skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The google tech talk from the book tour: [http://youtube.com/watch?v=m6gaj6huCp0]

I watched it a couple weeks ago; fun and fairly informative, but not terribly impressive. I highly recommend Connections [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35837] for an insightful examination of the history of innovation.
Either way, I'm safe if I avoid them altogether.
This young man aggregated a very valuable demographic in one place. Over 2 Million prime "hosteling" candidates, and travelers all accessible through his user list. As to the question of whether this is real, I am uncertain. It would be understandable however if it were.

What many entrepreneurs realize too late is that acquiring a lot of heterogeneous users quickly is of little value. Acquiring HOMOGENEOUS users is of great value. When all of a sites users are homogeneous, ie travelers, or runners, or 30 year old single women, the number of methods of monetizing them are legion. Monetization of an audience of less than 5 million is more difficult where there is no commonality.

This young man chose the simplest monetization method, sell the names.
Richard Stallman safe after Peru earthquake
False alarm. He's been active on the emacs-devel mailing list for the past three days.
Thanks for this. Is Time now in the business of publishing original science fiction?
I think open source has very little to do with being a 'cause' for concentration. What's interesting about it is it shows, to some degree, the natural distribution of high quality hackers throughout the world. And yes, of course people do interesting things outside of OS, I was just suggesting that it's a good proxy to see some areas where innovation is happening that don't have some of the other ingredients of SV.
For reference, the 55-day-later followup:

The "I Have 250,000 Users, Now What?" guy just sold his Facebook app for $3 million
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43352
London?
It's the next evolution of the Ken-Burns-O-Matic! Cool.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Burns_Effect
Hey! how did YOU know we came from primordial soup? Did that pesky Q from the Q continuum whisk you away through time for a day of sludge spying....thanks for believing in something you can't prove or even defend and just assuming its true. You people and your crazy closed minded religions.
"What I usually hear from language designers is a laundry list of minuscule little features which are not really any better than any other language, and are usually just style differences. "

Any examples? Matz? Guido? Alan Kay? Who actually says this?

The article condemns those who make assertions without proof, then does that very thing. A number of times,

Basically, every tool or language has some number of annoying hypesters. (Like, um, Rails, for example.) But treating them as legitimate sources of authority on that tool or language is usually just goofy.
All the "but there are a lot of competitors" caveats got tiresome.

Just go ahead and say "they haven't done enough to stand out" or "it doesn't have much you couldn't get any number of other places" or even "there's not enough new here." I assume that's what those comments really mean.
Y'know, after seeing "Cloudant" a few times, I'm starting to want to pronounce it en francais. Clou-dant. Clooo-dahhn. Okay, sorry.
"Wikinews has learned that Richard Stallman, the founder of the GNU Project, ->is not<- missing in Peru after a massive 8.0 earthquake struck the country on August 15."
"... The question is, will the innovation demonstrated be enough to attract users? ..."

Thats where the markets come in. Markets efficiently decide the wheat from the chaff, good from the bad. The beaut thing about the yc approach is that minimal capital will be expended. Live or die, the development, marketing, launch and uptake is efficient.
Knex computer at Olin College
"The K'NEX calculator stands over 10 feet tall, and can perform 4 bit addition and subtraction operations in about 30 seconds. The slowest part of the operation is the user entering the balls. From there the balls trickle down, computing the result of the operation, and then sending that through a 4 bit decoder, which flips a flag that tells the user the answer. Since it is 4 bit, we can add and subtract numbers from 0 to 15."
It's been changed back and forth, including the title...
Why do natural disasters always strike highly religious areas? The bible belt is devastated by tornadoes and hurricanes every year. Don't they wonder why us liberal godless heathens on the coasts aren't feeling some divine wrath, too?
5 iPhone Apps I'd Like To See From Apple
Two Social System Design Trends That Should Really, Really Stop
It's just a online version of Microsoft Photostory.

The music collection feature seems useful.

