skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not about gender. From your point of view it's about character weakness. A woman has bad experiences with men, so she should be trained to seek haven among women? If she wants to get a mortgage, should she do so only through a female mortgage broker? If she wants to buy a car, does it have to be sold to her by a woman? Or more generally does she need to attend a women-only class that teaches her to negotiate with salesmen? Sounds like a form of community codependency to me.

A better solution might be to teach women (and men) to accept and understand different styles of communication. And that class shouldn't be gender-specific.

In regard to programming, another commenter had a great solution. Get some books, make a github account, learn to code. You have complete anonymity on github. It's a place where all aspects of your individuality can drop out of consideration except the most important in the context: your ability to understand and write code.
I have plenty of evidence in the form of experience by women. I don't have a "discrimination-measuring machine", though. You'd be hard-pressed to find one of those.

I know this isn't what a lot of HNers like to hear, but discrimination exists whether you can measure it with a ruler or not. This is one of those things where you have to piece together anecdotal evidence with an empirical lack of women to get the answer.
"sex with" implies consent. Both Polanski and Salva raped their victims, full stop.
The goal of Amazon is to work with publishers to turn the best books into bestsellers.
I agree, and this would be a very typical long-term move by Amazon: they systematically partner with existing incumbents, and then develop a business model that renders them redundant. Book publishing was the first example.
Hehe great to know I'm not alone. I was feeling kinda guilty :)
How To Spot A Verbal Virtuoso: Are You Quietly Brilliant?
The electricity distributer in South Australia is able to control the compressor pump of a wide area of the population's air conditioners. They use this during high demand periods (like hot days in summer) to reduce the loading on power lines.

People don't really notice that their compressor pump is being cycled to reduce system demand. Are you working in this area too?
No they're not for any kind of border or government interaction... everyone really must stop perpetuating this.

It's a federal crime to lie to a border agent or government agent, and the EFF specifically says not to do this - see comment above.

Hidden volumes are fine for other uses and perhaps in other jurisdictions but will land you in hot water in the US/US Border.
Agreed on all your points.

What I'd love to dig in around, though, is if there's a way to quantify the difference between an inflammatory comment vs. a constructive comment.

Just thinking out loud: Source links/references perhaps? If it's a primarily English-speaking community, look for specific keywords? As a negative metric, look for an extended back-and-forth between two people?

This is one of the things I'm struggling with - it's easy to come up with "dumb" metrics & ideas, but the false positives/negatives are a real problem.
Which is why it's difficult to beat Hollywood for those few movie-watching slots. Your time is more important than the $10-15 more Hollywood will charge over an alternative production. So your alternative has to compete in something other than blockbuster special effects and well-known actors. The likely suspects are originality (e.g., Blair Witch Project) and story (Sling Blade).
So they'll pay you $200,000 for a theatrical release (but regardless of if your movie is chosen, you can't sell your work anywhere else for 18 months because they've got exclusive rights to buy it…all without giving you a penny), and you only get an extra $400,000 if it makes $60,000,000 at the box office?

It sounds like a cool concept, but sounds like a very lousy deal. Or am I missing something?
RQ-170s Still Flying
That's what IndieGoGo is.
You can now update Filesonic. All filesharing is disabled there.
Can you use TeX for any kind of document, or is it overkill for simple ones
I haven't been, and I don't normally comment either. I'm beginning to lately because the top stories don't satisfy me anymore.
Is this Hacker News or Institute for Noble Maidens?

That particular comment conveyed a valid point, it was done effectively and added to the discussion. I'm rather concerned that this site becomes more and more of an echo chamber as I see dozens of comments from different people that could be easily compressed into one.
well, to be precisely true, Sharereactor was run by a Swiss guy, and it was indeed torn down by the police. But the guy did not get in jail:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ShareReactor

but Sharereactor was designed for exchanging movies illegally, whereas rapidshare tries to be different :)
Corpus Delicti, latin for body of crime...

I'm sympathetic to the discussion of promoting a civil and interesting community, however, in this specific example, I believe the lack of sensitivity towards the poster is actually worse than the crime itself.

Guidelines are exactly that, guidelines. When a long time contributor becomes emotional about the brutally honest instruction of killing an industry, which happens to be one he feels aligned to, I would figure the appropriate response is to explain rather than admonish. There is a propensity to over-regulate with respect to the guidelines, which I attribute to a lack of thought, really.
They got to learn the business from the inside first... ;)
What were the more efficient ways (of getting around)?
Mice are pretty much just herbivores. I think you might something other than just mice to worry about...
This might be of interest: Fuzzing the Phone in your Phone [26C3]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBWc67iy4zI
THis is how it starts... shit.
It's clear why this happens. The people interested in fuzzy, quasi-political or "outrage" issues are passionately engaged with them. People are less passionate about the debate over the worst-case complexity of hash table lookups. At a step's remove, it's evident that the topics HN was intended to cover are systemically disadvantaged compared to whatever the moment's advocacy topics are --- and every moment has at least one advocacy topic: the TSA, SOPA, Occupy, Wikileaks, police misconduct, Asian manufacturing, ebook licensing, DRM, &c &c &c.

