skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm trying to learn Lisp/Scheme/Arc right now so that I can play around with news.arc. I've a good amount of work with numerical algorithms (statistics, matrices, graphs, machine learning...you name it), and I think there is a great deal of improvement to be had in the scoring algorithms that are used by social news sites (not just HN, but Digg, reddit, and so on).

Maybe YC could sponsor a little "Netflix Challenge" for Hacker News, where the 1st-place prize is an automatic bid to the upcoming YC round.
The co-founder is incredibly important. They provide a sanity check, and hopefully some ability to divide work up evenly.

Where are you located?
What is this, distributed captcha hack?
I was in Nashville TN for 3 months, then Louisville KY for 5 then Huntsville for 2 now I am in L.A. I do contract work for banks so I have to move around quite often.
Wow. That's so unique to indie music. I couldn't even imagine any other genre of music who's quality varies.
Doesn't this interfere/clash with the XFN specs?

Because, XFN uses rel attribute of links to define relationships.
That sounds about right.

Unfortunately I tend to find both right as they stop being cool. (I joined on erlang day)
I read RFS1 too, and contenture.com is not at all what I got out of it. Honestly I'm confused as to why that RFS led you to such a specific conclusion, not to mention one that doesn't match the RFS (why would contenture need a good writer?).

On contenture itself, I just don't think this is a good idea. Its been discussed on HN before, but my basic problem with it is that you'd have the top tier sites (i.e. NY Times) subsidizing the less known sites. No matter how the pot is distributed, you'd have the top tier site sharing revenue with the less known sites. Why would they join in?

I've got a lot of other issues with the contenture model, but that's the obvious dealbreaker. Also, micropayments are so boring, I don't understand why they are thought of as a panacea.

A more interesting approach is the Hulu model. Try searching for a show Hulu doesn't have, like South Park. They'll still show search results for it, and direct you offsite to watch the episode. As a result, the user learns that Hulu is the place to find online TV shows, regardless of the network. In this manner they've inserted themselves between the product makers and their customers, which is a recipe for $texas. And should they later arrange a syndication deal for South Park they can seamlessly change from offsite links to onsite links.

A key point with the Hulu model is that they still control a huge chunk of the best content. As much as possible, they're only "outsourcing" the long tail, low ROI content.

Its not a particularly new idea. Google largely operates the same way. Google has become the starting place for the web, even if your destination is offsite. When they find areas where they can replace offsite content with their own they do so (think Gmail, Youtube, and the ill-fated Knol). Blockbuster video does the same thing (owned by Paramount, who makes films), and so does your grocery store (with in-house brands where they see high-margin opportunities).
I didn't even know we had karma here. I just submit articles I find interesting in hopes that they'll be interesting to the community.

Also, I'm not quite clear on what you're having problems with. Why can't you "go the the new page and up-vote more interesting stories"?
Is this worth my time to read? My bogo-sensor was going off like crazy after reading the first couple of paragraphs.
You're looking at it backwards.

Right now, people communicating on microblogging services end up having three things that need to be working for them to get through:

1. The µblog
2. The URL shortener
3. The original site

Various URL shorteners might fall over for a bit, or any other number of stupid things.

In the wordpress example, they registered wp.me so they could shorten the URLs sanely: http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2009/08/16/m...

If you support shortening, you reduce a dependency. You can still use tinyurl or bit.ly or whatever in this model, but if you don't, it'll be done for you.
Oh I see the bigger problem is the constant moving. There are bound to be other individuals in most of those areas looking to do a start-up, but that would require a huge investment of time for you to seek out the local community. Makes sense to me.
I think it fits fine:

This attribute describes the relationship from the current document to the anchor specified by the href attribute. The value of this attribute is a space-separated list of link types.

I'd say a shorter version version of a URL represents a relationship to the current URL naturally.
Wrinkles, literally, stall production of Boeing's new 787
I find that reading fiction on vacation really stimulates my programming brain. There's a lot to be said for letting your mind roam free for a bit. I believe PG talks about the value of letting your mind roam in one of his essays (or possibly Hackers and Painters). In particular, I've found Neal Stephenson's books to be great for this purpose. If you haven't read Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, or Diamond Age, I would suggest reading one of them. It will satisfy your need for some "geek" content on vacation, without being all business.
Then why don't microblogging sites find a way to accomodate long URLs. Why do we have to start defining short (which is subjective) urls?
Twitter transformed into botnet command channel
"One fascinating limitation [...]"
Sounds highly unlikely. The sub has a huge area across which to dispose of the waste gas, the volume can't be that high that they need to release big bubbles at once. The chances of a satellite pointing at the right area of sea being able to detect even a metre-cross bubble against wave background ... I really can't see it.

