skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I flag anything that makes me think, "I could have spent those X minutes/seconds of my life reading something worthwhile." This screams of a plug for Gladwell's book, which may well be worth reading, but doesn't really offer anything interesting beyond "Bill Gates spent lots of hours programming and made a successful software company so practice a lot."

Well, yeah, duh.
Them, and AVC, and HugotheMongoose, and KimStarr, and Huxley78. It's baffling. I've never seen something like that happen before.
Google knew how to dodge Microsoft after Netscape succumbed - by adapting so not to make a mistake twice (desktop software). Fool you once I'm a millionaire, twice I'm a billionaire.
Slightly Stoopid - 2am live at the Wiltern on Vimeo
k, even more thoughts:

* STOP using the word "paranoid". You're not paranoid, you're right (or I'm not paying). Paranoid + merit badge sash of algorithm parameters = vanity project. You don't have a vanity project; stop being self-effacing.

* Consider taking a few minutes to write a positioning statement, then bucket your feature/function accordingly. A no-brainer template for positioning: For {companies,nonprofits,summer camps} that need {puppies,secure backup,surface mount soldering}, Colin Percival offers tarsnap. Unlike {mozy,carbonite,idrive}, tarsnap provides {block level security,puppy mincing} that allows users to {save the world,make better tacos}.

* Along similar lines, "my dream backup system" probably not the best positioning ever. Maybe kill those words. =)

* One feature you're probably unwilling to play up is that you're actually (probably ;) qualified to design a custom cryptosystem. Get some cryptofriends to vouch for you!
I run Windows & Ubuntu, and I would shudder at the thought of having to ship my laptop in. That's a lot of time to be without my computer.

I've honestly never encountered a problem that required the manufacturer's support. More than a handful of my Mac friends have had to ship theirs in.
They're awesome! I love slightly stoopid!
Right uh, sorry.
A related article. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=359551
Ok, I am 28 and I started coding at 8 (my father was a programmer) but I don't think I really spend more than 100 hours coding before 12, and 1500 by 18, in collage I may have added 2000 hours of real effort, but once I started working I have spent little time learning and more time jumping though hoops. I just started working with the J2EE / Spring / Hibernate world and within 200 hours of effort it seems fairly easy and it's mostly grunt work at this point in time.

So while I am still closing in on those 10,000 hours it's going to take a lot more stretching for me to get there. There was plenty of time I could have spent getting better, but I have written ASM, high and low level networking code, Multi-threaded Apps, desktop apps, code parsers, scientific number crunchers, websites, and mostly I just wonder why other people find it hard.

I don't think of my self as Fucking Awesome but I do think I am close to that point.
So what? I signed up to post.
Rock on! I used to work for those mofoes!
No thanks. You have to be sick to enjoy that.
When you buy stuff by printing your own credit cards.
Ask proggit: where to find free datasets
Terrible name for a business site. Terrible.
I can't believe it took me so much time to notice:

365 days a year already includes 7 days a week. So you'd actually need 27.4 hours of practice a day to make it in a year.
It's like a religion for them.
Looks nice. How fast is it? I wonder if you could make this into a simple off-site backup system for databases. It might require some more complex interaction with the db or os to do it right though (since the data is changing while you are reading it).
I didn't mention your name, so entering right now is only slightly suspicious. :-)

The fact that you use similar phrasing in all your posts, comment in unsimilar threads with quick, brief responses, and have similar disregards for things like two-way, interesting debates, tend to make me a little suspicious. I could be wrong, but with all due respect, at this point I rather doubt I am.

My question is: why? Are you the blog's author/submitter? I've noticed junk accounts pop up more when I mention my distaste for the article this was written about. You make similar comments to KrisZolar, who submitted this article. Every single response defending this post appears to be made from a spam account: KeshRivya also seems to be in this category. And every single one has the same anti-Rand stance as the original post, and writes in the same style.

The one thing that fascinates me is that a lot of these seems to have been made months-if-not-years ago. That takes a lot of effort. And I wonder why go to all the effort.

