skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting article and perspective -- when I get ideas about building things, I definitely don't remember marketing! It's like "hmm, well, I'll just make it and dumb it on the appstore. People will find it!"

But that probably doesn't work so well :)
Android Must Have Apps 2012
Index funds are wise, but remember that when you invest in the S&P you're investing in the US and in the dollar. Take a look at iShares funds, you may want to consider in which countries and currencies you want to store your money.
Mind mentioning some of the "many companies" that USV invests in that "profit from invading privacy"? Perhaps you're right, but that's a serious accusation without some backup. Aside from Zynga who has definitely had their fair share of well deserved criticism in the past (but has since cleaned up their act), what are the others?
Good point. They'll bring it down for a day and nothing will happen.

Is it likely that the big email providers keep the caching longer and could maintain some functionality in the event the TLD nameservers are down for more than 24 hours?
If I have the answer, but it will take some time to type it out, I will hit save after answering part of it (not even a complete part - I hit save after the first line or two).

Then I'll edit it to be a complete answer. (Release early, release often :) By doing this other answers see that someone else is working on it and won't also answer the question (this way they don't cost me points, but it also prevents them from wasting their time, so it helps both of us).

This is only necessary in the more popular question categories.

Also, once you have enough reputation the interface becomes faster and it's easier to race the answers.

That said, I got a bit tired of the race, and semi-retired.
Well it is a barrier that has stopped me participating too. It is very easy to dismiss these when you, and all those around you, are beyond them.
> As a brit, I fully appreciate and understand why some people in the world hate all britons. We've done some bad things as a nation in recent years and people have a right to tar us all with the same brush.

Well that's cute, but I disagree. I'm Dutch, we've done some rather bad things in our colonial times, yet it is not okay for Indonesians or South Africans to hate all Dutch. Similarly it is NOT okay for Dutch people to hate all Germans just because they invaded us in 40-45 (WW2), because they took our bikes or because they tend to defeat us in international soccer games.

> If any brit has a problem with the way other people look at them, it's their job as a citizen in a democracy to affect the change they want to see in people's attitude towards this country and it's people.

I'd agree with you on that point if only you weren't highly overestimating the level of influence "any Brit" has on these matters, compared to how much "some Brits" have.

Same for any democracy. Even those mythical ones that work. I'm responsible for my own actions, not for those of some bigshot that claims to represent "me" (one individual in a group of several million of that claim).

If you feel that's not right or self-centred and I should do better, I'll try to take responsibility for my own actions extra hard, but I refuse to take on those of some idiot I hardly have any control over. Best I can do with my little vote is to not vote for Geert Wilders--but as you may or may not have noticed, it didn't help much. So am I to feel responsible for that turdmongler? Fuck no! Yet will I discreetly defecate in the kitchen or bathroom sink of anyone I encounter that appears to subscribe to Wilders' moronic ideas? You can count on it, and that's all the responsibility I will take.

> Except when it's the French. There's no pleasing those cheese eating surrender monkeys.

hur hur hur :-/

I'm all for a bit more humorous light-hearted poking on HN, but I'd rather do without crap like this. Made it real hard to read The Black Swan when Taleb continuously did the same, too.
Try just being helpful to other people and not worrying about reputation points and badges and who's going to use the answer for what potentially commercial purpose.

It can be pretty rewarding to have someone thank you profusely for helping them figure something out. And you can learn a lot too -- sometimes to answer a question I'll have to actually go and research it a bit, or make a JSFiddle, that kind of thing.
I'm also curious. I've found the Backbone and Underscore documentation to be pretty good actually. And, in case I'm wondering what a function does _exactly_, the annotated source code (http://backbonejs.org/docs/backbone.html) is more than enough usually.
This tech would be pretty neat to just wrap around the edge of the book, to give a spine with the title of what you are currently reading.
I think that one gets so many upvotes because people who know how hard it is to send a lot of e-mail love to point that answer to people who don't (e.g. bosses, clients) making it very useful to a lot of people.
The iPhone is the most useless phone I have ever used.

Do you really care? Nope.

It works for people good for them if it does not they can use something else.
I think there is much more that can be done to make tools more user-friendly.

An example that pops to my mind is when you misspell a git command, and git suggest what you could've intended:

$ git pill
git: 'pill' is not a git command. See 'git --help'.

Did you mean this?
pull

That's already one step towards a better UI, but it could go even one step further if I could answer the question, ie: I press 'y' and git will pull.

Of course I'm not criticizing GIT (which I think as a better UI than many tools already), it's just an example.
Perhaps "lack of documentation" isn't the best synopsis. "lack of documentation for people who don't know what they're doing" is probably more accurate.

I've found the documentation to be a great reference, but invariably, due to lack of examples, if I'm trying to implement something I haven't used before, I have to scour the internet for other information before I can generally make sense of the official backbone docs.

