skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like the karma system overall, and I think the general quality of discussion on HN is evidence that things are mostly working well.

The only thing I find off about it is the average karma on profile pages. Personally, I find that it subconsciously dissuades me from commenting anywhere that is likely to result in few/no upvotes. My first comment on a story might get 20, 40, 80 upvotes, but any extended discussion is going to be rather nested, and so you're essentially burning through your average as each comment sits with only one or two votes. Similarly, commenting on "unpopular" articles means few people will see your comment, so you're pulling your average down again.

Should karma matter to me? Probably not. But I will confess to looking at people's profiles to see their average karma and time on HN as a way of knowing a bit more about them. I don't think it's unreasonable to feel that the average should be more representative than a straight average of all comment votes.

I don't like to complain without offering a solution, so this would be mine: weight the comment average as a function of the overall points on an article, to allow for more conversation around niche topics. Weight comments according to how deep in a thread they are, to allow more in-depth conversations to occur without a karmic penalty.

Karma can sometimes feel like a superficial way of "keeping score," but I think it serves a valuable role in promoting quality discussion. It still has room for improvement, though.
Curing aging will take too long. But there is an alternative.
The 250 number refers to the medical field. So the requisite background includes at least biology, and more preferably clinical experience. That diminishes the pool somewhat.

A similar phenomena certainly manifests in other highly specialized fields though. There are far fewer people with both the skills we're talking about, and deep water E&P or big 3 audit experience, for instance.
Why not start a startup simply because you're curious what would happen? You don't have to change the world. I think it's fine to just have an adventure (with the understanding that it may be a huge number of hours, fraught with frustration, etc).
Interestingly, this example is one of my counter-arguments for how TDD isn't applicable.

You have a function "sort(numbers)". You have a set of pre- and post-conditions; in this case the documentation lists the post-conditions and in TDD it's done through test exemplars.

But the author writes "Next, you can write actual code, then tests since you know clearly what you are going to code." This is rather incorrect. You know what your goals are, but not how you want to achieve it.

Are you going to implement Shell sort? Quicksort? Timsort? Your tests and your API documentation should not be so dependent on the implementation that you can't replace one with another (so long as certain performance requirements are met). But that means the *DD techniques don't clearly describe 'what you are going to code next.'

There are any of a number of algorithms with a similarly simple API but with complex implementations; substring search for one, and one I just did is graph canonicalization.

Here, btw, is a 2011 PyCon talk on Documentation Driven Development: http://blip.tv/pycon-us-videos-2009-2010-2011/pycon-2011-doc...
They are generally unlikely to have good enough test cases to make sure they implement these the same, as they are experimental.
Discussion:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3894533
The root cause of this issue is that prefixed properties are prefixed for too long as the standardization speed doesn't match the reality of how fast the web evolves and wants to evolve.

Fast releases and automated updates only make it worse, as two minutes after a prefixed property is thought up, a seriously large number of users will have support for it, developers will play with it and then the css code gets stuck on the internet.

By now most developers are in the mindset that it's okay to let a page differ in some browsers as long as the difference is only minor/aesthetic and not a functional handicap. And matching this vendors are perfectly happy with letting developers use prefixed properties as if they were stable.

Since these vendors make up the whatwg and w3c, they need to get their shit together and standardize faster and in the meantime developers need incentives to only use prefixed properties on test sites, which could be as simple as a console message that it should be removed (like how they did with the event.layerx deprecation) or having the user enable test mode in their browser configuration.
Ask HN: Help - I've hit a wall. 
I need help. I've reached a point where I have several parts of the project that are all interdependent, and it seems nothing can proceed without a huge amount of parallel work.

I'm a single tech founder and I feel like I'm going round in circles trying to get through this wall. I'm thinking of trying some freelancers but even the thought of explaining the dependencies is like a heavy weight in itself.

It all came to a head today, when I just realised I can't even beak down the next step into small prices because of the dependency. It's getting me down and I've run out of ideas to get me through. It feels like I'm wading through mud, and actually the end is in sight, but it's like looking at the summit of Everest from the ground.

Does this make any sense to anyone? Can you help?
Topicalizer - an information extraction suite - now open source
I disagree. There are plenty of snarky people on HN who know what they're talking about and aren't afraid to tell you. Unfortunately, that means that they get a disproportionate share of downvoting groupthink.

Perhaps the saddest example (for us) that I can think of is CPlatypus (http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=CPlatypus). Apparently a start up veteran, works at RedHat - I don't know what his blog is. I trawled back through his comments when I noticed he was hellbanned, and they were all pretty insightful. He hasn't been back in the last 30 days or so.
The Patchwork Cloud - A Model Driven Approach
Why would I want to run such a tool?

