skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure. As long as you understand that the example was one data point in time. I think of it as: "in 1983, John had problem X and found creative solution Y, which worked". It doesn't mean that John's company will be immune forever of business failures. I just try to learn from people's creative ways to approach problems and find smart solutions.

It helps that the same happened in my previous startup. When we were very small, I think we did a couple of great things. Some of those could be used in a business book as examples a smart company.

But a few years later, and 5X more employees, we were quite messed up. Whatever wisdom we had as a small team didn't carry over to the larger organization (I guess you could use this example in reverse in another business book :-)
In North America, 'damned [noun]' is a marked usage. 'That damn cat' is considerably more common—more common in writing, and moreso in speech.
I would suggest principle/principal instead.
Yeah, I think doing stuff like this would be crucial, maybe even more like once a quarter.
I'm actually kind of intimidated by the folks around here

Don't be! Another way of looking at it...

Everybody is really good at some stuff and not so good at others. Use this community and its experts as your sand box for the stuff you need to work on. Better to practice here than out there.

and afraid I'll get torn up for saying something dumb.

So what? The real experts here would never "tear you up". They'd just teach. Anyone who'd tear you up probably has issues of their own. You mustn't let that bother you. And even if it did, just log off and come back fresh later. We start over every day.

Glad you stopped lurking, heed. Welcome.
It is all about execution. And some of the best executions haven't been first (i.e. Windows, Google, iPod, etc). Actually having others developing your idea will not only provide reassurance that it is good, but it will also probably be better if someone else tries it first and fails.

Google wasn't the first search engine but they are the best. Microsoft didn't build the first operating system based on 'windows' but they did it the best (execution). Firefox wasn't the first browser but it is much better than IE. The iPod was very late to the handheld MP3 player market, but they are the best.

It is ALL about execution and unless it is a patentable idea then why not share? You might be more compelled to execute faster if others are doing it and you might learn from how not to bring it to market from other failures.

Ideas really are worth nothing. They are handed out to multiple people across the world. First to market is great on occasion but usually second or third to market become the mainstream choice.

In game development it is the same thing. People think they have the best idea ever and never share it. But in actuality the idea is not new as there is nothing new under the sun. It is just another configuration of some past idea in a new form.

Everyone else also has ideas they want to work on. Rarely will they drop it and start pursuing your idea.

Here is a great article on this same behavior in game development: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DavidRosen/20091027/3399/The_...

Also maybe this will provide a little motivation, don't let that idea turn into 'brain crack': http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/07/071106.html
True, but it is a very common mistakes. As is faze/phase, or moot/mute.
I would not say restrict them from commenting but rather make their first fee post rather critical.

Kind of like a karma multiplier so you get an instant separation of quality and then you can look at penalizing those that take the down delta rather quickly.

Choosing to assume someone is guilty before they commit an offense would surly drive bright people away.

Anyway good comment and don't get to intimidated, many of us are just wind bags anyway, bright sure but wind bags none the less.
I worked on a project similar to these and did a bit of research on existing solutions. If I remember correctly (I'm trying to find the document) Meebo uses a custom lighthttpd and does long polling.
How is this authoritative? This page was created today
Nokia has a balanced portfolio of crap. I used nokia phones for 4 years before getting an iPhone. Their menu systems look like they are designed by programmers. They are so hard to use. I mean, you learn to live with it, but it got to the point where I was checking days off my calendar until the 3gs was released (figuratively speaking, I don't own a calendar).

I had one phone that would always call people from my pocket because it had these 2 buttons on the side that if pressed at the same time, would activate voice dialing, and it would pick up random words from conversation and call whoever it thought you said. That made for some awkward moments. Oh, and there was no way to disable that "feature".

