skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As I'm posting this, the top submission on the /news page is "Why Microsoft Sucks: Hotmail dev team questions need for open standards".

I am guilty of upvoting it. Five seconds of thinking before upvoting would have prevented me from doing so - the linked comment just doesn't support the headline and Microsoft being hostile/oblivious to open standards isn't such big news anyway.

My point is that maybe we should be able to cancel upvotes. This would give upvoters the chance to read the comments (shallow stories usually have some comments pointing out that they are not that interesting) get convinced that they made a mistake and fix it.

Well, I understand that this might not be as simple as decreasing the counter. I suspect that there might be some impact on the ranking algorithm and probably a dozen things I haven't thought about. Still it might be worth it.
What's a reasonable amount of time to assume a user has left and isn't coming back? Why should they hold data forever when for whatever reason it looks like you've abandoned it?
Love, hate, and tmux
Yeah, when I was at Microsoft we were really out to get the users and the developers. Are you fucking serious? I expect it at Reddit but not here.
WikiRebels - A Documentary About WikiLeaks Crew
Simple - a job.
These articles are disappointing. First, people have already long since explored this design space for things like network routing and holding it up like it's a new idea is academically fraudulent. (I don't know whether it's the journalist or the scientists without more research, but I'd lay money on the journalist.) Second, the real world inspiration of ants is somewhat limited by the fact that the ants have been thrown at problems where, in computational terms, they have a lot more ants than complexities in the problem. A naive translation of the "ant algorithms" to computer programs would produce a very, very, very slow solution.

It's sort of cool, it's a nifty technique with limited applicability, but can we please stop acting like antlike-automata is some sort of cutting-edge brilliant breakthrough rather than a relatively standard tool in the belt for some domains? It's not the next generation and arguably not even the "current" generation.
For anyone interested, here is the full specs page from the CR-48.
http://db.tt/OEOLnOY
I would agree that there is no benefit to a person who comes from HN to read just that specific article. However, if I was a regular visitor to the guys blog and came across the article that way:

- Him posting the full text rather than a hyperlink saves me an extra click.
- Maybe it also makes it easier to talk about the article with the rest of that blogs community.
- It provides another copy in case the original goes down.
- If he also has other posts it provides a consistent visual aesthetic across the body of information.

It's somewhat like creating a miniature library and discussion group.

I don't find any of these arguments convincing, but they're possibilities.
Not sure about this. Hotmail accounts are like Facebook connect accounts, and I use mine for xbox live, MSN messenger, among other Microsoft services. Yet I haven't used Hotmail in years, and when I did I'd always get the "we deleted everything so now you're fresh again" setup notice.
Is there a wise one among us who could summarize the characteristics and status of the various Python interpreters us Python amateurs should be excited about?
I think the problem is that you run out of things that are deeply interesting while the "urge to post" continues to grow among users. It seems to me to be an inherent limitation of social news sites that want to keep their front page refreshing with new stuff. As journalists would probably phrase it, it's difficult to fit deep thought into the news cycle.
There's a big difference in the culture of a company that was built in a socialist country versus that of one built in a capitalist country.

Perhaps private companies have more wiggle room.

Rather than mandating, why not buy enough stock to have an influence on company decisions?
Venezuela or Nicaragua. Though obviously the departure isn't necessarily the choice of the corporation in either of those cases.

Well, in Nicaragua I'd say the most recent event was the hurricane, and so regulation wasn't the cause of industry's (tourism's) departure. But I still stand by the general theme, that multinational corporations are engaged in something of a bait-and-switch, even if there's no intentional malice behind it.

And in Venezuela, one can blame Chavez, but clearly his platform resonates with people because of a pattern of exploitation, even if Chavez himself turns out to be merely a new vector for exploitation.
All it would take to 'fix' our economic woes would be to reindustrialize. Coupled with high import tarrifs - in the range of 30-60% as was set historically during the periods of growth in the US, it wouldn't take long to restore the US 'productivity' and industrial output. It would mean that the large profit-seeking organizations in the US would make less money over time, but it would be better for the average American workers.
Financing approaches most likely to kill your company (if already on the edge)
"Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people."
Yup, I think user accounts are recycled. It's got its benefits and its downsides. I think it will be interesting to see 80 years from now. I guess non-recycled usernames will just get more esoteric?
How much time does the planetary core spend inside the embryonic cloud?

It seems like if it spent much time there, it should shows signs of the crushing gravitational pull required for it to maintain a large gaseous atmosphere during birth.
The last days of the polymath
Who all do we have as living polymaths on our planet? Any ideas?
Probably, although that was at its worst. The recovery was a continuum spread over a couple years, so there were pretty long periods of mild impairment as well.

