skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You need to reach a threshold of karma. Once you do, you'll see a down arrow on comments.

You should read the FAQ here: http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
It's not stored as plaintext. It is salted as per the restful authentication plugin with some tweaks for additional security.
I'm not emotional. You are wrong that everyone is emotional to some degree. Your rules are also wrong in certain cases. I would say more in email. Too far off topic here.

I'm looking out for the blind spots of all my teammates who are deluded into lionizing a propagandist because they thought he was entertaining on TV or have problems relating to death. I love my teammates so much that I'm willing to do this even though their pain around death and stupid conventions make them not like it. Like some sort of 21rst century Bodhisattva, I'm sacrificing my accumulated karma points to help all beings on hacker news. :)

When I worked with people on hospice, my clients seemed to really like me because most people treated them like they were dying or already dead and I naturally treated them like they were still alive. So my atypical reaction to the taboo about death isn't all bad. Dying people really liked that I wasn't emotionally affected by their death (they know their dying, they don't want everyone to be constantly reminding them of that by the way they act, because then their death costs them the rest of their human interaction too). But the survivors and mourners of dead people? Not so much into my attitude (except the ones that saw me work with their loved ones, and the nurses).
At first it bothered me that I could make a comment on something, maybe not a comment that everyone would agree with, but a comment that I believed, and yet I'd be down-voted. I'd watch my karma tick away and be like "What are these folks doing? What on earth is wrong with what I said? How does it lessen the quality of the conversation?"

Then I realized, it just doesn't matter. This isn't a contest, it's a community. All this measures is the general vibe of the comment. Higher numbers = better vibe. A fuzzy value at best.

More useful I think would be to see the total score, but also be able to mouse over the score to see how many down-votes and how many up-votes something received. But that would very likely require a big change by PG to maintain three scores, not one.
I'm reading your words, not your mind. Goodnight.

The widespread reaction shows how sick our culture is, not anything about Russert.

I liked talking with you because you made me rethink what I thought. I still think I'm right, but you made me think.

If we knew each other I'd bet 500 bucks that more information will come out by Jan 1 2010 that indicates Russert was occasionally a propagandist.
No. It was downvoted because it contributed nothing to the discussion. Saying 'thanks for your opposing view' is as useless as saying 'I agree' and nothing else.
Google Is Giving Us Pond-Skater Minds
I've been downvoted for explaining to a guy why he was being downvoted. he then told me his 'trolling' was a joke and to have a sense of humor (he was already at -4) then I started getting downvoted and he got upvoted.
there is definitely some of that. i can think of two former employers where i was one of the first ten employees, and i really enjoyed the work in the beginning. then they got bigger and things started to suck.

at the other end of the spectrum, there are the rockstar programmers who pretty much never have this kind of problem. they are always sought after, they can pretty much name their own game. they don't have to deal with lousy employers for one second, because there's always somebody offering them something better.

i'm not one of those guys. but i'm aiming to get good enough at the game that i don't always dislike my job, at least.
This guy's reading choices aside, this is further proof that Amazon takes their recommendations very, very seriously and understands that good recs = revenue. B&N - I'm not sure what they understand. B&N just doesn't seem to get it. Their Book Clubs could be great communities - if they were about community, not selling books (the sales will come folks!). And frankly, think outside the box folks. A recycled forum is just so lacking. The good thing about B&N is that they can often get the book there faster than (non-prime) Amazon. But when it comes down to it, I still do most of my nerd purchasing at bookpool. They don't try to recommend or sell me anything, but what I buy from them, they get right, and get it to me fast.
his description gave me an idea. how about an app that turns any list of links into a subscription where you get emailed 1 per/x days.

for example, you could highlight some of MITs open courses, click a button and then get emailed a link every x days.

I would find this highly useful as I'm the kind of person who never gets around to things.

Does this already exist?
"If you’re bootstrapping your startup, offshoring your web development is a great way to save money."

Am I the only one here who finds this statement a little spooky?

If I'm bootstrapping a web startup, development is the last thing I'd want to outsource.

For an early stage startup, development is both the most important thing to do and my best skill set. I'd want to focus on that and outsource anything else.
score another one for the rationalists.

(I'm still fence sitting though)
Seriously, this should be implemented on the device level. Its stupid easy to add one of these: http://octopart.com/search?q=dc+to+dc to your circuit board along with a 4 diode rectifier bridge and support a dizzying array of different inputs all at once. Lets just say 12-24 volts and let the individual machines that plug in sort out what they are going to do with that.

IMHO this is long overdue.
Comotivate to get stuff done
right on edw...

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.

I think it makes sense to offshore things like design (I use a great CSS guy in equador for some of my stuff) but for core project work I keep things closer to home.
OS X's Summarize service, by sentence:

> Basically I argued in that talk — successfully at Stanford, so I think that was... something — that for just-in-time compilers, it's becoming pretty clear, they have a lot better access, a lot better data at runtime about how you're actually using your program right now than the compiler ever had.

