skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Adding features is pretty safe territory but there's frequently going to be a certain amount of backlash when you change something, even when you're trying to improve it. It's scary how outraged users can become really. Announcing changes in advance and giving the option to use the old version can reduce the number of death threats :-)
I must admit finding it hard to make the distinction you suggest.

Would the American Civil War be a big guy beating up on a little guy? After all, the North was ten times as populous, and many, many times as rich. Nobody on either side thought the war would last very long.

How about the Romans and the Germanic tribes? Nobody in their right mind thought those Barbarians could stand up against the full might of the Roman Empire very long.

Wars are fought until one side decides to stop fighting. This means that "big guy/little guy" wars and "outcome is uncertain" wars don't seem to be that different. In fact the determining factor would seem to be how easy it is for one side to quit. But how would you know how much it would take to make the other side stop fighting until it actually happens? From the history I've seen, when both sides are very intimate with each other's language and culture -- that's when some of the deadliest, nastiest conflicts take place.
most Americans do associate war with far-off, little-known lands.

Probably because we're not too good at geography, and we're a little isolated by two small bodies of water.

Also, since the US has been an aggressor in going to war, stopping the US , or at least slowing down the US war machine is probably a good idea
Reddit started out as a blatant copy of digg, which was 6 months old when reddit launched. I think that sort of invalidates large parts of this essay.

Some digg copy from Dec. 2004:
"What's Digg? Digg is a technology news website that combines social
bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do."

Reddit copy from August 2005:
"A source for what's new and popular on the web--customized for you. We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it. All of the content on reddit is from users who are rewarded for good submissions (and punished for bad ones) by their peers. You decide what appears on your front page and simultaneously, which submissions rise to fame or fall into obscurity."

And, yes, I realize there was nothing completely original about digg, the idea was originally done by kuro5hin, yadda, yadda, and I actually have plenty of respect for PG and the reddit guys. I'm just saying....
Interesting article.
thanks, I'll test it on FF 2 on windows. I need to add a IE stylesheet so I shall do some windows testing.
The font turned me off right away. Using a simple hand written font might look better and still get the point across. Also, the red on mint isn't so appealing. Maybe a graphite on mint, with darker green links for accent?
It'd probably be helpful if it worked _without_ javascript too.
Hacker FAQ
If they just predict every start-up to fail, statistically, they would be 90%+ accurate :P

Predicting the success of a start up is probably just as hard as predicting where the market is going to go tomorrow (if not harder). There are too many variables in play. I think this is just a PR stunt; it definitely created enough buzz!
yeah good point, red on green should never be seen :p

I have swapped out the red with a dark grey.

I have a look at some other fonts. I think I have one that might work.
it does. I made sure of it.
Acrobat Reader actually can present in full screen, but, you're right -- it isn't good enough.

PDF loses much of the presentation itself -- builds, transitions, embedded media, etc.
One can use it to solve homework problems.

A problem I gave my class last week: you are holding 4 cards, 9, 10,k,Q. You draw the 5'th card from the deck, and if you don't like it, you can discard it and draw another. Obviously, you want a Jack, to get an inside straight.

The probability monad lets you describe your choices "imperatively" using monads and do notation. I.e., if I draw a Jack, keep it (I have a straight), otherwise draw again.

Note: I'm assuming below that cards with index 1,2,3,4 are jacks,

import Probability
import Collection
import Prelude
import Monad

insideStraight deck tries= do (card, rem) <- (selectOne deck)
let straight = if (card < 4) then True else False in
if (tries == 1 || straight)
then return straight --If I got a straight, return True. If I have no tries left, return False.
else insideStraight rem1 (tries - 1) --If I can try again, and I don't have a straight, do so.

main = do putStrLn "With no discards:"
putStrLn (show (insideStraight [1 .. 48] 1))
putStrLn "With one card discarded: "
putStrLn (show (insideStraight [1 .. 48] 2))
Contrary to what I suspect was your intent, you aren't being clever. You're just reinforcing the point that every choice has consequences...some intended, some not. For instance, the net increase in CO2 from your "cycle to work" respiration would, I suspect, be less damaging than the total net consequences of building, maintaining and driving a car. It'd be cheaper, too. Eating more greens might well make you fart more, though that's less than certain, but it would surely be less than the methane produced by the beef cattle that less-healthy eaters consume so voluminously.

Perhaps with some expansion, your reply could have made a serious contribution. Instead, it comes off looking glib.
Google's products don't change much in terms of UI/features. They innovate more on the technology behind the scenes.
Thanks for the interesting feedback.

