skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>My life has gotten so much better since I [switched to rc].

How long ago was that? I switched to rc in 2001 because I was unhappy with bash, and wish I had not bothered.

If the entire world switched from bash to rc when I did, then my switching to rc would have been a minor improvement, but since of course the rest of the world did not switch, my switching to rc just made me slightly incompatible with the rest of the world, and those incompatibilities more than cancel out the relatively minor advantages of rc relative to bash.

For example, file-name completion (the tab key) in shell mode in Emacs has been programmed to use the backslash character to escape, e.g., spaces in file names (and OS X ships with files whose names contain spaces). But rc does not grok the backslashes: it uses a different convention to quote characters like spaces, and no one as far as I have been able to discover has modified shell mode to use rc's convention (and none of fish, zsh, csh, tcsh, etc, share rc's convention on quoting).

rc is different enough from bash that about a third of the time, I cannot just copy a command line from a web page and paste it into rc without manually editing the command line first. for example, the two common ways of doing command substitution in Unix shell command lines are `like this` and $(like this), but rc recognizes neither convention, and I have to change it to be `{like this}. (Being different from the way the rest of the world does things for little or no actual benefit, by the way, is common in software from Plan 9.)

More examples at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7614694.

When I say that rc has only minor advantages over bash, I mean that I still find it almost as annoying to write anything involving a looping or a branching construct in rc as I do in bash. And I still miss not having access to the data structures I have access to in, e.g., Emacs Lisp. And for those data structures, such as the string, that rc and bash do have, I miss the API I have access to Emacs Lisp.

I still use rc as my interactive shell (mainly because I do not yet want to rewrite my 570 lines of customizations -- mostly rc functions that wrap commonly used commands like ls and du) but plan to phase out my reliance on rc gradually over the next few years.
Same here, reminded me of PHP
From my understanding the two aren't mutually exclusive. From example, couldn't you use ES6 decorators and typescript in the same project?
Counter counter :-)

Linux boots in 6 seconds. Caps is mapped to Mod4/super, you already have a GIANT control key. Linux does not need NM or Pulse either. And the operating system is not in the middle of being axed by Google, so while updates are not automatic I don't have to worry about them stopping.

But the two biggest points: Linux gets you an extra five hours of battery life, and lets you configure charge limits so that the non-replacable battery won't rot away in three years.
FF42/Windows
I have cleaned my share of malware infections and I can't think of one were the attack vector seemed to be FF.

Now we seem to be nerfing the beast because someone might do stupid things.
Hideo Kojima left Konami today; starting new studio
Could this be used in a large crowd? Such as a protest, or a concert? What are the scaling limitations? How does a message decide to stop propagating - wouldn't it just circle around a large crowd indefinitely?
Grub2 Authentication 0-Day
Google Analytics alerts/summaries integration for Slack
The Scandinavians I've met and worked with have a very good sense of humour. Utterly dry, you have to be tuned in to realise they are being funny.

Great film making nations though. Bergman, Dreyer, Sjöström etc.

So they don't make comedies as well or in enough numbers as other types. BFD.
> No re-training funds

Not exactly truthful. Most "free trade" recent agreements (past ~30 years or so) come with some sort of TAA support [1][2].

Why is it the federal government's responsibility to do these things? These are implied powers which the states have responsibility for. The Constitution does not reserve any of these for the federal government.

You can't ignore human ego, denial, and the power of convention. All one-industry towns wane when their one industry either falls or moves. People complain, panic, and some even try to move to find better luck elsewhere.

Ultimately, the largest anchor tends to be housing/property, which in the US tends to be paid for by long term debt. When a town loses its economic engine, demand to move there drops to near zero and the housing values fall underwater at the same time when people need to leave. I fail to see why the federal government should be on the hook for something like this. It would be subsidizing failure in a large way.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Adjustment_Assistance

[2] https://www.doleta.gov/programs/factsht/nafta.cfm
IBM adds cognitive APIs to its Watson IoT
why tether? why not let the balloon charge a battery, and have drones carry the battery back to earth when full, and vice versa...
Awesome! Creative coding is how I got into programming, too (http://cenizal.com/projects/vfx_portfolio/)
I don't go to PH anymore, too many cookie cutter prototypes, often with some annoying self-importance. I do think there are neat collections which are fun to browse, but it's not a platform for launching, or discovering the next thing in tech or anything quite like that. Mostly entertainment... I might have felt differently almost a year ago. Not sure what exactly changed.

