skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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?

It would be easy enough to do, but my gut tells me it would be a mistake, because it would make it easier for the site as a whole to deteriorate. As long as everyone has to see every story, there's a lot of pressure not to have bad stuff.

Paul Buchheit dislikes optional settings in software for similar reasons. He thinks they're usually just a way to punt on hard design decisions. Nearly everyone is going to use the defaults anyway, so you should just work hard to make those are right.
I was thinking the same thing. What a fantastic opportunity for somebody to build a centralized, remote system, that's easy to use and offers some really powerful features ("Hi Mr. Jones, would you like the same kind of luxury sedan you rented last time? A local map and directions to some common destinations is already on the front seat for you."), and then sell it to the rental car companies.

Somebody'd better do it, or I will. ;-)
I agree with you. That's why YC is in Cambridge half the year. It's the most walkable town in the US.
They'd be de facto public. The SEC wouldn't like it.
" You know the type. They make negative comments that will make the veins in your forehead pulse, and cause you to say things that you never ever say aloud. "

I believe this is due to a lack of maturity of the person who posted (on an open forum of all places!) and now doesn't like that someone disagrees. The so called "troll" must be evil because the poster just could not be incorrect in any way... no that would never happen.

Exploring all sides or playing the "devils advocate" is what gets you called a troll, The bully is usually the one saying "troll".

Articles saying otherwise are just an exercise in trying to legitimize why everytime when someone disagrees with you, they must be a troll. Now get all of your bully friends together, call that person a troll until they go away.
uh, actually this makes it easier to be decentralized, since it allows you to put a word document in iPaper on your own site (and looks a hell of a lot better than .doc -> HTML)
Wouldn't their prediction necessarily affect the outcome? Even more so if they intend to market it to investors. If they predict startup X is going to fail, and this prevents people from investing in Startup X, then it's more likely that Startup X will fail. On the other hand if they predict that Startup Y will succeed, and Startup Y gets a lot of press coverage and interested investors because of that, then they helped it happen. It's kind of self-fulfilling.

In order for them to prove that their algorithm is really accurate, they'd have to make the prediction and keep it secret, then see later if it came true or not. Of course, that doesn't really make for a marketable service...
I entered the Imagine Cup (referenced here) in 2003 at University. I ranked in the top 100 nationwide for the first round after answering a 30-minute quiz, and won non-OEM Office/Visual Studio.NET software (which I sold on Ebay) and a cool "Microsoft Genius" T-shirt which I occasionally wear. Microsoft go with Fruit of the Loom for their shirts.

I didn't bother with the 2nd round though - the effort curve dwindled after the success of the 1st round.
Probably the silliest thing ever to come out of Redmond after Bob.
Scribd Steps Up Its Game With iPaper
please RTFA before commenting; it's a good article and the creator of the software contributes a particularly arch comment at the end.

Automated unstructured information processing is the wave of the future, and it always will be ;-) (as used to be said of parallel computing, and perhaps still should be)
I read that 1 out of 10 VC-funded start up succeeds, on average. I am assuming "succeed" means profitable exit.

Activity wise, there certainly are enough data to pull a reasonable sample size to create a model. However, the tricky part is to identify the right variables. In my opinion, unlike the stock market, the variables to start-up success is much difficult to quantify. Would love to see their theory behind their model though!
Ah, I see that PG's advertisement for news.yc has worked, and Reddit has come for a visit.
Heck, if you can collect the arrival times from the various airlines, you could send a confirmation message a few minutes after the plane lands. Checking in would be as simple as hitting reply.
Live Mongrel Debugging and Recovery
Cost more, no facebook apps (TOS) ... competition is only good for the market if its real competition. What are the advantages over Amazon?
That would require the traveler's flight information, which I wasn't assuming was something the rental software would have access to. However, if the customer wanted to offer it up ... sure!

