skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Back in the day, we used to call this the [JustQuit Pattern](http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?QuitSuddenly)
Inside AdWords: Demographic bidding now available
Tangible Functional Programming
I'd be all for that. Hoping to go to startup school and was hoping to find something to do that night. Bonus points if I can just stay up all night and put off sleep until the plane flight home the next day.
"The best and the brightest will stay poor unless they stumble on a resource which is not taken. (A new internet business idea for example)."

Where does this data include for the fact that resources have been forcefully extracted from certain people groups for centuries?

Need not look further than look at Central and South America, and the entire sub-Saharan African continent.
(Also of course, several areas in Asia)

it is no surprise then, that the wealthiest nations and societies are those who extracted the resources (in this case ranging from gold, diamonds, oil, rubber, ivory, even crops such as fruit, coffee beans, and cocoa beans) by means of blatant corruption, deceit, and thievery.

Secondly, many have remarked on this site that ideas in and of themselves don't have much value -- it is the execution on the idea that makes it powerful.

That being re-hashed constantly on this site, how then does a new internet idea count as a resource? Without the ability, or the actual resources to execute on the idea then there is absolutely no value of that idea to the person. (say, if a poor person has little or no access to a computer or the internet, it seems a bit ludicrous a new internet business idea is a resource)

"First generation agent might have stumbled on a resource nearby by accident. It has improved its fitness function and he was able to successfully compete on the next round."

Not by accident, but by intent.
I Need A News Feed For My News Feeds - Brad Feld
I can't help but think that what people really need is a mix of email and feeds with the ability to make items public or private.
Maybe by implementing that gravity* slider alluded to in news.arc, or at least decreasing gravity so higher-rated articles last longer at the top of the front page.
I've done a few in the last couple months. It's much easier to vote for the good ones than write your own.
My degrees are in systems engineering, but I have to agree about point 3. University is not vocational training, if you want that there are plenty of (much cheaper!) places that offer career focused qualifications.

As for engineering being harder than other subjects... well, it certainly doesn't hurt me if people have that perception :)
The essay reminds me that autonomy is a glorious thing - we are ends in ourselves, not someone else's means to an end. It takes courage to be autonomous, both from the individual and from the group around that individual. Teddy Roosevelt said it:

It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly ... who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."

Life itself requires audacity to be truly alive. Audacity, as you pointed out needs no boss - no coach, no manager. It needs more than anything, freedom and respect from others. This essay is one of enormous hope to me - young people I work with are timid and aspire to the imprisoned safety of the cage not the free ferocity of the wilderness. Too many aspire to be either the sheep or the shepherd - to few aspire to be neither.
PDF: http://conal.net/papers/Eros/eros.pdf
I second this. I upvote comments much more than I upvote stories, since there's no drag on my usage later. I usually only upvote stories that I really, really want to be able to find again later.
I'd be interested in attending too, though I vote for "sometime after the 17th of April." How will we know where and when to meet up?
Are you suggesting that new submissions route through Mechanical Turk?

LOL.

Once approach might be that when humans detect dupes, they could be reported. Click the "dupe" link, specify the URL(s) of the dupe(s), and submit. The oldest submission "wins", and the data could be used to train a bayesian dupe detector. I imaging that you could start with a URL text match (it's the ends of the string that tend to be different), along with a check of the <title> for the supposedly dupe page, and maybe the first 128 characters of the story text or something.

It actually sounds like a fun project.
Whoa! Apologies for accidentally pimping you out without your permission.

