skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is that you're having a difference of opinion with someone, who uses the downvote to disagree with you in the strongest possible way. As long as HN allows up/down votes this problem will exist. They are two fundamentally flawed tools that result in quarrels and mistrust.
oh well, that doesn't mean Bill Gates is doing it wrong.

i remember his talk at TED where he released mosquitoes in the audience. his goals are pretty clear, invite other people to care.

sorry, but it doesn't work like that if you keep it to yourself.

and i'm by no mean belittling buddhists or anything...
I don't think that Facebook will lose much value in the long run, but I have definitely seen a drop in momentum from them. Also, I'm 100% frustrated with their constant changes to the fan/group/app pages. It's really hard to manage, especially if you're a small business person or startup guy/gal who wears a lot of hats.

Joseph Ranzenbach in this article says: "Insiders, who know better than anyone what the [Facebook] internal business trends are, have are clearly now more willing sellers as reflected by the recent consecutive stock price drop in secondary markets."

Well, I just hope that Facebook can continue their momentum and PLEASE improve your systems for small businesses - its way too hard to manage a system that seems to completely change very 4-6 months.
I really like their philosophy of "constant iteration", but man, sometimes I think: how would they design this if they took everything they know, and started over from scratch?
Seed-funded startup from Warsaw,PL is looking for a technology co-founder (CTO)
As an Apple shareholder, I would protest and Jobs would too. Re-read his 2005 Stanford commencement address. He's pretty in tune with life and death.

That said, it's a down day in the market and Apple stock is barely down 1 percent. At some point, everyone must step aside and let the younger generation take over. For Jobs, it appears that time has come. It's bittersweet, but it's also inevitable and no amount of money can change that.
Didn't realize it has been 20 years already :/
> Because it didn't make any sense considering the technical constraints and the physical design. Smartphones before the iPhone had much smaller screens, usually resistive (requiring a stylus to operate properly) and had keyboards, which were much more practical for unlocking.

Except as I pointed out that sort of thing just doesn't work for a lot of people. "Press this strange combination of keys in the right order and it unlocks" is not a usable solution for the masses. This was the status quo for at least 10 years, I remember the Menu * thing from 1998 and my last Nokia phone in 2008 had it.

Doing something in a different way than the way everyone else had done it for over 10 years prior is innovation. I'm not saying it warrants a patent and I never did say that. You say it's not innovative but it clearly is. As you pointed out the slide to unlock feature is trivial compared to the bigger change of using touch as the main input mechanism.

This is what innovation looks like, the iPhone changed the status quo: http://www.marco.org/2010/08/19/a-smartphone-retrospective
I mean that I am making myself feel worse for reading HN...

<lightHeartedAttemptAtEmpathyAndEncouragement>

That's a signal that your focus has shifted a little too much from your own work to HN. Take a day off and invest that energy back where it belongs. We'll be here when you get back. Promise.

</lightHeartedAttemptAtEmpathyAndEncouragement>

EDIT: Added tags (Lighten up you guys).
sssshhhhh.
Perhaps That Programmer Training Course Is Too Compressed (cartoon)
> IBM's first personal computer, IBM 5100 was introduced in 1975, one year earlier

> Before that Xerox Alto was introduced in 1973

How much did the IBM 5100 cost? The Alto wasn't even sold. Can they really be considered "the personal computer as we know it"? If we go that route, any desk-sized single-user mini-computer would be "the first PC". That's not the case.

> it had a GUI, a mouse, an object oriented OS and an Ethernet card

No, it hadn't (ethernet excepted). Smalltalk/80 (launched in, you guessed, 1980) was the first real product (one you could buy) and class-based OO was only introduced with Smalltalk/76. The Alto never went past R&D stage. Its descendants did (in the 80's).

> Making stuff available to mere mortals means making it a commodity.

No. It means making stuff with the right price/performance. Like I said before, the personal computer as we know it, did not exist before Woz added a keyboard and Jobs added a plastic case. Before the first Mac no ordinary person would be able to buy a GUI-capable computer. After it, every computer got a GUI (sometimes, grafted on top of a very rudimentary OS)

> If I could afford a cheap and usable personal computer (in my country in 1994), it's because of Microsoft, not Apple.

If you got your first computer in 1994, you already missed the most interesting part of the PC evolution. Bad for you - it was one hell of a party.
Is it really that bad? HN is still an oasis of civil discourse in a desert of internet trolls.
If Enyo is open-sourced we can decouple the webos device APIs from the framework so you can plug-in the Mozilla WebAPIs or Phonegap APIs if so desired.
Google Traffic Estimator now broken for Max CPC under $1.00
Newell calls on Microsoft to open up Xbox Live
We are all going to nod our heads to this post, but as 'raganwald knows, nothing is going to change as a result. The inoculations against tribalism and tribal drama are cultural. Whatever vaccine HN had against this, it's worn off.

