skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It would be interesting to see IAC spin-off Citysearch or Urbanspoon and get acquired by Garmin.
really really loved the super simple interface. got what it did instantly and love the idea also. but i am not able to update my email, i keep putting it in but it's still 'none'.

also i am personally not really trying to increase my vocabulary, can i use it to help like memorize/internalize just general ideas? for instance after reading something recently i want to memorize/internalize a few one liners. i tend to read things, really agree with it, but forget it after a while. or like if i do something stupid coding/process wise i wanna remember cuz after the pain fades sometimes i forget. do those things also work with the memorization algorithm?
The idea that facial tattoos mean "this person expects to spend his life in prison" is ridiculous. I know a dozen programmers with neck and facial tattoos, one of whom is also a VC-funded entrepreneur in Seattle. I bet the closest any of them have gotten to prison is in a video game.
YouTube - HP computers are racist
I agree comments are a great idea. But I don't think all comments are necessarily negative. I can think of times where I wanted to comment directly to the poster privately. So maybe there is an even more generalized solution for providing feedback/responses.

Flags are a good idea too. The HN feature set is still minimal and polished compared to other similar sites. So the community is really sensitive to any changes. From seeing previous feature experiments I think the only way to really see if it works is to implement it and get feedback. I remember some previous features that seemed like they would be great(!) when they were written up and first implemented. Then after a few hours or days were frustrating. Like the orange vs greys karma change.
Effective Survey Design
I disagree that this article highlights "why opening the immigration floodgates would be no bad thing." The article strongly supports immigration, which is to be expected from the economist, but I'd say it expresses no opinion on unlimited immigration, other than to mention that "No rich country allows unlimited immigration".

I find it frustrating that a country that admits 1.2 million immigrants a year is so often accused of being "anti-immigrant" because it does not adopt the unique policy of unlimited immigration.

I'm also a little surprised to see the economist describing immigration as a ponzi scheme, even if they do call it one that works. Ponzi schemes always appear to work for the first few iterations.
Why we might care: We now have every right to put on "Killing in the name of" in response to tired, vacuous and bland xmas songs that are a pain to tolerate every year.
Sugar: The Bitter Truth (UCSF lecture)
Making sense of multithreading crashes with SmartStop
I was struck by the allusion Lustig makes to sugar being as poisonous as alcohol. It makes ours look like a world of drug fiends.
World's most pathetic computer thief
You still can for most east coast cities. Probably less so in the northeast, though even there, southeastern Delaware is only about five hours from NYC, which is fine if you're going for a month, or every weekend for a month.

A bigger issue for that scenario would be that most people don't get a whole month off in the summer.
Don't most "web" languages support parameters in the same was .NET does (at least with Sql Server)?
No.

There is a correlation between tea and coffee and reduced prevalence of type 2 diabetes. This is much different from 'cutting' type 2 diabetes risk.

It is more likely that not drinking sugar water (i.e. coke, mountain dew) that cuts type 2 diabetes risk.

(As stated in the comments).

Tea and coffee are merely a means to quit drinking as much sugar water. You could likely replace tea and coffee with 'tap water' and 'bottled water', and get similarly good results.
I agree that it is definitely a nastiness problem, so if you were going to add one of these two types of flags, I'd recommend 'uncivil' over 'frivolous'

I think the right consequence for someone who accumulates too many uncivil flags is to have the server start to throttle their IP. This allows it to be a gradual, linear and temporary disincentive to poor behavior, rather than a binary response. Just dropping the connection is also de-escalating relative to alternatives like sending a message only to that user. I could certainly see people absolutely exploding when they see that they've been flagged as uncivil. Add a message on top of it, and things will definitely get out of hand at least some of the time. But if the connection starts to just get dropped, they maybe keep refreshing, maybe go somewhere else.
Criticism of the New Google Blogger Post Editor
Upvoted for calling me sexy cakes.
Up-voting breaks after you sign in in a different page.

The situation is this: sometimes I open a number of pages in tabs when I am not signed in, then read and vote on them all. The first time I vote I get the login page and everything works nicely, but if I later try to vote again on a different tab that doesn't know I was logged in, I get redirected to a dead page instead.

Repro:
1. When signed out, open a couple pages in tabs.
2. Sign in on one of them.
3. Try to use an up arrow in the other tab.

You should end up on a blank white page.
Zed shaw talks at length about (roughly) this kind of thing in his talk "The ACL is Dead". Tbe video is at:

http://blog.cusec.net/2009/01/05/zed-shaw-the-acl-is-dead-cu...

And there are summaries in the comments here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=420650

I wrote a few internal tools to automate various bits of drudgery at my last workplace. Nobody important wanted to know, but I and many other developers were saved hours of mindless work a week, and that makes me happy.

