skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Another point you could take from the piece is that people love being able to broadcast status signals. For example, adding badges/achievements/status to a social site can boost participation (see Yelp's elite, Stack Overflow badges).

It can be dangerous if you drive away your elite users (who are probably 80% of your activity anyway), but it can also be used to bring in new users and retain customers.
I have volunteered to be an ambassador for the program (subsequent to my earlier comment) and as I get a closer look I am beginning to worry that your assessment is correct.
The Next Bubble to Burst: California's Public Employee Pensions?
This unfortunately doesn't resolve problems with bad caching behavior -- not all internet service providers, including the big ones, are observing TTL or sane caching.

I think you're still better off solving the problem without relying on TTL or DNS caching behavior that you don't have control over.
A sure way to become a HN power user . . . 
I'm as guilty of this as anybody - but if you'd like to gain a massive amount of Karma simply write a script that posts every single new up-trending article from:

a) Daring Fireball

b) TechCrunch

c) NYTimes

Not that this is a big deal, I just find it interesting - what better way would there be to handle these submissions?
The problem with rote memorization is that it gets results. You cannot do algebra until you know your times tables by heart, and how did kids learn their times tables in ages past, when men were men and went to the moon without the aid of calculators? Drill, drill, drill.

Going on and on about the beauty of math is all well and good if your brain is wired that way, but when 90% of America's high school grads are stymied by making simple change, you fall back on what works.
Thanks for the link! Looks like I finally have an excuse to learn Ruby.
Managing S3 with Cloudberry
Are you suggesting artists or non-programmers to create animations not by using an authoring tool, but by typing numerous for's and setTimeout's ?

Also is it possible to streaming the animations in SVG?
One great thing about Git is all its support for using source control as a communication medium, not just a history of snapshots. So often, a source control log is like a landfill you really don't want to have to dig up. Git commits (done correctly) are intended to be read by humans. If you don't get this, then you don't get why things like the index are important.
We had the same discussion a few weeks ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1035206
I was using a 486 in 1998 to browse the web with Opera, reading my usenet with Internet News (Forte Free Agent later on) and my mail with Pegasus Mail.

486s were ridiculous expensive when they came out in '89 - remember a Commodore Amiga was advanced at that time. Even when I got my 486dx-66 in '94 it was towards the top of the range for a consumer PC.
I don't mean to come off sounding like a mouthpiece for Splunk, but Splunk does work with "cloud" data (hurray for buzz words), it is dead simple to use out of the box and recognizes many special fields like timestamps without any configuration (and also provides extensive configurability when needed) and scales like the distributed monster it is, capable of handling 10-15 MB of data / sec. on a single machines and GBs worth of data per day when scaled out across multiple machines. You should try it before you judge it on hearsay (and I'll maintain that you should also try any Splunk competitor before judging them as well).
FTA: This means in order to find what you want, you need to explore the data: you need to search it. The only tool most of us can use is grep

Um... what? Have the authors gotten stuck in a time vortex and been dropped off before, y'know, awk? Much less perl, or any of those new-fangled toys.

I mean: writing scripts to do log analysis is a pretty fundamental problem for server-side development, and lots of very smart people have spend the last two^H^H^Hthree decades working on tools to address the issue.

I don't even see how this (indexing the entries across a Hadoop cluster) is all that useful. In general, you don't do log analysis by asking "give me all the entries that match this pattern", you do it by walking them in order and extracting one or two fields from each line and building some kind of result data structure. This thing would be fine if you were asking for all the logs messages that mentioned "coffee", I guess. But what if you wanted a histogram of hit counts per page per day-of-week?
the stuff of yours that got voted up, is what you found online at popular sites. The reason it bypasses the death, is that other people try to submit it too, at which point it gets 1 extra upvote.

I'm more speaking for the people who write their own stuff(sivers, asmartbear etc). Who spend 2-3 hours putting an interesting article together, only to have it die in the new bin.

