skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Forgot one. Once you've been on a while, you can write the meta-post: "How to get your startup on Hacker News" or "Best times to post an article on HN"

Nice post, swombat.

The only thing I would add is that I have noticed that we all like charts, graphs, and details about stuff. So if you post about your income and traffic for a startup, be sure to include a chart and a bunch of nice, juicy details. People seem adverse to anything that's high-level or conceptual, and more friendly towards concrete and numerical information. Sometimes I think even if the details are tangential and not a directly necessary part of your thesis, folks like seeing them. So if you're doing a post on "When to log into HN to read the best comments" be sure to have some kind of graph. Don't just say 14:00GMT.
There is an Atom feed on the code listing page. feed://comfy-helvetica.jottit.com/user-css?m=history.atom
Oh, btw, Salman Khan is speaking at TED (rejoice)
SEO Efforts Often Overlooked
Only read the first page. But, it sounds like a better title would be "Can the Euro Be Saved?"
Nerf Gun Sharp Shooter
Really nice site, the idea makes a lot of sense and it seems like if you can get users, it should really take off. The design seems quite good, but like some of the other commenters, the small "notice" area at the top of each page seems like it could use a little more love. I think the name is memorable, and that's probably more important than any potential offense someone might take at the name.

Out of curiosity, could you explain the different services/apis you're using to get the list of products the kids search for? Are you just using the Amazon Product API or are there other services you're hitting too?
Keep your eyes peeled! Next month, "How to write an article about posting something to Hacker News"... ;-)

I just kept getting asked this in networking events, so I thought I'd rather have the answer written up. Glad everyone is finding it useful!
Reading up on Wikipedia, I think he got the encoding wrong. The samples he plays are the diff between left and right. Now I want to try this... but I don't have a scanner handy. Can anyone scan a record for me?
Persuasive Research Topics Propose a Commanding Character of the Writer
You need talent and excellent writing skills to write a persuasively. You need to be a pro at being able to persuade others that your manner of thinking is the right way to go. In order to perfect your persuasive writing, you should be conversant with writing on persuasive research topics.
I guess I don't understand the "force" aspect. As a distributor wouldn't you already be implementing WebM or Theora to satisfy Firefox/Opera? If so, how does Chrome all of a sudden force you to change?

As a Chrome use, what changes? All three codecs can be watched, H.264 however is through a sandboxed Flash player.
Additional inspirational content coming soon:

Napolean Hill, "Code and Get Rich"

Dale Carnegie, "How to Win Data and Influence Google"

Norman Vincent Peale, "The Power of Positive Customer Feedback"

Jack Canfield, "Chicken Soup for the Ruby Programmer"

Stephen Covey, "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Founders"

Ken Blanchard, "The One Minute Start-Up"

Harold Kushner, "When Bad Data Happens to Good Web Sites"

Tony Robbins, "Awaken the Coder Within"

Zig Zigler, "See You at the IPO"

Robert Kiyosaki, "Rich Angel, Poor Angel"

Wayne Dyer, "You'll See It When You Click It"

David Allen, "Getting Apps Done"

Robert Fulghum, "All I Really Need to Know I Learned at 37signals"
I think "banging on her" is where a line's been crossed. Misogynist if not sexist.
Are Chinese Mothers Superior To American Mothers?
Google uses us as tools in its battles and wars

Every company does. Or do you really believe that Apple is actively preventing Flash just because they really care about the consumer?

Google's hypocrisy is unbelievable

Google is a big company. The world is full of crazy and complicated choices, and there are many shades of gray.

I'll skip over technical details in this post...

Um...okay. Thanks.
>>the dot-bomb days and back then testing just wasn't part of the culture.

Yes, but I wrote "Testing has been central in Perl for most of a decade."

I was mostly doing C++ at that time, but when I looked at Perl again a few years later -- testing was like air; everywhere.

