skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Ergo, Zed is Hannah Montana."

Hello? I thought "Zed is dead", but now really, all that needed was an overt HCE reference to boost such a fine diatribe into the literary flame sphere.
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I saw something just like this from Orlando, Florida (I live in Alberta but was there for a trade show) on Tuesday, the same day as the police cam.

The one I saw didn't make as huge a flash at the end, but it was still the most incredible thing I've ever seen in the sky. I was with a friend (who didn't see it) and told him that I just saw something that absolutely had to be fireworks (even though it was going horizontal and not like any other fireworks I'd ever seen) because it was so bright and amazing, and we weren't far from Disney World. But turns out it was a meteor...
I think the point of the article was that he shouldn't have to edit his ssh settings to use Git.
>soils are by far the world's largest source of carbon dioxide, producing 10 times more carbon dioxide each year than all the carbon dioxide emissions from human activities combined. Small changes in how carbon emissions from soils are estimated, therefore, can have a large impact.

(from the article)
The irony is that Groucho was almost immediately invited to join the country club that inspired that comment.
For the reasons lined out here:

http://javascript.crockford.com/javascript.html

Don't get me wrong, it's my favorite language. I don't want to bash on Javascript. Most of the coding I do for fun is in Dashcode, which I never understood why isn't pore popular. But JS has big problems in public perception.

Stories on new things done in Ruby tend to elicit "cool, I can use that", but new things done in JS tend to elicit "what a waste, why use such a crappy language".
The solution is to have the government take over their liabilities, while their bondholders keep the assets?
Is there a Google penalty for mashups?
Jessica just tried the same test and was classified as an ISTJ, which judging from the description is hilariously accurate.

"Under stress, ISTJs may fall into "catastrophe mode", where they see nothing but all of the possibilities of what could go wrong. They will berate themselves for things which they should have done differently, or duties which they failed to perform. They will lose their ability to see things calmly and reasonably, and will depress themselves with their visions of doom."

(Within YC Jessica's nickname is Panic.)
Quality is really subjective. The frontpage of any social news site will never be 'perfect' for everyone. But if you close off the site, you limit submission variety...you tend to see the same sources from the same people.

Opening it to the public allows more diversity in content/discussions. Honestly, I think Hacker News is doing great, the quality is terrific...at least compared to other sites that I visit often (digg/reddit).
Encouraging a wide variety of viewpoints only adds to the discussion. Invite-only would limit the 'gene pool'.
The first stage of a community falling apart is when it starts getting meta. When your prayer group start discussing about how right their prayer group is, and how wrong other groups are; when K5 started getting lots of articles about K5; when the IQ club starts talking about how IQ makes them different.

That's always the step that precedes some type of change. Because when people start looking within, they never seem to be satisfied with what's there.
The 2007 highs were lower than 1999 highs considering inflation. The trade of the decade has been gold and commodities, not stocks.
I think pg was on to something when he said 'make it boring for trolls/reddit users/etc...', but that won't work if he doesn't come down a bit harder on the off topic stories. No, not the "huh, that's interesting" ones, the ones that draw out the politics/economics/someone is wrong on the internet discussions. It's usually pretty easy to figure out which ones will go that way.
The likelihood of scribd suddenly disappearing seems small, whereas the value of speed in developing new services is large. So seems like a good bet.
The Undying Animal: A critic reminds us why literature still matters
Designs of the Week: The Movie Theater Experience
If I Started A Company Today
FeedbackArmy.com - simple, cheap usability testing for your site
http://gtdsupport.netcentrics.com/learn/productTour.php (sadly, only for outlook)
Interesting! I'm pretty sure I'm an INFJ, though, and Typealyzer got three out of four wrong: ISTP.
It's Not Over: We are "the change we need."
YoYotech Fi7epower: The World's Fastest Personal Computer
Andrew hits upon some of the most critical issues for new startups. Personally, I care about the team the most. If you don't have the right team it doesn't matter what industry you're in cause your chance of success is very low. Plus I'd say you should always keep evaluating your team (and yourself) to see if you're still the right fit. Jettison folks (or yourself if appropriate) whenever it becomes apparent that they (or you) are hindering the business.
His problems seem to be directed more at GitHub and Unfuddle than git itself. Things like deleting a remote branch are not especially esoteric, so it seems like he just has trouble adjusting to the new way of thinking in git. That is fine, but his assessment of it is about as far from objective as possible.
And this is why I love git: I can use fine-grained check-ins locally to keep detailed track of my work, but squash everything together into a sane set of commits when I push upstream.
Tough times in Silicon Valley, but some hiring
Yes, that reminds me a lot of what I saw. Something like fireworks but horizontal and a single large (relative to fireworks) streak.
I'd loved to have a movie experience that excludes cell phone calls, getting coughed and sneezed on, grandma talking out loud asking "what did they say?"... arg
The result from my weblog test was exactly the result of my real Myers-Briggs test, INTJ. How?
I bet Nicholas Nassim Taleb is getting a lot of calls these days... Seems his criticisms of economic quantitative modeling have been vindicated more than he probably wished to see.
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To ensure that by the time they're controlling the front page, they've shown that people like what they have to say and that they've proven themselves a fit for the community.

