skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've also noticed a lack of interesting articles on the front page ever since pg's "troll" essay. The current general hubbub over zoo vs savanna comparisons takes up too many slots.

I think there are a couple ways to go. One thing to try is to show points, but no upvoting on the front page, and allow voting on the 'new' section, but no point totals. That way, articles that that get upvoted are interesting articles from people browsing new articles. Without the influence of points tallys, people will be voting more or less independently.

As it stands now, social news isn't a 'wisdom of the crowds' sort of thing, but more like a positive feedback system that relies on a catchy title and a chance on the front page. This probably makes it more of a hit-or-miss for good articles.

Secondly, as any community gets bigger, the common ground between them gets smaller. There was some quote about television being stupid and inane, not because people that watch it are stupid and inane, but that the common interests we have are stupid, but our refined tastes are varied.

I find myself upvoting very little on the front page now, and the I have to spend time scouring the 'new' section to find the interesting stuff. To be honest, I see no reason why we shouldn't fragment the top news. This isn't like a newspaper where we only have one page to print on. However, I don't mean, breaking it up into "subHNs" like reddit did.

I mean, I should be able to alter the weighing of the front page. The simplest scheme would be to allow a user to follow certain people's submits. I regularly like nickb (other than his xkcd submits) and chaostheory's submits, but not as much edw519. A mere difference in taste. However, my own news snobbery shouldn't affect what goes on the front page. Everyone then has their own 'view' of the top news. That way, if Hacker News sucks ass for you, it's because you voted for "haha news" and followed submitters' articles that you don't actually find interesting.

One of the arguments against this is that the articles would homogenize, because people would follow the same types of things. Though potentially computationally expensive, one might be able to characterize a user based on the articles submitted/voted in some parameter space, and then you can show a distance measure between this user vs you and all the people you follow.
Sort of, just and Donald Trump
My code is where I live, so I like to keep the place tidy and zen.
Straight out of college when I was 23 I was working on a startup idea with a friend. we each had jobs, but they were very different. I was working as a mortgage broker (back then it was a good business) and my friend was working at a restaurant. I would get off work at 5 or so and my co-founder left work at 11-12.

So 4 nights a week we would meet at kinko's at 1am and work until about 4 am together. I would sleep for a few hours early morning and I'd also sleep for a few hours after I got home from work.

We weren't coding, just writing a business plan. We actually won an SBA business plan contest and got a little money to start the company. This was definitely the craziest hours that I've ever worked.
Ive been working on my project http://www.mee-mah.com for the last few months for about an hour or two a day. However I did have the help of rent a coder!
It is using machine learning approach to estimate what the impact of your feedback should be. That way it is depends on context (only topics / tags right now) and is gaming proof (i.e. you can give as much feedback as you want, that would only improve your reputation / predictions for you by the system).
Poor PR is one of the things that happened to Smalltalk. "Don't complain, only code," is good advice. That should also extend to: "Don't Hype."

Smalltalk, Java, Python, and Ruby all made the same mistake, however. They started gaining prominence before they got fast enough. We need to stop making the same mistakes again and again. There's no reason why even a late-binding Pure Object language shouldn't run at 25% of the speed of compiled C on many benchmarks. There's no reason why programs in these languages shouldn't be widely known to be faster than naive implementations in C.
Calling a company dead is a metaphor. Saying something is the saddest thing you've read isn't; and in fact Carr writes as if he really believed it.
Comcast has been throttling "watch in now" to 512kbps on the nose here for 2 weeks now. It works at 3mbit when I route thru the VPN to our datacenter.

You're not on comcast are you?
I agree that the posts are getting more mundane as some try to get 'the top score' possible. I'm all for this place being incredibly pompous if keeps up the quality of the content. I question the purpose of a number based karma system. Couldn't we just have a thumbs up and thumbs down approach on individual posters and not their posts. This way if you personally recognise that someone has a higher quality of posts, then you will go to the effort of recommending that person. Then you may choose to look at those who are connected to them. This way people don't have the same motivations.
I'm all for a subscription based scheme as well if it keeps the quality up. Maybe even charge for it.
I think we could keep this up for a while.
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby%2Cpython%2Cperl%2C+ja...
The question is not what creates wealth but what keeps it unevenly distributed.

There have been experiments (computer simulations) that tried to explain 'Pareto distribution' -- a power law distribution of wealth leading to 20 percent of population having 80% of the wealth. I refer to 1996 Axtell and Epstein book (google for Sugarcape).

Basically, they created a number of software 'agents' and placed them on a landscape full of resources. Each agent possessed a 'fitness function' that controlled its further survival. Having access to resources improved the fitness function since the agent could replenish its energy and could go on hunting for resources having some surplus for the rainy day.

