skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like how you've set the example and then folks here have taken it upon themselves to help police things. It really has felt like a community watch.

I wonder if the folks at Reddit could have stomped out trollish behavior if they called it out as it developed. Did users try to do so? Or was it like a mob smashing windows every where?
The problem with this is that it isn't a model of an inbox -- it's a model of a to-do list to which anybody but you can add items. What you really want to do is process an email into something besides an email -- by quickly responding to it, by rephrasing it as a to-do item, by trashing it, or by 'hitting snooze' and getting a reminder in a day or a week.

Your inbox is for messages; it's a way to see what people are saying to you. As messages leave the inbox, they should be transformed into something that tells you what people want from you.
It was already used for ranking. Just take a look at the ranking when viewing everyone's notes.
A reddit/slinkset/news.arc-based mail reader would actually be really interesting.
Actually it does! Take a look at what you get when viewing everyone's notes for a search query.
I disagree. In a first-world country, an ambitious person might claw his way up to being regional director of cardboard issues for the EPA, and could earn low six figures. In a third-world country, that same ambitious person would get to that same level of authority, with the same proportionate salary -- and would be earning many times that amount in bribes. Outside of Western countries, there are very few things an ambitious person could achieve that do not in some way translate into money.
Only half? That is a gigantc number of people and it is growing every day.

And still there is no great news outlet that truly understands how to use the internet. It is a wide open opportunity.
Becoming Screen Literate
There's also the survivorship bias to consider...
"... what would you tell yourself? ..."

Practicing things many times over, matters more than doing them a couple of times; Be: aware of your surroundings and seize opportunity; irreverent to authority and the pompous; generous with your time; miserly with criticism; pain is temporary;
FYI, I've already done this. I started the project last week and am still testing it (it works though). http://www.feedbackarmy.com/

Visit the site, give it your URL and some specifics to focus on, dump a credit card number into paypal, and subscribe to an RSS feed for the results.
> if you've never attended a party held in another state by some random person you've never met in real life, I highly recommend it

This somewhat off-topic, but I'd highly recommend this as well. In general, I've been a member of a few Internet (IRC, forums, mailing lists) communities that would organize real-life events and made good friends and formed important associations through this.

I've also seen several degrade into "just another $medium community". In many cases they would be forked many times into smaller/more selective communities that'd would maintain the feel of the older days (you could say reddit this with news.y.c and programming.reddit).
Uh, what does that mean? How should they be using the internet?
Facebook Hackathon Results in Slick Visualizations
not really surprised here, back in the day when it was a 1/4" thick, I use to rip out all the ads that were front and back, then start reading it.
How about you give the aptitude test and scholarship(s) only to the poorest students? Assuming the scholarship is being donated because Africa is poor, this seems the most obvious thing to do. Also, the poorest students and families would be most grateful for it.
"... A good description of http://www.everyblock.com/ ... Mentioned below! ..."

Thanks, didn't see that.
I sort of chalked it up an an anomaly. In all, GA shows 474 visits from facebook.com. I paid for 543 clicks.

I suppose people could have hit stop/escape after the click was registered by FB but before the page loaded and the javascript registered.
Vote for 5 Facebook apps in the $225,000 2nd round of fbfund
There will probably never be another million dollar homepage...

In twenty years or so it might be possible to build another million-dollar homepage, just as it's been possible to revive fads from the 1960s, the 1970s, and the 1980s twenty years later. (The 1990s nostalgia is due any minute now.)

Twenty years from now there will be a large population of web users who have never heard of the original million-dollar homepage. Others might greet the revival of the fad as a charming reminder of their own youth.

And, of course, unless historical trends change a lot, eventually you'll be able to build a million-dollar homepage just by passing a hat around your circle of friends, just as Dr. Evil can no longer terrify the world by demanding a million-dollar ransom. ;)
Some are just iphone apps with lightweight fb interfaces. Many do not even have working applications. They had the potential to find some really great apps. Overall I am disappointed with the quality of the 25 finalists, especially since there is 225,000 dollars on the line.
Exactly. A simple vote up and down system has completely changed the way news are shared online. The same can be done for your email. I am sure someone has already developed such a plugin for her/himself, or is currently working on it.
"The changes you make only affect your own searches."

