skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing worth noting is that reversion to the mean doesn't have to be a bad thing. For example todays mean level of education compared to the mean level of education a few hundred years ago is very different. A good question to ask might be, would submitting this increase the mean level of discourse on Hacker News? It is the same sort of thing as what is in the guidelines, but reworded for greater relevance.
That said, the burritos can still be tasty, but they can't hold a candle to anything served in New Mexico.

That's just not a fair comparison :)
The big question is how these deals handle blackout situations. I hate it when NBC, Versus, or NHL Network get a NHL game so it's blacked out in the entire country.
Can we just get back to reading and discussing articles. I don't know if HN has jumped the shark or not, but I firmly believe that these days where we do too much navel gazing helps drag down the quality.

Also, I noticed that the account that posted this is less than a hundred says old. The guidelines state:

"If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)"

I think this falls under that category.
I think his reasoning is more like "I see a fundamental design flaw in all other cars which Toyota has recognized and addressed in a way that I like, and wish other manufacturers would adopt that solution or one similar to it."

You don't have to agree, but don't poo-poo his desire for a unified, simple application purchasing experience in his OS of choice. That's a customer talking about what they want out of a product.
Your solution is rash and doesn't do much more than illustrate your ignorance. This article is one of the first reports, and doesn't even contain numbers in terms of how many users are affected.

Sit back and wait for the real story to unfold, then make an analysis and contribute something. Simply bursting out with "Fire them all!" and the first report of a problem is childish at best.
None, still working like a horse
Is twitter the only way to get in contact with you? I don't see any contact page (or really anything besides the articles themselves).
I encourage everybody to come by the HN secret cabal IRC channel, #startups.

Do you mean through here: http://www.ircnet.org/ ?

If so, either I'm doing something wrong or the Secret Cabal is not in session tonight (darnit).
Aesthetically and technically this is very nicely done. But in terms of usability I actually find a plain list of movie names easier to parse - unless it lacks critical information and is drowned in ads like on most torrent aggregators...

My favorite interface is the "Overview"-mode in the iTunes store. I wish all content sites would look like this (in case you don't know it, scroll all the way down, then click Functions/Overview).
Actually--we already do this, as long as the URL is the only thing posted in the comment. The next step, parsing URLs from comments, is on my TODO list. :-P
This is a lot harder than it sounds. A library doesn't contain any indication of the type of the functions inside, just their names. You could instead read the header to get the types, but that requires that the development package is installed, oh and also you have to be able to parse arbitrary C code. Yikes!

Thankfully, someone's done a great part of the work. MacRuby and PyObjC need to be able to call C functions, so Apple threw together BridgeSupport: http://bridgesupport.macosforge.org/trac/wiki . It uses the clang front-end to parse headers, and outputs an XML file with the function info. It would be really cool if you could do this on non-Mac platforms, presumably it wouldn't be terribly much work...
I think this is one of the most overlooked considerations as we all transition to the cloud. What if we all buy in completely to these services but then, one day, Netflix, Hulu, et al (or the content owners) decide to remove a few shows/movies from their catalog?

At least with downloaded (DRM-free) media, I will always be able to play the files I paid for. No such guarantees with cloud services.
He didn't ask me to post it and I didn't ask anyone to upvote it. The only thing I did was let him know I posted it, so he'd know some extra traffic might be coming his way.

> Why on earth did you think other people would be interested in this?

Well, right now it's top on HN. Seems pretty self-explanatory.
Yes to CVv.

Only use AVS if your shipping.

Authorize only for 1.00 to verify card for subscription billing or authorize the card for full amount if you are batch end of day processing. The authorization holds the money for a period so you can capture it and if you never do it releases it back. It only affects a cards available credit and does not affect you or the consumer unless you capture it.
Are there any useful applications of Smalltalk for Javascript?
Is anyone else not surprised that the NFL, an industry that can't even get broadcast television down correctly, and seemingly refuses to go outside of it's little bubble distributors and programs that cost entirely too much isn't involved in these negotiations?
Sadly, I expect 'not available in your country' to pop up an awful lot with this type of deal.
Ask HN: Working on a startup as the sole developer
I have been working on a startup for some time, with a business cofounder meaning apart from a small amount of work from outside (had my brother do little bits and pieces) I have written all the code. I am starting to think that maybe it would be better to have a third cofounder if I could find the right person to also develop. I have seen other small startups in action where both founders are developing and the dynamic seems to be a lot better, the back and forward turns up a lot more bugs, generates ideas and generally stamps out bad coding practises.

