skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Earcup headphones all the way. Noise canceling is an added bonus.
I've scientifically confirmed that The Talking Heads made the best hacking music known to man.

Aside from that, I listen to a lot of Of Montreal, other indie pop, some electronic and movie soundtracks (There Will Be Blood and The Fountain OSTs are both great).
Try DragonForce.
Ditto Talking Heads. Also Depeche Mode and Tears for Fears.
Exactly. :D
Nice one nickb. Have you also tried tumblr as a 'crude delicious'? It has a sweet bookmarklet thats easy to use the same time as news.yc's.

Two tips I'd like to chip in myself:

1) Rewrite the headline to make it clearer

2) Don't post a submission or comment unless you believe it creates value for others. Consider the signal/noise ratio.

And a third for those who only want karma:

3) Mention a keyword such as PG, YC or Lisp in the headline. "Justin.tv Video interview with Paul Graham on
writing openID support for news.yc in lisp" would be a high karma headline
I prefer to enjoy the silence.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd7y6A-5uTY
C++ version is a disaster. It is literally two orders of magnitude slower than it should be.
Speakers. I don't want anything "touching" me when I'm doing my thing.
How 'bout taking the next step and making a shared Pandora station for hacking?
Oliver is a sharp guy - I recall his company (AlphaMask) demoing their nice 2D lib (on a 68000 based palm IIIc) to us when I worked at VM Labs.
I would assume that one reason PHP seems faster in practice is that much of the typical grunt work of a webapp (what he calls the "web environment") is done in C for PHP and Ruby for Ruby.
Joyent's problems continue
Welcome to the stone age! Metered Internet is what I had in 1997 in Russia. So much for predicted death of desktop applications and "keeping everything in the clowd" computing model, that so many tech journalists are predicting for everybody.

How can I expect to keep my ~200GB of data "in the clowd" if there is greedy Time Warner, Comcast and AT&T between me and my data? One is going to charge me more for pushing gigabytes monthly, another will throttle my not-so-good connection even further and another will spy on what I keep in my cloud?
Motorhead, Accept, Iron Maiden -- dedicated to programmers :)
Creating cool pictures with a few lines of code
...I was going to say something against that last point, and it not being done for the right purposes. I then hit reply and found you changed it. Well played.

But, this still applies to some more of the posts here. I notice that, for the most part, people are harking against news.yc being flooded with crappy submissions and turning into digg/reddit. Then you have threads like this where a portion of the focus of these comments are geared towards giving tips on how to have high karma retrieving posts.

In my opinion, karma is nice and all, but the main purpose of news.yc is to submit quality articles, articles that interest you and may interest others, without karma valuation playing a role in submitting something. That is part of the reason why digg has devolved into what it is now. People began to put a great deal of emphasis and importance on accumulating diggs, or karma here, which in turn decreased value of posts, and so on, blah blah.

In any case, vote me up!
Oh, and according to a guy at Yahoo:

"Consuming OpenID is a different beast that can't happen overnight. Give it some time. I'm optimistic that we'll get there."

http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/009856.html
The dude compared the performance of a couple of array-related functions in various run time libraries for 4 languages, with all those functions (probably) written in C. Although I still consider this exercise useful.
I don't think PG will let the signal to noise ratio get low. It's not that hard to keep it on the good side if you're not concerned with growing the largest possible audience.

I'm pretty sure PG runs this site because he likes it, not because he hopes to make the next Digg, so I'd expect that if the noise grew he'd work on keeping it down, even if that meant keeping the audience small.

That's just my impression. What say you PG?
Also, NaNoWriMo is helpful.
Hacker News Passes 100,000 Items
Yeah, go play poker online, then run the names of your 9 opponents through urban dictionary. Odds are 2 will be worse.

I just hope the same thing goes for fantasy sports.
RE #3: Yes, you will get karma for mentioning any of those 3 things, but that's because a lot of people are interested in them. Really, is there a better or more appropriate place on the internet for people to go if they're interested in PG, YC, or Lisp?
How to Grow A Business Empire
http://www.thesixtyone.com
Yeah, Notes sucks. I use it at work, and it is often painful, especially if you use another mail client that's user friendly. Then you know what you're missing.
Well, I write rather than program (well, technically I do both, but I suck pretty badly at the latter) but I like Mahler, especially as conducted by Bernstein.

