skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm relatively new here so I readily admit to having a very limited perspective: I used reddit years before I came here, and now I use reddit for just a few specific subreddits; HN has more than enough technical and bigger-picture pieces to occupy me. Certainly, the discussion threads are consistently of the highest quality, so much that I have to fight to read the OP first rather than jumping to the comments. I also admire the mod philosophy of discouraging off-topic, even if clever, posts...it's a fine line between cultivating fruitful discussions and being overbearing, but HN seems to do it better than just about anyone else.

I think it's a universal trait among communities to think that things were better back then. Maybe they were, but part of that mindset is out of a natural regret of years passed and nostalgia. But it'd be interesting to see more data about the quality of HN...obviously it's not easily contained in a metric, but some analysis of discussion length, upvotes per user, upvotes in a time period, distribution of top posts among domains, etc. would be a place to start.

A couple of months ago, someone started an epic discussion about how HN was going downhill. But the crux of his complaint was that people weren't giving him enough positive feedback, and he saw the non-glowing reviews of his two projects as negative sniping. I checked out his two sites (one was defunct, the other didn't seem to have much presence) and the various links-to-them that he posted. There was very little, if at all, sniping, and there were at least a few very constructive, helpful comments. It was disappointing to see so many users, including pg, jump into agreement with the disenchanted user. His overall argument may have had merit, but the reasoning and experience he used to get there were questionable.

But back to the OP: I think a -1 karma per link isn't a bad idea at all. OTOH, I think the (as I've perceived it) penalty for posting too frequently also fulfills that role.
"... the company has actually patented the knockoff design in China and is poised to sue Apple if it launches the next-generation iPhone in China later this year."

Seems like the Apple vs the rest of the World patent war is taking on new heights...
Pulse looks like a neat idea, but I can't stand the layout. Where should my eyes go?

I'm a big fan of "significance", "buzz", and "personalization" in theory, but I find it easier to skim some text myself.
Facebook -- the modern day pager
But its the media's interpretation that made it popular and widespread, which is the only reason any of us care to "take it back". Seems rather ironic to me.
It's neat, but I find things more useful when they're not separated by source/author, but in how interesting I'll find them. I don't read an Ars Technica article just because it's from ars.

To me it would be much better to get rid of the origin altogether to help eliminate bias and focus on the actual story.
The best part is the way TC explained how it's non-binding:

> "startups are required to honor their highest bid if follow up, in-person interviews are successful and they want to make a hire."
Is there a compsci oriented discussion forum with comaparable quality as HN in terms of discussions without the entrepreneurship bias? I would love to know and start following if a such a thing exists.
I also really enjoy working with ZF 1. It's the best designed framework I've worked with. I've just had a quick look through v2 but it looks good from what I've seen. The namespaces really help to clean things up.
Brightpearl Tutorial Videos
Great collection of sources, but please, mark :visited links!
Mars image may indicate presence of water ice
That pushes the issue back into the older question, given a nation's worth of people, what type of dividing lines best group them into sub-populations for the purpose of representation. That is, why lines in space vs lines in income, or total wealth, or hair color, or profession? And what defense of lines in space could possibly defend such complex (gerrymandered) ones?
It goes for most rip off stuff indeed; and not only that. The white label companies ship stuff which is simply unusable as you say. You have to be a hacker/modder to make it work. Which then actually works fine for the price. Out of the box however it's pure crap. If it has a custom OS (not android/linux) then you really need to look out; Android usually is already bad with the wrong/non working drivers etc, but when they made something themselves it's usually so bad that you cannot use it at all.

It's stuff to experiment with to try out different cases and such, but for real day to day use, you would not buy it.
Microsoft is making the same investment with Bing Maps
From the news submission guidelines -- "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
If you read Jessica Livingston's "Founders At Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days" published around the same Hacker News came into being, the connection will become clearer. The founders interviewed in the book were (mostly) hackers who created notable products and companies -- it's their stories of how they became entrepreneurs.
Heh Wikipedia is the worst. I feel like half the time I post something intelligent I basically get a bunch of people calling me a faggot for reading books, more often than not with 'references' to Wikipedia to explain why I'm wrong.

The problem with Wikipedia is that you're not allowed to plagiarize. So if there are three reasons to believe something is true, you'll get three of them listed. But if there are 100 reasons to believe something is true, you'll still only get three of them. Which essentially means the more reason there is to believe something is true, the less likely it is that Wikipedia will accurately reflect that. Digital Maoism indeed.
A couple of things:

Your friend's assault case - he's not a multi-billion dollar company with a massive investment in the mainland.

Chinese consumers don't simply love him, like they do Apple products. (First-hand experience.)

I notice the Goophone people are based in Hong Kong where the rule of law is quite a bit stronger.

