skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Trading ability to cut your losses at 50% of typical investment for inevitability of being cut off at 50% of a hugely successful return will balance out.

However, a hugely successful investment will bail sooner than 50% is reached. Thus the skew is in favor of startup.

Of course the actual negotiation may not take math into account. :-)
I've often wondered this myself, however, I have also thought about it from the opposite angle.

There are many sites that give no instruction as to how we are supposed to enter our credit card info. One can assume two possibilities: 1) The programmer of the site was ready, willing and able to parse multiple input types and simply strip out spaces, dashes, etc, or 2) I'm going to enter my credit card number into this page in a fashion not expected by said programmer and my much coveted Scarface Special Edition DVD will never show up at my door...

Just tell me what format you want so I can have some peace of mind and not have to decide which method is the best.
I think Markdown is more widely used, but I personally like Textile because it supports one thing that Markdown does not: footnotes. Otherwise, they are basically equivalent to me.
It seems that you're still implying that python is only good enough for lowly sysadmin tasks?
I prefer Textile because I find the linking syntax to be much more intuitive (I can never remember what's in parens and what's in brackets in Markdown).
This is a somewhat blunt way to put it, but it has to do with "you weren't paying attention to the Adobe Open Screen announcement on May 1st." SWF, FLV, and AMF were all freed then and, apart from developers already working with Flash, it didn't seem to make great waves because of the sudden, low-hype nature of the announcement. A lot of the comments that day - here and elsewhere - were confused, cynical remarks along the lines of "I'll believe it when I see it," when they had _already_ put everything up.

The direction of Flash has been towards greater openness since around the time Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005: One year later they released a new major version(9) with a new VM and a completely refactored API, and along with that they released an open source Flex 2 compiler.

Adobe would probably open source their own player and ensure it becomes the "de-facto standard implementation," if it were not licensing-encumbered.
doing concurrency right, is not easy. It takes an exeperienced developer to get it right (i.e good abstraction techniques, recovering from failure and interrupts, etc), so a lot of people are uncomfortable handling multi-threading, mainly b/c it adds yet another layer of what can go wrong.
http://maps.google.com/
One of the most important aspects of a news site is having a good community. A lot of the value of sites like news.yc aren't the links themselves, it's the comments provided by the technially adept community. That's not to say that the links are unimporant, it's that they aren't unique - most of the links come from a a small subset of tech news sites.

One thing I don't like is articles that are purely about business cycles. Company A raised 10 million dollars, or is dead, or is running out of money, or is being acquired. Somtimes that can be interesting, but I'm partial to writers that have a sense of humor, and are good at putting things into perspective. I like writing from guys like Zed Shaw, or Matt Maroon -- they're enterntaining.
And then there are the people who get macs for the hardware and replace OS X with some other unix variant.
it'd look like yc. now upvote me plz.
That's exactly the argument I'm trying to push.
"Let's Discuss Disqus"

So that's how you say it...
If you take a rigorous view of the question (and don't, for example, take some early COBOL test code and run it on an emulator) the actual answer is probably some old control code operating an industrial servo motor. Or similar.
I'd say it would resemble HN to a higher degree than it would resemble any other news site that currently exists.
When I answer that question I'll be sure to blog about it.
What is the advantage over RescueTime?
I'd go further and say that the links are only discussion fodder. they get people started, the comments that arise from the ensuing discussion are the reason i come to HN. I could easily (?) set up a feed that approximates the kind articles I actually click on HN, that's obviously not why we come here.
Why is this better than RescueTime? And why am I going to want to tell it what I'm doing? I'm obviously only going to tell it what I'm doing when I'm not wasting time...
[edit: krschultz posted the same thing while I was typing...]
Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo to leave the company
Why would you want cash when you can have amazon bucks? :)
I'll just quote John Gilmore:

"Freeing up specs for things that the community has already
reverse-engineered makes for good publicity, and eliminates a legal EULA issue that Adobe was likely to lose in court in most countries, but doesn't change anything substantial."

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash-dev/2008-05/msg00004...
Some items the article is glossing over:

First, the rental value doesn't take into account inflation. House payments are fixed, which means it gets effectively cheaper every year. Meanwhile, rents keep increasing. This means that while you can catch a house at the bottom of a bubble and lock in the price, if you rent in that same area, you'll find rents going way up when the housing bubble rises again.

Next, an 800 sq. ft. apartment isn't equivalent to a 1000 sq. ft. house with a yard. If you really want to cheap out on a house, get a mobile home -- though of course that doesn't include land, which is often leased.

Further, in this example, it assumes you have the difference between the two prices free and clear to invest -- you'll certainly need to make sure your investments do well, because at the end of 30 years, you aren't going to be a homeowner, and will still need a place to live.

