skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looks like cuil.com

I would prefer they made a simple list like here on hn instead. Is there some general news site with a simple list of news on the web?
Twitter is in the news a lot. At the Davos summit it seemed to be the only positive story in the entire world (twitter being used by legit journalists). It just works for a whole lot of folks. I suspect the new investors current opinion is that they just got the best deal of 09.
Valentine’s Day From My Side of the Counter
There's a much simpler reason. You can't test-drive a car online.

One wouldn't need to. One could test drive a car at a dealership.

I'm not sure how that's a simpler reason than the fact that selling new cars without a dealer is banned in the US.

Most buyers research their new cars on the internet even though they can't test drive them on the internet. Since they're on it already, ordering a car would not be difficult to swallow (there are already laws that allow buyers to return a new car for any reason within a certain time frame.)

Programmers are taught to try to cut out waste and save time and money, and they've tried to do so here. From what I recall reading, web sites had been shut down because they tried to skip the dealers. This shows that it is not a lack of customer confidence, but the force of the law that is keeping things as-is.

Finally, the argument that "one can't test-drive cars online" would be an important enough deterrent to an all-online purchase process does not consider that a new approach might be developed to allow potential buyers to test drive a car (such as for a price). More realistically, consumers will test drive the cars of their friends, that were already highly rated on the internet, such as... the cars that are already popular today.

A downside is that with fewer dealerships and the new development of getting charged to test drive a car, cars will become less fun to drive and more feature- and safety-oriented. But, that is already the trend. Luxury car manufacturers will still have dealerships for that reason.
Dealers complained, but at the end of the day their profits are really in the service and maintentance of the cars much less in the initial sale. Most dealers get their profits only if they reach certain sales targets in the form of kickbacks.

As for how friends and family members buy their cars, most of them drive corporate lease cars.

Dealers get paid for the test-drives they arrange for such customers because it is a certainty in those cases that the dealer will not be involved in the actual sale.

One example of an online store for cars is:

http://www.nieuweautokopen.nl/

(dutch, sorry and apologies for the irritating flash intro as well)

Of course the dealers are trying their hardest to sketch buying of a car through the internet as the most terrible decision you could make.

By law at least in Europe the whole concept of a brand dealer is no longer an acceptable concept, any car dealer can sell you any brand of (new) car. Importers / manufacturers can no longer make deals based on exclusivity.

I realize HN is US centric, in spite of that I would suggest a title of 'Why Americans can't buy a new car online'.
for the last 10 years [...] it has been possible to buy new cars online

In what country? Is Amazon.com selling and shipping these cars?
So how are the articles ordered? Does this order change over the course of the day? Sure it's a great way to expose me to tons of info with very easy eye movement, but it's also tons of real estate. How do I re-find an article or is that not really a problem? If they're not going to foster user added content, then no; if they are, then it's a big problem. I sure hope they also have a sortable list view (by post, by title, by author, by location, by popularity over a time period). They have a big challenge and I agree than the present form could be improved, I'm just not sure this is the only best way to go. Nice to see them pushing the envelope a bit though as it shows the get it and want to improve- two plusses in my book.
I think it depends a bit on how relevant community is to your application. If there's a community of users that is built up naturally by using your app (like there is at say Stack Overflow, which uses UserVoice) then you'll want to provide a place for the community to talk about features.

If your various users are generally unaware of each other, then I think that having a place for them to send you suggestions is fine.

My general thought is that building a system to handle suggestions before you have any is mildly premature. Provide an obvious way for users to send suggestions - a form or a prominent email address is usually fine - but wait until the flood of suggestions becomes a problem before solving it.
What is to keep an organized attack on a site's display method in IE8 by overuse of the 'compatibility mode' button when it's not appropriate? Especially since tech-un-savvy users will then see a site in compatibility mode when they didn't do anything in their browser, and they'll assume the site is busted?

Also, at which point do we stop assuming the majority of users are not tech-savvy? How much longer do they have to catch up? Everyone knows which hole the food goes in, no one makes special easy-to-eat food for the food-un-savvy crowd.
at the end of the day [dealer's] profits are really in the service and maintentance

Amazon.com's profits are in the service and maintenance of the books it sells?

Most dealers get their profits only if they reach certain sales targets in the form of kickbacks.

Amazon.com receives "kickbacks" for reaching book-sale targets?
1. Many people buy the NYT from newsstands, as noted elsewhere.

