skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few things:

1) I noticed the top pie chart image actually links to a YouTube video explaining the general concept of the site. There is no indication on or adjacent to the pie chart image (i.e. text, mouseover) informing the user there is an explanatory video to be seen if they click the image. I would imagine most users come and leave the site without ever knowing that video exists.

Given this, I might suggest embedding the video right on the home page in place of the static pie chart image since:

a) the video provides more explanation and is more engaging than a static image. Furthermore, in my experience, modern web users (and humans in general) are lazy and much prefer watching a video to reading text as a means of learning.
b) the video's first frame shows the same graph as the image (only difference being the colors of the pie slices), so even if the user doesn't wish to load/watch the video, they still see the first frame which conveniently agrees with the existing text to the right (excepting the different colors as mentioned)
c) any custom video takes time and effort to create, so why not showcase it and make sure it gets seen?

2) Consider creating a better header banner with perhaps a custom logo or simply more visual textures/patterns to catch the eye and leave more of a visual impression on the user. If nothing else, change either the color of the "ModernBallots.com" title or the banner background as there currently isn't enough contrast between the two, making the title difficult to read. You want this to be much more prominent and visually appealing (not obnoxious) since it's the title and URL of the site.

3) Provide a way for users to Search/Browse existing elections.

4) Allow users to embed elections in external pages/sites. This may be the most important item of all as far as getting your site "out there", hits/activity, and user mindshare.

Obviously, there is a ton more functionality that could be added to the site (i.e. login/user accounts, related elections list (when viewing a particular election), election/candidate level comments, option to choose/change the unit of rank (i.e. [1:2:3:4:5], ['really bad':'bad':'ok':'good':'really good'], etc.), and on and on), but I'm sure you've already thought of all these and many more. However, I would focus on addressing the four items I mentioned first and foremost.

Now that I've clobbered you with criticism/suggestions, I'd like to say that I do really like the simple, straight-forward design, the slim page width, the functionality and ease of use, the straying from political examples (especially since the words "ballot" and "election" are so closely associated with political elections), the homepage text, and especially the nod/reference to the source of the site's concept (Schulze STV). Giving credit where credit is due is so rare today in the cut-throat web startup world, so it's nice to see you do that.

Good luck with the site!

Derek
The Plywood-Armored Tractor Tank
Are you using Rails? Try A/Bingo (http://www.bingocardcreator.com/abingo) and Vanity (http://vanity.labnotes.org/)
which database servers advertise "single server durability" as a feature

Any database server that advertises being ACID compliant:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACID#Durability
Um, grooveshark does not have a deal with WMG.

WMG makes the same amount of money when you pay grooveshark as when you download bittorrent files. At least the bittorrent sites don't pretend they are legal to sucker people into paying them.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100111/1230487706.shtml
Anecdotally: A friend of mine who lives in Sweden gets 100 megabits for about the equivalent of $25 per month. It's not a gigabit, but it's a lot closer to a gigabit than five megabits is.
There is the possibility that the providers aren't intentionally gouging their customers. Even though the market is small, there is enough of a market to drive prices down. I think it's much more likely that those companies are just so horribly inefficient that it really does cost them a lot to provide you with high-speed access.
Google to test ultra high-speed broadband network
I didn't mention Ford getting bailouts, did I?

BTW loans at below market interest rates are a subsidy. Calling them loans is just doublespeak.

And turning off the key stops any car. The people who died when the car got to 100 miles per hour would probably also have died in the midst of nearly any minor malfunction that led to a bit of panic.

That's not to excuse the error, but as I mentioned, I think out of control speed "bugs" tap into the public psyche a bit more than all the other possible equally risky bugs.
Persistence is probably one of the most important trait of a programmer, if not a great hacker.

Just today, I cracked my recursion homework assignment, which I assume to be uncrackable for mere mortals and after my CS teacher just told me to do it.(I wrote code since middle school!)
This could be 7 billion and it wouldn't change anything.
Good Tutorial on http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/09/one-line-split-...
The Limits of Bioethics
One thing that excites me when I worry about the US losing its status is how competitive young people are.

College admissions are absurd, and good grades are a necessity. People take the SAT several times just to get a slightly higher score. Kids are fighting really hard to get into good schools, and so when I think of the younger generation being video gaming, tweeting, facebook addicts, I'm also happy to remember how much harder we work at school than our parents did.
Those annoying satisfaction surveys
This is easily the best article I've read on HN in weeks. It's refreshing to read a report from people who clearly understand their problem well, and are able to explain the technical and social problems they face.
I wonder when they will start trying to charge for the music that is stuck in my head.
Jester Unveils XerXeS Automated DoS Attack
We're pretty open-minded with regard to what coding is.

