skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you don't take a peek at the content on the other side of the URL then your options are somewhat limited. If I were faced with this problem I would probably start by doing broad "spam site" classification based on the domain name (which would probably eventually involve things like doing DNS/whois lookups and weighting by registrar.) Once you have likely targets you can silently blackhole the known spam sites and maybe create a "this might be spam, press the button to continue at your own risk" landing page for sites in the classification grey zone.
Just read the comments before you read the article to crowdsource your dereference.

Choosing to boycott linkbait will hardly make a difference as the linkbait aims to suck in the suckers and there are plenty of them.
The Consumerist: Shoppers Bite Back
Kindle, schmindle...I've got your $350 e-book reader right here
> A claim of a marginal tax rate of 75% without any solid numbers is hardly doing justice your thesis.

The top marginal rate is around 40%. SSI is around 15%. CA's top is around 10%. Add in some deduction phaseouts and it's easy to see 70%.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was worth paying a designer to make them. They're supposed to seem valuable.
That's a really terrible rebuttal. I was struck by the fact that Sailer seems to think it's impossible to be both aggressive and "cultivated." In my experience, these two traits are almost uncorrelated.

Also, his argument (insinuation, really) that female consumer spending in the US was a driving force of the sub-prime crisis completely is completely tangential to Lewis's argument, which is about male financial workers. (To my mind, both arguments seem unlikely and rather sexist. I'd like to think Sailer is being ironic, but no, he's not.)
What is a Social Media Expert
That's the route we'll go. We've looked at services that offer virtual goods as a platform, but they own the content. This means if they go out of business, our users lose what they paid for.

Trying to see if any other HN users have designers they've used that do really well with designing gifts.
One will also be able to see more chairs than have ever been crammed into YC's nave before. Huge numbers of people are coming to AngelConf tomorrow. That's one encouraging data point about the economy.
Propose HN: Boycott submissions with inaccurate titles to eradicate linkbait
I've seen the rise of linkbaiting in the last few months and I feel that the problem has achieved mythic proportions and that it will only be getting worse because of the obvious incentives:

Linkbait title = more people look at the article = more people upvote it = people see that linkbaiting is a valid strategy

As I remarked on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=503422, if a sizeable proportion of HN starts boycotting submissions with inaccurate titles, then the new way to get people to read your article would be to write an accurate title! The dynamic would be flipped on its head:

Linkbait title = nobody reads the article = nobody upvotes it = people see that linkbaiting is self-defeating.

So I propose we implement this. Here's the algorithm:

When clicking through to an article, summarily verify that the title is an accurate depiction of the content of the article. If it isn't, don't read the article, and post a comment with something to the effect of: "I refuse to read this article on the grounds that the submission's title isn't an accurate depiction of the content of the article", then state what the article is actually about. If somebody else already posted that and their summary appears accurate after a summary inspection of the article, upvote the comment.

I'd also advocate not to start any discussion (even if worthwhile) on a submission guilty of linkbait. I suspect a lot of people look at the number of comments as a proxy for interestingness of the article. Any worthwhile discussion that could take place in that bad submission's comments thread could very well grow on a good submission's...

Of course I wouldn't want to skip on great articles because the first submission has an inaccurate title, so I encourage new submissions of the same article with accurate titles. The anti-multisubmission feature, or whatever it's called, could get in the way, I'm not sure what to do about that yet.

The best would be to always have accurate titles, but obviously it can be hard to summarize the submission correctly in just a few words. I'd settle for just eliminating submissions with titles that were obviously crafted for maximum viewership with complete disregard for accuracy.

Who's with me?
That is really cool. I'm glad that Google is willing to go through all this hassle (court case, notice ads, etc) to digitize books. I'm sure somebody thinks they'll make money on it too, but even if it's a giant cash cow, it's also a giant win for culture.
I elaborated on this on a new thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=503561
One of my teachers (Akim Demaille from Epita) leads a French start up whose aim is to unify the way we communicate with robots (sort of) : http://www.gostai.com/
Stimulus 2.0: It’s The Startups, Stupid.
Your null hypothesis (or whatever it's called) is very pessimistic. Even if you benefited from those assignments, you might have benefited more from doing something else instead. Shouldn't it be your choice, as long as you can demonstrate command of the material?
The selfless gene: Rethinking Dawkins's doctrine
The article seems to stray away from a side by side comparison, netbooks have their place but reading books is most certainly not one of them.

