skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For those who do not live in and for the web, "whatever comes with the computer" is what gets used.

MSN wasn't anywhere near as popular as AOL. But why not? After all, it satisifed your criterion, because it "came with the computer."

Also, MSN chat is nowhere near as popular as AOL Instant Messenger

Microsoft Money (bundled with my computer) isn't as popular as Quicken.

Microsoft Works isn't as popular as Microsoft Office.

and on and on and on...

The only way bundling matters is if the program being bundled falls into the category of "Good Enough" for the user in question. IE satisfied this criterion; MSN did not.
All the lessons sound great, but in lieu of advertising or conferences, how do you make the first 10 sales? The first 100?

Surely it's not sufficient to simply "build it and they will [magically] come" unless your product is incredibly niche and solving a very painful demand.

Is the author a superb personal marketer, or did he literally sell 2 copies of his software to friends and then everything snowballed from there?

The sales graph suggests there's something else going on, and I really want to know what it is!
These ( http://www.coolreaders.com/specifications.asp ) look like one of the standard 6" e-ink screens [ http://www.eink.com/products/matrix/High_Res.html; iRex is not using the same screens as most everybody else]

You can read PDFs on those (I just got one from mybebook.com), but I do not think you're going to be happy reading technical PDFs, or anything 'printed' to A4/U.S.Letter size pages, on those 6" screens.

For freely circulated PDFs, DRM ought to be irrelevant, so the KindleDX may be right for you. Note that the iRex has touch+annotation features that you may need. It's the price of a low-end laptop, but may be worth the investment.

I'd really head over to http://mobileread.com/ and read a bit. You may even get one of the friendly locals to test one of your PDFs ;-). I don't have my iRex yet, it's next in my shopping list ...
Pedagogy of the Oppressor
The Best Places to Get Free Mp3 Music Downloads
With the current economy and the latest price hikes for iTunes, everyone is looking for cheaper ways to get new music. For most people this means swapping CDs with friends or using a P2P client. However, there are limits to the number of CDs your friends have, and P2P clients have had legal issues in the past. Fortunately, there are many legal places on the web to get all the music you want for free.
Kyro and I have had a run-in once before, he downmodded, from what I recall but cannot link-to (as it's almost a year old) was a perfectly reasonable and valuable comment. He did own up to downmodding it when I asked who did it (even though both of us were downmodded in the follow up).
I don't come to HN for jokes. Please refrain.
Until the inevitable lawsuit happens...
If you have showdead on, there is a dead-man posting in response to your comment, mixmax.
upmod posts that bring something new to the discussion, whether or not they are correct, and whether or not you agree with them.

I would find this very difficult for a post that [I felt] was not correct (and not interesting), even if it was a viewpoint which hadn't been mentioned yet in such a thread.
That depends on how you interpret and apply the feedback.

Accepting feedback for your style and manner, will help you get the substance of your argument across.
This description http://www.crunchbase.com/person/owen-byrne doesn't sound like the real story =)
I wouldn't spend more money on it again, I just found it really amusing trying to make sure there's not a tiny chance I could reliably be able to make a profit, even if minimal, by studying the statistics behind it. In the end it's like poker but even worse odds, even if you learn all the rules and even understand all the probability of each hand, you're still gambling and your odds aren't a hell of a lot better. Even if you could make a bid bot with millisecond precision it wouldn't increase your odds significantly, if at all. I too had read a bunch of blogs claiming it was a scam etc before joining.
This is absolutely true for me as well. I'll turn something as simple as writing a blog post into a gigantic project because I'm too strict with what I output. If the open source tool I'm working on doesn't perform quite as well as I'd hoped, I have pessimistic visions of it being wholly useless. If a homework problem stumps me, I simply cannot skip to the next problem or else I feel I've been defeated. Pessimism, combined with really caring, is strongly connected to procrastination.
A better way to think of it, is that procrastination is a symptom of another problem. You are referring to one potential problem i.e. not actually liking what you are doing. Some of the others responded with the problem being perfectionism, and wanting to do something that they cared about correctly. Right now I am procrastinating from fixing a bug because I cannot think of how to test it adequately and I do not want to just give it to the customer and hope that it works.
Procrastination may not be the optimal solution, but it may be much better then just ignoring the problem and pushing ahead with what you think you should be doing.
You should care less about what people think of you, and more about what different people bring to the table.

