skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yet I think that Joel nailed it with this phrase:

"A 50%-good solution that people actually have solves more problems and survives longer than a 99% solution that nobody has because it’s in your lab where you’re endlessly polishing the damn thing"

I also agree with nickelplate's comment (summary: Joel's main point that programmers should be pragmatic and be wary of using technologies they don't understand, as this is bound to get in the way of shipping a product.)
Alyssa P. Hacker NEVER answer a question.. she only ask trcky ones.
And of course, all developers should be familiar with U+F8D0 through U+F8FF.
I tried that, but I'm constantly logged into my main google account and having a few browsers open was a pain.
reddit uses the Wilson algo for comment sorting:

http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-s...
Wow, thanks! Didn't know about that
Startup Profile: Call-Em-All (Automated Voice Messaging)
What, poverty is the default state for all humans everywhere, or just China? Is silence part of the "default state" too?
OK, so what they are saying is that The Onion is throwing away 66% of its traffic by serving up 404s instead of serving up page views. Wouldn't they 1) have a better user experience by redirecting to the correct URL 2) have more page views and most important 3) make more money off of ads?

The Internet is trying to give the gift of free traffic and The Onion is saying: "no thanks." Most sites have to pay for traffic, and wouldn't be trowing it away.

Way to play it like Big Media. What's next? A pay wall?
WikiLeaks update: "We are fine" - http://twitter.com/wikileaks/statuses/10993931099
Isn't "Never carry your social security card in your wallet" standard advice? I was taught that since I was a child, before identity theft was even really a mainstream thing.

As to credit cards, if your wallet is lost or stolen, you can quickly cancel the cards. It is probably more difficult to quickly change all your passwords.

Keeping them in a safe, however, is probably a fine idea. Potentially a good one if you want people to have access to certain accounts if something happens to you.
Fixing Ruby's Inheritance Model Transparently (Neat Hack)
Message to Google: Not MORE data. LESS data that's MORE useful.

I don't want more crap buzzing in my inbox. I want you to help me find just the most important stuff.

I don't want more crap shared to me on Google Reader. I want you to notice that I'm getting over 100 new articles a day, but only 5 of them have any relevance to my work.

Just as your search pages showed fewer (but more useful) results than your competitors and gmail showed less spam, I'd like you to help me get less data everywhere else online.
Definitely agree. A lot of people use their Bloomberg Terminals completely by keyboard, whenever they even so much as change the tab ordering of fields on a function people complain. A lot of people have the layouts/ordering memorized.

Think about how much people complain when Facebook change their UI. Now imagine that if when they changed their layout you weren't able to do your job because it took you twice as long to find some information or if you lost a lot of money because you missed a pricing alert. Users are opposed to change for many reasons other than complexity for complexities sake.

If your company is willing to shell out $2k/month to give you a Bloomberg you've got other stuff you can brag about far more than the fact you can use a complex piece of software.

But I imagine the real reason they haven't done anything is simply because it's not worth it. Investing a huge amount of money (we're talking in the high tens or low hundreds of millions here) to revamp your GUI without a clear return on investment would be idiotic. They have been tackling the low hanging fruits though (the new graphs, font, etc.).
Ponder the possibility that you might be the one who changed. Maybe you read too much blog advice and got tired of it. Too much of anything is bad.

We have over a hundred thousand readers at SvN. Some just joined, some has been with us for a decade, everyone is different in some sense.

I write about what I care about and what I think about without too much concern as to whether everyone will love it all.
How Your iPhone Enables Genocide
Why doesn’t Apple have an App?
I think the "beginner" section needs a lot more work. After reading the top 3 entries assuming beginner's level, I'm left with... wait... remote branch? tracking? merge? fetch? so how do I do this "commit" you're talking about? what are you talking about?

