skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
HN vote weighting: some theory and a suggestion.
A problem which has been brought up in a few threads is that the front page doesn't seem to contain the stories people want it to contain.

I suspect that part of the reason for this is that voting occurs two ways: voting on an article you found on /newest, or voting on an article you found on the front page. The issue is, votes on /newest affect the content of the front page more than do votes on the front page, and this is kind of irretrievable. Most HN'ers don't browse /newest, and the composition of the user-base which browses /newest is different from the composition of the user-base which browses the front page. I don't think that trying to convince users to browse /newest is a good way to fix this. If you need to change the principles of human behavior to use your social doohickey, it just doesn't do hickey.

Let's make some assumptions. Front-page readers are almost entirely motivated by intrigue, and /newest users are motivated at least partially by something else. If we weight more highly the votes of /newest users whose promoted-things are popular with the front-page users, we improve the utility of the site to front-page users. If we further include the karma of the front-page users in the rating-weighting for the /newest users who voted on the article, we (hopefully) improve the utility of the site to front-page users who post constructive comments. In essence, we increase the weighting of users who upvote things which other constructive users later upvote.

This is different from karma-weighted rates because karma-whoring is no longer a useful way to increase one's weighting -- the most usefully predictive users will have their posts upvoted by lots of high-karma citizens, which would be hard to outdo even by karma-whoring sockpuppets.

So... when someone upvotes a post, you increment the article's sorting-score (the score used in sorting, not the true score) proportional to the user's weight, and you increment the weight of previous voters proportional to the user's karma score. You also decrease the weight of the person voting, since otherwise people who vote on everything (and are thus useless from a predictive standpoint) are rated highly. This increases the impact of high-karma users (a good thing) without increasing their power (human beings and power are kind of like fire and gasoline; a bad combination). Since karma distribution is highly uneven, maybe using the square root of karma would be better (less skew).

The problem is that this might encourage people to try to vote "with the crowd" -- since people usually try and get more power, even if it's totally meaningless.
I don't know why it bothers the original poster, but to me it seems like a cringe-worthy non sequitur. How is artificial flavoring related to education?
Koalas to the max
A more feature-rich implementation:
http://juliamap.googlelabs.com/
Yeah, repeating the generics is cumbersome and we could do with a better syntactical sugar for that.

Typically, the type's only reapeated if you're assigning to the same exact type as your constructor. In most cases, Map<K,V> foo = new ConcurrentHashMap<K,V> is more idiomatic than typing ConcurrentHashMap twice. Although concurrent is a little special because it's an implementation detail that you sometimes want to enforce via types.
Hence physician assistants. Stanford's program takes 1.5 years post ba. They can do most/all of what doctors and surgeons can do, but they may require a doctor to sign off on what they do; this varies by state. See http://www.princetonreview.com/Careers.aspx?cid=181

I'd bet that for a good chunk of what a general doctor does -- yup your ear is infected, here's an antibiotic; your wrist sure is broken, let me cast it; it hurts to pee -- uti or std; a full md is overkill. Living in SF, my gf who has had less complicated medical issues than me primarily sees a PA at One Medical Group, who by the way I would recommend. I recently tore ligaments in my ankle and broke my tibia plus fibula; even my orthopaedic surgeon has PAs helping her maximize efficiency.
<!DOCTYPE html> may fix this.
Gary Johnson spoke at the University of Michigan a week ago. Very interesting speaker, I highly recommend that people go if possible!
In terms of Google, those fears are pretty unfounded. Google releases new products all the time that fail to gain traction.
No, that's the theoretical beauty of aggregation. If black friday causes a 10x spike in transactions, a larger system won't help you.
You can't control for "bright parents." You can control for parents' income, parents' education, parents' height and weight, but you can't control for the kind of attitude towards childrearing and towards life that would cause a couple to send their kids to Montessori school.

This is why so many social science results that are "controlled" for various variables actually don't make any sense.
Ask HN - CO2 emissions and cloud computing
Who is responsible for the CO2 generated by cloud infrastructure? The company which is consuming it or the cloud infrastructure provider like Amazon or Rackspace.

And who will be taxed for those emissions?
I have no idea. The pedals aren't actually used for parens, they are used for Emacs keybinding prefixes.
The article says "early stage startups need to compete". I agree with this. I haven't really seen much movement in that direction though. So many startups try to get early employees to shoulder all risk themselves with no hope of reward, bogus equity deals, no benefits, etc. You hear about these VCs buying substantial slices of ownership for $12,000 or $6,000 or other such trivial amounts less than their weekly cost of first class airfare, which makes it impossible to offer real salaries to new hires.

Very little action going on that indicates there is a true understanding in the start up community that top talent is needed to invent top products that draw customers.

