skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I take the opposite stance: I'll gladly take friendly and thoughtful discussion of policy that is incidental when discussing an economic article.
I agree with you, but I did find the post interesting as a case study of how an intelligent community manager dealt with politics. What would happen if news.yc disallowed comments on "political" articles, for instance? (Not that I endorse the idea, or even have thought about it much.)
What are you talking about?
Thats a very good question which probably deserves a better answer than I can offer. But I'll have a go.

My first premise is that I think those who achieve success via "fair" competition tend to be better qualified than those who achieve it other ways.

My second premise is that over time successful founders should expect to find themselves in positions of power and influence beyond the scope of their initial successes.

My last premise is that societies avoid the worst types of social injustice when no single culture or way of thinking dominates the others. While heterogeneous societies may not make as much "progress" as homogeneous ones, they also avoid the worst cases.

Based on this, I think we'll have a better society if there are more qualified women at the top, but to have that we need more qualified women at all stages of the competition.
I like the concept of a trust network where you select degrees of trust separation. I think there are some recommendation sites who do this already (except they call it groups). NewsVine perhaps? Interesting concept nonetheless...
My favorite economic monograph of all time is from Friedrich von Hayek:

http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html

He describes how a market economy, though the price mechanism, utilizes distributed, localized data to effect the distribution of resources. It's hard to comprehend the unconscious and intricate processes of the market.

For lighter, more modern fair, I have always enjoyed the works of Steven Landsburg. From the trivial, such as why we walk up stairs but not escalators:

http://www.slate.com/id/2070182

To the profound, such as how to grow cars in Iowa:

http://faculty.tamu-commerce.edu/dfunderburk/428/readings/Th...

Empirical economics (what perhaps you mean by "scientific") is also fun and illuminating. The author of "Freakonomics", Steven Levitt, is enduringly popular nowadays. His work tends towards the empirical:

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/

I've always been a big fan of Cowen and Tabarok:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/

In college I studied the economics of environmentalism, which is essential to understand what approaches to helping the environment are likely to work or not (incentives matter!). I also studied the economics of law. Sorry, no quick fun links!

There is so much great economics out there, and so little life. Right now I am studying monetary policy. It's dense and dry, but also very controversial and unsettled, which makes it exciting.
Never heard of imeem but best of luck to you guys!!!
These kinds of stories are very dangerous for social news sites. People vote them up not because they're interesting, but just to support their preferred candidate.

Maybe somebody should submit an "Ask YC: What Presidential candidate do you like?" That way everybody could get their political opinions off their chest once and for all, and we wouldn't have to suffer through ten months of this kind of stuff.
He just posts a basic code snippet and then says "good luck figuring that out." Seems like he's just appealing to those who don't know and who don't want to know, but who are happy to have some blogger confirm their prejudices.
1. Voted for the continuation of the Patriot Act.
2. Has said that bombing Iran and nuclear options are not off the table.
3. Will continue the war on drugs despite admitting doing drugs
4. Will expand the government while lowering tax rates.
Stanford's New Website Converts Your Photos to 3D
Randall does mention Obama's support of open data standards and net neutrality. These issues are not only related to "hacker news", but will have an effect on every reader of this site.
Presidents can't make laws. At most, they can veto them. They can't set the budget. They can nominate Supreme Court justices, but have no control over them once nominated and often they interpret laws differently than how the appointing president thought they would. I can no longer say that the President can not unilaterally declare and wage war, but I can say that the Constitution grants the power to declare war to the Congress.

So what is the point of the Presidency, then? Especially in our day of modern media, a very big part of the President's ability to accomplish things is his ability to persuade the American people to work to achieve common goals. So maybe just "looking Presidential" or "sounding Presidential" is not important in and of itself. But if that is part of an overall power of persuasion devoted to noble ends, that can be a very important characteristic for a President, indeed.

Considering the current state of the Republican party, the Democratic candidates probably represent something closer to a "free economy" at this point. And of the remaining declared Democratic and Republican candidates, only Ron Paul has opposed the war so unambiguously.

Also, not much commentary yet on Obama bringing in Lawrence Lessig to advise him on technology issues. As that's probably the closest to being relevant to Hacker News, I would think that would get more discussion and some credit for Obama (again, relative to other actual candidates, not some idealized candidate who might agree with you on every issue).
Downvoting is overrated anyway.
I think the whole point of an endorsement is to make a cogent argument for why you believe such and such a person is the best candidate for such and such a position. So whether or not you find it persuasive, the endorsement itself is an attempt at a cogent argument. You are certainly free to ignore or disagree with the conclusion.
Erlang's OTP has got some pretty neat ideas. It's a skeletal structure in place for code that acts as servers, where transactions and hot-swappable code is built in. In addition, you can have a pool of generic servers that you can choose to 'become' a specialized server doing a specific task, and change it back when you don't have a use for it.
That article needs to get to the point.
My favorite OCaml tool: Unison File Synchronizer - http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison
Inexperience.
Use the Facebook app to draw users to your website(where there are features not in the app, or more useably than in the app).
That article shows that he actually DOES understand the concept of a hacker, he just doesn't think it applies to computer hackers (weird, huh?).

