skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"... We feel that t-shirts are great for communicating and sharing the things people care about so we see them as a great promotional medium. Until now, t-shirts have been static. We believe that there are many situations in which making a t-shirt dynamic is very valuable. ..."

After reading an interview with 'Ariel Poler' CEO & founder of textmarks, I spotted an interesting idea where SMS messaging & the humble t-shirt collide.
Symantec and Intel Develop Security software - TvByDemand | Forums | Intel
The urge to comment as a sign of danger
No, children should not have to or be able to make a choice about basic education. As nostrademons was saying, democracy begins to fall apart with a completely uneducated populace.
I think alec's suggesting to display the original domain beside the title of the link, ie. where it currently says "(nyud.net)", but still point the link to the submitted address.
that you touch yourself at night.
I don't get it. Why are you dissing YouOS?
And yet, this is someone who's gone the startup route (http://thecodist.com/fiche/thecodist/article/my-own-successf...).

Is this what Graham would look like if Yahoo hadn't bought Viaweb?
It's interesting what the Morris bio says:

In 1988 his discovery of buffer overflow first brought the Internet to the attention of the general public.

Hmmm... well, that's one way of putting it...

BTW, it's interesting that while Graham is the front man for YC, the idea of launching thousands of like-minded enterprises and seeing which prevail (while knowing many will get caught, killed off, or die) is very similar to how worms spread across networks.

YC as the capitalist/web applications worm?
There's also the SoundExchange fees for each song that is played from a friend-radio.
How much is News.YC worth?
If someone wanted to sell a site with a similar user and traffic numbers, in your opinion, what would be the present worth in 2007 dollars, 2002 dollars, and possibly 1999 dollars for a site like news.ycombinator.com.
Although it has apparently been going on all along, this title-censoring thing is, for me, the final straw.

Wow, I was just complaining about something I found annoying; I didn't mean to start a revolt.
Remember the 2 + 2 = 5 bit in the book "1984"? That was in reference to the Soviet claims that they met all the production goals for their 5 year plan in 4 years. The slogan was something like, "We achieved 5 in 4".

The production figures were all fraudulent, of course. The industrial figures weren't just wrong, but hid the fact that Russian argicultural had been set back 40 years--not to recover until the 1980s.

Back then, "Prosperity" was the ticket. And "Prosperity" meant smokestacks. What's the best way of making more smokestacks? Everyone has a pre-packaged solution to every problem, of course, which is phrased in various ways but amounts to:

We control you.

IE, control of the means of production. That's the solution--and since it precedes the problem, and since it doesn't actually solve any problems anyway, it has to search around pretty hard looking for a reason. Back then, the crisis was "Not enough smokestacks". In later years?

Umm. Poverty? Inequality? Pollution? Global cooling? Global Warming? ... The solution to "Global Warming" is of course "We need fewer smokestacks". Since people aren't likely to shut their smokestacks off willingly, the REAL solution is,

We control you.

...after seizing the means of production.
Our club is a little more exclusive than I thought.
Is the US Losing the Next Technology Race: Nanotechnology?
It's an interesting blog post on how other countries are catching on to emerging technologies more quickly than they used to.
Speaking of 1984, the USA can now destroy people such that they love Big Brother. http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/16/1416242
I think this really shows that life isn't rare but has a tendency to emerge in systems with a lot of energy. Consciousness might be much more rare, though.
Before you draw any conclusions from this story, you should really have a look at Jim Hansen's explanation of the error and figures here:
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/distro_LightUpstairs_70810.pdf

Their errors have basically no effect on global temp anomalies.
Bind-Case, a Lisp macro
Hasn't this stuff been around for a while?
SciVee: YouTube for Science (started by few non-profits)
tangentstudio.com/quotes

