skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You usually shouldn't call them girls in a professional forum unless they are younger than 16. Using a noun as an adjective is also bad form.

/ the more you know
The overall market share of IE6 is 48%
IE7 is 31%
Firefox across all versions about 14%

That will give you a better idea. Obviously the number is highly different for technology related sites. Example: I remember a popular tech blog mentioning that their firefox users were over 50%. So it really depends on your audience as well.

Hope that helps.
Your view that startups are created only to make $$$ is kind of cynical. Money is important, but I'd think that the really cool startups are the ones that try to change society. They just happen to get rewarded by the market.

Anyways, I agree that the original post is kind of random...
Paul Graham can derive S from K
Now bold something inside the link, and put a class attribute on the paragraph.
you all just proved my point
Yes, I do realize that Web sites with ads are sometimes looked down upon, especially in the tech community. Because that's how I used to feel. But recently I started embracing the fact that ads are what makes the Internet free. Without them, we'd have to pay 5 cents for every email and 15 sent for every search. I'll see what I can do about the design, though. Maybe I can make it less "messy".

And, none of the ads on the home page are paid, by the way. They are links to other very good startups[1].

[1] http://selfdebugging.com/2007/09/24/list-of-selected-startup...
" Baby boomers born between 1941 and 1964"

Yet another demarcation of the years that define the (essentially meaningless) term Baby Boomers.
Very interesting take on why it's good to charge companies to present at conferences. My initial thought was that Valleywag was only covering this because they've got it out for Jason Calacanis, but their incisiveness disarmed me.
Have you ever had a serious job with female coworkers? I'm going to guess "no," since your entire post is nonsense.

First, you are referring to informal situations. But, this is (supposed to be) a professional setting, and the rules are much different in a professional setting. Generally, you want to refer to the femininity of women as little as possible in a professional setting, and when you do have to refer to their femininity, you must be extra formal.

Here is the rule I go by: never call a woman a girl in a situation where it would be inappropriate to call her a bitch (she better be a good friend). And, never call a black man a boy because it is almost as bad as "nigger."

If you don't understand the reasoning behind these rules then you should find a good friend to explain them to you very carefully.
This is the kind of story that I used to love seeing on reddit. More please!! :)
How Seinfeldian. James Hong is even Steven.
Kosmos Distributed File System
Nobody would read it. (For approximate values of nobody.)
Teen Finds Her Flickr Image On Bus Stop Ad
"What are its mechanisms for passing information? For reaching consensus? Where are the possibilities for feedback loops?"

I didn't read the book as suggesting this was required. Surowecki champions a diverse set of people with diverse knowledge, consensus is reached when that knowledge combined tells us the crowd's opinion. Feedback loops are not considered. "The Wisdom of Crowds" applies more when people are acting in their own interests than collaborating towards a solution. Perhaps feedback loops are even what throws this system of crowd wisdom off (bubbles?).
Why Are Uploads So Painful?
I don't see how getting into college because of social connections is a problem.

People seem to think the smartest people academically should succeed but it is those people who utilize social connections best that succeed. Hence the pointy hair boss.
Paul Graham is not Jack Bauer . . . is he?
I didn't post that just to be PC, I posted it because I felt that in that context, "women" would have been a preferable, more respectful term, even though I wholeheartedly agree that English is a bit lacking in that it forces you to choose between "girl" and "woman", neither one of which is ideal. I would have erred on the side of respect, though.

Italian has ragazzo/a, which can be used both formally, and informally, for anyone from their teens to early thirties. It's far superior to the dichotomy that English forces upon us, but be that as it may, "girls" is probably left to women to use amongst themselves as they see fit.
Who would win? Paul Graham or Jack Bauer?
Are markets all about big companies?
Yahoo tops Google in quality of searches?
as with last time, he wants to find "patrons" to give him free money so that he can play da vinci somewhere.
Japanese Jumping Frog Robot
British Library books go digital
Motley Fool: RIAA's Day in Court Nearly Over
I don't have much patience for someone who critiques a book without reading it.

