skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Stephen Fry podgram on Language pedantic [MP3]
From: http://www.stephenfry.com/2008/12/22/series-2-episode-3-lang...
We shouldn't avoid paring stuff out to avoid the possibility of missing something. There's way too much news out there to take that approach, and the really big stuff generally gets posted multiple places.

Part of the problem is that HN's "gamut of topics", as you put it, has gotten too wide. There are lots of general tech news sites out there, this shouldn't be another. This is a narrowly focused community.
My thoughts, exactly. I thought it was a new creation of Nation States.
"most children classified as 'dullards' by the education system just don't understand how to cope with the traditional model of teaching"

Can't say I was ever classified as a 'dullard' but my grade school scores indicated that I was. Even when I went to college, after a stellar start, my performance deteriorated. After considerable time, I was able to go back to attend a world-class university and excelled, largely because I had learned what the goal actually was. When I was young, I mistook the 'traditional model of teaching' for learning, which was something I was quite good at. The goal of being the recipient of 'teaching' (ie, a student) is to achieve higher scores than everyone else. In fact, learning is potentially an impediment because it requires critical thinking, and you won't get far as a student with that. Some students understand the real goal and do quite well. And some may even learn at the same time. Many others are simply frustrated or turn off completely, as I did.
Details? :)
If an article only contains financial details, gossip, unverifiable rumor, or rambling incoherent editorials, then I don't think it belongs at the top of HN. Linkbait headlines are how TC articles get there.
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"Questions are the new answers" -- Socrates, 429 B.C.
Awesome overall idea, too.
OCamlPro and the future of OCaml
Is Browser Stealth Mode Stupid?
This is like the time someone on Metafilter suggested banning Cracked articles.
Shallow and deep discharges are not as good because they cause the battery to spend more time in the "danger zone" of full or zero.

Notice the 50% figure results in 750 full-charge equivalent cycles. Also, these figures are general and the magnitude varies based on the exact battery type.
independent of the language, you would always have to jump through hoops at that scale.
Turning PHP into a fast low level language was a great step and may have been required with other languages too.
Until we don't know that facebook have problems writing clean code, I wouldn't judge them for using PHP.
Fantastic project, and it's also a fascinating social experiment. Many people talk of changing bad situations, but this is a case of using art and engineering to make a solid attempt.
Being inundated with techcrunch articles is just a symptom of the real problem: there's no cost to submit articles, and there's potentially major karma in being first to submit an article that other people will also submit. Therefore, some people will submit anything they think others will, just to be first. These duplicate submissions also upvote the articles, pushing out better ones.

One option would be to make submitting posts cost a few points karma, as an experiment. I suspect the quality of posts on the frontpage would improve overnight, as interesting posts wouldn't fall off the frontpage within an hour, drowned out by gossip.
Wouldn't total mAh delivered be a better metric than charge cycles, since less power is delivered per cycle with shallower discharges? Some quick calculations, assuming a linear loss of capacity over time:

Assume an example rated battery capacity of 1700mAh

The average capacity over the life of the battery (i.e. reaching 70% capacity) is 80% (assuming batteries start at 90% and drop linearly to 70%).

At 100% DoD, 500 cycles * 80% * 1700mAh = 680Ah

At 50% DoD, 1500 cycles * 80% * 50% * 1700mAh = 1020Ah

At 25% DoD, 2500 cycles * 80% * 25% * 1700mAh = 850Ah

At 10% DoD, 4700 cycles * 80% * 10% * 1700mAh = 639Ah

So clearly a 50% DoD is better than 25% or 10%, but where does the optimum lie?
Cons lists are massively oversimplified. What about the case reddit had recently, where their masters and slaves got out of sync (presumably because master didn't fully flush a commit to disk, e.g. write buffering was on somewhere)? Hot standby is a hard problem, and has far more cons than just "you can't recover from drop table". When the fortune 500 company I used to work at would try replication with Oracle, it was often responsible for poor write performance, and sometimes we'd end up with two points of failure (a problem with either of 2 dbs could now make a system effectively unavailable) where before there had been only one. Maybe it's gotten better, maybe postgres has a great implementation, maybe our DBAs were just horrible... but five years ago I developed the opinion that the only way to get it right with traditional databases is to teach the application layer to handle failure, and sacrifice some part of ACID - and I haven't seen anything to convince me to change my mind since.
If the HN community starts upvoting gossipy TechCrunch articles, the community has deteriorated and the focus should be on rebuilding that. Banning TechCrunch would be treating the symptom and bring the community into more rapid decline, introducing an era of elitist censorship and immediately alienating core constituents.
On a small base (like a graph where the initial datapoints are less than 1/27th the ending datapoints), even large percentages can be hard to see. And I'm not sure how you can be agreeing 'exactly', since the Roman empire was as agriculturally based as anything else around (latifunda, panem et circenses, the Egypt grain tribute etc.).

