skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Things tend to look better the further you move them into the past. Nostalgia. Things just aren't anymore what they never used to be.

HN was and is the same. IMHO the best place of its kind. While the article shows an interesting formula, I don't think there is a need for it on HN.
My Favorite Business Model
yeah only take people who upvote both
I have to agree. I put our stuff in a colo 2 years ago and never looked back. Pretty much all servers come with some kind of remote console interface IPMI, and that's not terminal redirection, thats actually a totally self contained microprocessor and ether port that you can run on a separate subnet and control your server even if it's off. I updated the bios, reinstalled OS's, all via IPMI which is part of the motherboards. Add to that power strips that you can also control remotely and you're all set.
Our servers are in the Bay Area, I'm in Canada. I have NEVER had to drive/fly to fix anything. Never even had to use remote hands for anything. Sure some drives died, but standby drives are in place.

The costs are dirt cheap these days. You can get a full rack, power and a gigabit feed for about $800 in many colos in texas. We opted for equinix in san jose, which is all fancy with work areas, meeting rooms, etc when you are there, but the funny part is, we're never there!

I do like the virtualization for some maintenance/flexibility so we have a few servers that are hosts and we run our own private cloud where we get to decide where/what runs. Database servers on bare metal with ssd drives in other cases.
Best of both worlds.

It's so cheap you get a second colo in a different part of the country to house a second copy of your backups, and some redundant systems just in case something really bad happens.

Oh yeah and don't get me started on storage. We store about 100TB of data. How much is that on S3 per month? $12,000/month! A fancy enterprise storage system pays for itself every couple of month of s3 fees.
Apple tend to shun "completeness" for simplicity to the average user.
I.e.
1. Extra complexity without a significant consumer demand.
2. Licensing issues with the studios, should these be priced higher for example.
I love games, and they can often be the most creative form of media. However, there are a lot of ugly, tasteless, boring, & unoriginal games in existence. Vimeo tries to focus on high quality videos with artistic qualities, or good levels of production.
Clever idea in general, a few issues:

1. Sometimes people upvote without reading the article just because the comments are good, and want others to benefit from that as well.

2. Sometimes people upvote to save a submission, since there's no separate save function. For example, I want to send it to a friend later, but not right now, so I upvote it to make it easier to find (b/c HN search is hit-or-miss).

I confess I'm guilty of these, but I doubt I'm the only one.

By way of comparison, take Reddit. Upvoting and saving are separate functions. You can save submissions you think you might want to revisit later. Reasons for doing so:

1. Scanning the headlines quickly, but don't have time to actually read everything, want to save the article and comments for later perusal (lunch break, after work, whatever).

2. Subreddits reduce the cost of upvoting. For example, every time I consider whether to upvote a Bitcoin story on HN, I consider whether it's front-page worthy. On Reddit, that's not a problem, I can just assume it won't hit the general front page b/c it's a relatively niche subject, but the upvote might help it within its own subreddit.

One more potential problem with the idea of superflaggers. If 'social media experts', or spammers, or whatever the people are who game sites like Digg and Reddit got wind of the fact that flagging honeypots could increase the weight of their flags and/or votes, mightn't they also figure out how to abuse that?

A professional, as some of them seem to be (eg, able to spend all day every day doing this), might be able to achieve a denominator very close to 1, and a numerator close to the total actual honeypots.
Did Boris Badenov or Tonto transcribe the talk? Me having trouble finding definite articles therein.
So the punch is based on scanning a QR code?

That's correct. The business has a card with a QR code printed on it that you scan to get a "punch."

This is part of the value proposition for the merchants, I guess - they don't need a phone or device of their own at all, they just need to print a few things. The tradeoff is maybe the system is easier to game for the tiny percent that is technically inclined enough to try it.
The nice thing about ALAC with AirPlay is it does not transcode to a compressed format for streaming.
That's a hell of a reach toward anti-Semitism.
I am a UW student who went to this talk. It was an interesting event. I think Gates' response to the student who asked how to be rich was the most memorable part for me.

At the department website it says the talk will be archived, but the link doesn't seem to be active:

http://www.cs.washington.edu/events/billg_oct27_2011/
I'm confused too. I read everything on their website and I think I get it but I don't. I remember it used to be that you had to be within the proximity of the business to use the money, but now they're all "it's flexible!".
Even with GPS it doesn't validate my purchase. I can just stand outside the store and scan the barcode.

Its cool but with holes.
While IBM wasn't nearly the world's biggest PC maker as HP is right now, I would like to see a similar deal happen with WebOS. Lenovo has proven to manage the thinkpad line better than IBM[1].

[1] http://www.tmcnet.com/topics/articles/229026-hp-remains-bigg...
Not even remotely. H.264 is wondrous, but it can't compete with even ProRes. If we all had gigabit pipes, Apple would be selling/renting the latter over the former, believe you me.

