skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How about separating "quality" and "agreement" into separate scores?

While it complicates the interface, it would be much more useful for both authors and readers. It naturally leads to measuring controversy - the most interesting comments would be those with high quality and mixed agreement. Having a sense of HN's opinion would direct posts towards areas of maximum contribution. It would also re-direct some of the pile-on upvoting from low quality but obvious/funny/mean/etc. comments, so they could drop down the page despite having some appeal.

Some example cases:
a) I may agree with the snarky comment that calls out someone's obvious mistake, but I can simultaneously downvote for snark.
b) I may disagree with someone's analysis of the iOS vs Android market battle, but I can now register my disagreement while acknowledging that the poster made a good point.
c) I made a comment that came off as means-pirited, though that wasn't my intent. The quality downvotes are an unambiguous message, which I can't just write off with "I guess HN disagrees."
I love to learn using the Socratic method.
One of my favorite books is: "The Little Schemer" which is great and twists my mind in ways that I didn't think where possible.

Anyway do you know of other books, on any topic, that use the socratic method?
Yes, that is all there is to it.

Whether or not it's vendored will depend upon your method of gem install. If you'd rather not have it at all, simply comment out the `gem 'coffee-script'` line before running `bundle install`.
The planar mode graphics had been a benefit in the more memory restricted days before; it was starting to become a problem but still, at that point Amigas tended to play the games of the day better than PCs costing 3x as much until Doom pushed 3D to the forefront. There were enough 3D games on Amigas, but Doom was a level beyond them for a while. Still, I did enjoy Acid Software's Gloom which wasn't that far behind.

As a hardware platform, it was more closely tied to the individual chips but that was rapidly fading, with OS abstraction APIs for sound and graphics coming in around then.

As a software platform, while it lacked MMU-dependent features, in other ways it had major benefits. Small, fast, pretty tidy, modular, customisable. Quite frankly I'd still like something to replace the Amiga's Datatypes concept, 20 years later.

A sad loss to computing. To this day I'm baffled how Commodore managed to lose the not-PC slot to Apple in spite of having cheaper harder with more features and a vastly more capable operating system. I've said before here; if Commodore had done their job properly, we'd be saying Steve Who?
I learned how to count in binary using my fingers as digits probably about third grade. The pinkie is the 1. At that age, I thought it was pretty cool that I could count to 31 on one hand, and it stuck with me to this day. I'm sure I'll teach my son the same.
Deferred entry to University may be a good option. A (little known) benefit of deferred university education in the UK is that as an 'independent student' (or mature student) you may qualify for full payment of your student fees:
http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/EducationAndLearning/UniversityA...

I enrolled as an 'independent student' a few years ago (Male, 25 at the time, British citizen, no dependents, no significant savings) and, with part time jobs and moving back to live with my parents, graduated with very little student debt after 3 years.

It's worth considering, of course, that the pace of cuts in the UK may change this between now and when you're 25 (or already has). Just that you know it is an option.
Canadians would rather give up newspapers than the internet
How to Enhance your Iphone4 for Filming
Suppose you can rent a room for £250 per mo, eat and dress and buy utilities for the same and spend say £50 per mo of course on uni materials (books, tech, disposables). That's about £6450 pa. Add on fees of £7500.

Three year course under this regimen is c. £40k or $65k.

At my college (ie Uni) I paid 320 per mo for a room (quite a few years ago). Fees could be £9000 pa. At that rate the figures work out to c. $80k USD for a 3 year course.

I don't think that the $80k is the worst case scenario.
"Is a rose by any other name still not a rose?"

I write HAML, the plugin generates HTML.

I write Coffeescript, the plugin generates Javascript.

Surely you can see how these two are similar. Yes, there are more precise definitions for each, but pragmatically, they play a similar role.
My 3 year old site depends on recurring billing so this is something I've researched pretty well. If you have many non-US customers, as I do, the short story is that PayPal is really your only option. All alternatives depend on credit cards, which are not nearly as common outside the US.

I am aware of the horror stories around PayPal but I haven't had any serious problems in the last few years and I do hundreds of (recurring) transactions per day with them.

That said there is a pretty long list of annoying bugs in PayPal's recurring billing solution and most of the bugs have been in there for years. The technical bugs you can work around, but the "usability" bugs are quite annoying:

* If a user changes his credit card it will cancel all his subscriptions, unless he follows a specific set of steps that he won't find out about until it's too late

* If a user want to change a subscription and uses a different account to log into PayPal than the one he signed up with he gets the unhelpful error message that his "subscription has expired"

* If a user has two or more subscriptions and tries to change one PayPal will present him with a list of which one to change. This is a list of cryptic numbers. If he picks the wrong one it is near impossible to correct without canceling and resubscribing

* There is no way to pro-rate a subscription: if someone makes an annual payment for bronze tier and a day later decides to switch to silver tier PayPal will not charge the new price until a year from now.

