skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the same reason that open source projects are started by one guy with running code and not by committees talking about what to do. Everyone with an opinion isn't necessarily your customer - they are just guys with opinions.

You could be non-secretive without being interactive or not taking opinions. But that seems like burning PR early for a product you will be releasing soon anyway.

Do talk with people who's opinions you already value. But you aren't Microsoft so pre-announcing a product won't intimidate others into not competing with you and it won't whet potential customer's appetite. Make something you know you would use and then see how others like you respond.
It's a great quote, but conjuring Roosevelt seems a little extreme to combat snarky comments on TechCrunch =)
Here's the comment I left at TechCrunch, though right now it's awaiting moderation:

It is a mistake to think of Yahoo! as competing for search dominance. As Yahoo! has reiterated several times at this point, their strategy is to become the starting point for the web, not the search engine. Search is only one tool web users need, and Yahoo! has no interest in being the place they come to for it. They would rather be the place people leave from, time and time again.

So, how does a merger with AOL help Yahoo!?

1) Yahoo! maintains its position as the top site on the web. Quantcast shows that adding AOL’s visitors to Yahoo!’s puts Yahoo! at almost 200 million monthly uniques, almost 50% ahead of Google. ComScore data is less exact, since it groups AOL under “Time Warner Network”, but still shows the same trend:

- http://www.quantcast.com/top-sites-1

- http://www.comscore.com/press/.....press=2000

2) Yahoo! becomes the dominant player in IM. Yahoo! Messenger is already interoperable with Windows Live Messenger; adding interoperability with AIM means that they control ~70% of desktop IM client market share(more recent numbers on this are needed, but by the end of 2006 AIM was ~50 million, and both Yahoo! and Microsoft’s were ~20 million), and their clients can talk to everyone else’s. Yahoo! and AOL have both made progress in integrating IM with E-mail, something Microsoft still hasn’t done. As Yahoo! expands its e-mail services into enterprise markets, and enterprises increase their usage of IM, this could be a big deal.

3) Much better integration potential than with Microsoft. After being stuck in Time Warner’s in-fighting old media bureaucracy for so long, I’d imagine that AOL employees would be overjoyed to be brought into an organization that understands and is about the web. There’s also excellent potential for brand integration here:

- Yahoo! is a brand AOL users would be comfortable with.

- It’s a brand that it makes sense for AOL to adopt as it’s been expanding overseas operations(where Yahoo! already has a strong presence).

- The Yahoo! brand offers a graceful way to retire a brand that the tech-savvy have long scorned.

- Go to Yahoo.com, then go to AOL.com. The portals are almost identical. It’s feasible that a full-scale integration of the two properties could at some point take place.

4) There are plenty of other reasons why an AOL/Yahoo! merger has potential. Concentration of content-provider partnerships, joint efforts in mobile services/advertising, online/offline music offerings, and the fact that both are much more youth-friendly brands than MSN or Google. Plus more.

But TechCrunch isn’t paying me to write guest posts in their comments, so that’s all for now.
Thanks! I'll definitely check this out. Looks like a great starting resource.
Modified version of exploit which fixes the bug live in kernel memory:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=464953#14
Three Minutes with Facebook's Privacy Chief
The dark side of open source: Hacking MySQL
Yeah seriously. The media are always saying we're not training enough scientists & engineers. The fact is, we're training too many!
The odd thing about this "outsourced the poor" is that we didn't make them poorer in an absolute sense. We either left them where they were or gave them options that many of them prefer, which is another word for "richer".

We haven't freed them from whatever despot got to them first, but they don't seem to value that all that much. It's hard to see how their choice or situation is our fault.
Scanning Your Money to the Bank
Bad combo: Hackers with SEO skills
I totally agree. I usually read the comments first for a summary. If they are very, very positive, I might look at the link.
Very interesting, the most promising implementation of the micropayments concept I've seen yet. I love the ruthless simplicity of their approach, just looking at the url-entry box conjured up a half-dozen sites I had semi-subconsciously intended to tip as soon as the right solution comes along.

