skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd be careful about messing with points on comments (and with karma more generally).

You might enjoy imagining a forum where smart people anonymously engage in civilized discussion without need for the kind of lowbrow pleasure-center-stimulation that the current karma system provides, but I doubt such a thing could exist; if it did, it would probably be much less exciting than HN. Smart people who enjoy good discussion are still people, and most of what people do is seek out easy rewards.

You've built something almost impossible here: a place where it's very rewarding to say interesting things and very unrewarding, generally, to say uninteresting things. Don't look this gift horse too directly in the mouth. If you kill the point display on comments I think you'll kill a lot of the content on this site.

Not to mention that, though it's easy to make fun of people who get too sucked in to internet arguments, there's frankly nothing wrong with people going out of their way to correct other people and that kind of behavior is pretty fundamental to crowd conversations like HN. It's probably annoying that jacquesm's popular approval forced you to respond to him, but I (and others) enjoyed reading your comment; I think you'd be hard-pressed to show that you writing it was a net loss activity.
Facebook has gone rogue
Thank you for standing up for things of eternal importance. I wholeheartedly agree.
And here's my snarkier version: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1194542
Ah. That has nothing to do with ads.
I love this. I am coding on my Mac with Nowmov playing on my other laptop. Love how I can use keyboard to control.

I don't know about your algo, so it would be a nice addition to let people have accounts and then guess videos based on what they liked before, it will eliminate the need to touch keyboard to skip videos, overtime. :)
It means pretty much exactly what you say, only its the set top box that's doing the streaming, and the video outputs are only disabled for movies that are still in theaters.

I also find it hard to get overly worked up about it - it seems like a reasonable inconvenience to put up with for the ability to watch newly released features at home.

Digital usually looks better anyway.
I let a domain expire, about two years ago, that I had registered using GoDaddy. To this day they still email me every couple of weeks telling me this is my "last chance" to renew it.
Been trying to figure that out for ages... if there really is a way that would be huge.
What is Checklist for a Custom Term Paper
Custom term paper could be the best friend of students in times of need. However, it is not a healthy practice to always go for the free samples and other examples of a term paper, with the aim of refining them to suit the particular academic needs of students.
Entrepreneurship is Sexy, Right?
When I wrote a web-to-email gateway in 1994 it added a Received header with the web client IP address. Back then it was a harassment-prevention practice, because spam was either nonexistent or not a problem.
I had my own idea for dealing with this phenomenon. After reading your post I decided to try and make it a reality instead of an idea.

MiniLeap: A pickup game for startups

www.MiniLeap.com
As it stands, SearchYC doesn't get enough daily uniques to justify beefing up the system. Frankly, SearchYC was an experiment in how quickly I could learn a new technology (RoR) and build a system. I was completely expecting someone to come along a few months later to make SearchYC obsolete. It's been 2.5 years, and I don't think that's happened yet.
When on the web, I pretend to be a Markov chain that has some nonzero chance of stopping at each step.
Thermaltake Luxa2 LM200
I am amazed and still laughing at the guy who comes out with the flashlight.

Is there any place I could DL the entire score as a single file so I can play it over my Metropolis DVD? I don't feel like watching it with this scoring on youtube.
Ask HN: Moving Flash games to HTML5
Hey folks,

I made a very simple Flash game a few years back for a college class. It was quite fun. I had been thinking about recreating it with HTML and JS (and probably leveraging some HTML5 features like canvas). I figured it could be a cool game for iPhone/Android/WebOS phones, as well.

My biggest concern with doing this is cheating. This simple game had a scoreboard (Flash submitting a POST request to a PHP script, with some authentication/validation). The biggest drive to playing the game over and over was the scoreboard. I'm afraid that moving it HTML+JS would make it easy to cheat. (Example: Using Firebug to change the JavaScript to stop the countdown timer from working.) With Flash, the users don't know what's going on. The best they could do was intercept the POST traffic and see what's being sent.

I suppose I could use things like the YUI Compressor to keep the JS harder to modify. (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/compressor/)

I'm more curious on ideas for Flash game developers moving to HTML5. I probably haven't touched Flash since I made this game in college, so I don't know how Flash is these days. Any advice on how to handle potential cheaters would be great. Any other advice on moving Flash games to HTML5 for other developers could be helpful too.

Thanks!
There is a glitch though. I paused a video and when I resumed it started playing a totally different video, the video I paused is not even in the clip history.
I feel like there will be people who can't watch a movie they pay for because of this but even if the studios manage to execute this perfectly I'm worried about the precedent that this sets. How long will it be before they are pushing for the same restrictions on sports programs and cable tv shows?
Here's a link to the sourcecode: http://code.google.com/p/gource/
Bravo: this is the first time I've seen you publicly acknowledge that they exist. Baby steps!

