skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You would be surprised how many page views some of these apps get. Many of the apps were specially designed to promote page views and force the user to change page to do simple tasks. Anyways, I think the article is about right and that the buzz of the launch is long gone.. Unless you build something kick ass I don't think you can reach to top of the food chain anymore.
i wonder if performing a restart... something like what The Architect from The Matrix talks about...

i wonder if simply restarting the entire software would help a bit. in other words, deleting the entire database and starting from scratch every n years. meaning the front page would be blank, people would have to 'register' again with their karma at 1

if it takes making a new community, a restart might be a good approximation, among having other effects (eg the effect on karma whores)
Sorry for replying a bit late. For FFTs, flops are measured in a standardized way. If you are doing an FFT of length N, the number of flops is counted as 5 N log N no matter how the actual FFT is computed. So, in the case of FFT, really you just specify a length N and measure the time.

For CPUs, the numbers using FFTW, one of the fastest FFT libraries that does take advantage of SIMD, the numbers usually do not exceed 5-6 gflops particularly for larger lengths.

OTOH, the above 55 gflops figure is also somewhat misleading since it does not include transfer time of data b/w RAM and GPU. Actual throughput is somewhere around 20gflops. On one particular project using FFT, I got around 15 gflops using GPU including transfer time while testing several FFT libraries, I never got above 3 gflops on a 2.4ghz quad-core using all four cores. The lenghts were big enough not to fit into cache thus reducing CPU performance considerably.
The most important thing, besides the general desire to keep the community positive, is this: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Reddit, on the other hand, has the following guidelines:

Submit a link to anything interesting: news article, blog entry, video, picture...

The HN community is built around a particular standard. Reddit's official standard is the lowest common denominator. If the lowest common denominator is "Impeach Bush" and "Funny pic [nsfw]", then that's going to dominate.

Unfortunately, I've already seen Hacker News change over the last year (less programming-related content; more general business news). I'd love a gentle nudge back in the hacker direction. But it's still the best social bookmarking site at the moment.
Just want to second this. I just read much of the spec this summer, and was surprised how directly the byte codes corresponded to Java semantics.
But that's bastardizing the original Tolstoy quote, which IIRC was "Happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way", i.e. success looks the same, but failure is widely varied.

</pedantic>

Applies to startups too. And oh look, there's a Wikipedia article on it too:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle
Web 2.0 names that were stolen from my 4 year old
Jaiku, that was just bought by Google and Joomla are both names invented by the author's 4 year old. He wants her to get some credit...
Advice for the Young
Thanks for the advice guys. I've put the job up on both oDesk and RentACoder. Perhaps it will be useful to report back and tell everybody how it went? I'm really wary about trusting anybody else with "my" baby, but at some point I think it makes sense to offload non-value-added things. I really appreciate the feedback.
congrats! would love to here more details
I think there are a few things going on here that differentiate it from Digg/Reddit (I'll leave out Slashdot for the moment, because I think they have different concerns).

On Digg and Reddit, there is no "focus". Digg started out as a tech news site and degraded slowly until they opened up the doors to include all news, which brought what you have refered to as posts on Obama's latest news and pictures of their cats.

On reddit, the day I stopped reading was the day I saw a post on the front page encouraging folks to not post political stories on the politics sub-site because they don't get enough attention that way. That would imply that both sites have a problem with "activists".

To me, that sufficiently explains why the front page of HN "works". What I can't figure out is why the comments on this site tend to be so civil. The HN community seems to lack the hostility that plagues virtually every other site of its kind. Is it fewer angry people? Older, or more mature audience? Maybe it's migrants from the three sites you mention who were fed up with the poor behavior exhibited there?
4 Simple Steps To Minimize Failure Of Your Next Business Idea
Will Mainstream Users Ever Learn About The Browser's Address Bar?
They'd break your arm before they'd let you sit the exam. (so the arm would be in a cast)
I've been thinking of tattooing "print 'hello world'" on my arm, but after seeing this i think i would really seem stupid. What if i tattoo "(1..100).inject(&:+) sucks" . Will i seem mean?