But you are right that the annual growth due to efficiency was relatively small:

> Indeed generations of English schoolchildren have read, probably with bored bemusement, of the exploits of such supposedly heroic innovators as Jethro Tull (author in 1733 of An Essay on Horse-Hoeing Husbandry), “Turnip” Townsend, and Arthur Young. But this agricultural revolution is a myth, created by historians who vastly overestimated the gains in output from English agriculture in these years.4 The productivity growth rate in agriculture was instead modest, at 0.27 percent per year, lower than for the economy as a whole. But even these modest gains represented considerably faster productivity growth than had been typical over the years 1200–1800. Figure 12.4, for example, shows wheat yields per seed sown in England from 1211 to 1453. Medieval agriculture seems to have been totally static over hundreds of years.

(Clark remarks elsewhere that agricultural productivity growth is more like 1 or 2%, and the Chinese had easily double England's agriculture efficiency, but because farming is a war against entropy, with land being damaged and local pests adapting etc., the net productivity growth is small.)

Economic growth came mostly from population growth and exploiting additional natural resources.
To be honest, most people that are great developers didn't just turn middle-aged, think "I want to be a great developer," and spend a few years becoming one. Most of these developers have been hacking since they were literally single-digit age. Read Notch's AMA on Reddit (creator of Minecraft) - he was only 9 when he started hacking and he's 31 years old now. So, if you're asking how do I become a great developer now, it's probably too late.
I must say these are my favorite types of articles on HN. I also think these are the perfect use cases of cloud computing platforms such as AWS. Not sure why massively parallel and "embarrassingly parallel" computing intrigues me.
Are the battery life savings really worth the hassle and potential for lost work?
ASP.NET Deployment Needs To Be Fixed
It's equally important what you choose to leave out from your product, as what you include. It seems Gnome has included the kitchen sink.

What does this mean? Gnome 3.0 is rather incomplete. You can't even change themes or fonts yet.
Facebook Live to announce something
TravAlert Wakes You Up Before Your Bus Or Train Reaches Your Stop
A regular topic on HN over the years. Let's keep this thread simple. They're not going to be banned from HN. HN's link to YC is so overt that it doesn't even make sense to think of it as a "conflict of interest"; HN is a favor YC is doing you. YC isn't going out of its way to alienate a key PR channel.

I don't like TechCrunch. At all. I think the answer to dealing with the egregious TC stuff is simply to flag it and get on with your life.
I tried this at the grocery store tonight. Win.
Ryan Paul's review on Ars might be more useful:

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/reviews/2011/04/ars-revie...
MyColorscreen, a social platform for users to share their devices home screens.
HN is already moderated (subtly), and there are indeed sites that cannot be linked to from here.
Who Needs Flash? New WebGL And HTML5 Browser Game Sets Tron’s Light Cycles In 3D
1. If a bad TechCrunch article makes it to the top, is it because the karma system of HN needs refinement to mitigate perverse incentives?

2. Instead of a ban, would it be better if HN users slightly change the way they read articles or can HN show top X comments with each article title?

E.g. for 1., even though if a user writes a negative comment about an article, he/she may be inclined to upvote the article so that his/her comment is read resulting in an unsavory article gaining much attention.

E.g. for 2., a HN reader sensing a tabloid article from the header can go to the comments page first. Or better still, if HN can be tuned to just show top X comments, then would it solve the issue?
Since I've picked up my Thinkpad, I really wonder why Lenovo doesn't stick in a small internal battery ontop of the removable (say good for like 10 minutes or something...) so that:
a) On power loss (battery removed), it can still dump into hibernate (the real one)
b) So you can hotswap the external batteries. I have two batteries, and when I'm out for long periods, it annoys me that I have to dump it into hibernate so I can swap batteries. It's just an extra few minutes that really annoy me.
And staunchest defender since his first day as an SRE.

