skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, Slashdot kind of solved this a dozen years ago. It's an imperfect solution, but it's a 90% solution and I think that's good enough.

Part of it depends on content. If you're a real community, then having people sign up for commenting and rating comments is a good solution. It helps promote good content and the requirement to sign up keeps the community free of a lot of hit and run commenter who might often degrade the experience.

If you're a news site, then most of your content is from hit and runs (hits and runs?). You don't have people hanging around your site all day, waiting to post on the next story. You have Drudgereport linking to you and then a flood of mouth-breathers leaving a quick comment about "libtards" or "republicraps" or a quote from some religious text and so on. In these communities, the discussion will never be lifted up and no voting system will work, because nobody is invested in it. Further, if you require a sign-up, nobody is going to bother.

Then, there are blogs. Sometimes you may want people to have to sign up but in other cases, you might need or want to just let anyone freely comment without any hurdles. Nobody wants to go through a signup process if they're only going to see your blog once or twice in their life (when linked to from HN or elsewhere, for example). It's hard to choose the right path, here.

I think much of the answer comes down to two things;

1) Human moderation - both by the community itself and designated moderators - is very valuable.
2) Not every page on the planet needs to allow comments. Frankly, the local CBS news website doesn't need to accept comments on stories. Neither does the BBC's articles. Neither do most.

Of course, they have dismissed everything in this article, so the only thing left is for the government to require every internet user to use their real identity online and then have a single discussion/forum/conversation system that all runs on the same API (or have a standard API that ties together very different discussion/forum/conversation systems). Then, you will have no choice but to post as your real world identity and every comment you ever leave anywhere on the internet will be part of that identity and you will be rated on that identity, always. A truly unpleasant idea and I would rather put up with having to ignore the dregs of the internet versus losing the option of anonymity. Of course, people who live their lives in public often have a different view than this, since their personal desire is to get their own identity out there. Not everyone has that same goal or desire.

(I won't even bring up my distinct hatred of things like Disqus and Facebook whatchamacallit that sites implement instead of drawing up their own conversation tools).
Implicit conversions come to mind. They don't need to interact with anything to be confusing.

Consider this program:

#include <iostream>
using std::cout;
using std::endl;

struct C {
int x;
C(int _x) : x(_x) {}

operator bool() const { return 0 != x; }
};

struct D {
float f;
D(float _f) : f(_f) {}

operator bool() const { return 0.0f != f; }
};

int main() {
C c(9);
D d(2.0f);

if (c == d) {
cout << "Equal" << endl;
}

return 0;
}

g++ 3.4.4 doesn't so much as warn that something is fishy here, even with -Wall.

Not only that, but c and d are considered to be equal.
Blogger outage makes case against cloud only strategy
"Why are so many people using Java (perhaps even more than C and C++ combined)?"

Well, one contributing factor is that a lot of universities now have a heavily Java based curriculum (turning their CS programs into vocational schools, but I digress).

Another contributing factor is that Java has managed to carve itself a niche in which it is used extensively ("enterprise" applications - with all of the wonderful ambiguity that the word "enterprise" carries nowadays).

One more thing in Java's favor is just simple momentum. There are a lot of Java libraries that just plain work (and some work extremely well). There are a lot of applications on the corporate side that use Java.

Regardless of whether you or I like the language or not, Java has apparently proven itself useful to a broad swathe of people. It may not be an exciting language, but then neither is Cobol and it still exists as well (and puts food on quite a few tables).

Then there is the venerable JVM, which is actually an amazing piece of software engineering that has enabled the development of a wave of innovative new languages. Of course, one of the features of many of these new languages is the ability to drop down into Java for speed (now before anyone starts sneering, Java is actually not doing to bad on that front right now).

"Does it make a good language? Absolutely not."

Perhaps not in your opinion, but their are others who are quite fond of it. That's the problem with these type of pronouncements. What makes a "good language" varies from person to person.

Disclaimer: I have used Java for some small projects in the past - I may be somewhat biased.

Edit: Embarrassing grammatical flaws.
It seems to be better explained here:
https://drumbeat.org/en-US/challenges/beyond-comment-threads...
How 'rebel' phone network evaded shutdown
This article sounds a little like a plug for Return Path.

Fred does however conclude with an interesting observation that made me think:

"I do think the rise of alternative notification channels; sms, mobile push notifications, direct messages on twitter, facebook messaging, etc are going to move some of this kind of thing off of email over time."

E-mail is powerful. Groupon proved it to us again with their staggering valuation and penetrating marketing.

However, I think that e-mail is only powerful because it is the only reliable platform over which we have to communicate. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc all have messaging systems, but none of them have been able to push through their own glass ceilings to compete with e-mail as a platform over which to distribute messages.

