skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As soon as you can "fix" human nature, you'll have this one solved.

People communicate for lots of reasons...and, unfortunately, transmitting information isn't the most important. People posture, they seek out status, they build alliances...all of these things are deeply wired into us, because primates (and other critters) who are successful at these things have more descendents.

You are not a beautiful snowflake.

You are the descendent of lots of individuals who "abused" social situations for posturing and alliance building.
I wouldn't be able to recognize a good technology person

Cop out. Any idiot could say, "Hire me a division head from Microsoft" or whatever. The technology is quite simple, and having missed the boat the record industry is going to have to go with plan B: Cut costs and lower prices.

I watched a movie the other day and went to amazon to read the reviews--I was shocked to see that the soundtrack was 50 percent more expensive than the DVD. Obviously, an unsustainable model.
Not going to get too many votes when choice one is blank and choice two is blank :<)
Doctorow: How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook
Emacs! VI! Ron Paul! And how abut the Heinlein guy, eh?

As joshwa pointed out, http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
didn't know:

- setting innerHTML is faster than dom manipulation

- doing dom node manipulation is faster off dom (reinsert when manip is done)

- is attaching a 'click' event listener really that much slower than setting node.onclick?

disagree:

- onmousedown and onclick are different actions. onclick is inherently slower because it doesn't fire until after onmouseup. the difference is not 100ms, it's however long the user holds the mouse button. onmousedown should not commit the user to the action, since the user may decide not to do the action and needs a way to cancel it and void the action (ie: move the mouse off the target area before clicking). onmousedown, on the other hand, is an immediate commitment, so it can't be used for dangerous actions that the user may regret a split second later.
The 2008 Startup Marketing Plan
I was interested in the suggest feature mostly because I didn't know how to spell "quotidian"!

Otherwise, the differences are more about presentation than an actual difference in the technology. I guess I was really just impressed by the user interface of Definr.
In case you're curious, the Inflation Calculator [1] reports that $135 in 1982 dollars is $289 in 2006 dollars.

That's the C64 production cost, not a retail price. The MSRP of the Commodore 64 was $595 in 1982 ($1272.61 in 2006 dollars).

[1] http://www.westegg.com/inflation/
You might try looking for controversy. I've thought about this more for reddit/slashdot comments than for polls, but here are my ideas:

For comments on a point based site (such as reddit, this site if it gets popular), there are signs that a post is being downmodded by people who disagree. For instance, -10 points, 10 replies. Or 10 upmods, 12 downmods.

In your case, this would probably be 10 "innappropriates", and another 20-30 people actually using the poll. You might also look for people clicking "innappropriate" and then voting in the poll.
Maybe a better approach would be to silently gather statistics and find out the degree of correlation between any given user's "inappropriate" rating and the actual (as determined by you) inappropriateness of any given item.

Then, if someone has, say, a NEGATIVE correlation between their inappropriateness rating and the actual inappropriateness of said item, you can still use that person's ratings as a useful source of information... just not the way they intended ;-)
Mindrosia:  My controversial Facebook app for generating promising Facebook app ideas
Please try it out and let me know what you think!

Some discussion on it can be found here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=82787

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board...

http://forum.developers.facebook.com/viewtopic.php?pid=16026
ONE preview launch
Hello everyone,

I'm excited to be launching a preview for the ONE application platform today.

ONE is a web platform for productivity applications like calendars, task management, project management, invoicing, ...

It's an open platform so everybody will be able to develop on it (apps are written in HTML/JS).

Please let me know your thoughts.