And since I'm here, btilly you have one of the best AB testing decks out there, and I thank you for that.
Why stop there? http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cpp/rt_mandel_zoom_animtn.aspx (or any of several other results for the obvious search)
that number is probably averaged out. I bet it's probably more like 100,000 a second around peak hours and 500 a second in non-peak.
Jokes aside, would it not create a short pause before and after stepping on the pedal in order to synchronize with fingers typing, and thus slow you down?
Is Corporate Pricing suppose to be all 499/mo regardless of # of people? Why?
'Nation-building' is one of the most positive activities a politician can engage in. I wish the politicians that govern me did more of it.
I know MySQL has drunk the cool-aid with innodb, but 10 years ago their FAQ entry about why ACID was a bad idea convinced me I didn't ever want to rely on them for anything I might normally rely on a database for. I'm cool with intentionally trading off database features for other features that I value more (like availability), but I want it to be an intentional choice, and then it shouldn't still pretend to be a database for me - admit it's an unreliable data store and just use this unreliable fast thing for a cache, not as a database.
make submitting posts cost a few points karma, as an experiment

Love this idea.
I found this project a few weeks back and loved it. Almost posted it here. I would love to see a web version of it or at least aggregating tweets with a hashtag like #b4id
Reddit is censoring posts about HN
How about: Online Campaign Management for Candidates and Activists
Ask HN: What does the Twitter/Datasift deal mean for developers?
So, I write for ReadWriteWeb and I've been paying pretty close attention lately to the situation with Twitter, API access, the API Terms of Service and the developer ecosystem. Earlier this week, Twitter announced a deal with DataSift (formerly TweetMeme) to sell access to Twitter info (including historical) at a price much lower than the full firehose access offered with Gnip. The access is based on search, comes with extra data from Klout, PeerIndex, Qwerly and Lexalytics.

(Here's our writeup of the announcement too: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_announces_fire_hose_marketplace_up_to_10k.php )

So, I'm looking for reactions and interpretation from developers on what this means for the Twitter developer ecosystem. Got one? Got some insight? Let's talk!
Google's new Easter Egg - Tilt, Tilted, Askew
There's a huge unsolved need when it comes to accounting software. Good job identifying it!

The customer problem, as I understand it, is that accounting requires you to understand bizarre terminology and concepts (debits, credits, financial statements). Anybody who hasn't taken Accounting 101 and 102 would have a hard time using any accounting software I've ever seen. Even having taken accounting in college, most of us don't use it enough to remember all the details.

I would solve that problem by assuming the person using your software has no accounting background. Take out the jargon and replace it with familiar concepts. It's a wonderful UX challenge, but completely doable.

You have about a year to execute before I tackle this problem. Good luck!
I agree, this is genius.
Oh, and I'm Mike. My email is mike@readwriteweb.com if you don't want to just comment here. If you are willing to be quoted for a story, I'll need to know your full name and position/job title/company, what have you. :)
Commodore unveils far-less-retrotastic VIC-Slim
Here's an idea that could address a lot of complaints here, and potentially be kind of fun:

Add an extra personal setting where you can input urls of javascript files that you'd like your home page to link to. All that news.arc has to do is drop these includes (just the reference, not the actual content) somewhere in the final html that gets returned.

For example, my version of the home page would have this in it:

<script src="http://mydomain.com/myscript.js"/>

Users would be free to make any updates they want to their own DOM, such as blacklisting unwanted domains. People could also share useful code snippets.

If this gets enough votes here I'll repost it on the features page (which looks surprisingly stale, are we still using this? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363).
Banning TC articles is equivalent to the Red Cross refusing gay people's blood donations.

It's a very general (and wasteful) solution to a very specific problem. TC articles are undeniably insightful on some occasions.
Very cool, but I'm always frustrated by the resolution limit of digital Mandelbrot sets. I'd love to see one that would support (effectively) infinite zooming. Also, I'm aware that it's an artifact introduced by the use of HTML5, but sites that break my back button annoy me.
The products are 500 discharges, 750 discharges, 625 discharges, and 470 discharges, so it turns out that it does matter a bit; you can store 50% more total energy in the battery over its lifetime if you discharge it 50% each time than if you discharge it either 100% or 10% each time.
One word - Finance. NYC is still the banking capital of the world and banks love computers.
I also like the idea and agree with you on the name. From the US point of view, when I hear nation building, I think of the conflicts in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.

I also don't see how the name relates to non profits.
Actually not a Google employee any more. I left some months ago.
Alright. Nevermind then :-)
It appears he has something to say about that, too:

http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~blynn/c2go/
We're making a cross-platform desktop client in C++ / Qt.

We access Gmail over IMAP, and we specifically optimize for their servers (ie: we don't bother supporting the full range of the IMAP protocol, and we take advantage of Gmail specificities)

This allows the client to feel fast, even though actions that have to sync with Gmail, like deleting or archiving something aren't really faster or slower than with the web interface. But they happen in the background, so it feels snappier.

We will be releasing a private alpha in a few days. It's still very early, though. You can read / delete / archive / reply to emails in your inbox, and that's all for the moment.