Unless he happens to know the algorithm that defines human intuition and intelligence, I don't think the "wisdom of crowds" is just another name for "the behavior of distributed algorithms." (That's after discounting marketing considerations.)

The blogger says: "Naively lauding the alleged "wisdom of crowds" obscures the critical issue, which is the design of the distributed algorithm --- i.e., the social organization of the crowd. What are its mechanisms for passing information?..."

Surowiecki believes there are some necessary conditions to have some wisdom from crowds: diversity, independence, and a particular kind of decentralization. He points out in the book that design of the crowd and their interaction is essential to wisdom of crowds. Yadda yadda.

The blogger says: "Now, as I said, I have not read Surowiecki's book. It is entirely possible that I'm being utterly unfair to him based on the yammerings of others."

Yes, you are being utterly unfair. No up arrow for you.
i actually thought about that, its harder to read than plain ol html

{"p":{">":"this is a","a":{"@href":"http://example.com","b":{">":"link"}},">":".","@class":"my-p-class"}}
Sounds like you worked with some pretty uptight people! I would suggest buying them copies of Spice World. And no, "Hacker News" is not a professional setting, it's certainly informal. "Women" is itself a loaded term to many feminists, who may prefer "womyn", "womun", or some other spelling.

In order for "girl" to be insulting, you must subscribe to the notion that there is something wrong with being young and female. Accepting that premise is to unwittingly agree with perpetuating a worldview in which the very notion of female-ness is disempowering. "Girl Power" actually challenges the establishment; suppression of any reference to femininity reinforces the older male status quo.

That so many people are programmed to think "girl" is insulting just shows how far society still needs to go to free itself from counterproductive paradigms.

> never call a woman a girl in a situation where it would be inappropriate to call her a bitch

Your implication of equivalence is loony, and of course more evidence for the informality of Hacker News. Your post also suggests to me a useful reason to use the terms "girls" and "boys" -- to smoke out people who get offended so easily or are stuck with such old paradigms that they clearly lack the flexibility needed to work in a start-up. Valuable co-founders aren't stuck with old thinking, are hard to offend and easy to joke around with.
missing closing "}"
Replace the colon with a dash in your attribute names. Easy solution.
I've never understood why people feel that way. You don't mind a computer scanning your emails to detect spam, why do people mind when it is scanned to select unobtrusive advertising? Maybe I'm just desensitized, which is a scary thought.
Our site (a Los Angeles real estate site) has been 38% IE6, 29% IE7, 22% Firefox and 9% Safari over the past three
months.

Then again, we also get about 15% of our traffic from Mac users -- we love our Macs here in LA!

So if you cut out most of the Mac users, it looks pretty close to the percentages iamyoohoo cited.
"... dog-friendly policy ..."

Note this is at the top in "Building and keeping a good software engineering team, Attractive". Greenspun felt this was one the tipping points for leaving grad school to start ArsDigita.
Yeah, that really stood out. Seven out of 8 or 9 used MySQL.
I hate it when facts don't agree with my theories.
... where "utilize social connections best" is defined as "being born into the right family." I see your point.
Interview with Rudolf Bannasch, founder of EvoLogics, bio-robotics pioneer
What's so bad about the y combinator?
So they judged whether a student was qualified based on their school's "advertised requirements in terms of high school grade point average, SAT or ACT scores, letters of recommendation, and records of involvement in extracurricular activities." Specifically, they looked at students who failed every single test.

And then the next paragraph says "A sizable number are recruited athletes..."

