skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that there are problems with/from hierarchy and single-lever voting, I guess I don't think that it comes from formalized parties. I pretty much end up blaming the voter (I end up reducing a lot of complaints about voting systems to "If this democracy had more rules, people would vote better", which doesn't necessarily make much sense).

It would be interesting to see what resulted from removing affiliation information from ballots.
See this page on Swedish rape laws. In Sweden you are guilty until proven innocent in cases of alleged rape.

http://justice4assange.com/Sexual-Offences.html
Oracle and Google File Paid Writers List
Friend of mine has a theory that that's what Google is trying to do. Show how absurd the current patent system is and force a meltdown.
And they weren't able to send me my security verification number via sms until I sent them my ID.

Cool that it works when THEY need it.
> "Technology needs to empower people to manage people. Software should not manage people."

I agree, in a way.

The only communities I have seen that associates numbers with human merit or trustworthiness are the ones populated largely by programmers. I feel this is telling.

I always have low scores on these sites because I am just not motivated to contribute to them. While Jeff Atwood was on to something when he said that users can do a good job when they feel invested in the quality of content on a site, we just cannot expect numbers representing reputation or consensus to always be set rationally. That, and I just hate thinking I will be assigned a score for trying to contribute to a conversation when I have no idea how the site's culture will interpret what I do. We may as well carry those 1-10 judge cards around our necks and stick gold stars on outsiders' foreheads. It's absurd... but apparently it's necessary. It shouldn't be, but I know I can't handle 1 million+ users as a moderator.

One of my old jobs was to facilitate a chapter of Socrates Cafe, a national discourse organization. We allowed anyone at all to come in and share his or her experiences. My job was to facilitate the discussion and put out flames fanned by conversations between opposing parties. So, when atheist/theists, right-wing/left-wing wars erupt, I was supposed to take varying measures to restore order without evoking enough negativity to scare away members. That is, I had to try and settle everyone down while making them feel BETTER about everyone else.

I cannot begin to tell you how ridiculously hard this can be, and technology does not help unless you use it for shameless enforcement.

Intuition and context-awareness helps tremendously, and there have been times where I simply could not think of any solution to one particular heated debate outside of, no joke, an air horn. I hated having to blast all of the words right out of the room, but the group we had (to me) represented a community gone wrong that needed flat out intervention. We never once used tools to try and change the rules of conduct. Instead, we used technology as a brutal and unapologetic last-ditch enforcement of existing rules.

Now... That's a group where everyone saw each other in person. Clearly not the same thing as an online group. That's worse. In this setting, technology is the only thing you HAVE to mediate all interactions, even the "human" ones.

I don't have a real solution to the sorry state of large, rude online communities. In fact, if you made me a moderator, I would probably go on a banning spree until everyone was too terrified to stay on their own accord.

Even so, but I doubt anyone else really has a solution either... Including the OP. Improvement can only be measured until online cultures change in a way to push newly set boundaries.
There's definitely a pile-on effect happening. Consider that story about click fraud a few weeks back. As far as I can tell click fraud isn't any worse on Facebook than it is on any other ad network, but they took a disproportionate amount of heat.
That cross-eyed nitwit on the logged out homepage is an insulting stereotype of geek culture.

http://programming.com/static/img/bg.jpg

This website can go fuck itself.
Sridatta, thanks for taking time to articulate your ideas on how to improve Hacker News. I enjoyed your post and really like the idea of distinguishing veteran users.
Well since mariuz is the developer for some Firebird admin tool (another open source database) I'm going to take a guess that spreading FUD about the most popular open source database is good business.
I think it would have a good market in replacing shared hostel/dorm room accommodation for backpackers.
Good analysis, and Kotaku reported yesterday that OnLive applied for ABC protection and there will be a new company formed with at least some of the employees. http://kotaku.com/5935767/onlive-filing-for-bankruptcy-new-c...
>Using Chrome, I tried to drag and drop an image on a web site to Pasteboard and it didn't work.

This action has been working for quite some time on Google Images [1] (drag and drop an image from a different tab to the search bar) so it's probably a design oversight.

Regardless, I personally find drag and drop between different windows I haven't prepared in advance a real bother. I'd rather have the OS filepicker pop-up on click, navigate to my images, switch to icon previews and select the image there.

[1] https://www.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi
Check out this GPLv2 fork / alternative mentioned: http://mariadb.org
The Cost of a Logo
Assuming you mean desktop and not laptop PC, there's this: http://www.apple.com/magictrackpad/
Yankee living in the UK here...

I totally agree with your sentiment and let me play something out on the flip-side that I noticed about British life...

British people are brought up in a society that teaches them average is always OK and that life has dealt it's cards, so just deal with it. I know this is a sweeping generalization, and isn't how everyone in Great Britain operates, but this has been my general understanding of the motivation culture in this fine country. I've had this discussion with many people, either foreign or not, and they tend to believe this is a result of being in a class-system for hundreds of years.

