skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hear you express this sentiment often. Could you explain your thoughts on this?

If anything, I think the stories are the problem. Cool hacks and interesting science often fail to get the 2-3 upvotes they need to escape the new page. On page 2 of "New", I've found the following fairly decent stories that died recently: http://simplystatistics.org/2014/03/20/the-8020-rule-of-stat... http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/cassandra-...

Yet both of these are vastly more useful than Julie Horvath's "omfg, I had a workplace conflict" or "Yay basic income, no facts, no reasoning, yay" (currently 380 pts, 441 comments, was #1 for a while today).

I'd suggest that it's far more important to improve the stories than to improve the comments. The comments on a story like "JDK 8 Release Notes" or "Circuit Breaker" (about a distributed computing design pattern) are actually quite good.
Any language with proper module support since the early 80's allows for that.
Fair enough, but at the lowest income levels every cent counts. I don't see any benefit in it.

Isn't that directly contradicting the point you made earlier? If every cent counts at the lower level, then even earning 90 cents on the dollar extra is still plenty incentive to attempt to earn more.
I didn't know it was called that. I was actually thinking along the same lines. Make that the only tax. Everything else could be optional fees for services or premiums for insurance products.
In all seriousness, does this comment tree contribute to the discussion of the OP?
Yes it is a Joke. But it isn't that far fetched, which is why it hasn't been taken down.
go high - shoot for $2-3000. like peg_leg said, if they have custom coding charge much more.
"Endorsing only the best of similar comments is a feature."

Since vote count of posts was hidden, there hasn't really been a way to tell how many people agree with a viewpoint other than similar comments.
New 360 Panorama of the Milkyway
It depends on how that wealth is stored. Most wealthy people invest in things that are resilient or that even perform better under inflation. It's really the middle class that gets hit and the poor the worst because minimum wage doesn't go up that fast but prices definitely do.
If you think people can comment on each other's comment without a single emotion that's a mistake.

People share stories about their past experience, anger and frustration with one another. He cares about his ability to express here thoroughly and fully. Clearly thaumaturgy is now the one getting upset and doesn't want to make direct response anymore after offending OP.
But what if that's the only thing keeping comments on HN any good? If you post something that isn't genuinely interesting or insightful the best case is that you get ignored and the worst case is that you get shadow banned. This means that everyone hovers over the submit button and second guesses whether what they're posting is any good. I know that I've probably aborted about 1/3rd of all my comments and I think that's a good thing.
This is a really interesting setup for looking around the Milky Way.
The rules for health insurance brokers are a little antiquated. If you're going to sell health insurance online, someone in your company needs to be a licensed broker, and that person's name needs to be "on the building" so to speak.
Will there be an option to choose a colour for your bike shed? If so, how will they make it happen?
I suggest option 4: mimic Slashdot's moderation and meta-moderation system, which addressed comment quality issues in a flexible yet clear way.
- Turbo Pascal

- Object Pascal

- Delphi

- Modula-2

- Modula-3

- Oberon

- Active Oberon

- Component Pascal

- OCaml

- Haskell

- D

- Ada

- Eiffel

- ...

All languages with native code compiler available, where the header files can bot the manually or automatically generated from the implementation.

Many of them have, or used to have, code browsers and auto complete by reading the metadata stored in the binaries.

C based toolchains are still at stone age, in terms of modular programming support.
I didn't enter because I got irritated at Yahoo hijacking my Google login to make a Yahoo account and then ask for my phone number.
Maybe the easier solution would be to have two thresholds - one for un-endorsed posting and one for endorsing. Or having a heuristic that includes ave. comment score as a factor. Or... Or...

Honestly, the more I think about this, the more complicated it seems, which is usually not a good sign.
> I try to save my comments for when it's something really important.

Your approach is sound and honorable, but please do not silence yourself out of fear. By doing so you encourage a groupthink behavior on this forum.
SO has a lot of garbage posts which people expect two lines of description will receive a programmatic solution. Sometimes some moderators and users with high reputations do over-edit posts. But HN is not excluded.
Learn git workflow easily with interactive animations
It is incredible how C based compilation models become so widespread, that younger programmers are completely unaware of sane module systems in other languages with ahead of time compilation toolchains.
I think it's not about how easy it is to be endorsed. The idea of relying on other people to make your comment visible doesn't sound right. I can probably guess, against which type of comments this measure is for and I'm not sure if it's going to be enough. However, there is a Turkish saying which fits to this situation perfectly: "Damp wood, too, will burn alongside the dry", meaning, drastic measures to get rid of the wrong would damage the correct too.
It is probably a good thought but the implementation sounds too strict. The power users have ruined stackoverflow to an extent. I'd suggest relaxing the endorsement policy to a lower karma score. And perhaps a way of penalizing those who aren't doing a good job of letting positive comments in. So if you want power, it comes at a cost.

