skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
why not get rid of downvoting entirely?

Dissenting opinion (from someone who generally believes in positive reinforcement as the best policy): I tend to be a very controversial figure, wherever I go. I have dropped out of a lot of communities in part due to the degree to which I get attacked. Some of my comments here get upvoted, downvoted, upvoted, downvoted. It can be entertaining to watch it. It usually doesn't result in some pissing contest. I am content with having people who don't like me/my opinions vent their spleen by viciously giving an entire downvote to my comment and then moving on. I'm very cool with that. It beats the hell out of anything else I've known so far.
Why does Nas have no cash?
Snitching people into Gitmo is evil, and it is made possible and perpetuated by the American people.
3. child_process API and bolting C++ extensions onto node allow you to do this.
Absolutely beautiful. I couldn't get my eyes of the writing. What I REALLY like about the piece was portrayal of Jobs as a loving and affectionate human being which is what ultimately matters. Feels good to know that Jobs parted with such an expression of amazement...

Thanks for writing this, Mona.
Well, once she saw Mark babble around a topic without a specific answer to her question, she should've:
a) rephrase the question
b) change the topic.

Instead, she continued asking the same question. For example: "What did you do right?". Come on, is she seriously trying to get a coherent answer out of Mark with that? Is there a SINGLE thing that Mark could've done right to build a successful worldwide product? It's like asking for a silver bullet for startups. There's none. And then she kept asking that question over and over again..
A wifi pocket disk
Entertainment value at a Gambling Website
Nitro PDF Professional 5.5.0.16 Portable
Is Java faster then JavaScript? Yes.

Is it easier to write performant code with node.js vs Java Async IO? Subjective.
Smetana was deaf, too, and one of the best composers.
The one I'm most excited about is Stripe, but not yet available in my country.
Skunkworks design philosophy
Skunkworks design philosophy is a list of principles defined and used by Guido van Rossum during the early stage of development of python.
The cool thing about crashing the HN conference is you don't have to go to school for twelve years to pick up some tools and start hacking away (pardon the double entendre).
What is the value of a typical stipend and what is the the current federal government tax rate on it?
An added wrinkle here, reported by Wired:
(http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-10/29/rossi-success )
"The customer's controller, one Domenico Fioravanti, apparently reports to a man whose title is "Colonel". This suggests that the mystery customer might be DARPA, the Pentagon's extreme science wing which, as Wired.co.uk has previously noted, has expressed interestin Rossi's work -- but which might not be quite ready to explain to its political masters why it spent millions on a cold fusion device."

I think that goes a long way to explain a lot of the secrecy that the customer engaged in. Rather than being a scam it may actually be the visible tip of a military project. Remember, you can run cars on electricity and trucks on natural gas, but when you run out of oil your army comes to a stop. They have a lot of motivation to find an alternative.

As I understand it the process did not achieve 1MW because it got too hot and they had to cool it down. Per Rossi, if it gets over the melting temperature of nickle the reaction stops. But it ran in self-sustaining mode putting out enough power to satisfy the men in uniforms that it works so now they take it back to the USA and tinker with it themselves.
I think that fact he was sketching x-ray machines, iPad holders etc. even in hospital is just fantastic. The man did what he loved.
I don't think Mark was discounting it; I'm sure he appreciated Sean's role. He was just saying if he had the kind of knowledge he now has (maybe top HN articles, avc.com would suffice?), he would have stuck around Boston or New York.

Paul's example would better be supplemented by other stories like the telecom startup which was having a rough time, got in touch with Ron Conway who was an investor or FoF, Ron replied that he knew a telcom exec, and the company was saved.

You can absolutely create a scalable startup elsewhere but you have to be the right person with the right business.
Silly Valley weather is mostly nice most of the year. I used to motorcycle all of the time (spent several years without a car). Off the bike, I wear sandals. Cow-orkers of mine were known for their invariant shorts-and-flipflops.

It got boring. Now I'm in Seattle and the weather is actually interesting. It rains a lot, and we have very occasional snowfall, but most of the time I can still motorcycle.

I'm not sure what this has to do with HN, except that outside of SF, Silly Valley weather is generally drama-free and leaves you more time for work. :)
11.6 bn dollars - about €96 million

That was hilarous!
I think best thing we can ask pg to do is remove points altogether. Points are great for optimizing and ranking, but just let them go from display and keep them only in backend. May be keep average karma for comments but thats about it. Also if removing points is not possible, then punish people, in some way, who have less average karma for submissions. I think that will remove any incentive from submitting non interesting posts.
FuturICT: facilitating a symbiotic co-evolution of ICT and society
U.k needs pension release
Whenever I see "may" I have to remember that it's essentially meaningless, and your text is equally valid changing it to "may not", as in "a fiction about Easter Island may not be just as valid."

