skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a theory as to why the default HN attitude is one of skepticism.

Here's a quote from an article from Philip Greenspun, who company's board (ArsDigita) was taken over by VCs:

....But for most of this year Chip, Peter, and Allen [the suits] didn't want to listen to me. They even developed a theory for why they didn't have to listen to me: I'd hurt their feelings by criticizing their performance and capabilities; self-esteem was the most important thing in running a business; ergo, because I was injuring their self-esteem it was better if they just turned a deaf ear. I'm not sure how much time these three guys had ever spent with engineers. Chuck Vest, the president of MIT, in a private communication to some faculty, once described MIT as "a no-praise zone". My first week as an electrical engineering and computer science graduate student I asked a professor for help with a problem. He talked to me for a bit and then said "You're having trouble with this problem because you don't know anything and you're not working very hard."

http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/

(I found this from a link in the footnotes of pg's essay "A Unified Theory of VC Suckage" http://paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html)

In many areas in the hard sciences, maths and engineering, when you are wrong, you are wrong. No discussion. Many on HN have a background in these areas, hence their skeptical attitude to things that are fuzzy or as yet unproven (such as in the marketplace). People here often seem to assume that whatever is being discussed in a given article is dubious (or bullshit as the case may be). I believe this is healthy. The opposite attitude leads to all sorts of problems.
Smart people can effectively criticize anything.

However, that doesn't mean their criticism isn't valuable. The world simply isn't simple and one can always add caveats that are worth realizing and knowing about. Actually, a lot of times these criticisms come from people that do have domain knowledge, which is why they feel qualified to make the comment. The fact that many more people can criticize something doesn't mean they will.

Secondly, I don't see a lot of 'trashing' happening here, so I'm not sure what your paragraph on 'people with a bug up their ass' is referring to. The top-voted critical comments are mostly good comments. Perhaps a purely additive comment should be ranked higher, but that doesn't make these critical comments bad.

If 1% of readers would 'trash' an article and that trash would get voted up, this place would not be worth reading. It is, so your numbers don't add up and the point doesn't hold.
YMMV, but I often get more interested in a new topic by reading a skeptical comment. I remain skeptical about skeptical comments.
Agreed, content production is an inherently different game, with much less explosive potential.

Still, there are some good investments to be made. Even mediocre games are pulling down 7 figures on Xbox Arcade. With the development cost of a good indie title sitting in the $10,000 range, that's a pretty solid opportunity.

I doubt I'm alone as an indie developer that would be willing to give up a share of their game for zero investment dollars, just to have the YC name behind them. There's still a cost to YC there though. The integrity of their name is important.
Flying cars are possible today, but not economically viable.
I know at least one startup building a flying emergency vehicle for urban areas. But this one just looking like a van, but actually has many things common with helicopters.
I used to travel. Africa, Australia, Japan, Europe, Mexico, etc.
His point about Americans not traveling is valid. I wonder if part of the reason is that North America is so far away from everywhere else. It takes 11 hours to fly from Berlin to Thailand, but it takes 25 hours to fly from NYC to Thailand. Most Americans probably have to get to NYC or LA to get anywhere else in the world, which can be another 3-5 hours of flight time. The long distance is the main reason I don't travel as much as I once did.

However, in Mexico, the default foreigners are usually from the US.
> I'd also pick a nit: in my experience, ebook sales (and Amazon Kindle store sales in particular) are dwarfed by hardcover sales -- by a 50:1 ratio, in fact. Amazon are almost certainly cherry-picking if they can come up with books where Kindle sales outstrip hardcover. However, that's looking backwards -- it's fairly clear that ebooks are a rapidly growing sector and in another 2-5 years they'll definitively overtake hardcover sales by volume, if not by revenue. (Hardcovers net roughly $16 after discount, of which 10-15% goes to the author; Kindle store books net $7-10, of which Amazon takes a 30% cut before 5-10% of the remainder goes to the author.)

As mentioned in the article, Amazon already sells more Kindle books than they do hardcover books so I fail to see why they would need to cherry pick. And no need to wait 2-5 years, the future is here.
Having dirt on your face does not make you look homeless. Just one example: http://steampunkworkshop.com/yr-doin-it-right-3-sweep
Artificial carbon nanotechnology has been used by man since we had fire. It's called "soot". We still don't understand all of the physics of soot formation. The vagaries of burning and soot formation can result in some incredibly tiny particles. This is why smoke is so often used as a drug delivery method and why smoking fish and meat works so well: soot particles can get small enough to work their way between and sometimes through cell membranes.

