skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://blog.searchyc.com/2008/02/searchyc-presents-ask-yc-ar...

One of the finest assets of an online community has always been the hodgepodge of expertise brought forth from a diverse group of people. As Hacker News grew beyond just a link bank, the community naturally turned inwards for consultation. Submissions “tagged” with Ask YC started popping up more and more and the response solicited were both interesting and honest.

So to help people get the most out of past discussions, we’ve compiled a list of Hacker News community threads. The Ask YC Archive features a bar graph for visualizing discussions over time based on points. We’ve also set up an RSS feed (http://searchyc.com/askyc/rss) so you can keep track of new Ask YC threads in your favorite RSS reader. We hope these tools will allow our community to continually benefit from the wisdom of past discussions.
Thank you, it is a nice Bayesian point of view.
Think about the incentives you are creating. This fee would just get written into the contracts of viral ad companies, while enthusiastic users would be deterred by the psychological barrier of spending money to do something that feels like just saying "hey guys look at this".
Take that Harvard! Stanford drops tuition for students.
NO. In fact, I would love a link that says "downmod/ignore stories from similar to those that vote for this story". If a story has been up-ranked by a lot of people that you disagree with, you should be able to just ignore them, effectively producing different news feeds for different affinity pools.
I'm about to throw this on PG's essay list page. News.YC karma++ ftw...
I took a look at the FAQ page and then the idea began to make more sense - I could see where it fitted into the web ecosystem.
Trying to go to their website using Camino (I realize that its working for Firefox and other more popular browsers, was just kind of surprised):

javax.servlet.ServletException: agent.filename property not set in config
file
at com.cmp.nucleus.servlet.NucleusServlet.init(NucleusServlet.java:895)
at com.caucho.server.http.Application.createServlet(Application.java:3114)
at com.caucho.server.http.Application.loadServlet(Application.java:3065)
at com.caucho.server.http.QServletConfig.loadServlet(QServletConfig.java:435)
at com.caucho.server.http.Application.getFilterChainServlet(Application.java:2809)
at com.caucho.server.http.Application.buildFilterChain(Application.java:2765)
at com.caucho.server.http.Invocation.service(Invocation.java:313)
at com.caucho.server.http.RunnerRequest.handleRequest(RunnerRequest.java:346)
at com.caucho.server.http.RunnerRequest.handleConnection(RunnerRequest.java:274)
at com.caucho.server.TcpConnection.run(TcpConnection.java:139)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:595)
http://www.boingboing.net

http://www.waiterrant.net

http://www.offthebroiler.com (though it really went downhill when the author started trying to eat healthily)
I agree with one exception, DRM that is designed to keep a company's trade secrets secret. Encountered a few startups building DRM for that purpose and I have to say that I don't find it offensive.

Data leakage is a serious problem for many companies and DRMing its key data is a good solution.

Although it is technologically impossible to create a bullet proof DRM and DRM as a whole is a rotten concept, at least these things can be "fool" proof and prevent accidental leakage.
For such type of thing you should always have something at the last column, even return might be enough

A,B,,,,,,,,"
"
C,D,,,,,,,,"
"

That's newline there between " and "

I guess Excel loads that internally through a convertor, trims the rightmost unused columns, and then saves it that way.
Simple Apache Form Authentication: mod_auth_cookie
This module seems to have fallen by the wayside: The previous homepage has gone dark, and I was luckily able to grab the source from archive.org.

It's a really great way to set up a simple login form and get rid of the ugly Basic Authentication prompt. You still use Basic Authentication (including a .htpasswd file or mod_auth_mysql, for example), but redirect using a custom 401 handler that shows a login form, that in turn sets the user:password combination as a cookie.

On the server, mod_auth_cookie then takes that cookie and fakes the Basic Authentication headers. It's literally so simple, it can be configured with one line on top of Basic Auth:

AuthCookieName CookieName

I've resurrected the module from the abyss, and hosted a shiny new homepage at http://modauthcookie.weebly.com/
Whether it's interesting in its own right or not is not the issue. The subject matter is of a political nature, and doesn't really afffect or concern the technical community moreso than any other demographic group. Shouldn't this sort of thing be left to mainstream sites? In any event, most readers proably check other news sites, so this just seems redundant.
Damnit...so went to the wrong school...

