skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is: How do you trigger the IE7 compatibility mode? Microsoft proposed having new pages identify themselves as new with an "IE8" tag, and people freaked. The opposite answer -- having the old pages identify themselves with an "IE7" tag -- doesn't work because it requires someone to change all the old pages, and until that happens they're all broken, so the corporate users will refuse IE8 and stick with IE7 for another decade.

Having users press a button for IE7 mode whenever they see a broken page is just asking for trouble. Now you've equipped every Solitare-playing cube dweller in your company with a "break this page" toggle switch that needs to be constantly moved back and forth. The call volume to the IT department help desk just went up by an order of magnitude.

So you're stuck with stupid hacks like "enter IE7 compatibility node if the URL matches this regexp". Fragile, fragile, fragile. And what if you actually have the budget to slowly migrate your ancient intranet site into the modern world, one page at a time? How do you serve half your pages in IE7 and the other half in IE8 without a special tag to distinguish them?
I agree with what others are saying about usability, but it's great that you're making your idea a reality.

Keep up the good work!
The intention needs to be a lot clearer, also you could do with some javascript pop ups on your controls up in the corner as the alt info isn't fast enough.
It's for communication. Pretty much a fundamental need for the human animal.
Why good developers don't need a resume
A recession impacts venture capital in two main ways:

1) Reducing exit potential
2) Reducing available capital for new funds

The first is simple. In a recession, capital is more scarce. Cash on Balance Sheets shrink. This makes it harder to find buyers (as in acquisitions - think YouTube by Google). IPOs are also less successful because of depressed stock market performance. PE ratios generally decline, making these exits less attractive.

The second is more complicated. Since capital is more scarce, finding investors for new funds becomes more difficult. Venture capital (and all of private equity) is viewed as a risky asset class. In a recession, portfolio managers usually cut back on riskier investments, favoring safer investments, such as stocks and bonds.

However, VC funds are committed funds, meaning that once a fund starts, that money is there whenever it needs to be "called down." In this respect, recessions don't impact startup funding because the money has already been earmarked. Since the last two years have seen LOTS of money poured into VC with LOTS of additional funds created, I don't expect to see a significant slowdown over the next 1-2 years. If the recession lasts longer, or if exit opportunities change substantially, this may change.
Maybe if postings were limited to users with > 50 karma or something so it couldn't be gamed.
Sorry guys, didn't see that.
if you start listing jobs here, people will come for the jobs, possibly bringing the quality down.

Even worse, recruiters will spam us with thousands of lousy jobs, bringing the quality down even faster.
please send me one invite too. :) Thanks
ajbatac gmail
exactly zero dollars. if you tried to fix an exchange rate, you'd run into problems, because the supply of karma is infinite.
Investment tip: Never, ever put money in a fund with the word 'Gaussian' in it.
What is FriendFeed written in?
You put it in the configuration and expect the IT department to have it correctly configured for their site. When people try to access it from outside computers and it breaks you tell them how to put it in compatability mode. Ideal? Hardly, but standards compliance makes future versions of the browser so much easier and IE doesn't want to be the legacy intranet browser and keep losing ground to firefox on the mainstream internet.

Most likely these intranets keep IE7 on their computers and slowly migrate and phase out.

It's not like these sorts of things are alien to the entreprise world - they spend an enormous amount of time dealing with legacy incompabilities - but consumers don't want legacy browsers and that's what Microsoft are afraid of.
writes business plan
all the yahoo loyalist are concerned, because if microsoft takes over then the party of unlimited mails is also over !!! let us hope this doesn't happen ...
i learned how diversified hackers could be; and almost all of them are very interesting ; i learned that 'sharing is giving' and u gain so much by sharing n giving - it is truly a knowledge hub !!!
because developers are like the brain of the IT DNA - so a good developer can just shine by showing the portfolio of his/her skills and projects.
i like the first name better. but use both is
melb, aus
www.google.com/bookmarks
the arrival of LOLbots is inevitable.
What's Your Startup's Virality Coefficient?
Too late:

http://lolbots.com/

(went there to check if the domain's still available)
Same goes for RescueTime - once we start hiring (soon?) I'm sure I won't bother reading resumes anyway. I never have, really. They're generally boring, bloated, uninteresting piles of hackitude that people use to get past recruiter/screeners. I generally 1) google the person 2) ask them what they did that they're most proud of, and 3) a bunch of other stuff that depends on the person/job. I also prefer people I've worked with before, or who have come highly recommended from trusted friends.
Depends on why you want to blog. If you are in the corporate world, and are trying to market yourself in the job market, not sure if a blog is essential. But if you are an entrepreneur and working on a startup, it is absolutely essential. Its the voice of your company and helps you connect with your community. We're just launching now, but have build a great community over the past few months just by starting our company blog early.

