skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Forgetting the actual technology side of it (DOS, KA9Q and PINE for me), the biggest thing we (me and my dad) both thought when we first started to play with the net was: "You can download and do multiple things at the same time? How does THAT work?" We were, of course, used to regular BBSes..
You can thank Robert Moses, at least indirectly, for this. He was the one with the brilliant idea of placing highways along rivers, in order to provide the best views for the wealthy people who, in his mind, would be the primary users of the highway system.
Well, this is not something that applies to me, as I rarely buy tickets.

I do have one question: how do people get passionate about tickets? I mean, I LOVE the stuff I am working on, I NEED the stuff I am working on for myself, and I would not want to do anything else, but if they asked to me make a startup about tickets with a guaranteed 1 million payout, I'd really have a hard time doing it.

I just cannot imagine myself being passionate about tickets. It's a freakin ticket, I'm not going to devote a good chunk of my life towards making them a bit cheaper.
New York is probably the strangest case of this. Usually, before gentrification can occur, the housing stock must be upgraded, with laundry machines in each apartment and common spaces for each building. New York is gentrifying rapidly, but the housing stock remains of utterly terrible quality.
haha, well I think this is why: "as I rarely buy tickets."

But other than that, tt's not about the tickets; it's about the events.

I _love_ attending sports and concerts. I probably go to (and will continue to go to) 20-40 sporting events per year and 5-10 concerts per year. Now going to them is a business write off.
Russian Gang Hijacking PCs in Vast Scheme
To be honest, the best thing about CPAN isn't any specific module, it's the sheer breadth of them - and the ability to install everything in a uniform way and have it usually work. Plus things like the cpantesters and cpandeps system that make it fairly trivial to tell if something -will- work on all the platforms you're targeting before you commit yourself to it.

Of course, if you describe yourself as "an old PERL programmer" you may have missed a lot of the recent cool stuff on CPAN - the binary is called 'perl', the language 'Perl', and the mistake of calling it 'PERL' kinda went out with the 2001-era CGI.pm crowd (this isn't meant as an ad hominem - I've simply found that anybody who says 'PERL' as anything except a joke is -hugely- likely not to have taken advantage of most of CPAN and have no way of telling if you're an exception to that :)
Yes I think you make some very good points.
There is a movie production company called Epagogix http://www.epagogix.com/index.html that has an algorithm which predicts the success of a movie from the script. Epagogix was profiled in the book Super Crunchers http://www.randomhouse.com/bantamdell/supercrunchers/
This guy is a class act! Everything I've read of his has been interesting in some way and this post is the cherry on top - he pretty much gives away step by step how you should be promoting small software products in 2008.

What's great is that you can clearly tell he's just fumbling his way through after reading a few resources here and there, but because he's determined to follow the advice he gets and actually follows through on it, he gets results. He says 20% of the 40 bloggers (including many A/B-listers) wrote something about him just because he asked - that's what it's all about.. walking the (online) streets and spreading your message.
One interesting bit from the article:

Each morning, there are nearly as many people commuting out of the center to jobs in the suburbs as there are commuting in.

As far as I'm concerned, this defeats the point, unless there is excellent public transportation to the suburbs.

Another commenter mentioned Pittsburgh, and yep, this is even happening here. The developers, however, are very much pushing this toward "young" (read: single, or married without children) people. I don't think we'll see an influx of families/children into the downtown area (which is quite small by comparison) because there are very distinct urban neighborhoods with things like trees and grass within 5 miles of the city center. I can be in downtown Pittsburgh on my bike in 20 minutes, and I live near one of the rivers, have two parks within walking distance, and own a house that costs a fraction of what they are charging downtown. There are at least half a dozen other neighborhoods like this, too. Most of these neighborhoods also include a small business district with enough amenities to keep people in the neighborhood (and out of their cars).
i was 8 and i just looked at pictures of cars and stuff. That was not my pc, i got internet at home years after that. The net changed my life after i was 14 and discovered what a web forum was.
Personal Health: Sorting Out Coffee’s Contradictions
On the open source side there's Gnucash. It's a full double-entry accounting package that I've used for years. It's been awhile since I've used any Intuit products, but Gnucash is working fine for me.
Working around client-side limitations on custom HTTP headers
Please vote if you prefer a direct link to a website instead of a link to Techcrunch
I am tired of having to go to Techcrunch to find a link to a new startup/exciting product.