Though I hope they find a way around the possible problem of people spamming tips or just frivolously IOUing. Ideally once the thing gets some momentum, people will have a small pool of cash in their account so that the proportion of IOUs goes down, and the benefit of using the site become clear. But they'll have to get to that point quickly enough sustain interest.
Go Jayhawks!

BS Comp Sci Kansas 2006 here.
There was an interesting conversation about this a few weeks ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=102876
Upcoming Conferences: Webstock, WebVentures, Under The Radar, Graphing Social Patterns
could be a rumor started by Yahoo, trying to force Microsoft into making a higher offer.
Thanks all! back to bug fixing...
I struggle with this issue every day (just selected a postdoc.) There are tons of smart, educated, hard working, passionate scientists. Why is that? I think because we just plain like it. Low pay sucks. But, most of us probably would not work in a coal mine for $80K.

So, working in a coal mine "isn't right." Being a postdoc is just not ideal.
I think I can see the value of openness in my own personal experience (a couple of moderately successful startups). Of course, who knows how wildly successful I would've been had I been more paranoid? :-)

Google is another fine example.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google

Reading "Founders at Work" is a good exercise... Not a lot of stealth mode mentioned there.

Doesn't seem scant to me, though I'll concede it isn't particularly scientific.
Sorry, the Amazon Mechanical Turk beat you to that one.
Wikimedia’s 2007 Financials Posted
I suggest that you use the MSVS compiler, but the cygwin build environment (make sure to set the LIB and INCLUDE env variables). Then:

SYS=Windows make

That is the easiest way in Windows (for now).
There is HUGE difference between talking to people you meet and posting your idea(s) on the internet.

However most entrepreneurs seek a one solution fits all and try to follow the foot steps of others success. When in reality every idea/start up is different and what might work for one startup will kill the other.
Every time Yegge makes some comment about needing to be more terse in an essay longer than The Iliad, you have to chuckle a little.
It's not just the academic job market -- all of Western civilization is a pyramid scheme.
Hi, Abby from Tipjoy here. One exciting aspect of tipjoy is that the ranking is determined by the amount of PAID tips something has received. Right now nothing’s yet been paid (except for a little bit we’ve put in ourselves), so the top tip list has the spam you've mentioned. However, as people begin to pay for their tips (by hitting the ‘pay’ button in the upper right corner of tipjoy.com when signed in), the most popular tip list will start to evolve to reflect what’s really worth money to people.

That being said, we're probably going to add a "safe for work" mode, which you can toggle to hide questionable content.
Noob here (4 yrs). Muddled code is perfectly ok so long as you wall it off, jesus H christ. The UI should be separate from the machinery, seperate from the data it works on & outputs. Add a bit of refactoring & I'll be perfectly happy, I promise.
micro-payments: TipJoy http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=113122
I love the idea of earning a reputation based on how much you tip! As I just said in my post to techcrunch: We do expect that there will be some average amount of tips per piece of content which are never paid. As we collect more data, we'll be able to tell content creators what percent of their total tips earned they can actually expect to collect. Since it's free digital content, we think that a collection rate of less than 100% shouldn't be too much of a problem.
It could be because we originally weren't allowing people to tip themselves, which was causing a slew of problems since (of course) people wanted to try out the button on their site. That was just a big UI oversight on my part; sorry. We've pushed a change out there now, so if you try to tip yourself the button says 'thanks' but instead of 'give more' it says 'you own this!' to the left. Hopefully this will solve your problem. Please email us if it doesn't. Regarding the layout, we'll work on improvements to that and will announce an update on our blog once it's ready.
Scoble's commentary and tour of CERN; with plenty of photos
Now That's a Computer Book Cover
Subclipse is really neat.
30 Second Estimating
Running Commands “at” the Future
critisism is not bad, letting it go by without analysing it or affecting your perfomance is.
10 IRC client for Linux
Reversibility in Software Development
The tap leaked extensively in the case of J. S. Bach: two wives and 21 children.
Some people, noob or not, have a style. Some code has a style. Some programs are best expressed as narrative little stories and documenting them as such makes sense. This is often true when the program's data flow is very linear.

