skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like new name, but honestly dont think the content itself will change very much. I've noticed most submissions are generally hacker-centric anyway, although having the name of the site reflect this probably more accurately hones the focus. I think generally the content being submitted will be a reflection of the type of users using the site, regardless of the official mission statement. Manually moderating only goes so far...

Considering that, I would personally like to see this site make a conscious effort to remain "grass roots" rather than focus on growth. I love this forum because of the relatively high concentration of smart people who post here. I doest look like PG has any monetary objectives with this site (hence no ads), so I think simple word of mouth between hackers rather than deliberate promotion will keep content quality higher going forward.

The proposed rating system is brilliant.. I give props to whoever thought of that one!

Edit: I just realized that the new weighted voting system could have an unintended chilling effect on voting.. If smart users worry that placing a vote might adversely affect their "vote weight" on a post deemed by the admins as a dumb story, they might just refrain from doing so all together.
uncov on timebridge: 8.5 million raised for google calendar feature
Will we be able to see our "voting power" number? I'm assuming no.
She's deleted them recently. Google Reader still has them, so:

"Although criminals harm society, and slaves are seeking freedom, from the point of the criminal or slave (who is a criminal, de jure, for running away), the outcome is the same: very negative feedback.

You mention "the value pyramid". I don't see that: if you get caught and "massa" cuts your big toes off, you are back where you started, plus a whipping and minus your big toes.

You'll be gimping around for a long time after that.

The only good thing is that at that point, you can't be sold off to work in the rice. But that's about it; you are pretty screwed.

The only way it works is if you've got a chance of getting away. Then it could be worth it. As most slaves had no chance of getting away, they were nuts to do it."

There's a racist crack, and a very unpopular viewpoint, but as far as I know she's actually debating ideas, not just baiting people.

Is this kind of thing acceptable?
Facebook entrepeneur event: 2-day conference on social network platforms
[PDF] Encoding information flow in Haskell (think Perl taint-checking on steroids)
I suppose this is the first real post of Hacker News?

Whenever I study the history of science, I'm always left with a longing for a time machine. Alt-history is fascinating: what level of technology could humanity have achieved today if certain intellectual disasters could be avoided?

A humble request of a time traveler would be to ensure a continuous line of knowledge. Forgotten and rediscovered knowledge are such forces of friction and backsliding. Better communication over larger geographical areas would certainly have helped. It would be like a distributed backup system.
Glad you expanded, now I can read some more interesting stuff...
Google answers, but restricted to an established community (like ycnews) would be even more useful.
You've just created a way for people to game the system. Presumably, you'll submit stories you think are appropriate. Upmodding stories you submit will increase the power of the modder's vote. Avoid revealing the other oracles.
i think the answer lies on how you design the charging system. if users have to through a cart/transaction system, micropayments would never work. it should be simpler (say, with one click) with as less friction as possible.

micropayments are good for microservices. say you want to use basecamp for 1 week but dont want to pay the monthly service. itunes music store is another "microstore".
Ask.com on the Upswing
Nice work! I had not associated you with your username here until now.
This is good, I think. If it avoids the problems that Reddit ran into it's wicked cool.

However, doesn't this go away from the ideas of the social network, user-driven, "wisdom of crowds"? Do you have the problem now of the group not choosing which stories are good vs. which are agreeable to the human editors?
EBay's Swarm Strategy to Take On Craigslist
Good. Simple and straight fwd. You will see a 15% growth once you add other features (maybe Gmap, Google calendar syncrho, etc...) and you will see a 90% growth once you read and apply this http://particletree.com/features/the-importance-of-design-in...
Thanks. My productivity just went into a corner and shot itself.
This is really interesting news. It is sad in a way that so much of the previous efforts have been wasted due to differences in cultures, invasion, wars, disease etc. Imagine Newton studying this math when he was a kid... he would be working on other problems and everyone would be better off. Just amazes how much the ancient civilizations achieved with the resources they had and makes me appreciate them more.
Hey, thanks! I didn't know you were on here either. I need to pay closer attention... Yeah, when possible, I have been choosing pseudo-random usernames (via pwgen) so that my accounts aren't obviously tied to me if I later decide to leave services and they don't have good removal functionality. As you may have guessed, this has happened before :)
Thinking the way animals do
Interesting note on how some autistic people think.
I like the design. It's refreshing to see a startup that's not gradienty/shiny/stripy. :)
Ahh right, I think I remember reading a blog post about pricing strategy for ebooks marketed on ClickBank that explored this. Very interesting.

