skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The maths is backwards. To take an example, if I submit two stories under a log2-scaled points system which get four upvotes, then if you submit a single story, that story needs to get 16 upvotes for you to match my karma.

Assuming that people are chasing karma (let's leave why to the side for a second, because I don't understand it either), then it's far more efficient to submit lots of low-scoring stories than to even bother thinking about high-scoring ones.
Olin Shivers - The History of T http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html
Cringley's account of Paul Allen's fight against Hodgkin's disease while at Microsoft may be relevant.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/pulpit_20060330_0008...
WordPress new Google doc’s shortcode for psd, ai, svg, and more
I started a business in 2007 and quickly found I had the wrong partner. It was a forced partnership on my account and was a mistake, though the company has persevered and is profitable.

Knowing I wanted to found additional startups I always had my eye out for a great partner. I wasn't finding anyone I thought met all the criteria, yet I held fast to my commitment to not make the same mistake again. Ideas came and went but I was determined to not start by myself or with the wrong person.

Last summer I met a guy I could work with. We completed a detailed project and then decided to apply for Y-combinator. Nothing was done by either of us to facilitate finding this relationship - in fact it was almost by chance that we met at all - however it's clear after only 6 months of working together that it works. When it works it works.

My advice is to be patient. Never force the relationship. Network - but do it to meet new people not specifically to find a partner.
The Freemont plant is part of the crony deal they struck with then Speaker-Pelosi and the unions in exchange for their massive government subsidy.
And you don't think anyone in the bitcoin world is working on the same thing?

>the difference is that their a sophisticated infrastructure that exists to combat....

Infrastructure becomes moot when it's too "sophisticated" for granny(or me,I mean really, how often haveI lost my online banking key fob? or I have to enter an endless string of numbers just to see my balance?) to use.

And besides, we have the "sophisticated" infrastructure of cryptography on our side. The only real way around this is with social engineering, to which the current financial system is equally vulnerable.

With regards to the "authorities" you list see here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2387022, I find it hard to imagine that the CIA is worried or working on the problem of Nigerians or Russians trying to scam people, or helping people who are victims.
BP got far more in government handouts to pay for their Gulf oil rig blowout disaster. In a free market, BP would now be bankrupt as it would have had to pay for the cleanup of hundreds and hundreds of miles of damaged coastal property as well as compensating fishermen for millions (or billions?) in lost revenue.

Just to give one example. Just saying.

We live in a welfare state. Criticizing people for accepting welfare in a welfare state is like criticizing people for speeding at Nascar. Everybody does it. Every major corporation has lawyers and lobbyists in Washington to get as much pork as they possibly can.
I got the impression that jacquesm wasn't so concerned with how his work was being treated, but with how HN was being treated.
Cool site! Nice work.

It would add a little oomph if you could add some sort of subtle visual tracking (in the CSS for example) to highlight the stuff that moves. Between refreshes it's often hard to see what's changing.
You are right that there was no price change in the US. However in many international markets there has been a price reduction between the original pricing of the first iPad and the iPad 2. In Australia, the difference is between $50-100 when comparing original iPad launch price and iPad 2 pricing (http://techstyles.com.au/ipad-2-price/ipad/). Funny to see that the case is different from country to country.
Have a look here: http://www.bl.uk/bipc/index.html

Why were resources spent on this new and empty initiative, where there are perfectly good resources that exist already? Why not promote those? Why not build on those?
See this article for an explanation of HFT: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/08/the-sorcerer...
You are correct that being introverted and a social recluse are not the same thing.

Extroversion is the characteristic of being outgoing and comfortable in social interactions. It has nothing to do with speaking publicly which is more about controlling performance anxiety, many actors and other performers are introverted in private life.

People who self declare to be "not by nature particularly sociable" may be introverts, some of them may be social recluses, what they aren't is extrovert.
That's entirely untrue of the new generation of gear head. I'm a gear head and what I would consider an "average" Top Gear fan. I'd love a Tesla Roadster. I also find that Clarkson's views on a car are pretty close to what I feel. Yes, the whole out of juice thing was staged, but it was based on the realities of an all-electric car. It does have less range than most petrol powered vehicles. It does take longer to recharge than it would to refuel a petrol car. These are realities, but the show dramatizes them so the viewer can relate to them. Clarkson had plenty good to say about the car too.

None of this makes me want a Tesla any less, and I'd argue that this holds true for pretty much anyone who wants to buy a Tesla. It's a $100k+ two-seater car for crying out loud. You don't buy it because it's practical, you buy it because it goes like stink and is a technological triumph. It's as fast around their track as a Porsche 911 GT3, yet it's 100% electric! I almost fell out of my chair when I first saw that.
I have watched most of the series that are on Netflix, I think 2009 is the latest, and I thought it seemed to be on the decline in that series. They seem to be running out of new ideas, as happens with all long-running series.
I work in the Detroit area actually. The handful of one hour contract jobs I've done have been pure maintenance coding (i.e. bug fixes on existing applications, reports modifications, etc.)
Reasons for UML's descent into darkness (2008)
Email Support – The most challenging but the most rewarding
Phony: international phone number formatting with ruby
I really like Python, but CPython is an ugly monster.

