skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I do share your sentiment fearing that the community will change, I don't think that the karma totals are really a good gauge of content/comment quality on HN. Just because more people are here to upvote does not mean the comment is of lesser quality than before (the opposite is also true...)

A quick fix to this could be a sort of weighted comment score. Maybe the karma points / by the number of karma points added that day to give an idea of scale in comparison to the overall size of community. I'm sure others could come up with something more precise, but it's a start.
"Michael Jackson, whose prime was before my birth by the way, is the Icon of icons. His exit from the world is a once in a life time event that affects everyone."

His prime was during my lifetime, and while I respect what he did, his passing makes zero difference in my life. As best I can tell, he reached and passed his peak. (Not that his not-quite-peak stuff wasn't or wouldn't have been good, but it could not match the effect of Thriller)

His death is sad, as are most deaths, but hardly earth-shattering, and certainly not "once in a lifetime", given that people such Elvis, MLK, and JFK died during my lifetime as well.

Maybe it's our age difference.
You're requesting information from people you talk to in real life. People are volunteering it on the internet. You're naturally going to get different biases.

I know my experience in real life was colored by a few people trying Vista Business early on (on new hardware) and deciding that the new features were not worth the performance penalty. Everyone I know who's done this, including myself, has "downgraded" to XP (as Microsoft allows).

People I know in real life who are considering Vista now are somewhat disinclined to do so, in favor of just waiting for Windows 7.
in my opinion, i'd give them multiple levels of information. give them a simple notice that they're submitting score information, and provide an option to view more detailed information if they wish.
That's why it's a great place to work on startups. Fewer distractions.
> People who are more sedentary probably just have higher incomes and therefore avoid other health pitfalls.

You do actually have data to support your claim, right? (I don't know either way, but I'm not making any claims either.)

> Why can't the MSM learn a bit of statistics?

They're journalists.
"Existing on the internet and nowhere else" is a typical way to categorize people, given the existence of global communication. Having never met either of you (as far as I know), you only exist on the internet to me, and to each other. The rest is opaque.

As for Vista, we're not dealing with it as it is, but as it is reputed to be. And it has a terrible reputation. The technical merits versus XP can be argued, but its poor image is hard to contest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Windows_Vista.

We take that as a premise, because the technical bits don't matter any more, in the presence of Windows 7. The meat is the use of price as a tool to drive better initial reception of 7 than Vista. There's no need to analyze "Vista bad", because it is already widely believed to be bad.
If that's the case, then the market is unsustainable. Players will fail, causing scarcity, raising the value of applications, and conditioning users to expect to pay more.
Is Eminem Overrated? | Hip Hop MVP
I agree, but I've had comments that were in the eighties and I think one topped a hundred, and they don't show up here.
Your Facebook page shows all sorts of information that should not affect the hiring process - like your race, religion, marital status, number of children, and sexual orientation. I can't imagine anyone who thinks it would improve the hiring practice.

At the same time I have over a thousand helpful, hopefully well-written posts on message boards that I'll be happy to direct any employers to. They're a better resume than my actual resume, and harder to fake.
Jefferson wasn't half the intellect that Franklin was.

As far as Jefferson's diplomacy goes, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War .
I agree that it's a two-way interview, and that's really the only way to look at it. Even if you really need a job, you're better off waiting to find a good fit.

However, I disagree than a potential employer looking over our online persona is necessarily a negative thing. In fact, I think it can be positive in that it suggested the hiring manager is doing some real work to check out their candidates. Just like anything there are lines you can cross, but that's just common sense.

Asking for a potential hire to login into their FB and show their world shows a complete lack of common sense in almost any context.

Checking out a potential hire's technical background for a technical position is certainly within the realm of common sense, and I think it would be negligent not to. There may be a wealth of relevant information available online about the candidate, and this shouldn't be ignored.

Likewise, I would recommend putting in the effort to check out the employer's history too. Using google, wayback machine, chief staff members, etc. It doesn't take long and give's you a much better idea about the opportunity. Most employer's would find that kind of research shows commitment to finding a good fit.
Thanks! I'll continue to vie for the full prize too :)

I like that you're using python-twitter. I have played with it a bit and contributed to a very minor fix (http://code.google.com/p/python-twitter/issues/detail?id=58)

This is our 2nd Django project so we are still learning the ropes as well.
A discussion about a Magic Negro need not be racist, however I don't even want to look at what someone has to say on the subject if I'm hiring them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_negro
YouTube Star ‘mememolly’ To Be Next ‘Rocketboom’ Host
Strength is one of the best measures of health, especially as people age. Old people who are still strong will live a long time.

