skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Jack up x based on participation and commits/edits/reversions that "stick"

I would rather a more sophisticated metric than this. The metric of stickiness seems to work off of the idea that, in the average case, every reversion is a net win for content quality. My intuition might be serving me wrong, this sort of game mechanic seems prone to causing all sorts of ill-effects, gaming and odd edge cases.

For instance, who gets credit for a reversion of a reversion? How can you keep someone with a sufficient value of x from camping on an article and reverting whatever changes a well-intentioned and clueful but relatively new user posts? Since that new user has no more x to spend, the user camping gets rewarded for having his trollish reversion "stick", and the new user gets disenchanted and leaves.
I thought coke zero has 0 calories, other than the kidney stones you will get, it should not affect your weight due to calories no matter how much you drink, contrary to regular coke.
If your modules are going to be ported to the new version you're in luck. Upgrades are usually only supported for 'core', major revision upgrades of modules more often than not simply fail to convert the data to whatever backwards incompatible format they've come up with this time around.

On the whole drupal feels extremely immature, in spite of having gone through 6 major releases.
It's not evil to fix a machine when its users publish that the machine not working as expected.

It's not evil to refuse a human conversation regarding that machine.

You want reasons? What, some phone operator is going to be able to know the specifics of your exact circumstance and the entire Google system at a moment's notice and produce for you an actionable response? For all people in the world? For free?

You would prefer hold music and a canned response?

I'd prefer if Google fixed the problem as fast as possible. I prefer if that process didn't require my input, and Google probably doesn't need your input to fix their machines anyways.
'Lethal levels' of Propofol killed Michael Jackson - report opened today
Intel's cheap new SSD drives: First tests
I'm not advocating tossing all the other stuff out the window. Whatever mechanism they use now to stop spam accounts, keep it. I'm suggesting a different way to aportion the ability to make lasting changes to the site's content.
FWIW, the original title of the article is absolute rubbish - it's a "clever" title that gives nothing away. I wouldn't have clicked on it. Your title got me in there and I wasn't disappointed.
But radio is the perfect way to unwind after a long day of operating a mimeograph!
An idea of progress, moving forward.
Making Butter (video)
Looks great!

And I think the "space" (sharing stuff/ re-thinking owning/renting) needs a lot of attention.

Related:

* https://neighborgoods.net/ Neighborgoods is currently in private beta right now. They seem to be a social site centered on finding people to borrow/loan/rent stuff in your immediate area for free/small fees. Hopefully they will have an API, and projects like yours could benefit.
spots are a bit booked right now, but count me in as an enthusiastic follower if you open source it.

* For a Yahoo! Hack day project, somebody took the Yahoo! Mail API to make Freecycle data available "on the outside." It looks like this was done only as proof-of-concept, and since each Freecycle community is its own list, this might be hard, but I think there is a LOT to gained by scraping the goods out of there.

* Maybe take the eBay reputation data out via API, and display in your system?

A related idea is being done
This kind of stuff that Mr. Pink (someone should invite him out to dinner and find out if he doesn't tip :P) mentioned and guys like Alfie Kohn harp on about is intriguing, but there is one huge hole in the plot that I have never seen them address: The Problem of the Paycheck.

The studies that are being referenced lead naturally to the hypothesis "what would happen if I didn't give my employees any kind of artificial incentive at all?" (let's assume that they are all knowledge-work employees, say programmers for example).

The studies referenced in the talk and in Alfie Kohn's books suggest that you would see an increase in productivity, since that pesky, harmful incentive has moved out of the way.

Common sense (and experience, should anyone be foolish enough to actually try it) suggests that your workers will simply walk.

