skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I ran into a nasty bug(?) recently in the way Excel processes CSVs. I create a well formed CSV from a Java Web app which the user downloads. They open the CSV up in Excel and modify the data for an eventual upload. However, during the save process, Excel truncates trailing commas. Which causes my well formed CSV to be a poorly formed CSV during upload and parsing. Not fun.
No apology needed and I didn't take it personally. As a fellow hacker, I'm guessing that we both make the same 2 mistakes alot (at least I do): rushing to judgement when seeing something new and expecting non-hackers to think like we do.

Enjoy orientation with Granny. Let us know what you decided and how it went.
The set of things that matter, in world terms, far more than what Paul Graham thinks of trolls, or startup school, or memcached is large enough that it could easily crowd out the 'hacker news' without breaking a sweat, as this page suggests: http://www.ft.com/world

I don't see what the problem is with taking this kind of story elsewhere.

It's not a bad story or uninteresting, just that first this one...then a Musharraf one, then another one about the US primaries, and on and on. All of them more important than the regular fare here. And after a while, the value of the site is diluted in terms of its original purpose.
Scribd launches new platform and iPaper
I agree from my side, I think 8aweek.com is really a great product which everyone can use.
If you're rich enough, you negotiate landing rights at Moffett, right next to your office.
Pisa - HTML2PDF converter written in Python.
I wanted to get better that investing, so I started off buying shares, some through tip offs and then some through my own "research" on those companies, and some did well and some didnt...to get a better hold of this, I read Peter Lynch's books and basically, at the end of it all, the take home message from those books seem to be:
"Trust your common sense in the domain you work in or are most informed about", "dont diversify" and "dont invest for short term gains".
A simple Haskell web server
But I think he was intending to be funny by being so unfunny.

For example the famous sketch where he got into a 'fight' on stage, the audience was really into the sketch and he interrupted it right in the middle to get in a cheesy fake fight. That sort of anti-humor was what he was trying to achieve (or so I think). I agree a man wrestling a woman isn't funny, but in the context of what he was doing I find it hilarious.

I really appreciate the way he keeps his audience in such suspense, as they don't know what is planned and what is not, and they have no clue what will come next. It really shows his success at it when people think he faked his own death.

Belushi, Pyror and Murray are some of my favorite comedians, but they clearly have different styles of their own too. Belushi was great at physical humor, but someone might say they don't find someone acting obnoxious like that to be funny.

That is a great part of comedy, not everyone enjoys the same things.
The Wealthy Use Google, The Poor Use Yahoo
Come on David don't be so negative. Just because it might have happen on another site doesn't mean it will happen here. Like I said before, I can't vote the article up to the frontpage, takes more than one person.
He's right to worry. I worry too. And in fact our abuse detection code is suspicious about this story, because so many of the first upvotes were from newly created accounts.
remember, the hint says `defaults write com.apple.Dock workspaces-auto-swoosh -bool NO`, but if you use case-sensitive filesystem like me, it needs to be lower-case: dock. took me a while to figure.
The linked article should be taken in context -- it was published almost a year ago, when the public attitude about lending practices was quite different (and the nytimes does tend to reflect and follow public attitudes). For a sense of the period, look at this review of Senate Hearings on lending practices published the day before: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/23/business/23lend.html
Maybe it is time for a downvote button.
I voted this story up. The question I try to answer in deciding whether to upvote a story is this: is the story important to hackers? Castro retiring is a major event. It's not on a par with the fall of the Berlin Wall, say, but it's more important than nearly everything that's gone on in the US Primaries, to pick an example. My guess is that it's more interesting to most hackers than the unoriginal me-too lists of "Top ten mistakes startups make" that still regularly populate Hacker News.
"The idea of things like SGML and HTML—interchangeable, standardized file formats—didn’t really take hold until the Internet made it practical to interchange documents in the first place; this was a decade later than the Office binary formats were first invented."

