skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
'All About Agile' Seminar
learn about 10 key principles of agile software development, and how to implement scrum
-- I think the "D" discussion icon is superfluous. What's the point of marking something for discussion? Why not just start a discussion?

-- The name did make me think there'd be live timing function. Unless the thing with the broken, blinking 00h00 is it.

-- Project naming is broken. You allow projects to be named with more than one word, but things break if you do that: you can't use @Project Name, and todos added to a multi-word–named project are saved incorrectly and only get tagged with the first word of the project, so they aren't added to the project at all.

-- The projects should not be listed with arrows between: they imply a hierarchy where there isn't one. Also the general design breaks with more than two realistically named projects: http://imgur.com/Q49W.jpg

Seriously, everyone should work with real examples. It takes time and mental effort to enter realistic data, but how else will you know how well your product works? And you'll be able to take much nicer looking screenshots that actually show what your product can handle rather than only hint at it and make me figure the rest out myself.
Nginx vs Apache performance
You sound like my Sunday school teacher. "All of us draw blasphemous conclusions from time to time. I've done it more than once. The onus on you isn’t to wallow in guilt -- it’s to be aware of these deep-buried attitudes, and consciously try blah blah blah."

I listened to this speech a couple hundred times before it dawned on me: I was having those blasphemous thoughts because my Sunday school teacher was, in fact, full of baloney, and that speech was his way of preempting my critical thinking.

If you know an idea is false, you don't have to work to suppress it. Your brain is good at doing that for you. I think as a rule, if someone tells you to suppress an idea, you should do the opposite and follow it further. Even if it shocks you.
Maybe create an API so I can update this from my phone(via app) or maybe allow SMS updating. Mobile use is crucial for me, heck even allowing emails to create new todos/projects would be nice.
"There's no reason to believe there is any limit on the amount of newly created wealth consumers can absorb"

I think Michael H. Goldhaber's work on the "Attention Economy" gives reason to believe there may be a limit. When there is enough traditional wealth (goods and services), then time to enjoy it becomes the new scarcity.

Of course, if the limit is every consumer being ecstatically happy every waking moment, we have a loooooong way to go before we reach the limit.
Data Solutions to Big Problems
Category Theory for Beginners (PDF slides)
Also choosing your own colors for projects would be nice :)
Should we still make things?
Looking for rockstar developer / Entrepreneur
Just moved to the NYC, have a successful web design/SEM company. Looking for a partner.
Adding mobile capabilities would be a game changer for me. I'd sign-up for a year and pay you for it if you built a mobile interface and/or sms interface. I'd be willing to pay $10/month if this made scheduling my life as easy as it looks like it could and it included all the free SMS I wanted to send for use in scheduling tasks via mobile.
Absolutely. I tried to get a US-based lawyer to agree that we could set our terms of use out like this and he strongly recommended against it. His main argument was that whatever we wrote in the 'plain English' would be just as minding as the main body of the terms and, since the plain English section was invariably less rigorous in its specifications, we risked weakening the terms.
Actually, Anglicans don't have apostolic succession; all Anglican ordinations were declared null and void in the late 1800's by the Pope at the time. (They did examine the case very carefully--note that there are plenty of non-uniate Christians who have succession.)
"Which have I agreed to?"

Exactly. If the plain English is in fact the same as the legalese, then the legalese can be dropped. But it isn't, because there are (presumably) important subtleties.

You still have to read both, and understand the legalese.

"The real solution is to write simpler clearer User Agreements"

Quite true.
I think getting in is not prestigious in and of itself.
Creating a successful startup is prestigious.
But getting into YC and then failing wouldn't look especially great on your resume ( at least to most observers ).
Why is almost every comment you make all about yourself? Why must you always relate external events to yourself?
Hilarious. The head of "Hacker News" is mad because his news has been hacked.
Haskell isn't object-oriented, so there aren't any little namespaces (classes) running around that themselves need to occupy a namespace (package). So modules are enough.

The Haskell wiki entry on modules is short, pretty complete, and has plenty of examples:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Modules
Excellent article. Now the only question is, what to do about it?. It's depressing that (edit: the book) was published in 1984, and yet the mainstream doesn't seem to have learned from it.
Because a mathematically rigorous system would have to be too complicated to account for all the laws that are in effect in the US. Note that your system would have worked ~100 years ago when laws were significantly simpler. Move back another 100 years and it would be trivial: just enumerate the requirements for contract (mutual consent + commitment) and tortuous interference of property to codify the basis of 90% of classical English law.

