skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This has been suggested a few times, but I don't get it. How does limiting votes impact quality of comments? Seems like it'll just cause people who have run out of upvotes to post disguised and meaningless "i agree" comments.
diego, would you mind summarising for us what's wrong with the design?
use twilio or one of the other voip API's and setup a temporary inbound US number to do the gvoice authorization.

A few ppl I know international did this to great success

There is a weekend project + app in that for someone if they want to automate it for tasks that require an inbound US #
Thanks, I hope you enjoy it!
Thanks! I'm no designer so any feedback there is much appreciated. I've compacted things a bit, but will continue to tweak it.

I'm thinking I'll also add a drop-down menu around the top to let users jump to a service quickly (I've already got lots of feedback for other services to add so the page will just be getting longer).
E-Books: The New Frontier for Content Farms
"Constant reexamination of classics" sounds like bliss to me. I would love to see more of it. nostrademons' comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403317) about feeling like he's absorbed as much as he's ever going to get out of 15 minute blog posts, and hungering for deeper learning, is one that deeply resonates with me. I remember books. The last 5 years, say, of internet use has retarded my learning, and I'm ashamed for letting it happen.

I wish there were places to go online to teach or be taught about topics in a discussion-forum kind of way. I'd love, for example, a Lambda the Ultimate for newbs. LtU is an awesome, high-quality site, I just wish I could understand more than 10% of it.

I tend to use HN when I'm too tired to work or just waking up. Those are also the times when I'm not interested in buckling down and studying a hard subject. But surely I could do better than the kind of learning I get from HN (and other casual internet use), which is random access to shallow, scattered tidbits, as if training for a massive Trivial Pursuit tournament you never signed up for. If only there were a community where people devoted themselves to teaching and learning classic topics in a sustained way, but that still had the social and casual aspect. News as such doesn't interest me that much. I'm mostly just consuming it by default. If anyone's read this far - my apologies for adding a mostly off-topic comment to an already crowded thread.
It's worth noting that a sliding window of summarized monitoring samples is a solved problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RRDtool
I think point of hashing is to prove that researcher has indeed found the vulnerability first and reported it to the vendor. It is proof for "this summary was written by me 2 months ago".

Hash must be posted to some archived/public place (tweet, mailing list, etc) that can be referenced at later date when actual summary is released.
Here's a longer article that elaborates a bit more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1369595/Jacob-Barnet...
Out of curiosity: why couldn't you?
I'm in the ibanking risk technology space, and while I've never been in your position, I'd be happy to bounce some sales ideas back and forth

my first concern would be: what do you offer over riskmetrics, that couldn't be a feature in a larger offering? most of the work in utilizing third part software is data normalization over the inputs, so you've got to have a compelling use case

e-mail me web at foobox dot com if you're interested
Experiment suggestion: Upvotes are weighted as today, but downvotes are heavier weighted when you're downvoted by a user with high karma. I'd probably say that weight can't send a comment negative.
Ex-mining engineer here. Mining is very different to what Will describes. In fact, mining has very many similarities with the lifecycle of a software company.

Firstly there is the prospecting phase. This is akin to customer development. You look for where there might be traces of customers, and if you encounter them you drill a bit further to define the customers a bit better. Next, you do economic analysis to determine whether you are going to make a profit on this, or whether this is the right size/risk for your company. There is also a technical phase where you need to run trials to determine whether you will be able to successfully separate the minerals from the waste given whatever impurities that exist. You keep iterating, drilling, testing until you've hit the equivalent of product-market fit.

Then you have the expensive issue of scaling up. To build a mine takes great investment that will take years before it turns a profit. This is where the model diverges, because at this stage, the mining company has a defined asset but they do not build the mine themselves. These are done by a major contractor. It is like a giant civil engineering project and is managed as such.

When the mine is built (and roads, rails, port facilities are put in), the mining company then operates the mine. Operations is not anything like prospecting. It is dealing with daily issues and doing strategic planning, developing markets etc.. People live and work on a pretty steady basis, with rosters etc. In contrast, life as a prospector can be pretty rough. :)

Many startups function around the prospecting stages, since entry costs is lower but it is very risky. The rewards are high at this stage of course, but the prospectors have little ability to execute if they hit upon a mother load. Outside money will have to be brought in, or the prospector might sell up and get a nice exit.
Away for Canadians (based on geo IP) to be able to log that they want access to this service would be great. I don't expect that this kind of petition is going to be effective, but the relative number of votes between each service would be nice.
It's quite a stretch to say that Sony is operating within the law in their anti-jailbreaking efforts. The current laws on the books are being interpreted in ways that have serious problems with the constitution, and we're a few Supreme Court rulings away from being able to call the legal issue settled. (And that doesn't even address the fact that Sony's lawsuit is going poorly for them.) Sony is not operating within the law so much as within the system.

