skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just curious, was this story upvoted by mostly newer users?

Could you compute the average "age" by averaging how many days ago each user created their accounts? (I'm wondering about the "age" result of this specific story, but it also seems like a potentially useful metric that you could use to push stories like this down the page faster.)
Let's see, in just the past few super nested comments, you...

a) wagged your Madonna vs Whore complex out in the open air for everyone

b) implied women who engage in casual sex have a clinical disorder

c) said that women need society's protection against "cads"

d) said women can't take casual sex because of their poor widdle emooootionnnssss!

e) suggested that feminism has all the hallmarks of being engineered by evil menz!

A. No. I said that I don't like casual sex. Madonna/whore implies that a woman who has any sex (or any sex with a man who's not her husband) is a whore. I don't think that's remotely true, and that I never said. It would be hypocritical. I'm not a virgin, but I've only had sex in the context of a committed, loving relationship, and I would be extremely suspicious of a woman who didn't share those values.

A whore or slut is a person who has sex with bad or immoral motivations. There's nothing wrong with a person (male or female) enjoying sex.

B. I implied that people (not just women) who enjoy casual sex are playing out anachronistic "alpha male" scripts, and that people with those tendencies tend to be psychopathic.

Also, note that I used the term "alpha male" in reference to the clinical disorder of psychopathy, implying even more strongly that men who involve themselves in casual sex are disordered. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=456289 There are, in fact, more men who are psychopaths than women.

C. This was another poster. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=456087

D. I said: "[Casual sex] destroys a lot of men emotionally, as well. It's just not healthy for anyone." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=456289 Men and women are not all that different, and I think men are just as often damaged by casual sex.

These are all claims I've had about people. I made an effort not to gender them. You did.

E. I did NOT say that. As per C, that was another poster. I don't conflate casual sex with feminism, and I would NEVER disparage feminism in such a way as to associate it with immoral behavior or to suggest that it was "engineered by evil men". Sex and the City is not feminist. It's entertainment, and shitty (arguably misogynist) entertainment at that. I am quite feminist, but I happen to believe that casual sex is radically anti-feminist.
This is an incomplete collection. MIT has many more video courses here, for example: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/av/index.htm
It might be morally questionable though for Twitter to hijack the Amazon links of the everyman who is just posting something with no intention of making a profit from it.

I don't have a problem with that if the link doesn't have any affiliate info. But it would be morally questionable for Twitter to replace existing affiliate info with their own.
As much as I like the creator of AngelSoft, I think the $250 offer is wrong. AngelSoft provides good value by unifying the application process to many legitimate groups out there (angel forum for instance). One thing I hate is when each web site has a slightly different format to ask me about my business. TechCrunch has a template. YC has one. It goes on and on.

So AngelSoft is successful in that regard, with the hundreds of groups using them. The fact that they tried to monetize it by charging rookie entrepreneurs, well... it depreciates their brand.
In a bit of a shadow of Office Space, the alleged bomb planter's employer was named OmniTech.
I don't think you have to apologize for submitting. Maybe I'm wrong, but I've never viewed submissions as always being a positive endorsement of the content.
Behold Image Search
Behold is a search engine for high-quality Flickr images. It aims to answer your queries based on what is inside the images — at the pixel level. It offers a completely new way to search for images, using techniques of computer vision. It is different to standard image search engines, such as Flickr or Google, because those search through images using only image tags and filenames.
Thank you. And yeah, I can't think of a way to submit a story as an example of "what not to do" without editorializing its title / adding "prefix" commentary at the top of the page.
Unfortunately, OCaml only has lightweight threads, and F# isn't very performant in a non-Windows environment. I'm not sure there's really a clear winner here.
Do we need a North American currency?
Ask HN: Fuzzy Logic SQL select framework
Hi, I've recently been reading up on fuzzy logic. The crux of it seems to be allowing members to have partial inclusion in a set, instead of our current set paradigm of "it's in or it's out. As an example, consider the set "Long Rivers". The Amazon would have a 1.0 membership in this set whereas the Mississippi might have - let's say - 0.8 membership, the Ohio River 0.5, and the stream in your backyard would be 0. This number quantifies how much the item belongs in the set.

