skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You never listen to the third option? You seem to be assuming that these menu systems are sufficiently well designed that if you hear "1" and "2" and what you want is neither of them, you can just blindly press "3". This is almost never the case.
Somehow this comment seems related to the recent recursion post.

BTW, I think it's fine to complain in a new post. I guess it's annoying in the body of a long string of comments, but the entire point of the posting system is to allow group moderated discussion. If people don't like your question, they'll downvote it.

This is a much better response than ignoring idiotic behavior and/or spamming a good comment thread with whining.
You don't use much gold in a high end watch as it's heavy and not all that strong. Nobody wants to walk around with a 3 pound watch, and huge diamonds on watches look stupid. So it's all about restricted supply. This watch costs 200k because we are going to make 100 of them.

One of the hidden truths about high end watches is they don't keep vary good time. And they don't have high resale value most of the time.
After too many years of doing this, this is the best advice I can give: The most common issues are inconsistent spacing between elements. Don't try to understand why this may be, instead, use padding if margin isn't working, vice versa otherwise, and move the layout to another equivalent element (simple wrapper, etc.) if you run into a really sticky problem.

This has solved about 90% of the CSS-related cross-browser layout problems I've experienced.

Do not use hacks unless you absolutely must!

You should never need to target a non-Microsoft browser. When you need to target IE,

* html selector (IE6-inclusive)

and

html:not([dummy]) selector (IE7-exclusive)

Even though they work, these are for last resorts and should pretty much never be used. Most of the time that I see a cross-browser hack used, it really was due to the author's poor understanding of the CSS issue at hand and would've been corrected with good defensive styling using simple, well-supported styles.
Thoughtful comments that are factually wrong should be downvoted.

Seriously. If your code doesn't compile, the compiler doesn't care how much effort it took you to write it...
Twitter Takes Step Toward Business Service
Fairly easy to scan the comments the OP is talking about -- they're light-grey with negative scores, and it's clear they've had effort put into them.
For what it's worth, over the range N = [59050, 65536] = [3^10+1, 2^16], the number of choices in a ternary tree is 311 = 33, and in a base-2 tree is 216 = 32; 65536 is the largest N for which binary wins over ternary. They tie a few times for even higher N, for the last time at the interval [3^17 + 1, 2^27] = [129140164, 134217728]; ternary trees with number of leaves in this interval have 18 levels, binary trees have 27.

The point is that "sufficiently large" here turns out to be so large that nobody would actually build a phone tree that large, which is true for lots of mathematical results about "sufficiently large" numbers.
Thanks, that's an excellent point I had not fully considered. On the drive into work I was thinking about the benefits the site gains him, and pondering how to translate that into the cost of the site.
Actually I used all of these tools also but what I meant was if you build a tool any idiot can use then rest assured every idiot will use one. It's all good if the goal is leveraging the skills sets of the folks you hire. For programmers who really love to know things all the way down these tools are at best boring, and many hackers avoid them because when you really need them for something and hit a bug you're dead. There's nothing worse than going to upper management and saying I got stuck because VisualStudio won't let me do X.

This wasn't meant as flamebait.
Touch/e.

Capitalist economics is pretty useless as a theory, if it doesn't work in practise then it's no use. Define "work". The purpose of capitalism AFAICT is to make money for wealthy capitalists and it does a pretty good job at that. The social fixes added by governments to avoid the capitalists destroying the workforce (eg social security, min wages, health care) are the only reason it can continue. And now of course we have the bailouts, without which the capitalist economy would be dead already rather than groaning in death pains.

I'm pretty /au fait/ with the concept of borrowing to leverage larger sums of money to optimise efficient growth - floatation works IMO only if those buying have altruistic reasons as well; everything is too open to abuse from the big investors. Efficient allocation of resources is not the net effect IMO.

Another example, I can see how you want to mitigate against changes in currency destroying your profit on a large / long-term cross-border project by ForEx deals, but this isn't only how ForEx is used.

I don't see how gambling doesn't encompass a naked-short-sell (say) unless you have opportunity to influence the market by some insider trading, which is both [normally] immoral and illegal, or predict the market by being privy to some deals before they are made (as in the recent expose of the NYSE network being sniffed).
What ChromeOS could be
Currently we may work irregularly together, but I doubt we will take any extended projects together again. But who knows.

Thanks!
Erin Andrews Video Peep Pictures Rapidshare
> Somehow this comment seems related to the recent recursion post.

oops not intentional... Im not sure how that got in there (fail copy/paste)

> BTW, I think it's fine to complain in a new post.

