skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of the traffic tickets I and my friends have received, most were useful in actually reminding us to drive more carefully. Occasionally you hear of someone getting an unfair ticket: I think that's the exception rather than the rule.

I hate getting tickets as much as anyone else, and I've gotten my share of them. But I still don't use radar detectors, and won't use this service.

"A visible speed trap is far more defensible."
As long as the speed limit is clearly visible, why should the trap itself be visible?
This reminds me of bad relationship advice - you have to abuse your customers a little in order for them to appreciate you better in the long run.
Fibonacci Sequence everyone!
I'll start:

0
Dutch building furthest offshore (23 km) wind farm
Oh. This is a library under straight GPL. You can't use it in non-GPL code. No wonder I hadn't heard of it before.

Thanks for the pointer, it's neat. I really like how my approach turned out; the STLport red-black tree is well done. Backporting it to C only took a couple hours.
The idea of a popular and high quality "social news" site is fundamentally broken. Either you want a mass market or you want quality content. The mass market has an IQ of 100 and will not choose content that generally appeals to people here puzzling over "social news". Any fix that gets rid of the stuff morons like will cost you the mass market.

The metafilter people already went through all this. They started to achieve mass market popularity and quality started to go to shit. They cut off new membership and let attrition get rid of some people. Then they were happy again with their small community.

If you introduce an editorial role, well guess what, it's not "social news" anymore. Slashdot and Fark are far from new and web2.0.

This problem is nothing new. Look at reddit's sister company, Wired. Wired went from great in the 90s to mostly moronic and consumerist now. It's also a lot more popular now.
Is it too early to start talking about facebook killers?
Common food additives and colorings can increase hyperactive behavior in a broad range of children, a study being released today found.

It was the first time researchers conclusively and scientifically confirmed a link that had long been suspected by many parents. Numerous support groups for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder have for years recommended removing such ingredients from diets, although experts have continued to debate the evidence.

So, the parents and support groups "knew" the answer before there was scientific evidence supporting their claims.

So, they didn't know, they just have an unscientific agenda.

Now the article acts like their position was validated. It was not. It's scientific status hasn't changed whether science happens to reach the same conclusion or not. They are irrational either way.
If you push people hard enough...

... they will either:

- not be as productive (obvious)

- start being deceptive about what they're actually doing (to avoid repercussions)

- finally, they'll leave for greener pastures

I realize you're coming at it from a personal perspective... but it's something for startup founders to keep in mind as they bring on employees / non-founders.

There's a great example of this happening in practice in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJU1dzc5kM
I don't think Debian users are a large part of their target market...
What's that annoyingly addicting song in the background?
In response to the study, the Food Standards Agency advised parents to monitor their children's activity and, if they noted a marked change with food containing additives, to adjust their diets accordingly, eliminating artificial colors and preservatives.

That's stupid too. Parents aren't going to monitor children's behavior scientifically. They aren't going to record it carefully and objectively and compare it to control data previously recorded. This advice will simply lead them to act on whims and fancies.
While I think some of these people can provide valuable services without being a shyster, there is definitely that element floating around the web, especially the "Internet Marketing" space. (and the JohnChow.com crowd)

I do find it hilarious though that many of these internet marketing nerds make hundreds of thousands a month while many Web 2.0 companies spend millions and can barely bring in a few thousand in revenues.
You're 100% correct. While PG is likely genuinely dissatisfied with the current algorithms of reddit and digg, in this post, he was simply expressing helplessness about the many Ron Paul stories he has had to see on one of his favorite sites, and feels like he is responsible enough for the creation of the site to try to do something about it, but not really being able to do so.

For instance, Paul's argument did not take into account that voting up Ron Paul related articles is more about certain principles than about the man himself.

Some people like that Paul is pro-drugs. Some people like that he has the most consistent voting record. Some people like that he is libertarian. Some people like that he's fiscally responsible. That is not a single issue, unlike what PG has said in another post.

But beyond voting up unexpected political principles, readers also like to vote for articles that mention that media outlets reset or deleted polls and misrepresented their results, as well as those which criticize internet users for heavily favoring Ron Paul the most--which redditors and diggers feel is an attack on them or their intelligence.

Another reason users vote up Ron Paul stories is because users like rooting for the little guy.

Another reason is that users feel there is an injustice being done, such as that the main-stream media is not giving enough face time to all candidates.

Another reason has political roots--some users feel the other candidates aren't good enough, and regardless of what they think about Ron Paul, he has a consistent voting record.

Finally, many users vote up Ron Paul to vote for policy change, and realize there is little chance Ron Paul will actually be elected.

It has also become a self-serving prophecy in the main stream media that internet users heavily prefer Ron Paul and are responsible for online and text messaging votes, so those who use the internet think that's who they should vote for.

