skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nokia E51 ROSE Steel Unlocked
This business phone strides right into the boardroom and commands attention because there’s nothing frilly about its appearance. The Nokia E51 means business right from the get go and right down to its features this is a phone that doesn’t mess around. Nokia has thrown in every aspect that will keep you successfully connected.
Thanks for the validation on the "there's good material out there that nobody is using" point, russell.

I'm still working on ideas for collection, but I know an easy way to filter: simply refuse submission from any of the top 10K internet sites or so.

What would a news aggregation site look like without material from Engadget, CNN, NYT, etc but yet with stuff you really enjoy reading? Is such a thing possible? Or in other words, does the popularity of the source determine how much you enjoy reading the content, and not the content itself? Kind of like the expensive wine taste tests, where people consistently view expensive wine as tasting better but only after somebody tells them the price!

I don't know. I do know that it's been bugging me.
Like DanielBMarkham said, the spammers are likely just looking for easy targets. So my answer to you would be "probably not."

But if we assume that they will take HN at any cost, then their course of action will match that of bacteria: attack, mutate, rinse, repeat. Eventually it will be either them or us that survives. And it probably won't be us.
it was a response to Joel's claim that the only thing this guy did at msft was have lunch with Bill G. The links backing this up are on the reddit thread.
How about banning links in comments until a small karma level, say 10, or a few days registration? Another possibility might be deletion privileges for questionable comments for hackers above a certain karma or registration time. By questionable, I mean comments of a certain form from new users, rather than being completely subjective.
Interesting. Could it be that it's proof of account existence, and that's how someone gets paid?
I am sorry, I don't understand what do you mean?
Please forgive me, I am not a native english speaker.
The answer might be quite boring.

When a new user comes to this site he will try out the functionality, click around and see how things work. One of the things that he will probably want to know is how to submit an article. So he goes ahead and tries it, using whatever link he has handy.

I know this because I did it myself when I joined. I deleted it right away though. I've seen the same thing on other sites, so it's not that unusual.

Edit: tuned down the wording a bit, since PG's reply indicates that this might not be the sole reason.
More than anything else this is what will probably drive true artificial intelligence: the need for the internet to survive as a valid information and commercial platform. We're clearly setting up a prey-predator situation which will continue for as far as the eye can see.
Yeah. It's also just all about risk. People overestimate the risk of competitors stealing trade secrets, and the impact that might have on their business. And then they drastically underestimate the risk of sucking out because nobody ever uses their product.

15 years in the business, mostly in software, and my take is if you can trade some extra competitive risk to mitigate marketing risk, that's an absolute no-brainer.

Feel free to ask me when we're going to open-source our product. I have no idea. ;)
Everything you wanted on a phone
I actually left a comment on your blog a while ago.

You submitted an article here which I read and found to be amazingly good. So I wanted to leave a short comment saying just that. I had to retry a few times, and got some pretty weird errors. I tried changing e-mail adress, subject, etc. to see if the error would go away. So your problem might be that there are a lot of errors on the submission process, so people try again, often using different names, etc.
Yes, that works correctly.
1. Grad school pointlessly delays adulthood.

I learned useful information about my area of interest as well as myself during grad school. I also supported myself the entire time. That is part of what adults need to do.
Thanks.

Will look into that.

I like your idea about newbies trying out the system. Not as exciting as evil overlord botnets, but perhaps just as plausible. I guess the answers would be in a careful digging through the server logs.

Appreciate your trying. I just upgraded to MT 4.2, so hopefully the comment submission bugs have been worked out.
On my blog I'm getting comment spam without any links as well. The usual stuff like "Great work! Plan to come back often!"

I don't have a blog myself (shocking, I know), but I have read that some blogs flag the mail adresses of previously accepted comments. The next time someone posts a comment, it will be accepted automatically.

Could it be that some spammers use this approach to save accounts for future spamming?
If you wanna put it in economics terms, it's basically the difference between fixed costs and variable costs. Scalable professions have high fixed costs and low (or no) variable costs. So it may take you 10 years to learn how to program well and 3 years to write a killer application, but then once you've done that, you can sell as many copies as people will buy for zero cost. Naturally, this is high risk & high reward: many people give up before they've built a product that other people will buy.

It gets a little complicated because in a profession that's innately scalable (like computers, writing, or any sort of IP), the distinction between scalable and unscalable business models usually comes down to who's bearing the risk. So, if you're an entrepreneur, you front all of the fixed costs of developing the product yourself (or you get investors to do it in exchange for equity). In return, you get all the rewards if it's successful. However, if you're an employee, you sell your labor for a fixed price (= unscalable, since you have only a fixed amount of time), and then the company bears the risk of the product not succeeding in the market.

