skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you entirely except for one thing,

Downvoting without comment can do far more damage to conversation than can upvoting.

Imagine a real life conversation where you are speaking to another party, as you speak your mind, the other party continuously nods their head yes -- an upvote. You don't particularly feel the need to stop and ask "why do you agree with me?"

While on the other hand if, in the same situation, the other party started nodding their head no - a downvote, you would probably stop and ask them "why do you disagree with me?"

The conventions of this site essentially say that:

a) You can shake your head no, and the speaking party cannot ask why you disagree with them.

b) If the party asks why they are being met with disagreement, the response is the real world equivalent of a beating.

c) If you compare their negative, comment-less disagreement with any other similar situation, the response is a beating.

The result is that, after a couple exchanges like this, a typical person will not bother to speak their mind at all since they may end up with the online equivalent of a beating. Thus we end up with people that don't want to suffer the consequences of speaking out.

For example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1014800

Upvotes are like cake, it encourages people to work for more cake. But people will similarly work to avoid a beating, and non-participation is the easiest path to do so.
Can Foursquare achieve critical mass?
Not just the web but services such as http://waze.com as well. Indeed though.
I expected to see a bit more of how to use all those plugins. But I suppose a list of them is better than nothing.
Whether or not it was a waste of resources is not the point. The point is that science is what made going to the moon possible.
Decipher the YouTube spokesperson
A few days ago I sent Liz Gannes of NewTeeVee the following question to ask Google/YouTube:

"On July 7th 2008 Google made an unannounced change to the YouTube API ToS, which introduced a new restriction on commercial use. Can you positively confirm that this ToS change was NOT initiated or modeled in relation to a YouTube API powered website called Totlol (totlol.com) which has launched two months prior?"

Background story is here: http://www.totlol.com/t/story Discussion is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1019360

Today a YouTube spokesperson sent an official response:

"Updates to our API Terms of Service generally take months of preparation and review and are pushed out primarily to better serve our users, partners and developers. When new Terms of Service are ready, we notify our developers through as many channels as possible, including on our developer blog."

See here: http://newteevee.com/2009/12/29/totlol-creator-learns-the-hard-way-he-cant-build-a-business-on-youtube/

Is this an answer to the question? I'm not sure.

My attempt to decipher the YouTube spokesperson looks like this:

Question:

"2 is a prime number that when divided by 2 will result is an integer. Can you positively confirm 2 is not the only such prime number?"

YouTube spokesperson answers:

"Prime numbers are generally odd numbers and most are fairly big. When divided by 2 the result is not an integer."

Any other deciphering suggestions?
Is DHgate a Scam?
I can say, as a new guy, that I would participate more if that were the case.
No offence, but this comment sounds more like a one generated by a bot of some kind.
Russia's Armageddon plan to save Earth from collision with asteroid
See, that is exactly why the War on Terror naming doesn't make sense (+). All of the above are terrorists (and contemptible), none of the above are even a remote threat to American air travel, and approximately none of our War on Terror related activities target them except incidentally.
With the following priceless quote: "Everything will be done according to the laws of physics."
Norway leads the world in antibiotic resistance, has lowest rate of MSRA
A Theory of Goal-Oriented Communication
I think that it also seems to "taint" an entire thread the same as "leper unclean!". Especially when I see an entire thread of negative scores, I know that somebody has a chip on their shoulder for whoever steps in that turf they've decided to police. Participating in that thread is the same as a guaranteed downmod.
Yeah, I know who he is. I was avidly following the brouhaha when that offhand remark he made a few months ago wound up on the front page of Mashable.

Not to denigrate Joshua's achievements, but I'm not really into web stuff like most of you guys. The big topics around here are python, ruby, erlang, myssql, rails, et al. If I were to learn a new language today, I'd pick something like Z80 assembler. That makes me less marketable, but that's what appeals to me.

Andy Hertzfeld did his best work in the severely constrained environment of the early Macintosh. I'm equally impressed by guys who were able to write games for the Atari 2600 and the Intellivision in 2K of ROM and a couple hundred bytes of RAM. That's the kind of stories I like to hear, for better or worse. Not surprisingly, I've read every story on folklore.org several times.
Ugh. Not sure about you, but I think HN should be a IDE/Editor blog post restricted site.

