skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the feedback! We'll try to add a working demo, or at least some screenshots! For the UI, we'll tweak it a bit too!
"[H]as acquired a musty Victorian odor" says nothing about origins; that's the opposite of what "acquired" means. All you have to do is read the next sentence to see that Pinker is obviously talking about the arc of the idea in English-speaking modernity. Is he right about that? Maybe not, but your comment is irrelevant to his claim.
Solution - create new cuts of the torrents with updated ads every month.

Provide fast(ish) servers, so the new torrents will download faster.

Remove all links to the old torrents.
For me it was the following two comments. It just showed me this was the type of person who is obsessed with following the latest news and keeping up with all their feeds. It's an edge use-case, and not one I subscribe to (pun intended).

I combined that with my usual e-mail communications and my regular scans of Twitter in order to figure out what was going on during the day.

Twitter is basically an RSS feed, and many people even more obsessively than coffee.

Others may say that they can avoid the all-day-long RSS time suck by only opening their clients once per day, but I argue that it still piles up redundant content that you now have to waste time going through all at once.

Of course, Twitter never has redundant content or an echo-chamber effect.
Hmm.. Swapping diaries, that sounds like an idea we could add in!
I have learnt to ignore HN downvotes on my comments, and am now learning to also ignore upvotes. Thinking about internet karma is not worth anyone's time, especially because it robs you of your sense of humour.
Netflix, Starz Learn Absolutely Nothing from the RIAA
Dresses for wedding
It's my understanding that dumping files in to dropbox (on a paid for account) can be set to retain all past versions. That seems like a pretty sensible way of keeping versions but of course without merge abilities and such.
I think a demo is definitely needed on the homepage to convert signups.

Design wise, just be careful with using such light grey text on white background, as you can barely read some things. For example, the "bars" layout is unreadable on my screen unless you hover over a post.
Why on earth would you actually check a handful of sites throughout the day if you have RSS? That's what it's supposed to help with. You just have one site (or app), and check that whenever your code is compiling (or whatever), and _it_ checks all the other sites for you.

Actually opening up websites to see if they have something new feels horribly inefficient.
It is nice to see people trying to learn Agile methods, and I'm glad these guys have found something that works for them. I think they've done a great job getting started.

But to set the context for others, this is adopting circa 25% of what I'd consider a serious Agile approach. That's fine to start, and many stop there. But I hope they keep at it, as there's a lot more benefit to be gained.
Yeah, when you put it like that I see your point. Publishing the password was a silly thing to do. But I can't get angry about the reporter being non-technical. Most people are non-technical. To me, it was the responsibility of Wikileaks to secure the information, and to guide the Guardian to do the same. It seems they failed in that respect which, given their record of disorganisation and technical failures, doesn't surprise me.
Are metal umlauts the new left out vowels for Web 2.x? Will we see "flickr" renamed to "flïckër"?
I've only done this for 5 days max, but your experience tracks with mine. It's fascinating from a psychological point of view; I'd agree it's one of those things one ought to try at least once, like skydiving (which comes to mind since I skydived for the first time yesterday).
I recently read that book and found bits of it useful, but overall quite overrated, considering it's recommended every time UI/UX is discussed. Does anyone else feel this way?
Cheap Mulberry handbags
many opinions here is important to me, and i have been thinking some of the problem. i like this.
Does anyone know a place where I can post my review of Yelp.com?
You are right, but since the readers of this comment thread are self-selected, you lose the karma battle. Kind of like how on Youtube, every song is the best song in the world.
Well, I hope to see you out there. In a few months, the home will be sold, and the class C will be bought, and I will be learning about solar, crappy internet, and living on the cheap.

Thanks for the links. I will check them out.
Good question! The main benefit is you deploy directly from your git-server to your production server, instead of uploading from your own computer. This means a lot faster deploys, especially when your deployments are large or your internet connection is really poor (being able to make deployments quickly while on a 3G connection is awesome). whiskey_disk uses one ssh connection to your server for all work (so less time for spawning ssh connections), and the heavy traffic is not to/from your local machine.

Other benefits of the tool include putting all config files into version control, and a lot less less magic in your deployments.
Unless they've got Morgan Freeman or Tom Waits or Garrison Keillor doing the reading, I'm not sure how you can stand this.

I'm not just being cheeky, either; is listening to voice fonts for extended periods and for complex material just something you have to warm up to?
There's nothing wrong with RSS - it's how you use it.

I use Google Reader, and check my feed once, and at most twice a day, not constantly.

I have set the items to collapsed form, and only read the items that are interesting, reducing the time I spent reading through everything, which is a natural filter to block out noise. This way at the end of the day, I have about three or four articles to read. RSS is useful because it lets me choose what I want to read from a ton of incoming stuff.

