skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do this too. I have bloglines to show only updated feeds so it doesn't clutter up my feed list when the conversation goes dormant.

It really bothers me when blog software doesn't support rss feeds for comments on a specific post. It's a great way to increase the likelihood that you're going to have 1-and-done commenters for non-regular visitors to your site.
I basically agree with the Soros thesis. The fact that it has dire implications for many of us should not blind us to the reality of an out-of-whack global economy. To give one indication of the scale of imbalance, global reserves of dollars has gone up several fold, to $5+ trillion in the past few years. This is about the clearest evidence of the US devaluing its reserve currency status, through excess issuance of paper claims on itself.
"... I'm now wondering whether it's worth spending a day a week writing, instead of coding ..."

Do you have a blog? ~ http://inglua.wordpress.com/ then write some interesting things up and submit them
I hear these little brain teasers and can't help but think of Monty Python's Holy Grail: "What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?"

Yeah, I'm the guy who would ask "747-300 or 747-400?".
Granted it could probably be figured out by taking the vector of the thrust to lift ratio of the engines and wings at take off, but something tells me you'd go through a lot of planes that way rather than designing it with that in mind.
The founder of any community is usually more often mentioned and discussed than not, since he or she is pretty much the only person everyone knows. At Digg, people talk about Kevin Rose a lot. At Reddit, well, they haveavoided the phenomenon by staying out of the public light but talk of Reddit itself still reaches the homepage frequently.
I think this is disgraceful. The signal to noise ratio is so low already without hundreds of thousands of automatically generated books flooding the market.

If you find a book that's in a niche you're researching you'll probably snap it up even if it is unreviewed, which means that for each book multiple people are probably going to be duped. Basically, there's nothing intrinsically immoral about writing a bad book, but I think there is something immoral about generating hundreds of thousands of books that you know probably aren't going to add much value in the hope that people are tricked into buying them.

>>>
"While nothing announces that Mr. Parker’s books are computer generated, one reader, David Pascoe, seemed close to figuring it out himself, based on his comments to Amazon in 2004. Reviewing a guide to rosacea, a skin disorder, Mr. Pascoe, who is from Perth, Australia, complained: “The book is more of a template for ‘generic health researching’ than anything specific to rosacea. The information is of such a generic level that a sourcebook on the next medical topic is just a search and replace away.”

When told via e-mail that his suspicion was correct, Mr. Pascoe wrote back, “I guess it makes sense now as to why the book was so awful and frustrating.”Mr. Parker was willing to concede much of what Mr. Pascoe argued. “If you are good at the Internet, this book is useless,” he said, adding that Mr. Pascoe simply should not have bought it. But, Mr. Parker said, there are people who aren’t Internet savvy who have found these guides useful."
<<<<

Now, computers generating customised content for individuals may well be the future of knowledge transfer. So I think development in this area is exciting, and this guy is obviously way smarter than me if he can write books that seem like they're written by a human. But I don't think it should be commercialized before it actually adds value.
Getting Drunk on Chocolate in 1100 B.C.
Yeah, I bit too. That actually inspired this submittal.
The Amero :-O
That's a good idea but the maintenance on that seems deadly. I may try that out though

Edit: Incidentally, Hacker News doesn't have RSS feed on comments, heh
Lucky for me, my dad has been self-employed since I can remember, so I've always had a very central influence in my life that said much the same thing PG does about working for someone else versus yourself. I got lucky on my first business at 19 and I'm now 27 and still running it, but I'm also working on a new startup as well.

When I started, I didn't know what I was doing, I just went for it, and I've learnt the hard way much of the way through. So when I first started reading PG's essays years ago, I connected immediately with the ideas and with his natural inquisitiveness about the process. You can learn so much from other peoples' experiences. And he definitely exudes a sincerity that I think is hard to fake and hard to come by too.

PG and co have also created an invaluable resource in the HN community and in PG's writing as a resource to connect people who share the same desire for independence and creating great things. To me, there's no question that that has significant value for many people.
For a forum, I would see how this would work but in a case like YC, the issue is still there, somewhat :)
Maybe use http://friendfeed.com/ Aggregate all you activity - flickr, youtube, blog etc. and ask you friends to comment there. They'll keep all your entries, not only the onces currently in the RSS feed.
Visualizing Viruses [Pictures]
Why is this an either/or?

