jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Randomly kicked off Facebook. Do they really review?
My girlfriend was recently kicked off of Facebook. The reason Facebook gave was that they had determined that her account was a fraudulent one, that is what she saw after logging in. She clicked on an appeal button and just wrote that she is who she says she is. A few days later, she received the following email.

> Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2010 00:10:35 -0800
> To: @hotmail.com
> From: info+inscin@support.facebook.com
> Subject: Re: Disabled Account Appeal-ID Request
>
> Hi,
>
> Fake accounts are a violation of our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. Facebook requires users to provide their real first and last names. Impersonating anyone or anything is prohibited, as is maintaining multiple profiles on the site. Unfortunately, we will not be able to reactivate this account for any reason. This decision is final.
>
> Thanks for your understanding,
>
> The Facebook Team

Of course my response, not being a Facebook user was congratulations its not that Facebook does not want you its that real life wants you back :-). She of course would rather stay a user since she is a second grade teacher at a progressive school and had most of her superiors, friends, family and students as friends on her account. (Just to vouch for her I know they all could verify that she used her actual name, she definitely did not have another account or was interested in having one.)

I guess the remedy is to just use another email address, although I don't know if her name has been targeted now. But it made me wonder with 500 million users and 2000 employees, I am sure an algorithm determines fraudulent accounts and would they really review this stuff manually? My guess would be not. Wondering if anyone knows?
YC deadline in two days co-founder F's you
What do you do?
You stop what you are doing, build it day in and out. You sign a contract.
then he flips you and goes with another partner whom is a networker bringing in WELL KNOWN fund X with $500,000-$1mn Serious dollars at the seed stage (most probably true).
JP Morgan Intermediate Level SWE vs. Amazon Entry Level SWE
Will be graduating in May and got offers from these two companies. Any thoughts on where to go?
Ask HN: HN-style community sites for advertising/marketing and biz dev?
I've found the Hacker News community really helpful in a lot of ways and am often asking aloud "I wonder if there is a site like this for x community to congregate in".<p>At the moment I am specifically looking for something in the advertising industry but I have also been looking for something for up and coming film/tv writers and producers.<p>Any help much appreciated!
YouTube Movies promotes movies w/ HD quality, only SD is available post purchase
I've bought two movies so far, where the trailer offered HD quality (1080p), and I explicitly selected HD when I made my purchase and paid ~$4 more (in comparison to SD quality). When I get access to the movie I can only access SD quality. What is this practice?

I'm in Sweden. Examples include The Big Short (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCTtbLhnRUU) and Inglorious Basterds (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO78cZXiyHc).
Show HN: Giraf – Share and discover cultural life
https://giraf.app
Dear HN,

Over the last few years, I've built an app called Giraf, for sharing and discovering cultural life [0]. "Cultural life" encompasses any kind of creative work (music, books, films, paintings, poems, podcasts, etc.), as well as events (concerts, film screenings, museum exhibitions, book events, etc.), places (museums, parks, bookstores, etc.), and the artists themselves who create these things.

Giraf is essentially a knowledge graph plus a social network. The knowledge graph consists of all the cultural things just mentioned, as well as facts about relationships between them (e.g. song P is by artist Q, who's playing concert R, at music venue S). The social network is built around posts of items from the knowledge graph. You can reply to posts with thanks, comments, or suggestions. A suggestion features another item from the knowledge graph -- so it provides a way to say "if you like X, you should check out Y". The social network uses a follow-based mechanic that will be familiar from other social apps, but it's fully human-powered; there's no algorithmic curation.

Giraf represents the use case for social media that has always appealed to me. Most people, whether they'd think of it in these terms or not, are on a lifelong journey of cultural exploration -- listening to music, reading books, watching films, going to shows, visiting places that in some way embody local culture, and so on. Giraf is meant to be a tool that serves this journey.

The app has been really useful among my group of friends over the last few years, for exchanging recommendations in a low-key, async way. It turns out that a dedicated tool like this can bring out a lot of fruitful communication that wouldn't have been brought out in a group chat.

