skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://news.ycombinator.com/submit

From PG:

Submissions

There are two major types of problems a site like Hacker News needs to avoid: bad stories and bad comments. So far the danger of bad stories seems smaller. The stories on the frontpage now are still roughly the ones that would have been there when HN started.

I once thought I'd have to weight votes to keep crap off the frontpage, but I haven't had to yet. I wouldn't have predicted the frontpage would hold up so well, and I'm not sure why it has. Perhaps only the more thoughtful users care enough to submit and upvote links, so the marginal cost of one random new user approaches zero. Or perhaps the frontpage protects itself, by advertising what type of submission is expected.

The most dangerous thing for the frontpage is stuff that's too easy to upvote. If someone proves a new theorem, it takes some work by the reader to decide whether or not to upvote it. An amusing cartoon takes less. A rant with a rallying cry as the title takes zero, because people vote it up without even reading it.

Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it.

Hacker News has two kinds of protections against fluff. The most common types of fluff links are banned as off-topic. Pictures of kittens, political diatribes, and so on are explicitly banned. This keeps out most fluff, but not all of it. Some links are both fluff, in the sense of being very short, and also on topic.

There's no single solution to that. If a link is just an empty rant, editors will sometimes kill it even if it's on topic in the sense of being about hacking, because it's not on topic by the real standard, which is to engage one's intellectual curiosity. If the posts on a site are characteristically of this type I sometimes ban it, which means new stuff at that url is auto-killed. If a post has a linkbait title, editors sometimes rephrase it to be more matter-of-fact. This is especially necessary with links whose titles are rallying cries, because otherwise they become implicit "vote up if you believe such-and-such" posts, which are the most extreme form of fluff.

The techniques for dealing with links have to evolve, because the links do. The existence of aggregators has already affected what they aggregate. Writers now deliberately write things to draw traffic from aggregators—sometimes even specific ones. (No, the irony of this statement is not lost on me.) Then there are the more sinister mutations, like linkjacking—posting a paraphrase of someone else's article and submitting that instead of the original. These can get a lot of upvotes, because a lot of what's good in an article often survives; indeed, the closer the paraphrase is to plagiarism, the more survives. [3]

I think it's important that a site that kills submissions provide a way for users to see what got killed if they want to. That keeps editors honest, and just as importantly, makes users confident they'd know if the editors stopped being honest. HN users can do this by flipping a switch called showdead in their profile.
fascinating read. thanks.
The microformat the AP are talking about is described in a little more detail on the AP Labs Wiki:

http://labs.ap.org/wiki/hNews
"...because he, like most native speakers of Sinitic languages, fundamentally doesn't see a need to distinguish gender in personal pronouns."

I'm not sure that's correct. In Mandarin the word for he, she and it is "ta" but the written characters in all three cases are different. There is a distinction; your friends mixture of using he and she is more likely to be similar to the confusion felt by English speakers learning French for example and having to distinguish between using la and le.
Sponsored Conversations on Twitter Raise Concerns, Prompt Standards
In our brain, certain impulses are carried via electricity, so they are as fast as possible (inside their structure). Other, much more complex processes, don't involve electricity directly, but they are still fast enough -- but given their complexity, they are still really fast, relatively speaking, and they need quite no space (more important than everything else...).

Time is not a measure for intelligence.
If it were so, humans could be defined as some of the least intelligent beings on our planet (as they need many many years to finally be adults; in fact, we need to learn so many things; most animals are quite ready when they are born -- ask somebody who knows animals).

As for your speculations of human future: are we talking about science or fiction? Although humans are really good in inventing really fantastical future scenes, that has nothing to do with science -- so let's call it fiction for now...
If they want to follow this tack they should at least be
forced to remove the USB-compatible logo from their product
and its marketing materials.

This sounds reasonable.
Anti-trust law requires a monopolist to not make use of their monopoly position in one market to gain advantages in another. Assuming one accepts that there is an independent market for browsers, and that Microsoft has a monopoly position, it's pretty hard to argue that pre-installing their own browser does not make use of their monopoly situation to gain advantages in another market.

That users can download other browsers is irrelevant from the point of view of anti-trust unless you can show that users would make the same browser choices when one of the browsers is pre-loaded as they would if they had to explicitly pick one.

While the end-goal is to ensure consumers are not deprived choice with the resulting problems, the direct objective of anti-trust law is to protect the competitors of monopolists, regardless of whether the short-term effect on consumers is negative, as the long term detrimental effects of trusts are seen as too great (through direct experience with a large number of them...)
Designer Decimals - an arithmetical curiosity
Codeweavers to overtake Microsoft by 2018
I don't know about Chomsky, either. There has been some harsh criticism about integrity on e.g. Cambodia.

