skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because it's pure, you can know what comes out at the other end when you put something in. (That sounds more disturbing than it's meant to be). You can build pieces that you can reuse within many different structures, like different types of pipelines and filters. All without having to worry about leaks or the wrong stuff ending up in the wrong place.
Facebook for businesses - Why it should be done right
News stories work this way, putting the important information at the top. Other styles of writing (e.g. fiction) needn't.

Fiction is designed to catch your attention at the beginning, and make you want to read to the end. News is designed so that you can stop reading at any point, or just read the headline, and have got the basic gist of what's going on.

The attention-grabbing, mysterious headline on a "news" site, however, is a lousy trick in the memetic marketplace, tunneling its way into the host's brain to advantage itself at the cost of the reader.
I love computers. I am a Computer Nerd. I think computers are an important technology, not just a fun one.

You, and others here, who dislike the sentiment that something like the iPad could profoundly change someone's life, seem like you want to keep the magic of computation to yourselves. You denigrate design for humans as "marketing" and you demand to categorize the iPad as just another in a long line of Von Neumann machines.

It's not. And the Mission hipsters taking photos of their MacBooks with digital SLRs make me want to vomit. This is not about them.

It's about an old man who was cut off from computation--something I think is immensely valuable--and now has access to it.

Computation is important. Access to computation is important. You're right that talking about some new bullshit gadget as a religious miracle is embarrassing. I get that.

But you know what? Turing completeness is a miracle. Interactive computing is a religious miracle. The mouse is a religious miracle.

And this guy's dad being able to use a computer for the first time, after decades of being unable? Kind of a miracle in my book.

I'm sorry if that embarrasses you.
rather than Apple having to accomodate "enterprise" needs (and thereby perpetuating often antiquated or just poor ways of doing things).

Thats kind of a plastering over of the reality though.

iOS plays nice with ActiveSync, right there thats Apple accommodating enterprise needs. I can hit up exchange to remote wipe any employee's iPhone right now.

Its not that IT departments are forced to accommodate iPhones, they're forced to accommodate yet another smartphone.
The Metro Transit system in Minneapolis/St. Paul realtime info:

http://www.metrotransit.org/nextrip.aspx

The timing isn't perfect, but it gives you good sense of "Is there a bus coming soon." I've been thinking about coding up my own UI as theirs is pretty mediocre of what I want it to do.
I've read so many meta articles (including ones I've written) that I'm beginning to get a bit lost. Didn't raganwald already write something like this? Maybe a couple of times?

I float in and out of the community, sometimes being gone for a week and sometimes checking everyday. For many years. As we all know, meta commentary is not new here.

Yes, the magic sauce has worn off. People who spend weeks working on things are treated with easy criticism -- there's a reason PG asked for us to "be nice" to the new bunch of YC guys. People who post fluffy group-think are rewarded. What this leads to is more and more fluff, less and less real work that we can help with by commenting. Since we are more likely to be emotionally moved by things that are higher on the list, we feel as if we must comment [insert self-serving reason here]. This leads to comment-bloat, especially as traffic numbers soar.

I wish I had some secret formula to make it all better, but the way the site is structured, emotional response rules, not quality. When you vote up, you are saying "hell yeah!" not "my logical brain has deduced this to be of higher quality than average" -- at least in the aggregate. So the site is performing exactly as it should, sadly.
Are you trying to kill the independent mind and promote herd mentality? If things worked this way during the renaissance, Michelangelo would have died like Van Gough (broke and a total failure).

As PG has noted as well on many-a-occasion, the best ideas seem crazy at first.
I think it eventually becomes a question not of "is it better than the alternatives?" but "is it good enough for me to contribute my time?".
Why bring chat roulette into it?

Because it's been a phenomenally successful concept that millions already understand conceptually. And because it highlights their USP -- live, instant matching of language partners -- when their competitors who use vanilla video chat services require you to schedule online conferences.