For example, I get asked all the time how I got my site to 35K visits in 2 months. And I'd love to share. But I always put it off because I know there is a 90% chance it'll never get off the new page.

Why should I spend 3-5 hours putting that article together with graphs and data, if I know for a fact that there is 99% chance that it'll die. I got a site to run, I can't throw away my time like that.

In fact the only articles of mine that actually made it to the front page, were those which I linked to from another relevant discussion. Those got 40-60 upvotes. But if I didn't link them from a relevant thread, they'd be stuck in the new page like all the other submissions.
For 99% of all companies a simple unix box that collects log files and moves them along for permanent storage a few days later (S3/Tape) is enough. At Shopify we use Clarity which is a web frontend for Grep and Tail that we released as open source: http://github.com/tobi/clarity
25 Insanos casemods de um milhão de dólares
Eu sei, meio exagerado o título do artigo, mas a intenção é esta mesmo, despertar sua atenção para clicar e ver essa incrível copilação de 81 imagens dos computadores mais insanos que você já viu. Vamos deixar de conversa e ir direto ao ponto.
Jason's sweeping "it's less than <1%" comments are getting tired.

Mahalo is a great money printing machine, but come on, those are pages designed to do one thing - rip content quickly, monetize, and SPAM google.
The interesting thing here is not how many people do this but how many of the links that get posted were upvoted by 'friends'. Even if it is only a few people doing it if they are heavy submitters it could materially alter the situation.

And if they're 'critical' upvotes I wouldn't have much of a problem with it but if they are upvotes just because your friend wrote whatever then that's really the 'road to digg'.

From my own research I can see we are still quite a few 'yes' votes short.
A Gentle Intro to WebCenter 11g for WCI/ALUI customers
Drones already kind of look like they were built by Apple:

http://www.richard-seaman.com/Aircraft/AirShows/Nellis2006/H...

A few too many dangling peripherals though; if it were really Apple all that stuff would be flush with the surface.
With total control over the iPhone OS, I wonder if Apple will slowly start repositioning OS X as an operating system for power users and focus more on the iPhone OS for it's consumer-line products. A basic iLife/iWork suite for iPhone OS would be all that's needed for most users.
China Accuses U.S. of Cyberwarfare
Apache URL Rewriting Guide (practical solutions to common problems)
The Apple way to play H.264 is through the QuickTime APIs (and really, as of Snow Leopard the new QuickTime X APIs), not to write your own H.264 playback code that seeks to directly access hardware accelerators.

I'm confused... If hardware decoding were simply a matter of using the QuickTime APIs, why doesn't Flash just use those?
There are definitely dating services working in this direction, at least for people with iPhones. I don't know if anybody is integrating with existing social networks though.

I've seen iTryst Lite and datingDNA on the iPhone that take location into account when matching people. Not sure how much success they're having though. Adding onto existing dating brands would probably get more traction..
Twine Tied Up in Load Time
This is so true for me when learning a new programming language or framework. It was hard for me get started when I was trying to learn Django. But once I started doing the tutorials, it was easy.

Mastering something is a different story though.
The problem is when you include an easy mode, you normally don't have some types of challenges in the game. Take God of War, when you go for "hard mode" all that changes is the hit point pools. It's challenging only in the most limited concept of challenging and in the easy mode you kill gobs of enemies and quickly go though the world, in hard mode you stand around slowly attacking the same AI doing the same things for longer. What most gamers like is close to one hit kills with challenging foes and environment not to feel like you are attacking a brick wall with a ice pick.

Now if you add enemies to hard mode, require some sort of finishing move, or add extra ambushes that's different. But when you build a game for easy mode, and tack on pointless challenges it just feels cheap.