I'm now opening up Giraf to a wider audience. If the idea resonates with you, please check it out and give it a try! And I welcome any and all feedback here.

I'm committed to Giraf for the long term. My goal is to make Giraf financially viable, solely out of revenue from users who find it valuable and want to support it. To that end, I've built an optional, Patreon-style membership functionality [1].

Thanks for reading, and thanks for checking out Giraf!

Ian Hinsdale

[0] https://giraf.app

[1] https://giraf.app/membership/
The influence of political ideology on perceptions
http://hij.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/14/2/212
got this from a now dead thread, the study was interesting and so i'm submitting a direct link to the study itself because it sheds more light on the nature of our minds
Show HN: Sreenshot Bookmarks, a Weekend Project
http://folindux.com
It's an app for bookmarking webpages you want to remember. Just use bookmarklet to take screenshots whenever you want to bookmark a site.

I made this because I'm sick of text based bookmarking websites like Delicious and Pinboard. I'll always bookmark a site and try and find it later, but because it's all text/tag based I'll have forgotten what the site is about, but I'll remember what it looks like.

There's a laundry list of things I'm going to add to the site, so know it's really minimal right now.
Would appreciate any feedback you have :)
ACLU: software patents violate developer's free speech
https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech-womens-rights/patent-happy-patent-office-violating-first-amendment
"If including computer implementation in a patent automatically turns an abstract idea into an invention, then almost any idea that can be expressed in programming code could be patented and controlled. The Constitution does not allow that kind of intrusion on freedom of thought."
How Not to Suck at Blogging
http://manvsdebt.com/how-not-to-suck-at-blogging/
A review on how to build a genuine and transparent community in a short amount of time. What 'advice' to avoid and what things have brought the most ROI.
A (Simpler) Successful Git Branching Model 
http://drewfradette.ca/a-simpler-successful-git-branching-model/
A simplified model that allows simpler automation, based on Vincent Driessen’s successful Git branching model
My first Android App:Please review and let me know your thoughts
http://www.screencast.com/users/phorensik/folders/Jing/media/650ea659-dc0d-4327-8dc3-80ca84e1b8a0
I just release my first Android app for the soccer world cup 2010 in South Africa, here is a demo video: http://bit.ly/9FJWgM , since there's no such thing like url for apps on Android maket. If you are interest in soccer, please to take a look and let me know your toughts . The App can be found in the Android market under: soccer world cup 2010 - wm2010 .
Show HN: Managed WebSocket without vendor lockin
https://myws.dev/
While I was building Neeyer (https://neeyer.com), a location based social app, which I'll do another post later. I found it hard to find a managed Websocket service without vendor lock-in. So I built myws.dev and been using it for my app.

I know this is something I'd use myself (and I AM using it). So I hope this helps you too focus on your own app instead of infrastructure.
Should Newspapers Become Local Blog Networks?
http://publishing2.com/2007/07/20/should-newspapers-become-local-blog-networks/
Chicago Tribune just relaunched its website with, of course, more blogs -- A LOT more blogs -- news, entertainment, sports, living, business travel, with multiple blogs in each category.
Bill Gates at TED 2010 (Video)
http://blog.ted.com/2010/02/innovating_to_z.php
As a side note...his slides are awesome!
Show HN: Scale your APIs with Aperture flow control
https://github.com/fluxninja/aperture
Hello HN,

Over the past year, we have been building Aperture - an open-source flow control and reliability platform for cloud applications. Over the past few years, companies like LinkedIn[1], Google [2], Netflix [3], Stripe [4] have built cutting-edge flow control technologies to keep their applications reliable. Flow control is powerful because it enables graceful degradation- the ability to preserve key user experience pathways, even in the face of application failures. With Aperture project, we hope to democratize building reliable applications with effective flow control.

Aperture enables flow control through Aperture Agents and an Aperture Controller. Aperture Agents live next to your service instances as a sidecar and provide flow control components such as a weighted fair queuing scheduler for prioritized load-shedding and a distributed rate-limiter for abuse prevention. A flow is the fundamental unit of work from the perspective of an Aperture Agent. It could be an API call, a feature, or even a database query.

