skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dividing comment votes by article votes (or comment votes by parent votes) would be a start.
You can read it as many ways and with inflection wherever you like. But even if the insult is indirect, I don't think most would feel better when told they "could" be an idiot as opposed to they "are" one.

For me he could have made a more compelling argument without ever using the terms "dumdum", "idiot" or "moron".
Yeah, but who compensates two years of downtime?
Hope you guys will consider a free trial option when you launch the pro accounts. I'd probably need to play around with the pro features before I plunked down the credit card.
Ah, I see what's going on. If more than a certain percentage of your votes are downvotes (currently the threshold is 65%) the downarrow stops working till downvotes drop below that threshold.
"I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter".

Honestly it doesn't bother me. It's just a modernization of the "hear, hear" sentiment.
Is that that that that you were talking about?
JQuery 1.4 Might Break Your AJAX
While traveling in China, I realized that nearly everything about the way they do business, produce goods, etc. is far less efficient than in the US. Many activities that would be automated in the US require the interaction of many people; ever bought a train ticket online and had to pay a bike courier in cash to receive it?

If the Chinese let their currency float on the open market, my bet is that China would go from being extremely cheap for Westerners to fairly expensive. They're effectively using currency manipulation to compensate for an uncompetitive internal economic structure. (Hopefully in the long run they will be able to use what is in effect a huge foreign subsidy to fix their problems, but who knows).
That patents now last 20 years is completely absurd in the modern world. Anything that is 20 years old has either long ago become ubiquitous, or is long forgotten.

Even 8 years is too long these days in many markets (esp. technology) but would be somewhat more acceptable.
Synopsis:

This is bad json and will result in an error:
{ 'foo' : 'bar' }
{ foo: 'bar' }
{ foo: "bar" }
{ "foo" : 'bar' }

You must do this:
{ "foo" : "bar" }
Most hackers I know are anti-authoritarian more than anything else. This board tends to attract the more capitalistic types because of it's subject matter. I'm sure there are slashdot'ers that would call many of us "sellouts".

I think PG said it best in his "Keep your identity small" essay. Ultimately we all have different viewpoints. Being known for any particular -ism will generally hurt more than help.

The trick is self-organizing around people/teams that can accomplish goals because of (or in spite of) their various viewpoints.
"Don’t say currently if you can say now." Nice read.
I work in NYC. I seriously need a better umbrella for all that walking, but I feel like I'd be punched in the back of my Nubrella.
If we could just agree on a format, the "about" field on profiles could be used to embed information.
How A Kid Funded VoodooPC With His Credit Card And Sold It To HP
Unfortunately, the other two recent American protectorates, Iraq and Afghanistan, have had mixed results. Iraq seems to be doing better because it had pre-existing infrastructure. Afghanistan might be a better analogy. At least it's geographically far smaller, and easy to support from the continental US.

There are currently several thousand US troops in Haiti performing aid activities; I would bet that we could get a UN mandate if so desired.
The article says that this was a talk so perhaps it should be considered as a mild form of entertainment. I've read "On Writing Well" and (as I recall) it's considerably less abrasive than this article.

This talk was, to me, an entertaining rant to get a point across, not a serious critique of others' writing.
Having gone through the process somewhat myself there's 3 ways you do business in China from a structure point of view (IANAL, see the China Law Blog for more accurate and up to date info):

- Wholly Foreign Owned Enterprise: This is a Chinese LLC with foreign shareholders. All management and IP reside within the Chinese entity (or are licensed to). Management operates under Chinese laws and there are restrictions on how many Z Visas they'll give you to bring in foreign workers.

- Registered Office: This is just basically an outpost within China. It is quite limited in what it can do, notably it may not bill Chinese companies for services or products offered. Thus you can't sell anything from it. Interestingly here they tax you in China based on your Chinese expenses (since you have no revenue).

- Joint Venture: This is when you team up with a Chinese company and create a new company that has local management and IP which then engages the Chinese market.

As you can see your options for doing business within China are pretty restricted and pretty much always puts you at the mercy of the Chinese.
I don't find the linked macro particularly compelling -- however, that macro doesn't change anything about the semantics of anything, it just automates the processing of arguments. Any function is always free to interpret its arguments however it wants, and a lot of clojure fns already accept & args consisting of key-value pairs that are turned into maps at runtime and then inspected.
Excuse me, who is this douche and why do I care? I find it hard to believe that anyone who considers the semicolon "vestigial emoticon fodder" has written anything of much significance or value.
An easy (if slow) way to do so is to tunnel it through ssh. If things are too slow you can use the "blowfish" algorithm for encryption through the "-c blowfish" option.
The Genesis of SXSW
Right, that's why cloud services like EC2 and Rackspace Cloud Servers are being used for stuff like spam. Spammer can just buy a temporary instance for a few cents then take it down. That's also why many "cloud IPs" are being added to some spam blacklists, unfortunately.
Not CO2: http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=...

