skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The only problem is that you are assuming continual growth. While they are the cool place to be now, as soon as the become the uncool place to be, then they will be screwed.

If I was facebook, I would be very afraid of this happening. I understand facebook has some patents on the news feed an other minor aspects of facebook, but their basic feature set is somewhat small, but reproducible.

I think that any social platform faces the problem, that people will jump ship to what ever they think is cooler. Look at Myspace, that was hugely popular and suddenly it become the uncool place to be and then everyone and their moms, jumped ship to facebook. History is bound to repeat itself.
I've had my comments republished in your monthly but I rarely comment on HN anymore due to the negativity. Case in point:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1652566

We've gained a few trolls but I don't think we've suffered from evaporative cooling yet so it's not too late. I support removing down voting and switching to flagging specific offenses e.g. spam|offensive|troll to start.

Alternatively [just a crazy thought] how about we open up and show what each user has down voted. Perhaps as a courtesy we could only show down-votes starting Halloween 2010.
VLC endorses the iOS application in the App Store (at the time of linking):
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-ios.html
If you made your title: "Ask HN: Review ..." http://searchyc.com/Ask+HN%3A+Review it would show on http://news.ycombinator.com/ask
Venture Capital Sputters in the Third Quarter; Consumer Down, Business Services and Software Up
http://tcrn.ch/aAjwmj
Uniques are what count for big ad campaigns. Well, mostly. Uniques get the campaigns which you then have to fulfill with pageviews.
I think of downvotes as the gong on the gong show. One can follow all the established rules of politeness and still negatively affect the atmosphere of the site. The downvote is crucial for dealing with bores, stupid people and obnoxious comments which fit into the discussion guidelines, but are still obvious trolls.
For a straight-up failure test, yes. Try exposing wood and metal to fire, then cool it, then expose it again, etc. You can tell visually when the wood is likely to fail much easier than the metal.
This resonates with me. I knew (or rather hoped for) what you would write about from the title alone. I think I have a strong intuition and I trust it very much, but I have a hard time explaining my feeling to my Co-founder and other people we work with. This affects everything from choice of languages/frameworks, to design and style.

I wish I could get better at conveying my intuition. One way I have of doing this is if I find say a framework or library that 'feels' good. If it comes with strong rational explanation of why this is a good design, I can offset that work and just point to that. It's the same way with design patterns and essays or articles.

The best knowledge is knowledge that you already had, clearly laid out.
I use my real name to keep myself accountable. It's not my full name, but it's enough for anybody who is interested to narrow it down in a few minutes.
I don't work for Facebook and have no inside knowledge, but here's what I think.

It helps to step back and take a look at the big picture.
Companies have a certain number of advertising dollars. Companies that are really big in the consumer space spend large chunks of their revenue on advertising: consumer goods (soap, etc.), durables, autos, pharma, etc. This money is not going away anytime soon.

Now, if you're an advertiser, you want to advertise where there are people. This is why you see the MetLife blimp over big football games. The decals on the NASCAR cars. The funny ads in the SuperBowl.

For an advertiser, the holy grail is to achieve laser-like targeting: to be able to advertise to exactly the person who's most likely to buy his product. 80 years ago, the best option for advertisers was the radio. But it's a broadcast medium; you have no idea who's listening. So you make some intelligent guesses based on the program content and hope for the best. What's the ROI on radio ads?

20 years ago the best was the TV: the content was varied, so you could make better guesses. Want to appeal to the male 18-24 market? Advertise in football games, NASCAR events, WWF "Rumbles".

Then came the Internet. An advertiser could make even better guesses about the user; and more importantly, the advertiser could keep track of every impression, every click and every action. This is good, but still not good enough.

Broadly speaking: if you (advertiser) are willing to pay $X for a 10% chance of reaching the right audience, then chances are you'd be willing to pay $10*X for a 100% chance of reaching the right audience. Right?

And finally there's Facebook. The genius of FB is that the users have, on their own accord, given FB detailed information about themselves. Thanks to their social connections, they can't lie much either. I mean, it would be hard for me to claim I'm a female and single when my girlfriend is a connection on FB.

People keep thinking that FB will make money from the pageviews. IMHO, that is not the case. Yes, they have a bazillion pageviews and minutes spent online; they could make a billion or five per year easy with their pageviews.

The goldmine here is the "like" button. It will allow FB to spread its influence far and wide; and more importantly, it will allow FB to influence advertising on 3rd party sites. Instead of buying advertising on, say, CNN and paying $2/CPM, an advertiser will be able to hyper-target a user and advertise to that specific user on CNN (or wherever that user is). User + Content = More Value for Advertiser.
So while CNN may get $2/CPM for its pages currently, by using the "FB Ad Network" they will be able to make more, and give a large cut to FB too.