Heck, there was recently an announcement here from some company that was telling startups they didn't even need to have developers, they had plugin disposable cog developers in india that could do whatever was needed remotely, as if killer product development was a solved problem now handled by line workers. Obviously these nameless overseas developers won't be getting equity.

Really has seemed like amateur hour in the startup community for some time. So little activity is consistent with a desire to build solid companies with good products that are sustainable. Instead, more and more VC funds are run by guys with little successful business experience, who seem mostly interested in living the high life at the expense of the investors they are fleecing.
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I agree this is certainly a simplification, but I don't think one grossly so.

A lot of the points you mention do not apply to our setup:

- Our standby database is guaranteed to be consistent (barring some massive hardware failure), because we disable write caching on both the drives and the RAID controller, and the only data being exchanged is the write-ahead log. If the standby receives corrupt data, it will not apply it and will break off the replication and maintain its consistent (and stale) state. The underlying file system of the master and standby are completely distinct, thus any failure on either machine has no effect on the other.

- Streaming replication has no effect on write performance on the master, as the replication is best-effort and asynchronous. Of course this is a redundancy trade-off, but one that is fine for our needs. If you need to commit every transaction to multiple machines, that is a whole different and more complicated problem.

- Increasing availability was not the main goal for us. If our master database crashes, our website will break. However, our database state should be intact (either on the master or standby), and that was our goal. Having master-master replication or something along those lines is significantly more complicated and invites a host of problems that involve a lot of trade-offs. We accept that in case of master database hardware failure, a human is going to have to fix it. However, we believe with our current system, we can greatly reduce the time it will take.
Thanks for the feedback, you're right.

This whole sign-up page seriously needs some love.
This is a great collections of computer interfaces. Thanks
Setting the record straight on icorrect?
That's what I was going to write.
The founder appeared on the Colbert show and at first I thought this was a joke. They plan to charge $1000/year for people to "correct" information on the inter-tubes. Seriously do they have a clue?
I evolved the page break discussion to talk about tool support and ugliness. Bottom line: "If you like simplates but dislike the page break, then you have until Aspen 1.0 to come up with something that works perfectly with existing tools /and/ isn’t ugly."

http://aspen.io/page-break/
Microsoft debates overzealous retail expansion; Ballmer convinced “to hold back”
The number one problem with commercial OCaml is the lack of comprehensive library support. Until that's addressed, it's not going to take off. Brilliant language, not very practical. F# is a step in the right direction here.
Here's a start: http://aspen.io/templating/
I thought that I had asked them about that part. Hmmm.
Review bombing is the market's way of informing the publisher that their prices are too high.

If you want to say that a price a product is sold at is dictated soley by what the market can bear, then I don't see why it isn't acceptable to say that vandalising review sites is (one of )the market's way of responding to the pricing.

Edit : (When I say "I don't see why...", I'm geniunely curious )
Happy Birthday Google App Engine
That was a fantastic conference. I enjoyed Erik's presentations. Guy Steele's lecture was also very good, but his keynote with Richard P. Gabriel was incredible. He's actually done the 50 in 50 keynote before: http://blip.tv/file/1472720
Architecture astronauts
However, since they are all third-party solutions, there are such varying levels of complexity and support I think you would prefer to use the built-in versions of replication.

Depends on what you need replication to do for you. If you just want a full replica of your db, the built-in stuff is getting really good with 9.x (as far as I've heard; I have no direct experience with it). That said, the PostgreSQL hackers are specifically making most-case tools, and for most people, they're great.

If you have more complicated needs, though, you'll need to look elsewhere. The built-in tools are all-or-nothing, and single-master. I've worked in multiple environments where we had needs that went beyond what they'd have offered, had they existed at the time; multi-master, replicating a subset of your database(s), and transforming the data in-flight during replication are real needs that organizations find themselves facing, and based on what the core committee has said about their plans, those aren't going to be addressed with the built-in tools any time soon, if ever.
Goodbye Outlook - Gmail now lets you paste images directly from clipboard
As far as I know, salaries are included in H1B visa database. Ah, here's the article where somebody mined it for game developer salary: http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/blog/?p=107
From and article I read yesterday (I believe it was in wired) the "bubble" is solid quartz.
Gary Johnson- Solving problems instead of just throwing money at them.
I want to post this in my facebook page, tag all my friends and ask "what do you wanna do before you die?". It is always nice to know what your friends and family want to do before they die :)
I think that the legal system and major corporations will eventually have to follow the lead of some distributed computer systems, and just accept some small losses here and there in pursuit of greater gains elsewhere (I'm thinking of how Netflix embraces nondeterminism in its* distributed systems).

