skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If your site has a "chicken and egg" problem, that is it exponentially more useful the more people are using it (and vice versa) then you're going have a bumpy road ahead.

Chicken and egg suggestions:

- Do all you can to make your site not appear a ghost town. Create content yourself, and hide pages that don't function without enough content until there is enough content.

- Feature the best and most relevant content early on. This rewards your users, and gives visitors something to look at (while enticing them to join).

- Kiss your early adopter's asses; make it easy for them to give feedback and more receive personalized responses.

- Make it as easy as possible to join. This is by far the largest barrier to entry. If you can get users invested in joining before they join, that's great. For example, allow them to submit a comment, then say "this comment will be submitted when you sign up". Cheeky, but effective.

- IMO, don't show "streams" of stuff unless that stuff is really awesome. If I see a stream of stuff and it looks lame, I won't be impressed that it occurred 3 seconds ago.

- Make it look like a lot is going on. "A lot" can mean only a handful of things, which could all be made yourself.
> I’m a student of the market, the author of Investing 101 and can say with some authority that the market’s miserable decade-long performance is exactly what spells huge opportunity for you.

cringe
I think coal will last us for a while and we should over time be diversify our energy sources. Which America is looking to do more now. For instance, some of the power generated from coal should be generated with nuclear, solar, etc. This should bring down the rate of coal consumption and allow us to extend our usage of coal in producing energy for a longer period of time.

So I think energy diversification is the key.

Also, I think nuclear is a great alternative to coal,but for it to be a global option there has to be a lot of stuff done foreign policy wise and in the global security space.
Great feedback.

I just fixed that broken link. The automatic hiding of a tag is meant primarily to hide tons of duplicates that would happen if you searched for "amazon.com" for example. I guess I should check to see if it hides too much and if so, leave it in.

Paging is not implemented yet... and curiously enough you're the first to request it. Surprised it took so long!

Which "tougher queries" did you try? If you get a response that "the page was not popular enough" then there's not much I can do. I'm relying on delicious to have tags for the URL, and if none are present, then I'm SOL.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll have pagination done shortly.
Only 17 tabs? Although I'd love to be able to organize tabs better, I don't care about that nearly as much as I care about the performance of my system when that many tabs are open. (a) Memory usage (b) risk of some plugin or javascript on a page causing firefox to start eating 99% of my cpu.

Theoretically those two problems can be solved concurrently, but still-- favicons, hotkeys, and the ability to drag and drop solves most of my problems with tab organization. I use alternate windows only when really necessary.

What I'd really like is to have a second, isolated firefox process that I can run alongside my main one with as much functional independence as possible. One process will be for the relatively safe, familiar, and stable, text-oriented type sites with minimal advertising (hacker news, gmail, wikipedia, python.org, clojure.org, paulgraham.com, etc.), and the other process will be for heavy sites, new/risky sites, or otherwise problematic sites (eg if I have a youtube tab open I can't ctrl-PgDwn past it, when I hit that tab I have to stop and use the mouse-- a pain in the ass).

While Chrome's process-per-tab model is really nice, they're still all tied together and there's a risk of losing everything sometimes.
Yes, there is such thing as code sucking. Do you read the dailywtf?
Hmm.. it seems like people are using tabs to deal with a problem that bookmarks have already solved. Someone on here said they have one or two hundred tabs open for months. Is that really necessary? Couldn't tabs organised in folders solve that problem and increase your computers performance?
There's also my new http://hckrnews.com/ that lets you filter past days by top 10, top 20, or top 50%.
PriceMinister: a beautiful startup story and a great exit
Out of 64 pages, I counted 8 dedicated to programming (and I'm being generous).

Why is this called Hacker Monthly again?
Is that really true? Out of curiosity, how do you know this?
How are the results compared to google or DDG's in your test samples?
GirlDeveloper, your CSS sucks.
Delicious API.

Where would you like me to say it? It will probably go in an "about" page, but I don't think there's any benefit to the possible confusion of "what is the delicious API?" by putting it on the front page.
While I'll be the first to admit that many (perhaps most?) developers (present company included) have a tendency to quickly conclude that other people's code sucks (at least they do at some point in their careers), I have to disagree with the idea that there is no such thing as code that genuinely sucks.

I've read a lot of code in my lifetime, and some of it genuinely sucks. There is a such thing as a bad developer. There are people doing programming who really have no talent for it, or for some other reason are just really bad at it. Sometimes it is due to lack of experience. Sometimes it is due to the person not caring at all. And I am sure there are plenty of other reasons. It doesn't mean that a person can't get better, often they can get much better, but people do write code that sucks.

