skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Congratulations, and good luck. It looks very interesting.

You are using flash. Can you please use SwfObject, so users with high security in their browsers, don't have to click on the flash to activate it? I hope you understand what I mean.

SwfObject project is here: http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/

Thanks in advance.
Dreamhost actually frowns heavily on URL redirection sites, as they tend to get abused by spammers if submissions aren't carefully screened.
Patents Being Abused To Put Your Life In Danger
I think pg is saying it's one of the mantras of YC, not that of one of their companies.
I've been misreading that sentence since that essay was published - cool!
"At YC we use the phrase "ramen profitable" to describe the situation where you're making just enough to pay your living expenses. "

http://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html

He is not "ramen profitable" by that definition.
I fail to see at which point I recommended HN be comprised of "quip after quip". Or you've assumed that there is some sort of all-or-nothing requirement between quips and intelligible comments.
Glad you find it simple. We don't like installing plugins easier, but gamers need certain features that we couldn't provide with what's built into Flash--like push-to-talk from any application.
Volume?
We in fact are using swfobject.... Could you please file a bug report from inside any chat room by clicking on "feedback" so we can capture your browser information? Thanks. I'll double-check to make sure we've got the latest code.
More to the point, XML is a class of data formats. There's lots of data in XML that isn't publically available.
When I visited the website's homepage, I had to click on the flash to activate it.
Anyway I will report it.

EDIT: I am using Internet explorer 7, on windows XP.

EDIT: [It works fine in Google Chrome, whatever... maybe the problem happens because you move the user to https link? I am not sure, but could this be a reason?]
Chicago Based Idea Tank midVentures Accepting New Clients.
>>> It seems that the web has been so thoroughly infected by the memes of “the future is free”, “we’ll all live from ads”, “VC money will get us there”, and “acquisition is nirvana” that it has almost lost its faith in the simpler ways. <<<

This is funny. I remember it to be just the opposite - web was created with the idea of free exchange of information, at first mostly between scientists and universities. Later, commercial entities came and tried various ways to make money from the web. A few succeeded, a lot more failed. This guy just reversed it.
Let's say you're carrying $50K of credit card debt. Do you realize how much it costs just to service that debt? If your revenue is not greater than the minimum payments (just over the cost of interest) on that debt plus your living expenses, then you're a dead man walking. Borrowing from Peter to pay Paul works until you've max'd out your credit lines, and right now from the sounds of it you're accelerating toward that limit faster than you realize.

Focus on your cash flow. You need to be able to service that debt and pay for your cost of living. If you don't want to take a salaried job, start focussing on your consulting gigs. Preferably, find gigs that pay more. If that's not enough, take more of them (but be sure you can do the work).

I wish you luck. But it sounds to me like you're starting to realize you're in over your head and you're a bit shell shocked. I've been in your shoes, and I had to make some tough choices that involved temporarily moving back in with my parents until I got my finances under control, and working my ass off to the point where I barely got enough sleep. Thank goodness I didn't have mortgages to carry though.
>the submission detection script does not think that "www.domain.com" is the same as "domain.com", and treats them as different links.

Those two are not the same. Just like mail.google.com isn't the same as google.com.
> Why not figure out what various genes do

Do you really think that no one else has thought of that?

We're several Nobel prizes away from being able to do that in general.

I find that I'm generally better off when I assume that folks in a given field are not stupid. Yes, sometimes they are. Sometimes they're missing something obvious (to me). However, that's a low probability bet.
Here is My Glimpse of the Future
Perhaps boring was the wrong word... "stuffy", maybe? Look, I love HN as much as the next guy; it's the only link aggregation / commenting site I visit. And there is indeed a lot of good content here.

The site lacks personality and that's probably why people who are otherwise "smart enough" (or whatever metric you wish to use) to post here don't. Since there's no personality and usernames are deliberately downplayed in leu of every comment being judged strictly on its individual quality, there's no diversity. This is why I say "everyone is the same person".

