skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Congratulations! You've hit upon the tragic core of this industry: Namely, that it's full of semimature people who are only well-known because they're well-known. This is such a new field of study that even the biggest figures are usually only halfgood at what they do.

That's cruel. Let me rephrase: This isn't a new field. It's a series of new fields, all developing in tandem. Web design, web coding, web marketing, are all necessarily only a couple of decades old. The tools we're using are younger than that. Two years ago we were still debating how to align a webpage vertically. We've only begun to have real web typography in the same period of time. And programming is similarly new, and we still don't have good web marketing. But those of us who're invested in the web don't like to think about that, so we convince ourselves that we're as advanced and sophisticated as anything else. To do that, we lower the bar.

Celebrities in any field tend to balance skill and marketability. Rarely is somebody both ultrafamous and cutting-edge. So in a world where nobody is really that famous and nobody is really that talented, our famous icons are doubly pathetic. Even our best icons, like Zeldman and Fried, are bright but not really operating on a new plane. (I think there are some exceptions, like Dean Allen, but Dean isn't the size of Calcanis.)

That's why the brightest talents in our sphere come from other mediums. I think the best designers I know are all twee and twenty and annoying as fuck. For all their immaturity, that's the first generation that could grow up immersed in all the aspects of the business. But admitting their superiority is admitting just how fucking clueless we all are, and that wouldn't be as fun for the communty.

Calcanis is a particular jerk, though. I never got why we like him here. Mahalo's been a joke from launch day.

(Sorry if there were spelling errors. I wrote this on an iPod.)
Was yours the site with the numbers to weight the score along the top for each column? As a geek, I far preferred that because I had more control. As someone looking at this with the eye of your average user, this system is better. A bit like comparing vi and Textmate, I guess.
Good point! I should usability test the blog with non members (members don't receive the prompt to sign up for KartMe).
I think that is an excellent proof of the maxim that to create value you don't have to be better you have to appear to be delivering value.

Sports cars, diamonds and lots of other 'conspicuous consumption' items fall in this category.

Sometimes when you raise the price of an item the sales will go up.

Perception is almost as important as utility.

For high-fi gear you are looking at a mix of both.

Most people do not have the ears (most people over the age of 12, sorry) to tell an MP3 from a playback directly from the master.

But they'll be able to tell if it doesn't work at all. Most of the time. So some utility is a minimum, above that it is mostly perception. And I'll bet you that if you put the two of them side by side in a 'double blind' test but told the listeners which one cost $3500 that the majority of the people would find a reason why that one sounded better.

Gold plated RCA connectors anybody ?
Yeah, the bookmarklet made it very easy to submit with one hand on the mouse and the other on the coffee.
Rocket Surgery Made Easy
I quite like a lot of Microsoft's older products, and I think the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation does great work with his (and others' contributed) money. But every so often I, along with everyone else, gets reminded of Bill's ethics.
Data doesn't have copyright, but in europe a database such as this is protected by the 96/9/EC Database Directive (most members states implemented this around 1999/2000).

This includes non-electronic databases, so even if you scanned all this data from timetables published on paper, they'd still be protected by database rights -- and you don't have the right to use substantial parts of it without a license. (nor does your competitor).

(Assuming a government organization has database rights in the same way a person or corporation can have them).
Simple tweaks to a game like increasing hit point pools can make the game difficult in meaningful ways if there is additional depth available in the game. If an enemy has 100 hitpoints instead of 10 hitpoints, you may have to learn to anticipate and successfully dodge attacks instead of just ignoring them. Perhaps, God of War developers could have increased the damage output of the enemies or increased the frequency of their attacks instead of increasing their resilience.

However, I agree that I prefer when they add smarter AI rather than just increasing the enemies damage output or increasing the amount of damage they can sustain. In a game like God of War, the depth of the AI in general may be small to begin with, and there may not be much they can do to improve it. I imagine with God of War, the enemies have attack patterns, hit points and damage values for attacks with a very basic AI that begins attacking the player's character once they are within range or sight.

