skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reposting a comment I made on the new comment features thread:

...I'd prefer having the system make its values explicit via descriptors for comments (think Slashdot or Plastic). My top two would be "insightful" and "uncharitable". The former encourages what's best about this community, the latter strongly discourages what's worst. A lot of deep and pointless threads are caused by commenters reacting to their own hasty interpretations of what someone said rather than even-handedly responding to them.

Also, no "Funny".

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467281

I've also suggested (and agreed with later suggestions) that the karma score should be kept hidden. I'm not adverse to replacing "up/down" with "insightful/uncharitable" entirely.
- xmonad, conkeror, urxvt, emacs23 (gnus, w3m, emms, erc)
Everyone should know the rating system. People tend to ignore rating systems that are hidden or not easy to understand. An example of a rating system that suffers from many hidden features is the "credit score" system; of course it is not designed to be useful to consumers, it is designed to be useful to the companies that know it's hidden factors. An example of a scoring system that is defined, but generally hated for being opaque and complecated, is the BCS college bowl system.

You should make it so it is not easy to game; the way to go about this, is to make it so that the easiest way to "game" the system, is to do something that you want to encourage anyway. So instead of making a fake account and making fake transactions back and forth to up your score, give sellers a bonus for allowing new, unrated buyers to pay after receiving the item, for example.

Think about how the standardized tests for private pilot licenses and etc work. They publish thousands of example questions with the correct answers, and then for your test they select a few at random. If you "game" the system by studying all the questions, you achieve their goal anyway, which is to learn the material as well as they can reasonably measure.

Now, you could take out the reputation and knowing the seller part of it, but I think then you would have to step in and guarantee things for the buyer.

I would do an ebay-like accumulative rating system, but have points be weighted with age, so that a good rating from a week ago is worth more than one from a year ago. You might fade them linearly to zero, but I think your formula should give people who have had an account for a long time some weight just for that.

I am experimenting with a scoring / rating system now. it is for my site slackerfactor.com, which is mostly functional. The site allows you to keep track of who paid which costs among roommates or a similar group; if someone is a slacker, and doesn't pay his fair share for a while, his "slackerfactor" score shows it, and the people who are doing his share similarly have a better score.

I decided to make the score fade with age, linearly to 3 years, after three years it doesn't matter any more. Since recent debts / credits matter more, someone who is up for re-evaluation as a housemate at the end of a lease or whatever, and has been slacking all year, has an incentive to clean up their act and pay a bunch of bills or buy groceries or whatever. The main site doesn't display the slackerfactor yet, only the beta site, because the formula probably still needs to be tweaked according to how people will use it.

Another approach you might want to put in your bag of tricks is per-user modifications of the score. On Slashdot you can say you want to ignore "offtopic" moderations when deciding what comments to show, or to rank "troll" as a plus instead of a negative. Similarly, you might offer users the ability to have some checkboxes such as "ignore rankings more than a year old" or "negative rankings count as double if the person making the negative ranking has a score above 50" and so on. Giving people the ability to tweak knobs often quiets the most persistent complainers.
I think that the Firefox codebase is a lot of things. It's been around for a while, for sure. There's cruft - definitely. It's also being actively stripped of its cruft and being actively improved. I think a lot of people are coming to discover just how much 'oompf' the Firefox codebase has. For example, all of these huge JavaScript performance improvements (TraceMonkey) are a layer of additions on top of the existing JavaScript engine (SpiderMonkey). So yeah, there's some really smart people at Mozilla who are making the code base quite fast - just as there are at Apple, Opera, and Google. It's a great time to be a web developers - this performance battle is just awesome on so many levels.
Regarding testing JavaScript parse speed, why is it difficult to test in the browser? Couldn't you, for example, wrap a string containing JavaScript code in "function(){}" and pass it to eval, or do "new Function()", and not execute the result?

