skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Depending on how much you trust them, they could liberally delete comments, or knock them way down in their weighing. Of course, you run the risk of pissing people off.

Concurrently, you could use the votes (esp negative) of the users tracked and identified as described above as notifiers to the moderators. That way you leverage more volunteers, but with less power (and they wouldn't know they had it, either).
All true, obviously. That's why there's real power in rebalancing your portfolio on a regular basis. It forces you to push money into sectors that have headed down and pull money (take profits) from sectors that are up.
It's always good to see other side of the coin. Thanks for the clarifications.

I have always felt checkins can be used for various interesting services. viz a user checks-in a pub and he is suggested nearby pubs and offers, a tourist following a series of check-ins suggested by foursquare for exploring a place etc etc.

Badges are cool and all but people sticking just to earn badges is going to be temporary. Badges in Cityville, Farmville etc work well because they ride on top of gameplay and facebook - not much incentives in foursquare.
Opened a feature request ticket... tried to get into the Yammer Developer Network a week ago but it seems as if my application does not get approved...
Norway does that too:

http://skattelister.no/skatt/profil/liv-johanne-ullmann-3417...

Edit: Heh, obviously, this has done the rounds on HN while I was asleep.
I don't care that much about the GPS function since that is usually sent over 3G/4G (which in theory is harder to sniff).

But the apps that request access to your Contacts? I wanted to install an application recently (some recipe thing that had good UX) but it requested READ_CONTACTS. So I balked and didn't install it.

Why did a recipe app need access to my Contacts? To be fair, all of your iOS Contacts are wide-open to any SDK app (they never bothered to lock it down like GPS).

I think the real solution is something like LittleSnitch for Droid. It would have to be installed as a Root process though on a rooted phone.

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/Manifest.perm...
yeah most of the time the stuff will not be us giving away ipad 2's. Most of the stuff will be advertisers giving away stuff using triviatisements embedded on their website. So the credibility comes from them. Then after it is over, they will generally give out a coupon. Our theory is that their conversion rate will be higher than with normal coupons.
Unfortunately, I think the biggest problem is that there are a huge number of mediocre comments. The increase in meanness is just one of the more visible aspects of that. (Meanness is moral mediocrity.)

Although maybe I shouldn't say "unfortunately," because that problem may be easy to cure. E.g. it might work simply to add a karma cost of for commenting, an idea I'm seriously considering trying out.
Red Hat has put a lot of work into gcj, and was responsible for making Eclipse run on it. They've done a bunch of work on Iced Tea. They also have a bunch of Java applications they maintain/sell support for (JBoss is the big one).

If this is actually a company priority (and not a side project), it could be a Big Deal(TM).
Is the marketing industry specializing itself to death?
OK i don't know how this may help you when i was a 18 month old kid i was partly stroke by lightning and did not speak until i was 5 and English was not my really first language was speaking Yiddish at the same time when i could talk again at about 5 years of age. i got no special help for a long time if i needed to spell something i just did it so i could understand it, i didn't care if some else could read it. i remember writing person like he did PRES OND AND I'M ALMOST 70 NOW MAYBE HE WAS LIKE ME AND THESE ARE HIS NOTES THERE NOT CODE AT ALL, BUT HOW HE SEES THEM sorry about the upper case i still do it LOL i had to use spell check or you would laugh at me so i was trying to read it like if i was a bad speller and i used to make my own kind of short hand just a try I'm sure I'm off base

Gary
Has there ever been?
I remember you saying somewhere(or was it someone else) about high number of comments representative of argumentative topics whereas high-quality content having lesser comments - not much to argue about and people agreeing with article.

From that viewpoint, if the articles posted haven't changed much, not much have been lost. The perceived quality may be only representative of increase in number of users, and new users trying to earn karma or new users unfamiliar with guidelines.

So may be the high quality comments and articles are still there, but some low quality content/comment is skewing the perception.
It's going to attract lots of advanced iMovie users. It's going to attract users into buying Mac if FCP is 'the' standard editing software in video industry. For example my cousin is buying a Mac because kids wants GarageBand.
So is anything from Apple apart from iTunes running on Carbon anymore? I wonder how many more years Apple will continue supporting that framework before they finally drop it.
I guess not all of their writers agree. Their headlines tend to exaggerate too.

Number 1 in Top Eleven Weird Things About Business Insider: They have way too many lists.
he said and DID it:

What will Amazon look like in five years?
A place where you can buy anything and everything. And if that's your goal, you better have a tactic to accomplish it, a partnership strategy. For us, it's thousands of partners of all sizes and business models. That's what we're trying to do - within the context of being Earth's most customer-centric company.