2-3 hours to cremate:
http://ohiocrematory.com/process.html

"There were many mass graves identified"
The issue is the numbers involved. 6,000,000 to be exact.
http://www.gmsplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/normandy-...

"Can anyone seriously believe the surviving witnesses are victims of a collective hallucination or part of a conspiracy to hide some "truth"?"

Why even go there? Simply investigate the "scientific" basis for accepting the given narrative.

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=...

"It saddens me my species is capable of such a cold, directed, rational and efficient genocide. The possibility it may happen again frightens me deeply."

We're in agreement, here. And we frankly don't even need to reach that far back in history for evidence of the vile in our species. One look at what was done to Gaza and Iraq suffices.
About Megan Fox
What about inside job?

most companies have offices in india, china. And even risking a moral point here, all companies have chinese employees.

Hell, when I worked for a shady company here [regret] most employees used to sell the email database.

what about the oposite? use employees to insert vulnerabilities instead of selling data.

Will anyone run `cvs blame` on the IE4 source code?
Yeah, exactly. It's a dysfunctional pattern. I enjoy it, but I really think there's a systemic tendency to dysfunctional patterns here. That's inevitable with any social software, so you have to plan for your dysfunctions. Look at Stack Overflow, the dysfunction they get is karma whores answering as many questions as possible, and competing to be first with the answer. That's a pretty great dysfunction. The dysfunction we have here is anybody who polarizes opinions gets banned. The cynical (me) find it amusing and the sensitive (Giraffes) get their feelings hurt. Either way, it's bad. You don't want a community which punishes anyone for voicing controversial opinions, but that's inherent to the design here.
>Out of interest I started tracking my karma a while ago

Geez, you are taking it seriously indeed.

I trust PG when he says using average karma didn't help solving the problem but I don't have an opinion myself simply because I didn't even understand what the problem is exactly (Is it people splitting their votes between two contestants in a verbal fight?).

From my limited experience in web communities, karma always ends up being: people upvoting when they agree, downvoting when they don't. As I see it, the only good use of karma are 1) to decrease the number of "I agree" comments 2) to isolate obvious trolls.

This said, I don't care about Karma. The only feature I wish HN had is a "save button" similar to what reddit has. The reason is that it would allow me to follow up better the destiny of all those guys who come here and ask "rate/review my startup".
Orwell's and Shakespeare's style are both to be emulated, in the appropriate contexts.
Free Servers for economic stimulus from theplanet.com
Foursquare Rewards Social Networkers for Location Info
Ask HN: What's a good Android phone for casual development?
I unfortunately just ran my Samsung Eternity through the washing machine and it appears to be dead (unless anyone knows any tricks). I'm looking at this as an excuse to upgrade to Android. In addition to using it as an actual phone, I'd want to tinker with developing apps for it as well. Any recommendations?
There are only 10 questions, you can't review your questions before final submission of the test, some of the questions are pretty silly, and some of the terminology is questionable.

I think these kinds of "standardized" tests only make sense when the results are normalized against the population of test takers. That most embedded software developers received a D- only tells us that a combination of the performance of the test and the performance of the test taker was poor.
i'm dropping linux and going to use openbsd as my desktop. see ya.
Contact info updated. I'm waiting for my cellphone to detonate.
Is Google Nexus One going to fail or is it just a bad start.
This in many ways is quite desirable. China has so much excess labour that automation would cause severe problems.

I once worked with a North American automated parking meter company that was ambitious at entering the untapped Chinese market for parking meters. This was doomed since parking is almost always done by a parking attendant, even on the street. Parking is also often controlled by the owner of the block. The attendant is usually someones uncle or whatever that needs a subsistence job.

Another example are elevator attendants who sit on stools (often in private apartment buildings) and press the button for you. They often come with the building and are relatives of the manager or property developer. Absurd, but there you go.

Chinese work gangs always take at least 3 times more people to do the same job that you'd do in the west. Most of the peoples jobs in such a gang is to sit around watch and offer advice as far as I could tell.
The poor walk.

Public transport in my city in the UK is too expensive for me. I have the choice of lunch or bus. If the journey is longer it's usually cheaper to take the car (which we need for our business just not normally for commuting) unless the parking is going to be very expensive.

Often I'll walk home in the rain (just over a mile) and have several buses pass me - though if I'm away at 5pm I'll pass a couple of them - the buses are practically empty and I wonder why they couldn't drop the price and fill the seats. Perhaps they could have budget airfare style pricing with a cap?

The only people who regularly ride the buses here appear to be those with free passes - pensioners and those on benefits.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkuOuxRD1Bc
1. As cemerick pointed out, let-kw operates inside the function definition. It does not change any semantics.