I could go one. There are also internationalizations issues but I guess those only apply when you are outside the US like I am. (E.g. If you are outside the US then all the amounts in messages to your customers get formatted with a comma as a decimal separator, even if your customers are in US and you have your language set to US English). I've filed a bunch of bug reports over the years but I've never gotten a bug actually fixed.
Other stuff:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avida

http://adam.ierymenko.name/nanopond.shtml
Yep, we plan to do that.
Previous discussion here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1545178)
I would never work with co-founders who only like to live on cardboard pizza and redbull ;)

Same. I don't buy into the startup "lifestyle" of most B2C web companies. I'm pretty sure, in the US, it's a relic of the dotcom era that needs to die.
Hmm, I wonder about the accuracy of this, specifically about CD32s not being imported.

I worked, at that time, for the largest Amiga dealer in the US, and we built a couple hundred multimedia display kiosks using CD32s and Paravision SX-1s. We had no trouble getting them (well, other then the usual Commodore supply issues of the time).

Oh, wow, found an old email about this:

http://www.howtomakeanimations.info/cd32sx1mm300-problems

freaky.
I'm not in a startup anymore. The company is 25+ years old. I can tell you the company exists today because the original founders had an even split. Had they not, the President (a founder) would have trashed (caused to disintegrate, raided the accounts, etc) the company before many years had gone by. There were many situations where our leader knew: make a selfish move and you will be dealt with. Yeah, he could have fired some of us, but we could have had him removed as President and gotten our jobs back.

Some years ago, we ended up ousting him because of a very selfish and unethical deal he made, and some other issues.

If you can, make it an even split.
Erm... I see XOR for blinking cursors is obvious and should never be patented, but to blame only that for Amiga's demise is... a bit of an exaggeration. Management deserves most - in fact, almost all - of the credit for driving Commodore into the ground.

It's such a shame. Commodore made great computers.

The Amiga had sort of an identity problem. It was born a videogame console and NTSC timing was pervasive throughout the system and that made the design more complex as the machines evolved. They should have gotten rid of that as soon as they launched their second-generation machines.
I thought I would hate not seeing points on comments, but I find it's been very refreshing. It's much rarer that I find myself annoyed at the number of people who have upvoted something stupid or ignored something insightful. I still see the points on my own comments, which is the important part.

My vote: definitely continue hiding the points. It takes focus away from the content.
And all this time, I thought the language hierarchy, and it's correspondence with math/logic categories, was the real theory. UG is kind of an irrelevant side point, sort of an argument between "strong" vs "weak".

Type 0 - Recursivey enumerable.
Type 1 - Context-sensitive.
Type 2 - Context-free.
Type 3 - Regular.

As all languages fall into one of those 4 categories, and no other (so far), that seems to me to be THE definition of "following the rules" to an extreme.

Once you've identified which category a language is in, the word order and semantics are pretty damned irrelevant, as any experience computer programmer can attest (Java vs C++, Python vs Ruby, etc).
I loved the C64 and the Amiga. They were my first and second computer. But it's painfully clear in retrospect that Commodore never stood a chance. Jack Tramiel ran the show like a cigar-puffing industrialist straight out of a Dickens novel. There was none of Gates's vision of computing or Jobs's sense of quality from the top of the company. The Amiga line was developed almost entirely outside Commodore and then bought up and brought in house.
Side-note: Many users vote, or withhold votes, based on some sense of what the comment "should have scored." Awarding karma only for quality votes allows the reader to register assent/dissent without running up the score. There's a frequent problem where the first comment builds momentum just by being first; this change would at least partially address that problem.
The tax-payer pay you to do those two years don't they?

Personally I'd stick at school to do A-levels unless you were going in to something which is guaranteeing to make you a living and progress your career.

Uni, different question.
This isn't an article about the US using budgeting software. It's swipe at war/military spending. It would have been nice to see an unbiased and full feature article on this.
Why would you pay for the 2nd month?

Spotify isn't a radio service, it does have a (fairly iffy) recommendation service, but it's a fundamentally a "I want to hear this track or album by this artist, there it is, click play" service.
All i see is that most of the top selling apps are already on Amazon Store :/
Alternative Conclusion: Humans are very good at spotting patterns and making generalisations.

I can identify that certain plants are trees, or certain animals are dogs, even trees or dog breeds I've never encountered before. Most people would agree with my identification.

People from a similar cultural background to me will generally agree with me as to whether a completely novel piece of music is in tune and rhythmic (i.e. "grammatical", not necessarily "good"). Music from some traditions often sounds discordant (i.e. "ungrammatical") to me, due to the different scales used, yet I am sure that they must be considered grammatical by those who are familiar with such music.
In 1988 there was nothing like Calagari on the PC side for 3d graphics - at least not at an accessible price running on accessible hardware (1meg A500/M68000) from floppy disk - e.g. Autdesk's AutoShade was $1000 without a modeler and views could not be updated interactively as they could with Calagari. In other words, Autoshade was in the same price range as the entire Calagari system (sans monitor) and required several thousand dollars in additional software resources.

