skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find it funny (from the perspective of a vim user) that all of these people who have been using heavyweight IDEs and scoffing at us with our "basic" editors are slowly coming our way. I'm not sure exactly whom I mean by "all of these people," but there are certainly a lot of Mac users and Java programmers who are singing the praises of lightweight editors like TextMate when vim and emacs have been around for decades.

On the topic of vim, I highly recommend it for those who haven't tried it out. Sit me in front of vim and a unix terminal and I can quickly do any refactoring task that needs done. I have used vim macros to turn an HTML table into a C array in a few seconds. Seriously, once you get a powerful editor, it is so flexible and applicable that you will never want to be without it. Navigating text in an editor without vim's movement commands (W, w, B, b, {, }, *, #, and so many more) is simply painful.
Don't follow that link - 99% of the page is link spam. For the curious, here's a copy of the original post - http://jottit.com/n8uyr/
I am so tired of hearing that email is broken. Mine isn't. It works great. It's faster, more powerful and universal than anything web-based, like Facebook messages. It works on nearly any kind of phone even.

Yes, it's overused: my inbox grows faster than I would like. But not because "email sucks", but because other ways of communication are often inferior. At least I am glad I had stopped emailing links to myself after I found about delicious some time ago.

I like email. Am I the only one?
The internet is built on free-or-nearly-free operation. That's the beauty of it and I don't think Web 2.0 is likely to fall apart any time soon because of it. As the author says, the VC-funded "get big fast" sites will face some major challenges going forward, since the market has proven itself transient and eager to move on when things take a wrong turn(the growth of news.yc is attributable mostly to refugees of other sites moving in), but those companies are really a sideshow to the main event, which is happening in little fits and starts and niches.

I feel that the real stars are usually operating fairly quietly, building on a primarily-open model rather than a walled garden, and creating strong businesses in a highly traditional fashion: by being the best around. (cue the Joe Esposio song)

You can still build a stable foundation on an open model if your company holds the expertise in the technology; your immediate competition is likely to be arrogant and compete in the sprint for the walled garden, rather than the marathon for the open model. (other companies working towards an open model are collaborators toward a standard, but competitors in services. Hardly an unusual situation.)

If the competition gets a lot of momentum in an inelastic product(for example, operating systems or instant messaging), that can kill you early on, but over the long term the most-open player usually becomes disruptive and causes the marketplace to expand with a new set of services. That is my observation of most such situations in technology.
I almost crapped my pants when I saw this title -- I thought it was a dream of mine come true. For years I've hoped that someone really clever would make every webpage a wiki via a browser extension. Unfortunately, "universal" is here being used to mean "not universal". I'm still waiting. Cmon guys.
Amazon MP3 is worse than the iTunes store in every way except price. Amazon is competing almost solely on price, and they're losing.

I think one of the reasons is that when something is that cheap already (99 cents), saving 10 or 20 cents doesn't look so attractive (even though, percentage wise, its actually pretty significant).

But it should be really clear to anyone who pays attention to iTunes that Apple is selling way more tracks than albums, so the fact that Amazon has cheap album deals means even less to most people.

The thing is, Amazon certainly had the capabilities to build a better (or nearly better, since they'll never be able to integrate as well on a website) store, but they didn't. AmazonMP3's search feature, for example, works much worse than Amazon.com's. They could have also done really great integration with Amazon.com, but instead they do next to nothing.

Apple definitely can't rest on its laurels (nobody can), but the fact remains that nobody has come close to building a better music store.
Looks like 3.0 is still weakly typed, making it unsuitable for anything but glue:

In [1]: True + 1
Out[1]: 2

In [2]: (False + 1 == True) - 5
Out[2]: -4
Avant Browser is soooo much faster than firefox 3
Ok i dont work for Avant Browser or anything, infact I have been using firefox until now. Got into a conversation with one of my friends and asked him if he downloaded firefox 3 yet. He told me he didnt and told me hes been using Avant Browser for years. I got curious and downloaded it and by golly this thing is QUICK! its faster than any of the top browsers i have used. How come this thing isnt in the lime light like all the others? Gets you thinking huh...
Now that I use Gmail, I'm with you. I don't get spam in my inbox. Everything works just as I'd expect.
Topix Nabs 6 Content Partners To Become Local Info Hub
I'm liking this new blog. It's really making me optimistic about the prospects of a startup.
This is demonstrating a different concept, but it's also fun:

The Kingdom of Kay Oss

"Once upon a time in the land of Serenity, there ruled a king called Kay Oss. The king craved approval. More than anything else, he wanted to be liked by all of his people.

