skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Photo Dropper: The Fastest Way to Add Awesome Photos to Your Blog
Is that a $1000 pledged or paid?
You can't tip yourself very easily-- you'd have to create dummy accounts, I think. And the list is topped by paid tips-- so theoretically you could buy yourself to to top of the list (I'm sure TipJoy would HATE that!).
Matz on Ruby 1.9 at Google Tech Talk [video]
No so much motivating, but more like a reminder to get back to work when I'm procrastinating reading (and responding to) stupid comments on the interwebs.
How about forcing new users who want to contribute to go through a bit of a logic test? Perhaps answer some simple questions before signing up, to ensure they're at least a little alive where it counts?
Measures of happiness studys seem to be one of the key areas for nonsense research and journalism. I think the thing to take from this is that small increases in long-term average happiness aren't something we desire. Which isn't very surprising because the way to maximise that kind of happiness is to remove all struggle and conflict.
Very tired. Very happy.
Ask YC - Feature request Ask YC questions in their own queue
Can we have a separate page for the ASK YC stuff?

The reason is I think it will make for better discussions and keep them out of the news queue because they are not news. I still think they should have karma etc.

Maybe have a checkbox on the form to flag post as question/discussion.
use urltea or tinyurl :)
We'll be smart with the top tips page to try to make this harder. That is the only page where this would be a problem, and lots of people will only pay attention to what they've tipped, and and what their friends are tipping.
Great idea - sometimes I'm in the mood for good discussions and feedback, sometimes I just want the news.
cache: http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:WpRgP1s_rYwJ:seoblackha...
What is the rationale for showing the top n instead of everyone?
pledged.
I'm really interested in what the conversion rate is, but I understand you might not have that data yet or want to release it. I don't think a low rate is an invalidation of tipjoy at all incidentally, as long as its not zero of course.
SEO Blackhattery Superhack #1: Make a very simple statement that nobody can argue with and put a swearword in the title to make it exciting. Submit to social sites. Rake in the fucking money.
I hate to ask a stupid question because it's probably in your docs somewhere, but could you humor my laziness and tell me if it's easy/hard to extend this at will? I think if you had some way for people to easily add the ruby counterpart of a bash command and then share them with others, this could really be nice.

Beautiful idea either way. I like the idea of interacting with your OS the same way you would interact with irb or the lisp REPL.
What if you did a word count of the linked article, and used that for the weight? It might be good to strip out links from the count, but other than that it seems a pretty sold way of judging complexity.
Ask Yariv: Is there an Erlang framework to do REST ROA webservices?
I have an idea for a webservice, and I also want to learn Erlang (past doing the examples in Joe's book), so I figured I'd combine the two this weekend in a mini-project.

I was just wondering if you (or any other Erlangers out there) knew of an existing framework in Erlang to access mnesia or sql dbs somewhat RESTfully. Would Erlyweb be good at this?

I'm a total nub at this, so forgive me if this is a stupid question...
It'd be nice if anything that begins with the word 'ask' was treated this way. There are a lot of 'Ask PG' and 'Ask so-and-so' threads floating around.

I'd rather they were still included in the other stories, but it'd be nice if you could also view them on their own too. Usually the best discussions of some technical topic happen in these threads.
What prevents people from pledging enormous amounts of money but not paying anything?
There's nothing statistically odd about the voting on it.
maybe 3 pages
Normal(as it is now)
Ask YC
News
I think the new should just have em both.
sweet! Way to go guys.
Rms is no longer the maintainer of Emacs
> Of course, the real hacker spirited solution would be to let people make/share their own such formulas to make their own front pages, but I'm not sure if Paul has the time to implement that.

I have this in my roadmap for Vortices, see http://vortices.appjet.net/node/obj-LBlNDy7Ow
True. I checked the python reference again and it re-adjusts the modulo to have the same sign as the 2nd operand.

