skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Best. news.yc. Submission. Ever.

(not)
70+ High-End Components for Web Designers and Developers
In Twitter’s Scoble Problem, a Business Model
Most Annoying Habits of Technology Companies
Twitter's business model
Social Edge: By Social Entrepreneurs, For Social Entrepreneurs
Start-ups: your blog is your soul, baby.
[UPDATE] moved to my blog:

http://radleymarx.wordpress.com/2008/05/26/start-ups-your-blog-is-your-soul-baby/
... But I’m a blogger, web developer and evangelist. I don’t know the security side as well as I should and I don’t have time to make sure everything is rock solid ...

Wow, nice to know that the basics of web security isn't in his understanding of web developer's job and apparently beyound what an "evangelist" should care about. If web developers "do not have time" to secure their own shit, why would the world need them?

Besides, what does he want? Google kills thousands of fake spamming sites an hour, how on earth would they implement his idea of "heads up warning" before wiping them off the index?

And what would Microsoft/Yahoo do? The same goddamn thing, because spamming sites degrade search quality which hurts us all in the end.
Robert Bachrach responds to infamous Ethernet would be a failure memo
-> reddit.com
Wait, I thought you guys gave up because you stopped posting on your blog.
Valtrex For Geeks
Irrational Exuberance
An index for wiki sites
AKA yelp.

edit: or judysbook or (to a lesser extent) citysearch
What's with the new "I screw up and then blame mighty Google" pattern?!

I don't know, my reaction to your situation would be something like: "Oh fuck, I really need to learn how to secure my stuff properly! Thankfully Google prevented my mistake from affecting everyone else also!"
Oh how I long for the downvote button!
Ask YC: YUI for CSS grid
I'm a big fan of blueprint for CSS, it's simple and does the job well.

However, I'm considering the YUI grid for my next project, mainly because I want fluid layouts.

Does anyone have any experience with fluid YUI grids to share?

thanks very much!
probably reading gettingreal from 37signals would put you in right mood to start looking for things- you need to do on priority, now
Yea, I agree with those problems. That's why the approach we took with this idea was launch really early and get feedback from the community to see what changes need to be made and in which direction we should take the site. (i.e. we thought that the best way to solve these problems is to let the community guide us)

So far, we've had positive feedback from users who said they would post their guides on the site and others saying they want game reviews as well. We'll have to wait and see if that feedback actually translates into action by those users to register and post guides.
I think it was first written in the 40s, then revised in the 60s.
Is Django stable?: A friend keeps asking "but is it stable?"
TipJoy is doomed. I have a blog. My blog is where I write things, and my family and friends read it. I make no income from this blog. Why would I want to cheapen what I write by putting a big ol button on it, saying I want people to give me $2? That's chicken change, and the effect is that I look desperate for money. Like a guy playing guitar in the train.

TipJoy needs to evolve, but I feel the founder is a bit stuck in this idea. Let me give you a couple of ideas on how to evolve. If you need more ideas you'll need to hire me as a consultant:

1. Blogger puts up a picture of a book like "Programming in the C++ language" as part of his "want list". There is a label at the bottom saying "Contribute towards getting Max Klein this book". Then I can send him $2 and pretty soon he can buy that book. There is a progress bar at the bottom showing how much towards the book he got.

2. Conditional tips. Like a game, for example, if there is a football blog, the blogger puts out $2 saying Madrid will win next week. Readers can match his $2, and if he is right, he gets the money, otherwise the money goes back (with an option to tip anyways). This makes the process interactive and more fun instead of the dry tipping process.

I got more idea buns in my brain oven...
That was early on. I almost never see them being posted these days.

Vid comments are of lower information content and of higher bandwidth... so they are of higher cost when you consume them. Also, most people don't wanna fix their hair etc to be bothered with them. Seesmic should study why video phones flopped...
I go to Oxford, and that post is a gross and in many cases largely inaccurate generalisation. I'm sorry the oxbridge guys and girls you've known are so insufferable. I think you're significantly off the mark taking that experience and making a generalisation that encompasses two entire campus-worths of students. It's a bad depiction that's likely to keep the myth going and put off intelligent but maybe from a state school or that are not the most cocksure (intellectually or socially) of people - but people who could contribute a LOT to the university over time.

People have to know that it's OK to come here and learn new stuff, and be bright and contribute something back in your projects, and later, a PhD; you don't have to come, be socially accepted, show off all the time, and mentally abuse people in debates down at the Union or even just at the bar.
Surprised this is front page of HN, tbh. Not sure what values it adds to anyone.
PayPal: Ten Days And Counting To Fix Drop Down Menu Bug
Google Corporate History
This was a very good response to what I wrote. I applaud you.

> Full neutrality is impossible.

Completely agreed.

> You can teach about a war without making explicit moral judgements about either side.

