skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Another good reason to ignore this stuff is that it will be frequently used as a face-saving excuse to not spend money on something or back a company.

It's a lot easier to say, "Oh, we're not going to license your software any more due to the Global Financial Crisis" or "We're not going to put money into this venture because of the tech collapse" than it is to say "We're out of money" or "Your company and ideas suck".
Show HN: My weekend project, tracking the services you can't have in Canada
When you consider all sorts of dirty tricks that were employed, along with the stupid - in retrospect - blunders the competition made, it becomes much less than a surprise.

I can be outnumbered 10 to 1 against a stupid enemy and still have a fighting chance. I can't say the same with I am outnumbered 100 to 1.
Any evidence or reasoning behind why that will solve it?

At the moment you can downvote but (enough) people don't. If we gain flags, why will people who don't downvote use them?
When our community loses a person like RiderOfGirraffes, we should take notice.
The downvote karma threshold is 500, and it looks like you just passed it (perhaps for a second time?).
Quantum computers make use of quantum mechanics. So things like entanglement and decoherence are essential to the algorithms. It has nothing to do with base 2.
Why? Am I missing something?
You can certainly do as some suggest and have a target list, which I have done before, but find to be very exhausting. I personally prefer all the casual connections.

For example at SXSW this year I got more business cards from people that I shared rickshaw rides with then any other way. The same goes for cab rides or shuttle rides you share with people.

You are stuck with each other for 5 minutes so just strike up a conversation. Yes its a little more random and less targeted but it is also more natural, so even if they don't need you they may pass your card to someone else who does because you weren't that guy.

Also, if its a busy conference or one that essentially takes over a whole hotel or area like SXSW where pretty much everyone you pass by is at the conference, just hang out on a couch or bench in the hotel lobby. Tons of people will come by and ask if the seat is taken. Kindly let them know it is not and strike up a friendly conversation like you would in the cab or shuttle.
Perhaps things need to be spelled out explicitly. If someone says something that gets a downvote, they need to be offered constructive criticism. "Here's why you were downvoted, and what you can do in the future to prevent it from happening again."

This is very time-consuming to do, however. Writing a detailed response is costly and repetitive. Pressing "downvote" is easy. You punish the commenter, but don't tell him/her why; it's up to them to figure it out on their own, which is sometimes difficult/impossible from their perspective.

An idea:

If you downvote, you have to pick a reason why you downvoted from various options (e.g. drop-down list, checkboxes). If you pick something, your downvote is cast. If you don't do anything, the downvote isn't cast.

In the options, you can list ~10-20 reasons to downvote (too mean, off topic, etc...). Select one or more items from the list, and submit it. What was selected appears in a "voting stats" page/section for said comment. Then the user can then get the gist of why they were downvoted, perhaps with a generic message saying how they could improve in the future.

The downside is that it might required a re-direct if you downvote (might be annoying on iPad/mobile devices), and it'll also take longer to downvote. I don't think the latter will be an issue since downvoting is rare, and I'd imagine people would be willing to fill out a quick web-form if they really think something deserves negative karma.
You could make the charge wall control:

* posting a comment
* voting on a comment
* submitting a link / question
* voting on a submission

Each of those are debatable. For instance, submission voting might be open to all but comment voting is not.

An interesting variant: You can 'keep' a link without paying, but if you are paying, your 'keep' is the counted as a 'vote'.
The raindrops are great, but it was the greeting in your source code for aerotwist.com that made me roll off the chair. Love the aerotwist logo in underscores and pipes.
It's not so much 3 states, as it is two states and a superposition of both states, meaning that the qubit is effectively both a 0 and a 1 at the same time.
I believe Microsoft was a Delaware corporation for many years -- at least for several years that I worked there in the '90s. I don't know why they changed.
Relatively new user here...

I found the site when someone submitted something and asked me to upvote it. I didn't know what that was, so came here and made a stupid comment and got downvoted. I didn't know what that meant or why it happened, and no one went out of their way to explain it.

Months later, I have almost 1k karma and still didn't know who RiderofGiraffes was, and don't find myself caring.

The real issue here is culture, and the cultivation of it. There is a culture, but it's tough to find, and it's far from discoverable. Most of the links new users need to know about, such as the top 20 list, are hidden deep in the site. There aren't any avatars, and because of the strange nicknames, I never know who I am talking to unless I click through and they happen to have listed a URL or Twitter handle.

Point being - if you want people to act a certain way, I think you need to do a better job of describing it. I say that to the entire community.

I don't get the feeling of a nurturing environment here, and because of that, it's sort of a "fend for yourself" environment, which leads to the sort of behavior we see.

Just my .02, but this is what I'm picking up here.

