skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"in a nutshell points systems are an ingenious way of taking something with no tangible value and turning it into a prized virtual currency of sorts"

How is this different than most things we consider most valuable?
I'm surprised emacs shows up so much.
doesn't in-browser pdf viewing suck apart from safari?
Awesome, finally an intelligent social site where being funny won't draw allusions to digg and reddit:D

Anyways, I'm in. May be just the creative outlet I need.
> assuming gender ratio parity

Oh my, haha. At what schools does this occur?
He's not just arguing about the value of the degree itself -- he's arguing that the value of the degree, coupled with the rising costs (which are increasing at roughly double the rate of inflation), make the long-term value proposition of a college degree far less certain.

Furthermore, I think his argument is less focused on the value of the degree itself, and more on the value of subsidies for college tuition. Just as cheap lending made homes more expensive, cheap lending can/will/does make tuition more expensive. Is subsidizing a college education for everyone such a good idea, if it leads to enormous costs?

I don't know the answer, but I think that the argument is more complex than "degrees aren't worth as much when everyone has them."
If Facebook manages to become as useful as everyone is hoping, then yes I think it is very possible. If every internet user in the world in the world had a Facebook account they used, it would be incredibly valuable.

But it has to be everyone. I don't think it'll get there, because I don't think they'll be able to achieve the critical mass of users that Microsoft did with windows. They've managed to lock in college students-- meanwhile millions of people aged roughly 27+ barely use Facebook, and have little incentive to change their lifestyle to accommodate it.

Will Facebook be able to keep hooking college students for 20 years until the older generation becomes irrelevant? Will Facebook figure out how to get these users somehow? If they can't answer that then I don't really see it taking off the way everyone says. I don't think it will happen, because Facebook just isn't better than its alternatives (generally speaking, I'm not talking about MySpace I'm talking about the various other ways people use the internet without using facebook).
ASk YC: How to build a reddit for my own country
I'd like to build a reddit for my own country's news - Bangladesh. I dont want to use a sub reddit. I want to build my own. I am thinking of using Ruby, but would appreciate your advice. Also are there any recommendation algorithms that you can suggest? Thanks
I like Compete.com better than Alexa.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/scribd.com+weebly.com+reddi...

It tells a different story but the outcome is still the same. For Scribd to have higher traffic than Reddit is pretty impressive.
OVirt: Open Source Virtual Machine (Xen/KVM) Management (Runs on Rails)
Zillionics - How Huge Number Make Qualitative Changes
Compete also shows Yellowpages.com with much higher traffic than Scribd, but they do beat twitter.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/scribd.com+twitter.com+yell...
Cool! My site is now officially Web 3.0

http://ourdoings.com/2008-04-17
Interesting to note how to Joel Spolsky says that $50.000 is "a very small amount of money". Where I'm from that amount would be fairly high for an angel investor.

Maybe it's time to move...
The source for hacker news is opensourced. Why don't you just use that?
My wife developed a technique in ChinaTown NYC that rarely failed.

She would decide what she wanted to pay (less than what was being asked, obviously), put down the money in front of the salesperson while picking up the item and wait for a response.

The salesperson was almost never willing to let her pick her money back up again.
Does this offer anyone else a little bit of relief (for some reason it did me)? Or were you generally not thinking about it?
I was looking for a good way to combine my two favorite hobbies of beer and geeky conversation.
Thanks to everyone that emailed me, setting up subdomains for everyone.
Probably -- I wouldn't know -- but I much prefer it even when Firefox opens a PDF in Preview or Evince than trying to use iPaper. The two most common things I do with a PDF, scrolling and searching, work exactly the same there as in the browser.

Breaking a man's keyboard shortcuts and scroll-wheel is the webpage equivalent of kicking him in the nuts. It just ain't right.
yes ... though it depends who you ask. Many like hacker news rankings went down. Was 14K two days ago... now 77K, while looking down next to my alexa toolbar ranking of this site I have the compete toolbar that says hacker news is ranked 25K. Though compete only measures US traffic, best of my knowledge.
Scribd was ranked 900 something now its 500 something. Congrat to Ed K and the Scribd team!
Ten Thousand Cents
Scribd looks great, but Basecamp is down at 70262, probably since it uses subdomains. Full aggregated traffic for Basecamp and other 37signals properties would probably put it higher up on the list.
Interesting about Twitter going from 500 to 1,900 on Alexa. It's compete ranking and now its most current alexa ranking match up, as compete ranks it 2K.

