skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pooling memory for allocating links turns the allocation into amortized constant time.

List insertion is O(1) if you insert it at the head, and while moving the most-recently-accessed link to the head of the chain doesn't change the worst case behavior, it greatly improves the average in practice (and is dead easy).
Over the last 6 months I've seen comments that deservedly made it over the +10 mark hit -2 before getting there. I don't think you can just disappear comments that cross -2; it takes time for the score to settle.
Appreciate the reply Darshan. Yeah, I'm working at adding more details to the text. The color change however is an opacity change that I put initially because the background was an image, but I need to tweak that.

Thanks and good luck with FloType!
Count every user's up-votes and down-votes.

Change voter weight depending on how much it correlated with PG's votes in the past. Vote can even change direction if inverse correlation with PG's votes was observed.

Next step would be to create personalized page for every user when new submission is sorted according to correlation with that user (instead of PG).
The approach of hardcoding a set of nested loops per each possible count of input sets is probably okay for most common use-cases, but wouldn't a more general algorithm be better? You'd either need to generate N nested loops via template metaprogramming, or else use an algorithm that didn't explicitly have the nested loops.
Let me see... a headline with spin, an article with three fairly pointless sentences (I refuse to count equally pointless questions at the end), and a submission that should have been submitted as the source of the "article":

http://blog.chromium.org/2011/02/native-client-getting-ready...
I'm exactly in the same boat right now. I have a great startup http://UpOut.com. I can tell you what we're trying right now:

1) Email sign up form (200+ users signed up with 60+ so far on the "Submit an Activity")
2) Funny videos about us (first one is posted) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSZMn-s3NZs
3) Email every blog out there big and small to see if they're interested in covering when you launch.
4) Hiring people to write initial content.
5) Giving presents to advocates and good users of our beta.

We're trying everything right now to push it and get it viral. Any other suggestions anyone?
Thank you for your reply. I've read all of your submissions, very helpful. Leaning more towards a completely free application.

Take for example a blogging platform such as Posterous or Tumblr. Any suggestions as to how I would monetize my application other then direct banner advertising?

Past experiences?

Thank you for your help,
Good discussion of this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2236878
Westboro Baptist Church Responds to Anonymous: 'Bring It'
Just kill political stories more quickly.
Decoding VP8 On A Sega Dreamcast
I read this, thought, "whoah, really? That's damning!" and took at a look at 'jaybol (who I'd never heard of). This is an unfair summary of that user. His top submissions on SearchYC aren't infographics. Infographic spam may be his job, but he submits diverse and interesting articles to the site and that's where his karma comes from.
>But hey, I only have about 25 years of coding and online experience. To be fair, it's not SO's fault.

That was an absurd statement. Why don't you rather tell us what confuses you about the login process?
Whatever eases the massive pain and frustration involved in developing things for facebook, is imho a good thing.
Here's my idea for improving the quality on HN:

Ban silly meta-discussions where people discuss how terrible HN has become and fantasize about what draconian measures they'll take to make it better.

Seriously. There are things about HN that I don't like, but I find these kind of discussions even more annoying.
Would you care to explain?
Your two days worth is looking like a great site! Well done! :) Two points: On the tour page, there are two "tour" headers right under each other, which is strange. I recommend the tour bar in the header section just leaving the tour header in the main section. Secondly, on homepage, under "why do you ask for offline access" typo anyony=>anyone. Also, no-body really reads the lots of text in footers (or anywhere really!) so if you have something important to say (like why you want offline access), somewhere physically closer to the facebook login step would make more sense. And lastly, who did you design? If you did it in just 2 days, that's amazing, well done!
The Kindle is not a tablet though. That's not dismissing the Kindle (I own one of the big sized Kindle's and I lvoe it), Amazon explicitedly has set out to make an e-book reader, not a tablet.

The Nook is closer, but it still isn't comparable to an iPad.
You won't like this solution.. But I think the most effective way to fix the site would be to delete everything and start from scratch as a referral-based invite-only site.

There is a reason communities fork themselves as they approach Dunbar's number. It's not that we lack the technology to talk to more than 300 people at a time, it's that we implicitly treat strangers differently than we do friends. The problem is sociology, not technology.
I try and do my part by voting up the answers that are truly useful when I come across a question by searching, but I agree that it does tend to be a first-come first-serve type of system for the most part.

They've taken some steps to alleviate that (badges for getting an older answer upvoted to +5), but it's still an issue.
Oh, i see my design question has just been answered. There's definitely nothing wrong with using templates if they look that good. Well done!
The most ironic part of the iPad (and now Android) tablet explosion is that hard Bill Gates had been pushing tablets for years at Microsoft. And now Microsoft doesn't even have a dog in the fight.
Is having one's fingers in a lot of pies quite the same thing as vertical integration? If a team making a Samsung phone needs a chip made by another arm of Samsung, do they get special pricing or do they have to bid against other chip customers?
He's paid to make those submissions whether it's an infographic his company produced or a blog post they didn't. If that's not spam then what is it?

