skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand this is totally superficial, but can you keep the same color scheme that you had in the portal page (ie click to get started)?

Defaulting to politics is no fun. Here's an idea: Can you use the information which tells you where a user came from to customize the site for him? So say I came from HN, I would probably like to see stuff about technology, startups, ect. with the option of checking out other categories.

If the origin in unknown/unclear, then a default page similar to Google News would be nice, in that it shows all the major categories and top 3 from each.

Definitely work on cleaning up the interface so it's easily readable/scanable. Most users don't like to and/or don't know how to hunt for information if it's not amazingly simple to find.

Good luck!
I generally use legos to teach robotics to my students, the NXTs are cool but try to find the old-school ones with the yellow brick. Those are much more awesome.
checkout some stats
http://opc.shaastra.org/ranks/

even mid school folks from china did well in the contest..
almost first 3-4 ranks occupied by chinese

and then http://www.spoj.pl/ranks/countries/

checkout quality(total points/total users) of china compared to india...
Sounds like it has a much better chance of success in the Knight News Challenge
I tried it once when starting with gmaps API. But, I probably did something wrong then.

Thank you (both) for pointing out that I was wrong. I'll look at the javascript API again and see what can be done.
Valioso Business Directory- Society  Economics
Shame about the name.
The politically correct view is to dodge the issue. There are a large number of people that oppose a stance in either direction, so the best thing to do is say nothing and give nothing to either side to use as a reason to dislike you.
Leveraging Cognitive Bias in Social Design - Joshua Porter, Dconstruct 2008
It might sound surprising but CNet also uses similar techniques to generate huge parts of their product reviews.

The technique is the biggest threat to the current crop of 'content' driven search engines (read Google and everyone else) and has the potential to wreak havoc with current ranking systems. Given the lucrative nature of the automatic content generation business, this is also inevitable.
Thank you all for your comments/suggestions/criticism. I added all suggestions in my TO-DO list, and will look to implement them as soon as possible.
Largest Australian ISPs Say that Net neutrality is an 'American problem'
I think the main issue for these sites is reliability. I still remember many URL shortening services that sprung up in the last few years, before quietly going offline...URLtea is an example.

People use tinyurl because they know the links will stay active, at least for a long time after they are posted.
Boards running Linux
I'd buy that if all the people opposed weren't being downmodded into the ground.

To have a position from which dissent is not tolerated is the definition of PC. Hence the "correct" part of PC.
Linux is a Unix-type operating system which uses the Linux kernel. The name - Linux- comes from the Linux kernel, written in 1991 by Linus Torvalds. The system's utilities and libraries usually come from the GNU operating system, announced in 1983 by Richard Stallman. The following article presents some boards that are running on Linux.
Windows 7 on a Diet - Thank Goodness
Maybe more and more people are getting access to computers and to decent learning material and universities?
The article's not that long! Here's the second half:

To be clear, it all depends on what you count. If you're counting units sold, you can double your count by selling everyone 1 unit, then 2, then 4, etc. (In Finland I understand that cell phone usage is above 1 per capita, but still growing.) If you're counting the total number of households that own the product, you can double your count by doubling the population, or by convincing everyone to divorce and become two households. But if you're counting percentage of people (or households), there's just no more doubling after you pass 50%.
2008 Rails Rumble Registration - 48 hour startup competition
"z" in the domain name always makes me cringe...

All this talk of "we do this" and "we do that" actually makes me nervous to give you my data. It's just a wording/psychological thing.

That announcement thing gives me the irrits. You should show it over top of the content or otherwise you'll get a high bounce rate.

another site with square buttons? Isn't anyone getting sick of these yet?

Overall the experience was overwhelming. Where do I start? What do these things do? What should I click on next? Where is the value?

You talked about taking a river of RSS stuff - why not let me try it with my Google reader feed so I can see whether your intelligent stuff actually works?
The White Hats are hackers who spot security breaches and are a force for good
More relevant to HN readers is the fact that RMS's efforts have been a major factor in lowering the barrier for starting new companies. Almost all startups funded by YC are based on free/open source software. Sometimes people let his personality come in the way. But RMS has permanently changed the game.
Australia has too few people and is behind Texas economically.

Japan has less than half of the US (or Euroland) population and insignificant natural resources. Its GDP is way behind that of the US, China, and Euroland. (However, it does beat California, not to mention Texas.)

