skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your solicitation for feedback says:

"Most customer support communities on Get Satisfaction have some level of employee involvement (about three-quarters), but the rest are added and cultivated by customers."

OK. Just one point. This is kind of a meta-comment about how you are doing this.

The above, quoted from your solicitation for feedback, ambiguously mentions "employees" without clarifying whose employees they are. Employees of Get Satisfaction? Or employees of the company in question? I think I know the answer, but really it is ambiguous. To someone who hasn't read more about the back story, it is VERY ambiguous.

Ambiguity in the writing on your site seems to be a recurring theme. In fact, if I understand the back story correctly, a problem with ambiguity is one of the main reasons you did this new page design. Maybe you should try shuffling the writing team around a bit; they seem to be having trouble stepping outside of themselves to see the prose as others would see it.
On the other hand, thinking through the details is not a hallmark of many current laws which already cost lives (e.g., war on drugs, overly conservative regulation of new drugs by FDA). So the hurdle to be met by ironing out the details of changes in laws shouldn't be whether they will cost lives; it should be whether they will cost fewer lives than what currently exists.
It says "They do not have the deployment, scaling, and performance headaches that Ruby On Rails has". From my experience, it's true, even with Passenger (though much better than before).
That's why the legislative process is amendable. You don't have to get it all right the first time through, just mostly right.

A lot more complex legislation than legalization of marijuana passes on a regular basis.

I'm glad more people don't think like Yegge, they'd be too paralyzed by fear to ever get anything done.
FUD, this is just a financial analyst guessing. He doesn't know how much bandwidth YouTube actually uses, how much they pay for that bandwidth or even how much revenue YouTube takes in. All of the variables in his equation are made up.
These tables are mostly worthless. Just like a bunch of engineers/scientist to take humans and make them as close to numbers as possible.
Could you help me out here - which is easier to get started developing with - MPI or hadoop?

Its not just about cheap processor time, its about ease of use. Hadoop is a platform that does much much of the hard part for you, giving you an enormous head start to solving problems in parallel because all you have to really think about is the algorithm you're executing. Thinking in mapreduce is still hard, but its a whole lot easier than thinking in MPI, and it takes a lot less time to get real computations happening on your data.

The cloud computing time could be MORE expensive than supercomputer time. That doesn't matter. The point is that this stuff is now accessible to a much wider group than MPI was, and they're learning the skills to crunch gobs of data.

Its pretty clear that you're a 'smart kid' and that both MPI and mapreduce are pretty easy for you. Thats not the case for most people. You're talking about hard scientists. I'm talking about normal developers.
All businesses should primary focus on making money. That's what businesses do.

If you'd like to draw attention to Microsoft's illegal behavavior in the market, you have to explicitly state it, a dollar sign won't be enough for most people, who think you might simply be poor and envious.
Well you could start by undoing the existing laws. Say, just repeal the federal laws and defer to the states. See how that goes for a while.

Rather than creating some grand new plan, how about just undoing the broken old thing for a start.
I like the fact that the authors regard pulling together chunks of CPAN with custom code to be a middle ground between "buy or build".

While installing N distributions from CPAN for large values of N can be annoying, I think the way CPAN hangs together tends to lead to more granular releases of software which enables this sort of thing to a greater extent than I've seen on other projects - I'll happily reach for a CPAN module rather than writing a dozen lines of code.
The fact is, both ROR and PHP are good in different scenarios. CodeIgniter allowed me to build HnDir.com in <8 hours, and I'm using ROR on my current project. But this constant bashing of the other language treating it like PC vs Mac is just absurd.
Without taking sides, why is this being voted down?

Your opinion that this snippet reads like a natural language and is therefore useful is well taken.
His situation is unique: "Never Gonna Give You Up" was part of an internet phenomenon. I'm not commenting on the general case - which the studies apply to. I'm commenting on his case.

You are on the defensive to the point of it getting in the way of communication. I don't think he's a liar, and I don't want to invade his privacy. I do think he's reacting emotionally and not rationally. I would like to test this assumption, and iTunes sales are the simplest method I can think. My assumption is that more people would purchase the song on a whim online because of the internet meme than buying a CD in the store. This is why I'm not curious about CD sales.
Is Twitter for Serious Marketers?
If large corporations weren't forcing Microsoft products on their users, MS's market share would shrink relatively quickly, IMO.

It's not entirely dissimilar to a family that refuses to take a loved one off life support now that I think about.
Some other work that is a bit more generative is 'No Copy Paste'. You can see some of their videos are at http://ncp.kibu.hu/
It's exciting, but it sortof scares me to think that this is going to be the focus, rather than dealing with the underlying problem of self-control, or perhaps certain ingredients in our food supply.

