skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apologies. Ever since a close family friend died I've always used the present tense when describing her characteristics. I don't believe that those qualities she had ceased to exist after she passed away. Although technically she was kind, loving, and supportive. In my mind she still is that way. The person I remember is still alive in my head.
Vanilla is great, but really not what you want for a tech forum IMHO, because it's very web-based indeed, and encourages use of HTML and images, a thing that I like a lot for random forums but not for tech ones.
Here's the example from the article written using the Clojure thread macro:

(-> netstat_n (grep "tcp") (awk 5) sort uniq_c sort_n print)
I agree - Thanks for acknowledging it.

I've seen a lot more down voting of well-reasoned comments and arguments just because of disagreement, and I've seen a lot more snide, unhelpful, almost belligerent comments across the board.

I cant speak for others, but its good to know you are working on it, as I dont want to find another place.
I hope the design changes work.

There is an odd aspect to online culture where pointing out rudeness is voted down or dismissed as being overly sensitive or stuffy. So, some less overt way to signal to someone that they are being uncouth might a) be less threatening to receive and b) encourage more conscientious "watchdogs" to participate in bringing social pressure to bear.
Do you use desktop widgets? If so - what other than calendar & weather?
Why you, why now?
Good advice. However, more often than not, the devil lies in the details.
67% Say News Media Have Too Much Influence Over Government Decisions
You don't read the news or blogs? There's not a single day without an article questioning Google evilness when it comes to our data. I never see any about Yahoo.
I have never taken a hardware product to market, but I did have key roles at VC-funded companies, co-founded a company we got funded, and in 2005 did the VC tour on a hardware product.

What I'll say --- and again, don't take my word for it --- is that what you're saying may be the opposite of true. Hardware companies have a higher cost of sales, supply chain issues, worse margins, and must carry inventory (sometimes millions of dollars worth) to fulfill customers. The "hardware" part of what we were doing was, for the VCs that got into real due diligence, the least attractive part of what we were doing.

You may have a resume that is a mile long in hardware, and that may mitigate some of the concern.
Down-voting for disagreement vs objection is one of the issues at play. Previously, we were encouraged to down-vote for disagreement but as the masses came, the use of down-voting as a punishment less harsh than flagging started to become more common.
My plan for dealing with downvoting is just not to display points on comments any more. The hard part is that to make that work, I also have to come up with alternative ways for people to find the comments they're most interested in on big threads.
Acme works very well with proportional fonts, although it doesn't do relative indentation well as a result (think lining function arguments up on the left paren). Still a really brilliant editor in many ways.
The inferred conclusion of what tfh wrote:

As a result, men have evolved/learned to self-aggrandize in social situations (including professional ones), while women have not.
Examples are everywhere. In fact, almost every human interaction is an example. Here are a few off the top of my head:

Quality control rejected one program because it was indented 4 spaces instead of the standard 5, but accepted another, even though it had enough memory leaks to crash the server under certain conditions. The first was a detail; the second was an issue. It took me 2 days to get Q.C. to understand the difference.

A friend recently arrived for a dinner party an hour late and then complained to me that another spoke with her mouth full. As far as I was concerned, the first was an issue and the second was a detail. My friend thought otherwise about both.

Accounting recently spent 3 days implementing a new key policy for the private rest rooms (presumably to prevent theft) and then wrote off $50,000 of inventory because no one could find the proper paperwork. IMO, the former was a detail upon which much time was wasted and the latter was an issue that never actually got dealt with.

We spent the first hour of a recent meeting trying to determine naming conventions, but ran out of time before we decided if the customer's credit limit should be split between 2 divisions. Again, wasting time on details and not dealing with real issues. (This is a great example. One of the best ways to lose your shirt is to not deal with credit/collection/accounts receivable issues.)

My favorite on-line example: A few years ago here on hn, I posted examples of how I found some of my customers. I expected some interesting discussion, but the thread was hijacked because of the presence of 2 concepts in my original post "Bible" and "pawn shop". Lots of issues that could have provided value for people were never explored because the gang preferred to beat a detail to death. Unfortunately this sort of thing happens quite a bit on-line.

Funny how I still remember that thread. Here it is:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182400
Pretty much all modern video games are designed to exploit the same four or five cognitive flaws. The best way to see this in action is to sign up for Idle RPG:

http://idlerpg.net/

The one thing video games are good for is learning to recognize these patterns. That way at least you'll have a fighting chance at avoiding people who use this stuff to try to exploit you in real life.
There are?

I seem to recall seeing Israeli names on news groups every once in a while (off the top of my head - some of the top developers of plt scheme and php are Israeli), at least more often than their proportion of the world's population would suggest.

Remember that Israel has approximately 7 million people (~1/20 of Japan, ~1/40 of the US, ~1/170 of India).