I still love HN.
clever, well done.
Basically: Qubits (sort of) encode all possible states that a standard string of bits can take at the same time as a superposition, such that when you measure them, you have a possibility of observing each possible setting of the bits.

You can manipulate the possibility of observing certain states by performing operations on the bits (which are effectively interference). So a quantum calculation is more a probabilistic restriction on which state you want, rather than a direct calculation. In order to be sure of a result, you need to repeat the calculation to get a desired confidence (or just check the answer directly if that would be faster).
I believe this is not relevant to most hackers, except if they happen to be bio researchers. Worse yet, while being mostly irrelevant, it's also a barely disguised flamebait piece designed to incite a fruitless ethics debate. This should be posted somewhere else.

And I don't care how many downvotes I get either; the guys who where complaining about the increasing lack of focus on HN earlier today were right.
I think 14 qubits is large enough to factor 21.

Pretty sure it can't factor 35 yet, though.
No, they can run on quantum computers, but to properly simulate a quantum computer, you may need exponential space/time. Googling for supporting data brought up http://alumni.imsa.edu/~matth/quant/433/shor-par/node19.html which discusses simulating Shor's algorithm on a classical computer.

The reason for the exponential is that the bits are all in a superposition of all possible states (so for a 14-bit register, that's a superposition of 2 to the 14 states), which operations all act on. Or something like that. I'm not really that clear on the details. :(
Downvotes get lost in a sea of upvotes. Flags are stronger, enough of them will kill the comment regardless of karma. It also lets you be more specific than downvoting.
Thanks for clarifying. Your original comment was pretty confusing, though, as a reply.
Is there any video or audio footage of Alan Turing? I am not aware of any.

It would be really amazing to see video of him, or at least hear his voice.
Obviously that isn't the case; if it were we'd simply roll out ternary computers, which have been used before.

I'm no physicist, and my knowledge of quantum is mostly memories of an intro course I took 5 years ago, so I hope someone with a bit more knowledge can come and fill in the gaps here. Nevertheless, the basic principle is that quantum superposition allows us to parallelise things with relatively reasonable space requirements.
I like this idea as well and I think it supports how a digital community actually works. For example, some people are great at finding awesome, relevant, high quality articles to submit. They should be encouraged to do so by earning a particular badge.

Others are better at commenting, and maybe there are even different classifications of commenting or different badges.

You would be able to incentivize behavior (commenting) and then narrow it down to a particular type of commenting.

One interesting badge might be the efficiency badge, and that would be generating the most points or badges per minute on the site.
A comment/question coming from someone who is obviously a designer... It seems like Bushido is operating in a similar space as Heroku, and both have the same purple/dark color scheme and Japanese/Asian theme... Was this intentional, and if so, what are some merits and drawbacks to branding your product similarly to that of a competitor?

Of course this is an early beta and branding is of little importance for this kind of product, but as a designer, it's the first thing that came to mind.
That could simply be what they are chosen to look for isn't what you would consider interesting. If you had an editor here you could define what they are looking for.
Have you actually read the OP? That Wikipedia entry just briefly tells what Doki Doki Panic was like and contrasts it with SMB2, while the OP is about how Doki Doki Panic started out as a Mario game.
The penis hornets nest line came from Steven Colbert.
Doff - What is your social network reputation?
I don't know the solution, but let me offer a suggestion as to what the cause of the problem is.

I think the issue is that the things that seem insightful to relatively unskilled programmers seem obvious to very skilled ones. A lot of the blog posts I see on sites like this rehash issues that I thought were settled a long time ago, but what's happening is that people understand things for themselves over and over again. And it's actually helpful when they write it up, because their writeups then lead other people to understand these things. Thus there is a steady stream of posts about the same set of ideas that are always helpful to people, but are still clogging HN.

The trouble is that there's no way for people who have already understood something to stop seeing the same old posts. I see three options:
- get rid of the less-skilled people
- keep the less-skilled people, but stop them from learning from these posts
- somehow let people opt out of seeing posts on things they understand, but keep them around for other people to see

It seems obvious that the third solution is correct, but I don't yet know how to do it.
You know how I know they are up to no good? Because if they were doing something good they wouldn't be anonymous - they'd want credit for it.

Anonymous is nothing more then a group of random people that meet over the internet to do harmful/border-line illegal activities. This stuff about "protecting you" is just a cover.

