skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you are building a single product and have no plans for further products it is just as easy to name your company after your product, assuming that your product has a "user-friendly" name and is simple to remember. For example, AirBnB is catchy and easy to remember, and the company is built around the single product.

If you know ahead of time that you will be marketing several products down the road I think it is better to go with a name that encompasses those products (i.e. Adobe, Microsoft, 37 Signals, Zynga, etc...).

Microsoft wasn't named Disk Operating System for a reason, it was named Microsoft and DOS was a product so you combined the two to have Microsoft DOS.

Having a name that is different from the product if you plan to develop multiple products makes it easier to spin off or sell that individual product down the road. For example, it would be easy for Zynga to sell off the Farmville asset without having to change their entire corporate marketing scheme and deal with rebranding the company.
Gawker's Commenting Accounts Compromised — Change Your Passwords
My basic problem with them is question three in the FAQ (http://www.bitcoin.org/faq). In a nutshell, "What backs BitCoins? Nothing." It is true that a currency that is accepted by people is by definition valuable at the point in time where they accept it, but that does not mean you can create a backless-currency and have it all just magically work, nor that it will necessarily work across time. A dollar is accepted because you can use it to pay your debts to the US Government. Inductively, another economic entity will accept them for another good or service because they also have that value for a dollar, and further inductively because they know they can then use it for some other good or service, until the inductive net spans the globe. But they're trying to skip the base case. That doesn't work.

(And I suspect even if you could magic wand it into existence it would still be very vulnerable. Take any fiat currency today of your choice. Remove the government backing. How long does it last? Probably not zero, but it probably crumbles at the next crisis at the latest. It would only take one metaphorical bank run to demolish the entire currency in a heartbeat. And it would only take a small nucleus of savvy people to prompt such a bank run, too, and such savvy people definitely exist.)

And in startup parlance, this is just about the worst possible "boil the ocean" plan possible. Virtual currencies will eventually happen and I'd even bet within a century you could live entirely off non-government-backed currencies, but it'll happen organically, not by fiat. And, no joke, it'll probably be some form of MMORPG cash, because those are by far the best seed I can think of for this sort of system to crystallize around, though probably some future MMORPG that makes today's look like tinkertoys.
#1 - I have this happen 80% of the time on my iphone, now I just don't vote because I was always down voting people.

#4 - Is a great idea. It would be good to have "licensed" apps for NH. Not sure if I am like a large group of people but I like to use "official" apps.
Running djbdns wouldn't do much to demonstrate the lack of a performance penalty for type safe functional languages or the expressive power of declarative protocol specifications.
My exact thoughts. While he doesn't go into too much detail about what the idea is per se, he tells you a lot about himself, which is critical, tells you about compensation, location and expectations. Plus he promises to respond to everyone, which another sign of integrity. Good stuff Chris.
Yes. There is no "approach" that works, which means the problem is with expectations.
Let's see...incredible food, 24/7 nightlife, culture like nowhere else in the world, one of the largest and richest parks in the country, probably the best public transportation system in the country, a hell of a lot of convenience (drop-off wash-and-fold on every street corner, etc), a diverse and interesting population, easy access to not one, not two, but THREE separate international airports (JFK, LGA, Newark), and easy access to Europe.
The Atlantic Turns a Profit, With an Eye on the Web
I assume you're talking about this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1390895

I don't know what title you used when submitting it, but the current title wasn't written by a moderator. It's the original article title.

It's true that YC founders' accounts have a field set saying so, but the only code that looks at this field is the code for posting jobs. None of the anti-abuse code does. And the jobs page has been around for years.
> An elevated reading level is not necessarily a sign of more thoughtful or insightful comments. It could just be contrived banality disguised as conceptual depth.

Put simply, high reading level doesn't mean good content. (trying to prove your point :D)
They already block invalid SSL certificates and phishing/malware sites. Why not ads, too?
>If programming shops were willing to hire people fresh out of college with English degrees and teach them programming, they would probably do really, really well. But nobody is willing to do that, so college grads go without jobs and startups go without employees.

Do you have experience hiring someone with no technical experience and turning them into a productive employee? How did you train them? How long did it take?
We're already priced below the bulk price of most other vendors. What sort of volume do you have? Feel free to drop me an email at akalsey@tropo.com
I've fixed a few of these in the iPhone app I built. It's a native Cocoa app that lets you browse, vote, and comment on HN. Here's what the home screen looks like: http://michaelgrinich.com/hackernews/media/screenshot-1.png

I separated the voting arrows and reply button, which helps with accidental taps. Here's a comments page: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4595/hn-vote.png

There's also a few nice features, like an in-app browser with Readability and send to Instapaper/Twitter/etc. You can see a demo of the app here: http://michaelgrinich.com/hackernews/

The app doesn't sell enough to be a full-time project, so I push updates when I have time. Currently I'm working on an update with full iPad support.

