skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If they did it frequently enough to create a detectable pattern, the votes would start to be ignored to varying degrees.

As you point out (though this wasn't your theme), the ranking algorithm on the front page also helps mitigate the problem. Stuff upvoted by a ring will sink back down if it doesn't catch on with other users.
Bowkett: This Is Why You Should Pay For Advice
yeah, but don't you think it would be better if they were in totally different axes?
"A Grand Prize ($100) is awarded at the end of the calendar year to the best performing submission."
To develop terminology and understanding of the physical/mathematical problems you could look into the books of Jean Meeus. "Astronomical Algorithms" contains, ...well, exactly that: small recipes to solve problems in positional astronomy or calculate ephemerides. Check Willman Bell publishers for the english version of his books.

I liked "Celestial Mechanics" by Laurence Taff, but it's calculus-heavy which is nice if you're interested in the mathematical background and want to see some practical calculation examples.

Somewhere in the middle between these books is "Astronomical Methods and Calculations" by Acker and Jaschek. The exercises and solutions in this book come very close to the example you give.

Apologies for not putting links to the books but just google for author/title. Or check your local library.
Try 3d Deathchase - it's better than Doom!
Show your love to the companies listed at TechCrunch
Fully-justified text can actually be more readable than ragged-right (although ragged-right is definitely better for some contexts like narrow lines, and can apparently help readers with dyslexia). I believe this is because justified text makes it easier for the eye find the end of the next line and then track back to its start. Here's a reference to one study in which justified performed better than ragged-right (there are others too):

http://eserver.org/courses/w01/tc510/hades/kaltenbach1.htm

The advice to use ragged-right is almost always correct on the web, where it's not generally possible to reliably hyphenate or manually typeset your pages. But in print I would use justified text more often than ragged-right. There are reasons that almost all books and newspapers are set justified.
You have bigger problems if your coworkers don't look at what they're committing...

"git add -p" is your friend!
Which is an attempt to modify the implied obligations that have arisen from:

- Previous announcements that there would be a text mate 2.

- General expectations about what normal software companies do.

The point I was hoping to make is that people have expectations based on what they believe has/will/should happen, no matter what you believe you have promised, and you either need to deliver on those or change those expectations. If you don't then you might be surprised at their disappointment, but it's pretty inevitable should you fail to manage expectations well enough.

If that sounds stupid or unreasonable to you, then I mostly agree, but these are people you are dealing with and they don't always operate in a logical fashion.

(Incidentally implied obligations are also recognized in law. They don't have to be written into the contract to exist. One example from the UK is employer supplied perks that aren't in your contract. I'm not suggesting that there is any legal obligation in this case (as opposed to an expectation), but they do arise - there's some more information at http://www.gillhams.com/articles/141.cfm )
Did Fox actually say that the current cold weather was his reason for being on the show or is he projecting?
Harder to prove? :/ This is a community. Seems like you're taking this all a little seriously.

The bigger threat IMHO is things like the "OMG! This is a funny picture about how programmers see each other ROTFL!". That got something like 80 upvotes (Think it got killed evertually, but still). That's a far bigger worry than people asking friends to lend a vote or 2 to their submissions. IMHO
Incarnate: Find and reuse your avatar
Open source needs community (on an example of chad, africa) | williambrownstreet
Thanks, you beat me to it. The sensationalism in this article is incredible.

This is a simple engineering problem that does not justify an article titled "The Unintended Negative Consequences of LEDs". Put in a coil connected to a thermometer to melt snow if necessary. Problem solved, and energy is still conserved.
I use Quicksilver as my sole means of launching applications (plus a few other utility functions) and I've never experienced the kind of instability you're describing. Let ß56a7's low PID testify to it's rock solidness!

~ bgilmore → uptime
12:35 up 23 days, 56 mins, 5 users, load averages: 0.22 0.19 0.21
~ bgilmore → ps ax | grep Quick
149 ?? S 1:31.43 /Applications/Quicksilver.app/Contents/MacOS/Quicksilver -psn_0_36873

In all seriousness, though, I can imagine the irritation that would be caused by crashes. I've just never experienced them, and I've been on the Quicksilver train since 10.4.1 or so.