How many Swiss or Bulgarians do you see in the open source world?
> Kurt would not respond to the substance of what I asked. The jist of his response: “A court order should not shut down any website unless the entirety was not protected speech. While a ‘true threat’ is not protected speech, there are many views which are protected, even if repugnant”.

Forgive me if I misunderstood, but Kurt's response was perfectly apt. The article's author tried to compare a blog with a single unprotected post to a website entirely filled with direct calls to violence.

Kurt's response distinguishes these two cases. Shutting down an entire blog due to one post is different from shutting down a website filled entirely with unprotected material.
The current scientific consensus is that there are average overall differences in specific abilities and men have a wider spread in intelligence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_intelligence

Incidentally, even if there were no information showing that abilities/ambitions were different, it would not be reasonable to assume they were the same until proven otherwise.
I agree that this is a big problem. However, there aren't just 2 alternatives: your doctor's pseudo science or somebody else. Another alternative is to not listen to any advice at all and just eat what you want. America might actually be much healthier today if the government (including through doctors) never started pushing their nutritional advice on us.

I do agree that taking responsibility for your own health is a difficult, time consuming task that may be highly wasted if one can't distinguish between valid and invalid information. I wish I could figure out a way to help people with this process. If I show someone scientifically dense information their eyes glaze over.
Then enlighten us.

What is the structure of the Chinese government? National, Provencal, City? How are their leaders elected? Are there term limits? Does no one get to vote? If not, who determines the leadership?

How do laws get made in China (National, Provencal, City)? What are the rights of those accused of a crime? How does Judicial Process work? In general, are laws "common" or "codified"?

Is the military in control? Is the military allowed to take action within the country to keep order? Or is this the domain of local and/or National Guard as it is in the U.S.? Is China a police state? How so? Do the police not answer to anyone?

Does China have a "constitution"? What if any basic rights does it guarantee its people?

How does China's government (through answering the above) differ from Cuba? Russia?
It's triage. Usually you'll want to get back to the details and address them at some point. But given finite resources, it's a waste of time to try to dig through details when more pressing issues need attention.
Apple is a fruit, Google is a number?
Function composition and currying seem like a more natural translation to me.

Or you can think of it like this:

netstat_n >>= grep "tcp" >>= flip awk 5 >>= sort >>= uniq_c >>= sort_n

See also: http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/monadic-shell.html
I'm actually going to give the tab generator a try, looked pretty nice.
Hi ComputerGuru,

I guess the main question for me is, what stage are you at? Have you done adequate manufacturing engineering? Worked on the factory contacts? Just getting started on the science? Working on product refinement? A few demos out and helpful?

In terms of investors that I know about, both Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins are willing to invest in hardware projects with huge potential: with Khosla Ventures even at the science project stage. Angel investors are also pretty good bets, due to the social good angle.

Due to your describing it as 'hacked together,' and the lack of IP protection thus far (you should consider filing for provisional patents ASAP, they're far less expensive), you're probably seed or series A stage for Khosla Ventures, possibly too early for the other VCs that I know about, but potentially you could also raise money from a variety of foundations and from NIH, for example.

Good luck! If you'd like to contact me I can be reached at dani.fong at google's mail service.
No. Actually that company was trying to hack its competitors in addition to selling fake cameras.
Also, feed wasn't under real-time monitoring, it was pulled once in hour or something like that, it hard to find details even in Russian news.

And there is an error in publication: Yury Luzhkov isn't a former Mayor, he is still in charge (and won't retire in next decade, I think).
Does behavior like that of the administrator in the story cause our math and science scores to be lower, or do the lower math and science scores cause the behavior of the administrator? It’s hard to tease apart the causality here. It may very well be that the administrator wouldn’t have called the police if American students tested higher in math and science. That is, our lower math and science scores make us less knowledgeable in these areas and thus more prone to fear when it comes to an ominous looking device with wires.

In all likelihood it’s probably both, with feedback going both ways.
IdleRPG sounds like http://progressquest.com/
Someone already pointed out examples from East Africa. In west Africa, there is the native pictographs of Adinkra of Ghana. There is also the native Bagam writing system of Cameroon (extinct). In Nigeria, there was a script known as Nsibidi.