More importantly, it takes years for the legal system to deal with an issue even in the cases where it "works". Just take a look at the SCO case: they caused quite a bit of damage to the open-source software movement, and the company that chose to fight them is still in court and will never recoup their legal costs. Even if we do get a Supreme Court ruling 5 years from now saying that you can put whatever software you want on a piece of hardware you own, there's a lot of innovation being stifled in the meantime. The existing laws are not doing the job, and until they are fixed, there's a constant risk of bad precedents making it harder to fix things through the usual/proper/legal methods.

You are also reading too much in to my last statement. I am not saying that it is always right to break laws in pursuit of your ideals, I'm just saying that it's not always wrong. Something being illegal is not on its own a good indicator of whether it is wrong.
Yes the post title is misleading.
They haven't produced a 14 qubit quantum computer able to do any computation, but they have produced a single quantum register of 14 qubits with (according to the PDF linked by michael_nielsen) < 50% coherence - about 50% fidelity. Less impressive sounding but still pretty amazing.
The art of pitching to a (potential) technical cofounder
A few ramblings aimed at folks seeking someone to fill a technical cofounder role.
This is a cool effort. Since agda : haskell :: coq : ocaml, I'm curious why agda wasn't used. Does it not not support extraction in the same way?

I would liked to have seen the talk itself since there are a few places in the slides where more detail would be nice. For example, I saw no reason why focusLeft on slide 40 wouldn't be total---it's not recursive, so why wouldn't it terminate? (given that reverse is total)

I also wonder whether most functions in functional programs can be rewritten so that termination is evident due to structural recursion (like the transformation described on slide 41).
Don't bother notifying them. (I've been in this situation may times).

If the idea remains small and the startup/project has limited success, they are not going to come after you.

If the idea is good, you start a company and eventually get successful, they might come after you. In that case, you have one extra little thing to worry about.
Interesting to note, but not really all that informative. An in depth comparison of libraries might be more useful.
NuclearPhynance doesn't block entry, but displays the community rules next to your first 10 posts. They quickly ban "bad guys" and IP block sock puppets / hidemy#ss.

[PS you mean a strong _positive_ correlation, right? ;) ]
I think it's fiction and attempts to be an art piece. It's presented at galleries, not in museums. Vol II mentions: "Featuring guest collaborator Khwezi Gule, a curator, artist and writer" (emphasis mine). Also all other people working on the site seem to be artists, not historians or techies.

Why they can't mention that somewhere on the page is beyond me.
I would distribute uniformly rather than randomly.
Depends entirely on the post. Esoteric technical issues (as in the business model of advertising) have a higher level of debate than more relatable articles.
I am Canadian myself and suspect that gp is just sarcastic.
I've been reading HN anonymously for a few years, and while there's been a decrease in quality, I agree with pg in that all is not lost. The main problem, I believe, is in the quality of submissions. There's a lot more fluff/gossip on the front page (for example, the TechCrunch Facebook Comments rant) that doesn't inspire any real discussion. I think that if the submission quality can be improved, the comments will follow. And on that note, well-written and interesting comments are still fairly common... I think it will be a while yet before those show signs of disappearing altogether.
Well, you Canadians may not have Hulu, Skypein numbers, or full Netflix, but your beer does have a higher alcohol content - this may be a fair trade.
since you're familiar with the topic, does this look lightweight enough for say, mobile applications, or does it require massive processing power?
You could make flags scale concavely.
No one knows, and neither Skype nor Industry Canada nor the CRTC are saying anything.
Java implementation of algorithms from Norvig And Russell's AI
- Make the new page longer definitely help. Low hanging fruit.

- Give more karma to votes on new stories to compensate the extra effort to leave the front page.

- Display one or two random new items on the front page to increase exposure.

- UI change on front page. When mouse moves over the random new item box, display a popup overlaying page containing the new items to allow for upvotes. When mouse moves away, hide the new item page. It's more complicate to implement and might not work too well on phones but should remove the mental barrier to go to the new page.
Why are mean comments posted? Answer: because they are massively upvoted. People like Karma, and Karma is a useful tool to teach newbies how to act, by giving them shining examples of excellent posters/posts voted on by the community.

Why are mean comments upvoted? Answer: I don't know.

People learn how to act on HN by watching what gets upvoted, listening to the tone of discussions, and reading the submitted articles. Presumably, the unwanted comments are being made by new members of the community. Somehow, these new members were not properly taught by the community. In which step were they not properly taught?

I would like to submit three possible problems, along with three possible solutions.

