skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is porn a huge problem for scribd? I've never really looked at scribd before, so I just went to check out the Adult section. I'm seeing a lot of PDFs written in Cyrillic, "Soft Drink Awareness - How Coke and Pepsi are HELPFUL" and then further down "PUMPING women - are you running out of gas?." I'm not seeing a lot of porn here. However the stuff that is here seems pretty weird and hopeless. Scribd should have no problems removing it.
Am I the only one who ignores job postings asking for "Rockstar developers?"
Microsoft Gives Up on Vista
Yahoo beckons coders to gussy up search results
"Excercising my freedom does not give me the right to take away someone elses freedom."

Nonetheless, in this hypothetical situation, you failed in your quest to lay Megan. Therefore, by your own words, it is your own fault.

This myth, that it is your own fault if you fail to achieve your own goals, forms the foundation for conservative viewpoint in this nation. I'm not here to preach the gospel of the Left (they have their own mistaken views too), but you have to concede, as heart-breaking as it is, that the Right isn't always either.

Recognizing a situation for what it actually is necessitates that we take human behavior as an animal into consideration when observing our own behavior. Taken in the original context of the statement, the author's claim that our failures are "our" fault is an indictment, not merely an observation.

"Failure" is never just a black-and-white situation. We live in a complex, chaotic world. It's time it's addressed as such.
I recommend everyone go read the source essay by Ivan Krstić, rather than someone's commentary on it. See here: http://radian.org/notebook/sic-transit-gloria-laptopi
Digg - YouTube - Countdown: Special Comment
I like George Soros and hate demagogues.
Good point. I'm inclined to agree with you now. However, if the answer was something quick and easy, I would have done it.
I disagree with you, of course, but finding a fellow cycling fan here on HN is cool.

And I do agree with you that HN shouldn't cover the Giro. That's taking it too far (but I do think an occasional piece on a major geo-political issue is no problem at all).
Just came across this myself. You are right. Best piece about the whole OLPC mess I've read, mostly because I feel I understand what is going on with the OLPC, and maybe why everyone is leaving!
Learning to sit seiza will obsolete this solution.
I see two almost independent objections here, and I think the press has failed to convey this adequately:

- One is the Linux argument; that these laptops should be open to tinkering and closed source is inappropriate.

- One is the Sugar argument; that the desktop-and-windows GUI is not good enough, hence the building of the Sugar UI from the ground up. MS Windows is viewed as inappropriate for the same reasons that the laptop wasn't originally shipped with XFCE or GNOME.

As an interested observer, it seemed to me that both these arguments were prominent design objectives for a long time. It's not surprising that if you drop these objectives, a lot of the people who drank your Original Flavor KoolAid will drop you faster than New Coke.
The #1 Online News Experience is...
Have you thought about a dimensional model? IE a star scheme with a standard time/date dimension and your facts.
The point is that food is not video games. Food is a necessity for survival, unlike video games, and one that isn't best produced by the free market.

If farmers are not subsidized, you get things like the current food crisis: big companies squeeze out poor third world farmers, then food becomes more expensive to produce so the big companies, who care about profit more than farming, decide to produce less of it to drive up prices, resulting in a food shortage in the third world, one that the third world can't solve anymore because its farmers are bankrupt (short version).

Add to that the fact that the food produced by free market forces is often of dubious quality and nutritional value and it becomes clear, to me, that maybe farm subsidies are the lesser of two evils.

I agree with you, however, that the government shouldn't subsidize video games. Or most other things.
a.k.a Work Hard, Play Hard
Whoah! You realise you are referring to yourself as 'we'? You realise that you are losing your voice as an individual, and taking on a more neutral tone that represents a company? You realise what is happening, right? Your company is no longer a collection of startup founders, it's just a polite 'we'.

Lose that, it's the new world. Companies are made up of vocal intelligent people, not neutral hollow 'we's.
Short version: USA rediscovers common sense and humanity.
"I am getting really sick of people ragging on TV."

