skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems like a really fair review. People who want to believe their iPhones are better than everything else will find ammunition to support that claim. People who want an alternative to the iPhone will also find cause to rejoice. I like my iPhone, and I'm not really tempted to switch, but I'm glad to see some serious competition. Here's hoping for continued innovation from every quarter.
Math has always relied on a few geniuses to set things straight, the rest is just noise.
high-voltage direct current

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current

Quote: ' For long-distance distribution, HVDC systems are less expensive and suffer lower electrical losses '
Please try to avoid URL shorteners when posting links.
I actually think that the newcomments page is part of the problem. My theory is that people reading newcomments tend to downvote something that seems even a little bit controversial, without seeing the context in which it was made.

I notice that after a few hours the scores seem to settle into something more fair. A lot of people will fix unfair 0s and -1s.
francis bacon
WARNING: not for the faint of heart.
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/bacon/painting.jpg
Klee, Kandinsky, Escher, Kahlo, Riviera, Ethan Heidelbaugh, Steve Hemingway, Marcel Duchamp, Georgia O'Keefe, and whatshisname that I'm totally spacing out on right now but I'll remember later probably.

Also Margaret Atwood and Ani DiFranco.
There is no way a bike costs that much. Unless they hide gold under the seat, that is. They must be counting other expenses, like salaries or repairs and dividing by the number of bikes.

And before feeling too sorry for the poor company that provides the service, note that it thus obtained a monopoly on advertisement in Paris, which is a big deal. They regularly have columns in the newspapers complaining about vandalism, and how it's destroying its business, but they never complain that they got too much advertising space ;-)

Also bike costs are shared with the city. I have not subscribed to the service, since I very often see bike stations which are:

1) either full of bikes (no way to dock yours)
2) or with no bikes ready to ride at all

which means it lacks one of the fundamental aspect you would need from such a service: reliability. Technically, they are supposed to be moving bikes from stations which are full to stations which are empty but I have the feeling this is less likely to happen.

That's why I prefer having my own bike, even if it may be a pain to find a good place to park it.

For some reason, parisians don't feel the same way I do about reliability. They still use public transport and use the bike (when available) to go to/from the closest metro station.
"... except bill said that. this is a false meme that really, really needs to die."

Yes, I know it's a misquote.
They give it away with all of their Visual * Express suites, and there is even a seperate .exe installer for it, so I don't really think it counts as stealing if you use some other method to get it in an easier form.

But that's just me, I don't work for MS legal :)
The engineering issues are very interesting, but I find the social issues even more intriguing. What would happen if the bay bridge only re-opened to commercial traffic, and BART service was radically increased?

The bridge carries 280,000 thousand cars daily -- that's a lot of traffic driving around our city, people eating at restaurants, etc. Could we maintain that level of commerce while relying almost solely on public transportation?
Not bad... but how the story ends? Did he ever take those paper profits?

BRK haven't been stellar performer lately.
Does anyone know if you can get a data-only plan? I'm planning on picking one up for dev. Normally I'd just buy an unlocked one and swap a SIM card in for when I needed to use the data/cell features, but obviously I can't do that in this case.
I agree that Buffet is an excellent (and rare?) example of Good Capitalism.

But Berkshire has tremendously benefited from bail-outs of it's holdings like GE and GS!
If you can't judge a comment for a degree of "correctness", you can't judge one comment as "better" than another.
With modern languages and IDEs, I don't see any benefit to using monospaced fonts at all. I have been using Calibri for the last few years because it is readable and pleasant to look at, and I never have any problems lining things up provided they actually need to line up.
the 640k barrier was a major pain in my butt for almost a decade. first we had expanded memory, then extended memory, both of which could only be used by some programs. then there were add-ons like qemm, which could remap physical ram into unused areas of the 384k add-on space. for a long time there, computers that had more unused rom space than others were more valuable to people like me who ran a bunch of memory-hungry apps. what a nightmare!

