skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pg,

Is it possible that building on a 'broken' system isn't enough to fix the problem(s)?

The reason I point this out is that I think its possible that as a community grows the assumptions about the community become a part of the code and they aren't necessarily true anymore.

When a community is small by definition it has shared values. As the community grows it starts to fragment those shared values, but the code assumes that they still have shared values.

I am indifferent to the idea of down voting stories, but the code doesn't allow it because the assumption being made is that the stories being posted are being checked against the common community values, when in fact newer members (perhaps my self included on the newer point) see hacker news as the next technology/startup based Digg/Reddit/Slashdot, etc.
$20 discount only?!... hope they keep the ads to the screen saver.
There was once a billboard campaign on the tube in london that played on impostor syndrome, while managing at the same to be a double entendre.

The slogan went: "Faking it? Try a new position."
Amazon Announces Cheaper, $114 Kindle With Ads
Relevant: http://python.mirocommunity.org/video/1186/djangocon-2009-dj...

(Avi's pioneering talk about the trend of moving logic to the client.)
As we all know we get what we measure, right?

The problem here fundamentally is that there's not a clear metric which correlates with "good", because there's no clear definition of what "good" is. (This is my utility function. There are many utility functions like it, but this one is mine.)

It's a social problem, and as such I'm intensely suspicious that any technology can fix it. In particular, I suspect that any technological solution which "works" for some people is going to amount to a dictatorship of that sort of people - which is OK! It's a big internet! Everyone else can go somewhere else! - but doesn't hit our geek pleasure centres like an elegant algorithmic solution is.
In other words: if I were trying to fix this, I'd cut straight to the chase – find and engage some people who shared my understanding of what a good HN looks like, and empower them to moderate aggressively and wield the banhammer.
> If the two sides agreed on what constituted justice, there wouldn't be a court case.

And indeed this is the entire point of the common law: to provide independent decisions, according to rules, in order to settle disputes without violence.

Endless appeals don't always work either -- you actually need a legal reason to appeal beyond "I disliked the decision". You need something like "The judge was wrong on points of law X, Y and Z" and you need the appellate court to agree that there might be something to review.

Most appellate courts look pretty dimly on appealing for the sake of appealing. Plus their time is limited, so they will tend to pick cases with broader legal consequences that will impact more than the disputants.
the dots were there 1 hour ago, pg changed it back.
I like the way this discussion is going. It is strange how karma could encourage people to act in a counter productive way.

1. How about not displaying the karma of new users for the first year?

2. The second insight is multiple postings from a news site. HN was good at recommending "hard to find" articles or esoterica. Where there are multiple people submitting the same link, it is probably not going to be hard to find or esoteric in the first place.
Well it depends on truly what the scope of the project is. You could possibly find freelancers and coders at

http://www.rent-acoder.com/
http://www.project4hire.com/
http://www.freelancer.com/

or other sites that could match you with programmers. It also depends on what the project is exactly for, mobile, web app etc. and how many hours it is going to take to finish the project (an estimate). From my experience, it is very hard to get a US based programmer to do the job in that tight a budget, but it is of course dependent on the projects scope.

Hope that helps.

PS I do know some development companies that can give you a quote.
No, it should make you feel proud -- understanding the world through 26 (or other small numbers of) alphabets.

(Speaking as an asian.)
AskJeeves and Dogpile are still going strong. I could have sworn Dogpile didn't look so spammy before..
I did not read the paper yet, but COW btrees are interesting for practical reasons since it is possible to update the tree just writing in append-only mode, that is nearly the only way to avoid fsync (or alike) but still avoiding trivial corruptions (the new root node is always written at the end of the update). Otherwise you either use fsync as a write barrier or live with the problem that from the OS to the disk itself writes reordering can corrupt very easily your data structure in the event of a crash.

However I think that the real problem here is not at the algorithmic level, but at OS API level: just a provocation, don't you think that in the era of SSD drives where seeks are cheap is strange we resort to append only data structures?
Stateful JavaScript Web Applications.

but far more important... which animal will it have?
no one cares if it was titled "perl" or "scripting in perl" or "perl. definitive guide"...
You need platform-specific APIs to give you direct access to the relevant hardware, which you then need to be able to use efficiently.

Yes, and Firefox already has platform-specific Direct3D and OpenGL backends. Remember that a browser today needs to be able to accelerate not just video but all content and compositing, so they already have to put in that investment. The investment in video is just an additional delta.

I'd rather see applications just feed the bytestream to the OS to decode using the best means available, even if it means support for new codecs is a bit slow. (Although an OS-level codec plugin architecture like QuickTime Components can get you software decoding for new or obscure codecs.)

Hm. "I'd rather see applications just feed the HTML to the OS to render using the best means available, even if it means support for new HTML features is a bit slow. (Although a engine-level plugin architecture like ActiveX or NPAPI can get you some sort of rendering for new or obscure features.)" How is your assertion materially different?

