skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Humans are almost always the biggest weakness in any system.
That's exactly what I did and failed...
Out of curiosity, why does it matter who wrote it?
From a quick look at his comments, he seems to match the other heuristics seasoup mentions in that thread: meticulously correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation, use of semicolons, and use of dashes.

He also seems to comment heavily on technical issues - programming languages, database technologies, so it might make sense for him to feel heavy non-tech opinions deserve a onetimetoken. Similarly reasoned, the sentiment of "privacy is dead, there is only identity management" seems to be a realization appropriate for someone who recently started working on YC-funded companies. Seem convincing to me, but since they're all reverse-justifications, probably best to take them with a grain of salt: you might be able to draw similar conclusions combing through many other comment histories.

Interesting that this "human [powered] search engine" style of identification might have been faster than devising a machine heuristic.
Read the link!
http://jacquesmattheij.com/A+challenge,+identify+this+HN+use...
I would consider what this 'hacker' did a service to humanity, because now I know that something much more evil than him exists, namely this:

a small black box under vehicle dashboards that
responds to commands issued through a central website,
and relayed over a wireless pager network.

That's horrible! Why isn't wired concentrating on that aspect of the story? That's the story. That some hacker used it to have some fun honking horns is beside the point.

If I found out something like that existed in my car, I'd be livid!

EDIT: from the comments I see it's for derelicts who agree to have it installed. hmph. note to self: calm down
Also, odds are that someone wouldn't bother logging out and in between two accounts. I'd weight your search against people who commented in between the time that the throwaway account posted.

People who commented shortly before the throwaway account are also good candidates, as are people who seem to comment around the same time on other days.
Google is bringing Android to TVs
Well I fully agree with this comment i.e. I recognize the "quirks" too. It looks to me like the results of a U.K. education. As a Brit-born male, in my past I have had some non-Brit ladies comment about the robot...
Yeah it's almost crowd sourced. Reminds me of when the cops put a letter or riddle from a serial killer in the newspaper figuring someONE out there will recognize it, as opposed to a computer recognizing it. Or maybe that just happens in the movies.
I don't think the reason he wants to find out is because he wants to know. I think he wants to prove that it's possible to find out.

He thought it was long enough that he could pretty trivially have a program compare the writing style to other HN comments and determine who it was, but he failed. So it's a challenge for other hackers--can you write a program that can determine who said something simply based on the writing style and knowing that he's a member of a reasonably small sample (HN users).
All you're arguments are absolutely valid and true, but I don't think anyone isn't aware of them. Everyone knows design sells products, it's not about that.

I've done a bunch of designwork, including logos, for very small-scale projects like day-care centers, local sports organizations and so forth, and I can tell you they would be soo much better off just buying something they like from this place.

The marketplace isn't intended for Apple or Coca-Cola and any company understands the differences. No day-care center, no matter how stupid you think they are, pretend like they're getting the same for 99 bucks as they are with a professional design-firm. They don't want a professional design, they want something to stick on their letterhead for the annual newsletter.

These kinds of sites aren't competition to real designers, they offload crap-designers like me who would rather code.
"I immediately thought of that username"

Reminds me of "Blink", Malcolm Gladwell's book.
$1.8 Billion Will be Lost to Employees Watching March Madness
I don't think tokenadult would mind posting that comment from his own account. The person that posted this sees his HN-identity as not stating strong opinions.
He also uses lower case for facebook, twitter etc. which is what leaped out at me about the comment were trying to identify.

Edit: ok one other thing strikes me: use of the word "ton" doesn't quite fit with the rest of the language.
Yelp slapped by more legal challenges
Heh. I identified a Reddit IAMA once this way.
You got it. Sorry for not being more clear, I thought it was an interesting challenge, and since I've used up my 'two guesses' I think it is more appropriate to admit failure rather than to keep on hammering away at it until I hit the right user.

PG would have an easy time of it (log files) :)
I once had a totally benign website that triggered an anti-virus alert in Clam AV. There was an specific sequence of characters in the HTML that caused it.

One of the weirder bugs I've encountered.
Concert shot on Chatroulette with 15 MacBooks [video]
Universities:the hotbed of zombies...not really
May be stating the obvious here, but why is a probabilistic prediction model primarily aimed at consumers? Wouldn't it make more sense to apply to users for whom probability is useful e.g., truck fleets to predict delays? oil fields to show likely drill spots? etc.
I must have entered a time portal - that article isn't published until the 27th March!

