skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Again fair point (sorry, the intention was not to turn HN into a religion.vs debate :( that's not for here).

I think my main point was the huge emphasis on the story - definitely (and I dont think it is because of my bias) born out of the religious nature of the complaint.

If yourself were hosting a few thousands sites with GoDaddy and had objected in the same way (from a non-religious stance) and sent the same letter would it have made such a big story....

As I always say (it might be my catch phrase :P) "each to his own, and leave me to mine".

[for the record in case people misconstrue my bias I have great respect for faith (to a point, obviously); but I believe religious organisations to often be an evil force]
the influx of new people and the change (loss?) of culture are at such odds with me desire for inclusiveness and internal (personal) regulation, or free will.
Just in case anyone's uncertain, let me say explicitly that there's no connection. I don't remember knarf's group's application, but I'm sure we didn't turn anyone down because Immad and Jude were already working on a similar idea. (We do sometimes turn down a group because another group is doing the same thing, but I didn't understand what Immad and Jude were doing at the time.)
It's not entirely clear from the article, but it looks like they're measuring jobless claims in absolute terms, rather than by percentage of population. The population of the U.S. has grown by about 70 million people since 1982.
These Clay Shirky articles might interest you. In fact one of them might have been linked to from HN recently, I'm not totally certain:

http://is.gd/iv84

http://is.gd/NZu
I just use the bookmarklet to open a new window displaying the login information.
Censorship 2.0, then. Easier to create an uproar on the internet than bend the FCC to your will.

Personally, I found the commercials stupid and I dislike GoDaddy for reasons beyond their advertisements.
Within YC we always use the original one of these,

http://instantdomainsearch.com

It would be interesting to know how many YC-funded companies' names have first appeared in that box. At least 20 I suspect.
An angel investor that I talked to a few weeks ago said it's not about the idea and gave the example of Ray Krok. How many people have had the idea of flipping burgers, sticking it between a bun and some lettuce? It's about the execution. Maybe you can STILL do it better than them. Learn from their mistakes. Above all, keep moving.
The importance of ‘appropriate punctuation’
Ask HN: Light grey text is killing my eyes.
Self posts like this one have very low contrast when they use grey text and I find it impossible to read them.

In contrast, the comments which are in black text are easy to read.

Can something be done about this?
It's capitulations like this, agreeing when shown wrong, where appropriate, that separate HN from other sites.

The maturity here really shines through on occasions like this.
Indeed, and not so much for the people on the room, but because it gives the media a "hook" to sell the story and get people reading about it.

Kudos.
no, there are too many other free sources for articles like this
I have a subscription to Game Developer magazine. It's a typical industry magazine. Very heavy on the advertising and PR, with an occasional high quality article. They sometimes offer free subscriptions, and if you search around you might find a sign-up form. They make their money off advertising, and they seem to be more interested in increasing their readership than collecting subscription fees.
Sort the UI out :

Green and Black? argh :) Black on white will suffice, thanks

Either make the widgets [maximize, minimize, close] do something, or remove them.

The block on the right is too large, there is barely enough room to read the actual content -- consider moving all that sidebar into a nice JQuery slider at the top.

Do we need to know who submitted it and when on the front page? Can't we see those details when we click a command?

"You must be signed in to comment." ++ "or register"

I think you could order these nicer. Consider having tabs along the top: UNIX | WINDOWS | ALL

Clicking a tab shows you the relevant snippets. Allow me to sort each category by popularity or recentness.
Online Ad Revenues Pick Up In The Fourth Quarter.
reminds me how i prefer rating schemes over point accumulation ones. especially if the rating average is based on latest actions more than older ones. point accumulation with exponential experience levels (think rpg) is better than linear point accumulation.

i vote for you to keep the exact algorithm secret. make it work. that's more important than transparency. your real goal is trustworthiness, which i think you can accomplish in other ways. (i will never get used to voting on the quality of a post rather than in agreement/disagreement, which is what voting is historically intended for)
You need another person to pair with. Everything else follows. This is a hypothesis that I am currently testing. I tried following ideas -- and executing alone is hard. I tried using techniques for staying focused and executing, but those fizz out after a while. Then I noticed that the only things I have completed and released have been things I have done with other people. So now I am testing that out. Will keep you posted.
pg, How about doing something about this complaint? At 31 votes, it's my highest scoring comment. :-) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460859
now hn has orange, why not extend it further? like belt-color levels

say a new user is of white belt and can't post after s/he of age one week (then automatically get yellow belt and can post 1 post / day max) ... higher levels can post more per day

and maybe a penalty function like temporarily giving 1 day noprocrast for trolling
I would pay $5/month.
Introduction to Arduino Programming
Since you consider it censorship, would you prefer that these people continue giving their money to a company they find morally objectionable?
I believe you're referring to something exactly like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=464700
thx :)

In fairness (rereading back) I should have done so about 2 posts earlier :( oh well.
I'm surprised how the $10 barrier suddenly makes the quality of people and discussion on the forums much, much better. You can at least depend on everyone to use decent punctuation and spelling, among other things. Being able to lurk before signing up an account is a crucial part of this; otherwise people won't have any idea if you have quality content or not, and will default to not signing up.