Screen resolution of a netbook makes it hard enough to read webpages and other things but reading a book on one is out of the question to me, if I were to invest in an electronic way to read a book it would be with something that looked like ink, which the kindle has shown to be a very good selling point, not to mention Amazon and their book collection backing it.
And what might that be?
I think it's exaggerated slightly, but not terribly. They clearly considered it a high priority and put it in several questions. It's not as if the title was just extrapolated from an anecdotal experience.
I've used these design contests from the following forums.
You'll be surprised of their quality.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=94
http://www.webmaster-talk.com/graphic-design-contests/
Gee, we just met. I can't accept this ring.
Higher percentages should count a lot more than lower percentages. It is more difficult to go from 94-98 than it is to go from 54 to 58.
Have we learned nothing? Don't name your robot HAL!
I am surprised that Windows 7 doesn't have an inbuilt Twitter competitor (or does it?). With ICQ, lots of companies managed to grab a share, with Twitter nobody even seems to be trying. Weird.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dilbert_Principle
The Firefox Process Model
Loopt Adds “Friends You May Know” And Advertisements To Their iPhone App
What about 350%? (USA)
It depends if having all of your country's assets overseas seized and gunboats arriving in Reyjavik would be better than the current situation or not.

When you owe other countries a ton of money and you're not paying, you either need a quid pro quo, a payment plan, or you're going to get your balls busted.
If there is more you need to learn and you can stomach the thought of more schooling, go for it.
...Take off every Zig?!

You're making this really complicated. Just flag everything with a linkbait title. If enough people do that, it will get an editor's attention, and they can (hopefully) determine the reason for all the flagging is the title (linkbait titles are easy to identify) and change it.
Is this from personal experience?

Yes, when I say "in my experience" I am generally referring to my personal experience. :)

No doubt having a lot of books around, parents who read, and general encouragement to read are all factors as well.
Student-Managed Venture Funds are the Future for College Entrepreneurs
Quick And Easy Chicken Dishes That Taste Good
I don't think that any company thinking about raising outside financing should seriously consider Vermont. Basically, the reason why is no one is familiar with Vermont corporate law.
It's fascinating science, but the one thing that it proves to me is that MIT has absolutely solved the science of the press release. They do a far better job than most other engineering schools that I know of at hammering the message (for any given message) home, over and over, in breathless prose.

The very fact that they've subtitled their magazine (" Technology Review") as "The Authority on the Future of Technology" is proof of that.

Hell, the fact that they've gone beyond press releases to printing up their own hagiographic magazine is proof of that.

I don't say this to be bitter - as someone for whom marketing does not come easy, I'm perpetually impressed by what a great job they do.
I didn't have a television growing up, and I read. A lot.
From the article: :

"Instead of using brand dollars to create programming that can’t be skipped, it instead urges brands to continue buying TV commercials, but to insert content into those commercials that people are more likely to watch: important local event and community announcements."

I can't help it, this evokes some really funny thoughts. I imagine the coffee family having their well lighted morning coffee after their sweatless morning run, and then smiling into the camera with their well lighted teeth announcing local news. That would be so surreal. Maybe some day they can even know my name and tell me news about my own life.
How Chad Fowler Found Good Programmers in India
I grew up without a television, and it really wasn't that bad. The problem I ran into was a little different- when I was around a television, I couldn't stop paying attention. I've gotten better about that sort of thing as I've gotten older, but the truth is, I still can't tune out noise, or televisions, anywhere near as well as my peers who grew up with televisions.

I don't know if that's a common experience though.
I strongly agree with the above 2 comments.

You are describing what a manager is supposed to do. And you don't give enough details to diagnose the situation. I've seen coworkers who seriously had ADD (and were on enough prescription meds that their pill jar looked like a bowl of skittles), and I've seen coworkers who've had problems at home.

The guy with ADD couldn't see the 10000 ft view if you hit him on the head with it because ... ooh, look, shiny! He had to be micromanaged because his own steering mechanism was faulty.

May I recommend that you read Dynamics of Software Development? Because it sounds a lot like you want to flip the bozo bit over there.
http://www.amazon.com/Dynamics-Software-Development-Jim-McCa...
Twitter is broken
...for me, at any rate,

When trying to sign in, I get:
https://twitter.com/help_sessions/create

and that page, right now, tells me that:

That page doesn't exist!
I'm not sure that's right. For example

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutrient_timing

links muscular development with how the timing of eating is correlated with the timing of exercise, so I can see how a similar principle could easily apply to wait loss.
Why can't you imagine it? Not saying you are wrong, but I can imagine the digestion system to have all sorts of quirks. It seems conceivable to channel energy harvested from the food into different outlets.
More people in the US watched more hours of TV last year than any year before. Indeed, every year a new record is set for hours of TV watched. Nielsen's 2008 figures show 151 hours of TV per month, 3 hours of online video and 4 hours on mobile phone and other devices. So exactly what are we discussing here?
True, but luckily it is easy to unfollow the participants in such schemes.
I'm having the same problem. I was signed in and everything was hunky-dory but then I signed out just to test your example... bad idea. Now I'm stuck out!