To give an example, if you met Kyro at a convention or event, and he was an informative, insightful guy who happens to not like talking about his work in prison terms, then that's his opinion.

Making a whole QQ post about it on HN is just a little childish... now, I'm brand spanking new to HN, but if this is the kind of thing that goes on here, I won't be on HN for long.
I'm curious do a lot of people feel they need to restrain themselves from writing insults on the internet? My personality doesn't change between online or offline mode, I only adapt to the company I'm with with. If anything I'm more likely to get annoyed offline by the lack of Google and the inability to verify other peoples assertions.

The problem as so many people have pointed out and I agree with is that funny comments at the root aren't intellectually valuable. One of the problems with making funny comments at root (beyond that they are just useless) is that I think people like me don't always read the article before the comments so they don't have much of a context. I can skip a thread by jumping to the next root comment if the thread is uninteresting, but I can't skip a root comment and they offer more context buildup to make funny remarks in.

Now don't get me wrong I love humor but I think it's better served within the context of slashdot, reddit, digg and so on.
Nope...Nationwide is the first. Hopefully more will follow, and hopefully this app or similar apps will become available on other types of smart phones, too.
LOL at the down-votes :)
Do all 90’s computer hackers rollerblade?
Poll: What did you think of this article?
As I approach my six months on Hacker News it's time for my first poll.

I'm trying to work out what the commnity finds interesting. I've made a few submissions that got lots of up-mods (thank you!) and many that have sunk without a trace. I regard this as to be expected.

However, further to increase my, and perhaps your, understanding of what makes this place tick, I'd like to ask about a submission I made a couple of days ago. In particular, what was your reaction.

It was about tapping a coffee cup, something you can probably do within 30 seconds of reading the items, and which contains what is, for many, a mystery. So, here are my questions:
I didn't see it.
I didn't try the experiment.
I didn't try it, and meant to do it later.
I tried it, but didn't get the point.
I tried it, but it wasn't interesting.
I tried it and found it interesting, but not enough to up-mod.
I up-modded you.
Without getting into computer nostalgia, I'd like to mention the Amiga 600. Although I can't say I ever gave much thought to the looks of it as a kid, I think it would still look great on my desktop today.

http://www.amigau.com/aig/a600.jpg
It looks to me like most 90's hackers Rollerblade (well at least in the movies), HAHA!
Ah yes, but a lot of people think Null == 0. I have seen databases where 99% of the entries were Null, because they didn't know of the one to many relationship and thought Null was a good "number".
Well, your comment:

""landing a job as an accountant"
"I wish I had gone to prison"
What's the difference?"

Didn't add anything to the discussion more than a brief joke which attacks those who have chosen a difficult, strongly certified profession different than your own 'hacker' lifestyle. It's typical of the insular cliquishness which plagues all communities, including this one, and was more nasty than funny.

Kyro's comment seemed justified and would be appropriate to say to your face if he overheard you in a social setting.

Would you have delivered your own joke face-to-face to an accountant?

Further, would you have used your reputation in that 'real world' community to try to shoot him down the day after, as you're doing now?
Some people enjoy jokes regardless of topic. Please tolerate.
I've used my Kindle 2 in Greece and Israel. Outside the USA, you won't have wireless service, but you can buy books on amazon and transfer via USB from your computer. Same thing goes with PDFs. Just download, convert to ebook reader format and transfer.
Is A ROM Machine Really Worth Its Price? | The Fitness Guides
Honestly, this is brilliant. This is pretty much a perfect implementation of a crash toolkit. I am a fan.
If you say click on the 'Fox wrapped around a planet', your grandma will not find the icon.

