skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
whoohoo! I get to quote my thesis!

"Three solution approaches to concerns regarding autoﬂight systems, and mode transitions in
particular, are presented in this thesis. The ﬁrst is to use training to modify pilot behaviours, or
procedures to work around known problems. The second approach is to mitigate problems by
enhancing feedback. The third approach is to modify the process by which automation is
designed. The Operator Directed Process forces the consideration and creation of an automation
model early in the design process for use as the basis of the software speciﬁcation and training."

Sadly, an in contrast to this article, guess which ones happens the vast majority of the time?

The first. Which usually consists of a pink page inserted in to the pilots' handbooks.

I'd call that a "patch".
Ruby is a Playground, PHP is a Factory
There's 15 minutes of my life I'm never going to get back. He has a good point, though, Hacker News is barely worth reading these days.

Good job screwing it up, everyone.
No, "success" meaning its use is very widespread.
Paparazzi is a similar program that uses Safari on OS X.

http://www.derailer.org/paparazzi/
Good point, that's probably what happened to Friendster. The site was so slow that users stopped coming back. If you have lots of users and your site doesn't scale, they will check the site less often or abandon it completely.
Video search engine watches and learns
What 3 VC's Think of 5 Startup Pitches
I assume you got to the chat log via the links on the AI Box page... It seems none of those links go to posts related to the AI Box contest, so I assume the message numbers got re-indexed at some point and that chat log in question was actually unrelated.

Edit: The links seem to have been fixed and no longer go to the chat log.
That is incorrect. It is very hard to use simple rules like that to get high returns, because when enough people follow the rules, they become invalid. Renaissance is using a huge number of strategies, and they're constantly testing them. It's likely that any given strategy will be obsolete soon enough, but less likely that they'll all be wrong at once.

It might be useful to think of Renaissance as a market-maker, not a money manager -- given that you described two buy-and-hold strategies, and their average holding period is six minutes, it sounds like they might not be in the business you're talking about.

It's possible to get superior returns over time by having such a low cost or such a strong brand that your product is qualitatively different from someone else's: having a brand like Coca-Cola that is, say, 5% more recognizable than Pepsi can give you something that's worth much much more than Pepsi + 5%; being able to make trades 1% faster and 1% cheaper than anyone else (if Rentec can do that) means having a monopoly on taking advantage of one set of market discrepancies. They obviously have to spend a lot of money to maintain that advantage, but the advantage remains.
The speed which the code can be understood says much more about the writer than the reader.

I think the point is that you hold the writer of the code invariant, and then substitute different code readers; the rates at which two different people can understand a given piece of code says something about their ability as programmers. More than just rate of understanding, I think depth of understanding is just as important: a novice might read some code and say "it does X", whereas an expert will understand X, observe that the code really meant to do Y, and that it might have memory leaks, deadlocks, or incorrect corner cases, for example.

I think Gates has a very valid point: there are lots of circumstances where you need the ability to wade into an unknown code base and understand how it behaves (and how it ought to behave). The ability to read through code and understand non-trivial properties of the code really takes some experience to develop -- that is directly relevant to code review, for example.
The economics of downtime is a very important consideration. I read that three minutes of downtime reduces the value of a website by 1%. However, that may be a figure bandied by vendors of high-availability equipment. It is also generally acknowledged that high-availability is achieved through strict processes and sheer redundancy of hardware. Therefore, it gets exponentially more expensive to minimise downtime.

So, you've got two non-linear curves, cost and benefit. If you've got an exceptional team, a great architecture and good finances then getting 99.999% uptime should be easy. Of course, this assumes that you don't have unforeseen circumstances, glaring omissions in redundancy - or exponential growth and utilisation without a revenue stream.

Even with generous financing, exponential growth can be deadly. A small but sustained increment in load can be enough to cause a backlog in requests that never recovers. If you're growing fast then it can occur anywhere in your system at any time. I've been a DBA for a renderfarm with thousands of cores and this situation is stressing.

We've also had this situation while working on search. Thankfully, it occurred on a smaller scale and most thankfully it occurred before launch. We had two database servers, two app servers, no redundancy, on unreliable hardware. We didn't make much headway with efficiency improvements because long tests were likely to encounter hardware failure. It was demoralising.

This slowed the development and testing of a database failover feature in the database wrapper. Now this has been implemented, progress is much better. A test that previously took three hours now takes five minutes and we've had much more time to migrate to reliable hardware and introduce redundancy. We've also got a setup which can be used to test resilience to real modes of failure.
I'm Mark Bao, 16, owner of Avecora and coder and all that, and my parents are highly against, extremely unsupportive of coding/business/entrepreneurship. I'm guessing that it's a result of my lack of focus towards (high) school.

My reasons for doing this kind of thing early:

1) The people. Like eisokant said, networking is extremely important and I take it seriously.

