skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
thanks bro! will consider your suggestion.
Thanks for developing your Facebook application. We've disabled your account.
Sad. I work in the game industry, and it's sad seeing a work as nice as World of Warcraft perverted in that way. The designers never intended for such a thing to happen.

The future seems like it's going to be a balance between freedom to entertain and moral standards. With the way movies are going, games are in danger of becoming morally questionable too (think of a Saw game or a Hostel game where your main objective is to torture someone). Time is a valuable human resource, and a game like World of Warcraft wastes a lot of it. But it does give people satisfaction. So if it's morally wrong to waste a valuable resource, is the game morally wrong?

Maybe everyone has ways of perverting everything, and we shouldn't worry about it. But it must be painful to watch your creation destroy lives like that.
If you're selling it, this should be killed. If you're not, you need to be more clear.
Many people will cry in the next several months in connection with Face book :)
The problem isn't that Chinese gold farmers are "cheating." Rather, their behavior undermines the efforts of Blizzard to exploit those so needy for social status that they'll spend eight hours a day clicking on pictures of digital rats in order to feel like a hero.

You only see this type of neuroticism where people are competing for zero-sum social status that is arbitrarily handed down from on high.

You would never see people paying Chinese to, say, write their blogs for them or do anything else where social status is derived from bottom-up respect for the intrinsic quality of one's work.

/Sold his UO account eight years ago for $620 and hasn't touched that stuff since
The metadata is kept in an xml file, so you could back up the xml file as well.
Sure it will. Those metadata changes are stored on your hard drive, just like the music. It's in the iTunes Library and iTunes Music Library.xml files. And they needn't bother with scripts, either; there's already an OS X gui for rsync, and it wouldn't be too hard to build an app that automatically backs things up at a specified time.
Youth and energy beats guile and experience - or is it just the VC Squeeze?
I think there are worse things in the world. After all, they don't really harm anybody, or do they? In WoW you can't really harm other players, I think.
How can you convince venture capitalists to give you money to launch a startup?
So you tried to spam people with messages advertising your application, and they disabled your account for it. I don't see the problem.
Well irrespective of which way you see these businesses, it's inevitable that as more people sign up to virtual worlds the amount of money spent on trading virtual items is going to grow from the current "$1.8 Billion" market. www.sparter.com don't seem that worried!
So you hate Java because it is easy to use and stable? I fail to see the negatives in ease of use and cheap QA?
Not all OO languages allow operator overloading.
True? He criticizes it for being a "website". Also, he claims to be listening to a "zune", which means he probably works at MS and is bitter about other people succeeding... :)

I used to read this same kind of nonsense ("it's just a website") about Google. Some people just don't get the future. Read the quote at the bottom of this post: http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-be-right-90-of-time-and-why-id.html
Thanks for the feedback - it's a good feeling to see someone thinking about what I've started creating, and I appreciate it.

Amazon is certainly a giant that could probably wipe out both my site and some of the others in a minute if they chose. On the other hand, being so big means that they don't have the focus, so people go for the reviews, but that notwithstanding, there seems to be a thriving summary business, so I guess they're not satisfied with reviews, and that's understandable. Reviews are teasers and opinions on the merits of the book rather than attempts at faithful summaries of the book's key points.

Now, some of your points:

Licenses - yes... I've been mulling that over. The issue is of course how much control to give up. Too little, and perhaps people will be less interested in contributing. More data (what does everyone here think?) would be useful.

RSS/Atom is a high priority item to add - its usefulness is obvious. The question in my mind is what to create a feed for - new books added? Newly added books are at their most useless stage, because they don't have a summary just yet (hopefully one gets added soon, but still). It would be easy to add feeds for summary updates, but perhaps that would be sort of annoying for minor updates.

Stats are another area I'm working on. First and foremost is to visually display who contributed how much to any given summary, so that people can't just change a word or two and get marked as a contributor.