Apple have the money, they have the relationships. This whole thing is clearly grandstanding on the Goophone people's part.

I am willing to put cash money on the line to say it's inconsequential to Apple launching the iPhone 5 on the mainland. There will be a delay - the usual delay for Apple products that mainland China experiences and nothing to do with this knockoff junk.
I think because of SEO
good question; it should be renamed to Entrepreneurs news then
I don't know who you would mean with "they", but BBC doesn't use Symfony nor Silex. Feel free to contact BBC Future Media engineers, many of them are on linkedin.

That history about Silex is ONE developer testing it on a pet project, which is a completely different thing than saying "BBC uses Symfony"
15 Awesome Freelance Designers Websites
Surprising, considering the fact that the webpage of a designer is basically an advertisement of their own design ability.
I think the problem is workflows for todo lists are incredibly diverse and trying to incorporate support for them with a single UI without cluttering it to the point where it adds more friction than it removes is an incredibly challenge.

E.g. grouping things on paper: write down a few headlines and write your stuff underneath each one of them. Want a fresh todo list daily? Write down a few lines every morning, transferring from past list as needed. Want a historical record? Well, you just got that for free anyway. And so on.

A "dumb" todo list interface solves our workflow problems by abdicating the responsibility and making us "implement" the workflow manually and just provide support for implementing workflows. And so the need to complicate the UI in ways that will almost inevitably end up adding friction goes away.

Creating a mass market application with a sufficiently "fluid" workflow support to allow this in a "smart" todo list app without adding endless configuration screens is something that'd likely be incredibly hard.

For my part, I have my own heavily customized app that works for me. But it works for me because I can tweak the code itself to my workflow whenever I decide to change any of it, and can as a result take lots of shortcuts I wouldn't have been able to with a product intended for anyone else.
A good "full stack" designer is a very rare thing.
And if some clients decide to calculate difficulty differently, it results in a block chain fork.
Corporate ID theft has never been easier. Now some states are taking action.
My dad is the most disciplined person that I know. He got his math PhD in 2.5 years. He said that when he was in grad school, he'd wake up every morning at 4am, work without interruption until 8am, take a 1 hr nap until 9am, work until 5pm, stop work, and then sleep at 9pm. He kept a strict diet of only eating green veggies and never eating meat (plus, he couldn't afford meat).

I've never had any discipline. In college, I decided I'd finally get some discipline and I would do exactly what my dad did. I woke up at 4am every morning, took a 1hr nap at 9am, worked until 5pm, went to bed at 9pm. I wanted to be just like my hero.

In short, it was a total disaster. I was tired constantly. I slept in class all the time. I performed decently in school, but I remember it as a pretty unpleasant time. It was a pattern that was very hard to get to work inside of a college dorm where I also had a roommate sleeping in the same room. I found myself always thinking, "What would dad do?" Not, "What's right for me?" I beat myself up a lot when I couldn't live up to the kind of man my dad is.

I gave up on the idea of discipline, and it's been great for me. When I reflect on when I'm happy or unfulfilled with work, I don't think of it in terms of words like "motivation", "discipline", "inspiration", etc., because those words just express patterns and modes of approaching work that work/don't work for other people. I think, "Why am I tired?" "Why would I rather watch TV than work on my company?" "What are the short-term / long-term tradeoffs?" etc
Could someone program up a client that "cheats"? Or is there something preventing that.
Motivate yourself to be disciplined, and discipline yourself to be motivated. False dichotomy solved!
Twitter Lists can be very powerful.

- Create list of potential clients you want to work with.
- Get their twitter accounts, and create a list containing their twitter handles. Name the list something cool (Wedding Businesses to watch)

- You will have a list of tweets from people you might get work in near future.

- Engage with them on Twitter.

- After 3-4 INTELLIGENT replies - all of sudden you are in the online friends category with them

- You dont need to pitch now, if anyone of them is interested they will find about your website from your Twitter Bio and will call/email/message you.

It really had worked for me. I was spending 20-30 mins on that list daily.
I feel like there was a fast slide to content-free echo chamberism a while ago. HN was starting to become painfully predictable if it didn't talk about:

- Apple in glowing terms

- a LISP

- how massive overvaluations were not a bad sign

Certain HN rockstars would receive hundreds of upvotes for the most minor of comments and the fanboyism towards a few specific companies, products and people was so thick you could cut it with a knife. Anything that even smelled like dissent was downvoted until you couldn't even see the comment with a flashlight and a 100' rope.

