skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really like this idea. However, I'm not sure if it is solving the trolling problem. Most troll comments I've seen come from "throwaway" accounts -- one post, and then not used again. These trolls presumably don't care about being able to vote or not.

I like what Twitter is doing for their (IMO, similar) spam account problem. Users flag for review and block updates from suspected spammer. We already have flagging, but we don't have blocking. It would be nice to be able to selectively hide specific comments or users (perhaps behind a "[blocked]" tag, like deleted comments are done now), so existing users at least could more easily ignore these trolls.

Account banning could be done by voting. Once an account is flagged, it gets added to a list of suspect accounts. Users (potentially above a karma threshold) can vote on these accounts based on their usage history; if enough people flag and confirm these accounts as spam they will be deleted, with their posted comments masked under a "[spam]" tag.
This would be like non-binary whitelists that have multiple levels. I like it.
You aren't kidding about new user, only ten days old. I guess now that you are on board you don't care if we switched to an invitation based system, but what about all the others out there who might, like you, crave the "integrity and consistency" of HN?
German publications must also alter their online archives in a bid to comport with laws designed to provide offenders an avenue to “reintegrate back into society.”

This seems like a reasonable limit on free speech. Murder is a terrible crime to commit, but in certain circumstances, I think it's fair to give a person legal protection which would allow them to move on from such misdeeds.
his sister
As a new user, you should not be able to vote until you've read x number of posts or spent x number of days on the site to understand the culture.

This is not the same as just not counting the votes. Point here is by preventing voting you're explicitly communicating your expectations to the new user.
This was also true for Domino's Pizza back when they began to take off like a rocket: a very limited menu, and low delivery time.
My money is on #3, plus #4 - There are tremendously more varieties of prepackaged imitation food crap available today than there were a few decades ago, because growth and profits in the food industry are in processed food. So kids today have a huge smorgasbord of junk food being created for them and marketed directly to them. Parents almost don't stand a chance.
Grew up in the same neighborhood and went to elementary school and college together.
Sophomore year...of high school. Now ten years later and we're doing a startup together.
If I read that visualization correctly, their homepage traffic increased +1000% while the pageviews on specific areas like tech / politics didn't increase at all over the same time span. That's not something I'd be happy about.
I've never heard of someone losing trade secret protections because the security of their hosting provider was compromised. Have you?
Is Software Set to Replace Sports Journalists?
So you are not an intentionalist?

I'm not equiped to argue this authoratively, but from what i gather the words taken literally are out of character, so are at least disingenious at some level. Unless he really believed in the message, how can such a strident message be anything but ironic,satirical or hollow.
Researchers' well-aimed stone takes down Goliath botnet
Originally met each other at a local hackerspace http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Metalab

Spent lots of time together and got friends, then he decided to go after a product idea and I joined him.

For the valley folks this probably means hanging out at the Hacker Dojo http://hackerdojo.pbworks.com/
Survey: Python Use Up 45%
I'm thinking all they need is a Mint to their Yodlee.
we've been using it for almost a year now, and are pretty ok with it. There are occasional downtimes that are annoying, but as others said, not a big deal.
We are also reasonably happy with the simple issue tracker, although it misses some _really_ important features it is ok for our needs (but damn, I'd love attachments).
On a date.
Agreed. I've always been a fan of the intellectual and enlightening conversations here. It's really the main reason I keep coming back.
To me the entire Hacker Ethos, Culture, and quite possibly the majority of its inhabitants are here today for the same reasons I am here today. Try to imagine an alternate history where the Fascists controlled Europe. Look around. Do you see you colleagues and customers? Would there be a Silicon Valley? What would America be like?

The question of fighting for true freedom and equality is deeply connected with the motivations behind startups and hacking in my brain.

That's why I posted it here but not on reddit.

update: In the USA it is Veteran's Day, not Remembrance Day. So there has been quite a bit of discussion here about thanking living veterans and veterans of all wars, some of which are controversial. But my post thanked an unnamed soldier who died in a conflict where we were fighting for human justice. I had WWII in my mind when I wrote it very specifically.

Even if you disagree whether it belongs on HN, I hope you now understand why I thought the question of what our world would be like had Fascism prevailed and who would or wouldn't be here and who would or wouldn't fraternize with each other would be "Of interest to Hackers."

pax.
Microsoft Patent Application for 'sudo'?
New public relations: Beating back bad press with Google AdWords
No, but it is necessary to show that every effort has been made to protect the trade secrets and obfuscating code is one step in that direction.

I am no lawyer, but that's what the lawyers told me.
second that - current members have moral right to preserve the intent of the site.

Id make upvote power logarithmic in Karma, vis -

upvote = K log( karma )
dnvote = K/4 log( karma )

which would imply a certain Karma before you could upvote at all, and a larger karma before you could downvote at all.

