skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is only tangentially related to your post, but why does corporate America have such an aversion to telecommuting?

I was by far the most productive employee in my group at the large bank I worked for previously. I outproduced others, even while taking the hardest problems -- and we had a pretty good metrics systems, so I wasn't just gaming it.

But when I asked if I could work from home when I'd decided to move, the answer was an emphatic, "No."

So, they'd rather lose their most-productive employee who also would've been far more productive at home and then have to hire a probably-inferior replacement?

Makes no sense at all, yet so many companies are like this.
Any time you ever need to map an object to another object, you need this functionality.

Without a memory address, object's don't have any other unique values associated with them. It's actually a pretty fundamental problem.

Of course, like most things wrong with javascript, you can fix it if you work for it. Objective-J fixes all the things we had problems with, and this is one of them. A lot of things in Cappuccino would not be possible without the hashing feature Tom mentioned.

As a hash table, JavaScript objects are pretty awful. You can't get a count of objects unless you literally count all the keys. And you can't iterate over the keys if anyone else has added anything to the Object prototype.

Cappuccino has a proper hash table, CPDictionary, which solves both of those problems. There's a lot of other data structures that address some of the author's listed concerns.
Surge of Nerds Rebuilds Afghanistan
It would appear that they simply don't understand how to manage someone who isn't physically at the office, so they can't just walk over to your cube every five seconds and dickishly ask for a "status update."

I _am_ accounting for the absence of physical contact. My employees will have a desk VoIP phone connected to the company PBX, email, IM, and all the other stuff that is used for internal communication in companies where a bunch of folks are sat in offices and cubes but hardly ever bother to walk over to each other's positions as it is not really part of the workflow protocol. And these are employees, not subcontractors. I will manage them. I just won't be standing over their shoulder.

I don't see why that's such an impossibly lofty goal.
Reminds me of the part in Crpytonomicon in prison, when Waterhouse is hacking something up but using similar noise techniques to conceal it.
Yes, viper mode for emacs ;-)
I'm not, if that person is the idiot that made a filter mandatory. But I fear the little technician, that reasoned against filtering in the first place, will get the boot.
Sometimes I'll just upvote a submission on the 'new' page with 0 points to trigger group think because I might think the article will spark interesting debate, or to help prevent an 'ask hn' or 'rate my startup' submission from falling, which keeps other users here from seeking advice from the community.
My personal experience is that this can work great, but not if you're talking 'ordinary' employees, you'll have to do a good bit of screening to get people with the right mindset. Some are stellar at it, others will not be able to handle the freedom. For those individuals that can not handle the freedom it is better to have a per-job style payment.
"To minimize the risk, the government technology gurus have made it impossible to forward e-mail messages from the president"

That doesn't make any sense to me. Anyone know what that's supposed to mean?
Ah, the old gold standard canard again. Not even worth refuting these days, so I won't try.

" As for CEOs if they were acting wrongly then their board, or shareholders should revolt."

Hasn't happened yet, but it's a nice pie-in-the-sky fantasy.

I'm perplexed by many people's ideas here that the best way the system self-corrects is by effectively allowing the system to self-immolate.

Is there no better way?

"Productivity is constantly increasing, and will be increasing at faster rates."

Doubtful, but even if true, when will that productivity lead to better standards of living for all but the wealthy few? Incomes of the richest Americans more than doubled in the past eight years. Do you think they got twice as productive?

Before you answer, remember that in the financial sector at least, in the last two years, banks have lost more money than they have made in profits in the last 2,500 years of banking — even adjusted for inflation.
Of course. That is presumed. I am confident I have found the right people; I really believe they "get it."

What I wonder is whether this system will somehow fail to produce the results I need despite that.
Bottom line: Eric Bauman got rich by stealing other people's content. I don't know how this provides evidence that the system regulates itself.

Of course, in a truly self-regulated system, there would be no such thing as copyright, so Eric Bauman wouldn't have been stealing in the first place.
It serves a purpose, though. When you see a user with high karma, you can easily tell that he has contributed a lot to the conversation.
Enhancing Multitasking to Enhance Our Minds.
Ruby for Desktop Applications? Yes we can
that is an excellent observation.

One reason there are still lots of truckdrivers and not AI's driving those trucks is that even if you could build one it would be very hard to make it cost effective.

Long term it will probably be more like the drones piloted by guys sitting a couple of hundred (or thousand) miles away, jobs will be broken up into groups based on the 'hardness' of the problems that need solving and then get parcelled out a-la the mechanical turk.
When I was a kid-nerd, adults would ask me what I would like to do when grown-up. You know, in the manner they do this to be polite. And I figured, when I respond "I want to go to university and study!" they would smile and be happy. So there I had my slogan. Thing was: I also meant it. I imagined a place where I could work on projects of my own choosing as opposed to the stuff the teacher would come up with. That's what I thought means "to study". You are completely free, choose your subject and fight to master it and achieve great things that are a blessing for humanity. Oh, well.
Scaling software has much more to do with the architecture of the software than with the language.

