skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The vendor indicates "fixed" by posting the decrypted exploit data against their entry in Zed's database.

If the bug was benign in the first place, they can post the decrypted exploit without worrying about it or doing anything.
Complete the fledgling environment of selectivity in one fell swoop and explicitly say, in the guidelines, that low-karma users are no longer allowed to participate. Remove the ability to vote, comment, and perhaps read from all users below 5,000 karma. These meta posts, the how to vote posts, the discussion here and in other threads, the lamenting about comment quality in general: all of this aggravation is dancing around the central issue, which is low-karma users turning Hacker News into something that the high-karma users do not want. Period.

Just look at this thread. One person has eight separate top-level comments on this item, and is winning popular support. A large number of them have almost the exact same number of upvotes. You might as well rename HN to Shaped in the Old Guard's Image and wall it off. Just get it overwith so people will stop:

- Writing tired farewell pieces, and calling it a good thing because they're respected and high-karma

- Then turning around and churning out blog content that is front-paged daily on the community just departed from

- Complaining about HN's slow decline towards Redditdom

- Downvoting comments because they disagree with them

I know this sounds like snark, but it's totally honest. You have a big choice to make here: either you foster and encourage new users to participate, or you wall it off and keep HN in the bubble of functionality and community that the old guard reminisces about.

As a relatively new contributor, I've never felt more unwelcome on a site than I have here at times. It's not even about me. It's certainly not about disrespect to those high-karma users who believe in this community the most. It's about the community. If you want your community a certain way, then lock it to the people who made it that way. I also intentionally set the theoretical karma limit above my karma, because I'd love an excuse to not come back.

Aside: All of this meta crap recently is setting up for HN to be disrupted by a new community. I also find it telling that in the time it took me to submit my comment and upvote the parent post -- say, ten seconds -- I was already at zero.
In point I don't think it's a decline, just more of a noise issue. Many of the articles are interesting but I am noticing more submissions that have only a abstract connection to qualify for "Hacker" news.

I don't have any well though out answers to the question. I do think the more questions out there that could help solve this problem.

I'm thinking the commenting is more of a symptom than the underlying issue(s).......
Not just a play, but a fairly bad play.

Another objection: it's 1976. Would these folks have even known how to type? Governor Reagan wouldn't be complaining about the difficulty of typing, he'd have one of his secretaries come in and type while he dictates.

Also also, I just don't see Ronald Reagan agreeing to take time out to chat with Edward Said and Hanoi Jane at all.

Also also also, Reagan would be funnier.
> When the article is off the front page, the discussion quickly dies off with it. There needs to be a "hot discussions" tab that allows people to continue the conversations. This encourages people to get to know each other and participate in a coherent discussion that spans beyond 24 hours.

The decay constant should also be decreased, so that interesting submissions stay longer on the homepage. I usually don't comment on old submissions, because it feels like no one reads or votes on them.

I am willing to sacrifice the number of good articles on the homepage each day for the quality of comments on each article.

(edit: added last paragraph)
What's interesting is that we all KNOW what the answer to the problem is, but no one is going to go out on a limb and say it. So let me do so - HN needs a paid, full time, editor who will go through the submissions not to approve of what he/she likes (though you could go with a council of three if you're really worried about that), but to make sure they are real links to real articles - and that have the time to do the research to insure that the article is what it claims it is about, and hasn't been posted 20 times in the last week under slightly different names.

Isn't this the role of Slashdot's editors? Or do they choose the stories as well? Either way, Slashdot has almost no interesting stories these days.
The timing of this post is amazing.

I'm by no means a prolific commenter on HN. If I have something of value to add I'll try to ask; otherwise I usually abstain (but I'm only human, made a few dumb comments)

I just saw another article, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404157

and the two comments on it were either bashing IQ, or talking about penis size.

I feel like maybe the reddit/4chan community has started reading HN?

I felt like posting a comment on that thread asking, nay begging, for someone to post something interesting as a followup to the kids question in the video, instead we have.. I just don't know.

And after saying that, I have no useful suggestion. Any feedback system that is implemented can still/will be gamed.
Any feedback will be greatly appreciated. We are talking as much information possible for the BetaOne!
Wow, happy to see this posted here again. Just found out that the book is finally available on Amazon (yay!) http://www.amazon.com/Clever-Algorithms-Nature-Inspired-Prog...

Happy to answer any questions about the book/content.
It might be that the people that are reading the "new" stories and thus effectively making the decision which stories get at least a brief chance to see a wider audience, are not actually interested in the same things that the core is interested in.

This means that the community-at-large is effectively given the opportunity to vote on a sub-optimal selection of the submitted stories.