Had I re-written one of our actual products, the important people would have cared - but not in a positive way - and the developers wouldn't have cared.
Slashdot used to be my goto location for tech news. If I go far enough back, I used to read and enjoy the comments.

The beginning of the decline was the growth or maybe how they dealt with the growth. Meta-moderation was the nail in the coffin. The tags were never fine grained enough, at least for me. I quickly found out that my taste and what I appreciated in a comment were not the same as the masses. Then I found reddit and HN :) Where I still feel at home and often enjoy the commentary as much as the stories.

To summarize it, after looking back. I think what killed it for me was the decrease in quality of stories and comments while there was an increase in stories overall.
Data.

It's why Google wants everything.
What did it mean in practice to be in a swarm? What could you do with people in your swarm that you couldn't do with people in other swarms?
You could try not acknowledging downvotes on a new item until the number of downvotes reaches a threshold. For example the first downvote on an item would have no impact on the score or the placement of the item on the page. If the threshold is 2 then, the item would be affected after 2 downvotes. At that point the normal result for downvoting would occur. This would require two people to independently interpret the quality of an item. Though, I am only considering the case of an item being only downvoted.

Another idea I have is to require a reason for the downvote. Reasons could include: disagreement, uncivil, or offtopic. The score could be affected according to the reason. This could make downvoting more thoughtful and scores could be impacted less for disagreement.

Last idea: Instead of hiding all scores. Only hide the score for items with a score less than or equal to 1. These scores have less relevance and I think people will be less critical of comments if they don't see a negative score attached.
If I were to migrate somewhere, I'd migrate to an emerging country rather than one currently being looted by massive funneling of currency towards finance industry insiders, HMOs, and defense contractors. The Economist can act as cheerleader all it wants, but the US debt has risen to dangerous levels.
The manager should stay, explain why he is staying, announce
specific hours he will pop in for updates (he may have to
report to others too), stay out of the coders way,
don't make additional distractions, and order dinner.
If I did this, I'd make it work like comments work now. In fact, these messages would literally be comments, with some extra flag set.
Or giving them the benefit of the doubt, they tested on a black person but someone with lighter skin than the man in the video.
Slums of Manilla, Bogota, Delhi, Rio relocated? You really don't get that we're not talking about a bunch of guys in khakis and polos showing up ready to pitch in at the office on Monday? Believe it or not, the well educated and accomplished are generally happy where they are. The Mexican middle class does not emigrate.

Freshwater issues alone dictate a fall in the standard of living with further population increases.

The US got away with rather open immigration during the Ellis island wave by having virtually no safety net or public assistance. Over half of Italians who tried to make it here went broke and went home. If you want to kill every form of social welfare, public school included, maybe we can consider highly liberalized immigration. But not before.
This is really cool. About time that someone made something like this for the web. Wish I had this when I studied Chinese in college.
I only hopped in briefly, but I must say that at first glance it looked pretty impressive. I'm in the middle of wrapping up a project right now so digging in further is futile!

What intrigued me was the menu-item saying "Open Source" -- was almost the first thing I clicked on, but it seems that the actual IDE is not open source; it was the components that can be inserted into the actual IDE.

I imagine one thing that is is pretty high on the TODO list of the author is to replace the Visual Studio icons, though. Or perhaps MS is forgiving about these things. :-)

Will bookmark and return.
> most people don't get a whole month off in the summer

This is directly related to the population and labor supply issue.

I call hooey on your claim it's still possible. Quintupling the drive and substituting for nice house right on the beach a condo on a densely developed block is not what I'm talking about. There are barely any beaches that aren't over-developed on the entire east coast, anyway.
generally, I agree, but I do find, for example, that as programming.reddit.com got worse the swearing went up, and as HN has gotten worse swearing has gone up. Now the swearing is not always mean-spearited, and probably the mean-spirited swearing gets down-modded on HN. But swearing could just trigger a filter that says "swear words are used to get attention in important situations. Do you really think this is that important?".

Even if you can find some effective filters to use, most may eventually be worked around by commenters as you are implying. But they could give you more breathing room to find long-term solutions, and may help in that effort by increasing your awareness of what exactly the problems are.
Particularly ones that require a lot of infrastructure and maintenance to keep running. (servers)
It's something of a generational thing. I'm overgeneralizing, but self-identifying as black is more common in Generations X and Y and self-identifying as African-American is more common among Baby Boomers.
Why not learn COBOL and FORTRAN at 9 years old? I did it, since we had no C and Pascal yet.
What's an IE?

btw, it would be neat if i could play on opera mini.
A very thoughtful breakdown. It is obvious that Danny spent a good deal of time searching and watching the realtime results.

I also had to love Danny's response to the commentors who accused him of using Brittany Murphy's death to get traffic.
Great article, stupid title. They don't explain why immigration is a ponzi scheme "that works".
Good thought. I bet many of the more nasty-prone posters are less likely to revisit their posts to see how they were received, and to consider editing or adding to their posts if flagged as too snarky (or whatever).

