skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder how tough something like that would be to build?

My first thought would be how to get that factualized content. Most journalists (popular ones anyway) like to inject their own thoughts and opinions into pieces. It takes an extremely committed person with a clear set of rules to avoid doing that.

Perhaps a way to do it would be to have news articles written by an individual, and then have a few others, or a community, edit it wiki-style, and essentially act like a collaberative editor. After it passes the editing phase, it appears on the website.

Finding, empowering, and rewarding the best writers and editors would be really important. Also defining what that clear set of rules should be will be hard too, but not impossible.

StackOverflow.com did a pretty good job with that. Things are kept on topic (with occassional jokes here and there), they empower those with a high level of karma (can edit, delete others' posts), and have a good set of simple rules to follow when submitting questions to the site:

Avoid asking questions that are subjective, argumentative, or require extended discussion - http://stackoverflow.com/faq

I don't think an individual who is lacking time would find a news source thats purely factual boring. Instead it would make their lives easier and more efficient.
It's posts like yours when I wish that HN had a "save" feature.
I'm sort of disappointed that on the personalized layout they didn't suggest doing something useful with the caplock key.
Maybe something like Reddit's "rising" page would help. Basically, somewhere that would catch all of the stories that only got ~4 upvotes on the front page, but would filter out the ones that didn't get any.
Thanks for the input. I'm working on my startup as well, so don't be too worried about how I'm spending my spare time.

In fact, in one way, I made this so I could spend more time on my startup. I found myself wasting too much time reading Hacker News. Either I was procrastinating and refreshing too often, where I found it hard to either identify what story was new that I hadn't seen, or which ones I'd already seen but did not interest me. Or, I was going back and reading simply so I wouldn't miss anything, since stories tend to trail off pretty quickly unless they get a lot of votes.
Not enough experience to make a tic-tac-toe game? No time like the present to try!
Perhaps: autoscroll the pages (of the "new" pages), a-la duckduckgo.com ?
Users who aren't spending (at the moment) are better termed "product" since their presence on the site is being sold to others.
Hoefler & Frere-Jones are hiring a front-end web developer and web programmer
Zed's python book: http://sheddingbikes.com/LearnPythonTheHardWay.pdf
Mozilla Seabird - smart phone that may never fly (photos)
First point of advice would be to take a deep breath and slow way, way down. Everyone is pressuring you because they know you don't have cash and they want to get paid first before everyone else out of a dwindling set of assets. Slow the process down. Time - although it may not seem like it now - is on your side. Don't sell your car, don't take on a consumer loan. Slow down.

Your debt, while big to you, is minimal to the people you are working with, so they should be open to working through the issue with you.

a) Your lawyer, if it's a big firm, probably has a $2-3mm+ book, and a non-collection of $3k isn't going to effect them one bit. S/he has an incentive to work with you to come to an agreement on payment (if any) to maintain the relationship. Treat them with respect and you will get it in return. Deal with this bill last because it will be the easiest to manage.

b) $6k rackspace bill. Escalate the issue through the accounts payable department by explaining the situation and telling them they aren't going to get paid in full. If the first person on the phone doesn't get it, escalate to the next level, then the next level, etc. The gatekeeper's job is to put pressure on you to pay and create anxiety, which they seem to have done.

Once you get someone willing to work with you, fight to reduce the balance and then extend the payables as much as possible. For the value of the balance, figure out what rackspace could get by selling your receivable to a collections agency and offer slightly more - if they get $.18 per dollar owed, agree to pay $.19. Then, stretch the time period as much as possible.

c) Merchant account. This is where I would focus. This is your greatest exposure. Even if you didn't sign a personal guarantee, this could follow you professionally. Get on the phone with the merchant account holder and start dealing. Get the balance down to their cost first (that shouldn't be hard), and then see if you can grind it down farther. They have a loss reserve for this exact reason. Be open and transparent and pay the least amount possible while avoiding getting on the blacklist.

