skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No problem. I just got back. Regarding Miami, the only other advice is I think you need to go before June, when it becomes rainy.
Agree that there is a problem with comments, but there is also a problem with terrible or duplicate articles getting to the front page. I'd like the ability to downvote articles and we should all patrol duplicates - only allow linking to primary sources, etc.
As someone who successfully overcome depression, I would humbly suggest to read "letters from a stoic" by Seneca. After that you may think twice before taking some time off as a way of fighting you depression. You can also try to travel to places where people's living conditions are way below those you generally get in the US (instead of going to the beach and do nothing for a while). Guaranteed to change your perspectives about life.
Stay in school where you can get free counseling for your depression.
Yes, I apologize. There are a few things that raise my hackles when it comes to discussions of "income inequality" and "rich people".

1) The presumption that wealth is gained at the expense of someone else.
2) That wealth is always given and not earned.
3) That being "rich" is the result of some sort of criminal behavior.
4) Phrases like "doesn't need that much money" or "has too much money" and the like.
5) The idea that a job belongs to anyone other than the person providing it.

You didn't claim any of those things per se.
Thanks for the tip! It's unlikely that I would have discovered the captions without this comment...
Do job postings exaggerate their requirements? [StackExchange]
10 Months with a Luggable Server: The Dell M6500
We knew this coming, not a big surprise but I am looking forward to seeing what they will re-emerge with.
Let's make karma actually worth something. To do this, change these items:

1) You can submit one link a day. Additional submits cost karma.

2) Costs karma to reply to any comment. Top level comments seem to already filter okay. If you get downvotes on the comment you made the karma cost is a multiple of that.

I also think some things would help in general:

1) Title/Domain Regex - Allow me to specify a regex to exclude things from the frontpage. For example /Apple|iPad|techcrunch/.

2) You have to have 10 or 20 karma to do anything besides top thread comments. It would be easy to get that with a little effort, but it would pretty much eliminate all the spam and low hanging crap.

3) Have a option to (turned on by default) to collapse comments using the common +/- interface and display the total score for that thread. I think then you would be able to focus and find the good threads quickly. Coming into this discussion 5 hrs after the fact like I am doing is where this is really needed.

4) This is a big one, but I will throw it out there. Create an API. With that I think a LOT of smart people (instead of a few) could play with all of this and maybe find somethings that no one here is currently thinking of.
The issue with Google Voice isn't the IP address but needing an American phone number, so no, this service won't fix that.
Occasionally intelligent discourse only begins several comments in. We wouldn't want to exclude that.

If "karma whores" drive the system, then the incentives created by this change would drive them away from commenting on sub-threads. I guess "kw" probably already post something snarky right under the top comment (and probably time it).

The third of your points is your best idea (imho). Comments among just a few people are less likely to be generally interesting.
Definitely! I felt the same way. I'm just finishing my undergrad CS degree and I think there was maybe one AI lecture that mentioned Alan Turing-the-human-being out of all the classes I took... I would sometimes wonder.. are there other students who just hear things like "Turing complete", "Turing machine", etc., but don't have any idea who this "Turing" actually was?

I wish it was more common as part of these classes to actually talk about the great CS people.. who they are.. in our short history, because this is interesting stuff! Oh well.
Dude, you're awesome. Thanks :D
How Two American Kids Became Big-time Arms Dealers
Protection is not the problem. The problem is that each jurisdiction is a different sales market for copyright holders. While selling into Canada, Australia etc the sellers may have given over a total copyright license, or there might be terms trying to prevent "leakage" from the home market and so on.

For example, as an Australian, I used to be able to watch whole episodes of Stewart & Colbert via the website. Then one of the local cable companies got the Australian rights to those shows and blam, no more easily-watched episodes for me.
http://www.previouslook.com/hnews/new takes snapshots of the HN new page periodically to let go back over the new pages easy. Feel free to try it out.
Ask PG/HN: Is HN approaching Eternal September?
From Hacker News wikipedia article,

"The site was created by Paul Graham in February 2007. Initially it was called Startup News or occasionally News.YC. On August 14, 2007 it became known by its current name.[4] It developed as a project of his company Y Combinator, functioning as a real-world application of the Arc programming language which Graham co-developed.[5][6][7]
The intention was to recreate a community similar to the early days of Reddit.[8] Graham has stated he hopes to avoid the Eternal September that results in the general decline of intelligent discourse within a community.[9][10][11]"

I posted this earlier this morning, but deleted it. I know PG posted, but I'm curious what state we're at right now and thought I'd ask. PG, do you think HN has reached an "Eternal September" already, or only approaching it? I'm curious to hear from people who have been with the site since the beginning and enjoyed it at its highest points of delivering favorable content. It does seem a little different to me than it did early on.

