skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You beat me to it. The one I got wrong: I said most ANSI C compilers supported volatile const, not all. I guess I get a B+. Another question: "which expression resets the least significant bit in the variable". "Reset"? That means "clear", right? I got it right, because only one of the expressions actually changed the value of the variable.

In the whole survey, I found one question that was actually relevant and specific to writing C in embedded environments: when do you declare a variable volatile. The answer was "All of the above".

So yeah, not a good quiz.

There is one thing Hacker News has to learn from this article: silly little quizzes like this have spectacular PR value relative to the amount of effort they take to generate.
Let's read the sentence again.

""The other secret of Big Macs is that you can have an IQ that hovers somewhere between "idiot" and "moron"

He did not say that you must have an IQ of an idiot or moron to work at McDonald. He said that even if you have IQ of an idiot or moron, you can make a Big Mac which tastes like other Big Macs in the world. It's a big difference.
I'm still at work. Someone mind flagging this as SFW or not?
I know this pain first hand. The feedback loop for this kind of analysis is quite long and therefore much harder to actually accomplish.

It would be interesting to see a full-baked analysis on a landing page optimization. Many landing page optimization "experts" tout big gains like these but ignore analysis of the entire funnel and attributing costs of sales-reps time to deal with filtering "low quality" leads. (In a perfect world this isn't an issue because it can be automated, but we all know that isn't the case most of the time.)

Interesting analysis, though, and I would love to hear about your deeper analysis as the data becomes available.
Ok. That would help a lot.

It will at least make people that have been here for a long time have the same privileges as an account that is less than 5 minutes old.

I'd hate to be in your shoes on this one, it's one of those 'damned if you do/damned if you don't' kind of things.

From the sidelines it is easy enough to criticize but I've run enough websites to know that a users point of view is not always the same as the point of view of the person that tries to maintain the atmosphere.

I'm all for dropping the points, in fact, as far as I'm concerned you can drop the leaderboard as well.

If someone is interested in the karma of a user they can always go and look at the profile.

At least like that we get rid of stupid comments like 'I made it my mission to be in the top 100'.
SFW.
There were three prequels to the Star Wars trilogy?
I wonder how much smart people / money / hardware / etc you need to start an attack that sophisticated.
HN == nerds
Open Angel Forum – Colorado bound
> in case any crashed they would cash in $$$

Doesn't sound like much of a business model. As I understand it, Plane Spotting is much more of a nerdy hobby with the goal of spotting unusual or interesting craft, as well as accumulating lots of 'spots':

http://www.planespotters.net/

In a hacker vein, some of these folks' observations were crucial to uncovering the secret CIA bases in eastern Europe:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/dec/10/usa.terrorism1
Yes, I agree. I think they could improve their entire funnel conversion rate by adding some simplified "marketing content" back into the page.
5 years of infosthetics (visualization and demo of elastic lists)
Agreed. I know how to write comments that get tons of upvotes, but most of the comments I write aren't those kinds of comments, because I think there are other types of comments that also add a lot of value even if they don't get any upvotes.
Somehow this reminds me of "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo...) which I also can't wrap my head around :)
There are a couple other things that are down-weighted like self-posts... tweets, unembedded images. PG commented about this at one point.
Plus an incident like this is likely to grow advertiser sour to the whole medium, and not just the displays of a certain advertiser.

That was a douchey and bone-headed statement on their part.
I didn't see a lot of questions here that needed "looking up".

Most embedded C devs know what "volatile" does, because if you get that wrong your program crashes.

Very few developers know how to craft hygenic cpp macros, but since the question didn't ask about hygiene, I wouldn't expect anyone to feel like they should "look it up". You kind of either know it or you don't.

If anything, the problem with this quiz is that it was far too superficial.
I see your point, but I don't believe we have the same definition of "information-free". Unless I'm mistaken, upvotes are anonymous. A comment of "thank you" or appreciation is essentially a publicly identifiable upvote. The information being conveyed is to the commenter and that information is the appreciation of the comment from an identifiable individual.

