skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You may think it a cogent and thoughtful response (and you might be correct) but others may disagree even though they do not have the time to spend in a point-by-point refutation of your thesis. Voting is a filtering mechanism, and by downvoting without comment we collectively filter out "noise" from "signal"; what those two terms mean varies from person to person and may in fact have wildly different meaning to the people voting up or down, but that seems to be the intended effect of the voting arrows. Sometimes just saying "no/yes, I (dis)agree with you" is sufficient and the site is better served by encapsulating these statements into up and down votes rather than encouraging the equivalent of "+1 I agree" messages you see on some mailing lists.

I do not visit HN to argue epistemology or ethics and have little use for back-and-forth discussions between two people that nest twelve layers deep and which you can see after the first exchange are never going to end until they grow bored talking past each other and move on to some other comment thread. I would much rather that these disagreements and conflicting positions are handled in a way that does not take up space for other interesting arguments or points of discussion -- downvoting without a reply serves this purpose.
You can win damages consisting of your attorney's fees but that's predicated on you being absolutely certain that the judge will see it your way and tossing out the claim as frivolous.

This is never a given, especially when dealing with technology.
Nokia seems to be desperate. Maybe they think their situation is hopeless?
this will probably happen in this case. they are just placing their bargaining chips on the table.
This article comes off as rather offensive to me, it must be the language and constant ego bashing of nerds, but one thing that doesn't make sense is when Zed Shaw said he put his ego aside as he obviously didn't and was angry that his about page had fed these random music comments and is obviously upset that people took his about page seriously.
> 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.

If the auction price is reasonably high, that pretty much guarantees that H1Bs will not be used for low-wage occupations.

Suppose that the auction price is $100k. If the going rate for a particular job is $120k, no company is going to hire an H1B for more than $20k. Even if said company finds someone for $15k, the cost to the company is only $5k below market. If they find someone for $30k, that's like paying a not-H1B $130k.
Status and Evolutionary Biology
I've found that how you ask makes a big difference in how likely you are to get an answer. For example:

1.) On a mailing list, listing things you've already tried and other resources you've already read makes people more inclined to answer you. It shows that you're serious about solving the problem and just need a little help to get there, and keeps them from having to play 20 questions with what you already know.

2.) If you're asking a coworker to do something, ask if you can watch. They'll figure that you'll be able to do it yourself next time.

3.) In all cases, fundamental questions seem to be more useful than specific questions. "Where's that log data kept? How do I get access to it? What format is it in?" is more useful than "Can you look up who was scraping our server at 10:40 PM yesterday for me?", because the former lets you solve a whole class of problems by yourself, while the latter just takes care of the immediate need.
unfortunately most of the books I have wanted are not available for the kindle.
I'm new here, but I've always assumed (by how they are used) that downvotes were for pure disagreement.
Jennings restarted smoking after 9/11.
I am wondering how much credibility positions from Gartner is given in the startup community overall. They seem to be pretty risk-adverse, and not necessarily forward-thinking.
My favorite bash aliases:

alias aack="ack --all"

alias rack="ack --ruby --follow"

alias fack="ack --actionscript --follow"

alias jack="ack --js"

alias pack="ack --python"

(mentioned because aack would have prevented his searching problem)
I think points do a good job of positioning comments in a thread as you can easily pick out the common consensus, one thing that would be nice if it was encouraged is leaving comments when you downvote so that maybe a discussion can occur.

(Obviously however there are some comments that do not warrant discussion but this probably would end up fitting into the types of flags.)
TenYears: Unexpected Success Stories
He even merits a brief wikipedia article, which indicates he was sentenced to 8 years in 2004. Maybe he's already out?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blane_Nordahl
I saw the title and actually thought it meant Zynga was going to be making games for hobbyist bot programmers. Talk about a let down upon reading.

From the "cheating mafia games" department: I wrote a proxy server that would allow you to cheat at an iPhone variant of mafia wars. I watched its packets and saw some holes in the normally pretty solid OAuth communication it used with their servers. I never published the trick because it really made the game even more unfun than it was. Cheating is pretty rampant in games like this, but I don't know how anyone can enjoy doing it because there's really no fun in any game where the rules are meaningless.

If you're designing games, be sure you try really hard not to rely on the client for important game information, or put in other checks and balances to help catch lies and exaggerations coming over the wire.