(I know there is a good argument for genetics, but that can't account for the average weight gain in the US over the last couple decades).
To me, "dead" means something like "checkmated". "X is dead" means that X is in a situation that it can't get out of. Can you please point me to your definition?
> I'm not a native English speaker but the wording of "Ask a Question of Cyberdyne Customers" seems odd. Did they mean "to Cyberdyne Customers"?

Your phrasing might be more logical, but the phrasing that the page currently has is the phrasing that sounds best to native speakers' ears.

The simples English words sometimes have the trickiest definitions.

I recall that "be" takes multiple pages of the Oxford English Dictionary.

With regard to "of", I think that definition #8 here

http://www.yourdictionary.com/of

"concerning; about; with reference to - 'think well of me'"

is the way it's being used.
Social Applications are Social Networks
"To me too. I never understood, ten years ago, why on earth most people would prefer a web-based email client to a native desktop app but they did. And today that percentage is just increasing. Most people just don't have the same concerns you and I do."

For me it had more to do with the fact that GMail's minimalist UI ended up being more responsive than the likes of Outlook.

"Yeah, this one didn't make sense. If you're surprised when you come across a computer running the desktop OS used by more than 75% ([citation needed]) of the populace, then you clearly move in very narrow circles."

I'm fairly certain that it's still more than 75%. It's also very likely that Dell's monthly sales still exceed Apple's annual sales of computers. Apple's sales have been higher than usual, but still hasn't managed to make much of a dent in the Windows market -- and don't forget that mac users are buying Windows licences so that they can run Windows-only software also... so even though those are probably the minority of mac buyers, it does suggest that Apple's non-victory is even less complete than PG is implying. :)
TED Talk:  Bonnie Bassler: Discovering bacteria's amazing communication system
I'm maybe not getting the HN philosophy, but this kind of useless posts should better be voted down than up in my opinion. You bring nothing new to the table except your useless hate about what the author has to say.

I'm no php fan either, neither a Ruby one. I'm not that involved into language wars to be honest. To my naïve eye, this article just sounds satiric and fun. It's not meant to be serious, and, no matter what is your definition of fun, i find it hard to take that personnally.

Also, if you really want to take this article seriously, there is quite a bit of consensus around the fact that PHP has MANY shortcomings that are not present in other dynamic languages. I won't argue in lengths about that, but if you replace "Ruby" by "Python" here, the article doesn't change a lot.

So if you're really offended by this - fun - post enough to register on HN just to post a troll about it (what is to be digged up in this guys seriously, the part about cocks ? duh ..), why don't you chill up, grab a beer, and forget about computers for a moment ?
Software engineering here:

Divide the project into smaller pices. If your estimate for a piece is more than a day, it is still too big.

To make sure you know what is involved in implementing a piece by always including how to perform a function-test of the piece. This is powerful for those pie-in-the sky estimates that go "Ohh, that cant be so difficult..."

When it comes to fixing small bugs, verifying bugfixes, or other repetitive work, collect historic and use the average time, and multiply it with the number of things to do.

With this approach, I typically manage to time-estimate well enough for a 3 week sprint.

I have also began using a burn-down chart where I input number of hours worked on the project each day, so in the chart i can see how my remaining time burns down, and on top of that how many hours i did work each day. Making the remaining time bars black and the hours-spent fire-yellow, it is a really pretty "burn down" chart. If the fire is as big as the estimate decrease, im spot on with my estimates.
Someone sounds bitter on account of his favorite programming language.

Lisp is especially conducive to this sort of thing because it is (arguably) the best suited language for rapid prototyping; sure this could be done in other languages, but it wouldn't be as pretty or smooth.
the problem with most PHP frameworks (symfony, cake, yes even code igniter) is that they are much slower than Rails (by at least 4x). They don't buy you anything unless you're not willing to learn anything beyond PHP. in terms of deployment, you don't have to use capistrano; if you want you can manually deploy rails like php

another problem with PHP compared to x language is that it's too web centric; it's just not flexible enough

imho You're better off either using Rails or Django, but thats me
Your Title Is Not Your Job
In a few years I will likely be shooting .RAWs that are 50MB...

Some things are simply not meant to be done in the cloud. I think the right answer is to not fight the cloud OR the desktop appropriate applications. Developers should realize that for many markets, they may have to support both models to gain significant market share. Most companies have gained marketshare by customers what they want instead of forcing a particular model upon them...
I Like Debugging
I've also read of live coding with the language Processing and Python.

I think the limiting factor is the existence of a REPL.

What you are speaking of with the AST doesn't sound very "live", but definitely sounds interesting.
The possible similarity/dissimilarity of alien life to earth life (and hypothetical intelligent aliens to humans) keeps going back and forth. On one end, you see Hal Clement-esque ideas about critters with wild biochemistries and/or strange morphologies, on the other you see thoughts about a common biochemistry and/or convergently-evolved humanoids.

