skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Eternal September has become a pattern of mass interaction, especially on the net. It's why we have News.YC, after all: the Eternal September of Reddit.

The problem is fundamentally content overload, but that goes hand-in-hand with decrease in average quality. Quality, in an absolute sense, may increase, but it's overwhelmed by ignorance and mediocrity. So there needs to be filtering on the content lifecycle.

Filtering right up front is very effective, but bad for business. Take Google Answers. You had to pay money (mostly) to ask a question and few were allowed to answer them. Extremely high average quality content for what was there, but where are they now? Compare that, of course, with its polar opposite Yahoo Answers. It was never even August there!

But the internet's native model is to eliminate any constraint on generating content. That's why Eternal September was so grievous -- it's when that philosophy got mugged by the reality of induhviduals, spam, crazy people and the sheer volume of mundanity.

It was also when people realized that the potential of the internet was rapidly approaching. But okay, given Eternal September as a reality of content generation (don't try to set up walled gardens), what do you do? You bust out the best tools you can for dealing with it -- the PageRank, the groups, the tags, the voting, the social connections. And people seem to enjoy the internet again. And I think some money was made along the way.

So is it more interesting that Eternal September was the end of the golden age for the elite or the birth of a golden age for the mainstream?
" But this is not a startup; at this site the goal is quality, not growth."

A sincere thank you for that...
basecamp you are now on the hotseat...
try installing something like LFS (Linux from scratch) and see how much you learn about Linux. Maybe I'm just old school but even on Windows I was always studying the OS internals, the specs of the various protocols and the details of the filesystem. The difference is in Linux I have access to the sourcecode so in addition to reading a book on the specs I can study the implementation ad well.

Does this really make me a better programmer? I hope so. But it might be just an extreme form of procrastination.
man lex | grep Schmidt

Eric Schmidt is a hacker who became a manager. The executive search at Google was dreadfully prolonged because Larry & Sergey wouldn't accept someone without technical experience.
"Very, very few of the people you interview with in a research group will ever tell you that your academic career is a waste of time and that you should just leave, even if it's true."

It's true that they'll rarely say this explicitly. Ultimately, it's the potential grad student's responsibility to dig and find out what kind of a culture a research group has. This is a difficult thing to do, requiring considerable self-confidence and tenacity. Still, in my opinion, if someone is not willing to do this, then they really should consider some path other than academia.

"(2) Iterate until you find a group that looks excellent, or until you discover that all the excellent groups have a waiting list, at which point you need to either quit grad school, apply for a personal fellowship and win it, or work for whoever has the grant money to pay you."

You seem to be implicitly assuming that the world owes you a position in a good group. It doesn't. If you can't find one, then you shouldn't work for whoever has grant money to pay you. You should go and do something else - like start a company.
Unless a person needs specialized equipment or materials, why go into academia for research in the first place? It's easy enough to become financially free so you can spend all your time researching. The internet is there if you need to collaborate.
A&F: revenue - $2 billion a year, valuation - $5 bil

Facebook: revenue - $150 mil, valuation - $15 bil
Software Craftsmanship: Apprentice to Journeyman
This article forgets to factor in that there are a large number of investors that relish buying low during times of recession. The overall size of the pie may be decreasing but there may be more slices to go around.
Japanese engineers trash MacBook Air
How JavaScript Timers Work
There's a slight mistake imho. Einsteins theory of relativity is categorised as a "now we're ready" idea meaning that if he hadn't thought of it somebody else would have. While this is true for the special theory of relativity published in 1905 it is not true for the general theory of relativity which also includes gravity published ten years later.

Many scientists believe that if Einstein hadn't incorporated gravity into the theory there's a good chance that it would still be undiscovered today.

But aside from that a really worthwhile article.
I actually used to develop on a bug tracking system. I've used dozens.

I've never found one that was any good, and the majority of engineers and managers always complained about them. Either they're slow, unwieldy, complicated, feature light, bad at reporting, don't integrate with source control, integrate too much with source control, etc.

