skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Do 100+ comments ever scare you?
I love making comments on HN. It's definitely the best part of the site. It is usually coherent conversation among intelligent people.

However, when I look at a post and it says "120 comments," I get scared. It seems anything I say is just going to get lost in the noise. No matter the merit. (Some things I say should get lost. :])

I want to participate, but ya'll are scaring me away. Does this happen to anybody else?
JQuery Regular Expressions Review
HP is digitizing Paul McCartney's library of art, films, videos for the cloud
Ah, that's just baloney. I'm sorry to disrupt your belief that the Canon of Paul is strong enough to overpower any possible truth and to settle any possible HN argument, but that is just not true.

Stack Overflow got investors into an auction for our Series A round (including Fred Wilson, the author of this post, who ultimately invested). So did Quora (obviously, based on their valuation). So did any number of other hot startups. When the deal is hot they'll all crap themselves to get into it. When they think they're going to make 10x or 100x they're not going to worry about whether the premoney is $10m or $15m because they're dreaming about selling at $500m.

Paul has a unique view of raising capital, one that comes from the perspective of dozens of undifferentiated two-person startups with 3000 lines of code written over ten weeks and no barriers to entry or defensible positions because they have 3000 lines of code written over ten weeks. That's a position where maybe you don't have so much leverage with investors. It's only one aspect of the market.

What is true is that top notch VCs don't like to act like they're in an auction, because it makes them feel unloved, as if we only cared about them for their money. This is partially true... there are a lot of factors that are WAY more important in raising a series A than valuation, but that's a part of the VCs overall bid. And proper decorum dictates that the auction be done with finesse, because most VC bidders will drop out if they think they are just being used to get a higher price. But the idea that there's collusion in investment is just not borne out by the evidence: post money valuations vary wildly.
I forgot my password on Google and asked for the code that would allow me to change it to come via SMS. Took 2 weeks :(

I'm from Brazil, maybe that's why it took so long.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1715840 for Dave McClure's (one of those present) response to these allegations.
You figure he could be a little more professional. I guess a strategy for managing reputation risk is swear like a sailor in response to criticism and always ignore any specific concerns.
If your presumption regarding collusion were true (that it can't hold up in the real world), then there would never have been any cases of collusion in the real world, yet we have plenty of examples.
why do people need to use so much fck sht and d*ck when defending an argument I'll never understand. It doesn't make it any more influential or cool, if that's what is intended.
had the bank give me back everything that was stolen

Actually, that money most likely never made it very far - the businesses where the cards where used almost certainly never saw a cent of it. Worse, they probably still had to pay for the transaction fees (of the now reversed transaction) and a chargeback fee. The bank and any other service providers in the payment processing chain made more money than if the transaction had been legit, and the thief made off with the goods. Yup, accepting payment by credit card sucks.
After several issues with Python, Lisp, Haskell, etc., I'm coming around to the philosophy of just generating C or C++ code from Python or Lisp.

Productivity is a function of (familiarity, language, libraries, configuration, runtime). Other languages may be great due to (language, library), but configuration can be a show-stopper. Especially since most devs seem to see library/wrapper writing as a chance to pull in all their favourite cruft dependencies.
I didn't know Zed Shaw and Gary Vaynerchuck had a child. It's always fun to see kids discovering the Internet.
> Some of the more creative literary figures have taken great liberties with language, as a whole, and convention specifically.

Certainly. Is he aiming for "great literary figure" status, though? My guess is that in 50 years, people will still read the work of "great authors". A rant about a silicon valley "conspiracy"? My guess is no.
You're right about some kind of constraint, but what would happen if the user says the SMS never came and needs another? :) Some kind of rate limiting (one per day?) is necessary.
But there are good lists of career workhorse typefaces, and they don't look like either of these lists.
There is plenty of anti-competitive in the real world (phone companies are a nice example, but Intel and Microsoft have a nice track record too), but in this particular case due to the nature of the material involved it would be extremely hard to collude in the first place and almost impossible to prove that it actually happened if it did.

A bunch of guys having dinner and talking over business is not collusion, they call it 'synergy'.

Collusion is: "Start-ups X, Y and Z suddenly found that none of the angels present at such and such a dinner would accept deals over <some value> or under <some conditions>."

And even then you'd have a very hard time proving that it was because they colluded.

Also, how long would it take one of these guys to figure out that if he 'broke' the rule just once that nobody could ever accuse him/her of it and he'd have a surefire winner because that start-up would have found doors closed everywhere else.

