skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having had to deal with shit like this before, I can aver that blackholing the offenders is the highest-performance option.

In other words, you did right. Look into mod_dosevasive if you want to automate this sort of thing (and rechecking IPs every few hours/days/whatever). Note however that if you have a malicious attacker they will forge headers; of course if they're really malicious they'll just SYN-flood you like that.
Thanks! Good to know, and I'll definitely look into the mod_dosevasive.
If you want to really constrain it, require a browser specific to YC... perhaps written in Arc. Also: secret handshake ;)

(I can think of a justification for the first part, though--the time it takes to launch a separate browser that one cannot use for any other sites is the perhaps near the time it takes to cool down and forget any external emotional influences on your reading.)
I think this is really simple answer on the question why VCs are so conservative. They barely understand business they invest in. That's why they look for traction so much! Traction is just a mix of financial metrics, and that's what they really understand. Before you can show a hockey stick chart showing number of visitors, or better revenue or profit, there is no real interest from VC side.

I think the reason why angels become a real drivers of innovation these days is because they invest pre-revenue, and the reason why they do it is because they understand the business they invest in and play an active role in it.

Dimitri, founder www.nuospace.com
Actually, just today I went to cancel my $6/mo subscription to www.mofuse.com, which I use to format the iPhone app for my music blog that I run for fun (http://rawberryjams.com). After I logged in, the mofuse team announced that they were dropping their rates to $3/mo, so I accepted the new terms and logged out, keeping my subscription. Perfect example.
Or just invest it in some sort of fund for you that only pays out when your usage goes down.
It would increase the noise. People would make nonsense edits just to be able to read articles.
I'm not disagreeing it's a cheap way to get your site translated. But how's that help your user numbers? The point of the article is that the author thinks it'll fuel growth, even without any evidence that that's true.

I know from personal experience that just having a site in x language does not make it popular in x's country of origin. OkCupid has been doing the "users translate the site" idea for a while now, and still has to put in work beyond that to promote the site beyond the US.
This is true. It's a heuristic our brain uses so it doesn't have to reevaluate things every single time we experience them. Whether or not this is good or bad is very debatable and depends on the context.

The heuristic is something we evolved through evolution to help us make choices quickly and survive better. For example we know to just trust whatever the group leader says when there is danger rather than having an open debate every time he speaks because that could get us killed.

In the case of HN, does it matter if we have to fully evaluate the content every time before we vote (w/o knowing who wrote it)? I don't know. I think there are probably cases on HN where that heuristic is still to our benefit. I don't think theres black or white here, the costs on both sides just need to be weighed...

Also I think everyone should realize there is a small parallel with the ad hominem attck which is DH1 from PG's post about how to disagree with people (http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html). In this case it's exactly the opposite, vote up because of who it is instead of based on the merit, as opposed to vote down (or attack) based on who it is as instead of based on merit.
YC wasn't copied from the Summer of Code. We weren't really aware how that worked. What it was copied from, initially, was the classic college student summer job at a software co. The idea was basically to let people get a summer job starting a startup.

Later we tossed some aspects of that (going back to school in the fall doesn't work well with startups), but kept others, like the 3-month cycle.
OK, yes, it is possible as long as the other account never answers meta questions about this site or YC, and all meta-questions are eliminated in the comparison. It's still not worth doing, because there is a pg bias: people follow his comments and submissions and are more likely to vote them up because they are more likely to see them.
I've had a note to do a post based on the idea that no matter who I work for, a company, or my own company, that I "always work for myself". I'll include a link to this essay for sure. Right stuff. www.WildWildEastDailies.blogspot.com
Just be very very careful if you grab any application forms;-)
I'd say that SV is a sausage fest, but if these guys are rich, and mobile, than what prevents them to move to a place where they would have much better ods at finding good looking and smart women? If you have money, NYC is a blast. Maybe they can work a pet project from there.

I'd say, if you have more than 3-4 millions on your bank account, you are really well off, and the only thing that prevents from finding a woman, is your character, or lack of trying.

Bad looks, can be fixed with some good fashion, exercise, and maybe some litle surgery.
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I think you raise an interesting point. There are actually TWO problems here. One is that there is possibly a bias based on the content submitter/creator.

But the other is that, people who are followed will naturally get more votes, just because they get more views. Is that a bad thing? I dunno. But what if it got to a point where there were enough different people being followed that the only way onto the first page is by being one of them. That kindof sounds like a problem too.
Very funny anecdote. What bothers me though is that this implies that Google seems to think they own the web.

For example, they told the guy that he was lucky that they were willing to give him a backup, but it seems to me that Google's the one that should be taking responsibility for their actions.

Its a short jump from, "you have to use POST or we'll delete your stuff" to "you have to follow Google standard X or we won't index your site."