Unfortunately, it's a common misconception that Africa had no writing systems or math.
The Open Dinosaur Project
German government warns against using MS Explorer
don't believe that. it's history. Israel is becoming extremely religious state, where most budgets go to the religious families which in 10 years will be 50%. They make 10-12 kids, like 3rd world populations, don't do nothing that deals with science and progress, use public transportation where WOMEN ARE NOT ALLOWED TO SIT NEAR MAN and much more 200 B.C. ideas.
I remember someone mentioning that WoW (and other good MMOs) have a 30 second rule, in that you can run 30 seconds in any direction and find something to do (even if its killing more mobs) in order to keep the player's attention
I agree that its fine to point out problems you've observed from living in China. Certainly no country is beyond criticism. I have been reporting the other side of the coin in my posts simply to balance out the conversation. I have a long list of negative stories from 10 years in Shanghai. Some are absolutely shocking. But I have an even longer list of positive things to say. I suspect most making negative posts here have little to no direct knowledge of daily life in China.
That doesn't mean it's not useful :) It's also by JQuery devs. A Ask HN post on dev tools mightn't have got any upvotes or comments: that was my thinking -- at least here there's something to work off.
I guess it depends on the situation. That's never been a problem for me, and some of my best photos were of family and friends over Thanksgiving, especially the kids. They were never tense, they were at most curious if they even paid attention to me and the camera.

Not to mention that all the P&S and cameraphone pictures everyone else took were either incredibly noisy, washed out with major red eye because of the built-in flash, or blurred and unacceptable because of inadequate indoor lighting.
I came to the conclusion long ago that the only effective way to have effective non-grinding gameplay in an MMORPG is to base the game around competition between players. It is infeasible from a monetary perspective (development costs) and a practical standpoint to have interesting, custom-built content to fill years of gameplay.

What can break this barrier is interactions between actual people, which are far more interesting and variable than anything a developer can put together himself. The purpose of the game world should be to facilitate competition between players as best as possible.

Finally, a game should also be based around an activity that is inherently enjoyable without the existence of progression. For example, Team Fortress 2 is a lot of fun to play even though you're not "leveling up" or getting "epic equipment". World of Warcraft, by comparison, wouldn't addict anyone if there were no levels or equipment.

I can recall many games that have done either (or both) of these to some extent and were far more fun and interesting than any WoW clone:

1. Planetside. Not merely an MMOG first-person shooter, but one in which the primary content of the game consists of player combat. Shooting people in multiplayer games is fun, and doing it for territorial control with your friends in a persistent world is even moreso. Global Agenda looks like it might be bringing this concept back in 2010.

2. Shattered Galaxy. One of those games that got great review scores in every magazine and then disappeared off the map. A somewhat flawed but still very fun MMORTS, it was a blast to play even ignoring the progression aspect, and consisted entirely of player-vs-player team tactical combat with territorial control aspects. Incredibly addictive despite the pretty minimal progression system.

3. EVE Online. Failed miserably at the "base itself around fun activities" moniker, but based itself almost entirely around player-vs-player combat, empire-building, and market-based competition. To this day, it has set a bar for epic-scale player competition that no other game has gotten near. Basically all of the game's content was entirely player-generated: wars between player-run alliances over player-built space stations using player-built spaceships constructed using player-mined minerals.

In short, make it fun, and make it about competition between people, not between people and Orc NPCs.
What's interesting here though is that grinding seems to be a great way to build a successful (MMO)RPG. This is counterintuitive.
I don't think it's counterintuitive.

Which is easier: making a slot machine that will keep someone gambling for 30 minutes or making an interesting game that will keep someone playing for 30 minutes?
Like probably most other companies doing business in China, and probably for years.

Not defending it, just pointing out that this one decision of Yahoo's is, unfortunately, normal.
UK is not a part of Schengen area, so it is not just being island and all.
Dear Flash plugin, love OSX
I find it hard to believe that comment was posted by the real Alan Ellis.
>It is infeasible from a monetary perspective (development costs) and a practical standpoint to have interesting, custom-built content to fill years of gameplay.

Huh. Autogenerated MMORPG content seems... remotely plausible. Or at least, some of it could be autogenerated. The terrain, at least, and names. Maybe some of the quests. I haven't seen anyone trying this though, I guess it's hard to make autogenerated content pleasant.
Carnegie Mellon's Never Ending Language Learner
They spent 362 million $ on Spring Source (WTF!) and a 100 million $ on ZImbra (double WTF!). That's enough to buy a 100 early stage startups (and a chance of getting something really innovative). As it is it sounds like a typical MB droid play.
Those who can't do, can't teach either.
Tech changes and the entrepreneur: How to keep up
Currently, the science is all complete, the hardware is pretty much polished as is the firmware. The mechanical parts are the real problem; currently built at local metal workshops and some CNCs.

I have a single demo unit that is working great, and have ideas for future improvement that would need access to more than a local workshop. Haven't actually gotten in touch with anyone for real manufacturing mainly out of IP fears - I'm in the initial stages of talking to an IP lawyer now, but haven't actually handed over any of the inner workings partially out of paranoia and partially because I'm not sure what I'm looking for just yet. I'll take your suggestion and look at provisional patents in a few.