I want the web broken for users of broken browsers. I want those who use IE to suffer, so that they will upgrade to better browsers.

I want those who use Opera to stop and to start using a better browser.

I am tired of the progress of the web being hindered by this absurd notion that we should support every browser in existence. We shouldn't.
I added a newline (\n) to the beginning of my prompt. This way I never lose program output -- and also it's easier to see where previous commands begin and end in the scrollback buffer.
Another thing that increases difficulty is that depending on people's background and experience there are very different views on what is most important.

For example is my view exploratory data analysis and visualization are less important than using strong models and figuring out how to apply them to problems. I say this because I haven't seen any visualization methods that really tell you much about how hard or easy it will be to develop a predictive model. Sure you can do a 2-D LDA projection and if there's a huge amount of overlap you know you're not looking at a trivial problem. But if the problem is linearly separable someone's probably already got a good solution in Excel.

As for the "Big Data" buzzword it applies well to some problems like NLP or web analytics where massive datasets are available. In these cases it's clear that the more densely your data samples the problem space the better your performance will be and even very simple models will perform well.

However there are many applications where the amount of available training data is not so large and you need to use models which are powerful enough to discover non-obvious patterns. Applying such models and adequately evaluating them, which is critical to avoiding over-fitting with relatively small data sets, requires developing quite complex processes.
Yes but there are so many banks this is unlikely. In the rest of the world it just works.
Actually all browsers, except IE, should update themselves per default.

The problem is basically that IE and Opera hasn't been run of the market yet.
Seeing as how moths still fly into flames, it's probably going to be awhile.

Anyway, that's a shocking number, but I know it happens. I used to work at a TV station in college and once came out to my car to find a goose head on the hood. The body was a few feet away. It apparently had decapitated itself flying into the cables. My coworkers say it happens quite often during the migrations. They fly into the cables at night.

It was a bit disturbing, but made for a good meal!
Better in what sense? I don't like Safari and Chrome has turned into a buggy mess for me, whereas Opera is always stable. I've given up on the huge bloat of Firefox. IE is terrible. What's left?
I would place blame on W3C. Standardization simple take way too long.

Apple: We'd like some 3D transform properties for making cool websites for phones!
W3C: We'll have a draft ready by 2020.
Apple: Yea, we'll do our own thing.

If standardization was faster, we'd have much less problems with this.
LAZY?

Users choice of broken browsers should not, repeat not, be allowed to destroy or hold back the web. The web is too important.
Apple suing in 3, 2, 1...
Why don't the people who hire doctors, dentists, and lawyers suffer from the same talent shortage that the people who hire 'big data' computer scientists feel?

Because it's better across the board to start your own startup than work your ass off for a 4% raise at a place which recognizes you as top talent. I'm on the verge of starting a startup myself, removing myself from the people in this list. There is a shortage of talent in computer science, but never in the other disciplines, it may take another 30 years for the suits to have the ability to understand why.
And yet he seems to argue that the sort of world changing things we need aren't in the wheelhouse of startups, in the internet/mobile sense, which are the sort of startups that Phil Libin argued should only be done if you mean to change the world.

Fred Wilson's post seems to advocate crowdsourcing the funding of big, world changing ideas like curing cancer. Tackling these sort of problems is hardly prevalent among startups, but as far as it goes it's fine. But then changing the world is still an extrinsic motivation. You're not intrinsically driven to the idea of a startup or an obsession with the problem your trying to solve. I tend to think this is more problematic with the really big, world changing sort of problems with a long time horizon. It's also unclear to me how crowdfunding these sort of things would work. Would you need to renew funding annually? Would people continue funding you if they didn't see marked progress? ...maybe that's the point of his post, but in any case it's tangential at best to the present discussion.
Should there only be two car manufacturers? Competition is important. We should always push for open standards so they can be implemented by anyone. Maybe someday Google will decide that building a better browser is no longer in their best interest.
4chan switches to HTML5/CSS3 (SFW)
I too took the XeTeX path (see links below), mostly because of the way it can take advantage of the font variants provided by professional typefaces, and because using Modern, as beautiful as it is, feels a bit tacky on a résumé.

My approach was to eschew flexibility (even though LaTeX is amazing at it) in favour of aesthetics. Since I don't plan on updating it for the next few years, I decided to go crazy with tweaking the positioning of things until they fit just right. It would've probably been a bit easier in a DTP app like InDesign, but I try not to use proprietary software if I can help it, and I didn't want to waste time finding out whether Scribus was up to the task.

I'm a bit embarrassed about the source, because I didn't bother with defining styles properly and used quite a few hackish /vspace{}s instead, but it's good enough for a document only I'm going edit.