Then a few things happened and it seemed to slowly wind down and I think even reverse. The quality and content of HN seems remarkably improved in the last year:

- Karma became invisible

- Steve Jobs passed away

- Gruber posts started getting flagged

- Android came neck and neck with iOS then surpassed it, then Apple started suing

- a few overhyped, overvalued, overinvested-in companies popped in very public ways

In fact the discussions about the above things have been some of the most spirited, invigorating discussions on HN in a long while. But the other posts and discussions on other topics started getting better as well. Sure the focus of HN has somewhat changed a bit since the old, small community, days. But a few internal and external factors seems to have kept the ship upright.
The only thing that a compiler should do with source code that includes constructs that have undefined behavior is generate an error message so it can be corrected.
Ask HN: mass-submitting your pitch on forums (etc) during launch? 
Hi,

What do you think about mass-submitting your pitch on forums, facebook groups, google groups etc during startup launch?

Best,
Wiktor
Another attack on SSL
Sure. I don't know what's really going on. But neither do you. Yet you speculate the worst scenario and start slandering half of your nation.

Here in Holland we have a saying, where the literal translation in English would be "The inkeeper trusts his guests after his own character". Meaning that when a person has little faith in people, they are actually afraid that people are as morally corrupted as they themselves are.

In general, nice people collaborate more easily. Civilization is the conspiracy of nice people making a nice country. Except it's not a secret. So, when I don't know anything, and you don't know anything, the difference in our assumption, is the difference in our character.

Your speculation and slander tells us nothing about reality. It only tells us something about you.
> Certain HN rockstars would receive hundreds of upvotes for the most minor of comments

Oh! To be one of the principate! What networking that would lead to ;-)
The state of IE after installing the top 20 downloads from Download.com
Web intents do make more sense than creating arbitrary links to a new tab. You can be interactive with the site (on Twitter) without ever leaving the site.
(slightly OT but Apple paid Xerox for the GUI and then did significant development on it - compare a Smalltalk/80 system to the Lisa and you can see how much Apple did to improve it)
It would be the biggest douchebag move in history.
Refrain from it.

Since you will be doing mass posting, forum moderators will very quickly catch you doing that, and probably will ban you.

This might do more harm. Its better going to events nearby you live and doing a talk with smart plugin of your product at the end.
Although I agree with your premise of killing secondary and failed "software" I think that a lot of these stems from poor UX. Your five button screen example speaks to that. Why are there five buttons? Who decided that?

The reality is that it probably could have had the same functionality with 3 or 2 buttons and been easier to use but we always want to add more, not remove, "stuff".
The reality is that we create software for ourselves and then expect clients to "get it". Dogfooding is great but it doesn't mean that its "right" for potential clients. Just look at 37 Signals. They hit the nail on the head, but I would consider them the exception. Most software I've used over the years was clearly influenced by devs, manyt times to its detriment.
The people who leave comments that spoil hacker news don't care for karma, they'll just sock puppet to get their way. I don't think there's an especially large issue here, bad comments get down voted to the pits anyway.

Plus getting a down vote is often useful to help keep in the community guidelines.
Is this the moment to reflect on Slashdot? I have a few nontrepeneurial geek friends who still swear by /.
Any blocks that client produced would not match the expectations of the other clients. The difficulty being different would mean a successful hash that solves the block may not be seen as solving it by the other clients. They would reject it and your cheating client would be on its own fork.

If you could convince others to run your client then your network would get bigger. If it got >50% of the entire network then your blockchain would effectively be the main chain.
My apologies. I can say that's highly unusual and there's no excuse for it. Can you email me directly at rob@braintreepayments.com so I can straighten this out for you ASAP?
Originally it was called "Startup News". PG announced he was making a new site not focused on startups, since that got kind of dull. Instead he changed the name of this site and nothing really changed. My memory is kind of vague, but I believe that is more or less accurate.
I think all these approaches lead to elitarism and blackhat KEO tactics (Karma Engine Optimization).
Maybe a form of the pretty common the-forum-used-to-be-better-syndrome? :)
DNC runs over delegates with scripted platform vote [video] (04:39)
The Story About Two OAuth2 Vulnerabilities
I agree. I have worked now 20+ years in finance / technology - get this - before Google and Zynga and pretty much all of your "entrance" companies existed. Since 1999 I have commanded a high salary (but not willing to disclose here) so I would be very interested in seeing if there was any demand for people with skills like mine. Oh well. Let's hope somebody else has the same idea and makes it less elitist - let's be honest - the concept is not very difficult to copy is it ??!
"The Issues" - a Demo Realtime Application in AngularJS
Amazon's New Kindle Fire Tablets Are All Ad-Supported
"Evolution could explain the placebo effect"

Umm... what else could explain the placebo effect?

