skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It's clear (at least to me) that comment voting just promotes group-think."

Hmm...what's the benefit of comment voting? What's the signal carried by a high vote on a comment? I guess the intention is "this is worth reading/this is interesting"?

I wonder how the crowd would react to having agree/disagree/interesting/uninteresting buttons? Would that pull some of the 'noise' out into the agree/disagree axis, leaving better signal in the interesting/uninteresting?

If nothing else, it would give the software some traction on finding people who vote disagree+interesting which might help weighting/filtering.
> I think TeX doesn't take more than a "reasonable amount of effort" otherwise I, and many others, would use the alternatives.

Sure. But most people who write documents don't use TeX. That might be because TeX seems to prefer using its own custom font system which doesn't work with any of their fonts, and lacks and modern GUI. TeX should have, and could have, been Word, with an emphasis on structure.

The projects goals came from its Wikipedia page, which admittedly isn't referenced.
So, will this "...bring down global capitalism, start a second industrial revolution and save the environment"?
The most impressive thing I've ever seen on the internet is the way Slashdot ignored the Sept. 11th attacks.
This is exactly why they don't put the fate of humanity in my hands.

Finding a way to deal with nuclear waste just doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem to me. In the meantime, reprocessing the waste and storing the remaining waste somewhere safe seems like a prudent enough plan. If we can't find a way to get rid of it by the time we start running out of space, we stop using nuclear energy. We'll be far better prepared to switch over to solar et al at that point, assuming that nuclear is currently significantly more cost-effective than the alternatives.
Bebo kids will value privacy when they see adults do too
> You're going to be the one geek in the room with the Android phone.

No he won't. I'm giving my iPhone to the wife too.
It's a SDK licensing agreement restriction, not a technical one. Plenty of Installer apps run in the background.
Portable storage devices need security controls
Slow Feed Movement: 7 Tools to Filter the RSS Flood
New regular feature: “Send me an Angel”
Joel Spolsky admits he was being over-cautious all along
Nope:

http://getsatisfaction.com/huffduffer/topics/have_you_consid...
Sorry, folks: if Google remained a URL at Stanford for use by geeks only, I wouldn't consider it a success.

If Ubuntu never fixes goal #1, and particularly if it never fixed things stopping that goal, I wouldn't consider it a success.

TeX never achieved it's stated goal of allowing anyone to create typeset documents, and I don't consider it a success.

You may now return to digg and stop invading HN.

<sacredcow>
I don't have a current dump, but if you send me an email, I can give you the script I've written to create those dumps. It prints out the counts.
I didn't watch long enough to see that part.
Academia is where they put the green in the grass.
Ask YC: Question about writing Terms & Conditions (getting users to read them)
I am working on an application that might touch some legal gray areas in occasional circumstances.

I usually skip any Terms & Conditions for 99% of the stuff I sign up for on the web. There are three reasons for this:

1. They are hard to read, as they are usually a list of clauses and subclauses in legal terms.

2. I don't have the time, usually it's something small like a forum account or trying out some new web-app.

3. I've never actually had any scenario in my life where having read the Terms & Conditions would somehow have made a difference for me (in any way).

These three reasons combined are very strong, and probably apply to a lot of people as well.

One thing I have noticed is that I have read the Terms & Conditions (in abbreviated and easy to read form) every time Google wrote some thing like "this is not the usual yadda yadda!" They have done this for several of their apps and services that touched on privacy concerns (e.g., data aggregation by Google Toolbar).

This leads me to the following question. Would it be a good idea to have two huge buttons right above my T&C, "English" and "Legalese", with the default set to the former? English would provide a nice little blurb that summed it up in a few sentences, and clicking "Legalese" would do a Javascript layover that actually listed the clauses.

I am of course thinking that yes, that is a good idea, but I am asking because (1) I have not seen anyone do anything like this or anything similar (hence, is there some reason this would not be a good thing?), and (2) if the user clicks "Accept" having only read the English blurb without clicking "Legalese", is it still legally binding?