PDF: https://github.com/downloads/Aramgutang/resume/resume.pdf

Source: https://github.com/Aramgutang/resume/blob/master/resume.tex
Here's a better idea, developers: stop using vendor prefixes. Use the W3C-defined property only. If it isn't standardized yet (i.e. doesn't work), then don't use it.

Stop opening your Christmas presents at Easter.

(sorry; typed from a mobile device)
I know that Facebook had a number of issues trying to migrate to git. Many of these issues came from storing big blobs and mountains of code. There are code bases bigger than the linux kernel, they are often proprietary though.
One relatively speedy route to getting solid numerics scriptability in JS is to do the heavy lifting in NaCl. An NaCl plugin for node would then let you use the same binaries on both the server and client.
Again, I completely see the difference (and am actually in the process of moving full time to the private sector from academia, so will probably understand a lot more in six months) but visualising data well is not that hard.
Step 1: learn R
Step 2: Learn PCA
Step 3: Learn ggplot2
Step 4: play with the different geoms until you understand them (seriously though, everyone's eyes are optimised to find patterns, and if you can apply significance testing to these then you should be good)
Step 5: profit!? Note that I am being somewhat facetious here, but I suspect that the mathematical knowledge and ability to apply this to business problems will be the real limiting factors, as good practices in data analysis, programming and visualisation can be learned. Granted that will take a long time to learn, and there will be individual differences, but its doable.

Whether or not it will be done at all though is another matter.

Again, delirium's point is trivially true if one requires these people to know all of statistics, programming and data presentation as I don't think there's anyone who knows all of any one of these subjects.

I suppose it somewhat depends on what the skill levels for each of these areas need to be, and that varies from person to person as well as from application to application.
Longboards For Girls 
Longboards For Girls

Longboards,For, Girls

http://entertainment222.blogspot.com/2012/04/longboards-for-girls.html
A CV written in LaTeX has an advantage : it has a nice geeky touch, and to people like me immediately makes a good first impression -- as opposed to a CV sent in docx that I will immediately throw away -- because generally Real Hackers (or aspiring Hackers) use LaTeX for their CVs, while quiche eaters definitely use MS Word.

Note: I receive and dig through many CVs, while I didn't send mine to anyone for more than 12 years. My view of LaTeX maybe slightly skewed by my old age, but I'm probably quite representative of the sort of people developers would want their resumes to be read by, rather than some HR drone.
I didn't get the sense he is in it for the money in and of itself. He's talking about money in the sense of survival. You have to eat, and food isn't free. When you have to succeed just to survive, your options become clear and you have no choice but to act. It can't help but be motivating.
If they have responded with an inflammatory reply, I understand why they have been downvoted. I agree with you about the contributor CPlatypus, he did have a lot of insightful comments. However, he also frequently accused others (including pg!) of being liars, etc.

For the record, the hell banning practices are extremely disconcerting on Hacker News. On the original site that hellbanning was designed for, it was to slow down trolls, not those who responded in a controversial way. That there is no way of appealing to being hell banned is definitely a negative of contributing to this site: you'll never know you that you need to change your behaviour, and there is no way of fixing the issue - even if you were an insightful contributor such as CPlatypus.

Anyway, I think I've said my piece on this matter - I don't want to be controversial myself so I'll refrain from commenting more on the practices of those who are in ultimate control of this site.
So you want to hold the development of the web back, by giving developers incentives (really making them look like fools) to slow the progress of the web.

The only thing the prefix system threatens is a few unimportant browsers that arguably shouldn't even be around anymore and the pride of the w3c.

And you want to save them, by throwing the future of the web under a bus?
About Ukraine
I agree.

There're some prefixed properties which work on all major browser since forever (on a web scale)... but there're still a draft. Reading the minutes of the CSS group is enlightening : everything is really really slow.

Moreover, lots of non-defined prefixed properties don't break pages at all. Rounded corners per exemple are nice, but not displaying them is not a deal breaker. Same thing for transitions : site using them often provide a javascript fallback for non webkit browser.

If Opera wants to support webkit properties, they have to spoof their UA : lots of mobile website are designed for iPhone and Androïd (yes, that's not ideal, but it's a fact). It's the 00's mess again...
I have had a website and a LinkedIn profile for over a year that make this fairly clear

It doesn't work like that. You LinkedIn profile might easily land you any job in Software development, but not consulting.

In my opinion, if you want to do consulting for big corp. you should figure out what it takes to it. An attractive website and presentation, few buzzwords, client testimonials, business cards, and the other blablabla. Yes, it's irrelevant (and shitty) to what you are actually doing, but that's actually the world of consulting.
What's the advantage of using something like LaTeX for a CV? The point of a a resumé is purely to make you look good, and as such you'd be much better off making a PDF using a real layout tool (like InDesign).