Put another way, Microsoft didn't care about interop until they were convicted of illegal monopolistic practices and they couldn't get away with the kind of shit reflected in this spec anymore.
No problem. I've absorbed the following techniques from a wide range of sources (blogs to books to observing my savvy natural networking friends).

Please share your own observations or techniques (i'm not an expert - I just paint myself as one in news.yc land)

1. On your way to the event, choose to smile and say hi to almost everyone you pass. The first ten may not even register a response but once you get to thirty or event twenty hellos, people start to sense your warmness (you're warmed up socially)

2. When you get to the event, pause in the entrance for at least 10 seconds.

3. Silly technique but don't diss it until you try it. When you walk into an unfamilar room, make friends with it. Say (silently) 'Hello wall, nice to meet you. Hello table. how are you" Later you can extend this to (silently) sending out 'Hello person - it's nice to meet you' as you walk around the room.

4. Do not walk around with a drink. Keep your hands free. Walking around with a drink or worse a plate and a drink is like a 'don't bother me. i'm busy feeding myself' Put down your drinks/food and be open.

5. Talk to single individuals and bring them into a group with you (Do not say: "Nice meeting you. Talk to you later" - that could make a temporary enemy, Say: "I'd like to go talk with that group over there." (if they don't want to, then you can gracefully leave the singleton)

6. Remember names. Google will show you that there are many memorization techniques to do this. Some are pretty outrageous. All require practice (especially the visual mnemonic ones). All require hearing the name in the first place.

7. Wear your nametag (if there is one) on the right. Wearing it on the right lets another person see the nametag easier, during a handshake (assuming right-to-right)

8. You're not there to chat 30 minutes with a stranger (unless you want to). Mingling is not standing by the bar talking with one or two people. You're not there to build relationships (that's not possible) - if you enjoy talking with someone - get their contact info at the peak of the conversation.

9. Here's an example for holiday parties. The whole idea is to transition from (something shared) the environment to (you and your conversation partner) personal. A: 'Nice food' B: 'How are you enjoying the party' C: 'I like Holiday parties because' D: 'I'm looking forward to visiting my family in X during' E: 'What are your holiday plans'

10. Don't use close-ended questions. 'Are you having a good time'. That's boring. That's lame. Instead try making statements 'I like how that buffet line is as packed as I-280'

11. Follow up within 24-48 hours. For real bonus points, hand-write and mail an actual note in the postal mail.

(advanced)
12. You have to show initiative and commitment. If you walk up with a lame 'How are you?' you'll get a tepid response. However, if you walk up with a 'Nice to meet you. I'm wallflower' and the feeling like you already know them/they're good friends, then wow can happen

(Super-advanced)
13. Work the room like you own the place. The most natural and savviest of my friends do this. Confidence and a smile are the best icebreaker, not alcohol.
Ok, but by that same standard, the following stories are important too:

- Vote in Pakistan. They've got nukes...

- Kosovo independence has important repercussions in Europe and elsewhere.

- A big tax scandal in Germany, one of the world's most important economies.

- Obama just announced some kind of protectionist tax plan to 'keep jobs in America'.

just to grab a few...
It's like email, it's been around for a very long time and is hard to get right. Same with web page creation. These guys made it dead simple... hence, they did something right.
Zing!

You have a point there.

I always have wanted to get my pilot's license. I'll get on that.
Just make sure stories can't go below 1, imho.
lymphocytic colitis
A nice collection of videos on lymphocytic colitis
These are completely new to me. Thanks a lot.
I had a gut instinct that this was the case while in school, but then every authority figure in my life was telling me that I could be the valedictorian if only I'd "buckle down and study". It took some distance before I was able to objectively look back and judge who was ultimately right.

Since I've remained good friends with the person who actually became the valedictorian, I've been able to compare notes over time. It turns out that in as little as 5 years after graduation, being the valedictorian doesn't mean squat. Everyone wants to know what you've done lately.
Joel starts out by telling you that Microsoft's file formats are not the product of a demented Borg mind and are not impossible to read or create correctly.

