skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed, but it's not just a motivation problem. Deletionists get an upper-hand over inclusionists when the article is deleted because the history is not available, and you have to start all over. You can't just revert to a previous state of the article (that may not have been far from a state where it had enough references and content to avoid being questioned for notability).

Here's a particularly interesting self-referencing article that was deleted and previously discussed on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=518508
And here's the deleted page--with no options to look through the history and see what it used to look like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiid

If you could continue to help edit an article that was made invisible for most users, articles would have a lot more time to prove their notability.

One interesting question is whether Wikipedia is legally even allowed to hide the history of deleted articles. It's not even available in the database dumps, which wouldn't be a realistic format for the vast majority of users anyways:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dumps#What.27s_not_avail...

Content is licensed under GFDL or CC-SA so you'd think they are required to make it available somewhere.
Needs more cumin. Seriously, it's the taco spice. It aint a taco without cumin. Go to your spice rack, and take a sniff of the cumin jar. Yep, smells like tacos.
I'm leaving RIT/ROC this upcoming Sunday! I would have loved to attend. I know a few HN readers that would surely like to drop by. I'll spread the word.
Sure beats paying $4 to work at a coffee shop. Plus, not every coffee shop lets you bring your soldering iron or desktop computer.
"As for political articles, the test is whether the article is an instance of the ordinary back and forth of debate on some political question, or whether it's about some deeper underlying phenomenon that only happens to be related to politics. E.g. "Politician A accuses Politician B of X" or "Why policy Y is good/bad" are probably both offtopic, whereas "How political campaigns use statistics" is probably ok."

"Why the US healthcare system is broken" (well written or not) can be judged "politics" by this guideline according to the "Why policy Y is good/bad" part.

That said,

suggestion 1: This would be a great addition to the HN guidelines. Appending the above to "Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon." would add clarity.

suggestion 2: Can the "misflag rate" be made visible to flaggers as part of their profiles? This would help us improve our flagging.
You make some good points. Before I started doing meditation, I often practiced the kind of introspection you are describing. I still do sometimes, but not as much as before. I find that it really does help in gaining a sense of self and it is also empowering, so I can relate to how it pulled you out of depression. But as you mentioned, it can make a person way too analytical about everything and therefore hard to relate to others.

I think it is very good for creating works of art or hacking but for me it hinders being able to just relax and "feel the vibe" especially in social settings. Meditation, I find, creates for me the much needed balance.

Nice to have a normal discussion on here as opposed to the flamefests all over the web, HN is very cool!
Calm down. Breathe.

Hacker Dojo is a California Nonprofit Mutual Benefit Corporation. Fully tax-deductible federal 501(c)(3) status will hopefully happen when things settle down.
Ask HN: NYC HN Meetup?
Is there a decent NYC population on HN? If so, let's plan a meeting in the city in the next week or two, and make some friends! Feel free to post any places to go/things to do that would be interesting.
I would agree with you - but the 'infobox' (for lack of a better term) stays stationary over the same point of the building for the whole thing. I can't imagine the computations to keep it that centered based simply on the orientation of the phone would be either accurate enough or much faster than basic block/rectangle image processing.

After all, Google street-view does some simple image processing like that in-browser using JavaScript, and I'd imagine native iPhone code performance would approach that level of power.
Chinese netbooks break $100 mark...
That is because everybody uses health insurance for things that really shouldn't be insured.

My Dad was recently complaining that his prescription coverage was cut, so he was now paying about $100/mo for his prescriptions. I asked how much the pills would cost with no coverage, and he dug out the bills and determined they would cost about $600/mo. This sounds outrageous I suppose, until you realize that he pays about $1100/mo for insurance. Granted, that is for more than just drugs, but if insurance was really for unaffordable things, it wouldn't cost that much. My dad is still paying for his monthly prescriptions... just in a roundabout way.

Anecdotes aside, the article points this out too. Would you expect your fire insurance to cover the cost of batteries for a smoke detector? Of course not. But if it did, the batteries would most likely cost more, since instead of having to sell to millions of battery buyers in Wal-mart, battery makers would be selling to mere dozens of fire insurance companies, who would pass on the costs to those buying the insurance, and hence have no incentive to control battery costs. Even worse, the administrative costs of having people constantly file battery-replacement claims would dwarf the cost of the battery itself. So people would suddenly be paying $25 more a month to avoid buying $2 worth of batteries.

Sounds absurd I'm sure, but that is exactly how our comprehensive health insurance works today.

