skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At least one of the theories on the article talked about pushing on virtual particles, like a submarine pushing on the water around it. This would imply to me that efficiency goes down with speed. Just a thought.
I second your industry suspicions. There are probably also some niche subscription businesses out there like CandyJapan (http://www.candyjapan.com/candy-japan-crosses-10000-mrr) but at larger scale.
The solution to both loan situations (and debt problems in general that would risk making BI/GMI inadequate) is to fix bankruptcy laws to the extent that they don't currently provide an adequate out for them. To the extent that basic income or GMI "looks different" to existing bankruptcy laws than welfare benefits, its probably an essential compoment of any such plan to work that out.

> There are all kinds of corner cases which the current system handles.

Poor people not being able to afford adequate food during an economic downturn -- or even an economic boom -- on their own (including with whatever government assistance is provided) isn't, however, one of them. During good economic times, some of that gap is covered by private charities (especially for the poor in relatively affluent areas), but (1) that goes away during economic downturns, and (2) that's not something that BI/GMI replaces, anyway.

Sure, lets question if alternatives to the status quo do what we want, but lets also not pretend the status quo does things that it doesn't.
I don't think the community has a problem. It's more that we're out of options.

Most people (as far as I understand) downvote for a huge variety of reasons. Some are not acceptable by others. I trust the everybody knows WHAT a downvote is, so they are using it as best as they can.

I've been downvoted for my answers, when they were either politically different from some people OR they contained some form of bad language (e.g. irony). So all in all from I've seen, the downvoting system works fine as far as I can tell. If we had more options then might be better.
I've long thought that downvotes should require a comment. Perhaps a better idea is that dowvotes past a certain threshold require a comment.

I know I've been downvoted in the past for various innocent comments and have no idea why the groupthink thought that comment in particular had to die.

As has been observed here before, downvotes are often a normative function of the groupthink. But unless corrective action is suggested with the downvote, nothing normative can come out of it other than to not participate at all.
I"m not following why you think the wheel generator will produce more power than is required to spin the wheel in the first place. Friction is a pretty big issue in your scenario. It seems orthogonal to the actual results.
Also phrased as:

Remember the person behind the keyboard is a real person. You might not agree with them, but they're a living, breathing human being who took time out of their day to type what they typed.
Take a shower,take you partner or children with you and get out for a walk, look at the birds, the threes or the sea, or better go to a place where you can look at the thousands of millions of trillions of stars.

Then you will realize that it doesn't matter. Seriously, it doesn't matter at all.

Sometimes it happens to me too and I need to focus again on what is important and what is not.
Try comparing an original iPhone, and an an iPhone 5s, or an original iPad and an iPad Air. The difference is monumental. If instead of releasing incremental updates, there had simply been no intermediate steps, everyone would be blown away by the revolutionary new products.

You are simply complaining that change is incremental and that large changes take time. I'm sorry that spoils your enjoyment.
Better than productivity hacks: how to rewire your brain to be more productive
I think it still speaks volumes to HN's credit that a lot of wrongful downvotings are self-correcting. On almost any other site, message board, subreddit, or commenting section, you'd expect to see downvotes' becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy every time. The second something is 'in the grey,' it stays there, and gets worse. On HN, certain measures prevent that from happening -- but people also go to the trouble of upvoting things out of the grey, which is highly unusual by Intenet standards.

It's interesting to look at the group psychology of downvoting. The second something appears grey, a threshold has been crossed. A signal is raised. Everyone else who swings by sees a sort of implicit permission to downvote the comment, because it's already been downvoted, and hence, something about it must be worth downvoting. Before someone even reads the comment, they approach it with a downvote-ready mentality. You're conditioned to react negatively to a grey comment even before you read it, and that's a very powerful prompt.

HN self-corrects in a lot of cases, and that's interesting not only in the context of the Internet at large, but also in the context of human psychology. To read a greying comment with an open mind, and then go against the evident grain to re-upvote it, requires conscious and considered thought. It requires the activation of what Kahneman would call "System 2."[1] Most people don't vote in System 2; they vote in System 1.[2] HN seems to be different, and that's no small feat. It gives me hope, even if the trendline appears to be getting worse.

At the same time, I'm wondering if it's time for HN's admins to raise the karma threshold required for downvotes. Perhaps 500 (the commonly assumed number) is too low?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_process_theory

[2] I'd love to see a psychology study of internet commenting, whereby the study uses eye-tracking to determine if people actually read comments before casting a vote. My hypothesis is that upvotes usually follow the reading, while downvotes often precede the reading. Particularly if something is already grey.
I'd add anything negative about Aaron Schwartz to the list.
I disagree. Although that technology is wonderful, you will still always need the kind the drive and determination to do figure things out for yourself.