Thanks again!
You can backup XML files but this wouldn't allow for easy individual track restores with metadata preservation.

In addition, our solution allows for backup/restores from multiple Macs. Eg: You can restore a track from your work Mac to your home Mac with metadata preservation.

We already have a similar solution but for S3. Perhaps I can convince you to try it out, newly launched.
Yep, thought about that too, but in the end, it's still an order of magnitude more expensive, involves a country I'm less familiar with than the one I'm from, and I just wanted to get something set up for Squeezed Books without thinking the choice through any more (I've been considering it for several months).
I already have a solution. It's called "I back up my hard drive." You have a product in search of a market. Good luck.
Stalking 2.0: The Websites that Track Your Every Move (Voluntarily!)
Web 2.0: Multiple Search Engines
Thanks for the link, that was a great article.
Warcraft is actually fun to play even when you discount the in-game rewards system. It stays that way for much longer than most of its predecessors. Everyone I know that bought gold online for Warcraft did it for the fun of it, not in order to increase social status. This is in marked contrast to Everquest, where the items you had were a huge part of social status within the game.

Warcraft is not an especially social game as far as MMOs go. You are relatively free to play it in your own little bubble of friends. Competition is largely via PvP, which is almost entirely avoidable. This is unlike UO, which forced PVP, and unlke Everquest which forced intense competition for in-game resources.
I haven't finished reading the article yet, but I suspect this problem is a little blown out of proportion. The designers most definitely did plan for this, and the game is built to be resiliant to gold farming. The player economy is huge and important, but nevertheless a marginal aspect of the game. You can accomplish virtually anything without using it.

I suspect most of the millions of people who play Warcraft have fun and are not addicted to it.
dude. What are you talking about? just say if you do or don't.
Ning Rolls Out Facebook App Builder: Embed Your Social Network In a Social Network
More than a few years. This was the book that got everyone interested in OOP:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0201113716

As the name suggests, the language it describes was developed in 1980.
Uhh, excuse me, but the designers didn't expect sweatshops to pop up and waste asian people's lives farming gold. That's what's sad about it, the waste of time. I'm not talking about the people having fun, I'm talking about the people having to work for next to nothing doing something they hate and wasting their time on it.
People developing applications on Facebook are gambling. Early adoption of technology is always risky, and sometimes it pays of very well--often it doesn't.

I think its good that these issues are happening earlier than later, its important for Facebook developers to remember that they are investing their time and effort into a closed system that is controlled by individuals whose interests are not necessarily aligned with theirs.

At this point I am concerned about Facebook's development practices, and would be wary of investing my time. These frequent failures suggest that they are not using best practices (their test cases are insufficient), and its closed so you can't clean up their mistakes. Scary.
How is Powerset predicting growth?
I don't understand what problem this site is addressing. Why combine reddit-style voting with search engines? What is the deficiency of "traditional algorithmic-based search engines" that SansJ corrects?
Using forums to ask users (eg: what is the perfect search engine for you, what would it do?)
In a Search Refinement, a Chance to Rival Google (NYT article on Powerset)
Net Natives - Global Perspective (re: Fred Wilson's 'Age Question')
The wage is comparable to other menial jobs in China. I personally would rather farm gold than work 12 hour days in a manufacturing plant. At least you can chain smoke and maybe even listen to music.

What's sad is the hundreds of millions of Chinese people that would kill to have a standard of living as high as a city-dwelling gold farmer.
Through demonstration. Able to show an existing, working demo of a product (it may change course but it's better than explaining what you might achieve). By having a product that already has lots of users.
It isn't surprising that FB apps are not very serious, since FB is in its formative stages as a "real" website (one that is used for serious things, for arbitrary values of serious). I think that if facebook keeps growing like it is now, we will see the introduction of serious apps that in turn will attract more users, etc etc. Remember, 10 years ago no-one thought the internet will be used for serious things.
Unskilled wage workers of all sorts have been wasting their days almost exactly in this manner since the industrial revolution. It's worth noting that when Karl Marx wrote "Estranged Labor" the working conditions were much worse.