How can a recruited athlete fail at having an extracurricular activity? That doesn't even make sense. It's clear the author is just mixing and matching random studies with his preconceived conclusion.
i would say approx. 65%

depends of the content of the site, thus the user type.
From the 37s Guys: How do you keep up with new technology?
I found 3 interesting articles I hadn't read before right away. Thanks!
The only problem with going to Cuba through Canada is what if you accidentally lose your passport or have a medical emergency or get robbed or whatnot. No embassy or state dept. to help you out, so you're pretty much just staying there. Not to mention what happens the next time you try to travel and they see the stamp. Good story though.
One last-resort (but creative) option is to sit out on the curb in Harvard Square or on University Ave with your laptop and a cup for change. Plenty of people do that so they can sing or perform because it's something they love. If you want to do creative things and think it will be that important to the world, then the people who will mock you for doing something like this shouldn't bother you too much.
Yuck, asp. Why did you choose .net over lamp? And I agree, the Yahoo UI Library is awesome.
Paul Graham's face is always too pixelated for Jack Bauer's image enhancement programs.
There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand Paul Graham, and those who don't know binary.
Upmodded for gratuitous, yet relevant reference to The Graduate.
VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson goes to Russia
Globalization is happening.
Payloads for Twitter
Cool!

Ask HackerNews: How many of you were working on pretty much the same idea? I was :-(
Mining the NY Times Archives
These elite colleges are non-profit institutions, not government-funded. I'm not surprised they occasionally want to "waste their academic offerings" on billionaire's children with middling resumes. The situation is much better than in years past, but you'll never escape it.

Quite simply, Harvard didn't come by that $35 billion endowment on the basis of SAT scores alone. Everyone else in that stratus has to compete with that figure as well. This is simply an economic problem, compounded by wealth concentration. Who's going to make a college turn down a potential huge bequest in return for a handful of slightly-less-meritorious admissions? They can admit everyone alphabetically if they want to.

If anyone you know is surprised by this, tell them that you just found out that politicians listen to the people who write the biggest checks instead of the people who have the best ideas! They'll be appalled!
oh common. yet another rippoff. this web 2.0 is getting silly.

dig+reddit+collegehumor+??? = profit
Facebook Killing Google, Chapter II: Flyers
Startup valuation - data you need, tips you can use when grocking it.
Life is too short to be grumpy.

We've got a long way to go before it gets to daily xkcd threads.
This might seem like a strange question. We have made it so that it is very easy for one to click on our adsense ads by accident. Do you think google will block out account?Would they even notice?
Whatever. Here are some numbers:

http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/002566.html?entry=2566

Let's drop the conspiracy theories about the evil "white" man.

Anyway. Rest assurred that all inefficiency has to be paid for. When a valuable resource is given to one group that doesn't deserve it (blacks/hispanics/whatever through affirmative action) it has to be paid for by another undeserving group, rich idiots, who reasonably expect an ROI.

And so Harvard segments the market, giving away some degrees for politics reasons, and giving away others for economic reasons.
Stats from one very large site I have access to: Firefox is at 38% and IE is at 55% (split 53% IE7 and 45% IE6).

IE6 is the worst thing about creating sites right now.
So... good move on the co-inventor's part to get hired by Adobe, then?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47696
No page that uses Snap can claim ease of use.
Slave away for what it takes to get rich, then give yourself the free money.
Do you know if any of the major ad networks will take ads for adult or otherwise NSFW sites?
Reddit switched from CMUCL to Python (threading)

Source? With the bashing Python is getting because of the GIL, it surprises me that someone would switch to Python from elsewhere for any reasons related to threading.
What Happens When a Social Graph is Compromised?
Is George Orwell's 1984 becoming a reality?
I have fairly accurate numbers for reddit audience (had a page with 100% traffic referenced by programming.reddit.com, approx 600 visits): Firefox (68%), Safari (8%), IE6 (5%), IE7(6%), Opera (5%) and a few marginal ones.
What about privacy? http://fishtrain.com/2007/09/28/what-happens-when-a-social-g...
Has anyone heard of a VC who blogged about "10 things I learned from ArsDigita case?" I find that story fascinating and hope that VC community learned something from it.
So, why _don't_ you see many such parsers?
I don't really see how this is much different from my.reddit.com, but I could be missing something...

EDIT: sorry, I jumped the gun before I started reading more of the discussion. I look forward to seeing what comes out of it.
Head of Kauffman Foundation on Startups' Importance to the Economy
When Paul Graham goes to the cafeteria for lunch, he doesn't sit at a table. All the tables sit at Paul Graham.
The lawsuit notwithstanding, does anyone know if Virgin really did anything wrong here? What torts, as I'm told they say in law school.

