skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a great answer. The question was an attempt to see what's entertaining but not valuable, and what's so unique that there's no good substitute for. For instance, there are other web based email clients (not as good as gmail) but there's no other community I've found as great as HN. Since I'm sort of technologically isolated, the community here is a godsend that's the most stimulating entertainment I get outside of my wife and kids.
Do you Really Want to Be a Development Team Leader?
It could be made so that a nickname is automatically selected per-page. This way threads he comments in could be followed. A small pool of 5 or so names could be reused so that he couldn't be exposed by finding the user that has just been created.

Example implementation:

unames=['bob1','bob2','pg']
lu=len(unames)
secret_seed=309580435

from binascii import crc32
def hash_eq(number):
return crc32(str(number),secret_seed)

def get_uname(page_id):
return unames[hash_eq(page_id)%lu]

A checkbox for manual override could also be added.
Why I'm Not a [Insert Language Here] Programmer
Have you tried using Google Reader or other? I used to bookmark and revisit, but there were two problems - too much time visiting sites when there were no updates and it was too much hassle to visit sites with rare updates (like pg essays or Yegge novels). Now I follow ~150 feeds and it takes less time than I spent following 10-15 with bookmarks.
Alexa has changed! Big time...
Google (or even General) Non Compete
How does a non-compete work with Google? Is it usually:

1. Thou shall not sell thy services to a lord who is working on the same project as you were in Google.

or

2. Thou shall not sell thy services to a lord who is working on the same stuff as Google.

WHich one is it?

To me #2 would mean essentially not looking for work (in computing) for a year.

And how desperate would you be (individual situation ofcourse) to sign #1 or #2?

Cheers
FG
I'm not recommending they do or that quality would remain if they became paid. I just wanted to feel out which sites people really valued.
Even better: replace HN with a static snapshot of it as it exists right now! Then we know it will always be this good! :-D
Agreed -- there probably is something of a pg bias, but it's impossible to measure because his comments and submissions are better than the average anyways.
Thirded..
Cool app!

It's funny listening to tool & metallica and watching pictures of puppies and snowmen. Is this legal? Is it "fair use" because it's remixing music with pictures?

edit: I'm not seeing where it says what the current song is? Any pointers?
I looked for a solid week earlier this year, and didn't find anything that was really free or open. Kind of disappointing.

What I needed was to be able to take an IP, and get a reasonably accurate (25 miles) lat/long out of it. If anyone knows of one that exists, please let me know...
Handwriting Recognition for iPhone Now Available (PICS)
When browsing through http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg I notice that his comments won't make sense without knowing that it is pg who is making them.

Most are clarifications as Hacker News Maintainer and Furry Investor. (or Furry Capitalist?)

Knee jerk vote-ups I am guilty of are for: edw519, mixmax, rms, pg and nostrademons. But I'm very sure I'd have voted those comments up even if I didn't know the commenter's id. ID gives more context... it is like I hear it in a particular voice.
From 10000 to 0 Emails in an Inbox in 24 Hours
Good for him, that's a good idea and his network is good/big enough to make a site like this usable quikly.
I took the Bolt Bus (a regional bus line with power outlets and free wi-fi) from New York to Washington, DC this past weekend for $30 round trip.

For travel under 5 or 6 hours, you can hardly beat the price, convenience, or amenities. You can arrive 5 minutes early, pack liquids in your luggage, and surf the web. I expect a renaissance in bus travel if more companies adopt this model.
Pretty sweet. Question: is it possible for an embed not to immediately start playing when a person hits my blog?
I did think about providing the email interface. The only reason I ended up not implementing it was because I was afraid people would not be comfortable sharing their email ids with a new site. Plus, many people have auto email signatures (especially for office email account) that are appended automatically at the end of the email message. Sometimes these signatures contain personally identifiable information like title, extension number etc. I did not want this information accidentally disclosed on the site. I found these auto email signatures very difficult to parse out reliably across different formats and systems.
Being able to follow pg on his threads page is part of the bias too. He gets more votes because his comments get read by more people.
Dying 'Last Lecture' Prof's New Book Becomes Runaway Best Seller
It was just a joke in good earth. But now I see how you read it.

I'll try to double-check my post for ambiguïties next time.
I'll reserve judgement until I can see it in action, but on the surface the idea of a less spammy Expert's Exchange (I think that bit about the javascript windows is a subtle dig at them, but I can't be sure) could potentially be valuable.
There is probably a strong inverse correlation between working hard for success and attractiveness in men.

Why?
i was thinking that it would be funny if it was a data scrape of digg with a HN skin applied.

although that would probably turn out badly
I would hope that, if PG and I wrote exactly the same words about (e.g.) Lisp, his post would be upmodded an order of magnitude higher than mine. PG knows what he's talking about as a Lisp programmer, and we all know that. (The published books, the reputation, the history with Yahoo Store, and the existence of this site are big, big clues.) I don't know much about Lisp beyond SICP, and if I claimed I did you would have no way of knowing whether or not I'm telling the truth.

