skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, totally interesting. Thanks for posting! I had a good chat about this today in the office; on the one hand, it's insanely daunting to imagine how you'd actually trim it down.

On the other hand, myspace's social graph, especially around entertainment is arguably the only valuable thing at the company right now.

As a thought experiment, I asked "What if color.com owned myspace's traffic and social graph?" My answer is that color.com would be worth much more than the $250mm TC seems to think Myspace will sell for. Of course, that's an inflammatory company to pick, but choose your own social company. What about groupon, or what if Microsoft injected myspace into the Live community somehow?

All the moving parts / separate units are probably not adding much value right now, unfortunately. Since I haven't used myspace in many years I have no real domain knowledge here, though. And, I browsed it for a while today after thinking about this, and agree -- the site is huge, and complex, and as I recalled a nightmare of horrible personal design and usability. On the plus side, Bieber looked totally awesome.
Any chance of getting Python/Django support in the near future?
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As someone who recently joined HN, I think it would be very reasonable for new members to have lots of restrictions.

I won't pretend to understand the situation fully but I believe there is a learning curve with any new community before new users fully understand it.

I understand there is already a number of karma milestones for features but I think this system could be taken further to be even more beneficial.

- Perhaps a new user can do nothing for the first 30 days or similar.
- Followed by original comments only, no replies (except to own thread).
- Once some karma is achieved, allow replies and up-voting and slowly increase their abilities.
- Once they have significant karma allow them to make submissions, this may stop lots of random submissions in the hope of quick karma.

In my opinion the greatest benefit from this is not in preventing new users from participating, but in slowing them down long enough to understand and respect the current community so they may participate in a constructive and non disruptive way.
Actually, this is not correct. While recursion is typically implemented in the form of a function which calls itself, that is not exactly what recursion means. In fact, "recursion" derives from "recur", which simply means to repeat, or re-occur, which, when you look at it, is exactly what a "recursive" function is designed to do (without all that messy for/next, do/while jazz). Calling itself is just a particularly clever, interesting, and elegant way to do that.

To really illustrate the point of recursion, consider showing your students one of the simplest recursive algorithms out there. You can find it on the back of many shampoo bottles:

* Lather.
* Rinse.
* Repeat.
I'm not sure if his cautionary tales are that discouraging. That said, I work at a company at which about half of us are yellow+ TopCoders, IOI finalists, ICPC finalists, or something of that nature, so I'm surrounded by people who are very similar to his cautionary tales.
PG, if you really want to get hard data on whether comments have gotten "meaner", I'd be happy to help with that.

It seems the chief complaint is that comments are no longer increasing the happiness and confidence of the community, but rather raising anxiety and hostility. My startup is based on an algorithm for measuring the emotional impact of text and does in fact measure these four emotions.

I'd be pleased to help measure how comments' effects on readers have changed over time. I would do it myself, but I know you don't want me anonymously scraping every comment for the last 3+ years, and it'd be much faster to just get a data dump from the server.

Drop me a line if interested. :)
If you replace "Java Killer/Successor" with "New Programming Language" I think the title makes a lot more sense.
Meters are not just straight up kW/h devices. They can be used for power quality analysis, fault analysis, and whatever else the supplier can meter. http://www.selinc.com/metering/

Note that in certain deployments you might have meters operating as sensors (SCADA type setup), then some sort of central station running logic. So you of course can consider that an architecture for a hacker to exploit.

For a brief note, this describes what happens:
http://www.smartgridnews.com/artman/publish/commentary/Why_Y...

You can find some information in relation to this here: http://blog.iec61850.com/ which is run by http://nettedautomation.com/.

Cybersecurity in the power industry is a rising wave. It's been growing, but Stuxnet really drew many eyes onto SCADA / power systems in the industry.
Will you provide examples of mediocre comments? (Feel free to point any of mine out.)
You're not the only one that feels that way. Sadly, the elitism implied by "wow, our community sucks now" is overlooked by everyone practicing it.
There are no benchmarks showing JVM-based programs using less memory than most any other roughly equivalent programs on different runtimes. The JVM's reputation as a pig also comes from people's personal experiences -- even a simple email proxy (davmail) is easily at 100mb resident, over 1gb virtual.
Filtering comments by account age sounds a bit too xenophobic to me. However, your idea of an apprentice system is interesting. This is a random idea based off that, but what if new users were given posting privileges only after demonstrating that they can recognize quality comments by upvoting them? Since HN no longer shows vote count for comments, if a user is able to consistently recognize quality comments, then there is a higher probability that he/she will also contribute quality comments. This would effectively require users to read and learn HN posting etiquette/standards before they can start posting themselves.
This might be better suited for an Ask HN, but he mentions this in his slide on what not to do,

"Avoid self-destructive behavior/career-limiting moves"

In the cautionary tales he gives, I really don't see this, except for the missing going to grad school. What is a career-limiting move, and how would I be able to both identify one and maneuver around it?
Yeah it is a pretty easy concept to develop however the stumbling block for most people is the time required to implement the software to automatically enter members into the competitions. It takes longer than you would think.
I think the biggest gain with Aperture was speed. 2 was sloooooow. 3 still isn't the best, but it's much, much faster than 2.
There is no way I would ever take a job at such a joint, even if the original offer was fantastic.