Though were sure to see it's ranking go back up to 500 and beyond. It's the next huge thing, just like MySpace and Facebook!
Indenting Python with VIM
Defraggler: The Best Substitute for Windows Disk Defragmenter
I will set you up if you want to make it happen
Any good news for technology companies is good news for our economy in general and for each of us specifically.
I like http://www.slinkset.com -- not open source and missing features, though
I think that really depends on how the forum is structured. Usenet suffers from having a horrible signal-to-noise ratio, and while mailing lists aren't bad, they nominally lack googlability and any sort of ranking system.

So, I think the problem isn't that web forums are bad, merely that the interface for using them isn't as good as a newsreader. Might be a good opportunity...
The two largest Rails deployments on the internet are not on that list.
Since you were non-format-specific in your question:

Neil Gaiman
Haruki Murakami
William Gibson
Neal Stephenson
Banana Yoshimoto

;-)
Ask YC: DDoS protection
I'm looking at launching an anti-spam service in the next year or so and since spammers occasionally target them with DDoS attacks I was wondering if anyone can recommend:
1)Good/Cheap DDoS protection software
2)Good/Cheap DDoS protected colo or dedicated providers
3)Good/Cheap DDoS protection services (a la proxy shield).
Anyone know what JavaScript engine they use?
On Stacktrace.it, we have an incredible series of articles on Scheme for Python programmers, but unfortunately, at the moment they're in Italian only:

http://stacktrace.it/articoli/2008/02/le-avventure-di-un-pyt...
http://stacktrace.it/articoli/2008/02/le-avventure-di-un-pyt...
http://stacktrace.it/articoli/2008/02/le-avventure-di-un-pyt...
http://stacktrace.it/articoli/2008/02/le-avventure-di-un-pyt...
http://stacktrace.it/articoli/2008/03/le-avventure-di-un-pyt...
http://stacktrace.it/articoli/2008/03/le-avventure-di-un-pyt...
http://stacktrace.it/articoli/2008/04/le-avventure-di-un-pyt...
http://stacktrace.it/articoli/2008/04/le-avventure-di-un-pyt...
It's not "their way of doing things", it is just the way the web works (per HTTP spec). Any crawler would have done the same thing in that situation -- that fact that it happened to be Google is merely coincidental. Given the scale at which they operate, you can't expect Google or any other web-scale crawler to be mind-readers.
On your first point, I think he's suggesting something like "a lazy programmer will right great, detailed unit tests because he's too lazy do all the work by hand and not excited about fixing obscure bugs down the road." Seems a bit odd to call that lazy, but I get the gist.

On your second point, I guess I would say that "curious" might be an odd word. Some people who are intellectually curious dive into things very thoroughly, so they are likely to be meticulous but also likely to quickly find something else to obsess over.
Python and the Twitter API
Just because something is intangible doesn't mean it isn't valuable. Don't take what I wrote as cynicism.

Most things we consider of significant value have no value in a physical sense, i.e. tangibleness.
I wrote a fairly lengthy article and published it, only to find I'd been logged out:(
http://geocoder.us/. It's very accurate and you can set it up locally for speed -- it uses Perl and BerkeleyDB and the TIGER database
That sort of thing scales with cost-of-living. Joel was making NYC money at the time of founding Fog Creek. $50k in South Carolina takes you halfway to a decent house. In NYC, a salary that big is barely enough to pay for an apartment in Manhattan for a year.
54 cd

40 dir

33 start

29 c:\python\python.exe

21 c:\tools\php\php.exe

...

just kidding
People still use ls? Why not just tab completion?
Looks interesting. I had a few good laughs.

