skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of thoughtful responses by Chris to reactions to his Toast CouchDB-based chat app.

His summary of why he developed Toast: “Toast is a showcase of how simple a real-time chat system can be, when you leverage CouchDB's _changes API.”
Highlight of the article for me: "This is what the web-threatened punditry often fails to recognize: Focus is a paradox—it has distraction built into it. The two are symbiotic; they’re the systole and diastole of consciousness." I recall an article describing research done, in response to driving with cellphone in use that claimed that essentially people could not multi task. My take on the topic is at http://www.ciexinc.com/blogs/daily/080601.html
Sounds nice. I especially welcome the variable mechanism for colours so that I don't have to write the hex value of today's favourite color (or its highlighted or shaded variant) everywhere I use it.

I'm not sure yet if I'm happy with the lazily evaluated variables, though. In makefiles, I tend to prefer := assignment (eager evaluation) to = assignment (lazy evaluation) when possible to avoid surprises.
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I really don't like TC, but I am against banning.
Poll: Do you think HN community is polluted?
I felt like this for some time now. Got the idea of making this poll after seeing the poll "should we ban techcrunch?". http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625255

Some times I find HN front page _going towards_ 'being like digg' which I abandoned for boring content.
I like the title of the png used as the source for Fig. 2 (mouse over to see).
I like clevercss a lot, but there are some annoying bugs in the official release. I have a patched version here: http://github.com/dziegler/clevercss/tree/master

Also, check out http://code.google.com/p/django-css/ for easy integration with Django.
"you’ve been tricked into thinking that it is important."

The power of marketing...

...and ten stories on TC's frontpage per day.
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This is a wonderful blog post.

Simple is damn important. Usually simple is also equivalent with fast.
Article isnt saying much, and pretty much misses the point of social networking in general.

there is a huge gap between your friends that you talk to every day, and long lost strangers you havent seen in 20+ years. not only that there is a difference between the amount and type of information thats exchanged online / face to face.

facebook / twitter etc enable the type of information exchange that people have been trying to do since forever, in a better way.

the idea that they will just quietly pass through when didnt some study put facebook as 90% of internet time somewhere recently? just a bit off base.
This is how GitHub is going to win BitBucket. Maybe.
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First (Pixel Qi) screens out of the fab
"We don't need bigger jails, we need better schools"
This extended flailing of Mark Helprin seems thorough, but it seems a lot longer than necessary for most of us.

Synopsis: Mark Helprin does not do his research and throws around a lot of unjustified and erroneous invective.
No one seems to be commenting about the fact you can vote for both which I just did. Call me undecided.

TC sucks, but banning sites kinda goes against the whole free speech, freedom of information thing.

I'd support built-in content filters on an opt-in basis. That sounds like a good idea.
I still have the impression that HN discussions are of higher relevance than on e.g. reddit.

And a community "being polluted" suggests that there are "pure" members and "dirt" members -- I don't think that's a helpful angle to discuss a possible decline in average relevance of topics and comments.
I only check the front page once when I wake up in the morning (just to catch anything interesting overnight)
One of the points this article made that I like, and argued for in the other thread was

"what matters is fast enough"

people love saying X is too slow etc, the only thing that matters is the ability for X to perform up to your requirements, if you need a million concurrent users then yes access will be the wrong tech. but to say X is too slow, you must specify exactly what it is too slow for.
Not sure "[deleted]" posts are correctly indented from their parent. Also, the lack of space above them means they don't stand out from their parent. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=624964 is an example. It's not immediately obvious from indentation or spacing that swolchok's two posts aren't a reply to himself.
This article was an attention torture. The author tricks you in the beginning to grab your full attention to just go on and blah-blah-chat about things he learned or heard about attention, bottom line being that we can only hope neuroplasticity will save us.

What seemed like the most sensible thing in the article was that inability to focus is a result of depression or lost interest in the job. Good news indeed.
Polluted? Becoming like Digg?

It's becoming like Reddit if those are the questions on your mind.
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From the HN guidelines: "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link."
It's just the old newfag/oldfag debate, now with a slightly pretentious coating.
that depends on what we're getting out of techcrunch links. are the links linkbaity and generally lacking in content? absolutely. do said stories generate any interesting insight from commenters on HN? absolutely.