And then he spends the rest of the article explaining why the file formats are so demented and impossible to read or create correctly.

Which isn't the same thing at all. Just because there is a rich history of it-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time decisions doesn't mean the end result is any good.

There is a serious, deep, and interesting problem of scaling and complexity management that could be discussed here. But Microsoft's approach seems to have been one of embracing complexity. And Joel's role, today, is just defending that approach.
back to coding for you then!
iPod shuffle price cut, now $49
Hey, don't take it personally, I would have made the same comments whoever posted the story, and you're right that you only submitted it, it also took a bunch of people to upvote it. No one here but pg can really force anyone to do anything, so I'm just asking, and trying to explain why.

(BTW, even though I disagree with you, I upvoted you because a 0 or a -1 is more than enough to indicate disapproval).
Office Snapshots: Google Mountainview Headquarters
the idea is to have a single place to cache a data structure, so that duplication is avoided and invalidation is easier.

The problem with memcached is that I want to access the data sequentially, page by page. I can't seem to find a feasable way to store an ordered list (without really bad insert performance).
The PDF with ads didn't show any ads on my system.

I'm not sure what iPaper is all about, other than making my web browser view documents slower. iMyReinventedWheel sounds more like it (that's a joke).
True Social Software - Part II of Social Network Services of 2010
Bit of an ego blow to those styling themselves as "influentials."
I think we have different standards. In 10 years, will anyone remember any of these? Only Castro and Kosovo might qualify. I certainly wouldn't even considering upvoting any of the rest. They're ephemera, and I agree with you that they're not of great interest to hackers.
This is just so boring, I (and I guess others too) don't give a flip if he's retiring or whatever! There is no point in posting this to HN, everyone knows that the we don't like such stories here. Hence, the debate is futile.
Feld Thoughts: It's Better to Fail Quickly
They're all more important than the '10 things every startup should know' link in the grand scheme of things.

The other problem is that it doesn't pass the "make me smarter or inform me of something I didn't know" test. It's a piece of information I already knew, as did anyone else that is in any way connected to TV, radio or other news sites.
This is really impressive - if only they could add .eml and .msg files to the mix of supported files! :)
I understand where you are coming from. not taking it personally or to offend you, just thought it was an article that should be mentioned.
HN has a different news focus than other sites, and we're trying to protect its identity by saying that certain topics, while important, should not be discussed here. In short, we're trying to prevent the reddit effect.
Hello fellow Hacker News readers! I wrote this submission myself, and decided to submit it because I thought the community here would find it interesting. Several others in #startups on irc.freenode.net thought it wasn't a bad idea to submit my own material, and as far as I know news.YC doesn't have a policy against self-promotion.

If the community feels differently, that's worth discussing and perhaps noting somewhere.

Otherwise, I hope you find my article interesting. Another article(so I'm not spamming with separate submissions) startup founders may be interested in is:

The Importance of Taking Your Startup Global - http://socialstrategist.com/2007/08/20/go-global-or-lose-one...
Jack Gannsle's books:
http://www.ganssle.com/book.htm or check Amazon. Also has articles at his site which might interest you.

Also articles at embedded.com
No support for Python despite the homepage saying it is.

Apart from that it looks like an interesting service, could maybe help with a lot of the headaches of hosting...
The test I'm applying is not whether the stories are more important in the grand scheme of things. I completely agree with you - that test is not the right test to apply. The right test, in my opinion, is how interesting a story is to hackers. And on that criterion, my original judgement was that the news of Castro's resignation merits an upvote.

With that said, your point about how widely distributed a story is elsewhere is an interesting one. I'm not sure I completely agree - the Microsoft offer to buy Yahoo wouldn't have made it onto Hacker News under this criterion, for example.

Part of the reason for wanting stories like this to appear on Hacker News isn't so much to be informed of the existence of the story, but rather for the quality of the discussion provoked by the stories. There are certain commenters whose opinion of Castro's resignation I'd far rather hear than some talking head on CNN.
A RescueTime Video Review
Sugar does not make you fat. Fat does not make you fat. Carbohydrates do not make you fat. Protein does not make you fat. Food does not make you fat.

