skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The definition of stupid is directly related to the reader so you can't have a filter for that, it would have to be personal.

If you mean that it is subjective, Oritz's entire experiment is to find the degree to which it is so, or rather, the degree to which one can objectively measure intelligence in writing from its characteristics.
Barely get any pay?

$77k, one of the numbers cited, is hardly a pittance. Okay, you can reasonably easily make a lot more by selling yourself on the open market (especially in IT) but if academia and research is what you want to do, $77k is pretty livable in all but the most expensive of locales.
> Chicken Soup from the Soul

Normally it just comes from chicken stock...
10 reasons why I chose MySQL over MSSQL2005 Express
Being an MS junkee for years and years I have now turned to MySQL as the preferred backend for my site network. I list the top 10 reasons why.
It is an easy mistake to believe that tools as simple as Bayesian filters can emulate intelligence. It requires intelligence to determine whether someone else is intelligent or not, not a bunch of rules and filters.

As we've seen with spam, any unintelligent system can be circumvented given enough time and ingenuity. Bayesian filters are now but a small part of e-mail analysis.
Interesting.

You may want to change the color scheme, to avoid confusion with News.YC.
This sounds similar to the rules Yahoo Answers has.

What about users who vote up a story so that it is stored in their history? I do it often, i like a story but don't think i have much to add to the conversation, but still want to keep it.
I see in the blog that it's supposed to do RSS (I had a whole post typed up about how they should before I noticed) but I have a rather dumb idea that someone might like out there: a tape could be able to be an RSS subscriber as well; that is, have the twelve newest songs of a podcast cached and available on this website.

Also, though I don't know how (can you access ID3 information client-side? do hashing/audio fingerprinting?), you might be able to identify the file before it's fully uploaded, and just link in someone else's copy if it's already been uploaded.
take a look at kettle.js and the source code of a muxtape URL. you can download the files in the muxtape by grabbing the AWSaccessKeyID and Signature embedded in the HTML source (at the bottom) and building the URL for the source song from S3, e.g. http://muxtape.s3.amazonaws.com/songs/'+hex+'?PLEASE=DO_NOT_...
I knew that buckfast was good for something.
Every new xkcd gets posted and voted up here... even the bad ones. Maybe s/he doesn't like the hero worship and voted down the comments because there's no way to vote down the post. Kinda cheap, but there you go.
The definitions are human translated for now. We're still working on improving the translations to match the words - as in running = run and so on.
Vote weighting is possible, but maybe it's too extreme yet blunt for the problem at hand. Vote weighting would affect all articles, but really there's a specific problem of popular-but-trashy articles that you want to target.

For example, you could add a penalty for negative-rated comments. A trashy article is more likely to cause the sort of argument that gets comments downrated.

Or you could try to classify the comment contents and organization to get a sense of how "argumentative" vs "quality" they are. Bayesian if you want. You could use article contents, too, if you had a scraper.

Either way the ranking algorithm will have to get more complicated as time goes on. Logically you should have more information with more users, so the quality of articles should actually get better. The problem with vote weighting is that by downweighting votes you are discarding this extra information rather than using it more cleverly.
Give it up, you're going to fail. If you have to ask something like that you've already lost. It's obvious you're just in it for the cash.

You can get a loan and have someone do it for you which would just make you a VC or make it yourself. For the latter to work you need to be a geek with talent and tenacity. The sort of person who wouldn't need to ask that question for support.

In the end, less than %1 will make it and you will probably not fall into that 1%. If you really wanted to create something you would be coding, reading, and getting your hands dirty.
What a social network must do with 4.5M in funding?
If you are WePlay you hire a former NBA champ to be on your front page intro video .
How are you going to build the community?
This is unnecessarily harsh.
Exactly. It's because there are so many people, like that author, who are willing to continue on at a low salary and do nothing about it but whine on blogs. If they start leaving en masse to greener pastures, the salary will rise.
i'll 2nd that...

it's not hard... just give a couple of days and you will be up and running Apache/PHP/Mysql in no time... coz having done some programming will help the process...
But he needs blow to the head. I'm pretty sure Edison didn't walk around asking people similar questions.

People are surprising similar in all walks of life. People will read tons of articles about working out and never set foot in a gym. I know people with dozens of books on programming but don't know what a pointer is.

It's procrastination plain and simple. If you don't have the get up and go, you'll be a loser asking others for assistance in getting your business going.
Thanks so far for the feedback:
- mixmax: I have already bought some books to teach myself, but am finding it hard to concentrate! It has been a while since I have had to do any technical learning.
- uruzseven: To a certain extent, everyone is doing it for the money. After all, I did mention that the site was going to be an "ecommerce/community site".:) I believe my question was a fair one as I have not had experience in web programming, but am interested, now that I am in between jobs.
it's one of those things where appending the words "which works" makes the difference. (as Paul Buccheit says.) Google = search which works. Gmail = email which works. Wufoo = form-building which works.
Do you know that with a proper recommendation system you can vote both the user AND the story at the same time?
How do I write my UI specs?
Were you referring to the strategy of increasing the community size or from an implementation perspective?
I fail to see how they could sequence a mammoth's genome, yet consider it unlikely we'll eventually be able to clone one.

