skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why? Because it’s focused mostly on startup and hacking news, which is what we cover. It’s one of the best places to find information on startups we haven’t heard about yet. And, better, the community is jerk-free. Comments are mostly helpful, thoughtful and interesting.

Hopefully the TC coverage doesn't change this ...
My boss is great about monitors, and I even work in academia. He uses a 30" LCD (as do two other professors) and most of our other faculty/staff (with the exception of the admin staff) have at least two 19"s or larger.
Hm, I don't have much economy background, but my intuition says that it depends on how much money you invested in to begin with. How succesful is a sell depends on the interest rate you end up getting.

If you start a company with $1k and sell it for $10k in a month, it's certainly success. If you invest $10kk and sell it for $500k, it's a big failure.
Hacker News Site Guidelines
New to Hacker News? http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yes you're right, and there are also a lot of other considerations. The idea here is simply to get a basic idea of what people think constitutes a success.
You've ruined our non-trivial discussion!
And...I just lost. Thanks, spydez.
Make sure you follow the rules for getting into the Beta program. I got in very quickly.
Maybe there should be some kind of validation before you can start posting and taking part in the discussions.

A smart way of doing this would be to let potential new users write a bit about themselves, and let existing users vote on whether or not they should be allowed to post based on their introduction of themselves.

Another way would be to let new users have a quota of comments that could be raised if the initial comments were voted up.
Oh crap, here comes eternal sept.
If there is an influx, the lack of fluff will scare them away for quite a while.

It was over about a 12 month period of time that reddit went from being occasionally political to being totally dominated by Ron Paul/Obama fanatics. Rome wasn't destroyed in a day.
Get a good mike. Might be the most important thing you do to create a good vid.
Batten down the hatches, guys. Moderators, get your dead button finger ready.
Unfortunately it's the way it works in some areas. Just like with any other startup: you work and work to get something done and then hope your clients are willing to pay for it. Except in some markets the entire user base is a handful of companies with really deep pockets. I guess you should always try to get feedback as soon as possible but it's not always easy depending on who you're dealing with.
Free, open-source screen capture program for Windows:

http://camstudio.org/

I've used a suspiciously similar-looking program called DemoStudio in the past and I found it fairly easy to use.
Really we're more of a small, furry steam catapult.

The man just has a way with words! :)
Nobody ever succeeded that didn't sell their company?
we're working on it... =)
Insightful isn't a type of person, it's a type of idea.
we scale the difficulty of the questions dynamically, so if you're doing well it starts serving up harder questions, and vice versa.
With as much as we complain about how much noobs will change the site, why did he go off and do a stupid thing like put this on the front page of TC?
Yes - Microsoft, Maersk, and lots of others.

But this poll is about exits. Primarily because I think it's a good hard measure that we can all relate to.
Slashdot implemented something in something similar long time ago (I guess they still do it) and I don't know why nobody ripped that off. To start moderating your account need pass a certain threshold of "oldness".

I think the moderation is even more important because when people start modding down valid coments or modding up stupidity that's what make me want to leave. That's when I got annoyed with Digg +-2 years ago and Reddit +-1 year ago.
It was faster than that. There was very little fluff in April 2006, and by August 2006 it was overrun.
Perhaps it could be added that submitters shouldn't submit "flamebait" - eg. titles/articles that will elicit very predictable, emotionally charged responses, or have borderline lying titles. In short, not tabloid material; which some other democratic news sites are buried in now.

This is provably the most popular content for the masses, so it's something to watch out for. The editors here do already kill it and that's great, but why not put this guideline in writing?
Well put. It'll be interesting to see how pg and team handle something that every other site has failed miserably with.

I've got high hopes.
Where and how to find founding hackers for generous equity?
Yesterday I raised a question "How to find hackers for only stock options?" but one of the respondent brought to my attention that I should give equity instead of option ... and he/she is right - so here i'm - let me know the creative way to find a hacker founder for generous equity.
Study: depressed turn to blogging as coping mechanism
Why did you say that it costs $8,000 to be trained in... something?

