skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Okay... I have another one.

In Python:

>>> -1 % 3
2

In Javascript:

>>> -1 % 3
-1
No..... and I'm surely not the only one who thinks "lie" when someone says "cake".
Well, bear this in mind: you can consider condition 3 the least important. While conditions 1 and 2 are essential components of being a hacker, condition 3 is just a symptom. (1 && 2 && 3) is sufficient; (1 && 2) is necessary but not sufficient; (3) is neither necessary nor sufficient.

It's not like (3) is some sort of formal induction ceremony. It'll just be an offhand comment that the speaker probably won't remember making a week later. Most often it'll take the form of "you should talk to Fred; he's an XYZ hacker too" during a technical discussion about XYZ. It also tends to occur more often in person than over the internet. If you're worried because it hasn't happened yet, but most of your socialization is on the internet rather than meatspace, then don't sweat it.
Giant real-world game of Risk played on college campuses
Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe
Adobe looking for AIR pre-beta Linux users / devs
> ... integrated as an overlay with any other social network.

I think that the killer idea here is the "natural" social network. Email, IM, etc., are all used to communicate already. Adding analytics on top of that is genius, and really cool. The search is meh (see OSX's Spotlight), but the stats are sweet.
I like the idea of people being able to write their own formulas and share them.

I don't know how flexible YC News is but it would be great if each user could express their own individual ordering preference relations in their profile.
See Also:

* According to the International Earth-Destruction Advisory Board, the current earth destruction status is GREEN ("not destroyed").

* See the IEDAB website at http://qntm.org/?board for more information and further announcements.
Where's the MathML? =P
Twine Raises Millions More for Semantic Web
I voted this up for two reasons:

1. The article was well written and presented a point of view that is not commonly presented.

2. When I was younger (teenage years I think), I had this crazy idea to start smoking in order to see if I had the resolve to quit. Never did though, cause I understood the adverse affects if I couldn't quit.
Sounds counter productive....

If I want to move forward and make progress, I should look back and think about the past. Perhaps the conditions of the past are no longer relevant to the conditions of the present. Furthermore, I would think that part of the reason why somebody might not be making progress is because they are not paying attention to the conditions of the present while at the same time not reflecting upon the future.

However, what you are describing does have it's purposes as I have done exactly what you've suggested above at some point in the past. While this is a good way to reconnect yourself with past positive states (this helps when you are in a funk sometimes), I have not found this useful to move me forward and be competitive against others; to the contrary, it keeps me longing more for familiarity (the past) as opposed to uncertainty (the future) and whatever might result (good or bad).
News.YC leaders board now shows top 100
While I understand the point you are making, I think you are underestimating the value and appeal of Hollywood's traditional offerings. Just look at the amount of movies and TV shows shared using bittorrent.

Humans really really like stories. This has been true for literally thousands of years. Dramatic storytelling and sport have been the prime form of entertainment in all human societies since the dawn of time. Think of storytelling shamans, greek drama, elizabethean theatre, hollywood blockbusters. I don't think the demand for this "one-way communication" will be going away anytime soon.
Get Your Boss to Let You Blog at Work
If you’re a boss you should know that your employees who blog on company time may turn out to be the future heroes of the company, if you can find ways to harness their talent and drive.
No one can give you a definitive answer on VC's since everyone's experience is difference. The following is mine, hope it helps.

http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2007/10/vc-worst-enemy.html
I agree 100% -- when I find myself drifting off during the workday, I take a break for however long it takes to get back on the horse. Sometimes that's an hour long bikeride, sometimes it's an entire weekend of "no laptop".

