skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well there could be more refunds than legitimate purchases if you sold 3, refunded 2 and got to keep the money for 1.
Hardly.

Not to sound rude or anything, but I don't give a crap about the other 100 users. I care about what news I read.

Ultimately this is pg's site and he can do whatever the heck he wants with it. Whenever I state my dislike of a specific article, I'm not making some grand statement about what YCNews should be to fulfill the purpose of the universe, only about what I personally would prefer to see (or not) on this site.
The test you propose isn't entirely valid. If the "winning" teams who don't get funded by YC are told they "won", that would affect their control status because they would get a big boost in confidence. If they aren't told, again their confidence would get affected, but this time negatively.
CS/hacker is too narrow. Does OvercomingBias count as CS/hacker? Not really, it's more techno-philosophy.

I think general interest stories posted here should at least have some sort of technological angle.
...and that's one of the hallmarks of bubbles.
(1) Novell (the guys with more money) do.

(1a) I care about usability a _lot_ and I don't have a lab. A simple pc in a room is quite adequate for most studies. (For some of them you don't even need a pc)

(2) https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2007-...
I'm not religious, and I have no inclination to argue a simple and obvious point.

Observation is inherently limited by our observational capabilities, and this is not a radical thought, it's a very very basic thought. So your argument is not just wrong, it's incredibly wrong, and you should not be making it.

For example: Electrons. To posit that there are electrons, but viewed strictly from a 16th century perspective is a position that cannot be observed based off the technology available to them at that time.

As a purist, I take offense when anybody tries to claim that observation and experimentation can be anything but assumptions. It is something we observe to be a certain way, but very restricted by our particular viewpoint.

You think you are a man of science, but what you actually are is one of those people who said the earth could not be round because it looks flat. I've said something that is perfectly realisitic if one has some imagination, and you immediately shoot it down because it does not conform to how you think scientists should think.

Free your mind, and learn to deal with uncertainty.
Canonical doesn't, gnome does.
http://usability.gnome.org/
PVC and vinyl play time for clubbers
rubber bdsm is it a game or is there a seedy underside to this sub-culture
A combo between jDome and faceAPI would be great for playing Lock On or IL-2
Science in its current form wasn't prevalent back when people were saying that the Earth couldn't be round. Any modern day scientist would always be open to the possibility, given physical evidence. The very best model at the time showed that the earth was flat-- hey, it looks flat when you go outside. But evidence through experimentation led to the model being updated.

Electrons are small and you can't see them with your eyeballs. But J.J. Thomson used models of how cathode rays work and how electrical conduction works, and he hypothesized and then experimentally showed that electrons exist. They may not exist, and any good scientist would be open to that possibility, given evidence. But the best models we have today show that they do exist.

Observation and experimentation are one level beyond assumption. They're assumption backed by evidence. Blind assumption is to "suppose a case is true without proof."

Imagination drives science, true. But nothing imagined is ever considered science, or even possible, without some kind of evidence.

Uncertainty is fine. Is there dark matter? Is it possible to travel faster than the speed of light? Why are photons both particles and waves? Uncertainty is what makes these the interesting questions in science.
State and economy is general.
If you're building a web service for public consumption, you want random, interested developers to pick it up easily.

SOAP has a clear advantage over XML-RPC here: blub programmers have probably heard of it, and it will be supported out of the box in their language and IDE.
Flowers Israel
Do you think these folks understand the math behind improve startups' prospects by 6.4%? It seems the emotional reaction is usually driven by a basic misunderstanding - "$5k per founder for 10%!? OMG!" even when they're wrong on the basic facts. MA does a nice job clearing up the valuation "paradox" but it seems it's worth repeating over and over again, esp for newbies to investment equity who encounter YC and shudder at the "terms".

