skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A suggestion to whoever took the screenshot: ALT + PRINT SCREEN removes the taskbar.
How would they even enforce it?

Most of these motherfuckers are just republishing AP stories anyway.
You mean each day 100 posts make it onto the frontpage at some point?
You don't have to care about the quality of the code. It affects the system whether you care or not.

. . . or: "You don't have to believe in the devil. He believes in you."
But do you keep tabs on your 'control group' or do you part ways?

The statistics would be very interesting.

I assume that plenty of projects that did get off the ground would have done so regardless of YC investing in them, and plenty of projects that YC invested in that have tanked would have done so anyway.

An effect does not even imply that it has to be positive, though I would assume that to be the case if there is one. But it might even be negative, though it would take a fair amount of research to prove that one way or the other.

Do you stay in touch with the (potential) founders that you reject and do you keep track of their eventual success or failure ?

Edit: And if you do keep track how many of the ones that you rejected have succeeded vs the ones that you have funded ?
China Web Sites Seeking Users’ Names
As a long time C++ programmer is very much appreciate expert C++ advice, even if it comes from someone who hates C++.

This was great, and I would like to add that any good programmer should know that it is easily possible to run out of stack space, especially with recursion.
I've seen crowds of hundreds doing the Numa Numa Dance.
> Will it

> - support all my hardware including printers and external monitors?

That depends on what hardware you're using -- just as it does with Ubuntu, MS Windows, and MacOS X.

> support all file and media formats?

Applications do that -- not operating systems. Installing the win32-codecs port on FreeBSD (the basis for PC-BSD) works great for me, though.

> have equivalents for all the important software?

You are aware that Linux software generally runs on FreeBSD, right?

. . . and that FreeBSD has a built-in Linux emulation layer you can enable during installation?

. . . and that the FreeBSD ports system (which PC-BSD can use) has more software in it than any Linux distribution's software archives other than Debian?
I wish you luck, honestly. But I disagree with most of the premises you outline.

Why sit and read a newspaper, full of items that someone else picked for you, when you can read a news feed that you've tailored specifically to your interests?

Because the New York Times has a better handle on what's going on in the world today than I do? I want to be informed about what's going on out there, and every day at least once I read something interesting in the Times that didn't meet some pre-defined "interest" of mine.

News producers are looking for a way to be a well-paid journalist without having to restrict themselves to a single publication.

Really? I think most staffers are happy not to be free-lancers.

"In a way, you can think of the recording industry's model as a subscription-based one -- in that they expect people to pay for access to content on an ongoing basis -- and look at how that's gone for them."

Huh? How is the recording industry's model even remotely like a subscription one? Are you still in the "Columbia House Record & Tape Club" or something?
With the (possible?) exceptions of Wikipedia and WordPress PHP is used by these sides for the fairly thin front-end layer. The core algorithmic functionality is implemented in (usually) Java and C++ and occasionally Erlang, Python and Perl.

In fact, I am willing to argue that there's more reason to use something else if your app is simpler (i.e. it's a monolithic web application): you can add functionality without resorting to a more complex multi-tier/service oriented architecture or writing C-based extensions.
Thanks for the link. While I don't disagree with the general point of the linked article, the writer PhilGoetz misstates Searle's conclusion. Also, Goetz's counter-argument - that the locus of consciousness need not be the man in the room - is addressed in the Wikipedia article too:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#System_and_virtual...
The position she's in looks like it would become painful after about 30 seconds; the sand would hurt her arms.

That was pretty distracting to realize.
Wow . . . Linux must be ready for the Enterprise, because the Enterprise buzzwords are being used to tout Linux superiority now.
The only thing you're preventing is people reminding you that you have an old version. Worms, spiders and exploits doesn't check your version and someone checking will just see that you have removed it and try anyway.
"And, I think we can assume that subscription models aren't going to scale well."

I'd be careful making that assumption. There are at least two large, well known magazines that are purely subscription based and doing pretty well (Cook's Illustrated and Consumer Reports). People value their content enough to pay for it, regardless of the delivery mechanism. Their costs are going to decrease substantially as customer preference moves to online delivery, too.

There's a great deal of content out there people will pay for and the floundering large publishing companies are responsible for a huge chunk of it. Their problem is, however, that they've attempted to move print style business models directly to the web. Delivering something at marginal cost (effectively 0 on the intertubes) while incurring massive fixed costs and counting on ads for revenue hasn't and isn't going to play out so well when advertisers don't value the audience and medium like they do for print.

