skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Select a state or search below to advertise:"
Where do I select a state? Typing NE in the giant search box didn't yield Nebraska search results, however I then spotted the state drop down (not on the home page!)

"Search returned 1 results:" takes up a TON of screen real estate relative to the total area allocated for search results. Using the back button breaks search results filtering (at least state-based) - look at how Mint elegantly handles this use case.

Something about the spacing or presentation of the search results is irritating to me but I can't put my finger on what. The resulting pricing pages, by contrast, are quite nice and present the information in a coherent way.
Munin + some shell scripts that make sure the web server is rendering pages that look reasonable.
Harvard's CS171: Visualization (with videos via Flash and iTunes)
Yeah, and it's not even remotely the same sort of problem. A "Digg killer" or "reddit killer" just needs traffic. A Hacker News killer needs to have a good community.
Garry and Sachin have built an incredible company. These guys are hustlers with a laser-like focus, and will end up doing extremely well.
Same here. I went through cases and cases of vault and pepsi max during my degree program. Occassionally, I'll also drink a whole lot of coffee. But, I can drop it like that. The main effect I notice is feeling more tired for a bit as my body catches up on all the sleep it was deprived of. But, nothing else.
if sms is the best your phone can do (not a blackberry, iphone, etc) then just supress the link?
Climate Change Ponzi Scheme
Being that you're addressing this question to me, thought I would answer.

YC's value extends FAR beyond the minimal dollar amount it gives each startup. If you really don't get that, you simply haven't been paying attention. SAD.
It sounds to me like he's less interested in what a CS degree involves and more interested in what a good understanding of Computer Science involves, regardless of what one college decides is good for a curriculum, and so he wants to go beyond simply what the course is teaching. For reference, the definition of "supplement" in this instance is most likely "Something added, especially to make up for a deficiency."
Fun fact: once upon a time, the majority of nurses were perpetually hopped up on scary-powerful amphetamines. You joke about it now, but that kind of thing used to be normal. Hell, it was almost expected.
I suppose. Feels like a step in the wrong direction if developers have to have in the back of their mind "will this make sense without a link?"
No, Auctomatic. The Octoparts were physics grad students, but they could hack.
PG's all the more respected because he's very rarely active online. He only says something when he's got something interesting to say. Arrington writes 24/7.
... and they have such a great sense of design!
re: "small sample," think of it like this:

* about 5000 people saw the feedback form (presumably because they canceled the install)

* of that group, about 330 actually submitted something

Strictly as a matter of statistics, 330 is a big sample of the population who canceled. More than sample size, I would be concerned with sample bias; I expect that there is a systematic difference between people who submit the form and people who don't.
I've found that when I write documentation as I go along, I tend to document the wrong things. It's a bit like premature optimisation: you're in the thick of it, hyper-focused on whatever seems the hardest part of the problem at that stage. You document what's on your mind. As with optimisation at that stage, you're usually wrong.

So I've found you need to try to develop a sense for the sweet spot: the point in time where things have settled down a bit and you're seeing more of the big picture, yet it's all still completely clear in your mind and your memory hasn't been diluted by the muddy waters of time.

I suppose for a startup, the key here is the time where things have settled down a bit. I have no startup experience to speak of, but the impression I get is that that time can be a long way out. Almost certainly longer than you expect, as you iterate again and again and try to figure out what it is that users really want.

The other thing you need to ask yourself is why you're writing the documentation in the first place. Is it for potential future developers? The documentation isn't going to replace digging through the entire code for them. Most if not all documentation that I've encountered which attempted to serve this purpose was woefully inadequate and basically redundant. If the code is well-written, it usually documents itself, and if it isn't, you need to read it anyway because it's probably impossible to encapsulate all its subtleties in prose.

So internal developers are out. Who else comes into contact with your tech? Well, maybe you have non-programmer cofounders/employees who need to generate data in certain formats. You'll need to document those, no doubt, once the formats start to stabilise. Better still, get users of the docs to write them for you or with you. This sounds lazy, but actually their thought process is different, and future users will think more like them than you. Of course, check over the result for errors and inaccuracies.

