skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Geez, didn't think I'd get reamed over this (much less make the front page)

1) Stop-loss orders should be part of an investment strategy. Sometimes, with all your analysis, you can be wrong. Do you plan to risk your entire allocated capital if the stock goes to $0? Do you decide not to cash out in order to find better deals? If that's part of your plan, fine. The point is people don't have plans when they invest.

2) Selling a stock when it's dropped a dollar is not a good risk management strategy. O'Neil reccomends no more than an 8% drawdown on capital for larger stocks (a $5 stock is a different example).

3) Selling because someone else told you that the stock did a pigeon-toed tripple-flopped oat-and-tree formation is not good risk management. Although that is a viable pattern ;)

4) If a stock dropped and you are still convinced of its value, then average in. Of course this should have been part of your plan to begin with.

5) My rant was about not taking profits if a security doubles. That's dumb, especially in allocation strategies (which I mentioned near the bottom of the post).

6) You speak of value investing. That's a good strategy, but not the only strategy.

7) Buy and hold is a myth because people don't look beyond that. There's no contingency. Even Warren Buffet has contingincies (in which he just flat out buys the company so he can fix it).

8) And this post wasn't even about stock picking (your buy and hold examples are stocks) this was an ETF.
I would say that this isn't really hacker news...but it's actually a fairly clever social hack to try to calculate how many people are interested in NASA's return to the moon.

EDIT: It would be nice if the input form were a secure page though.
I'm sure he's writing it up as we type...but I would assume this is a "downvote" compromise.
I am so tempted to just press it and see what happens. But I fear that I will end up banishing you to the netherworld.
This example wasn't a swing. Swing timeframes are under a month. This was an ETF doubling in 5 years and giving it back in under 1.
I've used Other World Computing (http://www.macsales.com/) for 5-10 RAM purchases over the years. Good prices and I've never had a reliability problem. Mac focused, though RAM is generally RAM.
I'm hoping somebody will start submitting some rubbish stories so I can try flagging them.
I suspect it's a "report this post to the moderators" feature, although so far I've not really seen the need for it, so who knows.

EDIT: Ugh, it's already annoying me on the new/front pages, as the "<n> comments"/"discuss" links are harder to see and click now.

pg, would you mind swapping the "flag" and "discuss" links on story listing pages? Thanks!

EDIT2: same for the "parent" link on thread pages, I've had a couple near misses in the last 2 minutes.
Unflag feature, after flagging. Alternatively, an undo flag link.
90% of people lose money trading. Perhaps that should have been the original disclaimer.

And I never said that people shouldn't create a passive portfolio. If you want to put all your money into a broad based market etf, fine. I wansn't knocking on that.

This wasn't a matter of selling high. This was a matter of an etf doubling and people getting greedy.
Flag! You're it. Now I probably get banned for misusing it. ;)
I flagged this post :-) (the post, not your comment)

edit1: I did this before pg explained what 'flag' is for. Now I feel bad.

edit2: oops... I am used to clicking on the last link 'parent'. Did it once by mistake on a comment.
Well that was boring. The "flag" link changed to "flagged". No big explanatory screen like craigslist.
You guys are so fast I didn't have time to write anything about it. The purpose is to let users over a certain karma threshold flag spam and troll submissions.

It should only be used for spams and really egregious trolling, not for stuff that's merely vapid or mistaken or off-topic.

Please don't click on it just to try it out. Flags are really being recorded, so flagging something randomly could damage the reputation of the flagger and/or the submitter of the thing that got flagged.
Hm, all I see is a toggle: my post now says "flagged". I presume this means that Anubis is weighing my heart and deciding whether I'm bound for the netherworld.
The example was an index fund.
"Boring" is in the eye of the beholder.

Once I really understood relational data base theory, those things (SKUs, call centers, warehouses) became exciting to me. A chance to practice what we preach. My customers are laboratories, much more so than Carr Hall 203 was in college.

