skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there's more to it than that. There are other things I do which are hard, and hold me accountable, but which are not painful in the way that software estimation is.

The difference that I see is that software estimation has a third component: lack of control. Every couple days Alice is going to stop by and say "you know we need feature XYZ, too, right?" (which was never in the spec). Then I'm going to overhear at lunch that Bob rewrote the account-management system so I need to rewrite part of my code to integrate with that new interface. And Charlie is going to walk into my office 3 times a day and say "hey, did you see the new video game?". Oh, and this release we're also upgrading to a new version of the foobar library, which works fine for everyone else but mysteriously crashes on my machine, so I spend a day and a half fighting that.

I love being held accountable for hard things. (2 quickdraws on the side of the cliff that I need to retrieve? Great! I'm performing a solo next week and I need to get up to speed on something I've never played before? Bring it on!) But only if I'm being held accountable for something I have control over. Accountability - control = pain.

See also: traffic jams, delayed flights.
At the point where we'd engaged in massive-scale genetic engineering to insert knowledge into our DNA chain, jobs may no longer be the significant driving force of our lives. Or, at least, I'd like to hope that we'd have been able to move beyond them.
The vaccine analogy isn't that far off. The reason that people who don't vaccinate themselves put everyone at risk is because of the herd immunity. The vaccine isn't 100% effective, but a 99% effective vaccine will prevent the disease from spreading around enough that the 1% where it didn't take are still safe. The unvaccinated, however, still create an infection risk for the 1% who weren't vaccinated successfully.

In the same way, the fake security systems will cause increases in the relevancy of the failure rate of real security systems. Let's say that we have 100 criminals, 100 homes with 98% effective security systems, and 100 homes without. Currently, the 100 criminals will rob the 100 unsecured homes, because they don't want to take the 98% failure risk. Now, let's say that the people in the unsecured homes put in fake systems. The 100 criminals now attack 50 secured homes and 50 pretend secured homes. The security system stops 98% of the attacks on the secured homes, leaving one of those attacks as successful. The fifty criminals who attacked the unsecured homes still get away with everything. Thus, one person who bought a security system is attacked who wouldn't have been attacked if the fake systems weren't in play, so the people with the fake systems have added to the risk of people who own real systems. However, we have also decreased the number of successful attacks, so I'm not sure that there's reasonable claim of moral wrong-doing in this scenario.

Now, my numbers are obviously fictional, but the fake systems will increase the number of successful attacks on real systems. Whether that's a bad thing is an entirely different issue.
Could this be a side effect of comment scores not being displayed publicly any longer?
Off Topic

At the site's peak in mid-2009, STC attracted hundreds of
thousands of users per day, earning Vickerman up to
£50,000 ($78,500) per month in advertising revenue.

Let's say he did 999,000 users/day (to stay in the hundreds of thousands). That's still only $30K per month, if we assume a CPM of $1.00, which seems reasonable for a site like this.
Using hjkl instead of the arrows is not a small difference. It's huge.

Staying on the home-row vs having to move your hand over and back constantly affects your speed and accuracy in a big way.

Here's an easy way to switch: never, ever use the arrow keys to move the cursor again. Done!
How Swagsy Raised Its First $100K
Don't do it! Once your fingers learn and start to prefer hjkl you'll waste a lot of time and effort in other programs trying to use them.

Really, more things just need vi-like interfaces :(
What happens in a car accident? I can't imagine the sudden expulsion of all that compressed air is going to act like anything other than a small bomb going off.
And yet 12,000 people payed to get a network going. Myself included.
Extreme specificity overriding a CSS ID with 256 chained Classes
Would love to hear any feedback you guys have on our story. Thanks!
Another idea: port HaLVM and get a Haskell baremetal OS - with native threads, GC, type safety, instant boot - https://github.com/GaloisInc/HaLVM
It's a genuine problem and has been growing gradually worse for a while. I think the cause is simply growth. When a good community grows, it becomes worse in two ways: (a) more recent arrivals don't have as much of whatever quality distinguished the original members, and (b) the large size of the group makes people behave worse, because there is more anonymity in a larger group.