Upping the challenge in a game may actually make the game less fun, in that in order to overcome the added challenge, you have to take the game at a slower pace or resort to exploiting deficiencies in game mechanics that diminish the immersion in the game.
CNBC did a really good report on this for their "Dirty Money" show a while back. It's on Hulu, and definitely worth a watch if you have the time, if only for the economics and social perspective it gives you:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/83070/cnbc-originals-dirty-money-t...
The passive-aggressive bromance is a classic deflection trick.
Google creating a Zip Code API?
You know, after reading this, it would be interesting to compile a list of the top averaging websites as sorted by points on HN. That would be a neat way to find new sites that we collectively find interesting.
Sometimes I think Google just wants get their version number up as fast as possible, so it doesn't seem like IE is already at 8 while chrome still toddles around in there 3's. (of course this nonsense from a technical standpoint)
Substitute the word "institution" for "State", and you have a description that fits the U.S. (and many other places and situations) quite well.

Territorial government does not have a monopoly on hegemony nor the avarice it inspires.

(Not that I'm defending the Chinese government.)
how do you see the ground while you're landing, if you're facing up?

I guess you look down. The windshield looks transparent in that direction.
Errr, the list is rather (a lot) longer.

But don't worry about it, as long as it is on topic no harm done.

The problem is with the off-topic stuff that gets submitted like this.
Can you tell us how many different posters this covers? The list length seems arbitrary.
Ask HN: Is There Enough Tech Talent in NYC?
Hey Everyone,

Our company is profitable and growing rapidly. We're planning to relocate to either SF or NYC to continue expanding the company. One of our main concerns about moving to NYC is that it will be difficult to recruit on the engineering side. For companies that in NYC, has this been the case? Would you recommend relocating to NYC? How have you been able to find talent in that area?

P.S. Our company is in the fast growing social gaming space, so each place has its drawbacks/benefits in that regard.
Working on a Chef eBook
This is europe, collections of facts are covered by database rights (directive 96/9/EC).
It sure does. Changing the orientation of the Osprey's rotors must subject the whole assembly to some nasty forces.
Most of the things these companies release are interesting, and affect our lives in one way or another. I'm sure that individual engineers in these companies get a little thrill of pride when they are mentioned in HN.

So yeah, they would notice - it would probably get posted by a HN reader inside the corporation.

I don't think that any result, silence or otherwise would be the end of the world for anyone. Their own PR engines are huge.
Our pages are built by our community, so the quality will vary. That page doesn't have a "vertical manager" yet, but it will. Then we would build out the content a little more.

It's not a perfect system, people can't put multiple search boxes in there.

However, that page will never rank well in a search engine (unless by a fluke). In order to rank well you really need to have 500+ original words.

We're in the process of moving all pages to that standard. It's really a self-regulating thing: if our contributors make short pages they never rank and never make money. They get frustrated and we teach them how to make longer pages and some day they may rank.

... it's really not a problem, and the truth is we rank for three things well:

1. video game walkthroughs (typically 2-10,000 words!)
2. how to articles (typically 800 to 5,000 words)
3. question & answer pages (typically 300 to 10,000 words),

Isn't this basic SEO (and i'm not expert): build original content and you might rank. Build short pages, you don't rank.

All pages start short (just like wikipedia stubs do), and over time we make them longer. that's the normal process.
You mean, like this?: http://top.searchyc.com/
> The standard provides for arithmetic coding, but no one implements it because of the patent.

That is, there is an implementation in the libjpeg source tree, but it's disabled. I thought the patent had actually expired now, though.

Also, H.264's arithmetic coding mode saves ~20% bitrate; Vorbis or AAC could presumably benefit too, but neither of them use an arithmetic coder, even though AAC should have no patent problems. Maybe there's some technical problem I don't know about.
Apple Now A $50+ Billion Company — Major New Product This Week
To answer your question without inciting the classic NYC vs. San Fran debate: Yes, there is enough tech talent in NYC. There's a stable and rapidly growing tech scene here with startups across various disciplines, and finding engineering talent is not an issue. The latest news.YC inspired Hackers & Founders meetup had over 100 people and a waiting list to boot, which is evidence of the entrepreneurial enthusiasm.