I think the solution is that when techcrunch covers something that merits discussion, find a different source to link to as the discussion seed.
Here's an article from the NY Times that goes into this in some detail, although there appears to be no single compelling explanation:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/business/16digi.html

One thing that the article notes is that women have achieved parity in other technical fields:

"When all science and engineering fields are considered, the percentage of bachelor’s degree recipients who are women has improved to 51 percent in 2004-5 from 39 percent in 1984-85, according to National Science Foundation surveys."

I find it rather hard to believe that software professionals are especially sexist compared to those in other engineering fields, thus I tend to think that other factors -- a reputation for grueling work hours, the "nerd factor", perceived drop in availability of jobs due to outsourcing, etc... -- are driving women away.
prices can't emerge without healthy competition. we'll never have an accurate idea of medical care costs until artificial barriers to competition are removed.
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Why does one have to defeat the other?
the upshot is that my old Mac Mini was able to sustain 4 hours at the top slot on Hacker News without load exceeding 0.3

I thought everyone had learned to not run anything on Mac Minis (and take backups) after the Magnolia incident: http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2009/02/16/what-really-happened-a...
axod, I'm starting to think you've got a vendetta against TechCrunch. Did they give your startup a bad review?
I don't think we should ban anything on HN. Surely the 'collective wisdom' approach taken by a community like this is such that if the prevailing wind is anti-TC, then TC posts simply won't get upvoted?

Ah, for a perfect community.
The Hacklab.to toilet. Now on twitter.
Nope ... it´s not about the money, it´s about yourself, the opportunity that you lost. Money, after some stage, is just a reflex of your ability to make more money. The ability of making money was probably the reason that bring him down. After all he is a business man ...

If i was him, i would be bad too, but my life is not based on that, is based on God ... so i could survive. After all, i guess the best lost for him was his wife, what, probably, screwed with him.
Bing will have auto refining? I don't see how based on my definition of refining. A search is some number of bits as input, you can try to tease out more by performing computation or make guesses based on user search history. what you can't do is magic more bits into existence.

the beauty of google is that it approximates artificial intelligence. our primitive computation abilities could never figure out the relevance of pages based on crunching the actual contents of a page. but we're getting better on that end.

the future is probably halfway in between. relevance based on a combination of computation (think a more advanced wolfram alpha screening pagerank results).

I doubt bing has jumped ahead of both of these. throwing money at it won't change that.
Moral Hazard - Regulatory Response could allow Meltdown to Happen Again
"Fireproof" Shows Technology's Impact On Religion, Courts
Sarcastically going through Twitter Trends is about as strong an argument as the xkcd character shouting "Stop having fun!" (http://xkcd.com/359/)
Going Dutch, Not So Fast
A rebuttal to Russel Shorto's NYT article "Going Dutch" by a Dutch Columnist living in NY.
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yc is in bed with tc, you won't get too far with this
They're crap, but I'd prefer we keep with freedom of speech...
"perverse sounding" indeed... I'm no fan of mediocrity, but we can't all be above average, and not every company can be staffed entirely by geniuses. Any company that's a reasonable cross section of society will be naturally "mediocre."
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There's a really interesting documentary, "The World According to Sesame Street" (http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/worldaccordingtosesamestr...), about local Sesame Street productions attempts' to address HIV, ethnic tensions, and other major social issues in South Africa, Bangladesh, and Kosovo, while at the same time avoiding backlash and cultural imperialism. Those are mentioned in passing in the article, I'm surprised the documentary isn't.
Ban TC?? no. Behave yourself.

this is total bullshit.

i don't remember Arrington ever claiming to be some kind of guardian angel of startups, and dole out his attention evenly and equitably. As with any other blogger, if Twitter interests him and his people right now, that's what they're going to talk about.

IF you don't like his blog, take your news from elsewhere. But ban TC?? Ridiculous.
I don't think the parent necessarily implied that he couldn't be professional. Rather, perhaps, it requires some conscious attention to avoid oogling or whatnot. I applaud the honesty, myself.
So far the only thing that has knocked off social networking sites has been other social networking sites.
I am not sure what loss of "critical thinking" you are referring to.

I don't think anyone is losing mental marbles, nor do are stories getting that bad. (Admittedly, I couldn't stand the stories a month or two, but things seem to be on the upswing again). The discussion is usually interesting for any highly-moderated story on the front page.

Ironically, questioning the mental prowess of other posters without mentioning a rationale for it contributes to a decline in quality of the conversation taking place. Maybe you could be more specific?
Some STDs have been treated with success, e.g. with antibiotics.