I also like the fact that it's a one-time purchase; I don't have to worry about a yearly charge to a card that I feel like closing.

SA also gets a decent amount of cash by charging for things which are free on most forums; forum avatar, avatar title, searches, archives, private messaging, etc.. I wonder if this model could be applicable to a more minimalist site like HN, or any other non-forum.
just try it. i share your sense of doubt and confusion. until you actually build [a bike/massive user community/iphone app] it will seem like the most magical and mysterious thing in the world. you can't grok it until you've built it many times.

just go for it. it's easier with a team of collaborators or motivators--that is, you need both mentors to learn from and n00bs to learn with. shoot me an email if you want to bounce some ideas around. diN0bot bilumi org.
But it sure cuts down on repeated spam if they have to find a new credit card and pay a new $5 every time they get booted.
Being one of the college students who deceived themselves, I have to admit that I could not have put it better myself. Is it my own dumb fault? Yes, it is. I was an adult and like to think that I was smart enough to have made the decision under my own merit. Should I have researched the reality of post-graduation life more? Yes, again. It is very true that they sale you the dream of 80k - had I only known then that college wasn't a requirement for realising the dream, I could have saved 40k...
The fix is to not go into debt just to go to college. A college education is a luxury - but it's one that can be had at an affordable cost if you're ambitious, work your ass off, and take advantage of every grant, job, research position, etc. you can find. IMO, it's the people who do the leg work to get into those kinds of programs and reduce the cost of their own education that ultimately succeed in the end anyway.
I wonder what the effect on the economy would be if parents or the government gave kids a choice - you can have 4 years of college loans or the amount of 4 years in tuition as seed funding for your start-up.
Anytime you take a strong position on anything you risk losing part of your client base. A lot of people (myself included) feel strongly about how portraying sexuality in certain ways can impact a societies attitudes in a negative manner. The fact that those opinions affect purchasing habits stands to reason.
Use w3m:

http://w3m.sourceforge.net/

For reading, I find it much more pleasant than Firefox. Posting is perhaps a bit awkward.
Article states that he and his wife landed six figure salaries, but graduated with 194k in debt. I think more crucial to how the story unfolded is that they probably didn't live below their means, probably didn't consolidate the loans to a lower rate (they were paying rates at 9%-12%), and probably didn't pay the loan off aggressively.

I wouldn't blame going to college, or college choice for poor financial sense.
good question.

I volunteer to be downmodded and replied too :)
Great price compared to the Pro edition. How does Mathematica compare with R for statistics?
Very neat - I like the "Commands using <whatever>" feature.

The "Popular functions" box on the right has some command names running together ("perl" and "ping", "uname" and "uniq") for me on Firefox 3.1b2 on Windows.
MagicJack and the problem with gadget start-ups
What the hell were the couple in example #1 doing with their $200K income? If they wanted to pay off their debt in 10 years, they'd need about $2800 a month, assuming the rate was the full 12% the whole time.

I agree with a lot of the article, but a couple of idiots who pissed away the fruits of their education on too many vacations and fancy cars (obviously not any real investments, otherwise they could have refinanced their student debt) don't give a very good example.
Markaby is pretty sweet:

html do
head { title "Boats.com" }
body do
h1 "Boats.com has great deals"
ul do
li "$49 for a canoe"
li "$39 for a raft"
li "$29 for a huge boot that floats and can fit 5 people"
end
end
end
perseverance ... you will have failures (bugs, disks, networks, customer complaints, etc)
Awesome, reading now. There's a lot of stuff about implicit rankings that we've thought about (see my standard presentation on this: http://www.slideshare.net/dawdledotcom/actually-useful-trust...), but having written words helps a lot.
Creative destruction ... Google slayed by the Notificator?
Already posted:

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467692
A degree is far from useless.

the couple was $194,000 in debt. each landed a six-figure job. interest accruing at up to 12% a year.

"the pretax median household income in 2007 was $50,233," they where both making twice that in 1995. Even 12% of 200k = 24k/year should be easy when the couple is making over 200k/year. OMG, they only get to live off 3 times the median household income after graduation how they must have suffered.

Granted it would nice to have zero debt, but I suspect their real problems had little to do with debt.
Becoming a Customer Experience-Driven Business
I write tests as I develop, and they take the place of going to the browser or a repl and poking around at my work. In some sense, testing takes zero or negative net time. It would be hard to measure gross time, because it occurs in such small increments.
They always do, it's because of the holiday season, and really nothing to see as an indication that 'the worst is behind us'.

