skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sensationalism, over the top?
We're sitting here eating up stories about Yahoo and Twitter, and we're ignoring stories or questions that have actual relevance to startup founders. Why is that? Please don't tell me YC and HN are reducing themselves to the intellectual tedium of sensationalist media, or disinterest for our core subject matter, which is the successful steps to starting startups? We're reporting more about Yahoo than about startups these past few days... (which is abnormal compared to PG's essays or the best interests of YC).

We're starting a startup that will be profitable very quickly (a la David Heinemeier Hansson's Startup School speech) due to a dual subscription and content licensing model, but we've submitted a couple stories to YC/HN recently, which were almost immediately buried. We really would appreciate help/feedback from others, and we can't see why the insight from this community wouldn't be valuable for others as well. But my submission today didn't make the homepage or even within 160+ submissions of the home page within 2-3 seconds. We were almost instantly reduced to worthless in the submission list, since we disappeared within seconds of submission...

Are we missing a step, or could the HN algorithm stand to be tweaked to improve relevance for startups as opposed to generic reddit-style stories? If these types of stories are deliberately killed, then that leads to questions about the usefulness of the whole YC experience, since avoiding questions at such a low level really doesn't instill confidence at higher ones. Although I've read PG's Hacker's and Painters, I'd like to see more out of the HN community if we're going to call it a communal success...
Connecting with Consumers Using Deep Metaphors
PHP is without a doubt the worst structured language I've ever coded in. Probably the crappiest language after VBscript.

But I use it for anything web-based because it gives me guaranteed results, anytime, anywhere, on whatever scale on whatever budget. I just wouldn't use it for sites with complex business logic, but let's face it, most websites, even the big ones, are hardly rocket-science in that respect.

What I love most is the dynamic of the PHP community. For instance, when RoR arrived on the scene, the response wasn't to dis RoR or run scared, but more like "that's so cool, let's see if we can bring PHP to that level". And there is more sharing of knowledge and experience (and code) going on inside the PHP-community then any other developer community I know.

More then any development platform I know, PHP is alive and constantly developing, but still as easy to deploy and easy to learn as ever.
I have a feeling this has been asked before, but I'll bite: vim
I tried to connect to Freenode but the client has been D-Lined!
Ask YC: PG, Can we please get an iPhone icon?
News.YC's automatically-generated icon on the iPhone looks pretty terrible.

Can you please drop this: http://img242.imageshack.us/img242/3092/iconze9.png icon into the root directory and rename it "apple-touch-icon.png"?

iPhone users everywhere would thank you immensely.
Reigion vs Science and the Business Analyst
redirects to everyrecipe.info from Bangalore, India
True of maybe half of those features...but the other half? Well, if you don't know enough to miss them, I don't have any way to argue with you--there's no common language in which we can converse about them.

But, I feel uncomfortable every time something I write takes two or three times the lines of code because of what the language lacks. First class functions or lambdas, closures, and a good library fall into this category...and PHP fails on all of them (there are many PHP libraries, but most are buggy and rather scary, and the standard library has ad hoc'ery written all over it...I like for the standard library to at least be a little bit planned out rather than crammed in via 3000 or so functions in the same name space).

But PHP is a perfectly valid language for many classes of problem. Just be careful not to use it for the classes of problems for which it is extremely poorly suited.
"And there is more sharing of knowledge and experience (and code) going on inside the PHP-community then any other developer community I know."

There's somebody I'd like you to meet: http://perlmonks.org
What would be really cool would be if Xobni could write my emails for me and keep in touch with my contacts. I really kind of suck at that.
It is my observation that the time of day (when you make your submission) is very important. I have seen many a good link lost in a flood of (in my opinion) dross. At quieter times new posts pause for sufficient time to attract some attention - you need the first two or three votes to get to the lower ranks of the front page and thus come to a wider audience.
Keep in mind that the mainstream media has mostly ignored and/or misunderstood the Yahoo/Microsoft story. We are much better than the mainstream media. Have you watched TV lately?

