skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apparently the www.randsinrepose.com guy is also "Michael Lopp, senior engineering manager at Apple", according to that BusinessWeek "Tech Beat" article.
Assuming that's accurate, it alone is an interesting bit of news (to me at least) - even if it does date back to March 2008.
That may shed as much light on how innovation happens at Apple as the article itself does. The "wide-open" initial stage followed by gradual honing by reality checks doesn't feel very different than creativity-processes used in most organizations that value innovation.
The article might also be a helpful reminder that it isn't only from the brain of Steve Jobs that Apple mines for ideas.
Nice comeback, but address the example. People's time -- worth something only if sold?

Does the phrase opportunity cost ring a bell?
"yc chose somebody else (who had already in the program before) to create a business" I have to admit this part leave a bit uneasy from now on I will have to think twice before ...
have users with a certain reputation in and then charge a fee for new ones or just forbid commenting for users without reputation?!
I can definitely relate to the time aspect mentioned here. I find that for very complex design or architecture issues it can sometimes take an hour just to "load" the problem into my memory, such that I can then start thinking around creative solutions to it. I just couldn't do that in the typical open plan office.
If the charge served to reduce the chaff from unvetted commentators, then I'd have no problem with it. Depending on...

How smoothe (and trust-worthy) is the credit card payment process. If it makes registration/payment more of a hassle then the time/trouble cost would personally be a barrier when the $5.00 would not. But that's just me.
Duplicate of: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466704 ... honestly I liked both the first article and this second one, but I don't get it why shimon posted it twice on HN -- so I flagged this one.
Isn't Slashdot's whole karma system designed specifically because us hackers find it irresistible to play games.
a status symbol now makes "good karma" more shiny. people will try to attain it. this makes sense, otherwise why would pg add this feature, if not to promote good commenting. the poster's point is that people are trying to attain shiny; will the culture actually become nicer and more thoughtful?
I'm finding the ability to not override anymore is saving me a ton of time. Funny how when I could override it I would... Even though I set up the noprocrast parameters.
I think you underestimate the probability that the world does not divide neatly into trolls and non-trolls. Rather, the troll lurks within us all, and without constant vigilance, under the right conditions the troll will emerge!

In other words, users will not pay to troll. They'll pay to make a comment, which may or may not be a trollish comment. (A lot of trolls can't, in the heat of the moment, tell the difference between a troll and a comment -- that's what makes them prone to being trolls.) And then they'll have paid, which means there's no barrier at all to future trollish behavior from the same person.
Nah. Think about 4chan. When you remove usernames you encourage trolling more than you do lengthy responses.

I think if you're going to read, you might as well read everything that isn't grayed out with downvotes.
I'm glad someone mentioned this. MeFi has done really well and certainly hasn't lost steam since requiring a paid account. If HN were to go in a paid direction I think the posts and comments should be available to anyone (a la MeFi).
From the post: "just to cut out the comment before it happens, of course these [areas] are not mutually exclusive".
Your Orangeness,

I have a niggling doubt about YC - that their connections and network and the whole environment might make the difference between success and failure in marginal cases, or the difference between a moderate success and a big success in other cases, if other things are mostly the same: a couple of smart, motivated hackers. If this is indeed the case, people are right to feel bad if they get rejected, because they lost out on a big opportunity.

It would be interesting to be able to test the "YC effect", but difficult. One way might be for PG and company to select a group of people who are ... perhaps not 'mediocre', but not quite as good as the rest, and see how well they do (obviously you can't tell them that they're the test group). However, that has obvious problems: 15K+ is a decent chunk of change to spend on an experiment, and it's not a 'double blind'.

(Disclosure: never applied to YC, likely never will, unfortunately)
The last thing I want to see in my Twitter stream is automated spam. I'm pretty violently opposed to products like this.
Meta-discussions were really the death of digg. Soon after come the "experiments."
they can still be dedicated w/o paying. Like you said the money is trivial...if someone wants to screw things up, paying $5 is no big deal
Konstanz Information Miner
Well, the fact that interest rates are nearing zero does indicate how must is not enough.
I'd argue that space cycles help you refresh yourself. I usually get off of Hacker News geared up to churn out code and designs. If I coded nonstop all day I would burn out.
I ready both of your comments and enjoyed them... Would I pay $5/yr for content like this? Sure. However, it seems that only one of you would stay around...
I don't know about it being worth "something", but I'm pretty sure it's not worth "money" if you can't sell it; the context here is users paying for HN access.
Snow Leopard to Triangulate a Computer's Location
Crazy College Admissions Stories
That was an interesting article, tho a little old. Things may change now when Jobs is gone...
While I fail to see the HN angle in the story, I find it funny and pretty disturbing that judges (ab)use a loophole in the legal system to sentence someone to jail for 500 days for an offense with a stated maximum of 42 days.
Other individuals do not [share a common history with the "you" of a second ago].

