skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As hackers--and I include in this definition those who hack software, hardware, social behaviour, and marketplaces--our mission is first to UNDERSTAND and then second to INFLUENCE.

Maybe I can help with the understanding part. Here are some things that I've observed, as a hacker, about humans:

1. (most) people like to form groups and then compete with other groups

2. (most) people enjoy feeling superior to other people

These are things that seem to have been true in any part of the world, throughout all of human history.

So what's our plan here? Are we going to turn hackernews into the only collection of humans to ever live that defies these rules? Is there some technical solution that will change fundamental aspects of human nature? Maybe getting rid of the voting arrows will remove all of the meanness and tribal thinking on the planet.

I say all this because I don't understand the impetus for your post. Of course it would be nice if everything everyone said made an insightful contribution. But you know that people aren't like that. No amount of blog posting or commenting is going to change how people interact with each other. It seems like your problem isn't with the hacker news community, but with the nature of human socialization.

This looks like a clear case of selection bias. It's hard to do good as a hacker if you isolate yourself in an ivy tower of ycombinator hackers and geniuses. Making things does take some understanding of the average person and how they behave. If you truly think that hackernews is negative when compared with just about anywhere else, then you might be out of touch.
Some further information on this chess variant from a 2006 blog post:

http://pmburgess.blogspot.com.au/2006/06/singularity-chess.h...
That's a really interesting idea. Perhaps in a very small way it would also help to break the binary mode of thought (upvote/downvote, like/dislike, promote/demote) that people bring from other online forums.
I can't tell if you're kidding or not...

Is your question, do writers and mathematicians also speak of elegance and aesthetic in their work? Do writers engage and practice free writing and side-projects to hone their skills, beside whatever they have to do to pay the bills?

Expand your world man, there's so much more out there.
OP mentions downvotes. Are downvotes possible on HN? Are they reserved to some users only? Being a member for 4 years with less than 300 points, I don't have downvote icons on my page.
It doesn't matter where it's made. It's where it's authorized to be sold. The publisher will find it difficult to argue that the book they themselves imported was unauthorized.
I dunno, I sometimes meet people who are so consumed by the specificity and effort required to create whatever it is they're doing that it makes it impossible for them to spend any time looking at different things, keeping up with developments, keeping an open mind, etc. I'm not saying one always leads to the other, or that it's even common, but it happens. So being an almighty creator is not necessarily a panacea.
I've felt the same way for a long time. At length I've finally decided that the fear comes from simply having been burned one too many times by that "one-shot script" that I was forced to "just hack quickly" becoming the freaking cornerstone of some business process and then weighing me down like a millstone around my neck for years afterwards.

I still get calls from a company I worked at more than a decade ago from people I've never even heard of over something I "just hacked together" one idle weekend as a demonstration of what was possible. Of course, its been hacked and bodged by others for a decade now so I don't know any more than they do at this point. It doesn't matter. My number is company lore and I'm their Gandalf.

Its just not worth it. These days, I do it well, or not at all.
at the end of your first paragraph, shouldn't you say 'person a' leaves the market, not b?
The distributed object is a copy. This court case does not apply to the sole copy of a manuscript.
Research, sure, but it doesn't ignore the last decade of practical experience writing programs. A programming language is a user interface. The theory isn't all that matters.
I'm not sure what you mean. map is not supposed to be an endomorphism, rather it takes a function f and returns a list homomorphism.
There have been trolls in the analog workplace since forever, don't forget. Trolling is just a variation on assymetric, anti-social behaviour. Just like grafitii, it has am equally long-history presumably.
According to his talk, Facebook went into schools with existing social networks in order to demonstrate to themselves that what they were making was the better option. "If we can win in (these schools), then we can win everywhere" to paraphrase horribly.
Programming jobs are not much to brag about. Many IT people don't just check out after 5pm. They are on-call after work, stay up late at night trying to finish X or fix Y. They are expected to show up to the office on the weekends to do Z. In the meantime, the HR people are relaxing at home with their families.

As long as programming jobs are worse than regular jobs, people will require higher compensation to take those jobs. More stress, more requirements = higher compensation.
Thank you. After watching the original conference at which Surface was announced, I realized it was a game changer for the Microsoft ecosystem and it seemed like a great piece of hardware. The potential to replace 2 devices with one seemed very attractive to me.

But after seeing some reviews, it seems this hybrid doesn't function very well as a tablet and neither as a laptop. I'll still have to see someone using it on the lap to understand how the screen is able to stand. Granted it's an edge case but when I'm at airports I tend to do that.

Anyway, you reply just made me more curious to try one.
A little known fact is that the Justice Department is required to defend Congress's laws. Congress put the import restriction provisions into the law, and the Justice Department is required to argue in favor of them.
I've been using a Dell mini 9 netbook for 3 years that has only a 16GB SSD.

