skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll posit that the "startup" theme was what was responsible for all the self-help-SEO type posts.

I'll gladly put up with arcane posts about how to configure your emacs environment to write haskell if it means I don't have to see anymore inane posts about improving my credit score by "track suit CEO."
We were, now I guess the cat is a bit out of the bag. I've touched the samples up a bit. Hope they are a bit better.
If you are a siggraph member (I think it's $50 a year or so) you can stream the talks for free.
ExcelKoder : [hack] spreadsheets to wiki / html
struggling with all kinds of ascii art to get a decent display in a barcamp wiki,hacked a utility one evening to do just that. ports to html(with preview) as well !
I really wish the RSS feed had a link to the news.yc post about the link and not only to the link itself.

Often I want to jump to reading the thread on news.yc after reading the link itself, without having to find that story again on the news.yc page.
Getting Started with Gambit and Snow (an alternative to R6RS?)
Google-funded startup to offer free Wi-Fi in San Francisco
Now, a Google-funded startup is announcing an alternate plan to bathe the 49-square-mile city in Wi-Fi. It comes at a fraction of the cost, doesn't require the city to commit to anything, and employs hardware that's likely to outperform anything Earthlink can provide. It may prove to be a fatal blow to Mayor Gavin Newsom's already struggling plan to bridge the digital divide.
Srinivasa Ramanujan: the genius mathematician
RedHerring Returns: New Website, Videos, Social Network
We're not like other investment firms.
I think Napoleon was short for his time. At least, contemporaries spoke of him as short.
"Why Should Paul Graham Have All the Fun?" (Perry Metzger's talk at Lisp NYC: video & slides)
No tomatoes were thrown (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42216), but an entertaining talk nonetheless.

Otter is being released under BSD, and source will be made available at OtterLang.org, so it's more of a bazaar effort (in contrast to Graham's Arc cathedral).
What Are Google's Browser Plans?
Presumably existing users are smart enough to track another site.

It has some downsides too, such as overlapping content, but it might not have been a bad idea.
Music Mash - Remix your favorite songs. Share them with the world.
Is anyone interested in developing this idea?
I don't know Paul but having followed here for a while and having read most of his work I'll offer you two reasons:

1) The site was losing its usefulness for him so he made it more useful for himself and chances are others will find it useful as well.

2) Because He Can

Perhaps if you don't agree with the changes, then write your own news app and compete. Its how the world works after all.
I've had great success (and fun) using wxPython. wxWidgets combined with python is great.
25 Most Popular Business Websites July 2007
In today's competitive financial environment you need to be armed with the best information possible in order to succeed in business. To that end, we at eBizMBA here provide you with the Top 25 Business Websites ranked by a combination of Inbound Links, Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank, and U.S. traffic data from Compete and Quantcast. For entries where a wide range exists between the two data sets the highest numbers were used for ranking purposes. Although no traffic metrics are completely accurate we do believe the data below to be useful for gauging relative audience size. [Banks and financial service sites have been excluded from our list.]
It doesn't take much intelligence to follow two websites, but it does take some more effort.

Also, it's perhaps that the site now caters more to the target audience than to the thing that unites them (Y combinator/startups).
PlentyOfFish Architecture
What makes a good social object
Reddit held out longer than three months. I remember remarking to spez during Startup School '06 that I had noticed a recent, slight downtrend in quality. That was around the time that random photographs started appearing on the front page, and a couple weeks after the famous "Paul Graham Eats Breakfast" post. But it was far from nonsense then: the majority of front page content was still excellent. Reddit launched in late summer '05, so that's at least 8 months that it held out.
Second what Dean said. Lots of good hacker news places. Very few good early stage startup stuff. Too conflate what YC was with TC is silly. TC is a profile site. YC.news gathers helpful articles on how make your startup better.

I'll miss YC news if it becomes just another programmer site.
Interactive Map of the Linux Kernel
Is all this Zuckerberg gossip really interesting?

