skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And yet we trust these very same people with upvotes?

I agree the potential for damage is much higher with downvotes, but there's an asymmetry there.

The trick is to make downvotes cost a little bit of karma, IMO. And while I'm on the topic, upvotes shouldn't be as free as they are, either.
As I understanding, flagging brings articles to the attention of the secret cabal of editors (no one knows who they are, beyond the fact that pg is likely one of them). The more an article is flagged, I presume, the more it stands out to their attention. They then make a manual decision whether to kill the article - and can even bring it back if they change their mind (I've seen that happen a few times).

So flagging in and of itself does not trigger any automatic removal of the article. There has to be a human action to remove the offending article.
See my response to the first PG comment, along with related comments below. Downvotes do exist (mea culpa), but are so nerfed as to be effectively useless -- that's part of the reason I never saw them.

And they don't exist for article submissions, which is problematic for all the same reasons I listed in the blog entry.
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You're free to flag it, and downvote everyone who commented on it :/

I agree with you, stories about drugs aren't what I come to HN for.
Clothes are an necessary commodity. More importantly, it is difficult to verify where clothes came from or if their means of production are illicit. With (illegal) drugs, one can be almost certain that they were produced through illegal means. Thus forming a comparison between clothes and say... cocaine or heroine is fallacious.
1) As soon as users get over the karma threshold, downarrows appear right under the uparrows.

2) That's largely because few users make comments lame enough to be downvoted. But when they do, they get downvoted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507604
I don't know about most of them, but since Twitter is gaining more people with each passing day, a lot of website marketplaces have buyers interested in URL shortening services. Maybe they want to put ads on it, maybe Affiliate stuff, but selling your service is definitely a money maker.
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There is not, as some people seem to think, any economic upper bound on this number.

I know that this is a side issue, but it keeps cropping up as a side issue in pg's essays. I would be interested in a more thorough discussion of this point.
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Market research.
Not prepared to post it here (for obvious reasons)

I will email it though (you will need to register on a forum and make a few posts I think :) been a while since I joined) if you wish. Which email goes direct to you?
Interesting article. Thanks.

What I find fascinating is that the Dollar is not being shorted. At this point, everyone knows the US is no longer AAA, and interest rates are effectively zero. In a normal setting, the dollar would drop like a stone. It hasn't yet for the reason the article mentions, but it's pretty clear it will -- and soon. 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?
convex optimization covers a lot of different problem types. in general, you are trying to minimize (or maximize) some function (the objective function) over a set of variables subject to a set of constraints on those variables. 'convex optimization' deals specifically with optimization problems where the objective function is... convex. this essentially means you can efficiently find the global minimum (or maximum if the function is concave)

ok, so a simple example: lets say you're on a hacker's budget and you want to maximize your caloric intake given your limited funds. This is your objective function. BUT, if you're like me, you can't live on ramen and mountain dew... i have a basic set of nutritional requirements. These are your constraints. For example, sodium has to be less than A and protein greater than B and so on and so forth. So you are essentially optimizing over ALL possible diets.

My guess is you'd end getting back: kale, potatoes and beans. Now that's a real hacker's diet!
I think that's right. Since the early days there have been lots of people willing to say (from an academic bent) how python is basically just scheme, and (from a practical bent) how the likes of python+libraries is good enough to make scheme unnecessary. Programming in scheme feels very different to scheme, largely because of the neutered lambda.
can you do the same thing as is.gd ? if you apply a "-" to the end of a url, it previews it.
Although I can't find the article anymore (I'm almost certain that it was posted here) I remember reading that, as far as small handheld cameras are concerned, there appears to be a limit to the number of megapixels they can have without suffering from "digital noise". It appears to be around 6 MP. Above that "ideal" area noise reducing algorithms have to be employed to keep the quality relatively stable.
This phenomenon is caused due to the small area of the lens (sorry if this term is not correct for digital cameras) and the electronic properties of the light sensitive board.

The above applies only to small handheld cameras, larger/more expensive models, ie DSLR's, do not suffer from this.
I am awfully new to this game, but I do recall seeing a url shortener which enabled additional tracking to the initiating user. For example, showing the time distribution of the clicks along with originating sites. I may be stretching this a bit far, but just for the heck of it, if I wanted to figure out which social networking website had a larger pull for me in distributing information, this type of service would allow me to do that. (don't ask me why? :) )

The way I would build a business model around a URL shortener would be through those types of value add services which would draw users back to the site (ad-revenue, or potentially in-depth "pay" analytics), in addition to the already-mentioned resultant data insights.
So, that is a pretty big statement. Why do you expect this? You think there are people who are not using drugs because it is illegal? Or because they can't afford it?