>>Testing fanboys flame me all you want

Nah, I found "religion" after the dot-bomb, too. :-)
Luxury! In my time, there weren't other people to talk to. ;-)
Boston $uck$
Review my startup - E
Looking for feedback regarding the visibility and functionality of our product. Is it clear what we do from checking out our homepage? Is it obvious that 'See how it works' points to a video? What would you suggest? Best from Amsterdam!
Like always, mr. Krugman gets it wrong. Of course he blames the single currency, when he should have blamed things like "rules governing worker firing helped limit job loss, while strong social-welfare programs ensured that even the jobless retained their health care and received a basic income.". There's one thing that I've learned as a programmer, there's no silver bullet, you can't have both "strong" social programmes and a dynamic and versatile economy. You can't both stay at home doing nothing for most of the day (look at the 35-hour week in France, for example) and still dream at a life-style consisting of holidays abroad and 2 cars per family.
The author has and had the freedom to publish. No one stopped him from publishing the article.

The HN crowd don't really respect a conjecture without evidence. That's kinda why I come here.
What are arguments against conspiracies about 5 men that run the US?
I know this might sound like a silly question, but I constantly find myself in heated debates/exchanges with people that honestly believe that there is a small cabal of (say 5 - 6) men that secretly 'pull all the strings' behind the scenes.<p>What are some arguments I can use to actually convince them that that is impossible or just not true?
That's still more than four triangles -- two right triangles next to each other that way make a larger triangle. One way to make only four triangles is:

\	/
\	/
-------\----/------
\1	/
\/
/\
\	/	\	/
\	/ 2	\	/
---\---/------\----/-
\3/	\4 /
\	\/
/ \	/\
/ \	/ \
I think I agree with you, but what does Google stand to gain from controlling the video standard that they don't get from h264?
Einsteins Problem: 98% of the people in the world couldn't solve it
This article whitewashes the issue by first pointing out the problem, and then making some vague hand-wavy claim that Google is providing direct answers immediately that obviate further search.

This is nonsense.

I think the whole world knows that for many kinds of general searches (e.g., appliance reviews when shopping), Google has been completely overrun by spammy content.

I sure hope they're working on something.
Developing Math Intuition
A story of my last use of Standard Deviation.

My day to day job deals with credit card processing. A lot of my job deals with ensuring that transactions occur securely and reliably. It's a tedious job, it's not exciting, and involves a lot of testing, but I love the sense of knowing that actual money is flowing through a system I built.

Anyways, one of the things I wanted to do was build an automate alert system that would notify me of problems with processing transactions. Looked at it from high up, the system is fairly stable, and while it would be easy to notice if transactions suddenly stopped on the entire system, this rarely, if ever, actually happens (and hasn't happened except for planned < 1 minute outages).

However, consider the system runs through it many small individual sites, looking at all transactions is fairly useless. Instead, I wanted a warning to notify me when any specific account was suffering. Each account is different, and accounts for a variable number of transactions each day. Some accounts do more, some less. Their are other variables: some accounts do well at different types of the day because of where they are promoted in the world. Weekends generally see an uptick, but this again is variable.

So, I developed a system (using standard deviation) that essentially looked at an accounts history for the past X time period for a certain period of time throughout the day. Some accounts are inspected by looking at the numbers in the past hour (accounts with steady transactions), others are looked at over the last few hours, others are looked at over the day.

Obviously, we don't alert ourselves to certain cases that fall outside standard deviation, and we've adjusted the numbers to look at other areas, but the result of using standard deviation in this way suddenly opened up a new way at looking at our numbers and evaluating the current status of our system, as well as the accounts using it. Even if a problem doesn't exist on our end, we can alert the people that handle these accounts that a problem might exist, allowing them to take necessary action.

Understanding standard deviation, understanding how it can be used (along with other associated tools of math) makes for some really interesting things that you can do to improve your system as a whole.
"Play Present" - The Mind Tricks For Performance In The NBA
Alan Stein works with some of the top NBA athletes in the world on strength and conditioning. Here he talks about mind-focus ninja tricks that he teaches to get players to play to their potential.
Depending on what you want to do there are some options.

