skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The IM comparison is a good point. Adium, Meebo and other clients have great mass-market value. The niche point is also sharp. The more specific the boxes of data in a network are, the more relevant they are to the end-user.

My problem right now is that FriendFeed is nothing more than a grand pipe. It really holds no content, instead it creates a window to view content elsewhere. There are problems with this. One of the big ones is the feedback loop that emerges with heavy users (I twitt, which goes to friendfeed and tumblr, where it goes back to friend feed. same with delicious...) The second problem is that FF relies on data from outside sources: if delicious or FB turns off the flow what can FF do?

I guess my frustration lies in people vesting in FF's potential. It hasn't done anything terribly novel (though useful) yet. I'm waiting for the 'wow' moment. Something anyone can experience without having lots of early-adopter, data-exhausting friends to see the immediate benefit. Until FF can pull that off, I'm afraid our enthusiasm is misplaced.
Yeah, I wouldn't cause I'm pretty sure a catchy title would work to get it read, everyone that runs/writes for those blogs seem to respond fairly quickly.

If they don't respond it usually means that you putting out more noise than signal.
Picasa (desktop version) and vim. Mac OS X "Settings" dialog (among others) with real-time feedback.

Nothing on the web comes close to a decent desktop/console speed and usability yet: most of it is slow, laggy and the keyboard is nearly useless. gMail is a good exception.
Yeah, otherwise it isn't worth coming here. I can go anywhere else online and find people who'll just spout their preferences instead of respond rationally.

I made a submission out of this:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=149248
Ask News.yc: Should there be a lower karma bound for Ask News.YC?
Maybe it's just me being my curmudgeonly self, but I find most submissions that aren't a URL annoying. Not all, certainly, but most. And they seem to be far more repetitive than the links. How many times have you seen:

"How will the [recession/downturn/rising price of sopapillas in Tijuana] affect startups?"

or

"Ask YC: Feedback on my startup" (which now probably translates to "Michael Arrington please look at me!")

or

"Why do no Y Combinator companies ever have a business model?"

or

"What can we do about all of the idiots who are going to start coming here and turn this place into Reddit?"

Does anyone else get annoyed by this? If so, Perhaps a minimum karma rating for non-url submissions would fix it?
3 Comments a day?
I read Paul Graham's "How To Disagree" (http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html) and a blog "One a Day" (http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/03/one-a-day.html).

Would creating a scarcity of number of comments that can be posted a day (say 3 comments a day) make people think twice before commenting and probably reduce DH0 - DH3 type of responses?
Also, perhaps it's my own vanity, but I love to check my own comments and the responses to them (rather than the general feed) and would love it if clicking the number next to my name at top right took me there.
This video makes me think I've been underestimating the consciousness of some animals.
I don't think my comments were cynical. I'm optimistic that not being romantic can work even better than a status quo life.
Agreed. (Plus Admob is amazing. We see fantastic results with them) My one rebut to your Google-Yahoo metaphor is that there is less specific input with a phone, it's more contextual. With a keyboard and mouse its easy to navigate the web, but a number pad (or touch) and limited screen space means your navigation takes a hit and relevance becomes all the more important. For that reason the WAP deck is still clinging on and even players like Google and Yahoo are striving for a portal strategy in the mobile world.
The answers to "feedback for my startup" question was something I found really useful as a founder of a non-YC startup. I had no ulterior motives to having Arrington look at it, since it is very much alpha.
In my opinion YC is well above average, but its expertise doesn't apply to all issues.
Nice article.

Not sure if it's significantly different from DH6, but Karl Popper's style of debate might be termed DH7.

It's similar to DH6, but first you patch up the opponent's arguments to make the best possible case. Then you find the central point in that case, even if the author doesn't explicitly state it. It's what he really meant to say and might indeed have said if he was on good form. (If there's a stronger or more general version of that point you might select that instead.)

