skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did you watch the video? I don't think it's a coincidence, he makes pretty blatant references to Randy Pausch's "Last Lecture".

This video is just painfully awkward, but I guess that's the point.
Take-down campaigns won't crush startups. We get served with these notices everyday and we're happy to comply because we believe artists should be compensated for their work.

But the model is broken.

What will crush startups are the lawsuits by the major labels and their complete stubborn philosophy that online music companies have to capitulate to their unreasonable demands and pricing.

The future is the music company that can successfully market new artists in a way that the benefits to them greatly outweigh the benefits offered by a major label.

- Chris from Grooveshark
Got it...

Thanks. The comments here are getting to be so much that they are hard to follow. ;)
Learning in Business by Following the Heart
> I, the user, have a need to skim

The sort order is what gives you exactly that, and that is still there, so the 'good' stuff is still at the top (and even better than before now with the improved sorting algorithm). It's just 'relative' now, instead of 'absolute'.
I'd go so far as to say that I'd enjoy reading jokes and one-liners the folks here have to say about the news. We've got some really smart people that read HN. I bet their jokes are hilarious.

But that's only sometimes, not all of the time. If there could be a button for turning jokes off or on (or sorting by funny) then it'd be a hoot to see the site in that asepct.,

In short, I don't think it's a human behavior problem. Computer systems should let people act like people naturally act. This is a display problem. Some folks are seeing things in spots they would not like them to be in.

Instead of viewing the site as some huge function to take limited input and provide maximum output, perhaps it's better viewed as a big bucket of various randomized data. Then the purpose of the site is to sort and organize that random data in such a way as to provide maximum utility.
> If you ever got to being a candidate for, say, a national senior-school physics competition, you'd be transferred to region's best teachers. They would train you like a circus dog [...] but it wouldn't make you any good physicist.

Being one of such people, this is not entirely accurate.

For one thing, there is no practice of transferring students to best teachers, you have to want it get into the better schools. Another thing is that the best teachers are precisely the people who understand and will show you the essence of physics (or whatever your subject is).

Yes, a lot of time is devoted to competitions with repetitive problem set (the olympiads). But then, lots of time is devoted to non-competition topics. There are also competitions with open problems which require lots of imagination and original research on your part (e.g. ТЮФ, ТРИЗ and МАН for those who know). Some of the better schools require each student to complete a research project in his subject of choice.

My point here is that "circus dog training" is not at all correct.
You make a lot of assumptions there. The only salient point is that Google does not run the network they just forward calls. If they decide they don't want to forward calls to certain numbers that is there perogative. It's a whole lot different than the people running the wires and networks cutting of portions of the network from access to their users. When AT&T disables access to those numbers No one with AT&T service can call those networks. The same is not true for GV. The reasons for AT&T's restrictions do not apply and arguably should not apply.
Read this and notice that rms calls de Icaza a traitor:

http://www.osnews.com/story/22225/RMS_De_Icaza_Traitor_to_Fr...

Looks more like the former (evil) to me.
I am in US right now. That's why I have no access to Spotify. I believe that majority of the users here are interested in using Spotify but have no idea what it is.

Could you be more specific on what makes Spotify so unique? I heard that it is just another subscription based music player like Rhapsody but with better UI. Correct me if I am wrong.
I really, really like the basis of this idea.

But the more I ponder what you're trying to solve, the more I think you should provide scores weighted within the discussion. Perhaps, the quintile a comment is in. Use a bar that adds segments and shifts from one non-judgmental color to another. I wouldn't bother showing anything below a threshold of ten comments on a single link.

Otherwise, your piling-on problem returns, just with a little less fidelity.
Wow, I thought wheels was just an active user. Didn't know he was a part of the YC crew.
I'm trying to give it some time, jacquesm.

But right now I look at this thread and all I see is a bunch of jumbled-up comments. I don't know if the one at the top is worth-while for me to read or just matches some arcane criteria established by the programmer.

I'm forced to use "threads" to see where I've commented before and to use the new comments page to see where people are currently commenting. Any semblance of being able to apply my own sort criteria is gone.

And I think it gets to my ability to sort by my own criteria and the nested nature of the comments. Do I want to find highly-ranked comments under a lowly ranked parent? Sometimes those are the best ones.

I don't know. Let's see how it goes.
I have a serious question about this entire thing.

Does this set a precedence for future "mistakes" by large companies to deactivate and identify accounts simply because they send compromising information?

Put another way, what if you wanted to "nuke" someones gmail account - do you simply need to send "confidential information" then ask for the court order?

It is certainly a far fetched and expensive plan, but the question is really about precedence this case has set.

