skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm talking about the single-buyers. Lots of people watch these talent shows just for the trainwrecks. The people who take the X-factor seriously are the sort of people who'd watch a show just because it's presented by Ant and Dec... The people who buy whatever mass-produced focus-grouped auto-tuned rubbish the singles chart is normally full of.

I'd imagine the other sort of person who'd buy a single by "Joe" is the same demographically who'd buy one by say Cliff Richard.
delete you nytimes.com cookies.
JSONP and jQuery to quickly build powerful mashups
I agree. But still interesting why he does it.
How about having tags, and then letting the community dynamically decide which ones are standard? I think this would work because the community is fairly observant of the rules. Plus you could shape behavior by suggesting certain tags when the user wants to add a new tag to a submission. On top of covering the use cases you detail, it would:

1) Help with search if it is ever implemented

2) Allow users to quickly disseminate the subject of articles on the front page without ever opening them (especially helpful for ambiguous titles)

3) Maybe in the future allow users to subscribe/unsubscribe to certain tags if the front page starts getting too busy
then only logical reasoning behind is cheap machines for webservers and very powerful ones for "data" servers. otherwise network bandwith is only a fraction cpu-storage one.
The only oddity for a feature like that is that it's a bit like "judging" their comment.

I don't know how to explain it, but I'd almost rather the flag options be worded as "Sorry, this comment seems: uncivil" or "Sorry, this comment seems: off-topic" to lighten it a bit. If they were a friend in real life, I'd take them aside and say "hey man, that comment was great, but you might want to soften the tone. It kind of came across as rude."

Downvotes end up being seen as judgments of your ideas, and I would love to be able to provide better feedback. This would be great if this could somehow give the user a nudge that they wouldn't feel defensive about.

It may seem like a minor point, but I feel a little guidance would go a long way in helping users get the sort of social cues they already get in a real-life conversation.

Edit: Instead of calling it out as flagging, I'd be okay with a downvote system that simply/optionally let you specify a reason to provide (with 3-4 common nicely-worded options). I don't care about upvote reasons at all.
True, but I do think the age of the reality/kareoke show is nearing a close (Thankfully).

Big brother is gone, hopefully xfactor+britains got freaks, I think the public have grown absolutely sick of the same cheap TV.
APC has lots of users. Judging the userbase of a piece of software by the rate of major releases is like judging the speed of your car by the rate at which it breaks down.

It's an opcode cache. It doesn't need to gain features until it can read email.
Nuclear Reactor Wall Charts
Yeah, I've noticed a decline in the tone of comments too. The site seems to be getting nastier. I occasionally find myself thinking lately that I just don't want to be here anymore. But I am determined not to let HN go down without a fight.

If anyone has any more general suggestions for solving the nastiness problem, besides these new types of flag, I'm all ears.
If you're going to have flagging options on comments for uncivil or frivolous comments, you should probably raise the moderation floor to -1 or 0, because it doesn't seem fair to let people be downvoted below that point for disagreement alone.
The guy who got "hacked" (see colbyolson's post) couldn't keep his bias out of the conversation, ruined it for me. That and the guy comparing changing the page of a blog to stealing.

There could have been a lot more interesting questions asked.
I pretty much only flag posts for:

dupe
terrible-title
spam-site
not-even-arguably-hacker-related
About as interesting as why a schoolboy carves his name into a desk with a compass point.

A fitting punishment would be for a "hacker" to get random excepts from his victims blogs tattooed on his face.
How so? I still admire Slashdot's moderation system. (unless there's a woosh sound over my head right now).

The thing that killed Slashdot for me was the redesign - I'm not usually a design snob, but it's way too visually heavy for me. I think the moderation system is great, though - particularly the ability to set weights for different types of comments (e.g. -1 all Funny posts if memes and one-liners bother you).
This is the key phrase from the article:

"It looks like the “blog posts” are fragments from places like Wikipedia run through some obfuscator"

A Markov generator will create text based on the text it's trained on, and because of the way it works you'll end up with little snippets from the text sources. Here's an online one you can play with:

http://www.beetleinabox.com/mkv_input.html
What if the incivility flag actually included a message, so you could literally say what you're suggesting? What if it was, in effect, an anonymous comment that had no reply link and was only visible to the submitter of the parent comment?
One highlight in the Prisoner's Dilema was the concept of letting the opponent see you "throw the steering wheel out the window" during a game of chicken.

