skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"each post or comment is necessarily evaluated on its own terms" there is some extra overhead in doing that, and makes the user experience discontiguous for posters and readers.

Maybe it'd work whereby instead of just randomizing usernames, you'd just give the karma score of that user, (or rather their average comment score, or average comment score per day.)

I am definitely interested in going to a more anonymous forum, but which still has in-built controls against trolling. Given the age of this forum and my time on it, I want to start fresh with a new username (or username system) for some reason, but feel this is not the place to do it, and neither is 4Chan.

So the karma score on a comment would look like:

+/-xx | +/-xx.x | xx.x

comment score / avg comment score per day at time of posting / hours ago since comment posted capped at 24: items shut down after 24 hours.

You'd see if a person has excelled themselves in any one of their comments -- or it may be a troll comment from a smart user, which can also be funny or interesting. So when a comment is first posted, you look at the second number to see it's worth reading, after a while you can look at the first (or the second, or, one's own evaluation of the differences between the first two, or the three.)

There'd be no username tied with a comment, but you could see an extensive comment history privately, and you'd get a self-replying randomized daily email address that you give to someone if they want to see your metrics. Or instead, each comment has a <a href="randomnumber">user</a> link to show the profile page without (or without, not sure) comments, and has a customizable field.
How much do you pay editors and managers and developers to keep 12 year old sites sitting on a webserver?
Expressions are everything in L.A. Noire
Have you found good tutorials on how to use GIMP for mockups?
Paris Hilton and Katsuya
I've experienced erasures of memory related to using the bathroom. "Did I flush?" I had. It's not like I wasn't conscious, just that my brain doesn't give a shit. I'm sure he's talking about a similar thing.
hmmm, your definition of due process seems to be different than "good things happen to people we like, bad things happen to people we don't like." Are you sure that's how things are supposed to work?
WordPress custom sidebar for home page
Just watch the two video clips included on the page. A first in history? Realistic facial animation in a game. Wow. This is some truly remarkable advancements in existing mocap tech.
Ask HN: Thoughts on Using Karma for Homepage Placement?
I've been thinking about this for a while (this is not my primary account). Karma on HN is mostly just that - maybe it can be used for bragging rights but that's about it. And yet, as we all learned this week, HN is at over 1m page views/day during the week. This means, whether we like it or not, it is a powerful media property. PG - have you ever thought about allowing people to use karma as a kind of HN currency? On the one hand, that could lead to all sorts of karma-gaming, though alternatively, as page views increase one might make the assumption that gaming will increase site-wide. Just a thought.
How to kill the Arduino? (embrace it)
Security Lockdown for Linux
-Ubuntu Automatic updates
-Secure SSH
-Install Secure NX
-Secure MySQL
-Install fail2ban
Bringing up new hardware is a bit harder than that -- take a look at the most open example we have of doing so, the OLPC. 100% open hardware which they designed, but building the tools and bringing it up were still a lot of work.

Credit where it's due: the Android folks have worked very hard to make this an easy process for their OEMs.

By the way, this is why just about all hardware these days is brought up on Linux first. Yes, even your dear iDevices. :-)
Spam headline. Releasing support for safari for your browser extension is not "taking on apple".
That seems so backwards to me. I've had physical cards stolen before, and they get used, in person, immediately. I write "ASK ID" on the back of all my cards and thank clerks when they ask me.
Software and hardware have significantly different risk mitigation strategies. No matter how much high quality code you write, you can't keep a harddrive from failing. And when a harddrive fails, you don't immediately blame it on software (of course, software can drive hardware beyond its limits and cause a failure of the hardware, but that is software abusing the hardware or not knowing the limits of the hardware, and thus a software problem).
StackOverflow is done in ASP.NET MVC. They were one of the earliest adopters of ASP.NET MVC. It would make sense to go with Windows servers as Mono w/ Linux may not be up-to-date with latest C#/ASP.NET code. BTW, as they are part of BizSpark program, they would have got the server licences for cheap.