I want a pet mammoth dammit.
Yes, because TechCrunch has nothing to do with hacking.

But the other posters are definitely right: this is an inevitable problem and it would be nice to have a more organic solution. I've been trying to read and vote on the "new" page more.
Craigslist Is Our Mirror, Nothing Better (Or Worse)
It'll grow regardless. And, the kind of people that will actually stick around tend to be the kind of people we want to be here. The rest will wander off...back to digg, over to reddit, whatever.

Thanks for asking, though.

Now it's pg's job to figure out how to programmatically maintain the high quality of results. I still want one down-vote per week for stories...sometimes a story shows up that makes me feel ill to see it on the front page, and it would feel real good to vote them down, even if I only got to do it once per week(day|month).
True. Asking any amount is probably enough to weed out the folks who think hackers are inter-changeable and completely devoid of business ideas or acumen. Of course, you can also just say, "No thanks, I'm working on my own idea for the time being. Best of luck to you, though." That's what I do.
The Art of Sucking Up
Jim Cramer is still putting random words in random order
Movitz:  A Common Lisp x86 OS
As RMS mentions this is unnecessarily harsh. Besides I don't think it's true.

The winners in the startup game are not the ones that can code, but the ones that overcome problems and persist. And are willing to learn new things in order to succeed.

A guy that posts here, intending to learn how to program definitely shows some potential for persistence and learning. I think he will have better chances than most.
While its an interesting viewpoint, but I hope you do realize that the MySQL data access driver is still in its infancy, and its slower than the native MSSQL driver (quite understandable because both MSSQL and ASP.NET are developed by MS).

Now on your viewpoint:

- LIMIT ... you know you can use TOP in MSSQL, or the inbuilt DataView paging in ASP.NET with MSSQL.

- SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS ... The DataReader and other data access classes already provide this.

- memory requirements ... small doesn't mean more optimized for use with ASP.NET. Database caching with MSSQL on a Windows box is much better than with MySQL on the same Windows box.

- read performance ... this I can accept. MySQL may perform better for simple read-only data access.

- management ... agreed. MSSQL lacks the ease of wa eb-based database management tool, as compared to MySQL.

- backup/restore/moving data ... agreed. But for slightly broader migrations, DTS and Replication are the answer.

- MySQL is a full version ... any web host providing MySQL database or MSSQL database, will provide you with a standard version

- widespread ... For .NET apps, among the .NET community, MSSQL is any day more popular that MySQL.

- fulltext engine ... I've worked with full text indexing engines, and let me tell you that the MySQL fulltext engine is as bad as the MSSQL fulltext service. For fulltext indexing, its always a better idea to use an external engine like Lucene or Sphinx

- multi OS support - unless you are developing/deploying ASP.NET apps on Linux using Mono, I wouldn't bother about it much

Bottomline, (unfortunately) no other database server provides better performance for small-to-medium scale ASP.NET apps than MSSQL. For larger apps, Oracle can surely scale up. Just my .2c, from years of experience with "both" LAMP and .NET/MSSQL. Hope it helps!
Somebody is going to do it if you don't, so I'm not sure our answer to the question matters, does it?

I am firmly in the camp of "HN will eventually go to heck" -- mainly because of the mod system and the way these things tend to drive to the lowest common denominator. I know that the good-article-per-page ratio today is not as good as it was 6 months ago. But hey, pg wants to play this thing out, so crank 'er up, right?
The jwz initials seemed familiar. There was an earlier post linked to the same author about the early days at Netscape: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=100176 (or directly http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html?old_title_sucked ).
Increasing the community size
Thank You Microsoft for Prematurely Killing Windows XP
New type of a mouse: slider & tripod
StrokeDB - embeddable distributed document database written in Ruby
Why Student Programmers Rant about Business Students with “Ideas”
Questions vs. Answers
Sure! I used to chat and to "hang around" local BBSes all night long in '93-'95 (or so). I was using an IBM 486 DX 33, and a 14100 modem. This was in Finland, I don't know how much before my active time the BBSes were alive but I think they slowed down a lot afterwards.
What's the original format of this presentation? Why can't I just save it as a PDF or view as HTML?
Two things: 1) It would be great to have more reasonably good people here. 2) But I just don't want the scoring to be screwed up. If the voting keeps stuff that's only of interest to people who are into hacking and startups on the front page then other people will simply not stick around.