More passion, less thought, less tolerance for conflicting views, worse threads.

Paul Graham seems cautiously optimistic about comment quality. I think he's being too generous. I suspect that advocacy energy is cumulative; it doesn't go away when the topic fades, but sticks around and waits to bind to subsequent advocacy topics, causing the site to steadily crud up with them.
Don't include Ada with Hopper as Ada didn't really contribute anything and she is incorrectly considered the first programmer. Hopper actually did something and she did influence the field.
I have no input of my own, but I found this (http://tipsfor.us/2008/11/01/what-do-i-do-if-my-iphone-is-lo...) on Google.
Looks fine on iPhone. Windows don't drag (obviously). http://twitter.com/mike_critz/statuses/161238575835394048
It's not and never will be, because it's the wrong level of abstraction. For power efficiency you need an ASIC or something close to it. If you just want to be fast, ffvp8 is fine.
I think the "You can't make a minimally viable movie" point immediately contradicts itself by pointing out that so many movies are predictable commodity pablum. Hollywood has been producing mainly minimally viable movies since forever. And people keep going to see them. So "can't?" I don't understand.

Distribution issues should disappear as digital projection edges toward ubiquity, no? I thought industry observers considered the 3D resurgence to be a long-term distribution strategy: Modern digital 3D processes give the theaters the incentive to invest in the digital equipment that will eventually eliminate the distribution issues.
A few years ago, posting on HN felt like posting to a small community. Reputation and civility seemed to matter a lot. When people posted something offensive or rude, they were sanctioned to the point that they would often delete the offending comment. (I remember deleting a comment I made on an old account merely because, without tone, it seemed inflammatory; I felt compelled to delete it even though it had no malicious intent because it damaged the conversation.)

Now, I think it has become too large and feels anonymous. Posting something offensive has no cost because it doesn't feel like a "know your neighbor"-type community anymore. The costs imposed by karma seem to be less significant. I even think that if you post a rude or ideologically motivated comment, there are other rude people who will agree with you, attenuating the negative signal.

The HN is turning to reddit mime is genuine. I think it's just a consequence of having a very large community. Although a lot of HNers may disagree, I think the herd must be culled. I'd be happier of participation was limited. If I was the benevolent dictator, I'd collect a list of people whose contributions are most valuable and remove everyone else. Then, give those high-signal / low-noise contributors the ability to invite other people. Continue to have all content publicly readable, but ration the writes.

(Disclaimer: Although I have many doubts, I do believe it is possible to have an HN-scale community that remains civil; however, without the data, I'm not very comfortable just enumerating implementation ideas.)
I'd vote for that too!
You can’t make a minimally viable movie

Of course you can. It's just that the script (and "vision") has to be part of it. But there's plenty of extras that can be added only later: getting a professional actor instead of your cousin to do a secondary role, adding that CGI touch to improve ambiance, paying a good compositor to create some custom music, etc.

And tweaking based on research is done all the time: it's called "test screenings".
Alternatively, a pagerank-like scoring system where not all upvotes are equal. You could score each upvote giving it a value `influence` instead of `1`. The influence of an account increases when its posts are upvoted by PG or upvoted by people who are upvoted by PG, etc. This of course depends on the assumption that people who post nice comments also upvote nice comments.
How about a link? "Share" is to vague a word to google.
Is something happening to the quality of this community lately?

Personally I like the ass-comment (cue hackers fainting in the audience).

There's some passion and lifeblood in it that I'm missing on HN for a while. And he's obviously making a point beyond name-calling (the point I disagree with, just for the record).

What I'm growing tired of is quite the opposite. It's the politeness-police that demands fluffy padding around everything that is said and jumps out the woodwork at the slightest trace of "harsh tone" or (god forbid) humor that doesn't directly add to the discussion.

It's a fine line obviously, but having this particular comment spawn this particular Ask-HN is exactly what I mean. There's more than plenty echo-chambering and mutual shoulder-patting on HN as it is. Do we really need to throw a meta-tantrum every time someone opposes the hivemind with a strong, alternate opinion that is not coated in the finest super-gloss politeness?
Is there any actual evidence of this? I'd be really eager to refute this, but I'd be more interested in learning it was true. Most "New Studios" I know fall into the exact same trap that their predecessors have fallen into because none of the major players in this new breed of studios are doing anything different. You can streamline things as much as you want but you still run into the same systemic issues that plague the whole industry.
Thank you, that was very well put and explains a lot of other things I've read about Ireland and the Irish diaspora.
I think you're describing Pixar:

http://urbanpeek.com/2011/09/20/pixar-office/

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.06/pixar.html
It was launched in the fall of 2010.
This article missed the last and most interesting bit: we know that Quicksort is O(nlogn) in the best case and O(n^2) in the worst case; what is it like on average? That is, what is the performance averaged over all possible inputs?

