skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wish I didn't have to read Techcrunch's hollow journalism to learn about the latest YC class, because many of them seem like legitimate business cases working on fairly ambitious ideas.

The problem is, every Techcrunch post about a YC startup reads like a press release; completely devoid of any independent research, analysis, or, well, journalism. This author's most insightful analysis about the market is that "shipping and distribution" are "an essential part" of global trade. Wow! I never thought about it that way!

What's the size of the "small logistics services providers" market, who are the major potential customers and partners? How hard will it be to compete with established players like UPS and FedEX? How much is the company charging for the product? Isn't it ridiculous that the founder thinks he can pull a viral coefficient of 50?

I know this is nothing new, but seriously Techcrunch: you can do better than this.
Plenty of people have voiced objection to the lockdown of mobile devices by other vendors.

The reason for this particular fooferaw, I think, is the misconception that this will apply to x86.

It was my goal to clear that up, not to specifically endorse Microsoft-bashing.
yea, just look at the http headers, here's the call: http://www.nfl.com/liveupdate/scores/bigPlayVideos.json?rand...

just make your own tstamp for random
I dunno, it sort of reminds me of the Beatles (another Jobs favorite). John being serious and political, Paul being silly and saccharine. The combination was part of the magic, and everyone had their favorite. I think if you fully digitalized the software, the overall package would be too severe. If you made the hardware whimsical, it would be sickening.

Part of it is that the hardware is a fixed thing. You have it or you don't, and its job is to contain the software. With the software there is a lot more freedom of expression because there is choice. Apple should take that further and let people swap out the official apps.
What's a cliff agreement?
You are correct. Law enforcement involved in these investigations absolutely looks at CP. If they confiscate a computer with 10,000 CP images, they're looking at every one, day in and day out, and putting together a case for the prosecution. I'm glad that's not my job, and thankful for those whose it is.
I think this lays the real issue out but buries it:

> The only way to guarantee any visibility is to time very carefully using HNPickup, be a celebrity like John Gruber or Dustin Curtis, organize an up vote cabal, or write sensationalist content.

HN has become mainstream and it's subject to all the spam, pandering, submission strategies, power users and all the other bullshit that comes with that territory.

I'd start by getting rid of every user who's submission to comments ratio is ridiculous and every website that would be better suited to digg or reddit.
I read these articles bemoaning Apple's skeuomorphic application UIs, usually evoking the spirit of Dieter Rams to put their point across. In this instance it's classed as "horrific, dishonest and childish crap".

I understand the strong feelings of dislike, but I'd much rather be pointed towards alternative designs or even better alternative apps as a means to get away from the designs. Malady without remedy never sits well.
Forking the specs for an API feels just like forking an open source project. I wouldn't want to drudge through Facebook's API code, but it would be nice to comment on changes, have a changelog, and make them auto validate against their own specs.
YC relies on a constant flow of grist for the VC mill.

If YC News doesn't encourage budding entrepreneurs to throw themselves at long-shots, and into the VC startup culture, then it doesn't serve pg's interests.
"If I were looking to become a DBA today I wouldn't bother with PostgreSQL at all. I would learn all of the NoSQL databases because that is where all of the interest is right now."

That's what I was responding to. "looking to become a DBA" does not remotely imply someone who already "knows" Oracle and MySQL.
Great point. And, I would add, the statue of limitations is about to run out on prosecutions for the mortgage crisis which has had practically zero convictions. The savings and loans crisis of late 80's had 1000 felony convictions. We maybe on our way to being like Brazil.
Designer tech gadgets for enthusiasts
as seen on gizmodo, msnbc, laughing squid
Basically, I just need my OS to be a unix. On the desktop I also want to have great UI/UX (font rendering is part of it. Can't stand for weird font rendering on Windows, things are better on Ubuntu though.) So OS X is my choice.

I also like such aspects of it as support of multitouch trackpad gestures, Recovery HD, hard drive encryption out of the box, nice backup solution built-in, awesome application ecosystem.
Good point. Especially in the UK, the so-called "good guys" are a hair's breadth away from a doctrine of thought-crime, and pre-crime.
What is the HN take on Branch?
I have yet to see much conversation on this new platform here.
Oh _good grief_.
IM Chat Interface Designs for OSX Applications
Chris: I know you're a vim guy, so I know you'll be doing vim bindings eventually. I also know that vim emulation modes are always incomplete. I'd like to offer my services as a vim-mode tester. I vow to provide extremely robust feedback. I'm willing to offer this service for free, so that I can ensure Light Table's vim subset is a superset of my brain's vim subset ;-)
Reward users for browsing "New"

This is an interesting suggestion.