Personally, I think you should think of an employer as an insurance company: they underwrite the risk that your venture will fail in the marketplace, in exchange for taking the vast majority of the rewards if it succeeds. Whether or not this is a good tradeoff depends a lot on things like external economic circumstances, your skill level, ideas you have for new markets, etc.
Windows 7 allows users to disable Internet Explorer and more
The part about Spolsky, if true, is interesting because Joel obviously doesn't see some of the decisions he made at Microsoft as wrong since he's still doing the same thing.

"He made other similarly stupid decisions like creating a custom programming interface for BASIC in Excel instead of sharing a common interface as strongly recommended. "

Did anyone else think of his special Fog Creek internal programming language?

I particularly like this article that says you should only write new production code in a language lots of people know and others have lots of experience in and then ends with we don't though.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html
That doesn't explain the sudden sharp increase in these links. We're growing, but the growth rate didn't suddenly increase 10x like the rate of these links has.
No worries.

Appreciate your trying - I only did it because the article you wrote was really great :-) It's this one: http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology_is...
In my experience, nobody cares. Most people admire you for having the guts to have started one in the first place, and executives (often people who have started companies too, and have buried them) will be happy to hire you.

And I actually moved into Silicon Valley, coming off a failed startup. I'm not sure I could've gotten my job here otherwise.
It's vaguely charming/ironic that the Casnocha is doing pretty good in the scalable world of getting blog posts chatted about... Out of all the millions of blog posts, to be one of the few that random people will look at today...
I think S3 includes support for torrents, so it might help to reduce costs.
He means the exclamation points. In English you don't use those except when you really want to draw attention to a sentence. Otherwise you seem crazy! See what I mean!
If BillG has eaten lots of lunches with him then he should have been some guy for BillG and Co at least.
This just goes to show how important is to be nice ALLLL the time on the internet.

The one time JS is a douche, he gets called on it big time, and there's nothing he can say to make himself seem like less of a douche.

I am sure JS and GW are both perfectly fine people if you sit down with them for a cup of coffee, and if they randomly sat next to each other on a plane they'd probably get along fine too.

Stuff you write stays on the internet forever.
I was talking mostly about Eastern Europe, but thanks for your useless input.
Compared to the cost of building and maintaining your own system I think it is cheaper. Add the cost of servers, colocation, bandwidth, people.

Also, on S3 you pay exactly for what you use, if you use your own server you are paying for them up front. Another bonus is the using their CDN if you have frequently downloaded files.

Check this comment by Don MacAskill, CEO of SmugMug which stores a huge amount of data on S3: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=422574. Check his blog too: http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/tag/s3.
Maybe it's because the influx of new users are more casual in their use of the site, now that it has grown to a certain size. I could imagine that users that just stumble upon the site will be more willing to engage in this semi-destructible behaviour than users that got the site recommended from you or another early user.

Can you see whether the users that do this end up being good citizens? That would shed some light on whether these are malicious accounts or just new users trying things out.
10K top sites seems like an awfully large ban, so I would edit the list to allow interesting sites. Another tactic would to subscribe to feeds from particularly interesting sites, maybe filtering them for content length. For example, take joelonsoftware. He has interesting things to say, but most of his posts are there to keep the site fresh and should not be aggregated.

As for what I am looking for, I want information about techniques and developments in the software development and web entrepreneurial spaces. Popularity is probably a negative, because I have already seen it elsewhere.

I value commentary. I read the comments on HN before I read the story to see if it is worth the investment of my time. I also do first comments as a kind of payback.
An interesting twist on HN would be to require a comment on a submitted article rather than prohibiting it. That might be an effective junk filter.
I agree, and the newer Red Hot Chili Peppers albums are a perfect example of this.

Ever look analyze a Muse CD? The audio looks like a solid block zoomed out. Not that Muse isn't awesome.

The article seems to simplify the clipping issue a bit much, and it looks like some users here are confusing compression with maximization.

Compression is the relatively simple process of reducing dynamic range above a certain threshold by a certain ratio. If the ratio is 2:1 and the threshold is -10db, then 0 db would end up at -5, -8 would end up at -9, etc. Then you'd just make up the loss in volume by boosting it an equivalent amount. There's also the attack and release, where attack allows the volume to rise above the threshold for a given amount of time (measured in milliseconds) before it is compressed, and release will raise the volume up over a period of time after the source has returned below the threshold.

What's going on here, it's important to note, isn't quite compression. It's a much more complicated process involving potentially lots of different plugins and rack-mounted magic boxes that all sell for thousands of dollars. They focus specifically on the qualities of sound that make us perceive loudness, not just simple dynamic range.

(Though, to be fair, one of the most interesting mastering tools is the multiband compressor, which splits the audio based on frequency, compresses each band separately, then mixes them back together.)