I don't know to what extent a difference it makes, because everything I see, I think is obvious (forgot the term for this): I think holistic and heuristical thinking is the de facto, and most obvious way of dealing with multidisciplinary problems; in this case, I believe this falls into the same category as the "wicked" problems you describe. It seems like everybody on this forum has a fair amount of exposure to psychology, such that many concepts that I learned in a formal setting are in fact common sense. I have no idea how true this is, but I try to avoid stating the obvious, so I generally keep quiet about it.

I still suspect the following would be nothing new to you, but it's a different route of thinking so I'll write anyway.

A problem that "cannot be clearly defined" and has "no clear answer" is generally solved heuristically. This is an area where hard-earned experience, and not necessarily genius, pays off. Warfare is a good example, because it involves not only logistics but also understanding the enemy's culture and psychology and estimating their intelligence. Heuristics come from efficient processing of declarative and episodic memory, which are, very obviously, the result of accumulated experiences across diverse fields.

So regarding how to best design a car, it is logical to think that an engineer would be better than an artist, because they know what is required to make a car work, but an engineer with an art background is better than one without, because they can efficiently (i.e. long-term memory retrieval) co-synthesize knowledge pertaining to design and construction. This must also be the reason why pg says "hackers who can design are dangerous."

Your points about forum dynamics follow the same ideas. A flat discussion, which interferes with thought organization, forces readers to synthesize information as a whole, which places a larger stress in keeping relevant information in memory. A threaded discussion, on the other hand, has less stress on memory, because certain steps can be stored as logical patterns that draw from existing memory.

A very simple thought experiment to illustrate this could be as follows. Imagine a threaded discussion with these messages: man. suitcase. taxi. airport. airplane. country. building. meeting.

Next, a flat discussion: man. window. smoke. lake. chocolate. tree. bulldozer.

Now paint a mental image out of the information from these two threads. The first follows a very logical progression, is easier to remember, and can be painted in a fairly predictable manner. The second one seems more disparate, requires more memorization, and the end result is harder to imagine, a la the "wicked problem."

Hope I'm not too far down a tangent... I guess the relevance to the diagram is, it doesn't matter what diagram or map you use; the goal is simply to get all the facts into everybody's heads simultaneously. A mind map could work. A list would work. A powerpoint. Or, based on the type of stimulus, a mixture of things (my interest).
100% Telecommute Programming Gigs
This company hires programmers to work "anywhere in North America" in a way that is conducive to doing work on the side, such as a startup. They are completely legit; check out the list of previous projects. To be hired, you have to complete their programming test, which is a fairly intense OO mini-project.
I have observed in multiple contexts that users generally don't like change.

There are probably several reasons for this:

* understanding change requires mental effort

* users have already evaluated your service once and don't want to keep reevaluating it

* users bring their physical world expectations online (e.g., imagine buying a sports car that is then transformed at some point into a family car because the manufacturer decided it would be a good idea)
The mass media promotes the "dumbing down" of America more than anyone else. As smart people increasingly get their information from smarter places, the "dumb" places get even dumber. They no longer have to cater to the more educated crowd, so they don't.
By "users", I don't necessarily mean early adopters. When you get significant traffic (or non-technical traffic), your user base will be much more reluctant to change.
I think that, at least during a startup's early-adopter stage, the userbase is comprised of exactly the people who thrive on change (especially change for the better), so even if your hypothesis is correct, you may have a window of opportunity to make some aggressive improvements.
Was this supposed to be news, or a press release for Kevin Riley?
It's strange that the Wired article is implying that these types of pickup workshops are a "crazy Japanese thing", when the reality is that this stuff has been happening in the States for 10 or 15 years now.
Another useful trick I've found is to automatically delay my email responses. Rather than replying right away, I purposely let email sit for 48 hours or so. If people get an instant response, they'll send more useless emails.

Of course, this doesn't apply in every case. If I get something that I know is important, and the person isn't wasting my time, I'll respond instantly.
I've managed programmers for 10 years, and what I've found is that money is often not the most important motivator. Good hackers are artists, and they want (1) freedom, and (2) appreciation. When they ask for more money, it's often really their spouse who wants it. Granted, that's a good reason, and many spouses play an important role in not letting their hackers be exploited.
Would you have read the whole thing if it was a long winded essay in paragraph form?

I've seem more and more blog posts where this twitter style is used and for certain situations, it's very effective.
pmarca, Venture Hacks, and Guy Kawasaki's blog are among my (many) favorites.
I get the e-mails from the NFIB and I subscribe to A VC.
Co-Working: like working from Starbucks, but better
This video discusses a new type of office space that is gaining momentum among hackers and entrepreneurs. "Co-working" is office space that you pay for like a gym membership.
News.YC, could it be made clearer that submission titles have been subject to change by editors?
Many submission titles are changed by editors (= mainly PG?). At least that's what happened to several of my own. I'm not complaining about this editing, it may well be helpful to enforce certain standards. And my most recent submission was ignored until an editor completely replaced the title. But, under these circumstances, shouldn't a user's submissions page contain some clarification, something like "submission titles may have undergone editorial change or replacement"?