Perhaps they should blow bubble rings and disguise as a dolphin?
Flag if you don't think it fits the guidelines.
I did a quick search and didn't see anything too relevant. What is the difference between the classic and standard views?
At it happens, I'm currently looking to sell 3 Haro BMX bikes that I bought for a Scout group aways back and never ended up using. It's tempting to think I could pull off what these guys did and get a good price for them, but I can't back up the claims they made by citing my own biking expertise.

Still, they've definitely motivated me to try harder than I otherwise would have...
Don't get a co-founder just for the sake of your YC application. In fact, it might hurt you chances of getting accepted if you don't have the right person. From what I have seen in the YC application you need sell not only your idea but also your team. There have been cases where single person team have been accepted, e.g., Dropbox.

You should keep looking for a co-founder irrespective of all this. You should be able to sell your idea to someone smart and intelligent until then you really don't know how good the idea is.
Webmasters could have been giving thoughtful consideration of the length & structure of their URLs all this time, yet they have not been doing so. A voluntary system like this slightly better, but couldn't it be ignored just as easily?
You definitely need a co-founder. You can do without one, but it's nuts. A co-founder is good to bounce ideas off of, take care of tasks so you can focus on your needs, and fill out your weaknesses.

If you are already the techie, then you don't need another techie founder necessarily. You probably need the business strategy/marketing person to help you work with early customers to fill out the product and generate revenues.
I hate to rain on your bonfire, but here's what you're up against to profit from this: I took your two examples & threw them into Amazon (UK):

Quest for Adventure by Chris Bonnington (Paperback - 19 Sep 1991)
23 Used & new from £0.01

Return to Go (Hardcover)
by Jim Slater (Author)

12 used from £0.25

So besides the critical mass issues raised by other commenters, your information providers would have to be either cheaper, more experienced (neither realistic), or somehow provide a far richer experience than these two well-regarded examples. That's a big hurdle & it doesn't scale well.
Statistical Mechanics: Entropy, Order Parameters, and Complexity (free ebook)
Care to explain the lighttpd issue?
I hate uncommented code. When reading code I want to know what the programmer is trying to achieve (which is not infrequently different from what his code actually does).

I also often find myself wanting to just get a quick overview of what's going on instead of needing to dive in to the nitty-gritty of the implementation of a given block of code. Well-written comments help me get a bird's eye view of the code.

Certainly, uncommented code which is well written is better than uncommented code which is poorly written (and arguably better even than commented code which is poorly written), but good comments only improve code.

Still, despite my disagreement with the article, I'm upvoting it, because I think it's important to discuss issues such as this.
The source is open. Go build that. Users will either respond to it, or they won't.
"The main targets of nukes will be nuke launching sites [...]"

Probably not. If USA takes one in the eye (Washington DC) from Russia then they want to hit Moscow immediately after to show that a) we're fighting back, stop now if you don't want to end the world, b) everyone will notice and possibly you might cut off the head before further damage is done.

Yes silos will be a priority target, but not necessarily above major cities.
How to Legally (?) Obtain a Second Passport
Agreed. Hence the "interpret as you see fit".

The fact is, to the site, an upvote means "please move this up the page", and a downvote or flag means "please remove this". At a most basic primal 2-year-old communication level, up is "yes" and down is "no".
Too True Comic on US Health Care
Classic counts the votes of only the users who have been with HN for > 1 year.
TLS will break your mind in the most delicious way. I can't recommend it enough. As for practicality, I think that the world is trending in directions that make becoming comfortable with recursion more important.
Another great hacker fiction read: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
This article is spam
Yes, I know what pointing accomplishes. But it's also very effective to communicate without marking up my screen in greasy finger prints. Everyone — everyone — who thinks that they can point at something on a screen effectively without touching it, is just fooling themselves. You will touch my screen if you point at it, and I'll know you touched it, because your fingerprint will be there, painted in disgusting finger grease distorting my beautiful pixels. Maybe not every time, but most of the time.

There is a place for prized asshole behavior. Frankly, touching someone's screen when it clearly bothers them is pretty damn rude, imo. If the only way to get them to stop is to make them uncomfortable doing it in your presence, that seems fair to me.

I'd react roughly the same way if someone rubbed their genitals on my screen while I was using it. It's that offensive to me. (Actually, I wouldn't mind the genitals quite as much. They're probably cleaner.)
No doubt a co-founder is incredibly important if you're applying to YC, if just for the reason that PG says so. However, I started my company without a co-founder and we're doing fine. If you want to start a company, you shouldn't let anyone tell you that you don't have the necessary prerequisites.
One thing that can help the whole community is to look at the list of stories submitted by noobs

http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories

once in a while and flag those that are plainly spam or very badly off-topic. Sufficiently many flags kill a submission.
I was going to suggest "Snow Crash" as well, so I'll just second it. Very cool book.
I understand that it's not a huge deal, but that's not really the point. Do we really need to update every page on the internet with a short url? Just in case it gets linked on twitter or a shorter version is needed for some reason?

