skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think reading about the early history of the MIT AI labs and the history of LISP machines really helps to put RMS in context. Before reading about how that all played out, I was one of the ones who respected RMS's broad goals, but decried his almost radical attitude.

I don't think like that any longer. Instead, I now see RMS as a sort of holocaust survivor warning against complacency when dealing with dictators. If RMS seems overly concerned with corporations co-opting free software, it's only because he's been there!

(P.S. Sorry for not providing links to the LISP machine history. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine and http://funcall.blogspot.com are probably a good jumping-off points. The tl;dr of it is: MIT AI labs developed LISP, Symbolics took MIT's work and commercialized it without giving back, the MIT AI lab guys responded by going off and forming their own LISP machine company, and that left RMS all alone at MIT and hating commercial software)
I'm now experimenting with changing the function used to rank comments. I'm hopeful this will both help users find the good comments on a thread, and solve the problem of good but late comments getting stuck at the bottom of the page.
The 'Silent' Aircraft Initiative
The main focus of that book is the energy choices facing the UK.
somehow the huge investment companies like Twitter keep getting kinda makes me think that's NOT what VCs want...
Actually, if chess strength is judged by chess champions, the US was stronger than Russia in the 19th century.

Further, a quick look at Wikipedia shows that modern Chess as such did not really even exist in the 1700s. Modern Chess theory, based on position and piece value, originated in Europe and the United States in the late 19th century. Chess strength of any sort before that is irrelevant.

So basically, the article is right.
To me, the points are a way for other readers to signal agreement without needing to clutter the thread with dozens of "me too" comments. A score of 50 gives a comment the force of many voices, but it compacts those voices into two efficient bytes.

Sure, it's a noisy signal because scores don't just indicate agreement, but the context usually makes that clear. If a factual claim is up- or downvoted, it usually indicates that people believe the claim is true or false. For analysis or opinion, it may have to more with whether the comment is insightful or thought-provoking.
Wonderful, wonderful. Way beyond your typical anti-IP rant.
This change might improve voting, but it decreases the value of that voting.

I'll stipulate that the voting might be more "fair", if that is a goal. I'm not sure it should be. It might make the "game" of getting high karma more fair, but I'm not bothering with or bothered by that game anyway.

On the other hand, I can no longer use the results of this voting to help me skim a conversation. I want to know what everyone else found most valuable, without having to read through every comment on my own. I can't do that anymore. This completely breaks how I use HN.
FTA: Especially these days, they contend, when children spend more time in front of screens and less time in unsupervised play, kids need careful adult guidance and instruction before they are able to play in a productive way.

Kids need adults to show them how to play? Holy crap, what are we coming to?
what makes you think patent trolls are recent innovation? I think they're as old as patent office.
Stallman isn't a bad guy but he's a zealot and like in every other aspect of life following a zealot generally isn't a good idea.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against him speaking his mind or his supporters speaking theirs. The difference here is between "Mono and de Icaza are evil" and "I think Mono is the wrong approach and here's why"

Stallman always jumps to "people who disagree with me are evil" and that's why even his supporters are starting to wonder if he's doing more damage than good.
Your Guide to Music on the Web, Part II
Update: I wrote a new function to rank comment threads, and it's being used now. Seems promising.
If Skype should fall..
Just with pure Wikipedia-ing... Mikhail Moiseyevich Botvinnik was an assimilated Jew. Bronstein might have seemed "more Jewish" for all I know and so not have been considered desirable.

Also, terrible mistakes aren't unheard of in this level of play - I remember an account of the Karpov/Korchnoi match mentioning a few. The pressure in such a high level match is intense. Remember, no one has a day to analyze their next move. One player seals their move and it isn't revealed till the next day. True, they each get to think about the position in general but that's harder.
Power Management in Linux-Based Systems
Actually, there are cultures which foster intense distance running so I think even the genetics/distance running argument isn't a "slam dunk" - ie, to just act like the point is proven is a cheap, unsupported argument.
Computer Science is a ill-advised conflation of two different fields, of which one is largely an engineering discipline and one is essentially applied mathematics that the engineering side draws upon for tools and techniques. Neither is a "science" under any plausible definition of the word.
Ask HN: Which usernames do you recognise?
In the light of the current experiment of not showing comment ratings there's been a lot of (good) discussion about what criteria people use to vote. One thing that came up was giving a positive bias to usernames you recognize for their previous insightful comments or their expertise on a certain subject.

So the question is: Which usernames do you recognise, and why?
I don't think I'll run with this; it looks to be a mess.

But after a good 25 minutes of research, including a perusal of an AARP guide to the process, whose URL is at the bottom of this post (or Google "drug names medicare plans"), the relevant variables seem to be these:

1. geographical location (zip code)

2. each drug in the person's drug list

a. dosage -- frequency and amount

b. generic available?

c. lower cost brand-name drug of same therapeutic value available?