And I am genuinely curious as to why you think 12 Windows servers are pain compared to 12 Linux boxes?
they is used in a bunch of situations where the person prefers to be non gender specific. It only feels wrong for the first little bit, but hang out with enough people that have complex gender identities and you will get used to it.
But without Netflix, how valuable is their content?
75x trailing earnings in the current economic environments SEEMS expensive to me.

It seems the same to me as well, but markets seem to disagree. The riskier the bet, the more willing today's market seems to be willing to accept it.
More like

1. Board isn't impressed with current inhouse developements, and wants a "modern" mobile OS. There aren't really many alternatives to WP7.

2. Old CEO doesn't want to bend over to MS

3. Kick old CEO out and get a guy from MS to do negotiations with MS to license WP7
That depends on how you define a smartphone. Chinese manufacturers as well as Samsung have pushed price of Android phones down to around $150 - unlocked. Samsung's Android phones are not crap. At that price point, it steals the show because the competing Symbian phones were not at all good. Just compare the FB app for Android and that for Nokia. Smartphones will keep getting pushed to lower price-points. Also, they might be offered at cheap rates with 3G data plans. India - one of Nokia's biggest markets just finalized 3G spectrum allocation and there are rumors that operators here will start subsidizing smartphones with fixed data contracts. Nokia denmocratised mobile phones. It won't want to miss out when smartphones become democratised.
"Your second statement is at war with your first."

You missed the switch to differing valuations between two different people, it seems. You spoke as if either we're only talking about one person doing the comparison or you've casually assumed there is the objective metric I explicitly mentioned in play. No contradiction.

"Your example was also shit."

And you're just looking for reasons to tear something apart without doing the hard work of examining what was actually being said. Your nits are irrelevant to my point. I didn't give a treatise on the full value of how to create justice in the world, I'm speaking to the example at hand of how "Anonymous" retaliated and how people are applauding it when they shouldn't be. No wonder you consider it "shit", you're not even willing to grapple with what I said. You haven't fairly valuated it in the first place.
Several weeks is milliseconds in legal hearing time. Have you ever taken something simple to actual civil court before? It doesn't look like this got dragged out; the defense objected to the request, the judge reconsidered, and then apologized. What more can you reasonably ask for?
Build Website - Link to Our Site - Free Banners and Graphics Available
Right, I didn't mean to imply that this was deliberately misleading, just that I would imagine these things to be far more useful internally than to the casual observer. (i.e. it would be great for spotting consistent sore spots and the like, but not necessarily a statistically viable indicator of customer happiness)

My guess would be that the biggest benefit from this is going to be when people hear about how great the customer service was at 37s, stop by to check it out, and see a chart full of smiley faces, each one potentially representing an echo of the great experience they heard about.

PS: I would like to add a frowny face for never getting a response to my application :(
What do you mean a different computer? This was a copy that was never installed. I bought it from one of those online OEM shops. It wasn't zipzoomfly.com, but something like that.
Why stories like Egypt are fit for HN
Ask HN: how to spend two weeks in SF effectively?
A startup is flying me in from Europe to Palo Alto for an on-site job interview, and I've asked to postpone my return flight in order to use the opportunity to look around (I've never been to the West Coast before). So, now I have two weeks (25 Feb to 8 Mar) to spend in California. What would you suggest I should do to make the best use of my time?

I plan to do some local tourism of course, visit LA (is it worth it?), etc., but I want to spend as much time as possible in the famed local enterpreneur community. I'd love to attend any local enterpreneur events that will let me in, and just to meet and talk to people. Could you recommend any events or meetups that I could attend?

