skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Blackberry Co-Founders Announce $100M Waterloo VC Fund in Quantum Computing
You are right I suppose - perhaps then my analogy would be better suited to describing RSS as a niche technology. The issue is that niche technologies work in conjunction with a paid business model. Google's core business model is that of mass market and driving eyeballs to ads. Reader did not fit within the confines of their model any more.
> You typically need to have attended a good university to get a good job and to get into a good university you need to have graduated from a good secondary school

My parents were in the military so I floated all over as a kid, even through high school.

After high school I managed to get merit scholarships, but only enough to fully cover an in-state school 99% of you have never heard of, the very illustrious University of North Florida.

Despite all of that I've done just fine for myself since by taking advantage of opportunities that have been available to me. It depends on career field, but people are increasingly aware that graduating from a good school is not a predictor of success and that graduating from a "bad" school is not a predictor of failure.

I agree that education in the U.S. is broken in general, but I disagree on the emphasis you place on which University one attends.

P.S. In my travels as a child I've never been in a school system that wasn't already at a county level, so I'm not sure how helpful that suggestion would be. The counties are apparently still earmarking money from wealthy communities back to the schools that service those communities.
I'd even argue that just in time streaming with minimal buffering is its own form of copy protection - it just gets to be too slow to make it worth the while to copy en masse.
Good point, my misread, sorry.
You can do a sorta-like getattr in Go using reflect, though I'm not sure exactly what your use case is. Fields need to be exported (upper-case names) though:

http://play.golang.org/p/XPgHkKCz_D

But you're absolutely right, you trade in some easy expressiveness and lack of boilerplate for better performance and easy concurrency.

But Go is much better about the boilerplate required than most other static/compiled languages, IMO.
Just value the vote in some proportional manor based on its location on the page.

For example: voting for the top comment only adds 0.1 to the comment_score but voting for the bottom comment adds 2.0 to its comment_score, etc.
So are people less likely to be promoted when they work from home? Or are people who are already less likely to be promoted, more likely to work from home?
An easier solution would be to limit voting on a comment to, say, 2 hours after it was posted. However, is this really that big of a problem?

Often I find myself reading from the bottom up, so I'm more likely to promote overlooked comments. The comments on top don't need my vote, so I seldom give it to them. As long as I'm not the only person doing this, everything should be fine.
Amazon product reviews solves this problem. There's the regular feed of recent reviews in one column, and right next to it is a list of the top reviews and featured reviews.
But this would still result in the topmost comments getting most upvotes — all topmost comments except for number 1?

Now I'm oversimplifying, but the effect would be that comment 1 and 2 swapped place over and over again. Or the first N + 1 comments, if you restrict voting on the first N comments. (And people might be confused, perhaps annoyed, when they cannot vote on the first N comments?)

This would not help promoting [a really good but forgotten comment] that is located far away at position 10 or 20.
The quick, easy, free way to send mail-merged email from a Mac
Agreed, the RSS feed can be really hard to find on many sites.

There are lots of decent external apps, but I'd guess that most of today's web audience prefers consuming in the (already familiar) browser. Seems the situation might be a golden opportunity for someone who's got the chops to take advantage.
I can provide evidence that this is a horrible idea.

Try typing a phone number into google.

Go ahead, try it.

Google has improved in some regards. I recall having to look through 3-4 pages to find a decent result in some queries a few years ago. They're usually on the first or second page now, but there are still these worthless results that end up in the 1-3 spot. That's enough evidence for me that they need expert intervention, not algorithmic guessing.
Sure but the city of Chicago isn't very expensive. It's cheaper than the suburbs of say DC or NYC or SF by a good margin. $70k is a very good salary in the city. You can get a nice 2BR apartment in Lincoln Park (one of the more expensive areas) for only $1,600 per month. My studio Westchester costs almost that much!

Chicago teachers start around $51k with a bachelors. You can live better with that salary in Chicago than many Googlers earning $100k trying to live in SF...
Oh good question.
Agree, but your re-wording the notion of scarcity. you actually can control things that there is limited/tepid demand for. but this is confusing rent-seeking with rent-extracting. eg. in this example: it can be equally true AP is a failed rent extractor, but (is still) an active rent seeker. There is no contradiction.
There's a distinction between A parent and all parents.

Disproportionately more parents in low income areas (where kids have worse prospects already) will have very poor education themselves (possibly struggling with basic reading skills) and also possibly additional problems with drug/alcohol abuse etc. Not the sort of people who will be skilled at choosing curriculum and enforcing study.
I like this notion of the desktop metaphor being extended to bookmarks. Actually I was quite disappointed to see that Google missed this trick with their new Chromebooks, preferring to stuff app links into a bar at the bottom of their desktop. Your approach makes a lot more sense.