We recently discovered structures in soot we now call "Buckyballs" and "Buckytubes".
Something I noticed quite some time ago is that any sufficiently long comment thread on HN will converge on a semantic argument.
It's not really disproving your argument, you said almost every submission.
Parisians are rude in the spring and summer, when Paris is overrun by tourists. I can't say I blame them, I found the tourist situation in July insufferable. In the fall I've found Parisians as nice as anyone else in a huge city. I've never found New Yorkers particularly rude, especially nowadays.
Rigidly-structured salary policies often remind me of no-haggle car companies. Sure, it's good for the unmotivated, but the best will probably go elsewhere.
Hi - I'm pretty new to hacking'n'stuff. Would I be welcome/understand what the hell was going on? :)
This would be much more interesting if it was a web service and not a one off site.
Ha, your non-skeptical comment is on top. So there

disarm
I know you probably aren't actually trying to blame them for it, but I think its unfair to even state it like that. I'm in college now, with my parents paying for everything necessary, and I started a paid internship the year before university started, and then worked part time for them through the year, and full time again during the next summer. Finally this past summer, I moved to a research position at the university, and still do some freelance work for the company I was interning/part-timing at.

Now on top of a full load of classes, a research position (where the professor has never worked with an undergraduate, so I've been told I'll be treated like a PhD student - and so far it definitely feels like it), freelance work for a company (possibly another, we'll see), I'm still trying to find the time to get a company rolling with some friends of mine. And my parents still pay for everything necessary for schooling (books, tuition, housing, car, food, etc.). All it means to me is I can take the lower paying jobs that are better experience. For instance, I was offered a few jobs this summer, but I took the research position, even though it paid the worst because it looked interesting, challenging, and would help me eventually get to the grad school I want to be at.

This has been a bit long winded, but my point being, just because your parents pay, doesn't mean you have to sit back and do nothing.
That's a good observation. And come to think of it, I did think of a way to disallow this type of activity, but not entirely.

Since the client app will run on a smartphone, the person using the phone will have to reinstall the application many times so that he could intentionally subscribe again and again to an event. So I guess one thing to do would be to register the mobile user with his mobile phone's unique identifier and not allow him to subscribe again to a previously subscribed-to event.

Otherwise he would just have to buy more phones, but I don't think that's a practical solution.
I love the pauses to blog and tweet about the game. And not a single glance at HN?
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That game is from the Minecraft guy [1], here is his blogpost [2].

[1] http://www.minecraft.net/

[2] http://notch.tumblr.com/post/998637682/minecraft-alpha-v1-0-...
> Evolution took billions of years to engineer the ribosome

I see this argument a lot, but it doesn't really hold water. Evolution wasn't trying to engineer the ribosome. In fact, the only thing evolution tries to do is replicate. The biological forms that have come out of that are completely random.

Humans, on the other hand, consciously make efforts at engineering. Thousands of monkeys will never (for all practical purposes) manage to write a Shakespearean work, but Shakespeare did.

100 years ago we barely had phones. Almost no one had a car. There were no televisions and movies didn't have sound. Human flight was relegated to hot air balloons. On the other hand, total Internet bandwidth has increased from about 10 terabytes a month to 10,000,000 terabytes a month in the last 15 years. Trying to guess the limits of what we'll be able to do in the next 100 years is unfathomable to me.
Well, nowadays you can encrypt and sign sessions and store the signed/encrypted data on your client side (or non-encrypted cookies if you want them to be modifiable from the client side). As long as it's more difficult to fake session data than to buy working credit card numbers, you're fine (at least once you've taken care of XSS attacks, which I take to be no less of a problem in a single-page site).

Wow. Did I just point out that cookies have legitimate and valid uses? My self from 10 years ago would run after me with a shovel and yell that cookies are evil. (Incidentally, the opinion of my self from 10 years ago about Javascript would be exactly the same).
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Central (in particular) and South America (to a lesser extent) have way more American travelers than anywhere except Europe (at least this has been my anecdotal experience with nearly a year in Mexico/Central America). Costa Rica is practically the 51st state and south Nicaragua is well known for it's cheap land and American surfer ex-pats. Of course, flights to CA are super cheap from the US and this probably explains it.

The other thing that I've noticed is that Americans from the West Coast are much more likely to travel (of course, I'm from the west coast so this might be some confirmation bias).

(opinions based on a little more than two years or so of ongoing travel and probably something like 30 countries)
But I certainly would like to see more top comments that agree with what
the poster said, or expands on their argument.

