skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I might be on board with this if the author even began to discuss why what Google and Amazon are doing is less than ideal for the consumer, but the main point he's trying to make remains totally unexplained, and in addition I don't agree with his argument about Apple at all.

Why is a kindle fire less than ideal - because they sell books on it? You could make the same argument about every video game system - it's less than ideal because you have to buy video games for it. This isn't because nintendo is evil or lazy, it's just how the system works. A video game system is a device for consuming other peoples' video games (and nintendo's too, if they want), and the kindle fire is a device for consuming other peoples' books.

Why is android less than ideal, because it's ad supported? You could say the same thing about facebook, twitter, and every other company out there that provides a free service supported by ads. Some people don't like this, and this leads to developments like app.net - we'll see how paid services like this do over the next couple of years. But the fact remains that if you don't realize when you sign up for a free service that people are being paid to make that they need to make money somehow, you aren't even thinking.

Then let's move on to all of apple's major devices. You get a iphone, but this relies on a contract with a service provider, which is in fact how apple makes most of their money off iphones. Oh no - immoral!

Or you may buy an ipod, apple's other big product. But what's an ipod without music on it from a third party. Hold up - third party pollution, the ipod is no good as a product.

Or perhaps you buy the only other thing they sell, a computer. But you'd better not put any software on it from a third party, because then it's just a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Overall, I understand the general idea, but this was very poorly thought out and needs more thinking and explanation, not to mention that at least to me, the statement about Apple's products all being an "end" is definitely false.
textphile.net may be up your alley
This should be required reading for anybody interested in startups.
Thank you for the feedback - this is exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for. You have to drag the icons from finder, not from the dock. Does that work?
Talking to customers by Patrick Foley
wow! Fanboys are getting desperate for attention. Google does just as much of a bait and switch as Apple does. Google does in the form of Ads; Apple does it in the form of "oh, you bought this device! Cool here it is... Oh you wanted MP4's and other media for it? That'll cost you!" You think you're getting a great device but you're just getting something to interact with the media they lease to you.
Troll or not, I would suggest him to not use '✓ Verified Authentic' as a tagline. I was confused if that was a Google+ verification for identities.

Edit: Reason for downvote? The person's infobox looks like [1]. For a person not so active on G+ to realize that the first line is a user defined string and not system generated tag, it is confusing. [1]: http://i.imgur.com/zvaDq.png
This approach didn't work for Slashdot, Digg and Reddit, which are all fallen civilisations. If we don't try anything new to solve the problem, this civilisation will fall as well.
In general of course what you say makes sense but in this instance the app should be written in C.

The client asked for C, they know the future, you do not. If, as the service provider, you recommend C# and detail all the advantages and the client still wants C you go with C. Simple as that.

Saying C# is beautiful and powerful is irrelevant. The task can be done in any number of languages but the client asked for C, go with C.
I also signed up for Buffer, which has a really nice Chrome extension that adds "Add to Buffer" to some popular sites, including HN.
to be fair to onetimeuse001, Ford did own Jaguar at one time, so it might be a bad comparison.
How about (perceived) barrier to entry and risk of failure to execute instead?
Look at BBC's headlines compared to everyone else's. Someone explain this to me.
I agree it is obvious -- to you and I. how do you explain all the disagreement though...
Thank you, hadn't noticed that.
It is healthy to be wary of "evolution explains X" claims. As you say, evolution theory is intended to explain all biological developments. That doesn't mean that any particular evolutionary pressure we can conceive of that logically leads to the effect is the real explanation.
I've predominantly been a lurker here for quite awhile (my account is only a few hundred days older than your own) and I feel the quality is down from when I joined. Contrary to most people's opinions though I never felt the quality was all that high to begin with. I think the users here vastly overrate their contributions.

I enjoy HN as a nice source of interesting links and stories to read on my own time. Yet I find that I can't make it through even half of the comments on any given thread that is popular. It's too difficult to squeeze out the insightful stuff. I tend to just keep track of several regulars via their comments feed and try my best to avoid the chatter of the masses anymore.

My biggest personal pet peeve since I first joined here back in August of 2008 is when bigger threads devolve into tangential side arguments about who is using ad hominen, straw men tactics and other meta discussion methods. When half of the comments are about someone else's commenting technique the thread has gone into the weeds for me.
"However, I could be wrong. I mean, everyone did love the animated images, colors, and sounds on GeoCities which lead to their industry takeover and incredible success."

Let's not just assume that all annoyances are created equal. One is an integrally bad user experience, the only way out of which is to stop using the service wholesale. The other amounts to mousing-over a large area of the screen and clicking a button.
Have you tried DragonBox (iOS) yet? It's not exactly what you are asking for but it takes creativity, logic, and maths and jumbles them all together. My 8yo really enjoyed it.
Gamegossip - Gaming News Aggregator Launched, customizable tab when logged in
They are already in Brazil.
To be effective, your to-do list should also include when and where beside the task.

