skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's an idea to reward high quality posts in a way robust to karma inflation: You could change the criteria for a follow/nofollow decision to use the time a link spends on the front page (e.g. the top 30). High scoring posts stay there for a while, while low scoring posts will drop off quickly.

A similar approach could be used to dynamically set the karma barrier, if you don't want to track the rank of individual posts.
That's what I am trying to do with my web app (www.ezlearnz.com), although I'm not limiting the site to instructional videos, but also text, images, and interactive widgets.
Massive SQL Injection Attack 600.000++
Just came up with a new one for ezlearnz.com:

ezLearnz: this is your textbook on the internets
Schaum's Outlines are usually a good source of cheap (~$15) "cut the crap" textbook alternatives. Brief explanations, then many worked problems, then more problems with answers elsewhere.
FrankenMac in the Lab
Twitter Reportedly Putting More Gas In The Tank
15 Slideshows from the Web 2.0 Expo
The Art of Introduction
Student 'Twitters' his way out of Egyptian jail
Not to derail this post, but commenting on the 'allure of free' is starting to get as tired as the allure of free.
Apple will probably start making their own chips for the iPhone and their new gadgets but I doubt they will do the same for the PC market.

Agreed. I am an electrical engineer (circuit designer) and Intel is a monster when it comes to fabricating processors (their fabs are super optimized for processors alone, unlike generic fabs). I don't think Apple could do much better costwise by designing and manufacturing their own processers rather than buying Intel (even factoring in Intel's profits). This assumes that AMD continues to exist as competition.

Everyone in the circuits industry is very interested in how Apple will use PA Semi's processors.
the fact that apple machines used to have a totally different architecture than PCs felt right, in a psychological way. it drew a clear line in the sand between Us and Them. now that apple machines are pretty much the same under the hood as PCs ... it's sad.

I'm a bit of an Apple fanboy myself, but I simply don't get this attitude. I want the best processor in my machines. I admit that I have an emotional attachment to my personal computers, but it somehow does not encompass the brand of processor (or hard drive, graphics chip, etc.).
I actually wonder if Google has things like this built in.

Do you think it knows that a 3000 point digg story is better than a 50 point story?
"Twitter is a social-networking blog site"

Hah! The pace of the internet makes terms obsolete just as cnn starts to use them.
I don't see how his sarcasm detector is broken, wheels suggested we relax and don't jump to conclusions when someone is missing for a few days, and jdavid came in and acknowledged that we shouldn't be too worried but it's still nice to see that some people are.
He should have done a 3rd experiment where the kids could choose between 3 hershey's + small snickers and 2 hershey's + large snickers.
(News.YC members) Friends For Sale creators raise financing, say they’re not for sale
4M from Lightspeed. Congrats guys!

Info about their server architecture here: http://highscalability.com/friends-sale-architecture-300-mil...

I can't find the original post where they launched here. Can anyone here find it?
I think this talk about intel is crap. They wanted PA Semiconductor because Dan Dobberpuhl and his team are incredibly brilliant at design and because he has a strong interest in techniques to lower power.

You can read an interview with Dobberpuhl where his interest in low power comes through here: http://www.acmqueue.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=show...

He's all about low power. Making iPhones that have processors that work great but low power in an essential step to the coming revolution, and will further distance iPhone from it's competitors. Therefore, acquisition. Pressure on Intel is not what this is about. This is much more visionary than that and has to do with continuing to push what is possible with iPhone as far as it can go.
Not entirely serious, but there are an enormous number of blowhards coming out of the woodwork. And it did happen before.
So while there's an SEO thread up here, anyone want to guess when my site thinkgene.com will get some pagerank? It's picked up some huge links and a couple blogrolls but still PR0.

How long does Google take to give a new site Pagerank these days?
When I lived in the UK, I lived 35 miles away from my office and spent 200 GBP / month approx on gas. About 25% of my income. 10 years ago.