Think of a close group of friends. Could you randomly interchange them without anybody noticing? Probably not, but you could easily do that on HN. All you are to me is "one of those guys who holds the opinion that HN is <fill in your arguments>". There are lots and lots of you and you're all the same to me. There are people here like me, too, and we're probably all the same to you.

I don't really "know" anyone on HN; it isn't a community in that sense. It's just a group of like-minded people who hold the standard deviation of opinions regarding a (relatively small) set of topics. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

(edit: of course this isn't the reality of the situation -- I'm sure everyone here is not the same in "real life", but due to how HN is setup and run, for all intents and purposes they are here.)
You still have to invoice/bill customers and do the books.

Actually, no. That's all done automatically.

You're right about the rest -- but so far "bugs in my code" is very correlated to "new features in my code", so if I get hit by a bus it's unlikely that many new bugs will be found.
Please don't hold up Ocaml as OO -- the object system sucks and noone uses it.
TED: Mike Rowe talks about dirty jobs and innovation
From what I see, you could host this on AWS and be "profitable" with just one customer, right?

If EC2 instances were free, sure. :-)
How and Why I Missed The Boat As A Developer
It could definitely be easier, but --- especially if you're not fussy about structuring your equity participation --- it's not that hard. 80% of what you want beyond simple sole proprietorship (invoice/be invoiced, not losing your house) you can get online with a Delaware LLC.

I agree with Sachin but I always feel like I should chime in on threads like this to say that you shouldn't let incorporation (a) be an obstacle to getting started with your business or (b) be such a headache that you put it off until later, when you've accrued personal liability.
This was a set of papers used in a similar course at University Of Arizona

http://www.google.com/notebook/public/13031570498906015388/B...

Here's the class page:
http://www.cs.arizona.edu/classes/cs652/spring07/
You want to be less hapless? You may need happs
Joel's definition of Programmer Manager is closer to what I know as a Product Manager (except for the co-ordinating teams bit).

The APM definition of Program Manager (which covers a lot more than the software field) is someone who manages a portfolio of projects, balancing resources to deliver results. This is also roughly the definition that Wikipedia agrees with.

I agree with a lot of the rest though, especially: "It helps, as a program manager, to be pretty good at coding yourself. This is unfair. Program managers aren’t supposed to write code. But programmers tend to respect programmers a lot more than non-programmers, no matter how smart they are. It is possible to be an effective program manager without being a coder, but the burden of earning the respect of the programming team will be higher." That goes for Project/Program managers as well as Product managers.
Not recently. A couple of years ago I was getting around $4 CPM and $50/month from Adsense; now it's more like $0.25 CPM and $10/month. It's at the point where I'd remove the adsense except that I can't be bothered to edit all the pages I put it onto.
These articles are interpreting the bill slightly wrong, although the end result is mostly the same. The bill bans government-mandated open access, but scientists are still allowed to voluntarily submit their papers to open access journals such as PLoS.
I use EC2, and I'm 'renting' an elastic IP (v4) address from them for 1 cent an hour while it's not in use. I'm using the EC2 instance as a modified proxy server for a startup I'm working on, and obviously, I have to secure it. To do so, in Apache, I set my Allow rule to allow my home IP address for testing, which I can pay Comcast to keep static for me, and the IP address of the server I host the rest of my site on, which grabs content off of the EC2 server to display.

This is easy today, but I worry it will be more difficult if IPv6 migration doesn't happen and there is a shortage of cheap IPv4 addresses. End-user addressing provides immense value to web developers, because it makes it easy to connect computers with global addresses. I understand that NAT can take care of many of the architecture problems, but its still useful, as a developer, to avoid the headache of worrying about the way packets are being routed and just use a single number to represent a single computer/iphone/laser-nose-hair-trimmer connected to the Internet. It's a layer of abstraction that, unless I'm understanding incorrectly, NAT makes more difficult. Am I wrong?
Lab discovers first pentagonal ice crystals by chance
If Hacker News has got it wrong... I don't want to be right. IMHO HN is the most consistently readable, polite, and thought provoking news site on the net.