I would suggest getting a bucket then.

"Have you been watching TV lately?"

Have you observed the people who regularly watch TV? As a general rule, people know far more about what diet plan their latest football jocks are on than they know about world geography. I particularly loved this demonstration of this simple fact: http://youtube.com/watch?v=qUYm50jQscw

Heh, all I can say is, "Poor Australia."
Natural Gas and coal are good to go for centuries. That's my point.
Would you mind saying a bit more about the company?
Any hacker know how do you get on Digg front page?
looking to get my site YouYap.com on digg front page.
Any idea. I know a guy that get alot of his friend to digg story for him.
Both of these arguments sound like "we're going to build what our customers should want, not what they actually want". That rarely works except in a monopoly situation. Maybe OLPC imagined themselves as some sort of benevolent monopoly, but that rarely works as well.
Here's my take: treating a wronged person as a human, opening a discussion and offering reparations is likely to make them less angry and litigious, as compared to stonewalling and denying everything. This news is brought to you by some American hospitals.
You know, I would love an official API and several other features mentioned. But what I really want to see is faster serving of the Javascript included in my pages.

Several times recently, I've gone to my sites and it seems to never finish loading because Analytics is being slow again. It's at the foot of the page and installed correctly, but since it doesn't finish or close its connection it keeps the loading icon spinning forever which makes some users think there's still more to come. The last thing any analytics package should do is decrease the speed perception of your site.

Simple solution:

a) We download and install the Javascript on our end -- less for Google to serve, so they can focus on just saving the data.

b) They email us whenever a new version of the Javascript comes out, so we can update our copies.

That's not so hard, is it? Analytics is a nice stats interface, but it doesn't feel like it's been improved much (except for a new skin) in a long time. Expecting the above to be fixed, even just by improving the speed/stability of their JS serving, is the least we can hope for really.
I'd like to apply. Here is my experience:

In Programming:

- Programmed a bare metal steel pipe

- Wrote a napster clone - in VHDL

- Wrote a java virtual machine - in VB6

- Wrote a functional http server - in HTML

- Wrote a LISP compiler - in ARC

- Designed a Grammar that described a never ending program using a Type 3 grammar

- Wrote a windows Kernel Driver - using Punch Cards

- Created a COM object using only __asm push, pop and mov

In Marketing:

- Wrote a headline that converted more people than visited the site

- Sent an email newsletter that got forwarded more times than the ILOVEYOU virus

In Scaling

- Created a database that handled so many concurrent connections, we ran out of space in the integer

In design

- Created a GUI for a customer management system that was so intuitive, it only needed a single button and a single text field
Your question, "How do you get on Digg's fron page?" reminds of the question, "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?"

I'll quote the first paragraph of the referenced article (and is actually a good read):

"There's a story, perhaps apocryphal, about legendary pianist Arthur Rubinstein who was approached in the street near New York's world-famous Carnegie Hall by someone who asked, "Pardon me sir, how do I get to Carnegie Hall?" To which Rubinstein replied, "Practice, practice, practice!""

http://l.editthispage.com/2007/01/30
I have two friends at Google, one entry level in AdWords and another a senior exec in the social media division, and they told me they have had enough due to these reasons Fred listed.

It was bound to happen one day.
I'd like to suggest that you try to get these feature's implemented in getclicky. They're smaller. I feel like that make's them more susceptible to change. I think it's pretty apparent that Google isn't really listening to us here.

Plus they already has some of these features, which I think is awesome.

http://getclicky.com/
This begs the questions - who is the next Google?

Some place with a lot of growth ahead, human decency and appreciation of hackers values.
Ask HN: F/OSS Build Automation for C#
I've been really trying to get comfortable developing in C#.Net, as the platforming at work has been constrained to Microsoft offerings. Presented with a classic blank slate problem, I decided (perhaps in poor judgement and time mis-managed) to invest some time into starting a ('automatable') build process.