Some programs benefit greatly by having dense little blocks, with nothing more than a two work reminder as to what they do, that can be considered carefully and held tightly in the mind. Any program that has atomic/blocking operations or concurrency seems to fit this model.

To say that "noobs use a lot of this kind of comment" and "mature programmers use this different style" may be partly true but seems very much overly simplistic.
The twice-techcrunch is because it was submitted twice in a particular fashion. I'll merge them shortly. They've both gotten a bunch of tips, but only one is available on techcrunch.com. It's actually an interesting accidental experiment to see the tipping rates.
Eventually we're going to open up an extremely configurable API. It will allow you to create your own micropayments engine, and determine the distribution model of your content. Internationalization is also on the roadmap. Maybe we'll tip users who help out :)
How scalable is one web server?
mobmov.org is awesome! So many times since we've been building this, I've thought, "I'd tip that". Yet another. Sorry for the button troubles.
Lots of blogs are really good at finding the best things on the internet, and delivering them to readers. The content creators clearly should get most of any tips, but the "finders fee" is also an important part.

We intend on building this. The challenge will be making it clear that the button goes in part to both people. We really don't want to make users think too much about tipping.
That is an excellent idea. We'll have to think about how to do this correctly. Thanks
Tipjoy is actually just the first user of a system I'm calling Millipaid. It will be a completely customizable micropayments solution. Before then, we'll release Tipjoy Platform. The site owners get a cut, and the content creators get a cut. It will be up to the platform to decide the distribution. Video sites could really benefit from it. So could sites like thesixetyone, twitter, etc.
ugh no kidding. That's pretty much the main reason I like smaller projects. Who do I have to talk to in google to add conversions like "10 kilograms/megatons in joules"?
The writers deal: not a complete disaster. But close
he talks about the length of his blogs here: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-theory-201-...

quite funny
The availability of easy credit has kept lower/middle class consumption so high recently. It will not last. In fact as we speak this whole system is unwinding. Watch credit card delinquencies...

But I take it that what this article is really arguing for is the maintenance of free trade. And on that point I agree.
Yes, apparently. What's wrong with writing a blog again?
We test our front end using Selenium across multiple browsers every time we do a build.

I guess we'll just have to disagree on whether or not there's software that doesn't "need testing"
so the same steve-yegge of RnR is the same Geepster* who wrote this blog spot, and also a lisper!

this is sorta inconsistent! i am confused

*http://www.sdtimes.com/article/column-20071015-01.html
This is why I'm in no rush to port my app to FB, I did some trials and worked out how the FB api works with some test apps, but as far as making money from ads I don't see it.

You have to somehow get people from FB to your own domain where you can really hit them with adverts :)
this is obviously entirely dependent on the kind of software you're writing. if all you're doing is serving static pages, sure, one server can serve a million or more requests a day. but if you have a heavy server side component, like handling large file transfers, or even extensive batch processing, you're going to hit a wall a whole lot sooner.

a simple, effective approach to this problem is to partition your site into services, each of which run independently. then, when it comes time to scale, you can scale each service to its own box and beyond independently, with the added benefit of minimizing downtime to a small sub section of your site.
Indeed. We'll need to do something clever to prevent that. Hopefully we grow fast enough that it is a problem soon.

I'm very interested in giving more than the "top tips" page. I'd like to build a recommendation engine that give you want you want to see, based upon your past tipping behavior. That could entirely eliminate the other problems with other social news sites. We'll see.

