skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are two protocols described here. One is an extension to HTTP which allows the client and server to swap roles while still using the same connection. This would allow a server to "push" events to a client asynchronously. This will never work in a browser.

The other protocol tunnels an HTTP connection over another HTTP connection in the opposite direction. Tunneling asynchronous messages over HTTP is an old technique which can be implemented in a browser.

Neither protocol enables any kind of novel functionality. They merely add another layer of HTTP cruft.
Well when I said that I wasn't trying to claim that everyone who supports the current drug laws was being intellectually dishonest.

I was trying to say that I think the reason law enforcement (at all levels) pursues the 'drug war' so assertively is that it justifies a lot of spending, manpower, and surveillance, which may be good or bad.

When something pays the bills and gives you a little more latitude to operate, you'll find ways to justify it whether you are winning or losing.
I have the F31d (almost usable at iso 800 and good enough until iso 400) which I bought when fuji was stopping it because the F41d that had just come out had more megapixels but higher noise...

For good reviews see http://www.dpreview.com/ that's what I used last time I bought my camera...
"How do we make money? Simple. One word: Volume."

(edit: i'm referencing this: http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/first-cit...)
Nokia 5800 Theme: Soft Green Blue
Kind of PC, aren't we? Lower bound is -8. Knock yourself out.
The Computer Performance Shell Game
I'm pretty sure it's also one of those small interviews they have in the business section of the nytimes.. it looks more appropriate in the 'print' version.
The fact that people complain publicly about posts is a feature, not a bug: in moderation, it communicates among the group what the standards are for stories, and trains new users about flagging stories.

On the other hand, with a downvote, there's no opportunity for discussion, and the end result is that worthwhile stories about out-of-fashion concepts like Perl or .NET or software patents get suppressed.

It's worth mentioning how often the intent of voting is misconstrued; is it "I disagree with this" or "this adds no value"?
Your being down voted has little to do with political correctness. You insulted the OP and the comment wasn't even funny.
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No, the comment downvotes are not "nerfed"-- things get downvoted all the time, and there are often comments with negative karma-- you just haven't been around enough to notice on your cursory glance at the system. (The fact that they are in grey makes them easy to miss, which is part of the point.)

There aren't article downvotes-- but there doesn't seem to be a need for them. The moderators kill stories that are plainly inappropriate, and the ranking algorithm makes it difficult for things to reach the front page without a decent number of upvotes in a short period of time.

My point is: this is an interesting and subtle topic, and it might be in your best interest to study it in some detail, rather than just glancing superficially at what others are doing and forming conclusions thereupon.
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If you read the angel investing article as an entrepreneur, it is hard to miss pg's one recommendation to potential investors on how to pick good entrepreneurs: it is to pick those who are the opposite of hapless. I have been thinking about what being the "opposite of hapless" means very specifically for me at this time ever since I read the article. It was one of the things that drove me yesterday to just sit down and start hacking away at a hard problem I have after dithering on it for a couple of weeks.

I almost expected this essay.
Introducing the Microlecture Format
Comment votes are a tool for grooming the discussion. Discussion on most threads ends after a day or two. What's the value in downvoting a 3-day-old comment? Very few people are going to respond differently to the thread as a result.

If you want to participate, you should write comments, or, better yet, submissions of your own.
Or "I want/don't-want people to see this"

Or "Karma payback time, dude"

In practical terms, it means all of that. What it is "supposed" to mean, I guess, is stuff that PG likes to see (or not)
Are we still talking about Numenta? Their website links to several papers that address all of your questions:

http://numenta.com/for-developers/education.php
What's the asymmetry? You're begging the question. Bad upvotes mean too many people see something. Bad downvotes mean not enough people see it. The latter is worse than the former. So only one of the features is supported. This is a simpler approach than turning karma into a currency to spend on suppressing things people disagree with.

Having said that, the 2-1 downvote scheme you proposed does put some of us within spitting distance of taking nickb down to zero, so I support it wholeheartedly.
By your reasoning, you think it shouldn't be possible to upvote comments after a couple of days either then?
Bravo,
This is such a good article. As a filmmaker myself, (foureyedmonsters.com) what I'm very interested in is partnering with exhibitors with a universal license that makes managing re-distribution very simple. I would love to put a more advanced creative commons license on a film that would then allow TV brodcasters and other digital exhibitors to put ads on it, sell it, project it at events or even distribute for free but always sending 50 percent of gross revenue back to my piece of contents royalty collecting agent. I imagine a world with lots of very small production companies all using these up and coming standardized licenses and then a social web that just passes that content where ever it needs to go translating and even re-editing as it moves through the swarm.

I've co-founded a research and development project to function as a think tank designing this future model.

