skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a lot of history to this sort of discussion. Windows 95 was supposed to have an "object file store" as was NeXTStep v4.0 ... I think the basic idea was you would have what we now call "tags" for each document you worked on; everything would go into a datastore similar to what we now call "NoSQL". A "soup" where you just pull out the document(s) you care about.

Earlier discussions on this subject usually got into ideas like "pointer swizzling", virtual memory management, mmap'ing such files, etc. as the way to actually implement such a document store was considered.
First off, love your site. Great stuff.

I have a small monetization feature built in (homepage featured and search results featured). I really want to stay away from Adsense and other "annoying ad" type income generating. I am offering web design service to all the locations in my "welcome packet" in an attempt to generate some recurring income (offering sites for $99/month. Minimum 1 year contract).

May I ask what you do in terms of advertising / featured listings etc? If you don't want to share the details, I'd be happy to have you email me as well.

I acknowledge that monetization has been one of the overlooked parts of the website, as I wanted to create a resource first, make money second. Your post gives me second thoughts about that.
I eagerly anticipate the proliferation of self-organizing dynamics as it pertains to how we will consume (social) media in the future.

"For nearly everyone, the opinion of one's peers is the most powerful motivator of all—more powerful even than the nominal goal of most startup founders, getting rich."
http://www.paulgraham.com/mit.html
Sounds like an interesting idea for some scenarios. You should definitely give it a try. Assuming you do and it's open, drop a link to it on here.
That was my point about the KKK protests too... I brought it up b/c many people claim to support free speech but oppose some kinds of free speech, and in essence that's the sort of free speech we have in the US (the KKK has been banned from having its parades, etc.). In China, there is no pretense of free speech, yet some things are allowed and some disallowed.

I agree with you that demands won't work, and will probably make things worse. I think the danger of the sort of anti-China propaganda that we're seeing is that it's becoming an emotional groundswell quite similar to the anti-Saddam groundswel that preceeded the Iraq war. Not quite as bad, but there could always be some minor event (a plane shot down accidentally, a person detained, etc.) that would rapidly transform things into an irrational state where we'd have politicians seriously calling for warlike behavior.

I think the most important bottom line is that for the vast majority of Chinese people, the status quo will be better for their future and their families than if the US enacts sanctions or intervenes militarily. If we advocate making those people worse off (through sanctions, etc), we should realize that doing so without any cost to ourselves entails great hubris -- the core hubris of neoconservatism.
More automation as in API from Yelp, etc?

I agree with the rest of what you're saying, but to me, the data gathering (while time consuming) is part of what makes my site better than others in my area. The information is confirmed, it's accurate.

Thanks for taking the time to comment.
Which language/IDE are you using?
Yay, a knot geekery thread. :)

The bowline rules for tying one-handed. Otherwise, I'm inclined to agree with you, but properly dressing the figure-eight can be bit of a chore. It's too easy to get the ropes crossed inside the knot. For non-climbing use, I like the alpine butterfly family. Strong, versatile, and easy to tie in single, double, or triple-loop versions.
Thanks for an interesting article.

I think some of the problem is just adjustment into a new medium. Those of us who have been net-savvy for a while know how to read reviews - I am pretty confident we can all tell an irrational impossible-to-please customer from their bad review, as opposed to a rational customer who genuinely had a poor experience. The problem is that some of these business owners are worried that a poor review from a crazy person will sink them - but I doubt that is the case, if they respond in a calm, rational manner.

I encourage people to read through to the later example of the salon owner. Even if the owner had not caused the unhappy customer to up their review rating, I think I, as a potential customer, would have been capable of not placing much weight on 1 bad review out of 30 good ones.
It's harder to keep the base knot tight with that knot, although that could just be my inexperience.
to me this sounds a lot more complex than just writing the javascript in the first place, I need to generate 2 pages and make sure they are virtually identical, I can see making a minor differences that suddenly invalidates a diff on an entire page and ends up generating 5x more data than a plain full page load would have
im more of a

csv.DictReader(open('config.csv'), delimiter=",")

guy myself, but thx anyway :)
Why Yelp should pay attention to not shooting itself in the face.
> After further edit: There is recent research showing that learning can actually change brain neural connections

Yes, of course learning changes neural connections. How else would it work? Changing some chemicals won't get a brain very far.

But this is as far away from changing IQ as demonstrating the Casimir effect gets you to a tractor beam sucking in the _Millennium Falcon_. The famous study of the [London taxi](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/677048.stm) drivers shows they have changed connections, alright, even enlarged hippocampi - but nothing about increased brain mass or volume, because it's a zero-sum gain.

