skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cool, this actually looks like something I could use... Could you guys add a way to sign up without an .edu address? My university uses @mail.mcgill.ca.
Why There Should Not Be a "Release Backlog"
Great idea. Appealing to employers who want to hire was more relevant 1 year ago. Now they are appealing to job seekers. The best part is that when the tide turns again, they can simply re-launch their original idea!
I think the last quote I got from them on it was, really roughly, "good idea; bad business."
IDEs, education and the UNIX philosophy
Why does the "March 18" link on PaulGraham.com go to a PollEverywhere site?
So, O'Reilly had a glitch, everybody and their dog twittered about it, the author used twitter search to get the info early.

I don't see the Big Deal here anyhow. How about just shooting off an E-Mail to O'Reilly and ask?
What if something happens where there isn't an omniscient authority? Or if the authority is unresponsive?
It's already been posted and doesn't need to be posted again.
lower signal:noise, fragmented discussion
Jeebus...Don't feed the trolls.
Were these passwords being stored as plain-text?
its probably still bad throughout. Why hire some fresh college kid who you have to teach everything, when for the same money you can get someone with experience who is desperate to find a job and will take a paycut?
He used twitter search to find everybody and their dog twittering about it. I think his argument is that google search is not set up to provide this kind of information as quickly.
I outsmart them all. I use "1234fivesix".
I don't know if this already has been answered before, but how do you evaluate if a candidate has a sense of design?
The cool thing (according to the author) was using twitter search to find too many submissions accepted for RailConf...
Amazing! Absolutely amazing. Great talk.
would be great to hear your story of why you decided to change model...?
[shameless plug - read all before modding down] find another community of people interested in starting software/online businesses. I launched http://fairsoftware.net almost 6 months ago at TC50. We host a bunch of projects, most private, but some public. Join an existing project or put a call out there for ideas.

My motto: "Succeed Together". The team is the solution, not the problem. Once you got your team of passionate people, apply to YC!

[before you mod me down, feel free to contribute other places on the web where people can find partners that would qualify to start a YC-funded business. If you have a decent list, then mod me down. If you can't come up with more places, then accept that my plug really is informative :-) ]
I think the change in the frequency of occurences of incidents of companies like google is a measure of something. It was the IBM era companies, then the Microsoft era, the Dell era, Google, then what is next?

The technology is getting closer and closer to the end user, both in terms of breadth of knowledge and depth of knowledge. Ease of access. IBM's were big computers in corporations, Microsoft were pcs in the early adopter homes, dell in the mainstream homes, Google on the Internet.

What's next? Mobile? Wireless? Cloud Computing?

It's one hurdle after the next in both directions. Hardware footprint minimization, proliferation, and ease of use. Longevity. Functionality.

People are going to get left behind. They're just not going to want to keep up. They'll reject the new way. The rational way. The more efficient way. The faster, more productive way. The enabling way. The way toward free will.
That was embarrassing to read. Auto-tune is obvious and atrocious. The journalist in question has got to be tone deaf.
Glad I read these comments first ...
How is this different from the other gazillion job boards?
That guy on reddit is a troll, and his comment was modded down. No free social site will ever be invulnerable to trolls, but they must be ignored.

I post on both reddit and here, and I think your generalization that "everyone over there just posts stupid personal attacks when they disagree with you" is not constructive. Your original comment about how you refuse to comment on reddit added zero value to the conversation about a telephone company from 2000 - all it did was start a thread attacking a competing website. Doesn't this break the spirit of hackernews's rules on civility?

The mentality I sometimes see on here that "we are smarter than them" doesn't make a better site. Do it, don't say it. Threads like this aren't "intelligent," they are mean-spirited and off-topic.

Sorry, but the comparisons to reddit have been bugging me. I really want to be a member of this site, party because I think its foundation of intelligent and civil conversation is a great idea. But I see way too many comments that wouldn't even be kosher on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7necx/heres_a_th...
A secondary issue was the time investment. Now that I no longer care about trying to educate Reddit, I have time to ... not do that -- there is always something better to do than to converse with people that don't want to converse with you.

If HN "goes to shit", you can bet that I will get fed up and leave. It doesn't bother me much -- the people that I like on HN will probably go to the same place.

(Plus, HN does good things like completely deleting comments that are just going to attract flames. Censorship sucks, but if you want to talk without being deleted, get a blog. Hopefully HN's aggressiveness here will ensure that it remains the "island" to hop to for a few more years.)
I like gaming these free interactions. For instance, some computer track nubs have an autocorrect that stops the mouse pointer moving if it moves at a steady rate for long enough. The autocorrect puts an inverse velocity on the mouse pointer, so if you hold the nub steadily to the side for long enough and release, the mouse pointer moves on its own. I try to see how fast I can make it automatically move.

