skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I should probably enforce a limit on the number of times I'm allowed to plug this book on HN every year: J.E. Gordon's Structures, Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

http://www.amazon.com/Structures-Things-Dont-Fall-Down/dp/03...

It's not exactly a young book, but it's newer than the Bay Bridge...
I'm thinking historically. Microsoft brought killer apps to the Mac (most notably Office) that helped them learn enough to eventually beat the Mac with an open(er) platform.

This time it is Google bringing (or trying to bring) killer apps to the iPhone (voice search, Maps/Navigation, Google Voice, etc.) with a long-run intention of (among other things) applying what they learn to their open(er) platform.
And Berlioz
I was actually a bit surprised to learn that YC doesn't (as far as I could tell) have some sort of starter group insurance pool for their companies.

Keeping entrepreneurs off of the individual market (and distracted by the nonsense of dealing with health-insurance in general) seems like another small way to add value by improving the odds of success. That being said, I'd totally understand if there were legal or other practical barriers to doing something like that.
I think the problem is that down votes have more potential for abuse than to increase the efficiency of sorting. A factual error, corrected is just as valuable as any other average comment in my opinion. Perhaps they should be pushed down, but then you have people who will down vote to suppress opposing ideas and unpopular ones.

By only allowing up votes, it becomes much harder for people to manipulate any single comment, as it would require up voting everything else. So the filtering of better comments would end up being delegated to the majority consensus of up votes, and less possible manipulation by a minority of down votes.
On a similar topic, the primary use of "ignore lists" on forums appears to be the opportunity to smugly announce that someone has been added to yours.
What's the utility of an agree/disagree button? I don't think I would want to see that even if it was available to me.

I downvoted the parent comment because it's a crappy one-liner. It adds nothing except to express that some people are cool with swearing, which is not a very novel sentiment, and it does so in a way intended as flamebait.
In Germany the Deutsche Bahn (railways) has bought the provider of such rental bikes. Not sure if they actually make money or if it is just a prestige project. But they have existed for several years now.

The bicycles look so special that stealing them is probably not very tempting. Vandalism might still be a problem, though.
You think my options are "live with it" or "be frustrated?" I choose the third option, to advocate for improvement

Then you've chosen my second choice, living with it. Advocating for improvement is exercising your options to participate in the conversation, even if your participation only amounts to acknowledging our collective lack of knowledge.

Isn't it great that reasonable people can discuss things that are complicated? Think of how many intractable problems have been solved because people were too stupid not to know they were insolvable?

Expertise is easy -- you can rent it when you need it. Highly-effective teams working tough problems are not easy. It's perfectly legitimate to say something along the lines of "hey, we're sadly lacking in knowledge here, and here are the steps we should take to improve things" but that is a just another form of participation.
Ahh, Pollock. For me painting stopped at Pollock. There are many artists I like who came before Pollock, and none who came after. Pollock himself I find to be one of the most difficult painters. Most days I think he is a hack, but on occasion his work speaks to me.
The article about the car itself has substance: http://jalopnik.com/5388538/2011-lexus-lfa-first-drive
Brussels too : http://en.villo.be/
The worst part is downvoting someone without expressing why you did it. For example :

This is spam. Downvoted.

Most of the time people seem to just don't care about how someone else feels when gets downvoted. In the case of an article this gets more frustrating because there was effort to do it, document it and other things too. Even if the article is not what you think of "cool" it doesn't mean that it doesn't deserve an explanation on why it was downvoted.
Some might say: This is the internet, democracy etc... Democracy is also getting annoyed when someone thinks of you like a "nothing".
Other times, someone might post something that he doesn't like, only to see if others feel the same too.
I like Gerhard Richter, and well-done graffiti. Also some of the stuff coming out of the Leipzig school, Mattias Weischer et al.
Pandora has expanded its catalog, and I set up a modern minimalist station. I think I started with Nyman, but have been up-voting various pieces by Reich, Glass, Adams, Part. And getting to hear composers I was unaware of.
The vast majority of preferred artists mentioned here, are from the early half of the last century. Does this say something about HN'ers understanding and awareness of contemporary art?

It's a curious contrast with how most people reading HN are working at the absolute cutting edge of 21st century technology. Curiously, art has always been driven by advances in modern technology; whether that be in metal casting, developments in pigments and dyes and of course, the invention of the lens.
I've never seen an option to downvote. It could be because I don't have enough "points" in this game (130 as of the time I'm posting this) or it may be because I haven't been around long enough. Once, I did try to downvote something by kludging the "dir" variable. I was told I couldn't make that vote. What parameters must be met for a person to get downvoting ability?

Enough with the goofy meta-talk, though. Since I don't have downvoting ability, I didn't even know it existed until I saw comments with zero or negative scores. Coming at it from my neophytic perspective, I am torn. At first blush, "not upvoting" and "downvoting" seem like they would serve similar functions: floating better content to the top. My only guess is that downvoting is a catalyst that makes it happen faster.

