skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would like to see some evidence of this decline.

Here is my alternate theory:

It isn't obvious that 'the decline' is really anything other than selective memory. The good posts are memorable because they are good. The crappy posts are uninteresting and forgotten.

So if you look at HN and you see a bunch of stuff that you are not interested in on any given day, you compare it to the good stuff (that you actually remember), and you say 'what is all of this crap.'

This is exacerbated in older users, as they have seen more really great posts that they can compare everyday crap to.

It is like comparing a single random day of your life to the combined highlights of the last 4 years of your life. With that comparison and no perspective about what you are actually comparing. (So its kind of like being in a committed relationship).

----

So I can't honestly say that I have hard evidence of a decline in HN.

There are a few things that annoy me about internet discussions in general, on sites like this, which I would like to eliminate. These are on the level of pet peeves, however.
I'll give a few:

1.) Rapid back and forth of 1 liners and memes.

2.) I spend 1/2 hour or so composing and editing a rather in-depth post, and no one sees it.

This happens either because that thread has been pushed off of the front page, or the thread is already filled with comments which are only a couple lines, and while they may be reasonable and appropriately toned, seem to me to be a superficial analysis...

3.) Multiple articles on the same topic, all making it to the front page, even they don't really add anything to each other. It would be cool to merge articles/threads on the same topic.

4.) Blog links that do nothing but redirect to another blog or article. i.e. "x y has posted on y z; here's a link"...

5.) edit: Here's another: Karma is directly proportional to how early you post in the thread (by virtue of time being linear and people only visiting a thread a certain number of times).

There are more, but I can't think of them at the moment.
We all seem to have this problem. http://themeforest.net is a good resource for templates, not free, but just a few bucks. Some of them are pretty heavy, view the source of the demos and pick something that's easy to customize.
trafshow - ncurses based utility showing detailed network traffic
Chrome sends every keypress in the URL bar back too Google. http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/privacy.html When you type URLs or queries in the address bar, the letters you type are sent to your default search engine so the Suggest feature can automatically recommend terms or URLs you may be looking for.
You haven't looked into the scientific bungling behind this particular issue.

It was not a political failure, it was a flat out scientific failure.
Why you should build an open-source startup
How to make money in microseconds [algorithmic trading]
When you say "integrating animated objects created with Hype looks nearly impossible", what's your intention? Embedding Hype documents in existing web pages takes three lines of HTML (and uploading the resources folder, of course), so it's almost as simple as using the <embed> tag.

Within Hype, you can compose custom js functions to be run in response to user actions, like mouse down. Those functions are pure js and, as such, can use any libraries included on the same page which embeds your Hype document. Hype documents also vend a js API so external scripts can trigger animations or scene changes. With those two features, the Hype document can become a seamless part of an existing web page.

I'm curious to hear more about your needs, though! Feel free to email me at ryan@tumultco.com if you'd like to chat some more.
Well given that just with the bitcoin client alone many banking services are either no longer needed or already provided by the bitcoin network.

Savings, transfers(much faster than any bank transfer, I mean my bitcoin reaches it's destination before I can finish filling in the bank transfer forms), security. All there.

I don't need customer support when there's no problems. I've never had something so easy to use to buy on the internet before.
It will be very difficult to offer higher rates, better service, etc. than a non-profit credit union

Credit unions generally have disproportionally high overhead due to their size, and their rates are not great lately because of the corporate CU collapse. CUs face 38 basis points of assessments for the next two years to pay for the corporate bailouts.
Pet Molds
Not really. It was doctors like Atkins and journalists like Gary Taubes. Huge public support of Atkins forced nutritionists to start studying Atkins.

Nutritionists have been demonizing low carb diets since the 70s.

It is the general public, through anecdote and experience, that has made this discovery mainstream. Dr. Atkins and others made the discovery, but they were never accepted by the scientific community.
Not everyone has the same values as you. There's nothing inherently wrong with not caring if somebody knows where you surf, and being interested in the recommendations that their tool can provide.

Disclosure is good. Homogeneity and coercion are bad.
Pagoda goes in private beta - Heroku for PHP
Teen Peace Sign Bedding
Twitter blocked by evil firewall at work. What does this tweet say?
How much uniques do you average?
You are still ignorant of the latest research.
Extremely useful for working through design concepts and getting feedback. Thank you.
Mike Lee: Making Apps That Don’t Suck
About $10k a month from an old Facebook quiz app. I haven't touched the codebase or worked on said app in 8 months.
People above are mentioning how super injunctions violate an American's conception of the right to free speech, but I think this is the more troubling aspect: that it violates the journalist's right to due process. I'll grant that ignorance of the law isn't usually a good defense, but when the law (or in this case, court order) is kept secret, what other defense can you use?
Critique of Evans' article:

http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2008/08/13/the-weekly-carbo...
>> if Party A wins 51% of the popular vote in every single district, then will claim 100% governance of the entire country

