skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm quite a big fan of a well placed witty troll. It's one of the most delicate, subtle and hilarious forms of humour. That's when it's done well however, not all trolls are like that.

Some of the heartiest laughs I've ever had are sourced from trolls.

My troll spotting ability is falling at the wayside though. I used to be really good at spotting trolls, nowadays I come across something every now and think, "Is he trolling?". And that's the beauty of the best trolls, they border on insanity but keep it just within the realms of believability.
Oh man, I didn't even think of that. Such a basic concept...the mind reels. =(
Well, you can draw further distinctions between Rothbard and Nozick (don't know too much about Hoppe). Nozick would support a minimal state whose sole job was to protect property and was financed by government coercion.

Rothbard would go further, though, and say even that minimal state is too much, as it is still coercing people to fund government activity (police protection of property). Even as that end of property enforcement is just, it's still using an immoral means to achieve it.

Which just goes to show that one man's right that deserves government protection is another's coercion. I respect Rothbard's consistency, because it's quite problematic for the run-of-the-mill libertarian to argue for some forms of positive liberty (the right to government provision of property enforcement) while saying that other forms of positive liberty are categorically unjust (such as, say, the right to government provision of running water).
HN is great because you can say controversial things and still get voted up. Most comment voting systems are often: agree (vote up) or disagree (vote down). HN seems to be more along the lines of: Does this comment make empirical sense or is this person talking out of their ass.
I wonder how much lobbying hotels did to push this through.
My solution for that is a quick email saying "this is interesting... let me think about it and I'll reply a little later". It shows people that the discussion is not over yet, but has minimal impact on your task at hand. For things that are only sent to me, this is not required, but it works well for me when things are CC'd all around the department.
Excellent points, I could see a big benifit of these types of algorithms for people that don't have established credit scores. If as a bank seeing that a high school graduate knows many of my good customers, this would make me more willing to loan him money.
I have this same problem. I don't have a driver's license, so I'm not allowed to rent cars. Outrageous!

Taxis and public transportation work fine, though.
Grubwithus is currently active in: Chicago, Los Angeles (HQ), New York, San Francisco, Washington DC, Boston, and Seattle - and expanding rapidly.
Maybe. I've seen people claim this before, but my biggest problem is to not get distracted by all the other neat stuff I could be doing. Historically, the only time I have been able to maintain focus for long is when I have been getting paid for it, an external focus that helps override the distractions. There are more things I want to do than I am ever going to have time for.
So by "spring to life" the writer meant "we may, if we're lucky, finally see a glint of something". It's very exciting, yet the writer put it in terms that will scare the living hell of any uneducated person like me. Glad there's always HN.
Maybe, but be careful and think 'long shot':

I was one of three researchers in a team at Yorktown Heights that did some of the best research in AI in the world, published a string of peer-reviewed papers, was the source of two commercial products, gave a paper at the AAAI IAAI conference in Stanford with for that year the 25 best AI applications in the world, personally won an award, etc.

I've taught computer science at Georgetown University and Ohio State University. My Ph.D. is in applied math.

Once in my career, just as a 'scientific programmer', in two weeks I sent a few resume copies, went on seven interviews, and got five offers.

But after my Ph.D. and AI work, I sent over 1000 resumes to Google, Microsoft, GE, FedEx, and hundreds more, got only five interviews, and no offers. I got a nice letter back from Fisher Black (as in Black-Scholes) saying that he saw no applications of applied math or AI at GS.

I ask you: Who will hire you in AI and why?

In business, hiring is because some manager has some work to do and a budget to do it. That manager believes that they know nearly all that is needed to do the work and otherwise would not be betting his career on the work. Thus, the manager is not hiring high technical expertise he doesn't have. Instead the manager is, as on a factory floor 100 years ago, hiring labor to add 'muscle' to his work.

In particular, unless the manager knows AI, he won't be hiring for AI. And there is at most only a tiny chance that the manager knows AI and even less chance that his project will depend on AI.

Moreover, the manager does not want competition from below and does not want his project 'disrupted' from below so really doesn't want technical expertise above what is needed just to get his project done.

Net, if you know some AI and want to use it in business, then find an application and start your own business. Then, since you know AI, you won't have to hire anyone in AI either.

What I've said here for AI holds for essentially all advanced academic topics.

Sorry 'bout that.
I just spend the last 30 minutes to learn enough Ruby to pass the test. There are many ways to do this to get it to pass. Thank heavens for modulo, however.
Those rules are somewhat different to the ones I learned in HS. My teacher's version mapped buzz to multiples of seven, not three, and also required you to use fizz if there was a five anywhere in the number, and buzz for any number containing a seven. Thus, 17,27,37.. were buzzes, as were 70..79, 170..179, and so on. 57 and 75 were both fizz-buzz by that rule. Numbers with multiple 5s had to use the appropriate number of fizzes, and numbers with multiple 7s had to use the appropriate number of buzzes. Thus, 757 would be "buzz-fizz-buzz".

