skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that the reason that people have stopped quoting Kafka, is because he's really painful to read. Derrida, Greek philosophers: meh. Fun for a while, but fails to capture the imagination.

Part of the problem with "great" literature or philosophy is that so much of it is written by tortured, depressed people for the tortured and depressed audience. It was cool to read Nietzsche when I was tortured and depressed in my early 20's, sitting at the Kopi Cafe in Chicago, while chain smoking and pounding triple espresso's. Right now, I don't really have the time to think about soul-crushing absurdity of life. I'm too busy trying to found my startup. Not too many nihilists in Silicon Valley these days. You'd probably find more of them in the rust belt.
Testament To Perseverence In A Tough Business
Many have said the "the fix is in" in Hollywood. But it sounds to me like hard work and perseverence are the biggest stars.
Well, it's sort of a variation on google's Knol. The "forked" articles would in a sense be no more significant than the text currently hidden behind the "discussion" button, but it would allow dissenting people a more formal platform.
It plays kind of like an old realtime not-really-Roguelike called Castle Adventure.
Personally I find nearly all the mass-media submissions to be a dilution, no matter how techie or startup they sound. NY Times, WSJ, etc. They're written for too broad an audience compared to the focused info I expect to find on HN.
Grandialer, an iPhone app for GrandCentral
I like the minimalist look of the current site. Adding features like this increases the visual clutter.
Don't worry, you didn't slow down the server. I throttled your IP address. The server can withstand a crawler or two. The reason I ask people not to crawl the site is simply that if I let one person do it, I have to let everyone, and considering the audience here, that might mean we'd have 100 of them.
Tech IPOs Return With Rackspace
Wait 9 days and the index is ready http://www.google.com/search?q=270%2C000*3+seconds+in+days
I post under the same IP that I crawled on. Wouldn't have been too hard to connect the two.
Leaving NetBeans for Emacs as my Ruby editor
"You could do all sorts of interesting analysis on it… top posts, top contributors, posting frequency, etc etc."

How is that interesting?
There are always a few highly ranked stories that make me think "how could anyone vote that up?" but on average they're pretty interesting. There's no other site I prefer.

I think the thing that makes me happiest is how civil and thoughtful people are here. That experiment seems to be working. I'm shocked when I see the stuff people say in comment threads on other sites.
Well that was a waste of time clicking... I feel empty and used.

Who would have thought it'd come to sharing fortune cookie soundbites.
Yup, you have to stay ahead of these rapidly shortening trend cycles!
http://images.salon.com/comics/boll/2007/10/04/boll/story.jp...
If you must, why not just scrape the google cache instead of the live site?

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:news.ycombinator.com/it...

At this moment, that's the latest cached item they have. So, it'll lag by a few days, but that wouldn't matter much here.
Well, what better place to understand trends among posers?
Haven't tried, sorry.

It looks like you can add

[defaults]
branches = -a

to your hgrc to ignore inactive branches by default, though.
the real question here, I think, is do you really have any legal recourse to stop us (not just being provocative, I actually wonder)?
I had a similar experience with my hand-coded pages being nuked by Frontpage users at work some years ago. I just kept my own copies, and made all my changes to those. Anything that had been touched by Frontpage wouldn't get updated, it became a dead branch.

I would bring in changes that had happened in Frontpage, but from scratch by hand, not by importing any of Frontpage's code.

I also worked on my boss by setting up an internal A/B comparison site, where internal users could choose which page they liked better. They voted on whichever they liked, with no indication to them of which page has hand-coded and which was worked over by automated tools. When I had over 800 votes in less than a week, with 95% voting for the hand-coded pages and _all_ the user comments saying why they preferred them, I was able to get my boss to agree to keep the tools off my hand-written code for all but a couple of pages in the site.

I also wrote some scripts to generate new pages that were maintainable where there was a need to create new content on the fly, eliminating one of the big excuses for the Frontpage nukes ("You were out of the office, we had to post, and all they know is Frontpage!")

Good luck!
This is an interesting example. But to take the question further, exactly what choices do you allow an individual to trade away? As an extreme, will you allow an individual to trade his life away(or as in The Merchant of Venice, one pound of flesh), if it can be used in some way to obtain a better contract from someone else? In the poorer parts of the world, people sometimes sell themselves into slavery.

The options here are either A)the extreme position - an individual is free to make any contract whatsoever and is henceforth bound by that contract(the government is the enforcer), or B)there is a set of fundamental freedoms which one can't freely trade away.

Are you advocating A or B? If B, one would need to find some basic principles which determine what freedoms can't be given up voluntarily.
I think you're conveniently forgetting that most people choose a Mac so they have more time to create stuff, rather than messing with their computer.
Working my ass off at CKS/USWebCKS/marchFIRST
How do you even connect the dots from what Why said to using a Mac?

