skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Idea and implementation look good.

A similar site exists for all dot files (configuration files under unix,) which might be helpful: http://www.dotfiles.org

Regarding the actual site, there are a few design comments:

* Yeah, we get that it's supposed to look like a terminal, but the novelty of harsh fonts/colors wears off very quickly. Either having the ability to change it to something else or making a more pleasant default would be nice.

* Make it possible to increase the number of command lines per page. I doubt it is very tolling to generate and submit the pages, but I find it more convenient to just scroll rather than keep clicking 'next.' The way I use your site as of right now, is just keep going through commands, glazing over those I either know or don't find useful until I find the gems. Clicking next continuously is unproductive.

* The "minimize, maximize, close" buttons over the terminal are, as I see now, just a static image to simulate an actual terminal window. This is very unintuitive as I tried clicking them to, what I thought, will make the terminal either span the entire page or load more commands. Either add functionality to buttons or make it obvious that they aren't buttons.

* Finally, it'd be really nice if you don't have to sign up to vote or submit commands. Sometimes I just have one or two commands I'd like to contribute and would not want making an account in YetAnotherWebsite just to do so. You might be missing a lot of useful contributions by making sign-ups mandatory.

Otherwise, well done!
I would pay more, but that still wouldn't solve the problem. A better solution is to not allow anonymous posters. That said, a lot of folks here post under their real name or have info about their real name on their handle. This would do a lot more than charging $.

They flare up, grow, shrink, and die out all the time.

I think you pretty much captured the cycle of online communities.
"fork HN -- the code is open source!"

-sorry, where is it?
I'll chip in with a tiny little insight, which I think applies in this whole karmic discussion:

Complex systems encourage simple behaviour. Simple systems encourage complex behaviour.
MeFi is actually $5 for life and it's worked pretty well.
I still agree with this, as I was initially inclined to agree with it. It's a few upvotes, people! Surely nobody takes it that seriously!

And yet the sight of someone, out of the blue, acting out some elaborate deference to an orange-named person was quite jarring. Yeah, it was a joke, but the disarming smile is always part of these things, even when it's serious. Which I don't think it is, here, and at any rate it's too early to tell. But I remain... uncomfortable.

It's much like the disturbing feeling I get whenever someone suggests that the solution to the site's woes (whatever they are this week) is to give those of us with really high karma an array of superpowers that we can use to smite evil wherever it occurs. (Fortunately, that really has been treated as a joke, so far. The awesome powers granted to high-karma people -- you can change the color of your own menu bar -- are cute and completely appropriate.)

It's not a big deal, but if I had the power to turn off my orange name I probably would.
I don't know about India but in the states you can get model rockets or those pop-bottle water rocket kits. Maybe some creative rigging with a postage scale to measure forces and demonstrate the equal/opposite reaction of throwing matter (water) out the back of the rocket at high speed?

Electromagnetic stuff: here's instructions on making a motor out of some wire, a magnet and a double-A battery.
http://www.ehow.com/how_4422383_make-battery-motor.html

Other thoughts would be to check out instructibles.com, it's not geared towards science but a lot of the projects outlined could easily be used to demonstrate principles.
I would be happy to pay (much more even), but I don't think it's necessary to help the community.
HCoop: The Internet Hosting Cooperative
When you say you've learned your lesson, do you mean you'll upvote thought-provoking, longer comments in the future? If so, I wish you good luck, but I'm skeptical about your potential success.

I've had my news.yc account for almost 2 years now, and it has always worked this way. Pithy 1-liners get upvotes; longer thoughtful comments often languish.

We're all in a hurry, so we're more likely to read shorter comments. The longer a comment is, and the more it makes us think, the less likely we are to expend the effort. The most valuable comments are ones that can change our thinking, and by nature such comments will seem wrong or unimportant when we look at them with our current thinking. The problem is human, not technological.

It's easier for me to change what I do than to change what others do, so I've adjusted my comment style to be shorter. Sometimes that means I pass up the chance to share deep thoughts. Other times it makes me more effective. For example, both ericb's and my comments made the same point, but mine drove it home better, didn't it? Upvote with a clear conscience. :-)
Apple's Snow Leopard to include location, multi-touch tools
JQuery - Top Image Presentation Plugins
This isn't censorship, it's a boycott, and it's a perfectly valid way to express your dislike for a company's PR decisions. I don't care about the ads, but I wish more consumers would put their money where their mouth is in dealing with company practices they find inappropriate.

