skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two sides to every coin:

1. iPod and iTunes is one package. You use both to get the iPod experience and iTunes manages play counts, user behaviors, album covers, ratings, and store purchases. If you just wanted a mp3 player then get a cheap Asian one but complaining about how the iPod isn't right for you just seems like a waste of your time and God's time.

2. AT&T signed the partnership contract while T-Mobile and Verizon didn't. You're obviously a man of very important stature, you should give those CEOs a ring to get this resolved.

3. Apple Updates is a delivery platform for updates AND software. Last I recall, using Windows XP's update feature they would push software to me all the time too. How's that IE7 uninstall process going?

4. Flash churns up quite a lot of CPU cycles. That leads to battery usage. Which leads to unhappy users. Oh, since you're an arbiter of technology you can help me solve this problem: how do you create an interface for Flash applications to recognize your fat finger tips as a single pixel mouse pointer or how to make multitouch work on a Flash application without creating false positive contacts? Oh, wait, it might actually require some time and knowledge with iPhone's interface? No wonder that's why they opted to push that webapp solution instead and how everything on the iPhone are BIG BLOCKS or BIG BUTTONS? As for Java, you got me there.

You also must be new to Apple ideology. Apple as a company pushes innovation and it does so at the expense of its small user base. But at the same time, if it was up to the majority to decide on when to start using the mouse, stop using floppy disks, start using CD-ROM, and start using USB well... it'll be never. They're in a great position by being 'small' and not having to kowtow to customers (really, how smart are customers?) and if anything it's going to be their popularity that's going to trip them up. The bigger the user base the more noise and lamer whining.
Stupid comments on HN are likely to be very different in form than stupid comments on Youtube.

They are more likely to be written by smart-ish people who are either acting belligerent or trolling.

Reddit might be a much better source of highbrow stupid.

Any site that refers lots of new traffic to HN might also be considered as a source of potentially stupid comments. A markovian discriminator could get very good at identifying, say, TechCrunch-style comments. ;-)
I used a local BBS set up for Amiga users. Didn't really use it for communicating with others, mainly for file uploads/downloads... freeware games and what-not.

I remember being so excited to have access to "literally thousands of files!" Back then it was totally awesome. :-)
It's cute. A fine beginner Rails project.

First thing I wish for, 5 seconds after hitting this page: links. I want the thing being rated to be a link that I can click on. Try detecting URLs, and/or using Google's mighty I'm Feeling Lucky function.
awesome! congrats

I vote iterate. I think some sweet real time graphs and charts would be cool. but i like the simple look also.

One suggestion: Speed up the cron, i need instant gratification
I was a BBS user, and also ran a multi-line TAG board (you probably wouldn't know TAG unless you were from Michigan) for a while. Was a FIDOnet node, and was active on the CyberCrime (I think that was the name of it) that some guy out of FL (I think) administered, plus a few other 'nets that I've long since forgotten.

During my short college stint in '91 I found one of the main patch panels for our campus and patched an unused line to my dorm room to run a small BBS out of the dorm for a while. The dorms were setup then so that 2 rooms shared 1 phone line (and 1 bathroom as well). My dorm room had the shared line, a dedicated line, and "access" to the phone lines of the room above us, as the inhabitants never seemed to be there on weekends and it was a waste to fight over phone usage when there was a free line just sitting there...
I'd be more interested in the complement -- filters tuned to pick up smart or interesting writing. I'm not convinced that it's necessarily an identical problem.

It would be neat to run a battery of standard semantic analysis tools against the text of web pages ranked highly on HN, compared with pages not ranked highly.
I'm not too young for that era (37) but I have never used a BBS. Didn't even know how to operate a computer before I got one in 1996...