Currently, casual visitors to a submissions page are misled into assuming that the submission titles have been produced by the user himself/herself. Even more so as it says "by <user>" below every submission.
If the pickup school teacher gives his students the courage to approach women (even if it is with a pre-packaged ice breaker), I think that's a significant step: they are initiating and finding that the encounter didn't kill them. And like anything in life, taking a class is just a start - it's up to the student to continue learning (by taking initiative and gaining experience). I think (assuming you are single) that approaching an attractive human of the opposite sex whomps public speaking on the hierarchy of fear or stress-inducing situations.
Ok I have changed the colours now. I am not sure about the font at the moment.
Just the other day I told someone I was a hacker. They were surprised that I was willing to admit to being a criminal. Even after explaining the difference between "hacker" and "cracker", they remained mildly suspicious. <G>
Interesting. Is there a general discussion area for News.YC? I have some ideas and suggestions but don't know where the proper forum is.
I just checked out your app, and think it's pretty cool. You have some great features (text and images can be moved around, opacity, etc.) and the interface for creating new presentations is pretty slick.

I know that I'm being pedantic, but it is still not good enough. Having done quite a few presentations I know how important looks are. And even though your app lets me view my presentation in full screen it still doesn't fill out the entire screen real estate. This is a showstopper for me. And most likely will be for anyone using presentation software professionally.

Maybe you should consider a small app that will show HTML in fullscreen that users can download and use when presenting.
I think that speaks to their creativity, keeping things simple for the user takes a lot of creativity. I can't speak to your experience, but for me anger about change comes from three sources:

1. The small but sometimes vocal group that hates all change.
2. People who don't need the extra features and who now have more work to do for the same results.
3. People who are using my programs a little differently than I intended, and whose functionality I broke.

With the sometimes exception of #1, if I'm honest with myself, these are all problems caused by my lack of creativity not my users dislike of it. Your experience may be entirely different.
There is a thread for feature requests, see link at bottom of main page. (But I thought my suggestion here wouldn't really be a "feature".)
It's a wild guess but I would have used COM access to the word.dll to convert it to a more reasonable format.

Again, a wild guess but that is how I would have done it, trying to reverse engineer formats as bloated as the office formats is generally not a good idea if avoidable.
How is this even news? Guy Kawasaki is the most outspoken Apple fan in the world. I just kind of took it for granted that he would buy all kinds of Apple junk.

To me, the article even had the opposite of the (probably intended) effect. Instead of thinking how cool and affordable an "Apple lifestyle" is, I just kind of winced at the idea of spending $5K on that stuff.
Why read Guy Kawasaki? Evangelized product that sold itself, string of failures since. This article boring Apple fanboyism.
Yah, as soon as I wrote it I wanted to start a brand "portable potable".
Even if that is the case, his point still stands because someone (the OSX developers) didn't care enough about performance.
Is it really a big deal? I feel that the spirit of this site is more about the targeted content and useful comments, than the cleverness of the submission title.

I could are less if any of my submissions were edited, especially if the editing made them more likely to be read.
I'm enjoying using news.ycombinator.com, but I fear it will eventually suffer the same fate as Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, etc. The problem on the internet is a lack of scarcity. I'm beginning to think the only way to really solve the problem is through submitter fees. Without fees, I fear it will turn into a self-promoting free-for-all.

Think about the problem in terms of email spam. If email cost $0.25 to send, the spam problem would be gone. If a submission to Digg cost $10, their spam problem would mostly go away.

When everything is free, it's just one big race for the bottom. I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.
ok this is odd, it works for me on windows using ff 2.

All I am doing is validating the form and returning true or false to submit the form.
"I always teach my students that sex comes first," he says. "Then you figure out whether the woman is worth marrying later."
Tried coLinux. Had to go back to VirtualBox. I'm not sure what the problem was, but running network-heavy apps in coLinux caused my wireless connection to drop out in the Windows host. Never had that problem before or since with other VM products.

Otherwise, there were no problems and I felt it was right answer to the problem. Why bother running a full-on emulator, when the kernel is open-source and can be modified to run as a process within another OS?
I was promised "advice [I'll] never get" but I think we've all been hearing about index funds for quite a while now. In fact, it's the current conventional wisdom. Buying index funds is probably tantamount to betting on the change in the GDP. The people who work in finance want nothing but incoming money, low fees or high fees, and .23 percent of a trillion dollars is still a pretty nice skim.