Considering the the cost of the 80287 math coprocessors required by the modeler (ACAD) and the costs of VGA adapters in 1987, the cost of doing 3D graphics on a PC was substantially more than the Amiga.
Finding Literate Programmers
How does foundrs get paid? I couldn't find anything on the site, other than a sentence saying "you owe us a percentage of your money".
This is certainly a way to see it. Its rational and logic. And of course, I don't think the public shouldn't pay shitty schools were people only party.

However, I wonder what the results in reality, where people are usually not acting so rational, will be. If people were that rational in first place, wouldn't they see, that the amount of money they won't earn while they are in college instead of working is way larger than the fees?

I don't know the society in the UK very well, but here in Germany I had friends in third grade, who where sent to school that won't lead to degrees that qualify for university! They we're smart and had good grades, but their parents wanted them to earn money once they're 16.

I wonder how many parents would have taken them out of school even before the ago of 16 if only it was legal.
And that whole system of compulsory education is >100 years old, here! Isn't it a fact, that todays world requires more learning and therefore more time in school?
Delayed maturity is a trend as long as homo sapiens sapiens exists.
List of almost all 5 chars available .com domains
Say hello to the new boss, same as the old boss.

Amazon, Apple et al are becoming new middle men of the digital marketplace. Want to sell content online? If you want mass market exposure we'll have 30-70% of the revenue from the sweat of your brow and you better thank us for the privilege.

I wonder how long until they band together and form a lobby group called the Digital Content Providers Association of America.
I got the basic one (Bamboo) with the smallest possible size (I think it's the 4x6 one). If you're doing design and other complex tasks, it's probably better to have those large ones. For me though, since I only use it for general computing and the occasional design work, having a small one makes it portable (and it fits on my desk!).

Unfortunately though, after years of getting used to the mouse, I do find it hard doing detailed work in Photoshop (i.e. tracing something/colouring something). It probably has to do with me not being used to the tablet but in times like those, I (using the tablet) still don't have the dexterity to manipulate things as well as when using a mouse.
Your Startup Tagline is Anti-Social
What spat?
I don't know about anybody else, but this is exactly why I'm leery about any of these "cloud services". With my local music collection, I know that future developments are of no concern.

Another area in which this is very important is gaming - Steam has a near-monopoly on online sales of PC games, and if they were to go under, a lot of people would get screwed over. I rarely (if ever) play video games, but I've bought all the Humble Indie Bundles just to support an option that doesn't put customers at the mercy of the retailer's servers operating properly.
I know you are not offering legal advice, which IMO is good, but has the language in any of these documents been looked over by a profession/practicing lawyer? Other than that, these are great; I'll be using the Privacy Policy and NDA.
With Android atleast you can sell the app from your website or any market. With iPhone apps there is no chance of that at all. (Cydia doesn't really count).
To be fair, the author does not claim that the XOR patent was to blame for Commodore's demise. Rather, the claim is that:

1) Management "bet the farm" on CD32.

2) XOR patent infringement claims killed CD32.

3) The failure of the CD32 product was the last nail in the coffin.

Tragic. I loved my Amiga 500 dearly. It makes one wonder what might have happened if Commodore could have held on for a few more years and (perhaps under new management) ridden the wave of internet-driven hardware sales to new heights.
Trouble unsubscribing from Boxcar? Delete the app.
I love NovaLogic's games and their voxel engine, don't they own several patents on voxel engine based games? I think I remember that coming up in a discussion a few years back on why we haven't seen more voxel games prior to this recent slew(besides hardware liking polygons more).
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
A Rape in Cyberspace
>60/40 isn't measurable, but if you know you're providing more value than the other founder, it's going to be close enough...

The problem, of course, is that you have to convince the other founder that you're doing 50% more, will always do 50% more, and should get 50% more equity, without poisoning the working relationship.
Yep, fully agree, that's exactely what I say in point #4 of the blog post :)
I'm really not biased about this (I'm very apolitical), it's just clear when you lay it out like this that the main discretionary spending that needs to be cut to get a balanced budget is what they classify as "Security". Stealth bombers and other fancy things are nice but it's clear we can't actually afford them at this point.
Math is not linear
Sending people to space is cool. But sending people AND stuff to space at the same time is simply a stupid waste of money. The Apollo program docked space ships launched from the moon. If the shuttle was designed for 8 people + air filters + some water and no cargo it could have added a lot more redundancy and with a better Mass to surface area ratio it could have returned to earth a lot cooler. They could have even added some air breathing engines and landed an airplane vs a falling brick.