From the "when I was a kid" department: The first "software" I ever sold were scripts to automatically play BBS games like TradeWars. I'm glad that companies weren't flexing their legal muscles quite so much back then about auto-game-playing or it might have turned me off to doing software in the first place.
From what I've read, this was the problem... Nokia wanted to cross-license everything, and Apple balked at that. I can't say that I blame Apple, given that the iPhone interface seems to be far ahead of Nokia's current offerings.
The Dynamics of Scrolling
Um, he pretty much did that: http://code.google.com/p/markdownsharp/

By the way, what's with the assumption that github is the one true way? Is it that much better for you? I have code on Github, SourceForge, google code and while Github has some UI goodess, the windows tools for it are quite raw. The others also work fine. If you like DVCS, Sourceforge and Google code both do Mercurial
It's over here: http://code.google.com/p/markdownsharp/
I did not post the link here, nor did I call anything "beautiful," but I presume that the reason the original poster posted the link on a "discussion" site was to solicit "discussion." Immediate and forceful contradiction does not equate to discussion, even when the claim is "so false" as this one.
Exactly. It discourages participation through negative feedback. If you want to condition people to do a certain thing, like post thoughtful comments, then I think that's best achieved solely through positive reinforcement.
The Sad Tale Of Totlol
This reasserts that one cannot be perfect from the get-go.
How obvious!
There's a well known relationship between comment length and comment quality. In general, longer comment have more thought and effort put into them.

http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/09/29/comments_size_does_...

In other words, you can only snark or troll for so long; there's only so many ways to call somebody an idiot.
I doubt Nokia is willing to burn the bridges with standardization bodies like that.
I think terse negative feedback (a downvote) deserves some level of explanation otherwise the feedback from the vote is meaningless and people become afraid to post.
The auction idea is good, but there should also be some assurance companies don't get H1Bs for significantly less than the rate they would pay locals. H1B visas should never be used as cost-cutting mechanism. Perhaps a good one would be to fix the compensation of the H1B worker to the average local compensation for the same or comparable position.

OTOH, that would probably drive some companies out of the US because all their competition is doing the same. One must measure the possible consequences carefully.
Wow, fantastic. Apple must've patched up Safari 4 on Leopard to support the draft CSS3 code.
It would be in Delaware.

Investors would almost certainly want vesting terms. I'm not sure that is possible under LLC.
If you don't have time to post even a single sentence in response "I disagree, particularly on point...", you don't have time to be reading the post anyways. Better to keep off the site entirely until you get some proper time.
Ah, is that what those things that are labeled as EPA air quality stations are?
This article seems to me to conflate two things: how to have an exploratory discussion between two opposing viewpoints and how to win an argument.

For example, in an exploratory discussion, using your opponent's terms can lead to quicker definition of those terms, and less talking past one another. On the other hand, when trying to win an argument, allowing your opponent to frame the debate (either by using their terms or addressing/refuting their central points) can be the worst possible strategy!

I suspect that exploratory discussions where both parties are genuinely disinterested are rare in most contexts.
Sure, but you could probably argue that calling someone a "fag" without evidence is also DH3. But I think the nuance is that down voting is not explicitly stating a contradiction, only stating that you disagree (albeit anonymously), which is slightly more like DH0.

So yea it technically is also DH3.
Does Microsoft count?
yes, that definitely works only if you have 1 coder. fellow students of mine used email for SCM while working on a school project. it was pretty funny to hear that, since a) the major was Computer Science and b) the university would have set up SVN repositories on request (on university servers). well, after we told them about SVN and various other SCMT, they stopped pretty fast to use email for such an important task.
Maybe that's why quitting supposedly doesn't help, since quitting causes a large onset of stress, that might perpetuate throughout their life.
As far as I've always understood it, upvotes and downvotes relate to the value the voter perceives in an item (article or comment). If you think that the item adds value, you'll upvote it.

In most cases, agreeing with something is a prerequisite for seeing it as adding value. As a consequence, since people mostly upvote what they agree with, one tends to equate upvoting with agreement and downvoting with disagreement.

However, according to my understanding, downvoting should be used when you think that the item adds no value (or adds "negative value"). This is not the same thing as disagreement. Some examples of items that either add no or too little value are: name-calling, snarky one-liners with no useful content at all and very badly edited text (maybe the content has value, but the form negates it).
It's a good thing that Stephen was made aware of this security hole, but the author could have informed him a lot more effectively.