An analogous example would be our everyday sql selects. Let's say a company is searching for young employees with great sales records, to consider for promotions. "SELECT * FROM Employee WHERE Age<30 and Sales>100000 ORDER BY Sales desc,Age asc". This statement will miss the 21 year-old with $90,000 in sales and the 31 year-old with $500,000, although those people may be bright young stars as well. Widening the search parameters waters down the results and the black & white nature of it will always miss those on the cusp.

What the company actually wants is to do a sql statement "SELECT young employees with great sales records".

One solution would be fuzzy logic. They want employees that fall into two sets - 1.) young and 2.) good sales. The fuzzy solution would say, ok, every employee selling over $100,000 per year is a member of the Good Sales set with a membership value of 1.0. Over $90,000 is 0.8. $75,000 is 0.6.

Also, anyone less than 30 years old is a member of the Young Employee set with membership 1.0. 31 years old is 0.8. 35 is 0.5.

Once you define those parameters, by definition the membership of an employee in the two sets is the lowest membership he has in either set. Our precocious 21 year-old would be 0.8 (he has 1.0 in Young, and 0.8 in Good Sales) and our older but productive 31 year-old would also be 0.8 (0.8 Young and 1.0 Good Sales).

Our new query is something like "SELECT * FROM Employees WHERE Membership_YoungAndGoodSales>0 ORDER BY Membership_YoungAndGoodSales DESC, Sales DESC, Age ASC". This first returns all employees with perfect matches (1.0 membership in both sets) but scales down to include partial matches as well that might warrant a further look, as long as they have a non-zero membership in both sets.

I'm also testing this now with NBA games - instead of selecting teams that have scored 110 points per game AND have held opponents to 90 points per game AND (etc.), I just want to "SELECT high-scoring teams with good defense AND (etc.)"

Anyway, I was just curious if there was any existing db framework or code to deal with this. The major challenge seems to be coming up with the partial membership weights (e.g. a 31 year-old is 0.8 Young...why not 0.7 or 0.9?)

I was thinking that it would be possible to write a db selection framework that works with existing sql filter statements without modification - it could pre-process it and return exact matches first, then partials (for fields where it has membership information), ordering by the membership weight DESC. Anyway, feedback?
Corporations that will survive 100 years
The technical story of Muxtape
Can we stop using "epic fail" and other internet-fanboy like colloquialisms in our titles please?

It's not our title. That is the title of the post. So for example, if Joel's next article is entitled "The Cat Pictures Were an Epic Win For Suzie's New Startup", then that's a completely valid HN submission title.
The beard and long hair sort of screw the deal from the get-go, I think.

You can pry them from my cold, dead... uh... head.
I'm going to have to disagree here, based on data. We did A/B testing of our homepage with and without a phone number for months (using odd/even days) and simply could not see any measurable difference in sales. With all due respect to Ian, he makes a great product, and having a phone number on your web site is a good thing, but having the phone number on the home page (rather than a contact page) did ZERO for us.
Paul -- could you elaborate a bit here?

We all see hundreds of angel groups all over the world. There must be thousands or even tens of thousands of angel investors. How come "Angel groups generally are worthless"? Unable to make decisions? Poor management? No funds to invest? People just fishing for good ideas? etc?

I know a lot of people have tried something like "E-bay for Funding Startups" but not to much success. What's the major obstacle here?
Irish ISP Eircom Agrees to Disconnect Internet Users After Three Copyright Violations
Can you explain more about what it involves and in what ways it is intensive/hard, please?