This can perhaps be fixed by briefly flashing all new stories towards the bottom of the top news page, to give them a brief chance at wider exposure. One way to do this would be to make a queue, and put every new story on the bottom of the front page for 5 minutes barring a certain number of down-votes for moderation.

This might really effect which stories actually end up on the top news page (though perhaps only for stories submitted during peak times).
You can’t call ‘time out’ in Silicon Valley
Direct: http://www.turingfilm.com/
> This is true, but it doesn't necessarily mean that I'm incorrect in my assessment.

Right, but as the subject of a membership ritual I have to discount your assertion.

Sometimes membership rituals do increase value. But they increase perceived value regardless of what follows.
I've tested both Rackspace Cloud Servers and Amazon EC2, and am currently using Rackspace Cloud Servers in production for my site. There are a number of factors that influenced this decision:
- Support is definitely a factor. I've found the support reps at Rackspace to be really helpful, and in cases, depending who you speak to there, they sometimes go above the call of duty. I had a rep help me setup configure haproxy for load balancing while on their standard support (not managed).
- I've found setup to be simpler. I feel this is an entirely subjective area, but in setting up a new server, I typically just want a clean Ubuntu box. Having community made instances are nice, but not something I need or use, so selecting an AMI just seems to make it more confusing.

Overall, I'd say it's very much based on what you're doing. My site is quite simple, so the additional services Amazon offers just complicate the setup, and Rackspace wins in ease of use. If you're startup requires high amounts of memory, cpu or disk space, then Amazon's the winner. I've found scaling Rackspace also to be a lot simpler. When my site's been featured on Mashable, Fast Company, GigaOm, etc., in a couple clicks (even from my iPhone), I can scale to a bigger box.
Previously (664 days ago!):
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=647706
> The problem is only partially too many bad comments, it's also too few good comments. Your proposal is targeted at lowering the amount of bad comments, but it might do so at the expense of the good ones.

Very interesting point about not discouraging high value contributions: you don't want to create a situation where users have no desire (or are afraid to) comment.

> Most of the users that have a high karma count have so because they always have something insightful to say (mechanical_fish (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mechanical_fish) is a good example), and their incentive for posting interesting stuff is marginalized by this. Almost all people, whethere they'll admit it or not, are incentivized by other peoples approval, eg. karma, and downplaying their contributions will make them more prone to not submitting great comments.

I think we can all agree that users with high karma generally have it for a reason. However, you can't always deduce that if user A has higher karma than user B, than user A has higher karma because his contributions are always more insightful than user B's. It's not a total order.

The marginal incentive ("get more karma by writing a comment that gather N+1 up votes") is not aligned with the over all goal of the sight (produce consistently insightful content).
Clojure is almost as big as Common Lisp
Agreed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQh56geU0X8
It would be a big change, but enforcing real identities could help. Very few top commenters on HN are anonymous, and people are much more likely to be rude or intellectually lazy when no one knows its them. Given HN's readership there is a big incentive for most users to appear smart and nice through their HN activity - if potential co-founders, investors and clients could dig up my mean/dumb comment (or my upvote of one), I would be less impulsive in commenting and upvoting.
It's not a "skin" or theme like the old HTC Sense was on old Windows Mobile. On Android, everything is user replaceable, including the home screen, which is just another app. There is even a tutorial on the official Android site on how to make a homescreen app.

Go for Android is a homescreen app.
I agree that the waiter's risk is much lower. It was only the evidence that it is sometimes rational to pay for the right to work which I sought from the example.
More than that, it may be that the families of the affluent implicitly pay for their kids' internships.
I had issues like that after upgrading to 4. I exported my bookmarks and created a clean profile, which seemed to fix the issue.
Minority Report is tremendously well-remembered as an interface concept and almost forgotten as a Spielberg movie. The Wikipedia article's longest section is "Technology."

By now, it's practically a 145-minute tech concept video with a plot starring Tom Cruise.
I use the tags everytime because I feel the freedom to mark bulleted lists with checkboxes.

What I tried to say with integration is that you can read from external sources and put the information in OneNote automatically, you need to build some add-on or connect from a scripting language to do that.
That's fairly observant. Considering another post in this thread talked about joke posts. sigh And I was serious.
That's fair, but I felt that bushi.do would have been equally understood with an appropriate title or comment explaining the website. In fact, if the same article had been written on a different blog, I doubt an indirect link would have been submitted.
> Minimum comment length of ~50 words.

This would backfire because many useful comments aren't that long, and therefore people will be forced to pad them, this decreasing the s/n ratio.

For example, my paragraph above has 24 words.
In my experience, it is usually possible to get through periods of rapid growth without pre-existing support or knowledge. Sometimes you learn fast enough to manage on your own; sometimes you have to bring in experts after-the-fact, and pay through the nose. But there's no rule that says you need to ask for help now. If you want to "muddle through", you will probably manage.