It simply isn't going to happen, the VC world (especially angel investments) is too competitive (not in the last place due to YC) and too closely watched to get away with any of this.
The main reason to chose snail mail is not that it is slow, but that it shows some amount courtesy and appreciation.The cost (in terms of time) of writing an email v/s letter should not be measured in terms of the number of minutes. I think of it this way, somebody who had take the time to get some postal envelops, stamps, sat down and wrote the letter leaving his work in some way and then dropping it off to a post box is much more classy than someone who composed an email in his/her already open client and wrote a bare bone email with a template in their drafts folder.
I think the part I may have misunderstood was where you said, "With Googles CDN, they have to hack either my website, or Googles CDN.", and I interpreted that as an exclusive condition, rather than an inclusive one. Probably the "either" that did that.

With that misunderstanding corrected, I believe you're generally correct on the security argument. There's still some plausible variation in terms of server security policy and implementation of things like intrusion detection, (Is it safer to keep all your money in your home, or is it safer to keep most of it in a safe deposit box in a bank?) but that's not the key problem I thought I noticed in your argument, and not one worth devoting energy into.
Baloney. These guys didn't get rich by thinking they have market powers that they don't. There are zillions of angel investors who weren't in the room who were the ones who were raising the prices, including plenty of loose-cannon hedge fund guys in New York that fund companies that the Bin38 crowd don't even know about. The idea that ten or twenty angels could collude is about as realistic as the idea that you and your friends from Andover could force Stanford to lower everyone's tuition by meeting at a pizza parlor and making plans.
Yeah, I think 100 is edging north of some sweet spot where there's a good signal to noise ratio. I often don't comment on threads or do more than skim them when they've gotten that large.
If that "Thank you" was sincere: you're welcome. If it's not, sorry, I'm only trying to help.

My definition of a minimal webpage: a design that doesn't get in the way of it's content.

Unfortunately your current font-* styles get in the way of your content.

It's that simple.

It doesn't matter what web server you use, or how you define a minimal page. If I can't read your content, I'm not going to take stock in what it's trying to present.
Nope, it's not that simple: The Unformatted Web you propose is simply too dull and boring! That's why the MiniRank Formula specifically degrades such TEXT-ONLY pages!
http://mini-www.com/blog/mini_competitors/
Researchers develop protein-packed potato in India
That's not true. This clearly depends on the country you are in, the payment processor you use, and the type of credit card you got. (eg with chip or no chip).
Many people once where poor. My father grew up poor in the US and missed many a meal. The closest he ever came to describing it was "15 pounds in basic training from actually having enough to eat." However, after he started making 6 figures he could joke about being poor. It's not really complaining so much as saying, relative to that things are great.
Boring McClure style
Issues of price fixing by a group of investors tease at the difference between "mainstream conservative" and "libertarian". A "mainstream conservative" will probably want to have laws in place against price-fixing schemes which can hurt the small business owner/entrepreneur type person because small business is integral to economic stability/growth for the mainstream conservative (like a Jack Kemp, etc.). A hard-core libertarian (Ayn Rand, for instance) would be opposed to any regulations even those against practices which could hurt the entrepreneur. Because whereas in a "conservative ecosystem" the majority of hiring, etc. comes from small business/"main street" or whatever, in a "libertarian/John Galt ecosystem" most of the hiring is done by, you guessed it, John Galt. My point is, a mainstream conservative (a more moderate type) has an interest in preventing price-fixing and helping the small-time businessman whereas the libertarian does not. Therefore, "pro-business" means different things to different people. Pro-small-business (mainstream or moderate conservatism) is different or not always the same at any rate from being pro-big-business (libertarian/Objectivist). Thus, for example Gov. Romney would probably want to keep a lid on price-fixing which hurts mainstreet, while say Rand Paul would not. This is a great topic to tease out the nuances between various so-called "pro-business" or "conservative" viewpoints. Who's right? Who knows, but it is certainly instructive.
Unfortunately, with Netflix, Hulu, Tivo... I am never in short supply of things to watch on TV that isn't crap. All six seasons of Lost, that's a lot of time gone on!
The Wrong Stuff: NASA Astronaut on Making and Fixing Mistakes
I'd go for it. Having two years of working for Google on your CV will open doors in the future. Plus, you may find you love it and stay there for the rest of your life!

One thing I would take note of, as someone not from the US - realise that the US is very, very different to somewhere like the UK. In my limited experiences, the similarities mask the differences.
This kind of thing happens a lot. A favorite trick is to "bundle" your app with some useless add-on, and then split the revenue between your app and the add-on, halving your royalty. The way to get past that is to have a minimum royalty per unit, and a minimum aggregate royalty per quarter.
speaking his mind, like he would speak to you in person, is influential and cool.
I always thought of swearing as some kind of instinctual or emotional entity, I doubt it was deliberate, but more likely he's been drinking the haterade.
The deletion isn't always explicit. Several consumer "web security" applications delete cookies automatically and the user may not be aware.
Socrates: A Proposal for Purely Symbolic Python
Someone's probably working on an anti-measure right now.
Frankly, that's more just McClure's style -- to be abrasive and have 9 different colors in his posts.
I know someone who worked with Courtney. She's very smart.
It seems a lot more resource intensive to have a bot responding to SMS messages from many different phone numbers than more traditional ways of gaming the system.

