Hacker News Reader

bretton Non-Hacker News

The welcome post only has its title on the front page now. Before we didn't have an option for descriptions to not show up on the list pages.

bretton Posterous - Dead Simple Way to Blog and Share Files with Freinds

I do.

bretton WallStreet Crisis Covered with Slinkset

We've heard that at least once before. It's worth looking into.

bretton Javascript Parallax effect (hover over the header)

That's sweet. I pretty much felt required to waste some time adding a js easter egg to our blog.

bretton Silicon Alley Insider goes Slinkset.

That's a really good question. We've got some data to that end, but don't have a definitive answer yet.

My sense so far is that surprisingly few people can make it work, but the interaction changes a bit. With everyone using feed readers the site can move at much slower pace than something like news.yc. We use slinkset internally w/ just 2 people and it's helpful, but again it's a slightly different format (e.g. we disable voting for that).

bretton Picwing (YC summer 08) on ABC News

Seriously awesome. Congrats.

bretton JustHackIt - Post your idea and find people to start building it with

Awesome. Thank you.

bretton JustHackIt - Post your idea and find people to start building it with

That's odd. Would you mind letting me know what browser/OS you are using? You can email me at brett (a-t) slinkset.com

bretton Brief Q&A with the founders of Slinkset (YC Summer 08)

Thanks!

bretton Submit or vote on questions for PG for the Cambridge/Boston Startup Meetup on Monday

The link above goes the recent page. If you go to "Popular" (http://askpg.slinkset.com/) it's sorted by the absolute count and will never degrade.

We can easily set how much (or little) time factors into the ranking, but haven't exposed it in the UI yet. We'd like to get to that soon.

It would be nice if we eventually felt like a natural fit for stuff like this, though I realize it's not totally consistent with our positioning so far. Anything other than the ranking and deceptively named menu items that makes it suboptimal?

bretton Submit or vote on questions for PG for the Cambridge/Boston Startup Meetup on Monday

We hope to capture the answers and post them here, but we're still working out the details.

The invitation: http://anyvite.com/events/home/tmokjxuwai/cambridgeboston-st...

bretton Ask YC: How do you enable users to use their own domains with your application?

1. Yes. cname.theirsite.com resolves to myserver.com.mysite.com which in turn resolves to an IP address. Browsers will send requests to your server at that IP along with cname.theirsite.com in "Host" header.

2. I'm not totally sure. I would start with wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System

Users will likely ask for help, so you'll probably want to familiarize yourself with the UIs for major DNS providers, especially GoDaddy.

Another gotcha is that CNAMEs can be a little funky for root domains. So something.com will be harder (or impossible) for people to CNAME than foo.something.com depending on their provider. I've been told that CNAMEing the root domain means that all records (like MX) get automatically aliased as well, but I haven't found that to be uniformly true. My guess is that it depends on the DNS software.

bretton Ask YC: How do you enable users to use their own domains with your application?

Tell users to CNAME their domain to your own and then render pages based on the incoming HTTP "Host" header?

I feel like you've answered the bulk of your question. Are you looking for something more specific?

bretton NFL player IQ by position

That may be true. Though you could probably make the case that the optimal physical requirements for a center are rare as well, especially at the NFL level. If those requirements don't correlate with intelligence then centers are being selected partially for intelligence.

From my experience playing football offensive linemen and quarterbacks have significantly higher mental requirements. Personally, I always found keeping a complex offense straight against any potential defense more stressful than actually dealing with the defenders. My role on any given play wasn't set until the ball was snapped (or later). Most skill positions knew what they were supposed to do as soon as the play was called.

bretton What's New in Edge Rails: Nested Model Mass Assignment

Daigle's edge rails reviews are probably my favorite content of all the rails blogs I subscribe to.

bretton Y Combinator’s Slinkset Launches Hosted Reddits For The Masses

I would love to hear how it does.

bretton Y Combinator’s Slinkset Launches Hosted Reddits For The Masses

Thanks.

And, yeah, we've thought of a few options for targeting businesses. Help forums is definitely one.

bretton Y Combinator’s Slinkset Launches Hosted Reddits For The Masses

More on topic, I'd like to see more options to customize the "editorial policy" of your site - how many votes to get promoted, how user karma works, how sites get blocked, manual overrides, and so on.