Not to mention, pets are typically a problem; you're at the mercy of your landlord; the rent can be increased at any time; you have to deal with shared walls with neighbors; and your 6% return is not going to seem very exciting in 5 years when housing picks up again and that $400k house is worth $800k. It WILL pick up -- the country isn't becoming LESS crowded.

Your monthly investment amount will decrease every year as your rent gets increased, meaning your return is not going to be as good as depicted, especially if wages stagnate (as they effectively have in many sectors for the last 8 years). At 5% rent increase per year, you'll eventually be paying around $4000 for that same apartment in 30 years. Around year 20 the apartment costs more per month than the house. (This is a great area, remember, so the demand will be high. In some areas the rent can jump by 20% in a year instead of 5%.) This would mean you'd do significantly worse than if you bought the house.

The basic premise of this article is really "what if you live cheaply and invest your money vs. what if you spend all your money on housing and your house appreciates more slowly than an index fund".

Step 1. Live in your parents' basement for 30 (more) years.

Step 2. Invest the WHOLE $2400 per month on an index fund.

Step 3. Profit!

As you can see, the article ignores things about having your own house that are nice -- like a stable place for people to visit since you don't move every few years to cheaper places; not being at the mercy of parents or landlords; having a yard; not having to obey "quiet hours", and so forth.
Thanks, this is what I was looking for.
Time Management Advice from a Terminally ill Professor
This may not fit your way of looking at this problem but please, read on.

One of the most fun things about python, or any terse loose language, is that you can now write amazingly massive amounts of code without having to do exhaustive checking as you go. For example, in C, a non-expert will often end up having to write tons of tiny functions, recompiling, and testing _constantly_ in order to avoid the hell that is having written a large chunk of code containing one tiny error and not being able to find that error even after hours of debugging.

Just the other day I reimplemented a rather large network protocol coded in C into ~1500 lines of python all at once. When it was done I decided, with some trepidation, to just run the whole thing and see what happens. It worked! Soon after, my test code did find one small type error in an obscure edge part of the code, but the good feeling from getting the immediate success didn't go away!

So the bad practice is not having tests/asserts anyway -- regardless of whether your language has type checking. He is right that just running as much as possible can be much more encouraging and even FUN, for beginners especially.
why do you think i'm here?
Merb on Rubinius
Don't forget the costs of using a "lightweight" markup:

You have to learn some new system of quoting and escaping. I don't know textile or markdown, but I just went over to http://textism.com/tools/textile/index.php and tried to put a </code> close tag inside the sample code. It's got problems.

You get approximately one chance at a correct conversion to a richer format: converting to html. Nearly any other conversion, such as from the wrong lightweight markup to another lightweight markup, is lossy.

These markups aren't very extensible. They can't store metadata (e.g. microformats), or if they do, it tends to be by allowing html tags mixed into the markup, which means we're back into quoting/escaping issues.

There tend not to be any WYSIWYG editors, neither for you if you one day want one, nor for a less technical user who you'll someday want to edit your document.

So given almost zero knowledge about your problem, I'd recommend a WYSIWYG html editor. Whichever one you choose, it'll occasionally screw up and corrupt your formatting. Or maybe there will be subtle differences between the preview layout and a final browser layout. If you think those kind of issues will be a problem, then you REALLY don't want a lightweight markup language.
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Mare motels, open air barn kits, paddock shelters and livestock shelters shipped nationwide. America's easiest to install mare motels and horse shelters.
Since they are so similar, I think it helps to answer a few simple questions:

1. Do you need something that one has that the other doesn't?

2. Who's your target audience? Are they going to be writing a lot of markup? If so, considering the syntax differences is more important than say for blog comments where the only likely uses are bold, italic, and link.

3. How is the library support in your chosen language; are there any quirks? I remember at one point a bug surfaced in py-textile that had something to do with unicode chars so if you were using a lot of unicode chars it was better to go with Markdown.

If I had to pick one I generally like more it would probably be textile, but it's so dependent on the situation that I have no generalized evidence to support one being superior as a rule. If you only want to deal with one, period, I would probably go with Markdown just because, as mentioned, it is more widely used and therefor (slightly) more well-known (also highly dependent on audience) and likely to be better supported lib-wise.
This is my biggest problem with Markdown - I still use it because I'm too lazy to switch, but every single time I have to insert an image I have to check the syntax page to see if the title goes in parens or if the link does (while neither makes sense because regular links use brackets for both).

So while I use Markdown, I recommend Textile just so you can avoid this issue.
Powerset Launches Showcase For User Search Experience
You made pretty much the same points that I was about to.