Paradoxically, technology companies are rarely killed by a lack of technical know-how.

That said, there's also no shame in having support in place. If you already know that high scalability is not your core competency, and if you aren't intensely interested in making it be, having pre-existing support can be very helpful. I don't know how good Rackspace support is in particular, but I've often had very helpful conversations and planning sessions with support (mostly ISVs). Not to mention, it may be more cost-effective to consult them now than try to put out the fire later.
Windows DPI scaling used to not work very well. Maybe it has improved. For example, I remember Windows XP applications with text running off the edges of windows and buttons. Perhaps Windows DPI scaling is a reasonable option now.
If comments cost karma, some users will just submit more stories to try to earn more karma so they can keep commenting. That could decrease the overall quality of articles. One option would be to stop awarding karma for stories so that they only way to earn karma is through good comments. That would conflict with comments costing karma though because you'd never be able to earn the initial amount.
I've actually been reading this book over the past few months. I just stumbled across it while looking for info on neural networks in Ruby. The book takes a very clinical approach, but the code samples are surprisingly accessible.

I haven't bought the book yet (I read it on my iPad), but I will eventually buy it if I can't find a decent digital download. For some reason I'm so much more inclined to buy books offered for free than not.
Aren't you engaging in the genetic fallacy here though? Pointing out a possible origin of my belief does not mean that you have disproved the belief.
Just checked, it's the same Bob Greene who wrote a couple of great books on Michael Jordan.
You know, I can't help but think that you might have thought my adult post was supposed to be a joke. Considering the wording, I could understand how you might feel that way at first glance, but it was a knee jerk reaction. So maybe you should try to take things more seriously.
Wayne Gretzky's risk for missing a shot was ... nothing. It cost him nothing to miss. So of course it was rational to take every possible shot.

Curmudgeons have memories of shots taken that had high, probably still extant, negative side-effects. That's why they're cautious.
It brings a lot of traffic to my startup when a domain is listed as my company on Facebook also it allows me to read comments more clearly, there's no trash but there's a lot more pressure.

I posted a comment on the blackberry playbook review and someone that worked for RIM replied with a load of marketing spin I wasn't bothered to reply too. You also get notifications which makes me reply more often also that needs a lot of tweaking.
The problem with this approach is that then the users will instead choose to save up their points to submit their OWN stories, instead of spending them upvoting (and downvoting) threads and comments which help improve the content curation on HN (and is one of our main goals here).

This approach may work if there is additional points given by the system to the upvoter (or downvoter) if there is significant number of other users doing the same thing as that upvoter (or downvoter) too, which means his/her action is indeed valid and objective.

Users would then be more willing to vote, with the hope that other users will do the same thing as him/her too, and reap more points than what he/she spent for upvoting/downvoting. This enforces more thinking and evaluation of comments or stories before even upvoting or downvoting them.
the post got 136 facebook likes so far...
IBM Researchers Develop Drug to Target MRSA
That's a brilliant solution to the problem for cars that aren't Teslas, which has something like 1800 batteries lining its cabin floor. I don't think they'd be easily swapped.

For cars that don't implement batteries this way, I'm wondering how they allow for non-floor-mounted installations preventing the batteries from destroying their handling.

Further, how are the filling stations expected to deal with the variety of non-standard battery types on the market?
I think it was the assumption that it was a joke (as another commenter pointed out) based on what was written. Nothing about the post was NSFW, including the link. In fact, if anything in the post was NSFW, then the problem lies with the place of work, not me.
The only solid position against patents is the principled one. It would be a shame if biotech were hobbled for decades to come.

For those interested, a must-read resource: http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.h...
...and you're free to redistribute it!
4 Tips To Appear More Natural on Camera
Am I the only one who see's this as blatant link bait?

I only read part 2 but he's either not doing this seriously or he's overconfident in his thinking abilities.
| Before 1982, one can only do one thing at a time on any computer.

This might be true from a GUI perspective, but people have been able to do multiple things on computers since the late 1950's.

In fact, the alleged inventor of time sharing systems, John McCarthy, was already reminiscing about the history of time sharing just a year after the Blit Terminal was invented:

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/timesharing/times...
Stop trying to rely on the hive to vote good stories to the top. Either the democratic approach doesn't work or HN is getting gamed - either way the site is now effectively broken.

A decision has to be made from the top about what HN is all about. If it's startups and business then that's the only type of story allowed. Everything else gets dumped. I don't need another Reddit.

Mods would need strict guidelines about what qualifies and everything even slightly outside of these guidelines gets turfed.

oh and get rid of karma. It's bs. Encourages hivemind like nothing else.
reflect on the fact that what you are looking at is the very best product that a $75 billion software company, one famous for allegedly only hiring A-list talent, was able to build.