Anyway the only kickass UI is the nipple. Somehow it's just more compelling than any given layout of tabs and checkboxes....
Stories everyone's got, this is mine, what's yours?
To be fair, I hear Google asks similar questions, and I don't think anyone would argue that Google's software is too complex (at least from a user-interface perspective).
Indeed. I'm tempted to say it's a real-life case of squatting. When someone types in fakegrass.com, they're looking for a company that sells artificial grass. However, instead, it's a domain that's been almost completely computer-generated and filled with some vaguely useful information for the sole purpose of commercial gain (I doubt any heart went into the creation of fakegrass.com).
I sincerely hope all my competitors follow your advice.
I built it but they wouldn't come!
I wrote a "social" site but I'm having a hard time attracting users. What your experiences with promoting your site? Have you successfully started a forum before, and if so, how?
Attention Economy: The Game
No, Shaun, I mean how is being published different from being a "buzz" blogger?
At first my general sentiment was the same as yours. But then I realized that some people may want these products, even though I would never pay for one.

I think most of us on this site turn to the Internet first when we want to learn more about a topic. If you put yourself in the shoes of someone who isn't skilled at finding information online, or maybe just prefers reading material in book form, I think that these types of products may fill that kind of niche. Also, though I would never pay for one, if I were someday in an offline setting and the only reading materials were a National Enquirer, a romance novel, or one of these computer generated books, I'd probably read the latter.

I also agree with you that even if these products aren't that interesting, the technology is pretty cool and probably will create cool stuff in the future.

Finally, I haven't read one yet. This may give rise to the saying-"Don't judge a book by its computer." (Sorry, I couldn't resist)
> In short, the easy pickin's have long gone, and now we need complex tools and complex coding styles to get more performance from more cores using the existing languages.

I don't think more complexity is the answer here. All this massive multithreading just makes things impossible to debug.
A related question: does anyone know how reddit/digg/facebook/myspace gained their initial traction? Facebook couldn't have been very useful with all of 5 people on it. How did they gain their initial group of users?
4) Delete, but still display to the troll
Yup, I use Friendfeed. Funny, I was about to see if I could somehow add the YC RSS Feed to FriendFeed with the ability to display comments within but it's just not there yet. Soon, I bet :)
I was one of the first couple hundred people on Facebook (and one of the first 30 people at MIT on it). Zuckerberg started it at Harvard. It spread like wildfire at Harvard because it was highly useful and then he opened it up to MIT. And then Yale. And then UPenn. And so on and so forth.

I think the takeaway there is to try niching to a manageable segment of the user population at first.
OTTOMH:

reddit: PG and Joel Spolsky talked about it.
facebook: Zuck acquired the main harvard email list and spammed everyone.
myspace: The parent company spammed all its users.
digg: ?

I think spamming is almost inevitable. The plentyoffish guy spammed myspace (i think) and made lots of female sockpuppets.
If you bought one of these books, would you feel ripped off? I would.
> the cost to rent a converter box (dual tuner HD DVR) is now $14 a month. Considering I'd need one for every TV in my house, that would effectively quadruple my cable bill!

Good Lord. I can only imagine the fearsome startups you'd lead if you could just kick that massive TV habit.
I understood it to be something like a protein plaque that forms in the brain. The plaque shows up in cross sections looking like tar -- it's surprising the brain can function at all, having been altered that much.

Which makes it all the weirder that this treatment targets inflammation, allegedly. If the drug instantly melted the plaque, opening up the old synapses again, I could believe that. Maybe it does. Medical companies don't always understand exactly why their product works before starting trials.

Also noteworthy: it says a few patients have been on the treatment for several months, implying that the effect might be temporary. No mention of habituation, a la L-DOPA.
It's mostly a metaphor
for early peoples who
used the empty space they created
in cut down trees
for more efficient means of progress.

The literal sense does interest me as well, though.
Where do you pilot your canoes?
Leaked "Star Wars: Clone Wars" trailer [video]
It's not for Grandma, but there are a lot more technically-inclined Mac users than there were 10 years ago. If Apple manages to shut them down legally, these will have been a poor purchase, but if not, there are going to be a LOT more unlicensed clone manufacturers soon.
Building a Simple Highly Available Server
Sudoku done right
Solving Sudoku puzzles online is really more fun when you have a nice interface. http://www.sudoku-solver.net has nice web interface with color coding, timer, graph, pencil, hints etc.. what more do you guys expect ?
This isn't worth there time. If a person can afford $399 plus shipping they can probably afford a few more hundred for a real mac.
IIRC, Kevin Rose promoted digg during his TechTV gig.

I think Facebook started as a hot-or-not clone. Zuck went around to the college residences to scrape the pictures from the residence's face books.
"failure is not an option" its a fact of life. Things happen, it sucks but its how lessons are learned
The OP straddles the fine line between genuineness and trolling, but anyway,

"So - why do you guys listen to him ?"

a combination of

(1) expertise - PG is considered a "top 1%" Lisp hacker - has written some of the best books on lisp.

(2) worldly success without selling out/ doing nasty things (Viaweb and its sale)

(3) original thinker and excellent communicator ( his essays)

(4) has an attitude of "giving back to the community" by
(a) reaching out and actively engaging the community and
(b) working hard to enable others to attain successes similair to his own, from the position of someone who has "walked the path". (YC)

and (5) (as someone noted before) seems to be a genuinely nice and helpful guy.