Also, if you read contracts, it basically is math written out in english.
Thanks to these guys, SMS via Google Talk is now banned from unofficial clients.
I fell for the trickery(admittedly my mistake for trusting an unknown website) and submitted my user name, expecting to receive a graph like the page promised.

However, as pg already pointed out it was totally uncool not notifying him before making it public. I am in the support of full but responsible disclosure. So maybe he could have published it after informing pg and the issue was taken care of.
Zed Shaw used to have an image of a guitar on his blog, he might be your man. I don't know many other musical developers.
You are having quite an argument on your own there by putting words in my mouth so I'll leave you to that except to say that I am in this country because the US government thinks it's beneficial to the US in some way.

Meanwhile let me note you haven't presented any cogent argument as to what benefit the US gets by forcing me to stick to one job while I am already here and waiting for a greencard.
I don't think failing would look bad per se. There are a lot of learnings that can be taken from failure. Better to have tried and learnt, than to never try!
I disagree with him strongly on a lot of political issues, but he's right on the overarching philosophical point that people in most circumstances (business bureaucracies with extensive lobbying arms being the worst offenders) want exemptions for themselves from "market discipline". It's amusing to me that those who seem to be in full support of "capitalism" still want an byzantine, violent (cf. Iraq) and incredibly expensive welfare system to protect their own standard of living.

It seems that the secret for success in such an economy is to create a game in which nearly everyone's "wealth" increases, so no one gets pissed off because the game's being played in accordance with the comfortable and decadent lie that no one's standard of living can ever go down. Gradually this game drifts from reality, but aggregate psychology is such that the disparity isn't noticed until enormous, at which point a massive and painful correction occurs. This is when the maestros say "Sorry, we fucked up, but we can't help you now!" while chuckling all the way to the bank. Well... at least, that is what they do supposing there still are banks.
False dichotomy: All systems such as telephones, email, rss, etc... are both push and pull systems, the differentiation being who does the pushing and who does the pulling. In emails and telephones, the one who pushes is the one who wants to initiate conversation and the one who "pulls" is the one receiving the communication. Likewise, if somebody wanted to spam a rss feed, they could simply place a million more subscribers for that feed and orchestrate a DOS attack or a feed could have a large number of spurious users -- users who don't really pay attention to the content and are a net negative on the server resources.
Definitely.

Lesson learned from countless similar issues: sign-ups and credit card forms break in weird and wonderful ways.

Always test both right after a big deployment.
I missed the date, and honestly thought it had been written recently in response to the 2008 crisis. (Edit: never mind; the blog post was. Apologies for misunderstanding you.)
IMDB founder's vision: offer streaming for every title
I am not sure if our case is different from most but here it is:
We are working on a webapp which we are really excited about.
We talked with friends and potential users with great feedback.
We will continue to build it on the side while working day jobs and see if we can get traction from the users.
We are applying for YC Summer 09.
Getting accepted would validate that we are not the lunatic fringe. (The end users might still disagree)
It would allow us to jump into it full time and the application process would help us reflect on the
business side of things seriously, which we hackers get easily blind sided about.

However, looking at some other applicants experiences and expectations (as written on blogs), yes, it does feel like applying for an Ivy League MBA.
Looking for validation is something common between these 2 endeavors (and that includes us).

However, In my opinion, HN is what makes YC special. It's a model that's hard to replicate.
What makes it harder to startup in the UK versus the US? Not much, maybe the higher cost of living/higher legal fees etc. However, I agree that making a successful startup in the UK is a far harder, and it's probably due in part to that lack of an identifiable community.

There just doesn't seem to be the same depth of startup culture that exists in the US; the UK has no Silicon Valley and the online situation just reflects this. I think that's because we don't have a long history of really successful Internet startups.

The European VC scene does seem to be a little bit of a cargo cult version of the US model. The UK YCombinator doesn't exist, because there was no UK Yahoo! to sell the UK Viaweb to. As a consequence of this today's UK startup community is shepherded by individuals and companies with little Internet startup experience of their own.

It's kind of like having parents who were never themselves children.

As others have suggested on here, we could certainly build the software to create a place for UK startups to hangout. To go further and create something that makes starting up as easy in the UK as in Silicon Valley would take far more resources. Although probably not as much as you would think, as Paul Graham himself pointed out; http://www.paulgraham.com/maybe.html
i feel you're discriminating against the ninja community.
Rethinking Investing - Spotting Mistakes in Jon Stewart vs. Jim Cramer
Excellent! I'm sure sentiments like this will compel YC to invest in my idea - a prep-school to improve the chances for prospective YC applicants.

edit: Here's an example of the coursework the prep-school provides -
http://i697.photobucket.com/albums/vv335/comatose_kid/yc_dum...
Yes but why did Britain become "the sick man of Europe" at the same time?