People who don't use, don't use because they know it's unhealthy. Legalization is not going to change that.
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Bear in mind some countries still use those 'obsolete' definitions ;) Maybe it's a US/UK thing.
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"If a customer wants more than 12 megapixels, he should go to the full-frame models,"

I think (hope) that the next arms race will be sensor size. I drool over a $35 k/50 megapixel/36x48 mm sensor Hasselblad -- http://www.hasselbladusa.com/products/h-system/h3dii-50.aspx

Never underestimate the ability of seemingly out-of-reach technology products to come down in price and go mainstream. Whenever I hear phrases like "for the casual user," or "most people" I think - there's a market that's ripe for disruption.
But those are one-liners like you can already do in Python.
I have seen some url-shorteners offer paid analytics packages for magazines etc., that use the service in their articles.
From the advanced guide:

27 percent of those in social class AB found this unacceptable, increasing to 35 percent of the C2s and Ds, and 45 percent of those in social class E.

I'm sure whoever wrote this was just trying to refer to the different groups in a succinct way, but to me this classification system is amusingly reminiscent of a Brave New World's.
The people you have worked with, the LE at that street level, can hardly fn read, and they don't write the laws, and they don't profit from them the way others higher up the chain do, but they do understand that it is keeping them employed.

I'm am going to stay away from this thread after this, I live in the Republic of Colombia, and I am a bit - let us say - INTIMATELY acquainted with the topic. Why? One of the multiple reasons is that my Grandfather served and retired as a Colombian Supreme Court Justice, I have had a few talks with him over shots of that sugarcane hooch they like here, and the corruption on behalf of the Colombian gov AND the Americans down here is downright astonishing.

The gov and pharma and defense contractors ARE in cahoots in America. All you have to do is look!

The only solution short of vaccination (I understand there is a cocaine vaccine in the works) OR (my favorite idea) creating a biological agent that sets off a major crop disease which eradicates most of the coca plants - the only solution is to legalize, the problem is, you do that and no more clandestine crates full of 100 dollar bills for anyone in the US, Mexico, Colombia govs.

There is actually quite a bit of literature, from credible sources (some former high ranking LE) anyone that cares to look further into the topic most certainly can.

Ok, goodbye thread, now I'm getting worked up remembering some of the greasy illiterates (and their whores) driving BMW's that I have had minor run ins with down here with, ALL BECAUSE PROHIBITION ALLOWS SUCH SUBHUMANS TO PROFIT.
How? It may need little CPU or bandwidth, but at the end of the day it's hardware, it needs to be somewhere, be powered and cooled, etc etc. The cost may be low enough to be paid by the owner personally, but it's not going to be $0.
I get this feeling every time I log into Production...
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congratulations but I would've bought at 150 in half a year. and it has nothing to do with google.
i'd like it a little more simple too. perhaps maybe title sections that expand (like "Border?").

also, maybe more visual aids for the options - like images to show the result for a particular selection. this might speed up the use of the system.
Seems like the big advantage of "no waiting in line for check-in, security, or boarding." can't last.
+1 for a colour picker
I wish that thread had progressed to a more complete conclusion - I've been developing software with Twisted Python recently (a notoriously callback-heavy framework) and that syntax would clean up an awful lot of code in our code-base. In particular, I like that it's not a knee-jerk emulation of a particular syntax-feature of another language, but a general solution that works well for Ruby-style maps, defining property getters and setters, and setting up design-by-contract semantics.

I'd happily swap that syntax for some of the other features modern Python has grown, like the "with" statement, or decorators.
It sounds like you're saying that these particular founders don't have confidence in their ability to do x and are pleasantly surprised when, after a little push, they achieve it (even if it did turn out to be harder than they thought). From achieving x, they uncover the virgin territory of y.