I've got a full install of OS X 10.5, developer tools Photoshop, Aperture, other random apps and I run it with ~4GB free.

You'd be amazed how far even 16GB will go when you try.
It contradicts the definition of civility to say that the root cause of it is things that annoy you. Civility only comes into play when things annoy you.

The HN frontpage has its ups and downs and has for a long time. If you don't like the stories, it's not going to improve the situation to be uncivil in the comment threads. It just provokes people to reply in kind. And a fluff story on the frontpage (assuming it is) is not improved by having a flamewar appended to it.
It's a matter of how much the civilian population is focused on the effort. WWII was a total war, everyone back home was involved in some way, usually through rationing, working a war-effort job, buying a war bond, paying increased taxes, and/or worrying about loved ones serving in the military (often though the draft).

Things like Iraq and Afghanistan are basically peacetime military actions. It's a war over there... but back home, not so much. That affects what kind of talent, attention, priority, etc. goes into it.
"Windows 7 sold more 600 million copies in under three years. That is, on average, over 200 million additional potential customers every year. No other platform offer this."

This is wrong. Android should ship to 500 million new devices in the next 12 months alone: http://www.phonearena.com/news/500-million-Android-devices-a... If you are a developer who wants to focus on the fastest growing platform, Android is the one, not Windows 8.
Sure. Then convince the court your customers were just buying paper to recycle. You could also sell burned DVDs of The Dark Knight to customers interested in expanding their plastic collection.
Please, don't post shortened URLs.
Hey there, I'm the developer of a browser based IDE called pixelJET. I was researching visual JavaScript debugging concepts to integrate into pixelJET when your post came up on HN.

It's not really a real world applicatoin yet, but if it helps, your post inspired me gave me some ideas for integration into the product. If I publish anything I'll be sure to give you a shout out :)

A couple of thoughts for the demo, it would be cool to see the actual JavaScript source code too, so you could get a feel for what the visualisation is showing you. Also, noting which functions were event handlers would be useful, although a bit tricky.
For whatever it's worth, I'm the guy who wrote the Surface review trending today. I love reading HN every morning while I walk my dog, and I was dumbfounded that my Surface review made HN. That was a WTF moment for me. It's not the kind of stuff I come to HN for.

Don't get me wrong, I was honored - but it's off topic.
An FAQ for the 2012 US Presidential Election
I have a fake IPad charger, it barely charges my IPhone and can't charge the IPad at all. It was labelled as an Apple charger when I bought it for $10 and had good reviews.
The best design starts with the purpose. By thinking "what is the purpose of a cotton swab?" or "what is the purpose of the binding on a notebook?" a lot of unnecessary waste can be reduced. Muji is a great example of a company that really designs with purpose over absolutely everything else, and it's reflected in their style and timelessness of their product design.

This page, too. It's not over-designed, and there's plenty of white space and there's nothing superfluous on there.
Specifically, that's the hollowed-out book Neo keeps his mini-discs of illegal software in. So the title is not just a reference to the movie's themes, it's also literally true: it's not a functional book, since it's hollowed out, it's a simulation of a book.

Interestingly, "Simulacra and Simulation" is not a title that was invented for the movie: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0472065211
> qwerty keyboards were designed to slow down the typists

What were "the typists" typing on before qwerty?
Microsoft Surface Day 2: Setting up our new ‘iPad’
Will do but it doesn't seem to be heading that way :)

Are you also learning Rails?
Very interesting review, I enjoyed the dissection and review of what most people don't even think about (wall chargers).

On a non-technical note, Apple chargers should lose simply because of how goddamned large they are. They basically eat two spots on a power strip and are easily knocked out of wall sockets because of their weight.
What does MYa mean?

I thought it meant million years ago,but he writes "400MYa ago" and "200Mya [...] from now"
Is it dangerous to use a high output power charger, like the HP TouchPad one, with a low consumption device, like a phone?
You're right, Android is the fastest growing platform.

However, the four other reasons I list do not apply to Android and still make Windows 8 a bigger opportunity in my opinion.
Troubling and inevitable should not be viewed as mutually exclusive.
Brightswipe — an open-source torrent indexer
Downvote comments kicks in at 500 karma.

I don't know if downvote articles is an options.. maybe I just don't have enough Karma.
Breaking Bad, Microsoft, and Ecosystems
I got a nice charger from Buffalo (respected Japanese brand) that does a max of 4A (=can charge 2 iPads at once) and has 4 USB ports: 2 with the Apple power negotiation standard, and 2 with the Everyone Else/Android power negotiation standard.

It'd be nice to see an even broader test
I am at a loss for these arguments, I like what I like and I make no apologies for it. I prefer one system over another for a variety of reasons and I am not a fan of a company as it is a company. I may use their products because of reasons that make sense to me personally.