Pretty soon we'll be hearing about his having no. 2s... shudder
Maybe it's a dupe, I know I've read this one as well. Honestly though, norvig.com is a terrific site. He writes very well and I haven't read all of it yet. Here are my favorites so far:

http://norvig.com/python-iaq.html

http://norvig.com/21-days.html
AMD to extend x86 instruction set to ease multicore programming
Too bad there's no source on the page yet nor do I see an example of an application that uses it unlike News.YC.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, thanks.
America is nowhere near the leading position in mobile communication - how can it be leading in mobile social networking? I have the impression that this american journalist is so used to thinking that America leads the world in just anything that he does not checks this assumption any more.
Change is good but I think you mainly just stated what the site was becoming anyways based on the content as of lately. Hopefully, everyone can keep their politics in their basements and the hacker theme stays. That's why I stopped reading reddit daily. Now there's a politics sub-reddit but it took less then a week for it to junk up their homepage again...
"but if this company was started solely by hackers it would not be nearly as good"

Interesting bit of prejudice here. What makes a hacker less capable of doing whatever it is that non-hackers do? Is it the thick held-together-with-tape glasses? Maybe the caffeine addiction addled brain?

The neat thing about an all-hacker startup is that hackers can choose NOT to hack part or all of their time when the job calls for it. A non-hacker doesn't have the ability to shift gears during the early days of the product to just work on shipping the damned thing.

I'm a hacker, and have code running on millions of machines world-wide in numerous Open Source projects, but in our startup today, I predominantly do not hack. I still spend about 25% of my time hacking, but it's becoming less every month, as other aspects of the company become more pressing (marketing/evangelism, money management, support, hiring contractors, design, etc.). I happen to have a lot of business experience, as well, and I don't think that J Random Hacker would step right into this kind of position without some study and work, but to imagine that being an all-hacker company would lead to it being "not nearly as good" is funny. Hackers are people, generally smarter than average. Many happen to have other skills and experience outside of hacking.

I'm just picking on you, of course. I'm sure you didn't mean to imply that there are magical skills that disappear when one becomes a hacker, or that the hacker mentality is a form of retardation that dramatically negatively impacts other skills.
Interesting. I checked Wikipedia again, and apparently the issue of Napoleon's height is in dispute.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Bonaparte#Napoleon.27s...

"Many historians have recently argued that, contrary to popular belief, Napoleon was not short as often depicted in popular culture. Although historians disagree on Napoleon's precise height, it has been suggested that he was actually slightly taller than the average early 19th-century Frenchman.[27] Some historians claim the French emperor's height was recorded as 5 ft. 2 in French units, corresponding to 1.68 meters or 5 ft. 6 in Imperial units."
When cheap marketing is just a 'cheap trick' (And why Found|READ isn't the place for it)
It's Valleywag, what do you expect?
Another long-term factor to consider: startup enthusiasm ebbs with business cycles, while hacking endures.
That would make everything start out at #1.
Scientists find reason for contagious yawning
It's an "unconference" where everyone presents, everyone watches, and lots of socializing goes on. It's not about building things, though I imagine it's hard to resist building something if you meet up with folks or ideas that set you aflame with enthusiasm.

Imagine a developers conference without suits setting it up or major booths from people who want to sell you stuff. I doubt this one will be free of suits or people hocking there wares, as it is so large...but it should still be fun and predominantly free of entreprisey conference trappings.

Of course, to cover the other side, imagine a conference in which no one decides who presents--anybody who wants to write their name on the board can present something, no matter how stupid. You will see numerous boring, poorly planned and poorly presented, talks. You can walk away, however, and not feel bad about wasting any money because it is all free.

