skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Downmodding protocol
I have a policy of only downmodding posts that are not a part of legitimate discussion. This includes obvious trolls, but also any post where I don't think the post contributes anything, such as an ad-hominem attack.

I do not downmod a post just because I disagree with it. If I disagree with the post, but it's not an obvious troll or incendiary in any way, I leave it alone. I see downmodding as a means to keep discussions civil, not to show disapproval with a point of view.

In contrast, I upmod posts I agree with. This means that a single control - voting up or down - has an asymmetric meaning for me.

I don't think everyone follows this protocol, as I've seen posts that I feel are legitimate downmodded well past zero. I feel my policy is valid because downmodded posts diminish in readability - it's obvious to me the intention behind that is for downmodded posts to fall out from discussion.

What is your policy? Should we publish the accepted protocol (which is not necessarily mine) in the FAQ? I worry that even if my policy is is the intention, it's not intuitive to new members: most people expect symmetric meaning from a single control.
If you're arguing against the use of a certain word, don't start off with a justification of why you use it. Just don't use the word.

Also, it's not a difficult problem. The term is "consultant".
Because there are better opportunities on Wall Str... oh wait.

Your second point is key. Corporate society is structured so terribly that the big-box companies pretty much can't get top talent (and fire what little they can get for various forms of "insubordination"). No one with any talent is going to answer to a frat boy.

There are two somewhat parallel (but unequally situated) trees within the modern workplace, the old-style management tree ("visionaries" at the apex, implementers at the bottom) and the technology tree (of which technologists occupy the middle-upper levels and the lower ranks are filled entirely by machines). The tech tree has historically been mounted to a middling position on the management tree, resulting in a scenario where technology people become peons. The world's learning that this arrangement is a fistful of fail, and the mount point is moving up in the structure... but this is a discrete sort of transition, and traditional managers have to be brought kicking and screaming to it, so it usually happens through the destruction of old and creation of new companies, rather than within existing ones. This is one major reason why big-box companies have been slowly melting down, while the bulk of the nation's private sector talent was rather uselessly employed in an abstruse game called "finance".

In finance, technical people ("quants") were often given a designation one-half level above their seniority-based position, e.g. an entry-level quantitative analyst was between the "analyst" and "associate" levels. Finance is old-style corporate compared to cutting-edge startups, but Wall Street has (had?) a better grasp of how to capture talent than most F-500s.
lol getting better every day is a tough mantra to live up to.

getting better every other week -- now that's realistic. =)
The most important part of this announcement: "The first time you use this feature, you'll be prompted to download and install a small plugin."
Apple's iPhone Faces Off   With the Game Champs
Don't you want to talk to famous people? How about having a policy discussion with Barack Obama?
Nobody here pays for XML parsing libraries...

No, but some of us write our own. :-)
It's not useful to compare raw numbers against India and China since their population is larger than ours.

Also, what % of total college students drop out? It's got to be near 50 (though maybe less for declared majors).
I am about to graduate(heh I hope) this year with an ECE degree. Few of the points made here and by Don Dodge hold true.

Engineering is a tough degree, I have seen quite a few people drop out of CS and EE degrees in the last 4 years.

- Honestly the initial years of the program are quite boring, this is a huge de-motivator. People seem to get burnt early during the degree.

- Most teachers don't seem to give a shit. Not all, but many. Young people need motivation not everyone is driven, even as an engineering student. Especially with the content being tough, the faculty needs to show a little more enthusiasm through programs, events and 1-1 with the student.

- Its definitely true that I could have spent more time on working on my startup and other activities in college. Although I have managed to create balance between school and life. I party, I am not an A student. Although, I really don't aspire to be either. I could be more happy getting those As and Bs on all my classes but I will live with A/Bs and Cs. It does take a decent amount of effort to get a low B in an engineering class. Business and liberal arts classes are much much easier. I get a little annoyed when people whine about their silly little stats and writing classes.
Man, if it's so easy to just go get an MBA and make awesome money, why don't all us engineers just go do it then?

The belief there's some kind of massive inefficiency in the market that disproportionally rewards a bunch of frat-boy do-nothings at the expensive of us geeks reeks of a little sour grapes.
Spoken like someone who truly doesn't understand C. You even managed to confuse it with C++ (you might as well have said "Java" in the place of C++, it's about as close to C as C++ is)

Well done.

edit: Ignore this post. I misread. I'm an idiot. Sorry about that
Last time Arrington wrote a post about his email problem this was one of the solutions -- applying some kind of Digg methodology to his incoming messages -- suggested to alleviate his "problem" (I don't see how this is a problem worth finding solutions for, he's an edge case).