"Germany and Japan did well because their special interest groups were shattered by military defeat. When new labor unions formed in Germany and Japan, they tended to be very broad-based and therefore had an incentive in the overall welfare of their societies.

'Great Britain, the major nation with the longest immunity from dictatorship, invasion, and revolution, has had in this century a lower rate of growth than other large, developed democracies. Britain has [a] powerful network of special-interest organizations. The number and power of its trade unions need no description.' " (2nd quote written pre-Thatcher)

Britain also rebuilt but at a slower rate. The point is the longer a society remains (politically?) stable the more cruft it accumulates, like the dirty copper bottom of a long sailing ship.
> But when I read "people from Culture X tend to succeed; therefore we should give them a preference" what can I call that statement but racist?

Firstly, culture is not equal to race - it has nothing to do with race. The criticism against racism is usually because it is immutable (a person can not change his race) and race does not have any bearing on how a person acts (i.e. your personality is effected by the environment) or his intelligence.

Culture is the opposite of race - culture will determine how a person will react in certain situations. Culture can also be changed. People of all creeds can have “western” culture – i.e. democracy and respect for human rights. Other cultures have aspects that is undoubtedly perpendicular to western cultures (e.g. in its treatment of women). To each his own.

Not allowing someone to enter the US (which undoubtedly have a western culture) because he will not fit in (based on his own culture) is doing both the USA and the particular individual a favour.
Is this really how people are thinking about YCombinator funding? That it's a social stepping stone like getting a Harvard MBA? Ugh. I thought I escaped from those people when I left Boston. I'm applying mainly because I could use the money!
Because the reason you were allowed to in to the country was for that job for which there were no acceptably qualified american applicants. H1B is not simply a skill-based immigration policy, it exists to allow American businesses to hire outside talent when our own pool is running dry. There may be different programs for other purposes.. for instance, some other countries allow you to move there to start a business if you are going to make a minimum investment and hire a minimum number of people.
I want to use them so I don't have to write very much code, so that I can easily reason about my program by directly substituting symbols with their definitions, so that I can use pattern matching against instances of that type, so that I can group them into type classes and know what operations I'll have available to work with them... etc.
Most of the users in the leaderboard are there by the sheer amount of their posts rather than by being particularly insightful or controversial.
> From previous threads, I know you don't like rich people

You are mistaken.

> and are personally offended by income inequality

No, just excessive income inequality. There's something wrong with a system that allows one individual to amass more wealth than the bottom 40% of the population combined. That's a broken system that's far too tilted to favor the individual over the society as a whole. I don't have anything against rich people, I have something against the system that allows it to such excess.

Stating my opinion is not attacking, all I said was they could give more, which is a fact. The foundation is required to give 5% a year to avoid most taxes, which seems to be all they give, investing the other 95% to grow the endowment without taking into consideration of the harm that 95% could be bringing to the world...

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gatesx0...

That strikes me as them being more worried about making money than actually helping people.

> but I guarantee you those masses would not use his money in nearly as useful ways

No you can't, you can only guess.

> But attacking him for how he chooses to fight malaria - it boggles my mind.

You have a strange definition of attacking. I didn't attack them, and I'm not dissing the good they do but it's being blind to not see that they don't do as much as they can, they do as much as the law requires them too. That says something whether you want to see it or not.
Demo Invest
We currently have a demo site, which we paid to have developed. Will investors, invest in a demo or do they prefer to invest purely in an up and running site. The site will cost about $60k to be fully comnpleted and we do not have the starting capital to do this. Please help?
When I tried to register, I got a timeout on <http://thymerdev.stunf.com/accounts/register/>:

"The server at thymerdev.stunf.com is taking too long to respond."

But when I tried again, it worked. Is your web server having trouble with load? If so, do you have plans for scaling?

Edit: yes, it definitely could use some more speed. It's decent, but just a little too laggy for my liking. That said, this is the first time tracking thingy I've seriously considered actually using. I wish you the best of luck, and my reasons for doing so are largely selfish: I want Thymer to be great.

If you're serving this from a machine in the Netherlands, that could be a problem for those of us in other continents. The perception of quickness is important, so this is probably something you should sort out soon and then launch.
Just this morning I was bemoaning my lack of a simple todo list. I've played with most of the big names, RTM, Tadalist, etc. but this one looks, at least initially, to be much closer to what I need. I'm going to get my girlfriend / brain on it later hopefully to see if we can begin using it for coordination.

