skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your issue regarding the appeal to authority is present in real life to a large degree, and not limited to websites.

What you're suggesting is to remove the human altogether, and I'm not sure how AI would adjust when the average total quality reduces, which is usually the issue when a site scales.
Two points:

It seems a question of scope is in order here; what exactly is the purpose of a recommendation system?

Is it a system to forward to users that which they want to see, or is it a system that suggests various opinion of high quality to users? Often, I think we're trying to construct the latter by designing the former.

Secondly, Reddit's system works perfectly to forward to the user what they would like based on what's been submitted - the issue being that the average quality of submission has lowered over time. Even if the system gives you the best POS, you're still stuck with a POS.

The solution: Scaling is the problem, so stop/limit scaling.

We're not seeing a degradation of quality, we're seeing a better reflection of the average opinion - the larger the crowd, the lower the average. We're trying to enforce an expectation of quality that is held by a few on the many; this is impossible! The many don't hold the same regard or opinions as the few.

You can tweak things a little, perhaps come up with systems that use more cpu power than the space navigation does, but the end result will be the same: average opinion wins - exactly what you should expect.

Average opinion isn't what we want though, is it?
sorry, I read gropevine.com and thought bad things.
You should have asked what it would take to have her apply to your company... I could certainly use dedication like that in mine.
I'm in Philadelphia.
I'm based in Belgium. My co-founder lives in New York.
Henry Blodget: Why Newspapers Are Screwed
More like, the more powerful network effects you have, the less technology matters. Example: eBay.
I'm really sorry, This blog is about how to create passionate users for your product/webapp/etc.
I was not referring to any particular post on this blog.
I think this is an awesome blog, and it was really helpful for me.
In that case I agree with staunch, I don't think we share the same definition of entrepreneurship.
if you're in SF, nextbus.com is the way to go. nextbus uses gps to tell you how long 'til the next bus at your stop.
Mannheim, Germany, not exactly the Silicon Valley :-)
that too, but what i was trying to get at was "code beauty fetishism" that you often find among, e.g, ruby users.

beautiful code doesn't matter.
Am I the only one who doesn't care about Facebook?
All the social networks look like boring walled gardens/roach motels to me. Great if you can get in on the ground floor for the next big one, lousy for all the users.

I'm not willing to buy into an application platform that isn't open and vendor-neutral. For networking, I think there are better ways, like plain old face to face talking: the "hallway track" in conferences is often better than any of the talks.

I don't get it. And Zuckerberg stole the idea anyway.
Boston.
Good domain names should be spelled the way they sound. I would sell.
I would suggest rather than trying to find what you love, try first to learn to love what you do. Almost everyone has room to do their job better. The direction you should take your career will become more obvious after you do that. In my experience, these are the biggest obstacles to loving what you do:

- Being pessimistic yourself.

- Being surrounded by pessimistic people.

- Working for pessimistic management.

- Dealing with a poor physical work environment.

- Forgetting to aggressively attempt hard problems.

Sometimes, you'll hit a wall. It can't ALL come from within (though some Bhuddists may disagree).

I unloaded trucks in a warehouse for a few months after college, and while it was rewarding to get stronger and satisfying to work very quickly, it was clear that there would be very little change approaching infinity, and I could not do this the rest of my life.

In my last job, I was beginning to notice a similar wall, but more importantly it was fairly clear that management both did not enjoy working with technology, and did not enjoy managing employees within the framework of the company. They did not enjoy dealing with bureaucracy, yet it was forced on them often. This resulted in consistently poor morale. Even when we thought morale was good, it was bad by the standards of the company I work fow now.

It happened so gradually that all of a sudden one day I noticed that the thought of going to work made me sick to me stomach. But I knew it wasn't the work, because just a month or so earlier I'd happily immersed myself in a project and learned a lot, and I'd been making consistent progress.

If you need inspiration, Paul Graham's essays are good, although the one I would recommend first is Fred Brooks "The Tar Pit" (part of The Mythical Man-Month collection). In particular, in the section called "Joys of the Craft" he lists five reasons: The joy of making things, the pleasure of making them for other people, the fascination of the puzzle-like nature of the problems, the joy of always learning, and the delight of working in such a "tractible medium" that nevertheless produces real measurable results.
Milwaukee, WI 1.5hrs north of Chicago.
Daly City CA
I hold the same disdain for walled networks you do, but ultimately I use Facebook and others do as well simply because it is convenient and easy to use.

I also wouldn't base my main application on it, but as a developer I don't mind it for smaller apps.
I think facebook is like the corporate office space, its white, contains a cube farm, and is well devoid of personality. I more that do not care about FB, i just do not like it.
This is damning analysis, and, I think, too conservative - I think the real picture is worse for the NYT.

