skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN:  What are the most popular browser homepages?
I'm trying to see what the internet population at large uses as their browser's homepage. Google, iGoogle, NetVibes, PageFlakes, My Yahoo, MSN? I can't find any statistics on this. I'd very much appreciate it if anyone could find some data on this.

If you want to chime in with what you use, even though you're most likely an exception, I'm all ears! It might make good discussion. Mine is classic Google.
Looking forward to which Cloud based company/startup takes a fore front in this. @nategraves has a great point about APIs, would def. love to see a few of those and the applications that result from the sheer volume of data. Great initiative.
Chiropractic Marketing
How a Previously Broke Chiropractor gets 15+ New Patients / Month AND..... Collects over $30,000 / Month from the Social Media Boom! All WITHOUT Spending money on Advertising
I don't think Hacker News' system kills lame articles. I have seen obvious troll blog posts and such reach the top of HN repeatedly.

The reason this happens is because of the following. Let us say that an ordinary story that is completely relevant to Reddit and is worth reading is upvoted by 50 people and downvoted by 10. This gets the story +40. Now, let us take a very controversial story, say, a blog post on how much git sucks that is obviously fishing for links. This story gets upvoted by many more people, say, 100 people... and downvoted by 300. It doesn't get near the front page.

Now, take the same on HN. The first story gets +50, the second gets +100, despite the majority of people believing it should not be on the front page.

This is not to say that the Reddit system is better, but rather that the HN system is not perfect.
jfornear, you're missing the points we've all made. The drug trade only results in violence because right now, every step to bring drugs to consumers is illegal. That means that it's unmonitored, and results in violence. Since you're breaking the law either way, no matter what you do is illegal, so there's no incentive to be peaceful in your processes.

If the drug trade were to be legalized, suddenly people could profit more by accepting business regulations, and violence would lower.

The point I've made elsewhere here is that it used to be producing alcohol led to violence, thanks to the Prohibition. Once alcohol legalized, businesses started making drinks rather than criminals, and the violence stopped.
On the article page, this is what I see: http://screencast.com/t/Wqa1zmMJ I don't know if there is a rep threshold for flagging, but I wouldn't be surprised.
The companies were all picked based on stock price performance - which should tell you something about the books ability to make predictions.

Not to take anything away from Good to Great as a book, but past performance does not indicate future returns is pretty much the only constant about the stock market.
It depends. If I'm making drugs illegally, and in doing so I shoot some guy to keep him away from my drugs, then I should feel guilty. But if I'm not directly involved in that violence, then my feeling guilty for that illegal process only encourages the people who would use your morality to enforce their own corrupt principles. Not feeling guilt for the things you didn't do forces the corrupt laws to look at themselves and eventually revise.
If I see this tomorrow morning, HN will become 20% more like Reddit in my mind.
Are you and I reading the same guidelines?

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports,

Isn't "How to stop the drug wars" about politics? I know it is exactly the kind of article I expect to find on Reddit. I was surprised to see it on the front page here. From the linked article:

> That is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be fulfilled.

This is not an article about politics?
You're arguing for the other side now. You just (correctly, IMO) attributed the violence of the drug trade to the fact that it is illegal.

There's no violence in the tobacco or alcohol trades, largely because they are legal and regulated. It is a logical fallacy to blame the consumer for systemic violence.
You apparently need at least 51 karma to flag a post. (The number may not be exact, it's not an official source. Also, it says "comments" not "posts", so there may be a different threshold for that)

source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439396
I don't think it's even that anymore. Hacker News is now pretty much, "Interesting things, plus a lot of programmers use the site."

Which is good for everybody who uses HN as something other than a place to get tips about programming, which I expect is the vast majority of the HN user population.
Be Relentlessly Resourceful
If you are not careful, you'll end up like Cambrian House, with projects like "congress is corrupt, help me get rid of congress". And then what?

That wasn't what killed Cambrian House. It was the idea of crowdsourced software development itself. It's as silly an idea as crowdsourced novel-writing. Even if it weren't, the overhead of co-ordinating participants would be an order of magnitude harder than just writing the system.
Do you need down voting when you have a team of 30 pre-screening? Their is a higher likelihood of foul play when one has the opportunity to down vote one's post relative to one's own or peer's posts. A simple bubble-up philosophy can work. It would also be interesting to see a separate section similar to the top post thread but only contains posts that have been recently down-voted, can potential have some interesting take-aways.
"Don't you think that there is something wrong with, you know, killing people?"

Don'y you think that there is something wrong with, you know, addiction?

"Why not just castrate all the drug users instead? That would provide just as much of a disincentive without all the gratuitous violence."

