skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Digg Gets Social-er
It sure seems like it. Of course the right thing to do is actually implement Digg inside Facebook... like this: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2007/09/wildfire-has-launched.html

John.
How many of guys in your office/class came to work/school dressed as a pirate? Be Honest.

My answer is: 4
Awesome. A lot of people revile Steve Sailer, but I think he's one of the best essayists writing today.

This quote in particular elegantly sums up the history of philosophy:

"To this day, most philosophers suffer from Plato's disease: the assumption that reality fundamentally consists of abstract essences best described by words or geometry. (In truth, reality is largely a probabilistic affair best described by statistics.)"

It's not so much the world that's probabilistic, though, as the human mind and the thoughts and abstractions we impose on the world. Hume was the first philosopher to explicitly argue that the mind works this way, and modern research has supported him.

I think that, as Sailer briefly suggests, there is value in studying the works of skeptical philosophers like Hume: it gives you the tools to see through the kind of bullshit that philosophy is full of. Because you don't just see it in philosophy. It's there whenever people argue about politics or religion, and whenever a dreamy computer scientist rambles about "objects" and "types" and whatnot. It's useful to able to refute these arguments by recognizing their meaninglessness.
I think a method of ranking news based on the number and quality of comments would be better than voting up and down. This method would be somewhat analogous to page rank in that the rank of a story (webpage) is indirectly determined by the comments (links) and quality of the comments. Writing a comment is arguable less reflexive than clicking an arrow.

Also interesting news that was generating a good discussion could tend to persist and stay near the top. This would encourge thoughtful comments as you are not penalized for taking some time to think about the matter rather than hastily shooting from the hip.
Can Amazon make a science out of launching startups?
I'd give it a higher rating if it had a search UI. ;-)
Harvards tips to founders on how to delegate more effectively.
maybe trollurnalist or some derivative

I like the ones that lead with troll better.
8/10. Nitpicks:

No top button when viewing a comment - only parent. No way to undo/reverse a vote. Comment reply/edit is on another page instead of inline like reddit. No comment reply notification in the toolbar.
Of all the Joel articles this one was better than most. As someone else said I see Joel has a very practical kinda guy. He so practical that I don't look to him for setting the future. I've never seen a practical programmer, such as Joel, make anything that is future. I digress. However, his practicality in this article was an interesting slant on the future.

I do believe the next level is making my Google mail work with Flickr or vice versa. Right now all these applications are islands, but there is a lot of benefit to joining them into the larger part. Whatever, that is could be a great thing. Is it just an Web SDK? Is it the real Web OS? It's a practical prediction.
I'm not entirely convinced about the "view" thing... Amazon might be big enough to "create their own weather"... Add in LinkedIn and the pile of other sites that use tabs as primary nav, I don't see this as a major sin...
I second the nomination of "Good to Great" by Jim Collins <http://www.jimcollins.com/lib/books.html>. It's the best general business book I've read. Most popular business books were written by one manager who was successful one time at one company, but often their advice isn't generally applicable. "Good to Great" is actually based on quantitative economic and sociological research across many companies and it shows compelling evidence for how certain factors often lead to success.
Perhaps you could start a news.yc Vote Exchange website. I liked the funny linux command line story, so in exchange for me not upvoting it, you can not upvote something else!
I think the hardest part is finding what behavior to track. Click-through is obviously bad. Bookmarking and passing to friends will also slant the stories in a way that isn't necessarily good. I have a lot of friends that don't really care about hacker news, and tend to bookmark more reference-type material.

Comments are useful, but that slants towards controversial topics.
For someone who wants to establish a startup company I also recommend all of Clayton Christensen's books on innovation <http://www.claytonchristensen.com/publications.html>. He describes the difference between sustaining and disruptive innovations; if you want to make it big with a startup then you need to be disruptive.
"Top button" and "Undo Vote"

I second that. Much needed.
Xobni Press Coverage
I believe the problem with the down voting button is it often reflect more on the opinion of the voter rather than how well the article was written or its usefulness.

Good article that agree with the user = comment/up vote

Bad article that agree with the user = ignore

Good article that disagree with user = comment/down vote

Bad article that disagree with the user = down vote

Unless everyone actually vote up/down purely base on how good the article is and not their opinion, removing the down vote button is not a bad idea...

The voting button is a good idea if it's a poll, but the "hotness" of something is probably better tracked by the comments and other actions a user take...
I don't think undoing a vote would be a valuable feature. One of the nice things about this site is that it is minimalistic.