I wonder if you could create a company around this idea. Call it "Final Offer, Inc." The company would offer contracts that "throw the steering wheel out the window" when negotiating. How it works: I sign an agreement with Final Offer that obligates me to pay Final Offer 100% of the contract price if this is not the final offer. Or a software company's sales department takes out a Final Offer contract to certify that this pricing is the lowest it can offer for 8 months. The customer is then provided with Final Offer certification they can show when submitting the offer.
Get one that pushes everything over SSL / TLS / port 443. Other protocols / ports are often blocked in random and public settings.
I'm not sure what you're trying to argue against. My first sentence said (a) "ideas are generally not unique" and (b) "it is the execution that matters"

I didn't discuss whether the execution was spectacular or not and I didn't discuss whether the idea was great or decent.

on (a), as a matter of fact, this thread proves that the idea was not unique
on (b), as a matter of fact, the difference between the guy who had the idea and succeeded and the other guy who had the idea can be boiled down to one thing. I also suspect that hundreds of other people had the same idea. Again, what distinguished them from the guy who succeeded is simple.
One guy executed, the other guys just had the idea, but didn't execute (either because they were incapable of execution or because they had other priorities ...)
I think what went wrong was that they publicly displayed the score for whichever axis was most significant. Here, the only score that is displayed to all is the only positive one we have: "this comment adds to the discussion."

The reason I think this is what went wrong for them was that they had flags like "funny", for things that obviously don't add to the discussion, and too many choices for the other positive votes. IMHO, having one meaning for upvote and a handful of negative flags would be ideal if the flags were only visible to the submitter (to educate noobs/reprimand those who should know better) and whatever process is responsible for threshing the chaff.
But Al Gore invented PHP!
Snap and Search (No Words Needed)
Certainly Google App Engine(Phyton). It is nice to have a small free version for experiments and own projects. Great way to get your hands dirty. AWS/Amazon has to do its homework and open up a sandbox type of platform where you can put your small project of your own at no cost, and opt-in that others can copy/improve.

'Open' is the best way to innovate (small steps of improvement) on something.

Zynga (the company and the concept) proved to be successful with enough leverage and network effects Facebook provided.
Not specific, of course you can do it without much trouble in language/framework. It's easy to do in Arc, and with web programming with continuations in general. You want an example that is representative of things you'd like to do in practice. This example isn't. I'm not saying you did that deliberately. You have been programming websites in this continuation style for a long time, so it's understandable that you'd choose an example that's simple with continuations if you try to choose a simple example instead of a representative example. Most web programming is (1) display a list of things (2) display a detail view for something in the list (3) provide a form to add something to the list. The code for such an example provides much more information about how good a language/framework is for real world programming.

By the way, why did you choose to use string names for the data in the input form? Why not use variables directly and make aform work more like let (and like Mathematica's manipulate):

(form
(name (input-string))
(age (input-number))
(pr "Hello, " name ". You are " age " years old."))

Where input-X writes HTML output and returns a function that extracts the value of the field from the HTTP request. Validation works well too.
Good point. But I fail to see why C++ is the solution, when there are plenty of other languages that execute just as efficiently but do not have C++'s shortcomings. I would pick Haskell, but even good-old-Java will do just as well as C++ for Facebook's workload.
Yes there is: measure the frequencies each banner is shown to each visitor and add that data to your optimization parameters. Of course this requires you to identify and track each individual visitor, but it's a standard practice in online ad systems.
Ask HN: How do you pitch a skunk-works project once the proof of concept works?
I've been working on a skunk-works (unofficial side project, developed entirely outside of the wall) project for awhile with a good friend, and its getting to the point where we want to take it to an A/B test/weblab of some sort.

What are the best steps forward to minimize push-back from the current owners of the UI? Unlike the mac graphing calculator guy, we are both currently employed & wish to avoid being fired for ruffling the wrong feathers.

Is there any CYA stuff which we should do first?

Do you have any advice on how to keep someone from running away with our project and claiming credit?

Besides a working demo, what else should we prepare?

Should we get some sort of user testing done first outside of the company, or would that be more likely to be viewed in a negative light?

Whom would you first approach (own manager, manager of the group for whom the skunk-works project would change, VP, CEO,etc.)?

posted with a one-time account for anonymity. Thanks for the advice & sorry for the wall of text.
Hmm, must have skimmed past that...
Yes, that is a related problem. The floor used to be -8, but as the number of users increased (and maybe the median user got meaner) there started to be lots of comparatively earnest posts that got downvoted to -8. So I raised the cutoff to -4, but that still seems unsatisfactory. Voting still feels like it's being done by a mob.

I tried not displaying points on comments a while ago, in order to solve this problem, but users complained that this made HN harder to read because they couldn't pick out the good comments. I only gave it two days' trial though. Maybe I should have given it more time. Or maybe there is some other solution.

Anyone have any ideas?
If public meta-commenting is the issue, and assuming the comment isn't an outright troll, it'd be nice to know who took issue with it, and be able to ask why privately. Hence, civil discourse as though we're face-to-face. Anonymous one-word stamps are no more sensitive than unexplained downvotes, and will give rise to the exact same questions.
While we're on the topic of adding features, I'd like to know why links aren't clickable in the main submission. Is there a specific reason? Seems like an inconvenience enough that a "clickable links" comment is nearly always voted to the top.
That would work great for my part-- I'd assume moderators/admins could see it, too.

