skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> right now I don't think any mainstream tools assume markup is semantic.

Depends on what you're talking about; anything that uses microformats does, for example.

Tools generally can't assume that tables are semantic, because they've been so heavily abused. That's not going to change though. Perhaps the best solution is a <yes-this-is-really-a-table> element.

> tables aren't much moreso than divs.

Would you say that a table in a relational database isn't much more semantic than a string of bytes?
Seriously, what self-promotion?
I wonder if that is a marketing scam, but it is interesting in that sense - nicely done. Provocative, digg-friendly title, and mention some supposedly good books in passing (routed through e-junkie - maybe they pay bloggers?).
I was thinking that too. I can't think of any cases recently where I've engaged in relentless self-promotion.

I mean, I write essays, and since I believe the things I say in them, I am in a technical sense writing things that promote my own ideas, and thus me. But that's true of anyone who writes.

He can't have meant anything so complicated. Here's my theory of what he meant, based on his use of Matz as an example: relentlessly skipping the self-effacing remarks that most people surround their ideas with to help make the medicine go down.

If that's what he means, he's right. I don't do it out of arrogance, though. I skip that kind of stuff partly because it seems too much like a deliberate trick, and partly because it makes sentences longer than they need to be.
Wait, I'm confused. What's the point of this post? A meta-discussion about fallout from unmet expectations compared to koolaid-drinking trends? Don't you people have stuff to do?
You have to have a MySpace account before signing up.

This has caused me to break a promise to myself that I would prefer to be dragged apart by wild horses before having a dreaded MySpace account.

There is just too much money & exposure to loose by not signing up, I now have a MySpace account.
Click the image then full view in flickr.

I laugh at any movie that tries to show what hacking is. "Just give me one more minute! That's all I need to hack the mainframe."
I was actually quoting what several people have said, which perhaps is a description of their perception and not of reality.

I will edit the post, a clarification would strengthen the argument, thanks.
That would be very cool... I've read that scanning regular barcodes with a cameraphone is difficult, but I believe there are some people making headway with it.

If it were music, I'd rather just make a call to a number, have it listen to whatever song is in the background, and then download it for me.

Fred Wilson has talked about txt based commerce a bit as well - http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/01/texting-in-purc.html
25 points is when you get downmod

Some people have written external searches for news.yc, but google on site:ycombinator.com is mostly the way to go. I figured PG would write a search for news.yc before the release of Arc, but he didn't, so we'll get an internal news.yc eventually or never.
Titles phrased as questions might as well end with "No." As in "...richer than most people? No."
You weren't around last time applications opened for YC, were you? ;) The entire site seems to sort of shut down. Submissions drop off, commenting becomes practically non existent. The silence is very surreal.
Developers: Reuters Has $5000 With Your Name On It
I think the point of the article is to say, "You can't buy Apple's great software without paying for Apple's great hardware, but you can purchase Apple's great hardware, and still put someone else's software in there. Therefor, Apple is primarily a hardware company."

I would say instead, that Apple is a device company. Even though you can purchase Apple's hardware, it comes bundled with their software, no matter what, and if you want to purchase their software, you can only put it on their hardware.

The only device which you can put someone else's software on (disregarding linux on the ipod) is MS Windows on a Macintosh. You can't (with Apple's approval) put windows on Apple TV, iPods, or, the iPhone.

Apple is about the complete package. They prefer to design their own hardware, build their own software for their hardware, and build there own applications for their own OS.

The moral of the story: Apple, makes phenomenal products, does not play well with others.
At first it seemed like S3/EC2 was a way for Amazon to use their spare capacity and CPU cycles by renting overhead out. But now, that supposed sliver is a slice > 50%? That's impressive.
Japan's best sellers go cellular
I have a suggestion on color matching problems from design to implementation. I have asked the designers at my employer to mark in the mockups the hex color values for all elements in the design. This is a small extra step on their part that settles disputes before they start. They also mark font sizes and line-height (they call it leading I think) where needed.
I think the point he was trying to make is that the average American is so far ahead, financially, of people in third world countries that we take for granted the availability of money and credit. There are people starving to death over there because they don't have the money or means to feed themselves. They can't get jobs because there aren't any companies. People who might want to own a company can't do that because there is no one to lend them the capital to get started. They're in an impossible situation that's difficult for us to understand because we're so far removed from it.

So, when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, some company comes along and says to all of these people, "Hey everyone, we'll loan you the money you need to start a business so you can live", the people are offered an opportunity to change their lives to such an extreme degree that they're willing to do whatever it takes to get the money and pay it back. Here, in the Western world, if you start a business, fail, and lose half a million dollars, you can brush it off and try again with a different idea and investor. Granted, it might take you a while to find someone else who is willing to put the capital up, but you can. Over there, they can't. They have only one shot, so they take it and do the absolute best they can because it is an opportunity that will only come once.