I guess a corollary to my question is why isn't this being done frequently?
I agree. Especially since there's a socially conditioned stigma against falling for a false alarm when trying to help. It seems to be seen as a display of hysteria on the helper's part. That's why most people act "too cool" to actually do something - better not risk that precious reputation.

Better a few false positives than a false negative.
So you've reached the bottom of this thread, a story told every day in the same tome.. erm, tone... I consider myself superior but can't place the feeling, my peers are inferior but feel better, my teachers are bored but I know better, I could write more but not to be flippant, etc. etc.

As the song goes, "You don't get my sympathy, hanging out the fifteenth floor."
Sorcerer is the new Rockstar.
I am a mathematics student and sometimes need to look up papers. A lot of these papers are in journals not available online and have references to more of such papers. This can sometimes make even understanding a relatively simple proof that could be explain in a book in a few pages a gruesome all-day ordeal where 3/4th of the time is spent looking up references.

It would be really freaking cool if Google (Scholar?) could scan these articles into PDFs, then attempt to OCR the references and see if Google has indexed those, then embed hyperlinks to the references. This is technically feasible, and I imagine it would really make a lot of researchers very happy.
I agree, the video wasn't remotely interesting...
VIO POV.1 Helmet Camera
I looked at a ton of helmet cams and I finally settle on the VIO POV.1 helmet cam and it’s awesome
They use extra sensory input when you enter grad school. Complaint is high fashion. Only the Sermon Complaint remains, and this fellow rides west with esteem.
Agreed
I'm new here and it has happened to me twice already. Ok so the first time was a bit blunt and when I qualified it with a reply it got upvoted again.

But the second time I didn't bother (even though I basically made the same comment further up the page - on a slightly different slant/discussion) and it got upvoted.

It always comes down to the users and their whims in the end :P

This place is a lot better than most :D
This exchange is a classic example of a failure to communicate. We have the uber-geek founder of one of the most successful companies of the time and a dumb reporter who just wants some standard fluff to cut-and-paste into his article and neither party really understands the other. While Walker clearly exposed the guy as being prejudiced and ill-informed, he should have realized even before the interview that it wasn't in the best interest of his company to allow that to happen.

Walker clearly "won" the argument but he lost an opportunity to communicate the reasons for Autodesk's successes.
timr, sometimes I think you're from another planet.

I said I'd like for the politics to stay off the board, but basically it was impossible to do because of the nature of all of us humans that were interacting here. There is a conflict between what we would like and what is best for the board and our nature.

You took that and made it out to be some kind of hypocritical statement. Is there something about how we never meet our own ideals that you can't understand? I mean, maybe you're much better than this, but I find myself acting at odds with my own standards all the time -- it's part of the human condition.

In fact, because of this conflict and inevitability, I agreed with you on another thread that it would be good to try to figure out how to bring the political discussions in. I guess you could say that's hypocritical of me because it conflicts the the OP of this thread, but that would be easily missing the point too.
Why mobile carriers should support your local VoIP dealer
Impact of US Financial crisis on Indian Outsourcing Industry
From the beginning of summer 2008 there has been a slew of bad news in US that caused ripple effects across the globe. It all started with the housing subprime mortgage and now it trickled into the entire financial market. The US unemployment rate hits 6.1% and the industrial production fell to 1.1%, its largest decline in the past three years.
Business Analyst Resume
Different types of a business analyst. Find out some facts on being a business analyst.
Not a bad idea (TechCrunch's last gasp?? dare I suggest??)

But not a great start when the first bio states:
"All my investments to date have been in friend’s businesses. I like investing in people I know, respect and trust. I don’t have time to review pitches from people I’ve never met before."

So whilst it's interesting to hear about the guy it's no use for anyone on the look out for angel's to pitch at... :P
I'm curious - at what MAU level will the game "break even"?
wtf?

I think he's in love.
Ruby and Shoes Programming: A New Course
Sounds like he was incredibly close to operating a profitable affiliate advertising campaign- breaking even means he's onto something and could probably be eeking out a solid profit were he to tweak the ad copy.
Here's something scary to show the kids -- giant spider eating a bird

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&...
How To Upgrade Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) To 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) (Desktop & Server)
What does "Random Alpha/Numeric" mean ? - sequence not readable ?

