skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The sudden drop is a clear indication of down-votes. I've not looked at your specific case(s) in detail, but from the descriptions here it sounds like some few people here have taken exception to you or your material and decided to flag your posts, possibly without even reading them.

So if some of your upvotes come from what the software thinks is a voting ring, and/or if a few people flag your posts, they will drop to #80 or below very quickly.

Several technical solutions have been suggested in the past, but personally, I think it's a mistake for flags to count so heavily in the ranking. I think flags should not affect the ranking, but that sufficient flags compared with upvotes should result in deletion.

Consider. At the moment if a few people take exception to your posts then they will disappear from the front page and get very few views. Vigilant vigilantes can bury items quickly. Worse, spam gets buried, but not deleted.

If an item truly is spam, let it remain visible so that more people will flag it and thus cause its deletion. Simply burying it runs the risk it will never get deleted.
Geek Squad Creates Program For AARP
Just be honest with him. Tell him your concerns without sounding like you are attacking him.

If you let this sit, you will only resent him in the future, which is not the basis for a healthy relationship. It will most likely end in disaster.
It would cost $175k to clone Instagram
I really like the sentiment of the post, and the quotes. It's easy to waste time on things that are not important when starting a business.

However, from a bootstrapping perspective, I think it is useful to look at the value of your time in a different way. If you are thinking about leaving a job that pays $100K at big company X to bootstrap something, you might think of your opportunity cost as $100K. But a lot of that $100K will go to taxes, so when you quit your job you really only loose $60K. What's more, you might spend more on living expenses with your big company job (vacations, etc), that you would give up while bootstrapping but not really miss. So, maybe you are really giving up something like $30K/year in true lost value.

I quit my big company job about 9 years ago to bootstrap a very small company. It has worked out well, and proved quite profitable by whatever measure of opportunity cost you'd like to use. But because when I quit, my taxes went to zero and my expenses went way down, I found that the actual cost to me of forgoing income for a period was much lower than I had imagined.
> Votes by direct link don't really count.

what is a 'vote by direct link' and why?
I used a program caled Deluxe Paint to do it back in the late 80s/early 90s. Back then pretty much all pictures used a pallete anyway; it was a matter of creating a static image and just making sure you use a specific range for the parts you want animated. A lot of times it's just highlights you want to sparkle, lights you want to blink, or water you want to shimmer, and you'll create a range (with e.g. a gradient) for those specifically anyway). More complex effects are possible, but can be a bit time-consuming.

[edit] To clarify I did not do the drawings on this page. Also if you want to see a good example of slightly fancier effects than just shimmering, look at the "swamp cathedral - Day" sample there and hit options. See how there is one range that is just for the rippling water, but then a different more complicated range for making the reflection shimmer appropriately; in that one they had to cycle very specific regions from purple to green for the boundary between the reflection of the hill and the reflection of the building.
Microsoft: Conficker Worm Remains 'Ongoing' Threat
What will Wayland do to make video drivers easier to write?

Perhaps you're thinking of Gallium3D?
... or until he caves, yet again.
Good question. I'm going to try to answer it for embedding a scripting language into your existing code base.

I'm going to presume that your code base is written in something relatively low-level because otherwise you would not need to embed a scripting language. Hence, your application probably has some performance demands. Obviously you expect your scripting system to be slower, but not dog slow. While Lua is quite a bit faster than Ruby, both are orders of magnitude slower than C code, so I don't really see this as a problem in most cases.

Common tasks for an embedded language might be configuring some part of your application. For that, the embedded language does not need to be particularly fast or small. It only needs to have convenient ways of creating data structures and a simple C-API. I would wager that the C API of Lua is about as simple as it gets and it is absolutely trivial to embed it into your program. I would say that Ruby needs to catch up a bit to be useful here.

Another typical application is to write non performance-critical but complicated code in a nicer language. This usually evolves pretty quickly into some kind of specialized DSL. Hence, you need a language with rich metaprogramming capabilities. In my limited experience with metaprogramming in Ruby I have found it to be amazingly powerful (if somewhat hard to grasp). On the other hand, I would say that the absence of a built-in object system in Lua does count as a benefit here, since rolling your own hand-tailored object system that perfectly suits your DSL needs is relatively simple. In the end though, many more people know Ruby syntax than Lua syntax, so I could see a future for Ruby here.

Still, I don't really see Ruby and Lua in the same ballpark here. Lua is designed from ground up for embedding. As a result it is really fast, very small and extremely easy to embed.