EDIT: Of course, at comparable bitrates, H.264 would likely be superior to ProRes (75-250Mb/s), but the computational complexity involved in decoding even intra-frame only H.264 versus a mezzanine format like ProRes would certainly point towards sending the latter rather than the former down the pipe, ceteris paribus.
LOL you just made my day.
RSS - the internet's great underrated 'killer app'
If my upvotes/downvotes/flags may be secretly used to profile me in ways I can't know about, and my secret profile might negatively impact my experience on this site, isn't my best option to not participate at all?

In short, with this mechanism I can't trust that doing anything, be it clicking through to an article or flagging one, might negatively classify me. I can't be sure this site isn't trying to trap me somehow.

My advice is to let all of this hand-wringing about such nebulous issues as 'quality' go. It's a fairly decent community here and that's about as good as you could expect from the Internet at large. If you're really worried about what this site has become, simply conclude the 'Arc experiment' and shut it down.
The second proposal, implicit honeypots, is similar to something I'd been thinking of as a way to address the degradation of comment quality, and could be finagled to address that larger issue.

My idea was that you would start off with a limited number of "trusted" members, and invisibly flip a bit in their profile. These would become supervoters, and their votes would confer or remove some multiple of karma for each up- or down-vote. In so doing, they would exert a proportionally larger influence on the visibility of comments, hopefully helping to highlight good ones and bury bad ones.

The supervoter bit would not be static; it could be gained or lost. A supervoter whose submitted comments received net negative votes by other supervoters would lose their bit, as would one who consistently voted against the trend established by the other supervoters. Similarly, a non-supervoter who tended to submit and upvote comments that were favoured by existing supervoters and downvote comments that were buried by supervoters (before they had been greyed out, to avoid gaming) could, after a certain threshold, have their bits flipped as well.

Ideally, this process would be entirely transparent, with no one but yourself and other similarly privileged users able to see who had the bit. Similarly, it would be best if the change went unannounced. I'm aware that HN is OSS; perhaps it would be better to leave this out of that repo as reddit does with anti-spam measures. The reason for the secrecy is the same as that for hiding karma scores: it reduces karmawhoring and gaming.

As for submissions, I think the problem there is both less severe and easier to solve. HN's front page is still slow enough that it can be hand-curated. More mods would likely be able to keep a handle on things. However, an algorithmic solution could work. Similar to supervoters, have superflaggers: if the ratio of submissions someone flags to those removed is high enough, flip a superflagger bit in their profile. Then, any article in the new queue that was flagged by (say) 3 or more superflaggers would be automatically removed.

The reason I like these proposals, as well as the submission's, is that they are invisible and nobody knows if they are even operational. By hiding these workings from membership at large, I believe it would be possible to have a positive effect on quality while still discouraging the kinds of behaviours that have led to a massive decrease in quality on large parts of reddit.
Just to clarify, I think the grandparent's "this dude" referred to mechanical_fish.
Wow! This is really low. Is this the best counter argument to his accusations?
Murfie: Sending Your CDs to Cloud Heaven
Totally agree, both men are worthy of great respect.

Regarding Richard Stallman you can take or leave his personality, but he does take a very long view of the software ecosystem and he has made more than a few prophetic observations ("The Right to Read" foreshadowing widespread DRM comes to mind).

I'll always take the time to hear what he has to say.
> sure they could have been developing it earlier,

Actually there is evidence they had developed it much earlier. Some people examining the source tree found it was basically present in the G1 but commented out. They were even able to enable it with some crazy hacks - more info:

http://openhandsetmagazine.com/2009/01/the-story-of-multitou...

> the following January google launched the nexus one with multitouch

No I'm pretty sure the Nexus launched without multitouch; it was enabled in a release (2.1 update 1, a couple of months after launch). Again, an indication that even as late as January 2010 Google was still holding back - whether it was out of fear or through some hope of reconciliation - no idea. But I suspect the latter. Android was still small enough at that point that getting barred from the iPhone wholesale would have been horrible.

I think we're more or less agreeing here. I guess my only point is that to talk about any one incident in the chain in isolation is highly misleading.
If something is inherently good/true it will stand by it's own characteristics and not need others who prove them though often they need others to teach others.

That sounds pretty naive. At many points in history, what we now consider good and true were by no means widely accepted and had to be actively fought for. I'm pretty sure many people thought slavery was a good thing at one time and that women were inferior to men.
I spend all day in Emacs, and I used to work for Apple. Who do I root for?

(Kidding. I think Stallman makes his point eloquently clear here, and while I disagree, I can't impugn him as a person.)
Uh, hey Forrester, the real "HEROs" are the ones that take a couple of hours on their own time to streamline a bloated Windows install rather than wasting company resources to get a Mac working in a primarily Microsoft based infrastructure.
It's not a counter argument. I strongly believe Aaron is telling the truth about the porn spamming. However I also believe it does not make the perpetrator a bad cofounder.
I think there is really something in this. It does look like a very streamlined product with nice touches...but they must have executed very effectively.

