skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This information is pretty unsurprising. That said, I think Nielson is discounting to some degree the effect of good typography/page layout in this discussion.

Pages that are designed well will focus the attention of the audience on the content being delivered. Note that the users also aren't looking at other things that seem to be accessory, like the navigation panes. In the end, though, that's just another argument to try to blend ads into the content area of the site, ethical or not.
Sometimes "a routine software update" means "not a routine software update."
SEO for Wordpress
I'm in BCN. Think we might be the only two, or ..... :-)
Interesting. Wouldn't most user's have a portable music player? If so, why would users go to the site to listen to their uploaded music? From a listener standpoint, the fun is in exploring other people's music.

There really are two user roles at Anywhere.fm, the "inner DJ" and the "music consumer". The 1.4 million songs shows that they've been successful at making the "share your music" process easy. The more important statistic is how many people actually listen to any of the stations.
I've always read and enjoyed Steve's posts, but here he comes off smug (despite the self-depricating jokes) as if he's summoning enlightment for the audience, when the talk is simply obtuse. Is a trademark necessary? Hardly. You can call something 'free' and yet try to charge for it. No one needs to trademark the word 'free' to protect it. In the same way, if some companies are using the 'open source' moniker without releasing their source, it will become quickly evident to the customer.

Could there be a certification based on a set of standards? Sure. What that would look like is a great topic. But simply a lecture on basic marketing concepts is embarrassing and I think when Steve looks back on this video, it will be with a wince. (In his defence, I'm glad no one has had a camera around during any one of my numerous embarrassments.
Pitching VCs: The Investment Overview Slide
There are lots of 'one size fits all' strategies for pitching VCs. I have heard of everything from using consulting frameworks (e.g., 4 Ps) to the Fabulous 14.

The problem is that I've been in few meetings where an entrepreneur has been able to run through their presentation from start to finish.
Submissions on these topics does not bother me provided that they are about something that I did not see/consider before and they do not completely dominate the front page.
Can we predict the future using a temporal version of the Copernican principle? [pdf]
Here's the New Yorker article mentioned in the paper:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1999/07/12/1999_07_12_035_T...
The value of news.yc is the input of pg and the other moderators. Without them, news.yc is just another reddit.
Or use the MaxMind Geolite City database
I was very much hoping for the response to be a more active user base. At least then the community would still be some-what close to providing the wanted dialogue, as most users have been here for a few months already and there is some sort of community agreement on what constitutes a 'good' post. With a greater influx of new users the posting quality will probably go down, if not for the time it takes to grow accustomed to the social agreements on communication on the site. During this time, will we lose valued, long term members of the community? What is a decent solution to the problem of online community degrade?
Climate change is one of Rupert Murdoch's pet projects. The motivation for this article is nothing more than a positive performance review for David Byers.

Consider the first line "America's top scientists have admitted that the calculations ... were flawed" It's phrased as though the scientists were activly hiding the truth, pushing some secret agenda, rather than making a mistake. Line 2, "Climatologists ... have been forced to revise their estimations". what? at gunpoint?

Science is great because of objectivity. Any random guy can point out mistakes, and "Climatologists at Nasa's Goddard Institute of Space Science" will listen to him. The timesonline is nowhere near objective. Beware this article as a source, Its internal bias will mess with your ability to consider the quality of evidence.
When is the last time someone launched a massively successful attack like the one on Skype without claiming credit for it?

Napoleon once said, "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."
Skype: "It's Microsoft and Your Fault"
seeqpod makes more since to me.
http://www.seeqpod.com
Hacker Space Design Patterns (pdf presentation)
This being a bit of a geek site, I'd thought they were actually referring to this: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/10/27/880411....
Billionaire Strategies for Industry Dominance
How tycoons amassed their wealth and power.
What makes you think that whoever launched this attack against Skype (assuming that it was an attack) hasn't taken credit for it? Denial of service extortion (historically, most often against online gambling websites) is a thriving business; but you don't need to take credit publicly to get paid. There's also the possibility of profitting from Skype's outage without even taking credit privately, simply by using the advance knowledge that an attack will take place to make profitable trades on the stock market.
heh, here in michigan we get um, snow, the occasional freezing rain. But we're pretty much eventless (somehow attributable to the water around us i think)
Google's growth has come at a price
What is it that makes a college course Best Class Ever?
They aren't prepared for Windows updates? That doesn't sound right at all. Frankly they need to own up to the error and stop blaming others.
Even the Office 2007 box has a learning curve
You can. Go to your preferences, click on 'friends', and add the nicknames of all the posters you like. Then go to friends.reddit.com, and you'll only see submissions from those people. This feature came out about a half a year ago, IIRC.
Django running on the iPhone, introspecting the phone's sqlite call records
Let me recommend a friend of mine: http://phillipridlen.com/
UPA Boston Sept mtg - Client Side Story: Making Ajax, RIAs, and Browser-side Intelligence Usable
Just launched my new site: webmapp.com
social news with a local focus
Right - I'm aware of telecom (I worked for a telecom when I lived there), but I mean does anyone know of interesting startups, web 2.0 or otherwise?
Any details on how this was accomplished?
Anybody here know a good DNS service provider?
Hi guys do any of you know of a good DNS service provider? Aside from GoDaddy.com are there any alternatives? recommendations please thanks.