We needed a 6-8 seat aircraft and built a 737.
Jut DL'ed and played for a few minutes. I really like it, but there were issues with lag and general UI responsiveness.

Though very rough, I'm excited about the potential for this one.
College or University education is more than the "education". It's a way of life that people go through to gain some incredible social experiences that you can't get elsewhere. Now I agree that we always need to improve our education, but for the "college is worthless" because it doesn't help your career type, a great college(not a vocational school) is never for your career, it's for personal growth.

On a different note, do people notice that there are more and more teenagers using HN? I feel like HN is the new Myspace again.
Are you sure? The space shuttle has classified secret communications tech on board?

According to your link Intelsat 708 had classified systems. I find it highly unlikely that the space shuttle has militarily sensitive secrets unless you're suggesting that the shuttle program itself was militarised?
What if that information is misinformation?

Compared to the actual value of the comment itself, the information conveyed in an upvote or downvote is rather small, and is always meta-information.

Now that there are so many people here who seem to have vastly different opinions from me on what constitutes a quality comment, I am actually quite happy not knowing which comments they have flocked to support.
Voyager 1 is on the edge, and so is he
So once again the message seems to be: promising but it isn't done yet.

Logic would suggest that the positives of an early, not ready, release - say 100k sales would be totally outweighed by the negative: popular opinion saying "tablet X is rubbish" (no matter how much it improves the initial impression is the story that the media and popular opinion will stick with)

Why didn't they work on it for another 6 months and then release it because it sounds like it will be pretty nice when its finished.
The comments for that article are worth a read:

Zouf wrote:

While you are mostly correct, there is one good legal use of an email footer:
to declare the data above it as confidential, and therefore comply with
confidentiality agreements that protect only data that has been explicitly
declared as confidential.

I found this one particularly funny:

stewsnooze wrote:

Practice what you preach.......

This e-mail may contain confidential material. If you are not an intended
recipient, please notify the sender and delete all copies. It may also contain
personal views which are not the views of The Economist Group. We may
monitor e-mail to and from our network...

http://www.economist.com/comment/886653#comment-886653

I wouldn't start leaving them out just yet.
Zipcar Prices Its IPO at $18, Above the Expected Range
Zgraph
Orlando Web Design at its best. Zgraph is a leader in web design and graphics. Have them do your next job! You can trust a company that has been in business for over 15 years and who have won multiple awards!
This is one of the things you pay the big bucks for at the better private colleges. Part of their implicit contract with you is that they'll make available to you the resources necessary to complete your major in 4 years (although that can get difficult with laboratories that have highly finite sizes, e.g. a chemistry lab with N hoods) and they won't intentionally limit capacity with "weed out" courses. At the worst case some big colleges are less of a bargain than they appear since you have to take 5+ years to get into all the required courses due to capacity issues.

Or take the half of the big 4 CS schools: Berkeley is like many if not most big public schools in requiring you apply to either their Engineering or "Letters and Science" schools, and you can't take EECS without getting into the former, CS without getting into one of either (or at least that's what they say on their home page, their may be exceptions of course).

CMU is unusual for a private school in that you have to apply to their CS department which has a fixed per year class size of 135 (last time I checked). MIT and I gather Stanford are like most? private colleges in that acceptance allows you to major in anything you can do and to switch if you want to. If a major doubles in size "overnight" they'll move heaven and earth to accommodate the undergrads (which is a or the major theme of this blog posting, some panic that Stanford CS major enrollment is exploding).

MIT, mindful of the transitory popularly of fields (e.g. look at the early '70s areo-astro crash from which the field never recovered) has never let the EECS department---the number of professors and graduate students---get "too big", which sure appeared wise after the dot.com crash which resulted in undergraduate enrollment falling by more than 1/2. That put great stress on the department when it had 40% of the undergraduates in the 80s and 90s (and which they may be returning to, with their "CS1" course enrollment exploding from 250 last spring to 380 this spring). Enough that for a long time in that period they refused to offer a service introductory programming course for non-majors, citing their overload.
We feel all the documents on PearWords are solid, concise and fair to both parties.

That said, we've not had these certified by a practicing lawyer simply because even if we do most people would still rather have a lawyer they know and trust do it for them before signing a contract, especially considering the variety of territories that PearWord's audience is located. It should be a fair bit cheaper to have a lawyer look over and change where appropriate any details than have them write an original document for you.

PearWords strongly advise that any person have a lawyer vet and modify where necessary any legal documents before signing them, no matter the situation.

Thanks for your comment! :)
The insignificance of statistical significance [pdf]
Creating a New Type of Bookworm
Beans and rice. Probably the cheapest meal on the planet. It's surprising the number of people who don't realize how little money is needed to eat nutritiously (especially if you buy them dried and in bulk)