skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just because the regulators are inept doesn't mean that there aren't more regulations. http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/v31n4/cpr31n4-1.html

Perhaps an individual isn't able to tell, but consumer reports would be able to.

Each individual working in their best interest reforms the market. If they believe that it is unfair, e.g. insider trading, then they will refuse to take part. Thus a market would form to cater to these individuals.
Quite possibly a terrible example (+ hasty generalization, etc.), but here goes:

http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Interpretation-Computer-Prog...
You have to set an alarm. The minimum amount of time I sleep is 30 minutes, max is 45. Longer than 45 you start going into deep sleep and you'll be pretty unhappy if an alarm wakes you from that.
Oh shut your dirty trap, you whiny moron.

</sarcasm>

I still find HN to be a friendly, positive environment. Let's keep it that way!

Edit: Wow. Either starting your comment with a joke is somehow no longer OK, or nobody else agrees with me that HN is still friendly and positive. I've been reading HN everyday for a very long time. I think these negative trends are mostly just an illusion due to the novelty wearing off for newer users. "If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)" (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
I wrote an article about the closure aspect of Ruby blocks that was intended for beginners:

http://darwinweb.net/articles/41-ruby_blocks_as_closures

It really focuses on just one aspect of closures that Ruby's syntax makes especially convenient, which is that they enable you to write generic functions that don't need to know a single detail about what kind of data they are being applied to.
As you know, for most Tokyoites the use case is: bike from to the station; board the train.

If you're riding a road bike for fun or commuting then you usually don't need the station parking lot.
It had to happen- there's relatively fewer pg, patio11, raganwald, wheels, tptacek, swombat, etc., and more of this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=903880
Of course, this rule is true for non-web-app businesses as well. Improvements in quality increase the likelihood that customers will come back, and returning customers usually have higher margins (due to lower sales & support costs) than new acquisitions.
I've worked in the news business for 30 years and I've never even heard of OpenPR, for what that's worth.
Yes I should have worded it "when you can't rely on the government to save you"
If you're in the U.S., checkout 2gov.org - tweet @2gov with your view on current issues and they'll automatically notify all of your elected representatives.

They also provide some pretty cool rollup stats on what folks are tweeting to them.
I agree entirely. I rarely do more than skim the comments anymore, because too often it just turns into a contest for one-upsmanship and ego stroking. There are people on here that will take any opportunity to argue about any topic.
Eh, I get the sense that sometimes people will just grab any news story that hasn't been posted yet and post it hoping to get voted up points. I haven't been around all that long, but it seems like the signal to noise ratio is getting a lot higher even during the short time span that I've been on here.

Not only that, but you get twenty blog articles submitted pretty much all talking about the same thing every time, and it can just get draining. I think people get aggravated when they start reading the same thing over and over. "Release early/iterate often" has been the subject of no fewer than one top-page article nearly every day, and though it's good advice, I think by this point we get the message. Once the main point of an article is understood, people start to pick apart and criticize the smaller points I guess.
Manage your online research - report
Sinatra is widely used and becoming pretty ubiquitous. It's supplanting camping, which was also relatively widely used, but not nearly as much as sinatra.

The Merb/Rails merge reveals some reasons why there aren't a lot of widely used Ruby frameworks, and I'd say it's mostly a large scale manifestation of DRY, combined with the maturity and wealth of features in the Rails codebase and the fact that most of the changes devs would like to see in Rails are already going into it.
In Japan, it's as good as theft-proof.
I'm referring to all my anonymous functions from now on as kamikaze functions. Brilliant.
From the article:

"She assumed integrity is implicit in the characters of the "leaders.""

I haven't read much Ayn Rand (i.e., none), but I've read a lot about what she has said and written. Is the quote from the article above dramatic license on the case of the author, or did Rand actually state that integrity is a required characteristic in the 'leaders'?
I've noticed it as well. I'm not sure if this is due to an increased amount of criticism or if the quality of the articles posted has gone down, warranting more criticism.
Fantastic quote, I am enlightened.

As developers this is the polar opposite of how we are required to think in order to do our job, therefore it stands to reason that for tech startups this would be easier to achieve then in more marketing-heavy industries.
I think part of it is the extra traffic too: 10 comments pointing out the same criticism within a few minutes of each other. And you can see the rush in posting it.

Personally I have a few names I like to read commentary from and so keep an eye out for - then skim the rest.
Oh come on, -3 points? It was a joke, people! I upvoted because he beat me to it AND because I agree with him. I'm not seeing the negative downturn.
They're in-game inspired diagrams. The key is in the paragraph above the start of the 'Unclocked Logic' section.

