skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tell HN: Why you should submit your stuff as a blog posting
Self posts are strongly discounted on HN, if you post a question or an article without a link then you will find that there is a good chance that you will not be getting any traction at all.

The reason for this is that self posts are discounted at (and this is a guess, maybe PG can correct me) roughly 40% of what it would take to get a similar frontpage ranking for a regular post.

So even if your well formulated article that you posted on HN (nice, because you are obviously not in it for the advertising revenue) is voted up a few times its chances of being really discussed are very slim indeed.

On the other hand, you could post an external link to an article about prostitution ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1075970) or the latest episode in one of the soaps (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1075944) and you'd be guaranteed plenty of discussion.

The practical upshot of this is that if you really want an answer of if you really want to discuss a subject and you think that it is not mainstream enough to catch a couple of upvotes in the first half hour you can more than double your chances by posting it elsewhere and then submitting the link.

I don't pretend to understand the reason behind the penalty assigned to 'Ask HN' style posts and articles that are posted as original content on HN, I just notice that plenty of those seem to drop sight unseen whereas lots of trivial content makes the homepage without too much trouble, as long as it is on an external site.

We'll see if this post is self-defeating ;)

To see how big this effect is, as long as this post is on the homepage you can check it against other posts with links that have roughly the same number of points and age.
Andrew Warner's latest interview with Seth Godin
It is relevant, but I believe the downvotes are a response to the lack of an option to otherwise flag a comment as complete bullshit.
Releasing a bit early. Any feedback would be appreciated.
What makes you think that Easy mode was what set the bar and Hard mode just had hitpoints increased? Perhaps Hard mode was what they intended the game to be like and for Easy they just lowered the hit point totals.

For all the people complaining about how horrible Hard mode usually is - what should it be? Everyone seems to say - they just make the enemies have more hit points, or add more of them, or make them aim better. What do you want hard mode to be?

I would think that to make "easy mode", first you tune your game for the hardest setting. Then, you start progressively removing obstacles, turning up player advantages, turning down enemy advantages, etc for your easier settings.
Enter CoreAdvertising:

PO: We acquired Quattro to offer our developers a seamless way to make money.
If I could trust them to do that and only that with the information they collect about me, maybe I wouldn't mind so much.

But, first, what they do with the information they collect about me is completely out of my control. They could sell it to someone else or to another corporation or to the/a government for all I know. And I won't even know, as they're not required to tell me about what they actually do with the information they collect about me. And even if the only thing they do now with my information is provide suggestions and improve search results for me and don't sell any of this information to others, that doesn't mean that they won't change their minds and start doing something else at a later date.

Second, and more importantly, I have a profound distrust of corporations. Knowledge is power and I don't want to allow corporations to get even more power over me (or over anyone else).

Third, I believe any information about me is information I own, and if these companies want to collect information about me or use it in any way, they should ask my permission.

If I feel that it would be a good thing for them to either collect information about me or use it to "improve search results" or make recommendations or do whatever else they propose to do with that information, then I'll give them that permission. If not, they should be forbidden by law from doing so.

But, since there are no such laws (at least not in the US, that I'm aware of) I'll just forego using their service completely. In fact, even if there were laws, I'm not sure if I'd use their service, since it would take a lot of convincing for me to believe these corporations were actually obeying the law.
All that takes is a few generations to pass so the collective memory forgets. And then the empire united must divide.
He didn't. He used <abbr title="for example">f.ex.</abbr>. You know, an abbreviation.
If by must you mean often tend to, and by relationships you mean ratios, then I agree; it's a very useful model in the absence of other information. Wonderful, in fact.

Still, sociologically, working scientists tend to believe in these models as if they were hard rules, to the extent of constructing bridges, rockets, nuclear reactors, nationwide health recommendations and global financial systems without fundamentally understanding why each distribution might arise, and why it might fail to explain real phenomena.
Paul Graham's RSS Feed
Some time ago someone posted this link on HN http://www.arandomnumber.com/

I wonder whether number choice will fallo Benford's Law.
-1. Why didn't you post this on your blog ? :D
can you give me an example/explain further?
The fascinating part for me is toward the end of the article where he talked about the 2005 Playchess.com competition, in which teams of humans are free to use computers to compete in Chess. To everyone's surprise, a team of amateurs with 3 cheap computer won against both stand-alone computers and Grandmasters with state-of-the art computers.

His take away message:
"Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process".

I see this trend going on in AI for the long time, where the best use of development goes to augmenting human intelligence rather than supplanting it.
I'm curious why wikibooks hasn't taken off like it should. I don't know if the content isn't engaging enough or if the formatting is off.
I just started learning it myself a couple of weeks ago, and I'm now half-way through the online "Programming in Lua" book.

