skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
/usr/bin/script

script -t 2> script.demo.time script.demo
xemacs -nw
# M-x tetris
# ; play tetris now
# C-x C-c ; exit emacs
exit
# watch tetris being played:
scriptreplay script.demo.time script.demo

script can create a "screencast" of any terminal session. This works pretty well, but probably is not the right solution for the education market pg is talking about :-)
I've always been curious to know how much of Facebook was Zuckerberg and how much was other people. A lot of people are quick to slap him down, but quite a few accounts say that he's as brilliant as he's credited for.
I've proposed this before:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=391292

The big question would be how to propagate submissions and comments between communities. Especially if each community develops its own unique character. I've thought about organizing each community onto branches of a B-tree and letting upvoted submissions move up the tree, though my intuition says that this might not scale, as one community might overpower the rest.

Anyway it would be interesting if someone builds it.
set a high but attainable percentage goal for savings. if you're making typical programmer salary at a young age with no major expenses it isn't impossible to save 50% of your paycheck.

Just remember: once you can afford a down payment you recoup a huge amount of your own income by investing it in equity instead of throwing it away.
If my startup fails, this is my cover letter for my next employer
I submitted this yesterday and pulled it after 20 minutes. This was written in jest to capture my feelings the day before I announced my product here.
I am surprised that the average starting salary in silicon valley was only $50,000 in 1999. I was under the impression that tech salaries never returned to the dot com boom levels.

The average starting salary now must be at least $10,000 more.
Not untrue so much as inconsequential. Dave Barry wrote about this pretty famously: if Coke and Pepsi advertise how much better they taste, it's because they taste the same. If a shampoo company markets its special herb, that herb means nothing.

Apple's one of those rare companies that doesn't necessarily do that, because very often they've got something worth getting. I love their commercials where it's just a song and their product lying there, like the Macbook Air and the iMac commercials, because those are the ads where they don't have much to say, so they focus on the sheer beauty of their products. When they do have something big, the ads are incredible. I still love watching the old iPod ads. Incredible clips.
I neglected to mention that the method for detecting TrueCrypt volumes is described, somewhat, in the FAQ.
You definitely have to read the entire article. I assumed it was some dailywtf-style rant until the last paragraph.
Somebody downvoted you, which was stupid (guys, quit downvoting people you agree with if they're making good points, we're pretending to be civilized here), but I couldn't help but notice that while you've got criticism for Firefox, your things about Safari are things like "lukewarm", which isn't saying much, and "not customizable", which is false (Safari has some incredible plug-ins, and there're a handful of really good ones that people blatantly ignore because they don't advertise their existence). "Isn't especially remarkable" can be said about both Safari and Opera, who are pretty similar to me as an end user. The only impressive one is possibly Chrome, because of its multithreading.

Also, if you're a Mac user, I would recommend GlimmerBlocker (http://glimmerblocker.org), which works as an adblocker for every browser you have, which is awesome.
For better or worse, drift is inevitable. Words with unique or very unusual phonetics are all but doomed to regularization. Long-term irregularity is reserved for the most common words, in general.

Things like that still make me twitch, but we're getting to the point that if you spell it "unfazed" you'll get a "correction" from your friendly local spelling-nazi-wannabe.
Apple is a pain in the ass if you don't play by their rules. Using Quicktime on Windows is painful, and iTunes isn't much better. It's their one major falling-out as a company, though I can forgive them as long as I'm not using Windows at the moment.
Hehe fair enough =).

I just wanted to make that point because I believe many people (although perhaps not many hacker news types) are likely to waste their time because (from a cold, unfeeling economics nerd perspective) we tend to undervalue it.

Blowing 4 hours on the tube on for a CSI marathon becomes a lot less likely when you think of it as spending two-hundred bucks to be slightly entertained.

It's an unhealthy way to make every decision, but still a bit underused in my opinion.
Capistrano is mature and stable. Jamis deserves respect for the original idea and the implementation.

For the vast majority of people, the current version will work just fine. When we all get sick of git and start using the next source control system then Capistrano will need support for that but I can't see that happening anytime soon.