Doubt that. Death != castration. Many people care more about being alive than sex. Also, use of the death penalty is not gratuitous violence. It is aimed at drug users and dealers, easily identifiable through empirical standards, and it is for a specific purpose: reduction of the drug trade to reduce the associated violence, organized crime, and rates if addiction.

"I find it hard to believe that you are actually serious and not trolling."

I really am not trolling. I am quite serious and as my many responses indicate, I am willing to provide arguments to back my case.
Jimmy Carter made an excellent quote about the penalties for drug use.

"Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual that the use of the drug itself."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter
I use about:blank because I do not always wish to go to the same page each time I launch my browser, and I don't want to experience a slow start-up as my browser loads a pre-defined home page.

Out of curiosity, if you find this data, what do you want to use it for?
Nice write up, unalone. I'm anxious to see how the typical Facebook user reacts to these changes myself.
"most"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507890
MURANO PENDANTS IN MANY BEAUTIFUL DESIGNS
If you are looking for a Murano pendant then take a look at this site as they have one of the biggest selections that I have seen on the web. Each piece has been made from this beautiful Murano glass and they come in a stunning range of colours and designs. Each piece has been lovingly created from this foiled glass.
This is a great post. there any many insightful articles out there, all of them with insightful comments/theories. My personal opinion is that one should wait for Q1 reports and base forward judgments of the market based on what results and fundamental investment/market theories. The only thing the market has taught me over the past 8 months is that media is ever-permeable and fear mongering doesn't just exist in politics.
How limited was the input? Did someone type in whatever queries you guys asked?
The vast majority of people who buy and use drugs are also usually not involved in large organized crime units. This argument doesn't hold water.

Many illegal drugs are not addictive, or significantly less addictive than nicotine or alcohol. While some drugs are highly addictive, the laws are simply not based upon addictive potential. Even some of the most highly propagandized super-scary-drugs (LSD, Mescaline, MDMA) are not physiologically addictive.

Neither of these arguments are cogent.
"First Point: My problem with the death penalty - as a libertarian - is that I can't imagine anything more wrong for my government to do to me than to unjustly take my life away. And if you think wrongful execution doesn't happen, you're kidding yourself. It's just a matter-of-fact combination of no system being perfect, and the law of large numbers."

"Unjustly" is a matter of opinion (specifically, a Humean ought) and cannot be argued away.

Also, wrongful executions do not automatically mean that some policy is a bad idea. If one is interested in an aggregate reduction of problems, like in the case of the drug trade, its a matter of numbers and what works. If you disagree, then you need to explain to me why it is worse for the state to kill somebody than some random mob or a drug overdose. (btw, this especially applies to the death penalty when used against murderers).

"Second Point: That sounds like an opinion about cause and effect, rather than a fact. Which is okay, since the CIA always gets it right, like those WMDs they found right after we conquered Iraq!"

I used the CIA factbook as a proxy for information. If you wish, you are welcome to do more research on the subject. Keep in mind that Singapore is only 1 hour away from one of the largest drug production regions on the entire planet and yet continues to maintain proper law and order in its territory (this is largely incontestable as anybody who has ever been there will tell you).
I use Bang Bros.
Yeah, I think it's karma. oh well, just get some karma and then talk a little more about it, eh?

I think I've flagged something....once. Yup. Most everything on the front page is interesting, the most interesting of which I upvote, and the few things that aren't I just don't read and let die. the front page changes enough to allow me to do that anyway.
PG, I would be really interested in your experiences teaching people to relentlessly resourceful. How have you brought out resourcefulness in your startup founders?
The Stack Overflow guidelines prohibit discussion topics, but they still find their way through every once in awhile because the community doesn't mind them if they're interesting enough. Same thing here.
Usually lame articles are gone within a day. You can tell when all the comments object and eventually people flag and editors go "okay, we'll remove it."
Those are comments, not posts. Posts themselves cannot be downvoted.
Wii's beauty lies in it's level of interactivity and over all simplicity. (My mom picked up rockband in 15 mins).in my opinion the Wii will get better from an interactive standpoint ... ala more interesting game, hardware and interfacing with third party devices. I agree with the post and don't see a 8bit-16bit-64bit-128bit... transgression with respect to performance as we have seen in the past with Nintendo. Over all love the product, company (a beautiful margin based business) and of course this discussion/thread.
"Anyone who can muster their willpower for thirty seconds, can make a desperate effort to lift more weight than they usually could. But what if the weight that needs lifting is a truck? Then desperate efforts won't suffice; you'll have to do something out of the ordinary to succeed. You may have to do something that you weren't taught to do in school. Something that others aren't expecting you to do, and might not understand. You may have to go outside your comfortable routine, take on difficulties you don't have an existing mental program for handling, and bypass the System.

