skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suspect that part of the problem is in the execution--our collective social will simply isn't sufficient to maintain an awesome community as time (and users) go to infinity.

Along that line, I've been experimenting with some more direct controls for community control: scaling voting power with user intelligence as measured by an objective standard. I posted about it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=464700
Technology Does Not Drive Change......
bailoutbooth.com is the website.
I dumped Mathematica many, many years ago when they turned evil and started making it stop working after a month if you haven't registered it.
Elance is not a bad place to start ut you can look on Killerstartups.com and when you see a site you like email them and ask them for a referal .
Ask HN: Replacing Racially Insensitive Computer Terms With. . .?
So, my office tries to be sensitive in the language we use. However, many computer science terms aren't so sensitive. When we replicate databases, we have a master and a slave. When we deny email from someone, we blacklist it. Now, I'm sure we all agree that we don't use those terms to slight anyone (who would judge someone based on things other than language or framework choice?), but my workplace (and I as well) would like to be more sensitive about these issues.

I've tried thinking of things, but haven't come up with great options. "Mirror" might be a decent replacement for "slave", but I have no idea what to replace "blacklist" with. Is this an issue with your work? What do you use/suggest?
A year ago, comments that weren't blatantly offensive/crummy/rude/jerkish usually didn't fall below 0 points. The restraint of the community is what encouraged me to get so involved.

I'm all for downvoting a bad troll or uninvited meme/rickroll-speak much lower, but it kind of hurts to see real comments being modded into unreadably gray negatives for disagreement purposes.
- Caps-lock == Ctrl
- plist hacked so the whole system (at least cocoa-apps) behave emacs-like (Apple is meta)
- carbon emacs, because (fullscreen, extensions work, like to have the default GNU set-up as a starting point, and there was 1 thing Cocoa Emacs did not right but I forgot what it was)
- I use color themes a lot, I plan to have each major mode auto-choosing one; most of my .emacs pets are not implemented yet, in a way the real work tends to be more fascinating
- org-mode as "productivity app" and backbone for DTP
Irregexp, Google Chrome's New Regexp Implementation
so I downmodded them all

Frankly I do not see the point of downvoting or bragging about it, and your explanation does not make it right either.

Each of your comments detracted from the conversation,

You single handedly decided what detracts from the conversation, and I am sure you are not HN spokesman.

It's like "an eye for an eye", but in this case you are hurting someone because you disagree with their opinion or the way they expressed it (and yes, I understand sometimes some users can be disrespectful).

But even when someone is clearly not following the HN guidelines, they should simply be reminded of it, then ignored forever.

The "free hand" in HN will auto-regulate them. That is the same free hand that does not upvote spam links.

Downvoting comments "should not be" just as downvoting stories "is not". Silence is by far the best way to respond to ignorance.
Visualizing Keyterms with BOSS and Processing
We don't use TDD because we don't understand how to do it even though unit testing in principle seem like a pretty good idea. On the other hand, I can't imagine unit testing preventing most of the non-trivial bugs that turn up in our project.
I pull every now and then from git://repo.or.cz/emacs.git, and build my own with --with-ns. I was using CarbonEmacs, but multi-tty support is amazing. I have my main Emacs frames running, and if I need to pop into a quick session in a terminal, or SSHd in from another machine, it Just Works.

(Except the theme I'm using has very light colored comments, and I can't see them in 8 color terminal. Anyone have a suggestion for a 256 color terminal app?)

I don't use Mac copy-paste, etc, even though I was a Mac user long before I was an Emacs user. Using C-y and M-y reminds me of the kill ring everytime, where using C-v wouldn't. I do have the clipboard synced to the top of the kill ring though...not sure if that was a default.

I use Command as Meta, and have Caps Lock for Control system-wide.
>The point is, choose whats best for you.

