skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bitcoins probably won't take off (cf the failures of all the other alternative digital currencies so far), but the whole number of bitcoins is no more a roadblock than the limited number of ounces of gold in the world was to getting everyone using gold as currency. The problems basically lie elsewhere.
I think your point is a good one but I am confident that, if Microsoft started using PageRank for Bing, a Google lawsuit (or at least a Stanford lawsuit for the benefit of Google) would be both swift and formidable.
"95% of all messages are. "Can I call you?"

It's hard to separate cause and effect though, 95% of my messages are "Can I call you?", sometimes repeated 3-4 times, simply because the system often fails to reliably transmit anything longer without messages being lost, arriving out of order, etc. It is clearly hard to observe the users scientifically when the interface affects their behaviour.
Reddit was founded without any knowledge of Digg. I'm not sure that removing Kevin Rose from our timeline has a material impact on how we consume news in 2011, except by dumping Digg's user base into Reddit that much sooner.

> It is arguable that he invented the very social-news-voting system we are using on HN.

Given that Reddit was a Y Combinator company, my strong suspicion is that HN took its inspiration from sources other than Digg.

> Edit: And I do not mean to be rude, but how does your contribution to the internet compare to his?

My contribution is immaterial to the discussion. Pointing out that Kevin Rose does much better work as an internet celebrity than as a business leader would remain true (or false) whether I'm Danilo Campos or Vinton Cerf.
Whenever I have an app or library that "wtf segfaults" more than once, I try to fix the bug or not use that library. I don't try to run the job 1000 times and hope it works once.
I am a bit late to comment but here are a few thoughts

a) Staying on top of HN and current with articles and comments is becoming a fulltime job. Contributors who are productive in their non HN life will overtime realise that they are spending a disproportionate amount of time on HN. Something needs to be done to the mechanics of HN to change this. The only thing I can think of for this is highly unusual but here it is - Do not allow people to comment on stories by default, only vote for them as ontopic and offtopic. Later after a certain amount of time - stories become available for commenting or disappear entirely. This effectively decouples a story into two phases - is this story worthy of discussion on HN and second how good is the commentary on it. Doing this split will allow you to attack the story and comment quality in a more granular manner. Also sometimes its tempting to open an offtopic story just because it has 80 comments, hoping that some HN stalwart has added non trivial analysis to an otherwise trivial story. By not allowing discussion on offtopic stories such wayward curiosity on part of readers like yours truly could be avoided.
b) Remove the indirection currently in place to flag stories and comments. Downvoting is more convenient currently, perhaps flagging should be a bit more convenient than it is currently.
c) Turn HN into a fully customised experience. People prone to gossipping will overtime find themselves in a version of HN where gossip is abundant, ditto for technical users. An implementation is left as an exercise for the determined reader.
d) All changes dont have to be live on news.ycombinator.com. You could try out multiple versions with different incentives, maybe different sub-communities will find different local optima.
e) Force people submitting stories to write a comment longer than a certain threshold about the story.
You always have to think about UX. Just because the web isn't your domain doesn't mean its not important. I'm sure we've all been to websites that look dated and are poorly written, which turned you off from the company.

My point though is subtler, which is that if your value isn't in the web then you merely need to be competitive on the web, and in most of these cases an outsourced UI/UX will be superior than many of your competitors.
NASA's Brilliant Mission Patches
Funnily enough this was going to be my starting point into writing a C webapp. I felt that by writing a C module directly embedded in an existing web server it would allow me to leverage the request handling. Having already done bugfixes for apache C modules are work it felt the most relevant path to take. The problem I see with it though is you are bound to the webserver you write the module for. Portability would be nice.
See the endosymbiotic theory[0] for info on a similar phenomenon. In this case, however, the "inner" organism is eukaryotic as well. Not sure what kind of effect that has on the dynamics of intracellular transport processes, but it should be interesting to find out.