I can see why it was left out: the proof that Quicksort is O(nlogn) on average is much more complicated than anything in the article. (So, of course, my algorithms professor thought it would be a great homework problem. Cute.)

That said, the fact that it is O(nlogn) on average is actually well know--it's just the step from where the article left off to the conclusion that's missing. Wikipedia has an outline of the proof, if anybody is interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksort#Average_complexity
This is the unfortunate entropy of any online community. I've seen it in the community I managed as well.

First you have the founder(s) of the community and the early adopters. These people all are like minded, and all appreciate the mission or goal of the community. They contribute great things which makes it an awesome place to hang out all the time.

The next group of people who come in hear about how cool this small community is. They for the most part have the right idea but sometimes they are too enthusiastic and want to contribute right away instead of building cred slowly. This causes them to do things that doesn't quite fit with the original intent of the community. This annoys some early members and they leave.

The next wave are people the enthusiastic 2nd wave people bring in through evangelizing the community. Unfortunately the 2nd wave choose to highlight not the mission of the community but the benefits of it. This 3rd wave group are often in it for self gain and promotion rather than to be contributing members of the community. The original mission of the founder(s) is lost in the shuffle as the number of people who "get it" are quickly being outnumbered by those who are new and "don't get it". More of the early community members, people who made the original community so great, leave leaving the 2nd generation as the elder members. The remaining original members get into confrontational debates about what the community is supposed to be with the newer members.

After that, the community continues to degrade, eventually most of the original community resort to just lurking instead of engaging with the community which is now pretty much filled with self promotion and self serving. The community from the outside looking in appears to be the same on the surface but is a shell of its former greatness and actually quite sad for the original members and the founder(s).

The sad thing is there are people who come in the new waves that do get it, and have appreciation for the original mission and purpose of the founder, but they are always outnumbered by the others.
I find your lack of search-fu disturbing ;)

http://www.getshareapp.com/
How are women different?
Megaupload founder Kim "Dotcom"'s supervillian lifestyle
But "Hollywood" is such a broad term. Perhaps their intentions are to work with the "good" or necessary parts of Hollywood like actors, directors, writers, CGI teams, camera crews, sound experts, etc. without the large media companies themselves.

It's really been Amazon's core strategy all along: the classic "cut out the middle man."
Post production cost may be cheaper, but then you have to deal with distribution , marketing, PR, salaries for your cast ($20M per picture for a big movie star), crew, script, Etc.

And then you have to convince millions of moviegoers NOT to watch high budget competition such as Dark Knight Rising, Transformers, Twilight, Spiderman, etc.

Then you need to have something Millions of people want to watch this is the hard part :)

And then you'll kill Hollywood.
The problem is that this goes completely against human nature.

A leader's primary responsibility is stability. If he can't do that, he's considered by his followers to be a poor leader. It doesn't matter if that's unfair; that's how we've evolved because a leader who brings and maintains stability has historically brought the best chances of survival for the group.

David can post whatever he wants, but so long as he goes against human nature, he might as well try to make a river run uphill for all the good it'll do. All he's doing now is ruining his own credibility in the eyes of those who followed him. It may not be fair, but that's how things work.

One should never take upon themselves the mantle of leadership unless they're prepared to go all the way. That's the real lesson here.
Egypt's scientists savour post-revolution year
Character weakness? In whom? In the men who populate male-dominated fields who are incapable of treating women as equals, or in the women who avoid communities where they are not treated as equals?

Think carefully.
Is there a legal requirement to shutdown the account as well ?
Or is it enough under the DMCA to just remove files/links?
Common sense does not apply if you are not forced to do something by law. (loophole)
I've always wanted to write the following exposition and climax story.

Two strangers separately receive a note in the mail detailing how the other will die. The notes details the day and date of the strangers' deaths, an approximate location and a vague notion how it will happen. The notes provides small clues of their identities and thus both set out to id each other and prevent their deaths.

Ultimately, though, their quests to save one another ends in tragedy, as they mistakenly kill each other. Sorta you can't fight "Fate," type story.