(Genuine curiosity not dismissiveness)
Verify your work with checklists
How Does the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan Affect the Tech Industry?
I'd love to have a phone number on our site, but our market is global, so wouldn't it look negative to have a UK number, or a US number, for people in other countries? We are based in the UK, but we mainly sell outside of the UK (www.sourceguardian.com). I might try to put a number prominently on the site and see if this achieves anything or maybe gives more of a comfort factor to our visitors and I'll report back
"My girlfriend and I really hate this new potato peeler. Sweet, nevermind, Twitter popped up an ad for mypotatopeelers.com before I finished."
Poll: Hacker News to send emails on discussion thread
Many good discussions here, but its hard to keep track of through 'thread' or 'comments' feature. Why can't HN send an email everytime someone responds to a thread I am part of, or to a post that I made? Apparently the only posts that gets more discussion are the controversial ones (like the currently hot 'Mike Arrington got pissed!'). I would like to see more activity on other tech topics as well, and email will certainly help.
Want emails on HN threads, my posts (like Facebook, Youtube)
No, don't want emails
cool. my experience with other cultures--which may or may not be relevant to our exchange--is that humor and expected attitude vary wildly. i live with 8 other people, some for whom english is a second language, and humor is one of those areas where it feels like we're always miscommunicating. the web only exasperates this problem unless the site is obviously intended for hilarious entertainment. at any rate, i think the hacker community at large responds well to sincerity. remember that most of come here expecting intellectually interesting problems and solutions, rather than entertainment.
Do Angels/VCs pay?
They have no companies list to show for.
So you have no plan to make money for the entire year of 2009? Are you running a business or a charity?
The comments by Mihai Secasiu are more insightful than the article itself.
I think the site, your blog and write up are all great - thank you.

Can you use it to help find a better HN username as well, since it seems that "matt" was taken? ;)
My college roommate was from Hawaii, too. Same thing; our room was closer to a sauna than a freezer in the winter. Just a bit of a cultural thing...
Should be "iPhone" in the title.

(I had visions of an automated answering service: "What is the color of the top of the upper left edge cube? Press 1 for red, 2 for green...")
There was a post several days ago either here or on techmeme showing a conceptual system between twilio, voicecloud, SMS, etc. Since you've developed a system that clearly implements this would you happen to know more details of something like that. Are there any out of the box examples online that demonstrates the interoperability between this, or did you set it up from scratch?

The APIs look pretty straightforward, but if you have any further insight or resources on this integration it would be very helpful.
This blog post fails the "well-reasoned argument" test:

Pros of Return Codes:

1) Return codes are typed

2) Return codes are cleaner than exceptions and can have additional associated data

3) Exceptions are easy to ignore

4) Return codes integrate well with third-party code (how would you use Exceptions and not blow your client's call stack?)

Error handling is hard, let's go shopping.
A truly scary proposition is entering a username and coming up with names/addresses/etc.

That would scare the crap out of quite a few people, I would guess.
Microsoft Should Give Windows 7 Away For Free
Of course, in this case, the author of the post was also the submitter, so it truly was his title, but in general, sure.
Yes! People will give you feedback over phone, that they don't over email.
Why not just adopt .deb and apt?
So his only argument that Twitter is a protocol is that Seth Godin said that Twitter is a protocol. I think there is some truth to it, but it is nowhere near the level of information control that Google has achieved with Search. It's an invalid comparison, especially since 99% of apps operating on the Twitter protocol are completely asinine.

The mobile payment angle could be true, but its far from a sure thing. I tend to think most payments from mobile devices will be done through mobile web browsers, the same way we do them on a computer.

The piece closes by saying "The true power behind popular protocols can almost never be predicted" and "as Twitter grows it will have to remain observant of emerging trends of its users".

So you write an article predicting twitter will be a cash cow, and conclude by claiming the method of generating cash cannot be predicted? What makes this cash cow such a sure thing?

I strongly believe that Twitter will succeed, but this article is weak. The only real nugget is the Amazon Affiliate angle, and changing user links is borderline unethical and likely not a massive revenue generator.
"Despite Makwana's termination, Makwana's computer access was not immediately terminated"

Wow.
yeah, it just didn't add anything positive to the community. At best, it was neutral. I'd rather have a positive story be on the front page. It was also pretty high up.
Apologies for the days of delay - I'm on a reduced HN diet.