Lastly, you should also consider the intelligent but quiet guys in the classroom. Those who are uber conscious about speaking up despite having good suggestions. The fear of not being able to speak, if they don't say anything good enough will silence them.
Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu is founded by a South African
Yes, I appreciated that too. I wonder if the media has had an impact on this. In a TV interview for instance, it might be considered rude to refuse to answer a question.
love this. slight nitpick, might be helpful for an intern or somebody to help clear up some of the {illeg} pieces that can't be read artificially.

edit: switched browsers, hover over {illeg} is understandable.
I'm curious as to what others got out of a masters in Comp Sci. I didn't study comp sci as an undergrad and sometimes feel like there are concepts I'm completely ignorant of. I wonder if a masters in Comp Sci leads toward being able to handle complicated application development.
Edit: My previous comment was referring to the second occurrence of "return" in your example (after the "==>" arrow). Just noticed I mistakenly dropped the first occurrence of "return"; the first occurrence of "return" in your example is needed.
This comment you've written falls in line as one I would not endorse.

Same thing going on here; the earliest and most active members are the ones who decide what comments are worthwhile.

This is terrible. Some people don't have time for HN every day, every hour and now these users have to suck up to the elite, early and most active members' preference?
There is a large discussion on the subject here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761
Have you considered using some avg. rank threshold instead of karma for both this and down voting? or rather some blend of profile age, minimum karma, and avg. rank?

I look at 1000 karma and wonder why you would empower people who could simply be post happy.
I want this in my next MMO character design system.
I've been on HN for a long time, but I am using a different account now.

I think it's pretty bad that I have to prefix my argument with that. The outcome of this change will be to alienate new users or get them to suck up to older users long enough to boost their karma beyond noob-level. HN will become much more of an echo chamber.

Beyond that, are HN comments really that bad? There may be a few people who just know that HN is turning into Reddit. If you believe that, go read a few comments on Reddit and then read a few comments on HN.
> You left a free lunch on the table.

You appear to be discrediting opportunity costs (could those 30 minutes of researching brackets be better spent doing something practical?) and privacy costs (I'm sure Buffet's entries required a certain amount of personal information.)
There's still one perfect bracket after BOTH days (though not in the Buffet challenge): http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2001973-this-is-the-only-...
But doesn't that also mean that the rich have more mobility to move to another country with much lower taxes or just hide them like they do now? Are there even any estimates on how much money is lost due to tax evasion? Let alone the costs of lobbying (which must be expensive) and the negative costs from the consequences of said lobbying(Iraq War). Not to mention the costs of lost productivity due to monopolies(Comcast).

I guess the more important question is does it even make a difference no matter what you do. The rich will find some way to break down the system sooner or later. This seems exactly what happened in the last 30-40 years.

The answer doesn't seem to be financial, it's social. And maybe it will take an entire generation to suffer(somewhat comparable to the Greatest Generation) to truly appreciate being poor and disenfranchised.
Some of the best hackers I know are in India, and they don't use Microsoft products... I'm talking truly gifted people.

I myself am a BSD fanatic, but I recommend Linux based systems to all of my Windows using friends.
The problem I see now is we are killing each other. We got members who think they are the elite, the voice of the true HNers. And there is this other group which people are unhappy with their downvotes because people disagree with their alternative views. This extra moderation to me seems to be causing a war among HNers.
Doesn't it mean that every tcp connection would have to query dns at the beginning? What about client dns cache? Also, isn't that expensive in terms of connection time?
CITY is actually the world-wide best selling theme (or at least it was a few years ago)[1]. So while there are lots of other themes, just plain old Lego sets are still going strong.

[1] http://lego.gizmodo.com/5019797/everything-you-always-wanted...
I don't understand your system. So someone with over 1000 Karma would have to decide if my comment is worthwhile to be live. But at times my comment could be a good single line comment.

This is not a good system.
The $5 sign-up-fee isn't as cheap as it would seem in developing countries.
Sure, that's my point exactly. It's not interesting to comment on trivial omissions they made. The shortness of their links is not among the difficult problems that an image hosting service must solve.
Oh, do you want to know a strategy for 2048? You won't win every time but you should get passed that score regularly with it....
I have no degree on AI, or any sort of specialization, apart from studying by myself. But I do work with AI, using different approaches and techniques. /disclaimer

My view of AI is that it is as complex as it is fascinating. It might seem easy to just download an artificial neural network library, feed data to it and then see what it spits back, but what data should you feed it? And you want it learn? Or should you use a genetic algorithm instead of neural networks?

Those seem like easy questions to answer with a handful of math formulas, but the formulas will help you more on giving you a firmer assessment on the scope of the solution space, how to measure if it is really progressing, when the AI is in learning plateaus, etc.