All siblings share zero genetic and cultural history?
I realize that I may have sparked this line of argument with my quip about the time I spend posting on HN. But the fact is that for every hour I lose here I might well save an hour somewhere else, because some person posts something about github, or Linode, or Dropbox, or some other tool that I might otherwise never have heard of and I get that much smarter.

Time spent socializing with smart people is very difficult to value in dollars, but it is certainly not valueless! If nothing else, it preserves one's sanity and morale. And these are very hard things to buy, indeed.
Weight powered mobile "robot" - with "programming language" (video)
How to destroy a concept in a few clicks...
Besides the main idea, even, i can't even see who this software is addressed to. I mean, looking at the eye-melting advertisement of the first page, I feel like i'm watching some of these blinking advertisement which are only pushing to close the page.
So who would have an interest in that ? Some serious firm ? It looks more dedicated to the casual/unprofessionnal user
"You really think a troll won't pay five bucks a year?"

I think a truly motivated troll might pay five bucks.

But now we've got a clear, concrete ban target. Thwack! Out five bucks.

Can they sign up again? Sure! I wouldn't even try to stop them. But thwhack!, out another five bucks. How many trolls are $100 interested in trolling?

The equation for trolling radically alters when money is involved. Just like how spam wouldn't be practical if we could somehow charge even a penny per email. (Which I am well aware is impractical, but if it was, it would destroy spam.)
Image Metrics makes it easier and cheaper to put real faces in games
So, as far as I can understand, Y Combinator chose to support other guys working on an idea that is exactly the same as yours? I can see two useful lessons to learn:

1. So, those guys already launched with your idea? And you really think that their execution is perfect? Think twice. Yes, "YouTube for games" would be nice in theory, but to tell you the truth I don't want to play it, and I'm sure there are quite a few people like me in this respect. Something is not there that would make me enjoy this. But I like watching videos on YouTube, go figure. You can think hard about the deficiencies that prevent Heyzap from being enjoyable (yes, I hereby state that it is not enjoyable) and do this idea, the right way.

2. What made Y Combinator choose them over you? Even given the obvious deficiencies you realised in pt. 1? In your place, I would ask PG nicely to tell why you didn't make it and the other guys did.
Christians Bailing on GoDaddy Due to 'Immoral' Advertising
I know where you're coming from, and I kind of agree. But the tendency to deconstruct every element of one's environment and debate how it might be improved is one of the very hacker tendencies that the site is intended to encourage. We're not going to get rid of it. Just ignore it if you can. I try to ignore it, but obviously my success rate is not 100%. ;)

This thread isn't uninformative. Among other things, it is evolving into a catalogue of other sites that have tried this idea, and how it might have worked out for them (or not).
I didn't care about the sexy ads, I bailed because of their car salesman interface.
This seems to be a 'Benjamin Heckendorf' production, the same guy that sells 'how to succeed on craigslist' shit.

If he's going to do a 'domain by proxy' to avoid a C&D or worse by the twitter folks then I think that he'd better change his nameserver policy :)
So what about making HN invitation only. I like the idea.

The people who have contributed in the past could be autoinvited and could invite others as well (maybe depending n karma -> 100 points -> 1 invitation... )
IEEE Spectrum: Dream Jobs 2009
New rule: screw the comments where you're trying to help one person understand anything. It'll just lower your comment average.

I'll observe empirically if that's what happens under the new system. It looks like it could be a risk (as with this comment).
I get your point, but how does the wise old man explain how to make back money without losing even more time?
Something I find interesting about this post is that the author is an accomplished theoretical physicist, who has known and worked with many leading theoretical physicists and computer scientists. It gives his classification some extra credibility.
I don't think trolls and flamers care about karma. As long as their individual posts get low enough to be out of sight, whether they're at -8 or -50 doesn't matter. Presumably users will still get banned for the same extent of trolling and flaming.
I think that swombat's intended point was that the areas of genius correlate very highly with each other's presence -- to the point that treating their respective occurrences as independent events (possibly) damages our actual understanding of the situation. Which has been my experience also.

You did refute his actual point, though.
No.

I would pretend that I was seriously considering it, and then would find something that was nearly as good and never come back.

cf. Salon.com (despite the fact that it went free years ago)
by and large, this community seems to be fairly resistant to these types of things and to the general woes that plague places like reddit/digg. if an orange-namer starts getting out of line, i'm sure they'll be taken down a peg.

edited to add: about the only problem i forsee with orange names is that they become a self-fulfilling prophecy. "oh this guy is orange, he posts good comments, this is probably a good one too, i'll vote it up", leading to orange namers rarely losing orange-named status unless they really step out of line
alta vista vs google
THIS PROVES MY POINT

Hackers would have engaged me in discussion of what I wrote.