EDIT: Just reading the TC comments, it amazes me how often this basic misunderstanding comes up, even after an article that explains it.
Sarah Lacy writes fantasy, not journalism. Ah, I suppose I should say more. For the technical co-founder (the person who writes the code) YC offers the opportunity to complete avoid the "professionals" that are brought in to run things (often into the ground). Sarah makes her living writing PR fluff to support those same people. YC is a direct threat to her source of income, and thus needs to be attacked.
A simple solution to the “other” problem with select boxes
Would a government protect 100 acres? I also highly doubt it.

If a thousand people grouped together and bought 100,000 acres collectively you might stand a chance.
Some of that is just going to be people who read the Python Paradox.
"... I think the explanation usually is more emotional and less analytical. People start to dislike anything that gets a lot of publicity ..."

No but explaining this might help HN readers to resist posting these types of stories.

Competition of any sort generates "trash-talk" from competitors and the like. Joel has a nice explanation in "Fire & motion" ~ http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html why competitors might do this. HN readers are ( "unnecessarily" ) getting caught up in the cross-fire.
> I've always thought that an ISP could sell a NATted connection at a premium as a security feature

The problem is all the new aged people who use P2P file sharing, multiplayer console games, or any other internet application that relies on at least one or two inbound ports being open to listen on. An ISP couldn't possibly NAT-forward ports to individual users, but an end-user can easily decide to NAT-forward ports to their game console / desktop / laptop...
I'm not convinced they are wrong but the reasoning is poorly explained or misleading.

Without knowing the size the image will take up, the browser may be forced to rerender the page as the attribute data is received from the images to make way for it. This doesn't need to be done if there are attributes or if you've defined the size of its container etc.

For the second point, it's a comment that browsers have a limit to maximum persistent connections per server and a larger limit for maximum persistent connections overall. It naively uses the domain to define what a server is, so splitting over multiple subdomains will make it faster (see http://www.ajaxperformance.com/2006/12/18/circumventing-brow...). Incidentally, one of the big changes in FireFox 3 was to increase the number of persistent connections per server and IE8 is going to do the same thing. (See http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=565)
Some very cool stuff, I'm so happy to be involved in technology. Why on earth do people become lawyers and economists when you can create all this insanely cool stuff?

jDome was awesome, I have kind of lost interest in gaming but this brought it back a little bit.
In the presentation you can even enjoy english with a swedish accent :) .
Oh good, I was wondering what this meant to me as a novice at Rails.
These are the easy things to be uncertain about. But what about the more difficult things? For example - is time discrete? Such a concept would require as the very first step that we must let go of our usual observational abilities, as they are unable to step outside of time. So, first we have to discover how to observe, and only then can we start to experiment.
With all due respect to the talents of the best and brightest college grads, 250K, or 125K per head seems about right when compared to the starting salary those grads could get at a MS or Google. YC puts up a bit of funding and takes a small cut.

More importantly, I think is that it's giving young programmers a big leg up in understanding how the VC game is played and an opportunity to build a software career that is very independent. For really good programmers I suppose there is always demand, always a place to work and more or less define your own path. But if you sell your company for 15 mill, you get a nice piece of what I like to call FU money.

I've sort of followed this YC project from the beginning as an outsider and my sense is that the folks behind YC are putting back some of their good fortunes. It's a cool way to spend some of their money and possibly grow it even more.

All the negative press and trash talk about burned out programmers, etc. looks to me like a good measure of success. The others are looking at the backs of your sneakers
Sarah Lacy Trashes YC (and prompts the TechCrunch response)
Paid content is back.
Spare Some Bandwidth?
Like Politics? Broadcast Your View for Only $6
Reliability does not come from SOA Governance
Seems like every one of the "this is off-topic" comments would be a vote again #2

I'm okay with #2, but I think #1 is in the best interests of the board. Anybody can run a #2 board.

People who are saying 'this is off-topic" are actually customers providing feedback that the content not only sucks, but shouldn't even be part of the offering. And they feel that way enough to write a comment and not simply down-vote and/or leave the board. To me, there's some valuable feedback going on there.