Haha, at my last job, when the company decided to switch to .NET and C#, they ordered this hilarious three day training course that ended up costing about $30k (four people went). The guy doing the training knew his stuff, but I don't think I'm alone thinking this a bit ridiculous. Obviously this isn't .NET's fault, or C#'s, or even Microsoft's. It just comes to mind when I hear the term 'dot net' ... as it was a major sign that I should be leaving that job soon (which I did).

A developer that needs an $8,000 training session may not be worth his $60k salary.

100% agree. Like I said in my OP, I think C# (and .NET) and Java (with it's libraries) can be used for wonderful things by wonderful people... the problem is, being the industry standard, there are a lot of very unwonderful people in the way.
I've been wondering that too. Slashdot has gone through all of the problems that face digg, reddit, etc. And they have found some pretty good solutions through trial and error. They are even well documented here: http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml

Generally I am amazed that moderation systems are not better than they are, especially since the stakes seem to be so high in this niche right now.
I don't think you intended for that comment to make me laugh so hard, but good job either way.
Be friends with one. If you aren't already, then finding the right person is going to be a serious uphill battle.
The shortest description of Y Combinator I can think of is a "Venture Expediter"
SND = Slow News Day.
Pretty Interesting Stuff
TC Slows Hacker News - Start the Arc can't scale rants.
It was inevitable now it's time to start the blog posts about how Arc can't scale to the web. ;)
Hacker News gets Techcrunch'd and Arc falls to it's knees. Start your "Arc can't scale as well as X" rants here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133489
Let's ban everyone with < 10k karma!
I would have gone with topigina. It has a nice cadence to it.
I would have said that this is more of a case of great automated emergency systems doing their job, but considering that his ejection seat never even deployed and he still made it - that's some luck.
Transparent PNGs can Deadlock IE6
Rails is great, but this is just a lot of pointless, poorly written, blah blah blah. I wish I could down vote it.
For a language that was released a month ago I would be surprised if it did scale.
$10.000 == $10,000?
I guess I get what your are arguing now, but it seems like a false analogy. He isn't using his money to prop up an unproductive industry/product, he is giving it away. To the point where he doesn't even allow people to know it comes from him.

You call his goals 'unpopular' ... I personally think that helping restart the higher education system in Ireland to be a fairly admirable goal. Is there anyone out there that honestly campaigns against Big Education? Using his money and influence to help bring Sein Fein to the table seemed admirable. It's not like this guy is handing out eight balls to the poor.

OTOH, you earn points for coming up with an argument that charity is really price manipulation and subsidy in disguise. But I'll make this argument... it's his money to spend. You also have money to spend. If you happen to like buying a steak for dinner instead of dish of corn, are you manipulating the market by deliberately supporting a less productive product? (from an acres/cost to calories standpoint)
I like this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=119277

"I personally tend to try to apply the standard of whether it's of importance or interest to hackers in particular, rather than to human beings in general."

Stories about, say, the US elections are of equal importance to everyone, and fail that test.
" There is an upper limit, however:"

Agreed. I had a 30-inch Dell for about 7 months and eventually downgraded to a 24-inch Dell and I'm much happier.

30-inches is more time spent moving your neck around to see the rest of the screen and more space spent taking up your desk, that in my case is only 2 feet deep so being so close to such a large monitor is a bit awkward.
ugh, here they come... really hope place does not devolved into something like the digg/slashdot/techcrunch comment sections

it was nice while it lasted ; )
Likewise I usually run 3 to 4 Spaces in OS X.
Hacker News is one of my favorite sites - i love it for the quality of the content. Hope it doesn't go down because of the attention that it's getting now.
ah blast..
At these moderate loads the problem is more likely to be in the design of the web server than the language itself.
Actually, reading the tea leaves, I think Merb will become a solid competitor to Rails this year and perhaps even overtake it in 18-24 months. This is all speculative, of course, but there are definitely a lot of smart people taking a very serious look at Merb because it amounts to a clean-room rewrite of Rails that preserves most of its elegance and none of the bloat. Indeed, I consider Merb's relationship with Rails to be similar to that of Rubinius's relationship to MRI.