The best documentation I've found thus far has been other people's projects in Github. While trying not to cargo-cult copy/paste, seeing somebody else implement a feature similar to what I'm trying to do has been the best for me.
Great point - YC is just one path to startup success. The best founders will find a way to make it happen, no matter what.
I'm not sure what the value of this post is? Would you honestly expect every company or even every demo day to contain a frighteningly ambitious idea? And if they were frighteningly, scarily ambitious, would TC really hype them? The sane response seems to be to write them off instead as far too ambitious.

I guess I just don't get what the skepticism here brings to the table? I'm open to input about that.
This is beautiful, but I find it lacking because of the focus on the US mainland exclusively. It would be nice to see North America as a whole along with a good part of the Pacific and Atlantic, because these areas have a massive effect on wind patterns.

For example, the wind over the Chicago is travelling "backwards" for no apparent reason. This is most likely due to this being the "backward half" of a cyclonic system centred over Canada.

The other thing that struck me is the effect the Southwest desert has on wind patterns over all... just, wow.
Historically, privacy bills that get passed tend to be anti-privacy bills. The Medical Privacy Act gave your doctor permission to sell all your private medical data to marketers. The change is I now am forced to sign a privacy release that states I accept that they will sell my private data, and if I refuse to sign it, they refuse to provide medical services.

Any new bill about internet privacy in the US will be the same way. Lobbyists will make sure the name is orwellian doublespeak. It's not a coincidence that we see anti-privacy people like Wilson advocating for what will soon be a bill their people have carefully constructed in order to give them free reign to do as they please.
Hacking PR: Trying to build a buzz on a $0 budget
That's where the money seems to be. It's a shame, but I can't blame groups like these.
Just a point of clarification: users who can edit immediately (those over 2000 rep) can make edits of any length. The length limit is enforced for "suggested edits", which need to be approved by two other users and for which the editor earns +2 reputation.
Cool, but assumes all words have an even probability.

Vs a week player the ideal word list should only include 'common' words.

Vs an ideal player you need to assume they will pick from the list of words that you least likely to guess using optimum play.

Generically, optimum play ends up with a somewhat random list, aka 90% of the time pick E, 10% of the time pick I etc.

PS: Actually generating this list is a 'hard' problem and vary dictionary dependent, but you can probably get reasonably close using some sort of genetic algorithm and a enough simulation time.
No really, please bury this:
- You expended energy clicking it
- I get the satisfaction of righteous indignation
- In 12 months, my bitterness is justified by the meaninglessness of it all
Hey all, just wanted to share some learnings. What's worked for you and what hasn't?
Measure Calls to Action with Google Analytics Event Tracking
The AT&T API Platform SDK for HTML5
I'm not informed enough to say whether this will do anything. I only used it to illustrate that the administration is putting effort into the problem.
Why Failing Isn't Always Failure
> 0 - I use Stack Overflow as a resource

I'd participate but their etiquette is pretty much a turn off. "This should be a comment", "Post closed", etc. - I'm not particularly fond of bureaucratic processes.
Simply great game and the remake of it on the Wii is not half as good as the original.
I remember that I nearly knew every map by heart :)

(But I didn't manage to remember the respawn points.. crazy ;))
Hacker News has failed me... :)

It's strange, I feel like I should know this, but there aren't any clear references on the web either (that I have found).
Your intuition is telling you that you should shoot for 50% so that you can divide the search space in half regardless of the outcome. A right or wrong answer will eliminate half of the possible remaining words.

But right and wrong guesses are not equally valuable in hangman. A wrong guess will eliminate all words of a given length containing the given letter. But a correct guess gives you more: you get the location (or locations) of the letter in the word as a bonus. This will reduce your remaining search space drastically.

Thus, you should optimize for the success of your next guess.
news.ycombinator.com: nasty experience so far. Got bullied by some reputation whores. My reputation went from -2 to -19... and I even got locked _completely_ out of news.ycombinator.com during the experience. So my "karma" went down when I not only was NOT participating but was NOT even able to read the site. Total joke. One more thing: there's no cause-and-effect explanation for the negative karma --- I am just guessing it had to do with one particular guy and his buds.

Not a great way to promote participation. I posted in some detail about the experience, but did not get voted up. In my experience, YC's version of participation is definitely broken and promotes bullying and disinformation.
SendHub (YC W12) Looking for Backend Python Engineer
We're looking for a talented and determined backend dev to lead our API and Infrastructure efforts.

Skills: Python (We use Django), Postgres, Redis(or other NoSQL technologies), Experience writing RESTful APIs, Git

Nice to have: Experience using message queuing systems (like RabbitMQ), and experience using Heroku

What we're doing: We're building simple tools for business to communicate with their customers. We have thousands of users and are sending over 120k messages a month.