I've spent many hours over the past several years trying to understand and mitigate such problems. I've come up with a bunch of tweaks that worked, and I have hopes I'll be able to come up with more.

The idea I'm currently investigating, in case anyone is curious, is that votes rather than comments may be the easiest place to attack this problem. Although snarky comments themselves are the most obvious symptom, I suspect that voting is on average dumber than commenting, because it requires so much less work. So I'm going to try to see if it's possible to identify people who consistently upvote nasty comments and if so count their votes less.
I read it as coding just being a particular example. The argument works equally well for a pure-tech founder who needs to pick up some marketing to take his project to the next level.
Now Twitter is just a social network
My route: Slackware, Redhat, Mandrake, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, and now Mint Debian.

I finally got fed up with reinstalls, and so far very happy with Mint Debian's semi-rolling approach.

Also very happy with their inclusion of Cinnamon and Mate. Excellent community. Give it a go!
Mylan Engel wrote a fantastic paper (albeit about childhood starvation) about how we are in fact morally obligated to donate to relief funds based on (in his words) beliefs we already hold. I highly recommend it. "Hunger, Duty and Ecology: On What We Owe Starving Human Beings"
How Github became less social
Then you just end up with the riff-raff who have $50 to blow. Something Awful charges $10 for an account, but there are plenty of moderators who will ban you if you're a shitheel; you then have to pay another $10 to re-activate your account. It works for them, but I think HN is too self-moderating for that to work--imagine if they auto-banned you when your karma dropped below 0, think of the system gaming that would occur to get others banned!
That's the thing - I currently am the design/web guy. But I would rather concentrate on a single area then be the guy who can do it all. Sure, it's nice to know every aspect of development, but I rather be REALLY good at one thing then be average across the border.

With that said, I think it's really our fault that there's really no clear distinction between the front-end (client side) vs. the back-end (server-side.) I've seen senior "front-end developer" who only uses jQuery because he doesn't know JavaScript. And it's funny that you bring up politics, because that guys would get mad at me because I would show him a easier way (in jQuery, mind you) for traversing the DOM.

Sometimes, I wish there's was a certification process to be able to call yourself a "designer", "developer", or "programmer". I think it would make finding job/candidates much easier.
Show HN: Droidmeter.com - I want to help you study the Android App Store
Right, we turned off server syncing for the demo. You'll see identical speed in the real app though. Both the demo and real version use local data stores to read and write data, server syncing happens in the background. Moving forward, that will also serve as the foundation for enabling offline functionality.

I'll start working on getting projects to save for the demo.

Thanks for giving it a test drive!
Considering the next 2 launches where successful I think he had reasonable expectations at the time. As CEO your in a strange place of needing to be advertise and create a positive image without creating unrealistic expectations so people trust what you say in six months.
TBH, I see VERY few "Show HN" posts. I would like to review a startup and give constructive criticism, but HN has been flooded with op-ed blog posts with sensationalist headlines, or articles that have no relevance whatsoever to HN. Maybe the lack of "Show HN" posts is due to others feeling the way you do. But continue to post. Don't let HN become another Reddit, 4chan, Digg, pick-your-poison.
That's absolutely the way it was meant to be read.
Free Darkorbit Accounts/Darkorbit accounts for free
darkorbit, darkorbit account for free, darkorbit fat, darkorbit france, free darkorbit accounts, free full elite, full elite darkorbit, how to get darkorbit account for free, lf4, mmo, vengeance, vru<p>France<p>level - 19 - VRU - rank colonel ~460,000
experience - ~1,900,000,000 honour- ~15,500,500
uridium - ~1,190,000 credits - 1,000,000,000
LF3- 35
SG3N B02- 34
G3N-7900- 21
CPUs- all trade Repair credits 1,011<p>x2 - 507 000 x3 - 184 000 sab - 18 000
x4 - 120 000
plt-2021 - 4200 pld-3030 - 2250 xenomit - 112 200<p>designs - Enforser, Bastion, Exalted, Veteran, Solace
pilot bio - 34
tech : slots - 2, Precision targeter 822, Energy leech - 11
skylab - all 20 lvl
galaxy gates: alpha - open + 34/34, beta - open + 40/48, gamma - open + 71/82<p><pre><code> DOWNLOAD<p></code></pre>
Global America<p>Ep : + 780.000.000
honor : + 4.500.000
ALL DESIGN with GOLIATH ORANGE
alpha : 1 open
beta : 0
gamma : 1 open
+ infini extra ( all extra and more in invontory ) 1590 repair credit and 140 jump credit
35 pilot bio
all skylbe lvl 20
seprom lvl 18
pet lvl 13
and premium
and Vru<p><pre><code> DOWNLOAD<p></code></pre>
Global Europe<p>Full elite Goliath level 17 account
Both Diminisher and Sentinel designs
All Galaxy gates Completed and 80% open
All equipment and extras.
Pilot Bio = 25/50
Full level 20 skylab with max resources
Premium activated
3 Tech production lines<p>Level 4 P.E.T<p><pre><code> DOWNLOAD<p></code>
The binary gsutil does have a multi-threaded mode for uploading many files simultaneously: https://developers.google.com/storage/docs/gsutil_reference_...