How about saying 'Firefox'? It looks like a fox, and its tail looks like fire, so your grandma should find it.
I'm a few years younger, but I just realized that we were probably the first group of kids to enter adolescence with access to internet porn...
1981.

2009 and Y2K rears its ugly head again.
I fall into this. Even when what I'm committing is just a markup change that doesn't even get touched by the unit tests.
ugh, I remember how we used to mock 600 - mostly because of the specs, but it was kind of ugly too. 1200 on the other hand had the specs and the looks out of all amigas.
I'm especially interested in your memory of the item. By all means go find it and try it and comment there if you're interested.

Thanks in advance to all those who tolerate these questions.
"The people here are smart"

The people here believe they are smart. Some are correct, others are not.
Jokes add noise, preventing the signal of regular discussion. The limited tolerance of jokes here isn't random, it's an effort to protect the importance and screen real estate of substantive discussion.
It would be really handy to have VM software just "built in" to the BIOS and chipset. You could do some things at this level that are just impossible at higher levels, because you know some of the hardware you're sitting on at dev-time.

I don't know about the rest of the features of this thing, but the "virtualization at the firmware level" thing has potential.
I think it's pretty safe to say that dataflow is one of the most severely underused programming paradigms today.

(I'm not fond of "visual" programming however, except where it opens new possibilities to someone who would never dream of programming the "real" way).
So much potential in fact that mainframes have worked that way since the 1960s ;-)
Humor is ever-pervasive, and there are jokes that can inform as well as entertain. "Thats what she said" style humor probably isn't tolerated, but I suspect a good line that undermines the point of the poster is both funny and contributory to the conversation.
I remember lusting over a Sam Coupe as a cool upgrade to our Spectrums as a kid. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SAM_Coupé.jpg

Also some of the Amstrad machines were quite beautiful in their ugliness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Amstrad_PPC512_open.jpg
Why is that more interesting? It looks like you're dividing revenue by employee count. A high figure there just gives you efficiency, effectively the same thing that the profit per employee gives you. It says nothing about how expensive the employees are, Google isn't actually paying 900K per head.
My opinion is that anything that doesn't add value to the discussion should be avoided. If you keep that in mind, most of the issues you raised become irrelevant.

The high level of discourse is what attracted me to HN in the first place. Browsing HN is an intellectually stimulating experience. A great side-effect is that it challenges you to provide commentary at a higher level than most other places ("when in Rome, do as the Romans do"). If someone posts a smartass comment, the level of discussion usually drops. If this becomes the norm, then the overall quality would probably drop as well, partly because there'd be less incentive for people to post comments that add value to the discussion.

The are more than enough places on the net where you can enjoy the occasional flamewar, post puns, wind people up etc. I don't think HN should be one of them.
I think these are the one-liners that HN is not a fan of.
Nice... but to me there's nothing like the stark retro-futurism of the Commodore 8032-SK: http://www.1000bit.it/lista/c/commodore/8032sk/8032sk_mio2.j...
Great bootstrapping tips!!
Nate Silver has a pretty good critical analysis of the topic (but it's from yesterday so doesn't take this particular survey into account):

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/05/is-public-opinion-cha...
'if you hear a lot about women having what you consider inappropriate abortions, then you will be more likely to label yourself "pro-life", but if you hear a lot about women being prevented from having what you consider appropriate abortions, then you will be more likely to label yourself "pro-choice".'

Logically, then, people must be hearing about more women having "inappropriate" abortions than "appropriate" abortions?
Simple formula for selling anything online
I agree. We should try to stay away from religion and sudo-political-religious discussions here. Hackers come in every style and no amount of logic will change a hackers mind about these things.
True. I wonder if this kind of thing gets tested as part of car safety testing, like crash worthiness does? It probably ought to be, with the increasing use of in-car IT & entertainment tech.
Windows 7 to open user-friendly door
You mean in an IRC channel?... That's what counts as "in person" these days? I must be growing old. (I'm 23)
I guess we're using different definitions of "personal branding".
Isn't Japan with zero natural resources as better case study?
Just because someone is wrong, it doesn't mean they aren't smart.

