skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
valid points - i meant to type $200, but for some reason was thinking of the nanos and other devices and got $150ish in my head.

The huge sales of the touch at $230+ make my point even more, though, in many ways. People are OK with spending a moderate amount of money on a decent device. We can't be expected to drop everything for the next 'mobile device' that requires 2 year contracts all the time. Yes, tech bloggers and a few ubergeeks can do this - most people can't and won't.

"There's a reason why HTC, LG, Samsung, and Motorola have all created great Android smartphones". I think it's because they're basically lazy and unimaginative. Having Android dropped in their lap means they can ride a bandwagon without having to spend as much on R&D - they can use that money for even more invasive "nascar/nfl" licensing deals to put non-removable widgets on the device homescreen! (yes, I'm more than a bit cynical about this).

I had had high hopes for Palm with the webOS was first launched, but saw them trying to play the 'me too' game by only offering mobile phones, which are tied to carriers, and bring a huge baggage with them - legions of people who will never leave or never use particular carriers.

It's all water under the bridge now, but if anyone had the ability to redefine the PDA space, it was Palm, if only because of the legacy of the name. Well, that tied with the relative boldness of webOS - I wanted one, but I didn't want to have to tie up thousands of dollars and years of my life with a particular company.

FWIW, I have done that with AT&T/iphone, but relatively late in the game, and opted for it only after I realized how poorly the pre was going to play out being tied to sprint. I occasionally travel overseas and couldn't deal with CDMA only, and also already had some family on AT&T and the 'free minutes' thing tipped the balance.
> I am frustrated on daily basis by the results of many searches.

I have some speculation on this. Are you sure that your frustration comes from unusually poor results? Could it be that we're so used to things being perfect now, that a page of mediocre results looks like the end of the world?

Look at 2000. No Shazam. If you heard a song on the radio, that was the end of the story. There were some services you could call for $5 and a human would help you identify it. Now in 2011 you press a button and wait 5 seconds.

The web had a lot less information on it. A few hundred million people were connected. Now, in 2011, a few billion people can connect. Huge shift in quantity. Very tough to keep the S/N going strong.

2000: No Wikipedia. Now in 2011 if Wikipedia isn't in your top results you might be upset, but in 2000 you were happy even though Wikipedia didn't yet exist!

So I pose the question to you: Are you absolutely, positively sure that Google's quality has declined and what you are seeing isn't just a side-effect of everything else being so awesome?
Data Mining: Using Predictive Analysis and Social Network Analysis
Why Didn’t a Newspaper Create The Huffington Post?
HP announces The Palm TouchPad
Why The NY Times Will Lose to The Huffington Post
This is a temporary alteration. Fingerprints grow back.
Bookmarklets and How They Reduce Noise
HP announces The Palm Pre 3
Yes, that is indeed what I meant. Specifically, tech/web companies who's product you could use, but choose not to for some reason.
Fun design. Though, doesn't Facebook groups make group conversations like this a lot easier as using FB groups does not require having another tab open? Seems like FB has the social groups nailed. Very curious to hear convore's thoughts... And no, I don't work for FB.
Congratulations and much gratitude to you Paul, all of the YC team, and all of the editors for tireless and thankless work to keep things running well.

> As we approach HN's fourth birthday, traffic is now around 90 thousand unique visitors and 1 million page views on weekdays. (Http requests and page views are identical except for votes, of which there are about 25 thousand on a weekday.)

Interesting, interesting... btw, one set of stats I was curious on - got any numbers on how many people who browse are registered and what percent of registered users vote? I'd be fascinated to hear about it if the numbers are handy and not confidential.

Thanks again and congrats on news.yc and all the recent cool developments and successes at incubating.
We never made spam, we always used humans, but we made pages that were "light" in my opinion. They also lacked an EXPERT.

We solved this by hiring 55 video editors in the last six months and we now add an expert to every page.

So, if you definition of a content farm was "light" content written by non-experts then we we're a content farm.

