skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Characteristics of good writing
Good writing is usually short, precise, and to the point. Don't forget, don't be afraid to polarize people. Don't try to win everyone. They either love you or hate; but they'll respect you. Make sure you consider your audience. Pick a corner, and fight until you die.
So how would you spend this hypothetical wealth? The abstract concept of money is what allows the development of a highly specialized economy. Greater specialization leads to greater productivity, and hence increased wealth.
Sorry, I accidentally downmodded you. Hopefully adding to your thread will get you more recognition and increased upmods.

Anyways, this is awesome! Precisely the flat earth effect that Friedman foretold.

I just read Guns, Germs, and Steel recently. The underlying principle of all the ultimate causes that Diamond identifies is the auto-catalyst, where disparate entities collaborate and build on each other creating yet more possibilities for collaborating and building. That's why I see stuff like this and get so excited - we're creating a worldwide auto-catalyst and who can tell what the future holds!
Spending is a misnomer. If the things you would spend your money on are part of the very system of wealth you contribute to, then you don't need money. This is what we're seeing with the web.
Isn't the news volume supposed to provide a ground reference of absolute volume? Or did I get it wrong?
Many routing protocols commonly used (BGP, OSPF, etc) don't have sufficient authentication built in. They instead rely on ISPs setting up proper filters and everyone playing nice.
This isn't an Ask YC question; this is an Ask Your Lawyer question.
On the other hand, ruby and python remain relatively level:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=ruby%2C+python&ctab=0&...

Another interesting one, digg is falling, while reddit is steadily climbing:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=reddit%2C+digg&ctab=0&...
If anyone else gets curious about the hardcoded in domain that gets you auto-banned, I'll state what should have been obvious and say that it really isn't worth it.
why is this notorious?
Creative Uses For Old Computer Parts
Havoc Pennington makes a similar point in his essay "Working on Free Software" (http://ometer.com/hacking.html):

"Eric Raymond's thoughts on this topic are here; his HOWTO describes how to join "hacker culture." The culture isn't really necessary to participate in free software projects though, IMO. As long as you follow the community way-of-working you don't have to get into the social aspects (unless you'd like to)."
I don't understand your point. Are you talking about some sort of digital bartering system? And what exactly is the "overhead" of using money (I hope you aren't referring to the fact that it has to be earned)?
Can't this doc be summarized to a few bullet points? I have things to do!
While a bit cheesy, the article was a useful read. Reminded me of the climate we have at hackathons: lead by inspiration, check back on everybody's self-assigned project regularly.
I agree about the money not equaling wealth, but please explain the part about the overhead of money not being worth while.

Money has value because we can receive it in return for value we've created (a sort of universal value system), and transform it into another form of value or wealth. I don't see how it could ever get to the point where it's not worth having a universal medium of wealth. If it did get to that point, we'd have to resort to bartering. The only alternative is to have EVERYTHING be free - not just information products, but physical products, like cars, houses, and services. And if communist countries are any clue, this isn't the best way to do things.
Given his analysis, it may also be the case that "d" ideas occur quite frequently, but since they are (by definition) orthogonal to the way most people think, they do not catch on.

I'd say a lot of this occurs in science fiction and other literature, and these ideas eventually permeate culture and get turned into actual products. E.g. submarines, spaceships, robots.
Sure it does.
Qwaq releases Hydra multi-core Squeak VM
It would be fantastic if we could really get 99% off Hackers And Painters: http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0596006624.01._PE99_SCLZZZ...
Product management meets the scientific method
What Is Beautiful Code.
There are always weaknesses in existing products which allow nimble startups to gain a foothold and launch a company. It's also much easier to build a product when you don't have 10,000 users pinging you with feature requests and bug fixes.