(I'm a ⌃Space guy myself)
I think that you've identified an important problem, but I disagree with your approach to solving it. I think you're right that scarcity is a good way to make voting (especially approval-style voting) into something more meaningful.

One of the problems with Digg is not just the unlimited amount of voting that one can do, but also the unlimited amount of submitting one can do. As a result, you have people running scripts to submit tons and tons of articles scraped from RSS feeds. Literally one article every few seconds. What your system would do (making people earn mod points through submissions) is simply encourage users to submit as much as possible in order to gain more points. Crapflooding the queue then destroys the signal to noise ration irretrievably.

I think the better way to implement scarcity, apart from your method and Slashdot's method, is to weight users' votes according to the number of votes they've distributed in a given period (say 24 hours). So a person who votes for under 10 things might have each vote count as a full 1 point. But a person who votes for 20 things might have their vote count as only 1/2 a point. You might put a lower bound on it, so that a vote will never be worth less than 1/10th of a point, but you get the idea.

It's not scarcity by number, so much as scarcity by dilution. The best part of this is that it's invisible to the user. When you have a system that's visible ("You've got 5 Modpoints, Use 'em or Lose 'em!"), you encourage gaming the system. When you have a system that's invisible, users can behave normally or badly and the system can compensate without giving them clues as to how to game it.
Exactly. Shhh!
They use us ( http://urbanairship.com/ ) to deliver their in app content. Huzzah!

We've seen some good use of in app purchase (ChristmasfyMe included, of course) and I'm definitely excited about the platform; however, it would be nice to see microtransaction support. In app content is limited to app store pricing - in other words, the smallest amount you can charge is $0.99. This is great for content packs, but doesn't allow smaller transactions. For example, a small item in a game might only be a nickel instead of a dollar. As it is now, you have to offer 20 items instead of just the one a user might want.
I know some angels in Chicago that are interested in starting an incubator program focusing on translational medicine startups. They have contacts and experience on the regulatory/testing end. Not sure what market you are specifically interested in, but feel free to email me.
If so, will they still be cheaper to operate? I can buy that they'll still use less energy on net, but that isn't the only concern here.
Transactional NTFS only works on Vista, Server 2003, and later. It only works on local drives. There are many other limitations. Because of these limitations, I have not yet been able to use Transacitonal NTFS in any real program. Somebody always wants to store all their stuff--even critical stuff--on some network share.
I took note of the whole passage. Everett defines the Piraha grammar as not having recursion. He claims that when the Piraha use recursion in their linguistic communication ("story telling") they are somehow doing it outside the Piraha language. But the Piraha language is defined by the usage of the Piraha, not by one or another codified grammars.

Nevins et al. (linked above) note that recursion takes multiple forms in multiple languages and there isn't even anything terribly unusual about the form it takes in Piraha, even if this is a form Everett cannot accept into the grammar.
There is a catch, though; if you have the same file open multiple times, even with different names, then closing one file descriptor will release all locks on that file in the same process, even in different threads.

SQLite goes to great lengths to work around this. See: http://www.google.com/search?q=broken+by+design+site:sqlite....
This article got written because economists have a limited vocabulary for talking about design.

If you build a machine to solve a problem, and the machine doesn't act the way you want it to, that's a bug. Fixing bugs is easier than starting over would be. Bugs that make you wonder are called design flaws.

You don't get unintended consequences until your system works, and things change in your environment (or maybe with your users) because of the way it works. Unintended consequences are hard to fix because they only show up in systems that are already doing what you want.
I've trying Google QSB; it is super fast, looks great, and works more like QS than LaunchBar. It is supposedly extensible, so hopefully people develop for it.
I got super paranoid about that, so I created a system for creating quasi-random passwords for different sites, but based on the same rule:

salt+[reversed first four letters of site name]+[number of digits in site name] not the actual rule I used, but you get the idea

That was okay, but kind of annoying. Plus, I figured that the rule wouldn't be overly difficult to break, and then I'd be just as screwed as if I used the same PW for all sites.

