skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's less about the actual forecast and more about the way someone thinks about the business. If someone adamantly believes they're going to be a billion dollar company in a couple of years, that would be a signal. Either it's a really, really big idea and they're super-ambitious -- or, they're being unrealistic.
XM / Sirius merger approved
this issue has been resolved now- it is basically all MIT license now
A few minor things:

- after I signed up, it asked me to login. There's no need for this.

- I went through German lesson 1, but at the bottom it says "You are doing Lesson 0".

- progress went over 100% towards the end - a bit surprising
- restarting a lesson probably shouldn't reset the fact that it was completed

- I would like to see a list of the lessons I completed, maybe some stats to see how I did (maybe there is one and I missed it?) to track how I'm doing over time

- the links at the bottom of your homepage are broken

- being asked to pay for more than 3 lessons felt a bit like bait-and-switch, since the homepage promises 3000 words in big letters, but has no mention of cost (true, if it had, I might not have registered in the first place)

Al in all, a good idea, and good implementation. Clean, clear, and simple to use. I'm actually considering signing up.
Storm clouds over Silicon Valley
How good is the return for Google's Firefox referral program
I work for a large news-content company in San Francisco. I've been asked to review the potential revenue value of using Google's $1/download for Firefox referral program.

I read Google's info about it. I've read that they pay up to $1 based on a sliding scale of where the user is in the world.

What I am not able to find are people's real-world responses as to how successful the program is and what percentages of audience utilize the Firefox referral.

We have hundreds of thousands of visitors a month so there is a huge potential for this to be a good program for us.

If you have had experience with the referral program, would you care to share your experiences?
The consensus seems to be that this doesn't qualify as Hacker News, but I tend to think that a large percentage of the users of this board can empathize with this boy. I certainly went through some of this (though not nearly as much, and at a much younger age), and I'm sure a pretty large percentage of today's startup founders and programmers went through similar tormenting at some point for being smart, different, or just unlucky. Thus, this gets a well deserved up vote from me.
Actually, I think that is the point. Big companies are not necessarily always optimizing for employee and customer satisfaction. And frankly, with their size, creating a sustainable healthy internal environment becomes more and more difficult.

And although, as you say, the big guys don't always optimize around employee and customer satisfaction can you name one that would admit that?

One other note: small companies need to focus on profit as well or they won't have employees or customers for long.
Creating A Country Called VoIP
Google to provide Wireless Access to entire US
Ender's Game.
XML-RPC vs. REST
"For the first time, you can use any interface to edit a Rails application directly on the web, rather than rewriting the code offline, then uploading it to your host."

This seems super cool, especially for rapid prototyping, but does Heroku support any source control? I would be pretty nervous about updating a live application on the fly like that, having made some incredibly stupid changes to live code in my younger days (and that involved three steps, as opposed to one).
To be fair, my eyes were first drawn to the "I want to learn *" dropdown, so the rest made sense in that context.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_programming
Why do I need to sign up to use it? What reason is there that I need to create an account, give email address, choose a password?

Either allow everyone to just use it, or at least show them a demo, or let them play with something.
Enhance Security with Port Knocking
Dead as a dodo
The Adoption-Led Market
If you say good enough things everyone will like you

Oh my goodness. You're not serious, are you? This is a strategy for obtaining misery and contempt... and deserving it!
Fundamental misunderstanding: human code is made by human brains. Human brains understand everything (including code) via embodied metaphors and deal with complexity by splitting it into modules, then understanding each module abstractly, pushing away the details. Evolution doesn't work that way, at all. Why would it?
They are rockin' with OCaml! Very nice.

http://skydeck.com/jobs/
Perhaps. Would that be a good thing or a bad thing?

