skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe the "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory" keyword phrase comes the standards committee work where Nokia voluntarily promised that any patents relevant to the standards would be licensed as such. (Think GSM, UMTS, and all the cell phone protocols). Remember, just because legalese looks like English doesn't mean it is.

In order for standards committees to work without degenerating into a self serving orgy of "hide the patent requirement" the players generally agree to this. RAMBUS is a good example of why this is needed.

This may come down to: Does Nokia have patents, which are not covered by any of their standards obligations, that Apple is infringing. I expect there are some or Apple would not also have the "not valid" card on the table. Apple's pockets are deep enough to fight a patent validity suit.

Meanwhile, Nokia will be doing the same in reverse for Apple's patents, except that Apple won't have the "reasonable and non-discriminatory" obligation.
Not when used correctly.

I thought this was on some sort of FAQ page or the guidelines but couldn't find it now.

Downvoting is not to be used to show disapproval/disagreement, but rather to filter out messages that add nothing to the conversation by being off-topic or just devoid of content.

If you use downvotes to show your disapproval and add nothing to the conversation, then I suppose you're right they are tantamount to DH0 comments, but when used correctly they can (in theory anyway!) help provide better, more intellectually stimulating conversations by burying useless banter.
Very good, somehow hadn't seen this yet. Thanks!

If all comments on HN were disagreements, this could be an interesting alternative to the simple karma score of a comment. Better yet, f we could tease the concepts of each level away from the disagreement element, we could have an interesting way of classifying comments. Maybe a Conversational Hierarchy:

CH0 - Attack on a person

CH1 - Statement concerning a person

CH2 - Statement concerning a text

CH3 - Statement concerning a point made

CH4 - Reasoning/facts concerning a point made

CH5 - Reasoned response to a point made

CH6 - Reasoned response to the central point

5 and 6 could use a bit of beefing up, but you get the idea. They could each have karma scores assigned to them (negative for 0-2, neutral for 3, positive for 4-6) and the classification with the most votes wins. The "CH" appended to the beginning of the number makes it so noobs would be likely to the time to learn what they mean. The UI for this would have to be dead simple, maybe a dropdown.

Thoughts?
Ah, that is indeed a nice feature. When I first looked at haml, I was all about the indentation (being from Python) and rather skeptical of the CSS sugar. But once I ported the CSS sugar to SHPAML, I found I started writing better markup. I haven't bothered to automate any CSS generation from SHPAML, not because I don't think it would be a useful feature, but because I have a lot less experience with CSS to know what the pain points are. (I have pain points with CSS, but they are either just due to my own ignorance or problems not easily solved.)
I don't have any supporting evidence, but it seems like the downvote has been increasingly used to disagree over the past several months.
Sadly, implementation isn't all that matters.
This community does a pretty good job of disagreeing. Even the occasional bit of name-calling is usually buried in something thoughtful.

Irrelevance seems to be a greater danger to the comments here than the method of disagreements.

The comments are a place for discussing the content of the submitted article. They are not a place for complaining about the NYTimes registration, light text on a dark background, etc...
If the numbers in these charts are relative to the total number searches on Google, then it could just mean that the ratio of programming searches to non-programming searches is decreasing, (i.e. if more non-programmers are using Google, or if people don't use their phones to search for programming-related concepts on Google.)
"But, that’s the price you pay for being a public persona with fans."

Srsly? Public Persona? with fans...? Who?
Maybe that bit was meant tongue in cheek. I really hope so.
In this case, that would be "DH3" according to the article. Contradiction with no supporting evidence.
V3: voting down because the comment is not relevant to the thread, through accidental posting in the wrong place or complete misunderstanding.

V4: downvoting proper - You have a reason in mind, e.g. post is very aggressive, comment is incoherent, comment is trivial and could be answered with a Google query, yet the only way to express your desire for "fewer comments like this on HN" is funnelling through a single downvote, so that's what you do, because explanations all the time would add a lot of noise, and you accept that it's imperfect but will probably sort itself out if enough people vote.
Yes, when I was young and just starting out, the older DBAs and SAs often seemed reluctant to help out the developers or the users with ad-hoc requests. The DBAs in particular would just run a script they were given and send the dev the output, even if that output was just an error. I thought this was a bit poor, aren't we all on the same team? But, when I started to help people I soon found the truth. Either you were like that, or you spent the whole time debugging other people's stuff, doing work they couldn't be bothered to do, you'd spend ages working on a report or a feature and then the person who wanted it would say, oh, sorry, I don't need that anymore.