I spoke to a lawyer friend about this entire thing:

"The judge should have conducted a "balancing test" in which he asked whose rights it was more important to protect: those of hundreds of people whose account information was in the hands of some schmuck, or those of the schmuck who won't be able to email that dirty joke to his Mom if his email is suspended. It seems that the rights of the hundreds of account holders are more important, but you can protect their rights without suspending the schmuck's email address (and that is where I agree with Mr. Morris). The court could have ordered him to turn over all of the data he inadvertently received and swear under oath that he did not retain any further copies and that he did not distribute the copies to anyone else. Once that is done, if it turns out that the sensitive information was compromised in any way, the account holders can hold the bank accountable AND the schmuck. If the schmuck is a decent guy -- and if an IT professional certifies that he purged all the data and that it was not otherwise disseminated to outsiders -- then the story should end there and there is no First Amendment violation."

I think this balance test makes way more sense than what happened in this case.
Your first time, you might want to have someone experienced with you that you trust. It won't make you a better programmer, but like many life experiences, it is an opportunity to grow and learn more about yourself. You still have to do all the work yourself in order to realize that opportunity. I've been in the technology industry for 15 years, and virtually all of my closest friends have used psychedelics at some point.

Otherwise, I largely agree with swift's comments.
That is true. I'm thinking more along the lines of all the XP users out there that decided to skip Vista. For them it's a big upgrade.
No, I just read the article (sitting in a coffee shop at the moment). I'll have to watch the video when I get home -- thanks for clearing that up.
so -- the idea is to take some big list of drugs that a person requires and compute the lowest cost supplemental insurer?

I have a couple questions.

1 While the social utility of this is obvious, how do you support the (very likely) large amount of hand tuned scraping required to do this? I'm really curious if anybody has any ideas.

2 How do you prevent yourself from getting financially ruined by insurance companies suing you for whatever reason they dream up? It hardly matters if they have a case when they have inhouse counsel and you don't. But you have to imagine that the losers here are going to end up pissed off.
Since global karma (your collected karma over time) does not have any real function in the site as far as I can see you could lose it completely and not much of value would be lost, the way to look at it now is more 'relative', if you see a comment thread with a comment directly above the comment you're looking at that you think contributes less than the comment below it vote to lower one up.

After all, the biggest function by far of the votes is to influence the sort order, so the good stuff gets read by the people that skim. A vote is like a little bit of editorial power, you get to have a say in what goes 'above the fold'.
New ranking algoritm. See pg's comments in the experiment- thread.
Another thought:

The way that racist comments and other trolls generally get a minus -4 is useful. Having an indication that the community in general abhors a particular unfortunate comment is very useful in this case (though over -4's have seemed completely mean and unjustified).

I hope such comments still are going to get some 'deprecated' indicator...
Weekends are when I'm able to work on my startup. Compressed work schedule for paying job, 4 days x 10 hrs / day. 3 day weekends mean I can relax and put some solid hours in on my startup.
Do they have free DNS service like Godaddy's ?
Back a while ago I submitted an idea, that maybe there are herd (mob) effects on comment threads happening.

This should do the trick (driving the long tail).
Porting MIT Scheme to the .NET CLR
Sorry but can someone explain me why was I downvoted. I thought it was a legit question.
That sounds like a paraphrase of something George Polya said.
Sooo, when will we get pink, dancing polka dots to highlight conversations like this? :-)
At my startup I'm implementing these ideas from VPRI right now, we focus on implementing a parallel message-passing architecture in hardware and software. Founders wanted!
I'm relatively new to HN, and I am not in favor of the hiding of points on comments. One of the reasons I am here is because of the trust that was created in seeing that the community as a whole actually values (and devalues) the same things I do. If I were to discover HN now, that kind of information about the community is no longer available.
I think the problem is not so much with the choice of words as it is in the company in which you choose to use those words.

I swear a lot, I grew up in a fairly rough area of a big town and it took me some self control to get rid of it.

It's not that I mind, it is that other people mind, and the use of it in 'polite discourse' is therefore discouraged, there are other ways to express exactly the same thing without chancing stepping on someones toes. In general, if every third comment on HN would contain swear words we'd have to start calling it 4chan, and I'm sure plenty of people - including me - would leave.

That says noting about your freedom to choose whatever words you want, but you have to be aware that you are changing the atmosphere in a non subtle way by your choice of language.
From the viewpoint of someone pretty new:

pg, of course

mechanical_fish, unalone, patio11, jacquesm, edw519, riderofgiraffes (too memorable), abyssknight. I haven't read enough to easily recognize consistently insightful commenters yet. The names I currently have in memory are there probably due to frequency, insightful comments, activity in the same threads as me, replying to me, or their name struck me as interesting/memorable.
The Little Javascripter
Hmm, you definitely have a point. People have rarely felt musicians should be paid (a lot) for their self-expression; I can't really recall when it was a lucrative career. What I suppose I meant was that the best musicians have often (though not always) been poor business people.

