skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I never understood the confusion over how X11 refers to the "server" and the "client". You hit a key in xterm, the client, it requests, to the server, that certain pixels light up in such a way as to represent a character. Clients make requests, servers carry them out. The apparent confusion is more confounding when you consider that, today, few people actually run X clients remotely for everyday purposes, so the server and the client are right in front of you on the same machine, so confusion over the "server" being a "remote" resource are unfounded. On top of that, I can not comprehend what kinds of requests could be made by the video hardware, and the software that drives it, that would make it a client and the X application the server.
Spot On! Perhaps we should esteem those without Orange Names as (perhaps) frequent contributors to the more start-up/software related posts rather than the more generalised new items.
I was thinking I will need to teach:

1) Importance and applications of computers
2) How it might be affecting the life of these kids without their own knowledge
3) How computers work in a very simplified way
4) Using computers for fun

A charity organization has donated about 6 computers which they have kept in a room. I guess the students will have access to these.
Malinvestment also applies to labor. Workers need to retrain before they can start new productive jobs, and they need capital as well (not easy, since the US are borrowing instead of saving).
So, where does this fit into net neutrality? ISPs can certainly sell QoS services to customers.

For some applications, this is important (e.g. gaming). For others, it could be a nice competitive advantage. But then with more & more of the ATM frames dedicated to QoS, that'll leave more contention (thusly, higher latency & drop) for the rest.

I'm just worried about who's going to use these facts for what ends.
Truly impressive. The comparison shots show a huge difference in clarity. This looks like a great app.

It requires a jailbroken iPhone, by the way. Company site: http://www.occipital.com/ClearCam
I think it punishes commenting on niche hacker news postings that don't make it to the front page (i.e. far enough up on the list).

If only few people read a posting, only few people will upvote it. So even if the comment would be valuable for a high traffic posting, it doesn't really get any points.

Something that I really like about Hacker News, is that you can find lots of stuff on the second or third page that doesn't appeal to too many people, but is still interesting. Now, if you comment there a lot, it will decrease your karma.

IMO these comments can be more valuable to those interested than it can be appreciated using points (esp. for Ask HN/YC posts).
I agree. I'm in Alaska, so I'm pretty much behind everybody. I'm usually posting while you all are asleep. I'm screwed.
Going to go pedantic on you, but I believe you mean 'affect' and not 'effect'. I used to always have a have time with this until my doctoral supervisor told me to remember the mnemonic RAVEN: Remember Affect Verb Effect Noun. So 'to affect' is the verb and 'an effect' is the noun.

Of course, English being what it is there's an exception or two! Effect can be a verb when used in the form 'to effect a change'. And affect is from time to time a noun when used by psychologists.

But mostly RAVEN applies.
> Lim, who is fluent in six programming languages, started using the computer at the age of 2. He has since completed about 20 programming projects.
Don't worry, they won't eat more than what is produced.
Apple's design process - BusinessWeek
I never got around to digging in to the guts of grep to see what makes it so fast, that 'end of the string' match trick is a very nice one.

They guys that came up with that one must have been sitting there being pretty smug and wearing a silly grin. That's one neat hack.
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No, but maybe the way of tsarist Russia or Rwanda?

Vive la Révolution! Down with the dark orange ones!
I think this is a classic case of comments being misconstrued. The decision (as made clear) was obviously driven primarily by family (as it should be). The other comments were rationalising how the Valley (to him) presents a better startup sub culture.

Plus, of course, this link takes the words somewhat out of context. The original PG message clearly marks Boston as the #2 startup area - and then tries to explain why the #1 startup environment is leaps and bounds better.

Each to his own... certainly calling it bridge burning seems pure sensationalism :)
Just a thought in addition to the physics lectures (which are definitely important) - programming, or maybe even simple data entry, is probably the easiest way to earn money during spare time while still gaining knowledge and experience. If these kids could learn how to program and had access to computers with Internet access, I think there could be a way for them to earn some money and gain early job experience. And if the programming/computer lessons are related to physics, you could teach both at the same time.

I know some people would find this controversial since this is a high school classroom and not a vocational/trade school - that the kids need to focus on learning and building a strong educational foundation. But I'm from India and know how bad the situation can get... these kids are probably under a lot of pressure to earn for their families. Besides, I'm guessing there are people in the US with PhDs that are struggling to find jobs in this economy... if one benefit of a strong, pure educational foundation is some guarantee of job security in the future, it certainly isn't always the case.

