skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even if there wasn't, how are friends distinguishable from an automatic voting ring?

Even if they were distinguishable from a voting ring, it still makes sense for their upvotes to be ignored (since they're artificial votes, and a poor measure of a submission's value).

There could very well be some other logic at work, too, like being more likely to ignore votes by people who visited the submission directly, or ignoring votes that happen too soon for the voter to really have read the article. It is fun to speculate.

Do your friends ever upvote other submissions? It would be useful to consider this.
I would sell the equity and invest it in a six pack of socks. Honestly, I think anyone working for a startup should continually re-evaluate their commitment to the vision every 3-4 months. If it pains you to see where things are going you're better off cutting lose. I've seen people waste 4 years at a startup only to leave empty handed.

It can be very much like a gambler's dilemma. The more time/money you invest the harder it becomes to walk away. Eventually they realize they've stayed not because they agree with the vision, but because they don't want to cut their losses.

One such startup I know of is going 10 years strong. I think the VCs are in the same situation as the former coworker I mentioned; throwing good money after bad.
Write more! And make more graphs if you think of other cool ways to consider the usefulness/impact/community/power of languages (beyond the analyzed-to-death language shootout stuff).
Grammy Awarded to Video Game for the First Time (Baba Yetu from Civ IV)
I've turned down an offer from Google; here were my reasons:

1. I had just started at a startup (Mahalo), and I was excited about being 1/5th of a company's development team; being 1/1000th of a company's dev team felt less appealing.

2. They offered the same amount of money I was currently making, but I would have had to move from the affordable Twin Cities metro area to San Francisco.

3. I've telecommuted for every job I've had since college; I don't know how well I'd make the transition to commuting and wearing office-appropriate clothing every day.

At the time, #1 was the most powerful reason I had for declining, but now, it would be #2. They've called a few times since then to see if I've changed my mind, but with inertia being the powerful force that it is, I can't see myself moving out of Minnesota, away from my family and my wife's family. (I have told them that as soon as they open an office in Minneapolis, I'd be happy to talk to them again.) Although, with three feet of snow on the ground and sub-zero temperatures over the past few weeks, I'm reconsidering my four-season climate policy.
Do your friends ever upvote other submissions? It would be useful to consider this.

Yes.

Just to be clear, I'm not offended or trying to subvert the system; I'm just trying to understand what the process is. I imagine fighting spam on HN is a pretty difficult job, and catching voting rings is useful.

These aren't necessarily artificial votes, since I'm not forcing anybody to upvote an article; they get to make their own decisions, haha. All I do is bring it to their attention.
It is sad. I wonder how Sun could have prevented their demise? It was obvious to me from the late 1990s that their business model wouldn't survive cheap Unix boxes running on commodity hardware.
Who imposes programming on uninterested children?

As for the interested ones, you 'impose' certain programming languages on kids because 1) they want to learn to program and 2) you need a standardized way to teach. If you want to develop the manner of thinking required to assemble and organize algorithms, making a turtle move around the screen is a fine way to do it.
$200 isn't the actual market price for the HD555. You can get a pair from Amazon (US) for $85.

If you've only listened to your music with cheap earbuds, you haven't truly heard your music. Rediscovering your existing music collection, particularly if it's high-bitrate compressed or lossless, is a joy. Well worth the money if you enjoy music at all.
Exclude the "well known few" from the list of successful entrepreneurs and you still have a list of people that is quite large.

I am very fortunate I did not listen to anyone who told me their opinion when I was preparing to drop out of college some 5 years ago. As difficult as it was to do back then, the choices I have to make to run my company and keep my employees employed make that one decision appear pathetically simple and obvious.

Being an entrepreneur is about making decisions for yourself because no one else can tell you what to do (and once you become successful everyone will have an their opinions of what you should do.)

If you are incapable about making challenging decisions to run your own life you are not going to be a successful entrepreneur and you should listen to what other people tell you.
It's my understanding that Google expects its employees to work very hard. You say that "We're all happy now with our current life." Would you
continue to be happy if you had to work a lot harder than you do now?
Would your family continue to be happy if your job was taking much more
of your time, leaving less time for your family? I can understand the appeal
of working with so many really, really smart people, but the transition from
a happy life in a rural area to a high pressure job in California seems to me
to be a fairly risky choice.
What I was thinking, put another way, is that they are taking a risk with these two price-points doing this and getting caught out.

There is no need when they have headphones much cheaper, and MUCH more expensive than these two.