With that in mind, nearly every loan in the Western world can be taken with a ho-hum attitude becuase the opportunity will present itself again. That just isn't the case for those people.
What has more impact on the adoption of technologies: its technical merits or social behaviour?
The point of the post is to point out some basic psychology and human nature. And I think it is quite accurate too.

Note that PG and DHH could just as easily have been anyone else, the article just uses them as examples to prove a point.

And frankly I think that a lot of readers of YC news could do good with some insight into psychology and what makes people tick. It is a large part of a startups success.

(note: I don't intend to offend anyone, it is simply humble advice which you may of course ignore at your own discretion)
I'd like to think it's a good combination of both. New technology with technical merit arrives, smart people latch on and build things with it, improving the knowledge base and library depth. Then, more people flock on as they follow the leaders.
I guess I can see that. I'm just put off a bit by the way it's worded. I suppose that's the point, though.
UPenn Math Professor: Fractions should be scrapped
wow this is very surprising and impressive.

Does anyone have a list of the biggest AWS users?
Who are you talking about when you say "we"? I like Steve Jobs. As well as Woz.
I disagree with your metric for measuring quality -- all one has to do is look at reddit or digg to see that it fails. Of course, quality is in the eye of the beholder. I'm sure there are plenty of things who think that reddit or digg are the highest quality news sites out there.

Hmm... That's an interesting question. How do we actually measure quality?
There are so many different kinds of entrepreneurs, and so many different types of new enterprises (restaurants, used car dealerships, high-tech startups, law firms) that statistics about the "average entrepreneur" aren't very much use to anybody.

It's like trying to decide whether plumbing is a good occupation by looking at the average salary of jobs starting with P.
http://twitter.com/talesofdismay

Similarly, this guys is writing a novel via twitter, 140 chars at a time.
They started digg to get rid of all of the idiotic comments.
I don't get his point. If you're an artist and not a developer, just submit your PSD to a service like psd2html.com, and bada bing bada boom you've got yourself xhtml 1.0 transitional, CSS based design, etc. If you're a developer, you're usually better off hiring some nice design company...unless of course you're skilled enough to handle both design and code? In which case...you'd probably know all this 8 tips he gives?

And if you don't know these general ideas, why not just hire someone? Learning design takes a LOT of time, more time than most math/science/computer oriented coders are willing to spend simply on artsy design.
How to get a meeting?
Fed Cuts Rates Half Point to 3%
we are angry with Paul for daring to elbow us aside on his climb up the ladder

Elbowing? Ladder-climbing? Good grief. This is the sort of crap that makes me happy not to be any kind of celebrity.

The only statement here that seems accurate to me is that many people are motivated by envy. Even "Schadenfreude" is the wrong term to use; releasing Arc is hardly any kind of misfortune. And I don't see what Paul Graham and David Hansson have in common, other than that they get mentioned in contentless techfan wordfluff.
Tips for Personal Branding in the Digital Age
Its hard if not impossible to describe decimals to a new math student without using any fraction terminology.

But ya, maybe fraction arithmetic by hand is a little outdated.
Broken Links: There are many older links in the comments in the form of http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=<num>; which returns an error (like the many comments on this page).

Those old links really should be transparently re-mapped to /item?id=<num> instead.
Government organization (social insurance) in Saudi Arabia and developing a startup part time. Hope to make the jump some time soon.
I have a friend who was suspended from high-school for (indirectly) refusing to do a word puzzle. His stated reason is that he doesn't like word puzzles. When he was asked to leave the room for failing to follow instructions, he refused. The punishments escalated and he refused each one on the basis that it was overblown punishment for refusing to do a word puzzle. Eventually he reluctantly agreed to a week's suspension because the only worse punishment available was expulsion.

He still carps on about being suspended for a week for refusing to do a word puzzle.
There were 4 rooms for my first C++ class at uni: 3 with brand new Pentium II's and 1 with the old (and slow) 486's. No wonder, nobody wanted to be in that latter room for the exam at the end of the semester. So the teacher had to randomly dispatch people in those 4 rooms.

Funny surprise: the results from the 486's room were slightly better (than the results in other rooms). Hypotheses: people in the 486's room were thinking twice before launching the slow compilation (leading to less compilation errors), as opposed to launching it often in other rooms (with probably more compilation errors). Bottom line: increasing the focus reduces waste of time.
Why charge so little? Anything so cheap might as well be free.
We are extremely satisfied with EC2/S3 for our startup. The service has saved us a great deal of time we would otherwise have had to spend on the hardware side.
> contentless techfan wordfluff

A very competitive segment of the marketplace of hot air.
Fun story, but I wonder if they'll be renaming the "buggers" to make the game a tad less homophobic.
I agree with you, for me the number of points a thread has is just a measure of how many people in our community think it's an interesting topic.
About the quality of the thread, well, as you said, quality is in the eye of the beholder, for example, the thread that pg is showing as an example, (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=106893) is a funny and interesting one for me.

