skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Minority rule will discourage the kind of content that you posit new readers prefer and old readers dislike. If new readers need to sit through hard tech articles for a period before they can influence content, this will keep away new readers that don't like hard tech articles. They won't be able to simply reshape the community to their preferences instantly.

Imagine a 30-day waiting period between joining the site and being able to influence content. You won't stick around unless you like what is already there.
a trusted team will also help establish the value in an idea which is hard to do (in a way others will understand) by oneself. the sounding board can be really useful in helping define the exciting parts of an idea and at the same time distill the competitive bits - which means when it comes time to share the idea with a wider audience, it's clear how far the conversation can go.
A LOT of trouble can be saved if the hardware is confirmed to work with the OS. I bought a System76 Starling. Haven't upgraded it to Karmic yet - I figure I'll let more people tread the upgrade path until it is smoother.
"The guys were almost done with highschool"

How many of them became engineers?
Wikipedia is the über-encyclopædia. ;-)
You've lost sight of jacquesm's premise, which is when 1) the intention is not accurately reflected by the indentation, and 2) does not break the syntax of the language.

You asked what benefit might come from the redundancy of a curly brace, and this was a scenario in response.
"Oh, I've been saturated with Unix-peanut-gallery effluvia for so long that it no longer even surprises me when every question -- no matter how simple -- results in someone suggestion that you either A) patch your kernel or B) change distros. It's inevitable and inescapable, like Hitler."

-- jwz, 2002
really ... I configured my computer to dual boot Ubuntu in a couple of hours. It was faster than it took me to configure my original Windows installation (which came pre-installed, mind you).

And I have no idea what you are complaining about regarding the libraries. I just merely say ok when update manager pops up. Have not had problems thus far.
Best of luck to you. Instead of sharing the idea, share the questions and concerns you have in getting started, in a general fashion.

I know the feeling. Without any idea what it is you're working on, I know the best advice I can offer: keep at it. Here's a comment I wrote awhile ago with a similar sentiment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=302073
There we go again with "this time is different". Yes, AIM is still around today, but it's clearly nearing the end of its days: http://google.com/trends?q=aol+instant+messenger%2C+facebook....

This is a prime example of one technology replacing another. It's extremely naive to think that it'll stop with Facebook and friends.
A site like HN is basically a group of insiders, namely folks who have decided what is smart and what is not. So the system ought to favor insiderism and reject power from newcomers.

So, why let newer users vote at all? They can't downvote either, so there ought to be a karma threshold for voting as well, too. Then you would have to own some credibility (=karma) before you can begin to affect the site's future.

You get karma by posting good links and writing good comments. Who decides what's "good"? Those who have karma, of course! Back to the circle of insiders! So, you ought to gain karma normally if a high-karma user votes up your submission or comment. If lots of low-karma users do that you might get a tiny bit of karma but no more. If only few low-karma users do that you get nothing.

That should at least give most of the control to users with high karma. Note: I'm not entirely sure how HN works for beginners these days, so some of the above might already be in effect.
A prompt refund is good customer service.
But what pushes it up to 11 in my eyes, was that they refunded her $100 for a $96 overcharge.

Not because $4 is fair compensation for her trouble.
Or because $4 is so much money that she should be happy.

But because they actually took a moment to consider what message a $100 refund sent to the customer vs what $96 would send.
I see what you're saying, but it's also possible to argue that that man killed the father of a young baby.
Post it again! Post it again! Post it again! Post it again!
Man, I'm going through the routine right now. I wanted to become an iTunes affiliate for an iPhone app I'm about to submit. Apple a) does not clearly state what iPhone developers need to do since affiliates are typically websites b) sends you a generic rejection email and forces you to wait two weeks to reapply while you are scratching your head guessing what they want. So I've been calling linkshare, who are very helpful and clearly want to make money. Yet I send blind emails to apple crossing my fingers for a response.
I think you misinterpreted my post. I have zero "pride" in place here. I was simply responding to the parent post that some of these may not be homophones (at least according to my definition).

