skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everyone has a different idea of what karma should be for. Conspiracy theorists trust other conspiracy theorists and loathe anyone with a mundane explanation. Bicyclists like each other more than car owners.

So what you need is to give everyone their own karma table to rate other users. You arrive, and you are neutral towards everyone else. After a while, you vote some people up and some people down. As you establish what your own standards are, you are establishing your own weighting of different social behaviors. Your weightings are likely to correlate strongly with those of other users - most likely the majority group, but maybe you have a lot in common with an established minority crowd (eg UFO 'believers'). New encounters can then be assigned provisional karma scores based on the average scores handed out by the group with whom your own weightings correlate most strongly. Thus, if you are a UFO believer you will see provisional negative karma for the science geek who loves to debunk UFO theories, while if you are yourself a science geek you'll see provisional negative karma for UFO believers in accordance with the fact that your karma votes correlate strongly with similarly-minded people.

Characterizations of UFO believers, scientists etc. are based on internet stereotypes, not responsible for lost ego or damaged feelings

Obviously, a system like this with N users has N^2 karma scores and the cost of administering the karma system increases exponentially compared to linear user growth. But there are a lot of algorithms you could use to flatten this, since in practice there will be groups whose membership follows a power-law distribution, rather than purely atomistic noisy preferences. Another possibility is a local (client-side) karma table with p2p lookup.

Another downside is that groups will tend toward partisanship since there will not be any universal penalties for most unpopular views (obviously, some views are so extreme that they'll never gain any social traction); even minority thinkers will have a circle of friends who share an unpopular belief and provide mutual support (as can be seen across the internet). But this system accommodate pluralities, whereas attempts at universal karma result either in relative homogeneity (vast #s of echo chamber websites) or else the complete breakdown and abandonment of the karma concept, with attendant signal degradation (eg 4chan/b/).
When I was still involved with writing, published technical authors were able to negotiate better royalty rates for subsequent deals, particularly if they had representation (but not exclusively--as always it depends on your negotiating skills).
> I think the Pragmatic Programmers do an incredible PR job - especially as they have a PR umbilical cord with O'Reilly.

Really? I've been very dissatisfied with the latter's PR. It seems like a combination of asking authors to write more for free, tweeting once a month "Hey, here's a link to a book catalog page!", and sending free copies to people hoping they'll write reviews. It hasn't been worth the amount of money they take from gross sales.
Most of you steal your software
Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals, Chapter 2 of 13
Or you could use a high temperature semiconductor. True, there are cooling issues you'd have to overcome but the thing about levitating using a semiconductor is it is self-stabilizing.
Minimalism - A Practical Guide to Writing Less Code
When google first put the archive online, I could find 100's of posts I made in the 80's. Now, there are a few 10's. At this point, I don't even use the search for old stuff, assuming that the bits have just rotted so much that it's not worth it.
I got a lot of mileage out of a post by Dan Benjamin a few months ago: http://hivelogic.com/articles/how-to-start-a-meditation-prac...

As the URL (and title) implies, it provides you with a good starting point. I'd floundered for quite a while reading up on theory, which is nice but has nothing on actual practice.

In particular, he linked (and now, so will I) to the online text of Mindfulness In Plain English at http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html, which is both pragmatic and convincing.

Those two links finally got me started on the meditation practice I'd intended to try for years, and I've stuck to it without breaks longer than a day or two.
You might be interested in the book "Accelerando" < http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0441014151/charlieswe... >, as one of its plot points is that the basic unit of exchange in the economy changes from money to reputation.
You outsold Resig, which is probably the best-known JS book. I'm not saying you're the most successful book ever, but you're in a hot area and you're in the top quartile of titles.
To model 1 part of 1 CDO took 3 hours on 1 of fastest computers in the US
Music works for me. I also like noisy inter cafes because the noise just blends into a nice background ensemble.
Roles and Delegates and Refactoring
We've learned so much more here than we could ever give back. Hopefully this is just some small way to say thanks! We'd love to meet as many of you as possible.
> They don't have a choice, so you can't call them evil.

See my response below for an elaboration of why I use the term evil in this context. And all of the human beings involved in this system have choices as to how they can react. The fact that some of those choices have costs does not automatically remove the element of choice. The executive who chooses to perpetuate the system in it's current form is making a moral choice and should be held to account for it.
Time to take back Usenet and build another archive independently of Google, somehow.
This is a tough question to ask accurately.

What you'd really want to know is who uses an OS by choice, subtracting all other factors (e.g. if you're only using an OS because it runs some app that your work requires). There are plenty of reasons anyone might be using several different systems.