Understand, I think I am now much slower to be harsh toward other people's code than I used to be. In fact, I regularly give people the benefit of the doubt. Why? Because I've worked for that megalomaniac that wants done yesterday what can't possibly be done in a month's time. You know, the one that thinks that because his work consumes his entire life, and causes him to neglect his family and other responsibilities, so should yours. I've worked in multiple high-pressure situations, where no one cares what the code looks like, as long as it is done tomorrow. And you know what? Sometimes in situations like that people slap together whatever they can (as fast as they can) with duct tape and chewing gum, whatever it takes to get that unreasonable person (or people) off of their back. The results are often ugly, and you can argue whether the person could have done it better in the same (or even less) time. But I think it is worth cutting the other guy some slack. Thankfully, I no longer work for the megalomaniac (and haven't for many years) :-D

However, getting back to my original point, there is code that sucks. It may not be as prevalent as some think that it is, but believe me, it is out there (even after giving the other guy the benefit of the doubt).

Geez, what's up with me and the parenthetical kick today (perhaps I've been writing too much Scheme code recently). :-) <- got one last one in there.
Illusions: Colors Out of Space
Ask HN: Morality Question: What kind of programmer are you?
I have been struggling with a modification of:

Guy: “If I gave you a million dollars, would you sleep with me?”
Girl: “A million dollars is a lot of money, and you don’t look that bad, so I guess I would consider it”
Guy: “Ok, since I don’t have a million dollars, would you sleep with me for $100?”
Girl: (outraged) “What kind of girl do you think I am?”
Guy: “We’ve already established the answer to that question. Now we’re just negotiating the price”

The question I'm struggling with is an issue of Social Games. It seems like this great business opportunity: low initial cost -- build something, throw it on the web, see if you can make money; they log everything, do A/B testing, figure out what people like / what people want to buy, and iterate on that.

The downside, it appears is that the amount of money I make ... is directly proportional to how addicted other members of human race is -- which means I become motivated to make the game as addictive as possible.

Have other members of HN dealt with this issue? And if so, how did you resolve it?
I tried it on google reader (http://reader.google.com) and most of the top matches are google reader itself.

It worked better on reddit.com though.
Exactly. In fact, I'd say it's much more reasonable to expect stocks to do worse in this century. Physical resources are going to be tougher to acquire and more expensive and major scientific advances are going to be more difficult. It won't surprise me at all if the cheap, easy growth of the 19th-20th centuries turns out to be the exception, not the norm. I expect a lot of the current hype and froth around social networking and the web is going to turn out to be no more monetizable than it was ten years ago when people were making similar handwaving arguments about revenue and profitability.

I suppose Asia might buck the trend but a portfolio highly skewed in that direction now is a fairly speculative investment.
Blog about... anything! (Well, not quite...)

The KSplice guys have been doing it, and doing it well.
Eg. their traceroute tutorial. It has little to do with their product, but it does well to drives traffic to their site, and raise product awareness. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1557877

(See also: Joel Spolsky)
Two thoughts.

First: "when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create." --why

Second: I've had many fulfilling friendships with people who didn't enjoy the same music, movies, or books. I think that's a really crappy way to make friends, and a really good way to encourage people to isolate themselves even more into cultural echo chambers.
Google's "similar" link is akin to my results with "popularity" sort, only worse. That is, Google seems to do this: "What other URLs have some keywords in common with this one?" And of those, it sorts by "which is most popular?". The results, well, they're not at all impressive which is why I made this in the first place.

However, Google's index is much greater. Currently you can't search for non-semi-popular URLs on moreofit, but you can on Google. So they have me beaten there.

What is DDG?
The goal should be to die with a bank balance as close to zero as possible.
Well, fwiw, I get the fail whale more often than not when signing in. How much funding have they received again?
Iran - well, I am not the only one annoyed. Pretty much the entire middle east dreads the thought of it with a nuclear arsenal, let alone the damage it can do around the world with its proxies.
Yes, agreed. I am actually working on an iPad app for this purpose.
reddit and reddit.com shows two different search results. I thought reddit will refer to reddit.com
I guess I'm in a minority here. I rarely have more than 5 tabs open. I can honestly not fathom ever needing to use more than 50.

To the people who use gigantic numbers of tabs, what does your browsing workflow look like where you end up with that many?
That's a prime example of when to filter by tag. (You can do this by clicking on any tag)

Here's results for "reader.google.com", except omitting any results that have been tagged with "google":

http://bit.ly/dnsgfk
The query "reddit" is assumed to mean you are searching for sites that have been tagged as "reddit", which is different from "reddit.com" which is assumed to be a URL.