I'm sorry if it does turn out I'm raving and wrong, but I flagged this post. I don't know if there's a way of matching IPs, but the evidence all seems to point to a massive amount of throwaway accounts.
We have better things to blow our money on like endless wars.
The Landmine of Parsing HTML and Stripping HTML Comments
Let me guess: This GC was written completely by Sun employees and would have been written even if Hotspot wasn't open source.
Give me feedback on my homepage/startup
I'm starting a new company and I'm looking for some blunt unbiased feedback on our homepage design.

The image is available here:
http://dataholder415.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/login11-9-08.png

It would be awesome if I could get people's thoughts. Specifically:

1) Is it clear what we are doing?/What do you think we do?
2) Do you like our tagline?
3) Is it clear what a web computer is?
4) What do you rate this homepage on from a 1-10?
5) Any other thoughts

Thanks
Reading this has me realize that i didn't miss anything by skipping Rand books.
Dotfiles.org | .vimrc
Does Digg Have a Secret Co-Founder in the Attic?
Some Datasets Available on the Web
Not ported.
Not news to us since ojbyrne posts here, but it's nice to see Owen getting some of the recognition he deserves.
Ok, I have no idea how I came up with the 365 days instead of 52 weeks.
Freebase’s new look and new features
i wish the matchit thing would work with ruby; i've been annoyed that % on if/do/end/etc. doesn't work like it does with languages using brackets around blocks.
How To: Max Out Apple TV's Potential With Boxee
User Membership With PHP
Jump to page 6 and read the summary : http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-09-2003/jw-0905-toolbo...

The rest of the article has some interesting points, but I found it too wordy.
Six Real Gadgets That Minority Report Predicted Correctly
I rate it a 6/10. Colors could be improved.
That is cool but having an HTTP request for each bit of header text (which is what happens if you use an image) would cause unnecessary lag. If you have the bandwidth it doesn't matter I suppose.
Rare photo of the famous black t-shirts...
Peter Thiel: Banks Failed Because Run By Uncool Republicans
Loving what you do is necessary, but not sufficient.

What you do should be at the intersection of what you love and what you're good at.
Japan loves Apple, sales up there 39%
A little off-topic but whatever happened to Ramaze? It seemed to have so much potential....
Time and awesomeness is a correlation, not cause and effect. Sure, talent and time help, but the key ingredient is passion. Without it, you've got a long, painful road ahead of you. With it, you can climb mountains. .

The article gives Bill Gates as an example. According to the article, Gates is a great programmer because he sat in front of the computer for seven years. But Gladwell has it backwards... Gates sat in front of a computer for seven years because he had a passion for programming and that's what lead him to be great.
A Brief History of Defunct Electronics Chains in the Form of Old TV Ads
Quick question to the Vim experts here at HN but why is it when I start vim from the terminal (Ubuntu) it does not apply the color schemes I downloaded from Vim.org, yet when I start GVim I can see the color schemes applied?
Google Fixes Embarrassing Android Bug
On store shelves, stealthy shrinking of containers keeps prices from rising
Fast Food: Just Another Name for Corn
Soros: The Crisis & What to Do About It
one thing that spooks me is the fact that pictures that other people take of you can get tagged back to you. now I have to rely on the judgement of all my "friends" not to post something that may affect my job, relationship or sentencing hearings.
Ahhh yes now I remember. Stupid accounting tricks: look how much money we saved!
Sorry for the off topic comment but I have to say... I love middle-click-to-paste in X Windows! Hooray geekery.
It's not a requirement but there's a massive correlation between the two.

It's just like when people say they shouldn't worry about monetizing because of Google.
Newb question -- I don't really get the asset protection part of limited liability.

Say I sell my house to fund my business, then my LLC flops and I have to declare bankruptcy. I still lost my house, no?

Now say I take a loan out for $70K to fund my LLC and it flops and I have to declare bankruptcy. Then do I get to keep my house?

What's the difference?
YouTube Nabs Exclusive TV Deal
Ask HN: What are you practicing?
There have been a few articles recently saying that 10 years or 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is the key to becoming exceptional at anything. People always use sports and music as examples because they lend themselves naturally to deliberate practice.

