skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Keynes quote is well understood by most modern economists. Keynes shifted focus from 100% belief in the long run to a system where we try to smooth out the valleys as much as possible while working towards to long run. I'm not really sure what sort of point Bernstein is trying to prove by dropping it in his story, but it seems misinterpreted.

Also, his point of "More important, not all investors can afford to hang on for the long run" is misguided. INVESTORS shouldn't be investing in high-risk speculation unless they can invest for the long run. Otherwise, there are plenty of investment options that will return more modest rates with significantly less risk. I'd imagine the bulk of your average American's market exposure is through their 401(k) plans, which are certainly long run investments. Maybe people are a little more speculative with their non-retirement investments than I thought.

The entire basis of his story seems to be that just because the markets grew at X average over the past century that it won't mean that it will grow at X average over the next century. Even that statement isn't entirely true and everything past that premise in his article was poor. I just don't see any value in this at all.
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A wearable camera for blind people, that is hooked up to a computer that tells aloud what's there to be seen in the scene (for example reading street signs).

Some more ideas: http://www.lkozma.net/ideas
It's not really an idea, if you don't have an idea for a feasible way to implement it (feasible as in consumer friendly, of course you could put 10 pounds VR-helmets on people's heads).

Although admittedly, it depends on the context. It is not an idea in the context of "doable in hardware in the near future", but it could be an idea for a science fiction movie or book.
Do you know what else was a "great marketing" ploy by Apple? Making products that were better than their competitors. Customer evangalists aren't created by a marketing team - they are created by making great products.

Your cult references could be pretty much be applied to fans of anything: the Yankees, the Beatles, some restaurant, or even YCombinator. It's certainly not exlcusive to Apple.
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NearlyFreeSpeech (http://nearlyfreespeech.net). Slightly more expensive, but given their track record and their attitude toward web hosting, you can be pretty sure they're trustworthy.
Bad Programmers Are Not Good Programmers Who Are Slow
In case you want to dabble in digital electronics...
"It's not really an idea, if you don't have an idea for a feasible way to implement it"

OK, so you agree with me that the execution is the important thing? Excellent ;)

GPS, wearable computers, wi-fi, lightweight VR goggles, etc, make this very "do-able" for the right technical talent. Admittedly, that means I wouldn't have a whelk's chance in a super-nova, but some of you kids are surely in with a chance?
And the information that can be found using Zillow and Indeed isn't half bad either.
Apple has biggest impact on world consumers: survey
"Team B used a very simple algorithm, but they added in additional data beyond the Netflix set: information about movie genres from the Internet Movie Database (IMDB)."

I had no idea imdb had so much genre data. E.g., a "keywords" page for every movie [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/keywords] and, for every keyword, maps of (a) related keywords and (b) movies that mention it [c.f., http://www.imdb.com/keyword/metaphysical/].

Very cool.
Beyond craigslist proper, Kexter did a really good job for a couple of years. It was craigslist apartment listings overlayed onto Google maps plus the GIS data of your choice, so you could browse apartments by crime rates, per capita income, etc. Unfortunately as a condition of using the data they weren't allowed to monetize it, so they eventually stopped updating it and the last time I checked it was broken.
A quick preview of socialthing
There seem to be very smart, thoughtful people on both sides of this issue. On the one hand, I sense a consensus that the current DHTML/JavaScript mess is terrible. On the other hand, it's working pretty well for what it's doing. Is there some other alternative to closing the once-open web standards? What about SVG?
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Don't Let Below Average Programmers Hurt Your "Silver Codebase"
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No it's certainly not exclusive to Apple, and your examples of other instances of this phenomenon are good - My point is just how much they have perfected it.
This is just getting ridiculous now
Namecheap has recently become an ICANN accredited registar.
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This is just a rehash of the old, "who is more important, the engineer or the marketer?" argument. If the marketer has nothing to sell, he's not very important. Likewise, if the engineer can't bring her work to the world, she won't be successful.

I look at good web design as a branch of marketing: you are branding your product and making it known. Great marketers are extremely valuable, yet there are also people who call themselves marketing experts who don't really understand what marketing is all about.
I had read from various places that if you do that you'll end up in the 60 day 'purgatory' where you can't transfer your domain. Why would you need to disable this feature in order to transfer -- does it implicitly lock you out from getting the auth code?
AVOID DREAMHOST like the plague they will never release your domain, unless you know how to swim backwards across the Atlantic.
Idea * Judgment * Ability * Determination * Luck = $$$

Four of the five are qualities of the team.
mind you godaddy have so much spam it hurts
"Excel's team produced about 13,000 lines of code per staff year. Lotus's team produced 1,500 lines of code per staff year."