I love the plain text entry, reminds me of another of my favorite web apps, 30boxes.com. The calendar I use which manages my entire life :)
I am a full time skeptic and tend to notice these things :)
The Network is Strategic Again: Cisco Steps Up
Regardless, even if the MacBook cost more, at least you don't have the do the following:

- Install Norton, or any sort of anti-malware anti-spyware crap. A stock machine out of the box will work and be reasonably secure for the home user.

- No need to image the HDD before giving the machine to the user... Because unless your grandma suddenly learned how to sudo, the odds of them crapping up their partition is really low.

- No need to order instructional material on Amazon. Apple's website provides a large number of introductory videos that show a user how to use MacOS X.

My mother still hasn't quite learned how to use a computer. My hope is to get her a Mac in the next year and maybe finally she can check her own email :)
Why kids and teens use FB and Myspace but not Twitter
We got interviewed last time. Our application was pretty durned long. I don't know how they read it. They must skim them for the most part, focusing on the things most important to them and looking for raised red flags.

I do know very much that the tone has changed a bit in the interview (or did last time). They will ask a good bit about monetization. So your application will get extra points if you can show very clearly how you eventually plan to turn this into a concrete business.
WSJ says Youtube to do $500m in revenue in 2009
Now that is actually a logical point versus OP's "quit complaining coz this is not your country" logic. I upvoted you.

As an H-1B, I can only shift to other H-1B jobs. Which means other jobs where no acceptably qualified american applicants can be found. I don't even want to change this. I am just asking that my greencard application not restart if I shift from one H-1B job to another.

So in this specific instance, my question still remains unanswered. However, you are right on the general idea that I am arguing for skill based immigration instead of a specific job based immigration.
A phone version is planned - but we've discovered that most phone browsers are really terrible. Are you looking for an iPhone web version, or for a jar version (like google did for gmail/google maps)? Or do you think something that uses Opera Mobile/Mini would be good enough?

It's pretty hard to get reliable worldwide sms delivery, but -- sms for the USA and Europe we can do, I think.
Change, fear it
I thought the opposite. He didn't subscribe to the daddy model of wealth but rather he understood that what those bankers are doing are not creating real wealth.
a few bugs I noticed

If I type in @today twice (because it didn't move it to the "today" section), it assigns it to a user called today (I believe, at least that's the same visual language as when I assigned a task to another team member).

Is it possible to access my google calendar? My biz team member probably won't use this, but we share a google calendar. Would be nice to be able to manipulate it through your interface.

Overall, very nice. I'm very, very cheap so I'm not sure what price point I would be ok with, but it's still very impressive. Thanks for sharing!
Such a system would be particularly valuable for the European Union. The EU has over 20 official languages, and all legislation approved by the EU needs to be translated into all of the languages. (The situation is further complicated by several categories of laws: EU regulations are practically equal to federal laws, whereas EU directives are "law blueprints" that must be translated into national law, thus giving member states some leeway on how to implement them.)

I don't know exactly how EU lawmaking works (nor do I really want to know too much about what goes on in that monstrous Brussels/Strasbourg sausage factory), but I'd presume that the law drafts are most commonly worked out in English and French. A final document is then produced in either of these dominant languages, but it's written in a specific form to make it easier to translate into 20+ languages without catastrophic signal loss.

Your system could replace that subset of English or French... And it might actually be fairly easily accepted by EU officials because it would offer a scientific, seemingly objective solution to the perennial problem of what language the EU itself speaks (currently the situation is rather close to "all EU languages are equal, but some are more equal than others").
The article suggests that HTTP caching is "a fairly common practice nowadays." The claim is totally unsupported by any data and is likely incorrect. Most of HN probably have access to a web server on the Internet. Try throwing up some static content and refresh the page a few times. Notice any missing hits in the access logs? I doubt it.

There would be no need for CDNs if it were cheaper for ISPs to build a massive caching proxy infrastructure than it is to just buy more bandwidth and routers. I don't see how that statement is any less true for bittorrent than it is for HTTP.
I've seen one or two users who are very active but don't get many upvotes. On the other hand, there's a guy like patio11, whose every comment gets something like a hundred upvotes. So I'd guess that quality plays a part.
if you had a computer class in high school in 1968, you went to an awesome school!
Actually, interesting anecdote... my former roommate once had to ship a load of stuff (100+ lbs) from the US to Canada via DHL. DHL quoted him about $1000 for the whole thing.

Then we went through our employer, who had a deal with DHL... $70 and change.