skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, I was admitted to a PhD program in linguistics which required more than passing familiarity with the basic concepts of Chomsky's research, of which Universal Grammar is the basic concept.

In my comment UG = Universal Grammar.
Top Facebook Apps: Media
> All innovators are unconventional.

The real problem is that it's hard to distinguish "best" practices from conventional practices. Innovators are necessarily unconventional, but the ones we care about are also necessarily demonstrably good (in some sense). So there is this claim from the innovator side that "unconventional" is not a valid argument.

This claim only makes sense in the presence of an "unconventional" judgment -- i.e. that this creative work is necessarily deficient simply because it is unconventional.

Now, of course, no critic would put it so bluntly. But I think it illustrates the underlying dynamic.
Whether you can see points or not, I would think "I upvoted" comments with little content would still get downvoted.

Although, one side effect might be: When you can see a comment is highly scored, a reader may think, "everybody gets this guy, no need to help him argue the point. upvote" Whereas when you can see a comment is lowly scored, a reader may think, "this is a good argument, I'll help carry it, upvote and comment". But when you can't see scores, making the call to upvote and comment, or just upvote is made only on the content of the comment. Whether that's good or bad, I'm not sure.
Horror stories you may have heard aside, I've setup PayPal's website payments pro for many clients, with tremendous success. Never had any trouble with them, and my PayPal rep has always been reachable by phone and very helpful.

Additionally, I've used their recurring payments product (extra $30/month tacked on to Website Payments Pro). Its also really easy. You just send the transaction ID from a previous payment instead of the CC data , and PayPal looks it up in their vault.

Only shitty part with PayPal is you have to offer payment via paypal.com as an option ("Express Checkout"), which means you get to code an extra checkout flow! But maybe you were going to offer PayPal as an option anyway, so that's moot.

Authorize.net is great too, especially if you already have a merchant account setup with your bank. Their API is also super easy, and supported out of the box by most shopping carts.

I've chosen not to use Recurly or Spreedly. Handling money is a bitch, I want a partner with deep domain knowledge who lives and breathes payments. Keep in mind if you store your billing data with one of these guys, and they close up shop - you're fucked. Do you want to depend that heavily on a business with no 800 number and < 10 staff?

At the end of the day though, you'll have to make the call yourself. You've got no reason to believe me, the blog posts you've read, or anyone else you don't know personally. This is your business, your life - you can't just punt this one to the crowd.
For you Jedi out there, the headache you are feeling right now is thousands of copies of Excel 2008 on Macs crashing as people try to make pivot tables from this data.

My 2009 Mac Pro with 8 GB of RAM was defeated by the 2010 file.
It's a nice improvement. There is nothing worse than writing a thoughtful comment and then seeing someone write a snarky reply that got more points than the thoughtful comment. It just causes bad energy.

I like how points are shown only for each user's own comments. This way it's a competition only with one's self.
Well said. Several people upvote comments/stories they disagree with because they are very interesting and you would like for more people to see it and share their point of view.
Chomsky proposes only two rules: Merge and Move.
I've heard this many times but have yet to see it.

An H1-B holder is free to leave their employer at anytime and move company, providing that new company agree to file the change with USCIS. This can be done an unlimited number of times and is straightforward because it's not a "new" visa. Many companies will not employ a foreign national without a visa, but will happily take ones with existing H1-B's.

These transfers are common in the tech industry, at least in my experience on the west coast. Thankfully I'm now green carded and no longer have to worry about these things though :)
Do you have a walk-through on how to build a test from scratch? I'd totally use this on one of my membership sites. Bookmarked!
Same here. I'm gnawing at my face waiting on an opportunity to use Stripe.
I don't care about total points per se, I care about the probability that I'll appreciate having read something. What'd be a good proxy for this is the upvote rate, roughly upvotes divided by views (or rather, a MAP estimate of the upvote rate as the parameter of a binomial distribution, drawn from a beta prior...). The upvote count system, and the logged upvote count system both have the problem that if comment A has been seen 500 times and has 20 upvotes, and comment B has been seen 1000 times and has 30 upvotes, A is probably actually a bit better than B. An upvote rate fixes that problem, and still gives you a useful indicator about which comments are worth your attention.