@iskander - do you have other approaches for uploading which you'd prefer?
Working with pixels is a privilege
Some people are capable of more, but for whatever reason have fallen into a rut of uselessness. For those people, a warning can help and they might even go on to become productive commenters. I've even made good friends out of people I nearly wrote off in the beginning. If he/she's not one of those people, the warning will do nothing, the hellban will come soon enough and my comment will have done no harm. I like to see people have a chance to better themselves, even if they probably won't take it.
when you go to a restaurant, aren't you implicitly trusting most of their staff? if i couldn't trust some company to take care of my phone for an hour, i certainly wouldn't trust them to serve me food.
Is there an easy way to capture scroll activity on a mac app? I'd love to analyze a data dump of scroll activity and active window.
New app vows to expand 'human potential through positive reinforcement'
Well said, there's nothing more I come to HN for than a positive, supportive community, even where something is wrong and needs to be improved.

I have noticed in the last year on here it's become a lot more like other sites with more general hacker interested threads and (maybe I'm wrong) less and less startup relevant stuff. I know HN is for both, but I personally come here for startup signal.
Gel Packs! Cool!
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Bio-neural_gel_pack

(How nobody has reference this?)
> The way to know if a coffee shop is good is to ask for a quattro ristretto with milk

But I just want coffee flavored coffee.
could not have said it better
Do you have any sources for the technical arguments to why this is not feasible?
Here's a perfect example from a few days ago. Read the most voted-up comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4340014
FYI - you can technically upload directly to BigQuery and not go through cloud storage. It just tends to be a bit more error-prone in normal implementations. We're working on documenting resumable upload to handle error cases better.
That's fair; I also find trying to get books off of the Amazon store irritating. I personally have a nook, but I'll buy eBooks from any store. Regardless, I have to either go through the Kindle desktop app or (ugh) Adobe Digital Editions before I can get it into Calibre, and it's always more of a hassle than it should be.
Samsung's case that it didn't copy the iPhone and iPad—in pictures
Nice. Was the cop a Linux user? (Just kidding).
If your strand length is less than or equal to the read length of your sequencer, and you have the address blocks at the start of every sequence, you don't really need to worry about assembly. Read depth and/or a checksum of some kind will take care of errors in sequencing, and with short strands or compression of some kind, long repeats aren't much of a problem either.
http://waynehale.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/how-we-nearly-lost...

(Linked on TFA, but here for the curious).

Edit: and, that really is a good and powerful essay.
SpinPunch (YC S12) Aims To Build Faster, Prettier HTML5 Games
I completely agree.

