skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Upmodded this, downmodded its parent. Bottom line is that we read other feeds to learn about general news, and expect a higher SNR on this site, restricted to relevant domains. Downmods != disagree is correct, but I would not want to inhibit any downmod that improves the SNR and preserves the quality of a great news forum.
As someone funnier than me once said: "High school is a geographic coincidence"
news.yc is not just a news aggregator. It's also a community, one which is populated by people whose opinions I value more than those on general news aggregators. I might not be reading about Tim Russert's death for the first time, but I might still read something insightful about it that I wouldn't have seen elsewhere. You could fill the front page with articles about knitting, and if you could still get the same group of people to hang around, it would be still be more interesting than a typical day on Digg.
Almost word-for-word, I'm in the same situation and have a very similar outlook, for whatever that's worth.
>> I am attempting to teach myself Rails and have also made a concerted effort to understand Ruby.

There's your problem number one - trying to use and excel at Rails without understanding Ruby means that even if you become a moderately proficient Rails user, you won't know what you're doing, and will be unable to process past something you have a cookbook answer for. You can drive a car without understanding how an engine works (and assume that when you press the pedal down, "magic happens" and you accelerate), but to become a great driver you have to understand what makes the car go, and how to react to and optimize your behaviors for that.

Ruby is a language that does more than Rails.
Rails is a framework that's written in Ruby.

Learn the language first; then you'll know what's actually happening with Rails and what those commands mean. Net result is that you'll be a better Rails user, and you'll be able to use Ruby for many other things and in novel ways.

Separately, learn about database normalization and design. For this, start with the mantra "down, not across" - your tables should be much longer than they are wide, even if this means multiple tables.
Yes I read it. Russert has been pissing me off for years.

"VICE PRES. CHENEY: Who did the anthrax attack last fall, Tim? We don’t know. MR. RUSSERT: Could it have been Saddam?"

"MR. RUSSERT: What, specifically, has he obtained that you believe would enhance his nuclear development program?" (enhance presupposes WMDs exist. Loaded questions like this are a propaganda technique.)

"MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to the issue of Iraq. You have said that it poses a mortal threat to the United States. How? Define mortal threat." ("How?" presupposes a mortal threat, a propaganda technique.)

"Mr. RUSSERT: One year ago when you were on MEET THE PRESS just five days after September 11, I asked you a specific question about Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Let’s watch: (Videotape, September 16, 2001): Mr. RUSSERT: Do we have any evidence linking Saddam Hussein or Iraqis to this operation? VICE PRES. CHENEY: No. (End videotape) Mr. RUSSERT: Has anything changed, in your mind? VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I want to be very careful about how I say this. I’m not here today to make a specific allegation that Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11. I can’t say that. On the other hand..." (an obvious set up for Cheney to conflate)

"MR. RUSSERT: Why Iraq? Why not North Korea? Why not Iran? They, too, have weapons of mass destruction. Why not go after them?" ("too" implies there are WMDs. This is a propaganda technique.)

"MR. RUSSERT: So Saddam’s more dangerous than North Korea or Iran?" ("More" presupposes he is dangerous. Propaganda.)

"MR. RUSSERT: We have just a minute in this segment. Will militarily this be a cakewalk? Two, how long would we be there and how much would it cost?"

"MR. RUSSERT: Bottom line, it looks like we’re going to war."

You don't understand propaganda very well Rob.
Umm, the entire system is propaganda. The president has a bully pulpit and that drives the news.

Meanwhile, from your selective editing (nice bit of propaganda, yourself!) Russert is asking the exact questions that needed to be asked at that time.

Still, no journalist was going to be able to dispute a deceptive administration on the WMDs. Their only hope was to question the evidence. And Russert did exactly that.

What did you want from him? To call Cheney a liar to his face? Based on what? As it is, he was incredulous at the aluminum tubes.
Agree with timcederman. Pre-Google buyout, there were and still are tons of video hosting/sharing startups. BUT, why did YouTube ultimately take off and get purchased by Google? They did something different/better than everyone else.

In YouTube's case, I argue that they knew how to market themselves. Don't discredit your positioning and target audience. Write a kickass app tailored to what they specifically need. And hey, if it's another video app, how is your version better or more niche than YouTube?
Upmod: "Likely to remember reading this tomorrow"

Downmod: Incoherency, trolling, ad hominems, and spam. Also anything factually inaccurate, but only if it is currently +1 or higher.
Rhinos and Tigers
My edits crossed your post. I pointed out the parts that are clearly propaganda techniques. It isn't propaganda for me to quote him like this. I just located the examples of subtle propaganda.

