skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually I have heard many scientists utter something along the line of --

"I find the barriers between disciplines often quite an artificial creation here doctor, the more I study the more I see the connections that bind this universe together becoming clear to me. It is the way of the future."

--Proff. Friedrick Von Slick (fictional super villain in audio drama/podcast Red Panda)
Yes, this. I'm a happy windows user (probably a minority here) except for this bloody feature. And the fact that every time windows updates are downloaded I have to review them to make sure they don't contain some kind of genuine validation checker that won't benefit me in any way except probably make my windows copy illegal by mistake.
That might make sense but it could still mean that a long, pointless, off-topic discussion would rise to the top, above other shorter, succinct comments that might end up buried at the bottom.
Updates are particularly difficult to get right. For something that requires a restart, you have two main options: restart the computer for the user, or wait for the user to restart on its own. You run into two problems if you wait for the user: Many never actually restart, and if you let it trigger on Shutdown also, then you'll have the problem of users turning on their computer and having to wait 20 minutes for all 200 updates they haven't been bothering with to install.

As far as automated updates go, they should be requiring the user to acknowledge the "Restart now?" box, and nag the hell out of users until they acknowledge it somehow.
I find it odd that the only place you get airline style dispatching is the self service lines. But, I think it's a space and time issue. Adding the time it takes to find the next open spot and move there is going to reduce throughput.
Repeat after me: you cannot have a system with points and expect people not to play games with it.

Exactly! A lot of games just got killed, and now we're hearing some protesting about it.

The entire point of using karma is that it means something -- it has value. Heck, I bet to some folks it has a lot of value. I'd further bet that it has so much value to some folks that you could monetize it. But that's a discussion for another day.

You don't find it slightly pathetic that people would be judging themselves by the score of their comments on a web site? And I say this as an upstanding member of the Karma Kommunity.

There is, actually, one system of points that works brilliantly. Metafilter's favoriting system, which allows upvotes but not downvotes, lets top comments get notified, but doesn't penalize any other comments, and because MF uses a flat commenting system the conversation isn't at all affected by what people like and dislike.
somebody in the debate responded to a guy who was at -4 by saying "Look at your comment score, looks like I'm right." That's shit.

That's assuming that the majority is right. If somebody gets voted down there is a pretty good chance that they were wrong, or even if they were right, they said in the wrong tone/manner.
I respect our achievments and don't doubt you meant well by being there although I am not clear what RIGHT you feel you had to attend. If you have such a big problem with what happened, perhaps it would have been better to speak to Resham privately after the event when she was less stressed and had more time to discuss. Instead, you started Tweeting to the world about the injustice and then blog about it thus stirring up a shitstorm totally out of proportion to the incident. By offering people a right to reply when they are actually running an event seems to demonstrate an inflated sense of importance.

I stand by my point that if you feel this is so wrong, and are no doubt an accomplished entrepreneur, then set up an alternative. I would be equally happy to support yours, or other quality activities that support the growth of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. http://thebln.com By making this such an issue, you run the risk of alienating some of the people and organisations that would be inclined to help.
Yeah, I have, and no, he's definitely not a people person. There's a difference between being a 'people person' and deliberately saying nasty things about other people who have worked their asses off producing free software, though.

You're right in any case: name calling is out of line, for everyone involved, starting with RMS. If he doesn't like Mono or Microsoft or Debian or Apache or whatever, that's fine. But please refrain from personal insults.
One thing I don't like: The graying out of comments at 0 and -1. Your comment was gray when I came across it, and now that comes across as a very significant visual for judgment. I don't think a single voter should have the power to gray something out before anybody else has read it.
This is far more impressive, Chain Reaction (aka Boomshine) in javascript:

http://www.yvoschaap.com/chainrxn/
Scientists See Numbers Inside Peoples Heads
The Story & Observer Paradox
Infoquake author David Louis Edelman finishes his next book, Geosynchron
It took me three watchings to figure out what they were trying to demonstrate. Between the colors (not to harp on the color blindness thing, but those color choices were dreadful) and the speed of the animation, its relatively difficult to even understand what is happening the first few times through.
It'll be curious to see, then, if those one-liners get even more massively upvoted, or if the reaction towards them becomes something negative.
I think there's a very important semantic point to be made here. The open source movement would not have happened in the way it did without the free software movement. I believe to deny that is to be delusional about the reality of the situation.

