skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
--Is this 2020? It must be the future because MS has not died and is still very relevant.

My point, as has been made in the past, is that MS has not innovated for a good many years. No one is scared by MS any more. No one cares what they do. They aren't leading anything. They are simply trying to eke out their monopoly for all its worth.

No startup thinks "Oh no what if ms are developing a similar thing", because we all know they aren't.

I expect they could still turn it around, but they'd have to actually make things people want which isn't what they are used to. They are used to a monopoly.
The case for pictures next to usernames on Hacker News
I’ve been using this site for a while now, and though I do recognize some usernames, I only have a vague sense of personalities for very few of them (excluding people I’ve actually met in person). I think the problem is that when I’m reading comments I see the username and the comment, but I don’t really associate them together in order to form a bond over time between that username and those set of comments. Instead, I tend to remember a set of comments and a set of usernames, independently. Am I alone here in this behavior?

In any case, the cities and ambition thread got me thinking about what it would take to make an online community more like an offline one. I think the bulk of it comes down to conversation, of which there are two parts: content and mechanics. The content side seems OK here (for what I’m looking for at least). The mechanics side falls way behind the offline world, however.

Offline we have 3-d conversations using most of our sensory perceptions. Online, a lot of that obviously goes away. Of course there are benefits of being online too, e.g. asynchronous threads, archiving, etc. But the lack of the senses drastically takes away the emotional feel of the offline community.

Pictures next to usernames I believe would be at least a start in the other direction. We would get more of a visual sense for a person. For me at least, I think I would start associating usernames more with their set of comments. And I think that would greatly increase the sense of community gained from the site. I’m sure there are other (low-impact) things one could do as well, but I just haven’t thought of them.

I get it pg, you don’t want to spend your time working on this site (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=201122), but maybe someone playing around with Arc could make the change and then it could be ported back.
Any tutorials / services that show how one can get instance running up quickly? I am a newbie to this.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=202096
There are several platforms already existing that can help you get up and running faster: GigaSpaces and Appistry both come to mind, but they are geared toward Java, .Net, and C++.
Surely the ability to take back a sent document is only useful if everyone else agrees to play by the rules? The moment I cut-and-paste the doc, or find some way to download it, you're right back where you were before.
Ask YC: Anyone familiar with the Business of Software Conference in Boston in September?
Reposted by edw519 05/28/08 10:30 Eastern time - No one responded before, so I thought I'd try again. Really curious. If no one responds this time, then that's my answer.

I thought that Startup School was one of the best things I ever attended. Now I found the Business of Software Conference in Boston September 3-4.

http://www.businessofsoftware.org/

The speaker list is incredible. Some of them are Joel Spolsky, Eric Sink, Seth Godin, Richard Stallman, Jason Fried, Dharmesh Shah, and Jessica Livingston, among others. I think I've read just about everything these speakers have written, so naturally, I'm interested.

The price is $1400 if you pay by June 7, which is $1400 more than Startup School, but somehow I get the feeling it's well worth it. Between this fee, air fare, hotel, and meals, one needs to think very carefully about going.

I suspect it's aimed at a different audience than Startup School, so I was wondering...

- Has anyone here gone to this before?

- Is anyone planning to go this year?

- What kind of people would one expect to meet?

- What kind of access to the speakers could one reasonably expect?

- What are the biggest differences between this and Startup School?

- jl, do you know what you'll be speaking about? Perhaps a sneak peak?

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated to help decide. Who knows, maybe a small Hacker News get-together in Boston in September?
A nice thing is that it is elastic and cheap to answer your own question. It is not like a shared hosting plan specifically in that there are no contract terms or hassle to get started. Before you spend too much time, just fire up an instance. If, between the docs and getting your hands dirty, it starts to make sense - great. If not, you've "wasted" $0.10/hour (plus your own, more valuable time) for a neat experience.
One more thing. Can you recommend any books that can help me in understanding art? This is kind of silly but I'm looking around for books that can help me appreciate and identify good art, at least.
Most people are lazy though, and if you can get a few votes from the lazy/indifferent, then you are more likely to end up on the front page (and get all that ad revenue or whatever).