Bankruptcy (I'm not an attorney, so take this with the necessary grain of salt) is the last resort. It's long and painful for everyone involved - including you - and none of your creditors want to go there. Your creditors have an interest in working out your debts with you without going to court.
From http://marc.info/?l=git&m=128077393712932&w=2

I'd figured to play with Git in an unusual way: to create a repository for the U.S. Constitution where amendments are presented as patches.

What follows is an interesting discussion of getting git to represent the dates correctly. :)
What I would actually want is to be able to put something like

ruby -r base64 -e 'puts Base64.decode64("emhhbGJyZWNodEBnbWFpbC5jb20=")'

into the email field. Doesn't take probably for length or validation reasons :) Anyone who can't figure that out, I don't think I want emailing me through HN.
I'm going to start using autoantonyms in completely ambiguous ways in email. I love it!
"better, faster, smarter", if you can measure these you can improve these. Focus on that.

- Work hard, have aggressive deadlines and get rid of the people who are being lazy. You are in business for a long time and probably your developers have become bored and run out of ideas. You need to challenge and motivate them like in the early days.
- Get some smart people as advisors/consultant to help you generate innovative ideas to improve your product and define the timelines. Especially if you don't have any technically strong guys in the core team.
I'd suggest that much of the decline in traffic was due to the demise of the DiggBar, so it was fake traffic anyway.
I'm so thrilled that they gave Carl Malamud/Law.gov $1 million. His tireless devotion to shining sunlight on government has dramatically changed the way we interact with our government (i.e. SEC EDGAR, which started off as a skunkworks project he turned over to the SEC under threat).

If you'd like to donate, go to http://public.resource.gov and scroll down to the PayPal Donate button. I just gave $100.
If you're building a search engine, better get a UX guy.

If you're building a photo sharing site, better get a UX guy.

If you're building a social app, then hell yes, get a UX guy AND a designer.
Haven't you heard of executive dating services? ;)
Doh! Thanks. I should have linked to that :D
(Everybody, check out this amazing, constantly updated (!) book that Zed wrote.)
Is this the same as these, or something new? --> http://searchyc.com/president+shut+down
> I'm not one of those guys that can call up Rackspace and be like, hey, if you go into collections, you won't get shit, so we're doing it my way.

Trouble is the time you learn the most, this is also a part of doing business, over the years I've had a few occasions to have to bring 'bad news' (in some cases very bad), you will have to bite the bullet on that one.

> Lots of time passed before I came to my senses.

Hope is sometimes a dangerous thing.

> You know me

Drop me a line, maybe I can do something a bit more concrete.
"When those far removed from the creation of wealth -- undergraduates, reporters, politicians -- hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think injustice! An experienced programmer would be more likely to think is that all? The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software."

Yet, the top 5% of programmers don't get a disproportionate amount of the money, someone else typically does. There is a giant disconnect between those who get the most money and those who add the most value to society. Who's added more value to society, Linus Torvalds or Jason Calcanis? Who's gotten more money? How much value do hedge fund managers add to society compared to the amount of money they make? How much value have the coders of mysql added to society versus the amount of money they have made?
Glad to hear that the Khan Academy was awarded $2m! Completely well-deserved imo.
Just for reference: The C-Corp does provide a pretty heavy liability shield. However, alot of these contracts where likely personally guaranteed. It's nearly impossible to open a merchant account for a young company without personal guarantees from the principles. The lawyer likely required personal guarantees on the retainer as well.

It's part of doing business really. Creditors really don't like corporate protection (for obvious reasons) so it's pretty easy to get yourself into a situation that they're seeing... although the high number of charge-backs is something of a head scratcher.
Dont worry about embarrassment, be upfront about any mistakes and move on.
I've used it ever since it was in beta, (for around 2 years), and I've never had a problem with it, as michael_dorfman said, "it just works."
There is a FAQ, actually:

http://codelesson.com/faq
Go to a local credit union instead of a big bank. You can probably also use your car or other assets as loan collateral. I'm sorry to hear you're going through this. The best of luck to you.
Thanks. Would you mind elaborating more on the difference between UX and design? And how each can help a startup achieve its business goals?
Or you could just make video games.

