skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We may be on a slippery slope, but we're not quickly approaching one. Editors have fixed titles from day 1.

I think the best plan is just to make it policy that submission titles have a different status from comments. They have to, because all the users have to share the same title for each link.
You can't "guess" any better than flipping a coin when it comes to funding research. They laughed at Bill Gates when he said he wanted control of the software. I think there is room for improvement (which there is for everything) in the funding of research but to call it worthless just because there isn't a direct need or use for something is itself worthless. Any kind of knowledge is useful, no matter what.
I don't think he meant what you think he meant by "clean".
That's a pretty naive analysis of the situation. A good Facebook app isn't just some functionality shoved into boxes on people's profiles and canvas pages. You actually have to integrate with the site to make it useful.

Any site that does anything remotely social already has it's own friend relationships to help manage that. Putting such a site's functionality into a Facebook app is never going to be as simple as copy and pasting, and if your site isn't social enough to have already necessitated its own friend feature, it's not going to be social enough add any utility as a Facebook app.

"Right now, most of the widgets that are out there are an attempt to squeeze the elements of a service into a neat little sidebar rectangle--a bottleneck created by one-way APIs, limited space, and underwhelming goals."

How does his solution solve that?
My reasoning for London:

Lots of Big Co's have offices here such as Google, Yahoo, BBC, Skype, etc

Lots of great startups: Last.fm, Moo, Crowdstorm, Mind Candy, Gottabet, etc

Some great universities: Imperial, RCA, near to Oxford & Cambridge

Good VCs: Index Ventures, Accel, Atlas plus Seedcamp

Plenty of events: Ranging from weekly openCoffee's to big barcamps and Hackday and conferences like Future of Web Apps. Last nights Facebook Developer Garage pulled in 200 or so.
I'm not sure I understand that explanation.

So we share the same title for each link (yes, we do), but we see different comments?

No, we don't: if there's a ridiculous/obnoxious/puerile/etc. comment posted, we all share that, too.

Why should the editing policy for titles be different from comments?
Probably the best solution is to have a "posted by" (editor name) and a "submitted by" (user name) like Slashdot. Alternatively, an "edited by" tag added to anything changed after submission.
The benefits of a robust, frictionless OpenID/reg solution probably outweigh competitive concerns for most people (on here, at least). Sometimes the potential benefits of cooperation outweigh the risks.

It would really help if a big player made a commitment to OpenID, but I'm not sure that's the only way it could catch on. If tons of smaller players could come together on a wrap-type system, we might eventually force the big fish to adopt it via pressure from the margins. It could happpen, it's a very compelling technology in a lot of ways. It would have to be really, really well-designed - that's key. I think it's do-able.

That being said, I want to see what YC-funded clickpass.com is like before I go crazy on some big new effort. If they have a killer solution I may just use that. Also, I doubt YC would appreciate it too much if I start an open-source competitor to one of their companies on hacker news.
He may have meant that different users should give a specific submission the same title, one without spelling mistakes and bias. So if a user titles a submission with spelling mistakes or bias then it would be reasonable to edit the title to the correct form.
This paints all VCs as moronic and unethical-- that just isn't the case all the time...

The list of consumer startups who have taken zero VC dollars is pretty damn short...
Goodbye, Hacker News. I'm going back to Reddit.
It was worth putting up with the sycophancy of many of the commenters here who seem to participate only to impress PG, their would-be benefactor...for a while. It was worth it while the stories focused on the niche we are all interested in, startups. The change to more general-purpose news, the attempt to re-create the Reddit of old, seemed to be made without first asking the overall community for input (unlike the way that Craig Newmark makes all changes to Craig's List, for example). Although it has apparently been going on all along, this title-censoring thing is, for me, the final straw. Yes, Reddit has been overrun by the unwashed masses. It has become messy in the way that democracy itself is messy. But this site is getting the feeling of an artificially sterile place for tech elites as defined by PG and his minions. So I'm going back to the unwashed masses, even if it means having to read a few more titles about cat pictures. Best of luck, though, PG, and thanks for the great information this site has given me thus far. I will continue to follow your impressive career and your essays with great interest.