The only other site I can think of that's close to as consistently a high level of quality in the posts and comments is MetaFilter. And unfortunately there are very few technology discussions over there. :-(
There's a nice lesson in there - you don't need an office until not having an office is a problem.
Cool! Congratulations, Voxli!

If any Hacker News people want to hang out, go here: https://voxli.com/hackernews
Links to advanced computer science courses - systems, algorithms and mathematics.
1. You should get rid of the newest link. It will be full of porn. Although, now, there is only one porn link.

2. Your service is difficult to communicate. (At least, I did not immediately understand its purpose.) I think you should automatically play a short, silent, unobtrusive screencast that demonstrates the unique features of your product.

3. On your front page, consider displaying only those users who have uploaded thumbnails. And you should probably pre-approve those images. Now, I'm looking at durbin licking a sharp piece of class. It is kind of freaking me out.

All in all, I think you are a tasteful designer: well done.

Good luck.
The more I read these stories, the more I appreciate the patio11 approach.
While the message might be genuine and the site founder might have legitimate intentions to help other software developers succeed in business, the tone and style of the language reminds me too much of the language used in self-help seminars or pyramid schemes promising grand rewards if you simply follow the given advice.

It unintentionally and perhaps naively raises my suspicions and skepticism.
TheSixtyOne (YC W09) Is Building a Digg For Indie Music
It is quite reasonable for upvoters to have a highly disproportionate say, because it's a highly disproportionate problem -- as you surely must realize, considering that you assign disproportionate effects to upvotes/downvotes on your own site.

But you never give any reasoning for your own disproportionate weights beyond what you personally feel is fair or seems to work. Granted, HN gives no little rationale as well, but that makes it at least as valid, having survived longer. It may be that the ideal weight for downvotes is even lower than 1/5th, or it may be that merely having downvotes at all hurts a site more than not having them.

The message an upvote sends is "I like this and I want to see more of it". Conversely, you seem to think a downvote should say "I hate this and want to see less of it", but when the site adds them directly to upvotes, the downvote message becomes "I hate this and I think everyone who voted it up is an idiot." A site using this mechanism sends the message "We are willing to allow controversial material as long as an enthusiastic subset of users votes it up." I would expect this to encourage clique voting over time.

By contrast, the message the flag system sends is "I don't think this belongs on the site; what do you think?" It defers the decision of what belongs on the site to editors. This is more work than letting the market decide, and it probably doesn't scale as well. However, it also ensures that the market doesn't take your site in directions that you don't want to go.
This is terribly exciting. I recently read Bill Bryson's short work "Shakespeare" and was amazed to find out how little is known about Shakespeare, & indeed most playwrights from that time.

Turns out one of the 2 images (prior to this) that show Shakespeare's appearance, the bust, was practically destroyed when it was erroneously whitewashed which removed most of the detail. (The caretaker believed the colors were not meant to be part of the bust.)

It's practically miraculous that something new was unearthed now, after people have been hunting for a couple hundred years.

Mysterious. Tragic. Historical. What more could you want?
very nice...but leaves me hanging for my purposes.

I would pay to have an export of the sample pages in a programmer friendly CSS "starter kit" such as Blueprint or more to my needs, Compass.

Forget about micro-charging or recurring monthly bills. Charge $100 or more for 30 days of exports to various well done programmer friendly formats.

This is good stuff. I'm waiting for someone to come up with the next step to enable programmers to create all-in-one CSS grid and typography and color palette starter kits.
24 Solid State Drives Open All of Microsoft Office In .5 Seconds
This seems like an MIT/Harvard thing. I've noticed that the people who call me 'dfranke' IRL, you included, tend to be affiliated with one of the two.