Rhapsody has a phenomenal classical selection.
Are you a PHP God? Anonymous Free-Speech Platform (VC-backed) Needs You
Hello PHP Hacker/God

The goal of BoredAt is to surface the top thoughts and ideas of communities, attempting to democratize information and shed light on the question 'what are the people around you really thinking?'

Our contextual, uncensored social media company for universities is expanding its student-led pilot project to users at top companies and we're poised for rapid growth
X	Founded in February 2006, BoredAt took off w/ same trajectory as Facebook and 50% penetration on college campuses
X	We're backed by Redpoint Ventures and Draper Richards
X	Small, brilliant team, BoredAt architecture highly scalable
X	Located in downtown San Mateo
You should join BoredAt if you:
X	Are motivated by solving hard problems
X	Like the idea of working in a small and agile startup environment
X	Appreciate the idea of being one of the first employees in a company with unlimited potential
X	You like to implement features quickly without bureaucratic overhead
X	You start a lot of sentences with "What if.."
X	You don't wait for others to tell you what to do
X	You are awesome
We offer competitive salaries, stock options, healthcare benefits, and an open culture

The Spec

Looking for talented front-end UI expert. This individual should be able to program all steps required for front-end UI feature and product development which includes:

1.	Convert design mockups to cross-browser compatible XHTML/CSS.
2.	Build necessary JavaScript required for front-end UI functionality.
3.	Develop front-end PHP code for new and existing features.

Mastery in:
-	XHTML
-	CSS
-	JavaScript (OO)
-	PHP
-	Heavy DOM manipulation
-	AJAX via JSON

Knowledge of:
-	PHP MVC frameworks
-	Object Oriented application development
-	Prototype/Scriptaculous JavaScript Packages
-	Cross-browser compatibility issues and ability to develop solutions
-	MySQL

Strong plus:
-	Experience building Flash applications

Availability: Full-time
Location: downtown San Mateo, next to Caltrain

Send your resume to aneel@boredat.net
No recruitment agencies, please
http://youtube.com/results?search_query=nerdcore
This is one of the better reactions to piracy that I've seen. If these companies can find a way to make money off of this, all of the sudden it isn't piracy anymore.

It's a business model.
Agile authoring of papers
Actually it is worse than arbitrary. The greatest bastion of electronic music in the main stream is in hip hop. Metal makes far less use of computers and such.
Huh? First you said that uncompressed movies take up about 25gb for 2 hours. Blu-ray movies are generally around 25gb, which leaves the second layer free for extras or whatever.

Then you said that "blue-ray is not uncompressed video (thus, 25GB holds a 2 hour compressed movie)" By your own math they would only take up 12.5ish gb if compressed.

I actually am curious what digital cable uses. It's definitely 720p in my area, and probably compressed, but not highly.
"Investor/Entrepreneur Value Expectation Gap": Part 3 (Entrepreneur vs. Investor)
Rain. It's probably strange, but ambient rain sounds are quite relaxing.

If anyone is interested in this, go here: http://www.hypnosishealthcare.com/rainsounds.html

Choose "Rain MP3 Download". Twelve bucks gets you an hour of rain without any background noise at all.

Note that you'll need to play with Winamp's equalizer a bit to make it sound great through headphones. The Full Bass preset is perfect.
I once wrote a compiler and a VM for a custom language and without much optimization it performed almost twice as fast as PHP. Not that I'm good at VM's but probably PHP is really bad.
Fire Eagle is coming...
Do large companies really generate 'real change' ?
What about adding it to http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs ?
The Nasty Little Truth about Idiots Who Don't Understand Dimensions
On Giving Talks: Show the Love
YAY! (Yet Another YAML)
"Programming in C is a premature optimization"
Marion Tinsley: Human Perfection at Checkers? (pdf)
Sorry about it changing. I have a very iterative approach to writing.

Are there any non-karma approaches to news sites that work well?