I suspect this study is just confirming that people with higher muscle mass live longer.
Hulu ad rates become higher than tv ad rates
The real time search dillema
hmm its using javascript and ajax - could something in your browser be disabling it? I'm having trouble duplicating the error on my end.
Each week it seems they have to put out x words and this somehow hurts the quality. I've found they tend to talk about internet/new technology from an outside point of view (heavy use of jargon to try and fit in, quick to sensationalise the negative impact of anything new).

An ex girlfriend is a tech "journalist" for a new-world tech blog. What you've described is exactly how the new media outlets work.
IronPython in Action and the Decline of Windows
Well, how about we take some of the $700 billion a year that we would suddenly /not/ be sending overseas to Russia, Latin America and the Middle East to build schools, hospitals, libraries in the hardest hit countries? Increasing efficiency _always_ has the potential to leave everyone better off. Econ 101. What you choose to do with the extra money left on the table is up to you, but you should never pass up the chance to do better simply because of inertia.
[..] today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role.

Is this a bad joke?! Believe?! What has believe to do with this?

Please if you don't know - watch this talk from Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf ( http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/ )

Video H264 720x576 Encoded
http://dewy.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/CCC/25C3/video_h264_720x576/25...
(From 12/2008, CCC Congress 25C3)

Information and further links about this talk:
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2008/Fahrplan/events/2863.en.h...

His job is to give scientific advice to people who need to make decisions on these Global Warming topics.

Global warming will destroy the sea, the animals, plants and finally us. Stop this whole argument of is this real or bullshit and read the research for yourself if you still doubt it.

Who needs money when we all can't go outside anymore because its 50 degrees Celsius outside?
Hmm, Thanks for the comments! I'll try to figure out a way to simplify it!
The weakness I saw in The Camel Has Two Humps was the lumping together of the consistently correct and the consistently incorrent. See http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1624#comment-19778

Trying to deduce anything from the success of the consistently correct group is fraught. It sure looks like they have some prior exposure. The interest lies in the consistently incorrect group. Perhaps their success points to the importance of having a consistent model, to be corrected by instruction. Or perhaps the consistently incorrect group all failed. We don't know how many were in this group and if there were very few the aggregation of the correct and incorrect into a single group could completely wash their fate out of the overall statistics.
Really simple. Internet merchants have to collect sales tax on residents of any state where they have a physical presence.

Amazon has been careful to limit their physical presence to Washington so that their sales are tax free in the 49 other states.

North Carolina doesn't like all the lost sales tax revenues caused by people buying things from Amazon.

So they changed the law so that having an AFFILIATE in North Carolina is the same as having a physical presence in North Carolina.

Amazon retaliated by eliminating all North Carolina affiliates. (Many of whom will probably just change the address on their account. Since Amazon pays by direct deposit, this won't matter).

It's the only way Amazon can keep from having to charge sales tax to ALL North Carolina residents which would make them more expensive.
You're right about the tree. I just realized that these would stick out into the road on a normal street..
Jackson’s Death Exploited by Spammers
Nevada is favored as a state with no income tax and with stricter privacy protections.

If you actually run your business from Nevada, you can get the benefits of both.

Delaware, in contrast, offers no particular advantages with respect to tax or privacy. If mainly offers what might be called corporate efficiency - it is a well-oiled machine for mature companies wanting to place a premium on control of the company's affairs. It also has a well-developed corporate law enabling public companies who are sued over complex corporate transactions to have excellent and well-developed legal authority around which to plan their legal affairs.

Concerning Nevada, though, if you do not have a true presence there, you get no special tax advantages because you have to pay state income taxes in the state from which you conduct your business. As noted by skmurphy, you would also have to register as a foreign corporation in your home state.

I believe a good number of people go the Nevada route via online services and then simply ignore the rules (i.e., they don't pay state income tax in their home state in the belief that a Nevada corporation does not need to). As a lawyer, of course, I can't advise this even though it may be a common practice. It is plainly illegal and, if it catches up with you, you will significant tax and other troubles.

There are cottage industries set up about the Nevada (and Delaware) incorporation process, mostly consisting of online filing services. They have a motive not to disclose the problems associated with out-of-state filings and often promote misinformation on these issues.

This is not to say that incorporating in Nevada or Delaware is not good for some companies. It is. It just has to be the right situation.
Which the City of Bozeman has since backed off on.
What I find really unusual is this happened in Bozeman. I spent a couple weeks there an a ski/backpack trip and the culture was extremely liberal.