Can anyone think of realistic ways that kids in this situation could make money by coding, or doing something computer related, on the Web? Amazon Mechanical Turk comes to mind, but I don't know much about it, or if the tasks involved will teach you anything significant.
It would be cool, but distracting. Maybe you'll be able to do it for yourself once scripting abilities are added.
Teaching kids about computers is great, but given your limited time, and the limited availability of kit, my personal feeling is that you'd be best spending most of your time teaching them basic science. Having a good grasp of doing experiments, measuring things, and general problem solving, is of great value in everything they may end up doing. Teaching them "about computers" pretty much only teaches them about computers.

In the end, though, it is your judgement. You have to teach them

a) what you're comfortable with

b) what they will respond to

c) what seems to provide value, short and long term.

I think basic science is better than "about computers", but you'll be the man on the spot, and it will be your call. I think you're doing a fantastic thing.
It's not flaunting of karma - it serves a usability purpose.

If you want to skim for good comments, this feature helps you do so. This feature helps to highlight comments with few points that might be of merit, because the poster tends to say good things.

I'd advise that if not being orange hurts a person's feelings, that reflects on the person's state of mind more than anything.

Bottom line - if the orange color helps me find better comments, faster - it' a good feature.
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How about:

comment karma / min (1, max (story karma, 10)

But your normalization idea might work better.
The feature helps me find better comments, faster - therefore it is good.

It intuitively highlights for me low-scoring comments that I may want to read.
Would it be possible to have an indication of your comments-points average within your profile.

The new orange badge-of honour has motivated me to become more insightful, witty, helpful and technically adept... but I want to know how much more ISWHTA I need to become to hit the threshold.

There's actually a serious point to this, some people will be quite serious about wanting to "go orange" and I think that's a fine aspiration. Unfortunately, the system as devised is likely to penalises two types of comment:

1. Commenting on slightly older stories - the comment is less likely to be voted up (or down) and will therefore harm the commentor's points average.

2. The "Thanks" comment. I have on occasion posted a quick 'thank you' to someone for answering a question. I wouldn't expect that to be voted up - it is not interesting or insightful, it's just an (almost private) message of appreciation for some help. Saying "thanks" reduces your average.

If you want less of that type of behaviour then, fine - but I suspect that these are unintended consequences.
"The moralists insist it’s irresponsible for us to just print more money."

Actually economists, not moralists, are against this; because excessive pumping of money in they system in this way will cause hyper-inflation.
Classical (and rather extreme) example of why printing money should be kept under check: Zimbabwe.
Your second experiment is absolutely fantastic, and I have used it. I was disappointed to find that the kids actually seemed to learn nothing from it. The principles seem to be pretty deep, and there's actually a lot going on. Maybe I didn't explore it enough, but I think it's a difficult experiment to "get" until you're older.

Your first one is easiest done with a "slinky". You don't need a strobe, because it all happens really, really slowly.

Off-topic: Some people are like slinkies. Of no real use, but they still make you laugh when you see them tumble down stairs ...
My workflow in most projects:

1. create .css file

2. tweak pixel-positions via Firebug and instant preview

3. write final positions into .css file

Firebug nicely display the line number of the css rule to tweak. This isn't possible with something like Sass, so i assume it would slow me down.

This instant preview tweaking with Firebug is even more important with legacy CSS to find the position where a certain value is set. I can't think of a way to do that with Sass.
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I did an internship in Lagos, Nigeria and during this time a lot of folks from Ghana came to work there. They were the most friendly, open-minded and welcoming people I met during this time. Now that Nigeria is no longer a safe place to be, a lot of expats (mostly working for oil and construction companies) moved their families to Ghana . I doesn't matter from where they fly out to the oil rigs.
A war on wars?
This concurrs with the grandfather's theory. This particular domain of physics, quantum theory, is certainly new and, we may say, as immature as the other domains were 3 centuries ago.
I have to confess that the idea is clever: but ultimately does not fix the problem.

The issue, as I see it, is not so much the posts as the voting. Which varies wildly and is fairly indescriminate. A worthless but sensationalist message might get lots of upvotes whilst a shy but informative message will get missed.