What can we do to keep the quality high..? My first thought is positive guidelines to focus on (just a few, see Forrst.com's guidelines), ideas that delivered us the best material/discussions anyways, just put them up so people know.

If it was the small community that is missed, that might be hard to fix.
Purely curious...is this that big of a problem? Karma isn't my end-all-be-all, I don't think I'd be upset if someone misfired a downvote on me.

I only see flags being useful for admins to help keep spammers out and to ban truly offending users.
I generally try to keep my comments short. Verbosity isn't good per se.
Running from my current lifestyle is sort of what I am trying to do. I really can't think of anything else in the short term that would help, though I am open to suggestions. I did look into non-profits, but they want you to work for free, pay them application fees for stuff, which really sucks, if they had been nicer, I would have offered to re:design their website, but I really didn't want to offer any webwork upfront as I wanted to stay away from the computer for a while.

I am fairly good at web:design, but really that is not what I could call a purpose. I have dabbled in random stuff from photography to volunteering to build houses to skydiving, and I really don't find passion in any of that and I can't figure out why. Are there other ways to find what you love doing ? I remember a Steve Jobs speech where he says "...keep looking, and don't settle." But it gets disheartening after a while.

Thanks. Also, how does one get employed as a ski resort with no prior knowledge ?
Trimean or winsorized mean could be useful in this case.
Embedding V8 Javascript Engine and Go
One Month of Hulu Plus free with IE9
There are many interesting characters in the mathematical sciences but most courses don't go into their personal backgrounds.
Risk aversion and loss aversion might lead to excessive silence if every comment cost karma. Maybe the cost could kick in above a certain speed/number of comments, or above some other threshold.
Gotta rid the world of IE6-IE8 and get everyone to at least IE9, even if your favorite browser is Chrome or Firefox.
There are a few differences - you can get Australian Sype-In numbers, and I don't think you can get any Netflix access at all.
I'd have to imagine that'd violate some sort of treaty. That's a huge part of the issues. These sort of regional restrictions are all wrapped up in a mess of various treaties and international agreements that Canada could not easily extricate themselves from.
You don't need any background to work at a ski resort unless you want to teach lessons. Another idea is working at a national park. I worked at glacier national park after my freshman year of college.
I would love to see some of these visuals make their way into xscreensaver... Unfortunately I have already promised I would take a look into the Apple II screensaver because it's not completely faithful to its 8-bit namesake. Besides that, this is completely beyond my modest knowledge on mindblowing visuals.

I am more than a little embarrassed because I thought I could map the output of the Apple II screensaver to a curved surface to mimic a CRT screen on current flat screens. That was humbling.
May I suggest going back to earlier time of HN? Because of the success, there are too many cooks in the kitchen. You have to always increase the number of moderators as the input from users increases. We are all here to read/discuss pretty much the same news. Why not have a chosen few provide the links and start discussions. Maybe the moderators themselves? This will cut down on duplicate links/stories and it will cut down the noise tremendously. Those who are truly interested in HN, will stick around and discuss. Those who are not, will simply go find their news somewhere else.
The real problem is that it's difficult to encode social constraints into a system. StackOverflow tries it, and i think that they have erred on the side of restricting contribution in order to preserve their system.

It is far more effective to have members of the community, particularly people who are representative of the ethos that HN has had to point out bad behavior, and recommend more responsible courses of action.

In so far as we are a community, we should encourage behavior as a community. Ultimately the point of writing comments and posting links is for others to see them, karma is worthless otherwise.

To that end, i think there's interesting things that could be done with average karma. If we're trying to encourage hill-climbing behavior towards better karma, why not highlight comments w/ higher average karma than you have? If we are trying to encourage leadership, then perhaps we should point out who is leading, and the behavior which we should be emulated.
tptacek, it would be great to require everything on HN to be "scholarly" or sufficiently serious, no? But the question is how to do that.
Yet they still manage to under-perform year after year.
What property is being damaged by Anonymous, and why does their anonymity matter to the assessment of whether their actions are right or wrong?

The way I see it, aside from temporary business interruptions from the occasional successful DDoS, the only thing Anonymous harms are reputations.

As to why their actions might sometimes be justified: most of their targets are (attempting to) abuse the legal system - most often by using copyright law for purposes that are harmful to the general public and beyond the constitutionally justifiable power of copyright law.

Surely you can understand that when the legal system is part of the problem, it is sometimes necessary to resolve the problem with extra-legal means.
Thanks for the book recommendation. I don't want to come across as arrogant, but my childhood till 13 years old was spent in moderate poverty in another country, so I really know what living in a slum feels like. When I think about what little I remember from those days, it makes my cringe because I do realize how lucky I am to be where I am, but then the motivation is short lived. What else if at all helped you overcome depression ?
Ask HN: Where are the open source AI/planning libraries?
For the game my partner and I are writing, we're using open source libraries where ever possible. We've been able to find high quality open source libraries for physics, graphics, etc. Now I'm looking for a planning AI library for the NPCs, and I'm turning up nothing useful. We have no problem with writing our own libraries (and releasing them as open source!) when the existing offerings are poor quality or missing, but I don't want to re-implement something if a good one already exists.
What do you mean, your post "got deleted?" When moderators kill stuff, they mark it as dead, not deleted. Did you not delete your post yourself?

