skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Disclaimer: I admire Daniel Hillis greatly, perhaps irrationally.

That said, Metaweb sounds amazing. If it takes off, it will be not so much a useful product in itself, but an enabling technology for an entirely new class of products. Imagine the possibilities that arise from having a relatively complete, constantly evolving ontology of everything. All of those nifty tricks that computational linguists and proof theoreticians can do over finite domains, using very limited ontologies, become possible for all sorts of other applications. Armed with an ontology that closely matches the real world, it is finally possible to write code that can reason about the real world, rather than just throw Bayes law at it and hope something useful falls out.
Great List; Thanks Brian!
From an HCI standpoint this would be tricky, but it would be great to have a system for handling dupes and near-dupes by merging their comment pages. For instance, right now there are two articles about the recent demo of Metaweb/freebase. I commented on one of them, returned to the mainpage, and realized that the other (which also had no comments) was now higher ranked.

This raises a quandry as to whether I should cross-post, or just move on and hope that the discussion happens in the one I picked.

(Note, this is the harder case, of near-dupes: the two articles are different, but \begin{precog} most of the discussion will be about the product they reference.\end{precog} Hence it is semantically reasonable to merge their comment threads.)

So, as a oneliner: add a way to merge duplicate articles.
Another article on Freebase (and Web 3.0--how did I miss that?)
I'm going to go ahead and cross-post this from the other article about freebase.

Disclaimer: I admire Daniel Hillis greatly, perhaps irrationally.

That said, Metaweb sounds amazing. If it takes off, it will be not so much a useful product in itself, but an enabling technology for an entirely new class of products. Imagine the possibilities that arise from having a relatively complete, constantly evolving ontology of everything. All of those nifty tricks that computational linguists and proof theoreticians can do over finite domains, using very limited ontologies, become possible for all sorts of other applications. Armed with an ontology that closely matches the real world, it is finally possible to write code that can reason about the real world, rather than just throw Bayes law at it and hope something useful falls out.
Cringely talks about Video Decoding/Encoding Hardware in all new Macs
I like it, but is this a duplication of efforts from that Facebook page I saw earlier? We probably ought to standardize on one place. I personally like Wikis for this type of business.
You're right, of course (and I need not point out the irony that DH was in deep with AI), but I'm holding out hope (and not just because I'm bitter that the Connection Machine failed!). The main reason (in my opinion) that the semantic web has failed so far is the reliance on 1) predefined, very limited ontologies, and 2) creator-generated rich metadata. Freebase seems to me like, if not the solution, at least a good step in the right direction in terms of addressing these. The real question, of course, will be whether a userbase springs up to keep it up to date, and whether the logic behind it can keep it reasonably self-consistent.

Here's to hoping.
NetTunes - Lend your music online so you can listen to everyone elses
You're right - there is some duplication, but I think the wiki and fb event page can compliment each-other.

It's hard to contact the other members on the FB event page, unless you're friends w/ them. Hopefully this will allow everyone to easily share contact info.
Yes, I did go there and was surprised it did not ask me for my school name. Thanks.
Seattle startup event "for geeks, techies, and makers"
Based on the fund size they are discussing, I'd say that's a pretty good bet. For the startup community, I think that's a good thing. While competition in the seed/angel space is fine and dandy, having a VC firm headed by someone has hacker-aware as Tim O'Reilly seems like a definite win.
The story of search is not finished.
There was once upon a time a bit of rumbling about getting Jython going on javame. I don't think anything ever came of it, and if standard Jython is any indication, it would have been, as you said, /very/ slow.
Interesting...could someone who's been around longer than I have take a stab at assigning some of those peaks to real-world events? I'm particularly interested in the peak near the end of February, and the following trough.
Where is the info about "business plan competition"?
Ah, yes... we are fickle. :)

