skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The notion of pointers is interesting - to me, as a relative novice to programming, pointers seem as the intuitive way of doing things - and not at all hard. What this implies is that different people have very different mental models of the world and how it works. I know people that I would certainly consider smarter than myself who have trouble understanding the concept of pointers - so it's not just about intelligence, though a certain baseline is probably needed.

On the other hand I have serious trouble understanding faith and the thought of a god - this is one of the things that just doesn't seem to fit into my mental model of the world. So understanding certain abstract concepts seems to have some kind of correlation to how you view the world, and what you find to be easy and what you find to be hard.

I'm not quite sure I brought the point across in a coherent manner - but one can hope...
What are the most frequently asked questions by a VC?
When you go for a fund raising, what are the most frequently asked questions by a VC?
And yes, both SCO and Xenix are dead now.
You can. Just indent it.
Good idea. I would suggest "> " instead of "|" (Markdown-like).
How come mod_rewrite is on there? Isn't that basically just regular expressions?

As for a more general suggestion: databases. Seriously. It is embarrassing how many aren't, but just about every programmer these days has to be very comfortable with understanding database querying and optimization, because that's one of those few lines of code which can make or break an entire application.
Quite good

At first I thought it was free hosting spam lol
Oh god, here goes the procession of posts like this, everybody off the cliff before its too late.

Wanna make the quality of the community better? Submit better things, be more selective about your upmods, make better comments but dont flood it with dramatic I'm leaving posts.

By doing so you're contributing to the the very problem that caused you to leave...
A collection of styles that lets you control the appearance of websites and Mozilla applications
Also, here's a quick-and-dirty diff for it:

--- news.arc.old 2008-03-31 15:07:54.000000000 -0700
+++ news.arc 2008-03-31 15:08:34.000000000 -0700
@@ -382,7 +382,9 @@
.pagebreak {page-break-before:always}

pre { overflow: hidden; padding: 2px; }
-pre:hover {overflow:auto} "))
+pre:hover {overflow:auto}
+
+blockquote {border-left: 3px solid #bbbbbb; padding-left: 8px; font-style: italic;} "))

; only need pre padding because of a bug in Mac Firefox

--- app.arc.old 2008-03-31 14:07:12.000000000 -0700
+++ app.arc 2008-03-31 15:06:43.000000000 -0700
@@ -423,6 +423,13 @@
(pr cb)
(= i (+ (- newi spaces 1) (len cb))))
(pr "</code></pre>"))
+ (iflet (newi spaces) (blockquoted s i (if (is i 0) 2 0))
+ (do (pr "<blockquote><p>")
+ (let bq (block-quote s (- newi spaces 1))
+ (pr (car bq))
+ (= i (cadr bq))
+ (pr "</p></blockquote>")))
+
(iflet newi (parabreak s i (if (is i 0) 1 0))
(do (unless (is i 0) (pr "<p>"))
(= i (- newi 1)))
@@ -441,7 +448,7 @@
(tag (a href url rel 'nofollow)
(pr (if (no maxurl) url (ellipsize url maxurl))))
(= i (- n 1)))
- (writec (s i))))))))
+ (writec (s i)))))))))

(def indented-code (s i (o newlines 0) (o spaces 0))
(let c (s i)
@@ -455,6 +462,20 @@
(indented-code s (+ i 1) (+ newlines 1) 0)
(indented-code s (+ i 1) newlines (+ spaces 1)))))

+(def blockquoted (s i (o newlines 0) (o spaces 0) (o arrow 0))
+ (let c (s i)
+ (if (is c #\|)
+ (blockquoted s (+ i 1) newlines spaces 1)
+ (nonwhite c)
+ (if (and (> spaces 0) (is arrow 1))
+ (list i (+ 1 spaces))
+ nil)
+ (atend i s)
+ nil
+ (is c #\newline)
+ (blockquoted s (+ i 1) (+ newlines 1) 0 0)
+ (blockquoted s (+ i 1) newlines (+ spaces 1) arrow))))
+
(def parabreak (s i (o newlines 0))
(let c (s i)
(if (or (nonwhite c) (atend i s))
@@ -494,6 +515,25 @@
(nonwhite (s (+ i 2))))))
(writec (s (++ i))))))