Thank you (all) for the comments - this is remarkably informative.
slashdot -> reddit -> programming.reddit -> hacker news -> ???
Website Statistics?
What sort of site statistics do you all collect on your websites? I'm gearing up for my site launch and I have the usual view count per page plus IP address logging, but I'm wondering if there's any other interesting statistic gathering I could be doing.

So what do you do?
In the past, I've set up MRTG (http://www.mrtg.com/) graphs of things important to the site/business, e.g. new users, new posts, purchases, etc.
I've been reading less of ycombo news lately since it was just mostly articles on how to get VC funding and recent hoopla, and not really interesting things on the edges/fringes of markets, society, and technology. Imo, those are what you have to pay attention to, in order to have any type of gauge as to the probable direction of the future.

I've submitted a share of "interesting" things, but they're usually drowned out by "easy reading" Hopefully, the human editor factor will allow the proposed indirect control of the swarm.

I've had some interesting discussions over at octonews--but it's a different niche--hardware/sci/tech/health. I'd love it if yc.news is able to turn itself into hacker news. I had missed the mid 2006 reddit, and hearing great insight is often more valuable than the actual article itself. Not that how to fill out a term sheet, analysis on facebook, or top ten things to get started on your startup isn't interesting, but one can only take so much of that in the last 3 months.

I cheer the new direction
Well, we'll either be seeing floating-point karma, or we just won't see story and comment karma increase anymore when we upvote them if we have a < 1 vote weight.
Facebook Opens Up Their Data Feeds
I actually started reading /. again a while back. The quality of the discussion there has gone up quite a bit ever since the kiddies and trolls defected to Digg and Reddit.
We are living in someone else's computer simulation
Wrestler death numbers misleading - TvByDemand | Forums | WWE
Can you put a page views number in front of each submission?
Presumably, however, if someone who did that started voting for "bad" stories, his voting power would, appropriately, go through the floor.
Awesome move. One thing I always missed on early reddit and Startup News was Slashdot's comment-tagging system; comments are not only voted up and down but tagged with "interesting", "funny", "insightful", etc. Also, there's an absolute score on Slashdot comments (1 -> 5) so it's easy to see off-hand what the really good comments are.

In general, my point is that on social news sites, the comments are often just as interesting as the stories themselves. This is why (at least I think) Slashdot is so great. More software and techniques to organize and enhance comment browsing would be really cool.
I always thought that this would be a really interesting plot for a novel. Sophie's World kinda did it already, but it dropped the ball by having the recursion level stop at 1. I was kinda hoping that at the end of the book, Sophie would pick up a pen and begin to write a book about a guy named Jostein...
Really small motherboard
10cms X 7cms.
My guess is that these self interested folks would create many accounts, buy cred with mischievous modding, and make a distributed effort to upmod a particular story. They wouldn't do this to upmod any random story. But news.yc needs to get much bigger in order for this to be a real problem. This is a real problem on Digg.
Potato powered webserver
The following is a great book on pricing

http://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Tactics-Pricing-Growing-Profi...

It was on the reading list for a pricing class I took. All I can say is that pricing should be the culmination of your marketing strategy. The book does a great job of explaining some real rationale and logical thinking on how to set your price.

The nice advantage you appear to have is that you can tweak or iterate your pricing strategy? maybe try different prices for different people or times of the day/month/year?

Good luck!
Facebook wars: social groups, symbols, jargon and tagging others
I'm pretty sure a movie did it.. "The Thirteenth Floor", something like that.
Ok, I was trying to be nice to the poor NeoOffice guys. :)
What is a slashdotting from Hacker News called?
A better Random Number generator
Uses atmospheric noise. An API around this would be useful.
I'm pretty sure separate accounts are linked via IP addresses. And the one person who will go to all the trouble to spoof his IP address consistently for each of his 10 accounts isn't worth worrying about.

We're small, and we're going to stay small for awhile (hopefully), so this really isn't worth worrying about.
Ah, good point. We can just look and see what happens when we upvote a story. Unless, of course, voting power varies based on the popularity of a story -- then it's more complicated.
Hacking and if the site goes down it was probably hacked.
Making Desktop App Upgrades as easy as Web 2.0 Apps
A web server that isn't very powerful.
Hack away.
Yes from the write up it seems to be moving from "wisdom of crowds" to "wisdom of AI". The editors will be "training" the system to recognize a good story. PG is probably hoping that one day the system will be able to tell a good story from a bad one without any help from editors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computing_2400_BC-1...