I for one would happily pay 20 USD or more for a really well-produced album full of good music. Sadly, that's a pretty rare find. While I suspect that some musicians will continue producing quality albums regardless, and hopefully listeners will support them, it seems that more than anyone else the recording industry as a whole is destroying itself by producing lousy albums.
I'm a brand new hacker who's learning ruby/rails to develop my first web app. I haven't yet gotten to the point of deployment (or even thinking about deployment). For someone like me, what are the pros and cons of using Heroku versus a traditional host? I've got lots of time and am eager to learn, but with so many different pieces to the startup puzzle, I'm wondering where exactly to best allocate it.
Bah, I've been a loser from ~7 to ~18 (I'm 22) and I see right through the BS. I've been bullied repeatedly during that time. Fortunately it was "only" words in my case but the ravages and dynamics are mostly the same, I think. Here are some couple points, in random order:

- Probably, about 50% of the fault lies with Billy. He will never get out of this hell if he doesn't accept a big part of responsibility. There's a reason he's the only one that gets beat so much and so hard. I'm sure his mother is well-meaning, but she's not helping him by putting all the blame on the other kids and the authorities which don't do squat. Which brings me to my next point.

- Trying to get Billy out of hell by counting on authorities or throwing lawsuits is mostly pointless. The perpetrators are mostly untouchable and they're fully aware of it. Those that push for the authorities to enforce Billy's safety are only taking his destiny out of his hands and giving him a good excuse to blame others for his predicament. "It's not my fault if I'm not safe, it's the authorities that don't protect me enough". There will always be waves and waves of people that will attack Billy, verbally or physically, because guess what, there are tons of people in this world that are in dire need of better status and self-esteem and a lot of them will opt to pray on easy targets to make themselves feel superior.

- I'm sure Billy thinks he can't reverse the tide because everyone knows him and how he gets beat. But throw him in a new neighborhood where nobody knows his past at all, and I'll bet you the same problem will occur. That's because he's projecting a bloody image of himself that the sharks will no doubt sniff real quick. When I was bullied, when people I had never even seen called me names I thought the word somehow had got around. But what I should have understood is that it's just the blood and shark thing. It's not that everyone knows you, it's that everyone can picture you in the generic loser template. Those days, I can recognize the "old me's" at a glance, and it's painfully obvious I could become a bully if I hadn't matured properly.

- Trying to find external motivations like "he's too tall" or "he wears glasses" or "he has learning disabilities" is BS. When I was a loser, I was indeed "too tall", and there always was "something wrong with me" (ex: unfashionable clothes), but now I'm as tall as ever and I still have unfashionable clothes but nobody notices that anymore. Weird, eh? No, it's just my attitude that's changed.
I like to ask where the founders grew up - I actually like to know alot about people's backgrounds as kids
In terms of graphic design, you want to limit the number of fonts and font sizes in any given composition. You have a lot of different sizes and some odd bolding. "The average newspaper..." doesn't need to be bold. In fact, it hurts the readability.
I wanted to put that in the title but it is limited to 100 chars. On their blog over the last year they've mentioned some neat looking OCaml tools they've written (some have been open sourced)
I see this argument a lot from YC fans, but I never see the two big problems with it addressed:

(1) The overwhelming majority of VC A-rounds don't go to YC companies.

(2) A majority of YC companies don't seem to get funded --- defined here as "an A round of over $1MM".

Graham knows more about (2) than I can claim to, and I could be wrong, but my sense of it is that I am not.

The normal route to funding for News.YC readers seems to be:

(1) Bootstrap
(2) Prototype
(3) Customers
(4) Adult Supervision
(5) Funding

(4) --- a CEO who knows how to talk to VC --- sounds demeaning, until you realize that it pales in comparison to (5), which dominates both the normal and the YC graph (note edge to (0) FAILURE at every vertex).
I agree, I thought it was more for vocabulary building and it took me a couple of moments to realize it was about foreign language.
Front page is too busy. While base color scheme is nice and consistent, whoever decided on help/blog/login colors must be shot. Do the same to whoever spelled "this is the fastest .." all in lower case and highlighted with lime background.

