skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As long as we're naming things:

Y Combinator acts as a startup hearth — just a little bit of support from money, but included is an environment which promotes growth.
Look at this graph of television ad spending over the last 30 years - http://www.nextcenturymedia.com/images/Image3.gif - (the associated article - http://www.nextcenturymedia.com/library/dougross-article-b.h... - is less pertinent.) While there is a noticeable lack of growth during recessions, it's anything but dried up completely.

Jeff Bussgang does a nice job of explaining why VC funds are more attractive to investors during a downturn - http://bostonvcblog.typepad.com/vc/2008/01/whos-afraid-of.ht...

The sky is not falling.
Google Analytics Fun
But karma tells you whether what you wrote is valuable here.
You have a good memory ;-)
News Corp.'s Murdoch rules out bid for Yahoo / But open to some kind of deal
Because it's a different market than it was in 2002. Technology has progressed and people continue to move from other forms of media to the internet. The large players are more stable. Media buyers are more comfortable with the idea of advertising on the web. That's why online ad revenue increased by 25% in 2007 - http://www.iab.net/insights_research/1357
Django has a shell that automatically loads all model objects. If you've got a decent shared-nothing architecture and point your config to the live DB (bad idea, but for the sake of argument...) that's effectively a REPL for the webserver.

For that matter, you can get the same effect with the MySQL prompt and a shared-nothing PHP architecture.
ProtoFlow: coverflow widget for Prototype
I've been using Linode for a couple years. They're reasonably priced and I've never had any issues with them.
If that is your hero definition, what is your superhero definition?
Just about anyone can do just about anything, eventually.

Too many people prevent possibility by discounting others because they fail to distinguish between the words "eventually" and "never".
Weight.
Did Arrington Just Kill YC News?
Cut features, don't cut quality, and avoid cutting so much that you enter a different market entirely. You want to launch as soon as you're better than the existing alternatives for your target market. If your target market is fairly empty, that should be soon.

But you don't want to enter a crowded market just because it's easier to push something out the door. We made that mistake with Diffle; I figured that I could do the website features while still keeping my day job, so we pushed those out the door before working on the thornier game-creation problems. But that moved us from the game-creation business to the game hosting business, which is a much more crowded and competitive area. Our initial launch has been less successful than we'd like - not just in terms of users (which we're gaining, although they're fairly low-engagement users), but in terms of information. We haven't learned nearly as much as we wanted from the initial release, because the folks we're targeting for game creation aren't looking at us yet.
"Algorithms for programmers" full text
Bingo, I was being hyperbolic there.

The core idea is that upmods and downmods need to embody some sense of value. Without a buy-in cost, the only contributing source of value is 1-vote-per-story exclusivity. Without a buy-in cost, nothing is stopping me (edit: or someone else, hah. I don't mean to implicate myself for the sake of rhetoric) from getting a bot together to upmod every single story essentially nullifying the benefit of my vote and still maximizing the return.
Selfish Gene, social dynamics, sexual attraction, status.

It took me a few months of reading and thinking about all this stuff to comprehend it and put any of it into action. When I did, and saw the results, it broke my brain and forced me to re-evaluate pretty much everything I understood about the world... not just human behaviour and relationships but business, economics, politics, the lot.
Parenting is harder than it looks - and much more rewarding than you might expect.

I didn't have an appreciation for how amazing my parents were until I had children.
From what I've learnt of business in France, it appears to have a lot of anti-competative laws built in. From talk between British Ex-Pats living out there, it appears most see more benefit working outside the law than in it.

I talked to one guy who ended up going out to work on a guys Chateau to get it out of a weird "uninhabitable" status that houses can get. Apparently the owner started out getting legit french workers, except the plasterers doing the walls suddenly refused to work because they needed some old wiring removed and they're not allowed to do it. The guys said this happened so often he fired them all, came back to the UK and found a bunch of contractors, paid them to drive down and then when they'd finished a months work he paid them back in the UK to avoid money trouble crossing the border.