So while I think there is a lot of valuable insights to be gained from these experiments (e.g. people work like hell when something has meaning for them - see the works of Viktor Frankl for more on this), I think there's too much of a tendency to oversimplify and say "incentives are bad, mmkay?"
Mako's the best I've found. Templetor looks nice but is awful because (of all things) whitespace is significant! That's a no-go for a template system.
why ? All it does is count your submission as a vote towards the original, that's ok isn't it ?
If you did want to use Ruby, however, a new project called Bowline offers something similar: http://leadthinking.com/191-bowline-a-ruby-gui-framework
It's great to see someone taking piles of data and pulling some meaning out of it. I think it's easy enough these days to be able to see the potential of data-mining a site like Facebook, but I expect a lot of value to come out of sites like FlightCaster that are getting value in domains that folks don't normally think of being data-intensive. Google was more or less data-mining, but it was a relatively easy set of data to access: public websites. Now, we're seeing the exploitation of more obscure, but not necessarily less valuable, data.
There are several licenses which attempt to imitate or facilitate public domain status already, most notably Creative Common's CC0 (http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0) and the WTFPL (http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/).
Okay so first, web.py is sort of old news.

That being said, shouldn't the inherent nature of HN filter "old news" itself? If 14 people (at this time) found this link interesting enough to up vote then who are we to say its not newsworthy?

The slope gets a bit slippery. The other day someone posted a link to the Sinatra framework, which I've heard of but never looked at until it it made the front page here.

I think the democratic nature of HN should do the filtering for us. and _that_ being said I'd still like a downvote button ;-)

(and why are you being downvoted? is this too meta HN? I'm not sure where else to discuss these topics)
Regulators: EU data protection laws apply to social networks
The thing that the imitators lack is Paul, his vision, and the intent that he describes in this article.

The closer of a mirror to YC an imitator gets, the further they get from the intent that makes YC possible and successful.

I also want to say this might be the first PG essay that I not only liked, but agreed with. Usually I enjoy, but disagree with him.
Heh, well, the last bit aside -- obviously, there's certainly nothing wrong with your posting of web.py; the existing guidelines make that clear enough.

Which is neither here nor there, as I'm not proposing the rule as a criticism of your actions, but as a proposed answer to a question very like, "Is there a simple social rule that could prevent these kind of collisions from becoming increasingly common as HN grows?"

I think that the rule I propose has merit as an idea, so I'm arguing for it, not criticizing your actions. ;)
Apparently it was actually Facebook 4chan'd

http://thecoffeedesk.com/news/index.php/2009/08/22/4chan-hac...
> cancel the customer's other bookings from that city on that day.

Means you can't fly out of a city, fly back, then fly out again. Also, you can't double book yourself out of a given city and then choose which flight you want to take.

I think he's going to get stung on the $100 cancellation/no-show fee:

> Changes or cancellations of flight bookings made after 11:59 p.m. MDT three days prior to the flight's scheduled departure will incur a $100 change/cancel fee. "No shows" for flights will incur a $100 fee, with Pass suspension until fee is paid.

Miss one connecting flight (e.g., due to an overnight delay) and they could be looking at $300 in cancellation fees.
So this is essentially human error because someone failed to restart the server. The same thing would have happened if it was running Linux, Unix, etc.
So -- are you saying that I'm doing things in the wrong order? Should I always know for sure whether I want to submit something before I check to see if it has already been submitted? What if I want to check whether it has been submitted before I finish reading it, and don't want to submit something without reading it in full?

Are you saying this capability doesn't exist, but unwilling to just come out and say so because you fear I'll dislike the lack of such a feature? I'm confused about the reason for questions without answers in response to my own question.
Well, they have fixed it.
Let me know if/when it's there, please.
Gross generalizations supported with no data and based only upon personal experience. Almost everything he said could be said about many businesses, both large and small.

The unnecessary and distracting profanity didn't help much either.
Fair enough, but then you probably should pick your words with a bit more care.

As for the rule, I think it is a bad one. The simplest solution would be a technical one: If a user has not seen a url because it was posted before that user became a member then he/she will see it, otherwise it gets rendered invisible. That way you get to have your cake and I can eat mine too.
Wondering How Seriously Apple Is Taking The FCC Inquiry?
Excellent! I think we've figured out the mechanism for prohibiting comment downvotes.