By paragraph:

> Case in point? Regular expressions. (raise hand) Who likes to write their own giant deterministic finite automata to do string matching? Heh. It's weird — nobody raised their hand.

So, something about people not wanting to write their own compilers?
This makes a lot of sense. IMHO hackers are the best programmers. I've always been surprised that there hasn't been more acknowledgement of this fact by the big names in the business.
Sadly, the Davis Square McIntyre & Moore closed recently.
Arrington is wrong about everything. So what's new.
I don't think you have to take it as a all-or-none deal.

Often, I'll outsource small sub-projects that I know would take me more time than I can budget for that aspect or because I don't want to sidetrack myself from the marketing aspect of my business.

For instance, I needed to extract data out of a Firefox plugin that used SQLite. I really didn't feel like unraveling the schema and putting together the core SQL statements to extract that data the way I needed, so I had an outsourced developer hack it together for me for $50.

It probably took him about 5 hours to put together, so if I value my time over $10/hr, it was money well spent. (Especially when working on marketing parts of my business, my time is worth wayyy-y more than $10/hr.)
Unique Rolling Bench
Shouldn't it be called AJAH? It still requires JavaScript...

Anyway, I prefer using JSON for most things.
What I learned from your comment is that I should write my own 'summarizer service' that picks a random sentence from a document, calls it a summary, slap the phrase 'N-tier' on it, and sell it to Fortune 500 companies.

At least both those sentences are somewhat important points he had, but most of the talk was about JVM languages and specifically Rhino.
Arrington Talks Yahoo/Google/Microsoft On NBC
Why IM Interoperability May Just be a Dream
Scientists create bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol
Ken Auletta interview with Eric Schmidt
after taxes and health and 401k, THEN put away 10% of whatever's left for your own investment. Who knows if you'll be able to cash in that 401k.

10% is your baseline. Do it no matter what. Then set an investment goal like 25% a month. this keeps you thinking about frivolous spending.

set aside 10-25% a month for your twenties and you will be WELL ahead of the vast majority of people, especially with CS salaries as they are today.

my personal goal is 50%. Very steep from most people's perspective, but I'm not having kids so...
AOL has released partial specs for parts of OSCAR but neglected to include the sections necessary for ICQ compatibility, and there is an obsolete draft RFC for MSNP. Both of those protocols have been reverse engineered and documented fairly well, but there are no open source implementations suitable for use as jabber gateways.

Sorry, but that's just not true. OpenFire has an excellent opensource IM gateway plugin with support for all of the protocols he mentions. The only one still missing from the open source community is Skype.
NYT Slams Jerry Yang
Having skimmed it, I can reduce the 11,500 words to just 128:

--

The future lies with dynamic languages; their success in big systems, and Scala as a complex move in the anti-dynamic direction, are both inconvenient developments for Java and static-typing orthodoxy. Still, the JVM and VMs in general are good for dynamic language implementations.

Javascript/Rhino is better than you think, and among the best of the JVM languages -- better than Java, and still easy to integrate with Java in both directions. Rhino is getting investment from Google and elsewhere; remaining objections will be conquered.

Google will open-source 'Rhino's not Ruby' (aka 'Rhino on Rails') this year (he hopes). RnR has been used by a 20-developer team there to build a huge web app in a small code footprint. Google's JSCompiler for compressing JS will likely be open-sourced, too.
The Energy Problem and What to Do About It
This statement is spooky edw.. it's spooky.

All code needs to be maintained. Those offshore guys are quick to grab the money and it doesn't take too long for them to send you the code but it's gotta be maintained otherwise it's garbage. And that's the big problem with off shore development....
"...people kept trickling in, and I estimate there were about 400 people stuffed in the room by the end. It was standing-room only, and people were spilling out into the hall. The conclusion? The other talks must have been really boring."

Actual conclusion: people eat lunch. His talk was at 12:45, and the previous round of sessions had completed at 12:30.
I don't understand the last two paragraphs (before "Power Points").... the article is mentioning "for the greater good" and some counter-arguments to points that haven't been made in the article itself! The benefits of their technology is clear, but they're defending it against arguments that have (presumably) been made without telling us what they are...
How does one self-fund a startup properly?
I have a startup (set up as an S-Corp) I want to add some of my personal funds to, but I want to know the best way to go about it. If I pay myself with equity can I create additional shares, or do I have to transfer shares? If I consider it a loan to the corporation, do I need to specify terms of repayment?