Welcome to the first web empire.
I understand that some of Digg's changes relate to this second concern. Their issues (I'll admit to limited understanding, so feel free to correct me somebody) relate to their rating algorithm being linked to how 'popular' a contributer is. This naturally weights power users more and pushes their contributions to the front, where they get more views, more votes, and therefore more power.

My (similarly limited) understanding of the HN ranking system is that it's more a factor of time and votes - ie, the question of who contributed is not relevant to the ranking system, only to all of us users who decide which articles to read and vote on, which brings us back to the original question.
That's per inch of height. Just in case anyone was wondering.
Mod the parent up! For serious discussions, mailing lists and Usenet are far superior to _any_ web forum.

I certainly would not mind reading this site in a newsreader.
The real culprit is credentialism.

In the 1800's, a high school drop out could architect the New York Public library. Abe Lincoln became a lawyer by reading in his spare time and passing the bar exam. Today, the law requires you to have 7 years of college to practice either occupation.

Why did this happen? As far as I know it was not because buildings were falling down left and right. The most likely answer is that people who work an occupation want to erect barriers to entry, thus forcing up their own wages. The policy has a ratchet effect, as a large interest group is now created of people who are dependent on those barriers. Thus the policy is extremely difficult to roll back.

If we really want to open career doors for the most people possible at the lowest cost, we should eliminate legal schooling requirements for all occupations. Then we can return to the 19th century apprenticeship system, which was completely free and gave better career preparation.
I always use centimeters because magnitude counts.
That formula is already applied in the site but I think time variable should be less now
Women can fall in love with guys that aren't hot. Guys don't fall in love with women who aren't hot to them. Love, yes; in love, no.
I wrote a tool you may find useful: http://hystry.com/newsyc/follow
Actually money is very important because, like height, it is a heritable trait. It's like a legally designated addition to the DNA molecule.

Pop out a kid with a rich guy and you've got swanky child support and the kid gets a trust fund.
Time is a factor right now but it is linear factor which i guess is not working right now. Need to make it logarithmic.
I just had a conversation with someone today about adding editorial content to a site. There is no content to post yet, but it's time to get cracking on writing the code to display it! As if writing the code is the hardest part of this. If we wanted it to take 15 minutes, we could install wordpress and be done: but it would be an empty site without all the other non-programming "business" things that need to be done before one can actually say they have a blog, ahem, editorial section.
congrates man :) any suggestion how my application rivals4ever.com can get techcrunched ??
Aren't There Any Real Problems Left To Solve?
Really? Has Jeff Atwood ever demonstrated any programming ability? Frankly, I think they're both windbags, not programmers :)
This is a long article, but interesting. Basically, guy gets stuck in elevator for 41 hours and it ends up ruining his life.

here's the time lapse of the 41 hours on security camera

http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/2008/04/21/080421_elev...
Have You Seen faceroller? Mobile social networking
Media on Mobile devices - Post your comments!
Pixar’s Brad Bird on Fostering Innovation
we just got crunched ourselves yesterday (see: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/16/soocial-makes-plaxo-loo...). we tried to get techcrunched a year but that was way to early (hindsight).

pick the moment you know you are up for it and then make sure you visit an event where some editor of techcrunch is and give them a demo. face to face contact really is so much more powerful than an e-mail from a stranger.
thats how it worked for us, anyways!
A nonissue. Some gain weight as dust settles somewhere on the housing; others lose weight due to erosion during handling. It's a grain of salt difference.

Additionally, weight differs slightly depending where on the planet you are as Earth bulges around the equator some 80 miles more than around the poles. The farther you are from the center, the more the pull of gravity diminishes. Increasing elevation also has this effect.
Do you actually have problems with Gmail's IMAP support in practice? I've heard similar comments about issues with Gmail's IMAP support, but it's working fine for me.
Orkut Applications Go Live Silently
"Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?"

If Schrödinger masturbates, does the kitten in the box die?
USNews reports BPA plastic unsafe
Grasping the Lifestream
I still haven't figured out how the new comment interface actually works, which scores major negative points for usability. At least the old-style version was simple.
Reading the report, some of the comments suggest that people try using PET (polyethelene tetrapthalate) bottles. This sparked my interest, since in Japan almost all consumer beverage containers are PET. On a whim I looked up the safety research on PET plastics, only to find that the main research that is quoted to say they are safe is from ILSI, a chemical and big food funded affiliate group that is also associated with the Tobacco and Petroleum industries. [1]

Combine this with recent news that in practically every place they have tested (including wells, major cities in the US and Japan) there are traces of prescription drugs in the water supply [2] I think I'm going to finally give up the convenience of all those lovely beverage choices and just drink fresh tea.

