skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i admit it, i'm a clicker...

it was just too much for me. i'm suing you for rehab therapy now to cure my aclicktion.

they say you haven't succeeded as a business until you're sued. congratulations, give me your money now
Well, I've always been a fan of the 37signals school of thought around bringing simplicity to web applications. You know - the whole "Getting Real" thing.

The way I see it, this has a better business model than a lot of web startups nowadays. At the very least, we've got a slow "burn rate" seeing as how we've spent about 5 hours on the project. As for generating revenue? I think we've got a while before we have to worry about that. We're more focused on scaling the systems than anything right now.

Over 100k clicks on day one? Here's to a successful launch!
There's a fine line between irony/parody and wasting everyone's time...
Second largest point gain ever!
<grunt> bigthboy not amused... buttons make bigthboy angry! <roar>...

but in all honesty, what is the true point behind this? I am aware of people's addiction to press buttons, but if you can convince someone to pay you in order to press a button then you've got something. Without that, I really just don't think this is anything more than a time-sink for those who are procrastinating, and most certainly not a start-up. =P
Will the stock market remain volatile for a long time?
I agree that engaging in post-dictions is a pointless exercise.

However, I still hold out hope that some people might still have something interesting to say on days with interesting fluctuations in economic indicators- Their incredible unpredictability is conceptually interesting on many levels.
Dialyzer - A Must Use Tool
Somewhere there's a real startup who posted here and nobody upvoted or commented about their work.

I'm sure this is pressing their buttons about now.
This took you five hours? Seriously?
why would anyone come back to this..what the hell..i dont get it
The images are a very nice touch. I spent more time tracking them down though.
Short covering.
aka Sucker's Rally.
HN Seattle meetup tonight, 7:30, at University Zoka
Depends, like I said. I've used it both in job hunting and filling positions that are open. In the case where I was job hunting I did searches on the people who interviewed me either before (if I happened to know who I was meeting with) or after the interviews.

I even searched for people I didn't interview with, but were listed as having worked for the same company with similar job titles. It's a good way gauge the caliber of the people they've hired to work there.
Is it better for the environment to read your newspaper online?
Are you working on your startup full time? The cost of a single person working on a startup is at least $30k/year, even if you cut salary to the bone.
It's not as clear-cut-wasteful as you might assume. I wondered about this when I read your line and mused on whether newspapers or websites are more wasteful. Here's a Slate article I dug out:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=346912
No, no, no - just because the NSA developed it does not mean it is the right solution for this problem. Read the comment above explaining fast versus slow hashing.
These calculations are sorta dangerous.

Online Newspaper X has over 20m online readers. Most of them have at some point subscribed to print publications @ $200+ per year. If it was a membership site at just $2 per month, wouldn't they be able to keep some readers? 10%? 5%?.

You're not telling me someone making $80k per year would replace the newspaper she reads every day to to save a few cents a read?

Wouldn't people pay to use google? What if it was just $0.50 a month? or $0.01 per search?

The concept that if people use a site, it's worth money, has not proved itself.
Digital Dark Age Could Destroy Our Cultural Record
I don't visit Ycombinator for this kind of news.
Reconnaissance Orbiter Reveals Details of a Wetter Mars
Wish I could be there ... can we do this once a month?
The real question is, why don't people understand English? "He" is not always gender-specific, depending on the context. Don't like it? Well, I don't like the word "moist", but I put up with it since it's part of the damned language.
Agreed. I've been working with it too - for touting how it "opens up facebook" it certainly lacks a lot of features...
At least your main competitor gets ad revenue:

http://www.instantrimshot.com/
There was a big VW short squeeze today:
http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/top-5/2008/10/28/Volks...
Shit. I'll have to talk to the CEO about this. We should have done more market research.
It's my belief that the "how" is as important as the "what" when it comes to your business. If you don't put the same quality of thought into how you execute on your solution, your value proposition is that much harder to emphasize.
"10087 clicks from you... Thank You"
I think you fade this rally. The only news to come out today was very negative: consumer confidence came in at 38%, vs. the expected 52%. This was a record low. The Case-Schiller home price index dropped by a record amount as well. Other indicators looked bad as well: the CDX (an index of the credit quality of investment-grade companies, as measured by the price of their credit default swaps) was roughly unchanged, 10yr notes were only a little bit lower, the yield on 2yr notes is still a ridiculously low 1.6%, the primary mortgage rate remains well over 7%, etc.

So the question is, what good news drove this rally? I can't think of any. I think you sell stocks here.

The biggest risk is the Fed meeting tomorrow. The market is expecting a 50 basis point cut in the Fed Funds target rate (currently at 1.5%). If the Fed only goes 25bp, there will be a huge selloff. If the Fed goes 75bp, there's a moderate rally. 50bp, I think we see a moderate selloff.
There's that whole "hope" theme. And lots and lots of people voted early, in the midst of this awful financial mess. They're immune from last minute turnarounds.
Sweet, all you need is some venture capital and you're on your way to the big time!
I realise it's a gag. But...