(All of this works via HTML scraping since there's no API.)
At least some types of UI changes would affect content quality. For example changing the size and color of the up and down arrows could have a big impact on voting frequency. Making the submit link more or less prominent could have a big impact on submission frequency, as well as providing tools like submission bookmarklets. And if at some point the majority of HN usage is mobile, it'll really change the sort of stories that people upvote.

It's not clear which direction you would want those metrics to move to improve quality, but it at least seems like UI vs quality is not a zero-sum tradeoff.
Can someone briefly explain how google determines reading level? I'm assuming it's using something like the Flesch–Kincaid test:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabil...

A brief search on wikipedia reveals a few readability tests, but they all seem to be based on sentence/syllable ratios, not content complexity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Readability_tests

And in general they all rank multi-syllable (longer) words higher. Which would mean a conversation between two Java API writers would be ranked higher than a ruby conversation :)

Java vs Ruby vs Lisp: http://i.imgur.com/tq3pA.png
Think you’re good at networking? Properly following up
> It's impossible to use HN on mobile iPhone and Android handhelds.

I actually find it quite the opposite. I've downloaded multiple Android apps that try to improve the HN reading interface, and I still find myself using browser instead. The closest thing that I would describe as being "bad" on my phone is that the arrows are small enough that I sometimes misvote on comments. Otherwise, I think it works really well:

* Each comment is the width of the screen, so there's not much vertical scrolling needed

* Comments are still well-indented so that I can easily follow a thread by scrolling right or left.

* I greatly enjoy being able to long-press comment links from the main page to open them in a new window, and then long-press the OP link to open that in a second window, and be able to use the back button to return to comments when I'm done reading, or even switch back and forth like I can in Chrome at home.
"contrived banality disguised as conceptual depth"

Is it possible this phrase is an example of itself? :-)
I pay $120 a month for 40 gigs of admittedly quite fast internet here in NZ. WTF is this guy talking about. Bloody americans
We could imbues bitcoin with intrinsic value if we use bitcoin as a notarization database.

The problem with that is the use of bitcoin as a notarization service will erode bitcoin as a form of money. You would need to pay higher fee to prioritize bitcoin over big documents such as DNS record and contracts. That become inconvenient real fast for those who transact in bitcoin.
So, were these "passwords" stored as salted hashes?
I like the UI. I know it's hard for some to believe, but it's stark and functional and fast and mostly stays out of the way; it works. The comment scores need to be hidden for comments you didn't write; other than that, what's to improve? Taking back votes? How about, just forget about the vote.

If HN has a problem with titles, it's with not enough stores having their titles rewritten to the article original.
I've hired a few technical employees in the Chicago area, and I found that it's almost impossible to find someone with basic reasoning skills. Most people I interviewed had very poor eyes for details, had a hard time spotting or understanding their own mistakes, making sense of novel situations, thinking abstractly or generalizing from specifics etc... This was true even among CS graduates from schools with decent reputations. I don't know why the pool is so bad or if it has always been this way.
"Spending more time on UI = spending less on quality."

I disagree.

The inability to reverse incorrect votes reduces the quality of the site by assigning incorrect scores to comments. In fact, many comments are apologies for accidental down-votes.

Also, not being able to comment inline means thread context is lost when comments are being composed. It is very likely this results in lower quality comments, which reduces the quality of the site.

A good UI can and does lead to a higher quality sites. Keep things as simple as possible, but not so simple that quality suffers.

Just my opinion.
I've been trying to find this out also. There's no indication that they are; but the only indication that they aren't was them saying that shorter passwords will be much less secure.
Well then... what's the current up/down internet connection, after subtracting the average use? That's the limit (unless limited further by something else). Why not advertise it? It's probably huge.
Yes, as I said in the parent comment, the moderator changed it back to the original story headline.

I had changed it because I knew nobody cares about the Library of Congress, and no one knows what Portolan means. I read the story, determined a meaningful title, and the moderator decided that was no good. Since I have edited many, many newspapers, and written countless headlines, I felt particularly annoyed.
Thanks. In short the idea is to create a truly interactive sports site.

It's simple and allows users to curate a link board (like Reddit), it gets more nuanced to the person as they vote and interact more. Add in comment and voting systems that look and respond like Quora. Very fast, built in editorial controls, extra stuff like formatting and bulleting. This is the minimum viable product.

After you get enough users and enough content being curated, you can start scraping the information. Make a truly personalized sports application. Flipboard, but more bad ass.