For the record, the OP's strong reaction to people getting the words wrong is not something that bugs me. I commonly mistype words like weather/whether and there/their.
From experience: the "News2" thing does work. The only problem is that after a few "NewsN" iterations, you come to realize that you're just basically kicking out everyone except for the same few core groups of users each time you make a new one, so you might as well just have the single site with the core users and lock it down.
No, morons are abuzz, no one of above average intelligence is.
That's a fair point, probably clouded by the fact that the Soviet Union was, at first, an ally to Nazi Germany, and eventually celebrated its victory by forcibly annexing eastern Europe and the dozen of million people living there as a buffer against western Europe.
Platforms, Networks, Features, Capabiliites....etc..AT&T Network is much better then Verizon has mis-represented it to be.
None of the fore mention things matters to the VAST majority of wireless phone end users. The VAST Majority of end users want a very friendly, easy to use and adoptable wireless phone solution. That's it period. The minority of geeks out there can buy Droids and AT&T will continue to ownthe VAST majority of the consumer market with the PROVEN Success of the iphone.. End of Story
Google Go Name Change Petition
To change the name to "Issue 9" re: http://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=9
Gawker Media is pulling in $300 million per year? Didn't Rupert Murduck just say that "no one is making any serious money in online content"?
Minimum viable x is a great lesson in engineering. Always start small and slowly build from there while keeping it working.
The henchman should be honored, because without the honor, there would be no reason for the henchman to kill - the personal risk is too great, and the personal reward too little. But the mob as a whole clearly benefits from killing rivals, so by introducing honor (which, for someone without it, is worth a lot), everyone can expect a positive payout (except for the rival).

I think you'd probably object to my ignoring the totality of the situation - a murder has been committed. But what's the harm in murder as long as it's happening external to "our civilization"?
To limit the effect of one-liners, you can try making the maximum karma a comment can have be a function of the number of words in the comment. A simple linear relationship would mean that a one-word comment ("No") could never have a karma greater than one. It may be that a more complex function would be better, but something like that may help.
I think using karma as a proxy for good judgement has its own inherent problems. High karma can easily be attained by karma-whoring behavior or by obsessively and excessively contributing to the site. Both of which imply poor judgement of one form or another. Not all high-karma users fall to those categories of course. I think if you combined it with an admin-controlled visible-only-to-admin override flag the high-karma filter might work.

It would be interesting too because over time as a user's karma rises or falls it would change the current score of all the articles and comments he's voted. That would be interesting for two reasons: 1. It could cause old, interesting articles to bubble back up onto the front page months or years after they were originally posted and 2. It could help alleviate people's anxiety associated with their own karma score-- it would be something that you know bounces around in an out-of-your-control manner and not something that monotonically trends upwards. The loop between user's karma, article and comment points would be closed. We could use our fancy math to analyze the stability of the system and figure out the proper controller to insert in the loop to prevent positive feedback making it all go to the rails. It could be beautiful.
I'll take thousands of braces over significant whitespace any day.
Starting a BIG Technology Company is like Sacking Rome, minus the sex
True, but at the heart of this assertion is that Go was already a language name that was taken _before_ Google used it.

Which might entirely be true.

But that assertion would be strengthened by pointing to a link/post that was somewhat _older_.
Wow, Adobe's alpha 64 bit flash plugin doesn't work for you? Alpha software broken? Who would have thought. And certainly if you used OSX or Windows you would get a completely different Adobe 64 bit flash plugin that works seamlessly. Right.

Regarding rhythmbox there is plenty of software on windows and mac that has memory leaks and resource leaks. Of course on windows or mac nobody blames the operating system for faulty software. But on Linux, well Linux is to be blamed for everything.
What's your current laptop? I'm in the market for one, and plan on running Ubuntu (with Windows in a VirtualBox)
Thomas Ptacek, why the odd unproofed assertion? Seems counter to the Salesforce, RIM etc trends.

(I appreciate the point you made above about font creators feeling fairly compensated for use of their creations though, thanks.)
Padova fact: the treaty ending the war between Italy and the Austro-Hungarian empire was signed in a villa just to the south of Padova:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_Giusti
Yup. Petition is here: http://www.petitiononline.com/gglgoi9/petition.html

I think the issue has more to do with Google's attitude problem - arbitrarily picking a name and not caring to do the research to see if it was taken...
I think the usual idea is that during development, cell division patterns in the plant apical meristem [1] implement some Lindenmayer system [2]. I don't know if anyone has looked into genetic & molecular mechanisms whereby cell division could be regulated so as to implement an L-system in this way.

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

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system

-----

edit: lots of stuff here: http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/
I replied to your reply clarifying why the one-liner comment was downmodded. In further hopes that my comment would dissuade others considering a one-liner. Does that make my action 2x worse? confused
13 years of CNN.com traffic, visualized
So the problem is that, at a certain growth point, growing the community and preserving the feel of the community become more or less mutually exclusive. New people will invariably bring their feel for things here, even if it displeases existing users.

Anything involving kharma or other metrics is also likely to fail, and will probably lead to lots of benign but likely popular posts so that people can get more "power".

