skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I second that. I Facebook component to the site would be a great way to get the site out there in front of people, and it would also help with the login issue. It would also be interesting to see that "Your friend, Justin thinks that the Patriots will win the Superbowl in 2009"
Michael Tsai: Welcome to iPhone: Your Crappy Mac of Tomorrow, Today
I had always thought that Craigslist was poorly designed, but I've changed my mind. This site is, ostensibly, better designed. But I still had to look around for about 15 seconds before I found what I was looking for.

The way that the Craiglist headings are designed is really great, actually. With large headers you lose vertical separation, and this is especially valuable in visualizing the "search | categories | cities" split.

The Craiglist design may not be a happy accident of bad web design. I think it was done very carefully.
The interview is reasonably interesting, but despite the title and the interviewer's introduction she doesn't even mention facebook. Not once.
In defense of <insert religion here>. A programming language is a tool and some tools are better than others. There's no need to defend them.
Obligatory xkcd comic: http://xkcd.com/224/
You list "Create Wikipedia page for Onista". I wouldn't advise it - you'll just get the page deleted immediately for not being notable.
Yeah, I think hotornot picked up because it was fun and quick to rate without having to register or anything.
extremely useful, and potentially solved a deal-breaking problem I've spent a month working on.
Well, it depends on why it's being attacked. My feeling is that Perl is an under-appreciated tool because it's not cool to like Perl. In the post I don't really try to defend Perl's actual flaws, which are many, but to point out to an audience that presumably mostly doesn't know Perl, that it can be really useful for some sorts of tasks.
Brilliant, thanks. Prawnto rocks as well, y'all might make the links to both projects bigger.
21 About:Config Hacks (Tweaks) For Firefox 3
I was thinking of something like yours for a while. But mine is more close to accent training for several different languages. I think you don't need to avoid monetizing the service. Instead, if the stuff is good and easy to use, your contribution by removing heavy flash cards gives users more convenience.

In real life, people help each other as friends. But since we can not help each others as strangers, so we exchange money. When you have money and you really like your service and users, you will put the money into making your service better because now you have resources to hire more people to deal with something that volunteers, users community won't/can't. And you still can have money for yourself to live a good life, and I think they won't mind that and are happy that because you deserve it!

Also, you somewhat underestimate the chance that your learning tool is really better than flashcards and help students learn better. Think about this: there are probably around order of 100 millions kids in the world that need to learn English in schools. Maybe 5 millions of them really want to learn English well for their future careers and they will invest their time and money to learn it well. While your contribution to make 5 millions people have a better time in life. They may just buy a set of flash card for $10 for a semesters and throw them away, meanwhile your service is fun and they learn much faster and better. So in order that your server can handle the traffic, you can just price it as the flash cards and see how people take it.

Begin of edit:

Your product is not Microsoft Windows. You don't force people to use it. You don't bully your competitors. So you should not feel guilty of taking money for your achievement.
If you really want someone else to take care of it. Make it open source and see how the world react to it.

End of edit.
google: create poll site:news.ycombinator.com

First link leads to the post with http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

google: search ycombinator

First link is http://www.searchyc.com/
40 points and no comments, that's special.

I thought it was interesting :)
People have been saying that YCombinator and the general hackernews culture encourages people to work 80+ hours a week. I would like to put that to rest right now. It's just not true.

Yes, people who work for YCombinator startups tend to work a lot of hours. There is a simple reason for that: Anything worth doing is hard. It takes time and passion and constant attention. There is no free lunch.

Paul Graham isn't a damn cult leader. He just talks sense. Imagine you have only 3 months to build something so impressive that a venture capitalist will give you a million dollars to continue building it. What would you do? Work a four day week like 37Signals? Or spend every minute you have working hard to make something amazing?

People get defensive when they feel that you're implying they aren't working hard enough. Starting a company (especially a YC company) is an extraordinary situation that calls for extraordinary measures. Please stop making a big deal about the hours people work and focus more on what they build.
How to get a 28.9% risk-free after-tax return: Looking at Debt repayment as an Investment.
* I want to try stuff without any signup-process.