If they want to fulfil the goal of the site ("The goal with this site is to make it usable as a way for beginners to get off the ground using Git [...]"), they still have a long way to go.
>So if a product has a large number of ratings, but they are 50/50 positive and negative, then it's not going to rise to the top simply because it has the most reviews.

What I'm saying is that it will rise to the top because even though only 50% of the ratings are positive, it will have many many more positive ratings than the nearest next item. That 2nd item may have a much higher percentage of positive ratings, but a much lower number of total ratings.
It's not their fault people autopost every blog post to Hacker News and upvote it.
"The Onion is throwing away 66% of its traffic by serving up 404s instead of serving up page views."

Spidering and organic activity are bundled together in this 66% number. It would be interesting to know what percentage of this was people who wanted to see an Onion page.
Look up where Singapore is located. It's not even close to china.
Interesting resource. Not comprehensive but it looks like a decent resource to point newcomers to.

I think it would be useful for him to put together a faq for someone completely new to git and provide some kind of outline of what order to learn specific things.
While I'm neither a Marxist nor a Chomskyite-anarcho-syndicalist, I have read Manufacturing Consent, and I'd say it's a pretty straight-forward application of Gramsci's theory of hegemony to the United States. Gramsci, the leader of the Italian Communist Party, wrote his theory while in jail, outlining two forms of domination: direct coercion, and rule through civil society. Hegemony is the latter—the production of seemingly spontaneous consent for the policies of the (capitalist-controlled) state. The capitalist ruling class accomplishes this through the production of an intellectual class and related institution that support and justify the current order. The public absorbs these ideas and narratives and thus consents to the exploitative capitalist order.

Chomsky just applied that idea to the United States during the Cold War (although I'm sure he would say it's still applicable). The capitalists control the corporate media, they set up foundations that fund think tanks, they lobby the government. All reporting is dependent on advertising from corporations that won't brook deviations from the current order. So an overall discourse is created in the U.S. by corporate control which makes sure the debate stays within certain bounds of dissent, but never goes so far as to be dangerous to the capitalist system.

If you don't buy Gramscianism and don't see capitalists as capable of running society's discourse in a coordinated and conspiratorial manner, you probably won't buy Manufacturing Consent's argument.

On a side note, I was reading it in a Starbucks in London in 2003 during the run-up to the Iraq War. A Canadian reporter approached me for the purpose of interviewing me about the Iraq War, simply because I was reading Chomsky. She was hoping to get an anti-war quote from an angry young Brit, but was surprised that I was American. An interesting selection bias on the part of the reporter.
Sharing over ideas is how we work on our company. That's how we've always worked on our company.

If you're not going to out-spend the competition on advertising, you damn well better have another strategy for getting people interested. For the past decade we've been sharing our ideas and opinions on Signal vs Noise and that has turned out quite alright.

Also, I'm curious to hear what our 4 or 5 mantras are? Maybe you're a better pattern-matcher than me, but if, for example, we could reduce the ~90 essays in REWORK to just 4-5 master ideas, that'd be quite the amazing compression. I thought we already kept it pretty tight at ~30K characters, but sounds like you have a better algorithm.
Except when the company is cashflow negative and needs to continue issuing debt to operate. Once confidence in them is shot, and they can't find money to borrow, they file for bankruptcy. See the parallel?
If you think Apple's app store policies are ambigious, try Nintendo's
It's very nice to see a mathematically motivated piece on how to sort based on users ratings. But there are two problems with the solution presented, the first minor, and the second more serious.

Minor: Distributions of ratings are not usually normal about the average possible rating -- they are usually skewed to the positive end, because people are pretty good at selecting what they read or view. The solution presented will tend to skew low-frequency ratings too far toward the average. It should be easy to calculate an expected average for your site, and use this instead of 1/2 for the formula given in the post.