Quick bug report, there is a display issue when one's browser window (or screen) isn't wide enough, it chops off whatever is meant to be at the right hand side at the top: http://i.imgur.com/GfNtJcv.png
Thanks. 30 is a magic number.
massive distortion of otherwise well-defined words

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

You may want to re-check your work.
The boxes that determined me reading them were turning blue much faster than I got to them.

It really didn't consider me thinking about a topic, more just if I was reading them all quickly, what I might get to.

One thing that might be an interesting add is where I am clicking my mouse. Especially on high text ratio websites, I click where I am reading to help guide my eyes. Do others do that? That could help the when read algo.
Agree more or less, except for the last part. I don't see how convergence is necessary or even desirable.
in uk, yes... consider recent case of ex politician being wrongly accused of being paedophile by influential twitter users... they are now getting sued. even those that merely retweeted... there is no defensce to claim it was public knowledge already. it was untrue and damaging
Yes. The math is much more subtle than people realize. Bayesian (meaning conditional) probability is required for any solution to be passable. The problem that needs to be solved is given the number of upvotes, downvotes, and views, what is the probability that it is a comment that the next random reader would want to upvote it, and then sort on that probability. There are well established formulas for this kind of thing.

The one you link considers the upvotes and downvotes as the sample population then constructs the probability that you will upvote it and ranks on that. This allows late posts to take over early posts if they have a better ratio, even if they have significantly less votes, but only if it is "enough" better to make up for its lack of confidence.

This fails to address a few things here:

* It completely ignores people that read the post but didn't vote. There really is no way to get a perfect count of this no matter how much scroll logging, but you could approximate it and then include it in the calculation.

* On HN many people can't downvote.

* As others have pointed HN doesn't necessarily start with a base assumption of all commenters being equal, nor should they.
Why do you say branches are expensive?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2041/how-do-i-create-a-br...
Well no, because I didn't want to install `sl`.

But it looks like you're right. I just tried `while true; do ( echo hi; sleep 1; echo bye; ); done` and ^Z does stop the cycle.
How internet is being used to track, torture and kill gays
I agree with this. The algorithm doesn't need to be exactly correct, always. It only needs to work well on the whole, given data on many visitors.
I always assumed that the best solution was the votes / age one, at least as a starting point.

Adding average karma is certainly an interesting system as somebody else mentioned.
btw - I was one of the key engineering members on the team that built Eidogen when it was a startup. Very expensive!
How Noam Chomsky is discussed
Glad to hear this, I use ipython on a daily basis, and chatted with him at euroscipy a while back, he is a very nice guy! I think he comments on here every now and then, too, so in case you read this: Thanks and congratulations!
Funniest footnote I've ever read in a paper:

"8. At the request of an anonymous referee, we perform a check on our nominal
masculinity measure by examining the score for Bacon Magazine’s “Top 10 Stripper
Names.” In theory, female exotic dancers choose hyper-feminized stage names. Only two
of those names, Candy and Porsche, had a nominal masculinity of 0. Three other names
had nominal masculinity names below the mean female voter. Two other names on the
list actually scored quite high in nominal masculinity; Angel had a nominal masculinity
of 0.15 (due to its popularity among Spanish speakers as a boy’s name) and Houston had
a nominal masculinity of 0.98. These ﬁndings suggest the potential for further research,
which is beyond the scope of this paper."
I have actually done quite some research into HN's and Reddit's algorithms (i.e. http://amix.dk/blog/post/19574 and http://amix.dk/blog/post/19588 ) and I would say that using The Wilson score confidence interval would improve HN's comment sections a lot.

The real meat is here:
http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating....

Even if it looks hairy it's fairly simple to implement in e.g. Python (from Reddit's code, rewritten from PyRex):
https://gist.github.com/amix/5230165

Maybe pg could try this out for a few days and we could see what the results are!
Saving money and reducing consumption hurts the economy in the short term, but in the long term it encourages capital investment, lending, and other behavior that creates sustainable jobs and more trade. Whether or not an increase in sales tax will have those effects on Americans has yet to be seen.
Apple Buys 'Indoor GPS' startup for 20M
Interesting idea, but I find that spatial systems are problematic for people like myself who end up falling behind on their organizing.