So, in Clojure you can't use Java objects with the great sequence and hashmap libs:

(def h (new java.util.HashMap))

(. h put :a 1)

(. h put :b 2)

user=> h

#=(java.util.HashMap. {:b 2, :a 1})

Hashmaps in Clojure are, like Arc's, callable:

user=> ({:a 1 :b 2} :b)

2

But not if they are Java Maps:

user=> (h :b)

java.lang.ClassCastException: java.util.HashMap (NO_SOURCE_FILE:0)

So rainbow does the right thing - let's you use Arc functions on Java objects?

By the way, Clojure's .. macro is pretty handy:

(.. System (getProperties) (get "os.name")) expands to:

(. (. System (getProperties)) (get "os.name"))
If a grumpy Google engineer managed to cause their Chubby service (synchronized file write service) to start corrupting random files, then that might have a big impact on the integrity of end-user data.

My point is, even a well-designed system is vulnerable when someone has access to its internals. Give me a system and a day, and I could probably think of a few subtle (or not-so-subtle) ways to break it for the purpose of inflicting damage.
..but not Carnegie Mellon? Oh well, I guess we can't all be the best. ;)
Aaarrgggghh ... I wanted some insight from the HN community and got none!!
Ah, gotcha.

... But it really was epic just how horribly that line of code failed, though. 5 bugs in just 48 characters; or 1 bug every 9.6 chars. The rest of the system was probably equally epic.
Take a look at this picture: http://www.csharp-architect.com/images/MonobenchmarksIncLinu...

Mono performs pretty good in comparison to Microsoft's runtime. The garbage collector still needs some work, but it would not surprise me if Mono becomes very competitive in the near future.
Fail to see how this is so much more genius than the existing web sites for rubik cube solutions.
How about including it with Xcode, then?
I must say that's one of the most scary one line of code I have seen. I'd be hard pressed to come up with a more scary single assign statement.

Any volunteers?
MSFT vs. GOOG vs. YHOO vs. AAPL vs. AMZN over 2 years
I ran this graph dated back to the last time I was looking for a job, just to compare how well each company has done since then. I never would have predicted this.
The blog references Spolsky who has marked it expired. Perhaps he has changed his mind.

Problems with error codes:

Too easy to ignore.

Errors and normal return codes get mixed.

Often difficult to pick a distinguished error value, 0, -1?

Problems with exceptions:

Too easy to ignore. How often do you find empty exceptions?

Too many types of exceptions, The Java libraries are particularly guilty of this.

Adding a checked exception can break code all over the universe.
> (using odd/even days)

That sounds like an odd way to do it - do your customers typically purchase on the same day they first hit your web site? If not, they likely came back several times and might have been bemused or even frustrated to find the phone number appearing and then disappearing. Or just seeing the phone number one of those days was enough to accrue all the benefit of having the phone number on any day.
I was surprised at the number of tech firms in the list (e.g. Adobe, TI, NetApp, Cisco, Juniper) and the jobs that are listed are the engineering and other technical jobs. Reading the comments I wasn't expected any tech firms to be on the list.
We have a plan to make money this year. But then again, so did the last start-up I worked at, and it took us a while longer than a year to post revenues of any kind.

For TrailBehind, we think we can start bringing in revenues this summer (or a large enough audience for institutional funding), but our fallback is to seek additional angel funding. And Plan C is to accept some consulting gigs. We're also going to apply to YC, but that's more for the intangibles than the money.

This month, I brought on our first employee (besides the two founders, who are hackers), to execute our sales and marketing plan. We have multiple paths to revenue that he is charged with exploring, along with seeking out additional funding.

Because our website is devoted to the outdoors, the market is cyclical, and I have determined what that cycle is using Google Analytics. So, we have been developing for a few months, and we'll have a major go-to-market push in the late spring as the hiking season revs up. We're also using the next few months to begin laying seeds with potential partners and additional investors.
I'm not sure what the cause is. I've just noticed that I never come across startups who've been funded by them.
If I had to guess, I think the problem might be the investors they attract. None of the top angels I know would join an angel group; they're all already plugged into the startup world, usually because they came from it themselves.
What a wierd comment
Some pretty slick graphics in that app.
Ask YC: Why can't you down-mod people's responses to you?
I understand the potential for abuse here, but I feel like the pros outweigh the cons, and I highly doubt that adding this ability would have a "chilling effect" on disagreements. Quite frankly, most of us don't care about karma enough that we would withhold disagreements for fear of a 1-point reprisal.

