skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been wanting to play back the writing of an essay for years. Since Etherpad saves every keystroke, I convinced the founders to add a way to play them back. "Startups in 13 Sentences" was the first essay I wrote on Etherpad. Now I'm going to write all of them on it.

Playback is just one little feature of Etherpad, but think of the implications of this alone. Among other things it will make cheating impossible in classes where students write papers, because now you can finally "show your work" in writing the way you do in math.
Correction... "the" master.
The submitted link points to a one sentence blurb, and I figured it was just a lead-in to an environmental fluff piece. I suppose if it contains hard data, I'll go through the "nytimes hassle". (thanks)
And they did a great job. The brochures look great and they arrived ahead of schedule.
Climatologists know about the ice age cycles. The talk is about deviations from the expected temperature changes.
The magic of Apple, of course, is that on many occasions they catch up, but they integrate their features so neatly that using their product you do feel like they've done something for the very first time. I've found myself getting thrilled about features Apple adds that I've had on other systems for a while, because they very often get them just right in ways that other operating systems and companies don't.

Dashboard and Spaces, for instance, both excited me a lot when I first got to use them, and in Space's case when they first got announced. I'd been using Ubuntu at the time, and I had both widgets and multiple desktops, but it was different. With the Apple system, it feels right visually and in effect. The way widgets spin around when you use them, the small thing like the clock turning into a calendar when you click it, in Dashboard. With Spaces, the way your windows visually flew around, and the way you could zoom out and see the little cubbies.

I'll get flack for saying it, but it just happened with Safari 4 and tabs. For the first time, they make sense where they are. I run Safari with minimal chrome, and now the tabs ARE the window bar. And that makes sense! These tabs are effectively multiple windows stacked into a single space. It suddenly fits perfectly how they're displayed. Safari 4 has problems with the specifics of how the tabs go, but for the first time it makes sense where they appear visually.

That's why I love Apple's marketing: because it's so excitingly arrogant. No matter what they've got, they talk about it like it's magic and new, and I love that in commercials. No people going "Oh! This is so exciting to me!". They just take it for granted that you'd better like what they're talking about. It's more fun to see commercials like that. (I adore the iPhone app ads, with the "Things have changed forever" slogan, for that particular reason.)
That feature is neat and gives insight into the way people write. Would be just as interesting to see a playback of versioned source code files in SVN / CVS..
HN has reached critical mass. No need to worry about a quick death anymore. Add friction to keep the randoms out and to help make those that stay feel like they are part of an exclusive club. Friction = cost. Some micro payment, say .99/yr, that adds enough friction to slow the adoption by non-core types. Those that value this exclusive "club," like myself, would gladly render unto Caesar.
Correct. While I was working actively on my software, my brain focused on the best ways to do X or Y in the fastest time using a software application. In other words, writing something to make me more productive or more time efficient, even if it wasn't something that would be sellable. If it saved me time, then I could therefore use that time to code something I could sell. So I let my brain wander around the karma concept and that's what I came up with (a long time ago). But no, I decided not to do it.

One corollary to that is by not having done it, all I can do is write a post on news.yc. But that does not mean that it should be confused with the act of actually doing it.

Another corollary is that maybe doing it wouldn't have been a bad idea. If karma is the measure of value, and users enjoy the stories, maybe developing an algorithm that automatically submits stories to news.yc (and judges how users vote on it to then submit better stories, the way a human might) would actually be something Paul loves, and the first release of such an app, of course, could basically submit everything indiscriminately to start with.
You can do that in Etherpad now. It grew out of a code editor the Appjets wrote for their own use.
> think of the implications of this alone

There are already non-webapp mouselog/keylog and replay applications. And besides, think of the implications of letting students be on the internet while they are writing essays.
I find technical news sites to be similar to how fashions work.

That is, a good model of changing fashion are some forerunners that starts doing something -- and then gets copied by lots of people. The ones that want to be fashionable then have to change or look like all others.

Technical news sites seems to be places with interesting discussion that gets overrun with wannabees that lowers the average quality. If this is correct, HN is doomed to be Diggified (the opposite of dignified). Like all non-invitation discussion sites.

(-: I also tried to be responsible for the average quality and only read, but now failed to keep my fingers controlled after a few months. :-)
Hi Jonathan,
Thanks for your thoughts. If you'd like to discuss integration email me, raffi@dashnine.org.

I'll have to try out Safari 4 and see what happens. I agree the price structure is a bit of a wag. I'm really trying to leave it open for those who embed After the Deadline in apps and want to let people go get their own API key.