OTOH, most people I know think everything we do is boring. They'd rather watch TV and talk about each other. Fortunately, we know better.
i wish we could un-flag. some will be curious to what will happen if you click on it.
I only buy Crucial ram, but from NewEgg.
Sort of related...an excerpt from Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Black Swan):

"For the non-mathematician, probability is an indecipherably complex field. But Taleb makes it easy by proving all the mathematics wrong. Let me introduce you to Brooklyn-born Fat Tony and academically inclined Dr John, two of Taleb's creations. You toss a coin 40 times and it comes up heads every time. What is the chance of it coming up heads the 41st time? Dr John gives the answer drummed into the heads of every statistic student: 50/50. Fat Tony shakes his head and says the chances are no more than 1%. "You are either full of crap," he says, "or a pure sucker to buy that 50% business. The coin gotta be loaded."

The chances of a coin coming up heads 41 times are so small as to be effectively impossible in this universe. It is far, far more likely that somebody is cheating. Fat Tony wins. Dr John is the sucker. And the one thing that drives Taleb more than anything else is the determination not to be a sucker. Dr John is the economist or banker who thinks he can manage risk through mathematics. Fat Tony relies only on what happens in the real world. "
Man, they're just kids.
Really good job mstefff, the feedback seems good too. Don't rest on your success...
Yes, but what is considered kosher to report?

1. Blatant machine-generated spam?

2. Really nasty stuff? (child porn, incitement to violence)

3. Slightly nasty stuff? (ordinary porn, Rick Astley)

4. Slightly spammy stuff? (unjustifiable advertising-like links?)

5. Comments which are insulting or nasty?

6. Comments which are just plain stupid?

7. Comments which only slightly stupid?

8. Things which you think are "not appropriate for HN"?

9. Other categories of stuff you don't want to see?

update: Never mind, answered by pg elsewhere.
whoops... excuse my first few flags then... I gave them to some that were merely off topic.
Is there some sort of cost associated with flagging? I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "could damage the reputation of the flagger".
Okay, upon further warning from PG, I deleted my flagged post to save myself from the netherworld.

This uncovered a bug: a deleted + flagged post produces a strange looking thing in Safari: the words "deleted" and "flagged" superimposed on each other.
This is good advice. Founding a business takes skills, desire, and vision. Knowing what people actually need(rather than guessing) is part of the vision.
Same for opera.
Ahh. True enough, but a narrow one to be sure, (Made up of only 24 banks and lenders). Point remains that it was hand picked from a sector that is doing historically bad right now in order to try to prove a dubious point.
How about an unflag toggle or an undo?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=226414
Presumably, you're wasting moderator time, for which you will burn in hell eternally! By which I mean, you might lose navbar colour and flagging privileges.
If someone flags stuff that turns out to be good (as measured by e.g. not later being killed), it would be reasonable to ignore their flags in future. The sw doesn't do that yet, but when and if that feature appears, it will be based on all flags ever made by an account.
Don't read the New Yorker much, do you guys?

That "ton of paper" is great writing - people use a "ton" to mean an unspecified large amount, but then there's already the unspecified "filled", so you have to rethink what they just read as an actual, 2000lb ton. Then, once they've corrected themselves, they have to visualize what 2,000lb of paper looks like, and most people probably imagine it looking bigger than it actually does. I found the writing to be a joy.
For once, I would love to see a bit of a global perspective on one of these articles. US cities would still fare well, but to mention Omaha without even bothering to include cities like London, Copenhagen and Vancouver is pretty useless.
Same for (corporate-provided) IE 6.
This is not dubious. People don't have a plan for asset allocation when developing individual portfolios.

Like I said in the post, if you've want 5% of your assets exposed to banks, and the etf doubles, then your exposure is now 10% of your portfolio. You should start paring off to reduce your risk to that particular industry.

Even with broad based index funds aren't completely diversified. There's no hedging against currency, inflation, and taxes (i.e. muni bonds).