Since when does using a Mac mean you're an aspiring artist who fails to actually create anything?
There have been several lawsuits about Web crawlers: http://ilt.eff.org/index.php/Trespass_to_Chattels
I made my first web app; a library card system for my church that ran on AppleScript and FileMaker. The search was just a loop that compared the word the user searched for with each record. Needless to say, it did not scale.
Getting your Olympics fix online
In other words non-competes are bad for economy, just like slavery is bad for economy. The similarity is more than skin-deep.
Georgia is work at will state also, non competes don't really work here either.
Gambling, working, partying, and going to school, in that order. I then quit them all in reverse order.
but i tend to create only to satisfy my tastes...
It's necessary on reddit because the "new" page flies by very quickly, and just a few jerks who downmod everything but their own submissions can control the content.
Yeah, I think we've all met the guy who is so busy being an artist that he forgets to create art. Ditto for programmers.

The Mac thing was a cheap shot, though.
Dropped out of high school to work for a dot-bomb, best decision i've ever made =) Make more money and didn't have to waste all that time in school.
thats all three, but only for mouse/keyboard.
if you want to do this kind of stuff, why not go with Yahoo BOSS or something similar. You could theoretically do some of the sorting you were hoping to do.
They used to sell fanta to Nazis in WWII
Agreed on those points but also the url. Despite seeing the url my fingers began typing "YouPlace" before I did a quick double take and hit o instead of u.
I think YC have better humor than that.
sweet! finally a decent place
Man, I wanna vote this up for the 2nd time.
You would be surprised: http://top.searchyc.com/
I was playing hockey in the streets with my friends. Basically, I was still in school (not college) and I was young. Sometimes at night, I would write a little bit of HTML and Javascript when no one was looking though ;)
When I was a writer for Wired News, it was always exasperating to see the previous day's stats and find that the story with the word "iPod" in the title got 5 times the pageviews of the "hard stories" on topics like privacy breaches or environmental waste.

But them's the breaks.

It's not a vote on the True Merit of a submission -- it's just a nod to something you happen to have found interesting that day.
I'd be tempted to add TC, Mashable and the like to that as well. Though the stories are good, how many HN readers also visit those sites anyway.

Maybe a grey-list for anything linking to those sites, and then one of the top 100 users needs to vote it up in order for the article to be white-listed? Something like that? Unfortunately, that means that the most dedicated users are burdened in cleaning things up for the rest of the community, but by definition, they are already dedicated and would probably/hopefully like the site cleaned up for everybody.

I'm curious where the 'Rate my start-ups' fit into this? Do people like them? Or do you find this to not be the best venue to view them.

I posted my start-up here and the feedback I got was amazing, but that doesn't mean the community wants that stuff here.
where i said micropayment api's i meant api's which can be used for a small payment (few cents or lower)
No idea, but I don't find that useful. I use :set showmatch, and a plugin called UnMtchBracket.vim (IIRC) that highlights any currently unmatched brackets.

This is pretty personal, so I guess it's something you may want to at least give a try.
Your stereotype of "most Mac users" may be a bit dated. Lots of people own Macs for reasons that have nothing to do with being (or appearing) creative.
Why not create periodic dumps of the database and allow people to glean interesting statistical data from it? You could remove any non-public information (passwords, preferences, individual up/down voting, last 2 octets of the IP, etc). It would be interesting to see what hours and what days people are active, where the visitors are coming from, what the most common words used are, etc.
Not sure I'm getting thick or the css work is eating my brain.

I think he meant "confined" rather than "defined".
I was there, part of the Pseudo team, and I can say that it was just one idea from being wildly successful - user generated content. We had done some amazing things with early streaming as one of the first realaudio sites. As with most ideas, the idea of user generated content was there but broadband lines were not what they are today - so the user content focus was chat - which we now know is not enough. I think Pseudo was doing some genuine innovating in streaming, high traffic sites, crawlers and intense live video (some shows were 7 hours long!). But in the end we only hear about the successes and the silent evidence of the failures usually goes unnoticed. I think Pseudo was what MTV would have been had it been 5 years too early in trying to go on the air.
It's more that the MoGo folks have finally developed an algorithm which is appropriate to Go. Their monte-carlo-based strategies scale well in Go, whereas the alpha-beta-style chess-like algorithms do not scale well. I don't think there are any people involved who used to work on chess who now work on Go.
I still like the idea of categorizing things like startup feedback. and ask hn/yc/pg.
after seeing a twitter at 11 points I'm not sure I'd agree.
"An Intuitive Explanation of Quantum Mechanics":

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/an-intuitive-ex.html
"If something's hard to do then it's not worth doing." - H. Simpson
I think the front page has a lot of interesting links. The link titles ought to be cleaned up wrt the leading or trailing site identifications, e.g. "... - CNN", "... - Yahoo! News"

OTOH, the comments are more in the nature of trackbacks, and are not interesting at all.
This would be better if it were lengthened out to a proper article.

