skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sometimes, humor is not rewarded here. Even if during the process it is making a point.

I've met quite a few hackers/cs guys who take themselves WAY too seriously. Maybe that's why they don't have girlfriends.

Sometimes it feels like the vibe here can lean towards "I'm a super serious hacker who knows his/her shit and I'm going to be a millionaire with my start up, so I'm going to ignore the SPIRIT of your post and pick it apart like a trekkie at a convention."

In the end, we all need to just get over ourselves.
They've found that almost everyone only uses two of the buttons -- but it's a different two for each person.
Social Media Monitoring and What Successful Social Networks Need to Do
Yes, but towards the bottom he admits he also wouldn't want his employees to post any picture making the company look bad. Such as a picture of them wearing a company shirt while engaging in illegal activity. That's the gray area he is referring to.
The Branden quotes weren't taken out of context. It was the Branden affair that first led me to doubt her words, and that's pretty much as it happened.

Back-up of the mass murdering psychopath bits: http://michaelprescott.net/hickman.htm FTA:

According to Rand scholar Chris Matthew Sciabarra, she deliberately modeled Renahan - intended to be her first sketch of her ideal man - after this same William Edward Hickman. Renahan, she enthuses in another journal entry, "is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness -- [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people ... Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should."

So she modeled her initial Randian Hero after the psychopath.

In the original version of her first novel We the Living: "What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?"

Sounds Jokereqsue, no?

Of The Fountainhead's hero, Howard Roark: He "has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world."

And:

The editor also provides the briefest and most detail-free synopsis of Hickman's crime possible: "He was accused of kidnapping and murdering a young girl. He was found guilty and sentenced to death in February of 1928; he was hanged on October 20, 1928."

As far as I can tell, this is the one and only reference to Hickman's victim to be found anywhere in the book. Ayn Rand never mentions the victim at all in any of her journal entries. The closest she comes is a sneering reference to another girl, "who wrote a letter to Hickman [in jail], asking him 'to get religion so that little girls everywhere would stop being afraid of him.'"

Pretty damning. And there's much, much more.
who wants to spend time learning to play this?

http://fretwar.com/static/data/round/1/media/xzibitonics_C.m...
I think we need more CEOs doing stuff like this. CEOs are real people too.
Why would it require a bass guitar category? It appears to be entirely about generic scales and such. Just play it a couple of octaves down.
One option would be to, in your free time, get involved in an open source project that uses the new language. Additionally, that might also help build your reputation and resume quality experience.
This sort of back and forth makes me believe we'll only be able to intelligently control carbon emissions by attaching a real monetary price to its emission. Not that it's simple, but it seems like a more realistic solution than trying to regulate it upstream, or charge sin taxes for it upstream.
This seems kinda like social web meets dueling banjos, but instead of dueling against a moonshine swilling hillbilly, you're dueling against a soulless algorithm that generates random melodies. Maybe its just me, but listening to xzibitonics made me think of the music that would play in hell as your flesh was slowly being peeled off.
Wait a minute. You're telling me that if the number of people who stop paying me goes down, I make more money? NO F'ING WAY!

Seriously, is this worth writing about? You should clearly optimize all three relevant factors (traffic, conversion rates, and retention). 1% is not set in stone, and you need only get to 1.5% to get the same 50% increase.
It's a joke? -_-'
Yahoo describes its cloud infrastructure
Nope, not rails (troll). It's a web.py application combined with a Lamson application. The frontend is run through nginx and I use some heavy caching tricks to make it fast as possible.

The primary design for hosting costs (scalability) are:

1) http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpAdditionModule to serve static headers and footers so the framework doesn't.

2) Javascript determines the login state of a user and then displays user state links.

3) Generation of the site is "out of order" for convenience of generation/caching, and then javascript knits it back together. We'll explore more of this later.

4) Caching for about 5 minutes on most pages, depending on usage.

5) Use of http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpProxyModule#proxy_store to do page caching for content that needs to be dynamically generated very infrequently.

6) Gzip compression (should do precompression really) and other tuneups.

7) Using Lamson to accept posts via email so that they're processed off-line and statically generated. This is also really easy for people to use and easy to setup, so triple win.

It's currently not close to a production setup, but I'm going for making it easy to host on a small server to keep costs low. Part of that is just not using the framework when possible.

For statistics, right now the Nginx server is getting a modest 4-10 req/sec for html, but the backend is only serving about 1 request a minute thanks to all the above. Also the site really doesn't accept uploaded content via HTTP except say for photos.

Hope that helps, I may blog about it more later.
That's awesome. Next time I go camping I'll bring some flint and a bit of NeXT Cube.
Ask HN: Name my crazy idea
I have built an iPhone app that is one screen - it describes the app and provides a text-box to provide feedback. The idea of the app is to build whatever the majority of users want, but to start from a blank slate. We'll take feedback via the app, as well as a voting forum.

