skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought the site was broken or something because of that!

Then I remembered it was earth day but I gotta say, what a crap implementation of it.

If you read some of the comments on TC also you will see that people didn't even get the purpose of it.

o and almost make sure you label links like this as [PIC] so the HN community knows what they are going too.
Looks like the file is gone?
People are rarely as funny as they think they are.
For about ten minutes. Then it became obnoxious that it covered the front page.
Yokum is good people, constantly helping the entrepreneurial community understand the legalities and intricacies of funding and organizing start-ups.

Check his website: http://www.startupcompanylawyer.com/
Slashdot is filled with people trying to be funny. To the point that it dominates a thread, and drowns out real discussion. I hope we can avoid that here.
It was at +5 before linking to it here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=564827

That is an example of humor that didn't get nuked to hell.

It's also, I humbly put forth, an example of making an counter argument, making a separate point and not being mind-numbingly boring about it.

HN, humor is not death. You can laugh a little and still have time to believe you're smarter and better than the rest of us.
Taking a casual remark unreasonably literally is "one of the funniest occurrences on HN, ever"?

I'm having trouble finding any variation on that joke that I've found funny since the 5th grade...
Ha!

"Is NSTimer the only way to perform animation on this #*! iphone ?"
Right, but there are some seriously funny comments.
+1 for RFC 1149 :)
That's just because you don't have any sense of humor.
And they are completely drowned out by the seriously unfunny comments. As is actual discourse. That's one of the reasons I gave up on Slashdot.
Humor is not automatically downvoted. One-liners that add nothing to a discussion are.

Humor can be used to great effect in order to make a point--but, more often than not, it represents much less of an increase in signal and much more of an increase in noise.
How would this be a sustainable revenue stream? I mean, if you pay for a vanity URL, it would surely be a one-time cost, no? Especially after going through a bid.
I see this a lot, particularly on here: when someone doesn't find something funny that another finds funny, they're accused of not having a sense of humor.

I have a sense of humor. It might be different than yours, but I have one. I also have a low tolerance for noise on HN. I don't come here for "teh funny." I have others places I go for that. I come here for interesting, hacker related items. I can find funny all over the internet. This is the only reliable place I know of to find good hacker news. I'd rather not spoil that.
this is kind of awesome... I wonder if there will be any negligible bump in overall browser usage stats as a result of this.
What is "open source web design"?
I see what you did there... ;D
I know you're not just trolling, because you contribute many insightful comments on HN, but I just don't see why you are so focused on headcount as the measure of business growth.

The low marginal cost of additional customers in a subscription software business makes your argument an apples-to-oranges comparison. You might need to hire additional staff to manage and maintain a growing portfolio of rental properties, but with subscription software you only have to improve your CRM tools and development processes to maintain a growing customer base with near-constant headcount. If better CRM tools happens to be what you are selling anyway, there's a pretty obvious multiplier for growing profits with very low headcount growth.
I kinda agree with you partly but, just playing devil's advocate here, one could make the exact opposite argument in that just because you'd like to keep it serious doesn't mean everyone else feels the same way.
MySpace CEO/CoFounder Chris DeWolfe Steps Down
it should be noted that they later added IE6 support
Agreed. And equally important is the fact that no one really talks about it. Instead of bringing up how they were around for "Erlang Day" in every comment thread, people just remember it in the back of their minds as something amusing that happened in the past.
Two more words: sous vide.
Check out pain à l'ancienne, the cold fermented baguette from Peter Reinhart in The Bread Bakers Apprentice. Several people who have tasted this say they can no longer eat store bought bread and it's amazingly easy to make.
Ask HN: Herd effects on HN?
I'm seeing a pattern here (I gotta start timing this):

Many comments start out with an even number of slowly incoming VOTES, and once one or few of those comments hit a critical mass in up-votes they gain rank much quicker: there is noticeable ACCELERATION in the uptake. I suspect we could have a herd effect going on, where people are not really reading the comments, but confidently up-voting what other people have up-voted.

Also, many stories sit around for a while (at the top), before anybody comments. Then traffic in COMMENTS trickles in slowly, and after a critical mass of comments, again, the uptake ACCELERATES. Here I suspect people are waiting for other people to claim the space.

Any thoughts?
World's First Hard X-ray Laser Achieves "First Light"
...wow.

Verbose. Hope I never have to work with PSD anywhere except in my happy photoshop 7 (yeah the upgrade wasn't worth it, and I use WINE so...)
Not necessarily easy, but I cannot recommend "Bread" by Hamelman enough:
http://www.amazon.com/Bread-Bakers-Book-Techniques-Recipes/d...

It's actually geared towards professional (artisanal) bakers, but all recipes include home proportions as well. I've baked a lot from it, and never had a failure. It manages to be both incredibly thorough and scientific, yet convey the passion and craft side of it as well.