Anyways, if you've got a minute and can take a look (link at bottom), recommend any tools/tooling missing, and any good books that speak to these topics. Or, any constructive criticism that occurs to you as it might be entirely to sparse on the details. Thanks!

http://kleevr.blogspot.com/2008/05/c-build-automation-using-svn-havent.html

* I just realized I may have been using 'Ask YC:', when I should've been using 'Ask HN:',... or perhaps 'Ask 1:' *

and just remember shift-8 makes things italic
Also check out http://www.ccbda.org/publications/pub21e/21e-Section6.html#A... for a shorter overview
link: http://kleevr.blogspot.com/2008/05/c-build-automation-using-...
Here are some in-depth resources about asynchronous network IO:

http://www.unpbook.com/ (I'm glad to see that someone took over from Stevens so that these books don't languish.)
http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html
The simple answer: Get enough diggs from a wide range of users in a short space of time.

The problem is, to get those diggs your site or page needs to be something digg worthy. Unfortunately, your site (IMO) isn't digg worthy.
It all comes down to my former worry: don’t we need to strengthen the muscles of our brains? Once our brains find strength largely unneeded, because of the instant Provigil lift, then we’d surely become dependent on the drug.
Yeah, good point. Scribd should ditch the porn and introduce new features to provide their users actual sex, now that would be a killer app!
> It's just a series of quotes from crazy people who tell us we're all going to die

Actually none of them say that, nor are any particularly crazy. What they do say is that the global agricultural system is slow to react to changes, and when it does, it often dramatically overreacts, which can cause large-scale famine. They also say that “western” society has promoted an incredibly wasteful agricultural system which produces vast quantities of extremely unhealthy food, in the process sickening consumers and destroying landscapes.

Anyway, going directly to the sources (e.g. Pollan: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t....) is more useful than this New Yorker article.

> Another of my pet peeves is when people criticize the "Western" system of doing something without providing any contrast with an "Eastern" way of doing it.

It's just a way of lumping Western Europe and the US behind one generic name. In this case, the contrast is not with an “Eastern” way, but with a “developing country” way.
Try 'Search Y Combinator' instead:

http://www.searchyc.com/
> If farmers are not subsidized, you get things like the current food crisis:

Actually one of the biggest problems we face today is that American corn/wheat/soybean farmers are very heavily subsidized, and it threw the whole global agricultural system out of kilter.

> big companies, who care about profit more than farming, decide to produce less of it to drive up prices, resulting in a food shortage in the third world,

They aren’t intentionally driving up prices, no. But that is the effect of turning large amounts of corn into ethanol.

> Add to that the fact that the food produced by free market forces is often of dubious quality and nutritional value

None of our current food is “produced by free market forces” so this is merely speculative.
Number 1 is already possible and its even advised by Google. However, you don't get email updates.

I can't find the link that advises its use right now, but this link talks about hosting ga.js on your server: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?...
> Hooray! Many thanks. I knew that if I complained about this often enough...

The place to complain is the TextMate IRC channel, where someone will be happy to straighten you out in real time. :-)

> How should I approach this?

Well the easiest way would be to just make a series of 20 macros which insert the symbols when you press the numbers, and vice versa. But you could also do it through cocoa key bindings or a keyboard layout, with more trouble.
That's a short term view. Microsoft still has a monopoly, but it's dying. Teaching children on windows isn't a good idea IMHO. It's unlikely to be relevent to them when they are older.
MSDW

"Make Something Diggers Want"

( sorry, couldn't resist ;) )
I enjoyed reading this book, but:

(1) some of its arguments have been regularly refuted; for instance, "the power of context" and "broken windows".