Agreed 100%.
Is tech still a safe career choice?
Why don't more women work in IT?
All this experiment demonstrates is the extreme importance of style and presentation. If you say something negative in a joyful, entertaining way as opposed to a bitchy way people value your contribution more (enough more that the negative comment is all of a sudden considered a positive contribution to the discussion rather than a low-quality dig at someone).
I wonder if calculating a user's karma as a weighted average of the scores of their last N comments, rather than a sum, would help. Inasmuch as karma scores affect anything, it might gently encourage fewer, more insightful comments.
I sincerely doubt anyone who runs a company that makes bug-tracking software loses any sleep about software bugs being eliminated forever.

Regardless of what happens in the software industry, to-do lists ain't going away any time soon.
This site has taught me not to downvote with emotion.

I pretty much think "how many votes should this have? how great is the comment?" and I upvote or downvote it based on how incorrect their current rating is.

Lately I find myself upvoting a lot of comments I don't agree with simply because people have downvoted them into oblivion just for having a different opinion.
I can't tell if this is an attempt at humor/sarcasm or not.

I don't think any of the terms you describe could even be remotely regarded as "racially sensitive" unless you were going out of your way to do so.
Only give people the upmod points of responders if the original comment has positive karma. Or let's say your original comment has karma +4; you get karma of responders up to +4 per response, but not more than that.
Luchador Masks | Wrestling in HQ photos
Yahoo launches search tool like one Google killed
Sorry the formating. Here is it again:

Caps-lock == Ctrl

plist hacked so the whole system (at least cocoa-apps) behave emacs-like (Apple is meta)

carbon emacs (not the one running under the CLI, the .app), because:

(fullscreen, extensions work, like to have the default GNU set-up as a starting point, and there was 1 thing Cocoa Emacs did not right but I forgot what it was)

I use color themes a lot, I plan to have each major mode auto-choosing one; most of my .emacs pets are not implemented yet, in a way the real work tends to be more fascinating

org-mode as "productivity app" and backbone for DTP
MSFT is giving cops free USB drives designed to autocollect personal info from PCs
Did AOL Just Write Down Its Bebo Acquisition?
The six faces of Windows 7
I think Kurzweil's viewpoint is simply to point out the exponential growth in information technology, and how that may affect humanity, rather than to incorporate and understand the effects of ALL technology.
Lets Go Deep - Wedding Bells For Manny & The Dodgers?
all over usenet, not just cll... Here's a fun old thread on c.l.python about him: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_frm/t...
I was trying to avoid reading Hacker News more than once a day but I was glad I saw this on my second visit! :)
I also find it strange that there are no 304 status codes. Does that mean that they blindly download each page when they update their index?

Unless you are Google or Yahoo with thousands of servers, you could save some time by only processing pages that have actually been modified.
I have been on HN for almost 700 days now and read it almost daily, I rarely post, comment, or login but I think the content & community here is best in class.

While there seems to be some discussion about the quality of the community lately, I think the quality of the submissions is still extremely high, and that the comments are still for the most part insightful and valuable.
Reminds me of... Favour object composition over class inheritance, only we are talking about mixin inheritance instead of class inheritance.
I think, there are really smart service providers. You have to just choose one from bids.
What a bummer. I was hoping for something new about Kindle and this article does little more than try to funnel readers into the registration-required Standard Prediction Market. Oh well. Move along; nothing to see here.
The more complicated the system, the easier it is to game.

Presumably at some point that ceases to be true for a sufficiently complicated and good system, but my guess is that we're up into AI-complete territory there.
How to Launch Your Web Show on Facebook
testThingsYouMightHaveChanged requires running your tests manually, which is slow and hard to fully reproduce later. It also depends on being able to make strong predictions about what your change affects, unit testing assumes that anything could have broken.
Scarcity of luxury is by definition a subset of scarcity, so it is a scarcity problem.

Sure, we could all live on beans on rice, but people don't do that unless they have to.
Web 2.0 Storytelling
You should probably be more specific in who you are looking for. Because right now, it looks like you are looking for someone with a pulse.