But, what should we, as a society, do about it? While blogs and other citizen journalism have actually helped journalism, there is still significant value in dedicated professional journalism. A significant amount of the raw material that is discussed in the political and news blogs comes from the professional sites.

Reporting is expensive and good reporting is hard - we'll be at a serious loss if someone doesn't figure out a good way to pay for it.
Nope. I don't give a damn either. Having hundreds of "friends" is pointless (how many of them actually know you well? less than 10?) and it's a lot easier to maintain relationship with those you care about through personal correspondence through email or over the phone or in person.

Facebook is just a giant game designed for you to waste a lot of your time on it. I'd rater work on something productive... but hey, do whatever rocks your boat.
Convenient for what?
never used, never will and I am a college student and 99% of my friends have profiles
An epiphany about Functional Programming and Lazy Evaluation
Lima, Peru
My family also lives in Marietta (east Cobb), although I go to school at Auburn.
Sources of sample business plans?
Despite the current fashion of dismissing business plans, where can one find some examples of serious business plans? serious != school assignments. Of course plans from successful companies are preferable, but success can also be related to a tighter corporate hold on plans.

Some starting points:
Viaweb: www.paulgraham.com/vwplan.html
Extracts from Yahoo's 1995 plan: http://www.stanford.edu/class/e145/materials/Yahoo_1995_STVP...
.com era from the Business Plan Archive: www.businessplanarchive.org
And another era: Eckert & Mauchly's Business Plan from 1946 http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Eckert_Mau...
epi0Bauqu and Riley, I'm in Plymouth Meeting, PA. Hit me at codeslinger _AT_ gmail _DOT_ com to rap about stuff.
Delft, The Netherlands. But ready to move the moment it's neccessary.
Social networks should evolve into a more specific community.
For example, a business network where you can collaborate with co-workers around the world to improve your marketing strategy among other things.
It just don't make sense to me looking at people I don't care about.
The bottom line is that social networks are mostly a waste of time. Geek and Social do not really go together. You usually have a small and close group of friends and you sure do not need FB or MSp to connect with them. I have a FB profile and that is because I have a Facebook application and my only friends are a few users and my co-foundrs.
But remember that just because you are not using Facebook does not mean you should not look for opportunities in the environment. If you can build an app that will generate a nice return within a few months, then do it.
..."And Zuckerberg stole the idea anyway."

Google stole the idea for Adwords, too.

Besides, how can you steal the idea "a community for college kids"? We had one of these when I was in college (the earliest days of the internet)... It sucked, but a lot of us used it.

On the caring about FB front, however-- I agree. Great article here calling Facebook "AOL 2.0":

http://www.kottke.org/07/07/facebook-vs-aol-redux
Tulsa, Oklahoma
You don't have time to read 30 books when you're starting a company. I hardly even have time to write this comment.
And you have to set body {border: 0} or some such or they'll just click on the browser chrome. We had complaints from users when we broke this in our app :-)
Doesn't look like anything special to me.
Convenient for organizing events, sharing photos, communicating with groups... Sure, tools for all this stuff existed before (upcoming.org, flickr...), but the fact that it is all wrapped in the same interface means more people will (and do) use it.
I suspect we're seeing a classic disruptive innovation at work here. A new technology (blogging) arrives that provides lower quality than existing markets demand, but does so at dramatically reduced cost. Existing solutions have overshot the quality levels demanded by the marketplace - the average American can't tell the difference between FOX News and the New York Times. The existing market remains, but is dwarfed in size by the new market for low-quality, shoot-from-the-hit journalism. Meanwhile, incumbents find they can't meet the cost structures necessary to compete in the new market.

I suspect that the New York Times will go the way of the Betamax and the Lisp Machine. It becomes a quaint relic of a technically superior age, but nobody actually buys it anymore.

The good news is that once a disruptive innovation has taken over the market, it usually improves to eventually match the original incumbent. So after a few years of drek, we'll see the worst, most content-free blogs die off and be replaced by people who put more thought into it. I suspect this is what'll happen to the best reporters - after a few lean years, they'll start up blogs, people will realize that those blogs give much better information than the competition, and they'll end up making much more than they ever did while working for a newspaper. After all, they don't have to share all the ad revenue they generate with the print staff anymore.

Only the best reporters, though. It'll suck to be a mediocre reporter, just as it sucks to be a mediocre real estate agent now and it sucked to be a mediocre programmer in 2002. The field will probably shrink significantly, but that's the whole point of capitalism - freeing up labor to work in fields where they'll be more productive.
isn't getting dates supposed to be _the_ reason for facebook's existence? :P
http://www.businessplanarchive.org/
I've signed up and have tried to get something useful out of facebook and the other major ones, but nothing productive has really come of any of it. I suppose if I were in college and it was the central repository for events or if I was looking for dates, maybe I would find something useful there. But college was a long time ago at this point and I'm married.

