skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> However the devil is in the unintended consequences of
the details. If you transfer the auction cost around
then you've effectively made an H-1B into a regular
employee, part of whose salary gets paid to the
government. This encourages underpaying H-1Bs relative
to local competition,

> Nope. You forgot the money being paid to the govt.
That increases the costs to the company, which is the
number that they care about.

Read more carefully. I did not forget the money being paid to the government. Instead I was describing a net effect where employers would keep their internal cost the same and drop the salary offering by the amount of the fee. The net result is then exactly that part of what would have been the H1B's salary goes to the government instead.

By contrast if the fee is only owed by the original employer then any subsequent employer can offer the same salary that they would for a local and have the same total cost for the employee. Market pressures will push them to do that. This will push the original employer to pay prevailing market rates or better to keep the employee around long enough to recoup their initial investment.
Precisely, pg has put some interesting controls on the site based on lessons learned at other places. For example, new users can only post so fast, and can't downvote until they hit some karma threshold.

The idea being that new users are forced to observe the community conventions on the site and decide if they want to conform to them. By the time they "grow up" they can then move about with greater and greater freedom. This seems to work pretty well regarding arguments and comments.

However, as this topic most clearly demonstrates, the pain point on the site is not the nature of the comments or forms of argument, it's the up/downvote problem. The theory was that higher quality posts would naturally end up with higher scores from more upvotes. Lessons learned from this site should show that to not be entirely true.
I always take it to mean that a down vote is supposed to represent that the content of the post was off-topic, misinformed, or otherwise not useful or inappropriate.

I often up-vote people that I disagree with (or who are disagreeing with me) because they are presenting their argument in a way that is reasonable and intelligent.

Ex. I would down-vote someone if they started name-calling, I would not down-vote them if they had an opinion that I thought was wrong. Of course, this would be dependent on how good the argument that they present is, or if the opinion is intentionally flammable.
Since the comments for this post have grown a lot, maybe you haven't seen PG's own comment. If that's the case, here's the direct link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021235
Great post. I've been relying on heatmapping tools like Crazy Egg to answer some of those questions about where users are clicking. There are some definite limitations though; it seems like GA might fill those gaps nicely - for free.
1. vote Pirate Party

2. abolish misuses of patents

3. companies such as Nokia are forced to get revenue by making things people want, rather than rent-seeking

4. everyone wins!
Actually MultiVac sounds closer to Wolfram|Alpha, especially the data being curated by civil servants, and only subsequently analyzed/interpreted/correlated by the computer.
haha I think someone posted a clever comment like this the last time this story surfaced on HN, too. Mabye whoever is downmodding this wrote the first one? ;)
Modern IDEs inject close tags and angle brackets into the source document. The SHPAML preprocessor injects that syntax into the target document. The use case applies to the person who wants clean syntax in the source document and executable syntax in the target document.
Central Market is a gourmet store, it has less focus on all organic. It wins in both variety and quality.
See also:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1019059
>...to hitting the reply button, setting focus on the reply entry form, composing a well thought-out and cogent response, and then hitting the reply button

You forgot about "having to hit each and every individual key used in word formation in the correct order, some keys more than once (and a few several times), having to adhere to reasonable rules of grammar to string the words together into a sentence with meaning, and to remember to stay on topic and respond to the comment rather than slowly drifting off topic into a stream of consciousness, having to maintain visual focus on the screen while typing, and after hitting the reply button, waiting for the comment to refresh, and then another 30-40 minutes refreshing to watch my karma".

I think you assign far too much effort to the task of typing a single sentence.
It would be interesting to see how kernels compiled with pcc and gcc compare, size-wise and performance-wise.
I do not understand why this witty, on-topic post has been downvoted so hard. I believe it added loads to the conversation.
Many smart people are too busy doing other things to spend time cultivating a blog or writing articles. Sharing with your coworkers when the job calls for it is of immediate utility, and a very different beast than putting your thoughts onto the internet at large.
To me, that's not a problem. I truly believe you should be the signal, not the noise, so if you're not adding value, what are you doing? Obviously you can take it too far, but I really don't think this happens all that often, compared to the plethora of people sharing far too early.
It is a small, but special source of pride, to see comments like my post, discussing the problems with the downvote, be downvoted into oblivion thus entirely confirming my statement.
It's not a collaborative project in any way -- Gruber does not accept contributions and repudiates forks + reimplementations. His Markdown.pl implementation is dogshit even by the already low standards of hand-written many-pass regex-based spaghetti-parsers.