>>> 1 % -3
-2
>>> -1 % -3
-1
The movie is amazing, and I highly recommend it.

But this is kind of ridiculous.
I slept through this class once already. Now it is your turn. :)
now that this has been switched to so smarmy affiliate chair site can we please no longer vote it up?
he just built a site trying to SEO for office chairs. if there's good content, even if it's a for profit site, no real reason to ignore it
Why Does Popcorn Cost So Much at the Movies?
I added the Snipshot icon to both the "site integration" page and the "photo edit" page to make the snipshot link on the latter page easier to notice. I also made the top-left icon not be a link on the "back end" pages where your login applies.
I'm not. The site is required reading and I bumped it on sight.
Is comment karma tracked differently than submit karma?
get TrackMeNot.
I have found my best motivation is other people being succesful at what I have been working at for awhile it really chaps my hide so to speek. So I add more features and integrate existing features bettter.
And the punch-line of what appeared to be the phoned-in disjointed ramblings of a hungover journalist trying to hit his deadline:

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert.
Documentary: How to build a company on a Post-It note
Love the snark!
Ah, thanks for the clarification -- our thinking has a lot more in common than I thought. FWIW, I'm no economist either. I did major in Political Economy for a short while, but that just means that I had enough time to gobble up some conventional thinking on the matter (including that strict definition of raw materials) -- if I judge by my classmates in those courses, my studies are certainly no guarantee that I understand anything at all about the real world :-).

I don't have a lot of time right now, but in brief -- I like the way Warren Buffett puts it when he mentions that we're all indebted to the "ovarian lottery" for much of what we have in life... if he'd have been born in some poor African country, there's little chance he'd have had the success he has, because they don't have "raw material" (in your sense of the word) necessary to take his talent and create wealth out of it.

Also -- you're perfectly right that a lot of the conflict in a place like the Congo is caused by conflict over raw resources. I was using that sort of example to show how an abundance of raw material doesn't necessarily lead to wealth "in general" for the country; it can actually have the opposite effect.
Ask YC: What is the best Python book for a beginner?
I'm looking to learn more about Python and want to buy a book to read in my spare time (and I do know of the online Python docs, the free Dive into Python website, etc). Can anyone recommend a book that is up-to-date (i.e., covers 2.5)?

Looking at Amazon, I'm leaning towards Learning Python, 3rd Edition (http://tinyurl.com/2az6zh). Any opinions on this one?

Thanks for the help.
There should definitely be a page for feature requests. I'm not crazy about the current thread that aggregates the requests. That page is too big, and there is no filtering out for features that have either been built or rejected (unless I am wrong).
It's weird how articles like this one get upvoted so much, but don't get discussed. I looked for comments several times, and even though I read it and thought about it, I was always hoping someone else had posted about it. I guess it just speaks for itself.
Ah. Well, I agree with that. Taking a break totally away from work, especially, can be a great refresher. Instead of letting frustration imply problems, it might just be signaling the need for some fresh perspective.
Next step: Electron porn.
So not only do you have a recipe for cripplingly slow growth, but you also fail to ensure improvement in the quality of submissions. It's not like people are invulnerable to "Dude, c'mon...invite me!" from their friends, hacker or otherwise.
One invite a year? That's pretty extreme.
Fatherhood makes -me- happy. I don't care about how others feel about it.

Unfortunately, this is a horrible article on a fascinating subject: hedonistic psychology. If you haven't read Dan Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness", you're missing out. A better introduction to what he has to say can be found here:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/97
Elegant in the sense that you apply one general formula instead of hacks (managing things manually is a hack, yes?).
Password fatigue - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"20% of customer service calls are password-related."

Adding passwords to a site would make customer service increase 25%. This is brutal considering it's hard to automate, and according to Joel Spolsky, one of the first jobs a startup hands to a dude who works on an hourly wage.

Then there's the larger cost of turning users away.
My advice: be an atheist when it comes to your tool selection. Use the tools that get a specific job done the fastest.