Actually, yes. Paul Graham, sir, why dont you take a look at Yahoo Answers? It is hugely popular and in a very short time. If you think of a Yahoo Question as corresponding to a YC Article, and our YC comments equivalent to the Yahoo answers, then it's not too hard to see how you could improve.
Interesting thought now - what prevents you from copying every feature on Yahoo Answers?
You really have to start with a *small* core language, or you will end up with something on your phone that's "sort of" Python/Tcl/Ruby/whatever. Hecl isn't a speed demon on a slow phone, but it is still usable.
I think it sounds like a pretty interesting idea. I'm excited to get my hands on the API and see what kind of information you can really pull out of it.
March 10: Meet YC partner Jessica Livingston in Berkeley
I think it was an O'Reilly blog post about news.yc.
Study: Abandoning net neutrality discourages improvements in service
Even after reading the FAQs I don't see how this is legal. I'm pretty sure you still need a blanket license to give access to major label music. Seems to me that you can download music off of other people like a p2p.without paying royalties.
It's been on my calendar for about a week now. I'll be driving over to Berkeley tomorrow morning to spend the day. Will you be there for her presentation, Paul?
Ah, your website answered my question. Looking forward to it.

And of course, I'm going to want you to sign my copy of the book as well!
Would anyone care to toss out an evaluation of how worthwhile it is? I want to attend, but I would be taking days off from school and traveling from east-central Canada. (Very Expensive!) Feel free to drop me an email at aran@arandonohue.com if you don't want to be public with your opinions. Thanks!
Free Visual Directory
Now that I think of it, this is a place where we're much more likely to have involved discussions rather than quick "where you been" type comments. That implies to me that you'd kind of want the same threading / nesting as the general boards. What if a user simply has their own personal submission spot- they can post things that are meaningful to them- latest blog entry, a discussion that they want to keep off the front page for now, etc. Others could post articles, comments, and linkless topics just like in the general board- the difference being the user can outright delete the posts.

You gain the ability for a user to post more specialized information or stuff they themselves generated without spamming, you get an easy mechanism for another user to post a quick message or even start a discussion with that user, you get the ability for multiple people to join in and make intelligent comments and still have the place readable and organized, and I assume you'd be able to reuse a bunch of code.

Differences from the general board- I'm thinking maybe topics shouldn't get pushed off the bottom? Hopefully that's not a storage issue. Karma could stay the same as normal or you could make it work the same within the topics but not reflect on the users' real score, or you could let just the user who owns that board to give out karma, get rid of it altogether for the user board, or whatever.

[upd. Oh, and also, if things get interesting or there gets to be some important content you could submit a link to that discussion in the general board]
I second jwecker's idea to allow a single photo avatar for each member.

It would be very beneficial to attach faces to the personalities, especially in light of the upcoming Startup School.
Yeah it sounds pretty interesting. It works off of the idea that you can lend your music to a friend, and you can make a backup of something, what you can't do is listen to your backup while the other person listens to the original. So they let people 'upload' their songs to get a number of keys and then when you want to listen to a song, whether you own it or not, as long as there is an available key it should be legal. If it holds up I would LOVE to see this for movies and TV shows.
I think one of the drops could have been when RSS was implemented and us junkies didnt have to do constant page refreshes to keep up to date.
pg, did you create news.yc as a long term solution or is this something temporary (just for the startup school and YC applicants)? It's great to see the site's enormous growth. Unfortunately, there is a good chance the traffic will drop sharply following April.

*ill still be around, though. YC can't get rid of me that easily*
What does 'showdead' on my profile page do?
Err, that's page views, not unique IPs? If so, then I think I'm about half of that graph...

Edit: Nevermind, I'm about a 1/20th. I slipped a decimal.
It might not be a good idea to place too many requests on pg's schedule. What Paul can do, instead, is integrate "MyBlogLog" widget into news.yc. That alone will solve the problems regarding messaging and avatars.
Here's what gets me- in the first couple of days there were some pretty good posts that got _tons_ of marks. There are some users in the top 20 rankings that haven't had any activity since the first couple of days- like http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=beau . I have to be honest, while the customer service article was nice, I don't think it would get more than 20 points these days- I don't think any article would.