Funny how if I went to Stanford it would be profitable for my mom to quit her job.
the rich feed the rich!
As a religious person, I don't find the graph itself to be anti-religion. The teachings of Jesus recorded in the Christian scriptures repeatedly warn that material wealth can interfere with one's relationship with God, and other (many? most?) religions make similar observations. So one way to look at this data is that it simply confirms this precept.
Well spotted - I just assumed that the server was having traffic problems as this link has been posted by Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror. It opens just fine in a FireFox IE tab of course.
Process One is hiring new Erlang developers
Well, crap. The only reason I didn't apply to Stanford was because my family wouldn't be able to afford it.

..but Berkeley's EECS a wonderful alternative, so it's all good, I guess. =)
"In the future, Harvard will cost $1 billion a year, and only Bill Gates's children will pay full price. When anyone else walks through the door, the message will be 'Special price, just for you.' "
--Greg Mankiw
xkcd - Duty Calls
are they getting money from elsewhere, or are they just taking fewer students from those income brackets?
Isn't working for me in these popular browsers you speak of, unless it's just a mac thing?

EDIT: A ha, it works now. Maybe it's a server load thing.
generally, people you find on online forums are going to be bad. the difference is, if you find a designer in estonia on odesk, you'll pay 50 bucks for bad design. if you get a san fran designer from craigslist, you'll pay hundreds for a bad design.

go with people you know, or people friends refer you to.
they have 17 billion dollars in cash from donations and various other means. they're now disbursing that through the free tuition process.
well what is java written in?
you can always claim that hadoop is ultimately writen in the language used to create java.

they should have used Perl5 and Moose thought!
>Perhaps, I'm just lucky to live in the RIGHT suburb!

yes. eden prarie was a tiny town until the 1970s that just happened to get swallowed up by the twin cities sprawl. thus it does have some history and character of its own. other suburbs in the twin cities are already slummy: richfield, robbinsdale, fridley, crystal, brooklyn center, etc. any suburb in the midwest where more people rent than own is not a good place.
Ones not already mentioned: http://www.atomicwang.org/motherfucker/Index/Index.html (programmer at Delicious Monster), http://ask.metafilter.com/ (Q&A site on a wide range of subjects), http://daringfireball.net (Mac weblog).
I wouldn't applaud them for marginalizing PDF so much as applaud them for providing a better alternative for online content.
OS X's support for PDF is phenomenal, and Foxit's launchtime on Windows is lightning fast. I can't speak for Linux (as I haven't opened a PDF on linux in some time), but I agree that where embedded content is concerned, PDF's browser integration is terrible across the board.
A friend of mine simply hooked up a cellphone using USB and sent SMS using AT commands. Takes a bit of programming, but as cheap as can be.

http://www.developershome.com/sms/howToSendSMSFromPC.asp
Sweet idea. Scales well, too, assuming you can find cheap cheap phones with pay as you go data.
It's absurdly hideous. I would be embarrassed to carry that.
Their admissions are need-blind, so they can't "just take fewer students" from a given income bracket.
just make sure you don't spend all your time studying in Soda...
No.
Hackers aren't totally insulated from politics, and as long as we have some interest in these things, having that reflected on n.yc isn't bad, IMO. By the same reasoning a deluge of such stories would be inappropriate because, proportionally speaking, we're not as concerned about such things as more traditionally hacker-relevant topics.
Indeed. Do I know you? I hang out in the CSUA sometimes.
the video does indeed backfire. the 'standard algorithm' is less efficient than most of the other mental calculation tricks. in the trivial case of multiplying two 2-digit numbers it looks easy, but it becomes cumbersome when you're multiplying a column of three 4-digit numbers. it is even worse for division. the reason why old school math teachers like it is because it is easy to teach and grade.

regarding other countries: the countries where people are stereotypically good at arithmetic don't teach the 'standard algorithm' as primary.