Most of us on hackernews aren't trying to be athletes or musicians. So what are you practicing?

I'm trying to identify the skills that will make me more successful as a startup founder. Technical skills are obvious, but I don't spend a lot of time doing deliberate practice with those because programming and admin are only a small part of a successful startup. Are there any other startup founder skills that can be improved with hours of daily practice?
Refining a Project Execution Strategy
Hotmail also doesn't let a lot of legitimate email through...
Tell Hacker News: Throwaway accounts
The user KrisZolar seems to have a vast amount of throwaway, spam accounts, which are upvoting one another and cluttering up this thread in particular: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=359551.

Those users are: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ScottHanson, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=SkylerNovak, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=RobertHenderson, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Huxley78, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Nerdlinger, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Dino, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=AVC, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Haggen, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=KeshRivya, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=KimStarr, and http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=HugotheMongoose.

I wanted to be absolutely certain of this before making the accusation. I'm dead certain of these names, for the following reasons:

1) They follow similar patterns. Either they are very old, inactive user names, or they are extremely new. They all make small comments in other threads that, while not contributing anything useful, are upvoted slightly - to the point where they can upvote other account names.

2) Each one has a similar, one-sided look at Ayn Rand. They all react with very immediate hostility and none of them stop to make decent arguments.

3) Every single one gets incredibly hostile towards people who claim that the article KrisZolar submitted is a poorly-written article. (That article, for the record, took a similar approach to debunking Rand.)

4) They respond to one another's comments, always in the affirmative. When discussing with other people, they each respond in turn, rarely starting a long back-and-forth discussion, and their comments are all upvoted similarly to their original comments: up one or two points in thin trickles, after they've been downvoted. This despite a lack of content.

5) Several of them have deleted their posts after being responded to.

6) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360063 is a comment thread in which Nerdlinger, who has not been a part of the ongoing thread, responds in the defensive as if he has been here for a while.

7) Similarities in the way that they speak and the way in which they use grammar.

8) If you open each of these accounts at once, you see a pattern in their posts: each posts one or two at a time, in a cycle, never simultaneously. There are gaps between their posts in which none of them speak whatsoever.

I flagged their posts, but I don't know exactly how to approach this case. I've never seen something like it on Hacker News. Hopefully this is the right protocol.
Go-oo: A Lighter, Faster OpenOffice, With Extras
In your terminal Vim session, type :echo g:colors_name to find out if you have a colour scheme set.

Also what version of Vim are you using? If you are using Vim-Tiny for example, it is not compiled with syntax highlighting support. Type :version to see the list of compiled features and look for '+syntax'.

Otherwise it could be your terminal emulator playing up.

Try :set t_Co to see how many colours Vim can recognise in your terminal. Ideally this should return at least '8'. If it doesn't there may be some tips in :h xterm-color.
My question precisely.
what the hell is a sikh?

<go ahead downvote me i can take it>
Never stop closing.
Pick a startup based on the team not on the idea. Make sure the team has a good dynamic. Make sure the team is composed of people who can actually build the product.

The team I was in at StartupCamp Melbourne also learned this lesson: http://www.inquisitr.com/4560/melbourne-startup-camp-the-goo... .

Invest in teams, not ideas.
FT.com’s new-look homepage
Are there countries for sale?
email pg...
Rarely, but few participate with the expectation that a group of relative strangers can punch out a viable business over the coarse of a weekend.

It's more like exercise for entrepreneurs.
I'm pretty sure pg said there's some anti-sockpuppet provisions in news.yc. I believe upvoting between sockpuppets is ignored.

But I agree, this seems suspicious.
UPDATE: Hey everyone, I've updated iCombinator with a couple of things:

1. http://icombinator.net/ now forwards to http://www.icombinator.net/ GAE doesn't allow naked domains anymore

2. Added an icon for the web clip

3. Enabled standalone status (thanks doctyper!)

Anyone have better artistic skills for the icon? I'm open to suggestions :)
How fast is it?

How fast is your internet connection? On a decent CPU the tarsnap code can easily push 50 Mbps -- the largest part of its time is spent in zlib, compressing data before it is encrypted and uploaded -- so the limiting factor is almost certainly going to be bandwidth.

