skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think Mark didn't go into those schools with competing product with the goal of going head on with the competition, but to test the riskiest assumption that he is "building something people want". Going into the school with existing product is the riskiest move, so it should be tested first.
I recently switched over to the SIII from the iPhone 4. Honestly, I'm not that impressed. Physically the device is great; I like the size of the screen and the finish is decent, but the screen sensitivity is sorely lacking compared to my 2 year old iPhone. I find myself having to use the back button all the time after clicking on the wrong links or wrong app icons. I don't remember ever having this problem on the iPhone. The battery life is also inferior, probably due to the screen-size and I don't want to have to lug around another battery every day.

I haven't tried the iPhone 5 yet as it hasn't been launched in Korea yet, but I seriously doubt that the iPhone 5 is an inferior product to the S III. There are some nice customizations you can do with Android phones, but if you want a phone that just "works", go with an iPhone.
Thank you for writing about this. Bickering about biases that an article or commenter might have is the least productive thing imaginable. We all have biases, we all have one product that we prefer over another. If you have a well developed reason for that preference, I want to hear it and hope that you'll share it. But, when I come across a post/comment that is clearly of no substance, my first reaction is to ignore it and move on with my day. Life is too short to waste time and typing on attacking someone for sharing something of little value.
I'm thinking you missed the memo that China is a communist country and therefore the people are equal. gosh. whats wrong with you guys ??? ;)
I was talking about in other contexts besides Academia. But yes, that is one solution. And it does work in print. But it has to co-exist alongside the other content.
Top Ways to Die in DIY Space Project (Wired)
"Uncivil"? "Inappropriate"? "Bile"? "Divisive incivility"?

Those are pretty strong words. All I've seen is a few geeks trading opinions about--ultimately petty--consumer electronics issues.

It's all just opinion. Nobody's said "Person X is ignorant waste of consciousness and they should kill themselves" (which would be uncivil, inappropriate, bilious, and divisive.) They just have opinions about products. Products that in the grand scheme of human achievement really aren't that important.

You're just causing even more drama with this self-righteous post. It's all, like, your opinion, man; take it easy, let the geeks bicker (relatively politely) about fruit versus miniature eiderdown, and save the outrage for things that are truly worth it.

Edit: I'm not going to upvote this parent meta-post, and neither should you, dear reader, for it itself is the one causing drama, not the majority of posts on HN in the past few days.
He may have just approved the item, but he might be a start to tracking it down.

The map should have been "cleared" (ie permission from the rights holder obtained), but if they thought it was a real hand drawn image created for the film, they may have missed it.

Side note, imdb lists three additional people in the art department with his surname. The power of having a long career and two oscar noms, I guess.
>I would have no qualms asking the moderators to fix this. I can't understand any metric by which these are useful posts to have on the front page. There is lots of much better stuff sitting on the New page which is being crowded out by noise that I could go read in two hundred other places.

Those threads are not useful in the sense of spawning civil discussions, but they may be useful in the sense that it keeps people heavily engaged on HN. I can imagine someone running HN thinking "Hmm, the site is kind of dead when the front page talks about Haskell but the site explodes when Apple and Microsoft fans wage war."

From the point of view of someone (YC) trying to get as many possible eyeballs to look at their stuff (YC investments), allowing this sort of thing to continue seems like the logical choice. Are the raganwalds of HN going to leave because of flaming Apple threads? I doubt it. So it'll probably continue.

Alright, enough conspiracy for one afternoon. :)
The replies about iPad vs. Surface vs. Android tablets have reminded me of nothing so much as the kind of silly arguments that console fans have over Playstations, Xboxes and Wiis.

I think that the reason is the same: when you spend money on one, you buy into a community and an ecosystem. You become a part of a tribe and naturally begin to see the world in an us vs. them paradigm.

It's worth noting that this is an irrational behaviour set, and best avoided if you want to learn anything objective. In typically-emotive arguments like these, you have to make the decision yourself and realise that, whatever you choose, you'll likely justify it to yourself afterwards however you can. Once you start to realise that, you begin to realise how inconsequential "what type of tablet or console you own" is, and the less likely you'll be to fall into that destructive us-vs-them mindset.
TheInternet.com is for sale
I think dark ages is a bit strong. Especially since a lot of the pictures from the earlier part of that period using the then inferior technology are mostly surplus photos. IE photos that would have been taken using film were still mostly being taken using film. Digital photos were/are surplus photos.