on the other hand, i've seen those books (math teachers in the family) and they aren't very good. text books are a scam. students would do better with a good teacher and cheapo dover paperbacks. there are a couple great ones on speed arithmetic.
I mean it somewhat facetiously. I went to Cornell, and judging by the prices for books, food (the items that are really marked up), margins are important to them. Then again, they have less money than Stanford.
no. if there was a down arrow, you could downmod. but there isn't, so you can only complain.
NO.
I love this site because you can find informations relative to hackers and startups. If I want to find general world news there are plenty of other site that I can look to. I wish the site stay focused on hacker/startup news. Otherwise the risk is that this kind of informations get diluted in world news. Maybe this kind of news would not reach the top if we could downmod it
One might or might not be impressed - depending upon the number of students this is likely to affect. I am sure that Stanford has done it's sums and taken into account the net impact of attracting applications from bright students coming from less well of homes.
Server load has nothing to do with what browser you're using.
Case study on world news coverage made by social news sites
good point. but hey, that's even cooler.
Very cool, I will probably use this at some point soon.

IMO, this is a big part of what makes open source so valuable.
I second that. Couldn't make anything off it until I went to some page and clicked the bookmarklet to see what happens. Nice idea though!

"Watch websites for changes/updates" might be a start.
This will definitely welcome a lot of foreign students to apply where the rich middle class barely earns $30000 - including the IT industry which has the fattest pay packages.
The University of Pennsylvania also has a similar policy. http://www.admissionsug.upenn.edu/paying/
Fair point. Done.
Cool stuff. Love the graph. Keep up the good work!
Clearly it is going to take finite time to read all of this book and thus comment intelligently on the whole.

Sampling chapter one tells me that this is very well written and pertinent - if you don't get bogged down in the immediate issues of DOS calls. Performance is always going to be crucial for all but the most trivial (or unrepeated) tasks.

I quote from the chapter's conclusion

"This chapter has presented a quick step-by-step overview of the design process. I’m not claiming that this is the only way to create high-performance code; it’s just an approach that works for me. Create code however you want, but never forget that design matters more than detailed optimization. Never stop looking for inventive ways to boost performance-and never waste time speeding up code that doesn’t need to be sped up."

Spot On!
When an execution is as incredibly simple as hot or not -- that counts as part of the idea!!
Tech-Ex: Vodafone to "Guarantee" BlackBerry Service with Neverfail Technology
Mozilla Messaging Starts Operations
OK, I know we've been pummeled with posts about Mozilla Messaging, but they now have content on their own site.

Worth checking out if, like me, you still haven't found the "perfect" email client/process.
Launch: Backpack Multiuser (and single-user)
The Dark Side of Light
Social Media in the 1990’s
Or download pirate versions. Can anyone see any moral problem what so ever with that?
Did it fall out of grace because it was vulnerable to cross-site attacks ?
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery )
Ha... I'll keep that I'm mind next time I'm tempted to comment here.
ADSENSE IN FLASH NOW POSSIBLE...
Happy birthday.Thanks for creating HN, PG :)
It's unclear whether this policy also applies to foreign students.

Typically, Stanford's financial aid to foreign students has not been "need-blind".

Does anyone have further info on this?
I've done some outsourcing that worked on a smaller scale than what you described. My rules:

-Only outsource on a project basis.

-Find developers who have done almost exactly what I'm looking for previously, usually via rentacoder.com. Invite them to bid on the project.

-Use escrow.

-Don't outsource to companies, only individuals. Companies will have churn problems and will claim expertise in everything. If you're not doing a bid-based approach, you will get a sales guy to try and talk you up.
That's exactly why I would downvote this if I could. It's a misleading article that he stolen from someone else (because I've seen this many times on different blogs) and has tons of bogus data that no one checks.

About Russia: In 1987 the GDP was:
USA : 5,093,396
USSR: 1,965,457

P.S. nukes don't care about GDP.

P.P.S. In 2007 EU had a GDP of $16,574 trillion and USA: $13.794 trillion. So it would be easier to make a map the other way around.
OLPC Jam (i.e. Hacking) Session at NYU this Saturday (Feb. 23)
Most people form their political opinions based on their self image, not on rational thought. I.e.