The Aperture Controller is powered by always-on, dataflow-driven policies that continuously track deviations from SLOs and calculate recovery or escalation actions. The policies running in the Controller are expressed as circuits, similar to circuit networks in the game Factorio[5].

You can deploy Aperture into your service instances through Service Mesh (using Envoy) or Aperture SDKs.

We are excited to release Aperture as an open source project under the AGPL v3 license, and invite SREs, DevOps & enthusiasts to give the project a try. We would love to hear your feedback on Aperture and how we can improve!

GitHub: https://github.com/fluxninja/aperture

Docs: https://docs.fluxninja.com/

Announcement: https://techcrunch.com/sponsor/fluxninja/fluxninja-announces...

Explainer Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEl4SMo3KNo

[1]: https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2022/hodor--detecting-...

[2]: https://sre.google/sre-book/handling-overload/

[3]: https://netflixtechblog.com/keeping-netflix-reliable-using-p...

[4]: https://stripe.com/blog/rate-limiters

[5]: https://wiki.factorio.com/Circuit_network
Speech-Jamming Gun Silences From 30 Meters
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/03/01/1429217/speech-jamming-gun-silences-from-30-meters
We live in a George Orwell novel
Rubik's cube in HTML5 (CSS3 and Javascript)
http://html5rubik.com
Rubik's cube in HTML5 (CSS3 and JavaScript) Try it in mobile/tablet! Tutorial included :) #html5rubik
What do the green user names mean? 
I looked in the FAQ and it says nothing, but I just noticed that some user names are green (both in the home page and in the comments inside links)

(for example, http://puu.sh/1C0y)

Is it that said users are new? (both the users I saw in green have created < 24 hours, so maybe that's it, but if anyone knows for sure… great :))
Cloud Hosting (Amazon EC2, Rackspace etc), help please?
I am currently going through a cost saving excercise and looking at cloud hosting as a possible solution. I currently run 3 dedicated servers, 1 load balancer, a SAN and a NAS.

It was only by accident that I came across EC2 from another post detailing how to create a proxy using EC2 to access the internet. Quite a revalation as I do love the EC2 platform and how flexible it is. I have signed up to the Windows instance to check it out to make sure it does everything I need it to.

It turns out it does do everything I need it to but I am a little afraid of the hidden costs. With my dedicated servers, I pay an amount a month and thats it. With EC2 I have worked it out and we will save money but I always feel like I am missing something in the config and if I went full scale with it they I am going to get stung.

Whats everyones experience with services like this? Can anyone offer their experience or advice? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Aaron Swartz & Taryn Simon (2011) - Art/Tech Tag Team
http://vimeo.com/40651117
Rhizome Seven on Seven Conference took place on April 14th 2012 at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Rhizome's Seven on Seven conference pairs seven leading artists with seven game-changing technologists in teams of two, and challenges them to develop something new—be it an application, social media, artwork, product, or whatever they imagine—over the course of a single day.
Show HN: qme: simple utility for queueing long-running commands
https://github.com/abdusco/qme
I keep needing a way to run long-running resource intensive tasks after one another. Normally, I'd write a script which loops over the items, but not knowing what needs to run (I pick files as I go through a folder), I knew it's time I create something to scratch my own itch. So, I've created this utility to queue up commands.

It captures command, args, env and working directory and puts it in a queue, and runs it when it's time.
At the same time, it spins up an RPC server to receive commands from other instances. If there's no server available, it becomes a server itself and waits for commands or shuts itself down after idling for some time.

This is my first (published) Golang project, so guidance & review would be appreciated.
Show HN: Free cloud security insights for Kubernetes
https://cast.ai/cloud-security/
Wanted to share some exciting news - CAST AI (AI-driven cloud cost monitoring and management platform) has launched a free Cloud security insights tool for K8s.