Not sure how to solve karma hunting, but that's orthogonal, and a smaller issue.

Id weaken downvote power because it is more damaging when used, and also because it seems to act in a way to reduce freedom of speech : people may be scared to speak the truth due to fear of losing karma, which devalues the site. Id almost prefer not to have downvotes, but there are comments I might want downvoted [racism, personal abuse, religious bigotry etc]
I lived in the same boarding house for two years with my first cofounder (Steve), who I started my first business with 7 years later. I was working for Accenture, and looking for a way out of the corporate world, and in fact was actively looking to start my own business, and Steve called me up and asked if I'd like to help him with this business idea he had...

My cofounder on my next business (Bob) is Steve's brother. I met him when I moved back to the UK, but obviously knew of him before, and had a strong introduction via Steve. I slept on his couch for 2 weeks when I first moved to London. Then I met him every once in a while for a few years, almost moved into the same flat-share at one point (the estate agent screwed up so it didn't happen). Then, at some point, the idea for Woobius came together (it was called Citeworks at the time...) and we got started on it.
"This was written by a guy who enjoys Ayn Rand."
;-)
hdmoore: HP plans to buy 3Com ($2.7b), which owns TippingPoint, which runs ZDI [Zero Day Initiative, a market for zero-day vulnerabilities], which has a 1128-day [vulnerability] in HP products.

"Maybe it was cheaper to buy them than fix all the bugs". (rim shot!)
this is also a case of correlation does not imply causation. People who fall out of touch may have done so because things are not going well as opposed to being the cause of things not going so well.
This is an impressive proof of concept, but the single most powerful thing about key value stores / document-based DB's is their independence from SQL.

Lately I have been experimenting with MongoDB and, personally, the divergence from SQL is refreshing and helps me rethink those engrained RDBMS principles!

Perhaps this could be useful when migrating from a legacy SQL system?
never had any security issues

You don't know for sure that you haven't had any security problems. All you know is that you haven't noticed the results of any security compromise.
At high school, in our dorm room; he was a junior, I a senior. I met our third cofounder years ago on the internet in a blogging network called Random Shapes.
As interns at Google. We shared a workspace there, but it turned out that we attended the same university.
1) Sophomore Year in HS
2) IRC
In my defense, Python would agree with me that it is readable: it would happily execute the line in the wrong block scope because of a single, invisible character was present or missing.

I bet you meant "semantically correct" instead. Yes, every program's semantics need to be correct in order for the program to be correct. That's a tautology, and it's a deflection from the subject of the tradeoff analysis that you requested upthread.

You're probably a bundle of joy to work with, too. :^)
Do you want your email server to use a language that even the developers admit isn't yet ready for production?
Through a bay area car enthusiast club. We realized we both had a passion for startups.
Erecting walls is never the answer. Any community, from a website to an entire country, suffers if it decides to close itself off from the world. There are too many examples to list.

So, making registration hard or invite-only, or making new users feel inferior is not the answer. I like the fact that I can vote on articles right after joining. Having to "earn my privileges" by having my opinions validated by someone first would have likely made me leave. And though I'm a newbie, I solemnly promise I won't be posting any lolcats :)

This doesn't mean a lack of policing, but with this many users it has to be improved. One problem that pops out right away is: there is no feedback associated with votes.

Are private messages a possibility? Or even a limited implementation, just for votes? A downvote would require a reason (to be sent to the poster by PM). This way the user can learn to write better comments. The downvote should be anonymous for the receiving user, so the discussion doesn't devolve into vengeful bickering. Upvotes could also have a reason (perhaps optional). I think this would balance out the impression of being shot down all the time.
I find it ironic to see such an attitude on the domain ycombinator.com.

(of course, as long as you're consistent and bash PG for his appropriation just as much as you're bashing Google now, that's fine)
According to one Heritage Foundation study[1], US military enlistees tend to come disproportionately from middle class backgrounds. They found that only 11% of enlisted recruits came from the poorest quintile of neighbourhoods in the US.

While the Heritage Foundation is not an entirely neutral institution, its methodology in this study seems fairly sound. And its findings don't support the popular belief that American soldiers are disproportionately poor and ill-educated and only joined because they had no alternatives.

Anecdotally, I've found this to be true for all of the American soldiers I have met and spoken to about their backgrounds and their reasons for enlisting.

[1] - http://www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/cda08-05.c...
A thorough evaluation of Go from a Google Employee
Oh, great call. The possibility of an unauthorized person injecting code could be disastrous.

Presumably, if you're security conscious, someone reviews all patches before they make it anywhere near shipping. But obviously that is not foolproof.

But then, what would happen if, say, someone went through the backdoor on github and patched a binary and modified the commit log to cover his tracks.