Keep in mind similar style checking tech costs $130-160. The users thing is really just an abstraction on a requests/month model. When I have data about how much people use the service I'll build in some limits to prevent abuse.
Capitalizing on accessibility, the Authors Guild is out of touch
> But I would really like to see, from people who run this one up the flagpole, substantive evidence indicating that 1) Advocating falsehoods is a good way to get grant money, rather than to earn scientific ridicule and a sure death to one's research credibility, and/or

The "AGW support gets funding" argument doesn't require that anyone lie. It merely requires that AGW support be used as a criteria for determining funding.

> 2) A significant number of theories have risen to acceptance within the scientific community based on the supposed ease they afforded in obtaining funding, and have later been dropped when the scandal was discovered.

Again - scandal isn't necessary.

AI before the winter qualifies. So does room-temperature fusion. In fact, all of the "trends" do.

Funding is a social process.
I'm going to go out on a limb and disagree with you entirely. Marketing is not about displaying facts. I'd love it to be about being brutally honest with your product, but if that's how it was then there would be no need for marketing. Instead, marketing is about conveying what you want to convey quickly and without crap. Apple's point is, "Here are our new things. They're really cool." Anything outside of that you've got to implicitly understand is there just for spectacle, and in Apple's case I forgive them entirely, because they're so good at making commercials and ads.

Know what kind of marketing I hate? The sort where you put smiling faces all over and add peripheral features and say "We're a community of happy people," or "We give you an experience", or that use things like ridiculous swooshes and gradients to look nice. Know who does that? Opera Opera Opera. They show smiling users, and their site's all about swooshes and gradients.

And it pisses me off more that Opera is so arrogant about being the first, because guess who they're blatantly stealing from? Apple! Their front page's Latest News aesthetic is ripped directly from Apple's front page. Their layout for browser features on their browser page? That's new: it used to be columns until Apple started their "3-column new features" method of advertising. Their "three snappy words for a product" is taken from Apple. Their font is Myriad Pro, for fuck's sake. Only they don't rip right from Apple, because Apple's schtick is "We show you our product and make that product beautiful enough to market itself", and Opera can't do that. (Maybe now that Hicks is on Opera's team, they can start - I'd love that, since I prefer Opera and their marketing to the browser and marketing of Mozilla - remember that "promotes openness" checkbox on the Firefox vs. Safari page? I do.)

As I said in another comment, at least Apple is honest about their marketing. Their marketing is very blatantly so, and they keep it a point to maintain some integrity: all they talk about are their features. Opera doesn't do that. Most companies don't. As a result, Apple's ads come across every time as refreshing and new, and they don't try to convince you with features that aren't really there. I'm fine with that.
I've tried using SimpleCDN. They are cheap and probably for a reason. I was going to use about 10-15Mbps, for tiny files, so it seemed like a cheap solution to my bandwidth problem.
- First problem, they didn't let me use the whole $15, even though it was enough for me for more than a day. They locked my account in a few hours, without notice.
- My sites were down all night long. There is no phone number to reach support. I e-mailed them in the morning. They got back to me 5 hrs later. Asking for money and saying I would have used up my balance if they kept the site up. What is the point of giving $15, if they don't let you use it?
- Even though I already had $13 of my credit for the evaluation period. I paid an extra $25, they opened my account.
- Then 5 hrs later, they shut down my account again, without notice. Citing terms of service. I e-mailed again. We'll see when they get back.

Although price is really cheap, I don't think I will ever use simplecdn again. I will try to get my $25 back. I still have $37 in my account.
Is there a good place to get more info about these quiet startups?
I'm always suspicious of analyses like that. Most people's earnings aren't that granular. If I make $X/hour, I don't automatically get $X/10 if you save me 6 minutes in the kitchen. Even if I do bill by the hour, it's practically impossible to bill for 6 minutes. Now consider that fact that many (most?) people don't even get paid by the hour, but by the week/month.

For me, the marginal income from an extra 6 minutes of time is zero.
Its not so much about search as the realtime indexing, at least for now. Their db is up-to-the-minute; their search algorithms are 15 years old.
The ability to save web sites as standalone applications.
actually i am more of a stick person (though not always)... so i find that reminding myself of a failure motivates... especially when its 5AM and freezing - the reminder of having to spend all my hours at a sucky job and not doing anything useful, just springs me out onto my laptop!!! and not to mention the "zone" is just brilliant...
Disclosure: I write very little code targeted at non-technical endusers, in fact most my code is for my own use. These facts strongly influence my config file solution.

If find the need for a config file (I tend to like command line options better) 95% of the time I use python code and import.

The benefits are many; zero work required, known syntax, powerful syntax, arbitrarily complex, no parsing required, nice traceback/errors with screwed up syntax.