However, since I live in the Sacramento area I will add that his numbers seem way off. $400K doesn't get you a 1000 sqft two-bedroomer nowadays, it gets you quite a nice three or four bedroomer (say, http://sacramento.craigslist.org/rfs/672061645.html)... or a huge six-bedroomer if you want to live in a new suburb (http://sacramento.craigslist.org/rfs/676328067.html)

The $950 a month for a one-bedroom apartment is about right.
I think niche'd social news sites are part of the future of the web. Reddit's create your own reddit is a step in the right direction but it remains to be seen if people prefer starting upa group on an existing network or trying to start one from scratch (the difference between the programming reddit and HN).

AFAIK no one has done white label social news yet. startup?
http://www.planit3d.com/source/texture_files/roads/road12.jp...
I think it's fairer to compare Markdown + Smartypants to Textile.

That said, I still prefer Textile, I just like the syntax better.
See also the fascinating Benford's Law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford's_law
Prompting the user e.g. ("no spaces") is a nice cue of the same fashion as an asterisk (*) for required form fields - both reduce user frustration.

However, it would be nice to think that we could automagically correct spaces/dashes etc. in CC numbers and transition directly to a confirmation page.

I wonder if translation of CC numbers is verboten by any payment gateways?
I really don't understand why GitHub is so popular. Git's a DVCS, so why pay to host on someone else's server? You don't even need a central repo with Git, and if you're large enough to want one, you more than likely have your own servers.

http://groovie.org/articles/2008/05/06/most-bizarre-git-serv...
(not my post, but I share his opinion)
I think you're approaching it from a wrong point of view. You don't have a browsing problem, you have an issue with getting things done or you have a procrastination problem. This is why I have little use for all the apps that tell me how much time I'm spending on diff sites / programs. That data is useful and interesting but it's not good for solving your procrastination issue since you already know you have a problem!

I found this essay interesting: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/ It shows you how procrastination has some hidden benefits. Give it a read.

Now, how do I cope with info out there. Well, every morning I give myself a set of tasks that I want to accomplish that day (if you have a boss... he will do a part of that for you I guess). I almost always start with the hardest thing on the list or with something that's time sensitive (like call someone at 11am etc) and I break it up into smaller tasks as I go along. The rule is that I am not available for chat, email etc. until I'm done with the big task. I do not browse the web for anything that's not related to the task. Until that task is done, I do not touch email or the browser. Now, once I'm done with it or I'm stuck, I take a walk for few minutes or I jump into the second task on the list. Funny thing is, as you start doing something else, very quickly you start getting ideas about the old problem. If I get an idea about how to solve my previous task, I go back to it and then go back to the task I was doing before. If most of your tasks involve programming, get git and it will be a godsend to you since it lends itself perfectly to this model of working.

Once I'm done with a big task, I take 30-40 min off and I check my RSS feeds, I check HN, check email etc. I check email only 3 times a day. I find it extremely distracting if I check email more often. Email eats up too much of my time. If you're an email junkie, look into Merlin Mann's Inbox Zero concept:

http://www.43folders.com/izero
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=973149761529535925

Also, take a look at this hack: http://www.43folders.com/2005/10/11/procrastination-hack-102... It's a method to get you in the mode of working on something so you acclimate yourself to work.

In the end, it comes down to strong will. Just force yourself to do something!
What are News.YC analogues for other areas?
I love coming to news.yc for all things related to software, hacking, entrepreneurship, and all things in-between. What are similarly excellent aggregator sites for other areas like Energy/Cleantech, Healthcare, Hardware, etc?
Q&A about the $150M Blackberry Partners Fund
I agree, the article ignores many positive aspects of homeownership. However, some of the points you make are poorly founded. For instance, there's no guarantee a 400k house in Sacramento will be worth 800k in five years, solely because US is becoming more crowded. It's a bold claim. Also, the idea of being at the mercy of your landlords is weird. In markets with a lot of excess inventory, some landlords can't find tenants. This puts them at the tenant's mercy. Second, if you own a house, you can be at the mercy of the bank, or the local home owner's association, or some such.

Some points are good, though; if one takes out a fixed-rate mortgage, payments are fixed and will become less painful as inflation makes them smaller in absolute terms.
Just get into your router config and block sites that you know will suck you in (ex: reddit or digg), on your workstation. I personally block them during "my work hours", that way I have something to look forward to after I've got my work done.