Edit: This is not the whole truth - the software "feels" the music - the effects it applies to pictures try to match the mooth of the music, like visualisations.
Yes, but how does one area of research of CS being pointless spoil the other areas? I don't think it is a curate's egg at all. I don't want to claim that CS is not spoiled, though. The patronage thing might be a problem. However, research topics do have to compete even in science - they may not be exposed to judgement by the general public, as are companies, but internally, there are mechanisms of selection. Probably not the best ones, but still. And if too much money would flow into obviously useless research, there might even be a public outcry.
New TED talk: Jacqueline Novogratz on roles of markets and charity in Africa
Charities and markets must cooperate in Africa, personal dignity is more important than wealth.
Techcrunch: Techstars demo day
I didn't see the article as a manifesto against industrialism, despite the sensationalist title. Jared Diamond is a researcher, after all - I just found it informative to learn something about ancient societies, without jumping to conclusions from that.
Lies, Damn Lies, and the Number of Sexual Partners
R6RS Scheme ratification vote results (preliminary)
Tip for Cloudant: market your product in countries outside of the US. In Japan, Korea, and some parts of Europe people have very high bandwidth connections but high latency to the US. A high bandwidth delay product means multiple connections is a massive win for largish files. I'd go so far as saying you should totally ignore the US entirely. Market it to foreigners as a way to download faster from the US, where so much content is hosted.
My winners are Anywhere.fm and Dropbox. The minute anywhere goes mobile they will truly change the way we listen to music or anything audio. If you think about it one day people will laugh about the Ipod. I never really grasp the concept of putting all your songs in a box. It is like carrying all your savings in a briefcase rather than a debit card. Anywhere will soon ( i hope) start streaming your tunes using edge, gprs or wifi enabled phones. wacth out Jobs.
Maybe it's the other way around. Those areas are religious because they have more natural disasters. Things that are out of their control.
I think part of what bugs me is that it's also somewhat sensationalist, which is why reddit keeps reposting it.
I think I'd want to "take it to the data" to get a real answer.
Skype network is down, possibly under viral DoS attack. Lessons?
If this is true, there are lessons to learn: (1) be open and (2) leave a door for emergency upgrades.
If this is true, there are lessons to learn: (1) be open and (2) leave a door for emergency upgrades.
You're in control - urine-controlled input device
How To Make a Funny Talk Title Without Using The Word "Weasel"
he's blagging about branding this time

has a link to a video with his speech at OSCOM at the end
What happened to the footnotes?

Edit: Oh, they've managed to make it into a completely different URL. I guess that's slightly more usable than the previous system, if I open that URL before I start reading, but it would really be nice if there were links from the content. We'll see what GreaseMonkey has to say about it.
Ga-ga for Groups? LinkedIn is Lame, Facebook is Fantastic
Scariest cephalopod you'll see today (and i'm gonna guess all week)
just cause it's interesting. and it's got vampyretoothus for a name...
Startup Fears Feds Are Dragging Feet On Free Wi-Fi Network
Menlo Park, CA (AHN) - A California startup is considering suing the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to decide whether to grant permission to build a free nation-wide Wi-Fi network. M2Z said the FCC has waited 15 months since its petition, more than one year.
That's a very strange opinion.
Maybe it's God's way of telling us, "You Idiots, I'm not real."
Banks in Trouble: Good Summary of the Credit & Liquidity Crisis
My wife says the same thing. It must be a loss aversion response to their choice of mate.