I think it really depends on a number of factors. Firstly, what job are you looking for? If it's design, then yes, maybe InDesign is a wise choice (I don't know, I'm not a designer and I'd never heard of InDesign before). If you are looking for a research position or more technical work, especially in sectors which value open source software experience, LaTeX might be a much better choice. Besides the fact that InDesign only runs on Windows and OSX (no FreeBSD or Linux), it's also not open source, and some places might prefer applicants that can get the job done with software that doesn't cost a bundle or come with onerous licenses.

I know that when I translated my resume from HTML to LaTeX, then posted it in PDF on my website, I started getting more requests for interviews (no, I'm not going to post a link; I'm not really looking for work and you probably wouldn't find it aesthetically pleasing anyway). I'm not sure whether it was the PDF or the LaTeX aspect (or something else) that made it more visible to recruiters, but LaTeX and/or a plain looking CV are obviously not interview killers. I wasn't even looking for interviews, didn't even post my resume to any job sites! I mostly try to keep my resume up to date for practice and keeping my options open.
> By now most developers are in the mindset that it's okay to let a page differ in some browsers as long as the difference is only minor/aesthetic and not a functional handicap.

Well, if they're writing standards compliant code it's fine if the page is different in different browsers, but I take your point that developers are happy to write non-standards compliant code to provide extra functionality for a few users.

> in the meantime developers need incentives to only use prefixed properties on test sites,

Maybe search engines need to provide boosts for standards-compliance and drops for standards-ignorance.
deadline because for 500th time someone promised something impossible to the client

This is a killer in machine learning applications. The toolsets rarely cover the entire extent of what needs to be done, so at least some custom code needs to be written. But results aren't deterministic - you don't really know if it's going to work until you run it. Several iterations are often needed to get to the first useable results. It has all the problems of building any piece of software, plus another layer of risk that the accuracy just won't be there with the first thing(s) you try.

My point is... actually agreeing to be the machine learning guy on a project totally sucks because time estimates are almost meaningless, and the modern business culture is to label anything late as a failure.
I disagree with your concept of Chrome being buggy. It is not more buggy than the rest and has decent support for the new advanced features (with the exception of the calc css feature).
There's definitely a need for people to continue working on developing new models and ideas. I think that's where academic research fits. That said the academic world could do a much better job of effectively evaluating and comparing models so that practitioners have a clearer view of what works where. There also seem to be a lot of biases that get perpetuated in the academic world, like the bias against neural networks.

However I think what's really needed for this technology to develop to its true potential is figuring out how to apply it to real problems and I think that's more a role for industry practitioners than academics. The problem is that for people to make a living at this there needs to be a market. I think what we are seeing in this area is a shortage of both supply and demand with the supply side hindering the demand side and vice versa.
Opera has long been the most innovative and standards-compliant browser available.

Google and Mozilla may have bigger teams, but the most innovation is still coming out of Norway.
It's significantly different though. I can't go into much detail, but being an acquired founder is not the same a being a hired employee.
I agree, but then we hit the problem that the W3C stuff moves so slowly. We can end up with a situation where all modern browsers (WebKit-based, Firefox and Opera, maybe even IE) implement the same property, but the W3C standard hasn't caught up and might not for months.
I don't have any numbers regarding conversions but based on a lot of the providers I've seen, SnapEngage seems like one of the easiest to implement and operate (and is priced pretty reasonably depending on your needs). They do have a free plan, but it's kind of 'hidden' on the pricing page. Www.SnapEngage.com.
I wonder how this will affect those who have started using javascript aids like http://leaverou.github.com/prefixfree/

At this point there are enough prefixes to make manually adding each more than a bit pointless.
Discussion of the project (not this article):
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3898675
thanks, didn't spot it when posting this. Deleting.
A car needs a road to run on, that is all the infrastructure that has to be common between cars (your car might need gasoline, but that does not mean that your neighbors car can't run on diesel or be an electric car).

So you driving an old car does not mean I can't drive a new much more fuel-efficient car.

A web browser on the other hand has a gigantic interface between it and the users and as such it is extremely arrogant to assume that the web should be held back due to your choice of browser.

If you don't like the look of it, or whatever you can totally apply skins or plugins to make it obey voice commands (I would love to read a blog post about how you did that) since those things don't interfere with the progress of the web.
Onslaught 2 prototype open sourced and on Github
In a world that has platforms other than the PC, there is no reason to assume browsers available on PC platforms are the only ones that matter.

Opera Mini works very well on mobile phones for example.

You're also on a web site with a lot of people working at startups: pretty much the epitome of not accepting the status quo and creating new things. If we all said "screw it" when big projects took over, the world would be a lot less interesting.