skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the most heartbreaking thing about all of this is the lady in the comments who said her husband just lost his job and she's pregnant with health complications. This is ridiculous, if someone bought OnLive, they just bought a publicly tainted company and apparently it's EA (a company that is no stranger to being dicks).
The computer itself is different because it's just the space where the application lives. Complaining about the duality is like complaining that Dieter Rams' radio doesn't burst into fire whenever someone tries to play The Beatles on it.

The radio, the computer, the modern art museum are very different from their contents. They may be achievements of design by themselves, but are ultimately meant to disappear and give way to the content -- music, software, art. The content may well be kitschy (why not, I think in 2012 we're way past the 'kitsch is bad' presumption), but it doesn't mean the space should be -- in fact, the space might be the one place where kitsch is an objectively poor idea.

Think brutalist architecture covered with overgrowth. In my opinion, minimal shines in present of the fancy, and vice-versa. And personally, I like the permanent to be minimal, and the fancy to be transient.
'…and under this variation of bankruptcy which is valid in California the company as of this moment does not exist and portions of it are being acquired by a brand new entity but what that means is all of your options are gone.'

I would love to understand what this variation is and if it's actually legal from any lawyer types out there.
Good point, I adjusted it to reward "New" threads.
Diluted, yes. Eliminated, no. See other comments in this thread about the "cliff" -- once you're past it, it's harder to get screwed over.
Nice work, and thanks for replying to all the questions here. I didn't read the paper, maybe it is addressed in there, but how much did it cost to synthesize that much DNA? Also, it could be random access if you PCR amplified the fragments you need based on the barcodes - you could even make a FAT (file allocation TUBE) which has all the file names and their barcodes.
I find that more often than expected, PCA (or maybe MDS) gets a majority of the performance of any kind of unsupervised method. If you're really interested in exploring the data and methodologies, then PCA is a poor stopping point... but if you just want it to work, it's surprising how well PCA tradeoffs are good tradeoffs.

All the obvious caveats apply to that whole line of thought, though.
I thought the sorting of comments was based on the votes for that comment in that thread, not based on the average karma of the poster. Is that not the case?
You're right but because it's logarithmic, the difference is nominal and evaporates as a new member makes more posts.

Plus, what is the downside to encouraging new members to post?
Good luck to any typical employee having any chance of getting an exception to a standard options agreement.

Options have primarily been 1 year cliff/4 year vest since forever, and that is unlikely to change.

This is all part of the "fun" of signing on to a startup, and a big part of the reason why you often hear advice advocating to not trade salary for options, or to not be swayed by the potential future value of options in considering your job offer.

Unless you are a "name brand" in your industry and being heaving recruited, you should operate under the assumption your typical options grant will end up being worth between $0 and $5000 at best.
LayerVault raises seed round from Betaworks, SV Angel
[ FWIW you don't need to use a url shortner here, and it's actually preferred that you don't. If you're worried that folks will say "Gee he's just clicking to his own service" and down vote your comment, if they click through and see that you did that, and they are so inclined, they will do that anyway. ]

I don't know if I agree with your suggestion that the reason Twitter doesn't charge for their API is that they don't have a proper service contract (or by implication an API infrastructure). Some services make little sense until they are 'large' and getting 'large' is hindered by cost.

What Twitter doesn't have is a 'freemium' model of API access, but I don't doubt they will get there eventually.
I think a lot of "no photography" is because the store doesn't see any upside, and because a lot of photographers are fucking obnoxious while taking photos (taking up lots of space, bumping into people, obstructing traffic, etc.) -- I know I've done the same while trying to get a shot.

A smart store would recognize that great photos in e.g. a Yelp review are going to help it. I've never had a problem, even in no-photography-usually areas, if I go to the duty manager and say I'd like to take photos for online review sites, wikipedia, etc.
Wow, I had no idea average karma sorted people higher/lower.

But you actively try to protect your karma? After my karma hit 1000 I basically stopped caring anymore. What incentive do you have to protect your karma (serious question, I'm not sure I understand why it matters)?
Ok, ok :)

I registered and tried it. Technically the graphics and gameplay looked smooth, but as far as 2D games go, I thought that was already normal in HTML5. Despite the comment in the article, lots of people are doing stuff like this, and even 3D content that looks very good.

As for the rest, the constant nagging to connect to Facebook friends was highly annoying. But I guess that's the same as any Facebook game these days?

Otherwise, the game didn't really appeal to me, not sure why, I used to like this genre. Something about the tutorial felt overly contrived perhaps.
Trust me, there are a lot of creative trolls.
Yes please fix the new page!

