skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm at a year and a half. Hacker News is turning into Reddit. It's following the exact same path, albeit thankfully slower, and the causes behind that path—influx of users, need for attention, karma lust—aren't causes that Paul is looking to fix.

Reddit's not the worst thing in the world, but make no mistake, we're headed there.
Noda Time is born
Why I’m giving away WriteRoom for 6 days
In some ways I can really see the readability gains - haml is very succinct and neat. But there's a cost involved, namely getting my eyes and brain to comfortably recognize new syntax and patterns, something that for me usually takes a long time.

I also worry about creating something in HAML and having people not familiar with it not be able to dive into the project and start working right away. I'm actually on the other side of that scenario right now and it's a pain.

But I do have to admit, it's a very pleasing syntax.
Sure, I'll keep that in mind.

One point I'd like to make though is that it's less about the karma itself than it is about the reason that people don't like the question. I could understand why if I was trolling, insulting, etc.

Honestly, I don't care if my karma goes to negative infinity, unless that would automatically ban my account, or something to that effect.
I assume you meant to say it seems like the signal to noise ratio is getting lower? i.e. more noise.
How to Create BlackBerry Ringtones | TechJaws.com
Warning: unscalable databases and spaghetti code can make your startup fail.
Space Elevators Climbing Towards Reality
I would like to think that Google Code really should not call out whether a project is an official Google project. Ideally all open source projects would live and die on their own merits.
Looks very seasonal to me... probably indicative that most of the readers are in the same hemisphere.

I know that when winter approaches for me, I tend to get a little disheartened with whatever I'm doing, want to quit and do something inspiring and new... Then when spring rolls around, things are so much better and I have a new lease on life.

I'd suggest comments reflect people's internal barometer, and there probably have been studies on this...
You have about 10 seconds to get his interest before he starts thinking about his WoW raid tonight, and about 5 minutes for the whole explanation.

Not going to happen. First, you need a person that wants to better themselves as a programmer, and understanding closures is just a part of that. Discounting the time it takes to put someone in that state of mind, closures can be explained in under a minute (edit: OK, maybe two minutes ;)).

A closure is just a (function, bindings) pair. If someone has a Java/C++ background, it might help to think of a closure as an object which has some code with references to variables defined outside of that code. Those variables are dependencies without which you can't run the code.

JavaScript example:

function foo() {
var x = 1;
function bar() {
return x + 1;
}
return bar;
}

What does foo() return? It returns bar. But it can't just return bar, since bar has a dependency on x, so it returns bar and everything bar references: the closure (bar, { x: 1 }). In practice, you call a closure as you would call a function, but underneath the abstraction, you need to realize what's returned is both bar and the value of x.
Among other things Fred Hoyle (at least learn to spell his name!) was the H in the classic B2FH paper that elucidated the processes by which various elements were created in stars, and explained the relative distribution of different isotopes in the universe.

In my opinion that paper is on the list of the 10 most important discoveries in science in the last century. See http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/what-makes-it-science.h... for the rest of that list.
Make sure you didn't move the app while you were running it.
1. Official Google projects have the "Google" label. http://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=label:Google
I think we need more erlang threads to drive the quality up
I thought that above-the-fold still has to do with first impressions. If I get to a website and I see a link that I looks a mostly-like-what-I-want, but a link that is definitely-what-I-want is further down the page, I'll probably click the mostly-like-what-I-want link because I saw it first and it looks "good enough."

Let's do a thought experiment. If you put the ads all at the top of the page, and all the non-ad search results below the fold you'd probably get a reasonable click rate on the ads. Now, let's think about if we put all the non-ad search results above the fold, and all the ads down at the bottom. Do you think people would get to those ads and read them nearly as much?
So when does "x" get evaluated? What if x was a global variable instead? (Honest questions here, not trying to sidetrack the discussion. No, I don't "get" closures.)
Don't even joke about that!
Really this is something of a response to #1 and #3. Imagine that instead of congress listening, journalists/bloggers/etc used it as a way of doing their own impromptu polls of sentiment on issues by district.
>What can freemium webapps learn from freemium games?