What about 51% of the votes in 51% of the districts?
Wallaby is rather limited, according to Adobe's own site: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Wallaby#Release_Notes

Notably, ActionScript is not converted and only the latest WebKit browsers are supported. Hype's content displays almost everywhere (and you're seamlessly made aware in-app when there'll be differences between Hype's scene editor and any given browser), and Hype's Javascript support allows for much more interactive content than can be produced by a FLA processed via Wallaby.
Lise Buyer, banker who guided Google IPO, talks about LinkedIn IPO
Woah, that's like 300kb of javascript...
Libcaca and its various programs:

http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca

Also, there is neercs, a terminal multiplexer that uses libcaca:
http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/neercs
Here's one that I find does not get a lot of mention but is quite useful when you need it.

"tee"
So he wrote it all in Lisp...
This sounds kind of silly to say, but when I spent 5 minutes getting abcde set up (to rip, encode, and tag into Ogg Vorbis, MP3, and FLAC at the same time), and then had it finish encoding everything just 30 seconds or so after it finished ripping, I felt like I was in the future.

I mean, I remember even 5 years ago ripping a CD took actual effort and a long time to get all the encoding done. So yay for abcde.
"I've stepped down from my position as lead engineer of BankSimple. I wish them good luck, with or without me." by KirinDave (Dave Fayram)
I have Little Snitch on my machine too, but I've set up a rule that allows my browser to make calls to port 80.

Are you saying you don't have a generic rule in place, and are instead using Little Snitch to approve calls to port 80 for every new domain you visit? If so, that'd certainly work, but it seems more than a little impractical.
Congrats on your release! Glad to see a growing market for modern web standards animation tools. I'm building my own CSS Animation tool as well, so the more the merrier. I'll have to check out your approach and get down to work on my next build.
"In the UK it is deemed that people have a right to privacy."

I believe the public outcry is more around the fact that this is only available to corporations and the rich as these super-injunctions run over £100k[1] to obtain.

[1] This number has been bandied about in many of the articles, but I haven't seen an "authoritative" source on it.
Not an AskHN
I've reread you original post and don't see any mention of case sensitivity. In fact you insisted that americans use inproper unit (1000 times off), which is not true at all.

Also, I always pay attention to food labels and never noticed any confusion. As far as I can tell the units on Nutrition Facts label are always correct.[1]

[1] http://www.google.com/search?q=nutrition+label&tbm=isch
That's kind of like saying you won't use web services because you don't want a "hot potatoe" [sic] problem between your ISP and their ISP when there is an issue.

Businesses contract out services all the time. In this case, BankSimple is using some established company to store your money. They just provide the web interface and someone to yell at when there is a problem.
I think maybe most ignorant person in the room would be a better description in most cases.

If you were the dumbest person in the room there would be little chance for you to close the gap. They would be light years ahead and pulling out, instead of you catching up.
> I've stepped down from my position as lead engineer of BankSimple. I wish them good luck, with or without me.
Hmm.. you are right I've imagined this behavior. I could've sworn I'd seen this happen a number of times but looking back now I'm not seeing it.
I'm sure I'm wrong (and will be summarily slapped down), but I can't help but think that it is more than just possible that Apple would expose small/indie developers like this just to cull the number of apps in their store.
Interesting that his pic is still in their "Team" mosaic on the homepage.
I average $30 month on a fishing blog, I'm pretty passionate about it too so i don't really consider it work. All the revenue is via google adsense. I've been trying google affiliate but in 6 months have made zero on it.

The site is built on wordpress so i've been thinking about some kind of amazon affiliate plugin but i haven't pulled the trigger yet, haven't read any outstanding reviews on amazon plugins either.
Was there any animations in particular that appeared to be slow? What browser are you using, and on what model Macbook?

Hype's content takes advantage of CSS3 when possible, making some animations and effects hardware accelerated. If those CSS3 features aren't supported by the browser then we fall back to Javascript based animations which aren't accelerated.

All the animations should be quite snappy though, regardless of how they're animated!
Tim Ferriss made the assertion in the 4 Hour Body that what should be a benchmark for health is reproductive fitness ("sexyness"). This is tough to measure objectively, but not subjectively. A significant portion of our brain is devoted to processing exactly that (ever notice how you can instantly spot an attractive member of the opposite/preferred sex out of the corner of your eye?).