It's complete dumb luck whether or not something makes it out of there now, tons of great content that never gets seen.
Where was this stated?
If 5 of us post in a thread at the same time, and no one upvotes any of the comments for an hour, then the ranking of the posts is going to have some kind of dependency on our karma metrics, rather than a "first come first serve" ordering.
I think it is reasonable to say the shuttle was supposed to "get into space on the day it was planned to launch".

I do not have data on it, but using that yardstick or even the more lenient "get into space within a month of the planned date", I think it was not very reliable. I also have the impression (but again: I do not have data) that the Soyuz is way more reliable in that respect.
Personally, I think I'd find pricing tiers as a relief. It might be a hard pill to swallow at first, but in the long run it aligns third party API developers and Twitter's interests. Twitter would have a reason to provide quality support to developers, and in turn developers would have a stronger sense of security in developing using the Twitter API, since they're paying for it.

Pricing is hard to get right. But they have years of data, a billion dollars, and 140 employees. I think they have the resources to give it a good first estimate.
Self-charging battery both generates and stores energy
I'll give that a try, but I don't care much for Echofon on any other platforms.

There is a service called Tweetmarker (http://tweetmarker.net) which some clients are now using to flag your last-read location amongst other clients on other platforms (e.g. Osfoora on Mac and Tweetbot on iOS).
Steve Perlman should be publicly shamed, that's the only way to prevent this. These greedy people should be scared to do this in the future.

You may get more money, but your reputation is fucked.

Morally i find this way more infuriating than Yahoo suing Facebook.
Well, I'm gonna upvote you just for being baked! First, you have accepted the principle that you will follow what YOU feel is OK to do, regardless of its legality, and second, it's a damned good excuse!

Have you had a look at how widely the age of consent varies around the world? There have been cases of 17 year olds in the US being jailed for sex with their 15 year old girlfriends. In Islamic countries there are 8 year olds getting married. It just isn't that cut and dried, and I don't believe the state should be involved in policing ANY aspect of people's sex lives. Yes, I am an anarchist - of the Lew Rockwell type ;)
There are many models of unionization. I'm represented by a union (in Denmark), and it's not particularly sclerotic or adversarial. It's just an organization that is skilled in contracts and can provide advice and advocacy on my behalf, along with some information aggregation.

Their #1 most useful service is probably their email address that provides legal advice about whether I should sign a particular contract or not, and what my options are. Strikes are extremely rare, but consultations to ensure it never gets to that point are common. For example, if I were asked to sign a never-before-seen contract provision, and I forwarded it to them, they might use their backchannel contacts with the company to ask what this is all about, and, if the answer isn't to their liking, warn other members to watch out for this new provision. That helps make sure that changes like that don't slip by unnoticed. It may, admittedly, help that there is a cultural value against labor strife, so companies lose a lot of face if they get to the point of open conflict with their union. That allows unions to mostly do their job without having to exercise "hard power" like actual strikes.

The main things they do, imo, is to make sure that workers are informed about what contracts they're signing, and that companies get appropriate pushback about the more onerous provisions. Americans also do that to some extent, but since they lack effective unions, they have to do it via legislation, like how California has banned noncompetes.
While reading this article through HN, (http://slifty.com/2012/08/a-tor-of-the-dark-web/) I thought it will be a good idea if HN can be moved inside an onion network like tor. People need to go through tor in order to access the site. It should not be visible via normal http/ip addresses. This can reduce the number of users coming on HN, and hopefully HN maintains the authenticity.
"What doesn't matter"
...
"Complaints of 'too much startups, not enough tech' or vice-versa"

Is there a place to go for real hacking articles and none of the startup news bullshit? I don't care if it's called Hacker News or not. I don't even care if it's /new/. I just want a place to discuss interesting articles about making software and hardware do interesting things.
You said a lot of what I just posted except shorter and better. One thing I missed that you got and that's worth expanding on is stardom. The stardom breeds a lot of the groupthink and hive mind around here I think.

I agree that there's a problem with fads and jealousy but I disagree with what that problem is. I think the jealousy comes from us nobody's and not the stars. It's the proletariat, so to speak, that are jealous of not just the stars but anyone who has the guts to put something cool they made in front of HN.

Fads again are just what promotes groupthink. Why does everyone on HN love Ruby but most people outside HN don't have any strong feelings for or against it? Because it's trendy. I work at a company in Chicago where we run our sites and apps on either Java, PHP, or Ruby. No one in the company ever looks down their nose at anyone else not using the language their primarily working with because that shit doesn't matter. The fads on HN aren't real. They're specific to HN and possibly Silicon Valley but people talk about it here as if it mattered somehow.