This is something that is very interesting to the majority of the audience here, even if it is distracting from actually creating a startup. There is nothing you can do to stop this discussion. We are discussing one of the biggest things to happen in the history of Big Internet. Ask more interesting questions if you want to engage the community, hackers are not interested in accounting questions. Ask your accountant.
Playing it a little loose with the term "genius" don't you think?

It sounds more like a desperate trick to bring in irrelevant traffic.
On the other hand ironing may be a challenge.
(Lisp Hymn
Oh, Python is rather flexible. You can program in several styles - including something that smells like Functional Programming.

It's only on a tactical level that you see "There is one way to do it" in action.
With only his nose to type.
Good comment in post: "I feel terrible for all the 26 people who bought PlaysForSuren’t songs :-)"

Reflects my feelings too. It seems like if enough people cared MS would just keep one of those servers running...
That's not what I did to you at all. You made a list of Microsoft's failures, someone else simply pointed out that one of them was in fact a success. (In fact, a few probably are by any non-hacker's definition, including Windows vs. Linux.) I didn't take it out of context, I simply seconded someone who pointed out that you were contradicting yourself.
From what I have heard: If you can stand PHP - you can make it work.

I just do not like to code in the language.
I'm a fan!
Make your own without the need to SSH or do anything special:

http://allinthehead.com/retro/319/how-to-set-an-apple-touch-...
Colloquy most definitely has DCC chat/send support. Right click any nick.
Here’s A Hosting Provider You’ll Probably Want To Avoid
As I do Java, Groovy and Ruby, I find IntelliJ perfect for all three.
funny :-).
And not only with clients, but also send sweet nothings to your girlfriend, endearing and respectful letters to your parents, stern and firm letters to the IRS, and so on. And make coffee.
Yahoo shares would be converted to MS shares + cash.
This is very neat, and responsive too ...

I am impressed!
While that's definitely a great way to get icons for sites don't specifically support the iTouch devices it's not exactly an elegant solution. At least for my site, I'd rather users not have to go to that much trouble to see a nice looking icon. Much easier to just put the right file in the right spot once and saves everyone involved a bit of time.

Going by the amount of people who used iPhones at Startup School, this'd be a great little enhancement for a lot of people, myself included.
Top 10 mistakes when building Flex applications
20 most profitable tech companies
It is ridiculous when you consider that most businesses are valued at 3 * annual revenue when sold. I wonder what exactly makes web businesses so apparently over-evaluated. Is it the IP? The network effect? Hope someone knowledgeable pitches in.
emacs.
Not everyone finds the same questions interesting or useful.

I found only two submissions from you, both 10 or 11 days old, so the current mix of news on the front page isn't really relevant. In one case, as rms notes, the question would've been better posed to an accountant. In the other case, you never bothered joining in on the discussion, which is a good way to kill a thread.

I definitely don't think there's cause for saying that HN has a glut of 'generic reddit-style stories', or that the discussion here is reducing itself to 'the intellectual tedium of sensationalist media', just because the two questions you posed didn't get any traction at the time. I would expect that the archetypal successful entrepreneur wouldn't give up and cry foul quite so quickly.
Because we're not dumbasses. Give it a few days and I think it will become clear that he is.
Agreed that it would be great if everyone supported these icons. That said, boucher's solution is fine for the millions of sites that don't, so I don't know why he was downmodded.

I went ahead and cropped the YC logo from the homepage and put up here: http://tlrobinson.net/misc/yc.png
Lots of Animals Learn, but Smarter Isn’t Better
Metapic - generate an infinite number of original images using rules
Is it really necessary to create a thread for something trivial like this? Couldn't you just mail PG?
I like Wing IDE for python.
I can add that I've been doing part-time tech support (only two weeks left! Hurrah!) for a while, and I'd say that of the Mac users that call in, most of them are still running Tiger. Leopard wasn't quite compelling enough for many people to justify the price tag.