This is surprising. Indian mathematicians invented the 0, binary, formal language specs, logarithms... I wonder what changed.
So I should find the stories that PG votes up and then vote them up so I get a 'louder voice'? Sounds good to me ;)
I understand. A lot of services tend to make too much information public by default. And I think you're correct that meetup is too public. This factor hinders adoption of social services beyond the young and the extroverted.

When I see you I will show you what I've been working on.
I always appreciate it when folks admit that their success is not completely due to their personal greatness. Humility's one of those signs of 'good people' I really believe in.
See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign
My biggest worry is a slippery slope. For instance, lately I've been reading lots about economics. A lot of it is stuff I would consider hacker-worthy. However, it might not interest some people, and others might have philosophical objections. Or even political objections. We're already, at that point, on our way downhill.
If you mean what changed in recent times - imperial rule. It has been only 60 years since India has been independent.
This was a negative?

India was made up of numerous warring states, until one massive war that turned them into a possession of Britain. I'm not aware of how their economic situation changed after that, but if Africa is any indicator... http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/country...
Nasdaq's New Portal Market: IPO Alternative for Startups?
The benefits of an IPO w/o the regulatory burden?

Here's an overview:

Any private firm can list on Nasdaq's new platform ... [any firm that does list] would remain private and not have to make public their financial statements or submit to federal regulation, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate accountability law.
It is well known that all scientific knowledge was given to us by aliens.
The Trouble With Enterprise Software
Yes, you're right. I was thinking the same thing this afternoon as I was driving around.

However, one problem that continues to present itself is the cumulative nature of karma accretion. Only if there is a completely separate scaling mechanism which determines vote weight independent of karma could be this avoided.

Otherwise even if an upmodder gets less for voting up PG (or Nostra) stories, they still get something.
Whoah, new comment sorting?
I noticed this on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42317. It looks like top-level comments aren't being sorted outright by score. Porque no?
I thought that Perl was the swiss army chainsaw? Now I'm all confused.
I've thought about a similar phenomenon many times--that the Earth is nothing more than an atom floating around in the body of some greater being.

But to see something like this published in the NYT...that was a bit surprising. Interesting, though.
sweet news.
So, the problem of AI has been solved. I guess I missed the news...
That isn't necessarily a bad thing, though. It means they're participating in YC news.

Besides, I bet the vote weight curve isn't linear.. It's probably logarithmic, so you'll see diminishing returns.

The real question to ask is, "Why would people want a large vote weight?" The only malicious reason is to get something meaningless to the frontpage really quickly. But that will still render them powerless immediately if it's flagged as nonsense.

Besides, at least one other person will still have to agree with you to get it to the front page. This sort of guard is to prevent your votes from getting things to the front page if you upvote nonsense.
A good read, but ultimately disappointing, since it offers no real advice on correcting the issue, spare "CIO's must get educated".

Question for all of you hackers: Do you have examples of companies that have realized the issues in the article and then successfully implemented strategies (no matter how crazy) that solved the problem?

Off hand, my opinion of enterprise systems and the "solution" to them is close to what DHH (of rails fame) thinks: nuke 'em all and get little apps to do little things. Are there other examples of different approaches?
Hitwise Launches New Widget
i thought they've always been sorted by popularity (the score per time elasped)
Classmates.com hopes for an IPO boost (What?)
Here's a good one by Joel:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...
Scsh - The Scheme Shell
"nuke 'em all and get little apps to do little things."

That only works if the little apps can speak together very, very well. My most recent "real job" was at a large on-line bookseller in Italy, and everything has to be integrated:

- The web site has to know about the presence or lack of books in the warehouse.

- The customer order system has to know about the warehouse.

- There needs to be an automated solution that knows how to order from suppliers, and the web site needs to know how long it takes to get a book from supplier X, on average, and thus needs access to supplier order statistics.

- The boss has to be able to see the numbers going by in the whole system, and be able to create promotional offers and things like that.

etc...
Luckily PC snobbery has been on a steep decline for some time now.

Intel/MS people still love to deride osx/apple market share, missing the point entirely.

Does BMW try to be the Ford Taurus of the automobile market? No, that would of course be ridiculous. /end speaking to the choir =)/
Anyone going to BarCamp this weekend?
Strange.