PS I'm a python guy, so (1..100).inject(&:+) seems very ugly.
Someone correct me, but I think King Gillette started in his forties, inventing something people wanted: the safety razor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Camp_Gillette
Deploy Rails apps to EC2 in minutes with the RoR JumpBox
GoDaddy’s Domain Registration Totally Screws .me
Or if you want to build a product instead of a feature.
Anyone want to contrast OCaml with Scala?

Scala is also multi-paradigm and has type inferencing. What would the differences be (to someone learning Scala, but no experience with OCaml)?
Ask this before signing up for SaaS and cloud computing
You're probably too old to quit your job, live in a one bedroom apartment with two other dudes, and eat Ramen for six months. But you're probably not too old to start something as a side project with your friends and see if it goes somewhere.
Firebuggin'
Page views is possibly the worst metric for this enterprise. Warbook had tons of page views, but it was designed to generate them. Scrabbulous on the other had had essentially one or two, but it's engagement was through the roof.
My apologies for being a brickhead, but how do page views turn into money for a Facebook app author?
I'm a big OCaml fan, but heck if I've had a chance to use it yet.

If Microsoft can keep F# "pure" OCaml it has a great shot at winning the scaling wars. Stuff like workflows and monads are still messing with my head, though.
Theories about persuasion
fyi: there's a step-by-step tutorial here on how to move the JumpBox to EC2 once you have your app deployed-> http://blog.jumpbox.com/2008/06/27/a-beginners-guide-to-runn...
http://www.rockyou.com

http://www.slide.com

http://www.seriousbusiness.com/
This is why hacker news has a collection of editors with the power to kill cat pictures with a click.
An inspiring story from a fellow old-timer! ;-)
IPhone Developer: Apple's Secrecy, Slowness Makes Things Difficult
Part of the problem may be that the article is a pdf, and you have to create an account to read it.
No. I'm 38 and a year in as CTO of a startup while moonlighting on another "hobby" business I've had for a couple of years.

Oh, and I have two kids, a wife, and a yard. I actually know my kids and they know who I am :-). But, I don't watch TV, the only video games I play are with my kids, and I'm having the time of my life.

You can do it. It's just a matter of desire and priorities. Me, I have more fun getting code to run than watching TV or playing an RPG. And that's really the only "sacrifice" I've made, and I think it's a rather good one, personally.
I know; I mean in addition to YC.
Note that the statistic isn't for HN only, but also includes the rest of ycombinator.com. I suspect HN didn't shrink; instead YC got press hits in April + May after registrations and kicking off the summer cycle. Also, for that level of traffic, I'd be wary of compete.com stats. More so than usual in any case.
Playing Games With Your Mind
I didn't need an account to read it. A direct link is here:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1127877_code...
Interesting. Entering college as a computer agnostic and hs dropout in the late 80's I was dismayed by my curriculum and it's focus on word processing, dos, floppy disks, etc..
It seemed that the computer medium was dross and doldrum.

Previously, in HS, I was terribly bored with most subject matter presentation and irritated by authority in general.

I had been an avid reader since 5 or 6 and had read science fiction/fantasy and classic literature during these formative years. I did not do well in the college environment. I dropped all my classes.

Years later, I returned to college: emphasis had once again turned to the printed word, symbolism, and other recognizable concepts rather than any ability to use a computer. 4.0 average for two semesters was the result.

At the third semester I found myself in honors courses which irritated me with opinions I was too immature to discard gracefully and once again dropped out.