Most of the sites have About Us/ FAQs ,etc and most of the time I can figure out whether a product will be useful for me so please, link directly to your site.
Where the Race Now Begins at Kindergarten
Womens in india
They were going for ~$300 a pop. But I'm from Detroit so I would have gone had I been in the area.

At least you can still buy your Browns season tickets.
The Rocketboom story
I think there are many factors involved, but the author seems to want to use 'US doing bad in science' as a hammer to beat on one particular point, which may well be a valid one, but is doubtless only one of many problems.
good point. why don't you create a poll instead of a submit?
Nah, that's not true at all. The pinnacle of American/Western cultural achievement is a media celebrity who is famous just for being themselves, e.g. the "winner" of a reality TV show, an "it girl", a supermodel, etc. I don't think the average person is really even aware of CEOs.

Incidentally, a CEO has probably worked for longer to get to where they are than a given celebrity has even been alive, and probably makes a tenth as much money.
Will you be adding venue maps? I know I could look it up elsewhere, but it would be nice to be able to pull up from the ticketstumbler site.
Thank Rudy Giuliani and community policing and predictive law enforcement software for making cities relatively safe again.
Agreed. We have them all downloaded. Should be up within a week.
Stanford professor details 'Cyber 9/11' and government plans to restrict the Internet
Why Java developers should not breed
Here goes all my karma right out the window, but honestly I'm not here to be popular.

For the life of me, I can not understand what would propel someone to think that making a performance comparison between PHP and Java would:

a) makes sense
b) be insightful
c) make sense

Pure idiocy.
Virtual Serial Port Kit released
Virtual Serial Port Kit is a software which creates virtual serial ports and connects them via virtual null-modem cable. It allows to speed up development process during debugging and data-logging period. You can debug your program (which uses serial port) by connecting it to another program (e.g. serial device emulator).
Top News of Politics
The programming “zone.” Fiction or myth?
5½ More Books In a Hacker’s Bookshelf
File management sever
X-Men go west, to San Francisco
How Newspapers Can Turn Problems Into Profit
First Person, Plural
When (and how) did the "Chronicle of Higher Education" become such a superficial rag?
Why not just preview and link to a google map?
Well, I've only read the introduction of the actual paper, but they do start talking about God :)
I like the summary provided by TechCrunch
Photoshop scripting with Python
I should have clarified...by maps I mean: stadium seating charts. We want to have stadium seating charts and directions so it will be a combination of both ideas.
Sprint 2nd Quater loses 901,000 customers and 344 million dollars
congrats to you and your family then... must be a nice payday hopefully. ;-)
Should You Pay Twice as Much for a Mac?
Ideas for color palettes
As I commented on the article itself, we're doing something very similar at NewsCred. On all the NewsCred topic pages, we have a pane devoted to Twitter buzz on the topic, using the Summize API. Its gotten a lot of good feedback. As an example, here is the page for the Tropical Storm Edourdo, and you can see people twittering their real-time experiences on our topic pages: http://www.newscred.com/tropical-storm-edouard
Mistakes in Web Design
TechCrunch deserves credit when it is the one to inform us about the new product. We shouldn't ignore that.