It seems to me that Chomsky notes something obvious -- USA has an egoistic foreign policy and lies about it, like most every country (see "realpolitik"). When Chomsky then gives his explaination for the lies, he seems to border on conspiracy theories].
Russia declares September 13 (12 on leap years) as Programmer's Day
"the idea of using "he" to be gender neutral doesn't bother me. Maybe it's because I'm a sexist"

Or perhaps you don't mind being subtly emasculated.
fixed, thanks (the title was originally: "Interview with Brad Sprengler, author of the last Linux 0day exploit"). Sorry for my poor english skills.
Making the compiler work harder for you
for those who read Russian: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%94%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%8C_%D0%BF...
"It's almost impossible to avoid AP content at the moment"

I don't see any problem for a blogger to stop linking to AP. Not wanting to be linked to is a very stupid wish, so instead of trying to "educate" AP it's much simpler and more appropriate to fullfill their wish.
Interesting article (and video). I'm actually based in the North East of England and have quietly "got on" with building businesses. I have 2 registered in London though because that ultimately became necessary to achieve the ends I required there.
Thanks, it is very similar actually, I followed the link and is the cutting stock problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_stock_problem, seems quite complex. Need to do more reading!
The woolly mammoth jerks again, is what I think.
I've been an editor enough years to know that "they" is not accepted as a pronoun referring to an antecedent in the singular number in standard written English

Why not? As you pointed out, it's how you and many others speak. The only reason it persists in being "incorrect" is because it is deemed so. None of the alternatives I've seen seem particularly better, and indeed often worse. Can't we let English grow in this direction?
Perfect versus Better
GTD: identifying your contexts
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=542804
Address not found! ;)
Agreed.

I meant my comment in the context of the message I replied to. In that in 2002 they first tried to push a new OS to the desktop market as it was then. From what I heard about it, nextstep was not anymore advanced compared to the rest of the market than Linux/Ubuntu/Gnome is now to it's market.

I don't believe any company could afford to start back right down to the kernel and low level libraries for a new desktop OS, even it was just going to run a web browser. I would say that any competitor to Apple and Microsoft would have to use a Linux kernel, CUPS etc. as a base - just as OS X used NextStep/BSD as base.
Brain == FPGA ?
Which is about as specific as "First you should figure out what it is that cures cancer, and then you should have people with cancer do that thing." Calculating the intrinsic value of a business is very, very difficult -- which is why Buffett is so rich from being good at it.
Offline Blog Editors
This may amaze you, but Hawaii is only a small part of the world.
Remember that it's Bactomputer Alpha 0.00001 ;-)
Since locked down, limited firmwares on all consumer grade cameras prevent any kind of direct computer control...

(shrug) If I buy a camera without TWAIN support, that's my fault.
What made the 1/4 + 1/16 + 1/256... = 1/3 that was posted earlier this week so good was that it did not use numeric labeling, but purely visual content to make its point. If you could figure out a way to graphically represent what is now labeled, it'd be a complete success.
I have a feeling this will end up going the way of the prostitution section on Craigslist, or that site where you could offer to carpool with someone to work.

The entrenched businesses don't want any competition from this here new-fangled internets.
Funny thing. I can swap "Wall Street" for "Las Vegas" in what you just said, and it reads exactly the same.

It boils down to this, in my opinion:

1) The market is simply random. Every stock you buy is a bet placed on a roulette table.

2) Mutual funds, derivatives, etc are just ways of hiding the randomness. (Hey, why play at one roulette table when you can play at 1,000 at the same time! Less risk!)

3) Even if you do decide to take the plunge and buy in, the system is rigged against you. Much smarter people have figured out how to get theirs and get out before you know what's happened. The house always wins.
The Power of Less – Setting Limits
The problem isn't with getting some individuals to act on this. The problem is getting society as a whole to do so. This is a general problem with trying to incite a boycott of something that has very widespread usage: the dent you can make is often too small to be noticed, because society is too hard to organize.
Ass backwards! It makes it more interesting to watch if these people are wearing super swim suits that help them swim crazy fast. Its not like they have jet packs and flippers atached to the suit. How bout we say they are not allowed to shave too.
I like this idea better then "they".
The Maude project [1] (and its documentation) may be of interest; they use term rewriting in a formal modeling and model-checking tool. There's an introductory course at [2].

1. http://maude.cs.uiuc.edu/

2. http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~peterol/inf3230-lecturenotes.html
I'm pretty sure "1/4 + 1/16 + 1/256... = 1/3" was in the title of the post.
I disagree that papers aren't creating anything. To the extent that todays' news industry just parrots back press releases, you may be correct, but I definitely think there's a need for not just interpretation but investigation.

If there had been no newspapers in 1972, I don't see who would have put in the effort of pulling at the threads until the Watergate scandal unraveled. To take a more modern example, I don't see any bloggers that would have taken the time or had interest in doing the few big investigative stories that the San Jose Mercury has broken in the past few years, the one about people being wrongfully jailed because of bad public defenders and the one about the SJ Police's outrageously high number of downtown disorderly arrests, come to mind.