I see myself as a decent developer but at the same time the code is entirely mine without any kind of oversight to guide what can be a bit of a complex architecture, feeling that it could be possible that I go off in the wrong direction on some things but have no oversight. It also causes lazy techniques like not fully worrying about version control and adhoc changing things given that I know that in general the files aren't being edited by others. I also feel a little alone on real technical issues where my cofounder can't really offer any input, sure I could discuss it with others but obviously they don't have the background on the codebase to frame the conversation.

Really just interested in hearing about how others have dealt with being either the sole developer at a startup or a single founder and how it's panned out in the long run, I wouldn't be too concerned about the equity loss as x% of $0 is still $0 unless your startup really gets off the ground, so I'm more concerned with giving it the best chance to get off the ground.
Those days are gone.

I blame karma. I know it existed back then too but I don't think people talked about it. There should be no "top users" page. Having a measuring stick drives competition and there should be no metric to civil discussion besides the rewarding feeling of discovery and helping people.
My suggestions for tweaks to improve the site:

1. hard ban on purely political news ("Egyptian leader stepped down! OMG!")

2. hard ban on gender-specific things ("i'm female, went to bar during hacker conference, got groped, OMG!" -- yes it was hacker conference, but gosh subtract the 'during hacker conference' and you have real life, it's independent of tech, not specific to it or due to it, just a life thing with guys and gals)

3. particularly if hard bans (enforced by a set of trusted admins) on the above topics are not added, then allow submitters and admins to add/edit content tags for each post; then allow logged-in users to submit content filters so that when they see, eg., the front page, it can suppress all posts with certain tags (eg., pure-politics, gender, sports, religion, etc.)

4. optional for-small-periodic-fee premium accounts, which allow those users to exercise extra features like smarter content tagging/filtering, sorting, user following, user submission/comment filtering (so you can blacklist blowhards and pedants from what you see, even if they are not banned from the site overall)... I'd personally love to blacklist anybody that ever does a comment reply to me that is (a) rude, or (b) idiotic, or (c) overly pedantic (some is fine, we're nerds, goes with territory, and some precision is valuable, sometimes). Blacklists could be flat files, one user per line. We could share them among each other privately. I've bookmarked a few "ahole-or-idiot" users but I'd love it if I could have them automatically stripped from anything I see on HN in the future. Actually, I'd love to have this feature on all social/forum/news sites I visit.

5. fix the "type comment, hit submit, get error page saying something doesn't exist, so you have to go back, copy your text, hit Refresh, paste the text back in, hit Submit again" bug/feature. that drives me nuts. feels like impl side-effect rather than intentional UX

6. don't have the up/down arrows so close together when viewed on iPhone

7. don't allow just anyone to downvote any comment. or at least, they can't downvote it beyond 1 point, below which is penalty land. right now, any dumbass can downvote a comment of mine from 1 to 0, which then reduces my overall lifelong site karma by 1. Just because they disagreed with me. Or they're an asshole. Or they accidentally hit the downvote button (see 6). Instead, have a minimum karma requirement to issue downvotes, and/or only admins.

HN is great, despite it's imperfections. But I'd gladly pay up for premium features. HN Gold? HNGold.com (YC-W11)?

EDIT: added a few items
This was in response to a now deleted comment that claimed that more popular languages would show up as having more profanity because they have more commits, even if the profanity per commit was constant.
That actually sounds great, and I agree that that'd cover the vast majority of use cases. Another argument for open sourcing it to be forked to the community's tastes :)
Arrington says that writing about startups would not be the best business decision, and he is probably right - less people interested in startups than Apple, Facebook, etc as well as a reduced # of advertisers.

How would a "startup-only blog" pay the bills? The Startup Foundry guys - would love to hear your thoughts.
VirtualBox can actually do physical-partition virtualization, but you have to produce a VMDK file that points to the partition you want, and use that as the virtual disk. (Oh, and run VBox as root.) Conveniently, I've written some code to produce such a file: https://github.com/vasi/vmdk-raw-parts . Enjoy!
This would be superb & a huge win for YouTube as a publishing platform. The biggest gap in online media is live content. This is especially true for sports (at their best live) So YouTube locking down the rights to these streams (hopefully for all games, not select high profile ones) would be a home run. Hope this comes true! Go Lake Show!
What Henry David Thoreau Can Teach Us about the Internet
I can't say I speak for Square and I definitely don't know the details of their contacts with the credit card processors, but 2.75% is probably limited by what they get charged to process the credit cards. I would hazard a guess that they got between 2 and 2.5% and are skimming the other .25 - .75% off the top for themselves.

My father in law runs a small business and has shopped around for credit card processing in the past. He has a deal around 2% at the moment. If you are diligent about shopping around and being part of merchant groups and such, 2-2.5% is doable. If you are not diligent, a business will probably get 2.5-3% per transaction. If the business is huge (national chains) with lots of negotiating leverage, they can do even better. Mind you, this number off the top of my head are ballparked from anecdotal experience.