I think you're probably right about happiness, but I didn't find that my impairment helped me relate to others. Even when well, I feel like I relate to most people in an 'emulation mode': a feedback loop of consciously gauging reactions and continually asking myself how my audience expects me to react. Being impaired just made this less effective and more stressful.

The general feeling was similar to being sleep deprived and unable to focus. Small concepts felt very complicated and hard to grasp, but at the same time I constantly realized that I wasn't operating very well. I suppose if the effect was more like alcohol, where the impairment is more obvious to the audience than to the drinker, that there might be more of a pro-social effect. I'm not much of a fan of alcohol, though, so again this might be just a personality issue.
"Before globalization and free trade it was roughly true that what was good for American industry was good for the American people. "

Offshoring manufacturing may leave a small group of people without jobs, but it lowers the cost of goods for everyone.
It's not a conscious decision to be hostile, just an effect of Microsoft's cultural norms and attitudes.
I haven't used skywriter, since it was bespin, but I was impressed with the progress at the time. http://kodingen.com/ looks pretty nice though.
There's arguments for doing so. There's also the arguments against it - but you should think about both side of the fence, and this side has a Star Wars reference!
Apple engineer re-creates 2,000-year-old Greek computer. With Legos.
I can't find a date on the article, when was it written? It still speaks of 'the standard' without referencing 0x, is it from the 2000-2004 era or earlier?
According to the docs and the developer comments they do get deleted. Presumably using the account with xbox live and other services is what's keeping it active, even if you don't log into hotmail directly.

I've also already experienced both situations. When the @live.com accounts became available I registered my name, never used it, eventually forgot to keep logging in to keep it active and it got deleted. Meanwhile, the account I use for xbox live stayed active even though I hadn't logged in to hotmail in at least 2 years until a couple weeks ago.
1 Year.

There are many people who make event specific emails addresses. These events are annual, so they use the email yearly.
If it was dead, it wouldn't "be so bad" anymore... for a certain definition of 'solves the problem,' it solves the problem.

Note the scare quotes around "be so bad." I still think HN is a valuable place to spend my time.
You won't regret going the Yii route. I'm amazed that people are still coding the basics from the ground up when there are already top-notch frameworks out there.
No, it's a lot more complicated than that. Actually, what you're suggesting just doesn't scale.
In the last six months, I've seen a lot of linkbait on the edge of webspam get voted highly on HN.

Although HN's quality is better than it's competition, HN subscribers still have the psychology that makes Reddit what it is. (Now, you need a ~lack~ of psychology to explain Digg, but that's another story)
I do value athletics highly and I believe I could overcome my vertical ineptitude, but the reality is that my stature gave me an advantage in wrestling and a major disadvantage in basketball, so I went with what worked and put my effort into being a wrestler.

This is why natural ability is such a hard thing for me to accept - I really believe that I can be good at anything, and I believe that is true of other people as well, but if they don't believe it, how will it happen?

It's kind of a chicken and egg problem, or maybe a qualia problem. I have an empowering imagination and I surround myself with like people. I can't imagine someone else lacking that - but maybe some people do? I don't know, its a little frustrating.
I'm curious about how would you sandbox the code that users write so that it won't affect the system?

Would love to see an open source implementation!
Same "news" different source:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1989565
A client that uses Exchange has to limit internal mail-boxes to 100 megs. If you want backups, move messages to a .pst and copy it to a network share...

I think that reliance on Exchange is a huge mistake.
Living Polymaths.
Who all do we have as living polymaths on our planet? Any ideas?
Yeah the full name is Exchange ActiveSync.
That's incredibly kind of you but I think my girlfriend already bought one for me (there are 3 book shaped presents under the tree right now and considering I only asked for 3 books...). Thank you for the thought though! Perhaps another HN member wants to take you up on this offer?
I've often wondered why these companies don't install a non-IE browser as a primary browser, leaving IE6 on the system, then using HTAs (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms536496%28VS.85%29....) with IE6 to deliver their intranet stuff.
Man vs. Machine: Piecing Together a 425-million-year-old Jigsaw
Well, to your first point, I'd say that productivity in relative terms is a more useful measure in this case because that's generally where the best investments are to made - if we're sticking with the "investors don't need america" part.

The issue with using absolute productivity in a global world is that comparative advantage in production (i.e. higher productivity growth, and with it higher real incomes in the developing world) are the driver for lifestyle.

Think of it this way: if others are wealthier, they'll put upward price pressure on supply side of goods that American's buy (look at copper for example) - while at the same time American productivity (vis-a-vis real income) decreases (or at least remains flat) make these goods less affordable from the demand side.