In either case, the mind sorts itself. I know EXACTLY what I have to do during my next run and I'm motivated and charged to execute.
That is actually an error in the python implementation. According to the language reference: "(a/b)*b + (a%b) = a" where the (a/b) step is rounded towards 0. This implies the if a is negative, (a%b) should also be negative. Note that this modulus standard is also used for the C, C++, and JAVA standard. Here, its python's mess up.
maybe even a modding system for the modding systems...
Who makes good office seating
Great advice, just what I needed.
I'd qualify that. Switching editors should be as hard as switching languages. If not, your editor eith isn't powerful enough or you aren't using it right.
Just out of curiosity - how many active accounts are there on YC news?
Neural Network on a Commodore 64 (by the founder of Autodesk)
ROTFLMAO
Hey, some VCs actually do think and some do not. Many play follow the leader and make large profits by doing so. A good thinking VC could help you with capital and connections and advice, if you needed those things.
VCs always want to get some measure of control over your business and that often leads to problems.
if your business is a service provided to individuals or companies, there is less potential for large upside growth than if you are developing a stand alone business that generates it's own brand and revenue.
I never saw the point in a web OS. I have to have an operating system, with a browser, to get to my operating system?

With all the plugins I have in Firefox to get everything to my liking, my browser's almost an OS in it's own right, so adding in Cloudo would be some unholy trifecta of OSes.

Just... why?
LISP:ASDF for the slightly confused
An good ergonomic chair is an excellent investment if you spend most of your day in one.

Aeron is by far the best office chair I have ever had, and is definitely worth the (quite hefty) price.

http://www.hermanmiller.com/CDA/SSA/Product/0,,a10-c440-p8,0...
You gave $1000 through Tipjoy. Thanks.
Arrington threatens us with twice as much startup blogging
News.YC is a community. Our individual behaviour taken as a collective is what constitutes the dynamics that emerge. There are benefits to both maintaining an organic element of letting the community choose for themselves and to having some mathematical/code-based governance.

At the same time, there are a number of assumptions in both the formula above (as well as the title mind you) and its description that are more in favor of eliminating the diversity. This could detract from the whole user experience. While I personally don't like the fluff, the diversity it affords us all more valuable than having our contributions be governed by an equation...
How about this surprise which caught me out a couple of days ago, try:

function hello ()
{

return
{
value : 10
};

}

window.alert (hello ().value);

It burps in FF and IE...
The communist smear against open source
pg has noted that the fluff stories that this site's target audience might vote up (the "dangerous" stories that would attract those mentally-14-years-old people who are ruining / have ruined reddit) seem to tend to be quick to read. Is there a way HN could keep track of how long a particular story was kept open?

It'd be a pretty contrary approach. Clicking on a link would probably have to open the story in an iframe within HN. Lots of people hate that, I know. Maybe it could be made optional? Would people sacrifice that for improved link quality?

The iframe would be set below whatever amount of HN chrome at the top pg wants plus an "I'm done" button. HN could keep track of time between clicking on the story and clicking "I'm done".

A big question I had was "what about fraudulent reports." It's interesting that this is somewhat self limiting because increasing ranking this way would, by definition, take more time. Also, using the existing anti-spam heuristics (E.g., mostly new accounts upvoting a story), HN could further filter out time reports from unreliable sources.

It occurs to me also that this could be done completely transparently if HN didn't have to deal with the so called "same origin" security policy. A plug in could probably be written for HN to get around it, but bypassing the single most important security policy of the web might just be an intrinsically bad idea.
How to Identify Bad CIOs in Their Natural Habitat
What I consider to be beautiful is code that is as expressive as it can be without being redundant, and as brief and precise as possible without significantly losing meaning. If your code is really beautiful, someone with a solid grasp of the language should be able to read it fluidly, and should they encounter bits and pieces that they don't recognize, they should at least be able to see how they relate to or interact with the rest of the code. In a well written piece, you don't have to constantly stop and look up words, even if you come across some that you've never seen before; you are able to gain at least a basic understanding of their meaning through context. Reading good code should improve your own coding in the same way that reading well-written literature increases your writing skills and vocabulary.
[Rhino book] > When null is used in a Boolean context, it converts to false. When used in a numeric context, it converts to 0. And when used in a string context, it converts to "null".
Well what do you know, the supersize-me of cigarettes.