You know them well enough to invite them to a private party at your office. Do you know the CO2stats people better, given that you're including a cross-site web-bug javascript from them that frequently blocks the site's page rendering?

It's a few hundred bytes of <form>, you could remove it later if they flamed out with the same ridiculous ease with which you could add it.
I'm in Florida. This kind of stuff is so common here. There's a reason Fark has a special [Florida] tag.
I'd be surprised if someone really wanted my IP they couldn't get it just by getting me to visit something off facebook.
Hacking the Startup Process: A Pickup Game for Co-Founders
Since Zynga's in-game credits are essentially a scam on multiple levels (remember Scamville? and the psychological manipulation / exploitation involved in the first place), they have absolutely zero moral high ground to complain about Facebook replacing their in-game credits with Facebook's own, especially if this cuts down on scammy behavior.
> It's less useless than the 5 IE toolbars your annoying relatives live with, but just as obnoxious.

Ouch.

That's a funny bit of writing, but really, when you think about it the searchyc guys deserve a round of applause for what they've built and that they did it without being funded or any kind of profit motive makes it even more impressive.
A pragmatic opinion of what needs to happen in the wake of Facebook
The buzzword of the week is 'open'.

In the wake of both Apple rebuking flash, and Facebook rebuking the ethics of user interaction, everyone wants to embrace transparency and detailed analysis of what happens with data.

I'm of the firm opinion that everyone on this bandwagon is missing the point.

An open platform is good in my opinion. I made the comment that a progressive platform is a platform that developers can build upon and expand; that a progressive platform is one that evolves in the environment in which users find it most useful. An excellent example of this is twitter implementing the @username and #hashtag interactions, which began as user conceived concepts. But when Facebook decided it was going to announce to the world how you use it's services, critics raged.

When Apple decided it would mandate how Apps were developed, again critics raged. When Apple announced they would be metaphorically divorcing Flash, there was an uproar but there was the slight consensus "maybe this is for the better". Here's the common link:

After talking with a proclaimed software developer right here on HN, and seeing the response Apple published in the wake of the various App rejections and most recently the separation from Adobe, the rationals were both the same:

We're doing this for the users.

I call bullshit. Facebook has a track record of implementing incremental changes that despite what 80% of the non-tech oriented userbase thinks, is a 'good change'. This is crucial, because whether or not we actually like it, the conventional target audience of both Facebook and Apple are non-tech users who simply want a means to an end: communication/consumption of media. If they get that means, they're happy. Facebook and Apple realize this.

It's time we did too.

So here's what I'm here to say: Wired.com has issued a call to arms for developers to produce an open platform for networking and distributing user content. A democratic one, even. Here's what I'm asking:

Build for the customer. Yes, I understand how important it is that transparency and democracy have a place in an ecosystem where every voice has the capacity to influence the rest. But it's just as important that you listen to those voices and pay attention to the core principles:

We are consumers. We buy things, we use things, and when something better comes along we buy that. Focus on what matters to the people based on how the people use these products and stop trying to build a utopia. And when I say "based on how the people use", I don't mean make up your own ideals of what's good for the consumer. Interact, communicate and collaborate.

That's a thousand times more "open" and more "transparent" than telling users 'in an attempt to be open, we're going to disclose our activity'. Start from the bottom up, not from the top down.
Can someone show evidence of this statement?

"Now, say you you write a public update, saying, “My boss had a crazy great idea for a new product!” Now, you might not know it, but there is a Facebook page for “My Crazy Boss” and because your post had all the right words, your post now shows up on that page. Include the words “FBI” or “CIA,” and you show up on the FBI or CIA page."

That is scary.
painkillers and vitamins.
If you got a lot more traffic because YC would anoint you the 'official' YC search engine would you be able to handle it?

Would you commit to beefing up the system to whatever it took?
I'm not sure I understand. As much as I love Lucida Grande, Cocoa != Lucida Grande. Rather, Mac OS X : Lucida Grande :: iPhone OS : Helvetica.
I think people are missing the thumbs up/down. This is more like pandora for videos.
Replace “520 gods” with “520 religions.” (The true number of trivially unique religions is closer to the number of people who have ever lived, since many peoples' beliefs differ from denominational creeds.) “Problem” solved.
Yeah this happens now, pages get a list of relevant status updates down the bottom, sometimes not so relevant. Almost seems like this should be restricted to people who like the page to keep it relevant. Also I wonder if there going to do anything about page fragmentation, they create a page for the exact way you typed something in, even though there is a more relevant page with different word formatting.
I could write a crawl for these words, if it was a public update.
"It’s time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and distributed."

Before Facebook there was FOAF, which was exactly the same except for that it was open and distributed... And nobody used it. Being closed is the only thing that makes Facebook good.
> painkillers and vitamins.

