skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First of all, how can you rationally hate something? Hate is inherently irrational. Anybody who hates anything hates it irrationally. The title should simply be, "Engineers hate advertising tech". The use of the word "irrationally" is simply a lame attempt to paint us as being objectively wrong, which doesn't even make sense.

Second, I think a lot of people have good reasons for disliking advertising tech. Beyond a certain point, advertising essentially becomes a zero-sum game. The people who see your ads are only going to spend so much money on stuff, and once you've saturated that, the best you can do is move the money around. It's unlikely that your product is vastly better than what people would otherwise find. Advertising can certainly help get the word out about truly excellent new products, but that use is vastly outweighed by simply trying to switch people from one brand to another mostly equivalent one.

Because of this zero-sum nature of much advertising, it becomes a race to the bottom. In most markets, if competing products A and B both improve an equal amount, everybody benefits. In advertising, if competing ads A and B both become more effective at selling, little changes. The better ad will continue to work better, but the absolute effect will not change much. (In reality, all ads compete against all other ads to an extent for people's money, but the point still holds as long as you look at all of them.) The trouble is that an ad's effectiveness is only loosely tied to its aesthetic value or utility to the viewer. In other markets, when competitors race to improve their products, the result is awesome products. In advertising, the result is ads that are continually larger, louder, brighter, stupider, more difficult to bypass, more insulting, and more annoying. Companies race to one-up each other's ads and the rest of us are just collateral damage in their war.

Ads are intruding on more and more of our lives, including things we pay for. Everybody I know hates sitting through ads after paying $BIGNUM at a movie theater, but somehow the practice has become universal anyway. I suppose it hurts sales less than it boosts revenues. This helps the theater, but it doesn't help me. Tickets didn't get any cheaper when ads went in. For an internet example, take Hulu Plus, which I understand is now showing ads to paid subscribers.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, ads are probably the single greatest non-government mechanism for invading our privacy today. Ads work better when they're targeted based on personal information, and the result is private companies with vast amounts of information about everybody's browsing habits, held and used in a completely opaque and unaccountable fashion. Ad networks are becoming vast spy networks that just happen to be used for the relatively benign purpose of getting us to buy stuff. And you wonder why we don't like ad technology?
The existing evidence includes the typical experience of people new to FOSS using things like Emacs, VIM, Gnome or GIMP...

Bad usability and a high learning curve are not the same thing. A high learning curve is what makes people "new to FOSS" have difficulty with emacs/vim, not a lack of usability.

And Gnome is also a bad example, since it is both usable and has a minimal learning curve. At my last job we set up a crowd of 30 fashionistas (no tech background whatsoever) using gnome with no real issues. Several of them also used inkscape with little difficulty.
I don't know how to solve the problem, but I have thought about it; some thoughts:

The computing industry seems to keep repeating cycles with local and remote processing - thin terminals and mainframes, then the desktop PC, now "The Cloud" is mainframes 2.0, then mobile apps are starting to bring native code back to the user again (although many are tied into the cloud) - similarly, online communities keep alternating between distributed (BBSes + IRC), centralised (myspace, AOL), distributed (forums + IRC again), centralised (facebook + twitter). As such, the churn of users from one system to another is pretty much constant. (There are many reasons for users to move from one system to another, but this is the one that I've seen as an inevitable constant since the internet began, and other reasons are different each time).

How does users moving around relate to quality of community though? Perhaps I'm being subjective and biased, but it seems to me that the highest signal to noise ratio happens at the front of the wave, the masses with the pop culture are the middle, and the ocean of spam trails behind. As such, if we assume that users will move from one system to another no matter what, the degredation of community at a given location is inevitable.

Taking slashdot as an example - the technical side of it, while not perfect, was fairly good and did a fine job back when a handful of technically-inclined people used it; but when it became overwhelmed with average people, there's nothing the system could do to stop it (I don't think HN is immune to this either, it just happens to be at the front of the wave right now). Also in the case of slashdot, the editors started treating the average people as their target audience, which accelerated the decline...

Also, thanks to things like Ubuntu, slashdot's niche of "linux users" stopped being a niche, thus opening the floodgates - I find that communities are generally better when you need to put effort into finding them, rather than them being the default that the lazy people go to for a popular subject (note that this isn't quite hipster sentiment - that would be to say the subject itself becomes worse when it gets popular).
drink coffee; use Pivotal Tracker, don't check email.
if he's partially responsible for the current Ubuntu desktop and the current Firefox, I stand by my comments.

Change over substance.
You should be able to click and drag on the graph to select a rectangular zoom region
You're Not Trying Hard Enough
MySQL Cluster running on Raspberry Pi
I don't have a beef with it. I also think that of you apply to the jobs posted on HN, you will get my point.

Sadly, I don't use Paypal. You can make a donation to your local hackerspace with the $100 that you will soon lose.