I ask because from what I can tell, they didn't quite do anything that should get them into legal hot water. They followed the terms of the CC license. The only trouble spot is that they didn't get the girl's permission, but it would be easy to argue that she gave the photographer implicit rights to the image and thus would have little say in how it's used.

Obviously, though, her complaint is understandable. If only as a courtesy, Virgin certainly should have contacted the photographer to say that they were using the image in a large campaign. But unfortunately, I'm not sure there's a legal recourse. What we've got here is a failure to communicate.
In real hunts, you have this one player called the "alpha male". If you think cooperation is the hallmark of such arrangements, try a bit of defiance...
Thanks. I'll probably double my per-unit commission cost for my startup product, per your inspiration.
The problem that middle-class whites have is two-fold: (a) they're poorly equipped to game the system, and (b) that's not well-recognized by colleges.

The point (I hope) of affirmative action is that colleges understand that minorities are relatively disadvantaged at jumping through the right hoops (private school pedigree, solid extracurriculars, SAT prep classes, etc.), so the colleges try to compensate for that. Rich idiots get a leg up simply by virtue of their being rich and well-connected, which makes explicit legacy favoritism their second layer of advantage.

Your numbers support the increasingly popular (and very well-founded) idea that race-based affirmative action makes much less sense than that based on socioeconomic class.
No, he means the entirety of your site looks like a domain squatting ad page. Most domain squatters put categorized ads on their pages, and your links look similar to that. Have a think about the design of your content. But two thumbs up for the idea.
It's bad because "ability to use social connections" is not going to cure any diseases or solve any hard technical problems and make the world a better place for everyone.

It's basically corruption, and corruption often leads to bad things. Really the only reason it's remotely acceptable is that the money donated by the parents of these kids is partly why the college is so good to begin with, and many people do benefit from that.

The other thing is that one of the main criticisms of affirmative action revolves around the example of the poor white boy who didn't get into the school he wanted because a lesser qualified minority got preference. "Reverse discrimination!" People cry.
The Normal form of the game is linked in the article

stag rabbit

stag 10,10 0,8

rabbit 8,0 7,7

Both players choose stag or rabbit and score according to the cell on the grid that matches both moves. So 10, 10 is better than 7,7 for everyone so it is Pareto optimal however a player choosing rabbit gets 8 or 7 versus 10 or 0 for stag, so the uncertainty is higher for stag.

I think a way to translate the article into this framework is to add players, reducing the likelihood of getting saddled with a zero if you trust. Then, when someone rabbits, redistribute from some 10s to the zero guy. Instead of 10 a lot and 0 some, you get 10 some and 9 a lot, better than 8 or 7 always. Hence credit card interest rates, and credit cards existing at all (you pay 14% because lots of folks default, but without a big pool it would be too risky for the lender)

However, lots of rabbits can swamp this arrangement; a bank run would be a good example. Then you rationally go rabbit because your 10 9 is turning into a 5 3.

So perhaps institutionalizing trust is approximately equal to diversification.
hey, Why I did got negged? Seriously, people, chill out.
IN SOVIET RUSSIA, PAUL GRAHAM.... wait, what?
The ajaxWindows experience
I'm curious if there is any path planning/intelligence to this or if it's mainly an exercise in building something mechanically similar to a frog.

Either way it's pretty impressive.
TED talks: Flying on solar wings
Paul Graham is so good, that C++ is called PG++
I REALLY appreciate the fact that a forum poster actually took the time to go out and get the numbers relevant to a subject s/he is posting on!

A few nit picks:

The population numbers for Asians, Blacks, and Latinos DO INDEED include far larger numbers of foreign students than the other numbers, as you were wondering. Not that it makes a difference to the point you were attempting to make. I'm just pointing out that the 'representation' numbers you gave imply that the Asian, Latino or Black populations at Harvard are composed exclusively of native born Americans, I wanted to make clear that they are not. Though I suppose anyone familiar with Harvard would find that to be obvious.