A guy we met out there works as a handyman, apparently the only one in the area because you have to pay multiple taxes or something stupid to do more than one area of work. So he's "based" in the UK and every six months he goes out to see his kids and travels back to his house in the south of France, "on business". The insane thing about it is that it's perfectly legal in France for the guy to spend 50 weeks there a year, and he doesn't even have to pay the French taxes as he's working in a business loop hole.

Essentially he's working under the contract worker laws, that a Brit can work in France as a reporter or specialist or whatever and not pay taxes as he's working for a British company. The thing is, he's the only person employed in his company and he requires himself to work in France. It's just ludicrous. With the EU how it is, the French builders could just start a business in the UK and do the exact same thing and make more money because UK taxes are lower.
mixmax wearing underwear over his pants, duh
Ask PG: I keep nearly deleting my comments, fix?
Minor usability quirk. Frequently after I comment on an article I zip up the tree by clicking the parent button off-handedly as I read the comments. This works great until I hit an earlier comment of mine when suddenly the "parent" button is replaced by delete.

Ay! No, I don't want to delete that. Thank goodness for confirmation pages.

Any chance you could change the order of the buttons on the "Viewing your own contribution" page to, say

link | edit | delete | parent

or just move the delete button somewhere else entirely and make it red?
How Smart Is Your State? US States Ranked by Patents per Million People
"Understanding continuations are functions that don't return." I've never heard a clearer explanation of continuations!

I remember when I first read a similarly short explanation of Lisp. Suddenly it clicked. It was something like: "All code can be represented as an AST. S-expressions are just serialized ASTs." Only it was better. Lost the source.

PS: I love everyone's comments, keep them coming!
Yes, the Condorcet vote is nice. But for practical purposes I've settled with approval voting as a favorite since it is easy to understand and can not be gamed.
You could let people bet karma on stories on the new page...
You should have studied math. ;)
Perhaps it should be the first thing users see after they create a login?
What I'm doing in my homegrown framework to avoid/reduce memcache dogpiling is this (pseudocode):

n = 1000;
key = "myMemCacheEntry";

if (random(0,n) == 1 || (value = memcache_get(key)) == false) {
value = compute_value();
memcache_put(key,value);
}

return value;

Adjust n according to your current peak traffic. When traffic is low, the algorithm won't always catch on, but the dogpiling won't be as severe.
I think you've misunderstood my intent. I don't think HN is boring. I would, however, like to give the hordes I fear are visiting from Techcrunch an incentive to believe it's boring. Not having any means to actually fill the front page with boring news about, for example, health insurance, I submitted a link about health insurance with a title that described my hope and alluded to the Techcrunch story. It was both boring news and a joke.

Before any comments were added, I think it was pretty funny. With the comments explaining the details, I think it's substantially less funny. Anyway, sorry for giving the impression that I hate the place.

I guess that's one of the dangers of multiple inheritance.
I can always refuse to argue with you and punch you instead.
I was wondering the same thing.
Just to make you procrastinate even more:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
What slashdot learned about moderation systems (buried in the faq)
Lots of people 'route around' the French legal system (especially concerning tax and social charges) because it's onerous. This is a classic example of what happens when you introduce a really complex burdening system... people figure out now to ignore it.
New users can't vote without karma, so it shouldn't be too bad.
um, hello! we're tired of that already. hint, hint.
The Axiom of Choice saves lives!
Addendum after the edit period:

Wavelet transforms also go on this list.
I feel that Sarkozy has squibbed the reform process, and so France is going to have to wait a long time for a rejuvenated economy. I posted about this here:
http://reddit.com/info/6165b/comments/c02iflh

One of Sarkozy's first acts was to make an impromptu decision to subsidise fishermen because the cost of fuel had gone up. He gave them the full amount they asked for, when the fishermen themselves said afterwards that it had been an ambit claim. His private life has now detracted from his ability to wield power; this in a country where voters traditionally don't care about a politician's private life, as long as (s)he is reasonably discrete.
I don't know that I was surprised by the CLT itself. What surprised me about it was how nice it made everything else. In some sense there are whole books full of theorems which go from tedious and complex to 12-year-old simple in just 3 letters.
> app would depend heavily on user-generated content