Here's the rebuttal: 1) you need a varied enough audience that actually cared enough about his life to sift through messages directed to him and 2) if you could amass such an audience it becomes politically, or money-wise, prudent to game it for your own benefit and 3) why would he trust audiences to judge or to even read his messages?
The trick is to do a killer job for a decent client on a non-trivial problem.

Then you're set.

Finding a decent client can be hard if you're going through sites like elancer or guru - but they're there. There are even ones with nice, interesting projects. Ones that are willing to pay you a much better rate once you've been in communication with them for a while.

It's an uphill battle, but if you produce quality work, and can explain the methods you use, you will be viewed as just as much of a "professional" as the "big boys". Once you have that bit of word-of-mouth and good reviews / feedback, you pretty much have your pick of work, although you may not be rolling in the dough.
You betcha! But I would darn hope Obama talks to me about policies because of my reputable expertise on such matters and not because I won American Idol.
I think how interesting it is depends on your interest.

If you are heavily into programming, as it seems you are, I can understand that SQL queries seem trivial and boring. If your interest is elsewhere programming is often just a tool used to create the interesting stuff. Whether that is usability, design, getting people to interact in new ways, launching rockets or automatically turning off your garden lights when your computer powers down.

Believe it or not there are interesting discussions to be had about other things than programming.
United First Financial
Review of United First Financial on YouTube.
This is just an uninformed rant. There's no need to even download the file if you use the Gecko Media Player; I'm watching Apples Transporter 3 trailer as I write this in 720p in-browser.
For the vast majority of people, chatting with Obama is not even remotely possible. With this idea, it is but based on merit.
The idea is that people doing this would build a reputation so that Arrington is more likely to follow them on Twitter.

So there's an incentive to do a good job here.
yeah, pretty lame. because the decided to go with a new plugin this will be way less useful.
Toshiba timesculpture [video]
From an intellectual point of view I do too.

When I read the news I'm sure it's true.
I think you misread the comment you were responding to, and the comment that it was responding to.
our lawyers need to contact your lawyers about the use of our image there. who are your lawyers? ;)
The more you say Arrington the more you peg this as an edge case.

That said, Arrington follows his existing friends or things he's interested in. If you @ reply him he will read it but more than likely he won't respond to it. That's two problems then, 1) trying to prove you can be his friend and 2) getting him to react. If you're trying to be his friend a Twitter-Digg app is a pretty lame way of doing so. If you're trying to get him to react the simplest way is to send him compelling content or proposition.
Correction: you are a little crazy if you're a startup founder.

Good luck ;-)
You already know how I treat lawyers.
Let's not forget, American Idol is based on merit too. So we're in agreement, there should be a version of American Idol with the prize of meeting Obama.
I think it's more a question of positioning yourself and getting the right customers. I have several friends that are freelancers, doing both design and code, and they charge between $100 and $190 an hour. Like everything else in life you just have to work for it.
when companies "hire" banks to help them find financing, is it a flat fee or performance based?
Loopt is small. Facebook is big. The phone companies will only let small people into their house. They'll have a much harder time getting deals done.
> My ex-wife with zero programming experience has trained herself in less than a month to run a simple SQL queries in Visual basic and blast results in a grid control on a form, so did thousands of ex-taxi drivers in late 90s. So?

To be honest, I'm still not sure what point you're trying to make is. At best it's somewhat of an Ad Hominem attack.
> What I realised is that neither exception-based approach is appropriate when one wishes to make software as robust as possible.

The author misses the main point of exceptions: they let us separate data processing code from error handling code. This is why we are more productive in languages that have exceptions and our code is easier to maintain.

C requires us to handle errors throughout our program, tightly coupling the data processing code with the error handling code. With apologies to Mr. Spencer, I would declare that:

"Those who don't code in languages that lack exceptions are doomed to reimplement them, poorly."
He's not arguing that he hates the term in a & of itself.

He's arguing against the ugly baggage it's picked up.
"At the recent Web 2.0 conference John suggested that the US should staple a Green Card to every foreign student's engineering diploma and encourage them to stay in the USA."

I really agree this. It's hard for a foreigner to work here.
The problem with this market is that buyers see price but don't hafe other information to make decision. Race to the bottom doesn't serve the need of producers or even consumers - razor thing margins leave no budget for innovation, only for the bare minimum. This breeds short planning horizon, and sometimes things just need to take more time.
How Long Until You're a Millionaire?
Why is sorting out Arrington's inbox well a lame way of becoming his friend on twitter?

BTW, another reason why you might upvote a message is because you would like to see Arrington's reply (assuming he will reply to it in public).
Defensive programming vs. `Let it fail`.

I think the space between to two is more uncomfortable than either extreme.
Larry Brilliant (google.org director) has been interested in using online data gathering for predicting and containing outbreaks for a while.