Massive thanks to Jamis for all the love he's given to these projects over the last few years.
Although I personally consider nytimes one of the few info sites really worth registering for, you might try http://www.bugmenot.com if you feel otherwise, they usually have working links for just about any free site.
I wonder about the assertion that this approach would prevent blind people from using a site. I'm not up to speed on the current state of the art of screenreaders for the blind (last time I looked they were still running on DOS) but it would surprise me if they weren't looking at the DOM that resulted from loading the page in a regular browser, rather than reading the HTML directly. If that were the case, all of the javascript stuff should "just work". Anyone know better?
It declares its self as fake. While others deny that charge.
This is an idea that's given rise to many conspiracy theories about the politicizing of science, many of which make a lot of sense when you look at them objectively. I recommend reading Michael Crichton's essay on second hand smoking and some of the content on Green Agenda to get some background information:

http://veritasvincitprolibertate.wordpress.com/2008/06/21/mi...
http://www.green-agenda.com/

It's scary to think that powerful people might justify using science as a political tool, just because they believe the ends justify the means. If you're willing to manipulate the truth for what you perceive is good, it opens the door for many dystopian scenarios.
Well the article was about 50% financial advice and 50% generic business/personal skill advice. I think it's great advice despite what kind of company you are working for, even if you are an entrepreneur.
Maybe, but only if you had a larger sample than one person. You'll find that there are at least several common ways to write - most quite unlike each other. That would probably be the biggest lesson.. that there is little you can learn from watching this process except "just do it your way".

I found it quite surprising to watch. I thought it was a genetic algorithm writing an article somehow at first with all the constant deleting and rewriting.

Once I realized what was really going on I was struck by what an odd writing style it was (to my experience). I'm firmly in the "get it all out then come back and tighten it up" clan. There are, I suspect, at least several groups though.. I'm intrigued what they all are (perhaps the "just write and don't ever edit" group, the "refine as you go" group, the "headings then fill the gaps" group...)
Ask HN: What motivates you to keep working despite government bailouts/theft
US is 65 trillion dollars in debt (and I am not a baby boomer who mortgaged our great country away), and just spent 3 trillions. The older generations are gonna want us to work extra hard to pay off their debt, or the government is gonna inflate our money away. Why should I work so hard, slaving day and night on my project, when they're just gonna steal the end values?

That's what I want to know. What motivates you guys to keep working? Because I'm on the verge of giving up (I've got 15 years of living expenses saved up, so I can either spend it on the startup, or just live a quiet life)

I feel like John Galt and just want to say 'I will stop the motor of the world', and walk away. What keeps you guys going?
You beg the question of whether it's legal or not. You claim it's legal because it's legal.

I totally agree that it should be, but I disagree that this has been established in any legal sense. Personally I think the evidence points in the direction of "it has never been considered legally".
How often do you want to see a video clip, as opposed to looking at realtime stats? I've done one Twitter search ever, for notadouche.com when it caught on, and that's all I've needed. If an event happens, Twitter gets hits, but even then the need for video is much more constant.

How many times do I need to host video versus talk about something breaking? How many times do I want to do each? YouTube gives me an essential service: put video online. Twitter doesn't.

How many times do you share a YouTube video as opposed to sharing a tweet?
Thanks. Right now IB = stress. That is all.
how long did that take in real time?
An Algorithm for Compressing Space and Time
If I want people building mashups with my site, I'll provide an API, HTML is not an API.

If I want Google to see my data, I'll provide it to them when they crawl, more accurately, if I'm ajaxing in data with JavaScript, it's usually explicitly because I don't want crawlers getting to it.

It is not a web developers job to go out of his way to support people who deliberately break their browsers and more often than not contribute very little to the bottom line. Most of us are building apps for people that actually want to use them as intended.
You know what I mean.

We still use parallel ports at work for a couple of things, but that's becoming problematic.
Inflation. $50k in 1999 is roughly $63k now. http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
$25000 Hacking Contest open to the Public
i'd love to see how a piece of legislation gets written with something like this.
Etherpad technology marks the Beginning of the End of comment spamming, although that is not what it is intended for.
I agree, and I think that the solution is simple: limit people's ability to give out upvotes. Maybe restrict people's weekly upvotes to c * ln(karma) + d or something. (Make d small!) Or have upvotes actually cost you like a tenth of a karma point. (Dunno if karma should be turned into currency, though, since then I could imagine people trying to game the system.)

This solves another problem that really bothers me: an upvote to a really insightful comment (like the parent) has the same weight as an upvote to a comment that's merely useful, or, worse, that merely shares my feelings on some topic. Insight (in my opinion) should always count for more than anything else, and I think limiting upvotes will make it so -- because I think most people actually do care about it most.

- EDIT -
Another (even more dire, IMO) problem that might have a similar solution: comment threads are way too long. Only four or five months ago I could make a comment and I'd be absolutely certain that at least a few reasonable people would read it, and so it never felt like luck when my comments moved up; my good comments inevitably got upvotes, and my mediocre comments stayed where they were. Now comments get lost in the wash. I'm tacking this edit onto this comment partially because it's tangentially relevant, but mostly because I don't have faith that anybody will ever see it otherwise.

That's a huge problem, and I suspect that it is in fact the fundamental cause of the degeneration of other social news sites. When people know that their contributions will be noted, they act like they're participating in a conversation. When the success of a comment depends on a metaphorical die roll, I think people adopt the mentality of, "I'll throw shit at the wall and see what sticks."