2. What about other costs, such as tech support?
I fail to see the relevance of injecting amazon.com flawed analogies in a discussion about buying cars on line, could you please explain what you mean with that ?
Love it. I like the idea of sitting back and scan the information without the need of scrolling.
Good step forwards towards interaction. Some more things that could make it a killer:

* Graceful degradation for noscript; maybe do a simple CSS fallback option.
* The page-slide animation is eye-candy but IMHO with time it might get annoying, make it optional.
* It shouldn't be hard to add an X on top-right corner of boxes to remove or shade things you read already.
* Some killer fonts, it's the New York Times!
thats strange, I tried it again and it didnt do any of those
could you please explain what you mean with [amazon.com analogies to online car sales]

Wikipedia can do it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com

Amazon.com [...] is America's largest online retailer
at the end of the day [dealer's] profits are really in the service and maintentance

Why would anyone bother paying to maintain an automobile cheaply-purchased online, when he could instead cheaply purchase another new automobile online?
The best Gilliam-mindfuck is Tideland. Just amazing.
One could even rent a car (to test-own) from a business that rents cars.
But your agreement or non-agreement doesn't matter, since it's based on armchair reasoning. There is real research on this subject, and numbers trump whatever you'd like to be true.
More peace quotes
Always look on the bright side of total and humiliating failure
wow that looks really terrible
A coupon site? That's one of their recomendations? Maybe they should also offer a time machine to go back to 1998. Ok, maybe a bit smarmy, but that is one busy space with a handful of very heavy jitters and no good domains left. Just a bad idea in 2009.
Most definitely. Even in the UK, where they switched to metric some time ago, imperial measurements can still be seen all over, and many papers still provide both Celsius and Fahrenheit measurements.

While it would be nice if we Americans were exposed more to SI (rather than just in science classes), I don't really think it's important that imperial measurements be abandoned. They still serve their purpose in everyday life, so there's no real reason to switch.
I for one like it, I think it does a good job of providing an 'at-a-glance' overview of stories, it fits a good number of stories on one screen (20) and it is suitably uncluttered for my aesthetic tastes. The only thing I would change is have the animation effects a little faster, say 25%, just to increase the 'snappiness' factor a little. A good job well done IMHO.
you don't have infinite money to spend, so there's a good chance you'll go broke before you win

I.e. risk-of-ruin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruin_theory
I just installed it, this is a very good time saver. This is much better than temp variables because it defines "temp variable" automatically for you.
The model they have is perfectly viable.

The disk allocation was very tight (especially for companies moving legacy repos to it) - it was 3gb space for a 'large' account intended for 25 users and 50 repos.
I didn't mean pasting into the PDF but copying parts of a PDF in order to paste them elsewhere. This is not deterministically possible because (most) PDF documents do not contain a sequence of letters or words but rather a sequence of painting instructions, which can be different from the order in which the document is read.

Also, the codes used to represent letters refer to fonts not to unicode code points (or other character sets for that matter). So my problem is that extracting text from PDF has to use a heuristic approach that always fails at some point. That's why copy and paste out of PDF documents leads to such strange results sometimes.

The use case I'm talking about is to distribute documents for viewing, printing AND further processing.

The issues I have with the PDF format are not solvable by adding features because the features are already there. PDF documents can contain unicode text and a very large number of other structural information as you have pointed out. I know because I have written PDF software and I have read the spec very carefully top to bottom.

There are two major problems:

* The PDF format is incredibly bloated, difficult to process, and it allows documents to be distributed without deterministically extractable text. (And I don't mean the case where the author deliberately restricts text extraction)

* The widely used tools to create PDF files, by default, do not use the PDF features that would allow deterministic text extraction.

The PDF format is older than the web. Data integration and search were not important tasks when PDF was created in 1992. It was meant for printing and viewing only.

The only way to solve these problems would be to remove features from the PDF spec or to mandate the use of other features. Both would be incompatible with previous versions in a way that is completely unacceptable. That's why I think there has to be a new much simpler format that leaves all the old arcane baggage behind and facilitates reliable processing in addition to viewing and printing.
Google to Take a Hefty Cut on Android App Sales
re: 'killer fonts'

I can't imagine it'd be too hard to include server-side fonts akin to stylesheets in the HTML header of sites. Ok, the major obstacles are:

1) Browsers need to support the functionality
2) Operating system-specific font rendering

Wouldn't this really open up the possibilities for web designers?
"I'd rather see them coded in C, or better, optimized C, or better, pure asm written by someone who knows what they're doing."

In most markets, the greatest source of economic value is high-level optimization of the whole system. If the Gods should bless you with overwhelming market demand, then you hire some bitheads to do micro-optimization (or just throw hardware at the problem).

This especially includes search. Plenty of systems have search engines that are lightning fast and come with all the bells and whistles. And are nearly useless because they (1) prioritize by criteria that are wrong for the users, and (2) are written in impenetrable optimized low-level languages that the system maintainer lacks the skills to customize.
Hmm, I find the list kind of "meh". There are some good films on there, but a lot of them I don't consider adventurous enough to be on among The Truly Strange. Lynch's stuff fits that bill well, but doesn't belong on the same page as e.g. Donnie Darko. A lot of these are really just witty.
To an extent the delay seems related to program complexity. I released a utility app (http://rankforest.com/ranktouch) that was approved after 5 days.
IE 4.0+ (yes, four-point-oh), Firefox 3.1+, Opera 10+, and the latest Safari builds all support @font-face.
CTO - Webdeveloper/Designer required
Please send an email to kg@zsaqa.com!
You will love it. It's all about change.