0: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Endosymbiotic...
I don't think that he was trying to say that people only root for genuinely good characters. He was saying that when we do root for the bad guy, we invariably rationalize it to ourselves by finding ways to think of the bad guy as not being truly evil. "Misunderstood," or "noble savage," or "at least he has a personal code he follows faithfully," or at the very least, "not as bad as the other guys."

We may start out subconsciously rooting for the bad guy because of our desire to see the plot advanced, but when we catch ourselves doing it we come up with some other reason why it's acceptable to root for the bad guy in that particular situation. We want to identify with the central character--if the central character is not a good person, we need to find traits worthy of our sympathy and/or empathy.
What about all of the UI animations built into jQuery and other frameworks these days? Sliding, pulsing, hopping, etc. all provide essentially the same purpose, to guide your attention to a particular element as it changes. I don't see anyone clamoring about those being the second coming of the evil BLINK tag.

The problem with the BLINK tag was the fact that anything wrapped in it would blink continuously, for as long as the page was loaded. I don't think anyone is suggesting that this plugin should be used to continuously rumble anything on the page, any more than anyone thinks jQuery.slideToggle() should be called in an infinite loop to slide something up and down continuously.

It's a design element that should be used sparingly and for a limited time to grab the user's attention in an interesting way. Nothing more.
In desperate need of a designer for our web app? Anyone out there?
We're in desperate need of a designer to work on a new web app we're developing. Planning on posting to 37 signals jobs but wanted to see if there were any good sites where I could browse and contact designers for the job.

Any ideas?
I can't imagine bitcoins in their current implementation gaining traction as a form of payment with 'regular folks'. I mean the whole idea is complicated enough that even I as a technically minded person have trouble fully understanding how it works.

Plus it's not clear to me that there are enough bitcoins to go around. Some comments below point out the fact that bitcoins can be divided down to multiple decimal places. That's great and all but I can't imagine a 'regular person' being comfortable with the idea that they currently posses .00152 bitcoins. I doubt most people think of a penny as .01 dollars, because fractions are confusing. Plus even if that .00152 bitcoins is enough to buy a car, it still just seems like a minuscule amount.

I don't mean to be a huge downer. I think bitcoins are an interesting idea, but if you want to sell things now a more traditional payment method would probably make sense.
Can't we just have a minimal webserver for ZeroMQ, and from there all the languages with ZeroMQ bindings?
See Better Place's business model: buy the car, but rent the batteries, and have charging stations where they can be swapped in about as much time as filling your tank.

http://www.betterplace.com/
Your last sentence seems to imply that I do have a thin skin. It's possible. It's also possible that the generation of Germans that brought us Auschwitz is a disconcerting one to me and justifiably so.

Would you have lunch with Rudolf Hoss and be pleasant to him? What about a guard there? Perhaps the discomfort in me has to do with the fact that so many Germans committed atrocities and my conclusion is that I am no better. That is, in the same situation I would have done the same thing.

I could have a thin skin. By the way, my experience with men who saw combat - real combat - don't talk about it. The will tell a few anecdotes but nothing to do with combat. The ones who talk about their war experiences usually aren't the ones who actually did any fighting.
The app evaluation process isn't quite "free, professional-level usability testing for my apps"—it requires an annual membership fee.

However, if you get as much useful technical help as this person did, that fee looks like a bargain.
I'm already giving this away for free with a PayPal donate link at http://pickdropapp.com/ but what the hell: http://gumroad.com/l/cvhhwi
This argument can cut both ways. If I'm a designer, and I can make a kick-ass interface, but aren't so great on the programming skills, can I, or can I not hire a programmer to make work?

