skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Educate people on flagging inappropriate comments, like offensive ones, instead of downvoting. Downvoting can be used for disagreement, but nasty comments deserve to be flagged and then eliminated.

Then, put a heavy fine on it: for example, if a user has a comment eliminated due to flagging, he loses a big amount of karma (20%?) and he cannot comment/submit for one day.
Turkey agrees to end the battle against Youtube
I'm curious about what a team based workflow looks like without VCS, I'm really struggling to see how you could work without one. Can someone who's seen this enlighten me?
From reading the recent 'ImperialViolet' article titled 'Overclocking SSL' about Google's efforts, it seems the issues are that:

- unless you use the recently patched version, OpenSSL uses an overhead of 50KB per connection; even with the patch, it's 5KB. (It's not clear if this 'connection' overhead is also the size of the 'session' data which must be cached for followup handshakes to go faster.)

- in all cases using commonly-available software, SSL adds roundtrips to connection-establishment, and thus latency for the end-user. Minimizing this requires carefully choosing how you handle certificates and how you cache session info, and having a large or shared session cache may need different load-balancing than sites already use.

- Google has several proposals (all dated 2010) for further reducing or in some cases eliminating roundtrips; no implementations other than in Google Chrome and Google's frontend servers were mentioned by the 'Overclocking' article.

So there's still an adjustment cost, new overhead costs, and a latency cost, for adopting SSL. You can minimize these by doing-as-Google-does, but the software to do so is not yet freely available.
But that's real life. The goal is to make the conversation here equivalent to how people talk in real life, not be more polite than that.
The Wikipedia has a good article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divisibility_rule
Google announces the launch of Election Center mobile site
It was already suggested often that people should "pay" karma to post and maybe even to comment

Users should be encouraged to comment LESS, only if they have something useful to say.

That's what I'm doing anyway, because I really don't care about karma and speak only when I have something worth to say, would be cool if anyone was acting like this since we have no shortage of users.
Might help to break down the concept of "risk" in this context:

- Part A: Seeing a distant island full of fruit and thinking "Wow, I'm totally going there - screw everyone else who's just eating potatoes around here."

- Part B: Choosing to make a boat rather than jumping straight in the sea and risking drowning or death by shark.

So the goal itself is risky and/or unknown, but it doesn't mean you have to do stupid or excessively risky things to get there.

There's a lot of overlap between scouting/explorer/pirate behaviour and entrepreneurship - certainly for me. The very same thing that keeps me going as an entrepreneur sees me exploring/climbing and hiking in dangerous but beautiful places. It's an odd personality trait, but one that's evolutionarily advantageous (now the islanders have all the fruit they need) :)
Hmmm. If someone put on their CV that they got patches into Rails (or another large, popular OSS project) you wouldn't think of that as a pretty big plus?
I use Geany. It's not particularly featureful but it has some code completion, tabs, and highlighting support; the only thing I really miss over classic "power editors" is the deep programmability, which I don't actually like most of the time. I like sensible defaults so that when I reinstall there's zero hassle and I can just work immediately. (but I will admit to envying some of the more whiz-bang stuff that you get by bothering to really learn Vim/Emacs.)
I don't agree. "Sane" people introduces something which is frequently a false dichotomy; whether you are driven by your rationality, or by more visceral and deep-seated spirits. The problem is the difference between rationality and enlightened rationality: what is good for you personally in the short term, versus what is good for everybody in the longer term. These things can give contradictory advice, and both can be labeled as rational. But the second isn't intuitive to most people: it generally needs to be supplied from somewhere else, usually emotions.

Let's say you need to get drinking water from the river, but there are crocodiles down there too. If you minimize your risk, you'll get just enough water for yourself. On the other hand, if you get more than enough water, you'll be able to share your surplus, increase your social standing, find a more attractive mate, etc.

Ah! you say - but the "minimizing risk" here isn't actually minimizing risk, but increasing another risk, a risk that you'll never get anywhere in life, won't raise a family and pass on your genes, etc.