Those are not stories that would have come out in the absence of an operation willing to commit to long-term footwork. They certainly wouldn't have been written by some bloggers looking for news online, because it's happening in the real, offline, world, and you can't just "link" to it.

Without newspapers, or the equivalent thereof, these stories would not be told and no one would keep the government honest (to the extent that newspapers today haven't already failed at this). And I think this would be a loss to society.
Feeding Frenzy – Walter Cronkite, Apollo 11, Entrecard Sold | TechJaws
Zookeeper.
I thought they all came that way...
I disagree, even just coming from the perspective of agile practices (rather than agile ideals). I don't see how you would easily engage in test first development. Infact testing in general is a challenge. Same goes for refactoring, you can adjust the model, but what if you're trying to overcome other challenges, such as streamline to make your code more performant. MDA hides all of that away. It is true though that the more people centric agile practices are still valid (retros, stand ups etc.), but these would be valid in any situation.
Monetize The Audience, Not The Content
Clouds are gathering over the venture capital industry
I don't necessarily mean that the business would have to go to a fully-paid model, just that they will have to find some other way of adding value to their product, be it support, training, or add-on features or services.

If this type of business model doesn't match with what you want to be doing, then maybe open sourcing your product isn't the right move for you.
It's a different target demographic. In a trip to DC recently, we got a private room on AirBnB and saved roughly $25 pr. night ($75 vs. $100) over the hotel we'd otherwise have used, and we got a better experience for it.

We didn't feel any obligation to hang out with the host, bring gifts or stay in touch, or to accommodate our host or anyone else at our home -- which made things a lot easier.

I think it's more correct to think of AirBnB as cheap hotel, not premium couchsurfing.
Nice! I like being corrected :D
Certainly not mad at your for saying that... I personally have this opinion of the markets, and thats why I don't "invest". When I go to Vegas, I have a great time, and treat money on the table as an entertainment expense. That said, society has convinced the average person that their retirement money needs to be in the market (via 401k's). As long as it is the case that uninformed people are coerced into trusting the market, I will be vocally angry when they are cheated out of their money.
Solve Computational Geometry Problems
Web based file managers with jquery & PHP
Is Your Life Satisfying or Disappointing?
I appreciate the candor. The reason for PHP over my first choice of Django is that this project has a lot of junior people with PHP-only skills.

I'm wondering about HaXe because I still want the people on the team who can appreciate it to get a high productivity language with snob appeal, but without fracturing the project into two code bases that need to cross type system barriers to call into each other, as would be the case if the "language snob components" were in, say, a JVM language.

The price is that the PHP-only people won't be able to read the cross-language group's code effectively; but frankly I don't think they'd do much of that anyway.

One hypothetical setup would be:

1. Doctrine ORM

2. HaXe-to-PHP business logic and harder UI logic, calling the ORM and referring to the PHP-only pieces by links only

3. PHP pieced together by tinkerers from lots of CRM-like components for simpler front end stuff, occasionally calling the ORM and the HaXe-to-PHP classes

Separately, being able to cross-compile to JavaScript/Flash for the client - and doing I/O without breaking the type system - looks exciting.

So, I'm considering HaXe to keep a fraction of the second and third PHP benefit you list.
It's called neuroplasticity. I've read "The brain that changes itself" by Norman Doidge and it uncovers a whole new world.
Zero friction marketing
Why it is called Zero Friction Marketing ?
Saj call it Zero Friction Marketing as CPA offers allow you to make fat commissions without needing to generate a sale which eliminates all the ‘friction’ from the marketing process.
(no troll)

1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + ... = 1

is like a binary version of

9/10 + 9/100 + 9/1000 + ... = 0.999... = 1
Nice post.

I'm always fighting with my strive for perfection myself.

And, sometimes, I'm so tired of struggling with this part of my personality that I end up doing even worse than how I would've done if I would have taken that particular task more lightly.
Programmers owe far more to the works of Chomsky -- more than most are aware of, or care to admit. Without his rigorous stance, I am not sure if compilers(!) and programming languages would exist, the way they do now.

Research has been more openly industrialized in the past few decades; it is hard to escape pseudoscience due to the sheer mass production. Deprecated Phd.-s are just a symptom, pseudo-Phd.-s just make matter worse. Cargo-cult is quite easy to unmask for anybody, pseudoscience is tougher by design.