From what I've read there are a bunch of startups in this space, doing very similar things. Even here in Australia there are a few I can think of that are doing pretty well. As none have yet been bought by Google for $50m, I'd be curious to know more about the kind of traction Punchd had prior to the acquisition (how many users did they have, were the pulling in revenue) - it's always interesting to know more about how a startup with this kind of success executed!

Also, hats off to the Punchd guys...I remember the thread about the acquisition and there was a lot of praise for the founders themselves, as people and as founders.
"Just a minimal superset of C with lambdas"

You pretty much exactly described Objective-C with that statement. I'm not sure if you intentionally meant that or not?
On the longer term Richard Matthew Stallman would have ended up changing the world in a more meaningful manner than Steven Paul Jobs.

We must not allow cult leaders and their status in judging value added to the world with their work. Come to think of it, what is the new thing that Steve Jobs bought to the world. Surely he bought the iPhone/iPad or the iPod. But none of that was something that didn't exist before. Phones, music players et al have been there for a century now. If the gloss and entertainment value of Apple products is the measure of Steve Jobs's success. The status of iPhone in this world is nothing bigger than video games. Those are just cool-to-have gadgets of our time. iPhone hasn't changed anything in the primary paradigm. People used still send emails, communicate and get entertained in the same ways they did before iPhone. iPhone just enabled that to happen in a easier way. But we have other things to learn from Steve Jobs, which have little to do with larger implications on Software on the longer run. He is role model for totally different set of tasks.

On the other hand, here we have RMS. Who has a proven record for fighting for something that will decide how we will use and control what we buy or build over the foreseeable future. He is also a giant who has enabled, developed and helped developed FOSS software that is helping running thousands of dollars of business today.

Richard Matthew Stallman is trying to show us the moon, but some of us are busy pointing mistakes in his finger
I use unmanaged dedicated servers with Serverbeach, but I assume SoftLayer has similar tools. If I totally screw up my server there are tools to boot in rescue mode or just wipe the machine and do a clean OS install.

For testing out puppet processes I use Vagrant with VirtualBox on my local machine.
Yes, thank you! I originally had the formulas differently and forgot to update the text to reflect the flip. :)
Of special interest: how he frames the process as starting with the customer needs instead of the existing technology. And how he has the scar tissue to prove that's the way to do it.

Nothing on 60 minutes or the endless techblog coverage has come close to exposing what exactly it was that made him think so very different.

Or maybe, as a bizdev guy, it's just my own biases showing.
Each time I see stories about this device I end up wanting to have access to one at my local climbing gym REALLY BADLY. I hope they manage to bring the price down enough that I might actually be able to pitch it to the gym.
Nope. Fortunately, no explosion. :) I actually just had a late day at work so haven't gotten a chance to come back to this.

But in regards to your reply. It really sums everything perfectly and I can't thank you enough for your help. It has given me a lot to think about and figure out... and ultimately start accomplishing. I think the route of hiring someone to freelance and not just have it outsourced and part ways is a far better strategy. If they can guide me through what they are doing, why they are doing it, and even be there after completion as well... it'd be 100 times better than being left with a cheaper site but being a bit more blind to what's going on and when going forward.

Again, I can't thank you enough for your help.
The big difference here was that the Mac had been around for ten years, had a big user base (even if small relative to windows) and sustainable compelling advantages over its competitors (best versions of most graphics apps, only versions of some, many unique media apps (e.g avid, protools), real multiple monitor support, system level color management). If WebOS had ten years of history and a bunch of industry leading apps on it the analogy might be stronger.
You sound like you have an awesome attitude! Maintain that attitude, it'll take you further than any technical skillset will.

As for your dream to work at github: learn objective-c, and make an ipad app that allows you to code on an ipad: pull a project, change code, and make commits back upstream. If you do that well enough, you never know you might get a job offer. And if not, you'll make enough money selling the app to not care ;)

(make a few smaller apps first, though - don't fall into the trap of biting off more than you can chew to start with!)
Groupon and Zynga Founders Get Extra Clout Before IPOs
Making Money With Brand New Money Machine
How to make a massive cash flow and a flood of traffic with this very powerful mobile money machine. This system comes with a complete package with video's and written material to get you started in changing your lifestyle and financially secure you forever..Please take a few minutes to watch the video..
Billionaire-scale conspicuous consumption is certainly overrated. But Gates's own example shows how wonderfully useful and fulfilling it can be to have tens of billions of dollars to mobilize in a really heroic cause, like working to eradicate various infectious diseases from the human experience.

