skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Adobe Blurs Line Between PC and Web
You missed the joke... I had already seen it in the source, I was just trying to bait someone to post a link :-). It didn't occur to me to see what was there, though. I had just assumed it was a spam site.
:) I actually baited myself a while ago into posting one of the other sites banned here. Tech dumpster DOT com (a bad uncov) is one and I think Teen wag DOT com (a social network run by 13 year olds) is another. Someone should give them a try and see if they're still active!

For those curious, the hardcoded banned site plays the Rickroll video and has endless javascript popups to make it really difficult to leave.
Tax Returns
Online Tax Filing
More than that, in my opinion. Ratatouille is a great movie in itself. Just like "The Incredibles", it is a film where you see fully developed characters and an interesting story without getting pseudo-intelectual over it.

Also, I went to see it with my girlfriend at the time. It was a few weeks past the opening weekend, and I remember that we've noticed how few people were "taking the kids" to the movie. They were going on their own, which I took as a excellent sign that animated movies are no longer just about the cute factor. Computers are just supporting the movie, instead of being the selling point of it.
Actual vs Perceived threats (aka People are Crazy)
Wag was spamming/trolling us incessantly in news.yc's earliest days. I've heard of dumpster but wasn't aware they were blacklisted. I assume that one is just a url-kill and nothing worse?
how is goggle formed

how goggle get advertisemnet
i asked the same question of a network phd student. i got the simple text version, and i have no idea if it is valid or not, but the guy i know is very smart.

he says in all likelihood, a guy in charge setup a malicious route or "report" saying they could access youtube faster than they really could. which means, everyone trying to get to youtube, went through pakistan because it was the fastest way to youtube. so all youtube traffic went to pakistan, which was the ddos part.

why isn't this a huge problem? it kinda is. the system shouldn't be able to be taken down. But, it isn't a huge problem because nobody actually does this.

Apparently, isps pay a lot for their access, and this kinda thing is a good way of paying a lot more and loosing all your money and not having internet, which is the opposite of the business they are in.

i've never ever heard of something like this happening, or about these 'reports.' so... maybe nobody should listen to me. but my friend is usually right about this stuff.
If it's this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=120991 then the reason is not the comment so much as being in the wrong place at the wrong time. HN members are trying very hard to avoid becoming the next reddit... we want to keep the signal/noise ratio high. Since you were posting in (and thereby validating) a topic that many viewed as fluff, you sort of got crucified. That said, I didn't vote your comment down.

Then again, I could be overanalyzing the entire situation, and it could just be that a lot of this community prefers sex alone ;).
Wasn't this only discovered in the 70's or even later?
I once thought I would have a career in media, but I switched to software in part because I realized that my customer was going to be corporations, and the product was audience attention. It saddens me that ads are invading the software world too.

Advertisements are not a neutral way to make money. That model rewards massive infrastructure investment, control of information distribution, and overall low quality of the actual product.

It's very strange that one of Facebook's big problems is that their content is too interesting and meaningful to their users.
Everyone who has ever had to work in IT cares. When you need 81 screws to replace a motherboard (as a previous example cited) you wind up spending a magnitude of time longer fiddling with a laptop just to fix it. Multiply that times 100 and you have long support times and disgruntled workers.

The attitude that a laptop has to have eighty billion screws to be well-engineered is nonsense. Thinkpads are the perfect example -- they are known for being extremely sturdy and tough, but also have a reputation for being remarkably easy to work with in terms of parts replacement, etc. Defending Apple for "wanting to make sure it works perfectly" does not hold water -- we may as well admit that they don't really want _you_ poking around in your own computer under any circumstances.
Just about every movie that got an Oscar nod is a worth a trip to The Pirate Bay. My favorites this year were Diving Bell and the Butterfly, There Will be Blood, and War/Dance.
I think it's unnecessary for any comment to be modded below -1 or so, so I gave you some free karma points.
Interesting, but simple to explain because people tend to operate on unthinkability rather than hazard.