If my GPU has a high-quality, high-speed H.264 decoder, I shouldn't have to worry about which browsers will use it. They should all default to the OS-provided decoding and playback methods unless there are sound technical reasons not to. If I want to use a new codec that's not supported by the fixed-function decoder, I shouldn't have to worry about which web browsers have bothered to include the necessary OpenCL code to decode on my GPU. I should just be able to install one codec that hooks in to the OS's media framework, and all browsers should use that first.

- See http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2009/06/directsh... for some problems with using OS codecs, some of which apply to Quicktime too.

- You're ignoring the fact that browser makers may think supporting H.264 is against the principles of the web and will damage it.
Modern JavaScript Application Architecture
Building Stateful JavaScript Apps
JavaScript Web Apps Demystified
i personally think it's not very correct to call hieroglyphs characters and assign each of them a code.

i may be wrong but i think that there is an growing number of hieroglyphs as there is an infinite (growing) number of words; and every h. consists of more primitive parts - i think they should be coded so that the sequence of primitives would form a hieroglyph like in european languages letters form words
Timing can play such a critical role in an article gaining traction, that a lack of votes is not necessarily indicative of a lack of quality - e.g. right now, there is probably a worthy article on the new page that someone actively using no-procrast won't see because it is in competition with this announcement from PG.

Aside, I like not showing the points on articles.
Sams Teach Yourself HTML and CSS in 24 Hours
I'd love if you tried the shipped idea suggested by ericb[1]. A simple input-form in the profile page that someone could put a link to and that would light up a 1x1 pixel next to their username if they've shipped a startup yet.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1918772
I really don't think that duplicate content was ever a problem for HN. It's just not an issue.

The community has done a very good job of providing links to earlier discussions and has generally accepted that occasional repeats of old content are nothing to get worked up about and may even be desirable.
I absolutely agree. Although the comments on engadget suggest buying the cheap version and reflashing it with vanilla firmware which could be a nice thing to do.
The writing of judgements tends to resemble a recursive descent parser. The case itself will cause the parties to survey the tree of legal arguments quite thoroughly; then it will be up to the judge to present the version of the law they believe is correct.

Judges don't like being appealed against, so as a rule they will treat every argument made before them when rendering judgement. Otherwise they leave an opening for an appeal on the basis that certain arguments weren't settled.
Grim Tweeper, Openbook and Tech Tutorial website
How about "Modern JavaScript Applications"? Couldn't an app built with this methodology be wrapped into an iOS/Android application?

Edit: I almost want to just up-vote addyosmani's entry. :)
This is why I'll probably never be rich.

Something I can get done in a weekend, I'd release it free and Open Source. Plus, lifetime commitment? (for something supposedly dead simple?).
> does it have a name?

The division of labour. Different people have different strengths and preferences. Gains are made from trading on those differences.
Hammers don't cost $2500.

Sometimes heavy equipment is added on by contractors. For instance, I can dig this ditch with a shovel, or we can rent a backhoe, and have it done in a few hours.
You can thank Marissa Mayer for all the boring UIs Google puts out. Engineers making design decisions, you know. (I'm an engineer myself, btw.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/business/01marissa.html
Cool idea, but there is some serious banding on that gradient in the background. Woah. Can somebody through some dither on that?
I've been reading the ebook of Wiseman's book, _The Luck Factor_. It's quite interesting, and Wiseman includes a few exercises where the reader can fall into the same trap (hopefully I haven't spoiled anything by mentioning them).
Yes, just as Federal Express it's privately owned. US government has 20% of the shares. Until a 1976 change in Federal Reserve Act the list of owners was public: http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol...
Not sure I agree.

I feel that you should get at least 10 people to agree they are willing to pay for your product in order to validate it. It might not be true for all scenarios, but it definitely seems valid for the idea that is presented in the blog post.

This is an excellent article that lists some valid points why you should start marketing the day you start coding.
http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2010/10/14/startup-marketing-pa...
lie.

from $199 to $108.

very different from free.
no points in comments: very interesting, a lot less bias. Unfortunately fast scanning of the best things is compromised. Probably it's still a good idea to avoid points, at least for a few days. When the comment is old enough there is no reason to don't show points again.
The Javascript Age >> http://metamarketsgroup.com/blog/node-js-and-the-javascript-...
I don't know if I'd be interested in cultivating customers who are that price sensitive, especially with so many publishers insistent on the 12.99 price point for new Kindle books. Seems like a weird move for Amazon.
It sounds like you should be able to recover the priorities using their API https://github.com/blog/831-issues-2-0-the-next-generation#c... but I agree that the decision to upgrade everyone immediately was a bad move especially since it resulted in feature-regression.
David, I was coming to the same conclusions as well. One downside is that to the new user, the articles appearing would be what is considered interesting by the "average" user.