Anyway, the focus of a 'loudness maximizer', as opposed to a compressor, is pure... loudness. That's where the clipping comes from, and that's actually how you get clipping without the sound actually sounding distorted and clipped. It's pushing the edge of distortion a little bit, and you can kind of hear that on poorly mastered loud recordings.

It's a lot harder to get the same effect with a compressor and a hard limiter (which prevents the audio from going above a certain level no matter what - basically a compressor with an infinite ratio).

edit: By the way, because of imperfections in the original compression hardware (and modern software simulations of said imperfections), the compression process isn't actually as straightforward as I said. In theory, that's how it works, but compressors are generally known to 'color' the sound a bit while they compress. In other words, the compressor that the Beatles ran vocals through is not capable of also giving you that pulsing, compressed sound you get from One More Time by Daft Punk. For example.
I love seeing new markets evolve.

The last desktop I bought was an 800MHz Power Mac G4. The last 5 computers I have purchased have been notebooks, mostly on the small side. My next computer is going to be a netbook, even if just for fun.
WoW!
I feel there is a culture shock here.
Even I had to look up the word "exclamation"; I really still have a too long road in learning english. :(
S3 does look pretty expensive for this case. In general, I think S3 is best for storing files that aren't retrieved often. For hosting a download, there are better options.

I have an BingoDisk account that supposedly provides unlimited transfer. If you are just uploading and downloading stuff, it sounds like BingoDisk is ideal. (http://www.bingodisk.com/) I use it for hosting big files, like a 600M SQLite database with information about CPAN modules. It gets quite a few downloads, and nobody has ever told me I'm abusing the service.

(FWIW, I used to use BingoDisk for backups, but Linux's WebDAV support does not work well for backups -- way too much caching going on. S3 turned out to be infinitely more reliable. I don't think this has anything to do with BingoDisk, though, but rather how davfs2 is implemented. This may or may not be a problem for your use case.)

If you don't mind offloading the cost to your users, though, S3 is probably the way to go. I think Amazon will even bill your users for you now.
Dell Studio 14 Laptop
Yep, you're right. Perhaps only 1K sites as a rule. I also like the idea of getting feeds and just manually sorting through them. I firmly believe that there's a mix between old-fashioned editing, user-editing, and user-submissions that hasn't been tried yet. Seems like everybody wants to do one or the other, when mixing them up might be the best solution. Perhaps an editor scours the top-hundred or so sites in a niche, along with user submissions. After the editor is finished, users can validate or not the entries based on feedback, like you said.

At the end of the day, how many articles do you really need to provide the average reader? It can't be that many. If you can find four or five truly unique and high quality articles for a reader each day, I think you'll build a loyal following. So the goal is to have zillions of articles enter, but only a few appear to the reader. I don't think "herd mentality" or voting systems are the way to sort that data. There has to be a better way.

Good stuff to think about.
Introduction to Parallel Algorithms
I have this book, in chm format on my laptop.
It's really so great.
was hoping for something a bit more specific (we already use github to synch our code), but appreciate the comments.
Hey... I give you lots of credit for being open to learning... and for continuing to try to contribute to this English-based forum. Live & learn: that's okay.
I used this and had a good experience with it. The project I used it on was ~150K lines of C and had lots of developers from different organizations contributing code. That made it a pretty good example of a project that was having trouble growing because of manual memory management. On such a project, just defining and documenting who should call free() for a given data structure is hard and actually enforcing those rules (and figuring out what component broke them) is much harder.

We were able to pretty easily integrate it into the project (we already had macros indirecting all calls to malloc() and free()) and initially use it as a leak detector. After that we were able to trust it to handle deallocation where it made sense.

A neat feature of this collector is that you can tell it during allocation that a block is guaranteed to have no pointers in it for those cases where you can know that (blacklisting big chunks of floating point data or images). This improves the performance and accuracy of the conservative collection as it doesn't need to scan those blocks. That makes it less objectionable if you are accustomed to the level of control you get with C.

If I were to build a big system in C again, I would use it from the beginning. But I am unlikely to build such a big system in C these days.
Perhaps the spammers are testing to see if the spam "sticks". The sites where the spams stays will be revisited. Perhaps that spammers think that an account that posts links that don't come up on a black list will considered "safer" later when they can then spam seriously.
QuickPlan: An incremental algorithm for satisfying hierarchies of multi-way, dataflow constraints [PS]
By contrast, a lot of folks around my office joke that TI (the big one in Texas) stands for Tiny Income.