3. the pharmacy of choice

a. local pharmacy

b. mail-order pharmacy

4. Payments

a. annual deductible

b. monthly drug premium

c. how much your drug copays cost at four different levels of coverage:

i. before deductible is met

ii. after deductible is met, but before limit of $2700 is reached (beginning of doughnut hole)

iii. in doughnut hole, when recipient pays 100% of costs

iv. after catastrophic stage is reached ($4350, end of doughnut hole), and government/plan again helps out.

5. The plans

a. plan ratings (how good customer service is, based on customer feedback, etc.)

b. tiers, ranging from lowest copay (1) to highest copay (4 or 5). Each drug falls into a particular tier; some drugs may have alternatives in cheaper tiers. Some plans don't use tiers.

c. restrictions on certain drugs

I would be willing to bet that someone who actually understands this process would want to qualify or correct some or all of what I've written.

From what I can tell, the question is often not 'does plan a cover drug z', but rather 'given that I'm taking drugs w, x, y and z, will my costs be lowest with plan a, b or c.' This is precisely the sort of computation that software should help out with, but, as I said above, it looks messy. Also, if you dispense inaccurate information, you could really be inflicting harm on someone.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&...
Part of it is just not having a good way of offering those recommendations when you're in the midst of an Autoplay session, which is going to change in the next launch cycle as we implement our new algorithm.

As for the major labels, keep your eyes peeled. We're working hard on that end. We know it will be a critical component.
I'm usually not a music person.

But this is brilliant. The amount of effort that must have gone into making something like this... Timing the typing and speaking to the rhythm. It helps that I disagree with the modern state of IP.

I hope it goes viral. Dear Lily, why you being so silly...
PG. Not sure why :-)
remapping capslock -> esc will make editing so much easier and faster. being able to easily enter command mode has increased my speed more than anything else,
it's also really useful in other interfaces, to be able to quickly hit escape instead of reaching over to the top of the keyboard.

add
xmodmap -e 'clear Lock' -e 'keycode 0x42 = Escape'
to your ~/.xinitrc on linux
I'm glad to see that the artist who performed this isn't just talking about it, he's actually doing what he says. I poked around a little ways, got to his MySpace page, and found this: http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&..., where he not only provides the link to buy his newest album, but he also provides a link to download it too (http://www.megaupload.com/?d=HMMBYOTZ).

As a side note, I don't understand the recent trend for bands to only have a MySpace page, and not have their own site. It just seems a little tacky to me.
One big problem I have with Mono is that it seems terminally buggy. A Mono application I was thinking of getting involved with had untraceable memory leaks to it that seemed to doom an otherwise excellent app to second-rate-ness.

Further, the whole '.NET' architecture seems to be structurally so elaborate that any open source implementation would have to be buggy and incomplete since no one person would have the time to really finish or even understand all of it.

So I think that even without the thread of patents, .NET is a bad thing for open source because it gives folks a continual impetus to go to the working, closed-source MS implementation.
I particularly liked his last line: But when you're between the devil and the deep blue sea, you need to stop worrying about pirates, and adjust your sails. It seems particularly apt in the current state of the internet.
patio11 and mechanical_fish tend to be consistently insightful, and rarely mean.
One of the major obstacles is that you don't just need power, you need power on demand. Using current technology it's impossible to store electricity so it needs to be used right away or it's lost. Wind, solar and many other forms of green energy aren't dependable enough that you can rely on them as your only power source. If the wind doesn't blow on a winter night you're going to have a cold apartment if you're dependent on wind and solar.

There are experiments being done with transferring large amounts of electricity across countries in Europe based on the assumption that it will always be windy or sunny somewhere and that if power can be transferred long enough the uncertainty of supply will be cut drastically.
Larry Ellison Interview
Add to that the fact that a lot of snippets are outdated...
Online banking system have not been around that long. I do understand banking systems (the legacy stuff) and online banking (the newer front end stuff) particularly well as I built some of them. When I say built, I mean the company I founded wrote the code and I was the lead architect for what was used in many online banking systems.

Access to your accounts online should entail a system just for online access which is separate from and has a tightly controlled internal interface to the legacy bank system. I realize some banks may not have done it this way.

I spent my early career integrating with and sometimes replacing legacy mainframe systems. I have much respect for the old constraints programmers had. If a bank gets their online access wrong for anything written in the last 10 to 15 years its probably due to a decision to not architect the solution properly rather then a programmer being ignorant.
Software Freedom Day 2009
This new system saves me a lot of time by making HN less attractive.
It breaks the analogy, though. When you have the devil to pay, adjusting your sails won't do any good. Pirates or not.
There isn't such a country. A conflict with money will get your ass served anywhere.
-- You mean experiment of not showing comment ratings?