That's causing me to release later. Don't want to do a full launch of a site that has no content yet...
Gee, I registered only yesterday. I'm glad I made it before it became mainstream!
The simplicity and difficulty of Bayes' Law.
It's a pity there isn't a automated way to fix this -- a Netflix-like system that sorts articles by how highly they are rated by other users who rate articles like you do.
What about:

http://economist.com/articles?somearticle

and

http://economist.com/articles?entirelydifferentarticle
No. I read it and followed your instructions. It's not even a contradiction when written down.
this is just a repost...
Ask YC: How to create enough content for launch?
How does one go about creating content on a site to have a public launch of a site that would interest others to stick around and contribute? (ie - if you were building a site for customer reviews of companies in a certain industry)
Finally, EU approves Google's buy of DoubleClick
In other news, exceptions are rare.
Emergent phenomena were a big one for me, too. One of my favorite pieces on the topic of economics is Hayek’s:
http://www.econlib.org/Library/Essays/hykKnw1.html

Dawkin’s “The Ancestor’s Tale” showed me this pattern in biology, too, and drastically rewrote the way I see the world.

Being able to follow and understand mathematical proofs for the first time was also enlightening. I prefer the simple, clever ones, such as Cantor’s diagonal proof of the uncountability of the real numbers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor's_diagonal_argument
How to spread awareness about World IT Day?
I have just started WorldITday.com....
The purpose of the website is to decide a day to dedicate to Information Technology.

Now how do I promote it?
Which is the best way to promote and create a buzz about the website?
Any constructive comments are also welcome ...

URL is www.worlditday.com
Well, I created a cronjob to remind people about System Administrator Appreciation Day ( http://www.sysadminday.com/ ).
Mine too too. It makes logic not look so logical anymore.
In my experience, when people are becoming computer literate, they get exposed to:
Webmail,
Search,
Wikipedia,
Chat Rooms,
Online Poker,
MySpace,
Facebook,

In no particular order.

I think that the mobile web would be a place to make a killing on ads once it's mainstream, no computer required.
For threads like this, you'll want precede the title with "Ask YC:"

I would look into using Amazon's mechanical turk to get it populated.

Edit: I see you fixed it. Cool.
Shredz64: Guitar Hero on the Commodore-64
The most influential thing I’ve learned is that people act by their individual set of incentives. Apply choice aspects of psychology and economics – then you got something big. Think game theory.

Also, I'm waiting for the Human Genome Project to help elucidate more on the placebo effect.

I think it has a major correlation with the phenotypic vs. genotypic expression of faith - something all humans display toward an institution, ideology, themselves, and/or another person.

This will be immensely powerful information.
HTTP-Headers Status Diagram
Google buy of DoubleClick cleared by EU
37signals' actual attitude is mostly right. That is, listen to your gut before focus groups, and keep things simple even when the horde calls for feature-itis.

The 'problem' is mostly that they (apparently) don't understand how their public statements make them seem. They make themselves look arrogant, even if they're not.

Maybe they don't care about public perception. What Don Norman is saying (in part) is that they will eventually pay a price for this attitude. He may be right.
Is that mysterious slowness also known as "The Arrington Effect"?
Is the Net Too Neutral?
Good Analytics Can Get You Booty
> one of 12 seats in the French Senate reserved for representatives of French expatriate voters

We need this in the US. There are hundreds of thousands of essentially disenfranchised American expats. Congress does not address the special concerns of expats. We should create one or two congressional districts called "overseas" and expats should have the option to register there in exchange for giving up mainland voter registration.
Google (Subscribed Links) and Yahoo (SearchMonkey) already allow some SERP modifications.