Either way, if you enjoy writing, just do it!
Consider for a moment that longer text is not necessarily better. The size limitation is by no means an implementation detail - it was designed in.

Longer text is better for some writers - they don't have to work to fit in their message. But it's better for all readers - they can come read their twitters knowing no single entry will swamp it.
How to Innovate Right Now
very cool fellas, and it also parlayed into a sweet shout-out for Weebly founder David Rusenko. YC power!
Idea: Karma exchange
I think he's talking about jobs people actually have to kill the incumbent to gain the title. Like Santa Claus or those guys in Stargate.
I see your point about money mitigating certain risks, however, people engage in risky behavior all the time in order to gain some joy. Skiing, skydiving, and if you want to get closer to home, driving a car are all risky behaviors. The point of the story to me at least is that the fishermen made the very same value vs. risk judgments a businessman might make and decided that the risk of his lifestyle was worth the reward of being able to enjoy his family and friends fully right at that very moment, rather than in some distant hopeful future. Both are fully valid ways of looking at the world but the two men simply made different calls based on what was most important to them.
stammy, you used to just IM me! what happened? ;)
even better, limit the ability for the job postings to even be viewed to only people with X karma. that would keep both the gig postings and respondents to people within the community.
(i've seen it done elsewhere with reasonable success)
In a nutshell, banks work like this: People give them money to hold by putting it into checking/savings accounts. Banks then turn around and lend that money to others via loans. Sometimes they use that money to invest for themselves.

A bank’s primary asset is trust. For a bank to work, the consumers must believe that their money is safe with their bank. Otherwise, they will not give their own money to the bank for safekeeping, and the bank would have no money to lend to others or invest. The irony is that banks cannot possibly have the cash on hand to give back to all their customers at once. But, as long as people believe in the bank, and keep their money in the bank, the bank stays afloat.

The problem that we're having now, is that certain banks that lent out a lot of customer’s money in bad mortgages. So, with as many foreclosures that we’ve had, banks have lost a lot of money, and people lose trust in their banks. When people lose trust in a bank, they withdraw their money, creating a “run on the bank” just like in It’s a Wonderful Life. This is what happened to Bair.

The big fear is fear itself. Worst case scenario is that the entire nation would have a loss of trust in the entire banking system. This could cause a run on the banking system, and lead to a chain reaction of banks imploding. This is what happened during the Great Depression.

That’s why the Fed stepped in, and said that they would cover Bair’s bad debts to avoid a big bank’s collapse. It sucks, because the rest of the country is on the hook for Bair’s losses. And, the US dollar is gets weaker when the government prints money to cover bad debts. But, it beats a chain reaction of banks imploding.
The biggest potential impact on the taxpayer in the extreme short term won't have as much to do with the complete truth of the situation as it will with how the public and the markets interpret the move.
At the risk of interjecting fiction into a business discussion.

This whole thing 'karma vs cash' reminds me of the intersection between the way Cory Doctorow describes the 'Whuffie' reputation based currency in 'Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom' and the way the the protagonist of Charlie Stross' 'Accelerando' makes his living in the first chapter or so of the book.
When you see the one textbox on the twitter page, the 140-character limit, one's first reaction is to think twitter is something trivial. Resist this tempting line of thought. Twitter isn't trivial. It is status messages, yes, just like IM. However:

a) Past statuses get archived. Each of them gets a permalink. You get RSS on them. There's a huge difference between just seeing what someone's doing right now, and being able to see a concise summary of their day or days laid out before you.

b) You can access it via mobile phones.

c) It is a social network. You can discover interesting people by clicking around.

d) You can follow others. This one is so huge I'm certain I still haven't grasped all of its implications. Twitter is a social network built on a single simple one-way connection, and already there's more value flowing through it than through facebook.

When I go to facebook I get spammed and poked and bitten and humped and god knows what else. Facebook is made for senders. When I go to twitter I can get a sense of what my close friends and family are up to, no matter where on earth they are, so that when I do open up my IM window to chat with them I don't have to start with the tedious "how was your day?" I have prebuilt objects to begin a conversation with. Twitter is built for recipients.
Oxford:  Digital Piracy Benefits Affected Companies
again, you can't do this. it wouldn't work because karma is infinite. the reason a Euro or USD has value is because there is a limited supply of them.

if you did fix an exchange rate of karma to USD or whatever currency, you and a friend could just upmod each other's comments to get free money.
I could have used some MUD Rehab back in the late eighties!!! :)
You already have 7-8 precent unemployment and probably had it back in 2002. The reason you don't know this is because of the very specific US way of counting unemployment: someone who has not "actively" looked for work in the last 4 weeks is not counted.

