skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately "improving articles on subjects of note" (as well as arguing notability) requires more contentious editing/lawyering compared to "developing new articles on marginal topics". The lawyering is exciting for one kind of old-hand contributor -- but turns off many others.

So optimizing for "improving articles on subjects of note" may paradoxically serve to make total editor attention more scarce, and waste more of it on low-value disputes and incremental refinements. "Why bother," a newbie or loosely-attached casual contributor might ask, "when all these busybodies keep marking subjects of interest to me for deletion, and mangling prose with obsessive footnotes (or requests for same)?"

!#@!@^% deletionists are ruining Wikipedia. They'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
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I'm maintaining that distinction the whole way down

Then why do you insist on ignoring the distinction when I use the term? I mean one thing, but you claim I mean the other.

By censor I was referring to censorship a presumably immoral violation of rights such as that done by government, which is how the post I replied to used the term, how the term is most often used, and the only way that makes sense in what you agree started as a moral argument. It is what I have meant the entire time.
Do people really think poor people choose to be so? Nobody wants to be poor.

That no one wants to be poor is obvious enough, but it's hardly the same as whether or not they choose to be. The poorest person I know has an IQ of 186 and a PhD in chemistry. He chooses to live on government disability and not work, even though he's quite capable of doing so. But he he shares a quality I've noticed in all of the poor people I know personally: a belief the world owes him a living. Everything in his screwed-up life is someone else's fault, never his, no matter how much damage he inflicts on others.

That isn't all poor people, but it's a lot of them.
I suppose it would be a good strategy for those who want their flags counted to flag newer rather than older articles then. The more hours that have passed, the higher the odds are that those who would flag already have.

It would also be a deterrent for those such as myself who flag articles for nauseatingly bad grammar. I don't have that much patience when reading pages with verbless sentences, "there is" vs "there are" mistakes, and that sort of thing. Most 20-somethings do, though. I flagged one just this week after running into a paragraph that started with the following sentence:

Anyway.

The way I had looked at the issue up until now was that this sort of flagging still had some use. Articles would rarely get killed for terrible grammar alone, but if they were also somewhat inappropriate for another reason, then the grammatical errors could push them over the edge.
Deletionism nudges the project power more towards those with "editing-as-sport and status-seeking" motivations. Procedural games are what they like.

For new and casual contributors, deletionism forces them to engage on topics they aren't passionate about -- older topics and wikipedia lawyering -- rather than the marginal topics they're excited to get started (and which may become rigorously 'notable' in due time). Some of these people will just be driven away.
The best scam I have seen for this booted linux off a USB flash built into the "laptop" deep down and inside and they gave you a VNC session to a nearby beefy Windows XP running on dual cores and 4GB (these particular guys were caught after I pulled out the ethernet, but I would have paid them a grand in cash if they had the foresight to add a wifi card.) The laptop itself is probably some kind of cheap ARM processor with 128 megs. Others have been ancient laptops put into a brand new case and the Windows OS hexedited to oblivion to report larger resources (this is even trivial when the sellers are pretending to be Lenovo employees; they say it has no OS and they can boot the machine to BIOS, show you the resources it has and peripherals but until it fails to find and OS in the MBR; yyyyeah, you just been looking at a "demo"; the power button has been rigged to replay a video; press ALT-TAB and you will end up in Windows 98 Media Player.)

P.S. If you suspect a scam don't call them out on it. Just say you have no money and walk away. Most of these "criminals" are just unemployed laborers working for a local mafia anyway, no need to make the poor guy lose face.
Just got the app. What's with the 17-and-over warning?
Wow! Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo!

You have to hand them kudos for being creative though :)

Reminds me of a video compression box I was asked to inspect for an investor in the mid 80's.
This is one of the great mistakes of our time: that knowledge is the goal. If that's the goal, anything other than fact and logic-based areas are not worthwhile. But this is simply an unfortunate side-effect of the industrial revolution.

Understanding is the goal, and knowledge is necessary but not sufficient for understanding. (In fact, knowledge which doesn't promote understanding is trivia, though you probably won't know which that is until the end of your life.)

Fiction literature is absolutely one of the best sources of understanding. Be careful that you're not fishing in the river when you live near the sea.
You stole my 'recipe'. The only difference is that I usually use tofu or similar for protein (vego) and I add it first to get a just little of that tasty-but-probably-carcinogenic browning on it.

Anyway I'd like to see a book of other 'Cooking Patterns' laid out like this.
Ask HN: What do you think of my project?
http://www.searchekko.com/

It's like a "related articles" widget for blogs, but it uses visitors' HTTP referrers to target the related articles. (It only displays to visitors arriving from a search engine.)