2) The experience. I'm not getting a huge amount of business experience from this, but it's still valuable to learn about.

3) Make some money to re-invest into future things.

All are hard to do and are important problems. Unfortunately, I've been unable to network around here due to location (Boston = sucky networking compared to the Bay Area) and time. And, of course, my parents are anti-supportive of it, so it's tough to find time to work and code amidst their demands and school.
Poor Steve Ballmer. Now he really does have egg on his face
Steve Ballmer has to dodge eggs in Budapest
Can someone give us (or at least me) the gist of what he's saying?
Author of The Black Swan discusses his book [video]
Where do you get this 1/4 or 1/3 from?
1) Find small businesses advertising on google using requester.mturk.com

2) Offer them a speed test trial on your underloaded servers.

3) Switch them over to your higher cost servers so they spend less on Adwords and get more business for less.

4) Repeat.
If you're asking about front page ranking. it's been released with arc2, and looks like this:

(= gravity* 1.4 timebase* 120 front-threshold* 1)

(def frontpage-rank (s (o gravity gravity*))
(/ (- (realscore s) 1)
(expt (/ (+ (item-age s) timebase*) 60) gravity)))

(def realscore (i) (- i!score i!sockvotes))

(def item-age (i) (hours-since i!time))

Which is summarized, also in the code, as "[net] Votes divided by the age in hours to the gravityth power."
I actually liked the rambling, ranting quality of the post. "People are asking themselves how to save Hacker News, and they need to realize there is only one technology which can save Hacker News, and that is the time machine" <- priceless :)

I probably wouldn't have read the post if it were shorter and dryer, though it looks like it had the opposite effect on many.
Excellent points here, especially the bits about the rationale behind patching major packages when maintainers should be taking the extra time to submit patches upstream instead.
1. The kind of stories that are most popular on reddit and digg (pictures and politics) are banned here.

2. Because that kind of stuff is banned, the average digg/reddit reader, if he comes across News.YC, finds the content boring and leaves.

3. The custom of the site is to be civil in comments.

4. Votes on comments affect karma.

5. Trolls are fairly rapidly banned. The only reason Giles hasn't already been banned is that I thought perhaps he was joking.
I guess it depends on what your goal is. My goal is making this startup work, but I'm in a dysfunctional market. I think I'd rather not know the real odds.
The idea is to add native support for dynamic languages (e.g. Ruby, Python, etc) to the JVM, not to make the Java language itself dynamic.
Good points. However...

There's a huge difference between a "needing the ability to wade into an unknown code base and understand how it behaves" and "one of the finest tests of programming ability".
Absolutely. I consider "hacking up a prototype" part of analysis, not development.
Ok forks! This is how I convinced my parents.
I told them since I don't have a mortgage, wife, kids, and other financial burdens, this is the perfect time for me to go off to work on my own projects. Even if I fail, I at least know I tried and have experience for the next gig. Life is short, and it's too easy to fall into the daily grind of working in the office. Hence, if I don't try, it will be harder for me to follow my dreams when I'm older. This is the Valley for heaven's sake! Where expression, art, and science can become a reality.
Voila! They were sold!
Not necessarily. If you get the same results every time, repeated testing provides nothing.
Systematic factors inherent to social news sites degrade their quality over time. Voting is broken because of the nature of the people who vote the most and thus have the most influence on the front page: They are people with too much time on their hands. That is, anyone with a worthwhile opinion is off doing other things more important than commenting or voting on a news site.

This isn't to say I agree, I'm just trying to summarize the relevant bits as best as I can.
I think he's more concerned with public messaging on a website where anyone else can read it. Do you post your emails or chat logs to a blog?
These are really nice measures, but I think they still do not address the most important problem - people who have more time on their hands have disproportionate effect on the site.

I guess #6. vote weighting will be required soon.
It seems like a cool idea for a lot of people out there, although it's not for me as I don't get quite that involved with rivalries.

I noticed the instant chat at the bottom of any given rivalry, but is there a more asynchronous form of communication between the two sides of a given rivalry?
Science and Wikipedia
I still think that *one* of the finest tests ...

I agree it is one of the most important trait of a good programmer to understand other people's code. One can only be good at programming by writing code and reading other people's (good) code to keep on improving and acquiring knowledge.

If a person is good (and quick) at understanding someone else's code, it is a good indication of him/her being blessed with a good analytical mind, and experience/habit of delving in to code.

Of course, this ability helps when working in a team, but more importantly it is required to understand the existing solutions and their drawbacks/advantages. e.g. If one intends to write a web server or a new VM for a language, it would be helpful to refer and understand the existing open solutions, before starting out.