PS: One option would be to have extended death, where you "kill" enemies but they keep attacking for a few seconds but if you walk away they quickly die. It makes the world feel more real and adds more challenge without slowing down the pace of the action.
At the risk of sounding like a shill, you should have a look at Shuttle PCs. They have a very elegant and logical way of using a very limited amount of case space.
I think it's fair to say it's works for the same reason the laugh-track works. Clearly we enjoy performances more when we're in the company of others visibly/audibly enjoying them.

My sometimes negative reaction to synthetic or real crowd approval combines two judgments: the material is awful, and the crowd is despicable in their approval of it (people sometimes viscerally hate laugh tracks). If I like the performance, I won't be disgusted by the laugh track.
Ideally you should read an article before commenting on it.
max joy + max disgust = getting relief from constipation.
I'm not 100% certain of this, but I believe even SSL is vulnerable to certain man-in-the-middle attacks when routed through a single point like tor.

For example:
http://www.teamfurry.com/wordpress/2007/11/20/tor-exit-node-...

A google search returns lots of results, although I'm unsure if any are 'in the wild' exploits.
Bill Gates, number 1?

I don't know if he qualifies as a one of the "30 great web geeks." He didn't have a blog until last week? And, he was probably the single person who could have changed Internet Explorer for the better, not to mention the whole Outlook HTML email mess.

[EDIT] Oh! I noticed that the index is ranked according to some arbitrary numbers like Twitter followers, Technorati, Blog Buzz, etc...

Probably time to figure out a better formula.
Have you read http://www.negativland.com/albini.html ? The article is nearly 20 years old, so grain of salt and all that, but the system does appear to be set out so that the people making and recording music don't see any of your money when you buy an album.
It's hard to tell if a company with a large patent portfolio is only planning to use them defensively.
Does Amazon lend any support to patent reform efforts?
Ruby is a form of superscript, commonly used in Asian text. The WebKit blog explains it well, with examples:

"A ruby annotation is a short piece of text in smaller font, written directly above or below or – with vertical text – to either side of the base text. It is most often used in East Asian typography in order to provide further information. Most commonly it shows the pronounciation of Chinese characters. Another use case is in text books, to give the foreign spelling of a native word, or vice versa. In literary text or Manga ruby is also sometimes used to specify a variant pronunciation of the underlying characters, to add some depth or twist to the normal understanding."

http://webkit.org/blog/948/ruby-rendering-in-webkit/

The CSS3 ruby spec itself is here:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/CR-css3-ruby-20030514/
This will stash the changes you see using git diff, but not the ones you have staged, so it will leave the code on disk exactly the same as the index.

"on disk"... I guess he meant in your working directory of code?
Given that collectors have called me repeatedly looking for someone else and refused to listen when I told them it was a wrong number, I have no trouble believing they are violating laws in dealing with people that actually have debts. If suing them will get them to change, I'm all for it.
why would a tor user allow a java applet to be installed on his/her computer?
Except high-end prostitutes are a bit of an odd Veblen good because as fewer people can afford a particular prostitute, the intrinsic value really does go up.
I actually do have a reason for disliking the inclusion of easy-modes in video games. It takes development time away from making a quality challenging gameplay experience. Unfortunately, since the casual market is larger than the hardcore market, it is smart for the developers to focus on the easier modes that cater to this casual base of players. The end result is that hard modes in games generally feel more liked some quick and dirty hack to make enemies super resistant to attacks or perfectly accurate aiming machines, or just throwing more of them at you.

Perhaps if more developers took time to create a well-crafted and challenging gameplay experience it wouldn't bother me so much. More complex objectives or smarter enemies. Maybe that's a tall order, but it seems like in most cases, difficulty is a decision between fun, easy and unsatisfying, or frustrating, hard and maybe (or maybe not) rewarding.
Thank you for this great post. It and this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1063198 have convinced me to switch to git.
I'll let my friend know. It's his domain and hosted on his server. This was the first time I've visited the site in about a year and I happen to have been in Chrome when checking if it was still live, so it worked fine. I doubt he'll care or make any changes since I'm pretty sure nobody visits it anymore. Thanks for the heads up though!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I know about the brain, the title is misleading. What the team of scientists found seems to be more like a more detailed explanation of how the brain actually goes about storing the memories, not encoding them. Finding how the brain encodes the memories should unveil the API the brain uses and eventually lead us to exploring the way we could read the data from the brain.
You forgot to add PG's essay's to the list. Those seem to be karma gold for whomever submits them.
Great. He's breaking Tor.

