skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know what you have been considering doing with testing, but off the top of my head I don't know of anyone doing content A/B testing (ie: which version of content is more effective). I would expect to see a more granular, dynamic approach in website verbiage as NLP matures. For example, at my day job they argue semantics endlessly. Tailoring a websites' grammar to the user could increase effectiveness. This is an area I consider fascinating and wouldn't mind chatting more about it off line if you like.
In the time it took you to write that you could have found and submitted several things that improved the quality of the community... When people start trying to game the system it detracts from what news.yc is supposed to be.
I understand what you believe to be true, but I'm not speaking from a hypothetical perspective. I've seen the 3.6 MIT student get rejected, while a 4.0 student from a "lesser" school gained admission. It happens.

As I said, a high GPA from MIT isn't going to hurt you, but it's not a golden ticket, either. If nothing else, grad schools like the GRE because it's a standardized metric. Still, neither GRE score nor GPA are particularly good predictors of success in graduate school, and the committees know this.
isn't that what they call trolling? Granted, you're probably being sarcastic.
fame isn't the sysadmin that allocates accounts. if i want to call him dhh or rms or pg, i can.
Sitting through an interview with this guy would be hell on earth.
I don't think anyone claims it's possible to read said data using standard drive firmware, so comparing it to uninitialised memory isn't the whole story. I always figured the theory was that if the cell was magnetised twice, you could tell from the magnitude of the resulting field not only its current magnetisation but also its history. I can see how that might be possible based on magnetic properties of real materials. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteresis_loop#Magnetic_hyster... ) However, you'd have to take an analog reading, not a binary one. The idea here being that N, then S magnetisation ought to yield a weaker S magnetisation than S, S.

Strong enough magnetisation will erase that history though, and presumably make the current data more long-lived and random bit-flips rarer. I'm just wondering if the tech used back in the days wasn't sophisticated to magnetise cells strongly enough. (without affecting neighbouring cells)

Yes, I probably am thinking about this too much. I guess that serves me right for doing a physics degree at university. :)
3 years ago Apple still used PowerPC chips. The marketing emphasis was on the capabilities of PowerPC, such as SFP and DPF, over the x86 chips.

Due to various reasons, the PowerPC designs has languished while Intel has surged forth with Core Duo chips and with Apple's transition to the same Intel chips that ALL manufacturers have access to, it should be obvious the marketing emphasis has to be something else. To, I don't know, Mac OS X, user experience, and design perhaps?
I thought the purpose of HN was to judge the quality of applicants to YC, not by your karma score but by sampling the quality of actual posts.

So although your karma is increasing, if you're planning on applying, it doesn't give you much of an edge.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong. I'm just speculating.

+1 for hacking the karma system.
That's a tricky one, as flash drives have special logic built in to avoid repeatedly overwriting the same block to prevent deterioration. On the other hand, bypassing that logic in order to read out the data in the extra blocks is not possible in software, (unless there's a backdoor) and I don't know if the logic sits on the controller chip or the actual flash chip. If it's the latter, it'll be pretty damn hard to get to.

EDIT +1 for mentioning c't
It's not the purpose, just an additional benefit. The main reason we made News.YC was that we wanted a good news site for our own use.
Unless they happen to be that special blend of better and faster, in which case they will out-innovate and overtake you. However, that probably would have been inevitable anyway.
Just never forget the derek powazek and JPG mag episode...
Problem is, leaving after a couple of years of a PhD program is the academic equivalent of chewing your own leg off, and most people won't do it -- even if it's the right decision.

You have to be exceptionally mentally strong to leave that culture without grabbing the brass ring, and even then, it can haunt you with feelings of failure and inadequacy for years (people like Jerry, Larry and Sergey are the obvious exceptions.)
I don't really think so. When was the last time "Ads by Google" became something people used to discover that nifty search engine? I really can't imagine that. "Hay look it lez me find things!"
The reference manuals are a very good resource, but probably not the best place to start initially. Keep in mind if you are using gas (the gnu assembler), that it uses AT&T syntax and not Intel syntax. The biggest difference is the order of the operands for the instructions are reversed compared to how they are listed in the manual.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

-- Henry Ford.
I'm going to this but I was planning on not buying a ticket and just going to various shows / parties with a big group of indie music type friends.