I caught up pretty quickly though.
I wrote the code for moondog BBS (Santa Barbara, CA) - using all but about 10 bytes of memory on a Commodore 64 with a floppy drive. I invented a db system that made us look like a big IBM system. It was really great fun (coded it while in HS).
Yeah, I was on local Amiga BBS's in the 613 area code. Fun times.
Feature Request: Downvoting Rate Limiting
Could we rate limit downvoting (maybe upvoting too)? This would make it inconvenient to downvote (or upvote) entire threads without reading them.
So you "just need a hacker", huh?
I especially liked the fact that they did not seem to have any bias going in or coming out. And, they actually built the same site using both frameworks and took notes along the way - all in all, very commendable.
Tormenting Your Tests with Heckle
I take the 80/20 approach to supporting ie6: If 80% of the features and layout work well in ie6 and 20% not so well then that's acceptable. I have no interest in wasting time writing exceptions for a broken browser. True to their oblivious nature ie6 users don't seem to notice or even care that the looks different in ie6.
Strange Time for CFO to Quit Electronic Arts
Merb-0.9.2 is out
I was on the Index BBS in Atlanta, as well as gobs of smaller ones. I was a L.O.R.D. addict, so I'd run out my turns on one BBS and then hop to the next.
I was totally into the BBS scene in high school. There were three run by friends within our local calling area, and I remember dialing & redialing each of the three, getting a busy signal, cursing my timing, and trying again.

I spent waaaaay too much time playing TradeWars back then...
No, I never did subscribe to Apple ideology, but I can see that you're quite indoctrinated.

1) You got me there. I was quite stupid to pay for an overpriced iPod when all I wanted to do was rip my CD's to an MP3 player. Unfortunately the packaging did not contain a disclaimer saying that the computer interface did not work like every other MP3 player ever sold. Apple will never fool me twice.

2) I can see if AT&T somehow subsidized the phone, the lock-in would be fair, but it doesn't. Apple got the exclusive contract only so it could get extra cash above and beyond the original purchase price. This is about as consumer-friendly as the crapware that is preinstalled on most PC's.

3) Equating Apple's practices to Microsoft's practices only strengthens my argument.

4) It has nothing to do with CPU cycles or battery life. The SDK allows any developer to waste as much battery life as they want. I was referring to the prohibition against interpreters: http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2008/03/06/apple-bans-fire...
I used BBSes in Columbus, OH and remember them... fairly vaguely. Not much of a user until the multi-user systems came along, with 8 or even 16 modems at a time, on multiple phone lines -- those were much more interesting.

I remember that in my freshman year of college one of the primary uses of my awesome 10Mbit fiberoptic dorm-room Ethernet connection was to telnet to an open machine at Ohio State that happened to have an outgoing modem that you could use to make local BBS phone calls in Columbus. No password required. Man, those were innocent times on the Internet.

I still find it painfully ironic that I had such great broadband connectivity in college, from 1989 to 1993, when HTTP hadn't been invented yet and all there was to do was FTP, Telnet, and eventually Gopher.
Yahoo, Google, MySpace in OpenSocial joint venture
BBS The Firm FTW! 2af / LOD

;)
I am 10 years your junior and I had the privilege of playing on BBS (512) in 1994-1995. I was enthralled with my old Packard Bell. True, it was mostly a file dump board (what wasn't back then), but it was fun nonetheless.
God's memory leak - a scientific treatment (exposes a subtle bug in Ruby)
You could also replace the cron job with a Jabber client to receive the @rating messages.
Slide 68 indicates latest Rails version is 1.1.6. The document was uploaded on 19 June (I'm guessing 2007). Is this really relevant now?

I will tack on that the framework will not make or break your idea. The advantage of one framework over another should be weighed in how long it takes your team to go to market; this translates into asking your development team (or yourself) what they (or you) can handle in the coming months in anticipation of the project taking off. Also your code should be done in such a way that you can ditch whatever framework you currently use for something better suited for what your future requirements might be.