Incidentally, pages 6 and 7 makes it sound as if working in a good RMT outfit is actually fun and challenging. Apart from the exaggerated description of the time and effort it takes to reach the "maximum number of experience points," it's a very accurate description of what it's like to play Warcraft. I'd certainly rather spend 12 hours a day as part of a 40 man team solving Warcraft raid encounters than spending 12 hours a day packing sneakers or something.
"Oh and don't tell the YC guys that you are hardly a hacker. They wont like that."

The definition of "hacker" is somewhat arbitrary but is nonetheless given inflated status by the majority of this community, it seems.

(I could be mistaken, of course.)
Is there a way to measure (via Google or some other publicly accesible technology) how close two terms are related, in the public discourse and on the Internet? (I'm sure there's some stupid easy way to do this, but I forget what the best way is.)
You can also consider setting up a single proprietorship or an unlimited partnership for the time being. That's a lot cheaper in Holland, and I imagine also in most European countries. The only big problem is that you cannot borrow money without being personally liable, and you cannot sell shares, but if you just need a "business" for the time being for tax purposes and to order stuff from places that will only sell to businesses (more common in Europe than in the US), it will do fine. In fact, I once set up a single proprietorship for the sole purpose of being able to buy food for cheap at a restaurant supply store, and it cost me about half of the Oregon LLC referred to earlier, and was done in a half an hour at the Chamber of Commerce, without lawyers involved.
Showdead (and related "new deletion feature") clarification from pg fyi:

Most relevant excerpt (MRE): "You can still see dead stuff if you set showdead to yes."

The rest of the comment for context:
Your comment is still alive

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27969

even though the post you commented on was deleted.

I just added deletion. When something is deleted, it really goes away. This is different from marking something as dead. You can still see dead stuff if you set showdead to yes.

Deletion is for submitters who change their mind; marking stuff as dead is for editors to do to spams and offtopic submissions.
Marry an American and give up 50% of your equity in the company?
Ditto. I misspoke. ("contributing motivator" would be more accurate than "_the_ main reason.")

Having legal counsel in the know is certainly just one of many pieces, it all depends on which ones you need (most). (And that in turns depends on what precisely you're going after.)
What's interesting is that I can only delete this, most recent comment/post. (Older threads and comments I have made I am no longer able to delete.) This is an FYI.

I wonder what the exact time-window is, because I am also unable to delete previous posts (since pg made this mini-announcement).

I wonder when/if it's going to be possible to delete your YC account (and all related information).

Digg promised this feature at "The Future of Web Apps" but it has yet to materialize (on Digg), I believe.

Does anyone know what the situation at reddit is wrt control of "your own personal information"? :)

I really am curious as to when the Web will evolve policies and products that adequately address this concern/"feature request."
LOL. Is it that difficult to marry an American nowadays, that you need to give up 1/2 your equity?

This is just one of any millions of potential solutions...
The answer to your questions are available in these articles:
http://searchengineland.com/070403-040029.php
http://www.interactivedaily.com/2007/02/20/social-search-engine-startup-idea/
and to a lesser extent here:
http://www.trk7.com/blog/sansj/a-democratic-approach-to-internet-search/
Facebook, unline google, is just a message board. You can talk all you want about significanse of social networking online, and how it "changes everybody's life", but significant or not, this is social phenomena, not a technological one.

But from a technology point of view, Facebook is primitive. College projects at good CS schools are more interesting and challening. It's a freakin message board, just like that guy said.
I've never been that enthusiastic about OO but I've recently become a convert to a particular case. Perl's CGI::Application module makes your whole website a single class, and each page in that site is a method in the class. I believe web.py is similar in idea. So rather than a folder full of scripts for each page you just have a single script which contains the code for all the pages of the site.