That said, I've gotten to the front page of delicious and reddit without stupid tricks like this. I just wrote an article that people liked. (What a concept.) I don't have ads either.
Hilarious.

I've always thought Cambridge's message was "You're not a student. Go away."
I've heard varying opinions on the claim that speculation is driving up prices instead of supply & demand. Economists seem split down the middle, with some saying that it's all traders stockpiling oil in anticipation of future price increases and some saying it's rising demand from India and China. Personally, I believe it's speculation, but that's only because every other time we've seen a 50% rise in price over 6 months (housing, dot-com) it's been a bubble rather than a sustained increase.

This is one of those things that it's impossible to know for sure either way, since secret market manipulations are by definition secret, and anyone who knows has a vested interest in not telling you.

Regardless, Friedman's point holds either way. If it's a supply problem, then a gas price floor encourages the development of efficient vehicles and alternative energy technologies, providing us with alternative supply sources. If it's a demand problem, a gas price floor reduces our consumption demand, and then India and China can go deal with the troublesome states in the Middle East (let them handle Iraq!) If it's a speculation problem, a price floor encourages development of alternative energy, which cuts demand for petroleum and ends up causing a price collapse, with speculators left holding the bag.
I'd rather read an opinion which disagrees with the rest of the world than agrees with it, if only for the sake of novelty.
No. Google's AppEngine just isn't great for small sites (and by small I mean anything under reddit/digg sized).

Why? Because AppEngine makes you program in a way that will infinitely scale - which is a lot harder. You have to denormalize all your data, manually calculate everything, etc.

If you want to become the next big thing, you won't do it with AppEngine. Why? Because the advantage that you and your buddy have as a two-person team is that you don't have to worry about instantly having millions of users. AppEngine is what people like Google have to start out with. So, if you have an idea, you can beat bigger players out of the gate because you can start small. You can use things like joins to make your application easy to code.

If you forgo that advantage, you just aren't going to be agile enough to compete with large teams.
This comment breaks how the page renders under FF 3rc1...
I prefer text.
You are not alone, Gabriel. Visual association beats textual and this makes sense.

One thing though, the images would increase the bandwidth to the site, and maybe even hamper performance.
To throw in one more environment you may want to take a look at flexiscale. It may work out more expensive (largely because they're based in the UK) but they have some nice features. Persistent storage, F5 load balancing (you don't need additional instances to set them up as with EC2) and automatic restart if something does go wrong with an instance.

Again, I haven't used them, just a bit of research.
A lot about cities, but nothing about the ~10% that still don't live in them. The general message of the parts of rural America I've lived in seems to be "we're not like everyone else". (The "we" is important.)

From that, you get common worries about encroaching suburbs (the "everyone else" pushing us out). The "we" varies, from small funky communal pockets, and of course religious groups desperate to be their own thing, to the dying breed (but still generally dominant in rural life) of farmers.
Personally, the lack of images is a plus for me. It's one of the things I love about HN. That lack of emotional feel towards posters is what keeps postings focused. Take Digg for instance, I think that it's that sense of community that leads to 99% of the comments being of no real benefit at all, because everyone is trying to crack a joke.
Unlike Matt's, your opinion statement lacks a basis.

[Disclaimer: I'm a linux user, former mac classic/10.2.8 user, former windows 3.11/95/98/XP user.]
Given that Facebook ads keep offering me cheap wedding rings whenever I happen to be looking at the profile of any one of my female friends, I'm pretty jaded by ad suckage already.
yeah no pictures...Im real ugly I have been told
On the user side, you could presumably turn them off. As for server performance, Y Combinator should be able it.
The current layout of HN doesn't lend itself to avatars at all, IMHO. They would break up the page in awkward ways. If avatars where implemented they should only be 25x25 or something similarly tiny.
Shit, I thought you were referencing Myers-Briggs -- I'm INTP, although I know plenty of INTJs...
Ask YC: What Facebook application is the best?
I'm curious what you all think about Facebook applications - which are the best, your favorite. Especially if anyone likes some lesser-known apps...