My guess is Square negotiated a percentage when they started. They have since proven their business and are processing enough transactions that they were able to renegotiate a better deal. Then they passed on the savings. I am sure they would like to drop to 1.75% if they could, they still have to pay the credit card processors and make some money. But that is all conjecture.
Update went fine on an unbranded HTC Trophy for me, although having to deal with the Zune software is a minus.
Maybe someone would want to use Lisp to generate some C# code into an existing project? .NET is great for polyglot programming, but you can't really mix languages inside a single project.
Yes, but if you read the article, all the acquisitions were done in 2005 onwards i.e. in the last 5 years. It was quite clear by then that the dot-com bubble had burst.
At Fairfax Digital we frequently use bounties for positions like search marketers, UX people or mobile app devs. $5K + an iPad works really well. We've had tremendous success from internal referrals via this method. It makes most sense when hiring in industries with a low average tenure but trying to fill more esoteric roles.
the NFL screwed themselves with their contract with DirecTV (NFL Network & Sunday ticket) they effectively handed over all broadcast rights to (out of market/streaming) DirecTV (aside from NBC's Sunday Night Football broadcast)

NFL games are streamed via a free DirecTV app. But you need the $400+ Sunday Ticket package from them...
CBS, NBC, Fox & ESPN are paying a combined $20.4B to broadcast games [1], DirecTV another $700M. I'm not really surprised they aren't interested here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NFL_on_television
Really? To me the Zune software is about 8 steps beyond iTunes.

The UI is great, lots of nice touches, looks modern, it's fast. I can drag music and such to my phone even if I'm using someone else's Zune software.
When I found myself a third co-founder it extremely helped out our startup. Not only do you have a third head to help out, but you have another person to balance out the other two founders. I find working with just one other person can lead to divisions. If you have a third you can have another opinion on matters.

Unless you feel three is a crowd, I would say go for it! Find a person who can not only be a great asset to the team, but helps balance the emotion and energy in the team dynamic.
What about using baysian filtering? We already have a lot of data on good and bad comment styles, baysian filtering could give us an indication if a comment is violating HN guidelines.

I am not so optimistic about submissions because the data we currently have is tainted by submissions we don't want. However by using the technique you have described, we could probably achieve better results.
It probably wouldn't and that is part of the problem, a lot of things that would be great can't work as a business and shouldn't... I guess they could always go down the paid route, but for it to exist as a free blog and be entirely about true startups I can't see it being a business success like Techcrunch is. They could always try and work out a way to "pray" on the early adopter trend, where every self proclaimed "social media expert" (or whatever they call themselves these days) wants and needs to know about the next big thing before it's arrived and they might be willing to pay for that privilege.
I'm in pretty much the same boat, FWIW. My goal is to add a co-founder (or two, maybe even three) eventually, but haven't found people who were A. interested and B. the right fit, so far.

All I can suggest you do is some of the same stuff I do: use the Internet to get that "extra voice" you need... ask questions here, on Quora, on StackOverflow, programming.reddit.com, programmers.stackexchange.com, etc. Use mailing lists for the various libraries, frameworks and/or tools you might happen to use.

One thing that applies in my case, though, that might not in yours is that my code is open-source. So if somebody really wants to dig in and talk about things on a low level, they can clone my repo and get right into the guts of things. Also, the fact that I'm trying to run the open-source project in a respectable manner also adds pressure to keep everything pushed up to the github repo, use reasonable commit messages, etc., etc.

Something else you might want to look into is the HN Office Hours site. Find a fellow HN'er or two that has "office hours" and call / skype / IM them and chat about things. Heck, even just join #startups or ##solofounders on Freenode and that'll give you some people to talk to.
Stop asking questions sonny, I've been here X years and am tired of navel gazing.
It'd look a lot nicer without those social media icons there.
A $500 tablet can't replace my $200 (new) netbook.

I'm a writer, a touch screen tablet where a usable keyboard obscures my work area (IE being able to see what I have written) makes the device useless for work. It becomes solely a glorified ebook reader with the added perk that I could actually edit something should I want to go through an excessive hassle of dealing with no keyboard.
I just want to speak up as a relative newcomer that feels I've learned enough about this place to speak my mind without being afraid of retribution and can do so with a basic understanding of what works/doesn't work here.

I really like it here, and it's my 1st stop after Gmail every day, and often more than once per day. Nothing is perfect, but as far as I'm concerned, this is as good as it gets.
Ask HN: Review our location based app - mapTheGraph
Hi,

We are a new location based startup and our first product is a Facebook app.

mapTheGraph ( http://apps.facebook.com/mapthegraph ) is a location based social network, currently integrated with Facebook. It lets you update and share interesting places you've been to on a map. It is a social network that replaces the status update with the location update. Simply double click on the map and we will automatically add details to it and share it.