Effeminate MBA candidate WANNABE HACKERS would downmod me.

Thank you, you have proven my point.
You cannot always make back any money you lose, if you could, the world would not be in this current financial crisis and the many before it.
That sucks, but that's life.

Give yourself 48 hours to feel bad about this, and think about why you are feeling bad about this... and then move onto the next thing.

Rejection is part of business, and having the competition scoop you is part of rejection.
I wonder how this will fare for X-Plane. As far as I know, it's still mostly written by one person and provides a simulation that some argue is superior to Msft Flight Sim. I just bought X-Plane a few weeks ago, but have never used MsftFlightSim, so can't really compare.

Anywho, sad to see MsftFlightSim go, I gather it had quite a following.
Well I'm about 14 hours ahead of east coast USA - I usually get to stories about 6-8 hours after they've started and my comments can most often be found down the bottom of threads and due to "group think" thats where they stay.

The other thing to do is to comment on new stories (which I do) but due to them not being as often trafficked those can also go unnoticed.

Generally, I can still get karma, but most often I get Karma by saying inane things or being early to a post. At most other times I'm shit-outta-luck.
Yes. I would also pay to get more attention for my questions. Sort of like many game worlds, where you can earn points either by activity or by paying hard cash.
Ask HN: Any experience with open source MQ/AMQ/JBoss Messaging?
Do any of you have experience/opinion on the various open source MQ derivatives and how they compare with IBM Websphere MQ or MSMQ?

ActiveMQ at first glance seems to be the most used
http://activemq.apache.org/how-does-activemq-compare-to-jbossmq.html
I guess I will have to start my own business after I finish school instead of trying to squeeze my way on to the corporate ladder.

I'll be honest, I'm not overly worried about unemployment. Good ideas will still be able to take off, and talent that may have previously unavailable to a startup will now be easier to acquire. Unemployment is a huge problem and I feel for everyone I know who has been affected by the recent downturn, but I sincerely believe that it is our job as entrepreneurs to help alleviate this problem.
I think strong identity is going to be how this sort of thing is eventually settled. Email addresses is fine, but there are plenty of sites which provide a means of getting a throw-away address. Maybe mimicking how banks and governments handle it and requesting N out of M different kinds of identity might help?
After interviewing for PriceAdvance we were concerned that YC would mention our idea to Bountii as it's in a similar vein. They did not, and further demonstrated a level of integrity I imagine is unusual in the VC space by not doing so. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=78761)

Without hearing more about how your idea was different it's very difficult to say whether or not it's just obvious next step, something others would easily come up with. It is, of course, with anything, more about the team than the idea, as has been said elsewhere. The execution rather than just the idea itself.

Regardless, for my part, I find YC above reproach when it comes to any insinuation that any sort of collusion or anything untoward might occur with respect to genuinely interesting / novel / unique ideas.
its a multifaceted problem. while the financial services firms multiplied, yes, it is also a byproduct of the fact that the global pool of money also grew by a similar factor over that time period.

the things that the institutions did to break the economy were definitely bad, with their poorly planned investment vehicles, but i don't think that the number of firms reflects anything beyond the existing wealth. there became enough money and interest to support more firms.
VCs are looking more for people that are worth investing in rather than ideas. Good people can execute on any idea. Sorry to be blunt.
I won't refute you on that (someone once posted a article here on HN that discussed this) however the linked article for this thread is specifically about people filing for unemployment for the first time. Thus your point that "They stop counting a person as unemployed after they stop receiving the unemployment checks, no matter if they found a job or ran out of time" doesn't taint the stat of a 26-year high for filings for new claims.
The value of your time increases with time. Making back 1 hour's worth of your time in cash today will probably only take you a few minutes a 20 years' time. However, making back 1 hour's worth of your time in time is impossible.
Unit testing is not (generally) useful
Nope.

I just turned 18. I have no bank account, no credit card, no PayPal account, nothing. Charging for HN would mean asking me - and others like me - to leave. HN is a valuable website, and I don't want to lose it.

Here's an idea: make HN invite-only. Members get to invite others only when they reach a certain karma level (say, X). Once they reach level X, they get to invite 3 people. After that, they get to invite one more person per Y karma points, where Y < X. Moreover, inviting others would mean losing those Y points.

Diligence on the part of existing users would ensure only people who post insightful content get karma.
As the person whose comment you are quoting you completely picked up on what I was trying to signal. Of course I still posted my comment but I felt like talking back to someone 'superior', and of course that is not the intended reason for the change but one of the not-so-nice side effects.

I personally think that the real quality measurement of comments is not up to a mere algorithm and a voting system that is so susceptible to bias.

Just looking at my posting history an hour ago or so to see what if any of my '1' rated comments I should take back considering the effect on the average karma over the last of my 50 posts, and I'd have to conclude that for me that really would reduce the value of HN to < 0.