By the way, how much of it is evolved versus designed? Do you still seed new patterns? Are there any patterns that don't seem to evolve and have to be designed?
We'd be up for hosting a monthly meetup.
Bug.gd error search (our startup) made PC World's fantastic freebies list
Here's one suggestion they left out which I think would help: have something to show the partners (ideally, a working prototype)
I found this post interesting despite errors, e.g. PG is not a venture capitalist.
Anyone up to start a likemind.us Coffee Friday for the Hacker News set? I could use a break from advertising talk, personally. http://twitter.com/dbreunig
I think that opera has become the third wheel when there is only enough space for 2. The opera browser is pretty good IMHO and it has some outstanding features that people may enjoy but it just doesn't have firefox's plugin support or the wide acceptability and market share of IE. If everybody used opera, everybody would probably continue using opera just how if everybody used firefox, they would continue using firefox, and how now that ~80% use IE, about 80% continue to use IE. Browsers and pretty much anything on the internet run into a phenomena known as network externalities. It is a situation where switching costs are so high that once a user is committed to one choice, they stick to it. Opera is just in the wrong market at the wrong time. This is also why firefox's progress is so amazing. Fighting network externalities is very tough (see ipv4 vs. ipv6).
Give a down vote to selected users.
How about irony? Right below Carr's post is a promo for Carr's own book.
Analyst claims power business users disappointed with AJAX apps
Great point, I definitely endorse that point as well. We didn't have a prototype when we applied, but we created one by the time we were interviewed. Showing even a rough prototype will explain your idea better than anything you say during that 5 minutes.
I'll be in Palo Alto from April 17-20.
http://twitter.com/cthan
I'm surprised that in a group as logical as YCNews, no one called him on this. Just because doing nothing leads to poverty doesn't mean it's the only way to get to poverty, or that doing something will get you out of it. It's just one path that doesn't imply anything about the other paths. All the talk of bricks and Ferrari's are arguments about a point that wasn't made.
I'd be interested to know what amount of accepted applicants don't even have a prototype if not at least something drawn out on paper.
The simple solution: A mail client that doesn't say how many unread messages you have. If it's urgent they'll find another way of contacting you.

This is one of the great things about Twitter. Nowhere is there a "x twitters unread" on the site. You simply dip in and out as you wish.
Sounds like a nice-to-have feature. I don't think it's that bad to delete your own post if you notice the dup soon enough. No skin off your nose if the moderators kill it, either. That's happened to me.
I'm taking a philosophy class and my professor is interested in it, so I assume she would be sharing it with the rest of her classes.
This just shows that there are forms of societal wealth, without which there is just another form of poverty. Things like a legal system, low crime, enforceable contracts, public safety, etc are all forms of wealth that enable new investments and more wealth. Falls in the same category as seaports, natural resources, an educated populace, etc.
Of course people's parents can do all sorts of things to create a poor environment for a child to grow up in. Maybe their parents did the same thing. But at some point, regardless of what your parents did, you have to take responsibility for your own actions and try to make something of your life -- or not.

By the same token, dysfunctional rich kids into drugs and other methods of squandering wealth are so common that they're a cliche. Maybe their emotionally distant parents are to blame too.

Regardless of how they got there, at some point you have to just acknowledge that some people have useful survival skills for getting ahead in society, and some do not. Also, that virtually anyone who isn't actually mentally retarded has some ability to develop those skills if they want to strongly enough.

This leaves you the option of modeling these skills as obtainable, which means that you create incentives for people to get their sh*t together, and the option of modeling these skills as innate and beyond anyone's control, which means that you just support people who drew the short straw and don't bother with incentives.

I think it's pretty clear which of these models contributes to wealth gain over time and which contributes to welfare dependency.
+1

The first thing I ask of anyone interviewing with YC: Do you have a demo?

If you don't have a demo, you're going to have to describe your vision in a very short span of time and under pressure. Your demo, presumably, won't be shaky or easily confused by pg's questions (which I was pretty much always thrown off by, as they weren't the things we came in expecting to answer or talk about), and will just work. Even a mockup is better than having nothing, though not by much.

Having a demo exhibits so many things that are impossible for them to really judge in any other way. It shows you're committed to the project enough to spend some of your own time on it. It shows you're capable enough to build the things you say you're going to build (or at least a reasonable start on those things). It shows that you've thought enough about the idea to produce a prototype, which gives a much better view of the workability of the concept. And, finally, it helps them to understand what the heck you're talking about--they're hearing dozens of pitches on the interview weekend, and will be far more likely to remember what you're doing, if you show them than if you merely tell them.
How about this approach: the earlier a member signed up, the more their votes count in the rankings.
> It's also possible to create lots of wealth without making money

Habitat for Humanity comes to mind.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143097

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143451

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=96078
Opera cache's the hell out of everything. I remember navigating to http://localhost:3000 when developing a rails app without actually starting up a rails server, and seeing the last version of my rails app show up.

That and some wonky CSS rules are my only complaint.
I don't think this guy made that assertion. What he said was that PG needs to be part of the VC game in order to make money.

The whole notion of YC is that they are seed funding, with the expectation that the startups they fund will be bought (or have some other favorable monetary transaction) by the big companies PG says are unnatural. The article is a nice way of calling PG a hypocrite.