-- Amazing...
I've found this to be the case too, I think telling students that recursion is difficult artificially limits their ability to comprehend it.
And if a sector dies completely, regularly rebalancing your portfolio will ensure that you waste the maximum amount of money for that sector.
A very approachable and enjoyable read. How close to "production quality" is the author's system?
To me, this raises the question, "How do I determine whether to be happy with what I'm getting paid?" This is where having open salaries would be beneficial - I could compare my salaries against others with the same skills and experience and determine whether I was being treated fairly or not.
This really bugs me. What defines mediocre to you? We're defining the problem in relatives. I mean, look at the exchange that just happened:

> Comments are getting worse.

>> What is worse?

> Comments are overwhelmingly mediocre.

So, I ask, what is mediocre?

Comments are the thoughts of human beings using your system, and there's no technological or psychological means to have any semblance of control over them. Their perceived quality is a direct reflection of the community you have. Any attempt to "fix" perceived quality is going to divide your community, and any disruption or improvement to the community is going to indirectly adjust perceived quality.

Just like none of us writes like Thomas Jefferson these days and a number of words have fallen out of favor, so has your community evolved and a new definition of "average comment" must be found. This is all a relative game, anyway; a comment that you call mediocre I might find to be a golden nugget of awesome, and why should my opinion matter any less?

As an aside, I wish I had a dollar for every suggested technological fix to the declining-comment problem. Based on how this thread is shaping up, I'd be doing better than my 401(k).
No. Cisco is new to the game and frankly, I don't trust them to stick to it. They're spreading themselves way too thin and today's Flip video news only seems to corroborate my belief. That and their solutions cost $TEXAS.
I always use Cmd-H to hide. The minimize/zoom has never been very useful for me.
This is going to be a fun event!

To be clear - I am helping organize it :) but still, it really is going to be fun. And I/O Ventures is letting us use their great space that is next to The Summit in the Mission.
Python's shelve module
How's Venture.io? I almost applied to them but decided that Y-Combinator would be better.
When I was writing Ansi Common Lisp I spent a while thinking about why students find recursion a difficult concept. I decided it was because they think of a function as a machine for doing something. E.g. the length function as a machine that finds the lengths of lists. If you think of a function instead as a definition-- e.g. as the definition of length-- then suddenly it's not difficult anymore.

At least, that was the transition I had made myself. My initial difficulty in understanding recursion was probably exacerbated by the fact that the professors themselves (at Cornell in the 1980s) had a mental model of computing that was very close to the machine, and thought the way to understand recursion was to visualize the state of the stack over time as a recursive function computed it result.
You're looking at approx 30% deducted at source for 50k in Quebec, I think. You get quite a lot for your tax dollars in Canada though.
What battle? The war was lost the moment DMCA became the law of the land.
When learning recursion, there aren't much practice problems people do in imperative languages. Most of the imperative languages don't have tail call optimization and the prevalent culture is to use iteration.

That said, there are some problems for which the iterative solution won't be straight forward viz. quicksort, mergesort, binary tree traversal etc etc. But the issue is when a student not very familiar with recursion stumbles upon these, he has a hard time understanding them.

I learned recursion and manual recursion removal in C. I already understood recursion when I read "The Little Schemer", but it still managed to change my perception. I highly recommend it, regardless of whether you are going to work in Scheme(most likely no) or not.
I don't think the example I've given is iterative. It generates a recursive process.

You're right on a different point though, this example is much more efficiently implemented iteratively. The point was to illustrate that writing recursive functions is not difficult.

I guess we don't see eye to eye on recursion being taught first. :p In my opinion, recursions analog to "the real world" is much more intuitively obvious than iteration.
What I found fascinating was the Mallory MITM 'testing' program.

https://bitbucket.org/IntrepidusGroup/mallory

http://intrepidusgroup.com/insight/2010/12/mallory-and-me-se...
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It might be the language's fault, but that doesn't make the least bit of difference. CSS is here to stay for the foreseeable future, and she's saying we have learn how to use the tools we're stuck with the best we can.
True.

But then wasn't it Twain who said, "In the future 80 percent of all quotations will be attributed to Mark Twain"?
I just don't see this as a viable business (big enough market or a market sustainable by charging a large enough margin). It'd probably be a fun project to take on at one of the Hack-Weekend type events.
LOGO, a programming language for teaching computing to young children, uses recursion as its fundamental control structure. My kids studied it successfully in a Philadelphia public school on C64s in the 1980s.
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Sounds like Googles strategy.
<curmudgeon>

Assignment using := and string concatenation using adjacency aren't particularly new.

</curmudgeon>

edit -- further looking through the presentations ...

They seem to have ditched the 'new' keyword, but not gone as far as having inferred typing which is a pity.