It's one thing being shown how to do something, it's another thing to work it out for yourself, in much the same way as studying maths or physic etc.
Data caps are the only thing that makes sense. Nobody can deliver 'unlimited' data, and it just ends up being trolling the users.

Instead they should gradually deprioritize the connection/lower the speed, and allow you buying additional GB's.
Doesn't imgur deserve to be here?
I get paid fine, thanks. So do lots of people that don't ever do anything that has anything to do with sales. And which competitive market are you talking about, exactly? My experience has lately has been that there's such a dearth of decent programmers that nobody can manage to stay fully staffed, at least in my metro area (DC), on either the non-profit or commercial side. It's totally a job-seeker's market, and people with decent skills can basically work anywhere they want.
Maintaining Permissive-Licensed Files in a GPL-Licensed Project
Hm, no. The author actually gots it wrong :-)

Go to the early days of IRC, BBS and Mailing Lists and see what kind of flames flew around for just asking what other people considered lame.

HN community is really polite!
Relevant: Neil Stephenson's Reamde takes the principle of Ransomware and plays it out to a fun conclusion. This site would have come in handy. Highly recommended http://www.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-Fantasy/Reamde-Audiobook/B0...
In this case, the baddies just happened to be eNom.
>If there are Russian soldiers in Ukraine

there aren't soldiers yet. Special agents, mercenaries and volunteers - yes. Including 200+ Serbs volunteers/mercenaries (Russians helped Serbs back in similar way in similar war in 199x)

>the actions of Russia are without question much worse than any of the actions taken by the US.

not really. Both countries regularly engage in proxy wars. US used real soldiers btw in Afganistan and Iraq.
Some sort of double checking of downvotes is pretty common in many places that do support them. We had metamoderation even in good old slashdot.

Now, at least there are plenty of HN users that are active looking at downvoted content, and bringing it back up if they think the downvote was unfair. This behavior could be used to evaluate frequent downvoters: If someone consistently downvotes comments that end up in the positives, then maybe their downvoting privileges should be revoked.

An algorithm like that should be pretty easy to tweak too: Start with removing, say, the bottom 1% in ranked downvoting quality, and alter it as needed.
10GBase-T also entails more power consumption per port and significant latency over other 10GbE standards.
I believe that one of the intents behind the fading-out of comments is to invoke OCD and encourage corrective upvoting for comments that don't deserve it.

I do think it should start at -1 points and not 0 points, however.
This is an excellent question. There are plenty of tech companies which happen to have been founded by one woman. Why not include some? I suspect this wasn't a deliberate oversight by the author, but it does illustrate the benefit of having an editor or some other feedback before clicking Publish.

Examples:

Blurb, founded by Eileen Gittins

Mightybell, founded by Gina Bianchini

LearnVest, founded by Alexa von Tobel

Joyus, founded by Sukhinder Singh Cassidy
> do the kids using these laptops work better with a Unity-style interface or a traditional desktop? Which one allows them to use their computers more effectively?

Hard to say. I personally think KDE is better for both purposes (experienced users and beginners). Unity style UI is too limiting and I don't like the direction it takes.

> Mint is popular, but it's popularity is largely because it's basically a skinned, traditional-desktop version of Ubuntu

It's more than that. Mint is also not managed by Canonical, and therefore they are distanced from related controversies. They are sticking to the global community in choices like Wayland and so on.
Techmeme only has 10,000 recurring readers? I don't believe that for a second. I loaded the "source" for this info - http://www.businessinsider.com/techmeme-growth-2014-3 - and the only place 10,000 recurring readers is mentioned is in a hypothetical example of how stats can be inflated by content sites, not actual stats for Techmeme.
agree: 'upvote' or 'flag' and if you click 'flag' you have to choose an option like 'insulting' 'revealing personal info' etc
The distinction between purchase and rental is irrelevant here. A rental is a purchase of certain rights for a period of time, and generally doesn't allow for "take-backs" any more than a purchase of ownership. If you rent an apartment for 1 year, your landlord can't come back several days after you moved in and say "Sorry, I changed my mind, I'm taking my apartment back and renting it to someone else" unless the rental agreement specifically allows for that.

(Source: renter's rights informational websites & literature specific to my area of residence. IANAL.)
Yep. I have been truly baffled more than once by a downvote on a comment. The first time it happened I made the mistake of asking why... and that one got downvoted even more. Strange.
Where are you from where everyone knows algebra? I understand you people like it, so do I - that doesn't mean it's for everyone.

edit:

This is perhaps a bit too curt, but I don't understand how comments like this generate conversation - they would be better served by the poster googling "why learn how to code" or "why should children learn how to code" and responding to the specific arguments that other people have made rather than saying:

"Forgive me, but it just seems like there's this misconception that everyone should know coding like they know algebra. I understand you people like it, so do I - that doesn't mean it's for everyone."

in which you could easily substitute 'reading' for 'algebra' and and 'algebra' for 'coding':

"Forgive me, but it just seems like there's this misconception that everyone should know algebra like they know reading. I understand you people like it, so do I - that doesn't mean it's for everyone."

