skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It still leaves the "I have to do a bunch of work beyond simply scrolling down to read this discussion" problem. I don't like solutions that put excessive burden on the largest audience of anonymous readers. Write once, read many, and all that.

I don't see how collapsing them all to a linear discussion would help this: you simply get one massive topic overtaking the entire conversation, making it impossible to even have the second discussion at all... if the content doesn't get posted because it is off-topic in the linear model, no amount of scrolling will find it.

Again, though, this is why almost no sites are actually a linear model; the closest you seem to get to a linear community currently is in the medium of real-time chat, where you still have servers divided into channels, but the channels are relatively fixed and difficult to browse.

The result is that you have communities existing within a single server/channel; as an example, there is a community which I started on an IRC server (not iPhone hacking, btw: a bunch of random friends and acquaintances that has grown and shrunk at various points over time, mostly concentrated with people form the small college that I attended) that has existed for years with a single linear thread.

Real-time chat, though, is a drastically different kind of medium: handling multiple real-time conversations is simply hard in a way that having multiple asynchronous conversations is not. I maintain, then, that this is why almost no discussion community has ever had a truly linear model: content tends to fall into 4-5 levels of hierarchy, with at least two of them being under direct user control.

Once you expand the scope of where you look for the tree in this way, you then note that StackOverflow is actually more threaded than classic discussion forums: of the five levels it has (sites, tags--which I will again explicitly point out is just another hierarchy level where the entries in lower levels might be seen in multiple places--, questions, answers, comments), four of them are under immediate user control, and the fifth is decided by a largely democratic process.

In practice, Hacker News threads sometimes get really deep (and I again agree that they can get confusing down there), but the very top-level is sufficiently shallow that you need some of that depth below to have any interesting conversations: if there were only one linear conversation per posted link, things would rapidly get really boring when only one of the politics/economics/etc. angles was able to be covered at a time (by which point the others would have missed their window).

Hacker News, does, though, actually have a form of thread limiting; I didn't go into it in detail in my earlier post, but I'll go ahead and do so now: as you get deeper into a thread, the "reply" button takes longer and longer to appear. This mechanism is actually defeat-able (which is funny, and some might argue a bug: you click "link", and on the comment's own page you can always reply immediately), but it still does help slow the rate at which a thread can get very deep.
Jordan and team are good friends of ours (Filepicker.io team). We are trying to solve similar problems but approaching it from different directions. Its going to be an interesting future. :-)
I suspect that the comments are negative because the word Pivot is being used to generate buzz without substance.
Go go Collections!
Windows 8 apps hackable and crackable, just like iOS and Android
Nothing is uncrackable. Considering Microsoft's DRM for Windows has constantly been hacked since Windows XP before the final consumer public release, it's no surprise Windows 8 apps can be hacked as well. Why do companies even bother in the end anything can be bypassed, save yourself the cash and just give it up Microsoft and every other software company.
It is not remotely fantastic.

I live 2.4 miles from my workplace -- Capitol Hill to Pioneer Square and I could run to work faster than the non-transfer bus that went between my front door and 2 blocks from work.

Now that they've changed the bus system (Sept 2012)? That's a transfer. Yes...between one of the most densely populated neighborhoods and a reasonably dense job district.

During rush hour, with bus transfer, that could take over 48 minutes for 2.4 miles -- that's 20 minutes/mile or 3 miles per hour. I've walked it in that amount of time +/- 2 minutes.
If this is making local copies and syncing them like dropbox it could maybe be awesome but is likely read only. If it doesn't work like that then it will be terrible and constantly be loading, imagine trying to open a big image collection if it is making the requests right then.

However if it is dropbox style it might use a lot of people's hds.
This is the ugly but logical end point of continuing to treat the indirect effects of aging without addressing the core problem.
The search is garbage but overall windows explorer is miles ahead of finder. You pretty much need to use a 3rd party explorer on a mac.
This product (might someday) solve a real problem I have: one significant impediment to picking up a new web app is the need to learn yet another way of interfacing with the content I "own" on it.

If Collections can provide a compelling consistent interface on top of existing web apps, and an API for new web apps to target, then they might get to own some valuable conceptual real estate in user's minds: "I'm willing to try this new service because I already know how I'll be able to manage my content on it".

This also makes the world a better place by making it easier on the newcomers--it's unfair to them that established players occupy the "I know how to use this already" space in users' heads, that their service has to not just be better, but be that much better than the established players, to reach people.

Then they could use that conceptual real estate to promote those new web apps, and that promotion could yield revenue. Another option would be to wrap their own reference implementations of the services they're abstracting over in a premium layer. Another would be to work with web apps to provide value-added interfaces to the web apps' premium services and take a cut of whatever the web apps charge. Another would be to offer a premium corporate version that plugs into internal corporate datastores (in a way that, presumably, doesn't suck, distinguishing them from other products).