PS, Editors, feel free to change my title to "Hacker News Rocks!"
Jive Software raises $15M, takes on Microsoft in Web 2.0 office
A few people at either extreme wouldn't make the median go anywhere, that's the whole idea of using median instead of arithmetic mean.

Probably this explains the difference between genders: say three women have 1,5 and 9 partners, while three men have 0,0 and 15 partners, the means are 5 in both cases, but the medians 5 vs. 0.
Wait, what? Dude, a story that's submitted should be titled the same regardless of who submits the story. The only variance in titles should be mere semantics. Any extra information in the title only adds bias or spelling/grammar mistakes. Therefore, editing a title to its correct form is just fine. Relax.

But if you can't relax, goodbye. If this thread title is any indication, you produce great Reddit/Digg titles.

I hope Paul changes "title: " to "suggest a title: " on the submission page so people realize it's not their title. They didn't produce the content, and if they did then the editors aren't retitle it.
The Power of Good UI Design
I'm putting together a simple forum right now.
I did make Group-O-Matic :). Seriously though, it's free, and I started a Philadelphia hackathon group that is working well so far. bmaier, will you at least give it a try?
Wow, and suddenly I realized how much it must suck to be an editor...
Thing is, Reddit really sucks now. I was just visiting it today and was amazed by the number of ignoranuses (ignoranus = someone who is both stupid and an asshole) on it.

I wonder if this is the eventual fate of all online communities. I've been through at least half a dozen now, and I've yet to see one survive as something other than trite, meaningless bullshit.

The curious thing is - in at least one case (HP fandom, and possibly the C2 wiki), I kept the friendships that I formed in it. Maybe that's the real point of online communities - form offline friendships, and keep those.

Looking forward to the Boston meetup on Sunday...
I actually think this is sort of a dumb argument to get into in the first place, but you have to admit that not letting the original submitters to own their titles (when you allow them to own the resulting karma) is kind of inconsistent.

Ultimately, though, this sort of user revolt is bound to happen whenever you make major changes to how a community works. I think news.yc'll make it with or without the people who are pissed.
".. not letting the original submitters to own their titles (when you allow them to own their resulting karma) is kind of inconsistent."

I don't see how a user owns a title to content they didn't produce. If they produced it, the editors won't change it.

You get karma for bringing quality content to other people's attention, not for calling the content something it isn't.
What's the expression? The politics are so bad because the stakes are so low?
Ok, a forum is set up for now at http://www.geekchicago.com/talk
the geekchicago.com site itself is not complete yet but the forum is working, lets talk there.
A bikeshed (from a discussion on the FreeBSD mailing list -- see http://www.bikeshed.com/).
Also, Reddit doesn't have as much meaningless drama. As of right now, anyway.
It somehow felt a lot better IMO when it was "Startup News"
love the newly coined word and its etymology :)
I understand the idea, that creating a clone isn't the way to go. But I think their is nothing wrong with trying to solve the same problem. With the ipod, Apple realized that like with the mobile phone, how it looks is much more important than how much space it has. I bought the first generation ipod. I remember a guy stopping me on a train station and wanting to try it out. We talked about it for a bit, he loved it, didn't care how much it cost. Unfortunately for him it didn't work with Windows. When Apple fixed that everything changed. The rest of the products on the market are just not good enough with respect to the ipod in terms of looks.
Help me build a Top 10 Facebook App
I'm pretty sure this app will have many millions of users. It incorporates video-game-like elements and involves strategic competition which will keep users coming back.

I will take care of the front-end design and securing advertising.

Willing to split equity 50-50.