* How will you make money?

* Looks good
Thats exactly right, I have no problem with shelling out $5-$20 for a little piece of software, even less if its going to an independent developer.

When we start talking Microsoft or Adobe prices, from independent developers is when I start feeling a little uneasy. I came across a piece of software several months ago that I kinda liked, but the price tag was $699, I simply didn't like it that much.
Craigslist deliberately forces you to interact within your local sphere. It may suck if you're on the border of two of their regions, but it helps them keep a local focus. They could easily implement nationwide search.
Perhaps downvoting shouldn't actually change the post's position, but rather should just be stored as a separate stat that only the mods can see, and perhaps use to determine what posts should be more carefully reviewed.
Are you suggesting religions don't need to be defended?
He's not wrong. Apple's garden-walling was become extensive enough that it's gone beyond ensuring a good experience for their users, and has started to damage the platform. This should have been obvious to them since jailbreaking became so common, but I guess it hasn't quite sunk in yet. Apple needs to allow people to use their platform, or it won't become as good as it deserves to be.
There are like 1 billion prediction markets out there. The measure of a prediction market is the quality * quantity of earnest participants. What secret sauce do you have? If you don't have something killer, give up now.
You may have given up on Ruby too soon. I'd encourage you to try again. What book were you using?

The fact that you called it "Ruby on Rails" does not inspire confidence. Rails is a complex Ruby framework, and a lot of Rails code actually consists of calls to a Ruby-based DSL for the Web. It's hard to appreciate the kinship between Ruby and Perl, or Ruby's usefulness for Perl-like tasks, when you approach the language from that high-level angle. Try Programming Ruby or The Ruby Way -- or, heck, try _Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby with Cartoon Foxes, which is how I learned, though its unique style is not for everyone.

Ruby was built by a Perl fan; it was named in honor of Perl, and I find that most of the glue-code tasks that were easy in Perl are even easier in Ruby.

I will certainly use Perl in the future -- one good thing about the language's awesome documentation culture, and its excellent automated build tools, is that they let you use Perl code without having to read any of it. But I don't read or write Perl anymore unless I really have to -- just as, back in 1999, I didn't use sed or awk and avoided writing shell scripts, because I had Perl.
but it doesn't always outweigh the benefits of giving something away free.

Exactly, I've always loved the idea of a freemium model as it gives you the best of both worlds, the ability to scale your product uptake exponentially by removing the "penny barrier" but also having a direct method of success by providing extra value to those customers who want it.

This is probably the same business model I'll be using for the startup I'm planning to apply to YC with later this year. I'm still looking at some of the numbers for other possible solutions before I make a decision either way, but right now it seems to be a win/win situation.

Now if only I could find a reliable co-founder... :(
I'm surprised no one's built an app that just spiders the craigslist database and allows you to query it in more interesting ways than the craigslist developers could think of.
Ask HN: What has been your biggest mistake?
I'm keen to learn from failure, and what better way than to learn from the mistakes of others. :)

What are some of the biggest mistakes you've made.. and what have you learnt?
Damn, now you've ruined it :)
Actually, I like it. I wanted to look at vehicles and it was far easier to browse than craigslist, cause there are pictures right next to the thing like ebay.

Though, yeah, its not as community oriented maybe?

Bookmarked.
Information overload. I wish the people who did things like that took the time to find out the best resource, and had 1 resource for everything.

Site to find a good accountant: blahblah.com
Site to find a good lawyer: blahblah.com
Site to find current loan rates: blahblah.com
Make some of your own
Their model focuses on providing listings to other.

Ex: http://olx.friendster.com/
I think it's a strange that some of the most liberal people in the world (bay area hippies, yay!) are also some of the biggest advocates to break down privacy barriers. For better or worse, I am personally in this camp as well.