Here's the initial post: http://onejournal.wordpress.com

The homepage: http://unobeta.com

The developers corner, this might be interesting for you hackers: http://unobeta.com/developers

Brave souls can try the first application written on ONE, a basic calendar: http://unobeta.com/apps/calendar.html

Enjoy
By the way, everyone, I'm quite aware of how inflation works. The point is: The C64 was roughly as good as any home computer of the day. The OLPC is bottom of the heap, and I can pick up a used computer for 20 dollars that would shred it.
I am reminded of the quote (variously attributed), "Ideas are like assholes. Everybody's got one; no one wants to see YOURS..."
Startup Weekend Lessons (Atlanta)
Mobile app startups need to start thanking Google. Thanks G :)
8 Ways to Seriously Screwup Your Linux System
Ask YC: Does competition motivate you?
Hey I was wondering if anyone has been using online compeition sites? I want to start bettering my computer programming skills and I found competition heavily motivates me.

Which leads me to my main question: How much does compeition motivate you?
The hosting site is just an intermediary. The link is to a presentation by the chief architect of Plaxo (15M users says he probably knows what he's talking about), and it's just hosted on SlideShare.
Good advice, although try to be tasteful repeating the name in conversation. It can get irritating when somebody keeps repeating my name over and over again to my face.
oh can you send me a screen shot colourbleu at free dot fr

many thanks

btw what browser are you using?
It motivates me to try harder, to deliver something exceptional.

But it's not the main driver behind what I do.
1) You can select your audience by tailoring the site more specifically to groups of people who are less prone to this problem, or

2) Employ user moderators and moderate the moderators.
I charge $5/mo for RunFatBoy ( http://www.runfatboy.net ).

I would rather service 100 paying customers vs a million freebies. Less customer service emails, less scaling costs, and I can sleep at night.
Have you tried competitive programming sites or entered in competitions? Or does the general idea of competition motivate you? I've been thinking about this philosophically for the past few days.
Are you able to keep up with the volume on YC? I find I'm missing a lot over just the time I sleep.

If you're not going to be able to catch it all then it's much better to try out different filtering approaches (this is just a prototype) than to leave the filtering to chance. So went my reasoning.
Oh, good point. I am tolerant of globals :). Also of assignment instead of equality in conditionals (with an extra layer of parens to flag their unconventional nature). I've also used class methods where the implicit variable is in this.
innerHTML is also really really evil.
Apart from making for horrible ugly code, it plain doesn't work for many things (tables/forms have issues).

I'd take many of the points with a pinch of salt. Use profilers, and other debug methods to find out what works/doesn't work in your code.

For example the point about event listeners vs setting node.onclick. Perhaps it is marginally quicker. But will the user notice unless you add 1,000 event listeners? Unlikely. Might not even notice then. It all depends on where and how it's used. Also obviously you can't use .onclick if you want several event handlers attached to the same event unless you do that functionality yourself.
Sure, and this is good stuff about meetings: "Meetings are toxic":

http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch07_Meetings_Are_Toxic.php
Or the most-tracked users by users you're tracking.
Interesting product (Plaxo).

I've been looking for a web-based contact manager/address book. Plaxo is probably the best I've seen, but it still has major usability problems - trying to prune/combine contacts after importing was a nightmare. Is there anything better?
This is the best anti-social-networking article I've read yet. Choice quote:

You'd think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It's not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there's a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I'd cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, "Am I your friend?" yes or no, this instant, please.
One word: Of course.
This should be fun.
Sense of touch restored for woman with bionic arm
Biblical flood may have driven the spread of agriculture
That's an excellent point Goladus ;)
I believe this article is referencing the the metaphor and the hyperbole of "Exponential Growth!!!"...not a mathematical treatment of growth rates.

That growth eventually slows is a very very simple point, but it's important to never forget. Maybe everybody is making this too complicated because Saul Griffith is supposed to be a 'genius' now?
Typo, you meant

Two words: Of course it does
Yep, that's the site. Glad you like it. :)

I've been thinking similarly about 'mark as inappropriate' - that it could give people a way to express themselves about the question, even if it doesn't have a large effect on the site. We could have:

- mark as abusive/spam
- duplicate question (another ongoing issue)
- I don't like this question

(edited to fix formatting)
So the ConnectU guys expected to get a hacker who would do all the work for them... well...
> You might also look for people clicking "innappropriate" and then voting in the poll.