My take on the situation though after reading the article is just a case of understandable incompetence. They just didn't realize what a big deal it was. They were looking for a limited number of bad flags and didn't really think it through. Someone with very little social networking experience, read some nightmare accounts in some FUD article and made a really dumb decision.
It's clear that the App Store is seriously broken. Every week we hear some new horror story, and they cover a distressingly wide range of types of brokenness. It's even clear, to an extent, what needs to be improved; better or more reasonable standards, for one, but the biggest issue, with a bullet, is transparency (as someone who deals with Apple regularly in a professional context I can say sadly that these are issues that Apple needs to improve on in more than one aspect of their business; their consumer face is magnificently polished but a lot of their corporate back end, so to speak, stinks).

What's truly distressing is that there's absolutely no indication as to whether these ARE in fact being addressed—or even if they're being ignored. The App Store and its machinations are so opaque—and so inconsistently so—that just as developers are left in the dark when they submit an app, the community as a whole is totally in the dark about the state of the Store and its many discontents. We have no real idea if Apple has heard us, and whether they care if so; we have no idea if there are any improvements afoot or not, so we sort of sit in uneasy darkness. There's the half-formed notion that tomorrow they might unveil a fully-formed, totally overhauled App Store protocol that nobody knew was coming. But of course, there's also the notion that they won't.
Unfortunately, it makes it difficult to read at work without being conspicuous.
I think this is another one of those why architects are architects and engineers are engineers, first it looks much much more expensive than a traditional on ground bike rack which takes minimal installation and is much more of an eyesore and looks as if it cannot accommodate very many bikes.
Interesting. Why is that? My naive assumption would have been that SF in particular would be good for straight males.
In 2003 in Europe roughly 35.000 people died from heat.
That is not an issue?
His kaxxt card game at the end is kinda neat. It's like Magic the Gathering or Pokemon, but uses programming constructs to guide the game play.
The list definitely has a cutoff.

Other lists are available at http://news.ycombinator.org/lists
What does the user care about? In your example, I guess they care about bandwidth usage and personal data. So in that light, I would inform them that a small amount of game-specific, non-personal info needs to be sent to the website (server is jargon, so should be avoided) to record the score.

My point is that as much info as the user cares about should be provided in a clear, accessible manner.

Where personal data and/or legal disclosure laws apply, then more transparency and info is better.

Unfortunately, it is not unnecessary to point out that all information of all types at all times should always be rigorously honest. If you're going to tell your users something, be truthful.
I also love seeing code repositories in early version. Seeing a code base grow and become polished is encouraging, especially looking at a mess of functions in the first few days of my projects.
_why rocks so hard he can dress up any way he wants!
Fuzzy Future for the Internet 'Cloud'
And unfortunately, many of those "more leftwing groups" are those that take center stage. Take Al Gore (please):

[Question:] There's a lot of debate right now over the best way to communicate about global warming and get people motivated. Do you scare people or give them hope? What's the right mix?

[Gore's Answer:] ... I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.

http://www.grist.org/article/roberts2/
[Video .mp4] Climate Change (Global Warming) - State of the Science
New Data Show Jump in Science and Engineering Graduate Study
Trevor, did you design twitchboard.com alone? Do you have a portfolio of any UI design work you have done which you can point me to? We are looking for someone to help us with design. Thanks.
The rate per ad is higher, but the number of ads is much lower, so ad revenue per show is still lower on Hulu.
By the same token, it seems to me that the ratio "story upvotes"/"number of comments" has gone higher and higher recently.

I'm not sure what it says about HN though. I might not necessarily be a bad thing actually. I'm not really for having a flood of comments on all the stories.
Do you have any facts or research to back this up? Beyond a certain baseline level of fitness, I would be pretty surprised to find out stronger means living longer. You would expect to see a lot more strongmen get to be over 80 years old if that was true.
WTF? This is the second OPINION piece that's been posted today. Don't upvote this crap!
Adding Insult To Injury: MySpace Botches Layoffs
I would be interested to see a list of the best HN comments as judged not by raw karma points but as:

karma points of the comment / karma points of the post
Is "best" really the proper defining word to use? More eyeballs are viewing the RIP Michael Jackson thread, thus resulting in more potential up-votes -- based on that, I'd be hard-pressed to establish it as the "best" comment... maybe "most up-voted" is more fitting.
"Often the fraudsters have their art down to a science and their software clicks ads so fast and moves on to the next one that it doesn’t even hang around long enough for the underlying URL to resolve."

I thought that was pretty funny. I suppose the author imagines a computer program that clicks on links in a browser.
TANSTAAFL.

We don't just punt money into Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc -- we exchange it for oil which we then use productively. By definition, if we didn't want the oil more than the money (or anything else we could get for that money) we wouldn't make the deal. How does it increase the total efficiency to coerce people into spending money on X instead of Y if when they have their druthers they clearly prefer Y?