Drop me a mail if you want to try it out, or sign-up for the beta at http://betterinbox.com (The beta will be released later, in a few months I think)
Flexible Parking Pricing coming to SF
There's a (very popular) Firefox extension that already lets you do this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/
"doesn't involving". That'll teach me to comment on HN at 8 AM.
Got an error on IE9
"Browser does not support canvas"

IE9 supports HTML5 canvas. Would have been great to compare the performance & rendering.
The Story of Emily and Control
To minimise page size I pack the javascript for my html5 game - Last Man Standing: A Zombie Apocalypse - into a png and load it using canvas and eval.

It packs my 51KB minified source into an 18KB image file.

Works a charm :)
Your comment sounds like you don't know anything about Montessori education. The program of education you suggest has basically nothing in common with Montessori schooling, except perhaps for being different from traditional schooling.

Montessori's method is centered on structured, self-directed individual activities with materials prepared to focus children's attention on one or another particular skill considered important. Traditionally, it does not involve "doing things with you", "museums and crap", or just "doing things [one] finds interesting".
NYC cab drivers won't be so easy on Uber
You're welcome for that.
Fedora 15 is most likely to be the Gnome 3 showcase. Its release on May 24 is nicely timed to allow them enough time to integrate Gnome Shell. As a desktop distro it's second in popularity only to Ubuntu, which makes it the most popular distro to choose Gnome Shell as its default UI.

But all this shouldn't affect your hardware purchases. A System76 machine should run Fedora just as well as it does Ubuntu.
"As I write this the Android team is still hard at work to bring all the new Honeycomb features to phones. As soon as this work is completed, we’ll publish the code."

Does that mean the source to Honeycomb itself will be released, or just that they're essentially backporting Honeycomb features to the Android 2.x branch, and will open-source that when it's done? The way that's worded makes me wonder.
I think the verbosity complaint here isn't about the length of the name, it's about having to repeat the type and generic arguments.
April Fools Day Pranks
I'm not a big fan of TC either but they earned their position and users are sharing their stories. Help the community promote other points of views instead, but arguing against them just gives them more relevance.
My understanding is the primary difference is that data from Datasift is not for display (analysis only), which, if accurate, would only work for a small set of companies currently accessing the data.
I didn't think I'd signed up when using that form, since it doesn't appear to have any visual feedback. A "Confirmation email sent!" would be nice. :)

That said, I can't wait to see what you come up with!
... sign up for cryonics?
I think the dispute here isn't so much whether or not Montessori education has or doesn't have advantages, rather it's the confirmation bias inherent in finding famous people who had a Montessori education and then using them to hint that their success is primarily due to their education.

See for example statements from the article like "perhaps it’s just a coincidence that Montessori alumni lead two of the world’s most innovative companies...". To which I would say, yes, it almost certainly is coincidence. Look at the (non-Montessori educated) leaders of pretty much every other company in the world as counterexamples.

The description of Jeff Bezos's behaviour makes it sound like he was an exceptional example of children in that system (unless Montessori teachers routinely have to pick kids out of their chairs), so probably not a good example of typical results from that system.
Why would you think they don't need them?
This is the beauty of aggregation: when you add a lot more different types of users to the system, the load tends to be balanced out because not everybody needs the same resource at exactly the same time. As long as the distribution of different resource requirement is relatively even, the larger the system is, the stabler it becomes.

Statistically, adding multiple standard derivations yield a smaller value than their sum.
The most useful thing for me out of that list is "Shift + ?" shortcut. For too long I had to open another tab, open Google, and type in 'Gmail shortcuts'...
Me. Thank you! :)
I'm making an application for small businesses to select, edit and print their own gift certificates:

http://www.giftcertificatefactory.com

I'm spending an awful lot of time writing content as a SEO strategy. It does take time to climb up the ranks of Google but it's a worthwhile investment!
The best part of it? It doesn't cost millions of dollars to use! Only thousands!
I think fear of big players is sort of orthogonal to the thoroughly debunked "ideas are everything" notion. Even if you are the first mover in a given market, you might afraid that Google could release a competing product tomorrow and eat your lunch.
Great suggestion! I wholeheartedly agree with what you said, it is vastly superior to my second solution.
Wow - 5 things at the same time... makes me reevaluate my lethargy not to start working on a second project at the same time... How do you cope working on 5 different things? Any project that gets time priority?
Also, you will greatly anger your potential corporate customers by explicitly charging them 25x more for the same services. Instead, devise a pricing scheme that herds corporate customers into the high price tier.
The less I sit and ponder about the meaning of life and what I'm doing and what to do in the future, the happier I am.

Before I die, I don't want to contemplate what I want to do before I die. Not to say I'm not achievement-oriented, because I am, I just associate "before I die" type statements with similar "what if?" personalities - although obviously "what if?" is a concrete statement while "before I die" still leaves room for change, which can inspire hope - although it most often won't inspire action.
I thought we had banned polls asking if we should ban TechCrunch.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625313