skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Around this time of day the submissions on the new page go by so fast that only the most juicy stuff makes it to the front page. 4 votes before you scroll off the new page or your article might as well be dead, it's very rare (but it does happen) to see anything get traction afterwards.

And of course you didn't write about a scandal in progress or something like that.

If you write just for the interaction with HN I can imagine that it is hard if your stuff goes by unnoticed, but of course there is no automatic relationship between what you did and how it was received in the past coupled with everything you write in the future.

Maybe simply not enough people thought it was homepage worthy and it is a signal to do better? That's how I interpret it when my stuff slides by without even a single upvote.

(I note that even devmonk who commented did not upvote your submission).

Don't take it so personal, as HN grows this is bound to happen more and more often. I've had it happen to me with an article that was requested by people here, that felt pretty weird too, but there really are no guarantees.

Spray and pray :)
The undue emphasis on superficial happiness dissuades people with a healthy range of emotions. I inherited a melancholy disposition from my parents and tend to gloss over it socially. People don't know what to do with it, and that is their fault, as I can only be myself. This creates a strange tension: do they like me when life is good, or all the time? This tension is exacerbated further by being relatively young (28), single (meaning I should always be auditioning for a mate, or something), and, worst of all, existing within a culture (Christianity) that prizes the "has it all together" facade.

My response to all this is learning the games that make up surface-level social interactions and getting good at them. It is definitely faking it, but sometimes you stumble on someone who can talk and listen in equal amounts, at which point I know I can cut the bullshit.
i550 or a Farrier F-22, both are pretty fast sailboats that are pretty straightforward builds.
Mark Zuckerberg On $100 Million Education Donation
What an awesome idea. I'm adding that to my to-do list.
Do you want your screen saver to turn on only when you click a button? There are a number of behaviors that you want your computer to do automatically without your input and a proximity sensor can help it do these things more intelligently. If auto full-screening a video is not one of them, you can always turn that off.
Study: Pricing Practices for Cloud Software
King Java is dead, long live the kind
Oops, sorry... I should have replied to the other comment here, relating to the story in the Washington Post. Deleted and reposted at the proper place.
"An adversary can make such a quicksort go quadratic by arranging for the pivot to compare low against almost all items not seen during pivot selection, so the partition will be lopsided. Those items may be regarded as a “gas” of values whose relationship to each other is unknown. The exact values don’t matter as long as they are not compared against each other. Quadratic behavior is guaranteed since n − O(1) gas values must survive pivot selection among n items. Almost all partition high."

This paragraph from the paper is a false statement when applied to randomized quicksort. The adversary cannot "arrange for the pivot to compare low against all items not seen during pivot selection," if quicksort was randomized namely because the adversary has no information about the other elements. In deterministic quicksort he does. Thus, this is where his argument breaks down in relation to randomized quicksort.

I think he focused on deterministic and just tacked on the statement about randomized without thinking about it. Its a very subtle error to make when using the adversarial method against a randomized algorithm and because his analysis deals with deterministic quicksort I doubt he put much thought into the randomized case.
ARM is low power. For applications which scale horizontally, Oracle could build a server with lots of ARM's inside. There is already a startup (Smooth-Stone) which proposes to do exactly this.

Also, an Open Solaris port for ARM exists. Oracle may plan to extend/rebuild it.

http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Project+osarm/WebHome
I love that this has gotten so well-known. Tanya is from my hometown and it's fantastic to see a member of our arts community make an imprint on the world like she has.
But that would have the unintended side-effect of making the site much more attractive to spammers because they'd be almost guaranteed some homepage exposure.
It's been around since 2007 (or earlier). They just renamed/bundled it.

See my longer comment further down this page for details.
The Text Field Glow
I was a bit shocked when I got to the last line...

"Instead, he blogs about the most interesting ones. Companies embarrassed by having their e-mails posted online can get him to pull the entries from his blog for a small payment."

Blackmail for a good cause is still blackmail.
Short answer, from the article: The secret to raising boys who read, I submit, is pretty simple—keep electronic media, especially video games and recreational Internet, under control (that is to say, almost completely absent). Then fill your shelves with good books.
Ask HN: What is the best website for tracking flight status?
I just got through browsing some of the popular flight status tracking web sites to track my wife's morning flight. However, I didn't find any site all that great of an experience. Does anyone have a favorite?
Uhh, the JVM does runtime compilation as well.
Although to be fair to Wine they have had to build the entire stack - as far as I can see this only runs on Windows. Presumably emulating the Windows APIs on Windows is a lot easier than emulating them on a completely different underlying platform.