It just seems a little ridiculous to me.
Habbo Principal
I think you're looking at the problem wrong. Follow my logic here. National News will not be reported by local agencies in the future. There's just too much web coverage (they might syndicate some national source but they won't cover it). So take that out of the equation. With that gone what is a local news paper supposed to do? To me the answer is "the stuff going on locally"

So what I would do would be to build a platform for local news agencies of the future.

Define all the local news sources out there: Police Info, Fire Dept. Info, Local Events, etc… Then provide software (web based I would assume) that would allow a business of a few people to set up shop in a small town (or more likely cluster of towns) and deliver the local news. They would have to make the actual deals with the Police depts., Fire Depts, Local Convention Centers, et al. to provide the info but you could make a thriving business just by selling them pre-made software that makes collecting that info easy.

Distributing that news is another area. Again, the paper part probably isn't going to live on. But local agencies could easily make their money off of websites if those web sites were done well. I personally would bundle distribution with the content collection software but you could probably make some money just off software that would create a professional website. Say that supports syndication and is viewable on mobile phones (keep in mind most small businesses are still paying thousands to con men to design static web sites). Allow for alternate distribution like sms alerts and you could have an even more viable product.

You'll have to pardon the long reply but the point I'm making is one that Microsoft made years ago which is the real money in technology is made by those who create software that empowers others.
Not new, but:
entrepreneur
n. A person who organizes, operates, and assumes the risk for a business venture.

[French, from Old French, from entreprendre, to undertake; see enterprise.]
Display your current git branch as part of your bash prompt
You don't need the C standard library to write algorithms in C. Therefore you can do computational complexity analysis that is independent of the C language implementation.

(I don't actually think you could name a function from the ISO C standard library that differs in complexity across implementations, but it's besides the point).
Before you mod this, bear in mind the original grandparent poster removed a rather crass sentence from his post about a girlfriend holding you back in life. I would vote his comment up as it is now, but it was not like that when I modded it down.
Emmett and I figured this out the other day at the request of one of our other engineers; I thought that some of you might be interested in it.
Or Scrabble :) I've recently got rather addicted on Scrabble and it's amazing how much you soak up if you actually look up the words that get played against you (and if you play against a computer, it'll play some crazy stuff against you). iPhone Scrabble is now my main addiction..
It is great that the full transcript for the video is shown on the web page.

I never bother to sit though a whole video. I can read much faster than anyone can speak.
Well, my girlfriend and co-founder flips out whenever I touch her monitor. I understand where she's coming from, and we're still together, so you can probably get away with warding off your co-workers paws.

This assumes of course that they don't harbor some secret dislike for you, such that your complaints might touch off an avalanche of retribution that leaves you jobless, homeless, and pariahed by society at large.
I've had successful exits founding companies in all three ways (solo, with one co-founder, and with two co-founders) and from my experience having two co-founders has been the best experience. One co-founder means you get a bigger slice of the pie, but also means that there's no mediator if the two of you can't agree. And take it from me, there will be many times when you don't agree. That's why I prefer two co-founders, because when two people take a side they're often able to convince the third member.
My setup guarantees that I get at most one:

"WTF...oh...Dvorak. Here, you type."
The benefit to filtering input is that it is less error prone for programmers. The filter on output method that most Rails programmers use involves setting it up on an output-by-output method. I like the input technique because it only needs to be configured once.

I think the risk of new techniques getting by this filter are low (although the risk of the filter having bugs is high, as judged by the number of bugs that popup in more critical software). In XSS there are only a limited set of attack vectors (iframe, javascript, flash), and those get filtered completely. The underlying filter is based on whitelisting, so it's not like new additions to the HTML spec are going to open security holes before we have a chance to close them (it's the opposite, new, safe HTML additions will need to be explicitly allowed before they can be used).
Communication - Vital to a Young Business
I'm only 27 so take this with a pinch of salt but I'm finding that true "insight" tends to take the form of making connections between seemingly unconnected things. To make these connections requires that you have, of course, an inquisitive, sharp mind, but also a broad knowledge-base to pull from.