Major: What you really need is a missing data point: the number of readers who haven't made any rating at all. It's pretty clear if you think of two examples:

Item 1
1,000,000 views
10 positive ratings
1 negative rating

Item 2
15 views
10 positive ratings
1 negative rating

Clearly, readers feel pretty blah about Item 1. You're much better off displaying Item 2, other things being equal, but the formula doesn't distinguish the two cases.
Who's who amongst the deniers of Global Warming -- the soap opera continues
The thinking is work on the best idea that you have right now. Not the best one you haven't even come up with yet. That's not going to be very helpful.
Cigarette Lighter Device Said To Improve Car’s Fuel Effeciency By 18%
Is this person spamming? Flamming? Being somehow inappropriate?

Guys, there is absolutely no reason that this comment should be at -4 (other than the caps at the end). Siculars is making a semi-valid point. Content publishes do want the internet to be static in the way that books are. They want you to go to facebook and see it exactly as they have laid it out and they want you to see it in this fashion because it is good for them.

Please, let's not try and suppress comments just because we don't agree with them. That's inappropriate and, really, pretty juvenile.

Sicular, you make a good point, but I probably would have left that adaptation of "First the came" off.

In addition, I think that 100% flash websites are becoming less common (the only one I can think of right now is grooveshark, and I'm not entirely sure that that is all flash). To me, the 100% flash stuff was all about "what you see is what you get", so seeing it go away is good :).

I think we might see a resurgence of this when the iPad starts gaining popularity. A lot of publishers are very intrigued by the idea of a static medium for their designers to work on. It should be interesting to watch.
I call you self-righteous because you don't seem to know much about the situation in China, but make blanket statements based on a few readings of prominent western publications.

Look, we're both on the same page. Democracy in China is good. Demanding democracy is good.

The matter at hand is how best to transition to a true meaningful democracy. My point, that transition should come slow in order to minimize social/economic/political disruption is on point. EVERY prominent western publications agree on this matter.

Slow transition is pragmatic, and favoring it does not equate one to a CCP sympathizer nor is it self defeatist. Different strokes for different folks.

China has already proven that one can spur economic development by going its own way instead of following western policies. There is no reason to believe that it can't transition to a democracy there own way as well.

Your assertion that those in power do not want to give it up and a slow transition to democracy are not mutually exclusive. AGAIN many of China's neighbors have been able to make this transition so I don't see why this can't be done in China. True, dictators don't want to give up power. The trick is making them do so with non-violent disruptive means, and that can be achieved with a large middle class, educated polity, etc things that provide collective power to the masses.

I urge you to actually visit China and you'll see that not all people who use the word "democracy" are brutally oppressed. By god, even senior ranking members of the CCP have used the term during state speeches!

In regards to corruption you are right that its a big issue, although I know of no study that states the problem is as big as you make it. That said, do note that concentration of wealth/power among the social elite is an unfortunate part of reality the world over, the west included.

The main point though that I want to get across is that people like you, smart educated westerners, need to realize that the problems in China are not NEARLY at the level that the media presents it to be. Anyone who has visited China in the past few years can attest to this. Even in the countryside, many problems have been SEVERELY alleviated.

The problems you have listed and the China you have presented is really a caricature of present reality.
>Be aware of a strong anti-chinese bias in the general US media

That's what's valuable about this leak. It's not just a Western journalist's subjective, emotional assessment of the state of Chinese politics. It's Chinese politics written by Chinese politicians in their own words, and the leak was made by the Chinese not Westerners. Bias doesn't enter into the reporting.
Ah, I see your point and I agree. "Rainmaker" is the wrong term for sure. A better categorization would be exactly what you said, a "doer" ... so to restate my comment: make sure you push some of those rank 1 ideas forward, if even marginally, as it will help you mature from a dreamer to a "doer"
Swarms of Helicopter Robots Could Create Huge 3-D Displays
MIT is developing tiny, lighted helicopters whose movement will be coordinated to create shape-shifting displays.
In the spirit of "ask HN: who's hiring" FOSS job board
>we have had relatively few wars

I don't think that's an accurate representation. We've had a short history compared to European states, but we've packed a lot of fighting into that time: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/crs/rl30172.htm
> Just because it doesn't have a gui as sexy or user friendly as versions [...]