Personally, I use a tagging model because it's easy and quick enough to catch back up.
If I make a mistake in the address it will not let me delete or edit the address. I also get logged into other users bookmarks.
Instead of ranking by net points, or points over time, the comments could be ranked by points per view. This essentially gives a close approximation to "What percentage of people who viewed this comment found it worthwhile?"
Programmer == Super_Hero
I believe this to be a category error. The Newton is not a technology with a format that died with it. If it was no longer possible to press the buttons or use the screen on a Newton, or that you could only create lists of things that existed in the 90s, the comparison would be more apt.
Best Business Card – Kevin Mitnick
If you're on a Mac with homebrew, "brew install sl" will get you there!
Probably a bit of each.
I don't think it's the same at all. I don't think it requires a history of meat-eating in order to determine whether or not something tastes good to you or not. I tried steak, chicken, and fish. I don't think that most people would call meat "an acquired taste"?

My personal theory is that vegans put in way more effort to make their food taste good than non-vegans, and we eat an extremely wide variety of foods, so eating things like "steak" or "chicken" is generally a very boring flavor experience. I had a bite of "good steak" and thought...this is alright, but I could make better-tasting seitan!
Maybe I'm just stupid, but I feel like scoring by "attention" would subject comments to the same top-sticking, accelerating feedback loop. No?
Thank you for your feedback. Sorry for the inconvenience. I will address that quickly.
Thank you. Yeah like I said it is by no means a solution to the security problem in the current authentication system. Though it is great that people are thinking of alternatives.
So the problem is that sorting by upvotes alone creates a list of comments where the first comments to the pack get the most reads, and therefore the most upvotes, such that the first comment will have 200+ upvotes if it is posted first, but may never even see the light of day if it's added later, once a majority of the votes have already been cast.

The solution is to sort instead by (upvotes/total views). That way, the comment at the top that 1000 people have viewed and 500 people have upvoted falls back behind one that 50 have viewed and that 40 have upvoted, a comment that typically would go unseen by the masses, but which is signficantly more likely to be upvoted (or enjoyed) by any given person.
I've attempted to stay away from Google products mainly because the customer service or support of their products is horrendous.

That being said, I wish they would either better evaluate the popularity of their products and monetize them, or simply not allow them out into the wild for people to use and then kill it a year later regardless of adoption.
"How would my phone know what I'd read on my computer if I'd already left the house?"

Your phone could just contact your home computer via IP address (or maybe domain name, dynamic or otherwise) your home computer has. Your home computer would, of course, need to be on at the time your phone tries to connect to it (and vice versa).

Another option is to use an intermediary server under your control, like perhaps a VPS host that you'd run some syncing software on, and have both the phone and your home computer sync to that. That way, only the VPS and the machine/phone you're syncing from would need to be on at a time (ie. both your phone and home computer wouldn't need to be on at the same time, if that was a problem for you).
I'm having a hard time coming up with a beautiful intuitive layout with 2 columns — I think most blogs would look somewhat odd if the comment field was split in 2 columns?

And if you don't use columns, but show the most recent comment in a box above other comments? Then a variant of the original problem appears? — The most recent comment is visible at the top of the comment section (in the most-recent-comments box) and gets most upvotes / attention. (If you cannot upvote it, people will feel annoyed?)

Also, showing the most recent comments first, rather than genuinely-interesting-comments, somewhat wastes people's time?

Anyway I think it's a good idea (although hard to implement?) and I've thought about something similar a bit too.
I see. Very valuable feedback, thanks ;)
Interestingly, at least how I have zsh configured and don't have bash configured, the behavior of `fg` after suspending these is different.

With zsh when I resume the execution it continues looping. However with bash it resumes for only one more iteration.
You work with people or How I stopped the flame war and learned to play nicely
Savings would be a good thing, but I don't think the banks care to pretend they want to encourage savings any more ... au contraire. The 5% interest passbook savings rate - which the Depression/lWW2 generation enjoyed - "encouraged" savings ... until it got stripped away after the S&L bailout and was never replaced.

So the "good thing" would have to come from Congress. Good luck with that.
Quantum Valley Investments
http://quantumvalleyinvestments.com/
> "I tried steak, chicken, and fish"

That does not seem much better. You may as well say "I don't like alcohol, I tried 'good beer', wine, and liquor".

There are particular animals that I like or do not like (salmon for instance I have never been a fan of with any preparation I have tried) and various preparations/cuts that I do not like (lamb chops, most preparations of steak besides rare (preferably Pittsburgh rare, which is sadly difficult to find or prepare yourself at home) and most baked/broiled preparations of poultry). These classifications are again only scratching the surface of course, basically just breaking the question down to "ale or lager? white wine or red? Dark liquor, or clear?"

