skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I use Yahoo at home, from the Firefox toolbar. I'm growing increasingly suspicious of Google (call me crazy) and for many things it's about as good.

That said, I would have no problem with banning Yahoo from HN. I've never used Yahoo to search HN, and Yahoo's "site:foo" support is one of their relative weaknesses, so I doubt I ever will. (It "redirects to Site Explorer", which looks basically like normal search but uglier and with less information.)

You could even redirect them to The Site Which Shall Not Be Mentioned.
alphalab decides after YC.
http://www.iwalphalab.org/survey_overview.aspx
(look in the sidebar)
It kind of reminds me of a salary history where a company wants to pay you according to how other companies value you, instead of making their own determination.

It's like they don't know what to ask, so they went with what you came up with. Well, if they can't figure out what information they need on their own, how are they going to figure out who to invest in on their own?
I thought of the free software based Asterisk PBX too. Maybe a modern interpretation is that the face represents someone making a poor comment as they disagree with someone, basically spewing dial tone!
Gizmodo: Psystar's a Hoax
Unfortunately the limit is going to be in the chipsets for that DDR2-667 RAM. PC2 5300 -- that is not a wide bus, 5.3 GB/s. That's the bottleneck.
Its tough to beat Google Analytics, let alone make the switch.
Mint.com

It needs more features, but so far it's the only tool I have that is able to synch with all 12 of my financial accounts without having to manually download/import OFX or MNY files.
Airports suck enough that I would still drive anywhere 5 hours away, especially if I can't get around via public transport once I'm there. If I'm in SJ and going to Long Beach for a weekend, it's no more time to just drive (and a 10% chance of a speeding ticket seems high even if you don't count the fact that you can just not speed and reduce it to 0%) and saves me the hassle/expense of renting a car.
Corporations do lots of random things to motivate their sales guys. Lots of weird things, lots of cheesy things.

This is surely just a silly, known-to-be-ridiculous video they put together as one of their sillier/lighter things for sales training, or a sales conference keynote.

How about some of you guys share some of your insight on how you plan to (or do) motivate your sales and marketing guys? Or are salespeople a thing your companies will never have?

I personally haven't given it much thought, but seeing some of the 'net reaction' to this video, I see a number of people misunderstanding this. Perhaps because they've never worked in management at a large corp (and maybe never want to)?

When I see this, it just reminds me of the sorts of problems corporations have when they get larger. It's not a minor problem when you consider the idea of having thousands of software salespeople who don't necessarily have the tech knowledge (or time) to study up on new features/tricks to get their clients to upgrade/buy. Tricks like this at least force them to take a deep breath and think about how they might position things better when new offerings are available.

There's almost no doubt that a clever entrepreneur could make a lucrative business if they're able to improve upon the existing sales training/motivation models. There's a lot of money on the line in these corporations to improve these things (as one would expect).
I would be surprised if that was the reason for the timing of the decisions, I suspect it was just convenient for them. AlphaLab is going after a decidedly different market than YC: people that live in Pittsburgh. AlphaLab is also consciously an incubator and not something that failed at copying YC and accidentally turned into an incubator.
Nice one. I've done exactly this 3 or 4 times without a problem. But,

a) Don't mention the word 'work' when passing through immigration.

b) Ensure you're carrying a credit card, and can produce evidence of a bankroll large enough to cover your entire stay.

c) Don't carry hardcopy docs e.g. functional specs, and bury email that mentions timelines in webmail or some such.

d) Think of the rest of us when you're hacking from a bungalow on Phi Phi Island.

All this sounds excessively cloak and dagger until you're in an interview room with some muppet pawing at your laptop.
You mean, you'd either pay and spend as much (or more) time on them, or you'd never visit them again and not subscribe.

Sadly, there's no middle ground.
How do you guys pipe in the internet? (what do you mean with "your own internet gateway".

That sucks balls that you guys have to go to so much trouble to get your work with your computers how you like them.

At least you engineers are a tight-knit group and can do this. Thinks of all the poor fellows who can't do this! (either for computer proficiency or group-size or whatever)
Would it make things unbearable? I've accessed https websites and I didn't even know they were slower up until now. Am I missing something?
no my friend just got out of alpha works; and they used linux very heavily. see http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource

- any company that is spending money with little to no (gauranteed) return; is ahead of the curve.
I will believe it when i see it.
that said, I seriously doubt it.
Way too much thought. Here's my idea of a sales training video:

5 second fade-in of thier commision percentage.

5 seconds of just the percentage sitting on the screen.

Then one of those damn screaming ghoulish pop up pictures to get them off their ass and selling so the next batch of sales people can come in and watch the training video.
CowboyNeal
I wouldn't pay for any of those sites. I'd pay for google if all search engines started charging. Also, I'd probably end up paying for some e-mail service if gmail would charge (it might not be gmail).

