skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The coolest thing about this is the visualizations. That's great work creating an interactive piece in HTML5.
But it's a slippery slope, right? It's easier to worry now BEFORE marketing zomboids etc. arrive and bombard us.
Maybe experienced HN (read as a mix of high karma + there since the beginning), could have a bigger impact on which articles are chosen. I honestly don't mind a "dictatorship" selection where chosen members could remove useless post / select useful one.
WordPress change spell check language
What brings a tear to my eye is that, back in those days, it was hard for me to tell at first that it was a deliberate plot. It felt quite natural to have multiple discussions of Erlang on the front page.
Sure,

I'm a software engineer by day, and a software/hardware hacker at night also working on my own start-up. I require reference to be easy and without lag. Once I build up a flow of thoughts and ideas that I've compiled from a list of sources, I like to be able to reference them and organize them without having books lying about everywhere.

I recently learned Objective-C pretty rapidly by having access to multiple books at the same time and consuming them in parallel. When I would have trouble understanding one concept in one book, I would move to another book that could explain the concept better to me. So I was book-sourcing my learning.

iBooks is sufficient for this, but I've been thinking about building my own tool that processes information the way I do and keeping the journal handy.

My set-up is (left to right): 27Inch Cinema Display, iPad on stand, MacBook Pro.

I use my cinema display for coding and browsing, the macbook for logs/stderr/stdout, and I use the iPad as a book reference. So I can flip back and forth around the iPad if I need to, or I can take my iPad to another workspace on my workbench and not have to deal with lugging my laptop around.
This article is an exaggeration. Due to various laws, regulations, and the fear of being sued by their shareholders, publicly traded companies in the US report every risk factor imaginable in their annual reports. The report in question includes 13 full pages of these.

The relevant section of the 10K is:

We rely upon Amazon Web Services to operate certain aspects of our service and any disruption of or interference with our use of the Amazon Web Services operation would impact our operations and our business would be adversely impacted.

Amazon Web Services, or AWS, provides a distributed computing infrastructure platform for business operations, or what is commonly referred to as a cloud computing service. We have architected our software and computer systems so as to utilize data processing, storage capabilities and other services provided by AWS. Currently, we run the majority of our computing at AWS. Given this, along with the fact that we cannot easily switch our AWS operations to another cloud provider, any disruption of or interference with our use of AWS would impact our operations and our business would be adversely impacted. While the retail side of Amazon may compete with us, we do not believe that Amazon will use the AWS operation in such a manner as to gain competitive advantage against our service.

Other risk factors in the report include everything from boilerplate:

We could be subject to economic, political, regulatory and other risks arising from our international operations.

If we are unable to compete effectively, our business will be adversely affected.

...to the real risks:

Changes in how network operators handle and charge for access to data that travel across their networks could adversely impact our business.

If we are not able to manage our growth, our business could be adversely affected.
Cool idea. I'd like to see an IMDB link somewhere on the page and perhaps partnerships with private trackers?
The Declaration of Independence is not a natural law it is in any sense of the word a political law.

The Founding Fathers declaration doesn't apply to the 5.8 billion people who lives outside the US.

And even if it did it would not by any metrics be a natural law. Property rights is a human construct nothing else.
Independence of Non-Executive Directors
Nice - how closely have you looked at yotaa.com? They seem to be doing a very similar play but are further along with UI and with testing from multiple locations.
The slowdown and Erlangfest was because of a big new influx of users, see pg's post here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145

And pg's appeal for sanity:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512280
> Are you out of your mind?

I humbly suggest that this might not be the tone you ought to take, and it might not be the tone you'd like to take.
Terminitor: Hasta la vista redundant commands
Tie in rotten tomatoes reviews and you've got a torrent butler with taste.
Metafilter is often cited. They have a $5 fee for accounts.