There are many, many reasons why Ron Paul is being selected. When articles with his name come up, there are a variety of reasons to vote them up. Those may not be good reasons to vote up those articles, but they're genuine, and I doubt there's a conspiracy.
Good, randomly found, motivated marketing people seem hard to find. (or maybe I just don't know where to look)

i.e. let's say you've developed a little site. it launched with a little buzz but then tapered off. you've added a bunch of features and a lot of the site/code infrastructure is in place to take it to the next level, but you've done very little marketing / etc.

What to do next in this case? I have a site like that which is kind of rotting on the vine... a few k in revenue each month gradually sloping downward without anymore work on it from my part.

Biggest problem: managing people part-time can be a huge pain.
No, I think the real problem is that talking about politics brings out the worst in people who disagree with you (because you make them feel angry), and the only the mildly unsavory in people who don't (because you make them feel smug). How many people responded to What You Can't Say with some form of "Yes for thee, but not for me"?

Telling people an important part of their opinion-forming mechanism -- their facts, or their fact-finding, or their ability to tell "probative" from "normative" -- is just as special case that gives everyone an equal opportunity to show his ass.

I actually spent some time thinking about how you could do better than what's out there now -- provide a way to enforce good rhetorical behavior; set some rules about evidence; and especially, make prominence based on credibility or evidentiary support.

But in the end, I don't think many forum users would really prefer the hard work of keeping their opinions in line with all the available facts to the satisfaction of beating a disembodied un-person in a non-argument. And also, there are a lot of factors working against you:

http://www.singinst.org/Biases.pdf

http://overcomingbias.com
Too late, actually.
Especially now that Parakey is facebook.
I'd be excited to see graphics cards with multi core processors that can do this...
I think zealous voting is indeed representative of the current userbase:

For a long time the quality and diversity of links in Reddit was quite stable, reflecting the strong core userbase. Major systemic issues [1] led to more junk-food like submissions edging in, and slowly the forces involved drove out the original core audience, long-september style. This process continued gaining momentum, until fairly quickly lurching to the new stable state we find it in today. A similar process can be observed in wikipedia: those who care the most, have the most time, and the most tolerance for internet drama naturally dominate: the young and the passionate.

1. a) Reddit conflated two distinct actions into a single vote: training the recommendation engine (vote on what you like/dislike) and judging quality (what is good/bad). This lead to a culture of voting on taste, tending the system away from voting on quality, partly because of:
b) The nature of these systems, like the mainstream media, is to tend to the lowest common denominator as audience size increases. This should not have been surprising.

How to avoid these issues? Paul's suggestion (somewhere else on this page) about automated topic clustering is a good one. A similar approach I favor is encouraging clusters of users to form naturally, using a collaborative classification/filtering approach; even something as simple as allowing three tags per link could do this. Once clusters are established, it should be much easier to allow users to opt-in or out of the clusters they like/dislike. The editor/oracle approach and/or weighted voting should also work, but seems like a lot more effort.

[ahem. I feel like I should mention I'm somewhat biased, as I'm now working on something experimental in this domain]
Don't piss in our own pool, piss in our neighbor's?
Thats funny! Relational databases work for many computing problems, and i don't even think of it as that cultish. If you want to access data but don't know how its going to be accessed until run time (i.e., if you need to search records based on any number of parameters), a relational database makes sense.

Also, the people he should be scared of are VAX people, not RDB people.
People break the law.
People are fined.
You call it revenue generation.
I call it being smart. Can you really propose that if police know where to catch people committing crimes they should avoid the place and not go after these people?
Scary. I find it hard to believe that they can't catch these people. How quick can the botnet do RSA?
web entrepreneur != blogger
Piss is a little harsh. It's just economics. Marketing is hard. I like taking shortcuts.
Things that are likely to be voted highly on digg or reddit are really good for your pagerank.

For some industries, pagerank is the only thing that matters. If I could displace the kratom king in google searches for "kratom" I could turn my tiny business into something real.
"...100 of his vocal supporters can dictate the stories for a site with 100,000 users."

Only for as long as the 100,000 is reasonably happy with what the 100 is providing them. Otherwise you'd think they'd have the sense to either start downvoting, or simply stop using reddit, rendering it a site with 100 readers who all vote. More likely many of the 100,000 see reddit as their best source for all the Ron Paul news the 'mainstream' media is 'trying to hide' from them.
I notice that Paul Graham hates seeing Ron Paul articles, but Paul Buchheit does not.

Maybe PG is used to seeing his name in Reddit since its beginning? Paul Buchheit does not expect any articles to be about him, so when he sees " Paul " in an article, he does not feel an instinctive reaction of curiosity followed by quick repulsion.

