skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks.

Yeah. There's a lot of players in the tech world that lurk on this site, even if they don't post. I mean, Arrington, D Shah, P Buchheit and obviously PG post fairly frequently. I'm sure that O'Reilly has someone lurking here, if not reading Hacker news himself. I have no doubt that a number of angel investors and VC's read up on HN users just to find out what's bubbling among the next group of founders.

Paul early on said that one of the reasons that he made the site was to be able to get to know founders and applicants and have a bit of reference material before they apply. I'd guess it has at least a little bearing on their YC application screening. I could be wrong.

All that to say, is... Post intelligent, well reasoned comments and interesting articles. Avoid trolls and flame-baiting. Avoid posting things that you might regret later. People are reading what you post.
I see an emerging market demand for a quality manufactured version of the infrared LED pen, as demonstrated, for use with the inexpensive interactive whiteboard.
i'm a firm believer that the web browser in its current incarnation isn't suitable for mobile. trying to consume desktop content on mobile screens is like drinking one tiny sip at a time: great in a pinch, but tiresome otherwise.
La Cambusa - Book Trailer
A love story along an Italian seashore (book trailer of "La Cambusa" - "The Galley"). Omar e Giulia: graffio e stimmata, rabbia e peccato, curiosità e amore. La Cambusa - romanzo di Tommy Di Bari e Fabio Di Credico, Rizzoli editore. Book trailer scritto, prodotto e diretto da Grenar. Con: Angela Capobianco, Pietro Caramia. Musica: Antonio Recchia. Aiuto regia: Francesco Colucci. Visita http://www.lacambusa.net - info [a t] grenar.info
Right now the poll is 55% in favor of banning. Banning an entire organization is rather unprecedented, so I'd suggest we wait for a bit more of a consensus before going ahead with it.
what's the latest word on the release date?
Fair points =)

Check out our more detailed posting here: http://snaptalent.com/ads/88/
Wow, even god has given up on Java.
I'll admit, I'm a bit spooked that that all of my work is going to dry up suddenly because of the big bad recession. But I haven't noticed anything yet; I still have contract work and people pestering me for a resume.

How's everyone else doing?
Maybe there's an opportunity here. The article points to a number of aggregation issues.
I personally avoid anything by Guy Kawasaki because it all just seems like contentless fluff self-promotion, but not sure he is quite Valleywag quality.

... and I wouldn't advocate banning Guy either. It's a personal thing. But it would be nice if I had a blacklist that I could just add his domain to.
This sounds like a great idea. Anyone in Chihuahua Mexico interested? :-D
That might be true for small companies, but large companies (Intel, MS, Google, etc.) might realize cost savings by the difference in wages paid to immigrants versus U.S. workers.

I think the immigrant vs. American worker stems from a fear or intuition that there are, indeed, a finite number of jobs and, possibly, that the number is trending down, not up, for the developer/designer kinds of jobs. Let's be honest here, IT, admin, maintenance, and testing jobs are lower caste than architect, design, and coding. Jobs in the first category, on average, pay less than the the jobs in the second. I think the number of positions required in the second category are on the decline. As the computer software industry matures and evolves, we just don't require so many developers. If and when we start moving towards a realized utility computing future (Ref. The Big Switch by N. Carr), we won't need as many maintainers and admins, either. Of course, it doesn't help to watch many of these jobs go overseas, either. Combine that with H1-B visas, and American tech workers can be forgiven for a little bit of xenophobia. But, maybe it's possible that broader economic and industry trends are the real issue. That's my theory, and I could be wrong.
So you got a YC interview? Now what.. (from the founders of Snaptalent, YC winter 08)
How IT can save us from recession
Ron Eglash: African fractals, in buildings and braids
Could you just add the ability to blacklist domains on a per-user basis? That way I could personally blacklist valleywag.com and nytimes.com if I wanted to, while others could enjoy their linkbait if they wanted.

Blacklisting would simply not show me stories with given string in the url.
Ok, in context you comment means a lot more.

I think there's a lot to be said for running from the gut. We're running in 18 directions right now from the gut and determined to get our startup off of the ground. But when we first presented our stuff a couple weeks back we realized that some stuff that seems clear to us, because we're so close to the problem, wasn't coming through in the presentation. If we'd had a group to pre-pitch that through, we might have gotten a "Huh?" at a more appropriate moment.

A lot of people also seem to be looking for co-founders (we're not, but this seems to be a common problem). In a community they might be able to find that.

Another bit is that it seems pretty much all VCs / Angels prefer personal introductions. Well, that assumes you've got them. We're starting to pull them out of the woodwork, with a few good leads, but we may have a couple dozen pitches before we get a bite, which means we're going to need a lot of introductions. I'm super-well connected to hacker culture in the OSS world, but that doesn't translate over to seed funding.

