skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's simple:

Hacker news is an open community right now - and the time policing the content would be a bigger waste of time than the current proportion of less interesting content, which you only need to skip.

I'm glad I don't police the site - because I can't get into LISP and I would block all LISP content. And that might hurt some one's feelings.
I read some of the stuff on this list but having someone recommend Donald Trump sets off alarm bells. But I am willing to be proven wrong. Anyone else concur with the selection of Art of the Deal?
I vote for stronger wording and more moderation of off-topic stuff.
add a caveat to the current description that tells people to strongly consider what they are posting if it isn't CS related.
Oil rig off the shore of CA that has been shutdown for nearly a decade put back on line
I've kept the faith for so long. But I'm having a bad week. So someone please, please tell me that HN isn't turning into Reddit and that this completely irrelevant submission is just a bad dream, like the Star Wars prequels.
That's a great book. I wish they had it online. It can't sell many copies.

I contacted David Friedman about that. He says that the publisher holds the copyright, not him. I actually think they would sell more copies if people were able to link to it online.
Russia's new nuclear Challenge to Europe
Not while they insert a 'Powered by AppJet' tag on every page
Some egregious certifications that are required in other states cover hair-dressers and florists. I remember reading about someone that wanted to open up an African hair braiding salon but was denied because she hadn't completed a year-long certification course on hair-dressing that had nothing to do with the African braiding style.
In this day and age, I think using a width that will accomodate 240p-wide screens will likey be safe. Having the small pre-click size will take care of any old smaller displays.
On Heads, sleeping beauty gets asked once. On Tails, she gets asked twice. If I walk into the room and see her being asked, it's a better bet that the coin landed tails.

If this experiment is repeated many times, "Tails" will be the right answer twice as often.

You can try this with a friend. As someone pointed out later on in the page, you just answer the first question freely and if it's tails are required to answer the second question the same way as you did the first. Or just answer heads every time--no memory wiping required. If it's really 50/50 then answering heads should get you your answer.

Because the interviewer asks questions in an unbalanced manner, the interviewee actually gets more information just by being asked.
I think we can all agree that stuff behind a paywall sucks.
TOS isn't the same as malicious.
He uses harsh language as a writing crutch. It's easier to elicit a response from readers by shocking them with curse words than with ideas.

It's not actually his cursing that I object to. His writing is not coherent or original. He spends more time attacking others than presenting original ideas.
Other topics do have explicit approval, given the current guidelines. That seems to be the cause of the constant stream of "this is off topic" comments.
Your first diagram makes it look like something is split between Monday and Tuesday, when it's not split at all. You get both of those "tails" interviews, in sequence. So you get asked two times for the answer when it is tails, and only once when it is heads.

Try doing the experiment several times and see how well you do picking heads every time you "wake up." There's no need to have memory alteration if you set your strategy beforehand. You'll only be right 1/3 of the time if you bet on heads.
I agree. What's really bothering me is the lack of guidelines. Its fine if you clearly delineate what won't be allowed, and developers just have to live with that. But making it up as you go along is just bad business. "I am Rich" might have been a very simple app, but a developer who spends a lot of time on their app only to have it removed as a "judgement call" doesn't deserve that type of treatment.

Apple needs to start speaking out about what criteria they're using. Developers don't like risk, and they'll start looking elsewhere if Apple doesn't start putting down the rules in writing (whatever they might be).
There is a split. Given tails, it is either Monday or Tuesday.
What inspired me to become an inventor
I agree. 26 million dollars raised by a far outside the mainstream candidate is pretty heady stuff. No big names, no PAC support, and no Republican Party support. So, yes, we all definitely want that kind of passionate user. In fact, I think Apple and Ron Paul have a lot in common, with regard to their "customers". Both pay more (Paul supporters tend to be far less wealthy than Clinton or McCain supporters, so $500 is a lot more money relatively speaking), and get less (we all knew the odds of electing Paul were practically nil, and we certainly knew we weren't going to get any political favors from him if he did get elected), but they're still generally more excited than customers of other "products".

Guy Kawasaki's best (IMHO) writings cover this very topic. He's not the first, and he's not the last, as Seth Godin treads the same ground, but I found Selling the Dream and Rules for Revolutionaries at least as good as Art of the Start (which is also pretty damned good). It's mostly motivation, rather than anything particularly visionary, but it's the motivation that an introverted nerd like me needs to really go the extra mile on outward facing work.
Why don't you simply do it then? Stop discussing here and start doing.
The problem is that giving kids laptops does not make them smarter. OLPCs are not magical teachers.