My sense is the HN crowd would be aghast at such a notion, but I don't see that much of a difference. A good product is about vision, and a design nerd or code nerd can have it, and that doesn't demean or diminish the value of the other.
No, not at all, and I did not mean to imply this about the Nortel patents in my comment. Indeed, a company like Nortel very likely would have a large grouping of high-quality patents that truly tie to innovative steps it has taken over the years. Google's aim, I assume, is to get these (and whatever happens to come with them) to help fight off flaky patent challenges in the future.
How radioactive is neodymium? It looks like most of its isotopes are stable and the rest have half-lives significantly exceeding the current age of the universe, just like ²³⁸U.
Swiss Court Orders Google to Manually Blur Faces, License Plates in Street View
Army: Manning Snuck ‘Data-Mining’ Software Onto Secret Network
Clj3D: A Clojure graphic library
Of course it does, just pass "oauth_access_type=read" when calling /oauth/authorize...

Posted here, as nobody seems to know about this:

http://blog.stochastictechnologies.com/gaining-read-only-acc...
I agree with you that if what he was asking for was specific to users who disable cookies and javascript it wouldn't make much sense for the chrome team to spend a lot of time on it.

That being said, it seems like the APIs for this (that is, ones for modifying browser settings instead of interacting with site content) would have a ton of uses beyond just disabling cookies and javascript. Although as someone mentioned below, it looks like they're at least on the "Wish List".
Yeah, that's a good point actually. Perhaps I should be more direct and say that governments are trying to optimise happiness. In this case, abortion is less clear-cut because there is no good evidence that an unborn baby is conscious, or that it isn't. However, I agree with you that this isn't a good example, and someone has to decide when and if a fetus is a conscious, living being.

In a 'perfect' form of the government I described, this issue would be decided by the government based on hard science, so there would be some decision. But this still leaves the question of what position to take in the absence of any conclusive evidence.

To extend the flawed-ness: do you think this applies to issues such as homosexuality (to pick the most controversial)? Do you think that all morality should be legislated?
Scientists journey into an active volcano crater
oh. well.. this is very quick project and I did not really spent a lot of time polishing it. So I could expect that. Do you have screenshot/copypaste by any chance? If so, could you send it to pavel@yepcorp.com?
I see where you're coming from, I think, but I think both of your ideas can definitely work together. You say that some people can support the antagonist, but I'm not sure that's what you mean. I think there's a difference between objectively realizing and appreciating the necessity of a villain and actively hoping he comes out on top. For example, as much as Darth Vader and the Emperor moved the Star Wars original trilogy along, I don't think anybody really wanted them to end up ruling the universe.

Unless they did, in which case, my point is moot.

Edit: Of course, drawing from another source, you do have a point when it comes to Zuko from the Avatar series. He was a "villain" (that later became a protagonist) who was given even more of a backstory than the main character, and it was very clear that the audience was supposed to be sympathetic towards him, despite the fact that his single goal in life was to kill the Avatar.
Think of the first time you ever used a computer. I agree that once you know that there is a app called terminal, using the Hierarchical menu might not be the best way to launch/use it. But the very first time you use a computer, its useful to see "Ahh - I can do Graphics, Programming, System Administration, Games. Oh wow it even has Solitaire!". So a hybrid approach with something like Gnome-Do for power users while retaining the hierarchical menu for regular users is optimal imo. Heck a lot of power users even create application sessions and do most of their app launching automatically at startup.
You mean mongrel2?
You have to pay Microsoft too. What exactly do you find that makes cocoa a "pain to learn"?
I put this just 'cos I wanted to put something into footer. I do not care about copyrights at this point =)
If it's technology-related, you should check out http://loudstartup.com/ -- it contains a list of all the tech-related media sites I know of.

Disclaimer, that's my site.
As a designer I can tell you that the two key questions you need to ask yourself are:

1. Is the product UX/UI design an essential core your product? i.e. Are you willing to listen to the designer if they have suggestions that may change the core of your product.

2. If so do you have the budget and long term prospects to hire someone full time? If you don't are you willing to give the designer shares in your company or a percentage of the profits?

