jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
I do think you are correct, in that more commenters means a greater chance of getting an expert answer, but it also increases the chance of getting poor answer. How do you determine which one to take?

Well, if you're reading a thread about the BP oil rig fiasco and some guy is just repeating idiocy he heard on CNN while another guy says "I used to work for a drilling engineering company designing blowout preventers and I can tell you that the following bits are wrong because..." then I'd take the second guy. But YMMV.

If the choice was between taking the advice of pg and RandomDood123 regarding startups, I'd probably take pg's. I wouldn't disregard RandomDood, but at the same time, pg's comment would gain more weight.

How many people are there that have this degree of notoriety and actually comment on HN? I mean for you, how many are there: a dozen? A half-dozen? These people are already incentivized to write under their real name. So requiring that everyone use their real names would not really change anything regarding the dozen or so widely recognized people whose names "matter".

Moreover, discussion at HN tends to range over many topics for which pg (or any famous commenter) really isn't particularly privileged.

Finally, let's say that RandomDood123 changed his user id to match his real name, Bob Smith. Would that make you more likely to take his word over pg's? I expect not. So why on Earth should we require RandomDood123 to use his real name?
The real name policy sucks if you haven't been able to secure a nice email address on gmail.
Or Iran, or one of the [blank]-istans. There are a LOT of aggressive little countries.
Good move. I had a girlfriend whose father worked designing guidance systems for rockets. He couldn't speak a word about his job to his family, and it was apparent that his conscience struggled with the fact that his engineering handiwork was only good for killing people.
Two Kids, In Two Years: Best.
I think MacOS is close enough to a commercialization of Linux for the desktop to count as that. (I realize it's not based on Linux of course, but the result is very similar).
Let's find out.

I've just created a posterous account at http://pmn.posterous.com

The email that I've authorized is paul@pmn.org

I've put one post on there, any other posts that appear are not from me.

(I should note, I use Posterous for some personal stuff and love the service. This isn't something I've been terribly concerned about yet.)
If the system was ever adopted widely (which I presume the founders desire) I would imagine that spoof posting would be a huge problem if someone could pull it off.
I think they do some checking in the headers. It's not impossible to masquerade as someone.

But how many people want to maliciously post to some random person's Posterous blog? Probably not too many.
Since we're sharing ... I recently setup a personal Posterous blog so I could photo blog my eating habits using my ancient WinMo phone. I have a WordPress blog which I could have used (WP has post via email built in) but the Posterous system was just so simple I went with it instead.
> It's also enough to fund a startup.

That's the thing. You don't need $1M to fund a startup. Even one that ends up making millions for you, or that can be acquired. Try not to let the money act as an excuse for not starting. (I know, it's hard! :)

You can actually start the life you want at 35, now.
Plus YC involvement. Post by email feature was the reason to talk about Posterous though
With all respect, all the guilt for this word belongs to Austrians :).
And this is why they tell you to have somebody stay to mind the home during a funeral.
It's not just four times Chernobyl.

It looks like the total right now is about 10 times Chernobyl, but if TEPCO keeps transferring more spent fuel to the storage pools, it could go up to 24 times Chernobyl (the total spent fuel inventory).

I would still argue that 24 times Chernobyl is nowhere near "apocalyptic" on a global scale. But you're right, it's good to work with the correct numbers.

the Soviets reacted pretty fast in comparison to TEPCO and made sure, that a lot of the material did not escape