So I thought there must have been a lot of people using it at the very beginning- excited and contributing and the karma flowed like milk and honey and then the novelty wore off and a bunch of people dropped out. I see the opposite in the graph. I guess the usage of the site is what changed considerably.
Try it out. Then report back here and let us know. ;)
The word 'dead' makes me worry it's a delete profile button so I don't want to try it!

I dont want this to be like that time when I got curious if rm -rf / would work :)
yeah Dan, do one for the team!
Come to think about it there is a drop when I went away for a few days...
I used the RSS feed for a little while, but I tend to just leave a browser window open at yc.news now as I work on various things.

There's nothing quite like the YC tan and orange to really put me in the startup mood.
btw immad- i was making fun of myself and the current state of my business, not your submission, which was definitely relevant. cheers :)
Big Red Button syndrome overcame me and I tried it.

I'm still here, cant see any differences :s

Seriously, anyone know what this does? It's starting to bug me now.
I tried it and it reset my karma.
luckily though my karma is actually a formula- [danielha - rand(10,50)]
And yet you still have 234? I think someones fibbing :p
har har. :)
As someone who has been funded by O'Reilly AlphaTech (I'm one of the founders of Wesabe), I would recommend them highly. I've known them for many years, and Mark and Tim both worked with me on my last startup (Popular Power).

I can say a lot about why they like them, but when I was talking with a CEO recently I mentioned this Richard Nixon quote: "When you win, you hear from everyone - when you lose, you hear from your friends." I've heard messages of support from these guys in both instances. If you're looking for someone who will understand your idea and back it or not for the right reasons, and then support you all the way if they invest, I think OATV is a fantastic option.

--Marc Hedlund
It might be interesting to try a decay function on the leader board.

Now, it's probably not cool to take away karma points, but it would reward activity. Plus, it'll get around the issue of single posters who post a single ridiculously popular post. They would have their hayday in karma but then slide back in the rankings in favor of the regulars.
It lets you continue to see articles/comments that Paul kills. Dupes, spam, etc.
There are a lot of people who follow the links yet dont vote even if they like them. An example is the facebook YC news group. It has 42 members yet the story announcing it only has 13 points.

Could this be an example of the 1% rule? http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1823959,00.html
Feature suggestion:

A page in our profile that indicates recent activity pertaining to us, such as someone replying to your comment. Sometimes I reply to comments in older discussions and it's likely the person I am replying will never see it.
The karma of active users would continue to rise whilst the dead users stay steady and eventually get overtaken.

Perhaps a 'most karma in the past week' leader board would work?
Which ones are you referring to? Not all of the previous companies have appealed to me as a user, but they've all peaked my interest as a hacker.
And now you've taken away one of the little mysteries that makes the world an interesting place :p

Thanks for the info, it was bugging me more than any drop down menu should.
Sounds like Paul ought to add some more cryptically-labeled knobs that don't do anything :-)
I like the idea; this mirrors some discussion in the "Thoughts on using news.YC" thread, viz. http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=2987
Feature Request: Add a magic switch! [see http://www.livingstonmontana.com/access/dan/191magicswitch.html]
What tool do you use to analyse traffic?
I use Firebug too and love it
I tend to think that it is more the result of a bit of cognitive dissonance, particularly with respect to what the points values mean. They can be viewed either as a metric of popularity, or a metric of quality. Most people {{handwaving}} conceive of points as some mixture of the two, hence there is a reluctance to give a point to a story with, say, 20 points, even if you liked it, because you don't think it is a "21-point quality" story.
The unnamed MIT graduate is none other than Guy Steele. His son Matt is on my Mystery Hunt team and I've heard this story from him. It's not a cigar box, it's a locked filing cabinet in his basement (no, there's no Beware of Leopard sign, sorry). Guy doesn't like to let people touch it lest they try switching it to "magic".
The reason those early articles got so many points is that the decay function was broken initially. Instead of accelerating downward off the frontpage with age, the velocity of stories' fall actually decreased. Because of this bug some of those stories stayed on the frontpage racking up votes for 4 days.
It's not only me who kills them. There are a bunch of people (mostly founders of startups we've funded) who have editor auth. 90% of dupes and spams are dead before I see them.