This combination of these is very rare.

It is interesting to compare PG to another hacker, Peter Norvig.

In my (admittedly limited) perception, Norvig " scores" as well as PG on points 1-3 and 5, but not so much on point 4 (which is all right, different folks and all that).

Norvig seems to be more remote and inaccessible and more "wizardly".

( NB: I am not saying this is true, I am talking of perception. Peter Norvig is a very friendly, very nice guy)

Matz/Guido/Kernighan .. all these folks seem to have more detached online personas, though they all embody the expert + nice factors.

I think the key to PG's popularity is in the combination of excellence/expertise and his "help others be successful" actions.

PS: I don't agree with the "cult" description - a cult is where the leader is essentially worshiped (PG is admired, there is a difference) and his sayings are uncritically accepted (PG gets pushback and criticism on YC)
Can We Make Operating Systems Reliable and Secure?
Weekend circulars show jailbroken iPod touch with Installer on board
Best damn SVN client for macs
> Since everyone has to obey artificial rules, there's no harm in making the rules prevent damage to the players.

You're begging the question here. Many of these drugs are overwhelmingly beneficial -- e.g. Human Growth Hormone. Prohibiting it makes about as much sense as prohibiting surgery; it's used to promote healing of injuries. If they cared about damage to players, its use would be encouraged. Reducing recovery time means they are playing and making money for the sport rather than laid up for months and just cashing checks. I would argue you have a moral duty to yourself to use any and all means to get better, and anyone who argues you should remain injured longer has no moral basis to stand on.

Baseball's rules are simply about image in this "drug war" climate. It's extremely hypocritical; Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds likely made a fortune for the league with all the excitement about breaking home run records.

It's also uncomfortably Übermensch-ish. If you disallow this type of enhancement, you're leaving it up to whoever was born with favorable genetics. It's not even about who trains the hardest -- someone with better genetics can do less work and get better results than someone else who works his tail off.

Additionally, there is a wide range of performance-enhancing substances, some of which are well-studied and can be safely taken under medical supervision. However, the well-known ones are typically the ones they test for and prohibit, which drives the practice underground and spurs development of experimental new substances of dubious safety.

And realistically, in order to compete in many sports today, you need both the genetics and the pharmaceutical enhancement. Thus the biggest threat to athletes' physical health is the prohibition of well-understood substances and the legal pressure on doctors which makes it difficult for an athlete to get the proper medical supervision. The system simply does not reward people who either lack superior genetics or the willingness to use these substances.
Observations on using an RDBMS alternative (BigTable)
Myspace gained their initial traction with pseudo-spam.

I'd suggest not following by their example.
Seriously, there's a problem with your promotion if you won't give us the URL.

If the URL is too embarrassing to admit to... well, there's your problem!
If you max out the machine on their store, the result is $1045 plus shipping. Add in a 24" LCD with the same resolution as Apple's 24" for ~$360 with free shipping (found on pricewatch.com) for a total of ~$1450.

If you price out the equivalent iMac (except slightly worse (320 GB instead of 400GB; 256MB graphics instead of the max of 512MB graphics at Psystar) the result is $2299. That's about $800 extra for slightly less. Of course, Apple's will be nicer in design, fit, and finish, and you'll get Apple support (and I don't know whether Psystar will provide equivalent support). Is that worth $800? I dunno.
In the social sites I've worked on the first core group of users were always friends/associates of the creator. Get your friends(like 50+) using it to give you a base of people then start trying to attract the unknowns.
This sounds interesting to me too, and in an area where I've had some experience. If nothing else perhaps we can trade notes. You'll find contact details in my profile.
No, the license for OSX only allows it to be installed on Apple hardware. The consensus on reddit (and here) is that these guys will be shut down on Monday.
I don't think there will be a "valley" in Europe, ever. There will be different independent places, startup hubs, all across Europe, London being one of them.
hah that is hillarious. Because I feel it requires more discipline and knowledge to publish an authoritative book on a topic and have it be recognized as such than it takes to string together the right blend of rhetoric to keep an audience captivated for a few weeks. But really I can also see this is sort of an apples and oranges comparison (on my part in the first place) so I digress.
"Apple-branded" hardware.
The same reason Barack Obama has the following he has over Hillary Clinton. They both have their message, but they appeal to different people for different reasons. PG isn't the only essayist out there talking about the Internet, Programming, and Startup Markets. That doesn't mean he has to be the one any given person listens to.

