skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Disqus is the answer to all commenting systems! :)
IL-Celerate Applications Due June 20 (IL-based YC clone)
Apparently the reality distortion field is radioactive.
I'm currently working on similar software to what a lot of banks use. The user interface is given very very low priority. It's kind of sad.

I'm working on the back-end side of things (the money must add up! otherwise the accountants get grumpy) but would love to see more innovation on the interface side of things.
Probably the same reason that just about all large companies have annoying websites. Something to do with large companies being terrible at anything which isn't the core of their business.
I agree that his health is a personal matter.

Is this multi-billion dollar company overly dependent on one individual?

If not, then his health is not an issue.

If so, then the real issue isn't his health.

The real issue is the backup/succession plan. I have seen 100 million dollar companies paralyzed by the heart attack of one individual. Apple stockholders do deserve to know that that can't happen here.
This is the top story on Hacker News? Embarrassing.

Should I add downvotes on stories, for users over a certain karma threshold?
Saw this - thought locals might appreciate it (need to have an IL resident on the team, be in Chicago for 3 mos, in their offices 3 days/week, $5k/founder, etc)
IPhone Background Processing: Not Fixed But Halfway There
Alternatives to TechCrunch, choose one, be happy:

CenterNetworks
Mashable!
VentureBeat
Read/Write Web
This is seriously an excellent idea. My Bank of America online banking just improved by leaps and bounds.

Thanks!
Some Thoughts on Joel Spolsky's Live Mesh Rant
Thank God ValleyWag is banned, because their article on the matter is obscenely light-hearted about the matter.

I pray Jobs is OK, cancer is no joke :-(
I didn't vote it up myself, but I'm not surprised that on a slow news day, something about TC would get voted up by a lot of people interested in tech (especially web) startup news.

A lot of people ask for downvotes when they're particularly annoyed by a particular story, but they're always told to just go vote up something good.

A more moderate change might be to allow people to undo their upvotes if they decide the story wasn't worth saving after all.

You have more data and experience than anybody else. Try out what you think will be best and undo it if it doesn't work.
I agree. It was an asshole move to write such a story. There's no actual news here. And despite all their high-sounding justifications for writing it (which make up about half the text), it's pretty clear what their motives are.

Incidentally, according to the software I wrote to warn if the quality of stories on the front page goes down, this is the lowest scoring story ever to get this high on the front page.
Tell Arrington!
Run a website?  Don't be the only person who gets to laugh at crazy feedback [breadpig project]
Can anybody give reasons to favor one of those four above the others?
Server Error in '/weblog' Application.
Could not load file or assembly 'WelcomeMacro' or one of its dependencies. Access is denied.
What amaze me about this article and comments here is that the only reason it is important this guy cancer is because it'll affect the stock prices.
Four Reasons Why You Should Leave Facebook
Look they even get reprinted in the Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05...
Please note that this is 2.6M Rand, which is a little over ~300K USD.
Yes. Please.

A couple week trial period couldn't hurt. What's there to lose?
Design by committee - multiple departments with a say in the final product.
If you want to give more money to the poor, the only place you can get it is from the rich. But the amount you'd have to take to fund universal health insurance wouldn't put much of a dent in inequality. To get rid of inequality, you have to explicitly ban being rich, e.g. with tax rates that go asymptotic at a certain point.
Developerlife - The Blog » Apple WWDC - MobileMe and iPhone background tasks
BofA just put in all these crazy icons on their on the U/I that make no sense. My wife and I where looking at it last night in total confusion - they bacially filled the screen with a bunch of useless crap.

An improvement would have simply been using a larger font and breaking out transactions into logical categories, maybe even a newsfeed type feature to let you know at a glance the most recent transactions.

Other banks are far worse than them, really its remarkable how bad they are even today. then you have credit card companies, don't even get me started....
I don't know about the rest of you, but I would personally prefer a fix to the "Unknown or expired link" problem.
I think that ultimately what we need is a consistent portable way of representing your social and personal data on the web. Give third parties individualized access to discrete portions of that data. Retain the ability to revoke that access at will. The current explosion of data duplication is a huge mess.