If people actually used health insurance for things that are equivalent to a house burning down, it would function more like other insurance, and get cheaper. I'm 26, and my most expensive health expense to date was my birth. The next closest thing was probably when I had my adenoids out when I was 7. After that, when I broke my big toe ($900). None of those are akin to having a house burn down or getting in a car wreck. The first two were predictable and all three could be payable with credit or HSAs. It makes no sense to pay thousands of dollars a month so you can go to the doctor for free when it would only cost $150 anyway.
I don't think hackerspaces would be considered a real business. Most of them are non-profit and community driven. If you live somewhere with enough hackers, it makes sense to have something like this. My grandmother has a "hackerspace" for their gang of mahjongg players. All the gamers put in money to rent out a huge office where they can play 24/7.

More info here:
http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Hackerspaces
Swing by, it will be worth the drive :)
Tim Tyler's Microswitch Keyboard
Good news for beer-bellied hackers: having a gut is hip
Facebook browser that is: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/rockmelt_netscapes_andr...
With the accelerometer you can detect gravity (true down) and your angle relative to it. Then model the earth as a plane and keep the label a constant distance above the ground.

Seems like they did a good job of it though. It's really slick.
Do you really think government will be able to negotiate the price of basic medicine better than say Walmart/Costco? US have had Medicare/Medicaid for years but that had no effect on price of basic medicines.

Walmart enters the market and voila, you can get 90 day prescription for 10$! You can get similar deals at Costco and Sams Club. Show me one government program which has actually reduced the price of medicine. Walmart opens up clinic at their stores at a low cost so that uninsured people can visit the clinic and actually get basic treatment by paying cash. CVS and other pharmacy stores have followed Walmart's footsteps and started their own clinics program.

As I commented elsewhere, having a school voucher system will ensure that everyone gets education while also letting free market do its magic.

I am from India and we don't have any free health care there. We do have free public school but they are terrible. My father worked hard to send me to private school and I did part time work in college to fund my education.

And I am not suggesting that government should not provide public infrastructure. As I have shown in my other comment, not even 1% of your tax money goes towards infrastructure. Why are you not talking about (outraged about) the immense waste by done by defense/social security/medicare medicaid?
Also, webkit (Chrome & Safari) seems to render the background JPEG in a slightly browner color than Firefox (on Mac OS X) - which is different from the page background. Design geeks these guys are not.
i dont understand , are we still talking about a qwerty keyboard? or a special kind with just two rows, one of which is a "home" row that is placed wherever certain fingers are?
No one is suggesting that there should not be government or taxes. What we are advocating for is limited government and minimal taxes.

Think about this for a moment. You think that health care is a right and everyone should have it. To expand this, you can also say that 'food' is a right and everyone should get it. Should government get in to business of taxing people and making sure that food is provided for everyone?
Actually, Natal's AI is believed to have come from Peter Molyneux's Dimitri Project, which then turned into the full Milo project. Its motion capture, facial recognition and voice recognition, not to mention the microphone array helps perform acoustic source localization and ambient noise suppression, all of which was developed in-house at microsoft.

3DV was bought out in March 2009, Natal was shown fully functional and shipped to developers at E3 in June (actually 2nd-4th). So you're telling us in the space of maybe 2-3 months work Microsoft managed to make a fully functional Natal. Not to mention the system is entirely different. ZCam's sensing was an 8-bit 1/4-VGA , where as Natal's uses an infrared projector, tied with a monochrome CMOS sensor to allow it to work under any lighting condition (including no lighting) and allows it to sense at different ranges.

The differences are so huge in design it is impossible it was bought and demonstrated in the space of a couple of months.

I'm sorry, I don't buy it that microsoft bought Natal, there was simply too much work required to say they only had access to the ZCam after March 2009 and allowed people to actually play with Natal's demonstrations at E3.
I wasn't responding to you, but to the post I commented under. I don't think of "hacker" as someone who does most of the stuff found in the first paragraph of your writing that opened this whole thread.
Because the original vector is not pointing in the same direction as the final vector (it is at an angle of 60 degrees to it).

Mmm, no, the axis around which I rotated the coin didn't change at all, by definition.
Kragen started blogging about 5 years before blogs were invented:

http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/mailing-lists.html

edit: oops, I thought you were responding to Kragen's comment. Read his 'blog' anyways, it's awesome :)
Also, apparently they own http://me.lt/ which is a newly configured version of https://scalr.net/ (Cloud Computing on top of EC2).
XYZ Cancer Testimonial On Alternative Therapies Great News
I Know A Secret for Fighting Cancer! By Sharon Scarf
With all the talk about the swine flu and its vaccine doing the round these days, I was seriously worried about my health. The big diseases - AIDS, hepatitis, cancer, diabetes to name a few.
I'm glad to see Parakey went somewhere after all.
I'm gonna be in town, and friends are starting one of these locally. I'm not looking to join, I am just curious to see how it works - can I stop by?
Cash value life insurance blog colorado
Through the infinite banking system, you be the bank! This wealth creation program is intended on helping you finance the future through cash value life insurance
Is Microsoft truly evil?
I have mixed feelings about 'augmented reality' (especially with regards to those bluetooth jerks), but this seems like it would be extremely useful with HUDs.
Ask HN: What's your favorite reference material on starting a business?
I'm starting a consulting business on the side to save up money for more ambitious ventures. Unfortunately, I know nothing about starting business. I was hoping that some of the folks here who have successfully launched could share any references they found useful. I'm specifically concerned with the financial side of things, but any trustworthy references and advice would be much appreciated.
Hacker Dojo is like sex? This must be the kind of sex one has with a roomful of 20-year-old "ninjas" obsessively typing the acronyms PG, HN, YC, DHH, and RoR into their MacBook Pros. As Paris Hilton would say, that's hot.
This is old and incorrect. Adam Kennedy released the PPI module and has been working steadily on the Padre editor which is capable of refactoring Perl code as well as parsing it.

