skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Assuming that's in his init method, he left

-(void) dealloc {

self.newProgram = nil;

}

as an exercise for the reader.
How does Mint grab all your debit and credit card information from your bank?

When they started, they used Yodlee, who now has an app store where you can build on that same platform. They have already done the hard part of integrating with Banks.
http://www.finappstore.com/
Any particular reason for the name?
The thesis being true or not is beside the point - yes, America eats too much sugar. Probably. But the problem about articles like this, and other campaigns to curb "bad eating habits" (like New York City's vendetta against salt and soda) is that it promotes a negative attitude towards food and eating, which feeds the cycle of abuse towards food and towards self esteem, instead of going deeper into the root of the problem itself. Any recovering food addict will tell you that the first thing you learn in rehab is to relearn your attitude towards food. What if, on the subway, people read signs that said "Eat well! Eat what you want! Thumbs Up!" instead of "You're going to die of diabetes if you don't stop eating sugar in toxic amounts"? Of course, that's an over reductive analogy - but my point is that it's not the American Diet that needs change, it is the American Attitude Towards Food that is desperately dysfunctional.
I seem to prefer HN without points because it forces me to actually look closer at the content instead of just skimming for the big numbers.
Yes, since I wasn't sure I was going to stop displaying points on comments, I just hacked the js for updating scores. Though frankly it never was an indication of whether a vote took.
In the article you say, "...we also took the initiative to set our own valuation. Investors were very value-conscious in those days. It's not just enough to be a solid opportunity, you also need to be a good value. We set a price we thought was fair and wouldn't generate a lot of push back."

Don't need to disclose the actual number but how did you determine what was a "fair" valuation. Was it a discount to prevailing valuations? Did all investors buy in at the same valuation or were the terms more generous for the first investors?
Ask HN: What are some tells to look for during a pitch?
My team had a pitch today with an incubator. It was 10 minutes long. 5 minutes presentation and 5 minutes Q&A which wound up being 2 or 3 questions.

Some groups ran over. We just did 10 minutes.

Good sign? Bad sign?

Quickest 10 minutes in my life. Felt like a train ran us over!
I got two here for ya:

Men of Honor - Deniro, Gooding Jr.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yiMuXj_ayc

Scent of a Woman - Pacino
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqsf0XynGz8

If you don't love these you have no heart.
Our actual burn rate was pretty low (~$10K/mo) but it was also unsustainable. No one was being paid and we were just finding enough money to keep a roof over our head. Our "true" burn to keep going would have been much higher than that.
Well, I did think the book is a bit whiny, but not quite to the point of the strong language.
I think it's too soon to actually judge, as we're still in the "ick! change!" phase. Ask again in another week or two. Same for any other experiment you run in the future; unless it obviously and immediately fails, give it some simmer time. (IMHO, of course.)
Maybe making it a coarser indicator would give the best of both worlds... maybe a colored indicator (or grey dot) with color/darkness indicating how many upvotes.
They have a pretty big trojan horse to push cloud services. iOS.
One thing I don't understand (I'm relatively new, I guess): are comments in a thread sorted according to upvotes?

If they are, my vote is for without points, because then I can still skim, but I won't have these numbers to focus on.
That doesn't scale.
As does E-xact:

http://www.e-xact.com/hosted-checkout/
Maybe you could have a color range indicating roughly how good the comment was? I like the feedback a lot the numbers gave but I think hiding the actual numbers would be a good thing so people don't play the numbers game too much.
I'd recommend adding an "Undecided: let the experiment continue" option.
From the article

"at a non-existent subdomain of Typewire's site"

Surely a non-existent subdomain should return a Name Error?

Unless you explicitly asked for a wildcard subdomain (which I realize the T&Cs _say_ you did, even though you never intended too), then I'd expect ww.realdomain.com and qqq.realdomain.com to return NXDOMAIN.