Personally, I'd prefer to see this addressed by comparing sample groups. :)
The problem is it introduces an implicit statement into your explicit statement. That makes it more difficult to focus discussion.
Self Care tips for Kidney Infections
I'm not saying you're intentionally doing this

You are and they are.

And BTW, their success probably depends on the misleading wording, at least initially. If it were done as you say from the very beginning, they would probably have much less traffic now.

The art of building a successful Web 2.0 company seems to do whatever is required always staying a hair's width away from getting sued. Threats of a lawsuit are great for publicity just as long as they don't materialize into litigation.
I think this type of thread needs flagged and removed altogether. It serves no intellectual purpose, I personally don't like reading stuff that's presented in this type of way.

*Edit: thanks for deleting this. I don't see anything wrong with pointing out the differences between ROR and PHP, but the trolling is getting old.
> Your phrasing might be more logical, but the phrasing that the page currently has is the phrasing that sounds best to native speakers' ears.

I disagree. I ask a favor OF someone. I ask a question TO someone.
This would be a great example of what "hacking" is to someone unfamiliar with the classical usage of the term.
Ask HN: Current hosted document editing/sharing systems and their direction?
I'm looking at a start-up opportunity (within my existing small company) based on connecting to existing hosted document systems such as Google Docs, Zoho Writer, Zimbra docs, buzzword.com, etc. (including photoshop.com for pictures, etc.) I guess there's also whatever Microsoft does with Office Online. (Are there other major such services I'm forgetting?)

This might sound naive, but how would one go about figuring the relative popularity of these kinds of services and their trajectories?

These kinds of systems are clearly gaining momentum, but one rarely hears about them in the day-to-day noise of the webosphere.

Do you think they're headed for (mostly) replacement of the desktop-based office suites? Or will the desktop-based suites fight back and maintain some market share long-term?

Or is classical online document editing going to fade away in the face of other collaboration methods like wikis? (I don't think so, ultimately, but it's certainly possible.)
I think you need to step back and figure out who your customer is first.

From my outside view, it seems like you are trying to be everything to two very distinct entities - organizations and their customers. It seems you are trying to insert yourselves in between this relationship, even if one party isn't interested. I think this is the failure point.

It seems in my mind that the real customer here is the organization, since they are the ones paying for the service. You act - intentionally or not - as an advocate for the customer. Everything you do seems to be aligned with goading the organization into giving you money. It is very off putting from their perspective, which in the long run will probably end up hurting you.

If you want to be a voice for consumers, be that. If you want to provide a service to organizations, do that. Don't attempt to insert yourself into an already existing relationship - regardless of how functional it is.
I strongly disagree that "businesses should primarily focus on making money." They should focus on solving problems or making great products. The money follows. There's a word for "primarily focusing on making money": greed. I don't think we want more greedy companies around...
> I think people underestimate just how puritanical America is.

I would guess that the average US public opinion and the special-interest groups that "guide" the media greatly differ. American Family Association I'm looking at you.
and it makes the author sound like a fifteen year old writing l33tsp34k.
Definitely another entertaining rant, both about the difficulty of legalizing marijuana and the dangers of equating obvious with easy.

My big problem with his rant about the difficulty of legalization is that people are suffering badly, right now, and you have to weigh that against the challenges of "the project".

There's "stop the bleeding" and "cure the disease." Sometimes, you can't wait for a full plan on the cure. In my opinion, denying cancer patients a drug reduces pain and improves appetite counts as bleeding. At some point, you have to deal with the consequences later.

Which we do - California's medical marijuana facilities have been raided by federal police, product was seized, product was returned, appeals were filed, etc...

Sure, I suppose this would have gone more smoothly if we'd denied cancer patients 10 years of relief so a profoundly inept and corrupt bureaucracy could catch up with morality.
"Photoshop through a browser? DO NOT WANT."

That sounds like "3d games in Windows?" in 1995, or any other "$perf_sucking_app in $new_environment".

The "browser" that's going to run Photoshop 2015 won't be Netscape 3. It'll have a JIT'd JS engine (so it'll be really fast), it'll have local storage (so you don't need to upload anything), it'll have efficient graphics libraries (so it can use your video card), it'll have native-feeling controls, and so on.

It's a "browser" only in that it's a continuous upgrade from our beloved Netscape, but it won't look much like Netscape at all. In terms of user experience, it'll be basically like the Photoshop you know and love, except without the adventure that is the Adobe installer.
Tell HN: "Ruby vs. PHP" is not of interest to good hackers.
Hacker News Guidelines

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Good hackers do not find PHP bashing interesting (or Ruby/MySQL/Java/Python/.NET bashing).

If you do find this sort of thing interesting, please respect the site guidelines and don't submit or upmod it. There are many other places on the web that specialize in this sort of thing.