. . . unless it's more complex than it at first seems. I don't really have the LISP Fu yet to figure it out from the source.
The problem this post neglects is distribution. Hunting and finding potential customers among 5,000,000 is a lot more difficult than among 500.
The Top Query At Today’s Yahoo Event? Bing.
The Craigslist Credo: Unbrand, Demonetize, Uncompete
Calling All Amateur Astronomers: Help Solve a Mystery
Especially when they run together, like this:

{% block title %}{{ section.title }}{% endblock %}
I just wrote a satirical piece a few days ago using the Kenyon speech and the "Federer..." article:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/8/19/17330/9169
Really? How so? I don't find any difficulty imagining things, just an absence of difficulty in choosing not to.
I'm afraid I don't follow you.

If you want to submit something but you're not sure if it has been submitted or not the dupe filter will tell you so clearly.

If you don't want so submit something before you've read it in full then simply read it first, then submit it.

anyway, the easiest way to search any site is simply like this:

go to google.com

type:

site:news.ycombinator.com your search keywords

the space between the .com and the first keywords is crucial.
Open source, not $19 billion, may be best health care stimulus
After browsing around your site for a few minutes, I didn't find this essay. Link?
Oh yeah...endif, endfor, endblock. Oddly, there's no elif tag, though.
starting off with "it's a sad state of affairs" sets a smug tone, begging for a smart-ass response. and the "FAIL" just turns it hostile.

i'm not defending the station, but i do think customers should be as civil as companies are expected to be, if they want civil treatment in return.
I had never heard of David Foster Wallace before this. Thanks for sharing it, has really made my day.
I'm quite sure I read an interview or maybe just a mailing list posting where the author of sqlite (D. Richard Hipp) said that he in someway regretted releasing sqlite in the public domain, or at least if he knew what he knows now about the legal issues surrounding public domain he might reconsider. I can't find it. Does anybody else remember reading something similar or did I just imagine it?
I thought his Genealogy of Morality was better executed in deconstructing our ideas of right and wrong.
I love reading articles like this. 8 years or so ago Ruby replaced Perl for me as my 'go to' language for day-to-day problems. I haven't looked back since.

What other people call 'magic', I call not understanding the language and execution environment.

For long-running server-side stuff Ruby would not be my first choice, but for eloquence and scripting capabilities... accept no substitute.
The guy who was the maintainer of Google Calculator from 2005 to 2007 confirmed that this is the correct explanation. He said he wanted to switch it to use bignums, but wasn't able to (and not due to technical reasons).

ZorbaTHut (http://mandible.net) said:

it's 80-bit ieee floats internally, but there's some specialized code
to clamp it to zero when it looks like it ought to be zero.
as far as I know it should otherwise behave exactly like 80-bit ieee
(it wouldn't surprise me if the clamping code is being a little overzealous
in this case)
Right, the democratic component (and inability to do digg-style burying that results) is what makes the news on these kinds of sites better than other options.

The danger, of course, is: how is HN different from reddit.com/r/programming ?

How does it stay different? I think it's clear that we would want it to retain a distinctive flavor, but it seems almost inevitable that it would morph into proggit -- unless, perhaps, pg made the user interface purposely difficult. ;)

Suggested solutions are sometimes code, sometimes convention.

Code: longer time limits on deeply nested conversations. Like this one.

Convention: no blog spam wrapping other people's content. (Filters fail here because it's worth a human's time to write just enough almost-relevant 'content' to surround a link, so humans are essential).

Different communities can adopt different conventions, and those can shape and inform the voting going forward -- which may be one of the only things that let different democratic news sites retain their distinctive characteristics.