I hope they prove me wrong though. It would be nice if out of the blue I met someone interesting through one of these sites.
Bingo. So far, social networks haven't organized themselves into specific internal communities which have a goal.
learn to love....
We do not love jobs, what we have is Passion for our apps.
We do not want 2 b offered Jobs, we want to Create them.
We do not want to work for Google, maybe they can buy our startup, but we will leave as soon as we can.
We do not want to work with 100k other employees, we want to work with 100M users.
We are artists. We create it. They enjoy it. That we love.
Cleveland, Ohio. I travel regularly to Detroit, San Francisco and Atlanta for business though.
Two-way Video Conferencing for iPhone (trick done with mirrors!)
maybe http://sribd.com
Lisbon, Portugal
St Louis, MO
You've got company. I have no idea what the fuss is about -- and why it's so sudden.
"I am a college student and 99% of my friends have profiles"

And this is the relevant bit of you're post. ;-)
I don't care about FB either. I probably should, because it's a huge phenomenon, but, no matter how hard I try, I just can't.

In the first place, all these pure social networking sites (i.e. those that don't do much useful if you're the only user) rub me slightly the wrong way. I feel I'm being asked to invest my effort into creating value for someone else, and that I'm being locked into a single-vendor implementation. It's not a good feeling.

In the second place, I just don't see what FB _does_ for me that I can't do more simply some other way.

Although I can't remember name of the fellow who said it, or the exact wording, I share the sentiment that "I already belong to a social network. It's called the Internet." I've got an e-mail address, and a (few!) websites. I don't see why I should have to play in somebody's walled garden to connect with other people who've got the same.
I'd like to call shenanigans! First of all, the camera on the iPhone can't do video - so that's a pretty great work around to start with. Second, I'm pretty sure the iPhone can't do voice and data synchronously. The fact there is no software released, and it only works on their two phones sounds even more suspicious.

Ecamm makes some sweet products (I recommend their iMage webcam for mac users), but I think this post is a hoax.
Breakdowns: Why does Facebook want to hide its source code?
"... What's going to happen to all of the good reporters? ..."

If you haven't noticed, front-line, serious news gatherers have been diminishing for many years. Reducing the number of first hand source gatherers. Editors & sub-editors who read stories, check titles have greater responsibilities so last minute checks on stories with clanker titles, mistakes miss out. There has been a serious decline in the variety of sources (always bad). Younger readers are shunning traditional media (tv, radio, newspapers).

So what's happening? Is it all bad? Well yes and no. Joe public is now the news gathers with phone, sms and web in hand. Websites who specialise in particular topics gather & pick up these stories and traditional media lag behind.

The re-adjustment will occur when the new, "new media" sites are required to have greater technical, cost and professional standards. Markets will and have been re-adjusting the traditional news structure.

So does traditional media disappear?

No, they adjust, adapt or become irrelevant. At the moment - traditional journalism (reliable source gathering, questioning the status quo, looking beyond the hype, analysing ) has been the worse for wear and we are worse off for it.
News moving from print to web is a fundamental shift in the nature of the market, which brings many opportunities for growth by embracing the realities of the net, and a high chance of failure by ignoring those realities. Some thoughts:

The focus of the business needs to adapt to what is demanded online: giving people want they want that other sites don't give them, and conversely not providing things done better elsewhere. There is plenty of room for innovation: treating news more like data [http://www.holovaty.com/blog/archive/2006/09/06/0307], exploiting archives, focus on analysis... In short, losing the mindset of transferring print to web, sticking to core competencies, extending and innovating where appropriate, and ditching the junk.

The organisation of the business may be able to move from the monolithic style to a more networked model, with more freelancing, syndication and aggregation, more 'citizen reporters' and a blurred line between bloggers and journalists.

The big newspapers have strong brands, and for the near future most people don't want news from some random blog, or to have to trawl the net. NYT and friends are well positioned to capture the new news business. But likely many of them will refuse to change, or try and fail. So, a period of turmoil and consolidation: many papers fold, reporters shift gears and go where the money is online, the fit adapt and survive, the weak stagnate and die. But I think all those reporters, all the net-folk wanting news, and a few savvy types to put it together, will work it out in the end one way or another.
San Francisco, CA. Although I'm taking a detour to Paris for awhile, long story.
Wow, a startup in St. Louis of all places. I grew up and briefly worked for a startup there. Are you at Wash U?
Lisp in Lisp by PG
I think one should distinguish between 'care about' and 'like.'