At least point out some of the skills you are looking for or state if you are looking for someone who can code or someone who is a "business guy with an idea"
that's a dupe:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=463583
I started off with MacPorts' Emacs 22.3 package and just used it on the command line. Eventually I moved to a portfile that tracked Emacs CVS, and finally settled on Aquamacs.

I've tried Cocoa Emacs from CVS, but it has one major problem that makes it unusable for me: no fullscreen support. The latest version of Aquamacs does this perfectly. I have an entire space dedicated to Aquamacs, and I send files to it from Terminal with emacsclient.

I too have capslock bound to control. I don't have any other keyboard modifications. I'm used to option/alt working the same in Emacs and every other OS X application (try alt+left/right/backspace/delete in an input box).

My ~/.emacs doesn't have a lot of OS X-specific settings. My favorite thing about my setup right now is having Pyflakes automatically highlight errors in my Python code as I write it. Flyspell in strings and comments is also great.

If you're interested, my ~/.emacs is here: [link redacted]
I'm not sure what the exact rule is right now, but would it help to simply increase the threshold at which people are allowed to downvote comments?
I'm new to OS X (from Windows, mostly, with MinGW), but old to emacs. In my brief investigations, I have found Carbon Emacs to be the most friendly -- mainly because it makes no attempts what-so-ever to fit in with the Mac keystrokes, which suits me fine. Like most other people, I bind caps-lock to control, which I recommend whatever your platform.

Now a brief question of my own: is there any way to map command to meta in the apple terminal???

I know about mapping option to meta, but it just ain't the same, especially when I hit command-W hoping to copy text and accidentally close my whole frickin' terminal.
Not every company needs an App Store
"There is this strange myth that "the pro-CSS side" is somehow against tabular or grid-based layouts, or believe that this kind of layout should only be used for "tabular data". That is a fundamental misunderstanding."

I agree with you... except it is not a myth. There are tons of people walking around and spouting off who have come to believe that "Tables are evil!"

People with considered opinions like you are not in the majority of those speaking.

"Note that CSS does not say that disply:table is only for tabluar data."

It says "Table layout can be used to represent tabular relationships between data." Direct quote, and skimming that page, it's the only normative comment about what it is for. I again agree that CSS doesn't forbid the use in layout, but there definitely are people thinking tabular layouts are forbidden and that only the "IE subset" (again, my best guess at what incoherent thing these people are arguing for) is "pure".

You basically re-iterated my point, but I assure you that you are wrong about what other people think. Go check out the parallel /r/programming post.
This is just a muddled explanation of monetarism, which is pretty well clearly nonsense at this point. No macroeconomic developments of the last 100 years confirm it.

> We’re not being punished for our exuberance

We're being "punished" for massive malinvestment. Wealth was poured into assets and ventures that could never achieve positive returns. A recession/depression is the process of liquidating malinvestments and redeploying wealth and labor to economically profitable ventures.

The malinvestment happens partly from mass psychology and mostly because of artificially manipulated interest rates. The natural market interest rate reflects the amount of wealth available for investment (capital). When people have saved a lot and there's a lot of wealth stored up, interest rates are low. When interest rates are artificially held low, investors and business people get the mistaken impression there's much more stored wealth in the society than there actually is. Then eventually many business plans come to tears at roughly the same time, as it becomes apparent there isn't the wealth to drive demand for the ventures. This is a recession.
Wal-Mart testing diesel-hybrid trucks, wants to double fleet efficiency by 2015
OK. I'm not sure yet, whether to go with ad model or subscription.
Will cloud services lift small businesses higher?
The blogpost you refer to mentions they are tired of not being able to do this.. So they probably prefer to keep it in MySQL, but as that's not possible, they fork instead.