#file config.py

debug = True

directories_to_backup = [
# path exclude these subdirs
("/media/programming", ("log_files","temp_files")),
("/media/documents", ("archive",)),
]

# or, if you relish verbosity
directory_info = dict
directories_to_backup = [
directory_info(path="/media/programming", exclude=("log_files","temp_files")),
directory_info(path="/media/documents", exclude=("archive",)),
]

# the options are as endless as your knowledge of Python

Usage

import config

for path, excludes in config.directories_to_backup:
garbleblaster(path, excludes)
Comparative Biology in Aging Research
good read. different point of view.
Had to become a morning person this semester (early classes). My tactics are twofold:

Coffee by the bed. Literally within about two feet. I'm a little crazy, so I've hacked my coffee machine together, but programmable store-bought stuff works too.

iPhone by the bed. It's really bright, I hold it a few inches from my face and start going through my RSS reader. Gets my mind in gear and my pupils to contract.
An incredible website.
Finally I have found the motivation I need to write my IB Extended Essay (days before it is due).

How do you get the play back link though?
There have also been many thousands of programming hours invested in making your average filesystem fast and reliable.

It all depends on what you want to do. If you want relational queries a RDBMS provides a huge advantage. If you only want key-value lookup an RDBMS might be overkill.
Specifically they are sueing over the support of8.3 versions of long filenames. Presumably the sd card in the tomtom uses FAT
When I read "mature" I thought you meant in demeanor, but now that I look at the site, I am guessing all you meant by it was ... older/more established?

I like the inviting-ness of airbnb, and sheer simplicity. For me it is much more welcoming, and thus motivating (to go out and explore) than the vibe I get from couchsurfing.

to each his own.
Specifically they are sueing over the support of 8.3 versions of long filenames. Presumably the sd card in the tomtom uses FAT
Good! Transparency and customer communication are a huge plus
Too much navel gazing is really bad for a site. This isn't to say the essay lacks insight, just that Hacker News is diminished by frequent debates.

PG, have you considered invite only schemes?

What about explicit 'people rank', where friends can rate eachother in a reputation system? That might really help with the quality of comments.

It would also help conversation is you could follow people you like. Twitter and Tumblr both do a really good job of 'pick your peers'. I often track these two links:
http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg
http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ivankirigin

It would be nice if there was a thread stream of selected people. It would make me engage in conversation more often. Too many comments don't have an easy response, making them closer to declarations than discussions.

Also, have you considered adding an explicit cost to votes? You could weight those above a certain karma threshold higher if each vote were $0.10.
This is very off-topic, but in the last few years I've noticed more and more intelligent people misspelling words phonetically ("unphased" instead of "unfazed").

I can understand someone flubbing pronunciation (eg "macabre", "learned"), but what is causing this other phenomenon? Are people (Harvard professors!) not reading as much as they used to? Are they less concerned about editing? Is this the last great challenge for spellcheck?
Can you provide links to some of these? I'd prefer a non-webapp version, since I have an intermittent internet connection.
For now they just hacked together something custom for me. However, Etherpad saves every keystroke, so once they enable this for everyone, you'll be able to replay stuff you wrote with it.
To be cynical, all marketing is untrue. If it was true then they wouldn't have to tell you otherwise.

Try listening to advertising and considering how plausible the _exact opposite_ of what they say is. You'll be surprised.
For users that care it's self policing

FWIW, there are a lot of users that don't care. I know some of my highest-rated comments here have been one-liner jokes. This means that the community doesn't really consciously think about "policing", they just click things that they agree with or that made them giggle.

(As an aside, have you ever read a really well-written post that you completely disagreed with, and didn't upmod it? I have. It's hard to promote people that are wrong. Human nature trumps "self policing", it seems.)
Great site. Interesting biz related side topic: Have sites like this trended too far towards the policy of "no account required"?

This is a service I actually want to sign up for and I wasn't able to find a sign up link after looking around for 30 seconds or so. Surely there would be some benefit to EtherPad to have me sign up for an actual account and collect data on me.. which in this case I am happy to have them do since they are providing a solid service..
cool!

I did IB in Tallahassee, Florida. That was 5 years ago, but good luck!
The real trick is to never have to get out of bed in the morning.
I don't get much from productivity "tricks". I get excited for a little while, but the excitement wears off a week, maybe a few days later, and I'm back where I started.

The best long-term advice I know is to just do it fucking now. If you have to get up, then get out of the bed and get ready, whether you feel like it or not. It's not what you wanted to hear, but maybe you'll feel better hearing it from Paul Graham:

"But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right."
The thing that I keep hitting myself over the head is regarding taking risks... I wish I had known that after I graduated...
No, the marginal income (in dollars) is the smallest amount of dollars that you'd take to work for someone else for those 6 minutes.

Said differently, if I'd offer you six bucks at dinner time to give up cooking and work for me and you'd say no, then your time must be worth at least six dollars, or $1/min, otherwise you'd have done it.

Since it's a nice, clean, hypothetical we get to ignore things like the silliness of working for only 6 minutes, or the time it takes to leave your kitchen.