See, the entire system isn't supposed to be propaganda. Thats why we have a first amendment. To prevent exactly that. It's not a defense of Tim.

Russert pretended to question them to help Dick Cheney lay out his case. That's his role. This is not actual questioning. That's the message control his press person testified about Russert giving. Look at the subtle linguistic structure of what he's saying. Propaganda.

I wanted him to not ask questions that subtly presuppose the exact things Dick Cheney is trying to deceive the ameriacn people into believing. I wanted him not to work off the record with Cheney's press people before the interviews. I wanted him to tell us when a powerful corrupt person slips instead of later taking it off the record (this is not about the live interviews, but the stuff on background and stuff like that).
This is part of an escalation of the Net Neutrality war. Will Google actually release it and risk angering the companies that bring Google and other services to the net? Will Comcast do anything to counter? How much will it really affect us?

Both sides have their turf to defend. Comcast saves money by throtting bandwidth, Google makes money by making sure no site with AdSense is throttled.

I just hope it isn't government rulings that decide this in the end.
Off topic, but this story was added a day ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216861

Usually HN filters out repeats, but not this time. Very strange and interesting.
I see a practice here which I find unhelpful: "bandwagon upvoting" where it appears that people vote up the leading comments. Do we really need to vote the top comments in a post out of the park, please tell me what utility this provides?

I saw this a lot on slashdot when I used to frequent that site. Comments that were at 3 or 4 got pushed to 5, but comments at 2 or less got ignored. But on that site, there was a hard upper limit of 5 points.

As far as my voting practices: I upvote select comments I think are particularly lucid and have not been voted up "significantly"

I downvote what I think are innapropriate comments such as hateful, vulgar, insulting (see this site's guidelines) "excessively" whiny or demanding or just plain babble (rarely, usually I just ignore babble).

I do NOT downvote opinions I disagree with. I either ignore them or reply.

Overall, though, I think the lack of hard and fast rules to voting adds more than detracts. If we all vote in different ways, then that makes the site more dynamic.
Specific claims with specific dates are falsifiable, but saying that there will be a singularity in the next 40 years is insufficiently specific (without carefully defining the term singularity, which very few singularitarians do), and proponents of such claims have a tendency to push back their prediction dates as the time when those predictions will need to come true approaches (AI, flying cars, the end of the world, etc.). It is the lack of specificity, both in the conditions of falsehood and in the time frame, that renders the singularitarians' claims as unscientific.
How could you possibly know he was "pretending"? I suppose he was faking the incredulity at the aluminum tubes too?

Journalists cover the news. They don't make it. Unfortunately, the system is unable to ferret out truth, no matter how much you'd like to believe otherwise. We were failed by a good many journalists who failed to ask the right questions. Russert wasn't one of them. The transcript shows exactly that.

Better, what's one question he didn't ask that he should have in that interview? Name one.
Yup, but on a different site; it's a press release. I find funny that in my submission people were complaining that I removed the 'may' part of the title; in this one, people are complaining of the opposite ;)
+1 for the first person that posts a summary.
First. (You said "first". You said nothing about quality.)

To get from 11,494 words to 400 words, every 29th word:

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If people are debating whether or not Hussein is obtaining aluminum tubes for his WMDs (the ones he has "too") the propagandist wins. When Russert postures like this, he's miming the false dichotomy the propagandist wants people to be arguing. The question being debated covertly contains the information the propagandist wants to convey (the propagandist doesn't care about the thing being debated). In this way, the fact the propagandist wants to convey sinks into both sides of the superficial argument. Russert's skepticism of these tubes is a textbook example of this mode of propaganda.

"Hussein has the tubes for his WMD program." "There is no evidence he has tubes for his WMD program." People here "WMD program" 20 times. Who cares about the tubes, that's where the propaganda is working.

I don't think he was evil. I think he got in over his head and then was so interested in keeping his power and access he let himself be available to be manipulated.

I would of wanted him to ask about the way Cheney's press office handled the run up to the interview, and what he knew about the way his press office was setting up his interviews.
Drunken, entropic rambling.
It could be that stages 1-3 mirror the company lifecycle. Companies start out not sucking (as startups) and slowly either become lousy and big, or get bought into a lousy and big company.
Here's the actual talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BttI-y9VzXQ
"I would of wanted him to ask about the way Cheney's press office handled the run up to the interview, and what he knew about the way his press office was setting up his interviews."