'The something-of-something-else' pattern is incredibly useful as a means of introducing new services and ideas. (My favourite is from Ronald Shusett and Dan O'Bannon, who famously pitched the film 'Alien' as 'Jaws in space'.) Sure -- you might take on the negative elements of the service you're comparing yourselves with as well as the positive ones, but as long as you have answers for those questions (e.g. "Good question. Our community is self-policing, and we review and ban users who misbehave."), then I see little harm in it.
Publishers explore ways to avoid Apple fees, rules
"We're not going to fix this problem. I'm also fine with that."

Just thinking out loud here in terms of potential ways to stem this although perhaps this is futile.

What if HN had a checkbox for ad-hominem and/or off-topic comments?

Check boxing a comment as an ad hominem would add to your "ad hominem" score (separate from karma). Likewise for off-topic. This wouldn't stop a person from posting ad hominem or off-topic comments, but the idea of accumulating points for bad behavior could dissuade (some) people from making too many. Who would want to be branded the off-topic or ad-hominem gal?

Perhaps it wouldn't work -- but at minimum I think it would be an interesting experiment in promoting civility and thoughtful discussion.
If it can't be supported with relevant examples or detailed rationales, then what is it contributing? And if it is not contributing, then isn't downvoting appropriate?

And a comment score debate is pulsu equus mortuus.
How is it that Apple is the dominant player?
They make the most money, sure, but they are far from the #1 unit shipper.
They've only had a phone on the market for ~4-5 years at that!
Thanks for the feedback.

I completely understand your concern about trust. As of now, we are small (just two of us). But we worked in small and big companies handling very sensitive customer data with integrity and professionally. If nothing, you can check out our linkedIn profiles. Also, you can always call us or email us to learn more how we operate.
We hope that trust in our company will come with time.

Regarding 37signals requiring login/password, our service does realtime continuos synchronization and that cannot be achieved using only the API.
I havent built anything yet, I've just been mocking it up at talking to people about it.

A potential way to make money is to allow people to map out their trip before hand. Airline companies and travel agencies would surely be interested in offering coupons for potential travelers.
But what about printed materials like business cards and letterhead? You would want these to match your web style.
It's just another skill, it can help and make certain things go much faster if you are good at mental math, but in the end the only thing that matters is your understanding of the operations you are doing in either your head, or your calculator.

I am unsure how the traditional Calculus course is, but I took a slightly altered one at a technical institute, and we spent quite a bit of time learning the methods computers use to calculate integrals. I think it is safe to say that as long as I understand these methods and remember them, I am at no disability to use a computer, rather then solving integrals on paper.
Same here, waiting for the brazilian Portuguese support.
He was, and I was trying to make the point that he was wrong. :)
I'm really digging that quote. I never thought about the paths I have chosen away from corporate life (assuming that is what he is referring to by "navy") to be fun, just that they were more interesting. In the end, I like to think that it is about fun.
Another look under the hood of search
Steve Jobs' early Reality Distortion Field
I was thinking of allowing users to login with an already established social network like Twitter or Facebook. Im not sure how I would integrate it with wordpress/tumblr/posterous. Any suggestions?
This post has absolutely nothing to do with technology news.

It's entirely meta.

My head is exploding.
You don't need to pay for a top rated course to find someone who's trying to learn your language and vice versa, and meet up with them in person when you live in a multicultural city as the parent said, with universities where there are lots of young people eager to learn.
Agree 100%. I'd add it should be a separate score too... No one would want to be a high scorer in these areas...
Authorized Steve Jobs biography will include resignation details
Not to derail this, but there is a lot of idolatry surrounding Lincoln that he doesn't deserve. He was just a Politician; like all the rest.
It's well-acknowledged that those who don't understand the fundamentals of a subject are hampered.

Whether it's computer use, programming, or mathematics.

Of course, the prof would do well to become fully familiar with a TI-89 or a HP-50 graphing calculator. It's ignorant to bash what you don't understand.

