skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
this is annoying. there's a bug where i often don't get "reply" buttons on replies to my own comments.

anyway, yes the problem with this topic is that it is a synthesis of so many things that you could literally write several books on the subject. the modern college system is a leviathan in its own right.
Many engineers also tend more towards absolutes in their world views.
I believe they're more worried about making sure paid apps can't be cracked and published outside the market.

Also, from the Nexus One has 512 MB of flash, not 200.
Ideally it's not. But I've seen all YC alumni and founders upvote all other YC company related posts within very short amount of time. Just add (YC Year) in subject line, and it gets an upvote from other YC fellow.

I guess everything is fair in love, war and marketing (your startup or you). :)
Is it just me that prefers the second code snippet by a mile?
Engineers are practical. Perhaps this purely pragmatic thinking leads them towards radicalism because it is the most practical, albeit unethical course of action?
This kind of behavior is exactly what made Digg the useless oligarchy of content promotion that it is.

I think asking other people to vote your favored story to the front page is really an exercise in egotism, and it kinda misses the point. If other people are interested, your story will make it to the front page on merit.

If other people aren't interested, why would one force it to the front page? For what? So that people can see it and skip over it and not discuss it and wish something more interesting were on the front page?

I hope it doesn't come to the same measures that Digg tried (and mostly failed) to implement, with algorithmic detection of rigged voting and banning of people doing scripted submissions and votes.
The whole line has been marred by the them continuing the ship buggy processors with the bios work-around. Would you buy another Phenom if you had the misfortune of getting one of these?
A lot of submissions are escaping the duplicate detector recently.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021813
Case history of the freemium model on the iPhone
Except that "how well they'll stack up" with Apple isn't measured in profit; it's measured in sales or market share. While the Xbox might not yet be net profitable, it does have enough market share to claim that it stacks up with its competition. I'm not saying the Courier will be competitive, but I hardly think you can, a priori, write Microsoft off in this market.
Interesting idea.

Related: If the government announced that in 10 years the minimum deductible for health insurance would be locked at no less than $20,000, what would that do for health care costs? In other words, if the only legal health insurance was catastrophic, would the health care industry be forced to become affordable?
This whole series (this article is part 7 of a series of blog posts) seems like it should be titled "Qualities the Author Perceives he Embodies that Lead to his Great Success".

I guess that was a long way to call this self-congragulatory bullshit.
Sure. All performance tuning depends on figuring out where the bottlenecks are; but having found said bottlenecks, many people make the mistake of considering price/performance ratios for those individual components rather than for the system as a whole.

This isn't just relevant for CPU performance -- people do exactly the same thing with disks. If you want the most disk space for the least expense, it's worth buying 2 TB drives even if they're more than 2x as expensive as 1 TB drives.
Actually, I don't deserve my customer's money, unless we specifically enter into an agreement where I agree to provide some service or product in exchange for that money. And to my knowledge, buying TM 1.0 in no way included an agreement that v2.0 would be released at a specific time or in specific intervals. Ergo, the creator of TM owes his customers absolutely nothing. He can go crawl under a rock and die, or he can build the greatest text editor the world has ever seen and never release any of it to anyone. It would be a great waste but that's his right.

Wanting something does not give you the right to it.
You should FIRE anyone doing an "adequate" job - Netflix does
It's not like you have to keep Flash turned on just because you can
After the third or fourth crash I added a launchd item to restart Quicksilver whenever it crashes.

I never even notice the crashes any more, and when it starts acting funny I can Cmd+Q it and it will be freshly restarted in a few seconds.
Then maybe universities and research centers should be separated. My tuition should be applied towards the professors who will be teaching me. I'm going there for my own personal progress. If I want to go to a university that's doing the research then I would be willing to pay the extra tuition to go there.
It is surprising, but the human brain is wired to think logarithmically

Then again, we perceive forces, brightness, and loudness logarithmically. (This is not just the subjective experience. The way we are wired to our sound, light, and kinesthetic receptors is indeed logarithmic.) Why shouldn't we also naturally think that way?
thx I'll have to check those out, my mathematica license is gone :[
Princeton alumni behind Ocarina, Bump, and more
Arduino pin I/O performance analysis
No offense, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to fly a plane into a building and know that the building will suffer significant damage.

I mean if they were really smart, they'd have crashed one plane into one tower at just the right place to have it collapse on the other tower. They'd would have also saved one planeful of passengers' lives.