So then let us distinguish between the virtues 'make a desperate effort' and 'make an extraordinary effort'.

And I will even say: The second virtue is higher than the first."

-- http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/10/isshokenmei.html
Reminds me of the demo of Freebase Parallax:
http://mqlx.com/~david/parallax/

The demo was very impressive, but in practice they just couldn't match the scope of Wikipedia or the wider Web. It may be the same way with Wolfram|Alpha.
Shouldn't these rep limits, and the information about them, be codified into the FAQ?
How Bad is Tech Unemployment?
> It's a valid point, though. At what point is the line drawn?

That wasn't really his point so much as yours. ;)

> Political issues often result in uncivil discussion. There is also probably significant audience crossover with reddit that caused that post to rise up. Hackers may have an interest in libertarianism or economics, but does that mean that this site should become one about Ron Paul if people feel that way?

That is in fact a good question to ask, and I wasn't precluding it from being asked, but rather reiterating the stated goals for Hacker News. Such questions ought to be asked.
I wish I could upvote this with all my karma. alcohol causes more deaths than all illegal drugs combined.
Yeah, those guidelines: the ones that say "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" is on topic and go out of their way to make explicit that this is "more than hacking and startups". Also, the ones that say "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site", which I wish you would respect.

This is not an article about politics?

My comment was plainly not about the article but about a false description you made of this site. The article itself strikes me as a borderline case. It can't really be called "evidence of some interesting new phenomenon", but neither is it narrowly about politics. It's an intellectually respectable piece about a thorny social issue. For me, it passes the test because of the interesting historical content of the first paragraph, which I was curious and gratified to learn.

If I could make one thing go away from HN it isn't egregiously off-topic articles, which the flagging-and-editing protocol handles just fine, but rather the incessant "The sky is falling, it's just like Reddit" meta-noise.
This is my favorite essay of yours so far.

I usually enjoy your ideas, but this one hit me like a freight train of: "Are you being resourceful enough?"

Sadly the answer is "not enough."

Fortunately I feel the right question has be found.
Isn't this exactly why downvoting should be a bit more prevalent than it is now? For marginally topical (and in my opinion completely off-topic) political stories like that?

Right now only the people who upvote it get to have a say.
Freelance Writing
Make Money Writing Online in 3 Easy Steps
Very timely. I'm presenting at Rails Conf this year and the last time I gave a presentation was, uh, high school. :\
yes, that's true -- but we also allow people to vote against those off-topic articles, and move to close (or reopen) them. There's no way to vote down a link submission on HN.
The only time I see where Python will adopt a lambda that doesn't suck, is the day when the community itself embraces functional programming. At the rate that is going and from what I've read from the commenters of the article. I don't think that's happening anytime soon.
And for those too cheap to buy the book, this 70-minute Google talk by the author of Presentation Zen will give you most of the information for free: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ2vtQCESpk
http://news.ycombinator.com/newest

Its always new.
Pitching investors: The Two Crime Rule
> Also, the ones that say "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site", which I wish you would respect.

But that's precisely what happens when you give people no other option to vote against something: they write comments complaining about it. It's a direct and very literal consequence of the design decision not to allow downvotes on article submissions.

Besides, I only brought that up because pg said:

> The reason HN doesn't need downvotes is that HN, unlike Reddit, kills lame articles.

Which is generally true, but clearly not true today because the top rated article is, as you said, borderline. And from my perspective, it is not at all borderline, and I'd vote against it in a heartbeat.
Right now only the people who upvote it get to have a say.

Not so. The people who flag it also get to have a say. And if you observed the site more closely you would notice that their say is quite effective.
I'm curious about contextual dependence in this...

For example, I can often be relentlessly resourceful in technical matters. If an approach doesn't work, then there's some other combination of code that may get us there, it just won't be as easy or elegant. But then we can usually simplify it after the fact to make it reasonably maintainable.

But when it comes to social matters, I'm far more likely to just give up than to keep pushing people or trying different approaches. A lot of that is simply because I know that code has no feelings: I won't be burning any bridges because I think that function definition deserves to die. But it's hard to tell when you've pushed a person too far, or when they'll get offended because you went behind their back, and if that'll bite you later.

Is there a way to apply resourcefulness in one situation to another, and basically "cross-train" to become more persistent in different domains?
karma limits change all the time, due to "inflation." it used to be pretty difficult to get to 100 points. these days you could get there in a day or two, if you're determined.
I work in a regulated industry, and all our calls are recorded as a matter of course (the company is perfectly upfront about doing this, and everyone understands the reasons behind it). The tapes are only meant to be used in the case of an investigation by the regulators, but some bright spark decided to that, after a major incident, the recordings of the conf call should be analyzed to capture action points, lessons learned, etc. So we all piled into a boardroom and they started the recording... Which turned out to be several hours of people bitching and swearing, often about completely unrelated things to the incident, with pretty much no useful content (all of which had been sent by the actual engineers via IM). So we stopped doing that.