-- http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-searc...
No, we're not by any means thinking of selling equity to non-accredited investors directly.

Perhaps "some legal obstacles" was not the best phrase to use. There are significant legal obstacles, and we're consulting with a corporate lawyer from the U. Chicago who has agreed to do some preliminary work pro bono.

Everything is in the early stages, and with corporate law the line between what's considered innovation and what's considered fraud is murky. Without annoying my partners by saying too much, we're confident we have a type of solution.
"... How does he (Winer) pay the bills? ..."

"... This approach is really not so different from being a magazine writer. You write for whoever wants your stuff and get paid per peice. The only difference here is that Winer's not getting paid, unless he's running ads that go with his articles across all these outlets. ..."

Stringers?

Winer has written about making money with technology, writing here ~ http://www.scripting.com/davenet/2001/02/13/howToMakeMoneyOn... here ~ http://www.scripting.com/2005/12/12.html#howToMakeMoneyOnThe... and the latest here ~ http://www.podtech.net/home/894/gnomedex-how-to-make-money-o...

"... A personal ad network. That's kind of interesting. So someone would pay to get an ad that runs alongside anything Winer writes across the HuffPo, newsjunk and anywhere else, latching onto his brand explicitly. ..."

Adverts on websites are history ~ http://www.podtech.net/home/894/gnomedex-how-to-make-money-o...
Another factor to consider is that people of african descent tend to have more low birthweight babies than other groups. Low birthweight babies die more, regardless of the medical system. African descended people are common in the US, Brazil and Caribbean, but not so much in Europe.

But it isn't really a fault of the medical system or development process, just genetic/hereditary bad luck.

I'd suggest the trend lines on his charts are more meaningful than individual bubbles.
I was getting at something more specific than just a logical fallacy, but specifically the part where you sanctimoniously declare "aHA! It isn't real!" It is true that is a special case of a more general logical fallacy, but I see this specific one pop up a lot, reifying ignorance, then declaring it false as if that actually proves something.
The founders of Reddit had a deliberate policy of never censoring anything. They only banned spammers. And the trolls arrived gradually, so there was never a point where it was clear that something had to be done about it. Exactly like happened to NYC, actually.

All this stuff is still being figured out. I do think that trolling (in the broader sense) is temporary, though. It's just the kind of bug that happens in any new system before it stabilizes.
sure, i'll take design advice from a website that uses white text over a busy background graphic making it impossible to read.

flagged as blogspam.
Exactly. Would anyone who posts here willingly visit 4chan?

Slashdot may be one exception though. Trolling increased there until Digg and Reddit became popular. I think many of the slashdot trolls left for Digg and Reddit, and the amount of trolling on slashdot has subjectively decreased.

Thoughtful posters go where the feel like they are heard and appreciated. Trolls go where the system permits them to do the most damage.
It is far easier to put garbage cans on streetcorners than change how people behave or ban common packaging.
How is making a dating site for people with HIV/AIDS a "totally stupid" idea?
I think there's also a dating site somewhere for people with herpes and other STDS.
Sounds like a good idea to me.
Supercomputing brought to desktop
It's seems like there is a lot more complexity in modern products but there is also not the same kind of engineering attitude to products. Working in the Internet industry I've met so many people without formal backgrounds, something unthinkable in more traditional industries.

I think that the primary problem is managing complexity and that requires more rigor and more considered product cycles. Less about feature packing and more about reliability.
7. I can get it in a paper form (or similar) that is safe to stuff in a bag and read on the beach? (and the news isn't stuff that gets out of date in a second).

I don't understand the online "magazine" concept - not sure how it translates.