You see, America was built and is comprised largely of the most motivated people on the planet. They (we) came to find the country because they wanted something better. Does the American Dream still exist? Of course it does, because it's an idea and will only die if we tell the idea to die. America is NOT for everyone. As you've outlined, not EVERYONE wants to live like that. I enjoy the same comforts as you, but I believe if I have the same superior means and the intelligence a you, I can earn vastly more money in the US and live vastly more comfortable. Does that mean I necessarily want that life? Not really, it's just that America provides and culturally accepts that plausibility of it, regardless of whether it's truly a reality.

This is probably going to be a radical statement - but I really wish the poor people of America had the ability to leave the country. They are really the only ones who complain about America not being suitable and backwards. If you're rich in America, there's little to complain about and life is good. What this would do is force the rich to provide better support to the poor, because without the poor the rich won't exist and we'd have a much bigger middle class (which is something that has made America so strong).
Wait, they're doing this by hand? Production deployments to a computer on a different planet? In the 21st century? If there's one deploy I'd want to automate the hell of (and test, over a 2 baud network), it's this one.

It's not like these guys never did a remote software update before. So I must be missing something.
>However, we have a serious media problem in the US

As an outside, who has briefly stayed in a lot of countries including America I would have to agree with you. In most of the countries, the news channel covers international news quite regularly, but when I was in the US it was very VERY difficult for me to get any kind of international news from the television. Most of them just glossed over it, which made it appear that they were just ticking the checkbox of the day.
Hegemonies don't end because they get weak, they end because something else gets stronger.

Oracle's been doing good work at the boring task of making mysql work better on large multiprocessor machines. They've done a lot more to improve mysql than Sun ever did. (For that matter, Oracle's finally putting lambdas into Java too...)

Postgresql is catching up, but like the Python and Ruby programmers who whine about PHP, team Postgresql has never seriously asked the question of why MySQL has had more market traction than Postgresql. (HINT: it's not just hype, for many people, MySQL was the product they wanted)

And then there is the whole half-baked NoSQL peanut gallery.

You can point to some success stories but if you pick the average NoSQL product and have run-of-the-mill results you might experience spending 8 months building a product and then discovering the performance sucks with any number of servers. Or getting a phone call Saturday evening from the CTO like "Dude, where's my data?"

I wanted to like mongodb, it's got a beautiful design and even some funding -- on paper it's the closest thing to a company that could take on MySQL.

But then there was the terrible sprint where I rebuilt something I'd built in MySQL, and despite mongodb supposedly having the correct kind of index, queries in mongodb took 20 sec where MySQL took 0.03 sec.

The competition isn't quite ready yet.
Do thinkpads still have those terrible trackpointy things in the middle of the keyboard?

That's not timeless design. That's a timeless pice of crap!

Now the MacBook Pro trackpad... Fingers fly on that glass.
The article is 2 years old and was as wrong then as it is now.

MySQL, OpenOffice, Java, Glassfish are all still as free and open as they've always been.
Wp MySQL error. Lol
It's also unusable on an Android phone. There's a problem with the meta tags I think; the site doesn't allow scaling and it doesn't adjust itself to small screen sizes. You have to allow one or the other for your site to work well on a phone.
If these are a reasonably soundproof, they would be awesome in airports.
They weren't charged for other incidents.
Let Gates do it. He's dumping multi-millions into Africa while I sit here watching a homeless person walk down the street outside.
That sounds like a good idea. Some potential users could potentially do like me, though, and close the page right after seeing the cliché "nerd" image.
Funny story: For about the first two-three months of my using Hacker News, I didn't realize the front page existed. For whatever reason I never clicked "Hacker News" on the navbar, so I thought "New" and "Ask" were the only places to read stories.

It was actually rather nice. Lots of fresh stories on the new page (albeit a lot of spam too), and honest discussion on the Ask page.
My pleasure, you're welcome!
As an architect by training I find it really exciting to see something like this. The business of architecture is an incredible mess. Although I see a lot of big challenges in getting this to work well it's a great way to make a positive intervention in spaces that are often quite negative. Architects think about this kind of stuff all the time, but they rarely implement it.

All that being said these things look really overwrought, made from a strange collection of materials, and seem unlikely to be as clean as they should be. The rounded corners are driving me crazy.
Having lived in both the United States and Denmark, I think I would like America to go at least slightly more down that road. It frees up a lot of individual decision-making if very basic things are taken care of. Even in the U.S., nobody expects you to contract for your own police officers to investigate a crime if you get shot. Denmark just takes it a bit further and says you shouldn't have to contract for the ambulance and hospital that treat the gunshot wound, either. That frees you up to work on things that actually matter. Not having healthcare tied to employment frees up many options as well.
I'm planning to add some more Google Analytics tracking events to get some more data on how the site is being used, I don't have any data to give you at this moment.