People may choose to read his writings because there is a certain element that he talks which some people appeal to. Just like with Obama, his dedication to a cause draws people that Hillary perhaps lacks and vice versa. Calling it a cult may be a bit of an oversimplification because of the mass number of people. If connecting with a large number of people and earning the respect you do comes at the cost of being called such a term, then Edgar Allen Poe should by all means have monuments and statues among Literature students.
I have a plan to start a game of some sort, get a local computer store to sponsor it with a new PC as the prize.
Maybe sell local advertising on the site as much to spread awearness as anything.

If it goes well then find a bigger sponsor and do another game, slightly less local next time around....
very interesting, but didn't Matt Cutts say he suggested you didn't rely... on google crawling through your forms and indexing that information. The best way to get your site fully indexed (which is the purpose of the crawler) is to have a open site, with information that is not behind any logins or forms.
What are these characters and stories you refer to? Clearly I haven't read this set of essays.
That's because I'm not trying to promote my site here, just ask for information. I've already done that before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=135495 There's a bit more information here: http://fyynd.com/FAQ/
Hey, troll or not, it's an interesting question. Have you read the other responses? Most are coherent and many are actually quite insightful.
All that's being squatted is the ISBN used to print the book.

It doesn't stop anyone from publishing competing studies about the world outlook for snow blowers and cold weather gear in Australia.
Paying attention to someone is not the same thing as following them, admiring them, deifying them, or even agreeing with them.

I think you will find that many people read what Paul writes because he consistently writes things that provoke useful thought. That can be beneficial even if you don't agree with everything he writes.

In fact, even if you violently disagree with what he writes, if he provokes you into thinking about something you think is important, that's a win for you.
I find it amusing that this site is so concerned with quality yet when such an obvious troll comes by, you're all blinded by your admiration for pg. Way to feed the trolls. I guess we know what Hacker News' kryptonite is.
Yes, it is a blatant troll, but it's also an interesting question. As long as a troll brings interesting discussion and not flame wars, it's not necessarily a bad thing.
Storage Space, The Final Frontier: Amazon EC2 adds persistent disks
Salesforce For Google Apps Launches
Werner Vogels on Amazon EC2's new persistent storage feature
A RESTful web service demo in yaws
Then to borrow from Ms Rand:

She felt herself screaming silently, at times, for a glimpse of human ability, a single glimpse of clean, hard, radiant competence. She had fits of tortured longing for a friend or enemy with a mind better than her own.

Most of the people who end up on here, or in PG's orbit in general can find themselves in this quote. It isn't PG himself, per se, but the kind of people he attracts and hangs out with.
This Week in Ruby: a summary of this week's highlights from the Ruby and Rails communities.
Beat me to the punch. Tabs is all I would have missed (I switched to OS X at Leopard).
Pharmaceutical companies sometimes even release medications without knowing why they work.

Kind of like Isotretinoin, which says in the prescriber's pamphlet, "The exact mechanism of action of isotretinoin is not currently understood."

Made me feel really great to be taking something that is "not currently understood," though approved as safe by the FDA.
For posterity - digg on TechTv: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1_YoG7lqI4
Look at this MRI of a Alzheimer's patient before onset (right), and after onset (left).

http://www.urmc.rochester.edu/neuroslides/slides/slide193.jp...

It looks like there is PHYSICAL damage done to the brain-- there is actualy missing brain matter; as you can see, the sinuses have enlarged in size.

How can this injection reverse that? I call false until they publish something.
As somebody running a site very much like yours, let me tell you:

Pick a place for your fight where you have an advantage: social news has clear leaders and network effect working against you.

Pick a tool for your fight: web site that is looks and feels like any other site is not enough (even if it has 10x better tech behind it)

Pick your friends, who are for the long run: talk to your best users, make friends. Talk to your competitors too, news.YC is a great place to make it happen (I'll be happy to chat to you).

Learn from the mistakes of others: there have been plenty of personalized news sites that failed before, what have you learned from their mistakes?
LinkedIn started with "friends of the company" of the company too - key is to integrate a "network effect" and viral loops in the service
Brain Scanner Can See Your Decisions Before You Make Them
Co.comments and Disqus where applicable are good
I have been owned a social site that started from zero and grew to hundreds of thousands of users. Here is the brief rundown of how it happened:

~ 3 months in: We used some "unconventional methods" (that I won't mention in detail) to attract a few initial users.

~ 7 months in: We had a breakthrough with google (we still aren't sure exactly what it was) and we started to get a ton of search traffic

~ 10 months in: from here, traffic was all from word of mouth and referrals. This was by far the major segment. The first two combined up to maybe 40,000 users...everything from there to 300,000 was primarily driven by word of mouth

After that we had some deals, etc, but most of it was just surviving until things picked up on their own.

I can tell you that we tried anything and everything to get even a little bit of attention in those days. I can't point back to one thing and say "that's what really got it started"...I think it was just a combination of keeping ourselves out there until we were in the right place at the right time.

And now I have to do it all again.