skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's unbelievably pleasant to browse the bookshelves with zoomii! We'll see more star interaction designers like these guys in the future.
I am not sure how Matt's startup is doing but I know his blog is gaining more traction and I can see it rise to a healthy and dedicated audience within the next 12 months. Matt may be that one guy who makes a million in profit from his blog.
Pointing out what you (and others) see as a problem with this news site, and suggest it as a reason to go to your news site, only makes sense if you don't see them as independent.
And yet it seems to be pretty damned popular...and growing rapidly. I noticed when I checked earlier today that it has passed reddit in hits, by some measure (Compete.com, specifically, though Alexa has scribd surpassing reddit at least a year ago--at least one of them is horribly wrong). If I had a website that measured success in traffic, I'd probably be pretty happy with that kind of popularity and growth.
It doesn't exist.

According to a number of users at Metafilter ( http://www.metafilter.com/28301/Scrambled-Text ), they've scoured the net and found nothing...
Really, if you have an office doc that you want to put online, then why not export it as a pdf?
Why the second half of the title? I could give it a less if it was "broken" by Digg or Twitter or Slashdot or email - the only thing that matters is whether there is ice or not on Mars. You don't see CNN headlines suffixed with "as AP told us" or "and Reuters had it first!" etc.
This is a good business opportunity to start a VPN service in Korea or Taiwan...
Which makes the phenomenon even stranger - nobody here seems to be able to come up with a good explanation of scribd's success, yet somehow they do succeed.
1. Lightweight, in-browser preview of docs.

2. Embeddable docs: you don't have to leave the context in which a doc is referenced to peruse it.

3. Easy way to integrate advertising in docs.

4. Improves browsability of docs by aggregating them and analyzing content for relatedness.

5. Comments/community.

Admittedly, the shortcomings this ranter lists (can't save, can't print, can't copy & paste) are major annoyances. The problem here isn't that Scribd doesn't add any value: it most certainly does. The problem is that it currently takes away enough value to make many potential uses of their services annoying, like the very situation on HN mentioned in this guy's blog post. But why is Scribd necessarily to blame, here? The person who submitted the Scribd version of the document could have linked to the freely downloadable version instead.

Just because there are dumb uses of a service doesn't mean that service is useless.

(On the other hand, it's possible the linker wouldn't have found the document to begin with if it wasn't on Scribd. In which case, the value added from aiding users in discovery of valuable documents clearly outweighs the nuisance of having to find a freely downloadable copy yourself.)

Sheesh, folks. Do a little thinking before you decide to jump on the hater bandwagon.
While not exactly polite, the post is right on the money.

The biggest usability problem with Scribd is the lack of the access to the actual PDF. In fact, had they put a big fat link to the PDF somewhere in the viewer, it would've actually become a handy online PDF preview tool.

I can't imagine they haven't thought about this feature. Its usefulness to the end-user is damn obvious, but yet it's not in the Scribd. Which makes one really wonder if the goal of locking users in is not that hypothetical after all.
Accounting and book-keeping, once money starts to flow.

Payroll.

Support (you'll want it taken care of, but you shouldn't succumb to the impulse--at least not entirely, because you need to support customers daily in order to understand them).

Legal crap. Taxes, employment agreements, etc.

I want to say billing and invoicing and payment handling, but I think it's probably more efficient to bite the bullet and integrate these tightly into your own system--so that you always know exactly what's happening and how every change in your product or marketing effects your bottom line.
Microsoft rules out post-Yahoo buying spree
It's good for hosting and distributing documents of dubious copyright.
Good point.

Most people I know who attend regularly see the institution of the church as a means to do good in the world and their community. Some also contribute to open source projects in the same spirit.