Ruby is a proper general-purpose programming language in its own right. Even though mruby is going quite far to make it small and simple, it will never compete with something that was purposely built for that. On the other hand, Lua will never compete with Ruby in terms of library support and rich syntax.
LDAP is a PITA. Flat files usually have three things to remember:

# is a comment
key
value

That's the format of most config files I see.
> The article in question highlights something that we should all understand very well at this point: Government rule-making is, more often than not, fraught with unintended consequences that, ultimately, end-up costing us in terms of money, freedom and choice.

This is how I see it:

1. Government makes an anti-kickback rule.

2. It relaxes the rule.

3. Corporations take advantage of the opportunity using kickbacks to entrench themselves in the market, costing us money, freedom and choice.

4. Your conclusion: government rule making is bad.
Just as "legal" does not mean "ethical", "contractually permitted" does not mean "not a jerk move".
No hosting with Google Drive yet, but that's ok.
I like the runway angle. It's consistent with Fred Wilson's advice about the importance of keeping enough cash in the bank: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/08/what-a-ceo-does.html
How Google Drive Terms compare to Dropbox and Skydrive
BRB, making Instagram
The problem is that these people (and others) don't know enough to realize their economic predictions are worthless. There is truth to the old saw, "Economists are good at predicting recessions. They've predicted eight of the last three. . . "

In many cases the prognosticators are fully aware that their predictions are worthless but persist in the facade to build up a reputation. It takes only a few lucky coincidences to get set up for life. People love to hear bold predictions.
Obama Administration Threatens To Veto CISPA
A flag or two will do that for you.
"only images"

As long as they don't do WMFs, with their code-injection-by-design functionality...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Metafile_vulnerability
The life cycle of a resource
i just raised a $200k round in 2 weeks, hourly rate = $595/hour. beat that, hot shot
Really interesting! Looks like FB overpaid! Ha
you can do more than just improve on the boxing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rad-hard#Radiation-hardening_t...
In six of the top 10 most competitive countries in the
world (Sweden, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark,
and the United Kingdom), it's illegal to demand more
than a 48-hour work week.

The fact that it's illegal doesn't mean it's not happening.
There's a video of one of Greg's talks (from Surge 2011) here: http://lanyrd.com/2011/surge/shzth/
I agree with the "Pushing Data" part and disagree with the "Not Pages". An important "dumb client" still exists: the CDN. I think a popular model in the near future will be to push server-rendered HTML to a CDN, along with JavaScript that the ultimate client uses to get whatever has changed since that HTML was rendered.
Only available in the US, too bad.
How to Avoid Burnout: Marissa Mayer
Looks pretty much like a Blackberry from that time (then leading device reg. services etc).

Compare this with the Openmoko Neo 1973 from about the same time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_1973

Sadly never really took off.
Worry Driven Development
What you generically call "government meddling", I call (more precisely, imho) "corporation-funded, lobbyist-enabled legislative corruption".

This is a very popular view generally promoted in the more liberal corners of the political ecosystem. Not being in either the liberal or conservative extremes I tend to see things differently.

You have to ask a few questions to get to the bottom of it:

Q: What are lobbyists?
A: Organizations that create a way to reach out to
law-makers directly, voice opinion and have some
influence on relevant matters.

Q: Why do businesses use lobbyists?
A: Because they can and it provides them with a way
to navigate an already complex system.

Q: Why are corporations able to fund lobbyist?
A: Because it is legal

Q: Why is it legal?
A: Because politicians passed laws allowing it.

Q: Why did they do that?
A: Many reasons.
One might be that they need that funding to stay in power.
Another might be that they don't really care about us but
would much rather ensure their own political existence.
Yet another might be that we, the people, don't really
show-up in any meaningful way on their radars outside of
elections.
And, finally, one more reason could be that, well, we allow it.

Q: What should we do about it?
A: Make it illegal.

Q: Would corporations and lobbyists then be able to influence legislation?
A: Maybe, but at least not through those legally-provided channels.

You don't have to ask too many questions to get to the fundamental reasons behind a problem. It's hard to hide from reality. I don't have a problem with someone (or a corporation) using the available legal framework to advance their cause or standing. If the means for political influence produce bad results the system is to blame, not the user of the system.

A simpler example might be in product design. If I design a chainsaw that is faster and more powerful to use I'd expect businesses to use it to gain advantage over competitors and make more money. If, as a result of this more people are getting hurt because the design isn't very sound, you don't turn around and blame the businesses using it. The design was at fault. Bad engineering. People will use what they are given to work with. Fix the problem, not the symptoms. It's not a perfect analogy, but it illustrates the fundamental idea.
10000 hours would be doing something as your day job for 5 years. (5 * 50 * 40)

I don't think that you'd qualify as a "true master" with 5 years of experience.
If your list is that simple, it takes no extra effort to add closing tags (especially if you're using a worthwhile IDE). If your list is more complicated, the closing tags will increase readability while decreasing ambiguity (and again they require no extra effort in a good IDE). This kind of thing might make sense for Google as a way to cut down on bandwidth costs over a long period of time, but it's a bad practice for 99% of the people reading it.
> most people would not want their web service cut off if they get a spike in traffic.

