skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're going to consider the possibility that the U.S. economy will go into a full-fledged collapse, you should also consider:

1.) The possibility of large tariffs on all international transactions.

2.) The possibility that certain nations will be declared "enemy powers" and all trade with them will be banned.

3.) The possibility that all communications outside the United States (yes, that means the Internet) will be banned for national security reasons.

4.) The possibility that the government will nationalize the Internet, your business, or both.

5.) The possibility of riots in major U.S. cities.

6.) The possibility that a mandatory draft may send you or your workforce to war.

7.) The possibility of mass propaganda campaigns and government nationalization of all media.

8.) The possibility that all computer professionals will be drafted into massive cryptographic projects.

All of these have happened historically after major economic crises. They almost seem to be inevitable after a Depression-level panic.

My point is that some eventualities shouldn't be planned for, not because they won't happen, but because you can't plan for them. Once political unrest starts, all bets are off, because the basic ground rules of society are gone. Some looter could come up to you with a gun and blow your brains out, and that would be the end of your business.
Facebook to let users vote on news feed
I don't think so, at least not hackers who are programmers. Most of the interesting links seem to be cross-posted from programming.reddit.com and receive relatively few upvotes.

I know a number of very good hackers and not a single one reads news.ycombinator.com. Many are too advanced, and too busy hacking, to even bother with sites like this or reddit. You will however find a number of them posting on Lambda the Ultimate, and a few on programming.reddit.com.

My gut feeling is that news.ycombinator.com appeals to the low end of the technical hacker continuum, and more to entrepreneurial/business oriented hackers.

Here is a list of the top 10 items as I edit this post:

1. Number of founders - statistics
163 points by fauigerzigerk 2 days ago | 34 comments

2. Pmarca donates US$28 million to Stanford's hospital (pmarca.com)
30 points by henning 16 hours ago | 16 comments

3. Innovative New Rails Host: Online IDE, Web Console, Instantly Live (heroku.com)
19 points by chaostheory 13 hours ago | 6 comments

4. Absolutely, DO NOT, get a co-founder!
88 points by BitGeek 2 days ago | 92 comments

5. The Talent Myth, by Malcolm Gladwell (newyorker.com)
3 points by hhm 2 hours ago | 1 comment

6. Modern Lisp (with support for concurrency) based on Java Virtual Machine (sourceforge.net)
10 points by riobard 11 hours ago | discuss

7. Performance-pay Perplexes (newyorker.com)
25 points by davidw 1 day ago | 5 comments

8. Ask YC: did Hacker News really achieve the objective?
2 points by hhm 1 hour ago | 3 comments

9. Exercise on the Brain (nytimes.com)
29 points by jlhamilton 1 day ago | discuss

10. Steroid bust shows Feds can still get at "private" and "secure" e-mail (arstechnica.com)
8 points by muriithi 12 hours ago | 2 comments

I'd say #6 is the only item of technical interest and not a single comment!
(able a basic lisp editor)
Scripteka: prototype.js extensions list
Why Bad Site Design Succeeds
The goal is not to have just articles about hacking, but articles of interest to hackers. We're not trying to make something like programming.reddit.com, but something like www.reddit.com was in 2006.
Nothing new on the list; mostly a combo of Joel Spolsky & PG.

One exception: "For example, many of the languages that can be written extremely quickly thanks to type inference or syntactic tricks are often difficult to follow when they are maintained. The two minutes worth of typing saved can cause an hour of wasted time down the road."

Um, sometimes, given that crap code can be written in any language, but I find that the more concise languages are easier to read and maintain in the long run.
to me Hacker News will always be Startup News =)
What Can You Tell Me About Arbitration?
I'm trying to resolve a disagreement with an unhappy client, and it looks to be headed to arbitration (I'm in the USA).

This would be my first time, and I'm wondering what to expect and how best to prepare. Can anyone here share their experience with, or knowledge of, arbitration?
This question doesn't have a yes/no answer. The content changes each day, as does the audience.