Is San Fran a better choice? It could be, but let's leave that to another thread.
Hah, you're missing the point. The kind of men that pay for super-high-priced call girls are just as often looking for an educated, interesting woman to talk to as they are for sex. Lots of the "elite" call girls have higher degrees, for example, or are well-traveled.

I posted a Hulu link to the CNBC episode of "Dirty Money" where they talked about the high-end of the prostitution business. It's pretty eye-opening if you take the time to watch it.
Mega Man 2 actually had an easy mode that was called normal mode. Ninja Gaiden is a terribly difficult game, but it's unfair to choose Mega Man 2's normal mode as representative of the difficulty of the Mega Man series.

"Technically, Mega Man 2's easy mode was called normal mode, while the white-knuckled difficulty typically found in a Mega Man game was called difficult, but it was an easy mode."

http://kotaku.com/5444479/mega-man-10-brings-the-easy
That's the kind of rationalizing I'd expect from someone with such a poor standard of ethics. Gates is not going to be alone here, of course. Everyone doing business in China has to be telling themselves stuff like this.
> Am I the only one who simply can't stand Jason Calacanis?

One of the rules of this site is that you ought to write things that you would feel comfortable saying to someone's face. And often it's very practical because all sorts of people turn up to read stuff here. Including Jason, it appears.

That said, I get a bad vibe too: why is everything he is associated with seemingly "Jason's this" or "Jason's that". Generally, a startup is known first and foremost as the company, not as "Alexis Ohanian's Reddit" or "Sergey Brin's Google", but you always find that guy's name in the same phrase as Mahalo. I can't quite place my finger on why this bugs me, but perhaps it's something to do with building something up as a free standing entity versus lending your famous name to something.
His strongest skills are hype & public relations.

AOL was mainly buying into the trend of blogging / lower cost content production models when they bought Weblogs, Inc. They didn't buy a huge cash generating company.

Jason was bragging about having about a million a year in revenues (revenues, not profits) with some absurdly large number of writers (like 30). And part of that cash flow was selling text links that flow PageRank to online casinos...over 100 of them carpet-bombed his network of blogs.
http://www.threadwatch.org/node/6312

And (ironically) back then he was also selling links to scraper sites
http://www.threadwatch.org/node/5295
(maybe that is where the Mahalo idea came from)?
What's the block cipher mode in which a small series of disk errors makes everything unencryptable? That doesn't even happen in CBC.
You are correct, my best skill is finding amazing people and supporting the heck out of them.

However, I would give myself a modest amount of credit for finding verticals a little earlier than average (silicon alley, blogs, human-powered search, etc), as well as marketing, branding and product design.

I never asked to be an expert... I just state my opinion and folks can respond to it. Sometimes i'm right, many times I'm wrong.

I don't claim to be smarter than anyone... I just go to work every day and try to do a little better each day.
That was one I was going to mention, along with the Wright Brothers, before I reread the question and realised it was only software patents they were interested in. Still fascinating how people that I'd always heard venerated as inventors could have spent so much time and energy holding other people back.
I thought this was pretty amusing, but it's not much of a surprise. High-end audio gear is mostly a marketing business. It doesn't make much financial sense for these companies to do their own hardware engineering when they can license it and save their money for buying good reviews in audiophile mags. Their only mistake in this case is that they didn't claim to cryogenically treat the faceplate or something, to give audiophiles a reason to claim it has superior video quality. =)
This isn't really new. It looks very similar to the Convair Pogo. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_XFY
If I list a few dozen example "fluke rankings" will that mean you are full of crap once again?

Let me know how many need to be listed for you to see the patern, and I will prove you factually incorrect once more.
It's actually true... we can make mistakes.