So I withhold my vote.
>Hair doesn't burn, right?

You just have to add a little of a flammable substance to it. I'd suggest ethanol or gasoline.
> Not to sound rude or anything, but I don't give a crap about the other 100 users. I care about what news I read.

Fair enough.

In this case, I'm more concerned about how realistic the alleged 1:100 ratio of unhappy/happy users is.
Nice catch. Allow me to double down on the "numbers not worth much" observation.
python with 'end of scope' comments looks totally alien to me. I hope they are there for educational reasons rather than for a coding 'style'.
Insert "just not evenly distributed" here.
how come? could you give an example?
Am I missing something?

I saw that comment on Sarah's blog by Paul mentioning the "Twitter friend"? Who's that? Any link to his previous coverage of YC?
Most startups do not create value, says Scott Shane
Every language is Blub to someone. What do Haskell types think about Lisp?
CodePlex vs. SourceForge Most Downloaded Apps
You can try Passenger and Enterprise Rails combination before multi-threaded Rails.

It's interesting that in his announcement dhh actually downplayed the importance of this contribution, saying it is just another item in the enterprise-readiness checklist.

I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that a lot of Ruby-related native code, including db drivers, is written in a way that actually blocks the green threads when the native code is waiting on I/O. Can anyone confirm or deny this?
The dead zone of slick
the assumption is that languages vary in power, and furthermore that lisp sits pretty high on this power ladder. let us assume further that lisp is more powerful than python (i think that's safe. in this forum anyways). so to say that python readability makes lisp blub sort of implies python is blub to you. unless, of course, you think python is more powerful than lisp.

my question is, what leads people to believe lisp is so high up on the language power scale?

ps: incidentally, macros are all about readability. if you took all the macros out of your program and substituted them by their macro expansion (by copying and pasting) you would end up with exactly the same program. exactly. it would just be less readable ;)
The Perils of FUI: Fake User Interface
I never got how this is supposed to be "spooky". To me it is common sense. To whit:

If a spin 1 particle (say, a photon) is "tweaked" by adding energy to it in some way, like say, being in the presence of a strong magnetic field, there is a chance it could briefly decay into two spin 1/2 particles (say an electron and an anti-electron). If the electron flies over to village A and is measured to have an "up" spin, and the anti-electron flies over to village B, if the electron had been measured to have an "up" spin in village A, why then naturally it should come as no surprise that the anti-electron in village B will be measured to have a "down" spin, due to conservation of spin laws. Spin 1 is decomposible into two spin 1/2 particles, so 1/2(electron) + 1/2(anti-electron)=1(photon). The spin can be up or down, not both, so if one particle has "up" spin, the other necessarily has "down" spin.

I have never understood why this is all supposed to be so "spooky". It is just simple common sense based on known conservation laws. Spin is conserved. If a spin 1 particle decays into two particles, and one is "up spin 1/2" then by necessity, not by any kind of "spookiness" but by basic necessity, the other particle will be "down spin 1/2".

Conservation laws are not "spooky". They are high school physics. So I really don't understand sensationalist articles like this, other than to try to get a "reaction" from the ill-informed.
now. now.
Not all of this stuff is obvious to everyone.. For example, I don't really know much about SQL optimisation, when people say things like 'Joins are bad, de-normalisation is good' I kind of just nod my head without really understanding exactly why.

I think this article helps straighten out what might be a few myths about memcached, which is helpful for scalability noobs like myself. :)
It is getting spookier with experiments where each photon, say, hits a semi-opaque mirror and chooses a path randomly. The Geneva experiment was doing precisely that:

You start with an ultraviolet photon and split it into two photons. One goes one way and the other goes another way, both to identical interferometers. Entering its own interferometer, each photon must make a random decision as to whether it will travel a long pathway through the device or a short one. Then you look for a correlation between the pathways taken by the photons in their respective interferometers.