Now I use 1Password to generate and store all of my passwords. I use dropbox to sync it across all my computers, and if I log in to dropbox, I can access a web interface. There's also an iPhone app, so it's not completely annoying never knowing any of my passwords, and I don't have to worry about one site storing my PW plain text and being exploited. [Now I just need to worry about my dropbox account getting hacked... here's hoping they don't store in plain text ;)]

I don't have anything to do with 1Password, and there are a lot of other apps out there that do the same thing.
If the heating element is thermostat-driven, and not on all the time, then yes.
Any system which has human psychology in the loop is going to be difficult to predict. I'll be impressed if these kinds of phenomena can be predicted though. We already know that crime is more likely in certain neighborhoods, but whether you can make more specific predictions than that I don't know (almost getting into precrime territory).
I thought that the scientific community had by and large backed off from the earth cooking to the more easily provable position of CO2 levels rising/oceans acidifying?
People ganging up on other people is a serious issue, and yes, it does happen.

The other item is also a big problem, but don't underestimate the pressure that comes from having your comments systematically downvoted and/or your submissions killed.
That doesn't mean it still doesn't apply. Mac OS X has seen some major API changes and additions in the past couple major releases (that have all happened since Allan announced his working on TM 2.0), and I can see the DNF fiasco repeat itself here. TextMate 1.x won't become completely and unrunnably obsolete, but redoing major features to take advantage of some shiny new API and therefore pushing back any potential release date? It's the same idea on a longer time scale.
You can do a lot better hyphenation than most people realize.. e.g. http://code.google.com/p/hyphenator/
Agreed. This layout felt so refreshing when it was on the frontpage earlier: http://evhead.com/

Body copy is 16px on the homepage, 17px on post pages.
Not exactly true. I use S3 account to host my files only. I don't use it for hosting or whatsoever. If I use robots.txt, I prevent it from appearing in Google and since you don't know my bucket name or my S3 account name, you can't read my robots.txt file.
This is a great one: Under POSIX, any write() to a fifo that has at least PIPE_BUF free is atomic.

There's a neat trick I'd like to add that takes advantage of this: Multiple clients can use a message whose size divides evenly into PIPE_BUF without any possibility of interleave, and so they do not need to lock.

int n=sizeof(struct message);
struct message m[n/PIPE_BUF];
assert(sizeof(m)==PIPE_BUF);
if(pipe(fds)==-1)abort();
for(i=0;i<cpus;i++){if(!fork())child(fds[1]);}
while(r=read(fds[0],m,PIPE_BUF)){for(i=r/n-1;i>=0;--i)handle(m+i);}

Each child can write entire messages, without locking and without interleaving, so long as sizeof(struct message)*n is exactly PIPE_BUF.

Btw, your pipe(&pipefd) should've been pipe(pipefd) if pipefd is an array of 2 int
That's a silly, misleading, and self-serving statement Leone made.

The reason guys like him target 20-somethings is the same reason con artists target the elderly. They are vulnerable.

In the case of 20-somethings, they're vulnerable because they are still green/naive. All they see is some friendly dude with a slick pitch who knows how to throw around a few buzzwords and sound smart to their virgin ears.

They don't yet realize that 99% of VCs are reading from the same used-car salesmen's script, jumping on the same latest-and-greatest bandwagon, and generally trying to position them for an *ss f-ing. You can do that to a 20-something. Not so much to a 30 or 40 year old.

I'm exaggerating and using loaded language for effect and spice, but that's the crux of the biscuit.