(Disclosure: Working on an article so your suggestions might show up there...)
Digg comments aren't bad because they have pictures. They are bad because they are from that set of commenters.

If you supposed the set of Hacker News commenters didn't change, I think pictures would clearly be a win. What you seem to be suggesting is that by adding pictures, we would attract bad commenters. I just don't think that is true.
I think it's better if people make their own portraits with their ideas.
That's exactly the problem I am describing. They are making their own portraits, but they aren't sticking to their usernames, at least for me. A visual icon would help. It could be small, 25x25 as someone suggested.
There was art before copyright and there will be art after it as well.

The rights afforded artists under copyright laws are not natural rights, but were created for the specific purpose. If that purpose is no longer served by these laws then they should be eliminated.

It is a federal crime now to take a camera into a movie theater. You can receive jail time for this. When will the insanity stop?
I agree that as an option, pictures hold more value than is intuitively understood by most people. I view hacker news as a small community that desires the ability to maintain it's tight focus and not expand too much or too fast (all the "Please block this from showing up on hacker news" posts area good example of the sentiment)

On the web, focus is a HUGE commodity and we are right to desire it. I would argue that a sense of community and a sense of focus go hand in hand, and given that I think optional images could help maintain a sense of community even as our numbers grow larger.
The "Windows is becoming less relevent" problem
Evidently many people (including me) enjoy reading Matt's contrarian views. He's also the founder of a YC-funded company, and many of us here at HN know him personally; that's probably also a factor.
I vote for a ban of matmaroon.com. The only content that ever comes from there are these silly rants.

s/aro/or
Yup - should use Gravatar
Random_data: generates seed data (names, addresses, dates, phone numbers, e-mail, ...)
Have you seen some of these guys?

Hey -- count your blessings.

(Just kidding!)
I'm the same way, I'm usually not able to associate a username with a set of posts unless I've either met them in person or seen a picture of them online. That said, I think we'd be losing more than we'd be gaining by adding pictures.
Hey, I Know Where U R (Loopt)
Even if you were to add pictures, the place to do it would be on the user's profile page and not next to the posts.
Whuh oh. The only toilet on space staion is busted and no plumber out there until next week!
There's more than one thing going on when you talk about oil prices.

You've got two sides: supply and demand. Currently it's a supply problem. We can only get so much oil per week into this country. There's only so much pipeline and so many tankers that we can send into our country. We are facing demand destruction. People decreased driving by 11 billion miles this March as compared to last March. Decreases in driving YoY have occured three other times and that was during severe oil crises.

http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/2008/05/us-vehicle-miles-...

See this interview if you'd like to learn more about the fundamentals going on currently.

http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2008/05/t-boone-picke...

But there is speculation, that is a fact. The total barrel capacity for Cushing, OK (where light sweet crude is delivered) is around 65 Million bbd. The current open interest for this contract on the NYMEX is about 300 Million bbd. These contracts aren't exercised, they are rolled and such.

Not only are their speculators, there are hedgers (transports, airlines, UPS, etc) so that accounts for some.

I am not anti-speculation. Speculators give liquidity to a market and encourage price discovery. Upping the margin requirements to trade /CL is a dumb idea. It would lead to further price manipulation.

We do need to get rid of OTC (over the counter) markets because they don't show us the price. The same can be said with credit default swaps (CDS), but that's another story. Provide an open market, and that will help.