"Because of the success of science, there is, I think, a kind of pseudoscience. Social science is an example of a science which is not a science; they don't do [things] scientifically; they follow the forms -- you gather data, you do so-and-so and so forth but they don't get any laws, they haven't found out anything.... You see, I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have to be about checking the experiment, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something, and therefore I see how they get their information and I can't believe they know it, they haven't done the work necessary, haven't done the checks necessary, haven't done the care necessary. I have a great suspicion that they don't know, that this stuff is [wrong], and they're intimidating people." -- The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, by Richard P. Feynman
Is this a joke? Please tell me it's a joke.
This is an excellent opportunity for someone to create a start up around. The AP is basically just a news aggregation service and a monopoly. How many organizations just get their news off of the AP and don't actually sponsor any of their own.

A small company could have liberal reuse policies and use the APs lack of foresight against them. Pay contributors for their content based on its popularity.
Hilarious. Especially the graph.
The Quirky Genius of the Dos Equis Ad Campaign
It could be that the explanation is much simpler than that. The CEOs of old world institutions like the A.P. (and I'm really trying not to generalize here but I've seen it too many times) can't be bothered to surf the web for a few minutes let alone try to understand the basic accepted concepts of web based copyrights. Somebody in the line of command either was too scared to set him straight, or straight failed to explain properly how the online world works.

This CEO had a lightbulb moment, was too convinced that it will work, and is just probably seeing it through on the strength of his position and authority. He could have asked the advice and opinion of people with more experience and knowledge in the field, and well, we've seen this happen too many times..
It's a great joke, and a great piece of PR.
Oh come on guys, it's obviously tongue in cheek. A very clever press release that shows the founders have a great sense of humor. I'm checking out their product.
I doubt I would have watched that when I was a kid, but I will DEFINITELY watch it now. The cartoon format makes it kind of goofy, but the content is great.
Of course it is. Reading past the first paragraph or looking at the graph for 10 seconds will reveal that. "Projected Nonsense Data" ... come on :)
LOL, these guys always crack me up.
Create a great brand. Create great content. Stop: You're both blogging right.
FreeYourID Gives Up On Trying To Monetize OpenID
One BIG problem with charging for online newspaper access is that it's currently given away for free. Once you give something away, people react very badly if you start charging for it (eg Jot). This mistake has killed a number of software companies over the years. Look at TimesSelect - that was a stunning failure.

If they want to subscribe, the newspapers need to figure out how to sell something that they haven't already given away for free. Wish I could tell you what that is, because they already give everything away. The only other option would be to figure out a new way to make money off their content.
This is a pretty good matrix to asses where you stand. If you are going to be an expert programmer, a good chunk of level three understanding is necessary.

I particularly liked error handling: "Only Codes the Happy Cases." I have not so fond memories of a large system that coded only the happy cases and swollowed the exceptions without reporting them.
This has got to be my current favorite Ad campaign, using Chuck Norris style one liners. I want to be "the most interesting man in the world" I should drink Dos Equis.
The post appears to me to be a bug report not a "complaint". I feel you have mischaracterised it, these are not the same thing.

LLVM stands for Low Level Virtual Machine. http://llvm.org/ As I understand it it provides an abstraction layer which could sit below a C compiler for the C code to be compiled down into. If so LLVM will never fully replace GCC or any other C compilers.

I think the OpenBSD project is working on PCC http://pcc.ludd.ltu.se/ as a possible long term replacement for GCC.
Amazon.com buying Zappos for $928 million
Search Engines Specialize: "Status Search" for `Friends` online
Maybe it's just my lazy desire not to have to think about such matters, but I just defer to Strunk and White in these discussions. I love it when someone else makes these coin-flip decisions for me and publishes a book about it. :)

Their take? Just use "he". Gender be damned.
Would you really pay $0.25 for the Washington Post's story about a new healthcare plan when The Politico or CNN has a similar story for free? At best, this would only work for really "important" stories. Very few people are going to pay $0.25 to read an obit or a restaurant review.

Frankly, I think this approach is far worse than a flat subscription. And $0.25 is way to high. I would probably switch to a (lesser) news site that was free rather than pay a fee for 95% of the stuff out there.
I think I understand your point, but I respectfully submit that it's a bit of a stretch to turn identity theft into something like "computer identity theft". The arguments being presented by you and others boil down to an assertion that Palm behaved fraudulently by emulating Apple's USB device IDs.

But while I think it's useful to talk about defrauding other humans, it makes no sense to me to to talk about a computer defrauding another computer, at least, not yet :-D. This is where the analogy breaks down, in my opinion, and why I don't have any moral problems with what Palm is doing. A far closer analogy would be Compaq's emulation of the original PC BIOS.

I don't think anyone is asserting that Palm is intending to trick reasonable humans into thinking that their Pre is actually an iPod device. Everyone realizes that they are offering an iPod compatible device. To achieve this end, they are having their device "defraud" another computer. I'm okay with this. At worst, they have perhaps violated their licensing agreement with the USB Implementers forum. If so, this could be remedied by removing the USB logo from the Pre, and then even this argument dissolves.