I observed that if you mention your password has random Alpha Numeric the time taken to break jumps to thousands of days.
F*ckedCompany 2.0: The Joke Isn't Funny Anymore
>> Scribd acquisition to follow shortly

Really.
Exactly.

After 3 attempts most high security sites block you out and others introduce a captcha (which though crackable through crackable will introduce a delay). Any site is going to take note (or go down) of 25 billion hits/hr that too on a single account (does total traffic/hour on a site like google.com sum to this? )

The time taken is only to generate the permutations, not to crack a password.
* I have been in classes in math, physics, economics, and political science departments, at three universities, which not only recommend doing schoolwork in TeX, but provide templates to facilitate the process.

* I know dozens of people who made resumés in TeX.

* A huge number of technical journal publishers (in some fields, the majority) use TeX

* Write a math or very technical science book. Submit it in anything other than TeX. Some places may still accept it. They are by far the minority.

---

Your posts are pointless nonsense.
FWIW, I posted the direct link to HN, but I also wrote a blog post about it that might fill in some of the missing gaps for some:

http://www.mobileorchard.com/take-stanfords-iphone-programmi...
But he never had an opportunity to communicate Autodesk's success. The reporter's underlying goal was to establish why Autodesk wouldn't be successful. No amount of effective communication would have convinced the reporter that his conclusion wasn't valid.
Can you trust whatever random IT guy you hire to manage your exchange server?
Getting Through The Tough Times by Tim Bray
I laughed and laughed. Beautiful. If that batch of kids doesn't produce a proper engineer (or two or three), then it will be the schools that have failed, because I think Monty has provided ample inspiration.

Of course, they did seem at least as interested in the candy as in the giant robot delivering it, if not moreso. Maybe kids today are just completely jaded by technical miracles, since new ones seem to arrive every day. When I was a kid, we didn't have any of these Internets, or cell phones that can play movies or find out almost any fact in seconds, or robotic vacuum cleaners, or jet packs, or personal oxygen sleep chambers, like these kids today. We had to call people using phones that plugged into the wall, and if we wanted to send email our PC or C64 or Amiga had to dial up a FIDO or Aminet hub and do a batch send/receive. And we had to walk to school in the snow. Uphill. Both ways.
Yahoo Query Language - The future of Web Services?
I'm confused. He says he paid $70 for the ads, which resulted in $1.36 in sales. How is that close to breaking even?
Seth's Blog: Easy to type
Kaazing Gateway: HTML 5 WebSock Server Released
Gmail Labs Adds Text Messaging Feature. KTHXBAI.
Writing Self-Confident Code
The fact that HN doesn't seem to have an objective or motive to be as big as possible is good. For Reddit, more viewers = more ad revenue = winning. At the very least, HN won't actively court and support silly goofy discussion.
I think that TeX is a success, but that you would be very accurate to say that perhaps it has fallen short of what it could have been.
Another Stanford course that got plenty of buzz from last year:

CS 377W
“Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook”
3-5 units
Tues & Thurs: 2:15 - 5:05
No Downturn For Silicon Valley
its very useful to students
Perhaps, perhaps not. We do know the guy was dumb, hostile, unsatisified by the exchange and in a position to publish bad things. Walker may have been better off to just refuse the interview. However agreeing to the interview and then using the opportunity to just piss him off did nobody any good.
Step 1: Get a lot of users; Step 2: ???; Step 3: Profit!

This is why LinkedIn's ability to monetize is so important. Facebook has already raised half a billion and will probably need to raise that amount again to survive until it comes out with its business plan. According to the TechCrunch figures, they're loosing $142M/year (dangerous assumption, I know).

At that point, maybe Facebook can become profitable, but how profitable? I don't really feel like running net present value calculations (maybes someone else can), but when you're talking about VC of $1B and the better part of a decade before profitability, you quickly see how much someone has to make to actually be a worthwhile venture. Maybe Facebook will start making billions per year. Maybe Facebook just won't be able to monetize their traffic (to a profitable level).
I like the idea of "Little Brother" -- the people as a whole, rather than those in power, becoming the agents of ubiquitous surveillance. YouTube and cheap digital cameras have power as well.