Undoing a vote, even if it is useful, would add clutter to the UI. Because I always enjoy the sparseness, but would rarely want to undo a vote, I think the site is better off without the feature.
Jim Loy's Mathematics Page
Here is why we need a down arrow.
the iSteve spam meme.
In dorkland, the answer is 4. In the rest of the world, 0.
Joel is unimpressive, technically.

His software products are lightweights, and he makes most of his money from his fan base, selling books and job ads on his web site.

He's just not relevant any more (if he ever was in the first place).
That's neither funny nor witty.
To each his own I guess. It's interesting to note though that I work at a startup incubator (http://rtpark.uwaterloo.ca/realestate/accelerator.html)
Will xobni work on Thunderbird, or will it always be Outlook only?
Oh fuck off. Arrrrr.
McKinsey: Online Ads Lack "meaningful metrics" (?)
First we need to remember Joel doesn't spend as much time on his blog entries as Paul Graham spends on his. With that in mind - what did Joel mean? Joel meant at leat these two things:

a) Complex design patterns will be refactored into fewer elements. GWT is a nice try but Java isn't simplification - and you Java heads know this.

b) Optimization isn't the only secret sauce to rely on. Companies that put all their eggs in this basket get burned by companies that understand the larger problem begging for a solution. When resource scarcity relaxes, the companies that understand this will automagically appear at the front of the line.
The world is fundamentally probabilistic, though (see quantum mechanics). If anything, it is the human mind's ideas that are not probabilistic in a similar fashion, or at least that remains to be proven.
#1) Build something people want.

#2) P^R
How to watch NBC and read the New York Times totally free&#8230;
Finding Business "Idols": A New Model to Accelerate Start-Ups (such as YCombinator)
"Undoing a vote, even if it is useful, would add clutter to the UI."

No, it would just leave the arrows in place except highlighted when "voted". You could then click it again to unvote, or click the opposite arrow to reverse vote. Just like Reddit.

I'm not saying I want unvoting, as I don't really care, but I don't think it clutters the interface in any meaningful way. (Though it does make the pair of arrows multi-state, which could be confusing for some users. Doesn't seem to bother redditors though.)
Clearly neither system works reliably, but just to put that suggestion in context:

http://reddit.com/info/2r8d8/comments

vs.

http://programming.reddit.com/info/2qbye/comments

"Quality" sounds like a good metric until you realize that upvotes mean "I agree!", not "Good comment".
Never Eat Alone,
How to Win Friends and Influence People,
Getting to Yes,
The Effective Executive
...and like 40 more, too many to list!
Hiring Family & Friends
What is everyone's opinion on hiring family and/or friends and why? I've heard both negative and positive reasoning from both ends and wanted to throw it out there for you all to weigh in.
I agree. That is why I purposely did not equate quality with up and down voting, but left it undefined. Perhaps a solution could be that the quality of a comment was ranked by the number and quality of sub-comments. We would have the beginning of a highly ranked comment thread, for example.
Ask: Why do web developers think the only applications people use are web apps?
I'm getting kind of sick of comments like the following, which appeared on Joyent's blog Joyeur a few weeks ago: "The exciting software development of today is being done on the internet. Desktop, packaged software has many years of utility left, but one doesn't see millions of people adopting (=excitement) some installable desktop, client-side software the way people are adopting internet-based software."

What a bunch of bullshit. Doesn't this guy know that the popular file sharing apps have literally hundreds of millions of downloads? Azureus and eMule alone have well over 300 million, and Azureus is a Java app! That's more downloads than Facebook and MySpace users combined.

Desktop software has "many years" of utility left? You're damn right there are many years left. Gaming is going to be a $50 bln/yr market in a few years (with revenues disproportionately coming from highend 3D games) and the craziness with GPUs and general-purpose GPU computing is only in its infancy. Many of the things people will do with this fantastic new power (like protein folding) will likely have much greater significance than any Facebook platform app.

There's so much compelling stuff you can only do locally. Why does that suddenly become insignificant just because web apps are a good way to create highly data-driven applications?
I only revile Steve Sailer because of his self-marketing campaign of leaving many tiresome comments on the Freakonomics and Malcolm Gladwell blogs, taking the authors to task at length over various issues. I was unaware he was well-known from anywhere else. His essays may be splendid but he behaves like a kook.
Someone should make a web based RDBMS on top of one of these data drops.
Interesting, basically the opposite of rent-a-coder type sites
Hackers Unite: How Can Spam Spoofing Be Defeated?
So I go to check my mail and I get dozens of "Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender" messages from a server in France.

No, I'm not Julia, and I don't have a private message to send to every permutation of "Thierry[0-9]*" at the French site.

And yes, I know how easy it is for a spammer to set an email's "From" header so that it looks like it came from the info address at my domain.