I suggest it is the voting practices that need to be addressed. I vote very rarely on messages (maybe once or twice a day): making my approval something "to be gained". I know others use that approach too - and I think it makes things worth much more.

Ideally (IMO) a good situation should be one where a post with 5 votes should be stunningly good and 20 votes a "once in a lifetime" achievment.

Some ideas...
- Vote weighting (Karma or average Karma effects the weight of your vote)

- Include "Downvotes" next to the total. This helps identify messages with a lot of disagreement (i.e. something with a 1 might have 20 downs and 21 ups - that is worth taking a look at).

- Im not sure how you position the comments (never tracked them in depth) but I think you could try

- - New comments stay at the "top" of the page for a set time (an hr perhaps?) before being ranked properly.

- - Ranked posts: push all negative marked posts below -1 to the bottom. All positive stuff to the top marked on activity (a combination of the direct replies and the number of up&down votes)

That doesn't totally fix the problem but I suggest it might have an impact :D
Suppose someone tends to make insightful, useful and interesting comments, the sort you want to find when quickly skimming. Suppose that same person also makes lots of little comments to assist others in finding information, the sort of comments that don't get upmodded because they've taken time to compile and hence come late, the sort that are on niche matters that don't make it to the front page, etc.

This feature prevents you from seeing their comments.

As long as I take the time to research my answers, and as long as I take time to find and flag duplicate submissions, my name will never turn orange. That means that people like you who skim for the orange will never value my other submissions.

<fx: shrugs> Maybe my contributions are of no value.
But short term expansion will surely not be enough to quell the crisis.
Also, the point that other commentators have made on falling value of the currency stands valid. At the moment, America is facing twin problems of slowing economy and mounting debt; whose classical "cure" point to different directions.
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I use CVS builds of GNU Emacs, they work great. Just check the source out from CVS and './configure --with-ns; make install' will produce an Emacs.app for you to drag to Applications.

The only problems I have is a bug where if you resize your window at least once, it will cause annoying flashes during redraw (but I almost never resize my emacs window, so that's not an issue) and that I would like more integration with the OS.

On the latter front, I already started calling NS services from Emacs (ns-service-Things-add-item-as-Note). This is very cool. What I'd like is more of an ability to customize what Emacs does when it is called to open a file.

I remap Caps Lock to Ctrl.
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I [...] disagree. [...] it is uncertainty, pain and infirmity I am afraid of, not death. [...] We don't need a war on aging, we need a war on suffering.

You don't think it is possible to be aged (senesced), but not dead? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466749

Could you call your war on suffering, a war on senescence? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senescence
"Hell, segments of our population die from immediate peanut exposure - good grief!"

That's not as bad as its sounds. Spiders can't take coffein and dogs can't stomach chocolate.
People tend to care for their offspring. Humans do it longer than almost anything else.
You can do a lot for 2) with Slinkys or other long springs and a stopwatch to help understand waves, frequency, etc.

There's also a cool outdoor experiment you can do to measure the speed of sound by clapping pieces of wood/books together in a constant, even rhythm such that you hear an echo between each clap (so you hear clap - echo - clap - echo). By measuring the distance to the wall, and timing the sequence for a set number of claps/echoes, you can get a good estimate of the speed of sound. You can also make a game to see which "team" can get the best measurement. It's a very cheap demo, but it utilizes a lot of concepts of physics and physics experiments.
Evolution [...] selects those who are best adapted to their environment

Are you sure it is not, instead, selective-pressure that does that? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=437043
Is it just me, or for a while did NYTimes not force this login screen for most articles? I was kind of surprised to get it.

In any event, clicking on the link in Google seems to get past it: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22A+Haven+for+Spar...
There's a major difference between n00b and casual user. The n00b doesn't try to integrate, they don't try to absorb the culture. They simply act like puppies, get very excited and pee all over the place.

The intention is to help n00bs become casual users, and some casual users to become respected members. You are definitely more of a casual user approaching welcome member.

I've been here less time than you - these are simply my opinions.
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"Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it."

René Descartes

I break the program in functional parts that are easier to grasp and I assemble those parts only after having written tests for those parts.
Well, I don't actually care about orange names. I think the far more useful change recently introduced is the -8 karma limit, which will prevent lynch mob behaviour when someone makes a comment which a significant number of people disagree with strongly.