There was recently a thread on erlang-general that was almost 100 replies long. It started out as "Is Erlang a Good First Language?"... then slowly dissolved into "IDE Bashing". I had to switch my mailing list options to digest I was getting so many emails each day with personal rants.

The thing is, Emacs and Vim are awesome, and they are "huge" programs. Also, they are "extremely" flexible, so one persons preferences might be way different than the others. For example, the blog post here uses MacVim and GVim? That's crazy talk (IMHO).

RTFM!
Do you have any sort law background? Your knowledge is certainly above the general citizen, but the application of the law is off.

1. Safer alternative design is only recognized in a minority of US jurisdictions. Warning defects is a separate cause of action from design defects. The Apple warning w/r/t iPods is precisely written as it is because of warning defect laws across the country. Also, w/r/t warning defects, there is no duty to warn of open and obvious defects.

2. w/r/t class actions, damages aren't multiplied by products sold, but rather by injured plaintiffs. There are no surprise sources of liability. The causes of action are mechanical and slow moving.

3. Yes, you are correct w/r/t pleadings. But a pleading is only the first step in filing a lawsuit. Once that is filed, the facts and evidence starts getting passed around. Also see Fed R. Civ. P Rule 12(b)(6) (motion to dismiss) and Rule 56 (summary judgement). The parties vigorously fight between themselves to rid of the lawsuit versus keep it going. And both Defendants and Plaintiffs drag on lawsuits for various tactical reasons.

4. Look to the State Legislatures for the law updates, not the Courts. California has an "Unfair Competition Law" that gives expanded causes of actions, and was created by the Legislature, not the courts. Massachusetts has a similar statute (MGL 93A Unfair and Deceptive Business Practices). It is the legislatures moving to protect their citizens, not the Courts.

Yes, you have to prove cause and effect. Lawyers call it proximate cause and it is an essential element in most (perhaps all) causes of action.

w/r/t forum shopping, I guess. There are specific rules on where a suit may be filed. To move to another jurisdiction you need a plaintiff in that jurisdiction. The Apple case was in California because the plaintiff and Apple are in California.

I skipped over some other stuff but those are the big areas that caught my eye.

And yes, my viewpoint is shaped by being a person close to becoming a lawyer.
Even then, I think the scores for each should be bifurcated so that people can see the number of "worth reading" vs. "not worth reading" votes, and the same for agree/disagree.

I think the practice should at least be modeled liked a number-line. The default is 0, neither an upmod or downmod. Just as it is, an upmod (or +1) should be given if the post was particularly interesting (not agreeable, interesting), and a downmod (or -1) should be given if the post was particularly non-interesting (not disagreeable, non-interesting).

I think too many people only see the world as either +1/-1 with no option to just leave a comment alone.
> missed out on a opportunity to bring a lot of the dynamic language programmers into the .NET fold.

I think one of the reasons is that they are well ... Microsoft. It is irrational, it doesn't make sense, but that's the vibe I get.

Their languages and ideas are not bad, I think it is the association with their company that is somehow hurting them. For example, F# is a very nice language, but I think the fact that it runs on .NET is putting off a lot of people. It seems to me if F# wasn't related in any way to Microsoft, it would have fared a lot better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_syndrome
It was a document sent to thousands of people at airports and airlines internationally, it wasn't classified, and it describes what millions of passengers are going to experience firsthand going through security lines. In other words: not exactly a secret, and certainly not worth going brownshirt on bloggers for.
Panasonic plans home-use storage cell
This seems like a cool idea, just not sure how it could be implemented. Any examples of something like this you know of?
Vishnuvardhan Died
Vishnuvardhan died and Kannada film industry has lost a shining star Vishnuvardhan. Vishnuvardhan died of severe cardiac arrest early morning on Wednesday,
I used to say Two thousand nine, but I'll be saying twenty-ten for the same reason I used to say nineteen ninety nine.
I'm going to be a contrarian and predict that tablets fail to gain traction outside of a small niche market. The Apple tablet will be an amazing piece of technology, sure, but I don't think that people are going to want to carry around a device of that size without having a physical keyboard for input.
10 Gadgets that Defined the Decade
After following this topic for a while, it seems that the main problem is objection to comment-less downmods, not downmods in principle.
Starting a new business is hard. It takes time and energy.