ESPN has one of the more interesting models out there. They've done a really good job offering premium paid content in addition to their free web based stuff. I think you'll see other online publishers do something similar, with varying levels of success.
If the guy's generating statistics for the purpose of determining where it needs to improve, I think his stats are more likely to be useful.
So . . . the only way someone can be "unbaised" in your view is to say "What I use sucks."
We see this model in television today. The aggregators will become channels where customers subscribe to them or see ads and the aggregators pay the content producers for the rights to display the content on the sites.
C/C++ are low level languages. C++ has object orientation, but talking to C++ from Zend is very tedious (if I am not mistaken, you essentially end up passing objects as void pointers).

Python, Ruby, Perl, Java, Erlang, allow you to do systems-programming (i.e. writing daemons, doing threading and high performance event driven/non-blocking I/O) while still retaining high-level features such as reflection/meta programming.
And how will we ever pop that bubble? Wouldn't that meant that many, many middle class kids, sons and daughters of voters, would suddenly not be able to afford college? How would that ever happen politically?
Simon Willison used to have a demo and code for a date (no time) parser which was pretty cool a few years back. No idea if further work has been done on it.

http://simonwillison.net/code/js/date-parser
> was thus able to officially call that version of Linux "UNIX(TM)"

FTFY

Being "UNIX" is about passing tests and paying money. Being "Unix" is about the ancestry of the code and the design philosophy. Being "a Unix clone" happens where the ancestry of the code diverges.

That's the way most of us who know something about the subject use the terms. If it is actually an exact duplicate of the original code, we tend to call that a "copy" -- not a "clone". For instance, "I have a copy of AT&T Unix at home."
I emailed something to you about this last year. Is there anything you find useful in it?

http://exponentialspace.com/hn-churn.txt
We're not actually talking about sex, remember. We're talking about unpaid internships.

The OP was arguing that people are hypocrits, if they say "two consenting adults can do whatever they want" (behind closed doors) for sex, and then turns around and wants worker protection laws.

Nobody in this comment thread is actually talking about sex. It's all about the metaphorical comparison, which IMO, breaks down pretty quickly.

In the metaphor -- two sex vs unpaid internships -- there is no corollary for birth control. It is a red herring.

Get it?
Mobile: the sharpest nail in the newspaper coffin.
I have noticed the same thing and wholeheartedly agree with you.

Simple solution: categories with separate feeds.
That's a good point, plenty of advocacy seems to stem from 'it is what I use so therefore it must be good, if not the best'.

There seems to be an awful lot of that happening.
Still, your English is pretty good for a bot. (BTW- welcome! I always knew I'd see it here first).
It's worse than that.

Each time an interesting post (say a blog post on fractal dimensionality in the stock market) gets posted
ALL of that persons previous work gets posted as well.
So you have a head post, followed by 5 other follow up
articles which just kills Signal to Noise ratio.
That leads to the subreddit problem.
I don't see how this is backed by science in this article.
Could just need more points before reaching the RSS feed?
The RepRap is an awesome project, but it is NOT self-replicating. It can print the plastic parts which make up a small part of system Bill of Materials, at much lower resolution. It is very lossy. I use a high end 3D printer at my office and even with precision machines they are very finicky and prone to malfunction. MakerBot is similarly cool, but again it won't reproduce itself.

A sub $1000 3D printer is cool enough, lets not get carried away.
> I can't think of any field in which determination is overrated

Getting into land wars with Russia with winter approaching.
The Provider Model Pattern, Really?
i think it always said that, but had the articles present. why would he take down those articles?
I wouldn't be so certain this is committing suicide. It could be argued that providing all content for free is committing suicide as well.
I love how he puts 'copying' and 'linking' on the same level of 'bad'. You don't want me to link to your stories? Please take a class of Internet 101 - most sites would kill to have that many free links.
Fascinating set of proposals, thanks for posting them here. They seem to fall under the general category of 'automatic gain control': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_gain_control

As the 'noise' of submissions goes up, a system that automatically adapts to the amount of activity in order to determine constitutes the 'signal' will probably help HN readers cope.

I think OP's problem stems mostly from the format in which (s)he reads HN. Checking the frontpage two or three times a day doesn't lead to the same kind of overload as the RSS might. Whereas when checking the frontpage you'll see a mostly stable set of articles (with most of the churn down at the bottom few), on the RSS feed you'll see every single article that hit the frontpage regardless of how short of period of time it spent there.

