skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Might have something to do with the fact that there is no obvious way to contact an 'admin', like on any other forum or irc network. Perhaps except the 'any other forum or irc network' part.
The iPhone was over two years old and extremely common when the Nexus One was released. Its once-astonishing features are now considered kind of routine. Its level of polish is rapidly becoming the industry standard.

The minimum is always moving.

It would be a different story if the Nexus One were tailored for a niche market. And, in fact, it arguably is: for much of the geek target market, the market of people who know what multitasking is and thrill to read the fine print on the contracts at the Android App Store, the Nexus One is far more than a minimum viable product. And so it seems to get a lot of buzz in that market. Hopefully its market is large enough to sustain something like it.
What are you talking about, this isn't a question of security.
Having a local backup of the repo and making branching/merging very cheap reduces the friction in several VC operations. You can use techniques such as bisect* without cumulative network latency disrupting your train of thought. Also, when throwaway branches are cheap, you'll probably find you use them quite a bit more.

* For finding what commit introduced a bug, by binary search. Flag a revision as the last known good commit, then bisect will switch to a one in-between, wait for you to test and mark it as good or bad, then repeat. Better yet, just provide a test suite and it will classify the revision automatically.

It's somewhat comparable to incremental programming with a REPL, rather than a compile-link-test cycle. Sure, you only get feedback on your code "slightly faster", but that makes a tremendous difference.

Git is hyped pretty hard (software hipsters seem to be gaga over it, probably in part because of gasp Linus), but if you ignore all that, it is a pretty good version control system.
even if he get 66 million followers I don't give a shit.
No, it isn't, it's something particular HNers like to complain about due to some over zealous sense of free speech or something like that. Why could this not have been handled silently through an admin, like you would anywhere else where this might happen?

The problem is that HN has turned into a monster of a forum, and to know everything that goes on behind the scenes to keep it functioning and to set up guidelines that navigate this perfectly is utopian. False positives and accidents happen, admins welcome reports of these, I don't get what the community gets out of them, though.
25 Ways Nanotechnology is Revolutionizing Medicine
With scientific understanding growing, it is becoming possible to engineer the smallest devices and applications to help in a variety of fields. One of the fields that is likely to benefit greatly from nanotechnology is medicine.
NYC SeedStart (a startup launcher for NYC)
You can mail pg and ask him. Recently there have been a few stories on HN from users saying 'why is X happening to me' where X is votes not counting, stories being flagged, comments being deleted.

TBH I'm just not interested. If you've got a problem with something that's happened to you ask pg. Don't come whining to the group.

And the user who is secretly emailing people about comments that have been deleted doesn't seem helpful either. They are working in a behind-the-scenes manner that could easily end up being counterproductive as some 'anti-HN' group gets formed by it.
I live on a boat, and have been doing so for the past four years. If you have any questions throw me an e-mail, Ill be glad to answer.
http://enjoys.it/hn/outcast.html

After I asked in #startups if someone would be so kind to submit it, I was suggested to mail to pg's email address. I did and received a dry "Ok, I unbanned you.".
Yes. They delete the information from their databases.

Of course, nothing to stop them from giving the information to someone else to hold before the end dates.
pg is the admin; at a guess queries like this would usually take a while to get a response.

Someone here would probably be able to answer the question faster.
What happens when Michael Bay needs this back to destroy an earth bound comet?
Google's China Problem (and China's Google Problem) [2006]
Romania is actually one of the fastest growing countries in Europe and is upper middle income.

In my country (South Africa), 2/3rds of the population voted for a president who is known to be corrupt. He is on the verge of giving his friend (who organized him a bribe) a presidential pardon.

What is shocking for me is not that the president is corrupt - but that he has the support of 66% of the population. The majority of the population approves of his corruption. Is there anything redeemable in a country if the majority thinks corruption is okay?
I had an account banned, you can clearly see why

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=skwiddor
Indeed. I commented on something and only discovered accidentally that my comment could only be seen be me, which is a horrible way for things to work. Your comment is hidden and you have no idea. I emailed the contact email (cant remember the address) and never got an answer. It really made me never want to comment again and seemed totally capricious.
> To use jordyhoyt's analogy, it would be like expecting Erlang to be readable by a layman.

If lawyerese for a formally-defined language with a compiler and everything, I'd have less problems with it. But from whetre I'm standing, it just looks like obfuscated English.
Which native Americans? The Yaqui? Or the Iroquois, pre-league or post-league? Or the Chiricahua Apaches? Or the Pequot?

Each of those had their own unique culture, their own identity, their own language, their own technology. Some were cruel to their captives and in times of war; others were not. Some wanted to expand their territory and conquer lands and other tribes, while others had found territory to settle in and had no desire to expand, while still others were purely nomadic.