Are there any panel discussions that are free? At any rate I'm pretty pumped up about this. I'd be down for meeting up some startup types at a bar. Anyway this seems really fun, I'm pretty pumped!
Even if you consider this mac fanboyism, I must say the air is simply a feat of design and engineering. Its hard to deny that. And the price, while being expensive because it is Apple hardware, is sill fairly reasonable. Its not mac fanboyism to praise something that is genuinely aesthetically pleasing.

I do however, wish that I could in fact afford one. Which, I can't.
the thread, for reference: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117128
They cannot be equal - unless the first is Q one of them has spent at least a year in college, so my answer would depend upon what the other has done in the mean time and for what kind of job I was trying to fill the position for.
I think this might be the exact kind of situation that an advanced http://phoenomi.com/2008/02/13/the-rise-of-social-governance... system could solve.
The Design Innovation Team produced a lot of interesting toys in Processing and Flash, but nothing that was relevant to Yahoo's business.

http://design.yahoo.com/project.php?pid=1

http://design.yahoo.com/project.php?pid=2

http://design.yahoo.com/project.php?pid=3

http://design.yahoo.com/project.php?pid=4

http://design.yahoo.com/project.php?pid=5

http://design.yahoo.com/project.php?pid=6

http://design.yahoo.com/project.php?pid=7

http://design.yahoo.com/project.php?pid=8

This one is just a ripoff of something a Google engineer did a long time ago, and has been part of the Mountain View tour for years:

http://design.yahoo.com/project.php?pid=9

The artists from yHaus were very talented, but their relevance to Yahoo amounted to supercool projections at Brickhouse parties. And that may be all that they were asked to do. Some companies treat innovation as a core part of the business, and others treat it as a P.R. exercise.
Agreed.. people starting using Google before AdSense existed.
The underlying assumption -- that social connections will act as a barrier to war -- seems pretty flawed. Extensive connections didn't prevent any of the European wars between, say, 1700 and 1945. A country is more likely to have an internal war than one with any given outside nation.

Maybe, as an American, Scott associates wars with far-off, little-known lands. True in recent times for the US maybe, but certainly not for most conflicts.
Probably?!?

Yikes, either lots of people here have no sense of humor, or I've failed to convey the level of sarcasm. In all fairness, I take all the blame. From now on, I will put <sarcasm> and </sarcasm> tags on posts like these. I guess it's had to tell if you don't know me and can't see or hear me.

I really don't care about karma, but I find it fascinating because I have no idea how it's calculated. Sometimes I think if I posted the cure for cancer, I'd earn 1 point, but if I make one smarta$$ remark, I'd earn 48 points (actually happened once, I don't know why).

I have no plans to apply to ycombinator, but who knows, that can always change; this is such a great group, you'd be a fool to not have it on your "options list".

I do know that I have found a home. It's hard to describe, but I get something here that I have found nowhere else. I participate frequently. That, probably more than anything else, explains my karma score.

As far as this post is concerned, I just found it amusing that responses to my original post went on and on all night. Sorry if I failed to convey my sense of amusement.

(Also, to the guys who were "sparring" in the OP, certainly no harm intended. Just a suggestion: keep your posts short enough for those of us who only take 5 minute breaks. Oops, time's up. Back to work.)
Fair enough. You can look at my profile to see that I DO submit often. Problem is, I never know what others will find interesting.
New in Python 3: Extended unpacking
Absolutely! Sorry if I inferred otherwise. The number one thing I've said to customers over the years, "Give me the WHAT; I'll figure out the HOW."
First look: latest Google Android SDK a big improvement
The cult of the dead cows strikes again!
Who cares? Seriously, everyone needs to get over the whole obsession with karma? It's really stupid.
I use Lucene in our apps for indexing files and and other usefull things. It is a java based indexing lib. if you are not happy with google or anyone else and have a specific thing in mind, you can use it to create your own search engine.
Presumably driving it around in trucks?
Well the way I look at this, we're paying for it right? Supply and demand, people.
This is funny. They have deployed an ASP.NET app to an IIS server supporting only ASP classic. Brings up memories of good old ASP, back in the day. That was real hacking just like QBasic. I loved it. And I wouldn't wanna go back... :)
"Where is it, then?"