Once they had a chance to react, yes. But a lot of the radioactive material inside the Chernobyl reactor was released with the combined hydrogen and graphite explosion which happened very early in the sequence of events, before anything could be contained. After that explosion, as I understand it, there wasn't a lot left to contain. The only way that release could have been prevented would have been if the Soviets had had the sense to build a secondary containment structure around the reactor, which they didn't.
Manning used mental instability as part of his defense during the trial, among several other arguments. It might have been one reason the judge's sentence was half the time the prosecution was pushing for. Earlier, Adrian Lamo used Manning's emotional/depressive state to find out about the information sent to Wikileaks.
I have a different read on that. Control doesn't work if no one cares about social opprobrium. If the culture has changed so that whatever behavior you're engaging in is no longer considered taboo / everyone else is doing it, you cannot be controlled by others using the threat of exposure against you (this doesn't apply to behaviors that are actually made illegal, so would be protestors/dissidents get no help from this.) Now, some may say that that kind of change itself is bad (due to the newer [theorized] cultural control strategy of reverse desublimation in the west since the 1960s), but I think that ship has long sailed anyway.

For a basic example, let's take visible public inebriation. If large numbers / the majority of people do that on a regular basis - and everyone can see it - how could you use that as a threat against people? Right now it can be used against, for example, potential job seekers because of information asymmetry (job seeker has photo of being drunk on a public post / interviewer keeps their drunken photos private.) In a world where everyone can see everyone (and archives are infinite / searchable) that power goes away. As Brin discusses in The Transparent Society, people avoid eavesdropping (or at least hide it) because they know others are looking - and IS a behavior that gets social opprobrium, and so is effectively policed. An important (and perhaps obvious) caveat to all this is that social policing only applies to people with roughly symmetrical levels of power (i.e., this doesn't work for government surveillance - they can use much more powerful tools than shame / fear of exposure.)

I think another interesting thing to think about (that we have a recent data point on) is comment sections pre- and post- Facebook comments. It was often stated in the pre- area that real names attached to posts would prevent egregious public behavior due to shame / fear. What we've seen is that this is not the case. Comment sections using Facebook comments are still often filled with much of the ugliness they had before. Is it ignorance, foolishness, feelings of invulnerability, the belief that their opinions represent a silent majority? Hard to say, but I'd like to see someone take on that topic since we now have so much data on it.
The root of it was that Microsoft thought of the web browser as a kind of competing alternate OS-on-top-of-the-OS (which, in many ways, it is - the OS and browser each feature their own arguably duplicative/redundant UI frameworks, launching/switching mechanisms, etc). They didn't think this situation could last - either the browser would be subsumed into the OS, or the OS would be subsumed into the browser, or they would merge somehow. This belief was shared by others at the time (e.g. Marc Andreessen's famous declaration that the web would reduce Windows to "a poorly debugged set of device drivers"). So everything they were trying to do with IE and Windows was based on the intention that the distinction between them would gradually disappear.
HTTP/2 helps reduce the latency penalty that's one of the biggest constraints to HTTP/1.x performance.

Sure we can work around this using techniques like CSS sprites, merging JS files, CSS files etc. but these are hacks that come with their own tradeoffs - most notably caching but also sprites bring memory challenges on some devices too.

Using a single TCP connection opens up some issues where there's packet loss but it also means the TCP congestion window will grow at it's maximum rate without the risks that opening multiple connections and domain sharding bring.

Multiplexing also offers interesting possibilities of partial resource download e.g. download part of a progressive JPEG, and then the rest later.

Push allows servers to send content e.g. CSS, fonts e.g. that's in the browser's critical rendering path before the client has even discovered it needs it.

Header compression reduces both the request and response overhead, and request overhead if often forgotten in web development which is funny as most connections have asymmetric speeds.

Prioritisation allows the browser and server to schedule content download 'more intelligently' than our current browser heuristics.