I find wired nice airport/toilet reading.
Accepting personal responsibility was one of the reasons I have been successful.
Unfortunately, on of my good friends started to visit 4chan regularly, and he's been harder and harder to deal with, of late...
I miss TechTV. Patrick Norton in a kilt destroying a PC with a sledgehammer was classier than a pistol.
They are talking about the main ranking. There is however a secondary link ranking when viewing everyone's notes that is affected.
Ask YC: Are Standards a joke?
What do you guys think ?
Google news has - 1310 Errors, 91 warning(s) http://tinyurl.com/5vne4e
Google.co.in has - 68 Errors, 13 warning(s)
http://tinyurl.com/5oznsp
News.ycombinator.com has - 136 Errors, 6
warning(s)
http://tinyurl.com/5l6ftf
Facebook has - 27 Errors, 6 warning(s)
http://tinyurl.com/62xcta
Yahoo has - 91 Errors, 64 warning(s)
http://tinyurl.com/5bqf9p
Youtube has - 70 Errors, 56 warning(s)
http://tinyurl.com/5gsap7
Live has - 4 errors
http://tinyurl.com/69x2ll
Blogger has - 28 Errors
http://tinyurl.com/5djo4q
An Infinite Loop in the Brain
SimplyMEPIS: The best desktop Linux you haven't tried
The fact that this has been upvoted to the front page concerns me greatly.
How Obama Helped Digg Fix Bugs
While I'm not sure this is news (well not anymore) I love ReCAPTCHA.

What I especially like about ReCAPTCHA is the engineering elegance. The second word is hard to break by hackers because it already failed a machine OCR algorithm (obviously that doesn't solve "Turking").

I also like that they have an audio CAPTCHA making their solution accessible by default. This is something a lot of home grown solutions lack. The Web should remain a place for everyone with or without a visual impairment.
Right now I'm looking at a transfer; at the same time, my co-founder and I are pushing to have a sellable product as quickly as possible. We're both freshmen who went to advanced programs in high school and are finding college to be a bit of a drag, so either way things will hopefully get better.
I really dig the spirit of this article, but a few of the companies mentioned had revenue below $200k. I wouldn't exactly say anyone is "rich" from that yet.

PickyDomains is expected to hit six figures this year
It's the service created by the author of this article.
Different markets value companies differently. No company in its right mind would choose to be valued by this one.
I wonder what it feels like to make a lot of money doing something that feels kind of stupid. I'm sure the money goes a long way to soothing any mental discomfort, but I still wonder.
˙ʎɐp sʍǝu ʍols
/b/ is somewhat interesting from the perspective of trying to make a community that is NOT like /b/. Kind of like the smelly cave woman in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who gives out a list of every choice she's made in life and tells Arthur that if he makes the opposite choices maybe he won't end up nearly as bad off as her.
Yes, it was. None of the things said or insinuated were without reason. It was primarily a shame on you all type of commentary.
Well that didn't take long...Google searchwiki is back
That's also a (poorly) hacked up canned Wordpress Them- Hey! Look at that huge pile of uneaten dogfood!
yeah if it was just one year. running a 200k business a year for 5-10 years will certainly make you rich.
Kind of wish I'd gone today, but the ridiculous thing was if you got tickets (which I did), they weren't guaranteed for entry. It was first come first served for getting inside. They didn't even give an indication of how overbooked it was... It ended up being a three-tier lottery.
WHY IS THIS ON THE FRONT PAGE?

reCAPTCHA has been around for ages. This isn't something new. Everyone knows about it. It's also widely implemented.

I would like to add however, I hate reCAPTCHA. If you are a web developer who has added reCaptcha to your site, remove it. If you are thinking about adding it in, don't do it! reCAPTCHA takes the annoying in a CAPTCHA and multiplies it by two. No longer are the days where you have to solve one illegible CAPTCHA, now you have to do two. Plus, one of them is so bad that OCR software couldn't recognize it.