I'm quite impressed with the core language, which is quite elegant. And it's amazing what they've been able to do using just associative arrays (called "tables" in Lua) as their sole data structure.
Organic Indie Preorder Pack Postmortem
Super stuff.

Ok, now to go and design the thing, you game ?

If so drop me an email. It's been a long long time since I've done gate level logic but this is a very interesting little project.
There was a trend of top-level Magic: The Gathering players taking up poker, it shouldn't be surprising that has extended to chess.
Translation: "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

Apple may be a one-eyed man in the realm of the blind, but even so that does sometimes make them king. Apple doesn't do anything that the rest of the industry can't: they coordinate good usability and aesthetic design with strong execution and solid brand management, but the rest of the industry doesn't. And that will continue to give Apple a huge competitive advantage until the rest of the industry wakes up and "gets it".

(See also: Google, re: combining solid usability design, top tier application development, and revolutionary data center/IT operations on the web.)
> We'll see if this post is self-defeating ;)

But compare the position this entry has on the homepage with the others around it, the key metric is (points / age), and you'll see that linked posts with a lesser score by that metric still rank much higher.
Maybe you can create a yahoo! Pipe to filter the content you want ?
this is what I think could be the answer/an alternative answer. I have a basic theory:

"Anything you want to learn is accessible online via existing content or smart people you can connect with. Someone just needs to organize it all"

The answer I usually get is something like, well, yeah Google, but that's a pretty primary way to go about it. If you want to learn RoR for the first time, you might pick up a book, but you'll probably scour the net utilizing different sites. So why not organize the content that already exists into a more structured manner that slightly resembles chapter ie- programming 101 go here, setting up apache go here, learning about sessions go here, interacting with MySQL go here, etc.
Replacing GNU assembler with Factor code
كأس الامم الافريقية - كووورة
The main thing is: we focus on bringing a cost and performance advantage to the small and medium companies, to make their lives a little better.
Lock yourself in the basement, destroy the key.
VCs Are Not Evil: What Entrepreneurs Need To Know
That doesn't explain base invariance
This takes me back... Internet Explorer 5 for Mac used to support a widely lauded feature similar to this, where you could "subscribe" to a page and it would tell you when it updated.

RSS pretty much obsoleted the feature and I have never seen it in a browser since. There have definitely been times when it would be useful, and I'm glad it's in Google Reader now!
So what do you think about his other 5000 words?
yup, that's why textbooks are a broken economic model. If the quality is good, a professor would certainly choose a far less expensive book. Many of my professors usually suggest how to get the book cheaper.
Counterexample: What about a reader? These are common both in literature and the social sciences, but the best example is a collection of short stories.

In a reader, the editor must pay each one of these authors something. In a juvinile reader, count on 30 stories. (source: http://activities.macmillanmh.com/reading/treasures/stories/... as an example.) On top of that, there are questions, extra resources, and accompanying teacher material to write. And you're going to be able to pay for all this in 7 bucks?

Perhaps if we limit this to single/dual author textbooks, we can start talking about it. It could be an interesting disruptive system when it comes to tenure, for sure. (Without the curated system, academia will have to adapt.)
Only if you're using a decimal notation for binary systems (think of 1 and 0 of computers).

[Not regarding you comment or this response]

As I have understood, the Law applies only to a logarithmic scale [1 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4, ... to ...]. Look at this pattern graph:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BenfordDensities.png
update: gone and way much better. Thank you for the feedback.
I use the Firefox extension Update Scanner to much the same effect: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3362. No complaints so far, although my use has been mild. Note that you'll need to install via the beta channel if you've got Firefox 3.6.
"Google Streetview" Video of Haiti
Yeah, so this is the same as gnome's gconf settings for NetworkManager preferences.

But that being said, the plist file format isn't all that great (there was a time when Apple had binary "compiled plist" files, but the pl command no longer supports that) -- the alternating "key" and value tags only associated by order in the file is kind of anti-XML. On one of my Xserves with two interfaces active, this file is 9k, massive for its purpose. This is not something that even an experienced administrator would want to edit using anything other than the GUI, doing so would be quite error prone. So if you want your settings to stick, you should be doing it from the GUI on OSX. The complexity of doing it from the GUI in a way that sticks and from the command line in a way that doesn't stick are roughly the same, but the results are different: to get it to stick by editing from the command line is quite a bit more complex.
Jan. 25, 1979: Robot Kills Human
Communication: When it fails, who is to blame?
this relates to my thoughts in one of the comments below:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1076436

Why not just curate links and existing content for learning something?
When large companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft) register secret domains, they tend to do so professionally. I don't think any product has been leaked in recent history due to an amateur DNS screw up.
Wel... Since it's possible to track Tor traffic that way, it's best to assume all the really evil guys (those who work for governments inclined on spying on their citizens, not the paedophiles) are capable of this.