I'm sure it's a little rough, but I'd love to hear what you guys think. Thanks!
As long as people are submitting easy hacker recipes, here's one of my staples:

-Fill a saucepan with water and boil

-While you're waiting, chop up one small onion and heat some oil in a pan

-Brown the onion in the pan with some garlic and spices (I prefer red pepper flakes, cayenne, and Chipotle Tobasco)

-Once the water's boiling, toss in a packet of your standard cheap-ass ramen and the spice packet (or just random cheap noodles and some bouillon)

-Crack an egg (or two if you want it thicker) into the mix and stir vigorously (it's easier if you scramble the egg first, but it dirties more dishes)

-Dump the onion pan into the ramen mix and add more spices to taste

Boom, you've got yourself some startup stew. Depending on the ramen seasoning you use, this can be vegetarian and eggs are a good source of protein.

Basically the single most important rule for making cheap food at home is learning to love your spice rack. I have Sam's Club jars of red pepper flakes, onion powder, and garlic powder, plus a big tub of minced garlic and an arsenal of dried peppers and hot sauces. These things can make a $.50 meal taste bearable enough to eat all the time. Plus the different mixes of spices give the illusion of being a different meal... if you use your imagination a little bit.

I see cooking a lot like hacking; once you understand how a dish works, you can take it apart and rebuild it to suit your tastes.
Ask HN:  Good Collection Agency for Freelancers?
I have a particularly bad client who is flat-out refusing to pay his final bill. It was a straightforward time & materials job, with good documentation that he asked for the work to be done and that I did it. Still, it seems there's no convincing him to pay his bills.

It's a couple thousand dollars outstanding, so I'd rather not let it go. I'm thinking the next step is to hand this over to a collection agency to deal with this for me. Can anybody here recommend a good one for this sort of thing?

Ideally, I'm looking for the sort of disreputable thugs who will show up at the fancy restaurant while he's having a business meeting and demand payment in the most damaging way possible. But at the end of the day, anybody that simply gets him to pay his bills would work fine.

Any suggestions?
If he isn't a hacker, I don't know who is. Multitracking was innovative and early multitracking was a straight up hack. The first solid-body guitar was made out of a 2x4 mounted into an acoustic guitar. He may not have hacked computers, but he was a great hacker.
What the hell are you talking about? I'm stunned that we've come so far, so fast, that you can buy a fully functional portable computer for under $100!!

Your comparison with the iPhone, which is almost 10 times the price, is completely invalid. And your little slur on "China design" is also wrong. Countries don't design things, companies do. And it's not like America has any kind of reputation for good design besides the output of a single company - which is arguably largely due to the effort of a single man!
s/the/that/

Sigh.
Sorry, I can not find the exact source. The Eidgenossen (`comrades in oath') fought against the old German Empire. Schwyz was the name of one Kanton, but soon used by outsiders to describe the whole confedereation. The Eidgenossen did not like this at first, but eventually accepted the name defiantly. However their state's official name - even today - is confoederatio helvetica. (This is in neo-Latin mostly not to give official preference to one of the countries languages over another.)

Perhaps not nearly as bad as `nigger', but `swiss' was not meant as a compliment at first either.
> Try to avoid the tofu that comes waterlogged in a little failure tub.

Why? Is there some problem with storing it this way or do those brands just tend to be the crappy ones? After you used some storing in water is the only way to keep it fresh that I'm aware of.
That's a really nice idea. Immediately I was wondering how you'd deal with refeeral spam, then I noticed your 'from search engine only' bit.

That does make me think there might be a fairly easy way to spam your service though: find a search page where page of spammer ranks high, do lots of visits from botnet to page of target with referring url search engine page.

You'd think that these are 'related' pages whereas in fact no such link exists.

You'll have to guard against that somehow, check back on the search page and see if it is really related or if somebody is spoofing the referrer.
Yes, any function gives rise to equivalence classes. And linear functions give rise to equivalence classes that preserve structure in vector spaces.

(I guess our discourse has reached its end of usefulness here.)
Why Indinero isn't "Freemium"
> which is arguably largely due to the effort of a single man!

I doubt that. I'm taking it that you refer to Steve Jobs here, and while he has a ton of influence there are a lot more people making a lot of effort than just him.

Steve Jobs by himself would - just like any other human being - have a hard time designing a functioning and well packaged toaster from scratch.

There are a lot of people involved in product development at Apple, any item they release is the product of the efforts of a very large team.

For the rest of it I completely agree with your comment.
Thanks for the feedback! In its current implementation, the widget actually only displays other articles on the installed site (that way it's more useful to the site owner). And each visitor's arrival only affects the widget as it displays to them -- they don't affect how it appears for other users.