How we actually measure quality?... Hmmm, that would make a great startup right?
2008 Web Based Startup Trends
A friend recently told me the key is a Casino on the Moon!

No one will ever pay enough for space tourism unless it becomes a destination like Vegas.
I only comment when I have something useful to say. I really don't like posting nonsensical bullcrap.
Yes and thanks for taking the time to write this...
The end of the article is more enlightening though.

"Wealthy individuals with lower ability can start new businesses because they are less likely to face the disciplining effect of external finance."

The author also writes that those same correlations occur in business school and other upper tier schools, which lend themselves to perceptions of high achievement.

At no time however have capital costs been low like in the software industry, so perhaps the real key is to encourage more of the low income to hack away :)
Arc Cross Reference Wiki
Stranded at the airport? Don't forget Rule 240
To understand Arc fully, I set up an unofficial wiki site for Arc documentation.

(Maybe I should post this in Arc forum but I don't have access yet).
Autonet Mobile: Your Own Personal Hotspot, Everywhere You Go
The "high-level CPU" challenge
PG: Clarification about Character Sets
I'm going to assume this service is faster than a regular IM Send File. If not, I don't know why I pay to use it beyond my free IM or the free alternatives like DropSend or Dreamhost Files Forever, among many many others.
From reading this, I conclude that Lisp has MAJOR potential for developing big games in a quick and smart way. You'd develop and debug your game from within itself (REPL access in-game, restart support, etc), and then to ship it you'd make a compiler that compiles down to the proper runtime environment (C?) (so that you don't have to worry about lisp compatibility for the gamers and the garbage collector ruining the experience once in a while).

It's a major undertaking, but the potential payoff is HUGE!

DISCLAIMER: I don't know what I'm talking about (games development).
RSS feed items don't have a link that takes directly to the comment page. I am too lazy to go to the main page, search for the entry and post a comment.
Lisp was actually used for game development in the Crash Bandicoot games, and in other games by the same company. Later the company was bought and Lisp stopped being used afaik.
Nothing, in and of itself. Just as there is nothing wrong with eating an ice cream, in and of itself.

But if you get into the habit of eating ice cream all the time, if you start eating more and more ice cream to the point where you are neglecting normal food, you will end up with a nutrition imbalance which will result in decreased mental ability, decreased ability to concentrate for long periods of time, and oh yeah you will get fat, which most people consider to be a bad thing.
Try this feed I hacked up: http://feeds.re.inklesspen.com/newsyc
Cute, bizarre, clever. Good.
I've never even heard of that one. Very odd. Did they have a lot of action?
Release early and release often.

Anyhing that is released in a version 1.0 (which I think arc isn't even) will have flaws and shortcomings. The value of the feedback by far exceeds the cost of having users look at a product that isn't flawless.

This is especially true for something as complicated as a programming language.
It works even there. Entertainment is as much science as any other business. Even the most popular songs around are more or less scientifically crafted.
I should say many of. Rock and maybe country are pretty much the only organic forms of music you'll find on FM radio these days.
I am not a scheme/lisp expert by any means.

But from following the discussion on reddit, it seems that the most biting criticism of Arc are not related to unicode or w3c specs, but that Arc doesn't have any enhancements over scheme besides shortening some keywords.

Can someone with more knowledge than me weigh in on what Arc gives us that scheme doesn't?
i'd rather have a movie :-\
no worries, EMC will take care of them.
I think Steve and Apple is a horrible comparison here.
Apple's not a hardware company. Apple is, primarily, a software company. They just make money on hardware.

Steve Jobs said in a keynote recently (quoting Alan Kay), "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." That is, essentially, Apple's philosophy.
I think its more like going back to the initial spirit of Scheme and making it right: "Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary."

So, criticizing lack of features is meaningless to Arc. Valid criticism may be to find weaknesses and restrictions.
A lot of your essays praise "hackers" relentlessly, with the understanding that you are talking largely about yourself and your circle.
An official implementation.
The problem I have is that with all of the great things to read about, I forget about going back to the comments and leave my thoughts about it. :-P
too much hype was build around vmware. it's greate for some uses like building test servers and few other things. I would never setup linux server as virtual servers. unless i have cheap hosting company and wanted to sell private servers for $2 :)
Your comment is tea.
it's funny most people didn't seek perfomance charts than support of Unicode, but this due to the general nature of the audience here in Hacker News, who are mostly web application developers, therefore one of their priorities is multi-language support, so no need to blame anyone.