A combination of recommendation engine, sock-puppet squelching, manual site curation, crowd sourcing, and tweaks to our hotness algorithm should be a solution.
Fantastic, I look forward to seeing this service take off. However, I think you have a major (and seemingly hidden) issue: trust.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think you guys are out to swindle me or anything (quite the opposite), but honestly your website sets my 'dodgy brothers' sensor tingling. The main source of information, the FAQ, intermingles sales pitches with fragmented bites of detail about how the service actually works. Most of the FAQ is fluff, with the few facts hidden amongst it. I have several questions about how the service works. For example: When do you take your cut? What happens to uncollected funds? If I donate 10c to someone, am I going to be sent an email demanding payment 5 times a day? (I am not asking for a response on these questions here – I think this information should be on the website itself).

At the moment, if I use your service, I know what is going to happen in a general sense (and I had to read thoroughly to even get this far), but I don't know all the details. Because I don't know the details, I have to trust that you are going to do these right. But why should I trust you to do that? If you were trustworthy, wouldn't you be upfront in the first place? The more I have to trust you, the less willing I am going to be to trust you.

Also, be-careful of how you advertise yourselves. Quite a few statements in that FAQ are quite strange, like discussing passing on future savings to the tip receivers, and the whole money transfer service thing. Why are you asking for more of my trust, or my help? Me... help a company? You're supposed to be helping me! I don't want to trade with you because you're going to be help me in the future, I want to trade with you because you are going to help me right now. So you just need to sell your current rates and features convincingly. Don't get me wrong, slash your prices as soon as you can, but don't promise you will, just do it and let everyone know you've done it when you've done it. You can't tell me you're customer orientated; almost every company says it. Let your customers tell me (word of mouth style, not via your home-page :-) ).

I believe this trust to be an extremely important issue for you to deal with, because you aren't some website asking for my email address, you are a website dedicated to handling money transfers.

“If I were king of the zoo,” I would drop the FAQ format and split the information out into two separate sections. The first would be your selling page, something that compels customers to try the service. The second would be simple, no fluff, factual explanation of what happens. Screenshots, diagrams, and examples can make all the difference.

Sorry, I don't mean to be so negative. You guys have the opportunity to make something great; its excites a man such as myself!
Color Tile Optical Illusion
When I was there last summer, the rate conversions project was basically a one person operation.

It doesn't look like Google knows what a megaton is, but even if it did, it'd be the same unit class as joules, so I doubt your conversion could ever work.
A hard science education is a great preparation for a ton of intellectual jobs. I think this exodus from academia shows that the modern world "industry" now offers problems just as complicated as solving Schrodinger's equation.
How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free
Looking for a co-founder in South Africa
With the way the Rand (our currency) is going, I think it would be a good idea to start a business with global potential. Please get in touch if you're interested. I can supply a bit of capital in exchange for larger shareholding.

Also, if you're already working on or planning a startup, please reply to this thread so that the other South African readers can know that there is hope!

I'm a developer with 5 years of experience, mainly Microsoft, but have started doing a lot of Ruby on Rails in the last year and have played with PHP, did a year of C++ etc. Running Ubuntu and I'm ready to repent from my Microsoft development ways. I had a serious aversion towards PHP, so I'm glad RoR came along. I think I would work well with another developer or potentially a designer.

I have a degree in computer science - best in class, for what it's worth. But I was too busy pretending not to be a geek to meet any interesting people to start a company with. Sigh.
Lisp NYC: Common Lisp vs Arc Deathmatch
Weebly is becoming a proof of concept. That you can withstand pressures of companies like Google when you outperform their own similar products.
Mine is Photoree, the collaborative image recommendation system ( http://www.photoree.com ). Just got reviewed by KillerStartups http://www.killerstartups.com/Video-Music-Photo/Photoreecom-...
Where the heck is my focus?
Do users a favor and set the keyboard focus.
Along those lines, what do you think of a wikiable application for forums such as hacker news?