I think of looking at new submissions as a kind of "service to the community"-- more specifically, to the community I want HN to be. If the front page is filled with links I don't value, then it's partly my fault if I've failed to upvote submissions I would rather see on the front page (this, of course, means browsing "new" is a reward unto itself, but it's a somewhat abstract reward nonetheless).

Sometimes I wish HN wouldn't track average karma. That discourages me from commenting on new submissions that I believe won't get many eyeballs. Intellectually, I know my average karma shouldn't mean anything to me, but the fact that it's there for all the world to see exerts a gravity of its own. "You get what you measure."
Yes they can get a warrant, and they do, but there's honestly so much of it out there that there's only so many hours in a day for investigators to subpoena information, arrest someone, do forensics on their computer, prosecute the suspect, etc etc. Far less serious offense, but it's similar to how the RIAA/MPAA can only go after so many music/movie pirates out there.
The convenience for the language parser at least translates into convenience for structured editing in the case of Lisp.

I always miss the convenience of modifying code with Paredit when I'm working in another language.
Gotta agree with this. Most of the really bad comments I've seen on HN wind up downvoted to light grey. Here, negative feedback directly to a creator is almost always constructive, even if you don't like the tone.

It's still the best you're going to get on any public forum I'm aware of.

> TechCrunch comments?

And those have real Facebook identities attached to everyone. I'm amazed at the things people will say even when it has their name on it and will be out there forever.
That wouldn't make a difference. When a company is failing, investors are always first in line to get their money back, and in this case there's a lot of investor money to be paid back before anyone else sees a dime.
"At present, TOR is simply enabling child predators to be better child predators."

As are their cars, their phones, the air they breathe, etc.

When are smart people going to stop falling into this fallacy?
I'm enjoying the new version much more than the original. Much less buggy, smoother and an overall pleasant experience.

What I like most is a better way for me to use Google Docs. I'm more inclined to use it over Office simply by virtue of how the app handles things. Well done :)
I wish to note that what can be better than one brain's subset: the union of two brain subsets! Hint Hint.
Jquery.PageGuide by Sprint.ly
While my personal opinion regarding skeumorphic design falls very much in line with the author's, I don't think that there is a contradiction in Apple's design philosophy.

The hardware is minimal because its true purpose is to let the software shine. It's a magical box that can become anything, from a calendar to a photobooth to a music studio. Apple's visual design choices in software have always seemed to fall under the skeuomorphic end of things (faux brushed aluminum?) and having a minimal hardware accentuates these flourishes.
Lisp quotes does have plenty of advantages for human reading, though.
These are the moments when I love HN. Some hard facts here, thanks for explaining!
OnLive Shutting Down?
Sun is the most perfect sphere ever observed in nature
(2) probably would not work. Commenters could troll, and then the community replying in disagreement would up-vote their comment.

Here are my ideas:
(A)Not showing someone their karma score ever, unless it is negative.

(B)Leaving a line between the comment field and the reply button saying, "Stay constructive."

(C)That line of text could link to the guidelines.

(D)Detect if someone says 'idiot' and then change the line to, "You said 'idiot', do you still want to post?"
I cannot judge whether I'm getting swapped in a battery that is going to die.

Sure, you can. When's the last time the battery display on your laptop or cell phone lied to you? Battery monitoring tech has been reliable since the lead-acid days, and it's only gotten better over the past few years.

There'd be some redundancy in most cases anyway. A sports car might require two or three standard battery units, each of which would consist of numerous individually-monitored cells. An 18-wheeler might require thirty or forty of the same standard battery packages, or perhaps ten of a larger form factor (think 'AA' versus 'C' or 'D'). In both cases the vehicles would be able to limp on half-power or less, in the event of battery failures.

This objection is a complete non-starter, no pun intended.

Edit: By the way, those swappable battery modules are going to last a lot longer since they won't need to be fast-charged.
Because capitalist society is unable to provide full employment.
I didn't say anything about the language being the problem. I just was not able to find any simple contact info and I informed him his site does not render correctly using a comment. I didn't say I'm assuming anything. You haven't read my comment closely.
Five ways to shutdown Windows 8
Mars, Equality, or Both?
I could see keyword association much like PG's email spam filter working for this.
A "cliff" refers to a time period that must pass before an employee's options vest. It's typical for startups to offer options with a 1 year "cliff" to keep employees from walking away with equity if they don't stick around.

Say an early hire is offered 4% equity with no cliff. That means that .083% will vest each month, and that early employee could walk away with more than tenth of a point of equity after 2 months, likely before they contribute enough value to the company to justify such equity.

Startup employees should view equity as a bonus anyway, and make sure they're earning a market rate unless they're earning really significant equity, because best case scenario the equity will be significantly diluted before an exit, and more likely, the company won't make it to exit, and the stock options will therefore be worthless.