Games have some advantages that can be hard for apps to replicate; games are, in general, more social than typical applications. Games are also somewhat more enviable. When I was 11, a few friends and I played RuneScape (remember runescape?). After one of us got a paid membership, everyone else suddenly got way more interested in having a paid RuneScape membership. That is to say, if one person gets a paid membership to a multiplayer online game, other people in their social circle will probably be more likely to subscribe as well.

Taking advantage of this with a webapp would require that you provide something that someone either finds worthwhile showing off or something conspicuous enough that they don't have to. The second condition applied for Apple's iPod in the early part of the decade. It'd also probably be a good idea to offer benefits to groups of paid members as well as to individual paid members.
I was going to leave a rude comment in response to this as a joke, but someone beat me to it. What a jerk.

(By the way, me saying "What a jerk." is a joke. (To prevent more downratings.))
Zed Shaw's latest project - Fret War
Fret War is a guitar competition site where contestants try to defeat lesser guitarists in weekly rounds playing randomly generated music. Awards are given each week for interpretation, accuracy, speed, and uniqueness.
What does Karma matter for?

I notice that people care about it and experience consternation about downvotes, I don't yet understand why. In my experience with the site, every comment speaks for itself, and getting downvoted just means a lot of people disagree with you. When it happens in real life it doesn't bother me, I don't see why it would on here.

The thing I'm really looking out for when I browse are the topical mega-comments that appear sometime, usually when someone understands the topic at hand better than the original author. There are only so many of those to go around, so the rest is chatter, it has to be. Everyone wants to talk, only a few people have relavant insight... still true to life :S.
Yea, it is definitely successful but what I meant by that is the users of SO are not at all elite when Google sends them there when they ask how to do their homework.
Closures are the context in which a function executes. The best way to demonstrate this is with a silly example that sticks in the mind:

def learn_how_to_greet(formal=True):
if formal:
string = "Good day, Mr. {last_name}."
else:
string = "What's up, {first_name}?"
def greet(**kwds):
return string.format(**kwds)
return greet
How (and why) Sillicon Alley Insider uses MongoDB
Bad for the Gizmo guys. And open source version I guess too.
And how is this to be corrected? The LA market is pretty huge, but Angelenos seem to have many things to distract them from sports. Chicago is a big market, and there was a stretch when one of the ownership groups was rolling in cable money, but that never produced a win.

Maybe we could force the Yankees to sell to Dan Snyder, the Washington Redskins' owner? He seems to reproduce many of the traits that George Steinbrenner brought, once upon a time, to destroying the Yankees' efficiency.
This is more complicated than you may think. For example, if you live in the USA, how do you estimate the dollar's fall in value over the next 10 to 20 years?
Comments get upvoted for different reasons. Split the karma into sections like funny, insightful, cool, whatever.. then u can weed out the crap.
Yeah whenever we've had a meta-chat inevitably people come on and say "who cares about karma?"

That sounds all fine and dandy, but study after study has shown that if you put numbers/points/stars next to desired user behavior it is going to incentivize it. So yes, in theory it shouldn't matter at all, but due to the freaky way people's minds work, it actually matters a great deal.

It's not a logic thing.
I agree. I had a submission killed recently, even though it was getting voted up very quickly and (IMHO at least) completely relevant; a few people flagged and said it was 'garbage' without bothering to open the PDF referenced in the article. Doesn't make me feel like posting again.
I can't find solid analysis of Amazon's rating system, but neither YouTube nor Netflix are bimodal:

* YouTube is all 5 stars (http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/09/five-stars-domina...)