Edit: Perhaps OAuth [http://oauth.net/] is a good starting point.
It seems like more of a problem not to.

I think the best solution is to allow inequality, but to work hard to prevent wealth from becoming self-perpetuating through political power.
I agree with 99% of the writer's picks for books, and 100% on the authors. However, Rainbows End was not Vinge's best work and isn't close to mind blowing.
he should know already
It works the other way, though. People in less developed countries have kids because they need them to produce food. When they know that they won't starve without having many offspring, they have fewer.

Another way to look at it is that having a child in a less developed country is closer to a net gain in terms of payback to the parent over the life of the child. In developed countries, children are a big investment on which no one expects to come close to breaking even.
not for me either, might just be you. sorry.
"And then the bubble burst"
My old 1990 Geo Metro got about 50 MPG. I could fill up the tank for about $10 and drive for a month. Of course, there were no power windows, no power steering, no power brakes, and no crash survivability. And I had to turn off the A/C to reach highway speed. And the car was tossed about in a stiff breeze. (Literally! Driving in windy areas could be quite harrowing.)

Still, it got 50 MPG. And it had 4 doors! That was quite the feature.

I was surprised to hear that the 175,000 mile Metro went for $3000 on eBay... I counted myself lucky to retire mine to the junkyard at 180,000 miles without paying a towing fee.
Perhaps you could publish a list of similar stories that don't deserve front page status and display them to users when they create an account.

Or arm the top 100 users with a -1 button and let them offset the tendency to front page bad (or non) stories.
A brief, frivolous, but fairly accurate history of Money
I constantly find myself wanting to downvote specific stories. My only other choice is to upvote everything around it, which isn't what I really mean to do.
It's worth a try. If story downvotes existed, stories like this might not even be upvoted... I suspect most of its upvotes reflect pent-up demand for downvotes on previous TC material.
Anyone here independently confirm this yet? Not a good sign from a Google neutrality standpoint.

I'll try it tonight if no one else gets a chance.
YC Feature Request: Weekly HN Summary
Hacker News is currently my primary source of tech news, but I'd like to avoid checking it daily in order to avoid productivity / data smog issues.

I'd love to be able to see a weekly archive of the top 20 or so stories from the week that I can catch up on at my leisure.

The closest thing I've found is this page: http://www.aiderss.com/great/news.ycombinator.com

However, the algorithm favors items with many delicious saves, diggs, etc which are noisier, in my opinion, than the HN scores.
Overcoming Objections to Refactoring
I'm curious how Erlang would do for distributed versioning.
Hitwise: Google Up, Yahoo Down in Search for May, 2008
EchoTopic: Semantic, In-Text Ads
PaltalkExpress: Embeddable Video Chat
Drop.io Adds Scribd’s iPaper For Smoother File Browsing
Scoble: I’m a phone freak
I was involved in a very small startup. There were three of us, and we didn't release anything. What happened was that my cofounders decided that they would have rather had someone else on the team than me because I didn't code (at the time) and can be occasionally difficult to work with. Several months later both of them, after failing to find another third person for the venture, called it quits.

So the whole thing, which was based on my idea from the start, failed. This was in mid-January.

The way it happened, however, gave me a great deal of what I would call "negative inspiration." When I first got the news that I was off the team, I spent a weekend away to relax and collect my thoughts. When I got back, I went to the library and checked out books on programming, called and emailed several contacts who I had talked about working with before, and got to work. I learned PHP and started writing a Facebook app, talked with the CEO of a video game art outsourcing company about working on a spinoff project, and talked with some young founders I had met along the way about joining their teams.