He says "a hacker is someone who wants to understand his trade a few levels deeper than everyone else." Um, that could be the tagline for Hacker News - "For people who want to understand their trade a few levels deeper than everyone else".

I doubt he's met any of the Great Hackers in the Paul Graham mold - I think pg would be furious if any of his yc people made those UI mistakes. Isn't the ultimate hard problem to "make something people want"?
On one hand, it's nice to see traditional media being given a lesson in what people really want, eg. being able to lightly sample huge amounts of content at a low price.

On the other hand, the success of bittorrent has directly killed all development on the many great systems that were beginning to make big advances in security and improving lives. These systems would allow for goals greater than simple piracy to be reached. Goals such as freeing regions from censorship, preventing unlawful wire-tapping and curbing some types of unjust lawsuits.

So if bittorrent dies, thanks for all the free stuff! but I'm happy to see you go.
Ideas subreddit: submit your ideas here and see what others think of them
Tell YC: Need tabindexes. I keep going to the help page when I try to submit a comment.
As titled.
Sounds like a good way to brainstorm.
Mobile phone browsers with flash support would be great! I have Opera Mini (http://www.operamini.com/), a 'full' mobile browser on a BB but the experience isn't that great because of the small screen. I prefer BB's built in browser that automatically formats the webpage for the small screen.
"...such as why we walk up stairs but not escalators: "

I actually walk up escalators. I have never seen anyone else do this, and I always wondered why. You get to the top even faster!
This is great. I missed Avi Bryant's keynote (dinner ran long) and I've been kicking myself ever since---and also cursing its absence on the web. I'll continue kicking and cursing, of course, but now not about this. Thanks!
It's interesting to see how this guy has defined himself. There aren't many posts (21 posts since May 2003) and of those, only 8 appear to be about programming. Out of those, 3 of them are trashing higher levels of abstraction, and small but powerful languages, including Lisp and pg by name. It strikes me as weird that a significant portion of his writing effort would go defending the status quo against a small, upstart philosophy. If you're on Goliath's side, why are you so defensive?
Thus highlighting the problem with voting:

1. Assertion made, viz, "Obama looks presidential".

2. Disproof offered, viz, a visual display of all prior presidents, none of whom look the remotest bit like Obama, even after correcting for skin color.

3. Instant downvoting of disproof, and upvoting of false assertion.

Get this, chums. He wouldn't even pass for a Kenyan president:

http://peacecorpsonline.org/messages/jpeg/bushandkibaki.jpg

Enough with the BS. I read the prominent liberal blogs, and the very day that Mike Ditka dropped out of the senate race, and Obama became an uncontestable shoo-in, the party mouths decided that Obama was their future candidate. He was given the DNC keynote to officially start the process: It was an embarressing mess of nonsense ("gay friends in the red states"), cliches ("America...a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before") and winking admissions of the two-faced identity politics to come ("They would give me an African name, Barack, or "blessed," believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success.").

Fine, and so everyone in the media agreed that the intolerable bilge confirmed his brilliance. There's no fighting taste, and I'll agree he delivers better than Clinton (who sounds like she's adressing a disobediant kindergarten class) but why Obama out of 300 millions? He fit the bill, but what bill was it?

I made a prediction long ago: Obama is the one chance for the Democrats to lose the white house yet again. Hillary and Edwards split the white vote in South Carolina. The whole South will play the same. Hispanics are less than inspired by him as well. Clinton won the Hispanic vote handily in Nevada.

You have a candidate that is popular with two groups: Blacks, who know the price, and over-educated white liberals, who don't. McCain wins.
Why Doesn't Anyone Give a Crap About Freedom Zero? (a new Mac is a "giant hardware dongle")
I don't think this author makes his point very well. But I think Amit makes a similar point here:

http://amitp.blogspot.com/2007/04/lisp-vs-python-syntax.html

Single quote summary: "When I'm writing code I prefer Lisp; when I'm reading code I prefer Python."

I think where Mr. Kesteloot goes wrong is comparing Lisp with Java. Java sucks both for reading and writing, pretty much.
"...friendly and thoughtful..."