+(def block-quote (s i)
+ (++ i)
+ (list
+ (tostring
+ (until (let left (- (len s) i 1)
+ (or (is left 0)
+ (and (> left 3)
+ (is (s (+ i 1)) #\newline)
+ (or (no (is (s (+ i 2)) #\|))
+ (nonwhite (s (+ i 3)))))))
+ (if (and (>= i 0)
+ (is (s (+ i 1)) #\|)
+ (or (is i 0) (is (s i) #\newline)))
+ (do (writec #\space)(++ i))
+ (if (is (s (+ i 1)) #\newline)
+ (do (pr "</p><p>") (++ i))
+ (writec (s (++ i)))))))
+ i))
+
(def unmarkdown (s)
(tostring
(forlen i s
@@ -520,6 +560,11 @@
(awhen (findsubseq "</code></pre>" s (+ i 12))
(pr (cut s (+ i 11) it))
(= i (+ it 12)))
+ (litmatch "<blockquote><p>" s i)
+ (awhen (findsubseq "</p></blockquote>" s (+ i 16))
+ (pr #\newline #\newline "|")
+ (pr (subst "\n|" "</p><p> " (cut s (+ i 15) it)))
+ (= i (+ it 16)))
(writec (s i))))))
I want it to look pretty, though. Not like code.
Yeah, probably a good idea. Harder, though, since arc turns > into &gt; before running the markdown stuff on it.
Ask YC:  Anyone want to get together before Startup School?
I've put together a meetup page to organize a get together the night before Startup School. It's at a cafe in downtown Mountain View. There's a map, directions and 3 time slots that people can sign up for.

Sorry about the RSVP requirement, I just didn't want to overwhelm the cafe if 50 people showed up at once. And, I thought it would be easier to break the ice if people showed up in smaller groups.

The link is here: http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/1737/

And also get there from the Startup School Wiki: http://wiki.startupschool.org/doku.php

Looking forward to meeting people.
Does anyone else have experience with BrainTree? They look good and seem to offer a very robust API (which would make -my- life a heckuva lot easier), but my boss is still leaning towards PayPal due to brand/stability.

Also, they talk a lot about "up-front pricing," yet I can't seem to find any information about pricing and fee's on their website. What gives?
That is actually one of the steps. :) But I've been waiting for "instant approval" from JourneyEd for two weeks now for Microsoft's DreamSpark program.
This insightful News.YC thread that I stumbled upon a while back seems to explain C pointers in a different manner better than I have seen elsewhere:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=87348

(Other than the stuff about casting between pointers and ints though.. )

"That was the lightening bolt moment. The problem with pointers in C is that the [star][varname] syntax means two different things, and they are actually contradictory from a certain perspective. In one context it means "declare a variable that is a pointer" and in the other it means "deference". Whenever my languages-brain bit looked at this it couldn't deal with it, recognised it as a contradictory positions and basically shut me down, but not in a way that let me work out what was going on. Have a look at it yourself from that perspective - hopefully you'll see what I always did. Now whenever I look at C code I instead just think "everything is an int and pointers are all about casting ints, and a star when you declare something is your way of telling the compiler that the type of this thing is int-pointer instead of just int". Thus I now have no difficulties at all."
I'd love to see this for prototype. Let us know if you ever get around to it.

Mootools lets you do it; you can even choose the type of compression you want (although I prefer to minify things myself): http://www.mootools.net/download
I thought Startup.com was worth watching primarily because it was pretty entertaining (e.g. how easy it was to get funding during the Boom; how much of a scam artist that Kaleel guy is). Watching the company collapse was instructive -- they didn't focus on making something people wanted. It was also interesting to see how badly they mishandled conflict among the founders, and how they were able to blow through so much money so quickly.
I don't think the quality has declined much at all. Good articles make it to the top and the commenting is fine.