In just about every situation you could say that greetings, salutations, etc. convey no obvious information. But I'm not sure how far we'd get without them. I personally believe that things like this are what maintain and bond a community. But that is simply my opinion. I'd take a thoughtful comment reply, even if in disagreement, than an upvote any day.
Apparently, the PTO doesn't actually do this anymore. President Obama was misinformed in his statement.

http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2010/01/14/president-obama-calls-u...
The specific manifestation of the problem may not be novel, but the underlying problem persists. It's the people, process, technology argument. McDonald's is heavy on process and technology but have unskilled labor - as far as restaurant work is concerned.

An article I read in the early 2K's summed up several software engineering studies about the importance of people, process, and technology to software projects. The conclusion, overwhelmingly, was that successful projects had a cohesive team of very good developers. In less successful and completely failed projects, developers were not carefully chosen and time was not allocated to develop a sense of team. Software methodology and technology (equipment, tools, etc.) varied widely and was not deemed as critical to success.

The conclusion was that people were 60% of the success of a project while process and technology were 20% each.

I'll try to find a link to the article. It would have been around 2001 in either IEEE's Computer, CACM, Queue, or Dr. Dobb's.
> I don't tailor comments to please others.

Super. Neither do I, prepare for the occasional -4. And don't worry about it.

> I always thought awarding karma just for submitting stories was unwarranted.

That's a double edged one. On the one hand, yes, you're right. And some of the 'top submitters' here take the easy road by putting in a lot of the mainstream / techcrunch stuff.

On the other hand to get some points for finding a really nice article sends the signal that says 'well done', find us more stuff of that caliber.

Personally I think that domains that have had more than say 20 links submitted (TC, wsj, cnn, bbc, sciam, the top blogs and so on) should no longer be rewarded.

It's basically a race between the people that have their RSS feeders primed and want to be the first to submit that sort of thing.
I'd say it's a safe bet that stealing Google's source code wouldn't help much with replicating their datacenter infrastructure.
Because it's a lose-lose proposition. If I get it right, I'm helping some other schmuck break into people's systems. If I get it wrong then I'm the schmuck.

And yes, people will learn to break into systems without my help, and yes, openness is the best defense we have against these things. I've just decided I'm just not going to put anything out there that could possibly be used like that.

I tell you one of the reasons why: about twelve years ago, back in the Windows 3/95 days, I got a call from some stock brokers in New York. They wanted to know basically how to spy on their employees.

So I sketched out a system where software would take pictures of their desktops every few seconds -- this was a long time before such software ever existed. I also sketched out several ways you could keep the software from being detected.

I never knew if they wrote the system or what happened to my design, but it never sat well with me. I always wished I could have went back and not provided them with the information.

So now I don't do that anymore.
As a German learning to write in English I had to constantly remind myself to keep my sentences short :)
How To Innovate Right Now
I don't really get the part with Russian nested dolls.

Was it like this?:

For example, there is a code which is encrypted three times. And that crypt-code by itself is executable which decrypts itself into another executable, and so on.

If this is true - I'm really impressed.
Scheme from Scratch - Bootstrap v0.10 - If
I suggested this before, but I think it was well after you stopped reading the threads. Let me try again:

Why not show a percentile for comments? Before there are 10 or 20 or so comments on a page, don't show any score of any kind (except maybe gray out really bad comments). Then, when the number of comments is high enough, display a percentile compared to all the other positively ranked comments. You can still use points internally, but you display a much fuzzier number to users. It is useful to quickly pick out the best comments to read, but once a comment becomes one of the best in the thread, no one will have to keep voting it up (and similar for down). People will just cast votes to say "this comment is over (or under) valued" not to say "This comment deserves another (or one less) karma point".