People use facebook and such for flipboard concentrate on their ENTIRE network. I have 500+ friends, most don't like sports, many don't like MY teams. I want the best content on my teams from all sources in one place. I also want to be able to interact and game with other sports fans from my teams.

That's a more elaborate version of the idea. -Chris
could you talk a bit about your thinking behind this filter?

"A lot of people have asked for it. It would be easy to write. Let's try it and see what happens."
Why do you insist on an IL? The real reason why JavaScript won out over Java and ActiveX is exactly because it's a programming language and not an IL. Inline JavaScript in HTML pages is the killer feature of JavaScript.

From a technical point of view, you also need to think about how scripts interact with other dynamically loaded scripts. That means standardizing on function calling convention, symbol tables, types and object representation. There's no way to solve these things with something like bytecode (which is why there were never any Java applets that load other Java applets), you need a dynamically-typed programming language. So R4RS Scheme may have been a better choice, but that's not what Netscape marketing wanted, so what.
I might have considered this a good idea, before I played SecondLife with Linden dollars, or used points on Listia, or got gold on Gaia Online.

The problem with these virtual currencies so far is that they're very unstable and they suffer from quick and dramatic deflation and inflation (usually the latter) that makes them absolutely terrible as primary currencies if you don't want to starve to death.

This isn't to say that gov't backed currencies don't have this problem; far from it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Examples_of_hype...

Keeping currencies stable is very difficult, which means that I'm really nervous about any system that isn't well-established already. It's not a guarantee, but it's better than nothing.
No, articles get deprecated quite soon anyway. Try substituting 100 for 500 in the URL: you only get 1 article currently.
Many thanks for those. I obviously haven't digested them yet, but I will.
Having seen the pastebin link, these guys use really, really poor password. Only alphanumeric - usually just one of the two - rarely with capitalization, and nothing else.
In the article, they start with:

"TL:DR. Jump off a cliff and create an awesome fucking company."

Even for a tl;dr, I do not find that enticing. I expect a tl;dr to be short, probably just 1 sentence, but is that the best they could do? Nothing in that 1 sentence makes me want to commit to the project. And, really, the tone is a red flag.

I've got a ton of non-technical friends who have ideas for websites. I probably get asked to commit some time to websites once or twice a month. I say no 99% of the time. I say no unless the time commitment is small and I owe the person a favor, or I actually believe in the idea - which happens about once every 2 years.

A lot of people want my help with websites. If someone wants me to commit my time to them, they need to do a lot to win me over.

Also, I worry about this:

"^I’m looking for one person to be a 50% co-founder"

I think it is usually best if someone is in charge. 50/50 can lead to uncertainty about who is making the decisions.
it would be nice, though. You know there would only be two plans: $25 limited and an unlimited plan (for who knows how much, $50? $60?)
A bitcoin<->pog exchange sounds like a business that'd have at least one customer, then...

I've looked at bitcoins, and then figured that I don't really have much use for the things I can buy with them, including phone cards or online poker chips. On one bitcoin thread, I mentioned that using bitcoins for an online game currency wouldn't work for me as a game developer because I actually need to buy food and housing.

Perhaps, though, just perhaps, bitcoins are going through the 3 phases described by Arthur Schopenhauer: 1) ridiclued, 2) violently opposed, 3) accepted as fact.

But personally I have to admit I'd feel more comfortable with 9mm ammunition or bags of rice as a reliable currency.
We now get about 80k unique visitors on weekdays. There hasn't been any sudden spike.
Ask HN: Dynamic data in a database
I am trying to figure out whether or not I should make the switch from a standard database to something new and fancy like mongodb, but I am still unsure how my problem fits into either solution.

Essentially what I have is data that grows with time, so a column based database seems likely to cause headaches in the near future. I should also note that I receive all my data in a JSON format, so I was leaning towards a mongo solution given those facts. It seems pretty keen on storing data in that object based format.

I think my only concerns are how do you do match up data from one collection to another. Say for instance I wanted to organize my data in such a form so that I had an entry collection, a hash data collection and then a results collection. How would I associate those details with a given entry within the entry collection? Or would I just store it all together?
As far as I can tell, the main problem with micropayments is to do them, a company has to be licensed as a bank. In the UK, the regulatory requirements for banking are such that it takes £100 million to set up a new one; other jurisdictions are similar I imagine.
Here is someone that did this, figured it might be helpful for you.

http://www.k9ventures.com/2009/09/my-story-and-support-for-t...
Ironically, time spent arguing that "it's better to focus on the content rather than the UI" could have been spent to improve the UI.
Not least because of the astoundingly small number of monkeys found on Mars ...
> I'm assuming it's using something like the Flesch–Kincaid test

Yes, It seems to be since it is only available for content in english.

Although, as far as I know they have not said anything regarding the algorithm used yet.