I do agree with your reasoning if the above wasn't so.
Ask HN: How to politely quit my job?
I humbly request the wisdom of fellow HNers,

Folks, I currently work on a very small company with a really great boss (who's a family friend). This company is quite small, we're only 4 persons including my boss and his wife. I am tasked with a really boring (maybe nightmarish) job where I am the single programmer/maintainer of a lovecraftnian designed online app, this jobs is slowly driving me crazy because I LIKE to focus on quality and the programmers before me focused on fast, so I've inherited a codebase with no docs, a scm with not a single commit comment and a mysql db with 10k tables. In summary, the ambient is great, people are great, job is not.

Now, I've received and accepted my dream job proposal working for a previous contractor on projects I really enjoy but I don't quite know how to bring these news to my current boss. How to approach and tell him that I am leaving in some days. He is a great guy and his family and mine goes way back. I want to talk as soon as possible because I want to help to find a decent replacement and train the guy a little on how to navigate that stuff. So, anyone here ever faced similar situation? WWHND (What Would HNers Do)

Cheers
Sounds awesome. I'm actually going to be in SE Asia for 5 months starting in 10 days (to start working on my own software product) so I'm already converted and can definitely see the value in this :-) Being surrounded with like-minded people in a coworking space on the beach in Indonesia to hack your next big thing? What else?

Also, for the visa thing, it's not really a problem unless people want to stay there very long. Speaking about Indonesia, they are now granting tourist visas for 2 months. Should be plenty enough!
True, and I'm something of a headphone enthusiast as well, but there is a lot of snake oil. Even among stuff that isn't outright snake oil, it's very hard to actually spot differences above a certain level, and I'm not convinced everyone who claims they can is actually doing so. Sometimes I'm not that sure for my own listening. I do try to do blind tests sometimes, but they're hard to really keep blind (different feel of headphones, recognize the sound of a headphone I've already heard before, etc.). And beyond that, what exactly constitutes "quality" is a whole other story! The easiest way to tell differences among high-end headphones is to train yourself on certain test samples that are notoriously hard to reproduce properly, and then listen for differences, but it's not at all clear that doing that is a meaningful predictor of subjective enjoyability when using the headphone to listen to normal music.

Overall I've settled on open-back headphones in the ~$70-150 range as the sweet spot for me personally (I mostly use Grado SR-80s).
> You'd have better success if you showed some respect for your readers by capitalizing and writing your posts in a normal style. Starting off with "lol" and an emoticon marks you as somebody who hasn't thought about what he is about to write, and who doesn't care to present his thoughts to the reader in an organized manner.

That is the biggest pile of bs I have ever read. Just because he starts his posts with a lol, and a smiley mean NOTHING. It angers and disgusts me to think that 17 other people happen to agree with you.

You guys (and I mean the HN "elite") try to avoid group thinking like its the plague, you believe you operate like the intelligent guys of the web but your reaction to that comment was disgusting and evident that your guilty of the same underlying thread that fuels racism and prejudice - difference.

What you've done is no different to this scenario - your at school, your one of the popular guys - and a kid reluctantly comes up to you one day, and says "Hey, I'm pretty shy around here because I feel I don't fit in." Your response was "well, of course you don't kid, look at you, you dress like an idiot and you stink" - then you and your cronies all laugh.

I used to really like HN, I used to enjoy the comments more than I did the articles at one point. But this has just become a place where people can split hairs, argue semantics, stroke their own ego's and do their best to feel self-important. Your comment is the epitome of my point.

I can't believe you just grilled that dude because of how he types. I've met plenty of very, very wealthy and successful individuals to know that how you type has absolutely no connection to how much respect you give readers, and how much they think about their responses.

The barrier to entry of participating on HN is not how you word, or begin your point - but the value you add.
> The account sign-up process says that Quora can use your Facebook or Twitter identity to save you time — so why did I have to enter my e-mail address and make up a password anyway?

This is what annoyed me most when signing up for Quora.
I somewhat hate the fact that websites had to spoonfeed almost everything to the user. Quora does look rudimentary, but it gets the job done. i think the simplicity is not ugly, but rather clean.

I would love to see a site whose part of the user experience is actually experiencing the site first hand on one's own, like the smart people that they are. (or is it a user-filtering system)
At the cost (among other things) of not being able to pass functions as arguments, though that could be worked around.
Hence the surprise of many consumers, I believe. They're actually being sold a luxury product, whose price is based a lot on branding/status/etc., but they believe, or want to believe, that they're buying a product whose price is based on the quality/cost of its inputs (and/or design, or manufacturing). So, 2x as expensive headphone is expected to be made out of better components, or constructed with a more expensive method, or something, and people are dismayed when they find that that isn't the case.

It is somewhat unfortunate as a consumer that the market has turned out that way, rather than as a more competitive market. It makes shopping for audio equipment a lot more time consuming, because prices don't have much to do with either production cost or quality.
Given the topic of this discussion any type of answer counts, right?