* Netflix: 3, 4, and 5 dominate (http://www.timelydevelopment.com/demos/NetflixPrize.aspx)
What happens if you do:

def learn_how_to_greet(formal=True):
if formal:
string = "Good day, Mr. {last_name}."
else:
string = "What's up, {first_name}?"
def greet(**kwds):
return string.format(**kwds)
ret = greet
string = "WHOA! Look at me!"
return ret

In other words, at what point do the variables used in the "greet" function get saved off? And what is saved, the variable name itself, or the data in it?
Also, here in the USA, our government (for very good reasons) underestimates inflation. In the last decade, stuff like the cost of food, medical expenses, and housing have been removed or diminished in the inflation rate calculations. Stuff like the drop in consumer electronics is factored into this calculation with a strong weighting factor.
Every online community is naturally inclined to become 4chan. It happened to 4chan, it happened to digg, it's definitely on the cusp at reddit and I expect it will eventually happen to HN.

I'm not happy about this :/
Can you put some templates to get started...Starting with a empty page is kind of pain..
Facebook is preparing the launch of their XMPP connection interface
"He's not being judged on the merits of his work, but rather on a personal level."

To be honest IMHO he made it about himself. By being self-aggrandizing in the original post he distracted from the real usability issues that he found with AA.com and instead made it a vitriolic rant devoid of civility or understanding. Yes, this thread is very much about "Dustin is an ass", and rightfully so - the first blog post is long over, and now we get to address the aftermath of Dustin's tactlessness. It's entirely valid to, at this point, point out how the lack of civility and the hostile tone contributed to solving no problems at all - it's a lesson we can all take home.

"I guess that makes them more ignorant, which, by people's argument here, should mean they are in a lesser place to express their disappointment."

But that's not what Dustin said. As a designer he claimed that AA could do a complete make-over with a trivial amount of effort, and that the fact that it hasn't been done already points to massive incompetence within the company. He then called for the mass firing of everyone responsible for the website within AA.

It's one thing to claim (whether as designer or user) that AA's website sucks, and that there are specific problems with it, etc etc. It's quite another to claim (as a professional designer) that this means incompetence, or that doing it right is trivially easy, or that your redesign has covered all the main bases. The former is legitimate complaint or criticism, the latter is arrogant and severely lacking in perspective.

As a user you don't need to understand why products are the way they are. As a designer, though, you better damn well understand it.

"People here are just taking cheap shots based on their belief that because Dustin hasn't worked at a big company, his opinion and demand for a better product are invalid."

I ripped into Dustin pretty hard when his redesign was first posted here - I didn't know his age nor his experience in the industry at the time. I don't get the feeling that if he was a scarred veteran of the industry that he'd get it any easier. Arrogant, smug bullshit is arrogant, smug bullshit no matter how old or experienced you are.
Every open, unfettered online community, anyway. Hacker News could save itself with harsher mods and possibly restraints on registration. I think it'll happen if we slide too far, but I don't see it happening anytime soon.
Most of the examples listed are companies that started with Perl and have never migrated. Of more interest for the future of the language are succeeding current startups done in Perl.

Two that I'm aware of in the Los Angeles area are CampusExplorer and The Rubicon Project.
This has been a trend for me. I've even moved away from using AdBlock, but I still use NoScript, and it's still amazing.

It often surprises me how different some websites look on other people's computers. It makes me realize that advertising really does change the user experience, especially when they're the animated flash ads. A nice, relaxing read suddenly becomes flashy, distracting, and obnoxious.
How many new initiatives use Perl though? There's a lot of legacy code in that list.
HN should charge people for the right to post. Even $1 a month would go a long way towards separating out the yokels from those who actually have something to contribute. I'd pay it.
You still want applicable objects, though, and closures don't quite cut it. (I say this as a schemer.)