Question your assumptions. They're wrong.
Yeah, anchors would be great. They aren't really any different from a hyperlink, they are hyperlinks fare and square, they just refer to the same document. If only there was a way to refer to `self` in Markdown…
I don't think you're right. The reasons seem to be that people are downmodding as a social normalization function. It's like saying "don't post more like that please".

I think you are taking downmods a bit too personally.
While we're being sticklers for the guidelines...

If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.
Maybe only downmods force a user to "spend" karma? This would weed out habitual downmodders.
Crafting Subtle & Realistic User Interfaces
The flag mechanism already exists to deal with true trash if I'm not mistaken.

It seems to me, respectfully, that using the downvote to try and clean the community is like a small-town sheriff trying to keep the perceived riff-raff of city-slickers, with their strange ways and funny hair, out of his community.
Well, I sent them email asking what they need for power/bandwidth/rackspace, to add a node usefully.

I doubt I'm the only person on HN who has large amounts of computing resources to spare. I suppose we'll see what's required to help.
- Canon Digital ELPH (2000)

- Apple PowerBook G4 (Titanium) (2001)

- Microsoft Windows XP (2001) / Apple Mac OS X (2000)

- Apple iPod (2001)

- TiVo Series2 (2002)

- Motorola RAZR V3 (2003)

- PalmOne Treo 600 / 650 (2003 / 2004)

- Microsoft Xbox 360 (2005)

- Apple iPhone (2007)

- ASUS Eee PC 900 (2008)

Not a very controversial list. Any big ones that HN thinks are missing?
Ignorant as charged, I guess. And the fact that neither of you can see the embarassing complexity of these solutions relative to, again, setting a variable reflects what, your corresponding ignorance of von neumann architectures?
I'm sort of a staunch law & order kind of guy, but this is why you never talk to the police. If they want to talk to you, they can have ample opportunity to do so in your lawyer's offices, in a comfortable plush chair, right into the tape recorder, after giving you blanket immunity for anything resulting from what you are about to tell them.

I will also happily let the authorities image my hard drive if they can convince a judge to issue a search warrant for the entire thing. It isn't that I don't trust you, officer, it is just that I desire to renew our traditional understanding that my papers and effects are mine and not to be trifled with lightly.
Plastic transparent panels have a way of becoming more and more opaque with the years, and will therefore look terrible shortly, unless made of glass. If glass, then either it will be so thick as to have noticeable edges, or thin enough to be dangerous if struck. The cable solution is more interesting, though it also sacrifices the visual minimalism in the design.
I'd love to see the code for such a bot! Well, me and a thousand NLP researchers, I'm sure.

[edit] NLP being Natural Language Processing, rather than Neuro-Linguistic Programming ;)
I think there's some significant innovation in scaling the Socratic method here. I do not think it is clear a priori that such a thing is even possible.
And it's complement, anything and everything can be given access to the network over the air. Your car, your washing machine, your golf bag; the wiring closet at work, the front door of your apartment building, fire hydrants, parking lots.

Data everywhere is a precondition for endowing the world around us with intelligence.
In the early '90s I wrote some software in Microsoft C++ that was distributed as an executable. An IBMer MBA friend of mine was horrified that anyone could distribute as many copies of my program as they liked without each user having to buy a C++ compiler.

Almost 20 years on Microsoft sound like IBM did back in the day.
For 2001 through 2009, I said "oh one", "oh two", etc. Now, with 2010, I can't say "oh ten", because it doesn't sound right.

The next best choice is "twenty ten", which is much more verbose.
> It seems to me that someone thin-skinned enough to cease posting his opinions because his comments get downvoted (rather than reconsidering how he comments and seeing if he can improve how he comments) might be just as discouraged from posting minority opinions if he sees a lot of replies that disagree with him.