I'd really love to see you run that experiment for a day or two :-) What do you say?
"Word economy" is the highest calling in my experience with landing pages. If something can be said in bullet points intstead of paragraphs, use the bullets.
My Rant On Web 2.0 Design Fundamentalism
Your office help desk is jealous
That's a really nice idea actually.
In Haiti electricity is rationed. It turns off at 10.
Actually, just having that on the user page would be interesting, even if it's no longer used for anything internally.
I'm 2.89, on a downward trend, and the past several of my votes haven't counted. Is something else going on?

I recognize the good intention, but the "vote not counting" thing is on a visceral, psychological level very irritating. It feels antagonistic.

I recommend that you kill that feature in the short term, and then proceed to remove scores from most comment displays.
Am I missing something? I don't see how this is astroturfing. Bad/sloppy writing, maybe...
Totally unrelated to the article, but I've got to put my good word in for Linode. I've never had such good service from a hosting provider, and frankly for a (currently) tiny account.
"More generally, are many hackers libertarians?"

Possibly slightly more than the general population. I used to see a lot of claims that libertarians were very common among hackers and geeks, but that's never seemed to pan out. Even the sort of left-wing and right-wing people who call themselves "libertarians" because they like some civil liberties issue or hate taxes don't seem any more common than normal.

Mind, I don't hear those claims as much, anymore.
It depends a lot on what field the patent is in, but less than 20% of utility patents take 5+ years to issue. It looks like the average time has been about 3 to 3 1/2 years recently.

http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2009/07/patent-application-p...

This about 3 years old, but shows the differences between different types of patents:

http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2007/02/prosecution_dat.html

Software patents are definitely on the long side of things.
As an IT guy, I'm a big fan of how Haworth is trying to remove the help desk stereotype. Some seriously smart guys over there.
These aren't outlier cases.

If I wanted to boost my comment score average, I would very deliberately formulate even more bogus opinions about popular "controversies". Oh, I sure would come up with a lot of crap to say about Zynga, the Apple Tablet, and Websprockets.

It would work, because haunting the less popular topics has been a surefire way to get my average to drop.
I think it is the number in the third column of the leaderboard.

Mine is at 1.91 and I can't vote so that would make sense.
Opening up a page in a web browser ought to be a safe operation. Letting that page start a plugin, or running something it downloads, or flat out using IE for an unknown link, then I'd be more inclined to blame the user.

(This is why I use Foxit for PDF reading, I don't have a PDF plugin enabled in my browser, PDFs download to disk, and similarly QuickTime, RealPlayer, WMP etc. plugins are all disabled, with only Flash enabled but controlled via FlashBlock.)
True. Maggie Thatcher one said

"A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure."
PG commented about this at one point.

(sigh)
Not to mention your words. English doesn't have nearly as ... robust a mechanism for generating compound words as German.
Agreed. They helped me compile a custom kernel the other day on IRC, they have simply awesome support.
One of the articles in Russian says that disgruntled employee is suspected.
One way to minimize the number of times where you need a fast recharge is to partially charge almost every time you stop somewhere for more than a few minutes.

Most cars sit in driveways and parking lots the vast majority of the time (I don't know the average, but I would bet something like 20-22 hours out of 24).

This wouldn't completely solve the problem, but make it much rarer.
One article I saw implicated a Rackspace server in the attacker's side of event. I presume that meant Slicehost.

If I was breaking into computers "off the clock", I'd probably look to just-a-CC# no-questions-asked hosting providers (probably overseas) as my staging ground. This is something new. Commodity virtualized VPS systems like Slicehost are an awfully convenient way to launder attacks.

It's only been in the last couple years that VM slices have been so quick and easy to buy.
How about your parents or local/state politicians? Interestingly, those tend to be the top two use cases for letters sent from people without accounts. (The other major use case is invoice/receipts and snail mail marketing -- but that tends to be solely through the API, which requires an account.)
I think a lot of these devices operate directly via a network, some I believe even operate via wireless. Regardless of HOW they operate, there will always be an attack vector.