If the company comes here directly, it gets linked directly and we have an even deeper conversation.
Are you serious? I'd much rather have TechCrunch's unique, seriously opinionated, and void of content, representation of a startup than exploring the startup myself. After all, would you see news first hand or have FOX report them to you in a fair and balanced way?
A New Paradigm - Haskell and HAppS
I would like a summary from Hacker News, TechCrunch's creditability is not all that good.
I just cannot imagine myself being passionate about tickets. It's a freakin ticket

What the founders seem most interested in (like their customers, presumably) is not the tickets themselves but the sporting events that they're tickets to.
Del.icio.us Python API
You hit the nail on the head: This whole essay is based on a false premise (which nonetheless is strongly believed by PG). Cambridge only seems to be a "smart" town if your social group consists of people associated with MIT, and you're only likely to end up in that social group if you were part of the middle class when you moved there.
Probably doesn't have enough karma...
Leave the TechCrunch link, it's often easier to read the summary instead of look at the site, even if the summary isn't that good. It's along the same lines as how I read the comments on HN to see if I should read the article.

EDIT: This (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=267935) is a great example of why I read HN comments before reading an article. Something like that could have been terrible or great, and the comments cleared that up for me.
Yes -- link directly. TechCrunch spews opinion, not facts.
I wish people would just go about their lives and stop swinging between coffee/alcohol/chocolate/meat binges and abstinence. There is a middle road you can take and you don't need to stress so much. Just role the dice and get on with life. After all that's what we are bloody here for!

Sorry, rant over.
Yep, I'm a nerd. When I was scanning headlines, I glossed over Gang and Hijacking and wondered what the Russians were adding to the Scheme programming language.
Agreed. I've noticed that when startups launch on YC with a "Review my Startup" or something, the feedback is almost always significantly better even if the comments are lesser in number.
Top Vacation Spots For Geeks
Techcrunch sucks. But its opinion is very important and there is often useful information in the write up.

...but I HATE the regurgitation of Techcrunch (and CodingHorror) links here on Hacker News. How about prefixing links with the site:

[Techcrunch] Twitter Twitter Twitter :-)
the only non-Communist country to have one

Is that why Cuba has so many medals starting in the 60s?
I'm just describing a phenomenon I've seen at large companies, i.e. 10% of the people do all the work.

The other 90% spend their time attending meetings, writing memos, and otherwise looking busy but not actually adding value.
Fascinating! It reminds me of cell division shortly after fertilization. I wonder if there is a similar pattern when ideas spread throughout a given population.
What's even more hilarious is that maxklein was one of our beta testers. Guess we did a piss poor job conveying the message.
Something I'd really find useful for this service would be an API. If I were working on an app (totally hypothetically, of course) where people can meet each other by connecting over shared interest in events, it would be great to automatically associate TicketStumbler results with the events where applicable.

Just a thought.
Coming from a part of the country where people usually just send their kids to public schools, I find it hard to imagine how a kindergarten admissions committee decide which students to accept. What sort of track record does a 5 year old have? Do they look at the number of papers these kids have published? Is there a preschool version of the SAT?
The firms that hire them are mediators between the raw market and the labor market. And those firms almost always pay for the expected average productivity for that position. Which leads to ... the Team Compensation issue.

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
He will soon enough, after this "Who likes likeable things?" poll.
How To Stand Out in a Sea of Storage Startups
possible...
I like the simple interface. I wish you could extend it to the actual buying phase though, so I don't need to go to StubHub and make an account there just to buy it, which (when I get a look at the overwrought stubhub site) might make me throw up my hands in frustration. Also, a couple tickets I clicked on had already been sold; it'd be great if you could prevent that... (btw, add concert ticket search and I will probably use this all the time.)
Its a tough market to be in because stubhub is so good right now.
Maybe that kind of info appeals to some people, but, I prefer to read the Blog/About Us section that is available now on most product websites. Not to mention the comments on HN.
Sorry, I disagree. Half the time I don't click through to the start-up.

Many early/beta front pages are badly designed and do a terrible job of conveying what the start-up is trying to sell. TechCrunch at least does a reasonable job of pre-digesting what the start-up is about.

I'd be quite annoyed to lose the tech-crunch links.
I've been working in Detroit this summer.