My solution would be to limit weekly "root" comments (comments that respond directly to a submission, not to other comments) with a formula similar to the one above (c ln(karma) + d), though with the caveat that comments that get more than a few upvotes get "refunded." But frankly I'd endure any kind of unreasonable limitation if it would get rid of the feeling that this community is gradually but inexorably turning into a mob.
It's actually only the fan presale that is will call only, I believe that the regular onsale has normal delivery options.
> What you can and should do is support the...

Bullshit, the only thing we should do is whatever the bottom line requires. 99.9% of users don't break their browsers on purpose, so you lose very little and save a ton of time and effort by simply not choosing to go the extra mile for those pesky few that try and break your site.
I really liked this sentence I caught. "Launching lets you observe the collision between your presuppositions and the needs of actual users."
I know, every word should tell, but I wish it had made it.
Kindle 2 Tear Down
Thanks! I didn't know about Safari's plugins, and I didn't have specific criticisms of it -- other than the crashing bug with drove me nuts at one point -- because I haven't worked with it as much as I have Firefox. Usually it just hangs out in the background somewhere running Pandora and occasionally being a testbed for a site. (However, it just took forever to shut down...)

GlimmerBlocker looks great, I'm trying it out now.
After thinking about the topic for the past year or so I sat down and wrote up the major problem I found with using up/down voting for comments in a rather long blog entry

http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2009/02/comments-rating-s...

I would be extremely surprised if HN changed or even tried a different system, but hopefully it can be useful for developers who are creating the next generation social new site. The key point: The number of points a good comment gets is directly related to the number of users that read the comment.
This is an incredible thing to watch! Can you do this with any piece of writing on Etherpad?

What a great way of bringing attention to a start-up: make something that's inherently fascinating due to features. This is unlike anything online I've seen before because the functionality just doesn't exist anywhere else. So it's a great thing to watch and it also tells you about the service.

I like that you keep constantly going back to eliminate unnecessary language. Something tells me that's the first and most obvious trait of watching good writers write: at the governor's school, when the writers would write on paper instead of on the computer, you could read a draft and see that emerging pattern of phrase after phrase, each building on the last. It's interesting seeing it happen on the computer.
Its open. That's the greatness. The dev kit is a little lacking but already it has GPIO pins if you wanted to do a relay and a usb port for a $20 spark-fun "usb-whacker" if you're too lazy for gpio.

The point is that with the schematic and the backing of Marvell, it will be easy for relatively small players to add cool innovative features with custom builds. Every time I find a place to buy a WRT54G, its different inside and takes a lot of googling and fiddling to get any linux at all on its tiny flash.

The Linksys WRT54G or any hacked Linux powered home NAS are finished products. This is an exciting beginning.

Note: I actually chose lavalamps as an example while looking at the little usb lavalamp on my desk and thinking about writing a tiny web app for this little box so that I could plug it into the usb port and have a "computer free web enabled lava lamp" anywhere in the house. The simple (usb to) serial commands to make the lamp come on and change colors would be super easy with this little device.
If only they hadn't killed Jaiku.

Google's wonderful at competing when they can change the experience paradigm (Gmail, Google Maps). They're terrible when they can't (Google Answers, Google Video). If Google tried to ape the look and feel of Twitter ("but better!"), they'd fail.
"An Algorithm for Compressing Space and Time" -- amazing performance improvements for "Game of life". (I can't find an old submition so here's a new one http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495438 )

Hashlife algorithm might find some benefits from implementing it in a functional language.
The lobbyists will have to start to use etherpad then.
"Of course, at that time I thought that social networking sites were a complete waste of time -- both for the users and those developing the sites -- so I earnestly tried to talk Mark out of squandering his precious Harvard education on such a frivolous endeavor. "You think you're going to compete against Friendster and Orkut?" was the general outline of my argument. There were already too many social networking sites out there, I claimed, and building yet another one was clearly a waste of time."

Interestingly the argument against building a social network is still the same, and inevitably someone will come along, not listen to the advice and create the next facebook. These things seem to be cyclic in nature.
We're thinking of charging for having accounts.
The most intelligent people in the world make mistakes...pretty sure spelling error is inconsequential for him.
John Galt is a fictional character. He lives in an oversimplified world where the virtue of selfishness outweighs the rest of humanity's concerns.

You (and anyone you know who you might move to Colorado or whatever) don't have the capacity to stop the motor of the world. And if you live in the United States today, you are among the least tethered, in economic terms, of any person who has ever lived.

The sad reality is that we're all in this together. It's part of the social contract. Government pays for roads and public schools and national defense. If you've never taken advantage of these services and civilization has been built on your back, clearly you've been wronged. Otherwise, grow up. The world is bigger than you.