Only if they are sure enough about their finances and their web service to be confident that the spike will be profitable.
I think that saying that regulation is necessary (as opposed to desirable) might be too strong. In most cases things can still function without regulation, because people know things aren't regulated and can take that into account by being cautious. Now, this is often inefficient and causes some number of people to get screwed over, but it still works.

I'm sure there could exist some golden system of regulation for health care and there are even countries like Singapore seem to have found something close enough, but its not clear to me that our current system in the US actually manages to be better than no regulation at all.
White House issues veto threat to CISPA
Absolutely correct. We are using the Graph API. The magic comes with you do link analysis and cluster it with other public data.
Show HN: A Sexy Proposal Generator for Freelance Developers
Being from Texas I've always wanted to do a start up in Austin, but as the article mentions, there's this pervasive notion that you have to be in SF/SV in order to get any real traction or attract any real talent. Is anyone familiar with the Austin scene and is the article right in saying the community is really starting to materialize into a competitive threat to the Silicon Valley? I'm stuck between trying to go to grad school (Computer Engineering) at Stanford/Berkley or at UTAustin and this article has made UTAustin sound much more appealing.
Right - it's not that no pages are going to be rendered and transmitted. You've obviously got to get the HTML/CSS/JS into your browser somehow. There's also going to be a certain amount of heavy lifting that will keeping happening server side - big data analytics and all that.

But the trend is towards doing less rendering server side and more on the client side, with just the raw data being pushed around rather than the presentation of that data.
Uh, no. Did you even read the post?
I guess teams are worth a lot more than I thought
And in Python 3 it's a generator with

zip(range(len(seq)), seq)
Hemloft: Egg-shaped Treehouse in Canada
Ark is "already" doing massive things for sure. It already has indexed 1 billion+ profiles and more coming in the pipeline. I do not know of any other search engine that has accomplished that yet
Yeah, cancer definitely isn't the "low hanging fruit". Hospital errors and infections would be much easier to address, though as this article shows, even that is nearly impossible.
I thinks is worth it. A great app. And a good strategy of FB to absorb a potencial competitor
The government setup the rules that enabled exactly that behavior.

I see you making this argument over and over in this discussion, but you seem to be ignoring the flip-side of that fact: People exploited those government rules.

Any calculus of culpability for the current state of affairs that ignores that fact, pointing fingers solely at the government, is myopic to the point of absurdity. No-one forced these medical supply cooperatives turned for-profit organizations to exploit the rules for their own advantage, establishing a system of pay-to-play kickbacks that demonstrably holds back progress and actually kills people. (Don't mind me. I'm a little pissed off about this particular subject right now; I just had an uncle die from sepsis.)

The people in those organizations made conscious, rational choices to engage in that kind of behavior. If they didn't foresee the consequences of doing that, they're as dumb, blind, and undeserving of the responsibility for stewarding their corner of the world as the government bureaucrats who created the rules in the first place.

Or are you actually arguing that people who exploit unintended consequences for their own benefit, regardless of the impact to the rest of the world, are somehow blameless? That only the people who made those consequences possible have any culpability?

It takes two to tango, after all.
IIRC in order to make the acceleration work correctly nVidia needed to actually re-implement a number of parts of the X Server itself since X was not originally designed for accelerated drivers / compositing.
Thanks for trying to help shed light on this.

If this is the case, it would do HN a great deal of good for this system to be made more transparent. I understand that it might not make sense to publish the exact formula or algoritm which could expose "exploits" to those wishing to game the system, but I think it would be useful to at least show how many flags and down-votes a post has received. It would, for one thing, put an end to this speculation.

If it is the case that these extraordinarily fast demotions (#2 to #88 in one step) come from "normal" flagging and down-voting, I would ask: Why the hate? :-) I can say categorically that people LOVE Des' posts—not one gets less that 50k uniques in a week or so. Including the ones that are ripped off the HN home page. If it's simply because Des posts all of his hard work here, I would then ask: Does HN not want good content? And Des simply submitting it does not ever cause it to hit the home page—it takes a lot of votes to get it there. (Which is more than can be said for YC hiring posts…)

I love(d) HN, and it's totally within the rights of YC to do what they wish with it. But situations like this are doing a lot of long-term damage to the trust one can have in it as a source of quality, relavent content.