In answer to your question, I don't think things are hopeless yet. Comment threads are visibly worse, but it's a long way from saying that to saying irretrievable decline has set in.
These days it's just a label which allows them to largely avoid the SEC.
Happy to send you some source code, maybe you can shine some light? msg me your email @keyle on twitter?
Length of a comment is not an indication of insightfulness. Wall of text sometime is a turn-off. People who are busy tend to just leave bare minimum to convey their point.
Money quote : "Facebook Comments is basically Facebook writ small: while it’s maddeningly mediocre lowest-common-denominator crap, it’s not quite bad enough not to use."

Yep.
Company Sites Beat Online Job Boards, Social Media
I keep hearing this argument about water scarcity, but is it true that water is scarce? or clean water is scarce.

Unlike oil, populations are concentrated around water. With improvements in technology to clean and desalinate water, would this market for water still exist?

Oil is limited in quantity, isn't cycled by the environment quickly and must be shipped from the area where it is retrieved to where it is to be used.

To me, this means that clean water technology has huge value, but that water that is already clean is less valuable.
Make sure you generate everything you need when processing data in one pass. ie. you take the last 100 data points, (or what have you), turn that into your graph. Then work on the next set of points, etc.

The key to this is to make sure that everything is constant sized. Don't have anything that has to run over every data point you collect.

As an example, you can take the last 5 minutes worth of data points (as a buffer), and then create a single five minute graph. You can then create an average of the 5 minutes worth of points and move that in to a second buffer which would have say an hours worth of points in 5 minute intervals, etc. Each step has a constant sized buffer and will draw in constant time.

Also, when you view your report, only view pregenerated graphs/tables/etc. It just makes things easier on you, and it stops you from having to care particularly about how long it takes to run your analysis.
"Am I the only one who see's this as blatant link bait?"

Lau Jensen is a known pro Clojure troll with a history of dissing other languages with not much knowledge about those languages. See the discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1771595 for links to where he attempts to discredit Scala, C# and Python (the last of which, in retrospect, is mildly funny, since a Clojure port of Norvig's Sudoku solver ended up slower than Python).

fwiw he's even made dumb comments on the Clojure dev process and got told off by Rich Hickey.(who said about one of his blog posts "tl;dr: This blog post is the idle chatter of people who are not involved in the Clojure development process in any significant way. Lau has never submitted a single patch. Apparently his free lunch isn't arriving fast enough." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2055543)

I wouldn't pay him much attention (I am surprised this article got so many upvotes). He writes inflammatory stuff all the time. Think Jon Harrop minus the competence.
I really like your suggestion. It could be extended even further.

If readers are willing to tag stories not just as "good" or "bad" but with categorical labels, then suddenly the news aggregator "knows" a lot more about the data its serving up. You could have categories at the top, preferential sorting for users, and more.
compared to !north_america, you're getting off lightly.
They under perform compared to the market as a whole but the people who put their money into a hedge fund don't care about that. They are not able to get the same returns a hedge fund can get on their own.
I wish we could tag articles so they can be filtered. People want to have lots of meta discussions like this [Meta], for example. Every day there are articles trying to inspire people to got for it[Inspiration]. A few [Science] posts. A few [politics], which should be deleted automatically. We also have [Tech] and [Developer].
PG: Yes, I deleted it, corrected. Sorry.
You can really see how tiny that thing is in the last two photos. I've never seen a photo of the Space Shuttle next to anything I can relate to, so I was amazed how enormous it was on a visit to the Houston Space Center. The only relevant photo I can find puts it atop a 747:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Atlantis_on_Shuttle_Carrie...
Bias in favour of upvotes from the bottom of the page.

Everybody scrolls from the top down. Those who vote for lower-down stories are less likely to be amplifying the hive mind.
What is Face Description?
It's telling that this comment got more upvotes than any of my other (much more constructive) comments in this thread
Sony survived the rootkit incident. I doubt that Anonymous will be able to do even that much harm unless they turn up something that the SEC would take offense to.
It sounded pretty bad to me. If he only mashed notes in one key it would have sounded much better.
There's a difference between "damage" and "permanent damage". If Sony has servers that are functioning correctly and Anonymous causes them not to function correctly than damage is being done. There is money Sony would have been making during that time that they are not making. As far as their Anonymity I didn't say anything about it making their actions right or wrong. The original post put forth "transparency" as a value Anonymous stood for and I was refuting that. By definition Anonymous people can't be transparent.

