skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://blog.searchyc.com/2008/02/searchyc-presents-best-of-h...

Today we're launching another feature of SearchYC: Top Lists. Using our index of Hacker News threads and comments, we've compiled lists of the most interesting items to date.

So what did we find? Sticking true to the Web 2.0 mentality, TechCrunch articles were the most submitted, by far. Other Silicon Valley favorites such as Valleywag, Mashable, and Wired also made it to the top.

As for top users, nickb gets the honor with more than 1900 submissions while pg has more than 2000 comments. Go ahead and take a look for yourself, and see if you can find other trends in Hacker News activity.
Musings on Web 3.0
I think it would be nicer if each blogger did that themselves. They'd probably find their own typos better that way too :)
A proposal for an experiment:

Having read a bit about the research in networks and graph theory that has been done over the last few years I think that submissions, activity of users and karma points follow a powerlaw. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law)

Seems like you have the numbers to confirm whether this is true or not.

It would be really interesting to see...
I've been using ServerBeach for about 8 months now, growing from 1 dedicated server to 4, and am quite happy with them. No downtimes or problems of any kind so far.
If you decide to use them, you can use my referral code - ND86GGNNTQ - to get $100 off.
Torvalds: Microsoft is bluffing on patents
The Great American Jobs Machine Is Conking Out
It would be nice to see two additional lists ranked by average karma/submission and average karma/comment. Being able to specify a time range qualification on the searches would be nice too.
Ask YC: Feedback on Web App/iPhone App Please
Spotstart.com is a collection of popular searchable web resources. I had a prelimiary version over a year ago, but just coded it again. If you visit the site on an iPhone, you will see a customized version (http://www.apple.com/webapps/searchtools/spotstart.html). Somehow, I think the iPhone version will be more popular. There is a category for startups which includes Hacker News searched from google.

Please let me know what you guys think. Anything to be added or removed? Thanks.
How Big Is the Web? 155,583,825 Sites
The 10 most memorable tech Super Bowl ads
5 Innovative Industrial Designs for Ecological Living
We gave that some consideration, but the queries weren't all that interesting. The vast majority of those lists (something like 80%) consist of people with only one post. To illustrate this, here are the top tens for those queries:

Top Points per Submission
+-------------+------+----+---------+
| username | pts | ct | avg |
+-------------+------+----+---------+
| dwaters | 95 | 1 | 95.0000 |
| keesj | 78 | 1 | 78.0000 |
| brl | 122 | 2 | 61.0000 |
| a-kill-ease | 60 | 1 | 60.0000 |
| zombo | 58 | 1 | 58.0000 |
| markovich | 58 | 1 | 58.0000 |
| fresno | 55 | 1 | 55.0000 |
| jdale27 | 53 | 1 | 53.0000 |
| qwertyy | 48 | 1 | 48.0000 |
| jsomers | 48 | 1 | 48.0000 |
+-------------+------+----+---------+

Top Points per Comment
+------------+------+----+---------+
| username | pts | ct | avg |
+------------+------+----+---------+
| hazchem | 37 | 1 | 37.0000 |
| capablanca | 36 | 1 | 36.0000 |
| jdrake3 | 24 | 1 | 24.0000 |
| juanjose | 24 | 1 | 24.0000 |
| cetaganda | 41 | 2 | 20.5000 |
| cysh | 19 | 1 | 19.0000 |
| chime | 17 | 1 | 17.0000 |
| zamfi | 17 | 1 | 17.0000 |
| kilik | 17 | 1 | 17.0000 |
| loumf | 15 | 1 | 15.0000 |
+------------+------+----+---------+
slicehost.com, not expensive, scale-up, scale-down, no extra fees, various selection of distros. simply great!
If I understand the problem correctly, doesn't this list (http://searchyc.com/top/submitter) confirm that? Our data on users' karma is somewhat limited. Turns out that the sum of your points across submissions and comments does not equal karma (downmods have more weight).
Obama the choice of Democrats in Indonesia
Nigerian 5-Year-Olds Repair OLPCs in "Hospital"
It seems like a step back from my MacBook which, like my sadly missed PB 12", manages 4+ hours on battery.
Since I don't use IE...no.
I just tried runnning it through excel, and at first glance it does indeed look like it is a powerlav...