It is possible to write software in any language that scales poorly as well as to write software that scales very well.

Right now I'm working on a site that pulls in about 1/2 million uniques daily written in Java (chosen by the programmer before me), before that that same site was written in PHP.

Ruby, perl, PHP they're all just different hammers, a good programmer should be able to write scalable web applications with all of the above, but will find a matter of personal preference (or historical accidents) to make the decision.

In the beginning it is probably smarter to learn how to program in a language for which there is a market, not to focus so much on scalability issues because when just starting out getting paying work is probably more important.

Another issue when learning how to code is to learn how to write clean code, I know I'm showing my age here but you could do worse than to have a look at the source code to the GNU utils package, there is a ton of 'good' code in there that will help you to develop a legible style. That will come in handy in any language, scalable or not :)
Thanks; I am less worried that I've lost my mind.
Learn a new language with Project Euler problems
Learning a new non-trivial programming language is a considerable task, and after doing the initial reading work it is essential to start some coding in it. I found when learning lisp (with Practical Common Lisp) that solving mathematical problems from the http://projecteuler.net site was a great and satisfying way to get going. Each problem demands the development and implementation of an algorithm (apart from a few best done in the head or on paper!). The algorithms required cover both working with numbers and strings and cover a lot of ground. There is also then a good discussion forum to debate solutions, which languages have been used etc. Enjoy!
Confirmed: Apple and Adobe Collaborating on iPhone Flash
Sadly, viper-mode behaves more like a poor nvi clone than a featureful vim clone.
I'd be the last to say that Javascript doesn't have its proper place, all of the sites I'm working on use it to some extent.

But I'd not call it 'good enough' as in a replacement for all those other programming languages that make up todays palette, it is simply good enough for its intended purpose, which is to extend web pages to include features for which tags are too limiting, including underwater communication with a web server in order to make dynamic changes to a page that has already been served.

JavaScript to me is a means to an end, definitely not a general purpose programming language. Though technically you can write anything in it (it's Turing complete after all).
i'm more into fp and using lisp so for my experience-based suggestion the dev technologies are all aligned (lisp, jquery, script-fu)

a less parallel could be erlang, jquery, python-fu where one needs to learn 3 distincts techs -> takes more time

for oop, it could be ruby, prototype, <insert ruby for photo>, and of course sql

i didn't put sql because i don't use it now since my data structure (linked list) is not easily mapped into tables shrug and i use a lot of regex on top of it ... but it would be sqlite if i have to use sql again

abundant open source options ... choose the smallest set
This is true for now. It becomes interesting when we develop context-dependent AI that can crawl through the 'everything bucket' and create structured data from it. An Evernote or Shovebox that could automatically add events to my calendar, automatically filter and categorize incoming e-mails and bookmarks, etc. would be a game-changer.
The word is cheapskate not cheapstake.
Points have their uses in making it easier to zoom in on the important parts of a discussion (or the best contributions), it's helpful if you have a limited amount of time to spend and you want to make the most of that.

Unfortunately they tend to turn in to a goal by themselves.

Points are the root of all evil ;)

It's a classic case of influencing the system that you are measuring, same with google pagerank or a volt meter with a low internal resistance.
its lifted right from Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. Which is a great read and a wonderful tool to teach the importance of the right to privacy and encryption.
It does work, I've been working from home for almost 2 years - leading a team who partly work in an office and partly work at home.

Not everyone may want to work from home though.

Campfire + VOIP works well to manage everything.

We all run on a central network using VPN but we're slowly starting to use more external services - and I hope we can ditch the VPN for most stuff in a few months - using Google Apps, Github and some proprietary web apps.

It gives more time to work as you're not commuting and if you have a young family it means you get to see the kids more.
If it is at all feasible I'd suggest you get people together periodically, that will go a long way towards building a lasting configuration.

Whether that's feasible or not you'll have to make sure that people know that their contributions are being noted and to stimulate frequent contact between your team members.

I've had a (small) office in Toronto (about 10 people) and we worked from home as well for a while, it was quite interesting to see some of the best performers in the office environment turn into absolute sloths when given the freedom and vice versa.
If they let you work at home they would need to let everyone work at home. The house of cards comes tumbling down.
They could be talking about drm features in outlook 2007 which lets you specify restrictions on forwarding of messages.