From one angle HN is just a traffic source for user submitted content and that makes it a target for people/sites/companies who aren't invested in the community that is the value.
Maybe bonus submissions/comments could be awarded for some sort of karma threshold on individual items (e.g. One more submission if you hit 50 karma on an item or one more comment if you hit 15 on a comment.)
Nothing.

The ability to change opinions is an important difference between rational and overly stubborn people.

Sometimes I can be convinced during a discussion. Then people are often very surprised that I change my opinion at all. Then I wonder why the bother to discuss, if they don't expect me to actually change my opinion.
I'm curious why everyone who writes style guides seems to hate C++ exceptions.
The problem isn't Google so much as it is a lack of an understanding of the value of privacy and anonymity on the internet among the general population.

And it is also a matter of the lack of serious support for maintaining such privacy and anonymity at the internet infrastructure level, and at the level of applications that interface with the internet (web browsers in particular).

These things go hand in hand. As the general public becomes more educated about the value of privacy and anonymity (and what happens when, due to the lack of either, abuses occur) there will be more demand for technology that supports keeping their data and lives more private.

Then software, hardware, and services that protect privacy and anonymity will become more economically viable, and companies like Google will have a much harder time spying on their users.

This is why education about the value of privacy and anonymity is so valuable.

Until that happens, people will voluntarily leak information about themselves all over the place. Witness the popularity of Facebook, or hundreds of other sites where people gladly give up their privacy for various dubious enticements.
http://stackoverflow.com/ is easy to browse without having to login.

http://quora.com/ puts up a wall.
Agh, I care about this subject, but this poll is terrible. The options seem a crazy mishmash. Some of them are precise, others are general. What does 'make the flag button more powerful' mean? I think it's getting most of its votes because people make their own assumptions about what it means.

Has someone attempted a hierarchy of choices? The HN frontpage works as it does because you have a relatively stable set of people voting on submissions to enter the front page. So to improve it you could constrain who can submit, who can upvote, and cultural norms about what is permitted (guidelines). Each of those could have specific concrete proposals. One of those I would vote on.

And so on and so forth. I haven't mentioned comments at all, but I think it's useful to light up this state space.

Hmm, I wish polls would separate comments based on how they voted.
Thanks for the typo catch, and point about the header, I'll get started on fixing these :)

And lastly, who did you design?

I cheated and used a couple of templates from ThemeForest :)
RecSys 2010: YouTube
JQuery 1.5 Visual Cheat Sheet
Touché. I must admit that I've never thought of Java as something from Kurt Vonnegut, but the analogy is apt.
You can use this trick for memoization.
Example: http://paste.pocoo.org/show/341849/
It must be unrelated because there's http://math.stackexchange.com/
The world's simplest Mobile App Maker
Excellent idea and execution, congrats!

The audio on video though was not understandable due to low quality and accent.
Reputation is, by and large, a measure of how time you spend on the site, much like an MMO. If you're interested in more popular technologies, you tend to have more questions to answer (and yes, more people read and upvote your answers).
Not at all. Those "bells and whistles" you decry have negligible impact its ease of use, as it's been designed such that the extras (due dates, priorities, projects, etc) are only there if/when you actually want to use them.

Otherwise it's just "task add something", "task list", "task done something".

And if you do find yourself wanting to use those "bells and whistles", they're just a man page away.
The biggest obstacle would be to avoid being co-opted by the usual crowd of spin doctors and propagandists.

Once those folks take over, the majority of people tune out the channel, whatever channel that is. And rightly so.
> Possible fix: Put the up-vote graphic to the left side of a comment (e.g. where it is now), and place the down-vote graphic to the right side

I'm seconding that suggestion. It's the minimal possible coding workload, and solves the problem instantly for all time.
Again: I am not arguing with you about whether he's a spammer or not. I have no idea if he is. I'm saying, when I look at his top submissions, they aren't low-quality.
Scrum Status: Easy "Scrums" for distributed/mobile teams
During the discussion that sparked the creation of this poll, I too suggested weighting upvotes by the karma of the upvoter. Thinking about it further, I still like the idea, but it would have to be done properly or it could be easily gamed. Example: a small group with relatively low karma could simply upvote every post and comment made by others within that group (a complete directed graph of upvoting). It would not take a particularly large group to be able to artificially inflate its karma at a greater than linear rate.