And yeah, the elitism is a thing too, but now it's pretty much open to everyone... pretty trivial to get an invite.
The Government Wants Access to Smartphones. What You Should Know
Sublime text follows this approach:

http://www.sublimetext.com/3

However Semver is useful for dependency managing.
Donuts: We Are Not Going to Delete New GTLD Extensions
So they mention that the asymmetrical melting of glaciers contribute to "wobble". Do commute patterns with millions of vehicles exerting force on the earth along non cancelling routes, contribute to additional wobble?
Yesterday was his birthday, and the Google Doodle was about him. That probably had a big effect on the article's ranking, as I know I and many others clicked it and read more about him.
You'll get no argument from me on that front. I still believe tech companies should go with other locations now because there is already incentive and opportunity to do so.
Just checked back on this post from yesterday. The reason I didn't pose it to SO is that 1. I still do associate HN with a strong Lisp community. 2. It's more of a question of opinion versus a technical question itself and figured the discussion could be interesting for the site. I also didn't give too much thought as to where I was posting it.
> Doesn't sound like they'll have the extra people.

When automation wipes out 99.99% of jobs, nearly all people will be "extra" people. Globally.
If it is asymptotically faster, then it is implied that there are problems the faster one can solve, that the other cannot, assuming finite time.
But what does this mean for my precious tree-style tabs?
2. I don't see what its performance on Medium has to do with it. My point is that it was a perfectly good article pulled from the front page.

3. There are plenty of rather large companies that don't get as much attention here as Stripe does (I don't have anything against Stripe btw, just using them as an example in this case).

If HN pulled this article it would be pretty damning on the part of YC. The placement of this article in question does not disprove my previous points.

FWIW, I've enjoyed relatively decent success from my own product launches on HN.

EDIT: re: medium - I mistook you the first time. Apologies. My point still stands re: posts being pulled.
> Very interesting. I sometimes wonder why Detroit, with all that available, inexpensive facilities and infrastructure, doesn't advertise itself as a center for engineering talent. Why aren't people who need such things doing it in Detroit, where it's cheap?

As I understand it the main reason is:

AFAIK, what's cheap in Detroit is labor, particularly unskilled labor, and disused facilities that may require substantial remediation to serve their original purpose, and may be more expensive to turn to new purposes than building fresh somewhere else.

What's not cheap in Detroit is the things that firms that need engineering talent need, including engineering talent.
Tip: if you have troubles using your mobile device (e.g. for me it was giving just "device not supported" messages), you may use second instance of Chrome and emulate mobile device via developer tools:

https://twitter.com/paul_irish/status/676874420007243776
DotStar Pi Painter
But that can happen anywhere. The question is did you post succeed or fail because of the random luck, the merit of the post, or because of some built in bias within the system.

For example, if I tried to post my new product on Product Hunt it wouldn't do very well because I'm not allowed to post there. This blog post is arguing even if I could post there it wouldn't do well if an insider didn't promote it heavily.

On HN, anybody can post a "Show HN" and have it appear under the "Show HN" section. It is unlikely to gain any significant traffic or traction on the main site, but that is because there is a crap load of content being submitted all the time and readers have very limited attention.

I think there are a lot of smart ideas HN could do to make the front page better, and it isn't perfect. But HN wants your "Show HN" to go well, and then have you go form a company and apply to YC. A for profit community wants your post to do badly so you have to pay to get it to do well.
If you want a response to this and you don't see one here in the next few hours (I'll try, but can't right now), you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com. The short version is that you're partly right on #2 but probably less than you think, and definitely not on #3.

Edit: ok, here you go. Long, but hard to make shorter.

Here are all the things that can make a post fall in rank: user flags, software penalties (for voting rings, flamewars, etc.), and moderator downweights. All try to optimize HN for the core value of the site—intellectual curiosity—and all are mechanisms to countervail the upvoting system in some way. Why? Because pure upvoting optimizes for other things than intellectual curiosity, such as outrage, gossip, and gaming the system.

Think of HN like a flower garden. The flowers are stories that gratify intellectual curiosity, and to have these we must protect the garden against weeds, rabbits, motor vehicles, and other things that otherwise would soon take over.

User flags and software take care of much, but not all, so moderation is needed. (We'd love to make it not be needed, but that's a hard problem.) Our criteria for downweighting come from a general sense of what attracts upvotes for reasons other than intellectual interest. It's not about what we personally believe, or have a vested interest in, or even what we happen to be interested in ourselves, with the possible exception of APL.

When we downweight, we try to use a light touch. When you see a story plummet off the front page, it probably wasn't moderators who did that (or there was a clear-cut reason, such as a duplicate). In judgment call cases, we're more likely to make a story go from #1 to #4. It's all about balance.

You may reply that "a general sense" is hopelessly subjective, and I'd have to agree, yet it's not as subjective as you might think. For example, we wouldn't downweight a substantive article about startups just because it disagreed with YC's philosophy. We might do so if it included a lot of tricks to stir up controversy. Do you see the difference? The latter is procedural; not much different than editing linkbait out of titles. If you do this job across tens of thousands of stories, and you're conscious of the obvious biases, you can mostly guard against them, especially since the same patterns come up over and over.