My take is, flag these topics off the site. Cut them off like a gangrenous limb. We want to keep the leg, but even more, we want our heart to keep beating.

But then, a vocal subset of HN users is offended by the idea that story upvotes don't mean it's OK to debate libertarianism vs. liberalism here, so don't misread this comment as prescriptive. We're not going to fix this problem. I'm also fine with that.

Ed's right too, of course. Are you here to hear what the average HN'er thinks about Steve Jobs? No, you're not. I read HN in two ways, both of which still work for me:

* I scan for stories I have something to contribute to, and

* I read a shortlist of users whose presence on a thread have been reliable signifiers of quality. (The list is on my profile.)

Try doing that. You'll miss a lot of HN; a good thing!
[video] Jeremy Ashkenas – CoffeeScript for the Well-Rounded Rubyist
pi/3 is 60°, and the sine of that is √3 / 2. But yes, that's not something one calculates by head, that's memorization. And working out √3 / 2 into decimals also takes a calculator, though I can approximate by knowing the first two significant digits would be 1.7 / 2 = 0.85.

One can memorize trig tables like multiplication tables, and I do find that useful from time to time. I remember sin, cos, and tan for 0°, 30°, 45°, 60°, and 90°, and how to flip the signs to get all four quadrants from 0° to 360°.
I know this is not Reddit, but i am on the brink to post a facepalm image.
An idea (to fix public transport schedules).
AMD poaches new CEO from Lenovo
I think the key in #1 and #2 is to give the blogs an incentive to mention you, if you do a simple press release, there is no incentive there- if you offer to write a meaningful post, they'll be more likely to respond. Everyone needs good content.
You know what I want? Ad spending forecasting. If I spend a dollar more on display ads what am I going to get from it.
I agree. The iPad is a PC...sort of. Unfortunately we've come to determine that the desktop and the laptop as representative of personal computing. It's not. Computers were meant to be for the professionals (IT), not for everyone e;se. This includes Office people. The 'PC' was meant as an appliance.

I can't say when this change will exactly occur (maybe 3-4 years?) but no one wants the 'PC'. They want simplicity. The modern PC does not offer this.
Interestingly, the most commented story on Reddit was (is?) "Obama beats McCain to become president" as well.
Sorry, but I don't see this as a big issue. Discussing Apple is disproportionately interesting because of the reactions it invokes.

Whenever there is a major story about Apple, there will typically be a tribal war because Apple has positioned itself as a tribal artifact (e.g. think differently, I'm a Mac, dolphin shorts v. grey suits)...

And forgive me for being a cynic, but it wouldn't surprise me if Job's resignation had been sitting in a can to be used in the case of fire...and yesterday morning, Apple's security incompetence regarding OSX Lion had all the makings of a major PR fire which has now been swept off everyone's radar screen like so much anthrax after 911.
That morning, slashdot was the only news related website that would load for me.
Thanks that was a good read. Why is our profession so plagued with this problem? no one would think of asking other professions to work for free. Is it just that we are inundated by it that we don't see it happen to other professions or is this a problem that overwhelmingly affects freelancers in the technical and creative trades. I understand not having the money to do it, but take for example auto repair. If you don't have the money to fix your car you don't go to a mechanic and beg for free work. Even if it is a commercial vehicle you don't go to the mechanic and say fix it and I will give you a (generally small) cut of profits. No you either come up with the money or you learn to fix the car yourself. Now granted mechanical skills are easier to teach than artistic skills. Some people just don't have the eye for art. But the issue still stands why do people feel it is acceptable to ask for free work in digital mediums, when they would never do so in the physical world?
Hi, I'm Jake, one of the Verbling founders. Thanks for this feedback!
We are planning to launch more language combinations in the future, though Spanish-English is the only one currently active. As we scale, we can allow users to impose filters such as "I want to talk to advanced speakers only."
What Is Amalaki?
App: Automatically Donate 10% of All Money In Your Bank Account to Charity
One of the most amazing /. pieces ever: Neal Stephen's interview (http://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/Neal-Stephenson-R...). And some of the comments are as hilarious as the interview.

I, too, read /. in the late 90s and up to around 2005, when I became more interested in other things, and other sites began making the changes that /. (and presumably CmdrTaco) were resistant to.

I also remember trying to read the source and muttering over the innumerable lines of cryptic Perl.
Ask HN: Review my startup idea
Its summer and all my friends are currently traveling. One of the more common type of posts I see go something like this:

Detroit -> New York -> DC -> Denver -> LA -> San Francisco etc etc etc

That or someone simply posts a link to their travel blog where they document their adventures in some far off country like India.

So I was sitting there thinking that there must be a better way to do this. I want to build a system where people can document their travels in a more organized manner.