About being able to drag images from another website, I decided to wait with implementing that feature since the main point of the app is to upload images that aren't already hosted somewhere else. The only use case it would have is if you'd like to crop the image before sharing it with others. I might add some analytics to track that too, to see how many there are that actually are trying to do that.
Maybe it's my experience of living in central London but I can certainly think of many 'demographics' that would be interested in soundproof bedrooms on the street...
I like the UI and it seems pretty nice.
But under Firefox the image does not upload at first (stays a 00%). I first have to cancel and reclick Upload for it to work.

When I'm on a website and right-click -> copy Image, its says nothing is in my clipboard, I first have to paste it in Paint and copy it again for it to work on the site, is it a bug or am I misunderstanding how the clipboard works (I'm under Win7)?

When you generate the URL, it would be great if it was clickable or at least a button to go to the image. I understand the goal is for the user to have a URL to share so copying may be more important that clicking.

Do you plan to add the ability to delete a picture? I don't see a button anywhere to do so, and no info on how long you keep the data. Will you apply a policy like pastebin for text?

Anyway it's really an easy way to share a picture with someone, hope you'll add features!
But who's going to change and wash the sheets? Especially if it's being rented out by the hour. Will there be a full laundry after each and every user?
I didn't mean it as a criticism, just trying to add to the conversation.
MongoDB works best when it is thought of as a JSON document store.

And when you do and have lots of embedded entities it becomes very fast and with its fluid schema a lot easier to manage and maintain. For my use case I do a single query to fetch my self contained User object which would need 30+ queries if I was using a relational database. It's an order of magnitude faster.

So really NoSQL databases aren't a replacement for relational databases just another alternative.
The most important lesson, as always, is that you are not as smart as you think you are.

Until we can say we got this getting to space thing, spacecraft should be considered research vehicles and information on every single aspect of their operation has to be gathered. When the Columbia was lost, I was appalled nobody ever inspected the heatshield for damage occurred during lift-off after more than 100 flights. Even if you consider it dangerous (or too much work) to have an astronaut visually inspect it, this could have been done from the Mir space station.

Many spacecraft were lost to arrogance, to the false certainty we know what we are doing when, in fact, we are still learning.
He hasn't been mentioned yet: Rocky Anderson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Anderson
Or simply a visitor with shallow opinions. And preconceptions.
On my first submission to this site, I acted like an asshole in the comments section to reciprocate the attitude of the comments I got. My opinionated tone earned me more points, when I hate doing that kind of thing to begin with.

This is a cultural issue. I should not be rewarded for being a dick, nor should anyone else. Period.
> A lot of the cool features that are being touted in the NodeJS frameworks have been already done elsewhere for much longer.

Are you including Derby.js and Meteor.js in this? The main example the article uses is the way these frameworks seamlessly sync to your datastore and other clients, and the server is running the same code so you don't have to write almost any boilerplate to do this.

This seems like a unique property of running javascript on server and browser, and I don't know of anything in Python/Ruby/Java that even tries to do this. It seems like it would inevitably be more complicated and require duplication of code. Unless you had a framework that compiled your model and view code from one of these languages to or from javascript (which I've always thought would be cool but now seems like a worse solution than Meteor or Derby)
Ahh, another outlier :)

That's a good observation about the British. They're also really pessimistic (Americans are broadly positive). And, unfortunately, they're very small minded (polar opposite of Americans). That's the result of being a fallen Empire, I guess.

I like the Dutch: they're stubborn and everyone has an opinion on everything BUT they respect that. Heck, it's expected. That's something they have in common with Americans (very direct and opinionated). They have a similar background (America was colonized by various Christian sects, The Netherlands was the central hub of lots of sects because it was the only place they managed to live together without killing each other). Yet they're pragmatic, and largely class-less. Same as the Scandinavians. They also share the same 19th century ideas over work as the Yanks (>40h weeks, retire at 67), only they have holidays. Protestant work ethic at work.

BTW, I would recommend spending some time living in a foreign country - as a native (INTEGRATING, not moving to Spain to live with a load of rich British ex-pats) to anyone reading. It really opens your mind, and changes the way you think about yourself (and the world as a whole). Even better if you can combine it with learning another language.
Right, but you may be aware that Friedrich Nietzsche would have said all discussions are about taste.
Not exactly, but yeah it expects you to be able to right click. It's up to the user how they wish to do that, tap with two fingers on trackpad, ctrl-tap etc.
Also, Percona rocks. XtraDB is just a drop-in replacement for InnoDB.

http://www.percona.com/software/percona-server
China is a super power. I don't believe poor living standards preclude it from being so. The Chinese exert huge influence over the Asia region. It's why your starting to see USA place a lot of emphasis on a military presence in the Asia region.