Very interesting thanks.
Great stuff thanks.
Could have been 15,000,001.

I'm no more patient that I would expect any of my clients to be. Funny, they never care WHY something isn't working right.
I've never understood how Facebook got to be so big in the first place with their policy of requiring to sign up to do anything. I've never needed to see a Facebook page that badly that I'd want to spend the time signing up for yet another website that I never use. (And why is Facebook banned from BugMeNot?)

Facebook is the new AOL... hadn't thought of it that way, but it does seem like an appropriate analogy.
I really wish people would stop this fad of rubbishing the reader in titles.

"The best X you've ever seen"
"Everything you've been taught is wrong"
"Why you're wrong about everything"
"10 things you don't know about X"
"Why you'll never amount to anything"
"All the code you write is rubbish. Here's how to do it."

etc

Most of the time the article doesn't live up to the claim in the title.
Scripting News: The next step in Digg clones (only members submit/vote, public can view results)
Posted over the sink!
A per-user, shareable kill list and bayesian filter. Let them have their revolution, it will be ignored!
Best. Post. Ever.
ack, a grep like tool that used perl regex
that's all fine and dandy, except for the implication that a background download equates to being technically savvy

however, the hack itself is neat.
I believe every word of what he says.
A friend of mine once organized concerts. These guys that hang around the music business are dumb as dogshit.
I admit I have a lot of pending friends' requests... I was hoping they were going to expire but it looks like Facebook haven't implemented this very useful feature.
every "Why you'll never amount to anything" article i've read has lived up to its title :(
Simple: Make it inconvenient. Require anybody who marks a post inappropriate to fill in a textbox explaining themselves.

Apply a basic 'stupid filter' to submissions (just to strip out submissions which are gibberish or vulgar) and make it clear to people that you will be filtering on those things.

Set a reasonable limit - 250 characters or something, so editors don't have to read essays on why a submission is inappropriate.

A little inconvenience goes a long way in shutting down site abusers. ;)
God help you when the Ron Paul fans discover your site, irrespective of the merits of Paul's policies.
you want to ignore everyone new? just like that?
Gee, Thanks Sherlock...
... and perhaps combined with making it clear that your reason is public would be interesting as well. Great food for thought thanks.
I think this is a rather clever idea.. It reminds me a bit of Slashdot's system, with the firehose- Anyone can submit stories, but only editors can promote them to the front page.

I can't help but thing there's a way to go one step further though, and automatically make groups based on the people you upvote, or who's pages you like.. This seems like the sort of thing Reddit tries to do with it's customized pages, but if it was pulled off more ideally, you'd get news that's interesting to the people who you've found interesting before.
Open Web Awards Nominations Open
The Open Web Awards is the first ever online, open collaborative awards event, to recognize the best online communities representing web 2.0.
Thanks. I agree it's not an ideal situation..

Truth be told, we probably could fix the background download problem.. If we recorded every IP that tried to contact your public IP, and then set your gateway to be through the VPN when trying to reach THAT IP, it just might work..

The thing is, that would be fragile, and might take a week or two of work to get right.. Since this is a legacy application, and we're actively working to replace it, for now I'm happy with the 90% solution. I'd rather spend the two weeks making version 2.0 closer to launch.

-Colin
May be you should just not friend them? It's as easy as friending them.
This Facebook backlash trend is interesting.
Reducing the footprint of Python applications
Why the RIAA may be afraid of targeting Harvard students
i think the trend is only with the tech-crowd, we'll see if this spreads to non-techy people, but i think the myspace crowd enjoys where facebook is at right now - self expression, maximum friend count etc...

you can get value out of facebook, just add the friends who are truly in your inner-circle, or those that were and moved away.

you can also prevent yourself from being searched for, so when someone else says i can't find you on facebook, you can say a) oh, i'm not on facebook, or b) oh i have the privacy settings on, i'll send an invite to you
Hmm... Facebook is full of techie crowd. All those college people are quite competent when it comes to using the Web. All you need is one: "X purchased [porn dvd] from Y" in your feed and all your 'friends' are gonna laugh at you and ridicule you and it will leave you with sour feeling in your mouth. Or they'll criticize your tastes and judge you by the crap you buy.