I'm not sure there's any book in my home that I'd keep in its place if I had to choose.
C'mon TechCrunch, just use a transparent bg [PIC]
// No, PSD is an abysmal format. Having worked on this code for several weeks now, my hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns.

// Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find something in the attic of your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th birthday... I am spending a lot of time imagining amusing fates for the people responsible for this Rube Goldberg of a file format.

Woah. This guy is a natural poet. If I were the computer, my loop might have skipped an iteration.
As a recent arrival who has been trying to figure out what the community standard is, I have been paying close attention to this question. In line with rms's comment, no, I don't think humour gets downvoted per se. Cheap shots definitely are, which covers a lot of sarcasm, as are quips with no additional content and general rudeness. What I would say is that comments which lack content get punished even more when attempting (either successfully or not) to get a laugh.

I certainly don't think there is anything wrong with having a forum where every line doesn't play to the peanut gallery.
maybe the solution, then, would be to only allow this for personal profiles?
Standard Slashdot has a mod-filter set high and you'll get both very smart and very funny comments. The aggregate intelligence is actually higher on Slashdot because there's more users, but it's hard to engage in that community properly without having to plow through the tripe.

If there was a mod-filter here, or an upvote/downvote categorizer like there is at Slashdot, things would change. The direct payoff of humour is pleasure, with insight being of a different quality. There's more variety at Slashdot, and people can be more of themselves, for better and worse, and the modding style and layout promotes that diversity. Here, people downmod anything that doesn't add value to the discussion (or strongly opposes one's point-of-view) because you have to look at it, but on Slashdot, participation has it's own inherent value because of the filter.

Furthermore, if people here were identified by their real names, can you imagine how straight-jacketed most would feel, not wanting to be perceived as weird or 'funny' at any point?

Just takin' a stab.
Well, I come to hacker news to read news and to learn, not really for laughs. Sure a bit of comic relief here and there is okay, but god when the site gets covered in junk links (which rarely happens but I've seen a few bad days) -- it's beating the purpose of the site.

and that's something we never want ;)
the name of the font has to be right there in the style-sheet

With @font-face declarations, actually, you can name a font whatever you want, and point it at a file on your server that is named whatever you want.
Skoda India Forays Into SUV Segment With Skoda Yeti
Well, I don't go to techcrunch or NYT on my own volition (okay NYT sometimes but never techcrunch) -- so any articles interesting enough to make news.yc are the only ones I read. therefore, I appreciate them. But yeah if they vanished I don't think I'd care.
Ask YC: Any way to find "top" list over time?
Hi,

Is there any way (perhaps a feature of SearchYC?) to find the "top" HN articles over a period of time?

The motivation for asking is that I saw an article recently (had a graph about the effect of addiction and declining pleasure reponses in the brain) and can't find it at all after numerous bookmark, searchYC and google searches.
Just to note, the posting was on July 24, 2008. (I was ready to jump for joy, but instead, feel disappointed that this is old)
"... PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an insult to other bad formats...

If there are two different ways of doing something, PSD will do both, in different places. It will then make up three more ways no sane human would think of, and do those.
PSD makes inconsistency an art form...

Earlier, I tried to get a hold of the latest specs for the PSD file format. To do this, I had to apply to them for permission to apply to them to have them consider sending me this sacred tome. This would have involved faxing them a copy of some document or other, probably signed in blood. I can only imagine that they make this process so difficult because they are intensely ashamed of having created this abomination..."

Awesome comments!!!

I can feel the passionated hate to PSD file format!, even althought I never had to work with that.
It may seem that way, but that has more to do with the fact that agreement is not inherently comment worthy, since it does not do anything to further the discussion (note that expansion of an existing argument is comment worthy, but significantly rarer). Instead, the first responses to something have to show disagreement in order to establish an alternative viewpoint, through which there can be discussion.
Top Construction Companies
Haha tsally, I got into Berkeley and UIUC...going to UIUC (see you there!!) cause the cost difference is completely unjustifiable. Unless you're instate...50k vs 10k (merit scholarships)...yeah it's pretty clear which one you go to. Well, unless of course you can afford the 50k. Haha.
I already have five gasoline-powered vehicles (two cars and three motorcycles) capable of good mileage and long range, so I'm looking for something with the simplicity and elegance of pure electric drive.
Suhas Gopinath talking about how he conquered the global web from India
I don't work anywhere where NDA's apply, but I go out of my way not to find out what anybody else gets paid (and for my own team, I only let HR tell me within certain bands).