So onx day thx bxnxvolxnt dxspot dxcidxd that thx bxst way to bx likxd was to frxx his pxople from thx swxat and toil of work. Hx dxcrxxd that no onx in Sxrxnity would xvxr again bx hxld accountablx for thxir xndxavors.

Zll of thx workxrs rxstxd from thxvr dzvly lzbors. “Blxss thx Kvng,” thxy xxclzvmxd! Thx fzrmxrs dvdn’t hzrvxst thx crops. Thx Kvng’s zrmy dvsbzndxd. Zll of thx mxrchznts vn thx kvngdom wxnt on zn xxtxmdxd vzcztvpm tp the Fzr Ezst. Thx shop ownxrs hung svgns on thxvr doors thzt szvd, “Gonx Fvshvng Vndxfvnvtxly.”

Xvxn thx jxstxrs, whq prqvvdxd z wzlcqmx rxspvtx frqm thx fqrmzlvtvxs qf thz kvng’s cqurt, stqppxd clqwnvng zrqund. Thx kvng’s knvghts, whq wxrx vxry wvsx, dvd nqt wznt to zct zgzvnst thx kvng’s wvshxs. Sq thxy put thxvr shvnvng zrmqr vn stqrzgx znd dvsmzntlxd thx rqundtzblx. “Zt lxzst thxrx wvll be nq mqrx bqrvng mxxtvngs,” thxy svghxd wvth rxlvxf.

Wzs thx kvng whq wzntxd tq bx lvkxd by xvxryqnx a gqqd nzturxd rulxr? Qr wzs hx mxrxly fqqlhzrty? Only tvmx wquld txll.

Zs tvmx wxnt qn. Sxrxnvty chzngxd vts nzmx to Znxvxty. Thxrx wzs tqtzl dvsqrdxr and cqnfusvqn vn thx kvngdqm, znd vt lqqkxd lvkx thvs: Bcx dqufghj klzm nqxp qqt rqst vqxwxxz bqxc dqf ghzj ythmnot kwt vmptxdl kqlxmmnxp."
http://www.languagehat.com/archives/000840.php

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ctfonts/WordRecognition....
A Manifesto for the Next Industrial Revolution - Umair Haque
The depressing thing is that the government will be spending over $25M per year of their citizens' money in order to enforce rules that benefit what? 5% of the population?
Generally speaking these kinds of employers are often close to home - not true. People take the distance of these employers into account when choosing where to live, instead of the other way around. You'll find the relatives of employees may be dragged around easily by the whims of the employer's industry (and their government Boards.)
How many people work in large corporations? Are there really companies that share data around that isn't PDF?

Sure - I'm working at a 3 letter big tech company, but still, This is 2008, PDF is pretty common.
while amusing, I think that in this culture "marriage" has become synonymous with "bad marriage" as evinced by the attitude of this post and the portrayal of marriage in the media.
Specifically, I think that too many marriages (and relationships in general) involve a dominant/submissive relationship rather than one based on equality. I think the media promotes this idea that either you are in charge or they are with no room for something in between.
I guess it's a question of how much you want to invest in your tools. Learning vi and emacs is like a lifetime of compound interest.

I agree that if you just want to code something yesterday, you probably won't reach for these most powerful tools. I'd say that if you're committed to programming over the long-term, though, you'd be hamstringing yourself by not starting on them now.