In my case, I use 3 different OSes. My only Windows machine is at work; and while I use it for occasional development for Windows, it is mostly a dumb terminal to access a Linux box. At home, I use a Mac by choice, but I can also use it to access Linux at work. Am I a "Windows user" if I visit HN from work? Well, I'd rather not be counted as one.
One way around the mafia problem is a kind of normalisation, though it has its own flaws. A negative vote from someone who always gives negative votes counts for less than a negative vote from someone who generally gives positive votes. You can add in thresholding and voting ring detection for some fun, resulting in normalisation of their opinion to some degree.

There's also normalisation on the other end, how many of the total votes are negative or positive - but this doesn't really work unless there's a transaction cost, as fake accounts can shill the voting.
The cost of corporate communism.
In the end, then, the rusting shell of Google Groups is
a reminder that Google is an advertising company — not
a modern-day Library of Alexandria.
You spend a lot of time talking about semantics and levels of abstraction, but there's no mention at all of syntax. I find it difficult to consider something a "language" when the syntactic rules are completely decoupled from the abstractions that it describes.
Might be ridiculous, might not. French general universities are cookie cutter, they're al meant to be more or less equivalent. The Grande Écoles focus on one specific subject, so they get hammered on rankings, but they are all excellent in their fields. There are no great German universities, full stop, for the same reason as in France, and tehy don't have a GE equivalent. There are some departments in some universities that are world class, Karlsruhe in CS, Saarbrucken in Computational Linguistics.
I had noticed problems a few weeks ago, but it seems to be working today.
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.hypertext/search?group=al...

And the advanced search always worked and still works better.
http://groups.google.com/advanced_search?q=&sitesearch=g...
I think Ruby and other techbooks now have more channels of distribution. So the author does have an option of not going with Apress. Why settle if the deal is crap ? It would be interesting to have other authors tell us about there experiences. The transparency could put pressure on publishers.
The screen real estate always bites you (as stated in the article). 9/10 inches is just not good enough for all the Mac UI.
What, if any, compliance or regulatory action is being taken preemptively by the bank?
I still remember having to look into a French-English dictionary to find the right word for 'spacesuit'...

Old games are like legos, less sophistication = more imagination.
ClickToFlash for control over Flash content (Mac)
It seems to me that you're giving up far more money to a publisher than a good copywriter and a good designer will cost. It's true though that you have to pay these expenses up front (although not until you've finished with the book itself, and even with the technical review --- at which point you know pretty well whether the copyeditor is worth the expense).
if i were in your shoes, i would probably look for a local cofounder and continue to treat the offshort dev team as supplementary contractors if/when necessary.

you've already encountered issues with standard set of issues with offshore teams, and it will likely only get worse as more issues come up if you actually do end up giving them some ownership, power, and legal control.
I tried this a few days ago, and it's really quite well done. In addition to the controls, it is very useful for natively viewing H.264 on YouTube.
Hello again! Thanks for anticipating the next post that is currently in draft form. I am extremely interested in what I call "meta-syntactic programming" and everybody else calls "Macros circa 1969."

http://github.com/raganwald/rewrite_rails#readme
In fairness to Apress, why would they move forward marketing a title for an obsoleted technology?
Server-side javascript is only relevant here if it has access to a working DOM, since that's what any HTML generation or templating is going to be based on. At that point you basically do have a headless browser, whether you call it that or not.

I find Google's proposal goofy; I think I agree with the poster who suggested feeding google static HTML (probably via a sitemap) which references canonical URLs that might be ajaxy, rather than having it crawl an ajax site and do this magic token manipulation to get the static HTML equivalent.
Twig: A flexible, fast, secure template language for PHP
This is why I don't read Popular Mechanics. Maybe they've seen it, it rocks, it will be out by the time the print issue hits the stands...but it looks an awful lot like advertorial. And I consider myself a likely cheerleader for the Crunchpad.

Don't even get me started on the multiple different kinds of fail in the full list.
That's interesting; how much more do you think Cooper could have gotten?
XSS Protection by Default in Rails 3.0
I HATE how hard it is to find Legos that aren't just part of a kit that builds ONE thing and has step by step instructions.

My nephew has several of these, but I think they're such a waste compared to the old days where you had a bucket of blocks, and you built whatever you wanted. I also have fond memories of Capsela, Constructs, and old Erector Sets.
I am not sure who is your target market. It doesn't mentions anywhere what is the purpose of creating a login, either.

However, I have a suggestion which might make it appeal to a broader audience. When a user creates a login, you can provide a list of celebrities of each category. The user can pick the ones he/she wants to read the tweets from for each category. Maybe adding an option of receiving daily email/rss feed be useful. Also, being able to add all the checked celebrities into the twitter account be also useful.
I agree completely. I built a team of engineers (generally junior devs) all of them had pretty freshly minted degrees and all of them had built something outside of work. This team rocked.

