skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Saying VC's love startups that infringe copyright is a bit too crass, maybe even dense. They're shooting themselves in the foot with that kind of argument. I think it makes more sense to say VCs value social media startups a lot more; it would just happen that social media has more cases of reproducing protected media than anything.
What I've always wanted is a unix command that would give me more info (user generated info) on the error that just happened in my shell.

Scenario: I'm compiling something on Leopard and it stops with an error. I type the command "wtf"

ERROR: compile quit because of this reason xxxxxxxxxx

> wtf

It automatically records the output of the error and saves it some web site's database. It can find others with the problem and open a browser to the discussion on that issue. Someone else probably already found a way around it or there's some library i'm missing and someone there has explained what it is.

The 'wtf' command would automatically do that "google search" for me and log my info to help others.
YouTube for Smart People
I like how this discussion has evolved away from "an interesting social experiment" to a look at how to best promote quality and diversity on HN.

I don't think the original question was identifying a problem and trying to solve it, but the points made here all seek to improve what's working already today.
Congrats, pretty cool. Just tried pink floyd and was pretty cool. Hope ur server can handle tones of traffic from techcrunch. Is it not illegal to play songs retreived from other sources?
I agree with everything you say, except the "it never makes economic sense" part. I'm currently unemployed and programming, thanks to savings from a job that I held for a few years after college that isn't accessible to those without a degree. I suppose there are other routes to independence at 25, too, but there are more young investment bankers in the world than self-made rich people.

On the other hand, I'm going back to grad school in the fall. It's not for the money, or even to meet co-founders. Rather, it's just something that I feel I have to do for me, to sate my curiosity. I'm young and life is long. As long as I can find a nice young lass that will stick with me and be poor for a few years, there's really no drawback to extending my education and waiting to get rich.
No, it's like movie stars being paid more based on past performance. People go with brand names and things they recognize whether it's clothes, fast food, detergent or people. Always have and always will.
Thanks, but Gzip and HTTP caching are already being used. I'm just trying to squeeze the last few bytes out. :)
How did you get on techcrunch? emailed them or they just found out?
Do I get anything out of this payment, or would it be exactly the same as now but with cash exchanging hands? I might pay for GMail if it meant actual support (can't get IMAP to work) and no ads, for example.

In general, no, I'd just switch. Everybody has competition.

I only spend money online when buying a physical product or human-generated service. Amazon already knows my CC#, and if one of my regular webcomics went pay-only I'd pay to keep reading.
In a similar vein, Amazon. Not for the shopping experience (though it is nice) but for the reviews.
Also: networking.

One thing I disagree with you about college is teaching you how to think. At mine anyway, I'm assaulted every day with worthless crap that makes me want to shut off my ears. Mostly liberal crap like 'diversity,' 'cultural appreciation,' and 'the bees are being killed by cell phone waves.'

On the other hand, I do learn all kinds of wonderful things from fellow Computer Science students. It may be worth it.
...which is detrimental. They won't if we don't let them.
its irony but "why MBA?" is the typical question before/after MBA is done. I think it is just like any other masters degree but with lot more generalistic focus on business rather than dedicated domain(physics/electronics/DSP). It helps you understand the theory of the business from mostly "only theory people".

Startups are exciting and excruciating both.
Ideas bank in the making
MIT prof Edward Lorenz, father of chaos theory, dies at 90
I use the Hacker News and InstaPaper bookmarklets daily.
Is The New Alexa More Accurate? Initial Answer: No.
:-*

According to Wikipedia, he's kissing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon#Common_examples
If you pay me a mere $8k per year -- a big savings over college -- I'll be happy to let you come over a few times a week and be shamed into reading Kierkegaard and Augustine. I'll even buy the books for you, which is more than your college will do.

For an additional fee I'll let you live on your own, in your very own apartment, and give you the valuable life experience of earning your own rent money.

I can also direct you to places where you will meet lots of college students and programmers -- I live in Boston, so this is so easy that I'll throw it in for free.
"... Only PG will know what username he is using other than pg. ..."

Unfortunately I suspect more than a few will recognise his fist. Just like old school morse signallers can recognise individuals by listening. I'm pretty sure individual writing styles are recognisable.

My idea would be to make user names invisible on submissions to individuals, until after you vote. Only then revealing who they are to the person who votes.
It depends on the school. A good CS program at a liberal arts college is better than a bad CS program at an engineering school. However, I'm unqualified to comment as the CS program at my liberal arts school only had two decent courses, so I switched to math.
Python Generator Tricks for Systems Programmers [pdf]
Money isn't everything. Silicon Valley is filled with thousands of ugly rich dudes who can't find a date.
I wish I could afford to travel from * to the Valley this year
"... Holy Egg Freckles! ..."