Fair enough ofc. I just thought I would raise it in case people had missed the guidelines :)
Better Arguing: Review of "Why I Became an Atheist"
I think I get it. He's not a dev & he's working with "cloud" apps so he very understandably doesn't care about source code availability. To him freedom/openness/etc is windows app development vs iphone app development. And something about more features means you're more free to do what you want.
Thanks much to you (and dtf) for the feedback. Really appreciated. We don't get a lot of press (you'd think that whoever wrote the piece about open source media apps would have at least Googled around a bit beforehand...), but the WOM is working nicely.
"Thoughtful comments that are factually wrong should be downvoted."

Maybe. Maybe not. But one thing's for sure. It you think something is "factually wrong", your reply provides much more feedback than a vote.

I'd like to think that judgment based upon data is what separates hackers from posers. Let's see that data please.
'Shanghai to promote two-child families'
Cool. Agreed.

But just like the pirates say, it's not a code. More like guidelines.

I think that's what makes HN so frustrating sometimes to people (including myself). There is quite a bit of flex involved. For instance, I just submitted a blog entry I have on arguing which looks at religious-type arguments. It's probably over the line (perhaps not?) but I'm not completely sure, so I just threw it out there to let the community decide. Posting, to me, has a much looser set of rules/guidelines than commenting.

But that's just my interpretation of the community mores.
"Fairly easy to scan the comments the OP is talking about -- they're light-grey with negative scores, "

not necessarily true at the time of reading (vs at the time of posting) . You forget that comment scores are dynamic and even very old comments can be upvoted past zero (downvotes have a time window) and maybe no longer "light-grey with negative scores" by the time someone reads this submission and looks for the comments.
Kudos is not about etiquette it's about what motivates people to upvote or downvote and this differs from person to person.

Personally I value truth, humour and interesting information. You will note that etiquette isn't part of my up/down voting practice. Other people have different rules.

Kudos is a reflection of the community which means that the community is (if we follow your theory) slightly rude. I don't have a problem with this.
I do however have a problem with NOT downvoting thoughtful comments I disagree with. I think it's rude to tell people that they should think like you. I would downvote you for this but etiquette isn't part of my kudos practice and I think this discussion is interesting.
To continue with your analogy, I would assume most people would be very irritated with a compiler which only reported that you made an error but didn't give you any context into where the error occurred.

Most compilers make a large effort to give you good error messages with file names and line numbers so you can correct your mistake.

Downvoting is like reporting an error with no context: not very useful in determining what is wrong with the comment.
Report says U.S. government ill-equipped in cybersecurity
Microsoft's Windows Revenue Skids, Netbooks a Factor
As someone who has received a string of downvoted commented recently (admittedly they were warranted given the nature of some of them) I really don't see the problem.

Someone disagrees with you and does the initial downvoting, then groupthink kicks in and your score hits the floor.

It's a simple fact of life in social media sites (it occurs on many sites with differing communities), this is why PG put in the -8 limit, to combat the detrimental effect of this kind of groupthink.

Honestly, deal with it, it's just online Karma, a simple numerical value... what effect does it really have after you've unlocked various features on HN.
It would be very interesting to see a list of the top 50 or so downmodding offenders next to a list of their "karma score" (or whatever it's called here). Even anonymous statistics would be interesting. Some people are just mean because they can be.
That caught my eye, too! My best guess is that it counts as some kind of gambling or game of chance in Quebec, and there's legal implications. That's only a guess, though
How raindrops fall
Most popular Rails sites & webserver & appserver (stats)
You probably can't. I don't know if it's at the federal or the state level, but people are usually protected from signing away their rights in a contract. For example, a contract that stated I was not able to vote in an upcoming election would be unenforceable.
Ultimately, it's a culture thing. I've been here for the better part of a year, and I've noticed that comments which I feel are worth lots of merit (I wrote a script that makes your life noticeably better! here!) and ones of less merit (It's the same as a link 30 pixels away!) are voted to almost the same karma. This was not always the case - historically, things seemed to be voted far more consistently.

The reason for this, as I ponder it in my head, might be that the threshold for downvoting on comments is too low relative to the amount of people granted that power. In my sole opinion, as the number of people able to downvote goes up, the worth of the comment voting system goes down.

Perhaps, instead - a small economy based upon earning karma with good comments, and spending it when you make negative votes - might be a good idea.
Idea For DropBox (Integrated Backup API)
How great would it be if Dropbox offered an API to web application developers, where they could back up your data directly into special folder in your Dropbox? An example would be: My online office suite automatically backs up my documents into my Dropbox, or an online home school application automatically backs up all my worksheets into Dropbox.
I'll second this with one minor caveat. They're not necessarily "downmodding offenders" until proven as such by the data you're requesting. They're just the top 50 downvoters.
Formal Methods in Modern Critical-Software Development
Larger-than-life palatial homes of tech czars
Where does one get information on these meetups? I'm in MD area, working in NOVA, but this is the first I've heard of it.
That data's not meaningful without also considering upvotes - they could just be prolific modders.
The purpose of karma on HN is to promote civil discussion, not to show agreement or disagreement. Hence, downmodding comments that you disagree with, yet are still valid, runs counter to the system's intended use.
" if you build a tool any idiot can use then rest assured every idiot will use one"

True, but not making something because idiots would misuse it isn't a good road to go down either.