See http://www.r6rs.org/formal-comments/comment-6.txt, for example.
I mean, look how well that worked for Slashdot!
Or we could all start naming our children with GUIDs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID
Preview of McSweeney's Panorama—a 21st-century newspaper
Ha, I had and loved 2 CueCats. If nothing else it was great to get free scanning hardware. Some cool projects were done with them at the time.
20 Lines or Less #31 - Traffic shaping, header re-writing and TLS renegotiation
Remember in 2008 when we got tax rebates from Bush? Those were to get the economy going, based on the fact that we were entering a recession. It was a big worry. Unemployment at that point was < 5% too. In fact, I bought my house that summer, when housing prices were on the way down, but before the credit crunch made it impossible to get credit. We were already in a recession then, according to the news at the time anyway.

The collapse of LB and BS et al, is something different, those were a big deal panic, associated with, but not the start of, the recession. They were the worsening of it.

The actually interesting thing here is that we were told about the recession we were in for quite a while before the collapses, then we were told how we just got into a recession because of the collapses. Or have we always been at war with eastasia?
So, the people here that annoy you most here can pay $1 to be entitled to annoy you, and meanwhile we make sure that people like David Heinemier Hanson and Nate Lawson and Joel Spolsky and the UX guy from Zappos and all the other interesting people who drop in to comment once or twice... never do.
You're not as funny as you think you are.
That makes me wonder what "anonymous" actually means. As I understand it, Google anonymizing the logs in fact means they don't store any information that can lead directly back to you: as in, based on a single log file, they couldn't say who you are.

In the greater context of things, however, it is not anonymous: based on your previous access patterns, and your current (< 18 months) access patterns, they could link your anonymized logs with your unanonymized logs. Is that still anonymous then ?

This all reminds me of some research from Germany I heard about a few years ago: basically, if you have someone's ZIP code, age, gender and education, you can get a > 99% accuracy resolving who this person is in real life.
I'm pretty sure intuition : )
Play.com hit by ordering glitch
That looks like a damped harmonic oscillator to me.

Which I guess makes sense :)
I'm guessing it's actually a free plan, despite the "30 day trial" text. I'm guessing it's a humongous typo.

When you sign up for the priced plans the sign up form asks for credit card info and promises 30 days free. The "Free" link goes to this sign up form: https://scoutapp.com/accounts/new?subscription_id=2 which doesn't ask for any contact details, and clearly shows the price as $0.00.

Besides, I don't think the guys running Scout would refer to their service as freemium on their blog if they didn't have a free version. Their help link at the bottom of the website is also broken ( http://scoutapp.com/info/help ), which means the the website probably hasn't been tested/proofread very carefully (understandably -- there's so much to do).
Quick caution: there's selection bias here bigtime. If you read the comments on this thread, Hacker News is clearly in urgent danger of becoming Reddit. Of course, this post is designed to attract people worried about Hacker News becoming Reddit.
I absolutely agree. But my point was that saying being an asshole is okay because Steve Jobs was an asshole is a bit lopsided. Jobs was an asshole when he was ignorant, too, but he was still ignorant. Similarly, Dustin might be an ass, but that doesn't give his words an instant mandate.
How to Explain Venture Capital to a 5th Grader
Sex education, sex study, urdu hindi sex education
A little, probably. There are good days and bad days. I was particularly struck by the harshness of this one:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=925034

and also that such a huge number of people piled on to vote it up.