A
→o * o→M O
o * o
B

The mechanical power goes in the first →, and the [M O] part is the output. A and B are the AND inputs. Gearboxes actually look like *, but o is also being used for gearboxes, albeit gearboxes that are just there to drain power.
doesn't matter anyways, closed protocols are a dead end technology. an open solution will take its place and the network effect will see that to be the eventual outcome.
It's a bit much for a D-cup but for a very obese woman, not that surprising. I had a girlfriend who was a 40(I think) DDD/E. She constantly complained about back pain from carrying all that weight on her chest.

Breasts the size of your head may look appealing, but to the owner, they're not a lot of fun!
> Checking parameters in every method (especially an OO system) is a sure way to have poor performance.

This seems overly general to me. I'm not sure it's a "sure way to have poor performance." It seems to me that (for example) a null-check is pretty fast.

> Normal methods should just work find even if a parameter is NULL.

What's a "normal method"? And if the business logic of the method requires a particular parameter to be non-null (or has some other constraint), what should happen when a null parameter is passed-in (by a test or otherwise)?
I've noticed it also. When I first joined people really took care that their comments were thoughtful and respectful, even if they were disagreeing. Is there anything to do other than to personally try harder to be thoughtful contributors?
Quality of HN Comments Over Time
| . .
| . .
q| . . . .
u| . . . . . .
a| . . . . .
l| . . . . .
i| . . . . .
t| . . . you are here -->. .
y| (that's all)
|________________________________________________________
S O N D J F M A M J J A S O N D J F M A M J J A S O N D
'08 '09
It's just you....twit.
I never made that valuation, you made it for me. I said that the author implied finance was a lesser career choice than nuclear physics, then provided an example where statistical analysis can be used in finance to provide a social good.

Not all bad-credit people are bums looking to default on their loans, skirting the credit collectors as long as they can, living on the underbelly of society. But people who were hit hard by a disaster, made a few mistakes in the past, or are just getting started out are lumped in with the deadbeats. Unfortunately, there is no way to tell them apart, based on financial numbers. By minimizing risk in dealing with these types of loans, the people who are legitimately trying to improve their lives are given an avenue to show they are responsible enough to own a home.

There is still risk involved, but the construct is not inherently deceiving about its risk level. The problem was over-leveraging on this type of activity. Even over-leveraging on mutual funds and money market funds can make you lose your shirt.

"an accounting trick to statistically suppress risk"
Mortgage-backed securities as a construct unto themselves are no more an "accounting trick" anymore than accident, life, or health insurance policies are "account tricks". Regardless, "risk" is nothing but a probability factor anyway. Risk is the probability of losing money on an investment, not the certainty of it. To organize assets together in vehicles that allow the earnings of the winners offset the losses of the losers, you're not performing accounting legerdemain, you are reducing actual risk.
It doesn't take a picture. The RedLaser SDK uses an underground API to access the camera's video frames, which is technically not allowed but overlooked for RedLaser?
Uh oh. I did the same before seeing yours. Maybe sense of humor is the real problem here.
ISO forms group for cloud computing/SOA standards development
Jobs isn't a designer. That's why Apple hires people like Ives. The best visionaries/CEOs aren't good at everything -- they're good at critiquing others' work and letting the experts do what they do best.
Well yes, but I was speaking in general. The system could go down (software problem, extended power outage, broken robots, etc etc). I think the benefits outweigh that though.
Crap. I just upvoted edw519 for his pithy comment!
Kind like of a mesh idea?
Graph is shockingly accurate. I've deleted and created accounts in each peak and trough you laid out.
I think a closed forum with users who have established definitions for the difference between what each number of the scale implies would have a bimodal distribution.
Sites like youtube ( http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/09/five-stars-domina... ) and amazon ( http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1562764.1562800&co... ) have more of a J-curve
Could this have something to do with startup failures?

Multiple failures might put people in a bad mood.
Disrespect is never funny.
Grass is always greener...

There are lots of bikes but streets are narrow and bike lanes are nowhere to be found (I was amazed when I visited Amsterdam)

Most people ride on the sidewalk; some ride on the street but on the wrong side (contrary to the traffic!).

Most drivers don't seem to be aware of bikes. For instance, you have to take a lot of care of drivers coming from the opposite direction and turning (on their) right in front of you.

Also, most Japanese university students don't own cars and would probably envy you Americans. :-)
Only assuming the bike is perfectly balanced. Any kind of imbalance will lead to a very damaging torsional force on the rim.
Do you really think there are that many actual startup people here, relative to the commenters as a whole? Also, with few exceptions (myself clearly included), the people here who actually have companies tend to be very positive.
A great new business model
Totally speculative conspiracy theory.
Imagine you need a task to be done. Normally, you go and do it yourself. With a closure, you write the instructions and just hand it off to someone :)
Perl far from dead, more popular than you think
While quality may have been varying, it's still fantastic compared to the mire that exists outside. We're lucky.
Regarding 1, that's nonsense. There are many unethical people in positions of power in both Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead.

