skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The inherent problem with this is that certain posts simply cannot be made shorter without omitting useful information. When users are expected to write short comments, you'll quickly find that one-liner jokes and the like are the most upvoted, not the ones with actual content.

While 4chan may be a fun way to pass time, it's hardly the place I go when I want to read/join intelligent discussions or learn new things.

The degeneration of HN is likely due to the influx of new users from 4chan and Reddit, where comments are very short and often appeal to the lowest common denominator.
Phil Jones, Bristol, United Kingdom.

Looking for freelance/remote/onsite Bristol area.

I'm a web developer guy, doing ASP.NET MVC (Not WebForms), C#, SQL Server and RavenDB. I'm good with the full web stack. I can also turn PSD designs into beautiful HTML/CSS/jQuery functioning websites. I'm a fan of clean, simple code and not the traditional N+1 layers of abstractions people associate with .NET developers.
Minimalism and 'getting rid of your possessions' has been one of those hot internet topics for as long as I can remember.

The trend I notice is that the articles preaching the extreme end of this are almost always written by 20-something bloggers who are so much happier now they're couch surfing the world care free rather than 'working 9-5 to pay for that TV'.

Obviously, there is a large truth in there. We all take only a few things on holiday with us and enjoy it. But sleeping on other peoples couches, using their kitchens, bathrooms and towels, and freelancing to get some money to your paypal account now and then isn't a particularly sustainable lifestyle.

I suspect if you came back in 10 years you'll see a different picture. If you want to think about having children or living a generally western lifestyle as opposed to a '3rd world' or really homeless lifestyle then there's a sensible balance point.

I believe rejecting materialism is about giving your energy, focus and love to your passions, your family, and enjoying the experiences life gives you over material things. Not blindly aiming to own 10 or 20 objects while you're basically renting or borrowing everything else to keep living in a western style. All things in moderation :)
You think it's trying to get food? Out of a lid? Come on...
timezones ... thx for responding about TTL. About the only thing I'd add is that it needs to be set to 24h whereas most others will accept lower values.
It is open to interpretation whether a site with a US and non-US domain is a domestic site.

Exactly. There is a lot in this bill which is open for interpretation.
> If I'm teaching an introductory class on Chemistry, you'd better believe that when I reach the section on cyanide I'm going to tell students: "bad, bad, bad; never use this chemical"!

I agree. So would I. However, what Zed is doing in the last chapter is showing code written by other people. If you taught your students about an experiment done by other (widely regarded) researches, would you say "bad, bad, bad; they should never have used these chemicals"?

I would say: "See, they used it here, but only because they were very, very, very careful. Let's explore different ways this breaks down. … As you can see, I'd recommend you to not do what these people did."
Very useful for new founders, although as you quite rightly point out if you pay a half-decent accountancy firm to handle your company finances they should be sorting most of this out for you!
Defriending My Rapist
Umm .. this feature is already implemented and shipping .. in Mac OSX! Try this: select some text, right click, "Summarize" .. oila! Not news at all.
To throw a couple of ideas into the "tech solutions" pile, I wonder what would happen to the quality of comments in a community if a mandatory 1 minute delay was put in before the text area would appear. This would I think have two benefits: 1. it would for commenters to think about what they were saying for at least a minute. 2. It would raise the barrier of entry to the point that posting a worthless one liner doesn't seem worthwhile or satisfying.
- Herding people seems to be a very difficult problem, but on the other hand i am not aware of scientific approaches to it. There's only assumptions that things like karma, upvotes, reputation increase the likelihood of a comment being useful. Can anyone point to relevant literature?

- In the end, i don't think it's possible to stop people from commenting, people just feel the need add a comment when they have read an interesting post (Just like this very comment in fact). Having a rule that says not to means nothing. Having your comment under an interesting topic is a modern way to say "Hey that caught my interest and i think i should participate in the group that discusses this topic, even though i don't have anything insightful to say". It's mostly an emotional reaction.