In a world where most people are looking at HTTP using DevTools, WebPageTest and Wireshark rather than the native text format a binary protocol isn't a problem.
I've heard Kandel translations of Lem are really good? Certainly the fragments I've read were fantastic - I didn't thought it's possible to translate the wordplay in Cyberiad and he did it:

http://english.lem.pl/home/bookshelf/how-the-word-was-saved?...
A faraday bag probably helps to reduce the tracking: http://killyourphone.com/
Is there return type polymorphism in Swift? Without it monad-generic operations are limited.
You can practically set your watch by the timing of the latest meme that purports to identify the One True Panacea for Clinical Depression™. Looking like it'll be time to pull the crown on mine pretty soon.
When we first started we had an amazing group of volunteers with experience in Ruby. Our focus is project based learning. It's been perfect for this.
There's another side to that, which is that charging a tiny amount has a disproportionate effect on usage (e.g. $0.00 to $0.01 has a bigger effect than $0.01 to $1.00). This shows that charging a fee has the negative impact of preventing people from buying them, even though the benefit outwieghs the cost.
Climate change is a funny topic. I don't see the populace or scientifically illiterate senators (read that as James Inhofe of Oklahoma) weighing in on the standard model of physics, proteomics, or the results/implications of steroid use...but when it comes to anthropogenic warming...everybody has an unequivocal answer. Those most certain seem to be of the political stripe that had the certainty that Iraq had wmd and posed an existential threat to human existence. The scary thing about these folk is that they are so convinced they are right that they are able to convince the people who look at things probabilistically that they are ABSOLUTELY right. Because economics.
Related comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1918594
I recently came across some YT channels of high-altitude climbers who'd deceased in their endeavors, with their last videos remaining.

http://www.youtube.com/user/karlunterkircher http://www.youtube.com/user/FredrikEricsson http://vimeo.com/joepuryear/videos

Creepy. There'd be an opportunity for digital wills, so a next of kin can claim passwords for ghosted accounts. Maybe some type of program that various sites can adopt, and users just register their account names with the program's hub site.
"Short period" is still objectively false.
This might not be a terrible thing... maybe domain names shouldn't be centrally controlled in the way they are today.

I for one would love to see a totally new domain name system, in the same way BitTorrent radically changed how we look at data transfer.
tactical counter: chrome/firefox plugin that checks if the domain the user entered has been seized. if yes, it looks up the real ip address and forwards the user.
I disagree, and think instead that words do mean things.

Is there a marriage ceremony anywhere in the mainstream of western culture that doesn't involve promising, in effect, to make the relationship permanent?
It broke for me in the fact that after several pages; it took several clicks of the back button to return to HN.
Paul votes against earmarks for TX, but for the overall bill (with earmarks). He was taken to task for this during the election. I'm not aware of any other evidence that suggests his bills are disingenuous.
"the more sensitive the topic under discussion, the more careful you have to be to avoid offense."

You assumption is that one would want to avoid offense. (note that I don't mean 'not cause deliberate offense') Western newspapers were told to not run the Mohammed cartoons, so as to 'not cause offense'. Feel free to defend the position that people shouldn't make rape jokes, but basing that on 'you shouldn't cause offense' is not an argument.
The Netflix Android App doesn't seem to use the "ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION" or "ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION" permissions: http://i.imgur.com/wFOLs6Q.png
Best. Wired. Article. Ever.
As expected, mainstream media reports this as:

'Zoom and enhance': A much-mocked CSI trope becomes reality

http://theweek.com/article/index/254848/zoom-and-enhance-a-m...
When you want to refer to the same concept over and over, it helps to give it a name.

Other examples: ajax, lamp, nosql, soa ... they may be buzzwords, but they are helpful. I don't see the problem here.
Conventional wisdom holds that rebuilding an old system is fraught with pitfalls. Executing is nontrivial and has zillions of decision-points where things could've gone radically differently.

Evaluating impact of tool choice requires experience and is intertwined with other factors. My experience tells me that Clojure's use is significant.
I think the article asks the wrong question. Surely by 2115 we will have a perfect universal translator fluent in hundreds of languages.

Why learn Chinese or Hindi if your smartphone or perhaps your glasses will seamlessly translate back and forth between your native language? The pressure to learn a second language will be lessened greatly.
Hans Monderman was a famous Dutch traffic engineer who hated traffic signs, which he considers an admission of failure.