PG, please consider action for #2. Don't go with the "show everyone different rankings" approach of reddit though.
Me too. Typically I'd just follow any interesting headlines from the rss feed, but since the first TechCrunch mention I've been interacting with the site quite a bit more (hopefully in only positive ways).

I think ultimately hacker news is a coterie of sufficient specialisation that it will survive multiple techcrunchings, or at least fare better than digg - as Yogi Berra said, "Nobody goes there any more. It's too crowded".
Security by obscurity is not really security at all. Perhaps the TechCrunch exposure has hurt the site in the short term, but if Hacker News can get through these growing pains it will be presumably better off in the long run.

The problem as I see it is not the size of the community but the concentration of thinkers. It doesn't really matter what articles make it to the front page; if the comments start filling up with cheap one liners and unreasoned opinions I know that I for one will lose interest.
Sort of. I stayed in south east asia to live cheap & learn python. Supporting myself on a few hours of work per week makes it easy to tinker, have fun, and figure out what to build next by "playing".

So I'm not in the midst of a startup right now, but when it comes to my next serious effort, I can't really imagine myself doing anything else.
now something that random, pointless and fun is what hacking is all about. :-)
A library? That's what I do...

(I'm funding my study time by working part time in chunks as a software contractor.)
You are a tad bit late in asking ;-). In any case, you can't control the kind of folks that read your website and decide to show up and participate here.

That said most of the folks here (at least the ones that have been using this website from the earlier days) don't want this site to go the way of other communities online, where the quality of shared articles and conversations go down the drain.

From my time on many online communities, it's not the question of if the quality will go down, but when, and I would rather see an algorithmic solution to reduce the noise.
Was couriering for quite some time :)
The story lists £70k as the salary for a full professor. I worked in the UK as an assistant professor for 7 years, having to re-apply for my job every year. Finally I admitted that per hour worked burger-flippers were being paid more than me. I left, got a job in IT support in an accountancy firm. Within 5 years I was the lead developer, because everyone else in the IT department was dumb or lazy or both. Per hour I was earning 1000% more than as a teacher. The truth is that US and UK societies do not really respect education - school is fundamentally a child-minding service, university is a rite of passage. School teachers have more industrial strength than university teachers, because if the schools close the lack of child-minding causes far more problems.
Iminta does the Twitter thing too
Because implementing an Idea is most of the time harder than having an Idea

And becausing aquiring the knowledge to implement the Idea is also a lot harder than the effort needed to aquire an Idea

Finally, I think because people who do and know how to do are so preocupied with the tuff-ness of implementing the Idea they sometimes loose enthusiam and in many way this sometimes ties them down or set them back a little, and it the worry free business student just irritates them
How to name a startup
I think the influx of new users is good; there are probably people out there with great things to contribute, that don't even know Hacker News exists. But of course the characteristics of the front page posts are going to change.

There is a somewhat controversial solution here... just make a sub-section of HN where only users that signed up X days ago or earlier can post and vote. If X = 250 and guys like me get screwed, then so be it; if old timers are actually better voters, then at least I'll get to read the better articles. And you don't lock out new users either, since the original front page will still exist without any vote weighting.

Personally I don't know if the quality of the "old timers" section would be any better or worse than the normal front page, since "interesting" is a subjective concept. But if you miss the Hacker News of the good old days, then maybe it makes sense to bring that HN back to the future this way.
since the demographic of this community seems to be smart entrepeneurs, what would people here think is the best way to protect their community from the morons of the internet? I remember in olden day's when digg was a friendly place full of interesting news, nowadays its, well it's digg... Keeping a social news site under the raydar is not the solution to this problem, there should be something more elegant, any ideas?

disclaimer i am not looking for ideas for a news site, personally i feel the market is saturated, and anyway i have far better ideas to work on ;)
Are startups using this site?
Lemme guess, jaanix?
Similar thing from Xobni: http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/2008/01/three-clever-xobni-f...

I imitated it and the feedback from it is the source of daily amusement for me.
I'd agree with that. The one piece of software that I have written that people choose to use (as opposed to being forced to because the code is embedded in the widget they just bought)has got to be the most trivial thing I have ever done - a multicast bridge that I hacked together one afternoon. It has some trace that is very useful for the proprietary multicast protocol that we use.

That stupid bridge, that I wrote because I needed it one day, is now in regular use in three different companies (mine plus two parteners). I get support emails for it to add features or fix bugs about once a month.

If you find it useful, chances are that others will find it useful too.

That said, I think that the Y-Combinator crowd should probably pay more attention to resolving non-programming needs. Most programming tasks already have good tools these days, because if a programmer sees a need, she can code it herself straight away, and programming tasks have lots of programmers identifying programming needs.