While the odds of dying in a car accident are (much) higher than dying in a plane accident, it's unthinkable that so many people die simultaneously from a method of transportation that intuitively feels less safe than a box rolling on the ground.

The only exception on that chart is the asteroid impact, which can probably be discounted because it's for all intents and purposes impossible in our lifetime.
Oh, BTW, Apple's lead designer is a brit, Jonathan Paul Ive CBE. Good Old Europe, bloody yes. And his main inspiration? Old Braun designs.

"So European electronic companies should not be pursuing the faster-quicker-cheaper road, but the beautiful-elegant-simple road".
I finally found the words to express well what I was thinking.
While I think that your description is a bit hard to understand you are on to the right thing.

It is basically all about the relatively new discipline of behavioral economics.

If you have 45 minutes to spare you should watch Daniel Kahneman's nobel prize lecture on the subject here: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2002/...

Definitely worth the time...
Rethinking Recommendation Engines
Managing the Consumer Influencer...
Hopefully this racist drivel won't make it to the front page. The only merit in this piece is that it illustrates the current fashion in Europe for taking pride in narrowmindedness and bigotry (a trend that is, according to a sociologist friend of mine, strongest in the author's country - Denmark - and my own - the Netherlands)
A low cost of customer acquisition for your web startup
Facebook – insight from an 18yr old female college student
Ah. I see that you didn't quite grasp the consequences of Pakistan's mistake, and wish to repeat it for your own self.
Some people spend way too much time worrying about which language to use. Just pick one that doesn't suck too badly for the job you need, and use it.
I lurked on Digg shortly after it debuted. It was very briefly pretty good, and then devolved incredibly fast.

I was also on Slashdot pretty early -- I still have a low 5-digit UID there -- and back around 1999 it was pretty incredible. It's bounced back a little since the Natalie-Portman-Hot-Grits days, but not nearly enough.

Might be that the other way for me to look at this is, I am the death knell for any social networking site that I start hanging around on. ;-)
But are you the last of the good or the first of the bad?
I recently put together something vaguely like this for a client website. You can check out the effect at http://kanesrestaurant.biz/menu/menureg.html . The JS and CSS aren't too heavy. I've tested the slide-in-slide-out effect on Safari, Firefox (Mac and Win), IE (Win, v6 and 7, 5.0 should be OK too). There are still a couple of bugs, but at this point they're pretty subtle. There are two things I like best about it: one, that adding another slide to the series is as easy as adding another div to the html and setting its class to "slide", and two, that I spent some time playing with various algorithms for the actual slide effect before settling on a logarithmic scale.

Overall site is (very) incomplete, and I've got a few too many projects at the moment, so be gentle.
Upmod for truth.

How'd you like No Country for Old Men? I thought it was an instant classic, though in a head scratching way.
It's not true that you need bad content for advertising to work. You just need advertising that's better than the content. I watch Superbowl ads willingly, and I read basically every ad in WIRED that doesn't look crappily designed.

That said, it's hard to make content more important than my friends...
I'm the guy that wrote this, and I'm sorry if I offended you. I never meant it to be racist in any way, and I hope it doesn't come through that way - if it does I am to blame.

The point of the article is that we must all try to look at what we do best and focus on that. It seems that Europeans are unable to compete in the better-faster-cheaper hardware market, and thus have to try to find another advantage to exploit in order to become competitive.

I'm not in any way trying to degrade Asian countries. On the contrary I am saying that they have a distinct advantage in hardware production, and try to come up with a model for European competitiveness. Because we are behind Asia in this market.