I'd quit, that simple.

Lots of the meta discussion around this subject has been a pretty good learning experience for me, I consider the time on this 'experiment' well spent in that sense, but I think the outcome to date has only been:

- more incentive to game the system

- exploding meta discussions about the subject including one open attempt at revolt

- something deep inside me that I can not put quite in to words that makes me uncomfortable about distinguishing individuals instead by 'their cover' instead of reading what they have to say.
I see what you're saying... but I'm young enough that I could loose my house and cars and 401k and all the other junk, and still make it back in 20 years, probably less because I'm more productive. Granted, that's not true for everybody. But i think it's only true for the super rich, and the very old. My dad's doing pretty well. if he had to start over... I don't know if he has enough time to make it all back but he's smart and hardworking. I'm sure he could make a dent.

I think a better argument would be, "you have to start over" and starting over sucks.
That's surprising. I would have expected him to be pretty savvy about slide design.
I flat-out refuse to use PayPal for anything. I am reluctant to use my credit card except for shopping sites that have a decent track record of security. A small site with a Comodo certificate won't get my business. If HN used Amazon for payment, then I would consider it since I already have CC info on file there, it's no additional risk to me. Like some others have said here, I don't think it would do much (if any) good for this site. It won't deter trolls, at least not dedicated trolls. I think moderation is the only way to keep this from degrading to Reddit, then Digg, and lastly 4chan. Delete posts that don't conform to this site's goals and TOS. Ban users that violate TOS more than 'x' times. I think this site is pretty good at self-policing itself already. The tone is much more business-like and adult than any of the other techie news/social sites that I frequent.
Well, yes and no. This article isn't about unemployment, it's about jobless claims. While jobless claims are tallied the way you describe, unemployment numbers are derived from a monthly poll:

http://www.bls.gov/cps/uiclaims.htm

Those numbers also probably understate the problem, but not for the reason you mentioned; the official unemployment numbers do not include people that are underemployed or those that have stopped actively looking for a job.
Another really important feature is missing:

For people like me, who every now and then make completely unpopular comments (with some negative consequences, at least mathematically speaking), it would be nice if we could get more and more invisible (I mean the user name), because unpopular folks really deserve absolute invisibility! (Take that, lst!!)

Please down vote if you agree!
I read the book that he wrote. I recommend it because it's a personal account of how you can become happier if you become a small part of someone's day (as a Starbucks barista).

There is a funny story in his book. He was serving the morning rush and an attractive, vibrant woman ordered some complex coffee combo. It was his daughter but he didn't recognize her until she called him out on it: "Dad, it's me!"
and their sneak attack auto-renew
This kinda stuff makes me really cross/sick; as someone majorly opposed to cencorship....

It's a fairly pathetic episode and a sad description on modern religion.

(as an addendum when I asked the Church at the end of the road to stop handing leaflets/preaching to my young cousin as she walked passed I got into all sorts of trouble for religious descrimination.... double standards!).

/rant over (sorry)
How about bailing on GoDaddy because they provide the exact wrong balance between control and simplicity.

Also: http://nodaddy.com

And a comic I find particularly funny: http://echopic.com/gnv
No, but I might be willing to go through some kind of hazing ritual.
Maybe he forgot that he'd already posted it. Easy to do.
Also I guess they may technically be a start up, in comparison to say cisco, but they are pretty established and already have several enterprise level products on the market. So it's more like bruce springsteen showing up and jamming with mike ness for a few songs at a sold out show. or something.
$5 is not much of a barrier to entry for someone with an agenda, say troll or marketer.
Unfortunately, the "experiments" have already arrived:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465991
It's for spammers. Plain and simple. Look at the feature list. "Unlimited accounts, unlimited followers" unlimited frustration for real human users.
The beauty of the Orange name is that it only reflects your last 50 comments
List of nice games
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame
AT&T's fiber plans run into trouble by the Bay
An alternative explanation:

http://www.whereisthemoney.org

You shouldn't just print money if it supports theft via nontransparent government accounting, impoverishes the many, and enriches the few.

Then you are just Zimbabwe 2.0.

Fix the accounting systems first, please.
If you're worried about it in your app, you could always do

class OHash < Hash ; end

And use OHash as a marker that you're taking advantage of the ordering features.

Over time, though, I think this will be a real plus for people learning programming via Ruby. Non-ordered hashes are non-intuitive if you don't know what "hash" means, and think it's just a dictionary.
ServerJS: one week into building a better JavaScript
Ask HN: Hacker-Friendly (and Cheap) Places to stay in Cambridge, MA?
I'm thinking of going to the International Lisp Conference (http://www.international-lisp-conference.org/2009/index) next month at MIT, but I don't know anyone I could stay with, and I'd like to avoid the (pricey) area hotels.