I remember a few name Gruesome, mechanical_fish ... but I'd recognize more if saw them in context.

But I don't a moderate in the basis of names I know anyway...

It seems like this experiment will make people in general less likely to moderate. I used to moderate highly rated posts on opinion and less highly rated posts on quality. I now moderate everything on opinion but I suspect others are more self-censored - my guess comes because I haven't had any up or down moderations recently...
Terrific (and probably effective) song.

Half way through Dan Bull implied that he took the background score from one of Lily's songs. He did, but he never properly gave credit at the end of the clip. And that's just not cool. Even if you think that music should be in the public domain (like I believe all university papers should be) you still must never use something without giving credit where it's due.

It only took 20 seconds to Google, but still. The original song is "22" from the album "It's Not Me, It's You".
I think the recent trend you're referring to is not-so-recent for more than a year now and is already on the decline. But reasons are quite obvious.
An attempt to make a better TV Guide
The small mammals and venture creation - YC impacting entrepreneurial landscape
No, we don't owe a debt to his extremism. There are thousands of people out there who have created open source software without the extremism. We do owe a debt to his work on those projects, but not to his extremism. The work could have, and often is, done without the extremism.
IIRC, search is expensive. It takes a lot of capital to get the indices and user-data which makes you competitive. Yahoo wanted to make money off of their (numerous) other properties as opposed to running down the rabbit hole of search.
As old as the net.

1) Some guy says something obnoxious.

2) Bystanders observe, "What a dick-move."

3) Guy complains that people are trying to censor him because they dare say that they disapprove of or disagree with him.

The main innovation in modern days is that for some folks, fanboys will take care of step 3 on behalf of the guy who's "under attack".
Apparently John Oliver (from The Daily Show) was there: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30686429@N07/3953575603/in/set-...
Sorry. Typo. fixed.
5 gal/min? My showerhead is 1.75 gal/min; and, yes, it has plenty of pressure.

Also, you don't need to be heating your water to 150 degrees (65 + 85). In fact, that's dangerously hot. Even if you did have your water heater set that high, you'd be diluting the stream substantially with cold water to get it back down to a comfortable temperature.

Between these two, it would appear that he's easily off by a factor of 5 or so.
That could be good, if it did it by removing bad attractions.

Some controversial threads with large numbers of votes were starting to feel like fights that attracted a crowd of onlookers. Those are very engaging, certainly, but it's probably better for both fighters and onlookers to have less of them.
At least at my school (U of Washington), CSE and Informatics are completely different programs. Our Info department is basically information science, web design, and watered-down programming. They are two distinct disciplines and should not become one.
"Since small business constitute 99.2% of all employer businesses in California, and all of non-employer business, the regulatory cost is borne almost completely by small business."

This a non-sequitur. According to www.sba.gov, small businesses account for about half of private sector employees and 44% of payroll (on a national level). This is a huge part of the economy but it is not "almost completely" the whole economy.
When you make a call with Google Voice, Google doesn't transmit your voice over the internet or over telephone wires or via microwaves. Your phone provider does that.

If true, why are certain numbers blocked, and the right to block numbers at Google's discretion asserted in the GV terms-of-service? Those calls are not being routed over your existing phone provider, or else Google wouldn't care about the destination.

And why shouldn't a "forwarding" service -- one that includes a new dialable endpoint number, SMS, conferencing, free long-distance, and more -- meet the same regulatory standards as other competitive services offering a phone number/SMS/conferencing/bundled-long-distance/etc.?

If Google can route an inbound call to any of several numbers purchased from other providers (mobile/home/office), even switching mid-call, how are they doing that if their service does not travel over and depend on "actual communication networks of any kind"?

It's unseemly that Google argues from general principles of fairness when asking the FCC to make rules in new areas (as with network neutrality), but then splits semantic hairs to define their quacks-like-a-duck GV offering as an exempt "Web-based software application".
This is just a hypothetical concept. The designer has not created a product that has the ability to 'grow' into meat or the technology that would do this. He has designed a pot. Big whoop. The story minus the content-jack here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1215883/Contr...
More stuff is written in java than lisp. Does this much java a better language by your definition?