I probably would pay for wikipedia if I had to, as well. Maybe planetmath.org.
probably when he listened to one too many pitches (that he didn't ask for)
Why switch? Couldn't you run both?

Google Analytics is spiffy, but it seems to miss quite a few queries and visitors to our site (according to our Apache server logs). Competition in this area would be nice, though I wonder how long quality analytics tools like these can be provided for free.
I watched two girls one cup without flinching, but I couldn't stand to watch 10 seconds of this.
does this mean intelligence is linked to physical ability? or body coordination? (I have about 15 friends who prove otherwise)
the fact that tc is even covering this only further increases the probability of it being taken off my news reader.

Security isnt solved with smoke and mirrors. Comprehensive desktop cryptography solutions have existed for years on end.
They use some Java, but a whole lot more Python and C++...
I'd be interested in paying per use or per minute. Something 8aweek could do and give proceeds to charity?
As far as I remember it appeared on the front page of Paul Graham's site around the time "What you can't say" was first published.
Sun to Begin Close Sourcing MySQL
I use the free Maxmind country database.
I'd be happy to pay for Rescue Time and Hacker News, but having said that I'm not sure that I would pay for either if I hadn't used them for free first.
Omnisio (http://omnisio.com/) is doing the honors.
The Pirate Bay Launches Uncensored Blogging Service
I largely agree about the insanity of our highway subsidy, but I can see some of the logic in it. Cars are more convenient/practical in rural areas, and the US is pretty rural (I think it's stupid and short-sighted to encourage rural development via highway subsidy, but that's another rant).

That said, in most of the developed world, the competition is between planes and trains. Cars are more expensive (probably because they're not as heavily subsidized).
I got techcrunched!
Hehe, I made it to TC now how cool is that.
There are more feeds coming soon, after startup school and YC interviews.
Ask News.YC: Proposed experiment to test "The PG bias"
It has been frequently commented by people outside the news.yc community that news.yc is too pandering to PG. To test this, I propose the following experiment which requires PG's co-operation. I propose that PG also post comments / submissions etc under some other username and then compare the average upmods for posts under the "pg" username vs the random anonymous username.
This can be started at an unspecified time in the future and run for lets say 1 month. Only PG will know what username he is using other than pg.

I also propose the same for nickb and other prominent users. 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.

Well actually it may already be the case that they are posting under multiple names.

Might be an interesting social experiment.

edit : Or is it already underway? nickb is pg :P?
Congrats, man
I don't think we have to do much about it. Copies are never as big a problem as they seem.
Glad you like the site :)
I think this fell through... bummer
Thanks, you're welcome!
Ask YC: How do you evaluate a good sys admin?
Justin.tv is looking to hire a great sys admin, but we lack experience in evaluating them. Any advice from the masses?
Sorry, but I have to correct. I was a lead on packager on one of our projects to alphaWorks, I was working in the emerging standards department. The peace, love, free software and standards side of the business.

I hear lotus notes is multi-threaded now. :)
from my install script..

compizconfig-settings-manager, emerald (& get some themes)

nautilus-open-terminal

netbeans, python, rails

google desktop (tracker sux balls)

dvd playback (google it, i forget how)
You are trying too hard to make a point that people don't agree with. You don't need STL/Boost to be a productive c++ programmer. That's fine, no arguments there. But you don't have to avoid STL/Boost in order to be a productive/efficient c++ programmer either. Get over it.
Hehe I got Hackernews'ed too Bonus points. ding ding. lol
No, Microsoft did not run this as a commercial. Yes, it is a joke (though a "motivational" joke, which takes the funny right out of it).

One might have gleaned that information from, I dunno, reading the article.
MSN's crawler is a spammer: they "check" using referral spam using the livebot IP addresses. They admitted to it, they said they stopped it, but they haven't.

Please ban them.
Usualy Google gets better results that a custom search engine for your site, because Google also knows the links form other web pages to your site.
Keep us updated with the traffic effect from the TechCrunch mention.
Great Copywriting -- Not for Robots
Unless once someone 'accepts' an offer from one of these micro-VC firm they are entering in a binding contract that has some sort of penalty for breaking it, could you not simply allow candidates who have accepted elsewhere to still interview with you? If you like them and accept them, then they'd get to choose whether they'd like to stay with their existing micro VC or jump ship for YCombinator. Granted, filling one of your limited slots with people who have opportunities elsewhere may be a waste of your time. But that would at least mitigate the problem of people 'stealing' away your interviewees.
For all of you critical readers out there, the word 'train' is not mentioned in the article...
Why Beautiful Women Marry Less Attractive Men
YC: What is competitive pay in SF?
I'm looking at a few jobs in SF on craigslist and no one seems to list compensation of any sort (salary, bonus, equity) for a Front-End Developer or PHP Developer.