Best,
Klaus
First of all due to this thread I think that I won't be going out for at least a month. Thank you HN.. :P

I'd like to make my own contribution to this thread since it hasn't been mentioned.
It's "The man from earth".
Not exactly mindfuck material, since it lacks that "surreal" element, but at least on my case, each time I finish it I can't help but just sit silent and think about the claims it poses, from a philosophical point of view.
In that sense it could be in the mindflirt-romantic-dinner-with-potential category..
> Graceful degradation for noscript
> The page-slide animation is eye-candy but IMHO with time it might get annoying, make it optional.

The page is utterly useless without JS. I keep JS turned off. It's a good thing I read here about the animation eye candy before trying to turn it on to explore the NYT page. Side-to-side movement on a screen gives me brain seizures. If NYT sticks with this new plan, that will be yet one more site that's off limits to me.

If I want movement and eye candy with my news, I can turn on the TV.
I don't recall any judgement call like this in the article. The Good/Bad dichotomy is something you are inventing in your own mind.
Ask HN: How to Catch Bad Bots?
I do part-time server admin & wonder how others monitor their webserver(s) for badly behaving bots like scrapers, DDoS, etc. What tools & procedures do you use & follow?
TCHO, San Francisco's high-tech chocolate
Market Failure. Or Not?
Interesting, especially the fieldset tag looks very useful, I didn't know about that one.
I didn't say that it doesn't work, I'm just saying that maybe there's a better business model hidden behind it. What if 50% of all the open source projects in the world and their forks are all on github. Does that open up some other ways to make money?
Just Jump: Start using Clouds and CDNs
It's not bad, but I believe it would be much clearer if every article had 'category' icon instead of a photo. At the moment it takes to long to filter information overhead.
That's really funny how the author takes the example of audi q5 and compares it to Google results.
How HTML Templates Should Work
Many many years ago I wrote a few apps for PalmOS devices and the biggest problems were small incompatibilities between different PalmOS versions and small quirks of each device. The fact that the iPhone has a very limited selection of handsets, means that the chances that something that works on your device will work everywhere else are much much higher...

Plus the PalmOS emulator was never as good as the iPhone emulator.
Excellent. I'm pretty addicted to the completion in cdargs, but the learning features of autojump are pretty cool. I'm giving it a shot.
That's too much like work.

EDIT: I currently use cdargs, and it had to get built into muscle memory before it was really powerful. Now, I type "cv twTABENTER" and I'm where I want to be, before I've finished thinking about where I want to be.
Jurafsky and Martin, Speech and language processing

http://books.google.com/books?id=fZmj5UNK8AQC&pg=PR24...
It reminds me of http://oursignal.com. Maybe that's why I am having hard time with it. Except for the lead story, all articles have the same size square and color. Lack of visual anchor makes hard to read.
A "cup" is a much easier notion to get your head around than "about 50-70 ml".

This opinion can only come from exposure. Whenever I see "one cup" in a recipe I'm 100% baffled. A big cup? A tea cup? One of those larger coffee mugs? Trying to judge what is actually meant here can leads to volumes differing about two to three times in scale.

Give me centiliters, desiliters and liters any day.

I still have no idea what a cup is. And 50-70 ml seems way too little to make sense, so I will just assume you pulled those numbers out of thin air.
>> Also, I'm one of the lucky 676 people that have a two letter domain.

I agree there are still great names -- that's why I have that website. I'm just saying that the good one-word English names have definitely been picked over.
I appreciate the "noob's intro" to dabbling in Cloud hosting. Makes it worth a try.

I've appreciated even more the HN discussions about need for backup of cloud hosting in the light of outages during last year. Viva la paranoia! As my buddies say, "In God we trust. For hosting we backup independently."
Metric is design by committee, as hacker's we should consider that a mark against it.

Just like http really. We should all be rolling our own protocols.
I appreciate your raising the question here, as maybe we can hear from people on front lines. There are, meanwhile, some interesting starting points at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDoS#Prevention_and_response
Strange, none of my projects remotely approach the old limits. Maybe this is to attract bigger projects such as linux, xorg, gnome, etc.
YouTube - Beyond Test Driven Development: Behaviour Driven Development
The Death Of "Web 2.0″
They need to add 'label' to that list. It's not really obscure, but not enough people use it; not even the big sites (ahem, eBay.) It adds a good amount to the usability to the page, in my opinion.