The post assumes humans are bound to sense habits and gives little credit to the power to making decisions - where one can change their mind and act upon that decision.

All you need is a mental transition between the previous activity and the new activity. How? Well, the problem has existed as long as humans, so just figure out how parents convince kindergarteners to go to school, why some cultures pray before eating food (try to think beyond thankful-for-food reasons), and how famous leaders can led entire movements. The common denominator to all these will be your answer.
BugASalt: IndieGoGo hits 500k
I've been looking for a way to solve that exact problem for a long time. I'm not 100% sure this is going to improve my current workflow though. Will try...
Yeah, that worked! Could you see if you could get it to work with dragging from the dock? Also, when you switch groups, I didn't realize it "exits" all of your other apps. It may be a good idea to just hide the other apps. Thoughts?
"he even gave us a list with the name of the global variables (sigh) he wants us to use." -> Your boss clearly doesn't trust his team. Get him to trust you (may or may not be possible), and everything else will follow.
Maybe most of the market doesn't care, but I care a lot. I gladly paid $30 more for an ad-free Kindle, and I won't be buying one of the new Fires if they don't have an ad-free version.
You shouldn't wait till you're 30 to do your first startup
My 2 guesses: SEO or that little sidebar box they have showing popular articles has a character limit to look good.
This article discusses what can be done with just time and location, if you just treat them with a bit more smarts: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4489121
Sales Proposal Rules: Stop Creating Your Own Price Objections
I think this has been posted already. How does the duplicate detection work?

Good article nonetheless.
As a forum owner, to me "pageviews/month" is a pretty scary metric. "You mean I'll have to pay more if Google wants to index me?" What about bandwidth/mth? That seems more palatable to me.
This was discussed a while back as well
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3842554

And my thoughts
"Here's an idea:
Have karma and voting tied together. Your Karma is basically how much votes you get to give.
If someone makes a good post, people upvote it, spending their precious karma. The person made the post, collects the karma and and they can use it to vote other posts.
We can limit karma by having new users start off with 0. And they only way they can vote/get karma is to contribute positively with quality articles/posts.
Now it works the other way too. Make downvoting take away karma of the OP too, thus making people put more thought into their posts. The downvoting action will cost a vote, so people don't running around downvoting everything without thinking.
Basically let Karma/Vote be a resource that can be used to promote positive contribution and dissuade useless contributions.
The tricky part is balancing the karma in the whole system. Downvoting siphons votes/karma from the system, we need a way to introduce additional karma/votes into the system. Maybe a monthly replenish method where say everyone gets 10 votes each month. But in order to qualify for the monthly bonus, you must first contribute enough (get the up votes) past a certain threshold (say 100 upvotes to your posts/contributions)."
Limits of statistics
An elegant demonstration of the problem.
The problem I face in Canada (Toronto) is that I prefer to stay as a contractor.
I looked into a few startups myself, and the pay wasn't that interesting (that and the fact I'd have to commute 2 hours per day).
I love the comment in the top of your source:

<!-- THIS IS NOT THE PLACE TO BE LEARNING HTML, CSS OR JAVASCRIPT. THIS CODE IS OF EXCEPTIONALLY POOR QUALITY. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
:NOTE TO SELF: INSERT ASCII WARNING TRIANGLE FROM 4CHAN HERE TO GIVE READERS THE HIEBBY-JIEBIES:
-->
Http://www.mobilephonebd.com/maximus-mobile/Maximus-Mobile-Phone-Price-List.html
For the most part HN is far from being in decline. I say this from the perspective of going back to very active participation in various lists back in the days when USENET and private BBS's were your only choices. I've seen a lot, the good, the bad and the ugly.

I do feel that some tweaks here and there could be useful, and I suspect that this is happening on a somewhat regular basis. My own pet peeve is that down-votes ought to cost you something and that down-voting should require a comment. Down-vote comments could be hidden by default so as to not pollute threads too much.

We are all guilty to some degree of adding pollution. This is a group of human beings, not algorithms. It will happen. And this is normal.

As a libertarian and real working entrepreneur who has founded and run several companies, succeeded and failed, I tend to react negatively to very liberal views and views not necessarily rooted in real entrepreneurial experience.

On the political end, some of the younger minds on HN have been politically polluted by the liberal bend of our universities and mainstream media. Until they have a collision with reality they then to simply parrot what was driven into their heads because that's all they know.