Amen.
[SF] Xobni looking for contract database expert
Ever wonder how successful companies bridge the gap between product availability and having millions of users? Xobni will be crossing this gap over the next year and we are looking for a database expert to help us build out our funnel tracking systems. This means the chance to work directly with our VP Marketing who has led marketing from the beginning for two $100M+ startups.

We are looking for someone who understands indices, stored procedures, concurrency, query optimization, DB tuning, etc. We are willing to bring on someone without direct DBA experience if they have the right background.

The idea is to work with us as a contractor at full throttle for a month or so to set things up, and then we can take it from there depending on how things are going.

Please send resumes to jobs@xobni.com, and mention the Database Wizard position.
Sure, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=105822

Answered in a different thread on this topic.
"When you set your SmugMug gallery to 'private', this is exactly what you're doing - making the gallery and photos difficult, but not impossible, to find."

Is that the usual definition of 'private'?
That's an idea that I love and HATE at the same time, with multiple reasons for each. I love that I would get to hear what everyone thinks and love that it would be confined to one place. I hate that it would likely incite lots of ugly, ugly comments, and that it would probably draw the useful, civil comments out of context of other threads where they would be appropriate.

Politics can be so divisive and get so heated that even people who are interested are afraid to talk about it in public.

I think the problem is that a political party or candidate is a very low-bandwidth symbol that loses most of the information contained in that choice. The fact that a Mormon, a woman, and a black guy are running means that any vote can be interpreted as discrimination against the group not chosen. For example, if you told me you voted for John Edwards, should I assume you like his economic populism or that you're too narrow minded for a black or woman president? If you vote for a Republican, does that mean you are a homophobe? It's like trying to express everything you believe about anything, the moral, ethical, and intellectual debates you have inside into two bits (party, candidate). That's a hard problem.
Thanks for submitting this toffer.
Wow, this article is just living in its own little world. How can you write an article about the mobile web, and reference MobileSafari one time, in passing, and webkit zero times.

The iPhone alone accounts for ~0.1% of browsers, to opera mini's ~ 0.02%. Plus, webkit is on 30+ million Nokia devices. Even more relevant, maybe, is that webkit is actually the same on mobile devices and desktops, unlike Opera mini.
Hacker News is the new Reddit

Please say it aint so.
I do it too. I've seen many people do that... I guess that depends on the hurry (in my case, it depends on how much it bores me to stay still at the escalator).
It seems like this is working as designed. The problem is different definitions of "private," which I think SmugMug is wrong on. While the setting is functioning as they intended, I do not consider it to be private. If the label were "not displayed" this issue would probably not have come up.
Argh---there are no slides. Some can be found at http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/51/presentations.htm..., but not Avi Bryant's. D'oh!
Presidents have the most unilateral power with regards to foreign policy. He or She is, in effect, America's face to the world. So looking or sounding Presidential does have its own importance.

While they can't unilaterally start war by law, history has shown us Presidents can get away with unilaterally weilding military power. Furthermore the elecorate has taught Congress that voting for war equals re-election; anti-war equals a boot to the curb. Congress, naturally, votes for their own job security. In the same way that it's not about voting just for someone "looking presidential" it shouldn't be about someone who is just anti-(this)war.

In the end though, I believe that hackers not paying attention to politics will only lead to not having our needs heard at all. Believing you can stay 'out' or 'above' politics is a fool's errand. You will be affected.
I agree it is the term 'private' that is wrong here, not necessarily the behavior (though it obviously could be more secure.)
so it's not true? well even if it was, i don't see what's wrong with it. sounds useful, and the user had to activate it.
the success of bittorrent has directly killed all development on the many great systems

Examples please.
$1 Camera Image Stabilizer
Tweetmeme, a Copy of Techmeme For Twitter
2008: The Year Web 2.0 Hits the Enterprise, Says Forrester
This would be a great thread if it weren't for all the people complaining about its existence.
Lawyer Offers $10K Bounty for Blogger's Identity
F8ce the music: Facebook applications are declining in popularity
Wow... Thanks. Too bad many of the slides are missing, but worthwhile anyways...
Charging the founders of the Pirate Bay will stop nothing. It won't even stop The Pirate Bay.
Suggest YC: Create a user generated advice db for entrepreneurs
Hi, Is it possible for YC to create an advice db/forum for entrepreneurs similar to what thefunded does? I am sure it would be a lot easier for YC to bootstrap it.
thefunded does not make all the content avaialble to non-members plus their membership is too restrictive.
Of course. That's all true. I have no problem with him writing about his views, but the title of this article made it sound like he has some sort of higher political ground. Maybe a better title would have been "xkcd talks politics, Randall Munroe likes Obama"

It just seemed strange to see a comic writer getting his own post here about endorsement of a political candidate.