So, my question is, what should I call such a thing? As soon as I figure out a name and domain, I will push this to the App Store.

Whatever the name is, it must:

1) also lead to a good domain name

2) be 12 characters or less, spaces included, or at least have a short version as well

Here are some names we have considered:

1) Evolver (or The Amazing Evolving App)

2) OurApp

3) BTO App (Built to Order)
I think his problem of persona mis-matches is a temporary problem we all will face. Are you a leader of your organization or are you a burning man guy? We all have limited time to understand your true personality, so we have to rely on our best generalizations and stereotypes.

However, not too long from now we will all either be a) so exposed that our simple notions of persona will break down. We can just be people and we can be judged in context instead of these pseudo-personas, or b) we will all be so scared about breaking our personas that we will just withdraw from expressing ourselves honestly.

In the meantime, yea its a broken system. If you want to express the persona of a successful business person, it might just mean you don't get to express yourself as burning man dude until you retire or something. Its a sacrifice because the rest of the world just is not ready to see you as both.
This guy is a genius.

I never heard of him before. I never heard of his company. I never heard of his book(s).

Now, I know about all this and he sucked me in to like him personally and made his brand much more human and likable.

This guy is a genius.
I used to have a mouse that had some fancy buttons on it. I only attached two crucial commands to the mouse: One button was a double click, one button was a hide/unhide desktop. I couldn't figure out what to do with the other ones.
that's why you have two facebook accounts. One under your real name that's proper and has your business contacts. And one under some fake name that only your close friends know.
iDea
I'm not sure the purpose of this is to inspire.
Using Gearman For Distributed Alerts
Congrats PG.

Crossing the chasm from startup famous to community theater famous is always something to celebrate. :)
Ask HN: How does a start-up team find off-site contracting work (web or mobile?)
Inquiring minds want to know...
Open-source Resources for Cloud Computing
My first year on YC was depressing, as comments that I put a lot of work, energy, effort and thought into would sometimes be downmodded into oblivion.

I would write an expose on Hiring practices we used to have at Netscape, detailing precisely what hiring managers though, and how - and people would downmod me like there was tomorrow.

Over time, I realized, that sometimes it's just a popularity contest. Your comments, even if well meant, may just not be in agreement with somebody elses. I just learned to deal with it - over time you get a sense for the Ebb and Flow - and can learn quite a bit about the community. Don't always consider a downmod to be negative - sometimes it's just a reflection of what other people think - not a reflection of your comments value.
I'm almost tempted to go to Portland to see this. Is there anyone there who can see it and report back?

More: "Wrapping up the evening, a character based on philanthropist Paul Graham instructs the audience on constructive disagreement in How to Have an Argument. The existential crisis that interrupts him brings about an exploration of the creative process, gratuitous accents and cake for all." (http://portlandactorsconservatory.blogspot.com/2009/10/stay-...)
Or "iDeate" ... more buzzword-compliant.
Cool! Glad to be helpful :) I feel like I'm rephrasing the same thing a lot, but in hindsight, closures took me quite a bit of repetition/rephrasing to wrap my mind around. To fully grok them, you really need to have a clear understanding of how scope and variable references work.
I think I'm missing something in both iDea iDeate - what's the meme here?
It's because people are so goddamn awful at design.

There's so much bullshit in the average design calculated to leech a few more clicks out of people. Archive trees on the side, tag clouds, lots and lots of numbers calculating I-don't-give-a-fuck, share buttons. People stick colors and borders where colors and borders have no reason being. On top of that, people have no clue how to make readable typography. None. I'm shocked at how many people go along with ugly text without once learning to make it attractive. Good designers, too, that just never thought to look at making their text fit into their page.

When you have ugly layouts, people won't tolerate reading as much, and you learn that your "best" writing is much shorter. There're some exceptions. I don't think it's surprising that the best longform writers I know all have very attractive-looking longform designs. Certainly that's what I put effort into this week, designing my new portfolio.
http://portlandactorsconservatory.blogspot.com/2009/10/25-re...

"10. Paul Graham doesn’t know (yet) that he’s being portrayed on the stage."
It's easy to find contracting work that's more single contractor focused on the job boards. I'm not sure which boards, if any, are more geared explicitly toward contracts more friendly to teams.
>where is this place that fears degradation into HN?