As a corollary to that, doing

eval("function(){"+code+"}")

is much slower (~5x) than

new Function(code)

at least in Firefox using 280slides.com as my test subject (which is part of the reason we do use "new Function").
Yes - my initial thought was 'Sabbatical - what will that mean for his business and (more importantly to me) his writing?"

Realising it was a March 2000 article, I'm now interested in a follow up. Did his start-up shift his 4-years-on 1-year-off work strategy because of finances, or because he was more energised to keep at it for longer?

And how did his perception of "billions of not-very-smart venture dollars out there...good salaries...and the chance of having a "liquidity event" change in the 12 months after this was written?
Yes, definitely. For any public site I develop, I use OpenID logins exclusively. (Most of the "real" work I do involves non-public applications, and OpenID just doesn't fit there. But for sites that I want my IRC buddies to use, OpenID is the best solution -- easy to implement, and it means the users can spend their time playing with the site, not waiting for the e-mail confirmation message.)
There are always edge cases, but that website seeks to prepare a student for a particular course with current notes from the actual course. The copied exams from the site looks to be a direct copyright violation though I did not purchase one to see if it is a scan/textual copy of the exam or a paraphrasing of it. As long gff keeps it generic he should be fine. Though, I am not a lawyer.
Hopefully you are using a Firefox variant, like Conkeror or Vimperator.

Plain Firefox has an extremely unfriendly keyboard UI.
Don't forget http://www.simplecdn.com/ for a CDN too. You can save a lot by hosting on S3 and using simplecdn to serve the data.
Netscape executive, Michael J Homer, dies at 50
I like this idea! I am going through a computer science and engineering curriculum at university right now and this type of site with VHDL and other CE subjects would be very useful.
Maybe have some kind of forum as well so that some kind of discussion could take place? After you find a post that is worthy of a sticky you could then put it up as part of the main site.
I had to dig, but I'm pretty sure you can't deposit into your Amazon Payments account with an Amazon Gift Card. This is a bummer -- I feel like Amazon could have a real advantage over Google and PayPal with essentially the ability to deposit with cash.
new Function() /may/ work - but that's only if a browser actually parses the code when you pass it in to the function. Maybe a browser is lazy and only parses it when it's executed for the first time? (I know that's what I'd probably do.) Of course then we're back to our original problem again - being unable to find the difference between them.

To your second point: Of course eval("function(){"+code+"}" is going to be a lot slower than new Function(code) - you're constructing a closure to any external variables that are used (not to mention that using eval will have to parse the full expression and return the result - rather than with new Function which has a singular purpose).
That's true, and that's a big weakness in my argument. However, if the hypothetical "best guy" can't bring himself to turn down 50 million at a competing (and probably quite close to death) firm, then the firm that needs him most should be able to pay him. There is no reason for arbitrary limits, especially when they incentivize the people most capable of saving your firm to join your competitors.
Interesting.

I actually ran the traceroute. To the webnlbcopilot server, it's 18 hops, and a few of the machines along the way are named like "deploy.akamaitechnologies.com". (So I assume this is the Akamai route.) The latency on this route is 38ms or so.

The other route is only 14 hops, but the ping time is 54ms.

So yeah, interesting. More hops, but measurably faster.
Viral Chain Note Jumps Facebook, Connecting Readers And Bloggers
I suppose you could wrap the code in "if(false){ }" (or make the first statement a "return" in the case of "new Function()") and actually execute it to ensure it's being parsed, but we're entering hacky territory...
"superfast superclean superhighway" means "we have a private network." There's nothing special going on. Call up your telco and say you want a 10 gigabit connection from new york to LA and they'll be happy to oblige.

Just because two computers in the world are talking doesn't mean they use the big-i Internet.
It's called being declared legally emancipated in the United States, but I think it is not easy to do.
Ask HN: How much are you paying for your karma?
To dismiss any ideas that karma could be purchased or that anybody does: that's not what I meant, read on.