If you use something like Django, you won't even interact with the database directly. I don't know if there is a coding-ish word for "writing SQL queries," but there's certainly more than SQL in database land.

Honestly, my number one tip for learning this stuff is just to read constantly and write code whenever you can. Also, sometimes you need to do projects that don't end in a product you can sell in order to learn new things, so get used to throwing stuff away (not literally, of course, but certainly from a revenue standpoint).

Overall though, knowing how to code (and having learned for the "right reasons") is hugely helpful in dealing with Software people in the future. I suspect you knew that already :)
Talking about not having TV is a way to feel superior.

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/26/28-not-having-a-t...
Git vs. Mercurial deathmatch
Coopers Rock is a great place! It's great in the spring time.
http://www.hypertable.com # doesn't suck
This will teach you everything you need to know about transistors.

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...

And this should give you some good background in digital logic and how to assemble stuff like counters and muxes into useful digital circuits.

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...
For what it's worth: this is a micro-ISV guy that patio11 respects (PerfectTablePlan is the Bingo Card Creator of wedding seating plans). This post was less sophisticated than some of what Patrick has written, but you can bet I now have his blog RSS'd.
HN, thought you might like this find. Freagle.org: Free campsite, free water
Looks like it's big in Germany/Europe. I'm the one in Seattle... it'd be nice to see this take off more in North America.
Enlighten me. Can you show the power consumption details of your old IBM servers.

For Ex, the plug consumes 5 Watts. Probably saving $100 for a year is not much for you.
Entrepreneurs: The Newspaper Industry Needs You
yeah that makes sense. I have several projects I am working on in tandem which have been insanely frustrating, but once you can actually make something work it's easier to stop doubting yourself. i guess the eventual goal is a complete end-to-end implementation of a large web project. if 5 years is too much time, that is great news.
If that's less sophisticated than a usual post, count me in!
On the other hand, it shows just how reliable cars are that we don't think about those things.

Generally people are quite foolish while driving. Have you noticed how people driving heavy SUVs with 4 wheel drive (which get better traction in the snow) think that they can safely travel 65 mph on icy roads? It seems not to occur to them that the vehicle has lots of momentum and will slide on ice.
Pass that Interview 1: Mimic a Class in Javascript
Start out with a simple game, like hangman or something else w/ clearly defined rules and gameplay that mostly depends on guessing. Have people play it a few times, and then have everyone come up with and write down the rules. Emphasize the writing things down formally part, since that's the most basic type of programming. Have them play the game again, but this time using the rules they defined. You could give out awards for the kids who find errors in the rules. Try a different game (tic-tac-toe? rock paper scissors?) and repeat the exercise.

Once they've figured out that, give them a bare-bones vocabulary (eg something like python, but don't tell them it's a programming language) to write the rules in.
Even in the comments! Love it. "Well, I haven't had a TV in..."
Google Maps wasn't the first tiled draggable online map. That honor belongs to Bernhard Seefeld and map.search.ch, launched in October 2004:

http://www.bernhardseefeld.ch/archives/000099.html
Menace in mad march of the thought police
Apple's Virtual Reality Store: Second Life or XBox Live?
Excellent point. Note too that the program only subsidized certain sorts of vehicle upgrades (the kind that benefit US companies).

Most anyone could have improved overall MPG by simply buying a Prius, but the incentives were structured not to give any additional incentive to such purchases.
Yup, my employers are still standardised on CVS. We're hoping to start trying out SVN in the next year or so - but Git is just too different to gain any traction in the near future.

Not helped by the fact that SVN has hooks into the Visual Studio version control architecture, whereas Git has an odd plugin that works in a non-standard way.
I'm not sure why, but the negatives really threw me off. I kept thinking, "Wait, you _shouldn't_ do that?"
I don't remember going through this phase when I was learning to program! I got started with C many years ago and I remember savoring every moment. :) I think what may account for the difference is that in my case the interest in programming stemmed from wanting to learn how the computer worked and C's low level nature facilitated this very well. With regard to the author it seems she's more anxious to start creating real useful applications. I get the impression she's more interested in the end product of the programming than the actual programming process.

Currently I do most of my development for the linux platform but I was considering moving to windows to take advantage of some opportunities in that area but I am facing some of the same challenges as the author of the article. The C# language and .NET platform are a whole new world and it feels like I am starting from scratch. It's hard to justify as I can do everything I need to do on the linux platform.
There have been a bunch of studies indicating that learning languages (and this applies to music as well, I believe) at a young age gives you immense advantages over those who start later. Tons of theories for why this is (but that's going down a brain development/neuroscience rat hole that's a whole other thread).
Being relentlessly resourceful doesn't always mean "do it myself". Sometimes it means you go get funding, sometimes it means finding someone to work for equity or revenue share, sometimes it means figuring out how to make money somewhere else until you afford to pay someone to do X.
All cars have fatal flaws, they just occur with some probability between 0 and 1.