Definitely. We've got a lot of ideas and plans along these lines. I think you're right on about the personality of the site admins shaping the content. Though in more ways than just choosing how the engine works.

bretton Applications open for winter 2009 YC funding

Unless they've omitted something or lied it should be clear from the rest of the app why they're picking yes.

bretton Posterous (YC summer 08) Beats Tumblr In Simplicity

I know plenty of people who use email regularly but claim ignorance as to what a blog is. In fact, I'm related to a few. My guess is that I could get them up and running with Posterous pretty quickly.

bretton Popularity Algorithms

There's always the source to news.yc: http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc2.tar

bretton 28 mod_rails / Passenger Resources To Help You Deploy Rails Applications Faster

Anyone using it?

bretton [dead]

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=181204

bretton [dead]

There's an index link in the menu: http://paulgraham.com/ind.html

bretton Are you addicted to (email, the web, coffee, alcohol, etc.)?

Why even try to make it into an acronym when you have to work that hard for it?

bretton Ask YC: Are there any white label community news sites like HN?

I'm one of the cofounders. Please feel free to get in touch: brett at slinkset

bretton Ask YC: Where is YC News hosted?

  #!/usr/bin/env ruby
  domains = %w{reddit.com loopt.com clickfacts.com
               textpayme.com snipshot.com inklingmarkets.com flagr.com wufoo.com 
               youos.com likebetter.com thinkature.com jamglue.com shoutfit.com scribd.com 
               weebly.com virtualmin.com buxfer.com octopart.com heysan.com justin.tv 
               iminlikewithyou.com socialmoth.com xobni.com versionate.com adpinion.com anywhere.fm 
               fuzzwich.com bountii.com auctomatic.com disqus.com draftmix.com webmynd.com 
               rescuetime.com reble.fm heroku.com tipjoy.com addher.com 8aweek.com}

  orgs = {}
  domains.each do |c|
    whois = `host -t a #{c} | grep 'has address' | cut -f 4 -d ' ' | xargs -n 1 whois`
    if org = whois.grep(/OrgName/).first
      org = org.sub(/OrgName:\s/, '').strip
    else
      org = whois.split("\n").first.split("(")[0].strip.sub(/\s+[A-Z\-\d]+$/, '')
    end
    orgs[org] ||= []
    orgs[org] << c
  end
  max_size = orgs.sort_by{|k, v| k.size}.last.first.size


  orgs.sort_by{|k, v| v.size}.reverse.each do |o, ds|
    puts "%-#{max_size}s %5s" % [o, ds.size]
    ds.each {|d| puts "\t#{d}"}
  end
  puts
  puts "%-#{max_size}s %5s" % ["Total # of Domains", domains.size]
  puts "%-#{max_size}s %5s" % ["Total # of Providers", orgs.size]

bretton Ask YC: Where is YC News hosted?

I made a little bit more robust version. Some of the whois calls (like heroku.com) have 2 OrgName lines and some don't have one at all (like weebly.com).

  Amazon.com, Inc.                           7
  	youos.com
  	jamglue.com
  	shoutfit.com
  	socialmoth.com
  	webmynd.com
  	heroku.com
  	8aweek.com
  SoftLayer Technologies Inc.                5
  	scribd.com
  	xobni.com
  	anywhere.fm
  	bountii.com
  	disqus.com
  ThePlanet.com Internet Services, Inc.      5
  	snipshot.com
  	virtualmin.com
  	heysan.com
  	adpinion.com
  	reble.fm
  Hurricane Electric                         3
  	weebly.com
  	octopart.com
  	auctomatic.com
  Internap Network Services                  2
  	loopt.com
  	likebetter.com
  NoZone, Inc.                               2
  	flagr.com
  	thinkature.com
  Peer 1 Network Inc.                        2
  	rescuetime.com
  	addher.com
  ServePath, LLC                             1
  	reddit.com
  American Digital Network                   1
  	fuzzwich.com
  Columbus Network Access Point, Inc.        1
  	versionate.com
  Performance Systems International Inc.     1
  	justin.tv
  Global Netoptex, Inc                       1
  	clickfacts.com
  RackForce Hosting Inc.                     1
  	draftmix.com
  Time Warner Telecom, Inc.                  1
  	textpayme.com
  Logicworks Corporation                     1
  	inklingmarkets.com
  Layered Technologies, Inc.                 1
  	buxfer.com
  Rackspace.com, Ltd.                        1
  	iminlikewithyou.com
  BitPusher, LLC                             1
  	wufoo.com
  Slicehost LLC                              1
  	tipjoy.com

bretton Ask News.YC: Proposed experiment to test "The PG bias"

Being able to follow pg on his threads page is part of the bias too. He gets more votes because his comments get read by more people.

bretton Does this look familiar to anyone?

I would argue that if you're going to go the trouble of including a "Shout-outs" page, you should mention the company who's application you stole verbatim:

http://www.founderscoop.com/shout-outs.php