Performance, cost, usability, etc. are all factored into the system I use, the phone, tablet, etc. are all purchased based on these factors. If you do not like a particular product just do not buy it and if for some reason someone asks for your opinion on a product you can give it without being fanatical about it, it is just a product.
Looks pretty cool but the pawn rules are a hack. Since "forward" is no longer a well defined direction, I propose allowing pawns to move to any adjacent square, and capture to any diagonal square.
The hedgehog strategy there worked, brilliantly, but it is a strategy, a strategy designed around not losing. In the case of the American military, most of our missions now have specific aims that can't be accomplished by simply avoiding disasters.
This is the most important point. The benefit of these elite schools, is that peer pressure plays a positive role. All kids compete at these schools, form study groups etc.. Teachers want to teach motivated students and these things together drive education.
Supposedly much the same happened to the North in the Civil War at least for the first few years. Lincoln had to keep on getting rid of his generals till he found one who was willing to fight (Grant). Same thing happened in World War I with the generals not adapting to trench warfare and just sending their men out to die again and again. Its human nature. Without a real way to measure performance, the people who get ahead are the ones who game the system.
I read this through without having read any reviews or even the cover, and I was pleasantly surprised as to how good a read it was. Not the plot, that was absolutely meh, nor the ticking of pop reference and stereotypes boxes that the author quite clearly wanted to get done. But despite fact that it was an unabashedly predictable and pedestrian plot, it was a pretty awesome book.

It got a 3/5 on my scale, on which 95% of fiction books get 1 star and 4% get 2 stars, which means it's worth reading for almost everybody, is a fun enough read, and while it won't change the world should definitely be in the top 100 popular books of last year. Read it. It got 4.27 on Goodreads, which also testifies as to how good it is.
Given raganwald's recent "Tell HN", is it possible to keep the discussion on this thread civil? I would assume it is still impossible to needlessly argue politics here, but please prove me wrong.
Very nicely done. I'd love a version of this that worked on Linux as well.
found today - facebook likes for network solutions is negative.
They appear at 500 karma.
I think you could argue that taste often gets in the way of creating things. Those pre-defined censures you impose on your creation before it's even an embryo: "It'll be like this and sort of like this, but definitely not like this because that is so unsophisticated." It's your ego trying to deal with insecurity and fear of failure before your brain's logical centre has even had a chance to analyse the idea.
Sorry I'm just babbling, I have no real-world examples of this but it's just a thought and it might or might not be true.
I wonder how this changes up the nature of openings. I don't know too much about chess openings, but usually it seems lik you want to control the center. But in this case, it seems like all roads lead to the center, so would it be wise to have pieces sitting there?
One thing that always annoys me when Apple products take over the world is how they are limited to American constraints. Sony Ericsson made a brilliant charger that plugged into the wall and you could just stand your phone onto. Apple would never think of that since the American plug standard is too weak to carry the same weight a Schuko can. And now everyone has to copy Apple instead of innovating...
Clojure 1.4 vs Node 0.8.x performance
I ran some benchmarks today. I would like some input from the HN community to potentially fix any issues with the clojure code, try the tests out on a proper server and maybe even setup more realistic test cases.
Great advice, both from you and grandparent. First, I wanted to say that my boss is a programmer himself, much better than I am, and he understands the value of good code very well. But he's also a bussinesperson and knows when the product is much more important than the code - I trust him on this. At least consciously. It's really not his fault at all.

---

> You can create a personal project to explore the depths of "not refactoring", in hopes that you'll get used to it.

I can't. I mean - I do program in my spare time and have side projects, but if anything it worsens the situation: I have more time and no deadline, so I just tinker with the code until I'm satisfied. And I am satisfied, it's not like I don't know what "good enough" means, just that in personal projects that level of "good" is even higher, because I'm the one who sets it.

> You could also just try getting faster at your newer technique: writing code and refactoring in an hour instead of 3 (learning your tools like a master helps with this)

This is exactly what I'm trying to do - but it's a workaround at best, not a solution to the problem.

> rather your experience with hitting the limitations of writing shitty code

That's true - around that time I was part of a team that developed CRM system in PHP. It was meant to be 3-4 months project but in the end it was a year long nightmare of rewrites and feeling guilty for everything. I never did any postmortem or proper analysis of what went wrong (everything) and maybe that's why my attitude changed. I wonder if it's too late now?

---

> "get it working and keep it working"

This is a way I work most of the time. And refactoring I do and am talking about is always much quicker than an hour - I do it in very small chunks, one function or class at a time, not breaking the code. It's just that these very small refactorings pile up and in effect I have a nice script, which is documented and properly structured, and which took twice as long to write than it should.