Long story short, I started Emacs a few months ago and I'm never going back.
I don't get the humor in that. I mean, I see the obvious shell of what's supposed to be funny; but to me there's no actual funniness in it, just a profound absence of mutual respect.
I loved the letter, but I can't vote up a submission from a blog post that was 90% Valleywag copy plus one short added paragraph.
1) If monetizing is likely, start to monetize. Proving that you can at least start will help fundraising immensely, and it's a long road.

2) Fundraising is a 3-6 month long process. Start before you need it. Angels are hard to find (especially in a non-hub), so start networking now.

3) You're talking about raising multiple rounds. Common! Angel, seed, series A, series B, etc. etc. The first round investors get a better valuation for their dollar but will expect to get diluted in later rounds.

4) Original source may opt to not invest more in later rounds. They retain the (diluted) ownership that they bought and generally have no special cash out options. Oftentimes early funding is convertible debt (aka bridge loan). Any investor expects a pay-out really only in a liquidity event (IPO or acquisition). Most have a 3-7 year horizon.

In general, read:

http://paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html
http://venturehacks.com
http://www.askthevc.com/
The problem with email is trust.

ANYONE can leave something in my inbox. Whereas you have to be on my contact list to send me messages over other mediums.

Sure, I can setup filters. But when I exchange business cards, we find each other on Facebook , Twitter, Jabber, etc.

People just don't have an address book that ties into their email as a trusted system.
Hostmonster Reviews Hosted at Host Monster
Hostmonster review
Maybe an engineering project will bring peace to the middle east.
You have some time now to find those opposing drug study citations. Your claims interest me and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter, but the rubber will start hitting the road for me if this conversation progresses from accusations to evidence.

Here's an example of the kind of thing that interests me: a recent meta-study of FDA trials of SSRIs (antidepressants) showed little to no benefit over placebo, below statistical significance in some important cases. So there's a fair chance that most people shouldn't get SSRIs because they just don't work.

"Drug–placebo differences in antidepressant efficacy increase as a function of baseline severity, but are relatively small even for severely depressed patients. The relationship between initial severity and antidepressant efficacy is attributable to decreased responsiveness to placebo among very severely depressed patients, rather than to increased responsiveness to medication."

Read it here.

http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-docum...
Code your own DNA
Credit card lenders may be monitoring your activities and cut your credit.
The Matt Cohler Exit Interview
First viable compressed air car: get 200-300km per tank of air.
Ability to focus on things I really want, and beign free from daily life distractions.
It's things like this that make me an anarchist. I know that theoretically governments exist because protection services will be underprovided in the marketplace. But is this "protection"? Is this really for the good of society? Must we put up with such indignities? Is anarchic capitalism so much worse that we should never try it?

Also, I doubt that they can effectively enforce this.
Still Struggling with Social Networking
When I first tried out Textmate, my immediate reaction was "is it me, or is Textmate modeled after emacs?". There is a lot to be said about the emacs (or vim) model of lightweight editor + macros. For those of us with *nix backgrounds, I suppose it comes with the turf

Of course, I know enough people who are super quick in Eclipse.
Most people add little value to the society. Please see Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

In my opinion, what is education, and the whole welfare state, about is creating the best environment for the high archievers, and not limiting them needlessly. The thing is that no one knows which family raises a genius. That is why all children, and thus their parents, should have the slighty the same starting environment, or at least the guaranteed minimum.

One side note is that most educational reforms perceive the education as a thing separated from the society. It is not truth. For instance, it is harder to be a high archiever if your parents lack the social and cultural capital. And the financial capital's role is way less important than before.

The yet another side note is that enormous time, at least in Polish education, is wasted on propaganda and socialization. This time could be spent better.
i suspect most of these people had made plans to leave long before. based on hearsay, of course.
"broken by Twitter". Best headline ever.
I can't fathom if you're being sarcastic or what. If not, why do you think this has any bearing on widespread twitter usage?

I'd say it's more likely it'd get big if celebrities were using it, or people on the big brother show or something, but news from mars lander? :/
Not being sarcastic at all!

If a website is too slow, it has a significant adverse effect on my likelihood of using it.