Do the existing products in your industry have great reporting engines? If not, make that the highlight of your product. The 10% of the industry that needs more reporting functionality will flock to you.
Can online surfing be further simplified?
I was discussing some idea with one of my friends. This is shootout from that one and complementary to his idea. Lets say you have 8-10 regular URLS to visit also you waste lot of time on them. RSS readers have solved this problem to some extent i.e. it at least saves your time where you have to manually go and check something interesting to read. Ans there are tools which now help you to safeguard your habits :) (8aWeek and Rescuetime; both are YC funded).

Now come back to main idea. RSS has solved problem partially where you just need to read news to which you are subscribed. Or RSS is completely successful in that thing because that was the aim. I wish (I wish I make one )there should be some application within the browser which will allow me to access all my favorite urls within one login. Again it allow me to force-login/auto-login whichever I want for particular website. It should have inbuilt RSS reader so that I need not open other Browser window to see goodies. Further add some notifications so that I can work on the things and wander there only when matters. It should keep working asynchronously(RSS)/sync(Other applications) whenever I want. Yes there is valid point that you can store all favorite urls in bookmark and open them in tabs in one go (Firefox) and let firefox remember your all passwords. I agree to that but there is something more can be done which will add value to online surfing experience from the proposed sandbox. I guess there are such tools/applications but may be I don't know so share your views.
No, the overhead is in the charging and tracking of money. If your system is dynamic and fine grained enough, then it can cost just as much to maintain the financial representation of what is happening as the event itself. Thus, you don't really make anything.

A very hypothetical example: say you have millions of simultaneous users all over the world who are constantly, but unpredictably, using your web service. The value of all these people using your service together is very high. However, since people use the service irregularly, charging them a significant amount would make it not worthwhile for them to use your system, and you lose your crowd. On the other hand, the amount that you could reasonably charge them is so small that it would only cover the cost of transaction, and would make the psychological overhead great enough that you would again lose your crowd. So, overall, it is best to not charge anything, and instead extract value in other ways, such as demographic information mining.
That can't be the whole story. A company hiring a roofer can't discriminate on the basis of physical handicap? What if he is in a wheelchair?
This definitely can't happen with material objects. I'd say things are different in the information realm, though.

The faster, more fine grained, and more dynamic a system is, the less money makes sense, since the cost of managing the money comes closer to the value of the money being managed.
umm here is the reference:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/21/...
Also, on your specialization point, there is great value found in integration. I don't know if you are a _n_x programmer, but the level of integration among all the specialized tools makes it a much more valuable system (at least for a programmer) than a balkanized Microsoft box.

You also see this realization in the current trend of Services Oriented Architectures, which is basically the UNIX philosophy writ large.
Highly recommended read.
Ad spending moving from portals to search, entertainment sites
There already is one. Its called NASDAQ.
I have one gaming site with forums that makes 400,000 impressions a month. It makes probably $140 in Adsense in a good month, plus about $170 in targetted banner ads from sponsors who approached me directly.

As such, it's enough to cover the servers of that hobby and pay a little towards my other dedicated servers.

By no means is it bringing in enough money for any business. That would require better conversion/click rates or a lot more impressions than I get.

I could probably get the banner advertisers to pay up to 50% more by bargaining harder (since there are a number of small business suitors), but I like them to get solid return on those advertisements.
This particular book is one of the four recommended on http://ycombinator.com/lib.html
I think a migration cycle in the nerd sites will decrease the problem - effectively establishing equilibrium.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121109
Ratatouille and The Golden Compass win Oscars
You are right that this article talks of a "wider applicability" of the business model where services are cross-subsidized by advertising.

But, there's more:

The article emphasizes that the "costs" for an Internet Service, which hitherto have been cross-subsidized by advertising are, for all practical purposes, not relevant any more. It is true that this article talks only of the bandwidth, storage and computation costs and excludes the cost of labor. But much has been said before about the costs of labor decreasing via improved frameworks and tools.