The quick (and probably flawed) solution I came up with was to have a tiered base amount that is determined by the karma percentile of the upvoter (eg, 75th percentile might get you an additional 2 points, 25-75 1 extra). Furthermore, there is an additional potential bonus based on the karma delta between voter and votee (ie, upvotes from top HN'ers are more valuable to newbs than to other top HN'ers). As an example, we'll say that we add one point for every 25% tier between the voter and votee (no bonus if they are the same). Using this example, a top-tier vote would be worth 5 points to a newb but 3 to a veteran.

This would allow high-quality posters with more recent accounts to quickly gain the necessary karma for voting, polls, etc without causing such massive karma inflation on the high end.
Because I haven't been involved in game development professionally since 2002. Even though my knowledge is now 9 years out of date, I know that this article is low quality.
Peanut Labs: Using Surveys to Generate $10m in Annual Revenue
Ahem, the text states the opposite of his point.

However, I was a little tongue-in-cheek there. The RFC disagrees, but browsers have been doing it wrong for as long as I can remember. So, in practice he's right... ;)
I buy Joel Spolsky's take on this, which is that there are software features that improve communities and software features that degrade communities. They may not be the sole determinants of community quality, but they exist. Do you think Hacker News has identified all of the low-hanging fruit already, or do you disagree with Joel Spolsky on this point? (Or is there a third option I'm missing?)
Can you explain how continuations apply here. I don't really have a good idea about that.

Wrt setjmp/longjmp, I think the key differences are the lack of a 'setjmp' and that you don't have to pass in the setjmp buffer down the calls. If you ignore those aspects and focus only the barest essence, yes they're the same (just like nitrogen and a cake are the same because they're both made of protons, neutrons, and electrons).
Furthermore, when you create an account with Quora, it begs and pleads with you to give it all your personal information in your Facebook account. Not just "What is your token ID?" or even "Who are your friends?", no! Everything about you!

But what takes the cake is the history tracking that Quora uses. It suggests topics that interest me. Like both Barnes and Noble and Borders... from an article I read on HN yesterday. Blatantly telling your users that you're spying on their activity is a great way to endear them to your service.
Proposal: If it's desirable that votes not be undoable, make them non-undoable after 5 minutes, but undoable until that point.
You would probably enjoy submissions that are approved by voters who voted similar to you in the past.
You would probably want to penalize submissions that are approved by voters who you voted inversely in the past.
So, the idea is to weight every vote according to what your past voting pattern.
For initial implementation we can use PG's voting pattern:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2242525
Jack Griffin's Ouster: Lessons from a Failed "Change Agent"
Hey HN, this is a new site I've made to help teams do daily standup meetings (or "scrums"), when not everyone can be in the same room or even on the phone together.

I'm very interested in feedback, comments, suggestions, etc!

Just interested in the underlaying tech, or source code? Take a look at the project page on Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/rwilcox/srumstatus/
RF Control hack for virtually any device
I laughed when I saw this: "If your function crashes upon error, you should append OrDie to the function name.", and then as an example: "OpenFileOrDie". Lol.
Well, a couple of reasons. One, as they explained there, C++ exceptions weren't very good when they wrote the bulk of their code. The second reason is that writing exception safe code is hard in C++.

Combining those two, you have code that wasn't written exception defensively having unexpected exit paths due to exceptions and now you've got bugs.

It sounds like they would've included exceptions if they didn't have a legacy codebase. I'm sure that would've added a decent amount to the doc.
Yeah I'm not adding "give up" to the poll. For what it's worth, people are already doing this, cliqueing themselves off the site. That strategy doesn't require announcements or drama to put into effect.
And as usual, being clever in Python equates to getting yourself in trouble.

Dammit, people - in Python, "That's clever" is an insult. Learn the philosophy of a language and you'll be much happier using it.
AllVid Battle Lines: Google, Best Buy, Sony Ally Against Big Cable
I think the S/N is too low in those resume.
Isn't that the benefit gained from testing, rather than BDD?
Online courses from the world's top scholars
I would disagree with this safe-net concept. In general, a young guy has almost nothing to lose and everything to gain. Secondly, if he gives himself a reason to fail.. he is allowing himself to fail.

With that said, I'd say, figure out a half decent plan. Execute it. Fail.. Learn. Execute better. Repeat. It doesn't matter how much you fail but don't take on too much debt.. just work more.
There was a time, around a year ago, when meta-navel-gazing was really dragging the front page down, so I know what you mean. Unfortunately, the annoying meta-negativity that's driving this submission† is spilling over into comments from people like 'edw519 and 'iamelgringo†† in normal discussion threads. I can only assume this discussion is more productive than the one that happened on the "it's hard to travel into the USA" thread earlier this week.

Did I miss a lot of meta-posts over the last few weeks, or am I right that this is one of the very few active meta-discussions we've had in a little while?

