skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask PG: Please stop the opaque voting policies
Many people have expressed their dismay at the completely opaque voting policies. By this I mean
that it is not clear when or why votes are counted or not.

Whatever you are experimenting on, I do not think
that it is having any positive effects. Bandwagon
voting - which I think is more detrimental than
unfair downvoting - is still rampant.

For me the current situation has the effect that
scores cannot be trusted. Coupled with the fact
that completely legitimate posts are sometimes auto-killed, for me this site's credibility is
questionable.

I do believe that you have good intentions, but
please consider the unintended consequences.
Not much to this article really. The author (who is coincidentally a Facebook ringtone ad guy) says:

- I'm not happy with Google results
- Bing's are about the same quality, so I can use Bing.

Default search deals are valuable, but not the entire game. Google's pushing toolbar hard as always, so there's constant jostling for default search from the browser, legit toolbars, spyware, spammy toolbars, etc. If MSFT wants to pay above the odds for particular deals, Google will let them.
I think the most disturbing part of the SCOTUS ruling on corporations' donating to campaigns is being missed.

Let's say I work a normal 9-5 job for a large company, like Ford. Let's further say I'm a Democrat, but Ford decides to donate a large sum of money to a Republican candidate. (Or, if you'd rather not consider party affiliation, just assume I disgree with the candidate's platform.) Essentially, my work is now directly going to fund policies that I disagree with. Does that mean I should quit my job and go work for a corporation that supports Democrats?

This can happen in a way without corporations being able to directly contribute, but at least the money is funneled through the compensation of the executives and it's their own personal decision. Although I might think the executive is overpaid, I have no right to tell anyone else how to spend their own money.

Similarly, what if I'm an average American and I have some of my IRA/401(k) invested in Ford, who then backs a political candidate I don't agree with. In a less direct way, my money (used to purchase stock in the company) is being used to fund political decisions I disagree with. Should I sell my stock?

The missing element that it seems no one is talking about is that the ruling essentially politicizes both the employer-employee relationship and the corporation-stockholder relationship.
"Another example: When we were building the tablet PC in 2001, the vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn’t like the concept. The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet. "

This is easily solved with a few strategic firings.
Music Label EMI (parent Terra Firma) Seeking $160 Million In Life Support
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897558.asp... :)
No no no, you're making the assuption that "buying an licensed encoder off the shelf" gives you some kind of patent license. It does not. It's a license to run the software from the manufacturer of the software. It sometimes contains a transferable license from the patent holders, for some purposes. Read carefully.

But walking into Fry's and buying a codec product off the shelf for $49.95 doesn't automatically allow you to start a video megasite.
>> 3. ugh. Hadn't realized that. I like IMAP even less, now. (Told you I didn't know much about MIME ;-)

>> 6. I wasn't intending it as a security mechanism, but as a way to know which bits you have and which you don't. Do you think SHA-1 is still a bad idea in that case?
Is there any evidence for this supposed trend? Or will these “many” programmers remain merely a vague hand-wave?
They have the patients, money, and resources to do it.

Despite the fact that I'm a regular Windows user, I still don't appreciate being referred to as a "patient".
There is no such "vast majority of independents who have strong libertarian leanings" outside of LP propaganda, just a small fraction of "independents" who don't want to admit they consistently vote for one party or the other.

(Oh, yes, and a tiny, tiny fraction of libertarians, some minority of whom care about the LP.)
Who the hell would buy this with the announcement of the iPad?
He has fortune setup to display a 'fortune' when he logs in. Apparently one of the fortunes is a fake kernel panic message. So he logged in and saw this message thinking it was a real kernel panic before he realized it was just the output of fortune.
Why run an Internet business in China? Even the giants like Google can't quite get it right. Why do you think you will succeed?

Much better to be in the US or Europe. It's worth the extra taxes or whatever.
Do you have evidence that my plausible alternative hypothesis is not how it works, or are you just guessing?

In any case, I don't believe my alternate hypothesis is a complete explanation. All I'm doing is showing why Bowles' statistics don't prove his case at all. All they do is prove that whatever factor causes low income (which may well be hard work) is hereditary.

Incidentally, one of your hypothesis is demonstrably false. 90% of the poor do have "spare capacity to actually try and get better at things because [they are] not trying to put dinner on the table constantly...". 80% of the poor (people below the poverty line) don't work at all (and are not looking for work) and 90% don't work full time (at least 27 weeks/year). So at least 90% of the poor do have spare capacity to improve their lot.