I can confidently say:
Detroit sure hasn't inverted.
Half of U.S. adults use social media
This is planned, though in the beginning we're planning on it being a sort of private API so we can know who's using it. From there, we'll see what happens. I totally agree though, I love APIs ;)
Now just a damn minute. If the article you linked to is correct, then the World Bank is playing a devious game of sleight of hand: They got the idea that the US must have "intangible wealth" because of the fact that the domestic resources and domestic production don't account for all the wealth. The sleight of hand is in the fact that they never consider the fact that the USA's rich classes operate in dozens of countries. The US imports most of its natural resources, and it even imports a large portion of the finished goods. All of these imports benefit American investors. About the only thing they export are the costs: Those who aren't part of the rich class have to constantly worry about their jobs going to China, India, Jakarta, and Indonesia, where labor is cheaper.

All "intangible" means in this case is "Oops, we missed it!"
Congrats guys -- superb job, very well done.
HN already adds the domain after the link.
I don't click Techcrunch links (never), but this is a matter of personal choice and a subjective ethical code. While I regret the popularity of such kind of content, I also really hate when a minority tries to enforce it's own rules over the majority.

So I won't complain, and certainly won't ask for the removal of TC links, since there is a real demand for it and most people are fine with it.

When I'm really interested in some start-up covered by TC, I usually Google my way around, it's quick and easy. Since I'm not alone for wanting a direct link, maybe the best way to solve this is to submit the direct link in the comments.

It wouldn't be so hard to get this new habit : if you're the first to Google your way around, please post the direct link in the comments. I've done it once before : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227015 Easy and convenient, isn't it ?
Standard Customization. Flexibility and the future of the Web.
Seems like a social enabled rehash of the old Bartle test.

It's also really annoying it forces you to try to register before you can do anything. I gave a fake e-mail and fake name to registration and then it told me I could take the test, though it had sent a confirmation to my fake e-mail... Strange.

I took the test and the results seemed a bit off, however... some of the questions were strange as well.
Pyfacebook - Google Code
Stubhub is one of our ticket providers although we'll be competing for the same traffic. And yes Stubhub rocks - our other providers are so far behind them it's not even funny.
Traffic Accounting with Linux IPTables
When to use CSS framework?
A very good arguement for removing the karma threshold for making polls.

"Vote up if..." is the last thing HN needs.
For some reason these palettes all make me think of really nice looking retro-style indie games.
Thanks for the feedback. We thought about this but including the buying phase on our website would not only expose us to significantly more liability but it would essentially destroy millions of dollars in brand equity that places like Stubhub and Tickets Now have built.

Although we agree that it's not as convenient, we're pretty set on sending our visitors to the actual providers (like Kayak does with airlines). Not doing that carries a lot of wrongly addressed customer service issues and liability exposure we're not prepared to and don't want to, deal with.

We're going to be adding servers soon so our crawls will approach closer and closer to real time. Sorry we didn't have your tickets still available.
If someone wants to create a poll, that would be fine, but "please vote up if" links are not good for the site.
1. Bad Search

2. PDF Files for Online Reading

3. Not Changing the Color of Visited Links

4. Non-Scannable Text

5. Fixed Font Size

6. Page Titles With Low Search Engine Visibility

7. Anything That Looks Like an Advertisement

8. Violating Design Conventions

9. Opening New Browser Windows

10. Not Answering Users' Questions
Ask YC: MacBook alternative?
I might be replacing my MacBook with a regular x86 running Linux. It's simply beginning to piss me off that it breaks all the time. Crappy build quality.

But I really like the size–13.3"–and the look. A lot of regular laptops are basically freakin' bloated. Same price range as the regular MacBook.

Any alternatives? I know of the Vaios.
I find myself wishing HN didn't violate 1 and 3.
How about removing the karma threshold for making polls then?
There are dozens of ways to explore the differences, and not everyone will care about the same things.

But a data point I haven't seen yet is total ownership time. I have literally had my Power Mac dual G5 for over 5 years. And although I finally upgraded it recently to an Intel Mac, it took me a long time to decide if this was even necessary. My "old" machine still works beautifully, and I simply moved it to a different room.