(2) I've never heard a story about any real business using the "lessons" of this book to accomplish a marketing objective.
Another good book where I'm not sure I know of too many people actually accomplishing something practical as a result of reading it.
I did an internship at Microsoft in the summer of 2005. Every year, interns who are incoming seniors are invited to Bill Gates's house for a barbeque, and I was lucky enough to be able to go. At that time Google was so hot -- radically new and good, we thought, practically a developer's paradise -- but Bill kept saying that they were just the "media darling" of the moment. He said he'd seen it before, and soon enough Google would be just another company. A lot of the interns at Microsoft that year were probably rejected from Google -- maybe even most of us. "You just don't understand", we were thinking, "Google is different". There was no way Bill Gates could understand, of all people. But actually he was totally right.
Ries & Trout "Positioning" is a classic, and a short read.
Its interesting that in response to: "A YC company to -REVOLUTIONIZE- the food industry?"(emphasis mine) the posts center around why its not profitable, not possible, not desirable, etc.

Wow, a regular bunch of free-thinking, revolutionaries around here. Sad.

How about this: A company that helps educate and organize individuals and groups for cooperative food production. Sort of a distributed CFA(community farm alliance) except that a group combines its production resources to form a 'virtual farm'. And in turn, 'virtual farms' can trade in a 'virtual market'. The production could scale from the individual, to the group, to the meta-group, etc.

The premise is that an individual signs up and perhaps that person is already involved in some type of food production. Based on their location and what they are producing, they are assigned to contribute to a group of people producing other, complimentary goods. This group meets up and exchanges their produce so that they regularly have a good variety of vegetables etc.

Alternately, an individual can sign up and be assigned a certain production item. The site has extensive information resources, and trained farmers, agricultural engineers etc. that can be used for resources. Also, other members from local groups can help this individual if they are knowledgeable, etc.

Alternately, groups of people can choose to all produce the same vegetables and then trade them to other groups.

The site could invest in community garden plots and charge a small fee for the use of the soil, tools, knowledge base, etc. and in this way allow city/apartment dwellers to participate.

This site would be geared towards non-professional farmers that are still interested in local, organic food production. But perhaps it could scale to be larger.

Perhaps this isnt exactly, 'revolutionizing the food industry', but if the millions of people spending hours a day on social networks, etc. spent some of their time participating, this could seriously impact food production for many people.
I dont know, just off the top of my head, but surely its better to at least TRY to come up with an idea, rather than list off all the reasons its not possible or too hard.
NSFW Title + Hot Girl Thumbnail + Rickroll.

Works every time.
Any recommendations for good HP fan fiction?
Where are the unhappy founders?
[excuse a belated post about startup school]

I've been mulling over the differences between YC startup school and academic conferences. Startup school left me with a feeling I have not experience before.... It's hard to fully articulate, but perhaps "thrilling" is the best adjective. Founders I met dream big, they're excited, and those feelings are contagious.

Am I crazy? Are startup founders really as excited as perceived? My primary fear is a selection effect. Those interested and excited in startups, attend things like startup school, those who feel bitter, tired, or bored with startups, don't.

Still, the same could be said of academic conferences, yet, I have never felt the same air of excitement at one. Why? Am I missing something? Did anyone else experience the same sensation? Anyone interested in sharing their thoughts?

I'm utterly confused. It's easy to drone on with my own hyperbole here. I guess I'd rather hear yours. :)
The Only Sustainable Edge

This is pretty much the only book that matters ;-)
Honesty is the best policy. Who'd thunk it?
If possible ... Dont buy books, try marketing techniques in your own small enetrprise. In this way you will discover what works and what doesnt work.
Software Above the Level of a Single Device
Bahahahaha!
Most operating systems have some highly efficient way of handling many open network connections, for example epoll on linux, kqueue on xBSD, event ports on solaris. These are much more efficient than select() with large numbers of open sockets and the Erlang VM will use the appropriate one for the host OS when run with the +Ktrue option.

The SMP Erlang VM (as of Erlang/OTP R11B, R12B highly recommended) runs, by default, one process scheduler per CPU. So on a dual-core machine you can have two sockets being read from/written to simultaneously. Erlang allows you to program to a very simple model of one Erlang process per socket, with the VM using select/epoll/kqueue/etc to determine which processes have incoming data and are thus runnable.