Subversion's killer-app GUI is Tortoise, and Mercurial has a similar tool, too: TortoiseHg. (http://tortoisehg.bitbucket.org/)

So I don't think this is really a GUI problem.
37 signals and Fog Creek target very sophisticated users, so in their case a well respected blog goes a long way. You could probably make the same argument for Mint, although I think their main target is a rung lower than the other two.
Well, I've been doing it full-time for 5 years now. And at the scale we operate on, 5 years is a lot of data. 172 startups is several times the number a VC partner would deal with in his career.
And I thought we all were still living in the 21st century.

I wonder if this is how it is in mainland China, what it must be like in Tibet..
Like most investors, we wouldn't normally get any return till what in the business is called a "liquidity event," meaning either an acquisition or an IPO.
What will be Facebook's AdWords?
I agree. Focusing on trying to figure out what your “best idea” is because you want to optimize your time and only work on that is not always the best approach. Sometimes this can lead to procrastination and self doubt because you are not sure what your best idea is and you don’t want to waste your time working on anything else (which then causes you to waste time).

There is value in starting on any idea that you have and working hard on it because often you get inspired while working and a better idea will present itself. Then you can choose to integrate that idea into what you are working on or drop what you are doing switch to the better idea.
I agree, especially that the skew needs to be site dependent. For example the iPhone app store actually has the opposite problem where their rate on delete "feature", skews the average ratings way down. Reviews are heavily distributed along 1 star or 5 star ratings.

Would also be curious to see a comparison of different rating systems, for example i'd like to see what the distribution is on a site thumbs up/down rating site like digg vs a 5 star system.
Ask HN: How to become friendly, communicative and talkative?
Hi, I'm a developer but i'm not so friendly, communicative, talkative (in fact i'm real lousy at that) if I improve these areas I would benefit so much. Anyone has tips/books/psycho/tricks that can help me be a very friendly, talkative, communicative, funny developer?
Real Men of Genius: Mr Cell Phone Holster Wearer
Yup, I use Coda
It does not say that the insertion is O(1). It says that it's O(1) _at the head_.
This article is very insightful. Thanks for the great read.

Landing pages -- that's one magical knob everyone should definitely turn...
Infographics -- The Oatmeal is another great example of the effectiveness of this
I'm a big fan of MLK. He once said "the arch of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice"

You could argue that this applies to China. Change is long and slow, but there is progress being made. The situation today, even with its restrictions, is 100x better than it was 10, 20, 30 years ago. There is little reason to believe that it won't continue to improve.

The middle class is growing, people are increasingly more educated, these two things are major ingredients for democracy.

Why I think you're use of his Letter From Birmingham Jail is a "bullshit passionate appeal" is because the context that his letter was written in and the current Chinese climate are two different beasts.

Are my points that off? I'm surprised by how much opposition I've incurred on HN. The points I've raised and the arguments I've made are not radical. They are in fact widely accepted / endorsed by the majority of China scholars in the west.
Oh. I may need an addendum then.
I'm not into SIGGRAPH papers, though if they implement those, it would explain the short time it takes to make. I am, however, still amazed by the possibilities of Photoshop: Photoshop shows us how the human brain is capable of finding patterns in nature and copy that realistically.

Surely, the latter comment was an overstatement if you're working professionally with Photoshop. But I do think it sooner or later would be some truth in my statement: If Photoshop manage to imitate realism well enough that humans don't see mistakes, then the only thing they would have to work on is speeding up the algorithm. (in that area of Photoshop, of course)
I wonder if they'll be converting Clippy next.