It's human nature. Something that is given freely has no value. Now I only trade time and knowledge with equals.
It would not have helped at all since it completely changes the meaning. 'proves' is a statement about the code, if true then we can talk about the influence of TDD on the code. 'made me more confident' is a statement about the author's state of mind - it lets us talk about the effect of TDD on the author's state of mind, which is a lot less interesting. Re-reading my code carefully or telling myself I'm awesome might make me more confident in my code changes but you rarely hear much about Careful Inspection Driven or Self-affirmation Driven Design.
> In practice, "hookup culture" is founded on the humiliation of the woman, which makes it an expression of loathing for humanity.

Someone else pointed out that you're wrong about hookups, so I'll point out that casual sex is a broader term than hookups and humiliation isn't necessarily part of it either.

My kinky friends would point our that humiliation need not have anything to do with self-loathing, let along loathing for humanity.
> When you release code, there's an implicit commitment of improving and maintaining it

Why? Why are there any commitments whatsoever attached to making code publicly available? I could just as easily keep it to myself.
Somehow I knew that would be the one comment
PageRank is the biggest ad hominem attack of all time.
This is somewhat similar to "curse of knowledge" principle described in the idea stickiness theory book "Made to stick".

Although it's probably one of the symptoms, it's not the most important one.

They don't share because of their EGOS.
I don't think it's clear whether pg is endorsing the downvote as a form of disagreement or simply making the observation that it is often used that way.

Petercooper wrote a great response in that thread. Disagreement by downvote stifles any attempt at honest debate.
I'm not siding with Zynga but there seems to be some precedent here

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/07/popular-wow-autom...
Things can get messy if people sending you patches for something generated, rather than patches for the original source, though. Most such transformations aren't trivially reversible.
I would agree with this sentiment, I find it immeasurably frustrating when I spend twenty minutes writing a cogent and thoughtful response to someone to only get downvoted with no refutation/counter argument. I can agree with downvoting when there are pointless one-liners that don't add any value, like "This post sucks" or "What was the author thinking?"; but not at all when someone has spent time constructing a chain of arguments.
Don't mistake the instance for the class.

The class of categorical imperatives, per Wikipedia:

A categorical imperative ... denotes an absolute, unconditional requirement that asserts its authority in all circumstances, both required and justified as an end in itself.

Whereas Kant's Categorical Imperative is an instance of that class, specific to morality:

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
I can see where you're coming from, in that "dilettante" may be less outlandish than calling someone a "fag." It's a more refined description, but in the end both are still most likely unfounded claims.

In most cases you are probably calling the person a "dilettante" or "self-important" without really knowing the person. And chances are such labels will be emotionally, rather than rationally motivated. So it's true that in some cases the claim can be legitimate, but given our setting in an almost anonymous internet discussion place, it's unlikely that those claims are ever founded on reason. I think that was Paul's point: that calling someone a "fag" vs "self-important dilettante" are similar in their usually unfounded bases. You're correct in that there is a fundamental difference because calling someone a "fag" is not only unfounded, it's also derogatory as well as irrelevant to any rational argument (irrelevant, unless it is an argument about their sexuality).
Actually to the best of my knowledge nicotine is a stimulant that increases stress. However it alleviates withdrawal symptoms, that are generally causing even more stress.

Seeing a cigarette as stress relief is like thanking a guy for stopping hitting you on the head while he's amusing himself by whacking you in the shoulder instead.
I think it's fair to say that if most people upvote with things they agree with, then they will downvote things they disagree with.

It may even be a subconscious act.
Bollocks. I reasonably assert that you're an idiot.
The funny thing is that pi's decimal digits have very nice "random" properties (e.g. asymptotically uniform distribution), but it's extremely compressible.

Which partly explains why it turns up more often than most other transcendentals:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_probability
I wholeheartedly disagree:

1) Spam should be flagged not downvoted.

2) On/Offtopic is about as subjective as you can get. Some of the most interesting comments I've seen on HN were the ones that were non-obviously related to the post or were meta-comments, or even better, when an interesting conversation ran wild and flowed from topic to topic to topic.

3) Downvoting is being used more and more and more for uncommented disagreement.

Don't believe me? Visit any thread here and see which posts are sitting at <=0 karma. I guarantee the vast vast majority of them will be

1) Humorous and on-topic (even if the humor is bad).

2) On topic but non-specifically disagreed with by somebody (who? nobody knows since no comments were probably provided).
I agree. I've always thought the intention here was to use comments to disagree, and reserve down-voting for really poor comments that may not be constructive to the conversation. As another poster pointed out, getting down-voted does cause me re-think my comment, but I'd rather know why someone down-voted me.