Of course, it can be 'broken'.
Perhaps I'm biased because it's how I first learned vi ~15 years ago,
but I still think the best way to learn vi(m) is by running
vimtutor. It copies the tutorial text file to /tmp and launches
vim against it. The text first teaches the user how to move the cursor
around (in order to scroll down to the next lesson), then how to exit the editor,
and finally different ways of modifying text. Many lessons are followed
by interactive examples, which is a really neat way to learn (e.g.,
"Make the second line below look like the first line").

Text of the tutorial: http://ftp.vim.org/vim/runtime/tutor/tutor
Capitalism I think is as much a necessary evil as democracy, we know it isn't perfect but we've found it to be very very hard to come up with a working alternative.

The best way to prove your point of course is to live it, and I'm very curious what proposal you have to replace capitalism. Socialism has been tried in the sovblock countries and it failed (due to greed and incompetence), so it seems that capitalism is better capable of dealing with those two human qualities.

The financial crisis - as bad as it is - is not nearly as bad as the situation that existed in the former USSR and its satellite states. China may come to some middle ground between capitalism and communism/socialism but they have some way to go before they can call themselves an open society.

What is your alternative ?
Someone should make the case for a separate test / dev environment to the big G :)

Seriously though, I wonder how many programmers / site builders are going to use this as an excuse for their own goofs....

"Look, if google can be down for half an hour due to one slash, you really shouldn't be angry with me for [insert some terrible mistake here]."
True, but I think it's a lot easier to get to the karma level where you can downmod now. Unless the limits have been raised.
Presumably this is for http://www.minuteglass.com/? If you are after any significantly large sample data to base some usability/design decisions on, I'd recommend Amazon Mechanical Turk.
The Popular Practice of Putting Stuff Off
"PLAYBOY: What will change?
JOBS: The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people—as remarkable as the telephone."
I meant with the length of the list, not with the individual entries.
$30 a month makes this "public service" a toy for highly paid commuters

I don't think you have to be that highly paid at all for this to make a whole lot of sense. 30 minutes a workday is 10 hours a month, minimum, spent on rapid transit. That time is lost to you unless you have some way to make use of it -- and the Internet for time-shifting either productive labor or errands makes a whole lot of sense.

I have roughly 4 hours of daily commute (yay, Japan) and would give my spleen to have sustained connectivity (and room to open a laptop). It would give me essentially two workweeks for free -- and believe me, I'd put them to use.
You may or may not like eBaum. But I think his new company will prevail in the long run. The modern worlds companies are extremely different from an old taylorism-ideology. You need the right people. Now eBaum is just going to rebuild the new sites in a couple of days, which is easy since they've done it before. They will probably make it better as well. They know how to gather content (legality of this content i'll rather not comment on).
Everyone involved in community projects should read this (doesn't matter whether online or offline)
I recall PG saying something a while back about a "rollback" feature that would give you the option to only display those comments and submissions created by users above a certain account-age/karma threshold. So in effect you could turn a knob and the site would roll back to, say, the user base from 300 days ago.

I thought it sounded like a pretty elegant (if potentially divisive) solution, maybe worth serious consideration.
>I really can't think of any reason why you'd want to show score before voting.

It really depends on whether you see yourself as a Hacker News reader, or as a Hacker News editor. It's just like Amazon: If I'm a customer, I want to hear what everyone else thinks about something. But if I were hiring someone to be a professional reviewer for Amazon, I'd hide the other ratings to make them as objective as possible.

So here are two ways ratings make HN a more pleasant experience:

- If I have limited time to go through HN, I want to be able to zoom in on the comments others judged to be of the highest quality.

- If the comment is on a topic I have little familiarity with, it's often hard to judge its accuracy/validity on my own. A decent number of votes gives me confidence that the person is right.

So in these respects, it's just like Google rankings or Amazon ratings.

Having points probably does cause some amount of groupthink. I bet hiding votes would scrunch the distribution of votes around the mean.

By the way, if HN's database contains the exact sequence of upmods/downmods for a particular story, e.g. 1, 1, -1, -1, -1, 1, ..., it would be possible to test how much groupthink is involved by modeling the sequence of votes as a random walk and testing how much the probability of an upmod/downmod is conditional on the current number of votes. Or, if HN starts hiding votes, you could analyze how this affects voting patterns. Sounds like an interesting college stats/psychology project for someone :)
I'd much rather deal with the ramifications of "groupthink" than wade through dozens of banal comments.

Vote counts give me more information. While that may affect my understanding of an idea, it's for the better.

Points may have an inherent bias towards older posts or well known authors, but I value what they represent.
Vim commands every programmer should know
Completely agree, and said as much not long ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=447563

I tend to find myself influenced by the karma count more than anything else. I have to log myself out after commenting to increase the cost of checking the change to my net karma.