If the same argument can be used for not letting women drive as for not teaching kids to code, it's because what you've said is essentially a no-op.

One of the reasons I'm a programmer now is because before the cold war ended, it wasn't even a question whether children should be taught how to program, and they started me on Logo and Basic when I was a lot shorter than I am now.

>Why are so many programmers intent on getting everyone from every demographic, rich poor, black white, interested not interested, into coding?

The mention of class and race here are disturbing to me, as if these are your candidate filters to decide who to teach coding to. It would never occur to me to mention wealth and race during a question about what people should be taught.

The straw man that I'm projecting onto you here is: "Why teach classes of people who are destined from childhood to be low-paid service workers anything other than grill, fryer, and point-of-sale register skills?"
I would heavily caution you against basing a stock purchase on this. Not because you're necessarily wrong about it being a sign, but because that's not what moves the stock.
23 Campaigns Every Startup Should Run to Gain Immediate Traction
Yeah, the downvote brigade problem rears its head whenever I try to discuss the ISP side of the network neutrality debate. I don't even necessarily agree with all of it -- but I feel it's a perspective that is sorely missing in most internet discussions of the topic.

Heaven forbid you treat Internet routing and content delivery like a business and try to align profit incentives with societally desired outcomes - the HN opinion seems to be that all Internet peering and access should be free to everyone (nevermind that a lot of companies make a lot of money off of it).

I'm of the opinion that posts should be upvoted whether you agree with them or not - if it's a well-spoken argument, it adds to the discussion. Good arguments strengthen everyone: if someone replies to your post with a well-worded argument that you have no answer for, someone else with more knowledge on the subject or a different perspective might have one that reinforces your position.

IMO there should be a "mod override" that allows moderators to set the floor on certain controversial posts to 1. This could ensure informative posts don't get buried just because the majority happens to disagree with the opinion presented. HN as a community is pretty good at encouraging discussion and avoiding groupthink, but it's still a problem on certain topics.
Out of touch and dumb, get educated child
I tried getting into the Baroque Cycle, but I just couldn't quite do it. I think it's the one thing he's written that I'll never finish reading.
How Design Thinking Transformed Airbnb Into a Billion Dollar Business
Facebook Buys Secure Server Technology Provider PrivateCore
High-quality comments rank higher, so they're the first read and no signal is needed to differentiate them.

You can flag comments by clicking the direct link to a comment too.
> And part of why we failed (besides obviously being cash strapped) was the early validation that we were lacking (from a customer side, but also from an investor/VC side).

If you lack customer validation, you don't have a business. Period. Beyond the seed stage, venture firms are investing to scale nascent businesses. Without customer validation, you aren't going to be able to raise a meaningful amount of capital from investors. Put simply, investor validation is a function of customer validation.

The great thing about customer validation is that you don't need lots of money to get in front of customers, and sometimes you don't even need a finished product at all. No VC is going to do this legwork for you.
Yes, that's frequently done in win32 land, but in this case, I'd argue the following should have been done

1) Why provide a copy of the parameter at the end of a struct?

2) How will you ever expand that struct given the fact that you put a variably-sized member at the end?

3) Why doesn't the current version of the header come with a

char[] SessionName;

member as last member, so it's at least halfway convenient?

4) No seriously - why is it copied in at the end and not a pointer?

5) That struct doesn't even have a DWORD size member as first member, are we expecting to get coupling between some flag and "oh and expect there to be additional members after that char array"?

Even for Win32's usual badness, it's pretty bad.
A game engine for building online adaptations of board and card games
"verified from the ground up with good experimental conditions"

No it hasn't. That's the hype. Read the Baez commentary referenced elsewhere. Research all the other physics breaking phenomenon that had experimental confirmation but were still shown to be wrong.

It's not like this effect was just noticed yesterday. You'd think that for an effect that Shaw created a company for in 2000, we'd have solid experimental results by now that addressed every single problem.

It mostly reminds me of the E-Cat in that there are people who want it to be true so badly that they cherry pick the results and statements that they want to believe while disregarding contraindications.
In general, I agree with you. The nature of internet commenting is such. There should be no expectation that the parent comment will continue to live -- the comment itself should be considered "owned" by the original poster, who has the prerogative to delete it.

But that shouldn't be an excuse for any of us to refrain from providing feedback, insight, and advice online. In fact, we should continue to do so with the understanding that our time in producing that comment/content is volunteered.

And of course, on the other side, we should strive to retain the record of the communication chain if we are the original posters. Deleting a comment is your choice, but it's probably good practice and behavior not to.
The Official Unofficial 2014 “Best of BlackHat” swag list
For those interested there's a new movie coming out on the topic called Imitation Game.