They offer a demand based clientel service.
Diagram showing all programming paradigms and their relationships (Lambda the Ultimate)
The 12V Battery Hack: Unlock the $40 hidden inside a 12V battery
Seven Tips for giving Google EDU presentations (or any tech video that is going up online)
Regular Expressions Cheat Sheet (with JavaScript examples)
"People who complain about the content on reddit and yet never submit a thing, need to keep quiet or contribute something other than complaints to the community."

http://reddit.com/goto?id=2gq14
The Future of CSS and the end of 3.0
New Scheme/SICP Resource: the wla lectures from UC Berkeley
Because of course 'real hacker topics' are not divisive..
Indian outsourcing is killing IT
Gmail driving Google Apps adoption at college
Business Week - The Wiki Workplace
if we are going to play this game, don't we need the stats on the site?
Should it vary by site content? Reddit turned into a general purpose social news site, but Hacker News is more of a niche thing. Would a larger corporation buy a site like this? I'm not saying they wouldn't; I don't know how it works, maybe someone could explain.
Artificial Life Likely in 3 to 10 Years!
nothing personal. Just stating a personal observation to make a conversation. Assuming smart people is not enough, maybe there are other factors overlooked, that determin a startup's future.
What's the logic behind this precedent? Isn't it functionally equivalent to what mp3.com offered?
YouTube - Derren Brown beats 9 chess players simultaneously (and tells you how he did it)
Thinking outside the Opera box: Interview with Opera CEO
It would probably be worth more as a web application that allowed you to pretty much run your own reddit or news.ycombinator than as a "hacker news" site. A larger corporation might buy it for the actual software, not the audience.
It's worth exactly $48,493.63 USD.
Logic? US courts? Does not compute.
However much anyone is willing to pay for it, like anything else.
A nice-to-have would be if YCombinator eventually offers localization services so that its startups could expand quickly into foreign markets, perhaps even at launch.
I guess it's a compliment to scribd, unless of course they were planning to release a german version in the near future, in which case they would have a new direct competitor.

Our English teacher used to always say that imitation is the greatest form of flattery. Congrats scribd.
While the paranoia prone part of my mind worries, I believe this is definitely a wonderful thing. Imagine the possibilities for the planet and beyond.
while i found Dion's post interesting, Alex Russell's comment was much more informative. The fixes Alex discusses are definitely needed.
"... but this comment thread did. ~ Melb, Aus. ..."

brings it to about 4 I think.
I don't see the problem. We all have broad interests. Hackers do things other than hack. If a discussion doesn't interest you, don't participate. You say that politics will pollute the site but you give nothing to back this up. Certainly there is a big difference between day to day USA politics and questions about optimal governance. One is explicitly off-topic and the other isn't.
Why are there no web designers in W3C?
Yawn. Call me once you have results, or at least a reasonable theory justifying your optimism. Getting a bunch of lipids to assemble into a sphere doesn't convince me that you are going to soon create "wet artificial life".
Carl Malamud Takes on WestLaw (Putting a complete database of US Case law in the public domain)
The software is trivial, or close to it. Sure, there are a few smart/hard bits, but any competent developer could resolve them with a month or less of development time.

Building a community is much harder than building a simple web application like this one. And not that by saying this, I'm not trivializing News.YC, I'm just saying you're placing value in the wrong place.
A purpose driven (virtual) life
"When they take in new information, it stays in the 'small hard drive' of working memory without passing over into the 'zip drive' of long-term memory."

Is this really an apt description? Would it not be more accurate to say "RAM" and "hard drive", respectively?

(Leave it to me to miss the point in the name of pedantry, haha. I ask because I'm not particularly knowledgeable in neuroscience, but from the terminology this is what I assume.)
So doing something about global warming is just like communist Russia?

I think you're in the running for the "reddit hyperbole transplant award".