Collection's play for native integration (e.g. extending that consistent interface over all your local content) distinguishes them from Dropbox, which prefers to own that content.

A similar problem to this, that Collections isn't targeting (yet), is to provide an abstraction not over data but over operations. It's already far too complicated to juggle email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Gmail, G+, SMS, tumblr, etc. That means that I have to really think hard about letting a new web app into my routine.

An intermediary that presents a consistent interface to all those services, and opens itself up for use with new services, could try to win over valuable conceptual space with users and make the world a better place in exactly the same way.
So that developers can build apps. You didn't really think that through did you? You need some level of protection, even if it's breakable.
Exactly, it's all about managing expectations. You can't blame users in the aggregate for being upset when you set their expectations very high and then try to bring them down.

Actually, to blame an aggregate group of people (especially your own customers) for anything is folly. Chances are it's not them, it's you.
Nice, always great to run into someone else from the u of c. Happy so many people from our school made it. Did you interview?
I'm not sure that I'd even go so far as to say no passwords in the repo. In some environments, the developer is the only one with access to DB and the app code, and there is no growth planned (no separation of responsibilities), in which case it is acceptable even if not optimal to have them in database.yml.
> ...it would be great if replies at a certain depth were collapsed automatically...

I agree: I love that feature. However, Reddit then has the problem that you often find a really stupid comment rebutted by the most exciting and interesting comment on the entire thread; in such a situation, the stupid comment gets downvoted and manages to auto-collapse away the juicy gold hiding below. Slashdot handled this better: they auto-collapse threads, but if an auto-collapsed thread contains a highly-ranked comment, it "bubbles out"... as in, you can still see it, even though its parent has been collapsed... I'm not certain how to best describe it, but it is amazingly useful.

> I also wish there was some way to encourage concision in comments. ... The article itself is only 1541 words (and I didn't read the whole of that either).

This community seems to encourage well-thought-out replies; I could technically have posted a "blog response", but I find it more interesting to end up in conversations in the comments of the articles where I think of things to write. (I may actually soon start a more real blog, but I've always seen that as an awkward way to do back/forths.) Personally, I find the longer comments to be the ones that are more valuable, and would rather short comments be discouraged ;P.

(Another solution to this, btw, is to just have comments get collapsed to something that then has a "Read More" that inline-expands to the full comment; this is how Facebook solves this, as otherwise it would become a problem that your Timeline or Newsfeed was dominated by a couple very long posts instead of being an overview of the material available. As someone who actually does read and value long comments, however, I have mixed feelings about this. I mean, if you didn't read the whole of the article, it becomes difficult to really comment on it effectively: it doesn't take that long.)
Oh my god, this is shocking news! Shocking I tell you!
I will throw in as yet another voice in the "you are spamming me" chorus.
I had another "ideas guy" pitch me last night, and I wrote him most of this in an email, which when finished turned out to look like being worth a blog post.

This is for all those people who "just need a technical guy to code up my idea!"

It doesn't work like that. It _especially_ doesn't work like that if your idea is hardware…
to expand on jlgreco's point, not only are you now allowed to get off in the back it is strongly encouraged. Advertisements as well as signs on the bus itself tell you to get off in the back, and in my experience everyone does. Even though it's only been a couple months, bus rides are noticeably faster.

You are correct about rush hour busses out of downtown being absolutely packed though. While it can be an unpleasant ride, passengers are very rarely turned away.
"Big companies don't try to copy unsuccessful ideas, it never happens."

Have you ever worked at a big company? Big companies are so dysfunctional. It's not that the individuals are stupid but the broken dynamics of people working together can generate some pretty dumb decisions.

Big companies copy bad ideas all the time. This is one reason why startups can disrupt them.

"worst case scenario they'll try to buy you in order to copy you. Next worst they'll try to copy you once you're already becoming successful. Neither of those are bad scenarios."

This makes no sense. If they buy you, that's NOT the worst case scenario. The founders walk away wealthier. If they try to copy and succeed, the founders walk away with nothing. That is worse than them trying to buy the company.

I don't understand why "Neither of those are bad scenarios." The first one is possibly good, depending on what they're offering for the company.
Uh...but the original rule at elimination of the ride-free zone was that you can get off ONLY at the rear of the bus.

There were drivers who were enforcing this with an iron fist.

They've since backed off, but it's pretty clear that the people making the rules at King County Metro do not ride the bus.

Also, unless the attendants with portable scanners are present, you can't enter the back of the bus unless you're willing to cheat -- it's a double-edged sword.
Let's get the obvious out of the way: The thermostat concept is an analogy. In Friedman's original article, it's being used to describe money supply targeting [not real thermostats].