But good post, I totally agree that the current phase of communication is going to be passive broadcasting. I think a more interesting question is ... what's next?
Well I think that this method only really could have worked in that environment - given the students already had some exposure to the material in the previous year.

I suppose this only really would have worked for the more difficult subjects aswell.
#1 with a bullet: listening to the hype.
I have a similar history. I wrote my first web app in 96, in C on SunOS. Since then I've worked on all different types of platforms and at last count had used 13 different programming languages in that period.

I recently went through a re-eval of what tech I wanted to be working with and ended up with Python. I tried to return to Perl but couldn't do it. Mainly it is because I'm back working on web projects and Perl's web frameworks aren't so nice. People worship CPAN, but I've never found it any more useful than SF or Googe Code. That is to say, useful yes, but amazing or worthy of awe? Not hardly.

I will say though that Perl was pretty much the only language that made me smile and I eagerly await Perl 6.
I open up links I want to read in tabs, and then revisit them. I closed the tab for this twice, thinking that it was a squatted domain that I'd somehow browsed to. The third time, I stopped to see what it was.
s/is //
Thanks. And it is sad. I was pretty much hoping to just be a smartass. I love the new space race, however slow it seems to be playing out. I went to the first SS1 launch. But traditional private rockets have a terrible history. I think Rutan's way is best.
I don't see what goal of theirs is facilitated by having a crippled search function. Someone in a border is going to look in the neighboring regions anyway - it just makes it painful for them and leaves the door open for a more sensible competitor.
I agree that Perl's CPAN is probably the most awesome thing invented since slice bread. If you want to hack together something really quick, like PHP, Perl is awesome.

But the beauty of Ruby on Rails is abstraction. It takes a while getting used to the code and the framework, but that time invested is paid off in productivity. Ruby on Rails is really on a whole new playing field. Complete object orientation, a fully developed framework to deploy and TEST with a single command in the terminal, MVC, it is just ... heavnly. To be honest, any language can build the Rails framework. Ruby isn't necessarily too unique in that sense. What does make it unique is having an evangelical preacher for its framework, David "oh so sexy" Hansson, and a kind and awesome community.

You should give it another shot, if you're a web developer, it'll make your life a million times easier.
Can you point to a case where the police broke into someone's home, the homeowner shot the police, and was subsequently cleared on self-defense grounds? Or do you mean some yet-to-exist GRU/NKVD/KGB-alike entity rather than, say, the FBI executing a no-knock warrant? I am not trying to be argumentative, just legitimately curious.
I have to laugh when I hear people say they could "build a better-looking Craigslist" in "a few months" or "a few weeks" or "a weekend" [or insert your own timeframe.] Craigslist isn't just some simple bulletin board software and forums that Craig put up on the Web one night -- it's the result of years of steady growth, good customer service, good word-of-mouth, and just good business. Sure, you could build a localized classified ads service that looks "more modern" -- meaning it uses gradients for no good reason other than everyone else is using them -- but that's no Craiglist.

Now, if you have a site that somehow gets past some major problem or irritation that Craiglist users face, then maybe you've got a chance. But if you're just putting a new coat of paint on an old, well-executed idea, I'm not seeing the opportunity there.
> 8. Create Wikipedia page for Onista.

Wikipedia is not a promotion vehicle and using it as such is one of the most blatant and despised violations of WP editing policies (which you should familiarize yourselves with). Your article will be speedy-deleted; moreover, it will be very hard to restore the article later on even if your project does become notable. Keep this in mind.
I found it an easier read than Cancer Ward, for what it's worth.
I actually found the two-page "Technical note" at:

http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/uploads/sbfxot55p5k3kd454n14...

and it's pretty useless. Lots of talk of parts-per-million, but absolutely no justification of the most important danger-world-in-crisis idea: that there will be a tipping point beyond which change is "irreversible".

In summary, I suggest ignoring this article, and the people who wrote it, entirely.
I think this is in terms of startup mistakes, seeing as how "life mistakes" could start an entirely new forum all together.