The flaw you are mentioning also has a probability of killing someone of between 0 and 1.

The point is that car companies decide when to do a recall based on a cost/benefit analysis and not just because there is a low probability flaw that could occasionally be fatal.
Are you Willing to Sacrifice Everything to Obtain Your Happiness
Actually, it's not really that bad. The problem was that with Git or Hg, when you fetch you get every version of every file for the whole history of the project. Which means if you've had a lot of big files, you get ALL of them. Also, they don't delta compress well, so that can be a lot, much of which you may never need again, so it's inefficient. For most projects, this isn't a big deal, but if you have a bunch of large texture files or video that MUST be in the project (game development, perhaps), this can be an issue.

Subversion is "better" at this only because it does shallow checkouts - it only gets the last version of the project. It is still ludicrously inefficient in it's transfer protocol.

Git can actually do this type of development fine - if you do 'git clone --depth=1 [url]' it will also do a shallow clone (just the last commit and it's associated content) and will transfer the data much more efficiently than SVN. In the past you couldn't then commit to that repo, which was the issue, but in newer versions you can. You can also later deepen the repository if you want. It is not an often used feature, but I think it brings Git pretty close to on-par with SVN for large projects, if not better in many respects.
Being a programmer who's into 4th month of learning Mandarin I didn't really get the analogy. You need persistence and practice, yes, but it applies to any non-trivial undertaking.

I think the conclusion is, hard stuff is hard, and you have to try hard.
Really excited about this. Blazing speed!
Ask HN: Is Google Buzz Anti Inbox Zero?
All cars have "bugs" that could result in the death of the operator. It just depends on what the probability of death is (and how traceable it would be).

Car companies' risk management departments decide to do a recall when the cost of doing one is cheaper than not doing one. End of story.
His point about binary files is true. Until it gets as good as SVN at handling binary files then it probably will not have an easy time getting people to convert.

I don't think I've ever stored a binary file in my source-code control system. (Hint: your VCS is not your backup server.)

(Yes, OK, I have a favicon.ico in some of my repositories. This has not detracted from the "git experience".)
Well, I guess I fail reading comprehension then :-)
Thoughts on an Open Source Company
I've been wishing the US had a score based voting system for a while now, but there are considerable obstacles:
-Two dominant, incumbent parties that have no incentive to make it easier for more parties.
-A populace that is unlikely to understand why one would even want to change the voting system, and why score-based voting would enable more parties to rise.
-Millions of dollars or more invested in the current voting system.

to name a few.

Not to discourage you, though, I think it's great.

Education might be a good place to start, and that seems to be what you're dabbling with in writing this web app. I'd be very interested to hear your ideas regarding the other issues, though (and any other issues you think of).

I don't believe the current system is codified in the US constitution, though I could be wrong - a friend and I couldn't find anything specifically prescribing the choose one candidate ballot system of voting in the national constitution when we looked. The specific methods might be decided at the state level.
Isn't it worth bidding up to 99,999...% of your profit, if it really already accounts for all costs?
Could we have a little more in-depth analysis than "I saw fight club?"
Nice story, I hope you said 'sorry love that's mine' and poked your fingers in her food to take it out:)
So, from what I understand, this is a way for clients like Adium to connect to Facebook chat, but it isn't a way for things like Google Talk to interact with Facebook Chat. That's disappointing. It would have been nice if they announced that they're trying to get interoperability with other networks going.
Some amateurs have identified errors in the published literature.
They've identified typos. If they show to be significant, I would most certainly want to know.

Because you are concerned that their corrections might affect the debate, you compare them to deranged conspiracy theorists in an effort to discredit them.

No, I simply don't want action to stop because an amatuer found a minor error and start having to go back to debating it all from the beginning again.
Moving Music, Pics and More Btwn Phone and Linux Netbook
Another uninformed comment.

If you drove a Prius (I do) then you would know A) Prius's don't usually have a key in the ignition and B) you can't turn the car off while accelerating.

Do you understand this is a software issue, chief? You have no clue what is going on. For all you know, the entire car might be unresponsive. Ever had a computer hang on you?
Me think so. You can't process Buzz to zero nor convert it to actions. At least not all of it.
There will alway be jobs because well, of scarcity. Not to mention that trade allow people who have a comparative advantage to work even if their trading partner are vastly more productive in everything.

Probably the biggest reasons why teenager are unemployed is labor laws.

If the minimum wage is too high for teenage productivity, than it is likely that the employers will not hire them.
Do you think the bailouts happened just as the auto companies were beginning to have an inkling that things weren't going well?
Past performance is not indicative of future success.

