skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I attended the Startup School in 2007, I had to apply. I was sure I wasn't going to get in, but I did, and when I got there I understood that the application wasn't elitist, it was because the venue was pretty fixed in size... and the quality of the event was much different due to this (relatively light) filter you'd applied.

I think hacker news would be much different if you applied a similar filter.

If everyone here were someone sincerely interested in doing a startup, who believed that it was moral to make money by improving people's lives, and believed that technological innovation was a good way to do it, then I think the site would be much different.

The early quality has turned HN into a popular source for a certain segment of news. But that has diluted it as an effective community.

Occasionally there's been talk of doing another site along these lines, but the right kind of filter wasn't obvious.

I think that it is clear what the right kind of filter is-- an application form like the Startup School one.

I don't know what your intentions are for HN going forward, if you have any interest in making significant changes or not. After Nirvana (my open source web platform project) is released, and my startups MVP is done, I intend to write software for a community of startup founders and see if we can make a go of it.

But you have a much bigger following. I think if you liked this idea, picking a hundred or so of the commenters you liked the best from the site would enable rapid evaluation of such applications (especially if the applications were relatively short). However, it might be too easy to game such a system.

But that's where my thoughts are. I always like to try and propose a solution when I see a problem, even if I am not sure my solution will work.
I was not trying to say that it the fact. Actually, I should not mentioned developers - because that is very broad term.

The observation from different blogs and posts is that business practices of company in question is not well received by hackers community. Now the key question here is what is modern definition of "hacker".

I claim that our society (at least online society) seems to define hacker as a person who has values which are not compatible with business practices of certain companies.
I don't mean this to be offensive, but I'm getting the distinct impression that you don't have any familiarity with Taiwanese politics past what you've read in (usually poor) English media coverage.

The 國民黨 (which you call the "Chinese" nationalist party) has been losing support in each election cycle since 2000. Also, I don't think it's an accident that Ma's impressive results in the last presidential election coincided with his abandonment of the 國民黨's usual platform of unification with China. He campaigned almost purely on economic issues. Similarly the legislative victories came on an economic platform.

The guomingdang's victories have put the brakes on a few localization initiatives such as name changes of formerly state-owned businesses (e.g. 中華電信). However, the bulk of pan-green efforts have remained intact. Taiwanese is now taught at elementary school and children are no longer forbidden to speak it. History classes now focus on Taiwanese rather than Chinese history. Identity polls published by the politically-neutral Apple Daily now find a smaller than ever ratio of people consider themselves to be Chinese and a majority consider themselves to be Taiwanese only. This flies directly in the face of your claim that "No one considers Taiwan a country, aside from a minority party in Taiwan".
I rather see freedom from censorship here.
I started with Turbo C++ 4.0 in 1994 as a geeky 8th grader. You're evoking some powerful memories. A tremendously sad day.
I know you were looking for an answer from Matt but I thought I would offer up my opinion here (as you might have noticed, I love talking about this stuff).

Our models currently suggest that the presence of contextual advertising is a significant predictive factor of webspam.

We use 10-fold bagging and classification trees, so it's not all that easy to generalize. But I pulled one model out at random for fun.

The top predictive factor in this particular model is the probability outcome of the bigrams (word pairs) extracted the visible text on the page. Here are a few significant bigrams:

relocationcompanies
productsproviding
productspure
qualitybook
recruitmentwebsite
ticketsour
thesetraffic
representingclients
todayplay
tourshigh
registryrepair
rentproperties
weddingportal
printingcanvas
prhuman
privacyprotection
providingefficient
waytrade
printingstationery
priceseverything
website*daily

Next, this model looks for tokens extracted from the URL and particular meta tags from the page. Similar to above, but I believe unigrams only. A few examples follow. Please keep in mind that none of these phrases are used individually... they are each weighted and combined with all other known factors on the page:

offer
review
book
more
Management
into
Web
Library
blog
Joomla
forums

The model then looks at the outdegree of the page (number of unique domains pointed to).

