skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, we don't always hear the good results.

However, one thing that is rarely reported, and I'd like to know, is how much the defendants in this case had to spend on lawyers to get these trolls to go away. If they had to spend a lot of money, and didn't recover it, that's a loss. Plus, how much time loss and personal stress/unhappiness did this lawsuit cost them?

If a court system drags you through the dirt and bleeds you dry to get a ruling that most people would agree is common sense, well, that's better than a bad ruling, but it's still a kind of fail.
We're not freaking out -- we're just curious why things are working the way they are.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846123
The Y Combinator-denied fly to YC Reject
Broken link above.

Try this one:
http://tools.ietf.org/agenda/80/slides/httpbis-7.pdf
Okay, I'll come clean. I've been experimenting with HN for over three years.

At first, I would try out HN and the effect on me was quite mild. I simply didn't see what the fuss was about. But the most I experimented with HN, the more I realized how powerful it is.

Nowadays, I use HN daily, sometimes more than once daily.

Sure my relationships with people who don't use HN have suffered. But who cares? They don't understand. That's why they don't use HN.
That can be your next Tweet
Is there any valid technical reason for browsers to handle media files in any way other than wrapping OS provided codecs?

See http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2009/06/directsh.... The philosophical reasons are even more important though.
Sounds like random binary data - in fact, I bet the audio is generated the same way as the video.
Ask PG: Can you explain the new features?
I notice that karma on comments is now hidden, and that some comments have an orange dot. I've also noticed that some user names on submissions are green. There may be other changes I haven't noticed.

Could you (or somebody) give a brief rundown of the changes, and the intent?
I'm flabbergasted you're still peddling the ridiclous notion that the single payer health care system that is working for every other nation in the Western World is broken.
Looks like it's fixed now.
IPad 2 + Head Tracking: Glasses-free 3D
Very well written and clear. I just started to put what you learned into practice :)
There's more information about Buddy on his website:

http://buddywins.com/
You are quite smart and you guessed right. Start-ups are not a guarantee to win the lottery. PG makes money with people being interested in start-ups, so he tells you about as much of the advantages as possible. And it is not like he's lying or hiding something. From all the facts he just emphasizes the ones that he thinks favor his own situation most. Both "smart hacker" and "working hard" can be interpreted in different ways. Not much of a surprise, isn't it?
Brian did it all himself. While I do not know the wealth of his parents, they have played almost no role in Kiip, other than being his cheerleaders. I have only met his father once, as his parents still live up in Canada.

I know this because I am a co-founder of Kiip.
Background on the advisory: http://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/04/new-adobe-flash-zero-day-...

According to sources, the attacks exploit a vulnerability in fully-patched versions of Flash, and are being leveraged in targeted spear-phishing campaigns launched against select organizations and individuals that work with or for the U.S. government. Sources say the attacks so far have embedded the Flash exploit inside of Microsoft Word files made to look like important government documents.

Here's a virustotal scan of one of the documents: http://www.virustotal.com/file-scan/report.html?id=1e677420d...