I don't think there is a single graph that expresses as well as this one how bad the situation really is:

http://www.investmenttools.com/futures/bdi_baltic_dry_index....
Thanks. I modded up the parent submission, in part, because I was pretty sure I'd seen several of these syntaxes by now and I wanted to precipitate a shootout in the comment section. ;)

More examples, please! Here's some haml, from the haml site. (I don't actually know haml, but perhaps I soon will:)

#content
.left.column
%h2 Welcome to our site!
%p= print_information
.right.column= render :partial => "sidebar"

Grading these competitions is hard, since it depends on taste and you can't always tell from a short example how something will perform in the field. haml may be a bit too terse (though I say that without being convinced that it's true; terse is generally good), and on first glance it will confuse the daylights out of an otherwise HTML-savvy person who has never seen it before. But I certainly like it compared to tag soup.
To address your first point, GitHub are already doing some of this: they reduced server loads by lazy-loading commit data when cached data isn't available.

http://github.com/blog/293-while-you-were-sleeping

At work we do a fair amount of client-side form validation. While we have server-side validation too, doing it in the browser as well vastly reduces the number of times invalid inputs make it through to the server and have to be expensively processed. Of course, this creates other problems (making sure the client- and server-side validation routines precisely mirror one another, for example), but for some use-cases it's worth it.
Metafilter has been very successful in preserving its user culture -- and it has a very particular community, with a sophisticated writing style, etc. It's easy to imagine that if they hadn't done the fee, the site could have degenerated into a digg-like mess.

I think Metafilter is a positive example of a small fee policy working.
Nice work!

This goes very well with some of our company's long-term goals of making things easier for techies (e.g. http://bug.gd and http://featurelist.org )

If you're interested in talking about partnership opportunities (at a minimum we can help with hosting), drop me a line at matthew at bug.gd.

Nice work again!
Whoops. You're right - I'll actually read the comments in future.
<i>So you pretty much put off 4 years of salary, 4 years of raises, 4 years of building contacts, 4 years of climbing the corporate ladder [...]</i>

While I agree with much of what you say, 4 years in college surely builds contacts (likely of much better quality than otherwise), and you surely get a kick-start in the corporate ladder (if this is fair or not is another matter).
Nice idea and execution. I've bookmarked and twitter-followed. The autocomplete search is excellent. I'm not too keen on the black background. I'd like to read about the server-side design.
its not really the student's fault. Its the parents/society's. There is this idea, that if you don't go to college after highschool that you are some sort of loser.

When in reality you can self-teach yourself everything they teach you in college. Take programming for example, is it worth going into debt up to your eyeballs, if you could have learned everything on your own?
I think there's a fine line to walk: tell enough about the principles that you use for contributors to earn reputations, but not with too precise a detail. Not necessarily to keep people from trying to "work the system" - but because you may need to tweak how things are weighted without always having to make a formal commitment to weights, etc.

Besides: telling people which factors will affect reputation ratings is a powerful statement about the principles and values you want your site to support. That make sense?
I think quality of HN comments would improve, if it has a

RED vote = TRUTH (Past & Present Context)

GREEN vote = HOPE (Positive Future from Win-Win Context)

YELLOW vote = OTHERS
I haven't seen a rationale for it yet but I'd guess that it's a subtle way of encouraging descriptions to be short (like the one you just wrote), it's probably intentional that it's hard to read long rambling posts like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468139

I read a pg comment somewhere that makes me think that's his design decision - he already weighs "Ask HN" type of posts differently than the standard one with links, for example. Maybe it's to ward off too much navel-gazing.
How about a two tiered system, whereupon we maintain both and open and invite only board?
Every system can be gamed. Including this one.

What I find interesting is the + and - votes often appear to be attempts to deny or affirm the truth of the post in opposition to its actual truth content. Its as if mere expression of an opinion contains the expectation of being able to coerce reality to agree and that a counter opinion can cancel that effect. Its Postmodern philosophy in full flower. Kant would be proud of his intellectual children.

Thankfully, there does seem to be much less adherence to Postmodern philosophy on this list compared to others which is why I bother with this list. However, the philosophy lives deeply inside the Karma feature.

The fact remains, that throughout history, what most people believe to be true has little to do with what is actually true. Any new truth that is discovered, is discovered first by a single individual. If that truth is fundamental, it will be rejected by "common sense" and "consensus" until at least one generation has passed - likely several. So also a crackpot notion of a crank will take at least a generation to pass or at least the death of the crank. The age of a "truth" has a poor correspondence to what is actually true.