I take a lot of pictures now on my phone. I took very few pictures before one year ago (when I got my first camera phone).
Well I for one vote for Surface reviews and similar articles. And I think there is a lot to talk about with Surface, both on the product in itself and on the product as a signifier. Surface is a major product release, and iconic of a big shift in corporate strategy by one of the largest tech companies in the game. Surface is Microsoft's first step as an Apple-esque high-end device manufacturer. It speaks to the evolution of Microsoft specifically and to the continued development of post-iPhone UI and consumer tech in general. So there is a lot of interest riding on how Microsoft has executed the Surface, how well Windows 8 lives up to its promise, and the problems, potentials and future development of the platform. And Marco's review touched on all those points, as well as the issue of Microsoft's retail strategy and the Microsoft-Apple rivalry. Then consider that all of these issues plug into even deeper trends of the growing relationship between IT, everyday life and popular culture, including Apple's successful fashion-isation of technology (always a hot button for the traditionally specs and functionality oriented IT enthusiast crowd.)

So it's not surprising I think that people are interested and emotional about these issues. It would be surprising if they weren't. But just because they are appear populist does not mean they aren't rich potential sites of inquiry - it just becomes harder to explore why they are interesting when the debate so easily spins out of control.
It's hardly a data point, but people definitely get confused. A relative was telling me about her new iPhone, when I next met her, she pulled out her Samsung to show me it, still calling it an iPhone. This person isn't stupid, just isn't particularly tech literate.
Wow -- just reading this, I felt my concentration patterns change.

This is why, as a Christian, I meditate on something, instead of simply emptying my mind. I spent an hour or so in Psalm 119 this morning, contemplating a few verses, comparing with my life, and shaping my thinking to fit those verses.

Here's a thought. What if 50 of us committed to checking /newest at a particular time (say, 5 am), finding 2 articles worth reading, and adding a substantive, reflective comment to start things off?

That would gigantically impact Hacker News if we did that. In fact, I'm going to do that right now.
Nice. I have bookmarked this to keep an eye on the storm.
Compared to the iPhone? Bigger screen. Android.

It'd take something exceptional for me to consider an iPhone for those two reasons alone.

But I'm sure there's enough users who usually fall down on either side that are reasonably undecided enough that they might wait to see whether the "other camp" has something exceptional to offer before making their purchase decision when there's a new big launch around the corner.
It's because HN has become the defacto comments section on every blog that has turned off comments. The comments are pretty much the same, just moved to a different place.
A reminder: let's be civil, not just in tech discussions, but in all of our discussions. Even when someone touches on a pet peeve, don't give in to the temptation to bend the rules a little bit.

In particular:

* yeah, I know you really like [company] and really don't like [competitor], but please don't say mean things about those who disagree with you, and especially don't say mean things about the staff at those companies without very good reason

* it's election season in the US, which means more than the usual number of offhand derogatory comments about the other side's politicians and voters. Please refrain from this.

* I've seen a few shots taken at other peoples' religions. Principled disagreement is OK, but try to resist name-calling.

* There have even been a couple of recent arguments about nationality that have involved some unnecessary name-calling.

* As a final heads up, remember that even deleted posts may be cached by various external services that grabbed them via the API. It's good to think better of something after the fact and take it down as soon as you can, but it's even better to avoid posting nastiness in the first place.

As a community, let's do a better job of controlling our own posts first and foremost, and let's do a better job of downvoting and flagging when others cross the line.
A few suggestions based on my experience (I have the same problem sometimes...):

- "get it working and keep it working": get the minimal possible functionality working (outputting some result, even if there's utterly no error handling, input is ignored, all of the requisite services are stubs and any actual processing is faked), and make sure you keep it working -- if some refactoring is going to take more than an hour or two, plan it differently. This helps you get really quickly to a proof-of-concept (with TODOs everywhere in the code), and stops you from shredding it to "do it right" because that would break it.

- keep a list of your ideas of how to do it correctly, in a separate file. Yes, for the moment we're dropping the input directly into a SQL query and returning the result directly wrapped in a <pre> tag; for the real product we'll need parametrized queries, a dynamically loading JS table (to research), etc. etc.

- stay offline. Do not download libraries or frameworks, do not research the best way to do X, do not research the problem domain or look for open source projects that do similar things but are huge and will suck up your entire afternoon when you could have just hacked out a completely unreuseable, inflexible, one-time fix for this particular problem in an hour. Research is fun, it's interesting, and it's a way to avoid actually doing what you need to do -- half-assed work. If you really need to look something up, put it on a list, and give yourself 10 minutes to research everything on the list in a few hours.

Good luck!
I agree but it's inevitable. The creators are busy creating, and the fact that there is no shortage of "non-creators defined by their taste" (who also have an abundance of free time) - means it is a bit of a hopeless battle maintaining the integrity of the comments.
But my comment really ties the forum together, man.