And _then_ you carefully demolish it.
Most of these 'junk loans' that were made to borrowers with bad credit were resold on the stock market to third parties. The fact that lenders 1) didn't have to suffer the consequences of making bad loans and 2) financially profited from making those bad loans suggests that they had an interest in seeing relaxed underwriting standards. For this reason, I can't help but think that the author is pointedly ignoring the main contributing factor to the mortgage disaster.
I've been watching this post closely. First of all I don't think it ever made the top of the front page, which I think is odd for the techcrunch post covering the launch of a YC company.

Either the founders didn't make a lot of friends during the YC dinners or something more probable - everyone knows that Omnisio is a winner. Voting it up only reveals our own inadequacies.

Because as soon as I saw this I said wow, I wish I had thought of that, or better yet, I wish I knew how to do that. This product is going to rock the socks.
One way to crank up the level is not to rise to the bait, but instead to politely ask them to be more specific.

Unfortunately this rarely works in the sense of eliciting a reply. But when it doesn't, it does at least tend to shut them up.
"look like cynicism"

Significant discussion happens around the "nerve points" and questioning their legitimacy can look like cynicism.
Irish teenagers make dotcom millions
Why would she take him to court over a friend request?
To me, the other side looks very pessimistic. They say: so what if it hurts people? Life would be even worse without it. No optimism that life doesn't have to hurt.
you eat like samurai Danielsan
That is awesome. Thank you for sharing that!
DH1, but against oneself.
That's a good point that you should patch up their argument first. But also, you shouldn't think of it as their argument. It is an argument. If you want to find the truth you should look for the best arguments on all sides, not refute a shoddy one.
I thought about the relation to parody, and the answer is that it's an orthogonal issue. Parody can be DH1 or DH6 depending on how well it's done.
Chuck E. Cheese IT'S THE PLACE TO BE __
I agree that some questions are repeat but I think opposit of what you say. I can get to the link posts from anywhere else and not all of them are of heigh quality or intersting. some I find to be useless topics.

But what I like about the ask yc is that it's from people that I have something in common with. Sure some may be boring or repeat but I don't mind to test and give feedback on someone's start-up not because it's something I like to do but because thats how I can give back to this community.

you may one day have a realy boring question posted here too. that may be of nobody's interest and boring but I am sure you still get good answer.
Good artists copy. Great artists steal. -- Picasso
Actually I thought of making DH7 something similar: not merely refuting what your opponent said, but also explaining what led him to make that mistake. But I wasn't sure, so I left it out.
I thought this was going to be a link to Devil's Playground which is MUCH more interesting than some Cringley column

http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/2002/may/amish/
Can a Swimsuit Be Too Good?
As I understand it, you are proposing a sort of evolutionary psychology theory. Humans personalities today are certain ways because of selection pressure on genes.

I think that sort of theory is mistaken because there has not been significant selection pressure on human genes recently. More specifically, there hasn't been selection pressure on human genes since around the time that humans first got personalities. So I don't think genetic evolution was able to have much influence on our personalities.

The reason there wasn't selection pressure on genes is that any survival needs could be filled faster and better by ideas, so genetic differences didn't have much chance to matter.
That's what the "threads" link does.
Feature Request: We can haz API?
Don't know if or why there have been no requests for api access, but can we have it?
We just are what we are. Play to win

You can only play to win if you have some control over your life. If you do, then you aren't just what you are now.

If you want to win, I don't see how life strategies known for causing lots of pain and misery are wise. Couldn't we say that life is too short to to waste time with love and sex instead of working on something important (like, say, life-extension research)?
When cutting code, Lisp is the lightsaber
Isn't psychoanalyzing the other person (and considering him an 'opponent'), rather than focussing impersonally on ideas, more the stuff of the low numbers than the top?