Selecting German and clicking on Start brings me to the page featuring a photo of dude wearing what looks like an Afghani hat. Also bunch of text is in bold - this is really annoying, you should really ease off on neurolinguistics :)

The overall impression of first two pages is "amateurish", which means that I am leaving even before I had a chance to learn what the site is about. Work on your design, make sure it's as visually polished as it gets. Then poll people again, this time - regarding the functionality of the service.
Tweetburner
What is a small business incubator? Empirically "incubators" in the silicon valley / software world have all been total failures.
Must have for GTD fans
What about "If I'd known it was harmless I would have killed it myself"? I think the small furry creatures deserve more sympathy than musicians who want government to guarantee a business model.
I am serious. What do you think could possibly prevent this from working (other than insufficient skill to say good enough things)?

You say it's a strategy for obtaining misery and contempt. But it's not a strategy. It's just a fact. The strategy of attempting to get everyone to like you in this way is something different. That's hard and I didn't recommend it, I only said it is possible.
ESPN Turns Off Ad Networks
What a bunch of FUD. Granted there are lots of products that abuse TCP/IP, even Cloudant, the Y Combinator funded home router startup http://www.crunchbase.com/company/cloudant

But P2P technologies like BitTorrent don't use multiple connections to maximize bandwidth to a single server, they use multiple connections to distribute the load across many other hosts.

They continue to espouse the virtues of P2P applications as “efficient” but what they don’t tell us is that “efficient” means efficiency in bandwidth hogging.

If I want to download a 500MB movie, I NEED to use 500MB of bandwidth one way or another. The demand is there, the only question is how will it be met.

P2P networks are incredibly efficient in that they distribute the load across many many hosts and networks. Just because they use lots of bandwidth doesn't mean they're inefficient. Try distributing a popular torrent from a single server and watch it melt before your eyes.

They also don’t tell us that P2P is efficient at offloading the costs of video distribution to someone else.

Yeah, that someone else is me and all the other BitTorrent peers who are paying our ISPs for access to the internet.

The diagram below shows what happens when an application like BitTorrent uses the network continuously.

That has much more to do with the BitTorrent protocol than the TCP/IP protocols. It takes time for a host to discover other peers and ramp up, etc. Additionally, comparing BitTorrent to email, and even Skype, is a ridiculous comparison.

If it's really such a big problem, ISPs should shape traffic across the board, fairly. AND disclose to their customers what they're really paying for. But they certainly shouldn't filter or limit specific types of traffic.
I'm not sure how many hackers could physically work in [law|business|medical|pharmacy|nursing].

My point was that because school systems are hackable, sometimes hackers will have hacked the signs of the costs involved. For example, my graduate school costs less than -$12,000 a year, but some peoples' schools may cost more than $12,000 a year (so they're not "doing something right?"). Big deal. In the long run, education wins financially and in terms of helping people accomplish their goals.

One can easily make the argument that startups are education, but obviously this consists of more than "Web 2.0" and a few other buzzwords thrown together at random. (I'm not criticizing Paul here, but I am criticizing the lunatic fringe that seems to grow around Paul.)
Longer story:
http://www.esquire.com/features/esquire-100/pigfinger1007
A single comment or timestamp would change the hash.

Maybe the <title>, or the contents of the first <h1> or something would be a better proxy.
"Probably, about 50% of the fault lies with Billy."

Do you have any unsubstantiated claims that DON'T come from "The Secret"?
Those not hacker news comments are so tiresome. I was curious about the article, but it didn't seem to have a punchline. But then I was still curious about the comments on Hacker News. After all, it seems to be a system with a problem. Billy most definitely seems to not have managed to hack the system to his advantage.

It seems unlikely that there could be a technological answer to those problems, but who knows?
"throw him in a new neighborhood where nobody knows his past at all, and I'll bet you the same problem will occur."