We use similar criteria for household and farm animals ("shiny coat," musculature, posture and signs of coordination and activity). Back when slavery was widespread, slave traders made their choices the same way.
I cannot understand how they will generate revenue while staying loyal to customers

By skimming off a percentage of the interest your money is earning in their institutional account.
I think you're right that people simply don't know how to share, and that they probably would share if they did know how. But isn't it troubling that sharing requires some kind of special knowledge? that sharing is a "feature" to be added (or not) at the producer's whim? And isn't it troubling that people don't seem to be upset about that?
Concurrency & Garbage Collection - Considerations as the JVM Goes to Big Data
Biggest Lies of Online Advertising
Exactly. From what I can tell, there's not much difference between the information ant is collecting and that that's regularly sent back to Google from Chrome, except that the latter is likely even more invasive.
This whole 'entitlement' angle is just wrong thinking here.

The fundamental is that technological advance has given us something good, that we did not have before, for free. The sensible question is, how can we best benefit from it.

Are we entitled to the invention of the car? Are we entitled to comfortably travel at faster than walking pace? The question seems meaningless, let alone unhelpful.
This is a bit disingenious. When your core product is a hosted service, its a lot easier to be open source. There's a lot more into using your product than just compiling it.

Take a standalone product like Camtasia. It works really well and its worth the money to buy it. But if it was FOSS and I could just donwload the sources, build and it use it, and only had to pay for support -- well I probably would never buy it. I've never needed support with it. It's so easy to use, I've never had a need for support (in fact, that's partially why I'm willing to pay for it!).

Figure out what your business model is first. And then do what makes sense. Open sourcing often does, but not always.
> unless presented as reason that popular opinion will not support them.

That was implicitly part of my message, yes. They're certainly not hacking the social perception...

> Being able to predict their agenda from their physical appearance is entirely irrelevant.

People are visually blocked before they could get to their message. If they want support from more than the usual suspects, then they have to play according to the rules of the social game.

If I won't change my "insulting" style, I get downvoted at HN. If they won't change, they won't get upvoted in elections.
I co-own a web app which makes about $70k a year total, which I split 50/50 with my partner.

Living in a relatively expensive place, I'm satisfied with that for now as it enables a modest yet comfortable standard of living. The usual benefits - flexible hours, can work in any location with internet access, complete choice of technologies, etc. go a long way.

We could do a lot better, though and I'm aiming to do that. The current business I have can't grow due to the unique situation (it's based on another company's API, and that company is atrocious in every way imaginable - including developer hostility). It's been a blessing, though and I'm looking to build some great new stuff this year.
without comment scores, new users don't have feedback from the community on how they're supposed to act. There's no way for them to learn the culture.

Or more likely, the culture just changed. That happens sometimes, and when it does, there's no going back.

HN has become much more adversarial in recent months, and it has nothing to do with whether or not we see a number attached to the comment. You don't need that number to know whether the person who wrote the comment is someone that you probably wouldn't want to hang out with in real life.

My guess is that we're just all strangers now, and that it is human nature to implicitly treat strangers differently than we do friends. What's amazing (to me anyway) is that this change has affected even users whose names I recognize going back years. People whom I used to have a lot of respect for. It's not just the new users.

You either like debating strangers or you don't, and the people who relish these kinds of debates will pursue them even in the absence of a scorekeeper.
You are correct. It's just the insurance that's restricted to military. They are the best bank you'll ever use IMO.
> To accept that the State is strong and does whatever powerful interests desire is spineless.

"Accept everything just the way it is." - Miyamoto Musashi's first principle of the Dokkodo

Making statements of fact that are true is not cowardly. Note that I didn't make any value judgment of the current system. Just stated how things are.

That's always the starting point. How things actually are. You always start there.
"This is a complex situation that few or none of us are properly equipped to resolve."

This is, in fact, not a complex situation. Law is not a magic, unknownable realm populated by wizards who have the sole ability to understand what it means. Hard questions in law are hard questions, like hard questions in engineering are hard questions, but this is not a hard question. It's only a hard question if you are ignorant of the law or are intellectually committed to law not working the way law actually works.

Printing a check which exceeds one's granted authority is, with absolute certainty, a crime. You seem to be hung up on the notion that the payroll company can print one check and, therefore, if it prints two checks, check #2 is kinda grey-area authorized. The law does not see things that way: if you're knowingly printing extra checks to with the extent of stealing from their account, it is screamingly illegal.

I mean, want to look at an actual law? Here you go, MA General Law Chapter 267 (Forgery and Crimes Against the Currency) Section 1 (False or forged records, certificates, returns, attestations and other writings)

"Section 2. Whoever, with intent to injure or defraud, falsely makes, alters, forges or counterfeits a railroad ticket, railroad mileage book or railroad pass, or a ticket, badge, pass or any written or printed license purporting to entitle the holder or owner thereof to admission to any exhibition, entertainment, performance, match or contest of any kind, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not more than three years or in jail for not more than two years, or by a fine of not more than five hundred dollars."