As far as your other statements you prove my point. The parties Anonymous tends to attack are people who are working completely inside the law but Anonymous disagrees with the law so they take it out on the company.

A perfect example of this is the Sony thing. Geohot set out to crack the PS3. Sony warned him not to by sending a cease and desist (we know this happened because he stopped his work for a while because of it). He continued to do it and eventually succeeded. Sony than sued him for doing it.

In this case Sony is not abusing the law. They are suing in accordance with it. But Anonymous disagrees with the law so they are attacking Sony (for the record I also disagree with the law but I don't blame Sony for that I blame politicians)

Finally your last statement is just scary. What you're basically saying is you have the right to break the law whenever you feel it's wrong. Extrapolate that right to everyone and you have chaos. Every person who feels society is unjustly weighted against them can rob a bank by that logic.
No offence to pg, but why did this comment get upvoted 9 times?

This makes me think it would be good to remove the name of the commenter as well as the number of points a comment gets.
I didn't feel like I knew what the answer was, so I was very curious to see what it would be.

I'd actually been considering hiring someone to run HN, though not to moderate it in quite as hands-on a way as you're suggesting. Interesting idea though.
Yeah. The market is too small - let's get procreatin', Canadians.
"I wanted Alan Turing to be raised into the pantheon of great Britons, but I felt it would be hypocritical to do so without recognising that Britain treated him so badly" JGC.

It's Turing year next year and it was John Graham-Cumming ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jgrahamc who organised for Turing to receive an apology from the British Government for his mistreatment. You can read more about it here ~ http://seldomlogical.com/2009/09/12/a-benevolent-social-hack
Absolutely. This instantly made me think of "Patio11 says 'Hello Ladies'": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2371965
How about real nationwide coverage. Stupid Rogers monopoly
So how long until a Gnome remix of Ubuntu appears? Already with Natty, or in 2012? I guess gubuntu name is free. Or maybe some existing remixes get a sudden popularity spike. Or maybe nobody cares, and those who care switch to Fedora/Arch/Debian/<distro-du-jour>.
A DDoS has the same effect on a company and their customers as a sit-in does on a brick-and-mortar establishment. Sit-ins have proven to be both effective and socially acceptable. The main question with a DDoS is whether the balance of power between the protestors and the target is too favorable to a small group of protestors, not whether the tactic can work at all.
I tried badges based on average comment score (the infamous orange dot experiment) and everyone hated it, including me, because it divided the community into haves and have-nots.
Metafilter uses this, so it is a valid model. I'm supporting you on this.
> acknowledging seniority

Why is seniority good in and of itself? Privileging seniority seems anti-democratic and anti-newbie.
The drunk dotted border in Google Chrome
But you can easily get it by setting up a US iTunes account which is slightly tricky but doable without a US credit or gift card.

Edit: http://www.simonblog.com/2009/04/14/how-to-register-an-itune...
Marketing Legal Pads Like iPads
And in a lot of cases it simply doesn't make sense to deal with a whole new regulatory system for a 10% bump in potential market size.
Whenever I see a viral based beta signup referral scheme, I start to wonder if they don't have faith in their app surviving and thriving on it's own merit.

I prefer to drag my friends/followers in when I've actually had a chance to see and play with the app, not when there's a pretty logo on the beta signup page.
I can't wait to see what the crew (now with Bankoff) will be able to do. Engadget is not and will not be the same without its core editorial staff and it is a shame that AOL ruined such a great property.

The article seems to suggest that the new site would exist as part of SB Nation, but I highly doubt that. Like the article suggests, there isn't much relation between the two sides besides a relatively similar demographic. Otherwise, that was a decent read.

I digress -- this news wasn't especially shocking but it's very nice to know that they aren't done with tech blogging yet. I'm very excited to see what the new site will bring to the table.
Wow. That's any creative developer's dream job. Amazing stuff. I'd love to work for a startup that just comes up with stuff like that. It seems like such a dark and hidden industry.

I do create fun stuff in my free time http://noben.org/term.io/
Is there any reason to be concerned about the future of the Bing API?
I wouldn't call it a "service", per se, but you cannot buy a Kindle from Amazon.ca. You can, however (and this is more on-topic), buy books for it, but the selection is limited.

Edit: I should add that a lot of the things that are available on Amazon.com (the US site) won't ship to Canada. You don't even get the option to pay for extra shipping charges; it just won't ship, period.

Edit 2: An article about Amazon's efforts to deal with the "cultural protection rules" here, among other things (like foreign ownership issues): http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/amazon-given-g...
Do comment flags currently have any affect beyond signaling to pg and the moderators that the comment should be looked at? Specifically, does flagging a comment (perhaps enough times) actually prevent that comment from obtaining any more karma?