All of that is why I'd like to see a group come together. It's not a fear of bulldozing our way through the startup world, or a desire to hold hands and reaffirm each other, just an acknowledgement that some people will have smart stuff to say, and hopefully we'll notice. Some people will have dumb stuff to say, and hopefully we'll ignore it.
Hard stimulants have the same negative effects on people who doctors prescribe them to too.

So, a developing child a doctor decides has ADD will experience these, and probably worse if it impacts development.
Wordrosia: An original word puzzle that combines puzzle solving with social news.
School Assembly (in Brighton, UK)
You know what would really make this a killer app?

If I could post a URL I want to test in a form, and be able to select select what browsers I want to test that URL in. And, then, have a script run that would open that URL in each of the web browsers I want to test it in.

That would make a web designer's life much, much easier.
In traditional radio, an interviewer had x-minutes to get the job done. The duration of the time slot was the hard limit they were working against and it ensured a tight focus on the content. You received a lot of information in a short burst of time.

Amateur podcasts by contrast can go on for however long the interviewer would like. The result seems to be an unstructured rambling chat rather than a to-the-point discussion, and you can’t skim it like a blog post or text article to pull out the valuable points – you have to listen to the whole danged thing.

Perhaps if podcasts were set to have a hard limit of ten minutes we’d see a spike in quality? Much as Twitter forces a condensed to-the-point blog.
Do you have an details on the wage differences between immigrants vs U.S. workers? I was under the possibly mistaken impression that companies were not allowed to pay H1B workers less.
In all these conversations, I still don't see any of the "business" folks saying:

"I'm a business guy, so while my hacker partner is spending 18-hours a day in the basement, I'm doing this:

* X

* Y

* Z"
I added both for now. We'll give it a try for a while. If it gets distracting later on we can make a call on that.
Pure equity IS a founder position. Does "basically joining the founding team" mean less equity than other founders? Also, sell the company! If I am a designer (and I'm not), why would I want to contact you?
European companies and outsourcing isn’t a match
Filling Information Gaps: Experts
IBM is making bank on that need. They offer Free and Open Source software, but take on the accountability and support. There's big money there, but I think you have to have some major clout to really take advantage of it.
It's not unprecedented. There are other sites that are banned, mainly because they spammed us or consist mainly of linkjacked content. I only asked this time because users occasionally vote up Valleywag stories.
I'm all for undoing votes, as everyone makes mistakes sometimes. With news though, it's slightly complicated by the fact that the effect of your vote is time sensitive.

In other words, if you vote up a story and then change your vote a day later, the vote has already contributed to putting the article on the front page on that first day, and so the "damage" has already be done.
Heisenbugs
Brother Industries shows off eyeglass-mountable retina scanning display
I thought of that, but the goal here is not to evolve into a site that's everything to everyone, like Reddit or Digg. We want to have the best collection of links for hackers. So we can't duck decisions like this.

We shouldn't expect never to have to ban a site if both (a) we want to make News.YC be about a specific topic, and (b) there are sites with a deliberate strategy of linkbaiting.
Presumably it could easily be like comments: you have 2 hours to edit it.
I'd rather see news.YC figure out how to be a coherent community than fracture into different interest groups.
Certainly that's right, in the archetypal beating-the-odds startup situation. If you're a YC company, stop reading.

But isn't it different for acquisitions done to integrate with an existing platform or are T&T (talent and technology) exits? Call them the "let's see if this works" offer. Yeah, I know, not the investor's desired scenario, but not so bad for founders, especially bootstrappers.

There seem to be a lot more of those deals out there which would be attractive for young entrepreneurs. And frankly, it might make sense based on that to try to use popular technology in clever ways.

Honestly, it's not that exciting to discuss. But if you don't have explosive growth, well, it's something you think about.
I'm just about to graduate from Babson with a degree in entrepreneurship. Not going to lie, it leaves me desiring more in the entrepreneurial field - they just don't teach it right here :(
Drip, drip, drip goes the Twit
Does this designer/writer position require any knowledge of SQL?
I think browsershots.org does that
oops, I mean slinkset, not slicehost.
..and for those interested in the Wiki itself, allow me to save you the few seconds required to find the footer link:

http://github.com/meekish/collective

Looking through the source, I notice they used Defensio as a spam filtering solution. Anyone else have experience with Defensio, and want to recommend or rant on the subject?
They changed it to " YCombinator devotee", I would have preferred "YC Groupie" ... ;-)
Passenger (mod_rails) released
Apathy, this is a good comment, and I've just submitted a video about how Helico's sequencer works. Could you add this comment it to the news.thinkgene submission? :)

http://news.thinkgene.com/links/The_Personal_Genome_Project_...
Ruport: Business Reporting for Ruby
There's a somewhat spotty timeline here: http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html

I started using Google in the first half of 1998. When people talk about these things, I'm always shocked to learn how early to the party I appear to have been. It felt like it was already a big deal when I first saw it, maybe because it was so shocking to see that search wasn't as doomed as it had seemed to be.
Article links to screencast. gem install passenger should pull down passenger-1.0.1. taking a look...
What would take browsershots.org to this level would be to include any JS/console errors and warnings and attach them as text to the screenshot. This would let someone test faster without having to load up a virtual OS.