Overall though, you nailed it. And your very last line definitely holds true.
No, them being fired was not in question - them being fired, so that the owner can walk away with all of the money from an acquisition is the substance of the article.
One thing I'd like to see: Merged discussions.

Maybe instead of adding a comment, you could also have a button to add another link covering the same topic. Good for when someone links a BGR story that's just a linkbait headline summary of a BI article that's just a rewrite of a NYT interview. So let's say all articles for a common topic become linked. Allow upvotes on articles and the highest one becomes titular for the meta-thread.

This would (1) condense topics so the front page isn't deluged with say 5 twitter api threads, (2) unify discussions and avoid repetition, (3) help enforce good net practices i.e. linking to the best source.
I have been a huge HN fan for many years and read daily but the unnecessarily hostile atmosphere in the comments often detracts from the otherwise great content.

I guess it's a problem that gets more difficult to solve with scale but there must surely be a solution.
Confirmed: OnLive’s assets sold to another company
I understand you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover - but a Vim book that has Visual Basic on the cover (legacy VB6 no less) seems like a big, big warning sign.
Have you ever worked at a company with xxxx employees? They would have to create a new product, perhaps a new business unit. The best developers may want to work on the API biz, even though it may make 1/50th of what ads make.

If you're a b2b customer paying $$ or $$$$, you would expect an SLA, customer support, etc. (think AWS). All that is expensive, and if the revenue would not be in the ballpark of ads then Twitter won't do it now. They need to find their cash cow before they can explore smaller markets.
Hard not to scoff at with that sensational title.
That does actually make sense. I think it's folly, but I guess I'm biased.
Unless it's a per/something charge the numbers wouldn't be significant. I would guess there's less than a thousand serious API developers.
I usually just watch and read the articles but I've been wanting to get more involved for a while. I know I have a future doing the kinds of things you guys have done, and someday very soon I hope that I will. By keeping people like me who haven't yet accomplished anything out, you would be denying a real chance at digital mentorship.

I know how much I've learned and how grateful I am for having the chance to learn from this community, I'm sure there are many others as well that feel the same.

So to the community as a whole thank you for the chance to learn until I've mustered up the courage to take the plunge.
How about this: charge a subscription fee to perform "destructive" actions on HN. This means posting comments and voting, including upvotes. Perhaps submitting stories can remain free — the paying users will determine the quality of the submissions.

Some of us (used to) get a lot of value out of HN, so $10 or $50 a year would be a bargain.
I would also remove the duplicated content/submissions which create or could create fragmentation of good comments, besides a personal frustration for having just wasted time opening again the same link only because the title seemed different.
> The lesson I take from this is that the Shuttle should have been killed on the drawing board, never flown.

Exactly, yes. The design should have been revised until they weren't pushing safety margins so hard. Of course, that would have been an engineer-led approach, which is the opposite approach from the one they used.
I think sometimes we forget that Apple's primary audience doesn't even know what skeumorphism is, and certainly won't call it "regressive aesthetic infantilism" (it sounds cooler to write like that, so I can't exactly fault the author). But so what if it's an illusory metaphor?

Andy Mangold's appropriately-titled blog post "Skeuomorphism: The Opiate of the People" addresses the role of skeumorphism quite clearly, I think:

"Some people believe that skeuomorphism makes an interface easier to use, or more intuitive for the user, and I simply don’t buy that. But what hadn’t occurred to me is that it doesn’t matter if it actually does make it easier to use, all that matters is that it makes the average person think it’s easier to use. In reality, a user must take time to learn any interface, whether clad in faux leather or not. The skeuomorphism in iOS plainly tricks people that might otherwise walk away…"
[http://andymangold.com/skeuomorphism-the-opiate-of-the-peopl...]

People often quote the goal of effective skeumorphism as leveraging existing patterns (which just happen to be physical, not digital), to make an interface more familiar and easier to use. I think, if this is true, then it's rarely executed on that level. But if a user is more willing, more patient, and more inclined to go through a learning curve because of skeumorphism, I'd argue this is effective design.

Sometimes anti-skeumorphism sentiment sounds really similar to the "aesthetics don't matter as long as it works!" rallying cry. If aesthetics make it more pleasant to use a product, then the aesthetics serve a purpose.