"The courts may not work anymore, but as long as everyone is videotaping everyone else, justice will be served." --The Simpsons

And a Google search reveals that the term "Little Brother" as I just used it was apparently coined by Cory Doctorow as well. Looks like a good book, too.
The assumption is that you have access to the hashed version of the password. That's not so hard to get from some sites. I have retrieved user-password pairs using very simple SQL Injection in some e-commerce sites(not any the big ones, of course).

The numbers give make no sense, because doesn't state which hash is using, and the difference may be huge:

~/john-1.7.2/run$ ./john --test
Benchmarking: Traditional DES [128/128 BS SSE2]... DONE
Many salts: 906828 c/s real, 908646 c/s virtual
Only one salt: 805504 c/s real, 805504 c/s virtual

Benchmarking: BSDI DES (x725) [128/128 BS SSE2]... DONE
Many salts: 31271 c/s real, 31334 c/s virtual
Only one salt: 30617 c/s real, 30617 c/s virtual

Benchmarking: FreeBSD MD5 [32/32]... DONE
Raw: 8617 c/s real, 8652 c/s virtual

Benchmarking: OpenBSD Blowfish (x32) [32/32]... DONE
Raw: 415 c/s real, 416 c/s virtual

Benchmarking: Kerberos AFS DES [48/64 4K MMX]... DONE
Short: 186368 c/s real, 186741 c/s virtual
Long: 528588 c/s real, 531779 c/s virtual

Benchmarking: NT LM DES [128/128 BS SSE2]... DONE
Raw: 6575K c/s real, 6588K c/s virtual

Which I find unbelieveable is that lots of web applications use simple MD5-passwords(not the FreeBSD MD5 based version but just MD5 hashes) without even using salts, which makes them almost instantly crackable using Rainbow tables.
Buy Reductil
Reductil
Politics? What politics. Oh - you mean all that stuff over at reddit is politics - I thought it was a TV soap - nothing about the politics of Europe, Asia or Africa that I have seen.

I think it best to keep parochial politics well away from HN.
Mint Error News Magazine, Issue #25 Published
Cleaning silver coins
i predict a crash, burn, and firesale.
Jono Bacon: On Lessig
I once ran a personal (not personals) ad on Facebook using free credits, back in my naïve days. (I realize that age isn't a representation of work, but I didn't have much space to enter what exactly I worked on - and decided age is a quick clincher.)

http://files.markbao.com/fb_ad.png

It didn't really go too well. I'm the owner of a now-defunct Facebook ad network, so it's interesting to see the official one in action. I targeted it towards entrepreneurs and venture capitalists (though I had a separate one that targeted venture capital networks only, which I received 3,000 impressions and 4 clicks through.) After 242,000 impressions, I had 378 clicks, CTR of 0.16, and average CPC of 0.32/click and average CPM of 0.49/thousand impressions. In total, I took out $119 out of my free credit.

The results in terms of contacts: I received about 10 Facebook friend requests each day it was going, and about 3 LinkedIn invitations; I gained a few quality connections that were not just random people.

You can't put a price on a connection, but $119 is a bit to spend for that.
Ask HN: Really short domain name. What to do with it? 
Looking at my domain name list today I realzed I still own 'off.gr', a greek domain name. any ideas what to do with it?
It's about stackoverflow. I just tried it.

Search was broken (gave a LOLCAT "WAIT I'll fix it")

But typing a question title has a really cool web2/ajax auto-search facility, as in the article: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask
New version of USB over Network is out
The great cosmic challenge
Understanding network-side scripting
Yoono Announces Support For IE, New Services
I think the problem is humor.

It's fun, it gets you lots of upvotes because maybe it makes someone smile. But it's too damn easy. It short-circuits real discussion with pop culture references and snarkiness. Conversation is quickly suffocated when solid posts are blanketed with 4chan memes as responses.
Next Facebook, Apple or Twitter Might Not Make It Under Obama or McCain Presidency
it's a man sized robot that can pick up candy and deal w/ kids. that's entirely interesting.
I suggest you think my posts are nonsense because you haven't read or understood them, particularly the part about the difference between having some users in a limited set of fields and allowing anyone to produce typeset documents easily.