The fact that one AV engine detected it as a 0-day was the source of admonishments or congratulations depending on where the observers stood. Until it was discussed that the one detection was probably an unrelated false positive.

~~~

Additional artifacts from the attack including the spearphising tease and the times they were being sent (early morning friday apr 8) - at the height of the budget battle.

http://contagiodump.blogspot.com/2011/04/apr-8-cve-2011-0611...
Font-face face off: web font delivery services compared
Didn't mean to imply you were: I was suggesting that the change might have been temporarily reverted. Looks like it's back now.
Thanks for the pointer. My first thought is that I didn't see anything overwhelmingly compelling there, although I can see the benefits of having a "standard" language with many implementations vs. an implementation defined language.

As far as OCaml OO goes, I rarely use it (with one exception: objects implementing the "visitor pattern" for traversing the AST of a C program [1]) so its existence doesn't affect me. Perhaps I'd view the resulting language complexity as a negative if I had to maintain OCaml code that was OO heavy.

[1]: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~necula/cil/api/Cil.cilVisitor....
Is there a way we can see the current list of changes that are in production? While things like new users being colored green are obvious, other things such as a change in the decay function on the front page may be less obvious. Just curious to see what's going on at any given time.
speculation is rife over here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2434333

n00bs have green names, probably you can only see points on comments if you have enough karma, and so on.
There is no point in saying 100 words when you can make the point in 10.
I guess I haven't really used any distraction-free editing tools and honestly I was pretty skeptical while reading the post about the quality of feedback and value the product might have.... until I got to the mockup.

If the product looks & works as well as the mockup suggests, I'd buy it at the price mentioned, and I'm someone who only writes a half dozen or so posts a year.
HTML5 Body Elements #5 Structural Layout
Their test doesn't show that it was testimonials that led to the increase, since they had to change the page layout to make room for the testimonials. For completeness they should should test putting non-testimonial text there.
The Brilliant Richard Feynman & The Creation of Thinking Machines
These guys are technically incompetent. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1709194
edited correct link to the actual paper http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1103/1103.4282v2.pdf
FWIW, my immediate gut reaction to the lack of comment scores was extremely positive.
In my eyes YCR clearly shows that there needs to be something beside YC. Every super hero needs his arch enemy.
Interesting time lapse video: SFO to CDG
I second the priorities feature; it gets more important as the project grows and more "noise" is added to the tracker. We'll see how the otherwise in every way better Issues adapts to it.

e.g. https://github.com/pokeb/asi-http-request/issues is now sorted after creation date - really not the best way to sort the list.
Why would you say it's difficult to integrate into the app?

I think it's an interesting business model and I'd love to see how it plays out. The one thing I'd be worried about is being constantly bombarded with promotions (as a gamer) as I get my achievements.

It's complicated to scale up though - you definitely need to have enough games and advertisers on the system to make it worthwhile.

Definitely want to see how it plays out.
Have you considered adding a slight cost for submitting articles? (perhaps 2-5 points of karma?) There's a reward for submitting anything first that other people are likely to submit, but no cost, so the new page is often clogged with industry buzz that drowns out more substantial submissions. Many excellent article fall off within an hour, and then they can't get reposted.

Having more articles on the front page that aren't based on a scramble for duplicate-submission karma would probably improve the overall discussion threads, too; those posts tend to draw a lot of shallow comments.

It would also help with spam. Win win win.

I also wonder what percentage of upvotes for submissions comes just from duplicate submissions - maybe those should be counted differently (or not at all)? If the front page is already full of threads about some news about Apple (or whatever), being first to submit a redundant (but distinct) post is disproportionately rewarded, yet reduces the signal/noise ratio even further.
Unknown or expired link.
Steven Sasson, inventor of the digital camera and why he chose 30 pics limit
All used up. Some more: dybc-arne
jjvq-ximp
jkef-ctcu
cctp-qqxu
uvmh-aduv
I've co-founded companies in Boston, NYC and SF and I've also worked at large software companies. I've seen quite a bit of appreciation of startup talent in all cases.
I'm surprised that I was able to perceive individual characters. At the beginning when the movie is displaying the alphabet it seems like I can see each letter. Is this really one character per frame (assuming playback at 24 frames per second)?

Edit:

49,571 (characters) divided by 25 (frames per second) comes out to 1,982.84. 1,982.84 seconds is 33.03 minutes. Taking into account the padding at the beginning and end of the video reveals that the video displays 1 character per frame at 25 frames per second.
Overall I think eliminating the point display on comments works very well! I'm no longer tempted to pile on, either positive or negative, on comments.
Sometimes, I do the reverse of what you described. I upvote comments that are at -1 (even though I wouldn't have upvoted the comment if it hadn't been less than 1.)

In these cases, I have a neutral feeling about the comment, but upvote it because 0, -1 etc. seem unfair.

Hiding the points will mean that HN will lose some of its self-correcting capacity (when it comes to comments that were downvoted unfairly).

Anyway, it will be interesting to see the results of this experiment.
Maybe using the "top color" from the user's settings?
http://searchyc.com/submissions/feynman+connection+machine?s...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31834 <- 5 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191212 <- 15 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=311454 <- 12 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=628094 <- 1 comment