Then again, Something Awful is $10...
Do you have reference about that claim? (that people don't like it)
It looks like you're not following your own advice. :)

http://www.slowcop.com/reports/4d6468ff34b95f3cbb000554
Digital Chocolate Raises $12 Million for Social Games Push
I will never refer a friend to an SEO company. Not even for $12,000.
I was with you up until the 'get a job' part.
Cellphone Radiation Increases Brain Activity
$5.45 is the tipping point where the 2.75% accounts for a larger portion of the fees than the $0.15. (EDIT: added to original comment)

There are merchants who do a small # of transactions a day w/ each transaction being significantly higher than $5.45. For these merchants, dropping the per fee transaction results in negligible savings. A lower % is what matters to them.

Basically, Square is great. It'd be even better if they offered another option.
From a legal aspect, how is this going to last at all? IANAL but I was under the impression most meta-search engines operated in at least a semi-grey area because they don't spoon feed illegal content to you. Most just index the big trackers and (conveniently) don't discriminate between illegal and legal content. I feel like when you are dropping torrents into buckets more specific than "video" and "audio" (e.g. linking multiple torrents to a specific movie, highlighting the HD versions) any conventional argument against aiding copyright infringement is out the window.

Awesome site though.
I never curse in my commit messages. That doesn't mean I don't want to! Cursing is a vice of mine, acquired through summers of cleaning bathrooms and picking up trash at a state park in high school. I use euphamisms when coding professionally, but it's easy to map my commit messages at old companies back to my original swear.

"Blameless" bug:

Original: Now recalculates the height of the container element after repopulating
the content.
Translation: Did Bob test this fucking thing ONCE before he committed this?

Fixing my own mistake:

Original: Tweaks the NUM_PATHS config value.
Translation: Wow, I apparently have shit-for-brains. I hope nobody ran a build in
the past 20 minutes.

Overdesigning:

Original: Updates the object creation code per Bob's feedback.
Translation: Another Goddamn FactoryFactoryBuilder?! I officially don't
understand this codebase.

Major cleanup needed:

Original: Style tweaks needed for GCC compilation.
Translation: OMFG. This isn't even valid C++. It doesn't even compile.

OK, I'm not perfect:

Original: Fuck IE7.
Translation: No seriously, fuck IE7.
Very nice indeed! Increased page score on grsites.com from 92 to 96 in 5 minutes. More convenient than YSlow. Bookmarked!
Fair enough, but that depends entirely on what you're using that $3k laptop for...
Personally, a $500-1000 tablet + $2k desktop would give me considerably more value and mobility than a $3k laptop.
That's clubhousing, not treehousing. Treehousing would be putting social barriers on entry. Clubhousing would be financial.

These terms are 100% arbitrary and invented an hour ago, but these seem like good definitions.
OverDrive Media Console eBook Review
No, what Reddit does is fragmenting community. How much does the tag system in StackOverflow or Quora fragment them? Tags helped people to somehow filter their already overwhelmed input stream, focus on what they really interest in, and more importantly, ban the items they genuinely don't like to see.
Ask HN: Mass Mailing or SPAM? 
Our service targets a very specific industry that is not tech-savy. A large list of relevant people with their emails is available on the government's website and we are tempted to do a mass mailing (I realise the law). What are the pros/cons? And which service would you use if you were to do this?
Dribbble, then.
Guess they aren't going with the plausible deniability legal route.
Wow, did their stock actually 10x between when they got there and when they sold it?
The non-technical questions on HN have poor associated discussions though. As OPs go further from tech/startups (and towards econ and policy), commenters display a poorer understanding of basic concepts.

Bottom line: sure, hackers care about many problems. But that doesn't make up for the poor discussion quality surrounding many non-tech articles here.
Chernobyl, My Primeval, Teeming, Irradiated Eden
My only problem with MIT CourseWare is that the video (audio sometimes) is poor quality, I wish they uploaded 720p learning beauty.
Most of that crap is from the Facebook and Twitter buttons :/
It'll be interesting to see how that model holds up to another 2-3 years. The few invite-based communities I've been a part of started to degrade as the social graph grew out and started to pick up the occasional undesirable.

