skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the most interesting feature of the chart is that Germany and the U.S. have the smallest spread.
Human Dynamics Revealed Through Web Analytics
I heard that more screws is better in laptops, though I'm not sure why.

I'm still using a 12" Powerbook as my laptop too. I've had it for 3 years now, and don't have a single complaint. I love how it fits into pretty much any bag, and how the battery lasts 3 to 5 hours.
Here's an article I wrote on the same topic:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-camusic/

They did an excellent job with WolframTones. Mathematica is a powerful language.
Embedded programmers only code in C because they haven't yet discovered C++ (seriously...embedded programming is like living in the 70s).

C++ will be all the rage in embedded circles in the 2020 decade.
ok, ok, vendors are at fault too.
Fair enough but that's because the question contradicts itself.

1) Sharing the information isn't that hard; the internet is amazing that way. Sure most people won't get it, but if it has value, enough people will. But if it's as good as you say, you'll most certainly lose control of it. If the idea helps a lot of people, this is the way you should go.

2) You can stay quiet and when it's done, talk to a lawyer about IP rights. While this ensures you maintain control, it also will slow down the development.

Either way can hurt you or help you (and the idea). In the end, the decision is yours.
Moving on from centralised-decentralised development, or: what’s after github and gitorious?
1) publish it, and/or publish it with a co-author with clout in the field. that would require you to prove the idea to someone with clout.
2) if you plan on monetizing the idea, create a company and have the people you release the idea to sign non-disclosure agreements.
Security Showdown: OS X Caves First, Vista Buckles (Due To Flash). Ubuntu Wins
Middle-Aged Users' Declining Web Performance
A Browser based (with js, no plugins) screen sharing.
Something like VNC for the web, for real time tech support.
Upvoted for Vim!
MySpace Now Offers Text Message Alerts to Users’ Mobile Phones
Uh, hello? Almost any one of Microsoft's mainstream product lines is bigger than Facebook. Office vs. Facebook? Office. Windows vs. Facebook? Windows. Xbox vs. Facebook? Xbox. MSN Search vs. Facebook? Probably MSN Search.

Congratulations are due to Facebook for managing to scale their one product, pre-business-model, without H1-B's.

I'm not an advocate for H1-B visas (though we could have a spirited debate about their merits vs. offshoring), but this is a pretty silly article.
I've been using Gandi for many years. Never a problem and, at least the last time I checked, they had a proper policy saying that your name was yours.
I think it's hard to talk about solutions when we don't have a solid definition of the problem. To define the problem well, I think access to the news.YC data would be very helpful.

So a meta-idea would be to open the news.YC database of users, submissions, posts, and ratings. That way, we can look for specific changes in voting/submission patterns. In particular, I'd like to know:

- how post length has changed over time

- how strong the correlation between post length and score is

- if participation has dropped among those who used to contribute the most valuable comments

- the average comment score over time

I don't see any downsides - news.YC isn't looking for profit, or to be acquired, so there doesn't see to be much use in protecting the data...

How about it, Paul?
You can't change your life until you change what you do everyday
Self Improvement
"If ideas are worthless please dumb a few on this thread."

How about a spell checker that recognizes context?
Nielson raises an important problem but completely misses the single most important issue: font size. As resolutions get tighter and fonts get smaller, who suffers? Those with far sightedness. It must be a pain in the butt to put your glasses on or off depending on how well that web page designer understands the problem.

Guy Kawasaki deals with this here:

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html
1. You have to decide whether this is something you need to protect for financial reasons. If so, patent, copyright, trademark or whatever before you tell people.

2. If it's not, then just publish the darn thing.
You may also find this thread useful: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=131359

(I have a T61 and asked YC if buying a MBP will give me significant advantages.)
Product injection sometimes works both ways - Indie film-makers have to purposely hide mainstream logo'd stuff or they'll get in legal murky waters - as in if you have a Coke bottle prominently visible you are implying that Coke might have something to do with your little film..
#3 is a prime example of why tables are good for layout.
What if the guy who takes 5X to do the work has less bugs and more efficient code and secure code? just because you code faster doesn't mean your code is better, in fact it is probably worse, because you didn't take your time.