I'd hate for people to abuse the anonymous nature of it sometimes and be rude-- we haven't had any "private" messaging so far on HN, so this would open a little of that world for moderators to think about.
Hmm, interesting. The problem though is that these tags are supposed to be private, so there would be no force to make customs converge.
The first line of your comment is pretty insightful. The rest, not so much. It seems you've fallen victim to exactly what you're criticizing.
That is a really good idea,
but I suggest making sure that the commenter gets notified of that private reply (instead of having to check it manually).
One point to consider is whether this will be a one-off deal or whether this will be a good business model for your company.

If you think that you'd like to work on getting more white label deals, I think that it will be worth it for you to spend a lot of times/resources on implementing this white-label deal. OTH if this is not going to be an important biusiness model for you, you may want to make sure you don't expend too much energy on a one-off deal.
So, its my understanding, that this wasn't do the GPL versus the BSD license, but had more to do with the uncertainty hanging over the BSD distributions due to a lawsuit threat from proprietary Unix.

Now of course I could be wrong, but I think there may be other factors which could explain the difference.
I use AdBlock to filter out this pattern:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/js/app/*

Seems to work effectively.
The AdBlock filter I mentioned earlier completely kills this.
Are Hot U.S. Startups The New Bling For Rich Russians?
Ask HN: Please review Wordey - Remembrance dictionary
Logical arrow of time and terminology
Weird, I always though of xfactor single-buyers as young people (future pop wannabees) hoping to catch a bit of the star factor of the people they had been voting for.

Looking for more data I came across this

http://www.bpi.co.uk/members-area/article/bpi-statistical-ha...

It suggests that in 2008 95% of singles were downloaded. So I doubt the weather had much to do with it. Still no demographics on who actually buys cds normally though.
I like this idea of being able to hide comments and stories from submitters with accounts fewer than N days old, where N is a setting that each user can tweak.
It's to illustrate the mentality. After all, wouldn't someone else just tattoo his face? No? So that's not much of an excuse for defacing someone else's property.

A brand of H on both cheeks would do as well.
Some highlights of Na’vi
Ignore most of the other comments threading from this point, and HASH THE PASSWORDS with a salted hashing scheme. If it's not salted, it's almost as bad as not encrypting them at all.
Hashed passwords are character-agnostic as well, so the only reason to limit your character-space then becomes preventing injection... which you should be using a library to do for you, because, frankly, "they" know better, and it's been more heavily tested than your code.

If you're storing passwords in ANY reversible format, you're a threat to every user's security. It's part of why I like OpenID: if your server is compromised, I'm not.
Why rag on Facebook? Smells like linkbait to me, why not argue the general case? At least Facebook is using their servers, what about all the unused servers? Old servers that could be consolidated? Servers running even more inefficient code than PHP?
Along the same lines, I'd like to see a throttle that limits how many stories a user can submit from the same domain.

There are a handful of users that seem to only submit from 1 or 2 sites that (I presume) they are affiliated with. This is just more noise that makes skimming the /new page and promoting good stories less efficient than it could be.

Regarding titles... What about a title/subtitle option? Keep whatever title the actual article has, and a slightly smaller subtitle where the submitter can editorialize.
+1 for Heroku!
In my opinion, the "best" work also scores highly across the criteria. In my experience, the voting body increasingly ignores criteria as it gets larger. Perhaps the quality of the results would improve if the voting body had to rank the criteria to provide weights, then rank their preferences for each criteria. This informs the voting body and the results might surprise (and even please) everyone. But that's complicated.

Having designed and run preferential ranking systems for selecting multiple winners (unlike the Oscars), I've seen that polarizing choices tend to get eliminated regardless of artistic merit. Sometimes, we address this by letting the results of the larger voting body inform the decision of a smaller panel, who are allowed to vary the algorithm and play with other variables before making the final determination (in ranking subjective things like art, fairness in voting is not always the main priority).

The problem with the compromise candidate is that it is often not anyone's first preference, therefore nobody considers it the best. This is especially true when the number of candidates is large.

As an experiment, I'd like to ask voters to select only the best and worst single candidates, then apply a straightforward preferential ranking algorithm against those as if they were the top two choices. I wouldn't be surprised if this would narrow the field to works with the most artistic merit.
Have you thought about showing the aggregate number of flags too? This might be interesting if you have multiple types of flags.