The only things I've wanted to downvote if I could were trolling, spam, and tangents. To that end, I think "not relevant or contributing to the discussion" is probably the most popular reason.
The city where I studied, Rennes in France, has such a scheme in place since about 9 years ago and there haven't been any vandalism that I could see...

One thing though is that a lot of people preferred their own bikes because the bikes were not all that nice to ride (and I guess that Rennes being a small city, it's not all that useful to be able to get a bike on the last leg of a commute)...
That's your opinion. To me, I thought it was a good one liner. See our differing opinions? Down voting/flagging should be reserved for those comments people mutually agree on as bad.

What's the difference between discouraging by threat of jail time and discouraging vs social disapproval? Both are threats against you for certain behaviors. While these threats may be justified for stuff people all agree on are bad like racism, I do not think it's a good idea for subjective opinions. It will lead to socially induced censorship and society as a whole will become single-minded, afraid of thinking against the crowd.

I think HN should foster the environment for unique thinking and controversial comments. Sure there isn't official discouragement of certain opinions, but if we allow the mob to do it it's practically the same thing.
I like to scan the newcomments page to see if there is anything worth commenting on.

Doing that, I noticed a long-time poster making the point that the community has changed and asking if anybody else has noticed it. So I said yes, it has changed, and quite a bit.

The reward for my comment was several downvotes. As it turns out, his comment was part of some Rand thread. My comment was viewed as supportive of his position, so I was punished. Everybody who took one position was getting upvoted, and everybody who took another was getting downvoted.

Now was that what really happened? Or was my comment simply empty and a pointless waste of bandwidth? I honestly don't know. All I have is up and down scores to go by. So for all of you who think the up-down arrows enforce community behavior, I have a simple question: how can the community push me to conform when I don't know if it's giving me a "we disagree" or a "poor quality" message?

I know I can (and have) made the same comment in other discussions and actually got voted up, so I don't think the quality of my comment had much to do with it. It looks a lot like context and opinion matter the most to me. Probably also the time of the week and time of day.

In short, the voting system is broken. A lot.
HTML5, a 3 minute guide
I've had comments and submissions of mine downvoted before, and I didn't take offense. The article or my comment was simply "unliked" rather than enjoyed (upvoted) or met with indifference (left alone). Reading anything more into it is kind of silly.

You certainly can't please everyone all the time.
I like to keep the best for last ;)
Kandinsky, Casper David Friedrich, Robert Bordo, and Beyonce Knowles.
Great tip! I'll check it out.
I've met these guys and they are very smart. It's a very cool app and I expect it will only get cooler. Worth checking out if you haven't seen it yet.
I remember from the summer I spent in Innsbruck, Austria (my dad was teaching on a summer abroad program for American students) in 2003 that there were hundreds of bikes standing on orderly bike racks or improvisationally leaning against various structures on nearly every nontrivial street.

The biggest surprise to someone just coming from America is that very few of them were locked, and it did not seem to be a major concern for anyone. I remember asking if the bikes commonly get stolen and the responses seemed to suggest that while nothing is wholly impossible in principle, in practice the answer was no.

Innsbruck is not a wholly homogenous city, though it is certainly much smaller than Paris (+/- 100k, all told); there are lots of foreigners, and in particular, a fair number of Turkish, Yugoslav and miscellaneous immigrants, many of whom would certainly be characterised as poor and/or working in low-wage service industry. There's plenty of graffiti, some evidence of other kinds of vandalism, and other such things.

Yet somehow, the bikes don't seem to get stolen, and nobody has any qualms about just leaving theirs outside, or in the hallway near their apartment, etc.

I am not sure what to conclude from this, other than that these things vary greatly by the prevailing mood of the society.
Funny but as snail mail is used super decreasingly over the past decade, its personal value has drastically gone up.

I have an aunt who snail mails a few photos of her family every now and then with a handwritten letter. She's been doing this for years. Yet, each year receiving the personal snail mail brings more excitement than the previous year!
I literally haven't been to digg ever since discovering HN oh so long ago...

The open, friendly, transparent process here is a very welcome relief from the ongoing war between users and moderators, the latter of which are constantly engaged in silently burying articles as they're submitted, blacklisting sites just because users submit their own content, and banning users for no good reason.

Thank god for HN :)
Let your hair down Island: The Ultimate tour guide to Ibiza
I'm starting to see why all those internet scammers make money.
We have a similar bicycle share program in Ottawa. I haven't seen any vandalism. The bikes always look clean and new. Possibly because only a few people use them.
"Does this say something about HN'ers understanding and awareness of contemporary art?"

I find it hard to keep on top of, and experience, contemporary art. Unlike music, where it's fairly easy to get exposed to something, much contemporary visual art requires a physical presence to appreciate.