One more reason Arc is not for everyone is due to its functional syntax.
I think the challenge would be how to make functional syntax accesible to the masses. Arc seems to be one step forward, although functional programming will never be for everyone.
when I was there few months ago, most of the individual borrowers were apparently listed by just a few none profit organizations. it made it look fake. So you would see similar borrowers from few particular regions. I guess it really isn't micro lending when an organization puts up a list of who would benefit. that's still ok. just a sense of false advertising i think. I am loosing some trust in them and something just doesn't feel right. maybe I am wrong but I hope someone comes up with a better system or other types. micro lending is great system indeed.
And herein lies the grudge.

by praising hackers to the point of being demi-gods capable of feats that mere mortals can only dream of you put yourself (and all hackers) on a piedestal. As the parent states this will de facto also include yourself.

most people, being rather small-minded, don't like someone on a piedestal and naturally want to bring them down.

It is very hard to avoid if you are (semi)famous. Especially so if you are also smart.

Tragic but true.
Incidentally, I attended a VMWare info session earlier today. Surprised no one in the audience mentioned it.
You can use your news.yc login/pass in the Arc forum.
"Bionic" Contact Lens May Create Tiny Personal Displays
Sprout: The Online WYSIWYG Editor for Flash
This seems like a generalization of Warnock's Dilemma (paraphrased, "if a forum post has no replies, it cannot be determined whether it is because it is so smart and concise that it cannot be enhanced, or because it is too stupid to warrant comment").

It's an information problem. We can determine from comment contents what about an article warranted feedback, but we cannot determine anything from the lack of comment (i.e. the one that never gets posted).
This is going to introduce a whole new generation of kids to the Space Invaders strategy.

...though "Shoot through your own fortresses" now becomes "Shoot through your own legs."
If I really wanted to procrastinate, I would find all the blog posts complaining about lack of unicode, and count how many times a non-ASCII character was used.
Submissions without comments just aren't remarkable.
That's a better way of putting it. :)
VC Blog List
Taking Twitter Seriously
I was just recently casting around wondering where the heck something-like-Access was on the web and couldn't believe there was so little available. Looks neat, looking forward to trying it out.
The increase in people who think such links are cool to submit and vote up is the most direct sign of declining quality. This site has switched from startup news to meta discussion about itself.
This phenomena is mentioned in The Mythical Man Month. An interactive debug session is three times more productive than batch submissions. However, when access to computational power becomes too easy, people fiddle aimlessly without a directed plan.
Can free daily newspapers succeed in America?
What is so bad about suspension? He would have more time to do something that is fun when he is not in school.
The Economist's take on OLPC v. Intel
If students spend less time on fractions, long division and so on then presumably they will have more time for something else. If I had to offer a suggestion it would be something that still involves fractions in an applied setting, like basic ideas of probability and statistics.
Yeah, Arc is explicitly version zero.
"Although the Classmate costs $285, it includes a branded Intel chip and Microsoft software, both of which the XO lacks."

ish.
I know. The problem is that I forgot news.yc pass. (I can still post because of cookie) Asking pg to reset the pass of both.
I have a friend who's 22 of karma and can downmod, so there must be something else...
i wish Apple was strictly a hardware company. they produce absolutely brilliantly engineered devices, it's a shame that they go to such extreme lengths to prevent people from putting their own software on them.
College applications ask if you were ever suspended from school.
Seems like some languages are getting the point. While looking for a resource about Unicode support, I saw promising things as well as inauspicious. Seems like multibyte character support would be a good thing to catalog for programming languages (specs as well as implementations)
I think many people mistakenly thought Arc was supposed to be some new kind of framework like Ruby on Rails. I'll bet few of them read the stuff over at http://paulgraham.com/arc.html ahead of time.

I wonder how many people just jumped to the download announcement compared to the number who read the Arc essays.
Totally social behavior (out of those 2). History shows technical merits ALWAYS lose out. Its almost a law, I have no idea why.
"The Fortune At The Bottom Of The Pyramid" is excellent too:
http://www.amazon.com/Fortune-Bottom-Pyramid-Eradicating-Pub...
What makes you think it's written to stdout?
Before anyone downmods hhm for a 'non-relevant' post, consider this: you're flying into Mountain View (San Jose or SF) for the YCombinator interview the day of. Say your flight gets delayed because of the 'weather' but another airline is flying on schedule to the Bay Area.. you will remember Rule 240 and thank HHM. :)

Too bad I couldn't use Rule 240 to argue my way into a free flight on my way back from Novembers YC interviews.. I can picture the airline agent look all smug and say "but sir, your flight was yesterday". Oops!