There are plenty of those, but it's easy to mistake them for sceptical comments. Questions, side notes, alternate interpretations, etc. are expansions of an argument, into territory not covered by the original post.
When someone starts a comment with 'However ...' or 'I mostly agree, but ...', the remainder of the comment is usually supportive, constructive and littered with tidbits that add to understanding of the point under discussion. However, simply due to the way the argument starts, we view it is 'criticism', because it sets itself up as countering the article, due to the use of an 'inverting' word/phrase, like 'however' or 'but'. There's probably a word for those words and this effect in English, but I don't know it.
You are exactly right. Towards the end of 2008 I took off for two months, and traveled to East Africa, Israel, Jordan, East Asia, England, and Hungary, 13 countries in total. Towards the end, I really started to grow tired of the constant moving and need to be out exploring. Being home at my favorite bookstore started to sound better than ever. Even though it did get a little tiring towards the end, it was one of the best things I have ever done, something I'll never forget.
Here we have one of those multi-talented programmers I keep talking about. The same programmer did the code, high-quality sprite illustration, and even the music to the youtube video (which was pretty good, and matched the nature of the time lapse video).

I am inspired by this. I'm going to do this the next time I work on a game. Has anyone used time-lapse screencap software they can suggest?
Ask HN: Patents for startups?
I believe to have found a patentable software methodology. I consulted a patent attorney, and learned that a provisional patent application costs $3000. A year later, non-provisional application would cost $15000 + filing and drawing fees, coming close to $20000 per patent in total. Currently these costs are prohibitive, but on the other hand it makes sense to apply to protect our IP.

Do you have any experiences with applying for patents as a startup? Is there a workaround to avoid these costs? How good would a DIY patent application be?
I hope I'm not flagged as a spammer over this, since I tend to make this point every chance I get. Namely, how exactly do you go about rapid prototyping? I figure in all likelihood it's a bit of an art and requires a lot of experience and knowledge. I realize I may not be there yet. Still, are there any highly recommended references?

Books are OK, but in particular videos would help the most. Seeing how experienced programmers kick off a project could (I think) shed much light. PeepCode looks serious, but it focuses too much on one particular technology.

Thanks, and sorry to keep bugging with this...
Lets hope Q4 here means October 1st. I for one, am waiting for the 'postville' refresh. I can live with 300GB of space, and would love to have the speed benefits of a SSD.
Patent strategy for startup companies
This works extremely well for me also. The Cambridge Trader Joe's is extremely close to a whole foods.
I wasn't too keen on the pessimism in his article; I can agree, in principle, with what he was saying but the point of emergent fields is in how unpredictable they are - this may lead to unrealistic expectations (which can often times drive innovation in the long run, TBH).
Servos are pretty much terrible for anything except maybe driving the wheels on a very small robot, provided that robot is also equipped with encoders on the wheels. Basically you're just applying power to the motor for some time and hoping it turns the right amount; unlike say a stepper motor, you have no built-in guarantee of how far it'll turn. You can make up for that with the encoders, but the other big problem with servos is that they're not very strong... all the ones I've ever used have plastic gears inside which love to strip.
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Number 11 (Only applies to non-english speaking software): English.

Related to number 4, english expressions can be as bad as technical jargon. There's no reason to call a file 'file', if the localised Datei or Fichier is better understood.
There we go, without js, which you didn't identify at first. Rather, you just started to list things that seems like they weren't working.

The best way to determine if something lives up to its claims is to try it. You can't look at sites done in NOLOH and then expect them to have implemented or turned on every feature.

Furthermore, it's amazing that when our competitors 280north, or Sproutcore, or whatever else is "cool" posts something nobody complains that you HAVE to have js. No degradation options, no text-based browsers. Nobody complains that their sites aren't in their tool, or that they have significantly less resources than we do.

As soon as we post something there's usually somebody that steers the conversation to a different topic and then criticizes us for one reason or another. In this case you successfully diverted the conversation from "single page" websites into a conversation on js degradation, which in the case of NOLOH is really irrelevant to most users.

Search engines get a different version from the js, non-js versions, thus the non-js version is only for humans that specifically decide to turn off their js. Could it be better, yes, will it be better, yes, can we mandate it, no.
Consequently, when they install a desktop app on a new machine they are often surprised that it can’t automatically access the documents they created on a previous machine

Really!? I've never, ever observed this.

In the words of Zoolander, the files are IN the computer.
I think you mischaracterize most long term travelers. I've been traveling for a little more than two years and I'd estimate that, unless I don't particularly enjoy a location, I spend closer to a month in most places.