Except that it isn't the "very best product ... FB was able to build." It is just something useful that a team at FB built -- something that provides some value for websites and users, and that will continue to be evolved and improved in the future.

FB Comments may or may not be an amazing product, but obviously it is good enough for TC, so that says something.
The secret history of Super Mario Bros. 2
> Remove the ability to vote, comment, and perhaps read from all users below 5,000 karma.

This is hardly a good example to all the aspiring startup folks on how to treat your users.

Perhaps the old guard/high karma users keep posting here in part because they know they have a large audience. What makes you think they would stick around if the site were walled off?

Edit: Removed the accusation of trolling, apologies for that.
and?
Nowhere is the opposite stated or implied.
He does come across as smug, but as far as I can see, the clojure version is indeed both smaller and correct compared to the longer and buggy scala version.

What do you think he's missing?
People like things you don't. What else is new?
"... fixing the decreasing quality of comment threads on HN ... Anyone have any suggestions? We're on mostly uncharted territory here. ..."

In any group of people where the cost of joining is minimal and the freedom reins are loose, you will see behavioural changes mutate in ways resembling Golding's "Lord of the Flies". The big problem with HN is the founder assumption that we (users) will be a) civil b) willing, positive contributors and c) thoughtful. Maintaining this requires some means of natural selection. At first it was probably a combination of being curious, an early adopter and nerd-like. Some (quick & possibly stupid) ideas:

- intellectual paywall: add a penalty of a kind that selects readers/contributors

- classifier: run a classifier that categorises users by type and apply rules (behaviour modifier)

- change focus of HN to News with sub hacker focus (radical focus change)

- add a real minimal paywall sending $ to something like EFF or other hacker friendly charity (penalise by currency - bad)

- stop HN altogether (deny)

- wipe the slate clean & build a new HN like community but with http://perlmonk.org like progression of privs by tasks (enforced discipline) at start of user creation.
> I hope you can find a way to reduce the mean-spiritedness fluff, and make HN more pleasant again.

I think this last sentence is very telling. Low quality is only part of the problem. What really makes people want to disengage is having their feelings hurt.
Facebook Comments removes honesty and replaces it with PC Cheerleading. Sounds perfect for the modern TC as it moves from startup coverage to covering companies founded before computers had mice. Most real insights are unpopular, if they were popular it'd be common knowledge.

This will stop trolls for a few minutes, you can buy a Facebook account with 100 friends for a buck or two if you really want to troll. On the long term this is likely to succeed to the same degree that Kuro5hin charging $5 for an account had.
Well the US Treasury sells T-bills every quarter, folks who have T-bills and want to convert them into cash sell them pretty much at any time.

A treasury bill has a 'face value', like $10,000 which is what the bill will be worth, and a maturity date which is when it will be worth that. If you buy a T-bill you buy it at an 'auction' [1] in which you (typically) pay less than the face value and you calculate what it would be worth when it matures, which gives you the return. If you hold it until it matures your return is 'guaranteed'.

Bonds can be re-sold, and they are, so you can hold a bond for a while and as interest rates change the 'value' of your bond changes because it has a fixed maturity value and maturity date. So if you are building a treasury bond 'ladder' you take your money, divide it up into 'n' equal parts, and buy bonds that are about to mature 'momentarily' (like this quarter), in 2 quarters, in 3 quarters, in a year, Etc until with the last little bit you buy bonds that are brand new and mature in 10, 20, or 30 years (depending on your style). Now every quarter you have mature bonds to turn in for cash, which you then use to buy the same face value of bonds that mature in 10, 20, or 30 years. You will have money left over and that is your 'income' every quarter. The face value of all your bonds is 'fixed' and your income stream comes from turning over mature bonds into newly issued ones.

This is exactly what a 'bond fund' does, it charges you to do all the paperwork, it might use a mix of bonds to get a better rate of return. But if its just you making a fund for yourself, pretty much any competent financial agent can set it up for you. And while it is very safe (because it is very low risk) it won't pay you as much as you might want. On the plus side with "Treasury Inflation Protected Securities" (TIPS) you won't lose money due to inflation either, with the caveat that the same guys who are paying you interest are the arbiter of what is and what isn't 'inflation' and as many have pointed out this is sort of a conflict of interest.

If you have $5M and give it to a decent manager (I know I know how do you find 'decent'?) and tell them "I want an upper middle class tax free income off this with no risk to the principal." they should be able to oblige you.

(disclaimer, I'm not a financial analyst! seriously if you had that kind of capital it really really helps to have someone who does this all day to help you manage it, happy to recommend mine if you contact me off list.)

[1] http://www.treasurydirect.gov/instit/auctfund/work/work.htm
Earth as a nuclear furnace (geothermal heat is mostly from radioactive decay)