Edit: did the down-voters ever cared to read the code or even write a Python module in C?
>do you think it really needs pointing out that this is an entertainment show?

I think the ancestor comment is simply saying that they need to say that they lie about the factual basis of the show. I don't think that playing conkers with caravans or driving cars of ski-jumps or whatever should allow them to make bare-faced lies about basic performance elements of cars that they review.
Agile Web Development with Rails 4th ed. released
May be i am wrong. But I think that pr funding news will kill early adopters. Gmail, facebook, twitter early adopters in the most active parts are geeks. Geeks love cool and new ideas. But when you know that millions are put on the stake, that will encourage not to use their product. For tech audience stakes are high and i cannot imagine pressure in colors ofise:)
Everyone will expect kind of "magic". The first product iteration is not enough polished to justify prelaunch money. After seeing interview it's clear that they didn't have communication strategy and all information storm got them off guard. There is another problem with this big funding -the message clearly is we are sure you wil love it because we are betting big. Bad pr move guys, for company to succeed, and to get followers you must have mantra for your selves and clear public message like no evil company in case of google. Perception is reality. Now the message reads: color.com(domain name for 350 000 usd) have 42 millions on their hands to change the world by making something useful (social app) and to have profit by selling data to third parties.
Guess what, if facebook was communicated in public eye like color.com, they will be dead long ago.
Bitcoin banks negate true anonymity, the govt can contact the bank and ask for acct details, so they are worse than regular banks, being uninsured, unregulated, and unsecured. Also, real banks have men with guns (not to mention the capability to summon heavily-armed police officers on very short notice) to protect them. Neither your computer nor your bitcoin bank is 1] stored in a vault or 2] protected by armed guards.

With that said, if you want anonymity, you don't use a bitcoin bank. Which means you store ALL your money on your computer, probably. Who carries ALL their money in their wallet? No-one.

ATM cards have various protections built into them, pin number, fraud protection, withdrawal limit, the fact that people keep them on their person and know to protect them, etc.

You can't steal an ATM card from 200 feet away without someone knowing about it.

It's also relatively hard to pickpocket people. You have to be right next to them.

The first bitcoin-stealing virus is going to be downright hilarious. (What's your physical analogy there? Someone could build a network of tiny robots and have them covertly steal cash from banks? It's theoretically possible.)
is this feature 'enabled' by default on some mobile clients?

Pretty sure it's disabled by default on the official android client, but I'm sure somewhere there's some client that has it always on.
DOA: RIM Will Ship PlayBook Without Mail, Messaging or Contacts
Apple is probably barred from doing this due to the issues with Apple Records.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer
How on earth did you get the domain? I'm shocked that it wasn't already taken :)
Ha. Don't tell the guys at Lambda the Ultimate that ;)

Incidentally, i submitted a link (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2386915 ) about an hour ago, and after watching it depressingly fall off the first page of the new list, i think i'm giving up on ever submitting a link to HN again.

What's so frustrating is that i can identify content that is good, and relevant (the link above is about open data, citizen access to data, and information management), which are obviously relevant to the hacker news community.

But the only ways i can think to remedy this would be to either lobby my friends hard to vote up the link (something i'm loathe to do), or start pimping the links on other sites, in the hopes that people will try to submit it, see the existing link, and vote it up.

There's just no way i can do better than a piece of content like this. Oh well. I guess i'll stick to commenting.
Google design based off Microsoft Excel 2011? You decide.
I actually like the concept of color, but they really fucked up the launch. I don't see the use case as you describe.

Imagine being at a baseball game and in between innings you can pull up pics from all over the stadium.

Or you're a high schooler in a suburban town bored on a friday night and you can see pics of what your class mates are doing all over town.

The 150 ft range is stupid...it should automatically adjust to cover an area of interest whether that's a sporting event, party, apartment building or small town.
> the nice thing about karma for submissions is it's
> basically a whole lot of smart people saying 'well
> done for finding this, it's definitely valuable.'

That doesn't really seem to be the case any more. There's a lot of stuff coming up on the Front Page now that I, personally, think is not valuable at all. It's not spam, so I feel disinclined to flag it, but I can't downvote it either. I think there are a lot of older hands who are starting to despair that so much trivial material makes it to the Front Page, and there seems to be no way of stopping it.

There is no doubt in my mind that the community has been diluted in its intent, purpose and interest. Often the new people have insightful and interesting things to say, but the focus is largely gone as compared to what attracted people in the first place.