This means lifestyle, even with a fixed absolute productiviy, will decrease.
I think those are reasonable descriptions, but they're not quite how I see them.
I think OO is orthogonal to imperative vs functional. You can program OO in a pure functional language, and you can do pretty typical C programming with OO.
The motivation to submit a story should be "this is really interesting" not "this will get me a lot of votes."
Thanks. This is just the first iteration, so there are many more features to come. But we wanted to launch as fast as possible.
The big difference between metafilter and e.g. Hacker News/reddit is that the moderators at metafilter are very active and often delete posts and comments which are of too low quality, and they have a very active discussion with the community about the moderation (see http://metatalk.metafilter.com/).

In addition to this, signing up (required for posting) costs $5 and this is a significant barrier of entry for creating spam accounts and for users that just don't care enough about quality.
If it were my site, I'd add a document classifier that makes articles about certain topics face a headwind, or better yet, creates a kind of repulsion between recent articles... If there are already two articles on the front page about Assange on a given day, that's enough.

If documents are clean, you can compute the repulsion from the bag-of-word dot products between documents, but web pages often have a lot of noise in the outer template, so getting good results with web pages means you need some kind of template drop-out.
Why should this company be any more of a patent troll than Apple, or any other of the companies that register trivial patents and then sue other companies?
Doesn't China's currency manipulation really support his argument? If the currency floated at its "correct" levels, China would instantly be uncompetitive and the factors would move to another country. I've already seen several companies moving their production to countries other than China (from China) based on increasing costs relative to other countries.
I think it's a good idea to strip read receipt request headers from mailing list messages; they just don't make any sense in that context.

But more generally, MDNs and DSNs do serve a useful purpose when used conscientiously, and I don't think it makes sense to block them for all messages. The real problem isn't the notification requests themselves, but email clients that implement the notifications badly.
Why We Should Start Using CSS3 and HTML5 Today
It's really not. Do you actually know any Microsoft developers? It's just impolite for people at Microsoft to say: "Reddit says it wants this feature but we haven't implemented this feature. Why? Because we have done a massive user study in the past year on this and there are fewer than 1% of users (power users only) who actually care."
The problem is that it costs money to buy those inexpensive computers and TVs. If there aren't the jobs in the US to make these things, then there aren't the wages necessary to buy them. For a while, this wasn't a problem but as time goes on the lack of production in the US is hurting the public more and more.
Yes but all of it is in negative connotation. The replies on the thread are downright insulting. Take this for example - http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ej32l/we_are_the_hotma...

I think the Hotmail team shouldn't have done this, at least not before putting all the basic features in place.
Gmail "might" delete inactive accounts after 9 months/270 days. But if it's forwarding mail it wont delete it, unlike hotmail. Hotmail has more conditions for inactivity it seems.
Right, it doesn't make the hotmail situation look better, it just reinforces how bad they both are.

What's also horrible about the yahoo policy is that there is that you can reactive the account (at least for some period of time), but the email archives are deleted. This happened to one of my accounts.
Maybe they understand that 85% of people's email is spam anyway and don't really care if accounts get deleted... almost like saying: "you should have known better!"
Ah, but the smart people are the ones who leave first. Go check out reddit.com/r/programming these days and see if you can find any of the smart people who were around back when it was still programming.reddit.com.

It'll happen here, if it hasn't already. People are starting spinoffs every few weeks, and it's only a matter of time before one of them gets some traction. One of them might have already, for all we know, since they certainly won't tell us about it here.
Link to solofounders:http://webchat.freenode.net?channels=%23%23solofounders&...

Link to startups: http://webchat.freenode.net?channels=%23startups&uio=d4

(For those who've never used IRC)
WOW! It's almost like someone took all of John Gruber's points and rewrote them in an even less succinct style! Amazing!
Nothing new, they should check the work of Marco Dorigo, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization
Instead - let's vastly decrease our standing army, and focus more on quick reaction elite troop and ask for volunteers when we have a big war worth fighting. In WWI&II, the military was far out-gunned and under-manned compared to Germans in the beginning, but the threat was very real - so we mobilized a massive force.

If we did this - we'd never end up in wars like Iraq / Afghanistan - imagine trying to raise the volunteers. Maybe the Republicans would go, but then again at least they could vote with their feet - where it counts.
Which continuous integration framework do you use?
> Now Michael Athanasiou at the Technical University of Serres in
> Greece and a few buddies say that DEMETER spotted good of
> evidence of a change in ultralow frequency radio waves in the
> ionosphere above Haiti in the run up to the quake.

"... and a few buddies..." ? Is this thing being operated out of a garage?
"Have you no shame?" I bet you do, and everyone else here too.

The problem is that American executives don't.

Look at the pay gap between American and European or Japanese executives: 2x European executives, 4x for the Japanese and Koreans. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/world/americas/18iht-lette...

While there's some fiscal rules in place to benefit society in those countries, the main cause of this disparity is purely greed in American executives. With the way that the current top players are willing to sit on production startups, there's no way to reindustrialize without complete societal change. Namely, reducing everyone's consumption and increasing the uptake of domestically produced, high-quality and long-lasting goods.

