skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've thought about this before, and I'm betting that a large portion of the developers on HN have too. For me it always comes back to the fact that any new language, framework, or SDK on top of an old one simply fragments the industry even more. When 10 developers come up with 10 different abstractions of 3 frameworks, you get the exact opposite of what you are trying to accomplish.

If you want everyone to use the same framework, then my advice - though somewhat impractical - is to use it, advocate for it, and contribute to the community.
Interesting. My sister pulled in almost $30k renting her awesome house in downtown Charleston last year, but then the city contacted every host (through AirBnB) threatening massive fines and even jail, and now there's barely a place to be found downtown (where tourists want to go, natch).
For what it's worth: I didn't mean to sound so dismissive; I was genuinely surprised. Sorry about that.

(This wasn't a thread about fanfic, btw).
Where are you losing people? If no one is clicking get started, address the homepage first. If people look at products but still don't buy, start with your products page.

1. Are you performing split testing on major components of your landing page?

"Increase your brownie points!" strikes me as awkward and mathematical (makes me think $browniePoints++). Ask a few friends in your target market to help you brainstorm.

2. I almost missed the arrows to see more products per category. Make them more prominent and switch the circles in the top right for page numbers.
I've heard this plenty of times, and I know this anecdotal, but it does predict things. Every developer at FreshBooks when I was there was the same type. Every one of my girlfriends (that I got to take the test long after we broke up) is the same type.

There are correlations with IQ, with employment, with other accepted tests. The primary weakness of MB is that results are normally distributed across each letter, so a majority of the population is not strongly correlated with each letter. Just look at the hacker news response. I know it is self reported, but I don't buy that the two of the least populous types self reported themselves by a factor of 1000.
with the stderred LD_PRELOAD alias
this works for me:
stderred python -c 'import os; print "Yo!"; os.write(2, "Jola\n\r")'
but this doesn't;
stderred ruby -e 'puts "Yo!";STDERR.write "Jola\n\r"'

if i do an strace the writes are going to the same file descriptors.. any ideas?
Peopleware, absolutely.
The question is in honest, good faith.

The progressive era followed the era of robber barons. There was even more wealth asymmetry in America then than now. Something happened to make that transition take place, something cultural, something that the abstraction called dollars couldn't sufficiently buy and sway. Concentrated money can't be the only determining factor in how change happens, or at least not in a sustained fashion. It's just one more leaky abstraction about legitimacy that breaks down from time to time when abused too far.

Occupy Wallstreet (and the we are the 99 percent tumbler) has been responded to as a wildly outsized threat in the political discourse of establishment pundits that I follow, almost an existential threat. I guess I'm writing through all this to try to understand why they're so shaken by it - clearly, it's not like those dirty hippies and their bongos have giant war chests, either.

The thing that makes the concentrated wealth in America so damn powerful, I'm increasingly convinced, far more than the pragmatic reach of the money, is the confidence of its holders in the moral rightness of the general order, their outsized belief in the narratives they tell themselves - and the complacency of the rest of us in going along with those stories.

Money matters, in some eras much more than others. (Again, this is why I find the idea of Wikipedia going, essentially, on strike, so massively fascinating. How much money does Wikipedia have, and how much profit? And yet how much cultural and moral influence does it have?) Maybe the frustration and sense of helplessness that you're writing here, that so many of us write here, is exactly the thing that eventually whittles away the confidence up above, the thing that makes attacking the corruption possible?

Or maybe not. But I'm toying with the idea of trying on just a bit of hope for tactical reasons after stewing in an awful lot of cynicism for quite a while.
Anonymity shouldn't be an excuse for mean or inflammatory behavior, and it shouldn't be a reason to accept that behavior. And, I can speak from personal experience in dealing with people that have emotional issues that it isn't always a choice to take such things seriously. It wears on them.

I don't think it's in 'the nature' of online anonymous communities to be cruel, flippant, and intentionally inflammatory. Anonymity is not in place to devalue the communication, or the community. the asshole problem is a negative side effect.

I would argue that some people, just as in face-to-face problems, have issues disconnected themselves from online abuse or trolling.

This goes beyond emotional issues, though. It matters to me that Hackers News (or a handful of other sites I spend time on) is a place where you and I can have this discussion in this way. When I'm done writing this there will not be 5 replies of "fag" to my or your post, because we are all invested in keeping this community respectable. We're invested in well thought out discourse, and we take the rules seriously. There's a trust that ripples throughout this online anonymous community that the users need to conduct themselves respectfully. It matters to me, and while I'm not invested to the point of letting it hurt me if someone were to troll me, I'm invested enough that I treat people and their words with respect because I expect the same. Good, healthy, strong online communities are of great value to me, they matter.
Yes, I received one, and it's from the same stanford.edu email address that sent the letter congratulating people on perfect 100s after homework 4.
> Troll is, more often than not, a term used to circle the wagons.