Wow, that would have been insightful.

Meanwhile, you're naive if you think the President (and VP) doesn't set the national agenda. The problem is not enough journalists questioned that agenda. Russert wasn't one of them.

Russert asked the questions. That's more than 99% of the journalists did at the same time. I simply don't see how you can blame him because the answers were deceptive. He was never going to be in a position to prove the administration wrong (nor any journalist).
How do you down vote?
Agreed. Amazon rocks. But I'd recommend that guy to change his habits though: classical music is better for you than junk common sense literature. I haven't read all of those books, but some. Maybe others are better, but I doubt it. When Peter Norvig joked at startup school about lack of substance in these "economics for masses" books, the audience audibly agreed.
You are exactly correct: since an upvote "floats" something to the top, you should upvote when you think other people should see it. As hackers understand, knowing what something does is important to knowing how to use it correctly.
The Heart of Silicon Valley (1997)
It this author is right, most people would only read about half of this article.

(I'm not sure he's right - I only read half of the article.)
Yeah, this is surprising from B&N. If Qdoba can track all the burrito purchases I make, B&N can surely keep track of what books I have. Once you have the data, making recommendations isn't rocket science.
We crossed edits again.

I don't think the presidents prerogative to set the agenda extends to colluding with a supposedly free press to deceive the american public. The way Russert questioned the VP was part of that collusion.

(Hey, I noticed you're a neuroscientist. If we're going to be typing back and forth, I'd rather be picking your brain about that then spending one more second of my life thinking about Tim Russert.)
Your evidence of "collusion" is your ability to read between the lines of linguistic cues? I'm shocked, shocked!, you're not a journalist with those investigative skills.

I wouldn't have engaged you on this topic if I didn't find your comments so distasteful and dirty. I had hoped to find a rational perspective behind that emotion. Clearly, it's all emotion.
Jonathan is holding his chopsticks pretty well
Thanks! I find it hard to skim something that long, and this really helped me get it.

I wish I had a bite-sized rhino... Damn you, Steve Yegge!
Clinton's concession was not simply damaging because it wasn't hacker news--stories of that nature threaten hacker news as a whole.

(1) A story about Clinton's concession contains no information content. Everyone at all tracking politics knew it was coming, and anyone who cared about when it happened could have predicted the timing reasonably well in advance. Tim Russert dying is a story with no hacker news content, but it is at least some information--I sincerely doubt anyone was predicting Russert's imminent demise.

(2) A story about Clinton conceding is divisive to the community. It brings up a topic of discussion unrelated to the topic that brings this community together, and, given the tendency of some people to downvote in order to indicate disagreement, ultimately increases the homogeneity of the viewpoints expressed here. Most people do not find Russert's death nearly as divisive. Regardless of what you think of the quality of Russert's interviews, historical trends tend to indicate that he will be replaced by someone worse at it.

(3) A story about Clinton's concession reminds everyone of how Reddit came to be what it is. This sort of story is relatively benign in this respect.

(4) The story about Clinton conceding--if it had been popular--brings the baggage of continual political stories in its wake. If every time a major media figure dies there is a single HN story about it, HN is not incredibly damaged by this.
I am paying around 50$/month for my broadband and is pretty much connected 8hours a day.

Does that mean someone else is paying for me? I.E. most people surf less and there for don't use the 50$ dllars they pay?

I mean how is this actually working, internet used to be expensive like 10 years ago when you paid per hour and had a modem.

I thought it was so cheap now because it is cheap to let people have the bandwidth.

I don't really get this issue with wanting to control what people access.
Why don't the broadbandproviders charge you for how much bandwidth you use instead?
I would be delighted to see some software to actually measure throttling; there's nothing the network neutrality needs more than some actual data about what is happening and how pervasive it is.

My guess is that most ISPs do no throttling outside of peer-to-peer filesharing.
My evidence of collusion includes the quotes by Tim and Cheney's press person at the Scooter Libby trial, and these quotes. These are not little linguistic tics, but well documented propaganda techniques.

What you find dirty and distasteful is the fact that you are going to inevitably die, and could drop dead any second like Tim did, not my comments. Confronted by the sudden death of someone you liked, and attacks on him, you attack back, as if by refuting the attacks on him you can fight back against the inevitability of death.