It was harder to get rid of them because they knew someone who knew someone, and trying to push them out had a network effect. It might be obvious to someone removed by 3+ levels that a bad element is bad, but the person who invited them might not see it.
Awesome, glad you found it useful!
It claims to be 10 x faster than Squeak, wow. OTOH, comparing speed with native Javascript would help too.
All the big Southern California aerospace spending was big in WWII and for a decade or two after (Lockheed, Douglas, Hughes North American Aviation, &c.), but for various reasons in the 60s congress started moving those contracts elsewhere, especially throughout the South (e.g. a lot of NASA stuff went to Florida). Perhaps the kind of tech that was being done in Silicon Valley had a more plausible transition to non-defense uses, or perhaps defense-related contracts just continued a bit longer there than in SoCal?
http://news.ycombinator.com//item?id=512145
It's obvious that building an API is easier than 1) building and shipping physical devices that work well enough to qualify for card present transactions and 2) obviating the need for a merchant account (only PayPal really gets you there, although Amazon Payments and Google Checkout kinda sorta do).

Square decided to do the hard stuff first. And they pulled it off! That's what's so amazing about this company. I just hope that when they build their API that they do a PCI compliant vault that adheres to the Data Portability Standard. (Or, at the least, integrate with Recurly, who could handle the subscription logic and provide the PCI compliant vault.) And, of course, their chargeback management processes need to not suck.

If they do, there would be no reason to ever, ever pick anything other than Square for any side project all the way up to a fairly large (>$100K/month) web app.
Ebooks and print books have different markets. Ergo, we should expect pricing to be correlated, but different.

Consider: The economics of producing a hardcover book and a trade paperback are not as different as their prices suggest. The hardcover costs a bit more to print, but not significantly much more, because most of the cost of producing a book is in the writing and editing and marketing. The difference between hardcover and paperback is an artificial marketing distinction: Hardcovers seem more substantial, and (more importantly) they come out earlier, so they sell to the people with more money than patience and with a taste in bookbinding. They are therefore priced higher to take advantage of those folks' willingness to pay.

I suspect that so long as e-readers cost hundreds of dollars (and, more importantly, e-books have DRM and can't be borrowed or resold) they will naturally tend to be priced like hardcovers, or worse.
Everyone here has seen this same lifecycle play out at just about every online community there ever was. Doesn't matter whether it was open or closed. It's a fact of life.

The solutions offered are top-down culture modification and just plain don't work. Adapt, and wait for the next HN to come along. You can't stop the train.
From the link at the bottom of the listing: "This is an on-site position, based in Cornbury Park, Oxfordshire. Only applicants who are authorized to work in the UK will be considered."

I thought the website was called "Remote Jobs"? If I go to this website, I expect all openings to be for remote workers.

Just a thought anyway, I like the site!
Solid state drives refuse to delete data
The snide remarks got voted up in 2008 also. For a long time, my top rated comment (posted in 2008, 50 upvotes) was nothing but snark.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=318690

(In contrast, my most valuable submission to HN ever only got 14 upvotes: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=250027 )
I use windows 7 backup and find it to be pretty good, actually.
It's bad when you find out that idea that you working on is already develop by someone else. But if that happens you have two options: try with some other idea or try to make 'stolen' idea better : )
Completely...I've been in the same position for a while. There are dozens of apps, hacks and sites (some competitive with yours and mine!) launched every day by creators that have identified and are trying to solve legit problems --the same ones you're trying to solve. Thing is, most of these creators don't have 1) the design discipline to make the products really appealing to serve their niche consumers and 2) the forbearance to stick it out during the inevitable long iterative process. Which means that if you have confidence in your own ability to do those things better than a competitor (especially if what you're doing is "not exactly" what the it does) then, onward!
This problem applies to all communities using votes to sort user-generated contents: HN, Reddit, StackOverflow, Quora, etc.

