skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. GET A MAP. Boston's roads are paved cowpaths and the city is a huge Celtic knot. Yes, Boston was designed by cows.

2. On Fridays and Saturdays, go to Haymarket (Haymarket stop on the Orange Line) if you want to save a ton of money on food but live very, very well. I could write a whole article about Haymarket, but the short of it is that it's a superb open air market with fresh produce, fish, meats and cheeses. I recently walked away with 24 pints of organic strawberries for $6.

3. The best place for a game of chess is in Harvard Square at the Au Bon Pain courtyard (Harvard Square on the Red Line). I did write an article about it, so search for my name if you want to. Keep in mind that there are always more players than there are boards to play with, so bring a board unless you like to watch.

4. The Esplanade along the Charles River is gorgeous in the summer and is great for biking, running, rollerblading and people watching. It's also a good place for free concerts during the summer.

5. The best thrift stores are Boomerangs in Jamaica Plain and Savers on Route 9. I've found Armani shirts for $5.

6. The Museum of Fine Arts (Ruggles stop on the Orange Line), or the MFA as locals call it, has free admittance on Wednesdays.

7. The greenest, most socially responsible bank you'll find in Boston is Wainwright Bank. I haven't been to their newest branch, but I heard it uses natural light and things like the counters and flooring are made of cornstalk and bamboo.

8. There is a Trader Joe's that's accessible by the T (Hynes Convention Center on the Green Line) but it's a dry store thanks to the Massachusetts' law that prohibits them from selling alcohol at more than 3 locations in the state. The Trader Joe's on Memorial Drive in Cambridge is the best location. For whatever reason, the lines are shorter and the staff seems happier.

9. I know you're already in school, but one of the greatest resources in Boston is the Independent Activities Period at MIT (Kendall/MIT stop on the Red Line) every January and February. I have great memories of a 20 hour course I took with Tim Berners-Lee.

10. If you have a dog, you are required to go to Franklin Park in Jamaica Plain. It's the city's largest greenspace and it was designed by the same Frank Law Olmstead who later designed Central Park in New York. It's also home to the Franklin Park Zoo, where a gorilla actually escaped a few years ago and was seen waiting at a bus stop.
I believe his point is that it increases interoperability if all languages sit on top of the JVM.
sure you should, watch this.

Adults who list "Harry Potter" among their top books are morons.
What I mean is I do not need to downvote nor comment if I believe it is not worth it.

I would suggest limits on the number of karma points we can use each week or day (with no rollover) and eliminate the downvote feature.

In the case a comment or story is inappropriate, it can be flagged.
I downmodded this comment.

Even Bill Gates is struggling with this one. He built a huge r&d center in bejing a few years back and he's deeply regretting it now.

Could you please give a source for this?
We're hacker's, which in the classic, geek definition of the word means to build something by taking existing tools and applying them in a new and unusual way.

What you are suggesting is essentially cracking the system and breaking it. If I could down vote an article, I would.
and those that list knuth or shakespeare are trying too hard ;-)

this is fun! you may not be able to judge a book by its cover, but I bet you can judge a person by their books (in a 'sufficient but not necessary' sense.)
I really dig devices that allow for charging via USB. However, I can see how some devices are going to need more than +5V.

I'd love to see some growth on the "no wires" side we have been hearing from, too. Nothing worse than the tangle of wires you plug all your gadgets into when you walk in the front door.
last time i tried to get a low score here i got banned.
400,000 black plastic balls used to shade Ivanhoe Reservoir
> "bandwagon upvoting" where it appears that people vote up the leading comments.

Same deal as with Google Adwords and the reason advertisers are willing to pay top dollar for spots 1-4(ish). They're more visible, so they get more action.

You have to bear in mind that by design the top is that space where eyes fall first. So it stands to reason those comments at the top of the page are the ones that get the most action. Not saying "agreeing because others agree" doesn't go on... I just think it's effect is dwarfed in comparison to the effect visibility has on a comment's votes.

I don't see any way around the problem -- if it's a problem at all -- without altering the presentation of comments. I just don't think it's worth that.
I'm planning on getting MIT open courses involved with BrainBank once it's slightly more mature.
Made in...
awesome... I never new that bash could do this.
Reddit or not, here we come.
I disagree with your second sentence, but I upvoted you for it.
I talked about this more in detail:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=208748

To quote:

It is not ridiculous, since people aren't downmodding to express a difference of opinion about what the person said. They are downmodding to assert they do not want to hear any political opinion on Hacker News, because--as has been said--there are countless other venues for hackers to express and debate political opinion; Hacker News is not one of them.

