skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I need some clarification on #1:

Could you provide easy examples where you would use a pair-wise approach, and a list-wise approach? Like, let's say I wanted to build a recommendation system for college football pick-ems (Ie, will Iowa beat Michigan State? Etc.). Which method would be preferred, and why?

Another question:

Let's say (again) that I want to build a recommendation engine for college football picks. How do I know how much (more) data will help for training purposes? IE, will only Win/loss records suffice [probably not], or should I add in the opponent they beat (or were beaten by) as well? What about whether the game was away/at home? What about factoring in the individual players on each team, and their stats? What about the temperature that day? How you do end up knowing when you can stop looking at smaller and smaller variables with your training data, and have something that gives the best results?
I was a postdoc during the NYC transit strike, I read how much various unskilled MTA job categories (e.g., garbage collector, token booth cashier [1]) made and how much of a pay increase they hoped for. That was depressing.

[1] For those outside NYC, we have a human in many subway stations selling metrocards. Often the human refuses to sell metrocards and just points people to the vending machine.
It's possible, but I think such criticism should be leveled at those specific cases where it is applicable, preferably clear cut cases.

To take a general stance like this against a whole class of submissions many of which were clearly done from an altruistic point of view is just not very friendly at all.
Ditto. And it's so awesome to see the author's whimsy pay off so well, judging by the overall response here.
Self-empathy as a source of "willpower"
Could MZ have done more damage control since the release of the social network? He's given away hundreds of millions of dollars and done myriad interviews since then. This is at least the most direct he's been about why he's around so much in the public eye. But really, come on, it's a movie.
I saw your reply where you said you were running automatic submissions. What was your point in doing that though? Gathering up lots of interesting stories and avoiding having to submit them manually? Trying to auto-submit the ever-popular Atlantic, NY Times, and TechCrunch articles to increase your karma? Spamming HN for profit? Or, just to see if you could? (As you allude to..)
You got downvoted (probably for snarky-ness) but I agree with your sentiment.

These heroku outages are slowly turning into a running gag. I'm not even hosting anything on heroku, yet this is the 3rd time I hear about a multi-hour outage this year. God knows how many outages I didn't hear about.

So, "rock-solid" does indeed sound a bit out of place here.
as the father of a 11 month old daughter I can attest to part one, and that I'm terrified of #2. :-)
I think the point here is that this Teenager thinks that the punishment for not handing over the password can't be as long as the punishment for proving a crime using the evidence stored on his harddrive. I didn't go to the link, but from what I remember, he's accused of possessing child porn. In US, it would be as easy as saying, I've been under so much duress because of all this, that I forgot what the key is and where I kept it. I mean, they can't keep him locked up forever, right.
> Often, a good test of whether something is worth doing is "what if everyone did the same?"

I don't buy this logic; it implies, for instance, that no one in the world should be a professional programmer, because if everyone was, no other jobs would get done.

In this specific instance, I think the Offer HN submissions go against the "News" part of Hacker News, but a few here and there are not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps allowing anyone to downvote self-referential posts would help stem the tide?
For traveling up the chain your method is the best. For getting replies to a tweet there is an undocumented API [1] that was implemented with #newtwitter that returns some responses.

You could also use the third-party API that Twitoaster provides. Twitoaster will generally only work if the user who created tweet that started the conversation is a Twitoaster user.

[1] http://app.apigee.com/console/apigee-console-snapshots-12833...
[2] http://twitoaster.com/api/
Well, following the advice I got here I started out with Erlang - where you have much of the same issues you describe, too. However, having immutable variables also allows for some pretty nifty stuff in Erlang (and I guess in Haskell even more; thinking of assignment as regex matching etc.), and I would even say for Erlang, which has no static type safety, it actually might come as a blessing. I don't know how often I have traced errors in dynamic languages exactly because of that (or - even worse - still have bogus code I never noticed...). And I don't know why, but to me functional programming in C, Python and Lisp always had seemed far easier than grasping a decent OO model in Java or anything - at best I liked AOP, but that seems pretty quiet nowadays; and with "green threads" and all that stuff coming along, it seems that my easier approach to "functional" is a benefit finally...
Yes, it'll be free to download a couple of weeks after you buy the PDF.
Didn't you offer HN subdomain names?
To me, it sounds like they rolled one software component back to a known working version.

That's not unreasonable. And doesn't sound like "a lot of unnecessary version control gymnastics" to me.

Of course, the problem was that the version they rolled back to was incompatible with the current version of their other services.
25 Reasons You Can’t Afford to Miss BlueGlass FL
I am not sure this is the right question to ask.

The problem is that you can build an elaborate maze of QA checks and still miss problems like these (and kill the company's ability to innovate in the process).