Censorship would be these groups lobbying the FCC to ban the commercials.
hullo - i more or less agree. i'm advocating spreadsheets as more of a sanity check on your business assumptions than as a real predictive model.
> That helped me Google up a later study

I narrowly escape embarrassment, because "phonetic activation" was a mistake. It's phonological activation, but I excuse myself if you were successful with that term :)

Now that I see this abstract, the "vaguely recalled" paper could have been on kana vs kanji processing. It's quite a no-brainer actually, because kanji stresses pattern recognition far more than kana, so it's only natural that phonological activation comes later, at which point semantic activation may have been activated.

Regarding the linked research, however, I can make a few observations. First, both as heavily-practiced scripts it isn't surprising that the same areas are recruited. We are looking at areas of phonological and semantic processing. Second, as these are heavily-practiced skills, pattern recognition is very efficient; you could probably get substantial differences if you compared bopomofo-trained readers vs. pinyin-trained readers, reading each others' scripts. In this case, you could predict, again, the same areas recruited for processing, but significant timing differences. Third, this is obviously not an RSVP paradigm. If it were, you'd be able to tweak how fast the subject needs to perceive the symbols, and it could be possible to get slightly different results between order of processing for the symbols. And under the RSVP paradigm, I would make the risky prediction that hanzi would win out in cognitive overload situations.

Just to clarify, I'm not commenting on the relative advantages in processing (nor do I think the bottleneck is in the script -- and hence it's silly to proclaim the superiority of semantic power of one script over another for the language trolls and apologists). It's more of a "language engineer's" look at scripts.
I think in time we'll see communities based on membership where you do pay a fee, and then if you behave badly you'll get nuked and kicked out of the community. And it needn't be limited to one site. You could have a site goodcitizen.com and then people would have accounts with it, and their membership there would allow them to participate in blogs, etc.

The trick will be in who finds a good way to do the 'justice' system right. I've thought about this model quite a bit..

Another problem is payment systems. Part of the culture of the internet with payments is that you have to work with parties who have a business model based on bad faith. Google checkout seems to be changing that though, and now is the first time I've thought about the model since evaluating them.
Second that. I wouldn't like to use an overlong username though so I've shortened it a bit. And to put my money where my mouth is I've just added my full name and email address to the profile.

Reputation systems that are based on anonymity don't really work well in the long term, your 'net creds' don't translate in to 'street creds' and vice versa unless there is a one-on-one correspondence between the two.

Wikipedia has made some big goofs with this, allowing people to claim a reputation they could not back up in real life. There was the one guy that claimed to be an authority on religion if I recall it right that had just read through 'catholicism for dummies' or something like that.
An argument could be made that the resistor lattice is a "specific knowledge" test of electricity, and that mastermind is a specific knowledge test in combinatorial logic.

What type of knowledge are you looking to assess specifically? Economics and education policy are particularly troubling to assess objectively (I'm a fan of the Austrian school, but there are a few smart Keynesians, for instance). How do you assess economics knowledge? What sort of questions would you ask?
A troll would totally pay to manipulate and pee in your sacred pond.
I'm not too sure about that. My name is in orange, and I've had my share of terrible comments.

I'm honestly not too sure what the orange adds to the mix. Personally, I think it would be more useful to have the score displayed in the user's profile. I tend to check a person's profile if I think they're new and here to troll; that would help verify or disprove that (for me at least).
I would pay if you find a way to avoid excluding people who are assets to this community, but don't want to or can't pay.

Maybe there could be a system of free trial that would extend to a free yearly subscription for people whose karma is high enough by the end of the trial period?
IF all they did was skim money, then the economy would have simply routed around them (just as discount execution-only brokerages did to traditional stockbrokers, or Internet banking did to branches on the high street). That it didn't suggests that they did create value, and that the premise of your question is flawed.
The Great College Hoax
Well, everyone else here is beating around the bush and trying hard to be nice so I'll be the one to do you a favor and just straight up tell you. It's either A. that YC liked your idea, but didn't like you- instead liking both the idea AND the other people. Or B. YC didn't like your idea or you enough but really liked the other people. I hope that helps and good luck proving them wrong.
The author rejects unit tests because they don't help find bugs. I don't think his reasoning adds up to much, more like rationalizations for already-held beliefs.

But if you want to take the argument seriously, I would say that "finding bugs" is not the primary reason I write unit tests anyway. It's to prevent regressions, and make me feel safe that I haven't broken anything after a refactoring. If not for my unit tests, I'd be scared to change much of anything, for fear of stirring up a whole bunch of trouble that I'll have to fix later on.
Exactly my opinion, so far so good, the posts are still of great interest for me.

What bothers me more is the increasing number of meta-talk.
Right... He's saying to move away from NFS to a host that can more easily (and more economically) handle the traffic you're getting.
open source is awesome. open source is not, however, a replacement for explanations, which are often briefer and more broadly understandable.
Yes I know, I really love their archive... I was hoping to find something as of now :-)
Yes without a thought
It's boycott to a point yes. But spamming media outlets with it is an attempt at censorship.