But the big reward is in how to creatively use AI. By "seeing" data in a new way you can ask different questions, and might get some interesting answers.

I'm telling you all this because my view on how and when to use AI evolves constantly to this days, and I've been working with it for about 7 years.

So start studying right now if you really like this field. Not only will the formal AI education become easier, but you will probably be able to get more from it if you get there with some experience.
Do I have to be a member of the Communist Party to get the comment approved?
British Library Says It's Copyright Infringement To Take Photos Inside Library
I agree with you. Using OSS doesn't mean that you will have no software vulnerabilities, but when was the last time you heard a major news story about a Linux based virus?
South Africa is in the south?
I read HN every hour (almost) and stay updated on the comments of many posts that are very interesting. I read the comments more than the post itself.

I chose not to comment since I didn't feel like I add value to the discussions. That may not be the same a year or 5 years or a decade down the line when I think HN will still be relevant and I will be more wiser to say something. Learning is forever and I would feel very sad if somehow my commenting in the future is buried because I did not have enough karma. Atleast, that's my take on it.
My 6 year old son is obsessed with Lego. I think it's great to watch him follow the directions to get a big set built. (So far, the biggest he's done solo is ~ 1100 pieces). The process of following the directions, seeing the small changes from step to step, is great for him. Some of the newer sets have some really good engineering behind them too. The above 1100+ set was a Star Wars ship that basically had a Technic skeleton that the rest was attached to.

But I'm far more impressed with the little creations he makes on his own by mixing and matching sets. Usually he makes small transport ships out of anything he can get his hands on, but it's the random stuff that's the best.

(And I think it's hilarious to see Batman fighting along side Clone Troopers.)
Update: I'm actually having high hopes for webpack as it seems to combine the strengths of both Browserify and RequireJS, and seems tweakable to package modules into a couple of files. I'm not sure why it's way less popular on Github though.
Same here. But occasionally he'll diverge and change the design a bit, or he'll try to build it just by looking at the cover, or not finish the third rail wagon, because he has the main engine, and a second one.
In reading a thread (say, over the course of 5-15 minutes), I will often want to post comments at various points. Because I am not in a popular HN timezone, if I needed to wait for comments to be endorsed, I would find this seriously frustrating. Waiting and checking to see if a comment had been approved would be a huge time sink.

Edit: I think that limit has been lifted to five now.
Or my favorite phrasing, "Any sufficiently dominant corporation is indistinguishable from a government."
Please make the page a bit more mobile device (touch) friendly.

A simple HTML5 media query (CSS) that increase the font-size, add some space around the links (above the comments) and make the page content (table width) 100%. Thanks.
> Not if you don't have access to machinery, modern seeds, chemicals, weather forecasting, tens of thousands of years worth of agricultural research and oral history, et cetera.

I disagree with that. Half my native country is rural, with a really long history of agriculture, and it's far from homogenous. Work ethic and intelligence really matter, even for farmers (especially work ethic; some people just work harder than others). There's always that one farmer who has more cattle or pigs than the others (or takes better care of their crops), and a few who can barely feed themselves. This was true even centuries before modern equipment, like tractors and chemicals.

> Basically the only thing that matters is luck and hard work.

Not everyone is equally hard working; in fact, I'd say the differences among individuals are quite significant. Also, you're ignoring intelligence/creativity.

> But much less so than "taxation is theft".

Also, as I already said in another comment, I'm not arguing that "taxation is theft" (as I already asked another commenter, please point out where I explicitly claimed that). I'm only arguing that paying people so they don't hurt me is theft (or extortion or a protection racket).

Two ideas seem insane to me in this whole thread: 1) that "we should pay poor people to stop them from killing us" and 2) that "we as a society are punishing people who can't find a job", with the corollary of "we're rewarding people who do have jobs". So far, I've only been arguing against these.
Middle click doesnt really work on mobile and not at all on the various HN interface apps which people use due to HNs layout being 1990-era style and not usable at all even for reading on mobile.

Also, for the fuck of it, if I see ten good but un-endorsed comments, I have potentially ten tabs to load (hello latencies on UMTS links) and ten tabs to close! My netbook doesnt have enough pixels for the tabs, let alone RAM. Text-based browsers dont even have tabs.

The HN community may be great and all, but the technological part of it Just. Plain. Sucks.

YC is hunting for startups, and every single one of all the YC-backed companies has a better website UX than HN/YC itself. What a shame.
I would imagine most people would hedge at least one round earlier. A perfect bracket going into the elite 8 would have an expected value of ~1M after tax. Nobody would ride it past then. Of course, you end up running a 1/128 chance of being the unhappiest winner of a million bucks ever.

I actually think that if anyone had gotten through this weekend clean (48/48) the expected value is 9k pretax, and I think most would take that.
And my kid can spot the difference between LEGO and some other brands, even if the pieces are compatible - it's something about the texture, the coloring, and how they stick together that makes LEGO unique.