Personally, I tend to avoid down-voting, even for egregious comments.
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ErrantX said "I bet there's been some tampering going on". That's what I was referring too. As is the theme of this thread. I'm not getting in to the nitty definitions of the what "real" or "tampered" means because I think we all know what is being discussed here.
step1) write trivial app, put in app store for 99c

step2) document process, get picked up by gizmodo

step3) profit! (??)

I guess it's a clever way to break through the noise.. but 99c? really?
I suppose someone out there disagrees with you.
Should You Check Your Answers During Tests?
I like to believe that the fellow HNers are not victims (at least often) of the conformity phenomenon.

But mayyyybe we would be conforming if we all try not to be victims of the conformity phenomenon.

That my friends I will coin as the "conformity paradox".
> ack didn’t pick it up because that’s a text file. DAMN!

`ack -a` is your friend, Zed. No snark intended, that's all I have to say.
using "ruby on rails" massively changes the results: http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=31&q=python%2...
Cry me a river.
From the numbers, we can conclude that Zed is at least somewhat awesome:

http://top.searchyc.com/domains_by_average_points
Great app!

Just out of curiosity, is the Heroku market large enough to support a highly customized app like this?
Maybe. Or maybe it's because of this:

"Smart people want to give their best and as they learn more, they learn that they need to learn a lot more before they start sharing."

I'd be reluctant to share what I know about, say, website security, because I have this dim awareness that there are probably lots of things I'm missing, and anything I post would be flamed to death.

Maybe that's because this is "the knowledge at my current level" that I'm not ready to share yet.

Or maybe it's because, although I seem to be effective, I secretly fear that I'm incompetent.

"Better to stay silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt."
Lots of words does not an argument make, and I'd bet often a downvote on a long post reflects that.

Nor does length equal quality: a good one or two line post can speak volumes more than a poor wall of text.
Just because you spent time constructing an argument doesn't mean it's cogent. In some cases it may be indistinguishable from a troll. But even conceding that popular opinion will tend to suppress valid arguments, I think it's just a fact of human nature that no community can escape no matter how much the members may pride themselves on their [relative] objectivity.
> regulation prevents those mistakes from growing into systemic risks.

Regulation creates systemic risks.

Regulation is why all big US banks took a huge hit when Fannie and Freddie hit the skids. Regulation is also why banks were holding "insured" mortgage pools.
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It prevents people from going and taking something out of Carry-On, or going to a bathroom, just prior to landing - giving everyone else a chance to see him doing this and stopping him.

Presumably, the concern was that there would be a repeat of this attempt to set a bomb off _just prior to landing_. One of the major reasons why the Christmas underwear bomber was stopped was he was in his seat.

The next bomber would probably have been better served by trying to set off a bomb in the bathroom. The rules in place for the next week are to call attention to those people.
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> I don't quite understand why this is a big deal (admittedly, I don't play the game, but I don't see how this is different than if a player sat there and played repetitively themselves)

Maybe it's the fact that a person playing the game can't compete with an automated script whose sole purpose is to win the game and be better than a human player? I'd have very little interest in competing against other robots.
> From that, Atwood somehow gets "passive aggressive".

That confused me too. Exactly how is "I despise what you've done with Text::Markdown" passive?
Whoa, found many other interesting things there, too: http://x31eq.com/tuning.htm

Thanks!
> The elephant in the room here is campaign financing. As long as a person* with great wealth can outweigh the desires of the majority of people we will get the government that we deserve.

The fix, making it impossible for ordinary people to contribute useful amounts of money to political causes in which they believe, makes things worse.

Note that we didn't actually have rich people buying elections before the various campaign finance restrictions. Out of fear of a then-imaginary problem, we set up a system where the problem actually occurs.

Malice or incompetence - either way, it's not much of a recommendation.
I'm pretty sure you can.
Perhaps a better system would be to tally both up and downvotes rather than upvote-downvotes. This way comments with a score of 0 might still have 1000 upvotes and a 1000 downvotes, showing that it is both a popular as well as a polarizing opinion.
IANAL but I think this asymmetry came about with the DMCA. You used to have to go after people for copyright infringement through a series of somewhat expensive and formal legal proceedings; now the onus is on the defendant.
I've read that eBay's Java front end runs on Windows (and still runs on it due to general cluelessness; their capacity management problems have to do with the latter).
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Actually, since a PHP array is more like a combination of a python list and a python dictionary or a ruby hash and a ruby array, this is the best comparison: http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=31&q=python%2...
Personally, getting downvoted tends to make me rethink wanting to even bother to comment.
I understand the use case, and if people are frequently sending you patches for your HTML, you probably want to make HTML the authoritative source. Do people frequently send you patches for HTML that you author? SHPAML does not allow you to trivially reverse HTML patches, but it does allow you to manually apply them without too much pain, as it lets most HTML pass through unmolested. I actually source control my HTML output to be able to see diffs on the HTML, for what it's worth.
We're using 'pass' in slightly different senses, what I meant is (and this applies to any test methodology) - in the strictest sense, getting the expected outputs from a test-suite, making a change and getting the expected outputs from a test-suite proves that you are getting the expected outputs from your test-suite. It may do a lot of other things but typically proving correctness is not one of them.