So unless becoming a user on your site is worth much much more than the average site, just the increased barrier, even if not totally secure, should be enough to keep the vast majority of bots away.
The difference is that creating "Hey Jude" is a completely creative effort, like making a painting or writing a novel. You can't estimate up front how long it's going to take, it takes what it takes. The more you make it like an engineering process the more you remove the part that makes people interested in it. The "soul" if you will.

Creating a map is an engineering process. You take data and translate into another form. A robot could do it. Translating from one language to another is the same thing in principle, but much harder [1].

Writing an English text book is a little more free form but probably what she was getting at is the fact that English doesn't belong to anyone. You're creating a description or view of something that already exists, not a new thing itself.

A program slides even more toward art but at least you're given parameters.

[1] A computer can't do this properly until we have much better AI. The translator has to be able to understand the feeling of the words and then express those in the target language if possible.
Top Graphical User Interfaces in Statistical Software
The degree of regulatory capture now inside the system is extreme and obvious.

Yet people continue to clamor for greater government control over a wider range of affairs. I simply can't fathom why my fellow citizens can simultaneously complain about the corporatism that government displays and hand the government the means to achieve even more of the same.

on this side of the Atlantic

I assume that when you say this, you're talking about my side of the Atlantic. Is that right?
7 Freely available E-Books/Guides for .NET Programmers and Architects
The Sparc T series are relatively interesting chips. They offer logical segmentation for virtualization and IO, which is supported in Solaris and OpenBSD - you could, for example, run an OpenBSD firewall and a Solaris webserver in one unit.

They also have chip level threading, which is similar to Intel's hyperthreading, but much more dense - 8 threads per CPU core on most models.

These chips are designed for processing and network IO - they come with dual 10 gigabit ethernet on the CPU, but limited PCIe expansion compared even to most desktop PC's. Great for a compute server.

I wish the older ones would come down in price - the original T1000 servers are still going for nearly 2k on Ebay...
omg, I thought this was a Ruby on Rails performance blog post...
VLC Media Player on iPad: No More Need to Convert Videos
The iPad has changed my life; there I said it. However, putting aside couch browsing, a term most associated with the Apple tablet, the iPad could have been so much more.
They don't have to sue Apache, they just have to sue their users ... i.e. Android is using Harmony's class libraries, with Google being one of Harmony's customers.

So it is already happening.
Sounds like you're unfamiliar with Dave's style in general - he's well known for his profanity.
right on, small groups != market trends
But there's a driving force getting those folks together in the same room. I think it's a sign of great seed deals moving out of the valley.
Completely agree with you, but unfortunately since Google is already so strongly gamed sometimes the only way to survive is to game it yourself.
"status report" is vague. Devs can maintain an internal blog where they just post a few sentences about what they are doing, any problems, etc. Or run an internal status.net server. It doesn't have to be onerous.
The Russians weren't the first to float a nuclear reactor. See also, nuclear submarine, nuclear aircraft carrier.

Each Nimitz class aircraft carrier has two A4W reactors on board capable of generating over 200 MW of power with a service life of 20 years. That's enough to power around 60,000 homes. In the video, they mention supplying 45,000 people for 12 years, but no mention of MW output.

It's a good idea, but a couple of the problems you mention aren't exactly solved by floating the reactor in the ocean.

2. In the event of a failure, yes, only the people on board would be injured in the blast, but that's the case with most land-based reactors as well. Reactors don't blow up like nuclear bombs because the reaction isn't as focused. The fizzle out with a big glow and a huge emission of radiation. Bottom line is that it isn't all that much different from a land-based reactor, unless said reactor is downtown in an urban center.

3. I can't believe you're even suggesting that. Don't you think there is some reason we don't package up all our existing nuclear waste and dump it in the ocean?

The component of reactor failure that affects the most people is fallout. When a reactor fizzles out, it spews massive amounts of radiation in to the atmosphere. That radiation attaches to dust particles, which can travel hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles. With a nuclear reactor floating around in the arctic, we have good reason to be concerned. The arctic is the shortest path from Russia to the US. The question is, what are the atmospheric patterns in the arctic? I don't know, but I'm definitely looking in to it.
Good to see someone bring some balance to this whole thing. You can read between the lines that he's pretty careful about not offending anybody, but at the same time lays out some pretty clear reasons why there likely is nothing to it.

My personal take on this is that as long as there are more people wanting to do deals with angels than there are funds it's a buyers market and you'll have to live with that.

Part of that is that angels set some of the terms and have some influence over the price. And if they set their valuation too low or you (the start-up) sets the valuation too high is that there is no deal.

