skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Any plans to support OpenID as well?
How I Got Here, The Full Story
Twitter Applications (Part-10)
Genius: 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. Then there’s the prize money.
Get Ahead By Being More Likeable: 10 Rules
On music and passion
The kill/yank names rub me the wrong way because where "cut and paste" suggest X-acto knives and glue sticks to me, that is, editing text on paper, there's no metaphoric grouping between "kill" and "yank". It also makes expressing the act of copying awkward. Copying is called "kill-ring-save", which is a kind of terse "kill-it-but-don't-actually-kill- it-just-copy-it-as-if-you-did". It further breaks down any metaphoric concept tying them together.

I'm not arguing that "copy/cut/paste" are better terms because they're already used by most people, but rather because they collectively express the operations in terms of an existing, analogous, and likely familiar idea. (I think the "ring" part of it is perfect, though.)
I see that, yes, horrible signups are a barrier. Asking "normal" questions - name, how did you find us, password hint q/a - is so expected now that, as long as the site works and has what I want, I will do it. I question statements like "... for every question you add to a form you lose 40% of the people viewing it." because they don't take quality of the signup into account.

You get into the question of which is better: quantity or quality? Is it better to have a database of 100,000 people who showed the minimum interest or of 10,000 people who are very interested? I say I'd rather be in charge of those 10,000 but I know there are many in favor of the 100,000.
The magic of low-hanging fruit
Open Wireless and the Illusion of Security
Yeah! I am actually working on my mashup for the contest :)

Its only after that I have started searching for more contests.

For others: Daylife is conducting a very interesting contest. Its about using news data from their API to build any kind of really cool. As per their site, they expect that developers create anything 'useful' and 'creative' that uses their news data. Visit http://cookbook.daylife.com for more info. They also have listed lot of cool sample ideas to work on(if you have run out of ideas). So all you have to do is to develop any software (web app or desktop app or app for anyother platform) that uses 'News' data from the Daylife API.
Why are Europeans so hesitant to have children, and what does it mean for their future and for ours?
There's viper-mode to emulate vi, but the first real roadblock is probably learning how to explain to the built-in help system what you're trying to figure out.

C-h t (that's Control-h, let go of control, t) will open up a thorough tutorial. Also, http://emacswiki.org has a lot of info at all levels of expertise.
I'm assume that a human contracted it while slaughtering a monkey for food. Perhaps some of the monkey's blood splashed into the person's eye? Perhaps many humans contracted the virus in a similar manner?
I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip
> Teens in Tech will be a community for teenagers who want
> to start podcasting, blogging, video-casting, and producing
> all types of new media. Users will get their own blog where
> they can upload audio, video, text, and other files to
> their personalized blog.

Nothing new?
Or just by eating said infected monkey.
... and ugly to anyone who's worked with Erlang.
The OP was talking about a microISV (he even calls it "consultingware" himself). No mention of "big ticket business software" anywhere in this thread.
Which apparently puts it with paper, photography, ... what haven't they declared obsolete yet? (Magazines?)

More sensationalistic headlines from Wired! Hooray!
Money doesn't buy happiness; it just helps you arrive in style. - Tony Robbins

Once you eliminate low outlying cases (people who can't afford the basics), I have witnessed little correlation between money and happiness. I know lots of people of ordinary means who are thrilled with life and are a pleasure to be with. OTOH, I dread spending time with many people I know that do have more money than most. They seem like they've lost focus on what really is important. (I don't want to hear you complain about people who work for you and I certainly don't care who you're suing; did you call your mother today?)

Just my experience. I suspect others have witnessed the same.
Wow! A whole list of web design contests. Thats a nice site.

But I am not so good at shaping stuff. I am more comfortable with straight lines, circles and other definite shapes. So I just manage to design. I love the backend job more :)

Do you know any webpage that lists more of 'development' kind of contests?
Let me try to explain the idea with a very concrete example
(it should be then clear why EC2 would not accomplish the
same thing):

Imagine a company called Online-Spreadsheets.com that makes a
spreadsheet as a web application.