"I'm an artistic creative person" -> "I'm a Democrat" -> "I support abortion."

Or

"I'm a good Christian" -> "I'm a Republican" -> "I support lower taxes."

How does this relate to vouchers?

1. The beneficiaries of the current monopoly oppose vouchers due to simple greed.

2. Their political allies try to protect them, to keep votes/campaign contributions coming.

3. "People like me (e.g. political allies of the teachers union) oppose vouchers. Therefore, I oppose vouchers. Only bad people on the other side of the fence support them."
Sorry - I did not make it clear. It was not a server issue but a browser issue. The site seems to respond best to Internet Explorer so I opened it in FireFox using the IE tab "addin".
I am very much interested in this topic...given that I'm foreign. Does anybody know if this would benefit a peruvian?
I just thought of a way to make sure the kids never get stumped. The kid in the article was stuck breaking up 674 into easier numbers. Perhaps there is a method of "breaking the problem into easier-to-digest numbers" that always works.

Hmm, we could break up 674 as 600+70+4, and 249 as 200+40+9. I think this method just might work for all numbers!

Now I just need a catchy name to market this. How about "Child-friendly Mathematics: a -4'th century approach"? It's even diversity friendly (crucial in the education market), since it was invented by a non-western culture.
Respondents were given a +1 if they believe faith in God is necessary for morality

Is that really a measure of religiosity? Is someone who believes that necessarily more religious than someone who doesn't?
#1 result is the parent comment.

Phrase may be a little obscure.
Hiring a Star Web Designer:

http://ourdoings.com/2008-02-12
Couldn't have said it better myself.
1. If your parents make 100k+ but don't want to spend it on your education, you're screwed.

2. If you're not a spoiled only child and your parents have to divide that money up then you're screwed.

#1 angers me especially. Parents I know don't do that anymore, especially when colleges rape us with such obscene tuitions while doing relatively little to improve the education.
I'll remember it and laugh at myself as I'm typing my comment.
Web hosting now vs 10 years ago
I'm sad that this reddit-style meta-complaint made it to the front page, actually.
How to deploy to the cloud of your choice
Hardly anybody knows about opportunity cost. And in the case of many poor people, all they have in abundance is time anyway. Sad, but true.
Small, but disruptive - "femtocells"
Greenlet Python: Lightweight concurrent threads using Python's standard interpreter
/Apparently no one has my sense of humor.
Big Bang Wasn't the Beginning?
Something I wonder about with these is: once people start getting a hold of them, does that increase the 'hackability' (in both good and bad senses) of mobile phones and their networks?
Nice idea. Made me think of tinyurl, so thats good. But this is just as easy to replicate, which makes me think of the hundreds of tinyurl clones. If you take a look at how those clones tried to distinguish themselves from tinyurl and what features they added, it might give you some ideas on how to add value to your site. Might let you stay ahead of the inevitable competition if people find this useful.

Also, a pro user would want to integrate this into some other service. So you should consider providing a simple request API call that returns the feed address. You should also consider not charging any money initially and focus instead on building a userbase.
Erlang's typing system: less is more?
GNU Emacs Calc Manual: Not your Grandpa's Calculator
Bloaty Parts Of The HTML5 Specification That Should Be Removed
The Uni-can'ts and Uni-can of Uni-code
One of my favorite hangouts back in my purely design days was http://www.DesignersTalk.com
It could still do with some more work.

The watch changes button made me expect that the page would show me real time changes. Why not change it to "Create Feed" as thats what it does.

You have a lot of white space to work with. Use it to better explain what the site is about. Display the pro account option more prominently. Add a little color.
This appears to have been lifted almost directly out of last week's Onion.
Great concept, but I went once and it didn't work for me. 15 people squeezed into a 2 room apartment with no air conditioning. I was the only one who didn't bring a laptop. If I had, I would have had to balance it on my lap. The people seemed nice enough, but every one of them had their head down, working away furiously. I hated to interrupt anyone to chat.

Better for me would be working from home alone and going out to a bar or restaurant to socialize. Oh wait, I already do that.