An economic union of the reasonable Asian countries could be big enough but what would China do?
Recession Proof Your Job with Web Based Tools
Pandora Lives a Little Longer, House Passes Webcaster Act
Something ignored here is that lots of people will decide not to start startups because they become more risk averse in a downturn. That will kill many more, I suspect.
I'm not confusing anything, just restating what he said in his interview with Jessica. The actual quote is "When you get very, very tired -- and I had been up for four nights all night long; Steve and I got mononucleosis -- your head gets in this real creative state and it thinks of ideas that you'd normally just throw out."
Did you know you could access hacker news via http://www.hackerne.ws?
http://www.hackerne.ws
I ran a few of his posts through a Markov chain filter. It's really not that far off from the original:

In the Zero Sum Games, watching the torch pass from startup to cloudkeeper is an aggregation layer of microblogging service output upon which track, bridging, and other services such as Salesforce have always been where Microsoft performs its own jujitsu on itself. What they're called is irrelevant; what they call bloggers. Each of us detect regarding Microsoft comes in large doses from CEO Eric Schmidt, who still has not fully flushed the years of struggle with Redmond at Sun and Novell from his system. Page's responses were somewhat careful and subtly guarded, but Brin seems at ease with the PDC at the atomic item level, allowing a much deeper level of workflow for information when we are and what they call the Now Web depend on the network. That's why we're applying our own bearhug here, by inviting all the steps while dancing backwards.
The only federal taxes that about half Americans pay are for their retirement, and even that is subsidized by the other half.

Of the "not retirement" taxes, the vast majority is already paid by the "rich", with a huge fraction coming from the top 5% alone.

How much more progressive should the system be?

And, in Biden's words, shouldn't the rest of America be patriotic, ie pay taxes?
Interesting. It is a little unclear to me from this article the nature of the discrepancy between the predicted strength of the gravitomagnetic field from general relativity and what the researchers claim to be observing. Whence the increase in strength in the gravitomagnetic field from predictions? Is it an effect from quantum theory? Maybe the article just doesn't go into detail enough, but seems to me either there needs to be a satisfactory explanation for this discrepancy, or, what they are observing is not the gravitomagnetic field.
I don't want to comment in great detail here, but this analysis is factually incorrect. No civil suits are involved. If you're interested, you should really just read the proceedings.
I'll agree it's PC on Hacker News because apparently we have a large number of readers who don't like prop 8. As to the downmodding, there are other reasons that your comment could have been downmodded.

Once you escape the bubble that is Hacker News you find an extremely large population of religious people that are for prop 8.

So you have large populations for and against. Thus, either position is strongly supported and opposed, there is no correct position that will not be assaulted. Google didn't post on Hacker News, they posted on a public blog.
Reminds me of Paul Graham's `cities and ambition' essay...
regexp?
We need to move to algorithmic optimization. I want a language that will switch by itself between using a vector or a list to represent some sequence X, then choose the best one.

In any case, that's what I'm working on.
(Nanotechnology + Swords) ε AwsomeThings
Thanks! That looks very interesting.
When the communists took power in China, mobs would go from house to house in what was euphemistically called "people's courts" The mob would bring out the capitalist, demonstrate all of the rewards of their work. Usually they would be whipped into a frenzy, the idea being that there was no way anybody needed any of that wealth.

Either you understand how deeply immoral that is or you don't.
This has been mentioned already but more meta statistics would be cool, like who has the best track record. I think it would be intresting to measure rightness and wrongness on a weekly basis. Like this week, 70% of the were correctly called. You could determin something along the lines of, people who pick NFL games, are better then those who pick NCAA. If this is just a side project, you could get people to do the meta analysis by providing an api, or do dumps of the data the people can download and process. I was thinking to myself how cool it would be to go and get the same data and do some of that stuff, but it would take me forever to do the scrapping that I think your doing.
And there you have it: the pitfalls of operator overloading.
Build a robot - not one of those snap-together kits. A kit that comes with schematics and parts that you have to solder on. Just figuring out what goes where, in what direction, etc, and studying the schematics as you go, will teach you TONS about electronics.

This applies for all "put together" electronics kits. They sell things like "build your own alarm clock" that I think will work just as well.
There were a few bits about this stuff in Neil Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.
I agree. Every program seemed to have a few "while (true)" lines, often with comments above them like "// infinite time loop" :(

And another example for your earlier point:

// print out the shred id
<<< me.id(); >>>;
Ergonomic Office Chairs
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I am opposed to our government getting involved in marriage, period.

Gays nor straights should have to turn to the government to have their unions blessed.

But since straights have such advantages given to them as a result of our legal system, it would be silly not to have the rights given to all.

Marriage is NOT a religious construct. It is a construct granted because of other dependent bodies of law, including taxes, health care, child custody, property rights.

Without marriage laws to assist, it is more difficult to have our courts administer the other dependent laws. You are therefore denying gays equal access to the legal system and its protections as a result.