Well if that sounds like a good idea for a movie or short-film I'd love to see it made

Edit: Offering script ideas (crowd-sourcing scripts) could possibly be a good "kill Hollywood," idea. Where the most popular crowd-sourced scripts get funded thru either KickStarter or Amazon Studios.
I'm in the US and my electric company has that too. They pay up to $30 per month in the summer if you opt-in to the program.

https://www.peco.com/Savings/ProgramsandRebates/Residential/...

> During high summer energy use periods, PECO Smart A/C Saver works to reduce electricity usage by "cycling" central air conditioners throughout the region
To paraphrase Nelson Muntz of The Simpsons universe... "Stealing movies is a victimless crime... like punching someone in the dark!"

- Let's imagine this plan was executed and turned out to be successful. And let's imagine the studio generates some very big hits.

- Now, imagine that, even though the movies only costs 99 cents to stream, people pirate them anyway (the same way people pirate 99 cent iPhone apps, but, unlike pirated apps, anyone can watch the pirated movies -- not just people with jailbroken devices).

- Suddenly you'll have millions of people using torrents to get bootleg copies of your movies... enough people to where you can't get investors and others their needed financial returns unless you try to put a stop to it.

My question: How do you put a stop to it without becoming Hollywood allover again?

That, to me, is the big issue here. So either you come-up with a theft-proof way of distributing movies or you try to stop it. Or shut down your business.

And adding interactivity to them is not the answer IMHO. I need my passive entertainment and so does everyone else who chooses watching a movie or tv show over playing a game at any point during a day.
I think this suggestion kind of misses the point: the evolution of mass culture, at least over the 20th century, has moved from radio, to movies, to TV. The biggest growth in recent new media has been video games, and now, online social services and games. Coming up with a new way of making Hollywoods product isn't going to kill Hollywood - a NEW product that eventually replaces Hollywoods products will, or at least relegate "films" and "tv shows" to the status of radio and newspapers.

What series of incremental improvements (an inevitable wrong-turns) will bring us to that next paradigm of entertainment and culture? Will screens necessarily be part of the equation for that next leap? Will we accept passively soaking in this media, or will our participation be required?

We can think of experiences like ST:TNG's Holodeck or Neuromancer/Snow Crash's plugged-in immersive metaverse as science fiction, but so was the idea of full-color screens that respond to your gestures or verbal commands not so long ago. The YC challenge to all of us dreamers is what intermediary steps are needed to make a Holodeck a reality? Then, how do we start building the first of those?
As a fellow Austrian I don't intend to criticize the author too much (;. It's an okay article, however nothing special and tbh it kinda feels like the introductory section of the first chapter of an algorithms book.

What's bugging me tough, is that lately quite a few of those "okay but not Hacker News material" articles made it to the top.

It seems that esp. the words mathematics and algorithm are enough for an article to appear in the top ten. I wonder why that is ...
Bootstrapped Consumer Web Startup Stories? #Win and #Fail
There have been a number of great threads on HN by/for self-funded startup stories.

I would love to start a new discussion on bootstrapped (non-venture backed) startup experiences focused on the consumer web space. Wins and Fails are both welcome!
The master theorem is a blight on the teaching of analysis of algorithms. The main reason is that few students understand what makes it work and end up treating it as a piece of plug-and-chug equipment. The second reason is that it is not very general.

The alternative? Learn to love recursion trees. It addresses both issues. It's intuitive and it's general. As a side effect, the master theorem becomes an almost obvious fact; the three different cases correspond to geometric sums with increasing, decreasing and constant terms, with the caveat that since we are working asymptotically, increasing/decreasing/constant must be interpreted in the looser asymptotic sense. A geometric series with increasing (decreasing) terms is dominated by its last (first) term, corresponding in the recursion to the last (first) level of the tree. That makes it trivial to estimate the sum: just estimate the cost at the appropriate level and you're done. Only in the constant term case do all the terms play a role, but then you get your estimate by just multiplying the number of terms (the tree depth) by the constant value the terms have in common.
I'm disappointed in the shallow look people are giving this. You can't just read the marketing copy and take it at face value. Amazon Studios is actually pretty terrible for creatives, as many successful screenwriters et al. have been pointing out for over a year now:

http://artfulwriter.com/?p=1103

http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/motion-captured/posts/the-mornin...

Since those were written things have improved slightly, but anyone thinking about participating should still have serious reservations:

http://johnaugust.com/2011/amazon-studios-now-slightly-less-...
Not according to Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_fascism#General_c...

> "the State pays for the blunders of private enterprise... Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social."
Incivility isn't just happening in relation to comments; I'm seeing thoughtful (or somewhat naive, but not inflammatory and certainly not with intent to mislead) comments downvoted on a somewhat regular basis now, simply because they may be wrong, or because many others don't agree with them.
I'm not sure what you're saying, and even less sure of how it relates to the question at hand.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3498177
Filesonic Kills File-Sharing Service After MegaUpload Arrests