This was the single best bar I ever set for hiring young engineers.
Yeah, making the product is hard but there are many newsletters that cost way more than $25 month.

Here's a list of investing newsletters that cost more than $25/month.

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/newsletters/newsletters.asp?...

There's even one that is $100 month and I've seen others that are even more.

The difference between these and "high-quality magazines" is that these are extremely targeted to a specific audience with a minimum of advertising.
This topic always makes me think of "Getting Real":

http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/75day_getting_real_book_s...

Yes, you are not as well-marketed at 37signals.

On the other hand, $175,000 (!!!) is a very very very long shot from $19,000.
I have the same reaction whenever I go to the Lego store. I think the stuff looks great but I wonder if I'll be able to find sets that can do anything for my daughter when she's old enough to not eat them.
No Quest for Glory (aka Hero's Quest) :(
It could be a second layer under an ablative layer of camo.
Music doesn't work for me either, but I have no problems with background noise at a cafe or office or something like that. I think it has to do with background noise lacking any sort of discernible structure to focus on. That sort of background is more like white noise and easy to phase out, music gives me too much to focus on.
The word "choose" probably doesn't help much.
I have to say this always works for me too. The thing is there are always forces pulling us away from what is most important. When i meditate sometimes it becomes more clear what is most important. Usually about 30 minutes into it I visually see something related to a goal. After that I just follow the vision. I worked with a guy who graduated from Pepperdine University for his MBA, and he said they are teaching meditation techniques to business majors now.
Is Bash scripting still relevant today, other than working with and understanding legacy code? Why wouldn't I use something like Python or even Perl instead?
The Hacker News title here is the opposite of the one on the article itself.
This.

I suspect this is not an uncommon problem. I have found a solution that works pretty well, though (though it's nothing fancy): don't do that.

By that I mean, when you find yourself faced by one of those waits, and are about to switch to some time-sucking activity, ask yourself, "will I really stop this before the wait is over, or I lose track of time?"

I've lost so much time to these sorts of things that I do one of two things during the wait. 1) I just stare at that progress bar. Boring, but at least I won't find myself reading Wikipedia in an hour or something. I know that I'll only waste 10 minutes instead of an hour. Alternatively, I 2) spend a few seconds thinking of a task that won't suck me in but needs to be done. For example, I go through my code and see that everything's formatted well, or commented well. Or answer a few emails (I don't tend to get sucked into emails, I know some do).

You have to train yourself to respond right when you feel that tug of "what can I look at next?" You end up telling yourself "no" hundreds of times a day. It's a challenge, but it's worth it.
Thank you! You're tips are very helpful and I'll be trying them out.
Yeah, I was looking forward to a good contrarian article. But it was worth reading (and right) that hires should come from 'in network'.
Programmers are standing by, please commit now!! If you commit within the next 24 hours, I will even take 10% stake for no extra charge. As a bonus offer we will even get rid of your co-founder.
What are you waiting for, commit now!!

-for the sense of humor challenged, the above is a joke-
re: our earlier discussion about it--i might have changed my opinion about it.
MySQL's release troubles started well before their acquisition. I think the jury's still out on how Sun does with them.
How about an X-No-Profits header?
I like Podrunner (http://podrunner.com). Intended for runners, but it's got a good beat. Occasional remixed lyrics can be a bit distracting, but much less so than pop (not all tracks have vocals, and they're repetitive so it's easy to tune out). Also, the mixes are an hour which is a great chunk of time to disappear and come up for air later.
Dear Developer (2008)
It is funny to watch this get upvoted and downvoted in real time, as a religious war descends on my little comment...
Perhaps title should be:

> I Wouldn't Hire a Programmer With [No] Interest in Programming Outside of Work
I know exactly where you're talking about - it's BEAUTIFUL out there. I love Lincoln, I worked out there for 4+ years and it's a wonderful place. I'd encourage folks to go for the scenery alone!

Is the software you're working on Knowhi? It's not clear from the event posting, I'm just assuming from your profile.
The sad thing is that if Google had had the foresight to build in decent browsing, filtering etc., and polish up NNTP a bit, they could own the vast internet message board space, and we would be reading this on alt.hacking.ycombinator or suchlike.