If you are to build a passive portfolio, get a friend that works in the High Net Worth section of a broker and get the allocation sheet from them. There's an ETF for every category.
Gates' parting thoughts on MSFT
heh...could we have a list of flagged posts, in the lists page?
Normally I like articles like this, but he lost me here:

Reaching for my mug is a commitment. It is a reminder that, “Hey, we’re focusing elsewhere for moment. Don’t screw this up. I’m hot.”

Really? I think he just needed an interesting-sounding paragraph and made that up on the spot. I bet he had never thought of it that way before. Ah, over-analysis. If you think hard enough, you can make anything sound incredibly complicated.
newegg.com or zipzoomfly.com or pricewatch.com
The author of that article obviously doesn't understand the scientific method. Sad.
same for FF3/WIN
Sorry, I flagged this accidentally. (I tried out the new feature before reading about it.) Please do not take offense.

Is there any way to unflag? Thanks.
'flag' is now where 'parent' used to be (last link). Until the users get accustomed to this, there might be some unintentional flagging.
It's funny... I hadn't realized the extent to which my subconscious was trained to scan down the right-hand side of the links, evaluating the "X comments" display and using it as a guide for what to click on.

When I hit the homepage I got this sudden feeling of wrongness in my stomach, like vertigo. Only then did I consciously see the new "flag" links.

So, yeah, I also vote to move the flag links to the left.

(This reminds me of Teresa Nielsen Hayden's stories about the superhumanly-talented copy editors who perceive typos as literally jumping out of the page, or blinking, or who feel physical pain at the sight of misspelled words.)
HN appears to be all about not being able to undo things. Is there any operation that's undo-able, other than deleting your own posts?
Well...when I saw Pownce on that list I didn't hesitate for a second to close that tab!

Pathetic.
You want to see all your spam trophies?
I use deal sites, but I check regularly rather than waiting until I need it. Just recently I picked up 2GB for $10 AR - that's pretty decent, you have to admit. On the other hand, this had led to me having several extra GB sitting around.
Navbar colour?

I have 143 karma but I don't see that yet (although I do see 'flag'). Hmm.
That would be neat. Then we could use "flag" to mean "really good" and restrict upvoting to those-in-the-know and those-with-lots-of-karma. The main page would then be just a front for the underground hackernews community :)

Wow, actually I like this idea.
30% is pretty amazing. I'm no expert, but if you google "click through rates" you get some good articles on the first page.

I think you're defiantly hitting your audience. You should try to get info on who's installing the app, and using it one week later, etc etc. if you can.
The flag link still shows for deleted comments
YC blog
This little text field can contain a lot of text. Enough for blog entries. So it might be an interesting idea to publish a blog directly on this page.

It might not be a good idea for the community though. If the blog is any good - you will get some regular readers. They may vote up your entries - which will pollute the front page.

If I had anything to say I would probably do it myself - just because it's possible. But I guess I am just to lazy and elliptical.
ok; here's the source, btw:

(def flaglink (i user whence)
(when (and user (> (karma user) flag-threshold*))
(pr bar*)
(w/rlink (do (if (mem user i!flags)
(pull user i!flags)
(push user i!flags))
(save-item i)
whence)
(pr (if (mem user i!flags) "unflag" "flag")))))
Er, I didn't say nothing about the navbar secret. >_>

Seriously, you get to change the colour of the orange bar at the top when you're at or above 250 karma. Either then or if you can be bothered to set up some user CSS or javascript. :) No idea if there are further perks beyond that.
Yahoo! Chats with Semantic Web Expert, Ben Adida
Crucial, Crucial, Crucial
Same for 10.4 / FF2.
Getting ActiveScaffold 1.1.1 to Work With Rails 2.1.0
You can now unflag.
You probably meant:

vectorDotProduct = zipWith ( * )