The moral of this story: recording internal calls isn't unusual and it's unlikely that anyone really cares.
SIRC Guide to Flirting
May be off-topic, but I found it very interesting and not at all obvious. The stereotype of a hacker tends to be very socially oblivious, so this is perhaps relevant. Read before you kill.
Anyone remember when it was popular to add 'hidden' pages to websites? Was popular round 2000 - Maby its just me :)
> I'm far more likely to just give up than to keep pushing people or trying different approaches

That's how I feel about marketing and self-promotion
Dear Apple: Here's What to Do With Your Cash
http://start.fedoraproject.org/ , though thats cause I just havn't changed it.
That last point is a doozy of a non sequitur. Borderline does not equal lame. Not everyone agrees on what is interesting, so there will always be borderline cases, and these are not a problem. On the contrary, they add to the intellectual diversity of the site, which is its mandate.
I guess the (surprisingly) restrained reception to 'How to be an angel investor' forced pg to explicitly point out its key takeaway for founders and write a whole new essay for it. He just doesn't stop trying to do good - a different kind of relentless resourcefulness.
N70 Power Button Switch Ways
No. Hacker News doesn't have to work the same way as Stack Overflow. Not only are these limits fluctuating and not really public, HN relies on human editors a lot.

That's okay; the models are really different. Stack Overflow needs to scale more because to be useful, there need to be thousands of questions asked every day, and every question needs to be able to get a response. Hacker News can be useful to me even if it only gets a hundred new stories a day, and it's not really a problem if many stories get axed for a bad reason.
Stephen Wolfram and the techno-dianetics of Google-ology
Ack, I'm getting my terminology confused. I meant posts in the usenet/forum sense.
The drug story is actually some really intelligent analysis by the Economist. It is not the sort of garbage you get on Reddit.
This summary has struck me. I couldn't agree more about what it says and requires. Every day founders have to face the doubt inherent in what they are trying to accomplish.

But I think the hurdles are as much internal as they are external and the summary applies to both. Founders have to overcome the internal issues by being relentlessly resourceful as well as the external. "Why am I doing this?" is a question every founder is asking themselves daily because we are all sacrificing something to start our product.

Getting over the internal hurdles requires a great deal of resourcefulness merely to justify continuing the pursuit another day. "Should I quit now? Have I done everything I can to make this work?" "I can't quit yet because I haven't tried X."

You have to be resourceful to prove to yourself that you shouldn't quit just yet.

Relentless resourcefulness applies to internal factors as much as it does external factors because you have to be resourceful enough to provide yourself the impetus to continue, to keep sacrificing. "I can't quit this thing because I know there is a possibility that something I'm not thinking of will make it work. I have to find that thing."
Very succinct definition of a very common lesson in getting ahead. I've heard it phrased before as "use anything you see and everything you've got to reach your goal," which has a nice ring to it, but "be relentlessly resourceful" is beautifully simple.

I like the mini-essays almost more than I like the larger essays. They feel like long footnotes. It's fun reading a long essay, then a few days later getting an extra supplement.
The rise of technology has made manufacturing less labor intensive causing services to become relatively more emphasized.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/535980/service-ind...
Isn't the antonym of hapless opportunistic (without its negative connotation)?
i am a web developer & startup founder based in Nigeria, West Africa, a place where there is hardly any electricity, so my startup is run on generators & inverters, broadband isnt available, dialup is the norm here. the computers we use are 5 years old, the list goes on. but i & my team still get stuff done, because of the passion we have and i guess its because we are 'relentlessly resourcefull'. Thanks pg for another excellent write up.
I'm curious what pg's thoughts are about whether "relentless resourcefulness" is what it takes to be good at programming, independent of making a startup. I value his insights on programming, business, and persuasion much more than I value his insights on writing and painting.

It's sort of reassuring to think that living in Argentina is helping me develop some kind of important skill.
Fair enough.

I understand how voting works, but how does the flagging mechanism work? Once it's flagged by (n) people, what happens? I checked http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and I couldn't find anything.

I think flagging is a very different (and basically silent) axis of expression; you can't counter an upvote in the case of controversial, marginally on-topic questions like the drug war one.

I totally agree that some of the powers like voting down and flagging have to be earned through participation, by the way. We do the same thing on Stack Overflow.