If you have any love at all for history, stop referring to all those pre-colonial nations under a single name and title. Doing so is a vestigial prejudice in our culture, and worst of all, it's completely destroying any chance we have of learning what they were actually like.

As to relative "competence" -- well, we've begun exploring space. So, I guess it all depends on what you consider to be important.
I think for many people the barrier to mailing PG is perceived to be considerably higher than to ask the community.
I'm sure that's true but these posts come across as passive-aggressive. Rather than going direct to the person who could actually address the issue the submitters complain to the community.

It is almost always best to try to address problems with the people you are having a problem with.
I don't see how this differs from asking for advice on IRC when you have failed to take even the most cursory of glances at Google to track down the solution yourself. This is a golden rule of IRC support. Other than taking a little more time, the situation is exactly the same.
Eh, personally, I think it's important to appear graceful about it. Sure, post truthful statements on your website, tell people, etc... but, for example, publicly accusing your competitor of lying about you is probably in bad form.
how will this work? will i need to pay a certificate supplier to secure my own address? how much will that be? and how do i configure my local dns server/cache so that this information is propagated?
it's not like there is a 'contact the admin' link anywhere, the only way to find out is to ask others.

Don't forget that to mail some millionaire that also happens to run a forum is something that people will simply perceive as intimidating. If there would be a documented route to 'message the admin' then I think these threads would vanish.
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Kate, the owner of car-repair shops all over U.S.A., is faced with a new challenge: Go abroad! Build car-repair shops everywhere from snowy Canada, to the steaming African jungles! Buy cars, fix'em, give'em a painting and they're good to go. Increase the quality of your offers by upgrading buildings and tuning the cars so they don't pollute the environment in this Time Management game. Just be sure to see what the clients want so you can set the price high in Fix-it-up: World Tour!
Ask HN:  What maintains gender balance at a global level?
Buy Cheap & Discount Panasonic SCBT 100 | Panasonic SCBT100
Internet Security Software  Free Internet Security
Software Review Expert puts Comodo Internet Security to the test by purposely injecting his computer with Rootkits and other dangerous malware
It's a metaphor. The excuse I keep hearing is that if we learn how HN filters spam, it will enable spammers to game the system.

Frankly, I don't care so much about the internal mechanisms used to kill posts. I just want to understand the policy; I have the showdead flag on and at least a quarter of the time, I can't for the life of me figure out why a comment was killed. That lack of transparency makes me uncomfortable.
Why takeover bids rarely work
You are undoubtedly right, I guess I assumed that HN was filled with people who think they've got a God-given right to just email millionaires.
Twitter Goes Down,Overwhelmed by Whales
Hardware vs. Software: This Decade's Defining Technology Battle
Solar Start-Up Bloodbath 2010
Sorry, but as another EU citizen, I have to say that applying your criteria lot of countries (beginning with mine - Italy) should not have been accepted either. I'm afraid that EU simply can't be that much selective without losing any change of counting for something on the world scene.
AFAIK this hasn't been answered before (that's from 30s on searchyc).

We were discussing emailing pg a short while ago and the consensus then seemed to be "only if it's really important".
Am I the only one who finds those "cool" Bing background pictures very distracting?

I think Google has it right. Users want to search so just give them the search by default. No extra crap needed until you actively ask for it.
It seems that some people who have had their early comments downmodded (for an unpopular opinion, like not hating Perl) get the rest of their comments auto-killed. It happened to a friend of mine, who wanted to use HN but has since moved on to other sites, since he can't post anything anyone else can read. (I browse with showdead on, so I can see the comments, but I can't reply or upvote, so...)

It seems like the idea is to encourage the usual social-news-site groupthink, even though pg has publicly stated that he wants to avoid this. (The spaghetti-code that is news.arc is probably a contributing factor, but I digress...)
That's PG's own view of how this works, we're not even supposed to tell people to stop bothering with their posts because they have been banned.

I can see the rationale for it at some level but I really doubt that it has much effect, spammers are pretty good at monitoring the effect of their actions.

It also makes me wonder who the mysterious 'you've been banned' emailer is.
I found his address through other means; it's not particularly hard - but as you say it is a higher barrier than submitting a thread.

One thing I used to like about HN was how stuff like this just got genuine helpful responses and there was no worry about them existing.

I am guessing the number of people about here now means there are more of the threads, more make the front page and so forth (whereas before they were mostly the domain of the "new" page crowd)
Agree with you on all but the last example; I think the Mongol Empire was one of the marvels of human history, in terms of sheer size and coordination. It succeeded in uniting friendly tribes and warring tribes alike by allowing them to retain their cultural traditions and self-administrate, so long as it didn't violate Mongol law.