1) The problem is in the voting system. Mean comments are being upvoted, and the senior members of the community are largely powerless to stop these comments. Sure, they can downvote, but they are just one vote, and there are still many more junior members who will upvote the mean comment.
If you believe that: Senior members know what's best for the community, these members are senior because they have high karma, these members have high karma because the community has voted that these people know best. Weighing a vote by the karma of the user who made that vote would solve the problem of mean comments being upvoted.

2) The problem are the stories that make it to the front page.
Mean comments and the votes they receive are a symptom. The users who upvote are getting their social cues from the stories they read on the front page. Broad requirements on stories that are HN worthy allow for a wide variety of stories to get posted to HN. This is good for somebody who sifts through the 'new' section, but it also means that the only stories that get massively upvoted are stories that have general intersections between all of our interests. Evidence seems to show that the most common shared interest is gossip, which is conveniently unwanted by the community. The solution in this case, is to make stricter requirements about what stories are allowed.

3) The problem is that bad apples will always exist no matter what you do. At the moment, the easiest place for bad apples to exist is on the front page of HN. Unfortunately, this is also the place a lot of normal users like to exist. Perhaps a sandbox could be made for the bad apples to hate each other, and allow the normal users to exist in separate but equal lives. Unfortunately, this seems to go against the HN spirit, and I can't think of any useful ideas on how to implement such a sandbox without it sounding like a subreddit.

Finally I would like to add:
I like that HN takes the time for these self analysis every now and then. But, I think it's important to remember that we don't know what's best for us. The mere fact that we will upvote the type of content we don't want shows this.

This leads me to reiterate a comment best stated by idoh: "Let us not be too hasty in proposing solutions when the problem isn't really understood. At best they are shots in the dark. Even after you ship them you wouldn't be able to tell whether the fixes actually did anything or not."
Try listening to any of the materials here - www.oceen.com. Even if they are not exactly on the topic of depression they will all help. There's always something free on the home page. They will help you 'do nothing' in a constructive way that makes you feel better.

At first the effect will probably be short-lived - a little burst of energy and motivation. If you listen to one of them every day this will build up and become more stable.

Depression is essentially lack of energy/motivation. As soon as you get a bit more fuel into your system you feel less depressed. It's caused by many things which are not your fault in any way, but you do have the ability to overcome it.

We plan to make a series of materials (on the same site) specifically for depression, so let me know if you'd like to be a guinea pig.
> Not that easy with negative and zero scores

Started logs. [f(x) = log(x+1) or log(x+3)]
Tron Legacy was incredible visually and musically, I'm sad the story didn't live up to the rest of the movie. I hope Disney can look pass that and maybe make a sequel.

I hope this guy does go ahead and create a OpenGL UI toolkit. He should start a donation site to fund the project.
What makes things like this interesting is we don't quite know how the web world works in this regard yet. In the publishing world it didn't matter because what was important was the subscribers and the physical assets (printing press, building, etc...). In the software world people are everything. If the people walk out of an acquired startup the software dies.

But web publishing is different because it's not like software which requires exclusive use (most people won't use 2 different word processors for instance) and it's not like publishing where you have to pay for the product.

I'm reminded of people like Marshall Kirkpatrick and Duncan Riley who both broke off from Techcrunch and created successful sites without hurting the site they broke off from. At the same time there was a mass talent exodus from TVGuide.com a while back (they created their own site at TVGuidemagazine.com) and those people failed completely (eventually re-merging with tvguide.com)

So every time something like this happens it goes further towards answering the question of what is more important, the URL or the people
Lua still has no regex-dna because the standard string functions aren't proper regexes (no choice operator) and LPeg isn't available as a Debian package (which is the real problem).

'course, it'd be hard for LuaJIT to do much better in the shootout than it does now. It's beating C#.
Great write up! It's good to see real world uses for Processing and OpenFrameworks outside the context of trivial tutorials and sample code. I've always wondered who actually uses them and for what.
Another possible response to this problem would be to have "sticky" ideas that somehow define what HN is about. Ie, if you're new here, read some of this stuff before you start commenting.
It sounds exponentially less awful than before they were snapped. I particularly like when he adds a "1/16 Swing Heavy" rhythm to the notes.

I do agree that it would actually sound like music if he played all the notes in the same key, which you can do by following the lessons from part 1 of the same series.
Why not at the least accept the first submission for the PyPy entries? It shouldn't matter that it doesn't run on CPython -- if it's idiomatic Python and it runs on PyPy it looks valid.

At the same time, I can see where the guy is coming from with ctypes.
Well, the market for rhode island is small too. but the barriers for treating it the same as connecticut are nil. Its those barriers that are the problem, even if its just the costs of being in a different country.