Interesting to find out if anyone here has had any good experiences with Jelly.
Gates on Yahoo: It's the people
Not in my own company.
I love the one where he's pressing the button on the cell-phone and looking at the camera. Thats usability people!
Economic confidence plummets in the UK according to poll
I ate this book up like candy when I had my first gig at a game development shop. It's absolutely fantastic. Especially enjoyable is the stuff about his work on Quake - which, IMHO, was one of the greatest technical achievements in software, ever. (Do you think you could render a 3D environment at 25 fps, all in software, on a Pentium 75?? Unbelievable...)
You can even get GSM PCI cards that take 1 or more SIM cards. Presumably they exist for the north american system too. You might just want to check the terms of use of the operator, they may prohibit automation on normal tariffs.
I'm sorry if you don't understand how this relates to startups. It does.

I know of very few founders who didn't move to a new place for their startup. Understanding how the qualities of a region affect the prosperity of its companies will aide you greatly when weighing the costs and benefits of moving for your startup and where to move to.

Prior to what I have learned through HN, I may have moved back to Europe without giving it a second thought. Pull your head out of the compiler for a minute to see how location will affect your hacking career.

Reddit content is funny pictures, useless politics, inflammatory youtube, and misleading headlines. This is none of those.
Apple iPod 1GB Shuffle price cut to $49, 2GB player planned
CMU has an HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) program. Have you tried looking around that department?
Would be useful to allow a way for people to aggregate all changes into one feed. Hardly want to have to add 50 feeds when one could do the job.
i believe it fell out of grace because the maintainer's page disappeared. and no, it shouldn't be any more vulnerable to CSRF than a simple session-cookie system, which is what this basically is.
Yahoo to offer severance plans to employees
Hah. That's an oddly specific match for our dilemma. Have you ever used it?

I am at the same juncture now.
DVD Jon's startup "doubleTwist" is releasing a service that makes it easy for consumers to share iTunes content
I got that on my first attempt (Opera 9.25/Linux), after hitting 'reload' once I got the page. Weird.
Thanks! I might start with the email->sms and see how that goes. I have noticed, too that carriers don't always deliver the email->sms and many a times they have disappeared.
I seriously need to proof read my comments...
Ask YC:  Why?  The more time I spend here the more I get done.
Last night, my other half said, "Are you on that hacker news again? If you spent as much time on your software as that web site, you'd be done already."

Got me to thinking. I DO spend a lot of time here lately. But I've also gotten a lot of work done. Yesterday was a great day, with several major breakthroughs and lots of new code. Yet I was here off and on all day long. I can't explain it. It seems like it's the opposite of what you'd expect.

The only explanations I can think of is that reading and discussing interesting stuff here gets my juices flowing, almost like "stretching" before the real workout. Maybe being among others who are achieving the same things as me keeps me going. Also, it tempers the loneliness. Anyone else with similar experience?
With txtdrop, I did not see an API on their website. Is there something I am missing here?
Lets say your dad makes 55k and your mom makes 55k, I think your family would save a ton overall by having your mom or dad take an early retirement.
Startup Mistakes: Marketing or Advertising?
Hey e1ven. Thank you for those links. I did use searchYc.com to search for sms and text, but did not find those, so I appreciate you sending those my way.

To all those who responded, thanks a lot. I think I will start with the email->sms option, and then to textmarks (that really looks interesting, though if I were to open this out others they might not appreciate me giving their phone number to a third party).

I will be sure to fill you all in when and if this goes anywhere ;-) I certainly don't have $12000 for clickatell and if it comes to that, well, I might just not go public.
First Australian Startups Carnival 2008, March 3-17
The designers that I know don't hang out online. And many of the designers I know have trouble with basic business practices (invoicing). I'm partnered with one who is actually probably better at business than me, and easily much better at marketing, but they are hard to come by. I would check both the design school at pitt and CM (and art institute of Pittsburgh) and also the marketing school, for someone with design skills (or aspirations, depending on your need for great design, and your willingness to pay)
Wii-Proof Panasonic TV in the Works
Book has been sitting on my shelf forever since I found it in a clearance bin. Now I'll actually (try to) read it!
ObHacker: Densely populated neighborhoods can be more cheaply wired for broadband.