But by the way, interesting concept of anti-value.
I'm sure Information Theory has got something to say about creation ex nihilo.
Will Death Become Obsolete?
Hackers Break Into Mubarak Ruling Party Website
The linked article seems to have a predetermined conclusion to which it is trying to fit the data. Some examples:

Scare quotes are used to implicitly treat "reform" and "reformers" as somehow less than the words imply, without justification for this disdain.

Loaded terms are used to color perceptions of various elements in the plot ("beautiful" kids, "brutal" history, "tragedy", "painful" scores).

Why don’t American kids score at the top on international tests? Our brutal history is part of the answer, as is the immigration policy we maintain so people like Matthews can pay low wages to the people who care for their homes.

No evidence is provided for the claim that history or immigration policy are the cause for the discrepancies in scores.

Basically, the piece seems to invoke "think of the children," quote some opponents with unsubstantiated outrage, and call QED.

The fact that's totally ignored in this article, and which I find most interesting, is that American students of a given race outperform their peers in their native countries. The next question to ask is whether this correlation is meaningful, and if so, how to use it to improve education in the future.
Just a reminder: the House is voting on Patriot Act renewal Monday at 6:30 p.m. Eastern. Please call your representative! There are plenty of other ways you can help too.

Get FISA Right's action alert: http://bit.ly/feb13aa

EFF: https://secure.eff.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=Us...
Pointed out before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2214052 - this is from boomerang - not a known commercial decompiler really.
I think I'd much sooner take EFF's word than the FBI's word, about the number.

I don't think you understand what's going on here. There is no official number from the FBI that the EFF is somehow contradicting. What you might be mistaking for that is the estimate from a much smaller time frame (2003-2006) from a report by the DOJ Office of the Inspector General. The EFF's estimate is based on that estimate (see footnote 34 of their report).

What I am saying with regards to that number is that the way they combined it with the IOB records they obtained is deceptive. Specifically I have a problem with them using the OIG number (which includes violations as minor as typos) to simply extrapolate a bigger number of the kinds of things reported to the IOB (the data they have) without really acknowledging the differences in the datasets or the wide variation in severity.

I think we can all agree there was rampant, epidemic lawbreaking in the Bush Administration

I don't disagree, but I think that accurately quantifying this with actual evidence is more important than just stating it or worse, exaggerating it for rhetorical effect.

(I have been mistaken for a Republican or Bush apologist more times than I care to recall. I am neither by any stretch. I just don't like politics in general.)

Massaging the exact number smacks of an effort to distract.

That's my point. The EFF is pushing a Big Number (which this article repeats four times) that obscures the more nuanced but less attention-grabbing truth.

I'm disappointed that my posting appears to anybody to be an attempt to distract, so to be absolutely clear: I think people should ignore the big number in favor of reading the report in full and additionally at least skimming the OIG report.
The approach I'm taking is to make myself invaluable to the project.

At first, like you, I was scared that anybody could copy it and do it themselves, but after revealing my idea to others, I realized they didn't "get it" like I did. Every idea has subtleties, even something like Groupon which has been copied to death.

I've spent hundreds of hours on improving my understanding of the problem I'm trying to solve. Now I have the confidence that anyone smart enough to help me execute will also see the value of working with me and not against me.

The key is to make sure everyone's interests are aligned, that's how you build a real team. It's not what you've done in the past that counts (idea), it's what you'll do in the future (execution).
I don't argue that linux itself is bad, it's obviously very good overall. That doesn't say anything about overall code quality though - as usual there are good, bad and really ugly parts.

"I've looked at the source and there are pieces that are good and pieces that are not. A whole bunch of random people have contributed to this source, and the quality varies drastically." -Ken Thompson
I resent this kind of thinking.

"students may come up with great ideas and start a company, but they aren’t going to be able make it big unless they have the educational foundation."

College isn't the only way to get this educational foundation. I'd rather learn through trying to succeed in business, even if it means failure at first.
Einstein’s Granddaughter Left Out of Licensing Windfall
Similar concept with 2 locations in Toronto:

http://socialinnovation.ca/
>Dying Technology - PHP

Wow, that's a bold statement.
Here's the old readability JS. (bookmark it)