I suggest you find something you like to do and learn to contribute. And stop quoting Ayn Rand, it makes you sound like an idiot.
Eh. Welcome to the past. The copious version changes to Beethoven's 9th have always been available, for instance. Pen and paper and scratch-marks...
Nah, this guy does not know what he's talking about. An iPhone is a phone. The OS was built for the hardware, it was designed to communicate.

The NetBook is for the web. I can also install any OS, as it is a PC, not a phone with a built in OS.
Ask HN: What have you learned from Hacker News?
When I read the title of Paul's latest post "What I've Learned from Hacker News" I was hoping he was going to talk about what things he's learned from the stories and discussions here that stand out, not what he's learned about running the site itself. So I figured that may possibly make an interesting Ask HN question.

What important/useful things have you learned from the stories and discussions here that stand out to you?
Obama will hurt the economy
Umm redis is really cool. Nice job on this antirez. I've just finished implementing the entire spec here:

http://github.com/ezmobius/redis-rb/blob/0951204e6a84ca335ac...

And I am really enjoying being able to store lists as values and pushing/popping/indexing. Looking forward to where you are going with this.

Although the current release doesn't seem to support all the documented features yet. incrby and decrby don't work yet.

Can you get in touch? I'd love to pick your brain a little about redis.
i don't think he's good at coming up with ideas, but he has shown repeatedly that he will execute the hell out of a project.
He was offered a near $1-million offer from Microsoft, just for a job there, so his ability's not in dispute (unless $1-million is peanuts nowadays).
That's rather interesting, though it seems rather simple for the truecrypt developers to defend against this. Add some random noise the end of the file, or fake a file header.
Possibly it's because you're seeing more writing done in-browser as opposed to in a word processor that has spell check?
Computer Vision for Python
Yeah, I mean that CouchSurfing has an existing community that has already gone through a lot of the growing pains that social-network sites go through, and come out with a reasonably functional group; it's pretty rare for people to get robbed or raped through CS.
Viewing good design, I get the same shiver that I do when I see a beautiful woman.

Those calculators are devastating.
This is really amazing. It's interesting to watch you experiment with many PG-esque phrasings before settling on the final one, especially in the introduction.
> I don't really see enough incentive for the governments of the world to be paying for biased research in favour of global warming

The incentive seems obvious to me but correct me if I'm wrong: increased taxes and regulation resulting in more power for politicians.
I was thinking git would be a great tool for legislation writing as well...
wasn't that to acquire the app he built which suggests new music to listen to on your computer? and he rejected that and decided instead to go to harvard?

i bet he was just trying to buy more time to build something bigger. from what i've heard, he was very much on a rapid fire mode with his projects. if one failed or didn't grow very quickly, he wouldn't wait long before moving on to another one.
This is one of the best pieces of writing on entrepreneurship I have ever seen.
I'm not so sure. I think I could fake it.
Did facebook just get hijacked?
Going directly to http://facebook.com without the www is redirecting me to a sponsored landing page. Twitter seems to confirm its widespread and not spyware. Happened on multiple browsers. Anyone else?
I'm getting the same thing. On chrome it goes to http://http://facebook.com//.

Maybe it's a mistake -- an intern is about to get fired.
I learned to program :-)

I've always been curious and somewhat technically inclined, but also the guy that would put on a tie (I can actually do three different tieknots and a bowtie...) and go out and swing my arms madly around until someone pitied me enough to invest in or buy whatever I happened to be selling at the time. Worked pretty well too.

Then I started coming here, and realised that there was so much I didn't know, and that if I could learn it I would have a much easier time creating good products. Instead of the whole arm-swinging business to convince someone to program something for me I could just learn how to do it myself!

And so I did. And I realised that I should have done so ten years ago.

So thanks a lot, and sorry for all the silly questions.
This is about as knee-slappingly insightful as a Japanese person saying "Trust Paul Graham on startups? Pfft. What would Americans ever accomplish with a startup, invading somebody?"
is it me, or is pretty much the entire thing extremely common sense? Maybe I'm forgetting my college years, but I'm pretty sure I knew this back then
happy with HN now. please don't change the formula. i say that knowing it will change...but pleading with you to try to leave it the way it is.
Yup, I confirmed on Chrome, IE and FF. A number of other people I asked said they have no problems. This is a major mistake that should have never happened. That sponsor page should have some serious new revenue!
I don't see it anymore.
In the past, people had editors edit their writing before making it public. Now, they let people like you do the editing for them, saving the expense of having a real editor.

And oh yeah, writing comes together a lot faster now. You can have an idea in the morning and be on the front page of social news sites by the afternoon. When things happen that quickly, there is bound to be a brain-o (or typo) in your writing.
We've got a lot of demand for custom domains, so it has become one of our top priorities Therefore, the answer is soon.

If you've got more questions, feel free to email me directly at dan [[at]] fliggo.com.