I may have missed something, but it seems that some articles i'm able to chomp, while others im not. Is this intended, or a bug? I thought one was hilarious, when to chomp it, and it said "Chomped!" I hadn't chomped it. So I was a bit confused. Bug maybe?
i'm working on a similar project using rhino 1.7 on the jvm.

i've added a pretty seamless package management and script loading system on top of rhino (you can say 'package('foo.bar.baz')' and it does what you expect), and done a servlet that will invoke scripts written in it.

on top of the basic language and servlet infrastructure i've written a little glue to allow seaside-style continuation stuff, except that the continuations can be serialized and consumed inside another process so it can be clustered. i'm deeply indebted to attila szegadi for many of the techniques used to do this.

it's very cool (and quite fast/scalable) and js 1.7 is actually a very modern and powerful dynamic language (lexical scoping, comprehensions, generators, etc.). my company is in the process of open-sourcing it but if anyone wants a sneak peek let me know and i'll ship out a tarball.

oh and libraries aren't an issue, i've gotten everything i've needed by calling into the standard java library. we've written real applications with this thing.
Blogs? Nobody. I pay to read the authors that I'm willing to pay for, when I buy their books. Out of the OP's list, I've bought books by Steve McConnell, Paul Graham, Ted Neward and Joel Spolsky.
Hmmm, thanks for the head's up, I smell a bug. I'll double check my session flow after registration tonight.
Yeah I noticed the non-member chomping seemed a bit weird, I'm going to double check this tonight, thanks for the feedback. Basically, it should allow one vote on each story for each unique IP, whether you're logged in or not. I hope it's not allowing only one vote total for each non-logged in IP.

Maybe I should add a 'beta' tag at the top -- but I'm assuming my target audience wouldn't even know what that was ;)...
The cost is in distribution. How many people work in the TV industry to deliver the shows to the TV viewers vs how many people work in YouTube.
I imagine there are a bunch of startup types scattered around the Dallas area and this seems like something that might have a really positive impact. I'm near UTD in Richardson personally so anywhere around here is a good choice :)
Red Hat throws in towel on Linux desktop
I used to have cdl aliased to that, and lost track of it during a long sojourn in Windows. I'm still in the process of building out a really kickass bash again. Thanks for the reminder of that alias!
Steve Pavlina of 2005 and 2006 had some dazzling productivity and personal management articles.
try doing a search for DDoS in the colo forum over at webhostingtalk.com
UTD graduate at 635 & 75, here.
It seems so obvious, and yet it took me several years before I finally made a cd-ls alias. I made a mkdir-cd alias too.
Graphene is an amazing material but I think it suffers from the same problems as nanotube electronics - it's very hard to get the nanotubes to be positioned where you want them and connected in the topology that you wish. Geim's group has in the past used "exfoliated" graphene (basically the graphene is just peeled off with a bulk sample with scotch tape) And made some amazing discoveries that connect solid state physics to relativistic quantum field theory because of graphene's unique band structure. But for making electronic devices where you would want to pattern ~10^6 transistors, the exfoliation process is very hard to control and seems unlikely to scale well. When someone can produce a graphene sample the size of IC die call me. Still it does seem to have a lot of theoretical advantages over silicon, GaAs et. al. (especially the possibility of ballistic conduction)
We're building Bangladesh specific news sources into NewsCred ,currently in private alpha (I'm from Bangladesh too!) Drop me an email (shafqat[at]newscred.com] and we can talk.
You need to learn a lot more about DDoS if you think you can just hook up prolexic and be protected from DDoS.

Figure out your economics or bring on someone who has been there before.
Mencius Moldbug - http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/ - it's hard to tell if he's crazy or a prophet, but it's definitely the most intellectually fascinating blog I've ever come across.
See previously on News.YC: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=106020
MyOpenID for Your Domain - The Easiest Way to Use Your URL as an OpenID
You might also want to go through the "HOW TO: Secure and Optimize your VPS" tutorial at WebHostingTalk:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=468168
well that solves the least interesting problem at least ;)
Stone: Dead-Simple Data Persistence layer for Ruby web frameworks
I understand what the core functionality of Facebook involves, the fact that you must join does not make it "closed" at least by any reasonable definition that affects developers.

Also the amount of control Microsoft has over developers
and users is not comparable at all with a service like Facebook. You're talking about an OS that comes pre-installed in the computers most people use, they generally don't know how to keep it updated, much less remove it and install a different one. Anyone can join a new web service.