Maybe this is one of the reason Microsoft beat the crap out of Lotus, starting from a position where Lotus had 90% marketshare and they had none.
Geeks use keyboard shortcuts
If you are using the mouse to copy and paste then this tool is not for you. Seriously, learn some shortcuts :)

This is the second version of the site and I added lots of new features, so let me know what you think.

Here is the list of new features:

- feeds everywhere e.g. search for visual studio and subscribe to that feed to get all newly submitted shortcuts with that search term

- user voting (digg like), so vote to make sure only the good shortcuts make it

- best and latest shortcuts (and feeds)

- top 10 search queries

- user registration

- much better UI and UX (I think)

More features coming soon:

- favorites

- printer friendly

- and whatever you guys suggest.

Thanks and I hope you find it useful.
Fixed.

If you can point out namecheap doing something like this: http://nodaddy.com/mystory.html, then I'd agree with your second point.
Post your ideas to increase the quality of YC News
I've had a MacBook (now got a MacBook Air) and I'd go with the "Pro" version any day. I loved my 15" MacBook Pro and just couldn't get on anywhere near as much with the MacBook - sorry to those of you who love them. Thats my experience anyway
Did Your Shopping List Kill a Songbird?
Kawa can't capture continuations, so SISC definitely gets more attention. However, Kawa is way faster. If you read SISC's performance boasting you'll notice that it only compares itself to other Scheme interpreters on the JVM. Kawa is a compiler.
Operations is a competitive advantage
"Startup News was dying" - was it? That's not my recollection.
Software design and asking questions
Of course execution is excellent, but what I am saying your idea is not an executable idea (in my opinion). If lightweight VR goggles and low-voltage mobile graphics processors become available next month (or already are), you could jump from behind a corner and shout "here, I am the first to make good use of it and make the land-grab for this technology".

I just don't agree that all ideas fall into the non-executable category. I have lots of unexecuted ideas, but for most of them I already know how I could implement them (ie for web apps). I consider that execution plan a part of the idea. It is way different from saying "hey, I have an idea, let's create a spaceship with anti-gravity drive, or hey, let's create a perpeteum-mobile".

If you seriously think that technology for your idea is already within reach, I'd say go for it. It could be the future - who wants to carry around bricks with tiny displays forever?

A variant of your idea would be to show things on the screens of the "bricks". Ie a mobile phone with camera and GPS might be able to recognise what it is looking at and at least display some additional information for the item.

Actually it is already a good business to create goggles as you describe for industry use. For example I think airplane engineers use them when they repair some parts of the airplane, and the device shows them required parts in context.

What I think is not yet feasible to make a device that is unintrusive enough to be wearable all the time in daily life.
Best thing since the cluetrain etc.
I use another metaphor: air

Air is worthless. Air has no market value. But nobody can say air is unimportant.

If you have clean air and want to make money, you need the right execution: You need to combine your clean air with things that people can enjoy along with it. If you build and run a great resort, lots of people will come. They'll say it's the air that keeps them coming back. Hearing that, the idea guys who always talked about selling air will feel vindicated. They'll underestimate the importance of you getting the details right on your resort.
What's the name of the student team and what was their result?
with some help of Snipshot

http://aycu03.webshots.com/image/49922/2001351004567808923_r...
I disagree with the article. I have no basis for disagreement other than the need and desire to be contrary.
When I bought my first laptop with a university discount, I could only buy thinkpads and was a little worried because it had no touchpad at all. Luckely, I bought one anyway. The trackpoint is awesome, like the thinkpad's themselves.

I only had to replace one motherboard once (2 days until I got hte motherboard back) on an old R32. It still works today, even though it has now 5 years. As does a T42 and T60 which are used daily.
That has never been the premise of copyright, and patent law did not work that way up until about 20 years ago.

In theory, ideas were never supposed to be patentable. A patent had to show both an idea and a specific implementation of it. Only with the increase of legally-questionable patents on software and business methods have ideas been patented.
Blind submission removes the implicit "I thought this was valuable" filter and decreases the signal-to-noise ratio.
+1 vote from me too for the 19th -- Anyone here flying from San Diego?
I definitely appreciated this articulate and concise article.

I feel quite strongly that what you've described about "the web" is in fact symptomatic (probably not causal, however) of what ails communication as a whole, in this country - with regard to coherent dialog & debate, or lack thereof.
What are the incentives to post something on hacker news? If the incentive is "get noted by YC so they'll fund me", then posting LOL cats is unlikely.

If gaining karma is the incentive, then LOL-cats have a chance, with a critical mass of supporters (more upvoters than downvoters).

A universal incentive on the net is to drive traffic to one's own web site. That also get's undermined by LOLCats, because as they drive away visitors to the news site, they drive away prospective referals.

Judging by my comprehensive list, karma is the main threat (a ka recognition by peers)?

What exactly is so bad about Reddit? I don't read it, so I don't know?