So, meh. Heh, it was just an idea. /grumble
yeah, I would expect this too. otherwise, it's too easy for the host to slip up or give subtle clues.
Stanford study: Media multitaskers pay mental price
...Man, Clojure seems to have just about everything from every language ever.
The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine
I knew someone would suggest pylons. I haven't really checked out the community around pylons, but my guess is that there isn't quite as much reusable stuff out there as there is for django. I should look again though.
"We found that reducing the correlation between sweet taste and the caloric content of foods using artificial sweeteners in rats resulted in increased caloric intake, increased body weight, and increased adiposity"

Compared to what and by what amounts?
Is the increase in caloric intake bigger than the amount of calories you save by not drinking the non-diet version of the soda? I would guess not. This sounds similar to the fears of being dehydrated by coffee...
I thought this was great. I typed up a few summary notes that I can refer back to on it: http://philfreo.com/blog/interesting-ted-talk-on-motivation/
in bash:

bash-3.1$ echo "(999999999999999 - 999999999999997)" | bc
2
The best I've ever seen (though I haven't seen an implementation for Python) is straight up x-expessions (sexps) with unquoting and unquote-splicing.
If you haven't checked it out yet, you should definitely read his essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again."

http://harpers.org/media/pdf/dfw/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-000...
Nope, still equals zero.
Scrolling up means that you rotate the top of the wheel away from you. As things move away they become smaller, not bigger! I think Firefox has it correct, and the other browsers are wrong...

Similarly differing interpretations of controls occur in first person shooters with (non-)inverted mouselook.
Nokia Booklet 3G first video
Typedia: A Shared Encyclopedia of Typefaces
When defining a class you need to:
- Create a new file for the class.
- Type the class keyword
- Type the class name.
- Type the parent class name.
- Type the constructor definition.
- Type a call to the parent class's constructor.

This is all boilerplate and can easily take half a minute. How am I doing things wrong? Are you saying there's an easier way?

Or I can just type something like "./script/generate class Foo Bar" and be done with it and save like 15 seconds.
But people still like to read this stuff (and vote it up), because some subset will always be discovering it, and it gives the rest of us a chance to talk about it as a community. That said, you're right: it isn't news, and so it doesn't quite belong here.

"Hacker Stuff" would make a great sister site, though. Same community (shared login), but rather than a steady, chronological influx, it would be a (categorized?) list of "the most interesting-to-hackers stuff of all time," with comment threads to discuss it. I imagine it's also where perennial topics of discussion, such as "Music to hack to" would migrate.
Wow! Great article!
This pretty much sums up why you want to make it convenient for users to export your data.
The backstory to this is that it's just as likely that flagged revisions will open the encyclopedia up. Wikipedia already has a mechanism to keep people from editing controversial pages: "protection". A protected page can't be edited by anyone but an admin. "Flagged" pages are more open than the protected/semi-protected pages.
Can the Google Phone Be Saved?
Oops my mistake!
I don't even think you need that. Let your competitor break his head writing that code.
In practice people don't use scaffolding. It's good generating an initial skeleton but you're generally recommended to only use that as a starting point for implementing your own interface.

No, what makes Rails so great is not the scaffolding or the generators. It's the philosophy of Don't Repeat Yourself and having a smooth learning curve, and how everything in it reflects that philosophy.
How about a more indirect approach. You could make a Yahoo Answer's type site using Wikipedia. People are encouraged to ask questions about particular sections that they don't understand or are lacking information and then points are given for answered questions with citations.

Or you could do something like this http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/raphaelh/publications/chi... and then reward answers with points.
If only gmail weren't that good. I'm not too excited about the way composing emails works, but the organizing features are pretty great. It's been a while since I looked, but other webmail providers just couldn't compete. For some kind of reason, they're trying to reinvent Outlook with AJAX -- not a new idea, if I remember the history of the 'X' part correctly.

I'd even be interested in a good OSS package for hosting your own service, but there, too, I haven't seen anything approaching gmails usability.

If I were looking for a access-mail-anywhere solution, it looks like I would have to switch back to GNUS and get an Emacs 23 server somewhere...
Ok, may be "scam" is too harsh. Keep in mind these angel groups are usually group of rich people who made their fortune from big corporations such as Cisco, IBM, etc. They are not the type of angels you read about on TechCrunch (Ron Conway, Ariel Poler, etc).

