skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience, spamming low-quality posts, not counting the bottom [-8,1] and top [30, inf] gets me an average of about +10 each. The trick is to keep posting comments small (readable at a glance), intriguing (just enough to warrant an upvote), and non-controversial points early on in a popular thread.

If you can't be one of the first commentators, it's best to reply in a way that puts your reply as close to the top as possible - replying to anything "below the fold" is a terrible investment.

[Aside: yes, I'm ashamed to care about karma enough to think these things through, but somehow, I just can't help it]
Again, I downvoted because he provided no commentary or justification.
Code writers along for the ride for Google's next 'wave'
Real Reason Facebook Acquired Friendfeed & What Lesson Your Startup Can Learn
In 1 hour "Managing your first iPhone app project"
ping for invites bjoern@supercoolschool.com
I dislike those feedback tabs with a passion. I find them incredibly distracting.
Hadoop founder leaves Yahoo
Better explanation on VMWare blog: http://blogs.vmware.com/console/2009/08/vmware-acquires-spri...
Yes. Facebook is the whoever.
I both hope and sincerely think you are wrong. People improve with practice. Give them enough training to get that practice and they will improve.

Yes, the bar of what the machines can do is high, and rising, but there are a lot of things they will not be able to do for the forseeable future such as program, write, do most repairs, or pick heads of lettuce. At least for the immediate future, anything that is not repetitive and fixed in task will be hard to automate, but relatively easy to train a normal person for.
"Strips of old tire" (from your cited article) would be thicker than the soles of my Fivefinger Sprints. All of my running surfaces are rocky or gravelly, and the Sprints do not provide enough protection for me against stone bruising. Perhaps my feet will toughen, with more miles in these shoes... I don't know.

They're great fun as river shoes, though I have to guard my toes with greater care than I did with worn-out trail runners (my previous river shoe of choice).
I bought a cute little Martian file server from them years ago when they sold interesting hardware.
Ignore the Hungarian haters.

Which would be basically everyone who didn't learn to write software on Windows.

If you have a reasonable type system and language, leverage it to enforce semantics that Spolsky suggests you use Hungarian notation to imply by convention.

You'll be much less likely to be castigated by the individual who has to maintain your code after you. Microsoft has put Hungarian notation to rest, nobody else o speak of uses it, and you shouldn't either.
That's a terrible defense. Only a cat, and a fairly new one to coding at that, would find Hungarian notation to be useful as a debugging tool.
I'm slightly intimidated to reply to you, but YUI and YSlow are pretty significant if you're a front-end guy.
I've been working in Hong Kong for almost 6 months, and there definitely seems to be opportunity here. There is a lot more optimism than I've been seeing in the states when I go back, and software is perceived as an area in which the skill levels that you can find among the local Hong Kong population are lower than you would expect from westerners because there is such an emphasis on finance here.
As nanotech advances we will gain the ability to replace more and more rare elements with common ones. In the far future there's no reason why our technology couldn't be based entirely on nanoscale structures made of only the cheapest, most abundant elements. After all, nature does it just fine.
I feel like YDN is pretty meaty. And yes, 'Let Doug do what he wanted and paid him, and gave us Hadoop and Pig with great docs, along with YUI' is a pretty strong contribution.

I've never worked there, but if I could work on a cool project - yes, I would.

You do sound like you have a unique perspective :) I've always heard nothing but bad things about Yahoo management, and if they acquired my baby and kilt it I'm sure I'd hate them too. Don't the cash and freedom make up for it, somewhat?
According to WSJ, roughly $15MM in cash, $32.5MM in Facebook stock, based on the previous $6.5 billion valuation.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124993350820120361.html
2. A way of sharing items with family members (so only one spouse has to enter the number of the plumber)

Having more than one spouse must make it hard to keep track of things :)
Why I Love Boulder
yea...i ripped both my shoes on separate event sin 14 days...i'm going to use them less hard and hope the new ones don't break so quick
Yes they are, and thank you. I never have anything to submit to social news sites that hasn't already been submitted by someone else, though. If I'm breaking etiquette I'll stop.
The Cost Of FriendFeed: Roughly $50 Million In Cash And Stock
The problem is with so many big social graphs already on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace etc. it's difficult to build another. They were competing against Twitter and Facebook at the same time. Twitter is getting masses of press and Facebook already has masses of users. FriendFeed had a good product technically but still weren't getting there in gaining active users.