And it's not just me - see Google's assertion that speed is "just about the most important concern of users" - http://battellemedia.com/archives/003076.php
Olympic Cyclist Takes a Levelheaded Approach to a Ride
What is a well-balanced life?
Palm actually did have the distribution in place - through palmgear (interestingly, it still exist) which was THE go-to place for Palm apps.

Regarding advantages to the software developer, having just one place where you distribute, and that place being controlled by Apple, isn't a good thing at all. It may mean that it's easier to start selling, but also that you have no negotiating power if and when your app becomes a success.

The stupid music companies managed to hand over the keys to their distribution to Steve Jobs, but they're not exactly happy about the fact that he now has so much control over their fate. Apple's great at creating consumer electronics that actually appeals to people, but they don't seem to be a very nice company to deal with as a business.
And NASA scientists say "w00t"?!?
Die, Scribd. Die: You are web -0.5
this is a good idea. but come on, that is one ugly button!
Ask YC: What services do start ups want taken care for them?
Many start ups are great at coding and creating a cool web app, community, tool, etc. but don't want to or don't know how to do everything else necessary. What services would a start up want to be taken care for them?
Digital goods are not the same as physical goods. Too bad if Mint and Quicken lose out - there will always be free alternatives, so it is not really that big a loss for society.

There are also countless bands who make music and never see a dime, as well as countless bloggers who blog for free. Not everything is going to die without money.
"But, as far as for profit-websites (which have not-insignificant expenses) are concerned,"

Hosting is pretty darn cheap these days... If you keep your expenses tight, the chances of having to shut down are pretty much 0, and the chances of turning a profit are pretty high.

I also think the chances of youtube not being around are pretty amazingly slim. Even if it costs a ton to run, it's a strategic long term thing.
More like 0.005%.
Agreed, way too many colors to hope to be a universal icon.
Sliders is a tv show from a few years back.
Cos it's based on IE, one of the worst browsers available.

"Gets you thinking huh..."

No, not really.
Think Twitter’s the biggest microblogging service? Take a look at SMS GupShup
MathRider - A super scientific calculator
"It’s here. After more than eight months of development, we’ve finally launched our pride and joy, BricaBox."

That might have been a little on the longish side
Leaving Google
The stars who are hooked on start-ups
I sort of had a similar idea: an extension that would let you point out typos on any page on the internet, and the person responsible for the site (assumed to be admin@whereever, but can be redefined with a link tag on the site) will be automatically informed, or can set a preference using their extension to receive the corrections as an RSS feed that they can feed into, say, their bugtracker.
Celebrities are using it. Well, their lackeys are the ones posting, I'm sure. If those actually are celebrities.
So let's see, students submitting papers and receiving scores. Sounds familiar?

It should strike everybody as an idiotic way to evaluate potential business success. If anything good's gonna come out of it it's that we may come to questions that same process that's used to evaluate academic prowess.
The necessary paperwork: accounting, legal, payroll.
I thought they do it to get to heaven...
Goliath Presence Of An Internet Marketing Company
While working over a marketing research project, I came across some surprising results. Unbelievably true, but an Internet marketing company is really striding to mark a colossus presence. Sharing the same with you but ironically, I never established the same till I tried all the major search engines. Is it the guerrilla marketing itself OR the goodwill that followed with those expert online marketing solutions? Please peep in!
It's a community response to your suggestion that we should leave Hacker News and go to Jaanix because of the evils of downvoting. Downvoting is communication, it's really not a fault of the system if you find it too painful to hear.
Maybe they can finally remove the reference to "lambda" from the create_function documentation, which is entirely false and blatantly misleading.
You mean "economies of scope".

"Economies of scale" are a great idea - it refers to the concept that the more of one thing you produce, the better you get at it (and the cheaper you can make it). Take Google and online ads as an example.

"Economies of scope" are when you try to be everything to everybody.
A very insightful interview
Those are great ideas, and with any kind of /decent/ parser and code generator would be possible (because presumably the function expression returns a function type, which can be stored in a variable or passed around). But this is in PHP, were is_* functions ONLY work on "expressions" that look like variables (not expressions that evaluate to values), and debug_backtrace, while it returns an array, can not be indexed inline without assigning the result of it to a variable first.
I still don't know what Scribd is for, either. I guess if you had a flash-enabled browser but no PDF reader then it might be useful. That population is probably very small.