The interesting thing is a lot of the countries in the Asia/Pac region primarily trade with China, even US allies (e.g. Australia). If the US starts to get agressive (in the cold-war sense) within the region, at what point does economics trump allies?
'Beam Us Up, Mr. Scott': Why Misquotations Catch On
Why you need to run linux in a mac book?
Can anyone explain why ACPI would want to know what OS is running? Shouldn't it just report what it can do and let the OS decide what to do with it?
I have never been able to read about that experiment without feeling sick about what Seligman did to those dogs. Ironically, he ended up becoming an esteemed authority on "positive psychology".
“Which begs the question”

That doesn’t mean what you think it means.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
These talking points need to be updated. Please look at this URL:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_deb...

France's debt to GDP ratio is ~86-89%. The United States is 102%. Now the US is surely going to crash, and crash hard, but emulating France is not going to get us out of a debt crash. Quite the contrary.

1) "France's debt crisis could doom the European Union"
http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/The-Daily-Reckoning/2012/0724/France-s-debt-crisis-could-doom-the-European-Union

2) "France to tackle crushing debt, says French PM Ayrault"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-18693089

3) "Investors Won't Like The News Out Of Greece And France"
http://seekingalpha.com/article/571001-investors-won-t-like-the-news-out-of-greece-and-france

France's current debt to GDP ratio is about 86-89% as of the
first quarter of 2012. This ratio was expected to pass
100% by 2017 with Sarkozy as the president. With Hollande we can expect the ratio to pass 100% by an earlier date.
Admitting to breaking the law isn't what I was talking about, although being investigated for a crime involving images of child sexual abuse will be a traumatic experience even if it goes no further than that.

Imagine police raiding your home right now, and removing all computer items, and keeping those for several months (maybe years). Even without trial or conviction you'll have been put through a horrible experience.

Breaking any random law is also not much of a big deal. People break traffic laws all the time. People chose to break laws they consider unjust.

But choosing to break a law about images of child sexual abuse is a stupid thing to do. Being caught will lead to severe repercussions, with life long consequences.

Those consequences include criminal conviction and criminal record, having to register on a sex offenders list, potentially losing the employment he has, loss of employment opportunity in future, loss of travel opportunity, social stigma, etc etc etc.

That's the risk; what's the gain? "I was curious to see what was available"?
The metrics are just for papers uploaded to Academia.edu (as stated in my previous commment). I think real time metrics will come to other research sharing platforms. Academia.edu is leading the way here.

I would question your assumption that academics have not heard of Academia.edu. 1.7 million academics have signed up, and around 3,500 join each day. It's one of the largest research sharing platforms on the web, with more than ten times the traffic of, say, ArXiv.
Yes, that is true. What I wanted to give you with my comment is an insight that this harsh sentence didn't come unexpectedly out of the blue.

Those girls have a long history of such "actions" and what in most civilized countries happens is that you first get fined, then you are maybe arrested and set free on probation, and if you still refuse to conform to a socially (and legally) more acceptable behaviour, you eventually end up in jail.

The same goes for Kasparov. He's been arrested so many times for willfully committing minor offenses, that if he is found to be guilty of biting that officer he'll probably get a sentence near the maximum of 5 years in prison.
Most have a nipple and a pad.
Why Wall Street unfriended Facebook
THe only disadvantadge is that the secondary information you're storing in User - the one that would be stored in other tables - is now very hard to query. Am I right?
I second DominikR: img/bg.jpg was really a turn off (and I like to think I'm smack in the middle of the apparently intended target audience)
What is your proposal to automate this? Remember there is very large delay and blackouts that happen.

After they do it by hand several times, sure automate it.
Documenting the death of OnLive: notes from the company's final meeting
because without the poor the rich won't exist

Could you explain this statement? If you mean to imply that the rich somehow exploit the poor, the reality is exactly the other way around - the poor and middle class exploit the rich.

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2012/07/progressivity-of-taxe...

To quote Paul Krugman on the topic (he was discussing the 1980's, but none of the facts he relies on have changed significantly since then).

"...growth in inequality is not a simple picture. Old-line leftists, if there are any left, would like to make it a single story--the rich becoming richer by exploiting the poor. But that's just not a reasonable picture of America in the 1980s. For one thing, most of our very poor don't work, which makes it hard to exploit them. For another, the poor had so little to start with that the dollar value of the gains of the rich dwarfs that of the losses of the poor..."

The Age of Diminished Expectations, 1990, p. 22.

Also, the US has more progressive taxation than the rest of the OECD.

http://taxfoundation.org/blog/no-country-leans-upper-income-...
How to create, write and count lines in a file with Java