- As this is a threaded discussion, many people will post just to start a conversation (because they want to spark that conversation), or even start an argument.

- IMHO, the quality of the comments is directly related to the quality of the frontpage links. HN frontpage is heavily moderated that's why it's (for me at least) the best internet frontpage for technically-minded people. Not having a financial incentive is a big plus as administrators dont have to worry about readership.

- As a consequence of the frontpage quality, people who want to waste time don't stay long enough to add comments. Otherwise, i don't think there's anything special about the comment section here.
I'm jumping in a little late to this discussion, but I'm sort of required to comment here.

First off, as of early last year, I noted [1] that there is in fact quantitative evidence that HN is deteriorating in terms of positivity. I really need to re-run that analysis and bring it up to date, because I believe that we will see a sharp dip in the last 9 months. Between SOPA, Jobs' death, and all the other calamity that's happened, I certainly imagine it is getting darker here lately.

Secondly, I've put forward a few attempts to combat this. One approach is to change the way the karma system works [2], so that it rewards people for consistently being upvoted instead of the sort of lightning-bolt comments that tend to yield an exponential or maybe even bimodal distribution.

Another approach is to detect and flag anyone who is frequently rewarding malicious comments [3]. The system I put forth could be done either by manual flagging or implicitly by looking at co-occurrences. It was originally designed for articles, but as I noted in the post, it is trivial to adapt it to comments.

Now, in all these cases, the articles were on the front page and a lively discussion ensued. Yet nothing. Ever. Changes.

PG explicitly said he was "considering" the honeypot approach. I don't know if he's actually implemented it, since it wouldn't be visible to non-admins. I will guess that, since he's a busy guy and we still have these discussions periodically, he has not. Fine.

Why would you expect things to change course then? Or if you didn't, why are you all acting surprised now?

A site growing at super-linear speed is going to be very prone to these affects. If you do not put forth an effort to combat the influx of lower-quality comments, then you will see your site slip away.

[1] http://blog.effectcheck.com/2011/05/31/do-social-news-sites-...

[2] http://www.nashcoding.com/2011/08/23/how-karma-should-be-mea...

[3] http://www.nashcoding.com/2011/10/28/hackernews-needs-honeyp...
And if you're so patient that you keep waiting for food indefinitely you'll starve. This is just silly.
Thrifty Brains, Better Minds
Career of the Future: Data Scientist
There's so much crappy IP legislation right now, we could easily switch to, say the Research Works Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Works_Act which would put some taxpayer-funded research results behind paywalls. [edit] It's effectively double-dipping, getting paid once to do the research and then again if you want to actually read the results.
Before you lose any more nights losing sleep about this idea you have and its third or fourth iteration, maybe you should just release the idea in its original form and see how people react. I'm sure your idea is great, but I worry that it's a perfect solution to an imperfect userbase...meaning people value worthless, soundbite comments more than well thought out responses.

It's kinda like how people complain about how politics are only about soundbites. Sure, it's great to argue that among friends, but who really spends the time understanding the facts about every issue a candidate debates?
Also scroll down to check out the photos on the bottom of the page, awesome!
Glad it helped- I found the need for Employer's Liability Insurance to be the biggest surprise, so wanted to flag that up to people.
Sounds similar to https://shouldichangemypassword.com/
CRM for Consumer Goods
StayinFront Consumer Goods CRM is one of the best Consumer Goods CRM in the entire industry. StayinFront offer this Consumer Goods CRM as a complete suite supporting Account Selling, Retail Execution and Direct Store Delivery.
Actually I feel one of the benefits of the internet is that one can say things that wouldn't go down well in a face-to-face conversation. Not everything that makes sense is easy to accept.
Personally, I try not to spend too much time on HN (sometimes I enable noprocrast), so I need to quickly decide whether it's more worthwhile to read a single ten-paragraph comment instead of ten shorter ones presenting different points of view.

