skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps the reason that people troll (or take part in any sort of asshole behavior, really) is that they don't have anything better to do. Hear me out.

Hacker News is a "forum" whose main purpose is getting people to talk about/think about/post links to information related to startups. It has a very explicit purpose and to this end I would not expect it to be "infested" to the extent of a lot of other forums.

For instance, would we expect to see a lot of trolls on a forum devoted to advanced topics in theoretical math? "Orbifold cohomology is so much better than Hopfschild cohomology!" No. No, we wouldn't. A serious, well-defined, topic begets serious discussion.

This is the real problem with reddit, digg, etc. - there's no clear GOAL. Like, there's no -reason- that people shouldn't be assholes. What are they getting in the way of?

It's like if you opened the doors to your house and just held a "general forum." At first, discussion would be great (it's just your friends). Later, discussion would get worse (it's your friends' friends). Eventually it would degrade into the biggest losers who have nowhere to go sitting around and making fun of all the fun they're not having out in the real world (outside the house).

I agree with pg's sentiments that the architecture/rules of hacker news make it a much more intelligent, even (gasp) friendly forum, but I also think it's the community. They keep coming back because they have active interest. They have active interest because hacker news has established as its goal the provision of things of interest.

As always, I might just be woefully naive about human nature; but things seem so simple!
Tweaked version, for more corporation names instead of "why you should buy life insurance":

http://tinyurl.com/2fmpde
Programming.reddit is still mostly OK.
Start with 386/486 in 32-bit protected mode. Segmented addressing sucks and is not used. The 8086 also has a lot of extra instructions like LOOP which are useful only if you want to be a demo coder. On modern x86 many of these instructions aren't used.
The problem to he here is that the price of bottled water doesn't (evidently) reflect the true cost.

Driving a hummer, drinking bottled water, eating a big steak, taking airplanes everywhere. No prob, just pay for it. The price of these activities should be high enough that everyone is just delighted when someone does it, because the amount paid back into the commons makes it a great deal for everyone else.

That would end the moralizing, which doesn't make much sense in the first place (and is truly a hopeless way to influence anyone other than the choir anyway)
apple care....
It's not entirely clear to me that news.yc would be a better place without all the submissions and comments that get only one or two upvotes. For example, I'm still convinced that idiagram's wicked problem solving visualization was one of the intellectually interesting (and beautiful) news.yc submissions ever, even though I'm apparently the only one who voted for it:

http://www.idiagram.com/CP/cpprocess.html

Looking through my own submissions I see that the more intellectual stuff I've posted, while it's done well, has never gotten as many votes as the pithy one-liners.
Gated. Maybe the article covered this, but I suspect not.

The chemicals you use to make solar cells are nasty. Unless Californians change their labor and environmental laws, costs will probably stay prohibitive.

But hell, costs are prohibitive everywhere else, and likely to stay that way. There's only so much return from scale out there to collect.
The Best Investment Advice You'll Never Get... From Google
It could look like this:
(* (+ "a" (* "b")))
for:
"(a+b)"
[Perhaps you prefer not to re-use + and * for this.]

Sure, it's somewhat more verbose for this toy examples - but every intermediate expression (and the whole thing) is a Lisp-Object in its own right.

You would not even need macros.

Edit: There is a place for macros here to make things less verbose. Just write a macro that 'compiles':
(* (+ a (* b)))
into the form above.

For convenience you can offer a function that builds RegExps out of strings in the usual way.
I learned with a fabulous book that I believe was called "80836 Assembly Programming" or some such, from Microsoft Press. Also did a really good job of explaining the processor architecture, although I don't know how much that's changed between the x86 and the current generation. A lot, I assume. I know the P4 has a very different register set. I believe the instruction set is largely the same, however.

I can try and find it in my basement, if you really need it.
speech to text interests me because SLS (same language subtitling) now helps many in india learn to read..

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/12/same-language-subtitl...

synxi theory: with tools to easily sync/caption youtube, kaltura, etc, we can make a fun way to learn/teach each other language, (ie engelsk, spansk, norsk, etc)
Can You Live Without The Internet?
Youtube Overtakes Google To Become World's Second Most Popular Website
Are solid-state drives really better than hard disks?
When I worked with flash chips they were quite dumb and well-standardized, so bypassing a controller should be no problem.
I saw it on Back To The Future so I built it
Cool.

I'd be interested in seeing similar analysis on a per-comment basis.
Fred Wilson - Hypocritical, Wrong and Conflicted
Also, pg could probably run this on the complete data set, which might better illustrate what's happening with the more prolific members of the community.
And what about the McDonald's-rule: "Two countries with McDonald's don't go to war with each other."?

Does it hold up?