Higher-end hotels have systems that do this kind of thing already, and there's no reason that rental car companies couldn't also.
The airplane has 3 networks (navigation, entertainment and flight) - the reason they are connected (unknown)
It's more than that, though -- if you look at this in the context of generic data projection and 'intelligence amplification' software, some (perhaps positive) aspects of the subprime boom were logical outgrowths of more powerful tools for reviewing borrower credit histories.

And some of the hugely negative aspects of the subprime mortgage market (and resulting credit crunch) were logical outcomes of Wall Street's insane greed, coupled with derivative financial instruments that allowed risk to be packaged as CDOs without due diligence or oversight. Give Wall Street a loophole (hell, give any poorly regulated industry a loophole) and the outcome is predictable. Couple the loophole with automated tools that allow irresponsible people to conduct transactions in the blink of an eye -- an unsupervised ML project, as it were, with an algorithm appropriate only for supervised learning -- and you get a massive financial shockwave...

This is not entirely different from the computer-trading aspects of Black Friday, but due to the lax oversight of the fundamentals, it will likely have much longer-lasting aftershocks. It's unclear whether our next president will have the character to fix the underlying problems, but as usual, the tools have no morals -- it is only their users. And I've never seen any indication that a moral being can survive on Wall Street, at least not en masse.
Honestly; Please, please tell me that someone didn't get paid on msft payroll to create this stuff.
I don't believe Google would. They make there money with ads, an add-on to there platform isn't going to make them any additional ad sales so there is no reason for them to do it.
I know it's been 4 days, but ... I've also found that 8aweek is sorta handy for keeping track of time spent on a client website.
Yahoo Launches World's Largest Hadoop Production Application
Some good stuff here, and some dreck dressed up as profundity, I think. Of course depending on one's position in the software foodchain, what's dreck and what's wisdom might vary.

Tom van Vleck's software quality / Black Death analogy makes all the sense in the world to me while I'm nose-down in the code. To my clients and my managers it's probably worse than gibberish. Conversely, "Deming's 14 points" strike me as meaningless word salad.

And if I could mention one I love that's not on that list: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." (Donald Knuth)
The New York Times, Fake Steve Jobs, Wired, to name a few.

Some of the very best reads are one-offs. This comes to mind: http://www.improvresourcecenter.com/mb/tpcs.html
Check out demos on their blog: http://a.viary.com/blog Pretty impressive. I'm pretty sure you could do those operations with Splashup as well.
Complexity Theory: A Modern Approach
IMO it's also about education, not just wealth. On the sites I manage, the quality of Google traffic is significantly higher than from others. I'd rather have one hit from Google than two hits from another source.
Reading the description, my thought process was "So don't we already have pdf and Acrobat for that?"

Looking at the actual demo, my thought process was "Wow, Acrobat really sucks."
Pratchett fans, Sgt. Colon was on to something: Thieves steal Czech rail bridge
ISP ordered to turn over 1 email account accidently turns over hundreds
Andy Ihnatko Reviews Drobo & Droboshare
I think there is python support by way of CGI.

I use mosso for some static hosting, and it's a bit laggy when retrieving static files larger than a few kb.
I call vaporware. Another example of a concept site with impressive demos is streamy.com. I wouldn't be surprised if these were "honey pots" of sorts to collect email addresses of specific demographics (in this case it seems to be different levels of web developers, whereas Streamy was aimed at the Digg/reddit news crowd).

The thing that sets me off is the statement: "As soon as your invitation code hatches we will send it to your inbox." Cute way of saying, "We'll send you and invitation whenever we feel like it; but in the meantime we will do whatever we like with your email address." I did notice the guarantee "We promise not to spam!", but honestly that promise is as strong as the typeface used to display it.

Another factor that tips me off is that they seem to be violating one of the basics of good web application design: HAVE A FOCUS!!! Like Streamy, there are too many things going on here that promise a lot of possibilities but seem too much to deliver realistically. I would believe them more if they took perhaps ONE or at most TWO of the things they claim to be releasing and said that this product should be available soon...