Provided as counterpoint to this article.
Telecom Monthly - The Sprint Sucks Story
WTF? Why did this get upmodded?
I just started using Google Reader about 3 weeks ago. I'm currently subscribed to approximately 30 feeds, and I tend to skim the headlines on the busier sites, and then read whatever might catch my eye. On the slower sites, or blogs from folks that I know, I tend to read the whole article, or give up after I decide that I'm just not interested.
I have it configured to purge already read posts, so I just page down the busier blogs until I finish, or stumble upon something I like. I also tend to use the mark all read after the weekend or a day or two off, since I don't have the time to sift through too much detritus from not servicing my feeds. I think with news/social news sites like reddit & slashdot, which I had subscribed to, and subsequently unsubscribed to, have too much noise to lend themselves to reading in an RSS feed.
"Last.fm's Buggy New Design"

Seriously...the way he wrote the title reads like Last.fm invented a new design for some old-school transportation.
The BSA singles out eight states in software piracy report, suggests public safety link
Heh, probably true. :) I keep hearing about this Ramen stuff here on HN - I think I missed out!
because it answers the question perfectly.
SHA1 is generally recognized as being just fine for most business purposes, even after the Chinese attack.

When people talk about the security of something it's really important to understand the nature of the attack. Even if you could theoretically generate a random looking chunk of data which could return the same digest, that in itself does not make the timecert any less secure.

This is more an issue in traditional digital signature applications.

I also think I'd dispute the idea that they aren't worth much in a patent dispute. Academic Journals and Patent Applications work as a trusted third party in the same way as TimeCert does.

An online Lab Journal service would be an excellent idea.
Processing is reasonably powerful, and has also been implemented in javascript.

see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=185191
Google Announces Q2 Earnings And Stock Plummets
I wonder if older founders could hack that problem by starting up in an area outside their expertise.
Yes, the majority of people here just support banning, harsher punishments, and locking out all outsiders. Those are very poor solutions!

#1 and #2 cause strong negative backlash. As you would learn from marketing theory, a user that you have personally screwed with will likely cause 20x more damage to your brand than your best users improve it. #3 Locks out a lot of useful expertise. For sure, HN could use a lot more knowledge about programming. So far, this site has attracted lots of people who want to learn but much less so people who already know a lot and have wide experience. We still very much need to be inviting to the latter.

Another point that very knowledgeable people are very opinionated, stubborn, and generally assholes. Linus Torvalds is the stereotypical example. This is not to excusing the behavior, but the correlation exists and we will all have to try not to get so offended and ban people like immature children.

If you try to hold onto the past forever instead of trying to improve then you will fail.

I hope this was useful.
Reading 20 feeds with newsbeuter (http://synflood.at/newsbeuter.html)

Fast, simple, console-friendly, familiar keybindings and gets the job done without any distractions.

What more could you possibly wish for?
NetNewsWire

Have embarked upon a quest to break it — up to ~1000 feeds, and although it stalls out my MBP during huge updates, it's held up very well. Tried Google Reader but at about ~200 feeds, it crapped out and the whole AJAXy UI became totally unmanageable (plus, frequent bouts where the server never returned) — Google Reader issues may have been rectified, but at time I experimented with it, it was unwieldy.

I need to do some housekeeping to NNW — presently, I sort by feed source, and just fly through/ignore about half the feeds (especially the ones with frequent updates). It seems the more frequent the update, the less the quality fare, though HN is an exception in this regard. Really need to set up folder buckets to bury those that I might want to read, given extra time.

I scan and can flip through titles and first few paragraphs rapidly (3 pane view).

It really is a more efficient reading experience that magnifies your news/blog coverage, but you need to refine, and dispense with the ones that don't add value or at least bury them.

There is a dichotomy in reading experience via RSS vs. the Web that I will write an article about at some future point and lay out all my thoughts — lots of good stuff out there that has no RSS or content that RSS is not sufficiently capturing the content (some titles only or less than a sentence in body, or web site styling that enhances the viewership experience).