It'll be interesting to see what happens.
Every person is a set of ideas.
New Project: Newshoured - Local News Without Fuss
i heard there is an inbuilt product for the mac that does this. you said ishowu is 'pretty cheap', so I imagine that isnt it? thanks for everyone's help!
I find it amusing people are 'upset' that HN got techcrunch'd with the story being posted on TechCrunch. You should be ecstatic the TechCrunch editor frequents this site so often as you would most likely sell your first born to get featured on TechCrunch.
Social networks are like the eye: A Talk with Nicholas A. Christakis
I just put up a project I've been working on. It's a local news aggregator, but will probably become a general news aggregator at some point. I can see people asking for it the most. I'd appreciate any feedback as well as suggestions for local newspapers that people actually read (of course it'd be great if they had an RSS feed). Thanks!
What do you do to attract more women to work at your startup?
...if you do anything at all?

This is for an article at CIO.com, in which I'm hoping to share "things you can do to attract more IT women" (rather than tell more horror stories even though, face it, we all do love to read them).

Private comments to eschindler at cio dot com are okay, too.
The slowness is a self-defense mechanism. Slow down new signups and submissions.

Its genius really
mixmax, I'm sorry people are hammering your comments (not really deserved), but this just can't be answered on its own. If someone sells for $20 million but wanted to take over the world, it's disappointing. If dilution means the founder gets nothing out of a $5B exit, then it's a failure. It's just too subjective of a question.
Here is the thing. What makes some other solution more immune to a system-wide crash than ec2? When that happens, what is the major difference between that solution and an ec2 based one? If you really want to play it safe and don't trust amazon, then what you want is a disaster recover site which is completely independent. However, wouldn't you also want the same for any isp/hosting solution?
I didn't even know until now that there are editors on this site. Who are these people and what magical powers do they hold?
you guys, relax. pg has been thinking long and hard about the newbie influx problem for many months now. he saw what happened to reddit, and he's applying his usual sensible approach to preventing that from happening here.

if anybody can do this, pg can.
You're very insightful.
"Stories about, say, the US elections are of equal importance to everyone, and fail that test."

--I think that is wrong. US elections are important to americans (and maybe some foreigners that are into foreign politics).
You can be a hacker, and not an amercian, so you don't care much about US elections.
"Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.
...
Don't abuse the text field in the submission form to add commentary to links. The text field is for starting discussions. If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead."

These rules appear to be in direct opposition to each other. Could someone elaborate on which is the appropriate method?
The tabloid and flamebait techniques can, unfortunately, be effectively employed while remaining entirely within the hacker's topics of interest. I'll spare the naming of specific blogs or yc submissions...
The way I read the rules is that you're welcome to make any deals you want -- immunity, whatever -- but they aren't enforcable. The person you make the deal with is free to reneg the moment it's to his advantage.

Really, vanilla monopoly is a very carefully balanced game. I've never heard any house rule that doesn't make things worse.
Microsoft wants to freeze the Vista incapable lawsuit
Does Daylight Saving save energy?
You know, it really turns people off when you go around spamming your links all over the place (I've seem them both here and on reddit). You may have a great site, but perhaps you should let your technology speak for itself.