If I create a lot of value, I want to be able to capture a portion of it in my salary. I don't want to capture some average wage determined by a manager who doesn't have the guts to admit, even privately, that some people create more value than others.
In the case of a social news site like hn, the external factors have changed though. People now use such web sites for marketing purposes. So, they don't post a site to hn because they think hn readers could profit from it but primarily because they expect profits from visits by hn readers. (Since hn is about startups, this probably isn't that surprising and I'm most likely not telling you anything new. :-)

I think posting an article should have some "costs" or somehow "hurt" posters. They should be rewarded for posting an article if hn readers like it.
The Future of Social Networks
As the community increases in size, it's normal for this 'decline' to appear. I believe rather than focus on tweaking karma points or moderation is to introduce list functionality ala twitter so people can create their own HN within HN, as they see fit. As newer HNers start contributing, they can be tracked and eventually added to lists so it doesn't stagnate. Doing this will ensure old-timers will be happy while the community gets bigger and the quality 'declines' relative to x years ago.
This seems like a good time to plug tarsnap (happy user), which was specifically designed to address such concerns.
I just hacked together a large standing desk this weekend using cabinets from Ikea:

http://petermarks.info/2011/04/11/the-spaceship-2-0/

The criteria for this project was 1) Cheap 2) high enough to rest my elbows on, 3) large enough for all my gear, 4) Good looking enough to not embarrass my girlfriend.
lal.com?
I've had a lot more upsetting experiences in the comment threads here in the past year and a half than I did a few years ago. I find time on the site occasionally brining out my worse side as well. A few times, it's lead me to shut down my whole browser and go out for a walk.

As far as the stories are concerned, I don't think they ever all resonated with me. To be honest, I probably got more out of Reddit in early 2006 than I ever did out of this forum. Part of that maybe been because of one time benefits of becoming an online junkie-- finding your essays, seeing some of Steve Pavlina's older pieces, learning about a wide variety of niche interests, etc...

Since getting to HN, I'd say that about 1/3 to 1/4 of the front page has been consistently interesting. Too much of the rest has been self-promotional blogging, valley gossip and current fads (diet, exercise, productivity, etc).

I still wouldn't say that I see the site in a bad light. Both the stories and the discussions are a valuable resource. I'm just diverting a bit more focus towards stack exchange sites and screencasts.
The "value averaging" strategy provides an emotionless way to follow the advice to buy low and sell high while buying an index.

The idea is to fix a regular amount you want to increase your portfolio by, say monthly.

Let's say it's $100.

The first month, you buy $100 of shares. Total share value: $100.

The second month, your share value has fallen to $80, so you buy $120 of shares. Total share value: $200.

Third month. Shares have surged and are now worth $250. You buy $50 of shares. Total share value: $300.

Fourth month. Shares continue to surge. Your portfolio is now worth $420. You sell $20 of shares and place the cash in reserve. Total share value: $400.

Described in detail by Michael Edleson:

http://www.amazon.com/Value-Averaging-Strategy-Investment-Cl...

Probably the first "intelligent layperson" investment guide I've ever seen with instructions on how to perform monte carlo simulations.
Freelance work. $50 x 10 hours per week = $2000 per month.
Probably the best HN comment on recursion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2440869
How would we even answer this with the 3 sentences you gave us? We know nothing about you or your abilities.
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There are nonlossy transforms that can be done even with lossy formats, e.g., rotating a jpeg. ok, that's not reencoding.
I find it entertaining that Java's apparent successor will be, in many ways, a copy-cat of modern C#. It wasn't long ago that C# was created in Java's image.

If this language is not continually enhanced, then it will fall behind. Java has always had trouble with this because of committees and fear of actually saying "no" (real deprecation). I swear "it'll be in Java 7" has nearly become a tag-line this year.
Any "divide and conquer" algorithm is likely to be recursive. Thus, for instance, the FFT, the Karatsuba multiplication algorithm for large integers, Strassen's matrix multiplication algorithm for matrices and the like are all recursive.