Unfortunately, the government that developed was mostly a dictatorship, and as usual it was relatively short-lived once some key family members died off and left an opportunity for others to squabble.
"Eight times poorer" is improper English and makes no sense, but is a very common usage. Most of the time multipliers are written when they should have used reciprocals. My only explanation is that it is more dramatic to say "eight" and "poor" in the sentence than "1/8" (hey, that looks like math, math is hard) and "rich" (they are emphasizing the poorness of the poor, not the richness of the rich).

Proper English, as I understand it, would be to say "they were 1/8 as rich" or "they have only 12% as much wealth", but that is much less dramatic.
It's interesting, a $300k mortgague at, say, 3% apr would mean repayments of around $1150 per month for 35 years. So I guess you are effectively giving away a large proportion of your lifetime income. 3% of earnings would be a pretty god deal for most people :)
I don't know how many of you actually own a Nexus One, but I bought one, and I can't see why everyone is considering it such a failure. Having used an iPhone and an HTC Magic I think the Nexus is a big leap.

It does more than the iPhone out of the box - IM, free contact, calendar and Facebook sync, native Gmail, turn by turn navigation, and tons of technological improvements and finely tuned small details. Granted, it's not a revolution, just evolution, but it is the best phone out there right now.

Also, the 20,000 figure (for first week sales) that keeps being quoted everywhere is just a ridiculously inaccurate statistic.
The simplest - and imnsho best - solution to all this friction is a simple drop down on the submit page, four sections: hacking, startups, meta and other.

Four links at the top, homepage will only take entries from hacking and startups, label your content wrong and you lose 50 karma points.
I have a problem with this part:

"Given a choice between a part-time or easy job paying $60,000 and a demanding, stress-ridden job paying $120,000, Lederman would be wise to take the former"

So, people making 60k a year have either part-time or "easy jobs" and those making 120k are working hard and contributing to the economy, right?
Windows hole discovered after 17 years
Google Advertises Its China Position with Search Ads
Mac OS X: A sad tale of (in-)accessibility
How could 'not hating Perl' be an unpopular opinion ;)

Anyway, I fully agree that having your comments auto-killed just for saying what you think - no matter how unpopular - should never happen.

Is it possible that there is some kind of low threshold for your karma after which all your comments get killed?

Because I'm fairly sure that I have said some pretty unpopular stuff here and afaik I am not dead.

Maybe it's not too smart to start antagonizing people right off the bat, before you have sufficient 'karma cushion' to survive a drive-by downmod or two.

How about only displaying the downmod button after you've answered someone?
I'm not sure this article really intends the point about the "loudest guy in the room" to be a metaphor. He seems to actually be talking about someone with a lot of in-person charisma.

The internet is a bit different in that one is rarely labeled a 'loudmouth' until people start listening, making the question of "why do entrepreneurs flock to loudmouths" nonsensical.
Ask HN: Did Bill Gates took Twitter down?
Yesterday, Bill Gates joined Twitter and attracted a huge amount of followers in a matter of hours. Today everyone is getting the whale.
I think the "personal hell" is a feature rather than a bug. Very, very nasty to be inside it, but very effective as punishment.
> That's an uncomfortable assessment from regular site contributors.

First, I agree with you that a more transparent process would be a positive thing.

Second, I'd like to highlight that this is by far the finest community I've ever been a part of for a long term period. I've seen other communities good for six months to a year before coming somewhat unglued, and Hacker News hasn't done that in the two years or so I've been here. So I agree with you, but also want to take a moment to thank the moderators for what is largely a thankless job, and for what they're largely doing incredible work with.

So, agree that improvements can be made, and still - a massive amount of gratitude from me. Actually, if there's any HN mods in whatever city I'm in at any given time, shoot me an email and lunch is on me. Taipei right now, seriously, you guys are amazing and thanks.
The British got out of the imperialism business soon after they introduced universal sufferage; the average blokes would rather see their tax money spent on things like jobs for themselves than on maintaining supply lines to India.
Yes, this is a problem. The best doctors tend to be in the public system... or maybe they're the most networked? There should be plenty of good doctors working from their own offices, but they're probably a lot harder to find / evaluate.
The only ways of contacting available on this site are info@ycombinator.com (which I never got a reply on with a banning problem, I waited 3 weeks) and submitting a story.

Anything else is just not there unless you know about it by other means.
> nowadays we have flip for strings, reverse for lists, and invert for hashes

That seems utterly insane.
Don't move to NYC to do your startup (yet)
They also forgot the conquering usually also involved intentional, thorough genocide (as opposed to picking people off piecemeal, as they are now) and/or enslavement of the conquered people.
I was going to point out the same. The author, Tim Harford, has a blog in the Financial Times:

http://blogs.ft.com/undercover/

I still believe Freakonomics to be a better read :) but the Undercover Economist book was pretty good too (I read it because I was looking for similar style books)
it's just for the benefits of that code poetry thing.

the sole reason perl is used.
Programming from the Ground Up
In our case all candidates are reasonably corrupt. Most current politicians started their careers in the chaos following the '89 revolution, when a lot of the public wealth was sold for ridiculous prices. The current president is pretty well known for involvment in selling the state commerce fleet. What we do know for sure is that he's a pretty good manager, and the other guy is a lot more corrupt. So we voted for him, twice.