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723361 <- 10 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1205500 <- 23 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1308740

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1747116

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2025807

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2079473 <- 46 comments
Fun With C# and HP Laserjets | Programmer XR
Hack spills web security firm Barracuda Networks's confidential data
wasn't this done before, years ago, by Jon Lech Johansen? he wrote justeport - http://nanocr.eu/software/justeport/ (and i rewrote that in java as jjuste, but no longer have the code...)

here are the keys he found - http://nanocr.eu/2004/08/11/reversing-airtunes/ and http://nanocr.eu/sw/justeport/itunesrsakeys.txt
What else would you expect a very lucky person to believe? For any successful person it's much more gratifying to think you got where you are by being awesome than by being lucky.
Nice, I have been trying to sell Redis as a replacement for a very specific usage of ms SQL server. A tacit endorsement by StackOverflow has gone a long way towards legitimizing it for some of our management.
The "green user names" might be nicer if it was a continuum -- that is, "newest possible" would be bright green, and it would fade to gray over the course of days or weeks.
It's possible that porn tends to promote misogyny as well as tending to reduce rape.
I like the idea but I do have one immediate question:

We give you a unique link for each item you want to sell. You then can tweet, post, or share your link however you want. And as soon as your sales reach $10, we'll send over your earnings.

So if a user sells something and never reaches $10, is that essentially held in escrow forever? Is there any way for users to "cash out", so to speak, after a certain period of time?
Android Tutorial: 2d canvas graphics
Perhaps you are misunderstanding the question. What if instead it was rephrased:

"If tomorrow you died, and someone in the afterlife[1] asked you: 'Are you happy[2] with what you did yesterday?' could you truthfully respond 'Yes.'?".

In that case I would suggest that doing good work, but not to the point of neglecting friends and family, is a good thing to do. It doesn't ignore the reality of the situation but also doesn't lose the forest for the trees.

[1] Ignore here any and all disingenuous BS about the (non)existence of an afterlife, since in this case it does exist strictly as a rhetorical tool. Sadly I must include this disclaimer to prevent random strawmanning from the peanut gallery.

[2] Happy is a pretty nebulous word. Lets say it means roughly: content, satisfied, and generally pleased.
I've seen the speculation; I was hoping that PG might weigh in with some actual facts.
You might just consider making the flagging ability more apparent, and give it to some of the more senior members of HN. I only recently discovered it, but it has been useful in removing posts that belong on Reddit.
The altruist in you wants to beat a man who donated $100 million dollars with a stick?
No, not the worst. It's not at all ugly. That's something.
It's not every Unicode character, just the ones in Helvetica.
Right, that's the key question. I am writing the article on how to evaluate startups tomorrow. I'll put it in HN. If you don't want to miss the link, follow me at @simeons.
The usefulness of this kind of advice depends on the context. Someone who is in a rich environment for new experiences and opportunities, like college, would benefit from not over thinking. On the other hand, someone who is trying to get into college needs to be very discriminating in order to avoid the pitfalls of bad information(from parents, counselors, advocates for various for profit schools, etc) or short term temptations.

Also, I have to nitpick the party example:

“Unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner, and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through the newspaper determined to find certain job advertisements and, as a result, miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there, rather than just what they are looking for.”

What about the people who go into something knowing what they want, and end up getting it? Too often the final judgement of a decision is made after the situation is resolved, with the benefit of perfect information, and not the limited information the person actually had.
Pixar builds amazing moving 3D sculpture "zoetrope" (video)
Official Google Enterprise Blog: "Chrome is Ready For Business"

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/12/chrome-is-ready...
I've done research with Luis, and some of my friends are working on Duolingo. He's certainly an interesting person and a great lecturer. You really come to appreciate his teaching skills after taking his course (most take it as freshmen) and realize all the other professors are nowhere near that competent in teaching.
So here's a problem -- I think we all know that up/downvotes are routinely used to agree/disagree with the comments. With one notable exception, which is when the comment sits at 1, in which case it is not likely to be downvoted in disagreement.

Take parent comment for example. I disagree with it and if it had a score of 2+ I would've downvoted it, because my gut reaction was not "extremely positive". Now however I look at it and do not know if it's 1 or 2+, and so I cannot cast my disagreement vote without potentially pushing the comment into non-positive range.

(edit) Actually... what if there was separate agree/disagree indicator for each comment. As in "I was going to say something, but this comment is exactly that -> agreed". This will turn up/downvoting back to its original role of interesting/junk quantifier.
8% of men are red-green colorblind.
Given the choice between paying $X for a console that comes with restrictions so that you can only use it for playing games, or paying $Y for a console that you can do anything you want with, where $Y is greater than $X by up to a couple hundred dollars, most PS3 buyers would take the former.

I can see how people might worry that if using PS3s for non-gaming becomes widespread, Sony might feel the need to raise the price to make up for the loss.
opened a banana stand?
I'm not sure about it, but some of the comments about no karma have kept me thinking about "no karma for submissions". For any submissions.

As I see it, HN is about the conversation. I don't care who brings up a topic, if it's interesting. And then, I'd prefer to see discussion focused on that one submission thread, instead of spread across 3 or 5 or more follow-on submissions, particularly those placing #, ?, etc. at the end of the URL.