Given the technology they are developing, I would hope to see a blog article with some substance talking about some of the cutting edge technology that is at least tangentially related to what they are claiming to be able to deliver. Instead, there are some pics with text of little substance that seem to foster an image of "coolness" and design savvy but no indication that they have any real technical ability to deliver what they are advertising.

But of course, I could be wrong.... hopefully somebody here can disprove my cynicism (see the reply button below this comment Aviary people/developers/employees?!??!?!).
I think it is sad that we are discussing weather or not the story should be in HN. I would rather like to see a smart discussion on the actual event from all the smart people here. For starters: what is going to happen to cuba now? Should the embargo end?
Russix - LiveCD Linux Distro for Wireless Penetration Testing & WEP Cracking
Build a black diamond (establish your target audience and market)
Cartoon: Achewood

Blogs: Philalawyer.net, 37Signals' Signal Vs. Noise, Blog Maverick, all the Overheard in * blogs

One-offs: 37 Signals' Getting Real, public domain books including Letters to a Stoic and Walden to name a couple
Watts book Six Degrees is pretty interesting to read. There's a lot of good material in it that will leave you with lots to think about. It's a bit dense in places and could have used a better ordering of the materials, but I'd still recommend the book.
I like this approach. Very open ended but crucial if you're discerning enough.
Way to go Scribd! I think this one is going to be big, guys
Mozilla Messaging
I think the numbers encompass all jobs within the region-- not just tech ones, as you seem to be implying. If you include all employment sectors, then there are plenty of fulltime workers earning less than $30k: 27 percent, according to the article.
Apparently they do now, the customer support guy I spoke to before got it wrong. Django doesn't work at the moment though he said they hope to have it working soon
One of my most regularly visited links is http://aldaily.com/
Hacking in the real world
I've been using them for about 1.5 years, and while the road has been rocky, reliability recently has been much better. Their customer service is pretty awesome, and SSH is promised and is in the works.

Dollar for dollar, it's pretty comparable to running your own server, with ~infinite scalability and managed service to boot.
Here's the FAQ:

http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/news/faq/2008-02-19-01
It seems to stop around 2004. Python 2.4 and up are missing. So are the newer Java releases. And no Arc of course. Shame.
America's economy risks the mother of all meltdowns
DbC is one of the linchpins of future software development. The traditional desktop license "use at your own risk" simply won't be acceptable as computing power becomes more centralized in the future. The corporate world expects us to provide all possible diligence to show proof of correctness in our applications, and the products built with DbC will have a competitive edge over products which don't employ DbC.
Interoperability does not mean forward/backward compatibility for releases of a single vendor's software.

Forward/backward compatibility does not require a lot of work or intellect, unless you're deliberately obfuscating your format.
This isn't meant as a troll, but what exactly is the difference between this and FlashPaper?
> Don't get it.

Are you working the problem, or simply the most visible symptom?
10 "Stupid" Online Business Ideas That Made A Mint
"Indeed, Castro commentary is very likely to lead down the reddit road."

Hum... we don't want to digg too deep down the reddit hole?
Duke U. Set to Deploy World's Largest 802.11n Network
People really shouldn't lie outright in marketing materials:

iPaper Requires Download: No
iPaper Requires Installation: No

Last time I checked, Flash was still a plugin, not a built in feature of the web. I'm just as likely to not have flash on my system as a PDF reader.

Cost to create documents is perhaps the most misleading:

iPaper: Free, PDF: $299, Office: $150

There are a billion ways to create PDFs for free, including built in support in every application in Mac OS X. There are also free ways to create office compatible formats.

Most of the rest of this is distasteful, but less of an outright lie. Certainly PDFs can be embedded as links, not to mention, there are ways to embed on the page itself, with the supporting plugins. "Size of the application" is silly, given that you download Acrobat Reader once (and pretty much everyone has it), instead of downloading iPaper on every page load. Of course, again, Mac OS X has this all built in.
A good one to add to my portal. Thank you!
"SSH is promised and is in the works" - I don't get this one. You don't get shell access to the servers your app is running on? How can you do anything useful then?
Schneier on lock-in
Adpinion.
A little late to the party, right (http://pdfmenot.com/)
Butbutbut!!!