Edit: The answer is in the linked page. (It's "No, but better than the other rule.")
Thanks for posting this interesting data set, but after thinking about it for some time, I don't think this data offers any insights into yc.news. The leader to user ratio is too high, which skews all the numbers so that nothing really meaningful can be extracted. It's also hard to spot any trends from the point system alone - user identity, time of post relative to other news, and the controversy of the post content can play important factors in the post's point value, and all of these don't necessarily have any correlation with the user who posted it. I think in order to figure out something about the community, someone will have to get their hands dirty and actually look at post content.
Why Linux Doesn't Spread - the Curse of Being Free ("free = not valuable")
Mathematical Art
First, I really don't understand what we are arguing about here, since my initial comment already says that research and recommendations are much more important than GPA and GRE. Lets just agree to disagree on the rest.

Second, I never questioned the basis of your opinions, you questioned mine (indirectly).

Finally, maybe you should have spent more than two seconds googling, since MIT CS does not ask for your GRE scores. See the relevant part in this document (which is available on the page you linked):
http://web.mit.edu/admissions/graduate/pdfs/MIT_department_i...

(Edit: Did you go to grad school in CS? Because otherwise the whole discussion loses relevance.)
Wow, I could stare at that for minutes. Something's going to happen soon, I swear.
"Yahoo Canned Me": An Engineer's Lament
Mobile phones may soon be powered by hydrogen
I disagree. I was working on some Ajax stuff and I really needed a spinner. This is useful.
Hmm. You still have to consider the distributions of linux that are in fact very expensive. Look at Novell's distro. It's so fancy you can only rent it a few years out. That common man's XP you can keep pretty much forever. It will still be interesting to see the results of his experiment, though I think he will need more time to make a solid conclusion. One week doesn't seem like enough to me.

P.S. I know my argument about Novell ignores the fact that he was using pirated examples. I'm pointing out that even similarly priced OSes don't get as much market share as windows.
Seriously, you can program on a 13" screen? My brain gets angry that I can't see enough code even on my non-portable 17" laptop at 1920. Or is that only when attached to the external 24"? (kinda cheating...).
Solving the Problem of Enterprise Software Customizations
the US has ravaged third-world democracies for a quite a while now

That's only a counterexample if the US is a democracy... :)
IRC is a waste of time. The best things happen in real life.
Cutting out Static
I think that you have to distinguish between wars in which the outcome is uncertain—that is, wars in which real risk to both sides is present—and wars that are essentially a big guy beating up a little guy.

I agree that the former kind of war would happen with the same frequency if this pen pal idea were implemented—the motivation for such wars need to be large enough to overcome the personal danger that they produce, and so would easily overshadow semipersonal connections with citizens of the opposite side. I think that the latter would very much be deterred, though, because the motivation for such wars can be miniscule, to the point where even the humanization of the "enemy" could be a significant deterrent.
John Maeda's work is worth checking out as well: http://www.maedastudio.com/
High Performance PHP & MySQL Scaling Techniques
Did anyone else dismiss the entire article after reading the first five words?
GrowVeg Helps You Plant Vegetables Correctly
Just looked (again) at that link. I recall this page and recalling myself not getting far through it. On my revisit I still couldn't read it through entirely. It looks like one of those handouts that presents an unspecific problem, to which it throws a bunch of unspecific waypoints that lead to an unspecific solution.

I suspect you see something that I didn't; how do you approach reading this?

Also, between reading and coming back, you have been downvoted once. I have no idea what is downvote-worthy in your post... sometimes I just don't know what I am missing -- or if there is anything to miss in the first place.
I have a new proposal. Let's force all families to write letters to each other occasionally and even phone each other. This should stop domestic violence, no?
There is a lot of talk about what should be done in order to keep the community as it is, about what is a relevant post and what's not. But we have no metric to measure the cohesion, except for 'pleasure'. The analysis in the post is of course incomplete but I believe there is value in a metric that could tell us whether or not we are being steered away from the initial community.
Ask News.YC: Do you know of a world-class startup focused PR firm?
I already know of Schwartz Communications from PG's "The Submarine" essay. Anyone know of any other firms like them that are worth checking out?

Thanks in advance.
The Crab Nebula from Hubble [PIC]
Turning firefox into a WA assault kit
2 million Chinese kicked out of homes for Olympics
Music using only sounds from Windows XP and 98
Can you tell how many sections are inside a citrus without cutting it open?
The main hurdle I experience on a daily basis is not the perception of value but the fact that being free creates mindshare battles that work against distributed collaboration and contribution. It is MUCH more difficult to organize collaboration around content that can be freely replicated.

Why? Users tend to migrate towards interfaces that focus on content presentation rather than those which focus on getting stuff done. This works in favour of WYSIWYG style projects like Wikipedia but works against OSS-driven web services.

