skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The ratings are probably more meaningful for requiring that users go out of their way to rate. Make it too routine and the courtesy fours drown out the users with strong opinions.

Edit for the downvoters: this is me speculating on how the ratings work in practice. Whether the system is fair or serves your own interests are both seperate issues.
"Are you asking for a study? I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say."

Yes. Every few months I see a new study about how academic research grants are handed out more or less at random, how journals are heavily biased toward positive results, how journals are biased toward authors with previous citations, etc.

All this seriously challenges the claim that if you have sufficient evidence you will get published by a top journal.

Similarly, is there any evidence for the claim that, "If n observers each detect a falsehood with probability p then the probability of missing the falsehood is (1-p)^n."

Go ask Kitty Genovese about the validity of this formula.
As someone who has implemented operational transformation, I believe Google dropped it because it consumes a lot of network resources. If it became popular, Google would have to dedicate a fair chunk of infrastructure to it. Could they do it? Yes. But I believe they ran a little cost/benefit analysis on it at scale and probably decided they didn't want to continue with the wave model.

I am aware that some operational transformation is used in docs, however the usage scenario is different: collaboration is not the default use case and the number of collaborators would be smaller than in a wave, where the default use case is many waves with many participants.
Agreed - Ars is the closest thing, but it's actually a lot more tabloidy and much less technical than byte actually was.
Given any long-running task, there are two natural things to do:

1. Do something while the long-running task is running
2. Do something after the long-running task has completed

Node.js' callback function convention simply makes it stupendously easy for you to write code for both cases, and leans towards making case (1) as natural as possible. Case (2) is naturally easy in Javascript (and even easier in Coffeescript) because of the way Javascript supports closures.

application = function() {
// do stuff
database_call( options, function(err, callback) { // javascript closure
// case (2) logic
} );
// case (1) logic
}

How does Tora fare on this regard? Node.js is about parallelism through forking closures, not any solution to long running CPU intensive tasks.

The weakpoints of Node.js, in my opinion (and please correct me if I'm wrong, that would make me happy), is having to write a lot of boilerplate code for error and exception handling. Exception handling is particularly onerous because depending on the function call you'll never know which stack the exception will travel up. In the example above, you (probably) can't catch an exception from case (2) by wrapping the database_call in a try-catch block. Does anyone have a good solution to this?

All-in-all, I like that Node.js tries to stay pure by enforcing the above convention. Noders who stay in "userland" can't shoot themselves in the foot by making an asynchronous procedure synchronous, which may lead to faster code overall.
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I think only you can answer that question. Aside from the ethical reasons, at the end of the day, you should take the steps necessary to achieve your 3, 5, 10 year goals. Any company you work for will have pros and cons for you personally, whether other people believe they are childish or not.

What is it you want to do? What do you want to learn while getting paid? What do you need to get you to where you ultimately want to go? It is like when some asks me if one programming language is better than the other - the most honest answer I have seen anyone give to that question is: It depends on what you are trying to do.

If you want to start your own company one day, and don't like things as formal as they are in large companies, I would encourage you to work for a start up or small company. Things will likely be less formal, and you will likely get the opportunity to do a lot more things since in smaller companies everyone usually has to where more than one hat. Plus, its easier to have a big impact.

Just my two cents.
There's a difference between sticking to your principles and say, not discussing politics at family gatherings. Metering your social interaction based on the audience is just a fact of life. It's not inherently good or bad.
There are certain topics, such as sexual abuse and drug addiction that merit anonymous conversation, but this is tech. The main thing that folks are hiding behind is the fear of being wrong in hindsight.

If you're going to make a bold prediction or have a strong opinion, be prepared to back it up enough to slap your name on it. That's really not asking a whole lot.

Anonymity has its place in civil discourse, but definitely not in public comment threads that require no registration.
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Google did not create Orkut, it was acquired.
Maybe I'm not being the authentic me when I don't make dirty jokes to my Grandmother that I would to my friends but I'd view that more as simple respect.
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Cool idea! You probably weren't expecting to have an issue like that. In retrospect, having a nice friendly fail page would earn you customer love. Especially on a site relating to how people are feeling.
You should check out my startup http://www.crittercism.com
Its like Uservoice but for mobile apps. If a user submits a bug and you fix it the library lets you prompt affected users to leave a good review.
Do my IRL friends or family care about technical debates, or what the latest silicon valley teapot tempest is?