And yes, I have a certain affection for my home country - but don't we all?
It is a problem if a hacker does this to an ISP in order to push his political / religious / whatever agenda.
PrettySocial (http://www.prettysocial.net/) is 1367 lines of python code. Glad to see my code is relatively succinct :)
in that case, they didnt have a business model, they just got lucky!

if this is what you want to believe, fine, but there are those fields called strategic management, marketing and economics, where people study and discuss how you can make a real plan to make real money, and believe it or not it works, and many many companies survived thanks to those reasearches from those fields, and many many companies failed for ignoring those exact things

and in business just like in development, implementing is way harder than knowing, so just because you know whats right, doesnt mean you can do whats right
All I have to say to that is, .9999... equals 1.
Innominds and Global Roads announce Webinar: The Hyper-growth of Web 2.0 Applications
Functional Flow Control
Either way.
That seems to include news about Java the island for the java news.

Let's create a language called "porn" and make it the most popular language ever.
Why Can’t Broadband be Free Too?
I know that eventually as News.YC becomes more popular this community will homogenize

Suppose you wanted to convince someone who doesn't "know" that. Don't you think the right data could prove your point?
Creatures from primordial silicon: A lean, mean circuit that nobody understands
Gladwell's writing is very seductive but frequently wrong. I like to think of it as speculative non-fiction. It has the same mind-expanding qualities as good SF, and its connection to reality can be just as tenuous.

It is very easy to make up a plausible sounding theory. The hard part is making sure it has no holes in it. The harder part is proving it. As an example, I'll give an alternative evolutionary explanation for why it makes sense that (some) people can accurately judge others in a short amount of time (I claim no expertise in the evolutionary sciences; this is written as a layperson):

Consider an intelligent social species. When two strangers meet, the ability to judge accurately and to be favorably judged, both lead to better fitness. Lets assume there are situations where intelligence is the dominant quality that is being evaluated. Now if you are intelligent, you want to honestly communicate this, so its in your best interest to aid the judgement of the other person. If you are not, then its preferable to be dishonest and try and simulate intelligence. Now why should this situation lead to a state where (some) people can fairly easily make accurate judgements about others? It seems like the person judging has no easy way of accurately evaluating, but has to undertake the hard task of distinguishing between liars and truth-tellers. But the interesting part is that lying and intelligence are highly correlated, since lying takes more brainpower than just telling the truth. So the people who can fool the judgement of others, don't really need to, while those who need to lie, can't do so effectively. This evolutionary dynamic leads to a state where intelligent people can quickly judge the intelligence of others, because they don't have to worry about other intelligent people fooling them.
Notorious is the wrong word. It is well-known, however, and well-reputed on MIT's campus. It's an annual standing-room-only event.
Significantly more. I've had ~630k absolute uniques since launch, currently ~2k uniques/day waiting for the Wii to be in stock. There are conversion rate considerations, click through rate considerations, etc. When it's in stock on Amazon (when the light goes green) at the retail price (non bundled, non scalped), it makes at least $10.00 per Wii sold. Best case is a bundle ($750 retail, 5%, ~$35), worst case is Sears which only pays 1%.
> If more karma means more power, there is an incentive to post to get karma instead of posting to help the community.

One could argue that in the current community, posting to get karma and posting to help the community are one and the same. Reddit's downfall came more because of a change in the composition of the community than because of karma incentives. At the same time, you're right about the problems of people trying to get karma for karma's sake. I think the best way to reduce this problem is to make it harder to gain karma than just by posting popular links.

> Ultimately, 99% of the users are just like you and I and do not want to see news.yc turn into another digg/reddit. Why not take advantage of that, instead of treating it like a technical problem when it is really a community issue.

You're right. It is a community issue. But as soon as the "hordes of 14-year-olds" invade, the 99% you cite will drop. The current technical solution doesn't prevent that from happening. We're trying to find one that does.
Bingo. I think that's the key. And therein lies the problem. How does one keep a community small and high-quality without losing diversity.
Apply a no-exceptions whitelist to your email and you'd have the same thing. Almost nobody does, this, though, and for good reason.

This guy is absolutely right that Twitter is a clever design that folks would be wise to learn from. But Twitter doesn't so much eliminate the problem of spam as dodge it: most people still need a way for relative strangers to get through to them, but they have email for that, so Twitter doesn't need to solve that problem.