Exodus from FB has already begun.
7 Hot Markets that Can Make You a Millionaire
Simple solution: change your privacy settings.
As mentioned on the web site:

"Due to a current limitation in the Erlang/OTP filesystem driver a CouchDB database file can not grow beyond 2 gigabytes in size. This is not a limitation in CouchDB itself, but in the standard library it uses. This problem will be addressed in a future release."

This seems like a serious hurdle for major adoption.
I guess we should have warned everyone :)

There's quite a bit of good advice in the presentation.

One thing that I didn't see mentioned though is the difference between load-once and reload-on-every-page. Many of the worst JS abuses are from people loading 500k of JS every time the user clicks on anything. Apps such as Gmail or Google Reader only load the JS once then update bits of the page or an iframe as the user clicks around. That has some downsides of course, but it's the only good way to do something that's really JS-heavy.
GDrive Coming Soon
Google.org investing in clean energy
More MIT people I know. Sweet.
Metafilter has had this editorship/readership model for quite some time, right? I guess it's not Digg-like, but that hardly matters for the reader.

I guess the new aspect of this is the personalities involved and that they have blog readerships. That makes sense, although you wonder if they're going to be talking up their own stuff.

And are bloggers going to want to comment on stuff rather than reflexively write a new post on their blog? I think not.

So basically all you get in a "Blogger's Digg" is the links. But wait, you get those from the weblogs themselves.

So I think what this should really be describing is DayPop or Blogdex in their salad days. Anyone remember them? I know PG does, of course, since they helped inspire reddit. They basically were replaced by Tailrank. But TailRank is so broad after the blog explosion that you don't get the "small community" of bloggers and certainly lose sight of the individuals.

If Tailrank was weighted on the FeedBurner or Technorati rankings and formatted more like reddit, it would probably be just about as useful as any Digg for bloggers like this.
Explore the secret lives of TinyUrls
TinyWurld.com is my latest toy project. It finds tinyurls and shows thumbnails of where they lead. Of working tinyurls (a good chunk are broken) about 30% are maps--which are currently filtered out on the site.

I'm not a designer, but did the design myself, so suggestions and bug reports are welcome.
Testing and Optimizing Disk Performance under Linux
To test your disk's performance, use the hdparm utility. This program's main purpose is to display and set various ATA parameters that influence performance. The program can also run basic performance tests.
I'll be keeping an eye on here if folks have anything to point about TinyWurld--it's my latest toy project.
Lots of schools teach CS and say "Code it first and fix it later". They call this preventing "Premature optimization".

It's not totally wrong. But it's often wrong. The world isn't writing it's first program. Code that's too slow has a performance bug. And like any bug, it's better and cheaper to catch it early than late.

And you can't always use your own code. Eating your own dogfood is a reasonable idea but it can break the organization that is trying to fix and build the software. For example, if there's a bug in your new bug reporting system you'll lose the information that there's a bug and never fix it. And so on.

The performance gains that chip makers have given us have been stolen by the software makers to make generating software cheaper and faster, rather than being passed on to the users to make systems more responsive. Yes, there's a user benefit to having more software quicker, but that isn't enough.
"Shockingly Pink" Dolphin Surfaces
How to Develop a Mindset for Math
Don't like someone's free software project? Just ask the Internet to delete it.
Man, developers in my office loved this...
Disruptive Innovation and Walmart Linux
8 Lessons I Learned From The Cheapest Family In The Nation
http://itscommonsensestupid.blogspot.com/2007/11/reddit-is-a... has an interesting idea on this.