Would be good with more data though. Are the next 200 submitters available ?
YC Startup Going into Beta: Reble.FM Music Sharing
Well unless your friends are your core audience you should be wary of that approach. You tend to hang out with people that hold the same values that you do yourself. If you think that they are representative of the population as a whole you are headed for trouble.

Just saying... :-)
Jerry Yang to employees: We're looking at other options
IBM: years ahead with new types of hardware for storing data
Protecting databases from the inside
New Super-Efficient Chip Could Run on Body Heat
Complete Introduction to git
I've got a vps at slicehost and they've been great - would definately recommend them. For my next project im thinking of going Joyent, as their storage seems more scalable. I was thinking of using Amazon S3 with Slicehost, but am worried about the speed. The bandwidth costs seem pretty expensive too.
My strong preference is to down enough gin and tonics to get my brain off the fact that I'm way, way, way too high up in the air, a thought that it does not relinquish easily.
It might be interesting to see a scatter plot of number of submissions/comments vs. average points per submission/comment.

What would be really cool is if you opened up a simple API or just the raw data so we could go wild with it :)
What's the deal with Virtualization?
Why is virtualization becoming such a hot topic? It seems as if EMC's acquisition of VMWare revived it, and its stock. Xen and Microsoft's virtualization software is also becoming a topic of recent discussions.

I don't get it. What is so important about virtualization? and how is this different from cloud computing?
Coding Horror: Skill Disparities in Programming
Combine Ruby on Rails with WebSphere Application Server
Congrats guys. I've wanted something like this for a long time. It's a pity you can't play something simultaneously though. I suppose intimate listening sessions will have to stay in real space.

PS: I never thought I'd say this, but I love the license agreement. :-)
21 Merb Links, Tutorials and Other Resources
This is a poorly asked question. You don't give any details, and worse, I don't really know what your situation is, or at least the number of visitors your site gets. In addition, ad network partners are really dependent on the type of traffic you're getting. Is your site a niche car site, or clothing, or something easily monetizable, or are you getting traffic that more resembles myspace?

Re-write your situation and question with more details, and I'm sure a bunch of people can chime in with good advice.
So streaming a friends music collection to your PC is fine, but streaming it to an ipod isn't?
I'm not sure the legalities of this hold water personally.
Such muddiness when it comes to this sort of thing.
Thanks =)

Yup, RL does have a purpose still.

If anyone wants someone to share with, guessing my username would probably work.
There is a lisp (Scheme) compiler for the JVM, http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/index.html I use it all the time; I think it's great. The hard questions about lisp and java interaction haven't necessarily been solved but earnest attempt have been made to do so.
How Do You Spot a Bad CIO?
If you're serving up mostly static or cached content, you can survive any onslaught of traffic with a VPS, and I'll throw in my vote for Rimuhosting
Check and see if his name is Doug Nassaur:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=doug+nassaur&bt...
Amazon Targets Facebook Developers
MySpace Developer Platform Launches
This looks like a recipe for disaster.

I know, we've all heard the expression, "Ideas are worthless; execution is everything." I don't buy it and never have.

Ideas are NOT worthless; they have value, some much more than others.

So I'm supposed open my idea to others to vote on? I think not.

Here's an idea: don't ask me for my idea until you earn my trust.
Good code, bad code. The only truth. [comic]
Like bigbee, I also use ServerBeach. They are (very) affordable and offer support above the level that would be suggested by the cost.
Close enough. http://searchyc.com/top/list
sigh. i'm tired of trying to explain this. anybody else want to step in here?
If the labor market works, it seems like people should settle into positions where they are about average--and the standard deviation should stay small. If you take a random group of coders and give them brain teaser-style problems, of course large differences between performance will occur. If you gave people tasks completely outside their abilities, of course they will score a "zero". That says nothing about how they do their actual jobs.
Taiwan group guilty of 90 percent of Microsoft piracy
Well done. Thank you.
It'll be interesting to see how it plays out legally. I'm glad some people are prepared to push the laws even if I'm not sure I'd take that risk in my own startup. I guess the legal analogy they're going for here is that you are lending your friend the song, just like lending a physical CD. It sounds pretty reasonable but the law isn't really defined by what sounds reasonable.