... the truth is having short content pages indexed works against you--that's why i no indexed them to being with.

Again, I'm not as big of an expert on SEO as Aaron, but I think there is something called "page rank sculpting" in which you push your sites page rank to high-quality pages and no-index the ones that are shorter in terms of original content. We did that because one of our people read about it on a blog.

We're probably holding ourselves back having removed this and we are putting it back on because we didn't realize it was off.

That is why I thanked Aaron.

Is the page rank sculpting thing not a good idea? I thought this was a fairly certain thing: only index the best pages.
-1 for being logical! :-)
While this is not a confirmation we'll be seeing a tablet from Apple on Wednesday, it is the first thing we've heard from Apple in terms of launching a new product that I know of.
This is incredibly useful. That's why Redstone Software has been selling it for years, under the name Eggplant - see http://www.testplant.com/products/eggplant_functional_tester .
It takes a lot of work in QA to figure out why this is useful (back me up on t his one, experienced QA engineers) and the right way to do it so I'll give you the Cliff Notes:
This sort of bitmap recognition lets you automate that "last mile" QA groups can never seem to automate. autohotkeys, selenium, and other things all help automate lots of aspects of the interface with tons of caveats and gotchas. This is a much more useful, if less pleasingly elegant, solution.
When you are automating testing it's relatively easy to automate back-endstuff, write unit tests, write scripts wrapping cli interfaces and so on, but every automation team that deals with GUIs eventually stubs their toe on automating the user interface. BY having the computer automate the GUI task in the same way a human user executes it ( "I want to click the Apple Menu - Where is the Apple icon I know is on top of the Apple Menu? - Ah! There it is! I'll click it" ) you make it easier, or even possible, for the people writing the qa automation to automate the GUI in a reasonable amount of time.
There are some pitfalls. What if someone changes the theme on the automation rig? Well, you're an engineering team, not a preschool - DON'T change the theme!
What if somebody changes an icon in the app you're testing? Fortunately you have access to the bitmap (it's saved with the rst of the build files, yeah?) and of course the change notes for the build tell you hte iocon has been updated. Well, of course it isn't in the change notes, but when a test that was working fails you can easily run to the point where it says "Can't find the foo button." This is a hint to look for the foo button and think about why it can't be found.
Finally, all good scripting languages have an escape hatch to call otehr programs that can do things better than they can and return a result. Need to check an old COM object through its native interface? Write a small Windows app that your script calls to get that state.
It takes a lot of experience and frustration with trying to fully automate tests on a GUI to understand why this is useful. and the cry of "Bitmaps break because things cahnge" - well, no they don't. Not on a computer . Not if you know what you're doing and have control of the source. (Please disable all auto-update systems on your test rig or you will be surprised at some point.)
Yes. I picked up on a bit of uncomfortable subtext there as well, but didn't know what to make of it. It certainly wasn't an outburst like the Gore Vidal incident, however.

But there is very little point discussing the character of a dead man, regardless of the forum.
How about a CSV or Google Doc version so we can play with these numbers a bit? (filter, sort, etc)
Why Facebook wants you to have more friends
HackerNews meetup at PyCon 2010 Atlanta
Hi HN,

Who's going to PyCon this year?

What's your real name?

What do you do with Python?

What are you interested in at PyCon?

Looking forward to anything in particular in Atlanta?

Want to grab a beer? I'm arriving on the 16th and would be happy to meet with any and all of you.
E107 (Popular CMS/Portal) Included Backdoor
I can only find a few that have more than 10 submissions:

dustincurtis.com (dcurtis)

danieltenner.com (wheels iirc)

blog.last.fm

balsamiq.com

sivers.org

netflixprize.com

steve-yegge.blogspot.com

Most of the other ones are either mainstream or have very few submissions.