It may not be on the web at all. Could be mailing lists.
Or Facebook for friends and LinkedIn for business associates.
This is how the SomethingAwful forums remain, in my opinion, rather high quality despite being affiliated with an offensive comedy website. $10 and strict mods seemingly breed compliance with whatever regulations you care to enforce.
Max Levchin on Slide’s big virtual goods bet, scams and — mating
While a totally valid word, probably wouldn't make sense like "iDea" (idea) to the masses.
iVolve!
In what spirit should calling someone a 'twit' be taken? Should we pretend that it's an insightful social commentary? Or accept that it's a cheap attempt at humor based in disrespect for others?
Interesting. Some time ago I had the same idea for a web app, but I can definitely see this being easier to execute as a strictly mobile app. Please keep us informed here--I'm quite curious if the whole "majority rules" strategy could actually work.

Oh, and I vote iDea (Although the IP involved here could be disastrous).

EDIT: I'm now throwing my support to iVolve.
Am I the only one considering it a bit dodgy that the headline of this submission sounds like this was eg a blog post describing how to add SMS but instead you get to a commercial site?

I mean, I'd have nothing against this if the submitter had asked for feedback/review or simply had used a more honest title. :/
This is a fantastic name I think!

It seems we can get ivolveapp.com, but not not ivolve.com.
Did zed ever get another job? (didn't he leave to California a couple of months ago?)
I didn't quite understand: 1% off all his traffic, or 1% of the people who sign up for the free version?
the problem is that facebook is so mainstream that people basically expect you to have a facebook account. If you tell them you don't have one, you look weird.

If you tell them your facebook is for friends, they wonder why they don't qualify. + there are "friends" and friends. One you have no problems showing pictures of you getting wasted, for other it will make you lose face.
Pretty neat. I wasn't aware that there were other mazes, and I don't think other people do as well. Make the exits more clear. Also, it might be kinda neat to have 'erasers' that walk the maze that destroy a single line, and the community can work together to trap it soemwhere.

And after I change my avatar, I just can't find it amidst the noise.
Why do you delete and create accounts? How do you delete an account?
Holy shit, I didn't know about the suicide.

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the Reddit community - I've expressed this here on HN in the past.
I guess that also means that almost everyone thinks sixteen of the buttons are just in the way.
I have a MX Revolution and here's how I bind my buttons:

Left Click
Right Click
Middle Click (Open tab in new window)
Double Click
Copy
Paste
Next Tab
Previous Tab
Close
Next App
Previous App
Also check out Mojolicious (http://mojolicious.org/). Mojolicious::Lite (http://search.cpan.org/dist/Mojo/lib/Mojolicious/Lite.pm) seems very cool for that 3 page site I've been thinking about lately...

There's also jifty (http://search.cpan.org/dist/Jifty/lib/Jifty.pm) which seems a little more magic-y (ie, rails like) than Catalyst or Mojolicious.
I'm a refugee from Reddit. That place has become too immature and ignorant. It's hard to have a courteous, intelligent discussion there; it very easily degenerates into name-calling, arrogance and dogmatism. It feels like middle school all over again.

Hacker News' voting system is very Reddit-like, so it will also become Reddit. Expect Hacker News to become more immature as it grows in popularity.

Here are two changes that can be made to Hacker News to keep it from becoming Reddit:

* Discourage controversial or dramatic posts. For example, the latest brouhaha about American Airlines and Dustin Curtis was very dramatic, but its educational value was lower than some other less-dramatic posts on Hacker News. I think it's okay to have content like that on Hacker News, but there should be some damping effects to keep the controversial stories lower on the list. Otherwise, Hacker News will be taken over by knee-jerk, reactionary thinking instead of deeper, more nuanced, intelligent discussion. Technical gossip will supplant technical news.

* Provide two ways to vote: vote up if you agree, and vote up if you think the content is valuable. It's important not to conflate the two into one vote up button.
I'm pretty sure it was always an online game played through a Java applet. It's had a few incarnations, but overall it's still pretty similar to when it started.
because afterall, god gave us the earth to do with as we pleased and the other living creatures are just possessions and nothing more.

can we see the study what sort of car each child a person has is to while we are at it?
It depends.

If you're more like a Richard Branson type then keep em up.

If you're more like Steve Jobs then take them down..
Facebook was much better for this in the old days when they had a concept of a "restricted profile". You can still do something like it with groups, but it's much more administrative overhead, I wonder how many people bother.
Seems like 'web 2.0' guitarwar.com right?
Another possibility is to force people to use their real names.
See also, Merlin Mann's "noise-to-noise" ratio:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/merlin/sets/72157622077100537/d...
We have a short demo video on the homepage and a tour page. We also made a free account for people to try out. I wanted to make a bookmarklet demo to let you install the widget on arbitrary sites, but it's not a high priority at the moment.
There are successful companies out there that don't adhere to the typical structure, and I'm glad to add another company to that list. For example, the 20,000 employees at Gore-Tex have no bosses, you're on a team.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/89/open_gore.html?page=0...