Nick Rowe is abstracting away some of the specifics of Friedman's article, but he's talking about the same concept : how active targeting of one measure can achieve desirable changes in another one while still showing no/little correlation between the two.

Rowe is also applying that abstraction to another concrete example: the pedals in a car driving in a hilly area.
I respectfully beg to differ that "mathematics isn't about numbers or even proofs." Why are the math books on my shelves full of numbers and proofs? What was it I was wasting my time on in graduate school? This sort of definition (really a non-definition) is so vague that it robs mathematics of its character. Is mathematics important merely because many people believe that mathematicians are clever?
(A classic case study -- a radiation therapy machine that was badly programmed, resulting in several accidents where patients were given massive overdoses of radiation).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
Because it wouldn't have access to the local/device filesystem? Although a web interface to a program running on the device would be useful.
Kids in the 80s used telephones. Very few people knew what a BBS was and had the means to get on a BBS. I certainly didn't know anyone that was using a modem in the 80s.
> You made me think, "If only there were a host where you could install the software with one click, and it would automatically update itself..." Follow that thread far enough and the line between a blogging service and a hosting service begins to blur.

This is one of the things the large hosts (Bluehost, GoDaddy, Dreamhost, etc.) are very keen on, and they've been doing lots of work to try and get this to a good level. It's one driving factor behind the push in the WordPress community to get automatic upgrades built in.

> Edit: icebraining pointed out downthread that you can mostly export a Tumblr blog by adding '/rss' to the URL of each page, a process that is easily automated.

In fact, WordPress has a Tumblr importer: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tumblr-importer/

Notably though, it's built on their JSON API, not on the RSS, so it's not really an open standard.
Surprisingly Safe Cardboard Bike Helmet Gets Solid Backing
There are no unbreakable locks, but we use them anyway.
This is a bittersweet day for me. I have two sites running on Clojure + Noir. I just moved my development to Linux so I can get Leiningen 2 and ClojureScript running with zero fuss.

All the signs were there: The mumbling abound about Noir being "dead;" Grainger doing Light Table; no word about updates.

I agree that Clojure is not a good language for using frameworks, and the community, I think, has done an excellent job of standing behind this philosophy, as I am sure Hickey likes it. Noir, at least for me, was the perfect balance of getting something put together for a new person, as it didn't enforce anything seemingly unnatural or make any demands on what to use or how to use it. In simple terms, it gave me a lot of freedom to explore without hanging a noose around my head.

I never built a website before the two I wrote in Noir, but Noir, or rather, Lisp, let me see the possibilities of all the power that was available without ever having to search. I had an amazing experience, and probably one of the hurdles I'll always look back at and thing that was a step that made me a better programmer. I showed off this really cool thing I figured out and showed it off to people, and they said: "Yeah, programmic routing is really cool." I was like "routing?" Then I spent the rest of the night on the web reading about it.

I love Hiccup. Generating hundreds of lines of HTML from vapor is an amazing feeling. I love bcrypt. I don't know how to hash my data, but at least I know that Noir picked the best damn option. Every time I opened my code, I always felt that Clojure and Noir had the answer and it never let me down.

But here, the maintainers are saying that even Noir was too much framework for Clojure, and that Noir complected, and that to really get the full power of Clojure, it's time to let go. It's a scary thought, to leave Noir behind and venture off into my own without the feeding bottle with the idea that Noir was good enough, but oh how much have I learned, and how much more can I learn?

Thank you Chris and Raynes! I'm a better programmer because of you guys, and I am going to better yet thanks to both of you.

Does this mean Korma is heading off into oblivion as well?
I am a Indian and have seen this line often repeated.

A relationship from my cultural perspective is also about committing to make it work. I am trying to bootstrap a startup with my best friend and there is lot in common between us but when going gets tough, it is important to be not an asshole.

I am married as well. My wife's and my own dreams are somewhat different, but if I decide somehow to let my dreams take precedence over hers, there will be trouble. It is same as a startup, when going gets tough - it is important to be responsible/respecting and more importantly not let outside world affect the relationship.

Coming from a culture when arranged marriages have been the norm for ages, I can't overemphasis simply willingness to stick. I don't know and it may sound strange - most people are essentially good (and well meaning in their own way) and as we Indians have come to terms with the fact that, Love can blossom in arranged marriage as well. Where you did not know your life partner beforehand.

Trying to find perfect partner with whom goals and ambitions match is unicorn and rainbows.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I wasn't contradicting you, because clearly we agree on certain points.
Impressive growing list of US Government GitHub Repositories
The initial 12 neighborhoods include: Area 1: the University of Washington’s West Campus District, Area 2: South Lake Union, Area 3: First Hill/Capitol Hill/Central Area, Area 4: the University of Washington’s Metropolitan Tract in downtown Seattle, Area 5: the University of Washington’s Family Housing at Sand Point, Area 6: Northgate, Area 7: Volunteer Park Area, Area 8: Beacon Hill and SODO Light Rail Station and Areas 9-12: Mount Baker, Columbia City, Othello, and Rainier Beach.
Look out Sublime and Textmate ... here comes Brackets (stunning)
But this is still not bait and switch.