It's a great way to harness energy (though I wouldn't recommend the way it happened to anyone): I ended up in a state of "Oh yeah? I can't program? We'll see about that!" and had a working prototype of a Facebook app coded from scratch within two weekends (no fancy frameworks, which I now know is a stupid idea but I wanted to do it more to learn the language). I worked my ass off on the other fronts for several weeks, spinning plates left and right, while taking extra work at my freelance/contract 'day job' running A/V at meetings in the corporate penthouse of a very large company.

There was a bit of panic because I had expected some compensation for my first startup which never arrived, so I had to borrow a bit of money - about a month of living expenses.

About a month later, I started at my current job, which I love. I've learned new skills on the job as well as sharpening old ones - as employee number 2 at a startup, I can pick up tasks that interest me. I'm now coding in Actionscript 3, RoR, and occasionally Java (with a few tiny bits of PHP and Javascript here and there).

So it all worked out in the end. Though I'm disappointed that my original idea and company didn't work out, I realize that it wouldn't have worked out between the other members of the team and me anyway, even if I knew how to code and wasn't occasionally a jerk about things. In that respect, I'm glad I was out when I was and not later, because I would have been wasting my time.

(edited for grammar. COMMAS!)
Nope, just took too many stastics classes I guess :)
Toyota Announces New 516-Mile Range Fuel-Cell/Electric Hybrid
Windows Mobile 7 To Focus On Touch and Motion Gestures
a blessing in disguise
Well said. I will now predict the future. Steve Jobs will die. So will everyone else.

Apple is a company that is very clearly in need of an world class succession plan. It needs to be public and it needs to be endorsed by Steve himself while he is still seen as healthy and in control. Apple needs it more than most because of Steve's rock star status.

If Jobs has to step down before this is in place, I don't think Apple will do very well, both when it comes to stock value and product lines.
Loved it, even owned the music CDs "You Eediot" and "Crock of Christmas"
Very good point. Even if Steve Jobs lives till 100, he isn't going to live for ever, and might even want retire from being Apple CEO before then.

If I were an Apple shareholder I would be very concerned to ensure that a healthy Apple is not dependent on any one person, not even Steve Jobs.
Word of mouth totally works, but people are so impatient for their product or service to "go viral", they discount its long-term effects.
The principle public companies adhere to is that they should disclose anything 'material', meaning anything that, if it were widely known, would affect the stock price. Perhaps there are investors out there who think Apple would be worth $162 billion run by Gil Amelio or whoever, but I'm not one of them.
Here's another cost to consider:

The SMS messages are not bundled anymore, and you pay for what you want. Again, the prices are based on what you buy.

http://gigaom.com/2008/06/09/att-mobility-ceo-new-3g-iphone-... (towards the bottom of the interview)

I think the lowest SMS plan is an additional $5/month for 200 messages.
I read them. What did you want me to see?
It might make sense to keep upvote and downvote counters separate until either goes over a certain threshold and only then combine them.

That's to prevent deliberate sinking of freshly posted stories by a small, but coordinated effort.
where are my 30 lives?
I will now predict the future. Steve Jobs will die.

Holy shit! That can't happen! Maybe if I buy an iPhone it won't happen!
Oh, Apple's Steve Jobs. For a second I thought they were talking about the other one.
I think it's just an anti-TC sensibility that's emerging with the recent focus on twitter's troubles. TC seemed necessary when it was promoting startup efforts. But technical critiques seems well-beyond its niche (and I'll admit a bit terrifying to someone developing an application).
Thanks, this is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for!
Shouldn't e be in that formula somewhere?
I agree, and I wrote the damned thing.
Mashable I would advise against. It's full of fluff articles, and sometime a year or two ago had the inexplicable idea of turning into a social network itself. It's a mess of a site and its writing is no better.

Though I don't follow many blogs anymore, period, R/WW writes fewer articles, but it tends to do a much better job with making sure the articles it DOES write are good. It's fairly high-quality.
For only a 1.6% increase in price.
I posted a different version of this story a few days ago: http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2008/06/02/a_new_step_in_evolut...
Is it possible that a Hummer's better for the environment than a Prius is?
Update: The new batteries make the carbon footprint much less drastic.