Guilty as charged, but I confessed my sins and I'm now on the side of the righteous! Aaron Wall is now my biggest fan... he tells his clients to model their sits around my sites.
Mapping Python Code Over Protocol Buffer Records With lwpb
I went to the actual site without reading the introduction on the blog.

As a user who had no idea what he was about to read, here were my thoughts:

* The tagline below the logo is nearly perfect. Instantly told me what I was looking at.

* Gorgeous design. Love how simple the top section is.

* Plans & Pricing seems too prominent. I know you want me to click there so I can sign up, but ALL I know about the product is what I can guess from the tagline. I think you could remove it entirely (and make the "Next" button in the tour more prominent).

* I didn't really understand what was happening in the "Editing" screenshot. I wished the elements in the shot were labeled somehow.

* When I reached the "Viewing" screenshot, I only knew a change was made because I remembered the original tagline from a previous visit to Umbrella Today. I'm not sure it's clear otherwise.

* Plans & Pricing is gorgeous.

After that, I read the blog post, which gave me a much better overall picture of the product. It's written very well, though I'll admit raising an eyebrow at: "at this point, do you try to explain that your master branch has features that aren’t ready to go live yet?" This feels a little contrived. I think most folks know not to write long-running features in master, and I have little doubt that's how you're doing it at thoughtbot.

Just one guy's thoughts, though I am pretty squarely in your target market.

Anyhow, I'm psyched to see you guys launch this. It's clear you're scratching your own itch, and that's quite promising.
Does it support file uploads, like Campfire?
This actually sounds like a fantastic service that the publishers could offer if they were progressive enough.

How about a startup? Of all people in a position to implement the physical side of this: Half Price Books. They could scan the UPC barcodes and see what books are in a catalog, then offer to give the customer an eBook for a nominal fee. So they would be receiving money instead of paying it out. This would be a way of publishers to be able to make money off of IP with sales that have already dropped off. The publishers would still have to cooperate.
You bring up an interesting point. It would be nice if there was some sort of way real people could rank results. Even as an engineer, I am often frustrated by the results I get, but I have a hard time articulating what Google could do to show me what I wanted on the first page.
I just wanted to chime in and say that webOS is pretty cool to develop for. I went to a developer outreach event in San Diego a while back, and managed to make a fully-functional FMyLife app in less than 3 hours (not knowing anything about webOS beforehand).

Developing for webOS is a lot like developing Flex applications (which I had done previously), except the API is way less complicated than Flex's API, and it's all in HTML/CSS/JavaScript. I had a set of posters with all of the Flex objects/events/methods and it was seriously 3 posters worth of 9pt text.

I was really happy to hear that webOS was given new life at HP, because I had a really nice time developing for it and I was hoping that it would get some traction so I would have a reason to develop for it for real.
Oracle says 'Google wants to throw its licensees and users under the bus'
for many other people, the howto articles are in fact what they're looking for.

That's a fair point, but one of the top 6 when I searched was from fourhourworkweek.com, so a whole other level of bias set in on my part. :)

We've just forgotten how bad it was

I still remember wanting to go to hotbot.com and accidentally typing hotbox.com. In a room full of people. So, some of my memories of early engine use are actually quite vivid.
25 Servlet Interview Questions - Extreme Java
And there are more trains. Loads of Japanese media take place in the areas around rail lines, because people actually have experience with them. In the USA? Hah! Only a few cities have any, and only a few of those are any good.

For myself, I've lived near a train track my whole life, in well-built, older buildings. Well, 1/2 block away. The train goes by and everyone just pauses conversation until it passes, because it drowns out everything. Because trains do that. It's hard to move hundreds or thousands of tons quietly.
For an overdose of information on this topic, see:

http://www.nss.org/settlement/ssp/
"It is estimated that 1 in 50 people do not have prints or prints clear enough to be registered by the fingerprint readers currently in use."