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2007.pdf
They have tens of billions.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=msft

Balance Sheet
Total Cash (mrq): 33.45B
Total Debt (mrq): 6.00B
Total Debt/Equity (mrq): N/A
agreed ... also i think the dynamically-typed nature of python (and similar languages) makes them very amenable to rapid prototyping and experimentation (code just runs without having to fight the type inferencer or checker). python lets you do clean and beautiful functional programming, but also, as you mentioned, to drop down to quick-and-dirty imperative mode

the author has a good point about pure functional languages being better-suited for concurrent programming, though
i've found that demanding empirical evidence from a blog post often leads to disappointment ;)
You can definitely start saving too early, in the sense that over a 16 year period you might be better off with a portfolio more aggressive than a savings account.
"fortune" is a Unix/BSD/Linux command that prints a random quote to your screen (as in "fortune cookie"). Some Unix-like operating systems have fortune set up to run once automatically every time you log in to your account.

Someone with a great sense of humor set one of the random quotes to mimic a very serious operating system error message.

This poor guy finished upgrading his operating system, logged in, and got that error message as his fortune.
Ah, so once the byproducts are again at rest with 0 kinetic energy, total mass of the system will be equal to total mass of the system before?

So the energy of the explosion comes purely from the atoms being at a lower energy state than they were as uranium? I suppose it makes sense if it takes a huge outlay of energy to form them, which stars could certainly source.

I should go watch some physics OCW...
Redshift, certainly, but there's also the issue of recoil. A photon goes out of the laser at one end and momentum in the laser system must be conserved. Although we're talking about impossible "perfect" devices, a laser must also necessarily create heat.
Not sure about the new voting system. HN front page has become weired those days. I made few front pages in the past, the link stay for few hours (at least). Few days later, I made a front page, the discussion stayed few minutes and got only 12 point although (IMO) I think it's interesting and should get more attention.

What makes me angry is that some stories quickly disappear from the front page, which is going to turn HN into another Digg.
Well, on blogs Haskell, F# and clojure are popular, but in the words of past decades:

Show us the code.
Berkshire-hathaway's core competency is not digital or web-based. This is not a financial site. It is a site designed to entice entrepreneurs (its version of consumers.) Berkshire-hathaway is 44 years old and a fortune 500 company. Appfund is brand new and needs to build its brand/trust.
If nothing is done, there will be problems. If different things are experimented with, there will still be problems. There will always be problems -- no matter what -- for this sort of site when voting is involved. Nothing wrong with not liking the changes, but unless you're going to recommend alternatives, the post doesn't help much. If he does nothing, there are just different problems that different people will be unhappy about. I think experimenting is better than doing nothing, even if it means learning the hard way along the way.
Right on the money ;) All the evidence i have is purely subjective and anecdotal, but I personally know of a number for whom this is true.
I do :)
You got a contract, and a low-paying one at that. This was worth a blog posting?

All of these "How I did so and so" blog postings explaining basic life operations are getting annoying. Look forward to my next blog posting "How I Bought Some Organic Groceries While Only Walking A Block And A Half"
The article lacks depth. GaAs transistors can already switch into the 100+ GHz range and have the notable advantage of being commercially producible. I'm sure there's some good science here, and maybe some practical advantages. I just don't see it in the linked text. Maybe someone who's read the paper in Science can comment?
$status_url = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name='.$user;
$timeline = json_decode(file_get_contents($status_url));
for($i = 0; $i < count($timeline); $i++){
echo $timeline[$i]->text ."\n";
}

One line in it then.
Exactly--and since you're bringing economics into picture, the opportunity cost should exactly equal the wages expended on developing this. OP makes a valid point.

Not necessarily, if his job includes some degree of "on demand" responsibilities--it said he was a librarian who handles some tech support, so chances are a lot of what he's being paid for is just being there when needed. On a slow day, he'd be there anyway and getting paid the same, so working on something like this is a clear win over, I don't know, dusting shelves or something.
#1 is a stretch. Bartenders make $50-$100/hour 2-3 nights per week, for 4-6 hours of their shifts. The best bartenders in SF are grossing $65k-$75k .. Not really the equivalent. They're still working poor by local standards.
Voyager 1 is passing through InterStellar Matter which would slow it down relative to the speed that the ISM is travelling.
In an effort to make HN more like reddit jokes are being upvoted to the top position.
Polyamory is perfect. I have a girlfriend. My girlfriend has a girlfriend. When I want to work late (my office is at home), she goes over to hang out with her girlfriend. I win.
How To Replace Yourself With A Very Small Shell Script
This is fantastic! I haven't seen a BSOD in years (no Vista for me), but what's funny is that it's actually microsoft that's distributing it.