You have the right to believe in whatever you want.

You do not have the right, in MY country, to deny other human beings rights or protections that others have.

Go to church all you want. Just leave me out of your bigotry.
hasn't the bauhaus gotten round to making these affordable yet?
Pretty nice, better if it didn't redirect to www.hackerne.ws though...maybe I'm just too picky though!
did not know that. wonder what purpose it serves. "The .ws domain is an abbreviation for "Western Samoa", the nation's official name when two-letter country codes were standardized in the 1970s" -wik.
I'm not religious -- perhaps you missed that point.

Marriage is deeply a religious idea. Religions and their ideas of marriage pre-date all existing governments and other social structures. Therefore it would be silly to make an argument that marriage is government-based: it's not. Governments simply codified and wrote into law those commonly-held ideas of marriage. Later on, as society became more complex, sure, other rights were given based on these definitions.

Civil Unions offer all of the advantages of marriage without getting into a cultural war (unless you want to do that).

Sounds like you enjoy feeling very self-righteous about your beliefs, ie, the whole "in MY country" routine. I wouldn't want to deny rights to anybody. Why don't you calm down a bit and realize that you're trying to argue with somebody who basically agrees with you?

And don't call me a bigot. You don't know me, and based on your post you don't even understand my position on the issue. It's an ad hominem.
Civil unions are the same argument as "separate but equal".

You are a bigot. You wish gays to be set aside as "different".
The State of Location-Based Social Networking On The iPhone
The New Google Moderator
Yeah that would work if we were talking about building a school for gays.

This is not 1960 and we are not talking about African Americans. Once civil unions are defined there is no way they can be treated any differently than other legal relationships, such as limited power of attorney.

Think this through. Please. Stop using a civil rights metaphor. It's not. It's more a question of the licensing power of the state and the nomenclature of the privileges involved.

If I thought for a minute that civil unions were "separate but equal" I would not support them. But I do not feel that way. It's just rhetoric.
The description in the Baroque Cycle involved cooling the hot metal extremely slowly, from which I understand that Stephenson assumed the process was similar to what simulated annealing simulates (AFAIK the creation of diamonds is based on similar principle.)
http://www.hackerne.ws
an awful interview, but the one quote that stood out for me was:

> Davide: That’s what the hardware compatibility list is there for. The EFiX will work only on what we want it to work. This is to limit the users to exactly those that we want to use the module.

so apple dictates mac os x can only run on the hardware they choose, then this company comes along and creates a way to run mac os x on... only the specific non-apple hardware that they dictate it can run on? what's the point?
That's about marriage, not state-regulated marriage. You are being intellectually dishonest.
I'm surprised they managed to get this done with all the credit bailout noise.
I believe a forum member purchased and redirected it as "a gift to the Hacker News community" and was immediately flamed for the inherent security issues.
Mark,

Have you heard of the phrase, stop while you're ahead.

I followed your rebuttal essentially stating that one should not lose sight of small problems for the larger ones, but your derivative spiel about charities and about Darfur is incoherent babble.

Seriously.

Darfur was a non-issue in the US/ world-media until perhaps 2006, and even now, most Americans (and perhaps Germans as well?) don't know much about Darfur, don't care, and most importantly to your argument, they don't donate time or money to the issue. So what charities exactly are benefitting by distributing the 'propaganda' about the 'war' in Darfur.

It's not war, it's genocide.

Are you one of those who also didn't believe Holocaust Germany happened? Not enough evidence for you?

Stick to a logical argument backed up by either logic and data, or please do not argue here again. I'm tired of seeing your pointless rants where you spew this ridiculous, utter, nonsense.
Australia has too few people and is behind Texas economically.

So what does population have to do with it? I thought we're talking about economic strength.

Also way to compare apples to oranges eg the whole of a country to the 2nd highest producing state of the United states.

If we were to make this assumption true, then we would have to compare apples to apples, 2nd highest producing state to 2nd highest producing state (based on a per capita basis)... in which case Western Australia would beat Texas hands down. (nearly $61k USD per person compared to about $41k USD per person)

So while the biggest topic of discussion with the American's seems to be just the financial crisis, Australia is experiencing a weird dichotomy, financial crisis and resource-driven economic boom at the same time.
Should HN have some sort of RSS?
Should HN provide an RSS feed?
I don't know about everyone else, but i think at least for me it'd be nice to have a feed for at least all articles that get at least say 5-10 upvotes so I can have checking HN just be integrated into the workflow of checking my email...

any thoughts?
my login disappears
There are people starving in this world, dying of illnesses that could be treated, and Mr. Perkins is sitting in his empty mall of a boat.