Another group of people that will need documentation appears if you have some kind of outside-facing API. These people will usually not have the opportunity or inclination to trawl through your source, so as with the file formats example above, to the intended readers of the docs, the docs are the only source of information. I guess this one is really obvious, but I'm going to point out that the design of your API will be more important than nailing the docs for it. Iterate. An elegant API requires little introduction.

So these days I worry more about the quality of the code than the documentation, and I write docs only for those who won't come into contact with the code directly.

(NB: you can probably tell I've given this sort of thing a lot of thought, and have had extended discussions with other developers about the subject. Take all of the above with a grain of salt - many people will vigorously disagree with a lot of it. I'm also working on a project off-and-on that kind of explores this space; unfortunately earning money to stay alive is consuming my time at the moment)
I love the idea of non-transitive dice.
I did that and it worked pretty well. I was drinking a lot of Coke.

Six months later I thought "I'll have a Coke for lunch, it's alright since I had one with lunch yesterday". I almost paid for it before I realised I'd only had a very detailed dream where I'd bought and consumed a bottle of Coke with lunch.

I decided to stay off the caffeine for a little longer.
No, you can't really buy the connections and press that YC companies get. You can buy mediocre connections and press, but YC companies get a lot of good access to good connections, and the press they get (many good links and discussion from established websites) is better than you can buy, certainly better than you can buy for ~$15,000
If you're a YC founder with the capital to do angel investing, you will probably get a substantially higher quality deal flow than someone just walking around with half a million to invest.
This is all great advice that I, as a CS undergrad, am going to take to heart.

Something along a similar vein that bubbled up on HN a long while ago is the Programmer Competency Matrix: http://www.indiangeek.net/wp-content/uploads/Programmer%20co...

For my own part, this was a golden find, as it describes components of five spheres of competency (Computer Science, Software Engineering, Programming, Experience and Knowledge) as well as - and this is the important part - the steps it takes to obtain mastery in the components of those spheres.

While this may partially be an oversimplification, it does put things into terms my game-conditioned brain can easily understand, and I suspect that I'll likely discover anything it has missed in my pursuit of mastery.

Your college curriculum may or may not involve going through the SICP, but it's something I recommend. It's available online...

...in HTML

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html

...in PDF

http://web.mit.edu/alexmv/6.001/sicp.pdf

...with an accompaniment

http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2007/06/19/introducing-the-sicp...

...and there are several archived video lectures on the topic

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma...
I agree with you that it is large for the group but I would be more interested in the people who did cancel as you said. Especially with the example comments like a problem with firefox already running et cetera. I was just was trying to voice my disappointment in the article's given sample.
Savory: Native Kindle epub and PDF Converter
Anyone who understands math will at least get what the issues are in hacking, even if they don't understand random details. They won't panic at the sight of formal notation.
Cybercrime 2.0: When the Cloud Turns Dark
I love this on my phone, but I'd like to see them broaden this. For example, if I type in Apple Store, I'd like to see the one here in Santa Monica, CA.
I got started with Chef today and it's great.
It's organized into recipes, and you can share cookbooks (see the official one, it has plenty of recipes for common things). I also like using erb templates for config files.
Quick reference: cat /proc/cpuinfo

Your processor is buggy if it's an Opteron family 15, models 32-63 inclusive.
There's an update on the site: Astute commenter Daniel Pritchett might have the answer: An app called "Spy" that tracks social media conversations. TechCrunch would presumably use this to come up with story ideas or track conversations about its stories on the Web.
You sound like you're caffeine sensitive person, it's probably good that you steer clear, from what I remember you'd have a higher chance of palpitations and other side effects of caffeine.
Better yet, send one of the counselors/advisers an e-mail and ask them about a track you might be interested in. Or, e-mail a professor and ask them. Or both.
Font Face Replacement Embedding Techniques and Resources
An overview of the pros, cons, and features of the top four font replacement methods in order to help you decide which one is best suited for you.
Joe Siegler IM'd me a couple weeks ago and said he found a VHS tape that had some DOOM footage on it before its release and if I didn't want it he was gonna throw it out.