That being said, if the rumor in the article is true, its still a massive dick move, and it probably also cost the company a substantial amount of money in severance pay.

EDIT: It looks like it's Illegal in california (where OnLive is located) to claw back stock options by firing employees without cause [1]. Therefore, if the rumor is true, then OnLive probably had to pay the employees some cash equivalent of the stock options and get them to sign a termination agreement.

P.S. I'm not a lawyer and have nothing more than a cursory understanding of this stuff. This is definitely not legal advice and you should verify everything I say on your own.

[1] http://www.paulhastings.com/assets/publications/1443.pdf
I would agree, the ideal solution would be a self-organizing trust network where higher-quality comments tended to be promoted. I've previously suggested one way to implement such a system here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3473753 .
The analytics track the impact of papers that you have uploaded to Academia.edu. More and more scientists are aware that they want a profile where they can easily share their work, and which celebrates them as a scientist. Academia.edu helps scientists create that online presence. The dashboard is about helping you quantify the impact of that online presence.

Historically one has had to wait 3-5 years for citation metrics to start trickling through for a given paper you have published. The metrics on this dashboard are real-time. You can upload a paper to Academia.edu, and see 24 hours later that you have 100 views. As scientists get used to knowing the real time metrics around their research, they will never go back. Real-time metrics around distribution will be, from this point onwards, a permanent feature of the scientific process.
The only way to protect against this kind of abuse is to unionize.
How about "Be kind and constructive." instead?
I thought this headline was startling, and after reading through the article submitted here, I hunted up more reporting on the issue. The abstract of the underlying research report

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/08/15/science.1...

leads to the full report in the journal Science for people who can get through the Science paywall, and other reporting on the research report from Science staff writers

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/08/sun-slimmer-th...

and from other journalists

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/08/120817-sun-s...

http://www.nature.com/news/sun-stays-nearly-spherical-even-w...

fills in some of the details.
I'd like the app to check prices for me at a number of nearby stores so I can buy the stuff I always buy, but at the lowest prices. I've got about 3-4 stores that I visit pretty regularly, and I'm always trying to optimize on prices. Do that and I'll buy it (I'll get a smart phone too)!
Oracle might be popular, but few places can afford, or justify paying for it. MySQL is mostly popular because everyone was busy cargo culting based on what Facebook and YouTube were doing instead of evaluating the choices on their merits. Luckily most of those people have moved on to cargo culting NoSQL choices.

If you want a solid open-source database, especially one that has a future, learn Postgres.
There's also a client for the Blackberry.

It sucks, but it'll do in a pinch.
Sorry, for clarification, do you mean get rid of users who have a high submission/comment ratio, or low?
The title of your piece suggests a satirical tone and I was ready for a delicious morsel. Alas, I could not detect the slightest hint of sarcasm or of a darker, ulterior aim. It could still be there, mind you, but on subtler wavelength than my resonant cavity can detect. It might as well have been titled "HN Considered Harmful", I suppose.
If your options (1 option = chance to buy 1 share, at a price that's typically fixed when the options was issued) vest over a three year period, it means you would be issued 1/(12*3) of your total options per month, for three years.

A common clause in such a vesting schedule is a "1 year cliff", meaning you don't actually get any options granted to you for the first year of employment. After a year, you get a third (1 of 3 years) worth of options in a lump sum, then the usual monthly amount each month after that.

If you fire employees before they reach their cliff, they don't get any options, and won't benefit at all from any liquidation event / sale / etc.
(Shrug) They're not slow at mandating things like 55 MPG CAFE regulations, or at declaring CO2 a toxic pollutant. They would have a perfectly legitimate role to play in standardizing battery packages, IMO.

This is probably the kind of thing that would need to be done by international agreement, if it can be done at all.
Thanks egor :) . The pie chart with everything in shades of blue is a bit confusing, but bar charts do make things much clearer to visualize.
Let's post this again for the cheap seats shall we! So renditioning for torture: http://www.hrw.org/news/2006/11/09/sweden-violated-torture-b.... And life imprisonment in somewhere like GITMO (a la Bradley Manning) is just fine I suppose! Oh yes, I'm sure if you were Assange you'd feel SO much better now! Wake the fuck up! Law as written bears NO resemblance to what happens in practice (when it doesn't suit the Powers That Be), and that is just a very small part of what Assange is fighting against. Goddamn it gets tiring having to persuade/enlighten people who don't even realise Assange and Wikileaks are highting THEIR BATTLE for them! Show some bloody gratitude and at least educate yourself about the realities of this sordid world we live in. I think its the LEAST you can do to say thanks to people who ARE actually putting their life on the line for these principles.
OnLive is the ideal service for cpu/gpu games, and works great against cheaters in multiplayer games (No more transparent or wireframe walls, boxes around enemy players, and other tricks)

but then most social/casual games are not cpu/gpu hungry....