The semantic point is that the opinion of an originator of an effect has no necessary correspondence as to whether they were responsible for that effect or not. Despite Stallman's protestations to the contrary, despite his opposition to open source, these things do not make him any less responsible (in the cause-effect sense) for the open source movement. The inadvertence of the effect is irrelevant to the fact of its existence.
Social anything apps don't have to turn into mobs. Twitter's not a mob. Facebook's not a mob. Most large forums don't turn into mobs. In fact, forums, because they don't allow for comment voting, usually are much better against sensationalist postings because you understand every post is a user's opinion and not the vox populi.
For Windows, there definitive source in book form is the Microsoft Windows Internals series. I worked with a guy that used to work at Microsoft and he prefered this book to looking things up in the source code ;-)

http://www.amazon.com/Windows®-Internals-Including-Windows-P...

If you're in school, Microsoft also has an academic program that allows universities (almost) full access to the source code of various Windows kernels. Its called the Windows Research Kernel program and might help you along if you can get ahold of it because it comes with a ton of documentation: the original NT design papers, proposed class materials and a full copy of the aforementioned Microsoft Windows Internals book in PDF form.

For Mac, the online kernel guides are pretty good. The Mac OS X Internals book isn't so great for driver or kernel development directly, but is a good reference for learning about how things work. Having said that, the book is a bit dated at this point and could use an update for the later kernels.
Please Evaluate My Startup Idea
I was working with a poorly written code yesterday and had an idea for a startup. What if there was a online tool that you could submit a poorly written and indented code such as "while(1){ if (1){do(x);}}" and it would give you back a nice and correctly indented code like

while(1) {
if(1) {
do(x);
}
}

I was working at financial services company(Goldman Sachs) a while ago and they had a helper "software" that did this. Any software that was checked in had to run this helper tool which made all code at GS feature the same look-and-feel which was really really great. I even remember the indenting was always 4 spaces.

What do you think about this kind of online tool? I don't have time to do it myself, so if anyone wants to do it, please go ahead :). You also make money by, say, charging for a code that's 2000 lines or longer. Maybe Paul Graham would even give you money for that :).

Please let me know what you think.
A Whole Foods in NY has that. Everyone just gets into 3 lines and a note pops up telling you which cashier to go to. I think they have 3 lanes just to hold more people - the system would be identical with any N lanes.
I'm in a similar boat to Confusion on this one. I don't care about elegance; if I make a comment and then someone shows up with 2 sentences that basically say "You're an idiot. Obviously the answer is X." then context is important. Without knowing what the score is, I'll probably disregard the comment because I obviously disagree. However, if my comment has 1 point and the responder's has 50 points, then I know there's a pretty good chance I'm wrong, and know to go investigate.
"Pretty good chance." But here's the thing. What if they're not wrong? What if a bunch of people read the comment, didn't quite understand it, and then downvoted it because it already had downvotes? I know I act like that a lot while reading.

I also see a curious downvoting pattern on those frequent incidents when somebody mass downvotes all my comments for some reason or other. I'll assume for argument that on average I make useful, relevant comments. When new comments that I make get downvoted, there's about a 50-50 chance that the next person to come along also downvotes the comment, even when it's a good one. They see the other person's downvote and it reenforces in their mind that there was a good reason the comment was being downvoted. The ones that get a reverse upvote, however, then soar upwards.

I had made one comment a few days ago that go downvoted such, then for a while hovered between -1 and -2, with very little differentiation. Then it hit 1 again, and within a few hours had hit up to something like 16. That's a pattern that I see a lot. People are less willing to upvote a comment that's grey than they are to upvote something solidly in the black. That's a flaw.
It seems I wasn't able to make the code look like indented (Hacker News software automatically changed it). In the indented code while(1) should be on first line, "{" on the second line, "if(1)" on the third line, etc.. I'm sorry for that.
I think this was a dupe that was killed on HN...

Not sure why that was though.. It's no secret that 37Signals is very opinionated but that's part of what makes them interesting. It's also hard to argue with the success they've had. So please let this posting live. It's an entertaining read to say the least.
Maybe it's a subtle way to make sure they're being read.
Why are the Russians so good at chess?
Perhaps we could assign IDs to posters? The first commenter in a thread is A, the second commenter is B, so that each new thread gives users a new identity.

The problem with that is that anonymity leads to trolling.
I always did the same thing, and I (so far) have been up/down voting far more. Instead of keying in on a specific score I feel appropriate for that comment, I'm keying in on just the three options: Up, Down, No change. Without having a visible score, I am no longer constrained by "If I up/down vote this, it will take it out of the range I want it to be in". Instead I'm just up/down voting as I want to.
Tesco, an enormous supermarket chain, had that in some stores. It was so efficient, and (what I'd never considered) took up much less space: you don't need to keep waiting room for 20 lines, just one long line.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=how+to+form+delaware+llc
Google barks back at Microsoft over Chrome Frame security
I believe the shorter on-topic comment would be voted up more than the off-topic thread (unless ofcourse, the off-topic thread involves a sparky issue like Micheal Arrington).
I think that those threads will be downvoted same as always, and when they grey out it'll give other users the impression that those comments are less interesting/worthwhile than other comments.