If you look at friendfeed's stats they've leveled off for the last 7 months http://siteanalytics.compete.com/friendfeed.com/

FriendFeed was a technology company they know search, real-time, scaling etc. but social networking isn't just those things. Facebook gets the interface and it clearly works for people, but they have so far not done much with realtime, and since it's new I expect there are very few people that have experience of that.

To me, both sides needed this, friendfeed had stopped growing and Facebook needs to evolve against Twitter and the trend for realtime (on the web) in general.
Thanks for the kind words. I wish I could help. The company that bought IMSafer about 20 months ago had done some updates, but they mostly bought the backend stuff for products they were selling into other markets. Have you sent an email to support?
I need to look further, but so far it appears to me that when one chooses in a browser to view the certificate chain of a secure page, where that secure page references secure content from/using third party domains/certificates, only the certificate chain of the top level page is displayed. The other certificate chains involved are essentially hidden unless one views the page source or runs a traffic sniffer. Is that correct?

If so, I'd prefer an option to see all the certificate chains involved in loading a page's content. Maybe most users won't care, but some will, and it would keep those details from remaining hidden or difficult/time consuming to access.

Somewhat related to this, I continue to be somewhat frustrated at the amount of dialog navigation that is required to view certificate chains in some browsers (e.g. Firefox 3 made the chain viewing dialog deeper nested within a hierarchy of dialog navigation).

My perspective is that, even when users don't fully understand an item, they are good at noticing changes -- we're wired to do so. If the chain is easily accessed, and users are taught to give it a glance, they are likely to notice if/when it changes, particularly for regularly visited sites. They may not know exactly what is going on, but it would likely be enough to inject caution and a google (twitter, whatever) for answers.
With all due respect to Twitter, the FriendFeed acquisition at 1/10th of the cost was a better investment. You have the talents behind Gmail, and Google Maps (I believe), and now they are one of the largest consumer real time apps out there. It is also worth noting that they have done a great job at pushing new features live.
Facebook Flips The Switch On Real-Time Search, Goes After Twitter Where It Hurts
Drama: Zynga Founder Gets Restraing Order On Old Tribe.net Colleague
http://www.readingmatrix.com/articles/bell/article.pdf list's several primary sources. Check out: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=753927 for a longer response.
> You're using loose terminology that a system administrator might use,

How dare you insinuate that I might be a system administrator. Or that system administrators really don't know much beyond their domain. I won't stand for it!

I'm sure 'X windows' is technically a server in some the strictest sense. Technically I guess the client app issues a request for user input which is served by the X server. To extend that model the X server issues a sub-request to the user who fulfils that request. To me this seems to twist the terminology to the point where the user is just another service available to the program. It reflects a view of reality that does not appeal to ordinary end users and I believe this limited the success of X windows and unix/linux on the desktop.
Take a look at the top 50 and see their average submission and comment score.
FriendFeed Office Deserted: Whole Team Already at Facebook [pics]
Unemployment in urban areas is 4.3 percent, according to government data.

Credulously reporting unemployment statistics from the US government is naive. Credulously reporting unemployment statistics from a Communist dictatorship is journalistic malpractice.
The implications of this, is that we are selecting for early births, with no regard at all to how long we will live.

Normally long life means you can take care of the offspring, but since offspring will survive even if you don't, this aspect is not selected for.

The implications of this are not good, because we are selecting for the traits least desirable in modern society.