I've seen the fizz buzz test mentioned a lot lately, and had assumed that it was referring to the somewhat more challenging version I knew. Do people really have that much trouble with this simple version?
Money provides access in D.C. (Lawrence Lessig on The Daily Show)
I would very much love to! However, this seems like a 6+ month project; I can't afford that, and I don't see any way this could be profitable. I've been speculating lately that this is a primary reason that services like reddit/twitter/etherpad have been replacing open protocols.
Some of these exemplify "premature optimization" and will clutter code with no discernible benefit. I remember some days ago, in the days of PHP, there were heated debates about whether or not using single or double quotes for strings makes code faster.

As with most development, use good practices. But then at the end of the day, profile your application to find the actual bottlenecks.
One wonders if the 'fine' for this sort of behavior could be 'JP Morgan will provide the city of Birmingham the infrastructure to provide sewer and water service to the town, once complete they will transfer all titles and interest over to the town at no charge.'

The current consequence of 'pay some fines' doesn't serve the public, nor does it discourage the abuse. Restitution here is that the city doesn't have a sewer and water system. By having JP Morgan fund the building and provisioning of such a system and then handing it over debt/bond free to the city, the city is made whole (they have their sewer system), JP Morgan is punished (they paid for it), and hopefully they are discouraged from future attempts at bribing folks.
How to efficiently vacuum the house
Think of it as the "egocentric" rule of astronomy: always describe things from the perspective of the observer (you), not from the perspective of the agent.
I wouldn't really consider programmer == knows modulus. I only learned of the modulus operator a year or two ago (no formal CS background) and previously have built full scale web applications.
The only requirement to become an Israeli citizen is a religious claim. Apartheid based on religion vs race is not much better.

I consider the occupation terminology BS because there has been no progress on the two state solution for 50 years. It is one country defacto ruled by Israel. Israel tries to claim the Palestinian territories as a weird hybrid state, not independent but not part of Israel, just so they can claim to be democratic, but they are not.
This is the well known version AFAIK (I've seen in many times over the years).

I'm actually not that surprised people have trouble with it. Even in my CS program at a decent university, I encountered many students that could still not handle simple programming tasks in advanced courses, and were relying on the internet, cheating and heavily leaning on TAs to get through.
I took this course casually as well (wanted to fill in some gaps in my undergrad education). But my guess is that people that complete this course casual probably already have a lot on their plates. For me it was family, working, teaching and taking a grad class. I never double checked my hws, could only do a single pass through the lectures, and didn't spend any time checking for nuance in many of the Qs and my grade shows accordingly. However in the end I'm really excited that I was able to continue through it despite all this (I'm really curious to see the percentage of participants who saw the course through completion compared to those who signed up).

The correlation will be interesting. Undoubtedly the top 1000 is made of many of the type of people that must be the best at whatever they try (not exclusively of course) and with a decent amount of time on their hands, after all there is no disincentive whatsoever for not completing something and no previously known reward for perfection (I guess a piece of paper can count). Given some wording in some of the Qs (actually my only complaint about this course) a lot of care must be taken to ensure that every question is right, so being in the top 1000 is no small effort.
>When you multitask, it drops by an average of 10 points, 15 for men, five for women (yes, men are three times as bad at multitasking than women).

I would like to see a citation on this.
Free idea: why there are no trailers for theater plays?
I believe there are two reasons people don't go to theater more often: higher ticket prices and lack of information. If you only have a written review by some snoby artsy people and no friend to recommend a play, you might as well go see the latest Transformer - at least you know what you going to get for your money.

If there was a company that produced nice and professional looking (like holywood) trailers of theater plays I believe it could make good business helping producers and theater companies raise their revenue.
"Just do it" ads started in 1988, almost a decade before Think Different campaign, here's to compare:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENi1SvEFqsQ

Thanks for posting the Jobs' ad introduction, I've seen his talk before, but I as watched it after reading both the article and Isaacson's bio I saw something new and different.

I also have an impression that Rob Siltanen didn't remember correctly the Jobs' attire on that day as he saw him, that it was not actually a "black mock turtleneck" but a black sweater just like in the video.
Are you meaning they're getting that, or they're costing that?

For a $70/hour contract (~$140k/year), it actually costs the company north of $90-$100/hour (over $180k/year) when going through a recruiter.
That out to be good for media attention.
Actually Nokia has done a lot more than Microsoft. But obviously they too have a way to go before people learn about it.
"When faced with these sorts of situations, administrators will likely enact policies to shield their universities from liability, even if those policies don’t take advantage of the fair use exceptions to copyright provided to educators. In spite of the law’s current explicit protection for “multiple copies for classroom use,” many universities currently pay blanket licensing fees to the non-profit company Copyright Clearance Center in an attempt to stave off potential liability. And it’s understandable why the universities pay: the Center is now partially financing a 2008 lawsuit filed by an academic publisher against Georgia State University, which did not pay for such a license."