I don't think a comma is required after 'it'.
Cookthink - Like Pandora For Recipes
If there are externalities, they should be fixed. That is not telling other people what to do with their lives, it is telling them to not steal from others.

Not sure why the CO2 aspect doesn't get regulated through the prize of fuel, though.
I just made up "conspicuous conservation" on the spot, although I doubt I'm the first to do so. In this case it seems almost obvious.
[
Remember, you heard it here first (or tell me where you heard it before :)
]

Without having read the article (yet), my theory is that the web will become "semantic" in the sense "semaniacs" hope for ONLY when users can generate structured content (other than just photos, articles, comments, forum posts etc) EASILY ... that is: differently from when HTML started out, site owners cannot get such a ball rolling by painstakingly fleshing out RDF mark-up manually. Rather, those web sites will be "semantic" that provide wiki-like editing for data sets.

As an example, imagine a web-based database of restaurants:
- Let everyone provide tags for different categories (taste ie Indian/Italian/Regional, style ie luxury/fast food joint/middle-of-the-road, features ie garden/bar/smoking area)
- Let everyone update base facts such as address or name changes
- Let everyone add photos, media, reviews, comments
- Most importantly: let everyone rate/confirm/deny everyone elses contributions
- Reward by credits/trust/rankings but where commerce is involved, also by discounts/"miles"/whatever.

Make it easy for websites to do that, or create successful websites that do that so others follow suit should this be what people really want, and you have a semantic web in no time.

If the semantic web is what people want, this will be the only feasible way to create one. If it's not what they want, we will find out soon enough.
The elites make the wars and the elites already know each other.

http://cache.viewimages.com/xc/1424016.jpg?v=1&c=ViewIma...

http://cache.viewimages.com/xc/3359879.jpg?v=1&c=ViewIma...

http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/triumph/hitler-chamber...

http://www.btinternet.com/~sbishop100/alicky9.jpg
How about:

Sunday, 12:45 (previous session ends 12:30, next session starts at 2PM)

Where: Rio Grande (good Mexican food, close to the convention centre) http://tinyurl.com/2cfd7a
Ocaml is rapidly becoming my language of choice. Great guide, and an interesting read.
A bigger part of the problem is the placebo effect.
Rescaling the Pythagorean Theorem
Okay now I've read the article. The point I was making is their bullet point 11. The only one that I thought mattered in this article. Enterprise/platform/integration win rather than consumer win? Nope, consumers decide, they always do...
Clarifying: hey mine were pretty short bla bla bla
I'd like to meet up. I live in Austin so I know the area really well. I bought the full badge, so I'll be going to see a lot of bands as well. Feel free to send me an email.
No more than Gillette razors having "Gillette" written on them does.
I was a pretty skeptical regarding the Air. But, just today I went down to the CambridgeSide Apple Store and played with one of them. Its really quite nifty. The weight and thickness are really astounding. The numbers don't really mean much to me... having felt it now though, I can understand why some people love it.
I actually thought long and hard the other day about how such a system might be implemented, and came up with a few interesting ideas. Perhaps this encouragement will make me apply!

EDIT: I even wrote about it a long time ago, when I still updated my blog with any semblance of regularity. Weebly seems to be down for approximately the millionth time in the last month or so, though. I'll post the article if Weebly gets righted within the edit window.
I love Scott, but this shows a fundamental lack of understanding for why wars happen. The American Civil War comes to mind as the first counterexample. There are dozens more.