Also, when I'm bored, I like jiggling the compviz windows. That truly is a killer app.
What other models can they use, though? Every other distribution assumes even more about the problem domain, and would thus correlate even worse with black swans. Sounds kind of like a no free lunch theorem for finance.

Anyways, do you know if anyone is trying to come up with something better?
There is the Wikibook on Ada programming:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming

That's about as free as it gets. I have the "Programming in Ada 2005" book by John Barnes. I use both it and the Wikibook.
I think that's a little arrogant of a stance but that's not to say I don't agree with some of your points in you first post.

In my experience, I think you should consider working on your verbal communication skills. Nothing turns me (more importantly, team members and investors) off more than an ego-centric engineer who thinks their code is god. This can have a lot of implications in your product's quality and success on many levels. It's like the leader singer of a band thinking he knows best, most of the time the band ends up dissolving.
US President Obama Announces Stimulus Plan at 8pm EST [video]
There are a lot worth switching to. Cuil is nice. There are more to search results than speed of delivery.

I monitor search term locations in several search engines and notice the numbers of results returned for relatively new terms will sky rocket on Google, then fall dramatically back, while the others would remain relatively stable.

Why would that happen? I'm still trying to figure that out.
Looks very cool! Can you add hyperisland.se ?
How many years has it been since there was a blind or deaf musician on top charts? :)
I liken this story to the mortgage-backed securities mess/scandal/disaster. Read http://semyondukach.blogspot.com/2009/01/real-cause-of-finan... -- a link previously posted here on HN.

99.99% of the nights, this company could get by without a few $M of software to automate these processes and protect it from extreme risks. However, it couldn't survive even a single night of failure. It's like a player in an online poker tournament who makes extreme and unnecessary all-in bets to steal pots: The strategy works really well until the last time you try it.

I wonder if management/investors were really aware of the risk profile they had implicitly accepted.
Amazon could provide both a wifi and an EVDO connection. Wifi chips probably are very cheap on scale these days.

If the EVDO connection is available in their area, great. Use that. But if it is not, users can figure out how to set up the wifi connection. They have to figure out how to set up the wifi connection in their notebooks anyway.
Well, can you think of an example, even a contrived one?
I can't anyhow.
> No free social site will ever be invulnerable to trolls.

I disagree. I have noticed a lot of troll comments on HN. A few minutes later, I come back, and the comments have been killed (or even deleted entirely).

This is the way to deal with trolls. Instead of wasting my time getting upset or composing a reply, I just never see the comment, and can focus on something else.

> But I see way too many comments that wouldn't even be kosher on reddit.

Well, by those standards, I've never seen a comment on Reddit that would be "kosher on Reddit".

HN is definitely not perfect, but I have a social news addiction and (compared to Reddit) HN makes me want to kill a lot fewer people after reading it. Metafilter actually makes me like people (although there is really no technical content there, so I need something else for that).

Social news can be done right, it's just that Reddit's community failed to do that.

Edit, replying to this:

> Doesn't this break the spirit of hackernews's rules on civility?

HN has rules, but let's face it, no community ever follows the rules. The main (unwritten?) rule here is "explain your thoughts in more than 3 words". If you actually take the time to explain your thoughts, you are much less likely to upset anyone, and other people are much less less likely to regret reading the site. That is the most important thing for me, and I think others might agree.

I agree that this rant is attached to the wrong article, but that's how conversations go -- sometimes you digress. The level of discourse is high, however, so I don't think anyone is at all upset by this.
Jelly Talks: Facebook Connect & OpenID
The real world requires verbal communication. You definitely aren't the only person whose been annoyed by this (I'm one of them). However, it's essential and YC probably wants to see some ability/willingness to do it.
my idea would be really good but flights to silicon valley from ireland arnt cheap and im the only founder, not going to bother applying
A 6x6 puzzle runs from 1-6.
Account balances are not a part of M0. M0 is all of the bills and coins in existence. Your bank does not have all of the bills to back all of its customers account balances. Account balances are part of M1.
Isn't it interesting how things seem to get faster and faster?
Here's my take on it:

VC money is drying up. Without VC money, your runway is short. It's now much more important to get a lot of users excited quickly.

The best way to do this online is with video, hands down.

So if you can't produce a reasonably good video, you are at a distinct disadvantage, and your company is much less likely to be successful.
I think the idea is that it's easy to find a pattern when you are looking for one, but in this case, the author wasn't really looking for a pattern. He typed some stuff into twitter, and the pattern emerged in real time.

That is pretty cool.

(It would be even cooler if the author didn't bold every other word.)
The rowboat and the cloud
It takes focus .. and longer than you expect .. to get going under a full head of steam.