It's not your or your users job to digitize books. You aren't doing the world some great justice or charity by implementing reCAPTCHA on your site. If you want to digitize books, go help develop better OCR software. If you want to stop spam, there are better, less invasive methods.
Engrave Your Tech
We don't look at the karma number so much as the quality of the comments. It would be hard not to, actually. When I see a YC application from a username I recognize for making smart comments, it would be hard not to give it extra attention.
AES is approved by the NSA for top secret information. If they had found a way to crack it, don't you think there would have been a contest to replace AES like there was with DES?

They're not that far ahead any more.

http://www.schneier.com/essay-064.html
Yes. At least in the US, I believe, feed for a variety of meat animals is often composed heavily of corn. Ask your local rancher about this. Price of cow food goes up; price of tasty cow bits goes up.
I thought doggles was the least "stupid." Quotes because I agree that most of them aren't really stupid.
Assuming you don't have employees or significant costs, don't get hit by random acts of misfortune, and define rich relatively broadly.
Plus, one of them is so bad that OCR software couldn't recognize it.

... that's the point?
There is enough standardization happening to allow your browser to render those pages. That's a good start.

The problem historically with Web Standards has been 2-fold the lack of concrete implementations for vendors to work from. This leads to a variety of interpretations of the details of the standard.

Secondly their has been a lack of incentive for people to create standard markup. I hope things like Open Social (with Caja) and Yahoo's Search Monkey fix that. In the case of Search Monkey by using a Microformat (which must be valid HTML) then you get an enhanced listing in the Yahoo search engine. A definite benefit.
It's on the front page because people thought it was more interesting than everything not on the front page.

Plus, one of them is so bad that OCR software couldn't recognize it.

Wait, what?! I think you don't quite understand the premise of CAPTCHAs.
A more accurate title would be "How the US Presidential Election Helped Digg Find a Bug." I suspect the marketing department got to it.
Visual programming languages gaining popularity
3. GM or Ford should make a strategic deal with Tesla to turn 20% of its best dealerships into Tesla dealerships and should help Tesla get access to the American market. The same company should make Tesla a premier American brand.

My mind simply can't tokenize this lexical string. Compile failed.
An Open Stack glossary for Facebook developers
they're not colourful or textured or on a background or anything. If OCR software can't recognize black type (of a familiar typeface) on white, it must be pretty messed up.

I'm just saying it that making the user do this twice is just plain unusable and annoying.
AES is approved by the NSA for top secret information

Correction: AES192 and AES256 are approved by the NSA as a component in an approved implementation. AES128 is specifically NOT permitted for use with top secret information.

They're not that far ahead any more.

Schneier is probably right; the NSA is probably a few years ahead technologically instead of two decades ahead. However, they still have a very large budget.
Indeed, but delete-duplicates wants to know that it's a list and not a vector.
Not when you are developing for a government client that could hypothetically get sued if you don't use them. They don't find that possibility funny.
Please don't upvote this drivel.
Nokia 1110 No Network, 1600, 6030 Network Problem
1110, 1110 no network, 1600, 1600 no network, 6030, after flashing, network, Nokia, nokia signal problem, signal, ways
I didn't look at all the pages, but Google News' 1310 errors are caused in large part by the fact that they don't even declare a doctype. The use of the font tag (and not even quoting attribute values) is pretty embarrassing, but as previously stated, it's "good enough" for most browsers to render it properly.

There are dozens of very valid reasons for why that isn't really "good enough," but I won't get into those here. I don't think it's a question of whether or not standards are a joke, I just think there is disagreement among people as to whether or not they're worth adhering to. Having a few errors is no big deal; using deprecated HTML tags is a big deal (or at least I assume it will be at some point). I don't think the standards were created under the assumption that everyone would adhere 100% to them; that simply requires more effort than most people are willing to put forth.

This is further compounded by the fact that, yes, browsers do generally properly render even horrific markup such as that on Google News. I would argue that this is only done because it's a necessity and it shouldn't be viewed as a license to create deplorable markup, but what do I know. Until such a time that the advantages of proper standards (and extensions of them, such as microformats) become real benefits to people/businesses, many (most?) will continue to create junk markup -- because they're simply lazy, want to save a few bytes on the page load, or whatever other justifications they come up with.