i should have gotten on the unix bandwagon from the beginning. at the time i just didn't know any better.
Why do you like Pollock? Serious question.
Yeah, that is good. Zdzislaw Beksinski. thanks for sharing that.
Someone can be off-topic or troll in opinion threads. "What's your favorite X?" is not the place for "Stop using different types of Xs and start using Ys, noobs.", for example.
Thanks for the great tips. I've been bored with the usual suspects in my bookmarks, and have returned to reading dead trees again. I'm loving it! But I suspect your advice here will help me rejuvenate my love affair with the internet.
I'm pretty sure the marketing departments from "both" companies can get each other's logs verbatim with a phone call.
I was a Consolas guy until I discovered Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. I find it more readable, you might want to check it out.
This is less technical and more readable, http://www.amazon.com/Engineer-Human-Failure-Successful-Desi... , and Petroski describes a bridge that failed as the result of a single eyebeam failure. In that case though, there were only 4 very short eyebeams supporting the roadbed, one at each corner. He didn't actually call them eyebeams, but hangers, but from the photos, they are the same thing.
I might not say tremendously because GE and GS came to him in desperation looking for capital. Buffet probably would have done bigger deals with even better terms if they didn't get any bailout money. But his much bigger holdings in Wells Fargo sure benefited!

GS especially was buying Buffett's credibility more so than they needed a cash infusion in the wake of the financial meltdown.
Thank you for the suggestion and mini-review, added it to my wish list.
Why would they hire this guy? He's obviously not a trained journalist. Only professional journalists are allowed to report on news.

Note: heavy sarcasm intended. Also, I've been in the industry. For topics like this, that really is the attitude.
Using adwords, bloggers put up advertisements for companies they don't run, and affiliate advertising (which is the idea starting this thread) is similar.

I see what you mean though, that it would seem rude for BRK to make up their own ads for coke. At any rate, Buffett's approach is to not interfere in any of his businesses, so I'm sure that the two ads that are there (GEICO and Borsheims) would have been done in consultation. He could do that with coke etc, too.

I'm not saying he should do it, just that the same logic applies.

The point I'm making, tongue-in-cheek, is to echo Buffett's philosophy that when you buy a share in a company, you should think of it as buying that company, not as buying a share, so that you think of yourself as a business owner, and not a trader in shares.
Magritte: http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=magritte&FORM=IGRE
Some or most of this may be related to how complicated modern mathematics has become, I know at my college there are 6 undergraduate mathematics degrees to choose from (in regards to specialty) and only grows when you move into graduate school.
Malleable Media
And you would never use it for anything besides reading documents.
My favorite: http://www.ms-studio.com/FontSales/anonymous.html (free)

Installing anonymous is one of the first things I do when I get a new mac.
When I say threatening I mean with the intent to discourage. so when you down vote someone you disagree with you essentially discourage them from voicing their opinion. Why? Because when I'm downvoted I'm being punished. I don't want to be punished, so I either leave the community and decrease the variation in opinions or refrain from voicing it again. Is that what we want to allow here, or anywhere?

We ignore the kkk. We do not jail them. That is essentially what freedom of speech is about.

Furhermore we can't all have a consensus on every topic. It's good to have differing opinions and it's unavoidable to have disagreements. Being voted down for having opposing viewpoints is inevitable if the system permits it.

So to have a perfectly free speech community, we shouldn't provide the mechanism to condemn speech. We can however provide the mechanism to delete spam and blatantly trollish comments and perhaps even blatantly negative comments. But to give the majority the ability to hurt the minority will have negative long term consequences to the community.

So no one should have to think to themselves, "are people going to like what I say or should I just keep it to myself?" when posting a comment. No one benefits from that and we could all one day miss out on a great learning opportunity.
It's not really a shock wave, technically it is the Prandtl–Glauert singularity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prandtl–Glauert_singularity
I was thinking along the same lines. There are already services for sending emails into the future (futureme.org is one), but I think being able to do it with actual mail is a clever idea.