I think RTM is pretty much universally RTM though, whether or not the speaker has any Cambridge ties. I don't think I've ever heard any spoken reference to his full name.
But google.com is the same as www.google.com? and ycombinator.com is the same as www.ycombinator.com? Got what I mean!

I am talking about the "www" which is the acronym of "world wide web", and it's automatically assigned to any domain name, so usually domain.com and www.domain.com points to the same host, unles if the sysadmin changes it which rarely happens.

I am talking about the "www." and NOT any other subdomain that the sysadmin/webmaster can add/change or remove.

I am sorry if you misunderstand what I am talking about.
Can you please elaborate on why being good at RoR is being in a situation with no logical way out?

Sure. I learned Ruby on Rails about 3 years ago at a startup. I've since been trying to do other things for employment, but nobody wants to pay me to do anything besides Rails. Lucky for me, the economy has collapsed so nobody wants to pay me to do Rails, either.
I'll be very impressed if they can peel a particular segment of gamers away from Ventrilo.

World of Warcraft has voice chat built right in to the game but no one uses it. You would think Blizzard doing voice chat would wipe out third party competitors; the precise opposite is true.

Also, dealing with whiny teenage gamers as users is enough to make anyone want to kill themselves. Exhibit A: the WoW forums, which are actually stupider than YouTube comments.
If I remember the numbers correctly, he is getting about 4x the contributions from the academic publishing industry that non-supporters do. Anyway, all of these sums are pretty trivial.

My roomate's uncle threw around something like $40,000 in the Capitol and got a several million dollar award to do some preposterously high margin "aid work."

I expect our government to be for sale. I am pretty upset it is so cheap.
Chimp Gathers Stones for "Premeditated" Attacks on Zoo Visitors
Ah. I see. Your post was so general that it was hard to determine the application. How do you see this brain buddy system being more beneficial than joining a group that works on the same topic that you're thinking of? Are you on the anti-"too many chefs in the kitchen" bandwagon?
Just updating the numbers, as of 6:52pm EST 41/95 (43%) actually reached "ramen profitability"
>> "Hapless means bad stuff is happening to you."

Fair enough, although I've never heard it used without meaning unlucky/cursed/doomed. In all the places I've seen it used it references some unlucky downtrodden person who has bad luck through no real fault of their own.

I can't quite remember, but I'm sure it's used in quite a few cartoons.
This sounds like a great opportunity. It would seem ideal to have a 2-person team, since there would be no monetary hit and you could have a friend with you.
The rest of the world calls this role a Product Manager (happens to be what I do, too).

cf. Marissa Mayer, Ev Williams, Joe Kraus, Steve Jobs (on a high level), etc.

In Fortune 500 hell we call it 'Business Analyst' (because in bizarro enterprise software world, users and what they do with your software is called 'the business').

In Agile/Scrum they call it the 'Product Owner'.

Point is that someone needs to keep the big picture in mind and serve the interests of the end-user, all while sweating the details from their perspective as well.
I think the author has done a good job of discussing how the functional elements of a good front page should work together to focus communication and create a favorable first impression.

However, there's a lot of art-design advice sprinkled in alongside the content-design advice that I think is of a fundamentally lower quality.

"Color variances should always be blatant rather than subtle."

This statement is SO wrong. Contrast can be very important in creating visual separation and hierarchy, but this is dangerously close to the implication that everything should be contrasty all the time. (Think about flourescent spandex from the 80s as an example of this idea brought to life.) Style needs harmony. Walk in to a banana republic and look at how all the subtle variations of earth tones can blend to make some very stylish outfits... visit barackobama.com or whitehouse.gov and notice how all the different hues of blue work together to create a great aesthetic.

Wish I had more time for this... There are some FANTASTIC ideas in here about content design; what companies should be trying to say to potential users... and what they're actually saying.

But take the color-related, art-design stuff with a grain of salt.