I also don't know many good sources to follow contemporary art. There are some printed mags I browse through at B&N or Borders, but that's pretty haphazard. (The art galleries are one of the things I miss most about New York City. There are occasional good showings in the Phoenix area, but hardly on par with places like NYC or L.A.)

Are there good Web sites for keep abreast of contemporary art?
Most people going through YC are probably in the "can get away with being uninsured" demographic--young, male, healthy, single, childless, and not frequently engaged in activities hazardous to health--and for those who can do so, not having health insurance at all is the best way to not be distracted by it.
Actually, if we were still using CRTs at obscenely high resolutions, this font would be perfect.

I used it for ~10 minutes on a 21-inch Sony Trinitron running at 2048x1536@75Hz, and I couldn't do much but marvel at it. It was truly beautiful.

It's obviously a toy font at this point, though, so I doubt I'd be able to get real work done with it, so I've gone back to Consolas. Oh well.
This is easy to fix, just make your OpenID your own domain, or a subdomain of it (http://id.example.com/). The OpenID standard lets your delegate to your provider of choice with a couple of link tags. If it gets shut down or you find a better one, just switch. The websites you authenticate to won't care.
I downvote the following kinds of comments:

- comments that have a high excitement to information ratio, such as brief comments that include profanity or attitude, and of course garbage one-liner humor comments. But not good one-line comments (such as the best comeback of all time), and usually not the kind that are nested two or more levels deep in the tree.

- most comments made in reply to an article that definitely should be flagged.

- comments that deliberately ignore standard English in a bad direction. For example, those with sentences that end with the word "lol". On the other hand, saying that you "... vote (up|down) to manipulate ..." is ignoring standard English in a non-bad direction.

- comments that show an inability to appreciate rational discussion or approach things with a sufficient level of detachment. This often results a chain of replies between persons A and B, with person B getting several downvotes (by people voting for similar reasons) on every post and person A getting upvotes. Sometimes both A and B both get downvoted. I think that when people complain about being downvoted, usually it's because they were downvoted for this reason and begin to feel persecuted.

- certain types of self-indulgent comments. I suppose everybody writes comments because they want to share their opinion, but some are indulging the poster's desire to tell others about his worldview without being written in a way that could influence other people's worldviews. There were a lot of these, if you want examples, in the justin.tv suicide thread.

- comments that blandly recite a reader's opinion or reaction about an article, that don't add information, especially when there's a long tail of them and they're all the same. These are the less exciting kind of self-indulgent comments.

Basically, with that formula, I vote with the intent of making this site boring and unwelcoming with a high signal:noise ratio.
Wouldn't it make more sense to downvote either to eliminate spam/noise or to signal disagreement? I'm all for stoning spammers, but I think it's more constructive to write a response if you disagree with someone.
Are you sure this isn't just due to load balancing? You might be hitting a different node everytime, they probably don't sync too quickly, and with the amount of traffic digg gets, the numbers could easily vary by that much in a fairly short period of time.

Assuming malice seems premature.
Interesting that article doesn't mention G729 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.729) which has VAD (voice activity detection), but also specifies a noise coefficient. A voice frame contains 10 bytes of data, where a noise frame contains 2 bytes. The two byte frame contains a characteristic for the noise, so the other end hears the equivalent (roughly) noise. Cisco also implemented the same thing in G711, but its proprietary.
I used to frequent google.com, but modern web browsers let you search right from the URL bar, bypassing the site entirely. So you do have to go and look these days (or write a script that loads the HTTP and compares it to the standard version).
I guess it boils down to this: I have absolutely no interest in reading a website with comments like that. If a large proportion of comments were one-line opinions and purely argumentative back-and-forths, I would just not bother reading the HN comment sections. So I downvote it.

Now, I understand that you feel the opposite way. The only objective argument I can make for my position is that there are a great number of general-interest sites on the Internet with a huge amount of discussion which is on par with "That's fucking stupid," but only a handful with discussion that is consistently free of such comments and the associated derailing of the conversation that they frequently bring. (Historically, it seems like the only realistic way to weed them out is by keeping a community small or having heavy active moderation.) I'd like to encourage more of the latter.

I don't really like your analogies between physical intimidation and violence and downvoting, because the consequences of physical threats are so much more serious. I can't understand how it's a serious harm to anyone to tell them "you can't express viewpoints X, Y, or Z on Hacker News." It's a shame, but it's one of the very smallest shames that can possibly be inflicted upon a person.