I really want technology like OnLive to succeed... There is Gaikai too
How the votes get turned into "punishment" will have to be tested and tweaked. I think it is worth a try, because it sets the expectation for what your votes mean be the nature of the button that you are about to press.

You seem to be thinking that this is largely trollish behavior. I suspect, however, that most of it comes from ignorance of the expectations of the community. I'm not sure there is a fix for the trolls. But for noobs that watch reality tv shows and want to come here and be the acerbic judge I think we can stop it by keeping the behavioral expectations in the forefront.

The flaw with the idea isn't what you say. I think it's important to expect decent, reasonable behavior. The flaw is, 'ok, we have two buttons. Now what?'

I would start with having the quality score 'float' the article and pretty much ignore the agree/disagree score in karma metrics. But I would probably keep that a secret.
It just takes one nonrandom player in the pool of players for a more advanced strategy to gain an advantage. Consequently, it is almost certain that, given a tournament of an arbitrary set of RPS players, a very sophisticated RPS player will end up winning, whereas random players will always be relegated to mediocre results.
I read questions in the Ask section more then I read the main news topics.
Nokia's phones show some signs of whimsy. I think you are right about the severity of all tech design, but I'm not convinced hardware can't be whimsical.
Definitely. We have benefited a lot from what others have made public and will do the same.

I've also been working on a post that breaks down some of the performance metrics we saw from our celebrity social media tests.
More Reasons Why the Publishing Industry is Dead
Why isn’t Twitter charging for their API?
Perhaps when I get a chance to build my own data center for Blekko I'll be able to actually run the experiment [1]. Then I'll have a better answer. But would like to share a bit my reasoning.

You are correct that my concept 'threw away' the heat generated by compressing the air. However, since any energy stored at all was collected from a previously unharnessed source (the wind blowing past the data center) it might be more accurate to say that it would not collect all that it 'could'. But here is a very important distinction, the heat from air compression is 'low grade' heat, which is to say the delta between it and ambient is small enough that harvesting it in meaningful amounts is quite difficult. You also need to consider that this thing is operating next to a data center which is running an evaporative cooler 24/7 to pull excess heat from inside the box and dump it into the air outside the box. Basically spending energy to move the heat outside.

So from this side of the screen, to accept you point that not capturing the heat generated from compression was 'throwing it away' I would need to have some credible way of utilizing the captured heat.

Looking at it from the overall energy exchange picture, you've got the kinetic energy of the wind, with is 1/2mv^2 where m is the mass of the wind moving pass the windmill. Some percentage of that you convert to mechanical energy which runs the air pumps and some of that becomes heat in the bearings and linkages. The mechanical energy then compresses the air which by the ideal gas law goes up in temperature proportional to the change in volume. Just sitting there, the tanks holding the air cool off, losing this heat to the surrounding atmosphere. We could insulate the tanks to keep it inside (and pressures up) but it turns out that we'd like to harvest heat energy out of the data center later so we let this heat leave by convection. The tanks then go down in pressure thanks to that same ideal gas law.

So when we use this air, we decompress it inside our data center. This allows heat in the data center to be absorbed by the expanding air, which saves us the energy we would have been using to run the evaporative coolers to pull it out and increases this energy available in the air as it increases that static pressure differential between ambient and the decompressed air. So we 'get it back' as it were, in a positive way. Running it through the engines allows us to then harness the pressure differential, and if it comes out of the engines still 'colder' than the data center air we can inject it right into the regular atmosphere of the data center to offset warm air that is already there.

[1] Facebook also has a data center up there in the region and if someone there wants to pick up the ball and run with it that would be pretty cool to. You could write it up for the open compute stuff. Of course you still have to figure out how to get an MDI engine. If Tata ever shipped I considered buying cars, throwing away the body and just pulling out the engines. That would work but requires Tata to actually have a product you can buy.
And is there tracking code or some API available if authors don't want to/can't upload their papers to Academia.edu?

Edit: Rephrased as a general question.
I think showing veteran users in another color would really help a lot to set the tone. If the community rewards snarky posts with many upvotes, this alone will not be enough though.

Perhaps marking up veteran users by karma and/or seniority and weighting upvotes by the same metric?
While not all of us can spend the time to become an HN celebrity, there are many of us who have worked to get a high karma over time. HN should highlight the names of such users in purple, similar to the way it highlights newbies with green.

PG tried that (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467181), except with orange instead of purple.
"Sometimes I wish HN wouldn't track average karma. That discourages me from commenting on new submissions that I believe won't get many eyeballs."

Maybe some sort of comment karma normalization based on the upvotes for the topic as a whole or the total number of votes on the topic, to try to adjust for popularity of the topic vs quality of the comment...