Another possibility is to make the flag threshold higher but make the flags non anonymous(That might create a hostile environment though, e.g. tit-for-tat retaliation but I would hope this environment is mature enough for a frank discussion.)
The slashdot comment thread is surprisingly insightful [ http://developers.slashdot.org/story/09/12/20/1656248/When-D... ]
You can even write a scientific paper! Try this http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ :)
your comment just got you a techcrunch article:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/20/are-hot-u-s-startups-th...
I don't much like the idea of private messaging, but I really don't want to be explicitly notified of anything that has been typed by someone who I have not specifically designated as a friend.

I have enough spam and distraction in my life.
"I could do well at school if it was a priority of mine. [...] this BA would not be unlocking any doors for me."

If philosophy degree is nothing for you, than tell your parents. Come clean, start a new and maybe take on a technical or software degree, or symbolics, or math, physics. You should do something your comfortable with!

"Finishing college is just so not in line with where my desires really are."

Education (College/University) is one way to guide young people. Kind of a guiding light. Some young people don't read HN or use the internet to educate themselves, teach themselves, learn to discuss, learn to write (say blogging), ...

But when you are already orientate your life and future among your peers (HN, friends who code too, conferences) and identify yourself in them, than this BA in Philosophy is in your way. What you have to do is to monetize (business model ;-) your passion, your skills, ... look around your peers what they are doing. And I know it is easier said than done. Especially in this time.

But identification within somebody else (peer/parents/older friends, brother) beyond the age of 18 is crucial, and sometimes young people take the wrong route, or postpone it and thus underperform at formal education because of the lack of motivation.

And why formal education systems don't pick that up, the theme of identification, is that there is too much BS out there, rock stars, glamor, TV, ... there is too much 24/7 illusions out there. And media is making the majority of kids delusional by showing and presenting them values which are wrong, wrong in the context, wrong that this happened without sweat and hard work ... you get me.

"Well, that's a neat idea, but you need to get your degree first."

Then do philosophy as minor and do a major you are fascinated with.

"I just refuse to accept that my degree is truly something that I need in order to follow through on my plans to build a company."

You need lots of sweat equity, passion and learning on the go (accounting, economics, management). A formal education gives you only a paper with your name and that you read some books, the rulers, the pencil, and the rules you have to abide. But creativity, cognitive skills, soft skills, and working without boundaries in mind isn't something you don't learn.

What a rant this is again. Uhm.
This is a good point. "Uncivil" is more valuable than "Offtopic" and "Troll".
I'm excited by the ideas and approach of Palm, but their phone bores me. When I hold it I don't feel like I'm holding something substantial -- a sensation the iPhone does give me.
An inaccuracy at 4:57 to 5:00 where it shows the Moon's orbit to be circular(ish) around the Earth. If you show the Moon's orbit without the Earth it isn't a set of spirals, it's almost indistinguishable from a circle(ish) around the Sun. The size of the orbit around the Earth is so small compared with the distance to the Sun that the Moon's orbit looks like a circle with a slight wobble.

It's even convex.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_of_the_Moon#Path_of_Earth...
Whereby Statistics Improves Your Dart Game
If most people hate it, but a significant number of people love it, it will still get the go ahead.

I can't see that the number of people hating it has changed that much. Surely there aren't that many people who used to love it, and now hate it, nothing in the format has changed.

Now, why should those who hate it do any more than skip watching it? Why should they wreck it for the people who do like it? I don't understand this.

Also, the people who hate it don't really are about the strange Brit phenomemenom of xmas albums, they would likewise ignore it.

I am not sure what this is about, other than showing that people hate this show, although this was pretty obvious from the beginning.
As an actual Niyazov (no relation), I appreciate this.
There is the peer theory. Great peers can pull you out of many things just by aspiring you.
I don't mean to sidestep what is an interesting discussion on foreign investments here, but I was a little surprised how prominently HN was featured in this article. I've always seen the relationship between YC and TechCrunch as tolerant at best. But here Arrington not only directly refers to "Hacker News", but also fully quotes abalashov's comment. Are these two startup-centric organizations completely intertwined now, or should we expect a new rush of TC noobs? (I mean no disrespect by saying that either).
Something like this happened/is happening to a professor that I worked for in grad school. He has retracted several papers and will probably be retracting at least one more from top journals (Nature, Science, etc). Fortunately for me I was only in the group for a very short time and never had any publications as a result. This can't be said for the other students I knew in the group, although it was one of the grad student co-authors who apparently "turned him in".

My assessment of the situation is that the prof is extremely capable, but the pressures of being a tenure-track assistant professor, probably combined with the arrogance of thinking he could get away with faking data, made it too tempting.

I think he will certainly end up shut out of academia, but at the same time I don't think you'll hear about it, because too many people stand to lose face if it is publicized. I think this is probably the most common outcome of "scientific misconduct" when it is actually caught and punished.
Hey, I love it! Brilliant game! It's simple but there's still something to figure out because you have to anticipate the cascading effects of squares getting eliminated.

The explanation isn't good, but playing it reveals how it works anyway.