skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: Does a database exist for elasticity of demand of products in the market?
Ask YC: Does an open database exist that gives the elasticity of demand for products/services/commodities in the market?<p>If so, this could be a powerful new use of technology to help companies determine where to set their prices.<p>The technology may already be used by companies with lots of resources, but an open-source version for small businesses would be awesome.<p>If you have run across such a service (or the underlying database that would be necessary to run it) let me know. I'd be curious to look into it.
You know, you're right. Long story as to how that got there, but it should have gotten edited out with what preceded it. I'll fix that.
The problem is that Facebook isn't good at anything other than being a social network, and it's not even amazingly good at that in the same way that Google was amazingly good at search or the original Macintosh was amazingly good at being a personal computer.

There is no other way at the moment to use the internet to do the things I mentioned above.

My friends prefer evite for organizing things. It uses email, there's a thin layer of privacy, and you have a space to include details and RSVPs and such. It's not great, but it's less complicated than Facebook and you don't have to be a member of the site for it to work.

You can't google for "what should I do friday night" but you can use facebook to find out what people you know might be doing.

I like yelp for help with the question "what should I do friday night." It's a social network where members actually create useful content for anyone to use.
Not to mention that in this country, it's still not even the most popular social network. And even if it becomes that, it did so only because it replaced MySpace. I don't see what is any more irreplaceable about Facebook than MySpace.
Also you can Google for what bar/restaurant to go to. Or movie show times/reviews. Or how to get there.
git is great even if you're developing by yourself. I use git exclusively for all my work now (and use git-svn to integrate with others at work that use svn). Some of the benefits are:

merge tracking: this will also come to subversion in the future (but you'll have to migrate your repository)

having the entire repository checked out locally for offline use (being able to code on the train on the way to work is great)

fast branches - branches are really fast, especially since they're done locally, and there's basically no excuse for not quickly creating a branch when you want to try something out, and merge tracking

forking other open source repositories (including svn and cvs ones) for hacking and maintaing patches (until they get accepted upstream). git is nice and will attempt to always rebase your patches off the latest HEAD (and let you resolve conflicts if they occur).

git bisect for binary searching for the revision that broke something (can do a binary search over revisions to find out which revision broke a certain test).

did I mention that it integrates with svn?

git svn clone http://svnrepo.com/trunk
# do stuff
git add stuff/you/changed
git commit
git svn dcommit # commit changes from git into subversion

I could go on...
There's nothing wrong with managing programmers. It was just the assumption that I didn't want to "get my hands dirty" because I was female that bothered me.

I don't know if it's common for project managers to contribute code in other companies. At husband's company, it is pretty much unheard of for for a project manager to write code. Project manager tends to be more of a technical writing/managerial position in his company. There's nothing wrong with that. But I have no wish to be a full time technical writer/manager.
They almost can't monetize like Google. Google is active. You go there because you're looking for something specific. It's really easy (now) to make money off of the guy who Google's for "ipod".

On Facebook, you're relaxing. You're not in action mode. It's going to be hard for them to come up with ways to monetize passive traffic. The best anyone has done in offline media is show branding ads. This may work, and may even make them profitable, but it won't make them Google.
Yeah, Facebook is the wine & cocktail crowd while MySpace is the beer & more beer crowd.
Poll: Ban Valleywag?
Several users have suggested we ban Valleywag, not for anything in particular that they write about, but because their articles are always such deliberate linkbait. I personally agree. In 99% of Valleywag articles, the most interesting thing is the title. But I don't want to be accused of censorship, so I thought I'd ask for opinions first.
Yes, ban them; I'm tired of seeing Valleywag stories on News.YC.
No, don't ban them; I like seeing Valleywag stories on News.YC.
I'm assuming most of these people had non-competes signed with DoubleClick. So I'm not entirely sure what the problem is here. And yes, even if you're going to work for a single day you need to sign the standard noncompete agreements.
don't be evil... to your users. employees are company property.
Maybe Google didn't like the non-compete signed with DoubleClick.
Open Source Blog Project: 30 Traffic Generation Tips
Yeah, good luck hiring employees to treat as "property". I'm sure you'll get some real winners.
the advantage is that you have the same software running on your server as you do on the desktop. i can't tell you how frustrated I've been in the past trying to deploy some code i wrote only to find out I need to upgrade half the libraries on the system for my code to work.

most people agree that it's good to develop on the platform you will run in production, but they take it the opposite way (run outdated server software on their development environment).
I didn't mean that Facebook itself was more important to "most people." I meant that friendships and socializing in general are close to the top of the list of what most people consider important in life. Thus an online tool that helps people stay in touch with their friends and socialize is perceived as being very important, even though it seems like a trivial thing.
And ban all sites that use interstitial ads. Actually, I'd ban those before Valleywag.
I voted yes, as an application of my "PG should run his own site" principle... and because Valleywag links have often struck me the same way.