Just be sure to finish them. The mantra in indie/hobby video game development is "finish your games, and if you can't finish, try making something simpler".

See also: http://makegames.tumblr.com/post/1136623767/finishing-a-game
This is really a case where you can get all the information out the headline itself (and maybe a couple numbers).
It changed completely the way I manage files in my business. In positive of course.
How is a food truck free-riding any more than a person parking a car is? Unlike a car parker, the food truck owner is also paying licensing fees to the city.

If you believe people underpay for parking, I agree with you. Everyone who parks a car is free-riding, and food-trucks are free-riding to the exact same extent as a guy who commutes to work. But if that's the problem, why not just charge market rates for parking?
Diaspora: What next?
TechZing - Only The Best tech Podcast Online
That's what I would expect here as well. Lawers are - if anything - pretty realistic about plucking feathers from frogs, and they'll be happy enough to see something rather than nothing at all. After all, they might be your preferred contact the next time you strike out and perhaps succeed.
"I think this will be the first smartphone that isn't HTML5 capable. Incredible."

Really? I think only Google and webkit phones are HTML5 capable. Blackberry just jumped on this train like a month ago.
Still there here http://codelesson.com/view/introduction-to-programming-in-py...
Inside job? Is a company really that stupid to get hit 15 times over 4 years and not change how it transports money to the safe? Sounds like a very complex embezzlement scheme.
The 997 Grid System
Don't be embarrassed. It happens; especially in this kind of economy. Unless the failure was due to gross negligence on your part, no one who matters will hold it against you.
I read the New page sometimes. I've found that I have disproportionate power over what appears on the front page. Maybe half of the stories I upvote from the New page end up hitting the top half of the front page.

It only takes 3-4 votes for a newly submitted (< 30 minutes ago) story to hit the front page. If you and one other person like it, it'll usually get to the bottom of the hot list. From there, there's often a cascade effect as more and more people see it on the hot list. If the article's any good at all, it can often be in the top 5 within an hour or two.

It's good for karma, too, as getting early comments in on stories that later become hot is a good way to get lots of points on them.
Great advice. I grew up seeing that my dad always had a book with him. When he'd take my mom shopping he'd sit in the car and read. Wasn't long before I wanted to sit with dad and read too.

Also, while we had Atari/Nintendo/etc, that was limited to 30min a night. Reading was unlimited. Both parents took me to the library often and I got my first Library card in kindergarten.

I grew up to love reading and plan on using the same tactics with my own children.
> Would it kill them to have a reply address I could actually use to accomplish that?

I think that was Ryan's point -- with which I agree.

Admittedly, changing a flight might need a bit more back-and-forth than an e-mail exchange (they should provide their phone number in the email, and IIRC, airlines I have worked with do provide it). But you may have other reasons you need to reply, such as a quick clarification.
That's admirable, but if you can't pay, you can't pay. It's not worth selling organs over.
Probably not, but it might bankrupt them. Not to mention that e-mail is not guaranteed to be secure, so if your ISP or their mail server doesn't support encrypted connections, someone could be listening and reschedule your flight for you.
Names, SSNs, other government identification or account numbers, birth dates, mother's maiden names, usernames/passwords, bank data, financial account information.

Criminals can aggregate information, too.
Yup, just try it, make the board and how to check if someone won or if it's full, figure out how to get input from the user. Then if you like the language move to implementing a simple ai (start with randomly putting pieces ;p).