A guess: too many users might also result in repetitive submissions, as the new users are unaware that certain topics are already common knowledge within a community. Technological approaches might be possible, like better recognition of duplicates (analyze the content, not only the URLs).
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Microsoft UNIX
I can personally attest to Nearly Free Speech being a fantastic host. I used to use Godaddy, but their domain management tools were ugly and over complicated, and being a member of their site made me feel like I was just a number. NFS.net has simple, easy to use domain management tools, cheap hosting (Just like the name says) and anytime I needed help they have been able to respond very quickly. I would recommend them above any other hosting site.
Idea for simulating hacker news dilution
I find the problem of community dilution very fascinating. It does not only apply to news sites, but also to political parties, religions, groups in general. Probably there are tons of academic papers about it available somewhere - please post links, if you know any interesting ones. Unfortunately I don't know any :-(

However, I just had a thought for emulating the problem:

Create a random set of ideas, and give the simulated users random subsets of the ideas. Assume the users are undisciplined. For example the ideas might be "startups, hacking, stupid cartoons", and you don't really want to have "stupid cartoons" in your hackers community. But because users are undisciplined, they will upvote "stupid cartoons" anyway (if it is in their interest), even though they know they shouldn't.

Now you could go ahead and submit random stories (ie with random idea subsets) and see what happens to the news page. For example start with a high proportion of users who are only interested in hacking. Make up rules for their behaviour (leave site if signal-to-noise below x) and so on. Experiment with the results of different reward systems etc.

Hours of fun - I wish I had the time for it... Perhaps with a classifier, it would even be possible to analyze the real Hacker News.
Now that is just a marvelous restatement of the canonical optimization principle!
> but many aspects of how you define superiority come down
> to personal preference I guess

If you get a macbook then you don't have easy access to right or middle mouse buttons on the standard hardware. This sucks for linux. My experience of configuring X to hack keyboard buttons into being extra mouse buttons has been mixed, and I'd recommend thinking long and hard about buying an Apple for linux purposes. Sure, you can get an external mouse, but you could also just get a thinkpad.
i've always thought karma should equal to karma points / (number of posts + number of comments).
Well, remember that the next time you see an article with such phrasing as, "Hillary Clinton lies about her past."
I did the same thing last semester inspired by a class at Cornell. We came up with a very, very simple graph-based algorithm that gets above the competition's baseline (not quite bellkor level but there's lots of tweaking left to be done).

Now -- I was under the impression that using extra proprietary data (like imdb) is beyond the bounds of the competition. Can anyone shed some light on this? Maybe I should pick up the project again!
That was lazy of me. Will update with the eval in a few.
A google search should yield a number of ideas, as well as reading a few articles on read/write web and other places. My advice:
A) Find a pain
B) Combine that with a trend (different from setting a trend)
C) Start making it
"apparently the gold flows intermittently in this analogy"

It's nice to see commentary from someone that worked during the last dotcom crash.
the unfortunate thing is that, there are signs that the discussions will begin to suffer also.
is Woopra also a remote JS include or is it a local app like haveamint.com?
Ask YC:  Seeking feedback on Numbrosia's successor:  Wordrosia (work in progress, but playable)
You've changed the world - now what next?
Suppose that while working on something mundane, you stumble upon something that is brilliant and could change a field, nay, the world if it indeed is what you think it is. Suppose also that this something is related to a field in which you have no clout and no formal training - a field in which contributions from perceived dilettantes are ignored with abandon. The question is twofold:

1)How do you share this information with the world, overcoming the perceived noise from people like you?
2)How do you protect this brilliant result from theft?
I'm especially interested in a puzzle where strong human players can be competitive with strong computer players. How difficult would it be to create a strong Wordrosia computer player?

BTW, even though Wordrosia is playable, no checking is done to see if your submitted words are valid English words yet.

Moreover, the database may be cleared at any time and will be cleared when the puzzle is mostly done (in a week or so).
This is a good basic model and reminds me somewhat of the levels used in spiral-dynamics and similar systems, see the table in:
http://www.spiraldynamics.org/aboutsd_overview.htm

However, only levels DH3 and upwards follow the model of including the previous levels and adding enhancements, the first 2 levels are another mini-hierarchy, and DH2 is almost a category on it's own. Perhaps this might be modelled better with a dimension-level mapping. This also follows the ethos, pathos and logos.

This will allow analysis and levelling of each form of argument:
DH0 -> DE:0
DH1 -> DE:1
DH2 -> DP:0
DH3 -> DL:0
DH4 -> DL:1
DH5 -> DL:2
DH6 -> DL:3

I also like the concept of DH7 which explicitly argues against the strongest form of the statement.
DH7 -> DL:4
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Ask YC: What if Comments Made a Difference to Improving Karma and Front Page Status?
Here's a thought:

Everyone seems to want some kind of input on revolutionizing how karma is ranked, how votes are counted but I'm noticing a trend:

A lot of submissions that are voted up have fewer comments than submissions with lower vote counts. Now, maybe I'm missing something; this could very well already be the case - but would a more economic system be one that calculates points, and by association karma be one where points are allocated based on the number of comments a submission gets? Perhaps even a flat ratio.