The one that's been around longest but the most limited is the ASE (Android Scripting Environment)
http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducing-an...

Using the ASE you can create some simple programs to do small tasks.

If you're looking to build a full app you're probably going to be looking at either working through Java, or if you're on Gingerbread you can use C++. Previous versions of Android allowed for C++ libraries being linked to your apps but had no way to access the APIs for creating graphical interfaces. That's now changed so I recommend you look into the SDK and NDK if you're really serious about building on Android.
http://developer.android.com/sdk/
http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/

The only other option that I know about is that the Mono framework is being ported to android (.NET framework port). So if you know C# or any other .NET language you may be able to start there, although I think it's currently in closed beta.
http://monodroid.net/
Google Shopper for Android does this.
What are arguments against conspiracies about 5 men that run the US?
I know this might sound like a silly question, but I constantly find myself in heated debates/exchanges with people that honestly believe that there is a small cabal of (say 5 - 6) men that secretly 'pull all the strings' behind the scenes.

What are some arguments I can use to actually convince them that that is impossible or just not true?
Poop - I'm coining a phrase
Perl OOP, or "Poop" - an engaging and clever way to get people refering to Perl Object Oriented Programming. It brings a juvenile smile to the face and creates a fun-in-learning culture.
Homepage looks absolutely stunning. I can see you do online business cards of some sort. Perhaps list features that distinguish you from Bump, Cardmunch, About.me even more?
SparkFun Free Day up to $100 of stuff
"Porn", here, means that you see a bed with a fat black bar which says CENSORED and blocks your view on what's going on.

IIRC, that black bar is shaking, though.
A few months, agreed. This time drops with each successive language. In addition to learning the language, a developer must learn the ecosystem. Perl and CPAN, Ruby and rubygems, etc.
Sony please sue me too
so the official tribal dance after installing ubuntu is to raise the pendrive in the air and shouting "i haaaavee the poooweeeerrr"?
Can you give specific examples where the search returns a lot of spammy content?
I'm not quite ready to say that it's terrible news for us all; after all, the folks behind Concur could know just how bad their system is and be buying TripIt because they need something better.

Anything better.

The Concur website makes my eyes bleed, and the fact that you can't use their iPhone/iPad app without entering credit card information etc. on your company's Concur system is insane.

Hopefully, Concur will do the right thing and let the consumer portion of the TripIt brand stand and improve its enterprise crapware based on the TripIt brand.
Ask HN: Is screencast.com down / best way to host screencasts?
I can get to the home page but can't log in (Error 101, net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET from Chrome), and my screencasts just leave a blank hole in on my web pages?

Is screencast.com down or is something blocking it just for me?

Any other suggestions on the best way to host screencasts?

I tried to set up flowplayer against an Amazon S3/cloudfront but gave up in frustration after an hour or two of nothing more than a spinning progress indicator and no video and no errors or logging.
Ethically problematic, but yes.
I'm looking forward to it! The more metas you can throw in there and still keep it coherent? Love it. I might do something like "How to comment on articles about how to write articles on posting on Hacker News"

But we must have a chart. Maybe two charts, for a nice two-level effect. :)
I doubt it's about downvotes. I think people want to be supportive, on the basis that making something mediocre is better than not making anything at all.

I think the number of comments and upvotes is a good enough indicator - as you said, people who think it's stupid or (more likely) just don't care won't post anything. When asking for feedback it helps to be able to read between the lines - true excitement will show through, indifference will show as mainly technical advice (make your message clearer, move that to the left, a link is broken, etc.)
The key word was "theoretical"; or are there really competent Haskell programmers that hasn't done OO? :-)
Part of the point of reCAPTCHA is to crowdsource the digitisation of printed content that conventional OCR couldn't manage.