By then you should know a good chunk (IO, loops, built in data structures ...)
Not sure how useful this is for existing laws, but for pending legislation it would be fascinating to see the forks and merges as lawmakers negotiate toward a final bill. Maybe the Sunlight folks are doing something like this?
Granted it's probably the most convoluted way possible to give an email address, but it's there.
Never use your own money! Borrow and lose other people's money. It's the American Way! wink

(Note: I am an American, and thus reserve the right to poke myself in the eye.)

(While this was meant to be funny, it's really meant to be "ha-ha serious" not "ha-ha funny". Start-ups are by-nature risky endeavors. Putting your own financial well-being on the line in this fashion is as foolish as tight-rope walking without a net. If you've got a C-corp your personal assets should be somewhat protected. Make sure to do your homework on this...)

Oh, and last of all: Don't Panic. You can always flee to Europe or elsewhere. ;)
Consulting?
When I was a teenager I used to coach kids who had reading problems. My first action was to get them a library card and let them pick out something they were interested in; snakes and adventure stories were common choices.

And my advice to parents since has always been to encourage them to read anything they wanted first, the better a person can read the less difficult tedious books (school work, etc) becomes later. Reading is a skill, and like any skill it requires practice. The more enjoyable the practice, the more they'll do.
I don't understand the attitude that when someone says 'No' when you try to sell them something, you get mad about it.

Because that's what this article is talking about. He tried to persuade someone to invest, and they didn't want to. And he got mad about it.

This article has made me wonder if the right approach is answering 'no' initially to see what the reaction will be. If it's a decent reaction, then say 'yes' if you want it. If the reaction is off-the-wall, the answer is now 'no' anyhow.
Are Big Americans a Big Business Opportunity?
I've had trouble with Sitepoint as they instantly ban you if you post anything that remotely looks like spam. Many forums are the same way - what's the right approach to posting onto a forum? Do you have a good example of what's accepted? I got the ban-hammer pretty quick on Sitepoint for what I thought was a pretty innocent post asking for feedback on an MVP.
What strikes me as odd about this is that grains are a perfectly natural food source and a staple of plenty of really healthy people, from all around the world, and for as far back in history as you care to delve. Why not eat grains?

And also, since this appears to be about gluten: it cracks me up that one health food movement (the macrobiotic movement) get away with promoting seitan (which is just fried/steamed/baked wheat gluten) as a health food, while another movement says that gluten kills you.
Haha, ok ok, you win this one. Well played mister :)
Moving 60 million files between two windows servers
That's 100% better than all the captchas in the world.
searchyc? Nice! didn't know that.

I'm going to delete this submission
The first step in changing something is being able to understand it, and the first step in understanding it is to have it organized. The organizational component that is missing is, to put it in terms we at HN deal with everyday, to generate Changelogs and revision history (with attribution, down to the politician).

It would be nice to have all changes, including proposed changes, documented in a relatively easy to navigate format. Git, or any modern SCM, may qualify as a tool to provide that. Some of the most important metadata about proposed changes, even if they don't get included in the final, passed laws, would exist on branches; metadata like who proposed it and who signed off on it, who supports it. If anything, this would make The Daily Show's researchers' job easier.

While politics is 99% emotion, those emotions should include motivation, not frustration experienced early on when trying to grok the system. In a free society, the output of the governance should be accessible to all. One can debate if git is accessible, but it would definitely be a format that is more accessible, and maybe even more machine processable, than the current system.
It does, sort of. If you upvote a story, it is added to the "saved stories" link on your profile page.
I've seen the future of Internet communications
No audio/video lectures or screencasts?

It's unclear from FAQ what's "instructor-led" actually means.
One thing about it for me: the first night I tried it, thought it wasn't all that great, and went to bed. The next morning I went at it again, and now I'm totally obsessed. It just took a little bit for it to click.

For me, the game is genius because it enables me to make it what I want: I'm the kind of guy that starts building a house, and then wants to make it bigger. And then wants better stuff. And then needs to explore. The 'do anything, no goal' side of it means I'm truly free to make my own goals.