Facebook has utility as a constantly updated online address book. It also has tremendous market share and the Facebook API could lead to much of social-networking for the next half-decade being trapped in the Facebook world. Consequently, I care about Facebook.

I do not like Facebook. I do not like Zuckerberg. I do not use any Facebook applications because they all seem to be ridiculous time wasters. Maybe at some point this will change and there will be social-networking with greater utility.

I certainly hope it is sooner rather than later.
No, I don't care about it either. But at 34, why would I?
There are two aspects to what we think of as a "newspaper": the physical medium and the content - aggregation of mainstream print journalism.

The physical medium of paper is in many ways superior to our current generation of displays. It won't go away until we have daylight readable 20000:1 contrast-ratio flexible displays. That doesn't mean the print-newspaper business isn't doomed. Subscription numbers are in a nose dive, and still have a long way to fall.

Yet the aggregation of mainstream print journalism via a different medium still has a chance for success. The killer app for mainstream media is producing quality content. Bloggers can't support foreign offices, for example. Micheal Yon, Micheal Totten and other "embedded bloggers" are the exceptions that prove the rule. Distributed locality where you don't need a correspondent in, say, Beijing because Chinese Bloggers cover it, only partially solves this. There is something to be said for an expert outsider reporting news & trends.

So newspapers aren't necessarily screwed. If there were a way to directly support good content proportional to its value, good written journalism provided by online newspapers could survive and even thrive. The high hurdles of subscription and premium content and the indirect path of ad revenue aren't good enough. The article is right about the numbers.

I'm working on a startup that would allow a distributed set of people to directly support online content. In this way, newspapers could evolve to become aggregations of professional bloggers and journalists, providing high quality content for a profit.
Facebook is a utility, not just a frivolous form of entertainment. Users depend on the service to manage contacts, share photos, and meet new people. A lot of important information flows through the facebook social graph.

The posts here remind me of the guy who loves to brag about how he doesn't have a TV in his house. To each his own, but television has had a huge impact on business and culture world-wide.

So even if you don't personally want to be a Facebook user, you might think about how it is transforming the way a whole generation of people interact socially, recognize the business and cultural impact, and conclude that you should care about it anyway.
I'd like to think that is true but don't see evidence to support it. For instance, blogs don't seem to solve the problem of aggregation, which requires a special group of editors to evaluate content quality.

Consequently, I wouldn't expect the best reporters to be able to make more - I'd expect the worst reporters to make the most money. That is, those that are willing to dumb down/spice up the content so that it sells well. I call this the News Corp/Myspace effect and don't see any effective counter.

Do you?
Do keep in mind that IE doesn't have support for transparency in PNG graphics, however.
That question surprised me, because the purpose of billion-dollar businesses can usually be summed up in a few words.

Everybody has different uses for facebook, which is one of the reasons that it is so popular. To me, being able to see how ALL of your friends are doing is invaluable. I can log on and see the the state of my friends' lives, and not just my college friends, but people from any given stage of my life. I can find out where friend A is working, or whether friend B is single, etc.. It's ultimately about keeping connected.
The best bloggers are better than most reporters.

In fact, some well known bloggers are reporters who just decided they didn't need the paper anymore, like Matt Marshall of VentureBeat.
As am I. Jenkintown.
Was just in Prov. What startup you working on?
Symbolics Open Genera 2.0 for Alpha - complete package with Lisp
Paul Buchheit's idea for better file uploads on browsers -- anyone want to pledge to or develop it?
cool, I know someone from Ricoletta
Plagiarism: Reprints PG's 'The Equity Equation' with new name and no link back to source!
This guy reprints Paul Graham's 'The Equity Equation' but changes the name to 'The Executive Equation' and doesn't cite the source except by leaving a few links point back to paulgraham.com.

Is it just me, or is this not blatant plagiarism...
I was also born and raised in STL.. left 5 years ago for the west coast, moved to Asia at the beginning of 2007.

Palish, I'll be in STL 9/13 - 9/19 for business meet ups. If you have availability I'd love to buy you a drink and hear about what you have going there. Curious as to how the startup scene in STL is evolving.. -frank{&at&}actercompany.com.
Tro, Taro... Toronto, Canada.
"I'm serious about this, and willing to pay quite a bit of money to make it happen."

$17 does not strike me as a lot of money.

Has anyone used and had success with this micropledge site?
It's very new.
"$17 does not strike me as a lot of money". True. Obviously Paul hasn't pledged yet. :-)

microPledge is only a few days post-launch, so success stories are low in numbers just yet. But of course we look forward to them coming in slowly but surely.
http://jupload.sourceforge.net/applet-basic.html

Done.

Oh, right. No one likes Java. (I'm a little perplexed as to why the author defaulted to the nasty metal L&F).