What transpired from the simulation is that 'the Rich get Richer' axiom is basically true. First generation agent might have stumbled on a resource nearby by accident. It has improved its fitness function and he was able to successfully compete on the next round.

Meanwhile similarly fit agent who had bad luck in the first round (no resource nearby) was left chronically under-fit and his chances of 'making it to the top' diminished with every round.

This piece of empirical knowledge makes two important points about the society and the wealth.

Firstly, even in the free market society people always have unequal opportunities because this is an emergent quality of the system, not the result of some corruption, inability, personal passivity etc. The best and the brightest will stay poor unless they stumble on a resource which is not taken. (A new internet business idea for example).

Secondly, revolutions have their merits. They re-shuffle fitness landscape. Even when people do not directly 'expropriate' somebody's wealth by simply levelling the playing field revolutions create competing chances for the talented and the hard-working who would otherwise be forever destined to be relatively unfit comparing to those who already have access to resources.

Looks like extreme pro-market views are as primitive as extreme 'left' views. Social science really becomes fascinating when aided by computer science, doesn't it?
500's for me. Alternative link?
I can personally provide an inverse vote for Rackspace. I would 100% recommend people to avoid them. More than willing to elaborate if anyone needs more details.
In other words, capitalism is a treadmill!
"The tech industry's giants - like Microsoft, Intel and Oracle - are famous for ruthlessly dealing with competitors. Not Yahoo."

This is not a universal rule. Google and Apple didn't deal ruthlessly with competitors.
> So is everyone that got that impression from the essay a Reddit troll?

Yes. This whole silly argument started when the story went up on Reddit.
What if you knew the depth of the mail queue of the person to whom you were writing, before you wrote the e-mail? E.g., you are writing an e-mail to your boss, and when you start writing, you see that he or she has 150 unread e-mails. Might you change your mind and decide that it either 1.) wasn't that important after all, or 2.) important enough to relay the message in person or on the phone?
End-user vs development-oriented build system
The Wire and the web
I agree completely with the rails aspect. I've only been using ror for about 3 months and as long as you think of what you want to do in a 'rails' way you get lots done.

In regards to the parent question , when I first start a side project I spend a fair amount of time on it afterwork. But it usually settles to 2-3 nights a week for a couple hours and 9-5 sat.
">>People who start out with wealth seldom create wealth.<<

What is the basis of that statement? Bill Gates was born to a very wealthy family."

I'm pretty sure Bill Gates made more cash than he created wealth. Those are orthogonal concepts. It's possible to make cash without creating wealth or indeed, destroying it (ex: "successful" spammer that destroys the value of email). It's also possible to create lots of wealth without making money (the example is left as an exercise for the reader).
They share office space, own stakes in the other's companies. It sounds like an incubator, no? These solutions are appearing all over the place. Are incubators now a good idea? (YC is NOT included in that category)
Does this data have anything to do with anything?

Because these appear to be percentages of jobs on indexed job sites that mention term X, every single programming language that I checked is shrinking in share. Is that because software is becoming passé? Is it because there's a sudden enormous demand for pipefitters? Or is it just because some hiring managers (but not others) have concluded that hiring people through job site postings is a complete waste of time?

And is the relative share of Java, C++, Perl, Ruby, and Python being completely skewed by the relative percentages of hiring managers who think that job sites are a complete waste of time?

I certainly would never make an open job posting for a Ruby programmer unless I had no other choice. I don't enjoy reading resumés with a shovel.
I went to JTV for the first time a couple weeks ago and checked out the most popular streams. The #1 was a broadcast NBA game. The game had several thousand viewers on JTV, the next most popular streams were euro soccer matches with hundreds or some 1000s of viewers.

The most popular 'lifecast' had like 10 viewers at the time.

I wonder what % of jtv traffic is in a legal gray area. Of course youtube got rich off copyrighted content so there is a precedent for this business model. Interesting to see how it will play out.
State of the X window system
DNA seen through the eyes of a coder
The Top 10 Leadership Qualities
Try using a proxy to get a server in a different location.
The site has been diluted a bit. The TechCrunch post increased our traffic by 20% like a step function, and since then I've noticed slightly dumber stories getting slightly more votes. I don't think getting rid of karma would solve the problem, though. The problem is voting, not submission.

I may finally try turning on some kind of vote weighting. But there is a more organic solution:

Long-time users: please vote more.

If people voted up good stuff more often, that would fix the problem. And I know there is a lot of room to do that, because we now get around 12k unique visitors a day, and yet top stories rarely have more than 100 votes.
Text file wins 16 software awards
>>You'd be astonished at how many who start out with the Ferrari wreck it in short order and how many who start out with bricks become very strong because of it.

I had a general idea of how many belong to the former and latter categories, so I'm not astonished. The statistical data supports my point.

http://www.economicmobility.org/

>>People who start out with wealth seldom create wealth. In the best cases, they usually just administer it. Its the people who start out with the bricks that seem to end up creating the wealth.

