skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a brilliant essay, but then what do you expect from Paul Graham? It's eloquently put and finely crafted. This is a really interesting analytical tool.

I think there's some amusement to be found in an agreement hierarchy:

AH-0: Raw compliments.
AH-1: Ad hominem compliments.
AH-2: Compliments on style.
AH-3: Agreement with the main point.
AH-4: Extension of a minor point.
AH-5: Major corollary; extension of the main point
AH-6: Citation to make another, more overarching point.

Can anyone beat me up the ladder to AH-5?
"...for the sole purpose of enabling Google to provide you with the Service in accordance with its privacy policy".
I disagree with you. I think the influence of facebook (and other social networks), especially in helping to bring large groups of people together for a common cause, is understated.
Also, mark Zuckerberg is one of the worlds SuperClass, at least if your basis for this is on wealth,as hes worth at least $1 billion.
I prefer to keep that number at ONE, so my co-founders have an incentive not to kill me.
I think MSFT heard me ;)
Nsyght launches beta - social search just got interesting
Do you have an ad-based revenue model?
I'm astonished by the number of founders banking on ad-based model as the primary source of generating revenue. Does it really work for startups? What is your revenue model?
Some product-design insights buried in there.
they should have bought our site instead :) i2drive.com
Solicit YC
I hope you are not put off by the title. But I want you to offer me for a few weeks.

Do you know of a place where I can work as an intern this summer? Preferably your own startup.

I can start as soon as July 14 and would like to end in mid October as the latest.

I study math at Magdeburg University, Germany. Currently I live in Ankara, Turkey, for a semester abroad. I would not mind travelling around the world for the internship.

I have strong background in mathematical optimization and computational aspects of math. I have also picked up stochastic and did recently formalize my interest in economics and finance. The Germany study system is a bit strange - basically you can regard my as a graduate student.

My university requires me to write a seminar paper ('Studienarbeit') about my internship. So my field of work has to be related to math - or even better to optimization.

Do you think you can offer me the opportunity to research in a way that matters to your company and can be related to my study of mathematics?

Compensation would be nice. I'd especially appreciate an interesting field of work and a place to sleep.

Any other hints would be welcome as well. If you need more details - just ask. Thank you.
Play Super Mario in 14kb Javascript
P.S. I hope I got all the connotations right.

P.P.S. I can program and prefer functional languages. I like Python as well. I can adapt nonetheless. Internship does in no way have to consist of programming.

P.P.P.S. If someone is interested in learning what I will hopefully find out - please drop me a line.
Google, UN Put Refugees On The Map
where's the screencast and documentation?
Well, you already did and people seem to agree with you but really, the article isn't that bad.

It's not particularly well written but I certainly see no harm in an article that points out the obvious - Google, with getting their hands on as much surfer data as it is, is becoming dangerous and Google Apps is yet one more way for them to collect private data.

That's not a terribly insightful obvservation to make, but neither is it wrong and should it be "killed".

My 2 cents, anyway.
Source is here: http://www.kanamitweb.net/kwf1.0.0.tar.bz2
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely and all that.

Sure,Google isn't all that corrupt right now, but they're certainly becoming powerful.
Uh, this is a scam right?
I was going to do a similar site like this last summer but decided not to. I'm looking to ditch the domain CoFoundMe.com for cheap if you're interested.
Did Google rip Campfire off? Absolutely.

Is Campfire "obvious"? Design always seems obvious in retrospect. That's the point of design, it isn't a whiz-bang new feature, it's a way to arrange existing things in an effective way. Good design is the art of doing things that--in retrospect--seem obvious.

In any event, i find it interesting that Google now appear indistinguishable from Microsoft. Copying somebody else's app and giving your copy away so you can drive traffic to your platform has been done before.
Hack: Analysis of Coding Horror's Search Keywords
"In all likelihood, this product came from the ground up, not from the top down, and for some reason, no manager at Google thought it was going to be a problem."

Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.
I agree. But it also one of the most tempting things. But this is platform lockin for a new generation. Had to happen sooner or later.
clearly an april fool's joke making the rounds late.
s/Google/Microsoft/
s/Google App Engine/Windows

and you will see the problem ;)
In that particular organization there is an interface hierarchy that is distinct from its implementation hierarchy. And in the implementation hierarchy, they avoid overriding existing methods in favour of using abstract classes. This might be what you are suggesting.

The ultimate goal is to avoid using public inheritance to model WAS-A.
MBA schools in India seem to be taking a lead in incubation.

Of course, you are not likely to find hackers, mentors (in a startup sense), or entrepreneurs there.
You are totally missing the point - doesn't matter about property, if you can't take your app anywhere else without rewriting it, that is lock-in. Do you think writing for Windows locked you in content wise? Of course not. Totally irrelevant.
Welcome to 2008.