Basically I think your options are to freeze the community (or make it invite only) or to be ok with the fact that trolls will start showing up and all we can do is ignore them. I don't particularly advocate either of these, but generally believe less extreme measures are superior.

There's a fine line between trolling and radical new ideas and sometimes radical new ideas are a good thing.
I think unalone has a point. My reading of your comment was along the lines of "With only 1 product (essentially), Apple is in a tenuous position because if the iPhone is unsuccessful or is beaten (by Android or whatever) then they're completely out of the market. Whereas if Nokia had 50% of their phones fail completely, they'd still have 60+ phones to enable them to compete in the market."
A Maemo app for my soon-arriving N900.
Ask HN: Google official blogs don't have a user comments section. Why?
Is it not bit ironic for a company that is supposedly promotes open systems and open standards not to have a user comments section in their own blogs?

Google products and services are an integral and important part of every netizens life and its sphere of influence spread across nations and cultures.Should not they open their blogs to get users feedback and comments? Considering most of their important announcements come through the official blog - i guess it makes sense.

Your comments and opinions are welcome.
Individuals can fork it and name it anything they want, but "the community" can't just make Google call it what "the community" wants. Unless the fork is so popular it renders the original irrelevant.
I don't think it'll work, I have like 19K karma, should my one opinion be worth more than 19,000 new people? Maybe if it's in tiers, 1-1000 = 1 karma point, 1000-10000 = 10 karma points, 10000+ = 20 karma points.

Also the whole downvoting thing doesn't even work half the time. I usually see the down vote button in only like 10% of the threads, the rest I can only upvote.
I'm a relatively new user too, but for me HN is one of the few refuges for rational discourse online, and the last thing I would want is for it to become another digital ghetto.
Sorry, it is a touchy subject and I am certainly thankful to the troops who freed us, too. I don't have a good answer - not all wars can be avoided, but I certainly wouldn't want to encourage anybody to become a soldier. If I really believed in the cause, I might become a soldier, too, though.

I think many soldiers are from poor backgrounds, though. Not sure how many chose to become a soldier for the excitement, or because it offers them a good chance at a better life. Again sorry, I don't have good answers. Overall, though, I think words are cheap and improving pay is maybe better. Soldiers provide a service to society, society should pay.
http://issuenine.com
Interesting point, but you didn't mention the social aspect of FB and how powerful that is. It's why MySpace still lingers (massively) behind the scenes.

I used to think MySpace was for people who couldn't build their own website. With Facebook's success I'm changing that view. It's about the social connections not simply self publication.
Murder of Lehman Reviews: The Best
No, it probably won't "work" out of the box, meaning that it requires configuration. With a fresh install, typically the first thing I do is plug in an ethernet cable, download all available updates (including wifi drivers and other software if needed) and then configure the wifi. I did this when I bought a netbook preinstalled with Linux, but I might not have needed to install anything, I probably just didn't find the "switch" at first.
Your email reply is certainly worth a post here. Why don't you post it? Or if you like, I could post it indicating that it was your reply?
Forgive me if I'm missing something obvious, but how does it prevent unauthorized downloading? It looks like the font gets base64 encoded and put right into a CSS file?
The Cake Test (OpenGeoData)
It seems like mustpax just presented a compelling reason to do so.
An idea is really rather like a very abstract, high-level kind of source-code. And are we not convinced that open-source is a good, if not the superior, way?

In itself, duplication and spread of ideas is firmly defensible on Kantian grounds as the moral action. And surely in principle, freedom of non-rivalrous goods is desirable economically too. There is the claim of monopoly protection being an encouragement to production, yet the evidence for it is practically non-existent.

While we are probably all prone to an impulse of self-interest such as described in the blog-post, it does not seem the rational choice.
I see your point about Dell, but have you looked at other companies? Laptops by Asus are quite nice in terms of quality and are much less expensive. My point wasn't that Apple hardware is not well-designed and well put together -- it was that it wasn't really worth the cost difference (especially when you are choosing to not take advantage of a great operating system like OSX). There has got to be some other hardware out there that will make you happy.
No, a compelling reason is when you have lots of users in the same or similar situation asking you to do so.
When the intention is not reflected by the indentation, you need to fix that, in every programming language.

Python also has the handy benefit of telling you this immediately.

jacquesm's statement about the visible difference is obviously false.