Near as I can tell, the most she ever suggests is that people who compete within the market (e.g., by inventing a better metal or making better loans) are more ethical than those who use the government to gain an advantage.
The Strength of the Academic Enterprise
Those comments are still there, just a bit less obvious.

I figure it is because the "original" members were of a certain level of contributor. "hand picked" in a sense (classic early adopters). A these move on to pastures new and a large numbers of new people come in you start to get a range of commentary style rather than just top class stuff.

(not that all newcomers are bad - or indeed not that many of us are - just that you get a range of attitude).

And of course almost outright trolling is less obvious once the general range of commentary style is expanded; so it passes off as serious discussion.
I've also never heard of difference tables before, what a cool little technique!
Update: seconds after posting this, I refreshed and the full-bar ads went away. Have they just fixed the results?

Nope, the GoogleMind probably crawled the site, and upon discovering your dissatisfaction with the ads, updated your personalized results appropriately ;)
The most relevant part for people here:

"...co-operation between the university and industry, however, is so much harder that it usually fails. We might even conclude that the effort is hopeless.

To begin with, there is the great difference in Buxton Index. For industry, the Buxton Index is less than 10, probably closer to 4 or 5, whereas for the academic scientist the Buxton Index is closer to, say, 50, for what you offer your students should last a lifetime, their lives, to be precise.

The second problem has to do with the openness, which is a hallmark of the university, whereas, like the guilds, industry tends to see its knowledge as trade secret. People have tried to find legal solutions for this dilemma, but I am afraid that such solutions only touch the surface: at a more profound level, either one of the parties forsakes its duty, or the co-operation collapses.

But the greatest limitation on the usefulness of co-operation between industry and academia is almost certainly that the two have completely different purposes. To quote Harvey Earl of GM: "General Motors is in business for only one reason. To make money. In order to do that we make cars. But if we could make money by making garbage cans, we would make garbage cans.". Some people might argue that they even tried to make money by making garbage. But the product is secondary; to quote Harvey Earl again: "Listen, I'd put smokestacks right in the middle of the sons of bitches if I thought I could sell more cars.". These quotations are from the fifties, but things have not changed that much. For instance, computing science has very convincingly shown that simplicity is a necessary precondition for reliability, but industry willfully complicates products so as to make them proprietary. The disgraceful state of affairs is fully revealed by the traditional disclaimer with which industrial software is sold."
Would it be petty to edit you out of my original comment? :)

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how his asserted graph deserves the points it has now.
I think there are certainly times when things may go a bit far, but that's to be expected with such a volume of people - largely independent thinkers. A few might even be overtly negative or bellicose. I try to call it like I see it whether endorsing or critical, with no regard for being ingratiating for much the reasons PG points out here: http://www.paulgraham.com/discover.html
We've seen a similar trend in graduate enrollment in Toronto. Although I don't have an article to link to, last year the University extended graduate enrollment 3 times (from a January 6th deadline, to a May deadline) in an effort to attract more local students.

It appears that in the midst of the recession, the government has made it more expensive to bring in international students (one quote I got was "one international MASc student is similar to one local post-doctoral student") on a year-by-year expense, since our engineering graduate programs are research based and are thus funded. This was meant as an attempt to provide local new-grads with more opportunities in a dire job market, and in that sense, it certainly worked
Probably many want to have startups. Such people might be frustrated by their failure to acquire funding.
Did you generate that from intuition, or by some concrete algorithm?
I don't notice HN being that negative at all, although I'm relatively new, so I don't know if I know anything yet. What I do notice, however, is a bit too much self-seriousness, and it can come across as cold or negative at times when you're not used to it.
There are a lot of complicated and interesting things going on here. I just wish I had more time and data to dig into them.

One thing I have noticed is a consistent desire for the community to "meta discuss" how the board is doing -- much to the annoyance of others. (yes, this is a comment about meta comments, which makes it a meta meta) I'm not sure any of these conversations have kept the board from getting worse quicker or not -- it's impossible to measure something that didn't happen.

There seems to be common "games" you can play on boards like this, whether you're into game-playing or not. Edw519 has a tendency to come up with pithy quips that the majority of readers would like, thereby gaining his comments a lot upvotes. People who comment early get the "pile on" effect.

I know PG has tweaked the algorithm some to combat this, but all it's really done for me is to put rather worthless comments up above more interesting ones, so for me it makes the board less valuable.