† (which: for the record, I think this might be my second or third ever "Ask"-style post)

†† (neither of whom are normally prone to meta-negativity)
"The best way to make a defining-moment decision is to study all the facts, learn everything you can about the circumstances you're in, the pros and cons, the cost-benefit analysis, and then make your decision. It's really got to be thought out."

cf. http://www.gladwell.com/2010/2010_01_18_a_surething.html
> I never claimed (and I don't think anyone else did) that there are no "other talented people doing their jobs".

From your earlier comment:

> Jobs is a design and technological wizard who single-handedly righted the ship.

Thats you falling for the personality cult right there. That's also you claiming that Jobs somehow managed to fix Apple singlehandedly, which of course is wrong. Your comment about Ives trailblazing for years to come is quite amusing, given that Ive freely admits that he's heavily influenced by Dieter Ram's work (if you look at Ive's designs you'll see that he's following Ram's principles).

> Your rejoinder, rather than actually arguing against personality cults, is more a reminder that "a witty remark proves nothing."

That sentence appears to be a prime example of your quoted phrase.
I had loved that article. It was very succinct.
I have to say, I'm a huge fan of the MIT CompSci course. A more direct link is http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...
Lisp vs Python
If I made the poll more precise, it'd be a zillion options long. If there's a variant of one of these ideas you like, vote it up and then clarify in the thread. I deliberately kept the options vague.

Are some of the options too specific? Suggest ways for me to generalize them and I will.
And Facebook isn't?
How about big hungry corps come in different sizes and shapes but are still big hungry corps.
I like the idea of hiding scores, with one caveat: Ask HN. Those posts often end up taking on a StackExchange-like manner in which upvoting for agreement makes sense and you really do want to know which responses got the most votes.
I don't think anyone disputes that the GPL places more restrictions on a recipient of the code than a BSD license does. And you're right that, in one (extremely narrow) sense, this grants recipients of BSD-licensed code more "freedom" than recipients of GPL-licensed code.

The free software movement is about granting users freedom in this narrow sense, but it is also about building a society in which software freedom is valued and protected in a much broader sense. Software freedom is a social, moral and cultural goal in the same way that freedom of the press, freedom of association, or freedom from malicious prosecution are. These are "freedoms" in a broader sense than the dictionary definition, perhaps, but that doesn't mean that "freedom" is the wrong word to use.

Indeed, the broad sense of "freedom" is the one that is of primary importance, because without the social institutions that implement the broad sense of "freedom," the narrow sense of individual freedom in a particular setting becomes irrelevant or, worse, non-existent. Unless we have freedom of the press in the broad sense, for example, the fact that any particular publisher is free to say what it wants remains hollow. (One could hardly say, for example, that a country which has a single publisher that's free to publish as it pleases -- the state-run media outlet -- has a "free press.") A whole series of institutions are required to have a free press: a legal system that protects free printed speech, a system of publishers that actually produce that printed speech, an economic system that supports those publishers, and so on. In the same way, a whole series of institutions are required for software freedom: a system that protects certain freedoms of use for all users, as well as a system for developing free software, and for supporting that development in one way or another. It is these institutions that the GPL helps create; and in their absence, the possibility of BSD-licensed code, whether or not it would be "more free" in a particular case, is irrelevant to the social goal of software freedom for everyone.

Unfortunately, it is precisely the broad sense of "freedom" as a network of social institutions that define, protect and promote individual freedoms (in the narrow sense) that introduces the trade-offs and hard choices, the balancing act between certain particular freedoms of certain individuals and other freedoms of other individuals. But again, this hardly means that freedoms in the broad sense are not properly so called. And unless we make those hard choices, the narrow, individual freedoms that arise from them will not exist in a meaningful way.
The Unfortunate Death of BCC
I'll give you the example of the OnStartups answers community. I am logged in on Safari, and when I go to my user page, it says my OpenID is from Yahoo. Fine.

Now I open Firefox. I try to login to OnStartups, because it doesn't know who I am. I click on Yahoo, go through the authentication process. Guess what: it says it can't find that account on OnStartups (wrong answer), but finds it on StackOverflow, and asks me if I want to link it to my new account. What???

It's almost as bad as the experience I described with multiple Google accounts: http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2010/11/15/the-10-step-google-l...
Donated a $50 spot.
Votes weighted by account age, karma, karma average, or correlation to 'pg voting
I think ultimately the problem is HN is a source of traffic, that's why people tailor content for this audience, it's why the spammers are putting all those [dead] links in the new section etc.

Maybe it would help if you had to click through to the comment page to get to the external url - nobody's going to work hard to get a hundred visitors + the comments are often more interesting than the content.