Suppose a big corporation, Big-Car-Company, would like its
employees to use the web app provided Online-Spreadsheets.com,
but they can't bring themselves to trust Online-Spreadsheets.com
with their financial data.

That's where I come in. My company, say, Trusted-Web-App-Systems,
would make a program called TrustEnv. When you run TrustEnv on
a server, it creates a trusted environment into which you can
install a web app.

I give TrustEnv to Online-Spreadsheets.com for free.
Online-Spreadsheets.com installs TrustEnv on one of its
servers; a trusted environment is created. They then install
their web app into this trusted environment.

Online-Spreadsheets.com cannot easily extract any customer
data being processed within this trusted environment, despite the
fact that it's running on their own server.

Big-Car-Company can now connect to Online-Spreadsheets.com's
server (the one running TrustEnv) and use the spreadsheet web app with assurance
that their financial data is not easily copied, leaked, or spied on.

I would charge a fee to corporate customers like Big-Car-Company
to use web sites protected with TrustEnv. My job would be to write
TrustEnv, to convince corporate customers that they need it, and
to convince web app providers to install TrustEnv because there
is corporate demand for it. I would not run any web apps myself.
On what?

I remember how easy everything was in async environments before everyone needed a full time a windows admin. Just put dumb terminals everywhere and string coax. A printer was just a dumb terminal, too. Everything ran on the server.

Oh for the good old days.

Never mind, they're back. Except dumb terminals are now "thin clients" and the host is now the "cloud".
my SAT-style summary of a major point:

total viewing minutes :: subscriptions and micro-transactions
as
page-views :: retail store sales
Reddit's Ranking Algorithm
Well, it seems to be up when I click the link now.

Was it the site itself and their customers that were down, or was just the WWW site down?
Advice to a young programmer
Behold the raw, elemental beauty of the world's first monolithic Integrated Circuit
Pioneer in the field of global outsourcing
Start of 2008 is the ugliest in decades
I love Seth's blog, but this one seems a bit obvious. I think I might have to pull out the 'no duh' card on this one.
Top 10 Bruce Schneier Facts
I'd like to see some of the mathematical reasoning/logic behind this algorithm. Why that particular log function? Moreover, an explanation into what went behind each step? If the logic can't be explained in plain english, I'm always a bit sceptical.
I'm glad to say that I don't use facebook enough to care what grammar it uses.
GSP East: How to battle the Facebook zombie army
Most relevant bit:

The FBFund developer grant fund, which launched last fall, has given money to "more than two, less than 10" developers who applied, Ling said; Elman added that five to 10 more are "in the queue" and that grants of between $25,000 and $250,000 have been handed out.
What's the significance of December 8, 2005 7:46:43 AM?
True wealth is how long you can live and maintain your preferred lifestyle...without working (e.g. having a job vs multiple streams of income)
I use Slicehost for my applications and Bingodisk for big files and general static content. I also use the private part of Bingodisk for backups (via duplicity) from my laptop and application server. It's nice.
This is completely irrelevant, but said infected monkey would be an excellent name for a rock band.
That seems to be the time reddit.com went live. Compare this Guardian article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2005/dec/08/innovations...
Ah magic numbers; It's no CAFEBABE though. Most likely the time Reddit was relaunched after the Lisp to Python rewrite (Aaron's blog post)

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit
Sounds to me like he missed the common use of the "low hanging fruit" phrase.

The idea behind low-hanging fruit is that it's low hanging (easy to get to). Not that it's the "best" fruit, but it's the easiest to reach.

Not one of my favorite Godin articles, by far.
So, a couple people asked for an explanation, so here goes:

t_s basically serves as "gravity" to make older posts fall down the page. Why Dec 8, 2005? Maybe that's when they launched. Anyway, what t_s does in the function is equate a 10-fold increase in points with being submitted 12.5 hours (that's 45,000 secs) later. So a 1-hour-old post would have to improve its vote differential 10x over the next 12.5 hours to maintain it's rating to compensate for elapsed time. If a post's vote differential increases more than 10x in 12.5 hours, its rating goes up.