Email me if you're interested.
Just wait until the next impeachment petition.
Wireless Seed Stage Forum: Seed Funding for Wireless Start-ups
A rising tide lifts all boats; the importance of market selection A
I don't see any reason to choose between ynews and reddit. The level of technical dialogue here is better, no question -- and for awesome lolcats and social interest anecdotes, like http://politics.reddit.com/goto?id=2g6mu, there's reddit.
But that's solving a problem we don't have yet? I think this particular uproar is the liveliest discussion we've had on news.yc and even this isn't terribly exciting.
I second that, but I think editors want to stay anonymous. Just adding an asterisk next to edited titles would be sufficient.
I really liked the fact that YCombinator news was a niche site and I often wonder if the future of these sosial news sites is not having every category on a different site to deal with the signal vs noise factor...
Brad Fitzpatrick's Thoughts on the Social Graph
Why not create www.startupnews.com? If you want the code, google 'reddit clone'. I think the lisp community wrote atleast a dozen reddit clones after reddit switched from lisp to python.

I say this because a lot of people have a problem with the change from a startup focused to a hacker focused site.

Since you already have a community which is united around a common vision, it's probably worth acting now and create another site.

The lisp hackers did a similar thing when reddit moved from lisp to python. For some reason they thought that reddit was only for lisp hackers. BTW, I don't think that worked as most lisp hackers were already active on cll or #lisp
I really don't like the advice for #7 (bloggers do not own user generated content). Not necessarily that he's making it, it's just not the way it should be.

If I posted an essay in this comment, it should be up to me to save a copy of the work. Ycombinator should not have to make me agree to give up rights, the relevant rights should be given up automatically by the fact that I donated a copy of the work to store on their servers.
I have two recommendations:

1. Have patience.

2. Be a part of the solution.
talk about sycophancy
I'm interested and should be able to make it.
Hot links are great for discussion as many people will see them. But perhaps not many will interest you.

Personalized links (assuming personalization works well) would come closer to your interests, but there may be few people to discuss them with.

And so one might consider a way to allow users to pick some point between these two extremes that they would be happy with.
No, that's not the ubermensch mentality -- I'm talking about folks who think they've found the ubermensch. (Usually, the ubermensch is white.)
Paul Hsieh: Misconceptions about rand().
I would add a third objective:

To make sure you like the investor, and they would bring useful skills, contacts, and advice to your company.

This article assumes that going into the meeting you already know you want this VC to invest in you. You can have a pretty good idea of that by looking at their portfolio and asking around among people who've taken money from them, but personalities matter.
It looks to me like the (alleged) TripAdvisor purchase was first discussed at AppDevCon (a gathering of Facebook developers, entrepreneurs, and investors hosted by SocialMedia) on 8/15. This discussion took place before Inside Facebook wrote up the "Biggest Facebook App Acquisition Yet" post.

Inside Facebook live-blogged the AppDevCon (http://www.insidefacebook.com/2007/08/15/live-from-appdevcon...) and @ 3:23 PM, they quote Naval Ravikant from Hitforge as saying "The value of a Facebook user is going up - at first users were being sold for $0.10, now it's $0.60-$0.70. TripAdvisor just bought Where I've Been for $1.50/user."

There's no indication that anyone who was there was shocked or surprised at this statement. Instead, it seemed like it was presented rather matter-of-factly, like it was common knowledge.
Just found this statement from Craig Ulliott (creator of the Where I've Been app) on news.com (http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9761584-7.html):

"There have been some rumors in the market that we have sold our business. These rumors are not true. Our future development plans, combined with our robust community of users, current growth rates, and the attractiveness of the travel vertical, have led to a number of strategic discussions with potential partners/acquirers, but we have not agreed to any deals and we are committed to building Where I've Been into a sustainable and profitable standalone business."
I still visit proggit regularly. Actually, that's how I found out about the change since I had stopped visiting "Startup News" for the same reasons pg changed it.
News.com now has a statement from Craig Ulliot confirming that the report is not true: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43676
You make a good point. Do we really own the titles? If we don't own it, then who does? The hacker news community, the editors? I guess if we don't then we need to change our mindsets. Is that why we can't delete the submissions we make?
Is PG butt kissing the "elephant in the room"?
Ah! technical dialogue! Now where did you see that here? ;P
The number of typical comments for a post determine what kind of people want to/are willing to comment:

0-10 comments: People who want to talk about the post per se

11-50 comments: People who want to have a conversation.