I will add that I believe TurboGears to be the better platform all around, but am sticking to Rails because:

1) I like Ruby/Rails

2) I don't have the time/energy to dive into Python/TurboGears

3) I can implement something by myself confidently in Rails RIGHT NOW, as opposed to a few months down the road after getting comfy with Python (while at the same time maintaining my day job and OTHER life responsibilities)
The (lack of) testing death spiral
See also: this month's Wired cover.
How to differentiate between "two-a-penny" entrepreneurs and "ultrapreneurs"?
Even the least skillful trolls mask their ill intent by blending in and maintaining a non-descript tone. This is done in order to get past the "human spam filter." If you run stupidity detection based purely on the contents of their comments then you run the risk of simply banning controversial topics or people with bad spelling instead of controversial (trolling, roughly) behavior.

To better detect trolling behavior, I'd focus on responses:

- Content of the responses. Lots of shouting? Length.

- Number of responders. 50x more replies than you would otherwise expect from the thread?

- Depth of thread. Conversation still dragging on after all sane people have left?

- Timing of responses. Heated arguments leave no time for cooling off.

So measure effect of the troll, and your system won't have to try to understand what he's saying.

+ But you were referring to "stupid" measuring based on the submitters data may work just fine.
What a great comment. Thanks for providing me with a great train of thought to ponder over.

There's a lot that rings true about your argument.
I've seen one and a half startups fail because of this. (The second one isn't dead yet, they still have paying customers, but they were losing significant amounts of time to fixing regressions and incurring corresponding customer dissatisfaction.) For that matter, I've noticed that Reddit's had many more regressions lately, and that things that used to be rock-solid (eg. pagination) now seem to break disturbingly often.
that's interesting -- I didn't know Twitter supported that; I'll definitely check that out and implement it once I grok it
Telepresence will displace business air travel

http://www.cawtech.freeserve.co.uk/gf-abs.2.html
This sounds just like a zed shaw rant, in fact I think he says the exact same thing in some article.
For the most part this is usually true (although abrupt), it is often hard to break it to people that their 'awesome idea' really isn't worth anything.
Depends on whom you work for and what you do for them.
Pretty much any solid rant sounds like a Zed Shaw rant.
Probably a valid assessment.

I also think his opinion, while strongly stated, is very valid though.

There a more "good ideas" than people to implement them. Thinking up an idea, writing a business plan, and securing some funding is (IMO and IME) easier that actually putting that good idea into practice and finding all the little edge-cases, never-thought-of-thats, and such along the way.
Joel Spolsky had a notion about reading versus writing software: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000053.html
The XKCD folks implemented what they call "Robot9000". Robot9000 attempts to ensure that every comment being added to a site or chat channel is unique when compared against the history of the channel. It basically hashes a somewhat stripped-down version of each comment and compares it against the entire historical corpus of their chat. If the comment is found then the user is muted for an exponentially-increasing amount of time for each infraction. I believe there's a slow decay on the mute duration as well. This sort of filter won't stop stupid text, but it seems to be working for them. It's a novel approach to the problem of signal-dilution as a social network grows.

Robot9000 release announcement: http://blag.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-at...

Perl source:
http://media.peeron.com/tmp/ROBOT9000.html
Open ID would be a good solution if it was adopted on a wider scale and was more on it's way to becoming a trusted standard.

I think many sites require extranenous registration information just because other sites request the same information. It also gives them the option of analysis at a later date.

Some companies may actually use the information they collect for data mining or to resell. Even though this can sometimes have evil purposes, sometimes it can be beneficial for a company to say Paul Graham really likes chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream and its his birthday, but for most places collecting this information is of little use. It's just annoying for the user, as the many replies to this news posting can attest to.
I ran a BBS in Brisbane, Australia which was fairly successful. Still shows up on some current Fidonet listings :) http://bbs.ricta.net/zone3ip/n640.html
Well, funding is a different matter. If a beef-headed M.B.A. actually has some funding, they might actually be worth listening to.

