skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great points.

"I'm not the smartest guy here, so it may not be a whole lot, though..."

Please don't ever think that. 'Smartness' is just a function of few things which are in your control, at least in the long run. Thinking "I am not smart" is self-fulfilling.
The real experts here would never "tear you up". They'd just teach.

That's a good heuristic for what a lot of us are looking for here: not necessarily agreement, but a chance to learn. Some comments promote learning more than others.
Apologies if I came across as being judgemental about it - I'm not, really. My personality doesn't suit the military, and I'm lucky enough to be able to find employment elsewhere, but obviously there are people for whom one or both of those is not true. Fair enough.

(As an aside, I'm not going to comment on the moral legitimacy or lack thereof of soldiers, wars, etc., because in this context it's more a matter of personal moral beliefs than anything else.)

What bothers me is the notion that people are not responsible for their own actions.
I do. That's a pretty broad (and off-topic) question. I can't speak for everyone at the company, but if I had to sum up how I personally feel: hopeful.
thats cool, might have to use that for the work lan gaming sessions ..
BackType (YC S08) Is Hiring Search And Software Engineers
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466373
Ooh, very interesting - thanks!
You advocate verbosity to the author of arc?
Ask HN: Help me become a hacker
I eventually want to become involved in web-based start-ups through personal projects or maybe something more serious.

Right now I’m at University (studying a non-related science) and I would like to have sufficient ability to take ideas from paper to prototype for when I leave in a couple of years time. I’m currently learning Ruby because I’ve been told it has a friendly syntax compared to PHP, Java etc. I already have knowledge of HTML, CSS and I’m aware of JavaScript.

Up until now it’s going great. I understand pretty much everything in “Learn to Program” (Chris Pine) and I’m having a lot of fun but I do have some questions at the same time:

On a whole, what are the hardest/most boring parts of building web based software? What are the easiest/most enjoyable parts?

How important is developing with efficiency and scalability in mind?

What should I dedicate most of my learning time to?

How do I know if I am producing spaghetti code? I can’t tell good code from bad code.

There are just some of the things from the top of my head for the moment. I know the questions are pretty broad so answer what you want. Don’t flame me please :D
Right, and Linux has no compatibility issues if you use the OS that comes with the hardware.

But then again when people do not use the OS that comes with the hardware there may be some issues. And then bizarrely people inevitably blame Linux. I am pretty sure that installing OSX on a PC is just as hard or probably harder than installing Linux on a Mac. But people always complain about Linux.
On invitations, who would have invited me to read and participate? I live and work overseas and don't know anyone else that uses HN. I would feel too intimidated, and as though I were begging, to approach an existing user to ask for some sort of endorsement or invitation.

How might it work?

I think HN could do worse than add an intro guide for newcomers that carefully explains the difference between this and other sites the newcomer may have experienced before. e.g., a big difference IMO is the lack of playing for +1 Funny as is done on Slashdot. "Like Slashdot, but with just Insightful and Interesting." ;)
An alternative is to post an approving reply to the user you agree with, rather than a disagreeing reply to the user you disagree with. In some threads where I see a lot of trolling, I just liberally use the downvote button and don't comment at all. I try to post most of my comments in threads where a lot of participants are acting thoughtfully, unless I can get in VERY EARLY with some substantial information that is unfamiliar to most other participants on a perennially controversial issue.
Why consider it the Starbucks of Mexican when it's owned by McDonald's, a better example than any of the companies mentioned thus far.
What happens if you lose the cheap 200$ phone, do you still have to pay for the 2yr contract? Do you get another phone for the same contract or do you have to make another contract?

Anyway, that is not my experience at all with Nokia. They are very popular here in Europe because there is no carrier lock-in and anyone can get any phone that they want. This means that the best phones tend to win, not the ones that are the most subsidized. The high-end Nokia series are N (multimedia) and E (business).