The cartoon, a doonesberry (Garry Trudeau) ~ http://www.doonesberry.com is lampooning the apple Newton back in '93 and neatly sums up the problem of HW recognition. Apple scrapped the Newton. The idea survived in a simpler form called Graffiti. It's creator, Jeff Hawkins ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Hawkins along with MBA Donna Dubinsky ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Dubinsky both went to found Palm computing.

In '98 I was working with a company that wanted to make a web based product out of their Intranet version ... it just wasn't feasible to tie up a consultant for half the day to install an oracle db backend, web-server front-end. Taking notes I pulled out my trusty Palm III and proceeded to use Graffiti software to copy down the notes. Then to my surprise a honcho there lumbered out his rather large Newton.

Talk about "12 O'Clock" at Software Corral

At the time the Palms where pretty small. Smaller enough to fit in your shirt pocket. The Newton by comparison was huge. And to boot it suffered from the HW problems the doonesberry cartoon portrays.
http://thenextweb.org/2008/01/30/the-music-wars-continue-war...
Yea I will add that in a few days.
legal yes (see above link), in the player at the bottom right it has the track playing.
I had to kidnap MA's dog.
Grats!!!
company is based in India, it's just me that is in France ;-)
Oh man, THAT is awesome! ....Backing up my site now :-P
Ask YC: Grabbing content
First of all I would like to thank some of you who offered some life saving advice for my previous question.

Now that we have pulled up our socks and are making some headway, we have run into our first content problem.

We are building a business listings directory for a niche market. We have identified a bunch of ad-hoc sources for sourcing content. We have manually gathered content for our mockup, but to take it to the next level we need a lot more content than what we have going.

What are the different techniques used to gather content? It would be great if some of you have had specific experience in gathering content for some kind of a business listings directory.

Looking forward to some valuable insight!

Thanks again!
But...but...darn.
Heh, that's great to hear. This is exactly what we're trying to do with http://bug.gd and the error sharing database we launched last year. (Along with FF extensions and APIs this year.)

Our long-term plan is to integrate all over the place in software. For example, we have a proof of concept for this we announced at PyCon that does what you're describing inside the Python interactive interpreter:
http://blog.bug.gd/2008/03/29/error_help-for-python-hackers/

While we're excited from a business perspective for integrating into company's GUI apps, as hackers we're very excited about the potential here for completely changing the dynamic of the open source community.

Imagine if every new user, casual hacker, etc., trying out a new open source tool, could immediately get assistance whenever they ran into an error message. What may have taken 6 hours to get configured (and maybe stopped them) could now be a step-by-step "ah-ha" process for common scenarios.

That's precisely what we want to enable. In addition, most of the open source community doesn't even get very good feedback on how many people run into particular errors and give up entirely. This tool would give them the ability to see that, track errors, and put in their own solutions for when they find out people are running into those.

We have a lot of cool plans for this, and I absolutely love to read other people interested in this same endeavor. We're very keen on hearing more feedback on this.
Man, I want an invite but they where gone in seconds.
How many pairs of pants does Margaret Thatcher have again?
Great idea. People will do anything for karma.
I want to draw something random and have it make it to page one.
There's an age limit to that, though. This doesn't work with girls in their early 20s.

Edit: This also doesn't work on interesting girls - the kind that you will still like spending time with when their looks have declined.
"The Moffett Field, Calif.–facility was about to throw out hundreds of magnetic disks containing the Pioneer telemetric data—temperature and power readings that the twin craft had sent back to NASA once every few minutes until they traveled out of range"

What the hell kind of idiots work at NASA??? I mean COME ON. What is the damn point of sending a ship into space at all if some dude randomly decides to throw away all the telemetry data? Give me my tax money back and print a retraction for the term "rocket science" now please.
Unseen Problem: Color Blind Gamers
Good point, too bad nested comments don't float the original comment up higher.
I posted a comment but then I read it and it was stupid. Obviously something happened to it in transit.
it's more versatile for our needs as our technology is not limited to AIR/Flex/Adobe; it once ran through AJAX and IRC/AIM bots. And, we may combine the benefits of a flash media server in the near future... you could say we're still experimenting. This is web 3.0 territory we're talking about here... :P

Look for our tech in Quake Live, a free web-based version of Quake, if happen to be a gamer. It's coming soon...
I'm in the process of switching from a tech school to a liberal arts school.. My main reason is this: At the tech school, I'm constantly surrounded by computers. Now, after 2 years in, I'm getting pretty tired of that... to the point where I don't want to do any programming anymore.