That doesn't mean standards are a joke, it just means the benefits are too few, too poorly understood, or perceived as too insignificant (who cares about blind people on the internet?!?!)
Thanks for your comments.

The article's database allows two entries of the form: (marriage_id1, Tom, Mary) and (marriage_id2, Mary, Tom). to coexist in the database,

This mostly stems from using a set based on eq. If it used a custom equality function, this wouldn't problem. (The code implementing this involves a long trip into the weeds, and I wrote the article for people that have never heard of object databases... and for people that aren't necessarily comfortable with CL.)

The article's database also fails to handle the not uncommon case where two persons marry, divorce and then remarry (often consecutive times).

I would just add a fresh marriage object to the set. The reason we "change-class" on the marriage when divorcing is because a divorce cannot exist without a marriage. A remarriage is no different from a fresh marriage... in my mind anyway.

If you want to query on remarriages, though, then you should probably make a type for this. A quick "defclass" and you are set.

Some reasons relational databases are preferred: - ease of maintenance

Not sure there is a big difference here. There is some care and feeding that BDB requires, but nothing extreme. (You can also use a SQL-based database as the backend for Elephant.)

the relational model allows a standardized query language

There is no reason you couldn't declare classes so that information necessary for querying is present, and then add a query langauge on top of that. AllegroCache does exactly this.

constraints are handled within the database engine proper

I'm not sure why you see a difference between (network + relational database engine) and (rpc frontend + object database). I mean sure, you can touch the files on disk and ignore the RPC interface, but I can rm -rf /var/lib/mysql too. I don't see a difference in safety, other than the many years of production testing that the SQL databases have.

This is an implementation detail, though, and not a fundamental difference.
a) There's a big difference between 200k in revenue and 200k in profit

b) How many of these businesses will be around 10 years? I'll put the over/under at 5.
Perhaps this should be entitled "The Perils of Market Efficiency" instead, because this is more about market liberalization than improved productivity.

Although this article highlights some of the consequences of market liberalization, I think it's dangerously to extrapolate this case more broadly. First, structural readjustment programs took place in sub-Saharan countries that lacked necessary markets, transit infrastructure, and other prerequisites for private business growth. This differs from in the United States, where such infrastructure is substantially more mature. Second, many of these countries lack sufficient crop diversification, which when coupled with limited purchasing power, exacerbates famine during droughts.
Some fads can be revived...

but the real success of the million dollar homepage was convincing companies to buy ad space, not attracting people to the site. Sure many web users will not have heard of the site (I would venture to say web users of today have not heard of it) but the people spending the ad dollars are (presumably) a more knowledgeable group. That is the group the next million dollar homepage has to court if indeed there is a next million dollar homepage.

The eb and flow of certain fads depends on people forgetting or people lacking knowledge about the past, or nostalgia. I am hypothesizing that advertisers are immune to both of those things because they manage money and have to be careful.

..then again (yes I am arguing with myself) people on Wall Street manage an awful lot of money and repeat their same bad habits in cycles...so maybe you have a point.
I agree and have wondered for some time whether this list was in fact a plant on their part. I have been watching their site for some time and there is not a chance it is used often enough to attract those sort of figures. this article was linked to at their site shortly after they started up.
On a related note: I'm running an experiment on what people miss most in an email client. Currently Snooze This Message and the ability to add private notes to emails are winning.

Would be interesting to see what a more tech oriented crowd thinks, so feel free to vote - or add your own ideas.

http://ideas.vapormarket.com
Agreed. This is a site with a purpose. These people are in a unique situation where traditional methods of meeting people become complicated (to understate things). I think the person who made this list misunderstood or did not consider what role this could play in an HIV + person's life.
Bored in class? Learn about those computer thingies.
Two words: Rescue. Time.
What are they using for the log graphs? It looks like munin, but prettier.