Cheers!
This story's just silly. It doesn't say anything about the subject, and gives only Lenovo as an example. What is it trying to say? I don't know...
I had exactly this scenario happen years ago. I was driving to a four-way stoplight and the light was snowed over (only in my direction, as it turns out). The cars on the side road were stopped. I slowed to a near-stop and was trying to figure out what to do - some people coming from the opposite direction were going. Sure enough, the side traffic started entering the intersection and I tried to come to a complete stop and (in slow-motion) slid on ice into a car at about 5 MPH, who did not even bother to look to the sides, presumably because his light was perfectly clear.
Indeed. Those are the font sizes I'd go with doing print typography. On the web I almost always use 14-16px for body type. It's much easier to read.
Many of these features are actually quite common in other languages. For example, C# has lambdas, functions as first class objects, closures, dynamic programming, null coalescence etc. The real power of Lisp in my opinion is not the existence of these features but the way they perfectly fit into the S-Expression syntax.
Linear Bloom Filters
"I had students two years ago who did a project which is way more obvious now than it was two years ago; it turns out you can tell people are gay by analyzing their social networks."

This is one of the reasons I use social networking so sparingly. It seems like it would be fairly easy to do analysis based on a large stream of social networking information and use that to determine traits of a person that they did not intend to share. I'm sure that a lot of it is used for targeted purposes, like advertising, but it can also be dangerous. Maybe I'm just paranoid.
[60fps] Framerates do matter
Your submission record mirrors that of most of the top posters I see: the majority of posts get a few votes and die. Assuming your content is HN worthy and you're not posting too much, then it's not about fair, but far more important is the too great volume of posts.

The exception in my limited scouting was those posters with a feel for headlines, e.g. petercooper stands out with a better percentage.
> If other people are interested, your story will make it to the front page on merit.
>
> If other people aren't interested

Just a point of information: this is basically the "efficient market hypothesis" in another form.

I agree that the market is more efficient than any other alternative, but I do not think that the market is perfect, or that HN upvotes/downvotes are perfect.

In general, markets are better the more liquid they are, and the more people are involved.

I think that NEW topics submitted to HN are viewed by very few people, and the result from the first few people upvoting a new topic can be HUGE, in that there's a feedback effect - they are exposed to new viewers the higher they rise.

It would be quite interesting to do an A/B test at HN, where some topic that is of middlin' interest is introduced: half the viewers seen version A of HN where the topic is introduced at a karma of 1, and the other half of the viewers see version B of HN where the same topic, under a different name, is introduced at a karma of 10.

If you ran this test 20 times I'd be amazed if the highest karma that the article got was similar even 70% of the time.
So long as he isn't taking advantage of the data, I might even applaud this sort of thing.
Digg has the phenomenon as well, which they termed the 'bury brigades.' Organized groups of users would bury stories from certain sources/submitters or on certain topics. It ended up engendering a great deal of ill-will.
If anyone misses Geocities or myspace, look at this site in IE. I'm not sure what exactly the point of (seemingly) intentionally making your blog site readable in FF and outrageously hard to read in IE is...
37signals Podcast Ep5: A secret to making money online
Beware: rename() isn't atomic on Mac OS X:

http://www.weirdnet.nl/apple/rename.html
It's funny but these are mostly the reverse of what you want to do when closing deals with customers or business partners (vs.investors):

1. Focus on the opportunities that are in front of you.

2. Establish a working rapport with the customer/partner, a deal should be the start of a long and mutually beneficial relationship.

3. Maintain your balance, burnout is much more of a risk than losing any one deal in this environment.

4. Don't get into an adversarial relationship with your customer/partner.

5. Focus on reaching a business agreement, lawyers can advise you on business risks, but in the end it's the entrepreneur's call what risks to take.

EDIT: This post is not representative of the tone and quality of those on his website http://walkercorporatelaw.com/ here are two that are much more useful:

http://walkercorporatelaw.com/startup-issues/ask-the-attorne...

http://walkercorporatelaw.com/angel-issues/angel-financings-...
Why didn't anyone make something like a best bang for 100$ on sparkfun.com guide? I'll show up to anything that's free but I'm not real sure what the best deal is.