I'm positive at least 20% of the stories do not appeal to each person, but the stories in that 20% are different for each individual (see what I mean?)

Lack of interest towards a subject matter in an individual at a specific time doesn't necessarily denote lack of suitability for the subject for HN.

Personally I'm getting quite irritated at the need to eyeball-scan the news because I'm rather keeping up with the new articles so I visit often but I always have like 15 stories I already decided I wouldn't check out...
The way to combat lock in as a consumer is to negotiate a good deal for yourself before you sign up and get locked in - according to Varian and Shapiro, whose book he cites.
wonkette.com (during election season), reddit, aldaily.com, sciencedaily.com

It seems like there used to be more stuff worth reading on the web, but that's probably just my mental facilities going to hell as I get old (x > 30)
Assuming they're not being outright deceptive, they've got some images posted to their software blog that were generated with their Phoenix app.

We shall see ...
Does anyone know for sure if this is true or not?
The video interview in the above link is particularly cool.

Hadoop seems to be the quasi-secret sauce in a number of projects.

A comparison between Hadoop and Google's Sawzall is at:
http://glinden.blogspot.com/2007/04/yahoo-pig-and-google-saw...

The NLP search engine Powerset also uses it.
http://blog.powerset.com/2007/10/16/powerset-empowered-by-ha...
Hey, you're right. I totally missed that paragraph when I read it the first time -- I thought they were only reporting numbers for the "middle income" folks.

I'm actually amazed that the number is that high -- I figured that even the "menial" jobs would have to pay more than that in that region. It's hard for me to imagine anyone surviving in Silicon Valley on less than $30K, but I suppose that's just a failure of my own imagination.
History of Lambda-Calculus and Combinatory logic
My father is amazingly computer illiterate. My mom and I have tried to show him the way, but he's pretty stubborn. He can type about 3 words per minute (btw, learning to type correctly is a huge huge huge factor for getting people to explore the internet - imagine searching for something using one finger), but he understands Amazon.

This can be dangerous, but try walking your grandma through one-click shopping. I say it's dangerous because it can lead to impulsive buying, but Amazon introduces new users to search, user comments/reviews, and ecommerce. I think it is a good starting point to being introduced to the web.

side question - My mom is getting better and better using the internet/computer, but I can't figure out how to explain the concept of iTunes/big music library to her. Does anyone have any advice?
One thing Watts does not account for in his simulation ... in real life, influentials are disproportionately likely to be connected to other influentials.

And just empirically we can see the influentials do have an effect. No one can really deny the power of celebrity endorsements. Now what can be questioned, though, is just how many connections do you need before you can be considered an influential, and what magnitude is their influence? From Watt's experiment we can probably conclude that 40 is not enough to do a lot.
DVD Jon launches doubleTwist
The embargo should have never existed.
That's the most insidious part: it is subtle. We cannot definitively say one thing or another, which is why I'm asking ANYBODY from a.viary.com to show the YC.News community something substantial.

For example: send an invite to somebody of high reputation at Digg/reddit/YC.News and have them spread the word. This is a simple strategy that not only will help a.viary.com but will also lend tremendous credibility to their development efforts, not to mention future potential.