It's a great argument. One of the best counters I've seen to PG's essay, and an angle I didn't even think of. I really hope Paul responds to this, as I'm interested in his thoughts on the matter.
Kindle is spurring e-book sales? Up 24%.
Hard to quantify, as Sony just did a HUGE media push in airports and transit for their e-reader. But this comes hot on the heals of Bezo apologizing for Amazon's lack of Kindle supply.
Actually, he explicitly called pg a venture capitalist...specifically, he said:

"He’s a venture capitalist."

You can't possibly take that any other way.
How about imposing a small karma penalty to post a new story?

Then, set a minimum karma requirement for posters. The karma requirement could be positive or negative.

It would eliminate spammers and reduce bad stories in one fell swoop.

I noticed a couple users tend to post a large number of stories which generate no discussion and earn no points, but there's no loss to the user and no prevention mechanism.
In other words, Poor people are just lazy.

Sorry, but it's been my experience that people who submit that argument have know neither people nor poverty well enough to speak as an authority to its causes.
Your question's is a bit too broad, but let me tell you what I know. The first question you need to ask yourself is: are you read-bound or write-bound?

A "generic" advice for databases is that you -don't- want to have multiple small boxes when one big box will do. Managing many machines is complex both from the sysadmin and developer points of view. Instead, get a machine with as much ram as you can and disks as fast as possible (raid 0 really helps), cpu doesn't matter too much for databases. Obviously, don't expect to run your DB on a i486 ;-)

If your box can't cope with writes (disk too slow), you'll need to either increase the write speed of your machine again (more disks in a raid 0 array) or "shard" your data. You want to avoid that as much as you can, not fun.

If your box is read-bound (ie: is slow at reading), then you can start thinking about replication to multiple machines.

But quite frankly, I think you got it all wrong. Don't bother about scaling and improving performance now because it's almost impossible for you to know where the bottleneck is going to be anyways.

I've never used Symfony, so I don't know anything particular about it, but I don't think the framework is going to cause problems database-wise.
LiveJournal Says Goodbye to Unique Account Structure, Against Wishes of Advisors
I assume that PG, after all his bashing of the college application process, is very careful about not giving the wrappings more weight than the applicant. So hints like these wouldn't be worth much. All of these points are really obvious anyway, the kind of things you would consider when writing any important text.
Skydeck: unlocking the valuable information hidden in your cell phone bill
That's sort of a semantic debate, isn't it? PG might not be a traditional venture capitalist, but nevertheless, he invests money in companies in order to see a return. YC just does it on a much smaller scale than typical VC firms.
He's using the literal definition though, which basically describes YC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_capital

From the front page of YC: "Y Combinator is a new kind of venture firm specializing in funding early stage startups."

In essence he's correct, but at this point it's just semantics.
Logistically, sounds like a great idea to me.
Here's a rule-of-thumb that I go by: Whoever takes the other side into account best is the winner. For example:

Side 1: Language x sucks because of y!

Side 2: While it's true that x potentially sucks because of y, y is easily mitigated by z, and y still offers benefits a, b, & c that most other languages don't.

Even if you have only a shallow understanding of the argument, it's easy to see that in most real-world arguments Side 2 should win.

It's related to who gets angriest because people usually get angry because they have run out of other options.
A recycled idea:

Make submitting a story cost 1 point. If you have taken the time to reflect on the quality of your submission you should be confident that you will get at least 1 up vote to break even. Users with a negative point total would not be able to submit again until they have gained back enough karma through commenting.

I think one main problem, or a symptom, is that we now have a new page with the vast majority of the links having no up votes. No one wants to sort through uninteresting links to find the good stuff - even to "save" a favourite site.

I suspect that davidw is right: "the number of good articles is constant in a given period". If that is right then attracting more submissions will result in fewer "good articles" finding their way through.
Actually, I think the research shows power users are still dissatisfied with enterprise software, regardless of how much "web 2.0" it contains.
there are software available on the net that do this automatically for you.

see at: http://www.google.com/search?q=auto+submit+your+software
The Sugarscape models are interesting because they show that you are likely have a "rich get richer" accumulation even when there is no coercion.
Here's some ideas:

Votes don't count until you've been a member for X months.

Weigh votes based on a function of join date and karma.