OTOH, the big benefit of RSS is getting to read without the extraneous, tarted up graphic fare in a font size/style more suited to reading text on a monitor.
Startup Hiring: An Entrepreneur Disagrees With Entrepreneur Magazine
Microsoft Profit, Forecast Disappoint; Stock Declines
Google Earnings Fall Short of Estimates; Shares Drop
Many of the people who contribute to Linux do so because they feel it's "the right thing" in some sense (though that can mean a lot of things). There's a lot to be said for network effects increasing the value of Linux for everyone, but for a lot of people it's simply that they get their gratification from feeling like they've helped build something that other people enjoy and find useful. If more people use and enjoy what you've built it's simply more rewarding to do the work.
Limit the number of news submission per user in 24 hours. I suggest max 5 news/24 hours. That way, we can guard HN from spammers.
The guy is 31.
Donate to help a MySQler
A Thinking Man's Sphinx
Resulst seem pretty suspect:

Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 57%

Likelihood of you being MALE is 43%

Site Male-Female Ratio

google.com 0.98

commerceonline.com 0.77
Clutter Toolkit: a neat GUI toolkit
Jeff Bezos started Amazon.com when he was 40.
This guy had dedication to learn and dig deep into the internals of esoteric windows api calls, artificial intelligence, and bot detection. And he was doing something that he thought was fun; he had passion for it. I applaud his success.
Ask YC: Canonical web site width?
I haven't made a "real" website in awhile. Do you guys still aim for 800 or have we moved passed that phase yet? Is 1024 the new standard?
Apparently I'm 59% female. Hmm. I could have sworn...
I stopped reading at the heading: "Windows will be dead; Microsoft may or may not Die with it."

Windows has been dead since before Windows existed. (All you fellow old farts: How many prove-able, truly, completely superior alternatives were there to DOS in the old days?). And hasn't Windows, since the 1.0 release, always been inferior to the Mac? Has it not always crashed more, required more re-installs, and basically been a technical let-down in one way or another? This guy acts like he just discovered that Windows is technically inferior to the alternatives. This guy's standing so close to the curve, he thinks it's a flat line.

I'm thinking, as comatose_kid states, maybe this guy's not old enough. He should be taking advice and reading history books, he has no place actually giving advice.
I guess they were hoping to be bought out by Facebook? Or maybe some other big company wanting in on the Facebook pie. (Microsoft?)
31 now, or 31 when he wrote this back in 2005?
He was born in 1977 (according to his bio page).
In fact, he was 30.
Yes, it looks like pg built something to recognize good/bad stories:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=213951
LMAOOL at the modding for parent and grandparent, both by me!
Do you have kids? Family? Mortgage? Are you going to help your kids pay for college? What about parents? Do you have to help them out at all? Will you be able to purchase affordable health insurance?
I'm 44 and I just started on my fourth.
Deploying Drupal with Capistrano
Nice writeup on deploying Drupal with Capistrano, with real world code examples.
Sure they are! Complicated interfaces make it easy to:

1 - avoid forcing yourself to really prioritize your feature set, something that's really hard to do and requires really understanding your users.

2 - push a bunch of effort from you to the user.

For example, you cited A9.com. If I do a search on A9.com, the search results window is split (by default) into two parts: one that lists web search results and one that lists book search results. At least by default, it appears that both sections are always there.

If I do a search on Google, than Google will usually only display web search results, but if it senses I'm searching for something about a book (example: do a search for "Charles Dickens"), you'll sometimes see some book results up at the top.

Google's method of only showing you book results when it suspects you are looking for something having to do with books is both much less complex for the user and much more difficult to build.
"As you would learn from marketing theory, a user that you have personally screwed with will likely cause 20x more damage to your brand than your best users improve it."

I'd say that a jackass active on the site is more damaging than one banned. If you ban someone, you have only upset one user. If you allow a spammer/troll/flamer/etc to continue unchallenged, you have upset all of them.

