a 4 year-old to put on his shoes when you're running 10 minutes late is infuriating, etc. But the shining moments of bliss are so profound, so stunning.

I hear running marathons can be largely unpleasant, as well, but the feeling of crossing the finish line is unparalleled.
Wait, you believed them when they said "Write once, run anywhere"? That's so cute.
Acne Information
The iPhone SDK Will Be Late
When Wikipedia Won't Cut It: 25 Online Sources for Reliable, Researched Facts
Whats The Real Cause Of Acne?
Most acne medications only mask the symptoms of acne and does nothing to stop the real cause of acne. This is why people buy acne products month after month (year after year). And every time they stop using the product acne would come back again and again.
Digita Camera
All about digital Camera
Can Apple Patent the Pinch? Experts Say It's Possible
Are Wikileaks Servers in a Nuclear Bunker?
Balancing Work & Family
Some of us aren't interested in the numbers but we are interested in the patterns behind them, especially if they could be used to identify destructive trends.
"humans are naturally competitive."

[citation needed]
Organizations that think like this:

DHS

FBI

CIA

DOD

KGB

Thought Police

Please don't add YC.News to this list. It's one of the few places I enjoy on the net at the moment (and of those few, this is my favorite). I don't like the notion of having some sort policing activity to identify "destructive trends" as you call it.

Sorry for putting it so bluntly.
Sure Zack will email you as soon as I have some free time.
Having had several jobs where stock options were a motivator, I have a little advice to offer:

Stock options are not a replacement for a competitive salary, unless the technical people are given substantial ownership. So, for example, 1% of a company that could realistically reach a valuation of 2 million dollars is not enough. The risk is only worth it if the payoff will make up for and exceed any salary trade offs.

Be clear and realistic about the numbers. Don't exaggerate, please please please.

Options can make good bonuses, but only if the company is perceived as doing well. If your employees don't feel connected to the company, they'll scoff and become actively de-motivated.
The post is a year old and still has "Julias Ceasar" misspelled. A Nike-ish post with culture. Live-strong.
The original question aside (for the record, I'd find it interesting as well), does anyone else think this comment thread is kinda nasty? Ugh.
Servers in a nuclear bunker can just as easily be taken offline with a court order as servers not in a nuclear bunker.

A much wiser approach would be to mirror the content around the world, including in a number of countries with more lax laws on what can and cannot be stored on said server. The pirate bay seems to have success with this - according to them they don't even know where their servers are physically located.
I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. -- Jerome K. Jerome

Whenever I get someone watching me performing a task, I quote this. They stop watching shortly after they get the meaning.
There are three criteria for taking out a patent:

1) It must be non-obvious to a person skilled in the field

2) It must be novel

3) It must be useful

So I don't see why they shouldn't be able to patent it. Unless there is prior art.
Congratulations to Intel, you're only 15 months behind Sun ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T1 ).
Having observed Digg and Reddit devolve, solving this problem has nothing to do with conspiracy theories.
This is more about addressing Eternal September concerns (brilliant reference by someone yesterday). History will repeat itself until a clever, llama-free community ahem addresses these problems intelligently. I can't think of a better place for it.