Please fasten your seatbelts, enjoy the range of free software on offer.
Also, if your business involves software as a service, stay well out of the way of google ;)
Disqus is looking for interns.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=158091
I find the conclusion bizarre...

There has always been a class of ruling super-elites. Always has, always will be. Period.

The beauty of free-market capitalism (coupled with representative republicanism) is that the class is very fluid and far more transparent. People rise to "eliteness" and fall back down again - and far, far more people today have a shot at this kind of eliteness than ever have before. A lot of the old rules still apply (e.g., it helps to start off rich), but a lot of the old rules have been broken (e.g., you don't have to be the king's son).

What's the author's proposed solution (in search of a problem?)? Global governance! Yes, that's right. Let's take a system whereby people have the opportunity and fortune to become part of the elite by merit or sheer good luck or grassroots political support and change it so that only those who are approved may become part of the elite, and let's give that small group absolute power, and give them a structure by which they will never lose their eliteness, and make sure that merit or good luck has nothing to do with it, and oh, by the way, there won't be any way at all for them to be held accountable.

Great idea.
Could you add an e-mail address to your profile?
Neither of them have any compelling features IMHO,
But then I would say that wouldn't I :/

Also Huddlechat just goes to 'invalid page' when I try and sign in.
I thought I just did it a few minutes ago. I'll check again.

Edit: It's in my page when I'm logged in - but one can not see it (yet) from the outside. I wonder if I do something wrong or hacker news uses some kind of caching.

Anyway: It is matthias dot goergens at gmail etc
Just for fun: Innovation Comes in All Shapes and Sizes
Whoops, duplicate of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=158019 .
Registration Usability - 87 Registration Forms Tested
The article did a real good job of explaining what makes git different from the other popular VCS. I used to use git as a more flexible subversion, just bundling adds and commits. But after I had this concept figured out, I realized there is more to git than being distributed and more flexible than svn.
Wow. If I want that kind of treatment, I'll keep my current day job in IT.

Seriously, would this sort of arrangement be acceptable for most people in India? I don't think anyone could put up with that, but for so long.
The 'email' field in the profile is not visible to others (only seen by yc admin). 'About' is visible though.
Losing Customers at the Register: 12 Checkout Blunders
He's referring to business process documentation, which is different than code documentation. Coding (or design in general) is different than operations and can't be documented as precisely. It's the difference between "Here's what I did" and "Here's what to do"
Wow. That's very powerful for F-1 students starting start-ups. The OPT is very flexible, and you don't have to pay yourself a lot of money during that timeframe unlike an H-1B. Precisely what you need to do when you start up (assuming you've at least reasonable savings to sustain yourself.)
Talking about SEO, that was a pretty smart move!
not really ..check this out .."Once the prototype is ready, IIM Ahmedabad students shall work closely with the teams to develop a sound business plan and get traction for the product."..so finally the business guys will get in and teach a thing or two to the hacker group ;)...sounds like a plan.
Well, since PHP by default reinterprets bare-strings as actual strings, you can just type the name without quotes, and things should still work. Until you define() a constant with the same name.
I did not figure this out, yet. Thank you.
Does anyone know if this kind of thing is still practiced? I can think of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory (factory doors were locked to keep people from misbehaving; the fire was disastrous), De Beers (built concentration camps for workers so they couldn't fence diamonds), and the drug trade -- does anyone else work under actual guards?
(I am from India.) No, I think that's just bizarre.

As a people, we aren't as much averse to structure as US people are, but this is taking things a bit too far. And I honestly hope that these people are only kidding when they talk about all these "we will watch you" kind of things.
Not your fault at all. Confusing UI.
"What better than Microsoft, for valuable insights on IT to our enthusiastic Participants"

...
Yeah, I think that's exactly right: I think a pyramid naturally expresses a hierarchy of categories, with the category at the top being inclusive of the lower categories (think Maslow's hierarchy of needs: the higher needs are only relevant once the lower needs have been satisfied). That's clearly not the case here.

A misleading diagram is worse than no diagram at all.
I didn't realize this for 6 months until I read a similar conversation someone else about seeing an email address.
Anyone else surprised how slow TC's app is? For something simple like this, it's really slow... like ~3sec on average response times! I also got an error... (google Server Error)

I guess Google has more than few kinks to fix before they open it up completely...
"hes worth at least $1 billion"

On paper.
This is amazing. I kept thinking about whether it's possible to use javascript to make a simple game (instead of flex/actionscript). This proves that it is.
NYT article on Randy Pausch and "last lecture" book
I have seen confusion with this aspect of account configuration numerous times. Perhaps simply adding a note next to the email field indicating that the email address is only visible to the administrators would help solve this problem.

edit: perhaps you could vote up and/or comment on rms' suggestion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46100
I see. His example is meaningful only in a language that does not provide a convention for handling missing methods in the composed class. For instance, in ruby, I can distill your example to:

class Parent
def a; ... end
def b; ... end
def c; ... end
...
def zzzz; ... end
end

class B
def initialize
@parent = Parent.new
end

def b; special logic end

def method_missing(methodname)
@parent.send(methodname)
end

end
There are 2 kinds of people in the world: Those behind Door #1 who don't understand the Monty Hall problem, and those behind Doors #2 and 3 who do.