Regardless if it isn't your thing, then knock yourself out, but you should be sure that you don't fall into the trap of being confused why others don't share your personal preferences. (Or worse, trying to suggest that people who don't share your personal preferences are deluding themselves; lying to themselves about their own tastes.) I don't find myself annoyed by veganism/vegetariansim until I really get one of those vibes coming across.
People spent lots of time at Orkut pages, not just using a protocol through other apps. There is advertising in there.
And social networking is a business goal for them.
It's probably rude, but I think that the fact about the decreased morale is somewhat hilarious. Just picture the situation where you have a whole bunch of assembly line workers being ousted by pigeons. What would it feel like to know that a bird is better at your job than you? It's just absurd.
These are pretty bold claims given that the last cuts to capital gains offered little to no economic growth and hurt government revenues as well as contributing to the recent rise in income inequality in the US. Have a look at the published research on the topic.
It doesn't, by the time I log in. It's a freshly installed server, too...
So if the US were colder we wouldn't have education problems. Interesting theory.
Ground Breaking Ideas Sought to Improve the Lives of Millions
This is the sort of algorithm that really beats on CPython's weaknesses. Strings are immutable, so you're sitting there and just creating little tiny string object after little tiny string object, themselves made out of characters that are fairly heavyweight. You could hope that PyPy or something could work out how to optimize it, but I'm not sure PyPy would optimize around the constant strings.

Meanwhile, since Go has true arrays, and since you can probably just assume we're in English only and let byte[] substitute for real unicode, you can write very nearly what you'd write in C, albeit more safely, and not be creating string objects by the thousands, and it wouldn't be particularly unnatural Go code. A 12x differential is very plausible. I'd believe you could even go higher.

This is not to say that Go is awesome or that (C)Python is a bad language in general. I like (C)Python. But it does have some bad cases in it if you need lots of performance, fiddly little string algorithms and lots of numeric computation being two of the big ones. (By which I mean numeric computation in pure CPython, not with Numeric Python or PyPy.) In both cases the sheer rate of object creation and destruction work dwarfs the real work being done.
The only thing I've heard about UNF is that U Never Finish, because the registration system was completely fubar'd. IIRC, there was a story about a CS student that wrote a bit of software to try and work around the registration system, but it was shut down by the administration.
I'm not a professional economist but it seems to me that consumption is what is fundamental to market growth, and that capital is merely what you must have to scale up to maximize your ability to supply the products and services demanded by the consumers.

You can partition by B2B, B2C, B2G, whatever, but at some point it has to stop being a pyramid scheme, and that point is with the consumer who are generally able and willing to consume more if taxed less.
Not only that, but it takes <1s to type in feedly.com, and lo and behold, a competitor. Not only that, but the site reveals an android app you can download. Any decent monopolist would have never allowed that.

Krugman should really do some research on what monopolists do, starting off with Standard Oil. The internet is a highly competitive environment.
Ask HN: Could we decentralize RSS using email?
Google Reader is dead, and new and old readers owned by companies are popping up all over. What we'd all like is something simple and free, but the processing needs of a centralized service require something commercially-backed.

I've thought a bit on how we can avoid another Reader situation and still keep things free and open, and I had an idea: email.

Storage

Yes, you'd still need a service still to poll your list of feeds (Yahoo Pipes, Zapier, or custom servers could work). These services would then send you a specifically formatted email for each new post.

The title could be the subject, the post as the message. Perhaps the Blog, date and post link would be the first line. Extra information could be set in "X-" headers or in a signature. We'd need a standardized method for formatting these emails so that RSS readers could plug and play.

Finally you'd need to set up some filtering to avoid spamming yourself, or use a separate email address altogether.

Reading

Ok so maybe that would decentralize the storage of the posts. And you'd get some niceties like searching built in with your email provider. At first I assumed a read email would equal a read feed, which could work. But this would require readers to be able to access your email to mark them read.

Another thought would be for the RSS readers to support a forwarding address. Forward your feed emails to them, and they display it to you. To mark them read (without needing your email password) could they just email you back something?

Thoughts?
That's hilariously evil
Yeah I would have expected `fg` to continue the loop, but it doesn't. If I put `echo $?` after the subshell in that loop, it doesn't even print when I run `fg`. It's like bash just throws away the loop entirely when I suspend the subshell.
Now if only Outlook Web App used this style of notifications instead of an in-page popup, it would finally be simple to ditch Outlook in companies that still use Exchange.
Verbling (YC S11) announces Spanish classes on Spanish TV
The would work exactly how they work with the Linux kernel, for which git was created.