Good luck.

PS. Have you ever asked the people you have interviewed what they think about the process?
Tragedy of the Commons. What we really need is more incentive for people to maintain the quality of discussion, like if they were economically invested in the site.
I am an American, and not an atheist -- but I'm also not a Christian, and that question would have taken me aback too. In fact I'm quite sure I've never been asked that in my life. I would have been tempted to say something sarcastic like, "you really should get out more; there are people in this world who aren't Christians" but really, the guy was just trying to answer your question -- the reality being, I suppose, that everything there was to do in that town was organized by sect.
This isn't exactly what the article is about, but it's on the topic of iPhone and healthy food:

For people with food specific allergies, there's another fairly specific way that people are able to eat healthier due to smart phones. It's actually quite life changing. Last year through blood tests and biopsy I was diagnosed with Celiac Disease. That basically means my immune system attacks my intestines if I eat anything with gluten in it. Even a microscopic amount of gluten is too much, so kitchen contamination is a big problem and if people don't understand it, I will probably get contaminated food.

There are 2 iPhone apps that I don't know how I could live without:

1. "Find Me Gluten Free" - Shows me restaurants that are gluten aware. This allows me to eat out without the fear of hidden gluten in my food. I'm sure there are similar apps for every common allergy, such as peanuts.

2. "Gluten Free Ingredients" - Has a catalog of ingredients and lists if they can contain gluten or not. When someone hands me a packaged food that I'm unfamiliar with, I can quickly verify that there is no gluten in the product.

For people like me, I just can't imagine living without my iPhone. If it were 10 years ago I would mostly be relegated to eating at home or bringing my own food with me when I went out. Now I can even travel without concern.
Replace "commercial" with "enterprise" and I agree completely. Amazing how bad software that costs so much can be!

(side note: I might have accidentally down-voted you as my hand brushed over the screen. If so, I apologize and hopefully someone will give you an up-vote for me to replace it.)
n here is "generation". Start with one engineer, n=0. They refer 2, n=1. They each refer 2, referring a total of 4, n=2. Etc.

(It works out such that the total number of people follows the same curve. Think of the total number of engineers as (2^n)-1: following the same example above, one engineer is then n=1, three total is n=2, seven total is n=3.)
Do you apply this logic to all businesses you interact with?
A similar design is used in cheap universal IR controlled outlets: http://www.dealextreme.com/p/ir-remote-controlled-ac-outlet-...
Ask HN: please review my site StevenPalmerGolf.com
First off, please forgive me, I'm a long time reader of HN but only just signed up for an account so please don't think I'm spamming!

StevenPalmerGolf is an online golf tuition and statistic tracking service. We very recently launched a v1.0 of the site and I would greatly appreciate any feedback!

http://www.stevenpalmergolf.com

Thanks.
Android 4.0 now on 7.1% of devices
The only possible explanation I can think of is that such a statement would be targeting the non-Anglo Canadian residents, who may be able to live in relative isolation from what we'd consider mainstream North American culture. Even that explanation seems a bit far-fetched, but perhaps there are semi-detached Asian immigrant or First Nations groups. Interesting anecdote.
I'm with you on the advantages of C, but this is not true:

"Skilled C programmers do not need profilers, bounds checkers and memory leak detectors."

Skilled programmers use profilers because the alternative (guessing) is a poor strategy for diagnosing poor performance. And no skilled programmer would spurn a useful tool like a bounds checker or memory leak detector, because nobody is perfect and these tools save immense amounts of time by pointing you straight to the problem.
This article is saying the equivalent of, "the primary thing people use Starbucks for is to go to the bathroom. So we tested how hard it is for random people off the street to find the bathroom. Our conclusion is that Starbucks should put the bathroom next to the front door with large signs pointing to it as people walk in."

It seems Bitly doesn't want to be just a link-shortening service anymore. They're pivoting and want to draw you into the new service a little. At the risk of alienating bathroom-seekers, Bitly hopes you'll buy a cup of coffee while you're looking around. Which seems reasonable.
Was their net not that successful, or are people just assuming the worst?
Paul Graham thought about this as HN grew. http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

Also, the phenomenon where the people who are most invested in a community are the first to bail when it changes is often called "evaporative cooling".
Willy dot Pell at gmail dot com
Most US states are at-will states, meaning they're already immune from wrongful termination, except for discriminatory reasons. No matter how long the employee has been there.
You'd end up seeing a lot of 5 month and 29 day employment terms for people. It'd be no effective difference than 'contract and perhaps hire later', except so many people are averse to 'contract' work for reasons (sometimes valid ones) that have little to do with the work and more to do with the culture of 'benefits'.