Side note: I'm honestly trying to figure out the best way to write code.

I think that's key and merits more than a side note. One of the reasons just about any methodology can boast of success stories is that given a concerted, focused and rational effort to improve quality, quality tends to improve, regardless of methodology. Such efforts are quite hard to get right, especially for organizations but when they succeed, there's little empirical evidence the primary cause is the methodology.

So if TDD helps frame your own efforts to be a better programmer, by all means, TDD away. The TDD griping comes from the often overblown claims of TDD proponents that TDD improves quality. 'Honestly trying to figure out the best way to write code' is a more valuable starting point than TDD.
As your score on this now perfectly demonstrates.
Much of PHP's popularity comes from countries where the other two aren't even known, like Bangladesh. Limiting the search to either San Francisco or Boston gives the most useful results: http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=31&q=python%2...
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There's a lot in what you say. In the next couple months I'm going to be experimenting with solutions to this and related problems. The general plan will be to de-emphasize points and to add more types of flags.

For comments, there will be at least flags for incivility, fluff, and spam. Spammers, as now, will get banned instantly. People who accumulate a lot of flags for incivility may also get banned for some set period.
as just demonstrated at least twice.

edit lost track now it's down to -5....
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Knowledge is not a token which can be given away at a whim. It is impossible to communicate anything profound. If you would like to be smarter, read philosophy and drop acid.
But are standards committee members actually bound by promises they made to said committees? In other words, as members of the organization did they sign a legally binding contract?

It may be a jackass thing to do, but if they aren't actually legally obligated to license under "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory" then the standards argument won't hold any water.
For one thing, the script's name is "Mafia Wars Auto Play". I presume Zynga has a trademark on the term Mafia Wars, and would argue that the script's name implies a non-existent relationship between the two companies.
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Well could you not write new A and B functions that invoke the original functions with state parameters added while also providing the state-handling mechanisms. Then all other existing calls remain unchanged. This really just introduces a namespace for what would otherwise be a "global" but it keeps the real "global" namespace unpolluted.
I call them drive-by downvotes.

I imagine some guy in a black leather chair going "hmph," with an angry face, then clicking the down arrow.

This is why I find it annoying. I see a lot of DH3+ comments being downvoted with no explanation. Then I want to upvote the comment and, at the same time, ask why it has been downvoted.

My upvote probably wouldn't count. Then, in return, I'm afraid I'd get downvoted. From time to time I see someone else say "hey, why are you guys downvoting this? This guy is saying something worthwhile."

In which case, the situation reverses and the originally negative comment is +1 or +2. Or more. BUT, still lacking an explanation as to why the comment was downvoted to a negative in the first place.

Annoying.
How much depends on where you are and if the incorporation is out of state, i.e. in Delaware.

However, why would you need a c-corp to accept investment? An LLC provides a lot more flexibility and you'd just have to redo you Operating Agreement.

That flexibility comes at a price, an investor can and likely will insist on modifications that provide him greater protections/rights/whatever that he would have been able to get with an investment in a c-corp. I've worked for one promising company who's life was cut short when its devil investors abused various provisions they had put in the Operating Agreement to gain complete control (all of nothing, we all resigned, but they didn't seem to mind).
If that was really how it worked, what do you say to start-ups who make risky entrepreneurial bets on a daily basis?

Make things that people want? [ http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html ]

we just won't get it unless it's been thoroughly marketed to us, or suggested by friends and peers.

Yes, there is no demand for something novel without appropriately educated consumers. (I swear I just said that...)

We can amply ridicule keyboard manufacturers for their lack of any real breakthroughs or innovation in recent years.

Why? They have made great strides in creating exactly what consumers want: a $20 surprisingly durable USB keyboard with a 104 key layout (ex. Dell CJ651). The original poster's motivation is his realization that he is not the average consumer, and thus is not satisfied with the average product.

Finally, about what I'd like to see in keyboards

We all want a pony. I'll make you one, but it will cost $1,000 - I presume that you're okay with this.

Your extended character input problems have nothing to do with your keyboard - Mac OS X can easily input most of them with a small number of strokes on that same keyboard. You could switch the keys you speak of on Windows with different drivers.