Native processes use a lot of resources on most operating systems, so you can't use a process-per-socket model. So many web servers use a pool of processes/threads and queue up incoming requests that exceed that limit. Others use relatively few processes and use epoll/kqueue/etc directly.
Amazing feat of engineering; really puts into perspective the problems associated with supplying large amounts of power to densely packed areas.

Bonus points are awarded for suggesting that the 'Akira' be introduced as a unit of measurement for this kind of power.
Some observations:

Isn't the first title just the first volume of the Calculus textbook used in 'Saw'?

Does the second title have errata?

Does the third book describe the current political climate in the States?

Is the fourth book written by the Mafia?
You could drive your personal quotient through the roof if you switched to celery...
Second the Seth Godin recommendation. Best books there are on marketing. I also really like "The Big Dip"
Oddly enough, we just received a similar resume where I work..
How to stay very, very dumb. It's a fact: TV sitcoms destroy your brain.
If you make something awesome people will buzz about it and the news will naturally spread to news sites like Digg. I wouldn't qualify your site as "awesome" just yet.

You should get on the front page of Digg by doing something noteworthy, not try to make your thing noteworthy by getting on the front page of Digg. That's backwards.

edit: If there was a trivial way to get on the front page of Digg then anyone would do it and said site would become worthless. In fact it's a bit like your site, the barrier to entry is so insanely low any spammer can and does take advantage of it so why bother with it? The spam problem should be one of your top priorities right now.
First, get your site up and running. Then, make it compelling enough that people want to use it. Then, and only then, worry about getting publicity for it.
First of all, the corn / ethanol thing. That gets thrown about a lot, but it's not true. Only about 2% of the world's crop yield is used for biofuel production. So that by itself can't explain the current food crisis (which is real, but only if you live in the third world).

Second of all, I should have been clearer that I meant that third world farmers should be subsidized. It's the only way for them to survive the onslaught of western multi billion agricultural companies like Monsanto, which for a large part of their production certainly are not subsidized at all (though you're right about American corn/wheat/soybean farmers : American agriculture combines the worst of the European system - aggressive subsidies - with the worst of commercial aggriculture - inefficient production - from a nutritional point of view).

Third, American food is in fact produced by free market forces. It's the export to the rest of the world that is subsidized. Locally, small American farmers have been, for a large part, replaced by large agricultural conglomerates simply because those can create a large profit and buy up farm land even if the quality of their produce is at the very least debatable. European subsidies, on the other hand, go directly to farmers, allowing them to at least supply their home markets with plentiful food of often reasonably high quality.

The drawback of both systems is that food exports from the west (be they subsidized directly the way American food exports are or indirectly, the way European farm produce is) is that it destroys third world agriculture, which the IMF does not allow its governments to subsidize, either directly or indirectly by slapping import tariffs on food imports to offset the subsidies of the western governments.

Seeing as that this is the case (and a major reason for the food crisis) it seems to me not unreasonable to allow third world governments to subsidize as well to make the playing field somewhat level again.

A better idea would of course be to not subsidize at all but I don't see the US give up its export subsidies and, especially, the EU give up its farm subsidies anytime soon.
If you apologize sincerely, the victim will be less angry? Really? You're kidding, right?
Lots of CTO's don't build products, either.
I wonder how I could translate this to the shopping problem. I keep buying sweets in weak moments. Perhaps using two different purses could do the trick, one for forbidden stuff and the other for everything else?
Will you afford not to have the extra time?

Try to move to seasonal fruits, and add raw seasonal vegetables on top of it. Cut out the meat.

(This is probably what I'll be doing when my bf goes out of the country for a month... or at least, that's what I'm telling myself. :)
I didn't actually come up with this, he did: http://xkcd.com/125/
I always wanted to live right down the road from Carnegie Hall. That way when people asked how to get to my house, I could say "Practice, practice, practice. Then make a left."

[/plagiarism]