Put an API on that too so you could integrate it with a testing framework or desktop component (AIR?) without going to the site, and charge incrementally like Amazon does with AWS...

Even with VMWare, I could see myself paying for that.
"There will always be a huge market of MBAs wasting money on overpriced tech advice!"

Hey! Be careful. It's my main income source you are talking about!
I feel the opposite. I can't remember the last Valleywag story I've read that I would forward or recommend to a friend.
Can I offer you my experience with VC?

I am sure that there are some high quality VC's out there but the problem is that there is no quality control in that industry. Just use my observations as a guide but you will be surprise how well it fits their behaviors.

http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2007/10/vc-worst-enemy.html
These are inadequate options. The issue isn't whether you like to see them on News.YC, it's do you want to start banning people. Yes, I don't like seeing them on YC. But no, I don't want to ban them.

Come on! Isn't this a democratic news site front page is voted on by readers!?! This vote is absurd.

I think a better idea would be to institute negative points to submissions, not just comments. That way, the handful of people needed to make news frontpage worthy can be rejected by the masses tired of Valleywag.

If you have to ban sources on your democratic news site, you're missing the point.
I think podcasting is failing because it's too much work to get a podcast where I need it - in the car.

If I'm at a PC, I'd much rather read a transcript of the podcast - it's much faster for me to read than to listen.
This is like, a BFD. I have some foreign friends that would love to use this when they graduate. Can you imagine, all the students who will bring a printout of this change to their job interviews to prove that the company can hire them. Pretty awesome for them. Probably more competition for me when I try to get a job in a tech company.
From the article, it looks like someone just accidentally posted their own list, and then took it down.
Much as I like Obama, I can't help thinking that reporting these numbers is a bad idea, because it gives them significance that they don't deserve. Online activity is not a reliable indicator of popularity. It would be amazingly easy for an unscrupulous person to rent out a little time on a bot net to get a favorable ratio... even easier than it was in 1998, when Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf won People's Most Beautiful Person online contest.
That's awful - how were they able to identify your friend?
damn you valleywag
No SQL necessary.
I'm swamped. I pulled yet another all-nighter last night, I think my third so far this month. I'm still falling behind on projects.

I think I've finally made the decision to end my part-time job and go full-on into consulting and development. It's kinda spooky, 'cause as a friend said, now I'm getting on the high wire and the safety net's gone.

But, I just can't squeeze any more time out of the day.

Most of my clients have seen shorter revenues lately, and I know at least a couple other folks in the tech industry that are having trouble. I suspect that what the recession is doing at the moment is thinning the herd, laying off those with weaker skill sets while keeping the remainder pretty busy.
Scailure: The failure of a system due to it’s inability to operate efficiently above a certain size.
No one is calling Hackers News a paradigm shift.
http://authenticjobs.com/ is a good place to put out a listing as well. A lot of designers, freelance or otherwise, watch that board.
But what business is it of mine whether someone wants to destroy themselves with drugs? As long as that person is only harming himself, and not others, why should the government get involved?
I don't, and I think you are correct about the rule. But, I have anecdotal and second-hand accounts that it isn't always the case in practice.
The candidate will become a founder off course, we want someone passionate about the prospect of becoming part of our team. Self motivation is a must, we can't sell it, we only guarantee the project is really cool.
When innovators sell out
I like Twitter, but it has a big problem
Don't underestimate the difficulty in migrating users from an application that has been used daily for a long time. The average tech-saavy user could make the switch easily, but from my experience, that's a small percentage of a workforce in any reasonably large business. There are enough little differences between the applications to drive a non-technical user nuts (especially since it probably took them a solid year to learn MS Office well enough to do their job).
Seth's point is so right-on - setting yourself up with a rich Internet history will go a long way in securing your future. Start with a blog - or a twitter stream - or a Tumblr - but start NOW.
ok so I just tried site out.

Man, 30 minutes for my screenshots and one of them was completely blank (and it's not locally, so something was with the shot).