All around, a good time.
I'm planning to attend at least Saturday, assuming nothing else comes up. I'll be the one in the Virtualmin T-shirt (then again, I've sent out a bunch of them, so I suppose it isn't impossible for someone else to be wearing one...). Y'all be sure to say "hi" if you see me.
Scott Adams' startup idea: Hole Digger
Resubmission of old links now that the scope of this forum has expanded
How should we resubmit old links that were not so relevant before but are more so now?
Social news sites such as Digg, Nestscape, Fark, etc. are said to be losing momentum
A collection of details
His last slide had a list of links & resources (there's a subversion subdomain for getting the latest source, IIRC), but he also said not everything's been posted yet.

It's real, though; he brought a running version on his laptop and demoed some of the basic stuff for us.
Uses of "* is the new *" in 2005 represented graphically
I like the change.
obfuscate them by adding something like ?p=123 to the end of the url.
Why does any of that matter? This is PG's free site, which he has invested his time in and has asked nothing back for. Who are you to call anything associated with this site a "disservice"? That is patently absurd.

If you are not happy with this site anymore, you are free to go start your own. You should not be free, however, to sit idly by and condemn the decisions of those who are aiming to make progress.
Or, you could realize that this is the perfect opportunity to start your own site called "nickb's aggregation site covering exclusively startup news"
Fighting Spam for a New Startup
Heya! For my site launch I'm pretty sure I need to be ready to fight spam, but I'm not sure how ready. At the very least I'll set up a basic spam filter, but I'm unsure if I should train it myself beforehand (by copy and pasting the 1000 Gmail spam emails I have in my inbox) or wait until site launch.

People will write text that other people see, so it's probable that some of it will be spam.

What do you all do? Is there a big database of spam to preconfigure spam filters?
Squirrels wield a hot, secret weapon
cute facebook apps are the best way to impress girls if you are a geek, at least that's what happened to my friend who made a cute one involving kittens
CIA, Vatican busted for Wikipedia edits
No, users do have a right to complain. Any site purporting to offer a service ought to try to make users happy. And this site isn't just a personal project. It's part of YC. So I ought to be able to claim that this change will benefit the people our site is for. And I do think that. YC specifically targets more hackerly founders, and I think they want to read about more than just startups.
Who fucking cares?
Bullpoo - World of Warcraft Meets Wall Street
> Just because you're bored, doesn't mean everyone else is bored too.

We use ourselves as a proxy for the audience we want to visit this site. This is reasonable, because we were the type of founder we like to invest in.

It may sound presumptuous to use yourself as a proxy for the audience, but this is how a lot of good things came about: the Porsche 356, the Apple II, Google.
About finding people to sign up...

First off, if you happen to live near a big college, maybe you could plaster up some fliers, like, "Schedule your next party or club get-together at groupomatic.com!" I know when I was at college, I would have appreciated knowing where the parties were at, finding out the the school had an anime club, etc., in some other fashion the stopping to read every flier on every notice board I passed on the off chance something was there I'd be interested in. Maybe you could work something out with whatever department oversees student activities / clubs?

*Edit: Also, what about communities that are known for get togethers of most likely not necessarily wealthy people (the folks you are trying to poach from meetup)? Off the top of my head...LUGs, Demo Sceners, Furries, Flash Mobbers, Movie Fans (how cool would it be to arrange for a bunch of serious movie fans to all hit the same theater early so the place would be full of people who know better than to be obnoxious?), Gamers (LAN Parties, etc.). These types of folks often have forums with get-together sections or 'advertising' sections you could use. The draw is for cases where either a) the community is spread over many forums (they could all centralize on you for get-togethers) or b) members of multiple groups (say, gamers who are also interested in Linux).

