skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think the gp is far off. The author of the article clearly says that he places movies in his queue which he does not watch. If he provided truthful responses to Netflix (not interested, not-enough-stars-to-order-again) regarding these then the algorithm could be given a chance.

But he doesn't use the algorithm, and instead chooses movies the he won't watch. And then complains that Netflix will not populate his recommendations with more movies he doesn't want to watch.

Non-linear functions (such as mood over time) and non-static behavior (attitude adjustment to one title due to exposure to another) can be accounted for in the Netflix recommendation algorithm.
It seems that despite the best intentions, communities naturally self destruct

On the one hand I think you should qualify this with "online" communities, but on the other hand, nothing is forever. Online communities are just a little more transient than physical ones.

I honestly started to believe that this community was different, but now I see it's just like every other community, and will more than likely follow the established trend.

There's another phenomenon which grips people of all types, but is especially prevalent in online communities: nostalgia. Inevitably some component of the early membership will identify changes they don't like, complain vocally, and thus the mythologizing of the early days begins. My point is not whether this is right or wrong, but that whether there is substantive change or not these laments would inevitably occur due to the emotional factor.

What I find funny is that old folks reminisce about what life was like 50-60 years ago when the world really was indistinguishable from what it is today. But the gen-y is fond of reminiscing about how things were 2 years ago. "Remember back before Larry King was on Twitter?"

"Yeah, them were the days"
This is bull. The idea of karma is an illusion too. The man who stabs you in the gut and laughs, is a buddha. mu.
Chapeau! It's hacks like this that make me love the HN community :)
I'm inclined to think that this is part of the reason why the computer security kids are focusing more on online games.
They may charge you, and it may take a while, but they are legally obligated (in the States) to provide a patient with her own medical records.
Mochiweb
Unbelievably powerful software. Most Yaws installations are backed by Mochiweb.
Reading the changelog belies the complexity of that project... I would dearly love to have the time to take a look at the code for it.

Well done!
Hosted Mochiweb Documentation
If you want a POS, write in some erlang.
Sometimes you think you're hiring a Jimi Hendrix, but you wind up with a Shane MacGowan...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=776484
It's an educated guess.

If something had happened seriously to him, his family would be attending to it on a practical level. If so, I'd have expected them to have contacted someone already in the online community via his emails or by his direction. That expectation may be wrong, but you'd expect him to at least shoot a message out somehow already.

So either something extremely bad has happened and news hasn't got out, or he'll bounce back in some way. I think the latter. Furthermore, by the removal of NM's submissions of NickB, there could be a _why scenario: maybe he's wanting to rearrange his life: hopefully for positive reasons.

OTOH if something serious has happened, we could provide emotional support: but he might not want that.
Yaws Rewrite
Looks great. I've become a convert to 3d after seeing what the new circular polarization methods can do when I went to see Up. Meanwhile the world of autostereoscopy is becoming crowded, which is probably a good thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereoscopy
Because Erlang/OTP/Mnesia is a very cool platform. Mochiweb and Yaws are awesome. String handling blows, but what are you doing handling strings in Erlang?
Twitter Can Now Know Where You Tweet
Games for Extracting Randomness
It's the only way to prune the rose bush. Shit was getting pretty wilted.
At Singularity U., big brains meet the future
I installed MacPorts from SVN for Snow Leopard, I haven't had any problems yet.

Edit: I believe this is where I learned that installing from svn was necessary:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=720035
No, it wasn't. Some of us have flag options for a reason.
Listen: Google Launches An Audio Search Engine For Android
You can't please all the people all the time. Regardless of what platform you choose there always will be those who as "Why didn't you write it for Blub?" Delivering a top notch application to large market segment has a far greater potential to succeed than a lesser app to a different, possibly smaller, segment.