Your two-button key combination is either a bug, or you didn't lock your keypad.
Bing getting a fall refresh, incl data from Wolfram Alpha
Interesting; may I ask what was the example of 'News2' working?

Regarding the exclusivity of the core group of users, I understand that would tend to be the outcome. But I think the 'forking' method would be a little more dynamic than just locking down the user list. It would allow new, high quality users to come on board, if they really wanted to.

I realize how 'classist' this sounds, and it makes me a bit uncomfortable. But as we all know, good things came come out of dwelling on uncomfortable topics.
Even that is a shame. Is the actual full size image available?
While, say, the outright cruel attacks by some anti-Vietnam protestors to returning vets was unhelpful, I don't see why I should celebrate people who are fighting wars of conquest for the sake of oil. I don't think they're bad people, and understand that they probably imagine they are fighting to protect our freedom, but I think, if anything, I do them a disservice by honoring their violent actions, however well-intentioned they may be.
What's the problem here? You asked, I answered.
That is excellent advice! I am (unfortunately) a 5 minute voice mail rambler, which my wife often makes fun of me for. Make it an elevator pitch, I'm going to remember that.
Sexing Angelfish - Angelfish Tips
Pacifism works if everyone in the world is a pacifist. Barring that, there always exists the possibility of a situation where you will have the blood of many on your hands by refusing to take action against a single person.
ooh ooh, time for me to dust off and drag out the suggestion for another set of vote buttons to separate "I agree/disagree" and "good/poor contribution"?

That way you can acknowledge the wit in zingy one liners and agree with political and ideological statements while still shoving them down to the bottom as being poor contributions. You still get the feeling of being able to chime in while not facing the "I agree so I don't want to downvote" dilemma.
The sender knows it's invalid. How does the recipient know?
The second "Successful entrepreneurs move in packs" might be a product of the YC experience. It is a known fact that tech entrepreneurship is a lonely endeavour - not many people understand or care about what you're doing. Having a whole bunch of people with the same passion that are roughly at the same stage as you will inevitably tend to create a "wolfpack" trying to conquer the world.

But whether this is a trait of a successful entrepreneur is not so clear. I'm not saying it isn't so, just that the poster could be biased by the YC wolfpack experience. Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, for instance, weren't wellconnected when they started out with Kazaa and in the early days of Skype. I have several friends that are lone wolf entrepreneurs, and don't have many close friends or business associates in the strartup world. And some of them are very succesful.
I remember seeing papers and presentations on go! from eight or so years ago. Fujitsu Labs of America used it to build some multiagent systems. It drew on many years of previous work by Clark and McCabe, which I first came to know of in the mid 1980s.
Same thing with Five Guys (not sure if they've spread beyond the East Coast).

Very simple menus seems to be a hot trend recently.
Adding more weight to your point, I read that McDonald's divested their stake in the Chipotle chain, giving the reason that they wanted to focus on increasing revenue at their own restaurants.
Remote Exploit: Crashing Windows 7 and Server 2008
Yes I'd agree with the other reply that "pro patria" is "for [your] country", and has nothing to do with the word "fatherland".

(And yes I did study Latin for about 10 years).
It's an interesting point but I don't think it's the total value. I'm in my early 40's and the attraction for me is reconnecting with old friends from high school and college ( I use linkedin for the equivalent reason with old colleagues and business acquaintances). To me, it's what classmates.com could have evolved into with different management.

I'm certain I'm not the average facebook user, but that's the value add for me.
Sidux 2009-03 - Review and Commentary - Linux Critic
Did you ever read Shakespeare?

Couldn't make heads or tails of his writing. Maybe because it's shifted so much in the intervening centuries that it's only marginally comprehensible to someone who learned the modern tongue?

How has Gutenberg changed the rate of change in languages? Has greater availability of printed materials held things steady longer?

