skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: News website tips
Hi all,
Even before I start, I know that most of the hackers here go way beyond the standard "site with content" model when you innovate, nonetheless it would be very helpful to get some tips from you all on start a news website.
Here's the background; because to my profession I have an expert advantage when it comes to one industry, especially locally. Seeing some potential, I had bought a very nice domain and started a news website on Joomla. Although I have never promoted it, search engines have picked it up and its captured some very fine keywords.
However, I am facing some specific roadblocks in this project where your suggestions will be of immense help:

1) CMS - Joomla is OK, but I am not too excited about it. I looked around the net but did not came upon any news-specific CMS. What CMS + addons will you recommend for the site?

2) Humans. I single handedly can only contribute to a limit. I am considering getting some more people in. Is it a better idea to get a copywriter who can reproduce articles based on my idea or someone with knowledge about the subject matter (who may not be be well versed with the fine art of web copywriting). Also, where do you get to recruit good people?

3) If you have run a news site, any other tips you may have.

Thanks everyone.
Bootstrapping Consensus
You don't need sockpuppets when you have sycophants!
Does this apply to the particular thesis of his in question?

On HN, I've also heard that Seth Godin suffers from "confirmation bias" - but if we generalize about the person, instead of examining each specific thesis (and their support for it), it is an ad hominem argument - however kindly, balanced and reasonable the tone.
What ever happened to 'make something people want?' I was in the ice cream aisle a couple days back and it was downright depressing.

[edit: quantity is very important to me when it comes to ice cream :)]
overall it's a useful chart... I just didn't like the liability part for LLCs. To me (a lawyer could prove me wrong - I'm not a lawyer), LLC (and I think S corp) members have the same liability as a proprietorship if they are company operators (ie not just a passive investor).
The solution is too complex. Complex things don't survive, because complexity tends to decay. The universe has to be based of a very simple concept - but our minds, which are developed for earth-style biology has not yet landed on that concept.

I'll consider any theory seriously that is:

1. Very simple

2. Very stable
Windows 7: faster or just smarter?
VMware moves into mobile virtualisation
In your profile, set noprocrast to yes. maxvisit is the number of minutes you can browse HN per session. minaway is the amount of time you'll have to find something else to do.
> I think with companies like lenovo or dell that cater to corporate customers worldwide you probably end up with better service in more "remote" locations.

I had really good results with a US-bought laptop here in Innsbruck, Austria, which in some ways qualifies as 'remote'.

http://journal.dedasys.com/2007/11/20/and-were-back-in-actio...

I was dreading dealing with who knows what sort of awful bureaucracy, but instead it was simple, fast and convenient.
I've downloaded all the data they have for s&p 500 many times (I did it with processes, spawned one donwload about every 0.1 seconds). They block your connections if you download too fast.

If they give out csv exports as they do there is no reason why someone wouldn't download them and use them for personal use.

I guess you already know about the CSV download but if you don't, here is a link about it: http://www.diytraders.com/content/view/25/43/

I would however never ever use them in commercial product if that's what you are asking.
I consider myself to have about 1.5-2 hours of "genius" per day. I don't know if it really is genius, but during it, I'm operating at an intellectual level where I feel that I'm really making progress, and am able to grasp things, formulate clear questions and goals, and notice new connections.

After that time, my own thoughts start to elude capture, as if someone else's dream...

I can work longer, but I need to have a structured task - i.e. that doesn't require original thought, but is just a slog.

It's great to have a study to support my experience, and encourage me to value and nurture this "genius" time, with recovery time and activities.

EDIT at 1 hour per day, 10,000/365 = 27.4 years; say 30 years. If you are blessed with a naturally stronger constitution, enabling you to do 3 hours per day, you could do it in 10.
Forex Trade News
Forex trading news up to the minute with forex rates and charts as well as reviews of forex brokers.
http://golanzakai.blogspot.com/2008/11/memcached-replication...

Here is a setup where you can scale with memcached
Businesses survive recessions, features don't
Help Depression | The Simone Zone (TM)
The Simone Zone can Help Depression and work with you to get Help for Depression
I believe he means that since Debian already ran on ARM processors, it didn't have to be ported for this to work.
Where is this lighter and faster?

Go-oo is a little more M$ compatible and a litte more a developpers' version of oo. It installs into /opt which smells badly like novell crap.
Why Malcolm Gladwell Thinks We Have Little Control Over Our Own Success - discussion of "Outlier"
http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...
If you are voting you could start with not voting for the politicians that keep corn subsidies in place. Which is most of them.