First you say "apply both to the same subject" and now you say that's fiction may be "just as valid."

Szukalski's fiction is 30 volumes of text. You pick out that "the oceans move"? (By which you mean "cover the Earth", not continental drift or tides.) What about that human culture comes from a people on Easter Island, after Noah's flood? How is that fiction at all valid? Races derive from crossbreeding of species, again, after the flood? How is that at all valid?

If it's hard to pick the valid fiction from the invalid, then what's the point? Isn't it like looking up the date by randomly picking a day from this year's calendar?
I seriously doubt the easiest way to get the hat on is by digging a massive hole, burying the statue, using the ground around it as a ramp, maneuvering the head into position and then somehow either raising the statue in position or digging out the ground around the hole so that it no longer looks like a hole. I think it's more likely the statues were laid flat, their hats attached and then raised with ropes and blocks of wood and a lot of man power.

Who knows why they were buried, perhaps their religions and customs changed over time and they buried certain heads as a mark of denigration or respect.
* > Yet google will not give you any code to their actual core services.*

Which aren't even installed on my computer!
Haven't tried it (not in the US), but it sounds neat: Having a bookmarklet makes invoking it painless, and opening an URL from an SMS should be easy from most phones. I'm assuming the SMS delivery is basically instant. It's also cross-platform on both ends.

That said, these days I just use Fox To Phone (or Chrome to Phone) to accomplish this. This platform-specific solution works better than sending an SMS would. It also does a few things in addition to just transferring URLs.

In the past, I had a browser extension that created a 2d barcode for the current page. It worked in a pinch, but scanning the barcode with the phone is relatively time-consuming and, overall, just a nuisance. FWIW, you could do the barcode thing with a bookmarklet, too, and end up with a solution that's cross-platform on both ends.
Mine has a LED that projects the ETA on the floor. That's neat.
Ask HN: Increased submissions on weekends?
Every weekend the tech blogs I follow rarely publish much at all however I've noticed the HN feed explodes on the weekend. Why is this? Do "smaller" blogs tradiob tionally publish on the weekend, are HN users more active? Just an observation I thought I'd ask about.
You have a right to remain silent with the FBI, but they can use your silence against you.
Step by Step From Laze to Craze
The page where you enter your credit card probably should be SSL?
Giving up privacy?
I hope you were only advising on public privacy, which I myself rather not give up.
I understand where you are coming from, people can observe you to get all that information but when they are doing that you barely have privacy, by controlling the information they get by sending it to them yourself you control the border of private and public yourself.

-you can manipulate the stream of information and send false information, they will still check it and they will always do if they think it is necessary, you will never be trusted by them not even if all things you sent them are true.

-It is quite a hassle to keep all this information and to send it out. It would be easier to just let them investigate it themselves.
You make a compelling point. But not everyone has such a thick skin or is that relaxed about getting vented on... maybe if downvoting cost karma and there was a karma threshold for being the recipient of a downvote? That could be interesting: battle of the karma titans. Meanwhile, new people could get their feet wet without getting pilloried for their mistakes.
Credit Card?
You Are the Average of Your Five Closest Friends
Elon Musk interview by James Fallows
Top Marketer Lawrence Tam Talks About Scott Zlateff
>So what kind of extreme knowledge/magic did Jobs have?

Understanding design and people and making it applicable to his chosen profession.

>...it is definitely not magical to the engineers and programmers who made it.

It's obviously not magic but, for the large majority, it appears to be so. Even if you wanted to explain how the concept of Siri works to the average person they wouldn't want you to. I think it would ruin it for them.
Movado SAPPHIRE 606093
I think you have a point even though it is a gray area. However, I think that having the government focus on Real Transparency (TM) as a prevention instead of criminal enforcement would be a far more effective systemic reform. Not that I believe it likely to be implemented anytime soon.
How many days the Christmas have?
Would you mind giving more details on where one could register the ISBN, do you have a link ?
The account page to buy more transfer credits.
In both Ruby 1.8 and 1.9, Ruby code will not cause all threads to block when the CPU is idle. However, poorly coded C libraries that blocked on IO without providing Ruby a file descriptor (via rb_thread_select) could cause all threads to block.

Those libraries have largely been fixed or replaced (e.g. mysql with mysql2). Ruby 1.9.2 also provides a mechanism for C code to release the GIL if it does not involve any Ruby code, which is used Blythe typecasting code in mysql2, for instance.
I grew up around the seattle area and now I live in the Valley. I don't miss the weather. I really appreciate the weather here. It seems like a miracle to me that every day that I wake up I can go on my bike and go to work in nice weather. It might get chilly once in a while, but thats nothing a sweater can't fix. The two times it has rained while I was commuting, the rain so light and not nearly as cold that I laughed. Rain here tends to be a fine mist.
Oh, I'm not thick-skinned. I sit at my computer and whine to my two adult sons with the voice of a 3 year old about how nobody likes me, nobody talks to me, I have no friends and I got DOWNVOTED -- when I may have 20 upvotes and 1 downvote. I just think it's the lesser evil.
Wait a minute, aren't the expensive wines a mechanism of "hack[ing] by making people do things they wouldn't?" The wineries engineering this are the ones taking advantage of human nature -- the same position Farmville's in.