Having your whole site as a single class is convenient firstly as your constructor can handle the code that's common to each page, though you don't necessarily need OO to do this. Where this OO approach really shines thought is that you can create a more general web site class such as an online shop, and then subclass it for a particular instance of a shop for a client.
Heh, looks like a really nice GUI. See the video of the founder using it: http://blog.virtub.com/?p=15

Seems to me the difference between "web app" and "desktop app" is getting more and more fuzzy. Is it a web app because it's written in Flash? Is it a web app because it (presumably) doesn't store anything on your machine?

Given that desktop apps these days often interact heavily with data from the web (Google Earth, for instance), what exactly is the definition of "web app" now?
Just noticed that it says "4 comments" above, but there are only two. Presumably some bug with a discrepancy between the total count and the non-dead count. (Well, it did say 4 until I added mine. :-)
I completely disagree. They're targeting a specific market, though that market does not include you, there are a ton of people who want to have their music, and only their music, backed up.

You're also not really thinking about the big picture. By focusing their product on iTunes, they can add crazy features, like library sync, or library "move." I've helped my mom move her library to a new computer, this product would have been perfect to help her.

The good news is these guys already have a product, so they don't have to listen to bad negative feedback.
Well said. If there was better work than Gold Farming they would do it.

I'm with Milton Friedman in thinking that Sweatshops are a good thing, in that they provide a job for people who've got no place else to work. Remove the sweatshops and they starve.
Your comment on wasting their lives implies that there's something better they could be doing. If there was why would they waste their time Gold Farming? Clearly for the people who work at the Gold Farms it's the best paying thing they can find, else they would switch jobs.
+ The domain name + the descriptive text didn't work for me. I couldn't understand what the site was about very quickly. Maybe you could create a tagline, and put it under your logo? That's such a standard that it's really intuitive and reassuring.

"PostMyDay.com -- Rant and rave about your day!"

Or whatever..

+ I think you could cut back on the ads a bit. They're distracting and it's not like you have traffic to monetize yet.

+ I love smallcaps font too, but I think you're overusing it.

+ Maybe you can reduce the registration page. Not ask for any information you don't absolutely need. Make it less work to signup.

+ Top left front page login box is rendering incorrectly for me. Password: is above input but Email: is to the left of input.

+ Your use of the color red is a bit alarming. I see red and I think error/problem. Maybe make that stuff orangered or otherwise more mild?

+ As for the concept I think the biggest weakness is: Why do I need this thing? Maybe I'd like to bitch about my day, but why would I want to do it on here?

+ Maybe you could ask "What time do you get off?" and send an email to users everyday before or after they leave work asking "How was your day?". Send a link to update their page or accept their response email as a post?
The sw was counting dead and deleted comments as well. I figured no one would care, but people kept mentioning it, so I fixed it.
Yeah, and Google is just a box that you type stuff into. Just because someone can make an oversimplified explanation doesn't make it true. There's a lot more going on in these products than you realize. There's a reason why Facebook is winning and, for example, Orkut is not.
I wonder if some of the tedium in Gold Farming could be automated away with bots, or some kind of macro recorder?
The blame here lies squarely at the feet of Blizzard. Any game that CAN be automated deserves to be.

Instead of making a game that is interesting, they made a glorified Skinner box, because that's the proven formula to rake in the bucks via addiction. Like rats pressing a lever to get a pellet, the game substitutes repetitive, mindless activites for actual plot or compelling narrative.

Then they cracked down on bots. They install spyware on your machine called "Warden" and snoop what you're up to. They even nailed people using macros, programmable keyboards, and the commercial version of Wine (to play on Linux).

It's relatively easy to automate various game activities, but it's hard to make a bot that can convincingly fake being a human, especially if an admin starts asking questions or if they CAPTCHA you in some way.