From there, it breaks down into TLD (.biz, .ru, .gov, etc)

The file gets pretty hard to decipher at this point (it's a huge XML file) but contextual advertising is used as a predictive variable throughout.

Just from eyeballing it, it appears to be more or less as significant as the precision and recall rate of high value commercial terms, average word length (western languages only), and visible text length.

Based on what I'm looking at right now, my answer would be that sponsored posts are going to be far more harmful to the user experience than advertising.

Can't answer the rest of your question which I assume relates to the number of ad blocks or amount of space taken up by ads... we don't measure it.

Edit: Just realized that Google will probably delist this page within 24 hours. Should've used a gif for those bigrams. Oh well ;-)
Did anyone get a chance to try this out?
Lightning turns water to crystal
27 minute

FTFY
I'm not a YC funded company, but I don't think one has to die for there to be another option. And YC's existence should not stop anyone from offering alternatives. YC created something that works for them..and others from the looks of it and should continue to carry on in their own way.
LuaJIT adds another massive speed-up on top of the already healthy Lua performance.

http://luajit.org/performance_x86.html

http://luajit.org/performance.html

That said, I do agree that Lua can be more cumbersome than Python or Ruby.
Young(er) dev here:

It still is. It's the first, foremost, and only recommendation we give for a C book on Freenode among the veterans.

K&R is how I initially learned of Ritchie, along with Unix and hacker lore.

This is a sad day for me personally. We're starting to the lose the original hackers.

We need to start thinking about biographies and archival options. I appreciate that dmr was a private man, but we need to start making more opportunities to interview these guys.

Zed Shaw's work might eventually supplant K&R as my choice for a tutorial for people new to C, but I'll always recommend it to people who really want to know their roots.
It's disturbing to read XXXXX "has been burning through its $1.1 million quickly" and all they could think of is raising more money. Why about revenue? Did the idea of making money just drop off the face of the Silicon Valley?

That's just to show that inexperience entrepreneurs like Jessica ( not saying she's not a smart person ) has hype caught up with reality. It's not surprising that these entrepreneurs will fight a long and tough battle ahead.
Okay, Dustin. I have one for you to investigate next.

Does iOS watch your use patterns for the phone and mute alerts when it thinks you're asleep? It could be just me, but I know I'm not the only one with a Pavlovian response when I hear the mail dinger. And the phone is abnormally quiet until just around the time I normally get up, then I hear the morning mail ding in.

Am I nuts? Wife says I am.
#include <stdio.h>
main()
{
printf("goodbye, world\n");
}
Parse is hiring engineers to work on hard problems.
Parse is building a new layer of services that abstracts the internet away for mobile developers. We need great engineers to join us in this ambitious goal.

This isn't some Web 2.0 company flipping bits for ad sales. We have difficult and interesting engineering problems to solve. We need people who will not back down if they have to write a compiler, or hack a fast approximate solution to an NP-complete problem.

We move fast. We launched our private beta a little over two months after starting the company. Since then we've signed up over 3000 developers and have dozens of production apps in the store running on Parse.

We are four very technical cofounders who have been early employees or founders at successful startups. No matter your background, you will learn a lot working with the team at Parse.

We're based in San Francisco and are looking for people in San Francisco.

We offer significant equity, market salary, fully covered health insurance, your choice of equipment, but most importantly the opportunity to reinvent how applications are built.

Please get in touch - email Kevin at kevin@parse.com and mention your favorite programming language.
If the idea i'm talking about was implemented, i'd define a Journalist as someone that has a degree and a license. Whether they are a guy with a blog or a nightly news anchor. The lack of definition right now is the kind of thing i'm talking about.
I highly recommend you backup with iTunes first. I have run the beta for months and hadn't backed up in a while. iCloud was wiped last week and when I updated to the GM I lost everything. My last backup was in July, so that's where I had to start from there.
Zynga Launches New Games on ProjectZ Website
c--; /* to echo a sentiment expressed on g+ */
Sorry, I'm not a 20 something saying wow 70 is a long time, I'm closer to 50 than 40 so I can almost see 70. I was trying to provide some perspective on 70 not being old. It should still be a very productive time in peoples lives, and it's still way too young to die.
If I came to your house and showed you my gun, explained in loving detail how it worked, and informed you that I would brutally slay you if you disagreed with me - wouldn't you "agree" with anything I said?