I hope there are still neighborhoods where that kind of thing does not occur at all. When I went to school, there were of course popular and not so popular kids, but I don't recall kids having to visit the hospital on a regular basis because of bullying.
I agree that this is not Hacker News.

On the other hand, this relates to one of my pet causes. It is a shame that the boy’s parents have no options except to A) petition the school board for relief B) mount a political campaign to unseat the school board incumbents and then reform the school system (a large undertaking) or C) move to another school district. Why can’t they just take their money to a better run competitor?

School choice doesn’t answer every school quality problem, but there is a certain perverse anti-logic in bureaucratic monopolies that pervades much of what goes on in primary education.

Hopefully my rising to the bait won’t pollute Hacker News discourse too much, as only those who click on this comment thread will read my comment.
I disagree with claims it's his fault.
Verizon and AT&T dominate auction for 700mhz spectrum
Facebook Mirror | Index of /
So how would you change his attitude, and how soon would he see improvements?
Great idea, lousy execution. Besides the problems others have already mentioned, it's slooooooooowwwwwwww. Also, two very serious fundamental problems:

1. Many of your translations are wrong. I took the Spanish lesson. All of the Spanish verbs are infinitives, but the English translations are all gerunds.

2. Learning a language one word at a time doesn't really teach you the language. You need to learn more than just vocabulary, you need grammar, conjugations, declinations, etc.

But I hasten to add, the idea of a language tutor that keeps track of what you know and only drills you on the stuff you don't is a really good one and very promising if you can actually make it work. But it's not an easy problem. (For an aspiring entrepreneur this is a good thing. If it were easy someone else would have done it already.)
I look forward to trying the web-based version.

By the way, your hosting provider is a little slow when the site is accessed from the USA under its current load.
First impressions: I like it. It starts up much more quickly (I'm on OS X), and the interface is nicer (the tabs look better, the back button is larger than the forward button).
"I'm sure Billy thinks he can't reverse the tide because everyone knows him and how he gets beat. But throw him in a new neighborhood where nobody knows his past at all, and I'll bet you the same problem will occur. That's because he's projecting a bloody image of himself that the sharks will no doubt sniff real quick. "

I've only been rarely picked on as a kid, maybe all of five times that I remember. No one tried more than twice. I made friend with some of them. I pushed around a couple people (psychologically and socially), at least until one of them told me a few years later exactly what I did. (We were walking somewhere, and he opened up to me for some reason).

I agree that there are aggressors that sniff out fear and weakness. This may even be a literal thing, if someone can smell the stink of fear. However, I have no idea if this is what's happening in this specific instance of Billy. You really have to be face-to-face before you can be sure.

Whether or not Billy is giving off the "I'm a victim" signal, counting on the authorities is like looking for a bigger bully. You're reaching for a bigger stick, whether that is in the form of a lawsuit or jail time.

On the flip side of things, the American public education system is not that great. It's biggest flaw, particularly in middle school, is that it sets up the same kind of conditions as found in the Stanford Prison experiment. But that is more of a comment about the teacher-student dynamic than it is about the student-student dynamic. When you come down to it, forcing kids to go to school turns the whole education process into one big babysitting operation, and I think most kids know this at some level. Does that create more opportunities for these kids to get a sick kick?

I have a couple friends that grew up in the Talladega, AL area. Each of them independently told me that people around there are clinically antisocial and borderline-psychopathic. Hell, some are not even "borderline". They each told me that it wasn't just that people are inheriting genetic factors that predispose them to these kind of behavior, there are also environmental factors reinforcing them. The parents there mess with their kids. A common form of entertainment for groups of men is walking around looking for someone to beat up. In other words, you don't walk around in that area unless you're prepared to be physically assaulted.

A number of these issues is thoroughly addressed in Orson Scott Card's book, Ender's Game. Or even Lord of the Flies. Adolescent humor is exactly that. "Heh-heh". Look at Beavis and Butthead or South Park. It's what happens when there's no longer any real coming-of-age rites in a civilized society.
If you want attention, support Mac OS X
I'm not sure if this is just randomness at play, but I develop software that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux and my download statistics are showing some very interesting tendencies.