The reasons why you have (or don't have) various QA processes are much more interesting than the processes themselves.
I tried registering on RhinoCloud, and I get a 500 error on this page: https://app.rhinoaccounting.com/gaccount/newcompany/
Let's not address this problem prematurely.

This will likely simply fizzle out after awhile. If it doesn't, then we can discuss it and see what solutions are out there. But for now, no damage has been done and the "Offer HN" threads have been rather substantive in quality.
Huge difference between the planner and the attendee.

The fact of the matter is that the Ivies get applicants who didn't plan service trips, they created non-profits, funded them, and now are providing clothing and education for orphans in Africa.

And that kid will probably get rejected...because there's 100 other kids with similar stories.

So if the student is just attending service events and doesn't have an awesome leadership story that makes them sound awesome because of it, it's not really going to help their cause.
Vending Machines
Selecta are the European market leader in vending services, controlling over 35,000 vending machines in the UK and Ireland alone.
I've written mostly client code, and watched server action from the sidelines, but jumping straight to the hotfix only seems obvious in retrospect to me. Rolling back to a known-good state is the safe approach – it just didn't work in this case because of a surprise incompatibility with another system.

If you jump straight to the hotfix, you're basically enlisting the entirety of your userbase to join you in a round of QA, which could be sub-optimal if your hotfix ends up causing some other unintended consequence.

Right?
"cheap shared hosts" don't provide you with the same sort of infrastructure that heroku gives you.
I don't know if I'd describe this postmortem as excruciating detail. I'd like to know more about what products they're using, how the "mesh" become overloaded, what their fix was, etc.

NASA reports have excruciating detail. This felt a big vague.
Offer HN: I can review your web app usability and UI
The recent postings of people offering free services has been great, and I've taken advantage of a few to help me with website copy and design.

I'd like to pay it forward by offering my own services for any who need it. Send me your web app and I'll test it out and let you know what I think of the usability and what could possibly be improved.

My email is in my profile or post a link to your app here.
If "works" is reduced to the act of shuffling 7-bit characters around, then sure, and indeed, that's a big chunk of what e-mail does.

But trying to make sense of a large thread from five months ago with reply from many people (with little, or at least varying, ideas of quoting etiquette) on many different clients and platforms is not my idea of anything "working"...
While the motivation for Facebook was probably over-dramatized, I don't think you can support for even a second the idea that Hollywood (whatever that is) doesn't understand the joy of building things for their own sake.

After all, even the line "If you build it, they will come" is from a movie.
This is turning HN into a spam forum rather than being something for the better.

I could post an offer on HN, touting my wares and waxing phantasmagorical about my coding and consultancy skills. The first hit is free, but after that I only want to see the color of your greenbacks. It might even boost my ranking in the social graph somewhat. But I'm not going to. It would be undignified, and frankly it's not what I come to HN to read. I hope other people will think similarly and take their boosting activities elsewhere.
Have you used the PS3 browser? Or worse, the Wii browser?

One has to navigating the web with a joystick (have you tried it? It's fifth circle of hell terrible), the other has you suffering from cramps in 10 minutes flat.

If you've used the browsers, you know just astronomically bad those ideas are. A browser doesn't not belong on a joystick-driven device, it's slow to use and frustrating as hell. So why would MS put a browser on the Xbox?

And how exactly would a browser on the Xbox decrease their lock-in?
If I told you I have an account at Interactive Brokers, Zecco, Scottrade, and Sharebuild, frequent EliteTrader forums, and watch CNBC would people be interested in my tips?

I would be hesitant to act on financial tips without a well defined history. This is one reason why I'm a fan of the Covestor model where you can follow a well-documented history.

Having said that, if you can provide some journal of trades that beat SPY, I'd love to get your tips.
I've been using this one for many many years. Is your version better / more efficient in any way?

http://david.dojotoolkit.org/recss.html
Was that really excruciating detail? All I learned is that they had some bug in their messaging system and they screwed up while trying to fix it. Their postmortem pales in comparison to the recent facebook and foursquare postmortems.
Agreed- I really dig the design.

However, one little nitpick: the copyright and credit text at the bottom of the footer are killing me with the text shadow. My eyes strained to make out the characters.
Wow! Has this always been there?
They can fall back on development tools and expand to other platforms if all else fails.

Though that might not happen before they've spent too much of their reserves (and don't have enough coming in) to do it.
Zuckerberg's point is that Hollywood screenwriters don't understand that hackers are motivated by creating things for the sake of creating things. I find this very strange because screenwriters are themselves supposed to be creative people. Their failure to recognize a creative impulse in hackers says something, but I don't know what.
I got the exact same email from pg a couple of years ago. I had installed the XSS Me addon to Firefox, and inadvertently had it spamming the submission form.
Wherein the top post is a meta-discussion about css.
Your essay made me consider a very interesting aspect to parenting: Starting a family is the ultimate entrepreneurial endeavor. It's arguably the only business where the potential gains and risks are unmeasurable.
yikes, that's the one thing I forgot. will get to it tonight.
Dream recording device 'possible' researcher claims
how does one handle rate-limiting : I mean what is the back off method that Twitter approves ?

