skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is just a joke that Facebook could be valued at $6 billion. An absolute joke. FB has 30 million users, and that's not considering potential duplicates. The number of active users may be even smaller than that, and some people like I only log on once a week or so.

If FB gets sold for $6 billion, that means the new owning company would need to make $500 million a year for 12 years(!) to break even. Frankly, the Internet will probably be drastically different a decade from now. FB doesn't even make $50 million a year, who in their right mind thinks that they will all of a sudden make a profit off Facebook by spending that much money?

I swear some of these big companies just like throwing money at things. Yes, the dot-com bubble is here once again.
I'd agree with this, and even take it a bit farther. Many of the graduate level courses have lecture notes online and these can often give insight into current research. Here's a page with links to EE/CS courses: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/classes-eecs.html

Another thing to watch for, besides talks specifically open to the public, is lecture series taken for credit, such as {EE,CS}{198,298} in the above page. I took EE298.2 last semester for example, a communications/networking/DSP seminar, which had visiting scholars presenting their current research at almost every meeting. Nobody would have cared or probably even noticed if a random person showed up to listen.
Hmmm...

Read news.yc or work on boring enterprise apps at work?

That's a tough one :)
Write a review trashing this site and get a free PR4 (or PR5) link
Sound strange? Well it is, but it's also legit (you can check their PR).
Probably 6 at the moment. Too much.
Hah best post title ever :)
look at options
Good points. But again, these real life tiers are invented systems and not intuitive. They're just created for efficiency in operation in a particular environment. For universities, some roles work. For companies, others. For internet citizens, I think since there is a whole new level of information transparency (or lack of), we can jump out of the traditional way of thinking about roles.

The examples you give about discussion are all "real discussion." What I'm saying is that I believe the ideal discussion system would accomodate all these discussions. Poetry, sports, academic journals, etc. If not now, eventually it must.

While sometimes it makes sense to nicheify, like separating a fashion-specific website from a tech-specific one, the material isn't always mutually exclusive, and so lots of information is lost. There should be channels for different discussions to connect to each other. Wikipedia is one example of how it can be done.

I guess arbitrarily-tiered system is a bad phrase. I just mean no explicit tiers, like, you have a bit set for mod status, a bit set for troll status, etc. Everybody will interpret authority, or hierarchy, differently, so just leave it as-is, at least with subjectively assessed content, like puns, politically incorrect jokes... Of course objective measurements are useful for winnowing things like necessarily true statements and necessarily informative statements, but not everything.

I think reddit has a pretty good model. So is Slashdot. They're both obvious improvements from BBS style discussions. But there's a lot more to explore, and this more should be where there is more flexibility. One example where this flexibility is lacking is in funny Slashdot comments. Some of the +5 Funny are great stuff, but I can't just, say, have a Slashdot Jokes section and only look at those (and add jokes to the jokes section). So there's seenonslash.com. But that's a reposting of slashdot comments; in effect, lots of information that could've been more effectively harnessed if the Slashdot system itself was more flexible.

Just my thoughts, but in general I don't like institutions and hierarchies and I'm biased against them. Of course it's insane to abolish all demarcations, but why not allow responsibilities to be expanded or dimished in small increments according to performance? It might take x percent of y to impeach someone in real life, but a virtual system would allow you to, say, have a bit less power if the populace thinks you should have less.

It'd be an interesting experiment if anything.
Heysan is now dedicated exclusively to mobile messaging? What happened to flash slide shows?
Good stuff since Google is updating PageRank to the public soon
Digg Founder Kevin Rose's Company Domain Name - For Sale?
The greatest economic boom ever?
I've got a PR4 if anyone wants to trade.

www.hotdailymotion.com (nsfw)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33326
don't you tell me what to do. i'm a reble.
Connector and Slingshot Open-sourced and Free
I know it's OT, but ...
Lot of good thoughts there whacked. I also tend to be biased against institutions and hierarchies, although I have a similar bias against youtube comments and trollishness (which tend to be the same things). I think one of the main reasons that none of these basic problems has been solved is that the general mindset on when approaching them approximates your own. That is "we can jump out of the traditional way of thinking about roles."

I wish that were true, but the traditional way is the traditional way for a reason. It worked, providing necessary efficiency in a specific context. Now, I would argue in an 'ideal discussion system' there would be a variety of different contexts that would be modeled in different ways. This means that you have to have flexibility in the individual implementation, which is part of the reason I was exploring the possibility of lisp list strings in transactional databases below on this thread.

The problem with the arbitrarily-tiered system as I see it is that it relies on tagging. This may work in a smallish community but then you still have a problem when what you or I might consider trolls put youtube-style comments into this discussion on social modeling.