Trust, market penetration, usability, usage advantage... however you want to justify it, e-mail is "social media's secret weapon" only because social media hasn't figured out how to become more important.

E-mail isn't a secret weapon, it's the only platform available. Make a new one.
Spot on. It is actually one of the explanations in the Gneezy and Rustichini paper: "consider the practice of paying back a small amount for recycling a soft drink bottle, which is common in many European countries. Anecdotal evidence suggests that people are less willing to recycle when this small compensation is offered, than they are in places where no money is offered, and failure to recycle is simply considered bad behavior. It is unlikely that the amount offered is considered insulting. A different explanation in this case might be that people are afraid of looking ‘‘cheap’’ for making the effort of recycling to collect the small amount."
Android, iPhone apps silently monitor user ambience
This video does a nice job of explaining how to write a one-line Game of Life in APL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4
Not really a critique, just some rather muddled FUD from a once fashionable rival.
If she's an old friend, just tell her (as an old friend) that you're not interested in her tweets and that's why you're unfollowing her. To rely on third-party services to avoid dealing with interpersonal relations is what is known as "being passive-aggressive".

Anyway, it's not like you're calling her baby ugly, it's just Twitter.
Best Blog Post Ever Read By An Entrepreneur
Are you really saying that the time and energy you save coding and debugging by using high level features aren't worth a few minutes of compile time? It won't even be a few minutes except for the first time because of separate compilation.
The audio edition of The Economist is absolutely fantastic, as well read as it is well written, a pleasure to listen to.
Personally, I'd to see better editorial tools in comments. Stack-overflow / exchange achieves this with tagging and a basic rep. system. I'd like to extend this to comment forums.
Why not? UPS schedules their truck routes to minimize left turns.
In the year that I've owned my home, I've toyed with the idea of renting out a room or two. I have three bedrooms and I don't use any of them. I live in my basement. I know, I know. That sounds stupid. I have a basement that is the size of all but the largest apartment I've rented and it is where my sweet home theater is as well as my home office (I telecommute). Since it's where I spend so much time, I threw a sofa and a futon and an enormous bean bag down there (and a fridge and microwave). Now, I never even go to the top floor where the bedrooms are.

I could rent out all the bedrooms, including the master bedroom (with its own bathroom). I don't even know what the right price would be and I've heard plenty of horror stories about renting to people, but if I renteded even two of the rooms at only $350/mo, I'd have two thirds of my housing costs covered!

And, if I ever need to move, I could buy a house somewhere else and keep this one to rent it out. Again, I hear being a landlord sucks - but I have a handyman nearby who could do on-site work for me and once the house is paid off, the renters would basically be paying the mortgage on my second home.

Also, I plan to pay down the principal, too. I'm not making any extra payments just yet, but I am putting money in a savings account. If I have an emergency, I have access to that money today. If I don't have an emergency, then once I have enough saved up, I can pay off a hell of a lot of my house at once.

Owning a home can be a hassle. God damn, I sure as hell learned that right out of the gate. (I did a lot of remodeling to fit my lifestyle and my electrical needs, among other things). One thing it gives you, however, is more options. More choices, even if not mobility.
Is there an equivalent for Facebook? Not necessarily to deal with 'annoying' people but I want to prioritize messages from a subset of friends/family.
Learning to Love JavaScript
There is an incredible amount of hand waving on that page but nothing really solid for "evolving" comments.

It seems like a simple comment-voting system will answer the majority of the concerns.
i tried CBT when my life was a mess last year. it helped me accomplish some goals for a while, but it didn't last.

now i'm going to analysis 5 times a week, and it's made a world of difference.
Apple still has not released the requisite source code for WebCore (they redact code from it for their WAK* classes that they are not allowed to by the license, and which stymies work on iOS WebCore modifications).
That's sort of the way I see, yes gfx card drivers are terribly brittle but this is something the card manufacturers need to start looking into. We can't blame this all on the people trying to bring something awesome like WebGL which I think is crucial for the future of things like chromeOS. The browser vendor are aware of the issues and do a lot of checking (at least chrome does) of shaders.
Give my new store a try - http://laughingcomputer.com
Also very interesting:

Post Qualification Training in Selective Ignorance

http://www.midpsy.org/training_in_ignorance.doc

Excerpts:

"the assumption .. [is] that [CBT] represents a lucid treatment framework, founded upon a solid body of theory and research... [but] when this approach is examined from a historical perspective, it is revealed as a self-contradictory mishmash of psychiatric ideas, behavioural techniques, crude clinical pragmatism and post hoc justifications from the academic discipline of 'cognitive psychology' - or at least those bits of it that can be made to fit with the claims of the therapists.