Trailer: http://youtu.be/nuPZUUED5uk
Agree, grammars can be fun, but IMO syntax is the source of many wasted efforts and endless debates. Just use s-exps. Easy to parse, easy to manipulate, maybe not the easiest to read statically, but you can ask your ide/editor to query/transform it to check or gather data.
The Correlation Between Drinking With Coworkers And Success
You're being downvoted because you're self-promoting your startup for no reason, not because your content is low quality.
I think you misread it. "Programmer/Analyst II" is the exact same job in term what you need to do as "Jesus Saviour Software God", it is just less paid.

You should read parent as are you looking to be a loved programmer or a despised programmer.

For example, in my city, if you work in a Bank, you earn 40% more. Period. Yes, I didn't work in a bank when I arrived, and now I do - the job is exactly the same - the name of the stuff you need to get out of the database is different but otherwise that is the same shit: upstream system is sending some stuff that you need to filter for downstream system. Most of the knowledge is not even domain based, they are based on design quirks of both systems.
This is all too common with online communities, I am part of other online communities and you will always find people who post a question and receive great answers but the original poster will not even respond with a simple thank you.

More stringent rules when joining the community possibly?
I went to www.thisismetis.com and yep, it worked. Got a sweet job. I know lots of others that went to other schools that were successful. The trick is to love web development. You have to really be a geek about it. If you love it and passionate about it, itll work. If youre doing it for money or other reasons, it won't.
Hey, I'm 'Daemon404' on FreeNode and Mozilla IRC, or you can grab my FOSS email from my GitHub account or FFmpeg/Libav's git repo.
The downvote trend increased after the comment scores were hidden.

Before that, only the most egregious comments would go below -2.

I guess that having a negative score was seen as a sufficient punition.
I'm pretty sure Amazon was not a one-person start up. Maybe the idea, but he had a team from the get-go.
20 years old: Microsofts first website recreated
Ah, great idea!
Canada wants to exploit 'dysfunctional' U.S. immigration to lure tech workers
It is certainly not as easy, but not impossible either.
They missed one of my favorite examples: Mojang, makers of Minecraft (with single founder Markus Persson, a.k.a. Notch).
Neat! Hope this catches on. A couple things:

* The See A Demo link does nothing for me (Chrome on Windows). I had to scroll down to see the scene loading.

* The controls in the scene feel a little sluggish; I'd play around with adding a little bit of acceleration/deceleration and so on to make it feel more fluid and "lifelike".

* I'd like to know about what lighting/rendering tech you're running because it looks darn good :)
The $50 Kitkat Android phone
tl;dr

Focus on the company's bottom line and customer satisfaction. That is your job, not making pretty code.

To get a [good] job, you have to literally put your foot in a door; you must be connected to some person who works at that company.

The amount of money you get is based on the size of the company and your perceived worth. Ask for more than you think you're worth.

Make yourself look good. Talk up your cool projects, wax philosophical about your ideal development methodology, then hammer home how you're focused on the customer, efficiency, and the business's bottom line.

Focus on the key elements in any situation, don't get distracted by minutia, be assertive. Your motto is "restrained, confident professionalism."

"people are hilariously easy to hack" in the way you present yourself, so use all the hacks available. Be the James Bond of CRUD apps.

things not mentioned in the post:

Startups will hire you for positions you might not be qualified for and pay you peanuts for it, but it'll create experience/value/resume filler.

Academic achievement is only significant to people who prize intelligence over productivity. Just know how to get the work they need done and show them that.

Networking in person isn't necessary. Just build relationships.

If you're new, add [real] stuff to your resume to make it seem like you have relevant business experience, and be able to back up whatever you put down.

Don't "work your way up" through some corporate ladder. Just apply for the job you want. At some point you'll get it.
> Think of basic welfare as a utility, to draw upon as and when you need it, hopefully temporarily as you get back on your feet.

That's a not-entirely-unreasonable (though, still, I'd argue basically flawed) idea for welfare in an economy that is heavily labor dependent and in which the presumption that being jobless is a short-term, transitional situation and where the share of output going to labor (as opposed to capital) is relatively high.

One of the reasons I think ideas like BI have been catching on more recently is that it is increasingly obvious that the economy is, to the extent it ever was like that in outline, increasingly moving away from it and not likely to return to it.

> Incentives to be productive don't go away

With a guaranteed floor rather than guaranteed addition, yes, within a certain range incentives to be productive go away, because any gains up to the amount of the guaranteed floor have zero net return to the person producing them.
$10k-$20k for a coding school? That's way too much. Try Treehouse[0] before you do that and if you feel you still need a classroom experience take a class at an adult vocational school or city college.

[0]http://teamtreehouse.com/