It's a fine line but if the aim is to make GoDaddy tone down the Ad's to "religion approved" [sic] versions (as it seems it is) then it is an attempt at censorhip surely ;D
Originally? The wise old man bought and sold mortgage backed securities with a triple-A rating. Now, he stands out in the street corner with a cup in his hand and a cute cardboard sign.
It all depends on how your development works.

Let's look at a scenario where you are using an outside framework.

Not writing tests for your code? Framework v2.0 comes out and you want to use a great new feature in that version. Will your app work if you upgrade? Sure you'll have to test/QA your app regardless, but with tests you might have a better idea of where to look for problems.

This is what I'm facing at the moment as a single developer. The app has no test coverage so updating is a laborious process of testing everything by hand.

But getting into testing has it's own problems. The biggest I have with testing is when I read discussions about bugs within the test framework. How much time will you spend working around bugs in the testing framework?
How to tie your shoelace fast (video)
ah! thanks for letting me know.
Just browsing iphone apps among "Top Paid Apps" or "Top Free Apps" in related category on iTunes and find out what you like. Contact the company or author.

At least that's how our customers find us. It's a bit sound like I'm selling myself. But in case you're interested. here's what've done on iphone with a few highlights & my questions (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466840).
Ten underexposed games w/ something to say/teach (pdf slides)
I find HN a mixed bag. Some things are very good, most things are so-so, somethings are really bad. Just like real life.

The simple act of registration is enough to keep me away from most sites. At least this one is good enough that I thought it worth registration. Add a charge? I don't think it would be worth it for me to continue with it. I can find what it gives me elsewhere.

Like it or not, the Internet is a jungle.

The good thing about a jungle is that its full of all kinds of living things. The bad thing about a jungle is that its full of all kinds of living things.

When you live in a jungle its eat or be eaten then you die no matter what.
JavaScript makes relative times compatible with caching
Judging by his analogy and depth of insight, I'm guessing he's never even tried to write unit tests on a daily basis and certainly never done TDD. It's the same old argument that everyone makes when they've never actually learned to do something properly.
Again MetaFilter provides some guidance-- a separate silo for site meta-discussions (MetaTalk).
Meh. I think it's time to take an HN break for a few days until all the "Oh the humanity!" hand-wringing about the community bursting into flames has blown over.
Game programming is some of the most satisfying code you can write outside of coding up your own operating system.

It's real time, lots of subprocesses that you have to schedule properly to keep the game ticking along at a playable pace, all kinds of interaction between objects and if you're 'lucky' a good bit of math and 3d stuff.
I have that principle, but I'd relax it for HN. I think it's because I'll know that I'm being charged for a good reason.

That, and there's no "cat in a bag" situation: I know exactly what I'm getting.
He was using <b> instead of <div> because it was shorter.

That's a 4 byte savings on each button. If you had a lot of buttons on a page...that could end up saving hundreds of bytes.

I'm not sure how much that matters in the long run, but it's a great attitude to have. Bytes matter, microseconds count.

I started this comment purely tongue-in-cheek, but convinced myself of the argument before I finished writing it.
The difference is market value. If Bill were to auction off an hour lunch date with him, the winning bid would be its market value. If he spent an hour lurking or commenting on HN, it doesn't mean that hour cost him the same amount.
I really think that it is about both. You can have a stellar team with a shitty idea and bomb big time, you can have a stellar idea and a shitty team and you'll do the same.

A stellar team, a good idea, proper timing and now you maybe have something.
Ask HN: New Feature Request: Participation Acknowledgement
Interestingly enough, I've noticed that the special orange people (I wasn't one this morning, but I am one now) are not always the same as the people who have the highest karma scores.

For those people participating more, say the top 500, top 100, top 50, and top 10, I suggest a colored star beside their user name. Colors could be green, blue, red, and gold

This would be an acknowledgment for all the people who spent a lot of time adding information to the site that was upvoted the most.

There are some people who post rarely but get a high karma and then there are those that post a lot but are "steady earners" To me the more prolific high-karma participants are much more interesting to follow than simply those who are the most efficient with their commenting.

If you think the entire idea is silly, well I refer you to the current Orange username feature. To me it seems like this is along a similar vein.

(Just for the record, I am against the Orangeness and calling out of users. But if we're going to do it, we might as well be a little more judicial about how it's done)
if you down mod and then reply does the karma get removed?
No, really, it's not. A boycott wouldn't do much good if you didn't tell people about it.
Isn't this the same thing that Metafilter does? How's it working out for them? I know I paid my $5 for them, but I haven't been back there in a long time.
Actually I wrote unit tests daily at my last company, for about two years, and in the last six months of that I gave TDD a try.