Any idea what average salary is for someone with 2+ years and plenty of demo's?
Hmmm - just saw this on top of techmeme: http://www.news.com/8301-10787_3-9920713-60.html
Where are the 2006 recordings located?
It would be a good idea to quickly delete this and email pg directly about it, so few people are aware of the experiment.
Releasing more data would just give the competition something else to copy. Instead, YC could build a 'one click' application process and patent it.

Seriously though, YCombinator could always franchise their system. That way, they at least profit when others use the fruits of their labors.
sure will report back as it cools off
Could you make the site usable by people who don't want to sign in?

Pandora had a feature where you enter one song, and they tell you what they'd recommend. That intrigued me enough to sign up. That might be useful for BookLamp too.
Yes - an ec2 image with mod_rails installed would be even better than a screencast.
20 (Rare) Questions for Google Search Guru Udi Manber
"Might be an interesting social experiment."

It's not an interesting experiment unless you learn something from it. There's virtually nothing that can be learned from this.

Plus, I like being able to follow the comments of pg and others on their threads page.
> Cars are more convenient/practical in rural areas

Not really true. It only seems that way because of the development pattern subsidized highways have enabled. In much of the world housing is clustered in dense towns in rural areas. This was the normal development pattern in the US in the 1800s. Rural towns were fairly dense and walkable. The productive land was around the town. The housing was not needlessly spread out through the productive land.
sub-question: same question but for the seattle area; web developer or software engineer.

figured i'd save space and ask it here
I'd say that sysadmining is 99% about experience -- if you've encountered a problem before, you'll be much better at fixing it than if you haven't, no matter how good your knowledge of the underlying codebase is.

In that vein, I'd say that the best way to evaluate a sysadmin is to ask (a) what sysadmin experience he has, and (b) what sort of problems he has encountered which he has needed to resolve.
They do accept donations.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Yes I would love to know that too.
You're looking for a problem solver with an unflappable, even temperament. Ask them to bring their notebook, or show you their personal wiki - without exception the best sys admins I've ever met have meticulous notes detailing solutions to fringe problems, running sheets for curly recoveries, and other assorted arcana.
Also interesting would be to see whether users who have had an application rejected/accepted vote up pg as much as people who have not applied yet.
You've got to be kidding.

It takes an hour or more to get to SFO from almost anyplace in the city, and I suspect LAX is worse. If you're not at the airport at least an hour early these days, you may get bumped. Stress. Security checks. Rude airline people. Delays, cancellation with little or no reimbursement. A bag of stale peanuts. An hour down, and fiddle around more in the destination terminal. Rent a car to get around. That's at least four hours right there, and probably more.

And NO airline is going to be offering $39 flights in California.

Meanwhile, I could take a leisurely drive down 101. Stop for lunch. Enjoy the ocean. Relax. Take a friend or two and save them and you some money. Pull over once in a while and stretch our legs. When I arrive, I'm in my own car. I head right for my destination.

Of course, rail would be even better, and hopefully cheaper. But this is America. We want to make a few people rich at the expense of everyone else
I guess Compete has them worried. It is MUCH more accurate, even if it is US-only.
Why does the article start off with "a bootstrapped startup from Agentbleu, a Englishman living in France" and in the end say the location is in India? Did they get it wrong?
I wouldn't pay for gmail. I'd go back to using Thunderbird.

As for the rest... extremely hard to predict because if all the most popular sites charged money the dynamics of the web would be completely different.
The (humorous) dangers of Google's new deep search
I was reading the Slashdot article on Google's new "deep search" (http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/04/16/2052206.shtml) where it submits forms and sees what the results are. This is a quite insightful and interesting anecdote one user posted:

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=525058&cid=23096424

When I interned at Google, someone told me a funny anecdote about a guy who emailed their tech support insisting that the Google crawler had deleted his web site. At first, I think he was told that "Just because we download a copy of your site, doesn't mean your local copy is gone." (a'la obligatory bash [bash.org].) But, the guy insisted, and finally they double checked and his site was in fact gone. Turns out that it was a home-brewed wiki-style site, and each page had a "delete" button. The only problem was, the "delete" button sent its query via GET, not POST, and so the Google spider happily followed those links one-by-one and deleted the poor guy's entire site. The Google guys were feeling charitable and so they sent him a backup of his site, but told him he wouldn't be so lucky the next time, and he should change any forms that make changes to POSTs -- GETs are only for queries.

So, long story short, I wonder how Google will avoid more of this kind of problem if they're really going off the deep end and submitting random data on random forms on the web. Like the above guy, people may not design their site with such a spider in mind, and despite their lack of foresight this could kill a lot of goodwill if done improperly.
Ask YC:  Will people in the near future view blogging as bizarrely narcissistic?
Perhaps you view blogging that way now? And if not, why not?
They're also potentially planning to overlay the comments from the Chatterous real-time chatroom:

http://www.chatterous.com/landing/ss08/ss08/
I admit I am guilty of this. Often I realize it after I clicked vote up, but alas, by then it is too late.
I recently interviewed in SF area, and as a result did quite a lot of research on salaries, cost of living, benefits, etc, etc.

