skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, in other words, it's really important? Like, pays our bills, heats our homes, puts food on the table? If you want to apply reductionist arguments, then ancient money is just piles of metal. Not like it had any "value" beyond what they collectively gave it, either.

Do we have to revisit the barter system where value is traded for value to once again realize the reason money was invented? Fish for tools works, until you want apples.

It doesn't matter whether something "intrinsically" has value (wood as fuel, apple as food) if you can trade it for something that does. As long as that remains true, karma remains an int and bank accounts remain buying power. Fin.
I like the measures HN has in place to combat trolling. Karma, up/down votes, the downvote threshold, dead links, etc. are all really good and seem to work. The biggest thing though is just making sure everyone understands the kind of unspoken spirit of the site. I'd also argue that we want to keep this place kind of hushed as not to attract too broad of an audience.

What I don't like that I have seen a lot of, is what I like to call "karma police". People who abuse the downvote button to silence perfectly valid comments that they just happen to disagree with. That's a problem. I think we need to be more judicious about the up and down votes. It's easy to just up vote something with a title we agree with but does it really call for it? I liken it to how easy it is to press the Facebook like button everywhere. As for downvotes, that button should be reserved for off-topic, vulgar, or otherwise obvious trolling cases and not just because "I didn't like what he said, he's stupid, or whatever".
That may be about to change, however. Astronomers have spotted a cloud of gas with a mass about three times that of Earth that's on a trajectory that will have it pass close to Sgr A in 2013*

If this is for real, I am ridiculously humbled by the power of modern astronomy. It's pretty damned amazing to me that we have the ability to detect the location, dimension, and trajectory of a mere 3 earth-masses of thin, amorphous gas 27k light years away, in the noisiest and densest part of the galaxy.
VLC is more then a UI, they have to implement the decoders in libavcodec, and they do a lot of work to package things underneath. FFmpeg also supports VDPAU (the nvidia, linux video acceleration api), but it would still be some work for VLC to implement it.
Smartbox TV enrich the end-user experience on regular TV campaigns
So you can remove the human factor?
Hi guys, I'm the primary developer of libmv (http://libmv.googlecode.com) which is used for the motion tracking component in Blender. I also wrote some of the Blender-specific motion tracking code. What's in this release is not the final word; there's some exciting improvements in the pipeline. Let me know if you have any questions.
I don't think it is anywhere near 100k students. I can't find the cite, but I thought they commented somewhere that 20k or something like that people took the midterm.

I presume people are guessing how they are doing by just looking at their homework and midterm scores so far, weighted according to the appropriate weights.
Alcoholic =/= Workaholic. Your title is misleading.
I gave up on reading this article after the first page. Please spare us the X is great but I am greater speeches.
yes i think that is the best approach for now. just have a single html file that have both the css and html structure.

so if i have a landing page i want to contribute, i'd add:

/users/jaequery/landing1/index.html
/users/jaequery/landing1/images

and push to the repo.

along the lines, i'm thinking of you adding something like a README file that the system can read and process on the database to allow ability to search/sort/etc ...
Skill Doesn’t Matter If You Lack Taste
Galaxy Nexus launches December 15th on Verizon
I got the letter, I made a 100% on everything except homework 6 and 7 (missed 1 each on those).
Of the top of my head: start off with big up/down buttons. Then show a list of floors. Some people won't notice the second press required, but it's a start. I was confused by those things the first time too.
> "None of it really matters." That's your opinion.

Actually, it's more of a deliberate choice than an opinion, and I think it's clearly the correct choice based on the nature of anonymous online communities. Other people can choose to take anonymous trolling seriously, as if it were a person insulting them or being inappropriate face-to-face. But to do so is to misunderstand the idea of anonymity and online communities. I would argue that anonymous online communities really don't matter, in the sense that it's foolish to even be invested enough to be offended by insults or inappropriate behavior. I think people who choose to invest themselves personally in an anonymous online community are failing to understand the nature of the community, analogous to someone who misinterprets a work of parody or farce as sincere and is thus offended.

Obviously, there are exceptions, namely when people aren't acting anonymously online. No one is suggesting for example that an entrepreneur or a VC shouldn't be held accountable for things they post on twitter or their blog. When you're not anonymous, then online communication is essentially equivalent to face-to-face communication, with full liability.

Also, I'm not necessarily arguing against moderation in online communities. It's fine for admins to be restrictive in who they allow in a community, or to remove "troll posts." I'm just arguing that to invest yourself personally or emotionally in an anonymous online community is to misunderstand the nature of such communities, and is objectively unwise.
Why Doesn't Wikipedia Use Ads For Revenue?
Was it Preston Brooks?