So far, I'm here. So it works for me. So far. Ask me again in another month or two.

As far as I know, this is Paul's baby, written in his language and tweaked according to his goals. He's going to tweak it to make the content match what he likes. So far, we seem to like some of the same stuff. Hopefully that pattern will continue.
I'm 28, starting a startup, and have a wonderful little man (14 months), and a terrific wife. I would caution people from trying to do both. No matter how much time you spend with the tike, when your always trying to squeeze in a few extra hours on the startup things get wobbly.

One of the areas I have had the hardest time with is getting consistent quality time with my wife. Spending a few hours each evening, say 7-9 hanging with your family is no problem and you get lots of great time reading books, playing, and feeding, but when 9:15 rolls around and you want to get back to work, that's when the trouble begins.

While I'm not giving up, and am now trying to ensure I make more time for my wife so we don't loose sight of why we feel in love and got married then we will be alright.

So if its a choice - do one first and the other next - if it just happens - like life - then be vigilant about putting time and attention into your family - things can unravel fast and its no fun to feel like your risking your awesome family for your risky startup.
I would say it's a more useful tool to hackers that are interested in starting their own business... so useful to startup founders (or to-be founders) ... if you are doing your homework, many of the news you read here you might have already seen in your RSS reader, but I think you can sense the feel of community and how its different with all the other alternatives that are out there, when you see postings that are mostly tagged by Ask YC (I mostly mean postings like this one that is not linked to an article and is starting a discussion) ... The community here is definitely unique, and when discussions begin you can take advantage of who is here, their knowledge and experiences
Everyone post how curvy your mom/mum is to see if we can verify this
This is a nice experiment, but I don't see why it should be so uncommon. Considering the whole solo is in the same tone progression, you could have everything "sounding" nice, since they would be harmonizing.
Mckinsey and 'consulting' companies like this have the best hustle going on on the planet. Get some b-schoolers, collect some stats, put them into Power Point and state the obvious. Collect large check. Rinse, lather, repeat.
I love Pink Floyd ... this is a cool experiment, but how did they come up with the magical number! 15 secs apart? what if you play some other song and mix the solos with 12, or 20 sec apart maybe you can find something that works for them ... also it sounds like the first one is louder than the second one that comes in later, so its a bit hard to tell if you would get the same thing if they were both the same level
this guy divitt or hobitt or whatever just gives advice, which requires willpower to follow. Paul Graham, on the other hand, gives us noprocrast, which eliminates the need for us to exercise willpower, so that our executive skills can be applied to other things.
I think you're being a little too broad with your stereotypes:

"Many are too advanced, and too busy hacking, to even bother with sites like this or reddit"

"news.ycombinator.com appeals to the low end of the technical hacker continuum, and more to entrepreneurial/business oriented hackers"

I don't think being an advanced programmer and being business oriented are mutually exclusive. While I personally fit your stereotype(business oriented, low end of the technical spectrum--although I'd put myself in the top 10%), I know a few HackerNews readers who are both brilliant hackers and business minded. Plus if you make some money, you have more freedom to hack.
As a reader, I would like to see:

- Book reviews and recommendations

- Software reviews and recommendations
In that aspect I think hacker news is still not getting the message. Three possibilities :

1.To use your own metaphor, if you keep the animal in the cage for a long time, it takes a while for it to figure out that the cage has been lifted. But then this group animal never seems to get the hang of it. Perhaps this is a data point in group theory, namely that a group has far more inertia than single units.

2.Or perhaps the hackers are too busy startupping that they just cant be bothered about Intellectual curiosity

3.Or the third inference is the Hacker types that visit here are not into much else. An article about Pythagoras theorem being useful to measure n-dimensional distances made it into discussion here. In the math circles that concept is akin to understanding a "hello world" program. It is not surprising that experts in one area are totally naive in others, but I was hoping that hacker news could be a tool to alleviate that at least to some extent by bringing pointers and some discussion.