I can't make heads or tails of this comment. Could you please explain?
Groupon CEO: Being in a band made my business rock
Well the whole idea behind mahalo is stupid and it only gets traffic because Jason send traffic there. But no one is thinking "I'm going to search for something, gee I'll try mahalo". Jason's link baiting is the main traffic source and mahalo will prolly be out of business at some point in the next 3 years. So maybe they fold thisweekin into mahalo and maybe get the investors something.
Falcon 9 First Flight: May 16th
I love that there's a Facebook Like widget in the right column as you scroll down.
مشاهدة مباراة برشلونة واشبيلية بث مباشر
Splitting it by default would be weird, since a lot of people don't want it split. When I go out to eat with my family, we don't want four separate checks, and most couples going out don't want two checks. I don't even want separate checks with friends I go out with regularly, because we just alternate approximately instead of trying to calculate everything accurately to the nearest dollar.

In my experience the main groups who do want splits are college students and coworkers, but I'm not sure what proportion of total restaurant meals those two groups account for. Anecdotally, restaurants near colleges or in college towns are much more likely to ask you if you want a split check, though.

As for logistics, I think the main one is that it requires an extra level of keeping track, especially for larger groups. Instead of just punching in "two beers and a margarita for table 15", the waiter then has to enter in who ordered what, either while punching it in initially (if the system supports it) or afterwards. It's considerably more complicated to track 30 items ordered by 6 separate people than to just track 30 items ordered by a table. And then the waiter additionally has to ask for details on what to do with ambiguous things, like appetizers. People get pretty absurd with that too: they want one appetizer split between 5 of the 6 people (because the 6th person didn't eat any of it), another appetizer split evenly, the pitcher of beer split between a different 4-out-of-6 people. Oh, and they want two of those people on the same check because they're husband-and-wife, while the other four get 1-person checks. Etc., etc.
A new Ruby on Rails Tutorial chapter is out: Chapter 11 User microposts
I've got a question.

I really am starting to think Facebook went through my Gmail contacts without me even authorizing it to do so. In the past hour, it's suggested three people I

1) Don't have any friends in common with
2) Never searched for on Facebook
3) Never contacted other than through Gmail
and 4) never even worked with

One guy, I used to play Team Fortress Classic with, who only I've talked to through email showed up in my suggestions. Has anyone else experienced this?
The chocolate ration has been raised to 25 grams per week.
> Perhaps the fact our icon says 'HNSearch' is a problem - maybe we need to change this to 'HNSidebar'?

It would at least be more descriptive, and it would also reduce 'bounce' from people that install it and then are totally confused and remove it again.

Thanks for the explanation, I've actually installed webmynd in the past and we had some email exchange long ago (September last year or so), it's neat to see you're sticking around and explaining so clearly what webmynd is and what it is not.
Any time I see something valuable on HN I quickly bookmark it so that I can read it later on without the hassle to search it. Search is a hassle on YC. I think we need a solution especially having been used to quick and effective google search for almost anything.
Might be a fun project to implement the XMPP Microblogging XEP (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html) as a start. XMPP seems to have a lot of the basic features for a distributed social network (buddy list, pubsub, established protocol, etc...)
That's what searchyc.com is all about.

Google is a good solution, searchyc.com is even better.
Your argument would seem to work for even the world’s worst user experiences. Thus all user experiences become equally (not) frustrating with time. This is a contradiction with real-world experiences.

Edit: It's a popular, but dangerous, misconception among programmers that making something easy, usable, or intuitive means assuming the user is "dumb." Understanding that this isn’t true is very important for the success of one’s product.

Marco makes Instapaper and he has spent a lot of time thinking about & adjusting the placement of buttons in Instapaper for iPad's UI. His article is insightful and his opinion carries a lot of weight, for me.
I don't see how you went from my post to Pascal's wager. Please explain.
The story to take away from this is how much GitHub can add to a project's contributions. I'm sure Rails' popularity didn't hurt either. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0ji8FDNTj0#t=5m10s for the GH migration.
A guy I know has been working on something of the sort for awhile. I'm sure he'd appreciate some thoughtful input from enlightened beings such as yourselves. =^)

http://socknet.net/w/The_Socknet
VCs in seed clothing: Chris Dixon, Mark Suster, and Naval Ravikant interviewed
I agree. My RSS feed has 100s of articles every day. And I can't keep up :(
Stories like this are why the term "anti-feature" was invented. Here, we see a useful feature being removed from consumers for no technical reason-- what else can you call that other than anti-feature?
Testing an idea - need a specific data set
Hi HN, I have been looking for a list of every physical address known to the USPS. Does anyone know where I can get this? I've check the gov sites (USPS, HUD, Dept. of Commerce) but no luck. Thought I would ask here. Can anyone help?
Fair enough. I totally believe that don't judge startups from where they are now, but judge them based on where they will be after few years.