The ONLY thing that makes you fat is eating more calories than you spend during a day.

Want to lose weight? It's easy -- eat less. Add exercise so you lose mostly fat and less muscle, otherwise you'll end up "skinny fat."
Aha! Now we're getting somewhere: I was thinking the same thing about commentary - that's the only valid reason to have a widely visible story here.

However, I think that commentary on MS/Yahoo is far more relevant here than anything about Castro can possibly be. Indeed, Castro commentary is very likely to lead down the reddit road.
I'm not connected to a TV, radio or other news sites. This is my primary news source and I don't mind if occasionally an article like this makes its way to the top. OTOH I understand this doesn't belong on HN. But I wouldn't start violently complaining about it.

Why can't I just have a button to dismiss a story of the front page? Not downvote it, just make it disappear from MY homepage?
> "Since joining Mr. Fujita's school, I have had five successful relationships," says Hachioji Robocop,

oh my god!? his last name is Robocop!?? that's the best thing ever. i bet i could get laid 100x as much if my last name was Robocop.
VC Fundraising Manual: How Much Capital You Should Raise: Entrepreneur’s Perspective
Entrepreneurs often struggle with trying to figure out how much money they should raise. Unfortunately, there typically isn’t a scientific answer. However, there are a number of discernable incentives that influence entrepreneurs and VCs, driving the amount of capital you should raise. Taken in aggregate, these considerations should help you determine a reasonable amount of capital to raise.

Incentives that impact entrepreneurs:

Avoiding bankruptcy: Entrepreneurs have an incentive to...

More at markpeterdavis.com
Not much content. The posts it points to and the one it points to after that have more.

http://www.theconvergingnetwork.com/2008/02/fail-early-fail....
http://www.sethlevine.com/blog/archives/2008/02/failure.php
Another way of thinking about it: Cage's 4'33" isn't particularly interesting as a standalone piece: it's only interesting in the context of music at the time and its effect on avant-garde art. That's the sense in which I think of him as the fool: Kaufman exposes assumptions and makes you say, "Oh holy shit, he's breaking all the rules. Can he do that? Wait, why do we have these rules? Are these good rules to have?"
I've actually been thinking about that. I was thinking of a more general personal metrics site, though. Weight, personal finances, freethrow percentage, whatever you want to track, give people the tools they need to track whatever needs tracked in their lives.

Figure it's worth jotting down in the "any other ideas" section of the app, anyway.
Punk Rock Your Life: The Simple Six-Letter Word That Determines Success
Live.com: bigger than Google in September 2008
Watts' claim that trend-spreading data doesn't show the influentials pattern certainly seems plausible. The article places naive emphasis on his models, but those can be tweaked any which way. The really impressive finding is his repeat of Milgram's degrees-of-separation experiment.

I was going to add the music-ranking experiment to this list, but on second thought that one (while interesting) doesn't address the influentials theory at all.
The 10 Emerging Technologies of 2008 (TR10)
omg stop the lovefest
Radical Design, Radical Results
No one here is "complaining violently". Everyone has been quite civil so far. I like that about this site.

It's your choice not to follow other news sites. Something like cnn, bbc, etc... is a much better place to stay abreast of current events than yc.news.
Cool idea, but, "iPaper"?... They couldn't come up with a more creative name for it?
You sound like you never used macromedia flash paper. Scribd have just unlocked all the value in documents, rewritten an adobe product in 6 months which sucked, and done a deal with google to monetize them.

I guess the ads would depend upon what you uploaded.
Android's impact on hold for now
Ok, then take a look at how HTML does forward compatibility, for example. Extremely simple, elegant. Not that i defend lexable-parsable formats - I got the point that speed was important on stone-age computers. No. It's about architecture.