Anyways: that's where I think the value lies with FB. Sorry about the long comment. :-)
I never mentioned Ritalin. I meant Adderall and particularly amphetamines.

I know Ritalin is helpful for some people.
Aluminum (in most alloys) loses significant strength in the 400-500*F range. By 600F, Al alloys are very weak.

http://www.burnsstainless.com/yieldstrength.aspx
Dissertation Research Methods for Data Gathering
A dissertation requires sound and thorough research to be conducted in order for it to be a credible document. There are various dissertation research methods which can be carried out to ensure this credibility. Knowing these methods will assist students greatly.
What is the point of `unless you have "X" you can't have Y?`

Why shouldn't the poorest of the poor have access to telephones? The cell phone market in India is a free(er) market and people have access to cell phone service for less than $5/mo . That is the real story that is interesting.
I would definitely recommend learning the basics of some programming language. If anything else this will help you to understand what's going on and what needs to be done to have your vision implemented.
Actually, the time it takes is roughly dependent on the thickness of the wood and the delta in humidity from the place where it was cut and the place where it will be used.

Typically you want to avoid wood used for ladders drying out after the ladder is put together because it will loosen the joints.

The varnish helps with this as well.
That link cites the FSF's earlier analysis of the GNU Go case. About one month after the FSF published that and called for Apple to change their rules, Apple changed their rules. The current terms of service appear to eliminate the problem the FSF complained about.

One VLC developer says that it is fine under the current TOS to distribute VLC on the App Store: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1850340
Fast modmults for crypto keys are done using Montgomery multiplication, if the numbers being multiplied are power of two in size the ops are all masks and shifts after the initial transformation.
A picture of a puppy above the comment field.

Alternately, what are voting ratios looking like? Are there some people downvoting more than up? If so, a notice above the comment field letting them know could help.
Is OOP paradigm broken?
Can Python and Google App Engine experts take a look at these questions at Stackoverflow. (Links in comment) The whole thing makes me hate OOP. It may be my fault but a simple operation of writing a list to datastore and fetching it and printing the content of the list turns out to be so far impossible. Your comments would be greatly appreciated. I think the OOP paradigm is broken but that may be my own ignorance. Thanks.
Did you think this article was about directness? He spent the first half telling a story about his first writing gig. I don't think his point was anything like, "don't tell stories."
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4063767/what-does-fetch-f...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4061986/is-there-a-way-to...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4060924/google-app-engine...
You have every right not to fly. So it's not about power and control.
As I don't see any flattr gadget on the dispatched.ch blog, maybe the author forgot to enable it explains the lack of results?
As the others say have said. Depending on what your looking for will determine what is right for you.

I use Mandriva. I use it because it feels right for me.

Things I really like about it.
1. Broke from Red Hat.
2. KDE.
3. It has a centralized and useful tool set for managing the system.
4. It's packaging system is nice.
5. http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/
6. Power Pack has lots of goodies in it.
7. etc,....
Two out of three employees say they'll take lower pay if they can work remotely.
It looks like that was a case of piling on. There may be stuff I can do to mitigate that specifically. BTW, it's not our monthly; Hacker Monthly is someone else's project.
Humans were eating refined starches 20k years before agriculture
Nice one, checking your app out now...
I switched from Trac to Redmine and I haven't looked back. There's also a pretty solid migration script.
yes possible that people will jump ship for the next coolest thing. will everyones moms, dads and grandparents really want to "recreate" their social network and learn a new platform though?

facebook is unique as they are the biggest game in the world with people's real names and real social connections.
Replace the total karma score by the username in the upper right of the page with the average that's already visible on the profile page.

An average is a better indicator to the user of how well they are engaging with the site. It only goes up if the user consistently posts worthwhile comments, which rewards being selective about when you post and thoughtful about what you post. Fewer and better is encouraged. Consistently good is encouraged. Lousy comments (like one-on-one arguments and "Me too!") are discouraged even if nobody votes them down.

This bridges the gap between two existing forms of feedback:
total karma (which nobody really cares about, even though it's on every page) and the voting on individual comments (which is the closest thing we have to an indicator of comment quality), and gives the user continuous feedback on how much value they are adding to the site. It makes it much easier to know if your commenting is getting better or getting worse. That is, it is much easier to tell that my average is up or down from the last time I looked than it is to detect the fluctuation in the rate at which my karma accumulates.

Even if lousy comments get voted up--as happens when, for instance, someone first-posts an opinionated quip on a controversial submission and people swarm to vote in agreement--the impact on the user's average karma (which better reflects their value to the community) is much lower than the immediate spike in their total karma (the feedback they currently see). You don't have to stop people from writing such comments--just give them a smaller cookie when they do.