javascript:(function(){readConvertLinksToFootnotes=false;readStyle='style-newspaper';readSize='size-medium';readMargin='margin-wide';_readability_script=document.createElement('script');_readability_script.type='text/javascript';_readability_script.src='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/js/readability.js?x='+(Math.random());document.documentElement.appendChild(_readability_script);_readability_css=document.createElement('link');_readability_css.rel='stylesheet';_readability_css.href='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability.css';_readability_css.type='text/css';_readability_css.media='all';document.documentElement.appendChild(_readability_css);_readability_print_css=document.createElement('link');_readability_print_css.rel='stylesheet';_readability_print_css.href='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability-print.css';_readability_print_css.media='print';_readability_print_css.type='text/css';document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(_readability_print_css);})();
In case anyone is interested, I just did this mod for my hd555s and can confirm that it does seem to make the sound clearer although I can't really make a good comparison for obvious reasons.
Apparently I am more abusive to my headphones because I managed to break a plastic part on one side that connects the ear parts to the headband, mainly from them getting dropped on the floor countless times due to repeatedly tripping over the cord that's just a bit too long. I've kept them together with glue and tape in various combinations, since otherwise they still work fine.
Everything can't be proof of global warming. The climate is not getting "weirder". The weather is the weather; It is intrinsically random.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870442220457613...
GitHub has the largest number of repositories (yes, more than SourceForge) and arguably represents the more 'up and coming' open source projects.

You're particular complaint about .NET projects is more than compensated for by the Stack Overflow cross-listing.
Jules Verne doodle
1994: "Today": "What is the Internet, Anyway?"
Just for the record. I am an engineer. I worked at Elance for a couple of yrs in engineering. I also happened to write most of the front-end code for MyLikes in 2008/2009
This is why people are using the term "global weirding" or just "climate change" instead. Yes, the Earth actually is warming. The average temperature of the entire Earth is going up. If you've taken elementary Math you'll understand that if an average increases that means the extremes of the dataset have gotten more extreme (more extreme colds, more extreme heat).

How we came to be a society that views science, logic, and rational thought as the enemy of social progression I'll never know. I'm sure there's money in it somewhere.
I think it is more to make a point: http://www.paulgraham.com/discover.html
Same -- it's taken me almost two years of reading HN before actually signing up, because everything I feel like saying has normaly already been said much better than I could.
Everybody believes this is precisely Nokia and Microsofts stratergy.

WP7 will be the only phone that you are sure will play nicely with microsoft email etc

Business will follow the - never got fired for buying microsoft route

Nokia is the only brand these same businessmen have heard of - they aren't going to take a risk on some 'foreign firm'.

So Nokia becomes Microsoft's RIM.
Except the way it's implemented, it's very easy to add a question without searching for it.
I really do think so. If people aren't loving it anymore its dying. I didn't say it was dead, they can still make a turn around.
To be fair it is possible to parse google as a noun in that sentence. It reads a bit like an item in an RPG.

Google Cone of Haste +3
I found Pogue's hyperventilation over Follow a bit bizarre as well. Did he really not understand the concept (which was borrowed) or was he playing Devil's Advocate for mass consumption? Or did he simply find following people in a Q&A site an odd mix? Following questions and topics makes perfect sense to me.

"...the only question I have for Quora is, “Why not make this thing easier for normal people to figure out?”"

Other than the Question/Search box (which at first I found confusing because it was, well, rather innovative), maybe he'd like a bit more user messaging each step of the way to put his mind at ease.

I wonder how feels when he opens the box to his new Mac/iPhone/iPod/etc. each year without any instruction manuals?
I agree on them being worth it. That said, the best sounding headphones I've head (better than my HD 555's) were some 30 dollar Sony G74 (or something) 'street' headphones that they don't make anymore. The trade-off was that they were easily the most uncomfortable headphones ever devised. It was literally too painful to wear them for extended amounts of time.
Their best option would be to produce SPARC-based machines at PC prices. A PC is a very kludgy machine. If you don't need to be PC-compatible, your motherboard can be much simpler. Sun targeted the high-performance turf when "average" was becoming good enough.

Had they targeted the lower end of the server space (and workstations, to prevent Windows workstations being turned into cheap servers) with the better technology they had, the story would have been totally different.

Of course, buying companies they didn't need wasn't exactly clever.
This all depends. Some people are ambitious and work long hours, and others (often with families) have more regular schedules. There's a lot of talk about work-life balance. If you know what's important to you, you can probably get it.
For everyone dismissing you on the basis of an ad hominem attack, here is the first paragraph from Wikipedia. In particular, notice the second sentence:

An ad hominem (Latin: "to the man"), also known as argumentum ad hominem, is an attempt to link the validity of a premise to a characteristic or belief of the person advocating the premise.[1] The ad hominem is a classic logical fallacy,[2] but it is not always fallacious; in some instances, questions of personal conduct, character, motives, etc., are legitimate and relevant to the issue.
I don't think everything is proof of 'global warming'. I honestly don't how much is in our hands and how much isn't.

Interesting article. I like what he wrote...
"That's not to say we're helpless. There is at least one climate lesson that we can draw from the recent weather: Whatever happens, prosperity and preparedness help."
The weather is not the same as climate. When climate changes (and it has always changed in the past) some places become hotter, others become colder. Some places will get more precipitation, other places will become dryer.

The ice core drillings in deep layers of ice are a great way to learn about the history of climate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_core