I have an app that pulls data from the Twitter streaming API, filtering on a keyword. Suppose, I start getting rate-limited errors (I guess any response code other than 200, means that you are getting rate limited).

Can I still keep pinging Twitter - and when the 60 minutes are up, will the tweets start coming in again ? Or can I sleep for exactly 65 minutes and hope that everything will be fine again ?
Ack, shades of Digg
Nah, don't think so. I wasn't aware of any existing so I just wrote one. Apologies for lack of novel idea :P
Zuckerberg is flat-out wrong in his assertion that Hollywood doesn't understand people building something just because they like building things. I'm quite sure he's right when it comes to some people in Hollywood, possibly even many of the most powerful people. But I'll bet that what gets a great writer like Aaron Sorkin up in the morning is the same kind of creative impulse that drives hackers. Sorkin is a hacker - just in a different medium.

None of which is to say that Sorkin's portrayal of Zuckerberg is at all accurate. In the West Wing, Sorkin once wrote: "You think I think that an artist's job is to speak the truth [but] an artist's job... is to captivate you for however long we've asked for your attention." I think he's quite right, but it's a heck of a philosophy if you're making a movie about someone still living.
I agree that building things is its own motivation for many hackers but I also know many who have other motivations. One of my friends, for instance, has a borderline irrational desire to be more successful than his girlfriend's ex-boyfriend. Another is motivated purely by money and is now working in the finance industry.

To say that Hollywood "got it wrong" can only be true in this specific context. While it may or may not have been the case with MZ, there are certainly hackers that are motivated to work on significant projects in order to be accepted by girls or organizations, as the movie portrays.
Oh! Got it. Here where "offers" and "offerless" came from:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839808

and

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839857
I think it illustrates more that people don't realize what 99.9% actually is. Being down for an hour during a working day is a huge deal to most businesses, but they blithely think 99.9% is awesome availability.
Math 55 rates its own fairly detailed Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_55

For graduate study, US News and World Report currently ranks it a hair under MIT, along with Princeton, Stanford and UCB (http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...). Harvard has been strong in math for a long time.
Http://www.honeylocation.com/honey-location/vip/login
That would only be a reasonable deduction if HN had < 262 users. As it stands, it's impossible to judge based on a score that cannot be downvoted, and that's without considering selection bias.
Thanks for pointing this bug out. I will fix it asap.
What most hackers don't understand is that they do in fact have deep-seated psychological motives for all the things they want to build.

I don't know if Sorkin's yarn was even close to reality, or whether Zuck's angst at the time was merely coincidental with the development of FaceSmash. But the motivation for building Facebook or anything else is always more complex than "I thought it would be cool."

Hollywood may have missed the point, but they were right to look for one.
Visa question
what kind of visa i should get? if i get the interview? there will be trouble with my application since i've got a moslem name. any advice?
As far as I know the only one who has written anything about this is me. I wrote this essay five years ago visiting every Ivy league school and learning about their admission processes:

http://alexkrupp.com/pirate.html

I'm pretty sure the book The Game of Life talks about the admissions process of athletes and other students with special talents as well, but I haven't read it so I'm not sure how much detail they go into or how accurate it is. It's also worth understanding how the Academic Index works, since that's very important for getting into an Ivy. I don't think there is anything official written about it, but if you do some sleuthing you can find a bunch of stuff. For example a quick Google search turned up this:

http://home.comcast.net/~charles517/ivyai.html

It's only officially used for football, but I get the impression that it's often used unofficially as a ballpark for students with special talents in other areas.
This seems to be just new payment terms for micro payments.
Anybody know if they also plan to release anything to make UI better and more seamless integrated with the site's/app's experience?
Tell HN: Please continue offering your services (goods, rooms etc)
I've read and taken in swombats post to 'stop offering your services', and I think that he may have a point in the general sense, that some may abuse this format to gain a business advantage.

That said, I think it is much too early to make the call to stop doing this, let's fix problems if and when they appear.

The way to deal with that is to take any Offer HN at face value unless there is proof that it is not what it seems to be, and to indcate that if and when it appears.

From what I've seen so far all - or at the very least most - of the offers that have been made are both genuine and heartfelt, and at some personal expense in terms of time, effort or even goods to the person offering.

So please do keep them coming those 'Offer HN' postings and let's hope they will put HN on the map as a place where people do more than just talk.
BP dispersants 'causing sickness'
Both are new to me. Your link compares against a string, and his looks for the type in the DOM? Not sure which is better.