Just to get started, as long as we don't have clean water, plenty of food, proper healthcare, good education, meaningful personal freedom, and a well-functioning legal system for every human being in the world, cheap carbon-neutral energy, strong environmental protection and sustainable ecosystem conservation throughout the world, a cure for cancer, a complete genome and proteome and extended phenotype encyclopedia for all life on Earth, telescopes that can image Earthlike planets in other galaxies and the first stars to ignite in the extremely early Universe, robots crawling around under the surfaces of Europa and Enceladus and screaming through interstellar space toward Alpha Centauri and Epsilon Eridani, and human colonies on Mars and the asteroids and in the clouds of Venus, there will be plenty of interesting and valuable things to do for someone with tens of billions of dollars to throw at an ambitious project.
Yes we initially did that, bought a 50gb account and shared that folder with everyone, but it counts against their free 2Gb shares - so everyone needs their own 50Gb plan
Very true,

Actually vast majority of people can never tell the difference between perceived truth and the actual truth.
I strongly believe Aaron is telling the truth about the porn spamming

So you agree with Aaron.

However I also believe it does not make the perpetrator a bad cofounder.

And disagree with the journalist's image of the airBnB cofounder.

And you make this point by attacking the person you agree with? Makes no sense.
New Patent Suggests Apple is Working on Kinect-like 3D Control System
Ah so that falls under the umbrella of expectations of IT.

E.G. someone brought a machine from home one day and proceeded to work on it, then had a failure and lost "business critical" data. Then management chewed out IT with questions like "How could you allow someone put our data in that situation!!!", "What could you have done to prevent this!"... Hence IT Policy: no personal machines in the building.

To anyone else in IT; here's how you avoid that situation, and the resultant policies. Audit your connections, or have an inventory tool which will let you know when new MACs (the NIC addresses) are seen. Then follow up with a polite email to $PersonalDeviceUsers's Boss detailing what you can/can't offer service wise. So long as everyone understands the situation ahead of time (in writing), you'll avoid having to write such policies later.
Bummer! How did i miss that. Is there some community mailing list i should be on to find out about things like this in sydney?
There might be some selection bias, users who still like the contents of the current frontpage are more likely to still be around than users who as the frontpage shifted away from their taste visit it less often.
There were plenty of TV cameras everywhere recording. It'll surface somewhere, likely on the UW CSE pages.

For me watching the Kinect render the images so smoothly and immediately was pretty cool. Then again I was stuck 4 floors up and couldn't see anything.
I thought those "notes" were really poorly transcribed. Did the author really not have time to turn them into sentences?

"Personally like to thank you for saving me winter algebra last year through Khan Academy investment."

"Africa, 800m today will be bigger than China or India, 20M in 2040. In terms of stability, education."

"Politics and role of web?"

"Student question on negative impact of technology."

I understand that he was just trying to get the gist across, but this is a news article. I would have rather read a more readable article an hour later.
The thing I've found most interesting is the negative view of Jobs-elitism when it comes to the platform. "We can't just let anyone program for it" (or similar words).

I happen to disagree with this point of view for consumer products. I believe the content should be curated, poured over and held to usability standards. That is the only way that we'll be able to empower ordinary people, people who aren't engineers, programmers, or have ample time to fiddle with the software. If Jobs wanted everyone to be able to use his devices, to make it a household item, then he was going to have to make it fool proof. Jobs recognised that cynical connection, he wasn't just being a cunt for the thrill of it.

Coincidentally, if they weren't elitist on the development end, then they were being elitist on the consumer's side.
> One more potential problem with the idea of superflaggers. If 'social media experts', or spammers, or whatever the people are who game sites like Digg and Reddit got wind of the fact that flagging honeypots could increase the weight of their flags and/or votes, mightn't they also figure out how to abuse that? A professional, as some of them seem to be (eg, able to spend all day every day doing this), might be able to achieve a denominator very close to 1, and a numerator close to the total actual honeypots.

Super flaggers receive no special powers other than the ability to contribute to the honeypot score of a given article. Their votes and flags are counted the same as a normal user. I addressed this in more detail in another comment below, but basically the ability to and utility of gaming this system is minuscule.
Videos of game content pose as much of a (real) legal threat as wearing Nike shoes while having your picture taken.

If you don't intend people be able to screenshot the work, don't sell it on a computer. Perhaps in the days of Quake 1 this wasn't expected, but it is now.
Any suggestions on how? Is there a good subreddit to post this on and get attention?
Apple faces this problem too.

There are many ways to make a new device attractive besides making it incompatible with old devices. Support for new radio standards. Larger, brighter, higher resolution screens. More flash storage, a better camera, more attractive industrial design, more built-in apps, and a more polished UI for built-in apps.

Will this sort of backwards-compatible improvement always be possible? Probably not. Someday all the specs will be maxed out. But for now it's a good strategy.