Now, as far as my specific assertions go. The 0.05 point is basic statistics which I feel no need to justify. The short-term point flows out of the former (there's simply more noise when you do all your sampling over a few days or minutes, say), and short-term studies are particularly vulnerable to issues like testing effects; the Balkans thing I alluded to in enough detail that you could easily have googled it if you were genuinely curious: http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=balkans%20IQ%20io... And iodine deficiency isn't something that's purely long-term either - you can see effects after 24 weeks in this study: http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/83/1/108 (note the high significance).

The burden of proof is not on those who claim lack of malleability - not that there are any such people here - but on those who claim IQ boosts without good long-term IQ testing.
How to Manage Hackathons
It's true... but I assume (and hope) that US politicians are not stupid enough to advocate anything actively harsh against China. China is nearly a superpower, and we do not need anything like another Cold war. (Not that it would be as bad, but two large countries in a state of conflict do note bode well for their inhabitants.)
I agree. The defensive patent is becoming perhaps more important than the offensive patent, re trolls. Being able to use a patent in one area to not only defend against competitors locking you out of your own technology but also counter a potential patent suit in another technology is becoming all too common, re apple v nokia.
Until you can find a way to cool a laptop CPU passively, you're going to need airflow, so sealing the case is out.

Although building the platform on ARM (as we presume the Tablet to be) probably fixes that by simply not using a laptop CPU. Not to say that you can't have a passively-cooled x86 system, but are any of the new integrated platforms cool enough for that? Given the power you can get with ARM SOCs these days, it may not matter.
If they're stashing it under their mattress, I don't think they'd have gotten rich in the first place. If they've got it invested in stocks or bonds or even banks, then it's not idle and doing nothing. It's helping other people finance their businesses, buy houses, whatever. But it's definitely doing something useful. In fact, it's doing something so useful that the people using the money are willing to rent it from them.

You are absolutely incorrect. They aren't doing this. They are pulling out of the US economy and putting them in Euros, gold, or Chinese factories. Did you somehow forget the complaints of a credit crunch that banks weren't lending any money?

Do you really think they are dumb enough to keep investing in the US when dollars are being printed non-stop? If so you are way off base.

If there were no argument, you wouldn't be seeing arguments from prominent economists like Greg Mankiw, Bryan Caplan, and Tyler Cowen. And indeed, they've got good arguments. The idea that burning through money to stimulate the economy comes from the Keynesian tradition -- but we know from the 70's double-shot of inflation and unemployment that the Keynesian model is wrong (the question is, "just how wrong?").

Then why aren't they the ones making the decisions if they are so correct? And the government doesn't simply just spend money for the sake of spending it. It usually (not always of course) goes into projects that benefit the public for decades such as better roads, power, and homes.

And Keynesian model being wrong because of the 70's? That is simply naive. Inflation was due to fears of Opec increasing oil prices and moving off the gold standard. Inflation was already rising when Nixon implemented his limits on wage/price increases. US Debt as a fraction of the GDP was even decreasing during this period.

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/askville/4889596_...

Describing this as Keynesian is absolutely inane.
Ignores the obvious benefit of the classical filesystem, which is that all data inherits an enormous amount of generic functionality from it: organization, interop, sharing, backup, versioning, etc.

File systems don't need to die, they need to grow up and provide the things that apps always have to implement over top of them:

- user-centric interface that shows data in a way that makes sense to them: documents, apps, messages, contacts, etc.

- non-hiearchal structure, views based on search, filter, sort

- database-like performance and semantics e.g. indexes, transactions

- structured data that is trivial to load/save from any programming language

I believe that all this can be had while preserving the benefits of flat files, but it's an enormously ambitious undertaking and the only sort-of-attempt that I'm aware of (WinFS) never even shipped, let alone caught on.
I knew you guys had a laser cutter at hacklab, but I'd never heard the back story. Thanks! That was a great read!
A really should have but, with no children and he's already on retirement, I believe B would be getting the company anyway as they are old friends (this happened during a dispute). I believe they do have a clause in their agreement that should one of them pass on the remaining partner can buy out the others shares, opposed to them passing on to spouses.
The moment I pull an iPhone out in front of my kids, it's ripped from my hands by an 18-month-old and that becomes the primary toy for the next 30 minutes. She can unlock it, scramble my home pages, and leave it full of drool and sugar-based crust in a matter of seconds.