For content creators there is a big focus around compensating the creation of culture. If society considers culture to be a valuable thing, then that culture will earn it's value back. In other words, we won't see inflated monetary compensation to content creators, but there will be compensation that supports them making more. That is if anyone cares about the things they make. And that's I suppose why we call this democracy.
Regarding: "I'm pathologically optimistic about people's ability to change."

I am very interested in finding out if this optimism is based (somewhat empirically) on your experiences or is more of an intuitive belief based on your general outlook in life.
I think their intent is just to describe the mean, not the universal.

Plus, its very likely that as humans, our impressions of how well we are doing in one particular area will be dramatically incorrect, so if you are using this as a howto guide, you will inevitably get it wrong without lots of practice.
There's no accounting for taste, so I won't discuss whether the comment was humorous or not. However, I respectfully disagree that I have offended the original poster. Please allow me to explain:

As an engineer, I appreciate the original poster's resourcefulness and can-do attitude. Getting things done with minimum means is something admirable. However, it wouldn't be too far-fetched to claim that anyone who reads the words "Nigeria" and "internet" in the same sentence will think of 419 scams. That is not the OP's fault, of course, but it would be naive to think that such a prejudice does not work against him. Countries have reputations, sometimes good, sometimes bad. Sometimes your country's reputation helps, sometimes it hinders.

I am sure some people think I am being racist. Just so you know, I am no bigot. Moreover, if the OP was offended, he can defend himself, and I am here to apologize if my joke was offensive. I conjecture that if the OP were Russian and I made a stupid joke about vodka bottles and stuff, I wouldn't have been down-voted as fast. Not all bigotry is created equal, I guess.
Ask HN: What is the next leading company for cloud computing?
Hello,
My best friend from TX, heard that there is a company or startup that will be the leading in the cloud computing, and she is very interested in investing in that company, but she does not really know what is the name of the company/startup.

I told her that Amazon is the leading in the field of cloud computing.

She received a report that this company has stocks - or will have stocks soon. And in the report, they said that it will be similar to Google's stock.. when it ran to very high price. But they never mentioned the name of the company!

Do you have any idea about a company that's leading in the cloud computing, and have stocks - or will be IPO soon?

Also I would appreciate a list of companies/startups that work in the cloud computing, and that has a promosing future.

Thanks alot!
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On what grounds do you base the 640x480 claim? Most people that I know shoot at the highest res..

Also - the few photos I still get emailed seem much much slower to download than a 640 shot. :
If marijuana were readily available from pharmacies, how many people would use it instead of Vicodin or Oxycontin to treat pain? And it may be an effective antidepressant for many people. There are tens of billions of threatened revenue right there. Any other industry with that much at stake would exert substantial influence on the govt.

However, marijuana growers need it to stay illegal too. Some of them are influential in CA. It's currently the largest single cash crop in the US, just because it's illegal. If it were legal, it could probably be grown and sold for the same price as corn.
The issue is that pgpool is that it doesn't keep data consistent necessarily. For example, MySQL's default replication is statement based. That means that if you execute "UPDATE table SET var=57 WHERE id=10" on the master, it will run that same statement on the mirror. BUT, MySQL's replication is smart. If you say, "UPDATE table set updated_at=now()" on the master, it won't run that on the mirror. Rather, it will run "UPDATE table set updated_at=<the time that now evaluated to on the master>". pgpool also requires table locking when dealing with SERIALs and that is just unacceptable for performance.

It just has limitations that don't make it a good replication tool for production environments. pgpool is an awesome tool, but not for replication. Use it for load balancing and connection pooling which it is wonderful for.
Downvoting loses more information than "no downvoting". Think about a submission with 110 upvotes and 100 downvotes, it is overall rating is 10. A submission with only 15 upvotes has a rating of 15. Surely a submission which attracts 210 user votes must be more valuable than the other one.
Mediocre Content Turns Valuable
Music is awesome, amazing work.
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"An analysis of the 10 most prevalent lolcat photos, and what makes them entertaining".
I agree completely with the article, and like a lot of stuff from that 'newspaper', it is well written. However, I still think it's basically about politics, and would prefer not to see it here. Politics is a poisonous topic.

Few governments would tell you what you can and can't eat, but they sure do limit what you can sell to other people to eat, and most people are ok with that (minus a few libertarians who enjoy thinking up creative systems that more or less achieve the same results, minus the government).
Minor nit: you usually can't prove it will always find the narrowband signal. All you can prove is that it will do so with high probability.
SSD Awesome (AKA a great marketing campaign)
"I Quit" 1 Year anniversary
With people (by which I assume you mean co-founders or colleagues), being resourceful usually means finding out what is important to them in life and in that moment. Then you shouldn't have to push them very much (or at all) to get things done - they will almost always be things they want themselves. When this is not the case, you need to be resourceful in figuring out why they don't want to do something. Usually there's a legitimate reason which can be addressed.
"15-year-old Nelson" ?
Things that are actually more efficient don't require subsidies....