Reactions I receive (since I'm currently churning through the decision) tend to be offers for funding support, some of it not insignificant. To me, that is a much higher confidence indicator, although I have will some skin in the game, too.
Funny you say that, because my comment was actually in reference to a guy from Ukraine that the US company I work for has employed several times. He would just suddenly disappear for a week or more, and then when he finally came back, on one occasion, he hadn't been able to connect to the company because of the circumstances I mentioned above.
And yes, people, this will affect you too: both consumer loans (for cars, mortgages, etc.) and institutional credit (your VCs are using OPM) will be more difficult to come by in the coming months.
Keith Schacht does chicagobeta meetups and gets very good attendance (http://chicagobeta.com). He also runs http://freshwaterventure.com.
The Objective Of The First Meeting With A VC
The purpose of the first meeting with a VC is to get a second meeting. The purpose of the first meeting is not: 1) to secure an investment from the VC after the conclusion of that meeting, or
2) to tell the VC everything there is to know about your company.
The Internet Is Down: All Data Lost
Wow! It's so sad to see Africa so thin in the map. I hope the OLPC project will help fatten it up a bit.
Facebook Takes Action Against Black Hat Apps
Skype Knocked Out By The Algorithm
Yay dropbox. But when are you guys launching?
The Elephants of Neptune
Nice story that actually does whet the appetite for the "intellectually curious" :)
Does Skype Matter? Calacanis: Not really; TechCrunch Riley: Yes $1B Worth
Interesting that this latest group includes a photo-editing service: won't it compete with a similar company (slipshot, IIRC) which was funded earlier?
But if CS sucks and the programmers are so smart, why do they stay at the CS departments?
Why fund managers have an incentive to take overly high risks
My gut tells me TripAdvisor can't expect to make back that money on the users themselves over the next few years. If they shift the app to include advertising to achieve that level of revenue, it's going to lose out to whatever copy cat is still ad-free.
Startups:  Financial Markets Impact?
He didn't really program that startup in 10.5 hours, not when you include the countless hours of programming it took to be able to do something like that.
While I don't have the benefit of having seen these guys first-hand (I was at YC demo day), it seems like YC has a much better batch. It's worth noting that one of them (Intense Debate) is identical in almost every regard to a YC company (Disqus). I dunno who was first, but they are both apparently in a somewhat closed beta with a few real users. Both look good, and it's a product I would use (and I believe we will be using Disqus on a new blog). May the best business win, I reckon.

As a few other commentators have noted about Tech Stars (including one of the TS advisors), these are mostly features, and not products. That's OK, of course, as long as they realize they are features looking for a home rather than businesses waiting to be built.

YC also has quite a few feature companies, but it's possible to think of ways most could become products without a lot of stretching of the brain or dramatic changes in direction of their development. I am, of course, speaking without having heard the pitch from the Tech Stars groups. Maybe they are like YC company Fuzzwich, which I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to build a business on it until I heard the presentation (while dosed appropriately with the YC Kool-Aid, of course). It's still a really long shot, but they'll have a lot of fun, and with luck and good biz dev they might pull off something amazing.

Best of luck to the Tech Stars companies.
"What's in Ottawa?"

A lot of non-Web2.0 stuff. Like wireless, telecom, computing, etc.
Seattle is probably number 2, isn't it?
let me know. i'm there. the whole midphase thing turned me off immediately. a cup of coffee does not require sponsorship...
12 Important US Laws that every blogger needs to know
Applicable to more than just blogs.
Something like 85% of the world is religious: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Worldwide_percentage_of_A...

non-religious: 11.92%
atheist: 2.35%

For every earthquake in San Francisco it seems reasonable to expect at least 6 or 7 in other parts of the world.

I downmodded because I'd rather this forum not be burdened with trite religion-bashing posts.
If 2000 is any indication, all the funded startups with high overhead will go out of business, all the bootstrapped startups with 2 guys in a garage will tighten their belts, and we'll end up with a lot of startups changing their business model.

Some of the most successful startups of the first 5 years of the decade were born during the tail end of the dot-com boom and survived the recession. HotOrNot launched like a month before the NASDAQ peaked, had to go subscription, and then started earning millions a year. Blogger was started in 1999, laid off everyone in the bust, and then reemerged as the market started warming up. Flickr did most of their innovation and programming during the bust. Del.icio.us was the last of a string of side projects done while Joshua Schacter kept his day job.