However I don't think it's doing anyone any good to keep contributing on this topic. All I was doing was making a suggestion to improve something. The troll who posted 'no' with no arguments has a bunch of supporters, I'm being moderated down to nothing. You're not responding to my points, and you seem to think I'm not listening to you, though I'm trying to understand what you're saying. I give up, this isn't worth it.
fair enough, but would that also mean that its ok to reply to people who reply to trolls in the threads?
Yahoo! Search had lockable SafeSearch settings long before either DDG or Google (although, like Google's new implementation, it's cookie-based).
Convicted Murderer Sues Wikipedia, Demands Removal of His Name
I too will give it a try. Setting my address bar (and "g") alias search to Duck Duck Go. I wonder if I can start loving it. Currently I use Scroogle, a proxy to Google.
So how do you handle dynamic IP spaces?

Otherwise, it's not all that hard for one Comcast or AT&T user to lock safe search for their neighbors.
You're alluding to the broken windows theory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixing_Broken_Windows
I would prefer begin/end pairs or parentheses over braces.

But I quite like the indentation mechanism for Python.
Why thank you edw519, glad to visible.
Not true. While they may be broad, the authors still found common traits of the most historically successful companies. Collins wrote the follow-up "How the Mighty Fall" to then explain why/how they were unable to remain "Built to Last".

The failure of companies mentioned in Good to Great does not necessarily mean Good to Great was wrong; it's possible those companies were no longer following what made them great in the past.
Would you (do you?) trust your company's source code to github?
We've always hosted our own SCM repos...it's not hard, so why not? Well, my company is now (partially due to me) putting more and more stuff "in the cloud" (AWS, et al.), and the git repos are next. It makes total sense from a resources perspective to use github, but I (and the other partners) are concerned about theft, loss, and/or leakage of our proprietary (gasp!) goodies. Are we (overly) paranoid, or is github actually no less risky than the disgruntled emp problem/general hosting failure problem (e.g. If we were to just put our gitorious on a rackspace slice or something)/our in-house backups failing problem?
Either way, please send me your feedback.
> Google's attitude problem

That's a bit harsh. As far as I know, there are so many programming languages that it's easy to have a name conflict. This is probably an honest mistake on Google's part, and as I haven't yet seen an official response from Google, I can't say they have a bad attitude about this. Who knows, they may even have a sense of humor and rename it issue9.
I personally don't care about having a Facebook account any more than I be buffing up my MySpace account or a WoW character anytime soon. This cartoon sums it up my attitude pretty well:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zp_eKXDTiU0/SiQyLywcJ7I/AAAAAAAAE7...

However, I agree that since so many people use Facebook, it's a useful and important place to promote your business and for which to offer services.

It used to be that when we released widgets it was important to test on Blogger, Typepad, etc. but these days more potential users are on Facebook than Blogger. Of course, Facebook makes you jump through hoops to integrate anything with their site, but the large potential audience makes it worth it.
I believe the words that most people are actually looking for when they say sexy is aesthetically pleasing. Unfortunately sexy happens to be shorter and easier to throw around.

Plus, if you say some hardware or device is aesthetically pleasing, you might have to explain what you mean whereas few men will question what you mean if you say something is sexy.
Not really. Did you ever read Shakespeare? Language and spelling are always changing. It works in many other languages as well, despite the existence of accents.
NoSQL meet SQL (a SQL front-end to CouchDB)
Hint : macbook pros are incredibly easy to dual boot if you use the OS that comes with the hardware.

edit: feel free to mod me down, but it's the truth.
> I'm not a big fan of Wikipedia's deletionists, but I hope they go after this page.

How is that for a contradiction... Google launched their 'Go' language today, and it definitely is great that someone took the trouble to put this stake in the ground. Whether it is notable or not is debatable, I think the simple fact that there is a namespace collision between two programming languages is reason enough to make it notable.

It is all over the web, thanks to the efforts of the author, if it wasn't 'notable' yesterday it certainly is now.

http://econsultancy.com/blog/4954-google-go-was-the-name-alr...
I'm not sure what the behavior dynamics are in LtU, but it's a forum topic asking what seems like an open question to the LtU community, rather than what one would call a blog post.
I agree, Ubuntu can be unwieldy compared with the solidity of other distros. I usually put up with some slowness or instability because Ubuntu automates stupid little tasks like uncompressing files (which I really should learn how to do on the CLI anyway).

Can't say for sure, but it also seems like Firefox behaves differently between distros, as if the code in the repositories differs drastically enough to offer a dramatic performance boost. Granted these are not scientific observations and I'd defer to someone who ran *buntu vs another distro on two boxes with identical specs.
Don't know if you realize this, but regular snark in your comments reinforces bad behavior from newcomers. There is no gray area here: either we tolerate snark & sarcasm and slide into a pit of goo, or we don't tolerate it and keep this place civilized. Every single post counts.