You're also right that sometimes they deserve to be paid. It is my intuition that the free market works against supporting the largest number of musicians. It may work to reward the best, but to me, that doesn't foster innovation (since musicians rarely look at the payoff in terms of money--probably fame). Certain acts are always going to be very famous, but there probably is a lot of room for diversity.

The optimal strategy for creativity/diversity would be to provide a (minimal) amount of reimbursement for attempting to create music. This would not only bring music creation back to the masses (where it probably should be) but could also provide an incentive for creative people to put work out and also buy dinner.
not being in the us I dont know what rhapsody does, but :)

the desktop client is free to use in an unlimited way, there are adverts but they are pretty unintrusive.

they have a pretty massive library, at first there was a few holes but they are getting better and better.

their player interface is pretty decent, but their software rocks, I can search and start playing a song faster than I can with itunes playing local songs, if it goes offline, they have usually cached most of my popular playlists, I can have svn timing out and somehow this thing still plays new songs.

along with a mobile application that lets you store offline playlists.

from wikipedia it sounds like rhapsody is a pretty similar service, and if so I dont really understand what more people can want as a music consumer, its a pretty damn big step compared to just a few years ago
> I'd go so far as to say that I'd enjoy reading jokes and one-liners the folks here have to say about the news. We've got some really smart people that read HN. I bet their jokes are hilarious.

I agree. HN, while of course useful in other ways, seems so humorless to me. I understand that some HNers are paranoid about HN turning into Slashdot or Reddit, but it would probably be nice sometimes to have a more community-like feel, even if it were totally segregated from the "real" HN.
What a total disrespect for the students that were there. 35 minutes of painful awkwardness, with absolutely nothing to redeem it.

I don't know what the students were anticipating, or if they were required to be there for credit, but the whole ordeal was pathetic. And calling it "performance art" doesn't elevate it or make it in any way worthwhile.
This list is far from exhaustive:

People who joined much earlier than I whose comments I think about away from the computer (my heuristic for "recognize") include mechanical_fish, robg, pg (of course), and DanielBMarkham. I read a lot more of the "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" posts than of the "hacking and startups" posts.

Some people on board more recently whose usernames catch my attention include cwan, and there is a fairly large group of users, including quite a few from the leader list

http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

that I recognize as interesting posters but can't identify as recent users or as long-time users.

To the best of my knowledge and belief, I've not met any HN participant in person.
Shockmarket: Quant trading startup circa 1999.
I think it's that his "lightweight business-IT theories" aren't recognized as such.
I think there is a flaw in using Facebook friend connections for a dating site. Facebook friends are not the same as real friends, since the barrier to entry usually is just recognizing the requester and clicking accept. Of the 100+ "friends" I have on Facebook, maybe 10 are real friends (defined as people I regularly talk to or hang out with in person). I wouldn't feel comfortable introducing someone to "that girl who lived down the hall from me freshman year who friended me on Facebook"
Funny story, and I liked the jokes.
>So you think it's bad because you feel guilty about your past piracy?

No. I'm just saying it means less money for the music industry, which is not contingent on whether or not I feel guilty.

>I don't - the only music I've ever downloaded is stuff I've already bought on vinyl or CD, in some cases multiple times, and lost via lending/ moving house/ abandoned storage etc., or which is unavailable due to being out of print. And have you ever tried taking a crackly LP, snapped tape or delaminated CD back to the store for replacement?

That's nice, but do you really doubt that many or most filesharers are skinflint pirates like me?
didn't HN have something similar? I think there was a thread and an IRC channel and a Google group dedicated to Hacker news-ers reading SICP.
I don't have problems with any other electronic equipment, so if CFLs are delicate flowers.... (Filtered power isn't an option for a socket in the ceiling.)
So... the state famous for Silicon Valley is one of most hostile to entrepreneurship? Makes sense.

California has high personal and corporate taxes, laws that often favor employees over employers, lots of burdensome regulations, and is generally regarded as "economically less free" and hostile to businesses.

It also has an economy larger than all but a handful of countries, is generally in the top 15 states for income per capita, gross state product per capita, median household income, etc. On the other hand, the study mentions a ranking where the state with the most economic freedom was Kansas, which is average (or a bit below) on those same metrics.

Overall, at first glance it looks to me like there's a moderate negative correlation between what they define as "economically free" and a state being economically successful. What is it they're arguing for, again?
As far as music being available, I think it's a decent option, but it's still beholden (as far as I know) to the music label oligopoly.

I'd like to see something that gives the music labels a run for their money, doesn't require artists to sign away all their rights in return for sales and makes sense for all players in the business, not just the big-money interests.
Your grandparents were buying recorded music. It's not some new fad.