Mike
Yep, right after Duke Nukem Forever is released...
Reddit's all good except
Amen. Amen, amen, and amen.
Interesting he never mentions "eval()". Anyone notice any performance issues here?
Very few textbooks follow the historical approach as far as I can tell. The author gives a false account of the way Quantum Mechanics is typically taught.
Drankkit brings reddit lots of growth: an empirical study of the power of free beer
Dave's playing around with it with his buddies. What you'll end up seeing is a digg clone where groups of people can have own clones just like blogging on blogger or wordpress.

I assume groups will have the option of making their clone open to the public or keep it private.

It'll end up being niche clones on crack in a high school cafeteria.

Now what if it's monetized like metacafe.com where clones with over X number of views get paid. Money could come from subscriptions or advertising.

Time to start plugging away on pligg.
Security issues, and often not the right way to do things, but not sure of massive performance issues with it.
Mobile operators see 10 times more potential in social networking
The New York Times had a great article on cumulative advantage a few months back.

This is something to think about in terms of generating interest in any startup you might be involved with (namely being prepared when your chance comes). The snowball effect is phenomenal but keep in mind it can work in both directions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15wwlnidealab.t.h...
I could see it for encrypted backups only.
It's funny how quickly moods vary between "facebook is unstoppable" to "facebook is in a nosedive for disaster"... They seem to be good at listening to users and fixing mistakes, but they don't seem to have much foresight in their strategies -

Integrating my Amazon purchases onto my feed? Kind of neat, but I already do that with anything I want to share via a bookshare application...
"Does anyone really assume an exponential growth in the literal sense with users rushing in via some inter-galactic network when all earth users are exhausted?"

Some valuations for .com companies at the end of the 20th century did seem to have factored this expectation into their analysis.
I don't think this will be just a GDrive. As some bigshot at Google once said, they don't release products which aren't significantly better than anything in the market (BOCTAOE). The GDrive will certainly interface into Google Docs ... but what else?
www.hackerne.ws -- My New Year's gift to YC Hacker News
I bought this domain but I can give it to YC without money if they want it.<p>godaddy forwarding is not working so for now you have to use it with alias www. in front of the domain
I just bought this domain but I can give it to YC without money if they want it.

godaddy forwarding is not working so for now you have to use it with alias www.
"Free software is worth nothing -- even if it has a lot of users."

This is the problem with all the people that embrace open source or free software. The developers price themselves out of existence. Sure you have to hand out the source code, but you can still charge for the software.
Skype uses tcp-ip hole punching, basically trying to initiate a connection on both ends. guessing exit ports and trying to convince the firewall that this it received a response from the other side so it should start routing traffic to that port back.

The solution is not full proof and takes a few attempts to predict the outgoing ports.
The next version of the OLPC will use an Intel processor instead of an AMD processor.

Quote, please?
Worse still, the message is written with improper (bad) grammer "We was not able to..."
...participants peppered Mr. Negroponte and other project officials with questions about teacher training and software bugs. "It will always have bugs in it and it will never be perfect," Mr. Negroponte told them...

Which goes to show that being a professor at MIT doesn't automatically make you good at sales. Bragging about only using $1 on overhead is nice, but if they could sell 10 times as many laptops by charging twice as much for them and spending half of that money on marketing/sales, they'd still be getting more laptops to children...
1. I'm not suggesting people only use this interface. I myself do not. But it helps me make sure that I have greater coverage over at least the known sources of interesting stuff, with the rest getting the same random sampling as before.

2. This is just a prototype. There are other ways to filter stuff and I'm exploring those as well.

3. If and when Hacker News suffers a huge influx of new users, this tool will help me sift through them on my own schedule without causing me to lose my old 'friends' in the meantime.
"AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel said the company's network is already quite open and allows customers a number of options in terms of operating systems and other features."

hahahahaha, wow I'm speechless
ack is excellent. I also use it on Windows.
Cisco lost rights to iPhone trademark last year, experts say