If you want the list of one-offs and infrequent but high ranking sites let me know.
I have, yes. Thanks for the link though--I had lost it.
Why 30.1% of numbers start with 1
I bet I'm somewhere high for Techcrunch(possibly #1...although 716 seems high), I used to submit a ton of their stuff. Don't do that as often, since I'm busy with my own site now.

edit: apparently it's not me, since searchyc only shows 91 submissions...and a few of them are "Ask HN" types

edit #2: apparently it IS me, and searchyc just doesn't work that well. (thanks for the email Jacques). I'm actually surprised that only accounted for 6K votes, I figured it'd be closer to 15K
I've had the same problems with my machine. With both 10.5 and 10.6. Flash just sucks on a mac.
> "The Chinese efforts to censor the Internet have been very limited. It's easy to go around it, and so I think keeping the Internet thriving there is very important."

It's true to someone like Bill Gates. But for average Internet users in China, the Internet propaganda and censorship mechanism works great.
Well, I don't know about on-topic, but they were always interesting to me. I take solace in the fact that I've never read valleywag.

Did you scrape for the data or it it available somewhere as a download? For a while I've been curious about creating a more interactive approach to my links archive based on the content of each link.
Congratulations tlb!
You're right...most people who see prostitutes don't want other people to know about it.

On the other hand, most of the people who see high-end prostitutes do want people to know that there's a charming, beautiful woman with them for a certain occasion or whatever (but obviously they fail to mention that she's being paid to be there).
71 individual accounts, but 100 entries, so some individuals are on the list more than once.
Click through from google search for full article:
http://www.google.com/search?q=At+SEC,+a+Scholar+Who+Saw+It+...
They could buy Adobe and just drop the entire company into a dumpster along with it's software.
Interview with Chinese Internet entrepreneurs who have had their sites shut down
I think it has to do with the perception of the quality.

The single biggest risk on sleeping with a prostitute is getting a (or multiple) STDs, or even HIV.

If you sleep with a street hooker, your risk of getting something is relatively high (even if you use condoms, and all that). That street hooker that cost a hundred buck for couple of hours, probably sleeps with 20-30 people a week.
Talking about used good. This is actually really risky.

A high end prostitue, could get away with sleeping with only few people a week, and still make good money. She probably is sleeping with only rich people, so the risk factor is different.
The chance of her getting something from her are a lot lower.

Plus I heard that the high end ones, look really good, compare to the regular ones.

The really high end ones, are the ones that act as a gf. They don't get paid directly, but basically splurge on everything they can using your credit card.
If you have seen the move "Priceless", it is a good one to watch: http://www.pricelessthemovie.com/ (mostly a comedy). But the "gf" for the month, phenomena is real in Europe, and some countries in South America.
> Don't they realize how dumb they look?

After reviewing the 60 years history of PRC, no they don't.

The CCP is called TuGong or TuBaLu by the population for a reason, which literally means 'the party of hick bandits'
If Jason really wants advice, here's two things:

1) "Spreading our PageRank" is BS. More pages == more total PageRank. Wikipedia's summary isn't half bad: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

2) Remove the nofollow's from the attribution links to content you've scraped. Anything else is just plain rude.
Perhaps this will help:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
If no one knew or cared about the difficulty in climbing everest at all except those who climbed it, climbing everest would no longer have near the status that it does.

He argues that hardcore gamers don't want an easy mode because it makes completing the game more of a status signal, however, the lack of an easy mode reduces the audience that is even aware of the game.

Completing a hardcore game that nobody knows about doesn't give the gamer any status at all.

He's not making the argument that people who climb everest by riding an pressurized elevator with an oxygen supply should be able to claim they climbed everest, but the fact that there is an elevator shouldn't logically diminish the status conveyed to actual climbers of everest.
I think that Reddit's solution with a new entry at the top is good. Right now, there is a bias towards the preference of people who visit the "new" page.
It would be a cool feature for HN if pg made it so that the number of times a domain is submitted directly correlates to it's decay rate. Thus, articles from really popular sites would fall off the front page faster, opening up spots for articles from newer (to us) domains.