Anecdotal evidence: back in 1998 I insisted of doing websites in Vi and Photoshop. Refreshing a graphic layout would take me an hour, slicing pictures, measuring pixels and editing the corresponding HTML. Along came a demonstration of Macromedia's Fireworks and Dreamweaver where the guy on stage did the same thing in under 5 minutes. While the generated HTML wasn't as "pure" as my hand edited code it was close enough to realize that I was wasting major time with my existing method.

Never looked back being an tool atheist...
What an amazing story... this is the first I've read of it. It doesn't much to do with my argument, though. Even though I haven't talked about this much here, I personally believe that persistence is one of the most important ingredients in doing anything important. But it's not a holy grail to be worshiped at all costs. You can't make a general rule called "never give up" if "giving up" means ceasing the cooperation of a team for a particular purpose. That would be a stupid rule; it would lead to all sorts of irrational results. Imagine a VC firm that decided to never give up on any of its startups, ever. That sort of policy would fly in the face of all general knowledge about how the world of startups work.

Offering an anecdotal example is very problematic. What about all the other folks who were working on making blue LEDs whose, inventions had no chance of competing with Nakamura's? Because of the survivorship bias, we don't hear about them, yet they are just as important to understanding the dynamics of reality. After his invention was released, are they supposed to continue on the same path? Of course not. It doesn't mean they give up on life, or on themselves, but it does mean that they give up on a mission that they had committed themselves to for some period of time.

I'd never say that a founder should listen blindly to colleagues, and certainly not to me(!), in deciding whether it's worth continuing. These are complex decisions that need to be made carefully.

In short,

Success requires persistence,
but persistence does not imply success.
Most stories of success will be stories of persistence,
but not all stories of persistence will lead to success.

And many stories of success will include "giving up" on previous projects/companies before finding success in a new one.
This is a perfect example of where the theory/practice divide comes back to bite us. In THEORY enforced entropy, scheduled changes, "blind" passwords that don't echo back a character, etc. all make our users way safer. In practice, most of the time they just piss them off and the users just recycle the same "entropic-enough" passwords on all sites, which they rotate through whenever bothered to do so.

Users haven't read the security texts and, if they have, they probably don't care.

Which isn't to say we SHOULDN'T design systems like that, it just means that we shouldn't be surprised when users circumvent our well-intentioned password policies.
It was my daughter's first birthday today. Yes.
Why not read Dive into Python -- it's excellent -- and then learn about the new stuff in 2.5 later. The new stuff gives minor efficiency improvements, but Dive into Python is plenty good.

http://docs.python.org/whatsnew/whatsnew25.html
standard memory chips actually retain their data for seconds or even minutes after power is cut off

Okay, so they have to perform their new technique right after the password enters memory. That is less practical than other methods, for instance recording the sound of someone typing and then decyphering the password based upon keys' sound signatures.
Good story, but a misleading headline. Note the headline is perfectly correct, researchers did, in fact, find a way to steal encrypted data. . . for certain, particularly structured implementations, without remote access to the machine immediately after its been powered down with the keys in DRAM.

Everybody panic, I guess?
Totally agree. There a number of threats that are possible and WILDLY unlikely that are far more tenable concerns than this one.
Judge on privacy: Computer code trumps the law
Digg plans town hall meeting to uncover complaints
Perhaps separate queues for items without title links. I find these much more interesting.
What is your argument then? I'm afraid that you are not communicating across your argument effectively...I thought the article above was a pretty good refutation of the post to which I replied.

It is an amazing story isn't it?
What made Scoble cry?  Telescope
Marc Andreessen's newspaper deathwatch
There is a two step process: tip and then "give more". The max on "give more" is $10 for now.

