skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I once asked one of the leading quantum computing experimentalists how many qubits he could completely control in the lab. He immediately and emphatically replied "none". I always think of this when I see headlines touting achievements such as a 14-qubit quantum computer, or stories about controlled entanglement of 14 qubits. These make good narrative hooks for an article, but they can also hide a lot.

EDIT: A free pdf of a draft of the paper is at: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1009/1009.6126v2.pdf. A quick skim suggests that at 14 qubits the state they actually prepare in the lab is, indeed, not very similar to the state they intend to prepare, with a reported fidelity of about 50%. That's the same fidelity they'd get if they just prepared an all |0> state. While the paper reports terrifically interesting work, this and many other details in the paper suggest quite a subtle picture.
Except that HN already has a commercial purpose: It serves the needs of Y Combinator in some ways. You cannot fill out an application without including your HN handle, everyone on the app has to have one (or get one if they didn't have one already), and Paul reads a lot of the comments here and often is familiar with the person to some degree via their online participation here and that influences decisions concerning who gets into Y Combinator. So whatever gets done here probably needs to be done with an eye towards not undermining that agenda. Making it a commercial enterprise could so radically change the game as to make it useless or even counterproductive for its existing business-related agenda. How much would HN have to be worth to make it acceptable to lose that? I think only PG and the rest of Y Combinator can answer such a question, and possibly only to themselves rather than publicly.
Hide the username and vote count for comments with positive votes. Show the username and vote count for comments with negative votes. Users will be able to see the profile and username of a positive user by clicking on a "see profile" link in place of the username.
My biggest problem with facebook comments is that facebook is blocked at the corporate proxy so i can't see them.

Maybe thats a good thing....
I kinda "talk" to myself in my mind, when I read...
I disagree that credentials are the answer. Weighing with credentials doesn't scale broadly, which is what is needed here, and in fact may aggravate the problem when the expert has a bad day or their authority is applied to inappropriate subjects.

A better solution than "giving the smarter people a louder voice" would be to "give the louder people a smarter voice."

My suggestion below is to add a good way to discreetly provide feedback. Encourage people to send messages to you about what they think of your post, with the goal of encouraging everyone to improve the quality of their posting, and also to be more thoughtful about up/down voting.
Cheese in The Board
Thanks for making Index Tank, I am just starting to implement it into my ruby application and have found it to be easier than any other search option I have tried.
I installed it myself today. The W7 style auto-tiling feature is really pretty convenient when you combine it traditional Linux Alt-clicks. I installed the Compiz Settings Manager and made some modifications to the default keybindings, of course, and sped up the animations but nothing too invasive. I'm going to give it a chance before deciding if I want to go back to my beloved tiling window managers.
gshocks best fit my wrist. its heavy duty and less expensive
I think I'd be more tempted with the opposite. Either way a week's break for HN a year would certainly have an interesting effect on the community.
While 14 qubits is an impressive achievement, one of the biggest problems now seems to be maintaining coherence for more than a few nano or microseconds.
I absolutely agree, but with one exception. When I am learning something (currently: Django 1.3) I really need the extra screen space to peruse the docs, the IDE, the browser, and mauybe an IM or IRC window.

But, when I know the API (like say, CakePHP), I much prefer to grab the laptop, find a quiet corner somewhere, and go to town.

Tomorrow is a laptop day at Cielito Lindo. Iced tea, chips and salsa, and coding. Tomorrow will be a good day.
If you don't think there are any suitable comment engines on the market, why not put your money where your mouth is and pay my company to build one for you.

I think a reasonable budget/timeframe would be $350,000 over 18 months.

I look forward to hearing from you.
You could, but it's not really worth it - you'd end up with a pretty boring language. Also, JITs (in particular PyPy) should be able to get decent performance in the near future without asking the programmer to do anything unusual. In simple terms they assume that types are whatever they find and compile for that (occasionally the assumption is wrong, and they have to correct and do something else, but most of the time you get good performance just by pretending the program was written with static types, even though it wasn't). Obviously it's more complex than that, but you get the idea (the hard part is largely reducing the number of times you need to check you're assumptions are still OK)
The problem is the constant refreshing of stories on the front page. I need to visit a few times a day to have some idea as to what is going on.

If the refresh rate was slower, or the ability for a story to get to the front page would take longer then I would visit less.

At a guess most of the dub/mean comments get made by people who visit many, many times a day and comment out of boredom.

Some method to slow down the entire system would slow down all the posters and would result in longer posts rather than a bunch of witty one liners. Why would anyone go to the trouble of writing an in depth response to anything when it will be gone in three hours.

Increase the quality of the articles and you will increase the quality of the comments.