I just read Phillip Kaplan's Fucked Companies, and the one thing that all the dot-com flameouts had was that they took millions in funding and hired hundreds of people. The one thing that all the survivors had was that they hired no more than a dozen people and had or found a business model that actually brought in cash. Make more money than you spend.
Went to each of the company links and they all required sign up before seeing anything useful. So me being lazy I skipped over all of them...

I am curious when Arrington says "looking for funding" or "raising" does he mean the same thing? If "raising" implies that the company is already securing funds then I am impressed.
I remember seeing a lot of stories 6-12 months ago that talked about the 1% rule for user-contributions to participatory web sites. 1% create content, 10% interact with it, and 89% pass it by.

But according to this fairly recent article from Reuters http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSN17436388200..., the percentage of people that actually generate content is even lower. For example, only 0.16% of visitors to YouTube upload videos. And 0.2% of visits to Flickr are to upload new photos. Wikipedia fares better with 4.6% of visits used to make edits. But it's all a far cry from 20% of users generating content.
Participation on Web 2.0 sites remains weak
Yeah I agree - this belongs on reddit not the site formerly known as startup news...

There are enough reddits and diggs in the world, if hacker news is going the way of reddit and digg I'll probably pass
I'd say the web is full of horribly inefficient pages, but that's still a good article.
Replies to your submissions should go under threads
Currently, only replies to your comments are shown under threads. I think it would be better to also include replies to your submissions.
I think this makes sense. I certainly look at far more pictures and videos on Flickr and YouTube than I upload myself. But I do upload to both.

But I think the title is wrong. These ratios seem normal to me, not weak.

An interesting number would be word count of read vs. written in blogs and comments. My guess is that bloggers have an easier time having a conversation than videos or photos allow, making it more participatory.

And on that same note, do you include comments as participation? I think you should, but it doesn't look like they did.
What is the standard for reposting anothers articles on your own site
Of course there will be a link to the original authors site. But how much of the article can appear directly or is their some fair use guideline? This for more of a magazine format, and not a digg or hacker news forum.
There is this link at the bottom of news.yc page where you can request features you want:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
Attribution is key. But I don't know enough about FairUse to say what the magic upper limit percentage of quoted material is.

You can generally get to the beef of an article without posting more than half. Also, adding your own commentary makes your site more interesting.

But don't be evil: linkjacking is annoying.
Of course it does. Read the thread. PG has responded to a lot of requests and fixed a lot of bugs.
While you might not see it as a start-up, it is generating significant number of users and there must be some value in the type and volume of data being collected.

What we see depends mainly on what we look for. I prefer opportunity.
I'm in Lakeview. Is there an area we'd all want to meet in that's kinda central to everyone?
I used to be one of those people who came into a CS undergrad program, complaining about the barrage of math we had to learn and the very little detailed real-world programming we had to do. However, after having taken PL, automata, crypto, algorithms and AI, I see the point of having concrete rigor of proof and abstraction about your code. However, what the author says about CS being a badly managed field, by being a mix-bag of math and science rings true to me.

For instance, I have found out when I was a student sysadmin for my school, one of my CS professor who does research in typed-system does not know Perl. It behooves me that someone involved in CS, particularly research of programming languages, do not have a fundamental understanding of the practical application of their field. Someone earlier pointed out Church-Turing thesis being completely useless at the time of their publication, the same argument could be made for the Crick-Watson DNA publication (in their original publication, Watson only suggested that DNA being a double-helix). But the difference between these truly remarkable scientific discoveries with the average Joe academic pumping out crap each year, is that these theories were even then, foreseeable to have impact.

No, I don't buy the "oh, theory is an art; let the academics work for knowledge's sake." Recent advances in technology are as much driven by industry as much by academia, see Bioinformatics (Celera), see high performance computing (Aerospace companies), see AI/data-mining (Spam Bayesian filters, Amazon, Netflix).