I think something like PageRank can really help. The same need is to rank things based on a directed acyclic graph. The only difference is we have multiple kinds of vertexes: users, submissions, comments.
It says our web host is Amazon, but we're definitely on the Rackspace cloud. Does Rackspace have a dirty little secret?
What's the report URL? I can take a look.
YouTube Says It's in Negotiations to Stream Live NBA, NHL Games
The Nikkei is sometimes incorrect about technical details (it's a financial paper after all), and the mention of EPUB on Kindle could be their misunderstanding or just a wild speculation, which is their another trait.

The original article online appears to be behind the pay wall, and I couldn't find relevant article on paper, so this is just a guess...
2011's 25 geekiest 25th anniversaries
Even game mechanics have a problem.

Say your valued members have a certain mindset, ethos and style. Let's call it YC-meme. Everyone with YC-meme contributes in a manner that exemplifies YC-meme. If someone comes along and doesn't have that meme, their posts tend to not be what the memesters want. So, members use their voting powers to reduce that person's karma. Eventually they either leave, get ignored by all, or become infected with YC-meme.

Now, open up the community to everyone. At first, YC-meme is still dominant. Only 1% of people without it are able to write posts in a style similar enough to gather karma. Let's say they have RD-meme, which has about 80% overlap with YC-meme. Great.

The problem is, soon, there isn't 1% of the community with RD-meme, there's 10%. Who can (and do) re-enforce RD-meme posts, because it's what they want. People can even get lucky and simply contribute 'good' posts, long enough that they get a decent karma score, and so can re-enforce different memes.

What makes it WORSE is that what's acceptible is what's visible, so with more RD-meme posts, RD-meme posts become more likely, as the probability that they get 'punished' decreases.

End result: Community-dilution runaway.

There are a few 'cures' I can think of, but most are fairly prescriptive:

1. A concrete set of rules and behaviors that anyone can reference to moderate from. Gross.
2. A very high bar for moderation, with active participation. Given that the people most likely to have YC-meme are also likely to be busy, this might be doomed by design.
3. "Proof" required for contribution. Great way to kill off your community.
4. Invitations. Either so easy to get as to be meaningless, or so hard as to stagnate the community.
5. Close ranks to just people at/gone from YC. Sadly, that'd mean I was out. May still be the best alternative.

Maybe the community is self-aware enough to start consciously moderating better. Perhaps a post like this every so often might serve as a gentle reminder. That'd be the best outcome, but needs to be chosen by a majority of the user base. Do YOU want a stricter HN?
Fair enough. I think people pay special attention to the SXSW party scene, too; but a general solution for all events would be pretty interesting.
Or we swear in comments not commits :D
It could also be an implicit compliment: they may be avoiding someone else, thus invisible, but still want to talk with you.
I don't know what you tried to do there, but it didn't work. Link is broken.
Sen. Chris Dodd To Head MPAA (But Don’t Call Him A Lobbyist)
This is great. Few issues:

1. The "generating" process didn't do anything until I hit refresh, then everything appeared.

2. The "Forward a copy of this report via email" link doesn't do anything? (I'm in Chrome 8)

3. Reading the improvements under each header could be formatted in a much more easy to read format.

Thanks!
This is just a shitty fluff summary of another post that's currently on the front page.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2250001

Edit: and the readwriteweb post doesn't even link back to the post by Tav it quotes from. What garbage.
Yeah I've seen them. There are a few tools that do similar things. My long term goal is to be a full stack tool (both client and server side). I'm not sure where Yotta is going.
The non-technical questions on HN have poor associated discussions though

I've seen what looks like fantastic advice and discussion on a range of non-technical topics (particularly things like venture capital/financing and laws around starting a company and that kind of thing).

Of course, not being an expert in any of that stuff I'm at a loss to make a judgement as to it's veracity ;)
منتديات الشفاية الروحانية
The question to be answered then is "what mechanisms of reputation and combinatorial game mechanics can prevent regression towards the mean?"

I don't have an answer to this off the top of my head, but succinctly describing the problem as you just did oftentimes can be half the battle.
Ask HN: When to clock in, when to clock out?
I am in the wonderful position of setting my own hours. My boss likes me to work a certain minimum amount (because, so he says, his job is to make me rich), but the main concern is that the work gets done and when I do it is completely up to me.