What is the big thing that they claim to support? Freedom of expression? Yet that is exactly what they are sabotaging by shutting down people's websites with DDoS attacks.
Idea 3. Enlarge space. There are too many people in the common agora, so split up the community into smaller, more focused spaces, akin to Reddit. For instance, there are natural categories here around news, programming, business, science, and politics.

http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/EnlargeSpace
I wonder if their are any BioHackers out there that actually try to do this type of work. (Anyone?) I'm not one of them, but I've always had the impression they play more with bacteria than complex organisms. I think cost and accessibility are probably prohibitive to the garage biohacker, but would a very motivated biohacker have the advantage of not answering to an IRB?
They were also complaining about lack of civility, which is the reason your comment (which has a very snide tone) is getting downvoted.
A related problem is blogspam. If the original source material was submitted a while ago but didn't get many upvotes, there is a huge incentive for people to mirror the content or link to a site that links to the original.

I think a more useful metric than "number of votes since submission" would be "number of votes in the past hour/day/whatever." That way an item could be submitted days in the past, but still get on the front page if it had enough upvotes recently. For testing purposes, this could be an alternate front page like http://news.ycombinator.com/classic

Another option would be to have moderators manually de-dupe stories or fix them to link to the original source. While they're at it, the mods could ban or reduce the karma of users who submit blogspam or duplicate stories.
I liked the experiment of "orange" members (with >3.5 avg karma), and think it was worth more than a day's trial. The complaint of HN becoming a two-tiered society (like that blue-eyes expt) would be a benefit, if the oranges were expected to set an example. It seems harmless to try it for a week and measure the resulting quality (as opposed to the resulting complaints...).

Identifying the 10% "trusted elders" (in this way or other) makes the site easier to control, as a large corporations are easier for a government to control, and having "key influencers" and "fashion-leaders" to target make it easier to seed viral ideas.
Importantly, designated "trusted elders" would be expected to act as such (and if not, their elderhood could be revoked). This control is not exactly the hacker spirit - but something is needed.

The effect would be to make the site small again.
I appreciate it Mike, it was my first go, so it's good to get positive feedback 8) Maybe I'll keep doing it.
Eagle Cam  120,000 Live viewers
Really? I thought it was thought-provoking, even if I'm not entirely sure that I agree with the author. Certainly more intellectually stimulating than the usual "Company X did Thing Y" items.

But then, I've never really been clear on the topic of HN. Seems to me it's "stuff interesting to hackers", which this may well be, even if it isn't interesting to one individual hacker.
I don't think that the number of interesting stories have declined, but I think that they have become much harder to find because the number of non-interesting stories have definitely increased. Among the non-interesting stories, I often notice the same usernames over and over. Would limiting the number of story posts per day help the situation?
Thanks for the answer. Personally, I don't see it so much as flamebait as an interesting issue. Even so, as long as people remain civil, I think discussions of conflicting viewpoints can be very valuable.

I had the impression that HN was for broad content, as long as it was intellectually stimulating. However, based on this recent post about the decline of HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 I get the feeling that there are conflicting communities here.

Perhaps you are right. This is my second post. I am feeling conflicted, actually.
Tax all financial transactions: a very small tax, but just enough to keep trading systems that do many transactions quickly become less attractive. I believe that this type of high speed trading does not generate value for society. I am thinking of something similar to proposals that would make people pay $0.000001 per email to make spamming none cost effective.
Uhhh... 'Predator?' What's his next project, SkyNet Resource Planning? This seems like an April fools to me. I mean I'm sure he's done work in the area... but the article is dated April 1 and the previous literature didn't mention 'Predator.' I could be wrong, but it seems too advanced, and scary.
Engadget Editor Joshua Topolsky Joins SB Nation
The answer to the question "When should I start a business?" is always "now".

Waiting will never provide an advantage. Obviously conditions have an affect on how you plan, but not when to start.
Perhaps the karma for submitting articles should be separate from the karma for comments. I know when I was out to build karma I focused on submissions because there wasn't a downside.
Meanwhile, Zynga raises $500 Million from T. Rowe Price, Fidelity and Morgan Stanley. With 401k money from ordinary folks.

Compared to the hundreds of billions in the mortgage market, $500 million is chump change. That's why this "bubble" -- whether it exists in reality or only in the minds of HN commenters -- doesn't matter to the economy at large.

I am increasingly astonished at the lack of perspective among those who are concerned about a new "bubble".
The Second Annual NYC Startup Job Fair on Fri, Apr 8
If I may quote from their home page...

The Second Annual NYC Startup Job Fair (http://nycstartupjobfair.com/) aims to connect qualified students and job-seekers with exciting and innovative New York-based startups.

This event was created for individuals to gain insight into the NYC startup scene and initiate awareness throughout campuses and communities in New York City of the growing opportunities within exciting local startups.

We invite both startups and seekers to submit an application for attendance; our team is committed to drawing the highest caliber of attendees and attracting the best local startups.
This is a great idea.

This goes beyond just which digital services you can't get in Canada, but also many other types of products which aren't offered here for whatever reason. Models of automobiles, consumer electronics (TVs in particular, with sparser ranges of models), etc.

