skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This seemed like an interesting challenge, so I ended up creating a bookmarklet that lets you link to a comment on a post url (not directly from the person's stream, however) by clicking on it.

https://gist.github.com/1193282

It also accounts for the height of the gbar and googleplus navbar, since linking directly to the anchor tag puts the comment directly at the top of the page, behind both of those fixed elements.

edit: example link to that comment: https://plus.google.com#102150693225130002912/posts/PVZDD2N3...
I believe Yelp does pay reviewers for "seeding" a city when they launch in a new area in order for there to be content when they open in the city.
it helps to have a condensed "convince your boss"-pdf ready for just that!
I want to believe Yelp is above board - but the sheer mountain of accusations leveled against them is not encouraging.
They stole this question right off of AskReddit
I would hope that Yelp doesn't actually operate in the manner in which its detractors accuse it of (as it would seem to be pretty cut-and-dry extortion).

I assume Yelp operates in the way they say they do, but I still find it functionally useless as a review site.

Every once in a while I'll look up the reviews for a place that I frequent and like, and read the reviews. They inevitably show me that people's reviews might as well be random. If the reviews for places that I already like are this different from my own experiences, how useful can they be for places I'm thinking about going to?

It would be like if I read movie reviews from a reviewer who hates all the movies I like (or worse, is ambivalent). I wouldn't find reading their reviews useful.
If anyone is interested in a less corporate, more fun version of Alison, I started Curious Reef a while back. It's a social learning website.

For an example of someone actually learning something, here's a post by someone who just finished the MIT 6.00 Intro to Comp Sci class on Curious Reef: http://curiousreef.com/class/mit-opencourseware-600-introduc...
done. thx.
When you search for this business's name, you see the 1 star review right there on Google.com along with "Don't be fooled by a nice site ...". But when you click through there's 7 reviews with a total of 4.5 stars.

Yelp must have caught on to this breaking story?
If you want a fictional account, rather than a documentary like the excellent Inside Job, I think a black comedy in the style of Dr. Strangelove might be more appropriate.
Not to quibble, but I would say that using SRS and SKF doesn't really qualify as using "complex derivatives" to bet against the market.

For most investors there really wasn't an optimal way to do this, using ultra-short ETFs carried a lot of drawbacks. The best way (which I found and put 50% of my PA into) was to go long a Canadian insurer which had a ton of credit default swaps on most of the levered investment banks.

The other thing I would say is that, unless you are somehow exacerbating a problem (e.g.: somehow creating rumors to cause bank runs) then picking up cheap insurance isn't the same as being the guy controlling the predator drone in a strike. You'd instead be simply offsetting someone else's risk.
You are right, there is something more fundamental to strive for: purpose.

Alignment, whitespace, hierarchy and contrast are elements of visual syntax. You internalize the rules so much that when you're designing you're not thinking about it; you are thinking about what you are trying to achieve.

Say you need to design a sign-up page for a newsletter, you need to:

1. Tell users what the newsletter is about

2. Say how often it's published

3. Make them feel comfortable giving out their e-mail

4. Give some demonstration of value

As you are designing, you are thinking about what is the best way to accomplish each of these goals in a visual manner. You often don't even think where to align stuff, it just falls into place because you know where it's supposed to be.

If I were to make a parallel to code, it would be clearly internalizing the syntax of the language. You no longer think about where to indent your code, or of a comparison operator in javascript is == instead of =, you have achieved enough fluency to stop thinking about how to write code and actually achieving something.

___

Since everybody is plugging their own stuff, I wrote on the subject of programming and design here: http://method.ac/blog/design/programmers-designers.html
Notes on US College Debt
> I think I bought a total of maybe four new hardcover novels, as an undergraduate, so I still think of the hardcover as a sort of word-of-mouth trailer for the mass market paperback.