I'm a strong advocate of hiding the karma counts entirely (for users, submissions, and comments). That greatly reduces the conditioning effect, not to mention karma-related drama and groupthink (as Surowiecki argues, crowd wisdom is best procured when evaluations are performed independently). Submissions and comments can still be ordered by net karma over time, as they are now.

Whatever you choose to do, I think there's a strong argument in favor of experimentalism. Especially since the site isn't a commercial undertaking and can deal with the occasional disruption.

(Um, and yes, that user is me. I locked myself out of my account to keep myself from compulsively commenting and visiting the site. Apparently I still wanted back in.)
Teleworkers appreciate terseness.
I view it as, above all else, a failure of education.

People can't teach their children what money really is, if they themselves don't understand fiat currency and the power that the central banks have to expand and contract money supply.
His approach verges on being arrogant and probably only works when you already have fanatic followers.
Lessons Learned in Building a Highly Scalable MySQL Database
An embarrassing flub, sure, but perhaps not expensive. By scaring people away from natural results, Google's ad clickthroughs may have gone up during the glitch!
But 10 people's moral character? 30?

If the comment was really sparkling, it seems unlikely that the first two ignoramuses would drown out the larger cast of HN. It's not all about timing.
This isn't to actually let people read at work - it's a viral ad to encourage reading.
You are not good at locking yourself out of your account. While I appreciate the struggle with compulsion, I'm not sure you're fit to dictate guidelines.
To me, that article was an amazing technical achievement. The author went on for three pages about police seeking the right to jam cell phone signals, and not once did they mention the ramifications for the ability of the populace to hold the police to account for abuses. And they did so less than two weeks after damning cell phone video of the execution of a civilian by a police officer on the BART system.

While I would admire the author's technical skill in skirting the issue (truly amazing), I now have even deeper reservations about the editorial policy and institutional bias of the Washington Post. While many of the participants at HN write very lucidly, I wouldn't guess that many of us have worked as writers. I have, and I could not have designed a piece of writing to better omit the issue of civilian surveillance of law enforcement officers given the subject matter they were handling.
It was down voted because it was only tangentially related to the original post.
it's funny, that 'practice' is exactly what got me on to hacker news in the first place, a discussion of how to avoid procrastination.
to go through HN, I want to be able to zoom in on the comments others judged to be of the highest quality.

Of course reading this site only worsened the problem!

detects an infinite regress here somewhere...
I don't have any experience building a team like that, but i recently moved from a full time work-at-home freelancer to a part time work-at-home freelancer when i took on a full time job.

I can honestly confirm that my productivity has decreased by more than 50%. One part of it is because of the wasted time in getting to the office and back. Another bigger part is because programmers work in an open space plan. Some other parts would be office politics and so on...

Working in a home office was so much better than i often ended up working 16 hours a day prior to a project deadline and not mind(i used to enjoy what i do).

We used to communicate all the time via IM, via email, and via skype. And of course make full use of collaboration tools. Also, me being in a different time zone helped the process a lot.

So yeah, some people will take advantage of this situation. But then again, bad people will try to take advantage of any situation. It is up to you to recognize those people and stay away from them.
So, at least with bombs, wouldn't jamming devices allow for better targeting?

For instance, if I know jamming is employed, I could create a trigger that detects the jamming (not very subtle and only available to the military), and goes off when the jamming intensity starts to decline.

This would allow the bomb to go off right as the jamming device passes, causing maximum damage, no?

NOTE: I would never build such a device.
my experience is that the management in big companies isn't nearly as interested in productivity as you would hope. they're a lot more concerned about accountability, not screwing up, not doing things that could be held against them, etc.

so i'd say it's more likely a case of valuing a different set of things.
Well, then just how much did regulation helped prevent this whole fiasco?
This raises so many doubts.
As with numerous other comments to the original SF Chronicle article, I am outraged at the idea that one more WIFI service area thinks I should be subscribing for $30/ month or so. Right :/
Furthermore: who decided to sign a 10-year contract? The supervising Board for BART must have been blinded by its drool over a cash cow to help fund its operations. Did it not occur to them that it's likely rates will be coming down because of increased competition & new technologies within even 5 years?
Of course 16,000 signed up for free. Let's form a pool to bet how long it'll take to get that number of paid subscribers.
The system doesn't self-correct everywhere at the same time (unless there is a central bank point of failure, if you see where I'm going...), so if your company is bankrupt you can find a job elsewhere.

Mind you, people who were careful with their money and didn't believe in the pipe dream of ever increasing home equity need not worry about what's going on (well, they need to worry about what the government is doing, but that's another matter).