skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agree. Creditcard payments, however small, seems to be the by far most efficient way of filtering spam. CC payments make banning have a real effect.

Metafilter is the NIH syndrome on HN.

The problem with the New page is the extreme volume of entries due to everybody being able to post. Voting only goes so far, it doesn't work when you have too much stuff and users feel that their time spent voting doesn't make any significant difference.

The signal-to-noise ratio on the New page must increase before most users will go to the trouble of voting.
This. The trackpad is godly. I haven't seen a PC equivalent.
Noam Chomsky, had a rather simple and brilliant method of calculating how much coverage particular topics got. It's used in manufacturing consent. He or some grad students, collected all column inches related to East Timor and compared against the Khmer Rouge atrocities coverage in Cambodia. They found that the coverage of the atrocities far far outweighed the coverage of the "US supported Indonesian invasion and subjugation of East Timor".

It is this point I feel the parent is making, that the amount of coverage a topic receives is rooted in the propaganda aims of the powers that be and in the biases they wish to instill or are already instilled in the media consuming public.
After reading this post, and trying backlift out, which by the way looks Very promising and easy to use (to boot)!

I came across the following bug: https://github.com/backlift/docs/issues/1

Cant wait for it to be resolved so I can give backlift a good go.
Because we need an aggregator. It's not like a blogging engine, where I can just use Wordpress. A social network needs people.

http://status.net/wiki/List_of_servers
http://encyclomundi.org/wiki/List_of_Independent_Statusnet_I...
http://jpope.org/federatedusers

What's stopping anyone from building an aggregator?

Say, everybodytwitnow.com, where you can register your OStatus page, which then gets followed by the server and publically displayed? Bam, it's like Twitter, only actually cool.
I've seen that before and it's a really horribly ill-conceived memo. As in, almost certainly helping child abusers justify raping kids levels of bad.

Why? Because it takes the most brutal, violent examples of child pornography that the FBI could find - the stuff that from the discussions I've seen even most pedophiles are disgusted by - and uses that as its justification for why child porn is wrong. Now, this is very effective as a shock tactic for convincing the general public that child porn is evil and must be wiped out at any cost. Unfortunately, one of the main ways pedophiles justify acting on their urges is that they're not like the bad child rapists who torture kids for kicks, they actually care about the children they coerce into having sex with them and would "never harm them". (Again, I've seen this happen in multiple discussions and I believe it's even been documented by various researchers.) Documents like that FBI memo which use kids being tortured as their sole justification for why child porn is wrong can only further help them rationalise their actions.

I know SRS over on Reddit use that document to justify why they won't debate child porn and I have a feeling that's where you got it from. They've basically made it impossible to point out just how big a mistake they're making.
What Terrifies Google Execs?
Let me turn the question around. I have about 400GB of data (spread over ~3000 HDF files, each containing 42 compressed columns). The only way I can imagine using BigQuery on this data is if I convert it all to csv files (which will take a while) and upload them to google storage (which will also take a while). Is there any alternative?
3 Teens Cyberbullying Security Tips for Mobile Phones
Teens spend a great deal of time hanging out with each other; they are also extremely susceptible to peer pressure. Bullying has always been a major issue with them.
If you are interested in a real social network that is actually useful for programmers, have a look at Ohloh:

https://www.ohloh.net/

No matter how great your domain name (programming.com) is, and how well designed your landing page is: As long as you don't offer something that is significant better than Ohloh, I don't see how this project could gain any traction.
If you look at the user profiles, it appears that the image is a photo of the administrator (http://programming.com/users).
What algorithms are used for apps like '750Words'?
Show HN: Pasteboard - HTML5 Web App for Quick & Easy Image Sharing (Open Source)
Which begs the question: when are PC makers going to take their fingers off their a$$ and start producing decent hardware? (with a non Linux-restricting implementation of secure boot, KTHXBYE)
Suddenly this thread comes to mind http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396747

All you comments may be valid, but for me it just came across as quite vicious.
Oops! Paraphrase then o_O

How the f did I jumble it up like that? I said that so often over the last 20 years... huh. Thanks, better late than never. I Should read the book again.
Here is some - the homepage is unusable on an iPhone.
But is there a "Hacker News Manifesto"? No there isn't. HN is what it is because of the community. Sure, there should be moderators to control the profanity level.

But overall, if content is interesting and it's up-voted, it means it's meaningful to someone and therefore should maintain its place on HN.

The content should be driven by the community - if it's too startup related or too technology related is really a subjective matter.
http://www.istockphoto.com/search/lightbox/3750742
I don't understand the order either.

I've resigned myself to using the search for posts with "Ask HN:" ordered by date, not 100% I know but better than the alternative.

Clicky: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=Ask...

And a Clicky for "Show HN" http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=Sho...
Huh? The 90s called and they want their cliches back.