Oh and btw part of the reason Google stays at the top (at least with regard to revenues) IS because they're at the top. Having an enormous inventory is a big part of the ads business.
Product Creation: Sacrifice to Win
88 ss (alias for 'script/server')

81 rake

72 cd

34 git

23 sc (alias for 'script/console')

19 merb

18 sudo

14 ssh

13 nano

13 ls
Build Transformation across an Organization
Web 3.0 Will Be About Reducing the Noise
Why everyone should write a framework and never use it
This looks very interesting. I'm far from knowledgeable in this area, but I'd think radiation-created transient errors would be a serious problem with something this small.
ugh .... it is too early. There are so many ways, with some creative accounting, on how they could show more profit for this quarter and kick the can down the road.

The stock actually went down today, so investors are still weary of Google. The economy is going down the tubes, slowly but sureley.
+1 for pmarca.

Also http://particletree.com/ if it was updated more often - but I guess they're going for quality over quantity, which is fine by me.

Thanks for the post, will add some of those to my reading list.
Microsoft Acquires Farecast For $115M
Windows XP going off market in June: What it means?
He was some kind of manager at Microsoft for a while, so I'd guess he got some nice options from that.
Great idea, too bad I will miss the first one in SF. How about one in Boston on the first week of may?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/
This makes it even worse - I'm from Copenhagen, Denmark. Copenhagen is the 6'th most expensive city in the world to live in, just behind Hong Kong.
So you didn't do it...because you...didn't have a name?

What?
It took $50,000 plus tremendous distribution from his widely read "Joel on Software" articles. Don't underestimate that second part.
AC_MSG_CHECKING(for --with-js)
AC_ARG_WITH(js, [--with-js=PATH Path to spidermonkey source tree],
God, I need one now. May 1st, can't wait.
You can use:

Pligg: http://www.pligg.com/
PHPDugg: http://www.kubelabs.com/phpdug/
Google announces 1st quarter 2008 results
Microsoft's Ozzie gives open-source outlook
Everybody is keeping things quiet - any good solutions in sight? (not counting jaanix of course :)
Why Managing Small Projects is Harder
How to turn that IT Internship into an IT Job
Beware grannies on Facebook
I don't understand scribd's popularity. What's wrong with pdfs?
The posts on this thread show how news.yc has gone down the tubes.
They didn't announce until after hours, so only after-hours trading is going to reflect the call. And there, it's up big.
67 screen
59 ping
54 perl
49 vi
46 host
44 dmesg
39 killall
36 ps
30 ls
30 ip
Tab completion!!

Why the heck not?
Highly doubt it. They have a lot of signups, but I bet a lot fewer active users. Scribd claims over 17m uniques a month.

Though I bet 37 Signals financial statement looks a lot better.
Now you're talking about how he made that money work for his company. Might as well throw in the whole "don't pay myself or my co-founder," "work odd consulting jobs to get more cash," and "work out of my grandmother's old apartment," among various other tricks of the bootstrapper's trade.
Explain it to us!
Hey - I work in Portland, ME. Shoot me an email? john at quotesignal dot com - I'd love to catch up with you guys.
Also see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=160939
Not recommended if you are not already a lisp pro. The way you configure news.arc is through an arc prompt.
Ask YC - has the rating algorithm changed?
I've noticed that comments aren't necessarily sorted by how many votes they have. As I remember it they used to be. (I could be wrong here)

Has the algorithm changed? And what determines when a comment with a lover score gets to be shown higher than one with a higher score?
The Flow Experience
Whole-Brain Coding
134 sudo

55 csc

37 ls

34 cd

27 gcc

20 cp

19 ./guestbook.cgi

17 mzc

16 rm

14 make
They're sorted using the same algorithm as the frontpage: score divided by a power of time. It hasn't changed.
OK thanks

Just my bad memory then :-)
Hartija: Css Print Framework
i never liked acrobat reader on windows much. maybe that's it? or people just don't know where to host their pdfs. or don't know how to make pdfs.
Ask HN: Proto-hacker looking for a startup job
Hi,

I've always wanted to start my own company; discovering Paul's essays lead me to realize a web startup was something I was really interested in doing. I've begun teaching myself, but I'm not a programmer yet. pg suggests that the best way to learn "would be to find some startup to hire you in an initially menial capacity, and start learning to program on the side." This strikes me as a good idea. Also, I'd enjoy working in a company small enough that I can see the consequences of my actions and use them as feedback.