(and I agree with the post, adding a wildcard domain and putting ads on the parked pages is nasty, insisting it's a core part of your business model when called on it is evil, trying to then claim I'm somehow responsible for the ad content on this pages is beyond stupid! I'd certainly never use a registrar that chose to do that to me.)
I think this is almost identical to actually having a number because all it does is draws more attention to those comments.
"With", simply because I'm often too busy or lazy to read entire threads and just want to see the "best" comments.

I'd be okay with hiding the numbers but having some other indicator which could accomplish the same goal.
Some sites like pay trust (intuit) practice screen scraping, but that is a bad practice.
Ordering depends on age and votes. I.e. new comments and top comments are sort of interleaved.
Without. The lack of points make me look closer at the content rather than group think of a post. Even if briefly, a brand new comment is at the top of a thread. Unless I read it there is no way of knowing the quality in comparison to other comments. Would be interesting to know if the average karma per post is going up/down for those that have been around for a while.
Yeah, I like Hacker News without numerical indications of karma, but some sort of idea of how popular a comment is could be nice.
Hyperspeed Modeling-to-Printing Workflow with Tinkercad
The problem is I feel no feedback for voting, so I've stopped doing it.

If I could see the points after I vote I would probably vote even more than before.
There is here on HN a user that makes freely available for download papers behind pay wall, but can't find his account name (I thought I had it bookmarked).

Edit: Ok found it, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=freesciencenow
I felt the way you have put the comment in various shades better. The algorithm already sorts out what comments should float to the top. If people feel an answer is incorrectly placed, they can vote on it to fix it.

Point scoring: yes, it is a problem. HN "feels" somewhat nicer.

Further, there may be different reasons a comment may have been voted up:

1. The comment voted up is considered relevant

2. The reader agreed with the sentiment.

3. The comment was irrelevant, but was humorous.

Similarly, a comment may have been voted down because:

1. The comment was irrelevant.

2. The comment was relevant, but the reader disagreed with the point of view.

3. A polarising comment may end up with a net score of 0, but it is actually very relevant.

4. The comment was relevant, but was delivered in a brusque manner.
I think some of my posts have received more upvotes without points than they would have with points displayed. I wonder if in general there has been more total upvoting without points, as people are simply expressing appreciation or agreement rather than trying to move posts toward a "fair" score (something I've done in the past).

It's difficult to say whether that's a good thing. Since the poll numbers look pretty close so far (though it's only been ~15 minutes as of this writing), maybe it should be an option.
I'm going to be launching soon with PayPal's Digital Goods Express Checkout dealio. In theory, integration is simple, but I've found the documentation to be lengthy, incomplete, and just plain wrong in some cases. I've had speedy support responses, though. The Sandbox is handy, if clunky.

If Braintree had a micropayments option I would almost certainly have tried to go with them.
Not to try and "King Solomon" it, but couldn't you make it a user profile option to display comment points?

Personally, I think it's better now that they are not displayed, but if it reverts back to displaying them, I'd be happy to just not have to see them myself, regardless if other's want to.
Since no one can actually see the points I just gave jerf on his comment. I would like to say ditto. I think its much too soon. Some times there are a need of comments like this one where I would rather just vote up then comment ditto like im doing now.

What about on ASK HN: comments we allow points and on articles, we don't? Just a thought.
We had a lot of interoperability/driver issues with our SAN's (EMC), their mezzanine cards are generally just kind of crap.

When compared to the Palo Cards the are seriously deficient.