True, and the more I think about it, the less I believe it'll come up in a conversation with a 4 year old. Especially on specifics such as the morality of a specific war.

> Hiding your beliefs from your children just not to influence them is a form of lying, and it's futile IMO.

Very true. Hiding information is definitely a form of lying. See Mark Twain's On the Decadence of the Art of Lying, he makes a very good argument for saying lying is not a bad thing, in certain circumstances, but also that not telling the whole truth is also lying.

> Do you have to tell your relatives to keep the secret? Ridiculous.

My general belief was that relatives would have less of a dramatic impact on the child's behavior patterns than the parents of the child. So while the child might know they believe in god, it wont necessarily translate to the child believing in god himself. Oddly, I never connected Christmas with Christianity when I was a child.

> Just stating your beliefs, while acknowledging the possibility that you're wrong, is a very honest thing to do. The child will grow to make their own opinion before it matters for any practical purposes anyway. That's what my parents did with me, and I stopped believing in God at around the same time I stopped believing in Santa Claus. I never felt pressured either way, and I carry no trauma that I know of.

I believe your point was well made. I took things a bit to far with the not lying. I still believe influence is a form of lying when working from the perceptive of a parent to a child, but I now believe that the effect is far less than I had originally believed. Thinking back on it, my own parents did the same thing yours did, though I was pressured slightly into believing in Catholicism, the pressure wasn't so harsh that I felt compelled to actually do so. I guess I was a bit harsh on the naivety of children, thinking ideas would be implanted in their young minds far easier than they actually are. I think also, that I was tying the words 'influence' and 'manipulation' a bit closer than they actually are. It does irk me though, that some children take their parents beliefs to heart without even thinking about it, sometimes without even realizing it.
We're starved for DATA. Any factual data will do well.
This cartoon is all wrong. Religion is cooler than science when dragons are involved.
Great question, I'd like to know too. Sometimes I poke around popular open source projects, like the rails source. Here's how they implemented the syntatic sugar for things like "1.month.from_now":

http://github.com/rails/rails/tree/master/activesupport/lib/...

I recently found http://refactormycode.com/ and it looks interesting for learning, though not comprehensive. Sometimes it's nice to see the "before and after".
The truth is also that scientific evidence to date does not suggest there isn't a god. Unless, of course, you know of something I don't. Ideas such a creationism have long since been dissolved, but the existence of God? Not so much.

Additionally, I believe there was a very good essay somewhere that argued there was a heaven and a hell. Saying that if we know there are an infinite number of other dimensions with an infinite number of possibilities, whose to say there isn't one where ONLY good things happen and one where ONLY bad things happen. These places would be heaven and hell, respectively. Of course, if someone is actually sent to one of these places, they will immediately change it if they do something contrary to what is expected in that specific realm, no longer making it heaven or hell, and a new heaven or hell takes its place where that even didn't happen.

So, if heaven and hell exist, who is to say god does not?
This Is Funny Only if You Know Unix
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=199967
Where does it treat them with the same seriousness?

To me the initial SL component was just a screening / outreach process - finding them someone they wouldn't have otherwise found.

He then had 11 face-to-face interviews (in two different countries) totalling 9.5 hours of face-to-face time..

How was this "bypassing face-to-face interaction"?
Well, true. But you could argue the same about Santa Claus or any number of mythical creatures.

Do fairies live in the bottom of my garden? I'd say scientific evidence to date suggests not.
Influence doesn't have neutral connotations in English.

Sorry, I meant to say it doesn't have negative connotations.
My first computer ran at 87 kHz (!) - an IBM 1401. I wrote a compiler for a Python-like language for it, as well as an Operating System.

You kids today are spoiled with multi-GHz machines.
You have an idea for a start-up? Now work!
Also, even if only 100 people ever use Seesmic, you'll see a good number of posts pop up on TechCrunch, especially since Arrington invested in them. If they start popping up on random blogs then I'll be impressed.
I must be missing something about Seesmic. It's like YouTube but minus the volume slider. But it's integrated with TechCrunch's commenting system. Is that really a competitive edge?
I love this stuff! Sanjoy wrote his brilliant Ph.D. thesis based partially on an Order of Magnitude Physics course taught at Caltech by Sterl Phinney (his advisor) and Peter Goldreich. He is a brilliant teacher and this material is a goldmine of good ideas. (Full disclosure: Sanjoy and I taught Physics 1 together at Caltech, and Sterl was my advisor as well.)
Yup. Personally, my brain is having a real hard time putting the concepts of NASA and spam together.
Tim O'Reilly had a great post back in August of 2006 "Round 2: Dial Tone" http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/08/round_2_dial_tone.... where he said:

New applications often start out requiring operators, but eventually move towards dial-tone. For example, you can look at blogging as the “dial tone” equivalent of creating a web site. For ordinary folks (not most of my readers, but non-technical folks), creating a web site was something that required an operator. You went to a web design shop or an ISP and had them do it for you. The blogging revolution, the wiki revolution, the MySpace revolution, the CyWorld revolution, are really about providing a kind of self-service dial-tone for creating a web presence and community.