But when there is a deal then you can assume that it is to everybody's benefit. After all, no deals -> bad for investors and start-ups alike.
> I think it's a sign of great seed deals moving out of the valley.

I'd consider that good news.
Not enough colors!
McClure's post looks like the emails the whole company used to get from my menopausal VP back in 2001.
Agreed. I guess that's the next advancements that search engines need to make.
Why Ugly Sites Convert Better Than Yours
ANd a thousand others were founded by people of all ages. Not really statistically significant, but interesting.
I think everyone pretty much saw that distribution was going to become digital.

It was easier to steal music than buy it legally. That itch (instant gratification) would be scratched sooner or later.
21 Job Sites that Actually Help You Find a Job in IT
Benjamin Franklin once wrote “…in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”
Chris Yeh responds to Arrington's blog: Yes, there is a super-angel conspiracy
It's a simple idea and simple to do. Other than the person I was replying to, I made no assumptions if you or anyone else would like.

I really don't want to be dragged into this discussion with you, we have opposite personalities and I don't want to talk about the MiniRank Formula TEXT-ONLY whatever. Thank you for understanding :)
Then why does your Mini-WWW news post, from July 2010, say 'My ultimate dream is an Ads-FREE Web' with a link to the article.

That was you making a choice to link them together, not to keep them "absolutely nothing to do with [each other]".

At least stick to your convictions and beliefs, however idiotic I may think they are, rather than trying to backpedal out of it.
It was just a thought - I find myself using Readability a lot and imagine there might be some interesting things that could be done with it (e.g. better support for things like iPads).
That makes sense. Rail freight carriers built their own infrastructure with success (50% of US freight transport is done by rail vs 10% in Europe). High Speed Trains are nice, but they shouldn't be built by dismantling what's already working, and working well.
Are you talking about net neutrality?
How can you tell? Are you able to tell what a typeface is just by looking at it? What characteristics help you decide ?

I have been trying to learn about typography, passively, for the past couple months. Anything sans serif looks like Helvetica to me.
Business Writing Style is as Important as Content
How exactly do they plan to get all that energy back to Russia?
I'm trying to figure out who this was aimed at. Was it Mike? Was it PG? or Us the readers?
Who is hating on Dave?
Man do I love that word! It just rolls off the tongue.

Anyway, though, you know that most people are, in fact, hetero? Without having been given other information it he's got a ~90% chance of guessing right.

But feel free to comment on what it's like for a gay dude in the valley, that would be interesting.
He runs a business, and he tries to keep it relevant. A SV blog about start-ups that has to come out with 5 blog posts a day? You're going to run out of things to write about... why not create them?

I personally haven't dug deep enough into any of the flame-baity stories of tech-crunch, but considering more than half of them have typos, grammatical errors that make it difficult to read sometimes, little or no substantiated FACTS, make it all seem like gossip. A Tech-TMZ if you will.

It seems like they crank those stories out so fast they don't even bother to proof read them. Some are starting to believe they don't bother to stop and evaluate the merit of the story to begin with.

Techcrunch is only relevant because enough people go there to GAWK at MA's posts. Any of the legit stories are on other news sites within a day, usually better written and with more information. Its obvious that TC can be an armpit sometimes because it has the most stories written about itself.

I would be willing to entertain the idea that even if Mike was on to something, his reputation and execution on this story is like the boy crying wolf for real but no one takes him seriously anymore.
How a non-technical co-founder can be productive while the CTO builds the site
You have to hope you can become popular enough that when your initial deal runs out you can dictate terms to the record company and not the other way around. Or that you can use fame to generate revenue from other sources.
100 percent agree. Never mind where you went, it's about where you are GOING.
Just tried this in Opera. Having never visited the site before, I opened it in a "New Private Tab". Set Opera to reject all [normal] cookies from that domain. Saw an ID number on the page; recorded it. Opened another private tab. Saw a different ID number. Refreshed page; got yet another (different) ID number. Revisited page within same [private] tab (pressed Enter in address bar): got yet another (different) ID number. Did the same in Chrome (regular tabs): saw same behaviour.

Using two different private tabs in Opera, I get two different IDs to start with, but when using the "click to rediscover" buttons, both allegedly private tabs [eventually] end up with the same ID.
To be really convinced, I'd need to see how it gets translated into HTML as well. That was a weak spot with LaTeX last I remember - which was admittedly a while ago.

Having your resume in an easy-to-see-at-a-glance format is not optional, in my opinion.
Remote Pairing with Vim and TMux
What a weak post... this post is that it contains no content

I think the choice of fonts in the list was driven but what was available with affiliate links.
Most of the suit seems to be about the virtual machine, rather than the class libraries, but to be honest, the whole thing is as clear as mud.