Other than just ignore it, what can I do to prevent this from happening?

(Yes, it's not a huge problem in the grand scheme of things, but still annoying)

Any ideas?
FindaBusinessModel.com ?

GetMeClients.com ?

HowCanIMakeMoney.com ?
The best reason is because downvotes piss people off. They have been the cause of more flamewars on reddit than anything else. When you know you are right but everyone is downvoting you and upvoting the "wrong" guy, I know very few people who won't react aggressively.
I can't help but confuse http://mint.com with Shaun Inman's http://haveamint.com/ when I see coverage of mint.com. Inman's mint was first, but mint.com's name is more fitting...
DHH: Sun surprises at RailsConf Europe 2007
It's all relative: Greeks would love to have a national airline as "good" as Alitalia, since they have to deal with Olympic Airways.
The people here is, by far, the best feature.
There was something I used a few years back that was pretty much what you describe. They eventually dropped support for their free accounts, so I stopped using the service. I'll see if I can dig up the name of that company for you...
Hubbard's "A Message to Garcia" (written in 1899) is a must-read. It's available online here: http://www.birdsnest.com/garcia.htm

My AI professor made us read it for his class - no one else in the class seemed to like it, so you might not either.

My other two staples are

Paul Arden's books. ("It's Not How Good You Are, Its How Good You Want to Be: The World's Best Selling Book", and "Whatever You Think, Think the Opposite")

They're short reads, with huge print. Very simple, and to the point. They don't really say anything new / earth shaking - but it's a nicely packaged dose of one part inspiration, one part ambition, and one part a kick in the pants to do stuff. Anytime I'm in a lull, I re-read them both. They're also handy to give to nay-saying family, "friends" and colleagues.

If I haven't gifted you with this personal tri-force, you're probably not my friend.
I'm a bit skeptical of this. If you need horizontal space, how do you structure your navigation? A horizontal list of elements such as the ones news.yc use's could be considered tabs, no? How else _could_ that navigation even be structured? I'm stumped.

New rule, if you're going to tell people they can't use something, or aren't using it correctly, at least offer thoughts as to the correct way.
Forgot the bonus round book: "Lucky or Smart" by Bo Peabody - another VERY short reflection on his founding of Tripod during the tech boom.
Friends, maybe. Family, NO! Why? Because family always expects you to forgive them, family expects you to always be there for them no matter how much they screw up and family will freeload on this for as long as possible.
Relatedly, I've submitted quite a few of my blog posts both here and on programming.reddit.com, and they'll often get a good number of points here, but on reddit someone will almost instantly downvote them to zero, and they of course never come back up. So I like News.YC's system.

Do other people find the same thing?
lolnerf
Justin.tv office destroyed by nerf
I dont think the only apps people use are web apps. I just think that the majority of apps are moving to the web(basically, like you said, data driven applications), like CRM applications, Payroll applications, everything enterprise due to 'SOA's(Service Oriented Architectures), and more.

The web doesn't require a download, or an install like emule, kazaa, or bearshare. Web based applications also have less of a chance(if any) of infecting your computer with a virus like file sharing programs.

Gaming(imo) will always be native to the machine, only utilizing a connection for competing against other players.

So, it really doesn't become insignificant, it just takes more a back seat to applications that allow for more human interaction(any social network), profit(crm apps, soa's) or fame(myspace, youtube).
Data portability on web services is great too.
No, the right thing to do, clearly, is implement Facebook inside of Digg. Why compromise your own social network by embedding it inside of someone else's site? Especially when you're approximately the same size.
The Origin of Wealth
http://www.mckinsey.com/ideas/books/originofwealth/overview....

I thought it was very provocative, i was feeling very bored and reading it awoke my curiosity and eagerness to learn again.
Because stuff you can "only do locally" may not have that restriction in the near future.

The web is a classic disruptive innovation. It's significantly worse in most measures of performance (speed, ease of programming, consistency) than existing technologies. But it's better in a significant way (ease of deployment), and it lets you do things that old technologies did not (all the social-community stuff). Over time, the performance of both the incumbent technologies and the new disruptive technology increase. However, customers don't need the added performance along the traditional dimensions. When you're already at 30 FPS and photo-realistic images, how much better can you get?

When the web first came out, it wasn't good for much besides documents, and any sort of data-driven form application was very difficult to manage. Now practically everything online has some sort of interactivity. Then people said it would never be able to do office apps - and now we've got Google Docs & Spreadsheets & Presently. Now you're saying it'll never do high-performance 3D games - but somebody has already cloned Doom in Javascript (http://canvex.lazyilluminati.com/83/play.xhtml). Over time, you'll see webapps take over more and more markets from the desktop, until there's nothing left.