Mining google search queries is a step up from Brilliant's previously advocated method of automatically correlating reports of illness from news outlets around the world.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/larry_brilliant_wants_to_...
I would guess that the deal is structured to incentivize the bankers to make more money for their clients.
The insulation properties of carbon fiber depend on the resin used in construction. Some resins are quite thermally conductive. Also, most of the cooling is dominated by advection; air flow, that is, forced by the fan.
Ask HN: Review our startup - BeatMyPrice.com
Exactly. In properly written C, about half your code is checking for errors and handling them explicitly. If you don't do that, at some point it will blow your foot off; you have to account for those errors. C programmers have generally accepted this and thus spend an excessive amount of coding time thinking about and writing recovery mechanisms for external errors -- and that's why so many C programs are incredibly stable.
Flay is blowing my mind
Why Osama Doesn't Have a Facebook Account
DukaUS Launches Free Conference Calling, Realizes It Won’t Make Money
Watchmen Character Posters
well, it just about a time anyway.
it's painful to write on emulator and then find out that in the program didn't work as expected in handset.
The obvious privacy issues aside, that's pretty lame because you're not his real friend, you just want him to write or do something for you. How is moderating his messages going to establish some sort of friendship? That's creepy. Is he friends with top Diggers?

And why is seeing someone reply to something even considered an incentive?
So? Corn-fed burgers often come with the suchness of sodas, which are likely worse for you than the burgers. The fact that the article fails to mention HFCS is a problem with the article, not my post [IMHO].
But this article isn't about those things.
My policy is different than yours. I upmod for intelligent discussion and downmod for your same reasons. I do not always agree with what I upmod.

I think that publishing a protocol is an interesting idea, but the entropy afforded by the current system seems to work well for HN. If anything, I could potentially see mentioning that people should probably not downmod just based on personal opinions.
setjmp/longjmp is essentially what exception handlers do for you. I love C for its simplicity, but I'm not certain that leaving exception handling out of the language was a good idea. There are a lot of people who would agree with me there, including (I believe) a few Bell labs veterans who wrote the language in the first place.
Not everyone seems to realize this, but the video chat is based on flash. So I'm not quite sure what everything the downloaded software is doing.
For one, it does let flash access your webcam and mic without the normal security promptings, but with a 5.6MB install, I would imagine its doing more then that...will explore more later
That's a lot of upvotes for a rant. Is this your experience personally? Do you not like working for justin.tv?
But I am yet to see the code produced by YC-funded companies themselves.

You haven't looked very hard then.
On the first page after adding the app I was confused because there was a page that looks partly cut off, and I couldn't click on it. I finally realized that this was a screenshot and not an actual page I could interact with. It would be far better to just start me on the next page rather than showing the image. Better yet, step me through adding interests right away.
I think it's an incentive in this forum. People sometimes vote up submissions because they would like to see Paul Graham reply.
Same here. I consider the Linux kernel code simple compared to systems code that I've dealt with in a professional environment.
Because engineering is difficult.
There is an "aesthetic" to the kernel code I now realise (after having had it explained) - whilst some of it is no doubt odd looking, most of it is done that way for a reason, and reasonably consistently. But not to everyones taste.
"They also noted that some fields of expertise (such as the NBA) have built-in physical constraints (ex: height) which must be considered."

Mugsy Bogues.
I don't believe that is, or was, ever the intent.

I could be wrong. Get a copy of pligg and drop in tweets and users and see what happens.
I am arguing against this line:

"People often write in higher level languages because they want lots of bad code fast."

Even if this is true, it's true only in enterprise software environment where code quality has never been terribly important. Therefore it can't really be an argument against higher level languages in the context of a typical HN discussion.

Makes sense?
this is why these sites are doomed, dude. any site built on this model of news dissemination is doomed. putting out a flag button makes your site vulnerable to the tragedy of the commons. it's in everybody's group interest to only flag spam, but it's in everybody's personal interest to flag anything they don't want to see again. these sites are so intrinsically vulnerable to tragedies of the commons that we might as well call them sheep pastures.

they make the same mistake here that everybody else makes with tagging. if you look at the research on tagging, the big tagging success story was delicious - which leveraged SELF-INTEREST in its tagging system and produced a useful public resource as an emergent byproduct. this is not coincidence! read James Surowiecki. seriously. economics 101 for social software.

leveraging independent self-interest is THE key factor which differentiates the wisdom of crowds from the stupidity of groupthink. "the wisdom of crowds" is really just a reiteration of adam smith's invisible hand. to create an invisible hand effect, you must leverage independent self-interest within a shared context where independent self-interested actions are visible to other independent self-interested agents.