Here is what I think: nobody at Microsoft ever cared about making anything simpler than what they got after the first approximation, because complexity looks impressive and hence sells better. On the other hand, making things simpler requires more intellectual efforts and usually doesn't sell well, especially in the consumer product business.
Never knew that. Once I cut a CSV for someone else, I never wanted to see it again. Now I know why.
Mysterious chip start-up to take on Intel in mobile space
Putting startups on the map
"codewhisperer" - lol

Wish I would have thought of that.
it was nearly "Scribd Viewer". So, no. :-)
This is indeed big news. He's been in charge for almost half a century. Now what? Will his brother manage to keep control? Considering his age everybody must be plotting to take over the reins. Slow reforms or another revolution?

The Economist has more background: http://www.economist.com/daily/news/displaystory.cfm?story_i...
How to Hack Into a Boeing 787
Wow, this is awesome! Each time I had this issue of jumping spaces instead of the window I want within the app, I would spend about 5 seconds (which can seem an eternity) fixing things so it was just right, while at the same time telling myself, "Spaces is not a solution for you, but a solution for all..."

I was rather surprised that Spaces was as unsophisticated as it was when it shipped. I'm thrilled that Apple is allowing us the ability to tweak things according to our taste through a "deeper" set of features.
"off-line Web Apps" ... hmm, isn't that another way to say a desktop app that's also a special purpose client?
Meet Microsoft's Source Fource -- Developer Action Figures
It didn't stop me from wondering if I am sharpening the axe all eight hours.
These are great! Thank you.

I especially like #6. It's only data and it goes a long way.

This reminds me of a business workshop for hackers that I once went to. At exactly 9:00, all 20 of us were at our seats reading the workbook. The teacher entered the room and said, "If you people are interested in building your businesses, you obviously need to be here. Now close those books and get up and meet each other."
Apple intros 2GB iPod shuffle for $69
What are your favorite reads in the web? (Besides HN)
Mine: Reddit, Overheard in NY, Business Oprtunities, Dilbert, PostSecret the best of Craiglist.
You may be right. In the large, I'm optimistic that it's possible to set up a forum where sensible discussion of hot button issues like politics is possible. Certainly, HN offers good initial conditions for achieving this: a great base of intelligent commenters who mostly seem able to have intelligent conversations with one another, even when they disagree. But maybe HN isn't the right place to be attempting this.
The care and feeding of social network trolls
This is a great move business move by MSFT-it should have been done long ago.
I think I'm actually going to use this on my site...

Very cool!
More realistically, you could have a helipad. Still though, my idea of perfection would be someplace where I can live most of my life on foot. I think that that's something a lot of US towns get wrong, especially on the west coast.
Joel suggests using one licensed copy of Office to run as a web service backend but I'm not so sure Microsoft's EULA allows that.
Yes, that's surprisingly short, for what it claims to contain. HTTP/1.1, as of June 2007, is 222 pages, for example.
Kinda funny how Scribd is using one Adobe platform -- Flash (esp. FlashPlayer) -- to chip away at another Adobe Platform -- PDF (Adobe Reader and Acrobat).

I used to dislike both Flash plug-in launches and PDF Reader launches equally. Now, the combination of Adobe's work on making the Flash Player launch faster (helped along by the format's ubiquity -- it's probably already running in another tab), plus FlashBlock, means Flash is much less annoying than PDF.

So: bravo, Scribd, for marginalizing PDF even further.
What I meant about the ads was that the example from that link didn't show any.

As for Flash Paper, I didn't know about it, but reading up on it, it sounds like Scribd have a good API going.

One point is that they recently got sued for putting up books, etc. My gripe is that Word documents can be put on the web as HTML, so I don't see the need for a centralised repository (Scribd) when the Web suffices (decentralised).
I thought it was going to be "effort," but "action" may be better because it implies changing state. I.e. finally quitting. You can tell yourself that planning your startup is effort, but you can't claim it's action.
Midwage jobs vanish in Silicon Valley
Aviary - 18 different web-based graphics tools
DNA Pollution May Be Spawning Killer Microbes
Welcome to the bar, would you like webcam or non?