In other words, CBT is a 'tradition' rather than a distinct modality, owing most of its success to its appeal to a superficial rationalism and to the promise of delivering 'cheerful efficiency'"

The papers presented in one of the conferences mentioned in the above report are collected in this book:

http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/195/6/557
On the other hand, I don't think I've ever written a program that doesn't use containers, manage memory, and handle errors.
"Its hard, but not THAT hard!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY

6 years into building web-apps and finally I am just now seeing a few bucks rolling in (still <$1000 month).

I wasted lots of time, primarily pursuing the wrong kinds of business models (free!!!) or putting effort into the wrong areas of a business, ultimately burning out because things weren't working.

But, even if you've picked a good product with a good market, for the un-initiated engineer there's this mysterious delta between being able to build something (anything!), and making that something successful. My recommendation (because its working for me), is to find a co-founder who is a business guy employed at a successful small software company. Painting with broad strokes here, but try to pick a sales or marketing guy over a biz dev guy, I think they are connected better with the product.

You've heard this advice before. Its true. Engineers think of the world as meritocratic. But good product != success. You need someone to help you get past this way of thinking.
There are a number of different generations of atom cores and ARM cores of course. I don't have raw benchmarks, but my impression was that CE4100 at 1.2 was beating the previous gen of ARM at 1. D-link/Boxee was based on the tegra 2 platform and famously had to add 6 months to their development cycle switching to the CE4100 because the tegra 2 wasn't performing well enough for them - though I don't know the specifics there of what task wasn't performing well enough.
The real criticism, as it were, is in the final paragraphs where the author points to the usual study of psychotherapies which found small advantages for CBT. (I couldn't help but sarcastically think, 'and is 8% more effectiveness not worthwhile?')
Maybe it's just coming from a dynamic language, but it appears that you've overridden the bool operators to always return true. (except when you pass in 0 and 0.0) If you redefine how two structs of different kinds are compared, who is the compiler to say it's a problem?
You can set up lists of friends, and on every post there's a hide button, where you can either hide the person, or the kind of post.
A much better essay arguing that smallpox be preserved: http://www.cdc.gov/eid/content/17/4/681.htm
I think you know you've cracked when you prefer bad C# to clean Haskell.
Why Microsoft bought Skype
If you rent a house you're paying the mortgage for the owner + a bit more so there is no way you can rent a comparable home for that much less than buying.

This is one instance of a classic fallacy. Let's call it the steady-state fallacy:

If X is impossible over the long run, then X cannot really be happening.

In the housing market the second-order factor is speculation: During bubbles, like the one that is deflating now, people overpay for housing, way more than the equivalent rent, on the assumption that the house would appreciate. When housing prices fell instead, these people ended up owing more on their mortgage than the housing was worth. But it's better to collect 60% of your mortgage in rent than collect 0% of your mortgage on an empty house, or to live in your house in a town where you have no job.

So there are lots of houses and condos that rent for significantly less than they cost to buy. Pretty much all the ones in Boston, for example, at least until very recently.
Email already connects everyone on the Internet but billions of people are not online by an accident of geography and birth. Mobile phones connect a reasonable percentage of the rest. I may be mistaken but it is doubtful that many users' quality of life would be dramatically affected by the sudden demise of Facebook. It may be as bad as losing your favourite TV channel, but life goes on. Facebook is a convenience that does not solve any of our real problems or alleviate human drudgery in any way, It only increases the enjoyment of existing wealth at idle time.

Incidentally, an explicit statement of what mankind's actual goals are and what resources are being committed to solving them would go a long way to show that we really all want the same things. Anyone that believes our interests are best served by large corporations and governments at war is delusional. These entities rely on the premise that success can only come at the expense of the 'other guy'. In the grand scheme of things they are local optima that promote the very scarcity that they have evolved to manage. Open Source Software can teach something here, there are multiple distributions and programs, each freely borrowing from the successes and avoiding the failures of the other. The healthy but open competition between them means that we get the best operating systems that no money can buy. Even OSS is not immune to meaningless rivalries and sabotage.

The information age gives us new tools to approach the physical world which is where ALL the real challenges still are, even in computing (think the end of Moore's law, and the potential of quantum computing and communication). You mention mechanical engineering, we should have amazing open-source mechanical modelling software that realistically simulates the physical properties of large systems, allowing you to design, build and test machines from a catalog of reuseable components and subsystems in a virtual lab (Tesla did this in his head), and send it out into the cloud for fabrication and delivery.