Your business success will come from how well you support the product and how well you respond to market feedback and implement features that are in demand. You are more likely to accomplish that goal with what you know well and are comfortable with.
Conversion Optimization
Hi,

New to this site but wanted to offer help (free) if anyone needs it with signing up more users via optimizing their landing pages and sign up forms. I specialize in product development that uses multivariate testing to improve a variety of factors that affect conversion.

Planning on moving to SF this year and would love to meet up with some interesting people in the startup sphere.

Thanks
Al
Precisely -- his opinion about netflix is based off misusing it.

If he provided reasonable ratings, only ordered the types of movies he wants to watch, and then said "it isn't working because my moods change", then I'd pay a little more attention.
slightly different scope, but i had a customer that owned a couple restaurants and had a custom POS written in vb.net that they were trying to turn into a product to market to other restaurants. it was very poorly written and their developer eventually bailed on the project, but it had everything from food order entry screens, to food supply inventory, to employee management and interfacing with a badge/swipecard printer, to a map editor for the layout of the restaurant to be able to track which waitresses had which tables.

what have you seen in POS systems that you didn't like that would make you want to create a new one?

http://checkoutapp.com/ looks like a nice system for a mac-based store.
Because it's the international Erlang day :)
ERLAGN!
I MEAN ERLANG HAHA LOL:

my website: http://www.erlang.ewebsite.com/page/erlang
FYI also able to help with SEO for people using the rails or similar framework to build their apps
plz delete
Erlang - overhyped or underestimated?
Interesting. In the absence of a downvoting feature, HN has evolved a mechanism for clearing unwanted articles off the homepage: Massively upvote an entire home page's worth of alternative articles. This is done by groups of unrelated people who concentrate their votes by using the word "Erlang" as a flag.

I'm not sure this will end well.
A meta-language approach is great for increased portability, but also requires a larger up-front effort than a single platform solution. You would need to need to define your meta-language, build the code generators and test. As you develop the application you will most likely need to evolve your meta-language toolset. Testing will also require that you test for each of the targeted environments. It's a significant increase in investment in order to capture incremental market share. I have no idea what Fog Creek's ROI is on their meta-language compared to the .Net only projects.
What a sad day.

Agreed.

I've always thought that this community was something different. I love coming here; the intelligence; the discussion; the connectedness.

Me too.

I don't personally know a single one of you, but I've admired many of you in your ability to form smart and reasoned arguments about many things.

And I've admired and enjoyed the many discussions with you too, David.

Today I learned that you're not much more than any other community, despite your qualities. Today I learned that the same thing that destroyed reddit will likely destroy you

Here's where I start to disagree with you. I think you're overreacting.

as the site grows, the community fragments, cliques form, and conflict begins

That's not my take on today at all. Just a bunch of people letting off steam. Don't let yourself make it into anything bigger.

I was hoping that pg would be able to create something that could buck the trend

I believe he has. Don't let one bad day change your mind about that. OTOH, look at the bright side. I believe a day like today will provide pg with plenty of data for mods that will actually make the community stronger.

I won't say good-bye or promise never to post again or any of that crap

Good. See you tomorrow.

this small event is a rather depressing addition to my experiences of the day

Whenever it gets that bad, I tell myself that it's time to log off and get a life. Today was just one of those days.

I honestly started to believe that this community was different

It is. Have a little faith, brother.
Ok, the author is a bit of a moron. He said stupid things and detracted from what I am guessing his point is. He also didn't read about the Netflix algorithms and how they actually work (all around terrible job of reporting indeed.)

However, to circle back, what I think is his point is interesting: how do you model "mood over time" and "non-static behavior".

You say they "can be accounted for" and don't talk about how. In the winner's documentation they say they treated "user preference" variation over time the same as chunked up "user bias" over time (they define these terms in the paper.) While that obviously performed well numerically, isn't it believable that this is not an ideal solution, but one done under severe time constraints?