However, I am often puzzled over just what and how much time I should count as "doing work", particularly when so much of creative professions like programming is just thinking about the problem. At one extreme, I'd only count the time that I'm actually typing or in meetings; at the other, I'd say "I'm on the clock if I'm even thinking about a client." Obviously, neither one is a very good idea, so how do you know where to draw the line?
> Awesome, Japan overcomes NIH syndrome for once.

Maybe not. XMDF is the current dominant format for ebooks in Japan and the situation won't change shortly. XMDF has long history of supporting features specific to Japanese (vertical writing, ruby etc.) as well as DRM, while EPUB just has added support for vertical.
Very good tool and gives fairly optimistic results (slowcop.com gets 95/100) and quite some interesting tips. Going to use this next time instead of YSlow.

The only thing is that it really is into minifying the css and gives high numbers of potential savings. It'd be more helpful to display a number that takes gzip compression into account. Something like "Minify this css to save 31% (5% after compression)"
Awesome site but it's too flashy. My guess is that it'll draw too much attention and have to be taken down even though I would love a torrent site that doesn't make my eye's bleed.
OK. Is that Iran? (kidding)
Big mistake mentioning future-garage, now I looked it up on Google and know what it is. Pretty soon I'll be showing up uninvited to your raves.
"Takedown Policy
Please include the full URLs to the infringing material; no categories or search queries.
We follow the same takedown policy that Google uses."
etc, etc

OK. So basically: want to take down something? try go faster than ligth's speed...

Funny
DeployFu – A .NET (and Node/Pylons/Manos) Platform as a Service
If you're gonna disagree, have the courage to do so in writing.
You can't squeeze out rich people by raising prices without ending up with empty units, which landlords don't want.
Yeah, this is funny, there is novelty here, etc. A story counting profanities in source code/commits/etc. pops up every now and then.

I've found that the only real profanity in a source code comment is "HACK".

My swear jar overflows with quarters.
Thanks, the server is heavily loaded right now, so some of the ajax effects aren't showing.

The forward link should work. The report page has a lot of content, and forwarding is done with a lightbox. Try again?
DVD to iPad Converter for Mac V6.0.14 Review
DVD to iPad Converter for Mac is popular with Mac users. The DVD to iPad converter for Mac V6.0.14 improved the support to ipad and added some new features.
Can't wait for this to be public! :)
Sure, but there's also 2003-2005, where the stock increased several fold. It matters a lot where you pick your start and end points with tech companies in the last 15 years.
There was a submission a couple of weeks ago of a site that randomly arranged previous HN submissions of a certain threshold from the past with each refresh. Was really useful and sadly neither Searchyc.com or Google is helping with finding the post.

Perhaps the submitter sees this comment and shares the link here again?
Ah, gotcha. Thanks, this makes a little more sense
Major sports are the last thing keeping me tied to my satellite dish. Once I can get any game live online, it's gone.
Words can describe visual Effects in Art Term Paper
Students who are unfamiliar with the writing of art term papers should understand that it is a textual based representation of a visual representation of a piece of work. This requires students to be critical and analyze every aspect of the piece of work being written about.
Job boards are essentially a form of ad arbitrage, they buy traffic and resell it at a higher price. Because job boards can amortize the cost of buying traffic across multiple job adverts, they can afford to buy an audience which an individual company can't.

Because people only look for a new job rarely, it's very hard to build a brand for a job site. Hence job sites have to advertise continuously to sustain traffic levels.

A job site which offered free job adverts couldn't buy traffic and hence would be mostly useless to companies looking to hire.
My goal is to focus on performance, I haven't thought about branching out to other areas yet :) Seems interesting though..
Buying VMWare Fusion: A lesson in how to drive customers away
Introducing Cloud Controlled WiFi Scanners
For Mac OS and Win 7 we can also turn computers into access points for WiFi networking.

We created WiFi scanner apps for iOS, Mac OS, XP, Vista, and Win 7 and allow you to view results via a remote dashboard.

Please provide feedback.