Because that's the only reason Taiwan could be said to agree with mainland China.

Literally. As in, "If you formally declare independence we will kill you all in an invasion."
So, when you become the equivalent of a weathered, crotchety old man in the Open Source community, in IRC, at meetups, or anywhere else... kindly fuck off.

Sorry to be so blunt, but that's the point, here. It's fine not to want to help annoying beginner #5,000,000, but it doesn't require being an ass to the community, at large. Just keep your mouth shut, unless you have something nice or helpful to say, please.
Paul Graham is a really smart guy who has helped a lot of great startups, but that doesn't mean he's always right. He responded to a really incendiary post attacking a company he's trying to help succeed with a response that wasn't as carefully considered as it might have been.

If the original post had been of the form "It's a shame they're working with Monsanto because", then I expect he would either not have replied, or would have made a more measured response, but with a similar substance: when you have a startup that you're serious about growing, you sell to whoever you have to in order to keep the business moving forward. I'm not sure whether I entirely agree with that sentiment, but it's not that surprising for a pragmatic, fairly apolitical libertarian.

There are only two things that are disappointing at all: that he seemed like he was trying to slam the door on the debate, and that he disagrees with you. The former happened because he made a cranky response, while the latter can only be disappointing if you naturally expect someone as smart and likable as pg to agree with you on things like that.

I would say that this warrants taking a deep breath and relaxing first, then responding calmly and carefully.
Bob Galvin deserves a lot of credit for pioneering the mobile phone industry, and for propelling Motorola to be one of the most successful tech companies of its day. He was also a major philanthropist, and along with Bob Pritzker was a major contributor to the scholarship fund that paid for my college education. Thank you sir, rest in peace.
The IT industry is one of only a very few that can leverage technology so successfully. This allows for some unique opportunities (like "lifestyle businesses") that you don't see parallels to in other industries.

One guy with some skill, a computer and a marketable idea can build a business for himself and live very comfortably. If he wants to work at the beach for the day, he can. If he wants to work out of a coffeeshop, he can. That degree of freedom and ability to leverage technology isn't found in many other industries. That's why you don't find any parallels.
They must have forgotten to include Space on their research list! But will it come out of fiction?
> What I'd like to see is the ability to classify contacts by who is or isn't allowed to actually ring through to the handset.

Google voice allows you to do this. I have everyone except my friends and family go through call screening before they can ring my phone. I also have a recruiter who was calling me blocked with a "this number is disconnected" message. (he used 6 different numbers before I completely blocked him... yeesh)
You can't be serious. Licenses for law and medicine impede freedom. They limit our choices of (and the cost of) legal and medical services. We are just willing to make this trade off because average people have a hard time determining the quality of these practitioners and we don't want people going to jail or dying in surgery because they aren't very smart consumers.

You can't "improve" speech without making it less free. Sometimes the loss of freedom is worth it (like yelling fire in a crowded room) but most of the time it is not worth it. Restrict our freedom of speech so that journalists can't use anonymous sources? Give me a break.

"I'll leave someone else to define [the standard]." That's convenient, since there is no standard that would be enforceable without being oppressive. I challenge you to come up with a standard that would solve the problem you state, that would be enforceable, that wouldn't be an insult to basic freedoms of speech. You also have to define what a "journalist" is. In the internet world, we are all journalists.
If you were apolitical, you wouldn't see monsanto as "a company which pushes injustice across the world".

