skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In what universe, besides the one of a sentiment-analysis-algorithm, would that be considered a "negative" comment?

The algorithm likely has issues identifying if criticism is constructive. If you look at the negative/positive score of each word in isolation (e.g. fail, problem, drop, can't, hard) the comment is overwhelmingly negative.

You actually have to parse and understand the comment to prove that it's very positive. They could have ditched the algorithm, but then they would lose a quantifiable positivity score and instead would have had to rely on human intuition - which has it's problems, e.g. spend the whole day looking at negative comments and neutral comments might start looking positive.

The study may have had fundamental issues at the outset.
Is it possible to use TinyPress with already modified Jekyll?
I already host a blog on github and am using jekyll. What I would like to do is take advantage of that neat backend for writing posts.
I love this kind of thing, as it reminds me of English literature classes, where the meaning and origin or words changes so much depending on word class, point in history, social story, but at some point there was a common bond.

A few weeks ago at an ATM, having keyed-in the amount I wished to withdraw, I was presented with 3 options:
Cancel
Confirm
*Correct

All of the above are verbs, but I instinctively clicked 'Correct' taking the adjective meaning "This number is correct". The machine then asked me to re-input a withdrawal amount. The machine was focused on it's action; I was focused on the context of the number.

A jarring reminder that even for everyday words, context is important. This is relevant for a historic text such as the Bible, and for our work interacting, and creating or using systems that create interaction for others.
Indeed. From Carl Sagan's wonderful The Demon-Haunted World:

"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
Facebook will warn you if you're subject to government 'attacks'
Could you please summarize how djb's code is different?
True enough...
Yes, but not sending the "no thanks" email protects them from potential lawsuits over something said inadvertently within the email that a lawyer thinks might be actionable.
I think you may be promulgating a myth yourself - that building underground is the same, irrespective of location. The fact that London's Crossrail costs similar amounts per km may have something to do with the peculiar challenges of building under cities like London and New York.
Wasted Space in Container Shipping
I highly appreciate the "I don't know" ending and the polemic on the deservedness. From a scientific (economist?) point of view there is no clear answer but our society is based on everyone having a strong stand on this (usually in line with his personal interests).
Do you mean 20% excluding retirement programs ?
Remember to do that after maximizing contributions to your 401k, ira, etc... At layoff time you might be able to extract some money without penalty and with minimal taxes.
A well-designed DSL should be self-documenting and obvious. And the right tools (like a proper IDE integration, with syntax highlighting and autocompletion) would make such a DSL much more obvious than a library of functions (which still must be thoroughly documented to be usable).
This is an interesting article but very one sided. To really assess "the wisdom of HN community" the author should have assessed all four cells: Successful companies with positive comments, Successful companies with negative comments (which the author did), Unsuccessful companies with positive comments and Unsuccessful companies with negative comments. This would provide a broader and more objective picture of HN community
Silicon Valley startups are to investment what a day at the races is to a broker. You hope you'll pick a winner but ultimately those horses are not where the majority of the population's investment goes.
> Then the technical interview came, and one of the interviewers was instantly hostile as soon as he saw me. It was weird. Weird to the point where the other tech interviewer started playing good cop, saying things like "he just covered that" and "no, that's true". Whiteboard coding is strange enough, but doing it with zero feedback and a hostile interviewer who keeps trying to push you in bad directions (inheritance over composition, singletons, etc.) is, well, interesting. The application came back with the inevitable "good skills but bad culture fit" euphemism.

Wait, you think the companies that have to move fast have the coddling environment?
My favorite one is self-driving cars. If you say something factual and obvious, like for example that self-driving cars don't in fact exist yet and zero people are able to use one today, legions of flying monkeys will swoop in to call you a backward thinking luddite.

There are others.
After I wrote my "nermal" project (npm-installable JS authenticated-encryption container) I wrote a password manager as an example, which I called "tagaloop". Some documentation for it is available here:

https://github.com/drostie/nermal/tree/master/examples

In particular, I avoided the command-line interface precisely because the other tool on that page, ncrypt, would tend to leak inline passwords and such to log files. For various reasons those options were necessary to perform the job it required (e.g. in a script which is chmod root 500, for example) but not required for its use (it will just prompt you for the info if you leave the flags off).

In particular, the -a "add" option in Steel will probably save passwords to ~/.bash_history, no?
I had to write a garbage collector to get my SK combinator evaluator to run on a Unix mini (HLH Orion) in '88. Glad to see that functional languages eventually caught on though!