I thought that's already the case, though. Can't you not vote stories up until you have a certain karma level?
And he doesn't have to. ssh-keys is just a convenience.

Most of the complaints in this article can be restated as, "I haven't taken the time to understand my version control system and so every little thing I do is foreign and strange. Therefore I am resentful." With the multiple-user-account issue being more of a github logistics than anything else (if you host your own repo, you have the entire unix permissions model is available to you).

Everyone knows git is weird and new and has a much more complex interface than SVN, but the tradeoff is that you get an extremely powerful and flexible version control system.
I think you meant to link to here:

http://www.nexenta.org/os
I don't know if I've ever seen an oligarchy in action online before. It might be an interesting experiment to some degree.
Unfortunetly democracy does not work for big populations and digg.com is best example of it. Once it reachs critical mass we won't be able to police it just by voting, some level of moderation will be needed. The longer we delay the reach the better, so I vote for invite-only YC. MHO.
Tech News Tube - It's a series of news
What can Old Media do now to survive? Or is it to late?
HN is the only site I can reasonably allow myself to visit during a workday, because the quality of submitted articles are very high while the quantity and action is low. I haven't seen a decrease in quality of submitted articles.

I'd prefer the ability to downvote crappy articles in place of an invitation-only registration system.
I joined later than you, and when I did it was incredible. It stayed so until the middle of October, as the election picked up steam. I actually think that it's begun to recover in terms of the stories that hit the front; the comments are getting worse, and the hivemind is acting up (I disagree with you, but I voted you up because you made a comment that invited discussion), and I think that's the big problem on HN right now.

I think that as far as the system goes, HN works better than both Digg and Reddit. Digg was killed by its emphasis on the "Digg" button, by its claim to be a bookmarking site early on, and by its poor comment system. (That, and the formula for displaying all posts that reached a certain level of popularity and only those posts.) Reddit's system was far more flexible, but its community got far too one-sided, to a pretty awful degree. Hacker News discourages that stuff in part by forcing karma gaps before you have access to features.

I think that if anything, the karma requirements should be increased again. Require higher karma for downvoting comments and upvoting submissions, require some karma for submitting stories. That way, the people who have the most control over the system are the longer-time users, who have contributed more and who have much less of an impulsive reaction towards things. That's the most important thing to keep in mind: impulse kills civilized community.

I think HN can be saved, but only time can tell. I think that it will have to be tweaked to balance things out.
Keep Loyal Customers and Increase the Number of New Online Clients
When was the last time you saw such a CEO?
Rapid banning of trolls seems to be an effective troll guard. It also works well with spam.

Trolling and spam are both self-perpetuating problems. Users are ruder on sites where everyone else is rude, and spammers are more likely to submit links to sites they get traffic from. So you can prevent both problems by never letting them get a foothold.

Deletion doesn't have to be manual, especially in the case of spam. Spammers smart enough to measure the traffic they get from HN quickly give up. And the dumb ones obligingly continue to post from banned accounts and IP addresses. So currently 80-90% of spam is killed by software rather than humans.

Flagging turns out to be a feature that saves a lot of work. So does rate-limiting submissions from newly created accounts (and, obviously, the IP addresses they use).

One general approach I've found very useful is not to protect against a certain type of abuse till it arises. Aside from obvious things like not letting people vote more than once, you don't need much protection when you first launch.
People have been saying that for most of News.YC's life. Certainly for longer than you've been a user.

That's true, and they were saying it before I joined... but is it true? I know that in the last month quality has certainly dropped a notch, particularly in comments. Certain stories are just awful (the guy that wrote the blog post mocking the job applicant who asked about salary, and the follow-up posts, come to mind). It's still an incredibly high level of signal to noise, better than any other site I know of beyond perhaps MetaFilter, but that doesn't mean it isn't slowly getting worse.

Out of curiosity, do stories flagged by multiple users get auto-deleted? One story I flagged was deleted the moment I hit "flag." Does that work like Digg's "bury" button, or was that just coincidence?
Random global warming thought; can anyone here believe that we'll have a technological singularity in 20 years, and be worried about global warming?

I just realized that's why I'm not worried about it. I.e. technology will probably save us. Am I too optimistic?
likewise, i tell people i think will contribute and/ or involve themselves with the community, not just use selfishly... after-all i think what we're all doing here is valuable. otherwise, just keep you're mouth shut. my dad always said, "loose lips sink ships". it's trite, but still true.
For the life of me, I can't remember people.