I just tried to submit this same article, and now I can't vote this one up. What's the deal?
Are B1/B2 visas enough to apply for YC?
I am a Computer Engineer born, living and graduated in Brazil. For the past year I've been working as SDE for a company that had clients in the US - which was reason enough for said company to give me a Business Visa (B2).

It is not easy to start a company in Brazil - too many regulations, too many taxes, lack of angel investors, lack of personal credit, etc.

I did have however the opportunity to save money. So did a friend of mine (college colleague) that was working for Motorola (Brazil), and lost his job due to Motorola's terrible financial 2006.

I talked him into the idea of working in a startup project. We have a clear idea and starting to execute. I would personally love to be able to apply for YC this winter: not much because of the money, but as an opportunity to be in a more appropriate environment.

Considering that I am able to go to the interview and that my visa expires only in 2012, how hard would it be for YC to accept my application? I imagine there would be some issues irt to paperwork, wouldn't it?
I guess you could be right. Odd that I just noticed it today. I guess most threads don't have enough comments to make it obvious, and as time passes the time element fades to no effect.
Needs Analysis for Webmasters - The Essentials
As a consultant/webmaster, I have conducted many needs analysis sessions. I find that a needs analysis session is critical if you want to provide an accurate proposal. Following is the essential information you need.
Looking for Liberty? Avoid adjectives.
From "A Plan for Spam": "As a rule of thumb, the more qualifiers there are before the name of a country, the more corrupt the rulers. A country called The Socialist People's Democratic Republic of X is probably the last place in the world you'd want to live."
Find a co-founder at the weekend of code (8th/9th of September)
Since the YC application deadline is approaching and I still don't have a co-founder, I conceived the weekend of code: I propose to evaluate potential co-founders by doing a project together for a weekend.

As an experiment, I created a Ning network for it, not sure if that will work well. Alternatively, just use this thread to discuss potential projects? I shall see that an irc channel will be available during the weekend, and perhaps afterwards an opportunity for presentation and praise. Nothing to win, except new friends and experience.

I am inspired by the 48 hours game programming competition, which has always been great fun.
First Google Health Screenshots
My favorite variant of this is a story from Stanislaw Lem's book "Star diaries", written decades ago. I chose my nickname from the name of the hero of that book, Ijon Tichy ;-)
fscking ageist
A List Apart: Staying Motivated
Downmod all you want, but donna is on to something-- consider it a "random stirring of the pot" or a "making oneself more receptive to new ideas/success" as outlined in TFA.
Professor Nick Bostrom's site on the Simulation Argument: http://www.simulation-argument.com/

He also has some other cool stuff, like this "Letter From Utopia": http://nickbostrom.com/utopia.html
Creepy: it seems only a small step to replace the potatoes with human beings and launch head on into a Matrix scenario...
New Scientist: The Lure of the Conspiracy Theory
Linux.com: Spreading Python applications
I submitted this a week ago to programming.reddit but I know not everyone is signed up on reddit. So here it is, a quick tour of distutils.
VisualIDs:  Automatic Distinctive Icons for Desktop Interfaces [pdf]
From UNIVAC to Google: A Computer in Every Kitchen?
How to game the new voting power system
Just upvote all the stories that are already near the top. If the system works at all, then these will consist disproportionately of "good" stories, thus increasing your voting power.

One way to combat this would be to give much larger voting power bonuses for "discovering" good stories while they're still only visible in the new queue.
Thinking aloud:

Something about the idea of oracles makes me recoil. The obvious problem is that this approach may reinforce groupthink, both algorithmically and socially. And groupthink is already a considerable problem in these sort of systems. But then... this solution almost represents an acceptance of the inevitability of groupthink, kind of an attempt to steer the groupthink. Hmm. Perhaps this method would work best by working specifically with edge-cases - the best and worst posts, gently massaging out the toxic before it gets a chance to grow roots. It may not even be necessary to include good posts, since the actual problem to be solved is keeping out the crap.

But I am excited to see this kind of community flourish again, whatever shape it takes!
Sounds like a very welcomed alternative.
How to negotiate with the corporate elephant
I am not sure if it was all negative... I am sure the British brought good things to India. I do believe a century long British rule changed the focus and stifled innovation and free thought. How would it have gone had the British never ruled... hard to tell.
This is why if you have an idea you might as well do it. There's just no telling if it will be a success or not.
Obviously we're going to weight it by how early votes are.