The main way that this has been dealt with is to have evolving communities that focus on very technological subject material. By keeping things at a sufficient level of abstraction, one is able to create a new tech-specific language that must be mastered before one can participate. In other words, one has created a de facto tiered system.

The dark side of this is that the need to force discussion into tech-specific language prevents people from having substantial discussion about fundamentals. And fundamentals (like how people discuss things, or would like to discuss things) are often more important than the latest trends in functional programming.

So I would say that Slashdot and Reddit, though good models, encourage a certain faddishness with respect to the abstract language which they enforce.

As for responsibilities being incremental instead of predefined, I have had similar thoughts. I think the problem (as articulated in political philosophical tomes as well as other places) is that the populace may shift unless it has an investment in something in particular. Usually this investment is in property. With the online world one would need something like core users which are in some way invested in the success or failure of a particular online venue. Once one had core users (property owners) then there are a number of fluid mathematical systems one could employ for the evaluation and promotion both of good content and good users.

I was going to post more philosophical musings related what I see as the Turing Project, but I think Pg deleted my last comment on the topic and this post is quite long already.
Noob and other words worth thinking about (or, how WoW is like a startup environment)
CS could better be described as moribund rather than mature.
The reason why nobody has taken the time to create a digest of academic computer science papers (other than the ACM) is because 90% of such papers are not worth reading.
Silicon has been around for billions of years. Forming it into microprocessors is just a fad.
Go to an academic conference. I went to this one: http://www.icfpconference.org/ last year and it was well worth it.

Hunt around for a great class at the local CS department and either figure out a way to enroll or just 'drop in' on the class. I did this too and loved it.
I'm interested in these mathematical models used for content filtering, and I made up a little thought experiment as an exercise, but somehow it was too convoluted and I couldn't get an answer. Basically it ended up being something like, how many cookies would you give to a well-behaving kid? Yeah, it's about as general as that, although I had all these different rules for the game. It seems rather futile to predict it beforehand, so I decided that I would just run the system and see what happens. After I fix up the horrible UI...

Digg and reddit do it in the most straightforward manner. Slashdot is good because it actually matches up with some material in conversation theory. The metrics they chose are pretty good. The rating system though, not good enough.

I agree that the tech-specific language acts as a filter itself, but from a different perspective, I realized that Slashdot's modding system's UI and rules are probably a filter too. i.e., if you are willing to learn all the modding rules, and use the modding system, you've passed the "ritual." To the average user, these complications may well be intolerable.

I need to figure out what's tolerable, soon :)
Any reason why you can't downvote news entries?
Hmm.. let's try some reasoning.

Building a startup correctly takes research and knowledge (out of many things), which, if tallied as part of the building process, amounts to work. The various resources and the affluent discourse presented by news.YC presents knowledge in a host of fields, but is primarily focused on the subject of startups, as hinted by the title of the aforementioned site. Thus, we can deduce that by being on this site and reading this topic, in an attempt to further our startup knowledge through means of discourse, is in fact 'work.'

In theory, I am working on my startup by being on this site, possibly by even reading this thread.

Of course, when all is said and done you could have probably been working on your startup instead of reading all of the above BS. :)
I coded a blog and a digg / reddit style application
I coded a digg and reddit style application and also my blog (www.irintech.com/x1/) . this is not exactly my question, I did quite a bit of this with zero VC money, and it was not popular, well my blog is getting hits.

I would like to know what application be in a look a like or something out of the blue, will kick in users and not specific about vc funding, but yes will help with a point.

Thanks
Jean
What would my blog application be worth?
What would my blog application be worth, with and without VC funding. Of course with VC funding it could be developed more.
Favorite PG essay?
http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

My fellow friends and I identify :)
"At Harvard they have this policy where if you pass too many classes they ask you to leave."
Forced to choose one, I'd say What Business Can Learn From Open Source (http://paulgraham.com/opensource.html). I've felt that stuff for a long time but I was never able to articulate it like PG did. Now I just give people that essay and tell them "This will help explain where I'm coming from."
> (Dont worry, I did not downmod your post here).

Because it's a reply to your comment and you can't? :-)
If I'm writing this, I'm not working on my startup.
I wonder how many people think this then spend countless hours playing games/watching TV and other mindless forms of entertainment.
James Hong: Reinventing HOTorNOT, Part III
"In other languages, the equivalent word for hot is often used in the same way."

Certainly not in Japanese as far as I know. It may not be quite as universal as he thinks.
Facebook outshines Google as Silicon Valley elite gather to ponder the next big thing
I Love My iPhone
According to my PR calculator you have PR 1 :/
Beating The Averages
http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
SEO Example: How I Got Aerobed To Number 1 In Google
Live P2P Television: Streaming Now
1. http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

2. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
I'm not - I'm using the approach here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33888 . That gives me much more flexibility in picking out individual comments from a thread, returning all comments by a specific user, getting all comments posted today, etc. I'm just recognizing this as another possible way to solve the problem, if you don't care about the extra functionality..