Have the site sponsored by different people each day, and record the number of clicks on that day. Keep an archive, make it competitive.

e.g. 30th October is Obama day (just an example - not partisan), click to show your support! Sponsor pays some rate per click (or just to hire the site for the day).

As others have mentioned, your button would appear in many places (facebook widget, etc), so that would add some value to the potential sponsors.

Of course, they could put up their own button, but that wouldn't get them into your archives or the kudos of having the one and only 'clickthatbutton.com' buzz.

I don't think I'm being serious. But then, it's not that much crazier than the million-dollar homepage.
Don't forget its sister site:

http://www.sadtrombone.com/
There are already protocols better designed for that sort of thing (think SNMP or Syslog).

RSS is really just an XML schema optimized content syndication - it just isn't the right tool for the job. Not too mention that you probably don't want your one central server polling 50,000 desktops for updated RSS feeds every hour.
I'm worried about the result, and I do think it will only be short-term, but I don't think I'm overestimating the impact. 8 years of security theatre, either you're with the terrorists or you're against us, taking money from the poor to give to the rich, overblown right wing ideology, all perceived overnight as evaporated. It's not the final reality of a democratic president (which will almost certainly be mixed), but the perception of newfound freedom for a day or two. Its going to be huge.
It's fun that I was downmodded for explaining exactly why this problem happens. I used to be a game developer, and believe me, that's the true reason behind the problem.
I agree with you partly, but if everyone did this, where would the innovation in CSS be? A lot of people that have done new things and pushed the envelope in CSS seem to have brought skills from the print design world...

With judicious use of images and some other techniques, almost anything can be done in CSS. It just shouldn't be the starting point for your visual design, imho.
Your right. I think you need to make a distinction here.

Someone searching for 'stylish coffee machine' on Google is maybe 1% or 2% of selling a coffee machine to given a good product offering & e commerce experience. A digg visitor checking out this super stylish appliance is maybe a 0.1% chance. probably not even that. (same applies for chance of becoming a regular reader or app user or whatever).

This leads people to post a lot about how useless digg traffic is. But that's not entirely true. It has other uses. As nostrademons mentions, they are talkers. they are also bloggers & linkers, commentors on other blogs etc. If someone else brings up the topic, they jump in.

Different types of sites/apps/etc. have different channels that work for them. Digg may be useful in helping some of these along.

A secondary use is validation. Someone's already got a Google Office Account. They copy paste a piece of their spreadsheet on to it every month to share with 3-4 people. They then read a digg on how awesome Google Office is & how this blogger is ditching MS altogether. maybe this'll push them to write up their next proposal on G! Docs. etc. etc.

It's not 'conversion' traffic. But it still might be useful.
Shannon's capacity refers to the maximum signaling speed at the physical layer but this article muddles it all up with higher levels of the network abstraction layers.

That said, I think the title is probably true. It's been known for a decade that turbo codes and low-density-parity-check (LDPC) codes can approach the Shannon limit, especially if relatively long decoding latencies are tolerable. It just took some time for turbo and LDPC codes to make into standards and get deployed.
Not really :) I tease my girlfriend because she's on it sometimes for an hour or more at a time, but it's 'cause she's using the chat mostly. I'm generally more antisocial online; I disable chat and basically use facebook to keep up with out of town family and to play chess/scrabble.

I do think there's something important to people about what they've built though, which is something hopefully Yahoo and the others will be able to figure out too, but has so far eluded the other social networks. I like Yahoo, and I'm actually rooting for them. I'd really like to see Yahoo get back on its feet, and I hope it can do so independently of Microsoft. That would be great to see :)
I don't think so. The reason we kept bouncing off the low 8000s on the Dow is because there are real money buyers who are buying stocks there based on fundamentals like P/E ratio, expected earnings, etc. These guys are going to hold on to their portfolios for a while, rather than sell out for a quick buck. The type of guys who would take profit after today are hedge funds and other fast money types -- but they have had to give back a ton of money to investors, and their power to move the market is now limited. Even if those guys take profit tomorrow, I don't think it will noticeably hurt the price.
Good point. A push-based tech would definitely be preferable there.
Google Books — More Open Access?
sorry, didn't see this until just now - hope to join you for the next one.
Doh! Wish I had heard about this earlier... I have plans tonight, but I live right near there, so if you do one again I'll definitely try to make it over.
YUI 2.6.0 Support in Aptana Studio
Hmm, maybe more people agree with this guy than I thought. I have used all of the windowing systems I mentioned, and I vastly prefer being able to see open windows, with the few things that need to run in the background being tucked away in the tray. The OS X dock just seems wierd to me, in terms of being able to quickly access open windows and to get a good idea what is running on your system.
much more