Any websites that go over this for the self-funder, or person seeking a family and friends round?
What do you use to send/receive email for your Web App ?
I just wanted to know how people here at Hacker news handle email for their web applications.
Absolutely no disrespect intended.... but perhaps it is not the companies at fault? I mean to say, are the other fellow hackers/employees present just as disenchanted with the management and direction of the company as yourself, or was it always just you?
Bye Bye Blackberry. Hello iPhone 3G.
Open source project management app hits 500K downloads
from an earlier post:

"From starting the search, to the first developer writing code should take around 3-5 months and there may be further delays whilst you complete your documentation."

Don't know what start up has 5 months to wait before coding.

Wow.
It's badly written. Another thing is people eat bacteria shit in the form of yogurt and cheese all the time. So it's not like they should have a problem putting it in their cars.

Those are some cool bugs though...

If you could break down sewage like that, you could link them up with an RV's toilet or people's drainage fields and let them pump their own shit into their gas tanks. Eventually.
Twhirl and AlertThingy Need to Start Innovating!
Before you bother clicking, this isn't on NBC's national news, it is on "Kron 4 News".
I remember really wanting to like B&N e-mails. The thing that annoyed me was that they would always pretend to have great deals just for me. Then I realized that all of their 20% off deals would still cost me more than buying the book from Amazon at their normal price. Plus as alluded to in the article, I never saw any books/movies/CDs that jumped at me. I finally gave up and unsubscribed.

I love Border's e-mails on the other hand. They send me coupons varying from 10%-40%. I think that they do data mining to figure out which e-mails I respond to. I'm trying to teach their learning algorithm that I only use 40% off coupons;-)
I'd change that to:

"to build a huge web app that never saw the light of day"
That's a fair point.

But the downside is that you now have this mysterious black-box in your code that you can't really do anything with.

If, 6 months later, you decide that you want to add a feature or fix a bug you're only going to have two options:

1. Be at the mercy of the outsourced programmer

2. Spend 5 hours learning the schema, and understanding the existing code. Then, after realizing that the code you bought is crap (not necessarily true, but more likely than not), spending another 5 hours rewriting.
Premium Content and Advertising… Content is King
Is an open source plugin for a specific jabber server (OpenFire) suitable for use as a gateway that works with any jabber server? I wouldn't think so. Plus the OpenFire plugin is a hodgepodge of 3rd party libraries in various states of neglect.
New Champion Crowned in World of Supercomputers
India's SMS GupShup Has 3x The Usage Of Twitter And No Downtime
Oh Jerry, It [Yahoo!] is No Longer Your Baby!
that's a good question.

i'm of the opinion that there are really good A-level programmers, competent but not terribly imaginative B-level programmers, and so on.

those companies i'm calling "lousy" were populated by low B and high C level people. management comes to expect certain things from these types. you have to be at the office eight hours a day, no goofing off, you have to be managed pretty heavily or you won't get anything done, etc.

if you're the low B or high C type of programmer, you could be very happy at that kind of company. so yes, there were a bunch of my coworkers that were satisfied.

personally, i rate myself as a high B. i work best with minimal supervision. if the higher-ups get out of my way, i can do an enormous amount of work in a very short time. i can solve most problems on my own that nobody imagined would occur, without even bothering anybody with the details, most of the time.

i do a lot of what looks like goofing off, which makes low-B-level higher-ups uneasy. my desire to work independently and get things done quickly often runs afoul of the culture, which decrees that your boss gives you thing A to do, you do thing A and ONLY thing A, report that you've done it, commence twiddling your thumbs, the boss gives you thing B to do, and so on.

so companies i'm calling "lousy" are really just a poor fit for me. and they don't get nearly as much done, and they're liable to be working on boring problems.
The karma situation isn't anywhere near as bad as you're making it out to be. While what your suggesting can be done, there's absolutely no reason to do it. Hacker News is still a great place and a great community and there's no reason to turn all rebellious over a perceived injustice, and certainly no motivation to try to turn the whole karma system upside-down when -- on the whole -- it's working OK....
He didn't give any reasons for not doing number 2 (waiting for the Blackberry Bold)...
I don't perceive any injustice. So I pissed off some people in Russert's thread today. Pissing off people on the internet is part of life.

I think it's a video game, and could be better. That's what we do, make stuff better.

I'm not suggesting it's actually done, either. But would it make things better, if half the voters reversed their pattern?
Check out http://www.hitlinkz.com and choose Domain Registrars from the Popular Categories list. HitLinkz.com has a huge collection of domain registrars that are popular among its users.
IMHO: not really. Sure, for the while it takes to catch on (assuming it does) it would work and we'd know ourselves. But then when it becomes the "standard" for low ratings to mean high quality then people will start up-voting like crazy, and we're back where we started. The numbers are relative, so it doesn't make a difference if there's a leading "-" sign or not, it's the way people read and treat it that counts. When HN first started, + was the convention and people respected it (at first), then they didn't. If you switch to a "-" convention, people will respect it for some time, then the same thing will happen once more...
what if only a percentage do it? 25, 33, 50%?
Then it'll have no meaning. You'll downvote my reply because you think its worthy and someone else will come along and upvote it for the same reason (and, remember, everyone can upvote always). Or you'll upvote my reply because of how nasty, trollish, and a waste of bytes it is and someone will come along and take points away... it'd be chaos.
Hackers. Chaos. Fun. What's not to love? (Hypothetically)