If you want to scare out the speculators, tap into the Special Reserve for a week. That should cause a pop in the bubble. Clinton did it. Bush II has been pumping oil into the SPR and wanted to keep adding in and double the capacity. The numbers were something like 5x as much than what we had before he came in. Legislation just recently stopped him from adding more.

In terms of policy changes, you can put a price floor on crude contracts, say 70 bucks a barrel. Anytime the price goes under that, the government collects the difference and puts that money to work in a green hedge fund/pension hybrid.

Another policy would be to create economic incentives for people that buy cars. I've already explained this over on my blog (yes, shameless plug): http://www.graduatedtaste.com/2008/05/27/a-solution-to-the-e...
25x25 is pretty big. I think it would be clever to make it 15x15 or 10x10...
EC2 is like co-location in a cloud, so you will need to handle all sysadmin tasks yourself (however, you can select an image that already has LAMP installed). A single small EC2 instance is around $75 per month + bandwidth.

You can also go with a platform on top of EC2, like RightScale, which gives you some support, including MySQL, but it's expensive ($500 per month!). I don't have experience with other services but I do use the RightScale dashboard for creating/restarting/terminating instances.

There are many advantages to going with EC2 though, if you can absorb the admin work. For example, if you need to do some heavy crunching you can run another instance only for the time of the crunching, say 12 hours, and that's all you pay for (12 * $0.80, if you were to use an extra large instance).
I think pg's "portrait" was a metaphor.
I disagree, but that would certainly be a good start. I disagree because then I would have to click each time to see it, and that is an extra step. With some small icon on the page, I'd develop the history in an osmosis-like manner.
Of course it was a metaphor, and I continued it. I wasn't being literal. I'm saying if you did look at the set of comments of a person, you would see the "portrait." But that isn't happening, since at least in my mind, over time that set of comments isn't being associated with that username.
Windows 7? We already hate it.
"Digg comments aren't bad because they have pictures. They are bad because they are from that set of commenters."

I think it's as much the social norms as the user base. For example, we have kind of an unspoken humor armistice here. Normally humor is used to demonstrate intelligence. However, it's mutually understood that everyone here is intelligent enough to make the appropriate joke, but that we should refrain because it doesn't really add anything to the conversation or make anyone else any better off.
Bradenton, FL: You should leave until you are old.

St. Pete, FL: Didn't B-town tell you?! Get out of FL until you retire.

Trier, Germany: You should read classical literature.

Takamatsu, Japan: You should be Japanese.

Toronto, Canada: You should be polite, and make more money.
What would we be losing?
I always thought this was an issue at my school.
Fail the students who need to fail. Supposedly we had a rule that no more than 25% of a class should fail. I was in classes where more than that deserved to fail.

I also seriously considered dropping out when I received a D+ in a class that I felt deserved a solid F. I rarely went to class, I did none of the homework, and consequently received 3% of the total available test points.

I was also in the top half of that class. I considered dropping out because I felt my degree would be worthless if the standards were so low. Instead I started working hard and found that getting A's and B's was still appropriately difficult, even if getting a D+ was not.
It's better than sending the bits in the actual email. If you can revoke access to the attachment immediately after sending it, that's an improvement.

I'm guessing ninety-something percent of mistaken emails with attachments are noticed within the first ten seconds after it's sent, so you could really use an undo button. So for that, it's a good solution.

Me, I have the opposite problem. I write emails and forget to include the attachment, which necessitates I immediately send another copy with the attachment. I swear I did that recently and the recipient's GMail account blocked the email and all others from my address. I guess that behavior runs afoul of their spam algorithms.
Four Reasons Why The Internet Can’t Kill Cable TV (Yet)
depends on how you define features. For instance if you say that a firewall has a single feature of keeping your network safe then maybe not, but in reality, there are lots of sub-features involved in that that may not be irreducibly complex.
Understood. They could be icons. It doesn't really matter if they are actual pictures of faces. It matters that they are unique and visual.
You asked for it...