Since having a sense of math is required for being a mature citizen in modern life - think about all the numbers we are flooded with regarding public policy - it is no surprise that as numeracy goes down (helped by our good friend Calculator), mass voting wisdom goes down with it.

Speaking as a US citizen.
Two problems with this post:
1-it severely exaggerates the personal attacks
2-it ignores the comments that led to the 'ad-hominem attacks'

The comment that started the 'attacks' was: "Steve Jobs touched people lives in a way no other can, sometimes at a very personal level". I find this comment completely ridiculous. I own an iphone and use a mac, I'm not an apple hater, but I do hate irrational fanboys. Comments that drip fanboyism and go well past rational discussion should be downvoted, not people posting responses. The responses were slightly aggressive, but they were responses to a terrible comment.
$-18,000/year

^-- I'm a student :(
Thanks for the response. Sorry but I'm confused. So future major/minor releases are free to upgrade for license owners?
Ljuba Miljkovic wrote an interesting thesis for his iSchool and implemented an app which I think is one of the best designed out there.

http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/files/student_projects/Trans...

"Transporter: Real-time Public Transit Designed for the Bay Area"

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/transporter-real-time-public/...
Well put sir. I "grew up" on Slashdot as well (started reading circa 1998 as I recall) and although it's definitely declined, there was a "golden age" of Slashdot when the comments were far more interesting than the articles, which made the site worthwhile. Doesn't diminish what Slashdot was though.
Because we're a community of geeks, these threads always fill up with random technical countermeasures. I am dubious that any of them will work. I think showing other people's comment scores was a bug and I'm glad we fixed it†, but I don't think we need more features to address the cultural issues.

I do think we'd benefit from more guidance, but 'pg is pretty hands-off on this stuff. Graham could say today "no Apple vs. * debates", and about 100 people on HN would immediately start actively shutting down pointless Apple debates.

But he doesn't want to do that. I'm sure there's a reason for it. Part of it is probably that no matter what the ratio of light to heat, YC benefits from having HN active and perceived as open and unmoderated.

† Not interested in debating this; take it to 'pg
Just through buysellads, but i spent a few hours trying to figure out what combination of CPM, CTR, and Conversion rate would make sense for us.
My first impression of the lack of displayed scores was that it was triggering slightly more short, redundant comments of agreement or disagreement, as people scratched an itch for public display of assent/dissent.

I suspect you're right that a change in tone and increase in the use of tribal-loyalty-signifiers might also be a side-effect of invisible scores. An upvote or downvote was only ever a coarse grunt or shake of the head, but in many social situations, there's a feeling one must send such signals to be 'present'.

Often when one outlet for a behavior is closed, the behavior flows elsewhere. Perhaps no visible point-effect means more signalling via tone and word choice: publicly upvoting via fanboyish tone, and publicly downvoting via snark.

It's a theory!
Slashdot was the source of my now-permanent news habits, and, I believe, the Petri dish in which modern hacker culture was first cultivated. Slashdot had memes before they were called memes, or so it seems; most importantly, it had discussion via threaded comments and community moderation. I first used this handle on Slashdot, and whenever one of my sites goes down due to traffic, I'll say it's been slashdotted.

But the relevance of Slashdot as a site has been eclipsed, first by Digg, then by Reddit and HN. The network effect is part of it. The technology is part of it. There's some je ne sais quoi about these newer sites; maybe they'll be replaced by some other, more minimalist social news platform in the future.
I told myself I would set up an LLC as soon as it had some practical benefit to me, and five years later...

I don't mean that to be flippant. I can see many good arguments for it, including the ones you list, but in my specific circumstances (no clients to invoice, clear line between personal and business expenses) it has been simpler to remain a sole proprietor.