Also, especially in Zimbabwe, if you invest in sending children abroad to study, they will probably never come back. One of their biggest problems for the future is the mass exodus of intelligent, educated people from the country.
meaning the browser will auto-shrink any images that are too wide?
Job trends: Erlang, Lisp and Haskell
"Something an english speaking hacker anywhere in the world would be interested in"

This is exactly what got me hooked on HN in the beginning, and this is exactly what I want to keep seeing! Excellent way of phrasing it.
my old boss said '' tell me the rules and i'll play your game'' ... apple has told the rules, they aren't forcing you to play. i'm not saying its fair... but such is life
The way I read it, the problem is ambiguous.

1/2 is the answer to "What is the probability that the coin landed Heads?"

1/3 is the answer to "What is the average probability of you getting it right if you say the coin landed Heads?"

So I guess that makes me a "Can you rephrase the question?-er"
I feel like I must be missing something, although I suppose all good paradoxes give you that feeling. If it's heads, she's asked once (Monday) what it was, if tails, she's asked twice (Monday and Tuesday). Therefore, if she has no idea which of the three states she's currently in, there's a 1 in 3 chance it was heads
I'll be happy to see anything here but TechCrunch links. The fkin TechCrunch links for god sake!
Depending on the browser/OS, yes. Most popular phones these days have at least a QVGA display though (240x320 or 320x240) so if the enlarged size is < 240 wide it will likely fit on most screens.
I always find the confusion between platform and framework annoying.
"web platforms have to be free and open. LAMP is the reigning king. Ruby on Rails and Django are the up-and-coming challengers."

LAMP is Linux/Apache/Mysql/PHP, which is a platform. Django/RoR are frameworks for their respective languages, and still use Linux/Apache/Mysql or similar.
IMO, your alarm bells are justified.

In addition, doesn't it seem a little strange that a post about what they didn't teach you in school has "Required Reading" lists?
Anyone else think having 30 include files is a bad thing?
Except they don't tell all the rules. They are making judgement calls and removing apps that adhere to the TOS.
You're right, it's much easier to detect TOS violations and yet they are still failing to do so. If the description of an app is in clear violation and it still gets posted, what are the odds that they will catch an app that sends the developer everyone's contact list?
What are the good books on negotiation?

I previewed the Trump book and it looked like most stories and musings more than technical explanation.
"... So my question is, would you like to see the site's guidelines narrowed ..."

KISS, less rules & meta, more ideas.
I think you may be misreading the question. Given tails, you are asked both Monday AND Tuesday. That's why it gets tricky--you have to double down if it's tails.
A Really Useful Way to Take Notes [video]
Definitely.

If your goal is to maximize the number of correct guesses across all questionings, then always answer 1/3.

If your goal is to guess the current coin flip as accurately as possible, then always answer 1/2. (I interpret the question as this.)
Star formation could happen in up to one-quarter of possible universes
One more suggestion as I continue to play. The service as-is is awesome for checking out 'your' stocks, but adding functionality to search for a company by name rather than only symbol would be great in the mobile app (and the standard website as well for that matter). If I hear about a company while on the go, it would be cool to have a one-stop shop where I don't have to hit Google or some other mobile site to identify the ticker symbol before I can do some reading on StreetRead.
In a slightly more evil thought experiment (Harvey Dent might approve), we could make one slight change: if it's heads we interview her once and then let her go, but if it's tails we'll keep on waking her and interviewing her every day for a thousand years.

I think this version makes it clearer: if it's heads she'll be interviewed once, if it's tails she'll be interviewed thousands of times. At any given interview she should assign a very small probability to the possibility of heads.
There are three states, but they are not equiprobable. One-half of the time she'll be asked once, and one-half of the time she'll be asked twice. Hence, the one-half argument is because she'll only be in the "once" (Heads) state 1/2 of the time.
I think the WSJ articles go subscription 1-2 weeks after they are published. So they are free for a while and then they disappear from the internet.
Google Groups and Google Docs are not the same.
Try thinking about it this way instead:

If the coin comes up tails, you will be asked 1,000,000 times in a row. If the coin comes up heads, you have a 1/1,000,000 chance of being asked.

I wake you up. If you had to guess if the coin was heads or tails, what would you say?
I of course was referring to some system where if I pay for your education you come back and work in the country fro x number of years. It cant just be a system where the government pays for the education of a few hundred or thousand people and they move to New York or London. There have to be other factors whereby the government and private industry make it attractive for people to come back and start technology start-ups.
I would, but I'm not sure I'd be telling the truth.
Anything is better than European colonialism...
You cannot be woken up on tuesday with heads; that's part of the problem definition. So there are 3 ways to be woken up, and two of them are in the tails case.
I'm not so sure about the harm part, livefreeanddesign.org (the site for unlicensed designers) is giving me Post-Traumatic Stress due to its 1990's web design.
If you're being asked, then you know that a bet of Heads will be right 1/3 of the time. So the probability from your perspective is 1/3.