If you are developing an RSS reader, the intention of the app should not be to ping the user constantly, instead focus on enabling user productivity by letting him/her choose when to check the RSS feed, and optimize reading by letting the user filter through stuff easily - i.e. maximum productivity for the user.
Show HN: BidOnMyDay, bid to have me fly to you and do anything
Looking for feedback on my newest project, BidOnMyDay: http://bidonmyday.com

I came up with this idea a few weeks ago when JetBlue reopened sales of their BluePass. You bid to have my fly to you, using my BluePass, and do whatever work you need done. I'm a web developer but I'm willing to do almost anything. Bids start at $1.

To add additional value I'm doing a video and blog post of each job, with do-follow backlinks.

http://bidonmyday.com
Well done on shipping. Here are some things that can be improved:

1. Increase the font-size from 13px to 16px and set line-height 24px to make the type friendly.

2. Increase the height of your input fields and buttons to 28px to make them easier to focus and click on.

3. For the diary image on your front page, show a diary that has something written in it. Even better, show a screenshot of a Duuble diary.

4. Combine "First name" and "Last name" fields into "Your Name" for better internationalization and less visual elements / tabbing.

5. Move the "Tweet" button away from your sign up form to top right of the page. Use the official Twitter button. People are used to it.

6. The "Read more about Duuble" button should be a link not a button.
I think that's a fantastic way of thinking about it. Businesses don't win custom by doing totally unique things, but by doing common things in a way that is local/prettier/cheaper/easier/in a language you speak/on a device you own.

I think you've changed the way I'll look for "the idea". Not something new, but a problem I can solve, that people have and that scales, that other people like me don't want to touch.

One of the best comments I've read on HN, especially for stressing the complexity of why a product works. Thanks Daniel.
Well, it's not really an 'ü', we are officially 'Duuble', not 'Düüble'. The dots above the 'u's are meant to complete the smiling faces :)
Enter PostRank:

http://www.postrank.com/feed/

For every RSS feed you will get 4 RSS sub-feeds:

1. Best posts.

2. Great posts.

3. Good posts.

4. All posts.

The ranking (to decide if a post is good/great/best) is done through its popularity online (reddit, digg, delicious, etc.).

When I'm interested in a website I usually subscribe to the best posts sub-feed, sometimes to the great posts sub-feed. This way I'm never overloaded with RSS items to read and I don't miss anything important.

Here are ultra-filtered HN sub-feeds using a feed of HN posts of 150 votes or above:

http://www.postrank.com/feed/20ad1f84cfa8acedf528c616cd441f6...

Also, here is a JavaScript bookmarklet I created to find the PostRank sub-feeds for the current website you're on:

javascript:location.href='http://page2rss.com/page?url=+encodeURIComponent(location.href);

EDIT: ReFilter is also very useful if you want to only read posts about a particular topic:

http://re.rephrase.net/filter/
I just subscribed. Looks like a neat idea, hope it catches on.

I agree with the other commenter, a small makeover using something like Bootstrap would make all the difference here.
Woah, that's quite a list. Thanks though!
Really awesome idea! I cannot seem to click any of the links on my phone though.
do you have a source or reference for this effect? I'd love to be able to reference it, but this HN post might be stretching the definition of a reference...

Thanks, great point! :)
A Better Travel Guide for Geeks
>... charge less as a possible strategy. Is this a good idea?

Usually not. Competing on price is almost always a bad idea. There are two exceptions to this rule I can think of:

1. Your "knockoff target" is the only game in town and because of that they are able to charge a lot.

2. Their service is expensive to run because their infrastructure costs a lot (lots of servers, expensive proprietary app stack, ...) while you're able to run your service on significantly less expensive infrastructure.

The better approach is to see what their existing customers are bitching about. Where's the bitching there's a problem in need of a solution (and an opportunity to make money).
We chose to enter a business that has been saturated since 1999. Why? Because it was quite clear that most of the companies in the space were doing it wrong and inefficiently. We identified plenty of things that we could do better, and we executed on those things.

It's fairy straightforward to find a niche where the incumbents are operating sub-optimally.
✔ is about a famous tech company

✔ leader has left

✔ mentions afterstory of the company after leader departing

this article must have something to do with Apple.
Attitude is everything.

Read Henry Ford's autobiography: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7213
How to bypass 72-minute time limit for Megavideo stream (Part 2)
> Every viable web startup idea that I can think of has already been done by other startups who have been there many years before.

You aren't looking hard enough. At work, about once a week we come up with another perfectly viable startup idea. We're already working on one, though, so we file those away just in case.