That said, if you really can't advance your current version while remaining backwards-compatible, then why not fork the product and make the Tiger version a little bit cheaper? I've seen that from other developers, and absolutely love them for it.
Oh well, the 18 people who bought "Bob" tried to warn them...
You may already know this, but the developers of both Delicious Library and TextMate are going Leopard-only for their version twos.

The DL dev's justification is that almost all the people who spend money on software will buy Apple's stuff first, thus being Leopard-only cuts out only a small amount of your market.

TextMate's dev justified it in a similar way, saying that 90% of his customers are early-adopters who would be on Leopard as soon as it came out.

It is interesting to note that both of these apps have niche markets (people who organise their media collections and programmers/geeks). Thus, the devs are probably confident in their predictions about not reducing their potential customers too much.
Kottke?
Wasn't exactly a popular idea.
In this particular instance, yes.
Nobody bothered to mention that Michael Arrington gave a lot of us a pretty useful talk, for free, at Startup School '08. (And after getting hosed by Bezos, no less.)

Just sayin'.
If its RedBus, part of TelecityGroup ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TelecityGroup ) in London Docklands then I already had them flagged as a provider to avoid.

An ex-colleague quit without notice and another ex-colleague and I had to recover the root passwords from servers at RedBus. The security staff had no record of us and, without confirmation from our boss, issued me with a security pass and allowed me to vouch for my ex-colleague. If we weren't genuine, we could have picked any of the weak locks on the third floor and taken any equipment without question.
This looks like humor. The heavily-Scandinavian upper Midwest is a hotspot of extroverts? Ohio, Kentucky and Oklahoma are heavily neurotic?
What To Do With Failed Startup IP?
Popularizing Django — Or Reusable apps considered harmful.
Good article, I particularly liked these parts:

'Bruce Schneier, a famous cryptologist — or at least as famous a cryptologist as cryptologists are likely to get in this century — once described attempts to make digital bits uncopyable as “trying to make water not wet.”'

and

'Tom Lehrer’s description of folk singers as “the people who get up on stage and come out in favor of all the things that everyone else in the audience is against, like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on”'.
vim+bash=I win!
Ask YC: What should I ask John McCarthy?
I get to meet John McCarthy tomorrow. What should I ask him?
The only thing that's really good about PHP is the easy deployment. You just upload your files to your server and it works. The language is very crappy, so this easy deployment only outweighs the extra development effort up to a point. I'd recommend against it for sites that take more than two days of work. With services like Heroku, deployment with Rails may have become as easy as deployment with PHP.
Certainly not. I've used every feature in his list, except partial evaluation in a real program. Partial evaluation would have helped immensely, but it wasn't available in any language I've used. I admit that continuations weren't really necessary, but they do make code with backtracking much easier to read.
I definitely understand what you're saying - in LinkedIn's case it's year over year user and revenue growth.
Apple is repackaging standard Intel hardware and a modified FreeBSD. The result is sold as a boutique product. I fail to see either the genius or the revolution.
did u understand lambda-calclus or your whole awesome languagecreation called LISP was just a fluke?

in terms of AI, what will be next big steps, what kind of models will we go towards?

what do you think the future programming languages will look? lets say in 20 years and then in 50years?
will there be more singleparadigm-oriented languages or most languages will be multipardigm?
Tried. He either ignored it, or it got lost in his inbox.

I figured if the community agrees, he might be more inclined.
Enabling Compiz Fusion On An Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop (NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200)
TextMate for Ruby, NetBeans for Java.
Lisp was meant to be a language for AI research originally, but as we all know, no progress has been made in this field since Lisp came out. I'm curious what JMC thinks about this. Doesn't he think, for example, that there is no connection between Lisp and intelligence? Or maybe it's too early to talk about this?
http://buxfer.com/yc/
In praise of dual-class stock structures for public companies
No, I don't read techcrunch. But I think PG should cluster new stories to filter out similar stories. (Such that there isn't a new story on Microsoft/Yahoo, Xobni each day on hacker news)
Because it's a yc combinator startup and their are lots of yc combinator fans out there.