We would love to hear your views and feedback on this app. Since we are relatively unknown, we are finding publicity a huge challenge.
Try companies that specialize in design or interactive media. The design field is split 50-50 male/female in my experience.
Review my Idea: Building Prototypes as a Business in Silicon Valley
Basically, I want to help entrepreneurs to build very first versions of their products, quickly validate their ideas before they found serious tech-cofounders and get funded.

Why would entrepreneurs be interested in it

- it's cheap and quick;

- I'm in SF and can meet in-person within the Bay Area;

- they can get things done and get first working versions without a team.

Why would I do that

As an interesting alternative to remote/free-lance job. Help to network and gain new experience. I can't consider getting a real job because of the F-1 status.

Tools: Ruby on Rails, jQuery, mysql/mongo.

Any ideas on will this work?
Any similar services in the Bay Area?
And the main question: How to estimate the price of the work?
I recently bought Parallels, and it wasn't much better. From the email I sent them (after I finally found an email address):

- When I arrived on the checkout page (from the link in the nice email you sent), you had tacked on a $8 digital backup fee. That is a complete bullshit charge, and you added it by default with no explanation as to what it was, or why I would want it. It was also not particularly obvious whether or not I could remove said add-on. It is a shameless, low class, money grab.

- I switched my pricing from USD to CAD, and you added $10 despite the two currencies trading at parity (I quickly swapped back, and just paid in USD). Another shameless, senseless money grab.

- You require my name, home address, email address, and phone number in order for me to purchase downloadable software via Paypal. You do not need any of that information. You want it so that some tool in marketing can have pretty powerpoints. It should be optional. (Making it required simply requires me to make up information; a waste of both our time.)

- The “send me email spam” checkbox was checked by default. The only reason for this is to get permission to spam people too lazy to pay attention to the checkout. It’s another tasteless scam formulated by a greedy, customer hostile executive tool.

- After purchasing, I entered my serial number, and was informed that I would have to register to receive updates to the software I just purchased. I cannot explain to you how incredibly asinine I find that policy.

- The registration process once again required information I didn’t want to give you (requiring me to give you fake information)

- After registering, and confirming my registration via email, and entering my email/password combo into the application I was told that I had given invalid credentials, and to try again. (I hadn’t. I’m pretty good with copy/paste.) So I guess NO UPDATES FOR ME?
I work at a Big Ten college. Girls. Everywhere.

and it seems that somewhere on campus they are always looking for devs.
Lots of funny comments here, but in all seriousness, I think a lot of social game studios have more female employees.

It makes sense, considering the article on VentureBeat today that suggests that women play more social games than men: http://venturebeat.com/2011/02/22/do-women-play-more-games-t...

Perhaps a place like Zynga or Playdom would be a good fit for you?
In addition to what csomar said, for a small business or someone looking to hire an independent contractor, I think many advertisers would consider $425 to be a huge difference. But, I think a lot of potential advertisers would consider $75 significant in the first place.

But for me, charging advertisers a significant fee is valuable to establish that they're serious about hiring. That's the rationale behind the fee structure on my site	http://WheresTheRemote.com/ . To me, an advertiser paying a fee of something like 1x or 2x the hourly rate they're advertising (for an independent contractor or employee, respectively) is a token of their sincerity about wanting to hire and pay the rate they advertise, which the site requires them to include in the ad. Conversely, unwillingness to pay such a fee makes me concerned that they would just waste the time of the job seekers visiting my site and I don't want to publish the ad, since quality is an important goal for my project. Of course, having a decent amount of traffic would help establish the value proposition for advertisers to pay such a fee.
Good stuff. The analysis is better than YSlow.
Reeks of elitism.
I have recently begun to realize that there are 2 aspects to "website degeneration". One is the obvious new people showing up because they heard it's cool psuedo python paradox situation.

The other comes from the old-timers themselves. I'm not particularly that old-timer, but in the 3something years I've been here, I can say I have experienced this:

I've grown.

The "5 awesome vim tips" or "super deep closure stuff" articles that today annoy me as fluff were deep and new to me back then. HN was a fantastic site introducing me to amazing things, and it is introducing a lot of people to the same amazing things now. As such, the quest for truly new content needs to go deeper, but the people who need the lighter content are greater in number and enthusiasm, ensuring the fluff rises.

When the older crowd doesn't notice their growth, or the lack of change in content (or the combo) you start to get "it's gone down-hill" type comments.

edit: I mean the quest for truly new content for me needs to go deeper, not that the site necessarily needs to go that way.
You can set up VirtualBox to use a physical (ie. Bootcamp) partition or disk. It's not as easy as in Parallels, but it isn't difficult and is explained well in the manual.
sign up for beta :)