On the business end, there are a lot of people posting on HN that have never actually started or run a real business, leased space and equipment, hired and fired, had to deal with the various corrupt liberal labor boards, had to deal with taxation and regulation, the agony of business problems and the exhilaration of business success and a myriad of other real-world forces that a business has to face on a daily basis. Yet, they'll come to HN and think that because they read the internet they understand business.

All of this is OK to some degree or another. As I said, it's human nature and this is a group of human beings.

I like HN and want it to remain a high-quality source of interesting discussions relevant to the tech entrepreneur (and not just about which LISP is better!). I'll do my part and try to refrain from reacting to some of the aforementioned posts unless I can truly add valuable insights. Maybe others should also take a moment to re-examine their behavior patterns and see what could be improved. It's probably that simple.
Fair enough. I will give you that. It was a bit of a extreme on that example. But I imagine you do understand what I generally mean about the small things having the ability to add up.
Look, I despise Apple for believing that they should not only be able to patent things like two-finger-pinch but that they deserve a patent on it, but there is nothing good about this for anyone. They make good products. True knockoffs like this Goophone are a plague to progress.
Win $25,000 at Startup Showdown on Oct 9th
This is interesting but I am concern that people with no enough karma to post would abandon the account (because would be useless at that point) and starting creating new ones. Or worse, as they could have dummy throwaway accounts for potentially risk comments in which case this mechanism would not achieve its goal of getting better quality post.

However, I think it still would be possible to do something similar, like proportional weights for upvotes and downvotes depending on the karma. Also weighting your posts with your karma could help making to grow faster those posts coming from a reliable user.

We could go even further, making the karma as a rating instead of a linear accumulator and update it using something like an Elo rating system where we could compare the actual score (upvotes points) with an estimate prior score based on the actual karma (pretty close to what happen on chess actually)

I don't know.. I am just writing down some crazy ideas that came to my mind when I read the post. Any insights?
But then it is the fault of the user and not really the car dealership. Car dealership do not (cannot?) restrict you from using duplicate/fake/not-their parts, AFAIR. I do not think that anyone would hold the dealership responsible (legally and morally) for, say a mishap that happened because of a faulty fake tire.
But in Lisp when read naïvely left-to-right this becomes "times add one two three", which is nonsense in English.

So, "the product of the sum of 1 and 2, and 3"? Reads fine in English, as long as you refer to the results instead of describing what to do. :)
Images for your next Big Data presentation
Eventually I'm going to release a command line utility that does the same thing. You'll do something like define a .foreman file with

design "Photoshop CS5" "Google Chrome"

and then do "macforeman design" and it will act just like the gui app.
And thousands of people will call to report a counterfit product with apple in it instead of the 'small bee'.
Sorry for the late reply, but I had to sleep.

My problem is too much weight on video and too little on cpu power and memory amount.
The lesson is not "do not build on someone else's platform", but "be careful whose platform you build on". There have been signs for quite some time now that twitter was not particularly supportive of things built on them.
I think you should spend a paragraph giving a more clear explanation about what it does. The superlatives should be separate from a clear explanation.
Labrador: A web-based, database agnostic client for Rails development databases
> But human beings, with their very complicated behavior
> patterns for adaptation to many environments, probably have
> a system for regulating immune response that is harder to
> observe.

That, and even when playing along with this case, it would seem logical for our immune system to conserve these precious resources by relaxing and taking it easy when we know some medicine is going in to help us rather than go full throttle.
CrossOver for Mac will go free once 100,000 people pledge to vote.
I buy a video game console to play games. Most of the people I know bought a Fire to get a tablet.

Look, everyone, naturally, caters to the one who's paying the bills. Advertisers are paying the bill. They make money on the ads/books/goods not the device. Therefore the device is secondary.
10 Entrepreneur Tips to Keep Your Health and Sanity
That makes no sense to me. The forum owner/founder had to choose a forum in the beginning, right? If the forum owner chose poorly, then it makes for a frustrating experience thus only the most under-served niches/people will participate. Ultimately the community starts somehow and, to me, the forum software is a critical piece. It should be fluid, fast, and not get in posters' way.
This isn't a client, it's a manager. There's a vast difference in the relationship there.
True, but I believe the point is having an atmosphere (investors, universities, creative thinkers, etc.) that helps build a company.
So are you calling him a liar or not?
I think Amazon is an end unto itself, I LOVE buying goods from Amazon, and anything that lets me do it easier is fantastic. Everyone understands Amazon is a marketplace, no deception here. Google is a slightly different story.
I have never seen this, thank you for pointing it out - I will use it, but to be honest this is precisely the kind of valueless bureaucratic comment that irritated me enough to write the blogpost.

This is an internet forum, not a hashtable; uniqueness is not a design requirement, conversation, discussion and thought are, so I intend to have many more "Fire Aim Ready" moments.