It's not that people aren't interested in chatting to each other on the internet, I waste depressingly large quantities of time reading and posting in 5-6 different forums, this being one of them. There's still one usenet group I read regularly, but it's degraded to 50% spam and embittered ranting from an unhappy kibo clone.
I listen to music to deafen out the environment. Its not the best solution (Which would be working in a quiet environemnt), but the "distraction" from music is a lesser evil compared to the "distraction" from working in an office.
The worst problem of listening to music is that I get the song stuck on my head after I finish coding. I prefer to avoid it.
I do like Windows 7 but I have hated the direction of the start menu for years.

I just keep a folder of program icons that I can launch from the taskbar, much easier to deal with.

That and I do love pinning programs to the taskbar as I can keep the things I run all the time in the exact same position.
He was one in at least 20 billion.
Here's my problem: if I have 4 console windows open at the same time, and they're all hidden behind other windows, how do I switch to that one console I want? In Windows 98, each one had a button on the taskbar that didn't move, and it was one click on a known location to bring my desired window to the foreground and give it focus. In OS X, clicking on the dock icon won't help. I could alt-tab, but since I have 20 windows open, it will take a while. I could start minimizing windows until I see it, messing up my workspace. I could move windows around until I see it, messing up my workspace. I could use Expose, which is useless, since all the command windows look the same at 200px square. Is there something I'm missing?
Thanks, I missed that on the first time through. Quite an awkward implementation, IMHO.
My Physics professor* uses one of the textbooks listed there. It's a very entertaining book, well outlined, informative and teaches in a way that inspires you to look at our physical world rather than "plus number into formula to receive answer."

And the free price tag is highly welcome.

*I'm taking 1st year remedial physics because it's been too long and my previous credits no longer count etc.
The functionality you just outlined exists already. If you create an account, you can pick the celebrities.

The target audience is broad.Someone interested in tweets by celebs but does not want to either

* create a twitter account and add celebs one by one

* or feel like reading the celeb tweets only sometimes and does not want to pollute the twitter stream with non-stop celeb tweets.
This reminds me of George Washington's words: Whatever you do, please don't build a monument for me. I'm happy just serving.

So what did they do? Built a huge freaking stone phallus in the middle of the nation's capital.

I admire a lot of people. Too many to try to narrow it down. The difficult part about choosing one is that you're always looking at relative progress. At the end of the day, doing something admirable means measuring the delta between what most people like you accomplished and what you accomplished. That means that famous president with a big monument probably isn't as impressive as poor, uneducated grandfather who did something to make a lot of people's lives' better.

But I think you measure greatness in making people's lives better in the long run. So if I don't have candidates, I definitely have the metric.
damm! Now that's an intense experience. I'm often impressed with leaders that have a level of control over their emotions and intensity with the ability to use them to their advantage, with the right emotion tailored for the right situation.
Kurt Vonnegut's rules for writing short stories
I sleep for 20 minutes after lunch and it is great. If I didn't, I wouldn't work in the afternoon.
Paul Graham has a great post about hiring:
http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html [Great hackers]

Some other good links:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing...
http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html
IIRC most of the authors used to view the advance as the only real money. Any royalties that might appear were like manna from heaven.

I hope everybody doesn't mind me brain-dumping in this thread--it's the only place this stuff can go.
I don't know whether the talks will be recorded. It's being organized by Carsonified:

http://stackoverflow.carsonified.com/events/toronto/

I get the last spot, the one everyone skips to get an early start on their BEveERages.
Bad words in the dictionary
I'm not sure if this is a bug but the tabs (All, Movie/TV etc.) are all empty for me.

The design looks appealing at a glance (nice colors) but I have absolutely no idea what the service does and why I should register.

From the blurb on the right I can guess that you're somehow tracking celebrities. But I still don't know what advantage that gives me over just following them myself?

Oh, just noticed, when I select a country on the right then tweets start showing up. Well, again, I like the design, but wonder why I should sign up instead of just following those celebs myself? And what would signing up give me over what I already see right now?
Login w/ twitter account maybe, instead of a full-fledged signup?
no, i for one am glad that their usenet offering is "in tatters". many of us said things on usenet in 1994 etc that we would never want search and archived for all time. in 1994 usenet forgot. that was part of its magic. i can say that had i known that one day it would be part of a global search product, i would never have used my real name.

now that people are aware of search, we are aware of how to stay out of search. farming usenet means asking the impossible: asking people in 1994 to act as if all comments would be perpetually searchable
Machiavelli warned Princes about the danger of being an 'unarmed prophet.'

He might similarly warn you about being an 'unfunded revolutionary.'
What is the gambler’s equivalent of Amdahl’s Law?
If high res 9/10" screens work great although. (Like w/ the dell mini 10)
Simple Feature That Will Really Make Twitter Designer Friendly
I try and answer the question "What is the gambler’s equivalent of Amdahl’s Law?" with "The Kelly Betting System."