I remember reading about it in one of my american history class.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preston_Brooks

I'd watch CSPAN more if they had officiated brawls :)
23% of all US car accidents are caused by cell phone use. [1] That's 1.3 million crashes per year. I'd call that a big problem.

[1] http://www.nsc.org/Pages/NSCestimates16millioncrashescausedb...
Which means that once trolling takes hold, it tends to become the dominant culture. That had already happened to Slashdot and Digg by the time I paid attention to comment threads there, but I watched it happen to Reddit.

Reddit actually has a fascinating, rich culture. Trolling is just a part of it, but the community seems to be managing.
>What is Ballmer's vision?

Something about developers.
Hmm, I don't know. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be nasty, but this looks to me like wasted effort. Who is the target audience for this project?

Most Django/Python programmers are prone to have a setup they already comfortable with. It'd require a lot of nice features for me to ditch the comfort of my highly-customized Vim and a command line where I can do anything I want. Not even Eclipse did it for me (coming from .NET as I did I was really looking into finding a 'do-it-all' IDE when I first started.)

Anyway, I don't want to be the one to discourage you, so take my criticism with a grain of salt :)
>Again, you are making choices for them. You don't see anything wrong with this? Nobody is guaranteed a living. However, you should be given a chance. You are taking away that chance completely.

I don't even see where this is coming from. I think you jump over a few points in your logic here, or you just know nothing about an industry which you're trying to debate about.

>Over time, people with your attitude have pushed many artists to go with big labels.

NOPE. Where are you getting your talking points? The RIAA's "downloads = lost sales" page?

If people didn't broaden the market and fanbase for independent music and independent labels, it wouldn't exist, and you'd only have major label music.

They have little to no chance making any kind of living on their own (because people just share their music and don't pay for it). So, the label offers them money and some sort of living.

The labels offer an incredibly bad deal. And all the artists who, you know, actually make a living without belonging to a major label might want to have a word with you about your data.

>I hope you weren't charging any money, because you sure don't seem any better than a regular label.

Actually, we were tons better. We basically set up our store to be the reverse of the apple store: They get 70% we get 30% (agency model). So selling your album for $5 bucks nets you 3. The same album on iTunes, would you net you about $1.50.

Except, as an independent, you'd have to go through a service which functions as a 'label' that takes 50%. So an album that nets you $.75 on iTunes would make you $3 off our site.

Oh, and one of our founders actually owned an independent record label. The problem is, all of the small indies have no internet strategy, and everyone in the business knows that's the name of the game. Fortunately, sites like SoundCloud and Bandcamp are actually there for independent musicians these days.

I'd love to go on, but to me it seems like you have no clue as to what you're talking about and I've got better things to do than re-hash the research we used in our pitch. Good day!
Verizon’s Galaxy Nexus to finally launch tomorrow for $299.99
The Computers Cheap Sale Company
The Computers Cheap Sale Company. Special Price Product & Review Cheap Computers Sales Price Online Store
I think it is true both that politics were more substantive 30 years ago and that many 19th century presidential campaigns were incredibly nasty.

There tends to be an ebb and flow in these sorts of things. I think that there is a clear case to be made right now that the decline in common news sources among people with different political views in the last 20 years has led to nastier politics. When everyone more-or-less agreed on the facts and many of the terms of debate but disagreed on what the outcome of the debate should be, I think the form that debate took was healthier.

But that period was the byproduct of a limited number of TV news programs all of which adopted a sort of consensus mainstream agenda, combined with a newspaper system with one or two papers per town that tended to do the same. This was a specific period, not an all-purpose "in the old days" thing.

In some earlier eras, it was common for there to be a number of different newspapers in a city, each of which had quite a different agenda -- as still survives in the UK, for example.
yes, yes I do - the media companies caused the law in the first place - individuals raised the defense
The fact that official moderators (read: people with super-user powers) are needed on a forum indicates that the regulating powers are broken by design.

Back in late 2009 I built a forum that allowed every user to temporarily ban any other user. There were restrictions... bans lengths were temporary (and voted on democratically), expiring after the voted time limit, you could only ban a person you replied to, and everyone would be able to see that you were the person who banned the parent post. Other than that, the forum was completely anonymous, and it was able to regulate large numbers of trolls (mostly from 4chan). They seemed to appreciate the equality and the natural regulation.
Even in the most openly hostile troll communities (FYAD, /b/, etc.) there is a solid "trust": you will be trolled.

This idea of trust is a very strange thing, to me. If I present an argument or point logically and it is accepted, then there is no problem. If I do so and it is rejected logically, there is no problem. If I do so and are assailed with noise and rubbish, then it is usually pretty clear that it's just garbage and to be ignored.

If I seek affirmation and reassurance from people online instead of flesh-and-blood folks I can talk to directly, I being to wonder if this is actually an okay state of affairs. If my support group could be replaced with a bunch of clever Python scripts, Markov models, and machine learning algos, I would suggest that something is deeply wrong--and that is exactly the sort of inscrutable interface forums provide.