I wonder if you could make this into a simple off-site backup system for databases.

Tarsnap isn't likely to be useful for "real time" replication, but if you get your database to write a transaction log you might get interesting results by having tarsnap loop creating archives containing that one file.
you must have spent _hours_ investigating this guy. wow.
They all posted on the thread. I was in a 3-hour lab class, and happened to notice when they all commented after me.

After that, it only took about 20 minutes to check their posting times and write this up. The guy was really not subtle about it.
Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth opens up on mobility and design
Nov.10,1983: Gates Opens Windows a Bit Early
Good for unalone though and I agree with his assessment. It's quite impressive to see this level of commitment to HN.

Well done.
If your LLC flops (or your C corp or Sub-S corp) you don't have to declare bankruptcy provided you haven't pledged your personal assets to the company or it's creditors. Your LLC/C/Sub-S creditors can't come after your house or other assets unless you have personally pledged them at some point.
Emacs Calc - a built-in RPN calculator mode
Dynamic updates: how do you update the tarsnap clientside software?

I don't. Users do (by downloading the latest version, extracting the tarball, compiling, and installing).

Actually, you're right that I depend on SSL for this at the moment -- but I will be adding GPG signatures for the tarballs soon.

Consider a name other than tarsnap, too.

What's wrong with that name? In all seriousness, the people who would be turned off by that name are also people who would be turned off by the command-line interface.
Content Management For Colleges
Whether it`s keeping your PDA and cell phone users current, or complying with ADA requirements, the Campusuite content management system makes it easy to keep in touch.
I wrote to pg@ycombinator.com. Hopefully that's the correct address.
WSJ stopped crashing so much when I disabled javascript, but that's pretty drastic.
Yeah there is - I've come across this (innocently, naturally) before. Not sure of the exact algorithm.
Most folks I know who run the numbers choose Sub-S over LLC in CA. The tax treatment is less favorable for LLC.
I know the feeling though:

"I... can't... go... to... sleep... someone... is... wrong... on... the ... internet"
I'd feel better about an analysis from an expert on manufacturing and so forth, which I get the impression neither you, pg or me are.

I dunno about throwing "innovation" around on cars; I think people use that word without caution or really thinking about what it means.

When I grew up the nearest stop light was 20 miles away; cars were the only way to get around. Even now, living in Mountain View it's a hassle living without a car. Everywhere I've lived up until now was a huge hassle without a car, partly because it was so remote. A very large segment of the US lives like this and frankly, I don't like the idea of sharing a bus seat with strangers, waiting on trains, etc. I like the idea of automated cars as public transit and so forth but we shouldn't throw stuff out because it is old. The chair is lord only knows how old and just like I need to sit, I need to get out of the house to do whatever. ;)
Those of us who pride ourselves at merely having gotten a non-zero score on the Putnam think otherwise :-)
Advanced DSLs in Ruby - Neal Ford
I haven't used this extensively but I'm having no problems with % matching on ruby conditionals and blocks.

Maybe its because I have a .vim/syntax/ruby.vim installed. Do you?
Did textbook site Chegg raise $15M from Kleiner Perkins? Not exactly
“Major failure” takes FriendFeed down
I was thinking of the snapshot speed, where most of the data hasn't changed. Do you keep a local cache of block checksums or something to avoid having to check the server? How about an option to not examine the data if the file size and mtime haven't changed? (like rsync does)
This works well on Android G1 as well, as most iUi web apps do. I wonder though if it's best not to popup a new page when clicking through to an article. With G1's global Back button it's not too bad to quickly go back, but on iPhone, you need tap-swipe-tap.
I flagged a ton of them too, so it's not just you.
the look isn't as important as getting the message across of that you do.
I don't think the tagline has any meaning in the context (or lack there of) which you've given.

Basically, I have absolutely no idea what a web computer is.

Get to the basics
1) what is it
2) why would I use it
1) Is it clear what we are doing?/What do you think we do?

Not too clear. You ... give away thin clients?

3) Is it clear what a web computer is?