I'm merely saying that the speed you produce code is not directly related to it's quality. Release early and often does have it's merits. But that doesn't mean whip code out in an hour, and then fix bug after bug after bug.
Read this before signing up:

http://www.lastpodcast.net/2008/03/30/woopra-a-lesson-in-how...
Please post the steps soon :)
Discovering Work Life Balance
One step forward: a review of GNOME 2.2
Yeah, the design aspect is great. The thing looks great, it fits anywhere, but if you need to repair/upgrade the thing, it's a major pain!
Interesting. Is this a DH1 response or a DH2 response? (http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html) Maroon seems to inspire lots of highly charged responses, both positive and negative. But it seems that most of these stem from his acerbic and slightly glib writing style. His biggest critics are critics of his tone, I think. Not critics of actual content.
Colbert: Does Jon Stewart orally pleasure teamsters for pocket change?

Jon: Uhhh, no.

Colbert: Well, you are certainly entitled to that opinion, but I can assemble an impressive panel who say you do. I guess the truth lies somewhere in between.
Thirded.

They appear to be Canadian too -- which I feel is a point in their favour.
Originality is dead...
In the world that most of us (who visit this site) live in, originality is dying. Why? Who knows, but there are so many remakes of sites that it is ridiculous.

So my question... where do you feel the internet is going? What do you think will be the next technology on the web? And what interesting ideas have you had...?

Disclaimer: All ideas submited are now public and this forum cannot be used to prove that you originally had an idea!
Holographic Projection, here comes virtual confrences
I just heard a report on this on BBC world service. Sounds really interesting.
So far I have had no problem with them, either. Someone suggeested here that they don't release domain names for transfer (something about swimming backwards across the ocean).

Anyone else have this problem with Dreamhost?
some of the ones at the half bakery aren't half bad. The last time I checked, they wanted philly cheese spread in the shape of a bagel on a plastic sheet, kinda like the way cheese comes on a plastic sheet. That way, you can just slap it on, instead of spreading out the philly cheese.

Awesome.
How about publishing under a Creative Commons license:

http://creativecommons.org/license/

Cheers
What is the reason of increased noise? Isn't it the popularity?

In my opinion, yes. Whenever the site got mentioned somewhere, a new stream of unimportant topics appeared.

Why can't or shouldn't the gravity be dependent on submitter reputation? Wouldn't we find any techniques to prevent gaming such a system? If the raw importance, not gaining another karma points, matters, shouldn't we consider moderation by selected hackers?

Sorry for asking so many questions, but I find these being very fundamental to any further considerations about limiting anything. If you want to do this, you have to have some authority.

I strongly support the idea of opening the HN database. This would let the others build interfaces around it, experiment, and hopefully find better approaches to limiting the noise.

As a summary, please note that in case of increasing the quality, one has to do any of the following:
- increase the signal,
- limit the noise,
- develop better techniques for dealing with poor SNRs (but I find this being unapplicable by humans).

To make things clear, my comment is solely about limiting the noise. I'd be very happy to hear ideas on actually increasing the signal.
I don't get why it needs to look like a robot. Unless the buttons correspond to different parts of the body that you worked out or brushed, I don't see why it can't be a box with buttons on it.
This is so cool- I'll have to see the movie!!
Ok, by overwhelming majority the script is down.

Just don't flame me if I (as a human) post an xkcd that I actually find relevant :)
the rate and quality of originality is the same. the rate of unoriginality and idea-grabbers is just much higher now due to the internet, technology, and spread of information. turn-key software and internet businesses are just very easy and cheap things to start.

i can't say for sure where the internet is going, as the internet is fickle, or what the next big tech will be. at least in america, we're heading into or already in an economic downturn, so innovation will be slow in coming until we're out of that. 2008 will probably be flat.

i've only really had one really good idea lately and it has to do with reinventing the wheel for a niche old, monolithic industry. that would be the startup i'm working on now. its not any revelation for the masses, but having one monetarily successful startup will allow freedom for me to innovate in other areas without having to worry about paying bills.
kerrynitz: but the problem lies when they are dropped from the sentence - eg cabalamat's example becomes "Everyone likes cats"

Or even better a statement like "all decent people like cats". This has the form of a type [1] statement but the meaning of a type [2] statement.
This reminds me of the lemon problem in economics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

It's not that ideas are worthless, just like my car isn't worthless. But it's hard to know what a car's worth until it's driven, and it's even harder to know what an idea's worth until it's executed on.

Therefore, no market for ideas develops. Nobody buys ideas, since unlike cars, you can't exactly take them out for a "test-drive."

In the few places you do see a market, it's usually because information exists about the value of the idea. For example, patent trolls buy patents(ideas) to sue companies that are already infringing(executing) them.
Data Visualization with Ruby and RMagick - Where Are Those Bikes ?
Frankly, I don't think you "get" Lisp at all. Lisp's lack of syntax is its greatest strength. Beginning or inexperienced programmers in general seem to have great difficulty with this concept.