(and this doesn't even include the sum)

map ( * ) has type Num a => [a] -> [a -> a] which is not really what the dot product should be.
I'd probabl have to argue in favor of writing convenience methods to make a usable api right off the bat. For example, I don't necessarily NEED the strlen method, since I can make my own with little trouble, but it is sure nice to have. I'd say the more public methods there are in one's API the better. This way in the java world, you can have a public interface with all the methods a client developer could ever want, but protect (hide) the implementation of these methods. Without a good set of available public api methods, you a) inconvenience the target developer and b) make it impossible to hide the implementation, since to do anything useful with the application, the developer would need to know the "guts" of it, since the public api isn't good. So yes, probably this is a matter of taste, but in the spirit of "do unto others", personally I like having "conveniences" like the strlen example, and so I like to make similar "conveinces" when I'm writing code myself.
Actually it's not related to the downvoting problem. I added it because spam submissions have been increasing.
I can't wait to read a post on the use of Markov chains or Bloom filters to prevent boring posts.
When you hit 2001 karma you become the Star-Child.

Okay, not really. In fact, I'm not sure there are any perks beyond that, either. :)
same for IE7
Secrets about the internet
anagran (http://www.anagran.com/) seems interesting...
People are going to pay $10 a month for that are they?
$10 a month to see other cars moving around 'realtime' on my satnav?
Kira - A language that compiles to PHP
Why your product doesn’t need to go viral
The long tail is all about capturing and owning a niche, not selling a product to every household in America. What your company can learn about long tail marketing.
The threads page (http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=eru) is a kind of de facto microblog.

I wouldn't recommend using toplevel submissions as blog entries, because it would amount to self-submitting every post to news.yc. But if people wanted to use news.yc as a blog platform, I'd be open to it. It would only take about 10 lines of code. Does anyone?
Here we go again: MSFT and Yahoo Talks Back on
Does short really matter? What if its something incredibly obvious, but still relatively long... like "ISoldMyHouse.com"?
1) No. Again, why should you have an automatic system for panicking when other people panic? If your ideal is really to be average, but slow, how will you ever succeed?

2) Why 8%? Why not for low-price stocks? What about for stocks traded overseas (5 Yen? 500 Yen?)? It all sounds very unscientific -- and I've read O'Neil's books.

3) I didn't say that this involved selling then. That call caused the stock to drop in my example. Then the drop caused the stop-loss sale.

4) Average in before or after getting stopped out?

5) Why are you viewing the price quote isolated from the business value? If the stock is up 100% because the company is worth more, selling is not that wise. If the company triples in value (e.g. a new patent, a competitor going under), the 100% rise in price is not a good excuse to sell.

6) Value investing is when you try to buy something for less than it's worth. Usually, a strategy of paying 110 cents on the dollar can't get by with the claim that it's just another "strategy", even if the plan is to flip it to someone else for 120 cents on the dollar. When you rely on an infinite supply of subsequent suckers, it's very probable that you will some day be the last sucker.

7) "Buy and hold" doesn't mean "Buy and hold forever." It means that your bias should be towards sticking with a few good investments, rather than playing lots of markets. In general, if A's strategy calls for one good idea a year and B's strategy calls for ten good ideas a month, A will have devoted 100X as much effort to his average idea (and will be paying much lower taxes!).

8) So? When you purchase shares of many businesses at once, instead of one, are you exempt from behaving in a businesslike manner?
If thats the case I shouldn't be able to. I also might add a up button and a down button (like the left/right buttons you have on the top) so the user is aware the list scrolls. Similar to the Google Reader Widget for iGoogle.
Tell Warren Buffet that buy and hold is a myth...
Which is great. This is an industry where age or tenure are irrelevant. Anyone can make an impact.