"For programmers who really love to know things all the way down these tools are at best boring"

Do you mean boring in the sense that they just work and once you understand them they do exactly what you want, or boring as in you don't care it exists and you'd rather write it yourself, boilerplate included?

For me something that helps speed up a 20 minute job into a 20 second job is pretty cool, speed increase is one of the fundamental advantages of using computers.

"There's nothing worse than going to upper management and saying I got stuck because VisualStudio won't let me do X."

I haven't been hit by that, though I can imagine it leaves a mark.

"This wasn't meant as flamebait."

Roger, remark retracted ^_^

But now I'm curious about ya, When I only knew c++ I would sit and smugly think about how what the java people were doing wasn't real programming because they weren't managing their own memory, they were letting some program do that work. I now consider this a completely silly opinion.

I think control/productivity tradeoffs like garbage collectors are a much harder decision than, say, using a code generator and tweaking the output, as you the programmer have a lot more control over the generated code than you do a VM. What say you?
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Have you ever seen 'organized and cleanly written' driver code? Have you seen all the crazy #defines in the kernel itself, all the optimized bit hacks and so forth? Its running on the hardware, its low level..it has no choice but to be dirty..its the nitty gritty :P
Nice. I tried to look through the Jazz music new releases and bailed after the first page. Why? When I clicked "Jazz", it showed me 8 or 10 albums but at the bottom it said, "Page 1 of 52". Sorry - I'm not interesting in 52 page views to see what's up and coming.

Neat idea though.
Rejecta Mathematica goes live
I disagree. Just adding a comment to explain exactly what is factually wrong is a much better way to continue the conversation. Downvotes should be reserved for vulgar, rude, or off-topic comments.
I worry that when so many comments have negative votes, readers will be more inclined to downvote future comments.

While I agree with you that it's really human nature, I still think it needs to be discouraged, if only to keep HN the kind of place where debate is encouraged.
Calculate The Efficiency of Your User Interface
The order was 1) consulting, 2) FogBugz, 3) CityDesk. FogBugz was a side project that grew into a successful product, CityDesk was the first intentional product but it was not successful.
Disagreed. If downvoting meant "you are wrong", then it would be kinda like a black-hole if it weren't accompained by a reply, because the obvious follow-up question "why is that wrong?" would go un-answered, and thus nobody learns. Since learning is what we are here for, please correct "factually wrong" posts with a reply, not with a downvote.

It seems more correct to downvote those posts or replies that do not follow the vein of intellectual conversation that HN tries to promote, those comments that distract you from the main topic instead of giving you more info to chew on.

Similarly, those that do make you think, whether you agree or not, have contributed to the conversation and should not be downvoted. If you only wanted correct comments, then this wouldn't be a conversation, it would be going over what you already know, saying out loud what you read in a book or just plain brain masturbation.

Let's have a conversation.
Haha, I just got your joke.

Using the word "frippery" is frippery.
That is awesome. I used to play with the LEGO technic kits all the time, I spent hours with them.
This is another interesting link, a talk by the author of the linked post, with a similar focus (Don't make me click): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuELwq2ThJE&feature=chann...
Thoughts on Piracy and DRM from AI War Creator
The most efficient base for computation is e. The closest integer is 3, which is why the Soviets wasted lots of time and effort making a trinary computer.
The change of UI is really hacking me off as well. It was all nice and easy to use for ages, then suddenly the UI seemed to change a number of times over a couple of weeks since the release of FF 3.5. grrrr.
I'm also MD based (10 mins south of B'more), but that meet up was the closest thing to me. Email me if you want to chat.
You are just a number in some database. Who cares if you get banned?
Maybe. But some people tend to see the good in things, and some tend to focus on the bad. I think it could be reasonably hypothesized that persons who downvote a lot focus more on the negatives.

It's hard to read contextualization or to infer what we refer to as vocal inflections through writing; I am as guilty as anyone of the occasional "posting while drinking" (which I've noticed does tend to make my writing seem a little bit more hostile than intended); however, some attempts at humor here just end up falling pretty flat.
"I don't think the GPL had this usage in mind when it was written."

I think that's the author's point: freedom and openness are not the same thing. The GPL makes software free in the sense that any programmer can see, use and modify the code and must also make their own use free as well.