Padre: http://padre.perlide.org/
PPI: http://search.cpan.org/dist/PPI/
Well... ok, point conceded that they are separate things, but the reality is that they're so often linked that for practical purposes of sites like this they might as well be the same thing.

Reason being, is that a good discussion of the economics of some policy is about the most efficient to make it happen, but invariably the question comes up about whether it should happen or not. For instance, with health care, some people deeply believe that it should be available to all; others think the government shouldn't spend money on that sort of thing. With an article on the economics of cap and trade vs taxing carbon emissions, people will invariably pop out of the woodwork and deny that people can or are creating negative environmental externalities, or if they are, that anything should be done about it. And so on...

So... yes, they're separate, but the resulting discussions are indistinguishable in most cases.

As an example, if you look below at the comments, regarding school vouchers, someone corrects me that a "real" libertarian solution would simply be to abolish the idea of public schools paid for through tax dollars. There's such a fundamental disconnect in terms of someone who wants that, and someone, who, for instance wants a Nordic style state, that discussions aren't likely to go anywhere very good.
Once again the market and technological progress produces something that a dedicated group of smart individuals at a non-profit could not do.

I have no idea idea why this happens, but I've seen it again and again.

I wish that non-profits could be more effective at things like this, I've certainly worked at enough that were going for similar goals. But for some reason, somewhere, the incentives or the structure just don't align to produce these breakthroughs.

Maybe one day we will figure it out.
12 Months left to Live. How much money will you leave behind?
this is pretty cool. If only xkeys would put out drivers for osx and/or linux to program their matrix boards :(.
Care to Write Army Doctrine? With ID, Log On
Of course, it's a piece of garbage...
Fill up that station wagon for the return journey
I think he outranks you when talking about scraping google contents: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_DiBona
This has bitten me a few times. CS type journals should totally start requiring source, or at least links to it. I have more than once gotten the source used for a paper, only to find the claims of the authors were nothing like what the source actually did. Worse is that frequently there are leaps of "oh it will work like this" in the papers, which are show to be wrong by the code!
Congrats on the launch, great work!

Other than some obvious software bundled with the iPhone (like google maps, etc.), this is probably one of the best uses of the platform I've seen so far. It's useful to me personally, very innovative in a really cool way, and has potential to be huge. There is a shortage of innovative iPhone apps that are also useful, and you guys knocked it out of the ballpark. This sounds like perfect software for Apple to put into their commercial.
> in both FOSS and enterprise software, the code-base has usually third-party dozens if not more dependencies

Lua. ColorForth. STEPS.

> Writing software is now a team effort

There have always been software teams of many different sizes. But most projects on Sourceforge (or Github, or Freshmeat) are one-person projects.

> Think back to the day when a individual or two person could write a 2D side-scroller in DOS

It was more common for a group of two to five people to do it, you know, than for one person to do it. And there are any number of popular games these days built by small teams: World of Goo, Mafia Wars, Super Monkey Ball.

> as an example of someone who followed his vision without regard for profits or social acceptance.

Lots of people still do.

> today is optimizing on status quo

Most people are always trying to improve the status quo incrementally, except when that's obviously suicidal (e.g. the Ghost Dancers). In the early 90s "everyone" seemed to be working on graphics cards, database software, spreadsheets, word processors, and video games with themes licensed from movies or sports. The internet doesn't even appear in The Road Ahead. But some of us were doing other stuff... we just weren't visible until there was Wired.

Working on something new is never a popular activity because most new ideas are worthless. It's a generalization of the thing about 90% of startups failing: the other 10% mostly don't fail because they let their ideas fail and switched to something else.

> the only art form where its leading ... practitioners openly condone "selling out."

Massage, graphic design, architecture, cooking, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, warfare?

There's a lot of stuff going on.
I'm not sure how it's a bad thing that 25% of casual edits are reverted. Perhaps some of the habitual editors are nasty people, but 25% doesn't scare me.
You are doing a rotation in 3 dimensions. Surely the original example meant two dimensions. In 3 dimensions, the axis of rotation is indeed an eigenvector.
Show me one example where government is able to stimulate economy. First, you will have to clarify what 'stimulating an economy' means. Once you have specified what it means, you will have to explain how each dollar spent has somehow stimulated the economy.