If I may, a quote from one of my favorite movies, Antitrust: "Anybody working in a garage can put us out of business"
From the posts thus far, it's good to see the appreciation of this man. Not many of my computer books are as well-worn as my set of 'The Art'. His contribution of TeX alone would have assured his stature; just another side effect the good doctor. I just wish folks would leave him undisturbed so he can finish up v.4!!
Hmmm... if you do implement this, I suppose it would be pretty easy to integrate with e.g. tumblr.
Unflagging is now implemented.
The Incubator Decision- Why To Go or Not Go With Something Like YC
Is there anything that's not undoable, except voting?
Did I just see a 'repl' comment from pg? ;)

Anyway - I was more amazed that I catched the moment when I went from complaint to feature. I am used to your speed by now.
I'd really like it if it showed more stocks. It feels rather limited at the moment.
Same for FF3 / 10.5.
Geothermal-Powered USA: One Step Closer to Reality
The Economist touches on something big in its cover story on clean energy this week: "geothermal could be hot."

From the piece:

"The recoverable heat in rock under the United States is the equivalent of 2,000 years-worth of the country’s current energy consumption."
pretty interesting. seen tons of libraries do stuff like this, but if you can have it:

a) well documented
b) with good performance
c) easily extendable

people will use it to make very desktopy like web apps ala gho.st etc
Same here. Had no problems with them.
Interesting article, very thorough in its explanation of all the ways bands can get screwed financially. I'd be interested to see more hard data as to how common this case is, where it fits in on the spectrum (percentile-wise) of band signings.
What they don't tell you: the cities with the tech jobs are disproportionately expensive.

For example, cost of living in San Francisco is anywhere from 60-100% higher than most other parts of the US. Same goes for New York, Seattle and Boston. Even Boulder is fairly expensive.

Jobs in San Francisco, in particular, are not cost-effective. Sure, you get paid more, but the differential is rarely enough to make up for the increase in the cost of living. A $100k job in San Francisco (where rent on a one-bedroom apartment is easily $1500/month) is roughly equivalent to a $60k job in Seattle.

That said, San Francisco is gorgeous. It's probably worth a hit to your earning power to live there...at least while you're young and single.
Not in the FF3-on-Windows install for which Noloh doesn't work.

Add-ons installed there are Firebug, Live HTTP Headers, Tree Style Tab, and User Agent Switcher.
OK, so If I really wanted to do this I would post each entry as a comment to e.g. this submission.

Technically it would not be a very clever idea to turn news.yc into a blogging platform. If there is a benefit it would be social at most. (As the whole affair of 'startup news' instead of reddit was.)
This seems like a part of google finance's news view (except with more news). What I liked about google finance is how it pegged news articles with exact times on the market. Yours might have more articles, but I don't see how it's that much better than something more integrated.
mstefff, I think this is a great idea, but I have to agree with the majority of commenters that the implementation is poorly executed in three main ways:

1) the scrolling simply does not work as expected

2) you unnecessarily reinvented the scroll bar (axod elaborates very well on this)

3) needing to sign up before typing in a ticker symbol is a major turn off

These are all easily fixable problems, but you are showing little interest in listening to user feedback. Here are three things you said:

"I've barely had any issues with the scrolling"

"if you're at the top, you shouldn't scroll up, you should scroll down"

"There isn't anything wrong with the wrap-around"

It is easy to become blind to the deficiencies of interfaces you create. Of course the wrap-around seems logical to you because you created it. However, and this is really important, almost every single HN commenter had a problem with it. If you want your app to become popular and maybe even profitable, you MUST listen closely to your users/customers. Even if you do not agree with our collective advice, it is detrimental to openly tell your potential users that they are wrong.

So in a nutshell, open up to this constructive criticism. Your site looks very nice and offers a hefty collection of important financial news. Beware, though, that if developers cannot figure out the interface, suits won't stand a chance.
Asperger's: the IT industry's dark secret
Craigslist. People that have just upgraded their laptop or desktop sell the old RAM for next to nothing. If nothing fits the bill on CL then it's off to Newegg.
We're fast? You're fast.