skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey everybody...

Thanks a lot for all the feedback! It's amazing some of the things you sort of assume while you're developing something, but then when they're brought to your attention, it's obviously relevant :). We're working to redevelop our ranking system so that it's tied in with voting. Therefore, voting will constitute support for that poll. We're also streamlining the first-time user experience so that you can successfully vote without signing up.

These were all great comments, thanks so much for taking the time to check out the early iterations of our site. Development is now full-time, so if you ever have any more opinions, we'd love to hear them!
Maybe at MIT and its ilk. But this was at the University of Florida, which, while not in the same league, is by no means a backwater.
There's nothing there. It's a single paragraph, surrounded by ads, that says absolutely nothing of value. It's grammatically correct. English is fine. But it says nothing.
Internet Radio is Saved
Get An Invite To Any Private Beta
<surrounded by ads>

I wouldn't consider one text-link-ad as surrounding the post. Maybe others would...go figure.

The post is actually 109 words, more than a third of the Gettysburg Address - nearly half. Thank goodness Lincoln didn't post his speech here...I can imagine the comments :-)

The message is simple, no one cares about your product or service - that's the biggest shortcoming of hi-tech companies, they think their speeds-feeds-features-functionality matter. They don't. What matters is what you can do with them and what you do for your customers. In the case of selling to businesses, it's what you do to enable them to do for their customers - internal and external. Your product or service is irrelevant beyond its ability to achieve something of value worth paying for.
How do you register domains for your users?
I want to be able to register domains for my customers and just have their nameservers point to mine nameserver. Does anyone know how to do this? Thanks in advanced.
http://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+spoof+ip+address&i...
Does this really belong in Startup News?
An Entrepreneur's Interpretation of "The Dip"
It is a bad sign when you have to say "Think about it". It's like when someones says "Get it? <repeats punch line>. Get it?" after an unfunny joke. Maybe if you added some real-world examples of what you're trying to convey that would help it feel more concrete.
To save anyone else the trouble: bugmenot.com does not have any valid accounts for this site.
Ten Questions with Jeffrey Pfeffer
This interview is based on his latest book:What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management.
Google faces landmark lawsuit over sponsored links
iPhone OS X Architecture: Disk, Shell, and Password Security
Are RIAs trying to be too rich?
40 Terabytes More Data For Amazon S3
Sharing intelligence with your systems
Now I Really am a Yahoo!- acquisition of Right Media
AOL up, Google down? Not so fast
Microsoft eyes new ways to sell Office
Google's Brin does not see Facebook up for sale
Animal-like 'instinct' keeps robot marching
Most successful programming language ever? Whitespace:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language)

In fact, we're all programming in it right now, though we'd be getting some compilation errors.
Social Networks for Developers
Here are ten social networks every developer should check out.
Yes. Yes it does.
Thanks for the post. I agree. You certainly need a person who can help construct a persuasive message, both off your site like you mention, and on it too. I see a lot of sites that just don't convey their message on their own sites appropriately, which usually means essentially not at all. And this is just an immediate killer of the startup. It is just a turn off when you either don't know what to do immediately or don't know why it is important. I will add this to the list.
I met one founder of ustream at a conference this year, clueless faker for sure. Tall asian guy. Talked to my friend and I like he had a script memorized. Was easily confused by our questions. Explained to us how to set up an account we're both programmers btw in great detail. Talked about money. When asked about their technology he said its "proprietary" and then added some things that made no sense . Just a stupid asshole, why would they send him to interact with techies?
I m trying to convince my fiance about how less riskier
it is to do a startup than take a job and i m running short of points i love her help me out
I really doubt that they did...
Does anybody else feel slightly uneasy about the modern practice of requesting user account information to gather all social links of a user (email is worse than MySpace, I guess, but still).

I wouldn't want my friends to submit my email-address anywhere, it is hard enough to keep spam in check as it is.

Also I think just having such a pesky "recommend me" form is not all there is to viral marketing. Some products can also be inherently viral, if they require several people to use. An example would be a multiplayer computer game. Slideshows and Photos are not that viral in comparison, because you can just watch photos passively.
Maybe brainfuck could be useful for code obfuscation? Just write a small brainfuck interpreter (should be easy, as it only has 8 commands), then compile your code to brainfuck.