Notice therefore we see something interesting regarding the HN system. In essence, this is exactly what pg had in mind. Karma is taken away for comments and not just submissions, so that users will adapt to the Hacker News atmosphere. As we have seen from this thread, politics (even "news" like the first ever black general election presidential candidate) is simply not something people are interested in seeing on HN, and if people keep discussing it, they will be downmodded into oblivion, effectively maintaining the current HN mindset (since, presumably, people with negative, or quickly decreasing karma, will not want to continue posting on HN).

The only thing that could break such a system is a vast shift in the mentality of the community (which is not a bad thing since it would still keep the community happy, although it's very unlikely to happen), or a massive influx of new people into the community (which is why pg wants to keep the number of new signups per day low).
Vanity Fair's Blogopticon: trying to define where the bloggers are for the rest of us.
Keep in mind some people might also simply click downvote without paying much attention to their action. I've seen this time and time again on Reddit and here that when someone replies "Why are people downvoting me? Could you please explain?" to their own downvoted comment, everyone wakes up and realizes the comment isn't that bad, or possibly even quite insightful.
OK, so you're a physicist, and you know that, when the dust settles and the true theory whatever-it-may-be is found, it's going to have multiple worlds in it, rather than violating relativity.

I'm not a physicist, but I had studied physics for five years and I from what I have seen most physicists certainly wouldn't agree with you that the many-worlds interpretation is "the official verdict of Science." For the most part, physicists don't really care, because the all the results that can be tested experimentally remain the same no matter whether you talk about many worlds, about the wave function collapse or about something else entirely. This said, the majority of physicists who care at all choose to think in terms of the Copenhagen interpretation, which, as much as you may not like it, is simple and lets you get straight to the point. Which by the way does not imply that they think relativity is violated or that consciousness has any special status. If you want to consider relativity then the regular quantum mechanics is probably not the right framework anyway, since it is non-relativistic. What you want is the quantum field theory.
I'm not suggesting to do it.

Also, if it's broken already (because it's a video game), forcing it to evolve would be fixing it, not breaking it.

I'm just curious.
The attack is the community changing behavior spontaneously.

Really I just wanted to use the word irono-recursively.
www.alltop.com, there are few interesting and aggregation of various articles which help startups.
Jerry's decisions have definitely had a bad impact on Yahoo's shareholder, but in my opinion it had a good impact on FOSS.

As individuals who are pro FOSS we should encourage and support and if possible finance throught the stock market, companies that are pro FOSS

And we should also do the opposite for companies that aren't ... like MS

Yahoo developed, supported and used several FOSS project, merging with MS, would have most likely ended or constrained this support.

I think, that Jerry intentionally by supporting FOSS inside Yahoo and (probably non-intentionally) by ruining this MS take over deal have done good to FOSS, and it would not be a terrible thing to support him! even if merely morally

.. Go Yahoo! Go Jerry!
I don't know. Im pretty new here, and i learned allot of stuff about the place already. I can't down vote yet, but even if i could, i couldn't see myself doing it often. Not that im a good guy, its just that i don't feel like i have the right in most cases, i have the power, but not the right. And yes, i view it as a game, but i don't think we should hack it, it's not that creative of a hack, it looks more like a 16 year old boycotting nike in support of polar bears or something.
Man Indians are getting better at Web Apps too. Good read.
I fear what happens if someone buys Yahoo then tries to break up (or ruin) Geocities and Yahoo Groups. Geocities is a treasure trove of old and new websites and it should not go the way of most web hosting ISPs did, by deleting millions of webpages.
The work 'unscientific' is a very loaded word. It can be a powerful weapon, able to paint any assertion not presented like a scientific paper into the equivalent of astrology. It has been used in many instances to discredit quite reasonable (and correct) claims. Claims like 'smoking causes lung cancer'. Global Warming...

What would you have said to those who in 1994 where predicting the impact the internet would have on the world over the next 10-15 years?

There are those have attempted to provide precise definitions of elements of the singularity. The 'turing test' is an example and there are many others if you care to look.
I often hear people advocate a policy of only downvoting offensive or trolling comments on news.YC. I think it's a bad idea.

My goal in voting is always to improve the experience for the next reader. That means that I vote up what I think is the most interesting or important information, and vote down distractions and annoyances of all kinds: not just trolling, but also poorly thought out arguments, boring observations, rambling, point-missing, and anything else that consumes space without providing value.

You can look at that as being mean to people who posted comments that were merely not top-notch, but I think of it as being kind to the probably much larger number of people who are skimming the comments looking for something worthwhile.
This script assumes that I visit news.ycombinator.com to read news. I'd prefer a Firefox extension that compares the addresses of web pages I visit with links in the news.ycombinator.com RSS feed. That way I'd be notified that there's a discussion thread about the page I'm currently viewing.
Stem cell therapy for eye disease
It doesn't always have to go that way if you plan to have things reviewed. I know one founder of a ppc optimization service who outsourced his MySQL schema development to some folks in the former USSR a few years ago and then asked me to take a look at it when they were done. The schema was reasonable for what he needed and it looked pretty easy to map directly to the PHP framework he was using.