The Arduino starter kit?
Anytime a friend of mine has asked me to upvote something (usually on digg) I've read the article first and, if I liked it, I upvoted it. Most of the time I liked it and most of the time I would not have read it if they hadn't asked me to.
> Server 2003

Do you mean Server 2008?

I agree that the fact that it's only supported on Vista and later is a problem, but XP will hopefully slide into irrelevancy in the next year or so.

> It only works on local drives.

Are the things described in the blog post atomic over NFS? I remember reading that NFS breaks plenty of the guarantees that a POSIX system provides. Guaranteeing atomicity over a network does seem to be a somewhat harder job than guaranteeing it locally.
> Why the Unicode hate?

I don't know for sure - bad experience with it once, perhaps? I get fed up of IT, particularly stuff which is massive and complicated and finicky, particularly when it was designed by committee and foisted upon me and I don't benefit from it.

Other people just don't see the virtue in keeping their stuff simple so that it keeps my life simple. They should care less about showing off their "ability to put a telephone in a font" chops and more about how much I don't want to deal with whether the telephone is upper or lower case or the consequences of some wag putting it in their contact field and causing poorly written client software to crash when displaying it. Actually, that hasn't happened to me yet, but I'm just waiting for the phonecall where someone's web filtering software meets unicode domain names and falls flat on its face. "What site are you trying to go to?" "Some unpronouncable symbols".

When we/you/everyone can agree how to display tabs then we'll be getting somewhere and we can address the little squares of undisplayability.

It's not just unicode though, most sofware and hardware feels the aeriform wrath of my grumpy scowling.
One point I would like to add / disagree with:

"Suffice it to say that I don't think that the press you're going to receive outside the entrepreneurial community is enough to justify exposing your finances to the public."

I believe the opposite, most people (outside of tech) do not know much about products in tech, so they often come to people in tech for recommendations on everything from cell phones, to computers, to websites for fun / etc.

The same way you might ask a girl what flowers would be nice to get for your mom.

Recommendations exist in the real world & I personally think that putting yourself in front of a group of influencers (like the people here on HN) is a great way to gain word of mouth marketing.
Dude... that is a very good analogy!
point well taken.
Kerning is the spacing between letters. Again, like leading this seems like an obvious one, but still needs careful attention. Consider if your typeface generally needs spacing out more, or if it looks better with tighter kerning.

It sounds to me like the author might actually be talking about tracking, rather than kerning. From wikipedia: "While tracking increases the space between characters evenly, regardless of the characters, kerning increases the space based on character pairs".
The Equation of Software Design
AOL interested in Mashable
You don't keep searching after you found what you were looking for, right?
QCon 2010 Concurrency Track
Yep, in the comments he says, after discussing some of the non-SQL databases they're thinking about: "We have a few ideas [ of things to do with them (I think) ] but I really like to have solutions and then figure out opportunities to play with them. :)"

If you look at what his team accomplished in 2009 it's hard to argue with the attitude. This is a field that rewards well targeted proactive learning.
The Concurrency Challenge
Apple snubs Intel for tablet chips
Seems entirely intentional...

<!--[if IE]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://atomized.org/wp-content/themes/atomized2/ie.css type="text/css" media="screen">
<![endif]-->

I find it pretty hilarious, myself. The site is quite nice in firefox, but I would have immediately turned away if I were using ie. He must be making some assumptions about his readers.
Wow, this breaks a lot of UNIX.
You most of all need to be angry.

Suicide attacks are mostly limited to religious people, I think that somehow traces back to the philosophical part of religion that sees your earthly body as just a temporary vessel for your eternal soul (for want of a better word).

Almost every religion has some component to that effect.

What surprises me is that I would think that most engineers know enough about how the world really works that they would be able to pierce the veil of religion with enough doubt that they would err on the side of caution in case this body is all they've got.

When you're prepared to die it is relatively easy to take a lot of innocent people with you in to the grave.
you can tell by the prize amounts...