Your blog is the dial tone for your website, go too long between posts (and a month seems to be pushing it) and visitors will wonder if you are still there.
I'm not sure compete figures are very useful at all to be honest. I know everyone bashes alexa, but their numbers are actually usually closer to the truth than compete. Quantcast seem reasonable also.
Marry a teacher. Turns out they get that stuff for free.
It all depends on how data is aggregated and how specialized service like yours cater to the data i.e uses that data.

For example linkedIn takes all the data from the end user whenever there is communication event.

1) adding a profile: name/school/college/specialization/job industry/company

2) adding a new job- job industry/company

3) adding a contact - type of relationship

4) asking a question - mark that to industry vertical/set of people

So having granular details (which would help your service to serve users better) defines what data you need to collect from start and then you can use the same.

pure speculation is cooler with above set of data
Two types of viral.

1. Artificial virality. Huge audience. Capture a part of the audience, you're in for a good userbase. Exponential increase. This is his Hotmail example.

2. Natural virality. "John has sent you $20 over PayPal. Create an account to transfer to your bank." Built in a certain fashion that forces it to spread virally. Who wouldn't take twenty bucks?
I agree, although I think some companies play that to their advantage.
Once you are earning money from a stream, you know how much you're earning. If a company hasn't even tried to monetize something, they can pick any figures out of the air for projected revenues. "Unlimited potential!".
Umm...copyright?

Obviously that doesn't really help in nations that don't enforce copyright...but repeated takedown notices in the US will be enough of a nuisance to prevent wholesale theft over a long period of time.

I wrote a book, both online and published, a few years back that was lifted wholesale by a rather large (at the time, who have since fallen on well-deserved hard times) Linux vendor...a few letters between lawyers, a lump sum cash payment, and the problem went away. Obviously, the fact that all parties were in the US made copyright more effective...but most first world nations do respect copyright.
Nobody should be nagged by NYT to login, btw. Clear your cookies.
I'm not sure click fraud is quite as good a way to tip. If it happens too much Google may actually close their google account.

Click fraud isn't cool.
do you not see the irony in defending TipJoy and later ripping on Seesmic?

As Ivan, PG and others said about TipJoy -- it launched relatively recently and the company is iterating through features.

How does Seesmic not deserve the same patience?
Nice ideas, but I'll bet (2) falls under gambling and in some less than free countries that's illegal.
Please make Hacker News slower
I browse Hacker News from my iPhone, and due to the text size and link placements, I frequently mis-click, hitting user profile lnks instead of the story links. On other sites, this is fine, as I have time to hit stop and tap ok the correct link. Not so on HN - the profile page loads before I realize I've made a mistake.

So please, throw some for(i=0;i<10000;i++) loops in there. My productivity depends on it.
You make it sound like there has only been one crash at twitter.
Be suspicious of feedback, as well. Sometimes users don't actually know what they want. As Henry Ford said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

While I'm certain that there is a business model for revenue sharing out there that'll work, so far it has not. The people who want to make money on what they write put it on their own blog or website (generally) and the people who want the little moment of fame do their work for the largest community available (or the one that serves their little niche best). It seems like the happy medium is impossible--either you're paying them a pittance or you're not, as there's no way you can pay them the $50 option as in the experiment--the solution might be to make it possible for people to make more than they could make on their own even if you're taking a cut. Proving that to them might be hard, and it might still lead to less actual contribution from users than just asking for help.

But, I dunno. You'll have to experiment and find out. This is a case where measurement is going to be absolutely vital. You need to know when you're doing something that works 5% better, so that you can do more of it--and if the returns start diminishing, you need to be able to find the next biggest contributor to positive outcomes so you can keep cranking up the next best thing until you're either successful or you know you can't win.
The problem is that there really is no way to make a 100% secure site.
Waste of space. Are you going to be doing this for every NYT article?
I tried the YUI and ExtJS grids. Both seem to have quirks, but in the end I chose ExtJS and it has worked for me so far. I looked at things like performance to add dynamically 100 rows, and general flexibility.
I think these mars lander things have been some of the coolest, most inspiring technology-based endeavors in our time.

In terms of 'current news', the problem is that it's usually about politics, and thus not really more relevant to hackers than anyone else, whereas this clearly is. The politics articles also quickly degrade into boring, tired, rehashed debates, too, whereas something like this shouldn't.