At least HN doesn't have youtube quality comments yet. :)
[snide comment removed]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Brothers_2#Developm...
The letters are written by individuals trying to make the collective follow their orders. It's inevitable that the letters that surface are the ones that made the bigger impact, and to get there they have to be well written.

The penises and hornets nest thing is just to show the world how edgy and cool and free Anonymous is. I find amusing that many news websites and channels will display the full letter, penises included.
Yup, the same Bob Greene that nobody in Chicago really misses anymore.

http://goo.gl/rcjUo (Spy Magazine Dec '88 via Google Reader)
Those Kinds of Apologies Aren't Apologies
Hey TechCrunch, demand your money back.
> The blub setter/getter comment really is the archetypical "dumb comment", isn't it? Nicely done.

It's actually based on a real comment I saw: the discussion was about migrating a 10 MLOC (iirc) enterprise Java system to git. One comment said that this system must have been "5MM getters, 5MM setters". That struck me as particularly mean and below the belt strike against the programmers who worked on this system: it's very likely there is a good reason why it had to be in Java in the first place (and other JVM languages may not have been available when it was created) and even so, it didn't mean the programmers working on it would have chosen Java as the language themselves (but they were not there when the architectural decision was made). Further more, it added nothing to discussion.

This is not unlike poking fun of somebody for wearing the wrong kind of clothes on the school yard: cheap way to score social points with the plurality of others present, mean and ignorant (may be they can't afford the right kind of clothes, may be they are going hiking right after class).

An insightful comment would have been something like "That's great that you were able to get this into Git, changing a VCS is a painful task. Have you considered using Scala in some of the modules? Functional objects, case classes and implicits could help you model your business domain better, write thread safe code, and get rid of much of the boiler plate."
If you're shy... and if it's appropriate.. wear a shirt or sign that says you're a developer. Many people who go to conferences are looking to chat and find developers.
One problem I know is a problem because I see it all the time is people getting downvotes and not knowing why. If even a fraction of the people who have this problem complain, that's a lot of people who don't understand the unwritten rules.
We live in an age of fear where those in power try to make us afraid of the things we cannot see. Most 'isms (communism, terrorism, fascism) have been used to provoke fear at one time or another. Anonymous gives the fear mongers something to fear. An unseen enemy that is everywhere and nowhere.

I don't always agree with Anonymous' word choice or tactics. But, their work increases truth and transparency in the world and protects little guys from larger bullies. In general, I think they have a valuable place in the world.
Those are people's opinions and should be treated as such. Here's an article with some research behind it:

http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/27840/
Click on our website:

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Perhaps you could train a Bayes classifier on users' voting patterns (beginning with a corpus of good and bad comments) and use that to a) decide how to weight users' votes and b) classify further comments as good or bad. (This makes no attempt to classify comments by their content--that'd be done in the construction of the original corpus.)

Cf. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404283, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404459
The author misses a critical difference between winning a battle and winning the war.

Apple won the first battle for the smartphone. Now google is winning, and based on analyst reports on the comments by the author, it may well be a fight between Google and Microsoft for the winner in the end.

I doubt that the ipad 'took 5-percent market share'. They didn't sell 1/20th as many iPads as PCs did they? Windows 7 sold more than 90 million copies. Most people bought an iPad in addition to their PC (mac or windows). Those that I've spoken with who purchased an iPad as a replacement were very disappointed and ended up still using their pc.
No, the point is to avoid topics - including politics - that are not Hacker News. These are topics that drag down the overall quality of the site. Linkspam or not, this shouldn't be on here and I really wish the flag button would actually do something.
But that doesn't solve the problem of bad comments that get tons of upvotes, in fact it will probably aggravate that problem.
Open Building Blocks for an API
They are too decentralized and disorganized to do anything effective. All they really can do is DDoS people's servers and cause temporary inconveniences.
Teacher suspended over alleged Facebook comment
So, how about that Common Lisp community spirit?
Especially, a ban on "startup news". e.g. AngelGate was not intellectually interesting, but it was important industry news.

Eliminating the exciting news of the moment would make the site less entertaining for those not seeking intellectual stimulation. It would also make the site less popular. Both are good.

A ban would logically include YC company launches - revealing the conflict between YC's business interest and intellectual interest. It would be a defining moment, for what HN is.

"Startup news" could be a sister site, if important.
I think karma is a red herring. I don't think we need better algorithms, we should just remove personal karma.

I can't help but think in the case of RiderofGiraffes particular case karma might have kept him in the community longer than he should have, or burnt him out. Getting to the point where your contribution to a site is the auto-posting of popular content is probably a failure of the system.