The total cost to him was about $400.
Next Generation Wind Turbine Breaks $1/Watt Barrier
I wonder if those techcrunch Twitter stats are up to date or accurate. 3 million messages a day is really nothing in terms of scaling issues. 34 messages a second.

Although it also depends how many destinations each of those messages has.
Usually when I downvote its by accident, from me meaning t upvote but miss, really annoys me.

Only legit things I would downvote would be trolls.
I don't think the article was very well written. The constant lame attempts at humour made me skip a couple paragraphs because they were basically "haha, lost another reader there LOL".

There's a higher chance of bad writing on the internet than in a reasonably high-brow print paper or magazine. (or book) I guess when I encounter bad writing or annoying style, I'm more likely to skip it because I feel I'm wasting my time. There's better-written stuff out there with a higher information density.
What if they list Tolkien books or have a forum nick from Lord of the Rings? By the way, 'Nazgul' and 'Narsil' aren't two words that would normally go together.
Such an utter lack of understanding of Twitter's service model I've rarely seen. Message delivery was never Twitter's problem; dealing with persistance (I want my messages when I'm good and ready thanks, not when
the system wants to push them to me - READ: LIKE SMS MULTICAST!) is. Christ.

Downvote me all you like, but I'm embarrassed this story made 21 points.
Twitter Applications Part-8
Towards a fully mobile companion
I have two things to add:

1: The consequences of lifestyle won't hit until you cross thirty. Unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, poor posture, poor sleep habits, extreme stress - none of these matter when you're young, so you think you're invincible. We even celebrate this kind of lifestyle as some kind of macho thing. But bad lifestyle karma WILL eventually get you and weird shit will start happening with your health.

2: Want to wake up early? Just drink a huge glass of water before bed. I'm serious.
Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol
Should be: "scientists fund bugs that eat waste..."
touche... even though ideas are very important.. ideas by THEMSELVES are useless... Having said that I am totally useless when it comes to "coming up" with ideas.. i am more a builder myself... again, thats a pretty stupid labelling...
Paul Graham would say: "Build something people want."

And in your case, "Build Something You Want" (provided it doesn't exist) - and you'll have more energy to play with too.
I've downvoted once or twice when it was spam. I've upvoted many excellent discussions, a few of which I even disagreed with. When I disagree, I reply. Always, I learn something new, regardless if I changed my mind or not.
I downvote for factual errors (such as 'Symbian is open source') because a high vote count implies that the comment is correct.
I don't want to get junk e-mail from _anyone_. I always uncheck any preference boxes and it drives me wild when companies ignore that. Amazon seems to be a good citizen, but Expansys, AoC, Waitrose and a few others are persistant offenders.
This headline so reminds me of a poem titled "Annonce" ("Want Ad") which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote A.D. 1811:

"Ein Hündchen wird gesucht,
das weder murrt noch beißt,
zerbrochene Gläser frißt
und Diamanten scheißt."

Roughly translates to:

"Looking for a doggy which
will neither snarl nor bite,
broken glass shall be its food
and diamonds be its shite."
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=217889
I don't like voting at all, since it favors the democratic dictatorship of opinion.

So, the positive thing about voting is: stupid or nonsense comments can be marked as such.

But the negative thing remains: sometimes the truth (read: reality) is not popular at all, and seems to be wrong for the majority of audience. And since such comments are always voted down, you end up building your opinion only on a democratic base -- but:

Democratic Opinion Dictatorship Is Evil.
If enough people upvote purely for agreeing, it becomes possible to get karma for vapid posts that pander to the community.

I think it would be better to just factor in agreement as part of whether you'd like to see more. Maybe you agree with something, but the sentiment has been expressed so many times that it's getting tiresome.
Music production usually works on roughly this schedule. Producers and musicians show up in the studio sometime in the afternoon, and work goes on until well past midnight. Most musicians are night owls because that's when they play live, and studio work follows this rhythm.
Grails 1.0.3 Released
Does anyone know what the "$1/Watt" figure is supposed to mean?

"And it will make wind cheap – $1 per watt, installed – for the first time ever, with the 250,000 kWh machine to be priced at $250,000."

- kWh are a measure of energy, not power. (1 kW sustained over 1 hour) Are they saying the turbine's lifetime is limited generating that much energy?

- The paragraph above implies that the cost is $1/kWh - somewhat more reasonable than $1/Wh. Although that's still more (~3x) than I'm paying for my electricity right now.