He said: "The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there's a problem with a road, they always try to add something. To my mind, it's much better to remove things."

Wikipedia: Hans Monderman:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Monderman

Project for Public Places: Hans Monderman
http://www.pps.org/reference/hans-monderman

Urban Design London and Urban Design Group Multimedia: Hans Monderman:
http://www.urbannous.org.uk/Hans-Monderman-Presentation.htm

Roads Gone Wild:
http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic.html

Hans Monderman on the Importance of Human Interaction:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOH9-DgJdTo

His philosophy reminds me of the premise of "Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical User Interface": "I argue that interactivity is actually a curse for users and a crutch for designers, and users’ goals can be better satisfied through other means."

Interactivity is a failure state of user interfaces that could have predicted what the user wanted by context and history, and presented it to them without demanding so much of their time and attention.

Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical User Interface
http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/
> Is it ignorance, foolishness, feelings of invulnerability, the belief that their opinions represent a silent majority?

Or impermanence. Who's going to give you a hard time for a comment you wrote six months ago? Two months? Two weeks?

Thanks for posting. You described a lot of what I've been mulling over, but you did it way more articulately than I could've. (I'm saving it for later reference.)
I feel like people underestimate the time something will take but overestimate the actual effort. What you say seems to be a consequence of that.

We underestimate the time, because in reality we often worry about things, and procrastinate on decisions. But in the estimate we don't think about it, we assume all decisions will be made immediately.

We overestimate the effort, because we sometimes do not know how to solve certain problems or work efficiently and in the estimate, we only know the hard way, not the easy way. But with practice, the hard way often becomes easy.

It might also come down to us valuing future work more than the work in the past, so looking back things are less effort than looking forward. But in the case of time itself (represented by hit/missed deadlines) we value these as more important with respect to the past than to the future (they already happened, while the future is uncertain).
I don't know (or heard about) anyone who wiped down a cereal box or similar in the last year. This probably varies by country and the communication that was there early last year.
+1. Found my pal's German number in the dump but not on this website.
Selected "recommended project", that will default over to Yahoo! Answers as soon as the project has been tested enough to push to all of the Warriors.
It's fun to customise and learn, but going forward I'd rather defer to sensible defaults so that I can spend my thought cycles on solving software problems, rather than fixing all the weirdness that arises from my customisation.

I'm a big fan of Prettier for this very reason. It just works. It's decent. It lets everyone get on with writing software. If a project has ESLint, there's a high chance I'm going to be talking about semi-colons, or looking at oddly line-broken code. Someone else is going to notice it too, and want to fix it. Then we're all talking about the Airbnb config and what customisations we're going to make.

In recent years I've:

- Quit using Colemak and gone back to Qwerty

- Stopped using vim and went back to IntelliJ

- Stopped using custom fonts, themes and just stuck to defaults

- Become more selective about what plugins I use

And I'm suprisingly (or unsurprisingly) more productive.
While checking for it, I found this review of it, which praises it on many points:

LinApp - Most Comprehensive Collection Of Commercial Linux Applications I Have Ever Seen:

https://www.techdrivein.com/2010/08/linapp-most-comprehensiv...
What's your goal? Why do you want to learn a "lower level" language? Do you have experience in "higher level" languages?

I would say that a better approach in your case is to start by saying "I want to write programs to solve problems like XXXX", or "I want to learn a language that lands me a job doing YYYY".

For example, if you want to:

- build network services -> golang

- fiddle with OS level stuff (schedulers, memory management, etc.) -> C

- write high performance calculation/simulation programs -> julia

- get a nice solid base that can cover most of the above and has a promising future -> rust

Nim, D, V, Zig are very niche and I wouldn't recommend as a first "lower level" language (because you'll have a harder time finding answers, and they won't give you clear benefits over the other options in any problem space).