In general karma serves as an incentive to contribute, but its a fairly shallow kind of contribution, and I don't this site needs that anymore. Hopefully comment and submission score without accumulation give enough encouragement to quality without encouraging quantity.
This seems like it could help. I tend to read a submission, and maybe a few of the early comments, and then it just stews in my brain for a bit. Maybe an hour or two later I will suddenly have a fully formed idea to share, but by then the story has already left the front page, so I just don't bother commenting. It's not that I only want to comment if I think I am going to get points, but I only want to comment if I think someone is going to read it. I don't really see a point in just shouting out into the void.

Also, having the stories leave the front page so quickly encourages people who are just interested in getting points to throw out whatever garbage they can in hopes of grabbing a few upvotes by being one of only a few comments on a given submission.
Saw a segment about Martin Cooper on 60 minutes. http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6512514n&tag=rela...

The guy is probably over 80 years old today, but is still in pretty good shape.
Sorry, your comment is too short (as is mine)
Ok, forgive my ignorance, but why is it that quantum algorithms can ONLY run on quantum computers? Is it the fact that qubits can have three states? If that is the case (which it likely isn't), why is base 3 better for this work than base 2?
Who knows whether there's any truth to this rumor, but I am interested in discussing such a development.

As far as I can tell from speaking with my iPhone-owning friends, the ability to easily sync their iTunes libraries to their phones is a major selling point. And we all know that the music sync/playing experience on Android isn't really comparable. So this move would make little sense if Apple believe that iTunes' exclusivity on the iPhone drives a lot of phone sales.

On the other hand, there are now a ton of Android-owning people who would probably buy a lot more iTunes music and movies if it were available seamlessly on their phones. Seen that way this move would make perfect sense.

I'm not sure I'm convinced of the latter. It's probable that a lot of Android owners already use iTunes for music and movies and just copy it to their phones manually.
Images of US Military Space Drone
Interesting that after commenting my down vote arrows reappeared...
Reddit does this pretty well, they often feature a submission with a dot instead of the number of votes. Perhaps HN could randomly put a thread at the top without showing votes.
Does trickle-down economics provide a net increase in standards of living?
Does anyone have other splash pages that they think are well designed like About.me's?
It should be easier for me to give mice brain tumors.
I have read a bunch of Lucas' posts on The Board (through Planet Gnome), but I still think that I am not sure why The Board is useful for people who do not need to keep a record of the dates and times they create content on their computers.

I admit that there might be something I am not getting - does The Board integrate with other systems or applications in innovative ways that are not coming across in the static screenshots and blog posts I am reading?
Cool repost to Tech2IPO: http://tech2ipo.com/5890
Not strictly true. In real life, sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't. It depends on the particulars.
My thought was to have a selection of canned responses that encourage this sort of feedback without allowing it to devolve into arguments.

But anything that encourages feedback and discourages defensiveness will be effective.
Facebook / Twitter analysis, if it has 10,000 shares on Facebook/Twitter chances are we can find it somewhere else. Would any of us have missed that Color raised $41 million dollars? Probably not.

maybe ensuring the articles are at least a week old, that instantly removes 99% of the current events which are generally irrelevant and if it is relevant it will still be so in a week.

You might want to consider just shutting it down for 2 months, the great users will likely come back. It will definitely lower the dunbar number quite a bit.
That page has the most elaborate and geeky captcha I've ever seen. It's also not very practical considering that something like 7 percent of men have some degree of color blindness. I can barely tell the difference between 3 and 5 on that scale.
As a relatively new user I'm genuinely interested: which 3 or 4 types of comments and posts do you find interesting or representative of the old HN? I'm willing to change what I comment on or just move on, but I'm just not clear what the old HN did consist of? For an example of my confusion, I find current HN threads can mistake disagreement for originality, so "I disagree" comments are much more respected than "I agree, and also" comments. But then I read complaints about HN and it seems some users actually want more of an always-disagree culture and not less.
He's comparing Actors to STM, not Scala to Clojure.

I'd be more interested in a comparison of Clojure's STM to ScalaSTM (http://nbronson.github.com/scala-stm/index.html).
I don't know if he fails to realize it so much as it just makes him want to rant. Whatever the case may be, what works on a social network might not work for a cross-platform interface.

I miss Disqus at TC. I think they were working on a solution for problems with commenting. I don't get that sense from Facebook comments.
interesting; I'll look forward to this when 11.04 leaves beta. though recently I've found that just auto-hiding the two default Gnome panels and calling up gnome-do to open applications works well with my workflow.
Combining your comment and DarkShikari's (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404278), it seems like a good shootout should simply compare the simplest, most idiomatic solution possible in each language.
There has been much talk of better days, better comment threads and such.