I think this is true by definition, after all, if the majority are trolling then it's culturally acceptable and you have 4chan.

But I think if you are being intellectually honest you need to be open to the possibility that maybe you were acting like a dick on occasion. I've dealt with heavy duty trolling before, and it's a common refrain that the admins are "fascist" and that they are simply "censoring" unpopular opinions. All the while saying things that would get their asses kicked if said in public. For the unskilled troll their behavior is obvious, but the skilled troll can make himself indistinguishable from someone who just has a mild form of digital Aspergers. Often the only goal is to piss you off and waste your time. So in the battle against trolls, detached and ruthless action is often necessary because anything else allows them to win. If there is some collateral damage because one's opinion is just too "different", probably the best thing is to move on to a different forum, or just start a blog. Then you can post your opinions and gain even more notoriety with "the regulars" possibly defending you with the backing of their mighty reputation. Witness Ted Dziuba, that cocky prick would for sure be hellbanned if he waded into HN, but he doesn't have to because everyone reads his posts directly.
How we gamified our website
PG has an interesting approach to this: http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html

There's also the "noprocrast" setting in your HN profile which won't let you use for more than a certain amount of time.

I haven't implemented either approach. I've found that plugging in my headphones and listening to music or even spoken word gets me into one of those 60-90 minute zones of one-task productivity.
This is true for Newtonian gravity, but only approximately true for general relativity (or so I understand it).
As an American who's spent a little time in Israel, when I think of tech and Israel I think of Haifa.
As someone doing the course i would say its a decent way to identify some candidates but it wont be a really high correlation. It depends a lot on the time you have to invest and how rigorously you go through your answers and study the material the questions are drawn from. Some programming challenges would be great to better separate whether people really understood the material despite being harder to mark.

Personally I've always got a bit wrong in most of he homeworks but usually felt that while I understood the material I didn't recite enough time to rigorously check my answers and rewatch the materials to pick up on some of the subtle things you need to remember or some questions.
What about:

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

It seems like a smart, simple system.

?
From what I've seen I think they are taking all scores, I've heard from someone who got 6 100s and didn't get it, but he didn't attempt the last 2 quizes b/c he already had 6 100s.

I made 6 100's, a 98, and a 97, and a 100 on the midterm and I got it.
Simmons has shown a remarkable endurance for public displays of hubris (sometimes successfully, at least in terms of his own aims).

Maybe he will make an 'example' of the one fellow they arrested, but the possibility of less amateur reprisals from others seems to be just around the corner. Not because it's inherently the right response, but because Simmons makes such a goading spectacle of it.

I'm sincerely curious to see whether this kind of dies off on the awareness radar or if it has recurring flareups over the next few cycles.
I used to be able to "flag" posts on HN, but a few weeks ago that right appears to have been revoked. No idea what I may have done wrong; perhaps I'm a "troll" and I don't know it?
OTOH, is it not selling because of the name, or because the local AT&T store has one model, and will never recommend it?
> Trolls try to undermine a working system solely for their own enjoyment.

This is the most concise and accurate description of a troll on this thread (so far), thank you! As you state, this can result in undermining a working system, but more specifically, this selfishness and lack of empathy inevitably leads to:

poor communication -> negative emotions -> unconstructive conflicts

Selfish enjoyment really does get at the root of a trolls motivation, otherwise, "controversial" comments supported by sound logic, factual evidence and a genuine desire to get closer to the truth actually do add to the discussion. The real problem for a moderation system is determining if the motivation of the contributor is in line with the values of the community[1].

HN's rise in popularity and decline in quality commentary demonstrates how difficult it is to maintain the values of a community in the face of fast population growth (this just began to sound a bit too similar to arguments you hear in the immigration debate). If it's important to maintain your values, then it might also be important to mandate some level of assimilation in order to acquire certain privileges. The stackexchange sites have a fairly complex system for this and I rarely see trolls there, maybe HN should implement something similar?

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, HN's Values
They are also looking for people to work with Professor Thrun's company. So maybe they are looking for people who are passionate about the class.
Seasons Greetings from Zoopla, (via Header Response)
$curl -I -L http://www.zoopla.co.uk/

Seasons Greetings to all at Hacker News!
I think you could probably improve the usefulness and ease of use (and therefore success) of this project with a little extra leg work.