> Even defined down to "true macros", this is simply folk wisdom: you can get "Lisp-style macros" out of any language that gives you access to an abstract syntax tree.

Here's what Norvig says about a particular language that has access to the AST (he's not a "convert" to Python - he just decided to use it for examples in his AI book because he feels beginning programmers can pick it up easier):

Python does not have macros. Python does have access to the abstract syntax tree of programs, but this is not for the faint of heart. On the plus side, the modules are easy to understand, and with five minutes and five lines of code I was able to get this:

>>> parse("2 + 2")
['eval_input', ['testlist', ['test', ['and_test', ['not_test', ['comparison',
['expr', ['xor_expr', ['and_expr', ['shift_expr', ['arith_expr', ['term',
['factor', ['power', ['atom', [2, '2']]]]], [14, '+'], ['term', ['factor',
['power', ['atom', [2, '2']]]]]]]]]]]]]]], [4, ''], [0, '']]

This was rather a disapointment to me. The Lisp parse of the equivalent expression is (+ 2 2). It seems that only a real expert would want to manipulate Python parse trees, whereas Lisp parse trees are simple for anyone to use.
Are things really getting that bad here? I have been lurking and occasionally commenting here for quite a while and I haven't really noticed much change recently - the only thing I did notice was a slight slowdown in posts over the Easter period, which I might have expected anyway (but it may have been because I wasn't at my day job and spent more time here than normal!)
An automated front-end testing framework in javascript.
Check this out: http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/coscripter/browse/about

Now, instead of having users share common tasks, you use the same idea to offers developers the ability to add automated tests. A developer loads your tool which then records the inputs by listening to all DOM events, saves the sequence and then lets you user replay it to see if anything has changed.

While the above is a FF extension, it might be possible to do this all in js (so the developer would include a remote JS file from your server which records/plays back the events)

This would be useful when the UI is undergoing lots of CSS and visual changes, but with the actual functionality remaining the same (ie, button X produces value Y in field X).
You don't want foreigners coming to the country to work?
ix: <i>"Most internet posters are unable to state things clearly [...] because they're embarassed to put their points in view so nakedly."</i>

This is even more true of politicians. From Orwell's <i>Politics and the English Language</i>:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.
ha, awesome! boston based research, crew,filming,etc. so im sure there was a fan. Maybe a fellow hacker on the set?
Disagreeing with Paul Graham
http://code.google.com/soc/2008/

Click the list of ideas for projects that interest you. Only a fraction of the ones proposed will actaully get worked on, and you can also do this for stuff from 2007. There's much more hacking to be done than there are hackers.

Being unwilling to share ideas and knowledge with other people is a bad thing.
Good idea that's being implemented now. I think the cell phone approach is much more elegant than a wearable camera.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1850411...
You can protect your brilliant idea from theft by executing. Alternately, patent it and be a litigious SOB, but this requires a patentable idea and substantial money, typically.
This is getting ridiculous. I don't think I've ever seen so much self-congratulatory navel-gazing in any online community. Am I the only one for whom wading through stuff like this is as bad as wading through tasers & lolcats?
Nice ideas (voted it up), but I'm of a mind that the "weren't meant to have a boss" thing is kind of played out.
For a minute I thought this was going to lead to a page about IE6. I was really looking forward to learning what drugs I needed to take to turn that into a happy experience.

Fortunately, I'm much more willing to forgive a browser that is incompatible with the standards that were written five years after its release. :)
>However, following the axiom that tertiary training is what principally enables individuals to quickly grasp new complex subjects and therefore...

I'm not at all convinced that it is axiomatic that "tertiary training is what principally enables individuals to quickly grasp new complex subjects".
That sucks big times. I better run my new site on a .net domain then, just to be safe.
More like bad/insufficient data defeats even good algorithms. When we recommend movies to friends, we are often using very different and more useful information than what's in the Netflix database.
Better run those old browsers in a sandbox!
Submitting relevant links increases the signal. Voting limits the noise. I've never done either despite following Hacker News since it came online. Now I'm going to submit and vote more often because I want to see it continue to be the best. If each of us does this we'll have interesting news to read every day.

It's easy to forget that we make Hacker News. We can fend off the garbage by remembering to participate.

Submit and vote!
Do you? I wonder if you have a feel for the correct number. One million a year? Two million? One hundred million?
I've been using Moniker, after hearing some of those same good things. I have had no problems with them.