Notice that this thread is full of such disparaging assertions, but no actual details, no citations, and the closest anyone gets is to pointing to people who have a very clear political agenda who make accusations against monsanto.

"what is essentially a very well held and defensible position"

I think this is what he's referring to as "dumb". This is not a "defensible" position because it isn't a fact, it is merely a dislike. As for "very well held" its unclear what you mean, except maybe you mean "widely held". I think it is dumb to assume that just because a lot of people say the same thing about something, that means they are right, especially when they cannot go into details, and what they are saying is just broad political assertions.

"The point is, I am informed, I know exactly what I am against, and have every reason to be outraged at the injustice perpetrated by Monsanto."

If you're informed, why aren't you specific? Even when describing what you're outraged, the best you can say is "injustice". Such a weak word, and what does it really mean anyway? They did something you don't like?

Wendy's screwed up my order the other day, giving me someone else's food, and they didn't give me a coupon to compensate. Oh, the injustice! Sure, that's silly, but at least I described specifically what they did wrong!

You're "outraged" at something you can't even describe. Yet you're "apolitical". Really?

Personally, I'm so tired of people going around repeating things they heard from other people, without doing any investigation or applying a legitimate moral compass to the issue.

This leads to "heartless automatons"... people who are easily controlled by media outlets. "Hate walmart!" (but don't hate Target, they're just the same, only they're unionized, and therefore they're not evil.) "Blame Wall Street!" (But ignore the government that, via regulation, forced banks to make loans to people who couldn't repaying them, claiming that to do otherwise was "racist".) etc. etc. etc.
Rather than "banning" an entire site that seems to have some spammy pages, why not index only the home page, and flag it in the Google Webmaster Tools dashboard?

Also: are any specific notices or warnings given in Google Webmaster Tools, to inform the webmaster and give some clues about the findings and decisions of your team?

Thanks Matt for taking time to explain things here.
App Developer Gives In To Lodsys In David-And-Goliath Patent Fight
I swear mine does it too.

I suspect it mutes alerts after a period of inactivity (but it could be something sneaky like a combination of the photosensor and accelerometer reporting dark and no movement).
Users don't care what the URL looks like, Amazon does quite a bit of business with its crappy URL's and closures allow linking to actions without having to have a resource for every action. This is extraordanaryily useful when building complex applications.

Look, I use both styles daily and I'm telling you it'll be over my dead body before I allow someone to take closure style ugly links away from me. You aren't going to convince me that manually routed URL are always preferrable.
AFAIK, Siri internally asks these questions to Wolfram Alpha. And I am not sure if these questions are going into Apple's database. IMO, Wolfram Alpha is getting clever than Apple by this. :)
I want you to put this in perspective.

I read your previous post and you were working a shit job. I am a CEO of a tech company and I can assure you I know what you are talking about. I've never heard of such crazy hours (on a regular basis).

You're 20, so that necessarily means your job opportunities are limited. But so what? I was 24 before I got my first "real" job. And today I'm doing pretty well by any standards.

You have the next 20 years to do manifest whatever kind of crazy dream you have in your head. So go do it.

Edit: Thought maybe I would also suggest to add a few words about your location, what type of coding you like to do (languages, algorithms, domain space, w/e), and how you would rate your own level of emotional maturity. Maybe there are a few people out there who might be willing to give you a shot if it's the right fit... but be honest! Nothing could be worse than misrepresenting yourself and ending up similarly unhappy all for a few bucks. Way better to live honestly, trudge through the short-term pain, and find a long term solution that makes you really happy.
RIP, dmr
Really? I've talk to several VCs that were very active previously and they all agreed that valuations are frothy and now is not the time to invest. Naturally valuations are going to be lower since that's what the buyer's perception of that market.
I still have K&R on my shelf.

Thank you, DMR.
The man seems to be an infinite source of eye-moistening stories.