At any rate, if you search for "reddit" it should suggest "were you looking for sites like reddit.com?"
It gets complicated. Say the market restricts quotes to say every 10ms, and you want to quote a price just before the time of a news event. If you quote a "regular" price then you might get screwed when the news comes out which has an impact on the price and you can't pull your quote from the market. So you end up either not quoting a price at all or quoting a much worse price to protect yourself from the news. In either case you result in worse pricing for everyone.

Shrinking times also have the advantage of improving price precision, when your talking about price moves over a very small period of time we can often be talking about very small price moves (say one-thousandth of a cent) which helps everyone. When before something may have been worth 213.314 you may have only been able to sell at 213.31, which for large deals can have a significant impact in high-volume markets, but with higher precision prices are more accurate.
That wouldn't particularly affect me, would it?
The problem with searches for "sites like xx" is that people entering those search strings are likely to be fairly unsophisticated users (who aren't aware of the "similar" button or related: syntax, let alone the possibility of there being dedicated sites for that kind of search). Moreofit.com looks more like a power user tool.

The other problem is that Google's results for the suggested "sites like" queries are pretty helpful - they generally return articles and q&a pages with exactly the lists the end users are looking for. It might require more clicks to get there, but even the non-savvy user should be able to managed it.

I was impressed by the results returned by moreofit though, especially for websites that don't have numerous linkbait articles about "Top 10 websites for ....".

The tag importance sliders are especially neat, though one minor usability issue is that the update button (bottom right) is a long way away from the sliders and the text advising you to click it. The Google display ads returned when you do a URL search are horrendously irrelevant and probably deter users from clicking on the targeted text ads above them.
The green text sucks too. Way too hard to read.
Honestly, it's not really a checklist. PG enumerates some of the most important qualities in an interview. There was content in the interview that's rather difficult to express in writing, particularly the parts about friends sticking together and founder-groups with no apparent leader.

"No apparent leader" is easy to say, but during the video PG describes his observations of that leadership vacancy in a number of different ways. You can intuitively understand what sort of leadership he's talking about, in a way that "we don't like not knowing who to address a question to" doesn't really convey. (ie, it's nothing about the artist not wearing a "hi I'm the artist" nametag.) And it doesn't have to be a super-charismatic visionary who also knows everything, just someone who is more assertive and capable of driving the others.
I used to do that (keep tabs open of something I want to read) until I discovered this:

http://readitlaterlist.com/
It works if you're defending the free world (as in, that's the motivation of the members of the team).

Idealist me would like to think that such is the motivation of the majority of the HN 'team' =)
It does, unless you somehow escaped the influence of thousands of years of human evolution...
Any innovation in this space is welcomed by a chronic tab abuser like me.

That said, I was pretty disappointed when they started talking about identifying why you wanted to revisit a particular tab group and then failed to take the next logical step of adding in timed notifications...

The spammy sounding recommendation feature and sinister-sounding tab groups that could be shared in real time sounded like options I'd want turned off by default too.
Site looks down by the way
ATTN: Subway restaurants, start turning every other cheese slice the other way.
It shouldn't affect the idea or the startup directly, but it will come into play when he goes to sign a lease on office space, get a business line of credit, apply for a merchant account, etc.
yes, it was 13.
I thought the goal was to live a happy life, whether that results in a bank balance of zero or a few million.

The reason I save much of my income isn't because I want to be rich when I retire. It's because I can't think of things to spend it on now that would measurably increase my happiness. I'm not big on spending money just for the sake of spending money - that way lies dissatisfaction and the hedonic treadmill, as your desires increase faster than your ability to pay for those desires.

I'd much rather think hard about what I want from life and then spend money, carefully and judiciously, to achieve that. If it's not something I want, why should I buy it?

Own your money, don't let you money own you.
Silicon Valley Founder Institute List
excellent work!

The only think I'd say is to make the "update" button more prominent (eg add another one beneath the "searching for tags" sliders). A few times I wondered why it was not updating the results, and had to hunt around for it. Maybe some people, at the margin in terms of interest, would give up on it because of this.

It would be nice if there was some natural way for the results to update without specifically requesting it - eg. like how the "moreofit" links work. The way google does it in "search tools" for time choice is interesting: it provides typical defaults, that are linked (eg. Past 24 hours,Past week etc). I've always used it by just clicking on one of them, so the issue of "updating" doesn't occur. [reminiscent of 37signals' defaults]. Perhaps the truth is that while someone might theoretically want the results from the past 22 hours, in practice no-one ever does. Thus, the defaults are adequate. For your importance sliders, I guess this could be done with two links "important" vs "secondary" for each slider.