Along the same lines: you take a screenshot of your desktop environment with the terminal open in the middle of the screen. Then use that as your bootsplash image. When friends and enemies ask how you did that you just tell them "I reversed the boot process: first I load KDE, then the kernel. It's a lot faster this way."
Hm yeah. I second that. My votes didn't have an effect on anything for a couple of months now, which is very disappointing when coming across good stories and comments. Voting degraded for me just to keep bookmarks around in my saved stories. :(
Any new mail storage protocol should anticipate the need to store encrypted messages at rest. Sure, it can play a part by storing an encrypted index on the server to deliver to authorized clients, but all decryption and index updates should take place client-side with the user's private key. Stable UID's can help make this a reality. There is no reason to store messages in plaintext on the server, and no new protocol should depend on it.
Really? Last I checked both major parties in the states heavily competed for about 20% of the electorate who self-identified as independents.

Can't comment much on "fake" libertarians, though. I haven't seen much evidence that they either vote the same way each time or not. It might be that different candidates draw out different groups of these middle-grounders.

I'm not much on big-L libertarianism, mainly because so many of them are all over the board on policies, usually taking the core ideas beyond where they are practical. Libertarianism is best practiced when it has a healthy respect for the social contract, such as the use of national force on occasion.
I like IMAP even less, now. (Told you I didn't know much about MIME ;-)

IMAP might do some sort of MIME-handling, but MIME is part of the email spec, not the IMAP spec. Hating IMAP because of MIME is like hating cars because of the invention of the wheel (i.e. thinking that the wheel was invented as part of the production of the initial automobile).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME:

Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is an
Internet standard that extends the format of e-mail
to support:
* Text in character sets other than ASCII
* Non-text attachments
* Message bodies with multiple parts
* Header information in non-ASCII character sets

MIME is used to say things like 'this block of text is a base64-encoded file attachment, but also to say 'this block of text is encoded with this charset.'

If you use Gmail, try the 'open original message' option on emails that have attachments or multiple text parts on them (or even emails that have both a text and an html version of the content).

Dealing with MIME is part of dealing with emails in general, regardless of if you're interacting with an IMAP server, or composing an email to send to another user on the same mainframe (i.e. just moving files around).
Judging from the quality of the site, I parsed that as an overlooked typo of "patience."
So you're not really personally attesting to it, but you're personally attesting to an anecdote about polyphasic sleeping?
JooJoo Tablet Strikes Back: A Web App Store and Full Production
Are phpBB Users at Risk?
My business in China is not an internet business. It is a trading export company, but still, i need to use google reliably. I am aware of the situation of internet here, i just want learn the aftermath of "China hacks Google" incident and if it can affect my business. Thanks anyway for your comment.
You're welcome; it's not my phrase, just something I picked up in discussions of this issue.

Although I should also mention "The Last Fool" concept. Those long-term savings won't be fictitious if you aren't the last fool left with them, i.e. you find another "fool" to sell them too.

But as you note that's a very iffy thing, certainly not something you should bank on, so to speak.

(Hmmm, you left out the Soilent Green option ... it's already being discussed by "serious thinkers". And there are less unpleasant ways to abrogate explicit and implicit promises to older generations.)
Why We Love Narcissists (At First)
I strongly dissagree with your "[its] just SPEECH" notion. First off, who is a corporation? Seriously, who? Employees? Investors? Board? When the corporation speaks do they speak on behalf of all of the Who or just a minority?

Next, a corporation is an entity with limited liability, it is a way to protect people from getting in trouble for whatever. Why should such an entity have equal rights to speech (or anything for that matter)? I would think with limited liability comes limited rights. To put it another way: if corporations get to do the same exact stuff as people on the one side, they should get the same penalties and limitations on the other.

Finally as a shareholder, I am in it because I think that there is good business. I don't want that business to become illegal or over-regulated, and as such I will support the appropriate government moves on my own. I don't want to worry about whether or not the company I have stock in supports/opposes my views on gun-control or roe v wade or whatever. I am in it for a limited purpose, the buying and selling of various widgets and services. Not for a political stance. In fact I would like as much separation from my money and politics as possible, same as politics and religion are separate.
Will Obama allow democracy in Haiti?
He didn't say he has an Internet business, but just a business that runs with the help of Google tools, apps...
The red text here makes them seem pretty paranoid about their ability to sandbox the submissions: http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/contest/contest_information.php
4. How appropriate, you fight like a cow!