Next thing you know, someone will try prostitution for a month.
X Prize, Google set on 10 teams in $30 million race to moon
Ironically in a thread discussing how to stop fluff from reaching the front page.
Most important take away:

"Typing on it, well, sucks."
More On The UADA—Funny Money For a “Virtual” Facebook App Roll-Up Company
If you live each day as your last...
...but the willingness to pay for it might. That's why we have sequel overload - rather than risk a new movie, they just copy one that people have always shown willingness to pay for (Shrek, Pirates, etc)
Yep, I commented on your post. EDIT: Um, I mean I didn't comment, I emailed you.
Get the get-well cards ... dude's project is sick.
So I guess the confusing bit is that null==0 is Boolean, rather than numeric, context.
The MetaForum messageboard software has been doing this for years. Everyone gets to vote, but people's voting power is determined in turn by how valuable to the community they are. It removes the need for moderators entirely, and completely eliminates the ability for spammers to thrive.

Their formula bases a large amount of worth simply on how their posts have been modded in the past, but then also include things like post count and a decaying value on length of time.
Why software development is hard
I like their attitude. I just wrote "Do it fucking now" on a post-it note and stuck it by my desk. We'll see how that works out...
New Hampshire Startup Makes World’s Largest Sheets of Carbon Nanotubes
I thought that goods were distributed with trucks:->
Digg, Wikipedia, and the myth of web 2.0 democracy
Should YC news empower 'super-users' too?
What ever happened to YouOS?
This implies the if a is negative, (a%b) should also be negative.

No, python is giving you the Modulus after division (i.e. a "distance" which should be positive). If you interpret it that way everything is fine:

>>> a = -1
>>> b = 3
>>> (a/b)*b
-3
>>> (a%b)
2
>>> (a/b)*b + (a%b)
-1

Perhaps you're thinking of the Remainder?

Edit: it seems there isn't much consensus about what to do when a or b are negative. Wikipedia gives a helpful chart here how different languages choose to implement this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modulo_operation
But isn't the context a Boolean expression, so the 0 would be converted to a Boolean as well?
These are not operating systems in the normal sense of the word.

The web browser/server is the operating system, this is more like a window manager. But you still need the browser, which is also like a window manager. It all just doesn't really make sense.
This happens when putting a newline between return and any value.

This is actually a result of JavaScript's lax support of semi-colons. Semi-colons are generally not enforced in JavaScript, but this leads to some ambiguous cases. Your case may not seem ambiguous, but the following code snippet will show what is actually going on:

if (i==5)
return

i += 3;

As you can see, there are 2 possible meanings for this when there is no explicit semi-colon after the return. It can either mean "if i equals 5 return, else add 3 to i" or it could mean, "if i equals 5 return i plus 3". JavaScript does not try to discern which is "more correct" (since there are no return types on functions so this would be a very difficult task), but rather defaults to "floating returns" meaning "return;".
All entrepreneurs should read this.
Great insights into founding a company (Autodesk), spurning convention, hiring great people, using Lisp. It's all here.
Love the Aeron. I've had mine break a number of times since 2000 (the seat, the ball bearings, etc) and no matter where it was (Cambridge, Boulder, Chicago) they repaired it free and more quickly than I'd expected.
I know, I mentioned it as the new object because it's one of the few situations I know of where you might use a newline after the return keyword.

I understand what you mean, in this case though it would be helpful if the interpreter detects the statement as being not reachable since it's after the return.
That is interesting. The problem we're facing is fluff, so it seems fair to devise a strategy targeting fluff specifically. I have a hunch that fluff climbs up to the top because of a small group of happy-fluff-voting people (young accounts for some, as PG noted earlier in another thread). If this assumption is right, we could rely on the whole HN community for flagging fluff out effectively, as those happy-fluff-voting people are a minority.