See: http://www.slate.com/id/2186786/pagenum/all/#page_start
I just wrote a blog post about my "failed startup"...

http://airik.blogspot.com/2008/06/where-you-want-to-be.html

It didn't work out from a business point of view, but it was probably the best experience of my entire life. And in that sense, I feel like I succeeded. Frankly, I'm quite proud of it.
The $10,000 question
Advertising Targeting & Brand Implications
No, Amazon's new streaming video service is not derailing Amazon.com
It would be great if some invasive species behaved this way. The chemical which causes the plants to restrain themselves could be used to slow down their growth.
Eye Movement Patterns on Single and Dual-Column Web Pages
The health of the CEO definitely has impacts on the company, especially so in Apple's case. The health of Apple is directly related to Jobs, much more so than any other large company I can think of. There was an article (can't remember where) about his first bout with cancer and the struggle he had to stay on the up and up with the SEC. Basically it's his private matter up until it would be likely to affect his performance. It's kind of a grey area, but keeping things disclosed is much better for the company.

It's pretty depressing, but you'd have all sorts of insider trading problems with only a few people knowing you're sick. The people who would know (nurses, doctors, etc) would probably be fairly under the radar as far as that's concerned too.
I might consider taking this way:

“My 6 year old son is learning computer programming by first understanding the mathematical foundations, then applying what he has learned using Haskell, because it is short and natural (he doesn’t even know what Haskell is)”
http://blog.tmorris.net/does-java-cause-self-delusion/
I notice that noone is even considering the possibility that it's an anti-fraud measure run rampant.
Interesting read. The little snip at the though about creationists seemed a bit petty. Though I can understand why an evolutionary biologist might be a bit miffed at Creationist organizations.

In any case, score one for science.
Personally, I think if you blocked fromedome's blog spamming, the overall quality of submissions would probably go up by a measurable amount.
Digital Beijing: the cool datacenter that will be used for the 2008 Olympics
feature requests go here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
Here, I just made this for you: http://feeds.feedburner.com/HNWatrcoolr

It is the last 30 HN stories that made it to the top of the list. If you put it in your RSS reader, you can then visit it each week or whatever to catch up.

I'm getting these from http://hacker.watrcoolr.us (a site I made a few weeks ago).

The feed for that site is http://feeds.feedburner.com/HackerWatrCoolr (though that includes other sources in it as well.)
Has anybody tried GAE with Amazon FlexPay or another payment service?
Perhaps something like this will appear, but expect it to be a very slowly processed queue and one which the user can control. To be completely honest, once I stop using your GPS-powered-social-network du jour app I really don't want you knowing where I am. Apple's system currently gives app developers the ability to pass along notifications but by making the data flow a one-way street from the dev to the phone I remain in control of the phone and its data, not some dev I don't trust.
The little-known history of the "Comanche Empire"
I suspect this wouldn't work the way you want it to. Currently, "alt.techcrunch.die.die.die" has 38 points in the #2 spot, and you probably wouldn't want that sort of story to bump something more useful out of your weekly top 20.

Also, I understand your desire to minimize your time on the site, but news.yc also does rely at least somewhat on the participation of its users. On Friday you might find a great post from Monday that you could've lent some discussion to.

What about using something like 8aweek to limit your time on news.yc instead?
Give editors downvotes. This is less powerful than marking something dead. I would also give the functionality to anyone in the top 1%.
heck, i could spend all day addressing the misconceptions and downright falsehoods in this comment, but it sounds like you've already made up your mind.

I'll listen if you'd like to continue to comment.

great technical products are not produced via democracy. they're almost always the vision of just a few people.

This clearly puts you in the cathedral category from The Cathedral & the Bazaar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar). I think both approaches have their merits and operating systems should make room for both. Though, there are good arguments for both sides I tend to like enough openness for both approaches to compete.

that's patently absurd. apple randomly picked 4000 iphone devs to let into the beta program. that's all. they will let in more later, once they've gotten feedback from the first crop, and understand better how the process will work.