I'm not sure why someone would pledge an enormous amount of money. It is becomes a problem, we'll just report amount paid, or amount pledged by known sane users.
I never liked web sites that pretend to be your desktop. It just never is your desktop, now if they found a way to actually be your desktop when you booted your computer, it loads there site in place of your desktop. Now that would be a desktop. They would probably need to write there own browser that can access your local programs so you don't loose anything in the process.
Marketers Losing Interest in TV Ads
I don't understand the need to control things to such a degree. If certain posts become popular its because people want to read them. If its true that a majority of people here only want certain kinds of posts, then these "fluff" posts should move down the list pretty quickly naturally. If you really want this to be such a super exclusive club where only the "right" articles make it, then maybe we should just ditch the whole community thing entirely, make sign ups only through invitation -- AND if you pass a science/CS/math test! Then only people exactly the same as you would ever contribute.
All-Time Classics: a Selection of Recommended Books for Software Developers
The article doesn't mention the most important thing to do in requirements gathering: putting all the stakeholders in a room at the same time with a professional facilitator extracting REAL needs until everyone agrees, locking the door so no one gets out, and feeding them (so they don't notice that the door is locked).

What most analysts fail to realize is that there usually is NO ONE person with all the answers. And most people have DIFFERENT answers. So they don't see the need for this. And do see the need for everything else that doesn't work: UML, DFDs, Rational Rose, Microsoft project, etc., etc., etc.

Comprehensive requirements gathering makes all the other headaches go away. Anything less is an endless loop.
Ahem: http://img.4chan.com/b/

(Even mentioning this, though, I theorize that, in the future, there will be a sort of Godwin's law that prevents sociologists from bringing up 4chan.)
It'd be interesting if the weighting algorithm was somehow exposed to your account so you could mess with it.
http://searchyc.com/askyc - This will help you find some really great discussions when you're in the mood.
the aeron is a solid chair, but not my pick. I have a Knoll Life that I really like but I have had my eye on a few others, like the Haworth Zody and Steelcase Leap
there are no affiliates links there...
Peformance test: SDHC vs. HDD vs. SSD
Areas where Google is threatened on the global search scene
Gah, how you taunt me! So clever I must vote for you, yet then I fall for your cleverness! Ah screw it, upmod for you.
"Programming is not complicated because computers are complicated—it’s complicated because your requirements are complicated (even if you don’t know it yet)."

--Chris Ashton
They would do so to get free advertising.
The rates widely vary from 100% to 0%. It's hard to get an average from that. It'll always be hard to get a single number, as they'll be content and site dependent.

Soon we'll publish numbers that the average blogger can use.
It requires putting money into the system, which costs at least the overhead of a single PayPal transaction.
Facebook Fatigue?  Visitors Level Off In the U.S.
I found Learning Python + the python tutorial by Guido on python.org to be a great way to start
Another suggestion if it hasn't already been suggested before, is that the URLs provided should be checked with previous news.ycombinator.com submissions and if there is a match, the website should bug you about it.

i.e.:
person A: submit: www.xyz.com/article1 -- OK

person B: submit: www.xyz.com/article1 -- <msword>"Are you /sure/ you want to submit this article? personA did this <date> ago."</msword>

person C: submit: www.xyz.com/article 2 -- Bug them even for this, just so people can get the idea that its in good form to stay fresh and not have 2 or 3 URLs in the main news feed that will be all from the same website. This isn't reddit or digg. This shouldn't be "oh I found this website slightly interesting and so i'll put up 3 or 4 submissions to specific articles."
Why, praytell, was this even submitted?
I think the bayesian idea would work for the general case, but it would cause problems for the corner cases, which tend to be the most interesting.
Dive into Python is great.

I started learning Python from a Mark Lutz seminar actually. He is a great teacher.