This is really not ambiguous. Was it unpredictable that this was the law in MA? No.

If one hypothetically believes that this case does not qualify as "falsely makes" or that the bad actor here didn't have "intent to ... defraud", one is wrong. One is not just a little wrong, or arguably wrong, or sort of grey area wrong.
I think he's said it's on his to-do list, but he wants to add more 'cool' stuff first. Also you can get tools like dwarf therapist which take some of the pain out of managing the UI.
Startup Quote: Michael Lopp, Blogger, Rands In Repose
> Are you saying you don't have a generic rule in place, and are instead using Little Snitch to approve calls to port 80 for every new domain you visit?

Yes. And I do the same with cookies.

I do allow connections (and cookies) permanently to "trusted sites", but that's the exception rather than the rule.
Except for, you know, the presumably small devs that Apple fucked over in the process.
Your work speaks for you.

- Michael Lopp (@rands)

http://startupquote.com/post/5672304574
As I heard this morning they will not revoke the ban but treat people with dignity and dont send the police to hit them.

If we keep the protests without flags and political bias it shouldn't be a problem with sunday's elections.

I just hope the protests continue until the next year general elections, we need a change... a big one.
I would love to see a live video example on your landing page. It took me a long time and several clicks to figure it out.
We split it up based on how many hours/commits have been done in the project to date. It's a niche product sold to small and midsized financial services firms. We used salespeople to get to about $3k/month and from there everything was organic. About 5 months from starting line until we got our first customer.
Oh, absolutely. It'd be awful if they did this. But it'd be fun to watch Lodsys try to fend off Apple's legal team.
Remember that you are not your users. Maybe you would build from the source (and then again, wouldn't you pay for it since you're a developer and you understand how much work they put into it?), but regular users would take something that works every time, and most of the time they'd pay for it.
Site alone makes me wanna give them a try :)
Skip a step and scan the Kindle.
[video]Huaxi: Secrets of China's richest village
Alright, you've convinced me that making life harder for myself is somehow a way to get and maintain customers. What should I make? /sarcasm

The only good piece of advice here is to be awesome so your customers will love you and your product. ... I'm pretty sure that's common sense, and everyone would do it if it were that easy.
My guess (and I could be completely wrong) is that Apple is working behind the scenes in some way to take care of this.
Around $350/month

$100-$200 a month selling virtual weapons in SecondLife (Used to be around $800 a month a few years ago)

$200 a month with my two iOS apps developed using Unity3D. Each took around 1 week to make! Seriously was worth the $300 license, I doubt anybody could match the development speed natively.
Why do Mirrors Reverse Left and Right (but not Up and Down)?
Also very helpful: make that link actually work. Visiting the link redirected to a blank editor on an iPhone.
im cuckoo for cocoa canvas! there its been said at least once.
It really bothers me that so many people here seem to be saying "I am capable of scoring articles fairly, but the rest of the community seems not to be able to think for themselves, falling victim to group think and a herd mentality."

This seems like a lot of fundamental attribution error [1] going on here.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
One of the textbook examples of groupthink, used in just about every classroom that covers the topic, is the Challenger explosion. If it's a problem for rocket scientists, nobody is immune.
Any plans to integrate audio playback tools? This is so very close to what we need for authoring interactive ebooks in the education sector, but audio is critical.
I'd tend to say big company. Go to google or microsoft for two to three years. You'll go to a company with strong mentoring to help you dramatically improve your development skills, and you can almost view it as getting a masters in software engineering if you work hard and take advantage of everything the company has to offer. You'll get a great introduction to things like testing in practice, using and configuring linux in practice, developing good taste in software development practices, debugging large systems, what large systems should look like in order to be maintainable, source code control systems, etc. You should also be able to live relatively inexpensively and save a great deal of money.

After your two to three years, go to a startup. You'll get the increased responsibility and have the skills and experience to take advantage of it.

In my view, the problem with going to a startup is they tend to need you to be productive in a real hurry. There won't be much if any mentorship and often you'll be left to work autonomously. Frequently you won't even get reviews or feedback, which isn't as bad as it sounds, because often your boss won't be able to give good feedback anyway -- remember that at a startup your bosses are probably learning as they go just as much as you are. If you haven't developed good taste in software and a sense for how to build big systems -- something virtually no undergrad has, with the exception of people who've done a bunch of open source -- you can get yourself into a pretty bad place. Bright people can often overcome bad software development practices, but only for so long, and when the tech debt hits you it hits hard.

Edit: plus, if you go big company first, you can have little debt and $15k+ in the bank. There's nothing in the world as reassuring as knowing that if shit happens with your paycheck, you have 3-6 months to find a new job and won't have any trouble paying bills meanwhile.