Isn't that extortion? Georgia State didn't cough up their "protection" money. Time to smash the windows...
I always thought that was some kind of urban myth that programmers made up to make themselves look better.
As systems for public financing of campaigns go, it sucks less than some alternatives I've seen, but it remains a system for publically financing campaigns, which gives it a certain baseline level of unavoidable suckage.

Implementing such a system today would have the net effect of funneling piles of money towards the two well-known parties, making them even more unassailable. For candidates other than those of the two well-known parties, it seems unlikely to produce any useful effect beyond that attainable today through voluntary donations.

How about I keep my $50 and spend it as I see fit, on political candidates or otherwise, and you do the same? That seems like a far smarter, simpler system than the one you linked to, and than almost any other system I've seen proposed.
No.

But the accretion disk might appear visible to various instruments.

Basically, we will see the exact location of the black hole for the first time directly. Not the collapsar itself, of course, but the swirling disk surrounding it.
It took me a while to figure out why mine wasn't working because I wrote [1..100], which is a one-element array with a range in it. Too much Haskell, I guess.

To salvage my dignity, here's the Haskell solution:

main = mapM_ putStrLn $ map fizzbuzz [1..100]
where fizzbuzz n | n `mod` 15 == 0 = "FizzBuzz"
| n `mod` 3 == 0 = "Fizz"
| n `mod` 5 == 0 = "Buzz"
| otherwise = show n
> But sure...two steps back, one step forward.

Two steps back (lack of affordable clean water and lack of affordable sewage), hopefully the one step forward is going to be lack of government.

The leading problem in the western world is that the free market doesn't extend to government. I want to choose my politicians based on lowest expense and highest reward, because the electoral system seems to keep giving me the highest expense and the lowest rewards.
While this is great for Louis CK, whom I find to be hilarious and wish only the best, it doesn't strike me as a truly generalisable model. I mean, it's basically a restricted version of NPR's 'pledge' model, right? The copies are effectively free, but you can choose to donate some money to the artist. Sure this can work for someone with a lot of name recognition, but that's because he was already discovered.

I think the problem is that Louis CK isn't in the business of distribution, he's in the business of producing comedy. The NPR model does disaggregate the two. You don't pay for the distribution, you pay so that they keep producing content.

I think the Kickstarter model is more generalisable, in that it more directly solicits payment for the production, not the distribution. But it still depends on people wanting what you will produce, which means they have to know who you are already. Which, I think means that people are going to have to produce things for free until there's enough demand for continued production to be able to solicit payment.
The actual quote this is based on roughly said 99% of applicants, which is hardly the same as 99% of programmers.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmer...

My own opinion is that if the ratio is this bad by the time they get to the interview, you may not be pre-screening well enough.
I'm truly impressed at how you stated the point about Graffiti / Banksy while simultaneously explaining why it doesn't really have any bearing on the topic at hand.
It's admittedly been a while since I've read Brave New World, but I don't see the connection at all. Care to elaborate?
Lucid dreaming was an amateur discovery as well.
A right to reasonable access to sanitation, yes; the alternative is disease, and that's no good for anyone. That doesn't mean it should be free, of course.
You shouldn't have posted something positive about trolling. Now mind the downvotes.

This reminds me of an old phrase - "fish swimming against the current gets electrocuted".
So how would I find out this has happened to me? (Besides the obvious - no answers to my comments - of course.)
Sometimes we hackers work too hard to make things more complicated than they need to be.

I was referring to the hackers who use the forum, not the ones who run it. Sorry for the confusion.

It really is much easier and more beneficial for everyone to just be nice. Why work harder to achieve less?

A few strategies that have made it easier for me to "be nice":

1. Avoid long back and forth threads. Say what you have to say and get back to work.

2. Try to plan your comment to not be misinterpreted. This avoids much unnecessary pain. It's also difficult.

3. If someone responds negatively to you, wait and let others respond on your behalf. It's amazing how much better this feels.

4. Imagine that the other person has 42 legitimate reasons for not being nice. Let 'em slide.

5. Imagine that the other person may someday be your ideal co-founder, mentor, collaborator, customer, or angel. (Or more likely, your ideal co-founder, mentor, collaborator, customer, or angel is witnessing this exchange.) Don't say anything to scare them away.

6. Most of all: It doesn't matter! This is all optional. We were all busy working before Hacker News and will be busy working after Hacker News is gone (perish the thought). Lighten up.
>owning products that require no marketing that they're not incapable of doing it.

