skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But Greenspun's claim is that technology has done nothing to ease Malthusian limits, and he's wronger now than he's ever been. At the time Greenspun wandered into this fray, the concern was over human starvation. The situation really is much, much better, to a degree that is hard to fully appreciate.
Natural resources aren't finite in any meaningful economic sense. Even in a physical sense, the upper bounds are huge. And, most important, most people are net producers; the longer they live, the more they produce.
For me, facebook just enables a faster way to keep connections with people in the interim between actually doing things with them in person. I can see how it can be destructive to sit on FB for hours on end and not actually go spend time with people, but like anything else, it can be used for good or for ill -it's all about balance.
Sure. Say, when menus are open and being used, they will sometimes be forced to close by other tasks. I have had background processes such as Automator tasks steal focus for no apparent reason.
Absolutely. IMO the thing to model them after would be the PIM (personal information manager) pseudo-computers of the early 1990s. Segmented or possibly coarse dot matrix LCD (2-4 lines, ~40 characters), and a special (read: charity) deal with a chip manufacturer for a modest but modern microcontroller, such as an Atmel AVR32, which Digikey has at unit prices around $7. Bulk pricing for a large order of these direct from the manufacturer might be drastically cheaper (~$5? $3, even?)

They'll run linux, but I'm not sure how to get networking into them. Wireless might be a bit ambitious (802.11 is clearly out of the question). Maybe with a simple GPIO pin you could control a small AM transmitter/receiver pair, with the intent of transmitting ~300bps. For the money it might make sense to just put a couple external metal contacts on it and run wires to each desk -- which would also solve powering it.
I got tired of reprogramming my remote when the batteries died and haven't had a working one for about 2 months. I HIGHLY recommend tossing your remote, it really helps you evaluate your TV habits. You can still watch something if you really want to, but you have to actually plan for it and know what you want to see (activates executive brain function) as a result I am much more likely to simply forgo TV and do something constructive.
why have a meta-care about the race if you will not be around to witness it? It's like planning your own funeral--you'll never know how it turned out.

Does anyone ever stick around to experience how anything turns out, anyway? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus#Definitions_of_...

Normally, from instance to instance, each of us ceases to exist. A new person, under an illusion of being a "continuous" person and not merely one one in a sequence of related instantaneous persons, takes the place of the old person. And so it goes, from instance to instance. An instant from any given instance, the you of that instance will not exist. So why bother planning for those instances of you (who might remember being you, but are not you) that will exist (in their respective instances)?

That you that were you when "you" began reading this, is not the you that is you now. That former you left you his memories, but he cannot experience what you are experiencing now. So, why did he bother leaving any memories for you at all? Such bothering should have been pointless from his point of view, now that he is extinct. Yes? (...Unless he were under the illusion that he would somehow still exist, rather than the more-likely scenario of merely some creature like him, i.e. you, existing in his stead and who might be under the illusion that he is the same person as the person who kindly left the memories, the physical possessions, the bank account, the bodily health, etc.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleportation#Scenarios

someone with a materialistic view of the world might also see the disintegration of a given corpus as the killing of a human being. The reassembled human might be considered a different sentience with the same memories as the original, as could be easily proved by constructing not just one, but several copies of the original and interrogating each as to the perceived uniqueness of each. Each copy constructed using merely descriptive data, but not matter, transmitted from the origin and new matter already at the destination point would consider itself to be the true continuation of the original and yet this could not logically be true; moreover, because each copy constructed via this data-only method would be made of new matter that already existed at the destination, there would be no way, even in principle, of distinguishing the original from the copies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_and_change#Identity_an...

The problem of personal identity relates to change as applied to people. [...] The question is exactly why we call the old woman in 1998 the same person as that little girl in 1920.
New Comment Features
As someone who doesn't use Facebook or anything similar, I have to ask: does Facebook get you laid or get you good friends? Why do people use it?
I'm curious why they don't do some sort of cost-estimation when doing the regex compile. Oftentimes you use a regex only a few times in the life of the application, and it'd be nice if maybe it would build the regex automaton with some time-budget cap (say, N states created) and fallback to PCRE until its fully built.

(Backseat nitpicker here. And just thinking about it seems deliciously hairy.)
Check out hackerdojo.pbwiki.com. We're trying to do something similar.
Is there anything that dumps css all together and just manipulates the dom directly using Javascript.

In other words, build your site by instantiating components as you would if you were building a windows or flash application. I think that would be my preferred way of working.

For example: if I wanted a heading I could write a new class derived from a standard library, set a few properties to define its colour and font, perhaps some properties that define how it moves in relation to other entities.

You could even build a proper style hierarchy.

I've always felt the html / css / javascript stack was kind of clumsy and would love to just work in one environment.