If this guy thinks a fancy $1000 tablet is going to be that much more usable around kids, he's in for a rude awakening. If Eli already wants to climb all over his laptop, why wouldn't a tablet suffer the same fate?
Face based authentication
Except that when you ask someone "how well do you think you did on that test?", they hear "how well would you like me to think you think you did on that test?". The results are better explained, IMO, by noting that people tend to declare themselves as "about average" when asked about their intelligence, in an attempt to not appear snobby or lacking in confidence. For both extremes, evaluating oneself in the edge quartile is socially inappropriate.

Also, consider the correlation between schooling, ability to take grammar/logic tests, and modesty. In my experience, modesty is a social norm significantly correlated with schooling: have you ever heard someone brag about having studied at Princeton?

The experiment lacked the proper controls - for example, asking Princeton math majors how well they thought they knew political science, physics, or astronomy. I would hypothesize that they overestimate their competence (saying "about average") as much as anyone else. Another way to test this hypothesis would be to ask people to rate their own performance, then declare publicly how close their guesses were, and publicly award those with the best self-awareness.
Update on Google/China-ology
We can criticize it because this isn't a morality game. China doesn't rack up evil chips because the US behaved evilly in the past. There's no score to settle.

What they're doing is wrong and hurts us and the world right now, regardless of who did what in the past. We argue for principles that allow everyone to prosper. We argue for the golden rule and the categorical imperative.
I guess I've been causing the death of kittens for a while then. I couldn't, however, deduce from your wikipedia link or from a quick google search what the correct way of adding floating point numbers should be, though. Even the MS compiler guys at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa289157%28VS.71%29.... are writing code snippets that sum floating point numbers in a loop.

edit: You're write jfager. I didn't read the article I linked to very carefully. The article actually has an example algorithm, the Kahan sum, for reducing the error caused by summing floating point numbers in a loop!
I don't know how recent it is (I'm assuming that it is fairly recent, since nex3/rntz has had recent activity over at arclanguage.org), but http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc
Google's Chinese users who may be labeled as "subversives" by their government should be using it.

If the Aurora attacks were successful, the next thing the Chinese regime would've done is demand from Google all information about the users it found as subversive: in such a case, the attacks were just to get the right usernames from which to request further information on from Google.
That's right: if the diff takes more time then actually loading a new page, it doesn't make sense at all. However, I could see the diff script intelligent enough not to be slowed down by a minor difference. Anyways, this library would mostly make sense on pages with a very similar layout.
US since 2000: Double the debt, half the growth, no new jobs
Maybe the first artificial intelligence will emerge from Google?
Status is often context-specific to a given social environment, meaning it's not necessarily zero-sum. Mom can have the highest status in her church group, Dad can have the highest status of the household by being breadwinner, and Junior can be subordinate to both while holding the highest status in his World of Warcraft guild. Nearly everybody has a high status in at least one arena and a low status in another.
Do Bike-Helmet Laws Discourage Bicycling?
Easier than:

$("#comments").load("/post/749744/comments #comments")

is kind of a high bar to clear.
To be precise, Git makes merges easy, not merge conflicts, which is what you're talking about. Handling merge conflicts automatically is AI-complete. But many SCM systems make even straightforward merges difficult.
The earliest version or HN was a little bigger:

http://www.ycombinator.com/arc/news.6sep06.arc
Desert Drinks is a side project for me -- an experiment in the potential of a focused local directory. Right now, I have a single sponsor (the tall banner on the right).

I plan to more aggressively market and monetize the site this year (I just left my day job last month, and I have a to-do list a mile long). Even in the best-case scenario, I think it would be very tough to make a living on Desert Drinks alone. I can see it generating ~$1000/mo in this market of about 400,000 people.

I think the key is to figure out the formula and then build nationally market-by-market. In my opinion, that's how I think an individual could bootstrap this sort of business.
Internet Filter protest: Fade websites to black on Australia Day
I think it would be appropriate for people in China (and everyone else, for that matter) to discuss exactly the extent it was occurring and if it was hindering their enterprises there, discuss exactly the effects of such issues.

I would have no objection to stories of such things being posted on HN and I wouldn't object to those stories as anti-American. In fact, I think Americans frequently post such stories, we just often don't have good intelligence on what our government is doing.

That said, as a security researcher who has read some of the reports involved, I do think the PRC may in fact be operating on a far broader range of targets than our own government. In particularly their tendency to include any corporations they want is probably different than how we do things most (but not all) of the time. These may or may not just be stylistic differences and I would welcome a debate on which ones were more troublesome.

I would not blast such stories as racist, which is what the poster I was responding to was essentially doing.