There is nothing to mitigate human error. We all make mistakes, let alone some of us being plain dumb.
I would love to see this - I think it's a very promising idea.
Sorry, I meant software patents. None of mine have taken less than 5 years.
She might just be continuing the decades-long project of maintaining R2's cover.
No one told Luke it was impossible to bull's-eye womp rats in his T-16 back home, so he did it.

http://blog.traysoft.com/2009/12/nobody-told-me-its-impossib...
move along, move along...
An addendum to your last point: people want to eat REAL ice cream.

The only time I've heard of a non-dairy ice cream actually being called good by anyone but a health-freak was coconut based (incidentally, not coconut flavoured).
Groundbreaking touch screen functions on islate
Give up a hand, or walk around being eaten by a translucent Pac Man. I think I'll stick with the umbrella.
I'd rather read what TorrentFreak sources (but doesn't link to directly) instead:

http://ts1.gazettelive.co.uk/local-news/middlesbrough-man-de...

http://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teesside-news/2010/01/14/i...

And presumably the BBC article, since its the earliest report of the decision on the case that I can find.
The primary advantage (as I see it) of an umbrella over a rubber jacket or suit with a hood is convenience. It's quick to deploy and often very compact. At most, it is about the same size and shape as a cane.

This product is very bulky when folded up and has a curved shape that doesn't neatly fit in to a corner.
I've been running http://wasitup.com on Linode the last months and I've been pleased with their stablity except for a 9 minute network outage earlier today (to their credit they were able to resolve it quickly while communicating the status to us end users). For my opinion on the performance characteristics you'd have to read my article on the matter: http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison
Are you sure your votes don't count? Your average comment score is way over the threshold, and your account hasn't been flagged for any kind of abuse. There are other reasons individual votes may sometimes be ignored (e.g. apparent karma bombing, or voting rings) but if you upvote a randomly chosen comment, it should work. Let me know if it doesn't.
I wish things were a little more transparent.

Personally I don't think people should have their comment voting rights removed, without being told, unless they're really causing trouble. And even then, let them know so they can adjust their behavior/leave.

This sort of thing just kills communities IMHO.
11 of the 100 leaders' votes don't count, because <2.0. Something is disconnected, if our best and brightest are comment-vote-banned (could be the leader criteria, I suppose).

BTW I seem to be able to vote again now. Thanks pg! kinda nice... Though now I feel the weight of responsibility again. However, the big OCD thing is that now the UI works properly! I really like that. And, no longer being a persona non grata (an exaggeration; I could still comment and vote on submissions).
Yeah, I've had a $20 Linode virt for a couple of years and it's been pretty reliable.
While it may not be clear what the vector for this particular incident was, here's a defcon presentation about some of the general issues: http://www.defcon.org/html/links/dc-archives/dc-16-archive.h...
Bad day for the praise. Their Newark-based servers dropped off the net for about 10 minutes today, though in general I've been really happy with them.
Who said it was their statement? Seems to me like a canned question.
I never saw an RT face-to-face, but I spent a couple months daily in front of 3278s. Now I own a 3151 connected to a RS/6000, but it's not the same.
Sheesh,

I'm pretty sure the bad guys aren't going to gain much by any vagues sketches of an approach that apparently requires a whole modern state to execute... The original is specific in points...

And there are zillions of reasons for people not to reply to my post. I know I'm not always that interesting...
Scheme from Scratch - Bootstrap v0.11 - Primitive Procedures Part 1
Imagine saying "Capitalist America". How accurate is that? Not very :-)
I've never seen an upvote fail. It's only downvotes. I know that sometimes, if I downvote, nothing happens, I reload the page, nothing happens, but if I click through to the direct link for the comment the vote has taken effect --- in other words, I know to check for that. What I'm seeing is, most of my downvotes don't count.