I've never likes css and the very fact that things like Sass and Compass exist suggest to me its not really a very good way of defining an applications style.
Googling your name doesn't return your personal web site?
Nice to see that I'm not alone in trying to build a better social news site as a side project. And by the way, when you say "we", we all know there's only one of you. And forget about scaling. Learned that long ago myself...

My side project is at http://mushpot.net, and I think the goals are similar to sqrt(2):

- multiple votes

- make it harder to game the system

- give more productive members more influence over the content

But instead of having users solve puzzles, on Mush Pot, the amount you get to vote depends on how many votes your submissions have received. And since I'm already started, here are some of the other ideas behind it:

- long posts, not just links (posts can have hyperlinks)

- there's no difference between top-level posts and comments..anything can appear on the front page

- make users provide a reason for downvoting (or pile onto a reason given by another user)

- tags, ability to weight your front page using tags

And it also lets you login with Facebook and post your submissions back to your Facebook feed.

Wow, I'm impressing myself with the length of this feature list, although I have been building the site for quite a while. Now, everyone, at the count of three...click...HERE!: http://mushpot.net
Magical Thinking at Work
I like the orange-username thing. Maybe it would make sense to apply it to submissions as well as comments?
Also, let us jump from nested comments to their parents.
Do you have to cite HN in your assignment?
Risk is great. Does anyone know a good online community for Risk (i.e. where you can play Risk online)?
LIghtweight multi-platform XUL is something I think may be the answer. I'd like to take browser's connectivity and JavaScript VM, but non of HTML/CSS nonsense. XUL seems to work, and can be served from the cloud, but it's not easy to program for.
Maybe it is semantics, but I think it is very possible to complete a project/product/job to the very best of your own ability and STILL invite outside involvement and allow others to make suggestions and add value to the endeavor.

The underlying problem isn't only with the users of a system needing to buy in though, the real problem is that if you don't half-ass something it's a lot harder to be humble enough to take the criticism and suggestions of your users. If anything I think the article highlights the character flaw many of us have when we've built something we are proud of. I am willing to bet that he could have rolled out the first "perfect" system in a way that invited the very same user-directed suggestions and gotten great results. Doing so just takes humility, a great work ethic and a lot more intestinal fortitude.
Wow, I hate this feature. Comment karma was already implicitly self-reinforcing. Now HN has reified that in the UI. Can we opt out of being highlighted?
Follow your buddies with Google Latitude
Oy. All day long I slave over a hot repl, and for what? Such ingratitude, I tell you.
Edit: I was seeing some weirdness with different comments by the same person being highlighted / not highlighted, but it turns out that it was just due to caching (see pg's response below).
Would it make sense to have moving (formula based) thresholds?
This is off-topic, but I'm curious: your name appears red to me, and I've never seen this before. What is the significance of this?
"some of which are completely incompatible with the usual NFA and DFA algorithms" - It would be nice if you pointed to some article/resource giving more info on this.
Is this orangey feature retroactive on old comments at real time, or is it permanent for posts regardless of current karma?
While people will no doubt have a lot of differing opinions about any change in this community, one thing I find very encouraging is that PG and co are being extremely proactive and are very willing to try new things. -Whatever the outcome of any particular experiment is, I'm really glad to see that they are on top of things.
Hmm... not sure about the comment karma thing. People with decent averages may refrain from posting more speculative comments, just so it doesn't drag them down. That would seem to reinforce a tendency towards group-think. Of course, maybe that is good. :)
I don't believe this is true. I see plenty of orange responses to my comments 30+ days old.
There's just some caching going on.
The biggest problem I see is that it will discourage deep exchanges which are one of the most valuable phenomena that occur here.
i'd love to see graphs/statistics of comment points over time for hn users.
You chose a really nice color for the highlighting. There, I complimented it.
i was just wondering today, "would it be possible to see a user's karma without actually opening up their profile?" this sort of addresses that. i like it.
My concern is that this doesn't negate or discourage a lot of the behaviors that get amply rewarded (e.g. one-line zingers), but which a lot of us recognize as harmful to the community in the long run. In fact, I suspect it will actually exacerbate the problem.
The other thing that didn't hit me is that I enjoy commenting on things that are on the "new" page -many of those stories don't make it to the front page and as a result comments don't get replied to or upmodded as much.
A few random thoughts about Ruby's traditional unordered Hash:

The Hash#keys method should have returned a Set, not an Array. That way no one would have been baffled by the lack of predictable order. But, unfortunately, Set is not a built-in class. Hence, Hash#keys has to return an Array.

Since Rails came out, there's been, I think, an ever increasing use of Symbols as Hash keys. If you want to examine your Hash in a specific order--perhaps in a test--it's tempting to sort the Array of keys. But there's no Symbol#<=> method. Therefore, an Array of Symbols cannot be sorted (without monkey patching).