(That said, voting people down that much is just lame, people. What happened to the old hacker news where a -1 was sufficient to say "no, we think you're wrong"?)
I'm sick of science and religion being presented as a dichotomy. idiots should NOT get the same billing as science. Science is about how the world works. Religion is Harry Potter (children's fiction).
I basically agree with you, just I'm not sure which revenue sharing businesses are doomed and which are not. AdSense is obviously far from doomed. eBay is in the revenue sharing business as much as a game guide sharing site would be. What is the reason they succeed while others fail?
Trampoline
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equating ebola and AIDS to hotmail and youtube. has human life become so cheap?

i don't have a problem with the use of virus outbreaks being used to explain network effects, i do have a contention with the apparent disregard for the reality of, say, ebola spreading through zaire.
that's a bit reductionist. religion is also the collection of traditions, social organizations, and a good dose of how to tell right from wrong. now if you dislike the traditions, social organizations, and particular takes on right/wrong, thats one thing. to dismiss the entire institution of religion as merely being fantasy is as incorrect as saying that newtonian physics are an accurate and complete representation of reality.
please explain why you downmodded me so i can improve the quality of my posts.
Seesmic seems to be a largely redundant startup (with excellent execution and PR): so far it has very little value for the world at large; it tries solving a problem that doesn't exist; it's not technically very impressive, nor revolutionary. I think it's mainly a great demo of the silicon valley echochamber at work, and of great PR (both in the Valley, and in Cannes last week)
Ironically (or pseudo-ironically?), the very difference in connotation between self-taught and autodidactic is pretentiousness. Perhaps not quite pretentiousness, but more of a difference in social class -- a self-described autodidact is indicating that even though they are self-taught, they are not "blue collar" self-taught.
this is childish.
i'm using yui grids now. overall it's not bad... one quirk taht somewhat annoys me is that their 100% grid isn't really 100% - there is a noticable space on both the right and left

a lot of ppl also complain that yui is as verbose as tables... not to mention the M$ buyout is looming over my head. I'm wondering if this will affect all of Yahoo's open source efforts, since M$ still isn't very friendly towards open source (yui becomes ie centric)
You are living in the past. Just be aware of your choices as you make them. Thats all. Heard of Zen yet?
Ask hackers: Time as double?
I need to choose a data type to represent absolute time values for static typed language. I need a small time resolution and big time span coverage.

A natural choice is to use nanoseconds time ticks since some epoch. 64bit integer would then be fine. But we then get accuracy problems to represent time in seconds and rounding errors.

A fixed point value with seconds as time unit and decimal point between bit 29 and 30 might match most users precision preference. But it is not trivial to get fixed point computation correct because of the tricky problem of normalization and rounding errors.

Thus using double precision floats seems a good choice because all operations are built in computers. It is only the precision that is not uniform.

Do the hackers following YCombinator hackers news have an opinion to share on this ?
The title is very misleading, Google erased him from their index, not from the internet. I don't know why exactly, but a lot of webmasters thinks that somehow Google have to include them in the index, otherwise it's unjust towards them. But they don't have to, it's their property and they really can include or exclude websites as they wish, and it's just their good will that they publicize some of the criteria for getting in.
Wow. This whole article stank worse than that unrelated dead deer reference. It's a textbook example of knocking others down (with almost no constructive advice) to promote yourself. I can't believe you use this as your example for your newly started $500/pop analysis consultancy.

Your only piece of "analysis" was suggesting that they build in a magical way to let others show off their tips... which they already have.

Honestly, you should really feel ashamed of this poorly researched and completely off "work".
Localizing that sort of things is super tricky as many languages use different words for if there is one, versus 2, versus 3-5, versus 5+, so you really have to localized 3 or 4 Strings, even though in English there's only two options. I found this out the hard way.
I grew up in and around Oxford. In my summer I worked for a laundry service that cleaned the sheets of Oxford students. I know for a fact that they often made the wrong decisions in many different ways.
I think those are a different model, but your bringing them up has put things into a really interesting light for me.

It's the difference between a feudal system or a sharecropping system and owning your own land (but generally having to go through the commodities market to sell your goods--you still cut someone in on your profits, but you decide just about everything else about your business). And maybe that's actually why "revenue sharing" sites fail. Sharecropping worked for years...until something better came along. So, maybe the sharecropping age of the Internet never really came before an economy of independent production arrived, and so maybe it'll never happen on a large scale.

It's also based on the, probably incorrect, notion that there can only be so many "destinations" for any particular type of information or good on the Internet. As search gets better, as the semantic web grows (slowly, ever so slowly), and as the Internet population grows ever more diverse, it seems likely that the idea of a "destination site" will seem rather quaint. So, destinations that allow people to sharecrop on their real estate are probably doomed to fall under the onslaught of independent farmers.

Of course, the analogy could be flawed.
erm... zoom in so you don't mis-click?
i browse it on my ipod, i know what you are saying about mis-clicks, just pinch and zoom and the next page will come up not all zoomed in.

i don't think your gonna get them to add needless loops :)