Not sure if I've succeeded here in getting across the gist of what we do, but I hope it helps a bit.

As for #3, that's an easy one. We don't give YC startups extra favor when it comes to boosting stories. If a Stripe API went to #1, that was because the community heavily upvoted it. We also are less likely, not more, to downweight stories when they are critical about a YC startup, such as the thread we're currently commenting in.
I feel like its a mistake to hide content behind "see all" and arrow right buttons. I feel like people look at what is shown to them and they are willing to scroll down but far fewer people are likely to go to the trouble of pressing a right arrow or "see all" button.
I find shell to be a great part of my computers, ideal for making little inter-operating data-processing tools, system control programs and other hacks; it has enhanced my interaction with OS greatly. Its syntax is a little unusual, but to me it is very concise and readable. It's just that it requires some time to get used to it. After you've made your few tens-hundreds useful programs, you'll get the vibe shell has and begin to see even advantages to, say, python (in some task domains).
Americans are too strung up on the "be ashamed for someone" comedy that really doesn't go over well with Scandinavian audiences.

It's hard to find an American comedy (since Wag the Dog, perhaps) that doesn't fall on the gag of fremdschämen.

A typical example of the bleak humour from here would be the Danish movie [Flickering Lights](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XE4ZBcK01HU)
He is just pointing that game is rigged and a lot of articles promote how egalitarian everything is, how it is meritocracy. As someone also pointed out, there is somewhat similar thing here as well, just, I feel it is more clear what is happening.

Yes, it is like TechCrunch :).
Yeah, I guess since you think progressive thought is the same as voting for Democrats, try Seattle, Portland, SF, LA, Hawaii, Minnesota, Boston, New York... Neat how you ignored all of the places that people love.
Doing an update like that would force a merge, but there was nothing to merge. I made no changes. It was a read only (to me) repository. It should have just worked, and would have had someone else on the team not rewritten history.

I'm aware there are more options than delete and clone. My options were to spend time trying to fix my clone to which I had made no changes, or I could delete and reclone from the origin. The pragmatic solution was obvious and got me back to work more quickly than I would have otherwise been able to.

The fact that there are more options to allow fixing a broken clone are nice, but irrelevant. Had git not allowed removing published history, it would not have been an issue.

I'm all for the ability to amend history, which fossil does allow (to an extent). What it doesn't support deletion of old history followed by the creation of new history.
I worked in university IT for a year, focused on student's personal machines. A good majority of malware we experienced installed extensions and reconfigured browser preferences.

I understand why Mozilla and Google have done similar things to restrict extension installation, but can't help but think there has to be a better way for users who know what they're doing.
> The same thing Apple is selling with iAds?

Yea you have a point there.

It's less of a problem though because i only see iAds if i download and use "free" apps, which i don't. There is always the possibility to buy the apps, and in this case i won't ever see any ads at all.

However there is no way to pay for Google products like Google Search or Gmail to 'not see ads'. Google always sells your data. It's obvious of course, how else can they deliver a free product and cover their costs...
Does it feel more rigged because it is becoming more rigged or because the level of rigging that already exists in the ecosystem is becoming more visible?
"Over Quota

This application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later."
Funny thing is that recent React fully supports (even recommends) exactly this style for his use case. Stateless component can now be just a function.

https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/10/07/react-v0.14...

He could just change few lines and have JSX, React state management, contexts, property type and all that other stuff available if he ever needs it.

With his own solution he'd eventually need to re-implement bits of React.
That is normally called a Controller or a ViewController or something of the sort depending on the developer's preference.

There is no interchangeable "standard" for that for the same reason there is no "standard" for almost anything in technology: different requirements, platforms, styles, projects, etc
Let's Encrypt CA Owner/Root Inclusion Request [pdf]
Websites could read emotions by seeing how fast you move your mouse
Netflix’s Ongoing Quest to Save Bandwidth
A goodly number of Japanese people are over the moon to see a gaikokujin learning their language and would readily supply help.

I think I gained a few levels in Japanese by spending two weeks in Osaka, getting drunk and chatting with locals.
excellent post.
> Why is it the federal government's responsibility to do these things?

Because their cost imposed by federal internal and external policies adopted under the Congress' Commerce Clause powers (including when they are caused by decisions not to exercise Commerce Clause powers -- a decision not to act within granted power is itself an use of the power), and because while certain cities may the poster children for the problem, quite often when regional industries are effect, its not just one city in one state, but a whole state (or several) that suffer substantial net negative effects.