The question then becomes, "What does it mean now, that the costs to be cross-subsidized are so low?" This goes back to what PG, Marc Andreessen and others have been claiming all along: we are going to see more startups, a LOT more startups. Also, according to Chris Anderson's Long Tail, LOTS of startups in niche domains. Startups operating in niches, might not make a whole lot of money through advertising. But, this is precisely the point of the article, given the cross-subsidization needs being so low, some startups would be happy making a couple of thousand or tens of thousands a month (instead of millions).
Yes - and prior to May there was an AdSense 728x90 in the top frame (fun with auto-refreshing CPM rev =) ).
I'm talking about a no fuss system where you can have people buying and selling shares of your web site in minutes without starting a company officially or going through any legal process.
N.YC Feature Suggestion
When looking at my "Threads", each of the comments has an "on:" uri that points to the actual site that was linked to. I keep clicking that to be taken to the N.YC page for that discussion thread, but it takes me to the actual site instead. As it stands, I don't see that being very useful. I keep trying to use it the way I do because I want to view other comments that might have popped up. I don't see much value in how it currently functions.

What thoughts do you have about that?
The SEC stands in the way
notice Africa
Once we understand precisely how music affects the mind, it will be clear what makes the 5th Symphony work, and it will be possible to create its functionality as "the next obvious step". After all, it's not the sequence of notes that matters, it's the emotion that it creates. So yes, it's (4).
That's always going to be the exception, though it might become a larger one.
At the OReilly Tools of Change publishing conference I just went to, Tim OReilly gave a great talk on "Free is more complicated than you think". The old school publishers that don't use the web nearly as well as OReilly are shaking in the boots because of things like Wikipedia.

They just don't get it.

Chris is 100% right here.
My comment was mostly tongue-in-cheek. To answer your question though, the law and legal procedures are there to protect investors. Otherwise, whats to prevent you from running away with their money?
I was thinking the same thing, so I changed it to work the way you suggest.
Like all vague, sweeping questions of this sort, the answer is it depends. There's a hell of a lot of non-hacking work to do in a startup, how much exactly depends on the particular one.

But any non-hackers probably should have done at least some programming, so they at least have a feel for the strengths/limitations of their technology.
I think it's more likely that being hard to use would deter users who don't care what makes computers tick from using it, not force them to learn. They'd just go back to Windows.
If I read it correctly, they also successfully screwed YouTube over for an hour... so a pyhrric victory at the least.

Lately Pakistan has been 'Epic Fail' in general...
Cool. Can you show me how to redirect Yahoo's traffic to my blog?
Are you sure about IQ testing?
One can limit the use of the money to online advertising and servers say -- something that is easily enforced in an automated way. Moreover, one can enforce the payment of dividends from advertising.
Thanks. This had been bugging me too.

On a related note, is there a reason only the most recent comments can be viewed for a user? Is there a way to access all your own comments?
Facebook is making bringing in alot more then 214K a month via their self service social ads alone. I've spent a few thousand there over the past couple weeks, and I know alot of other people who have. Profit? of course not, but revenue definitely.
The devil is in the details.
If you limited it to accredited investors it might be possible, but that'd be extremely low volume/traffic - this is definitely something for lawyers to figure out.
I believe you want something like the Pink Sheets which is an unregulated stock market. You should check them out and see what laws they operate under.
I think what he's getting at is that while cyperpunk and hacking culture are not mutually exclusive, they do not entail each other.

From what I've seen a cyberpunk "hacker" is usually the "other" kind of hacker (again, not mutually exclusive)

I'm sure ESR wouldn't tell you to not waste your time on an amazing hacker (in the original sense of the word) who also happened to be into "cyperpunk", but most cyberpunks are not amazing hackers.
This is awesome. Great work Paul. just got it working with mzscheme v352: http://flickr.com/photos/pauls/2290165597/sizes/l/
I'd love to know how many uniques news.yc is getting from Colorado and what that trend is like.
I realize it's not sv, arrington suggested !sv = you're not serious about your startup, it's beneficial to be in sv statistically, Boulder is on par with sheboygan for funding (j/k matt) but I'm seeing an increasing amount of signal from Boulder / Denver.
Very interesting. Must be the first article I've read that used the word "cybernetic" seriously!
Anyone want to buy some old dot-com business models?
There's a good reason the stock market is so heavily regulated, otherwise it would be even more infested with scams and scandals than it already is.
On a related note, you've probably heard of oneshare.com which sells single shares of a stock for gifts, but what about high priced stocks like GOOG or Berkshire Hathaway...