Plus you don't become a terrorist to destroy things just because you know how to destroy things. They obviously did it out of radical idealism and desperation, and something else lead to that other than the fact that they knew how to destroy things.
I thought they were pro-forma profitable in 2009. I think your comment may be a bit knee-jerk.
How do you know who's upvoting those submissions?
Reviewing Kurzweil Predictions from 1999 for 2009
Yeah - it starts having some Wave like features.
I've done some experiments, it seems to me that the first vote is critical, and that it should occur w/in 10 - 20 minutes of posting a story. Otherwise the story just won't get noticed. I've seen this with submissions many time, and in fact have intentionally voted up a "worse" version of a story to test this. Turns out the upvoted version gains the momentum most of the time, even when the other story is better written or has more detail, or whatever.

Now whether or not it is ethical is different, but it seems to me that this general behaviour of how stories go would suggest a single "friend vote" at the right time carries more weight than having friends cheat anyway. So the question becomes: if I post something to HN, then link a friend to my HN posting, instead of a direct link, is it ethical since I know he will probably vote up the HN post.

Edit: another question that arrises... many of my freinds and I link each other constantly in private communications, does moving part of this to HN constitute an ethical dilemma since there is now voting and a larger audience invovled? Part of me says no, as those articles are interesting to us anyway, hence the linking, and the upvote is just a formalization of that...
We all agree that merit should be the ultimate judge. And I have experienced it myself: great posts I submit will rise on their own, not so good ones will linger.

However: without the initial boost of making it to the home page, great posts tend to die off and don't even get a chance to win on merit.

Some data to confirm my point: my submissions typically either get 1 vote (mine), no matter how good they are, or get from 10 to 30 votes, based on their merit. There is no middle ground.

So I find it a little bit naive to believe that merit alone will win the day. On the other hand, as everyone else said, I don't want HN to turn into guild of ringers...
If you're going to do it, there's a big difference between giving a story 1 or 2 extra points and 5 or 10.
Why is this so "creepy?" As a consumer, I am pretty much used to the fact that when I buy stuff with a credit card that the seller gets to know my name. In some cases, that is a good thing anyway (e.g. my credit card is overcharged, and I want to contact the seller to fix this).

Sure, there are privacy concerns. But there always are, if you are not paying cash...
Depends where the ISP is located, though I suspect it has more to do with cutting bandwidth costs than anything else.
Destruction is obviously easier than construction. But effective destruction is harder than it seems.

The guys that pulled 9/11 off got lucky in many respects, on the other hand if the situation would have been a little bit different there might have been many more people dead.
I was attempting to address this in my "literary criticism moment". "The average Joe" is, in my thinking, unlikely to be this specific in their analysis. "Use" gets the point across without invoking more complex topics (what does "consume" or "waste" mean) and/or words that may already be politically and emotionally loaded.

As for the "Please consider" part (responding to the other response in this branch of the discussion tree), I didn't want to be "telling" anyone what to do. I thought it would be more productive / invoke a more positive response to ask them to think things through for themselves. Also, since I'm not the building owner nor manager, it's not really my place to dictate policy. I'm making a suggestion to the individual reading the sign.

I don't go into more detail on the sign, because detail -- or the impression of same -- tends to put people off. If anyone's really interested, the cited URL is pretty simple and "MIT Energy Initiative" is pretty easy to remember and google. (Also/instead, maybe I was just lazy.)

Thanks for the feedback, though. Valid points. I'm just explaining my reasoning, not seeing them as invalid.
I've seen it happen...

The other 'quirk' which makes it a little worse, is that if someone submits something, and just asks a couple of friends to upvote it immediately, it pretty much goes to #1.

Maybe the ranking algorithm should have some protection against that.

I think really, articles should rise and fall on their own merits, but I don't think there's any reason not to tell friends about a cool submission. They should then use their judgement as to if they upvote it.
No, the apps can be pulled off the filesystem trivially on rooted devices anyway. I was whining to the developers on #android on freenode a while back, and the stated reason was indeed the hassle of supporting a non-standard external storage format.

And the 190MB is no doubt the free space available on the internal filesystem. The G1 has much less, actually.
Agreed. Comparing the $160 early 1900s Yale tuition that that of today's Yale is a little ridiculous. Yale and the like were the only real universities in the country. It would be better to compare to a public University (assuming we're still talking about someone trying to pay their way through college, that seems to be the place they would be going to). You're not looking at $40k a year, you're looking at ~$7000 (http://www.collegeboard.com/student/pay/add-it-up/4494.html).

And going by his math to pay for it, at 12 hours a day, for 32 days, you're looking at 384 total hours of work to pay for a year's tuition. To pay for a public school in the same number of hours worked, you would have to be making roughly $18 an hour, or a yearly salary of ~$38k (pre-tax, but that's a different issue entirely). Turns out college education is going to be roughly the same cost as it was then, if you're going to a public school.
To be fair, $5 registration fee came at the tail of a fairly long decline in quality.