Is the system totally vulnerable to an attack like this?
As a matter of fact yes, but with some workarounds. However, let's assume the answer is "of course not" instead: But it can be easily adapted - that's like creating a new filesystem from scratch because ext3 or reiserfs hasn't yet been ported to whatever platform you're working on - and going on to claim that no open source filesystem exists simply because you don't use any of them :)
It's not an "attack" - it's the normal course of events. If 50% of the community follows one convention and the other 50% follow another, it's inevitable.
If you can't code very well or are an mba with an idea, then it may make sense to offshore. It may be cheaper to send the code offshore than to send it across town. But it might not be too. You have to add in the cost of communication as well.

I would argue that it makes absolutely no sense to offshore code for a hacker.

It typically takes me longer to document the requirements of what I want than to actually write it. I would expect the same out of any good hacker. If it is code that would take less time to document than to write. That most likely isn't code you could send off to an average programmer now is it?

You are going to get code that stopped being developed at barely good enough. I don't know about everyone else but I don't want code that is barely good enough in my app.

You lose the domain knowledge of that component you outsourced. That is what you need to take your app to the next level.

You most likely will end up debugging that code at some point.

You miss the opportunity to iterate.

I'm sure there are just as many (proportionally) great developers off shore as on shore. It is harder to go across the world than across town, across town is harder than across the room. My final point is that I have a much better chance of getting someone great here than off shore. I've worked with thousands of developers over my career so far. I can count on one or two hands developers that I could say write me an X and I know I would get a really well written X. Most of the others would eventually get me a working X but we would have go through several iterations.
If I have to iterate I could have written it faster myself.

It may possibly make sense in some situations. The Hacker startup world is not that place.

As a hacker it makes absolutely NO sense. Okay last point. Most of us have read Pauls' Essays. We are all trying to "Build Something Great", That hopefully people want. Would Leonardo outsource? Build me a design for a flying machine / Tank / Submarine. What the hell do you think he would have gotten back? Right, I didn't think so either.
These types of puzzles are also fun to tinker with to pass time during a long road trip (provided you're with the right people).
I think Hacker News just jumped the shark.
I don't really see a need for this; I can use haXe to get the additional interoperability Yegge refers to with Rhino/Javascript, and I won't have to use the JVM to get it.

That he pooh-poohs all static languages by pointing to some excess of Scala and using a slippery-slope argument from there doesn't really help.

Plus the verbosity.
That's your opinion.

Many times, a comment is so inane that the only time-efficient way to express disagreement is to vote against it.

Any active forum is going to have a tiny bit of brass buried in a large pile of muck. If we spend all of our time apologizing to the muck-makers, there's very little time to find the brass.
Still, the JVM and VMs in general are good for dynamic language implementations.

Not just good, but vital for just-in-time optimization. The argument of JIT bringing dynamic languages to the speeds of Java/C++ seems compelling...
Downvoting opinions you dont like creates a streamlined and boring community and will turn into the tyranny of the masses.

Downvote trolling and upvote opinions and posts you like.
But dont downvote wellargumented posts that you disagree with.
Maybe he uses a fast keyboard? I've heard wonders about these:

http://www.datahand.com/products/proii.htm
I really do not think most startups can afford to go the route of big companies and offshore out their development work. (Side-note: I am a developer based out of India)

The first key hurdle is obviously to find the right company. RFI's and RFP's have been around long, and a very intelligent reply to them does not necessarily imply you would get the right set of developers to work for your project. A startup typically would not be a very 'big' account for most of the companies, and your probability of landing up with very good 'programming' talent is minimal. (I guess good programmers are in short supply at most places). At the end of the day, the developers on your project is what really matters.

Assuming, you are smart (and lucky) enough to have selected the right set of people for your offshored development project, still getting this relationship working across geographies, takes a bit of time. A fast and nimble startup, probably just does not have the luxury of time, assuming the product would change rapidly based on user feedback/market/competitor situation. (unless it was freakishly conceptualized in a brilliant way from the start itself)

In all, unless you have a relatively simple product in technical terms or a very well specified one, and have the luxury of time with you, only then look at outsourcing your development work.

One line decision maker: If you consider yourself a hacker, do not outsource your (initial) development. It's not for you, and high chance you would be left disappointed.
One flaw in your plan: Once you slip below 25 karma, you lose the ability to downvote comments.
+1. Saw your reply after posting mine. I think you have put the 'right' point across really well.