How is the Intertubes changing this? Has the ability to instantly view the work of people representing a zillion languages accelerated change?
Ask HN: Best coffee shops/daytime hacker hangouts in San Francisco?
I find myself camping out in SF quite frequently between meetings trying to get work done. I'm getting tired of Starbucks and Peets. Any good places with ample wifi & power outlets?
UX Fail: Colorblindness
Right now an article about veterans is the #3 post on the homepage and has an enormous number of points.

Good luck with that.
I would just build and release something. You'll learn quickly what code is good and what is bad from experience.
Parallel QuickSort using Go
Maybe if we're lucky Azul will go broke and Google will buy up the talent.
It happens when you've been in business for more than a few years. Every phone manufacturer except Apple and Palm has this "problem".

The local Nokia website allows me to choose a phone by features (e.g: bar, slide, etc; should it have bluetooth, wifi, GPS, etc). This -again - is typical of every phone manufacturer on this planet that has more than three models to sell.
Different countries personify their nations in different ways, or not at all. The Latin word patria is feminine, and Cicero and others personified Roma as a woman.

That said, 'fatherland' is not necessarily an unreasonable translation of patria, depending on the context. (It does have some unfortunate overtones now, but that's accidental.)
I apologize for the off-topicness. I'm looking forward to more Yahoo search innovations :). DDG uses both BOSS and YUI btw.
People always want to write the third person possessive as "it's", presumably because they're thinking the "'s" is needed to indicate possession.

Why doesn't this mistake carry over to the gendered forms? That is, why don't people write "hi's" or "her's"?
What about parents who don't want filtered sites on their own computers, just on their kids? I think Google's approach is really reasonable. If you know how to clear cookies, you know how to go to a different search engine to find what you want. The colored balls also make it easy to check from a distance what your child is up to.

I wouldn't want to be blocked based on IP, especially since it appears your implementation doesn't allow it to be undone. People search for porn, including parents. I like what DDG is up to, but this implementation is majorly flawed.
I don't think the problem is the number of features really but maintaining the simplicity or ability to access the features you need. For any given product there are probably a core set of features that everyone wants and beyond that each additional feature pleases some other slice of the customer group but before you add that extra feature you should probably consider what that might cost you in terms of maintaining the simplicity of access and ease of use of your core features.
I'm only guessing, but the downmods may actually be because of disingenuous rhetoric. Example: "you need to fix that, in every programming language."

This problem only exists if indentation is significant in the language as a way of demarcating blocks. This is exactly the reason for the suggested syntactic redundancy. A reasonable person can accept the tradeoff, but it's not reasonable to insist that the tradeoff isn't there at all.

Edit: the proposed scenario is readable code. It is, in fact, disingenuous to ignore that. It isn't candid to claim apathy, either.
Atlanta Startup Weekend 3 - this weekend (Nov 13-15)
hey there T., good seeing you here :)

An invitation based system could work, but there would have to be some kind of 'fast track', some people are only here because their stuff was once discussed on HN and then signed up to be able to provide a different point of view.

If they would have to wait for an invite that would take some really good stuff out of the mix.
I'm sorry to say, but your understanding is wrong. As another poster mentions, the poem (Ode III, 2) is from a series of highly patriotic poems, often called "the Roman odes" as a group. (That name is modern. It covers Odes III, 1-6.)

Many people feel that there are various levels of implicit irony or criticism in Horace's pro-Roman or pro-Augustan poems, but the surface level is clearly positive.
But every In-N-Out I've ever been to has a line out the door. Taco Bell may have a larger menu but I doubt they have anywhere near the per-store revenues or profit margin of an In-N-Out.
Remote SMB Exploit: Crashing Windows 7 and Server 2008
I think the philosophy is that a comment such as the above is (or should be) sufficiently inappropriate that anyone posting it here is either consciously trolling or oblivious to his environment. If he needs to be explicitly instructed not to post that, he will also be inclined to post a thousand other crappy comments, each of which are, as Tolstoy might or might not have said, crappy in their own way.