Kindle is great for cover-to-cover reading, but for reference I will always prefer dead-tree (but will settle for searchable pdfs)
Hi, I'm Winnie and am excited about data & research. Feel free to leave me questions you would like to have answered or email me directly at winnie@droidmeter.com !
The Google Rank-Modifying Spammers Patent
It can, it just needs to be position as fixed.
I'm interested in hearing more about this RPi OS. Would you mind sharing? So as not to take the thread too far off course: my email is in my profile.
I don't think it's beneficial to this discussion to be so cynical about sw007's intentions or motives. Many contributors to the site have multiple accounts, or have moved from an older to a newer one. Attacking his/her credibility doesn't further the conversation, especially as a number of people seem to agree that it's a point worth discussing.

It's almost besides the point, but if you'd researched a bit further you would have found a post confirming that this is an alias of another account.
The linked text is from the 90s. Not exactly news. But Plan 9 was a big improvement over Unix. Unfortunately, good things are often ignored.
There were some polls over the years, for example age:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2175588

And a comment has links to older polls

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2180045

Same for Operating System:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1511643

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2303726

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3786674

gender

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591309

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1421169

and region

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3298905

googling for:

poll [xyz] site:news.ycombinator.com

will get you most of the results you want :)

I hope you can extract and share some interesting data from there :)
halvm.org seems to be down (http://isitup.org/halvm.org). However, there is a summary here[1] and the source is on GitHub[2].

[1]: http://corp.galois.com/halvm/
[2]: https://github.com/GaloisInc/HaLVM
This looks really interesting. The Android app ecosystem is pretty messy, making some sense of it would be very useful for my company (www.cabanaapp.com).
While I can't empathize with you because I am a programmer, I feel like PHP isn't a great language to start on simply due to the fact that you have to coordinate a lot of non-programming things (servers, remote editing, HTML/CSS, etc.). I think you'd be more successful starting with Python or something else with a REPL.

PHP might be easier to learn on now than it was for me 8 years ago, I don't really know.
Considering it's probably tricky to programmatically determine what a nasty comment is, I'm assuming you'll figure out whether a comment is good/bad based on the ratio of upvotes to downvotes, and penalize those who voted against the grain.

I get this, but wouldn't this lead to making HN more conformist than it sometimes already is? "Either you agree with the majority of us about X, or..."
You are mistaken. Under International law, embassies are on sovereign soil of the guest country.
Nexus 7 Review, Part 2: The Hardware - Scott's Thoughts
Not free exactly. It's still locked in the kindle cage. You can't just download it as a PDF.
As soon as they get a whiff that people are doing this they'll just block the ip range. Site scrapping is big big business, and a cat and mouse game. Yes, it can be done though, you're right.
At the multi-billion dollar mark, though, it doesn't really matter that much now does it? :(
I suspect that George's lab used a sensible encoding scheme. They're fairly sharp.

I can't find a copy of the original article, but it's certainly more informative than some science journalism fluff piece.
The Single Most Important Object in the Global Economy
Ways to Level Up Your Sublime Text Editing
I used to pay 995$ a month US for a fulltime programer in Manila through a contracting firm.... completely good code for the basic project proof of concept stuff we were doing at the time (1999-2004'ish).... This seems no different, just adjusted to reflect cost.
Now this is a great idea.
I stand corrected. I personally like what Facebook now does (they used to have the same problem). They put the same information in a tile at the bottom of their right pane, which is fixed.
That's a really interesting idea considering the limited resources of the device.

Thank's for the suggestion; I'll check out the HaLVM site once it comes back up.

Alen (author of the post)
Ah yes, it has moved to github now
One of the reasons for the negative comments might be the sheer number of applications being developed and showcased.

Hence, many of the projects tend to bring in some deja-vu and the commenters are drawn to the lack of features more than usual.
Looks terrific, the Android ecosystem really needs this.
You'd trust the people at an average fast food joint (predominantly minimum-wage teenagers) to keep track of your phone? You have much more faith than me...
HN is just like any other social network.

I've run a social network for writers called Scribophile for almost 5 years now. People have said exactly what you're saying in this post about my site, all the way from day 1 to the present day. Too much negativity, people are out to get me, everybody is mean, person X is poisonous but I'm actually very nice, things used to be better in the "good old days".