51- comments: People who want to join a mob.

Obviously, ynews is moving from the first to the second, and that changes the types of comments/people commenting/overall community.
Wha? You can delete your own submissions. Just yesterday I submitted the RMS earthquake story before nickb did, but then deleted it after reading the Reddit comments on the same story and seeing that it was inaccurate.
It's not actually mine. I read it in some newspaper article about neologisms, and it appears in several places on the web (including 17 urbandictionary references).
I read where the name you mentioned was effectively unusable because it previously belonged to a (um...) salacious enterprise. As a result, it's blocked in nearly all web content filters, which is a problem in lots of schools, workplaces, etc. Something to watch out for if you re-use a domain name...
Are We Failing Our Geniuses?
You can only delete/edit them for one hour after submission.
Since everyone will have weighted voting power, all you will have to do anyway to game the system is upvote anything with a lot of votes. Steadily build up your karma with this bandwagon method, and then bam spring some ad-infested blog spam upon everyone.
It is often tempting to substitute 'smug' with a word like 'satisfied', but we must resist this unnatural temptation.
Five Quick Suggestions to Improve Twitter
Michael Moritz: The house that Google, Yahoo, and YouTube built
LA Times Loses It Over Google
This can be accounted for by giving more weight to those who vote for a story early in its accumulation of points. The biggest voting power boost is given to someone who gives a story its first point.
Another tip: don't make important legal decisions based on advice from people who aren't lawyers.
Any idea on how traffic trends for news.yc are since the relaunch? Was traffic dropping before the change? Has it gone up after?
Ebay had(?) long scheduled downtime every Wednesday for maintenance. Pretty sad that a tech company could succumb to such mediocrity.
shouldnt this be on reddit. and not here?
:) Thanks
email Safire stat. Gotta get him on the case.
My mother is the director of gifted education in a major midwestern city's public school district. She doesn't believe in evolution.

There are quotas for minorities. Many otherwise qualified students are denied acceptance because their places are reserved. And not just a few... many.

Logistically, kids need to be bused from other schools, but transportation is uncooperative and the schools resent the hassle. There is also an additional bureaucratic and testing cost. These costs are in addition to running the programs themselves, but _these_ costs specifically antagonize other political entities in the school district.

And of course... unlike special ed, teachers resent busing away their best students. They fight over dumping the worst, of course.

Politically (within the district) gifted education is a career for pariahs. They create hassle for the "normal" (aka "real") teachers and they have no power to deter neglect or abuse. The teachers and staff in the department are paid less than require more education than "real" teachers. This drives away the best teaching talent and firmly entrenches the some least ambitious teachers within the department.

The curriculum is a petri dish of all sorts of inane pet political agendas. Especially in science and math, the teachers don't know the subjects themselves, so these subjects simply aren't taught beyond a pre-packaged lesson plan.

The consequence: the most qualified students leave the district (if they can.) Instead of integration, communities become more and more segregated. Fact is, if you don't "segregate" special resources for the best within a community, the best will leave. School districts only have incentives to reduce segregation with their local district. But segregation is inevitable, and failing to deal with it merely bubbles the segregation to higher levels.

Hence, I'm writing this from Silicon Valley and not the midwest.

Update

So nerd education is the nerd of education.