I got thinking about this after reading a comment on another post about time = money, and wondered how much time karma leaders have spent on news.yc. Effectually, how much have they paid for their karma.

And, no, this is not high-karma bashing.

Consuming news.yc can be a quick way to find interesting things. Contributing to news.yc, though, is much more time intensive, especially if the content you wish to contribute is worthwhile. Pointless comments can be published in seconds. Thoughtful comments are, well, more time consuming as the commenter took the time to be thoughtful.

Which leads me to two graphs I wish I had:

(1) karma vs. time-on-site
(2) comment rating vs. time to write the comment.

It might also be interesting to include length of comment, since concise, witty comments are an exception that can be written quickly and rated highly.

But, since I don't have those graphs, I figured I'd just ask. How much have you paid for your karma? A monetary value depends on how much you think your time is worth, so rather than debate whose time is worth more, we can look at it in terms of karma per hour.

Now that would be an interesting leaderboard, best-of-news.yc ordered by karma / minute spent on news.yc ...
Basically, the Sabbath was moved for marketing purposes. The Council of Laodicea in 364 ordered all religious festivals to Sunday, not Saturday. There were a few reasons for this. One, Rome was mostly a pagan country, and most pagan religions reserved Sunday as a religious holiday. So the change would have helped convert pagans, and keep Christians in the church. Two, it differentiated the Christians from the Jews, and the Jews were being persecuted in Rome them. And the Roman emperor Constantine declared Sunday to be a day of rest in 321.

Most of the biblical emphasis a Sunday sabbath comes from the fact that Easter was celebrated on Sunday, and a few verses saying that religious holiday observance didn't matter.Some Catholic Catechisms mentions that there is no biblical support for a sabbath on Sunday, and justify it by saying that the church has the authority to change religious holidays. I'm not sure if this is atypical compared to most catechisms, I am not very familiar with Catholic theology.

Explanation for change:http://www.religioustolerance.org/sabbath.htm

Catholic Catechism excerpts: http://www.biblestudy.org/godsrest/catholic-protestant-confe... The site is definitely biased, but it has a nice collection of excepts from christian and catholic doctrines.
Perhaps something to do with small people having big ideas?

Kidding (just kidding).

But there was an article on here recently about ants, and how ants have developed this amazingly efficient system in their smallness. Using their collective intelligence and such, to navigate barriers.
Perhaps it was thought that the long list of bugs would finally get the attention they needed after the Sun buyout.

It's now been a while since the buyout and I'm sure more than one person is a little frustrated with the way things have turned out at this point; for better or for worse.
Problem is often what to build so that it's simple enough, yet significant to learn something.

Fizzbuzz is simple, but not really substantial to really learn anything about a language (unless it's low level assembly, I guess).

I've seen someone say they use "Petals around the Rose" game to learn. However, not all problems will show you the neat and special things about a programming language.

Currently, I'm taking a hard look at Lua and Love a la HN. I've decided to replicate Pong, and the Hungryboids example from Ruby and Shoes.

Since Lua is a prototype object system, it's a little bit of getting use to, especially since my use of Javascript has been minimal. Just writing a Vector class has been enlightening as to how to construct objects in Lua. Like Javascript's objects, Lua uses tables.

In a way, it's fairly elegant that complex language conventions can be built from the ground up using just tables. But on the other hand, everyone has to build it from the ground up every time, and scoping rules are a bit of a headache.
Last time this topic was topical on HN (about 6 months ago) I put my thoughts in a blog post http://www.shirlawsonline.com/blogs/199-my-pond-theory-or-ho...

I posed that size limits on membership and censorship were options - even using Bayesian filtering as a tool.