If someone broke into my house and I found out about it on Hacker News because they set up a webcam in my living room, I suppose it would be a good thing that I found out about a security problem in my home, but I certainly wouldn't be happy about it.
Both are examples of "ad hominem" fallacy. The fact that one is spelled better than the other (and uses a fancy word too) does not make it any less of a fallacy. Fallacy is not an argument, which was Paul's point.
I don't think that ordinary people are the problem. If by ordinary people you mean natural persons* . In the US government, the elected officials should represent the will of the people who elected them. The problem is that special interests find that money is better spent through lobbying. This allows them to buy votes and even write laws. A massive amount of money is spent lobbying:

http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/index.php

This money obviously has an effect. Ordinary people aren't creating lobbying groups.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_person
If everyone thought this way, many really great projects would never have been started, because their authors would be so bogged down by maintenance work they'd never do anything new. Take a look at John Resig's projects page:

http://ejohn.org/projects/

Click on anything that's not a JavaScript project, and you get a broken link. Would you rather he spend time fixing them up, or would you rather he spend time improving JQuery?
I am ashamed to say that here in Brazil the situation is very similar. It is very easy to bring litigation upon someone who said something someone else doesn't find appropriate and to go as far as censoring the information. There is currently one major newspaper that is under censorship that prevents it from reporting on a corrupt former president who is currently serving as a senator and his family.

The freedom of speech devices in the Constitution prohibit anonymity, rendering themselves ineffective.
As a marketing event producer at a multimedia company I say absolutely yes there is a market for this concept. I wish It was available now. It adds tremendous value to sponsorship packages and a measurable outcome for driving people to a website, event, etc ... everything other than television, print, and radio
Oh nice, that led me to find this Masterminds episode "The Silver Bandit":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6-TF2e0IHo
nostrademons suggestions are a great way to mark yourself as someone trying both to improve and not waste another's time.

I had blogged about how to ask an expert for help in http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2007/12/12/how-to-ask-an-expert... and suggested a couple more depending upon context. Robert Kelley in "How to Be a Star at Work" had these broader for novices in a new environment:

o Build your network before you need it, if possible.

o Be very mindful of people’s time and don’t waste it.

o Give careful thought to how you phrase your request or question.

o Summarize your attempts to solve the problem or find the information you as asking for help with.

o Verbally thank and follow up in writing, publicly credit.
You shouldn't be trying to win arguments. That's the root of all argumentation evil, as far as I'm concerned. In fact, that's one aspect of debate competition I really despise, the fetishizing of winning arguments. (OTOH, the way debate teams work you're forced to fully understand opposing viewpoints in a way that few people ever do.)
PCC builds OpenBSD kernel (4.6 -current)
Your post is a martyr post.
Tarsnap is unique in a few ways, but I don't know if you consider these important enough to be worth mentioning. For example:

* Tarsnap was designed to be secure against even the most skilled attackers -- and was written by someone (myself) with non-trivial expertise in cryptography and computer security.

* Because Tarsnap is built around tar(1), it is heavily scriptable; for experienced users this makes it far more flexible than any other tools.

* Tarsnap is AFAIK the only backup system which works as a metered service -- pricing per byte of bandwidth and per byte-month of storage used, starting at a (very small) fraction of a cent per month. Where other services have fixed monthly fees, Tarsnap just looks at your usage and charges you accordingly.

* I'm not sure if Tarsnap's snapshotting model is unique, but it's certainly unusual; and once Tarsnap users follow my advice of "forget everything you know about incremental backups", they all tell me that it's far more intuitive than other approaches.
I always just indent poems 4 spaces, making them into preformatted text.

In published work, poems are usually set apart from the prose and rendered in a different font anyway, so this seems natural enough to me. Courier isn't exactly my first choice for a poetic font, but it's good enough and gets the formatting across.
WSJ - 6 Interesting New Financial Web Sites
He said he put his ego aside in regards to redesigning his webapp to appeal to a wider audience, rather than what he wanted.

It doesn't seem terribly egotistical to want to correct people who are spreading an inaccurate representation of his product.
On the downside exposing points can lead to bias. You could easily make up your mind based on the points. It discourages individual thinking, and frankly if someone is too lazy to analyze and filter out the good comments for him/herself do we really want his/her opinion?

It can result in less accurate filtering. Popular comments may be voted up simply because someone sees the amount of points, skims the comment with perhaps a bare understanding, and thinks "hey, this guy's probably right." And then, ding, a possibly unwarranted upvote. The same effect can apply to an unpopular comment, but the effect is probably stronger for unpopular comments, which is why I think it is so dangerous. An unpopular comment would suffer more of this effect because people who disagree may build up more negative emotions, and this emotion may lead to more impulsive, irrational behavior making them more susceptible to the bias.