It would probably still sound pretentious, self-important and platitudinous, though.
I don't mind the "rate my start-up" questions that have a clear question about something specific that can be evaluated and responded to directly. Things like "here's what we're trying to do here and how, how effective do you think we're being at this?" as opposed to an open-ended "rate my start-up" with a url where we're supposed to do a top to bottom review to solve their business or presentation problems for them.
Randomly hating on mac users isn't all that creative either. (Disclosure: I'm not a mac user.)
That's easy. You do what most people do. Let yourself become unmotivated and distracted by working on your side project and your day job simultaneously. Then slowly begin neglecting your promising side project and let it fade into obsolescence and then finally into death.

If there was a reasonably pain-free solution to this problem there'd be far too many successful startups. Large corporations would have even more trouble hiring good hackers and the whole world would fall apart.
We started an FEC multicast streaming media company in '98 (got funded in '99) which flamed out with the CDN market in 2001.
That's about the silliest thing I've read.

Parent or grandparent?

Re Parent: yep, could well be a form of confirmation bias. "That guy is struggling, must not be smart. I wonder why all the smart people never struggle?"
"At will" usually just means you can get fired for nothing.
War erupts between Russia and Georgia
Yes, but it depends.
If you're going to leave, just leave. There's no need to waste our time telling us about it. I'm not trying to be (overly) harsh, but I'm pretty sure there are far more people than just me who are tired of wasting time reading comments from people threatening to leave or bitching about a post that got too high on the homepage.
I wish most of the blog posts I see linked here would condense their message like this, rather than rambling self-indulgently.
Hiding out at relatively safe Disney.com after escaping Excite@Home just before the fall.
It sounds a lot like circular logic. How do you work out whether someone is smart or not? By whether you see them struggle?

I can only ask "how the hell?" And they would say something like, "oh, it's just this and that."

That could be someone who, once they understand something, can explain it easily. That doesn't (necessarily) mean that they reached the initial understanding easily.
I also think the last month or so quality went down.
I think one of the problems is that a vote is either up or down; there's nothing in between. A vote that means "this is a really good article" is the same as a vote that means "I laughed" or "this article is so awful its funny" or "this was mildly interesting."

But having a scale where you can vote up an article by different amounts is pointless too, since it leads most people to voting either the max or the min score in order to have the most impact possible on the overall score. One idea would be to have different types of upvotes (much like the moderation on Slashdot) that correspond to different things the reader liked about it; this information could be used to organize and sort the submissions, in addition to rating them up or down.
Somehow the story sounds fake..

Would Turkish people really know English that well? Would they be able to communicate like that?
i agree with vaksel ... everyone will be using youplace.com
I think it's a techie thing. I took a course at work about influence and negotiation and the reaction of some people I was talking to (a few scientists) was "oh, you're taking that class on manipulating people!" complete with rolled eyeballs.
Actually of all the classes I've taken at work, that was one of the most useful.
I was looking at the crazy money being poured and hitting my head against the keyboard
Did you win the Putnam?

If not, please don't brag about turning down VCs so you could attend Oxford.
Did you win the Putnam?

I think you know the answer to that question. :-)

EDIT: For the benefit of people who weren't around 387 days ago, staunch is (I presume) referring to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
How did you discover it that quickly then? Do you have some type of server monitoring tool?
William Patry Copyright Blog returns
It's a list of links like reddit, this place and hundreds of other places on the web. The site should tell me how it's own list of links are more relevant or important to me.
I am not a huge fan of cartoon foxes, but he really nails it with that tweet. Maybe cartoon foxes aren't so bad after all.
Inside MobileMe: Secrets of the Cloud and Mobile Push
An "ask" or "questions" link in the nav bar could work, which would just show posts with /^Ask .+:/.
It's the idea that the person sitting there working on a mac must be creative b/c he has the good taste to own a mac, the machine of choice of graphic designers, marketers, and other creative types.
Creating a marketplace for artificial intelligence
The applications being created on the web today aren't as sophisticated as they could be, the reason being that to create something large enough to offer as a complete product requires tremendous resources. For example speech recognition is produced by only by two giant companies (Microsoft and IBM), and some level of text analysis in search engines (google, yahoo, microsoft). Computer vision is being actively pursued at large companies and yet they still cannot release a product yet.

An alternative way would be for small companies/individuals to start producing small fragments of functionality and offering it in a per for use basis. (as in a cat recognizer in an image, or a recognizer for the word "hello" in an audiofile).

To create the above recognizer would require gathering data (such as hundreds/thousands of pictures of cats) and feeding it to a supervised learning algorithm like svm, boosting etc.