Do people really throw this sort of stuff away without realising its value?
Link shorteners shorten the URL itself, they have little to do with the HTML tag.

hxxp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=549620

vs

hxxp://bitly.com/cjVY

Given the 140 character limit, a 50% savings is monstrous. Having Twitter auto-link on display is no big deal, it's free -- as news.yc does.

TinyURL was great in the day, it was a temporary stopgap until email clients quit breaking word-wrapped links. Since then and up until Twitter, I'd argue use cases for shortened links were near zero.

If Twitter rolled their own, they could smooth out usability issues with shortening (i.e. display the full link or host when viewing via the web, to crawlers, etc.)

--
edit: Changed http to hxxp to help clarify argument. News.yc auto-links http://, so the benefit wasn't as clear.
Ask HN: Review My WebApp - Recipe Puppy - Search recipes by ingredients and/or keyword
Yea, but that is not common day's Perl, this is extremely modern Perl! Just out of the CPAN oven Perl.
On Florida Real Estate, Ponzi Schemes and Twitter
I love that id has remained a small studio relative to their recognition, and while they might not always hit one out of the park — they love what they are doing and that makes me love their products moreso.

I've heard there's a lot of trickle down benefits, respect for each other, and a tight knit crew that keeps a low profile in Dallas-area. With the launch of id North (quake live), I believe this is the first time in their history that there's two distinctively separate teams for game dev. I read an interview w/ Carmack, he said the "web" was more difficult than they had initially anticipated, so I think spinning off a second team for QL and future web projects was the right move — and likely minimize team division/favoritism given their focus.
I think marc andreessen said they need to play more offense and less defense. True here.
How Obama used behavioral economics to win the election, and how he's using it to govern
You put lists, and you take lists :p

Imagine a key-value store/database. Each key is a word, the value is a list of keys from webpages, these keys are the webpage contents.

Get every value for the word "hacker", get every value for the word "news", intersect these values (distributing the computation, or DTC), get the webpages for this intersection. Now you have webpages that contain the term "hacker news".

Key -> Value (word, webpage ids)

hacker -> page_1,page_255,page_600,page_5041

news -> page_5,page_600,page_1001,page_5041

(so, intersect == page_600,page_5041)

Key -> Value (webpage ids, contents)

page_600 -> "hacker news new threads comments leaders"

page_5041 -> "where I can find news for hackers"

Now let's sort these webpages. Take the relevancy algorithm, apply to your list of webpages (DTC), so now you have another list. Now take the list of urls that the user has "banned" (think Google results wiki), and remove them from the list (DTC). Now take the content from the webpages, and select a snippet where the words "hacker" and "news" appears, and wrap them around bold tags (you guessed... DTC).

The thing with the so called MapReduce is that this distribution is somewhat made easier. You map your data, and you reduce, ad-infinitum-or-how-much-you-want, each time distributing the computation. I think I read somewhere in the past that a single query on Google can use up to 100 machines.
This problem has been solved well over a year by Phusion Passenger (www.modrails.com) and Ruby Enterprise Edition (www.rubyenterpriseedition.com). It saves you tons of memory.
Microsoft Online Still Sucking Wind After All These Years
Hello. Gzip is not the way to go, try 'Smaz' and you will get better results, but I'm going to write a specifically tuned version of Smaz in order to work very well with urls.