No. probably not.
I disagree. There have been several times when the 'Rate this app' modal box came up and I wanted to give a good rating for it but couldn't be bothered because it sent me out to the AppStore when what I really wanted to be doing was playing that game/using that app.
Interesting idea. I've started using a few more cloud apps lately, and the thought of losing everything certainly crossed my mind again. The problem thought is often the data is tied to some sort of object structure, which may be hard to replicate. For example, lately I've built a couple of mind maps on MindMeister that I would not want to use. However, the data mostly has meaning in the mind map structure, and having it in raw form, while better than nothing, would still mean I would need to convert it into something workable again.
Snarkily summarised:

1. Hype

2. Buzz

3. Fashionable

4. Hivemind

5. What my competitors are saying.
Odd comment to see on HN. TechCrunch had a lot of crap comments because of the audience they attract. I'm glad to see it get a little more serious there. We don't need humor everywhere on the net. Places that invite troll comments end up becoming 90% troll comments. Also, maybe it's just the people on your friends list? I notice a lot of public persona people have extremely bland statuses, but my normal friends don't mind having funny statuses.

Edit: It's possible I once again failed to detect sarcasm.
Valid concern. I wonder what is a good common-denominator solution.
your comment made me think of the striking resemblance of the modern mobile OS (iOS, Android) to the icon boards used to try and develop communications with other homonids.

http://www.thestencil.com/archives/images/lana2_lg.jpg

I'm definitely not saying this to make fun, many people have commented how this new UI paradigm is so easy even their toddlers can learn to use it at some level.
>Release movies to audiences in episodes; start by releasing a half-hour pilot, and if it takes off, call the actors and director back to make another hour. This could cut the cost of filmmaking by more than a factor of 2, especially if the first part goes easy on the special effects, the music, that kind of thing

There are a lot of fixed costs in movie theaters that make this impractical - you've got to get people seated and then get them out of the theater, for instance, which takes 20-30 minutes. Given that you can't charge more than $3 for a thirty minute movie, that decrease in utilization-percentage hurts their bottom line. Plus who is going to buy popcorn or a soda when they'll be in the theater for too short of a time to eat/drink it? And who's going to drive to a theater to watch something that's shorter than the average TV show?

Not to mention, who wants to watch 30 minutes of a story and then wait a year to watch the next hour? And I'm skeptical about people being willing to go to a movie when there's a realistic chance it'll get cut off before they see the end.

And many movies are still warming up at the half-hour mark - in "Star Wars: A New Hope", you've only just met Obi-Wan at the 30 minute mark. You haven't seen light-sabers, X-Wings, the word "Jedi", Han Solo, the Death Star, or the Millennium Falcon yet. In "Back to the Future", you're only just going back in time at that point. In the remake of King Kong, you don't even see Kong until like an hour into the film. At 30 minutes into Gladiator, you're still a good 20-30 minutes from seeing the inside of an Arena. At 30 minutes into Fellowship of the Ring, you've still met like half of the Fellowship. You'd have to rework the whole scripting paradigm if you want an accurate representation of what the film's about in that 30-minute episode.

>Instead of a pilot episode or abridged movie, do the first installment of the movie as a comic book.

This will lead to a very biased output, as only a subset of the movie-going population reads comic books.

>Don't spend anything on marketing. Release films in a single theater or a single city. If it takes off, print more copies. If GQ is to be believed, this would cut the cost of filmmaking in half, which would mean you could make twice as many movies.

With this approach, you've really got to hope that word-of-mouth generators like film blogs like the movie or that everyone in the audience is an active Tweeter. And you've really got to hope that everyone in your target audience is an active Web 2.0 user or has a close friend who is.
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People aren't single flat unified personas. People have facets to them, sometimes ones which don't necessarily sit comfortably with each other. You can be a good straight laced business exec, and be a hard core gamer. Your business associates might look down on you for that. You have a right to partition that world off from them, because it's none of their damned business and has no bearing on your dealings with them.

Having a single point of contact w/o the ability to filter or group your interactions scoped to people who you feel comfortable communicating with isn't just lame, it's socially poisonous.

Facebook is doing it wrong.
That's really nice, I like it better than the OP's page.
That means you're paying $1/customer/month even for dormant customers. Seems like a really bad call.

I do this for Appointment Reminder, too, mostly out of sheer laziness. I might revisit it eventually, but it hasn't broken the bank yet. (Finding my own number on my Twilio interface has gotten annoyingly complicated, though :) )
Was curious how they were able to detect the presence of a tracking company's cookie.

They're using an API provided by all of these tracking companies where they vend an image whose height is either 43 pixels (indicating you have a cookie) or 44 pixels (indicating you have no cookie).