Since the current system favors shameless outsourcing and cheap goods, your simple, effective plan is completely stonewalled.
I don't know about xbox live, but having using my hotmail login on msn via pidgin is enough to keep it active.
Glad the docs were easy to follow. The main purpose I see for unit tests is to make sure that future changes don't change/break existing functionality.

They're a lot of work to write/maintain so I only write them when the added value exceeds the cost :).
Unless you are referring to the recent recession (from which the graphs indicate we are recovering), we never de-industrialized. Our industrial output is higher than ever before.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/INDPRO

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/IPMAN
Thanks Noah - great advice!
...which on HN should mean the same thing, right?
Anonymous Shifts On WikiLeaks Strategy, Announces It With A Press Release
Start Me Up: Minnesota’s First Start-Up Accelerator
Internet/Media: 5 things that will define 2011
Oracle Asks Apache to Reconsider Java Committee Departure
I'm getting this error in my apache logs after installing it locally, although I have mod_rewrite turned on:

[error] [client 127.0.0.1] File does not exist: C:/Users/Peter/Documents/My Websites/epiphany/database, referer: http://epiphany.peter/examples/

Seems to be some mod_rewrite problem?

(ps: the main page at http://epiphany.peter/examples/ loads fine)

Suggestions anyone?
They filter out pretty much anything that has to do with sex, whether it's removal from Suggest or disabling instant search ("Press Enter to search").

It's hardly surprising that Google would remove it from these lists.
I think about 2000 was the first I saw it.
> An ant colony is the last place you'd expect to find a maths whiz

I actually remember seeing something very similar to this on TV when I was a kid, and the program I was watching was even older than me; probably produced before I was even born.
I'm surprised this hasn't been posted yet given the rarity of such interviews and the interesting history the STL has.

Coming up with something which was at the time entirely against mainstream practices and imbue it into the standard of a language as widely used as C++ takes a very special kind of person/s.
Yii's approach of "create db first, then we create heaps of code for you" doesn't appeal to me at all...
It may just be my style of coding or thinking but I can't imagine being more productive with larger frameworks (we use symfony at work).

I just want the bare essentials taken care of and I have a well established coding style that hasn't been dictated by any framework - for some reason I like that :).

This is definitely not meant to lure people away from larger frameworks but for someone like me who wants something that does less on my behalf.
Home Network Software Solutions - Chris Pirillo's take on Tonido
I don't think there's a single high-karma user on this site that disagrees with this point, or a single high-karma user on the site that wouldn't like it better if comment scores were invisible except to their owner.

The site also needs to do away with the leaderboard once and for all, and, in a perfect world, make it hard to find out how much karma another user has.

Seeing my own karma has absolutely made my writing suit HN better (I'm a lot meaner elsewhere). It's a valuable signal. I wouldn't wine if I got docked, or if karma went log-scored or something like that, because it's absolutely true that high-karma users also get an automatic point boost, but I'd rather not lose the signal.
I think what you're talking about for type-safety, not necessarily OOP. C supports types, but is not completely type-safe. It will tell the developer that they shouldn't be doing something, but won't enforce it.

The argument above is that most developers write object-oriented code in procedural languages. They have a set of functions that perform actions on a specific type of data structure. To encapsulate functionality and keep the codebase clean, all reads and writes to these data structures should go through these functions. This pattern is ubiquitous in well-written C code. OOP itself simply provides a standard framework and syntactic sugar to make this type of code more consistent and clear.

EDIT: Here's a real-world example: (came up for the first search of hash.c)
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/doxygen/hash_8c-source.h...
I didn't say MS was "out to get the users", I just mean that every response Microsoft has to perfectly reasonable questions like "why don't you support [insert standard here]?" has the same patronizing tone like "we've listened to our customers and delivered a product that they are satisfied with".
Google has certainly upped the ante on its design efforts, everything they've been releasing lately looks beautiful
Valdimir Putin leads Free Wikileaks Campaign
Outlook just sucks in general. What's most laughable is it's incredibly piss-poor search capabilities.
Feel free to open an issue in Github and I'll help get things sorted. I can't reach ephiphany.peter since that looks like a locally resolvable hostname.

First item to check is to make sure you have a .htaccess in all your examples subdirectories. It should be part of the repository.
If you don't like the super shady feeling that accompanies doing this, you could make friends with someone that uses marijuana. Contrary to popular portrayal, there are many users who are successful, normal people with interests that align with yours. Once you know people that smoke, you'll likely never be without at least one connection again (unless you move).
Title of this submission just copied from the URL?
Building a business with Haskell: Case Studies: Cryptol, HaLVM and Copilot