Even republican economist Greg Mankiw, of Harvard, suggests a carbon tax as an efficient, market based approach to correcting the negative externalities of carbon usage:

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/10/pigou-club-manifesto....
Agreed, but you can only sell a community once, you can sell the software many times.
Sadly, from my experience, all the points the author complains about isn't limited to Indian programmers but any random set of programmers.
"What Is My Blog Worth"says:

$172,749.24

http://www.business-opportunities.biz/projects/how-much-is-y...
Gravitational equivalent of a magnetic field measured for the first time
> You say that politics will pollute the site but you give nothing to back this up.

reddit.com

The problem is that the average quality of the politics discussions so far is much lower than that about startups. It's not "hacker-worthy".
more than anything, i'm interested in the way that this article seems to acknowledge the facebook's incumbency in the 'social graph' space. he seems to be making the statement that ownership of this graph is at present theirs to lose.
Of course being intelligent is not enough. And by the way a technically perfect product is not enough too.

It has to provide a benefit for the users which is not obvious with YouOS. Microsoft made the same mistake with Vista...

If your system contains a positive feedback (i.e. the more people are using your product, the more value it gets for users. It then attracts new users, etc.) the you get a chain reaction which can blow your numbers.

YouOS in it self doesn't have these two key properties. But they could provide an application running on YouOs that could have these properties. Something like Zimbra.
In order to justify the difference with classical systems, they should pick an application that profit fro the particularities of having a web os.
I've never been Libertarian nor a believer in the Free Market. I don't think I really grasp the core concepts, though, because as I'm reading through Wealth of Nations (among other things) I find the laissez-faire attitude is incredibly naive.

Real markets are filled with things like marketing, fraud (two points, I would argue, along the same continuum) and consumers who are not going to do what's best for themselves.

My own view is that the government should provide a decent life - including paying for meals and shelter if need be - for every single person. I'm at a school where I'd rather not be, taking classes I'd prefer not to, because I will need a degree to get a job. If I knew that the government (or rich relatives, for that matter, although unfortunately I have none) would support me if I were to fail at entrepreneurship, I'd drop out tomorrow.

Basically, the government should guarantee that it'll keep all people at a basic level of human decency. This would allow all citizens to take risks, which is essential in innovation.

Oh, and the government should handle most things that private insurance companies do nowadays. The way I see it, people shouldn't have the choice to not pay for some things. If we were to give people the option of not buying health insurance, it would make us a very cruel and cold society to stand by as the unfortunate souls who chose not to get insurance die of an expensive, treatable diseases. The cultural cost to society is far too high.

Edit: Word choice, among -> along
Not children, or their parents, I take it. So, how exactly do you draw the line of which ideas should be forced on unwilling families in the name of basic education?
fun exercise: come up with 5 different ways of valuing news.yc, each of which seem reasonable and each of which give wildly different answers.
The governments subsidize airports through enormous amounts of land close to cities at below market rates. Without this intervention, airfare would be much more expensive. Do you think we would be better off if airports would have had to purchase their land on a true free market or is it good for a government to give airports cheap land?
http://sidebarcreative.com but they're more along the lines of what a funded startup might hire, not a single person.
What should be considered off-topic?
Many have said that we need more explicit guidelines about what is off-topic. What do you think should be off-topic on news.ycombinator.com?
Skype: What happened on August 16
<quote>receiving a routine software update</quote>

Sounds like they're pointing the finger at microsoft to me.
Browsers are free to implement portions of CSS3; it's not the W3C's fault that they haven't (naturally, "they" in this sentence usually means "Internet Explorer").

I don't envy the W3C's position; everybody knows HTML, so everybody's a critic.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44000

My thread about optimal governance had a lot of complaints. Many people think that such discussions shouldn't be allowed and I disagree. The thread was more about economics than politics. It wasn't anywhere close to the day to day politics covered on the tv news. There is no evidence of this site turning into reddit, except for the people claiming it has. Why disallow this discussion?
Of course the politics discussion is going to be lower quality than the startup discussion. We have practical experience with startups. That doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile to discuss things other than hacking and startups.