I think the best example of my cynicism is tagsy.com:

http://tagsy.com

vs.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/tagsy.com

Notice any similarities with streamy.com and the old tagsy.com? I'm willing to bet streamy.com is total vaporware. They've had enough time to get beta testers and lend some credibility to the notion that they are not vaporware; especially given the fact that the Streamy demo on YouTube looked like a finished product! I have not seen the Aviary demo (where I work blocks YouTube), but I'm willing to bet that it looks like they've got something on the verge of being released (or in other words it is as impressive/polished as Streamy's demo on YouTube).
Haha, saw that comment coming a mile away! :)
Very nice guys! Scribd is my favorite company to come out of yCombinator. I think you guys have really done some great stuff, and you use Rails, which just makes it better!
Asimov: What is intelligence, anyway?
steve yegge blog rant
RIM Sues Motorola, Motorola Sues Back: Just Another Lawsuit That Won't Really Effect Either of Them?
Sounds like a business opportunity for someone else.
Looks like Yahoo! can now refresh its entire data base 34% faster. Meaning its index will now be overall updating more often than google. (although google is still the king of indexing content on a 'rate of freshness' scale')
Normally I agree Joel's articles, but having dealt with the new garbage that Microsoft calls a standard, Office Open XML, I can tell you that none of this applies. Yet the Open XML spec is over 6000 pages long (compared to these binary specs which are a measly 100-300 pages each).

Open XML is not designed for performance... it's XML, and today's computers are fast enough. It IS [supposed to be] designed for interoperability (somehow they managed to get ECMA to put their stamp of approval on it), but in reality it feels like it's a half-assed attempt to wrap all of Office's legacy formats in XML. For example, to import you still need WMF importing, because a lot of the graphics (including all clip art) are WMF.
Assassination Politics
Cost of Customer Acquisition - What Is It?
I can't see that it should end immediately -- the conditions under which it was started are still in place. However, it's probably a good opportunity to start negotiations with whoever takes over -- a gradual lifting of the embargo in exchange for democratic reforms, release of political prisoners, a timetable for free elections etc.
http://ajaxian.com is a good one
Skrentablog, QuickSprout, Signal vs noice, Seth Godin
and less and less everyday Techcrunch
i feel like fox news has moved trolling to television. its a good thing i stopped watching tv years ago
More tough for some of us who are broke and have no car to do this all within one day.
Share Your iTunes/Winamp Music Over The Internet
Gunter, the Boeing spokeswoman, mentioned that maintenance technicians with laptops will be able to wirelessly access and download information from the 787's administrative network while the plane is on the ground.

Likewise, gate personnel in the terminal can upload flight plans and passenger information via Wi-Fi to the cabin crew's onboard intranet.

Using WiFi to upload flight plans seems like a particularly bad idea...
1. Actually this shows that practical people, not lawyers, wrote the product description. Flash's widespread adoption means that a vast majority of Internet users don't have to install anything to use iPaper. http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/vers...

2. There are tools for free to create PDFs, just as there are tools to do almost everything for free versus its paid alternative. That does not mean iPaper has to compete with the free tools. They are competing with Adobe Acrobat which remains a paid application.
The conditions didn't change (ergo the embargo failed in it's intent) only causing more economic problems for the people you claim to be trying to save, and you want to keep it up?
Ahh... yet another pair of companies exchanging patent lawsuits. There should be a name for this.

Patent ping pong?
Ask YC: Reliable data on JS/Flash availability?
Wondering if people can point me to decent data on percentages of users who have JS or Flash available and enabled (by default, i.e. without asking them to download or prompt to turn on, etc.).

Driven by the webmail apps for JS and youtube for Flash, I feel like "most" people have them enabled, but I'd like to have some data to go on, especially if it appears one or the other is more available.

If you have your own data to offer, please indicate at least in broad strokes your type of users or the technical level you feel your users have.
Hackers are generally interested in the world around them, particularly things related to freedom (personal, intellectual, or otherwise). It doesn't get much bigger than this. How could this possibly be irrelevant? If its irrelevant to you, you must live in a bubble.
My guess is that Google actually would, and probably is; in an attempt to have a more social aspect Google is probably working on features that make it gmail part of a grander scheme including YouTube/Orkut/Blogger/etc..
The purpose of the question was clearly rhetorical. He was using the Nature story to imply that academia is corrupt. He wasn't curious of our impressions on the corruptness of academia. Therefore my comment is sensible.
HOWTO debug silent data corruption