Still - it's pretty cool.
What Entrepreneurs Should do about Price Fixing
Designing Facebook Places
I would argue that ARM is the biggest threat to Intel/AMD in the datacenter over the next ten years. Datacenter design these days is all about computation/joule/$, and ARM has a big lead by that metric. Smooth-Stone is already working on ARM-based server designs, and I'm sure more are in the works. Seems like exactly the kind of processor Oracle would want to own.
When China overtook India- using DEDUCER
PicScout: Where Risk-taking and Entrepreneurial Drive Are Part of DNA
HN isn't broken. So please, don't try to fix it.
But, he says, it "reminds people that the effects of relativity are actually experienced in their daily lives, not just by scientists".

If you enjoyed this article, surely you will enjoy _Einstein’s Dreams_:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einsteins_Dreams
I know I barely have time to read the stuff on the front page, let alone the new page. As it is, my wide reading berth takes an hour or two of my time a day and I try to submit interesting stuff I find. But much beyond that and I'm not getting stuff done.

A new front page sidebar could work, but it would clutter things up. I'm not sure of a design that combines new with popular. Are there any precedents out there?
Sometimes I wonder what my iPad can do that I can't do better on my laptop. The answer, always, is reading articles Instapaper.

That is if I can manage to wrestle it away from my girlfriend playing Plants vs Zombies!
It is just simply improper and disrespectful of others for anyone to communicate in the manner that Dave has

I think that is the essence of his persona. The whole justification for it-- I'm smart and I have money so I don't have to show anyone respect. Deal with it or leave.

It reminds me of my concept of ancient Rome for some reason. A place where power ruled, rather than the concept of egalitarianism.
"Inverse nanobarns"? WTF? I've never heard of the unit "barn", but a nanobarn just sounds like its about to spew out nanounicorns followed by nanoblackholes.

But its cool to see their progress and how they're slowly ramping up the power and beams to split instead of just going full throttle all at once.
Check out the airline itself. Many of them have their own flight tracking status apps. I personallyy use http://flightaware.com/
30+ Beautifully Designed Navigation Bar For Your Inspiration
A navigation bar (also known as a links bar or link bar) is a sub region of a web page that contains hypertext links in order to navigate between the pages of a website. Since it usually appears on all or at least on several pages of a website, it is one of the key design-elements of websites – in terms of usability as well as visual attractiveness.
Also there are books, googling around there is plenty. I actually have a store near my house that supports home built guitars and the guy there was really helpful, but that doesn't scale at all.

http://buildyourguitar.com/resources/links.htm
Well my father has built about 10 guitars (acoustic and electric), so that is kind of cheating.

Electric are definitely easier. Much like a computer the hardest part is figuring out what to buy because there are so many options. Figure out what kind of wood, what kind of neck, what kind of pickups etc to get the sound you want. A lot of people just knock off a common setup like a Les Paul or something well known.

I'd recommend buying the neck off the shelf, then it really comes down to just making the body which is general woodworking type stuff. (The block of wood heavily influences the sound so obviously you order one specifically for guitar building). The electronics are straightforward. The most technical part is the paint. You probably want to spray, I guess you could stain but in my case we had an aircompressor and a spray gun so it was too hard.

If you want to get more advanced, you can start to inlay stuff, I inlaid my name in mother of pearl on the neck, that was tough, but that is not necessary to build your own guitar, that was just for fun.

Actual build time is not that bad. If you have the tools it is cheaper than buying one, if you don't have the tools it is more expensive.
I think I need that fix. Thanks for reporting it!
This 25-year-old kid just funded 15 startups
End of An Era: HP Acquires ArcSight
I'm not even sure my votes ever count on HN so I rarely vote. The algorithms, as people talk about them, seem to be stacked against us casual readers.
Well done on taking your time out to do this. Congrats on launching.

I find this one far less scannable. I see what you tried to do but it needs a bit more refinement.
It's a lot harder to stick a database like oracle on a mini farm of very small processors than it is to throttle down a larger CPU during idle moments.

For the most part database servers that run Oracle are are not 'underutilized' that I would expect a huge pay-off from that.

The systemZ port of open solaris has already been killed by Oracle, I would not be much surprised to see them do the same with the ARM port (as far as I know it's not exactly the most popular platform for open solaris).

If there is change on the part of Oracle with respect to open solaris on ARM I'd expect it to be of the terminal variety.
Ask HN: Dropbox?
Hi All,

I would live thoughts on the Dropbox service. Reliable? Good Customer Service? Horror stories?

My goal here is just what they advertise for functionality. Unified across my devices, sharing, etc. I currently backup to a number of devices, etc.

Could I make my home directory for My mac my DropBox drive? Smart idea?

What do you all think would happen if DropBox went out of business. Would they make sure we all had copies of our data?

I have MobileMe now. It is decent for sure. I can buy 60gb more space for $99 for the year (or $49 for 40gb) It seems to have similar functionality. I doubt Apple would give us our data if they decided to discontinue MobileMe. It seems unlikely they would though.
You're right. And the last thing we want right now is to see another company go down in patent flames.
Encourage the USPTO to stop issuing software patents; deadline September 27
Databases are not about computation, they're about throughput, IO, vast gobs of memory, it goes much further than being simply compute bound.