Probably Ron Paul would be one of the few politicians that are actually against it. Because it doesn't say in the constitution that it's the governments job to meddle with the production or prices of food ;)
Yes.

If any of today's large companies survive, Google will absolutely be one of them. Their ad revenue may shrink (at least %-wise), but if anybody's going to survive it will be them. Amazon's probably got a pretty decent chance too.

Just looking at tech companies: Microsoft's cancerous growth will eventually kill it, Apple could get taken over by MBAs again post-Jobs, Sun has been dying forever, people will stop paying IBM for support. The best hope for the US automakers is to die and have their stuff bought and operated by foreign/new outfits in a very public way.
I wonder if official calculations of inflation take this into account...
actually the way i worked around this with both yahoo and google was to roundrobin my requests over a list of 1500 publicly available proxy servers :D
Would you like to know if your mobile is original or not?
Press the following on your mobile *#06# and the-international mobile equipment identity number appears. Then check the 7th and 8th numbers
Do you click the report spam button?
If we are talking about institutions still in place today of 1000+ year age, there are examples such as the Japanese empire (started BC) and the Danish kingdom (started in the 10th century).
Disguise your scrapes as a browser, so include an Explorer or Firefox browser ID string. Randomize the times between scrapes, so it looks more like a human being doing it. Make sure the scraper takes "coffee breaks" every now and then. Run the service from several servers at once, if you have them. I would guess your program is fairly low overhead (mine always have been) so contact friends and ask to use their server or home PCs. Extra credit for designing a cloud-like infrastructure where PCs could come-and-go without missing any data :)
Book Search (very KISS)
I get a relatively high number of false positives, but I admit that my situation is probably an outlier. I get error reports, mailing list moderation messages, and other stuff that must be hard to filter on.
Hire freelance
Welcome to the freelance content marketplace. Here you can buy and sell content by hiring freelance writers and content providing companies. You can even post writing jobs to hire freelance writers.
Whoever wrote this, did things right by keeping things simple(compared to Amazon's own window shopping application and many others). What amazed me was that the author doesn't appear to have put on affiliate links in those searches (or maybe Amazon tracks the referrals in some other way?).
Welcome to the freelance content marketplace. Here you can buy and sell content by hiring freelance writers and content providing companies. You can even post writing jobs to hire freelance writers.
The 7 per day that it's not sure of are already in the spam folder. On the rare occasion one gets to my inbox, yes I click the report spam button.
Like I said before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=334294

"For the 30 seconds that it will take to break this. This measure is not so much Orwellian as it is idiotic and a waste of time. Its sole purpose is to put up a PR stunt and that politicians can get away with using $128 million of taxpayer cash for this is unacceptable."

Nice to see somebody blowing the whistle.
Scientists and Philosophers Find That ‘Gene’ Has a Multitude of Meanings
Getting Ready for the Baby Shower Party
Originally, baby shower parties were organized to help the expecting parents to gather things for their baby in the form of gifts from people who attended the baby shower. These days the purpose of baby shower parties is not to focus so much on the gifts collected but it has become a tradition and a way of sharing the joy of the parents who are waiting for the arrival of their baby. Undoubtedly
Michael Malone has a bit of a reputation as a ball-breaker, and although I don't think much of his ISP I am thoroughly impressed that he's spoken out about this in public.

Could have been a bad move though, as I think the government will do what it can to exclude iiNet from the trial after Malone's comments. Even if they don't, iiNet's trial results would not be considered objective.

It's highly unfortunate but I think the Australian government and the communications minister thinks that it has a clear mandate from the electorate to introduce this "technology", and it's going to happen whether we like it or not.

The other problem is, no journalist or lay-person will take the comparison with Saudi Arabia or China as fact even though it's an accurate assessment (see the quotes and the attribution of the comment in the article).
Very kewl. A article about a service without linking it.
And even kewler. A new function in a service without a tryout. Good luck!
Maybe its just more security theatre. And lobbyists (isn't the front-running vendor a .NZ company?)
The End of Wall Street (Liar's Poker author)
Her heroes work hard at whatever they love - it's not established why they love it, but it's established that they act on their love.

Peter Keating (the shadow or antagonist of Howard Roark in the Fountainhead, with comparable ability but different choices) provides a counter-example: he loves painting, but doesn't practice it until after many years of ("aw, hell") architecture. When he eventually does turn to it, Howard Roark gently tells him "it's too late".