If posting does not bring karma, maybe this would help reduce the number of threads and increase their concentration of ensuing conversation.

I'm not sure, though. Something subconscious tells me I'm not seeing the other side(s) of such a change.

Also, if possible, I think the duplicate checker would benefit from being enhanced to detect at least the more obvious/prevalent workarounds, e.g. those same #, ?, etc. Of course, this, of itself, likely leads to an arms race. But maybe it would have at least some temporary value.
I contributed late to the last thread - but having a monthly "Erlang Day" (not necessarily about Erlang) would help establish a baseline for the kind of culture we want while relying completely on informal methods, i.e. no changes to code or rules of the community.
Crossing my fingers that it will be easier to tell users apart soon. That's currently my biggest gripe.

EDIT: Aaand negative karma. I like the changes already.
Ask HN: Best resources for running Adwords campaigns?
I recently found myself being tasked with running all adwords campaigns for a new startup. Any recommendations for best practices or online resources? I have a good grasp on the basics and I am looking for some advanced optimization strategies.
Only shows the Basic Multilingual Plane, when does the first sequel come out?
Yes, I realized this when making the image. It's certainly something people should consider before posting their results online even in an edited format. For me, blocking the names out was a barrier to discovery for most people (not worth the effort). It's not something I specifically want to share with the world, but there's nothing in that list I would be upset to hear people know either. Certainly a good comment for people to think about.
The nice thing about this, from what I understand, is that unlike Gumroad, it lets you sell things for < 99 cents. Obviously, that's a huge potential market.

I would guess the $10 minimum is a way to "hide" or "bundle" these tiny transactions that you can't efficiently handle through the existing credit card/banking system.

More generally, I guess the whole Minno business model/insight is to aggregate these kinds of small transactions that can't efficiently be handled by the existing financial system. (Minno is the payment service underlying Hawt Cakes.) This is literally speculation; I imagine the founders will correct me if I'm wrong.
The problem with this is it makes every submission into a karma game. If submitting costs karma, it will cause more people to think "will this earn enough points?" before submitting links.

... but that's not what you want people to think. You want them to think "is this interesting and on-topic for HN?" They're not the same question, as much as the former tries to approximate the latter.

If people focus too much on points, you're likely to get more groupthink and more industry buzz (since that stuff always gets a gazillion upvotes) instead of interesting articles.

Certainly, people think about link karma already, but I think this would make it worse. Creating a cost will cause even people who don't think about karma to think about it, even for just a moment -- which is probably not what you want.
It would have to be a significant step up from what I'm doing/making in the Bay Area (which is unlikely) to compensate for the opportunity cost (networking, chance at better jobs, etc). Can't categorically rule it out, but it doesn't seem likely.

Same's true for moving overseas, to the Midwest, etc.
The red dot helps quickly identify comment threads that might be compelling (something I used score for before).. but the lack of scores on the comments view (using the 'comments' header link) makes that view almost useless to me.. I don't use it all that often, but occasionally peruse it to identify threads that may be more interesting than their titles led me to believe.
Major Apple Love
This is a very old technique. I came across it six or so years ago: the article where I found the code, http://odetocode.com/humor/68.aspx, is from 2003.

It's a lot of fun though. And PJL can be very interesting to work with: I built a tool that used it to query printers for status information (although the amount of information I could extract seemed very dependent on the printer).
Thanks for releasing the invite codes here on Hacker News, Dave.
That may be a bit closer to the mark. The point is, you accepted his offer KNOWING that (a) you didn't have complete information, (b) he had every incentive to offer the bare minimum, and (c) that your contract didn't include any provisions saying you'd be entitled to more if the stated value subsequently climbed.

Sure, you COULD have that uptick provision included (maybe), but only if you'd taken the risk of holding out instead of settling for the $65 million. As soon as you accept the money, you accept all the conditions under which it was given. Provided that FB held up its end of the settlement deal (which it seems to have done), there was no reasonable basis for the Winkelvi to revisit the case.
Alternative to currently leaky BP oil spill cap [video]
Ask HN: Best way to outsource well spec'd out project
I have a sub $5k project, thoroughly spec'd out (I'm a dev myself) from UI down to the DB. What's the best way these days given the tight market to get a tightly scoped project like this of this size (small) constructed well, specifically finding a developer or development shop?
Adding an intentionally-failing test a part of the regular flow. TDD 101.
I really like having the flag button on the main page. My only suggestion would be to move it to the left of the comments button.

Either:

points by user time ago | flag | 32 comments
flag | points by user time ago | 32 comments

Otherwise it is too close to a commonly pressed button. Particularly on a touch screen.
Six Dream Projects of the 3-D Printing Pioneers
There are other comments about a 'dot' also. Am I missing something? I don't see any dots of any color (And I don't think I've ever seen any dots).
Three signs you have a management problem. And that problem might be you
Sorry, didn't expect this much of traffic. WP Super Cache turned on. Should be fine now!
It is not hard to remain static, there is a whole world out there full of specialized companies that do one thing well.

Your options of "grow" or "shrink" are arbitrarily limited: there are more than two choices.
Reaching for the stars - A brief history of manned spaceflight
I clicked ahead randomly.