Alternative theory: what they mean is the turbine generates up to 250kW under ideal conditions, and costs $250k to set up. That would mean the $1/Watt figure is about setup costs. (depends on the amount of required maintenence whether that's an interesting number)
Receiving email via Postfix and qmail has previously been described on this forum ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186879 ). To send email, pipe data to /usr/lib/sendmail or suchlike. Postfix, qmail and other MTAs typically install a wrapper at /usr/lib/sendmail

However, if you're hosting on ADSL, the IP address of your mail server is probably blacklisted, so you may have to configure your MTA to forward messages to your ISP's MTA. I found this easiest to configure in Sendmail, which can be configured to co-exist with other MTAs.
Installing An Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 LTS DNS Server With BIND
Actually "entrepreneurs fund bugs that eat waste..."
Your alternative theory is right. What they mean is that the turbine costs $250k retails, setup costs excluded. And these will add 10% easily - foundation, electrical network link etc. And the turbine generates 250kW of peak power under ideal (right wind) conditions. So the $1/W figure is, as you say, a one-time cost. Maintenance should be pretty low however.
That's what Twitter is, true, but it's not necessarily what users want. I'm sure if the Indian service was one day called "Twitter", people would keep using "Twitter".
Who is The Next Yahoo! Ceo?
No clue for an S corp but I'm saving this for later so I can read some smart person's answer :)
I'd like it better if it just had the links and not the description.
Any post w/ "Network Solutions" in it scares me
Possibly. In the article, he mentions that he has one million lines of Java in production.
"But the downside is that you now have this mysterious black-box in your code that you can't really do anything with."

Presumably you have the source code. Which makes it about as much of a black box as Apache, or MySQL or anything else you're using.
But this is where online retailers have a massive advantage. Amazon knows what we really buy, not just the stuff we like to brag about. Even around here, I bet people have bought more 'how to get rich' junk - let along Grisham and Clancy - than they have hardcore CS texts.
come to think of it, maybe that's the B&N strategy: appeal to the snob inside us. Tell us "you may just be buying thrillers and porn, but we know that you're an opera-lover deep down".

I'm not saying it's a good strategy, mind...
storing messages isn't really a hard problem either though.
Jurassic Park comes true
Republish & Display Feeds On Your Site Without Coding
Expert calls for vigilance on IVF technology
Why Disqus Is Winning the Web Comment Battles, and What's Next
Maintaining consistent state across a distributed system is a hard problem. Maybe Twitter are solving the wrong problem, that's for their investors to judge, but the problem they have decided to solve is a difficult one.
They spent a lot of time building them for others (outsourcing) and now are builing it for themselves (entreprenuering/producing).

The same model as the far east with cheap manufacturing of electronics goods in the previous decades. After a while of outsourced cheap production/manufacturing, these players learnt about the markets/products and how to actually design and build themselves and now many of them are major manufacturers and producers in thier own right.
Spicing Up Embedded JavaScript
I laugh when people talk about "sharding". In what way is storing your users in different databases by username any better than calling your disk drives by letter? The major database vendors all tried shared-nothing, and most have rejected it in favour of single images (using partitioning to arrange the data in a form suitable for parallel queries)
Why giving poor kids laptops doesn't improve their scholastic performance
You've gotta remember, Twitter is in a very sticky situation at the moment!

One one hand, they know their architecture isn't perfect and will be rebuilding it to cope with more users.

But on the other hand - they are a small team which is trying to keep it up in its current state, and cant just decide to close Twitter for a few weeks/months while they work on the new architecture, people will defiantly move to another service, and Twitter is dead.
Many people on HN are working for or on startups and bootstrapped projects. Implying any project concerned with the licensing cost is a little side project is disingenuous.

Even at large companies, all things being equal, having no licensing costs is a competitive advantage.
It works..because the Indian cellphone companies don't cheat you into paying a fee for RECEIVING sms or calls.
Google I/O 2008 - Python, Django, and App Engine (Video)
In a previous post ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=214742 ), you describe circumstances in which you evaluate contributions based upon the contributor.
"'Vouchered' kids also spent less time doing homework, got lower grades, and reported lower educational aspirations than the 'unvouchered' kids."

Hyperlinks subvert hierarchies.
I only said that you was probably a bot. A good method to determine if you are a bot is by drawing attention to the situation. A bot would very probably ignore the implication. So, you're either a very well written bot or a person. I now think that you're probably a person.
Chocolate can keep you cancer free
Relying on getters and setters is mostly wrong, here's why and what to do instead
Why Developers should Do Testing
Why the Browser is a Crappy Platform
Is Java the new COBOL? Yes. What does that mean, exactly? (Part 1)
Oil price may reach $250 a barrel.
I'm sorry, but why is this such a big deal? I'm not referring to the fact that's listed here, but rather why is it headline news that a particular not-so-special FOSS program has reached 500k downloads?

I've had my free software reach the 500k, and 1MM marks; but didn't think to make such a big deal about it.. can someone enlighten as to when it's considered a news-worthy accomplishment verses when its meaningless self-praise?