Nations don't resort to armed conflict because the citizens don't know each other that well. In fact, the counterexamples are very interesting -- I'm thinking of German presence in Great Britain before WWII. People demonize citizens of other nations after war is started, but that's more of a moral crutch than anything else. I think Scott confuses correlation with causality.
I think Hexstream was talking about human memory
If they are equal in all other ways (i.e., equally skilled, equally likeable), I'll choose the one without college.

My competitors are less likely to try and poach him, but he is just as valuable.
The most impressive bit is their dropdown with all the moving animations.
Microsoft buying every company in Silicon Valley would just be an indication that the chance of being bought out is even greater than previously thought, leading yet more people to create startups. The whole thrust of startups is that they are "started up". It's not like our current number of startups is all we have for the foreseeable future.
Yesterday I was watching Smith&Jones, Britcom also has much of this, constructing ideas around the stupidly obvious and ignored on the perspective of the comic writer.
My water tastes good and given the small amount of residual chlorine, is unlikely to be unhealthy. That's in the UK; whereabout are you talking about?

If the taste of the water really bothers you, in the UK they sell large water jugs which fill through charcoal filters (Brita), which remove any chlorine taste and only needed changing monthly or so.
Is there a way to grab a reddit comment corpus (a large set of reddit's comments)? I don't browse reddit but I think it would be a fun thing to play around with.
Why is the flame of a candle yellow? (nothing to do with temperature)
>If you continue innovating at a rapid pace, by the time they catch up to what you have now, the distance between you and them will have only gotten bigger.

Big if. Few people or organizations are capable of sustained, on-demand, innovation.

So, yes, if you can pull that off, you're golden anyway.
Keyword: Evil
It's true - what is there to discuss?
He was!
Easy to do when you omit the "h" from blah
I've had a 2 pounds laptop from Dell for two years now. Apple is a bit late.
Do you show your Gillette razor to thousands of people every day?
Has LinkedIn lost its soul to growth?
FTFA:

'A BBC Panorama documentary, "Bottled Water: Who Needs It?", to be broadcast tomorrow says that in terms of production, a litre bottle of Evian or Volvic generates up to 600 times more CO2 than a litre of tap water.'

And?

How much CO2 does a liter of tap water generate, and of all the ways I could reduce C02 generation, where does bottled water fit in?

Does the use of bottled water create more C02 than, say, raising farm animals for consumption?

Is it more harmful than printing newspapers? Reading Web sites?

This is not to argue for or against drinking bottled water, just that the choice of battles to fight seems goofy.
I'd say that still gives them more visibility.

I know I wouldn't be aware of their omnipresence as much if they didn't write "Ads by Google" alongside their ads. Insofar as ads is about building brand recognition and I recognize Google better, then "Ads by Google" is an ad within the ad from my perspective (by the way I'm 100% for it).
Creating more selective communities with stricter guidelines seems to be the wrong approach to dealing with trolls, especially based on the scenario pg lays out. As pg says, the larger a community grows, the easier it is for trolls to be accepted and the harder it is to mod (prune) the community. It seems that critical mass is just when the pruning community becomes smaller than the trolling community, and that by creating new communities with more stringent rules, you are just delaying the date (hopefully indefinitely) when trolls come in. I understand that the yc community is special, but even the comments here show that it won't work for much longer as the community grows beyond yc. To answer the question of "Will it scale?", I think its already a no.

If you've ever hung out with a lot of girls (from a guy's perspective), you can beging to understand the trolling community. 1 on 1 with a girl and you can get intellectual conversation, but the minute 3 or 4 girls get together, they start talking about clothes, guys, dramas, and all other stuff that just isn't interesting. I bet girls see it the same with guys too (5 guys together = WoW, DOTA, girls or crude jokes).