Now I'm spending $240 or so a month on gas, which is a rather smaller proportion of my income. I have considerable headroom before I start to notice much pain.

In particular, I could cut my gas bill in half by trading my SRT-4 for a Honda Fit (Jazz in UK) or similar.
Seems redundant to me. A 3000 point Digg story will likely have many more inbound links than a 50 point story anyway.
We need more talks by people who failed.

I have to believe that many people have done "the same thing" as Paul Graham, 37 Signals, and other successful people, and still gone nowhere.

I'm skeptical that people are really good at recognizing everything that they have done and the influence, good or bad, it had on their success, such that it ports well to other people and situations.

Folks probably cannot do "the same thing" as other people, because these other people cannot themselves accurately tell you what they really did, rather what they ended up deciding in retrospect was important to recall.
WordPress founder talks traffic, new features to Web 2.0 crowd
Twitter indexes thoughts and conversations, other words personal consumer information! Great for market researchers, as well as a company's who want to monitor brand and services!

I hate X company tweeted 1,000 times becomes very useful!
Using Amazon S3 from Perl
Shutterfly's Jeff Housenbold: Entrepreneurship is a State of Mind (aud:59m, vid:55s)
I'm not so sure Schaum's is that great. I want to "cut the crap" but replace it with a deeper study of whatever the student is studying.

I really dislike when a mathematics textbook states something like "The proof is too complicated and therefore not included." Let me be the judge of that. At least indicate where I may find a proof of a theorem if it's not included in the text.

I also believe that logic and proofs should be taught much earlier in the curriculum than at present, and I don't consider the simple geometric proofs learned in high school to be a firm basis on which to start. Under my plan, something like Rudin should be what is taught as a last math class in high school. Some may say that is too ambitious. I don't think so.
Is the Closed Source Inevitable?
I agree with this in theory, but there's one big advantage to running the same distro on both workstation and server: versioning and compatibility issues at deployment time more or less disappear.

I run Ubuntu on my development workstation, and deploy to Debian servers. While the environments are almost identical, I've wasted far too many hours tracking down stupid bugs in shared libraries that only occur one one distro or the other.
Did Apple Make A Mistake Choosing Objective-C For iPhone SDK?
New in Google Docs: Insert Videos, Edit CSS
Oh, I don't disagree. It's just that in this specific instance it was confusing. My comment was just because I'm sure other people might be confused as well. There's a Jared Diamond like half a mile from my house, so it just popped into my head first.
OAuth support for Google Accounts and Contacts API
"I'm getting really freaking tired of experiencing this level of incompetence"
You should taste wine with Gary Vaynerchuk to celebrate.
I am. Actually, I keep checking your HN submissions for it.
Like the pitch but it reads - Backups for Criminals - to me. Isn't it possible to encrypt already and then backup?
i love snail mail spam, especially the ones with paid envelopes that you can fill with funny things and send back
Ask YC: How did you escape the pressures of school?
I'm realizing that I haven't learned a single new thing in two years of school, and I'm fully prepared to drop out at the end of this semester and focus on business endeavors. My only fear is the student loan I'll have to pay back.

How many of you were able to escape the student loan barrier in life and succeed after dropping out, if that's the route you took.
I think there are plenty of programmers in America that are this incompetent.

Also, he writes "all things being equal, a guy with a CS degree, C++ experience, and a year with Ruby on Rails who's asking $20 an hour is going to be more appealing than a guy with the same background asking $60 an hour."

$20/hour for someone who claims to know Rails and C++? This has to be too good to be true, because anyone with a clue would want about 10x that.

All in all, I see where the author is coming from... but I don't think his unqualified assertions are correct.
How did this get reposted? Isn't there a filter to catch duplicates?
Darwin's Notes and Thoughts Go Online
O'Reilly Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers Pocketguide
Fight the good fight, my friend.