I want to see pedophiles in jail too, but if Tor is broken for this purpose, Tor will become useless for any purpose. Governments and others will catch on and take advantage of the same techniques to detect whatever other activity they happen to be interested in.

If you're a supporter of the sort of privacy Tor provides, this is a Bad Thing.
I'd like to second this request. I absolutely adore your search engine but regex/wildcards would be the cherry on top.

Doesn't hurt that I'm in the market for a domain. :D

Edit: Can you add purchasing in-page? Perhaps eventually add one-click purchasing? It'd be an obvious way to monetize and add convenience.
For me it's a mixed bag, some of the stuff I write that I think will be for a very small set of people does surprisingly well, other stuff that I think is more important does much worse.

But just like making music, I write what I write because it helps me to put down my thoughts, how many others read it, find it useful and/or comment on it is really not that big a deal to me, though I'm always very happy when there is some kind of interaction around something I write. Usually I learn as much from the feedback and the comments as I did from doing whatever it was that I wrote about in the first place.
I would guess most people who see prostitutes don't want other people to know about it. Every other Veblen good I can think of is the opposite -- the idea is to conspicuously consume.
Spectacular, and FAST!

One small note, from my experience: it wasn't immediately obvious that results would appear right away, partly because of the drop down and submit button at the bottom.
no [because I don't have HN friends =( ]
They do offer a premier API for uses that do not fit under their terms of service but it seems strange that they wouldn't follow-up on a valid lead.

My question is has anyone EVER gotten a take down notice for their use of Google maps?
in a lot of ways developers have been 'liberated' by these cloud systems to be able to scale apps rapidly, plus we are also only in the early stages of the cloud, it will be interesting to see how the playing field levels as more players enter the market.

on a related note, http://incubator.apache.org/libcloud/ is a python client thats trying to create a unified library for a bunch of popular cloud hosts
The E-Snub
Even better: Stallman is number 8. He doesn't even use the web!

This list is ridiculous.
It looks a lot like a Jobberbase install with custom theme and tags. http://www.jobberbase.com/
I'll be a witness to the fact that memory management on the Flash platform is horrible. The virtual machine that runs ActionScript is pretty good, but any use of the Flex libraries, "debugging" versions of SWFs, programmers who don't understand low-level concepts, etc... quickly leads to memory bloat, and in extreme cases - frequent crashing.
Content free-flagged.
The impact of firing probationary teachers on students
> So it comes down to this: If everyone is able to convince me that their product is a necessity, then I'll end up acquiring all of those products, but only some of them will be paid for.

Wait, you're saying 'only some of them will be paid for', even though you've been convinced all the products are 'a necessity'. A more succinct way of putting this, that I believe loses none of the intended meaning, is 'I want I want I want.' Of course, this behaviour is not to be blamed on you, poor consumer, for you live in an awful society which has bombarded -- yes, bombarded -- you with vile and shrill marketing in order to trick you into thinking you need it. The horror, the horror!
if android keeps improving native hardware support, it could become a serious player in the smart devices market. imagine your car's dashboard running android with a 3g connection.. that would be a pretty neat application
What does Karma really matter for? The only way to see it is to look at someones profile. I can't imagine the leaderboard is that big of a deal except to the person on it. And even then, I can imagine that it's not that big of a deal to those people.