I keep wanting to use "their" instead of "its", mixing the US and non-US notions of whether a corporation is a singular or plural noun.
This won't weed out TechCrunch submissions because they are usually upvoted above average. But the idea of charging against Karma is sound -- inferior submission incurs a certain "collective" cost to the HN audience and hence must be paid for. Only downside, as many have mentioned before, is that this turns the focus to Karma.
My friend Doug built something similar:

http://dougx.net/fractals/

Also some very nicely constructed HTML5 games:

http://dougx.net/plunder/

http://dougx.net/sweeper/
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3G Mobile Phones In India
It is almost two years since India has started hearing about 3G mobile phones. Unfortunately, 3g network is not available in most of the major cities in India.
Pillaging. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/_/dict.aspx?word=pillaging
Nice to see a .net app done quickly in this sea of RoR / django weekend apps.
Digital Signage with a focus on local events and information. It will be a centrally managed network of LCD TVs that are playing local news feeds, weather, realtime updateable ads. The host business will also be able to add content of their own. All of it is played back in glorious 1080. I'm also planning to incorporate SMS coupons and advertising as well.

My am installing my first display on Friday at the local bowling alley.
Didn't really understand what's wrong with msdeploy?

Deploying can't get much easier than clicking a single button in VS.Net... Rolling back IS an issue but it can be mitigated by versioning one's source code and testing the site locally before deploying.
While it can get a bit silly sometimes, I've come to really appreciate the verbosity of Obj-C method calls. Explicit parameter names make them very self-descriptive, and grouping the entire call within brackets makes structure obvious. Compare:

canvas.drawImage(kittens.subImage(vec2(10,10),vec2(20,20)),vec2(30,30))

vs

[canvas drawImage:[kittens subImageAt:vec2(10,10) withSize:vec2(20,20)] at:vec2(30,30)]
It's funny because the students thought he was being cheeky, when in fact he was making a logical leap that few individuals would EVER make, much less in a random junior level physics course.

He basically Nerd-burned them, and that is something I can get behind.
You all missed the point.

>> Solve a problem. Build something that people want. Make it good. Focus on your product instead of looking over your shoulder at the competition.
Well... amazon at this point has a pretty long established reputation as being an underpaid hellhole for developers. So I am not surprised they have 1900 open positions. If you are any good, you'll have better places to apply to. So they get the useless dregs. Amazon's story in this regard is a good lesson to tech firms about what happens if you treat developers like crap so long that word gets out about how bad it is at your place. The good ones will avoid you forever. You'll never again be able to hire the top talent, at any price. No one trusts you. Reputation is important. There's good reputation like Google, there's neither good or bad, like a lot of places, and then there are the places with the bad reputation.

In hardware for example, HP used to have the best possible reputation. But then Fiorina as CEO destroyed the company's reputation among engineers. They are now permanently crippled.

Word gets out.

Maybe everything there has changed and things are better. That's possible. But it doesn't matter. It's like the story of the reformed born again wife beater. Sure, he feels bad about what happened to all his previous spouses and swears he has changed. But does a solid down to earth woman who isn't emotionally damaged really want to be the one to find out if it is true? No.
subpoint (for you seth godin people out there) - don't let competition keep you from shipping.
I'm not seeing the relevance of your having looked up a word in a dictionary...
I'm envious that your experience lets you believe that local testing can mitigate the need for rolling back a production deployment.
Pi is about 3. Pi^2 is about 10. But better than both of these approximations is Pi^2 + Pi = 13, which gives Pi = (-1 + sqrt(53))/2 = 3.1400...

(It's too bad that the combination Pi^2 + Pi occurs basically never.)
Twimpact: Monitoring the Twitter firehose in Real Time
If they want, I'd know a startup founded by a designer ;)

Anyway, I totally agree, it's also true even better is when the designer is part of a team of co-founders that bring technical knowledge.
Dave McClure has some strong opinion about this.

http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/why-not-to-do-a-startup
Really impressive! Skype (5) crashed when I loaded the page. Granted, I was in a screen-sharing call.
Actually, there are journeyman software developers. Here are some links:

1. Corey Haines: http://programmingtour.blogspot.com/, http://www.coreyhaines.com/, http://www.coderetreat.com/

2. Journeyman Programmer Description: http://teamdoty.us/journeymanwp/?p=4 (from http://www.thejourneymanprogrammer.org/)

3. Software Craftsmanship: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_craftsmanship, http://scna.softwarecraftsmanship.org/, http://www.softwarecraftsmanship.org.uk/
Finally! Now my screenshot workflow is down to two steps:

Win+S (OneNote screenshot feature)
CTRL+V
> Not only is C easy for humans to understand,

Is he being funny or serious?
Major props for not making me sign in with Facebook to try it out.
Photographic Height/Weight Chart
I also had this idea and would love to talk to you more about it. I have some PSD's of the user interface I have been working on. I've developed the MVP and outline. Email is josh at joshmlewis.com. Thank you!
That is exactly what mine is too. I believe this makes us roughly 100 times more productive compared to those who need to cut an area from a screenshot and use something like Print Screen + PhotoShop.
I don't think it is an issue of technology (typedef, etc...) as much as an application target issue. Using short names in a language without any kind of namespace support can only work for a certain type of applications and developmenent organization.