It also helps to have a router config that makes it difficult and time intensive enough to make a change, that wat it's easier to just NOT make the change and get back to work.
They measured "persistence" by seeing how long people would try to solve an allegedly impossible anagram - "OCHERSTE". But anyone capable of googling for [anagram solver] should be able to see there is a solution to that anagram - "trochees".

anagram solver:

http://www.ssynth.co.uk/~gay/cgi-bin/nph-an?line=rocheste...

wikipedia on trochees:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trochee

Not that it invalidates the study or anything. Just funny that between the European Journal of Social Psychology and the canada.com reporter nobody thought to check if the impossible anagram was actually impossible ;-)
http://www.smacklet.com

I've plugged this ridiculously simple tool so many times earlier that I am embarrassed to do it again now. I am not sure if you'll find it useful at all - but I find it to be very useful for me. Anyway, it works like this: You type in what you are planning to do and then later you can review it. This improves your consciousness and you stop wasting time online. The change comes from within. You don't need this web app... you can even do it with a legal pad.
I guess my question would be more in line with: What would you like to see in a location-centric tech news site that provides the content for the social news sites we love.
Data formats are interesting, but I think everyone that reads this site has been using JSON for centuries now.
"D’Angelo is well-liked at Facebook, though he has mostly stayed behind the scenes. His departure is doubtless a blow to the organization — and also an opportunity to bring in a seasoned replacement to handle the site’s continuing expansion."

Is there evidence that the "seasoned replacement" is important? I've looked over a few articles at the Harvard Business School library, but I found nothing that conclusively showed "seasoned replacements," especially CEOs, made a positive impact on a startup.
Google, Microsoft and Yahoo – The Love Triangle
Information and technology are two industries that have the power to change the entire outlook of global business. These multi billion dollar industries are proving to be the bone of contention for industry leaders like Microsoft, Yahoo and Google. The dogfight we have been seeing clearly indicates the vested interests of the industry leaders.
Craigslist, Kijiji & Oodle: The Geographic Distribution of Classifieds 2.0
You just need to learn how the syntax works for reference-style links. Something like:

[Hacker News][hn] is a website.

[hn]: http://news.ycombinator.com/

You should generally use these all the time when writing documents you intend to maintain. For quick one-offs like blog comments, you can instead use:

[Hacker News](http://news.ycombinator.com/) is a website.

Once you actually use markdown for non-trivial documents, it is very easy to remember its syntax.
Use Markdown. It works extremely well with TextMate, because all of TextMate’s heaviest users and bundle contributors use Markdown. Once you start using it, you certainly won't want to write any non-trivial text document in HTML ever again.
This is only a first-hand account, but it seems to me that all of my friends have "gotten over" facebook - the ones that haven't unactivated their accounts as a social statement only check it every once in awhile for messages. Most friend's profiles are out of date, and only a small fraction of people seem to have found facebook apps continuously interesting (which they're sure to let me know with invitations to join them).

The novelty of facebook seems to have long worn off. I don't know if this is just me or a broader trend, but if I were in charge of fb, I'd look into it.
I have exactly the same problem, I need a solution ASAP.
The payment gateway software I've interfaced with is very specific about what formats it accepts. There's an xsd schema for it. Basically just numbers. The gateway still does a lot of validation and will throw all sorts of errors on insufficiently cleaned up data.
Reddit is the same thing, but for dumb pictures and political sensationalism.
I think there's probably a lot of precedent for "seasoned replacements" making a positive impact when it comes to technical infrastructure. Not that I can point you to any. But my sense is that most big sites on the web owe a good chunk of their scalability to some experienced ops genius(es).
Try to get a habit of at least 30 minutes with a good semi-technical book before you go to bed. If the book is right, it will inspire you to fall asleep only to wake up and code something, sometimes I won't go to bed at all - I'd stay up all night hacking. A book like that will make most news sites irrelevant, TV - pathetic and blog posts - either stupid or obvious. (and they are)
I'd like to see a quality over quantity site.

Today, technology news has a problem: people who might know what they're talking about don't write. Blogs are somewhat better but the blogger doesn't have an incentive to collect opposing points of view or do boring fact-checking or tedious testing.

I see a lot of people saying that the comments are the best part of the article. This is wrong. You only feel this way because tech reporting is so degraded.

What I would like: a news site that figures out some way to make money off rare information and insightful reporting. One half Consumer Reports, one half the Marc Andressen blog. Even if this resulted in there being just a few posts per day, I think I would read it. Plus, on the web, quality information can rake in pageviews over a long period of time, so this strategy isn't economic suicide. It does take a longer time to pay off.

Maybe there are a few sites like this today, such as Tom's Hardware or Ars Technica, but I am not much of a hardware guy. I deal with web software, and the writing around that topic seems to be decidedly fluffy.
Back when we were working on online shopping, this was always my litmus test for competence.
Well, the community here is definitely different. For every one person like you saying people have gotten over Facebook, there are hundreds of fraternity/sorority/college students that immerse themselves into Facebook day in and day out, uploading tons of pictures and adding applications.

It's understandable why people here tend to not give a damn about Facebook. You all have more important and productive things to do with your time. However, there's a whole world of mindless young kids who join groups aimlessly, post pictures of the almost daily college parties, and find joy in spamming friends' walls.

I use Facebook, but only as a means to keep in contact with people whom I wouldn't keep in my phonebook. It serves as a nice mediator.