However the more I think about it I suspect they would remind me that the pursuit of pleasure by doing good is just another form of hedonism, so strictly speaking my rephrased analogy isn't right either.
I use Scribd for finding copyrighted and stolen books. :-)

It is way easier to type "Linear Algebra Done Right" in the search, instead of installing some eMule, Napster, or whatever is popular right now for this purpose. (don't know, never used P2P networks)
I feared my above comment would be taken wrong, but the way questions (3) and (4) are worded, the core concept of an equity investment isn't yet in the asker's mind.

The comments from byrneseyeview and swivelmaster try to address this, but a few sentences in a comment thread aren't going to create the necessary understanding. j2d2 needs to do some basic reading about (small) business finance, just to be able to speak the lingo of investors and lawyers. Something approachable like those general-audience books with the self-deprecating names could be a reasonable place to start.

Until then, tips about subtle legal terms and multiple-round raises with professional VC firms are very premature, and perhaps even a disservice.
Given this - http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/17/scribd-goes-straight-ba... - it was good for porn sharing. It still probably is, because I doubt they have a reasonably good "flesh tone detection" software in place to fully automate the process.

Incidentally, this may also explain their steady traffic growth. It'd be interesting to look at their traffic numbers once all porn is eradicated.
Is it?

Uploaded On: 2007-11-04

I'm pretty sure the fail whale was around before Nov. 2007?
Birthday Party Games
Birthday Party Games
Universal... except for the parts of the universe that can't be edited.
To answer my own question, according to Wikipedia, Mars' surface temperature is between −87 °C and −5 °C, and the atmospheric pressure is around 0.007 atm to 0.009 atm.

And according to this (http://bhs.smuhsd.org/science-dept/marcan/apchemistry/h2opha...) phase diagram for water, sublimation occurs at pressure less than 0.006 atm and temperature less than 0.01 °C.

So while the pressure on Mars might be a little too high, it's pretty darn close. Wikipedia or that phase diagram could be wrong.

Also, I just came across this:

The atmospheric pressure on Mars is just a bit below the triple-point pressure. That's why the textbooks all say liquid water is unstable on the surface of Mars. Any liquid water will rapidly evaporate and the rest, cooled by evaporation, will freeze. Low spots on Mars may have pressures above the triple-point pressure, but are usually far too cold. Even if you did somehow get above 0 C on Mars and into the liquid field, you're so close to the vapor curve that water would rapidly evaporate. Even solid ice would quickly sublimate on Mars except in the very coldest areas.

http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/petrolgy/Ice%20Structure.HTM
<devils advocate>

1) You want people to eventually download and re-edit, but in the mean time (or for some people) you just want to allow them to see it in their browser.
2) The adobe pdf plug-in is less than spectacular, even if you do go to all the trouble to export your office docs to pdf.
3) I'm not sure, but the pdf conversion from the 3 Office document formats must be fairly lossy. Then again, I don't know that the office document conversion to ipaper is any better.
4) The user might not have Office or a suitable clone handy.

Also, this is only slightly related to what you're saying, but you could imagine Scribd supporting more obscure document formats which are not readily converted to pdf's.
Oh, that's mostly true. But not always.

For example the oil-rich states of the middle east see a lot of inflation right now. Expensive oil brought more new money than more new goods had been provided in the short term.
This is big news - I think we all need to stop, collaborate and listen.
If you fix interest rates - you can make very good nominal predictions. But nobody knows how much those x dollars are really worth when inflation is allowed to float.
Optimizing Haskell seemed to require quite deep knowledge about the way the compiler worked.
Oh, humans can go without food for days and then eat a whole lot of stuff in a short time.

Continuous food supply is a very recent comfort.
I do my work in the "interstices of [my] mind-wandering." That quote (see http://tinyurl.com/454tao) is going to stick with me for a while.
In other words, news broke out on twitter 2 1/2 years after ice was found on mars.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4479612.stm
1) Your continued comments are way off topic. In what way do they relate to doctors being overworked? None that I can see.