Until you can show that using the new Microsoft technology we are talking about (and MVC has only just come out) actually increases development time by a significant factor or some other significant problem, labelling it "improper tooling" is simply identity-based Microsoft hate.
I recognise quite a few. Off the top of my head is tpcatek, cperciva and dfranke because of their expertise, mechanical_fish, nostrademons, jacquesm, jasonlbaptiste, mattmaroon and tokenadult because they often have something intersting to say, markbao because he's a great entrepreneur at a young age, and danielbmarkham because he has life experience.
If you didn't know that, HN probably isn't the right place to start learning it.
Lily Allen's career took off because of her myspace page as she uploaded songs/videos. In her case, she never needed a website.
I really wish that muxtape would get their act together. Even if it would be "for bands only" the interface and quality of it far surpassed myspace. Why sites liske purevolume and myspace are the defacto site for promoting bands is beyond me.
Anything involving cells or batteries, electric vehicles and other machinery is going to be massive.
If they clarify anywhere that this is pure sci-fi concept art I couldn't find it. Unethical buzz whoring by Electrolux it seems to me.
I recognize quite a few. Especially the people who hang out on #startups - swombat, axod (well, hung out, no thanks to freenode...), wheels, daleharvey, etc... Indeed, it'd be interesting to meet more of you in person. I wonder who matches what I think of them and who doesn't. I know pg's accent didn't quite square with the one I had in my head for the essays.
For every username I recognise for previous insightful comments, I also recognise one for something 'bad'. Although I don't vote according to this, it does at least show me that positive bias is not the only potential 'worry' in a points-based rating system like HN.
There are some people who have a substantial advantage when they start their training and others who could never be grandmasters with any amount of training.

Genetic differences are often overstated by comparing one extreme to another.

Instead, consider the personal limits of any given individual to be the best in strength/physique contests, chess competitions, programming contests, time to run a mile, or playing in the NFL.

The brain is still a physical object, and its development is a mix of genetics and upbringing, just as height and musculature are. The difference is that chess playing abilities isn't so readily visible as bulging muscles are.

Such limits are unknown until the given person puts many, many years of work into a particular goal (often at least five years.) That's because limits are not defined by where one starts, but where one plateaus for multiple years following some kind of improvement over the prior five, ten, fifteen years.

Genetics may help push somebody over a plateau they would otherwise have hit sooner (just as having a good coach, training regimen, knowing one's own body, etc, will help as well). But discovering that one is genetically superior (which, for somebody with a given gift, could simply mean that he or she is able to accomplish something one second faster than somebody else with the same training experience in the entire lives--something hard to duplicate) doesn't displace the years of work it took to reach a point where genetics start to be the limiting factor.

For every person a journalist might say has a gift, there are hundreds of other people with the same level of achievement nobody writes about. There are about 2,000 active NFL players. There are many grandmasters. There are many active runners, swimmers, etc who are comparable to the fastest people of 50 years ago, but are slower than the current world record holders. All of these people have to train hard to get to where they are.

For example: it's possible that somebody on Hacker News has the kind of muscle fibers that speed runners dream of. However, that person would never know they are athletically gifted because they never got to the point where this ability mattered; e.g., their cardiovascular system runs out of gas quickly and they never bothered to keep trying, to see how good they could actually be.

Recap: do genetics matter at differentiating the best from the best? Yes. Are people who are not the best in a particular arena missing those genes they need to be Gary Kasparov, Randy Moss, Wayne Gretzky? Very unlikely. It's more likely they are missing the 5, 10, 15 years of exerted effort at that particular mission.

The best in the world are better than those who have tried to do the same professionally for many years. However, there are hundreds of millions of people out there who could be close to the best, who have not even tried (often, for the sake of a career, family, education.) Genetics are really one of the least important differentiators when comparing a professional (anything) to somebody who is doing something else. Therefore, the genetic argument is very, very weak.
Oh, I agree with that. I rarely downvote, and if/when I do I always leave a comment. It's more the opposite that I'm talking about here.

Someone may not down vote my comment, which, say, has 7 points. But they may leave a reply that is argumentative to my comment. With this new system, I can only see that my comment has 7 points, but I can't see that the counter-point reply to it may have 34.

The fact that many people are agreeing with the counter-point to my comment is significant, as is my inability to see that.
Mine are mostly topical, e.g. tptacek and cperciva for security, ice799 for systems stuff, etc.

I subscribe to a few comment feeds via searchyc so that I can read most of the comments from my favorites around here.
Please, don't think HN is big enough to justify this change (I wish I could downvote you! :).
It is one of the best. I know people that went there and they are all amazingly smart. A lot of tech companies (RIM, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple, etc.) will compete to hide for co-op as well as upon graduation. It is a good school to go to.
Any critiques would be helpful.
also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=844770

Can someone who knows explain what is going on? Things like G20 usually get protested, but I would like to know if the dept was honestly protesting but using funny signs, or just having fun.
It's not fair and I think she's really mean.
If you are a great chess player you wouldn't have time to become a decent mathematician.
If you're trying to prevent the wrong sorts of attractions, you might also try it on a selective basis. For example, if a thread hasn't received a vote in the past hour or day, or if a user isn't logged in and can't vote, you could continue to display the votes in that thread.