Even if the article were true, I think a little fear of your competition is healthy. I like how people are sweating it. I hope it spurs innovation and growth here at home.
Ask HN: Ensuring unique account logins across the globe
Question for the community. My company's application is starting to grow from a single production deployment to multiple production stacks that run independently in different datacenters.

How have other applications handled ensuring uniqueness of data (specifically login ids) across multiple distributed deployments of an application on the global stage while letting this data be driven by the public?

I keep coming back to this: Google and Yahoo let people generate accounts where (presumably) the email address is the id for the account, yet, these ids must be globally unique and the ids are registered very quickly, creating these accounts while a user sits at a browser waiting on a form post at the end of which, the account is registered (i.e. synchronous from the user perspective and complete within the default timeout for a browser request)

We're batting around ideas of using async messaging, highly available databases of hashes of in-use userid, LDAP with replication between datacenters, and some other strategies. Nothing feels completely solid nor have I been able to locate much on this topic online.

Do you have any thoughts on this type of distributed problem? In 2010, this feels like it should already be a solved problem and that I'm just ignorant of the solution. Does anybody know of papers or essays related to dealing with this type of issue or have thoughts on how they've seen this approached at other big companies?
You seem to have started with the premise that "tribal" societies are superior in some way. I disagree.

Additionally, kids have parents because they're extraordinarily unskilled at balancing the long-term perspective against the here and now (granted, many adults aren't much better). I find it hard to believe that just letting your kids do whatever they want is really the path to greatness for most kids. I think parents should help kids explore their passions but it seems there's a balance to be found where you also don't let your kids give up as soon as it gets difficult. My parents did that too often, and my wife's parents pushed her through the rough spots. I won't go into the whole results, but it's clear to me which is superior.
I would argue that the only skill a business owner really needs is the skill to identify, hire, and lead talent. Everything else is probably secondary. If you're not good at programming, learning to program in order to do it yourself is ridiculous advice - unless you spend ten years learning full time, you'll end up with a mediocre product.

Delegation works. Just do it.
I didn't see fight club, fyi. Not sure what you mean. Are you under the impression that the recall decision is more complex than that? Most bugs are fixed in the next model year or ignored.
Jabber support for FB Chat is nice, but failing to support SSL/TLS is not really acceptable...
Apple's bands go way too far
Shortly: Play to your strengths.
Research on the subject seems to contradict you. There are several problems

- Incentives are very hard to get right. If your bonus is tied to sales you inflate sales and don't care about margins. If your bonus is tied to margins you oversell and someone else suffers in aftersales support. If your bonus is tied to stockprice you do what you can to inflate the stockprice, hoping everything won't come crashing down before you receive your bonus. And so on.

- When it comes to it very few people are driven by money. They'll say they are but in reality they aren't. Would you knowingly sell something expensive to an old lady who can't afford it that she doesn't need in order to make a sell and get your bonus? Most people wouldn't.

- Incentives drive you to only care about the incentive for which you're awarded. If you're in one department and can make $10 knowing that another department will lose $100 that's what you'll do.

Besides very few choices in life, if any, are as black and white as you put them.
There's a saying that if you start learning a musical instrument when you're an adult, "you'll always play with an accent."

I suppose you could also program or seen code programmed with an accent.
Excessive saving cannot harm the economy, as more people save the interest rates go down -- the earn less, and there is plenty of money to be invested. People do not put money in their mattress, they invest it either through a savings account or in the stock market.
great, it's a popularity contest for programmers. Imagine if Ashton Kutcher started blogging via Github. I'd want to hire him immediately.
Iran says it will permanently shut down Gmail
Of course it's not a backup solution. That's what timemachine, superduper, mozy are for. Let's pretend that you are a graphic artist and you have a psd file with a picture for your website. You make a change that does not work well and your undo history is past it's limit. Instead of having to copy the file, rename it, make changes, and clutter up the folder you have one file with a history and commit messages that tell you what you changed. A commit message of "made the background transparent" followed by another commit "changed the font color to orange" is a lot better to see than a file name of "project_trans_back_orange_v1.psd" To each their own though.

A version control system is such that it can handle versions of the project and not just versions of the source code.

FWIW: I keep whatever files in the project I have uncompressed in git and it hasn't killed my HD space yet.
Is Google Docs now the new scribd when it comes to PDF links on HN? Give the real URL and note that it is a PDF in the title!
I had exactly the same problem, I read the hed, then the copy, then had to reread the hed.
The thread title and the article title are one letter different from each other, but it's a pretty important letter.
someone needs to build stuff that helps developers make money with their apps. we all cant be 37 signals or salesforce, nor want to be, but we all certainly want to sell our software.