But that's an intellectual risk. It's not likely to dawn on you unless you're quite introspected, or perhaps until it's too late and you're in relative middle age.

What if there was a different mechanism? What if exploring the boundaries of your capability, your talents, was its own reward? You can't explore those boundaries without risk of failure, even where failure might include death. A simple mechanism for that could be risk homeostasis, whereby a certain manageable amount of risk becomes its own visceral reward, attracting you to those boundaries and encouraging you to expand them.

In other words, getting utility out of risk itself - "liking adventure".
Thanks for the reply , i was more interested in the technical
aspects of the client / server for example
i know they are using python , but how did they compile it for windows ? py2exe ? , and how about server side ?
I don’t care if you’re a billionaire. If you haven’t started a company, really gambled your resume and your money and maybe even your marriage to just go crazy and try something on your own, you’re no pirate and you aren’t in the club.

I do appreciate the risks pirates take, this however, does not devalue the role of a peasant or a cobbler or a prime minister or a soldier to the society. Its narrow minded to establish one work to be better than the other.

Be pirate, if you think, you are best suited for it. There is NO shame in doing something else, for which you are better suited either.
Your boss is a jerk. Quit now, or as soon as possible (how much notice do you have to give?)!!
I feel it's absolutely in keeping with that.

"What if..." is a sign of curiosity, exploration, creativity, imagination and a modest disregard for the risk.

- "What if I climb down that cliff... will I find a beautiful and isolated beach?" (Versus: fall to death)

- "What if I sail this ship a bit further? Will the next island be more bountiful than the last?" (Versus: crash on rocks)

- "What if I replace this diode with an LED? Will the effects circuit sound better?" (Versus: break the effects pedal)

And so on.
No USB 3, no TRIM for their SSDs and no Blu-ray. Yay.
I'd like to see the karma system dispensed with entirely. I don't think it encourages thoughtful and productive discussions.
Ubuntu comes with proprietary NVidia & ATI drivers, last I checked, along with a bunch of other things in restricted, which is part of the default install.

So yeah, Ubuntu DOES come with non-free software by default, and the restricted repo is part of the default sources.list, to allow you to install even more non-free software easily.

By commercial, I meant they're (trying) to make money off of it, which they certainly do. There's a whole lot of things built around the distribution (Ubuntu One, support, etc) that in my reading, make the distribution commercial, or at least heavily commercially backed (as opposed to being community driven).
Stack Overflow just became a top-500 site.
> Second, what "productivity benefits"?

I guess that mathematical notation is often easier to read and comprehend. I'd rather see something like this http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/9/6/9/9695855b7c5869aad99fa...
than something like

sum [ for x in s -> f(x) ]

on the other hand, without an IDE that's capable of translating between both notations, editing would be rather painful
Perhaps clearly stating the policy/approach at the top of the HN page?

Not of the form "You must do this". But rather of the form "The mission of HN is to supply stimulating, insightful, {insert mission here}... Therefore always be polite, thoughtful, engaging and supporting".

That'll be enough I think. It's currently not immediately clear what the mission is unless you explore and delve deeper.
It's also the simplest non-tech thing to try first ;)
Possible solution 1 sounds like a horrible idea. By fragmenting the community it would fragment the knowledge, quite a high price to pay for clean comments.
Alexandria Mills Won Miss World 2010 Title
The 18-year-old Miss America Alexandria Mills, was crowned the 60th Miss World 2010 title at the Beauty Crown Theatre, Sanya, China on Saturday evening.
Totally agreed. I made a similar comment above. I think it'll work.
Scott Adams: Crazy Eyes
Apple mobiles: 4% unit share, 50% profit share
This is my biggest question (and I'd love thoughts from HN people on it); if Android is mostly seen on handsets with very small margins that compete on price with almost identical features... who's paying for the R&D to keep up with Apple's innovations?