In short, the ability to understand someone else's code quickly is a definite pointer of a good potential programming ability. Getting a person to write code is the best test most times, but the ability to adapt and learn new language/technology faster is governed highly by ability to read code.
or you could catch it on yc startup justin.tv
Don't forget angel investors. Not easy to get, but then again neither is venture funding. You can often raise enough for a YC-style startup - I know an entrepreneur who raised over $4M from angels and no institutional funding.

The upside of this approach is that it may open other paths to success. A VC is likely going to push you to go big big big. Angels are more likely to be happy with a modest success.
Okay, let's run an experiment. We'll meet in a private chat channel. We'll talk for at least two hours. If I can't convince you to tell us how you convinced the Gatekeeper, I'll Paypal you $10.
The assumption of independence underlying the math you're doing is probably outright false (albeit mathematically simple). As one example, imagine the case where all n schools use the exact same admissions criteria. Unless you're applying with a random application to each school, your math is shot; you will either get into every school or none of them. I won't even go into the genetic independence issue.
The no-framework PHP MVC framework
Ok, so you're saying that in the business of making money buying and selling stocks (short or long term doesn't matter) they have distinct competitive advantage that is not going away.

So what would be their advantage that holds for so long? Ability to properly calculate short-term risk/reward given all available public information?

Update: after reading your blog I found an answer - if stock market is a casino then quant funds are girls serving drinks to the audience.
Damnit i wish i could take my vote back. It's a lie - just a stub that requires payment to read.
The Internet! Where do you get your dubious information from?

Seriously, though, there have been a few studies of various degrees of reliability that indicate that new technology business failure rate over five years is quite a bit smaller than the old "9 in 10 startups fail" wives tale would have us believe. I wouldn't put significant weight on any particular piece of data, but it seems to be pretty consistently in that range whenever people who I would trust to know the numbers (VCs, angels, journalists covering the field, successful and famously unsuccessful entrepreneurs) talk about it.

And, among my own peers here in the valley who started during WFP07, about 1/7 of them are already rich (by some definition of rich). There were 21 groups, and I believe 3 have had exits, and I'm certain that Octopart, Weebly, Buxfer, Heysan, and Virtualmin have not come fully to fruition yet. Tsumobi might even surprise folks, as they're still slaving away in their secret underground lab in the Balkans (Josh may have actually said, "Boston", it was hard to hear at the Startup School reception due to the size of the crowd). YC certainly makes a notable improvement in the outcomes of their startups, but it's not magical, so I don't think it's a crazy idea to look at YC startups as at least somewhat representative of tech startups in general--where "tech startup" means, to me, folks who actually file the paperwork, build something, and get it into the hands of users...until you've done that, you're just another dork with a big idea (and those probably fail at a much higher rate than 9 in 10).

Anyway, we're only a year and a half into the experiment with the WFP07 group, and I expect the numbers will probably end up in the 1/3 to 1/2 range.
Answer YC: 42.
Don't panic. ;)
I think you missed the point, too. There are no mistakes for Hacker News to avoid -- the devolution of the site is inevitable. Sooner or later the trolls will take over, and we'll all move to some new site, who will promise to be better than Hacker News. This has all happened before, and it will all happen again.
Perhaps Gates overstates the case slightly, but I would say that there is a strong correlation between "X is a good programmer" and "X is an effective code reviewer" -- and the ability to quickly and accurately read code and to understand deep, non-trivial properties of the code has a lot to do with being a good code reviewer.
Dude, just stay away from girls that are into social media. Let's just say they give a different perspective on viral networks...
Can't resist the blonde geeky types.
I actually don't have an RSS reader that I'm happy with. What software does everyone here use? Something that works across both Linux and Windows would be nice.
Weird. I don't feel ill after looking at that PHP code.

A pretty nice approach, I think, though it still feels pretty clumsy and chattery--but PHP is just a very chattery language with all of its, what, 28000 keywords now?
Perhaps you have more effect by voting (i.e. switching) TV channels. The public opinion seems to be very important for government policy - and popular shows can be and are seen as a barometer for it, I guess.
Dysfunctional markets present oppurtunity.
New Open Source DNS Server Released Today
I can't believe more people voted for the Steve Ballmer egging story than this:-/
This exists as a greasemonkey script:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039
Certain Types Of Carbon Nanbotubes May Lead To Cancer
Facebook redesign preview: certain applications "may be less successful"
no, the standard amount of language keywords, but the lack of a standard namespace basically means that all the builtins (which you can't replace) are keywords.

edit: I guess language construct versus function really doesn't make a difference. In essence it's a reserved word.
Senator targets YouTube (wants all terrorist-related videos removed)
Aside from the pseudo-zed-shaw rant, I think he had a very interesting and enlightening point about the karma-as-video-game problem, and the general less-productive-people-have-more-time-to-influence problem.