How slow would development be if you had to do that!
Very insightful - thank you.
Here's an alternative to the "business guy" vs "hacker" debate which sometimes happens on here. I started out as a business guy 15 years ago and employed people to write software. My main focus was, and is, starting and running businesses and this was what I felt natural doing. What I did though, which made the difference, is that I learned to program. Cold Fusion at first, then Perl, a bit of PHP and now Python. I'll be the first to admit... "I'm not very good - and damned slow"... but what this experiene has done is given me a greater level of understanding for what is required, what is possible and has given me empathy with anyone I work with who is coding. We have the same issues with "Designer" Vs "Hacker" and we solve it (or attempt to) by educating people.

For the hacker, one thing to remember is that often the business guys (or gals) strength might actually be in "doing business" allowing you to concentrate on what you love. For the business guy you need to remember that you are employing people for a skill that you don't have and that there's no place for arrogance or posturing within the business - work together and compete against the competition

Where would Apple be without Woz, where without Steve Jobs?
It would indeed be nice to have an easy-to-use platform for creating AI on top of Starcraft. I think that would be nice because it's a very well balanced game, which is still being played, the work of the units is very well known and human players are quite good. I think it would make an awesome research platform for game AI.
This article reminded me of one that I read over at The Industry Standard (http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/03/18/keep-it-simple-be...) - Keep it simple, because VCs are stupid. It's a really good point that every founder should keep in mind that they know their business FAR better than the VC they are pitching. They should enter every meeting and discussion with that in mind.
The reasons she lists are why it will be extremely difficult to get Twitter to go mainstream. In the meantime, social networks and IM clients are adding or expand similar functionality, which make it even more difficult for Twitter to expand.

The lack of revenue doesn't help things, either ...
am i reading this wrong?

"In addition to the GNU General Public License v2 licensing terms, we explicitly grand [sic] you the permission to run any application on top of Passenger, regardless of the application's own licensing terms. The application will not be bound to the terms of the GPL in any way. That is, the GPL only applies to Passenger itself, and not to applications that are run through Passenger."
>finding one that is worth hiring and doesn't already have a good job is proving near impossible

I think you answered your own question. At some point they should just take a look at the harsh reality and concede that they aren't the most attractive place to work for the money they pay.
s/twitter/email/g and you have an early 90's commentary.
Most stereos sold these days come with a front auxiliary jack that you can plug an iPod (or any other portable music player) straight into. Many aftermarket stereos come with iPod dock connectors or USB connectors. I've installed one in my car and it makes it painfully easy to listen to podcasts in the car. Yeah, it'd be great if iTunes would wirelessly beam my podcasts to my car, but having them on an iPod that seamlessly integrates into the car stereo is a close second.
Err... no, I typed too quickly. Still, I really don't see the point of GPL'ing it under version two with that clause unless they think that it will mean hosting providers have to feed their changes back...
Should You Use a Credit Card to Finance Your Startup?
> we can't sell it, we only guarantee the project is really cool

It's great that you think it's cool, but if someone doesn't already know you, they have no reason to trust you on this point -- you're obviously biased on the subject. I mean this as constructive criticism, so I hope you won't take this the wrong way.

There are all kinds of startups out there that would love to have people work for them for free -- if you advertise for someone, you should have something about why they would care about yours as opposed to all the others. It's just like trying to attract an investor.

What's special about this startup? Is it the concept? The other founders' previous experience? The codebase you've built so far? Your connections that will help your site get noticed? What?
Mobile Firefox Prototype Arrives
Microsoft Live Maps Drinks Google Maps’ Milkshake
Not that I'm a strictly a business guy (I straddle product manager and hacker roles), but there are quite a few things, depending on the product/service, that need doing that aren't directly related to building the product:

* The "idea" stuff, also known as product management- defining features, writing requirements, market analysis to make sure you're going to achieve product/market fit, etc. Developers can/should have a say in this, but it's not always a match for all developers' skillset.

* Bizdev - lining up distribution, partnerships, and customers-- talking to them to make sure their needs are being met in the product, and making sure there is sufficient revenue/incentive to keep everyone happy

* Keeping the books, writing the appropriate bizplans/marketing plans/etc if bringing on investors is on the horizon

* Engaging outside resources - legal, accounting, office, contract workers (designers, developers, whatever core competencies aren't on staff already)

* Project management/cat herding
Even without that shenanigans, a candidate's popularity online seems to have little relevance to their real-world results. See Howard Dean, Ron Paul, etc.
browsershots.org - kills it I think. I don't know what the cost of operation is, but at most its a machine loaded with the different OS's and the different browsers (using commodity stuff probably under $1k) then the hosting bandwidth etc.. this is something that should be offered free to customers of your bigger service, this isn't a stand-a-lone product. imo
Google App Engine: Free and still barely worth it
I think this is really great. I'm relatively new to the Hacker News and YC, but love the threads. I guess I'm gonna have to get my Karma up to pass muster though :)
imo, no, unless you're doing the 0% APR across credit cards dance. there are just too many other, cheaper ways of getting a little bit of money.