If the timing between the photons is exactly adjusted, each twin seems to know what the other is doing and matches its choice of pathway to coincide with that of its distant partner. (upd)

From http://www.cebaf.gov/news/internet/1997/spooky.html
Will the iPhone Meet its Match from a Modern Day DOS?
I would say no, anything stimulating should go, at least stuff relating to maths and science. Dijkstra said c.s. has as little to do with computers as astronomy does to telescopes. Meaning that computers are an aid to understanding the theory of computation and information, which for Dijstra is properly a branch of maths, and are not an end in themselves, just as telescopes are an aid to understanding the stars, not an end in themselves. Therefore as c.s. may be viewed as a branch of maths and science, it should seem fair to allow posts relating to other branches of math and science too.
This helpfully validates some valid emails you might not want, e.g. root@localhost hardly helpful for a web site.
I don't know from Seth, but I can see he's got a big fan club here.

The "Just do it" them has been oft-used on HN. In that sense, the theme of the article was a re-run. (although perhaps a needed re-run?)

I just didn't get so much from the article. Glad you liked it. I'll keep my eye out for future Seth goodness.

I am getting a little tired of the same dozen commentators on HN. I was hoping we'd be a little more widely read than that.
Selecting the Best Baby Shower Invitations
Baby showers are special days for the entire family, a day of great joy and happiness as the family waits for the arrival of the newborn. When you are throwing a baby shower party you will as well know that it is your baby’s first party ever though it is not born yet; so as a parent you would like every thing to be of top class
One of the best hack stories was that of the Direct TV smartcard. They slowly uploaded updates to the card to create a dynamic programming interface. The first 8 computer bytes of all hacked cards were rewritten to read "GAME OVER".

Full story:

http://slashdot.org/articles/01/01/25/1343218.shtml
Open Web Podcast - by John Resig, Alex Russell, and Dion Almaer
Behind the Scenes at Facebook: Scaling Up FBChat Using Erlang
* Lolcats

Aren't you supposed to keep that a secret?
Jitterbit: An Open Source Project That Bridges Data Gaps
Time to "Free the Airwaves"
The End of the 404?
Transformie: Implement WebKit CSS transforms in IE
I mean shops that develop professionally for the iPhone, or developers that want to port something else that they've done. If you put all this time into something only to have it banned, well, thats too big a risk when you need a return to keep yourself in business. Selling something on another platform, like Palm, BB, Android or Symbian is better than selling nothing on the iPhone. The "I am Rich" guy didn't lose a lot of time over his app, but some companies put months or years into development. You just can't do that unless you know your app will be accepted.
Then you have to maintain the plugin interface. It is usually better to just use a hidden setting (see about:config in Firefox) to control access to these things. K.I.S.S.
Wait a minute. How did he come to this realisation? Did he just suddenly INVENT it? Did he just MAKE UP that graph? Because to me, it sure seems that way. He does not backup his assertion that python is now in the middle of the programmer world.
So it has the same problems as a lot of the news, then?
But validating the semantics of an email address doesn't catch a lot of error cases, e.g. "someone@hotmal.com" instead of "someone@hotmail.com" Question: why don't email validation routines ever try to find out if the domain in question is actually running something on port 25 and if it is, try to find out if that's a valid account on that server? (I've never done that in an email validation routine either but I have been thinking about it and wondering if it would be a good idea.)
You misunderstood me. If you're giving more refunds for a product than actual sales, it's probably better to pull the product.
Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?
Nah it won't. AppJet fails on many levels

1. Nobody likes javascript. We use it because it's there, but nobody LIKES it

2. A serious lack of sexy. AppJet makes an app that is targeted at hardcore nerds. And then markets it to beginners. Let me tell you somefink - even beginner programmers want to be hardcore. They don't want 'easy' stuff. You want 'quick' or you want 'cool', but not easy.