Does anyone know if there was legislation that made this API a requirement, or is this an example of an industry policing itself in an attempt to stay unregulated?
Ask HN: sorry, how long will I be blocked?
Typing from iPhone. Developing an extension, had a bug that issued a lot of queries really quickly, now getting empty response. Is this temporary? It was an accident. Please advise.
Our main focus so far has been in growing and scaling BuzzBlaze. Regarding monetization, we did have a few ideas floating around:

* Promoted feeds/articles - Once we scale, we can allow publishers to promote their feeds/articles to targeted users’ social streams and dashboards as well as email (see below) - similar to Twitter

* Advertisements - the fact that we know what kind of content the users are reading means we are able to deliver ads that are relevant and targeted - a win/win/win situation (users are not bombarded with irrelevant ads, brands can hypertarget the right market, we make money)

* Email marketing - We can have users opt-in to receive recommended readings and product promotions. We can partner with publishers who wish to promote their content through email (much like promoted feeds/articles). In addition, we can also email out product promotions (such as product deals etc) that are relevant to the users - based on what they read. Like the promoted feeds, this will be much more effective once we scale
"most baby-sitters don't have a fire-arms license."

I didn't mean this literally. The US needs to use force because other countries either don't have the ability or refuse.

"I don't want to even bother refuting this, but the US is an economic entity that seeks to maximize its economic advantage, not a baby-sitter"

What country isn't trying to maximize its economic advantage?

"You can sit around waiting for more evidence and when warming happens you can blame it on Sun spots or whatever, Are you also waiting on more evidence for heisenberg's uncertainty principle?"

Can I use this argument for anything I don't agree with. I'm asking for evidence and you are telling me that I shouldn't be sitting around and waiting for it. I'm also not blaming it on sunspots, I'm basing it on real evidence.

Since the subject has been so politicized, and supporting it means billions of dollars in funding (or lack there of), I question any scientist that is involved in it. Especially when we have zealous believers saying that anyone that questions it (even when there is evidence to the contrary) is a moron.

When you take things like carbon credits and forced government taxes out of it, I might start to stop questioning motives. It's also funny that a guy like Al Gore, who is essentially passing carbon credit laws that will put money directly in his pockets, is lauded as a hero and a genius.

"A large percentage of convicts in prison are from drug related crimes."

If you smoked meth and then murdered a family, does that count as a "drug-related crime". You seem to be implying that people that are just smoking a joint are filling our prison systems, when those people make up a very small percentage.
Straight from the horse's mouth, here's OCZ's patch log for v129, which describes a fix for a software-induced data-loss issue:
"Fixed rare corner case that could cause the drive to reset and clear user data"
http://www.ocztechnology.com/files/ssd_tools/OCZ_SSD_v129_Fi...

That was less than a month ago. Maybe this was the last bug; I'd guess not. I'm sure all the SSD vendors have firmware bugs, but my personal choice is not to go with OCZ in future. As you point out, it seems likely that other Sandforce vendors will share similar issues, so my understanding is that basically leaves Intel (?)

In future, before aggressively going on the attack, I think you should consider the possibility that you may not be as correct as you believe everyone else to be wrong. Let's keep things civilized around here.
I read this as "twat spire" in en-GB: twat is a word somewhere between "pussy" and "cunt" in British English. Just FWIW. I guess you're not British?
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But people are paying you. Right now his service is free.
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NYT paywall got you down?

http://www.google.com/search?q=45-Story+Walkup+Beckons+the+D...
Modest proposal: Just turn the comments off all together. TC doesn't give a shit about their commenters, and if something kicks off a big enough shit storm i'm sure there'll be a bajillion blog posts in reply and twitter will alight with the fire of righteous nerd rage.

If their comments are that much of a problem, just get rid of them. Facebook commenting is just a dumb half measure, trying to artificially impose additional social constraints on their commenters.

Besides, it's not like TechCrunch is leading by example in the first place. Is it any surprise that their comments are filled with trolls?
I like to leave comments on various news sites using my real name (or an alias based on my real name, like I do on HN). I also understand TC's motives for wanting users to stand up behind their opinions using their real names. It improves the quality of the discourse, although some people may feel intimidated to use their real names.

What I don't like about the new TC system is it ties the comments into Facebook, which I see as an area for communication with friends and family, most of whom are not interested in seeing my thoughts on technology.
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I would suggest picking up a sport(insert some form of physical activity). By working more hours you are not necessarily providing the startup with more productive hours. The longer the hours the more burnt out you will get. This will result in more mistakes (bugs), more time spent trying to solve problems etc.. Do not feel guilty for taking some time out for your own life. Not only will this help you, it will help the startup. It will give your brain time to reset and you should even see an improvement in time it takes you to do tasks. Even just taking time out of the office for a decent lunch break will help make your afternoons so much more productive. The number of times I have walked away from a problem to go for a walk (anything else but sitting at the desk staring at the problem), to come back to the problem and know exactly what is wrong.
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No, Google created Orkut.