That seems to be the only thing left on the site that is still Flash.
I like this interview because I was in a really good mood when Peter shot it. The startups had just finished the second (of three) demo day sessions, and they had all just nailed their presentations. I was so relieved. You can see from their body language in the background that they're all happy too.
I got 48 KB of HTML, 110 KB of stylesheets, 59 KB of images, and 136 KB of Javascript. I'm curious how you got your 142 KB number. Do you mean after it's been gzipped?
Well any number of things are supposed to do something but never seem to take off. I think it's newsworthy that Django got this level of validation.
Still, I wonder what Google does with page rank that goes to a 404 vs a permanent redirect.
A couple of notes there: first the item at the top of the list has more than an order of magnitude more ratings than the rest. For most ordered lists, this is probably an edge case that may have to be dealt with separately.

Finally, I've got to say, 26 reviews (for the #2 item) doesn't seem insignificant, and the #2 item seems to have something like a 15% higher _average_ rating. Also, on another trending rating (http://www.rateitall.com/t-3239938-2010-ncaa-tournament-team...), the #2 has a significantly higher rating (17-18% it looks like), but only one less review: 4 vs. 3. I think if I were sorting either of these based on the average rating and the # of ratings, I would have done both differently.

Based on this, it seems that the Wilson score probably _over-emphasizes_ sample size, especially on things like ratings on high-traffic internet sites that may have orders of magnitude swings in the number of ratings.

It seems like the Amazon method of average works just fine, except for items with very few ratings possibly receiving disproportionately high ratings. Again, edge cases, which should probably just be penalized manually.
In the absence of an objective definition of "well executed" I will give my opinion. Yes, Silverlight is well executed. I have done fairly complex apps in both SL and Flash, and the SL experience was better.

Some reasons: Flash is the 10th iteration of a platform on the 3rd iteration of a language, so Flash has several completely different and incompatible ways to do everything. Flash code must be written in ActionScript, which can be used in exactly one environment (well, not counting Flash Media Server).

The SL platform, on the other hand, is much more recent and has the benefit of throwing away years of iteration on WPF and doing things "right" from the start. It is well organized, consistent, and performs well. You can use libraries from non-SL projects in SL without rewriting them in a dead-end language.
"Const is not supported in IE [...] and wasn't originally supported in js."

Which is an irrelevant point anyway since it still doesn't justify hijacking an already commonly accepted convention for some other purpose.

"In other words you can put () around the assignment, but that doesn't mean you should or that it's a best practice."

The point is that the meaning is clarified by using the convention.

"It is advisable to not use simple assignments in a conditional expression,..."

I would not presume to know what level of brevity is desirable for a developer in a given situation. Conventions like the one mentioned are available for clarification of such constructs.

"Crockford literally wrote the book on JavaScript, and I've seen his defense of some of his coding conventions in various talks, so I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt."

Accepting an argument based on perceived authority is a logical fallacy. "the book on JavaScript" has some questionable things as well I hear:

Function.prototype.method = function(name, func) {
this.prototype[name] = func;
return this;
};

I do truly hope people don't consider such examples a good idea.
That doesn't explain why HFCS should be worse that sucrose. It contains about the same about of fructose and according to Dr. Lustig the bound is very easy for the body to break.

Regarding "The Bitter Truth", it's amazing to me that the fact that fructose is processed by the liver is not widely known. How could the medical community not know this for so long?
I stopped here:

5) Already a successful entrepreneur? Self-fund from cash via your last exit. VCs will be beating down your door to co-invest. Your choice...

This is garbage.
Meliae - Python memory usage analyser
I use what reddit uses, works well

http://code.reddit.com/browser/r2/r2/lib/db/sorts.py

s = score(ups, downs)
order = log(max(abs(s), 1), 10)
sign = 1 if s > 0 else -1 if s < 0 else 0
seconds = epoch_seconds(date) - 1134028003
return round(order + sign * seconds / 45000, 7)
These days, being associated with the YC brand is at least as valuable as the mentoring for the purposes of raising money. I don't think that's necessarily a good thing for these emerging companies and founders.