One commercial use might be for real estate agents sending letters to new homeowners 1/2 months into the future asking them how they're doing, etc. I think that would seem a bit more personal than just an email. I always enjoy it when I start receiving mail at a new residence!
I still don't like that definition, since it confuses the vast majority of multimedia formats with formats that are actually proprietary.

I prefer to reserve the word proprietary for formats where the specification is either secret or does not exist and any free implementations were reverse-engineered, e.g. RealVideo, Windows Media Audio, and so forth.

It doesn't make sense IMO to simply call 98% of everything proprietary; it sort of weakens the meaning of the word to overuse it as such.
Or buying things online, or posting to Twitter, etc. AJAX is nice for building applications, but very few applications need total interactivity. I can't think of any AJAX-y web application I actually use, other than ones I've written.

All of my web browsing is fine with the latency of a page load.
There will always be many who will downvote simply to supress dissident opinions.

Dissident opinions do not show up as much as mainstream ones, for obvious reasons. So the opportunity for a good dissident response to be disregarded is less. But when it does happen, it's much greater a loss to the overall community.
Reading this text without written permission is prohibited.

(What I mean to say is that the word "prohibited" has no meaning. The use of the passive voice does not make something a legal requirement.)
Yeah, there was no eBay, no Amazon, no Excite, no Hotmail, no Viaweb etc. before Web 2.0 came.
In a web-application form and function blur together, especially when what you're offering isn't exactly rocket science.
Instead of a downvote, how about a real explanation of why exactly monospaced fonts are actually required.

This bit of programmer dogma is totally unfounded. There is nothing more to it than tradition.
Uh huh, and that's bad how?
I guess it depends on how you interpret "like this" in the original post. The things you cite above are nothing at all like the BH homepage.
Discouragement is not punishment.

"We ignore the kkk."

Living in a state that actually occasionally has KKK rallies, "we" sure as Hell don't ignore them. We surround them with counter-protesters whenever they march in their sheets - and outnumber them by many multiples. We look at people ranting on about those dirty, criminal n---s and how America used to be white and pure and call them stupid fucking racists.

No, we don't jail them, we don't attack them, we don't fine them, we don't even raise the price of our groceries when they come in the store.

We downvote them.
Deja Vu * is Bitstream Vera * with Unicode characters. Good if you're not using Emacs and want nice-looking λs in your code. (Emacs has a map from character range -> font, so you can use your own Unicode font along with your favorite ASCII font. But using Deja Vu means you don't have to configure that as much.)

FWIW, I use Deja Vu Sans Mono for coding. It is a nice-looking font, especially when grey on black.
What about voting on HN? Would be pretty annoying to reload the page after every vote no?
CityCarShare is fantastic if you live somewhere with sufficient density that driving is (truly) not necessary for most trips.

We use bicycles, public transportation, and walking for nearly all of our trips, but rely on citycarshare for shopping, moving furniture, occasional weekend trips, etc. We also use a corporate car share account to move servers to/from the colocation facility.

It's a fantastic service -- far cheaper than owning a car, and zero-hassle. I hated dealing with the complexities of car ownership, from insurance and DMV registration to regular maintenance, speeding/parking tickets, and the general agitation of driving.

If you've never lived without a car, it can be surprisingly liberating to sell yours off.

With the money you save not owning a car, you can afford higher rent for a more desirable area, longer-term car rentals for one-off trips, etc.
It's not bad. But I wouldn't want to give up the applications that have made my life far more efficient due to their being hosted and universally available in a web-browser. Obviously Gmail is the big one here.
Yes. In fact my whole rant is overblown. Not altogether wrong, but overblown.
I personally don't think it's better than an iPhone, but I don't know if it needs to be. It's the first viable alternative out there. It's good for the market, which is in turn good for everyone else. I hope they don't rely on the whole "iDont" thing too much in the future, since Apple can make all those claims obsolete if they feel like it.
Maybe for the same reasons you offered: readability and easy to look at.