The two that I know of are:

1) Charge for membership
2) Keep the community small
I'm not suggesting we eradicate karma. Karma is a fine way to credit quality submissions and comments. Karma is not the problem, but rather a person's desire to accumulate lots of karma is.

I'm putting the burden on the users to evaluate their motives and to make sure that what they are submitting will really contribute to the community, not for the sole purpose of fueling their karma fetish.
Usually I listen to stuff that allows me to think... some chilled out stuff like Stereolab, Free Design, Telepopmusik, Thief, Portishead, Jazzanova, Forss, Yesterdays New Quintet, Wahoo, and more stuff like that.
Ten IT Urban Legends Exposed
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=87846
This would certainly damage my bottom line, but the fact is there are a lot of people who pay 30/month for their connections (the same as myself) but literally download 1/100,000th as much. It's hard to justify other people subsidizing me except for the fact that they're the losers in the transaction.
I use Sennheiser inner ear headphones and Itunes tells me that I mostly listen to:

Punk and music between the 70's and 90's.
That appears to be for YC funded companies only.
Groove Salad: http://somafm.com/

Cliqhop (also somaFM) if the problems are complex.
"PHP God" brings to mind something like this:

http://www.energycenter.com/auction.folder/Kali2.JPG
Stuff I've heard a lot before, so that I'm not paying much attention to it. Fishbone!
I'm incredibly glad my last employer bought me a pair of Bose Quiet Comfort headphones for Christmas. Probably the most comfortable headphones I've ever worn.
Lyrics really break my concentration too. I like electronica for that reason -- it doesn't have vocals and it's got a nice motivating beat.

Try Aphex Twin for some really good stuff.
I find my collection of Punk/Hardcore suits me best for programming. It keeps my mind alert, and works even better than caffeine in some cases.
Lush: Lisp Universal SHell (Lisp designed for numerical analysis)
PG: Can an arc instance distribute its threads across multiple cpu's? I'm not asking "can-in-principle" but rather whether the current implementation has that feature.
How to make an extra $4,687.50 this year
10 Signs Your Startup Might Be On The Rocks
How To Deconstruct Almost Anything
Yaml ain't a markup language
filling a narrow entertainment "niche" is the stupidest idea ever.
Advice to Aspiring Entrepreneurs: Play Poker
Design Police
It's still under too much development and too unstable to offer an outside API, but it's something we're very much considering.
Flash Tutorials
Explosions in the Sky
Most people can't tell the difference between 1080p and 720p resolution at any normal home viewing size or viewing distance.

The issue of compression is a bit more hard to answer, since all these formats all use the same codec. I have no idea what parameters you can tweak to make the same resolution video smaller.
I alternate between classical (I like Mozart and Beethoven and some others) and electronic/techno dance music. I can't have vocals; it breaks my flow.
The Best Companion Tools for YouTube and other Web Videos
Contributing to Rails with Git
WTF: horrible stupid system
I thought of posting a similar question before because you seemed to be responsible for 1 in 6 of everything that happens on the site. I'm surprised to hear you actually get other stuff done. For a while I was starting to suspect you might be a professional Hacker News researcher!
Don't forget that if you use the GPLv3 you won't be able to distribute your software with the OLPC, since it has anti-theft measures which put signed code at an advantage to unsigned.
http://www.last.fm/user/bootload/charts/?charttype=overall&#...
I had no idea. That was too good. (Except the bit about being picked last for dodgeball was hitting a little below the belt).

I'm glad I saw that. Now destroy that link forever.
Ask news.yc:  Should the gov't let the current crisis self-correct?
Offhand, it seems to me that the current liquidity crisis is the result of government market interference (artificially cheap credit) and the attempt to fix it is based on creating more cheap money. Shouldn't market forces be allowed to clean out and correct?
Every Stock Photo Online - search engine for free photos
Bell Labs did OK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs
Keynes pretty much demonstrated that the feast/famine metaphor doesn't apply to economics.

imho, the real mess is going to happen when the American public realizes that social security is possibly the least insolvent government program, but that its ongoing surpluses have been handed out in tax cuts and war profiteering.