Having a way to offer some means of adjustment would help distinguish between the accidental and willful nastiness.
Agree. Along the same lines, the items of the form

<span style="font-size:24px;" class="blue">Learning is a game.</span>

look like they ought to be links to describing the features (they're blue!) and so sent me needlessly changing NoScript settings, to no avail. If this is just unimplemented, then OK, but otherwise you should change the colour scheme before leaving beta, or your users will be wasting precious seconds on the front page. (Apologies if you already knew!)
You're wrong. Here is another example: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/eng_prem/8377195.st...
Is this the key criteria to optimize for?
These attempts at explaining what went wrong are likely all wrong themselves if the primary negative effect on on-line discussions is the size of the audience. The only thing we can really conclude is that it wasn't enough to turn the inevitable tide.
Ranking +101/-100 comments higher than +1/-0 comments is something that they implemented at reddit a couple months ago. They use an algorithm called a "Wilson Score confidence interval for a Bernoulli parameter."

Here are some relevant links:

http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-s...

http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating....

http://blog.linkibol.com/post/How-to-Build-a-Popularity-Algo...

Digg also has a way to rank comments by "controversy", so the comments that are most contested by up and down votes are placed at the top: http://about.digg.com/blog/new-comments-system-released
You are missing the general point about quality of life and cost of living. Also, I might add, about income inequality. Conveniently located housing or easy access to nature is now more something for the rich where-as it used to be for everyone.
When people immigrate to the US, they don't settle down in the middle of Montana or Nebraska. They go to the already crowded areas such as New York, California, Texas, and Florida. Are you going to force them to move to the desolate areas where KKK sentiment is high?

City infrastructure would be stretched to the breaking point. There is already too much traffic in some areas with no solution in sight. It is also unwise to turn all your possible arable land into farms. States like California have experienced water shortages that aren't going to be magically fixed with a couple million workers, they are going to get worse.

Of course speaking to the entrepreneur crowd here none of this matters to you personally because it would be to your advantage to be able to exploit foreign labor, make your millions, and then move to the suburbs or emigrate to a tax haven before the situation gets out of hand.
O2 gobbles Jajah for $200 million
"Interesting to note is that the computer language they use to teach it (scheme) has its roots in Lisp (which is over 40 years old) and will probably never change."

It should be noted that MIT switched the language they teach their undergrads this year to Python. It should also be noted that Python also has roots in Lisp.
That's my guess also, cut refined sugar from your diet any way you can to reduce chances of type 2 diabetes.
I don't mean the big missile, I mean the payload that InclinedPlane's strategy described - a missile shooting out a few thousand mininukes a short distance away. Such small payloads, even if we give them engines (which also makes them shine brightly to anti-missile lasers) are simply too small to outrun a ship - small engines tend to be very inefficient and slow.
I would like to be able flag a story as not a primary source/not the best source and give an alternative. Not sure if this will help the dicussions, but I think that a discussion tends to only get as good relative to the story. Often times the most helpful comments are ones which give alternative sources, so it might be good to think about supporting that.
I am not 100% sure, but I really don't think it was a free membership page. It gave me the impression that I needed to subscribe to see the content.
Random fact - Canada and Australia both have higher foreign born proportions - http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/071204/dq071204a-en.... The article seems to phrase things specifically to not mention them.
Strictly speaking a vote does affect someone's karma. But it doesn't cause their karma to be net decreased as a result of posting a comment unless you downvote the comment below 1, which most people don't do lightly. I think of the up and downvoting as a collaboration to determine how much additional karma someone should get for posting a new comment.
From what I read on wikipedia the 170 text does a very good job of explaining the nature of democracy in the US, and makes a number of predictions that pan out regarding party politics, but in your view is it still relevant for the America of the 21st century?

It is. DiA provides a very good picture on the character of the early American republic. It's very interesting to see how that character has progressed to the present day.
The shortest Phd thesis
I wasn't just thinking of me.
This is directly related to the population and labor supply issue.

No it's not. The American 'working class' never really got a whole month off in the summer. You are idealizing a non-existent past.
Giving away an Idea: The Dyson of Laundry Machines
I'd be interested to see the rationale

If you imported 100 million Einsteins and Catherine Zeta-Jones', then the positives of mass immigration would be fairly obvious. The negatives, less so. But even when the quality of immigrants is high, you have issues. For instance, there are large numbers of Chinese in Malaysia, the Philippines, etc, and they are exactly what you'd think you'd want: They're smart, hard-working, entrepreneurial. The effect, however, is resentment and affirmative-action-style laws against them. They certainly improve the GDP of the geographic areas they live in, but it's the per capita rundown of that GDP that matters to the natives. European immigration to America really did improve the place a lot, unless you're on a reservation. It's not unusual.