For example, I put together a stupid little app a few weeks ago that took a pdf document from Paris Town Hall that lists the addresses of all handcapped parking spaces in Paris. The app reads the list, sends the addresses to yahoo maps to get the long/lat, and then puts the results in a .gpx file for loading into gs devices. Yet another dumb app, but I've had more than 200 downloads of that .gpx file in only a couple of weeks. It's popular because there are apparently few programmers trying to solve problems in the handicapped problem space.
When the programming language site Lambda the Ultimate was going through the same transition, the admin asked long-time members for their opinions. The discussion is here:

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1550

My answer from there:

For me, read-only access to "old LtU" would be more pleasant than read-write access to "new LtU". In other words: I don't think bans are "extreme", my vote is for a lot more bans, and I wouldn't mind being banned myself if this improves the signal-to-noise ratio.
Turn Your PC into a DVD Ripping Monster (Linux Version)
Designing RedditRiver.com Website
Make it useful to yourself. Solve one of your own problems. Chances are others have the same problem as you.
Easy parsing with pyparsing
Learning to program well is a valuable skill that is well worth the time invested into it. For however long it takes to learn you free yourself from needing others to do all of your future development (sans time constraints of course).
> Yes, because TechCrunch has nothing to do with hacking.

Techcrunch is read by a huge percentage of all hackers working on tech startups. This site was previous called "Startup News". I think the TC audience is very well suited.
Bring Back Snacks (he of the hasty banhammer).

If you have no idea what I mean, be grateful.
When it comes to so-called "public knowledge," obscurity (and more largely, apathy) is the only kind of security there is. All websites eventually die (or, at least, all that I have observed); you can't "keep a community alive" so much as you can just let it die peacefully, leaving its children (perhaps under the same ownership!) to continue its legacy.
Let me re-quote the grandparent post for you, perhaps removing a bit of subtlety in the process:

> Yes, because TechCrunch has nothing at all whatsoever to do with hacking (rolls eyes)
"A drop down menu that ignores corporate jargon, came to terms with the fact there may actually be a flaw in THEIR system, and inquired about my emotional state."

I think support forms should have an Eliza program built-in:

"I have a problem with my email."
"So how do you feel about your problem with email?"
"Just fix the problem!"
"Tell me more about fix the problem."

That aside, enquiring about my emotional state would annoy the hell out of me :-}
How To Deal With A Fear Of Public Speaking
Fear of public speaking is the number one of all fears. In the words of Mark Twain: “There are 2 types of speakers: those that are nervous and those that are liars”. Our bodies are programmed from prehistorical times to react to fear with fight or flight––fight that animal or run out of its way. But that surge of adrenalin no longer helps us when we give a speehc. So we have to learn to manage it.
I think the future belongs to a wristband (like a watchband) that picks up the electric changes of your wrist muscles (their myoelectric signals). No keyboard. No mouse. Just train finger press combinations. It would be more for power users but would allow not just letters but whole words and commands. You could finally get close to communication at the speed of thought.
Wow. So the CueCat[1] really was ahead of its time!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat
Learn PHP. I started trying a while ago, it doesn't take that long to build a basic application so you can at least get a prototype going.
"Further, many business students are aggressive and gregarious, many programmers are socially awkward..."

I can generally agree with the article, but the old, old stereotypes aren't really helping, are they? I see very few "socially awkward" programmers in my work. They might not be game-show hosts, but they're not Rain Man either. As the author points out in the footnote, if you can master computing arcana, you can pick up the basic ideas around business and accounting fairly quickly.
Adding a second mechanism is just not going to work at all, I'm afraid. How would the application know which encoding you're trying to use? There's also no clean way to solve the reverse DNS issue with hashes.

Besides, it took long enough to get IDNs out "into the wild", and they're still struggling. IE6 still doesn't support them out-of-the-box, so there goes about half (or more) of your non-technical audience. I use exactly one site with an IDN regularly, http://öbb.at/ - the rail company here, and they actually advertise their other, non-IDN domain, oebb.at, presumably due to lack of browser support.
How about spending karma points as votes?
Very much so.

I'd expect to see similar implementations coming back, on a larger scale. It's a lot of what John Battelle writes about as the next evolution of search. It's just with the SERPs flipped inside out (they find you) and plastered all over books, posters, etc.
I think it is somewhat presumptuous of techcrunch to consider themselves as determining what is under or over the radar, as the metaphor goes. Techcrunch has less influence that it supposes.
No. I've had experiences where people gain 'karma' by being nice, only so they can troll some more. ('But I'll be nice this time, I promise!')
dvd::rip is a decent piece of software and all, but to be honest I think 99% of people here could type 'rip dvd linux' into google, so I'm not entirely sure how a simple how-to warrants a post to HN.

There, I've done it. I've degenerated into bashing the quality of submissions here too now.