That question assumes that innovation is important in the smartphone sector. That may not be the case I guess.

I'm just trying to understand the end situation as best I can as like a number of startups our future heavily depends on smartphones.
Suse has a system configuration utility called YAST which is user friendly for people who are afraid of the command line and also works across a text terminal like ssh. You can configure the network, manage packages, configure the firewall etc. all from within YAST. In the previous place I worked at the only reason for using SUSE was YAST, because the guy who was in charge of the servers was afraid of the Linux command line.

Mandriva comes with a lot of proprietary drivers that just work. Plus it is very friendly for people coming from Windows. For example I've used Mandriva a lot on my Nokia booklet 3G because it works with GMA 500.
There's always the 'Functional Pearls' series
As a former manufacturing engineer, I can tell you Apple's devices are extremely optimised to reduce the cost of manufacture yet maintain quality and this helps their margins considerable I'd imagine.

Their attention to the cost of assembly is - to me - as beautiful as the aesthetic design; they clearly have some amazing mechanical/design/process engineers.
I've actually been told this by multiple people. I think I may check it out.
Additionally, note that in effect Apple decides the price of smartphones. Must hurt being a competitor who's making a quality product and knowing you need to price similar to them in order for your customers to understand what level of quality they are buying. Too high and people will buy an iPhone, too low and people may feel you are lower quality.
Thanks again for the advice, and the offer. Be warned, I may take you up on it :)

I shall investigate creating that image. I found ASDF to be a bit problematic when I tried it on it's own (which is probably down to my inexperience), but QL worked first time.
"For entrepreneurship there is already enough reward for the risk."

Maybe that's true now, but it isn't a tautology. For example, pg has mentioned that a few centuries ago, people didn't keep the wealth they made (it was handed over to royalty), which made it so there were no incentives, which severely lowered entrepreneurship.

Society has to work at making sure the balance of incentives is "correct" (correct in the sense that that's what that society wants.) So asking about one potential way society can help increase risk-taking is perfectly valid and reasonable.
I'm guessing a few of my would-be investors probably read this site. I'd prefer to remain anonymous.
Preventing the site from declining into a set of meanness and stupidity (I believe the two are closely related) is something I think about constantly.

Does that imply anything regarding hateful posts in HN, or is it just a 'hey, there's a correlation here' observation?
I always downvote on harsh tone or meanness directed at others (but not directed at myself). I upvote for valuable and interesting information, and intelligently argued points. I try not to upvote for mere agreement (although sometimes it's hard not to), and I never downvote for disagreement. (There are some exceptions - questions that are phrased as surveys etc). Since my time here on HN, it seems to me that most people follow something like this, much more so than on most of reddit where upvote-if-funny/upvote-to-agree/downvote-to-disagree is the law of the land.
isn't this a mean-spirited comment?
I can't help but think that that this statement of "building things because you like building things" was very scripted at Startup School. The reaction of the crowd was 100% predictable and it was a very smart move and completely re-framed the movie and all the other bad publicity around Facebook.

"Their argument/story/point of view is not valid because they don't understand that you can just build things because you like building things" - 100% crowdpleaser. He is not addressing the issues, he is completely reframing it.

If you look for more examples check out the movie "Thank you for smoking": The question is not whether smoking is good or bad for you or whether we knew about that. The argument is whether we should make decisions for the people of this country or if it is their freedom to make their own decisions.
Thank you. Classes are a good idea for me I think. Established routine.
I don't know, I find that in smaller web communities I tend to participate more, because I know my voice is more likely to be heard. And if everyone knows everyone than people would be more easily remembered for making good comments. That would give them more of an incentive to be helpful and constructive. So the knowledge loss might not be as great as it would seem.

And communities could still be visible to everyone, even if only members of that community can participate. Then if there's a really good comment in one community, someone from another could just copy and paste it over.
Thank you everyone for the advice. It has helped me monumentally.
Limit the amount of downvotes one can perform per day, or per X hours.