I respectfully disagree. A downmod supplies almost zero feedback to the recipient. Many posts I've seen with negative mod scores are complex and have a number of topics in them. A downvote at no time explains what precisely was wrong with the post.

It's like a presidential candidate not getting a vote, he doesn't know what part of his platform lost him the vote, just that he didn't get it.

In real life a candidate can pay for a poll and find out why, here it seems that asking why immediately results in more downmods.

(I admit the analogy is imperfect, but hopefully you see where I'm trying to go with it).
The Definitive Guide to Sticking to Your New Year’s Resolutions
HAPPY NEW YEAR CHARLIE BROWN 
Happy New Year, Charlie Brown ended in 1986.
Charlie Brown is obliged to attend Peppermint Patty's New Year's Eve party, even though he has to finish the novel, War and Peace.
I have found that preparing to explain something makes me think and research it more, and understand it better. Some things that I sorta-knew how to work and where they come from became my own intellectual possessions, instruments, and later part of the toolbox, once I got to know them good enough to pass the workings on to someone else.

That third party needn't even exist, once you get the hang of learning new and lesser-understood stuff that way.
How To Mike Leach fired by Texas Tech-VIDEO Mike Leach fired by Texas Tech
LUBBOCK, Texas -- Texas Tech fired coach Mike Leach on Wednesday, two days after he was suspended by the school as it investigated his treatment of a player with a concussion.
Try MongoDB (online)
Secoor Premium Directory
Secoor is free premium online directory holding quality links of all kind of directories in there suitable categories.
I generally use something like:

expand -t "$tabWidth" "${files[@]}" | nl -b a | fold -s -w 108 | $PAGER

when I want to view files that use tabs; this is the final one-liner in a script I call 'view'. It gives me tabs expanded to width I specify (defaults 4), numbered lines, and long lines wrapped at word breaks but such that they don't break line numbering.
Rather either/or.
I'm the same way. As a student, a trick I used was to explain the material to an imaginary person in plain English(+). The process of formulating the explanation in your head does a lot to cement your understanding of a subject.

(+) In my head, not, say, out loud while waiting for the bus.
Escape Analysis in Java explained
Hackers often blame MBAs, management, and hierarchy for technological mishaps.

As often did I. But it turns out that managing people is hard. It is amazing to me that an organization that is Microsoft's size can decide and execute on anything at all, much less on the number of things that it actually does.

Cutting five layers of management, which is already few for an organization that's Microsoft's size, is really a recipe for chaos.
I sure hope they're emulating a CPU. I wish we had a kernel good enough to sandbox untrusted native code, but as far as I know there isn't one. OpenBSD had at least two local root exploits that we know of, and Linux (which they claim to be using) is worse off.
DogFooding is such a universally well known phrase in the technical industry, that I was utterly shocked when I ran into someone for whom it was new. It may be an insular phrase, but it's at least insular to a _very_ broad community.
Pendant Jewellery
Why not spoil yourself and add some pendant jewellery to your jewelry collection! There are so many pendants to choose from and you can even swap them from a pendant charm bracelet to a pendant necklace
Can Farming Save Detroit
Seems every ~10 years, a major computer company has to re-discover this themselves.

There exist some turds which even Steve Jobs cannot polish.
This article lists missed opportunities for market penetration when MS had technology ready.

I think the article is a bit harsh, even hostile. The criteria Most every technology decision must be justified by some data point. No company spends on research like Microsoft is not unlike the criticism leveled at Google by that departing designer. Large companies need operate this way.

The heart of the challenge is what transformations are necessary for a seriously successful company to stay vital. IBM went through a catastrophic point and came out due to some very astute business leadership. MS is more technologically focused.
1910 I would say nineteen ten, because one-thousand nine-hundred ten is much longer. But two-thousand ten is manageably short. If the year were 2100, I'd say twenty-one hundred, and if it were 2110, I'd say twenty-one ten.