I have a cynical view about them now and pretty much put-up with whatever I have. Since I know they're all pretty bad and it's impossible to please everyone, my expectations have been lowered.

Someone who used to also develop on bug tracking software told me to check out JIRA, but I'm skeptical as always:

http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/
Reddit's programming sub-reddit seems informative though.
My writing wasn't totally clear. That sentence would be better if it read "a professorship ostensibly depends only on intelligence."
The main reason there are so many look-alike startups is that they keep getting funded. Several possible explanations that would explain the phenomenon:

1) Investors are hoping that the first company to do something will not always be the most successful one. Their company could have the late-mover advantage (e.g., Facebook vs Friendster). Or they could just get lucky. YouTube was not the first video startup, but to a large extent they got lucky with timing, technology (video support in Flash), etc.

2) Investors are wary of completely new markets. Imagine Twitter going to VCs back in the day and pitching a service that's kinda like a blog, but you can only use 140 characters. Nobody would take it seriously. At some point in time, Twitter was already hot and had proven the market, but investors would still risk funding a startup that could out-Twitter Twitter. Worked for Jaiku.

3) If you look outside of Silicon Valley, many of the startups have very very tiny market share. In SV, Google Docs has already won, but a survey I read showed that only 0.5% of the US population uses an online office suite regularly. So, investors think, the game is far from over. Add Europe and Asia, and things look even worse.

4) Investors expect to have 80% of their investments fail, but have a 10x return on the other 20%.

5) More and more Web 2.0 companies rely on marketing rather than impressive technology and new solutions. People that started companies like PayPal are now making Flash slide shows (no offense). It's ridiculously hard to start a PayPal clone, but it's very easy to start a slide show site, so more people are trying. The Facebook widget 'economy' exacerbated the problem. Undoubtedly some of those will make a lot of money, but I think it is bad for the startup ecosystem in general.

6) There's a bubble. Stop asking questions, get the money, and run. :)
Great post, a bit too long.

Summary -

Ideas do not fall into just good or bad.

a) Dating Julia Roberts is a good idea, but its not feasible.

b) A free email address that has no password or registration is a good idea. (read the article if you're curious)

4 types of ideas:

a) "The obvious next" - ideas that follow logically from what's currently existing.

b) "Now we're ready" - ideas that have a certain technology or other requirement before its possible.

c) "infeasible" - ideas that are good but infeasible because technology/society/whatever is required not ready (its not a 'b' idea). Also ideas that have no money making business model fall into this category.

d) luminary ideas - ideas that are unique and original not just to the thinker, but to the rest of the world too. These are rare.

In short, work off of the 'b' and 'c' ideas, since technology is moving so fast. 'a' ideas are risky because you're competing with everyone else and a lot of luck/skill is required, and 'd' is out because lets face it, no one has them. 'c' ideas quickly become 'b' ideas -

"You merely have to act on them first. Given how fast our technology advances, it's a good idea to perpetually reconsider infeasible ideas every now and then. You never know when an infeasible idea might become feasible."
Crazy idea - but perhaps news.ycombinator should have limited registrations. I wonder what the outcome of that would be.
Radeon R5xx 3D programming guide released
The actual review (http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20080220/147736...) has a familiar flavor of people angrily criticizing something for falling short on what they mistakenly believe to be the critical axes.
Okay, so I found this awesome, superbly designed YouTube series that teaches you about how money is created and works and how we're in a massive debt problem as people/companies/governments not by accident but by design and if we don't do something soon, the whole system will crash permanently.

But since you'd get offended by such things being outside the immediate realm of programming, I'll refrain from posting it so people can concentrate on hacking while the world economy spirals out of control.

Of course, it will be hard to hack if economies collapse and the power grid goes off, but that's another off-topic discussion.
13 Useful email addresses
I often see the same idea start up over and over again. If the entire market for that area is growing, I guess there is room for a couple players in the space.