Disclaimer: I work for Intercom.
The Wordseye renderer actually happens to be a 90s vintage ray tracer.
It's certainly not illegal in the UK if the employee signs a waiver when hired: http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Employees/WorkingHour... (see "Opting out of the 48 hour week")
Yes, that would solve the issue of not being able to have your own robots.txt file and I did not know about that. On the other hand, Feedfetcher would still ignore the robots.txt
Fakester - dummy JSON data
There are a bunch of ways to do this already, and this requires jQuery. The only way I could see this as being interesting is if it has no dependencies. I really wish people would stop developing with jQuery as a dependency...
Besides voting rings, another annoyance I have is people creating throwaway accounts to add positive, but content-free, comments a story.. literally minutes later.

I wish there was a 48h delay between the creation of an account and being able to post your first comment.

I wouldn't expect this to solve all our problems, but I think it would help.
About an hour is the standard time for external data in Google Spreadsheet to be refreshed. I've come across this with JSON data.
I've read the same pg comment. I'm pretty sure that Des is not doing this. Thanks though.
It's not just Android. It's Android, iOS, and BlackBerry.

http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a...
Every time I see a color-cycling example, it's this pretty waterfall picture. Does anyone know what game it was originally from?
I don't think the OA would want you to take this as FUD. These are incredibly powerful tools that give you more control than the alternatives (AWS anyway), and yes unintended consequences are possible, but this really is a freak occurrence.
Ark has indexed 1 billion+ profiles and more coming in the pipeline. I do not know of any other search engine that has accomplished that yet. Yet, I get what you mean... I guess Ark will eventually adopt a "keep calm and ship" attitude as it matures.. Its still a very young company (about 20 people).
Clojure Atlas, a visualization of its standard library
That's what makes it hard to criticize this bill - of course teachers should encourage debate and critical thinking. And there are lots of subjects in science that merit debate. But the authors of the bill have a specific subject in mind - the fundamental validity of all of evolution - and giving students the impression that there is ANY debate among biologists about the fundamental validity of evolution is just dishonest.

Opponents of the bill claim that it's written the way it is (emphasizing critical thinking) to differentiate the bill from various earlier pro-creationism legislation that got overturned by the courts; details [1] and [2]. But anyway, I hope you're right and the bill ends up encouraging debate about real science.

[1] http://ncse.com/news/2012/04/boos-tennessees-monkey-law-0073...

[2] http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-04-09/debate-over-how...
Actually: should be available everywhere except France right now. (Selling encryption apps to France apparently requires an "export compliance approval" from the French government, and I haven’t gone through that process yet — primarily because I don't speak French.)

Let me know if that's not the case and I’ll double-check my settings in iTunes Connect.
I can certainly see it both ways. Thanks for the link and discussion guys. It's valuable for those just starting to make these kinds of decisions.
I don't see how this going to help small businesses.

As a registered small business S Corp, if this passed it would be thousands more in taxes for me( about 10k).
Or perhaps an email saying "We're past the limit you set, approve the overage in the next X hours by clicking this link". That way you don't cut off accidentally during a spike you want, but know about it.
Feedfetcher strikes again, huh? I never did find out why they were so interested in one of my images.

http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/10/27/wtfgoog/
Drop.io: $10M
Snaptu: $70M
Instagram: $1000M
Having everybody talk about your latest acquisition: Priceless!
There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's Facebook.
Finally someone takes a different stab at the Instagram news!
I always uninstall pulseaudio as the first thing I do on my Linux box.

I have always noticed a latency between the time that a sound is supposed to be played and when it is actually played with pulse. This doesn't matter so much when listening to an MP3 or whatever but if you are trying to use a sequencer or play a game it becomes a deal breaker.
Richard Feynman on reproducibility in science:

"When I was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in the psychology department. One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that went something like this--it had been found by others that under certain circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to whether, if she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do A. So her proposal was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still did A.

I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other person--to do it under condition X to see if she could also get result A, and then change to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know that the real difference was the thing she thought she
had under control.

She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor. And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment has already been done and you would be wasting time. This was in about 1947 or so, and it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to repeat psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and see what happens."

(from "Cargo Cult Science")
quite sad that Amazon still hasn't implemented bill capping yet. A lot of users want this... its been on their TODO list since 2006 https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=58127&...
I guess developing is being too easy...
just like asking you to pay for the services you used is not a jerk move.

Amazon did a nice thing, but the services were used. Asking to user to pay for those services (even if it was a mistake), would not have been a "jerk move"