Counter c = Counter();

would be better as

c = Counter();

(edit: ignore this, the local keyword apparently triggers type inference).

:= and = are used to distinguish between assignment to mutable and immutable variables. Is this necessary?

Clever use of syntactic sugar gives it a Lua-like flavour for programmatic generation of markup / UIs.

Use of & and | symbols gives a clever way to assemble interfaces.

When an object "satisfies" (ie "implements") interfaces, it can combine them either as intersections (&) or unions (|) of multiple interfaces.

A few nice features imported from functional programming land include algebraic types and type-safe switches.

A lot of attention paid to the covariance/contravariance tarpit.
If I were you, I'll take up a job, get a Mac, learn some Objective C and churn out an iOS app. Lowest investment (both money and time) required to make some serious money. Plus no risk as there's a job already.
"pros' endowments on these are four or five standard deviations from the population norm. They were likely selected for those endowments prior to most of their practice."

In the Outliers book, Gladwell also talks about the topic of how kids are selected for in sports. He uses the example of hockey. Essentially, the kids start out young and there isn't much difference in their ability in the beginning. But the 'chosen' kids get more attention, instruction and practice. So over the years they become "four or five standard deviations from the population norm", to use your phrase, but they don't start out that way.

In the hockey example, it comes down to size. A typical 6 and half year old is bigger, and that much more developed that a 6 year old, and they are slightly better players because of it. Essentially, this small advantage gets exaggerated.

So, according to Gladwell, people all start out in a very similar place, and it's the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice and work that makes the difference.

I don't know if this guy will make the PGA (there aren’t too many spots), but I am confident he'll be several standard deviations better than the population norm.
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As of 2011-04-13, 18000 pounds sterling is 29421 US dollars. Despite what you say about "getting your foot in the door", I would hesitate before taking a job that paid so poorly. For the record, my internship paid $25 per hour. That translates to $42000 per year [1]. I'm not an exceptional programmer, and my grades in school weren't that stellar either. I would strongly encourage you to negotiate before selling your services for so low a price.

1. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2425+per+hour+
Just curious - is the office space at the LSVP Sandhill offices?
Its not obvious to me this is a price based decision for Dropbox (although the benefit there is obvious).

Arguably the best feature of Dropbox for me is binary diffs. If you encrypt the Dropbox this goes out the window, or at least becomes significantly harder to pull off. Am I wrong?
I feel really stupid about a mistake I made recently while soldering, and this is extremely obvious: don't get cocky about where you're soldering.

I've been soldering for years, and just once I thought "you know, I'll just solder right here on the carpet. I'll be careful not to knock the iron over," instead of moving to my work desk. I melted a hole in the carpet.
TFA suggests "local c = Counter()" is what you are looking for.
Sugar Inc Raises Another $15 Million To Grow Its Women-Focused Media Empire
One of the projects in my CS program using recursion was a 6-degrees of Kevin Bacon game. It was neat and real-world practical IMO.
I just registered salaryshare.me. Let me see if I can get something going tonight.
Slashdot went down this road as you may well know. Moderators, then meta-moderators. ("Was this a fair moderation?") based on karma.

I have a low 5-digit UID on slashdot, and registered well after I started reading, so I was sort of in the second wave there. The discourse quality fell off and leveled out, but my experience is that low digit UIDs generally contribute at their historic high quality levels.

In my opinion, a low UID filter on slashdot would be far more effective than the mod/meta-mod/complain about mods and meta-mods response this system created.

I don't know how this might translate to HN; "Filter by age of account?" What if by default you only showed comments and posts from accounts older than two years? (This would disqualify me, by the way, so maybe one year..) :)

People could select to see comments from younger accounts if they liked, or perhaps very well seasoned accounts (two years on the site) could promote up comments to general visibility. This would be patently unfair, in that new awesome commenters would not get to contribute to the discourse immediately, but it would almost certainly immediately increase the quality of discourse.

Slashdot's system has some echos of this, but they made it far, far too easy to become a moderator as they wanted to spread the work out. They also I think created a mental expectation with the '-1' score which created a trolling subculture, that is, reading slashdot at -1 is a cesspit, and so nobody does it, hence people use it as a cesspit, hence.. What I'm suggesting is making it the strong default to do the equivalent of reading slashdot at say 4 and higher, but using age of account as the heuristic.

This would be a reasonably easy chrome extension, but obviously easier to do on your side. If you demo this yourself, I'd be curious to hear if you think the quality is improved.

In real life, we might call this an apprentice system, that is, you have to sit in the back, and only occasionally get your answers while you prove you wish to belong and that you deserve to belong. It's a known effective way of maintaining quality of members in a desirable group, from religious to musical to .. I imagine secret societies?
Apple Announces Final Cut Pro X At NAB
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It's very reasonable to recognize quality.