Security Insights offers the following features:
Kubernetes configuration checks, to ensure your cluster is configured according to best practices for pods and workloads. Users are provided with details on individual checks and resources through CAST AI’s user interface.
Vulnerability scans, which offer an overview of potential issues that might appear due to container images downloaded from public registries.
Round-the-clock visibility into your Kubernetes cluster configuration.
Container image vulnerability detection and security recommendations arranged and presented in order of priority.
Our goal is to make collaborative editing the standard on the web
https://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite/
Etherpad lite is a really-real time collaborative editor spawned from the Hell fire of Etherpad. We're reusing the well tested Etherpad easysync library to make it really realtime. Etherpad Lite is based on node.js ergo is much lighter and more stable than the original Etherpad<p>Announcement is here http://etherpad.org/2011/08/22/major-release-etherpad-lite-v1/
This guy got 400K fans with a DIY music app
http://www.incredibox.com/v4/
Strangely enough there's no mobile app.
Ask HN: List of Latest Batch of YC Startups?
Time to update my YCUniverse.com database with the lastest batch of start-ups:

http://ycuniverse.com/startups.php

Does anybody have a list of the latest start-ups? Also, are there any start-ups from prior start-up rounds that are missing from my list? Please let me know.
Show HN: RSS Feed Discovery Engine
https://discovery.thirdplace.no/?q=https://drewdevault.com
Proprietary feed readers don't reveal their discovery algorithms.

This is a FOSS solution to that problem.

Also has an api:

https://discovery.thirdplace.no/api?q=https://drewdevault.co...
8 Traits of Successful Entrepreneurs
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/253166/8_traits_of_successful_entrepreneurs.html
Do You Have What it Takes to Go into Business for Yourself?
Electromagnetic Field, a Hacker/Maker Camp for the UK - Hack a Day
http://hackaday.com/2012/08/03/electromagnetic-field-camp/
Friday 31st August – Sunday 2nd September 2012 in the UK. "There will be people talking about everything from genetic modification to electronics, blacksmithing to high-energy physics, reverse engineering to lock picking, crocheting to carpentry, and quadcopters to beer brewing. Events and activities will run throughout the day and into the evening, everything else (chats, debates, impromptu circus performances, orbital laser launches) will run as long as your collective energy lasts."
Watch New York Tech Meetup Live Broadcast at 6pm PST
http://www.livestream.com/nytechmeetup
guess this is last months, the actual broadcast will be at 9pm after the event is over. No idea why
The Pirate Bay Verdict (in English)
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/the-pirate-bay-verdict-goes-english-and-we-dish-the-dirt.ars
Link to PDF is in the article.
Apple debuts iPhone Developer Connection site
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/
Still no SDK, but this is at least a useful resource for developing web-based iPhone content.
Ask HN: How can a programmer optimize learning after getting a job?
I'm looking for my first programming job. I've just finished a coding bootcamp and have spent some time teaching myself (I'm currently studying algorithms).

When you're in school, the answer to "how do you learn as much as possible" is pretty straightforward - study hard, study smart, take hard classes etc. But I sense that the answer becomes different once you're not a student anymore.

* I sense that what you work on has a lot to do with how much you learn. If true, how do you end up in an environment where you're learning a lot?

* I sense that who you're around has a lot to do with how much you learn (because of guidance and mentorship). How do you end up in an environment where you're surrounded by the right people?

* Is it a good idea for more experienced programmers to still take classes? Read books? Etc.

* What are the skills worth having? Is it worth learning all the different frameworks? Being familiar with different levels of abstraction (hardware, architecture, systems level, scripting level...)? Drilling math and logic?

* Are there other disciplines that are particularly worth learning? I know PG talks about Art vs. Programming.

In general, how can a programmer learn as much as possible? And a related but tangential question, if you're a good programmer, how did you get good?
New Clojure "num" branch - 10x increase in some computations
http://gist.github.com/440102
Ask HN: APIs to reliably convert any document to HTML?
Hi HN,

I've broken my head on this, and haven't found a a reliable way to programmatically convert documents (doc, docx, pdf etc) to HTML. The only option seems open-office as a server - but this keeps crashing (at least once a day). I would like something that can process thousands of docs per day and not crash. Any one here has faced this problem / knows a solution?

[ PS: In case you're wondering why, we run a web app for recruiting ( recruiterbox.com ) which requires converting resumes to html ]
Show HN: Invest in Airbnbs Like Stocks
https://arrivedhomes.com/vacation-rentals
Hey HN - I’m Ryan, the co-founder of Arrived.