The best clarification possible is to create a sea of high-quality comments around his, so that he can contrast them with his, and learn.
A quick Google search says TV ads in prime time is $25 CPM...

How is online targeting better? The site might have a demographic profile, it can avoid showing an ad more than once per user, but it's nothing like search targeting...
I'm trying to make this a zingy one liner, because it wouldn't be such a good comeback unless it also fitted within the 8-10 words that the parent post was complaining about.

It is supposed to reference the idea that there isn't any intrinsic merit in verbosity, and that we often prize writing that is pared down and says only what it needs to - prose or code, and as a group prize languages that allow conciseness with joy going to Ruby, reverence to R and J, and fear and loathing to XML.

Particularly PG who has written more than once about Lisp and how it allows dense code to express a lot, so much so indeed that he reduced function creation to 'fn' in the language that backs this very site on which you are suggesting longer comments are the answer.

(See? Not so insightful, sharp and cool now, is it?)
Please don't; it compounds the problem. If you do, can I suggest that you say, "I'm going to delete my comment in a little while. Can you delete yours?"
Indeed -- the whole point of projects like that is they make you a better programmer. The program itself is just a nice side effect.
same goes for me; been reading this site for ages. Made an account not that long ago when I finally gave up on reddit, after giving up on digg. Both for the same kind of reasons.

With popularity comes the masses and that will always lead to lowest common denominator winning out. Hopefully there will never be any lolz cats on here!

Great job btw pg.
I liked raganwald's post, agreed with it, and think that he's generally a very bright and interesting guy, but I still flagged the article since I thought it wasn't really hacker news. pg can just up and kill stuff though, and doing more of that would set the tenor of the site.
The network effect. All your friends, family, etc are on there. Using their real names.

You want to get back in touch with Joe that you knew in 5th grade? How are you gonna do that over SMTP/IMAP? Easy on Facebook.

Or think about it this way: your aunt wants to put out photos of her family's recent vacation for everybody she knows to see. Is she (if she can possibly help it) going to go into her email app (or, worse, webmail) and make sure she's got all the right names with their associated somewhat-cryptic (well certainly more cryptic than a Normal Human Name) email addresses selected from her address book? Her address book (if it's even populated at all) probably doesn't have 10% of the email addresses that she wants to send to. And 1/2 of those are out of date or mistyped.

There's still plenty of room for separate services that do things with more options and with a broader reach. But for the basic cases (which is a LOT), having a single shared service that nearly everybody's on (and on which they don't have to remember a username->Real Name mapping), is a tremendous asset.
nationalism is a disease. using people's pride in arbitrary lines is just another in a long list of ways those in power get dumb kids to kill and be killed for their power games.
There are a bunch of coworking spaces in the city. I think all have monthly fees, but you can drop in and check them out:

http://citizenspace.us/
http://www.parisoma.com/
http://www.sandboxsuites.com/

Panera in SOMA is right beside the caltrain and has lots of outlets.
To represent a contrary viewpoint: I haven't seen more than a handful of the patently useless accounts whereas I've noticed more and more "big names" showing up on HN.

Just the other day in the Python language moratorium story I was asking about a particular PEP making the cut-off and the author of the PEP responded. I was blown-away.

The HN experience balance is still massively in favor of those latter moments rather than the former.

The level of the technical discourse is still higher than any other general technology site, even if there are a few ankle-biters around now.
A good title for this comment would be "20 Reasons why you shouldn't be blogging."

I often feel like I should be writing more about what I'm learning from my startup. Then I remember how embarrassing most of these lessons are and decide to save those stories for a day when they can do me good. Sometimes perhaps it's better for people to not hear from you for a while if you've got nothing good to report.
Please fully read my blog post next time. The last paragraph states that I wouldn't bet much on Facebook being around in 10 years.
Ask HN: Please suggest a name for my Django app
Hello,

I am looking for a working name for a demo app that I created in Django. I used the development server and now I want to buy a domain and migrate to hosted server so that I can demo the app. Here are the slides for what the app does. http://www.slideshare.net/zeynel1/swimswith-demo

Basically, I have names of lawyers and schools that they went to. I sort by school and declare that "Lawyer x knows Lawyer y" if they graduated from the same school the same year.