Just my random thoughts.
the article is old! 2001
I don't know how it will turn out, but I think reddit worked out really well. It's no longer a hacker news site, but that's not really a bad thing. It's a great service for a lot of people. Honestly, the extistence of reddit and programming.reddit means a lot of people already have fine places to be.

news.yc and reddit are both young, even in internet time. New members are important, and any forum must adapt to stay relevant.
I think this will still be about making startups better, except in the sense that "better" doesn't always mean short-term present-day details.
A whole lotta Emacs Lisp files
Why do most social networks make it so hard to move from viewing one friend to the next?
I remember reading that the officials he was surrounded with were mostly taller than he was, so he looked short relative to tall people.
I think short also because it can take a life time to master this subject and the author probably feels that there is much more to discuss than he has covered.
"Don't use web standards because Jeffrey Zeldman told you to," Blueprint's class names are OK
This could be your fate if you don't do a startup
welcome to the crushing grind of mediocrity, yahoo! style.
Greetings from Idiot America
Dean,

1. This site hasn't stopped being about startups.

2. Lots of people are bored with just reading about startups. Because beyond a point you need new material to spark interesting thoughts. Like many others here I am an entrepreneur for over 3 years and am now working on a web startup idea myself. I find stories such as #3, #5 and #6 useful - they contribute directly to my goals. Remember what stays on top is still decided by the people. And we won't go down the 'digg' path unless the audience that submits and votes changes - which is a problem I am certain PG is aware of and he has made references to some solutions that he is trying to put in place for keeping the stories interesting.

3. I have found that I find stories that PG submits interesting. As long as that is true he is a good measure for the typical audience.

4. Finally between stimulus and response I have freedom of choice. I will up vote only stories I like and I think that might be a great way to participate in the content.

Thoughts??
I agree with the change. After a while, all the startup articles sound exactly the same. 10 tips for starting a startup...10 tips for dealing with VCs...what it takes to succeed...
This is the kind of thing nobody would believe if you made it up. Nature is always more interesting than we imagined.

"Queerer than we can suppose."
PayPal fees for dummies
give me 2 ounces of whatever he's smoking...

seriously ... hole diggers? are you serious?!?
I figure old spam should work.

On a side note, how many people are making spam-filtering startups?
this article is like that idea I get just before I wake up or as i'm soaping my ass in the shower and think it's brilliant. Then I think about it for oh ... maybe a few hours and realize I was a big idiot for even beginning to think that I understood the concepts involved.

I then usually eat a sandwich
It said short + comprehensive.

Each one of those sections could probably fill a book if you wanted to go into detail citing examples, explaining concepts thoroughly, clarifying ambiguities, debunking other theories, and such.
Pdf version here: http://samizdat.mines.edu/howto/HowToBeAProgrammer.pdf
I'm not sure whether the effectiveness of the federal contracting model can be accurately compared against a start-up, but here goes.

My paying job is that of a systems engineer and it is my responsibility to keep track of meeting customer needs against cost and schedule. This being said, part of my work is to correctly capture customer needs and then make sure that the development and environment teams are able to architect and design according to specs. From a business standpoint, this dual team environment is effective in that the company for whom I work continues to win contracts because the customer's needs are met.

I think the arrangement where the founders are not currently developers would be equally effective as a team of developers as long as they are able to accurately capture and understand their customer's needs prior to the start of coding.
Voted up for the words "Tests with robotic squirrels".

Too bad I never had that much fun in my hardware labs at university.
As long as you can block out "xbox 360 halo level 3 mods/secret code" type posts I welcome the delta.
news.ycombinator meetup - Cambridge, MA 
We did a news.ycombinator.com meetup this past June and the turnout was great. Let's do another. It would be great to have a mix of summer ycombinator startups and people thinking of applying this October.

For a time/place, how about:
Sunday, August 19th at 7 PM
1369 Coffee House in Central Square
757 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02139

Leave a comment if you are interested.
Citrix buys Xensource
Citrix has signed a definitive agreement to acquire XenSource in an acquisition expected to close in Q4, 2007. XenSource will become the core of a new division within Citrix focused on virtualization and management solutions.
And I totally agree (that hackerly founders want to read about more than just startups); that's why I'm still here. I just took exception to the strong language of calling anything that you decide to do with your site a "disservice".

I don't know, maybe a big part of it is that I've been reading Atlas Shrugged lately (in my opinion, the most important work of modern fiction), and seeing several parallels between the characters in the book and people in our society today. So many people feel a righteous entitlement to things that they did not build, and calling this site a disservice just rubbed me the wrong way.