Fuck.
It seems the only thing every side can agree on is that pollution is bad. If you can reduce pollution & consumption without incurring additional costs (not just monetary), please try to do so.
The broken window theory article wasn't off-topic, the discussion immediately evolved into how it related to online forums and was very interesting.
Smart guy. Seems companies should hire him for millions of dollars to give them advice.
The problem is, downvoting means that each user has more power. If you want one article to hit the front - if you are willing to downvote every article that isn't that one article - then you suddenly have twice the moving power. At best, that dilutes the votes of the people who try to be very sparing in upvoting. At worst, it brings in a group of like-minded people who start to edge people out.

Example: every time an Apple story is posted, somebody complains not about the post but about their hatred for Apple. If those people could downvote Apple stories, I think some of them would. And if we have more anti-Apple people than pro-Apple people here, then suddenly the Apple folk have their voice muted. That's not an optimal solution.
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I'd say bad idea for now. I don't feel like we're yet large enough to really get the most value out of HN. We still see a lot of submissions go without comments, and with all the web apps we have to review these days, we could certainly use a few more people.

But if we ever notice quality falling dramatically, it may be time to move to such a model.
I don't participate for the karma points. It's more of a measure how much non-conformists agree with me. Which sounds kind of ironic, doesn't it?
i thought that looked familiar, yes it's still in the lobby at google. The onset of AIDS and the hope of the Internet discuss is a dramatic swing and makes his talk equally evocative.
20 years?! We can't even make an AI as smart as an ant yet.
Then again, I don't see what the utility of decaying karma is personally. It smacks of "what have you done for me lately". I think it's OK to respect people for past glories.

Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why I don't participate on Perlmonks. There are a lot of people there that have "been around forever" and answer questions as though it's 1999. I really enjoy reading the "don't use Moose, it's bloat" threads from people I've never heard of.

Anyway, karma decay would be good for Perlmonks, IMHO.
Apart from HN, another community which has handled trolls quite well is MetaFilter.

An interesting paper on MeFi: http://www.noor.bz/pdf/ali-hasan_metafilter.pdf [pdf]
I wonder how much the $5 joining fee is responsible for that.
I agree. As people join, karma becomes easier to get. The longer I've been on here, the faster I've gained karma. New users with a lot to say will rise quickly.

And the karma shouldn't be such a big deal! When I see somebody with low karma, I assume it's because they've been less active. The trend is always that the more you post the higher you'll get karma, because high-rated things have more visibility and therefore are more likely to get voted higher, and because fewer users can downvote. Karma's really fun, but people get way too worked up over these rankings.
So they have time to get a feel for what's appreciated and what's not around here. If they can upvote right on arrival they might erode the culture without even knowing. Multiply that effect by X new users each day and you have a continuous degradation.
I got ESTP and I've done the test before and gotten INTJ.

Anecdotally, I've heard a common complaint against MBTI is that it often changes by just retaking the test. (And it's horribly unfalsifiable.)
That's what it was like with Reddit. Their new subreddits saved themselves from that: AskReddit is an excellent part of the site, now.

Metafiler has AskMeFi. Maybe Hacker News could get something like that? Or perhaps we could choose to filter out self-referential posts?
http://www.typealyzer.com/en/about?lang=en

I would have expected an INTJ to click on the "about" link to get some hints at how it worked.

(I'm also supposedly INTJ -- based on other tests, not this one -- and that and a couple bucks can buy a cup of coffee.)
A short history of the bagel
But, every single time I want to do something, I have to look up a whole slew of commands. Why can’t I just memorize them? Because they’re horribly arcane and obtuse.

I don't think this has anything to do with Git. I remember the commands just fine, without having to use Google.
That's a point worth re-making... perhaps it would be worth doing this as an experiment for a week or two and seeing whether there are any negative side-effects, and if so, revert...
Somehow I missed that paragraph, sorry. My bad.

Still... The Economist.. Against graffiti... I don't know.
Dyson also describes a solution to any warming that is relevant to the article: better land management.

It takes a few years for carbon to cycle - into the air, then plants, then soil, then back.

Capturing carbon at some stage could be as simple as changing the plants that grow in certain areas. This doesn't require crippling an economy.

Surely there is some process by which biomass can be converted to black carbon, and perhaps generate power. Such a technological solution is but one of many, and the real answer to global warming and peak oil:

1. invest in research into alternative energy generation and storage that, at scale and independent of oil prices, are cheaper than coal

2. invest in research into technological solutions that cheaply remove massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere.
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2008/11/21/market-pl...
I disagree with the proof here. He implies that the two statements:
Asian children have a simpler number system vocabulary.
- and -
Asian children learn to count at a younger age.

prove the third:

A simpler number system vocabulary allows children to count at a younger age.