This isn't just about starting off with wealth. My Ferrari metaphor is more about having the repertoire of values and skills needed to become wealthy in a place like the U.S. rather than simply being endowed with money. You're vastly more likely to do well in life if you have parents who spend time with you teaching you to read, making sure you do your homework, provide emotional support, and instill values of hard work and success than you are if you have parents, a parent, or no parents who do none of those things.

The late John Ogbu studied why the children of affluent African American parents who went to excellent schools were much more likely to underperform academically relative to their peers, and discovered that parental disengagement was a major factor.

http://www.hepg.org/her/abstract/38

Sometimes people manage to acquire the necessary values and thus the skills necessary to do well, despite starting off in adverse conditions. But they're the exceptions, and were psychologically and sociologically positioned to be that way. So unfortunately they can't be used as examples demonstrating that "anybody" can overcome adversity.

>>Slavery and poverty are different economic relationships altogether. Equating them is usually rhetorical hyperbole and if taken seriously, leads to some very wrong conclusions.

It's not exactly a stretch to say that the enslaved have typically been poor on account of their being slaves, is it? And I never equated slavery and poverty[1]: I used slavery as an obvious example of how you can have the deck overwhelmingly stacked against you.

1. I'm resisting the urge to say, "Anyone who says or implies that I equated them is themselves engaging in rhetorical hyperbole." :)
I realized long ago that sometimes the one to build the ship isn’t necessarily the best captain. I’ve used the analogy a few times because it points out the difference in skills needed to perform the set of tasks involved in starting and running a company. I have no problem admitting that I’m not sure that most entrepreneurs are capable of doing one or the other or both (or even if they should from a cost/benefit or value add perspective).

How do you/did you know when it’s time to bring in someone else to manage the venture you created (at least from an operational perspective)?
FYI: Aaron Swartz assisted in the coding of the site, so it's probably not HN related, but past YC-founder related.
Let me help you with that: Apple. The c2 wiki was inspired by Hypercard.

Speaking of Rorshach Tests. Your example of a CS advance isn't. Wikipedia is an application of a PHP script designed 5 years before the site launched. But you probably wrote that comment using a CPU that is the product of N generations of CPU research at Intel corporation.
Web 2.0 Funding In 2007 Discouraging
> Five percent of the equity in each company will be distributed in a pool to be shared by other Founders Co-op firms.

Smart way to encourage people to help each other.
YC-Clone in Seattle with a Co-Op Twist?
One thing that I've been thinking is that... there just aren't that many really good HN worthy articles out there. Are more people likely to each post at a more or less constant rate? If so, that's going to dilute the site, if the number of "good articles" is constant in a given period. No idea how to fix that.
i like this idea, sounds like a great way to build a community
What does that have to do with becoming another reddit? It's a good thing if something that gets popular here gets picked up by the larger tech media. It IS a popularity contest -- the question of merit lies in the question "Among WHOM is this item popular"

If smart people in aggregate think this is popular, then it has merit.

The fact that TC and others pick up on things that get popular here validates that there are still smart people hitting the up arrows (to some extent anyway).
Yaw, attacking the same market/problem, but decidedly NOT a clone.

I _really_ like the co-op twist.

I think shared office space, however, is a LOUSY idea. Adding to my list of things to blog about!
I'd like a page that lists all the updates from those that I'm following (like a standard Twitter client) but with a link to expand the conversation around each update
In some situations and places, wealth can be harder to create. On the individual level, it would be hard to refute the fact that somebody with an Ivy League college education has more wealth creation opportunities than a farmer from a 3rd world country. Same thing also applies to poor countries and rich countries. So even though poverty is the rest state, it really doesn't help that some people are taking advantage of other people to create it.
Don't YC companies also work together or at least use each other's products? Co-oping sounds great, but only when it actually benefits users.
Could software be a list of business process mistakes?
Anyone up to a Hacker News meeting in San Francisco in April?
Hi everyone! I'm flying to SF from April 7th to the 17th of April. It would be great if we could setup some kind of informal meeting someday between those dates and have some pizza, beers and good chats/ideas exchanges/etc. Someone likes the idea and is willing to meet and have fun?

Send me a Twit (http://twitter.com/abarrera) if interested or email me at: abarrera AT neurosecurity DOT com

Hope seeing some of you guys there!
Hmm. Pretty sure Unix is universally credited to Bell Labs, originated in another operating system built by Bell Labs, and received substantial funding from Bell Labs. If your best argument is that Unix is an example of non-corporate research because Richie started it in his spare time, you don't have much of a case.
Why is everyone who invests small amounts of seed funding a "YC clone"? The implication is that the people they fund are "YC rejects" (YC people have explicitly claimed that on this site).