People who delay births, and thereby demonstrate health later in life have far fewer children than those who give birth early.

Additionally there is an unfortunate trend for people to delay children until their "career" is settled. Which means that people with simple careers (manual labor and the like) have far more children than those who's careers take longer (and are presumably more intelligent), and it's those more complex jobs that are in demand right now.
Just a note--if you use paragraph breaks and try to structure your thoughts instead of spewing long stream-of-consciousness comments, it makes it easier to understand what you're saying.

YouTube and Digg simplified distribution, not creation. Distributing software is no more difficult than distributing anything else. What you're talking about isn't analogous to allowing non-celebrities to create music, what you're talking about is allowing people who don't know how to sing, play an instrument, or compose a song to create music.

I've looked over your business's website. It seems like you have a good idea and a useful target market, but the web implementation is questionable, and there's nothing stopping someone from taking your same basic idea, executing it better, and eating your lunch.
Well, no. Not really:

"Fragments this small probably can't be assembled into a complete genome, but the authors were able to compare them to the reference human genome maintained by the National Institutes of Health. They were able to align sequences totaling 2.5 billion bases to the published version of the human genome."

So, it's apparently now possible to generate redundant, small-fragment coverage of the human genome in four weeks, but that's a long way from a full, assembled genome. The researchers had to cheat by performing alignments of the tiny fragments with the known, assembled human genome sequence. This was the same game that Celera Genomics had to play to claim a "fully assembled" genome from shotgun sequencing -- but they were using larger reads, and still failed to be scientifically convincing.

This is interesting technology, but the title is a massive exaggeration.
Widescreen, but I spend almost as much time in Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash as I do in Visual Studio and Notepad++.
Given that Facebook launched their realtime search today, that would be a pretty amazing integration time...

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/facebook-flips-the-swit...
Generally,the more worthwhile something is, the less we gain from skimming it.

Not that I thought that thermodynamics text was worthwhile.

On the other hand, skimming will sometimes get you to the good stuff. In the case of Anathem, about 150 pages of skimming.
I doubt me or my business happens to have any real, justifiable need for this now. But the enthusiastic geeky kid in me thinks this is super cool :)

Looks like it may be available by my birthday in a few months, maybe I'll suggest it if someone asks what to get me as a gift.
Is Hong Kong still an appreciably freer market than mainland China? China has always seemed like it has problems with political corruption, to the point where having influence over the right people in the party/govt. is an essential business skill. How is Hong Kong on that?
I feel like there's money to be made if someone can make the exact same product, but with a covering for the toes, so they look like regular shoes and don't stand out so much.
I think about these things too, but because I'm trying to prevent them from being necessary.

Unfortunately these are hard problems. I've been thinking about them since early Reddit and still don't have solutions.
The article makes an eloquent case for the following:

Code is liability.
I guess. I think the folks that pay Linus or whatever have done more for OS. Sun's opensolaris, too. MySQL, etc too. Just by sheer weight of code.

The problem is that the number of cool projects is pretty minimal. They're in duck and cover mode. They'll get pushed to trim employees further and further to stretch the revenues out.

I wish I had not sold it to them. The cash and freedom do not even come close; I would rather work on a big, popular product.
Well yes, I don't disagree with you there. If you plant two seeds with identical DNA but only give one of them enough water and sunlight then of course they're going to be different heights and weights after a few weeks. But you'll probably not find identical twin brothers where one becomes a NBA pro and the other a jockey.
The ongoing financial meltdown (not to mention Warming) argues against that assertion.

Our rationalization skills are evolving though. We now know many more people to point our fingers at.
I also do this naturally. I call it "reading a movie" and it works best for: fiction, computer stuff, and to a lesser extend where I already have some knowledge. It also works when I'm not tired. When I start 'reading words' (your wife's inner narrator), I have to give up and stop for a while. When reading new and difficult stuff I'll usually read each chunk[1] twice, once for the words and once for the picture. This seems to be the best. I do notice that I have an above average reading retention in my peer group, but at a conceptual level. I am absolutely terrible at quoting, since the ideas are transferred, not words.