('label' associates another block of text/html with an input field. So if something says: Name: |_________|, and Name is wrapped in the label tag, clicking on Name is enough to give the textbox focus)
The meaningfulness of rearranging the digits in a base-10 representation is fully and sufficiently demonstrated... by coming up with an interesting non-obvious mathematical fact that depends on rearranging the digits in a base-10 representation. Meaning is something you get out of a math trick, not something you put into it.
It certainly behaved very badly for me - also flagged.
Really? - The Claim - Never Blow Your Nose When You Have a Cold
Thousands of unconscious eye movements stop us from going blind
Yes, well, maybe death. More like aged and senile: what's hot yesterday is tepid today. What's news today is taken for granted tomorrow.

But, on the bright side: it is no long sufficient justification for your startup "be web 2.0"... It actually has to meet a demonstrable (or creatable) need. Now THERE's a innovative idea.
Dr. Willem Kolff dies at 97; Dutch physician built first kidney dialysis machine
Google Software Construction Toolkit Released
1 cup = ~250 mL = ~1/4 Liter = 237 mL
Fortunately, all ingredients in a recipe are usually given in 'cups'. If you use the same cup for all ingredients, the proportions of the ingredients stay the same, which is the most important part of a recipe.

It does not matter if you use a big cup, a tea cup or a coffee mug. The meal will still taste good, as the proportions are kept.

While for a 'metrical' recipe you need something that can measure weight and volume, for a 'cup' recipe you just need a cup, no matter what kind of cup.
I suspect some users might prefer a paid advanced version online instead of having to download a desktop app. You could either try a monthly subscription of $1 or a one time fee the same as your downloaded version.

To see which wording of "BuyNow" or "free trail" etc works best you should do some A/B testing using something like Google Web Optimizer. Hopefully it will speed up the process of finding the correct wording/strategy/layout.
Ditto.

Any idea where to access that mode from the traditional NYT frontpage?
"perfectly viable" != "optimal"

swombat is saying there may be a hidden business model that even the GitHub crew haven't discovered yet, because the conditions that enable it haven't yet been reached.
He sees a pattern _here_, not in the article. He's talking about the people _here_:

"It's too bad that the US didn't..."

"...its[sic] pretty asinine, ... and USA is stuck using obsolete..."

This has nothing to do with the metric system: You could define a hypothetical Z0 paper size as 42.81" x 30.27", a square yard, and then define paper sizes Z1, Z2, and so forth. Each would be half the area of the previous by performing the same operation. It's not as if 210 or 297 are particularly easy numbers to deal with, or that having precisely a square meter of material is all that important. Is it important that a sheet of A4 paper is about one eighth of a square meter?

And in defense of US Letter, its proportions are closer to the golden ratio than A4, which looks too skinny for me. But they're both too wide for letter writing; I think either octavo-sized or A5 paper is a more natural width for printing or hand-writing a single column of text. Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style – to mention one of a potential dozen or so authorities – recommends text columns be a maximum of about two alphabets of lowercase characters.
Firefox froze when this page loaded.

Default behavior for fieldset is different under IE, FF and Opera. IE rounds the corners where FF and OP do not. Not critical but if you're after the same look and feel it should be tested. Didn't try CSS with it.
Spatial Index Demos
Google's v-day logo is kinda scary looking
>The advantage of the download (desktop version) is that users can run in a borderless window with six color schemes and the ability to close the side palette.

Is this really an advantage? I'd want to confirm with potential users that they are concerned with color schemes (as I know I'd never pay for color) and having it in a borderless window as opposed to an additional tab in an already open FireFox.

You really need to define the additional advantage of the pay vs non-pay version. What is the screaming need in your users lives that paying $15 is going to solve?
I tried this and got similar results on my 64-bit Debian system. Conqueror (xulrunner-based) gets 190, Iceweasel scores 181, and the Windows Firefox under Wine gets 198. (These were the best of five runs for each. The standard deviation was pretty high for the Wine Firefox.)

Could be a compiler issue. It will be interesting to see how it does with the JIT compiler enabled, since that should mostly take the system compiler out of the equation.
Cool. Why isn't this something they integrate directly with SCons? Just credit etc.?
Why do the newspapers think they have to reduce themselves to news feeds?

I like the physical newspaper for the editorial value it provides: it places emphasis on certain stories (by making them larger and more accessible) and demotes others. This is real value, that I am willing to pay for.

The new interface makes almost every story identical.

Now, on the internet we have plenty of news feeds, and very few entities who can actually provide that editorial value. So I just can't understand why The New York Times would want to get rid of its biggest competitive advantage?
I don't think you can (yet?), but its was linked to from NYTimes blog for new features and announcements.

http://firstlook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/sunday-browsin...
I like A4 better than US Letter. Perhaps because it is "different".
why'd you link to the comments field?
NewsFox: Firefox Add-ons