I have other reasons to like Macs of course, but I know plenty of people constantly upgrading PCs and it wouldn't surprise me if over 6 years I have spent less on computers than they have.
Ok, it's now 20 points.
The Lazy Man's Guide to Web 2.0
TwitHire: Use Twitter to Find A Job
This reminds me of http://www.razume.com
Had a commodore 64 when I was 5. When I was 10 I got some computer for free from some law firm that only ran on floppies. Of course that was the same time when my dad got a new computer with a whopping 1 gig hard drive.
Hi. I'm Tom and I am the co-founder at TS and you know what, you're right -- I am not passionate about tickets. I'm not even passionate about sports. In fact, the only sport I care about is hockey; the rest I essentially hate. I am still very passionate about the project, however, because it has been very entertaining from a technical perspective and has been a great opportunity to not only take part in YC, but build a company with a very old friend.

I'm very passionate about the site, but not because I necessarily want to make my own ticket-buying experience better. I like TS because it's a useful service for other people, presents challenging work, and has been an opportunity to work with very large volumes of data, among other reasons. I may not find tickets or sports exciting, but not once since the start of this project have I thought to myself, "I really wish I was working on something else."

Edit: Once we have concert listings I suppose I can meet the artificial requirement of building something I would use because there's little I'm more passionate about than music.
I have heard many good things about ThinkPads, but never used them.

Having said that, I would only ever buy a MacBook. :)
I don't know what you're talking about when you say HN violates #3 on the list.

http://skitch.com/sant0sk1/1sfy/top6

Can you guess which stories I've already clicked thru?
I would recommend the VAIOs. I am looking at the new Z series myself.
I can't believe they failed to ask him the same beard question they asked Stroustrup :-)
It is ridiculous to imagine that a species that doesn't even have warp engines yet could destroy the universe.
I have friends at Sony. Sony issues Thinkpads to its own staff. I would be very surprised if Apple did the same.
Google releases Insights for Search, an extension of Google Trends
It's all about the parents, not the child, e.g.:

"The Wall Street Journal revealed the existence of a series of e-mails, in which former Salomon Smith Barney analyst Jack Grubman discussed his 1999 ratings upgrade of AT&T stock. According to the WSJ, the e-mails indicate that Grubman upgraded AT&T's stock rating from 'hold' to 'strong buy' at the urging of Citigroup Chairman Sandy Weill. In return, Weill is said to have promised to use his influence to get Grubman's daughters' admitted into the nursery school at the 92nd Street Y. Investigators from the New York district attorney's office, who are looking into the matter, say Grubman's twin girls began attending the Y just weeks after Citigroup donated $1 million to the 92nd Street Y's highly regarded preschool. That school is one of a handful of New York City preschools with reputations for sending their alumni on to the most prestigious private elementary and high schools."
I'd rather see more competitors to Ticketmaster. I never buy tickets from resellers and I rarely have a problem seeing a concert (not a sports fan).
My iMac lasted 6 years and died last month after being on for 24/7 for all that time. It cost me £1,200 when I bought it. So that's around £200 a year. I expect my new Mac Mini will last just as long and it only cost £400.

My £1,500 PC on the other hand is only two years old and is showing signs of dying and I question the value of trying to fix it given that no one seems to be able to nail down the problem. PCs just don't have the life expectancy of Macs.
Google Search Appliance gets bigger, better, stores 10M docs in a box
Haha, I love the reviews you're writing. Apparently one person thinks you're on crack when it comes to Live Journal.
Venture capital investing: What's next?
You are kidding me, any reason on why?
Yes, but we can't tell which comment threads you've looked at.
Same here... "Vast Scheme? Haven't heard of that one. Probably runs on massively parallel supercomputers."
No-one (that I know) knows for sure, it could simply be that management thinks that all the fancy multimedia stuff is a distraction from Real Work. Even so, it doesn't fill me with any sort of confidence.
An Energy Diet for Power-Hungry Household PCs
On a Mac, going through AppScript [http://appscript.sourceforge.net/] is another alternative for using Python to access AppleScriptable programs. One advantage is that it is the same approach for any application, it shouldn't require special support from that application.