I wish my application to Linn to work on the Rekursiv hardware had gone a bit further though...
I'd guess some obscure teams of consultants that are known internally by big corporations, but otherwise unknown in the IT-showbusiness world. They show up where there is real work to be done, and hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake.
Match Group (match.com, OkCupid, Tinder) Files for IPO
> It's easy for geeks/nerds/experts (especially vocal ones) to misjudge how products could be accepted by the masses (who are not geeks/nerds/experts).

That's a pretty bad conclusion. Is it any easier for non-"geek/nerds/experts" to judge the iphone on its mass market appeal? I don't think so. In fact that's pretty much what you figured in the BTTF "predictions" failing.

The thing is a lot of people here on HN, and in the tech community, like to judge products based on how easy or hard they are to build, and that has zero relation to how good the product is or how successful it will be. For a non-techie, it's in the realm of the impossible either way, so that stuff doesn't matter at all.
Kerbal Space Program, here I come.
I think part of the reason that it might be different this time round is because using web technologies for desktop applications gives access to a much broader pool of UI/UX talent to help build something that works well and looks nice. Applications built with web technologies are already looking noticeably better than anything you get with a cross-platform UI toolkit without putting in a lot of effort.
Homejoy is in the article but is no longer in business.[1] So I'm not sure if the point is that there weren't enough negative comments on their launch.

[1] http://blog.homejoy.com/homejoy-says-goodbye/
The article says that HN failed to predict the success of AirBnb. While factually correct, this says nothing about HN (or anyone in general). Nobody was able to predict the success of AirBnb, even the savviest of investors. AirBnb wasn't the only company of its kind, it wasn't run by the smartest people out there, it wasn't launched at some particularly good time, or anything similar.

They have just survived and succeeded. Why? Who knows.

But obsessing about HN comments is truly not worth it.
60+, programming for 44 years, triumphed over adversity more times than I can recall, wimpy looking nerd discounted by almost everyone I ever met. Hardly ever got the girl, got to be on the team, got the part, or got the job.

I'm a programmer because I can code, and at the end of the day, that's all that really matters.

You can hate on another person because they're too old or too ugly or too nerdy or too black or too female or too gay or too anything else, but the real beauty of our field is that success is binary and relatively easy to measure:

1. Can you build it?
2. Does what you build matter to someone else?

I've always considered rejection for any reason a self solving problem: if you're too stupid to accept me (whether you're in Silicon Valley or not), then I would have never wanted to work with you anyway. I'll find someone else who understands the value I produce and can provide the environment in which I can thrive.

Life is unfair, especially in Silicon Valley. It's not about the unfairness, it's about our response to the unfairness.

There has never been a better time and a better way to succeed than building software today. It doesn't matter who you are, where you're at, what you're like, what you have, or who you're with. 95% of the battle is what you can do. So go do it.
Youtube and reddit have a shaky relationship to reality.
Show HN: URL regex generator/helper
Good choice renaming from QuickBM.com. Yikes!
Well negativity in:

> I have a few qualms with this app:

> 1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

> 2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.

> 3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?

or skepticism in:

> It's pretty nice, and I was thinking to myself - hey cool, I could make an online backup of my code. Then it occured to me - who the hell is this guy, and why should I trust my code to be on his server!?

> That's a huge issue you should consider. Why would people feel comfortable leaving their valuable stuff on "Drews" server?

Or this[1] conversation. Or this[2] one.

That comments page is, I agree, not a troll-haven or something of the sort. But we do have a tendency to try and pick apart every potential flaw we see in something.

It's not a bad thing! Thorough vetting of an idea is the only good way to find potentially fatal flaws. But if you're looking for what the response of the enthusiast Internet community is going to be, this is definitely not the place to go.

A trial by fire we are.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8958

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9671
Kai Köpke Shares Tips on How to Grow in the Magento Community
In that case why do these people care that they dont get hired?
I think one point the article makes that is easier to miss is that the ads themselves are not that important. Text/simple image/flashing video/smell doesn't really matter that much. Ads are ads. The real problem is how ad-dependence deforms content. Clickbait being the most blatant example.
I can remember reading the original news posting about NCSA Mosaic and wondering "that sounds great - but what's the fascination with loading documents over a network?" :-)
The syntax for writing a content blocker is pretty simple [http://mschrage.com/content-blockers]

There is an in-app text editor where you can write the rules. Alternatively, you could write the code on a computer and copy it over.
There seems to be some assumptions that companies prefer to hire younger people. I have yet to see that, myself (getting close to 50). When I was interviewing people, I was looking for older people with good transferable skills. We just couldn't find anyone. However, I think that there are some caveats.