But I say two-thousand ten for 2010.
Acoustic Guitar Hack
Only thieves, crooks, and whores (political and otherwise) would want to emulate Bill Clinton.
Five Ways Apple's Tablet May Change the World
A quick check to his profile would have shown you that grellas is a lawyer (I guess that counts as a "law background" :) although one who is probably several years removed from actually getting his hands dirty in torts or direct litigation I would guess.
They are different implementations of standalone JS. Rhino is an interpreter written in Java while SpiderMonkey is a JIT compiler written in C or C++, I'm not sure which sorry.

Ideally there would be a CommonJS option as well (using narwhal).

http://narwhaljs.org/

http://commonjs.org/
If you want to know more about the future of wikileaks, check out this talk from 26C3: http://mirror.fem-net.de/CCC/26C3/mp4-ipod/26c3-3567-de-wiki...
Text is just to paste some plain ol' text. It doesn't attempt to execute it.
Choosing the Right Broadband Forum
The idea concerning the World Wide Web used to be a far-fetched idea extending only to a majority of cities in the urban areas. But through recent developments in the technological field in India, the rural areas now have gained access to the world through the broadband forum. There are numerous discussions
Right. You need the total number L and D of items each user has liked or disliked. You need the total number of liked items LT, and the total number of disliked items DT, which have the tag T. Then you just iterate through the tags and multiply the prior odds by (LT/L):(DT/D) for each tag. (To avoid zeroes, you could add 1 to all the numbers above.) This will usually give you a unrealistically extreme probability estimate at the end, but it's sometimes good at classifying positive vs. negative cases. Runtime should be linear in the number of tags.

If that doesn't work - don't be too surprised if it fails! - then it's time to either find something off-the-shelf, crack a textbook or hire an expert.
Andy McKee is better at it IMO and he doesn't make such a big deal about doing it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ddn4MGaS3N4
i know you're a troll... but which one?
1. still married in spite of everything, I'm pretty sure that puts him in the good 50% of all marriages.
2. kids seem fine. (i don't remember bill's kids on robot chicken)
3. friends. no idea. i bet he's fun at parties.
4. pretty sure u.s. president is the best possible politically.
5. nyt bestseller. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/books/bestseller/0923besth...

I understand you don't like the guy, but wtf?
A huge step forward towards real broadband ubiquitous Internet access (A larger clearwire wimax rollout perhaps?)
Two-way video phones is the one that resonates with me. The technology is far enough along, but nobody has nailed the interface/hardware combo yet. All it takes is one company to get it right--nobody does that better than Apple.
Seriously? That's the best you guys can do?

Just treat dating as anything else you'd like to improve upon. Do your research, understand the end goal, and follow people who are better than you.

When she asks what you do for a living you can respond:

"I'm actually a porn star stunt double, but on the weekends I'll do a little programming here and there"

And then smile. It's all in the delivery, Cocky and funny gets the job done.
The 5th Annual Pogie Awards for the Year’s Best Tech Ideas
If you're a Bad Religion fan then there's not much to think about. I'm always reminded of the song "Ten in 2010" when I hear the new date. Luckily we're not there yet!

http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/song/Ten+In+2010+LP+Version/...

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/badreligion/tenin2010.html
It's at least 8 months, not two.

The problem is that Markdown is far past critical mass, and is well into denouement. Everybody has the same major issues with its design, and are dissolutioned by the same outright bugs in Gruber's crap implementation. It doesn't help that the language is designed to be implemented as a regex substitution shitpile, as Gruber doesn't know the first thing about grammars.

He's been sitting on a pile of bugfixes for years that he refuses to release under his imprimatur. He hasn't blessed or even mentioned any of the dozen superior reimplementations of his spec. A few months ago he mentioned that he likes the idea behind Github's behavior-modifying patch for RDiscount, but not for his own use.

He really needs to post a new version of Markdown.pl with a disclaimer about its poor quality, and explicitly bless several of the reimplementations for actual use.
Http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubuntu/install-mysql-server-5-on-ubuntu/
I have a legit copy of home server. Next step: Convince my parents to turn this old pc into a home server as well. S many hassles solved, especially with the backups.