The "clinical thinking" is just a tool for you and I to use if we want to be happier in cheaper and easier ways than drinking $100 wine and playing Farmville all day. It's my experience that by looking at my life with slightly more Mr-Spock-ish eyes, I can understand something about where my desires and instincts come from, and do a better job fulfilling them.
Re: Bringing back points for individual comments

Pros:

* Saves the reader's time.
This is incredibly important. I've been here pretty much since the beginning, mostly as a lurker. I've noticed that I used to look forward to the stories with the most comments, because the best comments in those threads were generally very good and generally easy to identify. Now I avoid stories that have received a lot of comments. I just don't have the time to read every comment, and the current ranking system seems too inexact.

* Simple, structural, code-based adjustment.
Hacker News has a simple interface, simple rules, and a public code base. Bringing in a dedicated moderator might make some of us happier, but it would also be a tacit admission of defeat. I get the sense that PG would like to exhaust all simple, code-based solutions before getting to that point.

Cons:

* Unintended consequences: chasing after karma.
IIRC, this is PG's primary concern about comment scores.

Solutions?

* Maybe it makes more sense to hide karma for individual users than to hide scores on comments. There would still be thresholds of positive karma that would enable users to have certain privileges, but users wouldn't have access to that information. Admittedly, I haven't given this much consideration, so I haven't thought through the consequences.

* Maybe there is another way to make comments easier to scan. This could be done visually, perhaps using color or s simple icon. It might also make sense to offer another sub-HN, kind of like /classic. Personally, I don't rely on HN for news; for me, the value is in the comments. So maybe a /comments sub-HN could feature submissions that generate the best discussions. Defining best might take some doing (highest value average score? highest value single comment?) and would probably require a check or two to prevent users from gaming the system. But for those of us who think HN's value is most closely associated with the value of its comments, it would be great to have an interface that offered a more efficient way to find the most interesting comments.
Good idea. Unfortunately App Engine doesn't allow SSL on custom domains but you can go here for now: https://trnsfrapp.appspot.com/account
The quote is:

"Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.

Steve’s final words were:

OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW."

I assumed the "Oh wow"s referred to each of those people.
I did not count for Christmas because I don't have enough money for spend.
Now I realize why most of his products are so poetic.
Embedded systems are designed to squeeze the absolute maximum out of the hardware upon which they run. All this processor affinity, cache stride calculation, and avoidance of cross-core conflicts is just how business is done.

The upside is performance, because that's what is considered important in this case. The downside, which you've neglected to mention is difficulty of maintenance due to decreased comprehensibility of the system as a whole.

A relational database may not have that much value to the company as a whole.

By all means look at ways to make SQL DBMSes quicker. Lots of clever people have spent decades doing just that. I'm sure they're not finished yet. [incidentally Mohan et al, were using sequential writes for their [undo - or redo? I don't recall which] logs back when CPU speeds where measured in double-digit MHz - DB2 and all that. While its been a while since I had cause to look at the code inside any DBMS, I suspect the same is true today.]

But talking about SQL here is just a hammer in search of a thumb. Pick the tool for the job.

[in summary, I'm more than happy to keep building high-performance low-latency embedded systems in ways that might make an applications programmer weep, but I'm quite glad that the folks who take care of my company's payroll are running industrial-strength transactional systems]
Heh. Strangest description of 4chan yet.
I remember years ago having a senior developer say to me "don't use software patterns they will only make things complicated, you'll regret it in the long run." I scoffed at him, sat down with my books and learned al sorts of things.

After say 5 years I understand what he was saying to me know. Patterns are patterns, they implement themselves when you need them. All you need to know is how not to do it badly. You shouldn't be trying to implement patterns if you don't need them.

I know its a high horse position, because you need to go through a phase of using them to understand why they aren't a miracle cure. o I find the the growth/education of a programmer some what similar to the articles notion.

For reference any younger dev out there that looks at the work senior devs and thinks to themselves "why are they senior? there work is obviously rubbish", you'll probably end up that senior dev one day.

In my experience most senior devs have been like you... perfectionists, aborbsed with the latest greatest etc... and you learn over time all that really matters is delivering on time, code management, and getting burnt by the latest and greatest really sucks.