I totally agree that translation of results usually makes the jump from 'statistically significant at a p < .5' to 'fact' - and that's where the problem is.
Gasoline must have been cheap, when 24/7 running cost less than the weekly payments. (Or was it just very short-termist behaviour?)
Interesting. The idea that null results are not worth publishing has since the very beginning struck me as one of the most fundamentally flawed ideas in science. Interestingly, it seems to be very domain-dependent. In my field (astrophysics), null results are fairly frequently published, but I've heard that in other fields it's totally impossible to do.
When I first read it I instantly assumed OnStar had been hacked, then I thought it would suck to get that black box thing installed, then again, then again, OnStar could do even more damage if compromised wouldn't it?
"If I understand the CLT (big if) then the distribution of the _mean_ of a sample is, by the CLT, going to be Gaussian"

Yes, for an infinite number of samples. The rate at which is converges to a Gaussian, though, is strongly dependent on the distribution from which the measurements are drawn.
I've made my decision, based on years of following this forum, reading his essays, and visiting the Y Combinator startup founders at an event in Cambridge a few summers ago. Paul Graham really does support entrepreneurs.

What he does not support: Sockpuppets and misleading content posted to Hacker News. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Also, you have quite a bit of nerve promoting a blog post entitled "Is Paul Graham A Fraud? You Decide" and then writing in the body text: "This post isn’t intended to bash Paul Graham."
How to be cool (and not uncool) on Foursquare
SXSW: Spotify isn't coming to the U.S. just yet
I've been curious what the real benefit is of an operation that needs an onsite (versus multisite) phone system for fewer than, eh... the size of a single 16-24 station line card to use VoIP in the first place? If you've got under 10 people, you might be able to get away with a used 3x8 Norstar which has the approximate maintenance overhead of a desk lamp. And in some areas, you could probably be even better off than getting a key system with good old Centrex.

Again, this is largely curiosity. But when you start getting into maintenance and UI and latency and encoding support and QoS from your ISP and whatever else you have to care about to make simple dialtone work, I wonder if maybe the problem is getting nerded to death for no good reason?
Why SxSW Doesn't Suck
Simple psychology would lead me to guess that it is you Jacques. If I wanted to tell how easy it was to identify an anonymous comment, then I'd make one. I'd then publicise it, and challenge other people to crack it.

Maybe I'm being too clever for my own good...
It's slow enough as it is :/
It is great that he summarized many of his posts in one concise post.

I've read and followed his advice to form my first corp recently. But it took a few days of research to understand what he was saying and why.

It still costed me over $2k to get incorporated though.
Except "go open source" (which is very questionable!) most startups do:

-- launch at big confs or through popular blogs like techcrunch, which is essentially the same.

-- stealth development.

-- launch with features previously unseen on the market (there's no much sense in carbon copying your competitors).

-- mashups and buildups on google maps, facebooks, etc.

I can continue...

So basically that Zimbra guy did not discover America. All his advices are obvious and are iteratively being tried by many startups without any success. Here, I believe, the real reason for his success ($350M sold-out to Yahoo) was pure luck + plus something he will never start word-spreading about publicly.
> The person to innovate in a way that capitalizes on this research is going to make a lot of money.

Isn't this the very definition of `capitalize'?
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I'm not sure if it's a metaphor. Normally, predators will eat the smaller, younger and sicker animals, leaving the larger and stronger ones to survive. So there is pressure for prey animals to get larger to escape predators and pressure for predators to get larger in response. (Of course there is also pressure to remain small to reduce metabolic needs, and the size of the organism is as such dictated by the balance of these and other forces.)

However, hunting inverts this pyramid, culling the largest and most attractive individuals and leading to the survival of the smallest and least showy. And lo and behold it seems to be happening: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE50B73320090113
Except for "fully agree" and the hyphen bit, that would generally characterize my writing, if only because bad grammar & spelling bug me. But it sure ain't me :-)
Do you have any proof that the guy would acknowledge you are correct even if you identified him?

Seems like a good thing to verify first. Maybe you already got the guy and he just said "no it's not me."
This site wasn't created with the sole purpose of promoting your site. If you'd like to accomplish that, then find another venue. Or hang around and respect the wishes of its founder. You might learn something.
How do you know you failed?
funny thing about the sky- its always falling...

Even if we suddenly lost our standing as the largest economy in the world, I dont see that as meaning we will see Armageddon. It may even do us some good to let some other country be in the spotlight for a while.
That didn't stop me from competing when I was a student. I got into the finals. The training I did still helps me to identify and solve algorithmic challenges to this day.
Layers, I think, are more important for individual sections of the wireframe - this allows the eventual visual designer to take portions of the design atomically, leading to greater internal visual consistency throughout the site. It also eases the pain of slicing and dicing ;)
Wow. This post is in really poor form. You start out using the system unethically and are called on it. You then cite the need to be told rules? How about plain common sense? And then you come back here to spit in his face? Yeah, you deserve a banhammer on your head.
TV series to satirise Apple's Steve Jobs
I'm a big proponent of fair play and I think the author would identify himself when asked, but at the same time only PG can be sure.