One way to counteract this is to have the new user match, say, pg's profile.
Definitely "Javascript Web Applications" out of those options. Apps is misleading and informal. "Javascript Applications" is ambiguous, and the only people who will understand "Stateful" probably already know what's in the book. "Modern Javascript" is also good because that's basically what you're talking about here. If you focused on the realtime aspect of web app dev, you could even go with something like "Realtime Javascript Applications" - I bet there are a LOT of people searching and looking for books on that subject (I know I was).
On the front page, can you switch the order of 'flag' and 'N comments' - I think it's a 'Fits Law' type thing. I click into the comments for basically every story, but having to get between the time stamp and the "| flag" indicator ads a second of hesitation to make sure I'm not accidentally flagging something that I want to read.
This is HN. Instead of voting, you should find some way to A/B test the options.

That said, all the options are plain and descriptive, so I'm not sure how much difference it will make. Then again, who knows? Maybe people will buy it just because they're searching for "web app" or "stateful" or something.

If that's the case, maybe you can see if there are any relevant Google keyword trends to take advantage of.
The case hasn't been litigated yet. Sure, he's eventually going to take sides... but this is way premature.
Many jurisdictions have torts for abuse of process or malicious prosecution. The trick is proving it.

(IANAL, this isn't legal advice).
Ask HN: How to pay developers in Europe?
I just paid out the first quarter's profit shares for my startup, x264 LLC (commercial licensing arm of the x264 open source project). However, the majority of the major developers for the project are in Europe, so the best way to pay them seems a bit less obvious.

This time I did:

1. US developers: Mail a check.

2. UK developers: Mail a check (their banks are apparently fine with this).

3. Sweden/Germany/Austria/France: Wire transfer in native currency.

4. Russia: Wire transfer in US dollars to a special account set up by the developer.

The problem with this is that the wire transfer prices charged by the bank (Bank of America) are exorbitant: not only is it $35 per transfer, but they slash off another 5% in the form of exchange rate gouging. This latter will probably become a significant cost (~1-2% of total income) as income rises.

Is there any better option for international payments in the ~$500-$25000 range?
Either reversed, or can we get the comment link up to the right end of the top line of the submission, so that I'm not forced into scanning over and navigating over the "flag" button on the way to reading the comments?
A big issue I can foresee with this (other than confidentiality, etc) is simply the time required to give a quality review of a decent sized block of code, and making sure you get back a fair review in exchange.

You can review and give decent feedback on a small snippet of code fairly easily and quickly, but that's of limited value in a real project.

To be able to give a decent review (eg beyond a cursory "You should name that variable better, or your indentation sucks), requires that either the amount of code you are reviewing is so small that you can grok it quickly (limiting the value of the review), or that you spend at least some time familiarizing yourself with the rest of the code base so be able to gauge the impact of the code changes.

This is all good if the person you're trading reviews is prepared to spend the same amount of time on your code, but for example, I find it very frustrating when I spend 30-45 minutes giving a detailed review of a website on http://feedbackroulette.com (a similar concept, but for websites reviews), only to get back a 3 sentence review in exchange that was clearly bashed off in about 30 seconds. Awarding points for reviews goes someway to alleviate this, but still it's a real pita...
Your view of everything is skewed. As a rule, almost everything works "well". Crime is rare, legal disputes are usually settled sensibly, politicians work hard etc.

News is about the exceptions to the rule. "Everything Normal" does not make an interesting headline.
That's not what due process means. There's no law that says they have to give the defendant notice and opportunity to stop infringing before filing suit.

If the system needs reform, then reform the system. But a judge shouldn't be prematurely taking sides against a litigant who's playing by the rules as they currently exist.
I set up a Convore group as well: http://convore.com/3taps-hackathon/
>Stateful JavaScript Web Applications.

Agreed. It's the only one that properly describes the subject.

Also agreed that if it's any good people will just refer to it using the animal anyway.

EDIT: "Modern" would also be a good choice.
This might be worth experimenting with.

One of the problems of such communities is the echo chamber nature of hearing the same voices. I'd be interested to see what happens if you made it so that the more karma points you had, the harder it is for your comment to rise to the top. If a post by a leaderboard member is really interesting, then it'll get upvoted a lot- but because of the group think aspect leaderboard members tend to get upvoted a lot because they're in the leaderboard.

nb: This problem may be mitigated by not having scores visible.
If you were using paypal then it would allow the user to pay in any currency and in a way increase the target audience and wouldn't possibly put a buyer off.