So: is gaining greater confidence in one's ability to achieve stuff part of becoming relentlessly resourceful?
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Whilst this is more pythonic I personally prefer Javascripts use of lambdas as more than a means of expression. More like a way of life for the language :-) And that is IMHO what makes it functionally closer to Scheme. Just looking at the way one defines lambdas in Javascript and their use throughout the language is a thing of beauty.
That's a very good point. Might be a US/UK thing. I definitely tend to use "hapless" as "unlucky"... "hapless souls" != "helpless souls".
I think the joke is that after sticking two cars together for all eternity (one with a toilet, one without), they have effectively become one car. So the original solution has been restored: every car has a toilet.
Off topic Reddit nonsense
I think this is great news for startups. With the availability of this public data there will be plenty of innovation in the consumer space. You can start thinking about a host of services, increasing accessibility of information in health, travel and other areas.
> I do recall seeing a url shortener which enabled additional tracking to the initiating user

I think you mean http://cli.gs ? :)
One of my alltime favourite quotes that I think is relevant is:

"I can never stand still. I must explore and experiment. I am never satisfied with my work. I resent the limitations of my own imagination"

- Walt Disney

Also, perhaps this one might work too, also by Walt.

"Somehow I can't believe that there are any heights that can't be scaled by a man who knows the secrets of making dreams come true. This special secret, it seems to me, can be summarized in four C's. They are curiosity, confidence, courage, and constancy, and the greatest of all is confidence. When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way."

- Walt Disney
The children's bedtime story [from a former(?) Russian satellite] version of this parable is a projector film slide series titled "The coloured pencil", from the same era. It cheekily teaches the parents on how a "cost driven market based" pencil factory had a brilliant innovator, arguing, that there is no need for graphite in the end of a pencil, since nobody can use pencils when they are shorter than a cm or so. The savings made on using less graphite was stellar, the innovator got promoted.

Seeing the success, soon the second innovation followed: what use is the wood at the end of the pencil, when there isn't any graphite inside? Less wood, more profit.

And this handling of "externalised" costs continued until the pencil became dysfunctional, unusable (Dijkstra as a programmer would notice the powerful idea of recursion).

The story ends with the reinvention of the pencil, and a huge prime for the genius.

Back to Dijkstra's version: an MBA market analyst would come up with a "research" study which concludes, that in order to improve the "user experience" of the customers on the train, at least (two) WC-s would be needed in each wagon, pocketing a hefty consulting fee for the ground breaking innovation.
"Guides" on social behavior are by definition an awkward mix of over-generalized observations and overly-specific deductions. This one is no exception:

In pubs, for example, the area around the bar counter is universally understood to be the 'public zone', where initiating conversation with a stranger is acceptable, whereas sitting at a table usually indicates a greater desire for privacy. Tables furthest from the bar counter are the most 'private' zones.

When you first meet new people, their initial impression of you will be based 55% on your appearance and body-language, 38% on your style of speaking and only 7% on what you actually say.

That isn't to say they have no value. It's helpful to be aware of the various aspects of social interaction, like how eye contact and the distance you keep affects a conversation. The danger is that the ideas are presented as definitive facts, as though all you need to do is follow their prescription to success:

When you first approach an attractive stranger, having established at least an indication of mutual interest through eye contact, try to make eye contact again at about 4ft away, before moving any closer. At 4 ft (about two small steps away), you are on the borderline between what are known as the 'social zone' (4 to 12 ft) and the 'personal zone' (18in to 4ft).

The truth is, there is no prescription. At least, not a universal one. If you need a place to start, try simply to enjoy yourself when you're out. Being social comes more naturally when you're having a good time.
they are not "effectively useless", they just useless by you, a non participant / browser of the site.
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Obviously, the opposite of hapless is hapful.
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I don't care about downvotes. HN is just a great web site with great contents so that I hardly ever feel the need to downvote something.
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Arguably it's not a multi-line anonymous function, but several statement-level 'named variables' rather than block-level 'named variables'. Haskell doesn't really have the concept of "blocks" to begin with as it isn't an imperative language, so it's not really a fair comparison.

The Haskell solution is very similar to how Python currently deals with this situation, similar to your Perl and Lisp examples, by allowing named local functions within a block (rather than at statement-level), and also allowing a syntax for single-line anonymous functions (via "lambda").

I did actually ponder a Haskell-like syntax for Python, but decided it's less than ideal. Allowing assignment after a statement makes things more difficult to read, especially in imperative languages.
I second your take on addiction of drugs.
Interesting, I'm also from Nigeria. What's the name of your Startup?
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It costs a bit more than $0. So many people use the service, every long url on twitter is automatically shortened with the service. I think they have at least a single dedicated server, if not more.