The real question is what do you want to startup? -- a full scale business with lots of employees or a one man shop?
Thanks Vaksel for your advice... Indeed quitting everything is not an option, but potentially taking a holiday is...
We've found that someone talking live is a much higher bandwidth form of communication than words typed into a form. As well as words you get gestures, intonation, the vibe between a group of cofounders, etc.

But people shouldn't worry that they "video badly." We're not (I hope) so dumb that we'd be taken in by people who are merely smooth presenters. We come from the world of people who video badly ourselves. If we'd been applying for Viaweb, I'd have had to negotiate with Rtm how many words he'd say, and I'd be lucky if I got it as high as 10.
It's hard to compete with just a simple iChat / iSight setup, especially when all new Mac's come with one built-in. The quality is pretty spot-on, with little delay, echo, or distortion. And the cost... free.
That problem (or lack thereof) is not what they are addressing now. Companies who are hiring have little to complain about right now, because there are tons of candidates and little competition. Who does have stuff to complain about? Candidates. Who is going to be complaining the most? Recent college grads.

By shifting their focus, they are once again addressing a pain.
Images of flies on a urinal = 80% less 'spillage' on the airport bathroom floor
It's definitely not to test people's communication skills. We just want to see what they're like.
(found via http://hiphopo.posterous.com/images-of-flies-on-a-bathroom)
Probably not, but there probably wouldn't have been anyway. Only the first was in Cambridge. The three since have all been in the Valley, because it's so much easier to get speakers here.
You might be surprised and/or horrified by the number of "hackers" who know nothing of things like Usenet, IRC, mutt, etc. I think it really hit me when someone posed the serious question, "What's IRC?" He was older than me.

Don't get me started on "the cloud", either. Back in my day, we had to walk up hill, both ways, in the snow, to setup a mail server. And even then it didn't work.
I also do this. At first, my girlfriend hated it. Now she has subconsciously started doing it herself. Just as planned.
The stupidest things I've done in my programming job
It was posted a couple days ago. Too much repeat audience. Reposts a year later are better.
The last video url you put in the form field will overwrite whatever was there before. We might see an earlier video if you submit your application early, we look at it, and then you update and submit again before the deadline. But (a) it would be very unlikely that all three of us would independently do that and (b) we'd probably also check the new one after applications closed and we started reading them in earnest.
Please some editor fix my ridiculous title typos. I swear my caffeine level was at zero! Not my fault!
By things they've made, either in the past, or the project they're applying with.
What do you base this theory on?

I'm honestly not trying to attack you but there are several posts below (mine included) that indicate what you are saying isn't the case. If you have a factual basis that says we're wrong I'd be interested in hearing it. But in this post you are simply stating absolutes without backing those absolutes up.

I guess what I'm asking is "how do you know what you are saying is true?"
> They require either A. OS X to be hacked to run on the machines (aka: your pirated copy)

Hacked != Pirated.

I am planning to use a hacked MacOS X for IPhone development and I will buy the OS. That's fine, I can pay for the software.

I simply can't afford their overpriced desktop hardware. (The iPhone is reasonably cheap compared to their desktops).

Edit: I don't know why this has been down voted. Maybe I should say that what adds to Apple's desktops cost, besides their premium for the brand, is the importation tax for items over $500 here. As high as 60%. With this tax, I can simply buy the software and assembly the hardware from commodity parts myself.
Your code speaks for itself only to people who care about code. Which, as it happens, doesn't include a lot of investors, co-founders, customers, employees, and all of the other people you're going to have to persuade if your startup is going to be successful.

Heck, even if you have a "smarmy sales-dude" as a co-founder, you'll still eventually be in a role where persuasion/leadership is more valuable than coding chops. What percentage of successful startup CTOs do you think code on a day-to-day basis?
Oops, fixed. (Polleverywhere was in the summer 2008 cycle, and I used to have a link to them there.)
The NYT will die because they are not a must-have source of news or views.

I find cringe-making purple prose on the front page of the NYT every time I pick one up.

The writing is entirely too "precious", in spite of the many good writers they have.

Further, their recent strategy of hiring alt-weekly writers to try and give them an "edge" to their reporting has only accelerated the decay - people can tell when you are posing.
The logic is as follows: the college graduate is out of work because he or she has just successfully finished a degree, whereas the 'someone with more experience' is out of work for an unknown reason.
Take a look at http://ycombinator.com/video.html

Gives more context - They explicitly state they don't want to make it into a video making contest.
The Linux desktop’s innovation problem
To be fair, that same discussion will also claim that the need for the bailout is proof that libertarianism has already failed, that Milton Friedman was the dictator of Chile and that the infallible analogy to today's ciris is a babysitting club.
Please keep and release a tally of "creative" videos and how they were "creative": time lapse, blue screen, animated overlays...