I think you have a double negative there...
I do not know Ruby, but I wanted to see what happened when I clicked next. Without writing any code I clicked "Grade it!" This provided me with the unit test output. I looked at it for a moment and then guessed at a solution that might work using copy and paste and based on the comment in the code. Here it is:

puts ["1", "2", "fizz", "4", "buzz", "fizz", "7", "8", "fizz", "buzz", "11", "fizz", "13", "14", "fizzbuzz", "16", "17", "fizz", "19", "buzz", "fizz", "22", "23", "fizz", "buzz", "26", "fizz", "28", "29", "fizzbuzz", "31", "32", "fizz", "34", "buzz", "fizz", "37", "38", "fizz", "buzz", "41", "fizz", "43", "44", "fizzbuzz", "46", "47", "fizz", "49", "buzz", "fizz", "52", "53", "fizz", "buzz", "56", "fizz", "58", "59", "fizzbuzz", "61", "62", "fizz", "64", "buzz", "fizz", "67", "68", "fizz", "buzz", "71", "fizz", "73", "74", "fizzbuzz", "76", "77", "fizz", "79", "buzz", "fizz", "82", "83", "fizz", "buzz", "86", "fizz", "88", "89", "fizzbuzz", "91", "92", "fizz", "94", "buzz", "fizz", "97", "98", "fizz", "buzz"]

I passed.
I am happy I passed, I was worried I suck. What a great day! :)
Bananas and  monkeys
I think of them as parameters rather than tags, maybe should change the name in descriptions (using "smart tags" can be misleading).
It's simple without modulo too. Division's just repeated subtraction, so subtract 3 or 5 until you hit 0... if you pass it, it wasn't evenly divisible. Multiple loops instead of one.
The leading problem in the western world is that the free market does extend to government.

I get the politicians I am willing to pay for.

Unfortunately corporations have more money, and can afford to pay more than I can.

That is the free market at work.
I was thinking of the exact same thing.

It's ironic when a piece of writing tries to present you with factual information begins with a deceiving title, all in the name of attention grabbing.
Also the book "Erlang and OTP in Action". Great next-step book after the PragPub one (or even just skip the PragPub one).
One might worry this would prevent people from expressing controversial ideas, but empirically that doesn't seem to be what happens. When people say something substantial that gets modded down, they stubbornly leave it up. What people delete are wisecracks, because they have less invested in them.

I am not seeing this any more on HN.

This is the second time I read this essay, and my concerns are still the same: people who have minority opinions might not be able to express them in such a polite way as to be considered "thoughtful" by the majority.

I'm a bit of a contrarian commenter. That's because forums such as this one naturally gravitate to extremes. The programmer who lost his dog, and suddenly everybody is looking for him. The news story that causes us to be concerned about an intrusive government, and suddenly everybody sees Nazis everywhere.

People in groups naturally gravitate towards extremes. Whether they are right or wrong, other people may choose to try to persuade them of their error (and most times, the crowd is wrong because it takes things too far). In a highly-emotional discussion, it is almost impossible to convince the crowd that they might be wrong, no matter how you phrase it. People who try this are called trolls by the definition I see here, and they don't belong in the same category as folks who aren't part of the group but drop in to throw rhetorical hand-grenades at the rest of us. Quick test: if there were topic on HN titled "Final proof that the Earth is Still Flat" that linked to a reputable source and all the commenters were in agreement (stretch your imagination a bit) could you comment in such a fashion to show thoughtful consideration of the majority's opinion yet ask for people to really think this over? If you can follow along in my thought experiment, you'll find this is not a very easy thing to do at all. Most folks would just throw out a snarky rejoinder.

In my opinion a bit of nuance is required in this essay which is not present. EDIT: J.S. Mill, is on the money here: "...He argued that even if an opinion is false, the truth can be better understood by refuting the error..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill#Views_on_freed... Note the conflict between how the real world has to act, and how the online community is desired to act by the site owner (and the majority opinion) The short-term interest of the site, perhaps "a happy majority pushing forward to a new understanding in a specific field of study" and the strategic interest of a well-functioning society are very much in conflict here. This is a hugely important point, and in my opinion PG does not recognize this except in passing.
Same thing happened to my account a few months ago. I recall having a few bad days where I was, perhaps, overzealous in flagging what I considered inane or wrong or groupthink or low quality self-promotional drivel.

Having your features pared down is a fine line between "we're doing this for your own good to save you from yourself" and "we think your input is less valuable than everybody else here."
"But we still only have about 8,000 uniques a day."

Wow, now it's more like 120,000. If I was already worried about the problem then (which I must have been if I took the time to write about it), I'm surprised the site is even usable now.
Number 7 is a favorite of mine.

Sometimes you just need a nice long walk to clear your mind and reset your focus on the task at hand.
That's a great idea. Use bootstrap as a starting point and go from there. You already have a community forming around bootstrap that you could leverage.