I'm afraid I'm just not willing to invest that much time in costing them money--because the amount of money it costs the sender is significantly lower than the value I put on my time. Sure, if enough people do it, they will eventually find it unprofitable to send their junk...but the human resources wasted in getting to that point is overwhelming. Maybe I should hire a neighborhood kid to come by weekly, for envelope stuffing. $5 per week might be worth it.
I went to community college for the first 60 credits, at $50/credit. I financed that with a part-time job and picking a college 2 miles from my parent's house. By the time I dropped out I was... gosh a couple grand positive, no credit cards & no debt.

Maybe I'm missng something, but at least the first couple years of college don't have to be $900/credit plus dorm plus xyz extravaganzas. You're taking mostly required crap like Science credits and English 2. At least that way if you decide college is not for you, you haven't mortgaged your future.
I didn't mean to rile the "optimization is more awesome than donuts" brigade. Really. I was just trying to say (unsuccessfully) that they're probably approaching the problem wrong, if one guy is expected to solve performance problems without giving him the power to make deep architectural changes. Let's pretend I never mentioned optimization, premature or otherwise.

You go right ahead and optimize early, often, and from both ends. I don't want to get in the way of a man and his passion for optimized code.
He also has an uncommon humility considering his achievements that really commands attention when he speaks or writes. You just don't ever get the "hidden agenda" vibe from Donald. Its very refreshing.
All the same, I'd suggest, for instance, omitting the phrase "the hands of the US government". It's generally found in the context of conversations I don't want to be a part of, and the people that it appeals to will substitute it for "anyone that might want to steal it".
"The attack is only successful when the program that is being injected does not sanitize user supplied data."

Well, which is it? Does "regular" sanitizing prevent it, in which case is there anything new about this other than the massive scale? Or is the news that it sidesteps sanitizing because it's hex-encoded, in which case the statement is false?
How to Subvert I.T. and Play at Work
Personally, I'm not worried at all about the U.S. government getting at my stuff. But a company working on security sufficient to keep the NSA from reading my mail has more security than I'll ever need, which is reassuring.
I like the fonts you used (for the logo on top). What are they?
Aggregate Obsession
Ask YC: Looking for Micropayment service, any suggestions?
Start thinking about step 2 - Price, and so I start researching for Micropayment services. The ones that I know now is Paypal (not sure if they can be considered micropayment provider) and Zaypay (http://www.zaypay.com/public/en/docs/overview)

Feel free to drop in any you know.
i think this is a great idea. Think of a mix between Digg and a Google maps mash-up. Each town or city has its own area in google maps highlighted. You can make icons for each problem that signify what it is, like a pothole, (small, medium, giant meteor crater sizes), trees, problems with power or water, missing signs, etc. People can add them where the problems are. Then people can vote on what they'd really like to see fixed the soonest by clicking on the icon. It really connects people to their government. If people invest the time to point out a problem, they're going to be really annoyed if it doesn't get fixed, and care more about who in government is not getting it done.
This guy is clueless.

"For example, it took a long time for Apple to even realise that it needed to release an SDK for the iPhone. What they were thinking, I have no idea, given it’s a blindingly obvious requirement."

Obviously not. Obviously from the polish on the SDK, they were planning it all along. In fact, obviously selling the iPhone as a cellphone is a trojan horse for a revolutionary device that will act as a bridge between the computers of the 1990s and the cybernetic future. These guys are playing a game over years, planning this stuff way ahead of time. It comes out as a phone. Then, with GPS, 3G, SDK, it turns into a platform for games, enterprise, etc. After another year, it will do video chats like a tricorder and work with all sorts of devices.
If you're paying a kid, might as well pay him/her to do this: http://www.dearbulkmailer.com/
The Future of Enterprise Software: I Am So Scared, I Am So Excited
Salesforce dumping 4,000 PCs for Macs?
The assumption is qualified by the preface "all things being equal." However, the post confuses me. His story quite clearly demonstrates that all other things are _not_ equal, and that "a CS degree, C++ experience, and a year with Ruby on Rails who's asking $20 an hour" is not enough evidence to determine whether someone is competent or not.