We also didn't like that HP PS had to come in to install the system.
That doesn't help for long nested threads.
Ask HN: Where do you get your stock photography?
I'm looking for a place where I can pay a small fee (what is reasonable? $20?) for access to stock photography. Any suggestions? Ideally, it would be cheap, have a large selection of photos (I need pictures of people for my current app), and I need to be able to legally place them in the UI of my distributable application.
They're just now hiring a team? Pathetic.
Thomas made remarks about Zed Shaw probably causing companies to fail and not hiring him. At least, if it is the same video I am thinking about.
Stop groupthink. Please don't show points on comments.
Survey on Technology and Usage Evolution for a term paper. please help :)
Will be more than happy to share the raw data.
I think, based on the small subset of threads I have sampled by a convenience procedure, that not displaying minute-by-minute comment scores avoids the cognitive illusion human beings suffer from called anchoring bias

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

http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/a/anchoring.htm

and helps readers focus on the inherent worth of a comment. That's my general observation from seeing which comments are floating up or down in threads and which comments are graying out.
sxc.hu
Research Reveals Playbook for Shopper Marketing Success
It sometimes depends on what sort of data you are trying to get. Hipmunk could be crawling travel sites. Mint couldn't have been crawling banks as those are protected, unless people were giving them the passwords to their accounts.

Are you familiar with web scraping? Depending on the volume, and type of data you are trying to get, it might work for you. It should at least get you through proof of concept.
I'd be most interested to see whether hiding the scores changed voting behavior appreciably. Do stupid comments get upvoted more or less? It seems like that's the ultimate test, much more than whether people prefer it after trying it for a few days.
I studied linguistics in the 90's, including a class and a few seminars with Chomsky, but left grad school after a year. At this point I'm neither a linguist nor an expert but maintain a slightly more than passive interest in the field.

These kinds of crackpot articles surface every couple of years in the mainstream press, always from people who demonstrate no knowledge of Chomsky's work beyond having read the back cover of his 1965 "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax."

I didn't read the original article, but as described in the Ars article, the thesis makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. The fact that we may have a hard time reconciling how languages can be diverse in their handling of subject/object/verb order doesn't disprove the concept of Universal Grammar. In fact, it's an argument for Universal Grammar that we can even have a coherent conversation about the way all languages handle subject/object/verb order - Universal Grammar is not about providing a set of rules describe all languages, it's about explaining what a possible rule is, and you have to approach that with logic rather than statistics.

The Ars article talks about "languages that have been evolving for a minimum of 4,000 years," as if those languages simply sprung into existence a little more than 4 millennia ago with no relation to anything else. This is the linguistic equivalent of creationism.

[Edit: expanded acronym "UG" to "Universal Grammar" for clarity]
Seconded. When we go on cruises, my wife spends more time haggling over a ring than we've ever done on a house or a car.
Some processors ofter an option that allows you to redirect to a page that they host for the cc information, and then back to your page for checkout.
Javascript-based side project
http://instamapsearch.com
Perhaps it's better if it doesn't scale.
Get a lot of teachers to use it at a free / price sensitive basis. Then offer a district package that really beefs up the offering.

Make the teachers want those features. They can push the district a bit, and you can sell from the other end.
I'm starting to think I like it better without comments. Although if without, then I'd prefer those dots that showed up for a couple of hours on frequently upvoted comments. I really do like a skim option.
Where to get a cost effective 500GB of durable cloud storage?
I am consolidating my personal backup strategy and am looking for the best deal in durable offsite storage.

The best deal I've found so far is Amazon EBS mounted on a spot priced micro EC2, which is about $55 / month in total for 500GB.

Given the cost of raw HDD storage, I'm sure I can do a lot better than this.

What good alternatives do others use?

NB1: I have OSX and Linux servers to backup

NB2: Backblaze would be awesome, but it doesn't support Linux or have an API yet.
Disagree.

Let's stop saying "Please Stop Saying".
I moved from Auckland to Brisbane. The weather and lifestyle are better, people are generally more upbeat and opportunities are better.

New Zealand has a major case of tall poppy syndrome. Australia doesn't have this so much. Most people generally want you to succeed, and help you out.
I'm not sure. I definitely prefer to read with points on. I find it hard to skim a comment thread now, and I have no idea what the community thinks of particular points of view.