As for where the numbers come from, I'm pretty sure they're tuned by trial-and-error. It's really hard to predict voting patterns beforehand (ie how fast should items "fall" from the main page?)

The log function is there because your first 10 upvotes should have more weight than the 101st to 110th upvotes. The way the formula is written (and assuming 0 downvotes), your first 10 upvotes have the same weight as the next 100 upvotes, which have the same weight as the next 1000, etc. Again, the base of the logarithm is somewhat arbitrary, and can be tuned by trial and error.

And needless to say, if you have more downvotes than upvotes, your rating is negative. That's about it.

(note: I'm just reading the page and interpreting the algorithm - I don't have any special insight into how they chose these particular constants)

Edit: Time since Dec 8, 2005 is an elegant way of doing it. My first (crude) thought would've been to use "time since posting" to determine gravity, but that requires keeping track of what time it is now. This method is completely independent of the current time. So nicely done.
I believe another flaw of this article is that $100,000 is considered wealthy. My family's household income is above this but my dad provides for a family of 6, children. Of course he spends most of his time working.

I'd like to see a study done on people either who have a high net worth (like qaexl said) of say over $1,000,000 not including their primary residence. Then we could see what they do with the money they already have. Either that or people who have an income of over $250,000.

The issue with the study is that there are a ton of middle class people making over $100,000, but not many who can build it up, compared with the relatively few people with much higher actual net worths. The problem is that these two categories get counted together, and those barely breaking 6 figures vastly outweigh the others.

The other thing to consider is that those who are significantly well off may tend to enjoy pushing themselves (which is how they got their in the first place). PG doesn't have to do YCombinator. I'm sure Viaweb set him up for life. He probably just enjoys the industry and prefers to spend his time productively, just like many other wealthy people.
Actually, the SATs don't have analogies any more.

I was very disappointed to learn that.

Apparently the new SATs have a much lower correlation to IQ than the old one. They test 'school learning' (grammar, formulas, etc.) more than 'aptitude.'
Does anybody have other examples of algorithms of this type? How does HN work? (I'm lisp-illiterate so please don't tell me to read YC's source)
He doesn't need to scale since he doesn't care about making more money than it takes to have a comfortable lifestyle.
I'm curious why so many people have down-voted my comment above, as it's factual. I host stuff in my own datacenter, I don't overly promote it here, although I had considered a YC special rate. Or is it that I shouldn't promote my startup because it's not free? Several people here post links to or comments about their startup businesses without getting down-voted.
Bruce Schneier has a valid argument that if someone does something bad through your network and you have security on: how do you prove it was hacked?

While I should just buy a 50-foot CAT5 cable and plug in, Wi-fi is just more convenient. I like to think of using WPA2 + MAC filtering as the wireless network equivalent of The Club for automobiles (a deterrent; too much trouble to hack mine in the local air of (mostly-WEP) wi-fi networks)
Genius.

That bottle of champagne was awesome too!
Epic Fail, or, why the users hate us.
Your quote reminded me of this goodie:

"Money can't buy happiness, but neither can poverty" - Leo Rosten
Yes i noticed the same thing. I doubt the author made a mistake though, didnt seem to understand better.
I think a lot of that is great advice for a thirteen-year-old just getting feet wet, particularly the suggestion about diving in and hacking around.

I self-learned a whole lot about programming (and game design) with http://www.alice.org/ around the same age. It gives you a built-in 3D engine but learning more and more about Python lets you do cooler simulations. Maybe he should check it out?
How To Use WII for a Company Contest
Regular disclaimer: I use both vim and emacs equally, and there definitely some things I prefer in vim. However...

> 1) Several options...

One of the nice things about the help in emacs is that, when installed with source, function/variable lookup allows you to jump directly to the implementation from the help page, modify the code, and have the new implementation running in-line. This is useful for both one-off changes to built-ins (just re-evaluate the function), and for immediately fixing bugs in your own scripts as you find them.