The thing with online communities is, this is Web 2.0, your users are your product. The better the users, the better the product. If you have a good community, smart, helpful people will be attracted and will thus improve the community. If you have a bad one, they will be warded off. Scum breeds scum.

Think broken window theory.
Wish they wouldn't use Paypal.
Analysts expectations were way to high given the current market climate. Google couldn't maintain maintain the price for their stock even with the deal they cut with yahoo. The article made a key point of advertisers allocating their shrinking ad budgets elsewhere and I think this is one of the many factors that influenced the dip in stock price.
Metafilter simply turned off new user registration for a long time when they didn't like where things were going.
When hes 31, he knows what he missed or should have done when he was younger. An younger guy maynot realise that. We always realise mistakes or missed oppurtunities in hindsight.
Is funding drying out? Heavily Backed Financial Intelligence Firm Monitor110 Shutters
If that could be achieved then, yes you would be quite correct. However, it is very hard to completely cut people off on the Internet. Furthermore, they can start disparaging you through other mediums (eg blogs) and influence people they still know to be using your site.
as I worked on Balsamiq for many, many nights and week-ends

And this for sure is another form of cost.
feels to general to take seriously - having a little cash in the bank is not a bad thing, lusting over a vc round before building something is also a bad scenario in most cases. Instead of right vs. wrong in the boostrap vs. funding argument, I would much rather find about about how to determine the right amount you need and some useful advice in finding investors that will help beyond writing a check. otherwise its just more useless one size fits all advice that i ignore.
You most certainly did not miss out.
At 39 I work in a startup. I would say that mid-thirties is probably the ideal age to get involved with a startup. Both the founders for which I work are also 'mid thirties'. At that age you probably have enough experience to be at a great advantage over people in their 20s.

Good luck!
So? Thats free publicity. If they something bad about you, all they're doing is informing people of your existence. People will judge for themselves whether you are worth using, usually by checking it out themselves. At least, the kind of people you want on HN will.

The problem isn't with them badmouthing you on your site, it with them polluting your product. If the product sucks, people won't use it, no matter how much you suck up to them.
I'm female, but got these results -

Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 45%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 55%

Apparently, my surfing habits are androgynous.
Kleiner bets the farm - firm is going green and leaving Internet deals to the competition.
I think the requirement that every little text snippet appears once and only once on every site is bullshit. I can see how it would confuse the lesser search engines, but from a navigational standpoint, it usually makes sense to make content reachable in various ways. So Google should just deal with it instead forcing stupid rules on web developers.
How Walkable Is Your Neighborhood?
Oops... my cookies were messed up; I managed to download the article. I note, though, that the link you provided isn't a direct link. They must be checking referrer to discourage direct links... Annoying!
I consume feeds (ten in total) in two different ways: my iGoogle Homepage and the Opera Feeds reader.

For the iGoogle Homepage I have HN and /. feeds. These feeds are updated so frequently that I don't want to subscribe to them in my reader (and have the unread ones pile up). These I read selectively - only the titles that interest me.

The Opera Feed reader I use for blogs that get updated at most daily. For the most part, I read every entry, skipping only the ocassional esoteric post. I used to read these ones in Google Reader; but once I discovered Opera's reader is much faster, I haven't gone back. (It would be nice if their synch system did feeds too, though.) I like to use the reader for these because it helps me keep track of what I've read, keeps all my daily/weekly reading in one place, and for feeds that include their content since they load considerably faster without the overhead of their site (e.g. Dilbert Blog).
Huh. That site repeatedly made my Firefox (V3) crash. 5 times in a row. Weird...
Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 99%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 1%

:(
No, 38 is not too young. Sure, you'll get better as you get older, but there's no reason not to start now. If it's a software startup, you'll want a good codebase in place now before your kids get old enough to hack on it.

P.S. You put "am I too old" in the title. You might be able to get one of the moderators to fix that typo.
VC for Facebook widgetmakers is drying up