You'll find a limit to your knowledge of python if you just start hacking. Knowing C and how python is built help build an intuition for how things really work. I find it invaluable.
I think user selected filtering is a good half way point. Since this is a hacker site, it'd be cool to expose the ranking algorithm somehow for per user modification. Then, if someone comes up with a good one they can share it. This way effective filtering can happen, but it isn't forced on everyone.

http://arclanguage.org/item?id=1884

However, I know this is a hefty hack, so is probably not feasible.
I think ideally, karma should just be there for feedback for the poster and the reader. Paradoxically, the only reason karma is meaningful is that it is useless - there is no incentive to game the system. If more karma means more power, there is an incentive to post to get karma instead of posting to help the community.

If you don't believe that incentivising karma is a bad thing, try this thought experiment: if you gave away $1.00 for each karma point earned, would the quality of the content go up or down? You can add some conditions if you think the experiment is unfair, but I think you would still find that the quality would be reduced with incentives.

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.
Man, I'd kill to get $1 per karma point... I wonder how much my account would go for on eBay.
Bringing the poor online: a different business venture than the wireless phones one
On the other hand, length plus lots of points is a sure sign of insightfulness, or pg, not that there's a difference.
Dive into Python by far, for me at least!
Another thought: I think the karma score should also represent rate, instead of just weight. Otherwise the first people here become entrenched in the leader board. A static hierarchy seems pretty unhackerish.
This has to be in the top 10 dumbest things I've read online, written by a professional of course. I studied psychology, sociology and I carried on reading on them both well past finishing my college courses on them. This article is flawed and the reasons are three-fold:

Firstly, they discuss hedonistic pleasure. This is essentially the pleasure of getting fat, lazy and dying of hardened arteries. It isn't happiness, it's a base instinct well below our consciousness that is designed to enjoy sugars, sex and laziness programmed into us as a survival mechanism. Essentially the more you eat, have sex and do nothing, the better chance you -had- of surviving; now not so much.

Secondly, they poorly evaluate the pleasure of accomplishment. Your higher brain is designed to dump a load of endorphins into your system, because some minor pain/discomfort has been rewarded. Breaking down into tears at your kids graduation ceremony is artificial, it isn't programmed into people like feeling happy when they see their kid. You get so overly joyed when your children accomplish something because it is something that is a hell of a lot better for you than all the hedonistic pleasures combined, hence why they -do- wipe out all the minor feelings that led up to the accomplishment, essentially because it was worth it!

Thirdly, heroin blocks endorphin (the happy chemical, as well as 3 other chemicals') production. This is completely the opposite of kids, who can amplify the production. Heroin is a drug that literally disables your ability to be happy, I somehow don't see the similarity to kids here. He's comparing delayed gratification with instant gratification and immense delayed suffering/death...

I believe my three points are sufficient, however I must add that hedonistic psychology is an amazing subject. Although that being said, it is fascinating in a way that should educate you to do everything -BUT- the hedonistic pleasures.
When I first read this headline, before my mind fully processed it, I half expected it to be some kind of political scandal or police brutality video.
PG responded to this thought previously, saying that karma inflation takes care of it.
There are two movies I watched a second time immediately after finishing the first time through. Usual Suspects and Primer.

I'm torn whether the confusion in the end is am emblem of the loss of control, or bad editing.

I like how the movie helped me boil down all time travel sci-fi into a series of categories.

For example: can you stop yourself from going back in time?

Back to the Future: no. If you stop yourself, you won't exist in the past. Paradox.

Primer: yes. You will now enjoy a double.

Another idea I love about time travel: a paradox of ideas or substance. Give yourself a book to publish from the future. Who wrote it?

Star Trek 4: McCoy gives Kirk a pair of vintage reading glasses. Kirk leaves them in the past knowing McCoy will buy them in the future. Who made the glasses?
The Wikibooks article has quite a few useful sections, including at least one link to a page of free Python books.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programming:Python
Yep, I know what you mean. I've got the O'Reilly "Learning Python" book, but I'd love something that covered soup to nuts. Start with a python interpreter, suggest and IDE (EasyEclipse for LAMP?) and get me to Django.

Maybe I'm being lazy, but more practical, show me, types of tutorials work best for me.