Here is a non-cynical explanation (not that I believe that the cynical view that it is for salary suppression is necessarily wrong)

I realise a lot of people here work in startups or other kind of hothoused environments. The reality elsewhere is that a company needs people with all kinds of ability - they need the reliable but unimaginative person (let's call them the plodder programmer) that will come in and tie up all the lose ends that the hero programmer left behind before they got distracted by the latest shiny. The hard truth is the hero programmer will get paid much much more than the plodder, for obvious reasons. If the hero goes around telling everybody what they get, that is demoralising to the plodders - it just rubs their face into it, because they will never be the hero. But they can offer a company years of valuable service and dedicated work. As a geek herder, just because my HPs are worth more, it doesn't mean I value my plodders less.

So I would prefer not to discuss renumeration, though in my world that would be done out of politeness rather than contractually enforced.
If you click on your profile, there's a "saved" list of things that (as I recall) is based on what you vote up or comment on.

So if you acted on that article, it should be there somewhere. :)
Call me poetically-challenged, but I'd really appreciate an explanation. I don't get it...at ALL. How does earth day have anything to do with not recycling? What does URL shortening have anything to do with that either?
Even in jest, it's a simple-minded reflexive insult. Downvotes are a legitimate way to say we want less of that.
Does anyone know which laws (or laws) make this rule unenforceable? Joel (or the journalist) might very well be right, but I'd think one would prefer to know the law before crossing that line.
Yes. Good point. I have no problems with that statement. Working with the public is certainly better than secrecy. I'm just pointing that a music tax is being presented as reasonable. I was surprised the author implied this.

*I'm not personally unwilling to consider it. I think this is a practical problem as much as an ideological one. If this gives us a practical solution without too many negative side effects, I'm all for it. In fact, if anyone can point out an interesting exploration of the topic, I'm interested.
best meetup in a while, you should've been there. lots of cool ideas floating around and a number of startups, all of which were very compelling because people in this community get it.
I noticed this (though not in regards to the traffic - I only read Hacker News and not the associated blog/news) and had some itching curiosity as to why there was so much Erlang discussion going on.

I figured HN had some strange seating in the Erlang community :)
I think you're on the right track. In my experience, funny is not downvoted for funny's sake. However, there's a strong correlation between funny comments and short/low quality/insubstantial comments, and the latter will get downvoted.

If you want to be funny, be interesting at the same time. If you can't, then save the joke for reddit.
I have wanted to make granola. So easy, yet so incredibly tasty.

Too bad I'm stuck with a dorm kitchen.
It did bring Ruby into the mainstream.
Exactly: expansion of an existing argument is comment-worthy, but significantly rarer.

I'm missing a coherent discussion, instead I'm often stuck in a game of block & attack. One young hacker wants to show the other young hacker that he is superior. Personally, I find this is just noise... I seek comprehension.
Financial equivalent of a price-cutter - http://awurl.com/vfFnyQimZ -

feel's really warm & fuzzy @ 1% for 5 years then you start burning up. Negative amortization is evil.
Committed by me the other day:

-May god have mercy on all our souls for this code.

+Whereas once I was lost, now I am found.
If you own a personal domain, why not just setup a redirection for yourdomain.com/facebook to your Facebook profile. It's vanity, and it's free.
See similarly the 'Omniscient Debugger' for Java from Bil Lewis:

http://www.lambdacs.com/debugger/
Anyone know http://profile.to ?
I think this is simply a function of the perceived value of a story. If it doesn't have many upvotes, readers are unlikely to click on it, and therefore unlikely to upvote themselves.

Likewise, if there has been no commentary on an article, a reader is much more likely to comment on the article's site or not at all, rather than try to force a discussion.

An interesting question branching off of this is the percentage of upvotes related to the number of votes for a story. That is, how does the ratio of visits to upvotes change as a story gains traction. In my own personal experience, I don't think there's much of a difference. The only way to know for sure is to get the stats from PG.
Last year they put all the videos and slides up for free: http://sites.google.com/site/io/ (Thanks Google! ).

I'd imagine they'll do the same this year.

They seem like good sessions. Both this year and last year, I've kind of pined for more Google Apps-related stuff, but I admit that's due to an "enterprise IT" focus I have for my job, and Google in general is totally reasonably, more of a web company.

This year the Chrome sessions seem really interesting.

As with all events, you can get most of the content without going, via blogs, tweets, media coverage, and videos. It's the "hallway sessions," networking, and general inspiration and manic vibe that's unique.

I guess if you're going for API references, it's probably not worth it. If you want to corner a product manager, then it probably is worth it :D
Technical notes on o3d (Google's 3D browser plugin)
This somehow reminds me of a joke called

BOOL TrackPopupMenu(...);

in Windows that as per documentation returns an integer.
To clarify: I don't mean upvotes on the story but upvotes on comments (which is the 1. point).

>Likewise, if there has been no commentary on an article, a >reader is much more likely to comment on the article's site >or not at all

Unfortunately, this doesn't make sense logically.