It's a complete mystery to me, but maybe your site's actual visitors will have more context or will already have some idea what you are doing.
Bill Gates' New Career? Patent Troll For Nathan Myhrvold?
Tim Pope, author of Rails.vim, surround.vim and a bunch of other Vim Scripts has his config files at http://git.tpope.net/ he has some stuff I've never seen anywhere else.

I still like Emacs more though.
No, practice makes permanent.
I was thinking of the snapshot speed, where most of the data hasn't changed.

On modern CPUs, somewhere in the 20-50 MB/s range.

Do you keep a local cache of block checksums or something to avoid having to check the server?

Yes.

How about an option to not examine the data if the file size and mtime haven't changed? (like rsync does)

Tarsnap already does this for unmodified (file name, inode number, file size, mtime) tuples.
I think this is because Japanese consumers are very concerned with quality, and Apple makes good products. This is unusual for American products because a lot of them are a waste of space (cars, clothes, manufactured goods in general) and poorly made (by Japanese standards). Japanese only buy them before there's a reasonable European or Asian substitute.

Apple, on the other hand, hasn't made shitty products since the MBA left.
There are good things and bad things about unions but painting them all as somehow bad is a bit extreme. Of course, there are Japanese auto unions as there will be in China.

As the son of a man who was a APWU union man who worked himself to the bone for the family, my own personal experience can attest that the only thing that kept management's abusive treatment of their workers, like my dad, in check, was the union. While balance is a issue of most things, just blaming unions carte-blanche and saying we don't need them is...harsh.
Obligatory xkcd link: http://xkcd.com/386/
I'm still missing something. Clarified hypothetical situation:

Situation 1: I have a house worth $250K. I sell it and use $100K to fund my business. My business flops; I'm out the $100K.

Situation 2: I keep my $250K house and get a loan from my bank for $100K. My business flops; creditors can't come after my house because I'm behind the LLC firewall, right?

Why would anyone ever choose situation 1?
Thanks a ton for this, checking it out now.
Starbucks profit plummets by 97 percent
Why Washington Cannot Prevent Depression
First Look at Blue Spruce, IBM's Next Generation Browser Platform
Awesome work, thank you for helping keep YC great.
The book "The Omnivore's Dilemma" talks a lot about this. Basically, everything in American diets is corn based (corn fed beef, chicken, corn syrup, corn starch, etc.)
How do I combine Machine learning with nano-technology and fabbers?
I am into machine-learning already and I want to get into fabbers and self-replicating machines and nano-technology.

Is there any field that combines them all? Like could I use machine learning to figure stuff out in nano-tech?

I'm having a year off but will start uni next autumn and I have a hard time figuring out exactly what to study.

Main interest in machine learning is computer vision but really everything is interesting.
I don't look down on people who work with their hands. At the same time, though, I think that the power to create original things is the best power we've got. To be fair, few people ever do this, regardless of position. If you look at hackers as a whole, we're no better.

But at least we're sexy objects.
Wow, thanks for all the effort. Also, kudos for being cautious, and a good guy, about it.
Frances TGV passenger train hits 574.8 KM/H or 357 mph (video)
Spam Gets 1 Response Per 12,500,000 Emails 
S/F/O!
That's a lib site.
Could someone tell me how Wikipedia needs 6 million dollars every 6 months ?
You love Strands on the iPhone and so do we
Thanks for mentioning it in the original thread! I was suspicious, but had it down to paranoia before you mentioned that as well. The really old accounts made me doubt myself.
A comment from the article made me think: if a cow is pumped full of drugs, hormones, and food it doesn't normally eat (corn), with the goals of making the animal as fat as possible as fast as possible in order to feed the most humans in the quickest time, how can that meat not cause similar side effects when eaten by humans?
avcetim, you didn't happen to buy spare parts for manufacturing space shuttle heat panels? or maybe i'm thinking of something else.

anyway, i'm a grizzled 4.5 year indy tech veteran, work at software company that went from 70-400 in my tenure and an idea man. i'm seasoned working in a pressure cooker. interested in talking more if you are - looking to make a leap.