Because I don't care about the fact I'm dying, I do not let death cloud my judgement of the recently dead. This gives me a freedom to objectively judge them and the impact they have had on the world. Not respecting the taboo on death makes groups that are obsessively afraid of death not like me very much.

This is the first time in my life I've been called too emotional and not rational enough. I'll take it as a compliment, I guess. Most people tell me I don't seem like I have emotions. I get vulcan a lot. Never too emotional. So, thanks!

It's easier to think some guy you talked to online is an ass (which I am. don't care) then admit you've been fooled by a propagandist for 5 years, especially right after a shocking death. I don't expect to change your mind. I'm sorry for your sense of loss, and hope you'll eventually reconsider in light of what will be revealed about this time over the next few years.
What would be even more helpful would be an article about the Heart of Silicon Valley from 2017.
Rhino is cool, and useful.

We're actually using it in production for a couple things.
Can one person really produce so much text? Does he have a team of writers or what?
ISPs charge consumers a monthly fee for theoretically unlimited usage because that's the way most people are comfortable paying for their internet usage. Even a geek like me doesn't have a clear idea of how much bandwidth I use in a month, so for most people a per-byte-transferred pricing scheme would be totally unclear. Contrast this with something like per-minute phone usage pricing.

Bandwidth certainly is cheap, and constantly getting cheaper, but the average consumer's bandwidth usage is also increasing. A few years ago, as filesharing became mainstream, broadband ISPs found it much more costly to provide unlimited service. Their ways of managing this extra cost include some throttling but also, interestingly, a proliferation of local peering.

Local peering is when two small ISPs, say in a single city, notice they are both paying their ISPs in order to send traffic to each other, and decide to instead run a line between themselves and exchange traffic on that line instead of paying their ISPs. There was never any reason to do this sort of peering on a local level until we all started sharing music and movies with other folks in our neighborhoods; the increased demand has led ISPs to make a lot of the bandwidth we use less costly for them.
So now you're reading my mind?

Russert, no matter how much you may personally dislike him, did his job and did it well. The wide-spread reaction to his death show better the role he played in an industry that is far from perfect.

As for "this time", the evidence has already been made obvious. The administration gamed the case for war. No journalist was going to prove them wrong then. Russert asked the questions that needed to be asked. If only half of his peers did the same, we may have been in a different world today.

Good night.
LPTS -- I haven't had a lot to say to you on this thread. I think you're sadly off in your own world somewhere, but hey, we all have to live somewhere. I just didn't see the point of trying to chase you down over HN. Logic and language games are always fun -- another reason I like politics so much.

Part of this comment, however, deserves a reply. I can see where people think you're not very emotional and you would feel complimented by being called emotional. I would ask you to honestly consider that all people are emotional creatures. The more you've heard in your life how logical you are, the more you've probably bought into it. It's a lie.

Rule #1: People believe what they want to believe and use their mind and reasoning capability to justify it.

Rule #2: This is always easy to see in other people but tough as heck to see in yourself.

I post this because HN is full of bright, ambitious people. We're just the type of people to be logical, analytical, cold, etc. The sooner we all realize that introspection is more valuable than argument, the sooner we can work more effectively as a team. You see, good teams are full of these broken mammals called humans, each looking out after the other guy's blind spots. It's not a Vulcan debating society.

That's it for the sermon.
I got as far as:

Virtual Machines are good because they help language interoperability, which is something we need more of on the server side, but I gave up half way through before I could glean "How" VMs actually help language interoperability, but I think it has something to do with Rhine. Anyone care to read the last half? I'd read the rest, but I need to figure out why my virtual hosts aren't working in Apache on my new Debian server.
Twitter is becoming one of those rubber-necking, "God I don't want to watch this but I have to" kind of events... we don't exactly enjoy watching twitter suffer, but we get some sort of bizarre camaraderie from both watching, and participating in, its growing pains, which is strangely appropriate given the exhibitionist nature of twitter.

It's like we don't want to miss a moment of it, even if it ultimately implodes, because we want to be a part of it all.

I dunno. I probably shouldn't be posting after my fourth glass of wine. Sorry if this makes less sense to everyone else than it makes to me right now.
I ran this through an automated text summarizer.

Didn't make much sense then, either. Best I got was a discussion on languages running on top of the JVM and a mention of PG.
F|R Crib Sheet: How to Source Good Offshore Developers
Here is your opportunity to brush up on your Markov skills. Feed his post in as the text corpus, then generate the first 250-500 words. Should give you something at least passable.
I don't know if you should judge another's reading selection.