The same thing has happened before, with for example the XFree server and the OpenOffice suite, which both had/have terrible patch acceptance policies. The XFree was replaced by XOrg, and some distributions now include the alternative OpenOffice fork, so I guess sometimes that's the only way to go.
Deja vu:
http://www.slate.com/id/1937/
What was your process for learning? Where/how did you start? What language? Did you focus on trying to build a small web-app? Did you seek and have mentors? Any other helpful advice/insight is much appreciated. Thanks
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/facebook.c...

I think they'll do just fine.
wow, more reasons NOT to use microsoft products
just out of curiosity (since I already have an ITIN), does this allow getting EIN _without_ ITIN?
Posterous (YC S08) launches universal bookmarklet
Just like you say, Carbon Emacs + Caps->Control + Cmd->Meta. I dislike using Option as Meta, as you say.

This keyboard and setup is exactly the setup I have for Gnu Emacs on Solaris 8 that I have to use every day at work, and if I ever do serious work on Windows, I'll be able to remap Alt and Caps without trouble. The consistency of key placement is definitely helpful.
I don't have exact numbers, but well over 99% of searchers never click (and generally won't even look past) the 3rd result.
Big Ideas are not as important as Good Ideas
"Basically I just need to pay my bills and save money, and this money helps me do that. With my $50 I'm going to grab a McDonald's now."

I think someone is confused about saving money, and how to accomplish it, really.
Ask HN: Can you help me find a wife?

Really - a cofounder is a tight relationship that is tough to find. I wouldn't jump into bed with a stranger :)
Intuit intern's visualization project for Quickbooks data
A) Another reason I'm glad I'm a non-Windows user (rather than specify my OS of choice, in this case it seems sufficient to just be 'other').

B) I would imagine these devices are going to be pretty easy to detect. They have to be auto-mounted and execute some iteration of the MS auto-run thing (foggy on details here as I don't do much of anything with Windows). I imagine that you could make some good money with an underground app that (choose one or more of the following):

- Detected the USB drive and just erased everything on it

- Detect the USB drive and delete/obliterate data in a given folder on the PC

- Detect the USB drive and fill it with benign (and incorrect) data

I think about this, and unless support for these devices were baked into the kernel of Windows (which may well happen in the not too distant future), they seem easy to circumvent.
>a master and a slave

There have been white slaves and black masters historically so you will have to enlighten me as to why you believe there is anything "racially sensitive" in terms master and slave.

As far as blacklist goes you could easily use drop list, ignore list, or filter list since that is what it is doing.
I tried to think of a one-sentence witty sarcasm that would fit perfectly here, but couldn't. So, instead, I will point out that sometimes one line is all you need. I would much prefer a short reply that contains something new to a longer, very thoughtful, reply that adds nothing to the conversation. If it's even a little bit funny, all the better. In other words, "Omit needless words."
Creating All Humans: A Data-Driven AI Framework for Open Game Worlds
Wu Riddles: Hardcore tech-interview style riddles and mathematical puzzles
I certainly don't argue that the current CEOs of every firm receiving a bailout are doing a great job.

...but I love the message here: "Attention, world class CEOs who could earn 1,2, or 4 million dollars by working in the tech sector, or energy, or X or Y, or Z: you'd be a fool to come and try to salvage these firms. Instead, we'll find and recruit only the kind of management which is willing to take a fraction of what you're worth".
I downmodded only that one because it gave an incorrect and unnecessarily aggressive version of what Kent Beck wrote. Joel is 'a bright, experienced guy' in Beck's words, became 'Joel is an idiot' in yours.

I upmodded some of the answers you were given because they were informative and calmed the conversation down. That is the opposite of detracting.
Depressions are what happens when Recessions start feeding off of their own fall. Looking back at the great depression the amount of knowledge did not change, the workforce did not change, the amount of natural resources did not change much, but things kept getting worse. Over the long term Recessions are useful but Depressions can cause a lot more harm than good.