As for the orange name stuff, who cares. Karma is not an objective, it's a side-effect. If you do care about having an orange name, though, I agree that the algorithm is a bit dubious...
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Upvote the Gray! Downvote the Orange! Vive la Révolution!
May the endless cycle of mindless voting never stop!
and to preserve your "orangeness", you might as well fire off smartass comments as they occur to you even if they don't contribute to the conversation. it's the HN equivalent of rewarding thats-what-she-said jokes, and it'll just be a different kind of karma whoring.

slashdot got this particular issue right (at least in the early 2000s, before their digg-envy took hold) by not awarding karma for anything modded up "Funny". while these "funny" comments -- usually brief and snarky or perverted -- would still appear +5, there was otherwise no long-term incentive. unfortunately there's no analogous control mechanism here (and copping slashdot's mod system altogether seems too heavyweight.)

there was also a karma cap (+50?) above which your comments would start out at 2 points instead of 1; otherwise there's little point in accumulating more karma than that.

their moderation faq is worth a read (skip about a third of the way down to "will you delete my comment?"): http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml

also, some winding threads are really interesting (and vacuous ones are easy to skip) -- i don't know if it's worth the tradeoff to cull them.

(yes, i'm replying to the top-modded post so my comment goes above the fold.)
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so, why not load the first few results quickly, then fill in the rest later through ajax? It'll take more than .5 seconds to eyeball the first ten results.
There are many reasons, mostly to do with skewed priorities. I'll describe one of ways priorities get skewed. There is a disproportionately large film and TV industry with a lot of political backing which are interested in getting TV into as many homes as possible. In the south Indian state I come from, one of the election promises by the current chief minister (somewhat equivalent to a governor in US) was a free TV for every family. The same minister owns a private TV Network. What best way to get more audience than use government money...
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There must be some way to get a 'best of breed' without going through all the growing pains and frustration that come with setting up a community and then to see the inmates take over the asylum.

I also like to think that /. and HN appeal to a completely different audience, and the whole 'points' thing may be detrimental to that. As far as I'm concerned it could be completely under water (as in invisible to users of the site) and just used as a way to give/remove functionality and to influence sort orders and things like that.
Unfortunatly they are just slides so far (but still interesting). Anyone got some URL to audio/video/liveblog/transcripts on this speak?
Oh come on, now you're changing the terms. I've never heard anybody wanting a war on the measurement of aging.

It's the human bodily degeneration and weakness, physical and mental, that results from the biological processes of life running for tens of years that's the undesirable part. Commonly known as "old age" and "aging".
Some form of meta moderation would be a good fix for that, modding down when you disagree with someone is simply cheap. If you disagree then say so (and why!), don't mod down.

You can have your name in pink, purple or green for all I care it will not matter one little bit, the only thing that matters is what you have to say.
Yes, but they don't differ on how you deal with practical problems, at least not ones on the level of how to design a car or a computer. Maybe they would affect cutting edge semiconductor research or fusion reactor design, (I don't think the interpretations of quantum physics do, but other conjectures might).
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way old! But a great article.
Well here's a starter for you. Using enhanced regex syntax you can match a language containing strings of prime length. On the other hand (using the pumping lemma[1]) you can prove that that set is not regular, hence not detectable by a standard regex.

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=MDQ_K7-z2AMC&pg=PA47...
Ask HN - I don't understand the up/down arrows behavior ...
I'm finding that on some threads there are comments I can up or down mod, but other comments I can only up mod. I thought it might be because I couldn't downmod people with more karma than I have, but then I found a two comments by the same user, and I could downmod one but not the other.

I'm very confused by this - not that it really matters - but I'd like to understand. Can anyone here provide an explanation?

Thanks.
is this in New York or Banglore ... ?
Awesome stuff. Thanks for doing this.

What age are these kids? What's the local language?
how is that for double speak ? "AOL remains an extremely valued partner, and we’ll continue to work closely together to provide their users with the best search experience possible. After careful consideration, we made the decision that we needed to exercise our rights now so we could be in a position to sell our interest when the timing made sense for us.”

The language twists that publicly traded companies go through in order to express themselves are really tiring.

The plain text translation of that to me reads: "We don't want to kill you outright in public but we're tired of you and because the market is contracting we'd like to get out while the getting out is good. Also we'd like you very much to not switch to a competitor once we've ditched you."