Only when you start to "trust" the personas you encounter online and become invested in your model of them do you actually run the risk of getting hurt. Treat it like a game, learning what you can when you can and ignoring the rabble, and things go best.

:)
I think ridicule is perfectly appropriate once the beliefs you are talking about get batshit insane. Ridicule is a powerful tool, not so much to convince those who already believe, rather to convince those thinking about believing or on the fence about whether to no longer believe. It’s also a powerful tool to remind everyone that batshit insane beliefs are still around and that it’s apparently easy for humans to believe in them.

More specifically, I think it’s great to have both: People who painstakingly taken even the most batshit insane ideas serious and engage them on the same level and people who ridicule. That’s not a contradiction for me.
The black hole is estimated around 4 million solar masses, the gas cloud around 3 earth masses.
I applied to YC a few times ago with something to the ends of "In order to apply, you have to rate 3 other resumes for this position" Does anyone else think this is a good idea? I feel like there are too many people applying that suck, and it would be better to know where you stand/get feedback from other seekers?
Your method of detecting duplicate ballots is also subject to the vulnerability of false negatives if one person votes once on two different machines. There's no good way to protect against this. Further, useragent/IP pairs are easily bypassed by forging a false user agent string.
The real scandal is the long pattern of corrupt political leadership of Birmingham.

Birmingham was once an industrial capital, and in the middle of the last century was bigger than Atlanta, and in many ways better positioned economically to lead the south east. High taxes and a corrupt political culture drove Birmingham into the dirt. A couple generations later, Atlanta has one of the busiest airports in America, world-class universities, and hosted the Olympics, while Birmingham can't provide running water.

Elections matter.
Palantir has always creeped me out. Their core product is more or less Big Brother software that tracks individuals. At least HBGary was horribly incompetent in the end - the problem with Palantir is there are very smart people working there and they are much more hush-hush.
Palestinians aren't allowed to enter huge portions of the West Bank, including big sections of Hebron where only 500 Jewish settlers live among 300,000 Palestinians. There are whole highways that are Israeli only. Jewish settlers steal private land and then are defended by the IDF as has happened in Nabi Saleh.

One set of rules is enforced on Palestinians and another for Israelis living in the same area. That is the definition of apartheid.
How your t-shirt can help you meet cool people
The players within a game can be acting in a way they find distasteful, but which is nonetheless required of them by the rules. Students can be compelled to cheat if they perceive that it is widespread. Professors inflate their grades so their students are not disadvantaged upon graduation. Journalists "dumb down" their writing in order to better compete. Cyclists take dangerous drugs in order to stand a chance of winning against others they believe to be doing so as well.

In these tragedy-of-the-commons types of scenarios, all can be willing to agree to a change of the rules, so long as no actor gains immediate "unfair" advantage.

It's my personal opinion that most people in D.C. are fundamentally smart and good-hearted. Unfortunately, the euphemisms of spin constitute their thought processes. This, organized by the corrupting influence of money, has led in aggregate to delusion and dependency.

Rules-changing legislation is, hopefully, possible -- though perhaps only after beltway-types can be freed from self-deception.
Telecommuting is a lie

That's a bit stronger than the wording that I would use. But I totally see where you're coming from. There are organizations (such as WordPress) that seem to rely heavily on telecommuters successfully.

I'm going to stand by "strong bias for local talent" :)
Galaxy Nexus arrives on Verizon tomorrow, December 15th, for $299
Details and Rumors on Majel : Google is Going Beyond Siri
I dunno. I definitely consider Palantir evil no matter how many open-source goodies they put out.
It is incredibly callus to suggest that poor (mostly black) people do not deserve such basic necessities as drinkable water and sanitary disposal of their own excrement.

So yes, you are trolling.
The current Congress can't get anything done because one of the political parties has decided that it isn't in their interest to get anything done, to keep the other party from getting credit for it.

I don't mean to call out the Republicans for being uniquely unpleasant in this regard -- there have been periods when the Democrats have been just as calculatingly obstructive.
>While I read about SOPA, and the way that the MPAA lobbies, the thing that keeps popping into my head is, why exactly are those of us who love a free internet on the defensive on these issues? Why do we always end up being reactive? Why are we vaguely relieved when some people start making a bill that's only 1/10th as bad as SOPA / Protect IP? Why aren't we (or wikipedia, or tumblr, or google, or the whole fuzzy mess of everyone who so identities) driving for more proactive legislation that makes the internet even more free and even better protected?