The issue with upvote rates is that they're likely to be relatively low, and arithmetic differences between low probabilities aren't useful, so we should really use the log upvote rate -- but people aren't good at dealing with negative numbers, so it should be mapped to color or size or opacity of some indicator symbol or something. Suppose you had just a little dot next to each comment, the opacity of which is 100 + k * <log upvote rate>. Suppose k=8; exp(-12) is like 6 upvotes per million views, so almost no comment's dot would totally vanish, but if you had a 5% upvote rate your dot would be at ~75% opacity.
I have been getting the same experience. I actually got my first three digit karma comment soon after pg made the change. And I have been here for more then 2 years now.

I think when there are visible comment scores people do not vote based on whether they like a comment or not, they vote based on whether a certain comment deserves the current karma or not. Thus, they are likely to downvote highly voted comments not because they disagree but because they think "this bastard does not deserve THIS much karma".
Ask HN: Am I an accredited investor?
It seems plausible that the valuation of my business (an LLC, not a C corp) is high enough to give me a net worth >$1MM, but there has never been a public or private offering of our stock to establish valuation and we have little intention of doing such soon.

Does something need to be done formally to establish a business valuation without a stock offering, and are there any tax consequences of establishing such a valuation?
I think a bigger question is how do you create order when a thread gets to 100+ comments like this one. I personally get lost and stop reading comments on long threads. But there's a wealth of good conversation going. It just gets harder and harder to pinpoint them as comments increase.
Why we're going back to NYC to build Tutorspree
not yet, but its not too tough to figure out since there aren't many options yet.

i'll see about writing something up as soon as possible, though, as well as adding more information inline.
I will be honest and admit I didn't think that this would take off from the beginning. Some rough calculations show this is now looking at $100,000+ a year in revenue. Pretty impressive and goes to show that there can be a large enough market for anything if you deliver a good product.
Seems like it could be made either
a) easier to read / skim through comments ---with points shown, or
b) easier to cast a fair vote, and thus contribute to HN ---with points hidden.

Thinking of it this way, maybe we should have two different modes--- ‘quick reading’, with points shown and voting disabled, and ‘contribution’, with points hidden and voting enabled.

Wait, I know it complicates things a bit, but it makes sense. Look:

- If you do read everything carefully and don't rely on crowd's opinion, then you don't need points anyway and you can well contribute to HN by voting justly. Use ‘contribution’ mode.

- If you usually read HN in a hurry, thus you shouldn't be tempted to vote. Use ‘quick reading’ mode.

The weakest point here is changing mode. Don't know how frequently people switch between ‘skimming’ and ‘contribution’ mode while reading HN… If not often, then maybe it makes sense to place a switch on the user's settings page. (Maybe with contribution mode disabled for noobs.)
This might sound a bit cliche but without the support of the readers and subscribers (especially when we started charging for digital edition), the help of contributors (most notably rdela in early issues), the authors and commenters who graciously granting permission to publish their work, and most of all the HN community, Hacker Monthly wouldn't be possible at all.

Thank you! I will continue to pump out great issue + free special issue (one coming up in May) for a long time to come.
I am reasonably sure that you need your assets to be liquid. Your assets, if they are tied up in a non publicly traded company, are by definition illiquid.
I really, REALLY would like some way to distinguish 'excellent' comments from comments that are just rising to the top with higher point values.

a star, orange dot, bold title, anything.

that said I like HN without points.
I don't think H1-B visa holders are as desperate as you think. My company got me one, but I never moved, for a bunch of reasons. Salary was 90K a few years ago, and I only had a couple of years experience. Bigger blocker though was lack of vacation days, which was tied to seniority and not really negotiable. IOW I could have negotiated higher salary, but not what I wanted. So I didn't jump.
We have changed the Social tab and now feature a dozen or so of the more popular sites at the top.
I believe you are referring to http://saasy.com/

It is a bundled payment gateway+merchant. You don't have to get PCI compliant and you don't need a merchant account (no min transaction volumes, fight chargebacks for you etc).