Points from comments should have way more weight than karma points from submissions. It's easy to get massive karma points if you submit something interesting. On the other hand, you could spend a lot of time writing a comment and you wouldn't get than many points from it.
The lack of power tools may have exactly been why the building is as sturdy as it is. It took the builders several years to build the whole building. Most of the concrete they used hardened out before they built on the next section.

If they would have had powertools, construction would have progressed a lot faster, the concrete would not have hardened as well as it should and the building would have cracked and collapsed a lot more easily.
I understand how CarWoo works, but do people actually click on the "Buy this car" button without having test driven the car yet? I would never buy a car without a test drive. Or am I misunderstanding something...
Shipping Solves Everythig
The picture in (18) is quite profound.
Case in point ...

I've occasionally found a comment that I felt was both mean-spirited and largely content-free. I've down-voted that.

Then I wondered if that person had a history of such comments, so I've brought up their profile, looked through their comments, and attempted to assess each one on its merits. In cases of doubt I've left them alone, but if I've felt that the comment in question was again mean-spirited and content-free, I've down-voted that as well.

I've realised that such actions, while intended well, might be viewed as "punishing" the "contributor" in question. Further, I suspect that PG already detects and inhibits this behavior.

So here we have a case where I believe I'm doing the right thing to help reduce the mean-spiritedness of comments, and I get prevented from doing so.
... and #hackers-india on OFTC (irc.oftc.net). Most of the regulars are in the same situation as you: young twenty-somethings stuck in no-name colleges.

EDIT: drop me an email if you're in/around New Delhi. There are a bunch of Python hackers in this city. Email is in my profile.
I don't actually do any SEO work for the people asking for help - I simply give them advice and suggestions on how to improve their sites.

You are right about publicly admitting to have used SEO.
A lot of my clients have requested NDAs, but some haven't.
Unfortunately for them, admitting to have used SEO in their minds devalues the company.
I got about 450 emails from you guys. I'm replying to each and every one of them. It's taking some time - but I'm doing my best!
Even the successful poor writers usually have something going for them. Dan Brown is successful, I believe, because he uses very simple prose and patronizing monologues masquerading as dialogues to fill in required background material - this expands his market to a lot of people who don't read a lot and have a hard time with more sophisticated styles - and his timing of plot points and chapter pacing is excellent.

It's his pacing that I noticed most: it really is first class. But the actual writing is very uninteresting, reminding one of juvenile books targeted at 10 year olds.
In Japan, cinema releases are regularly 9-12 months behind DVD-quality bittorrent releases. I recently saw a rental DVD in the 'new releases' section which I'd rented 3 years earlier outside of Japan. Similarly, my wife loves Desperate Housewives, but Japanese releases are 18+ months after the American release.

I have two choices - I can download a movie right now in around 10 minutes without getting off the couch, and watch it in widescreen/surround in the comfort of my home, or I can wait a year or more to pay $22 to see it at the cinema. By the time that year is up, if I've somehow managed to avoid reading spoilers online, and waited months after the rest of the world has stopped talking about the movie, there's a chance I might even enjoy the trip to the cinema.

I would love to be able to pay $10 to get a decent quality download at the same time the rest of the world is watching a movie. Hell, I'd probably pay $20 if it was something I really wanted to see - it'd still be cheaper than the cinema. If iTunes Japan had a rental section (or if the local online rental stores were up-to-date with the rest of the world) I'd probably be spending hundreds of dollars a year on it.

I realize it's probably fiendishly complicated to take an English-language movie, negotiate multiple foreign release dates, translate it, subtitle it, market it in the local language etc, but it seems like it should be fairly easy to allow a non-US English-speaker to buy a (DRMed if necessary) downloadable copy of a movie online a reasonable time after it's been released in the states. It takes the production companies a year, yet two days after a new episode of Lost has aired in the states there'll be multiple fan-subbed versions doing the rounds on Japanese p2p networks.