If email ceased to exist, Twitter might find themselves pressured to reinvent it, and then spam would arrive right along with it. Similarly, if Twitter yielded to pressure to create a forum like this one, where relative strangers can contribute to discussions, trolls would arrive right along with that feature.
Ratatouille is entirely computer generated and almost every frame of The Golden Compass has been computer enhanced.
The Internet interprets censorship as damage and... fights back.
Stallman on handing over GNU Emacs, its future, and the importance of nomenclature
OpenSocial API: "Intelligently designed," but "bugs, bugs and lots of bugs"
Meaning you worked for a japanese company? A friend of mine bought a notebook from dynamism a couple of years ago, so it works. But anyway, I don't want to plug them.

Back then subnotebooks were very rare in Europe (presumably the market didn't want them), but they were popular in Japan, that is why we checked with dynamism. These days, there are some more subotebooks available in the US and Europe, so maybe dynamism doesn't matter anymore.
Monkeypatching is Destroying Ruby
Microsoft Should Acquire SAP, Not Yahoo
You can do this with lots of major retailers that use Scene7...fun with image servers!
My apologies for the offense. Partially this was a bit of karma whoring on the part of the submitter. But, we also don't see much of the European side of things on YC. I thought posting this during your daytime would give you guys more recognition.
Subtraction: Design Couldn’t Save Yahoo
Ok, let's see if I got it right. He wrote a program that could pick pieces of other programs after testing to find the "fittest" and made new ones until he found one that worked "correctly"? Was it?
10 reasons you should start a startup before turning 25
99 Graphic Design Resources
From the article: European cities have a calm and tranquil atmosphere, Asian and American cities have a hectic and confused atmosphere.

This is the same sentiment as http://www.paulgraham.com/usa.html
Ask News.YC: How difficult is it to break out of prevailing paradigms of the present?
I'm hoping that some sort of interesting discussion will come of this. I came across this picture in a recent issue of Motor Trend. This was Detroit's vision of the future car way back in the 1950s.

http://www.motortrend.com/features/archive/112_0803_mercury_xm_turnpike_cruiser/photo_01.html

What was so striking about what I see here is that the car design is more or less the same as what you'd find in the 1950s on a typical automobile except that it simply has more of what we don't need.

I wanted to know what people's thoughts were about being trapped in the paradigm of our times in the sense that the engineers of this car were trapped in the paradigm of their times.

How different, in retrospect, are the designs/plans/ideas that fuel some of the startups that are popping up today any more groundbreaking or "futuristic" than the "XM Turnpike" of the past??
For me it was the name of his book and the thinking behind it "Only the Paranoid Survive".

The other similar article that I can think of is Joe Kraus of excite talking about "Startups & the stockdale paradox": http://bnoopy.typepad.com/bnoopy/2005/01/startups_and_th.htm...
Why independent?
Consider the difference between these two statements:

> "I'm a cyberpunk!"

> "I'm into cyberpunk."

Now do you see what he means?
It does seem like it should, but I don't care for the white on black either. Maybe it is similar to why it is easier to drive during the daytime vs. nighttime.
It seems to me you're suggesting that Asians are less capable of producing elegant design than Europeans. Which seems to me fairly racist.

It's also not true. Most European companies are not Bang & Olufsen. The products of Philips (a Dutch company), for example, are fairly mediocre as far as their design is concerned. That does not prevent Philips from being a major international electronics manufacturer. The Japanese electronics manufacturer Sony, on the other hand, does in fact do design reasonably well.

So I don't think elegant design is a distinctly European virtue. Instead, the reason a lot of cheap Chinese crap is ugly is simply that it's just that - cheap crap. The fact that it's Chinese doesn't have anything to do with it.