It's amazing how many smart people don't get the problem at all.
Even better would be a series of two week externships that would give hackers exposure to business problems.
Yes. I even searched for a check box like: "Make my email visible to the public".
Many users aren't aware that the email field isn't public because it is visible when they view their own profile page while logged in. While your suggested solution is better, it might be an easier and quicker fix to simply add a note next to the email field indicating that the email address is only visible to the administrators. Then, if a user wanted to make his email address available to readers, he would think to pop it into the "about" field (perhaps with some obfuscation).
What are these people. 8K rupees a month = $200. Security guard - are you kidding me ?

the culture in india is risk averse. i grew up there, went to undergrad there and then come to an engineering school here. i had no trouble getting job offers, but declined them so I can do a startup, and my mom still feels so insecure that she asks me to take up a job with microsoft every time i talk to her.
Sure. We had this discussion some time ago. The secret is: Work your hard-worn knowledge into a smartass form.

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=97388)
Nuked (at least for now): http://suspended.hostgator.com/?domain=www.talkandroid.com
That power eventually corrupts -- I can see that. But instant corruption? I doubt it.
Leave Britney's parser alone!!!
I'm a big fan of Mercurial just for this reason. Mercurial offers most of the benefits of Git without the steep learning curve and poor documentation.

For instance, git add --patch can be done with hg record.
MIT Crushes Harvard at Google Games
no shrooms thou :(
I think that 14kb is missleading. Only part of the game and features are implemented.
Looks like Justin.TV and Scribd are battling for first...
Most of my code is "throw-away" code :|

In the sense that even if it's about the best code I can produce right now, in a couple months I'll have learned so much and improved the rest of the system incrementally so much that my formerly-best code I will need to throw away (as in refactor or even rewrite).
For a second I was afraid (and happy) that they beat me to this. Then I looked at the details. Its a scary hybrid of archaic school rules and a lack of repsect for latent business abilities of hackers with the yc concept.

I hope someone beats me to it because my plan is to first start a startup, learn how to do it right, make money to invest and THEN instantiate an object of a subclass of yc.
Here's something much more convincing, even: http://games.funnygames.nl/lemmings/index.html
"You should trust X's judgement because X is an expert in his field" and "You shouldn't trust Y's judgement because Y is acting like a crank" are both, given the right context, completely reasonable arguments to make. They have no place in a mathematics proof or another exercise in pure deductive reasoning, but very few real-world arguments involve pure deductive reasoning.

More on this from an old classmate of mine: http://legalminds.lp.findlaw.com/list/cyberia-l/msg19080.htm...

See also "Flamer Bingo": http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/009186.html
p.s.:

#!/bin/sh

while [ 1 -eq 1 ]
do
curl -d direction=$1 -d key=$2 http://appengine.crunchbase.com/
done

Param #1 is either "up" or "down", param #2 is the key obtained from the voting form.
Acquisitions: How Digg's CEO pitches his startup to big media companies
No doubt that YC is a great idea, I don’t think it is in anyway an 'internship' or 'sabbatical' . Am I missing something here?
you've found the fatal flaw in our design.
The css for #tabnav li could use a cursor: pointer.
And the min-width: 970px for #content makes the site scroll horizontally for me, while it has an awful lot of whitespace. You could easily remove some whitespace to prevent the horizontal scrolling.
In this kind of forum that encourages entrepreneurship even in the face of stiff competition I'm surprised that many people dismiss the notion that someone could make a better seed funding organization than YC.

There are many successful entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere who would be great startup advisors and inspiration leaders. If they decided to start YC clones I don't see why they couldn't attract great talent. They may even be more successful than YC at generating high returns on their investment. Luck plays a huge factor in startup success, after all...
Interesting comparison of the tangled working copy problem, i'll have to dive into Git and see what all the fuss is about.

On a side note: Am I the only person that couldn't see the site in firefox on linux? It crashed my browser every time I opened it and I ended up using lynx to view the article.
Since they actually name yc, it is my opinion that you should write a post about how their adaptation of it is (horribly) wrong. In addition to everything that is morally wrong with their rules, they make little business sense. If you don't trust the founders to manage their own time how can you trust them to be major share-holders and leaders of the company you are investing in?
Maybe they need to cache their handlers:

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/requestsandappc...