Almost all the people who download software are Mac users, even though...
Reminds me of La Ciudad y los Perros (The Time of the Hero).

http://www.enotes.com/time-hero/
Yeah that is what I was thinking when I added that last line.

For some reason I initially wasn't thinking about comments... so the title would be a much better proxy.
This is the first stress test, and looks like Django on webfaction is not holding up too well! Or maybe just my poor coding :)
The economics of attention
Google's free beer and 'big-ass' barbies
They're naturally going to get outpaced by people who vote reflexively based on titles (Ron Paul syndrome) or who go for short attention span content.

Perhaps a little javascript could be used to disable the article vote arrow until the page was actually read by the user, or maybe the arrows should only be on the comment page.
Great, but I think I will wait for version 3.01 when they fix most of the bugs. I am still running v. 1.5, as FF 2.0 was terrible, ok maybe not terrible, I just didn't like a lot of the changes they did to the ui.
"... It's much easier to vote for the good ones than write your own. ..."

More to the point you are rewarded more to post articles on a regular basis. Writing your own articles requires a far greater energy input. This is exposing a flaw in the system in a way. Maybe HN user submitted stories should get recognition in the submission process? Maybe a start at 2 points instead of one?
I'd love to see something along the lines of http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html
Learn karate.
I think the Hacker News homepage has a bug -- and that I fixed it.
A shameless plug? I think not.
Don't confuse a net loss of wealth with wealth not being created. If everybody got an equal portion of total wealth, then monopolies and spammers would be bad, but since somebody wins (even though there are more losers), wealth is technically created.

A better scenario is the "creative destruction" when one industry is displaced but society overall benefits, i.e. cars over horses, Wikipedia over Encarta over Britannica, etc.
Regardless how much vc-funded start-ups are encouraged to stay small, the investors ultimate incentive is for them to get as valuable as possible, and I could be wrong, but that usually means getting large as possible as fast as possible. All things being equal, big & bossy = higher valuation.
I noticed that it took some time to process each answer. If I had made this, I would probably have loaded the answers and image URLs for each lesson only once, in a single JS file (preferably a static file). Then you would not have to connect to the web server for each answer.

And try to keep the user's progress in a cookie if it's possible. Make the login optional if a user wants to save their progress permanently.
What will you do to find and retain the best people possible for the company?

What has worked for your company? What did you do to retain the best possible people?
I missed the last page before I posted the above comment. Briscoe's solution does sound ideal, but trying to patch TCP/IP is like trying to stop a freight train. Maintaining backwards compatibility with billions of existing hosts while making such drastic changes is not an easy task. That's why it's been almost 15 years since IPv6 was introduced and it's still not deployed in any significant numbers.
You're totally agreeing with the article's premise that poverty is a lack of wealth. Seaports, navigable rivers, stable, friendly neighbors, political stability, and arable land are all forms of wealth. Just because they aren't owned by an individual doesn't mean they aren't wealth. Most people in Africa lack these things and therefore they are poor. If these things existed, then there would be an infrastructure that would let individual, hard working and industrious Africans become wealthier.

If you compare any rich country with any poor country, you can make a similar list of things the poor country is lacking that make it poor. Those things are all forms of wealth. Whether it is natural or man-made doesn't matter.
"... The site has been diluted a bit. The TechCrunch post increased our traffic by 20% ... I don't think getting rid of karma would solve the problem, though. The problem is voting, not submission. ..."

Take a look at http://www.perlmonks.org You can vote but are limited by a daily ration proportional to hierarchy. But permonks has a different DNA compared to HN, less hierarchy more structured anarchy. So maybe that's not an ideal solution.

"... Long-time users: please vote more ..."

Willco, but I don't scale well. Of course there must be plenty of better ways to manage voting. Sounds like a new problem to solve.