You can see (what it seems to be) the official announcement here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web%20Search/thread?ti...
Absolutely true. Which won't happen until the developers of a game such as Eve can use bitcoins for buying something more than phone cards and online poker chips. Developers need to eat.
At this point, I wouldn't trust an email from gawker with a password reset link, considering they've just been hacked. Sadly I think most users would.
But would increasing voting frequency make the content better? It seems to me equally likely that it would make it worse. Ditto for having a more prominent submit link.

There is a submission bookmarklet. There's a link to it at the bottom of the page.
Intellij IDEA.

More powerful and reliable than Eclipse, but not free (and also a bit uglier).
Thank you! This is very relevant to my interests.
I like how the result for "noobcomments" is marked as a Basic Reading Level.
From my view the real problem is how valuable will English majors be at my startup. How long will it take them to get up to speed where someone doesn't have to hold their hand anymore.

I am really weary of hiring someone with zero programming experience. But not as apprehensive about hiring a programmer with little experience but some experience.

I'd be more likely to hire someone who was a self starter when it comes to learning programing over and English major who just couldn't find a job.
I'm just amazed they could find the source for some of the older Midway games. I think Bally kept really good archives, but I think Williams not so much.
There's also costs that scale with headcount but not experience. For instance, you've got to get computers and chairs and desks for everyone whether they're a rookie or an expert. Ditto things like healthcare. Sure, the rookies may have cubicles and slightly worse plans, but those costs aren't going to be 1/5 or 1/10 as expensive. And while the good programmers probably need less oversight than average, support personnel costs (internal IT, HR, recruitment, whatever) still scale with headcount.
I mean no offense, but this line stands out:

"I’m looking for an awesome person (people) interested in social, dynamic curation, mobile, near-field communication, qr codes, augmented reality, search, rich-media, minimalist design, gaming, and world domination."

That's the kind of buzzword-ridden sentence that scares me and is not clear at all.

But your willingness to answer questions and start a conversation is admirable. I will start another top-level thread with some questions for you.
Don't shoot yourself. Think of it as a business opportunity that will pay lots of money to write compilers! That's pretty rare these days.

I'm working on a COBOL to JavaScript migration product already. $$$
I’m looking for an awesome person (people) interested in social, dynamic curation, mobile, near-field communication, qr codes, augmented reality, search, rich-media, minimalist design, gaming, and world domination. Don’t worry, the MVP (minimum viable product) incorporates only some of those elements, but the vision extends in to all of those areas. Some of these ideas I’ve had for a decade or more, this isn't a knee-jerk proposition. This is an opportunity to take ownership and give your own vision. I'm willing to listen to just about anything and use whatever tools best execute the vision. HTML5 / CSS3, whatever back-end language you want. We dream it, pivot, build it, dominate.

hmmmm, Anything else you want to add in there? Not enough current buzzworthy technologies mentioned.
A quick UI fix would make HN readible on mobile devices. The fixed width of the page is caused by the navigation menu. If the navigation menu was made wrappable (white-space:auto) then the page would more easily fit right on almost any size screen. On mobile devices you can also eliminate unnecessary borders and padding. Very simple fixes like this would go a long way.
Ignore this and see tptacek's post about bcrypt instead.

This is why my preferred hashing scheme is username + seed + password, so that even if user1 and user2 both use "password" as their password, they'll end up with different hashes. That way if the database is compromised you can't do frequency analysis against the hashes to make guessing common passwords easier.
50/50 is just in relation to equity distribution. Nearly all of the Angels and VCs I've read about suggest 50/50 that way there is equal stake and interest.

That doesn't necessarily mean that I don't lead and take charge on some things. As far as I'm concerned, once I get someone skilled enough to help me build it's my job to go pitch, hustle, market and work my ass off while the cofounder builds a team, outsources small projects and puts things together.

What's the tonal problem? I'm enthusiastic. Sorry if I offended you the Fbomb, but that's just my personality. I've certainly read (and often been called, lol) more offensive things.

Thanks for your comment.
By my understanding, this system requires every transaction to be published to everyone, and to be remembered forever. That sounds like it inherently can't scale very far.

Details:

The basic data structure is a hash-chained list of blocks of transactions, with each block including one transaction of XX bitcoins from /dev/null to whoever generated that block. A node trying to calculate a next block include all (valid) transactions it knows. If the list branches, nodes ignore the shorter branch (this makes transactions more secure as they get older, assuming the swarm has more computing power than any troublemakers; so the time for a transaction to "clear" is whenever you trust that there are enough later blocks). In order to know if a transaction is valid, the node needs to have the prior transaction(s) that the involved bitcoins came through last (and any other subsequent transactions of that prior one). That prior transaction could be arbitrarily far back.