I'd discard ideas like allowing downvotes on articles. I do think the decision (by design) not to have downvotes reduces immature voting and also makes it clearer to detect suspect behavior, just like the fluff problem we're facing at the moment (e.g. 20 downvotes added to 40 upvotes brings a total of 20 votes, and thus reduces the alarm signal).
So is that pronounced roosh?
Defining ourselves in terms of Reddit (like refusing articles because they were posted on Reddit) is (funny and) problematic because:

- HN is independant from Reddit, and has its own identity, let's deal with our challenges.

- it would probably not fix the fluff problem (as it is not a simple solution, and there exists articles on Reddit which do not fall in the fluff category)
== needs two arguments of the same type. If they're both strings, it's a string compare. If they're objects, it does whatever it does for objects (identity, I think). If they're numbers, then it's a numeric comparison.

If it's given two objects of different types, then it has to coerce one of them. In this case, I would expect it to coerce null to 0, then compare 0==0.

Your way would have it coerce 0 to false and null to false, so it's still equal, but it has to coerce two things.

I can sort of see the logic in this though, since a lot of other languages (SQL) have the rule that nothing is allowed to be equal to null.
Thanks for the link; I've always been an Asimov fan. The short story format is fine for entertainment, but takes a while to get to the point:

Tapes are actually bad. They teach too much; they’re too painless. A man who learns that way doesn’t know how to learn any other way. He’s frozen into whatever position he’s been taped. Now if a person weren't given tapes but were forced to learn by hand, so to speak, from the start; why, then he’d get the habit of learning, and continue to learn.

I've never questioned the goal of schools to develop learning and thinking skills, rather than just convey content. However, the question is with what content should those skills be developed? It is that choice that requires a delicate balance between fundamental and practical content.
How about this one...

js> r = RegExp("asdf", "g");
/asdf/g
js> r.test("asdf")
true
js> r.test("asdf")
false
js> r.test("asdf")
true
js> r.test("asdf")
false

Surprisingly this is not a bug, though I was certain it was at first. When using the global flag the RegExp object will keep track of the last matching character position and start the next comparison at that position (after the 4th character, in this case) which results in this seemingly incorrect alternation between "asdf" matching "asdf". Removing the global flag produces correct results.
This title really confused me... it looked like a really strange math question, as in:

0 sign on -1 better or infinity better than single sign on [what?]

At least, that's what I saw at first. But I'm probably the only one.
Yes I think you are right about that, too early in the morning for me...

Makes me wonder what the rules are for coercion though, that is does it pick null to coerce or 0?
So, anyone want to have an SEOish SEO party where we can SEO our sites together in accordance with only the most smarmy SEO methods?
Temporal map of the movie "Primer"
Especially some of the parts about dealing with reporters and analysts.

http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_99.html

In the interview Walker basically made a fool of the reporter, who then trashed Autodesk in his report (causing their stock to drop from $60 to $28).
So, yesterday, I had alcohol for the first time, I passed out , and when I awoke, I discovered that I had been raped.
There is some small irony that this post was voted to the top, no?
That's a good insight, especially when you consider that it was the concluding paragraph of the article:

Before I wrap up, I’d like to point out that if the title of this post sounds suspect to you, consider it a huge red flag. If the thought of switching editors doesn’t fill you with quite a bit of dread, what you’re using now is almost certainly underpowered, and you definitely haven’t customized it enough. If this is you, take a look at one of the editors I’ve been discussing here, and take the time to learn it–I promise it’s worth the trouble. Just, uh…choose carefully.
Shouldn't this kind of thing (life experience) be more appropriate for http://www.kuro5hin.org ?
Anyone else suspicious that this article from a site called seoblackhat got 26 points and got to the top of hacker news in 3 hours?

I am.
c.disagree : concise > ramble
I am really looking forward to going sledding tomorrow morning.
I just experimented a bit with Rhino ( http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/ ) and I got nothin'. I had thought it might be that it coerces the right hand side to match the left's type, but it doesn't since:

null==0 || 0==null -> false

It's weird for number/string comparisons, too. "12" is greater than "102" (lexical ordering, "2" > "0") but less than 102 (coerces "12" to number).