Comparing the speed of upvotes on the story vs. speed of upvotes on comments over time is interesting.
<joke>He was just saying that to lull Microsoft into a false sense of security.</joke>

Still, I wonder what he thinks about Linux and the open source process today.
Coherent discussion IS a sequence of block and attack--thesis and antithesis--ideally (although rarely in practice) ending in some kind of resolution (synthesis). Comprehension without disagreement does not necessitate discussion or further remark; the best sign that you've written something of value that others have comprehended is when a comment is voted up without replies (the upvotes indicate value, and the lack of reply indicates agreement). Any other system would result in the overwhelming additional noise of a cacophony of "I agree"s with possible small variations.
Gantter Does Project Management in Your Browser
Basically, there's a place for humor and there's a place for constructive dialogue. You'd think the two would go hand in hand, but a voting system like HN proves that it's a tough thing to do.

Here's how it works. Give people a soapbox, a place for them to develop their own writing styles and personalities, and humor and pathos tend to develop. I see it in every blog that I read and like: every voice is different and unique because they're able to experiment and develop themselves, and then they get an audience.

On Hacker News, users are depersonalized. That is to say, Hacker News is about the community as a whole rather than as unalone or knightinblue. Our contributions are valued, but only as long as we're being a part of the community. Say you're having problems with an ex-wife. Say I've been learning how to play basketball. These things may be a big part of our lives, but they don't have a place in Hacker News. So we leave a part of ourselves at the door when we post here. In reward, we have a community that has thus far managed not to turn petty and immature, where you can discuss things with a lot of people without there being memorable characters and personalities distracting from the conversation.

In fact, the people whose names I do know tend to be ones I wish I didn't know. Certain people stand out to be because they do use HN in a way outside the norm. Some people I remember for being over-the-top sarcastic and scathing. Some people use Hacker News like a soapbox, an attention-getter space. I'm sure that in some ways, my own habit of writing lengthy posts stands out and irritates some people, because I'll often go into more detail than seems warranted with an initial post.

So the emphasis in what you said is dialogue. When an individual is speaking, personality becomes a big thing. But in a productive conversation, personality becomes a deterrent that distracts from the important details.
> a certain sense of satisfaction

I think this is an important and oft overlooked point. People so often talk about their 'time value of money' and use it as a justification to outsource so many parts of their life, often to the detriment of their quality of life.

Personally, I've been toying with the idea of curing my own ham - I do miss english style ham. I read a recipe last time I was in England, so I know roughly whats involved. Sounds like fun, but so far I haven't allowed myself the indulgence - one day..
The Future Of Computing Will Be Good Enough
I think Adobe made that on purpose to some extent.

The less other programs are able to handle a full-featured psd, the more consumers will likely buy the full version of photoshop (ok, some might be getting it through other sources, but at least most businesses would choose the real Photoshop over other programs).

Consider Open Office: As it handles only 99% of doc-files correctly, I found myself quickly buying the full MS-version, because you can't just manage that hassle in daily business life.

EDIT: I forgot: Great read, anyhow!!!
Why high-performance computing needs financial engineering
It is a mistake to take 'revenue forgone' too far. You would not (usually) spent that time in paid employment, so you haven't foregone that time.

Anyway, no need to get too fancy. If you don't enjoy cooking, don't do it. anyway:

"I take it as a given that everyone knows better than to quit their job—any job—to take up cracker-baking, so I attached no value to time."
http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999-05-07-01...

ESR clarifies with Ken Thompson.
A VC Revolution In The Making
Wow, never heard about salary-NDAs before this, sounds totally odd to me. Are they really commonly used? Where?
SEO Services
I found one of the best made blog on net which is giving lots of information about Link Building, SEO Services and SEO Process with its unique articles and resources which can help you to get maximum benefit of it regarding SEO. So do visit to submissiontips.wordpress.com.
I love detailed comments that include prose and give me a view of the mindset of the developer who's code I'm working on. It can really help you relate to the person and their code, and make the work easier.

Although it could just be that... if someone takes the time to write a humorous comment, they probably give a shit enough to not leave slop all over the file.
A Company Creates Market for Startup Shares
Great meetup. I'm the Canadian guy currently working on iPhone apps (Obama 8-Ball). alex at clutterme.com
Why did this have to show up right when I'm getting excited about trying Python?
Well, go check out the fonts. Some of them are nice. I'll use them.

People do actually upgrade their browsers these days. The browsers yell at them if they don't. The next versions of Firefox, Safari, Opera, and IE all support it. It's only a year or so off (probably less if you don't wait for IE6/7 to go away.)
In practice there aren't any totally novel ideas. So, if you gotta start every discussion from scratch with block & attack it gets tedious. How would a jazz musician be able to jam with new guys if they don't agree on something? I guess if hackers were Jazz musicians, the audience would hear short staccato outbursts mixed with gaps of silence.

And then there is the difference between an elegant attack, which you can learn from, or the usual trying to misinterpret a statement in their favor, which is called framing.