An Open Approach to Search (http://ysearchblog.com/archives/000523.html)

An easy way to add new features to Google (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/adding-new-features-to-google/)
I'd say Shootapult but if it sucks you risk being called Shitapult.
I use three with 3, with x2vnc. Linux in the middle on a 22", os x on the right on a 19, and windows on the left with a 19. It works wonderfully and I have instant access to multiple os's and browsers.
Ask PG: What's the traffic effect here from the TechCrunch mention?
Would you mind quantifying some numbers based on the TC front page treatment - before and after?

Pageviews?
New users?
Submissions?
Comments?
Anything else interesting?
Designing "in the pocket"
You have to be an accredited investor - which means you must have greater than $1m in net assets.
Do the Test
Cronjob is a good idea .... to remind people ...

But in my case .... I need more and more people to participate .... to decide World IT Day ...

I want the World IT Day to be decided by the users ...
Guy Kawasaki launches Alltop, an "online magazine rack"
Announcement here http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/03/announcing-form.html
Chemical brain controls nanobots
What Startups Don’t Need to Spend Money On
AJAX Solitaire
This an amazing use of AJAX and JavaScript. It's 31+ full screen Solitaire games that performs smoothly and looks great. Even has some great features such as Auto Play, Undo and multiple decks and customizable backgrounds. Even cooler that there are no ads and totally free.
That an interpreter or compiler is just another program.

Metaprogramming and higher-order functions.

Squeak the IDE.

That there is no magic in computers or programming.
MyVox API Released, add voice to any Web 2.0 app
Where Every Ad Knows Your Name
Mozilla's new Prism brings websites to the desktop
It looks like a made for adsense site created by a spammer who buys thousands of domains a day.
I have a theory that drive-by modders who only read short posts cause one-liners to out-karma thoughtful posts. Without seeing the data, it's hard to know, but I'm wondering if a penalty for that voting pattern would be worthwhile. The odds of learning something in a 2 word post that justifies my time here seem lower, comparatively.
This did bring to mind the new Yahoo program bd referenced. While apps in the search results is an interesting idea I don't think you're going to get Google to do this. It could, however, be an interesting idea for a startup. Build it to work with existing 'widgets' or Facebook apps and you would have a group of apps to start with.

You would have to have some way to track and determine relevance for apps but it could be really interesting. It might even be an actual USE for OpenID if each app pulled your credentials from OpenID, or directly from the search engine, you wouldn't have to worry about making a new login for every app that showed up in a search result.
Hm... some of them are (ICQ users), but the American portion of my contact list is split between Yahoo and MSN. For some of them those messengers are "corporate standard", i.e. everybody at work is running one of those two. Another sizeable group of corporate IM contacts is on Skype, and growing fast, due to the encryption I suppose. Frankly, I've never heard of AIM until I bought a Mac last month.

Am I on an island? :-)
I think "cashiers who can make change without a cash register" would be a better measure.
Always Refer to Your V1 As a Prototype
What do you think would help it look more legitimate? It seems to me like it would be hard to make a site like this - a collection of links - look otherwise while still keeping the simple, spare look.
The Hundred Greatest Theorems
If you don't really agree with software patents this measure doesn't work well...
The same folks who brought you Mighty Morphin Power Rangers want to fund your digital media startup.
ruby script/console
We got 14k unique ips yesterday, which without TC would have been 10k. The effect of the spike was diminished by being spread over 2 days, because we use GMT days for stats.

The most dramatic change was the number of new accounts. There were 258 new accounts in the last 24 hours. On a typical day there are 50-60.

The most interesting thing to me was that the TC traffic exposed a design flaw in the account creation code. That's why the site got so slow yesterday.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133804
A PS3 is probably the best bang per buck computing power you can buy for tasks that can be parallelized.

Quite a few scientists use a small cluster of PS3 for their data crunching.
Huh, not near as bad as I expected. For some reason I pictured a hoard of 10k new users posting nothing but xkcd and penny arcade.
Oh. Well that's far less damaging that I was expecting. So far, no influx of techcrunch commenters, that I can see.