He also gives an example of a test of competency that seems to work quite well for his purposes.

The thing that confuses me about the story is that instead of writing a blog post explaining that you need to pay more attention to tests and less to paper qualifications, he seems to be lamenting the fact that the qualifications do not mean what he thinks they mean.

He tosses out the "all other things being equal" phrase rather carelessly, IMO. I think he would be well-advised to spend a lot more time with the idea that all other things are rarely equal when it comes to hiring programmers.
Anyone with a clue who claims to know Rails and C++ would want about 200$/hour?...

On an unrelated note, I find it funny how the french equivalent of "I see where the author is coming from" is "Je vois où l'auteur veut en venir" ("I see where the author wants to go"). Come from, go to...
It looks like applications are vulnerable if they blindly stick the attacker-supplied data into the query. The difference between this and the usual variety is that it also gets past things that strip single quotes and then put the data into the query.

You would have to really go out of your way to be vulnerable to this. You would have to build your query like:

"SELECT * FROM foo WHERE bar=$user_supplied_data"

which I think we can all agree is retarded. Even the worst programmers I know at least write something like:

$user_supplied_data =~ s/'/''/g;
"SELECT * FROM foo WHERE bar='$user_supplied_data'";

(although PHP and not Perl ;) But of course using bindvars is the easiest and most correct solution.

It always amazes me how people go out of their way to write code that's more complicated and less secure. What!?!
Brings to mind another advantage of the startup world over the corporate world: your work speaks so loudly that no one cares what your resume says.
page rank doesn't matter much (Except to those who don't matter) .. its actually behind by atleast 3-6 months .. so what you see is the pagerank they had for you 3-6 months ago; so when you do get one since your 7th best link is your YC profile and above that are blogspot links; I'm pretty sure it will be a 2-3 ,
good to see a free service, that is useful. Thats one way to make a loyal customer
Of course closed source is inevitable. Most really awesome technology is closed source.

Not that I'm dissing open source, it has it's place, but it's not as good at really pushing the boundaries. I can't think of any open source I get super excited about and want to use every day.
I've heard the live feeds are expensive. How did you pay for them?
Top 10 Qualities of The Perfect Programmer
what resources do you use to find out those links?
yahoo site explorer (dont forge the 'http://' in the adress or it won't work, ... yahoo gives the best link data and are openly sharing more (lately) [see search monkey]
SmugMug releases premium video sharing service
How to Choose a Car Battery
A great site about how to choose a car battery, how to replace a car battery, how to recycle a car battery, how to jump start a car battery, with advice and lots of pictures.
Relevant especially after this discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=166324

And this comment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=166528
The Body in Depth
Jonathan Schwartz: A top blogger sees end to blogging
I took a semester between HS and college to move back to the US (I was in south america). Best move ever since I was on the fence about school and working with my uncle at a sewer and drain cleaning business (and plumbing too) gave me a great reality check.

I then went to a state school where, except for one semester, I worked full time and school full time for 2.5 years (1 $4,500 student loan only and about $2k in credit card debt + a car loan). I got an offer for a $35k a year job in Dallas through a friend and quit my $7.50 an hour job the next week.

Took another semester off and then continued taking classes in the evenings and weekends at a community college and local commuter college.

When I finally graduated it was basically a non-event for me (didn't walk or send announcements) since I realixed I'd just paid $30k for a piece of paper that is a one liner on my resume and that really didn't teach me much.

So, like I tell lots of people these days, take the basics at a community college, take the upper level classes at a college and just get the paper since unless you're going into the hedge fund business or med/law school noone cares about your grades, just that you have a degree.