Why not have shareshare.com, which sells you a share of a share, say 1/10th of a GOOG share for ~$50, or 1/1000th of a BRKA share for $140?

I guess this would end up being like a mutual fund consisting of a single stock...
gBrainy - Open Source Brain Trainer
The Forgiving Tree: A Self-Healing Distributed Data Structure
HTML5 SQL Player using Google Gears
> When I control the gear,

Does Boeing outsource anything? Discuss.

Obviously if you can run everything in-house for cheaper than an organization can do it elsewhere, you should. Large numbers of businesses are discovering that's not the case, or their 10 seconds of downtime isn't actually consequential. (If it is, then having an in-house base of expertise is critical. But an SLA is not the same as an in-house ops department!)
The GTD method: summary
Summary: (reproduced)
GTD is a simple and flexible method for managing your day-to-day tasks or activities, so as to maximize personal productivity.

IMP
The intended result of applying GTD is being able to keep up with a high workflow in a relaxed manner. The main principle is to get everything that is nagging you out of your mind and into a trusted external memory (file system), so that you can stay focused on what you actually have to do now, rather than on various ideas, plans and commitments for later.

To achieve this, GTD provides a compilation of tips and tools. Allen distinguishes five basic stages in our work:
We
(1) collect things that command our attention;
(2) process what they mean and what to do with them; and
(3) organize the results, which we
(4) review as options for what we choose to
(5) do.
How are these two movies more notable than any others? If any are worth highlighting, I'd probably pick No Country for Old Men, since it picked up four awards.
Noticed you use affiliates (amazon etc). How much do you make from those? Are they worth having?
Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls
TC has paid sponsorship slots that cost $10k/mo and there's 10 of them now.

http://www.techcrunch.com/advertise/

He also has quite a few other ads running as well. He's making an incredible amount of money and has been for years now. Selling your own ad space is by far the most profitable way to make ad money.
The 3 U's: A Model for "Advertising" in the App Economy
IE8 Beta 1 is focused on the developer community
Re-branding Microsoft
Marketing in a recession
The Golden Compass movie was really awful. Maybe it's notable that bad movies win Oscars? ;)
There seems something wrong with this, couldn't they take the slow parts and write just those parts in some other language?
The European advantage: product design
It's probably meant to stop karma bombs, and reduce the karma advantage of having many more posts.
What domain is that?

:-)
For a moment I was confused about what this was about, because a slight misspelling takes you to an illegitimate site RefreshThings.com that I went to first by accident.
"we now have a handy way to convert from reputation (PageRank) to attention (traffic) to money (ads)"

... on the attention economy (previously on hn)
Literate Programming in Lisp
At least now I can say that I've been rick rolled by PG himself.
What books should be in a "Personal CS Degree" Reading List?
i just had to go digging in news.arc and find that url..gah
Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and their Computation by Machine (Part I)
What's new in arc2
Yes, and the 12" powerbook is worst. I had to take the DC-in board out of mine, which requires completely emptying the insides except for the optical drive … damn what an arduous process. :)
Except they use 1.8" disks.
By karma bomb, do you mean downmodding all of a user's comments? If so, you can't downmod a comment after some period of time.
Growing a Language: A Conversation with Guy Steele
Their claims don't sound that plausible: Apple is full of not-stupid engineers.
Ratatouille, on the other hand, was great.
internet is serious business DOT com

get rolled at your own risk
It's a really clean, laidback, thriving, liberal environment
Adobe Blurs Line Between PC and Web - launch of AIR on Monday
Ask YC: Best Developer Hang-outs Online
Other than news.yc where do you spend your time when looking for development/hacker related news? This can include forums and news sites. I'm just trying to discover new places.