I've spent four months in Guatemala and over six in New Zealand. Most of the people I know who travel long term do the same thing. The only time I hear about people going to many countries in a short period is when countries are dense (central america and europe) or when they're only gone for a couple months and trying to get as many stamps (pokémon) as possible.
> The biological forms that have come out of that are completely random.

That's not strictly speaking true in the sense that we normally use 'random'.
It stands pretty strong. Lot of enterprise softwares are Java based. Most schools teach this as their main language. So, at least I don't see it happening anytime soon.
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The disconnect is that a lot of people do not find the Singularity an appealing concept. Of his list Yudkowsky seems the only sane one to me.

"Primarily concerned with the Singularity as a potential human-extinction event, Yudkowsky has dedicated his work to advocacy and developing strategies towards creating survivable Singularities."

My pure speculation is that many people feel a very understandable sense of unease, but it gets expressed as doubting the possibility of the singularity future. As opposed to accepting it as possible but advocating that we try to avoid it, or at the very least approach it with extreme caution.

Kurzweil, on the other hand, comes across to me as very Pollyana-ish. He seems to spend very little time considering what could go wrong with a Singularity, and much more time eagerly anticipating our impending god-like future.
If you don't like it then why are you on Rails? Rails has been defined by doing the right thing at the cost of stability since the beginning. If you want stability you should pick almost any other platform.

Claiming that Rails solves problems you "do not have" is blub thinking at its finest. Okay, I'll grant you that the routing changes are perhaps a little gratuitous. But consider the replacement of the ad-hoc manual SQL generation by arel. You will probably never even notice when this makes a query work that would have blown up before, or when your load times decrease because of lazy querying.

ActiveModel is another place where they've added huge power and flexibility. The fact that you no longer have to use ActiveRecord to get some of its best functionality is a huge win. Just because you haven't noticed how it might help you doesn't mean it won't if you give it a chance.

Even if you really don't need anything in Rails 3, it's still a straw man argument, because Rails 3 is all about modularization and embracing much wider development paradigms. If you want to use RSpec and FactoryGirl now you can do so with fully integrated generators. If ActiveRecord is useless to you, there is a well-defined API for any other ORM to integrate just as tightly. More importantly, the APIs that the components use are now public and documented, and will remain stable over time. This makes Rails useful for an order of magnitude more projects than it used to be.

Also, I should add that I'm in the same boat as you. I have a 50,000 line/200 model app dating back 3.5 years, and the Rails 3 upgrade is going to be painful. I put up with it though, because I much prefer a cutting edge platform to one where new thinking can never get a foothold.
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Awesome. I'd love to see a meatspace time lapse on the side, or in a small box-in-box.
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I like this perspective, I prefer optimism over critical pessimism. This stance is really what drives innovation - not being restrained by perceived or even real limitations.
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The iMac Touch patent: brilliant next step or flawed concept?
(off topic a bit)

I think every Russian HNer laughed out loud when they saw this title. Nanotech here in Russia is a synonym of enormous and inefficient government spending on vaporware since they started considering it a "National project". To be fair, I have no idea how true it is, but it does look very much so, especially with frequent appearance in news but no details about actual results.
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Yes, that's what I am thinking, with Larry's style of management/acquisition style, the future is uncertain for us Java Developers
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Prior art: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/ .
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seeing the world in black and white is typically reserved for teenagers. as we mature, we are able to understand more perspectives and see how numerous factors influence a problem, and how solutions can have complex and unexpected consequences. we tend to see bigger and bigger pictures. discussions becomes more than arguing over particular numbers; now they include the meanings of those numbers, and then the experience of the discussion itself matters.

Being critical and firm is fine, but being mean is unnecessary energy. If anything, we should encourage creativity and boldness. We should strive to be ourselves open and lead by example, as teammates not enemies.

I went to MIT. The cultural "no-praise" was both present, and yet seemingly lifting, if not in academia itself, then in the more mature "millenials" (!$!&@!(@!#(!) who seem to have more optimism, and thus more guts and less defensive reactions. In general the computer hacker culture has been broadening and is filled with a more inventive than argumentative mindset, which I think spirals positively on itself in terms of inclusiveness.

I've had the good fortune to have incredibly smart mentors*, who not only solve hard problems, but also lead by example on how it is possible to be a great engineer and socially fantastic.

So, to respecify the problem, if we could separate the skeptisism and interesting perspectives from reactionary negativity and meanness, that'd be hot.

I'm not sure skeptism or meanness is actually a problem---many have stated why skeptism tends to prevade the top and/or majority of comments---I just wanted to separate the problem domain into two distinct problems.