You can make the argument that we are in a sort of local maximum and that in the long run, tolerating this inefficiency is worthwhile because it would lead to the changing of the surface such that we can find an even better maximum. Could be. All I'm saying is that it's complex and monolithic technocratic solutions are doomed.
If you say something and claim it to be factual it's still up to me to believe you or not. I think belief has a lot to do with it.
I want this.

I founded and sold Groupvine, a group platform for colleges that was swallowed up by the Daily Jolt and shut down.

What I learned was that getting specific groups of people to shift habits and adopt new collaboration tools is tough. It's massive buy-in at every level.

We also wanted to aggregate activity from across campuses to filter a real-time stream of "what's happening now" in case you wanted to join in and check something out you didn't know was happening.

When I see this, I see a low barrier to entry and I see overlap with everything from what I was trying to accomplish to Yammer...

But then it applies to marketers, too. I want to know who everyone is who tweeted about Klean Kanteen bottles, but don't want to follow of them quite yet.

It's a "getting to know you" engine, a knowledge-cultivating engine, and simultaneously an activity-tracking engine.

I love it. It could be leveraged into marketers' tools, or simply as a way of giving people an easier way to be a voyeur. So many applications here!
"How is this even remotely hacker news?" is not one of the best HN comments.
I don't have a problem with the science exactly but rather the predictions that have been made from that science. Predicting the future is very difficult and I'd really like to see more discussion of that when this issue comes up.
http://dewy.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/CCC/25C3/video_h264_720x576/25...

Global warming is influenced by a multitude of contributing gases etc. Some of them can also cause cooling. Weather, being unpredictable of course screws up predictions. Also the oceans are taking a substancial amount of CO2 gases for instances which causes warming delays.

I agree with the error bars but climatology is not exactly a easy science if you have so many variables. Its not that we fully understand "just weather" yet.

Interesting question though, temperatures were constant for more or less 1 Mio. years (thanks ice-core probes for that information). Why suddenly in the last 100 years or so do we see a difference if you look in the timeframe of 1900 to now?

Even if I play your logic and go for a moment on your side and say ok who knows maybe the predictions are wrong. Does it makes sense to drive the Coal/Oil/Gas burning train? There is more waste coming from burning these than just CO2 you know.
> We could spend (and I just may) hours writing about liberalism but it comes down to freedom to do as you will provided it does not impinge upon the right of others to do the same.

Nice thought, but do you object to me owning "naughty" synthetic images? How about a gun? Can I refuse to associate with "those" people? How about hire them, lend them money, or rent my property to them? Can I allow smoking (tobacco) at my biz?

Do you care which drugs I use in my own home?
That quote doesn't even parse grammatically.
Sorry for a cynical answer, but your comment assumes that there are any governments that believe it's important for them to be trustworthy. I certainly don't get that feeling here in America, on either side of the aisle.
For the lazy: The article states the rate is $20-40 CPM.
Thats the beauty of the argument. Science gives us a tool to eliminate believe from the equation. Believe is something which has no place there.

With Science we make assumptions and lay them out for everybody to see or counter argument. After enough iterations of opinions and results we end up with something that gives us at least a high probability of being right.

Claim has to be followed by proof. Proof does not need believe as it stands by itself. If you believe it or not.
"The fact is that cybercriminals have no respect for taste and decency. The only thing they are interested in is making some money for themselves,"

...

the media (cough newspapers included cough) have no respect for taste and decency. The only thing they are interested in is making some money for themselves.
A) I totally agree

B) That list is just the top X comments by score over the past N days. It will change soon enough.
Look, I despise Windows and no longer use or program for it, but it is ignorant to say that GUI programming in Windows is still stuck in 1995. XAML adds a declarative interface to WPF control instantiation, and the out-of-the-box WPF controls are more powerful than most other GUI toolkits, including HTML.
Ask HN: benefits of being successful
Hello everyone. As I face yet another Friday night hacking session, I find myself a little low on motivation. I was hoping people could contribute their thoughts on what makes it all worth it in the end.
Twelve things economists need to remember to be helpful journalistic sources
I am a working UI Designer / Developer who also just built an application to learn Python/Django.

I feel that I could properly give this site a visual upgrade with my design and front-end skills, while also learning and maintaining the Django project.

Adding a viral loop to the mix would skyrocket groups and userbase. I'm definitely up for the challenge :)
I'd assume it works on the same algorithm as the home page and normal comment pages. Something of the form:

points / (timeSinceEpoch^2)

After a certain time the number of points needed to override the denominator is unattainable, no matter how popular the comment was. As a result, the comments on the top of this list should be both popular and recent.