It's absolutely his buggy baby.
There are two types of power: ability to do things and control over people. The latter is zero-sum, but the former is not. Knowledge always increases the ability to do things, but (depending on who has it) may increase or decrease control over others.
When Blizzard went after Glider, they claimed copyright, too. It was because Glider loaded the game itself to keep the WoW game client from detecting that Glider was reading and writing to its memory. Loading a copy of an application into memory on your own computer without the vendor's approval is now a copyright violation in court.
Crash of the Titans Unlockables for the Wii
A nice example of a seriously broken patent system
Oh getting all frothy at the mouth in an essentially joke thread is absurd. And 'reflexively downvoting' is a lot closer to dumbassery than replying to a comment. Whatever I think of her ideas, I don't think Ayn Rand is remotely in the caliber of people I put on the list, in terms of importance. That's why I didn't put her on the list and that's what I was explaining to the responder.
What are your thoughts on HAML and SASS? They aren't simply "cuter" they are a full-blown templating and stylesheet meta language. I've been using SASS in a Python project and love it. The more I use SASS, the more envious I grow of people who get to use HAML.

I was intending on eventually writing my own HAML-type language in Python, but it looks like with SHPAML, I won't have to. Because SHPAML supports raw HTML and doesn't do anything with the {} characters, I can use SHPAML in conjunction with my existing Jinja2 templates. This will enable me to convert my templates organically. The intermediate HTML/Jinja representation doesn't need to appear on disk, so this really looks like an easy way to add "cute" HTML syntax to and existing Python text templating language.
how does this compare to something like MixPanel?
Yes, you're right about that, but that still doesn't make it an "ad hominem" argument.

When a theoretician refuses to look at a proof because it is written by an unknown, he/she is implicitly stating his or her belief that the proof is very likely to be wrong. In this case, this belief is used as part of criteria for allocating time and effort.

If the same theoretician was to state that the proof is wrong because it was written by an unknown, this would constitute an argument. Said argument would be fallacious, because ad hominem argument is invalid in this case.

Incidentally, your claim that "PageRank is the biggest ad hominem attack of all time" is false precisely because of this distinction. PageRank does not constitute an argument, it's simply a sorting criterion. It's a value produced by an algorithm to determine approximate relevance of a page within the context of a search query. The value itself does not constitute an argument. However, if I were to claim that "page such-and-such presents false information on such-and-such topic because it's PageRank is bad" that would constitute a fallacious argument. However, it would still not be "ad hominem".

Now can you please repeating the same claim over and over in different comments? Repetition does not make it true.
I can't comment on the legal issues of this, since I too am not a lawyer, and don't live in the US.

What I can say is that your key - whether automatically generated or your favorite pass phrase - is known only to you, and without it all of your data is lost.

Thus, if you want to you could store it at the server (so you'd never lose the data) or you'd keep it to yourself (and never risk the data being exposed).
I once had a discussion about this topic with a colleague.

>For instance, in a technical field it can often be very difficult to understand much less evaluate a fully reasoned argument.

I think at the time I had fluffed a response to the question this answers which is "well how do I know that xyz guy really knows his stuff and isn't just a so-called-expert in his field, why should I believe him?".

But this sums it up nicely, it can take decades to learn enough about a field to understand the arguments properly.
Oh man, huge congratulations guys!
(shrug) Not getting frothy, just explaining the downvote. Peace.
Cities embrace mobile apps, 'Gov 2.0' - CNN.com
I'm surprised the DirectEdge folks havent done anything on app recommendations yet - not only will it be a huge hit if it works well, it'll bring in some great PR as well.
I think it only "requires" it if you want to copy and paste his code. If you're willing to modify his code, I don't think it's necessary.
Yes true, but it is at least positive reinforcement, whereas downvoting is negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement is conditioning through fear. So ignoring the potential ethical problems of conditioning through fear, there have been studies to show that positive reinforcement is better:
https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/1811/4924/1/V63N02_087.p...
RESTful Search
AT&T: The most hated company in iPhone land
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021116 was immediately downvoted to oblivion (it's hit -6 I believe at one point), not a single comment as to why.

While this one, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021119 while practically of the same content (though a hair less snarky) generated screens full of comments and is sitting at +10 as of this writing.

I think it has to do with the fact that people were scared off of the other post because it went straight into the vote incinerator and thus they didn't want to get downvoted themselves.

A downvote without a comment is just as rude online as a terse "no" is in real life.
I agree, but isn't this what Google does to other distribution channels?

I mean, newspapers are upset with Google because Google News takes their distribution channel, wraps their logo and ads, and makes revenue off of it.
I don't follow your argument. Are you saying the government's failure to prevent those three things from happening somehow proves regulation is worthless? Or are you just pointing out that individuals in the private sector were able to figure these things out before any government agencies?