Thus they try to make sure an actual human is sitting there doing the mindless activities all day long. This creates pressure to use the cheapest human labor possible to get these repetitive, mind-numbing tasks out of the way.

The sweatshop element could be eliminated by simply allowing scripting. Of course that wouldn't fix the game's inherent design flaws -- UO, EQ, and WoW all suffer(ed) from the same ones.
Can you come up with a name of a big product that is not bloated?

There are professionals who prefer to pay (and pay big price) and use Photoshop than Snipshot, MS Paint, Paint.NET and others.
Why Facebook is scarier than Google (ZD blog)
A large fraction, e.g. 1/5 can still be a minority.
I was joking, but it's true that you are essentially giving up half your assets by getting married.
Yes, we are using Flex in our application. It is pretty easy and quick to develop in Flex and their builder is worth all the money. Action script is very similar to java script so it is easy to pick up. I huge pro is that you don't need to worry about browse compatibility. Also a few extra good things are that the sdk is going to be open source and that mainstream websites already make use of it (for example yahoo maps and messenger are in flex). I recommend to at least try it before you turn your back on it.
If you like presenting your photos in a grid format "photos 1-9 of 83" then there's nothing missing. Once you step out of that mold there's unlimited possibility. Tabblo and ourdoings are two examples of mixing text and photos.

The fact that we still call them "photo sharing" sites shows how primitive our thinking is. What if you put all text-based web sites in one category?

What was missing for me that prompted ourdoings.com was a streamlined way to turn my backlog of photos into a nice summary of what my family had been up to. That's just my example. There are many other uses people might put photos to.

What I don't think we need is more social networking sites for photo enthusiasts. However, I could be proven wrong even for that specific category.
When this woman is writing bad things about you, it's a sign you're doing something right.
http://paulgraham.com/guidetoinvestors.html
Who Needs College? The Triumph of Young Web Founders
I honestly still find myself shocked at the low quality of ZD Net blogs. The analysis is often minimal, the length is usually 300-500 words, and the originality is non-existent. Trying to read that article was befuddling and ultimately I resorted to bewildered skimming.

Regarding the argument, I don't think Facebook is going to be a serious mechanism for good or evil until the company begins to take measured actions aimed at a long term goal other than "be big" and "make money." Things like the poor logistics for the API roll-out, constant minor changes, bug-inducing updates, etc, are signs of internal disorganization. I can't see either short or long term stability within that chaos.

I am also curious about Zuckerberg. I have heard both extremely negative things (arrogant), and very positive things. As usual reality is probably closer to the mean.
The screen shots of buzzword look good. I'd love to see it in action.
I'm strongly fighting the urge to downmod your comments, because you seem to "mean well". But "meaning well" is the sort of attitude that leads otherwise intelligent people to turn away from the basic facts of the free marketplace.

People want "gold coins" or whatever.

So and so wants a job.

A middleman arranges for an exchange of "gold coins" for real money by setting up an apparatus of technology, labor, marketing, and sales to allow it. (THIS ISN'T EASY.)

Everyone is richer for it, with the possible exception of the people buying the "gold coins" who are high-class cheaters. But the guy who buys a Porsche is an extra-high-class cheater on the dating market, and I'm more worried about him any day of the week.

The important thing is: Everybody is free, and it's this freedom (and not the FSF's "freedom") that took Ling or Wang or whoever out of the rice field.
Building a Web 2.0 website for a computer scientist is like building a doghouse for an architect. Neither needed to go to college to learn how, and therein is certainly not the value of their education.
The real problem is that we have an economic system where people would starve without sweat shops. Capitalism has this nasty little problem of all the wealth getting concentrated in the hands of the few and globalization exacerbates the problem. Unfortunately, no one's figured out a better way of distributing wealth.
10 Things We Can Learn From Apple
Amazing new facebook app (myTV) - unlimited number of your favorite YouTube videos right on your profile in 1 player