When you are choosing between $79 anything phone + 2yr contract, or a $199 iPhone + 2yr contract, it's kind of a no-brainer, unless you want a cheap phone for some reason, like you happen to be really accident prone.
What about a pagerank type algorithm for ranking comments that weights the votes depending on the voters own karma?

eg if a user with 1 karma upmods a comment, it adds 1 to its score, but if a user with 100 karma upmods a comment, it adds maybe 10 to its score.

Effectively tipping the balance in favor of those who have karma, and away from newbies.

(That's if we think those with lots of karma can be trusted to have a good feel for what is useful discussion and what isn't of course).

I think it might work well though - You could make a trollish comment, and a few newbies would upmod, but the big karma nicks would downmod, vastly reducing your karma, and thus the influence you have over upmodding/downmodding others comments.

Effectively your "ability to judge good comments" would then be tied to your "ability to make good comments".

Just an idea...
You mentioned no downward market movement whatsoever. Reread your comment.
The Second Best State in the Union for Solar Development is New Jersey? How?
That makes a lot of sense to me. It ensures that the older users have more power to keep the site the way it has always been. (I really shouldn't be talking as I've not yet been a year on HN. However, I commented to ensure you that at least one newer user is not opposed to having his vote worth less than that of an older user.)
Why Working at a Start-up Totally Rules
ah, okay - that's fair enough. the real reason i'm curious is that i want to quit my job and publish my own software.

would you be comfortable telling us what category the app falls into, or giving a sense of what it does? can you say what kind of marketing went into attaining those sales?
Credit card fraud prevention
Hopefully you'll excuse a short rant with no data to substantiate it.

It's easy to give someone a list of something to do. You already know how it's done. Need a sandwich? "Go to the store. Buy these x items. Come home. Take two slices of bread..."

It's more difficult to say, "A sandwich is all or part of a meal. It's a set of ingredients that are roughly planar, layered between two pieces of bread. Ingredients frequently include lettuce, tomato, deli meats, and cheese. A grocery store is a place where you can go to buy.."

Or let me put it another way. One of the places where you see much less FP than other areas is games and simulation. Is it because performance is really that important? Haskell is very fast and provides more straightforward parallelism. Certainly you can make Haskell code run faster than some of the stuff people make decent games with every single day.

I think it's because simulations of a world are really goddamn hard to understand. How can you hold that much in your head at once? Baseball sim. "Pitcher throws a ball. It travels towards home plate, where someone swings at it with a bat. Test for collision on the baseball's vector and the bat's arcing collision box. If the ball hits, then.."

vs.

"The speed of a baseball as thrown by a pitcher is a product of the amount of power chosen by the player and a selection from possible pitches. A pitch selection is a product of all input from the player's controller who is currently on the field. The player who is currently on the field is a product of the number of outs from the previous inning. The outs from the previous inning are.."

It's really hard to think like that, because these problems are really actually very complicated. We've been "cheating" all along by not really understanding what the hell is actually going on in our simulations. It's completely chaotic.

Massively complex 3D games with physics tend to be very very buggy, in case you haven't noticed. Companies with big budgets seem to be able to pull it off because they can playtest everything to death, and special-case everything as needed to avoid the most visible problems in the simulation. Falling through geometry, physics going crazy, AI behaving incomprehensibly. This can all be suppressed somewhat by lots of hard, manual work by large teams of people. It's obviously not ideal from a programming perspective.

It's a lot easier to just list the effects of what you're seeing happen. You don't have to understand the system itself, just what the behaviors look like. Understanding what's actually going on is very difficult.
The word you want is "dramatic".
Does anyone have the associated talk (I'm assuming this slide deck was for a speech)? I'm really interesting in hearing more details about the design.
I'm sure there are tons of new users who have registered recently that are great. My point is that by and large they haven't been. Closing user registration for awhile worked well for Metafilter, so I figured I'd bring it up.

tptacek made the best counter-argument for this idea; in that it would also prevent the people we want to hear from from registering; so my idea wasn't that great to begin with.