It seems like if one side is a number, then it coerces the other one to number as well, unless the other is null.

Which makes sense given what it was designed for, since any attribute you pull in from a DOM element will be a string, and you want to make forgetting to convert safe.
No. But, weigh comment karma a lot more than submit karma and it might be alright.
yeah, the willingness to pay is dropping. Its already disappeared for music (but itunes is changing that).

Figuring out what the audience will like exactly is a different (and difficult) problem. I'm sure there were a lot of greek tragedies that flopped.

If movies don't make money, they can't be made. So people don't get to watch them for free off the pirate bay. Hollywood needs to find ways to charge for and deliver content in a way that people are willing to pay for and consume. What they don't need is to go off and start trying to find crazy ways of making money on the internet. At that point they are no longer satisfying a basic human need, and there already are a million people working on "monetizing" the web.
I agree, that people with old accounts do not necessarily write better, more insightful comments or post better stories than recent arrivals, but they have been around longer, and are probably more committed to the community.

Case in point, the 3 character post that you mentioned was posted by davidw: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidw
He's been a member for over a year, and his karma is over 2300.
I voted this up because I agree with it, although it made me uneasy to vote up a submission that objects to submissions that are trying to combat bad submissions.
Trying to suppress this doesn't seem like a good idea... I find discussions of how to save news.yc from itself pretty interesting.
I'd be curious to see the voting records for this thread. It's kind of funny that Wordpress crashed, though.
I disagree. As the site gets more popular, there is going to be more incentive to game the system. Digg and Reddit are both victims of their own success. Once you start getting traffic, you start getting page rank. And, once you get page rank, your outgoing links are that much more valuable, and there is a greater incentive to game the system.

I think that safeguards need to be at least thought about to try and keep the quality of the site up. Case in point: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121534

I suspect the site's already being gamed.
Ah, the old Carpet Bowling fallacy:

“I think a new, different kind of bowling should be ‘carpet bowling.’ It's just like regular bowling, only the lanes are carpet instead of wood. I don't know why we should do this, but my God, we've got to try something!”

— Jack Handey
Any idea if the claims of silver and bismuth being more harmful than lead (!) have any truth to them?

Silver is used in cake toppings and bismuth is what turns Pepto-Bismol pink. I realize ubiquitous != safe, but c'mon.
I felt bad that it was necessary to post it. Personally, I hope Paul kills this, and every meta post about News.YC. Whoops, that's also a feature request.
Agreed.

And, this discussion is pertinent to pretty much any type of web application with a social component. Keeping signal to noise ratio high on their own web applications is a high priority to many of the people on this site.

This also goes hand in hand with the troll discussion that we had a week or so ago. It's a concern.
For the past 100 years you had a choice. For one way communication, radio, TV, movies. For two way communication, telephone. (I'm not even counting the books and letters for centuries before that.)

For the first time in human history, we have a medium that offers audio, video, text, and 2 way communication with (almost) anyone else in the world. People seem to like it. Any wonder they're abandoning everything else in droves to use it?
You're in denial. One or two a month? Have you been to the site in the past 5 days?

The "how to save HN" posts and comments are coming at a rapid pace because it's an immediate problem.
Always liked this one.
the smarmier the better!
Fundamental Coding Issues
If that's what you need to motivate you, then don't bother.
Won't people tip themselves, thus turning this service into an advertising one?
Irony is truly dead.
If you want to combat fluff, find quality links and post them. History has a long history; go back in time and find interesting things that people have written in the past.
Yeah man, what would 26 hackers be doing here on a Friday night? Preposterous!
10 teams from five countries at Google for start of Google Lunar X Prize
Google Says IP Addresses Aren’t Personal
where would they be? partying? hackers rather code than party. ;)
A simple weighting equation? Where's the "elegance"?
Posted on my wall right now: http://accelerating.org/tech_tidbits/img/2004ttpics/motivati...(robots).jpg
1000 in gift cards! yay!