The commercial policy that Congress pursues which results in these harms is usually done on the premise that it is ultimately the best on balance for the nation as a whole, and that the harms some areas experience are more the compensated by the benefits experienced elsewhere in the country. Which may be true, on balance, but if it is, then taxing those that benefit to provide support to those that are harmed should be able to remediate the damage to those harmed while still leaving those who benefit ahead.
This problem (reportedly) took Don Knuth, 24 hours to solve
Yes, they call it ESR, but did we really need Yet Another TLA?

As for requiring signing, from the moz wiki: "The current plan is to have ESR 45 work like 40-42, with a preference that can turn off [signing] enforcement."

Edit: source: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing
> Any ideas about what China has in mind for those 'millions of low-paid workers'?

I think China is a special case: The legitimacy of the whole political system, not just the current leader, depends on their ability to deliver economic satisfaction to their population. Major dislocations of low-skilled workers who probably lack the wealth or safety net to endure long-term unemployment could be risky.

On the other hand, without political reform how will the masses make their voices heard and have their interests addressed? Chinese leaders have a long history of treating them like chattle, from what I understand.
Check out LTE direct for a potential future technology that would have a much better range than wifi and bluetooth, which could potentially make this sort of thing workable.
I don't visit Product Hunt much, but I do follow their founder on Twitter.

He seems like a super well-intentioned person, so I'm surprised to read all of the commentary here on HN. Am I being duped by some Product Hunt scam that I'm completely oblivious to?
British Astronauts – an FAQ
It gets dark in the stratosphere too, and the UK already has a power grid connecting it with the Spanish power grid which doesn't rely on 20km cables into the sky...
several instances of PmWiki + Vimperator, being using that for nearly 10 years and thousands of edits so far
Not at all, and I don't love hearing what anti-progressives have to say so I'm not going to wade through that google search. I'm just saying that one reason those cities have a higher turnout for Democrats is because a lot of them are (or were) in labor unions.
> That first submission is it ... it will end up on an internal list of products ineligible for future consideration.

This can't be entirely true. I see featured posts on PH that are nothing more than "Version 2" of some previously featured "products". But the links go to the same place.
> That's cute. It's basically USENET over Bluetooth.

Or Tor, right? It seems like it's effectively a local onion router, albeit with significantly fewer possible sources.

The problem with this, to me, is that if an adversary is targeting a certain user, they know that the actual source is in close physical proximity to whomever they actually track. That said, if they hooked this into a WiFi mesh network, things could get really interesting...
Re: why there is no "standard" functions that you can [use] to theme various snippets of HTML/CSS.
-> There shouldn't really be a "theme" in HTML. Yes, you have classes and stuff, but the html should be _markup_ in that describes data, not worrying about presentation. Different themes should be achieved via CSS, which is the standard theming abilities you're looking for. Honestly, I can understand the confusion, since it's difficult to parse through all the technologies and understand what is going on at the heart of the matter.
Say theory A (the placebo effect theory) predicts a 25% improvement, because it's been measured in the past with that result. Then there's also theory B (the get-better-anyway theory, or null hypothesis), which wasn't measured initially but in recent studies shows a similar 25% improvement.

I don't understand how more studies testing theory A and getting 25%, while excluding theory B from testing, can show that A should be preferred over B. The rationale that A has been tested more thoroughly and therefore has a smaller confidence interval sounds circular.
I have almost the opposite, I use chrome for browsing but find FF's dev tools a lot more intuitive. Different mindsets I guess, and while I do find that some FF debugging features are confusing (the difference between the console, the scratchpad and the GCLI is just an annoying distinction), overall I find FF has better console highlighting and is easier to browse objects because it'll expand a logged object to a sidebar on click, but in chrome it stays in that console.

There is a separate issue where Firefox can have much worse performance when the developer tools are open. This is something has been slowly being addressed but I think there's still a lot of work to get it to chrome levels.
> Yes theoretically it shouldn't work, but I see it work everyday

I'm pretty sure this is not true (certainly the method you mention doesn't work), but if you think you know counterexamples, please send them to hn@ycombinator.com. We have put a ton of work into counteracting promotional voting a.k.a. voting rings, and genuine counterexamples (i.e. voting rings that defeated our software) are super valuable to us.
It's okay. That's how engineers and computer scientists work. The idea of "generalization" and "hyperbole" and "caricature" is often lost on us.

This is primarily why my technical blogging has slowed down significantly. Writing for an audience that cares more about details than The Point (tm) is often annoying.
I thought Android has p2p wifi (e.g., http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/wifip...). Is this not true in practice?
I can attest. I had two submissions that were inexplicably removed from the front page (both Show HN's). I emailed to ask why and in both instances dang reinstated my submissions.
Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time? [pdf]
Except the subject was and is Flint, if you think LA is a shining example of anything I've got news for you... Bah along