2. Most keyword arguments for Clojure's built-in functions follow the calling convention which let-kw makes easy, whereas the pass-in-a-separate-map convention is not used in clojure.core anywhere (that I can think of).

3. I've heard this type of anti-DSL argument before, but no one making it has ever linked to a (source-available) project where this caused a problem. Frankly, I've never heard of a dailywtf-type horror story about this, either. Do you actually have some evidence to support your view?
Ah, I guess that's why most of my router scans come from China: it's worth it.
They use Xen. No idea on the network architecture, though.
Microsoft does gives out source code for some of its software (including parts of windows) to various universities for research purposes. Ofcourse, there are NDAs involved but that shows they aren't shy to share the code in certain. situations.
Class is not the same as boring and the iPhone doesn’t use flashy colors anywhere (except where flashy colors are appropriate: to help distinguish between different apps, for the low battery warning, the reminder badge, the slider to turn it off, you get the idea). Nobody in their right mind would call the iPhone’s UI boring. Never mind the subdued dull blue and grey.

OS X was candy colored. A decade ago. The iPhone lost the candy, Mac OS X has some vestigial buttons and scrollbars but is otherwise very much moving towards battleship grey. But its past, present and future aren’t exactly boring.
Maybe the point of triple encryption was to make it less likely for scanners to find it in a routine scan? The people who did this certainly knew that once they were found it was over; they were just trying to delay being found a bit.

[Edit: added 2nd sentence.]
Because Vader managed to tell Luke was his son at like 300 meters distance through steel walls and shit, but didn't catch on when he was stood next to his daughter . . . some father!

If Luke had taken on the place of Bail Organa's kid, the rebellion would have been found out very, very fast. I'm sure Bail Organa ran into Vader many times while he was under Empire suspicion, however I believe it's very had to explain if Vader walks into your house and says "What the hell, that's my fucking son! Why do you have my child?!"

Apparently fathers have no connection whatsoever to their daughters. They've got to strangle their son multiple times before they notice they even have a daughter . . . sounds like an episode of the Simpsons.
Thanks - is that new today?

Odd: my average is precisely "2". Not "2.00" (as it is for robg, #6 on the leaders). Have you kindly promoted me, or is it just an coincidence (and you're using different formatting)?

EDIT my average should have decreased with this comment score at 1, but it hasn't (unless there's lag of course).
Looking at the homepage it shows a broken umbrella, a problem I have all the time. What I want is a something that doesn't break so easily, a sturdier umbrella. I don't want something that makes me look like an astronaut.
Google runs Microsoft's IE, attacks show
Bram Cohen: “Lawyers can’t tell you you can’t do something”
Or they have a lot of seed capital, and universal thinks why not take their money. My guess is that they haven't found a way to make much money from this arrangement. The bandwidth and storage costs alone can't be offset by advertising alone. VIP and pay for services are required. Now paying royalties for per play music makes this whole model very unworkable. The royalties imposed by the big 4 are a much more efficient way of preventing such models from taking shape than legal threats. So, legal threat -> resource starvation and legal thread -> royalty deal -> resource starvation. Same outcome, but the big 4 have more money now than doing just the legal route.
University alumni can often get an alumni card for much less. I can access several CS academic journals online with mine.
I'd say it depends on your tastes and circumstances - do you care what carrier? Do you care about the price? Do you want a physical keyboard?
http://bit.ly/q5YiA
Google, China, and the New High Ground of Advantage
Techcrunch's journalistic integrity being doubted? Naaaaah.
Hope this suggestion catches on, it sounds good.
$75m film being given away free, completely reinvents underwater cinematography
I, too, look forward to a day when I'm at work, and am surrounded by people mumbling at their computers and waving their arms.

No, sir, that won't be distracting in the least.
seems smart to me
R2 was a message boy, Leia dumped him onto Obi Wan hoping some loyalist sentiment would be kicked up in the old fool. Likely she'd over heard some communication between her step-father and Obi Wan, but never grasped why the old guy had marooned himself in a desert. Incidentally, to find out how to go Force-Ghost, which was instrumental to the survival of the Jedi order.

Apparently the Jedi's plan was that Obi Wan discover the ability to go force-ghost and as he's human and has a shitty lifespan, he could die and secretly transmit the information to Yoda without Sith interception. Obi Wan, instead of risking capture decided to let himself die . . . apparently after training Anakin, he really hates padawans.

Why did Obi Wan travel to Mos Eisley and not simply dig up his old ship he owned 20 years ago and fly that? I mean he was a frigging fighter pilot! This major plot hole introduced by his own backstory is somewhat helped by Chewbaca's back story, Obi Wan set up the meet, and possibly knew of Chewy beforehand and that Chewy and Han operated from Mos Eisley. This, I believe, was pure luck on Lucas' part.
And the most acquisitive companies of the next decade will be...?
I've commuted by bike for five or six years, and the main thing that seems to boggle people is that I ride through the Michigan winter. It's a lot easier to handle a fixed-gear mountain bike on ice than a car, though - if the rear tire starts to lose traction, the pedals jump due to the decrease in rolling resistance, and my legs reflexively stabilize them.