Usually, if the first paragraph is not absorbing enough and there is a risk that the rest is going to be rambling, I simply stop reading without any regrets. For me it's not an attention span issue, it's a limited time issue.
You're focusing too much on processes and methods. "What" should be your focus, not "how". For example it's paramount to test your software, but whether this is TDD or not is secondary.

As for reinventing the wheel, which library are you missing? I'm skeptical you cannot find a good library for your need.

You might not have the "automated tests" you are looking for, but maybe the library has been field tests for ten years which beats any automated test.

The real downside is that you cannot install libraries has easily as in "gem install library".
NOTHING has begun. It's the same money pushing in other countries. It will be defeated everywhere.
Semat Three Year Vision
Remote Debugging Django (mod_wsgi) Applications
> First, there's no need to be aggressive.

He isn't aggressive, he simply is the inimitable Zed Shaw :)

> The function has no way to detect this problem, so it's not even laziness.

His point : therefore you should not use this function, but strlcpy instead. Or course the K&R has the excellent excuse of predating about every alternative secure version of strcpy.

> Pascal strings embed the count within the string, but then you could forge a bogus pascal string with an incorrect size and trigger the same kind of problem.

I don't think that you could easily forge such a string using Pascal standard functions, but last time I wrote Pascal there was neither syntax highlighting in the editor nor hard drive in my PC.

Anyway, strlcpy should be immune, because it will truncate whatever string of bytes to the required length, see:

http://www.manpagez.com/man/3/strlcpy/

It doesn't preclude any implementation error (preperly a bug), of course.
> Assembly has everything a language needs for Turing completeness. Assign, Add, Subtract, Compare, Branch. And THAT is how the computer works 'under the hood'.

While what you say about Assembly is true, there's more to computer internals than doing arithmetic and control flow in the CPU. Virtual memory, DMA and IO are equally important, and the code that deals with that stuff is usually C code.

> > Learning C is almost mandatory if you want to see how deep the rabbit hole is.
> Not really. I know what is going on 'down there', regardless of which language was used to compile the machine code. What is REALLY useful is to have really succinct, powerful, high-level abstractions to build software quickly and with as little code as possible.

You can book-learn what's going on under the hood but that's no replacement for getting your hands dirty. If you want to actually write code that uses memory and pointers (e.g. memory mapped files), runs in kernel mode or twiddles with page tables and virtual memory, C is the best language you can do it with.

> I think if you want to understand what's going on 'down there' in the 'rabbit hole', learn assembly language.

Learning Assembly language(s) is a very useful skill for everyone. But doing anything practical with Assembly is a futile effort, it's best to stick to C in low level stuff and resort to Assembly only when you absolutely have to. For example when you have to change between processor modes or write an interrupt handler routing, there must be some (inline) Assembly involved. But if you want to get stuff done and work with the interesting stuff, going all-assembly is not worth the effort.

I wrote a tiny multitasking operating system in Assembly. While it worked very well initially, as soon as the complexity went above one screenful of assembly, it started becoming very unwieldy. I moved on to C and got more stuff done. I could focus on the interesting stuff like scheduling algorithms and virtual memory when I didn't have the mental overhead of having to make register allocations manually or whipping up my own control structures.
- successful economic development (those born in rich countries seem to take richness for granted. It is very valuable to those being born the country for the country to be rich. Singapore is now rich. It was poor just 40 years ago)
- safe city (probably the safest large city in the world)
- nice, warm weather
- great food
- easiest country to set up a business in the world
- good educational system
- very good health results
- budget surplus (they are not creating huge debt for the next few generations to deal with)
- very good public housing
- very good mass transit (people want it better, but it still is better than most other large, rich cities)
- good parks
- emerging art scene (it doesn't beat most other rich, world class cities, but is good and growing)
- international crossroads, very multi-cultural city which is nice in many ways but also a good position to be in as the world moves in a similar the direction)
- extremely well run government, you (or citizens...) may not like everything they are trying to do, but they are very effective at what they aim to do (something many governments are not able to do). They are willing to do very interesting things. Singapore will pay for the education of excellent students from Malaysia (as one small example - Singapore does many innovative things governmentally)
- very walkable city (don't need a car - can walk and use mass transit)
...