Obviously you can't make anybody alter their behavior over a number, but I think most here would if given a number that they could trust as representative of the shared goal of keeping this place from sucking.

tl;dr average karma is better feedback than total karma
I suggest implementing the same system using a variety of languages. Each language and system of libraries has some abstractions that can result in the novice having a very incomplete or incorrect mental model of what is actually happening.

In using a variety of frameworks/languages, the learner gets more adept each time since lots of the abstractions are the same, but really jumps forward in the areas where the abstractions are different enough to create some food for thought.

It is that sort of thinking that helps differentiate the designed aspects of a program from the ones that are implementation specific consequences of the design.
"but I see no reason to keep the advertising buttons on my blog, either"

I disabled them today, just before posting. Thanks for letting me know, anyway^^
That depends on the ability of the battery to get rid of excess heat, the surface area where the exchange takes place and the thickness of the electrodes.

If all these are designed with a very rapid charge regime in mind there need not be an issue.
If I could fix this I'd be launching the next billion dollar start-up around the technology. Just about every site goes through this type of growing pain: in the beginning it's obscure and spreads by word of mouth so that all of the people who visit the site share a common ethos; then, it grows and starts to attract other people who do not share the spirit that started the site; eventually, the "new" users outnumber the old users and they begin to set the standard for the sites personality.

You can try to raise awareness and ask people to not be evil on your site, but that's almost as effective as asking the tide not to come in. There are many bitter people in the world and they outnumber the well adjusted people who would rather spend their time building up a project instead of tearing down someone else's. These trolls crave attention - the negative attention they get by aggravating people on-line - so it's really not affective to point out the problem and ask them to stop or to ask the community to gang up on them; that's what they want.

We need a solution that frustrates these people. I've seen some sites where the comments a troll posts look like they are live on the site to the troll but they are hidden from everyone else. I think this is a very effective technique because it denies the troll the attention he is seeking and it saves the rest of the site from his attacks.

But, perhaps the best response is to remember Margaret Thatcher's advice about people trying to make you angry (i.e. no one can make you angry without your permission). If you see something that's not in the spirit of hacker news, just ignore it. Don't respond; don't show it to other people; just let it die a bitter and lonely death.
As a social media marketer, I can tell you that facebook is by far the best place to advertise when you want to go after a specific demographic. You can use the ads to target very very specific niches that are otherwise unreachable.

With Google, people are coming to you, they know what they are searching for and your ads are designed to appeal to that. The problem with search targeted ads though, is that you can't target people who don't know your product exists.

Facebook's CPC(cost-per-click) and CPM(cost-per-thousand impressions) are way lower as well, especially for demographics that google AdWords would charge you through he nose for. And as a benefit to good marketers, the Facebook advertising platform rewards you with lower costs the more successful your ads are.

You can create ads based on the interests you enter into your profile, city, age, sex, birthday, etc. A lot of companies are starting to take notice of the power of these ads, which is causing the advertising prices to rise (it's a bidding system), which in turn will increase FB's profit.

Facebook isn't going to go away anytime soon, people will always need a way to map out their connections, and Facebook is the de facto online identity for most people. I don't see Facebook being dethroned anytime soon, maybe disrupted a bit, by the likes of twitter or foursquare, but the core services of FB are something that will always be in demand.
I agree. And if you've found someone that needs to be prodded into coding, they aren't a good coder. That's your first warning.

Also, anything that annoys a developer is an obstacle. If you make it difficult to take vacation time, for example, that's an obstacle. Many companies seem to think 'Oh, everyone is that way' and that it makes it okay somehow. If there's something in the contract and you make it hard for the developer to get it, you're going wrong. Part of honoring your contract should be making sure it isn't difficult for the developer to collect on what they are promised.
Culture of lucky people
I would like to suggest www.groupsense.com it is a bug tracking tool with social features. So you can follow bugs / people / projects.

So for e.g. You can follow a particular bug that you are interested in. Or you may follow a particular user who might have filled interesting bugs in the past.

You get an activity stream from the bugs/people/projects that you are following.

I am one of the co-founders so take it with a grain of salt.

I would be happy to hand hold you to implement this and add features if you need them.

Send me an email at vidushi@groupsense.com I promise you it is a new software but we have been using it internally for over a year it is stable and you will love it when in 15 seconds everyday you will be able to look at your activity stream and exactly know what is happening.
i'd like to see two things:

1) a metric based on account age, submission karma, and comment karma. less weight on submission karma, since that is easier to manipulate. make this metric the barrier of entry for features instead of basing it purely on karma. it makes manipulation harder, and it encourages actual community participation/development.