Hopefully git would fail loudly when you pull?
The only thing I HATE about Python is the mandatory indentation. The problems with it are:

1. It mixes format with logic. Don't we all know this is one of the greatest evils one can commit?

2. Indentation is a bitch to parse compared with braces. Violates occam's razor of software of engineering -- simpler is better. Unnecessary complexity is the second greatest evil in software engineering.

3. Indentation is neither symmetrical nor logically unique. Therefore you can't delete all the formatting from a python program and expect a formatter to get it right. With symmetric braces a formatter always knows exactly what logical level it should be on by counting the number of closed braces; not possible with python's goofy system.

4. All that tiresome debate and worry over tabs versus spaces.

5. One can't really say "braces are redundant not indents" or "indents are redundant not braces". Redudency is commutative. I would say braces are for computers, indents are from human; it is simple to go from braces to indents but not so in the other direction.

Just a note -- I will always pick Python over any other scripting language. I just think the indentation is a serious mistake; there are so few other bad choices it tends to irk me that much more.
You may be interpreting "bare metal" a little different than I intended. I meant for "bare metal" to increase the scope. It sounds like you interpret it as decreasing the scope. Your use of "systems" sounds like what I meant for "bare metal". I interpret "systems" as relating primarily to operating systems and direct hardware, but maybe my perception is not mainstream. I guess I just chose the wrong phrase.

I agree that C now has a better controlling body. Those comments generally referred to the whole history of C and C++ combined.
Whether you value it or not, Turing got an apology from the British Prime Minister on behalf of the government because of an on-line petition.
There's a Five Guys in the Seattle area too.
Expanding on the idea of the 'classic' link, you could add a user selectable/configurable threshold for who's votes count based on age of registration. Newer users up voting meretricious comments would not impact those with a high set threshold.
On your past life as a spammer:
Wow, very interesting. How much is a 'lot'? :)

On your personal struggle:
I feel deep sympathy for you, and I hope something will be found out soon that can help you.

On your need to solve the money problem once and for all:
How much money do you need to make to solve the money problem? What kind of dollar amount would let you sit quietly in your room?

On your company idea:
If you are already giving up before you've made much progress, is this the really right idea to work on right now? If this is something you MUST do, in spite of the drudgery, what is the minimum you can do so you can move on quickly?
It seems like Cisco basically forced HP to compete with its high-margin network gear business, since Cisco moved into HP's server territory earlier this year (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/technology/companies/20cis...).

It looks like attacking a competitor's cash cow often results in the competitor attacking your cash cow?
I have to confess I haven't noticed a huge increase in replies to trolls and so called back slapping

Not that there aren't problems; I just haven't seen this specific one as being the biggest myself
Achieving Excess Returns
Depends what you mean by entrepreneurs. I know a vast flock of people who all formed bands in high school, recorded albums, toured. Some of our classical musicians were playing at local concert halls while in high school. Artists looked for exhibitions and writers looked for magazine publications.

You can separate people into three groups: People creating things, people who don't want to create things, and people who are content to go where they're taken. I have some friends who are really just happier preparing for work in business or in politics, rising ranks, living outside their work. I myself fall into neither category: I'm satisfied to drift. Thus far I haven't been prompted to pick a side, and I see merits for each.

Today's world is more entrepreneurial than the world of a decade ago was, but I think you'll find it becomes less and less overt and more a part of natural life. I launched two web sites yesterday, for instance, and both will be seeking an audience; ten years ago that might have been a sign of entrepreneurialism, but now the cost of launching a web site is so nonexistent that it's just part of a day's work.
SQL is a query language and, frankly, doesn't need to be tied to an RDBMS. Look at SimpleDB and now CouchDB.

However, with new k/v stores and other database models, I don't see why we need to mangle SQL to work with every single type of data model. If it can be mapped, great. Otherwise, let each database build a query language to truly exploit its power.
I wouldn't say he should stop blogging. It's a good way to connect with people from the woods. He's putting himself out there. That's tough, but through doing it, he can learn more than he would if he didn't.
Somewhat literally: McDonalds holds a huge stake in Chipotle. Except Chipotle is way healthier and works better than most fast food joints.
Ask HN: Confession - I use fake staff names to make my company look larger
I hope making this confession will make me feel better. Apologies for the length.

I started a startup in 2007 and convinced a very close friend to join me. We raised about $25,000 from F&F, left New York and moved to Silicon Valley because "that's what you do", right?

We rented a $900/mth flat in San Jose and settled in. The plan was to attend meetups, promote our product, meet VCs and hopefully raise more funding.

Our first VC pitch fell flat because we had no traction. I went back to the drawing board and fell into the killer feature trap. Feature and feature went into the product, month after month went past, and we burned our meagre cash.

We ran out of money. My co-founder went back to his day job but I decided I had to keep working. If anything, to pay my mum back her $10000.