You're probably looking in the wrong place. You could be mainly looking at existing companies, which of course means you won't think of anything new. Or you could be paying attention mainly to the obvious parts of yourself. But since people like us make startups, the obvious things we need are already covered.

Instead, go look at other people. Really look. Be an anthropologist at the ballpark, a psychologist at the coffee shop, a sociologist at the grocery store, a short-story writer at the bar. Look at the problems people really have and ask: could I build something that would help?

If you think the answer is yes, go pick up something like "The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development", or go do a Lean Startup Machine weekend. Learn how to test your ideas before you write code. When you find an idea you can't kill without building it (and find it you will) then go build it.
How about the opt-in model? For example, after someone actually gets a job that they found through your service, they could have the option of letting your app post to their wall. Something along the lines of, "I just landed a new job by using..."
Is the lack of nicknames intentional? Sure, for a private diary I don't need to see "xxCuteHoneyPiexx" in the browser, but one might prefer to "blug" as that instead of "Deborah.Jingleheimer".
Speakerphones? Chat rooms? There are lots of tools that work better than that for Agile development, Scrums in particular.
A question to web-designers: What are the metrics with which you test your design experimentations?

Does it pass the test if it aligns to a grid, contains a pleasant color palette, has enough whitespace, hierarchy, and contrast? Or is there something more fundamental you strive for?

I think a formal design education would be much less concerned with the former, and more concerned with the latter -- what are your most fundamental first principles as a person, and how can you instill those into your design and/or design process.

I want to see more articles about that.
Well, obviously I think so. Especially in the infrastructure industry, starting with very low prices and slowly working your way up the food chain is essentially how it's done. It's easy in the computer-infrastructure market, too; you simply don't lower your prices as fast as moore's law lowers your hardware costs.

I mean, you also need to think about your market and what they care about. It is a given, I think, that if you are breaking into an established market, you will be forced to accept lower margin than the established competition. But some markets? lowering the price won't help you. In those markets, don't lower your price, but spend a larger percentage of your revenues on sales or advertising. In some markets, like say contracting to 'enterprise' customers, it makes sense to actually charge more and give most of that to a middleman; I've never been able to get as much money directly renting myself out as I could going through a middleman, even after you take out the middleman's cut. Large corporations are more concerned about following the procedures than saving 50%. On the other hand, small companies? they'll switch providers for a 10% discount sometimes. Individuals paying with post-tax money can be even tighter than small companies. So know your market, and know if spending more on sales/marketing makes more sense or if firing the salesman and knocking his commission off the price will sell you more.

Another thing; Even if you provide the same service as the existing player, if your prices are significantly lower, you will probably be targeting a different market. I mean, I steal some customers from slicehost, but I think most of those are older customers who joined up when slicehost was small and cheaper. These days, really, I doubt there is a lot of overlap between the sort of people who would consider slicehost and the sort of people who would consider me.

Really, I think the slicehost example is a good one; back in the day, Slicehost was seen as the only player (marketing failure, I think, on Linode's part, mostly, if I'm remembering the timeline right. Linode was UML a long time ago, which is really a different product, but I think Linode was Xen by the time Slicehost hit the market. At the time, I was also selling Xen VPSs, but I was in no way a serious player.) So, there were a lot of people on Slicehost who switched to Linode or to me as time went on, as they were individuals or small companies.

But large companies? they want the big name, and barring a buyout, Linode and I can't give them that. (Linode is earning a reputation on their own, which is great for them, and really, for me too, because they have no reason to lower their prices as fast as they would otherwise. But they are a long ways from having the name that rackspace has.)

I was doing some consulting the other day for a friend who works for a very large company. They are paying rather a lot for dog-slow OpenVZ VPSs provided by Verio. They could have gotten a better deal almost anywhere, but they had the relationship with Verio.
> 5 of the 13 chapters are blank.

It's an update of HtDP (http://www.htdp.org/) and it's still in progress. I taught an intro (CS1) course using last year's draft (when chapters 1, 2, and 4 were all there was) and had no problems.
No idea why you got downvoted; I think that's the most essential truth of entrepreneurship.
Sounds like you have a bad recruiter. (2) is a situation that should never happen, as they get paid by a percentage of your base salary.

That said, it also sounds like you're in a situation where it's incredibly difficult to negotiate. I'd say take whatever they give you and kick ass at your job. You'll build up your resume, and in a few months if you believe your underpaid, you'll have something to negotiate with. Moreover, with something substantial on your resume you won't have any trouble moving elsewhere.