A long time back, I made this comment, and you agreed.

"*8 points by bluishgreen 132 days ago | link
It has become apparent that the quality of these social news sites depends on the quality/commitment of the society that is supporting it. It would be very interesting and useful to find out what the start up folks are doing on a daily basis besides thinking about start ups. Like I said, this could be a very good inspiration tool.

Lisp was a landmark in my large scale understanding of computer science. I wonder what are the landmarks in understanding something like physics, or say bio-informatics. What are the problems that these people are facing? Hackers like learning just for the heck of it. In the process we can bring about useful start ups to these domains instead of making another calender application and stacking outside some big huge company in the hopes of being acquired.

I am not asking for a general news site. I am asking for a site where news.yc culture and outlook is preserved, but the domain is slightly relaxed (Note: the relaxing should stop well before we start seeing LOL(pic) in the submissions). If you won't keep the same URL, its ok, as long as you some how figure out how to set up that "outlook""

Its in my nature to be optimistic, but 132 days hence, I don't think we are there yet.

Link to original discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31791
Don't forget, pay your "consultants" $50K per year and bill them out at $250/hr. Margins that would make Microsoft weep.
I thought the primary purpose of Hacker News was to give yc additional data for their decision making process twice a year. You can tell a lot about a person from their comments here.
Good question. I must admit that I was against the change in the first few days, but slowly i started to learn more through links that related to science, philosophy and even architecture. There are still some parasite links. If you open your house to everyone you can rest assure that some people (who love disorder) will walk in and try to destroy it. Overall I still like HackerNewsNetworks and although I am not a Hacker I can still acquire a tremendous amount of knowledge.
It's not the primary purpose, just an additional advantage. The original motivation was simply that we needed it ourselves. We'd funded so many people that it was getting awkward to pass around links by email.
There's far too little non-hacking stuff. I like to code just as much as the next guy, but really, I don't need to read 100 programming and Web 4.0 startup related articles each day. We need more of the "generally interesting to hackers" type of link, and less of the "directly about hacking" type of link.

I'd like to see interesting and stimulating articles on topics within math, biology, sociology, philosophy, economics, etc. I don't mean dry academic articles, but stimulating articles that look at the implications from these fields, observations that affect our understanding and perception of how the universe works. I also enjoy looking at and discussing the Big Questions out there. I tried submitting some stuff relating to my current interests, but they don't seem to get picked up. I think that since this community was seeded as a startup/hacking community, that's the area where we have the most overlap, and those articles get voted up the most. But I bet there's a bias against even clicking on the non-hacking articles that show up on the "new" page.

It would also be nice if the articles on hacking itself were deeper and more technically interesting, but I understand that's not likely to happen, as the audience shrinks as you get technically deeper/specific.

Some random examples of what I consider "Big Questions"

- How harmful is religion?

- What's consciousness?

- Do you need consciousness to build a thinking machine?

- Is math invented or discovered? (maybe there's not
much disagreement on this, but I've met at least one person who vehemently disagrees with me)

- Is a technological singularity likely?

- What is the thing I refer to as "I"? How much of "me" can
you cut away and still have "me" left?

- What are the evolutionary pressures that made us the way we are, and how have these pressures affected us?
I certainly find it awkward, perhaps because it requires more upfront design.
Building the world's best online word processor -- can you port TeXmacs to flash/silverlight?
Maybe this separation would help?

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/texmacs-dev/2007-11/msg000...
> I can literally travel the globe and work from any internet cafe.

I can do that now. My laptop has my development environment. No latency, no fears of dropped connections while editing. Local commits using mercurial, and my customized gvim rig.

And running "cap deploy" is pretty easy.