I don't know where you get the idea that I think I'm somehow better than anyone else; all I said is that the newer users haven't been of the same quality as the older users. That's just my opinion, and you're welcome to disagree with it. I've been very careful not to jump on the "this site is turning into reddit!!!1!" bandwagon, but the unfortunate truth of the matter is that the overall quality on HN has declined, and I blame the new users for that.
thank you so much for the tip is helping me already!, still it sucks...
"most things become popular for very good reasons"
Sure. But those reasons are gone. Long gone. So please, wrap it out already.

"that is what a web server does"
Did. Most PHP apps don't use /some-article.php and /another-article.php with relevant PHP files under those names, that would be bizzare. There surely is A routing FRAMEWORK those days.

"One PHP file per page is also not true"
...if you're using A FRAMEWORK.

"There is also no 'default templating', I can pipe to, or make PHP calls from the command line"
So what? There's still default templating outside <? ?>
And that's what you use unless you've got A FRAMEWORK.

Do you see a pattern here? The pattern is that you didn't read my comment, you used regexes instead. Sadly.
> it should have

ITYM it should of
Ask me three months ago
Facebook exists due to a transient inefficiency in yesterday's applications.

The big 'hook', the reason it gets so much traffic, is that people use it as a proxy for the wider internet. It's many services funneled through one account. (As opposed to having a gmail account for email, an msn account for chat, a yahoo account for games, a flickr account for pics, a wordpress account for blogging, a twitter account, etc)

But what keeps it relevant tomorrow?
Its a cost/benefit tradeoff and you are suggesting a black-swan sort of event as the benefit to compensate for a decreased signal to noise ratio. These events have actually happened, or at least we have had authors of various packages that get noticed and startup founders create accounts just to dive into discussions about their new hotness which we all noticed, so this benefit can't be dismissed out of hand but perhaps we need to think of some way to keep the possibility of comments like this open while raising the bar for most other comments...
I'll admit I don't know what magic the Python interpreter is capable of. I was imagining cases where an indentation change does not break readability:

for foo in bar:
foo.fizzle()
baz.wibble()

...versus...

for foo in bar:
foo.fizzle()
baz.wibble()

...how would it know that I wanted to wibble the baz every time I fizzle a foo, as opposed to wibbling the baz only after all foo have been fizzled?
RemObjects had a compiler for Object Pascal targeting .NET called... Chrome. When the browser came out, they ended up renaming it Oxygene.
How about this small thing--change the wording of the button add comment to add thoughtful comment.
The core issue at hand is that the authors don't have any real insight into these companies. The article addresses this issue - the authors are taking successful companies and overgeneralizing the specifics to fit the theme of their book.
I believe Automattic and 37signals both have office space. The former in SF and the latter in Chicago.

I think the founders don't work there full time at either, but I'm pretty sure some people do.
Sweet [found them](http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=51412338919). There's four videos linked in the post.
This page produced a negative affect for me when it said that "Effect is a noun; affect is a verb". IMO the author should effect the necessary changes to reflect this inaccuracy.
I'll stick with my babe Lady Macbeth and use "damned", thanks for the input.
Ask HN: Good websites about UI design
Hi,

I'm looking for interesting websites/blogs about user interface design.

Thanks!
It's not possible to pay soldiers a reasonable amount of money. If you pay them too much, you basically get an army of mercenaries, while the personal sacrifice any soldier send into harms way endures is impossible to truly translate to money.

We entrepreneurs often talk of our way of life as something we choose quite explicitly over financial security. I'm pretty sure the success of an army depends a lot on it's soldiers thinking roughly the same way about their chosen path.

Finally, my impression is that the United States is build on a certain mentality that's difficult for us Europeans to fully grasp. The country was founded by people fleeing from prosecution and suppression, and it's first war was fought against that same suppression trying to catch up. That mentality lies pretty deep in Americans, as I understand. It has nothing to do with cheating people into collecting our garbage and manning 24-hour convenience stores.