(For those missing the joke, http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1017105/more_cowbell/ )
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This link requires some kind of signup.
It ends up on pages like cnn.com, just like lots of other news that's important to many people. I guess once in a while it's easy enough to ignore, but with all the volatility, this was the third or fourth time I'd seen a post about the stock market bouncing around, and thought to myself that it's really not that interesting.
Hmmm... I think you should definitely go after the enterprise market.
It's just a Yahoo account. I was logged in so I didn't notice. Sorry about that.
Say hi to the Delicious Monster guys. They work out of Zoka. (http://www.delicious-monster.com/blog/2005/02/delicious-mons...)
This is the part that really starts to scare me. We keep seeing record or near record swings, and it's starting to look like we'll get at least one per week.

Bad downturns happen, and there is plenty of reason to expect that we can recover from them, yet I can't help but feel that these sorts of wild oscillations show some sort of deeper trouble in the system itself.
Everyone copies everyone else, if no one copied anyone else we would have 1 operating system, 1 car to drive, and 1 type of dessert cake to eat.

Anyway, I'm interested to see where Microsoft takes this product. I hope Ozzie (SP?) is helping move Microsoft in a new, better direction. Science knows since after the 2003 suites they've been making worse crap than usual.
I heard of this a while ago, but was skeptical whether such a large undertaking would meet with any success. Now they have a shipping app to point to as a concrete success.

Also interesting given the buzz about Wine and CrossOver, as Cocotron is the bizarro world Wine.
Does anyone have parking advice for an eastsider making the trip?
Yeah, just park in the neighborhood in front. You might have to walk a block or two but it's easy and free.
it looks like someone took a lambo front end and merged it with an audi R8 rear.
It's just that the hardware threads are slow, I think --- compiling stuff on the T2K also took forever. It also seems to me that there's seemingly little value in having 4 threads per core: it forces you to parallelize programs that ran fine with normal cores just to match the performance you'd get without hardware threads...
nobody's saying it's a bad thing.
The plan has been for 1.9 to be a stable series for a long (at least over a year) time now. I'm not sure there are any concrete plans for 2.0 at this time. If you use Ruby, now would be a good time to start getting comfortable with 1.9, though there doesn't seem to be much rush.

I updated one of my projects to work with 1.8.6 and 1.9 a couple months ago and it was mostly painless. I'm looking forward to the nice performance improvement and some of the api changes when it becomes production ready.
Ask HN: What are some of the best Tutorials/Resources on How to Build an IPhone App?
What are some of the best Tutorials/Resources on How to Build an IPhone App?
Google Killer.
It's still a fairly decent reference if you need to update your software for 1.9. Several incompatibilities I ran into were listed there. For others problems, I did have to search the mailing lists, though.
So, why are you sending the coordinates of each click back to the server?

I'm sure it would make a nice looking heat map, but is there some other reason?
Anybody interested in a San Diego meetup?
This is pretty good for Microsoft. There's finally a feature in the Windows UI that I would like to steal for my Ubuntu machine:

"Dragging a window to the top of the screen maximizes it automatically; dragging it off the top of the screen restores it. Dragging a window to the left or right edge of the screen resizes the window so that it takes 50% of the screen. With this, a pair of windows can be quickly docked to each screen edge to facilitate interaction between them. "
Wow, as a programmer, who likes CSS a lot, I totally disagree. Learn about CSS. Don't link to a reset - put it in your css, and understand what it does. DO NOT use a grid. Disagree with the doctype.... and so on. Feels like I'm being talked down to.
I recommend you to enroll on the iPhone Developer Program (it's free if you plan initially to develop for the iPhone simulator only).
I recommend you then to download Apple's documents under 'Getting Started Documents', including memory management and play with the tutorials.
Apple has plenty of resources on their program, they did a good job supporting developers. Good luck!
I wouldn't worry, your button is much nicer looking than theirs (it's inverted, wtf?)
I don't check cnn.com. I use filters like HN and twitter.
Techcrunch, is that you?
Twitter developer claims the 'the internet is built wrong'
The Internet's on Shaky Ground
I cheated:

while true; do curl -d submit.x=1 -d submit.y=1 -b clickthatbutton=10521 http://clickthatbutton.com/; echo; done

edit: and apparently you (or my ISP) throttle ;)
Then don't vote up.

It's just like capitalism, if your unhappy, don't buy the product.
Our logo is a button. I'd sponsor you for a day.
I find it interesting that anytime pg posts a comment it gets upvoted like crazy even if it isn't particularly brilliant. Honestly, I agree with him about this subject. I didn't check the market close, and the second largest daily increase in history is a great piece of information to be informed about. However, if an average user would have posted that it would have probably received a mix of agreement and "but it's not hacker news".