Of course if you own your own business, noone cares about a degree :)
Not the most exciting software, but I have no better closed-source alternatives to Firefox 3, TrueCrypt, OpenVPN, and lighttpd. But I agree, some of my favorite stuff is closed source.
TrueCrypt. WebKit (oops. duh). Yeah. There are a few.
So what I want to know is who the heck is Tara Ploughman?

Google finds lots of hits, but they're all quotes (and mostly referring to pg's page of quotes). I think maybe pg made up this clever character.
A winner is you!
Willie Sutton robbed banks because "that's where the money is".

Do you suppose that if he were a hacker today, he would be writing enterprise applications?

Enterprises are like oil tankers; they take forever to turn. But, as stories like this show, they have to turn. Say tuned. I wanna be around (with software in hand) when it happens.
gilesbowkett.blogspot.com!
_sounds kinda girly to complain about this._

yes, that's a good point, because anything females do is bad.
You could try Amazon FPS < http://www.amazon.com/Flexible-Payments-Service-AWS/b?ie=UTF... >. I'm not sure, but I think you might even be able to use them to bill less than 1 cent.
We've had some really good links though... At least 10 PR5 or higher and 2 or 3 PR6. And yeah, I know PR doesn't matter, we're already getting about 100 hits a day from deep random searches. I just want the PR# for my personal satisfaction.

The best SEO thing we did was an April Fools Joke. It was surprisingly popular and got some really good links, not to mention an obscene amount of stumble upon traffic. And we're in the Wikipedia article for Manbearpig which is good for 30 hits a day.
I think he took out "www."

It's probably possible to do something similar with superfluous POST variables.

Perhaps someone could improve the URL matching algorithm?
Yeah, there's definitely room for improvement. Digg's is really good at this point, it filters out ? reposts.
It looks like someone who might actually have some insight into this purchase doesn't understand it: http://www.cnet.com/8301-13512_1-9928659-23.html
What's wrong with serving criminals? Their money is good.

To me it reads more like backups for the nonconformists that are singled out by an american mindset eager to declare war on anything unexpected.
No. Objective-C is a great language, and Cocoa is a great framework built on top of it.

Any half-decent programmer should be able to pick up the basics very quickly.
In order to escape the pressures of high school, I started a company. It was something I had control over. In order to escape the pressures of college, I graduated a year early. Then I wrote a book about the pressures of school!
Their solution for customizability is to allow the user to edit the CSS?! It's clear Google Docs is written for geeks, by geeks.

(or the MySpace cut and paste crowd...)
If any of you are interested in high-end video sharing that's cheaper and higher quality that SmugMug I just want to throw out a quick plug for my company: www.viddyou.com

I'll happily extend a discount to any fellow HN'ers, email addy is in my profile.
Language popularity is one small component in determining success of an SDK, and is the wrong thing to focus on. He should have at least considered the reach of the platform it is running on.
It's really cool to see all these exciting things revolving around news.yc folk. It appears to be happening with increasing frequency too. Congrats guys!
Ah, my other post in this article was meant to be a reply to you. ENOBRAIN.

Basically, if you are using bindvars or even the simplest sanitation, you're safe. This "attack" lets you inject expressions that need a ' in them without a ' going over the wire.
A discount from what price? I can't find the price on the site. The help page http://www.viddyou.com/help.php helps explain the difference between a free and premium account, but lists no price for a premium account, as far as I can tell.

A Google search of "site:viddyou.com price" turns up nothing obvious.

A Google search of "viddyou price" turns up a mashable blog post on another site that says the price is $34.95: http://mashable.com/2008/03/19/viddyou-hd/

Is the price somewhere obvious that I missed?
Typing "I hate <company>" into Google is the same thing. Twitter just lowers the barrier to entry (for writing "i hate foo").
Woz's 4/22/08 Lecture at UC Berkeley [video]
Vista is to XP as WinMe was to Win98. Microsoft will recover with Windows 7, but the question will be how much of a role the OS plays in 2010 compared to what it did in 2001.