It would essentially be a blogging system with a twist. Someone who is traveling would "check-in" to cities very much like foursquare. If this person meets people during his travels he/she would create a "People" post where they would upload a picture of this person along with where they met and what they did together. They would add a "Places" post whenever they visit somekind of monument or tourist actions along with a series of photos and descriptions. I'm still thinking of other things to add but one of the cooler features would be a map that would keep track of where this person has been.

All of these "posts" would be collected on that account's site and this person can distribute it.

TLDR; A blogging system that is oriented towards travelers.
Islandia recurre al crowdsourcing para redactar su nueva constitución | Yorokobu
So your comment here just got inserted back into the story? I'm not sure if I've seen that happen before
Hey man, I'm in college and I've got some free time before heading off to school and I'd be willing to help you put something together (for free). email me hstove@gmail.com
Not everyone looks at it as a popularity contest though. A lot of people look at it as "holy shit, there are a hundred comments in this thread, I don't have time to read them all, and I'm glad I can see what the collective opinion is about which ones are worth reading first". The "popularity contest" aspect of it is a problem, but the "popularity" aspect of it isn't.
We did have the Internet and dial ups back then you know...

...back when usenet and gopher were king and you could telnet places still...

...and spam was about new Sun Sparc equipment.

Wish I could get back my SS2 with Wietek CPU and 2x 200Mb disks running SunOS4 :)
I have a question. Does early adopter license cover future major/minor releases?
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True in that it's personal, and a computing device. The most basic definition is: "A microcomputer designed for use by one person at a time"

But really I'd say FALSE if you're more specific and think of a "personal computer" as the IBM-standard set in the 1980s and 1990s. My first computer I remember was when my parents bought an Apple IIGS (fifth in the Apple II series and not like an IBM, I know!) and that, for me was a personal computer. The iPod seems more like a "personal entertainment device".
I enjoy the idea that this account wreaks havoc on nyt.com's internal metrics.
I'm thoroughly convinced Haskell is the String Theory of programming. You may not be convinced by it, but you sure as hell have to be smart to grok it.
I definitely share this experience, for instance in many of the recent "Groupon is a scam" threads, or anything having to do with Android. It becomes a disincentive to participate in conversations about certain topics.

I think one thing that might help, and that often spurs relatively useless chains of comments, is to clarify exactly when a post should be downvoted. I think some people use downvoting to express disagreement, but since downvoting not only compromises someone's reputation (via karma) but also minimizes the visibility of the comment, the effect is punishment for that disagreement, which again motivates me at least to avoid controversial topics where I seem to hold an uncommon view.
Just to prove my point, I'm getting downvoted for the comment above :) Some people simply cannot handle the downvote.
Apple isn't coming down to $100 from $375 - not anytime soon at least - don't be crazy.
Interactions of grade school students tracked & visualized for a day
PS If anyone from Olark is lurking -- you guys have made talking with everyone a TON easier!
I agree, invisible comment scores add noise, because if I read something I agree strongly with I feel compelled to show my approval. In the old days clicking the up-arrow would show a suitable quantum of approval, but nowadays I sometimes feel compelled to add a comment which just says "I agree" and perhaps adds some minor extra point.

While typing this comment it occurred to me that this comment falls into that very category. Whoops.
One thing I don't see mentioned is that Slashdot was a uniquely Michigan success story. They were an example to a lot of Michigan startups that you could be successful and stay in the state.

I haven't seen him lately but CmdrTaco used to attend startup related events. One of the early Slashdot crew, Kurt DeMaagd, is now an assistant professor at Michigan State.
Your Hurricane Irene tech-protection checklist
These are great points for someone like me who knows only programming. I would say this is a good list to look at 'when the time comes'.
EDIT: More clarity in line 1
The downside of Haskell is that performing mutations is more difficult than with traditional imperative or object oriented languages, as monads take some time to get used to.

That said, it's a wonderfully elegant and expressive language, and I suggest you just jump in and try it as opposed to looking for someone to convince you not to ;p. Learn you a Haskell for Great Good, and Real World Haskell are both available online, and are great resources. (written from a phone, otherwise I would provide links, though a google search should bring them up quickly)

Good Luck! moving from imperative/oo to functional style can be a mind bender, but don't let yourself get discouraged, it's still just code. :)
I didn’t like business because it taught processes (the programming equivalent of this would be memorizing syntax), economics looks at setting up systems that incorporate those processes (building a mock economy and simulating the effects of pulling various economic strings isn’t very different than building a robot). Hope this helps.
I submitted my review of of the Unicomp Customizer (http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/08/05/29/1334258/Review-o...) years ago, and I think that day remains the most traffic I've ever gotten. Granted, it's a generic Wordpress.com blog and thus not susceptible to Slashdotting, but I still remember looking at the traffic spike and going, "Wow."
> "Microsoft lost to the web."