It's a shame that thankfulness to esp. US and UK troops isn't better founded in western European minds, and that it's only brought up when trying to justify a new war. Fact is that 400.000 Americans died in WWII, without whom my German would probably be a lot better. There's a D-day burial ground in Normandy. Any European should make a point of visiting it sometime (I haven't yet) -- especially before making high-brow intellectual rants against war.
Government Will Pay $3 Million in Coffee Table Spying Suit
I've just got back from the States and lived there for a while. I prefer the way the UK does it. (Apart from The Sun.)
The US and Canada don't have troops on their streets recently shooting at their own population (or at least that sector that believe in transubstantiation)
Yoga Mats Aren’t Just for Yoga Anymore
True, affect is officially pronounced /ə'fɛkt/, versus /ɪˈfɛkt/ for effect.

Compliment and complement really are pronounced the same, though. Pronunciation is fairly discrete, either there's a noticable difference, or there's no difference at all.
And the comment gets automatically deleted if it reaches a flag threshold.
Rather, the translation is: 'It is sweet and right to die for one's country'. Alternatively, it could be rendered as 'It is noble and honourable to die for one's fatherland' or similar.
Facebook Denies Hijack
I'm not sure where you managed to conflate my use of the word "I" with generalisations about "some users".
I hear you - I'm an Ubuntu user and I see usability and driver regressions with every release.
I cant disable the touchpad in Karmic (could do do that in Jaunty) - bug marked as wishlist.
DEC Tulip drivers have stopped working from Hardy onwards.
Audio drivers dont work well on Thinkpad R series - its quite a hack to get them to work.
$75 CPM. Just wow.
It's hardly controversial for non-native speakers ;) I've always found this self-evident.

Auditory learning plays a much bigger role for native speakers, and you also need to consider the proportion of reading/writing vs speaking.
Oh yeah, I actually wondered about that after I posted :) I was on the fence about this, but all the examples I can find use CUDA, so I guess CUDA is the way to go: http://www.google.com/search?q=flame+fractal+on+GPU That makes sense, because it's more about huge matrices (flames are just big histograms) and less about textures on polygons.
Exactly why I wrote http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2009/03/11/the-great-startup-id...

I still think ideas are very important. A previous poster lists Google as an example of the fact that being first doesn't matter, execution does. Google was first and foremost a new idea (pagerank). And they also executed. And then they got lucky (adwords). But without the idea, they would not have beaten the #1 search engine of the times.
For example, Apple's product line prior to the return of Steve Jobs.
Unfortunately for you, not only are people notoriously (in linguistically savvy circles) bad at properly making and recognizing all of the vowel distinctions, you're also just wrong- affect and effect share a valid schwa initial pronunciation, and compliment and complement share their pronunciation.

The phenomenon you have fallen prey to is hyperarticulation, also responsible for the 'off-ten' pronunciation of 'often'. (Compare to soften, for example.)

Pronunciation is a bad place on which to perch your well-trained pride.
Why didn't Google use IP addresses too? Because doing so poses its own problems that a big company like Google doesn't want to deal with. For example, shared offices often use one IP address. If someone locks safe search there, it is locked for everyone.

This is a cool idea, but, as you admit, exceedingly error prone. There is no reliable way to determine who actually owns an IP address. With dynamic IPs it can even lead to one user blocking search for another user. Lock safe search, renew DHCP license, repeat.

How do you plan to deal with these conflicts?
What are the origins of the Japanese?
The keyboard problem on Thinkpads T400/T500 was solved in october 2008 - three months after introducing them and more than year ago.
After a certain threshold is met, the average quality of voting seems to be inversely proportional to the traffic on the site. This trend, with different overall parameters, appears to describe a large class of aggregation sites. I'm thinking specifically of HN, reddit and slashdot.

I think code and culture can shape this curve in useful and beneficial ways, but fundamentally, once an aggregation site gets popular, its quality declines. And the site gets popular because it has high quality.