All Macs come with very capable multi touch mice or touchpads. Clicking with two fingers (or more) for secondary mouse buttons is perfectly convenient and two finger scrolling is just awesome.

Are there no drivers or what?
Erythrophobia
Everyone Hates Julian Assange
Searching for a Reputable Online Escort Service?
OS X expects two mouse buttons too, I'm not sure what your point is.
Not using the arrow keys was a no-brainer back in the day of slow dial-up connections. Sending ^[OA over the wire instead of just h was a really big deal and when your connection dropped a byte you ended up with garbage in your files if you used the arrow keys. Having that sort of pain associated with their use has stuck with me ever since.
I've got a Macbook 7,1 with Ubuntu 12.04 running Xmonad, and its by far the smoothest linux experience I've ever had. I ran it under Gnome Unity for a bit and that was fine too. I've never had the mouse issues you refer to. The trackpad works just as well as it did until OS X.
I actually dual-boot Arch on my mid-2011 Macbook Pro, and two mouse buttons has been the least of my problems -- you can configure Synaptics to recognize a click on the touchpad with two fingers as a right-click, just like OS X. (You can even set it up to recognize a three-finger click as a middle click, which OS X doesn't do.)

The only real issue I have with Linux is that something keeps eating my bootloader, so I have to keep a GRUB boot CD around to boot into it.
No internet.No data charges.But you get everything.
Ah, so the admin's photo is a fake (http://programming.com/root).
That was my assumption by the end of the story. The bluntness of the explanation was more for effect or maybe how things were eventually interpreted by the workers, not what was actually said.
My constructive comment: people would be more inclined to test the site and provide feedback if they didn't have to request and wait for an invitation to even look at it and get a basic idea of its features.
I am so much annoyed by narrow minded skill choice "c/c++/sqlite/java/...". I have used quite a few technologies, yet my best skills are that I can learn new things and I know how to use a bug tracker (and others of course).

Those skill choices are OK in a technical forum, but not on a "recruiting" site. There is so much more to life than a technical skill.
They're teaching us this in ComputerScience and I wonder if this is total crap or not. Can you please shed light into this?

"In humans, the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA, Germ. DNS) is the carrier of genetic information, and the main constituent of the chromosomes.

DNA is a chain-like polymer of nucleotides, which differ in their nitrogen bases (Thymin/Cytosin bzw. Adenin/Guanin,)
The alphabet of the code is therefore: {Thymin, Cytosin, Adenin, Guanin,} or also { T, C, A, G }
Three consecutive bases form a word
So there are 43 = 64 combinations per word
so the word length is ld (64) bits = 6 bits
A gene contains about 200 words
A chromosome contains about 104 to 105 genes
The number of chromosomes per cell nucleus is 46 in humans
The stored data per nucleus have, a volume of 6 bit * 200 * 10^5 * 46 = 55200 bit * 10^5 * 5 * 10^9 bit * * 10^9 Byte = 1 GByte"
comments [ 1820 days ago ]:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46386
Thinkpads have an understated, timeless design, superior to almost all competition, Macs included. The only distinguishing quality of Macs is their built quality - but that's not exactly a good reason to buy an ugly laptop.

Of course, most people have pretty childish tastes and prefer shiny things. But I guess de gustibus non est disputandum.

[And yes, I do feel like I have a bit too much karma... ;]
Someone needs a patent on patents to stop this insanity.
This article from a fedora developer seemed a bit more hacker newsish to me:

Playing with Thunderbolt under Linux on Apple hardware

http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/15948.html
One of the things that won't change immediately, but will change over the long term is the availability of people familiar with MySQL.

With the cost structure described in the article, MySQL will start disappearing from university database courses. I used it when I taught databases. (It's bad enough that some of them use Access, but at least MySQL was supported for most.) This is double trouble, as MySQL Workbench was an introductory tool for many database features.

This is the reason (IMNSHO) Apple spent so much money in the 90s putting their software in schools, and why Microsoft has done the same this century at the university level. Software is a "gateway drug", and Oracle may be killing that.
There's nothing quite like reading a post with the words de gustibus non est disputandum while the poster debates matters of taste.
Hackitat - A film about political hacking, world wide
This article is kind of only half-thought through. Facebook is making contact to the user on behalf of this person that claims to be 'advancetehri', it is not a 'cold' invite by Facebook. This user 'advancetehri' used the invite a user feature and put this person's number in.

Evil plan to grab new users? No.

I feel like a vast majority of people take every single chance they get to argue that Facebook is out to get them.
Great going guys on getting a product launched.

Try to ignore the majority of comments from people offering nothing more than a self promotion of how much of a cynic they are.

Some thoughts on the site:

1. That photo needs to change, I personally like it in the same way I love parody twitter accounts like hipster programmer. However, some will view it as condescending.