We all seem to agree that life is hard, why can't we approach it as an engineering problem? I would like to see someone attempt to engineer a society in a systematic scientific way. Evolutionary algorithms, game theory and a few Petaflops of modelling power for the common objective function. No secrecy, sentiment or ideology just let the best algorithms decide.
ok why does everything these days have to be described as "Twilio for XYZ"

No disrespect to twilio, I think they've done a great job, but they aren't huge yet. They also weren't the first infrastructure PaaS to hit the market.
Tony Hsieh (Zappos CEO) on hiring humility -- don't be rude to your driver
Except when you use templates.
Define "hard." It is an eminently achievable goal to build a business which makes $1,000 a month. That isn't a "get into the NFL then win the Superbowl" goal, that is a "get into college" goal on the relative-risk-of-total-failure continuum. The process of doing it is fairly well understood and focused application of effort towards it makes it quite likely that you will succeed.

It does require a bit of a mindset change. You have to stop thinking of yourself as a "skilled developer", for one, since development skill leads to success in software businesses like the ability to cook amazing waffles leads to successfully running a bed and breakfast.
Read that again. It didn't find an 8% advantage for CBT.

Here's the sentence that mentions 8%:

"Dr. Wampold found that the methods and techniques unique to a given therapy account for only a modest portion (roughly 8 percent) of the overall treatment effects."

Note that he's talking about "a given therapy", not CBT in particular.

Also, it's not clear from the summary whether 8% was within the margin of error or not. And what kind of "effectiveness" are they measuring? Has the "effectiveness" been shown over the long-term or just the short-term? How large were the studies? Etc...
Knowledgable readers who care will likely know both standards; at that point it's a matter of consistency (or, at the very least, never do something that breaks both sets of rules).
Oh yeah - and I forgot to mention state health exchanges coming in 2014.

One question I'm really curious about - how do you plan to make money? Are you going to try to achieve agent/broker status? Sell ads to different insurers? Or just wait and see?
Which is extremely informal, as the pronoum "me" or "us" is omitted from the end, but the context of usage would imply its presence.
If you don't like macros (which are used quite a lot for this sort of thing - e.g. http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/sys/queue.h), void pointers and function pointers go a long way too. Nobody's writing red-black trees from scratch for every project, really.
As usual, use the right tool for the job. Personally, I use C++ mostly, for different reasons:

- There are some very good cross-platform toolkits available for C++ (such as Qt).

- There is no C99 support in Visual Studio. At the same time, C++-98 works across all major compilers these days.

- STL containers.

However, C++ just is the best choice for the projects I am currently working on. For other projects, with fewer dependencies and no portability requirements beyond Unixy environments I prefer C.

Nearly any language can be superior, depending on the project. The linked article attempts to show that C++ is superior based on some specific situations where this may indeed be the case.
May 4, 2010 dated posting. And the author's bio:

"James Delingpole is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything. He is the author of numerous fantastically entertaining books including 365 Ways to Drive a Liberal Crazy, Welcome To Obamaland: I've Seen Your Future And It Doesn't Work, How To Be Right,...."

suggests that he is a propagandist on the right rather than a journalist, someone blessed with a passion to promote a particular belief system rather than present dispassionate factual information and closely argued analysis. I do wonder why this got posted to HN. Despite huge efforts to sow FUD in the area of global warming, the basic premises have been established--climate is changing, those changes are going to be detrimental, and that most of those changes are due to human activities--and yet there are folks who find solace in one scientist's opinion simply because it differs from the opinion held by the vast majority of other scientists. I'd have no problem with discussion of climate change and human activity--that's a problem that involves everyone and one which presents opportunities for start-ups, but to persist in beating the "global warming is not happening" drum makes no sense here. Such religious issues ought to be taken elsewhere.
But easily revised to "Do you want to come with us?"

Not that I particularly think the rules are inviolable. I see them as guidelines: if you're using the passive voice then make sure that it won't be better in active. If you're ending with a preposition, then perhaps there's a clearer way to phrase it.
Sometimes I use the diffusion of innovations curve for rough estimates. So what was the non-disruptive technology people were using before salesforce? What sort of customers could benefit from using Salesforce? That's an easier market size number to find, and it can be a single number (for example corporations that use some form of CRM), or a number you come up with yourself (adding different industries that you think could benefit by using salesforce).

After I get an estimate for that number, I then apply that innovators are 2.5% of the market, early adopters 13.5%, early majority 34%, and laggards 16%. I don't have a single market size number, but I have a number for 'size of innovator adopters for this technology', 'size of early adopters for this technology', 'size of early majority for this technology', etc.

Now think about market size as who are the innovators and how can you acquire them and what is the timeline, and etc for the other categories.