True it could help him, but only if appreciated. It frequently won't be in public, or between strangers. And it runs a danger of polluting the main discussion. Any personal help is strictly a separate issue than which of the original ideas is true -- the person being helped could still have been right.
You're right, it might be possible to get an insecure application to give you API-accessible information about some other user (e.g., the application contains a page that spits out your entire profile on the screen, and you pass in your target's userid). That information is guarded by a user-specific session key, so the app would have to store each user's session key on the server (or have already cached the response) for it to work. A really insecure application could probably be coerced into making other API calls as well, like sending notifications or uploading photos.

I guess in that case Facebook might want to look in to providing some vulnerability testing tools to developers, or maybe running tests for them to find vulnerabilities. It's definitely a hard problem.
It's easier to sell loans that are likely to get paid back, isn't it? And at a higher price.
Poor thing, they probably only pay him peanuts for his paintings!
All the Internet's a Game
meebo
Thank you for that. A full six minutes of mindless humor.
I thought this was one of PG's best essays. A lot of the other ones are motivational or thought-provoking, but in terms of usefulness and clear thinking, this was it.
Bug, fixed; sorry?
All news sites are biased, moreso if they are community maintained. It's not devious; it's just sociology. Communities tend to reinforce values that they agree with or validate what they are doing, especially if it's risky. I think the sollution is to just factor that into your reading.
Or set your HDD as the only boot device and set a BIOS password.
Amazing... does anybody have any more information about this? Is this a trick where an elephant gets trained for many years to draw images, and gets used to the actions of moving the paintbrush across a canvas in a particular way (still an awesome feat)? Or do elephants naturally have drawing skills? Is there evidence that wild elephants draw things on cave walls, etc. by scratching on them with rocks or something?
There's a form of disagreement that I don't think fits into the hierarchy - where, rather than arguing that the author is incorrect, you argue that the author should not be saying that at all. This relates to the ideas in http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html.

It can be the simple "Hey! I put my braces on the next line, and I take offense at that!", to the "Arguing that all left-handed programmers write unmaintainable code is irresponsible because ...".

It's like responding to tone, but you are responding to what is being argued, rather than how it's written. It might not really be a disagreement since you aren't saying that the author is incorrect, but neither is "u r a fag!!!!!!!!!!".
Marc Andreessen on Charles Munger’s The Psychology of Entrepreneurial Misjudgment - Part I
Right behind you on this one. After reading the article I was terrified that YC.News would line up behind PG - how refreshing to see that the community is more than happy to dissent. I don't agree, but I really respect the forum which he was instrumental in creating.
she was trained, took ~5 years - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FGEJKQzaMA
"You can't call me an idiot", cried the idiot. That's Ad Hominem, y'know!
DH-3.5: Disagreeing with the author's Disagreement Hierarchy.

This category is particularly troublesome, as even when both parties agree, in principle, to disagree, they may still disagree on how to disagree.

One particular nuisance is the disagreer who seeks to impose a disagreement meta-hierarchy on the problem of agreeing on a disagreement hierarchy. That way is turtles, all the way down.
That's just one factor among many, but symptomatic of our underlying belief that money should go to where it is "deserved" rather than where it is effective....
No, I'm married, and my wife won't let me have one. ;-)
depends on what you mean by sell. But the way I understand it, it's way easier to sell loans without caring if they get paid back. Because then your essentially expanding your market to include 'people who won't pay back'. Bigger market means more sells. Normally you would exclude those people because you eventually want your money back with interest, but the sellers in this particular story didn't care about that. (It wasn't their money)
I think you're grasping at straws, here.

Got a better, more relevant example?
Yeah, that one example isn't enough, though it is interesting. It's a trend I've noticed and the point is valid, but I don't have a lot of good evidence I can pull.
Geeky song about cryptography - "Crypto"
My online free book search engine. Hope it helps.
I think it's a good idea.
Ask YC: Learning circuit/hardware; lab book?
Hello!