But at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter to me what people on here think of themselves and others as long they can articulate their opinions in an intelligent and reasonable manner.
I downvoted you because you quickly played the "personal attack" card in the same breath as you laid all the blame for what you perceive as a slide in HN quality at the feet of those who upvote different stories than you would -- which amounts to a personal attack. The obvious loop in your argument makes your comment uninteresting.
Microsoft Surface to hit market in 6-9 months
I loved some of these - that Cray "Bubbles" picture is classic, and even though I never saw a ZX Spectrum, the color scheme is awesome 80's. Some are a miss, though - the CPC 464?

If I were making a list, I'd add the Connection Machine CM-2: http://www.digibarn.com/collections/parts/connection-machine...
Now that's what a supercomputer should look like, not all these boring racks of commodity systems we get nowadays.

There should also be something from SGI - a bunch of pics are here: http://www.geocities.com/sgipics/

I'd also add the Tera MTA, a supercomputer system I'd bet few people have seen: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6270/su-tera.jpg
Barriers to entry for printing kept getting higher until the mimeograph, and I think the barrier to entry is more relevant than the overall efficiency per copy. In order to get those efficiencies, you needed a factory, essentially, and factories are easy to find and legislate about. Similarly, Prohibition didn't work because it was so easy to make your own in your own home (or the woods). Other drugs have been somewhat easier to legislate effectively against because they require more infrastructure. Marijuana is the exception, and that's also the most widely used illegal recreational drug. "Coincidence? I think not."
I'm surprised they omitted the NeXT Cube, the original Macintosh, Silicon Graphics Indigo, and the Be Box. Oh well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Space Shuttle Atlantis caught in silhouette against the Sun
Metakit (column-oriented embedded database) Python API
You essentially just called a community stupid. When provoked with such nonconstructive criticism, I'm not sure why you would expect said community to respond with anything but "No, you're stupid."
I can't view the video (refuse to install flash on 64-bit linux), but just in case anybody hasn't seen it, beej's guide to networking is pretty nice. http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/
It looks nothing like a fox unless you look quite carefully up to sizes 32x32.
Limited tolerance is the key. Zero tolerance would be equally as bad as complete tolerance, IMHO.
It might have been funny the first time, and mildly funny the 2nd time, but now every post about procrastination on every social news site on the web gets a couple of these comments. It's just noise after awhile.
Blacksocks.com: An infinite supply of black socks
On a related note, I think it's pretty cool to pop in IRC and "get to know" people from HN better. You can only tell so much about people based on static comments, and chatting freely on IRC gives you a chance to have a bit of a more free flowing informal conversation.

#startups

I'd hope that if I offended someone on here, they'd just grab me on IRC and chat, rather than post a lengthly writeup :/
.if she intended to use birth control but the birth control accidentally failed? ...if she intended to use birth control but forgot?

In general, it seems like people on the pro-life side are more likely to draw a strict boundary, whereas people on the pro-choice side are more likely to compromise. e.g. I can imagine someone saying "I'm in favor of a woman's right to choose -- but not if her choice means harming a fetus that can experience pain." I can't imagine a pro-lifer saying "Abortion means murdering a helpless infant. So before you do it, you better be damn sure you intended to check the expiration date on those condoms, but, like, totally forgot."
This made me laugh:

"D-Wave Systems of British Columbia announced a prototype quantum computer in January, 2007. It can play Sudoku."

Woohoo!
When you're mean to someone else successfully, you shift your pain to somebody else's on a psychic level.

Downmodding is an easy way to be mean, especially when you overkill a bad comment or are over-zealous with it. But in doing so, it will never resolve one's own pain.