If it is truly great, people will come through word of mouth.
I'm using everyone very loosely as "a broader community", and not actually every person on the planet, if that wasn't apparent.
Not every site. The Ars Technica forums have maintained a surprisingly high level of quality discussion over the years. Ars uses human moderators who read every post and enforce the rules.
US to approve OOXML for ISO standard
It isn't a question of who you trust. It's a question of what classes of events that your system can withstand. EC2 is not durable. It isn't designed to be.
Well, HN is written in Arc which has a REPL and so the editors can do whatever they want!
You could always re-implement Git in OCaml, Haskell, or whatever other language you might like.
Yes, you're probably right. I just couldn't really think of a better measure of success, and I thought the question was interesting. As you rightly point out it quickly gets pretty complex. Guess it didn't fly, but it was worth a try.

And thanks for you support :-)
Certainly, but it eliminates an entire category of posting about things that are relevant "because hackers live on the same planet everyone else does", which, true as it may be, doesn't justify dumping the tight focus this site has had on hacker/startup oriented topics.
The difference is in the value add of the blog posting. Reposts vs. commentary.
What's your mother tongue?

I think a lot of hackers are interested in spoken and written language and like to play around with words and puns, etc.
I don't know if this has been discussed before, but karma per comment would be interesting, too.
This would be killer on an iPhone.
Ask HN: Does anyone here play golf?
There was a question earlier about board games, and it made me wonder if anyone here plays golf. I've always thought it seemed like a boring game for a hacker because it's a game of skill and not strategy. But it does get you outside. Suggestions for hacker-friendly outdoor sports.

(No, I will no accept LARP as a response :-)
The struggle for purity, in general, provides a depressing history.
Hacker News is the Schrodinger blog. Techcrunch can’t observe it without changing its state.
Actually, instead of that, why not just assess their voting habits and allow posting at a certain threshold? Those users that continually upvote stories and comments that are considered "low quality" are held, be they new/old whatever. Get too low, and you can't vote either.

The only issue is you need to be very specific in how you choose to asses what is "high" vs. what is "low" quality. Too rigid and you basically encourage group-think, too lax; anarchy.

(Note: I would keep "karma" in place since it would help to distract from the "real" karma system.)
Ironically, one of the best places for Rails right now, lies in a place you rarely see innovation -- the big-company-internal-portal market.

Most of these sites are built on old J2EE, STRUTS, or worse ASP stacks. They've got complex configurations, and excessively convoluted deployments, both of which contribute long lead times to updates. Rails allows for a new paradigm that quite closely fits the demands of these customers. Sacrifice a bit on the scalability / reliability end, and take advantage of Rails' agility and simple deployment structure.

Because of their light traffic demands and simplistic feature sets (integrations with other internal corporate services are likely just HTTP based) corporate portals are a fantastic target for early Rails adoption. A single decent developer (the sort you can still _hire) should be able to construct and maintain a fairly complex corporate portal -- reducing development investments (whether in-house or outsourced).

It will be interesting to see which "software as a service" / "software consulting" company first adopts Rails as it's status-quo for this sort of consulting...
Hmm. We are being downmodded because our conversation is apparently detrimental to this thread. Let's take our metaphysical thoughts somewhere else.
dojo has this too ... [http://dojotoolkit.org/demos/fisheye-demo]
pg - You should take this out of the story table and just post it right at the top of the page.
Sarah Lacy, SXSW, And The Art Of The Interview
"... What Is Your Favorite Board Game? ... Chess ..."

While chess is good, 3D chess is one you should try. Recommended by my geology lecturer to improve 3D thinking.
Why can't we ask questions via Ask.YC?
We want to hear from the YC readers, not necessarily PG or whom-ever read the info@ycomb
Blah, this is no news. This isn't TMZ for hackers. Her interview doesn't change the industry, and it's not interesting technically.
Ask YC: Widgets vs Plugins ?
If you're developing a blog add-on, how would you choose between a widget (client side js/flash) and a plugin (server side, powerful) ?

A lot of blog widgets have done very well lately - Mybloglog, Addthis, Feedjit, Whos Amung Us, Entrecard ...

I struggle to recall a plugin which has done as well (Akismet perhaps).