Moving on, dynamic programming is a very important technique. About half the time it is easier for me to figure out a dp solution by writing a recursive solution with memoization than it is to build the solution bottom up.

The single most studied problem in computer science is sorting, for the simple reason that a surprising fraction of computing time spent is spent doing sort operations. Virtually every efficient sort algorithm uses recursion somewhere.

The fact that a lot of students won't go on to use recursion doesn't mean that it isn't a very useful technique.
I remember native client, but was actually native in the tech sense since it ran x86 code.
At many Japanese megacorps, the company's salary schedule is widely distributed in the company. At my company, the engineering track so closely followed the monopsony engineering employer in this region (cough I wonder what large automobile manufacturer that could be cough) that there is literally no middle class adult within 400 miles who could not guess my salary within 2% for each of the last seven years.
That's actually... a really bad license. Noncommercial only and no revenue is really restrictive, and retaining the right to relicense the software whenever Frozenbyte chooses?
My suggestion: heavy handed moderation without apology.

For example, the joke comments with lots of votes piss me off. Were I pg, I'd just delete them outright. If anyone noticed maybe they'd take the hint.

In other words: HN needs a benevolent dictator. "Democracies" on social news sites don't work because the average person is boring.
Instead of having an arrow for downvoting comments (which has a different intended meaning on hn than on most other social newssites) couldn't we have a button next to "flag" that has a name on it, e.g. "content-free/snarky/witty but pointless comment/fanboy pseudo-argument", so that people have some clear guidance when to click on it?
karma cost - good suggestion.

Also, instead of reddit gold, maybe HN Veterens - Where community voted and well known heavyweights get higher priority. A comment thread with pg in it is worth a lot to me. Subscription cost worthy.

Comments are a good way to keep a blog post in check, a community of editors/fact checkers instead of: A magazine, an editor, an advertising bias, and a journalist. But when I need to now debate whether the comments themselves have value, my trust in the community suffers.

I no longer visit reddit and HN is my last salvation.
The article says it draws inspiration from younger languages, and mentions Python as an example. This is false, Python is four years older than Java.
Yes, recursion is tied up with baggage about stack allocation. If recursion is approached as inductive reasoning, those objections never occur.

This particularly applies to tail-call optimizations and continuations. If somebody isn't thinking in terms of implementations, continuations are just "you pass in who to return the result to, as an argument." e.g. If it succeeds, tell this function the result, otherwise tell this function the error.

Yet another case of making concepts hard by knowing too much.
I mostly agree. It reminds me of stop-and-copy GC: you have a root set (very old accounts, or maybe current moderators) and you see what you can reach from it (the accounts the root set consistently upvotes), and you chuck everything else periodically.

What it means for an account to be GC'ed is up for experimentation, but a reasonable default might be that it doesn't get any voting or submission rights. Arguably it's a bigger problem that stupid comments get upvoted than that stupid comments exist at all.
A lot of the discussion whenever this comes up seems to be over discouraging bad comments.

I'm more concerned with the a decline in the quality of good comments. It's anecdotal of course, but it seems to me like the top 10% of comments I read and discussions I participate in here has declined. This is really the part that I care about most.

I care about the median or worst comment mostly because of how they affect the best ones.
I'm actually disappointed for seeing this on techcrunch. I have a lot of friends that worked on Duolingo and some of my research with Luis went into that project.

To write about a project that isn't finished and just has a landing page, however, is pretty disappointing. I don't know if I really would call it "news."
Previous HN discussion of SpiderOak's (very different) approach to this same topic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1640074
That guy could have been me. Modest upbringing, lean living, doormat at negotiations, accepting absurdly low compensation because it seemed like the thing to do at the time, check check check. I'm glad he is doing better now.

That said, mission effing accomplished for the company: they're well north of a million dollars richer because good little kids don't drop their drawers or talk salary numbers. This topic makes me feel positively Marxist: we're willingly participating in a system designed and perpetuated to exploit us because to do otherwise would be impolite.
looks like great tool but has many bugs as any search not work also some times strange results. What tool it used for keyword research, wordtracker?
And I thought this was about some new source control system that didn't need checkins.
Spawnfest: a 48 hour programming contest featuring Erlang
Hi everybody,

We're happy to announce that first Spawnfest (48 hour programming contest for Erlang, much like Rails Rumble and Node Knockout) is scheduled for 9th and 10th of July 2011. Our committee is currently working on competition rules and sponsors/prizes. We've secured some of the big names in the Erlang community as judges and planning to involve more judges so that every team gets fair review.

We're very excited about this opportunity to show the world what Erlang/OTP is capable of! The contest is not limiting entrants to web applications, in fact, we'll be having nominees in different categories.