An example would be HotOrNot clones on facebook or any embeddable site, (Friends For Sale, AddHer). These apps seem to be taking off even though they are really similiar to the existing hot or not.

Sometimes innovation isn't everything, good viral ideas can go pretty far.
Will you please give it a rest?
The style of this video reminded me of Adam Curtis' The Century Of The Self and The Trap - What Happened to our Dream of Freedom perhaps with a little Michael Moore sensationalism mixed in, but I'm not sure if that's enough of a reason to buy and read the book.
"During the first ten years of this HOWTO's life, I reported that from a new user's point of view, all Linux distributions are almost equivalent. But in 2006-2007, an actual best choice emerged: Ubuntu."

Ubuntu sort of spoils users by making a fancy GUI available for most every aspect of system management and administration. When I was starting out with Linux, I must've went through about a half dozen of broken Slackware installs (and a lot of banging my head on the keyboard) before I really got the hang of how to work with a Unix system, but it was a great learning experience nonetheless.

This isn't to say that Ubuntu isn't a great distro--it is, but I'm afraid that its ease of use impedes the whole "learning to be a hacker" process, while other distros practically force you to learn a lot to use them, and that's a Good Thing.
Seems to me the problem of news.yc, if there is one, so far would not be too many irrelevant submissions, but rather, not enough interesting submissions. Can we really expect dozens of stellar submissions every day, though? Maybe there are not even that many interesting new things relevant to hacker news happening in the world every day.
Here's an interesting response:

http://brockerhoff.net/bb/viewtopic.php?p=2417#2417
It's not tinfoil-hatish at all! People in Washington would be very bad at their jobs if they waited for a favorable opportunity before writing up policies and laws. You never know, tomorrow there might be a presidential sex scandal and you can get your proposal funded in exchange for your steadfast support.

The fact that the Patriot Act was drafted quickly proves that there is a security establishment, waiting to pounce on opportunity. It doesn't prove that 9-11 was somehow caused by such a group.
Gates Says Goodbye to Keyboards
The time is now.
After months of working on this prototype, we finally have something to show for. It's been an on and off project; I'm at Harvard; my soul mate works full-time as one of the lead engineers at Depaul University. After this semester, I'm taking a leave of absence from school, and he'll quit his job to work full time on this startup. It might not be the best prototype, but it's a starting point, we promise we will build from it. http://www.woozai.com:8080/woozai/test.swf
Personally I'm not sure what I think, but your question is the exact reason why so many newspapers proclaim this as a "Tech Bubble" -- too many companies making similar projects. The market isn't running out of room perhaps, just it needs to shake off the incompetent or repetitive services in order to keep moving.

The other thing to keep in mind is that at one point or another, most startups end up being unsuccessful. Very few actually end up to be profitable enough for an entrepreneur to retire on, which is usually the goal of a Web 2.0 entrepreneur.
From the article you linked:

"If I proposed such a design, our company would never approve it," said one of the engineers. "I can't find anything that is technically superior. We can make the same computer at a lower cost," said another. Did the MacBook Air's internal structure represent the immaturity of Apple's design skill?

While their claims sound plausible, I still invoke the ancient rite of "shit or get off the pot."
Leaving aside the question of whether filtering users upfront is desirable, you don't need to simply limit registration. There are a lot of intermediate steps you can take.

MetaFilter is a classic example of reasonable but comparatively high barriers to registration: $5 for an account and you have to wait a week to post. Seems very clever, but I'm not a MeFi regular, so I'm not sure how well that's worked out.
I only wish they would finalize 802.11n before boasting about 5Gbps.
Move Over, Oil, There’s Money in Texas Wind
I found the review for the ZoHo Show app to be completely misleading. I was able to easily do everything the author complained about, but maybe the app has changed in the last 2.5 months.
"I see no obvious differentiation in many new software companies"

Right. Don't forget that the key words are, "I see".