Seeing a comment he/she disagree with, and seeing that a bunch of people agree with him/her about disagreeing gives that person a sense of approval which erodes his/her ability to truly evaluate a dissenting comment objectively.
I'll put in a plug for Pandoc here:

http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

It's written in Haskell, it uses a real parser, it fixes several bugs in the spec, and it can output to nearly any format imaginable. What else could you want?
Molecular Manufacturing: Where’s the progress?
At my level, I'm as happy to help as can be; if a developer (that I know) needs some data from Prod or some performance tuning help, I'll just do it, if I have a problem with some of my own PL/SQL he'll help me. Everyone involved in this cosy arrangement (including me obv) knows not to abuse it. An outsider or a newcomer gets a chance to demonstrate their own value to the network (or the clique if you prefer) and if they don't, then they need to go through "official channels" for anything they want. And that can take days or weeks for the simplest thing... :-)

I always try to ask questions in terms of outcomes, and I ask people to do the same when they come to me. Describe the result you want to achieve, and I'll tell you the best way to get there. Asking too specific a question could just send you further down a blind alley...
SharesPost looks particularly interesting as far as potential impact to liquidity from early stage ventures.

Trefis is an intriguing way of looking at stocks - modeling the impact to share price from individual products

kaChing looks like a cool way to have your portfolio automatically model that of investing pros. I often thought something similar to this would be useful for those that subscribe to services like Cramer's ActionAlertsPlus service.
My complaint is that a clearly political post is showing up on HN. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

Hence, it was downvoted; it was noise.
It does when he is angry at people for stating information in the about page and he expects those people to know his about page is wrong.

He may actually be sincere in his thank you but the whole article made his tone snobbish in my mind so I didn't take it as real.
Video From the Manhattan Beach Project Longevity Summit
Apple doesn't mind using other people's stuff when it suits them - they did lift Creative's mp3 player UI and successfully sold it off as it's own.

http://www.tuaw.com/2006/08/23/apple-pays-100m-to-creative-i...
I confess I don't understand the value of this article. As far as I understood it, they haven't made a compelling product, they haven't made a boatload of money, they haven't innovated the development process and they don't have any special advice for getting approved by App Store (beyond RTFM). So what, apart from plugging their product, is the point of the article?
The weather machine
I'm disappointed they resorted to a one-way preprocessor. Is it really not feasible to make a first-class domain-specific language like this in Python?
"Now I only trade time and knowledge with equals."

If someone is clearly trying to improve themselves it never hurts to spend a few minutes helping them. Also, does this rule out asking folks who are smarter or more knowledgeable for help?
Tiny nano-electromagnets turn a cloak of invisibility into a possibility
Interesting - in the embedded software world we have the exact same problem with hardware. Mocking the hardware can confirm the internal consistency of your ideas about how it works, but most problems stem from your ideas being inconsistent with how it actually works.

Until now I always assumed that the environment from which TDD emerged (presumably database-driven "Enterprise" apps) was different in a way that made it seem like a better idea than it does to me, but your comment is causing me to seriously rethink that assumption.
I'm in the same boat with you. I don't visit the anti-H1B sites, because I want to keep my blood pressure down and I don't tolerate racist bigots that well, but the ComputerWorld article about the closure of the websites is troubling. Either there're details the article left out or the judge is seriously overstepping his authority.

I thought it was a long held principle that community sites can not be held responsible for users' content.

The story a month or so ago about the family of a woman whose ex-boyfriend has posted all kinds of derogatory and threatening material on multiple websites (incl. RipoffReport.com, who is the only website refusing the take down the content) has a completely different outcome. The judge in that case said he can't force the websites to take down the content, but several have done so voluntarily, RipoffReport.com being the only holdout.

I wonder if the fact that that case had an individual plaintiff rather than a company has anything to do with the different outcome?
Given your history behind the quote, it sounds as if Atwood found the quote to fit the judgment of the situation that he already had, rather than vice versa.
The barometer of Hacker News knowledge half-life is how well it tracks the state of a Zed Shaw side project.
Seeing alot of dupe stories (from various sources) today.
Economic Recovery Might Be More Robust Than Expected
Wow, it seems like Zed just discovered branding. A brand is established by owning a word/concept in the consumer's minds. In Fret Wars' case, it was randomly generated music. It doesn't matter if this is now no longer the case in reality, it's still the established brand.
We had to do some stuff to stop people from scripting our game recently. We didn't go the legal route, we just wrote some stuff to figure out who was doing it and suspended them.

It's a big deal because it messes up your in-game economy by devaluing the currency. Someone using a script will have a massive advantage over someone not using it. They'll have no reason to ever spend money, and they'll make it so that players not using a script feel they can't compete and thus make them not spend money too.

In our game, it's more of the competitive aspect. We have a system wherein people can get a whole fleet that they spent months (or years, once our game is that old) building. It could be wiped out by another guy in an hour if they make a mistake. If the other guy is playing by the same set of rules than them, it sucks but at least it's fair. If he used a bot to build a much larger fleet to enable him to do so, the customer won't be as understanding.