I think you fail to comprehend how complicated modern day economy is. Have you heard of 'I, Pencil' story? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6vjrzUplWU
The gist is that no single person knows how to make a pencil. Because of co-ordinated efforts of thousands of people, working for their own goals, makes it possible to manufacture pencil and deliver it at your local store where you can buy it for dollar a piece.

Do you really think that few hundred bureaucrats in DC can decide how billions of dollars should be spent so that economy is stimulated?
Hey, blogs had already been invented, they just weren't called that yet. And it wouldn't surprise me if Wes were already a subscriber, although I haven't looked :)
The author seems to me to be arguing that it is now more accessible to be a hacker, and while I would agree with that, I don't think that really translates to a rise of hacking. There is a key point in here: If someone wants to learn about how things work now, you have some really great resources. See, the resources may be there, but I'm just not so convinced that are more people now who have the curiosity and motivation to learn.
As always, the shortcut to success is to lower your standards.
The first sentence of your comment, "This really strikes home for me," may be correct. The rest of it seems to be wrong from beginning to end.
Here is a picture:
http://guangzhou.baixing.com/zanzhushang/t3122465.html

It also has wifi and a choice of 2, 4, or 8GB flash drive. Only 800x400 resolution though.
Red Gate is funding this. No local government / anybody else involved in any way. It's pretty expensive, but we figure it'll pay itself back. Somehow.

For example, we've already got a handful of startups at Red Gate (go-test.it, broadersheet.com and mixcloud) and there are all sorts of unintented, positive benefits. A couple of them have done some contracting work for use, they've introduced us to friends / relatives who've ended up working for us, and so on. And that's just the short-term stuff. Who knows what will happen long term.

Neil
No it's not. PPI's goal is only to do a "good enough" job. It explicitly states in the documentation that it is not capable of actually parsing Perl code and the discussion he gives in that documentation was what led to this formal proof being developed. Furthermore, in the PerlMonks discussion linked, Adam also commented: "This totally makes my day. Would you mind if I converted this to POD and included it the documentation for PPI?"
How I Built Mixtape.me from Scratch with No Experience
Kids today, no sense of history. The hacking scene was dead by September 1981. Oddly enough, it was marked as dead, again, in February of 1990. The last time the hacking scene was declared dead was April of 2000.

We probably have a few months before this hacker scene is also declared dead.
Need a job? Try Searching in China
10 Important Tips About Welding
Welding is the result of a combination of heat & pressure to melt materials & join them with a filler material. It is a process of fabrication which is a potentially dangerous one. It is part of industrial application. It can be done in many forms.
Another case of science telling us that what we always strongly suspected but could never be 100% sure about, was indeed correct.

This is (in the general case) more useful than people tend to realise.
It seems like this would be most beneficial to coders who are working on a bootstrapped startup or those without full-time jobs; i.e., those that would find it harder to pay $100/mo.
Penis-painter puts 'Big Dick' on little car  
Never touch another man's car. And never, never, ever, never, ever, ever, never ever draw a huge penis on it and write 'big dick' underneath....
To be fair, this isn't the same as the OLPC. The OLPC was rather rugged, and well designed for the kids it was intended to serve (see the wifi, screen, etc). This is simply a normal, but cheap, computer - impressive though the achievement is.
Perfect Group Community Events For Chat Room Friends
Chat rooms are great places to meet people with similar interests to yours. And on USAChatNow, you can actually create social occasions for you and your new friends. If you are going to put together a group outing, it is imperative that you still follow the rules of the room, use your discretion and protect yourself. Remember, safety is the name of the game in the chat rooms, so when setting up a get together.
Principal Tells Kindergartner to Unclog Toilet With Hands  
An Eagan principal who made a kindergarten boy clear out a clogged toilet by hand will be suspended, not fired, an arbitrator decided.
It's not quite true, is it...?

Av = cv v is an eigenvector, c the corresponding eigenvalue
(A^-1)Av = (A^-1)cv
v = c(A^-1)v
(1/c)v = (A^-1)v

So if c is an eigenvalue of A, then 1/c is an eigenvalue of (A^-1). (c can't be 0 because A is invertible, I think.)
Bing promotes itself by giving discounts on products found via Bing
> I fail to see how having a gov't spending our money makes the potential damage worse.

Oh really?

When you spend your money on your stuff, you try really hard to get the best value.

When you spend your money on someone else's stuff, you go cheap.

When you spend someone else's money on your stuff, you don't worry so much about cost effectiveness.

Govt spending is someone else's money for someone else's stuff. Do you really think that that's as good as either of the previous two categories, let alone the first one?
Nope. Because collections are outsourced.