At the most basic level, though, it's temporal price discrimination. Those who want to read the book right away will buy the expensive hardcover edition as soon as it's released, while others will wait for the cheaper paperback version. The free word-of-mouth advertising by those diehard fans is just an additional benefit.

Perhaps something similar will be seen with the Kindle store, in that prices for books will gradually drop, in order to net the highest profit from the hardcore fans, but still draw in casual readers with lower prices at a later date.
If you put two spaces at the beginning of the line, HN will ignore *asterisks*, switch to monospace, and won't wrap.
With Bittorrent some parts of the file can change and still people can seed the unchanged parts. So having multiple versions in the wild is less of a problem.
I recommend against the Kindle version, as the illustrations are messed up. Which is really bad, because they are supposed to illustrate design
1) Liquidation preferences: Right, and part of the problem is that as more investments are collected, more preferred shares get in line ahead of employees' common shares. "Down" rounds tend to devastate the value of common shares.

But the good news is that upper management and regular employees are in principle affected the same way by these vicissitudes, and in practice I've seen that mostly happen. Some exceptions include founders/upper-management getting special opportunities to cash out or receiving significant anti-dilutive share bonuses. I'm not saying that the founders and employees have exactly the same incentives here, but they are at least somewhat helpfully aligned.

2) Agree that I've heard gossip about these kinds of scenarios, but (I've often wondered) wouldn't this be a violation of their fiduciary duty to certain stockholders? Can a lawyer weigh in on whether (in theory) this scenario allows for a legal remedy?

3) True, the corporate charter is not a contract with an employee, and it can be rewritten at will by the Board. But it seems to me there are limits: if they edit the charter in a way that deliberately wipes out the value of your shares and had a choice not to, this resembles case 2, where I suspect one can seek legal redress (right?).
I don't think an explanation involving 'YMMV' and 'sounds like' is a sufficient support for your opening statement that it is 'an awful example'.

They have simply entered a market with a competing product. Unless you have evidence that their product is inferior to competing solutions and that they know it, but intend to overcome that problem by outmarketing the competition, then you really don't have any support for your position. Nestle has nothing to do with it until then.
Just to clarify - I was talking about oldest surviving buildings as we were discussing time capsules.

There are archaeological sites where large amounts of construction had been carried out that are much older than 3500BC e.g. Çatalhöyük in Turkey:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%87atalh%C3%B6y%C3%BCk

And, of course, Jericho:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho
Doesn't mention whether this includes the option of "adult" services.
when I say their software is s, I mean merde
Even if you assume 50,000 Android developers the numbers don't come out great. My number might be wrong but it's probably not wrong by two orders of magnitude.

Update: https://www.mylookout.com/appgenome reports that number of developers on android between Aug 10-Feb 11 grew by 4,000. So the number of android devs is probably in the low to mid tens of thousands.
The affiliate link affects the way some of us see the recommendation. In turn this reduces the contribution of you comment. It's kind of an internalized spam filter.

I would never downvote you for it, and I'm not saying you're wrong to put it in, I'm just trying to explain how some of us here will see it.

I'm more likely to check out the link if (a) you have nothing to gain and (b) I've seen great design work you've done. Without that I usually can't be bothered.
Stiforp Profits – Tools
It would be like if I read movie reviews from a
reviewer who hates all the movies I like (or worse,
is ambivalent). I wouldn't find reading their
reviews useful.

You could read the reviews, and then only go to movies that reviewer hates. Not a guarantee, but it does decrease the sample size. Unless the reviewer hates all movies.
I agree. If I got an email with "lawyer pomposity" in it, I would likely pretend I never got it and deliberately push back any accessibility plans out of spite. You don't have to stick "please" in every sentence, but you have to phrase things correctly. If it's phrased as a request, I would see an opportunity to make people happy and gladly go along. If it's phrased as an order, I would probably perceive it as an affront to my individual sovereignty and would be motivated to fight back rather than capitulate.
The book was published in 1988, with a mass-market paperback in 1995. Heck, the top review is from 1997. This tells me the publisher likely hasn't even thought about that book for 15-20 years.