When people are young, you tend to cut them some slack. You don't really know how they are going to turn out in a few years. You hire someone with the hope that they will improve quickly over the short term. When people are older, you have a track record to look at. Sometimes it is very obvious that they have had a hard time of it in their career.

The end result is not that people prefer younger people to older people, it's that they prefer unknown quantities to known, poorly performing quantities. If there is someone with an exceptionally good track record over a long period of time and who can do a good interview -- my experience is that they will be snapped up quickly.

I don't really buy the idea that length of employment is a serious issue either. Attrition in IT is huge and I never assume that anyone is going to last more than 2 or 3 years.
SQLite now supports JSON
> What does that even mean? We lived through the Internet revolution.

I was born after 1975 (barely - the Internet revolution happened when I was in high school and college) so I'm not just sticking up from myself here when I say that a lot of people born before 1975 really do "get it."

Almost anybody who spent ten minutes using BBSs in the 1980s knew that some kind of connected thing was going to be the future. It was nearly inevitable. Maybe it would have been a bunch of closed CompuServes and Prodigies, maybe it would have been a BBS in everybody's home, maybe it would have been something global and semi-mostly-kinda open like the Internet. Whatever the form, that generation knew that connectedness was the next logical step. You can see it in sci-fi of the era (Neuromancer, etc) ...they weren't sure what form or forms it was going to take, but everybody knew (hoped) we were going to be connecting to other people using our computers.

So a lot of people from that generation were right at home once the Internet became an everyday thing. And a lot of them weren't, obviously, but a lot of them were totally primed for it.
I remember once someone was doing the absolute wrong approach for something and I did basically number 3 and they said "I'd rather do it this way", of course since I knew it was wrong I should probably just have said "that is wrong do it like this".
"They're a growth incubator that pushes companies to grow fast over growing well."

Any evidence for this comment? Any evidence that there's even a tradeoff you can make? Any evidence that your hypothesis (which seems to be that "growing well" is better) is supported at all?

The reason (just guessing, not affiliated with YC) that YC feels like growing fast is best is that "growing well" might involve a greater investment before you've reached product-market fit.

I will also add that age-diversity has almost nothing to do with founders. Founders are already slightly older on average. Plenty of companies founded by young founders have their average age go up quite a bit once they have found product-market fit and can hire more people.
Erik Meijer and Leslie Lamport – Mathematical Reasoning and Distributed Systems
And for an alternate viewpoint that addresses 100% of the annotations: http://www.berenddeboer.net/sab/

The author of SAB fell into the snarky dismissal trap in more than a few places. It cheapens the work greatly.
Cherry picking posts about the successful companies from the glut of "Show HN" posts that have come through over the years is practically the definition of survivor bias.

Not that I am arguing with their larger point - if you believe in what you are doing, do not let comments on HN stop you from pursuing your vision.
What The New York Times Didn’t Say About Amazon
Not mutually exclusive. Why can't you have some hobby stuff on github ? I guess you might have to get permission in some companies, but not impossible anywhere I would think.

Also isn't programming one of those fields.
That's... a pretty insightful observation.

I suppose if you'd create a company that tried to exploit the comparative advantages of young and old staff, you'd face problems of leadership - who should run the show? The young, or the old?

But I think it could be worth trying out in Hackerspace context. I'm adding to my TODO list to try and encourage some 50+ people to hang out in our space; maybe they could contribute some important problems and good insights that the regular young crowd could tackle with the energy we have.

Thank you for sharing that quote.
Discussions of workplace diversity try to answer the question "Should Alice or Bob get the job?" That doesn't sound like the right question to me, because one of them is still left without a job. Instead of 30%/70% unemployment, you've achieved 50%/50%. That's nice, but...

I think we should try to create a baseline of happiness that no one can ever fall beneath. Universal basic income might be a good step in that direction, though I don't expect it to solve all the problems.
A Domain Specific Language for image analysis that has used GPUs as well is Diderot (http://diderot-language.cs.uchicago.edu/)

Diderot is very different from Halide though. I think Halide is for processing image data, while Diderot's interface is a much higher level of abstraction (program are written in terms of tensor fields, which Diderot then reconstructs from image data).
So, when do they start selling?
Employer Paternalism: Making It Easy for the Risk-Averse to Say ‘Yes’ to a Job
I would have thought this was relatively obvious.