The reason we expect music to be free, or nearly free, now is because of filesharing. If Napster and its spiritual descendants had never existed, people would still be buying music more or less like it was 1999.
Maybe they could do leaf blowers next.
I see your point, though I'm only concerned about the artist rather than industry. Do you use any of your estimated $600/yr savings to attend concerts? The point being that I personally feel music is most effective (commercially) as advertising for live performance. Or am I being naive?
PLT Scheme is so easy to download and get started with. I really recommend you use that instead of JavaScript when working through The Little Schemer. http://www.plt-scheme.org/

I'm working out a problem right now for JavaScript (client-side dictionary/grammar thingy) and it's easier for me to explore the problem in Scheme.

I don't really know why anyone would voluntarily choose to use JavaScript when Scheme is available.

edit: I'm not hating on this idea. JavaScript DOES have first-class functions and lexical scoping, so you can indeed do The Little Schemer in it. I'm pointing out PLT Scheme for anyone who hasn't already done The Little Schemer and has had their interest piqued.
Also, while Stallman can come across as kind of paranoid sometimes, where Microsoft is concerned they really have earned a lot of suspicion, distrust, and ill will with past behavior. I can't really blame someone for not wanting to forgive and forget quickly just because Microsoft has been a bit nicer lately.
Cracking the brain's numerical code
Hi Daeken,

That's impressive. Are you writing your OS for study purposes or you have something special in mind? I am interested in knowing as I am planning to do the same and might want to consult you.
Oh, not just the domain.

The actual path of the article is:

/2009/09/26/richard-stallman-smeared-for-truth/

Which makes me think he rethought his headline after originally writing it.

Again, reiterating my earlier statement... If you want to boycott Novell, start with digging out every piece of code they have touched directly or indirectly to Linux, starting with Gnome, Mono, and a whole ton of other stuff that will reduce Linux back to 1996-level functionality.
The record industry's post-Napster decline gives a hint about the relative magnitude of file-sharing's positive and negative impact on the record industry.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sect...

Short answer - it's negative.
http://groups.google.com/group/hacker-news-reads-sicp?hl=en&...
In design there is a trade-off of complexity vs. usability. Perl does a good job at giving programmers access to a lot of complex features by using clever/borrowed metaphors and idioms. The complexity still remains. This means when writing systems above a certain size perl is not a good choice precisely because it takes time to parse.

I like perl, but maintainability has more aspects than just following community conventions.

I don't know where you got the dislike of Algol: I cannot see the resemblance of algol and lua. Algol is in perl's ancestry (via the bourne shell) though.
Whereas the usual opinion is "filesharing must be OK because I do it so much."
I'd stay away from red and green and go with orange, to match the header color. These dots shouldn't map to any specific connotation; they're just visual indicators.
It's farcical to say that without modern chess theory you can't measure chess ability.

Russia had a strong reputation because strong players from other countries played against Russian players and lost. Have a look at Murray's A History of Chess (1913) it mentions a few accounts of Russia's strong chess abilities significantly pre-dating positional/piece value theory.
Or perhaps when businesses become successful, the state is able to take a bigger cut. If there isn't much activity, the host isn't fat enough to make a good target for taxes and regulation.
Regardless of RMS's position and community's reaction, that was just a poorly written, rambling paean to RMS.

I'll concede that there are some valid points to be fished out of that article and ruminated upon but the rampant amount of RMS adulation practically drowned it out.

(Full disclosure: I do indeed think that this is paranoid "they're all making fun of me" tripe. But that has no bearing on the above.)
"If he used the actual sample from the song then it's more likely"

Well, he didn't.

I totally disagree with you. The foundations of modern pop music are built on sampling the music of ages past. Much of what we enjoy today literally would not exist without the unfettered use of samples. We can't just say "nope, not any more."
Decoding Jackson Pollock
Horrifically bad software demo becomes horrifically bad performance art.
I love it. Any chance of eztv.it integration?
Facebook lawsuit: Mom, son say pranksters setup racist, sexual profile
The only reason I wouldn't have gotten up and left would have been the guy's story about his deceased student. There are glimmers of a potential performance art, but the video is mostly just awkward. He's lucky there weren't any interruptions or the video playing in the background would have been out of sync.
I think its important to give away things that are not your core business. I like the pandora hat and I remember it fondly, but if my coworker got a super-awesome pandora account, I think I would just feel "dang, why didn't I get one".
The Kindle as it exists today, is going to be a pretty sad design for mostly anything other than reading. Definitely not intended for playing shoot-'em-ups - playing chess or educational games might work, but then again, Kindle's form factor puts it right in the middle - it's too big to fit into a pocket like an iPhone and too small to be used as a full-fledged laptop.