edit
Whoops sorry I meant domain name registrar.
$10,000 Platform Hack off
Win $10,000 for the application that gets the most users after 24 hours.
Sounds like someone is confusing "ERP" (Enterprise Resource Planning) applications, which are successfully running millions of businesses with "ERP", the gargantuan garbage thrust upon fortune 500 companies by SAP, Oracle, and other bandits. The end of the first "ERP" (accounting, inventory, sales, marketing,...)? Hardly. The end of the second "ERP"? It's inevitable. Clearly, Web 2.0 is the next generation for many types of applications, including business. This is an argument in semantics. Nothing new here. Move along.
I think the way it works is that really good insulation makes the temperature more uniform. With poor insulation, it may be 65 at the thermostat, but only 60 near an exterior wall.
You mentioned GoDaddy, but do you mean provider or registrar? If the latter, try OpenDNS - www.opendns.com (at least I think that's the address; I'm on my phone so can only have one window open at a time)
I'm guessing he installed iPhone toolchain: http://iphone.fiveforty.net/wiki/index.php/Toolchain_Project
I see. So the Skype PR team was sitting around, possibly even delaying the relaunch...

- Harp plays, scene fades in -

"Neil, what's going on with the spin? We need that spin! We've just finished hiding the build numbers. Marketing has never been happier, so we can't afford anyone to know that we've been attacked now!" yelled Niklas, his ears flattening against his head. Being Supreme Skype Commander was hard work, and it was not made easier by this doofus from PR.

Neil glanced back, mildly annoyed. "I'm workin' on it, I'm workin' on it. Okay, hey, guys, a meteor. No wait, Velociraptors. Damn, no.."

They were all huddled in the conference room. Management had commanded them to stay late two days in a row now, until 6 PM. No one wanted to stay an hour late another day.

Suddenly, Tamma burst in. "I've got it! There was a windows update! It happened to coincide with the attack. We're saved!"

Everyone cheered, picking Tamma up and carrying her high in the air. Neil remained seated, slumped, head down.

"I still liked the Velociraptors.." he mumbled.

"Me TOO!" It came from behind him.

Neil had just enough time to turn around and scream in shock and horror before the Velociraptor jumped on him.

- Harp plays again, scene fades out -

I'm thinking no.
I suppose this means case closed. If you don't want to avoid these topics, then I guess there is no avoiding them and I am wasting my time arguing the other way. If not, then what would it take--a site wide poll with overwhelming participation and an overwhelming majority?

Turns out, I agree with both of your premises, but just not the conclusion. Sure, the smartest people are willing to change their minds about anything. I'm not saying I'm the smartest person, but I am certainly willing to change my mind about anything. And sure, there are new things to say about age-old topics. There are great political science and religious studies PhD theses and other papers produced each year.

All that being said, I still don't want to see that type of discussion on news.yc. Again, this is just my opinion. I guess I'll just have to put up with it or leave.
I use everydns.net - it's free.

If you mean registrar, I went through google. $10 gets you a .com, plus their web apps for the domain you register, which is a pretty good deal.
I'm not clear on whether you mean recursive DNS servers, a DNS registrar, or a BIND host. Regardless: OpenDNS, Register4Less, and DynDNS's Custom DNS service, respectively.
The key to getting positive insights out of controversial topics is to raise quality of the discussions rather than to censor them. My instinct was to agree with epi0Bauqu but one of the few stories I've upvoted after reading in the past day concerned both religion and politics [1]. This contradiction had been bothering me. But the situation is much more clear to me now.

An important goal for a community like this is to minimize or eliminate low quality, frustrating patterns of discussion. One can eliminate such patterns by censoring the topics that often lead to the discussions or by changing the culture of the group so that the problematic discussions are minimized.

The posting of libertarian/socialist/etc. aphorisms under the guise of an economic discussion should be discouraged. A relevant aspect of economics is that most interesting economic discussions rely on mathematics or at least a qualitative reference to a mathematical argument. If an intense economic discussion lacks such references it is almost certainly a low quality discussion.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44184
Do users pay for space? Will it be ad-supported?
Anything gaming related (Playstation, Xbox etc.). Doing a gaming startup? Fine, post. Found some crack codes or new screen shots, karma should be put under assault by everyone.
for itunes users who have a big music library, i find Simplify Media much easier. www.simplifymedia.com
"a site wide poll with overwhelming participation and an overwhelming majority?"