Perhaps, a quick fix for HN readers coming here from RSS feeds might simply be to not send every story out via RSS, but say, only those stories that stayed on the frontpage for >1 hour.
It's strange that you hasn't done this before. Ever done interval training? Maybe your training is recreational in which case the risk of getting injured probably overshadows(?) the gains of intense interval training.
This is a seriously specious line of reasoning.

Your example is both inaccurate in critical details:

- you require me to coerce Joe into coming to touch me

- I only require Joe not prevent me from using my own pharma lab and my own materials to cook up my own batch of S

...which is why I won't even answer your question; it's irrelevant to the situation at hand (changing essential details to get the outcome you want is silly).

You're also treating Joe like he's stupid, which is not very likely if he's inventing substance S (you and I may be idiots; Joe is smart with a capital S); given that Joe's a smart cookie it's a safe assumption that Joe is well aware that he's deciding to spend 10 years developing a new technique that can be easily replicated as soon as he invents it.

He's aware of the possibility for (ii) the entire time we're negotiating (i); failing to arrive at a mutually-agreeable arrangement as per (i) (eg something close to cost-of-manufacture; it's not like I can beat that price myself, right?) is a calculated risk on his part, which doesn't always work out in his favor.

There're obvious consequences for (ii) -- among which is Joe no longer deciding to invent substance T -- but those are consequences one can opt for, in precisely the same way that Joe's inflexibility (unwilling to compromise far enough on (i)) has unwanted consequences for Joe (prompting me to pick option (ii)) that he has opted for.

Which in general is the flipside of the "patent-ignoring nations undercut incentive to innovate, making future drugs unlikely to be invented" argument: pharma companies have been extremely well aware in general of eg the situation in india and more generally the sentiment that if push comes to shove (poverty, epidemic, etc.) the right thing to do is ignore patent and manufacture; in the same way that the consequences of ignoring patents are obvious so too is it obvious that driving too hard a bargain for too long will undermine the ability to drive future bargains at all, b/c sooner or later circumstances change and your not-really customers say "fuck it".

EG: it would've been prudent in the long-term for pharmacompanies to push for a standardized international regime for temporary patent abatement (due to epidemic or poverty, etc.) that (presumbably) would have some sliding scale (dire emergencies and abject poverty == SELL AT COST, less so @ the less extreme) and (for example) some notion of compensatory patent extension (eg an extension for 2 years + 2x the duration of the abatement period); such an arrangement wouldn't be ideal, but by proactively crafting a better-than-today, even-if-not-really-good-enough compromise they could've nipped the larger issue (countries going "rogue") mostly in the bud.
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/advanced-debugging-with-j...

compares IE8, firebug, dragonfly. I think i'll need to familiarize with IE 8 Dev Tools. Opera, not sure about

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1004&me...
The only way I see that you could use that data in a constructive way is to mine the hell out of it and to use it to add value to it somehow. That's going to be pretty tricky but it certainly seems to be a better goal than to just re-invent the wheel.
I did not! Don't listen to anythiException in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
try http://news.ycombinator.com/classic
The relationship between old media and aggregators isn't so much parasitic as it is symbiotic. They both need each other. Aggregators need stories and old media needs an audience for their articles. I've discovered a few old media sites through HN and Reddit that I now read regularly. If old media closes off their funnel of new readers where will they get their audience from?
All of those, except perhaps for FTP/torrents, exist as web apps. They might not yet be on par with desktop apps, but I think it is obvious that they will be. As for the web not starting fast, going to gmail is faster than opening outlook for me.
I'm shocked that none of you have seen the real problem here. It was right there at the end of the article - this is a small percentage of the market we're talking about here, 1% in Africa, similarly small numbers in the rest of the third world.

What does that tell us? It tells us that the only reason big pharma even bothers to fight for their patent is because they are legally forced to do so; if some idiot in the US can make a case that they're not defending their market, they might have it taken away.

They don't care about poor people healing themselves; they care about relatively rich people in the US buying generic drugs because they're cheaper, even though US society can afford to pay for it.

Drug companies aren't monsters, they're corporations - machines for making money, pure and simple. They're just doing what's required of them.