(Edit—regarding honesty and emotive interfaces in digital design, here's another well-articulated perspective on the issue: http://maxcho.com/2011/10/dont-send-love-letters-in-helvetic...)
Hell, if you want to contact me about the possibility of teaming up then details are on my profile.
Python is not cool enough for this :) I want Ruby support!!
The man in the arena. Classic. And fitting with the theme of entrepreneurship too, at least for me. When I started my first company I went to a business after hours event to meet and learn from people who'd done it before. One very bright woman took me aside into an office away from the party, told me there's one thing I need to know about business and that it's about the journey, not the destination then she turned on a computer, went online, and printed out this exact quote. She said its what got her through the hard times and after having to read it many times I can say it gets me through them too.
like the news…
Google Sues Apple, Seeks To Block iPhone, iPad & Mac Imports To U.S.
You have to open the inspector first (Ctrl+Shift+I or Firefox->Web Developer->Inspector), and then click the "3D" button on the bottom left (or bottom right if you're on some beta/nightlies).
CD Projekt RED unveils their new game mod toolkit
The other problem with this idea is that it creates too much of an echo chamber or filter bubble.
This, and many of the suggestions in the original thread, and pg's default response, are all falling into the same trap: they are attempting to fix a people problem using technical solutions.

Technology can make community management easier. Better algorithms and visual design and so on can improve the way that a community polices itself. But, I think eventually you'll run into vanishing returns from that kind of stuff. (I don't have any good science for this, but I've been spending too much time online since the dial-up BBS days, and community development is one of my interests.)

Eventually every community needs one or more managers, or gardeners (http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/) -- people who have been around a long time, who embody the "spirit" of the site, and who have, not absolute, but special influence on the community. (RiderOfGiraffes immediately comes to mind; I really wish he was still around.)

This is absolutely analogous to Google attempting to avoid customer service completely by piling on more and more automated systems. While those systems help, they can't yet replace an actual customer service department -- and I think the frequent complaints from people who've been impacted by Google's lack of customer service bears this out.

I like some of the suggestions in this post, but I don't think that they can resolve the main issue with HN at the moment: it has grown to a size which needs one or more community managers.

There are some architectural issues too. I think the current trend in online forums, where new things are always better than good things, is ultimately a step backwards in terms of encouraging thoughtful discussion (http://www.robsheldon.com/conversations-online/). If a really interesting item comes up on HN that requires, say, a solid hour to compose a thoughtful response -- something very technical that would benefit from some number crunching -- there is very little motivation to commit the time to write that response. By the time it's written and posted, the site has moved on to the next new thing. However, the first person to respond to an item with a quick, witty, or snarky response gets rewarded with lots of attention.

And that is a problem that can not be resolved by any of the suggestions so far.
Tweetly.co 
Tweetly.co is an app that allows users to send messages to multiple twitter and facebook users with just one click. @tweetlyapp
> That upper-right quadrant also includes, of course, "traditional" Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Echofon. Nearly eighteen months ago, we gave developers guidance that they should not build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience."And to reiterate what I wrote in my last post, that guidance continues to apply today.

https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api
I found the way Twitter works very similar to IRC. #hashtags, DM's and @references are all from IRC. Twitter made a system like this easier to use, and centralized it one big system rather than loosely connected chat networks.

In a similar manner Facebook replaced email with a centralized system which again is easier for users but has the same gatekeeper issues.
Well yes, the last three in your list are terrible exactly because they harm others. That is what I said.

Weapons are like drugs, they don't necessarily hurt anyone unless you plan to invade my home or threaten me. Assassination implies that the sole goal is killing a target, buying a gun can be for protection, for a collection, for fun and hobby, for sustenance, ect.
Was surprised to find this.
Because if he just shut down the company instead, his employees would totally have it made. There's no happy way to do a fire sale, which is what this looks like.
Please tell me you were trolling. Or that you're 10. Otherwise go read some basic mechanics from Goldstein's Classical Mechanics. And learn some basic mathematics.

Classical state of a particle lives in the 2n-dimensional manifold known as phase space. The coordinates of the phase space are the configuration space and the corresponding conjugate momenta.
The state is a single point on the phase space, corresponding to the initial conditions of the problem. The Hamiltonian determines the time evolution in the phase space, which is a trajectory.

To make is simpler for you to understand:
1. Position and momentum couples form the physical state. And of course, for any physical system, it exists.
2. You need 2 initial conditions to solve a 2nd order differential equation. You can't solve a differential equation without initial conditions (of course to use this fact, you would need to understand that F=ma is a differential equation, not a function) (Maybe it's better if you read some good introductory text, such as Feynman Lectures on Physics Vol 1, Chapter 9).

If still not clear for you: the initial state in a two body problem is determined by the initial position and velocity. They are the initial conditions of your "function" F=ma, which is actually a second order differential equation. F determines how this initial state will change over time.