Does the your experience match mine?

[1] The groupings can be a couple sentences or a couple of paragraphs per chunk, depending on how unfamiliar I am with the topic.
According to "Reading rate: a review of research and theory" by Ronald P. Carver, speed reading (not to be confused with mere skimming) doesn't work.

See: http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Rate-Review-Research-Theory/dp...
I have Dual Dell 2408WFP's... lets me see four apps at once with plenty of real estate.

Screen 1: Browser (showing whatever I'm working on) and gVim (with my code).

Screen 2: Browser (with whatever references/interweb material I'm looking up), multiple terminals (tail logs or for messing with git/whatever).

I use AwesomeWM (tiling window manager), so I don't have to bother arranging all this myself. Other tags (workspaces if you are from the gnome/kde world) have things like Pidgin and last.fm open.
Amazon's data could rock Google and online advertising
Facebook stock? haha
Yep. I think I actually mentioned it in an e-mail to you when you owned it. It's ok though, I'm about to uninstall the app as everyone in the house has grown up enough to deal with their own issues :).
Only if you are running the same stuff every other startup is ;-)
I have been wondering about that damn Feedback tab for a while, thanks for letting me know who to blame.
Spiral WHO?
Perhaps, another solution would be to custom build a plug for blacklisted extensions that isolates the main process better with some added processing overhead, something like a "fake in-process" thing.
Is there a start-up scene in China?

I would think doing a web based company would be limiting if you have to deal with the government's internet policies.
That's in the price range of a medical procedure.
The type of Hungarian notation Spolsky uses at Fog Creek is different than the Hungarian once pushed by Microsoft. He goes over that in the linked article. I'm not defending it - I've never tried it - but it obviously works for Joel.

Also, if you're working at Fog Creek, the guy who has to maintain your code after you will also be using Hungarian.
The curiosity killed the cat
But most folks are. Regardless, I'm surprised no one has started compiling this yet...
You are ignoring the distinctions between censorship by or on behalf of government actors and that by private enterprise or individuals in favor of arguing that because the same word can be used it is impossible to refer to them seperately.

This in spite of the fact that the word is almost universally used to refer to censorship by government authority (usually in a perjorative context) and that the context of the thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=750540) lends itself entirely to reading it as an immoral act. Your "entirely separate moral argument" is in fact the one started at the top of the thread. It was in fact the one I was engaged in before being derailed.
"the real asset of the company--the programmer"

Where does it get to the "adjust pay accordingly" part?
Is talent really worth $15 M? Seems a little expensive for a couple of programmers.
"As part of their regulatory redesign, Team Obama and Congress still don’t have a plan for reforming the giant taxpayer-backed institutions like Fannie that caused the credit crisis. Yet they’re moving to rewrite the rules for investing in tiny technology companies that had nothing to do with the meltdown. Under the proposed rules, venture firms will be declared systemic risks until they can prove themselves innocent."
It will be interesting to see how well this works. I developed a desktop check scanning application in 2007. We needed good quality scans to make the OCR work reliably. USAA has got to be getting high exception rates with this app, especially with the fixed focus cameras on iPhones before the 3GS.
I'm not sure that's a meaningful statement in the startup world, since I think it can be reduced to, "Startups tend to fail, except for the ones that don't."

If the incidence of such is higher within the recommendations space, it's by less than a standard deviation.
do most repairs, or pick heads of lettuce

These are purely rule-based, mechnical tasks. I would say those are among the first to go into robot hands.

At least for the immediate future, anything that is not repetitive and fixed in task will be hard to automate, but relatively easy to train a normal person for.

Well, immediate future is a relative term. Looking at what Asimo and other robotics projects can do today I very much expect the robots of 2050 to be capable of performing around 90% of all jobs better than a human.