Burnout is a very real thing for me.. and I'd much rather not be hating my field of study by the end of school.
However, an MBA will cost you a lot more. The demand is higher because the returns to a degree holder are higher at the margin.
Believe me it was not easy. Last year I made an app and they totally snuffed it. Someone somewhere along the line made a comment saying 'just move on, make another and another', I did and they still ignored it, bastards ha (lol). There is no formula, I suggest getting whatever you're making off the ground with SEO and once you gain some traction they might just take you more seriously (hopefully).
Hmm, I really don't know how to help. I did just inquire into something not specifically related but might be randomly useful.

There's a company called DeepData @ http://www.deepdata.com which might be of some use? They have APIs for business listing queries, and may be able to help on some categorizations.
If you mean screen-scraping, isn't this roughly what you're looking for?

http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/
I went to a liberal arts school, and I mildly regret it. It may have been better if it at least had an engineering school that I could have taken a few classes with.

Although this could be a case of greener grass syndrome. I wouldn't have gotten to try Theatre, Music, and Philosophy before settling on Math and discovering Economics if I weren't at a liberal arts school.

My advice to everybody is that there is no One Right Way. Only you can weigh the options in front of you and make the best choice.

For what it's worth, I'm going back to grad school to get an engineering degree. I might not miss out on anything after all.
It was probably posted because it's inexplicably random for pg.
Heh. Lot of them are secured though.
It'd be interesting if source browsing and javascript hacking were the only ways to affect the site. Then only hackers would be able to contribute.
its funny how you mentioned Digital Signal Processing as a specific masters...you must be an EE
What's the slippery slope?
an all too common tragedy with growth on the internet; it's hard to manage the charm and experience for early adopters; popularity attracts mediocrity and pollution, a sad reflection of the interweb swarm. syndicated content was a savior from this information overload till the blogsphere copy/pasted other's original content to feed bloated link farms. woe.

side rant aside, this graphic does not paint an accurate picture as categories, liking gaming, now have their own section and not counted as technology... among other significant flaws.

personally, digg lost its charm for me when it started integrating youtube videos and offbeat. I can find that crap elsewhere and it completely attracted the wrong crowd to the other, more relevant discussions. it's in this regard that I feel digg overextended them self and jeopardized what was rather an intelligent and sophisticated news source/discussion.
Linkjacked dupe. And here's the shameless plug ;-)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=165688
lixto
My favorite feature of Experts Exchange? If you scroll down past all the "encoded" comments (which now just say "All comments and solutions are available to Premium Service Members only."), and past the LONG list of topics, what do you find? The unencoded comments with the solutions ;)

Random example:
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Database/Oracle/Q_22765568.h...
E-bay wants Immunity Down Under over Paypal monopoly
I transfered from a technical/engineering school (1,500 students) to a more general state university (20,000) where computer science was not an important and the average student's ability was lower.

The real important difference was the curriculum. The state school had a language requirement (14 credit hours) tacked right on; CS is located in the Arts&Science school. It meant I couldn't take more technical electives.

The most important thing about undergrad years is what you can do when you leave, whether it came from a class or hours spent in self-directed study, as I did.

It meant a lot to potential employers when I could say that I have submitted (small) patches to the linux kernel, or wrote my own mini-kernel or compiler. Try writing a thread library or a nifty little VM, or something that is unusual and will stand out.
I hear you -- bookmarklets just aren't that well advertised, even though they can be pretty powerful.

I use delicious, google translate, instacalc (I'm biased for that one :) ), and post-to-tumblr occasionally.
Here are the users with the top median comment scores:

("pg" 4)
("theoneill" 3)
("mechanical_fish" 3)
("garbowza" 3)
("kkim" 3)
("paul" 3)
("cperciva" 3)

If there is a difference, it's not huge.
Hmm. I submitted this yesterday. I thought the dupe preventer was better than this...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=164592

Edit: Oh, I see, this one uses the "print" link. I wonder how this can be prevented in the future.
Dapper.net is your friend
Good question. The answer is yes, because the time to invest in moderate or expert knowledge of the mac is a good price to pay for years of the better experience. Further, this would suggest that they do it as soon as possible, because they will maximize good computer experience that way.

It's similar to switching from qwerty to dvorak on the keyboard. If you only type qwerty, then in order to type as fast at dvorak as you do with qwerty, you must use dvorak for 18 hours. After that, it's faster, and more ergonomic. The best decision is to bite the bullet and switch right away.
If it's how negotiation works, then why open with what you think you're worth? Why not ask for W where X << W?
Hacker News is PGs world, and if you don't like it, then go somewhere else.

I don't think this is true. I certainly don't want it to be true.
7 people you hope you don't meet at your start-up
did TC contact you before they cover you?
How we have handled a DDOS attack from a dumb program
I thought some people here might find this interesting. Our site has been slow recently, and it's due to a dumb program causing essentially a DDOS attack against us. Here's some of the things we've done to alleviate the situation.