C really shines for low-level programming: while something like Linux Kernel is extremely complex, it has relatively simple needs as far as interface goes. The public interface is very small (defined by system calls - I don't know the count, but suffice to say the most trivial python libraries will often have more functions). Same thing can be said for other applications where C has been very successfull for.

But something as fundamental as a lack of any namespace in C really hurts when you need to handle very large applications which cannot be easily split in very well defined components with small interfaces. Complex GUI and browsers come to mind, which is exactly the kind of things where C++ is a well accepted choice.
I read n = 3. I thought I was coming into a discreet calculus thread. Then i find it's continuous and got upset. Then I find that it's not even american calculus which makes me even more upset. I'm going to have to hammer out a few combinatoric problems regarding the probability of picking a McNuggets box with TWO boot-shaped nugs just to get my credibility back. /silly
Indeed...

I spent a five minutes looking for any small-text link to the source code - doesn't mean they aren't there. But...

Uh can someone "explain" how, exactly, there's no free version of this hypothetically free software?

???

Mono's had a dubious reputation
An interesting visual display of height to weight with actual user-submitted photos. You can even make out the distribution trend (I can't call it a regression curve, since there may be multiple photos behind each cell).
I feel like a bit of a snob for having this opinion, but I do have it, so might as well write it: If a hashtag like that ever got any traction then the results would be horrible. Hashtags like that attract so many morons and idiotic tweets, like one I saw the other day "#thingsblackpeopledontsay" (or something like that).

I've never seen any hashtag that wasn't shit except those based around events/people/etc. For example #Dodgers during a baseball game, or #Libya.

All other hashtags, the ones based around tweeting on a random idea, result in a load of shit. I don't want to read idiots tweeting "#b4id fukk loadsa hot bitches", thanks.
Is gravity not actually a force? Forcing theory to meet experiments
I am doing some very straightforward asp.net deployment using git, TeamCity, nunit, and powershell.

If the gauntlet of (unit-integration-acceptance) tests (in the master branch, naturally) all pass, the code is deployed to a staging server. Then there are some tests which run against staging. If those tests all pass, then the artifacts for the new version of the site are copied into a new directory (side by side) on the server. finally, a powershell script tells IIS to serve from the new directory.

End result? Deployments are zero-downtime non-events tha happen multiple times daily. Rollbacks are trivial (and rare). Any not-yet-ready for prime time code can be checked into any other git branches.

Database changes? I have a tiny bit of code, called from Application_OnStart that checks to see if it needs to do any CREATE TABLE or ALTER TABLE statements.

Sure, I had to create all of this stuff myself, but it's all crazy simple, reliable, and does just what the project needs.

Maybe someone could make some product to handle all of this, but the flexibility of linking together the best tools for the job wins for now.

Also, it's just easy.
If you believe in the physicalism of the human brain and mind, then any definition of consciousness boils down to "a bunch of chemo-electrical impulses."
Nice work. +1 for .Net!

This allows my web layer to have no project reference to my data layer, and forces my developers to explicitly call the logic/service layers every time they want some data.

I totally feel your pain for Linq. I'm a .Net guy myself and when we went full time on our startup we went with C# and I vowed to never fall into the traps and horrible mistakes I saw at past jobs using Linq2Sql and EF. Before POCO was available for EF I was masking the entities with Interfaces so that the web layer had no way to make 'extra queries'. I'd love to learn more about how you used T4/POCO/EF together to clean up this constant problem.

I've also wanted an excuse to use Unity for something... haven't had the chance yet.
I use Cropper (http://cropper.codeplex.com/). Works great, and both Notes and Outlook take the Ctrl+V just fine. Cropper can also be used to intercept PtrnScrn commands.
The One-second War (What Time Will You Die?)
There are a lot of responses to this question and I haven't read all of them, so I apologize if somebody has said this already, but the answer is dead simple: HN has gotten more popular! That's it. If I must state the obvious, this translates to a lower average IQ because the larger the degree of separation from the original creators of the forum, the lower intellectual density gets.
I've gotten restricted stock units (orders of magnitude less obviously), and I definitely don't recall them working like a loan etc.

The transaction is that you get N shares over a K-year vesting schedule (cliff + monthly/quarterly vesting etc). The dollar value on shares that TC published is arrived at by multiplying N by today's GOOG stock price.

This is better for the employee than cash because the stock price in one year may be higher than today. For the same reason, it's better for the company to give shares instead of cash, since they can pay out less in today's dollars.