Don't you see that many of the startups are boosting each other (which might not be a bad thing) and are using each others services to improve their chance of success.
His thoughts on multicores & parallel programming?
another piece of 'advice' "eat when hungry"
If you're posting something great during such a time of day, ask a friend to vote for you. Yes, this is a slippery slope.
That's how I ended up with the current site - unfortunately I've got very little aptitude in that direction.
So Much to Do, Not Enough Time!
(Not to be pedantic, but could you make an effort to write correctly?)

Edit: looking up people's history and randomly voting down what you can is pretty lame.
The first LISP interpreters were indeed flawed, see the 1995 footnote in Mc Carthy's famous paper. This is not uncommon when inventing something new. Do you blame Edison for not using wolfram in his first light bulb?
It's like an OpenID for street addresses. Couldn't this easily be a feature for Clickpass?
If you (or someone you know) runs a website whose patronage would be representative of your target audience, take a look at the webstats.

At an established software company, this is a very easy question to answer - you just look at the user agent stats on your purchase page.
Ask him about progress on his language Elephant, where "variables are not needed because you can refer directly to the past". http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/elephant/elephant.html
16 Ways to Keep A Razor- Sharp Focus at Work
PHP is horrible but not because it lacks continuations or macros or partial evaluation.

PHP is horrible because it is like an higher level of C, with an horrible standard library where the same thing can be done in 5 different ways, without literals for the most basic data types like arrays, without the simplest meta-programming abilities (assuming you don't want to use eval of course), OOP in theory (with an horrible OOP system for a dynamic language) but with all the base types that are not, and so on.
If this were the only way to post comments, even Reddit's signal-to-noise ratio might improve.
Here's the thing: if institutional investors truly believed that Yahoo was overplaying a weak hand, they could have sold their holdings at $28/share (or more).

These guys were gambling for a few bucks per share, just as much as Jerry Yang and the Yahoo board.
Ask YC:  What are the going rates for consulting gigs?
I'm wondering if people have any sense of what consulting gigs are paying these days. I'm sure that the pay rate varies by geography, industry, computer language and technology.

My primary interest is in hearing what LAMP, Django and RoR gigs are paying, but I'd also love to hear what DB consultants are making as well.

* edit *

Okay, I just want to clarify my question a little. Despite what people may infer, I'm not asking "How much can I charge?" I'm career changing, and I worked contract work as an ER/ICU nurse for 8 years. Nurses in the contract biz were pretty free and open with hourly salaries and living allowance ranges. I'm assuming (perhaps wrongly) that there is a similar culture in the software world.

I am asking for a rough ball-park. I'm looking for a range that people are making from "Oh, my God, they got screwed and will be eating ramen for months." to "I can't she had the balls to ask for that rate."

Not knowing the tech contracting business too well, I'm just asking for a lay of the land. If this is a taboo subject.... my bad. Please disregard.
I think they were referring to "Core Animation", a Cocoa framework for building smooth transitions in the GUI. This was AFAIK a by-product of the iPhone development.

But development for Leopard is also nicer because you can now use Objective-C 2.0 and garbage collection and lots of other new classes, like e.g. NSOperation which helps development for multi-core processing.
"If the market overall doesn't like the dual-stock structure, it can refuse to provide capital to those companies, and instead provide that capital to companies with shorter-term objectives and more outside shareholder control. But I don't predict that will happen, and I would be willing to bet my own company on that."

-First dibs on Ning IPO in a couple year!
> no progress has been made in this field since Lisp came out.

Lisp came out in 1958, according to the wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_%28programming_language%29

Saying that nothing has happened in AI since seems a bit...exaggerated. But I don't know much of anything about the field - anyone else care to comment?
I use NetBeans for RoR. Its pretty good, though I switch intermittently to emacs (I am still trying to learn emacs).