I'd also love to hear from others who have had luck with other techniques!
I thought some people here might find this interesting. Our site has been slow recently, and it's due to a dumb program causing essentially a DDOS attack against us. Here's some of the things we've done to alleviate the situation.

I'd also love to hear from others who have had luck with other techniques!
Given that karma is cumulative, median is a better measurement. I couldn't spot a standard deviation if it bit me these days, but I would guess the difference between 4 and 3 is significant.

Having said that, a community attracts people like the people it already contains. The more it grows, the greater variety of interests it contains, and therefore the greater number of people with certain, but now differing, interests it attracts.

If you think of it like ripples on a pond, if I'm way out on one edge, I'd likely be vastly different to a user on another edge, though we'd both find some common ground toward the centre. The closer you are to the centre the more you have in common to a greater number of people.

PG is the centre of the pond, so you would expect more people to be more 'like' him, which would lead to more votes. Not bias. Just community.
If you don't feel challenged, then take harder clases then. I thought my first year was really easy, and started getting agressive in choosing harder classes. Major CS, Minor Math and Physics, and by the second semester of the third year school was kicking my balls. Plus I was busy doing TONS of extracurricular activities, meeting people, and of course having some fun and going to parties once and a while.

Overrall it was an exellent experience. If I was 18 again, I'd do it again in a heart-beat.
I don't agree. Money is just a sign of a characteristic that is more important to women, leadership.

You have to realize that the attraction women feel for men evolved in a much different environment from our current world. Women are often attracted to men that are leaders and show the signs of someone who will be good at controlling his environment and providing a stable, safe situation for the raising of children.
One thing i know is that Matt writes pretty damn well, and he also does a bit of Google search to prepare his posts.
on one page: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-kilogr...
http://palojono.blogspot.com/2006/07/startup-school-stanford...

But the links are pretty slow for me.
I have been thinking about this a lot in the past hour or two, too. Though slightly off-topic:

I've been thinking that a hassle-free solution for micro-transactions needs to hit mainstream before the average internet user will be willing to pay for more things online.

Most people (including myself) would pay for more things online if it didn't involve finding your wallet and typing in your billing address and credit card information. Paypal is the closest thing I can think of, but I still get overwhelmed thinking about logging in and all that. A simple one click button that could somehow be synced with your RFID chip would be great..

On my current project, I am thinking about ways to monetize a small feature similar to the old Facebook gifts, which as stupid as those are, could potentially bring in $15 million this year for FB?
(Source: http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2008/01/23/facebook-digital-gifts-...) I bet FB could just charge users who upload more than 500 or so pictures $5/mo, and those sorority girls with 2500 party pics wouldn't think twice about pulling out daddies credit card.

It feels like it has become almost too trendy to give software services away for free lately. If you never charge you will never know how much people might have valued your service. If you start losing users drop the price? If you are trying to grow a user base, start out free and charge for additional features?
Social Cred
I feel than an MBA might be a waste of time for a good programmer. I did a part time program (it was the equivalent of one year of an MBA streched two years part time), and while I thought it was cool learning new things, it was not that useful actually.

Two classes that were good: Accounting, and Business Evaluation, both taught by Harvard professors, which made it very interesting. The rest were kinda flufy.

If you are an entrepenour at heart, and already have business skills, and MBA wont be that much useful. It is a two years commitment, plus costs a lot.

I'd suggest anybody just study accounting, business evaluation, and the ocasional entrepernurial class, and that will be more than enough.

It seems that MBA will be more valuable for people that like to look good in a suit, and want to join big corps, and where your 'title' matters.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet. If you are going to do this experiment, it needs to be _double-blind_. Meaning PG cannot know which username his post is going to show up under until after he has written it. Same goes for all the comments he writes (if you're going to measure those too).

If PG knows before hand what name his content is going to show up under there is a high likelihood of a bias on his part which he would be _unable_ to ignore even if he consciously tried. This is standard psych experiment stuff.
Competition: Win a Free Pass to Web 2.0 Expo
How is it impossible to measure? It has nothing to do with how his content quality ranks compared to other people. Since he is writing both the content under his name and the content under a different name, given that he doesn't know which one he's writing under until after he writes it, the quality should be at the same level (on average).

If the quality is the same but the points are different (between his real acct and anon acct), then you've found a bias.
Both, if possible. Plenty of places combine top-notch engineering with top-notch liberal arts schools.
This is true. But the experiment could take this into account. It could only count the votes which occur directly from the main page.
Session timeouts: they needn't exist
I think blogging is just a buzzword for writing. People of the future will most likely look at us as silly for distinguishing it as something special in the first place.

For example, why does every marketing firm in New York have a company-run "blog." Couldn't a section of the regular website serve the same purpose?
Hacker Envy