But I will play devil's advocate for three seconds, just for the hell of it: Are the conversations engendered by any previous Valleywag articles worth keeping? Just because the articles are inane or linkbaited doesn't mean that all the comments are as well. Good discussions can arise from all sorts of random sources. And eviscerating bad articles can be a fun sport, provided you don't get carried away with enthusiasm.

Okay, the three seconds are now up. And I, myself, can't remember any good Valleywag-inspired discussions, so... off with their head!
i'm personally kind of indifferent on their specific articles.

but imo, if you do ban them, you'll get a lot of "why ban vallywag and not XYZ"? its a slippery slope.

unless there are already similar sites that are banned. if so, ignore me, i'm a noob.
At a company such as Microsoft, you can become a software architect. This means you can focus on the major design issues and have developers implement your design. You can write code, but you don't have to write that much.

As you grow older, you will want to write less code and focus more on software architecture and management of programmers.
Live-video service Ustream.tv gets $11.1 million
I'm not a corporate finance expert, but I do remember hearing that companies in danger of a hostile takeover will sometimes take on massive debt or buy something really expensive to mess up their balance sheet and make themselves look less appealing. It certainly looks like this is what's going on here. If so it's a desperate strategy, and frankly I don't really understand it unless they're merely using it as a threat to get more money from MS.
Here's another piece of the puzzle. In the open source world, we use "planets" to aggregate blogs. Let's get that going for the news.YC crowd. If you're here, and you're running a startup, send me a link to your feed and I'll add it here.

http://planetstartup.directededge.com/

I'll worry about making it pretty later. I just took the default template for now.
Liz Lawley is a good advocate for geek women and runs this Women in Tech group blog:
http://www.misbehaving.net/
Well, I don't care about companies, I care about paradigms. Google represented a new paradigm in search. Movable Type's blogging software (the first I saw) represented a new paradigm in media. Napster in music.

It's more about the wave and less about the surfer. Google and Napster were riding huge waves. Facebook, I think, is boogie boarding on a tiny one.
Nvidia CEO opens a can of whoop-ass for Intel
That's brutal.
"engage in any employment, business or activity that is competitive with the Company's businesses"

There aren't many tech companies that can't be said to be competing with Google in one way or another. Assuming "the Company" means Google rather than Doubleclick (and it must) that makes them nearly unemployable.

"solicit business from, do business with or render services to, in any capacity, directly or indirectly, any entity that is or was a Company client or customer within the last twelve months of my employment with the Company, for a purpose or in a manner that is in any way competitive with the Company's business."

i.e., can't sell ads to anyone who used AdSense?

This is incredibly evil.
What about acquiring them?
courts won't enforce these. this is retarded.
For the same reasons, shouldn't TechCrunch stories be banned?
Would it make sense to give them an initial score of zero instead ?
“X doesn’t scale” is a myth
Google Calls Quattrone For Yahoo/Microsoft Advice
Gartner: Windows is collapsing
The Internet promotes a form of cultural obesity, threatens our intellectual health
Internet, the copy machine
Doesn't matter. First thing you sign when you join a new employer is an agreement that says something like "I am not under any other company's non-compete".

While this might not be enforceable, if you were a small company in a similar space, would you really risk hiring someone if you might get attacked by Google's lawyers?
People can use their own judgment-- I can generally summon the sense to NOT click on a link to a Valleywag article because I know it's linkbait. It's a slippery slope. Linkbait abounds.

(I voted no)
Rather than explicitly banning Valleywag or other particular sources, it might be more useful if PG can leverage his influence in this community by adding to the posting etiquette thread from a few weeks ago (right after the rush caused by TC) regarding the type of content that is the aim/target of this space. A simple disapproval/opinion by PG should weed out 80-90% of these posts from getting generated.
TechCrunch actually bothers me more. I don't recall ever being pissed off that a ValleyWag story wasted my time.
Okay, that was a little flippant on my part.

I agree with the other two guys that there isn't a whole lot of correlation between profitability and importance.