Editors can also fix typos and replace linkjacks with the url of the original article.
The RSS feed could do with links back to this comments page - Google reader doesn't show any such link.

That would increase traffic from RSS users, I should think.
Question: If you're not already starting a company, what currently occupies your time?
Also, if you plan to start something in the future, what is your expected timeline?
Bloody Robots. And they are not even bipedal dynamically self-balancing ones.

Estimated Time to Startup: 4 Months.
Venture Voice Podcast MP3 : Marketing a startup
Those fears can be legitimate, but I don't think they're favorable, because there are alternative and positive forms of motivation to deal with those situations. Fear also overrides logical thinking, which can't be good for business.
Wrong, perhaps, but a necessary wrong. Smart people that you know are perhaps the most effective filter to gauge purportedly smart people you don't know. While it would be nice if connections didn't matter, such a world would be infeasible. Thus, you enter the social network on merit: impress someone who is known to be smart, and that's your in. Eventually the line of contact reaches the VC you need to take you seriously.
University. In my opinion, college is the best thing to do when you don't have something better to do, if you'll pardon the tautology. Universities put you in contact with lots of other smart people, with the resources and freedom to devote your effort to whatever serves your interests.
While the legal principle backing their idea (first sale rights) is pretty solid, I doubt it will hold up here. The courts have not been kind to first sale and fair use rights in the past 5 years. This case is also complicated by the fact that there is no way to ensure that there is no concurrent use. While the system can ensure that no two people simultaneously use my copy of a song, it cannot ensure that I am not using my copy while someone else is.
I love the bareness of this site so far. Keeping it simple may hopefully maximise the honeymoon period before the deluge of crap that any small web success appears to attract.

I suspect the ability to successfully transition from this honeymoon period to moderate popularity will become a defining battle for a certain class of social web start-ups.
PageRank has revolutionized web search but maybe also delayed social apps for years (due to fear of out of control spam in such apps). Do you agree?
School...
2 Months 'til graduation...
let me out!
I don't quite understand the connection. Care to elaborate?
Adobe Edits the Development Cycle
After seeing what PageRank can do in terms of controlling spam, VCs would be reluctant to fund a startup that is much more prone to spamming (e.g., something like wikipedia, social bookmarking, etc.). So one might argue that PageRank has in fact discouraged people from even thinking about social apps for a long time.
Take a look at what Sergey Brin has to say about wikipedia:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7137075178977335350
We got another day's stats so as long as the story
was still live I just updated the url. Here's the
old one: http://ycombinator.com/ycnewstraffic.png
And from Geeking with Greg:

http://glinden.blogspot.com/2005/06/yahoo-gets-social-with-myweb.html

http://glinden.blogspot.com/2005/10/getting-crap-out-of-user-generated.html

http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/01/digg-spam-and-most-popular-lists.html

http://glinden.blogspot.com/2007/02/combating-tag-spam-paper.html
What sets this site apart for pg is that he can use it to guage peoples comments for when they apply for something. One thing that sets this site apart for me, though, is that I think most people here intend to meet one another in person at some point, sooner or later. That makes a big difference in the feel of the place. Using first names in posts, not acting like children in our debates, a real desire (from the first day in the feature request discussion) to see what other people look like and know what they're really up to, etc.
If it's on the web, spam will always be a possibility. I don't see people getting discouraged from creating networks due to spam. Any quarter-decent social application will have some measures for dealing with it.