As for what it does for the community there hasn't really been time to judge. I've seen a lot less of the usual suspects coming in saying the same the things they always say because they know it'll be highly upvoted.

Could there be a keep it for now option?
I agree. I was lost without the scores at first, but now I think it is useful not having them. However, I would like to see them after so many days/hours when the article is off of the front-page as it would be helpful when referencing older stuff and at that point I don't see any harm including it.
What is the use case for seeing the points on a comment anyway?

All you need to know is that the comments on the toppish are the best ones, and as you scroll down you can stop reading whenever you feel like it's gotten too bad.

I find that without points I'm definitely more focused on the content and are less likely to consciously / subconsciously groupthink.
I think the bigger problem is that highly rated comments below the first comment are pushed out by replies to the first.
> All this is possible because Mercurial stores the name of the branch in the changeset header

Then, everyone who tells that Mercurial is 'distributed' is lying.

Not everyone uses the same VCS. Suppose developer A received the set of patches via e-mail and applied them to his branch. Developer B received the same e-mails and applied them to his own branch. If their local branch names are different, these branches are now diverged forever.
What I used the scores for most was to know when to stop scrolling down when a story was highly commented. I would figure that if there are 100+ comments chances are any threads that start with an initial post < 10 are safe to skip.

Now though, I have very little info as to where I can "safely" stop. (Though I know I've gone too far if the font starts fading!)
Just said the same thing elsewhere but I'm very happy with Stripe and strongly recommend it.
The entire point of hiding comment scores is to allow people to judge for themselves how much a comment is worth – your expression of agreement is ruining that somewhat.
iStockPhoto.com is pretty popular
I upvoted you because you were negative and I believe it's a point worthy of consideration.

Is that ironic?
I do not understand how you find this "bad mouthing", since my ex co-founder did not put in any work. I am just stating the truth of his work ethic and contribution. Also I left my co-founder anonymous, so that his image would not be tarnished.
>Human languages are far more complex than any animal communication system we're aware of...

may be we need to spend some time out of the anthropocentric box. There is a whole world outside of it.
Ironically, I'm actually voting much more than before; perhaps because I'm reading more comments in depth, perhaps because I can't feel like a comment already has its "proper" score. Either way, I like the new way. (Perhaps show points after a few days or weeks, though.)
This is my school of thought; it would be nice to know which are the hot comments. Previously you could skim through only the higher rated ones if you were in a hurry, but now you sort of have to trawl through masses of text to find the gems.

One idea i thought might help the whole points vs. no points situation is changing karma from being the total points over all posts to just being the average points over all posts, so then people will be motivated to create fewer high-quality posts to boost their karma, rather than just trying to saturate HN with lots of posts that nab a point or two each. (somewhat hypocritical maybe)
My gut reaction is to keep them, but I think that's just because I don't like change.

If you do decide to drop them, it might be nice if something different was done for the time-displaying. I keep thinking the minute count in the comment header (pg 22 minutes ago | link) refers to points (pg 22 points [random text] | link). I still feel like jerf's comment (9 minutes ago) has more points than skennedy's (4 minutes ago), even though I know it's not actually true.

Although I'd probably get used to it within a month--it's just an annoying thing during the transition.
Mini-poll: Has everyone noticed how polls don't get very many upvotes? Many of them tend to get a ton of actual poll "votes", but not upvotes. I have always felt like if you are going to vote for a item you should give the poll a vote as well.
Yes, as several people have pointed out here, the trend of hackers and other developers going Mac was noted a long time ago. Paul Graham wrote about it in his essay "Return of the Mac" in 2005.

Scoble is talking about something bigger--not just hackers and developers. He's talking the business guys and the marketing guys. He's talking about people that came from Microsoft.

He's also talking about seeing a lot of iPads, and how maybe Jobs is right about the post-PC world.
Ditto.. also use istock.
I think the scores should appear to a user after (A) that person votes, or (B) 24 hours. Keeping the karma hidden to a user until he or she votes is, IMO, a good idea.