[1] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=International_Lif...

[2] http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/03/10/pharma.water1.ap/
Ask HN: reverse drm and user-contributed content : ideas & experiences?
I'm currently compiling a large corpus of articles written by different authors & I'm having difficulty verifying the copyright status of contributions.

Basically, I want to make sure all articles are under a copyleft license & no excessive copy-pasting has happened. GFDL, CC-BY, Public Domain content is acceptable of course. Ideally, we'd be able to score user-generated content on submission.

We've been looking at plagiarism detection (String Comparison Methods(e.g. RKR-GST), NLP (e.g. detection of writing style differences), search-based tools) but we obviously need help. There are some pretty smart people on this board so I thought I'd ask:

How are you handling copyright issues in user-generated content? Anyone has experience applying above methods to user-generated content? What mechanisms exist to automatically make sure that content is not covered by restrictive licenses, reverse drm if you wish to call it that way.
Yahoo Puts All The Chips On The Table. Time For Somebody To Fold.
Joe has a problem with his car, it makes a terribly annoying sound. He goes to Mechanic A
who decides to replace his engine. Problem solved, cost 10000$.
John has exactly the same problem (with the same cause), he goes to mechanic B who finds out
that a small part of the engine needs replacement. Problem fixed, cost 65$.

Btw, software, unlike buildings or chairs, is extensible and the (technical) desing decisions
of the programmer are very important in how extensible it is or if it is extensible at all.
5 Basics of Post Exchange
Fight Corporate Obfuscation With Programmatic Analysis
Nice service. Super easy to use.
Only currently available for macs, love it. long live Apple.

Spazmaster, for server scalability I might suggest running a linode. I run my apps from a Linode and use the YC backed startup Virtualmin for setting up the domains. I highly recommend both of these products, and my app survived getting crunched with 20% headroom all times (so far).
I pay for a Safari subscription. The quality of content there is so much better for some things than just randomly searching Google for programming problems. Right now, I have the $15 a month, but I'll go back to the $40 a month unlimited account after school's done and I'm in startup mode.

I also pay for a Rhapsody subscription. It's just so much nicer to have most any song available to me whenever I want it. Besides, I have a primordial dislike for I-Tunes. I did have a Yahoo Unlimited music subscription, but their customer service was awful.

I'd pay a bit for Gmail. I'd also pay a bit for Hacker News if it meant keeping Hacker News small and focused.
Just hope that you get you get returning visitors then. And even then, address mappings change over time.
The title of the blog-post is "Aren’t There Real Problems To Solve?", which is something completely differnet than "Aren't There Any Real Problems Left To Solve?".
The latter sounds like a rhethorical question that suggests that progress has come to an end.
The first one is a really good one (and I therefore recommend the blog-posting): are we often trying to solve problems that was caused by technology that not even solved a real problem. Are we getting into a problem-solving spiral that feeds itself?
These kinds of studies are ridiculous.

First there's the element of subjectivity and discretion in the "trained coders" that rate a person's attractiveness. On a single overall number scale no less.

But more importantly, how do they even hope to attain any semblance of ceteris paribus ("all things being equal") in this study? Of the millions of factors that contribute to pair selection and how couples interact, the researchers want to isolate disparities in attractiveness and test whether this is significant. Short of cloning a whole bunch of people and pairing them up with ugly and beautiful partners, AND THEN doing the tests, the sheer number of conflating variables makes this kind of research worthless. I don't think even the clones would make the results valid given the variables that aren't genetic eg. upbringing, mood on the day, individual preference etc.

It comes accross as if they came up with the conclusion first, and then fit a flimsy experiment to prove the point. The correlations are no doubt statistically significant, but to imply that they mean anything without even attempting to isolate any other conflicting factors is a joke.

Human interaction is a complex system. There's every possibility that attractiveness does contribute to pair selection as the researchers assert, but what is the proportion of that influence? What billion other factors contribute? My guess is that you'll never be able to isolate just one factor that accounts for the bulk of the influence.

This is not to say that social science experiments can't be done right, but it's not easy. This kind of reductionist tripe only serves to muddy the really good research out there.
True, but the cash is largely irrelevant. You could have 3-4 cents but if you have character and willpower you can find someone.

In fact, I would hypothesize that the kind of women who care whether you have $3-4 million are not the kind who care so much about character in the first place.
101 Awesome Downloadable Fonts for Designers
There are a number of foundries that create some truly impressive fonts, and share them with others. This article has highlighted 101 of them here, but many request that you provide credit or at least ask for permission for commercial use.
After Twitter Proposal Comes YouTube Divorce: Intriguing Use Of Web 2.0
MySpace Gets in the Game
Lately I have noticed there aren't ANY new sites out that are really revolutionary. Only minor tweaks on whats currently available. A bit disappointing;/
I agree... no meta questions would be compared.