Oracle is a database vendor first, OS vendor second, I can't make the case for them becoming a chip manufacturer, but who knows, I've been wrong before.
Thanks for the Mesh Potato mention. I haven't seen this project before but am very interested in stuff like this. My question is: what would happen if we overnight got an entire country wired? What kind of social, political and economic consequences would that have? I'm not thinking of the US, which already has a decent infrastructure, even if we want it to be better/faster/more neutral. I am thinking of African countries, a market largely underexposed to the internet. I suppose I can picture a startup trying to do this. Just think how many more Facebook users there could be...
Thanks Jacques. As usual, we agree. Sometimes I wonder why I reply to your comments at all, since we agree so much. :)

I think what bugged me was the lack of drive-by readers.

HN is pretty much the only site I submit to. I have no aspirations of blogging as a business. I blog because I want to, and I'd blog if nobody came by. So heck with the score or the front-page status. And no, it doesn't bug me that a large percentage of what I write is not home-page material. That's okay too. Hey, I got used to being a mediocre writer many years ago. It's all spray and pray now.

The problem is that as a submitter you'd at least like to get a decent second set of eyeballs on your work. The value the site provides to me as a submitter isn't making the front page -- it's getting the feedback from readers. No initial readers, no feedback (good or bad)

Sure, there is a bit of sour grapes here. I guess you'd think if you spent a long time writing something that in return you'd at least receive a reasonable review. But if the average number of initial reviewers is decreasing for everybody, it can't help but mean a decrease in the quality of material overall. So it would seem that my problem as a submitter, even a submitter of poor quality material, affects the quality of material on the site for all users.
I like Flight Aware, but that's the only one I've ever really used. They've got a nice map (you can even overlay over the sectional), plus histories for flight numbers, routes, similar routes and lots of other neat stuff.

I will admit it seems a little more geared towards pilots than the masses but there is lots of information presented well.
Yep. On the bright side, he is admitting he received the emails and is willing to pull them down. noreply.com is currently held by a domain sitter. Are they capturing emails behind the scenes? What other domain names are foolishly used for redirecting email?

Further, while there might be blackmail involved here, could those companies be sued for fraud for misrepresenting their identities to be this guy? Is "ignorance" a defense?
I think some of the reason Google News is the way it is has to do with balancing the line between providing free content and not paying copyright holders (Newspapers). Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

That being said, you're correct about quality being an issue. It seems that there are more algorithms, and less human component, deciding what reaches the front page. I think it would work better if it were like this:

1) Algorithm "bubbles up" the best news stories.

2) A trained human (or humans) filters through them, selects the best article.

3) Said article gets posted on the front page.

The trained person would have to have good journalistic taste. Pick out articles with proper headlines, rather than link-bait titles, or titles written by someone who has little clue what he/she is talking about (e.g. there aren't many journalists who are DBA's).

--------------------

A BIGGER problem is this: Showing only "news" and not "fluff".

Whenever there's a top-ten list, celebrity news, an op-ed piece, sports "news", reports on "marketing material" for new products/services, a puppy who fell down the well, "sharks" in the ocean (who pose no threat to you), the virgin mary appearing on a piece of toast, etc..., that's not real news. That's entertainment.

It would be nice if there was a news source that filtered all of that crap out. It might be as simple as gathering all news stories, and RegEx'ing out anything that also appears on Fark.com. ;)

The only news organization I'm aware of which does this well is PBS's News Hour. The problem is their presentation is very dry. On the plus side, they don't have "opinionated" reporters who add judgmental tones of voice and facial expressions to their presentation.

--------------------

Another random thought goes back to Op-Ed pieces. It would be nice if all online newspapers, or some sort of services, marked them as such, visually distinguishing them from news pieces. Perhaps make the webpage background light sky blue, rather than white. Anything, in a subtle visual manner, which states "This is someone's opinion; it may or may not be true".
They didn't need to buy Sun to run on their servers, either. But they clearly have ambitions to own the whole stack.
> persons of great computational ability (which I shall refer to as nerds)

I consider myself a nerd (obsessed with computers, technology, programming), but I'm not of "great computational ability", in fact, I hate crunching numbers, and I hated highschool math. The value of PI never fascinated me, I never tried to memorize any portion of it (other than 3.14).

I'm an 'INFP'[1] so I tend to look at the big picture and ignore the details. I only dive into a detail temporarily, on an as-needed basis, to fix a bug or improve performance, or something like that.

Point is, not all computer nerds are math geeks.

The only math I loved was elementary math, first degree equations, and from university: discrete math.

[1] http://personalitytype.com/career_quiz_2
Agreed.