And typical corporate mindset is "processes". And an long application that no one ever reads is just part of that process. This is very similar to job applications -- no recruiters care about your cover letter, but you have to write one because it's the "way" it is.
Hapkido consistently for a few years, also started some Krav Maga just a few weeks ago. Some Taekwondo and Aikido in the past.
Haven't used any in RL yet and hopefully never will. :)
Solar cells to be printed like newspaper, painted on rooftops
You should buy the book; the Illinois State Fair essay is worth the price alone. Also highly recommended is the audio version of "Consider The Lobster", in which DFW implements inline footnotes in audio.

I'm halfway through Infinite Jest right now (putting me many weeks behind http://infinitesummer.org, and I recommend it as well.
The stats I have seen would indicate that lender interest peaked around May 2008, and e.g. %age of listings funded decreased May-Sep: http://www.ericscc.com/stats/prosper-listing-volume

Unfortunately, I have no good historical stats on interest rate paid by borrowers, which would probably be the best metric for lender/borrower interest.
I don't necessarily agree - sometimes restrictions and boundaries actually spur the imagination, and deadlines definitely keep one's ass in gear and productive. I took a photography class in college so I could get access to the darkroom - expecting to hate the assignments for 'boxing in' my artistic spirit. Instead, they just gave me ideas. All my favorite photos and prints were made in that class.

Regardless, no one's restricting you to anything... This is a hacking contest, not a real job, so the choice to just not participate costs you nothing. To me, however, the challenge of building a cool app on a new & innovative API on a very short timeline sounds kind of intriguing actually.
Wolfram Alpha proves that N = N - 1
I think if your client relationship is something like "either I'm a bitch or the client is my bitch" then you have a ego issue.
Seems like Konarka is further along than this reseach group, but competition is a good thing...
I like the word "fuck"... it's catchy, and fun to use.
This is very dubious (proving the opposite is easier), but it was quite a lot of fun.
More likely to question things and annoy people in the process is again a social skills issue, really clever people can work out lots of stuff without having to ask for it, and when they do it's a matter of timing, tact and packaging.

The way the original posted phrased this, I don't believe he meant so much asking questions to clarify something obscure, but more accurately to stress something inconsistent or inaccurate. There are two aspects to this: noticing the inconsistency, and then notifying others. As I understand it, pattern recognition is something at least moderately related to intelligence. Revealing that pattern to others, and choosing when and how, is much more a matter of following social protocol, which may go even as far as to dictate that such patterns never be revealed.

Difficulty in dealing with average people is a social skills issue, but 'average' and 'below average' people might have that same problem.

This leads to a what I think difficult question that in general seems to have a suspiciously certain answer: when is it appropriate to disregard social etiquette and protocol? The obvious answer is: never, because no good ever comes from people being annoyed and offended.

This seems suspiciously clear-cut, and historically inaccurate. I can think of a number of very detrimental philosophies that would still be adhered to today if everyone's foremost goal was to never cause offense, far more detrimental than the offense fighting against them may have been.

Provided that there is some correlation between intelligence and noticing abnormalities in patterns, this point ties back to the first, in that the person deemed difficult may just be seeing a pattern that few others are able to see, and as a result of continually bringing up aspects of that pattern are considered difficult and a lackluster teammate.

I don't think just saying "stop being such an anti-social dickhead" is an all-inclusive solution. Further more, I don't think we want it to be when thinking about long-term concerns.
Our entry: http://ideabitbucket.com
This doesn't make intuitive sense to me: like almost everyone I know who drinks Diet Coke / Coke Zero, regular Coke --- the kind I'm supposed to have extra cravings for because the Coke Zero has jumbled up my pleasure wiring --- tastes completely disgusting to me now.

Am I supposed to be getting these sweet-calories from some other source? Because it's not as if diet soda has suddenly got me eating huge bags of M&Ms, either.
Someone suggested a Hacker Canon during the spate of "hey, Arduino exists" threads.