You can register your team at http://spawnfest.com/
When teaching our students concurrent programming using Erlang we never actually mentioned recursion and state immutability. With some careful hand-holding in the first exercises, most of the students seemed to be able to do fine. During three years of teaching the class, only two students ever asked me about immutability ("why can't I change the value of this variable?"). Recursion went similarly unnoticed, it was just the way one programmed in Erlang. Still, a lot of the code produced in the assignments was not very good, but that is to be expected from the course level and the students.

There are two main reasons why I think that most students picked it up without too big troubles. First is that we are just using these things as part of a language while focusing on other topics (concurrent programing). The other is that Erlang is language with such a different syntax from the normal Java-fare that one naturally expects to not be able to do things in the same way.
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Personally, I think that 4sq should have taken up the acquisition offer that it supposedly had.

No matter how much they try and innovate and launch new features, the premise of 'checking in' is forcing a user behavior - and sooner or later, checkin fatigue is going to set in. Just like most other shiny things, the shimmer wears off real quick.
I know you didn't claim Apple invented it, but I thought it would be informative to say Apple have added their own ideas but the main idea comes from BeOS, a once commercially viable operating system. These days it lives on in an open source recreation that has improved on BeOS, called Haiku. It uses a 64-bit journaling file system which has been improved now called HaikuFS that can hold 80,000 petabytes, caches so is fast and has user-definable attributes, like for contacts, music or anything you can think of really which can help you find things fast.
There's a reimplementation of Dashboard called Corkboard written by a fan so it goes both ways - good ideas are used elsewhere. :)
Sounds very similar to the Information Systems program, too. My girlfriend is pursuing a Business Administration heavy Information Systems program, whereas one of my roommates is about to graduate in a web-dev oriented Human-Computer Interactions and Information Systems double major. Yes, software engineering is a big and distinct field from Computer Science. But I'd say CMU gives plenty of options to make use of your CS or IS major.
Surprised and disappointed that they don't recommend RockMelt to their users. I'm not a huge fan of either, but if they wanted to do right by their users, the least they could do is to point them to the only other social-browsing game in town.
It looks like all of the PornArk videos are from one other site?
Are you hotlinking?
It's not clear the interface is that much better (aside from the lower ad-count).
Ask HN: posting job listings?
What are good places to post job listings? Where do people look? Where have companies had success?

37signals, github, stackoverflow, etc all have job boards... what works?
http://www.google.com/search?q=recursion

"Did you mean: recursion"
In their case, it sounds like GPS was sent over wifi by the apps.

But the bigger thing is regarding why those apps need GPS coordinates. Much like a recipe app needing contacts, and app that doesn't need to know my location shouldn't be transmitting it.
When Apple is good at that, I love it. It's depressing when they misstep in this arena and put something out that, below the veneer, doesn't contain much content. On the other hand, something like MacOS X itself is something my mom can use and feel like a pro (while she and my dad frequently get lost and confused with their Windows laptop), but I can also, just one level deeper, use and customize to the fullest extent I need.

It's obviously yet to be proven since this is just a preview announcement, but I don't expect Apple to drop the ball on FCP. Maybe that trust is misguided but the wording between the lines of their presentation seemed to indicate they knew what they were up against. They opened this presentation by listing off the success the app has had in an extremely hardcore and demanding professional community. It sounded like they were trying to very clearly communicate to folks: "We know this app is operated by people who use it to the fullest extent, grinding their top of the line machines into the ground to produce content, and 94% of them already like it the way it is."

So, seeing the comments saying "this just looks like iMovie! They should call it iMovie not Final Cut!" when it looks like what Apple is trying to do is solve problems and add efficiency to the rote surface level tasks of daily FCP use, bum me out.

( and add some we-can't-resist specular shine to the UI chrome, of course)
That sounds exactly like Reddits, which in my opinion are necessary to make Reddit tolerable, so I don't think it would be a bad idea here. Maybe having a finite number could work, too, as opposed to allowing any user to create sections.
I thought it was interesting. TC writes about pre-launched startups a good amount, and given this guy's background and the interestingness of the project, seems like a good article.
WP's a great example ... it's years since I've seen that site but as forums went it was and prob still is light years ahead of anything else that was around including the harsh but transparent moderation.
Sony would never have agreed to those terms. Period. That is not how they conduct their business or PR.
Rosin works really well as a flux. I learnt it from my dad, who always used to have a lump of rosin on his workbench to clean the soldering bit.
Steam?
I'll bet the version off pirate bay works fine. I know this is kind of snarky, but if they want to successfully combat piracy they need to make the pay-and-play experience better than the pirate one. DRM only affects those who play the unmodified game.