Of course, sometimes you want to assemble a search, and only then execute it (not have it update after every single term is added). For this, the standard practice seems to be to have a "search" button directly underneath however the search is configured (eg this what google search does for "custom range", for time, in web tools). So this would mean adding a "search" button beneath the sliders (not labeled "update", even though that is also an accurate description - I guess, maybeuse "moreofit", if you want to promote the brand at possible expense of usability).

tl;dr add a "search" button beneath the "searching for tags" sliders.
It also might be a self-organized system composed of multiple algos from different shops: i.e. like a "Life" game.

For example: one algo put a bid of X, a nanosecond later another algo steps and put a bid X+1. The first algo cancel X and put X+2, etc. Until it reaches a threshold of X+T, then all bots cancel and start again from X.

You can see this behavior with human traders in after-hours sessions or in other illiquid markets. But of course in case of humans we are not talking about nanoseconds ;)
Free iPhone App: R Language News and Updates
Because it is high rated articles from hacker news and as you probably have noticed, a major part of this crowd likes to vote up startup and other articles which are relevant to their interests.

Besides hacking isn't limited to programming anymore than artistry is limited to painting.

Other than that, I personally would be interested in a monthly magazine that focused on interesting programming related things.
On a related note, on my site, I am considering implementing an "import your profile" feature that will import a person's public domain profile information from a competitor's site. My hypothesis is that this will reduce the barrier to signup for at least some of my users.

My question is - is this legal? The data(profile) is publicly accessible and belongs to the person(technically I understand that the site owns it). However if it's out in the open, what are the terms for this?
The real reason to save money isn't to invest it in the stock market, it's so that you have the option to pounce when an opportunity arises. Say that a few of your smartest friends are founding a new startup, and they ask you to join, but they won't be able to pay you anything but equity until it gets off the ground. If you've got cashed saved up, you can take this risk; if you don't, you'll have to pass.

Stocks can fall into this category, but you should make that determination based on the fundamentals of the stock, not based on the blanket declaration that stock prices have always gone up in the past. If you see a stock that's grossly undervalued by the market, it's wonderful to have cash to pounce on that. If the whole market is (still) overvalued, which it seems to be to me, it doesn't make sense to pour money into it.
The recent posts on how easy it is to launch a start up these days screamed "glut" to me. One solution is to target a niche that wouldn't be well enough served by a universal solution.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that monitoring competitor popularity would be a valuable service (including an early warning system for detecting emerging competitors.) I think many of us do this every so often manually; and/or have google alerts set up for it. But a service that just does this would broaden the appeal - especially if you could somehow show that your estimates are more accurate... I have no idea of how you could do this... I guess you'd need a genuinely accurate measure, and then compare yours and manual searches with it. But if you could demonstrate that credibly and compellingly, it'd be gold.

I don't think you need to censor or sniff to do this.
I had someone contact me about a project they felt was taking too long. They had hired a contractor to do a Rails app, and wanted a second opinion the code to see what the developer was up to.

I got a copy of the code, and it all looked like boilerplate Rails stuff, pretty much by-the-book generated stuff. A first thought was, well, how freakn' long could it take to produce this? But it occurred to me that when you look at code (good or bad), there's often no way to know how the author got there. How much code was scrapped? What ideas were explored? Even when you have the repo history there's still no way to know what might be missing.

It's hard to look at code and make any judgments about the developer, since there are often numerous details that informed the decisions made along the way.
Is Good Code Impossible?
My experience in life thus far has suggested to me that it's not about saving, but about growth and pushing forward. You can scrimp and save, but if you instead put your resources to task and try to grow, you can move up to the next level, where your savings from the previous level are a pittance.

It is of course inherently more risky, and requires effort, but it seems like a better choice.

A case example is my uncle; a member of his family racked up some huge medical bills due to a hospital's mistake decades ago. He is starting a somewhat risky business venture, and I asked him why he wasn't instead getting a job and working. He told me that the bills were so great that working a regular job would never be able to pay them off, and so this was his only option.
"The way google does it in "search tools" for time choice is interesting"

Google actually does it about four different ways. There're defaults for common cases like past day/week/month, but there's also software that tries to guess if a particular date range is interesting, eg:

http://www.google.com/search?q=jessie+slaughter

Then there's "Latest", which actually does update in real time, if it has new results. And then there's "Custom date range", which lets you pick with a calendar widget and then requires that you hit Search again, much like MoreOfIt does.
I have a few tabs that have been open for years. After the first time Opera corrupted my autosave.win file I wrote an autobackup script for it (and these days it's automatically committed to a git repo every hour then backed up with the rest of my git repos).
Just a very small "Powered by Delicious" at the bottom of the page would give some added credibility and clarification.
i think what he's saying is it's an ok outcome if they can return capital (or slightly better)... likely for the purpose of reinvestment.

however that's not a target outcome, just a tolerable one.