I'm kidding, of course, but it could definitely be a learned reaction of seeing many Paul articles to be about oneself.
"When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off."
Overcoming Jealousy
You might be able to get a tax credit for your prototyping
if you are incorporated.
Bringing The Valley To DC
I don't think anybody (reasonable) believes there's a conspiracy. PG's original point is that a large number of users seem to be voting for Ron Paul stories not because they find the stories interesting and want to read more like them, but because they want to help Ron Paul's campaign or express a political opinion.

The intent of reddit is that users vote for posts they find interesting and against posts they find boring. Any situation that leads to posts gaining or losing points based on other criteria is a sign of a flaw in the system.

I'm not sure what the solution is. I don't find all Ron Paul articles boring, but I only need to see one article about how Fox News tried to make him look bad, not 30. Some sort of grouping might help. Once they have tags, I think it would help to create a flagging system somewhat similar to Craigslist that would allow users to suggest tags for posts. Once a certain number of users suggest a tag, the tag is added to the post. That way, users could filter out tags they didn't want to see, and override anybody who tries to game the system.
Unbelievable Growth is Just Beginning
Either launch or shut up..I am not watching the video, and I don't want a super secret invitation code either.
This secrecy thing is getting real old.
This is a great user interface paradigm. Tasks are the only things we do on computers, we want to put them front and center instead of obscuring them inside windows and menus and buttons and toolbars.

Microsoft is showing an interest in task oriented design with the new Office control panel. It's an enormous improvement over the old interface.

I used to have a really good long essay on task oriented design someone wrote around 1995, I'll try and track it down. And if anyone ever wants to discuss an entire task oriented computer environment, email me, it's one of my favorite things to talk about.
I find this formatting so much more better to read
http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html
Nice find! That guy has lots of good stuff on his site.
Why not just show what each story each user voted for?
Sounds like a smart guy, but this kind of stuff makes me think twice: http://www.rayandterry.com/

Also, does he have any technical books on the subjects he talks about?
if reddit or any other social news is vulnerable, it's expected people would exploit it, and not their fault.

there are ways to avoid misuse.

...adsense suffered fraud, paypal suffered fraud...
The trouble with these kinds of studies (and with empirical evidence in general) is that there are often omitted correlating factors left out of the analysis. Doctors would be sure to control diet and other medications, economists would control socioeconomic status, sociologists would look for cultural factors, etc. However, they're not going to do two or three of these sets at once so the result is a biased study no matter who performs it.

In this case I think a good potential omitted factor is the level of parental discipline. Suppose parents A are Dr. Spock laissez-faire with their kids. This is most likely correlated with:
Not sitting still for the family meal
Watching a lot of television
Getting their way in public places
So Junior gets lots of TV dinners, quick snacks, and time with the power rangers so he wants to do karate instead of read Fox in Socks

Parents B run a tight ship and consequently their vegan, free-range fed wonder-child is happy to sit on the magic carpet and hear about anything so long as it's not The Wealth of Nations again.

Applying the overused correlation != causation mantra is a bit cheap, to be fair we must follow the immediate next step, "If correlation != causation, why?" I think here we have plenty of compelling falsifiable narratives to try before we make green key-lime pie illegal.
Well its a shame you didn't read the article, they conducted a placebo controlled study where they randomly introduced these additives into the children's diets. There really should be no systemic effect from self-selection, apart from in the recruitment process (which they don't discuss).
No screens?
Wow, I've never read that. Here's my favorite section:

'Since from the time of Newton to now, we have come close to doubling knowledge every 17 years, more or less. And we cope with that, essentially, by specialization. In the next 340 years at that rate, there will be 20 doublings, i.e. a million, and there will be a million fields of specialty for every one field now. It isn't going to happen. The present growth of knowledge will choke itself off until we get different tools.'
The proliferation of Paul Graham stories on reddit were evidence of a design flaw in version 1 of social news.

Such a small proportion of people who visit news sites vote that a group of zealots can easily overtake a site like this. Spammers are comparatively easy to guard against; they don't care enough to create 100 sockpuppet accounts, and in any case the guys at reddit wouldn't have any qualms about killing spams that seemed to be merely for profit. This is a tougher problem.

You could say all the anti-C++ stories were already evidence of this problem. But a large proportion of programmers, even C++ users, disapprove of C++, and an even larger proportion of the kind of people who would use a social news site.

The Lisp zealots are another matter. This is more like spam; it's not just people who hate C++ so much that they reflexively upvote stories that sound critical of him; it's a deliberate attempt to market something online.