Here are my top 3:

1. Wasting money on a legal entity. If you're not making money, you cannot be sued. Wait until you make money or have someone willing to give you money before you waste money on protecting yourself.

2. Bad business partners. Judge your partners not by how much you like them but if they'll complement your skillz, add value to the team, and are dedicated to the project.

3. Not saying no. It's a personal problem, I'm a really nice guy, it's hard for me to say no sometimes, but it's necessary. It's not personal, it's business.
Thanks a lot. I was not aware of it.
I was comparing Ruby on Rails to Python with Django in that context; I looked at them when I was evaluating web frameworks, though obviously I deviated away from that in the rest of the post. Sorry if that was unclear.
Ben Goldacre, of Bad Science, points out some fundamental flaws with this "formula":
http://www.badscience.net/2008/08/fame/
I completely agree with you. I think that there are very smart reasons for why Steve Jobs did what he did.

When the iPhone version 1.0 was released AT&T probably was still in the "I'm a big carrier, hear me roar" kind of mentality. But as the iPhone blew up, AT&T released that it needed to adjust quick, so perhaps that's how Apple was able to push through their SDK.

I think in general Apple just has to be more open with it's fan cult.
Apple to launch the iPhone 'nano' in time for Christmas
I respectfully disagree. I think it is important to wall off the platform and sandbox the environment. This prevents things like stack attacks with walled off memory and background processes doing things it should not.

With so much personal information on the mobile phone, it'll be a complete nightmare if one of the applications is really a virus that spreads as a background process. Since it can contact your ENTIRE contact list, such a viral infection can crippling. In fact, in the Jailbroken iPhone community there have already been a couple of viruses.

But on the other hand, they should open up a couple more APIs, the camera, specifically.
Welcome to 2007.
Google Sites to Replace Google Page Creator
Anti-Piracy Lobby Gains Power Over Internet Subscribers
This is an awesome find. I had no idea Yahoo had a blog like this.

But just in general, I think people don't give Yahoo enough credit for what it's trying to accomplish. They have a lot of cool things in the pipeline and are big proponents of open source (ie. hadoop). This is just another example of how it's trying to reach out to startups and developers. Good for you Mr. Yang, keep on fighting the good fight.
Ask YC: Incorporating
We are a two person startup and each of us live in a different state. If we want to incorporate our interent company do we have to incorporate in each state? Or can we incorporate in Delaware? if we incorporate in Delaware will we have to register as a foreign entity in the states where we live?
The founder/CEO of this site is Fabrice Grinda (http://www.fabricegrinda.com/), who was interviewed on Venture Voice a while back (http://www.venturevoice.com/2005/12/vv_show_21_fabrice_grind...). His interview was one of my favorites.

He's got an interesting approach to entrepreneurship -- rather than coming up with novel ideas, Fabrice takes ideas that work in one location and replicates them somewhere else. First he built (and sold) the eBay of Latin America + Europe, then he brought ringtones to America from Asia (!). After selling his ringtone company for $80M, he founded OLX, to bring craigslist to other countries.

Check out his interview; you'll learn a lot.
try to hold on as much equity as you can
Welcome to iPhone: Your Crappy Mac of Tomorrow, Today
On Facebook, an 11-Letter Synonym for Scrabulous Turns Out to Be Wordscraper
Not listening to my own ideas.
Clean Your PLR
ContentLaundromat is an amazing new tool for "cleaning" PLR and Article Directory content so that you can avoid the dreaded duplicate content filters.
Not launching soon enough and waiting until the product was "perfect".
1. Not majoring in computer science the first time I quit my physics major. If you like something, don't stay away from it for silly reasons (like thinking that school will make you un-like it).

2. Not knowing the difference between profitability and traction when I was looking at startups to work for. I spent 2 years at a relatively low-growth startup because I thought that its profits meant it was successful, when I could've learned much more at a higher-growth yet unprofitable startup.