If I re-wrote those posts, I would definitely include descriptors as a partial solution. The karma game falls apart because the people whose thoughts are most encouraged are those who care about karma the least.

edit: I'm only applying this to social sites like those discussed here. On a site like eBay, there is much greater utility in the karma number and also much more restriction over its use and what it represents.
How was your site's holiday?
Summary: With a mini-projector/camera around his neck, and coloured rings on his fingers for gesturing, a guy augments reality in technically impressive ways.
If your unit testing isn't useful, then find a way to make it useful. Author misses the point completely.

Not unit testing is like building a car door and not check that it fits until all parts are to be assembled, and then reviewing what's wrong. Dumb.
Saves me some time from clicking through all my labels.
You Had Me At ‘Hello World’, 35 Great Nerd Pickup Lines
I use the following in a bookmarklet to narrow the width of the content on the page:

javascript:void(document.body.style.width='500px');void(document.body.style.position='relative');
Communication doesn't always have to be vocally spoken. Good link.
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Give me a break. If you don't want to read 25 things about your friends, don't read them! I'll echo harpastum saying the most ridiculous thing about this is that it made it to the front page of TIME. What will the topic of the author's next article be: the viral narcissism of "about you" email chain letters? That's SO 1998.

As much as I used to hate those chain letters I mentioned above, I surprised myself and took part in the 25 things meme on Facebook. I actually found it pretty edifying. I wrote some things I didn't realize I was going through at the time and learned some things I didn't know about my friends.

Did I need Facebook to do this exercise? No. But the fact that Facebook facilitated it is far from "stupid," as the author suggests it is.
It worked! I worried/speculated/exclaimed, "I guess thats why McDs is all reds and yellows."
Blackboard is a terrible piece of software that bullied everyone else out of the marketplace.

There's a lesson in there somewhere about the relative merits of politics versus products.
Putin rejects Dell's offer of aid
The Gmail team has really been on a roll lately. Are all these labs projects/plugins coming from the 20%?
Actually the Ivy League might be an incredibly attractive option for him. Harvard states that for families whose parents make less than 60k, the family will be expected to pay nothing at all. And MIT seems to be very generous with financial aid too. They will make sure that all of the financial need is met. They define financial need to be expected expenses minus EFC. They cover the rest with an expectation that you will work some (earn 2850 a year) and then will cover the rest in grants. Most elite colleges seem to be making a serious effort to make sure every family can afford their college. Of course the problem is in the details. But it sounds like these schools would all be willing to make sure that he could afford college.

Harvard Financial Aid:http://www.fao.fas.harvard.edu/fact_sheet.htm

MIT Financial Aid:http://web.mit.edu/sfs/financial_aid/index.html
Is it Windows 7 or KDE 4?
If users get a degraded experience, I've always thought it was my responsibility to do what I could to make it better for them. If that means I can't read the code easily, then so be it.
Edit: s/MFC/MVC/. Freudian slip there.
The credit crunch according to Soros
Ask HN: Is this idea outdated?
Dear sirs!
I have this project http://hello-namaste.com/ on a very early stage, but it seems to me like all those ideas are outdated and implemented by google and others, aren't they?
Have nice day!
I've been looking for a decent mouseless wm for XP. The choices seem extremely limited.
The ad was shown just once, but people still talk about it.

FWIW, the ad was actually shown twice, the first time was a month before the super bowl at midnight somewhere in Idaho, specifically so it could be submitted to award ceremonies for the year.
karma has shortcomings, but of course this stuff has to be built, and that takes time and testing. i'm sure pg knew about the shortcomings of a basic karma system going into it, but he probably had a lot of other things to tend to before going to improve karma. it makes for a good conversational starter on the topic though.
Looks like this talk just missed Opera's announcement of their own new JS engine:

http://my.opera.com/core/blog/2009/02/04/carakan
Golf is a different sport. And there's the great scene from "Tin Cup" that is the counterpoint to the point of this article. That would be the scene where Kevin Costner hits the ball into the water over and over trying to make the perfect shot. Searching for perfection on that one shot cost him everything.
You got that right!