Of course you can be paranoid, but I think the bigger chance is the author seeing a chance here at sowing some disinformation. Such as participating in this thread and giving false pointers and / or confusing the issue.

For the really paranoid, of course the last person to participate in this thread is 'the one'...

It wasn't me, that's for sure :)
Or it is you nagrom.
> Most people elsewhere do not know how to read urls. Their cost for learning to read urls and remember how to find out where a link goes is higher than they are willing to pay and statistical more expensive than not doing so despite the risks!

It doesn't even need to be statistical more expensive to be rational. Perhaps users may just be unable to forecast how much learning to read URLs will benefit them, and thus risk-aversion [1] prevents them from making the time investment.

[1] The use of risk-aversion on this meta-level is kind-of ironic, if you don't look too close.
I solemnly swear it wasn't me, but I do agree with you that would be a good prank.
The difference between those different entrants is a huge amount of time. The winning unis made correct entries earlier, and had less incorrect entries.

Compare it to a marathon where there are 9 finish lines. The more you cross, the better you did. Everyone who crossed the 6th line is ranked by when they crossed it - or how fast they ran. They probably also got much closer to the 7th line before the time ran out.
It's also eminently hackable, and based on the Linux kernel.
That's a good one, another poster above suggested something similar. I believe that HN'ers would play fair in something like this.

On the other hand that isn't proof of anything, but I think the changes are higher that someone will own up that didn't do it to throw sand in the eyes of the searchers than the reverse.

But then again, maybe I'm a sucker and I believe that people in general are honest and trustworthy. So far that seems to me to be a better assumption than the reverse.
Google fails to renew Chinese licence
Ask HN: How do I get the word out on my data mining report
Hi HN,

I did data-mining on my site and did some charting and such and BELIEVE my data to be interesting and blog worthy. I created it hoping to get it out there and drive traffic to my web app.

I don't have much of a contact list or presence on the web, so was looking for advice on how to proceed beyond posting to forums and reddit and such.

also i'd like to know whether the data is really blog worthy at all. If you run a blog/site in the domain how could one convince u to write something about it?

thanks much.
The Colts and Patriots Agree on Sports Analytics
Stanford BASES e-bootcamp for college students (apps due Mar 21)
Facebook Stalking to Negotiate
Examine both America in the 1920s and America now. Can you say with complete conviction the American society of now is no worse?

(to borrow an example from http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/ an easy way to negate the effect of medical/tech advances is to imagine a replica of 1920s America appearing overnight in the pacific - do you think it would take this country long to become a world power?)

From the outside it seems as though America has been "going to hell" for at least the last 100 years.
link to the data mining report: http://wiki.elograde.com/full:data-findings
I think there were simple games like that; not reaction stuff, though. I'll ask and hopefully get back to you in less than 24 hours.
The Case for the Fat Start-Up
i believe it is vaksel.
What the hell is wrong with u guys? get off pauls nuts...What has he done for you all? I dont think these guys did anything wrong.Its a sin to worship anyone other than God, smh
It's ok, it seems as if you have real experience doing this, in contrast to the armchair "scaling experts" flooding HN that balk at problems like this.
True in this case, but on-star also has the ability to disable cars, and I suspect a lot of people with it don't know about it: http://www.onstar.com/us_english/jsp/privacy_policy.jsp#othe...
Definitely a possibility... but based on what ?
Solvate is simple outsourcing for startups
Fight Back Code Design Erosion by Breaking Cycles with Sonar
First I want to say that I don't agree with publicly disclosing the "identity" of people who doesn't want to be found. I also don't think doing so "originates" from any good personal quality. That being said, I do remember this [1] talk from last CCC to be interesting from a technical standpoint.

[1] http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/Fahrplan/events/3468.en.h...
searchyc has this.
Derelicts or not, this system is plain evil: it teaches us that stuff we buy is less and less really ours.

We can't hack on stuff, we can't repair stuff, we should use stuff only the way we're supposed to, and now only when we are allowed to. The funniest thing is that we praise "private property"...
How can you go aginst these facts? Did we read the same article?
i tossed a few of the stylistic quirks into a search and took a look at some writing samples. i think his stuff looks the most similar. i'm going purely on my own arbitrary judgment. it just feels right. :) the method itself isn't much different than what has already been talked about.

edit: oh right, i also looked at the fact that he was posting comments on HN around the time that the one in question was posted. a lot of my other candidates didn't meet that data point.
Obviously it would not have to be public, an email with a confirmation and a request to keep it quiet would be fine.