This seems aimed at people are are not quite ready to call themselves developers. But at some point, if you want to build Web apps, you are going to have to learn to install software and set up a database and really learn to use a code editor.
Who cares? I'll take the hot wife and the dumb baby.
I put it in quotes when Googling. It's not quite a saying if it only exists broken up and in response to something else.
I guess I hadn't thought of it that way.
Yeah, it seems fragment caching is the way to go, though for live updates we're going to have to do something a little more elegant.
OK. Just in case I ever apply, my insightful comments are a true reflection of myself. My stupid comments were probably made by my evil twin who has the same login and password, but will not be my co-founder.
Sure, but what sort of hacker? Hackers have narrow and deep interests, so they tend to spend time in communities that are narrow and deep like comp.lang.*, Lambda the Ultimate, A List Apart, etc.

Based on the most popular topics, comments, etc I would say Hacker News appeals mostly to people building web apps which generally breaks down into programmers, designers, and perhaps business types. My prior comment indicated why HN doesn't appeal to programmers, and I don't see a lot of deep design topics or discussions either.

I don't think a community that addresses "hackers" in general can work. By its very nature it would have too much noise on topics any given hacker isn't interested in. I suspect that is why the hackers I know spend time in several specialized communities.
It's pretty hard to focus on pure hacking (including interesting articles not about startups) when something glamorous like startups is on everybody's minds. programming.reddit.com has been pretty good about sticking to pure programming stuff, but perhaps as long as Hacker News is affiliated with Y Combinator and the startup world, we'll never be able to build a pure hackers' community... simply because startups are so cool and garner impulsive interest.

Maybe there should be a separate hacker.news.ycombinator.org, similar to a sub-Reddit?

Edit: Again, when I say "pure hacking" articles, I don't mean just stuff about programming. I mean anything that is "generally interesting to hackers", like jey mentioned in his comment.
Exactly, because this is read by start uppers, and that include programmers, designers, etc.
Yes! One of the few places I feel right at home.
Tic tac toe minimax player, including game analysis, and a document with every single possible game
Hacker News seems to have more a MBA/VC bent than "hacker"... ...all of the interesting software design/programming articles seem to be lifted from programming.reddit.com. Discussions on languages, architecture, UI, etc....
I don't know if being a great programmer, and great at business (as in management, sales, etc), are mutually exclusive or not. However they do seem to require very different attitudes and skills. For example, becoming a great programmer requires an incredible amount of solitary time spent reading, thinking, and programming. This would not be very appealing to someone who feels happiest interacting with other people, which happens to be a skill necessary for management and sales.

My comment certainly wasn't meant to disparage anyone. We all start out at the low end of the continuum on any given subject. A hacker is someone really interested in the subject who dedicates much time and effort to advancing their skill.
to me if pg really wants Hacker News to be more like the old Reddit - to me this is the heart of the problem: http://news.ycombinator.com

It's context. By associating Ycombinator with Hacker News the people visiting it and the people attracted to it will have certain assumptions. Afterall YCombinator is seed funding and business mentoring for the technically and entrepreneurially inclined... is it really a surprise that the content reflects that?

if people really want a generic Hacker News as opposed to something just renamed from Startup News, YC needs to be disassociated with it (at least in name).

Besides as other people have already pointed out there are already plenty of other sites that meet general "hacker" news needs that are "good enough" (programming.reddit, dzone, slashdot, the list goes on...)

Startup News is a unique (and popular) niche of a niche (I haven't seen anything else with a following quite like it) - why change that?
Britain and America dominate list of best universities.
I was surprised to see the amount of British universities at the top. <a href="http://www.topuniversities.com/worlduniversityrankings/top20..." rel="nofollow">http://www.topuniversities.com/worlduniversityrankings/top20..., Caltech guys will be happy to see they got ahead of M.I.T.<p>And we Brazilians are just happy to see that USP and Unicamp got into the list (175 and 177). I do believe, however, that Unicamp got really impressive scores for quality of faculty.
I was surprised to see the amount of British universities at the top. http://www.topuniversities.com/worlduniversityrankings/top20... . Also, Caltech guys will be happy to see they got ahead of M.I.T.