My claim isn't really that they don't work, it's that (compared to the other things I listed) they have a tiny ROI.
I agree. Unit tests are what make refactoring safe.

Adding known bugs to the unit test suite is a good way to prevent regressions.
Ask HN: What Would You Do If You Had 3 Years to Live?
The Mayan calendar says the world will end in 2012. What would you do with your life if you had 3 years to live? http:/www.askbinc.com
I'm currently writing a personal project for university, and I've made sure to test it all the way through.

When I was part-way into coding this thing, I took a day to go through all the code and write tests for anything I could. I found a few bugs, so I could at least say that it helped somehow. But the tests have helped a lot more when I added to it - it feels -good- to see a big green bar light up whenever I add something. It's -nice- to run all tests, leave it a minute, and confirm that it's not going to blow up before I have to demonstrate to anybody. Of course, finding bugs is nice, and I set up a better testing rig to make sure it doesn't fail on anything I haven't thought of, but the benefits of unit testing go further than bug detection.

When you're all crestfallen with no desire to code, finding bugs is only secondary.
"preventing regressions" is a subset of "finding bugs", and I've found the other methods I listed to be more effective (from an ROI perspective) at doing that too.
time-out...

The number of meta posts on this subject is causing a serious overload, there is a 'request for features' feature and there is a thread dedicated to the subject on the front page, I'm sure this could have been blended in there.

Enough meta discussion for me for today.
A thousand people will pay, a hundred thousand won't.

HN will be an elitist forum of jerks in an echo chamber with fewer posts and two or three comments per post.

There goes the fun down the toilet.
Actually, there are three of us: http://www.experimenthouse.com/bio
(Come on, the link was in the profile... seriously?)

Not to start a flamewar, but did you really look? We've got markdown support (which means images, links, long posts, emphasis, lists). We also hand out currency based on received votes (as well as puzzle solves).

The "anything can hit the front page" is an interesting idea though. I thought about that, but I wondered how well it would work for discussions, which often don't make sense out-of-context. I poked around, but I didn't see any comments hit the mushpot FP. How well does that work in practice?

Instead, we moved a few "best" comments for each story into the RSS feed. Hopefully that will give good comments high visibility while also providing some context for what's going on.
Snow Leopard to Include CoreLocation and Multi-Touch APIs
How to beat the system to get a great job
I had to think about this for a while, but finally: no.

It worked for something awful but it pisses me off that if I have something valuable to contribute to a thread I have to cough up ten bucks. Just feels wrong. I'm doing the work right? Something awful still gets paid when someone reads my post and clicks on an ad. So, I have a negative feeling about something awful and never go there.

I might pay $5 for something that was truly value added for me, such as a secret list of "best of" content or something, or the ability to join a community of meta-moderators, or like that.
I think maybe that deference you noted is one of the intended consequences though. What I have heard overwhelmingly lately is A: HN as it stands now is a great community and B: People wish to preserve the current tone but are worried about the influx of new people who may not 'get' what HN is about.

I see the new 'orange' feature as a way to give a tiny bit more authority to users in good standing with the community, and as such it increases their ability to help maintain the tone as new users join.
send me an email. i live in a 9-person coop with a guest room. i'm back in town on feb 23rd and would be happy to host you. diN0bot bilumi org.
If it meant that this place doesn't go the way of reddit/digg/etc. then sure.
If passing unit tests give you the motivation you need to work, that's great!

Personally, just making something people want is enough motivation for me ;-)
To me Unit Testing is more about testing the expected outcome and making sure of the status quo rather then finding bugs and testing all the extreme small edge cases. Then when an abnormal and unexpected situation occurs, writing a test that induces it and fixing the code so that all the related tests pass.

To use the doctor analogy, I would say unit testing is more about testing patient outcomes when they are put through varying courses of drugs or treatments (fixing bugs and adding new features) rather then trying to make them die before declaring them healthy. Is the patients blood pressure normal? Check. Now the patient wants to start some treatment for something else. Oh wait, I'm getting an abnormal blood pressure reading.
Cari Malaysia - Find and Know Malaysia
I've likewise been here a while, and it has had an effect on my commenting style too. (Albeit almost the opposite.) If I think of a witty one liner or a joke, I'll resist posting it (where before I would have gone for it), because I actually consider whether it'll just add noise.

I also try to be more concise with my comments. Often times I think I have a point to make, but after writing quite a bit I realize that I'm just reasoning in circles and have no ground to stand on. If I can't state my point briefly (and then add elaboration to support it), then maybe I don't have one.

It says something about a site whose culture can make me abandon a position because I realize it's unfounded as I try to articulate it.

As for the one-liners. I'd like to qualify that I'll still upvote them if they are truly insightful, but I'll think twice if they are merely witty. As you say, good comments teach us something new.