I've been wanting to get into hardware type projects (robots, gizmos, etc) for a while but I'm fairly ignorant of hardware. I'm a software developer by trade. I've seen books like "The Art of Electronics" and "Teach Yourself Electricity & Electronics". But what I really need is a book of project/tutorials, that upon completing them, I can honestly say I am very, very familiar with electronics.

Is there such a book?
You could, but you could also say that life is too short to waste on ice cream, smiling and literature. None of these things have absolute value.

Happiness, and success are a perspective, not an objective reality. Importance is synthetic. Freedom is just a macroscopic view of determinism.

If you can find a way to be happy with or without relationships, you win. People seem to have succeeded and failed with both strategies.
>The reason there wasn't selection pressure on genes is that any survival needs could be filled faster and better by ideas, so genetic differences didn't have much chance to matter.

Link to external evidence to support this statement, please
Genes get to make changes every generation of humans. That's every 25 years or so. And to get very far evolution can take a lot of generations.

Ideas can go through generations in a matter of seconds within someone's head. So that's orders of magnitude faster.
I bet its custom. The font (typeface) detection util at http://www.whatthefont.com might be useful, or their forums.
You're paying too much attention to the voting. It just sorts the comments on the page and changes an arbitrary number next to your name.
That's a fine hierarchy and all. But I have the feeling that a more efficient way of conversation is to get rid of the notion of 'winning' and argument and move to 'solving' the problem. That goes beyond the intellectual and into the cultural - and that is makes it harder - but it would have also more leverage.
If an argument works to support either position then it's not a justification for romance.
A tunnel linking Alaska and Russia
Where do we end up if it goes to DH-infinities?
Impressed to see that no-one here is suggesting a Disagreement Hierarchy: DHH.

And no I didn't.
Apple is loser in three-way hacking contest
I have officially heard it all now.

I knew that a lot of the 'handlers' of corporate bigwigs would have them out angling for a defense at the trials that are looking increasingly likely, but this one just reeks of desperation. The current mortgage crisis was fueled by a myriad of reasons, but believe me, the idea that billionaires were sitting around thinking about ways to get money into the hands of poor black guys was hardly one of them.

I can see now that one of their strategies will be to play the race card. Their aim will be to ensure the jury thinks about something other than the mountain of documents, emails, and other internal and external communications and directives. All of which will point to the inescapable conclusion that their cases are really about garden variety fiduciary negligence on an unprecedented scale. The race card is how many of the wealthy, from OJ to the CEO of HealthSouth manage to escape justice. It behooves us all to hold our wallet and our will a little closer when the wealthy start to talk about racism, or the dangers thereof.

Middle America you are being conned. Just today the CEO of Bear Stearns unloaded what used to be over a USD1 billion stake in Bear for USD60 million, under the terms of the original deal with the government that his stake was only to be USD15 million. Poor him you say? He lost so much money you say? Consider the fact that Bear's stock price is being propped up by a USD30 billion guarantee from the US. Then ask yourself where the money for that guarantee comes from. Even better research it. Did you know several such guarantees are being made?

Consider some news that the government would have us believe is completely unrelated. It just got a whole lot harder for poor and middle class college students to get student loans, because the government has found it necessary to materially decrease the levels of subsidy it provides to student loans. Now a cynic would say that the CEO of Bear just raided the US college fund for USD60 million. An optimist would say the government is simply making financially prudent cut backs in its spending. The truth is somewhere in the middle, but I think we'd all agree that these types of financial machinations are sub optimal. Giving anti-capitalist guarantees of security is how we got here in the first place.

WOW . . . I'm ranting . . . I gotta stop working so late.

At least I caught myself.

The short version is this article insults my intelligence, and assumes that I am uninformed. All of which would trouble me a good deal less if the aim of this article was something other than keeping a scumbag out of Club-Fed.
When the front page of hacker news is filled entirely with questions about hacker news and its community, will it still be worth coming here?