If someone wants to become a HN power user, the key seems to be participation. Participate and people learn your handle, people learn your views and story, and sometimes you get to connect with similar people in real life. It's kind of neat.
I believe we have already made progress into reading data from the human brain - Identifying natural images from human brain activity (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v452/n7185/full/nature0...)
Jason's sweeping "it's less than <1%" comments are getting tired.

We can't tell whether Jason is misleading us about the proportion of scrape-generated pages on Mahalo without access to any Mahalo page statistics.

I'm not for or against Jason on this matter, I'm just saying that we have no data on which to base any conclusions. It's possible he's telling the truth.

It would be interesting for someone to take up the challenge of creating a small web app that finds all Mahalo URLs, heuristically examines them for spamminess and generates some statistics.

Not that such an app would be of any particular long term use, but it might be interesting nonetheless.
I think that if canvas and SVG gain some momentum, then authoring tools will follow. The biggest trouble is getting the momentum though.
New RF Stream Technology Reveals Compatibility Issues
I'm not sure if I should be glad that someone exposed a problem with tor and that the government could be exploiting it already, or if I should be sad that someone just showed the government how to do it.
oh yeah, it's def something you need to do for yourself...but it's all about priorities.

If I knew the article would have a chance on HN, I'd probably put a little bit more priority on it.
Flagged(story not comment)
Jason is full of it. Playing stupid and meek because he got caught.

The original SEO book post and HN discussion are here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1073723

EDITED: Added correct link (thanks icey!)
Well, it's only a Bad Thing if you consider releasing "exploit code" bad. (I wouldn't even classify this as exploit code, but...) After reading this, Tor users can decide whether they want Java applets (or any scripts, really) running on web pages they intend to view privately.

This only highlights something that individuals concerned about privacy should have known beforehand, namely that Tor is just a tool.
There's another option that should be added: People with multiple accounts.
I have really mixed feelings about this article.

I really feel like this guy, Craig, who is suing the debt collectors is a hacker for finding the information about possible violations and pursing it legally.

I am also all for punishing debt collectors for actions that abuse debtors.

However, there are several things that rub me the wrong way.

1) The fact that it is easier (less expensive) for a company to settle a case for $1K, rather than fight and win a case while costing themselves $10k gives the companies no incentive to fight back. Also, The plaintiff is already in debt and is having trouble paying, so what would a company get out of counter suing?

2) Statements like - "Katz doesn't believe that people are morally obligated to pay back their debts." and "People are brainwashed to think that paying a credit card is more important than paying for the necessities of life." - Maybe if people spent more time worrying about the necessities of life and less about luxury they wouldn't be in debt in the first place.
I can see both sides of this story, and I'm quite sure collection agencies break the rules, and they deserve to get called on it.

But... "I don't have to do anything but stay black and die." That sort of behavior is where I draw the line. You made the bad calls, you got into debt, pay your damn debts. And sue the collectors too if you like, but that they are doing wrong things doesn't obviate your responsibilities.
NASA’s Puffin Is Way Cooler Than a Jetpack
> I want to see pedophiles in jail too, […]

So you're essentially pro-thought-crime persecution. I will give you the benefit of the doubt and guess that you meant "I want to see child rapists in jail too, […]". A pedophile does not harm children just by being a pedophile or by being attracted to them, they only harm them when they abuse them.

I agree, however, with the rest of you post.
Presentation. Escorts wear nice clothes, speak the language properly, and are talented enough to pass off as a wife or girlfriend if that's what you're looking for. They can roll with a wealthy business crowd and not stick out too much. Just good ole' fashion market demographics at work. I'm sure some metric of success among the people who use their services is to brag about how much money they spent on a high end call girl. No different than bragging about your new $60k car in the driveway.
According to the comments it seems it is slower, buggier and in some case broken for some users.

Guess I see no reason to switch from FF 3.6 right now.
Read B again, and recognize that there is no such thing as a software patent "mainly to protect themselves". Consider the patent portfolio effect right from the first, wsj quote.
Job interview theory