As for storing the pickled output:

dbh.execute('UPDATE articles SET comments = $comments WHERE news_id = $id',
comments=pickle.dumps(article.comments))

The comments field can be a normal TEXT field, since the default format for pickle is ASCII-based.
The first greatest economic boom came with the mass replacement of animal power with steam power.

The second greatest economic boom started around 1910 with the coming widespread deployment of automobiles, airplanes, indoor plumbing, refrigeration, radio and telephones.
Beating the Averages and The Python Paradox
Shortsighted Greed (Angels are Good)
I don't mean to measure FB by Google criteria, that was mainly a response to what seemed to be a rather vacuous question from the article. Maybe I misunderstood, but people asking "why Google, why now?" in 2002 probably didn't use the internet at all or had a vested interest in some other search engine.

I can believe social networking technology will be huge, but I think enough human relationship aspects are mutually exclusive that it will be far more difficult for one service to completely dominate. "Why Facebook, why now?" is a much more interesting question than "Why Google, why now?"
how you store them, to how they are fetched, to how they are displayed and arranged according to popularity (i think thats how news.yc works) on every vote.
I agree. Google connects people to information. Facebook connects people to people. Information, once created, doesn't change. People do.
http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html - What You'll Wish You'd Known
Here too apparently. Currently 6/30 stories on the front page have the word "Facebook" in them.
The first was probably the use of language or tools. (Hard to say which came first, since other animals use tools too after a fashion.) After that the control of fire, the domestication of animals, agriculture, the city...

Fortunately they seem to occur at increasingly small intervals.
I'm still inclined to give the position to steam. Coaxing a lump of coal to do more work than a team of horses was an exponential shift (while staying within the realm of widespread application, unlike fission.)
I think a large part of it is related to Internet-enabled service delivery, so that for instance, HP can hire people in Manila to provide services to companies in USA and Europe.

Another part of it is the economic modernizing going on - 2 years ago when I was in Manila, Philippines, you needed to have cash when shopping or eating out, and houses/condos were sold for cash (you had 48 monthly payments at 0% interest at the end of which you owned the place).

When I was there a few months ago, you could get mortgages up to 20 years long and the bug bundle of cash I brought was irrelevant - every store except street vendors took credit cards.

Danger is that the increases in real estate worldwide could give us the mother of all asset bubbles, everywhere, simultaneously.
http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html my all time fav.
Well, no, i was being sarcastic, can't tell if you were sarcastic as well :)
SmugMug running on iPhone
You realize what happened after the boom of the 1920s, right? The worst depression this world has ever seen . There are many who say we are close to another.
Bust a Name - Great way to find available domain names
It's like Instant Domain Search taken to the next level - give it some words and it'll help you find something. Sorting by length and readability are great ideas.
Instant Domain Search taken to the next level. Sorting by length and readability is a great idea.
Which Y Combinator startup(s) have been the best source(s) of ideas for you (not necessarily ideas that you will pursue)?
For me, they are justin.tv, likebetter.com, and reddit.com.
well, there goes another one of my startup ideas... I suppose there's room for more than one in the market, though, as it's an implementation game.
news.yc
I don't think I would have survived high school if I hadn't read "Why Nerds Are Unpopular".
Here's one model I'd be interested in testing. Three roles: basic, member, and administrator. Each account has karma (natural numbers), but the exact of karma is invisible to all except the administrator. There is a karma meter which displays karma as a color gradient with different levels assigned different colors.

Content rating is done on a color gradient, from white to blue. Blue is good, white is bad, light blue would be okay. Only members can rate content. Rating would be also be weighted according to the karma of the person doing the rating. In other words, members with more karma would give (or take away) more karma per rating.

Each post would receive a default rating based on the karma of the poster, which would display as a color on the white to blue spectrum already described. The color would change as people rate the content.

Not only comments, but also threads could have ratings on a similar basis. This would allow people to set up certain filters so they would view threads with a certain content rating. Probably a person could automatically become a member when they pass some arbitrary karma threshold.

What do you think about this? Are you already working on something 'tolerable'?
Okay, makes sense. I hadn't read your earlier posting that carefully before, but it sounds better than what I had in mind.
this article has no substance...

the only interesting part is that jim breyer wears funky socks.
The reddit founders are letting the users use the report button for censorship instead of spam control -- so that's what it is. That's not good if you ask me.
Wow... I somehow managed to skip this one. Great read.

I, however, cannot get rid of the feeling that in open source world there is always one or two "few" who get all the credit (money, fame) for work of many.