Most social applications aren't aiming for the PageRank either. Their use is grown through word of mouth approaches, not organic search. What aspect of PageRank is doing this discouraging of social apps?
I don't think it's obvious at all that you can control spam in a social app such as wikipedia or social bookmarking. You need to try it out and see what happens.
in any ecosystem there are the parasites.
on the web your parasite is spam.
BTW, this paper about wikipedia is fascinating:

http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/papers/history_flow.pdf

See in particular the sections on "Vandalism and repair" and "Statistical corroboration".
More important, I think, than displaying the number of new comments is making it possible to /find/ them. The reordering of comments is usually a great thing, but in a relatively involved discussion, it can become quite a chore to find that new comment.

I'm not sure what the best way to implement it would be, from either an algorithmic or HCI standpoint, but it certainly would be nice if you could come up with a way to make new comments stand out in threads. (Preferably with new defined by when the user last viewed the page, rather than being a static global definition.)
The problem is that PageRank puts you in a mindset of creating sophisticated algorithms that are much more resistant to spam than naive approaches. In that sense, it discourages people from even trying out social apps.
Do you mind if I ask how many users there are? Have memberships mirrored the page requests more or less?
I run into this problem all the time--not good for diminishing by reload-addiction! It would be nice if pages included some js to rewrite history[1] via dom, so that we could always see the freshest versions of pages.

[1] It pains me to advocate breaking the "show me exactly what I was just seeing" semantics of the back button, but I think in this case the user clearly conceives the back button as "show me the abstract resource I was just seeing."
Looking at old comments[1], though, indicates that the overall volume of karma flow was much higher in the early days. Of course, it could be that the bug-driven hyperkarma on posts led users to be more generous with karma on comments.

[1] In particular, the feature request thread.
OT: What is policy (or general understanding) regarding near-dupes, i.e. submissions of different articles that all cover the same material?

(I seem to be fixating on this today--it's the metaweb/freebase thing.)
Aydin Senkut: Highlights from D Day
Sorry to sound stupid. What is wc -l? What does it stand for?
Oddly enough I'd never checked before, but as of now there are 1426 accounts. The reddits told me once that about 1 out of 10 visitors there is logged in, so this seems about right.
Web 2.0 Expo 2007, April 15-18, 2007, San Francisco, California
It's that time of the year again. Don't forget to register by this Monday if you plan on going -- you save $200. Students also get 65% off the workshop package (use coupon code: webex07ftst at registration).

My co-founder, Jason, and I plan on attending. It'll be our first Web2.0 expo. Is anyone else planning to attend? Any veterans care to share their past experiences?
Do we have any metrics on liveness of accounts? I've certainly felt that the community of active, thoughtful commentators is pretty small (not a bad thing!).
Submissions on articles that cover the same content should be fair game. The voting of the community should decide which article is worth reading.
Most of my time is being dedicated to working on my project. A beta launch is set for within the next 2-3 months.

I'm also at school in the meantime.
Meritocracy = promotion based on what others think you can do.

Silicon Valley = create wealth based on what you can do.

There isn't a word for it yet as far as I know. Suffice it to say, it's a step above meritocracy.
Guilder: a graphic user interface builder (model-driven ui design)
Prints the number of lines in a file.
I'd say the best social network to be in is one that has a bit of a meritocratic air about it. There will always be impressive company among you, no?
College. I'm on the ltwt rowing team, so that can take up as many hours per day as I want.

I'm also working on a couple of books. I have a full mindmap for one, so it's just a matter of translating it into prose. I write slowly, but hopefully I'll have a first draft that will be somewhat readable by others by the end of summer.
You don't miss out, because introductions flow so freely. It's not hard to find someone two hops from anyone you want to meet, and once you've done that (if you seem worth introducing), the two hops happen fast.
Some book picks for entrepreneurs (Squidoo)