Is this a question in honest good faith? Because I don't have a million dollars to buy, I mean bribe, I mean influence votes in the House and Senate? Further, these companies are on the defensive because they're being attacked. I would imagine Google would happily keep the status quo. They have no need to petition the government for "proactive" measures because everything is smooth sailing and not everyone wants to legislate every last detail to protect our freedoms. So instead, we're forced to react, and it's hard to do when you're combating people with huge war chests.
I've seen some relatives' kids accounts on Facebook. I'm not sure I can be as optimistic as your last paragraph. If anything, I'm pessimistic that many kids are writing utter utter trollish garbage online that may never ever go away.

Of course, there will be kids that are smart and don't do this, but kids that want to 'fit in' or 'be popular' may well end up rolling with the crowd and posting things that will hurt them later on.

As parents, we should be looking out for our kids, both in real life, and online.
I was thinking along the same lines yesterday about why there are so many negative comments online and not offline. I think one of the main reasons (that PG didn't cover) is that in the real world, people associate together in groups.

Nobody wants to be around a negative person, so not only does the negative person have a minimal negative impact on the people around him (since no one will listen), but the main problem arises when he gets online. Not only is this troll frustrated that no real people will listen to his negativity, but when he jumps online he's equal to everyone else. There are no groups. Nobody looks at his username like they would his face in the real-world and says "oh he's an ass, don't listen to him." I think it's partially because faces are easier to remember than usernames, and partially because we associate a whole personality with a face so we can avoid this person next time.

When everyone's equal they each have the same impact. This would be a beautiful system if there was 0 negativity online because the new guy with great ideas would be heard just as well as a 10-year online veteran. But in the online social world its strength seems to be its weakness. How am I supposed to know if the person commenting is a really cynical person or a constructive criticism-type person until I've fully read his comment, and by then he's already made his impact on me.

I don't think modern social networks have this problem as much though. I only socialize with my real friends on FB, Twitter, and G+.
There is an amazing, astounding paragraph in this article. Picture the scene. Steve Jobs looks at the pitch, and is actually, viscerally grabbed by fear. The fear that all of us experience once in a while when we realize there is a big opportunity ahead, but one that we need to jump off the cliff to grab. And he realizes the fear has grabbed him, and he pushes it away. "What am I doing?" he asks himself. "Screw it. It’s the right thing." And he jumps off the cliff, taking one great leap towards saving Apple.

Here's the paragraph in full:

"Jobs was quiet during the pitch, but he seemed intrigued throughout, and now it was time for him to talk. He looked around the room filled with the “Think Different” billboards and said, “This is great, this is really great … but I can’t do this. People already think I’m an egotist, and putting the Apple logo up there with all these geniuses will get me skewered by the press.” The room was totally silent. The “Think Different” campaign was the only campaign we had in our bag of tricks, and I thought for certain we were toast. Steve then paused and looked around the room and said out loud, yet almost as if to his own self, “What am I doing? Screw it. It’s the right thing. It’s great. Let’s talk tomorrow.” In a matter of seconds, right before our very eyes, he had done a complete about-face."
Why don't more elevators have these optimizations? On older buildings at least, I imagine it's because the landlord just doesn't care.

I walked by dozens and dozens of emergency vehicles this morning because of this horrible thing: http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/three-hurt-in-m...

My last office was in an older building like that and had a set of elevators that were chronically behaving erratically, so that kind of freaked me out more than it would otherwise.
As well as just search volume, Google has a surprisingly good handle on unique visitors to websites:

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=reddit.com%2C+news.ycomb...
Thank you Sir. You're right I've confused Beagle with Beagleboard, that of course is a huge difference.
I stay in accord with your opinion about dumbed down environments.

The Arduino boards, a "Beagle" and an Oscillator surely make out a nice learning environment for hacking and learning. I'm not requiring full compliance with OSHW licensing. It's because 3D-Printing will allow cheap custom devices and because I'm not fully agreeing with point 3, 12 and 13 for specific cases. When a specific hardware centric or locked design is the only requirement, or more efficient; when the software provided cannot be disclosed without risk of patent infringements etc.

Coming up with challenges is hard. But an unlocked environment to learn the principles of electrical engineering will offer interesting ones and combined with computer science it'll reveal the perspective a creator has to our world.

Thanks again for helping me and others =))
Ouch, fixed now.

That must've be the sleep deprivation symptom rearing it's ugly head.
Can somebody explain why the black hole at the center of our galaxy is called "Sgr A*"? Is there some system behind the name or are astronomers just like programmers in naming stuff (it took me a while to figure out how to pronounce nginx >:().
Lawful Evil is my take on it.
The article discusses how it is becoming a public, open source project.

The technology behind this was developed initially for a commercial product (Illumination Software Creator) and is being spun off from that project into the new Lunduke SDK, which is open source.
what does hellbanned look like on HN? Can't login? Can't post? Can post, but noone can see it?
The same system has capture of the media... so don't wait on it.