I would also much appreciate any general suggestions (where to stay if cash is somewhat limited, how to get around, etc.). Thanks!
I think GetSatisfaction did a great job responding to this post at the time and it's important to give them some credit for a good response to criticism.
I absolutely do not understand what you are trying to say with this comment. Can you make your point more directly? My point is: hard drives and mail spools get handed over to the opposition in civil cases all the time. It's called "discovery".
Reddit AmA: Director of the first ISP to challenge the USA Patriot Act
Looks like the biggest change is the addition of Django 1.2 (previously it was only 0.96). What are the key features that Django 1.2 offers?

Still waiting for SSL for custom domains, that's by far the biggest gap in GAE's feature set.
How to Profit From the First Bubble of 2011
They probably want more impressive things if you're older -- if you're 18, it's impressive to have created a single site and sold it for a few thousand dollars, and have that be your biggest achievement. If you're 40, it's less so.
Linke to the PLoS article that this post summarizes: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...
I've always thought patents were supposed to be detailed enough so that one competent in the field could produce the invention. In SW that is clearly not the case.

I'm not justifying patents. I also think they're generally not useful and destructive. But they are here.
I don't think you realize how different Android and MeeGo (or atleast Maemo) are. They aren't running the same kernel and their userland is completely different. The fact that both have bits of linux inside doesn't really make them alike. It probably would be easier to port Qt for WP7 than integrate Android on top of MeeGo.
The order being made at all is what I'm most concerned about. This is an important case about technology with a judge that demonstrably does not understand technology. Perfect recipe for a lose-lose situation.
They could do almost everything (administrator wise) via Powershell if they chose too, they're not necessarily stuck using Remote Desktop.
Here's an earlier explanation about their caching set-up using Redis:

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/69164/does-stackover...
F1 Engine Power Secrets (2000)
Nokia could go back and focus on great hardware.
I assume that they want to keep their hardware platform. And porting Android to that would almost certainly require opensourcing their baseband implementation and thus enable everyone else to build phones with similar architecture (ie. without dedicated baseband CPU).
Turns out Nokia gave those workers the rest of the day off. Journalism fail.
10 Great Features in 10 Different OSes
Yes, I tend to get discouraged at the photoshop hurdle.
Don't use Google's DNS or Open DNS. That screws with the CDN endpoint you are given and drastically hurts performance.
For a question like this, you should say roughly where you are. Employment laws vary greatly by country and state.

Also, even when you have a technical violation of law, unless you are relatively powerless without other options, you may be best served by exercising your right to find other employment.

From what I know of jurisdictions where I've worked (US, California and Texas), I can't think of a specific law the practice you describe would violate, as long as each of the furlough period, and the overtime sessions, are individually done legally. (Having them in rapid succession doesn't seem a relevant factor.) However, IANAL.
Very often, yes. The boilerplate IP contracts provided by most law firms usually claims one of:

* All software development work you ever do while employed by the company.

* All software development work you do using in any way any resource of the company, from computer to network connection.

* All software development work you do related to the business of the company that employs you.

* All software development work you do that isn't explicitly listed in an exhibit of exceptions you, the employee, fill out.

Before you start asking how enforceable this stuff is, note that unlike with noncompetes (which usually aren't practically enforceable), the way this issue is going to come up is, you're going to try to start a company, and your first official act of business is going to be to start defending yourself against legal actions from your employer that will torpedo any chance you have of getting funding for the year or so it takes for those actions to resolve themselves.

So, 'grellas may chime in and say "don't worry about this", in which case ignore me, but I wouldn't dick around with this issue. If my IP contract precluded me from working on my next company project, I'd get a clarified official path to working on it from my employer, and leave if one wasn't provided.
It seems odd, too, that they would use both CentOS and Ubuntu. Why not run Redis on Ubuntu?
Your blogpost would make a great Tell HN submission.
I'd suspect that after enduring 30 years of struggle against a dictator that they wouldn't care what language they were cheered in. Most people just want to live in peace, it's only those who have an axe to grind that incite things by worrying what language someone is congratulated in.
Intel defends MeeGo after Nokia defection
Thanks so much for the positive words. We're going to look into making the tag boxes a bit more beautiful.