(As an aside, just because it's a pet peeve: Please, the CIA? They're not the ones you have to be concerned with, the American government has a broad and vast array of different intelligence agencies, the CIA is not the most likely one to be doing this type of work. The CIA's job is to be one of the most visible intelligence agencies, a job they do very well.)
Using EMPs: A new way to punch through steel
I don't like it. I should have a choice whether to use quotes or not, and let me suffer the consequences. I don't like API's forcing "best practices" on me. The quotes add crappy visual noise and extra bytes.
Why Malcolm Gladwell is Wrong
I keep a proxy script on my webserver which comes in handy from time to time for that sort of thing - proxy.nfriedly.com
> my understanding of the article is precisely that intelligence can be reliably increased in the long term.

And why would you think that? I've already criticized the one explicit statement on that.

> You are quite correct, however one would hope that grades have at least some correalation with intelligence, but more importantly they are the measurable results in school. Being able to increase those measurable results is the primary goal, even if hypothetically intelligence did not go up.

They do have correlation. But correlation is not causation. Giving these students a pep talk and seeing their grades go up, and knowing about the correlation between IQ and grades, gives us as much reason to conclude their IQs went up as we had instead hired drill sergeants to stand in their classroom and yell at them in best FMJ fashion for being "slimy fucking walrus-looking pieces of shit", observed their grades go down, and then concluded their IQs went down.

(Another analogy. My dog crossing the road has high correlation with the road being empty. Does my kicking him into the middle of the street clears it of the oncoming SUV?)

> Similarly, if the ability to use their intelligence is increased hypotethically without actually increasing the intelligence itself, this is still a major improvement.

Sure, and it's quite valuable. Self-control and self-discipline are fantastically valuable traits, and to a degree substitutable for IQ. But boosting people's motivation is not the same thing as boosting their IQ. The latter is the historic breakthrough, not the former, interesting and valuable as it is.
The original Palm Pilot had no file system. There were databases, which you could open and read/write records to/from. I feel it worked pretty well, but soon newer devices came out with so much more ram that it devolved into unusably long lists of databases.

Current filesystems and their hierarchical folder structures give an easy-to-understand layer of abstraction without a whole lot of complications.

For improvements on the hierarchical part, the expansive list of filesystems using FUSE (http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/fuse/index.php?title=F...) has some interesting filesystems.

Maybe the author can find some likable ideas there?
We're trying, but for the most part we haven't yet developed the type of comprehensive strategy for these types of operations that the PRC has. You should read the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission's report linked from Google's blog entry.
As mentioned in my reply to @profquail, the use case was just an example. Perhaps I should have chosen a better one.
I also have a HHKB. It does technically have only one control key, but how often do you use the right Windows key? I just remapped it...

(And if you're a vim user, you remapped the big control key to ESC, right?)
using the word actor in this case adds no information and confuses people not familiar with this use, someone skimming quickly might think it was a play. Why not: men, youths, students, locals? Make the story more clear by adding more, accurate detail; not more confusing by trying to maintain some obscure notion of political correctness.
Meaningless how? In some absolute sense? It's a metric that, like any public metric, will guide behavior. The question to ask is "how will it guide behavior?"

The most quick/intuitive explanation is probably the best explanation - I think it'll make people think twice "is this more insightful than my average comment?" before hitting Submit. As the community grows, this is exactly what we need: incentives for commenting less, and reading more.
Your accusations are unproven, irrelevant and baseless. Please provide concrete arguments if you disagree.
Maybe pilif has a better example, but I don't think that necessarily applies to backporting a fix. Reason being that you can't cut the new release of the backported version on the master branch without doing a history rewrite. You could certainly have it on a separate branch off of the release version (of course), but then you have to keep that branch (which may or may not be a problem).
The whole point of the article you linked to is how to avoid summing floating point numbers in a simple loop.
I don't have enterprise experience with Django but per your second remark, I couldn't agree more. The templating approach using extends/blocks is a breath of fresh air over PHP stuff I used in the past like Smarty.

To put some numbers behind that, in about ~60 days I've overhauled the user interface about 3 or 4 times without impacting the developers. There's no way I could have imagined doing that in the past without causing a big mess. It's great to be able to have this type of flexibility, the hardest thing I've found about UI/UX is making changes after you felt what was wrong about it.
Interestingly, we've implemented this model with SVN except:

* where he has 'develop' we use /trunk

* we've /tags/ where he has master (and git style tags)

Along with this; git-svn gives those of us who use it at least some of the benefits of git, like rewriting before pushes and stashing.