If you are worried about currency fluctuations, would it be possible to have a US bank account which profit would enter which would then be used to pay for anything US based therefore decreasing risk when converting $CAD to $USD? If so, then you would only transfer money to $CAD when the currency rate falls into a certain range for example 0.95-1.xx
It is interesting that Amazon calculate $25 to the the ARPU they can achieve from the advertising generated over the life of the device, yet for most people I've asked $25 doesn't seem to be enough of an incentive/saving.

Not sure what conclusion to draw from that.
Given the $10-13 price point for most Kindle books, I'm honestly surprised Amazon isn't giving the device away to customers who already spend more than $100 / year and don't have one.
yeah but still the design doesn't belong to the designer but the company. Any code you write, isn't yours, its the property of the company that is paying you.
I wonder if ads will be specific to what you have on your Kindle or (even scarier) what you have purchased at Amazon.com.

This also brings up an interesting question; what you read on your kindle, is it as ad-worthy as what you read online?
I remember when Issues 1.0 came out, I tested it for only a short while before I found a blocking bug with vote counts. (The bug I found allowed anyone to downvote an issue as many times as they wanted). I wonder if the voting feature didn't get as much usage as it would have because it was buggy?
Also while you are hacking on it pg, can you implement the bookmarklet hack to collapse/expand comment trees? often it's fun to be able to just see each conversation starter and dive into one that's interesting, rather than the expanded list view which is hard to parse what are the interesting conversations.

this is the code, i don't recall where it came from:

https://gist.github.com/914520
Charge USD. Anytime I see a bill in CAD I immediately start worrying about conversion rates and possible customs charges, and if I can get the same thing for within 5% by doing a USD transaction I will.
Microsoft on mounting ISOs - Resolved - Won't Fix
This is an easy way for Amazon to start measuring the elasticity of demand for advertising. This will allow them to properly price advertising in the future. I wouldn't buy one, but this is a great idea.

Now if only Amazon allowed the public to see Kindle sales figures...
what ever happened to personal freedom?
Microsoft Bing Controls 30% Of Search Market, Google Slowly Sinking
Rather than keep trying to keep educating people that you don't want them to do what apparently is natural (I think digg and reddit et al have conditioned the upvote/downvote behavior upvote things based on agreement/disagreement/amusement.)

Maybe what's needed is to try an explicitly enable both these behaviors. Something like let the arrows become "popularity/reddit-mode" and add a separate "excellent" button next to "flag". Then you have two metrics without the annoying slashdot vectors. You can then either use the up/down votes or just leave them there as placebos.
Semi-OT, but the ad for Freshbooks is pretty ingenious (giving incentive to not just sign up or click through, but to actually use the service to get info from you Andrew). Was that something they came up with, or something you came up with to drive traffic towards the sponsor (if you can say)?
You really mean hyeroglyphs? Or ideographs/ideograms?
I think it's worth pointing out that this vulnerability is being exploited by people opening Word docs (on Windows) that they get via a phishing email. The last 0-day exploit against Flash that I saw posted on HN was the same thing but for a swf embedded in Excel. Not that these things aren't bad, but saying "Flash 0-day" sounds an awful lot more doomsday-ish than "0-day exploit if you open an attachment from a phishing email". Not trying to make excuses for Adobe, but people around here are pretty quick to jump on the overly-dramatic bandwagon when it comes to Flash.
My gut reaction was also positive, but then I realised I miss being able to see what comments the community finds valuable. Ordering within a thread as a measure of value only works if there are multiple child comments for a particular comment.

Sometimes people post long, multi-paragraph comments. Seeing a comment like that at 2 points makes me less inclined to read it than if it were at 30 points. Not being able to see points will make skimming comments slower.
We're just Ask.com now and are the 40th ranked site on the Internet according to April Alexa estimates.
Looking for success stories from rejected YC, TS or 500 applicants
Adventures in IPv6
small counterpoint to your counterpoint: I had him for 15-381 (Intro AI for non-CMU people), it was his first time teaching the class, and his lectures were substantially better than those of the other professor he co-taught with and had been teaching the class for many semesters. He was either my favorite or second favorite CS prof at CMU.
Really? I had the opposite reaction. I found the simplicity drew me to the text. At the end I clicked the footer because it seemed shiny/pretty, and it took me right to the email form.

I feel like a lot of websites, especially the ones which want me to sign up or understand their service, throw way to much crap at me for it to make sense. Two sentence mission statements, ominous screenshots, and cheeky feature lists only go so far --- in this case I appreciate the straightforward mission statement.
I more or less agree that Ayn Rand's philosophy is incomplete (especially aesthetics) and lacking nuance (there's not a lot about altruism as enlightened self-interest), but it is telling that neither the letter nor the post which elicited it attack her logic, or even recognize logic as a tool.
Negotiating can be learned and trained, it's nothing innate and static.

This book helped me learn something about it; despite its name.
http://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Power-Negotiating-Inside-Negot...