That said, what I wanted to stress was the idea of not taking outside funding, however you choose to structure things.
What you mean is: Last time FB held their f8 conference they introduced the Like button, which has experienced moderate success.
That'd be pretty sweet, huh? Stay tuned!
| Joe rodeo watches Special Price
Link fix: http://www.ams.org/notices/201103/rtx110300368p.pdf

Current link is missing the "f" at the end.
Marital Communication
> What are Gates crimes? Screwing over some competitors? Is that really a big deal?

Yes, it is.
There are a lot of stations (numbered lines only, I think) that have "time to next subway" signs which I've found to be pretty accurate. I'm not sure if there is an API for subway info, but they run so regularly (~5 mins or less during the day and 30 mins at late night) that it's generally not that important to get that info. I'm not going to take a taxi because the subway is 15 mins away.
Yes, either scores or scrap voting. I don't think this middle way works at all.
We are very much on the same page regarding funding, which is one of the things militating my LLC advocacy. If you think you can just get starting without goofing around with admin details and funding pitches, LLCs are great.
I downvote any comment containing the word "fanboy", and I encourage my fellow readers to do the same.
What if karma was just based on up and down votes?

Wouldn't that be simpler and more fair?
I see the potshots, but it's mostly confined to threads spawned from potshot bait.

I think the issue is that the potshot bait is starting to overwhelm the first few pages like a lazy bacteria. And we just ran out of antibiotics. I know I've been reading HN a lot less over the last several months. It might not be reflective of any real reality, but an idea can turn real if enough people start to believe it.
I thought about this mobile solution as well, as a way to get at data that in my (not humble anymore. Geez, just open up) opinion should be given away by the companies running the service. I like the UK datasets.

I'm coming from Germany. Although everyone complains about public transportation (and the Deutsche Bahn especially) it generally works. If you're at a bus stop, you generally get a nice timetable with all stations and arrival times for each of them.

Now I'm in Tel Aviv: If I'm lucky I've got a plan that shows me the route and ~maybe~ when the bus leaves the first stop. If I'm far away, this is useless..
Minimum Wage and the Prices of Comics
This already exists in Chicago http://www.ctabustracker.com/bustime/eta/eta.jsp / http://www.transitchicago.com/traintracker/
Correct, but sometimes it is best to just ignore what is happening and accept that these are just opinions. Once you let it go once or twice, it becomes much easier to just ignore threads that add no value.
Yes, I did realize I was generalizing some. But... Apple's supported some of those protocols, but not out of the gate, and they've not built their initial products around some competitor's idea about a market (at least, not that I've seen). So... yes with the iPhone, they did accomodate "the enterprise", but didn't base the success of the iPhone on how well it was accepted by 'the enterprise'.
I vehemently disagree. The gap we should be worried about is the reason gap.

While I enjoy math tremendously, part of my deep dissatisfaction with economics as a field is its incredible over-reliance on math as a tool for analysis. I'm speaking as someone who dreamed of being an economist all through high school and early college. Classically, economics had very little to do with (numeric) math, and much to do with reasoning about how people behave.

However, as modern statistics (and math as whole) began to develop rapidly in the early 20th century, and as logical positivism became a dominant philosophy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism), economists took note and begin applying these tools liberally to their field. They started collecting and compiling tons of data on anything they could measure. Data is compelling: numbers give a sense of precision and clarity that mere reasoning does not. But this appeal is also what makes numbers dangerous. Though rigorous empirical testing of hypotheses in science is clearly one of the greatest advancements of the last 200 years, it has often been misapplied to other fields where the same controls are hard to apply. And experiments without controls can produce essentially meaningless data. Economic data is particularly complex, and there is still much debate as to how to calculate even very basic oft-quoted economic figures like inflation, unemployment, and GDP.

Though there was significant debate about the usefulness of these new tools, they became enshrined by the two dominant mainstream schools of the 20th century: Keynesianism and Neo-Classicalism. This bastardization of the field has made economics into a cargo cult science, where researchers regularly base their knowledge on data that is only slightly more controlled and scientific than corporate accounting.