Social news has been around for two years. Giving one example doesn't mean a whole lot, especially when the community of reddit is fundamentally different from the community of news.ycombinator. The editors of reddit believe in non-intervention. The editors of news.yc believe in active and regular intervention, which means that news.yc won't turn into reddit.

The discussion in this thread isn't anywhere close to what you see on reddit. We have a problem when discussions start actually polluting the site. But they haven't yet, so I don't understand what the problem is.

We need to consider exactly what we don't want to allow on this site. See my new thread.
You're asking me to describe a curriculum. The curriculum nostrademons proposed sounds great to me. As a start, it's good to force reading and math on unwilling families in the name of basic education.
Hacker news or Y Combinator news
How do you collect the money if there are no toll booths? Subsidize the private corporation by having police stop people without them?

You don't seem to be considering a couple of things:

The "backed up by guns" (if you want to have a serious discussion, these sorts of libertarian cliches could perhaps be checked at the door) tax funded roads have benefits that extend beyond the road users. "Externalities" as it were, in terms of lower prices for goods that are easily and quickly shipped to the area, competition for other modes of transportation, and perhaps jobs in sectors like tourism.

If, ignoring the externalities, you wish to more directly attach the costs to the people utilizing the roads, you could raise gas taxes. Of course, that has its own positive and negative aspects, and winners and losers.

The real world is tremendously complicated, and I don't think it's really possible to predict everything. However, I don't think that means that you can simply ignore some of the more interesting facets of economics and say "errr, just let the market take care of it" - it's just too simplistic.
<quote>receiving a routine software update</quote>

Sounds like they're pointing the finger at microsoft to me.
"... The urge to comment as a sign of danger ..."

if that's the case, Donald Knuth is "Danger man" ~ http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/lp.html
This in my view confirms that the people who run Skype are either incompetent, dishonest, or both. I'm leaning towards dishonest, since it's hard to imagine how anyone could be so incompetent to both (a) roll out a network to millions of nodes without simulating how the network responds to major disruptions, and (b) build a large system which cannot be promptly "rebooted" into a clean state if anything goes wrong.

The alternative explanation -- that Skype was the target of a deliberate attack, and they're trying to keep quiet about this -- is to my paranoid mind far easier to believe; Skype would hardly be the first multi-billion dollar company to keep quiet about an attack out of fear that shareholders and/or customers would react unfavourably.
I think webOS are definately going to be in business. http://G.ho.st is really doing well.
On your personal observation, i agree to the fact that busienss acumen is more important then a strong technical abilities.
"... Here's an exercise: try posting an ad for a development project on Craiglist and ask for a quote. What you'll end up getting is tin-canned emails ... Then follow up with a random one and actually talk to their "Project Manager" and you'll notice that the email was just a bunch of bullshit and you're dealing with a two-man operation run out of a basement on a Pentium II. ..."

Lone hacker & founder in basement working on startup: 'Damn, he's on to us. That is praise, isn't it?'

I like this quote. Why? because it underpins the mentality of some people who think that having more programmers is better, flashier hardware solves all your performance problems and those blasted pesky upstarts are taking our work.

I bet similiar stories floated around mechanical & electrical engineering circles during the 50's with those wiley Japanese or in the 70's & 80's with the Taiwanese and electronics. Like it or not the Indians, the Bulgarians and countless other non-first world countries are going to harness the collective brain power, practice their commercial skills and improve their lot. In years to come a lot of the places mentioned "may have" the same success as past newcomers to the tech world.

Instead my scorn goes to the companies who "outsource" their competitive edge for the quick dollar return to owners, shareholders or simply adopting the latest business fad. Not realising anything that has software (car, microwave, etc) now means they are in the software business. Or worse, no understanding of the work they really do.

"... And yes, I'm an Indian ..."