I understand that you're concerned in an idealistic sense about the ethics of using simple majority rule to tell someone "you can't say that," but I just don't think it's a big concern in this context, when the whole Internet is an ultimate egalitarian arena full of people saying anything and everything. The much bigger problem, to me, is having so much content that you can't read the really high-quality things because they are swamped with noise that adds nothing, or almost nothing. (By high-quality things I mean ideas and arguments that are novel, useful, and well-informed.)
It isn't 100% accurate though. For instance, these driving directions:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=NW+...

are not correct. While 4th Ave is bi-directional, the segment between NW 51st St and NW 50th Pl is one way, north only (towards NW 51st St). I don't know if other GPS systems get this correct or not (I don't have a GPS system to check).
Thanks for the link. I never truly appreciated how much hacking and pure engineering there was going on in the car market.
I like how when you flag on craigslist you have to say why. If multiple people flag, the post is removed.
Istvan Sandorfi. http://www.fosaw.com/ Autechre. http://www.autechre.info/ Peter Greenaway. http://www.petergreenaway.info/ Edit: like the OP I could list many more; I could also ruminate for a long time on what common factors combine to create a particular artistic sensibility...but I won't. I believe all art is an attempt to impose order on one small corner of a chaotic universe, and is thus fundamentally an acknowledgement of entropy.
Your bank account is just a silly number in a computer! The money only has value because other people think it has value.
Big fan of Geiger and, more recently, Paul Booth. Historical preferences tend towards the dada and surreal - Dali, of course, is a favorite.
I love the magic that happened when Jackson Pollock combined Hopi Indian sand painting techniques with brush/canvas to harness the power of gravity:

http://www.monroegallery.com/showcase/images/MH_JacksonPollo...

If you ever go to MOMA in NYC, make sure you start on the 6th floor and work your way down...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pollock31.jpg

I also love when the worlds of mathematics and art meet, as in Pollock's fractals:

http://discovermagazine.com/2001/nov/featpollock

or, of course, anything by Escher:

http://www.headwaysoftware.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/chris...
The Ultimate Apple II Font: http://www.kreativekorp.com/software/fonts/apple2.shtml
Pics from Kevin's talk and NoSQL East (I was there):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pauls/sets/72157622686185710/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pauls/4061368173/in/set-7215762...
I had no idea that there was a higher language level version of Hadoop.

http://research.yahoo.com/project/90

Considering the number of venture capitalists who are swarming about in the Hadoop space, it's definitely worth the effort to get to know Pig a little better.
Getting the most out of a laptop battery
I concur with the sentiments re: Bach. I'm much more of a fan of Mozart, though I cannot articulate why.
Check out wooster collective (.com). It's a street art blog that I follow, some great work gets posted there.
Agreed. Success is demonstrated in knowing exactly what you want to achieve with something and sticking to it.
An interesting article on symmetry and fractal design exposed in Pollack's art: http://phys.unsw.edu.au/phys_about/PHYSICS!/FRACTAL_EXPRESSI...
I didn't see your comment until now, but I'd guess it was downvoted for 'feeding the troll'. While the comment you responded was reasonable, the grandparent was a bad joke that was rightly being beaten down. I'm not sure how the page placement algorithm currently works, but I'd assume, and I think others assume, that downvotes on the children help to move something down the page. In other words, you were a victim of collateral damage.
I think the question shouldn't be "do professors matter?" as much as it should be "do universities matter?"

IF you choose to pursue a university career, then YES, the professor makes a HUGE difference. One of my best professors this semester had to step out for a week to tend to personal issues, and the week he was gone feels like a void in my mind. The content we discussed in lecture went in one ear and out the other. He is what makes that class fun and engaging for me. The same applies to any great professor. Remove them from their classrooms and you'll probably see the students exiting the class at the end of the semester not knowing the material as well as that professor could have helped them to.

On the other hand, self-paced learners who choose to teach themselves and to learn form experience are learning in a different way, and you could argue still that this method benefits greatly from a mentor; someone who can guide them through their learning. In essence, what a professor does. Albeit in a different fashion.
There must be a better way to asses the "value" of content. I agree that the down vote is arguably a good gauge for how the community at large "feels" about the content but not a good indicator for "value". There are two metrics here that I do not believe can be extracted from a voting system.

I rarely comment, one of the few time I did I got down voted. I returned 3 days later and tried to defend my position, but it was too late and the community had move on. Oddly enough my comment did start a thread of discussion.

As I mentioned in my followup comment assessing the value of user contributed content is an area that we are trying to solve in a web application solution soon to be deployed.

Below is an excerpt from my comment.

"Using my initial comment as an example had I not posted that comment "value adding" content would never have been created. If my contributed content resulted in "value adding" content, is it not then "value adding" content? Is a good proxy of "value adding" content, content which produces or causes other content creation?"

So if a comment gets down voted but starts a wave of discussion surely it has value.
I've always been fascinated by the art and architecture of Eugene Tsui.

http://images.google.com/images?q=Eugene+Tsui

http://www.tdrinc.com/
Are they really going to use high power direct current transmission lines? Isn't that the least economical way to transmit power?