However, 99% of the time they don't have funding, they've (at best) got "strong interest from investors" or some such.
After "a year and a half of study, discussion, and hard work" BU unveils new logo
I can understand it. While I don't necessarily subscribe to the "ideas are worthless" meme, I definitely don't believe that "hackers" are commodities either.
Apple receives patent for iPod scroll wheel
When is the best time to launch a startup
not scalable, look at their "stupid" and "non-stupid" data
If you're interested in this sort of thing, check out the Innovator's Dilemma and the Innovator's Solution.
Century 21 BBS. +54-9-11-4632-7070
I was sysop of on of the first Argentinean BBS.
Nice times!
I ran one using Osiris XLT up until 1994 or so. I remember mowing lawns to save up for a ($200) 14.4 modem and to pay for my private line. :-)
Too young. My early scene was meeting up with the local kids to swap BASIC programs, pirated games, and 8-bit video game cartridges.
It would depend on your product. I think the key UI principle to remember is that if user work is not saved, make it obvious that this is the case. They way they can decide when they want to keep their data enough to save it.

If the data is impersonal enough you can add a "Whoops, lost you work? Click here to see recent orphans" link.
Exciting Startups Launch at DEMO08 California
There were regional BBSes?

That’s funny. One of my favorite software ideas is to create means for local communication so that people can form actual human real-space relationships, including marriage and enduring friendship. Wait long enough and old things become new again.
Depends, really.

If the startup is a social network based in the valley, yes, they probably have their heads up their asses.

If the startup is in the banking sector and based in Kansas City however, being "plugged in" to the right communities might not be the same communities where you'd find startup talent. They're not going to waste their time on techcrunch, because they need to stay connected to their clients, who are not in that sphere. That leaves them at a huge disadvantage when it comes to talent, so why not use a headhunter?
I was on BBS's whenever I wasn't in high school in the early 90's. Met my first 2 girlfriends on there. 619 a/c - San Diego.
I wouldn't get distracted by funding, especially angel funding, which is what you'll typically find at the very early stages.

Beef-headed MBA's went to school with other beef-heads, and might know a few people who know a few people. Scraping up $1M is not terribly difficult when you know a few people. Put another way, one of my favorite quotes is "A fool and his money are soon venture capital".
Successful Social Media Marketing Requires Personal Involvement
Yeah! Donno how that happened.I thought it merges duplicates.
I think we got common ground :) I consider features like "being open to criticism" and "appropriate level of attention to detail" basic things, so it does not contradict my POV (general conclusions limited to basic stuff), and since it is you who wrote it I assume, that it complies with yours too.

Not sure about how scientific method applies here (I DO agree with scientific method though), but I can live with that.

Now we just have to use it to somehow extinguish original flame of "you were not meant to ..." :)
Just kidding. I'm happy with discussion getting to the point of common ground +- epsilon.

I'll drink to that!

EDIT: how one downvotes posts here (no, not this thread)? I see only up arrows :|
Answer: Right Now. (That's always the right answer, btw)
Sounds as young as he looks.

My advice: Never pass up a good opportunity.
Now that I think about it, "having your own BBS" back in the day is a lot like "having your own domain/site" nowadays. Pretty much everyone wanted to do it, but there were a lot of lonely boards out there.
MyBlogLog Founder To Launch New Startup Gnip With $1 Million In Funding
That's 'cos it's not gonna be named windows 7 when it will be released.
Second Life Entrepreneurship - The Magazine
I implemented a similar idea a few weeks ago and called it http://www.tweviews.com I like your implementation: the RSS feed and the grouping of items being rated into the Hot Stuff category are both cool.

My set-up is similar: reply tweets sent to @tweviews However, I send them on as normal tweets to the tweviews Twitter account. This means that if people want tweviews, they can just follow the Twitter account.

Content-wise, I was shooting for a different slant: I also have a cron-job set up that pulls in the reply tweets, but I moderate them and only send on the good ones.

I'm still tweaking the format of the tweviews. Currently, it is "@tweviews thing, artist ... review" I display the latest five tweets in a sidebar on my blog (link in my profile) and automatically link the "thing, artist" part up to a Google search.