2) You really don't seem to have a good grasp of what the statistics are telling you. Take the statins example. As others have tried to explain to you quite politely, the statistical improvement of statins vs placebo are both significant, and even impressive. Your response? 'Asshole'. Nice work.
It is much, much easier to vote something up that says a simple profound truth than anything complicated for many different reasons. It is bad when easy to vote things dominate the homepage.
Network Interconnect: the Greatest Challenge in Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) Systems
Context is everything: why the semantic web is important
Nice try, but your argument doesn't hold up for society at large.

It doesn't matter to you as an individual if you are prescribed heart medicine when you need it. However, it truly does save lives in society. How do you propose we scale back the system of medicine? Should doctors no longer prescribe statins?
Not to denounce the educational aspect of doing it all, but it would seem the most straightfoward way to do this would be to use lex and yacc, which implement DSLs specifically designed to do this. Using a general purpose language seems like overkill (which is why parser generators exist).
Hell yeah it's got cool features. Programmable macros for instance. You never have to repeat yourself every again. You could mark certain points in your code and come back to it later. Not too mention it's installed in almost every Linux Distro out there. For good documentation http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
Speaking of Mac only editor's, I cannot wait to try Coda from Panic.
How Time's 50 best websites make money
SadeceWEB
Even if you don't have a PDF reader, there's still Google's chache that will display PDF and Word files in HTML just fine.

Scribd is completely and utterly useless. In two years time we will laugh about the little startup that thought it could improve the internet by displaying perfectly readable documents in a cumbersome flash interface (my biggest annoyance: scrolling using a scroll wheel doesn't work - where's the improvement in that?).
Compressed air has great power density, but awful energy density. I.e., you can unload power very quickly from it but can't store much at all.

Looking at this http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/new_cars/4217016.... popular mechanics article, this engine uses 340 Liters of air (under STP) compressed at 4350 PSI.

If my math is right, that only provides a theoretical maximum of about 55 MJ of energy, which is about the same as about 1.5 liters of gasoline.

A combustion engine runs at about 20% efficiency and, if memory serves, compressed air engines at around 30%. But let's give MDI the benefit of the doubt and assume their engines are 50% efficient.

That means this car claims to be able to go 200-300KM (125-185 miles) on the equivalent of about 4 Liters (or 1 gallon) of gasoline.

Now, getting 150 miles/gallon isn't physically impossible, but it seems pretty difficuly and does raise some red flags to me. And that's assuming they have a 50% efficient engine, which is extraordinarily unlikely. Assuming a 30% efficient engine, this car is doing the equivalent of 250 miles/gallon.
Working as a programmer - is it what you thought it would be?
While a really nice idea, it's inefficient and won't work. Time has proven over and over that technology requires a different perspective, and what we're used to doesn't always work. From the first attempts at flight by creating artificial wings and flapping them up and down to sowing machines that attempted to thread a needle through one side of a cloth and out the other, science has shown that what we're used just doesn't always translate to success in the machine world.
Erlang and XMPP at the Major League of Baseball
Sliders was a good show. Sliding through wormholes and visiting alternate realities.
Ironic, aren't you the one who posted a flash game the other day and it made to #1?
Safari v3.1.2 for Windows fixes "carpet bomb" behaviour
Although I'm not really sure who is driving all this traffic to Scribd (many mention that the dubious and illegal content may be a significant portion of this, although PG has said it is not), I think this boils down to a matter of preference.

For many members of the HN community, it is preferable to download/view the doc via a PDF reader for ease of use, lack of Flash, as well as saving and printing abilities. Obviously, for members of the Scribd community, this is not the preferable way in consuming content. The HN community is probably also privy to hordes of other ways to share and discover docs, while again, the Scribd community, apparently is not.

Personally, I think this is seemingly an argument for why YouTube should have failed back in 2005. Flash. Can already download movies using a desktop player. Embeddable content.

Love it or hate it, we see where it's gotten YouTube (at least in terms of eyeballs, acquisition, and traffic, if not monetization).

I did, however, for some reason find the post to be comical satire, and I laughed as I read it, but in general it's not_that_big_of_a_deal.