> 4) When I first read about this, I was immediately interested. For similar functionality (couldn't claim whether or not it was the SAME, strictly, as I don't actually use Emacs)...

Emacs's kill-ring and mark-ring are actually two separate things--the kill-ring is as you described, while the mark-ring is akin to having a web-browser's "back" button while editing text (e.g., edit some text in a function at the bottom of a file, jump to a separate function, edit some text; typing C-u C-space will then jump back to the original function).

> 6) Sad to say I'm at a loss here -- not to say vim couldn't do this, but rather I've never needed to do this in my range of experiences...

At work we have some servers which have only basic unix commands on them (they're also on a separate floor); it's much nicer to be able to edit files on my workstation using tramp (with vim, there's equivalent functionality, e.g. ftp://user:pass@hostname/path/to/file) than to deal with uploading/downloading files and trying to determine whether the server/my client has the more recent changes.
Lunarpages. Excellent customer service and the latest tech on all their managed servers (even the shared ones).
http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/misc/best_of.html

Some of the MIT hacks are nearly as impressive, though the MIT kids have the advantage of modern technology. One that stands out was a police car on top of their main dome, complete with coffee and a donut box containing instructions for taking the police car down.
It does. Although to make slightly more clear:

"If you had had 'had' here" => "If you would have put 'had' here"

"you would have had" => "you would have needed"

"to have had 'have' there" => "to have put 'have' there"

That is the kind of really amusing sentence we say every day without thinking about it. I've caught myself saying similar things while speaking to non-native speakers, and it's always a crapshoot. We really are lazy and use the verb 'to have' a lot.

Nice example.
Great concept but missing the most important piece of the puzzle:

THEMES!

That's what got wordpress it's place.
Just as one example, some languages (including English) derive a lot of meaning from a word in where it appears in the sentence (in "I like smoked salmon", smoked modifies the salmon, rather than referring to something I may have done), while others conjugate or otherwise modify words (frequently with suffixes) to mark what role they play in the sentence. Most of these sentences have to do with subverting expectations based on word order.
Ah, Erlang. The Ron Paul of programming languages.
I wish this was about the "Recommended" page, and why it doesn't work. Has anyone looked at this part of the open-sourced Reddit?
News.YC's is just

(p - 1) / (t + 2)^1.5

where p = points and t = age in hours
An open wireless + a home VPN + QoS works for me. I don't have ay problem letting other people on my network as long as my connection speeds are unaffected (thus the QoS) and my server has plenty of log information about who tried to access my home network. Also, the VPN provides real software security.
Actually reddit was launched before that, but the initial ranking algorithm didn't have enough force to pull popular stories back down. Dec 05 is probably around when they switched to the current ranking algorithm.
I think I love you: What happens in that first nanosecond that makes us fall for someone
Wow, i started learning seriously 6-7 months ago and i basically did all that. I even have most of the recommended books.
I wonder if the author realizes how funny this title sounds.
The author should have applied the "Google's spell checker" to his own article: "this emerging method... will compliment established theory-driven science".
I highly doubt a sovereign wealth fund would invest in Facebook. Most of their recent equity investments have been in dividend-paying stocks of US banks; they also tend to buy a lot of fixed income assets. Facebook won't be able to pay dividends any time soon, and while I recall them doing a debt offering, I can't imagine it's on the scale that would appeal to an SWF.
How about making the main rss feed auto-discoverable?
It's called "Amdahl's Law" in the computing world. The law of bottlenecks and efficiencies. Even if those cars went to infinite efficiency, you'd still benefit more by raising the 10MPGs to a higher number.

(No upvote from me though, this is way too obvious!)
In Diablo3 it seems they still do not allow players to rotate the camera - I was very impressed by that. Another thing I noticed was how Diablo-a-like every single screen of that game already looks. Improved all over, but still every detail just cries out "Diablo".

Btw, I guess I won't buy that game. D2 was just too addicting for me. I completely lost half a year on that and I don't want that happen to me ever again.
"As of this writing, Cambridge seems to be the intellectual capital of the world."