If, for whatever reason, you create a Hash whose keys are of various types, the keys are probably not sortable. Hence, there's no way to examine its contents in a predictable order.

A few thoughts about the new ordered Hash:

Personally, I see no need for the built-in Hash to be ordered. I'm so accustomed to thinking of hashes as unordered. And, because I don't have Ruby 1.9, I don't use the newfangled hashy syntax for passing parameters.

But one of the commenters (Radarek) points out something about parameter passing. He/she says, "It's another big + for ordered hashes because they are used as replacement for named parameters [in Ruby 1.9]." He/she mentions a project in which a method must process its keyword parameters in the order they were given.

The thought of trying to process keyword parameters in the order given is very jarring to my old-fashioned Ruby brain, and to my Python brain. Yet, evidently, someone out there wants to do this without telling the client to pass an Array of Arrays.

So I wonder what the major use case is for the predictable ordering of the built-in Hash. Perhaps it's for ease of examining and comparing Hashes in tests? Perhaps it's for processing keyword parameters in a specific order when they're passed using spiffy syntax? What?
I feel dumb for contradicting myself in a single thread, but after thinking about this for a bit I think I agree with you that it shouldn't be a part of the UI. However, I think the idea of implicitly boosting people with a good history is a good idea.

One idea would be to invisibly boost the ranking of comments by orange users, at least at first (we don't want to give a bad comment more credit just because the commenter has made good comments in the past). Let a new comment by an orange user rise for the first hour or so, and then drop it back down to where it would be if it was posted by a normal gray user.
You have probably seen it by now, but http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467181
Thanks! I tried about 30 different colors. (It takes a surprising amount of work to make it look like the site has no design.)
Dark Days for Green Energy
CEO pay cuts could spread beyond banks
A new feature released a few minutes ago. See http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html#4feb09
Nice. I've been using git at a rudimentary level, but this looks like a decent jumping off point for some more structured learning about the tool. Thanks!
If we're going to have submissions highlighted based on their submitter, I have another request: Please unhighlight (make grey, or something) submissions from accounts which are less than 1 hour old, at least until someone votes them up. The first thing I do when I see a spammy-sounding submission is check to see how old the submitting account is, and if it's less than an hour old the submissions is almost always spam.
This has me thinking, comment score appears to be tied to two independent things:

1. The quality of the post.

2. The time since the article was posted, it's arrival to the front page, etc.

Not all insightful comments are modded up the same, for this reason amongst a number of others. If someone says something smart, but says it late, the net effect will be to drag their karma/comment ratio down. I'd be concerned that this would prevent people from making good points when they run the risk of insufficient eyeballs.
Will this go away over time?
Hopefully this doesn't go the way of The Sneetches.
Another vote for Settlers, also axis and allies is good.
I agree. It seems a little too self-reinforcing to me. It may look nice when graphed out, but I think this feature may end up discouraging the discovery some of the variety of posts (more so than things already are).

Difficult to quantify. Will be interesting to see how it pans out.
Yeah, I have to admit that it's really unhappy with my (admittedly spartan) sense of style. A nice underline or just regular black would've been preferred.
Awful lot of markup for something that could arguably be better-accomplished with standard techniques (a tiny image and/or javascript progressive enhancement).
You can get a lot of that info from searchyc; a couple days ago, the median average comment score for the top 50 users, (excluding pg) was 2.48, the mean was 3.09, stddev of .5.

Yes, I am an unbelievably huge dork for knowing that.
It also really hits those of us who make lots of little comments across several threads. Unless you're early to comment, the structure of the thread's already there -- you don't want to coerce your own discussion into it, just add your thoughts.
Consider highlighting usernames for everyone in a darker shade of grey. The username is the most important thing in the line; it should stand out.
This site represents the evolution of git itself. From humble beginnings as a powerful tool suitable for use only by hardcore Linux hackers to a usable set of porcelain commands. From non-trival hosting requirements to Github. From gitk to GitX.

Now instead of having ugly man pages and a mish-mash of blog posts spread all over the place, we have a very nicely designed one-stop shop to get up to speed.

The coolest part is the content is publicly available for forking [http://github.com/qrush/gitready]
It might be useful to be able to see the average score for my last 50 comments on my user page. In principle, I could of course compute it myself - but might as well have the computer do the tallying for me ;-)
Who would have thought, a year ago, that any site with that number of users would be shutting down.

I too have seen ad revenues decrease 3-5x on my site. Are websites that don't sell a product no longer viable?
just curious given the recent scrutiny on karma: what goes through your mind when you want to know a user's karma?
That's a really good point. I thought that maybe you could solve this by dividing the story karma by the comment karma, but then you get the opposite effect; it hurts you to make a new comment on a front-page item and helps you to make one on a less-upvoted item. Maybe that itself would be a good thing.