Our currency routinely reaches or exceeds par with the US dollar, and yet many products are dramatically more expensive than you'd expect to be explained simply by currency differences alone (I guess there are a lot of other issues at play, but it doesn't help the widespread impression that we're getting screwed).

It would be awesome of your project also tracked how much more expensive products and/or services are in Canada than in the US.
It might be more reasonable than it seems at first glance. It's true that it's good to know how fast typical code runs, but there's another important question: when I run into performance problems and need to optimize a bottleneck, how fast can I make it before I have to resort to non-portable code or C extensions that complicate my build process?
Thanks for bringing the problem up. I never contributed too much but dropped in whenever I felt I had something insightful to say. Recently it has been getting less frequent but I think it's just that many of the front page stories aren't as interested as they have been and there is a good amount of duplicates. Since the community is large the comments tend to drop down faster as well so it's more difficult to get a discussion going.

A possible idea is to put up a dump of the HN data somewhere for users to download. Maybe the community can analyze it and find interesting patterns/behaviors and possibly solutions?
To be fair, Skype is available in Canada. Only Skype-in numbers aren't.
Is everyone who believes there is a lack of quality stories out there finding and submitting quality stories?

My main thought every time this topic comes up is "Community quality don't maintain itself."

So vote on comments you like or don't like, every time.

Check the "new page" and vote up stories you like. I know very few people do this, because I find good stuff overlooked there all the time.

And submit stories you want to see here. Someone has to do it or they'll never show up here.
It's not even a "group", it's just a self-applied label. Anyone can claim "We are Anonymous, and we are going to do X", whether X is good or bad. Do the organizers of this have anything in common with the organisers of any previous "Anonymous" activity? Probably not.

It seems to me that Anonymous has gone rapidly downhill in their choice of targets and tactics. When they were reading OT3 outside the Church of Scientology, that was something that most right-minded people could get behind, but this.... actually I don't even know what this is about; the letter doesn't really explain.

This is probably inevitable -- over time the folks with bad intentions will crowd out the folks with good intentions, since good people don't want to be associated with bad people. I was "part" of anonymous when "they" were protesting outside Scientology, but wouldn't be "part" of it now that "they" have started DDoSing random websites.
I'm obviously mistaken, otherwise the thread wouldn't have received so many positive votes. In fact, I apologize, it's me who apparently lost the plot. I bow to the majority opinion.

> I get the feeling that there are conflicting communities here.

Maybe, though that matter seems to be resolving itself on its own currently.

> Personally, I don't see it so much as flamebait as an interesting issue

Science research should be held to a higher standard, it shouldn't be compared to household rat catching. This shouldn't be thought-provoking at all. It's a case of apples and oranges. It's also borderline politics.
The time to stop is when you no longer enjoy what you're doing - not when you're on top.
I guess you could call me a "biohacker". I don't work on mice, I work on myself. I was diagnosed just under 10 years ago with "atypical cystic fibrosis" and, after a lifetime of being treated like a hypochondriac, promptly informed that "people like you don't get well". Having no other real choice, since doctors clearly had no plans to really help me get well, I began working on issues myself (and gradually began seeing results to a degree I never expected). My doctor expressed zero interest in how I was miraculously getting better. I get to "break" rules or make up rules as I see fit and that is, in fact, part of why I have made such astonishing progress.

FWIW:

Spent most of my life too sick to hold down a job and hid behind the label "homemaker and full time mom".

Spent about 3.5 months bedridden.

Diagnosed in May 2001 with "atypical cystic fibrosis".

Summer 2002: While attending GIS school in the smoggy LA area, got on boatloads of medication that doctors would not give me when I was bedridden and had no diagnosis. This helped save my life but left me a mess.

Spent the next several years getting off the drugs.

Antibiotic-free for something over 7 years (iirc).

Medication free since sometime in summer/fall of 2009.

Generally treated like a nutcase by the CF community which can't admit their real problem with me is they firmly believe the mantra "people like you don't get well" while simultaneously raising tens of thousands of dollars for the CF foundation and chanting "let CF stand for 'cure found'".
What does this do differently than Klout?
Isn't that the same as what I said above?
So you captured my email address, but haven't allowed me to sign up.

You also are not offering invite codes.

And it seems like you are doing what PeerIndex is doing. [edit: And also Klout, as mentioned by other commentators.]

Why is this newsworthy? Should this be flagged?
Klout is an alternative: http://klout.com/
Thanks for clarifying that. That was the only one which really surprised me to see on that list.
> Another interesting point is I feel like I have an association between the device and the types of activities I perform on them, to the point that I find it hard to write code on my desktop these days.

Do you have a similar association that you can only write code when you are on your 13"?

If you do, it sounds like you have trained yourself nicely to be productive.