And please author, there's no reason to make the posts on your blog bold all the way through! Bold type is not designed to be legible in large blocks... it's hard to read... and anything you DO choose to specifically emphasize is lost in the visual noise of all the boldness.
Anyone interested in this should check out Jenova Chen's thesis on Flow (which is the application of Flow Theory on games).

http://www.jenovachen.com/flowingames/foundation.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

In particular the three rules that Chen lays out:

1. As a premise, the game is intrinsically rewarding, and the player is up to play the game.
2. The game offers right amount of challenges to match with the player’s ability, which allows him/her to delve deeply into the game.
3. The player needs to feel a sense of personal control over the game activity.

Raph Koster also focuses on the same issues in his very accessible book A Theory of Fun.
A programmer has a higher cost than a factory worker
But a factory has a much higher cost than a couple of laptops
I'm currently on a small business HMO plan through Blue Cross/Blue Shield. I'm in Massachusetts, though, so I can't necessarily recommend it if you live elsewhere (insurance here is compulsory, rates are partially regulated, etc). The one advantage of being on a small business plan here is that you're covered the day your first check clears. In contrast, individual plans generally have a 6 to 8 month waiting period during which you pay premiums but receive no coverage.
thats fantastic, i would have to move somewhere very cheap to live off of filleritem.com
Tell YC/HN: There is a serious problem in the "Submit" script
Hello,
There is a serious/significant problem in the submit script, and I noticed it couple of days ago.

Couple days ago, user submitted the "Why TV lost" article by pg, while it was already submitted.
The problem is that the submit script does not really treat www.domain.com as domain.com , and treats them as different links.

A user has made a debate with me that mail.google.com is NOT the same as google.com, and it looks like he misunderstands what I mean.

I replied to this user with this:
"
But google.com is the same as www.google.com? and ycombinator.com is the same as www.ycombinator.com? Got what I mean!
I am talking about the "www" which is the acronym of "world wide web", and it's automatically assigned to any domain name, so usually domain.com and www.domain.com points to the same host, unles if the sysadmin changes it which rarely happens.

I am talking about the "www." and NOT any other subdomain that the sysadmin/webmaster can add/change or remove.

I am sorry if you misunderstand what I am talking about."

And you can look at it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508746

So as you see, the problem is about the "www" which usually points to the same website/host, but the submit script treats them as different links.

Am I right or wrong?
Thanks in advance.

EDIT: Solution? Adjust the submit script to treat www.domain.com/article/ as domain.com/article/

By the way, this problem happened again with the article: How to be a program manager (joelonsoftware.com)
which is listed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508918
I've been loving this guy's fonts for about a year or two now, he gets featured regularly in smashingmagazine and it's totally deserved.

For something with a bit more personality (which means you can't use it on every project) check out his Diavlo font, it's the one I used in this piece of my portfolio:

http://alabut.com/work.html#paybackable
My point is about rewriting our DNA from scratch. I don't think many scientists are thinking of doing that.
Verdict:"Made something USEFUL"

If the hotkey could be restricted to work only when the window/tab is active, I can see several people using it to communicate within an office environment (or for remote teams).

Frankly that will countless IM pings or having to walk to the next office.
This reminds me of an article I read years ago about cognitive psychologists trying to model how outfielders catch fly balls. Evidently, even given the massively parallel nature of the brain, it was very hard to come up with a model that was effective enough to explain the performance of real outfielders (Little League to Major League) but was simple enough to be neurologically plausible. Just like the social models you describe, none of the mathematically straightforward ways of modeling the fly ball problem were cognitively feasible. Yet, if you were teaching an engineering student to catch a fly ball, they would probably be helpful, even though the final goal would be to induce an entirely unrelated cognitive structure in the engineer's mind.
So isn't it really hard to interview Program Managers? This essay should have been more insightful had Joel included some information on how to hire Program Managers? I'm wondering how do Microsoft hire Program Managers?
Google: synthetic biology. There are plenty of people working in this area, it's just really hard and they've only got around to synthesizing bacteria.
Yeah, just discovered this myself. Looks like a super-professionally built and designed web app.