Context, in the form of background information about the author, makes a post more valuable. That's a no-brainer.
Ah, I thought security by obscurity was out of fashion by now. I'm admittedly out of touch with the "real" world.
But voting like this is screwing up the entire merit system we have here and enforcing group-think.

It's like movie stars getting elected to political office just because they are more recognizable...
Simple answer: money

it is interesting that article mentions height and money because while back i read another study that figured out how much money a man should make to compensate for a situation where the man is shorter than the woman. apparently there was an almost a linear correlation, for every inch of extra height that a woman has on a man, the man must have at least an extra 6 million of net worth.
+1, knee-jerk vote-up. :)

No, actually it's the phrase "it's like I hear it in a particular voice". Precisely correct. Sites like this one aren't collections of anonymous robots talking to other anonymous robots.
Microsoft to Show New Web Design Software at CRE8 Conference in Orlando on May 1
sigh ... I miss Usenet.

I wouldn't mind seeing a One True Site for technology questions again and sure hope this becomes one.
All I need is an MBA
This is a quote to counteract the misleading view that hackers are commodities, rather, it is the MBA's.

Guy Kawasaki was one of the original players that got Apple on its feet with the Macintosh. He now works as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley as CEO of Garage Technology Ventures

Kawasaki remarked, "I don't think an M.B.A. matters very much for starting a company. A much better educational background is an engineering degree. You can always hire MBAs, but if you don't have the ability to conceptualize and deliver a product, you've got nothing."

Link:
http://www.insidecrm.com/features/mbas-are-overrated-081307/
Thanks for your feedback. To answer your questions,

1. Benefit for the person asking the question: The person gets answer from the people he knows. When I needed CPA to file my taxes this year I found myself sending email to my office colleagues although there are many CPA reviews available on web. May be it's just me but sometimes suggestions from the people you know matter more than generic review site.

2. Benefit for the people who answer: These are people who are friends with the person asking the question. If they see email in their Inbox from a friend asking a specific question I think at least few of them will help.

At least that's what I think :)
Wow, further evidence that the most important tech book I ever read was Maurer's The Big Con:

http://www.amazon.com/Big-Con-Story-Confidence-Man/dp/038549...

I keep waiting for an enterprising Nigerian journalist to write the 419-scammer version of this book.
The only thing I remember from Business School:

"A degree in business is a degree in nothing."
"I don't know much about Lisp beyond SICP, and if I claimed I did you would have no way of knowing whether or not I'm telling the truth."

Well, someone as good as or better than you could tell if you're telling the truth. Of course, unless he himself wanted to know if it's the truth then someone as good as or better than himself would have to validate his validation of your claims. So it's a recursive chain-of-trust problem thing.

PG is not exactly the last word on lisp, for example I think a good implementation of Common Lisp knows more about it than he does ;P
I broadly split blogs into three types: Personal / Journal, Links, and Essays (either Opinion or well researched).

The first type could become self-serving, but isn't so necessarily. The other two are more outward looking.

Of course, regardless of the type, if you've been blogging for more years than you have readers then you may have narcissistic tendencies.
Experts Exchange definitely used to do rot13 and for sure do javascript windows. Plus, it's always within a few results on Google. There's no way he can possibly be talking about some other site.

(edit: admittedly this is still speculative)
Yeah, lets forget careful thinking and just support whoever had a good record previously regardless of what they say today.
If you did have to pay (I realize this is hypothetical), what if they charged per article you read and you got a free read when you contributed? Or part of a free article when you edited. Would that help to keep it extensive?
The experience of reading a comment knowing the commenter's id makes up (a little bit at least) for the lack of face2face. For example, based on a previous discussion, I know that mixmax had sex with a porn star :) When I read his comments now, my brain does some signal processing magic using this. Please note that I don't give him a +1 coz of this history. But this knowledge puts warmth in an otherwise cold place (cold = place filled with strangers).
Way too early? Using Facebook's own audience to translate it into their own languages sounds like a pretty dang good one. They don't have to do any work, and their number of translations will keep climbing. I think you can make some legit guesses based on that.
The Million Zimbabwean Dollar Homepage
I created this parody of the Million Dollar Homepage - it was mentioned on boingboing and the nytimes - I just want to get rid of the rest of the pixels so that I can say I sold them all. They are cheap! $0.03 per 900 pixel block. Thanks!
Interview with Debra Willret, Inventor of MacProject
The author suggests that techies may migrate back to Slashdot. I, for one, never left. Their editorial selection for front-page news cannot be beat. The commentary is still drivel, though.