One can no longer assume that just because an item has a high score, it must be of value. The interesting thing is that this is true of the Classic page as well.

And I've checked my snapshots from 2 years ago, and it really does seem to have changed.

People are upvoting things not because they are valuable, but because they are entertaining.
Difficult to see how publicizing this stuff could be beneficial for Mr. Allen. At that level, and sitting on top of a multi-billion dollar fortune, it almost never behooves you to say anything negative about anybody -- least of all one of your former partners. I also think complaining about not getting a bigger share of MS stock, when you've got 14 billion in the bank...not exactly the stuff of which Jedi are made.
Firestone EPDM
When a newspaper “rips off” your blog, then taunts you about it…
The reason Color got funded isn't because it will let people share photos with nearby people. It's because anyone who installs it will have authorized Color to do personal data collection on a massive scale. The photo sharing bit is little more than a pretext to get them to install it.
Good point, thanks!

FWIW, I think there is a problem if multiple bots attempting to autosubmit end up inadvertently creating a voting ring. But that can and should be fixed by changing the way HN treats submitting an article that has already been submitted.

Other than that, I only think bots are a problem for HN when submitting spam rather than ham. I am in favour of bots provided they don't play fast and loose with accounts. I would be ok with each bot having its own account, or all bots using their creator's accounts. I would consider it fraudulent to create bots that periodically give themselves new accounts to evade filtering.

If bots all used a stable account, pg could throttle or ban those that submit too much spam. But if a bot is constantly submitting articles that are upvoted by humans.... I'm happy to see it seed the new page.

JM2C, I don't make the rules, I just play by them.
Steve Jobs all over again? :)
Building a bot to win karma is a little like hiring a model to pretend to be your date. No, scratch that. We're hackers! Building a bot to win karma is a little like building your own replicant and taking it to the party as your date.
Ask HN: PHP, Python or Ruby?
Could you please help me decide which of these three languages to learn? (I already have hobbyist level experience with HTML and CSS)

I am a programming novice but I want to move forward and learn to code and build webapps/web services. Maybe down the road I could parlay the experience into a programming job, or build something to make a living on. I know there are a lot of bridges to cross before then. But first I have 2 projects that I want to learn how to build from scratch and launch successfully. One would be just another Google bookmarks-like web service (scratch my own itch) and another is basically a lost-and-found database, but with a bit of a twist. Right now I just want to do them as accomplishments and then reassess on where it will go from there.

Brief thoughts on each of the three:

1. PHP - It is common so there are lots of resources and lots of jobs. Also it seems like I know more people using it and that translates into it being easier to get help.

2. Ruby (RoR) - It is good and works very well like the others but honestly part of why I want to use Ruby and learn Rails is because it is so hot and trendy and cool and I am a victim of marketing.

3. Python - Marco Arment (of Instapaper) made a statement in an interview that I understood to say he uses PHP because it just works and he knows it inside and out but if he was going to start over he would use Python.

One factor in consideration would be which of the 3 languages makes you the most "hireable" in the North East US, even though I am not sure I would ever even get to that level.

I'd also love to hear from anyone who uses one of the three above but wishes they had chosen and become proficient in one of the other two instead.

Finally, does it really matter that much? Am I over analyzing? Should I just randomly pick a number 1 - 3 and go with that language, or just pick Ruby because I think Rails is cool and just start building and releasing already?

Thanks in advance!
It would be interesting to hear from the HN community, people with Samsung laptops, if they've had this happen, or if they check now, if this keylogger is discovered.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2386411 for the Vanity Fair article by Allen.
Yeah, I started a port of this code into Clojure about a year ago with no attempt to keep the design and it diverged a bit. I never finished it though as my plane landed. :)
Don't want to start a religious war,
but to me the Python code just looks more
clean.

It would be annoying if one did start. Unfortunately some people like to think that they know what you should find more clean.
This seems a bit surprising: what is the latency coming from the NIC to the motherboard ? I somehow doubt the latency due to distance within one piece of hardware matters (current CPU cannot do much more than a few 1000s cycles for the electricity to go around a few times in a motherboard, which is nothing to do any kind of advanced processing).
I don't dare to make any sweeping generalizations about this, but I would love to see how age, location and amount of time spent working at startups correlates with some of the opinions here. I suspect there might be some interesting (if not entirely unsurprising) trends there.
great book! thank you for sharing
Probabilistic Nondeterministic Programming
Text Strangers From Across the Room With PoKos App
Hmm dude, I think we're over-reliant on freekin' being connected all the time. GPS may fail once every X monts/days/whetever. Whatever the fail likelihood of GPS actually is, the likelihood of not being connected to the internet at any given location is far greater, yet we depend on it more and more.
If I got color, I'd understand the joke!
>Edit: Still, it seems rather boneheaded to try to solve a minor PR problem from two years ago with a lawsuit that is certain to be very public.