So definitely not $0, perhaps a couple hundred bucks which is made up with google ads.
well an evil strategy I wouldn't rule out is to make sure that you have loads of links in your system - you now own these links- then after a while insert an advertised page into the flow after a user clicks on one of the links.

wouldn't be surprised if some of the shorteners start doing this at some point.
What if more people used drugs and the related crime and accidents went up?
Correct, bit.ly knows all the most popular links on Twitter in real time. This is worth a ton, or at least it could be.
From the article:

"online advertising share of all advertising could reach as high as 23% if a scalable advertising solution for social media could be found."

Adpinion.com (y-combinator startup) may have an answer for that. Among other things, they're trying to optimize ad-campaigns based on in-ad user feedback.

Great idea, but is it possible that some "effective" ads might result in a knee-jerk reaction to click a down-mod button?

E.G. the picture of the frightened pointing guy on a certain colorful candy homepage:)
Considering I hadn't seen a single negative voted comment in a few dozen visits to HN, I'd say they're at the very least underutilized. Although I did notice that a few people went out of their way to vote down stuff in this thread. Ironic? :)
I think more specific advice and tips would be useful.
The greatest selling point or silver bullet in WII is the new user interface. Once people have experienced that, you will only experience a marginal increment in your enjoyment, no matter what developments they do.
I totally respect the Economist, but are they really saying something about the pointlessness of the drug war that I haven't heard a thousand times over already? Furthermore does it belong on a site devoted primarily to programming topics?

What next, some really intelligent analysis of Ron Paul?
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"Unfortunately there's no antonym of hapless"

Or at least there's no common antonym of hapless. If we're counting wank words, my dictionary memorizing friend informs me that agented is the antonym of hapless. It means a forceful person who causes change; literally a James Bond-like agent.
Like someone else said, the load is low enough to run on dirt cheap shared hosting like Dreamhost. So even if the cost isn't zero, it's less than what most people spend on snacks.
It's a big deal. The holy grail here is "nice general-purpose closure syntax". So the first try is the obvious:

function_name(
def(e):
print e
def(f):
print f
)

Now, this isn't inherently terrible and quite easy to read (although could very easily end up in debugging hell), but the problems begin because really you'd also have to allow this:

function_name(def(e):
print "e", def(e):
print "f"
)

Which is _really_ ugly, especially as you can't indent it more as it's against Python's (sane) indentation semantics. So this is ruled out.

Then you end up with Haskell-style:

function_blah(e, f) where:
e = lambda e: print e
f = lambda f: print f

This has multiple disadvantages for few advantages. Things go from "top-down" to magically changing form to what's underneath changes the statement above. This is suicide in an imperative language, least of all Python. And jumping from lambda to lambda isn't particularly readable either. And you still have to name your lambdas. The current syntax is better.

There is the alternative

within blah def e(e):
print e
blah(e)

but this creates messiness where you define a function for blah before blah is defined, which is messy. And you still need a name. And you could accidentally whack out other variable names.

So Python's blocks prevent you doing nice multi-line anonymous functions.

So your only choice is to create a special-case solution, as suggested in this post. So you end up thinking:

using blah do (e):
print "e"

Which only passes one. Now, this is less versatile than the other solutions, only allows you to pass a single parameter or anonymous function in, and is less readable - it's simply not /obvious/ what this does unless you know beforehand.
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To who? How do you package that up and sell it to someone?
There are exceptions to every rule, and Clifford Stoll is definitely an exception: his power and madness make it work.

You can see Jessica Livingston pacing back and forth here: http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2008/12/jessica-livingsto... It is annoying, and she seems nervous.

Note: This is not meant to pick on JL, very few people get it right, and I could just as easily have picked another example.
Where did you get your figures from?

According to StatCounter Global Stats, for Germany in February 2009 Firefox usage was at 58% and IE usage was at 34%.

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Nice! I am a web designer and even though I'll stick to using Fireworks (I'd rather create the entire layout than use a collection of dedicated tools) I can still appreciate that this attempts to solve a pain-in-the-ass issue for programmers.

One small bit of advice - I'd pick a default welcome button that wasn't quite as jarring as the orange one. Something with a bit more of a muted color scheme that goes with the rest of the blue layout you have going on, like:

http://tr.im/examplebluebutton

Otherwise, very well done.
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I just use the front page, but using the new page probably makes more sense. I'll undoubtably end up at the front page anyway.