EDIT: This isn't specifically directed at today's ironic "PHP vs. Ruby" post. That's a relatively mild instance of a more general trend.
In that article, it's hilarious because the microsoft biz dev guy misunderstands what he seeks to establish.
Bump Top - A better desktop
My Objection to Array#sum
How are iPhone apps a big story when the market is dominated by fart noise programs and games?

(Since when do Web 2.0 people give a crap about mobile gaming?)
Facebook, Yahoo, Flickr and Digg all use non-PHP solutions for the back end.

Rails can scale fine once you realize it's not magic; you take a hit from using a framework designed to make developers happy, not servers, but you can work around it — at the end of the day, Ruby isn't slow like people make it out to be.
at least we have cocks, you dickless little weasel
OK, I'll bite.

I should preface this by saying that I am looking for more information on why watching the sources of VC money is bad. So if there is a finance guy out here please let me know where my thinking is flawed.

Now treasury wants to watch the sources of certain asset classes so that, say, asset class A can't be a proxy for high risk asset class B. Now I assume, (and we all know what assuming does), this is to prevent the finance by proxy of high risk asset class B through low risk leverage via asset class A.

That seems, to me, to be imminently sensible given the education we've all received through the present crisis. Perhaps I have missed something. Any help from finance guys would be greatly appreciated.
I'm guessing it was downvoted because it was written in a snarky way.

Personally I don't understand the need for code that looks like natural language. This is probably because I grew up in the world of C/C++, and I find php to be the most relatable. When I look at Ruby I have to think about what the heck they are talking about.

Considering how popular Ruby is I have often thought of spending more time with it, but it is so slow I just can't get my head around bothering. PHP using opcode cachers(xcache) and a good webserver (lighttpd) will run very fast...

Jeremy
I hope so.

Tell HN: "Ruby vs. PHP" is not of interest to good hackers. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=554608
suggestion: please delete this crap.

the link is to lame pro-Ruby name-calling, and the comments are all lame anti-Ruby name-calling.

nothing good will come of it.
On the Net: College too expensive? Try YouTube
Yes I'm sure all 150 million of those people really wanted to listen to the whole song, and didn't, say, just close the window after 5 seconds.
I remember this :-)

http://searchyc.com/the+bipolar+lisp+programmer
+1.

this does not bring out the best in me.
underwhelming...
Being able to create something quick that's workable doesn't really indicate that you're a good programmer.

It doesn't?? Then what does? Quick and usable in the business world is practically the holy grail of programming!!!
The title of this post is pure, unadulterated linkbait. It is not surprising that people are responding with reflexive revulsion. This submission attracts an audience and then rudely spurns them.

Jokes about dead people can be funny. Inviting people to a relative's funeral and then bringing on a comedian to tease them about their formal clothes is... not funny.
You can get more than one result for this. This comes back up periodically here. Its good to be reminded of this from time to time!
so the TED video is cool. But I just installed it and it froze my comp.
How to Get 3 Character Domain Names | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
I don't know enough to say if this is a good or bad thing for the US, because I don't know enough about international commerce. These visas are basically a "I'm coming to the USA to get a big wage and send a ton of money home" visa, and I don't know if a lack of these will help the economy (by reducing the amount of $$$ going to a foreign country) or hurt it (lack of workers reduces the net income more than the worker sending money out of country).

Personally I believe this is more likely to hurt the economy. I'm sure it doesn't help that the workers send money to a country that largely doesn't invest in the US (there's minimal 'imports' into India from the US), but I'm sure the products these workers make will more than cover the money sent out of country.
"There really is a double-standard at work here. When musicians/songwriters say they're being fleeced, members of this (hacker) community pooh-pooh them, and accuse them of being dinosaurs who just don't get it."

I think the difference is that some musicians/songwriters expect their creative works to be a perpetual source of revenue. By contrast, developers usually expect a particular version of software to generate revenue for a few years at best, and even then there's the expectation that the developer should release patches throughout the lifespan of the software. Indeed, it's becoming increasingly common for software companies to open source old versions, such as Id with its Id Tech engines. When was the last time a prominent musician released their old works under a creative commons license?

I think the attitude of hackers is that "We have to continually create new things in order to make a buck, so why should some musicians expect to keep being paid for a song they wrote a generation ago?"
Make a realistic (some what conservative) estimate and triple it. Same rule goes for cost estimates. Doubling is never enough. Better to under-promise and over-deliver than the other way around.
This article probably explains very well why i like the idea of Clojure so much.

Like a lisp language with all the qualities of a lisp but avoiding the shortcomings by being able to grab finished libraries from the best of "tweezers and glue" language : Java
Call me crazy, but as an uninvolved third party it seems to me that this should fix the main problems identified and I'm impressed with Get Satisfaction for fixing it.
I think it has alot to do with the color of the boxes too, swap the "not yet participating" color with the "opted out" color and it comes across alot less threatening to me even with the same copy.