The original poster could log in and disclose who found him first.
Maybe this isn't the place to ask this question, but I've been asked to help a non-profit pick out some stock photography for their new web site (not something I normally do). So, inexpensive and royalty free.

I'm aware of iStockphoto. Any other recommendations for sites / sources?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162135
Is this the same company that was featured as a start-up in an episode of ABC's Shark Tank several months ago?
I'm not in the US so I can't recommend any particular provider. http://www.voip-info.org/ has a lot of information about both providers and equipment.

- For hosting the PBX yourself without learning Asterisk or FreeSWITCH, I can recommend Askozia PBX, which is based on m0n0wall: http://www.askozia.com/

I've also used FreePBX-based systems like TrixBox CE, which are more full-featured and more customizable, but might take more effort to upgrade.

- For reliable faxing, make sure your VoIP provider supports the T.38 protocol and get an ATA (analogue adapter) that supports it. You can then set up T.38 passthrough in your PBX.

- For equipment, I'd recommend going with one of the "known" brands. I've used Linksys SPA9xx and Snom phones, but read forums to see what people recommend for the PBX you choose. Keep in mind that a lot of the buttons and features on the phone might not work "out of the box", depending on the PBX you choose. I'd stay away from no-name brands unless you have tried them yourself or have very good recommendations.
Why did you put this into italics?
It's a bizarre world when people need to be told what a chimney pot is.
Either the author is pretty obtuse, or he's deliberately misrepresenting Bray's comparisons between the web and the iPhone app ecosystem. I thought it was pretty clear in Bray's original post that he wasn't try to say that Apple was censoring the internet, but was using the internet as an example of the virtues of uncensored, unrestricted innovation as compared to the highly restricted environment in the App store.

And of course, as others have already pointed out, saying the mobile Safari's HTML5 support is an acceptable alternative for apps that aren't allowed into the App store is as completely stupid now as it was when Apple released the original iPhone without a local app SDK: http://gizmodo.com/267899/no-iphone-sdk-means-no-killer-ipho...
What I learned from my kid's preschool website
Right, the great thing about predicting the end of the world - or America going to hell, is that you can always say "not yet!" and you're never wrong.
Exactly. It is much better to just write things that you are proud of and then sign them with your real name.
Mine is not a popular opinion and I'll probably lose comment karma for stating it. But Apple wants HTML5 to succeed precisely because it is an absolutely terrible platform on which to develop apps and games. Therefore, it gives them the illusion of supporting openness while being safe from actually competing against their own dev tools.

A lot of geeks love JavaScript and I've never figured out why, having developed in it. (Yes I've read Crockford.) The logic seems to go like this: sure it has problems but functions are first class objects! This means it's like Lisp and everyone knows Lisp is the best! As far as I can tell, arguments for JavaScript being usable don't tend to go much farther than this.
"... it teaches us that stuff we buy^H^H^H BORROW is less and less really ours."

T, FTFY.
No, I am Spartacus!
I am always glad to read about cool technology that could make us safer without being intrusive (lines disappear in ND too in winter), but I really worry that this is all for nothing given its GM. Every so often you hear about cool things from them and it never seems to go anywhere.

I just wish they could build a good, high reliability, low maintenance car that got over 40mpg.
As well as google.
The Hollywood Today post seems to cast all of that in doubt. And now I wonder how much of that interview in Writer's Digest that I cite below was true too. People like true underdog stories. Fake underdog stories are simply despicable.
You do know that the EU economy is larger than the US economy? OK - not one country, but pretty close to one market.
AOL Sets Up $10 Million Venture Fund To Back Local Startups
The American Empire? Yes, it will decline, but the OP did a poor job of explaining why. American corporations won't dominate the world's economic landscape forever.

As a country, we'll be fine. We won't really notice the change, because our standard of living will still be improving as this occurs.
Examine both America in the 1920s and America now. Can you say with complete conviction the American society of now is no worse?

Put yourself in the shoes of someone who isn't white, or is female, and ask the same question. There may be aspects of modern American society that are worse, but it's certainly better for a lot of people.
I am not going to argue definitions, since my view to this is irrelevant. The point is there are many people that do care and don't mind paying my company and others for this service. For those that care about rights, freedoms, etc, this is optional - no one is forcing you, it is for parents to make that choice.

As for rules, there are groups (e.g., 6-10, 12-14) for children and seeing hardcore porn at age 6 is not appropriate, nor is seeing someone's head cut off at 10 on ogrish. Some material I wish I had never seen.
Sadly, in this case, I am not Spartacus. That would require a mind so cunning that it makes mine hurt just to think of it ;-)
are the teenagers just there hanging out and socializing with each other (a common occurrence if there's a cafe inside the bookstore), or are they actually deeply engaged in reading?
I think that was GiftCardRescue: http://www.giftcardrescue.com/