Could a better mind please explain which is more appropriate?
I am not sure if this falls in line with what you have in mind, but...

I am learning RoR right now. Could I occasionally send you a quick email asking for clarification on something or help if I get stuck?

Please let me know what you think. Thanks for the offer!
"average American" doesn't know enough about to make a fully qualified decision.

If voters aren't qualified for a direct democracy, what makes them qualified for an indirect democracy AKA republic? Wouldn't they just pick the wrong representation, given the inherent ineptness of the public? If the public is truly a fringe, and the government is supposed to represent the fringe, wouldn't the government just be a fringe?

"Our government is supposed to represent the best interests of the people, not blindly enact their will."

If they're not enacting the will of the people, then who's will are they enacting? What qualifies these folks to know the best interest of everyone else?
Yes, you got carried away.

If something hasn't been submitted by a human being, it's probably not worth being submitted by a script.

Edit: What's the deal with the downvotes? The OP said he was parsing a file for multiple automated submissions.

This is bad. Even if he's collecting them for later in a batch, one would have to ask himself if the links are all that good. I would assume by pg's responses, he would agree.
Any intelligent life left at samba.org?
Whether they're all 100% altruistically motivated or not, if they are providing legitimately useful help for free as offered, I don't see a problem with it. As a possibly familiar example, speakers come to users groups/meetups to talk about things -- there are obvious benefits to the speaker, but we certainly don't vilify them for that.
It's just a movie, for us over here at HN.

For most regular people, it's the first time they ever hear about Mark Zuckerberg, who apparently is the guy running the site they spend all day using and posting personal stuff to. And the guy who runs the site they use to interact with their friends and share their photos has done some quite nasty stuff in the past, like mashing face photos together etc etc.

When I went to see the movie, the whole cinema was dumbfounded when the credits appeared and it was revealed that facebook is somehow currently worth 25 billion USD. People in general don't know anything about facebook.
What happens in a scenario where a file that was managed as part of a Parachute deployment is modified directly, and Parachute attempts to deploy a new version of it? I guess I'm asking how potential conflicts are handled. I looked around the help but haven't had a chance to try it out yet.
I'm an avid gamer and own both the PS3 and Xbox. I've used the PS3 browser, it's an unmitigated disaster of poor functionality and even poorer usability.

The Wii browser, having used that also, is pretty much the same, plus muscle pain.

I know a lot of gamers and have yet to meet a single person who uses the browsers with any sort of regularity. In fact, the only instances where people use browsers on consoles nowadays are when the game brings it up by itself (DLC purchases, news updates, etc), and even then it's always more painful to use than a native menu would've been.

You need to cite your sources, because from where I stand - which is that of an avid gamer heavily involved in the gaming community, I simply do not see any significant usage of console browsers at all.

> "Even when a tiny DSi has a very capable browser, smart phones have browsers. And a big gaming console from a supposed software company doesn't even have a web browser?"

The major obstacle with browsers is not platform hardware, it's usability. Smartphones and the DSi have browsers because the web is (as we discovered with the iPhone) very easy to navigate with a touch device, particularly a finger-driven touch device.

It is significantly less awesome when it's driven with a joystick. In fact, the experience is downright terrible. Implementing a browser on a console with joystick (or Wiimote) controls is a waste of time and energy, and can only serve to tarnish your brand as your users struggle with why the hell you implemented such a dumb thing.
To me, it suggests that this is just a more controversial post than all-but-one other frontpage post; not necessarily more agreed with. The majority of posts that I've read, and certainly the more up-voted, seem to be those disagreeing (at least in part) with the OP.

Edit: it's entirely possible I misread "points" for "posts", so ignore this entirely.
Ride sharing social app with reward system
Ridekicks is a place to share your car with your social network and incorporates a rate and reward system.
Of course, my point was that 99.9% is expected on even the cheapest setups. Premium hosting like Heroku should at least be able to deliver comparable uptime to a cheap shared host like HostGator.

However, Heroku appears to have no SLA, so its a moot point anyway.
Such as ?
Angelgate ? Blocks of Ice ? Parachutes ?

So your solution to the spam problem is "Let's add more spam, since we've already got lots?"
Like this? http://kruisit.nl/projects/mymomjust.png

I would also add a hover effect for the arrow and maybe some javascript to replace the page reload. Since this seems to be HN feelgood week: need a bit of help?
Same reason they aren't building cars or aeroplanes.
> the demand flowed to them.

Their combined blog readership was huge. They capitalized on that audience, not just the features.
Why is this a separate post?
And where would we be if AOL hadn't given us all unlimited dial-up access for a low monthly price?
I agree -- I see no problem other than their potentially clogging the main page. (I voted in support.)
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