You can use of the myriad if other apps, like Flickr which stores the images at a decent resolution (instead if the 612x612)
Thanks for the quick response. Lets say for the sake of simplicity (and a short weekend project) that I want to have a <div> on my site that anyone can copy a code <script type="text/javascript" src="//www.mycrummysite/mydiv.js"></script> and put on their website so that it shows the my div. Every time i change the contents of the div, it also changes on their site. That seems like a good way to start. Is there a quick way to learn how to do this?
Oh hell yes. I live in the U District. I am basically first in line for this. Signed up for more info as it happens. Goodbye, Comcast.
Those two months are the best summer you'll find anywhere. When I moved to SF, I missed them dearly. SF summers are terrible, and I found three of them more depressing than seven rainy winters in Seattle ever were.

I'll also take nonstop rain from Nov-Feb any day over the snowy winters in the Midwestern states where I grew up.

Finally, the key to not letting your plans get ruined by rain is to always plan for the possibility of rain. =)
4 people isn't exactly statistically significant. FullContact averages a 60% match rate to at least one social profile. Let me know if you find anything better.

It's an API. You could run two separate calls and then merge, or run the excel macro with two separate files and merge. We plan to have multiple queries in the future.
I'd just like to note that vBulletin, used on on many of the largest web forums on the internet, historically, and presently, has for some time supported a dual flat and threaded view. Most sites will default to the flat, but there is a setting to set it per user to threaded. That's why every post has their own reply link/button - to maintain the threading.
Rapleaf doesn't do social. They are great at demographics. FullContact provides publicly available social profile URLs. Depends on what you are looking for.
Product demo videos don't usually hold my attention ... but I was riveted for the full 20 mins (full credit to both the product and Jeffry Way). Downloading the repo now.
Uploaded e-crews for interstellar missions
Pretty cool. A little scary how accurate the heat map is though. It's recording me about a half a block from my house!
Huh? Yes, "thermostat" is used as an analogy (by both Friedman and Rowe).

But the article is not claiming that there is a "general thermostat theory." He's talking about one idea (there may be no measured correlation under targeting) and asking why this is not more widely known, especially since the abstract idea seems more widely applicable (to fields other than monetary theory and applied econometrics).

The inverse of Rowe's claim is that this idea is well known (maybe under a different name). Are you arguing that? If so, then by what name?
It also seemed to break my back button after I went to the sign up page. I had to type the HN url to get back here after I finished. That was annoying.
"Interesting but this screams black lower class."

You wouldn't write that, would you? So why is this an acceptable criticism?
I am speechless. Don't know what to say.
I enjoy hiking as a hobby and while I plan route with the use of a computer, I'd personally neverer rely soley on electronics when I'm out. The only reason that I suggest that bias is there is that the Apple story garnered quite a lot of attention, with much of the criticism extolling the virtues of Google maps. This was a timely reminder that they are not the panacea of mapping either. I wouldn't ever use Google Maps to plan a hike, they simply aren't reliable enough. So I take and accept your point, but will reserve a healthy amount of scepticism.

Edit: A case in point is the sub thread on search in the AppStore vs Google Play. I use Google Nexus and iOS devices and can assure you that the Play store on the phone is worse that the AppStore. The online version is significantly better. Discoverability is awful in both. This maybe my opinion, but it's based in real world use of both.
I think it sounds promising. As much as my habits are solidly in the "file explorer" space, I can see its limitations.

But, in order to even convince me there's a viable alternative, the user interface of something like Collections has to really knock it out of the park for me. So much so, it seems daunting.
These are not mutually exclusive concepts, just FYI.
Shooting: Green Beret Castle Assault - Free Online Games
See also http://news.dot-nxt.com/2012/12/14/internet-humbles-un-telec... which has more details about how the vote happened, and why.
Chris indicates that Korma isn't going anywhere. I think there is probably still motivation to maintain it. At least, even if he doesn't I'd be willing to bet that someone will.
The issue with the free ride for me was when you were on a bus that was leaving/had left the free ride area, you had to exit the front so that you could pay. That was a major pain in the ass on a full bendy-bus.

Eliminating the free-ride zone has solved all the problems from my perspective. I see no issue with only allowing people to enter at the front; it doesn't cause any hassle as far as I have seen. I guess it would be an issue if you really felt the need to sit at the back?
It would be cool if your slogan "Finder for the cloud" was replaced with "Explorer for the cloud" (or whatever windows users call it) if they are on windows.

You could detect this pretty easily and it would prevent alienating a large percentage of visitors.