Yes, her heroes' ability (brilliance) and loves (values) are already in place - but in this, they are no more gifted than anyone else. What differentiates them is their consistent choice to apply their ability to what they love, seek mentors, etc. As a personal choice, it is within their power, and does not come from their upbringing. It comes from them - as do your choices (of course, they also have many blessings and opportunities - as do you).
J300i Joystick Ways
j300, j300 joystick, j300 mouse, j300 mouse ways, joystick, links, mouse, sony ericsson, tracks, ways
Texas Driver Education course
Texas Driver Education course,approved by the Department of Public Safety. and receive your DMV driver certificate the next day!.Texas Driver Ed also includes the latest Texas laws and regulations, making sure that you're up to speed with everything you need to know, not just the basics.
Down-modded for basic misunderstanding of the scientific method.
Not currently, no, and that would, indeed, make it unscientific...
Not to mention that the multiverse theory can't currently be proven wrong and hence is unscientific.
Doubly so when it's an opinion piece on his vision: i.e. just rehashing the same campaign promises that we've been hearing for months.
How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci
1.) CMS - Joomla is OK

Around a week ago Bengtan posted his startup on the following thread. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=352987

http://www.prosepoint.org

He describes it as "Online Newspaper Software". It's opensource too. This might help you. Also there are a lot of new site plugins for Joomla.

But If you want a better CMS (in general), I would suggest Drupal. Joomla (and Mambo) lacks documentation. There's even sufficient tutorials to create some cool plugins.

Drupal on the other hand has a lot of plugins and clear docs. If you wanna create plugins for Drupal you won't need any tutorials. Just start off with the docs. It teaches you from the scratch and is good for beginners.

Apart, the best would be to try everything possible and then choose according to your and your users needs.

2.) where do you get to recruit good people?

If you wanna recruit people, but don't have a solid revenue base, try and get some freelancers working for you on a per post basis. Amazon Mechanical Turk has proved useful to a lot of guys who need small stuff done. Just toss a few cents and your job is done.

3.) If you have run a news site, any other tips you may have

CREATIVITY!!! CREATIVITY!!! CREATIVITY!!!

There are some data that you cannot have access to. A lot of large corporations have access to this data and offer APIs. So consider using external data too(mashup).

A lot of guys run new sites. Creative ideas are what would work if you wanna penetrate into a crowded market.

(shameless self promotion:) I developed a news site for a contest by Daylife. A part of the site was news search but there is another page where users can read news by their Delicious tags. Its at http://jaxly.com/deliciously

You'll find more of the content entries at http://challenge08.daylife.com

Also checkout the news mashups at ProgrammableWeb.

And there's another news site run by another HN member, http://jaanix.com which allows you to read news by assigning strength to keywords.

As I said before, it's just about how you can enthrall your users with your creativity (and the usefulness of the site).
Iceland!
While I agree that SEO has radically changed (from a pure markup game to a link-building game)

Changed since when? I've been receiving spam from people to "trade links" and list my site in their "link index" for years. "link-building" is nothing new, it's been around since it became known that Google's indexing is influenced by external references to pages.
What abusive treatment? The market doesnt value people who work at car factories very highly because their job is so easy that anyone even slightly more intelligent than a chimpanzee can do it. The supply of able workers is pretty near 100% of the population.

The reason programmers don't unionize is because they are trained in a trade that not just anyone can do. They don't need to worry about being "exploited".

Regardless of whether we need them or not, unions are why American car companies have no shot. They're saddled with ridiculous wages and pensions. They shouldn't, according to market economics, have to pay any more than Wal Mart for their labor, but they are forced to, and as such they'll never be able to compete in a global economy against those who aren't.

Any good things that come from a union in the short term (such as higher paychecks and pensions) are more than destroyed by the harm caused when they run entire industries out of the country. There's a reason they call my neck of the nation the rust belt.

It's price fixing pure and simple, and it's always bad for the economy in the end.
Something caught my eye on that page - old Canon logo. Just take a closer look at the logo and you'll find that it's the logo looks like an Indian Goddess. Sitting on a lotus is Saraswati but the face looks like Kali. And with multiple hands. One hand on the left has the mala(a sacred chanting chain) and a another above that has an axe.

A Japanese company with an Indian logo??
scratch the rest: http://img152.imageshack.us/img152/3820/icombinator5wt8.jpg

try that one. you can have any format you like if you want it. its a vector.
I have to agree that I never thought much of iiNet either. But Malone should be commended for speaking out on this issue.

As has already been mentioned, I don't doubt that if this mandatory filter does go ahead, they'll be a way around it, there always is. I'm just more pissed off that we will have to fuck around and find that way. I don't like being treated like a child.

I wonder how much opposition to this plan it will take before the government no longer thinks they have a clear mandate.