Some modern monospaced fonts are rather nice to look at, Consolas for example, and the ability to distinguish between 0O1l easily is an advantage for some fonts without having weird letter spacings.
You might find Hoppe's book, http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Economics-Politics-Monarchy-... , interesting. He claims democracy is the worst form of government, period. (The book is not easy reading and is pretty repetitive, but interesting.)
Ran into this last night when I was measuring some stack depths. Caught me off guard.
Of course comment score doesn't display value objectively or comprehensibly or indefinitely.

Every topic has it's decay period, you may have made a good point, but if the community doesn't feel that way during lifetime of the topic, then that was a lost cause. If it really matters try again, as you just did. If it doesn't - leave it alone.

There are many other things that HN doesn't do and leaves for people to figure out.

Perfect? No. Good enough? I think so.
The page gives all the information they want to share. Adding fancy stuff or Warren's pictures do not add any value. They follow similar philosophy at Berkshire's world headquarters where they have just about 20 odd people and Warren doesn't use a computer or even a calculator. World would be so different if we all could get by with only stuff that adds value to our lives.
Just middle-click to open the "your vote was counted" in a new tab.

But anyway, having Javascript in your browser is not what makes it bloated; Emacs had an embeddable programming language many years before anyone even thought to embed Javascript in a web browser. It is quirks mode + the DOM + bad programming. (Bad programming == using raw C++. A few years ago, Firefox used a lot of memory because of heap fragmenentation. Garbage collection or double-indirection pointers would easily have solved that problem.)
Compare with visible shockwaves from ThrustSSC:

http://www.andrewgraves.biz/ssc_stuff/images/exCS/Shock.jpg

http://www.andrewgraves.biz/ssc_stuff/images/exCS/Waves.jpg

from http://www.andrewgraves.biz/ssc_stuff/SSC_pics.htm
I'd give you 10 points for that answer. Only if I could :)
I don't think it's anything to do with being frugal. Buffet said many times during the dot-com boom that he wouldn't touch a tech stock with a 10 ft. pole owing to the fact that he had no clue what any of them did. When the bubble burst he had one of his best years ever by investing in brick and paint companies, IIRC.

So, it's not that he won't spring for a post-1992 web site because he's cheap. It's because he couldn't care less about the internet. He doesn't even have a computer. In a way I'm shocked that berkshirehathaway.com even exists. I assume they bought it to keep some idiot from hocking Viagra under that name.

To me, the world's richest man completely ignoring something to which many of us here devote our lives is a great reminder of the whole other physical world out there which will always be equally, if not more, as important as tech. Microblogging, blah blah will come and go, but people will always need to build brick walls and paint them.
When you press the "next-line" key, it's nice to know where you're going to end up. With a non-monospaced-font, you have to guess or count. With a monospaced font, it is visually obvious.
For such special-purpose threads, I think it's worth seeing those comments fall through upvotes (or flagging) rather than penalize straight opinions. A similar chilling effect to a downvoted opinion could be had by exposing the downvoters. :)

I'm curious if pg has data on this.
Not seeing the original comment to which you're referring, I can't offer any opinion on it in particular. However, I generally disagree with the statement "if a comment gets down voted but starts a wave of discussion surely it has value." Trolling is, at its heart, the creation of discussion by posts of negative value, usually by eliciting a strong emotional response from readers. Most troll-posts don't have value to those trolled (though there may be exceptions).
Monopolies are like monarchies. There may be a good one now and then but the system itself is faulty and prone to badness. A good monopoly will generally turn into a bad monopoly over time, because there are no competitive forces keeping it honest. Though there are rare exceptions. A competitive market tends to be long-term stable, resulting in better sustained, long-term results for customers.