Evolution can explain every biological aspect ever to have existed if you take it to a broad enough level
I am new to HN and I think the board's post are high quality compared to some other boards. One issue I have is that it can be too serious and void of humour. I assume the blogger of this article needs to lighten up a bit.
Yes, but this post could not be treated as spam, but as a some kind of advice or something like that, or I can make much smarter submition like asking first, and from another account posting an answer.
I thought the negative perception was due to the effect of nostalgia for old times, but this is an even better explanation. Everything is exciting and more stimulating at first, that's how the brain works. Of course after a few years, that feeling of freshness is going to be lessened, even if the actual overall quality is better.
Because the submitted article mentions the placebo effect, in the usual manner of popular articles, perhaps I should share here some links that are helpful for understanding what placebo effects are all about. Some of these online links cite quite a few useful scholarly publications.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/michael-specte...

"In other words, the best research we have strongly suggests that placebo effects are illusions, not real physiological effects. The possible exception to this are the subjective symptoms of pain and nausea, where the placebo effects are highly variable and may be due to subjective reporting."

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/angells-review...

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/the-rise-and-fa...

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/placebo-effect...

http://www.skepdic.com/placebo.html

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/revisiting-dan...

The statement in the article kindly submitted here, "Someone suffering from a low-level infection will recover just as nicely whether they take an active drug or a simple sugar pill" should be interpreted as "Animals have a lot of capacity for recovering from infections, and some treatments for infections are indistinguishable in outcomes from doing nothing" until a citation for a specific study involving infection in HUMAN subjects is brought into the discussion. Usually the "placebo effect" is just the no-op effect of the body healing over time with the body's own healing mechanisms, and the ONLY reliable findings of placebo effects in human medicine, according to the sources I am citing here, are self-reported subjective symptoms like pain and discomfort, not physiologically verifiable improvement in disease states.

So let's not rush too fast to assume an explanation for a phenomenon until the phenomenon is better defined. The submitted article goes on to discuss some animal studies related to seasonal patterns of light and darkness. These studies are related to the idea that the immune system is costly to maintain, drawing on many physiological resources of the living organism. That's a reasonably important point and is indeed the subject of much ongoing research. But human beings, with their very complicated behavior patterns for adaptation to many environments, probably have a system for regulating immune response that is harder to observe. I note for the record and for your reading enjoyment that the recent book he Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life by Robert Trivers

http://www.amazon.com/The-Folly-Fools-Deceit-Self-Deception/...

includes a chapter, with some citations to scientific studies, about immune system interaction with the brain suggesting a theory of self-deception in the aid of bodily healing, on evolutionary grounds. The whole book is interesting, and there is better established findings in it, so it is well worth a read whatever other science says about placebo effects.
Somewhere out there, the guy who invented the Handspring Treo is sitting in a rocking chair yelling at his TV: "Apple didn't invent anything! They stole my ideas!"

Get over it. Apple stood on the shoulders of giants and has the best marketers in the world.
Great article, but why all the bitterness towards the ad-based revenue? Ad-subsidized products are exactly that - products that are much cheaper than they would've been without ads. If thats a trade-off you're willing to accept, then buy one. It's a diversification of the product in a way - some people that wouldn't usually be able to buy products now can, at the cost of suffering through some ads.

The argument about the authors getting screwed over by serials is completely unfounded. Simply because amazon is selling serials for $1.99 does not imply that authors would suddenly get less money than they usually do. If anything, I'd wager they would get the amount they usually do for the whole book, and maybe a small commission off of the ads. Not that amazon won't take the bulk of the ad profits; they surely will, but on the whole theres no reason the authors should suddenly get shafted.

It's even better that Bezos is relatively upfront about his strategy (not that he would give it away too early, but presumably now that its too late for anyone to catch up) rather than pretending Amazon loves it customers for the wonderful and unique snowflakes they are. That said, they do have great customer service - its always been a straightforward, no-nonsense corp.

Also, I realize my post is largely based on general economic facts, so feel free to fire away on the things I missed.
In order to train your Neural Net you will need sample data; which will consist of examples of what are and are not "similar" devices. Someone will have to decide what looks similar enough to the object device, therefore your Neural Net will be as objective as the sample data.

Don't think of Neural nets as a higher order intelligence - it's only as clever as the sample data used, but rather something that can make consistent decisions.
Isn't that merely a case for periodic pruning and reordering of the list(s)?

I'm not very dedicated in my usage of to-do lists (probably to my detriment), but I think people who use them consistently revise their list at lunch and again at the end of the day... perhaps at breakfast too. Unless they have an assistant who does all that for them.
I often make comments specifically not intending them to be discussed. Some of those might be interpreted by some as sniping a discussion board, but I don't see this as a discussion board, but a comment board with replies.

And I take some pride in being able to condense my thoughts and get my point across without detracting.