I could understand this for a few months following the launch of the beta. But at this point open it up, what are they worried about? I'd just like to be able to put my own apps on my own iPhone for starters. I don't see how that will hurt Apple's app store launch. I understand why they are doing it, I just don't agree.

I'm happy Apple is at least based on FreeBSD. If Apple is going to use Unix as a selling point then they open themselves up to some expectations from the Linux / BSD crowd. I've found ways around any problems, new apps, different work processes. But, that doesn't mean I wasn't frustrated.
While I agree that this article made me think twice about my preconceptions of plant-life, it is nonetheless important to remember that evolution -- despite the length of time involved -- does not necessarily lead to complicated behavior.
I loved this. Tip it here: http://tipjoy.com/joy/20684/
Ask YC: Abandon my new corporate job to build my startup?
Over the last few months, a friend and I have been growing a startup. We just graduated college. He's moving back home to continue programming at a company he's been with for years. I chose to move to a neighboring city to take a stable job at a growing, somewhat large (~200 people) internet company.

I just started yesterday and I already feel like this wasn't the right decision. Our plan was to continue working in our free time to grow the site, but I want to dedicate 100% of my time to it, something that my partner is unwilling to do due to overbearing student loan payments and the allure of a near-six figure salary at his job. I fear that we'll both become too busy and worn out from our jobs and lose momentum with our venture.

Are there any people here who have successfully grown a company in their free time, ultimately making their venture full-time? I wonder how many people here are working on their startups part time?
Okay, by this point in time, I really hope that everyone on HN that needs to know (i.e. all programmers) actually knows about Unicode and UTF-8. Finding the right libraries for the job is pretty googlable. Are all these "UTF-8 is awesome" articles really so relevant?

UTF-8 has been around since 1993 and has been widely used on the web and as standard in most decent operating systems for at least 5 years, so enough already!
meta-babble

That's a great phrase. I hadn't heard it before.
Thanks! I'll try that out for a bit.
Judge Unseals Yahoo-Microsoft Lawsuit, Scandalous Details Emerge
If you're really interested in seeing the latest research, you should email relevant professors ahead of time with your bio and ask them to set you up with a graduate student to talk about what they're doing.
Using something like 8aweek is good for productivity, but I still end up missing the news aspect. I'm trying to get the best of both worlds -- no distraction w/o missing news :)

Perhaps the answer isn't algorithmic though, given how often poor quality items (like the one you mention) end up on top. Maybe I just need a quality tech blog that updates infrequently.
Not sure what can be done about this, but the URL matching is missing lots of stuff. Posted this five hours ago, with a 1-character difference in the URL:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=213784

(Ordinarily I wouldn't complain, but it's happened about six times in the last 2-3 days.)
well isn't it better to just ignore TC? I mean it's easy to critique something, where once we had insight all we have now is backchatter.

And seriously, this doesn't deserve to be on YC.
Stink bomb gas to give stroke victims new hope
That was one of my first thoughts, but I would assume that GAE spam-bot abuse would be smarter than that. If there really was someone doing this kind of stuff, surely they would just block that particular PayPal account (along with banning the GAE user) - AFAIK valid PayPal accounts aren't easy to generate in large quantities. And I can't imagine it's a reaction to a GAE-based DDoS attack, as spotting that kind of pattern ought to be really easy and resorting to blocking URLs wouldn't be necessary.

To be honest, I suspect this to be a bug rather than deliberate, or else you'd have thought that they'd have notified people.
I'm one of the people working on my startup part-time. Since my day job has nothing to do with web development, it's a joy for me to spend several hours in the evening doing web dev/design. However, I am painfully aware of the (lack of) speed in my progress; as such, I am looking for a co-founder to make faster progress. If a funding opportunity came up, I'd definitely go full time at it.
HP takes a swing at Apple’s MacBook Air with new Voodoo Envy laptop