This is not a trifling academic concern. So much of our lives is affected by what economists do and say. The bigger concern I have for young economics students is that their lack of mental math skills will make them more inclined toward the kind of overly precise large number manipulation that computers and calculators make so easy. I hope, for all of our sakes, that these less mathematically-inclined students will instead be wary of the numbers and critically apply reasoning to the models and assumptions they have been taught.
Boston's MBTA seems to be leading the way with this kind of information, and with making it open to developers. http://mbta.com/rider_tools/apps/ lists dozens of web sites and mobile apps which use data about the MBTA's buses and trains.

The MBTA's bus data (via http://www.nextbus.com, the giant in this industry) tends to be pretty good, though sometimes buses disappear from listings and reappear, and sometimes the predictions aren't very accurate, but they're definitely useful. Subway train data is only fed into the system once a train leaves the end of the line, so there tends not to be data for inbound trains for the first several stops. Commuter rail data is still different, because trains are so much less frequent and people tend to aim to be on a particular train which they know based on its scheduled time.

Other transit agencies are much more closed about their data. For instance, DC's WMATA requires you to sign up for an API key and access all data using their web services, even though their bus data comes from NextBus so you'd think they could let you hit NextBus's web services for their data.

There's also the brand-new GTFS-realtime spec from Google, which is a Protocol Buffer format for getting vehicle positions and so on very efficiently. The idea is that you'd be able to get the current locations of all the vehicles in a large system, like the MBTA, in a single request.

(Shameless plug: one of the MBTA apps listed in the app catalog is my web site http://www.mbtainfo.com)
I think $404.50/share is about the best quote he's ever had.
Hi Leej,

Think of it this way, we have Construct 2 and we are selling licenses for it. Because Construct 2 is in Beta we are rewarding people who buy it now as early adopters by giving them a significant discount. Once you buy a license you have a fully licensed copy of Construct 2.

Any new builds of Construct 2 are compatible with your license. You would only need to pay when we release Construct 3 which is far, far off in the future :) We release new builds all the time.

Hope that makes sense!

Tom
UCSD's shuttle service has a nice example of this: http://www.ucsdbus.com/
BusyFlow (accelerated by GammaRebels) does the same thing (although it's still in closed Beta) - http://www.facebook.com/busyflow
CmdrTaco Steps Down as Editor-in-Chief of Slashdot
Steve Jobs Begins Godfather Duties
The interesting thing here is that the single mod/creator of that subreddit can kill it off, despite there being many thousands of users subscribed and using it daily.

Seems like you should be able to give subreddits (or similar constructs on other social sites) up for adoption rather than abandon or kill them off.

Back in 2004 on audioscrobbler.com we had groups, with a "group politics" system where users could vote in new moderators and boot the old ones if they were dormant / abusive. It was far from perfect, but at least groups could survive the original mod going AWOL or just going plain nuts. Not seen anything like that since in social software.
My sense is that the threads of discussion raganwald mentions have increased since losing the comment karma score. The absence of a number next to each comment has made it impossible for me to instantly filter what's worth reading and what isn't. When I see a long thread of comments responding to a low karma comment, I know it's a debate I can probably ignore.

The last poll pg ran asking if people wanted karma totals back demonstrated overwhelming support for them. That was months ago, so there must be some compelling reason they're not back, but I certainly think they would go a long way to making HN comments more readable. At least, they do for me, and I'm the only one I can speak for!
Facebook has 750 Million members.....that itself is the reason for every business to do facebook right.
> you can probably get one via 1-click on Amazon now

That is almost literally true, only it's Nolo instead of Amazon.
I have always felt that visible scores helped provide extra signal, and argued against removing them.
Just about every bus/train will already have a GPS device on it (to help dispatchers and for safety), it's just a matter of convincing the transit authority to release that data into the public.

Minneapolis's MetroTransit, for example, has the ability to do realtime tracking but chose to go with a "n minutes until next bus" system rather than show moving dots on a map.
Accel Puts Over $30M In Dealer.com