And, to rant a teeny bit, that's what downvoting is used for. You don't downvote people that disagree with you or that say something you don't like. Downvoting is for removing comments that aren't relevant to the discussion. That's why they go grey. When I saw your comment, you'd been downvoted and greyed out, and you made a comment with a relevant or interesting point. You should not have been downvoted.
indent with two spaces for HN (works for submissions too). e.g.

while(1) {
if(1) {
do(x);
}
}
It's news because HN lets you resubmit dupes after a year has passed since the last time it was up.
There just isn't enough time to go through all the content; it's much easier to learn the site's bias & compensate.

That's one man's opinion. I read all the comments on every thread here, and find that not all the high-quality comments rise to the top. It's hit-and-miss. In a way that invalidates the theory of upvote-judging, no?

It's a shitty system that forces you to adapt to biases. Right now PG's experimenting with removing a bias and improving the system. You're arguing that it would be better if he left the system flawed.
"Android" is used nowhere in the marketing of any of the Android-based phones. That's why it says "With Google!" instead.

When it comes to the consumer, they're not going to even know what Android is. Go ask any Nokia owner if they like their Symbian phone.
Fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss has just had his first son Working name: "Oot".
Ask HN: group project for HN or if anyone wants to run with it
Recently spoke with a relative that is having to go through each company's website to determine which tier each medicine is in. Then compare each insurance company's Medicare supplement offering to see what is covered.

Idea is to have one site where the medicine is entered then go find the information from the drug companies and insurance companies. Would probably need by state. Big help is to have one place where you enter information and a page that could be printed out summarizing the results.

You might not ever make money on the site but there are a bunch of folks who would really appreciate an easy to use site for gathering information.

If you decide to run with this, please post how it goes.

Some Medicare information:
http://www.pueblo.gsa.gov/cic_text/health/drugplan/drugplan.htm
Well, most people will just be honest, especially in public, even if there's no real way for someone else to tell what they're doing.

Also, if eliminating conventional checkout lanes frees up floor space for more products to sell and lets them save money by hiring fewer cashiers, a higher rate of theft may still put them ahead overall. It can seem counterintuitive, but at some point preventing fraud is more expensive than just eating the loss.
IMHO you need to distinguish between a start-up and an idea for a website:

(01) A start-up is a business venture. It takes as input money, sweat and tears and can give you an output from a big loss to a few million dollars or more.

(02) Your idea is actually for an on-line tool. There are actually many tools that can do this for you, google for example javascript beautifier or your language + formatter. Most professional programmers will also be working in IDE that automatically does that. I cannot actually imagine any programmer paying for this!

By the way guaranteed, you will make zero money from Python developers!
I'd say other than Windows OS and Mac OS X. I haven't had a Mac problem that other people couldn't solve. Three cheers for standardization of hardware/OS, I guess.
How often are you changing stations? I tend to only change stations every couple of hours, if that often. It seems like frequent station changing defeats the purpose of music discovery, because of how Pandora seems to react when changing stations. If I change a station, listen to an entire song, and then change back, it (seems) to reset the "play things I know skolor likes before branching out into new things". I don't have any data at all on it, but after I have a sufficiently mature station (50+ "liked" songs, or so) it seems to mostly play through 10-20 songs before introducing any new songs I've never heard before.

My main complaint with Last.FM is that it makes me putting a label on what I like in music, and then match that up with how other people label music. I know next to nothing about music, I just know I like certain songs and dislike others (Ok, I know a little more than that, but not much). When I used Last.FM I would pick a genre/tag I liked/artist, listen for a while, and get bored with it because it either sounded exactly the same or else I picked the wrong tag and it turns out that wasn't the factor in the original music I liked.
Fuck that.

Don't you think that reaction is a little bit extreme? Unlike you, apparently, I don't have time to read all 800 comments on all the threads on this site.
Links to the researchers if you are interested:

http://www.danbgoldman.com/

http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~elishe/

http://www.connellybarnes.com/work/

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~af/

Great work guys.
Yes; if anything, hiding the username might be just as useful.
Perhaps I'm in the minority; I'd downvote that even if it was right because that's a shitty attitude for somebody to take.

Meanwhile, I think if somebody replies to you with something like that, it's worth investigating regardless of if they're the top answer or not. I'll draw a parallel to Reddit's "What's your favorite album?" threads. If you were to go by comment points alone, you'd think Radiohead's OK Computer was the best album of all time and that NIN took the four spots under that; meanwhile, albums out of the hive mind don't get as many upvotes, even if the commenter is more passionately in love with them.