Well, the components of the S&P are publicly available: The most mathematically sound thing to do (if you have 200K or more) is to buy a sample (30 or more) stocks on the index through a broker, and your total costs will be about 300 dollars. The one-time fee will be 300 / 200K = 0.0015 = .15 percent. Why aren't they recommending this course of action? Index funds are good because they are "stupid" (because stupid is cheap)...but anybody can do "stupid".

There is wealth to be extracted from people who think they are clever (but aren't) and people who think they are dumb (and are). You can make very good money on the market (1 percent a day or more) by buying on the noise. But this depends on one thing: An upward trend, however small. That upward trend depends only on money flows.

Re: Betting on the GDP. Notice the close similitude between the American and Foreign trends:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=5y&s=VFINX&l=on&...

...with one rather frightening difference. Obviously, they are reacting to the same things, but one of them is looking unhealthy in a fundamental way.

My investment advice: Buy boxes of young, but good, wine. And cellar them. Only do this, however, if you don't like drinking wine.
"Antiword is a free MS Word reader for Linux and RISC OS. There are ports to FreeBSD, BeOS, OS/2, Mac OS X, Amiga, VMS, NetWare, Plan9, EPOC, Zaurus PDA, MorphOS, Tru64/OSF and DOS. Antiword converts the binary files from Word 2, 6, 7, 97, 2000, 2002 and 2003 to plain text and to PostScript."

- http://www.winfield.demon.nl/
"Technical people are motivated by interesting work. They will put up with abominable working conditions if they get to work on something that interests them. I’ve managed people who had to be sent home at night. But technical people without interesting work are very difficult to manage. Their active minds tend to get them into trouble." -- From Judy McKay, author of "Managing the Test People" (http://tinyurl.com/3a9m69)

What is interesting work? That determination is up to the hacker's mind.
If you have a relatively large userbase, I would be hesitant about changing too much too fast. I would set up a poll or discussion thread in your site's news blog to get a feel for how your suggested changes would be received. If they like it, go for it. If they don't, find out why not.

However, changing one thing at a time is a good suggestion. Adding features helps improve the usefulness of your site and allows you to appeal to a broader audience. And if the users hate your new addition, they will sure as hell let you know.
Observing just the length of this thread, my initial thought is that pg has executed quite an exceptional troll himself...
Yeah, that'll work too. The point is that you need to leverage someone else's work to do it. Focus on your core, find shortcuts for everything else.
I don't think it's such a big deal, and maybe I'm the only one, but I don't like it if people have every reason to believe I wrote something that I didn't write. For example, the title of my most recent submission now contains the term "reproductive output", and I hate that term because it somehow seems to associate people with factories. (This is not to say the term is incorrect, and anyway it's taken from the story header.) But such things are very subjective.
Well, as he asks for my excuse, why I still not use it ...

I did grow up in the MS World where your fingers are trained to use <ctrl-v> and <ctrl-c>. And certainly all the other keybindings which you learn when programming with VS for a decade. I tried switching a few times, but having to press 3 keys at once is probably the main reason which keeps me still away from emacs.

Does anyone know of some emacs scripts which put all the keybindings from VS into emacs? Including stuff like blockselection with alt+mouse? Serious, I'm mostly working on Unix these days, but I still miss the VS editor :-(
Nature rejects double-blind peer review - how corrupt is academia?
The same thing happens with just about any degree in any field. People with formal education tend to be fairly skilled. But there are always stand-outs who, though having not gone through the traditional education process, are amazing performers. These are the people we hear about and admire, but it's not what we recommend to our kids. :-)
It's interesting. When I'm in crunch mode, I'm not thinking about features at all. I'm just doing the same thing as I did before, only without so much goofing off (reading email, drinking, eating, etc) I separate that from "hacking" which I picture as taking a machete and flailing away at the code until it submits, no matter what state it is in. I have been known to hack with the best of 'em, but only for short periods, usually the last few hours around a drop.

But usually I'm always thinking of the structure of the code as I code, continuing the work I did with modeling (if I did any) as I think through what is important, what goes where, what are the important nouns and verbs of my intermediate language. I drop back out of design mode to pick up various pieces of functionality, then continue the work. I'm usually looking for the biggest headache first -- might as well suffer now rather than later. Usually the biggest headaches are the ones that have greatest impact on whether your strategies are correct or not -- whether caching that huge list is going to work real-time or whether a distributed linked-list is going to work. But then I always end up spending the same amount of time on such vexing stuff as "How did I get that box blue, anyway?" or "why is that off by one pixel?" or something like that. Gee, I love programming.
In 2007 Google Bought 19 companies, spending a little more than 4 billion dollars
Thanks for the feedback mixmax, I know our app is not perfect, and we're thinking what to do to improve it.

Thanks again.

Germán
Ropemacs - Very good auto-complete and automated refactoring of Python code in Emacs.