It's also not true that Asian companies merely copy. At a certain stage during their development they do - that's how the aforementioned Sony started out, for example - but at a certain point they will start engineering their own products, like Sony did in the late 1970s or like Samsung started doing in the 1990s. It stands to reason Chinese companies will also, at some point in the future, begin to create their own products and start to compete with Bang & Olufsen, Philips and Sony.
Should ORMs Insulate Developers from SQL?
http://www.thedailywtf.com/ is becoming an extensive archive of anti-patterns. Updated Monday to Friday. Slightly biased towards Windows but when we're talking about anti-patterns, that just adds to the fun. Some of the database disasters are spectacular and you'll certainly learn what not to do with a database.
Oh... and a pony! I'd really like ponies to be free too, please.

If that's too much snark for you, google the phrase "Regulatory Capture." Enjoy!
WTFPL - Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License
I believe that there are cultural differences that make certain countries and regions better at different things than others. I like my sushi done by the Japanese, my Pizza done by the Italians, and my burger done by the Americans. Not because any one of the countries is superior, but because chances are that the Italian will make the best pizza. This does not imply that Italians are better at anything other than making pizza. Just look at their politics...

Also note that I'm talking about general trends, so of course you can find companies that contradict the pattern - but overall I stick to my point of view.
Castanaut: Ruby-powered OS X Screencasting DSL (automated screencasts)
Mixx.com gaining traction on mainstream news media sites - Mixx spotted on USA Today
CSS Sprite Generator
So...the most inspirational part of his biography wasn't his business success, but rather the time he cheated a bunch of people in a queue?
The very suggestion sends shivers down my spine. Seeing SAP and Oracle in action makes it clear that there are no great hacker minds involved. Microsoft is still hanging on to some smart people... but the prospect of working with SAP? I can only imagine that the mere thought would drive them off in droves.
Ok, you win. I hereby forgo my right to post one-liners on this site as doing so would be a pale imitation of your greatness.
At any rate, you all should post more stories from your side of the world. We Americans need some enculturatin';)
Can someone from UK explain how AIM works? or someone from Singapore explain how Catalist works?
The Internet decided to change it's name... it'd now like to be known by it's porn name... Skye Net.
No, developers should not insulate themselves from SQL and databases. ORMs in my opinion are a handy way to abstract away some of the common boilerplate, but I'll never understand why some people hate SQL and relational databases. I've written wonderfully clean multi-layered reporting queries which in a screenful of lines accomplish the same amount of work that several hundred if not thousands of lines spread over half a dozen or so files/classes will accomplish. Yes, relational databases and SQL aren't always the best answers, but for large homogeneous datasets they are really really handy. Of all the programming languages that I've used professionally, I've used SQL almost every single work week. No, I'm not a DBA even though I probably could be if I needed to.
This isn't true at all. I receive about as many spam followers for my active twitter account as I do friend requests for my shell myspace account.

http://twitter.com/fivedollarwiki, or http://twitter.com/DiningFever are both users which have recently followed me for no clear reason.
Actually I find it rather flattering that someone found this good enough to post to YC news, I haven't updated my blog for years and I mainly kept it as an exercise in writing. I never made an effort of promoting it.

But I like the discussion here, including the users that don't agree with me. It means that I have to think about my standpoints, and defend them intelligently if I am not convinced that I'm wrong.

So maybe I should start updating...
People want familiarity. Therefore, a drop-in replacement has more chance of succeeding, even if it has ornate details which are completely irrelevent. As an example, some early cars had a horse reins type mechanism. This allowed a horse owner to accelerate, brake and steer a car with no training. Unfortunately, it is a fiddly mechanism which requires the use of both hands at all times. It is obvious to us nowadays that peddles and a ship style wheel is more appropriate. However, even the peddles have a varied history because double clutching was quite common on early cars and remains in use in some large vehicles.
Goolag - scan for vulnerabilities using Google
10-15% of software development time is a lot. A whole lot. I'm not commenting on whether type inference saves that much time, but if it does, it's undoubtedly worth it.
MGTwitterEngine lets you integrate Twitter support into your Cocoa application
Dup. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=120154
Dup. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122226