> keep a list of your ideas of how to do it correctly, in a separate file

I do this with larger ideas. It's not that. Rather, I can't force myself to drop the input directly in the SQL using string formatting. I know I did it in PHP years ago and it burned me so hard I won't do it again. Willingly, at least.

> stay offline. Do not download libraries or frameworks, do not research the best way to do X...
> 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

This seems to be exactly what I need to do. It never occurred to me, but when I think about it I see that looking for "better" implementation in libraries eats large chunks of my time. And these implementations aren't even that good... Combined with mastery of tools, I think it can work. Thanks, I get the feeling that there is hope for me :)
The board looks neat but this concept seems only half baked, since it begins to confuse directionality once a turn is taken, and the new board greatly reduces the number of available moves.

There is just a single space for the pawns on the end to move to, after all, and it isn't well defined what moves the penultimate pawns could make should they move one square forward (can they attack end-pawns that have moved just one square?)

What might be a better variant would be to assign directionality to all pawns (starting as forward), and allow them to take left or right turns, perhaps diagonally. This greatly increases the number of game possibilities while introducing no new confusing scenarios.
No. They can condemn the sales by saying that 17 USC 602 controls in this situation, leaving first sale (17 USC 109) applicable to goods that have not been imported without authorization.

Briefly, 17 USC 106 says that copyright owner has the exclusive right to distribute copies. 17 USC 109 (first sale) says that once a particular copy has been distributed under the authority of the copyright owner, it is no longer a violation of the distribution right for others to redistribute that copy. 17 USC 602 says that importing copyrights works into the US without permission of the copyright owner violates the distribution right.
Over a month later and Comcast still doesn't know how to SSL
What do product managers wish for?
Ok, I just tried actually it works or not. Won't use it anymore. ;)
Firefox also runs on ARM Android devices. So it's not just IE10 that runs on multiple architectures.
I don't think any of us asked him.
No clue, but it's nice to have a namespace for it, rather than mucking up the global context with a simple utility method. Might be better off shimmying up to underscore (perhaps only if it's already detected, otherwise go global?), however there are lots of similar jquery 'plugins' of this nature..
Haven't had any problems with my Galaxy S3.
Passbook: Not the Product It Could've Been
Thanks, agreed.

If there is linux support, one direction it could go is configurable chef script to setup a linux webserver. Where the sweetspot is those one-off linode servers you have to scrap together for a small project, where a full chef-server would be overkill.
It looks like servos add a lot of extra weight and complexity to the design. Compare with alternate solutions that use smart alloys as actuators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE-OFaBHyFY
It supports pointer devices. The covers have trackpads built in and USB mice work a treat.
Sorry, what's your complaint about list comprehensions? That code does exactly what I would have expected it to. The mutable-state disgustingness is only there because you're explicitly calling a function with (nonsurprising) destructive properties; you could do the same in any lisp.
>Their kids are dead, their grandkids are dead, their great-grandkids are probably also gone.

Well, my grandma was born in 1919. Close enough?
"[...] anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" is equal to "anything" given enough users.

I think we got some good discussion out of this one, though.
Fundestroyer.py -- A quick script to cheat at Letterpress
Background Checks and Personal Ethics in Age of Google
Thanks ig1. We're located in Vancouver BC. Unfortunately, neither of us are particularly schmoozy and generally don't have a lot of time on our hands. VCs and similar don't tend to visit the conferences here anyway, and we're quite a ways past being in an incubator (600k seed, imagn.com, 2 cofounders - 1 technical, 1 business).
Welcome to experience. Have you ever tried walking along the outline of a balance beam drawn on the floor? Jumping along it? Now move the balance beam 1' off the ground, still easy? try 5' and take away the mats. The difference between walking the outline and walking the beam is that you can 'see' the consequences of failure and you know they hurt.

Not surprisingly this happens in engineering as well. You start "just trying to get it done" and when you didn't know better you just wrote it. But now that you know better, perhaps you've been bitten by an unchecked return value or a fixed length array, so now you reflexively look for those things, you fix them, you refactor them. This slows you down, and your fresh graduate peers start thinking "the old guy is slowin' down."

The only way I've found to move past this to let go of the responsibility when your manager asks you to. The conversation you have is "Boss, I can crank this out quickly but the faster its written the more likely it will have some future problem in it." then write that into the comment "Boss asked me to hack this out, said he would take responsibility date - time" and then just write it and move on. Later if it screws up you don't worry about it.

But you can't just go all irresponsible on them, you also need to think about the kinds of things your doing and step up your game in terms of what some folks called 'design patterns' make an effort to capture the way you write the things you write all the time and train your fingers to spit out an 'ok' version from the start.

Good luck.
Agreed, this is the way to do it. The only caveat is that IE has a bug where it omits the leading / on the pathname. You can normalize it with a simple one-liner: http://stackoverflow.com/a/6168370/172322