There's plenty you don't see. Anyone still in stealth mode. And those still not understood by the sheep who call themselves journalists. And don't forget, the best is always less than 10% of the rest.

Patience. Patience. Many of us here are working at it.
Sources?

(Welcome to wikicombinator.)
The basic principle is that your advisor has control over everything, and you have control over nothing. Need an important collaboration for your next paper? That won't happen without your advisor's support. The same goes for access to specialized equipment or supplies (the budget can become very tight when your PI doesn't like you). At most schools, your PI also controls your funding; you can expect to TA more often if s/he doesn't like you.

Your PI knows the weaknesses in your research and knowledge better than anyone, and can use this to your disadvantage. I've witnessed faculty who aggressively attack their own students during examinations (a truly disastrous scenario). More often, advisors will simply fail to defend their poor students from unfair attacks by other faculty. Departmental lectures, defenses, oral exams, etc. are remarkably subjective affairs, and one bad comment can snowball into an event that will add years to your time in grad school.

Another very common tactic is for the PI to hand out the best research projects to favored students. There's nothing so demoralizing as watching a first-year grad student get an publication in Science or Nature (by being assigned to an already successful project), when you've worked for years on failing experiments. I've seen this happen too many times to count.

Like I said, there's no way to list all of the different ways that your PI can make your life painful. It's just an extremely unbalanced, unregulated power relationship, and with any creativity at all, an advisor can use that power to destroy you.
The trouble with voice-to-text is that it's disruptive. If you have 20 people in a computer cluster all using voice-to-text, nobody is going to be able to concentrate. Nor do my roommates need to hear everything I'm writing.

To a lesser extent, it's a problem even when you're alone. Sometimes I type on autopilot while thinking about something completely different. If I need to speak rather than type, I'll surely have to break my train of thought. Speaking also requires greater physical exertion, which is antithetical to hacking because it means that changing things requires more work.
I think the analogy to torture is a little bit stretched but there's nothing controversial about the underlying facts.

1) there is a consensus among the global business elite, and some of the government elite, about how things ought to be run: Western-style democracy with the flow of goods and capital as unrestricted as possible.

1b) Partially this is self-interest, and partially it's a belief in a near-Randian libertarianism that has become dogma in the American right, despite it never having been really tried. (Because they can't get their agenda implemented in stable democracies). In this philosophy, government is a parasite that first feeds off of, and then strangles, the true activity of free people: business.

2) But almost no country believes in doctrinaire free markets, especially poor ones struggling to develop a mixed economy.

3) When great crises arise, these government and business elites are needed to funnel money and talent. They use the opportunity to advance their agenda.

3b) In certain cases, they don't mind making crises, and will even make them worse, in the belief that the world will then reorder itself to the state they deem to be natural and good, where markets rule.

The extreme version of this is Iraq, where planners seemed less concerned about providing stability than free markets.

An even more insidious form: see the documentary "Our Brand is Crisis". You will see American consultants considered to be left-wing, like James Carville, manipulating a crisis in a Third World country to elect a leader whose faith in the market is not shared by the public.

This is all caused by people who are good and nice and believe they are helping the countries involved. No conspiracy theory required.
Nice diagram. Thank you.
His comment implied that grad school is like undergrad where you accumulate lots of debt.

60K debt in student loans from undergrad is a world of difference from "wish I could save more".
I think there are probably some really cool Japanese notebooks that never make it to the US or Europe. This company used to make them available: http://www.dynamism.com/index.shtml , but looking now, I don't see anything we can't get outside of Japan (at first glance).
There's a big difference between operating systems which provide a C compiler by default and those that don't. About 10 years ago, the distinction wasn't the type of operating system but the vendor. Windows and Irix didn't have a C compiler by default. Linux distros did have a C compiler. Other languages, such as Perl, PHP, Java, Python and Ruby, weren't available by default on most platforms or didn't exist. So, you got a C compiler, if you were lucky. You got Perl if you were very lucky.