Really nice, thanks.
Advice taken. I have an offer from them right now, as well as an offer from elsewhere -- after seeing this whole thread, I think I'll go for the elsewhere. Thanks for the advice!
This may be a little old, but this really reminds me of the LG EnV Touch - the phone I had before my iPhone4. Here's a picture: http://admintell.napco.com/ee/images/uploads/gadgetell/lg-en...

Worse than putting the speakers on the back, the LG team actually stuck the speakers on the INSIDE of the phone. Yeah, it's fine and loud when you open it up, but you can barely hear the phone ring when it's closed and in a pocket. Things like this really bother me. Thanks for pointing this out.
next_newborn = calloc(1, sizeof(WORLD_CHANGER_ST));
RIP Dennis. Now that's a guy worth mourning about.

I'll check CNN and the BBC to see their special reports, surely if they had them when some marketing CEO kicked the bucket they'll give at least ten times the amount of coverage to a man who was 100 times his better!
Two visi0naries lost in one week. Unfortunately, Dennis Ritchie's passing will not get the level of coverage of Steve Jobs, but he deserves it. Without his critical contributions, the UNIX core of Steve Jobs' great products could not exist ...
alnayyir, you've been hellbanned. In case you didn't know.
What a wonderful story. Just when I thought I had shed all the tears I was going to shed over this over this past week, it just all comes right back. He was a legend, but also a good human being. A true rarity.
America's growing anti-intellectualism
If you have used technology of any sort over the last few decades there's a pretty decent chance that you've used technology that Steve Jobs had a significant impact on.

But the chances are 100.00% that you've used technology Dennis Ritchie has had a deeply profound impact on.
Can you elaborate regarding "taking care of shareholders" and why those things contributed to you not wanting to work there?
I didn't like how some doctor replied on that page talking like he's holier than thou. Not only did he not personally know to what extent Jobs was inflicted. He also thinks that he knows about all forms of therapy even though it's obvious he's only received training in hiw own discipline.
Hmm, I'd consider adwords and adsense as platformization.
Learning from books by yourself is one of the most inefficient ways to learn. This is particularly true for technologists. Very few professionals learn their fields very well in a vacuum -- it always struck me as absurd that software engineers are expected to do so.
Interview with Dennis M. Ritchie
Unix's founding fathers [2004]
Although there's no numbers for the 3GS and 3rd generation iPod touch, GigaOM did benchmark the iPad, iPad 2, iPhone 4 and 4th generation iPod touch to find small to otherwise noticeable improvements across the board: http://gigaom.com/apple/benchmarking-the-ios-5-update/

I have a 32GB 3rd generation iPod touch as my low-end development unit (the 8GB models can't be upgraded past 4.2.x), and I can also confirm that it is noticeably snappier.
I setup http://www.saasaholics.com for SaaS and Startup founders to help each other out
> I'm not advocating limiting free speech in any way, [...] i'm saying a standard should be set.

> Just as not having a basic food hygiene certificate doesnt stop you cooking in your own home, it would be a requirement to open a restaurant.

Oh yeah, you don't want to limit free speech, just the other kind. And you don't want restrictions, unless of course someone is close enough to hear the speech.

Thank you though, we're all imperceptibly smarter for having seen a would-be censor in another disguise.
MoD Halts GPS Jamming After Safety Complaints
Origo’s 3D Printer Could Be The Last Toy Your Ten Year Old Will Ever Need
Near-Earth Asteroid Discovered via Crowdsourcing
Exactly, right? I mean, I read that and thought "I'd kill OP to be 20 again".

20... no job, no ambition, no problems.
Are these responses real? My first reaction was "Funny, but I'm sure these are photoshopped".
"rather than going and educating yourself about what they do"

Your assumption that I'm not educated about the issue is in error.
For some instances where I know it's for marketing purposes but also that they'll use it as a lookup key for my account (e.g., loyalty cards) I give my parent's phone number.

Between that and being on the national do not call list (U.S.), I get no sales calls.

Occasionally, I'll use a 555 prefix (like in books or movies) which is a reserved designation for fictional numbers.