What you'll be doing: Working closely, and at speed, with our small team and toolset to take our messaging platform to the next level scaling to millions of users and messages sent per week. This will likely mean you'll be learning a lot and most of it will on the job.

Our Philosophy: We believe in building wonderful products and taking care of our people. We expect a lot of each other but we wouldn't want it any other way. We're hungry and we need you to be too.

We're based in Mountain View, CA, and while we're flexible on remote working, you'll need to be around the office.

If you're interested in being more than a cog in the machine, please drop us a line: ryan [at] sendhub [dot] com
Mine is 859. Pretty low.
You need a category for negative karma. TY.
Paul Graham said don't attack the problem head on. Make a beachhead. Supposedly these seemingly dull ideas are beachheads.

That was covered in a previous HN discussion about a similar article questioning YC startup ideas in practice.

But something like Dropbox seems to have a hard time scaling out, exploring other ideas, and that's with a founder who wants to build a big company like Apple.

Even if you start with a beachhead, it should be one that can grow. Apple started with a PC, to grow they made more and better PCs. Microsoft/Gates started with BASIC then pivoted drastically to an idea that could grow, an OS for PCs. What will Dropbox grow or pivot to in order to be an Apple size company? Hard to imagine backups for teams or iCloud but OS independent will be the ticket.
I'm still not 100% sold on these big sequencing projects. Sure, you get the genomes of a bunch of individuals, and then you do a bunch of GWAS on it to see if you can find some mutations that are linked to any phenotypes. It just doesn't seem very exciting. I love the idea that if you're working on any cell line/individual, you can just get it sequenced for decreasing amounts of money, but I'd love to be sold on some big picture stuff as to why 1000 genomes matters (and if GWAS actually has lived up to its promise).

That said, I've got a paper coming out real soon now that looked at the relationship between mutations across individual strains of Arabidopsis, and how (surprise surprise) you have fewer mutations in areas of proteins that potentially carry function, so I do think it's somewhat useful!
I should have used a plural instead of the singular. There are, of course, many alternatives to the free market. Communism, socialism, feudalism, anarchism, capitalism, cronyism, and quite a few other isms. And free markets are better than all of those alternatives. You don't think so? Examples, please, instead of non-existent dichotomies.
Am I the only one that doesn't understand the advantage?

I don't want paper-like e-ink displays that start to feel all "used" after a couple of days. Bending them will presumably keep them from lying flat later on. People talk about wanting to "fold" them -- and then you'll never get the creases out. And I don't want a whole book of these sheets -- for me, the whole advantage is that an e-reader doesn't need page turning!

If I had a flexible display, I would just keep it protected in a hard-backed case, thus negating the whole point. Am I missing something here?
Teamwork.

Screen for this by asking people for examples when they have been wrong / how they handled it, what is the best idea that a coworker came up with, or a specific example when they helped someone else succeed at work.

The most painful hiring mistakes I have made were brilliant people who lived in dire fear of being wrong, sought to hide facts that could disprove their positions, and made embarassingly destructive efforts to undermine others. If you ever do hire such a person, no matter how critical they may seem, you will be amazed at the productivity and mood improvement when they depart.
I felt the same way, fwiw, and I'm glad you mentioned it. I considere it an immature form of attention-getting, and counterproductive (I don't need to click through to read someone's opinion on work schedules from someone who isn't mature enough to express themselves without swearing)
Svbtle : Application
This was exactly my thoughts when reading the demo-day list. I wonder how pg reconciles this? Seems like an emerging strategic weakness for YC.
"If I were Paul Graham, these types of companies simply would not satisfy me (despite what look to be very lucrative payoffs)"

There's a difference in investing in companies expecting some kind of a return and throwing money at really ambitious ideas in the hope that one of those gets really successful. I cannot see how investing carefully and getting returns (ie. making money) is not satisfying.
I tried to answer some question once and it told me I needed reputation to submit an answer but it was not at all clear how I could acquire reputation to begin with. While I'm sure there's a relatively simple solution to this, I became frustrated and never looked into it further.
Maybe some of the people contributing answers to this comment thread could also suggest some literature on bioinformatics? (specifically for Software Engineers with limited biology backgrounds)
Identity theft is still called "theft", when in reality, nothing is really stolen, you information is merely copied.

If I copied your credit card number and sold in a big list to someone online (note: I didn't use the number to actually charge anything, I am just selling the numbers), it would still be called "theft" in all of the newspapers and under the law.

Let's not forget the whole Thesis theme debacle a little over a year ago. Tons of people here on HN were screaming that they stole source code. Wouldn't the source code have to be physically taken for it to be considered stolen (according to this article)?

Whenever I see an article talking about how pirating shouldn't be called theft, it's usually because the original author believes it should be legal.

It's actually closer to counterfeiting than theft. When you steal a car, General Motors doesn't lose an entire product line.