The problem is by no means solved...that's all I'm saying.
Erlang: nice set of libraries for a language with no type safety. Also, no mutable state ftw.
Got the VC Model Backward? Paltalk buys back stock from VCs
Minibonds: Matching up lenders with middle market borrowers
Top Silicon Valley Startups as IPO Market Awakens
Erlang, Joel Spolsky, Haskell, 37 Signals, _why, (YCS09)
Small Returns Reported From iLike Acquisition
I am surprised there is no button to follow the author on Twitter.
Why an Email Marketing List is Essential
As someone who knows neither this underscore persona nor this erlang language, they're both unwanted noise.

Time to add a comment to the feature request thread for filtering.
A simple title word exclusion filter would be nice.

This week, it would be "erlang" and "_why"
For perspective, here's James Cameron's first film (which is the hard one because you never have money) - some context plus ~13 minutes of slightly blurry google video, 'cause it was made way back in 1978.

http://www.slashfilm.com/2008/11/15/bdsf-james-camerons-xeno...
A fresh look at OOP with concurrent objects [Spark Scheme]
Erlang on Hacker News Frontpage
Apparently a lot of people disagree with you, given the number of Erlang articles. Not that it's a very good way to deal with the problem.

Not that said "problem" can be identified objectively, anyway.

Not that flagging does enough anymore even if you did agree there was a problem, thanks to the fact that herd upvotes are now taken into account when determining how many flags are necessary.
"Venture capitalists’ rule of thumb is that a company must have $100 million in sales and have a capitalization around $1 billion to do an IPO, in order to have enough money to meet the reporting structures of the Sarbanes-Oxley law."

Yup, loads of startups are waiting in the wings for their IPOs based on these criteria. Until regulatory reform lessens the compliance burdens for smaller-cap public companies, the IPO market will "awaken" only for the rare startup.

Sadly, this limits valuations for all startups, even those that are successfully acquired. Without a realistic IPO option for most startups, potential acquirers will know that their target companies have less leverage on price and will negotiate accordingly.

This notwithstanding, the article makes the broader point that things are beginning to thaw, which is a very good development for all startups.
but does he know erlang?
Agreed on both points. It's a shame that its layout is so poor, I'm sure many must leave the site as soon as they see that, assuming that the quality of the design reflects the quality of the content.
No idea why people are down voting you, that is in fact the real article.
Why did you open an account to just ask me that? Why don't you seek him out?
Coding standards: having more errors in code than code
I tried, but I guess the attempt was too 'poignant'. Here's an idea for anyone else interested: the parallel lives of _why the lucky stiff expressed in Erlang.
I'll gladly pay for anyone's copy of this highly-collectible and future-valuable magazine if they'd ship me one to Europe :)

I can see it being an interesting subject on Antique Roadshow 2090 and buying someone something nice.
There area a number of schools of thought on that :)

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/hacker.html

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-hack.html

http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

( I like the first one.)
I would just be happy if they dropped the natural language queries and gave me a heirarchical view of what's in it, filterable by keyword. Maybe give me a simple and well defined query language.

The fuzziness of natural language input always annoyed me.
I was thinking the same thing. I have a feeling pg might be before too long as well.
Publishing to Twitter from Facebook Pages
A/H1N1 flu vaccine to start
Urban flash mobs exploit one of the major weaknesses of cities, which, arguably, is their major strength: economy of scale through density.

Personally, I (and mammals of all other species) need more space.
Rough Cut: Erlang Code coverage with Rake
A virus that infects Delphi files… at compile-time
How to document Erlang code
Ask HN: Etherpad like whiteboard?
Is there a free web based real-time shared whiteboard? Or does some desktop IM client have this? Or some other tool you recommend?
Erlang is dynamic strong typed. It IS type safe. It's just not statically typed.

You can get static types for the safety through dialyzer, which does success type inference on source code or existing code (as long as it was compiled with debug info).

The tool will let you annotate types if you want it to make it more strict, otherwise it will just infer them. It will also analyze code to try and find things like patterns that will never match, case clauses that are shadowed by a previous one, etc.