Additionally, they probably don't have the book in digital format, making conversion extra effort and time. When you have decades and decades of publishing history, how do you pick which books to spend money on digitizing?
P. J. O'Rourke can turn a phrase:

Our summer weather in 2011 consisted of tornados, heat waves, an earthquake
and a hurricane. For everyone this side of Nome, summer vacation in the
summer is like having a coffee break at 2 a.m.

At the very least, our elected officials should be back on the job.
They left some unfinished business—such as the survival of America into
the second quarter of the 21st century, etc.

Eating Whoppers and fries for breakfast together was a bonding experience.
Every boy treasures that moment when his father first says to him,
"I don't think Mom needs to know about this."
Fine article, but if the goal is legitimacy in the design community, make sure not to misuse terms. Kuler and colorlovers.com are great resources but they probably won't teach you anything about color theory. Also, white balance does not mean what the author thinks it means.
Leading People? Dream Bigger: Create An Adventure Big Enough For Them To Follow
Hmm. Sounds familiar: http://observerapp.com/
You don't even need a custom client. Bittorrent is based on pieces (or was it parts?), which are relatively small blocks of data. As long as your ads do not affect the file otherwise (and they shouldn't) people can seed the common parts (= the actual content), and the incorrect ad pieces would be ignored.
Wow good idea man.
Mobile APP Network Forum Hacked, 15000 user accounts leaked
I suggest we make it a large black monolith and bury it.
I'm on it, I'm on it....(http://www.placeling.com).
... is this right - someone bid $20,000?
Convenience. At least that's the reason why I used Spotify for a while.
Pakistani Music site Database and Vulnerability Exposed by Maxt Breaker
Reviews can be pretty useful. If my mom needs a simple modem/wifi/router in her house, I'll just buy her whatever one has the most reviews on Amazon.
Yeah, movie reviews might not have been the best analogy. My general take on movie reviews is that I only use them to discover movies that I might have otherwise missed (i.e.: a bad review will never dissuade me from seeing a movie, but a good review of a movie I hadn't planned on seeing might make me see it).

And to be fair to Yelp, I've only ever really looked up Restaurant reviews, which seem to be the category of reviews that are the least useful. I don't think anything in a Yelp restaurant review short of "Every time I go here, they drag me to the back room and harvest my organs", would make me take notice one way or the other.
Philosophical question - why do people with disabilities have the right to higher priority than everyone else? Let's say you've calculated that there are 4000 blind people who might be interested in your website, but 11000 Spanish speakers, 9000 Korean speakers and 7000 Portuguese speakers. If someone comes to complain about accessibility for the blind, won't it be perfectly reasonable to answer (in more polite terms) "no, we won't handle you, we're going to do a Spanish translation first, then implement UTF-8 so we can do a Korean translation, then do the Portuguese translation, and only then maybe get to you"?
http://www.bettercallsaul.com/
Human Hamster Wheels for a Healthier America
BBBJ perhaps.
This is top notch advise. Noone wants to be sold to. Selling our SaaS products, I found that the best way to close is to ask prospects to educate you about their problems(related to your product, of course). You don't need to lie, tell them you are trying to learn more on a specific use case for your product - and that they are doing you a huge favor by helping you with that! People usually like to help. If you're asking the right questions, they might actually close the deal for you.
I think the fundamental problem is that designers use right brains to come up with solution: the brain that's involved in processing of emotions, shapes, "a-ha" moments, and seeing the whole picture.

Programming, on the other hand, seems to be a fairly analytical and logical activity that involves verbalizing logic in a programming language.

I suggest starting out with "The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" because if you try to approach design as you would approach programming it will look like a stick figure.
The World's First 3D Rendered Film [video]
What Jacqui did in RSS’ absence is always helpful: letting other people filter popular news sites for you.