Higher bandwidth indeed, but you're giving out an open canvas. Could be good, could be extreme. The restrictions of "traditional" submission mechanisms are like the "traditional" formats for resumes, preventing every resume from becoming a tabloid magazine.
Extremely cool stuff.

So -- looking at this and Melodyne (see other comment) let's extrapolate to see where the technology is heading.

It's Guitar Hero, except for real guitars. You and your friends play (hack) as best you can hit songs, along with vocals. The computer "adjusts" both the instrument and vocal performances to put you on-time and on-key.

Heck, I'd pay money for that. It'd be awesome.
I triple click to select the entire line/paragraph all the time. I don't even notice that I do it.
That might apply in a developed environment where piracy is essentially free aside from bandwidth. We're talking a 'buy bootleg CD from the local market' type of piracy, where price competition + some benefits may be a tenable strategy. People aren't pirating out of anger or stinginess - they're pirating because the official discs are a month's salary.
You can hear it on the following video how Auto-Tune can make anyone sign like a pop star:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpu6C70WROM
Hey Guys, this is actually an early prerelease, so a little premature to announce a relaunch :)

We're doing some interesting things inside and out and will let Hacker News members of what's up sometime soon.

In between email me on Sumon [at] Snaptalent [dot] com
Grumbling is one of the few ways grumblers can make the people who can effect change take some action. Be patient. Action will come.
Thanks. Maybe it was lost in translation, but by Design do you mean appearance (like in graphical, interface, industrial design) or architecture (like operating system design)?

If it's the former, I hope you don't get offended by it, but I think, looking at HN and your website, that you wouldn't be accepted. :) Nor would Sergey and Page.
Go to InformationWeek.com, ComputerWorld.com, and ITWeek.com, or pick a few other trade rags that publish a media kit.

Download the media kits, see how much traffic these similar sites get, and then see what the error is on Alexa. I think you'll find that the numbers are of the right order of magnitude.

You're going to get a pretty clear signal when looking at sites relative to one another, since most of the error will effect the sites the same. And if you have sites that have the same sorts of traffic patterns, then the relative signal should be even clearer.

It's true that people gaming the system effect the numbers, but that's not going to distort the numbers enough to make them worthless.

You can't use Alexa or similar to see whether one site has 3000 visitors a month and another has 3500. But if one ha 3000 and one has 30000 then you'll see it in the graph.
Hi FredSource,

The idea I have could be a one man shop!

The focus is going to be the crucial factor!

Thanks for your comment!
Snaptalent feels more personal. (That's just the first thing I thought of.)
We explicitly ask people not to do that:

http://ycombinator.com/video.html

If they ignore us and put in a bunch of fancy stuff anyway, we'll just click on "next." We have a lot of applications to read.
you're on your way to getting the whole picture. glad you're advocating both sides and exploring what is really happening. people should do more of that. More power to you.
I actually think the bounds checking etc of Ada is good. If you put that in a very C like language it would have been better accepted. Instead it had a bunch of readability 'improvements' that turned programmers off.
If only it were that simple. The metrics of "best suits everyone" and "most [economically] efficient" almost certainly do not coincide with today's populations, though I would say that the latter would probably come fairly close to a libertarian society (David D. Friedman's _The Machinery of Freedom_ is a book-length treatment of the idea).

If you take a random grouping, finding an arrangement that suits everyone will be very, very difficult, or impossible. The only way I can see to solve this is to make moving to where you agree easier.
I wondered about those. I thought some designer was just trying to be funny. (They give designers a lot more room in the Netherlands.)
Woops, I actually read that FAQ a long time ago, guess I forgot about it... Thank you :)
It appears that if the fall is steep the recovery is also steep. Makes sense if you think about it, and that is good news for the current recession.
Both. They're the same thing.

Good design doesn't mean fancy design. Quite the opposite.
I would say that Google felt a little cuter, but the fact is it had better search results. I'm not really going to pay for something because it's more personal necessarily (although it helps). I still don't understand how this is differentiated?
Picturesurf launches: Dead-Simple Photo Galleries For Bloggers
The "Online College Career Fair" is brilliant. It tells you exactly what the site does in four words.

The only thing I don't like is that there isn't a screenshot gallery. I'm not going to make an account on a site like that unless I can see screenshots of what each company's page looks like, what my resume looks like, etc.

I want to know that A) The site is useful B) The site is trustworthy. Without being able to see what the interaction looks like I can't do that, so I'm not going to sign up. If you want me to put out, buy me a drink first; asking for all my information right away is too much too fast. I need to know more about what I get out of it.
Nonsensical. Apple won't ship an OS that won't run on the computers they sell.
To be fair, Kanye has also employed vocoders. See: "The New Workout Plan"
The article is actually "Who is the target audience for the HP Mini 1000 MIE?". I was expected a broader topic based on the "edited" title.
It doesn't support wifi?(!)
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Please be the Google for Resumes.