It certainly doesn't appear that the private sector was able to prevent those three things from happening, so I can't see how your conclusion follows from your argument.
What are your 2010 programming goals?
Is smoking (outdoors) really that offensive? I agree that stale smoky clothes smell gross, but I'm never bothered by a crowd smoking outside a bar or club, or people doing it while they walk through the city. It's just a neutral city smell to me.
I didn't mean to suggest hiding the name so that we can't find out who posted the comment, but rather just making it more difficult. So you can still find out who wrote the comment, by clicking on the link to the comment, or perhaps requiring a mouseover.

I mean I can already see some problems to being able to see a name, and having that "communicate a great deal" just by the name. If the comment communicates a great deal, then why can't the comment stand on its own merits? It just seems that more people will be inclined to upvote because of the person who said it.

And I understand the concern about being able quickly skim and find notable experts replying. This is a potential problem with hiding author names. But I think some of this problem can be alleviated by the fact that better comments usually float to the top anyways.

Also perhaps this feature can be something that is only disabled after reaching a karma threshold?
It is too bad Perl isn't in the mix. You could get great stereotypes from that one. (But how many would understand a picture of a pair of training wheels sitting on the ground as their image of PHP folks?)

Of all of the groups, the ones who get to see the most attractive people are the Lisp fans. OK, attractive people they disagree with, but still attractive.
Even if you had downvoted me, by the simple fact that you provided some explanation (however minimal) is loads more engaging and interesting than providing an opinion, and coming back to see it scored at -3 or whatever.

I would understand the vote, and would still feel interested in engaging. I would view the downvote as a punctuation or an emoticon on your comment. Not a ricochet bullet in my living room.
Newspapers don't have (large) online distribution channels, but google does. Newspapers have content and google has the online distribution channel that gets millions more people to view that content.
I think I understood all of that except Haskell as seen by LISP fans. Haskell is a cute but vicious cat? What?
I am curious: what is it about GCC that BSD folks want to get rid of it so bad? I don't really follow GCC development, but on a multiple occasions I've heard people wishing there was something else.

I've used C component of it and it was fine. Their C++ implementation is lacking compared to Visual C++ (especially in generated code size and template-related error messages). What else do people dislike about it?
I think that government in particular needs to provide a web-based dashboard of stats to its citizens so we can see how the country is doing.

This is a great idea and should be easy to implement. A lot of data is already collected by the gov. Perhaps the gov 2.0 project might make this one step closer to reality.
Reality: With a few hot water bottles strapped around me, I could get staggering amounts of liquid onto a plane. I would theorize that VERY few people have both the skills and the desire to actually suicide bomb (or even hijack) a plane... Otherwise, why isn't it happening more often?

Planes running into buildings are pretty spectacular, but even if we removed ALL security measures, airport security would be WAY down on the list of things that result in needless death.

There are infinite cheap/free ways to terrorize people if you're willing to die. There is no way to be secure from it short of spending gazillions on preventative measures.

Being terrorized by lunatics will always be a cost of being hated. We should stop spending significant money on it, consider it a painful cost of being free/prosperous, and focus on not being so worthy of hate.
I've found that, many times over, and not just here.

Specifically, I've found it important to set expectations before setting out a point or comment. People read things with their prejudices and viewpoints at the fore. If you are to get a neutral reading, you must work to create a neutral setting first. This then makes your comment long-winded and apparently initially rambling, off-topic or irrelevant.

To counter that problem one must write very, very succinctly, but clearly.

This is all hard work. However, if you think it's worth making your point, it's the best way to give it a chance.
If anyone doesn't know, wattvision is a YC startup.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=832216
For extra points figure out the bias of the maker of the image :)

And who said HN doesn't have a sense of humour, 16 points and counting.
dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1019360
I bought the mouse if for no other reason that it duplicated most of my trackpad's functionality when I'm plugged into an external monitor. I'm exclusively a laptop user, so I've used nothing but trackpads for years, but plugging into a 30" screen requires me to push the laptop aside.

The magic mouse is suited more for very small hands. I don't have small hands. Given how little I'm plugged in it's tolerable though. This is their first mouse that I have actually chosen above other market options.

The only real show-stopper is the touch scrolling sensitivity. In applications such as InDesign and Photoshop (in full screen mode), there's a tendency to jump suddenly miles away on the viewing area from random touches.
With Nexus One, Is Google Eating Its Own Dogfood Or Its Own Children?
First of all, sorry about the name.

SHPAML is not a pseudo-programming syntax. It is purely a markup language, so there are no programming constructs.

SHPAML very deliberately tries to be a lightweight abstraction on top of HTML, unlike wikis and Markdown, which operate at a higher level abstraction. I am a huge fan of wikis, so I value the higher level abstraction at times, but I also see the need for an in-between solution.