And even AIDS victims live vastly longer with the new drugs than before. We just do not have a silver bullet.
Don't have to. My guess is that one is going to come out on top eventually.
I think that people should just start flagging posts they don't want to see.

If people are already doing that, then it could mean the HN has grown beyond what the early adopters consider to be the critical mass.
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You haven't provided nay supporting arguments for what makes VW different from TC or CH.
Enough of these silly poll postings.

I can't believe people are actually voting - I am by flagging this post.
There's no loss of "mental marbles," that implies insanity rather than a lack of a faculty most people don't have to begin with.

Are individual people losing it? Probably not.

But I point out logical inconsistencies where I see them, and when people miss the big picture (which is often) of a given problem or discussion.

Take the once-a-week discussion of pro-formal ed/anti-formal ed. It's always the same, the same ego-stroking and ego-defense, and most people are clearly working purely off their own biases, without even the benefit of having read any of the professional criticism / praise of the systems in place in the US, or learning theory, or theory of achievement, so on & so forth.

They talk to talk, since they are convinced of their own genius. This is "expressing yourself" at its worst.

Commentors are unfamiliar with basic rhetorical principles - calling certain things 'ad hominem' when they are genuinely relevant observations that have to do with the person, claiming that facts are pure and all that must be considered, falling prey to obvious bids for trolldom (time_management), etc., etc.

All of the above has, in my opinion, increased a lot in the past year & even last 6 mos. (Not to mention the shifting of content towards more & more regurgitated 'productivity porn,' tired old pablum that you could get from any 20-year-old Anthony Robbins tape or 60-year-old Peale book, or even older classical advice manuals.)

The alternative is that I'm suddenly a much deeper thinker than I was, and I don't think that's the case.
I'm against banning TC (and think this poll doesn't really matter too much in any case, as it's entirely up to pg), but how would TC being banned from HN impinge on their freedom to say what they want? 'Freedom of speech' does not imply that anyone has to transmit what you say.
I agree wholeheartedly, although I have to make the pointy-headed objection that fast and scalable are two different things. You can have a system which scales wonderfully and still takes unacceptable time for pages to render -- if so, you fail. You can also have a system which can't push over 100k page views in a day but renders snappily for those lucky folks -- and if your business model can win on 100k page views a day then you're doing pretty well for yourself now aren't you.

Please, God, send me scaling problems. I want my hardest problem in life to be too many people trying to give me money. (Is it just me or does the "My framework scales better than yours!" argument always rage in inverse proportion to the amount of money at stake per page view? I've seriously never heard it "Whoops, we had this great app people were paying real money for but we outgrew our old framework and needed a rewrite." Probably because the solution would be "Hire somebody to do it while sipping iced teas on a beach in Tahiti.")

I also think people need to be beaten around the head with the YSlow presentations until they get the point: 80% of the user perceptible delay happens on the front end. It does not matter whether you are running Rails or a CGI script written in hand-coded assembly -- stupid little things on the front-end like whether you gzipped your HTML or combined and minified your assets matter more in terms of user-perceived speed. But instead of adapting to that measurable, objective truth of our profession (where best practices are literally along the lines of "There is one line in your Apache configuration which will make HTML gzipped. Make sure it is on.") we waste time dickering over "shootouts" to see which backend gets to wait on IO or wait on rendering 100 ms faster.

Some days we're like the surgeons who scorn checklists because checklists are too easy to possibly save half of the lives lost during surgery.
The UK may be technically in the EU, but it is not European in currency or culture. It's much much more American than the other EU members.
"Inspired by Python" or inspired by Sass? http://haml.hamptoncatlin.com/docs/rdoc/classes/Sass.html
Apparently there is a Firefox plugin to do split panes:

http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_splitbrowser.html.en
I'm reminded of Smolin's _The Trouble with Physics_:

> Note that whereas there have always been talented women musicians, the number of women hired by orchestras rose significantly when candidates began auditioning behind a screen. This is why there is affirmative action. In all my experience, I have never seen a woman or an African American hired through an affirmative-action program who didn't strongly deserve it -- that is, who wasn't already arguably the best applicant. When hiring committees are no longer composed only of white men and we stop hearing expressions of open prejudice, then we can relax affirmative action. As it stands, people who are different -- who, for one reason or another, make powerful older male physicists uncomfortable -- are not hired.