Incidentally, I'm not saying this because I have some kind of ulterior motives. I think C++ is the worst language of my lifetime. And I am not anti-Paul Graham. I know nothing about him except that every article he writes makes it onto reddit--no one writes that much gold.
So then, if the system is so flawed and that's the main explanation for his success, surely with all the other candidates out there, their supporters, if they outnumber the people who agree with Ron Paul, should band together and easily negate his influence on Reddit, correct? If it only takes 100 to skew perception so much on Reddit, then multiply 100X, oh, 8 other candidates and they should have 8X the effect of Ron Paul's supporters, thus easily cancelling him out. Or are you just trying to find some gripe so you can peddle some new startup that addresses this imaginary flaw?
Startup Question: Why Venture Capital for Web Startup?
This is probably a silly question, but this seems a good forum to get an answer: It seems to be taken as a given that any founder will sooner or later apply for VC funding. Why would a founder of a web startup ever bother with venture capital? A web startup can be built by a team of 1-4 people working on it part-time (so no need for anyone to quit their full-time jobs). The time required to build such a web system would probably be on the order of 12-18 months. Because servers, bandwidth, and/or hosting services are cheap, this can all easily be self-financed (for ~$5000-$10000?). What have I missed here in this analysis that makes venture capital desirable or necessary?
we should have fixed it back in the day -- those paul graham essays being skyrocketed by zealots on reddit, including myself, was a leading indicator.
Well, aside from this being Kansas-only...

" The credit is 6.5% of the difference between the actual qualified research and development expenses for the year and the average of the actual expenditures made during the year and the two previous tax years."

Wonderful. I can take a credit for 6.5% of...umm, $0 - $0. That comes to...$0.

Sometimes it sucks not paying yourself...
and digg
Because when a competitor comes along that does have venture funding, they will leave you in the dust. They will be able t do more in less time and scale faster, while your hobby site remains just that.
The Universe of Discourse : The envelope paradox
Bram Cohen: IRC hackery
Are you guys any good at marketing?

"If you build it, they will come" sometimes applies but not usually.
It's a better format, yes, but the original article includes an introduction, and some questions that aren't in that version.

Edit: my mistake; the questions and answers are included in PG's website. I think that's only the intro and the biographical stuff that is not in that version of the article...
Thanks for this, I'm impressed by how thorough these slides are. I remain fascinated by those operating outside of the conventional boundaries of society.
Thank you for pointing out that small matter of competition. That was something I certainly had not taken into consideration.

With regard to your point on calling it a 'hobby' though. Because its possible for someone to put in 30-35 hours a week (over and above one's full-time commitment at the day job) if they're willing to work hard during 'free time', could this not serve as reasonable mitigating circumstances?
Even if it takes such a site 2x-4x as long to grow as it would with more expensive marketing, doesn't the fact that what it produces is over and above one's full time employment mean that growing as fast is less critical? After all, with self-financing you don't have people waiting to collect their investment money.
Off-topic, but it's rare to see a serious blog on livejournal. It has a reputation as less serious than Blogger.

Is it because it has some social networking aspects, like Xanga? Or is there something else going on here?
[When I click on that link it takes me to the weebly homepage. (?)]

Congratulations to the Wufoo team! Profitability is a great position to be in.

Now back to my question: being profitable doesn't rule out the option of being acquired. What was their investor exit/ROI plan when they applied to YC? What is it now? Are they paying out any dividends? Planning to?

Googling for "dividends site:news.ycombinator.com" reveals the following comment from PG:

( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28399 )

Most startups don't pay dividends. Even Microsoft barely does. Owning 10% of a technology startup basically means you get 10% of the proceeds if the company gets bought, or hold 10% of the now tradeable shares if it goes public.

But this is a comment on the industry at large, not on YC's policies. Although we can make educated guesses based on this, it would be great to have an explicit reply on this matter.
Estimating objects from serial numbers: How a statistical formula won the war
Definitely. I'm not bashing Gates for saying it. In the context he was dead on. But the author of the article seems to still push it as truth. Could just be my perception though, because he doesn't explicitly say it.
Joshua Schachter: Autoincrement considered harmful
I remember NPR doing a story on this. Their conclusion was that the headline's a little misleading. It should say SOME food additives may cause ADHD behavior in SOME children.

I guess the affect is small and affects those predisposed.
That's true.

I guess my point is that sites need some kind of marketing to succeed, unless they build something that "goes viral" and it takes luck and a product people truly want for that to happen.

An advantage of the VC funding is that the investors will make sure you worry about marketing. I'm just thinking of a recent post on here where a guy said "I launched my startup. I need more traffic. What do I do now?" So as long as these guys have some kind of plan for marketing, they can do it themselves.
looks way cooler than the segway - cheaper too
Why bring slashdotlogic to News.YC?