I just think you're underestimating the importance of social tools that help people communicate more efficiently. I could replace 'Facebook' with 'email' and 'Google' with 'the telephone' and your rant would make about as much sense, but it'd be just as wrong.
No, this is the promise of social news. Good things bubble up, uninteresting get dumped. If its not blatant spam, or totally irrelevant don't ban them.
Facebook is different from MySpace for exactly the use case of keeping up with your friends. Facebook is the only social network so far that rigorously enforces real names, identities and relationships through both social design and brute force. MySpace has degenerated in to a social game to rack up more points in the form of 'friends'. They are completely different, which is why Facebook is catching up to MySpace so quickly and MySpace is sinking.
Banning stuff isn't a solution to the problem of disagreement about what links should be posted here, or a solution for people who have conflicting ideas in their personality about what links they want to click on.
Was the pet rock Special and Important?

Well, for whom? For its creator it was obviously both. For a few happy customers it was at least special. For society at large, who gives a shit?

I think this would be a much clearer discussion if we defined "Special" and "Important" properly (and realized that they mean very different things to different people).

There are a lot of people on HN/YC who are trying to hack together a successful internet company. For them, I don't think Matt's definitions of Special or Important are all that useful, because they ignore a lot of viable business ideas -- ideas that fill a niche which is inane by itself, but economically important to a few focused souls. If you make your living building Widget X, then no matter how trivial that widget is to its users lives, it is everything to the people who devote their lives/company to producing it.

The better our economy evolves to allow niche ideas to make money, the harder time we're going to have figuring out how to define "Important". It is increasingly possible to earn a living doing something that's entirely trivial from a "big picture" point of view... but as soon as you're earning a living from it, it's become important (to you).
There's also RubyJS: http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/...

A tool to convert a subset of Ruby into JavaScript.

I saw Michael's talk at RubyConf 2007; the video is probably up on the confreaks site. Really neat stuff.
Neat. How did you do it? I have a pet project in mind and I want to use LISP.
If Google-like valuations is the bar for 'importance', then what's important on the internet other than Google?
Banning a single site feels good, but is a short-term band-aid on the moderation system. Better to identify the factors in valleywag stories that are undesireable and find a way to target them generally - to raise the editorial quality here across the board and leave behind the dross.

As others have pointed out, Valleywag doesn't have a monopoly on linkbait titles and thin follow-through.
Any clues on why this is "fantastic"?
I don't think freedom of speech would apply here so yes if Valleywag is causing problems then ban, put on notice or anything that would fix it...

but there should also be some set of rules, guidlines that everyone should know about to make the ban fair.
I think the existing voting system is adequate to determine if a Valleywag story is worthwhile.
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Might be good publicity, but also somewhat of a risk, if you were sued.
It didn't cover Google's properties.
Ah, ok. That makes more sense, although it is quite different from what my husband's company considers "managing coders" to be. That does sound more in line with what I want to do long term. Thanks for giving me a different view.
Also, Younoodle.com!

Pretty much the entrepreneur social network. It works pretty well, too.
Python hack for functional programming using assembly line syntax
Test server is gentoo, production may vary.
The Web needs criticism, not scorn
I voted for "No, don't ban them", but I don't particularly like Valleywag stories. Rather, I think the whack-a-mole approach of banning individual problem sites is a bad idea.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again: Users who post garbage stories should be more accountable. Make posting a story cost a few points of karma, so that people who repeatedly post stories which don't get voted up end up without any karma.

The specific problem of linkbait titles might also be helped by allowing users to "un-vote" a link which they previously voted up.
how about a feature where a user can ban certain domains from showing up in their results?

or a spam filter tailored to each individual user...
Any article which mentions Lee Siegel and doesn't mention "Sprezzatura" is... hiding something:

http://www.the-eleven.com/~tjlegg/index.php?/archives/2589-T...

For a guy who hates the Internet, this idiot Siegel sure has demonstrated a firm grasp of both sockpuppetry and linkbait.
I would like to learn how to use a mainframe? does anyone know if any of the mainframe os's (z/os and os/400 off the top of my head) can be run in a virtual environment? so I can learn them?

as an admin, big iron turns me on :D
gender stereotyping by parents begins at birth.
This is as evil as it gets.
You asked about censorship and then deleted an article on the front page a few days ago that had some interesting comments. It was a stupid article, to be sure, but did you have to completely delete it? There's no "send to second page" button in the moderation options?

My feelings: Do not ban any content, ever. Only delete things after they are submitted if they are off topic or ridiculously stupid.

Instead ban the users who vote those stupid things up, or diminish their voting "worth".

Sometimes, I like reading Valleywag stuff. It's certainly on topic, even if it's linkbait or pure lies. It's the comic, tabloid, side of the industry we're in. Maybe you can add a tag that says "tabloid" next to the Valleywag domain instead of downright banning it.