C++ is... huge. Modern C++ is a fine language, but you'll have to learn a lot to be able to handle it.
Maybe your school sucked. Not mine - it was the only place where I could use a PC, write some programs. Also, math - I miss so much the times when I could study math and solve complicated math exercises... Ahh... It was a magnificent time. Also, most of my teachers were interesting people.

And in just in case: 0 sarcasm in this whole comment.
Can someone please explain the situation to someone with no competence how these markets work?

As far as I understand, no one is allowed to trade on stock exchanges directly. Everyone has to go through a broker. Orders has to be settled in 2 days. So there are counterparty risks involved in both steps here. Is this where there was a problem? But the retail trading platform takes zero financial risk as long as they don't allow their customers to trade on credit (which is an entirely different issue).

As a retail customer I am entirely confident that I own whatever stocks has been purchased, even if the trading platform used should go belly up, as long as the stock in question is traded in a public exchange, which was the case here.

So what exactly was the problem? Some posts led my to believe Robin Hood and other apps extended some credit to its users in order for customers to be able to speculate immediately with their money and not have to wait for the trade to be settled. But surely the appropriate response to that would be to halt that credit, not suspend trading?

There is also the question how it is possible to limit buys or not sells? For every sell there is also a buy. If some platforms are limited to sell orders, someone must be on the other side of that trade, and will have an advantage in the market. How is that legal?

Or did this not concern stock trading at all? Some articles mentions options trading, which is a financial instrument issued by a counter party. But those kinds of orders are stopped all the time for all sorts of reasons. That is in itself hardly newsworthy.
that's obvious to me, what sounds more like a prediction is kotlin to be a dominant application development language (fullstack/scripting) natively compiled or on the JVM
Tinnitus is a symptom of almost everything.
> the technology is broken beyond fixability

[citation needed]

Crypto ideologues are a strawman. Anyone working on the actual tech agrees that blockchains are useful if, and only if, you can't rely on a single party and need a decentralized, trustless append-only database. Otherwise, why bother with the extra complexity? That's the whole point of blockchains, after all.

Technology choices are complex set of trade-offs, even within the blockchain space.
> I'm talking about in 1948 my friend.

I do not want to talk about 1948. I want to talk about the foundation of the Zionist organization, at the end of the 19th century.

At that time, none of the attrocities you mentioned had happened yet. And by that time, there was already a plan to colonize Eretz Yisrael, proposed by Theodor Hertzl in Der Judenstaat in 1896.

> Would you feel comfortable living in europe when the entire continent tried their best to kill you?

Shortly after the WW2, all of Europe became effectively vassal states of the United States and the Soviet Union. Neither the US or the USSR would have allowed any of the antisemitism perpetrated by the nazis.

> See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Jews_in_Syria.

The crisis you refer to is horrible, but we are talking about Eretz Yisrael, not Syria. And we are talking about the 19th century, not the 20th century.

> If a 2500 year old community are still considered immigrants then they must be citizens somewhere:)

Again, if you disagree with Syria, you can start a discussion about Syria. That would be a completely separate discussion from this one.
Is this Jeff Dean ?.
I think your kids are pretty atypical.
I really like it, i would like to be able to order the data by price, Cheapest Registrar etc.
Very good job.
just flag this submission, I certainly did
I think you're losing the forest for the trees. Corporations are made up of individuals. Individuals who bear the responsibility and power invested in them by the corporation for whom they work.

If the individual is liable, the corporation is liable, both for having initiated the project in the area, as well as imbuing the individual with the power and responsibility they have.

That's why it's a total non-starter that BP, Transocean and Halliburton appear to be trying to make responsibility evaporate (much like the hydrocarbons on the Gulf) by passing the buck to other parties.

The contract for drilling is in BPs name. It doesn't matter if they hired incompetent drillers (Transocean) to do the drilling. They did the hiring, it's their responsibility.
That's the whole idea of this project, isn't it?