I read recently a quote that declared "form is liberating" - just as architects are forced to design their pieces by both the constraints of material and economics; I would rather design my software and theory in the domain of application.
killed; should go in feature requests
I just set up a campfire for Chicago news.ycers if you want an invite drop your email to cubend#gmail.com It'll be easier to work something out in there.
Skype and the GNU Affero GPL
Fuck Facebook Conversion: Be platform agnostic and use your own APIs.
Mapping API Comparison
FuturePundit: Scientists Use Accelerated Evolution To Develop New Enzyme
Weak in comparison to what standard? So .2% of Flickr
visits are to upload photos. What percentage of visits
would represent "strong" participation?
FuturePundit: Depressed People Cannot Control Emotional Responses To Negative Images
Chicago News.YC Campfire
just set up at ycombinator.campfirenow.com so that we can work out a meetup or just talk more directly than in the comments here. If you want an invite mail cubend#gmail.com
Design at a crossroads
If free time is "time not spent on a fixed schedule" then I tended to have more in college, even as a double-major taking an overload of classes.

If free time is "time not spent working" then it's a toss-up.
Why repost at all? Isn't this what links are for?
Even large producers of content consume more content than they produce. For every blog post I usually view 10-12 sites/articles/posts myself from external sources.

This is news?
Daft Punk's Magical Pyramid/Spaceship: Infiltrated!
Figured I'd try to spice up the music-related hacker news a bit...

Here's some more pics during construction:
http://www.erolalkan.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?id=4048
Figured I'd try to spice up the music-related hacker news a bit...

Here's some more pics during construction:
http://www.erolalkan.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?id=4048
I don't get anywhere.fm. Isn't this what mp3.com tried to do and got sued out of existense for? I.e., you verified what CD's you owned with them and then you could listen to the CD anywhere.

What am I missing?
Indeed. And note that lots of sites have upload tools. I _never_ visit flickr to upload, though I have a pro account with hundreds of pictures.
Genetically Capitalist (.pdf)
The difference is that with anywhere.fm you upload your actual music files, instead of them playing back a single copy to everyone. So if anywhere.fm is illegal, the iPod would be too.
makes sense, so maybe a caption, commentary and the link would be the proper approach
My sense is that people just assumed Pareto Principle numbers (80/20 rule) and are making an implicit comparison to that. And they assume participation = content-creation = uploading photos.

But I agree with you. Uploading photos is only one way to participate on Flickr, it's not the only way.

I go to Flickr to upload my photos, but I also go just to look at my photos (which counts as a visit), and I encourage my friends to do so as well. That's what photos are for after all. I also comment on the photos of others and sometimes "favorite" them.

I think the implicit definition of participation in the article is too narrowly defined, at least in the case of Flickr.
According to the app developer's website (http://www.bigsight.org/craigulliott):

"Craig Ulliott is a freelance web developer and the guy behind the "Where I've Been" Facebook application that has reached more than 2.3 million users in its first two months since launch. Craig recently sold the application and user base to TripAdvisor for $3mm, which marks the first major sale of a Facebook application since the company opened up their API and development platform."
Is that his site?
404 Error Pages: Reloaded
Wasn't the term "open source software" invented specifically to get away from the word "free" in "free software"? They (companies) recognized that there was a branding problem all along.
seems finland is #1 with 75% of the population classified as internet users. that means everyone for me btw (because babies can't possibly be internet users do they?)
It is too bad this article does not mention what the upload/read only ratio is for MySpace and Facebook since I would imagine that these sites probably have higher ratios that would dispute their claim.
Scientists claim to have broken the speed of light
Provided these sites have sufficient content, these 'low participation' figures actually suggest that user content is being widely viewed.

Also I think a high submission to viewing ratio would correspond with a deluge of low quality content.
how popular are friends lists in social news sites?
I'm writing a niche social news site, and I'm wondering if I should bother including "friends" functionality. I've used digg, reddit & slashdot for years and have never felt it necassary to maintain a list of friends.

it's a news site, not a social network, so I'm not sure how useful it would be. what do you think?