First, add an additional requirement to contributing--require each sub folder to the project contain a manifest (json format) that describes some key information about the contribution:
[{ author: 'giberson', name: 'pixel button', descripton: 'classic pixel outlined button', template: pbutton.html, stylesheet: 'pbutton.css', type: 'layout|widget', version: 1 }]

Second, actually build a site similar in functionality to Google's font site, the content generated by parsing the main trunk contribution folders. (see http://www.google.com/webfonts)

This way users can browse the contributed content with inline examples.

You can also provide the user with a "quick use" button that produces the stylesheet href link, and the html code to insert into their page to use the style.

Notes on the manifest entries:

The main object of the manifest is an array, allowing for multiple components to be housed in a single contribution folder.

"template" is the html markup to be styled via css.

"stylesheet" is the stylesheet to be included by the page.

"type" is either layout or widget to represent if the styling/template are meant to replace your html or be inserted into it. Which will help the directory site determine best method to display preview, via an inline div or a popup div or some other creative mechanism.

"version" represents the manifest version, it allows you to upgrade the site and filter out contributions that have been updated with new required/optional manifest field properties or formats to work with new site features.
That's right, I confused the final with the midterm.
I don't think change is impossible in our current system of government. The idea just needs to spread that reform is more important than how that reform is perceived to affect any pet political issue, because it will improve the outcome of every other issue. I don't sense much momentum behind that meme, though.
OTOH, if one had the willpower to follow with the Pomodoro strictly, he wouldn't need it...
My take on these. I'm curious what others think.

1. Work backwards from goals to milestones to tasks.
I have no idea why more people don't do this.

2. Stop multi-tasking. No, seriously—stop.
See my response to #1

3. Be militant about eliminating distractions.
I'm not militant enough. Hence this post.

4. Schedule your email.
I need to try that. Setting a filter to only alert when my boss emails me has helped in the past. Other emails get answered between 60-90 minute tasks.

5. Use the phone.
I despise the phone. Email conversations provide a written record of the exchange and allow me to cut/paste responses if it's something for work (like a URL or code snippet). That said, I will force myself to pick up the handset.

6. Work on your own agenda.
My new job and situation allow for a lot more of this. It's life changing.

7. Work in 60 to 90 minute intervals.
I do try to do this. It works very well, although I usually don't make it to 90 minutes, just 60 minutes of just coding goes a long way. Do that a few times in a day (with meetings and such filling the balance of the day) and you're getting somewhere.
The final Apple TV version:

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."

The version for which Jobs said "It sucks! I hate it! It's advertising agency shit!":

"To the crazy ones. Here's to the misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. Here's to the ones who see the world differently. They're the ones who invent and imagine and create. They're the ones who push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to believe they can change the world are the ones who actually do."

The devil is in the details. I'd be also very unsatisfied with the line: "They're the ones who invent and imagine and create." Like a kid writing.

Also note that Jobs practically selected the whole concept, before, "on the spot" even if he expressed doubts -- most people would "sleep over it" or whatever -- he decided immediately. Really to be respected.
Given the length of this piece on just a small part of the book, I think you'd end up with encyclopedic tomes about Steve Jobs + Apple. This may not be a bad thing, but it would be a huge thing.
But when a community has set a precedent and an expectation for trust and respectful discussion, it is poisoning and degrading that community to come in and disrupt it intentionally for your own amusement. If you dump toxic waste into a pool, you've poisoned the pool, accusing the fish of just not liking it doesn't work.
Malware rebirthing suites intensify security arms race
They may be trying to collect resumes (and job placement performance) from the top 1000 students to see what the correlation is. If they can prove that correlation, then they could essentially run the courses as a recruiting tool for paying companies.
Ironic that the class is about AI, no?
He appears to be arguing that it's bad even when the community doesn't have that precedent/expectation, though (my examples were of communities where various varieties of "trolling" are expected/normal, like SA's FYAD, and 4chan's /b/). Plus, ecosystems are complex; Slashdot's is a bit of a mix. You can't napalm the "intruders" and accuse everyone burnt by napalm of just not liking it!
There's many small banks like you say, but the impression I get (I have not done the research to back this up) is that the few really major banks (i.e. Bank of America) have a huge market share. Again, I have not researched this, but just from day-to-day experience, it sure seems that way.

Edit: http://www.cardhub.com/edu/bank-market-share-by-deposits/
According to this site, the market share of the top 10 banks is about 45%. Those statistics are not highly precise but it illustrates the point I am trying to make.
Social polling startup hosts Presidential debate
(Trusted) recommendations.
(Filtered) online reviews.
Need.
While I think the downvoting keeps trolling low, I actually believe that the short lifespan of most articles/conversations does more to prevent trolling.