Of course, one of the classic problems with registrars is an inability to get your names out when things go bad. (Presumably the ones that make it difficult to join are rapidly culled by natural selection.) And it's kind of hard to judge that. I'm certainly not going to leave Moniker just to see how easily they let me go...
H1Bs are not "immigrants". We are non-immigrant alien workers.
I was amazed that he had found a cross-browser way to make sure font-sizes match pixels. But when testing it i found that his 12 pixel header is 8 pixels on my screen (smaller) and his 36 pixel heading is 40 pixels (larger) :-( that's with a plain firefox. Am I the only one experiencing this, or is this feature just not usefull?
if you have discovered something invaluable then the last people you need their opinion is ours.

unfortunately though, you dont know what you really discovered until you tried to implement it, and most of the times thats where failure lies.

so implement it and protect it if it works
then let the world/us know
Event Delegation Made Easy in Jquery
Here is an article I like a lot that shows just how bad a bad programmer can be. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000781.html

Basically to sum it up, the author mentions a very simple question that he asks potential programming candidates to solve. This kind of question is the kind of question you can solve by making it through two/three chapters in any programming book, yet the number of people, even senior level developers, that can't get it is astonishing.
The "answer" to "Keyboard vs. The Mouse" is the same as almost every other "vs." question: it depends on how the software was designed and written.
you can always patent it yourself with a fraction of the cost, nobody knows your invention better than you.
Even if it is played out, it's great to see a counter argument that's as logical as this and entertaining at the same time.
I also be it would be much easier to find a cofounder if you've already secured YC-status.
However, as Tog himself notes, when the keyboard shortcut is already memorized and well understood, it's a clear productivity win.

Tog never says that as far as I can tell.
I've always had trouble with PG's "proof" that ideas are worthless. Selling ideas doesn't work because to demonstrate that they are worth selling, you have to give them away.

There are plenty of people who get paid a ton of money for ideas-- simply by having demonstrated a good track record of ideas in the past. Authors and speakers (Seth Godin, for example) get paid piles of money for ideas that come with zero execution.
Not yet. Even with the slowness of Vista the (convertible) tablet is an awfully handy device frequently enough to be worth the premium. When he returns this summer we're going to install Ubuntu and, if needed, setup XP (or maybe Vista) in Virtualbox (which works beautifully with XP for my single need of checking web development renderings with IE - Virtualbox is untested by me with Vista). There are Onenote-like programs for Linux these day, but I haven't tried them.
>Maybe the correct conclusion to draw from them is "People who work for an asshole look less alive," or "People who work on boring projects look less alive."

It seems like both of these possible explanations are endemic to large organizations, and would be impossible if you were a startup founder. If you start your own company and your boss is an asshole and your project is boring, you only have yourself to blame. You also have the authority to fix it immediately.
I'm thinking Jessica did a multi-million dollar product placement deal. Well played!
If your line of work is such a commodity that the wage goes down to zero as the number of workers increases then you're not in very good shape already.

Take lawyers. Even when there are far too many people who meet the minimal qualifications, the better ones still get payed a huge amount because those who are paying them recognize the value of quality.

There will still be lots to exclude outsiders from higher pay even if it becomes easer for them to get in.
If you see a job posting that says something like, "Come work with us--we're fun, with employee empowerment, etc etc" you don't bother to argue with it because you know the angle it's coming from. Likewise if someone tells you to drop out and tune in because that's how they did it coming up from the muck, well, you have to remember that his writing has motivations closer to a job posting than a research paper.
When I spend an extended amount of time hacking on my Macbook, I find myself missing the extra resolution. The width is fine, but the height is just lacking. Whether or not that's important is probably a personal preference, but I know I wish I had gone with the pro, just to get a handful of extra lines vertically.
Hi5 Launches Developer Platform
Groovy's performance is not subjective
I think you're missing the larger point, which is that there are many possible conclusions you could draw from this very limited sample.
- Email is broken. There's no way for me to sort through 300 unread messages except to manually sort through them. What's important? What's junk? What's time sensitive? What's not? Which is social? Which is work?

- Hosted bug tracking software sucks. It's ridiculous. Make something pretty and simple-but-extensible

- Travel research online is terrible. I live and breath the interwebs, but whenever I travel, I buy a freakin' book. How ridiculous is that?

- Search STILL sucks.
Saw the movie Friday and I only have one thing to say: "Winner, winner, Chicken Dinner!!"
his logic on the px size standardization works for a while then breaks,
oops, my bad.
For being a wide-release, mainstream movie, they nailed the geek stuff pretty well.