I have not used Markdown much, but I see its merits as well.
You are splitting hairs. We don't need to stick to the precise dictionary meaning of various terms. Sometimes you gain more insight when you don't do that.
Man, once again, like last time; there's no Python.
"Superatoms" Mimic Elements: Research Reveals New Perspective of Periodic Table
As a veteran of 5 court cases I can assure you can in theory but in practice you can't.

If you win then that's good for you, but fat chance you're going to get your lawyers fees back except in very rare situations.

And even then you'll probably get some baseline payment of a fraction of the real costs.

Lawsuits are expensive, American lawsuits doubly so.
I always liked Tolkien better than Hemingway myself.
Askhn.org - shorter way to get to hacker news
I've setup http://askhn.org (just a smaller and easy domain) and forwarded it to news.ycombinator.com
BSD people tend to like BSD licensed things.
My guess: "pure fp" can be a scary experience. :)
The argument would be that they've already burned those bridges. In other words, all that matters here is really how vulnerable they are to Apple's legal threats.
I like it, but something is very wrong in Chrome (Dev track, Win7/64)...keyboard commands don't work, shapes stick in the corner, no way to stop drawing lines.
A decent portion of the population against downvoting aren't against downvoting per se, it's downvoting without a comment or counterargument.

PG already commented somewhere that he's experimenting with a number of solutions to this problem, and will hopefully come up with something as quick and convenient as the downvote but with the depth of requiring an added comment.
Well, the good news is that pg seems to agree with the general consensus that downvoting is broken.

I'm afraid though that unless each negative tag is balanced with a positive tag, and the tag scores are provided, that we'll end up in a similar state we are now, only with more complexity.
The future of media? Bet on events
I think it's more the bugs, which tend to show up in kernel code, and the ability to extend the compiler with security features, which is difficult in the rather hairy gcc code. OpenBSD used a custom gcc 2.95 derived compiler for ages because of bug fixes and their security extensions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio

I believe it doesn't even out until relatively late late in life, with male mortality being slightly higher at all ages. From the wikipedia article:

The "First World" G7 members all have a gender ratio in the range of 0.95–0.98 for the total population, of 1.05–1.07 at birth, of 1.05–1.06 for the group below 15, of 1.00–1.04 for the group aged 15–64, and of 0.70–0.75 for those over 65.
Ask HN: Recommendation for Books on Startups?
What are the books on startups that you would recommend as a must read for an aspiring entrepreneur?
Any such demonstrations would be totally anecdotal though.

There's no way to say its recommendations are quantitatively better, you just have to try it and see whether their machine learning stuff is better than Apple's ML stuff.
This is quite a long read, but I read the first part "Introduction to Vedic Mathematics", and as blown away at the methods of recitation used in ancient Indian to preserve sacred hymns.

From what little I've read about Vedic Mathematics, it seems like a powerful way of simplify arithmetic problems involving large numbers by cleverly reducing them to smaller arithmetic sets. The end result makes it a lot easier for the human brain to process.

Of course, there's surely a lot more to it I'm sure.
Any such demonstrations would be totally anecdotal though.

Why not conduct a proper experiment complete with statistical significance calculations?
Mets Get Jason Bay for 4 years, $66M | MLB Tribune
By the same argument, totlol was helping more people view youtube.
That's true, but I tend to see it as, "google is re-packaging the content for a different audience". In my news example, Google News is targeting the people who don't have time to delve into their local newspapers and just want a quick overview of the news. In a a sense, that's what Totlol is doing- just re-packaging the news for a different audience. The fact that Totlol is 1000x smaller than Google makes what Google is doing more nefarious. Why rip off the little guy?

Additionally, just because google has a large online distribution channel doesn't give it the right to steal. There's something to be said about information proliferating to a mass audience, but in many cases, what Google News does is basically stealing!

To me the solution is so obvious - Google should allow Youtube API users to have some sort of custom adsense, that both google and Totlol can share, for example, that I don't understand why they don't implement it.
That got appealed, any idea on how it ended ?
Haha, you're the first person I've seen notice that. FWIW, I didn't make this version but made the original (with the "hidden" text) that didn't have Haskell or Lisp. This is pretty cool though :-)
It's very basic but it gets the job done. I have difficulty browsing HN without it these days.
Umbrella designs
Looks very cool. Worked well in a quick session. Reminds me of Raphael and others.

Shame the license doesn't seem to be clear in what it allows and doesn't. It just has a generic copyright statement, which strictly speaking means you can't do much with it.
My personal favorite and one that I wish I read before I started:

the four steps to the epiphany