But not because Apple won anything.
Nor would things be much different today, for Apple, if 99% of desktop PCs were still running IE. (If anything, problematic web standards would push more focus to the App Store.)
I would love there to be varied flag options for comments. i.e. you click "Flag" and it spawns a dropdown with:

"Off-topic"
"Rude"
"Ad Hominem"
"Straw Man"

If enough flaggers agree on the lack of value (and the reason for it), punt it AND ALL OF THE REPLIES.
> People are born with a sense of numbers. Psychologists have confirmed this.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Subitizing
Sudden love for Gundotra's favorite authoritarian? Sounds more like a sigh of relief.

Vic Gundotra at Google I/O 2010: "if Google did not act we faced a Draconian future, a future where one man, one company, one device, one carrier would be our only choice"
And for the ones that don't have the financial ability to pay a top rated course?

I think this service enables self taught people with enough tools to march forward on their quest to learn a new language.
Decoding Steve Jobs: Trust the Art, Not the Artist
Speedy Chinese Clone Copies Startup Still in Beta
It's funny that you write this b/c I hadn't read any of those threads myself. I have a filter where I don't often read the comments on stories from major media that make it to HN. There's rarely anything much to discuss and you're absolutely right that I do not care what anyone on HN thinks of Steve Jobs.

As a side note, I'm happy about the removal of point visibility on comments... but I wonder if perhaps increased tribalism might be a result of users in search of social meaning... which used to be easier to obtain via points.. and over time has been replaced by an emergent tribal system, wars, etc.
I disagree, but am upvoting you anyway because you were in negative territory. Comment scores are necessary because:

a) Not everybody has time to read every comment on every thread, and

b) The scores provide a slight psychological reward for writing good comments, thus encouraging that sort of behaviour.

Forums without comment scores usually wind up looking like a complete mess.
Note that while these are probably the best practices for a company that knows it is immediately going to take funding, LLCs and S-Corps are valid choices for companies that aren't sure or that are going to be making money before they take funding.

The S-Corp in particular has some attractive features: it simplifies equity grants to employees compared to an LLC, and taxes are easier to deal with in a C-Corp (there's also a sort of notorious salary-vs.-distribution trick people place with S-Corps to reduce their taxable income).

The LLC is incredibly easy to set up; you can probably get one via 1-click on Amazon now.

In the only company I founded that took serious VC, I didn't handle any of the legal, but the sense I got was that legal for a real VC round is so innately expensive that the S-to-C conversion isn't a big deal by comparison. It's most convenient for everyone if you're not even incorporated, but that's their problem (it is dumb to do business without incorporating); if you're worth funding, nobody is not going to fund you because of the cost of converting to their preferred structure.
Doesn't really seem to address a pain point imo.
Looking at your site (static/welcome), some more thoughts:

1. where's the FB "Like" button? I see the Google +1 prominently displayed, but no Like button. Make it as easy as possible for people to share your site.

2. in my opinion there is too much text on the main page. You can remove the majority of the text and replace it with a stronger sign up call to action as well as some elements that demonstrate community activity- something like "most popular games over the last week", "trending titles"- something to show that it isn't a dead community, this would encourage sign ups.
Learn a REST API, JavaScript, Objective-C/iPhone and Android. If you do people will beat down your door. It is where the market is heading. What they all have in common is the client manages the UI and REST is your link to the programmable web.
Sugar Paper’s First Step
Nine women can't have a baby in one month, and dumping eleventy billion dollars into cancer research wouldn't produce results in the timeframe that I'm sadly guessing Jobs has left.

The investor enthusiasm alone would probably rescue this country from the brink of another recession.

Um, no.
I do wonder why extremetech.com chose the verb "poach" for their headline.
Thanks! I'll drop you an email tonight. :D
Rather than interpreting his essay as a sign of HN becoming too important in his life, I think it's more accurate to say that he values HN and feels that a blog post is a good way to contribute useful ideas back to the community.
Yeah, that's the challenge with biz-marketing speak in general - it's sales driven (not specifics driven or always substantive) and that frustrates me too!
20 years ago today: The First Linux Announcement from Linus Torvalds
Facebook Announces f8 Developer Conference: September 22
Actually you can pretty much do that -- define the cost of acquisition for ad spend and watch how it scales with customer growth, etc. Where do you have display ads right now?
More important than the civil discourse is that HN discussions are generally intelligent due to the high number of really fucking smart people who participate. That along with the karma system keeps much of the trolling in check.
>That's a signal that your focus has shifted a little too much from your own work to HN.

Amusing that to be the only reason is significantly oversimplifying.

The HN community is at best corrosive to the reader that is looking for technology and some buisness discussion. I made the mistake of assuming thats what I'd find here; once I got rid of silly notion, I found I no longer had a ill feeling when I went back to work after my lunch break.