This is why you occasionally end up with strange things like fractions and foreign characters, that you don't know how to input.

Use the refresh if you can't read it.
> Occam's razor?

Yup, came here to post just that.

Additionally, you can take some cards from Skeptics in general, and assert that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Burden of proof lies not on the skeptic, but on the one with the ludicrous claim.
Group-selection explanations are rarely correct.
Any one item, which I find to be an insult. Rather than worry about which book on my list I'm going to use the coupon for, I can buy 2 on Amazon and have them here in 2 days.
This discussion has focused on OO, but my point was that their general level was very low -- it wasn't just a lack of OO experience.

Good knowledge in some other area would have made it a lesser issue that they didn't have OO experience, but they were generally lacking knowledge across the board.
perl -e 'print pack("c*", 119, 101, 39, 114, 101, 32, 104, 105, 114, 105, 110, 103)'
Maybe I'm just a moron, but couldn't a lot of this problem be solved by making the decoder free to use in all circumstances? They already allow free Internet broadcast at no royalty, and have other free parts of their licensing now, so they're clearly open to the concept at least.

If I understand things correctly, for people shipping decoders the royalty amount is capped at $6.5 million a year. So they're making $6.5 million from Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Toshiba, Samsung, etc. All in all, probably a few hundred million over everyone?

Would it not be more advantageous to leave that money on the table, completely entrench your format EVERYWHERE, and then pick it up on the professional/encoder side of things?

CNN, CNET, Fox, whoever, probably wouldn't mind paying a little more and getting a single universal format for everything everywhere and home users/hobbyists can play for free since they'll never hit the thresholds. Startups can get going by working in the free zones (< 100k paid subs, free un-paid use).
Switch to tea. Coffee is a markedly inferior stimulant and the only reason Americans drink as much as they do is because of a certain political skirmish over taxation.

Tea contains L-theanine, which acts synergistically with caffeine. It increases levels of dopamine as caffeine does, but also levels of GABA, helping to reduce stress and take away the jittery, distractible edge that comes with coffee drinking. If you were to sit down and design a drug to help with mentally taxing work, you'd be hard pressed to concoct something better than tea.
The world is too complex for a small cabal to be controlling everything. This complexity is difficult for our puny minds to comprehend, so we instinctively latch onto simple models with a Wizard of Oz at the center, pulling all the levers and pushing all the buttons to make everything work the way it does. The ancient Greeks thought Zeus and the other gods on Mount Olympus controlled everything. The modern mind turns to secretive cabals. Same idea.
All kidding aside--and I was just kidding with my previous comment--while I think there is vast room for improvement in how people are moved through the education system I wouldn't go so far as to say I don't have any level of respect for it or community colleges in particular.

I graduated from high school two years early and started attending the local community college before moving to a 4-year university. My experiences were that yes, the day classes were like an unfortunate extension of high school, but the night classes were generally filled with people who were working during the day and serious about their time in class at night. Compared to the 4-year university, the feel was more collaborative and less competitive. In fact, one of my instructors during those community college days (Don Heidt, I'm thinking of you) was among the best I had. I still think about things that he said in class on a regular basis, and that was ~19 years ago.

So even though "a poorly trained ape could graduate from any community college in this country", I believe community colleges DO provide opportunities for students to better themselves. The problem is that community colleges, since they aren't selective, don't make great differentiators of applicants if you're not interested in trying to determine for yourself how capable someone is.
The problem is that this rarely happens. Concur makes software for the enterprise. What I'm saying is that I hope TripIt doesn't turn into an enterprise software. Most enterprise software are pure garbage.
I did not wake up this morning expecting to see programming language slashfic on HN (or at all, actually).