I've been hearing this back from a lot of my subscribers (I run weekly JavaScript, Ruby, and HTML5 newsletters). They've gotten sick of the deluge that accompanies RSS feeds and the lack of discrimination that sometimes occurs on Twitter and they trust me to curate that info for them. Of course, the next step is to expand into some slightly bigger niches ;-)

Of course, there's the "why aren't you doing this with RSS" crowd too, but with 25k subscribers and growing, I'm finding it pays to focus on those who actually want the e-mails!
I suspect Yelp is extremely venerable and could be successfully sued from several angles. However, the court system tends to protect such companies on free speech grounds etc. So, their downfall will probably come from leaked internal operations rather than any external source.
For any young HNers out there, let me say that travel is a skill like any other, and you shouldn't put off building it.

Growing up American, my image of travel was staying in hotels in Europe and looking at things we were told were important when we were in school. That's expensive and very isolating. This may be great for well-heeled, older couples looking for a minimally-exposed, relaxing jaunt abroad, but it's not what you want. It seems like every travel brochure I ever saw in the U.S. featured a photo of a healthy looking, silver-haired couple laughing and enjoying views from afar.

Instead, traveling on the cheap, staying in hostels, and getting directly involved in adventures is fun, mind-expanding, and most of all, not lonely.

I stayed for a week in a very friendly guest house in rural, northern Thailand for $6 per night. The hosts would cook meals for around $2, or you could tromp around and play every expat's favorite game: Who Has The Cheapest Lunch.

Like I said, though, travel is a skill. Just like that crappy code you wrote, your first trip will probably suck. But you'll look back on it fondly, after you've absorbed all the lessons it contained, and forgotten a few of the worst parts. More importantly, you'll level-up and your next trip will be better.
If I ran a media company, I would seed slow, low-quality (but not fake) torrents. That would boost the benefit of paying for fast, direct downloads of high-quality legit content.
Relevant: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2959299
Why not fix all the typos if it's as easy as clicking 'edit file'? He has the option to merge it by clicking one button.

I just can't see the downside. He didn't want to merge it due to the lack of signed-off-by, but at least he knows there's a typo there now and can fix it or let it be if it doesn't bother him.

(For the record, this was not the first typo fix contributed, see https://github.com/torvalds/diveclog/pull/2 for something he already pulled in.)
Radon Gas and Skin Cancer. Radon Mitigation Information
I am a fond user of RSS for the "large number of infrequently updated sites" use case, but I am still subscribed to some high-volume news sources. Relying on your friends to read them for you is good, but obviously not sustainable (if everyone did that...). I'm toying with the idea of doing naive Bayes filtering on my feeds to filter out the mass of stuff I'm not interested in.
Ask HN: Umbrella company for UK contractors
I'm looking to move back into contracting after a career break. Last time I did this I ran my own limited company, but this was a lot of hassle. Can anyone recommend a good (UK) umbrella company? Or should I set up my own company again?
BackBox Linux 2 released ~ THN : The Hacker News
It's interesting - Khan Academy has such massive following, but from a technology standpoint I've seen much cooler stuff... www.smart.fm comes to mind.
Actually making the words longer like that goes a long way to expressing emotion in your texts - while avoiding the use of emoticons, which make you look like a girl.

For example, adding letters to a word is especially useful when teasing someone- gives them a hint you're not 100% serious.
Cool. I still have a lot of the American continent to explore, but when I finish that, I'm waffling on whether to buy a sailboat and float around some islands, or fly to Europe and buy a motorhome ("caravan") over there. I thought I'd go for a year and a half, tops, and then buy a place in Austin or some other nice city. But, I'm 20 months in, and I just don't see any reason to stop. Every time I think, "I could buy/rent a place here." I start to get itchy feet and want to drive again. Even awesome places aren't awesome enough to keep me permanently content. I blog very rarely at http://nerdnomad.com and tweet at http://twitter.com/nerdnomad and post photos at http://flickr.com/photos/nerdnomad
the Better Business Bureau has been doing this for years. Welcome to the real business world.
URDU SEX STORIES: Main Aor Meri Sexy Teacher
"The simpler you make it the more that will but the simpler it is the less useful it becomes"