That being said, it was great at its peak. Combination of a blog community, debating club and much more.
There is also the complexity of how much the food is cooked and whether it is consumed along with other complementary food that aids in its digestion.
I had once heard of a theory that children left to their own devices in the presence of healthy food will eat what and how much they want and still remain healthy- even in the case of a child that prefers to repeatedly eat the same food. It's as if their instincts tell them what to eat and what not to eat by making them averse to a food whose nutrition they have had enough of.
To me, the ethics are not ambiguous. The article then rises based on your ability to recruit your friends to vote, not on the merits of the article.
Duplicate:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1022529
Sent you both one.
Why the Punditocracy is Wrong About the Google Phone
Well to some extent, that's partially the goal of Bespin, although it seems to be on the 'full rewrite' path these days too.

I would love to see it happen though, along with the ability to easily pair on a codebase via the browser, like Bespin is trying to do.
Fortunately for you, these already exist. Just avoid any university that calls itself a "research university". All community colleges and many other schools (notably liberal arts colleges) fall into this non-research category.

Turns out, however, that research and teaching are complementary, so the best faculty and the most gung ho students will often be at the research universities, and that you can often learn more in a research setting than in a classroom.
Cutting student aid would lead to lower tuition prices. More importantly, it would probably lead to completely different kinds of educational institutions. If students and their families had to more directly bear the costs of their educations, they would be more motivated to seek the best values.

By making college education artifically cheap, government discourages competition and innovation.

The best example are primary and secondary public schools which typically are completely free to a student. A private school, even if it delivers a much better educational value, has a hard time competing because if it charges anything, it's already more than what the student has to pay to attend public school.

The only way for private schools to compete in such an environment is to offer something the public school doesn't offer. A private school cannot compete by offering the same thing the public school offers but just at a lower price.
1 or 2 extra points within the first few seconds of a posts existence makes it shoot to the top 5 at least. I think the algorithm could do with some modification for that sort of case.
It's less of a pain in the ass if you don't use the same password on multiple sites.
I'd say that for HN, absolutely not.

One of the problems that I have with most moderation systems (reddit, digg, HN, etc.) is that everybody has got unlimited mod-power.

I can only speak for myself, but when I get slashdot moderator points, I make sure that I use them correctly; it feels like a privilege to get them.

Now, I don't think that that is the best way of doing things, but I think it is good.

The way I did it on my website (which is small, so I haven't really gotten to see if it works or not) is that you have to earn your mod points by submitting things and then having others upvote them. Points also expire after 24 hours. To me, encouraging your friends to upvote your stories is okay with my mod system because if they upvote on thing, it means that they can't upvote another.

I guess what I'm saying is yes, it is bad...but only because you don't lose anything by upvoting something. If mod points were limited, I don't see a problem with it, at least not as much of a problem...it would be a bit like encouraging your friends to use a product that you make, but still charging them for it.

(my website is: http://www.gibsonandlily.com if you want to see the mod-system I'm talking about).
That would be very hard to separate. There are very few professors who (in my experience) are professors simply because they want to teach students. The vast majority of them see teaching as simply a requirement to do research.

One of the key factors in combining the two is that you are not learning from someone who kind of studied the subject a decade or two previous like you would in high school, you're being taught by someone who is actively research the subject (or a similar subject).
To change a symlink I use:
ln -snf NEW_SOURCE TARGET
No, not really. On my blog I often talk about the things that I F'd up along the way. Probably more articles on that than self congratulations. I did some things well, I did some things poorly. I use examples from life because I think it makes it easier to read than just management speak. But I understand how this series could be perceived that way.
Here is hacker's blog (hosted at PirateBay's blogging platform):

http://igigi.baywords.com/

He seems to be on a crusade against bad security practices - RockYou was just one out of many sites he hacked (other sites are mostly Czech and Slovak).

Here in Slovakia, it's almost weekly media event when he hacks yet another popular local site (mobile phone operator, insurance company, no.1 portal, etc).

He also likes to call bullshit on companies PR nonsense released in aftermath.
Seven things you need to know about augmented reality
This is all in response to this exchange:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1035080
This article is over 2 years old. Clearly outdated. You may like to check out their site...they're not doing a lot of this anymore.
FWIW, if you click on "link" you can reply directly to the item. Definitely annoying though...
in alignment with the meta-discussion sparked by jacquesm, and after reading the actual submission, boy it sure does seem like we've been gamed.

Is a shortened regurgitation of a steve blank book sleeve really worth being on the front page? If so, why not just a link to his blog or the book on amazon?

http://steveblank.com/

http://amzn.com/0976470705

I know why you wrote the post; to market your website, but HN front page-worthy? I should hope not.
Yes but that still doesn't explain the motivation behind why engineers would do this. Like I said, just because you can destroy doesn't push you towards radicalism.