If I think about something strongly enough I will write about it, often post it and if people are interested enough in it, they will discuss it. I'm sure most ideas problems and potential solutions have been mentioned somewhere in mankind's 4000 years of written words, but context changes over time and many conversions are worth having as many times as necessary before a problem is solved.
Here is a good post about Arch package signing from the lead pacman dev http://www.toofishes.net/blog/real-story-behind-arch-linux-p...

Also, I believe that "pacman" definitely wins the award for best package manager names.
Simon Says Tutorials
The tags remind me of the tag support in YAML. YAML does have top-level elements, but the document break marker "---" gives you a stream of documents.
Thanks for the tip, but it is hardly different from the RaspberryPI.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3171448

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1159909

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3677350

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1779665

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2336657
Many of the comments on the "Chinese company uses leaked photos to copy, patent iPhone 5 design" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4487905) were disappointing / annoying / frustrating.

I am being the change I wish to see by not commenting in threads like that.

Visiting NEW and up voting great stories, and flagging garbage, helps. Maybe.
Windows as a brand suffered greatly at the hands of OEMs and their crappy software, regardless of whose fault it was.
One interesting question is whether or not Google will respond by adding an ad-supported component to their tablet ecosystem.

As a technical matter, I don't think it would be hard (for instance) to add Gmail ads to the Gmail app. And I'd think those ads wouldn't bother people much since they're used to them on the web. The real questions are whether or not the math works out and whether or not people would go for it (they way they apparently have with Amazon).
New Rails workshops to bring more women into the Boston software scene
The Australian government is currently spending $27.5bn to put fibre to the premises of 93% of Australian homes:

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

...and the other more remote premises will be covered by wireless and satellite services.
That's not what an investment is.
This is a difficult thing. In 2012/2013, forums are ubiquitous. If you're going to write a new forum software, you then have to make a choice:

1) Do you only target "people who don't have a forum yet but want to start one"?

2) Or do you make an upgrade/migration path from vBulletin/etc so that you can let existing forums move to your software?

If you go with #1, that's a long, long slog IMO. If you go with #2, you have an instant market of 100,000,000 forums.
How 12 Founders Named their Startups
What The IPS Saw
Or maybe it's more like this:

2007. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more.

2008. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more.

2009. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more.

2010. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more.

2011. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more.

2012. edw519, too busy building to comment. Community: Where have all the old timers gone?
History shows this will probably lead to a lawsuit by the local cable providers to stop it.
Yes, Amazon's content is the ends. But if it is so obvious to you and I why not everyone here arguing against the idea?
Due to the highly temporal nature of HN, I don't think reposts should be punished, especially if the repost window is a year.

I'm not sure if that's what you're trying to do, or if you're just trying to link to the old threads. If the latter, please carry on.
My Hacker News account is 1859 days old (just over 5 years). Over those 5 years, I've gone through several stages of my entrepreneurial career.

HN has been there from the time when I just was dreaming about launching a startup, through the gut check when I finally quit my full-time job to found a startup, selling that startup to another company, being fired by that company, and finally joining a friend's startup as CTO. I've changed throughout, and I've seen Hacker News change as well.

The problem I have witnessed with Hacker News is that over the years, it's transformed from a place where civil and intelligent discourse can be had to a place where each comment seems to be made for show. Rather than making solid arguments, each person seems to want to be seen as more intelligent than the rest of the commenters. This phenomena is the reason for what in my opinion is a breathtaking level of pedantry about the most mundane topics.

For example, there was a post on the front page yesterday about scalability at GitHub. It was an interesting and insightful article from a knowledgeable author. The top comment was something along the lines of, "I can't believe they wasted so much time making the UI look this good." HN used to be a place where insightful articles were rewarded with intelligent conversation and debate. What happened?

Another example. Someone launched a site earlier this week involving the sales of hobbyist electronics. The site was definitely interesting, and they experienced a large volume of traffic from HN and Reddit. The top comment? Something along the lines of, "when a startup can't keep its site up, it makes me question their abilities." HN used to be a site where you would be congratulated for launching. What happened?

It's this kind of stuff that has to go. I don't think Hacker News was ever perfect -- and maybe I'm just rooting for the site because of the potential that it has -- but it's definitely gotten worse over the past few years.

As a community, we need to stop the posturing and the pedantry, and get back to civil and intelligent discourse. We also need to act as the site's immune system, and stop promoting content that is clearly written to be seen but adds nothing to the conversation.
فلسطين. top-level domain representing the Occupied Palestinian Territory
I agree with everything you said about the ban on large servings of sweetened drinks. But remember we got this thanks to politicians, not scientists. It is a very typically "political" regulation in our society.

I in no way see how this applies to your fear of rule by scientists?