Most geeks assume that the two core founders of a business should be a coder and a biz person — I disagree with that assumption: To me a product starts with good design, and without that code and biz doesn't mean anything.
> Perhaps from the platform's perspective, not from the sellers. The motivation is to enable someone to quickly put up an item for sale. I can pretty damn quickly put up a single item for sale on ebay too.

You are completely wrong. The model is entirely different from the seller's perspective. See the author's original comment. I've included it below.

>How does this work for art though? I mean you want to see the icon/graphic/design/whatever before you pay for it.
This is also answered by the original comment.

"There have been many times in the past where I wanted to share a link - on Twitter or just through IM with a few friends - but did not want to go through the overhead of setting up a whole store."

The seller will be sharing a link with a person who they have a seller/buyer relationship with. The product in question is the last step in a process that the seller has complete control over.

No more of this. Cheers,
Sure but even if it was only 70% or 80% it would still be important.
New research: *.99 no longer optimal for prices
Google solves 'dicky ticker' mystery
Things to consider:

1.) Creating a filter system that finely discriminates between similar conditions (i.e. many ailments have very similar external symptoms, how will you distinguish between them?), but don't make it overly complex with a million options because people will get confused

2.) A novel rating system that can eliminate bad suggestions and bring to the top the most effective solutions (perhaps individuals who contribute some of the most effective treatments gain special status??)

3.) Personal picture and video submissions may be helpful, but always hold peoples' privacy with utmost regard; also, should you choose to incorporate multimedia into your site, do so with caution as I personally would not be so inclined to visit your site if I were greeted with throbbing pustules every which way!

This is an idea I (along with thousands of people I'm sure) have thought about. WebMD isn't bad but it can definitely be better.

If you want someone to bounce additional ideas off of let me know!
I like this - a lot.

Please give me the option to see a long list containing all of the people that I follow.

Showing me the users follow to followers ratio as a percentage would be useful data. If I could sort the long list based on this number, it would be even better.

I'm not sure about the current Twitter TOS, but having the option to bulk unfollow with a checkbox would make things fast and friendly.
Okay, this one is a pretty easy Keep per both policy and guideline, so it won't be difficult to defend. That said, the deletionist attitude pervading Wikipedia is the main reason I stopped being part of it years ago.
This isn't, and shouldn't be, the focus, but an added bonus it that maybe, just maybe, something valuable will come out of such projects.

Wasn't that how a Mining company from Minnesota (3M) ended up doing post-its?
I'm not sure why there is so much negative sentiment about this effect. Rumble can be used pretty nicely for a range of things, for example if you attempt to click on something which should not allow focus, or if you add an item to a new item to a page which would otherwise look too similar to the rest of the page and you want to draw attention to it ... there are loads of valid uses for this.
Protection & Security in Distributed Systems (UC Berkeley Video)
Uh oh. Over the past 6 weeks I've had the feeling of being liberated from my years-long Hacker News addiction. Now you want to fix it and suck me back in.

I'm surprised to see so much focus on the comments. I think the front page is the primary problem. I wonder how much of the comment problem would fix itself if the front page had more signal and less noise. Maybe that's naive.

Personalization is most certainly the wrong answer for HN, but when I thought last week of my ideal solution to the problem this is what I came up with:

1. Personalized weighted point calculations. Each vote is multiplied by a number which ranges from 0 to 2 in .1 increments. Everyone starts at 1. Everyone who up-votes the same story as me gets .1 added to their weight. Everyone who up-votes a story I down-vote gets .1 removed from their weight.

2. New users can't submit stories during an initial probationary period. They also start out at .1 and get .1 added to their weight each week they're active on the site. After 10 weeks of activity they can submit stories.

3. Weights are applied to comment rankings but not derived from them. Comment rankings also need to be much harsher. We want fewer comments and higher quality comments. Maybe ((weight*2) -.5) for calculating comment points. But the floor is always 0.

I don't know if ideas along these lines could be successfully de-personalized.