Solutions? Keep it small. This fails to keep in line with the existing goals of news.yc (advertising for existing startups, attracting smart people, etc). Another solution? Maybe try to preserve the small community feel as the site gets bigger. One way to do this would be to use user upvotes and downvotes as community boundaries for each user - ie: making their community presence only to those who rate them up, and to make their personal community those who they rate up. This is speculative at best, though.
Excellent point. I guess the challenge is in first determining whether adopting the strategy to give pages with semantic info a higher rank, a good one. In other words, will this improve users' satisfaction with search?

I suppose it could start out in Google Labs as an experiment. Although I m quite convinced of the power of the semantic web, I would think Google would tread carefully before changing what's working for them, now.
Then "immorality" is so prevalent that calling something immoral is pointless.
EDIT2: Weebly finally back online: http://myothercar.weebly.com/1/post/2007/11/a-confederacy-of...
I'm not going to argue with your logic (it's as good as any), but I wonder about using "poachability" as criteria in hiring. My goal would be to have an unpoachable workplace. No one (desirable) should ever leave except to start their own business.
They've gotten some publicity - remember the ad that was like {first 10 digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com?

But for the most part they haven't really advertised in the traditional way. Instead, they've used the best form of advertising - make a product so good that it speaks for itself!
You make a good point, the main reason the EU started was to prevent wars and it has worked. Since the formation of the EU, there has been no wars between its member nations, and that's saying a lot when sneezing in a foreign country was about all the justification needed.

Merely connecting people won't act as a barrier to war, but I think forming a universal governing structure would; however unlikely it is to actually happen. There's a saying that states democracy is just a farce to control the masses by giving the illusion of control, well I would say the EU does the exact same thing.

I can't speak for EU politics of late, I've rarely been in the UK the past year, however last I was keeping track the UK had a major problem with French farming subsidies (basically French farmers were being paid to be uncompetative) and the French wanted the UK to stop getting discounted for payments to the EU (each country pays like a tax that's supposed to benefit the whole, however the UK was paying less than it was getting in even though we're the richest country in the EU).

So, personally, I would say no level of communication will prevent war unless you're economically and socially tied as in the EU. I mean Kings would marry their daughters to Kings of other countries in an attempt to prevent war, the British bloodline has French descent in it. Even look at Richard the Lionheart, he barely even spoke english! Yet no amount of ties between England and France ever stopped war until the EU. Simple fact.
why * should buy *
I think it's a small risk to take to be able to go all out.

Reminds me of playing Warcraft II online.

At first, my strategy was to be as small as possible on the map so that maybe I can stay in the shadows long enough to maybe get strong enough to maybe eventually beat my opponent. My play got much, much better when I realized it's better to be strong even if it makes you more visible, because then they're screwed anyway.

Hope you'll forgive the lighthearted analogy.
Listening to your customers' needs is a great thing. But you should take this advice with a grain of salt in the early stages. If you only have a few customers and focus too much on building something they want, you risk becoming a consulting company instead of a product company. Get all the feedback you can, but use your judgment to decide whether to act on it.
Everything we do impacts on others, tracking small and arbitrary infractions and calling that morality is a far greater wrong than a less CO2 efficient source of water. Just cap and trade already, I hate these taboo based social manipulations.
"colleges should ask for portfolios of sample, graded school work."

There is some merit to this suggestion. It would make the counselor's job easier, the admissions officer's job easier, and the student's job much easier! But one concern is that this would tend to advantage students in private or top-tier public high schools even more than the current system does.
A facebook app that encourages users to record their symptoms, dates of infection, and location when they fall sick could provide interesting data for epidemiologists. Anyone want to help me write it - I have little programming experience, but I just fell in love with Python.
How to Schedule Your Writing Like a Professional Writer
Do you think that this advice also applies to writing software?
i thought the popup color picker was pretty cool too
Nice trick! Might be useful sometime...

What other wildcards are there?
As soon as I saw that ad, I thought "Google." When I got to the office, I checked with Trevor, and sure enough he had already figured it out.
I recommend "Assembly Language" by Jeff Duntemann and "The Art of Assembly Programming" by Randall Hyde [1]

[1] http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/AoA/index.html