There is also TypEr, which will work with DIalyzer to annotate existing functions for you.
Maybe you should leave yourself a bit more time if you're not ken. Then again, maybe not.
Bozo Sapiens - Curse of the Yummy
Ok, cool. It does work under konqueror 4.x, in case you were curious :) Also, should the modules in the list be ordered? They appear not to be, or at least they don't seem to be in any order I can determine.
The problem with linking to the print version is you don't get to see the comments. My favorite story of all was in the comments and comes from Ken Demarest who worked on Wing Commander:

Back on Wing Commander 1 we were getting an exception from our EMM386 memory manager when we exited the game. We'd clear the screen and a single line would print out, something like "EMM386 Memory manager error. Blah blah blah." We had to ship ASAP. So I hex edited the error in the memory manager itself to read "Thank you for playing Wing Commander."
Yeap, this is a common and very smart thing to do. Similar tricks are to sneak in a 1-3ms delay in the main game loop so you have about 10% of your framerate reserved, and if you're not running on DVD add some sleep() calls when a file is opened so you're not fooled by the virtually non-existent seek times of the devkits HDD.
To update, I've received a few anonymous e-mails with significant proof that the Jonathan Gillette theory is sound (though I won't go far as to say it's 100% certain).
I haven't used Vyew in a while, but found it useful. Seems to fit your criteria for free, web-based, and real-time.

http://vyew.com
It should probably be noted that what's actually going on here is that there's some issue in the Erlang runtime that's hurting it substantially on the quad-core box. On the single-core benchmarks, it speeds up substantially and is neck-and-neck with Haskell.

Partly there's an issue here that the priority for Erlang has always been more multi-box distributed systems rather thaan single-box concurrency, and partly there's an issue that Erlang's not-really-open-source nature seems to hold back progress in fixing issues like this. And, partly there's the fact that the Erlang core team doesn't really care at all about micro-benchmarks like this.
Check out dabbleboard.com Zohair, the founder, is a regular here and is making an awesome product.
Determining IP address and port of an incoming TCP/IP connection in Erlang
Personally? I find the slew of erlang articles to be far more annoying than the _why articles.
In Erlang, is there a way to create an empty function?
and because there's easy money to be made there. Well not really easy, but spending a month or so reversing WoW can pay for a nice summer vacation.
The certification process for autopilots, even for light single-engine aircraft, is designed to prevent "autopilot can't be turned off or over-ridden" scenarios.

Can it prevent all of them? No, but mine has a mandatory self-test that has to complete before it can be engaged, there is a dedicated breaker with a collar so I can kill power to just the autopilot, failing that I can kill the power to all avionics, failing that kill all electrical power, and failing all that each of the servos has a clutch on it that can easily be over-ridden by even the daintiest pilot. If the autopilot is commanding a left turn that I don't want, I can mechanically override it, or I have 4 electrical ways to shut it off. That takes "autopilot can't be disengaged" way, way down on the list of things to worry about, especially when compared to flying behind a single piston engine, with no anti-icing equipment.

If I fly my airplane into a mountain, the NTSB report will say: Probable cause: The pilot in command's failure to maintain clearance from terrain, resulting in in-flight collision with mountainous terrain. They may add: Contributing causes were: <some list of lesser causes such as weather, lighting conditions, failure of navigation equipment, projected spatial disorientation, and if they have evidence to support it, autopilot malfunction or more likely, pilot's incorrect or insufficient reaction to that malfunction>. The likelihood that S-tec [maker of my autopilot] is found liable is precisely 0.00%.
Presentation Erlang an Overview
The History of Atari: 1971-1977
Thinking Erlang 3
Erlang Syntax Highlighter
I have written a lot of database-driven web applications in dynamic languages, and the database has never been the bottleneck. It has always been in the application code.

(Actually, not true, when I worked for $LARGE_ADVERTISING_COMPANY, we checked the state of the session in the database for every request. This put an enormous load on the database, and made every page load take at least two seconds waiting for locks. No, I did not design any part of this system, nor was I allowed to fix it; so it doesn't count :)
Ah, the evils of software patents, even applied to hardware products.