I can distinctly remember several times the comments on an article were written by absolute experts in the material, full of insight and interesting content.

I could believe comments like those have become rarer.
Hopefully this also represents good news for the Mac Pro hardware and the Mac OS: If they're investing in from-scratch rewrites of apps targeting the above, they must see at least 5-10 years left in those products.

Those of us who like powerful Macs running powerful operating system were starting to think that those things were going away in favor of iThings running iOperating systems.
Ceylon looks a lot (if not identical) to Scala. I was trying hard to find a differentiation, but couldn't.
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The convincing authority is the plaintiff's law firm, which has tasked their digital forensics team with analyzing the documents and concluded that it is authentic and has taken the case on. It's not just BusinessWeek and Reuters.
This. It seems that most often the top comment is a direct rebuttal to whatever the original post was. While there is nothing wrong with this, and it's actually healthy to have opposing points of view, it seems like the community as a whole has gotten into a rut of criticizing everything. There are other ways to have constructive discussions than always pointing out what's wrong.
If there's no shortage of moderators, then have them moderate according to HN's missions and objectives like those in a startup does. This includes penalising comments that go against HN. If you're worried about the possible risks and outrage, then the alternative is to die slowly.

Here's a community that has really strict moderation: http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/wp_modfaq

The user is able to see reason for being censored and can complain, etc.
Well, we'd need to know when that was. $45k in 1980 would be pretty awesome.
Example of a comment I find mediocre: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2433896

It doesn't really add anything to the discussion. Snarky comments really don't belong here on HN and I've noticed a trend of them getting far more up votes than they used to.
That's your definition of quality, and I'm glad you shared it, but disheartened that you consider it the one true quality.

Reading your second sentence strictly, we can infer that to you, quality means (a) expert-level familiarity with a linked article, (b) insightful -- difficult to generalize because insight is different for different people, or (c) full of interesting content.

Of the three of those points, only one of them isn't dependent on the perspective, knowledge level, or interests of the reader. What is insightful to me might be common knowledge to you. What is insightful to you might be tediously stupid to me. What is interesting to you might be boring to me. On, and on, and on.
I can't help but feel like the recent flurry of "HN is declining" is saying to anyone who isn't part of the "old" crown that they are directly responsible for making HN a worse site. I know I feel like since I've created an account, its been all doom and gloom. I don't comment unless I feel that what I have to say would add something to the discussion, but regardless of karma it seems like the sentiment is that new users are dragging the site down.

I might be the only one who feels this way, but I doubt it. New users aren't all bad, and I can't imagine that the purposed decline is all our fault, either. However, the sentiment might be helping fuel the rate at which "bad" users join. Someone who has surfed for awhile and is thinking about creating an account is going to feel turned off for many of the same reasons why you don't jump on a sinking ship[0], but the trolls, etc. won't care either way. Just a thought.

[0] - I'm not implying that HN is in anyway a sinking ship, I derive a great value from it.
not yet, but I did find this http://www.photographybay.com/2011/04/12/final-cut-pro-user-...
explore = chasing yelp

specials 2.0 = chasing groupon

Foursquare's vision appears to be looking backward. Dennis Crowley's been thinking about this space for 10 years?
Some are more ambitious.
Ah, but neither does yours!

Why does the mediocrity apply to the comment you're replying to, but not your own? Your comment is dripping with snark and someone called you on it (thankfully). I actually think your comment is shittier than the one you're replying to, because you put yourself on a pedestal of telling the rest of us what to do.

Was that comment at the top of the discussion before you snarked it to oblivion? Probably not. It was most likely already in the deep hell of very light gray, and your content-free comment just made it worse. Calling the kettle black, in my opinion.
Why, though, do they think of a function as a machine for doing something?

Because we tell them so.

Before starting any standard CS curriculum (ignoring, for a moment, self-taught hackers), the only place a student should have heard about "functions" is in math class---where they are definitions. They get to intro Java and we tell them "no, no, that's not a function, this is a function, look, it's got variables and for loops and increments and a bunch of returns all through it, this is the real stuff, remember it!" We un-teach them about recursion, and later, when we try to re-teach it to them, we have to undo all of our previous work.

In the past, there was considerable merit to un-learning the inefficient definition-style functions and learning to think closer to the machine. Today, I think there's a lot more to be gained by sticking with the math-style function-as-a-definition, because we have efficient abstractions to deal with it, but of course, this is one of the friendliest forums for that sort of philosophy.

FWIW, I propose that all of academia make a distinction between pure, recursive, definition-style "functions", and imperative, stateful "methods". Probably won't catch on :-/
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Looking forward to seeing what comes out of this.