Recently he got some cheap "no-name" chinese produced "lego-clone" - just a tractor and a character to drive it. It was so bad, the pieces were not sticking together properly. The character's head kept falling off, and the hair piece too.

But eventually he used some real lego "replacement" pieces and did it.

We must have like 10,000+ pieces now... If only there was a sorting LEGO machine!
Except to ... to many layers of indirection.
He's talking about South India. Not South the direction of geography.
My son inherited my old Legos (mid-late 80s) when my dad moved somewhat recently. He actually lost a somewhat rare piece from one of the newer Star Wars sets and we found a replacement in the big bin of Lego from my childhood. That then led to a long building session of putting together one of the classic airport sets. It was awesome. And because it's Lego - they all still fit. I also had about a dozen 1980-something space guys, which was a great tie in for the movie.

So yes - keep the Lego, ditch everything else. You can download almost all of the old instructions online, which makes it that much better.
I think I may have overstated my case ;-)

I've taken the opportunity to look up how rainbow tables are used, and in practice, what are constructed are rainbows of likely hits, as well as exploitation of crytographic weaknesses in the MD5 algorithm. So, no, it's not the total address space, but, say, for keywords in multiple languages or known revealed passwords (of which the most common give you tremendous amounts of access -- the top 10 and 100 passwords will access many systems, and lists of millions are now available, for which rainbow tables are easily constructed). And the collision problem also remains.

As for assembling large amounts of storage: with distributed systems, whether on bare metal, cloud systems, or botnets, it's possible to aggregate terrebytes of memory (not merely on-disk storage) for quite modest budgets within reach of a company or moderate-high-net-worth evil genious, let alone a state actor. For commodity x86 servers, high-end memory now looks to be ~320 - 512 GB, though terrabyte range wouldn't surprise me (I think SGI are still pushing the envelope in this area in their Rackable incarnation).
The concepts aren't mutually exclusive. The spying is the underlying problem. The fallout is indisputably the result of Snowden's heroic disclosures -- and yes, I'm a full-on fan of what Snowden did, as well as why and how.
It is a powerful assertion to say you cant do something ever. There are many "natural creations of human interaction" to be discovered, and many that died or we definitely wish they died with a really strong consensus.

And prisons having currency could be a model example of how money is an arbitrary and unfair element of trade and distribution.
I think you need to see what Dr. Danielle Martin[1] a Canadian doctor had to say when she testified to the U.S. Senate defending the Canadian system.

The reference was to Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams’ controversial 2010 decision to undergo heart surgery at a Miami hospital.

“It’s actually interesting,” replied Dr. Martin, “because in fact the people
who are the pioneers of that particular surgery … are in Toronto, at the Peter Munk Cardiac Center, just down the street from where I work.”

She then hinted that Mr. Williams was of the mistaken belief that simply paying more for something “necessarily makes it better.”[2]

[1] http://youtu.be/iYOf6hXGx6M?t=1m22s

[2] http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/03/12/toronto-doctor-smack...
I don't understand. Can you provide a back of the envelope calculation to explain your thoughts?

For a BI to be bad from the perspective you're talking about it has to actively make people less productive.

You mean like a 10% reduction in work hours? https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money...
That's what I'm seeing here. Very little discussion on the article, lots of people posting lists of things they feel persecuted for believing, with the implication being that they're sitting there drumming their fingers and waiting to be validated by history. Oh, and other people arguing with them about those things. Hooray for the Internet I guess? :)
I like that line. I'm stealing it.
These reasons don't matter. What matters is that you use a widely used hash function through a widely used software library. Most security issues are implementation-related, not cryptography-related. And if there are problems with a scheme, more people should look for them. SHA2/3 are better options under this light.
Make Your Own 2048
Slashdot has the best and most advanced moderation system. Reddit/HN style moderation system is very simple but seem to work in most cases just fine too. But why change a working system? Maybe HN should add Sub-Topics (like reddit)?
DC-powered rail systems such as the Chicago "L" can be jerky because the motor controllers are stepped not continuous. It's basically late 19th/early 20th century technology. The AC-powered systems in their newer rolling stock offer smoother operation.
It goes back before East Germany as well.
Is there any evidence of credible/useful proprietary anti-virus software for Linux?
The discussion, and the topic, talks about a change that isn't so radical but that could improve things in society as a whole. But you're still talking in 'me' vs 'they' terms, and 'the criminals' and 'threats', mocking 'the unfortunate'...

This is not a conversation for the 'what about me?' mindset. The whole of this discussion(also to the other replies) you're only talking about yourself, I don't want to talk baseless opinions, the stuff I'm talking about is conceptual so you need to understand the concepts that precede the topic and don't seem to be there yet. I've made my argument at the first reply then tried expanding on it but you missed it