I realize that this is pretty much his site, and he makes the rules, but does that mean that we should all be hitting that little up arrow next to his name out of gratitude? Honestly, I don't think that he probably checks on the number of upvotes we have given him when looking at yc applications. Although, he may have some sweet filter algorithm that automatically takes that into account...
I'll be curious to see how that works for us dual screeners.
Vista's new network and sharing center is probably the worst thing about it. Otherwise I like the OS better than XP, but that is a disaster. I don't notice it so much on my desktop, since I set it and then forget it, but on my laptop it's a constant pain.
Whew. Almost forgot about this one. I'll be there
Thank you for finally emphasizing the fact that not every website is a startup.
Seconded. More advance notice would be nice (although I'm not sure I would have moved my massage to accommodate it in any event).
Nice list.

More here: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/schedule.html
(some overlap w/Dynamo, Paxos, Frangipani, and Petal).
The problem with these methods is that they assume you can figure out average months before cancellation.

If 10% of your members are still active (have never cancelled) since you launched, how can you estimate this? They may stay on for another week or another 5 years.

Clearly, this isn't something that can have a hard answer, but it would be nice to reduce the guesswork.
Keep in mind that it's a record point gain, not a percentage gain. We're constantly breaking those records because of inflation, and it's nothing to be particularly concerned about.

If you keep hearing about record-breaking percentage swings, well, that's a little more worrying.
37 signals provides products that people pay for and get value from.

Your button adds no value, has no stickyness, and is not something people will pay for.

I think your "product" here is just creative trolling.
With books, yes. With newspapers, no. I know that with some people, it's a ritual, but I can't imagine doing the flip and fold and flip and fold and wrinkle and crumple and cuss and tear routine with a newspaper on the subway or bus; instead, I just hold my phone up and read the news.

The runaway success of the iPhone should open the way for handheld internet readers to become a part of everyday life for more than just gadget geeks.
MTV smacks YouTube, posts almost every music video ever
Volkswagen temporarily becomes largest company in the world
Assuming you already know a bit of C and that you like learning by tutorial I'd recommend working through "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" 3rd Ed. by Aaron Hillegass. You will get a good tutorial-based introduction to Objective C, Xcode/Interface Builder and the design patterns used to build both OSX and iPhone apps. (iPhone is not mentioned in the book at all but the general patterns are the same.)

Be sure to understand the retain/release memory model as the garbage collector is not avail. on the iPhone.

With the background you gain from Hillegass you'll find it very easy to pick up the differences between OSX development (which uses AppKit) and the iPhone development (which uses UIKit). There is a lot of good information found at the iPhone Dev. Program's website which bridges the gap.

The tutorial approach is always a little frustrating to me personally as often details are glossed over and the topics are not covered systematically but if you supplement the tutorial with the information provided by Apple you can resolve all the little annoyances as they come up.

Finally I recommend watching the videos Apple's prepared about iPhone development.

Good luck and have fun!
Any chance this means there's a calendar API?
Upvote this if you feel like it. What do you think of my new startup? Got the idea at http://clickthatbutton.com/
I have to agree with you, when it comes down to the internet, its all about the ease of distributing information about whats happening RIGHT NOW. Take most of the technology blogs, and even HN for example. A great portion of what's on here or coming through the blogs is an overview or look at whats happening right now, today, or information about what somebody did TODAY. I also use these sources everyday as a primary source of what's going on. However, when I want a full fledged story about not only what is happened but what has happened and why it happened I tend to go to other sources, the Wall Street Journal for example.

However, what you need to notice is that even the more complex periodicals are also moving online. Newsweek, the WSJ itself, the New York Times, and so on and so forth. I think it truly is just a matter of time before even these move to a totally online system. No more Time Magazine delivered every day to your mailbox, instead its in your inbox.
After you're done writing your application, you're going to want to test it to make sure there isn't an abundance of bugs and other problems with what you've done.

Hmmm, not really very good advice. Automated testing after the fact is usually a losing battle. You don't have to do TDD, but waiting until you're "done" to start testing is going to be a painful proposition.
Any Tips for a Sales Website for SaaS Product?
hot dog awesome, not going to the moon awesome
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sorry?! i lost all my tabs and i was working on something important. dude, it's not april 1 anymore.
All good ideas of directions to take this, imo. Now that's insight. The have a different sponsor every day is something I thought of while I was making my pointless post (see bottom of this page) but neglected to mention.
Numbers That Go Up
I don't visit HN for this kind of comment :)

Seriously, the not hacker news comment has been beaten to death on this site. All you have to do is not say anything and move on when you see something you think is off topic. Otherwise you just add to the noise.