2) add another meta-moderation tool similar to the "flag" option. i mostly use flagging for spam or offensive posts. i'd like to see something else (unlocked by #1) that allows you to mark something that is off topic, non-contributing, or otherwise adding to "the decline". accounts accumulate these like points, and the more points an account has, the more features get revoked from it as punishment (which leads up to a temp ban). points decay with time, and have a hard cap on how many can be obtained in a single day or by a single comment, but a long history of points leads to more points being obtained per flag.

edit: just to add some thoughts -- the only way to prevent people from being anonymous internet idiots and adding noise to the signal is either with a carrot or a stick. there's not much we can offer as a carrot that other sites can't, or that they can't get by non-participation (just reading the site). that is, unless you want to implement a private karma-barrier section of the site (unless you already have an i'm not in it... :( but then i wouldn't know about that carrot and wouldn't change my actions to reflect wanting to obtain that reward).

the only real alternative is the stick, hence the revoking of features.
End of Obama's silicon honeymoon
Not a comment on FB's specific situation, but that's a bit like saying "I'll sell widgets at a loss and make up for it in volume, I can't possibly lose".
The airlines are clearly not ensuring that anything is perfect quality.
They don't take days to run. The other week I cracked around 16,000 LM hashes with EDPR in about 6 hours.

Incremental crackers have improved substantially over the past few years primarily due to the introduction of GPU programming (in some cases algorithms port easily, in other cases they need some work first to be optimal on a GPU), easier distributed programming and rainbow tables. There's some interesting projects that use GPU technology to optimise the rainbow table reduction function (see http://www.cryptohaze.com/ for an example). As GPU technology improves and as hardware becomes cheaper and more powerful these technologies bring capabilities previously limited to three-lettered agencies into the commercial and home space.
I think there just needs to be a better way of communicating the reason for a downvote (or, in fact, asking for a reason for a downvote, like popup and select troll/OT/etc.) so that it costs you a little more in thought/time. It's currently just as easy to downvote as upvote, but the cost of a single downvote to the comment/user is greater than the benefit of a single upvote.

Additionally, I've been thinking for a while that it would be cool if threads were ranked a little differently, and not just on the points/time of the parent. Sometimes there are really, really great comments that are replies to low-ranked ones, and the resulting thread gets kicked to the bottom of the page. Something like Avg points/time or just accounting for the average points of next-level comments when determining rank of a reply at each level.
I don't know if it is scientifically proven or not. Here is one small study. I think it is possible for sure but who knows if it can be proven scientifically beyond the shadow of a doubt. The fact that it is a possibility is good enough for me.

I would rather have a farmed organ made and grown from my own cells (assuming it is possible and proven method of course) than a donor organ that might have some chance of either rejection or even the remote possibility of adding or changing my personality / persona.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/k51335l4k4676577/
"We conducted open-ended interviews with volunteer transplant recipients, recipient families or friends, and donor families or friends, in hospitals in various parts of the country. Patients included ten recipients who had received heart or heart–lung transplants. Main outcome measures were transcripts of audiotaped interviews quoted verbatim. Two to 5 parallels per case were observed between changes following surgery and the histories of the donors. Parallels included changes in food, music, art, sexual, recreational, and career preferences, as well as specific instances of perceptions of names and sensory experiences related to the donors. The incidence of recipient awareness of personal changes in cardiac transplant patients is unknown. The effects of the immunosuppressant drugs, stress of the surgery, and statistical coincidence are insufficient to explain the findings. We suggest that cellular memory, possibly systemic memory, is a plausible explanation for these parallels."
That's something I wish HN could find a middle ground on. I _like_ Reddit. It's fun, and if you don't like the conversation, you can hide it and move on.

On HN, I can chat with some of the most influential people in technology, and it's great. But the moment anyone cracks a joke? Downvoted, sometimes in to oblivion.

I find it hard to believe such a sharp group of people would be so averse to humor, but the votes seem to indicate that.
I wrote a Thunderbird plugin a few months back that people may find useful to hide this issue in received mail at least. It changes wingding J, L and a few others to the unicode smiley, etc. http://github.com/richq/smileyfixer

It doesn't fix outgoing mails, so when you plain text reply to the original author they'll get their "J" right back at them :-)
Great line from the article: "So, I became a litigator...If I didn’t do that, I would’ve been in some other type of work that still involved writing fiction"
Legalizing pot: The billion dollar repercussions on British Columbia
My bad. I should have included "(video)" in the title or just linked directly to the video on vimeo.com.
They mentioned something about overhead electrical cables.