I'd actually argue for keeping the text color the same at 0 or -1, for the same reason.

I don't know that these "contentious exchanges" happen in practice. I remember that a year or two ago, there was the discussion of whether people with high average ratings deserve to have their names appear in orange, and my thought then was that making a fetish of karma averages discourages nested discussions, since root-set comments can end up at 20+, but 6th-level comments, no matter how insightful, are unlikely to get more than a single upvote.
As a sidenote, it's pretty useful sometimes to check if an employer does hire H1-B (like if you're doing your OPT and curious about what lies in the future) especially with smaller companies, so you can check here:

http://www.immihelp.com/h1b-sponsoring-companies-database/

This also includes salaries.
Points are not a substitute for citations or sound reasoning.

Your example is a perfect one of how useless points are in such a case. 5 points or 150, you still didn't learn "why". Could be that people just like the guy who made the comment.
No new news, just a job listing.

edit: Meaning, this is a job listing that could normally apply to a MobileMe position, but given recent speculation about apple expanding their "cloud", the job listing is used as fuel for that fire.
HN isn't only opinions. It also gives advice. How would you HNers who don't like points get advice in an area you know nothing about? What indicators would you use? Whatever sounds the best? Seeing a cumulative score of the opinions of intelligent users helps me.

Perhaps some of you know much more than me and don't need to learn anything. I'm not in that boat. HN helps me learn how other entrepreneurs think and what they think about areas that I'm moving into. This isn't reddit. This is a serious forum and seeing which advice gets the most upvotes helps me tremendously.
I understand now.

It is a very good looking site. I am a bit lost because there is not a great deal of visual cues to what I'm supposed to do. (My screen resolution is 1600x900) and the comment bubble didn't cue me in.

I've added a comment (see http://fab.com/inspiration/submarine-room). We'll see whether this get any reactions.
I am glad that pg managed to remove the karma display while making it clear what comments are below 1 karma, so you don't downvote someone beyond what is reasonable.

I also get the impression that it's affected the discussions for the better.
I think that not having points has some nice qualities, but it also feels like I'm being denied information that I find useful in reading/skimming a thread. I've noticed I find reading HN a lot harder while this has been in effect. (I've also noticed that I tend to unconsciously give numbers in usernames some weight when reading a comment. The same applies for the time it was posted.) One possible compromise would be to display either a number or simple graphic that approximates point totals instead of displaying them explicitly.

Also, I've been planning to write a longer blog post on the following, but given that I've had no time lately and am not likely to have any soon, I'll just float the idea here.

One idea I've had that I think might be interesting is dealing with upvotes or points in terms of logarithmic scales. That is, it takes one upvote/point to get a comment from 1-10, 2 upvotes/point to get from 11-20, etc. (Exact numbers would have to be scaled, of course.) I find that going into a thread an hour or two old and seeing comments with 50-100 points is a major disincentive to commenting, even if I have something to say. That comment or couple of comments and their resulting threads are going to make sure very few people ever read what I've written. An appropriately scaled log-scale system might make it so that really really good comments still get really really high scores, but so that others (which might have simply come too late in the discussion to be competitive on a raw-point scale) still get a chance at being seen.

(One related idea would be to make the point-approximating graphic log-scale even though the points themselves remain the same underneath.)
How do you know he can code it all "in his spare time?"
Could the same thing be argued for submissions as well?
I'd like some sort of indication of which posts are exceptionally high scoring. This would let people skim the comments if they aren't going to read them in-depth anyway, by signalling that maybe this one comment thread is actually a worthwhile read.
Why is there no one on HN that runs a registrar? Seems like there could be room for a startup here that could compete on pricing and offer some unique services.
Another vote for DynDNS. I'm a little surprised to not see them mentioned more - especially here, they're pretty "geek friendly".