And we Brazilians are just happy to see that USP and Unicamp got into the list (175 and 177). I do believe, however, that Unicamp got really impressive scores for quality of faculty.
I just looked through your comments...it appears your evil twin has been a lot more active than you (j/k)
Wow. I was taken way out of context on this one. Cover my ass? I stand by what I said. Yes, Stanford can take care of itself (I googled and its endowment is somewhere in the billions). So its a research hospital, that doesn't mean that the research they do is going to save lives. I'm not saying its not a noble thing to do, just that if you are going to give $28 million and brag about it, it better be for a damn good cause. Stanford Hospital, in my opinion, is not. Peace.
I think the "Hacker" part of the name is a bigger problem. In the old reddit you could found scientists, mathematicians, people from Nasa and so on, none of which would generally understand what's the matter with being a hacker or not.
Cool, reddit when it started was indeed very good. Maybe you can share with readers here, your thoughts on how to prevent hacker news from becoming another reddit. How do you plan to detect and eliminate cliques/cabals of the sort, that now rule the reddit front page. Also, I think it would be a good to have a static page that explains how the yc news karma works.
Actually that's changed quite a bit, since it became hacker news.
Still trying for the record eh?
I think more provocative and deeper issues are great. Only problem is: how do you do provocative/interesting when you have a system where people vote you up or down based on how much they like what you are saying?

If this were pre-copernicus Europe and we were discussing astronomy, some of the most interesting (and as it turned out later, easily verified) ideas would be voted through the floor. Neat discussions about neat topics turn into popularity contests and mob rule, even with a generally neat audience like this.

Perhaps sticking your neck out and taking a position which is uncomfortable and posting and engaging in provocative subjects requires a level of trust that doesn't exist in up-down social sites? It seems the format encourages being interesting and challenging, but only up to a point. I think lots of people confuse being snarky and asinine with having something interesting to say.

So count me in on the more deep questions -- as soon as we don't start voting people up or down based on which clique they are in and instead vote them up or down based on how interesting and thoughtful their comments and articles are. I remain skeptical that's going to happen anytime soon. How about going from up/down arrows to a dropdown with positive and negative attributes? That would at least start telling you something about what the raters were thinking, and might lead to some more interesting insights.
I've done both. My kid wins.

Until you've had one, you have no idea of the lower mammalian (reptilian?) bits of your brain that they will engage.

Having said that, I'm on my third startup, and I'm intending to have more kids!
Can you post the list? It's so lame that they make you create an account to see it.
"How Harmful is Religion?" topics are one of the biggest red herring scapegoat topics you can get, and usually come with a generous side of philosophical wankery. I'm glad we don't talk about it much here. I'd recommend discussion of the impact of particular cultural values and beliefs instead.

Personally, on non-hacker topics, I'd be interested to see more on linguistics, the scientific study of language. We can't even begin a real discussion on most of your listed topics until we know how to recognize and establish semantics and metaphors.

The first problem we run into with "how harmful is religion," for example, is that everyone is going to see 'religion' and think of something completely different, but no-one will notice. Everyone will start arguing and get angry because they're confused and don't realize it. The first problem we run into with "is math invented or discovered?" is defining invention and discovery. But again, most people ignore that question and dive right into discussion.

I'm also less interested in hearing people's opinions about how evolutionary pressures have affected us, than I am interested in hearing about the actual archaeological discoveries that inspire such speculation.
In a study done by English speaking people, is this result really a surprise?
"The rankings were based on a survey for the THES of 3,703 academics worldwide..."
Some flash developer recently told me that Adobe has published something to compile C libraries for Flash, or something like that? So presumably it should be relatively easy to port lots of editors to Flash?
sounds like slashdot 3.0 or another reddit/digg 2.0...