I like trains, but as passenger transport, they're not competitive.

Yes, I know about the energy efficiency of a full train. However, you can't have both decent utilization (reasonably full trains) and reasonable ridership. And, if you don't shoot for reasonable ridership, the fixed and labor costs will kill you. At reasonable ridership, lower utilization kills the realized efficiency and you're still having trouble with fixed and labor costs.

Note that govt involvement makes things worse. If a congress critter comes from a particular town, that town will get a stop, regardless of whether that makes sense. (Stops have a huge impact on average speed.)
Remember Apple and the iPod mini... Just because you're better than the competition - doesn't mean you're product is the best it could be.
Except in the second case, even if only a third of the people take the trouble to flag the article, it would have 100 points and 100 flaggings. Hopefully something getting flagged that much would be killed pretty quickly.

I like making a distinction between something that I simply don't find insightful and something that is actually trolling/spammy/false. In HN's case, my lack of an upvote is equivalent of not finding something insightful... my flagging is an indication of the latter.
No, it's not ironic. It's business as usual at HN. Posts get downvoted all the time. In fact, a more recent problem has been people overusing downvotes.

It sounds like you didn't actually understand the dynamics of the HN community. You sound silly insisting your initial impression is even partially right, when the whole community is telling you the opposite. (This applies only to posts, of course. Downvotes still don't exist for stories themselves, outside of flagging.)
> I see some cargo-cult potential in fsync-after-every-write here.

Well, we currently effectively have cargo-cult no-fsync, in that application writers who don't consider the matter get the fast-but-risky behaviour.

I think I'd be happy for naive application writers to get safe-and-slow as a default, learning that they can get fast-but-risky over time (as they, hopefully, become aware of when to use the two approaches).

That said, what that would really achieve is an overall impression that "writing files under Linux is slow", so perhaps the current situation is 'best'.
I think this will be a good way to create new jobs, and I am not sure if Obama really means it to be included in his 3.5 Millions jobs plan or not.

For example, even if Data.gov won't create API - which is less likely to happen -, I will create an API for Data.gov, and I will make a business model around it, and hire some programmers with me.

I have created API for Yahoo! Music videos long time ago before Yahoo! thinks of creating it's current music API. :)

APIs and making data accessable to others, and organizing the data and even mixing it like a mashup, is something that will help people for sure.
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PHash.org: the open source perceptual hash library
DHH likes to complain pretty much about everything!

Now because of that in my next presentation I'll use LOLdogs.

BTW, I love Federico Mena FAIL!s in his presentations.
I don't think you need to be too nervous at technical speaking engagements. In my experience, most people just show up to hear you say the name of the talk, and then they tune out and start using their laptop. So if you pace around the stage, they won't notice, 'cause they're off in some other world.

(You could say, "Well, that's because all your talks are so boring.". Maybe, but this happens at even the most interesting speaker's talks as well.)
I don't think it should, no. There's a big halo effect to karma, and disabling upvotes for stale comments might mitigate it.

But it's not a big problem.
Yeah, that is correct, but lame articles usually only make it to the "new" page, and never the "real frontpage". I've submitted to HN 2 or 3 times now, and my articles have been killed for lameness.

(In my defense I thought they were good articles. But the system appears to work from my experience.)
That's surprisingly ironic considering Disney's attitude towards the public domain and copyright extension.
I pity any Ikea customer that happened to be on hallucinogens that day.
Cydia Store now open for jailbreak app sales
Nah, it would have- and that's why HN is awesome. Dumb jokes get downmodded into oblivion, which keeps the quality of conversation high. If shit like that flew, the site would devolve into Reddit levels of lolcats. It doesn't contribute to the conversation and it leads into detours like this thread.

It's also beyond ridiculous to mock someone who's busting his ass to build a company when he has to transcend things like, you know, regular access to electricity, but that's a matter of personal taste.

I'm not saying show blind admiration because the cool kids are upmodding, I'm saying be respectful... especially when the OP is as badass as the OP in question!
You're confusing the "secret" Walt is referring to. He's not talking about intellectual property. He's talking about the so called "secret to success".
I don't have any hard data, but I'd estimate (as a heavy user) that at least half the stories with comments have at least one that has been downvoted below 1... but piling on someone is rare, just because it's rare that someone says something that needs to be piled on.