A typical salary in the Dallas, TX area for a software engineer like you describe is in the $60K ballpark plus benefits. To achieve a comparable standard of living in the Bay Area, you'd have to get a minimum of $85K + benefits, and it's probably closer to $100K + benefits after considering taxes and other hidden costs that I didn't have time to discover.

All that is simply to make an educated guess based on standard-of-living equivalence, of course. I have only very vague ideas of what actual pay scales in SF are.
Coding Horror: Introducing Stackoverflow.com
Good job! May I ask how you managed to do that?
This title is misleading. In fact the text of the article contradicts the title:

"About a third of the couples had a more attractive wife, a third a more attractive husband and the remaining partners showed matching looks."

Regardless, the article is stretching pretty far to make its conclusions. The study just showed couples where the woman is more attractive than the man were happier. That doesn't mean women should "marry down". It could just mean that men care more about looks, and therefore an attractive woman contributed more to the couple's happiness than an attractive man.
Does anonymity defeat the purpose of social bookmarking (and social networking in general)?

I agree that it would be an interesting social experiment, though I'm not concerned if people are pandering to pg, nickb, or anyone else.
Debate over which is better for CS majors - liberal arts college, or engineering school?
Congrats!

Why does Arrington call Pandora "geo-retarded"?
i hate vapid little sayings like this. people use these as mental shortcuts.

x? respond with y, problem solved.
Submissions could be made anonymous for a few hours. I think you would get more interesting items on the front page.
Yes, the ability to undo a vote would be useful. Shouldn't be that hard to implement, either, given that the site already keeps track of who has upvoted what.

I have also noticed that pg's comments have unusually high ratings, whether or not the actual content was unusually good.
"with the perfect 10 representing the ultimate babe."

Sounds real credible.
Well, yeah. I think we agree, and that's what I meant when I said that rural development subsidy is stupid.

Still, the US is a lot bigger than, say, France or Germany. It's harder to build comprehensive train systems between urban areas here (particularly in places like the west).
There is probably a strong inverse correlation between working hard for success and attractiveness in men. That could be reversing the results.

Women don't prefer less attractive men, all else being equal.
Just because people upmod more recognizable names, it doesn't mean they are pandering.

For example, I will be more likely to read a comment if it was written by any user that I recognize. If I'm more likely to read a comment I'm more likely to upvote it as well.
Scientists reconstruct the Pioneer spacecraft anomaly
Not as cool as mine. My username returns a wikipedia page about some asteroid. Cool stuff.
It is US-only. (Last FM is not).
Easiest way to test this would give the class 'user' to links to users. Folks could tweak their browser's CSS with a.user { display: none; } real easy.
googling my username brings up my hacker profile too
It does look a lot more accurate for my medium-small sites.

Compete data is still far too sparse to do better on these.
I agree - look past who posted something and judge it on merit.

If the pandering is a problem, you'll still get some of the same sites being voted up (paulgraham.com, techcrunch etc), but some other more interesting ones might break through.

Still, I would hope most of us look past those things anyway.
An idea I just thought of would be to keep the poster anonymous until the post achieves a certain rating - after that show who the poster is.

If there actually is favoritism this might solve that issue somewhat and yet give people credit where it's due.
i don't equate narcissism with blogging. you can describe some blogs as narcissistic, but i don't think that blogging is or will ever be narcissistic by definition.
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"Leaked". Right.....those Microsoft people are so authentic. I think this just convinced me to buy Vista..............................................................................................

NOT.
Congrats, although your logo image on the homepage is a bit distorted because you're trying to squeeze it into smaller dimensions (making the font look jagged). May want to get that cleared up.
N.B. The article was by Duncan Riley, not Arrington.
Online diaries, maybe, but a lot of blogs are no more narcissistic than cnn.com
aah .. too late for it now i guess. should have read your comment earlier.
if he/she edits all config files by hand instead of using some tool AND he can write shell scripts AND he knows how to do builds AND has experince with setup of any app server...
Find a psychologist, or even a psychology major with enough classes under their belt, and they can tell you that there is most certainly a bias towards upvoting those with a familiar name.

I don't recall the name of the principle, but doing some googling around about Robert Cialdini's work should get you all the information you need.
I they will only use drop downs, thus most don't contain such harsh options. I want to hear a good case of getting behind those forms... if they do enter data into boxes, they will do it off a dictionary list that is certified safe ..

- Sites still use drop down nav? (is that a case?)
StackOverflow.com : the new venture from Joel Spolsky