This is the reason countries in Europe tend to report higher unemployment than the United States does. Look to payrolls reports and the percentage of the population "working" for a better sense of the job market.
When You Listen to Fools, the Mob Rules
Okay, I am honestly getting fed up with more and more people trying to become WOM experts. Before you know it, WOM will become the new SEO because we all think it's something we can slap on like a plastic goldpainted badge and everyone will somehow take us as if we have more profundity than we deserve.

Just because it's called viral marketing doesn't mean it's truly viral. Just because you upload it to YouTube and get 200 viewers doesn't make it viral. Just because you do all the same things other true viral videos do, and make use of social content, doesn't make it viral. Especially if you only get 2 page views.

Leeroy Jenkins, 2girls1cup, THOSE were viral because they shook the entire Internet cage, and they didn't run around screaming "OMG I'M VIRAL OMG I'M VIRAL PAY ATTENTION TO ME". That kind of mentality doesn't bode well, it hasn't since grade school. Calling your product marketing campaign viral and then SHOVING it in the faces of others by calling it viral takes away from the true essence of social media if what you produce comes up short, or doesn't come up at all. The thought begins to ruminate "Is this really all the web has to offer? Sad advertisements that try to appeal to me simply because it's an advertisement on YouTube? Wow I need to get something better" and we all lose. Nobody wins.
Love number six about using down time at work to get smarter about useful things. The nice thing is that when you are in the media or marketing biz, there's not much you couldn't make a case for wanting/needing to know for your day job anyway.
Ask YC: Dynamic systems (text)books recommendation?
I've gotten a huge curiosity spark by the wikipedia articles on dynamic systems and chaos theory:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_systems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

I'm finishing up undergrad degrees in Math and CS, so I have a very basic understanding of algorithms as well as differential equations. Are there "standard textbooks" in the fields (equivalents of Rudin for Analysis or Russel/Norvig for AI)? Are there any interesting more pop-oriented books you can recommend?

I came on the subjects from robotics and cognitive science, so this is the kind of research I'm trying to understand:

http://www.cs.uvm.edu/~jbongard/publications.html
http://bdc.brain.riken.go.jp/~tani/projects.htm
If you have a problem to solve, check and see if nature has solved it first :-)

Also I have to say it but...Grey Goo anyone?
To be honest, I'm quite tired of all this "ugh, this is so reddit!" I wish people would discuss the (de)merits of comments in their own terms.
Is there something so wrong with showing people how they, too, can embark upon the path to "live there"? He said, "Great jobs, world class jobs, jobs people kill for... those jobs don't get filled by people emailing in resumes. Ever."

Clearly, he's trying to give people the right advice, the advice that can get them the same kind of job satisfaction that he has.
I watched Noah Glass respond to this at a panel with, "I want to know what my mother is up to. But that doesn't mean I want to talk to her right now."

That sentence is phrased for maximum humour, but with a kernel of deep insight:

a) If your mom was in the same room as you you would talk far more often with her than you do now. The easier you make something the more frequently it will happen. The more context y'all share about each other the more often y'all will talk to each other. And it's super hard to share context when you're far away from -- and out of sync with -- each other.

b) When you're face to face a lot of time you say things to each other where the only response is a grunt. That doesn't seem to be appropriate in IM or over the phone. The result: we're more careful what we say over the phone or IM. But if you can stop self-selecting what seems worth talking about you can find far more interesting conversation.

c) Just like not everything deserves a response, not everything deserves a response right now. If I know what is going on with my mother I'll have better conversation when I do talk to her. And it's better to lay the groundwork for it now, before we start talking.

d) We've had online communication for 10 years now, and it hasn't really cannibalized real-world interactions for the vast majority of us. What it has done is enriched and complemented them. In this case, twitter doesn't replace conversation, but it allows me to sidestep the tedious initial "how was your day, dear?" segways and head straight for the most juicy objects of conversation from somebody's timeline.

Conversation happens off twitter, but benefits from being rooted in it. This isn't purely synchronous IM or phone, nor is it purely asynchronous email. It's just a more organic way to manage conversation.
I think monetary transactions should stay out of hacker news because money attracts a crowd that is less than desirable and it is hard to keep them out.

Also, I don't think opening it up for help is a good idea either. The only kind of help that I would care about is high level design or algorithm/memory/time efficiency help. However, the only help most people ask for is "my code doesn't run" help. If there was a way to effectively minimize this, then maybe...
I'm willing to bet that it was literally and deliberately modeled after a large dog. Engineers borrow design from nature all the time because its much simpler than starting from scratch. Why reinvent walking when dogs already do it so well?
That's certainly what I took away from it. I think some commenters here are focusing too much on the "don't make a resume" instead of focusing on the "do something that distinguishes you from the rest".
Robots on the battlefield doesn't spook me at all. It seems to me to be an improvement over sending people to risk their lives.
The Money Masters is a good watch if you have time http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-515319560256183936&#...
I'd say if you want to put the effort in to present yourself professionally, form coherent well thought-out posts and keep at it on a regular basis then it's a winner. I find having a anonymous blog on some social networking site where I can rant if I feel like it is nice too, of course if you were to get ridiculously famous somebody might figure it out :-)
i am fully aware of what it means, which i think is obvious from what i wrote.what i was trying to communicate was that it was a step backwards for most people in most ways which makes it misleading to speak of fitness.of course you can argue that societies takes the place of organisms in this case but i think the term would be misleading even then, since it happened quite circumstantial
I also did some research on that and found out as follow:

- there are mainly 2 implementations: CPython and Jython, but i guess i will follow CPython...