This is a pretty good article from Valleywag:

* http://valleywag.com/378444/did-you-sign-googles-noncompete-...

* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=160603

Why would you want to censor that?

If you have to ask about being accused of censorship, something is seriously wrong. Also, using a poll like this is extremely ineffective. The mob is, as a whole, foolish. I imagine a ton of people are clicking "yes" simply due to a negative reaction to Valleywag, rather than understanding that censoring Valleywag may start a trend here that could get out of hand...
I don't think it's that slippery. There's only a few sites out there that are pure bottom feeders. Valleywag and Dailymail.co.uk are the only two that come to my mind immediately.
In the profile there is a showdead option -- if you set it to yes, you can see stories and comments that have been marked dead by an admin.

By generally, I agree, banning Valleywag is a slippery slope, or, at least, it doesn't help to solve the broader problems of social news this site faces.
Yes, I would if I were in the state of California. If you were small, google wouldn't notice anyways.
If the reason that there are less women in technical subjects is that their minds have been crippled by their upbringing (at a higher rate, for these particular subjects), then that is an important problem.
How many people keep ShowDead turned on? Do you, rms?
I do, but I doubt very many other people do.
To be fair, Oracle RAC is not a complete solution and doesn't really pretend to be. For HA you really need RAC and Dataguard.

Btw, I'm quite the Mnesia fan too.
It sounds like the problem isn't Valleywag, but whoever is submitting articles from Valleywag (that is, if I'm properly understanding how news.yc works). If people stop submitting them, then the problem will go away right?

We should just make it known that it is not socially acceptable for people to submit worthless articles to our community, no matter what site the articles from come.

If someone submits something from Valleywag, heap scorn upon them! But if someone is voting for it, then someone likes it. Appealing to the lowest common denominator (no offense) is part of democracy.
Fred Wilson is complaining about not having enough ways to make money - an old problem. Companies he invests in can't go public because of Sarbanes Oxley or a tough market. Acquisitions are apparently anti-climactic.

Making money is hard. Unregulated (liquid!) markets in which to do so are probably a bad idea.

When companies create substantial value for shareholders, investors will be able to "get out" easily. And probably not until then.
And for the record, the poll seems like it has some bias in the wording. I wish the second option said something more neutral like "No, don't ban them; I don't think it's necessary".

Right now it has kind of a "No, don't violate my civil rights; I like the terrorists" feel to it.
The only thing about the rule of law here is not getting caught. These laws are about controlling the population, not protecting them.

Here is where your "illegal drugs" thinking goes:
http://www.reason.com/news/show/124947.html
Faceted browsing for Mozilla Thunderbird
The key thing to remember is that this is a preview release, available only to a small number of users. Google is probably keeping an eye on ways people are trying to break out of the sandbox and fixing bugs with their SDK and infrastructure.

Google is trying to get people to write applications in a way that CAN scale, not necessarily something that is scalable at the moment (see the resource limits). Once the pressing issues are ironed out I am expecting to see more reasonable terms (in the free to pretty cheap range).
exactly. they're not laying off Google employees (or at least not many). they're laying off people they bought the rights to.
Addnr.com launch on sunday
check out the roadshow, if you are in hamburg!
Video: CrunchGear interviews James Dyson
> I don't see what is any more irreplaceable about Facebook than MySpace.

That's exactly it. You're probably not seeing how they're different. When you used Google you saw that it's different from Yahoo, but I'm sure many people didn't see the difference. After all, they're both search engines. Same here: although they're both social networks, Facebook is very different from MySpace. When I used Facebook the first time, I got that Aha moment you talked about.
I am working on building an online pencil and paper rpg play system. It would support a character database, dice rollers, major P&P systems, the usual forums, npc character search, all sort's of toy's for players/ST's,GM's,DM's, and a chat system. And eventually support for a subscription service for the books. Much like O'Reilly's Safari.

at least that's my primary idea atm. I have many others.

The problem is that most of the people I know wouldn't want to leave there security blanket of a comfortable job. Aren't technically adept enough, or generally aren't smart enough. I only can think of one person I would really, really consider. But he is part of the first problem, and working on a drinking addiction :(.

The rest of the people who I might consider I wouldn't get along with and don't share their style of visions.
Totally agree. FB is a complete waste of time and I wish TechCrunch would stop writing about it 50 times per day.
You should explain what the service is. Here's a link I found:

http://addnr.couchtycoon.net/learn.php