...sorry, just seemed to fit the theme.
I disagree. I was 22 when I quit my last job as a wage-slave, and that year I billed out 1100 hours at $125/hour. That might have been the best year of my life. A 6-figure salary for working essentially half-time.
Did I presume anything? I asked how you would solve these problems without a government, or provide a fair government without democracy.

And I said public or semi-public. It's pretty hard to prevent anyone unauthorized from getting onto a road; by definition they are big, and need easy access to be valuable. That's what I mean by "semi-public." If you have private roads, how do you prevent freeloaders without some sort of de-facto government? Likewise with hospitals; you can't distinguish between someone covered by your insurance and someone not when they come in from an automobile wreck, nor can you negotiate prices with them.

Liberty to me, can only occurs on an individual level, not through social engineering by a carefully selected technocract.

So you would prefer to be a lone hunter-gather than take advantage of the benefits that modern society has to offer you? Because beyond the lone, solitary hunter-gatherer, someone else's needs are always going to affect what options are available to you.
Ask HN: Tips/Guide for thinking like a physicist?
The title says it all, I'm having a hard time in a physics class (studying electricity)... and I just have a hard time wrapping my head around the application of formulas and how to "attack" the problems.

It's pretty much just felt like a dead weight for me, and usually I love problem/puzzle solving... but I guess not this time.

Thanks
The idea that people inevitably give up on their toolchain and move to another language en masse strikes me as a bit weird. I'm sure some people find itertools a good reason to learn other languages, but it's not some massive exodus. It's possible to use more than one language, you know. On the same project, even.
Yes. Because that's what those Russians were doing on the other side of the Iron Curtain... having massive orgies.

Well that does put a slightly different spin on "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need".
Printer: on fire
Nice, I can see my signature on there. Take that Steve Jobs!
http://static.fsf.org/nosvn/apple/iPadCloseUp.jpg
Hacking the Amazon Kindle DX, Part 1: Bluetooth Shell
I agree that ideally I should provide alternatives. However, I honestly thing that the kind of tweaking that is currently happening has no visible benefits but a lot of drawbacks. I simply do not /see/ any alternatives.

Also, I'm of the opinion that voting generally should not be tampered with. Either count every vote or drop voting
altogether.
How is this anything other than a complicated way of getting the government to subsidize 100% of higher education costs?
SQL codes for when things go wrong
I don't know what was going on behind the scenes with Arrington and these guys, but it makes me wonder if Michael decided to pull out of the (supposedly) promised investments and such as the details of the iPad came out over the last few months.

The main reasoning behind this hypothesis is that building a tablet isn't easy. Especially trying to get the software and hardware working well together and selling at an affordable price is very hard. Alex Lindsay(TWiT, PixelCorps) talks often about this. Several years ago he went through the entire process of consulting with hardware manufacturers, designers, and software development firms to make a tablet. He eventually gave it up because it didn't seem feasible at the time to make the kind of device he wanted.

(Alex, if you happen to be reading this I hope I got the story right.)
I used to have a boot-up message on my cell phone that said "This phone is stolen". And even though it was me who set it, it still got me every time I saw it.
Money is not speech. That's ridiculous.

Some people will always have an easier time of being heard than others. This is just about making sure that people can't directly buy their way to an easier time of being heard, buy buying off people in the government directly. They will instead have to be heard in a public forum, where public debate can occur.

1. Too much is controlled at the federal level. 2. The government has significantly overreached in its authority.

So what's your solution? When was the last time a president or congress made the government smaller? Is it possible for this to happen when monied interests can buy the ear of a congressman and get a great return on their investment because the government is so large and powerful?
Intro to Standard PHP Library (SPL)
Google Pushing HTML5 for the Future
F# and Clojure are rather new and Haskell is only now maybe coming out of it's "Avoid success at all costs" phase (or so I judge by the Coders at Work interview of Simon Peyton-Jones).
Just push your source out in the open. Then you will have published every small idea that's in your code.
http://www.themonkeycage.org/2009/12/three_myths_about_polit... Which is not exactly news.

As for "fake libertarians", I really don't know whether you are or not, and I'm not highly concerned - though many of your lines are reminiscent of the typical Team Red "if you guys were just a little closer to our ideas, you'd do such much better" shtick.

The simple truth is that actual, consistent libertarians predominantly opposed the war. I'm no more interested in historical revisionism on that point than I am in revisionism on the war itself.
What is paul graham's hacker news username
see title
Once upon a time people felt the need to lobby their government because they were being killed by their medicine.

It's easy to paint a rosy picture of our past. Do government regulations go too far some of the time? Definitely. But they do serve an important purpose in others.