One solution would be for major search engines like Google to skew rankings based on the presence or absense of generic AdSense-style advertising. This is unlikely to happen as long as search functionality is tightly knitted to ad networks.
Depending on how you count, 5 of these 14 are software challenges -- hackers have a lot of work to do this century!
From the linked-to Google Groups thread, this seems to just be someone using the RTM gmail addon without being aware of it:

http://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Problem-solving/msg/12a...

Although it's also true that native Gmail tasks are supposed to be in the works.
This is way off. Free always beats paid. Your example of champagne is somewhat accurate (i.e. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_dri...), but I don't think the same concept applies to software. When some alternatives cost money, consumers will almost always choose free. Why do people use Windows?

(1) It is pre-installed on machines - note: Linux is no longer "free" when you need to install it yourself

(2) It is included in the PCs price or consumers aren't aware of or given "free" alternatives

(3) Historically, *nix has been too difficult to install/use, lack of software, etc

Think about this: how much did MySQL just sell for? How much does MySQL cost?
how to tell how much javascript errors are in a page without seeing the source code? type javascirpt: in your browsers address :)
wget perhaps?
If your tolerance for risk is low (for example because you have a family to support) join a startup as one of the early employees, you still get a percentage of the wealth you generate and have almost all of the "security" of working for an established company.

It will also help you build the skills you'll need if one day you'll decide to build something of your own. I followed this path, and it was awesome for me.

I call it a startup apprenticeship program, find an entrepreneur you admire and believe you can learn a lot from, and join his company early on.
they probably bought RTM... I've been using Remember the Milk as a GMail add-in and it's fantastic. Why reinvent the wheel? Especially when it's already damn near perfect.
A geriatric assault on Italy's bloggers
It's been a while since I've been on slashdot, but back then their system was quite sophisticated. You could not always vote on stories, only when temporary moderator status was assigned to you by a random process. Additionally, sometimes you would be assigned meta-moderator status and get to vote on the quality of moderators ratings. Those meta-moderations would in turn influence the likelihood of the rated moderators to become moderators again in the future.
Also, they have categories for the votes ("funny", "insightful", "troll", ...).
I find Fred's post more convincing. It has more evidence and less ad hominems.
RTM is not for sale.
From my experience in most startups (2/3) spend the first 4 months almost entirely on programming. Later stages are obviously more balanced as other activities begin to take the spotlight.

So according to your stats you get a 25% improvement in productivity by using non-Blub language (don't worry as you gain familiarity with non-Blub programming this will actually improve) and that means launching a month earlier.

The only reason to not use a non-Blub language is that you need to write in the Lowest Common Denominator of your team and if the entire team isn't comfortable in a specific language you'd better not use it.

The only exception to the above rule is if you separate your efforts in a very specific way, if instead of using the entire team to build project A, you use part of the team to build tools that help build projects like project A easily and the rest of the team uses the tools the other half created to actually build project A. In which case the tool building group can use more powerful languages without any adverse effects.
Its an instant rumour mill. Now what will TechCrunch do?
This post reminded me of Kopelman's "Anti-penny gap" http://redeye.firstround.com/2008/01/some-thoughts-o.html

Price signaling is very real. High price almost always signals quality. Just look at luxury industry and how they can sell $30 worth of goods & labor for $1000s of dollars.
Ok, I took it out. Turns out nothing later ever needs the pw anyway.
Mozilla's PR firm was Spark PR
This is almost as embarrassing as Kansas mandating that creationism be taught in biology classes.
Now, if only the composer could have created music without altering the original sounds by transposing them to different keys, it would have been more impressive.
Damnit! I shouldn't comment late at night.
I'm working on a Flash game myself, and it's open source too:
http://code.google.com/p/spacecreeps/

The first versions didn't do so hot, but I started a from-scratch rewrite a little over a week ago and it's shaping up into something really nice.
> You may not write any data to the drive or disassemble the drive.

What the heck?
It would great if client application had understanding of context rather than blindly performing layout or having fragile scripts which scrape content. Today, if you access an ecommerce website and retreive a page which describes one or more products then your browser only obtains HTML for layout. The number of products and the fields are not apparent to the software. If the content was explicit then you could do more. For example, you could have a client which could switch to product thumbnails. You could have clients or servers performing meaningful price comparisons on more products.

For event listings, information could be added to calendar software more easily. For social networking, contacts could be added more easily. The central idea with semantic web is that layout isn't the final use of information.
Microsoft needs Yahoo developers developers developers
Startup that Predicts Success of Other Startups
That's from last October. I don't think it was actually passed.
Ok, so they're trying to be like a hedge fund for startup companies.