The one thing I would suggest, however, is that PG and co. remove the auto-Scribd PDF rendering. Clearly, by the position of this article on the front page, and the several comments below, this is not the preferable way to the HN community to consume PDFs, and we'd prefer not to be sent to Scribd to read PDFs.

(And, as someone who has been here for a couple hundred days now, I'm really interested to see if a founder will respond, or if PG will comment).
PDF has some sort of huge licensing fee attached to it for document creation. I'm working on a project where I needed to buy a redistributable PDF ripper component. I couldn't find one for less than $1500 because of the Adobe licensing fees.

Still hate Scribd.
Hackday Uk is now called Mashed08, this weekend in London.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=175378

A majority want a change in the HN Scribd implementation
A majority want Scribd available in some way
> The person who submitted the Scribd version of the document could have linked to the freely downloadable version instead.

I think I heard that links to pdfs are automatically converted to scribd. And saying "scribd's service is annoying, but you can't blame them if someone takes advantage of it" is a little silly. You're right about the dumb uses thing, but in this case the dumb use happens to be one of the intended uses. You can't blame HammerCo that their product sucks at driving screws, but they are absolutely responsible for ensuring that it doesn't suck at banging nails.
Maybe that's finally a promising money-making scheme for Twitter? I think the fail whale could outlive Twitter.
I'm not entirely against school, when i was 14 i changed schools and in my new class there were mostly girls and a few nerds(you get to be there after two exams) so it was pretty good. I actually enjoined and was exited. I started learning literature, philosophy, history and was pretty good at that and it was fun(i sort of did the "philosophical poetic teen who wears only black" thing for a while) Well after i got in to programing it got really boring, so thats my problem now, if i want to go to college i have to study chemistry,biology, and a lot of other stuff which i might be interested in, but are not anywhere near my favorite disciplines. So i would describe it more like a waste of time after you get near enough to graduation. And i do think kids should be forced in schools, they just have to have some choice and control after a certain age.For me it was 14, but that differs so its impossible to please everybody.
One dumb use does not invalidate the whole service.
3D GIFs Made from Old Stereo Cards Are Stupidly Simple, Effective
The entire "build something people want" mentality is flawed. If I could raise enough money, I could build cars and give them away for free. It's something people want and I would quickly own the market. Sure, the low overhead of the web makes giving your service away for free more realistic but it doesn't make the business model any more valid given the inability for a lot of well-funded startups to become profitable.

It's not that difficult to monetize traffic but it is very difficult to monetize traffic to the levels that would justify the current web 2.0 valuations. Maybe everyone is thinking that one day soon, we're going to see a revolution in advertising that will rain down on website owners. I don't see it happening.

This blog post was dead on.
;) I can only work within the system...
Yes, of course we can, but the result of doing that will be to optimize your body for doing that. Slow metabolism, lots of fat. Great for survival, not so great for the beach ;-)
So that's why it was so easy to decide it was ice... the collective unconscious sure has a short memory when it gets excited about something.
IPod touch shortages suggest new iTouch in September
Ask YC:  Anyone want to get together in Palo Alto this Thurday?
We have a Hackers and Founders Meetup Thursday night.

http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/1737/

Looking forward to getting together.
I'm not sure it does. Doesn't OpenOffice export to PDF for free? And you can script it with Python.
It's built into every Mac OS X installation: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/GraphicsImaging/Con...
I have a 15 year-old brother who shows some knack for programming. I've been thinking about what kind of career advice I would give him related to programming. I might say something like, "Being a software developer is awesome, but being a corporate software developer is awful."

Sometimes I wonder if I should just tell him to keep it as a skill but eschew it as a career.
Maybe part of the explanation is that it's very light-weight - the car in the photo looks tiny, it says it's made of fiberglass, and my guess is that the engine must also weigh much less than a comparable internal combustion engine (you don't need as much metal to contain the combustion...).

Of course, that probably comes with a heavy price to passenger safety. Fiberglass won't give you any protection in a crush. That may be the reason why Tata is involved and not some European manufacturer. The Euro market has some serious safety regulations.
The iPhone shows pdfs brilliantly as it is though. God I'm glad the iPhone doesn't support flash as well.
Modifications in Apache .htaccess file for web application security
Depressing news
Good points. Especially no. 1. However, the eventuality of it makes it unlikely IMO. The web is about here and now. Why not just use a wiki?
Internet Explorer Extinct By 2013?
What A Tiger Can Do
All feedback is useful, and if the feedback is a swearing rant, it doesn't make it less so in my view. Swearing rants are far more useful feedback than fluffy "it's nice" comments.

Getting any feedback at all is hard enough sometimes, without trying to get people to suggest solutions as well.
Size is not everything. And SMSGupShup shares the same problem as its American counterpart: how to generate profits off a utility (mostly - for GupShup) free service
3/4 choices posed (I'm ignoring 'other', verb, and user site preference) had to do with keeping Scribd in one way or another (what you call 'available in some way') so I'm not really sure that's an accurate representation of what the community wants.

Certainly more say "get rid of the scribding" than say "keep the Scribding"which is about all I need to know, although, if PG did not change it then, I doubt he really cares.

Also, hoping that those from the poll show their support in the comment because so far I haven't yet seen it ...
Until there is a law that prohibits SSL VPN services or requires them to store traffic data, etc. etc. Law ultimately dictates what technology can be legally used.
Pocket porn: The 20 most popular "adult" sites for your phone
Who visits porn sites on their iphone? A lot of you, apparently.
Enkin : Amazing Google Android App (location-based content in a unique way) 
"Enkin" introduces a new handheld navigation concept. It displays location-based content in a unique way that bridges the gap between reality and classic map-like representations. It combines GPS, orientation sensors, 3D graphics, live video, several web services and a novel user interface into an intuitive and light navigation system for phones.
Scrolling with a scroll wheel works for me.
Yes, I'm sure harsher punishments is what's necessary to change the behavior of 20% of the country. Can't possibly be that the laws need changing.
CMU Algorithm Analyzes Image ... And Knows Where It Was Taken
Here is the pdf http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/im2gps/im2gps.pdf
I think (and I discovered this far too late :-( ) that the most interesting programming is done by people who aren't really programmers. People who apply software to knowledge domains. A biochemist can learn Python a hell of a lot more quickly than a programmer can learn about protein folding, for example. A friend of mine is an astrophysicist and writes programs to model stellar events (then goes and checks his results with uber-telescopes). Me, I can connect interfaces to apps to data, I do a pretty good job of it (tho' I say so myself!) but what am I really adding to the sum of human understanding? Hmmm.
The Quasiturbine engine can be run on compressed air, and in transportation applications, it should (http://qtusa.promci.qc.ca/QTEfficaciteComparative.html) have better than 50% efficiency.

But great power density and awful energy density sounds like something an engineer should work with a little before declaring viability: A hybrid design with some other power source having high energy density, even if it can't deliver it very quickly.
Facebook, Tencent Launch Chinese Networking Sites
Facebook and Chinese IM (instant messaging) champion Tencent look set to join the battle for China's social networkers, as both have launched Chinese sites recently.

The Chinese version of Facebook appears to be the more elusive, as it began popping up on Thursday, and only to certain users of the site who are based in China. Even visitors going to Facebook's ".cn" domain are still routed to the main English homepage. "
Tell him to keep programming as a hobby. If he truly enjoys programming, he'll keep on doing it and getting better and better at it no matter what else he does. Above all, I'd suggest avoiding a CS degree, since most of the stuff he'll learn there will be stuff that he would learn on his own time anyway. If you're going to go through the effort of going through university, might as well learn something that you wouldn't have otherwise (I did Physics).

Please note that keeping programming as a hobby doesn't mean it won't turn in a job if he needs it to (as it has for me) - only that he will always be a well-rounded person rather than just a tech-only programmer.