Actually, I don't think this is boneheaded.

Tesla are probably finding no-one is touching them because somehow, ahem Top Gear, everyone has the impression that the car will run for 50miles and then pack in and your only option will be to tow it home and charge it for 16hours to get another 50miles.

This suit will at the very least raise the point that Top Gear misrepresented the mileage that one can expect to get and that they failed to mention fast-charging schemes. It's likely to get mentioned on Top Gear and in just about every motoring magazine and on every tech site everywhere. I think even a few million on the suit would be better spent than trying to reverse this perception through advertising.

If I were in Tesla's target population then learning that Top Gear lied and that the mileage is actually a lot better than it appeared would probably put me back on track for a sale whilst learning that Tesla is suing Top Gear wouldn't negatively affect my purchase decision.

TL;DR I think this is a win for Tesla overall.
Sorry to rain on your parade but battery-only powered electric cars still have too limited a range and take too long to recharge to be practical for most people. They may find a niche with people who can afford to have a separate car for a modest daily commute, but most people don't have the cash to tie up in an extra car just to be "green" (which electric cars aren't, really).
No, but it needs to be pointed out that it's fictional entertainment.

They have races and competitions between each other which are staged and adapted for dramatic results. The few car reviews they do are similarly dramatised. Does the viewer understand that the car didn't break down, that the person on the motorbike didn't coincidentally reach the same point as the person in the car, or whatever?

I suspect that most people don't realise that Top Gear is fictional entertainment instead of factual entertainment, because the extremely long-running brand of the show is rooted in factual entertainment.

Suing them over a fictional review is foolish, but if you were expecting an honest review of your product and got back a dramatised narrative you'd probably be pissed off too.
It's worth noting that the Ford GT actually ran out of gas on the Top Gear track while Clarkson was driving it, and they put it in the show. They got something ridiculous like 6 miles to the gallon and made a point of it.
Will Content Streaming Make ISPs Rich?
But these articles generally have many more votes than just a couple - this article has 149 at current count.
I am waiting for one of these shops to open up the opportunity to hobbyists/devs. I would love to try and create my own decision/trade algorithms but dont have the kind of money it would take to mitigate the cost effect of the trade volume (ie, at $8 per trade and making 1000 trades per day with an average return of 2% per day you would need to be working with more than 400K to even cover your tx cost).

Strikes me that it would be a great research incubator for them to understand/learn new ideas and techniques and hunt for talent.
I'm using ruby to glue together fast stuff in C.
The only time I have taken karma in to consideration is when I disagree with someone either in principle or in technical merit. If I were to even respond to such a post, I want to know if I am dealing with a troll or someone who is a highly regarded member of the community because they have earned their karma. Basically, I let it influence how I might approach someone to a certain extent. Other than that, I could care less what my or anyone else's karma is.
I've done work for years with estimation theory, and probabilistic estimators, but I never knew there was a field of study dedicated towards language development using statistical methods.

It would be ideal to have a range of introductory documents followed by a great book or two on the subject. Any tips appreciated.
Rather than karma/comments I'd like to see karma/uniques. Keep count of the logged in users that have seen the comment. Use a little Javascript to figure out which comments have been visible in their browser window long enough to read them.
The chassis is built/designed by Lotus.
First Image Ever Obtained from Mercury Orbit
Seem like HN killed your site? ;)
Talk about burying the lede...

And what does he mean by "After the initial set up of the laptop"? What exactly did he do? Couldn't it just mean that the security software he is using to do the scan or the media he is using is infected? I just think this sounds fishy until he's verified it with a completely different set of tools.
Enabling dynamic compression for WCF Data Feeds in IIS7
I feel like his reduce-true could be implemented with take-while and reductions, but my Clojure isn't strong enough to produce it. (last (take-while identity (reductions f ns)))) is close, but we need to take one more element than take-while does.
Follow Norvig's lead from Paradigms of Artificial Inteligence - write fast embedded paradigms. So write a performant Constraint Solver DSL couple it with a performant Prolog DSL. Solve all kinds of problems declaratively instead of just Sudoku. I've been working on that https://github.com/swannodette/logos ;)
Social Networking Blues
You are not Spanish, are you?
Exactly just like cash, people like cash.

However you could sell a lot of online services with bitcoins, potentially millions of USD worth without the taxman getting so much as a sniff that anything odd is happening. Nor even if they investigated you would they be able to prove anything(depending on your lifestyle,no pricy sports cars).

With regards to my political views, I'm not a fan of paying governments to screw me. I tend to like the idea of keeping the wealth I created. But more importantly I like being able to make that wealth with methods that the government might not approve of.

And bitcoin can allow me to do that.