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

I think it would be pretty neat for the community here. This would create a small feedback loop for ideas such as yours, and you don't have to bootstrap a new community to test new schemes.
Bad UI design:  Mystrey Meat Navigation
it goes a little further than that. All life forms are part of a grand pyramid scheme that keeps them alive for humans' benefit.
Ex-CNETer Launches Iminta
Nuconomy Emerges To Provide Next Generation Site Analytics
One problem that Steve doesn't talk about is that books on programming and all kinds of tutorials are mostly written by noobs and teenagers, and for a reason that's I think intuitively clear, vets rarely write tutorials. This is a pain for the industry as actually propaganda of bad or wrong styles of programming propagates itself through these kind of noob/teenage books. With very few exceptions.
Ask YC: What would you attempt if you knew you couldn’t fail?
.
I'm surprised no one has pointed out the giant negative spike in the last column.

It effectively says that the poor are spending (ie, consuming) more than they make to maintain their standard of living. So, yes, consumption is the same, but the cost is a mortgaged future or a edifice that crumbles the first time anyone is seriously sick.

Further, it seems strange that the values are absolute. I'd like to see them as a percentage of income.
Yahoo seeks to restart merger talks with AOL
...they don't seem to value that all that much. It's hard to see how their choice or situation is our fault.

Although it would be nice if this were the case, history starkly disagrees.
Microsoft-Yahoo: The end game nears; Was there an Amazon-Yahoo deal in the works?
Is mobile really a sure thing for Google?
Welcome to Cyberwar Country
GPhone Prototype Debuts At Mobile World Congress
How sticky is membership on Facebook? Just try breaking free
YHOO-AOL? You’re Kidding Me?
Google's Android software debuts in Barcelona
China's authorities warn of Valentine's Day virus
Yahoo in Talks With AOL - Exactly What We Suggested
The one thing every entrepreneur needs to have: Hope
When Women Rule
Also, a follow up post on the article I hacked together in 20 minutes ... http://davidadewumi.com/2008/02/11/when-women-rule-men-get-scared/

Seemingly a very important point of discussion for a male dominated forum such as Hacker News
Nice post. I hope it works well for you. And for other South Africans (sorry, US here).

As a single founder who sometimes feels pressure (mainly from here) to not be a single founder, I would hope to see more posts like this. I realize the ycombinator is not a matchmaking service, but what better place to look?

You don't mention a compelling reason for starting a business other than "the way the Rand is going". Do you have an idea (or even a concept)? Or are you purposefully not sharing it?

Which brings up an interesting question. If you're a single founder looking for co-founders iN a public place, how much should you share?
Before he branched off to the static type discussion, I thought he was going to propose a code editor which facilitated meta-data comments. That way the programmer could provide comments as verbose as he liked and the reader could decide whether to view them. They could include links, additional documentation, etc. The code and comments could be viewed in a split-screen, separate windows, etc. Maybe this exists?
Fly?
The Flow of MBR Rootkit Trojan Resumes
Technically, the definition they were using is the top-fifth of income earners. The average income of which was about 150k.
A new player in the Database world: BigTable
Sounds like you are doing well.
What are your plans?

I was back to A^2 last year for a week.
It has the same feel. I must admit that I miss the place from
time to time.
The 3G iPhone: Do we have it all wrong?
Windows Firewall [Pic]
I don't understand why people feel the need to have a co-founder. I don't think there's anything wrong with setting up your own company and then employing some other people to fill in any skills gap that you feel you might have. Personally I've always found it easier on my own... I make the decisions (for good or bad) after consulting with people, but there are never any issues or deadlocks where decisions can't be made because its down to me ultimately. Why do you feel you need a co-founder? Just curious and not wishing to start another thread on the merits either way
Running "sudo rm -rf /" [video]
Hey I shot you an email.
What does the word "fail" mean?
10 Steps to a Hugely Successful Web 2.0 Company
Comments don't run.
I got my data from here: http://celtickane.com/webdesign/jsspeed2007.php

Of course, the scientific method means this tests should be reproducible by everyone, and YMMV, but I wasn't talking bullshit, just see the page.