EDIT: Also, I was thinking of r/politics, where they have a neat rule: Mo self-posts M-F. It would be interesting if we followed the same dictum and allowed all sorts of meta on the week-ends but were strict about content on week-days.
Having been bitten a couple of times by private/protected shadowing issues in Java and C++, I default to protected unless I know for certain I want something totally private.
Also, The 199$ Kindle Fire had the biggest sales day(since the launch) after the iPad Mini unveiled:
http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/27/3563380/amazon-kindle-fir...
Theory: This is the only way his regurgitated attempt at a speech would get any attention.
Agreed. I suppose when Apple announced a tablet, I was hoping it would be something that was dual mode iOS OSX with usb ports and pen input. Instead, we got a big iphone, which while many people obviously love, was massively disappointing to people like me.

Thus I really like the ideas behind Surface, though Windows isn't ideal for working with unix, which I need for my job.
Most people buy a new phone when they're getting a new plan or renewing their old one, and don't want to delay that process for weeks.

As for "Let alone if it's the iPhone that they want" Apple is the most recognizable brand and thus a higher portion of it's users are likely to be uninformed and persuadable.
>But a lot of people don't care about that

Not in the general population, but on HN a lot likely do.

>It's fine to say "I don't buy Apple products because their policies are X, Y, Z". It's not fine to tack on "And you're [insert insult] for not realizing/caring and buying anyway".

Of course.
To be fair I imagine the client itself is much higher quality.

This just looks like a php form someone threw together in half an hour. Valve has a "work on what you want" policy so I imagine most of their developers are more interested in building the games and steam itself than survey websites.
The Pirate Effect
Time spent getting used to change is usually time that could have been better spent doing something else. That's particularly true when the end result is that you're back where you were (but it's now 1 week/month/year later).

There's change-as-in-progress, and change-as-in-another-meaningless-revolution-of-the-tech-hamsterwheel. I have no doubt at all that the internals of Windows 8 represent progress. The replacement of the start menu with Metro, on the other hand, smells so far very much like the hamsterwheel.
>This "something" refuses to use unknown or not fully understood tools. It refuses to let ugly line of code be.

It's called being a perfectionist.
Calculus vs. Statistics
Yes, I agree that there are things to talk about related to Surface and to Microsoft. But I disagree that either Marco's review (for reference: http://www.marco.org/2012/10/26/an-alternate-universe) or the currently popular review talk about them. Neither of them discuss Microsoft's general strategy hardly at all (Marco slips a few paragraphs in at the end, but it's not exactly the focus of the piece), and they sure don't talk about deeper trends regarding anything cultural whatsoever.

You're being extremely gracious by describing Marco as having "touched on...Microsoft's retail strategy" -- what he actually did is insert about ten jokey comments showcasing what he perceives as their incompetence. It was pretty funny, but if you re-read it, I don't think you'll honestly claim that you learned something credible or useful about Microsoft based on his description.

If you want to write a blog post connecting Surface to other components of Microsoft's strategy, and you have some interesting things to say about that strategy or about culture or about whatever, that sounds potentially cool. But these posts are really, really not that.
I don't believe the second theory said "most". The author just said some people will go to buy a new iPhone, find it out of stock, and buy an S3 instead.
3x the length, but only 0.03% the number of coalition troops lost. More allied troops died on an average day in WWII than coalition troops died in the entire Iraq conflict.
Stop trying to peddle the sale of it on HN. It's not even a good name.
追いかけて_葉書き-
> if you work with others, this will cause uber amounts of pain.

If this is true, why is it that there are plenty of large and successful frameworks and libraries written in Python?

> hacks will ensue en masse

Having downstream projects that use it is a sign of health for a library. If they're using the library in ways its creator never envisioned, so much the better for everyone. That's innovation.

More than once, I've had to make a choice between partially re-implementing part of a popular Java library's functionality, or shipping my own fork with all the maintenance burden that entails, because in the official version a field I want to access is private, or a class I want to subclass is final.
What apps are on the front page of your smartphone?
Put 2 words to fight on Twitter, LITERALLY
I guess because of the ubiquity and the amount of mindshare the iPhone got people say iPhone when they really mean SmartPhone.
They're probably booting into the desktop even though a few things are still getting initialized.
Does the "response rate" only reflect initial emails? If there is a conversation, then it's going to end eventually, so the fact that you don't respond to an email that says "okay" wouldn't really mean much.
I have never heard of an issue with screen sensitivity on Galaxy S3 from anyone before.
trap door creaks open, a Symbolics Genera machine running Zmacs is behind codewright

You raaaang?
It's actually people like me who are the problem, and I have to learn to control myself.

When I read a great essay by Marco, or Gruber, that is substantive, well written, and speaks to something I truly believe in, I have an instinctive twitch to upvote it. This is particularly true when I recognize that a lot of effort has gone into an essay like Gruber's recent "MacBook Pro Retina Essay", but, I'll even admit to even doing it with marco's silly blog entry about his trip to the Microsoft store in the mall - that really had no place on HN. (And, I say that coming from the position of listening to every one of his podcasts, reading his blog, and as a loyal instapaper and "The Magazine" subscriber)

I (and, I would kindly suggest), others need to learn to control our base urges to do this, or I agree, we'll need to lean on moderators to fix it for us. Save us from ourselves.