Thanks for sharing.
Zeno is still my favorite. To summarize in modern terms: in order for a particle to move 1 inch, it must first move 1/2 inch. Before it can move 1/2 inch, it must move 1/4 inch. Before it can move 1/4 inch, it must move 1/8 inch. And so on. The paradox is, if a particle has to traverse an infinite number of infinitely small spaces before it can move even one inch, how is it possible that it can move at all?

Some mathematicians pull out calculus to "disprove" the paradox, but to me it disproves nothing. For example, you can show, mathematically, that sum( 1/(2^N) ) = 1 as N goes from 1 to infinity. The problem is that you have to go to infinity before it will sum to 1. If space is infinitely divisible and a particle has to traverse an infinite number of subspaces in order to move just a nanometer, I still don't see how it's possible that it could move at all.
A lot of things would be a better measure.
Managing Information Streams
Ask YC: Are Americans forgetting the rest of the world?
I often encounter sites that basically assume you're living in America - many requiring you to have valid American credentials (state, zip, phonenumber, etc) to sign up. This is not only something that occurs on small sites, AOL is an example of one of the bigger sites doing it - (https://new.aol.com/freeaolweb/)

Why is this? It seems to me that American companies are missing a lot of business this way. Is there a reason for it, or are American companies just ignoring the rest of the world?
This would be a lot better if the colors varied continuously.
I think this is an opportunity for us to inspire an even bigger community of the benefits of grounded, esoteric conversation. Let's not worry about short term damage, but try to teach and motivate the newcomers and avoid creating an unwelcoming community.
20% Of Valley Startups Can’t Get To Their Cash
Having a non-generic slogan/tagline would help. MFA sites often have a meaningless slogan on them like "when you need it, you need it".

Clearly identifying what the site is the way reddit does would also help.

Make it look like it's not autogenerated by a script. How about a link to a blog or something?
Hopefully this will help dispel the myth that TechCrunch coverage is a "get-coverage-or-die" issue for startups. Getting on it is great, and the splash coverage from it is important.

But 4,000 uniques just isn't going to do it unless your site/service is TRULY viral. If it is, then you should be able to take off with 100 uniques just as well (if a little more slowly).
What happened to trumors? Is that still going?
Anyone use this and/or know anything about it? Anyone create an account?

Seems like a good idea, but feels like it might be a bit weird using this sort of site. How do they qualify the investors such that capital seekers don't run into problems with SEC regulations for acting more like a public company by posting things on a semi-public site?
I would stick it out in school for now, probably not what you want to hear. Its easy to say that you will get everything done if only you had the time, but many times its just an excuse (as you stated). Do you have the summer off? If so why not use that time to go hardcore on your idea, then make the decision in the fall (but plan on going back anyway).
Besides semesters are only a few months at a time.
SearchMe Launches New Search Engine With Heavy Backing From Sequoia
That's $1m not including real estate.
Sun aquires VirtualBox
No, he doesn't want to be an angel.

"I'd be funding friends, but I don't have a lot of time myself."

He wants to be part of a "friends and family" round or two. No harm in that-- but I think most of the questions you need to ask are best answered by a lawyer.
Sharing a public Git repo over HTTP [flow chart]
Fastest growing venture markets: New Mexico, Pittsburgh, Seattle, LA, DC
Yes, the graphic could use some help from http://www.colorbrewer.org/.
Does anyone have any suggestions for good lawyers with such expertise? We're located in SF.
explain...
Being on TC isn't just important for the numbers. It's who those people are. I suspect practically every startup investor reads TC, for example. That's not a factor for News.YC, but for the average startup those are good people to have know about you.

Also, the traffic boost is probably ordinarily more than 4k uniques. We probably have a fairly big overlap with TC readers.
Joe, thank you!
would that be so wrong?

:)
Pi Corp and Credentica, 2 Zero-knowledge spin-off startups acquired
I would look for "power users" or early adopters that have some loyalty to you or your company. You can try to bring invite some from competitors or meet some on some facebook groups, be imaginative. They should be able to generate enough content for you to attract real users.
Here's a link to the anchor:
http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm500