skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
no avatars please. For me, HN works well. We dont need the beginnings of yet another wannabe social network.

I would argue for incremental improvements to the interface:
iPhone friendly version
no more odd page parameters that timeout without a page
refresh
Um. Trees ARE carbon.
Then why have usernames (displayed) at all? Why is a picture so different than a username in terms of degrading the painting of a "portrait" of ideas? You could drop them altogether or replace them with a random string (generated each page view).
...or 10 x 1. Even with only 32 colors per pixel, that's over a quadrillion color combinations.
Your design is not future-proof.
Great read. The things is, all the planets are heating up.

http://www.livescience.com/environment/070312_solarsys_warmi...

It would be a wonderful and improbable coincidence if the net gain in heat from the sun gained by the earth where absolutely perfectly offset by the net loss in heat.
Maybe you could write a Greasemonkey script? You could have randomly generated avatars like Miis. Then you could also assign an image for specific posters that you feel are better indicative of their personalities.
By a man named Ash?

"Honey you got reaaaaaal ugly."
This seems like another Google offering that they don't take particularly seriously

I don't think so, Google's hosting is going to bite into MS's market of IIS and Windows Servers just like GMail/Calendar is competing with Outlook/Exchange.
Where would you get the images? Just generate them randomly?
I would think there is no doubt that New Orleans says: You should be yourself.
I like the approach to random data from Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Python. Use a grammar, walk to random productions. The advantage is that one powerful piece of code can generate lots of decent-seeming fake data of many types.
Sure it is, just add another pixel :)

"Look at that 3 pixel noob..."

You could use the user's top bar preferences!
Pic here - http://www.appscout.com/2008/05/windows_7_multitouch_feature...
13 reasons why Ruby, Python and the gang will push Java to die… of old age
I suppose email "undo" is a useful feature. Not sure -- maybe it's one of those great ideas which looks a bit lame at first.

Gmail handles outgoing attachments really well. If you type text like "here's the file I promised" or "I've attached a file" it prompts you if you don't, in fact, attach a file.
He absolutely creams Donald Knuth!

http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-bin/fight.cgi?q...

This calls to question the legitimacy of this. Also, it should be Knuth > Iron Man!
Controversial: he's just opposing conventional wisdom

Irrelevant or off-topic: Vista and Facebook are very relevant to this community

Baiting others: maybe he's guilty of this, but I think it's more the jarring cognitive dissonance of him opposing the accepted wisdom. A minority opinion isn't necessarily baiting.

Disrupt normal discussion: other people post his stuff.

Let's face it, he writes well, he argues his points well, and he calls out people he thinks are wrong. pg does the exact same thing, but no one disagrees with him since we're all in his world here.

Besides, how much of a troll is it to say something is good?
there is way more than a concentrated startup community in NYC, it's the third most active venture capital market in the world and will soon pass boston and be second only to Silicon Valley
"On the Internet, nobody know if you're a dog. So we fixed that problem."

Seriously, if I included a pic, it would be of someone else. It's better for everyone like that, trust me.
Oh, but the food tastes better when you're wearing a suit.
i was just making an appengine app to return this kind of data in tsv, json, xml, and yaml. lat/lng's are included, too.

would anyone else like this kind of web service?
They say the difference between an Oxford man and a Cambridge man is that when an Oxford man walks into a room, he looks as though he owns the place, and when a Cambridge man walks into a room, he looks as though he couldn't care less who owns it.

I think that should tell you quite a bit about the nature of ambition (and lack thereof) at both those Universities.
My suggestion is a little different: I would like to see more history kept than the last 20 or so comments (although search.yc helps a lot here) so that when I come across a new poster I can read their other submissions and comments and get a better feel for how they think based on what else they have written.
Paul, I think you are wrong about NYC. It's not about money first and foremost. It's about commerce and the neverending chase of what's next whether it be art, music, media, money, shopping, food, nightlife, etc, etc.

It's the greatest city in the world and the only city in the US that can compete with the great cities of Asia and Europe.
Never Hate. Only Ever Destroy.
LOVE it.
Hi, I'm Matt Maroon's agent. Please direct all irrational, accusatory non-productive trolling downmods at me. As of right now, 23 people have voted for my client's article, indicating that it many people think my client is in fact not a troll. If you disagree, please leave a civil comment. If you disagree with my client's responses, add another civil response of your own. Disagreement isn't cause for downmodding.
I bought 10,000 names from http://www.fakenamegenerator.com a few months back. It's turned out to be money well spent.
I agree. I think we can all give links to our blogs, or make a community on facebook. Actually, I am just going to do that and submit a link for those who are interested.
The way the user names are colored, it looks like we barely have them at all: The post text is in black, and the other information is in gray. I frequently find myself reading the text before I read who wrote it... which I think is just fine. It sends the message that the content is more important than the poster.
Oh okay, I didn't know that. I don't mind, I was just curious, thanks for the answer :)
And the original article "Vista is good" was... ?
No, I don't think this helps. Yes, you get more bandwidth, but the signal-to-noise ratio drops.
According to their website, the Carnelian Room in San Francisco requires jackets. See
http://carnelianroom.com/themaindiningroom.asp
"Trying to make bits non-copyable is like trying to make water not wet" - Bruce Schneier
I assume you meant "turn them on".

Adding a visually intrusive feature and enabling it by default is not the best thing to do, especially when the understated appearance is the feature of the website.
That's basically what Gravatar has recently adopted (http://blog.gravatar.com/2008/04/22/identicons-monsterids-an...) for non-users, and it is equal parts tacky and useful.

I'm not sold on the idea of something like this here, but even a very small icon (like 16x16 or smaller--very small) or bullet of color would would make threads easier to keep track of.
"the PR burden has now shifted to Microsoft to demonstrate that they actually can offer functionality that's not already available on a Mac."

This doesn't seem compelling. What is wrong with MSFT simply copying Apple while maintaining compatibility and familiarity for its users?

Consider American retreads of Britcoms (a longstanding tradition, I recall watching "Three's Company" religiously). The value proposition is simple: All the laughs of "Robin's Nest," with an accent you can understand.

So why must MSFT "innovate"? What is wrong with going to their user base and saying "All the nice features of OS X, with backwards compatibility and rewritten to be familiar to you"?

This may not be sexy to me personally, but it seems like a legitimate business strategy and like something many Windows owners would want.
Identicons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identicon
The first line of the article was "As Apple fanboyism has spread throughout the tech publications".

If that's not baiting I don't know what is.
In actual fact a lot of articles about Apple these days are bashing them. Especially for the Macbook air.

Also, I'm not really sure why Vista is relevent TBH, are people here starting up a company to write desktop apps for Vista? Do any hackers use Vista?
This reminds me of how Romania grades its universities by the number of students they pass. The result? Easy classes.
MetaFilter ( http://www.metafilter.com/ ) is an amazing demonstration of a cohesive online community that doesn't use images to represent users. MetaFilter users tend to be very familiar with each other (more so than other large online communities I've been in). While I agree images can be good, they certainly don't seem to be essential.

IRC is another example. People build up personalities and tie nicknames to them pretty easily without graphics.. and IRC can get very emotional at times.
I went to the first Business of Software conference, last year in San Jose, and thought it was so good I agreed to put my name on the second edition.

The audience is made up of pretty serious software companies... typically companies that are quietly making money selling software that people actually need, so they can afford to go to these conferences. I didn't see a lot of flashy twitter style "eyeball-first" companies. I saw companies like REAL Software, Red Gate, SourceGear and Atlassian, companies that making money and hiring people and growing fast and selling software. Michael Arrington was nowhere in sight. There were relatively few VC-funded companies and almost no companies whose business model was to build a thingamajig, get on Techcrunch, attract 10,000 eyeballs, and flip to Google... the cost of attending made it a very very serious crowd who learned a lot and most of whom will come back for a second year, I think.

If you're a serious software company and you'd like to learn from people who have been in your position and have a bit more experience than you, there's no better place to do this. The speakers are the least of it, since everything they say can be found on the web in 30 different places. Personally I learned the most from a hallway conversation with the head of sales at Red Gate where I learned how (and why) to hire an inside sales department; that hallway conversation was game changing for Fog Creek. If you like what DHH said at Startup School about charging money, this is the crowd you want to learn from.
How about a Twitter group that actually follows back? It would be nice to see what HN readers are up to at a glance, and Twitter has pics.

If nobody else wants to do it, and there is interest, I could set it up. I have no autofollow script yet, but I would ask Twitter support to enable it.

Edit: I already follow @newsycombinator, so if that would add autofollow it would be great ;-)
I made it out of clay...
DropSend and other similar services have been doing this forever. The only difference here is the marketing--this company is touting the ability to revoke read permissions on the attachments (which all its competitors allow as well) more than it touts the ability to send large files (which is what its competitors hype).

It is hard understand why a SAAS email attachment provider hypes security and privacy as its primary benefits; surely it is more secure to keep your attachments in-house and scrubbed out of outbound (through the firewall) emails. Even better, share them out on a network share that has full ACLs and automatic single-sign-on authentication.
If the purpose is -- as you say -- to "start associating usernames more with their set of comments", then random images should suffice. If the purpose is to have a visual item of personal expression added to each post, I suppose you'd need each person to choose one for themselves.
SSL Blacklist for Firefox
A Firefox plug-in that checks remote SSL certificates against the list of the RSA keys compromised by Debian's OpenSSL predictable PRNG mess.

I can't stress enough how important it is to have this blacklist installed. Detailed description of the issue is available both on the plug-in page and at this URL:

http://www.metasploit.com/users/hdm/tools/debian-openssl
Google Reader archives the feeds. Just keep scrolling back. There is also a not-very-official API.
If we added them, I'd say make them 16x16. People could use favicons for their sites (if they so desired).
Microsoft is countering with hosted Exchange service and hosted SQL Server services. I think hosted Exchange will be a lot more profitable than (ad-free) GMail hosting can ever be.
Well, a random image may not suffice for that purpose. I just don't know. Maybe for it to work, it has to be some sort of recognizable image. But random images would at least be worth a shot.
In grad school, one of my favorite professors accused over half of a class of cheating and ended up failing them all. In a way they deserved it. It was a computer science class in a master's degree program. If students at that level don't know not to submit an exact duplicate of a function, they deserve to fail.

I've also encountered students who I thought deserved to fail. One in particular was a criminology student. He spent more energy trying to simulate the "Ah ha!" reaction and sucking up to me than actually trying to get it for real. I kept thinking that this guy was studying criminology because he was trying to become a con man. Apparently, the system had rewarded him up til then for his faking behavior.
A couple of short pieces of advice. This is a tactical sales problem, not one of strategy or positioning. It sounds like your strategy is just fine. Do your best to at least slow down his decision cycle (keep him from making a bad decision for his organization) which prevents your low-flying competitor from early success. You can do this by offering a very limited version of your product for him to review that matches your competitors features, or ask to delay the decision until you've had a chance to show your product to other stakeholders. There's some chance the buyer is simply using the other company as a negotiation tool to get your price down.

In which case, ignore it. Find the customers who see their problem clearly, and why your specific solution takes care of their needs better than anything else, an concentrate your efforts on them.

Also, if you haven't read SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham, consider doing so when you get some time.

Good luck!
I'm just going to comment on my own submission, because I can't stress enough how important it is to have this plug-in installed.

This is a Firefox plug-in that checks SSL certificates against the list of the RSA keys compromised by Debian's predictable OpenSSL PRNG mess. A site using such certificates appears completely normal and secure in the Firefox. However it is absolutely trivial to mount a man-in-the-middle attack against an SSL session with such a site, thus completely negating the effects of SSL protection.

Detailed description of the issue is available both on the plug-in page and at this URL:

http://www.metasploit.com/users/hdm/tools/debian-openssl

(edit)

Here is a notable example - https://www.clickpass.com

http://img223.imageshack.us/img223/3784/clickpasskf8.png
Scalability Best Practices: Lessons from eBay
My understanding is that EC2 charges for wall clock time. I heard a rumor that Google was going to charge only for the actual CPU time used. In other words, if your service is totally idle, Google will be free but EC2 will cost you $84 a month per server.
Here is a group for facebook.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=14841858677
I can see real time playing a part in IRC. What do you think metafilter does differently (than here) in order to get its cohesiveness?
BrowserPlus: Yahoo's web app desktop platform
I can't believe you still sport a late 1980s-style spiky hair cut.

......

Robert Frost suggested that he could write poem/plays in which all of the characters went unnamed, and that the reader would identify the characters based entirely on tone. This idiosyncratic idea has come true to a degree on the internet: There is an accidental feature in some blogs (I think blogspot [1]) where almost everybody winds up posting as "anonymous". Despite this, you can usually tell in a rough way who is who.

At any rate, I don't think pictures ever add anything.

[1] Because it's a pain, depending on the blogger's settings, to log in.
Maybe it's just me, but I actually do tend to associate usernames with comments, at least for the frequent commenters like edw519.
There are some videos here from the 2007 event: http://www.businessofsoftware.org/lastyear.asp#videos
Well worth the read. Helpful and useful for any designer.
Cambridge it is in fact a city of at least 100,000 people, not a community within Boston. I do agree that he is describing just part of a city, not the whole, since Cambridge is diverse and has many communities within it.
I think multitouch is a decent thing to put into an OS if only as a stepping stone to later form factors. Sure, it isn't so hot now, but you can at least give hardware manufacturers reason to look at making computers that can leverage the feature more effectively. Trains need track, and tracks are only good for trains, but ya gotta start someplace.
He can't even get out of the first clause before trotting out the "Apple fanboyism" scapegoat. It's the tech industry equivalent of crying "liberal bias".
This can be helpful, but don't let this turn into an excuse to create forms with more fields than are necessary - you should feel the pain of stooping down to the level of a 3270 terminal and tabbbing and typing through a list of text fields.
Setting up and running EC2 from Windows: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?ex...

Create Customized AMI: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?ex...
i disagree on a pure simplicity view.

I like the fact i can concentrate on the article than on the author or picture or his/her CV (logical trend when you start adding a lot of info about users)

but frankly its the simplicity equation.
I agree that I wouldn't want be touching my laptop / desktop screen. But, assuming that the cost of of LCD glass continues to drop as a reasonable rate, I could see the custom-building crowd using it to make their own Surface-like tabletop computers. At least that's what I would do.
ask on facebook
"you can be economically successful as a band without selling a single record."

hmmm... good luck with that.
I'm reading this essay instead of working :-/
"The rights afforded artists under copyright laws are not natural rights"

There are no such thing as "natural rights" - only rights that we as society agree are beneficial. IP rights are no different than the rights for you to own your shoes or your house. They are just social contracts.
you aren't serious are you? Please tell me you website is your own pet project and that you didnt build it for a paying client or your employer
I expected to disagree with him on this, but he's right in a limited sense. You don't need the internet the way you need water. Economic destruction however could be created by messing with the internet.
I'd rather write one for the same reason.
His point is that the CO2 is not pollution in the same way that plastic in the Pacific gyre or PCBs in Love Canal are pollution. The excess CO2 is like the water from a flood caused by humans.

When you want to prevent floods, you need to find technologies and techniques that work with the laws of physics, natural systems, and economic forces. If you're going to build below sea level, what is the engineering required to compensate? Does the cost/benefit pan out? Likewise, if you're going to push the climate towards warming, what is the engineering required to compensate? Does the cost/benefit pan out? This is what Freeman Dyson and the authors he is reviewing are asking.

Nature doesn't care about us. But we humans have harnessed nature. Dyson is suggesting that we could do that once again to get us out of the current predicament.
This technique doesn't antialias the corners either. It just draws tiny background rectangles with careful margins. But it's pretty clever, IMHO. And a few lines of jquery could automatically add the extra markup at load time.
No one ever went broke selling at a profit. If you let this smaller competitor win he now has a bona fide win against you he can cite the next time you run up against him. If X, Y, and Z are close they will also be influenced by the win. The government buys on price, something to bear in mind if you want to continue to play in that market.
Ok, I was in your situation a month ago, and dove in. EC2 is great. It's easy to setup.

I suggest starting with ubuntu, as there is a plethora of resources for it if you are new to system administration

(start with this AMI http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?ex... )

Doesn't really matter if you are on osx, linux or windows once you are setup really, but get elasticfox for firefox, it does all the trivial things (starting an instance, etc) for you. very cool extension.

Just make sure you have a good backup plan for your data, as in any crash, your data is lost.

It is much more like getting a dedicated virtual account at a regular provider, so if you are used to control panels and everything like that, you'll have to install them yourself.
(webmin and usermin)

getting started with LAMP for ubuntu:
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/ubuntu-710-gutsy-gibbon-lamp-serve...
That's the most paranoid thing I've read in a long while.

Well, it's true, so perhaps paranoid is the wrong word. But if you've got secrets so dark that you can't trust Gmail with it, then I don't think email is the correct form of communication really.

It's got nothing to do with cloud computing.
Smart _young_ people. I can easily see myself buying this 10 years ago. Right now it's almost reflex to think about side-effects, but only because they bit me in the ass too many times. Also in time you read more and your mind opens more - and not in the usual sense.
Not enough data to determine if it's a tactical problem or a strategic problem. It would be interesting to hear the "tiny startup competitor's" perspective. They sound a lot like the early cisco. If the poster can't find a feature/benefit that segments the market away from this low cost provider so that his feature set no longer qualifies, it's not clear what stops them from taking this win and continuing to prosper at his expense.
Please. Check the absolutist pedantry at the door. If the technique works and doesn't affect the content management process (which, remember, is the real reason that people want non-semantic markup out of the HTML -- it's so that there's a single place to look for the semantic stuff) then by all means go for it. With just a few lines of jquery you could automate this process based on a single class tag for the "rounded corner" divs or whatnot, and everyone wins.

I'm not completely sold that this is easier than image mangement (it probably is for developers who fear graphics work, less so for designers who fear code hackery), but it's awfully clever to my eyes.
Naked stripped bare - startup runs out of cash, enters liquidation
If we start to link personalities to comments then we add bias to this site. If we try to refrain from introducing personalities the users must then focus on ideas, far better for the development of them.
Amazon launching new pay-per-view streaming service, but no idea what it does
I agree, I constantly refrain from cracking jokes because I don't want to see this turn into what Reddit has become lately.

I think it should be told somewhere what are the goals of the community and explain that we aim for efficiency, knowledge and insightful conversations more than entertainment. Not because we don't like entertainment but because that's not why we are here.