Can you provide a source? I'd be interested in seeing data to back this up.
Look, downvotes, I know that all platforms eventually cut off older hardware. But with Android the inconsistency in support for the market and OS updates are a notable part of the fragmentation concern.

The fact that hardware under a year old has been cut off is a cause for concern. The fact that hardware is launching without the market and/or will be launching with third party market apps is a cause for concern. Device numbers are bandied about in the general sense -- x-gajillion devices per month! -- but no context is available as to how many of those can access the store or got the last OS update, let alone how many will get the latest. That's a cause for concern.

I'm not suggesting Android's a bad or flawed platform. I'm just not willing to pretend that it's all roses either.

We're honest when we say "Going iOS can make you a ton of money, but the gravy train is always a subjective-review away from coming to screeching halt."

So what exactly is wrong with pointing out that this fragmentation thing isn't something we can just hand-wave away?
Social? Really? Folks - It's About the Data
If they want to do that, then they should have avoided "pad." They can't come out with a "touchPhone" or a "touchPod" without looking like they're trying to imitate Apple. Not that HP/Palm don't deserve some creedence, but I would never recommend anyone go head to head with Apple on branding alone - and that goes double if your strategy is clearly derivative of theirs.
It sounds like your "4 Hour" mantra is really not accurate -- you are spending more hours on fulfillment, and even more on all the posts and discussions.

I'd be interested to see what the actual profit/hour ends up being once you take all of that into account.
I wonder how they will monetize this? A white-label chat platform for websites that want a chat facility would be one option (StackOverflow rolled out chat recently, but this would have been a good candidate for them). Branded in-house chat for corporates would be another, especially those with distributed project teams that want to communicate around a project. I like the fact that the chat sessions are persistent and revolve around a topic - this makes them very useful in a project environment.
Is that still true? Arrington and YC have been very vocal about supporting female founders, but not enough female founders get to them.

The #1 obstacle for female founders is a lack of good role models, rather than discrimination. The Social Network is a very sad movie in terms of how misogynistic it was...
More voters means closer to average. It has to.

Quirky communities with strong personalities are more interesting.

(I'm still quite happy with HN though :)
It looks beautiful. But I must be missing something... what problem does it solve that forums or Twitter don't solve? Or how does it do it better? I just signed up and I'm not seeing the utility. I'm asking this sincerely.
I think most people searching for "buy domain name" (and not something more specific like "where to buy domain name" or "domain registrars") are probably looking for introductory info on how to go about purchasing their first domain.

In that context, these results could actually be considered better for most people.
I still don't get it. I would love to use Dropbox but I can't install it everywhere I go since the installation requires admin rights and I don't have them at the university's computer for example. But I can use SSH and therefore SCP from any computer without admin rights, so I really don't see what this does except eliminate the need for a shell account, which are practically free, heck even VPS's are beginning to be almost free nowadays.
Pick a tablet.
I prefer to invest in individual stocks and not a fund. Funds do give you some protection, but they will also limit your upside. I prefer the risk/reward trade-off of investing in individual stocks and options.

I am still relatively young so my risk profile is more on the risk seeking side right now. I'll seek out more of the funds when I'm 35+, married with children, and have more to lose.
that's because unemployment is so high ppl have nothing better to do than browse HN all day.
A startup would have to battle the legal system the publishers have helped create / abuse. Anyone know what, if anything, might stand in the way of such a setup?
Wouldn't it just be a law requiring ISP's to kill peering upon the government's request? Am I missing something here? If it isn't feasible, I would think that's because it isn't legal, not because of a technical hurdle.
Please take a look in earlier threads. Google doesn't even listen to patio11 before he writes a blog post that reaches #1 on HN.
Can we genetically evolve algorithms for genetically evolving cars?
I know this is a contentious question, but have you ever considered turning HN into a business with YC as the primary investor? The question is: could you advance it as a business without killing the magic and the splash benefit to Y Combinator. I think the answer to both is yes.
Despite being super-hot right now, deal sites are still just a customer acquisition tool. Best Buy could flood their stores tomorrow by advertising 90% off plasma TVs. Small businesses don't have the same level of experience and sophistication around customer lifetime value, so they're more likely to make mistakes like that. One of the services that Groupon provides (no idea about LS or other deal sites) is deal shaping/sizing, to help merchants offer deals that will not be super-costly or overwhelming to the merchant while still be appealing to customers. The Japanese new year incident (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2111609) describes this in more detail. I think even the anecdotes will become more and more infrequent as merchants and deal sites get better at this.
Android 2.3.3 Platform, New NFC Capabilities
It looks like URL of that article is case-insensitive and page does not specify canonical URL.