Not new at all, I was always confused that it took so long for all the media companies to realize you could do the 'exact same' advertising for online video as you did with TV. Just let people watch when ever they want on demand and it would be far superior to cable.

It only took them like 5 years since streaming video quality was decent to figure it out... hehe
Ah, yes I do see the distinction you are making after clarifying.
"There's no reason only poor people should have the experience" - TED video of Bill Gates
Unit testing can be this way, but it doesn't have to be. At a really low level, unit testing can be "testing the implementation", which may be useful while you're writing code, but isn't useful during a refactoring.

But slightly higher level tests can be written to almost never have this problem. Let's say you've written code to ensure that a CC transaction doesn't go through with an invalid number. No matter what the implementation looks like - no matter how much you refactor - this test should always work. The same is true for a wide range of useful tests. (These aren't strictly "unit" tests, but they fall into a similar category.)

My personal experience is that a good unit test suite is 99% useful when refactoring, and 1% painful.
As an example, to rotate a row to the right, move the mouse pointer to any square in the row then press the D key.
This is only valid if the code is not going to be maintained. If it is, and especially if someone other than the original developers are going to maintain it, then unit tests are worth their wait in gold.
Yep - but at the same time, it's not like I could've provided better data or more information - they have yet to release any code (and it's not even going to be in Opera 10 - so who knows if it'll even be out in 2009). I don't like working on speculation, I love having code in my hands, though :-)
Ask HN: What if we open-sourced our medical records, anonymously?
Everyone assumes our medical records need to be private, but wouldn't it be better to have it all published and Googleable? Anonymously, of course, various identifying things could be redacted.

Just imagine all the innovation that could happen if hackers could get access to huge amounts of medical records! We could identify patterns of all kinds, find the specifics on treatments for people with the same problems we have, and who knows what else.

I'd rather have millions of people out there looking through my medical records, not just my doctor.
I actually agree with her but IN REVERSE:
Ultimately, it is the owners of a company who must determine whether a CEO's rewards are justified by a CEO's performance.

It is up to sharegholders to decide if a CEOs performance justifies pay, AND TO HOLD CEOs ACCOUNTABLE or shareholders should LOSE EVERYTHING.

That's what's missing here. Shareholders deserve to be wiped out, for failing to provide the required oversight of their own investmanets.

Wiping out shareholders provides the last line of defence (self responsibility) for a system that is rapidly failing at all level.
Thanks for the reminder, Raganwald and silentbicycle. Time to close Hacker News and open up my editor.
This author should have bold and italic taken away from him.
Airlines testing biofuels
I feel a bit saddened by this since my life's work will likely fit on a USB drive. There's something to be said for not going all-digital.
The problem with the ad is the fact that it's ad odds with the rest of the brand, there's no unity. Coming from a different brand it could have worked, but it just came across like the school jock coming to class in goth.
Hiring For IT: What We’re Doing Wrong & How To Fix It
I got thinking about this after reading a comment on another post about time = money, and wondered how much time karma leaders have spent on news.yc. Effectually, how much have they paid for their karma.

You're assuming that the only thing people get out of HN is karma, which is certainly not the case. Karma is a side-effect.
>A law program loses accreditation if less than 50% of its students fail the bar exam.

Guess a crummy school where more than 50% fail the bar wouldn't have any problems then.
Oscar Voting System Poses Problems
Collection of research on network effects.
Abcphp.com
Boo Hoo in the Boardroom
For anyone still looking, I have settled on wikidot.
It's a little counter-intuitive to me that all that one has to do to "select" a column or a row is to point the mouse at the square. I kept trying to click at first. Perhaps make the selection outline a little brighter or show an outline over a whole row or column to emphasize this.

Another problem that I have with the "over to select" method is that I find myself trying to move the mouse to select the next square while I am moving a square around. Of course, doing this changes the selected square.

Also, consider making starting with a slower fill speed for the early levels. :-)

You've made a very addictive game.