I think this might be the reason they are using so much CPU time as well.
Ask YC: Feedback on startup: learnitlists.com
Learnitlists is a startup of a friend of mine. It is curently in beta, but they already have 10K users. He asked me to post it here to get your feedback. Thanks.
Real hackers write a program that takes a description of the pyramid as input and produce two output backends (ascii, image).
Hmmm by observing people's behavior, you can estimate what kinds of people they are. There's a shocker. I'm still not quite sure what college had to do with it all. Another observed behavior I think was his thought.
At least now we can see how the appengine handles heavy loads
I can't jump up diagonally :(
Standard CL Library: where is it?
I've been pretty busy lately, but surely I am slowly creeping along with my desire to finally learn some CL. I am half way through Seibel book, I have tons of bookmarks to Cliki, my emacs skills got better...

But the giant, enormous question, Question #1 that I was patiently waiting for the answer for, remains unanswered: where is the standard Common Lisp Library? You know, like clib for C or Ruby Core, or Python's famous lib?

Sure there are some functions that all CLs implement, but where are they listed? Where is the "missing manual"? Seibel's pulling stuff out of his hat all the time.

Even Wikipedia article about Common Lisp says: "The Common Lisp library relies heavily on such higher-order functions."

What library are they talking about? Where is it documented?
Some of the widgets seem slow to load. Don't want to register to try it out.
Yahoo seems headed the way of PeopleSoft
Successful Businesses Evolve
This isn't a Google application. It's a side project --- and, design aside, a totally obvious side project --- of a couple Google developers. Do you really want to single them out for attacking 37Signals?

As for the non-obviousness of Campfire's design, defend the argument. When Campfire was launched, it wasn't launched as a pioneering new chat interface. I don't see what's particularly interesting about it.
I havent looked deep into it, buts the docs mentioning that it was a crud datastore engine, which means there is no 1-1 relationship with sql, by the positioning of the rest of the api, I dont imagine the more complex functionality google will introduce will align with the current standards either
Man I am so tired of "Sign Up!" buttons... Pass.
I'm sorry, but this guy really needed to do some research. He doesn't even mention the Pentavirate... You know, The Queen, The Vatican, The Gettys, The Rothschilds, and Colonel Sanders before he went tits up.
cool, you wrote Visitors? thanks for saving me a lot of work!

I used it from 2004-2005 for clicktrails... great idea and implementation. Graphviz makes everything better (corollary: anything that needs Graphviz is interesting enough to get better)

Google Analytics and/or Visitors are about all I would think a person needs. And now that you have lloogg.com out there, it looks like clicktrails are covered in a GA-style interface. Kick ass! Great idea, again, best of luck.

I haven't run into many websites that couldn't be improved by clickpath analysis and refocusing navigation on the ways people actually use a site -- optimizing for the common case, in other words. It baffles me that any site would fail to do so. Now they really have no excuse.
Perhaps you'd enjoy this following article, then:

http://bret.appspot.com/entry/experimenting-google-app-engin...

;-)
Their front page reads like a pompous ad. Why can't people simply describe their product and let it speak for itself if it's so great? (or maybe it's not)

Here's a better version, IMO:

"The Kanamit Web Framework provides a templating engine and a persistence mechanism that runs on [list of supported relational databases].

This web framework leverages the power of Lisp well. We have developed a library that comprises many real-world usage scenarios. It's portable across lisp implementations. We got it running on several flavors of Lisp on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and we are currently porting it to our faithful Symbolics 3600. We even got it running inside Emacs 22.

You should get a decent development environment. Emacs 22, Slime and GNU-Lisp are what we use, but if you really want to use Eclipse (some people compare it to Emacs) it should work.

You can also order our book here. It took a while to write, but we wanted it ready for the public launch of our project."
"Linux has a driver problem" is a myth
Any recommendations on how to get around requiring users to sign up?

You can put in your OpenID url and receive full access that way but how else can I authenticate users without requiring them to sign up?
Paul Erdos got it wrong (!).
Error: "Your Password Must Be at Least 18770 Characters..."
Indeed, laughed after reading that this morning.
Ask YC: Did you apply to the Summer YC session?
Did you apply to the Summer YC session? If so, with what business/idea? Feel free to use general terms if your company is still in "stealth mode"

Tomorrow is the day, good luck to everyone!
This monkey thinks that perceived novelty/rarity could also explain the green-preference. When at the second forced-choice, blue has appeared in 2-of-4 positions, while both red and green have only appeared in 1-of-4 positions each. Further, blue has always been at least one choice. That makes it look common, so less interesting.
Sure there are some functions that all CLs implement, but where are they listed?

http://www.lisp.org/HyperSpec/FrontMatter/index.html
Nobody asked whetherthey should or would rip campfire off. The question is whether they did.
Nope, but good luck to those who did!