So we are thinking about trying to shape the curve with code and culture; that's good. I bet there's a more 'meta' solution though.

I'm not really proposing this, just throwing the idea out there. For a given site, once popularity starts pushing down voting and submission quality, make a new site. Obviously something as trivial as http://news2.ycombinator.com/ won't work. I'm not sure how this could be accomplished, but it's interesting to think about.
Or go upto a physics teacher and thank them.

The reason the Russian army isn't in western europe is not due to the heroic effort of the Queen's Cavalry - it's due to the ability to knock two pieces of Plutonium together.

It's the nerds/geeks at Aldermaston/LLNL/Los Alamos/	Sarov/Zheleznogorsk that have kept the world safe for you.
> Why would there ever be peace when we celebrate war and warriors, on the highest pedestals?

This has been well understood for 340 year, but let's take it one more time:

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

- Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of Present Discontents, 1770
I find the "go back to reddit" or "go back to digg" posts particularly ironic. If you are going to criticize those sites, then perhaps you shouldn't contribute to the degradation of this site in the same post.

That said, I was recently guilty of the commenting on a troll comment But I think it was justified in that instance, because the original poster was being attacked in a particularly vicious way, and I didn't want him to feel nobody was backing him up.
Maybe the guidelines should be '0'th or the '1'st post once or twice a day.
I hope it's ok to drop a small advert in here, it seems to be on topic.

If a good artist, designer or usability engineer is looking for a project over Christmas week then I and a friend(1) are going to be building a web app and would love a third partner. E-mail christmas09 at theplanis.com

(1) I'm a systems engineer who dabbles in marketing, Java Script, DBs and web apps - if you want a reference I can send you a beta invite for my current project. He is a lawyer who specialises in scripting languages and CSS.
I have never followed that logic. If a mob boss orders a henchman to kill a rival, who should be prosecuted for murder? I would feel that it should be both. I cannot see how it should be the mob boss and not the henchman. I also struggle to see how the henchman should be honored.
It's possible to build good communication on top of faulty protocols. Don't blame the language.

The value of the words in the dictionary stems from their widespread use. Intrinsically, they don't have any.
The reasonably rational person would infer from my comparison of Apple's two high-end product offerings vs Nokia's balanced offering and my saying that the former leads to a more tenuous market position that the intent was clearly to advocate introducing a lower-end unit with a cheaper data plan (the analogue to the $999 macbook).
I'm not replying to start a debate with Dennis_, but I'd like to say, as a vet myself, that any appreciation, however big or small, is appreciated.
I absolutely love the "mostly info sites" feature. This is so useful when searching for a review of a specific product instead of being spammed with 200 price comparison sites, purporting to offer reviews, but they really don't
Network effects make this time around substantially different. Note that some of the leading products from that era that benefited from network effects, such as AIM, are still around today.
Unless and until there is some compelling reason to do so, I don't.
Best single sentence in the article (referring to management gurus rules/habits): "But most of these rules are nothing more than wet fingers in the wind."
Oh, so many ideas, if only I could focus.

- Slime Volleyball in Clojure

- Some text-based game or simulation to take advantage of Ruby's metaprogramming abilities

- Improving an existing online game I run with AJAX/Facebook Connect.
they won't; both serve different needs.

dropbox is mainly used by people who don't use webapps to manage their documents and photos.
Our civilization is one worth celebrating because we have engaged in progressively less war. This, not our use of one evil to flail against another evil, is the cause of our success. If you haven't read Steven Pinker's essay A History of Violence (or seen the related TED talk at http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...), I would recommend taking a look.
It's just you. Trolls abuse attention, which is why you should ignore them. People who feed trolls are just misguided, it's OK to talk to them.
Doesn't authority come from accuracy, not recency? If you see any part of the article that is inaccurate, you should edit it and make it more authoritative.
Standardizing Go