However, the author could have been a bit nicer.
hahaha, I couldn't agree more. Scribd = way to place documents on the web, that are then not really on the web. It's too bad that one cannot scroll with spacebar on scribd either.
My communication skills must be terrible, but I'm not asking anybody to leave. Hacker News is great, but it covers only small subset of all the news out there.
I really like it :)

I read the other comments before looking at your site and initially agreed with comatose_kid. I still think if I were looking for a specific item, or buying lots of items than I would prefer to use amazon's interface directly. However for "I think I'll buy a book to read over the weekend but don't know what" browsing I quite like it.

Suggestion: The navigation/search/shopping basket box on the top left takes up space and interrupts browsing (imho). Have you considered putting it in a bar going across the whole page, or alternatively adding a minimize/maximize button to it?
Any good introductions to vim? I did the odd editing with vim with a cheat sheet side by side, but I never heard about the "cool features" before reading Hacker News.
I can see the point of being able to 'embed' a document inline, and I've seen that used on techcrunch with pdf docs via scribd. That sort of makes sense.
Although I'd still rather just have a link to the pdf at the end of the day.
I think they are in the beginning stages of what they eventually plan to offer. I am hoping they open up their API so developers can access the documents, change the way documents are displayed and how they inter-relate/handle being searched. I am assuming all of the data is held in a db rather than post script files meaning there is a lot of potential for cool parsing/analysis and novel ways of displaying the docs.

But at the same time I can see why people who only see it as "a new pdf" hate it. I really think/hope they have a much larger scope than that but it's obvious that portraying that on first impression is difficult.
What, a rant about Scribd, and nary a mention of the fact that it runs on Rails (and hence all its problems must be due to that framework)?
When I Left Yahoo...
EDIT: to those who are downvoting this post, I'd be really interested to hear why you think I shouldn't have posted it.

The place where it could really help is on embedded/mobile devices, where Flash is more widespread than PDF readers. However, the iPhone for example doesn't support Flash, and I suspect most other current-generation phones don't either.

Now, if Scribd converted as much as possible of the PDFs to (X)HTML/CSS and the rest to highly optimised images (tiled, and picking PNG or JPEG appropriately), that would be much more useful. Actually, even a version that just renders the documents as tiles of images would be quite helpful for devices that don't have PDF viewers, as the loss of copy & paste isn't going to be important on those devices.

Extra points for detecting the browser's display area height & width in pixels and getting the server to serve up appropriately scaled images. (where supported by the device of course)

That said, I used to dislike Scribd a lot more when I was having severe problems with Flash (on Linux). Opera 9.5 seems to have solved those apart from the bugs in Flash itself, but at least it's not taken the browser down with it for a while now. (running the plugin in a separate process with high niceness helps, and I can kill that when flash decides it needs 100% of one CPU after closing the page)

I'm still using the Greasemonkey/User Javascript for real PDF links on HN though. KPDF easily beats both Scribd and Adobe Reader in terms of usability and UI.
Funnily enough, I (and I guess many people here) am only interested in a small subset of "all the news out there". More is less.
Instead of swearing I believe he could write a post titled "How to improve Scribd" and share his frustrations with the Scribd team. That may have a better outcome. If someone has put a certain amount of energy and passion into a product noone should undermine the result.

Luckily the team is made of smart folks and they won't ask the author to go chill because they have nearly 3 million happy uniques to worry about.
Enough with GupShup already. It's a different site, with different needs architectural needs. Wasn't something like this posted already?
They also display office docs. While viewing office docs isn't a common thing for me, I'd much rather see them in a flash widget than boot up OpenOffice.
The Secret to Bill Gates' Success
Too slow to be useful IMHO
As an alternative, I think Clojure's approach of expanding symbols introduced in a macro to the namespace in which that macro was defined regardless of where it is called shows a lot of promise.
There is a recession right now, sometimes it is a good idea to just raise money when you can, especially when the dilution doesn't really effect anything.