If I have to chose between a police state and paedophiles, I'll take the paedos. At least they don't have guns.
Not to mention the fact the Bush Administration laid the groundwork for Obama to initiate the government bailout of GM. Bush knew it needed to be done but also recognized 1) He wasnt' going to have the time 2) it wouldn't be popular with Republicans.
A gentle introduction to Lisp
I found this book to be an extremely clear introduction.
Apparently, Benford rediscovered the law that Simon Newcomb wrote about in 1881:

http://www.jstor.org/pss/2369148
Suppose you vary the unit of measure. If the unit of measure is picked in the Benford's law distribution, then the expected leading digit of any value you give me will follow Benford's law.
Use Google VOice or a similar service and only calls you allow will get through. ALl others could go to a voicemail that's the sound of a disconnected phone.
The catch-22 is that this feature would be used by people who use Google Reader and thus who know of RSS and its benefits.
I think arguing against all censorship is doomed because people will always come up with examples that are very hard to argue with. For example, "what if someone puts detailed plans to make a nuclear bomb on the internet"? Would you really argue nothing should be done to prevent that?

What is really the problem here is the method. We can usually all agree that censorship must be an exception, not the rule. In fact, we can usually agree that in a democracy we have a set of important principles without which the pillars that support the democracy itself and the freedom of people within it will break down:

a) We try as hard not to censor as we can.

b) We try everything except censorship before we try censorship

c) Even then, we censor only when such censorship has a provable chance of preventing the serious harm that we have identified must be prevented

Filtering the internet fails all of these.
"... TechCrunch is by far in the lead. But why not? They publish good stuff ..."

Articles from TechCrunch span the topical or breaking news spectrum. On rare occasions, there are posts that really should make the headlines. I'm thinking of some posts Arrington made last year. Often I've tried reading TC articles a month or a week later and there is no substance to them. Marshmallow news. Not my cup of tea.
Why Cold Sores Are a Common Problem Among People?
It's amazing just how much hostility there is towards the notion of trying to keep information about yourself private.
Only 7% of the message is in the words
Very interesting, though kind of disappointed he skipped over the legal stuff. The other information is good to know, but a good portion could probably be deferred. The legal stuff is the real mystery. If nothing else, would be good to know the main points to square away with a lawyer (IP, release of liability, timeframes for changes, consequences if something goes wrong, etc).
New Way to Look for Diseases’ Genetic Roots
Why Flash is doomed
He overuses absolute positioning. Clearly dodgy.
If you're philosophically opposed to web applications why are you participating in Hacker News?
Wikibooks doesn't reward the authors at all. Wikibooks doesn't pay them money, it doesn't put their name on their work, and it doesn't let their contribution last forever -- others can go and muck it up with their editing. (If anything I've said here is wrong, then let's say it's the perception of these problems that is the problem.)

Also, the current books aren't particularly good and the syntax for editing them is arcane.
This is essentially how China is run: you take a standardized test when you're eighteen or so, and that test determines your life. If you do well, you have power, and if you do poorly, you don't.

I wonder how China's Steve Jobs did on the standardized test when s/he was eighteen. Our Steve Jobs hadn't even met Wozniak by that point.

There are many types of intelligence and only one type is measured by standardized testing. Indeed is it probably all the other types that will become increasingly important as society adjusted to its complete saturation with technology. Ken Robinson's TED talk addresses this far better than I could: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ken_robinson_says_schools_.... If you only watch a few TED talks, Ken's should certainly be one of them.

As you point out, the picture you paint of China is strangely appealing to those on HN (myself included). I think our types tend to be good at standardized testing and we enjoy highly efficient systems. However there is a massive cost to such a system because the Steve Jobs of the world are less likely to thrive. Once you look past the initial appeal of efficiency, it becomes a scary ideal indeed.
Not "30.1% of numbers" start with 1, but 30.1% of numbers from distributions that cover several orders of magnitude might.

http://www.billthelizard.com/2009/04/benfords-law.html

</pedantry>
I love the exploding data idea.
Latest release of E107 is backdoored
That's not surprising, as a wire coat hanger is very thick, and thus has lower resistance than most speaker wire. In a related vein, instead of buying expensive speaker wire, buy 16 gauge, 2 conductor (16/2) extension cord wire for about 1/3 the cost.
Love the simplicity and quality of the site. I like the "How can we improve this page" everywhere. It is nice to see a constant message of trying to improve and making it drop dead simple to send feedback.