At the end of the day, I think 3 things: 1)karma matters, whether you like it or not, 2) people play games with karma, and 3) you can only play so many quality-enhancing games: as the crowd grows outlying players are left with "cheap and dirty" games which work every so often.
I use RedLaser a bit and the scanning works better when I use the macro lens of my Clarifi case (http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/clarifi). Note: I'm not associated with Griffin in any way. Just thought I'd share this tip.
>"If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)"

Sweet. Only 8 more days and then I'll be able to voice my opinion without the "noob" stigma.
Make sure to read up on Robert Anton Wilson, the guy who defined it as such. His books are especially enlightening.
Prometheus Rising and Quantum Psychology are my favorites.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Anton_Wilson
it's sad because the problem of meshing has been solved pretty well ( olsr, batman, etc.), but there's almost no motivation for the big networks to implement it.

I predict status quo and price creep, while Android carves at the iPhone's market share. Instead of new features, we'll get the same features on different platforms!
Why scan a UPC code when you can just take a picture of the cover of a book and have the product found just as fast

Surely the error rate of that compared to bar codes is much higher. For common products Im sure it works just as well but bar code scanning doesn't degrade for edge cases in the same way.
I got downvoted one time by the same reason, but getting back to the subject, I really like the feedback guys receive when "asking HN", the community is always there to help who needs, I can't see this bad environment here (maybe few guys with bad sense of humor).
An HTTP resource kit for Python.
Could Microsoft Switch to Linux?
We operate in a market that has a few 800 pound gorillas with a bunch of 100 pound monkeys thrown in. I don't feel daunted for a second by the fact that the market is crowded - it just proves that there are customers out there looking for this particular kind of pain-killer.

The best-best is to have a unique workflow or feature and market it with a simple message. Speak to the userbase that would appreciate your unique position.

However, I think the most important thing to remember is that even if your feature set is identical (or less), there are other points of differentiation, even from a pure marketing point of view.

Here's an article that generalizes the problem from a perspective of a burger joint: http://www.yudkin.com/advantage.htm (yeah, I know, that site is ugly)

Every burger joint sells the same basic product, but you probably have an affinity for one over the others. Sometimes it's the flavor, but it can also be the price, the environment, or the personality of the business that you like.

Try to be unique, memorable, or remarkable in some way. Study your market,- plot it out if you have to - and find where you belong in the spectrum.
When did they change that? I remember when altavista used "or" by default, and then came google which did the (controversial for the time) "and". And it actually did work better!

And now we are back to "or"? Why? So many times I'm not happy with the results because of that.
Please allow me to rant about Google Code for a minute.

1. It's hard to tell which projects are official Google projects and which aren't.

2. The total lack of real names is disturbing to me. e.g. look at http://code.google.com/u/imsnah/ -- it's completely useless.
The nonlocal statement causes the listed identifiers to refer to previously bound variables in the nearest enclosing scope. [1]

While certainly a big improvement, we still can't access variables in arbitrary scopes, just local, nearest non-local, and global. To me, this seems a significantly more complex way of specifying variable scope than just declaring it explicitly.

1. http://docs.python.org/dev/3.0/reference/simple_stmts.html#t...
I do not post very often, as I frequently seem to have little to add to the already proliferate content. But it seems somewhat telling to me that my biggest recent gain in karma was directly related to a comment on Dell that seemed a bit of a zinger.

Most of my other sparse comments were questioning a premise, offering my .00002 cents worth, and typically neutral to positive in tone. I think. (Or at least that was my intention).
Closures are functions that exist inside a variable. Therefore an entire different level of scope, now exists inside that variable. The variable then becomes like an object in that respect.

Easy.
I didn't see much whining in here.

Aaron is pointing out that there might be big changes coming to far and away the biggest source of referral traffic on the web.

I probably don't have to spell this out for you, but it's a big deal if Google shifts focus from driving traffic to other sites, to driving traffic to its own sites.
Why then is it fine for the government to debase the currency, and therefore destroy the value of any accounts held in that currency?

The value of the currency depends on what I can exchange it for. If the US dollar's value relative to the things I buy and sell remains relatively stable over the next few years, and if my risk of losing my job remains low so that I can feel confident in my ability to keep earning those dollars, then as far as I'm concerned, the Fed is doing its job.

If the US dollar's value relative to gold goes down, I couldn't care less. I can't eat gold.
You're definitely right. Worse, I can feel the increase in negativity and trolling influencing me to become a more negative contributor myself.
Are you actually that negative? I hold my grudges against haters, but you always seem more snarky than actually hostile.
Since banks are both heavily regulated and customers' deposits are insured by the government, one can expect capitalist market forces to go awry with their operation.
If they don't already understand object-oriented programming, you make sure they understand that first.

If they understand objects, you explain that closures are the same as objects. They are bundles of state that carry around functions that operate on that state. The only real difference is that a single closure only contains a single function (method) that operates on its data, where a single object can have several methods.