(This was in the context of an argument about how physics institutions often filter out challengers to orthodoxy: including those who think differently, not just look differently.)
Why wouldn't the hypertumor go on to kill the host after it killed the tumor?
There are a number of Yahoo Pipes filters set up ready to go. Useful if your gateway into HN is through rss.
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I'd like to add

> Having your desk near the entrance to your office without visitors assuming you're the receptionist.

I'm male, I've had the desk near the entrance and guess what - I got treated like a recptionist too. It's not gender, it's that your the first person people come across.
It's interesting that the media companies are struggling to monetize her videos while Boyle, herself, should be able to do very very well with worldwide concert tours, personal appearances and, yes, the inevitable book deal and movie-of-the-week.
Actually, coming from a country with a high minimum wage ($16/hr+), the idea of a company paying some otherwise-unemployable warm body $5/hr to stand at the door and do nothing all day except say hello to indifferent customers seems bizarre to me - not to mention demeaning and perverse.

Our unemployment benefit is $6.20 an hour. I'd rather the poor guy stays at home, works on his novel or something, and keeps his dignity.
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Wow. These guys are on top of their game. I'm impressed!

I've been using Mercurial at work, and generally Git at home. This could definitely simplify my toolbox a bit. I need to spend some more time with Git, but right now Mercurial is edging out for me.
I just recently started watching Sesame Street with my son and I forgot how great it was. Especially the old stuff, which is all up at sesamestreet.org (I can't vouch for the new stuff as I'm at work at 10am.) The jokes were good, the music was good, the voice acting was good (who was the guy that used to do Kermit and Ernie?) We'll both sit there and watch for an hour and neither of us will get bored. All other children's programming on tv today is so vapid by comparison. Don't let your kid watch it if you can't stand it yourself.
HN is just following the normal distribution in terms of it's community, just like virtually every other social news site out there. The problem is people under ends of the curve don't really mix that well with each other in terms of their approach to certain things. That's why some people see "pollution".
His main argument seems to be "I don't like it, therefore eventually people will stop doing it." Just because he doesn't see a point to social networking doesn't mean that everybody feels that way.
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>Having interests that are unstereotypical for your gender and getting seen as cool and progressive rather than freaky and asexual for it.

A male (programmer or otherwise) with interests that are unstereotypical for a male is rarely seen as "cool and progressive" - being seen as freaky and gay is far more likely.
1) I had a comment censored after (politely) correcting the author on a technical fact in one of his posts.

2) Yes, the quality of this blog is definitely declining and taking on more of a gossipy tone.

But no, I would not ban TechCrunch. Sometimes they have interesting stuff. Instead I would focus on trying to find better methods for HN to attract and mold a better community. That's the real challenge.
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That is a good point. I've been in computers since '79 and never have I wanted (or witnessed someone wanting) an MS product. Rather, everybody felt the needed it because "it's compatible," "it's the way the industry is going", "it's the defacto standard"... Actual desire is nowhere to be found. The only time I can think of where Microsoft attempted to create actual desire recently was that god-awful Songsmith commercial.
Exactly. He had great business at the time, so he had a lot to lose. Gates had nothing, so his bet made a lot more sense. With what they knew, they probably both made the best choice.
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." -- Kurt Vonnegut
> (who was the guy that used to do Kermit and Ernie?)

That would be Jim Henson, inventor of the Muppets themselves. It's a shame his company doesn't own the rights to them anymore. Sesame Workshop owns most of the SS roster, and Disney owns the rest. The Jim Henson Company now only owns a few smaller franchises like The Dark Crystal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Henson
Presumably this changes the hashes? Is there some tool that converts git sha's to hg sha's, so you can still do something like `hg log <some git sha someone gave you>`? I guess that sort of stuff will cause the most confusion, just like local revision numbers can cause confusion (with hg and bazaar).
How do you explain not being about to down-vote submissions?
Who was the guy that used to do Kermit and Ernie?

It was Jim Henson himself for quite some time, and then Steve Whitmire took over after Jim's death.
The classy man's "yes" vote is made by... are you ready?... not. reading. TechCrunch.

o.O

And then obviously not linking to it, etc. Show some respect for freedom.
"European" culture is much more diverse than a lot of people think, including a lot of people in Europe.

I find that people that talk about "European" culture tend to refer to the culture of western part of continental Europe, usually excluding Eastern Europe, Turkey, Scandinavia, the UK, Ireland etc.

But even with a view that limited, there are vast cultural differences even within that group.

There is no unified European culture (nor currency). There are certain limited areas where different but large subsets of Europe share common ideals, but that's it.