The author, like many programmers, assumes that you can only use one language at a time. That if you're using Haskell, or Python, or whatever, that you're not allowed to mix-and-match with other languages within the same project. But you can! Most languages have an FFI; just bind their interpreter's APIs and you can run Haskell and Python and Ruby and Lua and whatever from within the same project, or even the same process.
I didn't know that, are they still sending out these coupons?
I explain it like this:

It's 3rd and 4. You have two running backs.
Running back A averages 8 yards a carry with a standard deviation of 6.
Running back B averages 5 yards a carry with a standard deviation of half a yard.

Which guy do you choose? If you just look at averages, you probably would choose A. But if you think of the standard deviation as an indication of consistency you choose B, because his 5 yard gains are very consistent, whereas A might bust one for big yards, but he's also likely to get dropped for a loss.
"Sleepyti.me is provided as a free service"

Curious about how it's earning money (unless you mean a different site)
But please avoid strong tea. It still has a lot of caffeine in it and tea can also hinder the absorption of iron and other long-term effects.

http://www.stashtea.com/caffeine+and+tea.aspx

Tea has approximately half the caffeine that coffee has.
6 Web Tools to Bridge the Gap Between Customer Expectations and Actions
I'm not talking about learning the syntax of the language, but things like design patterns, maintainability and readability. You need to read a lot of code to understand what works well and doesn't and it's language specific.

Understanding the Ruby way of doing things is different from understanding Ruby. Understanding when to use meta-templates in C++ is something you only learn by reading a lot of templated code.

After a few months you'll probably have only worked on a single code base on a tiny part of a project. You've no-way of understanding the ramifications of your design decisions will have on the project in 2-3 years time. You need to see multiple projects go from design stage to long term maintenance to understand issues such as where bugs get introduced, how code decisions impact maintainability, etc.
I'm the author. Glad you found the book useful, Zachary!
An example that is applicable to real life:

In trying to find jobs, most people dive right into the water of resumes and applications. You may be somewhat successfull with this approach (like the author making it past the first round), but there's a clear advantage to skipping the water. Find someone who can give you the job you want, and convince them to give it to you.

Personally, I've never gotten a job through applications, and have gotten many great jobs simply by emailing people. Or, I suppose, you could start your own business.
I suspect local used book stores are next. As a greater proportion of book purchases become e-books fewer physical books will be available for resale to used book stores. Yes, there are people who would never touch an e-book, but even a slight decrease in their available inventory is going to have an impact.
Well, H.264 licenses top out at 6 million, I think. On2 was acquired for 133 million(check Wikipedia). And they've only removed H.264 from Chrome, it would be disastrous for them to do the same with Android. So even if they were to license H.264 for its patent lifetime, they've lost more money than they've saved.
@swombat - really appreciate you addressing this subject. been wondering for a little while.

what's the consensus: post it outside of the standard work day? maybe ~6p EST? when EST people are basically done with work & PST are winding down?

when is HN most active in terms of content shared & comments? when is Ask HN most likely to get a look & response?
Ask HN: Test my app, fluin.com
What is this (http://fluin.com)? In a nutshell, it's a realtime threaded conversational web app.
I'm a college student who just spent his ENTIRE winter break building Fluin
Now that the spring semester has started, I'm looking for feedback so I can better the app on my free time and summer break.
-Thanks
> But the secret to Google’s success was actually not PageRank, although it makes for a good foundation myth.

From an algorithmic standpoint, I'm reasonably certain that pagerank wasn't the primary factor that catapulted Google's results in front of competitors.

I think that Google's algorithmic secret—initially, at least—was to use inbound link text as part of the index for a page. You don't hear people talk about it much, but this feature is one of the more powerful (and difficult) optimizations you can make to a hyperlink database search index.
Community-driven support offers benefits beyond cost savings, for one, it allows users to get faster responses. Your email probably can't provide answers every hour, but a vibrant support community will.

Additionally, it gives you a way to show publicly how friendly and responsive you are (assuming you participate in the community), which can impact your signups.

We always offer both, a public support option, community, or Facebook page, and an obvious private email link. Most users seem very happy with that level of interaction.