I think with the restrictive nature of this service the RIAA et al might see it as being in line with their view on a music purchasors license.
Interesting because it is in direct contradiction to a lot of research on expertise which strongly suggests that expertise takes time (and surprisingly, regardless of the field, it takes more or less 10 years) - summarized in this book http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Handbook-Expertise-Expert-Pe...

Of course we've all read Peter Norvig's "Teach yourself programming in 10 years" http://norvig.com/21-days.html

Caveat: Just doing the same thing for 10 years does not an expert make. To quote Norvig's article

"the maximal level of performance for individuals in a given domain is not attained automatically as a function of extended experience, but the level of performance can be increased even by highly experienced individuals as a result of deliberate efforts to improve."
It isn't the mechanics of typing, it's the entire paradigm. Why would I need to use Arabic characters in some sort of pseudo-English to represent what I wanted the computer to do? Why not spoken words? Or emotional nuances?

Not trying to go way off the deep end, but I think people make a big mistake when they say that since we have a printed code situation now we'll always have one. I'm already seeing a lot of graphical programming environments. Sure -- they suck to some degree. But each year they suck less and less. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to believe that fairly soon a lot of programming could be done graphically. I would think a spoken conversation, with the computer rapidly prototyping, executing, and testing the concepts as we discussed them, could create some very complex solutions. It's not about typing or the mechanics -- it's the paradigm that's outdated.
'Online Gap' Widens Divide Between Parents and Children
Right, the FAQ puts emphasis on you streaming one song at a time to people you know - I don't see how this is different from streaming ten songs to ten people you don't know, you're still sending music to people who don't own a copy of it. Not that I agree with the way the music industry seems to be going, but I imagine they could come knocking wanting a big piece of your pie?
I think bloggers have no time to do it themselves. To use this service will be more efficient for reader (than wait for blogger's podcast).
How to decide what startup to work with if you're a highly sought after developer
I guess that depends on who's saying, "WTF". That's often the response of many people to some of the best code I've ever seen.
The American Conservative publishes Sibel Edmonds' story of corruption at Washington's highest levels
AI is hard, so just outsource the I
> This industry changes too quickly to do something like worry about 100 years in the future.

Disagree. It may seem ivory-tower-y, but it's a great aspiration, and I don't see anyone else doing it. PG is financially secure, and probably one of the smarter hackers out there - I think it would be hard for him to justify a less ambition goal - surely it's better than toiling away publishing academic papers for whatever academic fads are popular, the vast majority of which will lie discarded 100 years from now.
Why do so many people think red, yellow and blue are subtractive primary colors?
He sort of bends the question like Hillary. He first puts down his competition, then curves the question back to his own product allowing himself to do some nice PR work for free.

He's just looking out for his best interests.
Do some research in regards to Joyent's stability before you make any moves to them.
Static Languages: Rationalizations and Myths (uses five different languages each day)
Lisaac, a compiled prototype-based language
A Wiki in Arc
"I know it is hopeless for me"

"I probably won't make the cut"

Stop talking like that right now! That negative little voice in your head will make your failure a self fulfilling prophesy. Don't mean to get all Dr. Phil on you, but if you're serious about starting a business, there is never room for that kind of talk, especially to yourself.
Inconsolata - a monospace font, designed for code listings in print
If the original poster is a computer person, I'd recommend some changes to this list. This is "Math for physics" but "Math for Computer Science" is rather different, and might be more interesting.

I'd recomment calculus up to integration. Don't worry about integration tricks, except for integration by parts (the most important formula in mathematics) and u-substitution. All the other integration tricks are pointless crap used to fill up time in calc classes.

Vector math is useful if you like either computer graphics or physics, but is not crucial.

On the other hand, everyone should know probability, even the purest mathematicians. Just don't try to learn it out of an "Introduction to Probability and Statistics for Engineers" book, all such books should be burned. Real/functional analysis would also be useful to better understand probability.