Is not a justification to be inherently racist.
Customer Service Importance
A post about the importance of Customer service, is difficult to disagree with it!
Most content on Reddit seems to be generated by about 5 people who either post as much as they can from whatever feeds they're subscribed to or whatever pulls people's strings. At the moment this is usually stories about how the cops are utterly corrupt and how Fox news totally sucks.

Why? It's not like they discuss the story or you actually get prizes for a high karma?

Nowadays I prefer finding a page edited by someone who shares similar interests as me e.g. boingboing or hackaday. Otherwise things just degenerate into "FUNNAY PIC [LOL!]" quickly.

Maybe rather than have a single pool of submitted stories, you could chose whose stories show up on your page.
It's hard to know. Presumably the system would look different today if the government had not distorted it in that way. Perhaps if market incentives were allowed to operate instead of the land being taken, we would all be flying around in the jet cars we expected.
Interview with Jeff Barr - Amazon Web Services evangelist
That's great if everyone agrees to put nostrademons in charge. Instead what you get is:

"When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of schoolchildren."

-- The late Albert Shanker, former president of the American Federation of Teachers, 1985
I have it all in the evolution logs. Sorry for the spoiler; I thought by this time you had all figured this out.
Google is 403 - wonder who got the dreaded 404 booth?
"The Google Analytics team will also be present at the Google booth (#403 in the expo hall on Tuesday and Wednesday), so stop by and say hi".
Off topic (imo): old stuff, politics, religion.
What do you get when an Oxford anthropologist writes a guide to English pub etiquette for tourists?
i had no idea how much of this i did without thinking till it was pointed out. are there reader equivalents?
Maybe this is just me, but I come to this site to see new stuff and then read discussions about the current and eventual implications of that new stuff. In ask news.yc threads, I am looking for either new ideas posed as questions or people that really need advice.

What I don't want to see is the rehashing of age-old discussions or endless arguments where no one is going to change their minds. I think your post was an example of both. "What services would the perfect government provide?" I mean seriously, where is that going to go besides get people to write out their entrenched positions and defend them ad infinitum? If people want to read the arguments about different types of government they can go to wikipedia.

I take your point in that it hasn't changed that much yet here. However, if you can nip it in the bud initially you might prevent a slow eventual migration to something you don't want. Hence the suggestion of guidelines displayed on the submit page.
Hacker news or Y Combinator news? Why does it matter?
Ok, I haven't been reading this for very long, but why does it matter that someone over there in YC Land decided to change the name? I'm not suggesting that it's a good or bad thing, I'm just curious.
A policy change about what stories are considered on/off topic was made in addition to a name change. The policy change is what matters.
http://www.unitednuclear.com/aerogel.htm

But currently out of stock. They have plenty of other stuff you're going to want, too.
Windows Users Caused Skype Outage
"The heating has improved significantly. I turned the thermostat down five degrees. It's been a remarkable transformation," he said.

Wow. Really good insulation can make 65 feel like 70.
http://www.irintech.com/x1/blogarchive.php?id=1432
The end of ERP?
So everybody knows this is true, yet doing software management with UML, report generation and that kind of crap pays more and thus valued more than engineering. When will laws of economy stop that?
@7media: yes that shows that it has changed, but doesn't really say anything other than that.
15 Startup Commandments
Mark Fletcher gives his 15 Startup Commandments
The truth about recycling
Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings
If innate talent was irrelevant to Laszlo's theory

I love how psychologists, more than other scientists, are allowed to pass by huge holes in methodology. Laszlo and his daughters are not a random sample--they started off as extremely intelligent people--in fact, they belonged to the same tiny pedigree that produced Szilard, Teller and Von Neumann.

Try the experiment with ordinary people and you'll come away disappointed.
Is anyone aware of a hacker studio in Austin, TX?
There often turn out to be new things you can say about age-old topics. And the smartest people are willing to change their minds about anything. So I don't think we should avoid topics simply because people have said a lot of stupid things about them in the past.
I assume the author thinks it's been hacked?