"They're not listening to the experts, they're not listening to the industry, they're not listening to consumers ... "

This is completely true and I can't believe the government is still even considering this plan.
Exactly how? Or are you just going to respond with a useless one-liner rather than actually explain your objection?

Statistical analysis of probabilities is a method of analyzing the odds of a theory's validity. If a theory requires that reality be extremely improbable, that theory is highly unlikely. And when there's absolutely nothing else you can do, its the only option other than blind faith.

I'll repeat this again:

If a theory requires that reality be extremely improbable, that theory is highly unlikely.

The entire point of the Anthropic Principle is to attempt to answer this question by stating that if reality was not improbable as such, we wouldn't exist to ask that question.

Do you object to this concept? How is this concept a violation of the scientific method?
Are you supposed to use this card reader from your computer at home? The SMS with a PIN seems more secure AND more usable, and has the added benefit that you get notified if someone else tries to login to your account.
I dare you to name one piece of security, be it physical or virtual, since say.. 1990, that hasn't been theatre.
Its the vendors that scare me. They smell blood (money) and will be constantly whispering in the governments ear - they will (unfortunately) appear as "experts" to the government.
New Corporate Motto: Save yourself at US taxpayers expense
I don't think anyone's arguing against cars. I just think that American cars are less desirable than Japanese, Swedish or German cars. Cars are no doubt useful things.
Nice tips. As a side note - in my opinion, finding a good color scheme can also improve your enjoyability and even usability of vim. I was surprised at how much easier on the eyes some color schemes were versus the default. In addition, if you like having a default terminal look that doesn't quite transfer well to vim (such as a terminal with a little transparency which can be helpful on smaller screens since you can effectively "share" some space between your terminal and whatever you might be reading off of), having a default colorscheme will fix that too.

One very (almost overly) comprehensive place to start is at:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~maverick/VimColorSchemeTest/

Personally I like desert256
Well its re-assuring to see people like make mistakes ;) It happens...
Quantum computing as a field arose from David Deutsch's desire to build an experiment which could test the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics. The idea was that if it were able to find a solution to a problem which was not tractable in one universe, then it would support the notion of a multiverse.
As an attendee of the SF startup weekend, I can say that it's mostly just an exercise for large group management and not actually product development. It's probably a great event for anyone who wants to show off their leadership skills, and not very useful for a top coder that wants to show off his production capacity. The stuff produced in the SF startup weekend could have easily been done by a single person under 24hrs without interruptions from "product managers" who want to change the direction of the product every 10 seconds...

If you want proof, just compare the startup weekend final products with those produced by 1 day contests like railsday or mashupday.

I remember the SF startup weekend, they had programming team and a database team that didn't really consult each other... the programming team went off and did a few simple data modeling and developed some interfaces and the database team went and created this huge database schema that nobody could conceivably develop for in 24hrs. They had all these fields for special case scenarios that were all basically neglected in the final product. I'd say there were probably at least 100 people in the SF weekend... all to produce one simple facebook app.
I warmly invite you to consult the wikipedia page on the scientific method:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

In it, you will find the "essential elements" of the scientific method:

* Characterizations (observations, definitions, and measurements of the subject of inquiry)

* Hypotheses (theoretical, hypothetical explanations of observations and measurements of the subject)

* Predictions (reasoning including logical deduction from the hypothesis or theory)

* Experiments (tests of all of the above)

The last two elements are missing from your approach, and it is hence unscientific.

Please note that the anthropic principle is not a scientific theory, it is a wild guess at why things might be what they are.

If a theory requires that reality be extremely improbable, that theory is highly unlikely.

This is a very wild conjecture with no substantiating evidence. It is wholly equal to blind faith, and in no way superior to it.
As someone who once lived in Atlanta, I can say the startup scene is not as thriving as you might think. Startup weekend travels around the country doing an event at each major city so it's nothing too special that one was held in Atlanta.
So it works... your spam goes to the spam folder.
Just tried from English to Italian, and I must admit it's quite funny
Please note that the anthropic principle is not a scientific theory, it is a wild guess at why things might be what they are.

It is wholly equal to blind faith, and in no way superior to it.

So, by your logic, the anthropic principle is wholly equal to blind faith? Sure, its not strictly science, and more of a logical argument than a scientific experiment (much like my original post), but really? Equal to blind faith?

If you are that deluded, I'm not even going to bother arguing this. This is pointless. Go get yourself a source a bit better than Wikipedia and educate yourself.
Same here. I didn't flag those, only the shiny new ones. I wish I'd been bolder now.