The down side is they only offer hosted payment pages and not suitable for everything... You need a finite set of goods/services you want to sell (eg monthly plans). You can't automate the process if you're building an online store where your customers can upload items for sale (eg AppStore).
Agreed. The "Minefield" (besides being a terrible alpha/pre-release codename) icon left a lot to be desired.
Braintree is great, the API, docs, and client libraries are all great. I'm using it for a subscription based product and couldn't be happier with the choice, even if the minimum fees are a little higher than most, if you aren't going to be able to cover a $75 minimum per month then you probably have bigger issues with your business plan than your payments provider.

The fact that they give data portability is great and the "transparent redirect" is super convenient, knowing that i have practically nothing to worry about from the PCI DSS side of things. If I ever get to the point of needing it (which I may soon) it looks like they have the ability to manage multi-merchant accounts from the same system http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/services/multi-merc...

Although I have heard great things about Stripe, really want to check that out soon. Also, after looking at the prices for Chargify or Recurly, it really doesn't seem to be that much of a value add for something that can be easily accomplished with the Braintree API.
http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/blog/?p=107

Christer Ericsson, a tech director at Sony Santa Monica (God of War) has pulled out all the figures for game developers a few times. As a point of reference, in my experience, game developer salaries tend to be ~10% higher than a similar role at Microsoft/Google/Apple but with poorer benefits.
I can't say I understand nearly enough to make any sort of decision about it, but this bit...

> He revamps his "program" every few years because he recognizes it as wrong.

... if true, I believe is what we call 'science'.
For a person considering going back to school as a non-trad student for either a BS in Computer Science or Computational Math, is this a bad time to be getting a degree in CS?
There are many payment gateway's out there (for example an Australian one is http://www.eway.com.au - never used them/no affiliation) that let you process payments via API.

I'd be inclined to pick something like that rather than use Paypal.
I'm not sure how much I like this idea, but instead of just arbitrarily cutting things off at top level comments, maybe comment scores could be shown as long as their parent's score is shown and they have more points than their parent.

The idea would be to highlight any path through the comment tree where comments are strictly increasingly valuable. So, for example if someone asks a question and gets a really good answer, the scores on both comments will be shown. The score could even be shown on an even better reply to the answer. But if someone trolls the really good answer, neither the score of the troll or that of responses to it would be shown.

A further improvement on this might be to use a time weighted value (where newer comments have more weight) similar to that already used in comment sorting so that comments have a chance to gain value instead of being pitted directly against an already popular comment.
It would have been funny if no one could see the point total for the options on this poll itself.
Hacker Monthly is great and sometimes it is just hard to beat the reading experience with paper. If you want another way to keep up you might check out my side project - the weekly Hacker Newsletter (http://hackernewsletter.com). Both projects compliment each other for people that are too busy to visit HN daily.
Ugh, I hate when people try to extrapolate from search trends. There are a million reasons that line could go up or down. Maybe since the twitter API is linked from the bottom of every single page on twitter.com, fewer people need to search it?

We may even be drawing the wrong conclusions, but you have to admit that those graphs are telling a pretty convincing story.

No, I don't have to admit that.
https://github.com/wsxiaoys/carc/
in case this helps, this is for the year 2010 data
create table visa_status (

LCA_CASE_NUMBER text,
STATUS text,
LCA_CASE_SUBMIT text,
VISA_CLASS text,
LCA_CASE_EMPLOYMENT_START_DATE text,
LCA_CASE_EMPLOYMENT_END_DATE text,
LCA_CASE_EMPLOYER_NAME text,