I would not say its my favorite IDE. I would prefer to work in emacs all the time (soon, fingers crossed).
Y Combinator Dataset Of Posts Version 1.1
A 102MB archive of Y Combinator posts is available by accessing http://www.rushy.com/ycombinator-news20080506.tar.gz

More to follow in the next day or so.
You're right. Good stuff is constantly being buried.

Resubmit it. Tweak the headline somehow. Say something like, "Really need some help..." or "Ask YC: How do you handle..." I, for one, would be glad to help if I can.

This board is like a "mini startup world" in itself (although much more sympathetic). Things go wrong. Things aren't fair. The world isn't quite ready. Don't complain. Do something about it. Consider it practice for when things really get unfair.
Ruby has a distribution problem
Up or Out - the attitude for contractors
"the pay rate varies by geography, industry, computer language and technology."

Mainly, it varies depending on whether you're any good (and whether people know that you're good). If you're asking "how high should I set my rate" - unfortunately, I don't think there's an easy answer to that, without knowing you.
Validity of Patent Judges, and Thousands of Their Decisions, in Question
I realize that a lot of this is going to be personal network specific--who do I know that's willing to get me a contract gig. I also realize that it's going to be talent specific.

But, I'm mostly looking for ballpark figures, I'm not really interested in rate setting. I'm career changing, and I should be graduating from school after this summer. I'm mostly trying to get a feel for rates.
This story has 34 upvotes and 22 comments. Someone is interested.

Sometimes, the biggest noise is the complaining about what is noise.
> 'Tom Lehrer’s description of folk singers as “the people who get up on stage and come out in favor of all the things that everyone else in the audience is against, like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on”'.

This second bit made me think of people like RMS.
My view may sound rather radical, but I think not everything that's called "A.I." has to do with intelligence. In other words, if a progress is reported by an AI researcher, it doesn't mean anything.

There are many forms of intelligence and for example Turing machines are just one, probably. If we are talking, however, about intelligent survival machines like ourselves, then we are not even close to understanding how it works.
"How to Set Your Hourly Consulting Rate":
http://30sleeps.com/blog/2007/09/27/set-your-hourly-rate/

and another one from Michael Hartl, "How I can charge so much":

http://eikonoklastes.org/articles/2007/09/26/how-i-can-charg...
This is really cool if a little buggy. The most annoying part right now is that the java script seems to be eating the space after a command when you type quickly. The amazon searching is really nice, but the craigs list searching gave me a lot of trouble.
Internet Mysteries: How Much File Sharing Traffic Travels the Net?
Folding your arms can help your brain: study
I really think that Microsoft customers must have some kind of Stockholm-syndrome thing going on in their brains. This is not the first time Microsoft has screwed its customers, and it won't be the last. And yet, for reasons passing my understanding, people keep coming back for more.
No. That would have confused the hell out of me. I mostly learn from computer books the first time, the reading isn't for puzzles, it's for reading and learning.

Giving bad information isn't fun, or a learning style.
Apple Tries To Move Into Your Living Room
How about splitting things up into 2 sections?

"ASK" type comments, which are pretty much a forum.
And a separate reddit news type thing.

It seems like if these 2 things were separated, then what are essentially forum posts, would have a better chance of a response.
Touchy subject?
Someone (pg ?) makes a "Hacker News 2" portal up and running. Seriously, I've seen this kind of stuff happen a couple of times before and it always works fine. There is a need for something that cannot be solved in any other way : less traffic.

From what I've seen before, this works like a charm. Everybody keeps up visiting the main site, but the few that needs more focus start to feed the second portal. Interesting stories of the second portal will get into the main one, adding value to submissions. Win-Win.

Remember the early days of HN ? There is a need for this kind of environment that disappeared when HN got popular. So make a second portal running, announce it, and it'll take off slowly effortlessly.
What do you do for living?
I was wondering if every Hacker News reader here works in technology or codes for living.

I work at an investment bank, but my friends and I are working on a web startup on weekends. I was wondering if anyone else is in a similar situation.
I am strongly in favor of the segmentation of this site but PG has said that he intends to make one site that is the best list of links for hackers, not one segmented site with different lists.