But as an impartial observer (I, strangely enough, don't really participate in my own site), I can say that things haven't really changed that much in 5 years. There were nice people then, there are nice people now. There were jerks then, there were jerks now.

Any place you get messy, emotional people together in an anonymous social situation, this is going to happen. What is also guaranteed to happen--and I think your post is illustrative of this--is long-timers will grow bored and decide to drift off. A guy (I can't remember his name right now) wrote an insightful post about this and called it "evaporative cooling". It happens to every single community, in mine, and in HN.

Does that mean HN is on an irreversible slide into decadence? Not really. It just means you're over the community, and it's time for you to move on. In reality I doubt the general vibe of HN has changed that much over the years. Otherwise nobody would be here.

However as an administrator of a community, I can tell you that I certainly do not appreciate disappointed, emotional, "it's not the good old days"-style, long-winded farewells. If people aren't finding a site useful, then just leave, or send a private note to the administrator with your thoughts. Absolutely nothing good comes out of a public complaint-fest. Sorry if that sounds harsh and brutal.
One thing that would solve the problem with growth would be partitioning the "community" into smaller groups that are manageable by each user. Reddit does it through subreddits and it works somewhat. I would favor an approach where users could white/gray/blacklist other users, and use these as modifiers to the overall score.
Thanks, that makes sense. But how to you get the address block at the start of each sequence?
maybe the new kids don't know any better? can we crowd-educate them as to acceptable comments? stackoverflow has used strict categorization of "reasons for flagging post" to great success in influencing how the crowd moderates.

"-1, poor tone"
"-1, offtopic"
"-1, factually incorrect"
Visa is huge in Brazil. However, OP is not exactly in the credit card processing market (cf. eduardordm's comments in this thread).
http://pornterest.net
it's probably tricky to programmatically determine what a nasty comment is

I've actually been working on that problem with a bot that assists in moderating a subreddit using a text classifier. It's tricky, and needs more work, but it is not impossible.
Understanding the CSS3 Flexbox (Flexible Box Layout Module)
Because we can't all be an architect AND a forman/plumber/electrician/roofer. How can you be really good at something if you don't practice and learn it constantly? I'm guessing you've mastered or actively learning HTML/CSS/JS/PERL/PHP/Python/RUBY/Rails/.NET/JAVA/C/C++/MySQL/Casandra/Go/ActionScript/etc? I mean, where do you stop?

Heck, even CSS has SASS/LESS/bootstrap/CSS3/browser-specific declaration and don't even get me started on JS libraries.

And I don't understand your condescending tone of what a "web designer" does. What makes that job any less important than a programmer?
"your estimates will be wrong. Even if you spend months doing them. Then you're in the same spot"

If you spend months doing estimates you will never do "nothing else". At the very least, you will have a much learnt a lot about the problem domain, and thus you will have a better overview of the work to do. You likely also will have discovered a few pitfalls to avoid, and you already will have changed the requirements of the project at the moment when it is cheapest: before you have a pile of code.
> So I'm going to try to see if it's possible to identify people who consistently upvote nasty comments and if so count their votes less.

Why don't you automate this process? All of the people you upvote have the most credibility, the posts they upvote have a little less, and people who upvote those posts gain a little credibility too, and so on. Tuned right, voting itself becomes a function of whatever the base of the community is.

New users -- depending on what kind of posts they upvote and who upvotes their posts -- must be able to gain credibility quickly, not just by upvoting the top posts, but picking winning and losing comments in the long term.
Major iPhone security flaw uncovered by hacker
Supercut: sunglasses from the movies
Yes absolutely, I wasn't putting that in because the case was damning enough without involving the energy loss in charging the thing.

Though the comments suggesting the electric engine is a compressor to "refill" the bottles on the go could need that reality check.
This change was made to fall in line with other .ini parsers, it is after all an "official" configuration file format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INI_file

Using # was an extension on top of what is allowed in Windows...
Finding the Facebook Magic
Upvote here for visibility http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4397245
uncoder0 made a torrent, upvote here for visibility http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4397245
A thousandth take on the Twitter API kerfluffle: It’s not about the nerds