Just because we (sometimes strongly) agree with it, we find it interesting, and it's well written, does not mean that it's fodder for HN.

And, we need to learn to write more like grellas, or patio11 when contributing to a thread - put some time, effort, and research into providing information on something that we know about, and can really educate others, with new, or insightful information that people are universally interested in.

Our (my) tendency to feed the echo chamber only brings the level of discourse down, and there are (many) other outlets that would be more appropriate venues for such threads.
There is no need to artificially keep people engaged by encouraging useless, off-topic content. If it's necessary to dilute articles about intellectually worthwhile subjects in order to have them here at all, then this community should shrivel and die and let another better-designed, better-focused or better-populated one take its place. HN doesn't even run on ad money.

I think Y Combinator is probably one of the worst things that ever happened to hacker news, as a common noun. HN (the community) ends up being flooded with startup and consumer electronics articles that are completely useless for hackers.

Marketing and business are not hacking in any sense of the word, and diluting the term by applying it to these multitudinous fields (see e.g. lifehacker.com) frustrates communication of its original meaning: those who are passionate about computing and stretch it past its limits.
I like, but I'm curious why this is a jQuery plugin.
Show HN: SoloWizard - Configurable Chef Script to Bootstrap your OS-X
Another funny defintion of Facebook 
This Facebook defintion is not only funny, but full of truth.
People identify with brands and criticism is taken as a personal attack on one's own value system.

So-called objective reviews are in truth more like the proselytizing words of rabid fundamentalists.

You can hide the discussion but you can't moderate the religious flames of consumerism.
I'd be happy with no truly meta-posts at all.

I've been running my own social network for the past five years, and in my experience it's been the meta-posts that are the ones that actually cause the drama.

Person A and person B have a little innocuous spat, but sort it out amongst themselves.

Self-righteous person C decides that person A committed a heinous atrocity and that it's symptomatic of a deeper festering infection in the site as a whole, and they make a meta-post about it to call people out. Next thing you know what was a minor, inconsequential, and ultimately solved issue becomes a site-wide rally-point for false outrage.

It sucks. HN is better than that, and the OP needs to chill before dragging the entire site into a false tempest in a teacup.

Edit: Oops, the OP is you. I wrote this reply thinking you agreed with me. Oh well!
This might be the least noteworthy thing I've ever seen on HN.
I would say that in Spain(at least before the crisis), we have a very good "great ideas" detector, but with inverted polarity. People usually goes around saying "this sucks, that sucks". But they can not think in fixing anything. That´s why I love the SV way of thinking, every thing is possible, just stand up and DO IT.
Also being 35, I realize that now I have more experience than when I was 23 (obviously), and that experience allows me to take distance from the group thinking the OP mentions (and now a days is oppressive here in Spain. People can´t think there is an end to the crisis, as there was an end to the crazy bubble).
I think is a good idea to change for a time, and immerse yourself on another ambient, job, place, whatever. There are thousands of things broken that need smart energetic people to fix them, and they are not another social network.

edit: some typos and punctuation.
It should be noted that Hacker News used to be called Startup News. That special blend of 'hacking' (programming) and entrepreneurship is what makes HN unique and worth having around. Once you leave that behind all you have is /r/programming.
Why I won’t be returning my Microsoft Surface RT
Have you used an early 2000's stylus tablet like a tc1100? I'm talking about those, not touch screen laptops.

http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tr/gallery/hptr1105/Image00021_...

> a laptop tablet is like a laptop, upon whose screen you can WRITE with a stylus. They are not touch devices like we think of today.

Please re-read. I am saying exactly this. The only way they are alike is they are somewhat in the same class of portability. The tc1100 is a beast at 3 pounds, but you can actually watch YouTube and browse the web in bed with one. I know, because I've done it. Doesn't work for the general public because ordinary people can't keep track of GUI item focus.
An Expert on 'Extreme Productivity': Boost Results, Reduce Hours
Responsive Web Design Process
Plasma gasification is an interesting technology related to your comment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification
I would imagine the audience of HN to care more about larger concerns more so than the general population, but I don't know how much higher those numbers would be.

I don't buy Apple products for the very reasons you cite, but there is considerable passionate support and occasional vitriolic ass-hattery for them here on HN.
I'm not sure if there is a single site/app for that, but it really helps if you are keeping an eye out for these things in your twitter, facebook, google+ streams.

I don't have many people from SF Bay area on my twitter, but I still found out about a couple of tech events, while I was there this summer.
That's twice now you've posted this.
Not Lorem Ipsum: Industry based copy for the web
Darn it, I swore I checked up on that. Heroku is having some troubles with my app - contacting them.