It doesn't make a different if you're only doing it once or a million times. The whole point of probability is to figure out what would happen if you did it a million times so that you use the optimal strategy when it happens only once.
No so simple, if it's Heads she does not get woken up on Tuesday at all.

So it's thirds: There are two way to be woken up for tails, and one way for heads.
I don't see how giving advice on where to put your furniture or what paint color to use has anything to do with spreading germs. Especially if it would be legal to give that advice for free. As I understand it, in Iowa someone with a degree in Interior design can architect a building no taller than 3 stories. I'd agree that you should have to have some sort of credentials to do something like that, but to pick paint color? In the words of the John Stossel - Give me a break!
Are you reading a different riddle?

We're reading the second green one on that page.
The reason that people are confused is because of the word "probability." I guess they don't realize that probability is simply a tool that tells you what to guess.
You are proposing the 1/3 argument -- by answering tails, she will get it right more often across trials.

But, 1/2 of the time she will be awoken once, and 1/2 she will be awoken 1,000,000 times. So, let's suppose she is awoken. There are 1,000,001 possible awakenings. The probability of her being in the first of these is 1/2 (Heads). The probability of her being in any particular other is 1/2*(1/1,000,000) (Tails).

Hence, she should answer 1/2 if she wants to guess the current coin flip correctly, since the chance of the coin being Heads on any arbitrary awakening is 1/2.
In this case Arrington is right and Shipley is wrong. Charging $18k to present will weed out most good early stage startups. Maybe that wasn't true 17 years ago when DEMO started, but the world has changed.
I don't think you have to.
http://appjet.com/docs/faq
There is a 50% chance of the coin landing on Heads, and a 50% of it landing on Tails.

The events in question are not independent. You have a 50% chance of being woken once, and a 50% chance of being woken 1,000,000 times.

Therefore the correct answer is 50%.
I can deal with a handful of random stories but if some jackass starts posting stuff like: "Karl Rove eats deep fat fried Iraqi baby flesh" or "Bush pulled off 9/11 to win a $1 wager with Hitler who is secretly hiding in Argentina" than I'll be leaving HN just like I left reddit.
"An Article About Startups That Wasn't Written By A Pretentious Asshole"

...Wanna Bet?
Aye, some people are tipping more VC money to go to cleaner energy startups than internet related ones.
Obscurity --> Hype explosion (omg how to take advantage of all those cores in CPUs and in the cloud?!) --> Attenuation --> Stabilisation.

Seems typical.
"There has never really been a true equivalent to this in the traditional distribution model. "

Yes there has. Package repositories on Linux include proprietary software, including demonstration versions, to everyone who can use them.
Whether or not you believe in burning criminals at the stake, the idea that we would change our stance on the matter because it's cold outside today is absurd.

(The point being that X in this case is an important issue of policy and Y is a transient, small-beer problem that X wouldn't really solve much anyway.)
I didn't put that in because as a guideline it's unenforceable. But given the current guidelines, it does seem to create what we have now (which I too like).

I only posted this poll because the only thing I'm 100% sure is valueless and off-topic is the "this is off-topic" comment that invariably ends up on anything not overtly CS/startup related.
A platform is an "environment" you build a system on, so a framework is also a platform...
Whoops, you can see from the title I meant to include both, but forgot to in the options. My bad.
I'm sort of with you, sort of not. I tend to skip a lot of the more technical articles, stuff about LISP, stuff on raganwald, etc. But I also wouldn't vote it down, because I don't have anything against it, I'm just not part of the audience for which it is intended. I'm not entirely sure I'm part of the audience for which this site is intended.
From what I understand, the RIM platform is more open in some ways already. Namely that anyone can acquire the SDK and develop apps, and there is no vetting by RIM. But there is a bit of complaining about the quality of the APIs.

http://devberry.com/2008/03/06/rim-sdk-a-pre-teen-schoolgirl...
Surely its not a CS/politics dichotomy? Really the voting system works quite well except for those articles where we vote to show our support.

I think staying away from American politics is a good rule of thumb - there is little chance that articles will be rated on their quality or relevance.
Right. I feel that even as this site covers slightly more mainstream topics, it does so in a much different way than Reddit. The bar is higher, the discussion more intelligent and civil.

You really can't go to Reddit/Digg for intelligent "mainstream interests". You can go there for unintelligent ravingly liberal interests. I find myself slightly left of center, but those sites seem to border on socialist.
I guess the question is whether being wrong 1,000,000 times is equivalent to being wrong 1 time.

Sadly, the problem doesn't define that.
stick to cs/startup stuff only. there are too many generic sites already.
I'd like it if the site were a little less self conscience. As a lot of sites like this grow, it seems like they all go through a sort of navel gazing, meta lovefest.

This is odd to me because the whole voting thing should mean that whatever the site is, is what we want. There should be enough wiggle room for the site to magically change with our changing interests. And, yet, not so much wiggle room that it can be completely taken over by people with completely different interests (politics, etc).