In practice, however, you aren't going to get your dream migrants, but a hit-and-miss assemblage. Entrepreneurs and professionals, yes, but also servants for the UMC and peasants for big agra and chicken-packers for Tyson, as well as criminals and parasites.

There's plenty of empty housing stock

Think twice when you say, essentially, "Well, we have shit to sell so let's import some customers." Very bad thinking there. The houses were built by companies making a bet on future demand. They bet wrong. It is absolutely unacceptable to manipulate demographics (and keep prices far too high) in order to backstop a gambler.
Vietnam was the first game theory conflict.
“Seems like a nod to the fact that the people who'd actually need to speak it would be American.”

Yeah, because multi-million marketing campaigns for Avatar didn’t roll over any other nation but the US, right? :)
This is too hard for me to implement by myself so I'm giving away this idea in hopes that some one runs with it.

Well, I doubt anyone will, but what do you think of it? I've had the idea for quite some time now, I'm curious what you guys think.
This clearly means that a "real Indian" would say "sorry, I don't know," but Google would lie. (Actually it's closer to asking whether it is a lie to be too embarrassed to admit to ignorance.)

If it had meant that a "real Indian" lies about it, it would have had a comma after "know" or "does" at the end.
On another thread, I thought it might be a good idea to keep around who voted for what. You use a recommendations system (perhaps from the Netflix contest) to determine how much you will like other comments, and then filter based on that.
This might result in something similar to swarms; the idea is that your "swarm," the group of people where you like their comments and you like theirs, is the only source of intelligent conversation.
I think he was referencing the actors and not the viewers
I think m0th87 was suggesting general, public tagging, which always sounds like a good idea but is really hard to implement well.
Flag as meta? A lot of people don't care for the meta-discussion.
I think there is definitely a difference in personality types between "Computer Science" people and "software engineers", which the author is characterizing as white and blue collar. However, I think the white/blue distinction carries overtones of a class difference which isn't necessary.

A good engineering team needs CS people to be the "architecture astronauts" and pure engineers to keep them grounded and make sure something actually ships. Too many CS guys and you ship something needlessly complicated far too late; too many engineers and you ship spaghetti code that doesn't scale, because they're focused on results rather than architecture.
Startseite von Mozilla Firefox
Yeah, sorry, this isn't a rape victim or someone who was mugged. A few lines of code got changed in a website that didn't (easily) update their plugins.

The 17 year old was being a 17 year old.
Submersible glider spent months collecting data on Atlantic waters
A few problems:

1. It seems to ignore the idea that some clothes need to be put on hangers so they don't wrinkle.

2. Not everyone tumble-dries everything (some clothes shrink, and all clothes wear out faster when tumble-dried -- that blue lint in the filter is your clothes wearing out)

3. How does a horizontal tumble-dryer work? The "tumble" part requires gravity.
Google pays no tax on £1.6bn in Britain
I first cut my teeth on GW-BASIC on my Tandy 1000, and I wrote some pretty crazy stuff on that. The author is totally right... demystifying what was going on was key to getting my feet wet. I soon learned that BASIC was an interpreted language (which is why I couldn't just run it at the command line), and that I needed a "compiler" to make machine code, or learn assembly, so then I wanted a compiler, and I learned C, etc. etc. etc.

Twenty something years later, I don't think the experience left me with any scars or bad habits, but I might not be a programmer today if I hadn't started with BASIC.
They worked much less, for sure.

http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/tabfig/2008/03/SWA08_Ch...

And this ignores that one income supported a stay at home wife.
If it looks like noise, it deserves to go. In other words, if, after reading a comment, I feel that my time was wasted, I should downvote the comment.
Once your clothes are dry you hang them as normal. The idea isn't a new way to store clean clothes. The main point of the idea is that you know when you need to do laundry (see through baskets) and you do it in one go (wash and dry).
I would favor the addition of a rude/inappropriate/trollish vote that would be anonymous in addition to the current upvote/downvote. Perhaps those are three buttons that are downvotes in that category.

This would add a useful dimension to the feedback.

I find myself using the up/down arrow largely for "contributes to the discussion". There is an element of "I agree", but I frequently click up on a comment that I disagree with because it is well-reasoned or brings up a thoughtful angle that is new.

To avoid the mob clicking of these new buttons, they could be shown only to the author of the comment, or very high karma individuals.
I've been wondering lately whether MIT's approach of starting with Scheme has any lasting impact on students. After almost a decade of coding, I'm finally grasping the power of Lisp, but I wonder if I'd started with a Lisp would I have gotten here sooner? Does it help or hinder students to learn something as alien as Lisp for their first language in college?
any recommendations for language apps on the iPhone?