This happened to me the other day, and I was all confused because normally when a site is down I can Twitter about it but with Twitter down there was nowhere to go. It was only down for a moment though, so problem averted. Still, not sure HN is the right forum for up-to-the-minute chit-chat about what sites are broken...
There's some logic to it. If you eat right before you go to bed, your body is going to burn what you've just eaten for energy. However, if you go to bed hungry, your body has no choice but to burn fat stores for energy (and besides, who cares if you're hungry when you go to bed, you're asleep!). In that sense, eating late at night can cause more of what you eat to be stored and less of what's stored to be burned.
No - they know most people are going to use SMS and want to gauge them for a s much money as possible.
The SMS infrastructure is fantastic (for them), they use a spare 140bytes in a message the phone is going to send to the tower as part of a 'I'm still here' message anyway - and then charge you 40p for it!
I don't think that's quite enough. There's a finite amount of editors and it will always take some time before they can fix a title, if they do so at all.

And by the time they rectify the situation, the submission will likely have gotten a number of upvotes in the most critical part of its life, due to the linkbait title.

Also, AFAIK we normal users can't see the number of flaggings a submission has had, so with due respect, I don't want to rely 100% on editors to have the initiative in this whole affair, in this time and age I'd prefer something more crowd-sourced.
Depends if you spent the money you borrowed on Nukes or Herring :-)
Maestro: A new .Net language for parallel programming from Microsoft
That's a serious accusation. Do you have any stats to back it up?
MIT: 'Nanostitching' could strengthen airplane skins, more
Sam Ruby leaving IBM for Microsoft
Not all calories are equal. Protein FTW. :)
Police action shuts down German hacker forum
PluggedIn’s ‘Hulu For Music Videos’ Heads To The Deadpool
I used to work for a medical school where my primary job was automating the information capture (video and slides) of lectures. We had numerous lectures going on every day and only one or two people to post-produce the videos. One of the big problems we faced was the large variety of inputs: cameras, Powerpoints, writing surfaces, DVDs, etc. Professors couldn't be bothered to standardize on a single presentation format and would sometimes wait days after initially presenting to provide the slides for us to include with the captured content. I started working on a solution that would hack into the VGA signal feeding the projector and capture stills on a regular basis so at the end of the class, we'd have both the video AND the contents of the presentation. The problem with that was that it wouldn't capture full motion video, like when instructors displayed video through the projector, or had powerpoint slides with video embedded in them. My next idea was to capture images of the VGA input at 30 fps, analyze the difference between the current frame and the previous few, and make a determination if a region of the image was displaying full-motion video (if so, I'd send that region to an encoder, then subsequently overlay it on top of the high-resolution stills when displaying it to the students online). I took another job before finishing work on that idea, and since then the medical school purchased MediaSite Live from Sonic Foundry, which I think does a pretty decent job (not as cool as my idea, but workable).
Twitter is available again for me, so yeah, for me it was only down for a few minutes.

As for whether HN is the appropriate forum to "tattle tale" when a well known website is down? Hmmm... Dunno about this one, I just figured it would be newsworthy, sorry if I wasted anybody's time...
I agree. I ran a company that started making serious revenue its second year in operation. My partner and I made the choice then of paying ourselves salaries, keeping a considerable portion of the revenue in our business bank account.

It was one of the best business decisions we ever made. The income that we saved is paying for our living expenses while we work behind the scenes to launch our new startup. If we had pocketed the cash, I doubt we'd be in as strong a position.
At the moment, it's free. I've got a number of apps running, and I've got nothing but praise for Heroku.

From what I remember, their plan was to bill based on usage, so if you have a quiet month, you get a small(ish) bill. Things get busy; you pay more.
I left Verizon after about 6 or 7 years a month ago because I wanted an iPhone. It's just the best phone for my needs on the market.

But if Verizon gets the iPhone next year, or the Palm Pre and the Pre offers a comparable user experience, I'll break my contract with AT&T in a heartbeat. I am really not nearly as satisfied with AT&T's network in my area and their customer support is terrible (Verizon's on the otherhand has always been good). Plus, 97% of the people I call on a daily basis are on Verizon, and thus free in network if I were to switch back.

I would guess that a lot (most?) people who switch from Verizon to AT&T do so for the iPhone. I can't really think of any other reason to switch to a company with an inferior network and icy customer service reps.
Amazon's Kindle e-books now on Apple iPhone, iPod
I agree, but there's different levels of "broken". The photography and fingerprinting is an egregious breach of privacy and dignity and surely puts the US (and Japan, btw) at the front of the pack in terms of just how broken the system is.
For college, which is voluntary, full disclosure would excuse the practice, although I still think it's foolish. However, in high school, which isn't voluntary, and where grades can affect your ability to get into college, it's worse.