The biggest problem I think is a bit different. I'm very very scared by the politicization of public institutions. Top management is always chosen based on party, and automatically so is middle management. This breeds a brand of bureaucracy interesting more in politics than in getting things done, and the more it lasts the lower the mindset seeps.
WILS: How can a load balancer keep a single server site available?
I don't think the lack-of-telling-people-to-not-bother-posting is about spam, it's about ordinary internet rats who would just reregister and continue making terrible posts.

It also makes me wonder who the mysterious 'you've been banned' emailer is.

What? I've never heard about this. (Edit: Oh, I glossed over half the threadstarter's text.)
I guess the OP was referring to rebasing before merging into the target branch.

This makes the history look much nicer.

While it's rewriting history, the only part of the history you change is the parent of the first commit on your branch and you are doing it on your private branch before merging it into the public one.

This is a totally standard practice and used by many people. In fact, at my place we have the policy of generally not doing non-ff merges into the main integration branch, so the history on the integration branch is always linear.
> I don't think the lack-of-telling-people-to-not-bother-posting is about spam, it's about ordinary internet rats who would just reregister and continue making terrible posts.

That's very well possible.

(edit: I doubt someone would go out of their way to alert a troll to being banned though)

> What? I've never heard about this.

You would have if you read the posting at the top of the page ;)
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Telepathic-critterdrug, with some psychic freeze-frames
Ask HN: Google Adsense for Search Alternatives
I am forced to look one because we are building our own search engine and want to show ads alongside. Google won't send ads without their search results. What we would want is something that gives us an Ads feed for a query. Is there something like this in market ?
this has been my most useful git tutorial, or more importantly, reference. it's great to come back to for how to deal with a situation that doesn't come up often enough, but when it does you need a concise answer on how to handle it.
I must start doing something having to do with RSS feeds then ... :P
Haiti earthquake: Trapped under rubble? There's an iPhone app for that
Really, it all depends on what you are doing :).

For example, Geokit rocks if you need to do, or add any geoencoding stuff.

If you can get past the hell on earth that is installing ImageMagick, then RMagick is amazing for image processing and handling.

If you need to write HTML, Haml/Sass is your new best friend, if you need to parse it, Nokigiri or Hpricot both rock.

If you need to track states in your objects, statemachine or eventmachine is pretty useful, and +1 to the commenter who pointed out ThinkingSphinx, that's blazingly fast for full text indexes.

The daemons gem is really useful if you want to daemonize a process, and create quick scripts to start background applications.

workling/starling are really good for background work as well, as is delayed_job.

It also depends on what ruby version you are using. I'd recommend 1.9, as we've managed to get patches for pretty much everything we run, or hacked the gems themselves to work, and it is faster than 1.8.6. That said, you do still run into problems.

There's loads more. There's more testing frameworks and unit test things than you can shake a stick at.

As I said it all depends what you are using, and what you are using it for.

Hope my ramble was informative! :-)
Git Fake Submodules
Any of them. They were all steam rolled by us.

>Some were cruel to their captives and in times of war; others were not.

What bearing does this have on anything? Most of the bad things we hear about were learned from someone else (e.g. scalping from the French).

>Some wanted to expand their territory and conquer lands and other tribes,

There was in-fighting between certain groups, but obviously none had the same appetite we did.

>If you have any love at all for history, stop referring to all those pre-colonial nations under a single name and title.

You seem to have an axe to grind. In normal usage, one provides as much detail as is relevant. If I were talking about people of earth in relation to some other alien race I would most likely say "humans" unless there was a real reason to be more specific.
sorry, but I disagree that it's easier to mess up in git. case in point, the rm command. in git the rm command will not destroy the existence of any actual data, in subversion it will. so an "accidental" rm in git looses you nothing but time in reverting correctly, in subversion you loose data, which is irrecoverable. similar things can be said for almost any git command. and those that could loose data require a force flag, almost every time.
Patents should just be made with a set of interpretable expressions, that way no one will have to read it except a computer.
My guess is that there's some code that says "if the first N comments all get voted negatively, it's probably just a spammer, kill it".
Turn on 'show dead' in your profile.
Nice! Though as a vim user I would rather have a layout that messed with zxcv and instead left hjkl alone... (Colemak is especially bad, with J below K.)