I have no idea how to fix the current system (and I'm sure smarter people than me have tried and failed), but I can't help but feel these companies are missing a huge opportunity internationally.
I don't know about their downfall from before, but the way I see it, Apple is focused on consumers, not developers/hackers. That is, they will always choose the consumer's experience over the hacker's convenience.

The recent move with the Mac App Store just confirmed my suspicions.

That's kinda why I want to stay away from the Mac, even though their laptops are very tempting. Damn, today I went to the apple store and saw the new Air. Very seductive.

But, I'm sticking to Linux. I don't do lots of multimedia stuff, so Linux works fine for me.
While I like the entrepreneur-as-a-pirate-rebel sentiment it's not the risk that attracts me but the desire to change the world and build stuff that other people find value in.

To build something that other people use is an ego boost.

To build something that other people _pay for_ is even better.
Do I understand correctly that just physically extracting a certain piece of DNA from a cell ("purifying" it) makes it patentable? That seems silly.

Yeah, it's ludicrous - imagine that I tried to file for a patent on using a random (but useful!) phrase in English on the basis that I was able to write a Perl regex to pull it out of a web page.

And I won't even qualify that with the usual "poor analogy" disclaimer - it's almost exactly what the current law allows for, just replace "random phrase in English" with "snippet of DNA", and "Perl regex" with "biochemical reaction".
Why do you say that Macintosh tools were impossible to come by legally? Maybe Mac development was limited to certain developers in the early days, but Apple released MPW in 1986. THINK Technologies introduced Lightspeed Pascal and Lightspeed C in 1986 too. Inside Macintosh was published in 1985.

(I had to research this, because I didn't own a Mac or program for Macs until about 1995.)
The Perfect Desktop - Ubuntu Studio 10.10
On Google Growing Up, Losing Employees & Being The New “California”
Fedora is great.
Fedora is not a public beta. Jesus Christ.!
>> There seems to be a general cognitive bias in the programming world against maintenance work, which strikes me as a bit dumb because it's both harder and more important than starting new projects.

This is not unique to the programming world. Starting something and finishing it looks a lot more impressive almost evrywhere than making something that exis´ts better. Just think how much more impressive founding yet another non-profit looks on ones cv compared to doubling the projects of an existing one.
I think it's because those who try to do that don't realize the full spectrum of things that Apple does right, seeing only the most superficial fraction of it.
another idea - "OpenCompany"

http://e-texteditor.com/blog/2009/opencompany

http://www.metagovernment.org/wiki/Open_company
How would anyone know what percentage of my success went to each specific teacher of the 50 or more I had over my lifetime? Was it the teacher who taught me how to read and write, the one who taught me basic math or the one who taught me higher level skills that should earn the highest percentage? Maybe it was the one who showed the biggest interest in getting me on the right track when I deviated? There are so many arbitrary variables.
Gene patents have not been a "problem" in the same way as software patents.

I'd argue that the "problem" is that the entire idea that ownership, even temporary, can be claimed on a pre-existing string of bits (and not just some particular method of extracting or using that information) that exists inside all of our bodies, is downright offensive. Moreso because the techniques to isolate and exploit these bit strings have now become commonplace and all but trivial.

And, unlike software patents, they are more likely to represent a significant R&D investment by the applicant.

But the patent system is not a subsidy for R&D costs, it's supposed to protect innovative inventions. I'm appalled at the idea that a research group might be prevented from researching novel therapies that target a particular gene just because some other company happened to successfully isolate it using standard techniques ten years ago.
There's always another election and another hot-button topic right around the corner.
Every sane person seeks to reduce risk.

That's simply not true (or else your definition of sane is very limited)

Just as a random example, the death rate for climbing Mount Everest is 10% (!) If sane people always seek to reduce risk then only insane people would climb Everest.
I like the "if your use case need that, to build your own linux from scratch" part.