In 2003, Google offered to purchase the social network Friendster, but the offer was declined by that company. Google then internally commissioned Orkut Büyükkökten to work on a competing independent project. The result was Orkut. The product launched on January 24, 2004.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut#History_of_orkut

(If it isn't clear from that quote, Orkut Büyükkökten was a Google employee)
The Kitty Genovese killing isn't a good example of the bystander effect, as the police were contacted at least once during the attack and most people who heard it could not see it happening.

http://www.psych.lancs.ac.uk/people/uploads/MarkLevine200706...

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037%2F0003-066X.62.6.555

From the abstract:

> Using archive material we show that there is no evidence for the presence of 38 witnesses, or that witnesses observed the murder, or that witnesses remained inactive.

(Further, why mention the bystander effect at all? It's a little confusing)
I don't see any comments on the article, it must be a plugin of mine.
The most tedious commenters at TechCrunch are the ones who use their real names. The anonymous trolls are frequently funny and insightful.
It did for a while, but has been mostly subsumed by Facebook in India, and increasingly in Brazil.

Edit: see, for example: http://cybergyaan.blogspot.com/2010/05/orkut-vs-facebook.htm...
Don’t believe me? Go to TechCrunch and count the comments on last week’s posts. Better yet, go read the comments. They suck. They’re sterile and neutered.

TechCrunch seems to be pretty happy with the result: http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/06/techcrunch-facebook-comment...

The problem with tying internet-wide identity to a broadcast network like Facebook is that people don’t want one normalized identity, either in real life, or virtually.

Is there any evidence this is true outside of geekdom?

People yearn to be individuals. They want to be authentic. [...] The nature of commenting on the web needs to feel organic and fluid, just like it does in real life.

But real life rarely includes trolls.

I don't like Facebook comments at all, and as long as TechCrunch uses them I probably won't be commenting, but this article makes too many broad statements, with too little support, for my taste.
Thanks, I'll take a look at these.
It's not just anonymity, it's anonymity coupled with a lack of consequences.

The ideal solution would be to make users sign in through their Facebook page, but then let them comment under whatever pseudonym they wanted. That way commenters could have anonymity, but abusive users could still be permanently banned.
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Heh. Reminds me of how when Google Wave came out, the company I worked for at the time made sure I was trying my darndest to get an invite so they wouldn't miss the boat.
I am not really convined, given facebook's past behaivor that any comment I make won't make it back to my facebook feed based on some new privacy change. Also, using facebook for login to third-party websites is not something I want to encourage.
I don't see them either because I use Facebook Disconnect plugin. Great plugin, BTW.
To me, it seems the real weakness of node.js is having to manage asynchronous control flow yourself, at all. It grows exponentially more ugly as the system increases in size. I really like continuation-passing-style as a technique (especially as a compiler IR), but doing that stuff by hand is so 70s.

I got pretty far along writing a similar system in Lua (because, hey, event-driven systems are pretty nice), and unlike Javascript, Lua has well-implemented coroutines - they singlehandedly eliminate a LOT of the ugly control flow management. Still, most libraries are blocking* . I eventually decided that, for small systems, an event-loop framework wasn't necessary in Lua (it's easy enough to just do it from scratch!), and for larger systems, I was better off using Erlang, which has the ideal foundation for that sort of system. In particular, I'm really not clear how much error-handling node.js does; that was what convinced me that Erlang's approach is refreshingly sane. When I started writing process-supervision and hot update code in Lua, I realized I was just re-implementing what Erlang does best.

* Which is a funny objection, like being mad that most libraries default to using decimal numbers rather than octal. It must be a conspiracy!

See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2150800 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304599
ughhhh another article on stuxnet......
Here's one problem with that article. If you don't use Facebook you can't leave them a comment about how you don't like the new comment system because it requires Facebook. That's going to exclude a large number of valid opinions about the new comment system. You'll only get feedback from those already willing to 'opt in'.

I don't use FB or Yahoo so I guess my TC commenting days are over for the time being.
Disclaimer: the following opinion is only my opinion and does not reflect anyone else on HN or the internet in any way shape or form:

I respect that you found yourself unable to accept a job there given your ethical stance.

I cannot put the following sentiment in harsh enough terms: I think the company is full of utter scumbags who should all be in prison or worse.

Good on you.