Notch has said that eventually there will be a way to 'win', though. It _is_ still in alpha, after all...
I can understand why you thought they would be sortable. However, it's designed around being a chronological list. When I want to scan the higher rated stories, I use the filter links -- top 10, top 20, top 50%. Sorting by points or comments does make some sense, however, it is also a function of how long a story has been posted -- so I don't really think a javascript sort in place would be too useful.

As for the UI design -- I wanted a simple list of stories that I could scan, plus I wanted to be able to see the points and number of comments associated with that story. While I understand your point about highest importance, if I had placed the numbers on the right the ragged right nature of the text would make it hard to scan.
The email field isn't public anyways.
The generated reports are kind of interesting - but they'll always be incomplete in some way for programmers, because many of the keys we press aren't captured in the outputted text. Keyboard shortcuts are my coding lifeblood.
There are no controls on this study. Lawsuit-happy companies appear to only win a small portion of their suits, but why? Is it because they have patented things that shouldn't have been? Bad lawyers? I can't being to imagine all the different things that could cause this.

And that's even before we compare it to other non-patent lawsuits.
I had a computer or some other electronic gadget since I was 7. I also played insane amounts of computer games (sometimes they had to take away computer from me).

But just like you I read insanely a lot - I had whole school library read by the time I was 10 - literary everything. When I had reading streaks I'd just pack my schoolbag chock full of books and bring them back in 2 weeks (I read the whole LOTR trilogy in 2 days! when I was 12!!!).

Computer games only gave me the chance for greater immersion. I also learned English all by myself just through trying to hack the computer and by playing games.

How it all came to be? Our home was full of books. My parents both read a lot (newspapers, novels, poetry...) and they were both formally uneducated. I also "inherited" boxes of 80's pop-tech magazines form my older brother and lots of novels from various people. My parents always showed that they were proud of me for reading a lot. I was also lucky that the dude who stocked me with games (pirated I must say!) had excellent taste - so I started my gaming career with Ultima Underworld 2 (not knowing English at the time), Colonization, TIE fighter,...

So if somebody were asking me for advice - I'd say:
1. Stock your home with loads of quality literature. 2. Commend your kids on reading. 3. Your kids WILL play games (else nowadays they will be considered dorks) - so you better stock some quality video games (RPG and strategy if possible). 4. Do not own a TV!

There.
> a commonly accepted definition [of 'literally'] ...

Really? If so, that's worse than "impact" used as a verb, or some of my relatives' apparent belief that certain prepositions no longer take objects ("we're going to the movies; ya wanna come with?")

[/old-fart-mode]
There's a more subtle point not listed here: I want to control who gets my e-mail. So I'd rather stay anonymous to those who are anonymous to me, and know who has my e-mail.
a woman carrying a child around is bearing it from A to B. Afterwards, it was born from A to B

Surely that would be borne, not born.
Why can't Starbucks do exactly what you are saying they can't do? It wouldn't be illegal for Starbucks to operator a mobile coffee truck, and if they sell below cost drinks to and take customers away from someone else at a loss then that would be between Starbucks and their shareholders.

And how would they be free-riding off our tax dollars? If that is the root cause here, then maybe the food truck owners should pay more taxes, which I doubt that it is.

Any established industry has a vested interest in keeping status quo. They don't want someone to come in and shake things up, because that means they might have to actually compete.
Gluten allergies aren't that uncommon.
ok so help me take it one step further. Just having that stuff isn't the end game.

What do they do with it? Apply for credit? Take out a loan? Even if they had someones bank account login information, is it really easy to drain an account? My bank certainly doesn't allow an online transfer to another account or location.
I'm working on a system which is similar but higher volume.

Have you done any benchmarks to test thousands of updates per second?

Same, but on the front-end. What is the impact of generating 10 reports per second for 2 hours? Do the writers get behind?

You won't have scaling issues in until the front-end hits some threshold of x queries per y updates, with x servers.

Good presentation on another application of mongo.