So you slowly stop writing over engineered code. That often means doing things a basic way, so people in the team aren't left behind that don't understand, understanding your code isn't that critical... whats critical is finishing on time, that optimisation is the last thing you do because it takes to long and you really don't know if what you are writing deserves so much attention (i.e. if it takes off revisit the code, if a choke point starts appearing then optimise). Basically don't waste time on problems which don't exist, don't create stress for yourself/team/management by over engineering solutions.

Next time you wonder why a senior dev seems to be hopeless ask them why they choose to deliver a solution like a beginner and maybe you'll learn something invaluable ;)
You're saying this approach doesn't fit problem domains that are CPU-intensive. That's a valid point.

The article doesn't directly address this but does compare LMAX to a typical database backed business application. The computation here is not usually CPU-bound.
C�mo Hacer Para Que El Pelo Crezca Naturalmente
It was a moving and powerful eulogy. Probably the most beautiful thing I've seen written about Jobs since his passing. One important takeaway for me was the quote:

“Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.”

I've experienced this firsthand. I've been privileged to work with some great web designers. I've forced myself to wait a minimum of 24 hours before rejecting a design and it has always served me very well. Sometimes your first reaction is going to be negative but in a day or so it reverses. I am not certain why this is true but for me it's been a winning strategy.
Apparently they published the first one: http://neglectedwar.com/blog/archives/8516
The main reason employees do not stick with companies as long in the Valley as in Seattle (or most likely anywhere else for that matter) is because a lot more people that work here want to start or join their own startup. And if they did not think about doing it initially, they will eventually get there since it is so much in the local culture.
Thirty MSU Protesters March in Hail and Rain to Reutter Park
Bonnie Bucqueroux to speak about industrial agriculture at Occupy Lansing
I'm glad the stream of "Steve Jobs was an asshole/genius" articles is done. This one shows his real human side.
I don't agree with his point that employees stick it out for long-term success in other places, while they don't in the Valley. Just because people stay with a company for a longer time doesn't mean that they subscribe to a different culture. I've worked in lots of places, and I got the impression that many people hold onto their jobs due to insufficient opportunities in the local area. If they had those opportunities, and a feeling of better security, I bet that they would move around more.

In a way, it sounds like he wants to have employees hang around longer without the company having to invest in a culture that makes them want to stay. The best way to keep employees onboard is a culture in the company that attracts the employees to want to stay. So many startups have compelling cultures at first, then bring in professional management, or excessive growth, and then the original employees seek their desired culture elsewhere. I sure don't want to hang around at a company that brings in traditional management techniques. I care about who I work with, and the conditions --- these days I think I prioritize those criteria over what I work on (and renumeration is a pretty low priority), because I can make lots of things that I work on interesting, but I can't change the management's attitudes (well, I'm trying to write a book to do so, but I wouldn't want to as a leaf node).
PyGTK will be maintained for a long time, and right now PyGObject it's not well supported in all distributions (and chances are that only the newest releases have a working version of PyGObject because it's been in heavy development for a long time).

It sounds to me like saying... oh, he's using Python 2.7.1 instead of Python 3.2.2.
Leaflet - a modern, lightweight JavaScript library for interactive maps
I believe you mean:

foo
bar;
bash: something;
thenBlitz.

http://www.inf.ufsc.br/poo/smalltalk/ibm/tutorial/chap3.html...
Hi,

Good idea ( I use Chrome to Phone on my android, to do that kind of think).
FYI : I tried the website and entered a random number I got a blank webpage with an error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/webapp/_webapp25.py", line 703, in __call__
handler.post(groups)
File "/base/data/home/apps/s~trnsfrapp/1.354335415123281066/main.py", line 388, in post
body=body)
File "/base/data/home/apps/s~trnsfrapp/1.354335415123281066/twilio/rest/resources.py", line 1018, in create
return self.create_instance(params)
File "/base/data/home/apps/s~trnsfrapp/1.354335415123281066/twilio/rest/resources.py", line 295, in create_instance
resp, instance = self.request("POST", self.uri, data=body)
File "/base/data/home/apps/s~trnsfrapp/1.354335415123281066/twilio/rest/resources.py", line 195, in request
resp = make_twilio_request(method, uri, auth=self.auth, *kwargs)
File "/base/data/home/apps/s~trnsfrapp/1.354335415123281066/twilio/rest/resources.py", line 168, in make_twilio_request
raise TwilioRestException(resp.status_code, resp.url, message)
TwilioRestException: HTTP ERROR 400: 21401: +15555557777 is not a valid phone number
https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts/AC36119600c07b44d...

Good continuation
Ask HN: What frustrating things do you wish someone would solve?
What frustrates you about your day-to-day development process that you would like someone to solve?

What tools or processes get in your way instead of making life easier?
Your Big Year: A contest for a free trip around the world for a year