You can get around the problem that you mention by only comparing votes which are made from the main page and not from a "follow" page.
Hey, who the hell cares? I come here because of good articles and intelligent community, that's all that interests me.
thanks, I didn't know that! Perhaps they should say so on the page...
> It may turn out that people upmod stuff from more recognizable names when they might have left it at neutral if some other user had submitted the same content.

I think when it comes to social interaction, the ability to build relationships of trust is a feature, not a bug.
I should never have written that - how can anyone here take me seriously now?

:-)
Using Passenger on OSX for Rails development
Writing a functioning facebook app in 13 lines of Rails code with Frankie
"Aren’t There Real Problems To Solve?"

I have always spent a lot of my time in small or midsize companies (10 to 200 employees), and I can assure you the answer is ABSOLUTELY.

These are hard working people who are in a different world than most of the readers here. They don't facebook, twitter, or IM at work. But they are unbelieveably busy trying to get things done while depending upon software and systems that most of us here would laugh at.

Many of them don't have time to get to all their emails and voice mails. They have to make snap decisions all day long without enough information because their software just doesn't give them what they need easily enough. They have constant problems with interpersonal communication, instruction, and understanding.

Just a sample of what I've witnessed in the past 3 weeks:

- We need multiple "ship to" addresses for this institutional customer. The software doesn't support it.

- The exchange server is down.

- We need multiple prices for the same item, depending on the scenario. The shopping cart won't allow it.

- 300 "smart part numbers" were configured incorrectly because no one gave Jane the correct Vendor Codes last week. But now, we have orders, inventory, and history for those items, so the software won't let us change or delete them.

- The exchange server is down.

- No one remembered to reset the warehouse server last night, so everything came in today with the wrong date.

- The new stockroom printer doesn't support HP PCL, so the bar code labels are all wrong.

- We think that $90,000 order acknowledgement from XYZ Company was deleted by the spam filter, but we're not sure.

- There was a bad pointer in the UPS data base last Tuesday, so 72 packages all went to the same customer in Duluth.

- The wrong 800 number is being printed on our invoices. Our customers are calling a sex hotline.

- The exchange server is down.

These are not jokes. I see them all the time. And while we regale all the cool stuff WE are doing, I can honestly say that the situation in many small businesses hasn't improved all that much. And there are 7 million of them. They need help.

The good news? This is a fantastic opportunity for those with our skills and technology.

Yes, there are plenty of real problems to solve. Stay tuned.
The biggest problem I have is the way they map IMAP "folders" to Gmail "tags". I guess my complaint is more with Gmail itself. Tags are nice, but I'd really like real folders too.

Also, you end up with basically two different inboxes: your real inbox, and the "All Mail" folder. You have to delete or mark messages in both places (I think there's supposed to be some sort of synchronization, but it's not obvious)
How did you raise your very first round of financing?
Edward Lorenz, father of chaos theory, dead at 90
Darwin's private papers get Internet launch
Hiring the Right Programmer
Those examples are just outliers. You can always be unlucky. But the majority of mechanics can fix your car. And the problem remains: how are you supposed to know beforehand which mechanic is good?

Extensible software: maybe it doesn't matter so much for a prototype. If the concept proves itself, you could also start writing it again.
Quick.as - Save 15 days of waiting while browsing
I use Yahoo search quite a bit (primarily, actually). Their context-guessing suggestions are really cool.

You didn't ask, but if it comes up I use Ask.com to search blogs.
Facebook knows who you are, and that's worth more than you think
Have you considered EC2-on-Rails? I tried it last week. Works like a charm exactly as advertised.

http://ec2onrails.rubyforge.org/
There was a time I remember this being true. A few weeks ago I stumbled upon an experts-exchange result and decided to see if it still worked--it didn't. So, I'm guessing this doesnt' always work.
this is a great post. It rings so true. We are a nearly ten year old technology firm that has spent years of laser light focus on our product. The venture industry is a herd that cannot understand innovation if their lives depended on it and seem to care more about the politics of the venture world rather than spending time to learn beyond the ridiculous 'elevator pitch'. God forbid you say your technology is a major innovation and will change an industry - I think they all would rather have a weather widget on Facebook than actually shape an industry. I sometimes wonder if VCs are so drawn to the Midas 8 from Google (which is 10 years old and getting dusty up at the top) that they emulate the investment strategy of this lucky few rather than finding their own path. Our company is now talking with Wall Street firms about raising $100 to $200 Million over the next few months and smart money is betting we have created a $50 Billion industry that never existed before. We find it comical as the street has embraced our company while the VC community continues to chase the "me-toos" while talking the talk.