My philosophy: go to Slashdot for the news, come to HN for the commentary.
yes, but sometimes the reputation is valuable. Given a poster's prior probability of intelligent comments, you have more information on which to vote.
in my experience, if you can get an engineering degree, you can get an MBA if you want one. but not necessarily the other way around.
Why VCs Aren’t More Brave
Yes, necessarily biased. Severely in some cases, but there's only one way to prove that...
Even if you implement this experiment, I bet there will still be an inherent bias for PG-related material, most notably his essays.

I really don't have a problem with it... that's what this community is all about. Hacker News is PGs world, and if you don't like it, then go somewhere else.
I think a good implementation of Common Lisp knows more about it than he does.

Perhaps -- but despite decades of effort and ambition, that implementation of Common Lisp still doesn't write very good essays about itself. ;)
+1 This should be tried.
Thanks for your feedback.

Other people on your email may also be interested in the answers you get - may be now or in future. It happens all the time on the mailing list I use. People request others to consolidated answers they has received for the questions they asked in past. That's what gave me this idea. This way they get to see them easily at one place without any extra effort of manually consolidating every now and then. I hope overtime it will build into a community knowledge base of common questions and answers.
i have faith that he'll produce a good solution, but the idea itself isn't new, so that might hold it back on the popularity scale.

here's to hoping. i'd love to see a consolidated resource.
Instead of getting into a numbers match between all the influencing factors, I'd rather just point out that there are many confounding factors and that the authors of this seemed to miss that point entirely.
i agree, but it's best not to overextend yourself in guessing about the intentions of others.
Thanks for the suggestion.

Yes, I definitely intend do give some sort of "Browse" navigation in future - maybe with a tag cloud? It's currently not on the site because I have not much content right now as I just launched it a few days ago. If I had top categories they will all be empty :) I will put them on once I have some sizable content.

Kinda chicken-and-egg problem :)

BTW you can see it (kinda) in action at http://askurpals.com/topic/10
I created this parody of the Million Dollar Homepage - it was mentioned on boingboing and the nytimes - I just want to get rid of the rest of the pixels so that I can say I sold them all. They are cheap - $0.03 per 900 pixel block. Thanks!
I really hope this works out well.

Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood are two of my most respected programming heroes.
In my experience most of the pay-for-info sites are MS related, or I should say, are for MS-related-technology. I used to find all kinds of great answers in deja and then google groups, but I think that IRC is sucking up all the latest programmer exchanges. Getting all those logs indexed onto the internet would be of great service to mankind.
Someone posted a while ago about a website with a similar idea (I guess it was called bugg'd) where you try to get solutions for your bug, and if you couldn't find in there, you'd be encouraged to post the solution you found elsewhere.
Edward Lorenz, father of chaos theory and the butterfly effect, dies at 90
i've found myself going back to slashdot after a decently long absence as well, but man, it's like they are in a competition with digg over who can have the worst comment interface. it's better than it used to be, but it's way too noisy.
For any interested souls, one million Zimbabwean dollars is equivalent to $33.37 as of this post. [1]

[1] http://cn.quote.com/us/forex/convert.action
We should put it on Justin.TV
You also allow him to relax his quality while enjoying his automatic points. Plus group-think lock-in for free.

I can only reducing this making the overall quality here improve.
And that's the "official" rate. The actual black market rate is much less - one million Zimbabwean dollars = $0.20

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601116&sid=aARo...
The GeoLite Country database at:

http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecountry)

is just fine for countries. The Ruby gem works nicely:

http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/...

... and there are other APIs as well:

http://www.maxmind.com/app/api

MaxMind is the standard.
You left out the "I wish I could afford to travel from Boston to the Valley this year" option, so I just voted "CowboyNeal".
suggestion: you actual logo size is 600x150, but you are shrinking it into 500x125, as a result, the quality is degraded. You logo looks much better in actual size: http://www.myplaylist.biz/i/myplaylist.jpg
In particular in the web industry, there's a lot of programmers who have "done all the hard stuff" and now just need a designer to "make it look pretty,"despite the fact that good design with a focus on usability is likely to change the structure and flow of the application.

I mention it, because I've caught myself thinking this way.
It's time to study the value of college (rising costs, falling benefits)
The MaxMind GeoIP City Database includes latitude and longitude. You could buy their "Web Service" at $20 per 50,000 queries...
Reiser's attorney: my client's a platypus, not a murderer
Well, better for their career or better for their dating life?:)
Slashdot is too noisy for me.

Aside from Hacker News, I still find some useful things on Programming Reddit, and I keep up with other tech news on Techmeme.
I hope reddit starts charging people to post. The "joke accounts" are ruining the site. $5 would kill those in 20 seconds.

Then we would just have to delete the non-programming parts of reddit. :)
Liberal arts school.