3. Letting ideas sit too long. I had the idea for http://www.whatshallidonow.net/ about a week before I started implementing it, but was busy with job apps. In the meantime, http://nowdothis.com/ launched, and now they have all the momentum.

4. Spending too much time on super-ambitious projects and ignoring the low-hanging fruit.
Supermarket Scale detects Fruits and Vegetables automatically
Actually, I like it. I wanted to look at vehicles and it was far easier to browse than craigslist, cause there are pictures right next to the thing like ebay.

Here we see the problem with a front-page design that screams "clone": Visitors like me click away without learning about your site's unique new features!

If they stuck a sample vehicle ad somewhere on the front page the site might become much stickier. They'd at least look like they were trying.

Finding the room on the page without losing valuable links might be a problem, though. Maybe if they took out all those framed boxes they might find room for a thumbnail?
What chance is there that other mainstream browsers are going to support this codec? It's great for Firefox to get out in front, but when will IE and Safari follow?
History's Funniest Error Messages
havent dared to make enough mistakes yet
Are you Japanese?
Just incorporate in Delaware, but if you're serious, I'd recommend spending some money on a lawyer. Further, if you're not making money, you're not making giving anything of legal value so I don't see why you'd need any form of limited liability. And if you are, you can probably afford a lawyer, and you should, this is important stuff!
Well, when you're under a dictatorship, you KNOW you're under a dictatorship. If you were pretty much anywhere in South America in the seventies, and something woke you up at 3 AM, odds were that was the secret police coming to take you away to torture and/or kill you.

I also stumbled upon this:
Fifteen former LAPD officers have plead guilty to running a robbery ring, which used fake no-knock raids as a ruse to catch victims off guard. The defendants would then steal cash and drugs to sell on the street. This tactic lead Radley Balko, editor of Reason Magazine, to complain "So not only can you not be sure the people banging down your door at night are the police, not only can you not be sure they’re the police even if they say they’re the police, you can’t even be sure it’s safe to let them in even if they are the police."[2][3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-knock_warrant
Sept 15. That's when the back to school promotion ends, and that's when they're going to launch the new Macbooks and Macbook Pros. I'm calling it right now!
This is truly the only path to happiness.
The devil is in the details...
Haskell, bondage-and-discipline and separation-of-concerns programming
Mozilla's Robert O'Callahan explains why it was important to support Ogg in Firefox
Have you asked yourselves: for what liability/tax/funding reason is incorporation necessary? Check out this thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=244009 (there may be others). Maybe then speak with an accountant or attorney to explore options.
Git-enabled googlecode-like code review
Not saying "no" enough. Trying to do too much, and doing none of it well.

So work on a small task you can complete rather than trying to tackle a giant problem you'll never finish.
they're not wearing eye protection...tsk tsk
Not playing football in 6th grade. I would have been a completely different person, I believe.
Why the epic fail at Twitter.com will be a major win
Let me start off with what I like:

1. Pretty good presentation. Looks clean, professional.

2. Easy to understand what your site does and the value proposition. This is a huge step in front of most major sites.

-----
Here is my criticism:

1. Your demo page is too tailored towards first time users. You need to look at models like reddit and digg to come up with a nice balance.

2. Like everyone else is saying, don't require sign-ups. And if you must, use OpenID and FB Connect to streamline the process.

3. Pretty pictures. Use some nice flash charts to give a better understanding on how your predictions are trending.

4. To be brutally honest. i don't see this site making critical mass. The problem with web 2.0 is that most people don't have time to join so many social networks, you need to consolidate this as either (a) an API for other companies to use and make your business a b2b model (there are a bunch for predication markets already) or (b) make it a social network application (but there should be a couple of these already too)

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/veepstakes/index.html

That's a good example of how to leverage some cool algorithms and a funky API to integrate with major sites.

Perhaps I'm a dick wad, but I think honesty is better than sugar coating. If you want to talk further, e-mail me charlesju[at]gmail[dot]com.