But, it's never been clear to me what use there is in talking about this...
Reddit is cs/hacker + socialist politics + flamewars.

Also, I find that comment to be very akin to "if you don't like something about America, move to another country."
cs/startup stuff only. too many generic sites out there already.
I would say it's like Reddit but with a more intelligent audience.
The funniest bit is the store's just a bastardized repository. These are problems that have been solved in OSS for probably decades now. In a perverse sort of way, i'm wishing it would wildly succed in its current form.
TechCrunch seems to fit within everyone's definition of on-topic here.
This is a great statistics lesson. All that's happening here is that the Erlang number is more volatile than the other numbers because the absolute number of samples is so low for Erlang. See the following, much better graph:

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=lisp%2C+haskell%2C+erlang

As you can see, there are literally three times more job ads that mention Lisp than Erlang, and 1.5 times more Haskell job ads, little did I know. And Erlang went from 0.0005% to 0.002%, which is indeed a very high growth rate -- but what happened here is that we went from 10 or 20 or Erlang ads to 80 or 100. [1] With numbers that small, no wonder the fluctuations are so large.

Of course, given that I wouldn't dream of hiring an Erlang programmer by posting an online job ad, I doubt these numbers are worth much anyway. But, to the extent that they are worth something, they're not bad news for Erlang fans.

[1] Indeed.com claims to index "millions of jobs". 0.0005% of two million is 10.
I voted for the yes cs/hacker stuff only because I think the narrow focus of the community is what keeps it small, which is what keeps the quality good. Other articles are good in moderation, but I'd hate to see HN become reddit (or worse).
No, the problem is people trying to enforce their vision of off-topic (stuff that is not CS/startup related) on a site whose guidelines define it as something entirely different.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that that proof doesn't use the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic. FTA states that every natural number has exactly one prime factorization, up to sign, and this proof doesn't use that.
Swombat, now look what you've done, you've turned the comments section of this post into a debate about rules...

Anyway, yeah this sucks ass. I love how China just spent $300 billion staging games while Russia invades Georgia, there continues to be a war in Iraq, and Zimbabwe suffers 9000% inflation.
I know nothing about Vanity Fair, but that article was good. So yeah, that's what I want to see here.

When you post as the off-topic police, you're defining off-topic in a different way than this site's guidelines suggest, and that is what I find annoying.
Speaking of which, what's up with popurls? Their traffic is down big the last two months.
There's a lot more to programmer productivity than language. There are a lot of organizational factors.

The programmer's aptitude is probably the biggest factor, and in the case of the most talented coders, probably swamps the choice of language by a large factor.

Being several times more productive is not going to benefit you so much if you are working on the wrong things.

Also, there is a lot of really bad code and really bad practices out there in different niches. There are still plenty of places where you can bring in test driven development and a language like Python and kick ass. In fact, I bet some of those niches will even have competitors who are backwards Python coders ripe for takedown.
"Are we in a bubble? This Company got $8 million in funding"

I dont think this tells us anything about bubbles, this just tells us there are stupid investors out there. Really stupid investors.
Be a better platform.
Someone recently pointed out that Google Maps has made this kind of perspective far more commonplace... and, of course, Wil Wright has just turned this movie into a game.

But this is still one awesome piece of science education.
No, a platform consists of everything below your application logic. Think hardware, i/o abstractions, etc.

A framework, on the other hand, assists in the development of an application, typically independent of the platform it runs on.
It's a good general principle. But I suspect that many people often don't take it as far as it could go. Memory management is a great example. It's orthogonal enough to business logic, it can be made to largely disappear from application code.

There's a lot more of this that could be accomplished, but our expectations are still a bit too low.

One fascinating thing about the Smalltalk environment is how it has managed to make lots of plumbing disappear. The "workspace," which is an app used for dynamically executing code, is so straightforward to write, a commercial Smalltalk environment (ObjectStudio) had a workspace that was written by a bored developer in an intro class! (The final version was more polished, but the thing was functioning as a workspace after only 10 minutes of coding.) Similarly, I can start coding a debugger capable of displaying the equivalent of a core dump in 10 minutes and have something that's usable. Things that are esoterica in other systems are just ordinary applications. There's relatively little to a Smalltalk "IDE" because there is just less to do to build one. Most of the meta level is ordinary objects manipulated mostly ordinary programs.
the argument for appjet, that the bondage of javascript-on-the-client
should be mirrored by javascript-on-the-server, is a false consistency
i for one will never embrace. instead i turn the dichotomy around and
ask why the choice on the server cannot be mirrored on the client. i
don't want a world with one programming language and neither should
you. it creates a single point of failure....the end result likely
being a non-web platform (flash, silverlight) taking over at some
point when the lack of choice becomes a problem for users and
developers.