Twitter, by contrast, makes its application open in that it offers a simple, powerful and permissive API to third party developers. They understand the positive network externality in allowing others to enhance and build on their own product, which makes it more valuable to everyone.

That openness is also a kind of freedom, but it's not the freedom that Stallman has in mind. Of course, as Torvalds has shown with his shepherding of the Linux project, freedom and openness can certainly coexist and reinforce each other.
Pretty ironic with preceeding commentary by Linus. As so often happens, he speaks on licensing, or on free vs. proprietary and it bites him in the ass.
Watch TV on Your PC with FreeZ | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
Here I thought the real news of the article was how high-end jewelery sellers' skills had atrophied over the boom years.
I flagged this because, though I probably would agree with the author's critique (had I read the book), I came to HN to avoid the inevitable flame wars that this topic evokes.
I never even considered FireBug and the WebDev Toolbar to be competing in any way?

To me they complement each other quite well.
Not that I've seen but it carries with it a built in money making function in that the links it shares when sites finally carry pre-orders could be affiliate links.
Machsend release – P2P file transfers inside the browser
Saturday's tough, but I'll probably be hacking Sunday if anyone around wants to meet up.
Quick: can someone create a proxy to hn which does the regexp s/\d+ points? by//g

I wonder what it would "feel" like to read hn without the quantification of quality.

After all the most interesting stuff would be still on top.

Edit:

I've done a quick bookmarklet, it seems to break links, but it gives an impression (so enter in in the urlbar at any hn site and press enter):

javascript:document.documentElement.innerHTML = document.documentElement.innerHTML.replace(/\d+ points?| by |/g,"");
Will the New iPod Touch Jump-Start VoIP?
For me, Facebook functions the same way my address book does: I pick it up when I want to contact somebody, and never for any other reason.
You make it sounds as if children need to be indoctrinated into programming. Maybe you are suffering from bias and are clouding your judgment?

Unless you really think it is too late for someone to learn programming starting at the college level. People can learn quantum/high energy/particle/etc. physics or <choose your own advanced field> starting at the college level with no previous experience. Is programming really that hard or is it more a matter of time needed to be invested studying/working becoming better?
A citizen’s responsibility before annual budget 2009
Twitter cleans house, aids newbies
Yeah, I use Z-brush in my job, and I have to agree. The overhead required just to learn the tool is steeper than it needs to be. Too many gotchas to learn. That being said, it is a great tool.
It is not an either/or - you can both vote and reply.

Thoughtfulness has little correlation to the quality of a comment. A one-liner from a subject matter expert is worth more than an entire paragraph of mere hearsay.
I do. http://www.xomb.org .

If you're interested in checking out the source, we're actually going through a huge code review / restructuring, so the main repo is actually fairly outdated. But until the new version is up to the same feature level as the old, we don't feel comfortable pushing that out. If you'd like to see the new source, it's here: http://github.com/wilkie/xomb/tree/ldc
This takes you through just about everything you need, all packages, etc. (but assumes you already have Debian set up)

For folks on Mac, etc., you may want to just Google about pre-packaged MAMP - Mac/Apache/Mysql/PHP. (I'm not sure whether there is anything set up for PHP 5.3 and latest MySQL yet.)

For a local testing server you shouldn't need to worry about performance.
I thought there were too many comments to link to:

Create's and bitdiddle's responses here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720924

This response: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720909

Is identical to this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720766

My comments in this entire conversation, also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720569 (at one point, each of mine was <0, now upvoted out of nagativity, thanks! :))
Personally, I cannot wait till more can be done in 3d space using your hands. It's going to be amazing to be able to set down the wacom tablet and mouse and and interact 1:1
I can't decide to up vote or flag the link. Still for those who are interested I tracked down the authors POV.

In a way this is kind of a rigged game for me, since I'm of the belief that God as the Great Unknowable is real. Now God as some specific version of some dogma is another thing entirely. But I'll try to keep an open mind about the entire thing. If nothing else it will be an interesting insight into how people think about infinity.

PS: I honestly feel religion is basically line noise free of content, but I still found the link interesting and far from a flame war.

Edit: On second thought flaged.
I think the people that downvoted you in the amazon threads were doing so because they thought you were trolling.

You seem to be smart, any rational person knows why jeff bezos was apologizing, so it seemed to me like you were saying something controversial to illicit a responce, and that should be discouraged imo.

(there is obviously a line betweens devils advocate and troll which I dont think you crossed, and so didnt downvote you).
In the same vain, we should also discourage upvoting simply for agreement. There is no reason why one-liners should get upvoted to very high scores. Upvotes should reward content and thoughtful discussion.