He why I find HN a highly strung forum:

- karma in general. As mentioned it can abused: over modding up and over modding down (yet this has been recently capped).

- wanting to post a reply but not having the patience of inclination to read other people's replies first.

- unfair distribution of karma. Too many times I've posted a 1 point comment only to have a responder receive around 10: it was because of me that their comment was possible and available.

- not being encouraged to reply with apt and polite responses, even though in conversation such would be required, such as "you're right" or "thanks for telling me that" or "are you sure?" etc. Such responses could be easily modded down, hence modding has replaced discourse.
I consider humor here to be mostly unwanted noise. Most of the time IMHO, commentators' attempts at witticism reduce to just groping around for self esteem boosts and/or goading one another into flamewars. Having been at /. for many years, I've really come to appreciate and miss the (+X, Funny) header, it saved me a lot of time when screening comments. I came to hackernews for knowledge, not users' forced online group therapy sessions.
Part 2 here: http://archive.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/05/13feature.html
In most cases, the path to success contains patches of work that's hard to get really excited about.

Of course, this argument is invalid if you're able to focus on the ultimate reward, rather than the task at hand, but I just find that leads to more procrastination.

One personal trait I admire (and don't have) is the ability to just pull yourself together and get an unpleasant task done. This wins many friends and much social capital.
Video is great! I loved it! thanks!
I wonder how the economy affects results. When people feel broken down do they gravitate more toward tradition?
Dunno. Or maybe Obama is so strongly associated with being pro-choice that a bunch of moderates are calling themselves "pro-life" in reaction.
Um, no. Subsidizing an activity will get more of it. He's more likely to consider drugs a viable choice knowing that he won't have to "rob, pimp, or deal".
You haven't been invited, yet? Oops.
If Google NaCl comes to fruition, they might have to consider rewriting their arsenal of Javascript apps as x86 apps!
This is certainly one of the more potent salvos in the war on Microsoft. Come on, M$, fight back! You can do it. You used to know how to innovate...
Now coming to a laptop near you ...

Microsoft also seems to be heading that way, now. Perhaps too late - they have an extremely heavy 'backward compatibility' load, carried so far (maybe too far) on a single code base.
It's more a framework for building a database system IMO; you do what you need to do in views.
my guess is you're not seeing the whole story. could be that the alias in question is one that was made to evade an earlier ban, for example.
"Just because someone is wrong, it doesn't mean they aren't smart"

Indeed, just as being right doesn't mean they are smart - but the point I'm making is that HN users cover a range of cleverness, and that self-estimation is pointless (Dunning-Kroger syndrome). Saying "only joke if you're clever" is all but identical to saying "anyone can joke".
You would think this. Bizarrely, though, most pro-life people do not act as though they believe abortion is murder, and when some do, the others get uncomfortable looks.
When Google fails, the Internet fails
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What to do with Apple Push Notifications (Part 1)
null is icky... In java's arrayList, you can't really tell if a cell hasn't been initialized or has the value "null."
Law Firm Closes Bank Account From Pirate Bay DDo$
And the word is "crackers". Hence the title of this site.
Reminds me of the Amazon efficiency expert who "optimized" her family's laundry by creating a common pool of white socks. Most females would not pick white socks.
Adrian, to your last point -- how would you suggest the site encourage polite responses such as your examples? I agree with you that having them makes a huge difference to the character of the site, and others seeing that will take them as cues as to how to behave themselves.

Are these responses often modded down? That seems like a bizarre response for a moderator.
"software hipster" -- this speaks volumes. nice.
Ask HN: Rate My App
I think most people who say that "abortion is murder" are actually speaking hyperbolically; if you ask them "so does that mean that every woman who has had an abortion ought to be doing twenty-to-life for infanticide?" most will start hemming and hawing. I think the proportion of Americans who want abortion to be treated exactly like murder, as it is in El Salvador (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/magazine/09abortion.html), is extremely small.