I know many people who use OpenBSD. I could list them too.

That doesn't mean that OpenBSD allows anyone to compute securely. OpenBSD has a high barrier to entry, requiring a lot of technical skill and prerequisite knowledge.

Which is fine, as OpenBSD never stated that was their intention.

TeX, on the other hand, intended to allow anyone to easily create typeset documents. But it's difficult to use, and hence only rarely used for modern typesetting.

For example, I would be flabbergasted if any of your 24+ friends who have TeX resumes didn't have those resumes refused by most companies or recruiters.

Don't take it personally.
5 Ways To Finance A Real Estate Investment
Not sure how much appetite for real estate information there is on HN, let's give it a try...
"I find it hard to believe you could live in (and love) this country without feeling..."

I do think this election is important. I also think it's reasonable to think it doesn't matter. My comment was about your reaction, not the premise :)
If everything else fails, there is this:
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...
Open High School of Utah
Entrepreneurs: 1; Patent Trolls: 0
same here. bizarre.
What if the number of points for a comment were not the first item in the first line above the comment itself? I am of the opinion that moving the 'x points' text elsewhere, or perhaps hiding it until one has voted or replied to the comment, would be useful. Even simply moving it to the _end_ of the line could help to force people to think about the comment before they think about how everyone else loves the comment.
yeah I was expecting at least the hands would brush against a kid and the children go screaming. Or may be when one of the kids is picking a chocolate on the ground the robot puts its hand down too!

Disappointed.
Sharp shows off memory-capable, e-ink fighting LCDs
I haven't read the article yet, but my first reaction to the name was: wow, vasectomies over the web?
Ask HN: Review a little side-project of mine?
but of course it will..
I've been working on this for a few hours each night over the last week. It uses the data from the FEC.

Thoughts?
huh. ok on a general term yes people do say it is very easy to say sorry now after you have screwed up.

But why is this on HN ? Irrelevant (this ought to be a public response to someone who said that) or am I missing something?
I think you should make the per capita displays be default. Otherwise, it's always the states with most population glow the brightest and, in my opinion, little information about the financing gets communicated.
Trust me on this, you'll never get a completely "truthful" article out of a journalist.
Clearly this was an extreme case, but my advice applies even when the journalist is amicable and eager to please, even then your opinion/data/information will be mangled in some way, shape or form.
Discovery of a New Particle?
"750 employees and growing"? Why do they need 750 employees?
gmail.....not in spam... still waiting
> As a US native, it probably wouldn't have occurred to me to include that modifier, so I guessed that you might not be American.

Never considered the possibility that an American might internationalize?

> I remember seven elections and have voted in four

Newbie :-) (The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again" comes to mind during this election.) How about the possibility that you're trying to relive when elections were new (to you)?

> Not to mention arguably America's lowest standing in the world since WWII.

Still irrelevant. When other countries need something, other countries forget "standing". When America needs something, they happily sell or don't have the capability. (Yes, Australia and some of the Euro contries have some amazing troops. However, they don't have many of them and they can't transport them.)

As someone once said in a slightly different context, if you want a friend, get a dog. Countries act out of perceived self-interest not friendship, standing, etc. (Disagree? Provide examples where "friendship" trumped perceived self-interest.)

If you insist on listening to Monday morning quarterbacks, shouldn't you at least pick ones whose predictions are reasonably accurate?
Remember that pointers are the double size in a 64bit memory layout. Depending on their structure, your programs might consume more memory. But you get to break the memory limit of a single program and you get rid of some of the cruft in the x86 ISA.

I've had few problems with a 64 bit Ubuntu on an AMD64 Athlon. The most notable is 32bit video codecs and flash. Interestingly, you can play Homeworld 2 and Warcraft III fine in Wine even on 64 bit.

The primary is problem is not that we progressed to 64 bit. It is that some operating systems and programs are still 32 bit dependent.
Lehman to add $200 million to bankruptcy costs, hiring 415 people to manage