It seems tantamount to wishing to constrain the number of seed-funded startups to the ones 4 people (PG & co.) can advise at once.

Are more startups a good thing, or not? If it is, don't deride newcomers by referring to them as a clone of what already exists.
The literary device he used it irrelevant. It is simply not tasteful writing.
Ouch. You seem to think Ethernet, Postscript, and C are inapplicable to modern computer science. Where did you go to school?
A New Tool From Google Alarms Sites
I'm not convinced that this "less interesting" problem is real.

For one thing, talking about the "quality" of news.yc posts is like talking about the weather. It's partially random, and it fluctuates. Sometimes it's grey and drizzly! Sometimes it's sunny! Sometimes you have Hurricane Katrina!

There certainly are lots of people complaining about the quality of posts, but that in itself isn't evidence of anything. People constantly talk about the weather, too. It's a safe topic, it's a shared experience that connects you with your audience ("Did you get wet yesterday? Yeah, I got wet, too!"), and it changes a lot, which guarantees that there will always be something to say.

Any community larger than five will never agree on the definition of an "on topic" submission. One person's sensationalist linkbait is another's clever marketing hook. One person's banal retread is another's timeless classic.

Finally, I don't think we need another system. We have a system: PG edits the site using whatever tools that come to hand. (Yes, the karma system is there, too, but it's kind of lightweight -- karma does not convey ultimate power, it's subtle in its influence, and it mostly serves as a way to send small-scale social signals.) Ultimately, I don't trust systems to build readable sites: I trust editors. I'm confident that, if the site starts to suck, PG will start arbitrarily pruning and transplanting and reworking the rules until it doesn't suck anymore. I certainly trust him more than I'll ever trust any mindless, gameable, automatic system, or any silver-bullet gimmick.
> Sorting, searching, filtering, tagging and personal preference should solve this problem

and ruin the sense of community (baby + bath water)
Lost in MySpace: How a generation of children are being raised online
How much of a hindrance are student loans to founders? Or inversely, how much of an advantage is having no debt?
Write an HN-worthy article and submit it.

Easier said than done, I admit. ;)
I don't want to get into an argument about food, but I don't buy the argument that the food most people eat is toxic to humans. Eating too much of it, and lack of exercise/physical activity can certainly be toxic. But you feel and see the consequences when you're doing that (having been there I can give a first hand account of what happens).
Ever shrinking attention spans.
A content site. Some of the best ideas are old ideas.
Google does give almost everything away for free. Apple's... users are pretty ruthless by proxy (alright, got me there).
Well, I don't think Android apps just get nuked from one minute to the next - they get a chance to shut down and save state.

If anything, Objective C is going to be more efficient in terms of processor cycles and memory, so that point would go to the iPhone.

I prefer Android's approach: laissez faire, and see what works out rather than attempt to foresee everything beforehand and risk killing off good apps before they even have a chance.
Is McCain In The Pocket Of The Telecomm Industry?
Oh, man -- your post made my math-addicted brain start estimating the financial cost of the time I spend here on news.YC. Now I need a drink, and it's only noon.

Believe me, $5 would be nothing.
Political perhaps, but net neutrality is an important topic to me and I'm curious what others have to say about this.
i heard second-hand about a theory/hypothesis saying that companies who focus on countering their competition perform poorly compared to those who focus on their market/potential market. it's pretty obvious i think. focusing solely on the competition and the current market restricts the field of view to a tiny subset of possibilities

i imagine it's related to what leads companies into performing feature-by-feature comparisons of their products, as opposed to, say, creating an mp3 player whose design and construction completely ignores every other mp3 player on the market, yet still manages to saturate it
I'm in St. Louis and still don't see any ads on that page. I checked and NoScript and AdBlock are both whitelisting you, too.

(What a curious thing! I'm trying to get more ads in my browsing experience! Who'da thunkit.)
When posting a reply to a comment, have the page center on your new post via an #anchor. This refreshes the other reply links on the page and makes it easier to find your place again on the page.
Agreed. It's not an unserious view of intellectual property to say that some creative works aren't valuable in and of themselves (or shouldn't be), but may help drive the value of something else that is.
It depends on what they mean by "shared office".

If they share a secretary and some meeting rooms it can work well.

If 20 companies are in the same cubicle farm, not so much.
Time decay might be a factor, but I think you'll get better results than making everything be a reply to the last update from that user. Once you find out what the magical N number is you can throw that in as well.
"punish the rich"... "the left-wing tends to be extreme"; this is just blatant partisanship. There is nothing to support, just opinion... what productive conversation could start this way?

This is why politics here is dangerous.
Top 5 Reasons it Sucks to be an Engineering Student | Wired Science from Wired.com
>> Are any of the following true? (a) You are the only founder.

I suspect this YC app field sends you to /dev/null. In the html, the select's name is "badness" !