So far here's my list:

http://refactormycode.com - not very active but I enjoy looking at others' code from time to time

http://dzone.com

http://reddit.com/r/programming/

and for when I'm really bored
http://www.topix.com/tech/programming-languages
Wanted: Someone Who Knows Nothing About the Job
xkcd - Fruit chart
The Most Inspirational Part of Andy Grove’s Autobiography
Adobe AIR v1.0 & Flex 3.0 Released; New Adobe Open Source Site Launched
You haven't tried affiliate marketing much have you.

One of my sites has around 1,000 visitors a day, generates $5k-$10k revenue a month.
google sell advertisement, not email accounts
google sell advertisement, not end user applications
google sell advertisement and to do so they attrack the audience by offering free things ... the idea itself it very simple, the brilliant thing is, google kept the audience hooked

google's ecommerce model is a by the book case, offer free content and services and sell ads

moral is, google didnt start by, we will offer this for free and they will come, they must have started by we wonna sell ads on the web, how can we make ppl come

if they do it any other way they will eventually vanish
"Many scientists believe that if Einstein hadn't incorporated gravity into the theory there's a good chance that it would still be undiscovered today."

Actually, no. If you start out with flat spacetime & try to describe massless spin-2 particles, you'll find gravity falls right out of the equations. It's quite elegant, really.
I'm gonna come right out and throw a vote in for two of the canonical works: <i>Computers and Intractability</i> by Garey and Johnson and Donald Knuth's <i>The Art of Computer Programming</i>.

The first one is a great, if occasionally thick, crash course in Theory of Computation and the second is a fantastic series on, well, damn near everything.

Huge chunks of <i>The Art of Computer Programming</i> are way beyond me and I've still learned tons from it.
Pyhrric victory indeed. To paraphrase Pyrrhus himself: "One more such victory will undo Pakistan (at least on the internet)."
Whittle Down Your Work Stress in 6 Simple Steps
Hackers ramp up Facebook, MySpace attacks
Speaking of karma, is there some sort of karma FAQ lying about that I've not seen yet? I mostly grok the system, I think, but I had one comment get viciously hammered. I thought the comment was fairly innocuous, but perhaps I transgressed some News.YC rule, policy, or etc. that I wasn't aware of?

I'd like to play by the rules, I'm just wondering if there's some sore of newb intro that maybe I missed when I signed up?
Asia/Pacific Internet population hits half a billion
By "Pakistan"...do we actually mean "Pakistan" or do we REALLY mean Musharraf?
Agreed. It's kind of sad that it was trumpeted as being so significant for its (a)religious views. There was such a message, but it was largely lost in the noise. So not only was it not a particularly good movie, it wasn't even as controversial, interesting, or important as a lot of people wanted it to be.
Haven't seen it. Worth renting, I take it?
well .. actually the opposite. google didnt start with the concept of ads at all. they started out by offering free search. ads were nowhere in their initial plans. it was later they discovered that ads actually helped them make money.
Rebranding MSFT is like puting lipstick on a pig. It stil wont change the fact it is a pig.

MSFT is overan by bozos, and it will keep staying like that unless they fire half of the people there. I don't know great developers that want to work for microsoft. I have met several people that used to work there, and for some reason I have never got along or particulary liked them. There was something that made me not tick with them. It is very wierd, but they some kind sense of sutle arrogance and "empty" pride. It is like people that think way too highly of themselves, without showing the real results.

Maybe some people try to attach to big companies so they can feel more important or part of the success, even if they don't really contribute much (there are merely a simple cog, in a thousands of engineers machine).

Maybe that's why MSFT is failing to do anything impactful on the web space.
A review of Eye-Fi the first Wireless SD card for your Camera
If you fall under any of the following, yes:

- Pixar movie lover (in my opinion the best story so far)
- Foodie (lots to geek out about)
- Computer Graphics hacker (even more to geek out about)