The net of this is each is responsible for filtering the noise coming at him and finding the few gems of truth it contains. There is always the possibility of being wrong. Karma scores are simply irrelevant accumulations of noise signals. Sorry, that is the nature of the beast.
Is it Time to Stop Going Ga-Ga over Google?
That would be true if you were shooting for total karma, but for the orange name thing it's the average that matters. If you want a high average, it's better to have a small number of highly rated posts than a large number of ok ones.
Confession: I'm a christian entrepreneur and I purchase all my domains and SSL certificates from GoDaddy. I never got the memo that I should boycott their services.

I have no problem with groups (christian or not) choosing to boycott certain companies because they object to their marketing practices. But I personally don't have time to cherry-pick these companies myself and make a public statement out of it.

I'm too busy trying to nurture my own family and business to worry about GoDaddy.

One last note: when it comes to watching sports (which my daughters enjoy watching with me), I find ads for E.D. treatments much more uncomfortable than GoDaddy's.
That was in fact the post that triggered this one. I gave up reading it after the second paragraph.

However it was mainly because I wasn't interested in the topic, but had checked all the other articles out. There are some long self posts that are genuinely interesting to read and it still hurts my eyes to read them.
good is relative, imo.
And I'm the orange guy you were replying to. As I replied later in the thread... please ignore my oranginess. I don't like it either. I think it's a mistake. You want good comments to rise to the top, not assume that only people who've made good comments in the past are the people to listen to.

I might have only BS to say on a particular topic, yet get flagged orange because I've said interesting things about other topics.
There is a lot of false propaganda spread about the 'value of college'. That being said, there are ways to reduce the expense and increase the return. Just because a few people make poor college financing decisions, and poor decisions about which school to attend, doesn't make all colleges a bad deal.
How about a karma floor for upmodding?
I'm one of the people who thinks there's some worth to being in a place with people who all want to learn. College isn't about money. It's about being open to explore.

I'm in a class about religion, another about creative (physical) design, one about interactive multimedia, one about advanced PHP work. Each semester I'm hoping to learn more about things I don't already know much about.

It's not about the degree. I haven't checked to see if I'm on the "prescribed path" to getting my degree, and I'm avoiding some things I need to graduate because they don't interest me (secondary language, technical writing). I'm in college because I want to discover things and I want to have four years to work on the things that fascinate me.
The content is what makes this site interesting. So I understand the concept but submit doing anything to discourage content is a bad business model. I am primarily a reader or "lurker", but am also an ANGEL investor and CEO of my own self funded start up.

So I would propose you develop a model that has a charge for reading that can be waived by posting credits. So announce 6 months from now it is $5 a yr but by being active you can reduce the charge. I realize lots of loop holes, but basically charge readers not content creators.
This is an interesting question, not because it's from a Mayan calendar (I'm a flying spaghetti follower myself) but because the standard line of "live like today's your last" is a bit tired.

If I had 3 years to live, say from a slow cancer, I'd probably pull a version of a Randy Pausch - work up to a big presentation in front of friends/family and videotape it.
I'm reading this thread while drinking a latte that cost nearly $5. Yes, I would pay $5 for a year of HN... even if there were still trolls.
So you're saying Amazon FPS isn't a game where you walk through the halls of a virtual bookstore fragging bad authors with your BFG?

Well, this looks kinda cool too, I guess.
A medium of exchange, not an exchange itself. A medium: "a means or instrumentality for storing or communicating information." Money enables the storage and communication of information about exchanges, as posited by your example.

As for deflation: Isn't there a cost to not reshingling your house? You don't have a reshingled house, something you presumably want. You shouldn't just look at the price of labor, you also have to look at the value of what the labor does: the house, reshingled. Compare that to the cost of reshingling the house. (Opportunity cost, in so many words).

I still fail to see the point of offering folks money to do something pointless, nor how it helps stop deflationary deadlock. If there's a deadlock then they'll just sit on that money as before, no?

I'm not sure I understand the deflationary deadlock -- you posit a situation where everyone sits on their cash and their labor, waiting -- waiting for what? Eventually someone is going to stop waiting and start working, eventually the gap between desired state and existing state will loom larger than the value of sitting on that money. In the house-shingling example, eventually you will value someone shingling your house for $X/hr today more than you will value having a not-reshingled house until the price drops to $Y/hr in Z days. When that point comes, you'll stop sitting on your money and hire someone to reshingle your house. Wouldn't a series of such events unlock the deflationary deadlock as the market reaches the new price point?
I wouldn't say everything- if you get a really good teacher in a really good program, you can learn a lot in a short amount of time from an expert that you may never be able to learn (or it may take a long time to) on your own.
Totally offtopic, but I hate it when people link to the Printer Friendly version. It's a whole lot harder to read on a widescreen monitor.

If you don't want to see ads on the regular site, install AdBlock like everyone else.
Creative destruction … Google slayed by the Notificator?
It seems like you're still using some form of automation to find bugs, regardless of whether these would be classified as unit tests, correct?