Also, I don't disagree with him.
Fat tail human, medium tail social & long tail algorithmic
Let me resize my own browser window, please.
Are Home Theater PCs worth the money?
site seems down right now (or at least really slow).

Wasn't there a YC company doing this at some point? Is this one and the same (since view3.com seems to redirect to the same very slow and/or down stanford AI page)?
Inc. Magazine: Is it crap?
Inc. Magazine brands itself "The Handbook of the American Entrepreneur." I'm curious to know what the Hacker News collective intelligence thinks of it.

I recently picked up a cheap subscription to see if there was anything to learn. Topics vary month-to-month, but there are usually case studies on successful entrepreneurs, tactical articles on subjects like marketing or management, and general interest essays.

I wonder, though, whether I ought to ignore everything inside and spend that monthly hour elsewhere. There are ads for shady companies. They have annoying 'special advertising features' that pose as articles. The back pages swell with MLM-type scams. It seems like the sort of advertising that would target dreamers and fools instead of busy entrepreneurs looking for tips during downtime. This leads me to question the reputability of the editors and thus any advice inside. Hence this post.

What do you think?

And if not Inc. etc., where's the high signal-to-noise entrepreneurial reading?
Ask YC: Startup School 2008? 
Will there be a startup school this year?

What coast? Still in March? I'd love to know the dates I should stay in town...
I agree with most of what you're saying, but would like to point a few things out:

1) Yes, you can track ROIs of that nature, and many people do. But as Steven Levitt says, it seems to not be a part of corporate culture to do so. And according to him, they often do waste millions. It's not the marketer's money, after all. They'll often say things like, "It's my job to spend the budget" when Levitt points out their losses.

2) There's more to online ads than clickthrough, I agree. I didn't say there wasn't. My point was that the stats are
easier to come by, and they'll be harder to weasel up.

3) That is a legitimate concern, I agree. However, being in a marketing arms race should already have been factored into the ROI, IRR, or whatever all-inclusive metric or set of metrics you are basing the budget decisions on. I don't mean Pepsi should give up, or that its marketing budget is bloated, but that even in an arms-race you can go too far.
What do you think? It's your hour afterall.
Coffee at barnes and noble while reading through their magazines for free. Can get everything in worthwhile during a single cup.
My app continues to add about 5,000+ users per day and total user count just passed 650k.

7-day rolling-window usage statistics are up about 20% since Nov/Dec and just two days ago hit a new record for number of active users in one day.

I don't force users to invite for any features, but every month or two I do flip a switch and have them bounced (just once) to the invite page as a friendly "Hey, tell your friends!" notice. I also run contests that use the invites as entries -- you'd be surprised how many people suddenly love sending invites once they realize more invites = more chances to win a $500 Nintendo Wii gaming package =)

Apps are hardly slowing down on Facebook, but I wholeheartedly agree that the problem of forcing invites has become more widespread and needs an immediate fix. That and the ridiculous amount of spammers smearing links all over developer review walls, discussion boards and fb:comment sections.
Declining stats on Facebook apps?
Why not? Anyone can endorse anyone. Xkcd just so happens to be the widely respected, best comic currently written. This is notable because comic authors don't normally endorse candidates.
I guess if you want to, you can think of it that way. I had OpenBSD on my old PowerBook for a while; I never really felt constrained by the platform. It's only "just a dongle" if you let it be just a dongle.
They're totally worth it as long as you treat them like the hobby they are and you truly love home theater.
This response is too long.
One major point Jeff failed to mention is that the so-called dongle can also run his precious Windows and with a little effort, Linux (and really, what is Linux without a little effort?)

Sure, you'll need a Mac if you want to run the Mac OS (legitimately). But to call it a dongle is a bit of a stretch in my opinion.

Of course, the entirety of this comment is pretty much divergent from the author's main point. So, feel free to disregard the above.

As for Freedom Zero, there are few places you'll be able to achieve that comfortably. But that's not what Apple is about, and plenty of people are happy with that, myself included.
My understanding is that they never had the record companies signed to begin with. It seems like they were trying to force their hands by issuing a press release, which obviously didn't work.
Will Price: Downturn - Now What?
The World Wide Web project
Hey far33d, you can find YCombinator's official page for this here: http://www.ycombinator.com/s2008.html

Short answers:

-Applications open now, due April 2nd.

-Boston(east coast), from June through August.

-In March, the accepted startups will be presenting to investors in Mountain View(west coast).
OK fair enough. Maybe there was reasonable content later in the article. The fact is that a lot of us can't afford to invest the time it takes to get through this guy's life story in the hope of finding it. Ironically the very people that the science content could have been more useful to are the ones who don't have the time to read it.
I for one welcome our new black-shirted overlords.

congrats, anson, lux and sachin!
Introducing Prologue