I usually up-vote people who disagree with me, actually, if I find that they're contributing to the discussion in a thoughtful way. It's the HN way, no?

But occasionally I get a reply that really deserves it, like this one, which I cannot down-mod: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=457222
And as long as you don't rely on security-by-pageful-of-blank-lines, you just may get away with it too!
> So why say [girl] then?

Because it helped identify something about the troll, namely it's one who has a problem with women. And it outed someone who seems to think that that's okay.

As the man says, here's your sign.
For those terrified of actually answering the phone, and who dread the idea of having to check voice mail constantly (like me), there are outfits that will take your call and transcribe it to an email for you. eg:

http://www.phonetag.com/

This way you can pretend to have a phone number but it's actually no different to publishing an email address. (Not saying this is really good business practice ... but it's there).
Huh - use an iPhone app to solve a rubik's cube?

Why not just create an iPhone rubik's cube app that uses the accelerometer?

I'd prefer an intangible version!
Canadian economist Herbert Grubel first introduced a potential manifestation of this concept in 1999. The North American Currency -- called the "Amero" in select circles -- would effectively comingle the Canadian dollar, U.S. dollar and Mexican peso.

What would make more sense would be a hierarchy of currencies:

Amero
/\
CAD USD MXN
/\ /\ /\
individual state currencies

That way, each level and section of government could raise the spending money it needs by simply issuing new shares (instead of punishing production and consumption via taxation of those things).
If PBS makes a show about them, it will at least be better than that Benjamin Button POS.
That's a neat idea. I might use it in our demo.
Good to see someone else not caught up in the hype of a new platform...

I guess the only real bonus is that you can use it when not near wifi etc.
Thats TRUE hacker news :) Thanks for sharing this link.
So, you can just think of this like a math problem. To get a score, you can take the reciprocal of the person's age (so, someone 30 becomes 1/30) and then (for readability's sake) multiply it by a constant (say, 30) to make someone 30 a 1.0, someone 31 becomes .96, someone 35 becomes .85, etc.

If you want it to vary more or less from that norm, you can use exponents and logs. In your example, you wanted .8 for 31 and .5 for 35. I think raising it to the 4th or 5th power will get you around that mark. So, you can make it really sensitive to change in value or really insensitive to change depending on the log or exp that you use.

Likewise, do the same thing with sales (only in this case, since higher is better, we don't need to do the reciprocal thing). So, 100,000 becomes your baseline and that's a 1.0 (just divide by 100,000). Here, linear looks good since a person drawing 200k should be twice as good as the person drawing 100k, but you could use exponents or logs just like the previous example.

Then, you multiply them together. So, someone 30 years old who gets 100,000 in sales has a 1.0 rating. Someone 25 years old with 100,000 in sales has a 2.0736 rating. Someone 35 with 500,000 in sales has a 2.69 rating. And so on.

The SQL would look something like this:

SELECT *, (POW((1/age)*30, 4)*(sales/100000)) as the_awesome_score FROM table_name ORDER BY the_awesome_score

Basically, the difficulty in fuzzy matching is creating a common measurement. Once we have both items on a common scale (here with age 30 and 100,000 in sales being a 1.0), you can just multiply them and then you have your score. You can easily adjust the numbers to make it more or less sensitive to change on either side of the equation to suit your needs.
I just ran across this yesterday. I've always been interested in creating 2D RPGs and Lua looks interesting, so this is on my list to explore.
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 72 - Happy New Year
That example reminds me of a fellow employee I worked with once who combined this abuse with a classic Australian idiom. He meant to say "I'm very tired".

He said: "I'm literally buggered".

Took me 10 minutes to stop laughing and get up off the floor.