I've just had my 22nd birthday (April 5th) and have moved to the Bay Area to be at the center of the industry. I want the entire startup experience, so I'm willing to work at a feverish pitch to do anything that needs to be done. If you have a startup or can refer me to one, please comment or email me at arramsabeti@gmail.com

Thanks!
Ask YC:  Wouldn't social news be more interesting if it didn't penalize old submissions?
One could have a mixture of new and old submissions under "hot". Old submissions are fine provided that you did not seen them before (the service can keep track of this).

Indeed, such a service could have a devastating effect on paid advertising.
The ROI Case For Business Blogging
So maybe the popularity comes out of ignorance?
Definitely... the .pdf readers in OSX and Linux work much better.

The .pdf reader in Windows that feels the most like a *nix .pdf reader is Foxit PDF. The Foxit PDF editor is also pretty nice, it lets you edit .pdfs at a relatively low level of markup and spacing.
yes. but that's not necessarily a bad thing to say about scribd. if scribd makes it easier for people to not know anything about how to use computers, then that's valuable to lots of people.
Reminds me how when searching for Linux fixes, it is never clear what version they apply for. They might describe some elaborate hacks that have been irrelevant for years, because there are easier ways in newer versions, but it is often impossible to know. I wish I could find only the answers that still apply to my version of Linux.
Aptana has been marketing their GPLed Jaxer server ("the Ajax server") which includes things like database access from javascript:

http://aptana.com/jaxer
Can I be on the mailing list for a city not yet participating?

If so, add me to TO!
edit: It is now added!
It's been up by as much as 80+ points in after hours trading.
Forex Impact on Google Revenues: $202M
I did that with this:

function z () {
if [ $# = 0 ]; then
ls -lFGh
else
cd "$*" && ls -lFGh
fi
}

That way if you don't specify a directory it just does an ls.

Edit: and apparently it took away my line breaks there, but it still makes sense.
Hey, great idea. As a former comedy writer I think it's really cool you decided to focus on written content instead of the usual YouTube stuff; comedy articles are an underappreciated form these days.

I agree with those who've said the design needs some work. I can see what you were going for, but I'm not sure you got there -- film noir is a tough look to pull off on the web. The monospaced font does feel like it's from another era, but to me it feels more like the early 90s than a 40s broadsheet. Personally I'd go with a regular serif font like Georgia, with a healthy amount of linespacing. For consistency's sake, I'd also keep the number of fonts you use to an absolute minimum -- the use of Tahoma on the right sidebar makes the "Cast" and "Popular Articles" sections look sort of like RSS widgets that don't fit in with the rest of the content. All that aside I do like the simplicity of the layout.

Yeah, I love the idea and I hope it takes off. Best of luck.
Yeah, that's awesome. Very impressed.

I agree about the design, it's just too colorless. And this is coming from someone who does a lot of design for a lot of different things and always has people tell him he uses too much black and white.
Ask YC:  Why not show internet traffic in a user friendly way to alleviate security fears?
There are probably a huge number of people who are terrified to be online due to security risks.

So why not show incoming and outgoing internet traffic in a friendly way (e.g., using program names, highlighting sensitive data, etc.)?
Using SSD on a MySQL database server
Today's the reddit alien's third birthday
Automatically import the stories you've Dugg into Facebook
It makes you wonder when a startup should begin internationalizing their product.

I guess this is easier for some companies than others, though - an international version of a service like an rss aggregator is a lot easier than an international version of a community site like reddit.
On another note, Desktop Tower Defense is AWSOME!
The comedy article is hard to pull off because it's so rare an unexpected. There's not much precedent so it seems like an unusual art form. I think it would be easier to write stand-up, sit-coms, or YouTubeish videos.
We just haven't done it yet. :) We were talking about it last week, give us a break!
Scribd should win some award for being the most counterintuitive successful startup. It's hard to imagine that computer science majors came up with this idea!
youtube doesn't do much besides make a few things easy: make a file web accessible and convert to another format and provide comments and some text people can paste to embed it, and i guess favorites and a bit more -- all the kinds of things scribd has i think. plus give away free storage space and bandwidth, which scribd does too.