Is there any data to support this point. Intuitively it feels that simple system would lead to higher number of reviews and consequently paint a more accurate picture of reality.
News About The Future Of eInk
i read hackernews via rss.. hundreds of posts per day - i simply don't go through all of them. whenever there's nothing interesting to read, i open it up and check what titles are interesting and start reading
I'll take those on a case-by-case basis ;)
Hungary Introduces 'Fat Tax'
"I learned that I don't want to relinquish that [programming] duty to others. I will day to day. But I need to be able to sit down and do what I want to do if I want to do it."

-Trent Rezner
It certainly seems like the majority of people complaining about tend to be mom and pop operations with little or no internet savvy. This tends to foster a paranoid attitude, sort of like when you know nothing about cars and take your car to a new mechanic.

On the other hand, Yelp is walking a thin line with their business model.
Linus Torvalds writes pretty awesome commit messages
Well, first and foremost: the existence of Hawking radiation hasn't been experimentally verified. There's no direct evidence (measuring radiation that could have no other source than the evaporation of the black hole) nor any indirect evidence (black holes losing mass at a rate that cannot be explained unless Hawking radiation is included). So although it seems to fit nicely into the picture, it may not exist at all.

A second type of answer is: I don't know and I admit that the physical picture of virtual particles hopping in and out of existence indeed nicely includes an explanation of Hawking radiation. However, I'm reminded of the texts that illustrate how many physical phenomena were considered to be satisfactorily 'explained' within, for instance, the aether model, even though it later turned out the model was fundamentally flawed and all of those physical interpretations were hogwash.

A third type of answer is: sometimes things simply aren't what they seem. For instance, we can describe phonons as if they're particles: they are described by the same statistics as 'real' particles are. However, they decidedly aren't particles. They aren't properties of individual particles either: they only exist in macroscopic, well-ordered, amounts of material. You could look at all individual atoms one by one and never arrive at phonons as partial explanations for their movements and properties. For that, you'd have to look at things at a different level.
Personally, I use RSS in Google Reader as a living bookmark system. I have about 500 subscriptions and don't pay any attention to the unread count. A couple times a week when I'm in the mood to check out stuff in a certain subject area, I'll go on google reader and click through things in that folder. For instance, if I'm looking for inspiration, I'll click through my "art and design" folder that has 50 to 100 feeds in it. Other times some business event will be in the news, and I'll go into my folder of business feeds.

Apparently using RSS in this way is somehow different than how most people use it. People complain about feeling guilty or somehow stressed out by unread counts. People complain about a psychological pressure to keep up with and read everything in a feed or collection of feeds.

However, I'm left wondering whether this is an issue with how the tools are designed, or perhaps with how RSS is framed. Perhaps we need to develop tools that deemphasize unread counts and instead further emphasize browsing or discontinuous digestion of the content streams.
Until maybe 10 years ago, there was exactly one profession where you could travel full time and still do your job at full efficiency: Writer.

Now there are exactly two.

It amazes me that so few software developers take advantage of this fact. You can fit your entire working world into a four pound laptop and connect to the internet through the sky. People will pay you the same money to write your code from the beach as they will to write it from a cube in the suburbs.

The future is pretty cool.
Good luck. I'm planning to downsize really soon, either into a tow vehicle+travel trailer, or into a smaller class C motorhome. I may even buy a box truck or bus and convert it into a motorhome, depending on how much I feel like getting my hands dirty next month when I start my search for a new rig...it's the only way to get a really solid diesel chassis with good gas mileage in a smallish (24'-28') motorhome that isn't outrageously expensive.