Working on something you love is a wonderful thing, but in a realm of all acitivtes required to build something, not everything is a subject of someone's love. In other words, someone will always have to get paid to clean the restrooms.
Once you have a few domain names picked, you can use http://www.DomainGrader.com (still in alpha) to see what score it gets.
Angel investors deserve respect from VCs
Most of the Winter Founders Program groups had some notable impact on our product and business...

Talking to Tsumobi and Heysan convinced us to add mobile capabilities to our products. That was a big thing. Tsumobi also gave me some new ideas about APIs and how to make them more valuable.

The fact that about half of the groups in WFP were using Ruby On Rails gave us the impetus to add RoR and Ruby Gems support. That one has just been released, so I'm not sure how important it's going to be for the majority of our customers. But it's probably good for buzz.

I got lots of good feedback on our new website during development from overhear.us, and then here on News.YC once it launched publicly.

Alexis' (of reddit) stuff about getting publicity on the cheap was inspiring, and we're starting to put some of it into practice now...I expect it'll be a good thing. Reddit also has awesome design.

I liberally stole design ideas from Wufoo and SocialMoth and Overhear.us.

Zenter and Octopart were awesome to watch presenting. I hope I picked up a few things.

We added a template-based WYSIWYG website builder to our product after Weebly dragged their feet on launching some sort of call-back API. (We'd still like to call out to Weebly, if they ever add an API, but that may not make business sense for them.)

Talking to Beau from Snipshot was also useful. Not sure what exactly we got out of it, but I seem to recall he brought up a lot of fantastic ideas in a very short period of time.

Hmmm...That's the bits that spring to mind. I'm sure I'm leaving off something...
Nobody Cares About Your Design!
Warren Buffett on what makes a good business [Video]
If they occur at increasingly small intervals, they are probably also decreasingly important and far-reaching. Probably we see those that are closer to us more important as they are.
Hackers and Painters
http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html

See also my view on this here:
http://weblog.fortnow.com/2006/07/science-and-art-of-computa...
It's just not obvious how many breaks you should take though so as to maximize overall productivity.
Excellent. Goes to show that even when there are great products in the market (like pcnames.com and instantdomainsearch.com), someone will come up with something better.
Dawn of the Dead--on Sun's potential comeback
9-to-5 or a healthy work-life balance?
Forms in Ruby on Rails - Part 2
Blame centralized control of the money supply, not the previous boom.
Anybody here using Sun in their startup? They are marketing to startups now. I am looking at the Try and Buy deals now.
Building on OpenID to Improve Localization
If microprocessors lasted only 5-6 years before they were replaced by a newer type of technology - then, yes, they would be just a fad. :)
excellent work! i love this
Serious question: Is there a tool that generates these spreadsheets:

http://i209.photobucket.com/albums/bb307/julianpaling/aerobe...

Is that a google utility? ...or did he do that himself?
That's too bad -- I thought Heysan was doing a much better job than Slide or its competitors.
"I wouldn't consider one text-link-ad as surrounding the post. Maybe others would...go figure."

We just have a different definition of "ad".

"Upcoming Events", the big Flash thing, the one that's bigger than the total size of your article, on the right: That's a big ol' ad.

"Site Sponsors", also an ad.

"Recent Readers", a big giant ad for MyBlogLog.

The P2P news submit assault at the bottom of the article. That's a whole lot of little bitty ads.

The Sitemeter tag. Little bitty ad.

My definition of "ad" is "anything on the page that serves to take my attention from the content and place it on some other service or product for the obvious gain of someone other than me, the end user." Almost everything else on the page is "ad-like" (things that look like ads and serve to distract from the content on the page, like the "Meet our editors" self-congratulation bit) but only the the above are "ads".

Nothing personal, Jim. I enjoy your posts here at News.YC a lot. I'm sure you've got some great articles in you. This just isn't one of them. And, the page could use some simplification so your poor users don't feel assaulted. I had the same problem with Joomla...it took me months to get it simplified to the point where I didn't feel blinded by all of the crap on the page. ;-)
Conservapedia Implicates Wikipedia Editors in Murder Plot
From the name, you can expect that Conservapedia will be biased - but implying that the cops were investigating Wikipedia is too much.
Why is there still a MoveOn Subreddit?
No one has posted to it for a year, nor can post to it from what I can tell. Why keep it? Some people think it is unecessarily polarizing.
Digg Founder Kevin Rose's Pownce Raises Privacy Concerns
That's a good one - but upon testing it does produce a lot of domains quickly that are similar, using only a few of the list of keywords in some cases. Still worth my upvote tho.
Certainly doesn't matter as much as we like to think
True true
It bugs me that downmodded comments trash karma - political disagreements often get downmodded not because they aren't valid, but because someone disagrees fundamentally. That doesn't seem right.
What makes it even more amazing is that it has a business model. Great to see a fresh, simple and smart execution of a useful tool.