There's a demo here: http://www.searchekko.com/demo.
Yes. Or if the victim could commit to not yielding to threats like this beforehand. Being able to commit oneself is of huge importance in games like chicken (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(game)).
Ah ok, that makes it a bit more solid.

edit: couldn't resist temptation to play around with it :)

I see how it works now, that's nifty. So, basically you're taking the search query, you retrieve the search terms and then you fish up a bunch of urls on the local server to try to capture the user longer.

This should have a measurable effect on time-on-site and bounce-rate stats.

You should do an A/B test for sets of pages with and without the widget to see if those variables change measurably (outside of statistical noise range).

That way you can get yourself a unique selling point.
Tofu is a protein too! The great thing is that all these things are easily interchangeable, so you use whatever you like.

Your post did remind me of an advanced technique. If you are cooking chunks of protein, the best method is to first fry the protein, then take it out, and then follow the original recipe. Why? Because you want to get that browning, and you only get that with direct contact between the protein and the pan. (This is known as the Maillard reaction.) But if you leave the protein in the whole time, it dries up faster than the vegetables (they have cell walls that are hard to soften).
Great info, thanks for sharing. What's the "merger premium" you usually see on such term sheets? Also, can you explain a bit more about the tax implications?
it's forced on all apps which have user generated content. i think it's a fairly new rule that the app store has.
Or solve the problem of homes by not only giving the government the right to buy at the nominal price stated for tax reasons --- but the general public.
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Don't necessarily need to. The founders run a very profitable and successful business. This is a way of getting smart people in the door with products adjacent to their existing one.

Early access to interesting products and great teams is likely more than enough value to them in return.

Disclaimer- I know the people who started this and they've got nothing but the best intentions. (They're also a quiet but highly successful company.)
Imho 2d google map is superior interface for finding information. I don't need to move with my phone around to get information etc. Was it your need to be able to recognize buildings based on street-view, because you can not read it from map? Technically impressive, thumbs up.
A Month of Fail - Lessons in Startup Management | CloudAve
That is precisely the idea. And it works. How do you think 90% of the legal and accountancy firms in London work?
Cambridge is only 45 minutes from London by train, and London does already have Seedcamp.

If you're early stage, Cambridge makes a lot of sense. Low living expenses, and a TON of angel money is around. A good number of the angels have the resources to do VC-level rounds. (VC's like Amadeus also have offices in Cambridge.)
Houses with power generation already have an indefinitely-large capacity battery on hand. It's called the grid.

If you produce too much power, you push your extra into the grid. If you don't produce enough, you pull what you need from the grid.

Yes, having local battery storage may allow you to time-shift for pricing reasons.

But it won't help power your home. Either you have enough local power production for that or not. If you do, you'll be a net exporter to the grid. If you don't you'll be a net consumer.
> It's rare I see a class action suit with merit, and this is one of them. If it was just Apple advertising it, it wouldn't be as big a problem

So only partial: the suit against AT&T makes sense (especially if they're advertising it…), again Apple not so much.
I disagree with your points 1 and 2.

Complexity of enterprise software engineering has grown, but you're making the wrong comparison as the hackers of the 1990s or 80s didn't work on anything remotely enterprisy. The effect you can have today as an individual hacker is greater than in the 80s or 90s, not smaller, simply because there are more programmable things in the world.

You're complaining about commercialization and you're making the assumption that artists and other people driven only by intrinsic values never wasted a thought on how to sell things. Historically, I think, that's not true, but I do get your point that commercial interests were certainly not the primary motivator. I think that still holds for most hackers today. Just look at all those "my 10 biggest startup mistakes" lists. Many of those mistakes stem from following technical interests instead of commercial logic.

I agree with your third point. There is a huge stinking excuse for hackers working on trivial boring things like Facebook or Twitter. That excuse is scalability. Yes scalability causes complex problems and solving them is difficult. BUT solving interesting problems comes with even greater scalability issues. Solving a difficult problem AND making it scale is worth much more in a technical as well as in a commercial sense.

I'm not saying Facebook or Twitter are useless. Apparently many people have fun using them. But making something like that is not hacking. Just look at the technologies and approaches they used in the beginning and you know that solving interesting technology problems surely was not the original motivation.
> Networks would be falling over themselves to cater for iPhone users if there was a choice in the matter.

Verizon and Sprint are in CDMA, not GSM… in the US, that leaves T-Mobile I think, which could run iPhones (unless a separate CDMA hardware is created).
> Am I supposed to listen to new music for just four minutes and then skip to something else?