Another approach would be to normalize the comment's score against the other comments on that story, and use a threshold on that. If there were 4 comments with karmas 1 to 4 and another story with 100 comments from 1 to 100, the 4 on the first would be just as good as the 100 on the second. That might be too much work, though ;)
See, I think the one-liner blight could be headed off by auto-collapsing threads that are long and mostly really short replies unless the karma of the parent comment is above a certain threshold.
So close... I'm at 
3.2 3.26
 3.06 with the highest comment crossed off. I'll probably never get there. For what it's worth, I like the feature.
Perhaps it would be good to put a karma threshold, or at least a time limit, on the ability to submit stories. (A karma threshold might be bad for people who like to browse but not comment.)
Is this really the direction that YC News should be headed? I don't think that this is a good idea and could easily lead to many problems. As some people here have pointed out, comments on new stories will be discouraged, deep and long threads will be curtailed, and comments are likely to get longer. It also creates a sort of class system within the community. Now a person's karma level is visually seen all the time.
i'd rather not see any karma or any points when i vote, thereby providing for content-based decisions. ideally, a comment would have three possible votes: up arrow, circle, down arrow. only after voting would a comment's score and user become visible.
Not just people with good averages, but more so people with lower averages who want to make them better.It may keep them from expressing counter-views that the orangey colored folks might, as a collective, down-mod and post ripostes which will encourage others to down-mod or not up-mod further.

Not implying that the orangey folks think as a herd, but it is possible that, by virtue of their prettier coloring, people will be more inclined to follow their lead, and think their opinion the more correct one.
BTW, average comment scores are only calculated very intermittently (because they wreak havoc with lazy loading) so it could take up to an hour before everyone's name displays in the right color.
collapsible comment threads would be very much appreciated.
No, but that gets rid of the really clean feel! I like that this site's only got 4 (5, now) colors. It feels so minimal that way. (Then, I enjoy the feeling when I discover something like clicking a user name and finding that it's a link when it's the first time; perhaps that's not the attitude pg wants?)
Those are also discouraged by PG asking people not to do them, and punishing people who do.
Twould be a pretty alarming form of caching if it didn't.
Regarding the link to the welcome page,

I can see the reasoning to limit it to the first day, however I would argue that the link isn't that intrusive and should probably stick around until the first comment or some karma threshold.

I certainly did not post within the first few days (if not months) and a quick reference to the guidelines would be handy.
(actually i post so infrequently that having it always there would be handy)
Sure, it makes people less likely to post anything that goes against the desires of the group. This will impact inane and stupid and inflammatory things more than unpopular ideas. As long as they are phrased civilly, unpopular ideas usually do fine. It's just that very often people that know their ideas are unpopular go out of their way to antagonize the community.
I enjoy Backgammon and Checkers, Scrabble and Monopoly.

My current affair is with Rubik's Cubes, though--but that's not the exact question here.
edit: i was going to whip out a greasemonkey script to do just that, but then i saw that the comments are just one big table...ug. i was hoping for nested div's. eit.
I don't know if this is a bug or a feature ... but, the edit button is no longer present on the main page. I have to click 'link', and then 'edit' is available.

I was just going to edit my comment with a link to searchyc.com. It tells me, for example, that my average comment score is ~4, but that my last few comments have been unusually unpopular (or at least unnoticed), which I assume drove me below the threshold. Maybe it would be nice to take the maximum of a user's all time average and average of the last 50 comments - that way users who have historically made positive contributions are given a little leeway to voice unpopular/controversial opinions.

EDIT: Odd, now the edit link is back. Maybe a weird effect of caching or something.
pg, is it just a plain average as in "karma / count_of_comments" ?

Consider using an average over a median range, i.e. sort comments by the score, trim top 10% and bottom 10% and then compute the average. This basically ignores occasional flukes, both positive and negative. Specifically, it rewards for consistently scoring well (and not just once) and doesn't punish for an occasional negative score.
Aquamacs has a solid fullscreen environment, and you gotta love the mac's text rendering.

First thing I did was swap to option = alt, command = meta.

Next was load up CEDET, and enable all the excessive display helpers. I'll eventually pear them down, but for now it's nice. Specifically, the header bar shows the current function/method body I'm in, and there's an overline over every signature.

Really nice to parse through large source files, especially when they're full of long definitions. Hey, no judging.
My own new comments weren't showing up as highlighted for some reason. Now they are.

I didn't believe I had an average score of less than 3.5 (not to brag or anything... it's only 4.4, for the record ;), so I went back to average my last 50 comments scores, and on the 2nd or 3rd page I noticed my username was finally orange.

Anyway, it seems to be ok now.
Could you please elaborate on that.