In the finished app I will add more relevant criteria to make it like commercial CRMs (such as InterAction) used by law firms.

I have been using the name "SwimsWith". Do you like the name? What suggestions do you have?

Thank you.
Air launch makes a few things easier. You save a little bit on the inefficiency of fighting gravity for those first few seconds getting off the ground, you save a lot more by easing the design envelope of your rocket nozzle.

It's difficult to make a rocket nozzle that works efficiently at the range of pressures from sea level to vacuum, at 50,000 ft atmospheric pressure is nearly 0.1 atm. Because of the exponential nature of the rocket equation even a slight increase in engine Isp can translate to a significant increase in payload (or decrease in vehicle size) or even cross the line of capability. For example, LOX/Kerosene engines tend to top out at a sea level Isp of around 309 seconds, though upper stage LOX/Kerosene engines have been built with vacuum Isps of 353 seconds. This translates to 17:1 and 12:1 mass ratios, which easily makes the difference between feasible and infeasible rockets (17:1 is at the edge of rocket building techniques, 12:1 well within it).
Here is my take at the questions you pose:

- The hardest and most boring part of a startup is all the stuff that businesses have to do, but that you don't personally find interesting. I hate accounting and taxes, but I have to do it. Some people don't like marketing, some don't like support, etc. But it has to be done. I'm sure you have something that every business does that you find tremendously boring ;-)

- The most enjoyable part (for me at least) is seeing an idea take shape and become a real thing.

- Don't worry about scalability at first. If it becomes a problem you can consider yourself a success. Better to get something out the door as fast as possible.

- Don't dedicate you learning time to anything, start something instead! Entrepreneurship is one of those things that you can only learn by doing. It's like basketball: You can read loads of books about it but only playing the game will make you a good player. It doesn't have to be youtube, just start with something small. Do a small webapp, sell something online, sell t-shirts. Doesn't matter. It will get you a feel for what it's like, and you'll learn a bunch in the process.

- Don't worry too much about spaghetti code at first. You can refactor it later. This is a great learning experience as well. When you've written code that looks tangled and that you can't quite follow, refactor. Messy code can become clean over time.

Just my two cents :-)
Definitely seems overly paranoid to me. The real value that your company has is in your brains. The things you've learned about your customers can never be fully captured in source code. Especially considering there's no real potential for loss of the code, only exposure, I'd say the tradeoffs are worth it.
Systems similar to this have been proposed in the past -- probably repeatedly. For example, although you probably wouldn't want such a system to be purely karma-based, you could still implement it by selecting a handful of the users that you thought represented the kind of community you wanted.

You could establish influence as a factor of a user's "distance" from the community's founders: you'd have the founders, the founders' friends, the founders' friends' friends, and so on, each with diminishing influence in community moderation.

However, this and other suggestions are not new, and pg doesn't tend to comment on them.

So in the end it's all a waste of effort.
In this hypothetical scenario, the person affected could take a few minutes to verify the information, and then report back to the host that the contact information is invalid.
What struck me about this article is how well it describes proactive students in the classroom. These students work together until they understand the material. Upon understanding the material, they do something original and exciting beyond what was presented in class. And throughout the whole process they always seem to be willing to talk about what they're working on with other people, simply because they find it cool. There's always a group of students in every class like this. For my software engineering class, it was the students that used Lisp, but I'm sure YMMV.

It raises an interesting question: why don't more students become entrepreneurs? It's either (A) these skills don't transfer well in practice or (B) a question of motivation and confidence. I'm inclined to believe (B), and I think PG has addressed this in "A Students Guide to Startups".

http://paulgraham.com/mit.html