Basically both the idea and the implementation are novel and are what I'm looking to patent. The actual mechanical details are out of my field of experience (computer engineering) and I have several different designs and I'm sure someone in the industry would have better ideas as well - that's something I'm hoping a VC could help me secure, somehow.

Thanks for the Khosla Ventures suggestion. I'll keep them in mind as I formulate my list & next steps :-)
Again, 37 signals like VoodooPC is just an exceptional example. That's why it is useful to look at aggregate numbers like the UVA/Darden study (I'm still trying to find an online copy for you guys) which tells you what the majority of successful entrepreneurs (who themselves are already a minority of entrepreneurs) do.

And the majority of successful entrepreneurs do not invest assets based on their perception of the magnitude of the opportunity but rather on their own idea of acceptable loss.

Stripped of the emotional mumbo-jumbo and romantic appeal of putting literally everything into an investment, the statistically successful position makes perfect sense.
He blows stuff out of proportion, and writes trollish articles that are popular on link hubs due to their provocativeness. I see a headline predicting doom for any non-British country and a telegraph URL and I know it's him again. His main function seems to be to reassure the Brits that it's much, much worse everywhere else.
EVE Online did autogenerated content for most of the base universe: the devs even noted that the random seed they used for the universe was "42". Of course, quests and such were hand-crafted later, this was just for the names, star systems, connections between them, NPC-controlled space stations, planets, moons, asteroid belts, resources, etc.

The real problem IMO is that autogenerated content can't be any more inherently interesting than the algorithm that created it. In EVE, this wasn't a problem, because the autogenerated content was merely intended as a "playing field" on which other events happened, but if the autogenerated content is the content itself, I think you'll have serious problems making it non-repetitive.
I'm sure you're smart enough to make changes that will boost the level of civility, and not reduce it. At the moment, the biggest reason not to zing someone with a cheap shot comment is the fact that you will soon find a negative number attached to the comment (how humiliating!). I suppose you could hide the points and completely hide comments that wind up with negative points (and, to have the discussion flow make sense, you'd have to also hide the responses to that comment). I'm sure you'll iterate, and find out what works best. Good luck, and thanks for caring enough to try to improve things around here.
Most MMOs are essentially "skinner boxes."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber#Sk...

Different MMOs have different levels of skill needed, as well are aimed at different audiences. Warcraft is aimed at "easy mode."

Ultimately, they are still "grinds."

Some games have lots of other little games, one that does a good job of having alternative schemes for advancement is a game called Vanguard. The diplomacy "mini game" is pretty interesting and I think was very innovative. If you are developing your own MMO, I seriously recommend playing VG to see diplomacy and how they've made crafting different. Sadly, VG is still buggy and the amount of people playing is dropping, and combined with the dearth of support for the game from Sony (Everquest is still the star at SOE) for VG, it will be around as long as the subscriber numbers stay high enough.

Disclaimer: I've played Vanguard on and off since beta (this handle is the name of one of my characters on Seradon), and I think it has great promise, however the game is a case study in how not to do things in the MMO industry.
By the time we identified you as the problem the damage was already done. In fact, when combined with potential performance penalty that Google may apply (could be 5%, 10%, for one week, two weeks... who knows) the actual amount of damage in lost traffic/business to us could easily run into the thousands.

Are you going to reimburse us the damages? Obviously not.

I want you to realize that the timeliness of your response is completely irrelevant to the matter at hand.

Proper net etiquette would be to have a reasonable limit of an ACTUAL 1 req/sec, not an average. Furthermore, allow only the webmaster of the site to increase the rate.

Also, while nofollow sculpting is not the original intention of the metatag, MANY people use it as such, so respect that directive.

Also, you can have your system be aware when a site is slow to respond and adjust crawl rates/times as necessary.

Also, user-agent protections are not enough. Many webservers have built-in automatic IP-based attack detection/prevention, but as far as I know, most don't have user-agent based systems. The new virtual land is distributed and webservers have to react to that new reality, but the onus is on you to be aware that many people are still running legacy systems.

If you guys did that from the beginning there wouldn't be an issue. And I'm sure all those complaints you see on other webmaster forums would largely go away as well.

There are many things you can/could've done to prevent this problem. There's things we could have done as well, but placing the blame on us is akin to blaming a robbed family for not locking the door. Sure, said family should have locked the door, but that in no way excuses the robber of their actions.

I know it's a lot easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, but when you're performing the equivalent of a DDoS attack and causing immediate and direct financial damages to a company... that doesn't fly.
Google has reached the backlash stage in the PR cycle, Yahoo has passed into the too-established-to-be-interesting stage.
Adobe is ridiculous. Flash on OS X is a joke. It makes sense why Apple is so hesitant to allow it on the iPhone.