I don't quite know how we as a culture do it, but we need to wean ourselves off of 'employer-provided benefits'. Getting back to a more consumer-driven market vs large employer group-driven market will make our job/work situations easier for generations to come.
The following sequence is generally considered to be humorous and is used by comedians often and to great effect:

* something generally considered 'bad' happens or is relayed

* the comedian remarks that that thing should not have happened

* then unexpectedly follows up with something that would actually make it worse, placing the previous remark in a new light

* all this while it is obvious, from his tone and body language, that he actually truly strongly disapproves of the original 'bad' thing

The sequence usually contains toying with expectations, seemingly contradicting yourself, obvious sarcasm and generally putting the audience on the wrong foot by making ludicrous statements you couldn't possibly be serious about.
pg has written at length on the dilution of online communities: http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

Seems obvious, but surely there are some who haven't come across it yet.
They say that they have disabled that now, so that's something.
You get 2^n - 1 which is what he means by scaling 2^n. That's because the (sum of numbers 2^k for k = 0 to n - 1) = 2^n - 1.

Example: if you have one, she hires 2, those 2 hire 2 each. You have 1+2+4 = 7 = 8 - 1 = 2^3 - 1
Thanks, I appreciate it. Descriptions are on my TODO list, but have been on the back burner in favor of more projects. I will have to bump up their priority.
I run one of the largest current internet forums, there are multiple problems (which I could talk about for hours) but ultimately the only solution is exclusivity. People are affected by their surroundings; as soon as you make a site public it will start to change.
I've seen some questionable items show up on the front page here. Particularly on the weekends. But this is a new low.
PhotoBoard for decorating your photos
Why I couldn't care less about bit.ly
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As an aside, I'm trying to read this on my iPad and it's absolutely infuriating when websites arbitrarily prevent me from zooming in on text. I'm the one who gets to decide what a good size for text is.
I don't necessarily agree with your taste (I like boring, pompous, overly-artsy movies) but the key problem for me is, like you, rotten tomato scores are a horrible indicator of my taste.
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You should add a demo link on your site
Rally.org - San Francisco

Building tools to help non-profits, charities, and other organizations fundraise and spread their message better.

Looking for:

- Full stack web developers (Rails, Capistrano, chef, etc)
- Data Scientists (machine learning, visualization, and front-end web development)

Our jobs page has more info https://rally.org/jobs

Email me at clay.woolam@rally.org and I'll get you connected
In case anyone hasn't already seen it, "A journey through the bowels of proggit"

http://corte.si/posts/socialmedia/redditgraph/index.html
K&R is a book not suitable for beginner tutorial in C, especially modern C. As a reference type work, ok.
In my experience programmers are often the worst people for designing the interface to their own product. Their designs are based on their own mental model of the product, which is in turn based on how the product is engineered.

Their intuitions of how end users will use a product is skewed by this same biased mental model. End users lack the in depth knowledge of how the product is constructed.

I've seen products I've built be run through formal user testing and A/B tests and the most important thing I learnt was that my intuition about user behavior is always wrong.

The truth is that a product needs both good engineering and good design to succeed. If it lacks either then it is going to fail. Engineers tend to be oblivious to bad design so if you are ignoring critiques then you are throwing away valuable data.
SEEKING WORK - Remote (I'm very inexpensive)

Latest Project. Highnoonsolutions.com/goals

Main skills: PHP, SMS Gateway, Design, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, Git.

timothydmoody@gmail.com (Tim)
It is pretty clear that bit.ly decided their core use case isn't interesting to them as a business and decided to change the core use case from shortening links and displaying metrics to collecting and sharing links. Businesses that need these kinds of metrics should probably be using non-free, more sophisticated services like awe.sm anyway.
To anyone who spends any significant amount of time on here, it is apparent that timing, rather than the quality of the link, decides whether or not something reaches the front page.

Is this a feature or a bug?
"Have you ever asked the people you have interviewed what they think about the process?", especially, perhaps, the people you didn't hire?

Almost without exception, people who don't get hired never hear back from a company as to why. Yes, I know all about "everyone's afraid to get sued for saying something wrong". So... develop a neutral feedback form to candidates as to why they were passed over, skills the interviewer(s) thought were lacking, etc. This will mean that people can get better, perhaps get another job (yes, maybe at a competitor, but also maybe somewhere else entirely), and continue to earn income, pay taxes, and contribute to society in a productive way. Some people can contribute without a job, sure, but right now most people need jobs.

Telling someone "we're sorry - we had 8 candidates apply for this position, and we ended up taking on someone with more experience in X, Y and Z compared to your experience level. We wish you the best of luck in your job search". This would be courteous, professional and helpful all at the same time. Between my own experience and that of several colleagues, fewer than 5% of employers ever provide something even remotely useful in terms of feedback.

How do we expect the job seeking population to get better without providing feedback mechanisms for them to learn from?
> 4" tame by today's standards... perfect for 2007 but today...