3. No platform with eyeballs and revenue potential

4. It's a frickin closed eco-system. Each new framework or way of doing things I learn takes a huge amount of my time and effort. The value of that time and effort to me is MASSIVE. No seriously, this is like me paying you $10.000. If you want me to buy a premium product from you that costs that much, then I want to feel pampered. I want a return on this investment. AppJet has no return! No money, no credibility, no Resume relevant qualifications.

5. If AppJet becomes open source, then it needs to offer me a very clear advantage over my current django+python combo. And unless the owners learn how to market to the geeks, this is not going to happen.

My conclusion: Your marketing is very wrong. Either sell to nerds or sell to internet marketers. But not this middle ground with no real defined target.
Here is another new concept.... http://www.nestedguis.com. Why have one UI when you can have lots? (there are some good videos there)
> What's missing in REST, btw, is a standard method of serializing structs, lists and scalar types.

Just use JSON. Apart from being more compact, readable and parseable, it has the added bonus of being a data format, not a method-call-on-the-wire format.
I like his argument that Erlang's concurrency is a secondary benefit. The main one is reliability.

Erlang's price of inefficiency (tax) is affordable with today's faster machines.
Ylastic is now live: UI to manage S3, EC2, SQS, etc.
Debategraph: better tools for better arguments
Facebook dethrones MySpace to become No1 SNS
Wanna fry your brains? Some time ago I was intrigued to learn about the non-probabilistic variant of the two envelopes problem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_envelopes_problem#A_non-pro...
New breed of 'net newsers' shape US media habits, says Pew report
It's something like the uncanny valley...
The USA has inclusiveness in its charter. A social news site is free to be as inclusive or exclusive as it cares to be.

Sure, but that attitude still makes you an asshole.
This is interesting argument in discussion about readability, usability and so on of regular expressions, but not something you want to use directly.

Almost nobody wants to validate email address according to SMTP-specified format, because almost anything is valid SMTP address and most of the formats supported by protocol specification are not usable in real world (because they does not work or does something completely unexpected...)

Moreover to use this monstrosity zou need to perform some preprocessing on the addres, because some aspects of SMTP address cannot be meaningfully expressed by regular expression. IIRC, you have to strip comments and normalize whitespace before you use this. It is probably good idea to allow comments and real names in addresses posted to some website (for example because if you paste address from some MUA, you will often get it with real name and comments), but this will not help you with that.
One fundamental difference between the early PC market and the current smart phone market seems to have escaped the author. The IBM PC and DOS were adopted by corporate IT departments - long before there was a mass market for PCs. In fact the dominance of the IBM PC format developed alongside a very healthy "home computer" market that ultimately collapsed and coalesced into the current games console market.

We have a healthy list of phone OS contenders battling it out for market share. As a developer, it would be nice to see one clear dominant winner but as a consumer I prefer choice.
Note that Lacy's original post contains links to and descriptions of current YCombinator companies.

TechCrunch also usually covers every YC project as it launches.

This is the main value of YCombinator: It provides guidance and media exposure that would otherwise take years to achieve, if at all - how many people can say that every project they do will get a story on TechCrunch?

Judging it as a VC company is misguided. The money involved is less than a year's tuition in many US colleges, and the recipients are mostly young enough to just live with their parents for a few months, and not need it anyway. The funding is minor, but the other parts - startups pay, a lot, to get this level of publicity and consulting.

I'd go with the "record label" metaphor instead of Lacy's American Idol one (I'm older ;)): Find talent, give them some producer and studio hours to record a single, then use your connections with DJs to get it some airplay hope it will catch on. Watch "24 Hour Party People" for more details :)

The one piece missing here, though, is the fact that ultimately the public (pre-mp3) was paying money for the singles. YC's audience is big companies with money to spend - it may prove less sustainable in the long run.
I guess I've been living under a rock lately... I've only seen one article so far