These ideas I think are mistaken:

1. Any notion of explicit control. Such as: hard coded karma values, comment size, non-bayesian content filters, etc. (New user probation being the 1 exception)

2. Anything based on unweighted karma values.

These ideas I'm suspicious of:

1. Economic solutions. They strike me as having the same problem as micro-payments. I don't want to have to think about how I'm spending my alloted money each time I up-vote or down-vote. Also the purpose of money is trading, not creating artificial scarcity. And even assuming the goal of artificial scarcity is worthwhile (I don't) then it implies some kind of hard-coded explicit control to determine purse size, which will always be a mistake.
HR 1249 -- House introduces patent reform bill
I would highly recommend the book : "Learned Optimism" by Martin Seligman. It's a great book about understanding depression and the steps you can take to fix it.

It helped me a lot, and still does, when I find myself spiraling down.
Well, one thing that is odd is that I'm under 40. I didn't mention this though. But I did grow up in the Canal Zone and have a colonial/imperial perspective on the issue of national arrogance.
It was a custom-made SRM made by someone else. They were intending to use it in an electric vehicle.
They must've bought their iPhone at some point. More seriously though, wanting to customize your phone shouldn't have a correlation with purchases. It's unfortunate that one has to jailbreak in order to do that, I'm sure if they didn't need to jailbreak you would have a higher number of purchases from the customization community.
Well done this is brilliant.
This game is for a young or unknown designer. It's their chance to establish themselves and build their portfolio. As a professional who makes a living in design, you are not obligated to compete. Though, you are still invited.

It was Skype's choice to put on this contest, and it should be assumed they know it is possible they won't get as quality a final product as possible. There are plenty of projects out there for quality designers to work on, and it bothers me that so many designers complain that free/cheap client work is such a pain in the community's ass.

Without a doubt, the type of client who wants to go that route is someone a designer of your talent wouldn't want to work with in the first place.

Right?
you don't need shuttle

> ssh -D localhost:8888 <you@yourvps.com>

then enter localhost:8888 as your socks proxy in your web browser.
Analyst Sees MacBook Air as a $2.2 Billion-a-Year "Quasi-Tablet"
Jonathan Rosenberg, Google VP Product Management to step down
Unfortunately this is not yet a usable solution. I'd love to see this implementation ported to Prosody though.
Ah, the good ol' google-your-own-symptoms approach to medicine.

I'm sure that for every correct diagnosis it produces three dozen folks who are pretty sure that their headache is brain cancer.
Getting into the App Store charts starts with strategy
All I could think of was Heroku's blog being ripped when reading this.
How to have your app request read-only access to Twitter's API.
I'd like to see a working prototype at least. Those who are fans know that seemingly starting with the success of the original product and then the Amiga, the company has always had some kind of problem delivering something new.
Those of you of a more "hackable machine" bent may find Boodler (http://boodler.org/) interesting to play with as a soundscape generator. I can't comment on how it compares to this Flash app, since I don't have Flash on this machine; I'd be interested to hear such a comparison from someone who's tried both.
Very cool! And if there's one company I admire, and would like to work for, it's GitHub.

This may also work for web-apps, btw. Let your users modify something about your web-app, or create something new, that is not just for them, and I'll bet they'll become much more invested (like wikipedia).
Bitching about language benchmarks has been done to death too.
PBS video on rare earth mining in China, specifically mentioning the Prius engine and battery e.g. the battery contains 22 pounds (10 kg's) of lanthanum.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JL4fluj004o
That is true- and I really like WPF/MVVM. Im also pretty impressed with ASP.NET MVC. However until recently there was not significant WPF traction for desktop applications. I really feel that one of cocoas best features is its simplicity. Its logical, powerful and easy to learn. I think WPF/MVVM may have a slightly steeper learning curve.
this is just a PC casemod. bleh.
Toyota creates a Scion theme for Cydia