I think the point isn't whether or not it's ethical (full disclosure in college would make it so), but whether it's a smart way to do things. I claim it isn't.
I don't even have mp3's anymore, that's how awesome grooveshark is.
From your algorithm:

When clicking through to an article, summarily verify that the title is an accurate depiction of the content of the article. If it isn't, don't read the article ... then state what the article is actually about.

Is this a joke?

How about a 'linkbait' link next to the 'flag' link. Or just tolerate it.

Linkbait titles are a problem, but your solution is not for me.
The Number 1 Rule to Being a Successful Entrepreneur
Other additions to the errata:

* Pfizer listed twice in Pharma

* "Macy" should be "Macy's"
Just curious, what's the status on the QA? Is it in shippable form? Has anyone bought one?
Yeah, well, those are the people I would consider the authorities, wouldn't you?

BTW, collapse is easily debunked: take a two-slit experiment a put a detector at one slit. Interference is destroyed for all photons despite the "fact" that only half the photons "actually" interact with the detector. Collapse cannot account for this. (I put "fact" and "actually" in scare quotes because in true fact all the photons interact with the detector, but not according to the collapse theory.)
Google Health: helping you better coordinate your care
Can anybody see this on Linux in Europe? I wonder if justin.tv is blocked in Europe or if the player somehow doesn't play nice with Flash on Linux.
We specifically don't appreciate those sorts of jokes around here.
Sailer agrees with you about the male/female thing. He's saying it doesn't seem to be a factor.
I like this conceptual sketch (from the wikipedia article): http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a94/WtMiller/scan0003-1.jpg
Instead of paying students for high marks, give them high marks for high profits.
The idea is to encourage entrepreneurship in schools rather than study for its own sake.

The marks would still be meaningful in an academic way if one believes that successful entrepreneurs probably have learned something important along the way.
Interesting, 35! according to various tools:

10333147966386100000000000000000000000000 (Open Office Calc)
10333147966386100000000000000000000000000 (Excel)
10333147966386144000000000000000000000000 (Gnumeric)
10333147966386145000000000000000000000000 (Windows Calculator)
10333147966386144929666651337523200000000 (Python)
"As I suspected, you're guessing - it's sort of like fundamental attribution error."

I don't think so. It's merely the most likely explanation. I note you haven't advanced any competing theories. However, not like I have any hard evidence, so consider the point retracted if it bothers you.

(various points about fingerprint collection)

Well, everything you say is true, as far as it goes. My point is not that fingerprint collection is utterly useless and no case whatsoever can be made for its enactment. What I am trying to say is that it is an extreme tactic with high costs, not least of which that it turns people off visiting the US at all, and its benefits are nebulous and require a lot of unlikely "what-if" scenarios to pay off at all. Meanwhile, the data collected is, IMO, very dangerous.

Ah, I see you've heard of the term "security theatre". Yes, that's exactly what it is, and a very damaging and costly act it is too.

"Be ready to be disappointed."

I am, but I don't think it's impossible that the draconian entry procedures will be dropped. They're really a product of paranoia and irrational fear; this dissipates in time.

When the drumbeat of terrorism scaremongering has died down a bit, and the post-crisis economic reality has dawned on everyone, it might well occur to the leaders of the country that perhaps they can't afford to throw away tourist and business dollars on misguided security theatre any more. It might take a while, but economic pragmatism wins out every time.
This is one of the reasons why I get most of my news these days through HN, and typically read the comments first. I get a concise summary and usually more interesting links to the original research.
Right now, the main problem with Facebook's message feature is that it is only available to friends as you addressed. You won't want to unfriend somebody because they post too much; if you unfriend, you also lose access to their photos, contact information, and it is also publicaly seen.

Along with the new homepage layout, the most important feature Facebook is adding is the one way follow for celebrity figures. This is very important; it will allow regular users to see the benefits of an individual sharing things about their lives. I believe that Facebook is using these celebrity accounts to sell users on opening up and sharing more information.

I expect one way follows to become open to all Facebook users in the future. Your Facebook account will have two sides: the public information sharing (Twitteresque chatter, links to articles, etc) and the entire profile.

They have to tread carefully, however. Facebook's root is in allowing only those within your network or friend circle to view your information. It will take a dramatic shift in the user's view of their information. If they can succeed, however, I think that Twitter will not be sustainable in the long run.
Uh, Wall Street did a excellent job at screwing at being Wall Street. Why do we have to blame some special Nordic trait for Iceland screwing up at being Wall Street?
"If only things were like I think they should be, then everything would be right."
"Linkbait titles are a problem, but your solution is not for me."

I'm fine with that. It's just version 0.1. I was trying to go for a solution that doesn't require more code.

But sure, what about just flagging all linkbait titles and, crucially, showing the number of flaggings for everyone to see.
Let him create CSS stylesheets for grid layouts without tables.