2. While you're in private alpha and that's all good, if someone is singing in with a Gtihub profile it's more than likely they're a value to what you're working on. Don't make them jump through hoops to obtain an alpha code, just let them on.

3. I think you should integrate with Github on an individuals profile to browse someones repos and comment on these.

4. When I see the profile I think of CV, I'm not sure why but I keep looking for an export to PDF button. Maybe it's the recommendation feature or the layout, either way if you're not trying to become a programmers CV something needs to change here. If that is your focus then I'd say mission accomplished.

Just my thoughts and kudos on launching as opposed to sitting on HN putting down others work.
They are looking a for a positive spin they can give to wall-street. If they release new stats on user growth still exploding to wall-street, that might reduce the hammering of their stocks. Sheer desperation as tough times call for desperate measures.
Looking forward to try this out for a terminal based streaming-data feed rendering library for columnar data. The curses module in python has been ... interesting ... so any alternative is welcome.
Hey, how about fixing the technical incompetence of the site?

Like the offensive "you're posting too fast" bullshit, when you haven't posted for hours?

Yeah, that would be a good start.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4394973
After having difficulty trying to write a console application with python/curses, this looks a much nicer way of doing it.
There are technological solutions to some of the problems.

For example, there is an increasing tendency to create dummy accounts for the sole purpose of dissing another user without getting your own account dirty. I was recently at the receiving end of this, and I have since noticed this happening more often all over HN. The solution for this would indeed be simple: don't allow new users to post comments for, say, 8 hours. In general these kinds of measures aim to make destructive behavior less fun, and I think they do work to an extend.

Then there are problems of style that can be solved by having guidelines.

Getting rid of "lolwut", "ORLY", or "Pro Tip:" comments is something we should all agree on; yet those are regularly upvoted, as are remarks that personally attack other users. This can be solved by declaring a ban on these kinds of things, because I believe the majority of users would honor those guidelines of they were made clearer.

Of course, the larger problem is that this even needs to be stated officially in the first place. It should be obvious that lolspeak, at hominem attacks, ridiculous trolling, and employing the basest rhetorical fallacies is not something that we reward here on HN, but nevertheless voters do reward them. That's indeed a problem of audience, not something that can be completely addressed by programming or guidelines.

Then there are people who see destructive criticism as the main problem, which I don't agree with. Personally, I try to keep my criticism constructive if possible and I do appreciate others doing the same. But when I want to receive feedback, I'm glad about any kind of response really as long as the tone of the discussion remains civilized.

The worst thing that can happen with feedback is not getting destructive criticism, it's the absence of any reaction at all.
It's fine if they work together. I just don't think a formalized hierarchy, nor a populace voting for candidates due to their party association, is healthy -- it causes bad distortions, like the threat of political death if a member dares cross the floor.
What I do personally is keep a (relatively short) file of hn usernames I find particularly good and those I find particularly bad. I go and read comments from those I find good sometimes, in addition to encountering them through the normal course of articles.

The bad ones, I reevaluate whenever I see another comment, but I've never yet seen a good reason to remove someone from that list. Sadly they never seem to end up hellbanned. It's uncorrelated largely with agreeing or disagreeing with views; it's just that there are a group of people who are, as the OP said, really negative, irrational, and destructive to civil discourse.
China Skepticism
I agree. Although it seems they recently (a few months ago, anyway) took out the ability to message members on the site, which seemed odd. Why would you not want people communicating? Now if I want to get in touch with someone I have to either track them down outside Github to find a Twitter or email address, or I have to comment on a Pull Request or create an Issue or something.
You are terribly overestimating.

http://www.tribology-abc.com/abc/thermodynamics.htm

gives just 2kwh for 250L tank at 150atm. Which is at most 10 miles of radius, probably less, and efficiency of about 40%
After all HN is a forum with lots of programmers, which may feel that this landing page image is insulting.

It's not that I'm against the concept itself, since I wanted to test the product immediately after I read the headline here, but that image instantly killed off any desire to try it.
I agree. I think they're completely underestimating how strong a first impression that stock photo leaves. I'd wager that in a few months they'll be scratching their heads and wondering why they have so few female members.
You're totally right, but i didn't see that article until you posted it, and I thought the content might be interesting to HN.
Is it just as easy as creating categories that add these methods?
I looked at Ohloh but could neither find "a real social network" nor something "actually useful for programmers". It seems to be just a collection of more or less well-known Open Source projects.
This is nicely done! The interface is dead-simple, and well-built. Good work.
Or just pull one of their repos and look at the commit metadata? Most people will have a real email address configured…
Solve Problems with Imagination
Show HN: Bangarang Boomerang - a music hack
Maybe there's a lesson for us right there.
Error establishing a database connection

Complements the post title perfectly :)
This page gave me an error connecting to the database. Ironic twist, or was there some other point?
Denormals are part of IEEE fp. If your implementation
is too slow, you can often trade correctness for speed by turning them off in the C/C++ runtimes.