I suspect, however, that the genie's out of the bottle, thankfully. They might be able to make things slightly more expensive, but lawsuits like that can take years. Moore's law is on the side of the SSD vendors, since it, unlike patent law, need not be adjudicated to apply.
Improved Syntax Highlight Brush for Erlang
Let me pull something completely out of my butt

Yup, that is most likely exactly how Wolfram claims that "NKS" has anything much to do with anything useful Alpha does.
I'm not sure why you're still arguing, but that wasn't convincing at all. I'll quickly address what you've said and then I'm done with the thread. Beyond that, I don't know what else to do other than again point you to the law and encourage you to talk to some experts in the field if you don't believe me. This isn't my analysis ... I'm just repeating what I learned when I took a class on the subject. Thankfully, it's also supported by the law. :)

"Common" does not imply correct. I will grant you that its common.

I'm not sure what you mean by "correct" in this domain. I don't think "correct" is defined here; there are only "legal" strategies and "liability-minimizing" strategies. The legality is a binary question and I think you'd agree that what Yahoo did was legal. Whether Yahoo's strategy is the most effective at limiting the liability is almost a closed question as well. You conceded earlier that it is a common strategy. The reason it is common for online service providers is that it is currently the most sure-fire strategy for limiting liability stemming from speech that users make.

... it explicitly counters your broad "better safe than sorry aproach" [sic]

No, actually it confirms what I said and explicitly debunks your claim that taking down the content is equivalent to adjudicating the copyright issues. The point of the provision is that you don't need to make a judgment; as long as you take the content down upon being made aware of potential copyright violations, you're fine. Hence, "better safe than sorry."

Without a takedown notice from a copyright holder, or an account dedicated to reproduction of unlicensed content, this is no legal reason for taking this content down.

What makes you think there was no such notice?
No, it's pretty obvious that they were close friends and coworkers, but not the same person.
Thanks! I went to fashion school myself, and felt much the same. In fact I was actively discriminated against by some of my teachers for using computers in my creative process (India, 1995). In their ignorance, they believed that "the computer did all the work." If only!
Ask HN: Use Facebook to land interviews?
I'm currently seeking an Internet professional job (Marketing or Web Design). I've sent numerous resumes out & never received an interview invite, until I found names of hiring managers(on company site) and then found/sent them message on Facebook re: jobs. This worked and landed me an interview that went great with her(age 29), but 2nd interviewer her boss (age 47) hearing I did this ended interview. So, would you use Facebook this way or it's going to far?
Ask Bored HN Readers:  Why was this killed?
This article seems pretty legit, and had a great discussion going:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=776111

Why was it killed?
Thoughts on .Tel and WebFinger
Ask HN: Rate my new start-up
Just redid the site, and bought an expiring site, and its data! So excited, however, I still need some advice to get me goin! ;)

http://bit.ly/LvhkY
Informative article, though I wish there was a bit more quantitative comparison to fluorescent, qualitatively awful though it may be, not just incandescent.
Ask HN: SXSW - Worth it?  Going?  Which Badge?
I'm planning ahead and am thinking of hitting up the conference. Does anyone have the scoop on which badge is worth getting and what to plan on doing once there?
An utterly commonplace article in itself, but to see this written by Don Box is surreal.

I fully agree. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=335734
Top Things the Letters “UBS” Stands For
Ask NH: How annoying is Erlang day?
I've noticed all the new articles about Erlang are being insta-killed. Is this really annoying people?

Like, this annoying:

http://skitch.com/nothingmuch/bhdwp/hacker-news-new-links

I personally enjoy a day where we can talk about technical things that matter instead of how AT&T is evil or how the iPhone plucked you from a burning building and saved your life.

Mostly, I want to see how long it takes for this submission to be killed.
Nice. I wish I could use voice search to search in the Market app, though.