When there is mass counterfeiting of something digital, the original author will slowly start to lose the ability to sell the product.

Why? Because the cost of a digital item is only what people are willing to pay. If the majority of people know they can get it for free (with no penalty), they will download it for free and you will have a difficult time in the future convincing them to pay for it.

You essentially are competing with yourself, but $0 cost being the difference.
The hard ones don't get press for years. Look at upvertr, sure it could be described as git + electronic software + parts sourcing, but it will take them a while to build this to the point where everyone will see how amazing and useful it is.
What gives you the impression that the things you do and say in public are not in front of them?
Choosing Between Making Money and Doing What You Love
I'm guessing they can target the virus RNA they're attempting to eradicate.
Be aware, you've linked directly to the home page of your tumblr instead of linking to the post itself. Your HN submission will become very confusing after you make another tumblr post.
I would imagine that the point is to encourage future entrepreneurs to avoid the two trends pointed out in the post. YCombinator and TechCrunch are both trendsetters, so it makes sense to express skepticism if you have a problem with the types of ideas TechCrunch is covering from demo day.
Making Money From Your App Isn’t Just About Advertising
I don't see how anyone can answer this without knowing how your customers and audience use the site. I could critique the fonts and such, but sometimes sites with downright ugly design are very useful to their user base, like Craigslist.

If you are asking such a general question I suspect you might not be doing enough measurement.

You can try Google Page Speed for some optimization suggestions but you're not doing badly, except for serving unscaled images (ouch). I'd fix that at least. https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/#url=www.pe.com&...
Install AutoPager and don't worry about things like that anymore.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/autopager/
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mmgagnmbebdebebbcl...
Not really true. If he's a vegetarian and most people aren't, he's not becoming more average by seeing vegetarian restaurants ranked above steakhouses. He's just getting results that he's more likely to find useful. (Try asking your vegan friends if they want a steak for dinner tonight. Do that every day. See if they get annoyed at all.)

Same goes for programming language. If you're programming Java and are googling for the Iterables library, you probably don't want to see the C# version. And if you always click Java results in preference to C# results, it makes sense to not clutter the top couple of results with C# information. You never use them, after all.

(Imagine the kind of advice you'd get from friends if they didn't know you. It wouldn't be very useful; you might as well ask a random stranger.)

Google is just a computer program whose config file you edit by using the Internet. Not all that scary.
I'm not a biology expert, but from my understanding, they wouldn't be able to "make a baby" as output. But they could make a cell that contains the specified DNA that would grow into a baby under the right conditions. Of course, we are still a ways out from having that technology.
I would put the columnists and bloggers section on the right side, under the search widget. It looks empty a bit. That's just my opinion. Reilk is absolutely right though.
Playing hangman against Sheldon Cooper was a mistake in the first place :)
> The high-traffic tags are full of low-quality or frequently asked questions. The amount of duplication in e.g. the C++ tag is staggering, but there doesn't seem to be a conscious effort to enforce a no-duplicate policy of any kind.

This is a tough one. There already is a system for dealing with duplicates, which is to vote to close as a duplicate, but requires 5 people to so vote before it will actually be closed. You could reduce that number, but there would probably be concern about abuse and mistakes if you reduced that too far. The thing is, it's fairly labor intensive to actually find duplicate questions, and ensure that they really are duplicates. In many cases, it's just easier to answer the new question, than to dig out the duplicate, vote to close, and then, if you actually want to be helpful, explain in a comment why the question is a duplicate (since beginners might not understand how the other question answers theirs).
i think this is more about who is saying "stupid" and how generous they feel about it. there are a few things

- if paul graham says it's stupid it's different than somebody who calls everything stupid.

- calling the owner of the idea stupid.

- plain old hating.

- saying 'stupid' can also be a part of the debate, that's natural.

this is a hard problem to solve, that's why i brought it up. there is definitely not an easy way of saying this is right or wrong, but if community sets its tone, i think participants will try to be a part of that commonality.

and hopfully HN stays 'objective' and within 'reason' with polite, kind, constructive comments. when there are no rules, haters win.
An even better strategy would be to weight your guesses towards the most information gain. If a letter appears often, but is in the same position most of the time, getting it won't help you as much as getting a letter that appears in fewer words but in more varied positions. Doing a quick check of 5 letter words in my /usr/share/dict/words file I find:
S: 659,62,267,260,2282
E: 122,829,448,1254,679
A: 252,1201,678,410,307

That is, S, when it appears, is heavily skewed towards the last letter in the word, finding it won't help you figure out the word nearly as well as finding the more evenly distributed E or A.
I think that might boil down to Bing apparently not having indexed you. From what I can tell, DDG gets a decent proportion of its search results from the Yahoo BOSS API, which I believe is these days mostly feeding Bing data.

The results there look pretty similar, anyway: http://www.bing.com/search?q=curvio