Of course, you can install interpreters and compilers on operating systems but, because there is no default, the userbase is instantly split. For example, those using Sun's C compiler versus those using gcc. Hardware was also more diverse. So, you could have a programming problem which was specific to a subset of processor, hardware, operating system type, operating system version, language and choice of compiler.

Nowadays, there's a fairly consistent base of gcc installs with a fairly consistent base of Perl, PHP, Java, Python and Ruby built on top. So, someone else is much more likely to have already solved a problem that you have encountered.

Anyhow, a closed-source operating system is less likely to be supplied with programming languages and you'll be more likely to encounter further barriers as you proceed.
Who is "they"? The group that discovered this has nothing to do with the 802.11n group.
Ironically, this post refers to itself.
I know people who'll drop $50,000 for software on a "gut feeling", but agonize for weeks about which brand of coffee to put in the break room.
Map of social network popularity around the world
Maybe news.yc needs a [fluff] designator, similar to [dead], so that articles bearing it can be optionally made invisible (the difference being that [fluff] might be visible by default).

(Or maybe [fluff] articles can be subject to downvotes! ;-)
Calculate how much your site is worth
Einstein, Newton displayed autistic traits
Seth's post is a little vague, so here's a specific scenario: If a video is available only as an RTMPE stream, then the only way to capture a lossless copy of that video for fair use purposes is to write an unauthorized RTMPE client (ripper), which would probably violate the DMCA and get smacked down by Adobe immediately. Also, open-source Flash players probably won't be able to play RTMPE streams at all, for the same reason.

Adobe is planning to add even more DRM in AIR: http://www.flashcomguru.com/index.cfm/2007/10/23/Flash-Video...
Gates Sees Diminished Role for Keyboards
5 Essential Tools for Digg Analysts
If you want some solid state chic then you can retro-fit a 2.5 inch SATA solid state disk. 832GB capacity is already announced ( http://www.bitmicro.com/press_news_releases_20080107.php ) and we could have 1TB by Christmas.
According to the tool on the site:

Google: $4552,092,873

Myspace: $302,159,931

facebook: $221,692,985

ycombinator: $88,266

My own site (which admittedly is just a static page) is valued at $58. Got some work to do there...
Persai article in Slate
Microsoft to stop making HD DVD players for its Xbox 360 video game system
Of note to me were the repeated complaints about the number of screws. I've repaired laptops semi-professionally for years, and one thing I've noticed is that laptops with a large number of screws tend not to fall apart, while those that have few screws do.

A Dell Latitude CPx (circa 2000) requires the removal of 9 screws to get the motherboard out. An early 14" iBook requires the removal of 81 screws to do the same. The Dell had numerous problems related to the flexing of the chassis. The iBook did not.
I can't believe at one point he recommended Java...
sweet $359, any buyers? Now it's time to start filling out my executive summary.
I'd love to see what fraction of sales are ultimately paid for by mom and dad.

$100 isn't unreasonable for well made wool pants that can last the better part of a decade. But for cheap shit that will disintegrate within two years?!
Usually it's the Japanese companies that excel at this kind of small, sleek electronics... perhaps someone's a little jealous?
Mark Shuttleworth’s Stance on Mono Inside Ubuntu
The Nazis had very nice shirts. The SS uniforms were designed by Hugo Boss.
Of course "the September that never ended" ended two years ago. So this post appears to be not only a non sequitur but also self-contradictory.
28 hour day
This tool is definitely crude (a newly created site is worth at least $50) but gives a good perspective on the factors one might use to interpret a site's value.
Is it legal to openly discriminate for attractiveness when hiring?

Or do they not have to discriminate, because ugly people never apply to work there?
Ever hear of Hilbert?
Dup. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122648
That color scheme burns my eyes.
Nice! A bit deserted though. My project is also at this stage :-)