There simply isn't much creativity or "humanity" involved in most jobs.
I don't think so.

Apple has enjoyed the fact less companies target OSX and, assuming the same competent to incompetent developer ratio for both platforms (something risky in itself, because the barriers of entry for Windows are much lower), it would be no surprise if there were less buggy programs for OSX.

Also, OSX is a bit older than the current Windows platforms. Don't forget OSX is a direct evolution of the NeXT operating system and that makes if a good four years older than Windows NT. It also builds on both the Mach microkernel and the BSD more conventional kernel, so, its plumbing is a tad more mature too.
I'll keep my mouth shut ;-)

Even though I don't work at a startup (quite the contrary, it's a big telco in Brazil)
12 programmers, 1 million + users.

Now unlike Twitter, friendfeed is not made of a bunch of marketers following other marketers. If you follow someone on Tiwtter you get something like "Thanks for the follow. I am expecting to learn from you. Check my website...".

Also The discussion around a particular shared item on FF is easier to follow.
I'm overall pretty impressed with Yahoo's commitment to FOSS development of Hadoop. They've done 90% of its development, and they seem very serious about a commitment to open source going forward.

But yeah, I can see how you'd feel like you do.
Yep, I'm really happy for Paul. He's proven to be an astute investor and a great founder.
Poll: Are your passwords in your email?
Perform a search on your email for some of your passwords. Be honest - did you find any?
I think it'd be really helpful for the readers for you to write about what you would change and why.
I'm guessing that you used it because many others before have also used it. The problem is it tends to propagate an untrue and unfortunate meme that the iPhone is the only mobile computing platform. Now that many are starting to doubt the 'perfect golden future' of the iPhone I think it is time to squash this meme.

The other thing is that many phones have had the capability of doing much of this for years. I had a phone 5 years ago that could record phone calls. I think it was an Ericsson.

The ironic thing is that there is a high likelihood Apple wouldn't allow you to implement these ideas where other platforms would.
Ego(1)
The New Google Search
RESTful Authentication
Some drawbacks:

running on hot pavement - the thin soles enable you to feel the temperature of whatever surface you're on. It never gets unbearable, but you'll definitely know when you're standing on a hot surface.

stepping on a single small rock - wearing normal shoes, the soles don't bend much if you step on a rock, but the vibrams flex around the rock so you'll definitely feel the pain.

stubbing your toes - the vibrams make it feel like you're barefoot, but the shoes make your foot slightly larger so sometimes you might trip on yourself walking normally because your body assumes you're barefoot.

not good on small clipless pedals on bikes - I bike a lot and sometimes I'll jump on my bike without my shoes with cleats. Normally it's not a problem with normal shoes since the rigidity of the soles protect me from the small surface area of the clipless pedals, but the vibrams make me feel like pedaling on tightrope.

getting sand in shoes - I have the KSOs, but sometimes a small sand particle will still make it in. Once in, the sand particle will make it down to the sole area and you'll definitely feel it since you don't wear socks to wear vibrams.

You'll get over most of these drawbacks after a few months though. The shoes are definitely worth it over the small drawbacks. If you're not sure, you should try them out in a running store first, you don't have to order them over the net.
Quality content is always welcome here. Keep it up!
Blame all you want, but it's been invaluable to us. We have a Help link on every page, which goes to Contact Us (i.e. an extra step), but for whatever reason, the signal on UserVoice feedback is much higher than messages sent via our Contact Us form.
I think the headline and the blog entry is saying that every line of code is going to be an interface for someone. Whether for the purposes of reading or using your code. Kind of stretching the user interface idea to this other thing, too.
"We took the approach to htmlspecialchars() every single GET/POST variable even before processing them."

Didn't PHP magic_quotes prove that that is a really bad idea?
New WebGL standard aims for 3D Web without browser plugins
Why You Should Use Sleep Mode