(Finding a random comment to downvote is more effort than I want to spend on this problem).
Hehe, funny, just yesterday I was wondering to myself if you did that on purpose, it seems that answer to that one is 'yes'.
The article describes a reasonable approach, but requires passing keyword arguments into a function as a separate map. I wrote a macro, let-kw, which allows a more natural calling convention: (my-fun req1 req2 :kw1 kw1-val :kw2 kw2-val)

I opened a ticket so let-kw would be considered for clojure-contrib inclusion (http://www.assembla.com/spaces/clojure-contrib/tickets/51-Ad...). The actual (final) macro source is posted on the Clojure mailing list (http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/msg/3ee695696c5ea1ec).
Reminds me of this spoken word piece from Def Poetry Jam. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmLE2bliXCI
I swear I have been reading a variation on this article every other year or so for the last decade. It's almost like the old 'bsd is dying' joke.
I have definitely experienced some kind of caching behavior in the past: Load a page, vote something up, reload the page and my vote has not counted. But then reload the page some time later (without voting again), and now my vote is counted.
Packing is already fairly effective. http://polypack.eecs.umich.edu/
second that.
Something is clearly broken, or not working properly. And affecting many HN users. I think it was worth the post.
I'm sure as a unicycle rider you're overhearing plenty of comments already!
The outage was upstream. The downtime was due to the Internet correcting itself by routing around the problem -- if you have access to BGP data, you can see the rash of rerouting that fixed the problem.

(Hint: Check jlintz's comment above.)
This is a great point that I hope people listen to. You REALLY have to tune your follow list. There's no one size fits all. Put time into thinking about what's useful to you. News? Commercial announcements? Personal friend updates?

And here's something it took me a long time to learn and adapt to:

Just because somebody is really cool/smart/one of your favorite thinkers, doesn't mean you should follow them.

When I first got to Twitter, I followed a lot of the writers/programmers/thinkers I admired. And while I still admire their work and think they're inspirational people, I had to unfollow many of them for the following reasons:

* They never tweeted about the things that otherwise made them interesting to me (they have every right to do this, just not a good fit for me on Twitter.)

* They used Twitter as their venting medium. (Well-known people tend to fly a lot, go to hotels a lot, and have many opportunities to be let down by "incompetence." Twitter has been their preferred medium to talk about such.) Again, I think this is fine. It's actually really healthy to vent. But it's not so great to hear it all the time.

* They were stressed a LOT. And it made me stressed. It makes sense. Productive smart people that are interesting to me are probably busy and have meetings and deadlines etc. But I felt their pain too acutely.

Anyway... I think Twitter is great. And everything I mentioned above is fine in moderation. (And it's even fine in abundance, just not for me.)

Really put some time curating your Twitter follower list, and it can be great.
> thank you for sharing so transparently.

You must have missed the bit where this was brought up many times before over a period of months.

This is the first time there actually is an answer and it turns out that at least from where I'm sitting this 'feature' was actually detrimental.

If there would have been some more user input I highly doubt this would have been implemented.
> Can you explain why only Apple, when overwhelmingly majority of american consumer goods are manufactured/assembled in China?

because the overwhelming majority of consumer goods i buy are from apple.

I think China has a bad enough reputation that advertising that it's not made in china won't be like shooting yourself in the leg. Although I also agree that it is vastly the governments (and thus our) faults for Initially legitimizing the government (or maybe nixon's fault). Unfortunately government action would be too strong an attack, and so would a massive boycott. so that's why a slow public opinion change, like my opinion, that actually makes it advantageous for companies to not make their crap in China.

If apple stopped making stuff in China, I might just upgrade more often. Now multiply that times every apple fanboy/girl and it's apple no longer has to shoot it's own foot.
I'm looking forward to the time I can program/controll my computer using entirely voice commands and virtual 3d holographic typing