The 2d language looks like a nice playground for artificial intelligence experiments (genetic algorithms).
Watching the video of the robot learning to walk up the ramp by leaning forward is remarkable.
How To Increase Productivity Using Your Kitchen Timer
We realized that one of the reasons we don't always drop everything and play dolls with her is that there is no definite amount of time we'll be playing; will it minutes? hours? We'd love to play all day but that just isn't practical. So we came up with a good solution. When it's time to play dolls or paint or whatever it is we're not sure we have time to do, we give her the option of how many minutes she wants to play. Offer up 15 minutes, sometimes she wants less, sometimes more. Then set the timer and give her our total uninterrupted attention.
What is a DevCamp?
You know that wasn't meant to be taken seriously...
I worked here for extended periods over the past few years and came to love the lifestyle and people. I'm far from a Japanophile, but I had to try living here.
Originals:

http://www.startupping.com/forums/showthread.php?t=347

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24345
Is it too late for you to change the news.yc title to "12 Coding Languages That Waned"? It's ridiculous to say that PowerBuilder and ColdFusion never took off.
Debunking 5 Business Myths about Second Life
I would have just pointed out that Napster was released in 1999. In the technology world that's ancient times.
Get ready lots of stories about Myspace
$9.80! I think it's still like $6 here in MD.

What if you factor in the expected value of cashing out on your equity?
right on schedule:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33960
I feel uneasy about that account-information practice, and I run a web site that does let people enter friends' email addresses. What sites besides Facebook ask for your account passwords?
Check out opensrs if you want to register domains for them. If the price is too high for you, you'll just have to give them instructions how to point their nameservers.
Pretty much all of the major social networking sites.
How many people would implement OpenID on their sites if it was really, really easy?

We're a YC startup working on exactly this problem. We felt that OpenID was a fantastic proposition but simply not easy to use and have made it literally dead-simple.

Who would isntall it on their site if they felt users would actually understand it?

Peter Nixey
www.sitepass.com
In general this is a great startup lesson. We've all seen on this site people posting "I have invites for X, who wants one?". Patterns like this reveal a gap between what people want and what's available. Systematizing it can lead to very successful projects. It can also be like a delicate flower that crumbles when you pick it up, which may be the case with invites.
Problems with this submission:

1) Sensationalist headline. The headline is just plain wrong. Internet radio is not yet saved since no reforms have been made.

"However, the source said the big question right now is whether webcasters not part of the CRB hearing might still have to pay the rates set by the board, minus the minimum fees."

2) Incorrect news site. Some appear submit articles without thinking, "How much does this contribute to the startup community? Would I find this in Digg, Reddit, or PG's anything-news site? If so, is it better suited there?" Which wouldn't be such a big deal, but..

3) No downvoting articles. I think this is a good decision by Paul, at least for the time being, since it removes the incentive for people to form mobs. But if anyone disagrees with the frontpage-worthiness of an article or the quality of the headline there's nothing they can do about it. Which can be bad when coupled with..

4) 2 points to hit the front page. Do you think it's time to up it to 3 or 4? Looking at the 'new' page, a lot of articles with 2 points are DOA, whereas if it has 4 points it's much more likely to have at least one comment. I wonder if it would still have 4 if it required 3 to get to the front page.

The quality of the submissions and comments at News.YC are excellent, but I wonder if it's worth fighting to keep that peak performance. Whenever you dispute the quality of something that everyone's looking at people will get angry at you, and maybe the problem will just fix itself. But I feel that fighting to keep the quality level near-perfect is a good thing.
3 days and InviteShare already up for sale?
Your algorithm suggestion is interesting, but probably not sufficient. Although reddit trolls are one step up from internet spammers, the same principle applies. With sufficient quantity of trolls/spammers blocking each one individually becomes an incredibly time intensive task - enough to drive away all those who don't have tons of time on their hands.

Pg speaks above about customs, but the problem with customers have to both (1) be educated about site customs (2) want to be educated about site customs. I think with any influx of 14 year olds of sufficient you will find both 1 & 2 problematic.

Now, personally, I think there is a significant difference between a news aggregation site and a community site. In a community site persons actually develop relationships and relate to each other on this basis. I have no seen that happen much on reddit or here. One reason for this is the speed of discussion - most of the best online discussions I have been involved with have taken days or weeks to fully develop. In any news-blog-digg driven site the time frame is closer to 24 hrs.

What I would favor is a multi-tiered system. For something like YC News there could be something like three tiers: (1) Old school hackers with experience in startups (2) Less experienced coders (3) Whoever wants to participate. Each conversation could be assigned a tier, and people of that tier and above tiers could participate. For example, a tier 3 discussion would accommodate people of tier 1,2 &3, a tier 2 discussion could accommodate tiers 1&2.

In many ways this model is what we already do. We have low-tier sites like digg which we may check, we come to places like this for a free form discussion mostly among people of type 2, and type 1 discussions are mainly engaged in via email. So in some ways the only innovation I propose is that some of these type 1 discussions be viewable to the public, so we can see what cool lisp hackers talk about in private (and solicit them for advice).

Response to other reddit comment comments:

Fallacy - I don't think the fallacy thing will work simply because (as with the site customs described above) one has to be educated as to what any given fallacy means.