- for serial comm: i found this page. http://pyserial.sourceforge.net/

- I still don't know which one is good GUI module (easy and nice API)

...funny that i am the only one answering my own question.. :o)
DARPA was the original ycombinator!
Python is my guess?

http://friendfeed.com/about/jobs
Only if you define news as what they dominate. Digg for example isn't controlled by a big media company (yet).
Thats exactly the point of the post actually. You cant make a product go viral. You can only build a product that is instrinsically viral because people are passionate about spreading the message. Dropping the viral marketing budget in favor of building something people want is a lot better use of $$$ in my opinion.
Yup, Python and Javascript primarily. We're all fairly pragmatic and will use whatever works though. The indexing engine is Lucene, which is of course written in Java. There's also a little bit of c++ around, but we try to minimize that.
/Agree.

I have always disliked the term "Viral Marketing" since it is simply Adspeak for the mechanism by which people discovered useful knowledge before there where any ad agencies around at all.

Sure, the Internet has compressed the time period that this happens in and has allowed for the phenomenon (hate to even call it that) to be easily tracked with the sorts of numbers agency guys and businessmen, live and die by but in the end the true genius of "Viral" Marketing is that by giving it that name Agencies have packaged something people have done for thousands of years and turned it into a product to sell.

Does it work? Sure. But come on guys, you are MARKETING people...couldn't you have at least named it something more..Positive sounding?
How to make reputation markets work
Motivation

This is the post-scarcity economy. Right now. Except that brain cycles are still scarce
Information abounds. Attention does not. And who do we pay attention to when everyone is giving information for free?
I remember thinking that SMS seemed kind of dumb. If I have a cell phone, and the person I'm messaging has a cell phone, why wouldn't I just make a phone call? Now I probably SMS more than I call...
Ducks to dodge the firestorm
I'm not sure what level of sarcasm you're aiming for, but Einstein was famous for not wearing socks.
I will offer 703 karma (plus whatever anyone will upvote this comment with) for another rails developer for RescueTime. I also cook breakfast for the entire team every day!
This really has enormous implications over a lot of fields, not just military. I can see this technology being used in prosthetics, in home-care (walking bots), and all over the service industry.

The first thing I thought when I saw this video was "what's the stock symbol for this company?".
I think microblogging as a concept has some merit. Everyone forms thoughts differently and for some, Twitter just works.

I think when social aggregations catch on more people will be more free to choose whatever medium of expression they choose and be assured that they are communicating with the people they want to communicate with.In fact, I really see a need for the "Sharers" if you will to be able to create their own outbound social feeds that aggregate the many forms of self-expression a single person may want to partake in.
Heck, I'd just settle for one ID that works EVERYPLACE.

But back to the Karma...Yeah that would be neat.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=132056
Sure would change the face of the site. Personally, I enjoy the focused nature of the discussion here.
Unlike P2P, which selects random peers to share with [...]

This is misleading. BitTorrent, for example, starts with a random set of peers, but then prefers peers that deliver better bandwidth (that's what "tit for tat" is all about). P4P isn't selecting peers that perform better at all, it's selecting peers that cost Verizon less. Overall bandwidth performance is the only relevant metric here -- hops are more about Verizon's costs than your bandwidth.

The touted "performance boosts of 200 percent on average and increases of up to 600 percent in some cases" occurred because peers were selected from within Verizon's high-speed Fios network (see this write-up for more details: http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9893915-7.html?tag=nefd.top). That's selecting faster peers a priori in a way that only works if you happen to be a customer of a higher-speed service. (If you could identify Fios peers, it would boost performance similarly for any peer on any ISPs to prefer them, regardless of how far away they are.) Customers of lower-speed services would find their P4P programs preferring slower-than-average peers, and the average customer would find her P4P programs preferring average peers.

Figuring out the effects on the network overall is complicated, but so far Verizon hasn't released any information about that.
Negative line. Haha, thats' awesome.
I applaud you.
your comment is far too long to post on twitter.
Blogging for mortals is to show who you are, how you think. When someone is interested in you (interviewer), they will read backwards through your past blog posts until they get bored. That's it. Post every month or so when you have something interesting to say.
my response: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=79694