every tagging system that fails to leverage self-interest fails to capture that. you can't just sprinkle magic web 2.0 fairy dust on something and go "Tagging!" if you want delicious results, you have to find out what made delicious work and emulate that. what made delicious work was a fundamental principle of economics. the reason so many sites have useless tags is that their makers are ignoring this fundamental principle. it's cargo cult site design.

similarly, this flagging nonsense flat-out ignores another basic fundamental of economics. what makes it even more insane is that Paul Graham already explained in one of his first blog posts about Bayesian filtering exactly why spam filters should be tuned to an individual's preferences and not to a group's. if you had a bunch of individually-tuned spam filters, you could find a way to leverage that. since you have a group-tuned spam filter, you have nothing but a tragedy of the commons magnet.

anyway, just ranting about why Hacker News should hurry up and cease to exist already.

edit: just for the record I'm responding to Reg's comment. I don't know if that's clear from the UI. it is a non sequitur rant, but it's not a complete non sequitur rant.
I think he is ignoring a (perhaps difficult) piece of reality. The lines have blurred of late between professional & amateur in all sorts of fields. The knowledge & abilities can be gained gradually & the tools are inexpensive.

There is no threshold where one becomes a professional designer, programmer etc. The neighbour's kid may be able to design your logo, install your shopping cart, etc. Some of them even do it well. Many do not.

A lot of the time the business owner hiring doesn't care too much about quality, isn't willing to pay for it or can't tell the difference. Making things worse is that a lot of the time the quality is not actually different or is equal to a lower tier of professionals making the price gap between medium & higher quality very high.

Look at it this way. Architects are largely shielded from this kind of mess. Legalities aside, people want pros & builders & engineers will probably refuse to work with amateurs. Interior designers may have the potential to add as much or more to a given project, but they will usually be excluded. You or your wife or boyfriend (or both) or your kid will have a crack at it. The guy at the furniture store will give you advice. Your accountant thinks that looks nice over there.

Now interior designers can lament the fact that you don't know the slightest thing about creating spaces, positioning, making use of light & all those things. You've made all the textbook errors. You're not utilising the building you paid so much to have designed. You made the most basic mistakes.

But this is the nature of the game when amateurs get to play. Graphic designers (& to a certain extent programmers) have moved from being architects (& lawyers & dentists) to being interior designers, caterers & piano teachers

That doesn't mean the profession disappers. But it means you have a certain market imbalance that follows. The bottom tier of service is no longer really needed.

1. The mechanic who used to get his card designed by the cheapest or closest guy gets his grandmother to do it free. He doesn't care what paper she uses. He may be wrong to do so, but tuff.

2. There are lots of people who are on the border of 'professional' that enter the market. Either in their skill or in their attitude. They can enter with this approach since entry barriers are pretty much $0. Usually they go by the title freelancer. Since you have this influx now competing with the previous cheap guys, for a market that is now smaller, prices drop.

Sprinkle in bidding sites & globalisation of labour, stir. Prices dropping, guys in slipknot tshirts bidding at under minimum wage & fighting for business. Not fun for the previously professional freelancer.

The answer of course is to go higher market. You may cater your own party yourself, but you're not expecting the queen of Belgium to. You know that $30 a martini bar got a professional interior designer in. Their prices are probably unaffected by any drop in the price of starting a business in their sector.
Ask HN: Techmeme clone
I am planning to build a techmeme clone targeted at specific niche. Are there any freely available solutions that I could use?
See below a list of OSS from YC companies.

This is clearly not the only way of giving back to the community. What about all the contributions they make to the projects they use. I believe scribd has stretched rails to limits beyond any other site and has made contributions from it. Adam from heroku just discussed a patch he submitted to rails too. The list goes on, I'm sure.

Also, you sound like you have used iPaper, a free service provided by Scribd. Perhaps you should consider an amicable request for an open version of iPaper (since that is obviously why you made this post) rather than calling YC companies parasites.
On a related note, I would be interested to hear what parts of your company's product you have opened.

I'll build a list:

http://blog.reddit.com/2008/06/reddit-goes-open-source.html

http://portal.insoshi.com/

http://ycombinator.com/seriesaa.html

http://www.webmin.com/index8.html

http://opensource.heroku.com/

http://trac.youos.com/

http://www.getdropbox.com/install?os=linux

http://www.xobni.com/about/opensource

http://appjet.com/app/150996096/source
Interestingly, I noticed earlier this week that the new GCC gives warnings when the return values of POSIX / libc functions are ignored but shouldn't be.
"1) some natural talent for X, varies based on the field"

No. The trend in the research is that "natural talent" is a MYTH. It does not exist.

Agree or disagree, I don't care, but as a summary of my post, your comment is inaccurate.