If you're worried about your recruiter, I'd recommend calling TTS Staffing and asking for Morgan, he's the best that I've dealt with in New York.
You can review it on Yelp.com: http://www.yelp.com/biz/yelp-san-francisco
If the best you can do is to copy and price (undercut) then someone will no doubt return the favor. It's an ugly race to the bottom.

There's always someone willing to do the work for less.

It's always, 100% unsustainable.

Why do more work for less $$?

Compete on ANYTHING but price.

Here's an idea. Find some product/service you really like, even promote it, and learn it inside and out. Find ways to do it better or perhaps there's a sub-market that needs more product/service in exchange for more $$.

I've paid consultants to do the work for me that I could not and/or would not do myself. I paid much more than it would have cost me to learn it myself. My time is worth more than learning new software.

In the end, even though I paid more, I received much more value in exchange for a trade-off of my time.
Well, I'm German. We do umlauts, we don't do smiles…

;)
Really nice, gonna check this out
The fact that everybody Googles what others have already done, instead of reading a manual (which no longer exists anyway) says it all.

Suppose your car mechanic did that?
Still growing---it's a lot more than last year but chapters 8--12 are still blank. I imagine that by next fall it will be in near-final draft form and they'll aim for a dead-tree publication date in time for Fall 2013, but that's just a guess.
Swapping out RSS for twitter is illogical. They are both RSS but Twitter doesn't have an unread count.

The article instead should have pointed to content browsing solutions that replicate the experience of a newspaper for quick exploration leading to deeper reading.
I was expecting a clever system of pictographs or landscape design to lead future generations to the vault. This:

> We depend upon the laws of the county of DeKalb, the State of Georgia, and the government of the United States and their heirs, assigns, and successors, and upon the sense of sportsmanship of posterity for the continued preservation of this vault until the year 8113, at which time we direct that it shall be opened by authorities representing the above governmental agencies and the administration of Oglethorpe University. Until that time we beg of all persons that this door and the contents of the crypt within may remain inviolate.

represents a very unrealistic expectation.
> The issue with RSS is that you can't put advertisements in it else it'd lose all value. So RSS is not a good thing for sites such as Ars.

Yes and no. While you'll be less exposed to ads than while visiting the site, RSS also lets the site push content to the user, which can lead to more pageviews than if he had to remember to visit it.
I can relate to this through personal experience (in a galaxy long ago and far away).

Early on in HN's life, emphasis was placed (in early comments) on removing (well, reducing) the emotional aspects and focusing on the information. At the time, it seemed the majority of the HN population embraced and welcomed this attitude.

(And what emotion did manifest, was more welcome for its genuineness and respectfulness. For example, people really did celebrate each other's launches -- often in a rather informed and informing fashion.)

Emotion is a principal item that concerns me about the original post that started this thread. There's too much of it.

I don't have a solution to HN's current situation, either. But getting amp-ed up about it won't, I think, help.

Some time ago (after forgetting, for a while), I switched on show dead. The newest/ page probably, on average, had (well) under 25% dead items. Since then, the number of dead items on newest/ has grown to often be well over 50% of the page (over 75%, not infrequently).

I agree with almost all of those post kills. It's utter crap: Irrelevant, promotional, having nothing to do with the real ("traditional", whatever) HN community.

And I see that as indicative of HN's overall situation. It's no longer a niche market. The world has found it, and unless the door is closed (not that I have a means to suggest of making that a solution), they will come in and picnic and litter and trod the grass until there is nothing but a mostly bare field, where one can hardly find the remaining grass for all the people standing in the way.

HN started as a self-selecting group. And I suppose it will re-incarnate somewhere, in some fashion, through a similar course of events.

As they say about X, the first rule of X is that you don't talk about X.

(But someone, hey, email me when you know what X is.)

I don't mean to sound arrogant, nor do I think I'm a particularly valuable member of the HN community, myself. But the signal to noise level has started to drop below the threshold that keeps me interested. And I notice a lot of the older, and in my experience more insightful user ID's, appear only infrequently now if at all. (And then, it can be more work than I can muster the will for, to find them -- or the more interesting newer user ID's -- amidst all the rest.)

Community versus publicity. Maybe there is a fundamental choice, there. Or the need for at least two tiers -- two buses of connection and traffic.
Read the WHOLE guide, then act. It clearly says that you shall not re-create the key if you have one.
As an alumni of Oglethorpe University, I would bet I'm the only one that reads HN (Anyone Else?).

You pass by the steal doors of the Crypt on the way to the Book Store. It was my observation that students didn't really care about the Crypt itself, but that in order to build it they had to gut the indoor pool.

70+ years later they still don't have a pool nor offer any Computer Science / Computer Engineering classes.