Your comments were downmodded because they were petty and you have a bad attitude. When you post:

"whatever downvote me, i am probably done also with hacker news too... no comparison to what it was 1 year ago...or at least few months ago"

what do you think is going to happen?
This is Ty Hurd from TysBlog.com - I take full responsibility for this. By no means did I anticipate you getting SPAMMED with a bunch of crap posts. I only meant for people to posts quality and relevant posts here. This site is a good resource for traffic, but only if the posts are relevant. My sincerest apologies.
Is downvoting comments really a problem? I haven't noticed that. Maybe your comments suck? :-)
I think that this is not the kind of thing you learn by reading a book - or sitting in front of a computer. It's a people thing. People have a knack for seeing through other people, whether they believe what they are presenting, like what they do etc.

These are the things I would recommend if you want to do a great demonstration:

- Love your product - nothing shines through like enthusiasm. Don't be afraid to show it either.

- Talk to people, study their reactions, smile to the waitresses, hook up with girls (or guys if that's your preference), start conversations with strangers on the bus. Like in all other walks of life if you practice interacting with people you will become good at it.

- Study great speakers when they do their thing - Start by looking at some of Steve Jobs keynotes. The guy is amazing. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are great at it too.

- Be prepared - Do your presentation until your girlfriend starts complaining that you talk in your sleep and she has heard more about you product while you sleep than she has heard about her other girlfriends sexlife. And that's a lot... Steve Jobs recites until everything is absolutely pixel perfect, and every eventuality is covered - and it shows. On their keynotes I heard that they have three independent AV systems. Just in case two of them break down.

- Read Dale carnegies "how to win friends and influence people - it's much better than all the modern crap. It's from the 1930's if my memory serves me correctly.

Good luck :-)
I found this:
http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/sounds/_HYPE.html

"<HYPE> is an "easter egg", an obscure feature hidden in a program for no other purpose than to make the programmers giggle themselves silly. In some versions of Netscape, <HYPE> plays a silly sound."
For those who have already added OpenID support, or something like Clickpass - what is the adoption rate like? How many people use it versus the traditional login?

I would be surprised if it's as high as 10% even for a tech-savvy site like News.YC, but I'm not basing that on any facts. Am I way off?
Analyst: How Apple sells 45 million iPhones in 2009
Why are you bothering me? Can't you see I'm checking my Blackberry?
Content owners should drop Yahoo for Google
The first half is an argument with a strawman:

It can be done, but you have to make it a deliberate project and
put some time and thought into it, rather than just stumbling on a
bunch of programmers in a cafe.

The story about the programmers in the cafe was not evidence for
any claim. It was just an explanation of what set me thinking about
the problem. It's not a pillar holding up anything, so attacking it
proves nothing.

(Incidentally, a moment's thought would have made it clear that I
have in fact "put some time and thought into it." I've spent 24 years as a
professional programmer, during which I've observed thousands of
programmers working for all sizes of companies. Plus I've seen
first hand the transformation undergone by roughly 200 YC-funded
founders so far.)

The second half is fallacy:

But rather than pointing out fallacies, a better way to refute
Graham's evolutionary argument is by reductio ad absurdum. ... Our
ancestors lived in a world that was shrouded in darkness half the
day, therefore we would be happier without electric lights.

This supposed refutation can itself be disproven by reductio ad
absurdum, because it could be applied to any explanation of our
inclinations based on how we evolved.

(Bad example, incidentally. There do seem to be conflicts between
electric lights and human biology:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02...)

Neither of these arguments even attempts to refute the central point
of the essay. In case anyone wants to try it, the central point
is that in an organization organized as a tree structure, structural
forces tend to give each person freedom in inverse proportion to
the size of the whole tree. That we work better in groups of 10
than 100 I feel is obvious enough not to need justification. The
argument from evolution is just an attempt to explain why groups
that size work.

Though on the whole my reaction is "I want my 20 minutes back,"
there was one encouraging thing about this experience. Even these
dishonest DH5s are more civil than Atwood DH2ing
about my choice of metaphors.
Privacy and the Commitment Problem
Typography: Going back to the future
Privacy: Beating the Commitment Problem
We use Proto/Scripta simply because it has better integration with Rails. I do like jQuery's syntax, however.
Later: Problem seems fixed. The server had been running for a comparatively long time, maybe two weeks. Presumably it (or Mzscheme) ran out of something. It seemed more important to make the site work than figure out what.
Yes, it was us.
Q&A: Ridley Scott on hacking "Blade Runner"
@ attention seeker - just leave if you dont like it. I bet you come back and lurk now and again :-)
Very well written, thanks for the link.
is air worthless, or _price_less?
Startup Advice for Hacker News Founders
I recently lost my company so thought I would share some unorthodox advice to Hacker News members.
America Online + AIM, Yahoo, Flickr, Livejournal, Vox, Typepad/key, Google, and enough widely-used sites, plus Drupal, Wordpress, and other widely-used platforms provide OpenID that very few users would need to create yet another login/password. Those already with many logins would likely already have multiple identity providers from which to choose. Those with few logins would presumably have less of an issue.