That can be said for at least two Cambridges.
Diablo I & II were the last games I played. I stayed away from computer games because I don't need another time-sink.

And then I read about Diablo III... The thing is highly addictive. The diablo-receptors in my brain already started firing :-)
"Money can buy almost everything, and the things that it can't buy are free anyway."

Once said by an interesting Danish millionaire.
I think it depends on how the person got rich.. working their asses off, or making it big after a hot music single, etc. Not that musicians don't work a lot, but there are some songs where I wonder how that crap ever got on the radio.
agreed. The same way with my family. Family of 5, including 3 colleges over 30k/year and family income is too high to get any financial aid other than loans.
"Work doesn't necessarily make you happy, but it may give you the money to do the things that make you happy" - from HS valedictory address by a smart kid who I knew when he was wee tall
“It’s insane to consider low birthrate as a crisis,”

I could not agree more.
The new Internet traffic spikes
I see your point, but it could be seen as equally immoral (if not more so) for me to cause the destruction that would have resulted. Especially since it would have hurt other people more than it hurt the perpetrators.

Threatening them with a media leak was one option. But it didn't seem to be a very good one, not to me or any of my mentors. The only way for an actual net-positive result here was for the management to be swiftly but quietly replaced by those with the power to do so. We went as far as we could to push for that.
Not entirely sure it's hacker news, but it's certainly a well written and in-depth article. It sums up a lot of things I've kind of known for a while: places with better social systems like the Nordic countries are better places to have children than in somewhere like Italy (where I'm writing from, on vacation) which is, very sadly, going nowhere fast. Having our daughter Helen in Austria was far easier, despite the language barrier, than it would have been in Italy.
Google Cloud At Work For NSF, Academia
The 21st century tomato
My god, I could barely stand to skim that. So, so much nothingness in so many words. A few points:

1. There is no crisis. Certain conditions produce certain effects. When smallpox is introduced into a population, the population declines, but subsequent generations resist it. The modern world has a perfectly consistent effect on population size, roughly the same as smallpox. The fittest, as always, will survive, and subsequent generations will not have the same problem.

2. The United States is not a "sparkling exception", if you correct your samples. If you reduce Americans to their European subset, you see that Birth rate was 11.6 for Non-Hispanic Whites http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat... ... the lowest of all major groups.

3. The subject of immigration should not come up. Europe will not "save itself" by replacing itself with North Africans. This point warrants no discussion. If you hate Europe as much as the editors of the nytimes, that's another matter, and it's a valid viewpoint to the degree that it is open. It's not open, of course.

4. Europe and Japan are both far too crowded. As long as the situation isn't treated like a crisis, with hopeless policies (mass immigration, mass boondoggles) the long-term effect will be positive.

5. Three big groups who've reversed the trend: Mormons, Albanian muslims, and Ultra-orthodox Jews. A portend of things to come, and it's no surprise that the nytimes is troubled by the situation resolving itself.
Studies find having kids makes people less happy
just depends on what you need

For example...
HIV doesn't exist, it's science fiction. Nobody has provided solid proof of its existence.
The tumblr bookmarklet seems to require some manual manipulation if you want to order content in the order it was presented on the page you are bookmarking.

I hope that the posterous bookmarklet is good at keeping the layout of the things I select.
Screen Shots: How I Use RSS to Track Thousands of News Sources Easily
Sales Guy vs. Web Dude
GoDaddy VP Caught Bidding Against Customers in Domain Auctions
Birth rate was 11.6 [per 1000 population] for Non-Hispanic Whites

But that's not the unit (average children per woman) that they use in the article, and there isn't an obvious conversion between the two (is there?). So this isn't enough information to compare how the birth rate among Americans of European descent compares to the birth rate in Europe itself... which I agree would be interesting.

Edit: I also agree about it being tiring to even skim that article. I do love it, though, when apocalpytic crises directly contradict each other. Weren't we all going to die because of exponential population growth?