How you actually get paid is irrelevant, the question is 'How much would you have to pay me right now to stop doing this and work.' That's the value of your time, because in an open economy, you could go work instead (subject to the caveats above). =)

Usually the question is asked in terms of what work you'd get paid most doing (which is often work you enjoy).
Even If I get paid $10MM/yr in one lump sum from a trust fund, the value of my time per minute is still however much money I'd take in lieu of my time, or, in economic parlance, the 'second best alternative'.

Just because you can't practically bill for a fraction of your time doesn't make it value-less. That's a common fallacy, and (imho) a wasteful way to look at life.

In this case, I'd argue that in light of what you said above that I would have to pay you a LOT to get you to quit cooking and go do work, so the value of that chunk of time is actually quite high.
Part of the reason Hacker News has maintained its character is the people it attracts. The people it attracts, hackers, are drawn in by the subject matter of hacking, which hardly appeals to the lowest common denominator of the internet. I'd like to see the same approach taken with sport or politics. Can an internet community be created that discusses politics or even religion in an intelligent and respectful way? It might be possible, likely way harder than hacker news to pull off.
I like where this post was going, but I don't thing it got there. Energy is a factor, but what about the value of one's effectiveness? It's not merely time, or energy that gets things done, it's effectiveness.

If I have all the energy in the world and all the time I want, it does not follow that I'll get more done. If I'm into what I do and I'm good at it (talent + interest) I'll be more effective and that's of much greater value than how much time and energy I put in on a given day.
What does the [xfs] annotation mean? I like seeing how other people write. :)

Edit: Nevermind. I see they're the references at the bottom! Why xfs and xtc?
Incredible. I was talking about my teacher about how a transition away from paper to tech is great and all but we have lost the sense of keeping drafts. Drafts have a very high value. I don't know how you are connected with the folks @ Etherpad but if there is anyway I can help, let me know.
Is there a reason that some of the companies you fund, like Clustrix, are not mentioned at http://ycombinator.com/faq.html ?
Would be interesting to see the same for code, with a high-level AST representation, and with different coders shown in different colors.
It's different when it's built into a generic, web-based editor. Imagine the difference between

a) telling students to install a keylogger, write an essay with it turned on, then submit the essay plus the logs, and then the teacher figuring out how to replay the logs, versus

b) telling students to write their essay at etherpad.com, they submit the url, teacher clicks on "replay."

As for the matter of students being online, that's going to have to get solved anyway, because all the apps are moving online.
the new one does tables, but still no monospace.
Good points. Theoretically, you're right, but I don't think it works that way practically. I'm not saying that my time is valueless. I'm just saying that while I value it, there is no efficient way for anyone to compensate me for 6 minutes of my free time. There are too many fixed costs associated with employing someone for that person to get paid the true marginal value of their time.

"No, the marginal income (in dollars) is the smallest amount of dollars that you'd take to work for someone else for those 6 minutes."

Theoretically, yes. But try to find someone who will employ you for just 6 minutes. There's not that much liquidity in the job market (yet?).
This is so hot. I'm really blown away.

It's also really interesting to watch a good writer go about editing. This is certainly a way to teach writing, besides the obvious method of practice.
Might be a minor point, but - pg, could you elaborate on the distinction between "bad people" and "people behaving badly"? I read most of the "Dilution" section as saying that bad behavior is situational (someone who flames on reddit posts intelligent comments here), except for the following blurb in the middle:

"forbidding bad behavior does tend to keep away bad people".

Is the implication that these "bad people" can't possibly behave any other way except badly?
I try to use strings of chars that don't naturally occur in English so I can find them by searching.
Teaching people to ignore the awesome parts of the internet is a fine skill to teach. It might be more valuable than the class you're writing for.
I don't think that's fair.

First, it doesn't look like this was an official Opera team complaint. I can't even tell for sure if the guy that started the thread works for Opera.

Second, right now each and every one of the web browsers available has some very stupid problems: Firefox 3 still uses silly amounts of memory, and can't even correctly scroll Reddit pages with lots of comments; Safari is only lukewarm, not customizable, has its own compliance quirks (some versions have a JS bug which will crash it), and isn't especially remarkable in terms of performance; and then there's Internet Explorer.

Opera at least is making an effort, and with fewer resources at hand than either Mozilla or Apple. I'm playing around with 10 alpha right now, and it can actually play TED videos on my PB G4 without skipping frames! Hooray!

With Opera's Dragonfly developer tool, about the only thing that keeps me going back to Firefox right now is AdBlock Plus. If only there were an auto-updating set-it-and-forget equivalent, I'd kick Firefox to the curb for not ironing out some of their issues before releasing 3.
This is interesting to watch. I notice you type something, you delete it, and then type something different quite a bit. When you write on paper, how do you deal with this constant deletion?
One thing I really like about HN is that you have chance to, once in a bad light (low karma), redeem yourself with future posts that are more carefully written.