As for your assertion that not disclosing the karma threshold for downvoting is 'bizarre', I'd argue it's useful not to provide an exact number. Enough video games have 'achievements' listed out for people to obtain... I'd rather have people participate honestly than just to gain more 'abilities'.
Hap is a middle English word meaning luck or fate. Things happen, mishaps occur. Perhaps.

Hapless means being in a situation with no logical way out, such as being stuck in quicksand, or being good at Ruby on Rails.
This has been discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=506064
Recent PG quotes:

1. So probably the limiting factor on the number of startups is the the pool of potential founders.

2. ...and they think "anyone could have done it." But that isn't true; they are not ordinary people.

3. Angels are the limiting reagent in startup formation.

#1 & #2 don't necessarily contradict #3. But it's interesting.

I like to think relentlessly resourceful/animal/not dead founders are limiting reagent.
Just yesterday I felt the same confusion. I'm working on a JavaScript web application that communicates with a Common Lisp backend using S-expressions one way and JSON the other way (for good enough reasons).

I devised a neat scheme with nested alists and wrote a poorly-specified, bug-ridden implementation of half of Common Lisp in JavaScript to make sense of it all. Then I got really confused for a couple of weeks until I finally figured out why it was so hard to get right.

JavaScript doesn't have a cons or pair type. There's just no way to get cdr and cons to work sanely without being able to juggle Arrays' individual conses. Adding a class for such a fundamental unit and implementing my own linked lists with that would bog everything down just a bit too much. So the house of cards collapsed.

In hindsight it's obvious, but I spent a lot of time wondering why the whole thing was so confusing.
Overall, I am glad I quit my job. Other than the fact that I am broke, I learned and accomplished a lot and ready to take Yonkly to the next level.

Personally, I think this is awesome, but it also should serve as a warning to those that are afraid of financial troubles. Most people who go this route truly do have to risk it all, so if you arent ready for that you should find a way to transition. For me -- living on the cheap while doing your own thing is great, and the only way to really motivate.
just for the record: there are lots of brilliant articles in dijkstra's EWDs. i am particularly fond of trip reports (almost always funny), programming language comments (e.g. EWD498, or EWD898: "Stop BASIC before it stops you") and insights to the commercial field of computer science (EWD 898: "I have fond memories of a project of the early 70's that postulated that we did not need programs at all! All we needed was intelligence amplification. If they have been able to design something that could amplify at all, they have probably discovered it would amplify stupidity as well; in any case I have not heard from it since.")
I think this is a case where the meaning of 'hapless' has drifted towards 'helpless' because of the similarity of sound. Paronyms are becoming synonyms.
To me, the insulting nature of your comment stemmed not from the economic status of Nigeria as a poor country (or the skin color of its residents) but the fact that you were jokingly implying the OP was involved in something illegal.

A joke about a Russian entrepreneur selling vodka, for example, would not be insulting, just trite. Which, quality of content wise, is equally bad.
It seems to be available for free online as well:
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Forgive me, but I still dont get why its a bad thing.

From your comment, it sounds more like you believe the 'accredited investor' rules are bad. These are pretty readily bypassable if you know how, but how does that relate to the quantity of microlending -- becuase potentially only a few can participate? I'm not trying to be argumentative, just understand your point of view. I see no downsides.
> So to me, this seems to be an opportunity of a lifetime, to short the dollar with gold, silver, Singapore Dollars, etc. Am I crazy?

Shorting the dollar only works if you can find something that will hold its value better.

It's not enough that the US system have problems, you can't make money unless you shift to a system will less problems.

I note that the Euro economies are taking an even larger hit. So much for their "superior regulation"....
I do place some culpability on the tobacco industry. That in no way obviates your personal responsibility for your choices. But I do think that promoting a product that you know will result in addiction and ill health for many people is morally negative.

So, I place some responsibility for both you and the tobacco industry for your addiction. In the end, you bear more responsibility (and bear all of the consequences). But that does not make the tobacco industry morally neutral or good, in my opinion.
> Things that are actually more efficient don't require subsidies....

This rings true, but I'm not sure.

Isn't the truth the weaker statement that new ventures which can't clearly demonstrate, in advance, that their balance of return+risk is likely to be better than investment in their competitors are unlikely to be funded?

And with larger ventures, which require significant investment in infrastructure, this calculation is skewed against new players (and new approaches - where rail counts as a 'new approach' for these purposes)?

Subsidy can tip the balance by reducing the initial risk, effectively lowering barriers to entry and thus encouraging more competition?

[Your other comments about viability are presumably dependent on passenger volumes/density etc. e.g. Local light rail works well in some cities. It may well be that all intercity services would come under your characterisation tho.]
The Sheer Size of IPV6