Google is very dominant but nothing it does could really be considered a monopoly, even search. Very few google products have significant "lock-in" the way most monopolistic products do.
I agree with you that there are a lot of people who are extremely valuable to an economy despite not having a degree. However I would suggest that a degree is still a good bar to have in place.

Why is a degree any less of an arbitrary requirement than requiring extensive real-world experience (thus restricting opportunities available to many recent graduates)?

I think it's simply naive and foolish to exclude candidates based entirely on secondary indicators of their skills. First-pass filtering is easy enough based on primary indicators.

Moreover, due to the rapid increase of college attendance post WWII (starting with the introduction of the GI bill), college degrees are no longer a rarity -- without further context, they are not really a suitable secondary indicator of much of anything. Now you have to get a phd to stand out from the crowd.
A real economy is the most complex system there is. Even with most of the simple rules known (and I don't think we are quite at this point yet), most of the economy will NOT be predictable.
You're taking it too personally.

How do you know the reasons your post got downvoted?

And why do you revenge against community after that?

Community has it's moods too, if it annoys you too much at some particular time you're always free to leave. That's what I do, but I know there's some value in this community so I return. But revenge is simply immature.
I downvote because I have been personally offended by something that has been said. Most often I have been offended by the sin of bad taste. This is, granted, a pretty wide area, but when somebody writes something egregiously distasteful—whether it's a terrible sense of humor, or a misinformed righteousness, or craven pandering to the self-important 'social media' upper crust, or indeed the myopic, worthless blather of said upper crust—I am aesthetically offended by that sort of thing. It offends my sense of decency, my sense of wit and interestingness. I suffer in the same way as I do when I witness incredibly stupid people on television, or very bad music, or indeed when I find myself buttonholed into a painfully tedious conversation with someone who is similarly lacking in good taste, be it social, intellectual, aesthetic or otherwise. I suffer and therefore I downvote, in an attempt to exorcise my pain.

Maybe that would be the easiest rule of thumb, then. If you say something which would, if I were chatting with you at a cocktail party, make me fearfully look for some excuse to go refill my drink, I will downvote you.
I wasn't too surprised that they cost a lot to make. I mean, after all, shopping carts cost ~175$.

Though, 1300$ does sound more reasonable.
Yes you're right. We each have our own definition of "better," as we do have for "correct." But it's less detrimental/errpr to just have you judge "better" than to have you judge both "better" and "worse" which is what happens when we allow judgements of "correct."
Yes. The solution is education, not dumbing everything down. If you treat people like they're dumb, they will act the part.
You only feel this way because you like Google. MS including a browser so people didn't have to FTP one or get one from friends made the world better too. It's probably that decision that helped the web grow to what it is today.

I remember what it was like trying to get on the internet before IE was included. It was a pain.

Also, consumerism's arguably bad for the world, due to over consumption, etc, so advertising isn't really good for the world, thus google is bad for the world.
Thanks for the information!

Actually I think I've read something about the different levels of SSL. I suppose it's possible to somehow limit the available modes, to avoid exposing vulnerabilities.

an attacker only needs to find one screwy CA in order to pretend to be whoever he wants.

- What's a screwy CA, and how does the pretending work? .. If it's possible to describe roughly.
I would like to know if the data-only plan is an option as well.

Normally I'd just buy an unlocked one and swap a SIM card in for when I needed to use the data/cell features, but obviously I can't do that in this case.

Why not? It would just be a CSIM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDMA_Subscriber_Identify_Module) card instead of a SIM card, right?
My point was not to take the position that karma is an unimportant number in a computer somewhere, but that people often claim as much in defense of various scoring systems on sites like this and Reddit and so on that create perverse incentives for the users.

I work on online videogames. You don't need to tell me the value of a number in a computer somewhere that means a whole heck of a lot to someone, and shapes how they act. :-)
Did anyone actually view the source on this? Besides deprecated Font tags there are incorrectly nested tags and Div tags with nothing in them. He must have literally asked the neighbor's junior high school kid if he'd put it together for $15. Talk about being frugal.