We made it possible to buy shares of vacation rentals, starting from $100. Investors earn the booking income & property appreciation from being an owner, without all of the work typically involved.

Airbnb’s can be a killer business. They have helped vacation rental owners generate over $150 Billion in rental income from serving a billion guest arrivals, but less than 0.5% of these guests have been able to participate in the owner side of the Airbnb economy.

Arrived is the first company with SEC Qualified offerings to buy shares in individual properties like this. We launched rental home investing last year and have funded $55m in rental homes across the country so far. And we are excited to launch vacation rental investing on our platform this week. Would love any feedback on our vacation rental launch.
How can non-US residents be part of Y Combinator?
According to the FAQ, it says it also funds non-US residents. But isn't it illegal for a non-US resident to be working in America without a visa?
Professor Calls for Taking Unabomber's Tech Critique Seriously
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Unabombers-Pen-Pal/131892/
The Unabomber continues to write manifestos from prison calling for end of tech. Should we be listening?
Ask HN: Critique my startup: ZeroTier One
(I've posted about this on other occasions, so apologies if I'm being spammy.)

https://www.zerotier.com/

-- Status:

Tech: Emulates an Ethernet switch over a robust P2P protocol.

Product: VPN-like, make virtual networks everywhere.

Revenue: freemium

Growth: ~1% organic (no promotion), ~50% user retention after 1-2 months (measured).

Feedback: positive, >90% "very disappointed" for canonical "if this product disappeared?" question.

-- Issues:

* 1% organic growth tells me: I haven't quite achieved product/market fit, the "beta" status is putting people off, or product isn't quite "there."

* Freemium conversion rate is also low, tells me current value proposition is broken.

* No mobile version. Already know how to build it, but time consuming...

-- Hypothesis:

Virtual networking ("VPN" has become confusing due to HideMyAss, etc.) is a "sleeper" market not unlike file sync. "There's lots of things that can do this." "But do you like any of them?"

I've studied Dropbox closely. I'm trying to do that in virtual networking-- solve an old problem in a compelling new way.

Some validation e.g.: #1 source of organic hits is variations of "alternative to Hamachi" directly or via alternativeto.net.

Two parter then... (1) is this hypothesis correct?, and (2) what would push this from "good" to "category redefining?"

I have some bigger "pivot" ideas but I wanted to get feedback on what's there first.

All thoughts are welcome. Thanks!
ArXiv: Astroinformatics: A 21st Century Approach to Astronomy
http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.3892
I would like to see some interesting links to where AI and astronomy/physics combined
Mozy releases C++ library for high-perf async, event I/O in a sync model.
http://code.mozy.com/projects/mordor/
Mozy releases Mordor, a C++ library for high-performance async, event-driven I/O in a synchronous programming model using cross-platform fibers and stack swapping.
How do you sell a 100% remote startup?
When a startup sells to another company, they sell their cash flow, customer/client base, products & services, IP, equipment, and employee contracts, among other things.

But is there a still a general expectation that the employees be working together in the same office, that remote organizations are too 'fragile' to risk purchasing outright?

What problems or disadvantages might companies comprised mainly of remote workforces, like 37 Signals and StackOverflow (not that either would ever sell), incur should they try to sell to another company (since most companies these days are non-remote)?
Packaging a Flask web app
http://www.plankandwhittle.com/packaging-a-flask-web-app/
How to package a Python Flask app as a distributable package.
Ask HN: Feedback on my startup and advice for the big pitch
http://www.arkalumen.com
Our startup is preparing to pitch at StartupCampMontreal3 this Thursday and I am looking to the HN community for some feedback and advice. We are a bit of an odd duck since we are not a web app but I have taken some marketing ideas from the web2.0 world to use to our advantage.

Our company mission is to bring the benefits of LED lighting to mainstream consumers. We have a 5 minute pitch this Thursday in front of an audience of several hundred investors, entrepreneurs, etc.

Any feedback and advice would be greatly appreciated.