I'd also suggest combinatorics/graph theory, and perhaps the theory of automata. That's edging towards computer science, but it is a fundamentally mathematical topic.

Also, it will be very slow going. It's not like picking up another computer language/framework; it's even harder than Haskell. I've have a Ph.D. in mathphys/num analysis, but it still takes me a long time to push through an introductory textbook in a field too far removed from my own. For instance, I sat through 4 semesters of abstract algebra (3 at the grad level), and I still don't understand it. Don't get discouraged.
mosso.com is $100 for clustered windows/linux hosting. good tech support, rails support. it's a rackspace venture.
The person saying WTF should have a weight depending on how many WTF's they get for their own code.
Like googles pagerank.

eg bad coder gets tons of WTFs, is a bad coder
He WTFs at everything because he has no clue, doesn't understand, but his WTF's are weighted low.
Agreed. Rimuhosting rocks. They have awesome support, too.
Unix Viruses
IBM Slams Microsoft, Calls OOXML "Inferior"
Time-Warner Considers Pay-Per-Gigabyte Service
Microsoft's Acquisition Of Yahoo: Not As Bad As Some Think
Unboxing a never-opened Apple IIc - photoset
The Recycling Myth
Today is a Proud Day to be an American (by Denny K Miu)
24 + Masters
The Discovery of Debugging
Myspace developer playground
3.4/4.0 at Brandeis university. I learned pretty early on that you take courses that both sound interesting and are taught by professors you like. If you find both then you enjoy doing the work as well as enjoy going to class. Once those two are taken care of you needn't worry too much about grades as they'll take care of themselves.
To pre-empt to those who will cry "politics!" at this - I claim it's an interesting look at how our government runs international relations. It's fascinating to study and understand for hackers because although seemingly simple in rhetoric, in reality, international relations it is a very complex system, and hence interesting to hackers.
No particular reasons...one of my siblings went there. I was never smart enough to even think of applying to this Ivy...

The CS program has a reputation

Brown attracts a very, diverse interesting intellectual student body (and liberal)

Randy Pausch, who delivered a brilliant lecture about living life, (http://tinyurl.com/38zo2k) met his mentor there.

Most schools are liberal only in the term 'Liberal Arts' for the course catalog. Brown is so liberal they even protest against the computer system not allowing them register for classes whenever they want. See:
http://www.brownalumnimagazine.com/july/august_2007/a_course...

Thayer Street (the main campus drag) is a wonder.
I think I must figure out how you made it scroll up to hide the URL bar after it loaded. Nice touch. It looks and feels right on the iPhone, but I'm not a candidate user. I keep everything like that in my synchronized bookmarks.
SoCal Linux Expo this weekend
Official: 16GB iPhone and 32GB iPod touch -- both $499
Will superintelligence emerge on the Web?
MySpace admits it made mistakes
Automated error catching technique awarded the Turing Prize
Buy your own 1U system, install max ram and max disk you can or can afford.

Colocate system for under $100 per month.

See http://webhostingtalk.com, look under "Colo Hosting Offers" forum for various offers from $39 per month on up. If you can get an offer that is local to where you are, that is better.

Reason: if you are serving images you will want lots of local disk space, and RAM to serve as disk cache or to serve as RAM for your webserver with its 1000+ connections.
Perhaps the solution is a bit of humility. Half the time you think you're "correcting" somebody it seems that you're actually completely misunderstanding their point, and half the other half you're just misunderstanding the issue. The condescending tone doesn't help, either.
Grails 1.0 released
Years of irrelevance
White House: Iran's Rocket Launch An Unfortunate Event
www.linode.com has been great for me.
Agree with Jyu. Reword the question. In general, you should evaluate the ad network partner on whether they can drive revenue with your inventory, especially with your type of audience. If your site has been around for a while and you know the traffic you're getting, then shop the deal around and inquire into other ad networks. At the very least, make sure it isn't exclusive so you can rotate those ads out.
Probably as management becomes more adept at spotting true programming talent, average or sub par programmers will for essentially the first time be forced to improve themselves. Many probably haven't improved because until recently they haven't really needed to.
http://www.xlhost.com is who I use and they have solid dedicated server prices and no contracts. Many times when they upgrade their hardware I "hop" servers to one of the new servers at the same price.