If you were a nerd in school, and you remember how _you_ were treated, doesn't that seem like a plausible extrapolation?
I rarely get involved in these sorts of discussions, and will continue by remaining neutral on this issue. However you've hit on my pet peeve - the 'slipery slope cliche' and so I cannot remain silent.
All of humankind's decisions lie somewhere on a slippery slope - the nature of being a human is making these kinds of choices. What makes us all so interesting is that we continue to live and function without falling down, and we trust each other to do the same. People really need to come up with stronger arguments without falling back on the 'it's a slippery slope' cliche. Every time I hear that phrase, I just want to reply with some other brilliant argument-ender like "now you're just comparing apples to oranges" or "that sounds like something Hitler would have said."
I think that's something Stalin would say.
Apple's next ad campaign?
Religious belief is orthogonal to the ability to teach well. You just have to leave beliefs out of it.
Assertion: The American K-12 school system is broken in huge ways. Let's talk about it!
1) Singularity is interesting because it changes what it means to be human. The idea of "machines enslaving us" suggests that people are thinking like movie plots: machines become "human-like" amid confused humans doomed as common everymen. What's more likely is that the modern human will become obsolete in the same way that the hunter-gather human has and the agrarian human is. Machines don't "enslave" us, they _become_ us.

2) How long until irresponsible birth is as egregious as irresponsible death?
The article is not about evolution.

I hope your mother has nothing to do with the science curriculum. This city wouldn't happen to be Kansas would it?
This sounds a lot like "I have this great idea, please build it and split the result with me 50/50". That doesn't work, sorry.
New SAT: Write Long, Badly and Prosper
Follows up the article below, on an academy for gifted children.
No kidding, when will people learn ideas are a dime a dozen and mostly worthless, it's execution of an idea that's valuable. Startups need do'ers, not idea people.
I am very disappointed at the editing. I understand if the user includes profanity or hate speech but nitpicking? It just seems like censorship when it doesn't need to be.
Doesn't need to be very formal. Just a little friendly transparency to avoid theses kinds of threads being repeated frequently.
I find those "idea guys" as annoying anyone but I think you guys are being overly critical here. He's saying he'll handle part of the technical work and part of the business end. He wants to carry his weight. Sounds like doing to me.
No kidding. Also:

Life Partners of Homosexuals Frequently Gay Themselves.
Maybe, but teach what?

Also, director means choosing curriculum and teacher selection.

And I'm not trying to derail the conversation, I'm suggesting anecdotal evidence about educational priorities (or lack of them) in public schools.
I have to respectfully disagree. He's saying he'll help with the front-end design and advertising. That's only the business part of it.

If you don't have technical ability, you really have to put your entire idea out there in detail to get help.
List of Lisp-based OSes
I think the art would be to stop people joining the site when it reaches an acceptable level of coolness.

Isn't this how Metafilter survives and maintains its excellent quality?
I think you might have misinterpreted his second point. He wasn't railing against the alerts per-se, but having them content free. It wouldn't be too much to ask for them to put an excerpt of the message in the email, but most sites refuse to do so to 'drive traffic'. (One of the sites I helped build is guilty of this too, so I shouldn't throw stones)
"And for reasons that no one understands, African Americans' IQ scores have tended to cluster about a standard deviation below the average--evidence for some that the tests themselves are biased."

sniff sniff

Like evidence "for some" that the tests work when you like the results ---but don't when you don't?
My 3.5 year old daughter figured out how to zoom in and out with the pinching motion :)
Can we please not turn this into Reddit quite so quickly?
The Seven P Formula for Marketing Success
The purpose of the seven P formula is to put in place the tools needed to consistently evaluate your marketing strategy. Following is an evaluation of each of the seven P's from the perspective of a Web 2.0 startup co-founder.
Thanks for the great link - I'm just switching over to Emacs (from the LispWorks IDE) right now - the timing is perfect :)
Do you think African Americans are a standard deviation dumber than average? Or just that this proves that IQ tests are useless?
Front-end design = HTML/Javascript/CSS/graphics = business?
"University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small" --Henry Kissinger
VMware, XenSource, and The Future Of Virtualization
Front end design = design what business service to offer and how it's presented. Html and anything else are implementation details.
I have no comment regarding the color yellow.
Ironic - TvByDemand | Forums | The Funnies