Trolling is most prevalent in forums, since you can carry on sophisticated conversations and see a long, linear conversation thread. It is a lot easier to bait and troll serious posters.

On HN, discussions are often dead within two days, and you can typically only follow conversations that you are directly involved in. Any time an article pushes past 100 comments it becomes basically impossible to keep long-running conversations alive.
The challenge is insufficiently specified. What sort of spacing am I supposed to put between the number, fizz/buzz, and the next answer? A space? A colon and a space? Does it matter?

I don't know ruby, so I didn't make a response, but these things should be spelled out.
Surprised no-one brought it up yet: What I'd like to know is if anyone involved with the class is getting a referral bonus for bringing candidates to companies...

Follow up is how we feel about that...
I'd argue that it's almost dishonest to discuss poverty and denial of basic rights in Birmingham without bringing up race.

I don't believe that the parent was even accusing the original poster of anything particularly dark on the racial front, just providing some context.
My point was that Ajax (XHR) is pretty much the same thing as launching an Intent, and it is pretty much as complicated as launching an Intent.

I would hesitate to say that Ajax and Intents are precisely the same since with Intents app gets paused and waits, with Ajax the user will often expect the website to still be functional while the Ajax call is still working. If you click the up arrow on a comment you wouldn't expect the Reply button to not work until the Ajax request has called back.

That said, I never meant to indicate that there was a big difference between an XHR request and launching an intent; I was merely trying to point out that an <a> tag is notably different in functionality than both a ajax request or an intent launch.
"Sometimes we hackers work too hard to make things more complicated than they need to be."

tl;dr: maintaining an online community is anything but simple.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean. One possibility is that you're referring to the hackers that build communities online who try to establish some sort of guidelines for behavior.

If this is what you meant then I think I disagree. I've tried a very similar experiment to pg's with HN. I run a small community site http://yakkstr.com and most of the users came from an older site called soulcast. soulcast had no rules and it degenerated exactly as expected and was full of trolls in no time. My entire goal was to recreate that site minus the trolls, and I ruthlessly enforced one simple rule. Do not directly insult other users of the site. (actually two rules: no porn, illegal stuff, or spam)

Simple right? Not really. I loved pg's child metaphor, and just like a child the trolls from the old site, who are smarter than actual children, do everything they can to find the limits to what is allowed, and they hover right around that line. As soon as they think you're going easy they push it farther.

One example, people like to argue about politics on yakkstr and one of the trolls uses a pattern of associating a label like "liberal" to someone then they insult the label. Moronic ideas for liberals, liberals are morons, etc, etc. Technically he's not violating my rule, but it's very hard to define an explicit rule to deal with such instances because you want to allow people to sometimes say controversial things about generic groups.

The problem arises when someone gets offended and reacts by directly insulting the savy troll. How do you deal with it? Not so easy. And occasionally a good user gets made at something and calls someone a moron. It leaves a bad taste in their mouth if you come down with an iron fist on them.

I don't have good answers to these problems, but I think the hard work is working out pretty well for my little community. But it is complicated and requires constant vigilance.
You may laugh at the utter simplicity of this test, but I administer this several times a week when I interview candidates.

I am still dismayed at how few programmers can solve this given 30 min (15 for the correct solution, plus 15 for optimizations across instructions and code brevity). It filters out the weak for sure.
Facebook's $10,000,000,000 Question
Here is the post I am quoting: The UK has a large problem with fake Pound coins.... Which states produce them remains a mystery, though some think it is the USA/CIA

After this quote a link was provided. That link did not mention anything about the USA or CIA producing fake UK pound coins.

Am I missing something? Why are the two topics in the same paragraph if they are not related?
> How does Blender compare to Maya, for example?

I know some 3D guys who prefer the way Blender handles a lot of basic modelling tasks. Others prefer Maya. I get the feeling it's a lot to do with what you're familiar with these days, because they're both quite capable in terms of functionality but they both have quite powerful, complicated user interfaces.

Unless something changed very recently, Blender still can't use FBX files properly. That alone is a deal-breaker for a lot of projects because FBX is very widely used in the rest of the industry.

Also, for all the talk of community around Blender, Maya still has a far bigger user base and far more professional-level tools you can plug in if you need more than the standard offering.

On the flip side, Blender is free and Maya costs several thousand. And to get Maya you have to deal with Autodesk, whose approach to customer service appears to be that they don't provide any. And the last two major releases of Maya have been absurdly buggy, to the point that Maya 2012 is already on 4 hotfixes and counting.
This one. The tactful thing would be to first accept the possibility you may at times come off as a bit conceited before asking for evidence and advice.