A case in point would be Gravatar (plugin) vs Mybloglog (widget). Gravatar never really took off, Mybloglog is ubiquitous as a sidebar property.
It's a frame of mind, influenced by his environment. I'm inclined to agree.
That bit is referring to questions about the YC program, not general questions of the Hacker News community.
why do you figure pg is amazingly good at this? he already banned me and rms from voting. that doesn't seem to suggest great leadership skills.
Please, no more xkcd, as much as I'm a fan. That's one less slot for an interesting article on the front page, as xkcd is usually guaranteed a spot if it's posted.
Mahaloism 1.0
Mahaloism is a socioeconomic structure that promotes long hours and low wages for humans based on the means of out producing machines. What do you think about Mahalo?
How to Run Digsby in linux with wine
One our users figured out how to get digsby running in wine and I thought this would be the best place to post. We have a linux version in the pipeline but this is a nice temporary hack.
Time to write it in an enterprise language -- I suggest C++.

(Seriously, though, this should give pg and company some valuable benchmarking data for later on.)
New Global Search Engine
So does this mean that Hacker News will soon be acquired by Google?
Why Rails rules: continuous forward motion
Cycling, of course! It can be both an individual or a team sport, has lots of tech if you want to get geeky about it, and is a great way to see the world up close without moving at a snail's pace.
For a hundred dollars I will write an essay for you.
It is just me or has the discussion of this article has strayed from the more interesting and fun angle - America bashing.
I for one thought it was amusing. Regards.
You think the editors interact with the system via the REPL? I would assume they just have the edit/delete functionality exposed for every post instead of just their own. Would be interested to know how this is actually implemented.
There's a reason why trading floors have three, four, or more monitors per computer. Where I work, most traders have four, but the FX and commodities guys have sometimes as many as eight monitors (one row of four above, one row of four below) tied to two computers at a single desk.
For me, the strategy comes into play when I realize I can only determine where the ball will end up with a marginal amount of certainty (in front of me or behind me). That said.. I love playing golf. Especially scrambles for the strategy reason.
"Zuckerbucks" was used in a Joy of Tech comic: http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/1015.html
I think startups are so desperate for good cofounders/early employees that they just don't care one way or another about the sex, race, etc. of the candidates... that's been my experience, anyway.
This is THE reason I left Reddit. Sensationalist articles that made stories appear demonstrably worse than they really were. Articles turned out not worth reading, I would downmod them and eventually good articles were impossible to find. I approve this idea.
It warms my heart to think that it's an infant botlet in training.
the source for HN is available in the Arc distro
What about arc makes anyone think it can scale? Is there an example of a continuations based web server that can?
http://amazon.decenturl.com/samson-audio-c01u-condenser is the kind of thing you'll be wanting
Mark Zuckerberg on Data Portability: An Interview
I believe the source for a subset of HN is available in the Arc distro. I remember PG commenting about having to remove YC specific stuff from there.
Remember that shifts are cyclical, temporary, and not the end of the world. Be happy for other countries which are finally getting a break.
Snakes in the Morning (how to get an edge on anything Americana)
GPL vs startups
Its an untyped, interpreted and does not have any heritage with the likes of C or even basic.

I guess it's heritage is smalltalk which I did enjoy when I studied.

Don't get me wrong it has its place but I think of it as a language that is like basic used to be. extremely easy to program in but if you learn just ruby you would have a hard time jumping to another programming langunage than if you had come from C#, C/C++ etc

no flames please :p
Architecture as a Language
oh well at least scoble didn't get a whiteboard out to explain how it works :p
I was hoping a big blog would NOT post about news.YC
I would rather have this community be small and focused rather then become something like Digg.
That doesn't seem to suggest anything at all, period.
Does HN have an issue with scalability? The site is tremendously slow from the new influx.

How would you go about scaling an Arc app?
Why do you say that? I think failing to get along peacefully with leaderboard users is a bad sign.
This was bound to happen, I'm afraid. If TechCrunch didn't do it, some Digg kidd would have.