I'm still stunned Gore lost.
Agreed. Sometimes the same behavior, implemented with slightly different intentions, can have vastly different effects.

nickb isn't far from a link spammer - he might very well be detected as one by a poor algorithm on a lesser site. Instead he's an incredibly important contributor.

On the other hand, I too have suspected that he was just a really well trained bot - which would still be impressive.
Text Rendering: Why Computer Displays Suck for Reading
CNN pays $750,000 for domain name
Digg's secret editors
The Big Switch to Utility Computing
I'd love to get a breakdown of that 12-13 hour day... I recently trimmed my RSS feeds but am still pretty aghast at how much time I spent with feeds/News.YC...
What's in a product name?
Twitter's Business Model
Actually, Matt, you claimed uncompressed movies take 25GB for two hours. Right up here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99416

What I said is, Blu-ray movies take up on average 25GB with MPEG2 compression. In other words, your original estimate of the size of things was wrong, as was your implication that blu-ray was uncompressed.
ISPs act like miserly pricks, pundits blame it on paying customers and new web services. Yawn.
I think the question is valid, but I really appreciate YHN because it is all hacker related news.
pm me the address and time. Or just be afraid.
Talking To The Music Industry Again
The unregulated market had a big part to play in causing the current sub-prime mess in the first place.

Check out the BBC's explanation of how the sub-prime lending model worked: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7073131.stm?src=rss

In a nutshell, banks used to lend people money with their own assets. Because it was their own money, they made people jump through hoops to make sure they could pay. But in the new model, banks packaged up mortgages and sold them to investors as mortgage bonds. The investors had no idea about the ability of individual homebuyers to pony up for repayments, but they were making a good return. Now that the banks didn't stand to lose, they loosened the standards on their normal checks and balances so that unemployed hobos could buy $500k homes (since there were no regulatory requirements). Ahhh the free market at work.

(The reason why so many banks lost money was because they themselves were big investors in the mortgage bond market)

The free market does solve problems and self-correct, but it can also cause a bit of damage along the way. The point of common sense regulation and government intervention isn't to stifle the market, but to prod it in the right direction and minimise the pain. Economists call it smoothing out the business cycle. Granted the highs aren't so high, but neither are the lows.
Ha, busted. There is a cold anonymous aspect to it though. Unlike our future users who we will love and adore.
Search Atheism On The Rise
Flickr brings tagging to vintage images
To Change The World, Write Mobile Apps
Scientists Make First Human Embryo Clones
iPhone with Lotus Notes: IT manager's nightmare?
Firefox developers are working to make it automatically adopt the look of the host operating system
"anonymous free-speech platform" - that's is a very lofty description of a site where you can go shoot the breeze about celebrities and so forth.

a lot of people who work on anonymity and free speech related software focus on things like subverting national firewalls put in place by oppressive totalitarian regimes - you just want to give people another way to dick around on the internet. not that there's anything wrong with that.
I'm fairly partial to the drone of a tanpura/tambura/tamboura (a bit like a sitar, only fretless). I visited with this swami for for a bit, and he gave me a recording as a background for Japa practice - it's incredibly powerful concentration music.
This one never gets old.

It's amazing how little people know about subpixel rendering, even in the design profession. I suppose it's not really required knowledge, but it's interesting to know how text antialiasing really works. You can do a lot with LCDs.
I'm exactly the same way but I've found that sighs j-pop fits in this as well. If I can't understand the words then it doesn't break my flow. German techno also seems to work.
Yeah, me too. I hesitated to post it, but figured it may spark some interesting discussion.
> The unregulated market had a big part to play in causing the current sub-prime mess in the first place.

And bailing them out will have what effect?

If you shield people from the consequences of doing dumb things, they'll keep doing them.

People who invested in subprime-mortgage-backed bonds SHOULD lose money.

Besides, they were going to keep the profit, so why shouldn't they take the loss?
The "R" Word Surfaces: Recesion in the Startup Community?
I've heard this advice from two independent sources this week... too bad I suck at poker.
Cheap credit was at the heart of the mortgage bubble. It fueled an unprecedented rise in housing prices. If housing prices rise at a historic rate for 5 years in a row, who cares about credit quality? Foreclose on a home and you own an asset worth 25% more than the mortgage you made! Don't lower your lending standards and you will make 0 loans in a competitive market where everybody else is giving mortgages away.