This is implicit with the modding process. If an overwhelming majority don't upmod politics and religion, then they won't make it to the front page often.
Hahahah -breath- hahahahah

Ultimate justice for the evil default setting "Start and connect on boot".
As a law student, I can attest to the fact that a great deal of Westlaw's value comes from the content they add. However, almost all of that value is derived from the texts of the cases themselves (in fact, all of it other than the search engine - which is fantastic compared to the alternatives [see findlaw.com another West product]). Westlaw provides overall synopses of cases, brief summaries of a case's points of law, and the ability to easily see any cases that cite the one you are reading (and if they do so positively or negatively).

Aside from the search engine, I wonder if most of this couldn't be replicated by some sort of a wiki. Given a complete collection of the texts and enough knowledgeable, willing volunteers - could Westlaw be replicated?
If the latter, I've been pretty happy with xname.org. Only complaint is that you can't publish SRV records.
It's not 'censorship', it' focus, although once we lost that, it becomes harder to say "this doesn't belong".

The problem is that initial results point to low quality discussions. Let me see if I can reference some:

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44201 - acting on global warming likened to communism, voted up

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43822 - random conjecture about political parties, voted up

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43891 sensationalist take (criminalizing information! plutocrats!) on admittedly problematic aspects of our society, voted up. This one's not so bad, but it still sets my hyperbole detector off.

- Random knee jerk libertarianism on other threads.

And those were ones that I noticed, that had been voted up. There have been more that thankfully have not been voted up.
The more an ad looks like a native site component, the more users will look at it

For all his wacky buildup about the ethics of disclosing such a fact this was a pretty sorry payoff. It is exactly what I would predict from the results of such a study. For something to be insidious enough to consider not telling the public about it I would expect it to at least be both born out by empirical evidence AND counter-intuitive.
Google Disconnects Grand Central Customers
Bucket Explorer, Bringing S3 Storage To The Masses
Why Use A Database Instead Of ____?
I think the overwhelming majority simply can't help but jump in with their two cents in a discussion about politics or religion... which is exactly why, overall, I'd rather avoid such discussions entirely. The signal-to-noise ratio is rarely worth it.
It's an attention grabbing title, certainly, but he does talk about a different architecture for the applications. Not in detail, but it's worth a quick look.
Rich Skrenta: Some thoughts on Mahalo (Building a content business with SEO)
OwnTerms: Creative Commons-licensed stock legal documents
Heh, I actually agree with your basic premise that it is better to make detailed and incremental tweaks than use the blunt instrument of wholesale censorship. This whole argument is somewhat ironic too because I like policy discussions and at least once enjoyed religious ones. (After all, I went out and earned a masters degree in Technology & Policy on my own volition and have written religious articles.)

What it comes down to for me, is that I am just heavily skeptical that raising the quality of these discussions to an acceptably interesting level in a relatively open online forum can be done, and so I have been advocating censorship instead. I hope I am wrong.
"Why is firefox blocked?" Hacked!
Prediction: Newspapers will go bankrupt in 2007, unless they corner web classifieds by 1998
Living near Si Valley but with lower living expenses?
I have been thinking about trying to locate to Sacremento in the hopes of being close to Silicon Valley but being able to afford to live. Are there good startup opportunities in places like these?
I can't find any content in my area (Toronto).

The site also feels too slow to use regularly.

But first and foremost, a simple sentence explaining the purpose of the website would do wonders for usability.
Sacramento is relatively close, but if you really want to be involved in the startup community, San Francisco is a much better choice.

Sacramento is far enough away to make you think twice about attending all the cool events that happen in San Francisco and Palo Alto and Mountain View.
The Gut Instinct Equation
Site is down. Is this the first YC.news effect?

Semi-related question: What do large companies use for accounting software? My day-job company seems to be outgrowing QuickBooks and I have no idea what to reccomend to them.
Fears of Mortgage Fallout May Hit Online Advertising
Idiots In The Box: Building B Gets $17.5 Million Funding For Converged TV Box
This seems slightly fishy. How can an event that's just announced claim to have 300 people coming?
Scientists: Artificial life likely in 3 to 10 years
it's a social news site with a very local focus.

alex_c - all the content is user submitted and it's only been up a few hours so check back later... ?
"But them getting out and taking over, never in our imagination could this happen."

That's comforting.
This could be cool. We previously had some discussion about this over here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37112
We are expecting to have around 300 people attend.
He said "many newspapers." And he is not far off. Newspaper ad revenues peaked in 2000.

http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.org/2007/narrative_newspapers...