I think that users have a right to express their opinion, but not to denounce a choice that is made. The beauty of freedom and capitalism is that if you don't like something, you're not forced to endure it. To try to make someone feel guilty (or obligated in some way) for something they have built, rather than just ignoring it, is quite possibly one of the worst infractions that one can commit against an individual.
Presumably the "best" post would be the one with the lowest rank.
Yes. By the above formula, everything would have a rank of zero when it was first posted.
Anyone acquainted with the MIT Enterprise Forum?
The Cambridge chapter labels all of its networking events as "members only" and membership starts at $75/year. Expecting people to pay for the privilege of meeting each other seems like a yellow flag, but if the forum actually attracts smart people then it's worth the price. Has anyone here been to any of their meetings? What's your opinion of them?
If you exclude everything with 0 votes, since you can't divide by 0 anyway, it might work.
Galvanized is definitely the most positive way to read into it. This wasn't a fun project by the developers. This was for the executives who were torturing the developers like cats do mice. One smart developer put a ball of yarn out to keep the cats busy long enough to get the cheese.

This was a hack for their crappy executive problem. Exactly what you can avoid on your own projects. I totally agree side projects can be a good for motivation, but it's probably a bad sign if it's necessary to the life of the project.
My partner and I will be there. Sounds great.
My experience is a few years old, but it probably hasn't changed much. It really depends what you are looking for. The enterprise forum in general is more on the business side than the hacker side, in my experience. I never really made any great connections there, but that may just be me being too introverted. Note that there is also the free e-club (http://web.mit.edu/e-club/) and the free 100K competition (http://www.mit100k.org/) at MIT.
And just to put a name to the audience, I'm very happy to see this change. I was getting bored of the links, and really this site is about hackers making things in startups. More than academia or open source projects, I think the natural home of the hacker is the startup.
Put yourself in their shoes. If you had a choice between making people happy on a web forum and doing what you think is best for your StartUp, which would you choose?

There are cases where StealthMode makes sense, right? Without knowing what they're doing, it'd be hard to give a good reason why they shouldn't be in StealthMode.
Chess match unveils underlying widespread belief in a soul
Thanks for the link to the e-club. That smells a lot better to me.
Did anyone else's mind jump to The Seventh Seal after seeing this headline?
You can't have had a news.yc meetup last June. The site wasn't launched till Feb.
Social design for social media companies
I'm saving a screenshot of this comment before Paul drinks his coffee and looks at it again.
Ari Gold of Video Games: Entrepreneurship Opportunity
Many of us watch Entourage, the hit HBO show. Who wants to be the Ari Gold of the video game world?
ok I changed it to say "this past june" instead of "last June" :-)
For email spam - http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~gvcormac/treccorpus/

For web spam - http://www-static.cc.gatech.edu/projects/doi/WebbSpamCorpus....
Hey Bokonist,

This sounds great. I was actually planning on getting this organized myself but wanted to give the teams some time to cool off after Demo Day.

If you need any help organizing let me know (see profile). Jessica said she'd try to drop in so I'll let her know that a time has been decided. I also have the email list from the last meet-up and would be more than happy to pass that along.
I'm new but is it part of the system to not allow new users the ability to down-vote?

I like the idea of actually using the karma instead of just having karma for karma's sake.
How JavaScript is Slowing Down the Web (And What To Do About It)
(I forgot to mention) I'm in. I'll probably drop in early to do some hacking in the coffee shop so if anyone wants to just chill and code, let me know.

Also, could the people attending tell us about themselves? It'd be great to see what kind of crowd we're going to get this time!
iJustine (from justin.tv) on front page of Yahoo
Why the iPhone doesn't have copy+paste
How many folks from this round are still in Boston?
Javascript or Flash Widgets debate. Help me choose what to use.
What are your thoughts, tips, and/or best practices for either?