This is obviously an exaggeration, but the number of reflective question-based Ask News.YC posts has become somewhat discouraging.
Maybe "DHH" could be responding with insults, like "f* you" ? ;-)
This elephant can draw better than I can!
All 44 Blackboard Patent Claims Invalidated
1. Write controversial essay.

2. Act innocent when people call you out on its controversial content.

3. Taxonomize all criticism of and disagreement with you into oblivion.

4. ???

5. PROFIT!
It's just a Google custom search. You could make money with it if you SEO'd the hell out of it, probably, but if you're posting the link here you're probably not good enough at SEO to actually make serious money doing this. I don't think that this is a particularly profitable niche either. You want to find something where Google pays you $1 per click.

Keep on trying though. For this type of marketing discussion, I'd recommend digitalpoint.com. The most commonly said marketing idea here is "Make something people want and they will tell their friends about it."
I've often made contrarian arguments, and at times pessimistic ones. Not about people's individual undertakings, as that would be against what I consider the spirit of things here, but in a 'general case', I think it's perfectly healthy.
I think it would be good to have a sub.news setup here, where submitted stories were classified and users could choose how much of each type was on their home page. If users liked lots of general discourse, they would only see the highest rated Startup/Hacker stories. If users only liked hacker/startup stuff, they would never see the general discussion, except when the other ones went off topic. I think the core hacker/startup culture would still survive in such a setup.

This drastically improved reddit, but it was already too late to save reddit. I think implementing sub.news.arc roughly as implemented on reddit would only improve news.ycombinator.com.
It would be quite a huge book. The topic area is more broad than you'd think, although not at all impenetrable. I don't know if any such comprehensive text exists. All of the books I used, I found to be quite poor and limited in scope compared to books in other fields. I think it's easy to see why. Frequently I'd just read everything I could scattered around the internet. Maybe you have a more narrow goal for what you want to learn than "electronics"?

Even the narrowly scoped books I found to usually be quite a bit less effective than they should be. Then again, the books I'm referring to where school books.
Furthermore, I think it's a "neighborly" thing to do.
Google site:news.ycombinator.com - it's been covered several times...
"OpenAvatars" idea - opinions?
What if there was some kind of standard for user profiles, so that they could be stored on client computers? For example, I could have a "business profile" for serious websites, listing my credentials, a photo with a tie, whatever, and a "fun profile" for flickr, facebook and whatever else.

Websites could understand the OpenAvatar protocol and enable signup with close to zero hassles. Users could choose with one click what information they would like to reveal to a website.

It is an extension of thinking about 3d virtual worlds into the 2d web - with 3d worlds, the idea is common to enter different rooms with different avatars (party outfit for parties, warrior outfit for fantasy game, and so on).

Of course there is the other trend to not store anything on the client, and hand over responsibility to web sites (ie I read that with clickpass, you also can have a profile picture). Maybe it doesn't even have tobe a contradiction - the protocol could be usable from clients as well as from web services?

Edit: I guess it could really work well as an extension of OpenID, like the way clickpass already provides with their photo and email address.
A solution to this is a personalized homepage and classification of stories. You could do it yourself with Greasemonkey if you really wanted to. Eventually I expect this functionality to be incorporated into news.arc.
I am worried about breadth vs depth issues. It's probably why people get degrees in this. :) I'm sorry if I made it sound like I thought it was trivial. I'm not in any hurry, though; The Hardware Hacking books from O'Reilly are ok but not .. I dunno, "enough". The "Teach Yourself .." book is pretty dense...
I tried that earlier today. Their t's in particular are pretty crazy, and not from any common font, I don't think. Could easily be a custom job based on something like VAG rounded for the vowels, though.
That's a problem with most EE books, it's either extreme depth or broad and shallow. You have a good question. I'd like to see others' recommendations.

I wish I could help more, but I still curse the books I learned from:)
Left unchecked, this could become problematic
New Mozilla Addons is Perfect… Almost!
Beard’s philosophy: browser concept hasn’t changed in 10 years