See http://wiki.openid.net/OpenIDServers for a much larger (but nowhere near comprehensive) list of providers.
shoot them an email to get pricing. they are massively more flexible than paypal, no branding on your site, and cheaper. seriously.
[edit] Part of Microsoft's AjaxView project:

http://research.microsoft.com/projects/ajaxview/

I don't recall being able to get the prototype working, but I didn't spend much time fiddling with it.
Bringing the cloud with you
The previous (first?) one is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=149887

It has interesting discussions on the current and historic quality of HN, which mostly give me the impression that it's all a matter of personal preference.

(note: I've not been around long, so I haven't experienced the "decline")
it was actually painfully hard. we ended up with a very elegant solution though... Blogger has a set of widgets, but we introduce some new ones (like a 'Photos' widget or an 'Events' widget). These sort of inherit from existing ones (by transforming their templates), so designers only have to code html+css for the standard 'Blog' widget and the others are inferred
There are many things I can list. But I'll provide just one - get a tripod/camera and videotape yourself presenting.

"Speaking Secrets of the Masters: The Personal Techniques Used by 22 of the World's Top Professional Speakers" is the best book I have ever come across on speaking as an art/science because it has many different insights.
Ugh. Looks like some accounts got corrupted when I shut down the server. If anyone else sees similar problems, please let me know here, and I'll fix your account from backups.
In-memory, in-process storage is by far the fastest option (assuming you know a hashtable from a granola bar). A single server can easily handle 1000+ requests/second, which is plenty. The only reason not to do it is if your data doesn't fit in RAM, which is probably not the case for News.YC.
When to Use GIF and JPEG Format
even though we have launched, we aren't trying to attract major pr yet. we want to beef up a few features a little more first, but when we do, we're thinking (besides announcing on the standard internet portals) to talk to some large national organizations (greek, community, etc). there is no paid version, but you CAN currently use your own domains for free. (in the "settings" tab)
What is USB?
Feature requests go here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
Types of Broadband Internet Access
Different Methods of Connecting Multiple Computers to One Internet Connection
> ... - and I don't presume to know how it happened.

Like I said, I only know enough to know that I can't comfortably refer to evolution to explain human nature. My point is that I doubt that most people who do reference evolution are familiar with the likes of sociobiology either.
ideally we would have a 'live demo' but our current architecture makes this tough. this is 1st on our list though.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsK1c9ZBpuw <= 21 Trailer
Good stuff. I would've liked to see data for: Nginx + Mongrels, Ngninx/Apache + Evented Mongrels, Swiftiply + Evented Mongrels.

http://brainspl.at/articles/2007/05/12/event-driven-mongrel-...
btw, we had to make a custom blogger xml interpreter from scratch
communities must grow or they will eventually die off.
as communities grow their aggregate intelligence goes down.

the problem is to reconcile these two facts.
good luck, because society hasn't solved this problem yet either. The most successful societies have been those that spread the most effectively, not the ones that treat their citizens the best.
thats a really good point, thanks. i was just looking at 37signals' backpack homepage and they handle this pretty well. might do something similar
Category theory in general, because it encompasses areas of computer science, mathematics, and physics.
There should be more advice on startups from people who failed - they bring key insights to the table.
Sub-$300 iPhone, 3G model seen driving 45M unit sales in 2009
Agreed, hence why I thought i'd publish my two cents
I wish there a way to tell when someone has added a new comment to one of the threads I'm involved in. This would be especially useful for threads that are more than a couple days old (too old to be worth checking specifically). Just because activity has died down doesn't mean I don't care if somebody says something. On the contrary, after-the-fact comments are often more thoughtful because the writer really cares about the topic.
With Vista breached, Linux remains unbeaten in hacking contest
Rate limit down (and up) voting, so you can't vote on a bunch of stuff very fast, but you won't notice the rate limit if you are reading the stuff you vote on.
My partner and I have been working on something similar at thinklinkr.com. We are currently (3/31/08) showing our crude version to friends and iterating rapidly. Drop me a line at vishu at thinklinkr.com and I'll send you an invitation.
The amount of fraudulent transactions going through PayPal and then requiring reversing is absolutely STAGGERING.