With what data are they building their models?
Those are nice stats, and I do think we can get some interesting characteristics about our community. I thought it is quite powerful to point to paul, palish, sharpshoot, or pg, and say that they are the community, since they have the best points per post measure. They are nothing less than the best representatives of our community (with regards to posts, not comments).

I'd like to think that the factors you mentioned (traffic, time of the day, controversy of the post) iron out statistically (since all posts are affected by those, there is an argument to ignore their respective influence).

This initiative makes me wish it is only the beginning: I want some more stats! For example:

- It would be interesting to see what's the points per post (PPP) of the leaders, compared to the PPP for most of the others (I agree with you that in the dataset, the leader to user ratio is too high). Maybe one could have a plotted distribution of PPP's across all users.

- I know HN has 8000 uniques/day, what is the proportion of those that are posting? e.g. how many of those users with less than 5 posts?

- also interesting is the proportion of points between posts and comments, per user. Different profiles: some people discuss a lot, some people post a lot, as it was often repeated in discussions. But what's the proportion of those 2 groups?
I'm not sure I buy into this argument. Most non-techy people I know have no idea how much a Windows license costs.

I'm often asked whether a specific offer for a PC "is a good deal" - invariably this is something off eBay which comes without an OS. When I mention how much a Windows license will cost on top of that, I'm usually accused of lying. (until I prove it)

Roughly as many times, I've been consulted when people "can't find Word" on their brand-new PC. For some reason everyone seems to think it comes free with Windows.

The most frequent piece of computer-related advice I get asked, though, is what "good, free virus scanner" I recommend.

I know the human mind is irrational and backwards, but is it really that backwards?
Precisely. The 'correct' thing to do to strike a balance between freedom and preventing damage is to levy a tax to 'cancel out' the externality. If people really, really want their bottled water, they'll be free to buy it, but factored into that price will be the true costs.

That's the theory, anyway. Calculating those costs may not always be obvious.
Interesting. I post lots of things that I find obscure and don't expect others to upmod.

I think part of the reason that news.yc is interesting is that there are a number of non-overlapping interest areas within a tight niche. Think about that. Diversity within a narrow field. I like that.
This doesn't have anything to do with hacker news.
Well... Meaningful communication between members of families prone to domestic violence, certainly could be helpful.
From the article: "in the last three decades the percentage of jobs requiring at least some college has doubled".

About 10 years ago, an acquaintance and former teacher noted a trend of qualification inflation. For example, in the UK, you need qualifications in numeracy and literacy as a pre-requisite for refuse collection. The job itself doesn't require these skills, its just a really easy method to eliminate candidates. For other jobs, certification and qualifications provides butt covering for employers.

Where does trend go? You'll need a degree and five years of training to do any job from burger flipping upwards. I hope another trend makes this situation moot because it would be dystopian to live in a society with such over-specialism.
Look at that pile of uneaten dogfood!
Can someone with a login please copy the contents of the article?
It's true, that if it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.

But do worry. Because the people who make money off of any invention are rarely the inventors. It's the people who brought it successfully to market. Did Bill Gates invent anything, for example? It's hard to make acceptance curve, but once you do, you want to be in the driver's seat.
As a relatively newer member here, it would be interesting to know how these numbers came about over time; i.e, did the more prolific members start out with a bang, or did they gradually build up steam to reach where they are now?
"If it says we’ll fail, and it’s right, that’s something of a paradox"

It is a paradox only if you assume that the quality of the product makes or breaks a company (not to mention their "AI" could be right only accidentally, in this particular case). It is weird that they believe that, given that "their algorithm uses sophisticated modeling pertaining to how social capital and networks can affect an organization’s performance".

It's an entertaining idea, but I doubt how they got to score such a PR hit with no substance whatsoever.
Will hydrogen power laptops and mobile telephones be allowed on aeroplanes? Lithium ion batteries are problematic when they combust. The energy density of hydrogen or methanol could make this situation worse. If these gadgets aren't allowed on aeroplanes than jet-setting trend setters won't buy them.
See also Veblen Goods:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
Our venture assumes that spinning platters will be obsolete within three years.
Nice analysis. Does the complete data include timestamps on up/down votes? The ratio of up to down votes might show how controversial is a posting while the rate of rise/fall might show... whether the posting was submitted at an opportune time?

Or what about looking at voting habits? What's the average/min/max/etc up/down voting ratio?

If you showed to what degree showing more statistics, particularly about new postings or first-page postings would change behavior?
Maybe this is interesting idea: http://lemurcatta.org/
Both, probably. Both plastic and the cost of shipping scale roughly with the cost of petroleum.
besides the point, but graffiti=incompetence? really? I've seen some talented graffiti...
There is no rules when it comes to business. just guidelines.

For example: Friendster was one of the leading social networks back in the day. They dropped the ball and there were 20 other competitors willing to pick the ball up.