In fact, that makes me wonder: could it be the voting that makes the tone of the site seem more negative? There are often nasty comments lurking at the bottom of a thread with 1 point or less, but they're not very noticeable. Whereas this one + 49 points (currently) = an angry mob.
It's not even readability that makes it a win; it's that the combination of jQ and Haml is like working in a markup language that has native support for every widget or UI flourish you could want.
Top Political Blog which are ready to take place of Print Media
The current scenario of delivering news is beyond TV and print media. Online media is taking place of print media in very rapid speed. There are enormous news sources exist which can compete with print media. Blogs are very famous way to distribute news among its readers.
The down side is that people rate up and down based on whether they agree with a comment instead of whether or not the comment was well crafted, high quality, and respectfully argued. If I make an off-topic post about how Watchmen was the best comic book movie of all time, that should not result in positive or negative ratings based on the opinion of the readers. Instead, it should be based on the quality of the input.
Further how do we count people who are underemployed? For instance, software developers who take fry-cook jobs because a crappy paycheck beats no paycheck. Self-employed is tricky too, because is slow business unemployed? Sure each of these edge cases is just that, but there are enough to add up to a noticable amount.
That's also what (possibly) happens when your agricultural system fails due to a dustbowl/drought, free trade is eliminated, big chunks of industry/labor cartelize, and the government takes over huge sectors of the economy.
Listing very old sites which may have still some perl fragments somewhere in there infrastructure doesn't mean perl isn't dead.
I don't know of any major sites written in perl today.
Also, i thought slashdot used perl a long time ago but have already written an new system, but i may remember that wrong...

http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/programming-language-jo... has some interesting trends. From what i see there, i'd say perl is probably still alive but slowly dying.

My hopes have been on parrot for perl. But after reading about the new perl version and its ridiculous new "features", i am convinced that perl will die when parrot breaks module compatibility with cpan, because noone will port modules, yet care for the new perl.
6 months sounds great. Since the recession is probably over (most recent GDP change was positive, although the NBER hasn't ruled yet), we should have recruiters kicking our doors down by April or May. And then we'll hire carpenters to replace the doors, and everyone wins.

Unfortunately, I think it's fairer to say that the first derivative of the unemployment rate is what actually lags by 6 months. April or May might be when it starts falling (fingers crossed), but it will have to fall for a couple of years before it reaches its pre-recession level. Every economist or seer I've heard of says it will still be around 9% in late 2010.

And that's six months if we're lucky. Consider the last one: recession ends in November 2001; unemployment doesn't really start dropping until early 2004!
Ugh not this shit again. I want to stab the BBC's science writers a thousand times.

Here's an analysis of the paper that article is based on by a linguist: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1869

Charts and voice spectrums ahead! So buckle up.
I've got the following matlab code:

eta1=0.7;
omega=10;
f = @(t) eta1*sin(omega*t) + (1-eta1)*sin(2*omega*t)

I can call

f(2)

and return a scaler value. I could just make a function in a separate document, but then I would have to pass in my parameters eta1 and omega. By using a closure, I just have to set those parameters in my code beforehand. Also, if I want to change my forcing term, by adding new parameters, I don't have to change the function definition, I just add those parameters right in.
I'd pay too.
There are millions (billions?) of lines of COBOL still out there too.

I can think of two strong arguments against picking a less-discussed (dying?) language:

1) Anecdotally, the top 1% of programmers (the people you really want to work with) will go to the tools that make them the most productive. The reason there's so much hype around languages like Ruby is that it makes programmers feel more productive and happier. The kind of programmers that go online and talk about these things after hours and argue about minor semantics are the passionate ones, and the most likely ones to rock from 9-5.

A 2% increase in productivity matters to a programmer that already gets twice as much done as an average code-monkey.

2) One also has to look at what languages are being learned by new coders. Code today might need to be maintained in 5, 10, or 20 years (let's hope not...). If Perl coders are sparse now, what happens when you need to hire a contractor at 2am in 10 years? You don't want to pay for one with an obscure skill-set.

I'm a firm believer in choosing the best tool for the job, and not jumping on the 'newest thing' every time a new blub gets an endorsement from this year's DHH, but; ceteris paribus, I'd pick a language that's gaining momentum in the world, not losing it.
This is the pettiest comment I have ever read.
Reddit's already there. They are, thankfully, less dangerous than 4chan (i.e., 4chan is likely to firebomb a building for their pet cause, Reddit is more likely to sit and post angry things about it)
except that maps returns reviews from non-google sites. search maps for "localino atlanta" to see what I mean.