\/\/\/\/
/ \
/ \
/ \
/\_/ 0 0 \_/\
| |
\/ \ |_| / \/
\ /
\ \-----/ /
\ /
\_______/
| |
Agreed. Sorry to all Digg users. This just makes the point further, in my opinion. Once we have these "social norms" established, we should be able to do things with the UI to increase community without degrading the adherence to the social norms.
The other thing that strikes me as odd is that, while his original article has enough points to stick to the front page, all of his comments here in defense of the article's points have been downvoted into oblivion.
"only W2K is stable"

yeah, that's my fav windows version too. It was the only time Windows was stable for me, where lockups and blue screens were relatively rare compared to XP... switched to osx before vista came
Zed offers some classic recommendations at the end of his post "Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All":

http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/programmer_stats.html
I don't think they're all entrants... just people who are curious about the service.
Ask HN: what would you like to see in Windows 7 to be happy?
- new kernel?

- unix base?

- compatibility?

- Stability?

- GUI ?

etc.
Ask HN: an archive for RSS feeds (similar to the wayback machine)?  
I thought an archive for RSS feeds (similar to the wayback machine) should exist. But I couldn't find any.

RSS would be a minimum common denominator for the web. When pulling an RSS feed, omehow you can only access the last 20 posts or so; I don't think this is a limit that the protocol imposes (it's rdf after all) or a custom, but the fact is you cannot get an old article from an RSS feed.

Feedburner (RSS kings) don't seem to have an archive, at least one I could find.

Do you know if such a thing exist? The main advantage of RSS over scraping is that there's little noise due to formatting, TOCs, ads, etc.
I like it visually, but it is not as efficient for my eye so parse as the old design.
Windows 7 is rumored to be going on this path (emulation of old windows, modular, ...)

but honestly I wonder how many of these new promises will come about. I still remember the old promises about Longhorn aka Vista. Their new filesys (i think winfs) is no where to be found, and their cool looking command line is just starting to show up on server 2008... M$ has a bad history with promises and reality
Oxytocin-free judgment.
> The main advantage of RSS over scraping is that there's little noise due to formatting, TOCs, ads, etc.

How would you get past the fact that not everyone publishes the entire piece of content in the RSS feed?

Slightly off topic, but related... I've often wondered why no one has created an RSS delivery protocol like IMAP. I've considered writing something many times, but it seems like it could get crushed by a few changes in already existing readers.
The notion that posting content of whatever sort onto your own web property is somehow illegitimate, to me, seems like an unhealthy notion. Further, I think "troll" is name-calling, pure and simple. Just emotion. The highest rated comment here right now consists of this:

"Vista is not good."

...to me, that's a pretty worthless comment--a grammatically, orthographically, socially correct version of "Vista Blow turdz". But it's no better in terms of elucidation.
DNA Sequence Alignment Algorithms: Needleman Wunsch and Smith Waterman
The free market will do the job. in 5 years we will be laughing about a 'price floor' at 4 bucks --gas won't be that cheap again until demand falls. Price floor or not.
I don't see it. By that token, why display usernames at all?
You got there before I could.
Toronto, Canada: Let's try to be New York City (but try to be polite)
Thank you, this is useful to me.
A big change would even just be to make the username stand out more. I can identify several popular posters on metafilter simply because the name is right there, in a bright colour / bold font directly underneath their posts.
How about just 1x1? Using the standard RGB color space there are 16,777,216. I doubt HN will have that many users so everyone gets their own color :-)
I'd be a bit concerned about patent issues with this one. There's a company that, on the surface, already does this.

Here's a link:
http://www.bigstring.com/free-email-address/aboutsecureemail...

From their site:
"BigString Corporation (OTCBB: BSGC) has created a revolutionary new email service that allows users to control their sent email. The Company’s BigString product is an email service for both individuals and businesses that is recallable and changeable. With a patent pending technology, BigString allows a user to easily send, recall, erase, self-destruct and modify an email after it has been sent."