If you have less than X amount of karma, your votes don't count. That would force new users to submit worthwhile content and comments before they have been "accepted" into the community.

After thinking about this for a while, I really like that third option I listed. If you don't contribute to the community, why should you be allowed to vote on the content of others?
No. Hacking does not equal Web 2.0.

Many of us were hacking long before "Web 2.0". Many of us currently hack stuff that is not "Web 2.0". And many of us will still be hacking long after "Web 2.0".

"Hacker News" is just right.
It gives numbers in the original blog post:

http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-awards...

"According to the report I received 2 weeks after submissions began “awardmestars” is now listed on 218 sites, pending on 394 sites and has been rejected by 421 sites. Approximately 7% of the sites that listed the software emailed me that it had won an award (I don’t know how many have displayed it with an award, without informing me). With 394 pending sites it might win quite a few more awards yet."

"Addendum 2 -- 23 awards ‘won’ at the latest count."
Shall I pour the 15 year-old Glenfiddich "Solara" or the MacAllan "Cask Strength" for you?
It is all in the original article:
http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-awards...
And there is an update:
http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/12/13/the-software-awards...
You seem to get a fair amount of upvotes. I basically think that things that 'really take off' are pretty random. I'd much rather hear people discuss "how to decide what to discard": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=144716 than Carr and Arrington bickering about IP: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=144105 (which was sort of interesting, but worth somewhere less than 10 points, IMO), but... so it goes.
Rails developers showing love for Heroku
This is something I've actually meant to ask pg about, but never seem to get around to it.

There are a few companies that YC has funded that have opted to go a slow-growth, close ownership, path to small business success that the article suggests is the logical conclusion of pg's essay (though, if one takes pg's work as a whole, I wouldn't say that's his raison d'etre--helping good developers create a huge amount of value in a short period of time is more his over-arching theme, I think).

Wufoo have opted not to push themselves into a giant business, but have a long-term plan for growth. My co-founder and I frequently waffle over which path to take, and so far have stayed the course of staying small with steadily increasing revenue over taking a bunch of investment and growing really fast. Both companies do have an exit plan, but it's a little further out and the intention is to make sure its on our own terms. pg has never indicated dissatisfaction with this path...even though it means the exit won't come quickly, as it did with reddit, Zenter, Parakey, etc. and thus YC won't see return on these businesses for at least a couple more years.

Of course, once one has a profitable exit, and optionally vests, you're then completely free to work in any environment you want. Which means you could do what Paul Buchheit did with his Googlebucks, and start a company that does exactly the work you want to do on the terms you want to do them on (and it turns out he wants to grow really fast, since he raised 5mil for FriendFeed). Which brings me back to what I think pg's real theme and logical conclusion is. pg likes to see people make something really great, really fast, and then make a really lot of money because of it. Once you've done that, you're then freed up to do anything you want (maybe after spending some time in a cage with your lion co-founders, while vesting)--including doing it all again.
Indeed. I am the author of the original article. I was out to expose sordid practices by download sites, not to vilify any class of software.
Why can't we simply admit to the jealous world of corporate wanna-be lions (i.e. pussycats) that we are the creme de la creme and they are not. We are always smarter, faster, stronger, and more sexy. We have more fun and self-esteem. We are on top of the evolutionary and social ladder. We are the gold standard. And we troll them down on their hate-blogs while we compile our next cash cow.
The way they have it executed is incredibly annoying.
I do wonder about the demo. All is well and good if it works with no glitches, but what if a spectacular bug catches you out when you don't expect it and the whole thing blows up in your face?

By limiting the scope (rather than the maturity) and testing heavily you can be reasonably confident, but it will leave you with a less impressive demo to throw up.
the only thing I noticed before (not sure if it's still valid) is that www.website.com is a dif submission than website.com
Cache cache cache. Pre-cache, serve slightly stale cache, write your own data structures to store cache data in special ways.

The obvious method is to use mem-cached, but beyond that, nothing seems to be standardized. Use every trick you can think of.
When analyzing systems, we typically look for a transient response and the initial conditions. Extending this analogy, it would seem natural that even if we knew the characteristics of a system, the behavior of the system would be largely controlled by the inputs.

I'm not sure either element can be excluded when trying to solve this - my guess is that it's the need to fit things into our own frameworks and understanding that pushes people to grossly oversimplify.