Realistically, we're probably a bit ahead of the middle of the pack, compensation-wise.
I recommend founders read this too. It would be useful to them to imagine how things look from the investors' side. I'm surprised more didn't take advantage of the Justin.tv stream to spy on the investors at AngelConf. They were pretty candid about how they think.
Let's all run to that side of the boat because that's where the fish are biting.
Founder Anti-Dilution Agreement
How much does an angel invest? ... The upper bound is obviously the total amount the founders want to raise.

Obviously this is an upper bound; but it isn't necessarily the upper bound. I'm sure there are instances where the limiting factor is how deep the angel's pockets are.
At least the default for wordpress is that if a user has had one comment approved then further comments are approved automatically. I suspect that's the motivation for a first wave of pseudo-spam followed by the real influx.
You can't do precise GC in C++ because you can't find all valid pointers.

Two of the "can't handle" cases are:
(1) the XOR trick to represent the prev/next pointer for a doubly-linked list with a single field.
(2) Ullman's set set representation which uses an array of values which may, or may not, be valid pointers. You don't know without consulting another structure. (The whole point of this representation is that you don't clear things on initialization.)
The news ultimately behind this is that Moore's law for CPU speeds has broken down. Since the real increase in performance always come from increased speed, the newest PCs are no longer that much better than older PCs. This is something of a disaster for the traditional PC which has been oriented towards selling the best technology at a $500 or $1000 dollar price range.

For this reason, we every reason to think that $400 or $200 machines will catch up to $1000 machines and thus total industry dollar sales are going to plummet.

Well, its better to be in software than hardware today, it seems.
I don't want to surprise you that I did not really receive any English education. I am self learner.

Your words made me feel really great.
I had heard a bunch of this before in random threads, but it was very interesting to read it all bundled together. It definitely deserves a few readings...

Thank you!
I am surprised, however, by the absence of Cisco Systems and Intel.

Intel is notorious, tho': http://www.faceintel.com/
Nah, it just means they hired a bunch of HR people from investment banks.
SongRaptor releases music recommendations
You probably need to allow more than 4 or 5 per day to encourage your readers to submit stories. I would suggest putting featured stories at the top and other noteworthy submissions below or on anther page. People really like to see their names in lights. Some concession to that will encourage that. Of course the downside is more trash. HN survives by the diligence of its community. Manual moderation should work well too.
I was looking through the legal documents just to get a sense of what technically happens when a corporation issues a new type of stock. Thanks for sharing these documents.

Not sure if this is relevant, but http://ycombinator.com/seriesaa/aa-boardconsent.doc has a typo... there is no section 1.iii .. it skips to 1.iiii and then 1.iv.
There are many possible answers depending on the type of application. How difficult is the view? That can be one person, or a very small piece depending. In some types of games, AI can be enough for one person. Business logic or the model, depending on the application, can be two thirds of the work. Further, programmers vary on productivity.

My suggestion would be to put out a preliminary design then split it into rough time estimates. Then, everyone pick a task and start working. As you go, you'll get a better idea on what takes the most time and adjust accordingly.
Noise could mask web searchers' IDs, preserve data integrity
Aim for mediocrity because you'll pretty much get there anyway. And restrain your kids so they don't think big. Perfect recipes for a boring life.
People’s creditworthiness, it seems, can be seen in their looks
I would read it charitably as synecdoche: the part (Arrington) for the whole (TechCrunch).
Yeah, I absolutely agree. That's the attitude I see in developers. The apps that make money are often not very complex, so it's worth the effort even if the party doesn't last forever.
zOMG. you straight COPied songza.com. this is crap
Git has won insofar as it is superior. The pace at which ignorant and late businesses catch on to this fact is of only tangential interest.
It's zillion times more effective to navigate using find-file or just by jumping to an existing buffer.

Jumping to an existing buffer is fast.

For finding files, I like eproject:

http://github.com/jrockway/eproject/tree/master

For finding tags, I obviously prefer tags table lookups, with imenu for navigating inside files.
Firefox achieves 100% market share in over 14% of continents
HN is entrepreneur-porn.

Indeed. HN can inform and motivate.

But simply reading HN also satisfies the startup itch a little... and can thus wind up being an ersatz substitute for the real thing. For each person HN encourages, it might also satiate another in place.
This mirrors my own realization; With Linux, Linus showed me he is an extremely good programmer. With Git, Linus showed me that he is a true genius.
I run a fairly small site. We're upto around 7 million hits a month, still pretty tiny. Our costs right now are fairly low, but recently I made a post inquiring how to cluster efficiently, because we needed more bandwidth available (And we were going to use a few 10mbit servers).

Someone suggested that we use s3. This would've tripled our bandwidth costs.

This is why I believe it's expensive.
Its not risk or cost free. Graduate school has a severe opportunity cost. If you can make $60K/year and grad school tuition is $20k a year, you have a $60k opportunity cost and a 20k out of pocket cost.
This topic on parallel algorithms is not in the book!