10 votes for 4 comments = 2.5, which we know is rounded up to 3. A person would then get 3 points for his submission based on that. It's devastatingly simple, but a lot more accurate, and much more fair to users who comment on a submission perhaps to point out something the user didn't cover (which is a positive since it enhances the value of what we all get from the submission) but don't vote because they may not exactly share the same opinion. No one is disadvantaged, and they contribute karma just the same to the original poster.

Thoughts?
I can't imagine Jessica spending her time on product injection, so there must have been a fan on the set.
First, if you have no formal training there could be something you're missing, so don't get your hopes up too high.

Second, find out "if it is what you think it is."

I wouldn't worry as much about protection until you're further along. Despite what you think, if this is truly revolutionary, you can scream the idea from the rooftops and no one will care. If something is within the expected field, research is all over it, but if it comes out of left field, it's not given a glance.
Is there a reason that you are commenting with a different account than the one you used to submit this post?
A device that looks like the original Nintendo robotic operating buddy with different buttons on the side that you depress whenever you complete a workout run for the day, brush your teeth, eat a healthy meal, or other tasks of your choosing; perhaps it also has an alarm clock style setting to update a numeric field, so you can submit a value like your weight for the day. It has a USB port and when connected to your pc will update an rrd file in your home account so you can review some useful looking graphs.
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I've been using Dotster for about 4 years now and they are fine. Make sure to search for discount coupons...
Coding Horror: Revisiting "Keyboard vs. The Mouse, pt 1"
The missing thread-level down arrow does prevent reddit-style polling. Pg might not like this suggestion because a worse nightmare might be "vote up if you like candy" threads.

If the down-arrows were karma-restricted to ensure adequate assimilation, though...
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That is all well and good, but it doesn't answer either question given the suppositions.
I submitted his post.
I didn't submit it.
I think you might be on to something, if you're saying that a personal or tonal response might be necessary to certain articles. Someone earlier mentioned the Ethos, Pathos and Logos vectors for disagreement, which I love. I read what you're saying as that just because an attack is on the person, doesn't mean it's irrelevant, which I think might be true. This means that there's different targets here and qualities of argument on each target. I've got a comment somewhere on adding dimensions to these levels and splitting them out, although the examples I gave can be improved on I'm sure.
I think it's fair to say that most name calling on the internet is of a low level variety, hence why it might get munged into a single list like this and placed at a low level, however a personal attack may take a higher and more-legitimate form, although I've not come to any examples of that.
There is a question on the legitimacy of arguing against anything other than the actual logic of the argument - I'll leave that to others to work out, I'm happy to say that there are different lines to attack on, and different qualities of attack on each level. I'll assume that the relevant line is dependant on the post and the respondent. What I think is worth taking away from this is that the level of argument raised in the response should be as high as possible.
>What exactly is so bad about Reddit? I don't read it, so I don't know?

The cliche is that reddit is turning into digg. I recently stopped visiting reddit because I think there is truth to the cliche. There are two dimensions to the the quality problem with reddit: content and comments. For 80% of the cases the content (i.e. the posted links) problem is solved: a few weeks back reddit did some excellent work on the algorithm to aggregate user's subreddits (e.g. politics, programming) and present links on the top page. Users seem to be happy with the change, so for example if someone doesn't want to see lolcatz, they just unsubscribe from the lolcatz subreddit. There are problems around people posting to wrong subreddits, but these are minor.

On the other hand comments are getting really bad. To understand this point, check out the "most dugg" comments on digg for pg's disagreement hierarchy essay. The top comment is just the word "No", and the 2nd and 3rd aren't that much better. So based on that I think whatever karma system you'll have, at the end it will reflect the overall sentiment of the user population on the site. For example, if the majority of the users believe that the comment "u r a fag" is a "good" response and give karma to the comment, then regardless of how you write the karma algorithm, the comments with the highest karma will reflect this primitive nature of the user population. Another example is youtube comments where there is a voting system, but reading comments makes you want to poke your eyes out.

There doesn't seem to be a solution other than to restrict comment voting/karma giving to a subset of the users who represent and vote in line with the behaviors that should be considered "good".
Jwz - Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day!
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Joel Spolsky has a real nice treatment of this:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html

My favorite line from that:

"Five Antonio Salieris won't produce Mozart's Requiem. Ever. Not if they work for 100 years."

Nice analogy to programming.
Nice metaphor: mountain climbing - startups.

Wish it were my idea.