Both:

http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/javascript/BreakingTheWebWithH...

and:

http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/javascript/breakingthewebwithh...

render the same content, and <link rel="canonical"> does not exist in source code of that page.
What would be more interesting, would be if he found a way to grow different fingerprints.
besides devices that can't access the store are those with limited access. Like the HTC Wildfire and the other devices with screen resolutions lower than 320x480
Scary thought: this bug is nice and obvious when the data gets "clamped" to max_int, but what about when it doesn't and overflows to some value in the middle? No way to tell how many systems suffer from that flavor.
As a newer user, what are the differences between the standard view and the classic view?
re: contract phones.... they're still tied to carriers, no? I don't think I can use that no-contract iPhone on any other carrier than AT&T, can I? I really don't know. It's insulting to have to pay that 'subsidy' markup when in fact I can't use it on any other network anyway.
Twitter should accept S.F.’s 6-yr no-payroll tax to move to mid-Market. It will help revitalize a blighted section of the City, create new jobs, and their bottom line.
Thank you, Paul for running an amazing site. I think I get a lot of value out of it. I hope YComibnator does, too.
Two-turkeys-do-not-make-an-eagl
Would love to see this for lectures in iTunes and be able to skip around to get to the juicy parts.
The defacto Algorithms and Data-structures book
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262033844/
Groupon does enable merchants to set quantity limits on deals.

Mercata wasn't a daily deal site, it was a demand aggregation site which has inherent problems as mentioned above and in the article.
Feel free to tweet that as I made sure it is appropriately 140 characters long...
Why Discovereads' book recommendations are more interesting than Amazon's
I feel like the lack of Android OS upgrading is the best planned obsolescence ploy ever. Not even Apple dares to pull such an heist, offering updates to most old devices.
Actually no; Dropbox and version control are different ends of the same problem spectrum. Using Dropbox for version control is non-optimal, and Dropbox VC is more backend/invisible to it's use case.

Dropbox is about syncing, as fast as possible and in real time - it is designed for multiple computers but only one concurrent use. So it is really for the individual. Versioning is a form of snap shot that is designed to allow multiple concurrent work (and has benefits for deployment, releases, bug tracking etc.)

The vision should be to see them working together IMO :)
I've seen some amazing, incredible collaboration tools come out of the web.

The main issue isn't the technology or the software or the CSS they use - but the fact that a majority of people don't know how to communicate. I say fix that first.

Also, the problem isn't being able to create groups or include or invite people as much as it is getting people to consistently use it to make it meaningful. My company has a wiki where we convey information, but guess how much information from the one-off conversations we have ends up there?
Seems like the article is about HTML5-based mobile web sites vs. native apps, not HTML5-based-apps vs. native apps. (It generally fails to define what it means, but I'm guessing they mean web sites given the reference to Apple telling developers to make HTML5 apps for things they won't let into the store. At least on iPhone, not-in-store equals not-an-app.)

Lower cost of development and lower cost of maintenance translate into more (and better) services for end users. It's unlikely that web apps are going to compete with "sovereign" apps on a phone like email or an RSS reader. But for a niche or transient application (like say, making a flight reservation or looking up your order status on a web site) the web apps probably are a better experience.