(And then the disruptive technology will shift to something else, like cell-phones or neuro-implants or whatever.)
This reminds me of a excellent blog called enplaned that was unfortunately shut down. Someone made a cache of it at http://www.enplaned.com/.
Agreed, I think the dominance of the web is inevitable.

Kind of as an experiment and part out of not wanting to reformat my diseased hard drive, I spent about 3 months last year booting from a minimal Linux and running Firefox (and a pdf viewer) as my only apps. I really didn't miss the desktop a whole lot. In the end, the only reason I run desktop apps today is to take some load off of the browser. I like Meebo more than GAIM but the really intensive javascript apps just use way too much memory in Firefox, especially when you have 12 hour Firefox sessions.

I'm looking forward to my future web-only existence... and I'll be first in line for the neuro-implant.
how do i get an invite code other than signing up for a waiting list ?
An alternative would be using flags, like reddit's 'report', the idea being you only use them for stuff that is really unsuitable, like spam, trolls and stupid stuff.
There is the Startup Library, if you did not know about it, on this site:
http://ycombinator.com/lib.html
Check out scriptoriumdaily.com for the tutors' blog.
Against the Gods by Peter Bernstein. At worst, a good background education on the history of probabilistic thought. At best, could fundamentally alter your world view.
A meme of two posts?
Before Plato and Heraclitus, Greeks thought reality was essentially chaotic and impossible to understand. You can see this in their creation myths. Heraclitus originated the idea of the Logos, a pattern underlying everything, and Plato built on this.
The problem with this is firstly that it creates a feedback loop, where the more commented something is, the higher it climbs, the more commented it is...

Secondly, it'd be hard to extract a quality measure from comments alone - there are a number of metrics (number of unique users commenting, rate of commenting, amount of voting...) but how do you get from that to a quality measure? How do you distinguish controversy from quality? Or comment threads full or jokes and snark?

Also, commenting on anything you disagree with or dislike would result in that link getting a boost, which can't be right.

All that said, I think comments could be used, but modestly, as part of a bigger algorithm.
Another alternative is a two-axis system. Up-down for agree-disagree, left-right for quality.
Before Plato and Heraclitus, Greeks thought reality was essentially chaotic and impossible to understand. You can see this in their creation myths. Heraclitus originated the idea of the Logos, a pattern underlying everything, and Plato built on this.

Articles like Steve's happen when people don't know their history of philosophy or science.
Yeah my thoughts. Although I don't know if it impossible - GWT does work of an AST - no reason why other languages couldn't drive it. Perhaps the contenders would be scala (static) and JavaFX markup stuff (which is also static, and designed for UI).

I know its unpopular, but for GUI stuff I prefer statically typed code. It is more verbose, but I find GUI stuff really hard to test (even with friendly tools) and having the compiler do some more work for me I find saves time on silly errors when manually trying stuff out. Yes I type more (or my IDE does really), and I am doing the work for the compiler to some sense, but I find it easier then any other way I have worked for many years doing this.

Its actually ironic (in the alanis sense), I would love a good static typed GUI language, but a dynamic one on the server ;) Maybe my brain is backwards, but I haven't been convinced so far by anyone who has shown me they actually do anything with what they talk about.

I do like JavaScript the language, where its going, when it is removed from the browsers. I wouldn't be unhappy using it more (just less so for the GUI - well I am keeping an eye on where jQuery is going it seems about right as a general tool for front ends for me, but not yet).
They're not real with the versions of the commands that I have.

Also, this is not the kind of "content" that I want to see on this site. I thought we had editors?
You could make down votes more expensive by forcing someone to type a rationale of why, or, if the dot product of their down vote to the community vote on a post is way off, discard. Finally, maybe have an up vote/down vote bank that can be exhausted for a given time period. Since you have so much free time, anyway.
In a small, smart community like this, an explicit upvote is a hard quality metric to beat.
Can I be your friend?
I think he's missing the point by focusing on the GUI -- it's a uniform
userland, not a uniform appearance, that facilitates interoperability. User
management, permissions and a model for resources go a long way toward
making a platform.

As Firefox, Silverlight & al. become more and more like desktops,
virtualization allows Linux to become more like a cross-platform application
environment. Web apps often find themselves recreating userland fundamentals.
The people at Vita Nuova caught on to this a few years ago, and released a
version of Inferno (Unix relative) as a browser plugin.
"Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking."
--Albert Einstein
Sort of interesting...not very accurate.
fbFund?
I'm surprised no one's starting talking about it.

Opinions? Analysis?