As far as IE6, what's that? :-P
Not to mention that it appears to do absolutely nothing on Linux with Chrome...it's just blank.
Depends on where you live. Heavily state dependent.
Rate My Web App: Revealy - URL Magnifier
And his point seemed to be a simple joke on how most people expect the justice system to work. No big deal.
Interesting read, its doubtful they can.

If it ever came to a dispute, id follow the guidance of mark zuckerberg and fight it out for the rights to my work.
Great idea!

We're also considering making the tag boxes appear on scroll; what do you think?
I'm not a security guy, so I'm at a loss with analyzing whether it makes sense or not.

It did occur to me, though, that I would not want to be the clerk asking for ID if the guy on the other end of the counter had just mugged somebody at gunpoint and was now looking to buy something so he could go down the street and pawn it to purchase drugs.

But I can definitely see the other side of the argument too.
First, we're probably hyperventilating about the extent to which this request was nonsensical. It could have been an oversight on the judge's part, or there could have been a rationale behind the request that simply didn't turn out to be reasonable in hindsight. We may never know, because the judge (properly) conceded the point quickly.

Second, it is not the job of a judge to "understand technology". We may not even want judges that are specifically steeped in technical knowledge. What we need them to be is fair arbiters of the law and of the ways the law allows facts to be introduced into evidence.
> Um...you do know that all the non-Alpha/x86 ports were considered failures in-house and dropped, right?

This is patently false.

> And the OS engineers who wrote the "portable" NT code have long since vested and moved on. The new kids on the block have probably never seen their code.

As an ex-Microsoftie I can tell you that you are wrong. Check Dave Cutler, Larry Wang and several other engineers (even from the original VMS team) still at Microsoft. NT has been ported to several different architectures internally many times over, though commercially only the x86 and PowerPC (XBox 360) variants have been widely released. Itanium ports worked perfectly well, but there was never any significant market for it.
Mini's are usually half the cost of a fullsized, and buying 24 at a time should give you somewhat of a discount off buying a single.
Er,its liking comparing Flash with Amazon EC2, I'm sure you're thinking that Azure is something else

Silverlight and Azure are different things, but they're both marketed towards developers who would like to take functionality, much of it in the form of internal apps, and make it accessible on the web or otherwise over WAN. I know this, because some Microsoft folks were pitching Azure to me just yesterday!

Yes, things don't make sense if you're stuck on "compete = comparable." A little reflection, and you should realize this isn't a very good assumption. (Teleconferencing and airlines, anyone?)
Facebook to allow iFrames inside apps
Interested to hear perspectives from Europe/UK as well as the US, so if you mention specifics please say where this is relevant.
I made this because I got tired of just blindly having to click on shortened links.
Wow. Android is really eating everybody's pie.

But Nokia dropped far less (47.6% -> 37.9%), proportionally, than Microsoft (8.7% -> 4.2%).

No question that Microsoft is the winner here.
I suppose there's also tgrep 08:30-08:36 | grep REDDITBROKE
Both Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood made several articles or blog posts explaining this. Obviously, they've got the licenses cheap; they're using the technology (WISC) they know best; and WS2008 is far, far better than any other previous MS server OS, due precisely to huge pressure from the linux challenger :)

Note : I'm a FSF member and free software fanatic, but I won't pretend that something that obviously works well, doesn't.
Locked in a Vegas Hotel Room with a Phantom Flex (very high FPS camera)
<em>A success by what metric?</em>

how about global market share?

2008: 52.4% of smartphones (RIM 17%, Apple 10%) [1]

2009: 47.2% of smartphones (RIM 21%, Apple 15%) [1]

Android came in at 0.5% and 5% for those two years.

Gartner forecasts that Symbian will remain in the number one smartphone OS position until 2014 when it is contested by Android [2]

Sure, it's in decline now, but it's been a phenomenal success.