I just had a different experience when I met you the other day at Chirp and demoed our app. It was a 4 month app developed in the part-time, has a decent traction, and growing at decent rate, but with great potential in future. I was more interested in explaining you my vision and getting your feedback on it, but it seemed like you gave lot of emphasis on its current usefulness and didn't seem to imagine how great and useful the app would be in few months.

So I was just curious, how your thought process works. But I'm glad that you seem to believe in the approach of what we potentially can achieve based on what we have achieved so far.

Thanks for your reply!
http://www.linkedin.com/companies/enole
Absolutely. (When using a laptop with tap-to-click enabled, I accidentally tap far too much. Quite frustrating.)
Ugh. Another FB article.

When the revolution comes, the spark that lights the fire won't come from Hacker News.

/me goes off to find a greasemonkey script to drop FB articles.
Yes, but what standards typically lack in innovation traction, they more than make up for in 800-pound-gorilla disruption.
I just noticed this when helping someone I know create an account. Many of her Yahoo contacts were recommended without it asking for a Yahoo login (Ironic, eh? Facebook calls that criminal when other companies do it.).

It also found many of my friends whom she had never even heard of---I had even defriended a couple of them. I'm thinking that it's also recommending based on cookies/session or IP address---perhaps their logic is that a person living with me likely knows many of the people whom I know.
I'm assuming you got downvoted because no one saw that episode of Criminal Minds. Heh.
Since searchyc do such a nice job, it seems a shame to throw the link to google instead.

But, it's not my site...
I concede that search is sometimes useful for any site, but google does a pretty good job and I respect pg's reluctance to mess with it. I do keep a list of HN articles that I want to be able to go back to.
Considering you are almost emulating what Flash does natively, it is an awesome effort already. I dare say that with Chrome's continuing improvements, it'll be barely noticeable soon. That said, people running slow machines might have more issues.
Great article .. for a gossip site.
How does one downvote something? Is there a karma level a user should be at to be able to downvote?
I can attest to some of this. I've worked with two specific individuals whose careers I believe were directly helped by being smokers. Not to say that they didn't deserve it, but it definitely helped.
I see Helvetica on the iPhone platform as more of an aberration (and possibly merely the result of license bickering, not through serious consideration). It doesn't seem to make any sense to switch to it on the portable devices. This has been partially mocked here: http://blog.cocoia.com/2008/swiss-interface-syndrome/

Anyway, the screenshot of the Apple booking interface shows Lucida Grande in use. When viewed on the iPad/iPhone, it'll have to drop back to Helvetica instead of the intended font. Hopefully Apple will see sense, though, and add Lucida Grande to OS 4.0 or beyond since its absence makes little sense.
Reocities can become Yelp for 90s web design: "We will publish your first Frontpage site, unless you pay us".
Thomas Sabo jewellery, Thomas Sabo silver for men and women
Presenting itself initially as Harvard's yearbook is what made it good, as it kickstarted its network effects (everyone feels sort of obligated to be "in the yearbook," because they want to imagine they will be reminisced about.) I've seen FOAF profiles, but I've never seen a FOAF network.
I did the same for two Facebook notifications, from different friends, and both tagged their city (Tuscaloosa, AL didn't surprise me, but Blountstown, FL? That's fairly targetted).
Other than your "pages" being totally public with no option to hide them from your public profile period and facebook's "new experience" program being OPT-OUT instead of OPT-IN I don't have too many issues with facebook's privacy. Configuring privacy settings the way I wanted them wasn't that complicated, I feel like this article may be blowing things out of proportion...
The base case of concise and inarticulate are identical.

The second most concise form of comment would be to say simply "yes" or "no." Do you feel such comments add to a discussion on account of their conciseness?
There is no reason any Facebook user (including hackers) would expect this information to be available.

Scenario:
I would like to know your IP.
I sign up for a throwaway FB account (perhaps through a proxy), send you a message designed to evoke a response (even if it’s “Who is this?”).
I have your IP.

Typically websites will only reveal users' IPs to administrators, moderators, owners, and/or peers when direct P2P is involved.

I also highly doubt this practice is described in their privacy policy.
I assume it means that some features are "good for you," while others are opiates; and possibly that this is a bad thing because opiates mask pain, and graphing pain is a crucial part of iterating a design, so the more opiates a design has, the more confounding factors there will be to evolving a good core product. (That's not to say that I agree that on-site search is an opiate, but an argument could be made for it.)

EDIT: Oh, wait, I screwed that up completely. It's from here: http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2008/03/does-...

Apparently, painkillers are the good things. Goes to show how weak analogies won't actually carry your message.
Lean Startup - Extreme Version
Yes, the minimum is at 200pts currently