I have lived there. I now live across strait in Malaysia. Here is my blog on Singapore

http://singapore.curiouscatnetwork.com/

I realize Singapore also have things they could do better. But this was a list of things Singapore does well.
Interesting. I'll check out the ability to run two different heroku instances for the same app to see if that can help. If you could point me to any literature on the subject it would be very much appreciated.

I'll ckeckout DotCloud as well. Thanks for the heads up!

edit: added request for more info
Unless it's an SUV and that mud is a (possibly fake http://www.wired.com/cars/energy/news/2005/06/67794) status symbol...
Isn't it ironic that the owner of hundreds of newspapers, magazines and TV channels decides to express his frustration over the "Silicon Valley paymasters" by posting his thoughts on... Twitter?

This guy can't recognize the value of freedom of expression on the internet when it is literally slapping him in the face.
Android Ice Cream Sandwich PSD startkit
I've put together some PSD templates based on the newly published Android Design guidelines. Someone might find them useful, feel free to download.
This looks really interesting.

Anybody have experience with these courses?
I agree with the problem analysis and I've read similar sentiments before here on HN for a while. However, I have yet to find an article that methodically explores the solution space, or even just suggests practically achievable improvements.

It would be said if we start to sound like Karl Marx, who provided well founded criticism of capitalism but was never able to come up with anything better.
Look how cute he is, trying to reframe it as "universal anger" against Obama, when ordinary people are really experiencing relief. And how he berates Google for playing the game, when he's been doing that openly for decades. Or how he directs fire at Axelrod, threatening the less powerful element of the administration.

He's like Mr. Cotton yesterday: an old man lying through his teeth in order to maintain his power and privileges, proud to be evil.
I also own practically nothing apart from my clothes (all bought at discount stores) and the food in my fridge.

All my tech needs are met by work , my furniture came with my (rented) house and my TV etc are mostly other peoples cast offs.
But that's just blogs on the tumblr domain. If it is on a subdomain I'd imagine it's not blocked.
Latest Tech News: Nokia ORO Ligh t- The Exclusive Phone
The Linux kernel is in C. Large parts of the Gnome project are in C.
The main thing that will stop you is the limit on the "slug size", which is 100mb. This is heaps for static text like html, but if your blog is image intensive you could hit the wall after a while. Video would push you over super quick.
ARM's East unimpressed with Medfield, design wins
It's trying to break the item open - they do this in other environments with other kinds of food.

Crows are very intelligent, do not make them angry, seriously, they will remember you.
My own experience from living out of a max 20kg suitcase is that owning too few things forces you to think about things a lot more than you would like to. Do I keep this? What do I throw away instead? Where do I get this quickly if such and such event occurs? What's the cost of buying this versus keeping/transporting it. Who can I borrow this from? Am I bothering them too much if I borrow this again? Etc, etc.

My conclusion is that owning too much stuff increases complexity, but owning too little does too and it can be very expensive.
We Need to Stop Google's Exploitation of Open Communities
Kotlin - The Road Ahead
Lockers
We supply the widest range of lockers for the workplace, schools and industry,staff lockers and office lockers
Facebook Reportedly to IPO in Late May
I think the problem is more on the side of investors than innovators. Investors here are more likely to be after less risky opportunities and want to see more revenue profit before getting involved. Compared to in SV where it seems like a good team/ idea can land you enough funding to make a real go of it without having to first bootstrap to profitability.
Too soon & too small a project to report progress. The conclussions are not new.

For all intents and purposes an insignificant piece of information. Flagged.