These guys weren't hired guns. They killed themselves.
"Flash is at the core of the business model of these web sites" - so basically he's saying it's a good thing to waste battery life on adverts?

It's good to see they're still as focused on the user experience as they always were.
JQuery Lesson Series: How To Use JSON with Twitter and Flickr API
Surely this is like turning the volume up to 11 because it's 1 louder.

"Adequate" is inadequate by Netflix's standards, so it's not "adequate" it's "below expectations". Daft.
Which has the added bonus of not tying you down to a contract.

That's basically what I'm doing. Right now I've got a family plan with 2 phones and unlimited internet on each for $100. Doesn't make sense to do anything else.

Of course they made it easy, but not really giving me an option. You can't buy the discounted phone on a family plan, ONLY that one individual plan. And you only get the full discount as a new subscriber. Odd.
Depends if you count "here! have a few million on us" from GOOG+MSFT. Is that sustainable? Is it not slightly risky?

Is a company that just perpetually gets more investment money 'profitable'? I guess in strict terms if you can convince people to give you money like that, then yes. But it can't go on forever.
That's still game-able.

Personally I'm pretty angry about this, also the fact that people seem to think that there are justifications for behavior like this.
We keep raising tuition so we can offer salaries competitive with our peer institutions

And in the meantime, those peer institutions are raising their tuitions to be competitive with you. It's an arms race, and the tuition increases are funding it. And those increases are only possible due to student loans (and tuition grants).

So your argument is circular: if these loans were curtailed to all institutions, then they wouldn't be able to escalate, and you wouldn't be forced to follow suit.
You can add this feature to other gloves with a few inches of conductive thread.

http://lifehacker.com/5412625/make-any-pair-of-gloves-work-w...
I wonder if this would be considered a "movie plot threat".

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=815264
Majority of both Drivers and VCs are Above Average
I think you should credit the community with more integrity. I don't think anyone here would blindly upvote a submission if asked to, without first checking if the submission was in fact something they'd upvote anyway if they knew about it.

Also for me, the ASK HN: submissions are the most interesting. Often they get overlooked and buried. It'd be nice to have a separate page for ASK HN submissions IMHO.

Anything to get more "ASK HN:" and less "ZOMG! Tablet! It's a tablet PC or at least a rumor about one!"

Is asking friends to flag a submission 'wrong' also?
Yes and no. Yes in that submissions do not rise solely based on their quality and merits. But no in that I have seen many many submissions, specifically Ask HNs, fall right through the 'new' page without an upvote. So I'll upvote them after reading the title, and not clicking through. If it's something I can help them out with, then I'll click through; if not, I upvote in hopes of someone else answering. I'll admit, I've asked many times for an Ask HN of mine to be upvoted because it seems that only when it hits the front page do people come of out of the woodwork.

For some reason, many more submissions are slipping through the cracks. I don't know if it's the algorithm that needs to be tweaked again or what. Stories will skyrocket to 150+ points while others are left unnoticed. I'm getting sick of seeing the same story on the front page for 2 consecutive days while Ask HNs and other interesting submissions are falling through on an hourly basis. That's why I'm ok with asking friends for upvotes.
They didn't become engineers in order to destroy, that's the wrong way around. They probably became engineers in order to learn how to build stuff, just like most of us here.

Then at some point in their life they found themselves in a larger pool of people that were frustrated somehow, and because of their skills they got recruited in to those particular roles.
I have a lot of experience with this actually. I had 20 domains all wrapped under the moniker "The LearnItFirst Training Network". These were all subsites that were focused on teaching/training one specific topic:

* LearnSqlServer.com

* LearnSharePoint.com

* LearnCSharp.com

etc

After four years of getting emails from confused users, I moved everything to one domain -> http://www.learnitfirst.com. After the first 90 days, I haven't gotten a single "I'm confused..." email (the first 90 days after the move saw a bunch of, 'Wait - what happened to LearnXYZ.com?").

I voted one domain
I have visitor tracking on my site and I have submitted several articles that no one has even glanced at.

There are two ways to over step this problem: One is to get an immediate upvote to your story. This will at least get you noticed.

The other is to title your article with something that seems to defy reality or be very unlikely. "Google sucks at search", no matter what the argument, is sure to get a lot of clicks. My theory is that people want to read the article to refute it (there are also a lot of google bashers around).
I'm surprised that there are no voting systems which simply detect cliques, and make your votes weaker when you're voting for someone in your clique.

That is, the more you vote for someone's submissions, the less "power" your votes have when voting on them. As long as you balanced it correctly, you would maintain the theme of compelling submissions hitting the front page while removing clique-based vote problems.

If someone is so awesome that everyone upvotes every single submission they have, and are thus part of their "clique," it still wouldn't be a problem, because there would be enough people upvoting their submissions to counteract the juice being removed from their individual votes.