In our case the fraud rate got close to 50%. Whatever anti-fraud provisions they have in place, they are not effective. Fortunately almost all fraudulent transactions originated from just one country, so it was relatively easy to deny paid services based on the user's location.
I have turned into such a bad sport about this April Fool's Day nonsense.
Unless you plan on replacing your laptop regularly or not taking it places, buying an HP or Dell may not be the most frugal decision. Apples and Thinkpads have metal frames that keep internal components from flexing and breaking solder joints[0]. Dells, HPs and most other cheaper laptops don't. I don't have any hard data for it, but I think laptops with frames last longer. I know several people who's computational needs aren't demanding who are still using iBooks and Thinkpads made in 2000.

[0] iBooks seem to break the BGAs on their video chips a lot anyway, but I don't think any new Apples have that problem.
It seems to happen if you spend a long time writing a comment or preparing a submission.
email idea:
tags as part of your email address. for generic mail you use your regular email address me@host.com
commerical stuff or whatever gets sent there.
your folders become inboxes for emails tagged with that folders name
me@host.com/friends automatically gets routed to your friends inbox.
you could make it so that anyone can make their own tags then give them out to subsets of their freinds as needed.

example
me@host.com/coworkers
me@host.com/spam (for when you use your email to sign up for stuff online)

that way lower priority folders only have to be checked when you know something is coming to them. and as spammers catch onto this you just make your tags less obvious.
Data got corrupted because of server restarts? That doesn't sound like a robust design. I can see how some sessions can get kicked out but data corruption should not occur.

It didn't seem to happen to me but I feel bad for others who didn't realize their karma dropped.
make a porn site that uses the iTunes model of charging and i guarantee you'll make money. Lots of people don't want to sign up for a hardcore porn site, but if they could buy a few videos of their favorite performer for 99cents with paypal they would in a heartbeat.
Ask YC: Startup atmosphere in Pittsburgh, PA?
I'm contemplating quitting full-time and moving from SF to Pittsburgh (where I'm originally from).

Reasons to move are mostly family related, but the move would also make sense financially.

What are the benefits of staying in SF if I'm starting a company and what is the startup atmosphere like in Pittsburgh (if anyone knows)?

Obvious answers (networking, etc.) are fine :)

Thanks!
If this were credible, it wouldn't be public.
we're not so much in the 'group communication' space as the 'web publishing' space. our main goal is to make interesting/useful/rich websites (though we may harness group communication for content). we want these websites to be valuable for those within the group AND mean something for those outside.
an simpler way for consistant margins and padding is

* {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}
How Much Is Facebook Really Worth?
Getting Started with Programming using the Internet
Hello everyone. I am not really a beginner to programming, but certainly no expert. I want to get started in making programs that can connect to the Internet to do something. Currently I work with C, Java, and Python. But, I hate Java, so pretend like I didn't just say that. I would like some help getting started in being able to make programs that use the Internet. That is vague I know, so let me try and clarify. I just want to be able to maybe take information off a webpage, and either save it to a text file or something as simple as that to start with. Maybe do the same with a small web-app, because from what I have read python can be very good at that with webpy. Anyway, if you have a book recommendation, a website, or any advice you could give me, please help a brother out.

Hope I wasn't to vague!
Is Facebook Worth the Hype?
As far as I can tell, the biggest concern is that OpenID makes phishing easier and more valuable. When the same user ID and password open all your accounts, one mistake compromises everything. Let's say clickpass gets huge, and someone forges a malicious clickpass-lookalike widget. They spread it around the net. Any password they steal gets them in to all clickpass-enabled accounts.