Tom Perkins said the same thing in the CBS interview link (video and text-transcript, Page 2) that Jonknee posted in this thread.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/01/60minutes/main3442...

Asked how much the Falcon cost Perkins, he tells Stahl, "The rule of thumb, Lesley, is that a big yacht costs about a million dollars a meter."

The Maltese Falcon is 88 meters long.

"I know it cost more than $88 million," Stahl remarks. "I've heard about $150 million. But I've also heard $300 million."

"No, not $300 million," Perkins says. "That's too much."

"Why don't, why won't you tell us? You've told us everything else. You don't seem to be embarrassed about everything else?" Stahl says.

"I'm embarrassed about that," Perkins admits.

Asked why, Perkins says, "There's the homeless and charity and there's lots of things you could do with that money that would improve the world, right?"

"Oh, good point. That you bring up yourself?" Stahl asks.

"Yeah," Perkins says. "So, you know, 'How selfish is this guy?' is, I guess, is the criticism. So the answer's pretty selfish, but I'm just not gonna put a number on it."

Why did it have to be the biggest boat?

"Lesley, I could give you some technical reasons on why it really has got to be big to work right. But I just wanted the biggest boat. Let's admit it," he says.

"It’s ego," Stahl remarks.

"Do I have an ego? Yes," Perkins admits. "Is it big? Yes."
Will Future Information Consumption Be In Nested GUIs?
HN does have an RSS feed at http://news.ycombinator.com/rss. As to filtering by upvotes: you might be able to figure something out with Pipes (although I'm not sure how).
What programming language? if Python is an option Beautiful Soup could be one alternative for HTML parsing.
If you know you're going to have infinite time loops, you might as well make a new control structure and call it `loopForever` or whatever.
I heard there was a printed student guide that was informally called 'the face book' at Harvard (and possibly other places) before any of these online projects got underway.

If so, I suspect the key question is whether that term can be repurposed to become a trademark for vaguely similar, but broader, commercial online services, and which actions of Zuckerberg and others may have served to create a defensible claim on that mark.
You're wrong about the violin. You still have to tune it in a certain way to get the same sound. The temperature and body structure and wood and all that affect the sound. So sheet music and knowing the scales is really the best we have. For synth stuff it would be nice to get exact formulas for how the synths produce the sound, but I guess that's considered a trade secret?
Becoming a Sexy Programmer: Slideshows
The article makes it look like bankers get paid for nothing. That is simply not true. Wall Street allocates capital. Somebody has to decide how the capital available in the US gets distributed. For startups, its VCs, for mature companies, it is large institutional banks and the stocks and bond markets. The salaries are large because of the sheer amount of money that floats around. Consider the banker(s) who decide whether to give a loan to GE or handle a mutual fund. Chances are good that that single transaction has several million USD attached to it. Even a few %age of that is a very large amount. The larger comercial banks like JPM and Citigroup have upwards of half a trillion dollars of deposits. Suddenly multi-million dollar salaries don't seem that extravagant anymore.

Furthermore, if top level execs were really overpaid, we would see competition from outsiders capable of offering similar quality at lower price. It is not unusual for corporations to hire outside the company. That executive pay is still high is an indication that maybe, CEOs really are worth a few million dollars a year.

This is further complicated by federal regulation surrounding this sector of the economy. Banking regulations make it nearly impossible to start a bank. Other financial institutions are similarly constrained (though maybe not to such an extent). This artificially decreases supply and therefore, increases prices.

Are there some abuses in pay? Sure, just like there are abuses in everything else. However, because business execs are paid X times the average American and some demonstrably bad CEOs are rewarded extravagantly for their incompetence does not imply that capitalism has failed and all high-level pay needs to be regulated.
The Cringely Plan: See the light
The current RSS takes the front page stories. Is that not enough of a filter for you?
Famous Awk One-Liners Explained, Part I
nice!

a similar site could be spun w/ the opencalais api from reuters, although i've noticed it attribute quotes to the subject rather than the speaker when context gets vague. afaik, quotations are also only available in the rdf-formatted feed.

my new "how far can i get on this today" project: a (visual) way to connect quotes that contradict both the speaker and within party lines.
Different domain, different cookie.
Is your brand awesome? Should it be?
This is a fantastic write-up. Lots of good information considering I have often found myself using one-liners without fully understanding how they work.
The page isn't redirecting properly
Iceweasel has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.
* This problem can sometimes be caused by disabling or refusing to accept cookies.
So is tinyurl too big to let fail?

Spread the links around shortening services-- it's not like we need every URL you ever shortened to work forever.

Also, some sites (like our little ri.ms site) also create a tinyurl for you so you can have those to fall back on if you need for whatever reason.