PS: We are not in a depression, but a major goal should be to avoid a depression while we let this recession fix many of the problems your talking about.
Prospect theory
Great job Garry, Sachin. I'm playing with it now :)
Depends. I know a guy with no programming skill who had an idea. Take that flash helicopter game people like to play and put it on Facebook. He hired a Russian guy through elance to do the flash, and a brilliant guy in Virginia through IRC to do the PHP. His app got big and he sold it six months later for a significant chunk of cash.
Inflation is one way to solve a debt crisis. What ends up sacrificed is the reputation of the currency (dollar in this case). Our spending power as a nation will decline when the rest of the world demands more dollars for their goods.

I have wondered lately if this is why we are keeping our car companies alive: Massive inflation could make them cheaper than foreign cars.
Happy Birthday Facebook, A Look In Retrospect ...
That's the Austrian view, anyway.
Congrats on the bookmarklet guys! Tumblr better watch out...
The change in the depression was massive government intervention. Hoover reacted quickly with unprecedented price support programs and stimulus to preserve the status quo. FDR upped the ante, and kept doing it for many years. There was a depression because the mistakes of the 20s were not swiftly liquidated.

The policy prescription for the current crisis is to beef up food stamps and heating assistance programs so people don't starve or freeze, and then let all nonviable businesses fail as quickly as possible so they can be reconstituted as profitable companies.
Like I said, I exhausted my personal networks. Think of it as match.com when all else fails.

Thought I'd add: I currently have two options - continue executing on an idea by myself and hope I'll find someone soon (as a result of the execution) or find someone first and then execute. Which would you pick?
It's two links out of 25. Surely you can just refrain from clicking on them?
What has Kent Beck shipped?

Follow the advice of people that have shipped code. That is what I took from the Stack Overflow podcast.

Seriously, what has Kent Beck shipped? The Chrysler Compensation program is always brought up. But, I understand that the project was cancelled.

I'm not trying to troll here. I would have greater confidence in Kent Beck's argument if I knew what he was actually capable of shipping.
Obama's Commerce Secretary Pick Loves The H-1B Program (Video)
I would be really interested in hearing success stories about finding cofounders online. I agree that a tight founder/cofounder relationship is tough to find, but there seems to be no shortage of good hackers out there wanting to work on exciting things. So maybe its just a matter of finding one of those hackers that you can get along with? Furthermore, I think the "tightness" of these types of relationships are basically proportional to how good of friends these two people would be outside of that founder/cofounder relationship. I always thought the best teams consisted of best friends.
I like b-sides - MP3 Mix-Tape Generator
> Kanji aren't that bad; it just takes time to memorize them

Yep, but I just didn't have the willpower/energy/interest.

I've heard from people who know kanji well, that when you read in kanji, you'll appreciate it how you can always quickly tell what something is roughly about, even before really reading it.

That's of course because the "pictures" convey meanings, and so on. I guess that can be called a certain kind of efficiency.
I've tried it. The code quality was OK but it took a lot of time just to document and explain the project to each coder over email, and time to do progress checks with each coder, answer their questions, and generally keep everyone coordinated with what others were working on. At some point I realized I was documenting the project in such detail and coordinating every step of it that it was faster to code it all myself. I would still outsource graphic design elements because I'm a better coder than artist.
Ask HN:  Do you look at who wrote a comment before you read it?
Just curious. It seemed like some people pay a lot of attention to who comes and goes. Really the only time I look at the author of a post is if they mention specifics about what they do or if there's a back and forth gong on.
You have chosen a very elaborate way to ignore the Hacker News guideline that suggests "Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.".

Your first comment had no context; it could have been applied to any story.

Your second comment suggested that you were wading into a debate about Agile Methods and XP without knowing who Kent Beck is.

Your third comment actually appeared to pertain to the discussion.
Good point. I'm changing it now.
I feel like the first part of that was a straw man argument.

But the conclusion had one good point.

The problem I have with singularity folks is a matter of putting the horse before the cart.

Sure it's nice to dream about the world after the singularity, but isn't your time better spent taking one step after another towards that future?

And doesn't that require taking the first step, which would be something improving today's technology?