I'm doing this work for Redis (another project of mine) but I guess that somebody else can exploit this work in order to build a stateless url shortener service. I hope so at least.
The HTML 5 video and audio tags are coming - it may be a long time before they get here, but when they finally do will there still be a need for Flash or Silverlight? Anything else besides video that they do can be done with Javascript. Will we still need them in five years?
What do you mean Java and C++ implement static typing poorly? C++ has some trade offs in order to be compatible with C. The Java static typing seems pretty good to me.
I love you to death Posterous, but why is there still no way to customize the design? :(
Well - I guess my point kind of remains. Public companies are kind of taking leadership from "the street" wherever it is, yet it can barely look past the next weekend (as recent markets have shown us).
Web use drops 40% as copyright law goes live in Sweden
The way I see it is that the internet has allowed professional journalism and scientific discourse to compete with schoolgirl gossip and yelling in bars.

One problem, though, is that the needs of these forms of communication aren't really the same. In a low-latency medium, for example, it's difficult to avoid strong structural biases toward both recency and immediate responses; these are both corrosive to the quality of the discourse. (I think these structural biases mostly account for the very low quality of professional journalism, but they are even stronger on e.g. reddit or HN.

pg and I have written some things about this:

http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2008-January...
http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html (under "Fluff Principle" and "Comments")
What I meant was that URLs would be replaced with the word "link".

<a href="hxxp://somelongurl.com/1234">link</a>

Like that, except actually a link. Short anchor text eliminates the need for short URLs.
Yet Firefox 3 is the most popular browser in Europe.
http://www.reuters.com/article/technology-media-telco-SP/idU...
What Is The Value Of A Human Life? (audio)
No Call from Y Combinator
Didn't get a call from YCombinator today for the summer group. Did anyone of you get one? If so whats your startup?

Oh well...still trucking :)
From his statement[1]: "We will end production of the F-22 fighter at 187 – representing 183 planes plus four recommended for inclusion in the FY 2009 supplemental."

[1]http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=134...
What you are doing sounds like the right level of detail. When I take over a project, I like to have an architectural overview so that I have a context to work from. Detailed but wrong is worthless. One important piece that I often find missing is a short narrative about each table in the database.

I write short architectural papers as I go along, mostly to get feedback from interested parties. I do the "official" documentation at the end.
Right. What I'm saying is the HTML is cruft.

<a href="hxxp://somereallylongurl.com/1234">link</a>

vs

hxxp://somereallylongurl.com/1234

vs

hxxp://shortner.com/1234

The client will automatically href it. You're not saving anything...actually creating more characters. The URL benefits from shortening, not the link title.
site is password protected
"Southern" gives you another 1.5, and "IT specialist" maybe gives you another 6, given the geographic area and gender. Total bits: 22.5. So there might be on the order of 1000 52-year-old male IT specialists in Southern California. The ones named "Don" are in trouble now.
This worries me. If someone searches for "ipod", why shouldn't the zune be allowed to advertise on the results page?

It should be completely up to Google how they want to monetize that results page, and which adverts they want to display there. Not up to a judge working from antiquated trademark law.

What's more, it's useful for the user. It's nice to see related things that might be of interest.

Here's the analogy:

* Man goes into shop
* Man asks sales assistant "Where are the iPods?"
* Sales assistant responds "Aisle 9"
* Man walks to aisle 9, and sees not only iPods, but various other mp3 players.
True. It's Perl that you could be writing, though.
post a username and password so we don't have to sign up?
to try out the account features
username:what
password:what
We're working on it! (Actually could use a few beta testers for the private beta, fire me a line...)
(If you're a startup CTO type, why are you doing Perl 5?)

Let's say you have InterestingObjects, a hash map from strings to objects. You could say InterestingObjects['foo'].andand['bar'].andand != '', but you might do better to rethink control flow, and reframe your problem, because there might be an easier way than always talking about variables that might not exist that have unknown properties. That looks like you're breaking encapsulation.
6 Months of free DropBox Pro
The commentary during the DOOM segment makes me realize how fucking awesome it was when it first came out.
Playing it when it first came out made me realise how fucking awesome it was!
Login to your basic account, you need to enter a credit card number.