Many new ideas and applications are marketed on HN quite validly under Show HN.

However, the first pass at marketing an application may not reflect its form further down the line.

For example, we often see poor landing pages, or simply landing pages that don't convey the problem succinctly enough to quickly satisfy our short attention spans.

A few months or years down the line and these development teams have homed their product, ironed out the bugs and built landing pages that are easy for anyone to understand quickly.

Interesting none the less.

Hence, what is launched on HN != its final form and cannot determine future success.
It seems like the biggest issue here is the compensation structure of startups. People who have been working for a long time are those least likely to take a huge pay cut for upside even if they're the people who are often well-suited for that risk.
Get Your Business Mobile App Up and Running in Seconds with Just 1 Click
BlackBerry opens its Priv kimono just a little wider
I wonder if the technical interview process can feed into this too. Particularly the questions straight out of the final year of a computer science degree. It'll be decades since senior engineers left university and they reasonably wont have held on to the knowledge that they haven't used.
The salary for any given employee is not a limiting factor. I think this is true. Even when you have a very limited budget, many places will prefer to be under head count with a higher performing team. If you can get that guy who is going to let you avoid running down rabbit holes all day, every day, they are worth the extra bucks.

I think the problem is that these people are hard to find -- whether young or old.
"those at the top of the game got there because of grit determination and little to do with talent. "

I think I agree with your sentiment here but want to clarify and see if you agree. There's still an EXTREMELY high talent bar to be a professional athlete, but talent, in itself, isn't enough (unless you're one of the truly rare lazy star athletes). Those who are blessed to have the talent and an above average work-ethic/determination are the ones with a good chance of making it.
You can do pretty impressive stunts with a kick scooter too!
It's a little bit of a mis-measurement of things though. I'm not sure quality software engineers make so much more on average, it's just that the percentage of the population that are quality software engineers is much higher. It's a pretty forced selection bias since if you're just mediocre you might self-select out (note: this is just one of many reasons you might self-select out).
The world’s quietest place
'pjc50 by "field" probably meant a subfield of software, like "sexy websites built on node.js". Not all types of software jobs yield Githubbable results.

That said, she definitely has something to share - if not open-soruce hobby projects, then at least interesting stories from jobs she did and battles she fought. I'd love to read such account.
What lazyjones was alluding to is that time != experience. A 25 year dev veteran who has just done the same code over and over has very little experience.

I've seen this while interviewing people. Person has 5 years experience on their resume, but it turns out they really have about 3 mos. experience. They got the job, learned it in about 3 mos. and just repeated it over over and with minor tweaks. Part of the blame is the company for no growth path and part is on the employee.

To the original point. Where I work now only 2 of the 7 devs are under 30, and they will both be 30 soon. Having this level of experience lets us build things very quickly. It also lets the business side trust the dev team to usually make the right decisions on the fly.
Perhaps, but it's not like you have to pay 2x or 3x more to hire a programmer in their 50's. More like 20% or 30% more. For 200% to 300% more experience. That's a deal, in my book.
I agreed with this up until this sentence.

> They also often lack the imagination on how to solve things in a new technological paradigm.

I think that they absolutely have the imagination, as well as the skill and experience, to solve these problems. What they lack is tolerance for risk.
> exposure to these hidden problems

I think this is a key to experience. I spent a large part of my 20s diving into problems and totally screwing up the solution. I learned a ton from this.

On the flip side, maybe 50% of those problems don't exist anymore, because new technology or methodologies have solved them. Knowing how to use CVS or SVN doesn't really count for much in a world dominated by git.

I think that's where I value a deep understanding of CS and core engineering practices, regardless of age. Understanding pointers, how to debug, and the difference of the heap vs. the stack hasn't changed much over the years.
Not only that, but command line options are generally not secure from other users on the system. Just running `ps -ef` can read command line options from any user. A more secure alternative would be running the program in an interactive mode.
I can agree with this on so many levels. As a student in a somewhat challenged branch of it, I often feel like me and my fellow students are "wasting" time on merely explaining theories, when in reality, a lot of us are very eager to get our hands dirty with something real.

Universities have a limited amount of ressources which means that you're pretty much left alone to figure your entire study-plan out to yourself, including picking partners and/or cases for examns. While this is not at all impossible, I know for a fact that a lot of students around me are eager to participate in something that weighs a little heavier than their own interest in social media or gaming.