How the average human thumb grew 0.5" between 2007 and 2012, making today's 4" screens better than 3.5" screens of 2007, is one of nature's mysteries.
I think a community's approach to moderation can also accelerate its degradation.

Consider a site where rules are overly broad, moderators are chosen by their ability to assert rules blindly and are actively dissuaded from using their own judgement, and meta discussion is not allowed (i.e. about the site and its rules). Furthermore, people who disagree with each other often enough are silently (shadow) blocked from each other.

We've read a lot of stories here about the importance of seeing things you disagree with and not creating an echo chamber for yourself; consider why a community would actually impose that on users.

These are symptoms of a community, IMO, chasing the lowest common denominator: sanitize the site as much as possible to sell ads, because disagreement debate drive eyeballs away. A good CPM can certainly be established in a place where everything is awesome and people are never wrong. Dictatorships-with-secret-police generate ad revenue, but not any real discussion.
I don't know which I feel saddest about:
1. Someone calling this "clearly unethical"
2. On a site named "hacker" news
3. That comment being top 1.
I have no doubt that your years of hiring practice have refined your ability to determine who is a good applicant. However, I question whether or not the steps you are following are just a sort of cargo-cultism or rationalization for the decision that you'd already made in the first few minutes of conversation.

Unfortunately, since nobody will ever engage in any sort of study (who would, it would be a tremendous waste of resources), we'll never know.
Space Engine: simulate the entire universe
google "swipe nokia n9"
The Tribler people have been working on some kind of incentive system so that you can download faster if you run a proxy. It's not clear whether that can compensate for the factor of N inefficiency that proxies create. BitTorrent only won because it was faster, so if a new system is N times slower than BitTorrent it's unlikely to succeed.

There's also OneSwarm which has been out for a while: http://www.oneswarm.org/
Yes. I flirted with the idea of an online community with a half life. For example, every 6 months the URL would completely change and only the top 1% of members would be notified of the new location. It would be in their hands to repopulate the community.

I haven't figured out how to determine the top 1% but this was more a pipe dream a than serious potential project. Anyone is free to take the idea and run with it.
garbage collectors are tightly integrated with the programming alnguage and runtime. Different languages, architectures, etc have different requirements from a GC...
HTC Evo 4G Now Available
I'm also Irish and I think the original comment is pretty valid - The point is you would never see a "normal" character in an irish/uk made production drink-driving, it is just a complete taboo. However, a massive amount of American produced shows have the protagonists driving home from the bar, and it is just accepted, which I always find quite jarring. If it was part of the character's image to be a law breaker/troubled/etc, that would be one thing, but "Sideways", the newest American Pie movie and "Dan in Real Life" spring to mind as 3 films I have seen lately which have examples of this casual drink driving. Clearly they aren't documentaries :-) but the American Pie movie in particular is pretty mainstream, so it was really surprising. I think it is reasonable to assume that the US attitude to drink-driving is quite a way behind Ireland.

And on your point on Darby O'Gill - That was an American film depicting Ireland, which was obviously full of stereotypes. The films and tv shows we are talking about are an American view of America, which you would assume should be a little more accurate in terms of attitudes/culture...
Why should I learn to program
Hey everyone,

I'm new to programming but not too new - I know HTML and CSS and starting ruby. Anyway, this has all been on my own. I've been following a lot of blogs like the one with Peter Thiel's Notes and a few others...but at the end of the day, I'm not really feeling the rewards of programming. I know I'm new, and it takes hard work, but why keep learning?

How is this making me a better person, or more competent for the future? I feel like I should be learning to code not because it will make me a better person, but because I love it. At the end of the day, I feel like I can say I really do. It's very tough though when you don't know enough yet to actually apply your knowledge and build cool things.

This is meant to be a motivational post. I'm looking for some advice to keep working hard and learning. I'm in a bit of a rut and need to break out of it!

Thanks for any advice beforehand.
It's tough.

The site I feel worst about is Tvtropes. A few years ago they had the great idea of basing a universal theory of culture derived from Japanese animation. Brilliant!

Then they get in trouble with AdSense because of drivel about sexual fetishes in tv and comics written by virgins, and it's just overrun by so many people that are completely incoherent that anybody who knows anything about writing or directing or acting just can't stand it.

Wikipedia avoids this fate by being aggressive about deleting stuff. Wikipedia is one of the least friendly web communities out there. But, it really has managed to go mainstream without falling apart.
I agree that traditionally the OSS community is not very welcoming to designers. I'd be interested in creating a website that engages designers and provides a platform for them to propose visual updates to existing free software. Is anyone else interested in this? Email me!
My biggest problem with the new site is how hard it is to customize the short link. I did it once after spending like 5 minutes trying to figure it out and to be honest I don't even remember how I did it so next time I'm sure it'll be almost as hard.