So I guess Chopin's Minute Waltz is not for you.
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That sucks. One strategy that I have with people that don't pay - and this used to happen in the past, it has not happened to me in a long time - is to simply call them every bloody day.

Once at 9 am, once at 2 pm and once at 4:30. To ask if they've already paid the bill.

Be very polite, make sure you get the right department.

Pretty soon they'll figure out they can't disconnect their phone, and that you won't go away.

Suggest payments in terms, take $300 today, arrange for a pickup in their offices and bring a buddy with you.

But make sure you stay 'clean', don't do anything stupid because that would give them leverage to get rid of you instead.

good luck!

And next time make sure you get labour+materials up front, and your profits on delivery (and make sure they have nothing if they don't pay). That's good business sense anyway when you're a freelancer.

Some customers it is much better not to have, the paying ones you want to keep the trouble makers you want to get rid of.
Yep, I definitely hope so. Just emailed you too
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I'm not sure any VC in Cambridge is suitable for startups gearing towards Seedcamp. I'm not sure if Springboard is geared towards these style companies, or more ramen profitable & scale without external help style companies. I suspect the latter.

I think there is massive benefit in having all the key VCs in one area, Cambridge can't compete - but Cambridge does have tons of angels. YMMV
> Is there some problem with storing it this way or do those brands just tend to be the crappy ones?

Both. The non-tub kind is a lot firmer and tastier, mostly due to the manufacturers giving a shit, which leads to the better packaging.

You don't have to store it immersed in water, just in a plastic bag. I usually use leftover grocery produce bags. It doesn't actually spoil any faster, any spoilage is much more obvious (sliminess / breakdown into chalky goop), and it doesn't get all loose and waterlogged.
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Timetric: acting as glue for the Internet of Things
Interestingly, they announced this after releasing an album on the Internet. Nine Inch Nails also announced their farewell tour after doing online release[s] (1 regular album, and a 4 CD instrumental, collaborative set). Maybe it's a sign of really getting tired of the "music business" when a well established band starts doing online releases?
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Ask HN: Buy Car
Having recently gotten my BS CS, I'm planning on getting a car. Nothing luxury, but also nothing that requires constant tweaking (it's a car, not .vimrc). So I just want something inexpensive & stable. Suggestions?
Surely anyone who has been on a Computer Science degree knows what the fixed point finder is!
A bit like 'pay what you want' - this is a band that has the prior cred and prior revenue to experiment pretty much however they damn well please.

Other threads around me point out the cons: albums are cornerstones of artists' careers, fantastic creative canvases, and so on.

But in a future when we're streaming, not owning, our music, and where the album is already dead (unpackaged by iTunes), there is arguably a future where music is released as a steady, no-rush stream of quality tracks that then get remixed and mashed up by listeners, and placed into the totally unique and possibly more meaningful context of the user's own playlists ("albums"). Like fanfic circulating around publishing, people will put together and share suggested album-like playlists anyway, perhaps even giving them their own 'album titles'. Wisdom of the crowd principle suggests these might be even better ordered and contextualised and thus increase the popularity of the tracks within to broadened audience, driving 'airplay' and perhaps ownership
I don't know. There are some great links that I would've missed if it were not for retweets. If all you get are "mass-email"-type RTs, get better friends :-)
Are you sure that (1.0 - time_spent) executes in constant time? Or that sleep() is precise enough?
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Err, isn't there a little confusion between hacker and cracker here?
Microblogging has become too important for Twitter to rule the field.
What does this line do?

cp /usr/local/share/tokyopromenade/passwd.txt .

Copy the password file to the base directory? I haven't installed it yet, but would that expose the plain text file to the world?
I just don't really understand why another redundant label -- "not notable" -- is needed to express the underlying concept of "not verifiable".

With only a couple of narrow exceptions, lack of notability is not sufficient for speedy deletion by an administrator, which means that all those articles still take up time and consume the effort of editors who participate in the AfD. In other words, I doubt that there's enough of a saving of time and effort to justify the myriad other problems the notability criterion is known to generate.

And so it seems to me that it'd be far simpler to do away with the notability guideline and keep the focus on what it allegedly aims to accomplish: ensuring that information in Wikipedia can be verified by reference to reliable sources. If an article cites no sources to back up the information it presents, get rid of it unless/until someone comes up with suitable sources, and throw the politics and the popularity contests out of the process.
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Well, this is what God intended, of course. Beaches are for kicking back, don't fool yourself that you'll increase your productivity if you bring along a laptop: some times in life you just need to blow off some steam, kick back at the beach and maybe do absolutely nothing. Then, back at the (hopefully ergonomic) desk, with a clear head, you'll be able to concentrate five days' worth of work in three: be an effective slacker!