Ethical dilemma - funny I never thought of doing that, although I think your solution would work.

Popular comments - yes this is a big problem; I have noticed it.
"Some products can also be inherently viral, if they require several people to use. An example would be ..."

You fail at marketing 101. The point of marketing is that can greatly increase your adoption. Even if your product is the best thing in the whole world -- that doesn't at all mean that adoption of it will spread like wildfire.
Article would have been useful with many more examples.
Most of these are online communities, but not exactly social networks, at least in the facebook sense. Advogato is close, but it focuses on open source.
I remember reading something from spez (I think) to the effect of "We asked him to tone it down, and he did." And I think pica said he'd been told to say "n-word" instead of, well, the n-word.

I have no idea why this was satisfactory to the reddits, since all it did was add a hilarious dash of ironic political correctness.
I think richardkulisz just misunderstood the reporting algorithm. He was a little less polite than pica, so people resented and reported him rather than downmodding and ignoring.
At least one related paper is available online:

http://research.yahoo.com/publication/structure_and_evolutio...

I probably won't have time to read it until this evening, but will post then.
Web 2.0: New Way To Monetize Your Content
Zubka.com to disrupt the recruitment industry
A search on Google returns almost 57 million references to "B2B". Google News shows 834 references to it in the last month. I hear it used every day by business people and consultants. I wouldn't characterize it as being "out of style".
Another way of putting it:

Banner ads on Facebook is a dumb way to monetize. Same on MySpace. People don't pay attention to banner ads on social networks because they are too busy paying attention to EACH OTHER. It's no surprise that people are complaining about low click through rates on Facebook display ads. But that doesn't mean that Facebook won't figure out how to monetize its growing userbase.

it's clear that Facebook and other social networks are in need of the aha moment that happened at Google when someone realized -- hey, if we rank the ads based on RELEVANCE as well as price bid, then people would be more likely to actually CLICK on the ad, and we'd make more money.

(from: http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2007/07/13/facebook-monetizatio...)
Google the Pimp Strikes Again with More Porn!
For those who think Google's core service can't be improved, or that it's not vulnerable...
For those who think Google's core service cannot be improved, or that Google is invulnerable...
Nothing there!? Are we reading the same post? It doesn't take thousands of words to make a point.

I think this short post makes a very cogent point. I rarely hear anyone talking about helping their clients to better serve their customers. But in B2B that's the whole game. If your B2B client can't attract and keep their customers then they can't be your customer for long.

Remember, we're in business to help our customers solve a problem or create an opportunity. If our customers are also businesses, that means we ultimately have to help them serve their customers better. That's how we help them solve a problem or create an opportunity.

If you fail at this, you'll fail in your business, eventually.

And, BTW, it's several paragraphs, not just one.
In this case "think about it" is appropriate because too few people take time to "think about" their customer's customers.

Jim's point is that too many vendor focus on what they do not what their customer's really want. This post is not meant to be a book or a seminar lesson. Just a brief thought stimulator. The message is clear as is. No examples are needed (IMHO).
Your bank has a REST API now
It's the API, Stupid
Old media passes rules with the help of the government in order to crush new media outlets. Users of new media outlets mobilize, and there's some temporary resolution.

How is that not relevant?

Another point worth making is that it seems that the philosophy taken with this site is that things that are obviously off topic (will it blend, articles about bush being a nazi, blatant spam, etc) are forbidden, and the community chooses what they find relevant from what's left.

Seems like a great policy to me, and it requires a lot less hands-on work.
Unfortunate name!
Facebook Monetization: Lessons From Google
I thought the point of making it viral would be to make it spread like wildfire? What does marketing 101 say about this? My guess is that "viral marketing" is not yet a word that is used in marketing 101.
I wonder if lisp should be included. If delphi and haskell are on the list, then it seems fair game to rank by relative rather than absolute comparisons (instead of absolute small numbers, rank by the gap between what is and what could/should have been). I might also include smalltalk on this list as well.

Oh well - with the web, nothing has to be past tense. Just don't call it a comeback!
Facebook: $6 Billion? Nah. [John Battelle]
"If you don't have rich parents you have to go into debt to attend private school."

That's not really true. Most top private school have really, really generous financial aid programs. And they give the money in outright grants instead of loans.

I come from a very middle-class family - father is a househusband, mother is a teacher. I went to Amherst College, which has a $40K/year sticker price. Amherst picked up more than 2/3 of my tuition in outright grants. It didn't cost me much more to attend than it would've at UMass (well, not quite true, I would've gotten a full ride at UMass, but it wasn't much more than the UMass sticker price). I ended up graduating with $4000 in loans, which I could pay back with internship earnings.
It's only tangently relevant, and the headline is inaccurate.