Found via Tim Ferriss' twitter - http://twitter.com/tferriss/status/1464561357
I went to CMU (BS ECE 96) and now live in the Bay Area. The weather in Palo Alto cannot be beat.

I get the sense that CMU will work you a bit harder.
I'm pretty sensitive to stimuli in general. I had trouble sleeping for the first 23 years of my life, until I cut out the caffeine.
Check your Google Analytics.That should be a great start. If you do not see any traffic from California, you know you (EDIT) are not selected . If you do, then look deeper and figure out the referral website etc...
Whoa, dude...relax. I know you're on edge waiting for the results, but damn :)

If you read my comment above, you'll see where I said: Yeah, I totally get that YC isn't about the cash.

My point was that YC is worth far more than the cash it invests. But I still don't get why someone who had built a company worth millions and taken millions out of it would go back to the YC model. YC has always struck me as being more for single college-aged founders with no track record than for older, more established entrepreneurs with plenty of money to fund their future startups.
5K is not a lot of money though, for freelancing. I mean it is OK, but it would be only one job. You would have to generate lot's of such "small" jobs. With the "enterprise jobs" you can go for months making >10K every month.

Are those "freelancer sites" mentioned those "joke" sites where people bid on jobs, and offer to program an ebay clone for 50$? I would not waste time with such sites. On Jobserve and Gulp the rates I have seen have generally been fair, (supposedly ~70€ per hour on average).
oh mememe =) firing the line...
That's a very true observation. Being a PHP developer everyone assumes I know how to operate Photoshop and often ask for a portfolio when >95% of my work is subcutaneous. I've never wooed anyone with sexy accounting interfaces. Chances are, I never will.
Safe: A gem enabling simple backups for your Ruby apps
It's like they respect science and the notion of evidence-based decision making or something.
It was bloody amazing.

The first time I played DOOM on my 386, in the dark, with a soundblaster turned up nice and loud, was the first time a computer ever scared me ;-)
Is Web 2.0 Abandoning the UGC Ship?
Caffeine doesn't appear to have an effect on me either. When I stop consuming caffeine I don't normally notice an effect until the next morning, when I'm usually a lot worse at getting up in the morning, but once I'm up I don't notice a thing.

I've gone months without caffeinated drinks before and I've never noticed withdrawal effects. Although this may be because I don't notice any effects of caffeine when I do drink it. Unless I'm drinking an energy drink like Rockstar, I never get the 'pick me up' effect people claim from a coffee.

I wonder if, just like some people are caffeine sensitive, if some people are simply caffeine insensitive and don't notice the effects one way or another.
The approach of the AP here will be interesting to watch. I think there does need to be some more balance between the content creators and those that do nothing but have popular RSS feeds.
The bribe in this case is free consumer to consumer transfers (and I don't think this bribe should be underestimated), but you're right, savvy consumers will still just use their rewards cards and continue to be subsidized by those who don't have rewards cards.

I don't think anyone will pull the plug on Visa/MC any time soon, but more competition would be nice.
1. Per my profile, which you have read, I am a technology novice.

2. Any successful business owner will tell you that the biggest question need answered when entering a new verical is "what is it I don't know that I don't know".

Enter YC at average 6% give, worth every penny!
Army has been developing a GPL'd CAD package since 1979: BRL-CAD
Can't believe I'm submitting this to you guys three days after GSoC applications closed.
nice find. i already have a pro account, but wouldnt mind some sort of coupon?
This is a really interesting issue: how can you do discounts to get new users without upsetting your existing paid users?
I feel the need to pull up a quote from the comments, attributed to a Pixar executive (in a social setting):

"Gee," he said, "that's something we wrestle with all the time. We're very aware of it and we're trying to change. But sometimes it's just so hard to find a way to justify adding a female character to the story."

If that quote doesn't singlehandedly demonstrate the accuracy of this article's analysis, I don't know what evidence possibly could.
In modern Python:

def expand_url(url):
return urllib2.urlopen(url).geturl()
Real-time view of Zappos purchases