LCA_CASE_EMPLOYER_ADDRESS text,

LCA_CASE_EMPLOYER_CITY text,

LCA_CASE_EMPLOYER_STATE text,

LCA_CASE_EMPLOYER_POSTAL_CODE text,

LCA_CASE_SOC_CODE text,

LCA_CASE_SOC_NAME text,

LCA_CASE_JOB_TITLE text,

LCA_CASE_WAGE_RATE_FROM text,

LCA_CASE_WAGE_RATE_TO text,

LCA_CASE_WAGE_RATE_UNIT text,

FULL_TIME_POS text,

TOTAL_WORKERS text,

LCA_CASE_WORKLOC1_CITY text,

LCA_CASE_WORKLOC1_STATE text,

PW_1 text,

PW_UNIT_1 text,

PW_SOURCE_1 text,

OTHER_WAGE_SOURCE_1 text,

YR_SOURCE_PUB_1 text,

LCA_CASE_WORKLOC2_CITY text,

LCA_CASE_WORKLOC2_STATE text,

PW_2 text,

PW_UNIT_2 text,

PW_SOURCE_2 text,

OTHER_WAGE_SOURCE_2 text,

YR_SOURCE_PUB_2 text,

LCA_CASE_NAICS_CODE text,

Decision_Date text);

LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE '/H1B_2010_TEXT/H1B_FY2010.txt'
INTO TABLE visa_status
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ','
LINES TERMINATED BY '\n';
Paypal Pro is better than people assume. The rates are ok.

There are lots of Paypal horror stories, but Paypal is actually on the side of merchants more than most merchant account providers. Yeah, chargebacks suck, but you have to deal with them with or without Paypal.

Also, with Paypal Pro you get your money right away; a lot of merchant accounts require you to wait a month or more before withdrawing your money.

I'm not doing subscriptions with Paypal Pro though.
Chargify does not work with Braintree v2 API, as far as I know.
I'm using the vim syntax file and plugins from vim-coffee-script and really like it so far. It even will mark trailing whitespace by highlighting it red (this is configurable as well).
I think it's very worthwhile to read the original article in this case as it supports something far less strong than what the Ars article does. It's argument is pretty compelling when you get to what it's actual argument is/should have been. But it hardly topples what it claims to.
Hacker Newsletter is great and I really recommend it.
Upvoting a comment should signify that I agree with what the author is writing, not that I want that comment to have more karma points. I don't care how many upvotes a comment gets if the people who are upvoting it are not people I agree with.

It would be more helpful if there was a lingering effect to agreeing with someone instead of just giving someone a karma point increment. Lets say that I upvoted zzyzx's comment, and based on that upvote, I am able to see a thumbs up on other comments that zzyzx upvoted, indicating that people who I agree with, agreed with that comment.
Joel Spolsky on allocating ownership in your startup
This is the first stable release in the 2.5 line. Yes you could use the new UI before now with pre-releases, but that's been true for a long long time.
Looks like Mozilla is using MindTouch http://www.mindtouch.com/ (albeit, highly customized). I'm also interested in setting up an internal repository/library for my team. this is a timely post!
"I don't like how much Microsoft charges for its tools"

I've got plenty of issues with Microsoft but the cost of their developer tools isn't one of them. I mean, sure Visual Studio Ultimate Super Turbo Edition Alpha X costs $11k, but who actually needs that? The Express Editions are free, which is very favorable pricing compared to say MonoTouch for Android or iOS which cost $400 just to get your foot in the door.
As a developer based in Singapore, it seems that PayPal is the best option. Would like to ask the international developers what options have they used and to the US based companies - when are you bringing your awesome services internationally?
The same argument he uses to advocate query hints rests on a situation actually much more likely to occur because of query hint use. Your assumptions can't use runtime statistics or cost configuration to alter a query plan.
Yeah, I tried to be careful to criticize only the Ars article, since I imagine there's a strong possibility the original may have been misquoted or misinterpreted.
Why won't Internet Explorer 10 run on Windows Vista?
Study links rest to long-term memory formation in fruit flies.
Agreed about SASS (prefer LESS, but still applies), and somewhat with CoffeeScript (I'm in the "make-it-optional-not-default-but-i-heart-CS" camp)...but 100% about HAML. It just always strikes me as backlash against HTML rather than an actual improvement.