[1] http://www.canalys.com/pr/2010/r2010021.html

[2] http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1434613
Next Evolution in Mobile Search Will be Built on Voice
Sounds like Hastings charmed them.

I'm a Netflix streaming subscriber and even though it's so cheap - I'm considering canceling because they don't bring enough new content online for me to get value from the service.
The Latex wikibook is amazing. I used that and this GitHub repository full of examples from an ethics class at my university to learn latex. https://github.com/mgius/calpoly_csc300_templates
[Ask HN]: What is the funniest thing you've seen or heard at your job?
I figure HN can use some comic relief ever once in a while.

I will be posting more comic questions if this one does good.
This seems like a fairly uninformed view of the Zuckerberg story. In the end, Facebook settled those claims for huge amounts of money (and only were able to because they in fact had huge amounts of money).
I don't think that it will become a problem. BitTorrent enjoys widespread use for legal purposes like distributing Linux distros, open data, etc. Homeland Security hasn't caused any trouble for legal downloads yet.

The bigger dangers are firewalls and ISPs that throttle or block BitTorrent traffic.
The swiss have frozen his assets:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/11/us-swiss-mubarak-i...

I'm glad to see this, its the first step to sending him to the Hague.
I believe he was being sarcastic.
Google App Engine Roadmap
Very much state dependent, and very much modified by the employment agreement (if you had one) when you joined a company. You can, and should, strike any objectionable material from the employment agreement, have the HR person who is helping you with your first day paperwork sign off on the changes, make a copy of the document, have the HR person sign the copy acknowledging it is a true copy of what was signed, and put that somewhere safe.

If the company won't accept your changes, then that is your signal that not only do they intend to own IP rights to perhaps everything you have done or will do, they also intend to litigate for those rights which you will have signed over to them with the agreement.

That is a good time to decide if you want to work there or not.

For folks who are thinking about changing companys but have yet to make the jump, ask your future employer to give you a copy of the employment agreement before you accept their offer. Have it reviewed by a lawyer. That way you can find out before you give notice that you weren't going to work there anyway.

At least for tech employees there is enough demand on the hiring side to give you an advantage.
Math and CS are better off than experimental sciences. Theoretical paper often contain errors, but these don't usually invalidate the conclusions.

In experimental sciences, hard sciences like physics do have a lower error rate than sciences that rely heavily on statistics. But that's changing. See the second page of this article: http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~ckirby/brad/papers/2005NEWMode... The author argues that "Nature has gotten more tight-fisted with modern physicists" and that physics is now more dependent on statistics.
Link broken? All I get is "Portal Not Found"
Certainly true - but arguably, cheap Windows machines democratized personal computing. I wouldn't discount Nokia's future in the developing world because of Microsoft's involvement.
Ah kids, gather here by the fire with me, and let me tell you a story of the olden times when you bought a car and could do whatever the hell you wanted with it. Because when you bought the car, you made it your property. You could modify it in whatever way you want. Sure, there were rules if you wanted to take it our for a ride, because others could get hurt. But if you were doing it just for the fun at home, no-one could stop you. You could even go over to your neighbor's house and help him change his car, too. Those were the times.
It's free for now and the plan is to give all our early adopters unlimited accounts.

Later on, we'll set some limits on user accounts, but only if we have to. Sophia's had ideas for monetization from the start, but that said, we want to make sure that enabling our users at no cost remains permanently prioritized over revenue.
How I Got Kicked Out of Y Combinator and Then Raised $1.5m for My Startup
Holy cow-- I never thought about this. Thank you so much for mentioning because it might explain our sometimes weak streaming performance for different sites.
Sure the application has a URL. But once I load it, it constructs what I see on the page on the fly. I can turn Javascript off and load an alternate page, but if I leave it on I'm loading an application that's every bit as opaque as Flash.