Thousands (perhaps millions) of people creating their own "classifiers" and charging for them (perhaps 1000 uses for 1 dollar) over the web might lead rapidly to seeing/thinking machines.

(A similar model can also be used to pose competition to entrenched monopoly software like mathematica/maya/autocad - thousands of people creating and charging for small bits of functionality)
the biggest condesenting pricks i have known usually use macs. It is rare to see windows users sneer at other people, just b/c of their choice of OS.

Remember, not everybody has 2K to spend in a computer, and if you are a student and do, your priorities are kind of backwards.

You can save a 1k by bying a decent PC, so you have 1k of savings, and one month more of runtime to work on a basement for your idea or startup to flourish. And I Bet you money, that all you need to spend is about 1 DAY in tinckering around, until you make both Windows and Linux as usable as your Mac. If you can survive with 1k a month (I could in Cambridge), you just saved about 29 days to work on your startup, if you had to buy the pricey macbook pro.

And, I have Macos, Windows XP, and a Linux box at home, and i can say that while MacOs is the more polished and better looking than all, it is not necessary the fastes for me. I find myself working much faster in XP or Linux.

And all of those that say you have to spend lots of money $$ into a good laptop in order to be able to get working, well, if you can't code in a $1,000 laptop, you probably can't in a $2,000 one.
It means you can't scan down the left hand side of the editor looking at indentation, you've got to double check with the existence/non-existence of line numbers. For the same reason that it is easier to read left-aligned text than it is to read right-aligned text, though not quite as bad since not all lines are "wrong".
Your post? Or why's tweet?
I don't think you can properly claim to own your own life if you aren't able to relinquish that ownership -- the obvious question is: if you don't own it, who does?

I am advocating A), in the sense that I would prefer to be governed under a judicial system that focuses on enforcing the promises I make, not making my decisions for me. The nice thing is that B is a subset of A -- under A, I could put some of my rights (the right to sell my life, the right to harm myself, the right to agree not to take a job in the future) under the control of a legal entity that prevented me from exercising it. Since anyone under A can live as if they were under B, advocating B over A can have no effect but to deprive people who do prefer A of their freedom.
My Holy Grail Of iPhone Apps Arrives: pTerm
Since when does using a Mac mean you're an aspiring artist who fails to actually create anything?

That would be when someone makes a generalization. I'd suggest that it's always dangerous to generalize when talking about people's lifestyles and habits.
What's the IRC client?
"Not everyone has Sam's deal-making ability. I myself don't. But if you don't, you can let the numbers speak for you."

PG you have hundreds of people applying to make a deal with you (through YC) and once you agree to make a deal--a decision that takes you 20 minutes--you are rarely rejected. Plus, when you are rejected the people who reject you usually fail. I appreciate the modesty but by no means do you seem like a poor deal maker.

I feel that no matter one's starting point they should work on there deal making ability so they can have more then just the numbers. You need the steak and the sizzle.

Just as startup founders in order to make a good product need to be persistent, intelligent and understand the technology; in order to make good deals the founders still need to be persistent and intelligent but also need to understand the components of what it takes to find and close deals.

So how can startup founders learn to be good deal makers?
Physical Heart, Virtual Body
Physical Heart, Virtual Body is a special guitar that combines physical acoustic properties with virtual sound processing capabilities.
I wonder how many people who think the quality is going down try to do anything about it?
If we assume 100 million internet users that you saved 100 years, that's roughly 30 seconds per user. Let's say just 10% of people use OS X or Mozilla - that's 5 minutes per user.

This is not to belittle, just to put your "100 years" in context. It's great work and you've saved me personally a lot more than 5 minutes.
I agree that it looks like git is going to win, but for entirely different reasons:

1) The person who wrote it is famous. It wouldn't have been taken seriously had (almost) anyone else written something comparable.

2) Network effects apply strongly here. You can't just use something else if you want to collaborate with people who use it.

I'm not very happy about having to use git, but the pain numbs after a while. And, to be fair, it does have some cool features, although little-to-nothing inherent to git or its implementation.
A link to "top" (full thread) alongside "link," "parent," and "flat" on comments. It's really annoying to click through generations of "parents" from random individual comments.

Edit: I just realized SearchYC has this feature. An advantage over feeds and Google.
If you work faster in $OSChoiceOne instead of $OSChoiceTwo, great. Use whatever works for you. I wouldn't expect you to do anything less. I would think less of you if you chose to use $OSChoiceTwo anyway, just to be popular. Which i think is the real problem here: Choosing something due to its perception and thinking it will make you work better instead of finding something that actually makes you work better.

And just to note, not every Mac costs $2000. Just like not every PC sells for < $1000. The Macbook costs $1100 (even less if you're a student or have an ADC discount) and an Alienware laptop from Dell costs $2100.