Above all though, the speed of the lookups is impressive. So many other tools are slow and clunky.
Anybody with a basic understanding of security is aware of this kind of attack.

The basic failure is that plenty of people think that by using Tor they are anonymous.

I'd rather have them think that and then have the real perps run in to law enforcement than to have the people that have real secrets to share and are stupid run in to law enforcement.

Any darknet that functions without flaws is enabling criminals as much or more than it enables legal uses, any darknet that is flawed by extension will help to catch a lot of criminals.

When you are doing stuff that can not stand the light of day it is probably best not to use technology that you do not fully understand.
> Not my opinion, but if you ever found the rule of the nerds appealing, now you know: that's China.

China is not the country the kind of nerds I know would be running.
> Our pages are built by our community

Your 'community' includes robots, according to the evidence Aaron collected.
Understood, but I can imagine a website displaying a button for "Get notified when we add new information" or something to that effect. Personally, I'd love to see more these buttons on local government websites, which are notorious for not having RSS feeds. So people might begin to use Google Reader upon discovering this new feature.
I posted this after reading through a thread using PHP. This technique is significantly more simple-minded, but it's still been awfully handy.
Not your cup of tea and that's cool but.. a lot of people like ephemeral news. TC posts aren't essays that'll make good book material, but in terms of a cutting insight or an exclusive scoop that matters to a lot of people right now, TC is pretty good.

Also, this site is called Hacker News, rather than Hacker Essays or Hacker Articles. While I also prefer the essays, articles, and deep blog posts, I also couldn't say that TC stuff isn't relevant here because it is usually "news."
Because they're not directly making money off of me.

I used to comment on movies on IMDB until they took the information I and others submitted to their free website and went commercial, putting tons of ads up and clearly started making money off of my contributions.

I also refuse to give reviews to Amazon for similar reasons.

I'm ok with participating in non-commercial forums, as I feel they are less likely to sell information about me than sites which have gone commercial.

Also, I don't really view forums as tools for collecting information about their participants, unlike all the "free" web-services run by corporations. I suppose forums could be used for this purpose, but I think at this point it's just less likely. But it's definitely something to consider.
My first Lisp book. Oh the memories.
The guy's twitter handle is @fluter, as http://twitter.com/fluter ... hope he shares light on his side of the story. Also I'd like to see a diff on the databases.
I'd say this is one of Andrew's best interviews yet. Definitely worth checking out.
How to Thrive as a Musician Without Suing Your Fans
That's what I thought too, learning about that law. For certain, 30% of prices start with 9... ;-)
Like you say, even the most basic markets require external factors like laws to function. The real estate market for example would, I believe, break down if it weren't for laws prohibiting people from trespassing, squatting, etc. The retail market would also break down if it wasn't for the enforcement and existence of shoplifting laws.

It seems software is in a position where the existing laws (or the enforcement of such laws, depending on how you look at it) are not adequate to sustain the market.

> Unfortunately for digital media, stealing and getting caught are both extremely impersonal acts, so there's very little embarrassment or guilt involved. And getting caught is so rare that the financial penalties are all but meaningless.

I think your assessment is absolutely spot on and I couldn't have said it better myself. Right now other than my own personal guilt, there is absolutely no reason for me not to pirate software. The chances of getting caught are extremely slim. I know many people who use pirated software extensively in a business environment and even there they stand almost no chance of being caught - and even if they were there would be very minor consequences. I feel that it's getting to the point where to be competitive in the market you have to use pirated software. How can you stay competitive when those you're competing against aren't competing on a level playing field.

I see only two possible solutions to the problem: 1) Some sort of miracle fix from the software industry - for example everything going to the web (in reality I doubt this will happen though) or 2) Actual enforcement and or the addition of new piracy laws so that piracy has some real consequences.
That initial minor boost is enough to throw a submission high up the frontpage - even 2 points, given close enough together in time, can do it.

simple solution: remove the automatic upvote given when an article is submitted that has already been submitted. If people want to upvote it, it's negligible effort to do so once they get to the story on HN. bonus submitting an article is a quick hack to find it on HN. Often one would also want to upvote the article, but not always e.g. one might be seeking the comments to help evaluate the article. Counting these "submissions" as "upvotes" is inaccurate.

summary: auto-upvoting of submissions is a needless, inaccurate and distorting convenience.
It works in any base, you can extend Benfords law to other bases easily.

Try it on a set of numbers in base 10, then convert them to base 16 and check the percentages you get. They still follow the same pattern, but of course there are more slots and the individual percentages are lower because of that.