That's not the (specific) point though. You and I can debate whether or not it's relevant 'til the cows come home. The problem is, if anyone disagrees that it is relevant, they have no way to express that except in comments, which is a costly affair that doesn't really change anyone's mind.

For example, you can argue that the other article that hit the front page, aptly titled "Google the Pimp Strikes Again with More Porn!", is also relevant to Startup News; after all, it's talking about Google, and Google was a startup. But if Joe thinks it's a waste of time, or even a detriment to the community, he has no choice but to ignore it (News.YC doesn't have a 'hide' feature) or comment on it, which throws him into the arms of anonymous downvoters.

"...the community chooses what they find relevant..."

Well, in theory. Back when the community was small, yeah. But right now, it only takes one other person to agree with you for your article to be featured front and center. Someone else thought that finding porn with random Google keywords with SafeSearch blatantly off was hilarious and relevant, but alas, not everything that's hilarious is Startup News worthy (Will it Blend, etc), and things that are only tangently relevant will probably find a happier home in Reddit.
Interesting... Seems like wesabe has a lot of interesting information at their disposal but I keep having trouble thinking of a concrete and useful task for it. There must be some good ideas there though.
This seems like a candid business effort in itself - develop a small web business/app over the course of a month and sell it early for a quick, cheap exit.

It's not really a bad idea if trying to raise some money for a very strong idea, if you don't mistakenly sell it like everything else that is.
I believe Google's biggest innovation in ad serving was factoring click through rates into choosing which ads to display. The straight up auction does a decent job of making money, but by forcing companies with low performing ads to either pay up or improve their ads, pretty much the entire ecosystem wins.
I suspect these findings will apply to a certain type of "community." It does not, for example, apply easily to the wikipedia community.

What would be equally interesting as these findings, are the premises. What service, what content, what medium, what purpose, and extremely importantly, how presented.
Visual-based search engine gets mulit-million VC funding
How does one learn about the latest advances in Computer Science (not fads) to apply and improve your work? 
Note: core stuff like algorithms, new patterns etc. not fads like RoR, Ajax...

Stuff that usually sits in abtruse papers, out of mind for the average developer.
Accessible to the average developer, and in a form more easily digestible
(studying research papers is not practical for all).

When I picked up the Cormen book recently, I saw lots of new stuff I didnt learn in College.
I tend to think online discussion systems will evolve to approximate real discussion. The online aspect is simply to allow easier information management, synchronization of more people (which would be physically impossible), and decrease of distance. Temporal issues aside, it makes pretty much sense, in that problems in real discussion easily predict problems in online discussion, and fixes to online discussion systems address problems in live discussion. It seems to me, however, that developers of discussion systems stop relating the online system to the real interaction and try to impose methods that make more programming sense, but less natural sense. Of course I'm probably not qualified to say this because I don't know how valid my theories are; we will see.

Nevertheless, based on this perspective, I suspect the tiered system would not work, simply because we don't think in tiers in real life. Everything is graded in subjective degrees. One day your Lisp email list would evolve into a nonsensical banter (somebody starts posting after getting drunk). One day a couple geniuses post on digg and write a bestseller novel on the comment system within 24 hours. Perhaps unlikely, but not impossible. There are zero barriers in real life that let this happen; when it needs to happen, it will. But online, the system becomes the barrier.

So instead of a multi-tier system, I believe the best system is bound to be an aribtrarily-tiered system. How might this work? Consider yomama on reddit, who posts yo mama jokes on every thread. Troll yes, but also a clown. If there is a clown thread, yomama gets the crown (sorry). Thing is, there are "tiers" in the sense that you only have upmod and downmod. And really, what do those mean? A tier of good, a tier of bad? Predefined categories will never be enough.

If there are disagreeing voices, I'd love to hear.
Facebook for $6 Billion? Wrong Question..
Computer Science, as a field is very mature, and as a result, very specialized in its research (though I disagree with the idea that core algorithm research is more relevant for the average developer than what you call fads).

The best thing to do is to first get more specific: what kind of algorithm? Is it database implementations? Virtualization techniques? Filesystem optimization? Graphics hardware? Programming languages?

Then, find the appropriate journals. Get an ACM membership so you can search and get full text of the library.
I'm currently a CS double-major in an American university. We learnt algorithms with Sedgewick's books (available for C and Java) and patterns with the Gang of Four book. I find that I rarely use the algorithms for web programming, but do use some patterns (MVC, Observer).

As for latest advances, there are many languages on the cutting edge, such as Haskell, OCaml and Erlang that would be worthy to study just to expand your horizons. These languages ARE many of the latest advances in CS. I'm currently diving into Lisp, and have found that some concepts are timeless (code as data, macros).
"find the appropriate journals. Get an ACM membership so you can search and get full text of the library"

for developers with full time jobs?