What happens when you give HAML to a non-Rails designer? Maybe it's just taste, but I feel that true markup with template tags for data (erb) is much better than a whole new markup language for designers to learn. YMMV.
Couldn't you pick a number over the top and have them bring you down? Or are the recruiters likely to not even consider you if you do that?
This post should be a comment on pg's post about it[1], this doesn't need to be on the front page itself.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039
agreed

i prefer browsing hn w/o comments since it lets me better evaluate each comment in an informational rather than social context.
As a class, perhaps not. All I know is from my what I observed with friends and family, mostly from Latin America, and many not in technology.
Twenty Years of Linux according to Linus Torvalds
Original study is here: http://www.jneurosci.org/content/31/15/5643.abstract (full-text requires subscription)
If the grandparent is indeed right and OP's intention is as you say, it even more trite. If even the sample was not correctly chosen, I am not sure I would believe the generalization :P
Suggestions for the Favorite social networks list?
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>>I also want to suggest that it might be interesting to have some non-numeric display that still allows for the 'quick scan' that you mention.

I agree with this, may be displaying a color coded dot in place of the comment score. The color can be computed from a log function of the score, and we only need a few colors to indicate the different types of comments without giving too much information away.
The solution is simple: display capped votes.

- 'good' results get shown for the cap, and from experience on other such sites, upvotes slow down once it hits the cap anyway
- 'bad' results show as well, as someone already said, sometimes a comment needs to be downmodded to oblivion, other times it just needs that slight rebuke and you don't want to downmod more.

Caps of +/-10 are enough to point out 'this comment is worthy of more attention', and will help avoid that problem where a popular opinion draws a hundred upvotes where a mere insightful opinion draws only a score.
I kind of like the feel of the site since, but I don't love how hard it is to wade through comments now. Have you considered collapsible comment threads, ala reddit or slashdot? I know this place doesn't want to turn into either, but as the comment volume goes up it seems like a better and better idea.
Spreedly Core is a simple API-based product for processing payments and is PCI compliant via transparent redirects (like Braintree). If all you're doing is processing one-time charges, it might be a good option to consider.

Basically, your payment form posts to SpreedlyCore, which posts back to your server with a token. Your app can then perform the basic payment actions, including validation of the user's posted payment data (minus the sensitive info, of course).

The service supports several gateways, and you never see the customer's payment details. The API simplifies dealing with responses. The biggest pain is that it's XML-based.

Regardless, I got it up and working in about a day, and I am slow. :)

It's very easy to use, and though new, the team is very responsive, and the API follows most conventions of their Spreedly subscription service, which is more mature.

The only thing you need to bring is an SSL cert, but you were gonna do that anyway. :)
It wasn't done in the same bills related to Christchurch. Rather, during the 'overtime' to deal with the aftermath of the Christchurch quake, this bill was promoted quickly also.

Doing this speeds up the process and avoids a huge amount of oversight, consideration and public input, and has very much caught the NZ public by surprise.

It's unlikely we (NZ public) will get organised enough to change this, and past laws with significant public outcry (which this doesn't have yet) have stayed without review, as referendum's are not binding in NZ.
Kaiser Chiefs BBC Interview
Payment processing is hard, so please give it more than a "cursory glance". Put yourself in the shoes of a brand new customer - they have lots of questions regarding your trustworthyness, billing process, refunds, pro-rating, discounts, invoicing and more. It's your job to alay those fears and be flexible in meeting their needs.

Paypal is great to get started but my experience is that you'll take a hit to your cashflow at some stage. They'll freeze your account, chew up a lot of your time and make you angry. That's part of the cost of doing business with Paypal, so if you need cashflow, accountability and legal protections then go with a bank.

In the early stages, don't be afraid to do a chunk of your billing work manually (producing invoices, providing refunds, calculating pro-rated charges etc). This will give you important insight into customer pain-points and you'll learn a lot about online payments too.
I am using cheddargetter and gravity payments for a soon to be launched site. www.turlytag.com
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