Also, Tony Hsieh sits in a cubicle among employees -- he's just one of the guys, even though he's the founder & CEO of a giant company recently purchased by Amazon. His cubicle office isn't near any windows either. He's also very approachable in the office, just as any other employee would be.
IPhone Superguide comes to the App Store... eventually
I don't think so. It looks like subsequent refreshes of the same query lower the number of sponsored links shown. I searched for "San Francisco dentists" (I'm in the Bay Area) and I got exactly what was shown in the article. Refreshed a few times, and the number of sponsored links shown was decremented by one each time until, until it got down to just the four small 2x2 ads.

Got the same behavior searching "Palo Alto dentists", though the number of sponsored links started lower.
It's like emacs for office users :)
https://www.dropbox.com/about -- He's an engineer at Dropbox now.
HN best practices (in contrast to reddit):

* Vote a comment up or down based on its quality, not on whether or not you like/agree with it.

* No politics.

* Downvote reddit-style conspiracy theory/rage against the machine comments...I have started seeing these sorts of comments on HN and it is making me very sad.
The author was a professional journalist.
Let's see the 'decline' in Perl jobs over the last five years:

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2C+php%2C+python%2C+r...
Groovy photo blog- HDR
Interestingly they say that they posted the pictures to Flickr which appears to be Picasa after all.
Wow, someone else using web.py, and that too for a "real" project! I always feel like a n00b for using such a stripped-down "framework" but after spending some time trying Pylons and Django, I found them both to be too "heavy-weight" for me.

What do you like and dislike about web.py?
I could see two issues:

- The first square you end up in might be closed. So it's hard to know what's going on since the keys don't seem to respond (it took me some time to realize that)

- The walls should be shared between adjacent squares. Right now, one wall can be made of the right border from one square and the left border of the square on the left. Which means you can lock "people".

Kind of fun though :)
Metrolyrics leverages Google Friend Connect - Adsense revenue doubles
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=924943

It is because of this thread that I probably won't participate in discussions here anymore. The extreme negativity and personal attacks make me feel as though I'm not a welcome voice here.

I miss the hacker news from two years ago, when I doubt wmeredith would have been supported so highly for a nasty personal attack.

On the other hand, I understand Michael Arrington a lot better now.
SEO for Firefox
Ah. This is a classic problem with transforming JS. We've run into something similar with Parenscript (but were able to correct it, rather than say "just don't write code that does X").
WARNING: iPhone 3GS Encryption Places Enterprise Data At Risk
He gives two examples in the same article; "Try to use it at work" and "Get involved in an open-source project".

If you're in a java shop and learning Python, have a look at jython and see where you can use it for testing, automation, etc. Even if only for your own local scripts.
SomethingAwful's the perfect example. They're the best at what they do, and their forums, while a bit immature for my tastes normally, have hands-down the most talented people there than I've found anywhere. I'm astonished at the artistic and entrepreneurial visionaries I see posting like mad there. I wish some of them would post here too.
>> Well if it matters - not being on facebook is very acceptable. I form the generation that is "expected to be" on facebook but I dont use facebook and most social networks.

Issues of privacy, and the right to be wrong is atmost important and I think with facebook/mysapce/twitter it makes your life totally accountable to atleast 300+ friends, if not more.

On the basic topic - Ok for a ceo to be on facebook ?
>> Well if your ok to the scrutiny of your peers, pals and foes alike then what the hell ? Upload and let the world know. But remember you lost your right to be wrong.
But no community can leverage that well, because Facebook already exists for that. Adding real names to a community of strangers doesn't help much. I'm certain I've trolled under my real name before when my name didn't matter.
JQuery Lessons Series: Manipulating CSS Classes
Nice domain :)
I'm seeing that more and more. Especially for certain career choices, or for people applying for jobs.
Can design change the world?
I don't understand the difference, could you elaborate?
I was more impressed by:

"The planets rotate, and we haven't figured out how to stop that," Cerf said.
Just speaking for mine, "ideate" is a fancy word for brainstorming.
Report: Apple to launch Verizon iPhone in Q3 2010
It's not that bad... keep a "safe list". Every time you add a friend either add them to the safe list or don't - it's right there on the add friend dialog. The "safe list" gets to see everything, the other list gets to see nothing but the basic info on the profile. This way you can friend anyone without offending them a rejection but at the same time keep professional contacts at arms reach.
Click-to-run, Microsoft makes Office 2010 available over the web
Is it just me, of does it seem like Microsoft hasn't learned yet and is still trying to not make real web apps?

At any rate, the streaming technology sounds cool.
Jerry,

Good luck with YC!
You should try it. It is remarkably great, and while I can't speak to error rates I believe that it is on par or better than a good camera-based scanner. Also: using SnapTell with my decades-old textbooks in Greek religion confirms it's not just for "common" products.

(Disclosure: I have nothing whatsoever to do with SnapTell, but I have been consistently impressed with the technology.)