I worked with subprime mortgage companies. After the bubble started to pop everybody blamed it on stupidity and greed. These qualities were surely involved. What goes up, after all, must come down - but try to time the pop! In the end, the bubble was market-driven and the market was Fed-manipulated.

We had a soft recession in 2001 because of cheap credit. We get another recession in 2008 because of that same cheap credit. End of story.
Photos: A Googleplex grows in D.C.
Silence! The voices tell me what to type.
Is he a representative of the east or west coast contingent?
This is consequential, you know.
The government can get involved to soften the blow, but it should be careful not to create ANOTHER bubble like it did in 2001.
this year a particular language surprised me: Lua. i'm not a polymath of programming languages, but in my experience Lua is the most powerful non-lisp language (in terms of abstractive power). it's scripted, functional, dynamically typed, supports closures, asymmetric coroutines, has a heterogeneous data structure, and gives you access to the 'compiler'. it's something like a heavily improved and simplified javascript
Many 'Hacker Safe' Web Sites Found Vulnerable
I actually (partially) agree. I think that any company that wishes to be a OpenID provider should also be a relying party. I wouldn't use Yahoo or any of the other big guys as my provider anyway, though.

I don't think sites should be reluctant to accept OpenID. It's more convenient for users to sign up, so if OpenID catches on (which obviously Yahoo thinks it will), they would likely get more (and happier) users. I'm not sure why you think support costs would be higher, since the OpenID provider is responsible for managing the user's account (lost passwords, etc...)

OpenID is very different from Passport, namely since OpenID is open, not controlled by Microsoft. As I've said before, if you're so worried about "corporate overlords" spying on you, there's a simple solution: be your own Open ID provider. It's very easy if you've every set up a simple website before.
Fine. Now what do I name my startup?
"An absolute idiot with 10-20M users can make a ton of money. So, get to tens of millions of users and forget about money."
Anyone got an invite yet? Sounds interesting.
I like music with nonsense lyrics for the same reason, i.e. cocteau twins, sigur ros, dead can dance. Otherwise, ambient stuff like explosions in the sky, god is an astronaut, mono (the japanese mono).
That's a pretty ridiculous statement. First of all, I happen to like C for certain types of problems. Second, porting a large program from one language to another is not a trivial "optimization", so if you suspect a problem may need the speed, it's probably wise to use a suitable language in the first place.
What Motivates Programmers?
Presentation Zen: 6 Presentation tips from a Steve Jobs keynote
Is it just me or does this seem like Jason is advocating the "get as many eyeballs as you can" business model//frenzy of web 1.0?
"Ken decided that he didn't need it and deleted it. You didn't happen to hang on to a backup copy, did you?"

And with that, Jared saw nearly a month's worth of work disappear. He hadn't put it into source control yet because it wasn't quite ready, and he didn't want someone to confuse it with a working version and run it."

That's the real WTF.
This book seems to have been written for people with no programming experience. If you know any at all (especially C) you can safely skip chapters 1, 2, 3, 6, 7.
http://www.gradolabs.com/product_pages/sr60.htm
i can't imagine not programming in Vim. it's so natural. using a normal text editor (including professional IDE's) feels like trudging through quagmire by comparison

a mistake learners of Vi make is being in insert mode most of the time. you should be in command mode almost always. like 94% of the time. otherwise it's no different than a normal text editor with hotkeys. also, newbies need to make use the repeat command '.' which repeats the whole last text _change_. it's not just a paste

once you get some good experience and try to stay out of insert mode, your cursor starts flying around performing all sorts of uber hacker slice & dice magic
I usually listen to only one track in repeat (for about an hour), one that I'm very familiar with, so i don't get distracted by it (it may or not have vocals)

I've notice that by doing so i stay in the same mind frame all the time.

Also, it is good to choose a track that puts you in the right mind frame, examples: "Chicago" by Sufjan Stevens puts me in an optimistic and somehow upbeat state, "A Warm Place" by Nine Inch Niles puts me in a more introverted-deep thinking state
Wow, people really don't like attention getting headlines.