This may be true, but he implies it as fact, without even granting that they may be other factors at work. Like a better education system perhaps.
Worse Than Worthless: Market Negatively Values the New York Times
That's what iPhone is for.
Are there tests that take X variables into account? I just took INTP, and it describes a part of me well - but just a part. For instance, I rarely feel sympathetic for people, but I empathize with people often and try to help them out, and that's marked down as Introverted. I don't think that's quite accurate.

Or did you just make that up on the fly?
we just started a new project and we tried out git briefly.
our prob with git is it supports ssh auth only (not HTTP Auth), which is retarded. makes setting up new users a pain. and leading non-techies thru setting it up is quite a challenge.

the other major prob is lack of windows support.

the people coding git clearly don't care about average joe users, just unix geeks.

don't forget, there are a lot of people who use source control that have never opened a command line in their life (like designers, doc people).

Because of these issues we had to switch to subversion....
When the stakes are this big, I would advise hedging your bets.
Thanks for the good reply. I guess it makes sense that I use scribd to get my community going, and if it takes off, use those resources to wean my dependency.
>> "I haven't taken the time to understand my version control system and so every little thing I do is foreign and strange. Therefore I am resentful."

It seems to me you look down on such opinion? That's what usability is about - make things easy enough to learn so that users are not recentful.
HN is ESFJ :)
RIP Brenden Foster - The 11 Year Old Who 'Got It'
Away From the House of Disney, Eisner Finds a Home Online
Marriage is a convenient shorthand for a sort of contract that is useful and common. Like LLC or NDA, it's one of those things that might have little differences from case to case, but in general, it's handy to talk about as one sort of thing.

A marriage is actually two contracts. It is a contract between the spouses, where they agree to grant one another certain rights (inheritance, medical decision power, financial support, etc.) It is also a contract with the two spouses on one side, and the society at large on the other, whereby society agrees to recognize the contract between the couple and treat them as one "unit" for purposes of taxes and such, and the couple agrees to be clear and explicit if they ever terminate the marriage.

The tax breaks are absolutely NOT "just a way to lure the provider into marriage." Generally, the thing that lures the provider is the comfort and security of long-term romantic companionship, and the desire to provide for someone they love.

There is nothing stopping a gay couple from formulating a contract between the two of them, signing it, getting it notarized, and even changing their names. But the other part of that contract, between society and the couple, that is allowed only for hetero couples in most states, and not for gay couples.

This is gender-based discrimination. There's just no other way to look at it. You can make the case that the discrimination is sensible, as some sorts of discrimination indeed are. (I.e., the ageism in prohibiting children from buying firearms.) However, legal discrimination based on gender is a VERY hard thing to justify rationally.

I'm not saying that tax breaks ought to exist or that they ought to be abolished. But, the fact is, they DO exist, and they're not going to be abolished any time soon. The qualification to receive this treatment from the government is that you enter into a specific sort of contract with a spouse. However, gays who enter into this sort of contract do not receive the same treatment by the government; their union is not recognized.

I don't see why he needs to marry.

Well, personally, I don't really see why ANYONE needs to marry, but my own situation has left me understandably cynical ;) The point is that, in my opinion, the law should be gender-blind. If marriages are worth special treatment apart from other sorts of committed relationships—and I think you could make a strong case that they are—then fine. But the gender of the partners should be immaterial in the eyes of the law.
Hmmm purchasing usability testing from a site using a dated design and bright green font on a black background?

No thanks.
why was that comment down voted? Did I say something controversial?
Connecticut drops felony charges against teacher who accidentally showed porn to class
I'm a big fan of the bagel... I suggest cutting into '3 slices' to maximize the experience:
http://www.howtodothings.com/food-drink/how-to-maximize-the-...
I'm still not understanding the big fuss about git. Okay, distributed source control is wonderful for OSS communities, but I'm not really seeing the point for a proprietary piece of software built by a small team.

Perhaps I just don't understand source control enough, but the fact remains that for me, svn has never really given me any want, really. There's just no reason for me to change.
It doesn't call for government-controlled agriculture, and neither do I.

Regulation is far different than control.
Yes that doesn't seem right. About the best thing for the taxpayer-voters the government could do would be to asset-strip the Big Three and any value extracted put into the public purse.
Is there a correlation with your results and the weather? I was just trying to think what might dramatically alter peoples' interest in parks and all I could think of was the weather.
I couldn't agree more. Karma encourages karma getting behavior. Sometimes that overlaps with good.
Seriously? Any chimp with half a brain - including me - saw a crash coming. I didn't need software models, and I may have been unable to pinpoint it, but all you had to do was use a little common sense.

When you're pretty confident that you're making market - more or less - and yet you can't possibly understand how your peers afford $500K houses and 2 $40K cars, the writing is on the wall.
A post from Virgin America's inaugural GoGo WiFi flight