Fifteen miles with snow is probably pushing it, though - I've only done up to six in the winter.
>> ... I started tracking my karma a while ago
> Geez, you are taking it seriously indeed.

Not especially. I just pull my profile page occasionally to see what happens. I am, however, also in the process of building a site that will have some facets in common with this and other sites, so seeing what happens here is in my own interest.

For what it's worth, I completely support PG in his continuing efforts to improve things. I appreciate that he will continue to make changes to try to address the problems that arise in a large site, and I realise that not all changes can be made completely openly.

It's a difficult problem with no general solutions. Yet. I'd like to think that contributors here will play a part in keeping this site of high-quality, and perhaps finding methods that will work more generally.
I'm sure it would be simple to bring out legislation that prevents "Patents that impede the ability of the Patent Office's performance of duty".
"Don’t say currently if you can say now."

Hmm.

To me, the most interesting thing about English is that there is a lot of additional meaning invested in what seems to be a choice of synonymous words.

"I am not currently married" conveys to me "I am not married but I will/want to be".

"I am not married now" means "I am not married but I used to be".

No?

[Disclaimer: English is not my first language, though by now I have the greatest fluency in it]
Even in writing it's a good practice to beat a dead horse, albeit maybe not as much.
Anything that is 20 years old has either long ago become ubiquitous...

That's kinda the point of the modern IP playbook: to get everyone to pay license fees for your technology.

There are plenty of patents that only make money in the final years of their term. For example, RSA was patented in 1983 but didn't come into widespread use until ~1995 and the patent expired in 2000; if the patent lasted 8 years we can assume that they would have made no money at all. (Of course, since the inventors of RSA were academics it's likely that the patent value provided no incentive towards the invention of RSA.) LZW is a similar story.
Is a $20 vps (360MB ram) enough for a small website?

I want to get one for me but I don't want to get rammed in the ass when I realize it is not enough and need to upgrade to at least 1GB.

I see I can get 1GB RAM at prgmr.com for the same $20
This is Britain with a nice dusting of icing sugar
I would assume this would mean that any internet startup in Italy might want to move. Who knows what other types of content will get hit.
See also some of the reactions from the 9 minute segment screened at TED:

http://blog.ted.com/2009/02/twitter_snapsho_4.php
The moment I saw one, I thought Segway.
Modal performance in browsers, or, exploiting z-index
You should have told her you were an ASCII portrait artist, and that you'd love her to model for you.
Wouldn't the sentence 'I want to put two hyphens between the words Fish and And, and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign' have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, and also after Chips?
Say what? Microsoft gave away the Windows source code to Chinese official for inspections? I'm absolutely stunned they would do that, never would've thought they agree to something like that.
AskPG : I would like to freeze my karma
Earlier today, I had a karma of 1111 for a minute. A couple of months ago, I spent some time at 666. I like it when I have a "signifiant" number and I wish I could freeze it for some days just for the pleasure of looking at it.

This is a very important issue in making HN better. Hope it will be done before I reach 1234 though...
I think some of this problem could be averted by better communication skills on our part. If I notice someone repeating something to me, maybe it means they don't think I've gotten it, so the best response would be to say it back to them in my own words. I've found this technique to be marvelous when I can remember to use it. ;)
It's nice that the conversion rate went up, but it would be a mistake to attribute the change to removing content, when there were many improvements to the overall design of the landing page as well.

I would say this is a lesson in the value of thoughtful design much more than in simply removing unnecessary content.
Well, I'm looking for similar recommendations, so I'll say for me it's: Verizon, no, yes.
Orwell's, more likely than Shakespeare's. The context 'Iambic pentameter blank verse play in Early Modern English' simply doesn't come up that often. Although there is the rare exception -

http://www.runleiarun.com/lebowski/
Trippy 3D projections onto buildings
Well, I guess the first people to use umbrellas probably looked pretty silly too.
On a motorcycle, you wear a really close-fitting umbrella called a "helmet". Problem solved.
I am reminded of the day when a co-worker of mine had an ergonomic evaluation done. When the ergonomist(?) saw what contorted way he typed (and hunt and peck at that), which apparently he had been doing forever, she could only suggest he might try voice recognition software. Thankfully he didn't take her advice.
I keep wanting to do the same with HTPCs (not so much the high price/ferrari aspect, but the niche aspect). This interview may have given me the kick in the ass to stop being so scared/hesitant and move from prototype/research to production.
In our estimates compressed air can be comparable to gas in capital cost, and far less expensive in lifetime cost. The technical development required is substantial though.