I'm not sure what those are or whether nafta was supposed to reduce them or what. Maybe its simply regulatory. Maybe everything has to be duplicated. Maybe Canadian companies like it the way it is.
If the badges are only shown on a users profile page I think you'll see a very different reaction.
It's still somewhat unclear to me how Cacti is deficient. You know it can track anything, right, not just what it ships with out of the box? I have a chat-like server process that holds open TCP streams to clients indefinitely, and we wrote something to feed Cacti that number, and it tracks it like any other.

I don't know how the internals look so I don't know whether it ends up being useful for other uses or not.

The other thing you probably ought to specify is the frequency of the reports and what you want them to be reporting on. On a decently-spec'ed system it just doesn't seem like you're really talking about that much data here, you should probably try to be more clear where your bottleneck is.

And you should probably head to some community that can pay attention to something like this for a longer period of time, a forum or a newsgroup or something.
The Cloud and the Mainframe: Bringing the Best of Both Worlds Together
Zappos just shut down their service to Canada:

http://business.transworld.net/59733/news/zappos-discontinui...
The question is in two parts: (1) Why do people add bad comments and stories?, and (2) How do we keep those from getting upvoted?

1) When newbies first see the karma system they begin (like in any game) to work hard to raise their numbers. They watch closely to learn what kinds of comments will get them points. Ways to address this:
-Make new users read the guidelines and address this issue more directly there.
-Make Karma look less like a competition.

2) Like other comments have said, figuring out who upvotes bad comments requires data-mining. A serious question here is whether democracy is a viable option any longer. What is the site meant to be: a mob, or a tight community which a mob may watch? Do we educate the problem-voters, or do we dis-empower them?
pg, you could present cleaned data in a Netflix Prize-style challenge. Let the hackers see the patterns in the data (whether bad upvotes are coming from new users, from old users without a lot of karma, etc) and make the prize be XX minutes of your attention (or money).

It seems like a lot of the comments on this thread are asking for more information -- or at the very least working from very different personal experiences.
I can't help but wonder why this wasn't posted as a comment in pg's thread? It kinda screams "my idea is better than everyone else's", while at the same time, ironically, I might add, adding to the problem rather than helping to solve it.
I would love for HN to implement tags. Unfortunately, it seems that the majority of HN users don't:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2367949
Also a limit on how much Karma you can get from one article submission. A lot of times it feels like luck when someone submits something and gets hundreds of Karma for it because they posted it first.
So. I submit a vuln that says "Product X has vulnerability Y."

The vendor decrypts this, and marks it as fixed in your database by submitting "decrypted" text that says "I like ponies."
A: The solution to social problems is rarely purely technological.

B: The amount of work it would take to implement such a system would be quite large, and would tax the hosting resources of HN significantly for little benefit.

In short, I don't think this is either very practical or very likely to be useful.
I don't think so. Up vs down is a 1-D dispute. Categories add dimensionality.
One thing I just hate the most being in Canada: many interesting stuff on Amazon.com does not ship to Canada, and Amazon.ca gets like nothing.
Simple, tie board participation more closely with YC application scores. What were you thinking?
The solution to social problems is rarely purley technological.

That's what I keep saying. Have an upvote.
> Or something like that. I'm not really that clear on the details. :(

Your intuition is correct. Quantum algorithms seem to perform better than classic algorithms because there are certain operations (like fourier transforms) that can be performed exponentially faster (as of today) than classic algorithms.

It is still unknown however whether or not we can simulate quantum computations classically without exponential blowup otherwise it would resolve major open questions in complexity theory.
For those that want a free service and don't mind ads, there's also
http://hotspotshield.com and http://expatshield.com which will let you access US and UK services respectively.

The UK one doesn't support OSX, so I run them both from within a separate Windows VM if there's some restricted service I want to access. That way their VPN software doesn't get in the way of my other activities, and I only get ads injected within the VM.
I think the interesting question is, if this comment system was standalone, so it didn't have any network or real name effects behind it, would anyone use it?

I'd prefer to use something attached to the back end and possibly use Facebook connect for the real name aspect, or even include the indication back into the feed on Facebook, although not everyone wants that.
Yes the music was awesome. No surprise, it was Daft Punk. I think they're in the film too. You see them as djs having minor interaction with the characters towards the end.
RSA Discusses How Flash Owned Them
pg, how much have you played around with simple weights of upvotes vs downvotes? Eg, making a downvote worth -1.1 and an upvote worth +1.0.
The problem isn't treaties, but distribution rights. US firms don't distribute content in Canada, but have Canadian subsidiaries or partners which do so. This means agreements between service providers and rights owners signed in the states aren't generally valid in Canada.
Firefox 'Do Not Track' header wins first convert