I would like to think we solve this here by being too boring for the "Hordes Of Moronic Imbeciles Expressing Their Opinions About You" (his term for it). However, being a jerk to people here and then being smug about it makes it hard not to consider one part of that group.

If you don't want to see your own site, block it:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039
I saw a reasonable TV documentary on this topic some time ago entitled "Survivors Guide to Plane Crashes", which is briefly summarised at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/5402342.stm

One of the more interesting aspects IMHO was the reason for turning off cabin lights when approaching for night landings: to acclimatise your eyes to the ambient light in case of crash. Of course the cabin crew don't disclose that...

A simple Google search reveals more tips: http://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+survive+a+plane+crash
I didn't see a rule against it. Why wouldn't an AI (or Yudkowski) try bribery to assist its escape?
You're a day early. Tomorrow's Thursday.
Clarifying Subversion Check-in Comments: [Added,Changed,Fixed,Deleted]
Ask YC: Any experience with Asus eee?
I have to admit, I'm salivating over this

http://www.amazon.com/Eee-PC-Screen-900-Preloaded/dp/B00191PKJK/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1211406264&sr=8-1

and was hoping to "justify" it with something more than "That's just too cool!"

Anyone have one of these? Able to setup a server? How is this version of Linux? Can this be more that just a toy?
The flip side is that if you follow this advice religiously, a disproportionate amount of your time will be spent tracking down bugs that are the fault of the OS, compiler, or (most commonly) framework & libraries. Assume that most bugs are your fault, and you'll end up putting in place mechanisms to catch, find, and fix bugs quickly. Then if you can fix those quickly, the ones that are left are the ones you didn't cause.
Essential Python Tips, Tricks, and Hacks
Oh, I always forget I am on Turkish time, now.
Sorry. Here is the link...

http://www.amazon.com/Eee-PC-Screen-900-Preloaded/dp/B00191P...
Lisp meta-discussion -- you never see this kind of dialogue on YC News
Um, I'm a geek because I live on the Internet and make a living FROM the Internet. It started with DOS and King's Quest when I was a little kid... Does using a Linux machine in '99 give me any geek points? Oh, please, can I be a geek now? *rolls eyes
Yeah. Certainly. Of course. You're fucking brilliant. Oh my god. I just collapsed a lung, I was laughing so hard.
True, but this wasn't really the case before mod_rails (Passenger) made it relatively painless to host rails apps on a shared server.

I deployed a smallish rails app on Dreamhost in about 5 minutes last night. My previous attempt to deploy on a stock SuSE/apache2 server took a few days of fairly dedicated prodding.
There's a rule about the discussion being between the AI and the Gatekeeper, not between the human behind the AI and the human behind the Gatekeeper.
My guess is that Twitter's downtime is due to overload, not hardware failures. Thus a scalable system (even one with a high slope) reduces the overload/downtime problem to "buy more servers -- now!" instead of the "analyze bottleneck, rewrite code" loop that it sounds like Twitter is in now.
I haven't looked at Django, so I can't compare. I've used Rails on a few projects and I like it. I've coded for decades and Ruby is the most programmer-friendly language I've found.

For the amateur, it is easier to approach PHP and start banging around than to learn Ruby and Rails.

The Rails free docs just aren't as good as say, the free MySQL or the free Postgresql docs. Or as good as the MS .NET docs. But there are several good books. And both Ruby and Rails work as advertised, they aren't bug-laden.
Yes, this is the gist of it.

The other aspect is that he thinks there is only 1 type of source that's ok for information consumption, which is the type that spews out brilliance. All the other sources are worthless, including the people that never say anything meaningful and the people that say something brilliant once in a lifetime.
Is Symfony better or cakePhp for PHP dev?
We want to create a site in Php and I am confused if we should use Symfony or cakePhp framework? I will appreciate some feedback on these two frameworks which can help me make the decision, Thanks.
Well, then, how about making it that the more you vote the less your votes matter?
Note to Web 2.0 Companies: Early Adopters are not the Mass Market
Apropos, from http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000006.html

"What I wondered was, what happens if you take top-notch C++ programmers who dream in pointers, and let them code in VB. What I discovered at Fog Creek was that they become super-efficient coding machines. The code looks pretty good, it's object-oriented and robust, but you don't waste time using tools that are at a level lower than you need. I've spent years writing code for C++/MFC and years writing code in Visual Basic, and let me tell you, VB is just much, much more productive. Michael and I had a good laugh today when we discovered somebody selling a beta crash-reporting product at $5000 for three months that Michael implemented in CityDesk in two days. (And we actually implemented a good part of ours in C++/ATL). And I also guarantee you that our Visual Basic code in CityDesk looks a lot better than most of the code you find written in macho languages like C++, because we're good programmers, and we write comments, and our variable names are well-chosen, and we do things the simple way, not the clever way, and so forth."