It makes us designers stronger. One of the first things I tell people trying to better their design is just that… redo your favourite website. Learn the techniques they used, find out what they did what they did and then mess it up and make it better.
the RSS feed is nice for catching new threads, but I haven't been using google reader much lately for my own reasons. (http://news.ycombinator.com/rss)
It would be interesting to run IIS Express on spoon.
As for the original topic of your submission, minimalistic interfaces, I'm all for it.

I predict the death of the submit button in the next 2 years.
Feature a random article selected from new articles submitted by users with at least 10 points?
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is now Richer than Apple CEO Steve Jobs
And actually, I'd also say that there's never a moment where 1/6 man is born.
I think it's unlikely for Oracle to buy ARM. They are more likely to buy chip companies in $30-300MM range, not multi-billion companies.
But, I see why Ellison would like to buy ARM:

* Buying ARM will give Oracle more leverage over Google in their Android/Java litigation.

* Combining their SPARC and Server expertise with ARM Design expertise will give them competitive advantage in Low Power High Density Datacenter plays.
What are these structures of society that make it possible for people to succeed?

How about enforcement of contracts, roads, and currency, to name the first three that came to mind?

But every tax, regulation, divisive political program, and every faction seeking to impose its narrow agenda on everyone at once just have the effect of raising the stakes of participating in society. They give people more to lose and more to fear in openly relating to others; people become less likely to form stable networks of trust and more likely to become isolated, disconnected, and paranoid.

I have no idea where you came up with this. It's empirically falsified just by looking at which of the populations of low-tax, laissez-faire America and high-tax, social democrat Western Europe is the most disconnected and paranoid...
I would expect that Apple, Google, Samsung, TI, and Qualcomm would do a little bit of a panic and try to put in competing bids. ARM works because it is a neutral party, and Oracle would be regarded as anything but a neutral party. This could have a large impact on a lot of companies, and some of those companies have much deeper pockets than Oracle.

Give Oracle already has SPARC, perhaps he meant GLOBALFOUNDRIES?
Ask HN: Who I can talk with about illegal hacking/malware?
I am creating an infographic about the business of spyware/malware and am having a hell of a time finding reliable research on the net. I would love to be able to talk (email) with someone who knows about the scene/process. It would be totally off the record, OR I can include a link to your site in the post.

For the record, I create some of the most popular infographics on the web

infographics.byJess.net

Can someone pass this on or contact me Jess -at- byJess.net
Thanks, I'm using linux.
"Refuse to change and don't want to learn new technologies" might be code for "the pain isn't acute enough to justify the effort of changing." How much are you really automating?

If it's a meaningful amount, there's a process in sales called "developing the need" of the customer (Read Spin Selling by Rackham). The process is basically asking them about how they do things and try to build a shared understanding of how much time/discomfort their current solution is costing them. Take a molehill and turn it into a mountain. Of course, it works best if it really IS costing them and they just don't think about it.
>keep electronic media, especially video games and recreational Internet, under control (that is to say, almost completely absent). Then fill your shelves with good books.

The problem with these books is that they interfere with the more traditional crafts of conversation and oratory.
The best spot to make a difference is the second and third pages of the 'new' set, that's where the stuff is that got lost.
Feross also already had a great reputation (and resume). He is well known at Stanford, organizing ACM events, among other things.
Dropbox is great all around for a number of reasons. The pricing is pretty good too, but for most uses, the free account is sufficient. There are tons of useful features too. If the service goes down, you have the stuff available on every PC that has synced. Check out http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/15_hacks_every_dro... and http://www.maximumpc.com/article/howtos/how_hack_your_dropbo... too.
So this is how the 'codec wars' annoy me. I cannot watch this on my iPad or in Safari. I guess I'll be recoding it to MP4. Will post a URL when done.
That is awesome, never seen that idea before.
My first job out of university was working on the mainframe systems for the Canada Pension Plan (equivalent to US Social Security). Every now and then some upstanding citizen would go in to register for their retirement benefits only to be told that unfortunately, as far as the computer was concerned, they were already dead. So we would run the "Lazarus" routine to resurrect them.

That was in the mid 90's but I'm sure the same thing is still happening today. Pensioners will eventually die, but that old COBOL code never will! :)
It all comes down to the royalties ARM will charge the chipmakers. If the price of a TI OMAP or Freescale i.MX jumps 100%, that seriously hurts the price of phones and netbooks.

Google, Apple, and Microsoft really don't get hurt on the software end, just the hardware pricing end.
They may be a database vendor first, but they also have a big applications business. They already have a good processor for databases (sparc), and ARM is exactly the kind or architecture you want for your app servers. Btw, I'm just playing devil's advocate. I sincerely hope that ARM doesn't join the Oracle graveyard of once-great technologies.
Student Arrested For Bringing "Weapon" To School