With that, I wanted to say that if wealthy, British educated, Africans are more qualified than African-Americans, then why should Harvard not admit them. Same with whites. If Jews are more qualified than non-Jewish whites, then they are the ones who deserve the spot at Harvard.

I realize that wealthy people get a pass, and while that is unseemly to me, I cannot claim to find it entirely unexpected.

All of this is coming from a Christian Midwesterner from the under-class and a farm state. So conservative that when I'm running the banks they won't pay any interest at all. But if we live in a meritocracy, then we live in a meritocracy. The fact of the matter is that if Harvard and other schools did not make 'allowances' there would be far fewer whites at Harvard than there are right now. I know that it's hard to hear, but there it is.

Even at second-tier schools, 'allowances' are made far too often. At the University of Wisconsin, they cut off foreign and out-of-state admissions so that less qualified Wisconsin residents can get some of the spots. As a conservative, I find this EXTREMELY distasteful.
How I made my presentations a little better
Paul Graham is so brainy, he has 2 left brains, and uses 0.3% of one of those to emulate Picasso's right brain, only with a better interface.
Wikipudiate?
This sort of stuff is irrelevant. These sites are not successful because of the backend.
Definitely good for a Mary Worth subplot.

Now let's hear about the time the waiter forgot to let you smell the cork and it turned out to be the '82 not the '81. LOL, we really had it out with the sommelier that night. Oh, well, just another day in the life of us steely, gung-ho adventurers/soft core porno mongers.
I didn't do extensive searching for the submission but I did find the following

- http://www.isi.imi.i.u-tokyo.ac.jp/research/3/index.html/con... (Japanese translation required)

- http://www.tech.co.uk/gadgets/future-tech/news/air-powered-l...

- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cgo7RZZqrXM

- http://www.google.com/search?q=Mowgli+robot

One thing I did notice was the umbilical hanging off the rear of the robot so there is some processing (pre?) going on.
For Thunderbird there are several extensions that may help: BlunderDelay, SendTools and Send Later Extension. I use BlunderDelay.
Probably because domain.com indicates the source, and xyz just indicates its location.

blog.flickr.com is still Flickr. Obviously there can be problems with this, but it's generally true.
Opportunities for integration
I Hate Everything, The Musical
It's just curiosity.
The Emerging-Semantics Web ("The Semantic Web is Dead")
Daily SnapShots Of Hacker News
I wrote a simple python program to make daily snap-shots of the front page stories and comments and post it in reverse chronological order. I wanted this tool as I didn't want to miss out on anything on the days that I couldn't spend much time here. Regular RSS reader didn't fit. Any suggestions welcome.
If the sorts of skills you want to learn are all very practical and don't have a very high learning curve (Ruby, OpenID, and REST, for example) and you don't need to understand them intimately, then I'm sure this approach works well. Not everything falls into that category: if you want to understand machine learning, or computational biology, or really understand database systems (hardly any of the "Web 2.0" folks do), then this sort of JIT approach to learning new things is probably insufficient.
I wrote a simple python program to make daily snap-shots of the front page stories and comments and post it in reverse chronological order. I wanted this tool as I didn't want to miss out on anything on the days that I couldn't spend much time here. Regular RSS reader didn't fit. Any suggestions welcome.
Awesome. I had been thinking about building something like this for a while. Here is a tip (I am handing over the rest of my idea to you now):
Index the content of the actual articles (follow the links). This would offer a perfect way to search for stuff you once read on ycnews. I usually remember what I read, not what the ycnews title was. It could also be easily extended to index reddit, digg, or any other link driven site.
Deciding About Indecision
In the Internet era, the most accessible information is the most valuable.
urgh! why is this here anyways? 9 points! God help us all!
42% firefox, 21% ie6, 20% ie7

no matter what your going to need to support it
Thanks! I'll build that.
Where'd you get your figures from?
I'm not referencing ID.
Heh, sounds like bait, but I stick by what I said and not take it here. You can email me, eric holloway, with google's email service if you want to know my views on ID.