They're also a sign you're skirting on the limits of FP
precision (or worse) so a bit of numerical analysis might still be a good idea...
I'm not a heavy user of gdb but every now and then I have to pull it out and use the basic features that I learned in a tutorial one day. I can't believe I have never heard of reverse debugging, would have saved a ton of time.
I'm more interested in a portable version.
Wow, I must say the comments on this post are a great example of the vitriolic nature of HN recently. I hope you guys don't get too discouraged by them.

The site looks well designed, and I think there's definitely room for a social networking site for programmers, that offers more than what Github and HN can provide to the community. Whether this site succeeds will depend entirely on what its actual features are, which is very unclear from the landing page ("Our mission" links to "#"...not exactly informative.) I would suggest putting up more information ASAP, because even a landing page just to gauge interest needs to contain enough info to capture people's interest. Also, as others have said, please change the photo.

Best of luck, I'm excited to see where this project goes!
How is this news?

Posted on November 6, 2010
I like this. good work and all the best !!
I must have another social network account to use your site?
Efficiency is always in context. In times where I go shopping with her, I like to enjoy the time I spend with her without the hassle of work and kids.
Don't think this analysis holds very much weight at all. I think there are a lot of reasons to not just search on Amazon - the most obvious of which is price shopping.

On another note, Google is in the process of moving their Google Shopping listings and Product Listing Ads to a fully commercialized Google Shopping portal / product.
Studying failure: What I learned from a Kickstarter project that failed… badly
If you're going to have a continuous scroll, please, please do not put links at the bottom of the page.
I'm guessing this wasn't intentional, but it was still a good laugh.
The design of this site looks like it's off to a good start, there are a few suggestions/issues I have, though.

* The links on the bottom of the front page don't go anywhere (href="#") and don't open anything for me.

* The pictures of the members sorta get out of alignment with each other in the user info page.

* considering that Stackoverflow exists and is immensely popular with programmers, what does programming.com do that's so different that would make a regular user of Stackoverflow (like me) to come over. What exactly is the 'social networking' aspect that would make me want to leave LinkedIn+Stackoverflow?

Lastly, and this is not a criticism but just a curiosity, are the makers of this website Iranian? I noticed a lot of the members in the people section were based out of Tehran.
Site Not mobile accessible. (Android 2.2.x)
I felt the exact same way using the Seaside IDE, but I only used it for a day, maybe it just takes some getting used to?
Very neat interface. App just works.
UFC Prediction: Jon Jones Vs. Dan Henderson
Nifty. Reminds of Corkboard.me from awhile back.
And if it wasn't for France you would be driving on the left.
Please: every restaurant install one of these. How many times have I finished a meal and just wanted to lie down for 15 minutes??
How many fake followers the most popular people on Twitter have
The LPL which Plan 9 now uses is basically equivalent to the BSD licence. It's non-viral.
> that'd be stupid, US and France are different countries with different traditions, legal systems, economic and political systems, etc.

> (state experiments don't have enough timespan and may not scale well)

You see, this is problem right here. America was founded on the idea that each state should govern themselves and that there should be minimal federal involvement (this is what Libertarians fight for). Furthermore, I'm not sure I agree with your line of reasoning. Your saying that we can't copy other countries because they're different, yet we can't copy ourselves because it doesn't scale well.

> I don't see why they would suffer electorally for it

I don't see why either, but that's the reality. Have you ever watched Fox News for more than 5 minutes? They would slander the hell out of ANY politician who said "let's be like France" in any capacity. Note - It's important to understand that neither I nor yourself need to watch Fox News. The point is, a VERY LARGE portion of America does, and they believe the stuff that spews out of these people's mouths.

I think the overall point of the article is that we are effectively "trapped" in the US because we are constantly reminded that "This is the America Way!" and to think otherwise is blasphemy. We are lucky in American to always have the ability to create a challenging opinion...always. However it doesn't mean it's popular. Popular gets you elected. Elected gets you legislation.
NYC bike share program delayed because "the software doesn’t work"
Gorgeous UI!

This is an interesting case because I've always wondered how users interact with drag and drop ui in the browsers. Are users accustomed to the concept or does it confuse them because traditionally browsers haven't supported drag and drop? I bet there a risk for a conflict in the user's mental models!

I wonder how drag and drop would compare to the traditional approach to upload images:

1. click the Browse Image button

2. Locate images

3. Select Images

4. OK image selection

Like I said, would love to see some stats on browser drag and drop.

EDIT: Using Chrome, I tried to drag and drop an image on a web site to Pasteboard and it didn't work. Kinda obvious since it's a clipboard object but it would be really cool if it worked (not sure why you would like to host an image that's already on the web but it's the idea that counts, I reckon).