I've been here less than 2 years but I ask if anyone can spare the time and dig up some classic examples of stories and threads, and great back and fourth comment based conversations...

I realize this is difficult given the non-archival nature of HN but can anyone show a "then" versus "now" difference?
Perhaps a submission should only fall off the page when X unique visitors have clicked on that link.

That way good content with poor headlines still has a shot.
Whoa. I'm looking for exactly this sort of job in Raleigh. I just submitted my resume on your job site. Hit me up at wednesday @ gmail.com, I'd love to chat.
MP/M allowed you to do this on a microcomputer (like an Altos 8000) in 1979. It was text-based, but it worked quite well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP/M
You'd get a lot of people creating multiple accounts to game this.
It's less a road than a well...

Good riddance.
You could get chips (er votes) relative to your average comment score.
430+ comments on a Sunday. One might say that for HN'ers, the quality of posts comes in at a close second to having this community of peers to converse with, argue with, share with and even make lame jokes with.
Thanks for the feedback - I've also been thinking of some kind of open beta with a kicker for users that get others to try it as well.
I fail to see how failed attempts at DDOSes protect the little guys.
Subtracting "reputation" as a requirement in that equation has to have at least a small positive value, doesn't it? I don't know how many independent researchers there are who have a chicken-and-egg problem with reputation because they don't know how to disclose both visibly and responsibly. But if there are any, Zed's method seems beneficial.
Fork.ly had an awesome splash page before they launched, it was kind of pyramid-scheme-like where the more friends you got to sign up, the higher your priority on their invite list. They talk about it in their blog[1]

LaunchRock[2] looks a cool splash page builder that's built around the same idea of being social/viral. It seems like a great strategy, I expect we'll see a lot of new startups adopt something similar. Ironically, LaunchRock hasn't actually launched yet, they're using their own splash page service to launch themselves.

[1] http://blog.forkly.com/post/2341870004/a-viral-launching-soo...
[2] http://launchrock.com
> Acknowledgment of mediocrity is the big first step, and a culture of innovation and design will follow.

I don't think you can start a culture of innovation with a "we were never really good at it" attitude.

They can innovate and build stuff nobody has done before. They just haven't, so far with the exception of Kinect, been able to build stuff nobody built before that people also wanted to buy.
I got the impression this was more of the Y! Answers option. You're in essence "leveling up" and with each level up you're getting more features unlocked. You unlock the ability to submit stories, or the ability to upvote/downvote comments. I didn't take that as point cost to perform action X.
Good thing. That's exactly what we need in the US.
The biggest double take for me was when they called GeoHot a "fellow hacker". Excuse me? GeoHot is a hacker. Anonymous are script kiddies. Big difference.
Borrow a verse from the book of MetaFilter: people need an area for meta discussions, and it's better for the signal:noise ratio if it's in a separate but equal space.

In fact, there's lots to be learned from MetaFilter. Two long but useful videos containing Mathowie's wisdom:

- http://vimeo.com/11916466

- http://vimeo.com/21043675
Before commenting, I viewed it a second time, pausing it several times (it's at 1:20, if you'd like to confirm the following). After about 10 seconds of training data (500 frames), he starts to draw with it. It loses tracking four times (not counting the two times his hand goes off-screen), and it's not obvious to me why - there don't seem to be major rotations or changes of his finger placement. In practical use, that would be annoying.

btw: my comment originally included praise for his work - but I thought his merit was obvious and that it distracted from my comment's point, so I deleted it. Instead, I'll just note that the first telephone also had lots of room for improvement - practically, the first of anything does. The cool thing was the idea of the telephone, and then making it real. How good it was is irrelevant compared with that it became real. It doesn't take away from the immense task of doing something that had not been done before or even imagined. Quality is not as crucial, because once you have the basic thing, it's (relatively) easy to iterate to improve it. I think having the idea and making it real deserves far far greater admiration than the quality of the prototype algorithm and implementation. Just as with the telephone.
Last year, 25 hedge fund managers earned a combined $22 billion
It should be harder for you to post this on HN.
The lack of virtual desktops in Windows is especially unfortunate since at least Windows 3.51 (but perhaps Windows NT 3.1) the support for multiple desktops (and multiple interactive login sessions) has been part of the operating system, but not properly exposed to users.
If you think this is bad, try doing something involving humans. Want to have people go to a website and fill out a survey? If you're a university researcher, be prepared for 20 pages of paperwork and a 6 month delay while a research ethics committee considers your application.

Unless you find a way to hack the process, of course. In one case I know, the surveyees were signed on as co-investigators, in order to take advantage of a loophole allowing researchers to do research on themselves without ethics approval.