I've heard people say good things about http://www.servage.com for light processing sites that need high bandwidth and lots of space.
You might want to put an About or What is this? link. I have no idea upon going to the site what this is.

It seems that this is a search directory, but your search doesn't work and I really don't need a directory.
It's an interesting idea, for sure, but depending on just how you bought your music, you (the user) could get screwed.

Take for instance, buying mp3s from Amazon, and using Reble.FM. That's a violation of your agreement with Amazon. And other things may have similar restrictions.

Of course, with illegally downloaded content, you have no worries about how you can legally use it.
But then for call-with-current-continuation there is also call/cc ... I've rarely seen the full name spelled out in code.
I really enjoy using Slicehost. You get a whole lot of server for very little money. The trade-off is that unlike many other VPS's you must set up the entire server yourself from scratch through the command line. This can be a little frustrating the first week, but VERY rewarding in that you learn the intricacies of server setup in the process (assuming you don't already have that capability).

Even more importantly though, they have excellent support. Forums, wikis, and live chat through their site. I remember getting help one time when I was first starting out, chatting with one of the owners at 3am on a Tuesday night as he helped me work out a bug with my server.
What does "an average of 7 years' experience" mean?

My years of programming have been very different to the guy who has been programming at a 9-5 job for the same amount of time. And, yes, also different from the guy who has sacrificed his entire life on the altar of programming for the same amount of time. It would be hard for a study to capture these differences, but I bet they are correlated with programming ability.
A problem with this, is that often the WTF go unsaid in public due to political reasons. My boss is the one who exclaims WTF the most in public. However, he generates a heck of a lot of WTF in private. Also, many of the WTF we generate are actually due to our coding around his WTFs.

This is just a restatement of the Principle of Least Astonishment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment
That's the most uninteresting of things he said. The real value of the article were his thoughts on hardware vs software cost.

Every hardware manufacturer must LOVE Linux for its own sake. And not just Asians, I would add. Ultimately, if DELL wants to make more money off each PC, they should switch to Linux. And now just vanilla distro, but their own unique flavor, with their own open source drivers for some unique hardware, similar to Apple's multi-touch. Right now that extra "software money" allowed per-PC is spent on Microsoft licenses.

Software is the king. Our startup (hardware + software) recently got acquired precisely because of our small software team - the other 80% of the company (hardware) wasn't of much value to the acquirer.
As a consultant, I met a lot of people in organizations with very useful (but decayed) applications in maintenance mode who just were there 9 to 5 for a paycheck. They had no interest in architecture or patterns or learning more about their craft at all. To them, it was just drudgery.

More shocking, years earlier in graduate school, I met a fellow student who old me, "To heck with understanding this. Just give me the answer so I can get my diploma!" She wanted to go into management.
Back in 1997, I met a programming idiot. He was one of those C programmers who regarded programming as a kind of "magic." He didn't understand anything about virtual machine semantics and separation of processes. Well, he moved to Atlanta for an $80k job, which he got through connections from his church, which was also a significant increase from his IT job at a public TV station.

No, the labor market is not perfect!
Can you tell me what part of the search failed and what browser you are using? Thanks.
Yeah I am planning on changing the name sometime soon. This was our concept site, to see if it would work and how to get it to work. At one point we were stuck with what domain to register for the site, and I had to pick one to move forward.
I'm in the same boat, right now working towards calculus, running through an algebra review. The big problem I have with some of the "classic" texts (and wikipedia/mathworld) is that they go way over my head very quickly, usually due to my lack of knowledge regarding the nomenclature and symbols of math. Or that I lack the basic knowledge to understand why an equation can transform from state a -> b. I've found that the Barron's College Review series (on algebra and calculus) to be easy to digest. I'm also using Algebra & Trigonometry by Sullivan as a reference for issues that are fuzzy in the Barron's book. I also plan on visiting sets, graphs and logic.