This has always been true on the desktop as well, until recently - you wanted a local email client and text editor, but you were fine using the web to access Wikipedia. (That's changing now, of course.) It's not sexy but _most_ web services / sites are transient, not sovereign, software and will likely translate better to a web app than a native app.
Pre3, Veer, and Touchpad now live on Palm's website
Out of the three new devices, I would have to say I am most interested in the Veer given its small size. Either way, bravo HP Palm for getting back into the game.
> 'Oh you should have held' is hindsight advice, it's not real advice.

I think Warren Buffett would disagree with you.
Turn off your Computer by your Mobile phone
Video Tutorial: Android Development - AsyncTask, Preferences, and Options Menu
This is basically localizing your app from developerese into clientspeak, right? I would think a highly client-accessible Rails i18n solution might be even more useful.

I'm thinking in particular about tr8n, whose lead developer presented at the LA Ruby Meetup and blew me away with the level of work that had been put into the system by the team at Geni. The focus is on crowdsourcing your translations, and I can tell you that's not at all unrealistic with the capabilities it has. I did a site with Globalize three years ago and am just amazed how far a leap ahead tr8n is even without the crowdsourcing aspect.

I hadn't thought about using this for a monolingual site but now I can see the use.

http://www.tr8n.org/
Sparrow, new Mac mail client out of beta and #1 on Mac App Store
Sparrow, a beautiful new Mac mail client has just launched in the Mac App Store and it has immediately shot to the number one paid app in many countries around the world, including the U.S.
Announcing Availability of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
yipit is a good example of company working off this idea, by compressing all of the daily deals relevant to you in your area into a single email.
> But to have more successes we must necessarily have more failures

I'm not sold on this. There's seems to be the popular belief that the ratio of failure:success is fixed, so to get more success, you have to get more fail too. Along with the "fail fast" technique that always reminds me of "the tortoise and the hare" fable. There seems to be an obsession with going as fast as you can, and not worrying if you fail.

Feynman's problem solving algorithm just seems more sensible:
1. write down the problem
2. think very hard
3. write down the answer
Is Verizon really launching two phones this month (Pre 2 and iPhone 4) that will be superseded by summer? That two-year contract is going to hurt.
HP Touchstone tech now lets you tap two devices together to swap a URL
The OS is promising but the phones are ugly. Those keyboards are just weird looking. I hope webOS takes off though, a trio of iOS, Android and webOS would be pretty cool.
Andreessen Horowitz Invests $80 Million in Twitter
UK Plans Close Encounter With Uranus
I really wish "Credit Card Sized" would take into account all three dimensions. This thing looks 5 to 10 times bigger than a credit card! I was super excited clicking on this headline, waiting for an actual really serious innovation in small technology. Imagine a credit card with a touch screen and the Internet and apps and oh wow this is going to be so cool!

Oh. It's huge.
I think most of the phones are trending toward a larger display. I wonder what the appeal of a much smaller device will be compared to most of the industry moving to larger screens. In my opinion this device might not be well received because of that.
I doubt Mr. Obama tells them national security related things, they're a little young for that. I have no doubt they would be subject to well organized and foul trolling if anyone could locate them online.
So, after giving four reasons for Mac users rarely changing from Safari - all wholly unrelated to social effects - the writer makes the bizarre remark that Mac users don't compare browsers (fair enough) and instead "succumb to peer pressure".

What?
Introducing the HP TouchPad
pg, please consider including the year in the dates on the news page.
Children read 4chan? I can imagine >= 15, but really, younger than that?

That's a pretty disgusting thought.
The HTC Wildfire (and any other phone with a low resolution screen like it) can access the Android Market.
Congrats to Convore!

My initial impression of the site is great. Immediately I was able to jump into the Hacker News group and switch between various topics seamlessly and chat.

I'm excited to be using this for small projects. Create a group and not just chat in one room but switch off between several topics in one group. Just the idea of that I can imagine would make collaboration on projects so much more organized. Great job guys!