Similarly, just because a lot of people think one thing on HN doesn't mean that one thing is the best answer. Looking up multiple solutions may take more time, but that leads to learning and growth, which I think should be the point of any community.
Coding at my new job I tried out Pandora and after a few days I kept hearing the same music. My test is eclectic and I like hearing folk to jazz to alternative to 80s to etc ... Pandora does not seem to offer this type of station, but Last.fm does as if you trained it via a plug in it knows exactly what genres you like and the artists in those genres.

Also, I use Fire.fm firefox last.fm toolbar which is great as it puts play controls right into firefox and last.fm does not need to be open!
Building Management Systems, Security Management Systems.
I guess my point in saying he's not a people person is to reiterate that folks should just kind of ignore him when he says something like this. Getting personally offended by a Richard Stallman comment is like getting personally offended by a young child wetting the bed. His role is 'tireless proponent of a powerful idea', not 'personable leader'.
I agree with everything you said with one exception.
It will be possible at some point to be the head of multiple science fields because our method of learning and storing information is changing completely.

We're making this fundamental shift from storing as much as we can in our heads to storing information outside our heads and learning more efficient ways of looking things up.

As the depth and breadth of our collective knowledge base increases so will our capacity to access, make connections and implement that knowledge.
If I'd just said Fuck that, absolutely! As it is, I went on to add a whole ton of details.

Unlike you, apparently, I don't have time to read all 800 comments on all the threads on this site.

Really? When you're spending 30 days flying around on a plane and sleeping in airports, I'd imagine you're the one with more time to waste.

The top comments on HN are still the highest-voted ones. Read however many you want before the discussion tires you. Also, I can't think of many HN threads that ended up with more than 300 comments. 300 is at most an hour's reading; an hour isn't very long.
Posted it yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=842893

It has not been killed but got 0 points and 0 comments.

I thought it was entertaining too.
I think a restart is usually ethical provided you don't use any assets from the previous company (besides perhaps your personal expertise).

In the former situation (just a name picked), after a restart you need a new name.

In your situation (dead guy wrote lots of code), after a restart you have to throw away the code.
I never used Pandora that much—I prefer consciously sitting down and listening to a particular album—but when I threw an early morning party, I set Pandora to play light jazz and the music gave everything a great feel. It's awesome that nowadays tools exist to let us manage music that way.
The automatic restart caused us no end of difficulties at my work. We were running long running data loading integration test scripts on windows boxes. Nothing worse then finding out that the script that was supposed to run over the weekend made it 8 hours then the machine rebooted to install updates.
My guess would be: More groupthink, less bandwagon.

That is, comments that (intentionally or not) pander to the audience will get more upvotes, but good comments that happen to get several early upvotes won't get the same pile-on effect. That's just a WAG, though.
I think the point is that even if you "know" that, you might not "get" it intuitively. This animation is supposed to help you "get" it, and even though it's a bit too fast, I think it does a great job.
How to broadcast audio over network so all computers are synced?
Anyone who grew up in the age of radio and had the kitchen and bedroom radios tuned to the same channel knows what I want to do.

I want to have a master broadcast computer and then be able to go from room to room and choose whether or not to put the computer in that room is playing that master channel. So then I could walk around the house and here the same music. Can the broadcast channel be used? I feel like this should be a solved problem, but Google is rather unrevealing.
Apropos of nothing, let me not one side effect of this recent change to HN: I'm really having a much harder time resisting the urge to downvote ideas just because they're really bad.

Instead, let me just say that this common notion -- that because good content is the ultimate signal of quality, we should read all the content before making a choice -- is like saying that, because the way your spouse gets along with children is vitally important to your future happiness, you should try having a child with all the eligible spouses you can find before you choose one.
But, if something does have vim bindings, even in a limited manner, it suddenly gains extraordinary appeal (e.g. keyboard navigation in gmail)
I read this a couple months ago and loved it. It's a physicist looking at the hard numbers of energy consumption and (sustainable) production. It's the opposite of all the wishy-washy environmentalist hand waving that's out there.

Read this if you've ever wondered about how leaving the lights on compares to turning the heat down a degree compares to...
It is a very good article. I read it last month in the paper version of the magazine, while on holiday and stroke a chord as I always considered myself to be one. We all have a current advantage over our predecessors in that knowledge is now so much more freely available.

As science and engineering expands it tends to fragment into specializations. Although I have always been advocating that specialization is for insects, the reality of life is that you need to be top notch on one or two fields and a generalist in as many as possible.