My reasoning is that first, you will be exposed to a broader curriculum, which will ideally make you more creative. Second, when going into college, you usually do not have a good idea of what you want to do (even if you think so now), so best put yourself in a position where you are giving yourself options. Third, it's good to be around people who do not think in the same way as you. Segmenting yourself away with a bunch of people who are more likely to think like you will only lead to groupthink. And fourth, if you plan on meeting girls at college, engineering school will leave you miserably disappointed.
If it's going to be a combination of Wikipedia, anti-experts-exchange, and programming reddit, they should have some feature where, when the answer is determined, all the other crap gets deleted, so that people searching into the site to find the answers sees ONLY the answers. (And related tidbits.) Maybe a certain "answered problems format."
Or maybe he just modifies his karma directly :)
Yup. It's a very good plan. The key is Accelerated C++. Just lock yourself in a room with a computer and a coffee machine and get through that book. It's short, well written, and contains examples throughout that you should be typing in as you progress through the book.
"You don't have to read past that first sentence to realize that this is heavily biased opinion from a person who earns his living doing web design."

Absolutely! Really, who could be less qualified to comment on web design?
Persistent identity is an important building block in community formation. Clay Shirky goes into some detail on this in "A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

"If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in. [...] It's pretty widely understood that anonymity doesn't work well in group settings, because "who said what when" is the minimum requirement for having a conversation. What's less well understood is that weak pseudonymity doesn't work well, either. Because I need to associate who's saying something to me now with previous conversations. The world's best reputation management system is right here, in the brain.[...] If you want a good reputation system, just let me remember who you are."

I am not sure what the problem is that you are trying to solve, but full anonymity will undoubtedly cause the HN community much more headache than whatever you believe is afflicting is now. Whether there is a "PG bias" or not, he is accountable for his words because they are associated in a persistent fashion with his login.

One final point, I don't know about a pg bias, but I certainly have a positive nickb bias, because he has submitted so many good articles, I will normally follow whatever he posts even if I am not thrilled about the title. Doesn't mean I vote him up no matter what, but making the submissions anonymous would remove an important signal/attribute.
I guess if you were really clever you could cache it too, if you had a site with a ton of traffic.
Many will argue that going for engineering gives you far more options with what you can do after.
Flickr enhances support for its API
all the accounts here are bots. Theres like 3-4 real people total. ;)
Alexa's rankings - still not good enough
http://www.hostip.info works great for me on www.newshoured.com
Sarah used to live in New York and cover fashion for women's magazines. Then she moved to Yemen
Learning is fun. Get an engineering/cs undergrad, then get an MBA. This way you can understand the entire spectrum of a technology company from code to financials.
I totally agree with you snowbird, I want to get that broad spectrum too. But its just too bad that a cs/engineering degree does not carry the same prestige and job security (or at least ease of job change by not super-specializing)as an MBA.
This is a great discussion about how to make a bookmarklet. I would like to see someone address the topic "How To Get Someone To Actually Use Your Web Application's Bookmarklet"

What bookmarklets do you all actually use? The only one I use regularly is delicious. Despite how simple it is, they don't seem to have much adoption.
Whichever school it is, it better be a BS. You don't want to know how lame it is to explain why you got a BA in CS.
It is interesting that you mention that MBAs have job security. I'm not so sure it is true. MBAs are often "middle management" and can be the first to be dismissed in hard times. Companies that think programmers are commodities aren't worth working for anyway.
The international kilogram conundrum
Damn. 6 million dollars per inch.
This is dead on about the copyright infringement.
Thanks for the mention!

That's our service: http://bug.gd

Our services focus solely on error messages-- the goal is to make it so no one ever has to solve any error message someone already bypassed.

While we're a solution database, it's not quite the forum as Joel's site sounds like it will be (more like Experts Exchange).

We use error messages as a vector for connecting users with different solutions. This let's us get a little more exact on the possible solutions, but we wouldn't cover typical programing or sysadmin tips/tricks. For example, we're also a Firefox extension, a Python interactive interpreter plugin, and will eventually grow to capture error messages for all sorts of software and help people right away while they use the applications.
It's an interesting idea and one that has merit. One of the smartest programmers I know didn't go to college. He spent his formative years building pipe organs and having 5 kids.

However, this makes the mistaken assumption that college's only role is to prepare you for a career. I majored in Philosophy at a Jesuit college in Chicago. Currently, I'm a software developer. College was about getting introduced to new ideas and read books I would have never sought out on my own. Really... who reads Augustine or Kierkegaard anymore? I learned how to live on my own in college; how I wanted to spend my time and my money, how to survive in my first apartment and make rent money. I also met a great bunch of friends I still keep in contact with.

Bottom line: college should never be treated like a trade school. It's not designed for job training. If you consider it so, it never makes economic sense. College, and liberal arts degrees in particular, teach you how to think.