I've finally got the product right, new business model and a few clients, including a subsidiary of AOL.

Here is the problem. Nobody knows that I run the company by myself. Just me, using multiple emails and aliases, doing customer service, marketing, tech support, software development etc.

I'm tired of doing so. I need more people but the company can't afford people yet. My friends are all in day jobs, trying to pay their bills so I can't ask them to contribute more than a couple of hours a week or the normal "can you give me a 2nd opinion of this design" question.

I read yesterday that Omar Hamoui (AdMob's CEO) was a one-man company when he got funded by Sequoia. I wish I could be open about being a one man company but I'm worried I may put people off.

Any advice?
I wonder what will happen with the 3Com brand, because IMHO 3Com > HP when it comes to networking. I suppose that it will disappear, but after how long? For example the Thinkpad brand still exists even if it was bought by Lenovo some years ago, while the Compaq brand wasn't used too much.
Maybe a stupid question, but what would be the altternative?

Recently I started to think along these lines: code not being used and/or worked on is slowly decaying (due to bitrot :) ). Personally i would opt to share even if it's not perfect. Practice makes perfect and that's what you can do by making your work available to others and thus allow them to 'judge' your work. Your question seems to imply that this is part of why you're considering sharing your work.
From a practical viewpoint: it might be good to think about maintenance and support, although i presume most open source project first need to be used at all before this becomes problem. I hope this makes any sense.
I once chatted about how Americans live up to the American dream while in other countries there is no such thing, you go to school and become another cog in the machine.

Entrepreneurship is frowned upon by some cultures- my family have are very much working class, my father and his father were both proud union men. Anything else wouldn't be encouraged
Really? I don't see any on http://www.in-n-out.com/locations.asp, and none came up when I searched for various cities.
Exactly- we do the same thing when people ask for refunds of our iPhone app. It's only $1.99 so if they go to the trouble of providing their PayPal, we send them back $5. Half the time they return it and take another look at the application.

In general, most people have such terrible experiences with customer service that they go in expecting a negative experience, placing them on the offensive. If you're responsive, helpful, and personable then they'll flip right around and tell their all friends about how awesome you are.
Field Report: Lessons Learned from 1-on-1 Usability Smackdown
It uses temporary views. Very slow. Damien Katz has a comment on the original post saying how it might be done efficiently.
This is the story of a young startup that made a "totally intuitive" product only to discover through usability testing that using their creation was as simple as resetting the clock on an old VCR. Here are some of the lessons we learned.
Awesome Visualisations of Choose Your Own Adventure books
Chipotle's meats (particularly the steak) can be quite bad at times, but the rest of their stuff is pretty good, and their chips are great. I haven't been to a Taco Bell since a Chipotle opened up in my neighborhood, despite the Taco Bell being quite a bit cheaper and only two blocks further away.
I think it would just end up with trolls pasting in Lorem Ipsum or something after their trollish comment. Having trash text in low quality comments might make them easier to identify as low quality and the need to post comments of a minimum length may possibly discourage some people from posting "zingers", but I don't feel it would be a net win overall.
30s to get your point across. Time for the point plus 2-3 key supporting arguments.
Make a Page, publish your stuff via RSS, start local Facebook conversations, ask people for local photos and for news of what's happening, possibly get them contributing ideas for stories. The more you can get people swept away into your cause, and that's not hard, then the more activity and attention and relevancy you've got.

Probably the most attention I've paid to a company beyond Facebook, Tumblr, and Reddit in these last few months has been to a clothing company with an excellent Facebook presence.
That's what MySpace was for. They always were shitty at social. Facebook was the first network designed entirely for efficiency of communication; that's how it beat MySpace.
عقارات للبيع في مصر و سيارات مستعملة وإيجار شقة فيلا أرض
4. They don't read blog posts about Entrepreneurs?
They're talking about Five Guys.
Hmm. Could do this for new accounts at least.
Of course they are, this day is not a celebration of victory, it's a sombre reflection on the costs of war and an opportunity to honour and thank veterans of past wars for their service on behalf of our respective countries. It is for example not uncommon for Allied and German veterans of WWII, once enemies, to unite for Remembrance Day services throughout the British Commonwealth.

Whether there are public tributes to soldiers in modern Germany is obviously a different issue, given that country's understandable ambivalence to its soldiers who fought in WWII, but that does not take away from the fact that, in the West, the events marking today are neither triumphant nor overly militaristic. In fact, today's events were started as a commemoration of the end of WWI, a war which had shaken the world to its core with its till-then unprecedented horror, brutality and human toll.
I wonder if the 3Com brand is worth anything these days. I haven't heard anything interesting from 3Com in years; the switching market is dominated by Cisco/Juniper/ProCurve/Brocade/Extreme and even smaller newcomers like Force10 seem to get more attention than 3Com.