Change the patent laws - and the diplomatic pressures of the US State Department - to allow third-world companies to sell generic drugs to people in third-world countries, and not people in first-world countries, and bam! Problem solved.
It's a lot too early. Until they look human, there's always the "meet in the flesh" test. When that happens, I'm not sure it'll matter much.
Keep in mind that I'm specifically addressing the situation in which Joe and I fail to come to an agreement (there's a line in there about that); much of what you're saying is more about the process leading up to (failure to reach) an agreement than what happens after you (fail to) reach an agreement.

You're somewhat wrong about knockoffs being sustainable -- generally it is sustainable, it just means that a universe of knockoffs isn't going to see new drugs. This means that pharma becomes a low-margin industry, but it's sustainable.

(Exceptions are for things like antibiotics and antivirals, which lose effectiveness over time as the wild population adapts; most other pharma products remain as effective as they ever were.)

Given the economic conditions in the third world -- india being a perfect example -- it's not surprising that india has taken the strategy it's taken; until the crippling disease-riddled poverty is taken care of the smart thing to do is to let the private sector solve the problems it can by taking a soft line on international pharma patents.

India could negotiate bulk purchases of pharma but clearly has decided it's not in its interest to do so; it's a large enough entity to get its own way and has done its own cost-benefit analyses that tip the balance in this favor; perhaps things wouldn't work out if everyone did it but then everyone isn't going to do it, anyways.

As far as Gilead goes: I can assure you that Gilead has hired mckinsey, game-theory phds, and many other eggheads to arrive at a pricing strategy in each legal region by carefully examining:

- expected purchase amount @ each pricepoint

- likelihood of country going rogue @ each pricepoint

...and that prices are set to accommodate Gilead's particular risk preference (where risk == "chance of driving a country to go rogue").
The biggest potential military threat to the US in the future does appear to be China. (IANAG: Though I am not a general, so take this with a grain of salt.)

We've already fought, in some fashion, arguably, 2 wars with them (Korea and Vietnam, though obviously they had a lesser role in the latter), they have over 4 times the population, could field a gigantic field army, have massively increased their industrial base, and we've become massively dependent on them for their manufacturing, letting ours atrophy. (Which may decrease the chance we'd start a war with them, but increases the chance it would hurt us if one happened anyway.) And Taiwan is the most likely flashpoint to start a shooting conflict since after 50+ years they still act like it's just a rebel province (hilarious!).

So yeah, if that happens, I could see how there would be a risk of hostility to Asian Americans. (Btw, I'm not a fan of that term, however, because Asia includes large parts of Russia, it includes India, Iran, etc. and yet as commonly used the term AA does not include people of those regions, which is bizarre. Therefore I like the older, but somehow now un-P.C. term of Oriental, because it more specifically refers to the culture cluster of Jap/Chi/Kor/Thai/etc.)
Plus, the governments of both countries will likely continue to want a Big Boogeyman to scare their citizens with, and focus aggression outward. The US and other countries have done it many times in the past, and I see no reason why it won't continue to happen in the future, unless some extreme change happens either to the nature of government, or the average intelligence/education/gullability of people.

Also, given the topic, I'm curious as to whether this thread will devolve into references to Hitler (bingo, too late!), or whether I'll get downmodded for using the 'evil' word Oriental. :)
Very true in my experience:

"When you take people like this and put them together with other ambitious people, they bloom like dying plants given water. Probably most ambitious people are starved for the sort of encouragement they'd get from ambitious peers, whatever their age."
If you would rather just read the slides instead of watch the video, they are here: http://www.azulsystems.com/events/vee_2009/2009_VEE.pdf
A self-replicating printer isn't that until it can build machines to go out and source the materials needed for the continued operation of the printer.
They tried to obscure personal information on the outer window, but they forgot the inner ones!
What makes you think that Adobe is abandoning Photoshop? Photoshop.com/Photoshop Express shares the branding, but it's an entirely different product targeted at an entirely different market.
shudder :)
Is there any hope for someone who is extremely willful but not all that disciplined? :/
Good points well made.

An interesting second-derivation of this is with co-founders. Two (or more) people who share a goal can spur each other on via internal competitiveness & a symbiotic pattern of compensating for dips in the other's discipline or willpower. For example I'm sure neither Lennon or McCartney would have achieved half of their combined output.
What are 'classic' posts?
As far as I know, newspaper make most of its money from advertising, not from charging subscribers.
FSDaily Security Fail (see image)