The surprising thing to me is that they have any classified ad revenue left. This suggests there are still opportunities for startups to take more away from them.
You may want to consider finding a location near public transportation; e.g. Pittburg near the BART. That way you can live outside SF affordably but BART into events; http://bart.gov/stations/map/systemMap.asp
I'd be interested in hearing trends about text-ad blindness. I know I look at and click adwords ads (and adsense ads) a LOT less than I did when they first came available... Especially since Google sold out their ad relevancy and allowed wildcard purchases or unrelated purchases (like ebay showing up on virtually every search with a "find SearchQuery and More at Ebay!!1!!1!"
In 2000, Google changed the premise behind this prediction, that advertising generally doesn't work on the Web.

The bigger problem with his prediction is that newspaper companies rarely go bankrupt. They get acquired.

He was right on the money that newspapers had a small window to keep hold of classified advertising. They missed that window; craigslist and ebay took over.

Also, he was right that newspaper companies are generally hurting in 2007.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/departments/business...
you are only there when you have users and/or customers
Facebook Messaging just got better... Facebook lets you send messages direct to email addresses
Do you have no life because you work in a startup or...
... do you work in a startup because you have no life?
10 Ways to Become a Media Favorite
I got mine from Yahoo! Small Business a couple years ago when they had a $3/year deal. I haven't seen anything like that recently. They seem to be a good registrar; the only thing I've wanted to do that I wasn't allowed was subdomain forwarding.
How to promote yourself and your business with confidence
i create life working with my startup
All great products have mantras
If you want the stats for YC, you can look them up on Alexa:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=http%3...
Spammers rejoice!
yes, i use Yahoo that made it hassel free
I gave this a try and it's not what I hoped for. You have to hit a reply button inside the email in order to respond or see attachements. I was hoping facebook would stop linking back to the site and let you reply to the email itself.
I guess they felt pressured by Xobni's plugin.
This is going to serve as a lesson on how not to communicate a screw up to your customers in the modern age.

What could have simply been, "we screwed up, we're sorry" is now going to be talked about not only in terms of the event, but the poor communication strategy.

tsk tsk skype.
There are a lot of neighborhoods in the Bay Area. They are not all expensive.
Is there something like this anywhere in the US? This sounds really great, but I've never heard of anything like it outside of a university..
re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update

I guess the title is ironic, but I was absolutely shocked when I first encountered Window's habit of voluntarily updating itself and rebooting. Of course, I've worked in manufacturing environments, and just the thought of equipment rebooting automatically...[shudder]

For some reason, no one else seemed to think it was a big deal--of course, as long as Windows isn't used for critical systems, who cares? Needless to say, Skype is doing just that.

What can go wrong will. Nothing new.
Getting more out of 'find' command
why the question ?
As per dnScoop ( http://dnscoop.com/?site=www.ycombinator.com ): The estimated value of http://www.ycombinator.com is: $2,231,230

This value is calculated based on several factors shown above, including: Links, Traffic (Alexa), age of the domain, site category, domain keyword popularity, and overall occurrences of the domain name on the web.
i dont understand why people are giving skype such a bad time. they have been quite honest (technically) about what happened - a bug got exposed by some really really extreme workload. Also, whoever thinks that they should have "modeled" this has no idea how hard it is to develop distributed systems. It's a fine ideal to have, but in practice it is ridiculously hard to achieve. Especially as the code evolves. What you need is the same code base being able to run on a real TCP/IP stack and in a simulated environment. This looks easy in the abstract, but it's really tricky to do in practice.
Never mind that keeping conversations inside facebook is what keeps facebook nerwork active and running. The moment proper emailing happens outside, facebook is dead.
Supposedly competent people trade billions of dollars daily based on models without looking beyond possible disruptions a few perceived standard deviations out. Heck, some hardy souls even drive across Minnesota bridges without much prior modeling. 4 years of smooth sailing before a major crash have been quite profitable for Skype, and has given them the resources to allegedly fix this problem, and the mindshare and market penetration to survive it.

Is there any good reason why MS couldn't spread their default auto reboot times out a bit? Or could the Skype installer request it randomly changed? I'm not really all that familiar with Skype or network security. Could such staggered reboots for example allow attackers to look at fixes early and launch a quick attack, hence be unacceptable to MS? If not, it sure seems like they would make life a lot easier on realtime P2P networks dependent on consumer desktop availability.

Also, any company being dishonest about technical matters is soon left with only incompetent tech people. So if Skype is dishonest, they are likely incompetent as well.
This quote from the article seems especially apropos to the web, where people judge a site quickly, and will likely never return regardless of what future improvements you make:

"If one part of your company's image still needs major work, fix it before you start the promotional effort. It's said a lot because it's true: You only get one chance to make a first impression."
How To: Install Apps on Your iPhone Easily, No Hacking Skills Required