--

Edit: the touchy-feely crowd downvoted me to -4 for telling what is essentially the truth but without much finesse. Ok. Let me put it this way: 7-days and one user is NOTHING in software engineering. What exactly are reporting here?
The "Accountable Politician App": paying for democracy
Download Game - Command & Conquer: Generals | Andra Little Notes
There is a spanish Digg-like site, Menéame [1], which offers this same option. I think it works pretty well as it keeps the site clean of news which don't obey the rules. Despite that, people will still reply explaining why they flagged the comment (and I think this is the correct way to behave: you should explain why the comment is wrong and how to improve it in order to improve the community)

[1] http://www.meneame.net
> Singapore is now rich. It was poor just 40 years ago

Many countries, particularly in that general region, have achieved that without being police states, though. Even where they had oppressive governments (as with Taiwan and South Korea back in the day), that has generally eased.
Except that doesn't work if the form posts to a HTTPS URL. You'd have to implement something at the browser level, e.g. installing a modified browser or a browser extension.
Construccion casa
the Hard-Not-To-UpVote kind.

I think this is why Slashdot added the "Funny" upvote option. It doesn't add any karma points to the poster, but the voter still feels like they recognized or validated a clever comment.
I've visited twice, read a lot, and conversed with a number of people who've lived there.

I admire how productive and peaceful Singapore is, with high living standards, a diverse population, a large degree of economic freedom/opportunity, and continuing effective investment in infrastructure and education. And it got there from a somewhat chaotic and resource-constrained start as an independent country, less than 50 years ago.

From what I've read, its health-care system delivers results as well as any other highly-developed country, at much lower costs.
The Decision-Making Flaw in Powerful People
I'm a freelance web developer and I'm moving to Berlin this week. I graduated Oxford and I specialize in Ruby on Rails web applications and have experience in everything from NLP to compilers and Facebook applications.

www.jackkinsella.ie
"Theory of Computation" is quite good.
What about their response to employees trying to start a union?
First Documented Case of Cyber Espionage?
Samsung Galaxy Note 1.4 GHz dual core | World New Electronics
Website outages and blackouts the right way
Bit of a success for Apple that this guy pared his life down to 15 things and 2 of them are Apple products.
One site that I think deals with this problem quite well is Metafilter. The comments are full of thoughtful and well reasoned discussions between the readers. Sure, there are problems: sometimes someone posts something that's mean spirited, or there's a few too many one liners in the comments thread, but, on the whole, these problems are rare.

In fact, the quality of the comments are so high that there's even an Ask Metafilter sub-section, where readers post, often very personal, questions and do so without fear of the kind of reaction they'll get.

What's most interesting about the Metafilter model is that there's no up- or down-voting, only favouriting.

So how do they ensure the quality of the comments? Well, to become a member you have to pay a one off $5 charge. It's not much, so almost everyone can afford it, but it seems to be enough to discourage drive-by comments or anyone who's not serious about contributing respectfully and substantively.

There's also the possibility for posts and comments to be deleted, and for an account to be banned completely if someone fails to follow the guidelines. I don't think this happens often.

http://www.metafilter.com/about.mefi
http://www.metafilter.com/guidelines.mefi
http://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi
Hojoki brings all your cloud apps into one activity stream
That sounds great! I'm 17, where can I sign up to get 250k
Ex-TechCruncher launches semantic Q&A service Beepl
Brainient raises $1.8 million to scale its video ad performance platform
I'm in Chile as part of Start-Up Chile. What exactly do you need? PS - I am also a US customer. A block on international traffic effects more than just international customers.
Social Q&A platform Beepl goes live
IT Consulting Chicago
CSS specializes in IT Consulting, providing Computer Support and Network Services in Chicago, St. Louis, Burr Ridge, Chesterfield, Downers Grove, Creve Coeur and Joliet.
Maybe the good photographers don't need Photoshop :)