So don't limit yourself to one discipline. If you're into comp sci, don't just read comp sci papers. Try some humanities or even art from time to time. The most unique ideas seem, to me, to come from taking knowledge from one field and adapting it into another. I've learned so much by taking a casual interest in fields unrelated to what I do and certainly feel "sharp" when I see connections between things I'd be otherwise ignorant of if I were a "specialist."
The question is specifically about XSS, so the context is by definition HTML and Javascript.
I've learned that people like you exist, and there is an easy way to deal with them. Simply flat-out refuse to engage in a meaningful dialog unless you stop touching my fucking screen. In fact, I'll even get up and walk away if necessary. ("How about we go discuss this at your monitor?")

It's not about the expense, and calling it a pet peeve is very dismissive. It's about respect and personal space more than anything else.

Consider this: I'm more comfortable without pants on. When I work from home, in my own space, I'm usually not wearing pants. But when I come into the office, I put on pants, because I have some modicum of respect for the people I work with, and I know that pantslessness is going to make people uncomfortable.

Your behavior doesn't bother you, but ignoring the fact that it bothers others is the very definition of rudeness. Do you also lick strangers?
This is phrased almost as a guessing game, so forensic analysis of RFS 1 is in order.

The phrase "you can't have aggregators without content" and suggestion that a writer is needed implies that this is content creation, not aggregation.

One way to start from making money is to let users pay to get what they want.

Here's one place it could lead: Let readers bid (or paying subscribers vote) on what they want investigated or discussed. Journalists are actually quite cheap, so a few hundred interested parties could fund a weeklong investigation by a professional journalist. You could also solicit leads and research assistance from the readers.

Then, once the story is published you still get any ad revenue, which could be targeted to the audience that you serve. Journalists could liveblog updates as they investigate, encouraging supporters to give additional funds to help them through the search. The editorial staff could float suggestions for stories and let users vote with their wallets on what they want investigated.

In this way users could also directly support the journalists who do good work, and the organization would scale by the level of interest.

Probably not what pg had in mind, but it doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility.
I'll also add that the holy grail is: technical founder + product/design founder + business/sales/marketing founder. That's what is currently working for me.
Interesting document, though I am not sure about the benefit/cost of transhumanism moving from ideal of a voluntary social order to commiting to the idea of liberal democracies, which is mob rule.
You should just not have conversations near other people's monitors about what's on their monitors. Ask them to come to your cube, or take a screenshot and circle the spot in question.
Anywhere, except... '[my laptop is] not doing what I want it to do. I'm trying to connect to the internet and it won't allow me to.'
I have all of those skills and I have been looking for a co-founder that does also. Perhaps I should just focus on a co-founder that has one of the aforementioned talents.
Upvoting a submission also adds it to a list of saved submissions. Thus, if one uses that list to remember interesting articles, discussions, or things that one wishes to read, upvoting many articles which one does not necessarily want saved would dilute that list.
The way I see is that this is how things start: one article like this is submitted and then each week another one is added, like a Fibonacci sequence until you have how Proggit or Digg is today.

And you can say that Hacker News will stay pure or whatever but this is exactly how things began with other sites and then slowly but surely things became less and less relevant. I do think that it will take quite some time before Hacker News gets that way but I'd rather be strict now and nip it in the bud before regretting it later.

With the analogy of tags I would say that if you had the two most basic tags: "hacker-related" (programming, science, tech and related fields) or "non-hacker-related" (ie. sleep habits) Then I would only have hacker-related tagged material here.

Now I realize that in the case of Digg they did purposely branch out to expand their community. And I doubt pg would do the same. Thus the speed at which Hacker News would descend in quality would be much slower, but in my mind it's not a sense of speed it's a sense of direction. And right now Hacker News is descending from the direction and the kind quality we had.
Nope. At least where I see from the simulator. Either it's gone completely -- escape velocity -- or it falls right back down. I think the problem is that orbiting bodies are continually "falling over the horizon", ie, there is a high degree of speed parallel to the ground underneath them for orbiting to work. (Or a low speed with a small pull of gravity, etc. But always some significant forward motion)

You can do some interesting things with packages that have thrusters on them. If I remember correctly you could have a 300-400km railgun shoot boxcar-sized payloads into orbit with very little additional thrust. It's a helluva cheap way to send mass into space -- once you spend a couple hundred billion for the railgun setup (which is still a good deal, btw)
Or how about Twitter just not count URLs against the length and be done with it.

For SMS, Twitter could just append a very short URL pointing to the actual tweet on their site, where you'll be able to see the URLs.
There's also that michelson-morley came out around the same time. Whether or not Einstein heard of it, there's very few ways of combining e&m & newtonian physics in light of that experiment. (Pun intended)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativity#S...
Apparently the fizeau experiment did influence his thinking
There is a place for prized asshole behavior.

Probably not. There's always a better way to say something. Acting like an asshole is just a fallback for not understanding how to effectively communicate. I'd be annoyed at a coworker if I had the dialogue you posted above with him/her.