Anyway, in summary, I really like Twitterate. Nice job.
Yay.

You need more karma to be able to vote down. 20 or 25 or so.

The reason I'd say those aren't basic things is they (and many others) are, apparently, too hard for most people. The world could be greatly improved by people doing them better. (Not to say I do all of them perfectly, either.)
To be free, information has to be smart (comments on Chris Anderson's "Free!")
Sony BMG plans online music subscription service
As someone that's done a modest amount of swimming, that's a horrible metaphor. If you don't pace yourself, there's no way you'll win a race.
Here's a simple test case for the leak.

http://pastie.caboo.se/170484
It's hard to find a brilliant hacker. But it's equally hard to find a brilliant marketing guy, a brilliant sales guy or a brilliant CEO.

While I don't disagree with the point of the post I think that many hackers should step back and look at how many great marketing people, CEO's etc. they know. The actual programming part is only a small part of starting a company, but many hackers seem to think it is all they need because hacking something together happens to be the first step to creating a great company.

The key insight is that no great company was made by only one guy. It takes both great hackers, great marketing people, great CEO's and great sales people. Hell, maybe you even need a great janitor...

So start showing some respect for each other instead of haggling over who needs who.
There were a bunch of bulletin boards that I used as a teenager in upstate/central NY. My favorite in terms of bulletin board software were the the ones using Citadel.
In a startup, it's NEVER "not your problem"
Revision3 Strengthens Blip.tv’s Roster With Syndication Deal
Thanks for this article. I downloaded the SDK for an app I'm creating only to notice that there's limited access to the camera. Hopefully this let's me complete my app.
I wish there was a way to get a transcript rather than just a video for things like this. I can read immensely faster than a speaker can speak. And with a transcript I can easily jump back and forth in the text, search for key phrases, and expect Google to be able to help me find it again later.

Does any software exist for automating transcriptions? I suspect that television closed-captioning does something similar. I've noticed phonologic transcription errors on CC TV multiple times in the past.
Lame annoying sophomoric humor. Big waste of time. I wish I'd taken your advice, but I can't get enough of Linux history.

There's no Linux history here you can't get in less-annoying form at:

https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/rhasan/linux/

or

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Linux_kernel
Excellent idea. Pity they are around five years late.
TradeWars is still alive and kicking if you're interested. Now you just need a telnet client and a server. I assume you have the former, so here are some links to the latter: http://oregonsouth.com/ice9/ and http://www.thestardock.com/
Windows NT was Windows 4,
Windows 2000 / XP was Windows 5,
Windows Vista was Windows 6,
And Windows 7 is... Windows 7.

I don't know if that will be the final release name or not.
Ask YC: How much would you pay to have Michael Arrington read your email?
Random thought regarding a random idea I've been toying with. The scenario:

You have a new startup you're launching, and it's a pretty cool product. Mike is overloaded with 2443 emails, and you want him to read yours. Consider you don't know him at all. How much would you pay to make sure he read your email?

Yes, I know some of you may say "None! TechCrunch isn't the end all to end all!". Just take this in a straight forward sense.
The idea of a modular operating system predates Linux by many many years.
It was a BBS that first introduced me to the beauty of multiplayer FPS goodness as well as the infamous MUD, Legend of the Red Dragon. My friend and I used to play Doom on a local BBS using a program called MILK. Those were good days.
I can't help but wonder whether this was inspired by the Facebook dev forums.
Did Bill Gates Really Say That? (who said famous C.S. related quotes?)
Moderation,reposting to Twitter, and linking are interesting ideas -- I hope you don't mind if I take them as suggestions and potentially implement them down the road.

What language/framework did you use to build tweviews?
Great job! Nice and simple.
I think bullying in public school is also a symptom of schools being co-ed. Take away the girls, and guys have much less motivation to show off their dominance.

However, they do need an opportunity to interact with girls, which is why single gender boarding schools are also bad news. In boarding schools, guys will become more homosexually oriented, and again motivated to show off their dominance.