skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pull request acceptance of women versus men
The Haystack – a documentary on the use of surveillance in the UK
No the same thing did not happen to the Aral Sea. What happened to the Aral sea was far far worse and far far more of our fault (humans).
There's a positive externality that arises from price-sensitive shopping. It promotes competition, which leads to lower prices for everyone.

If everyone behaved like you, requiring a 40% discount before moving away from Amazon, then Amazon would just set its prices 1/.6 = 66% higher than the other stores. Fortunately, not everyone is like you, so Amazon's prices are often competitive.

To some degree, I suppose this is like buying index funds versus buying individual stocks. I only buy index funds. But the reason I can get away with it is that there are at least a few people out there searching for value. I can't compete with them. But I can price-compare online, or at gas stations, etc. I see shopping for low prices as part of my duty as a capitalist. :)
Please don't comment like this here. There's no substantive view that can't be expressed civilly.
There was a story published about that potential rescue mission recently [1]. Briefly stated, the complexity involved in getting Atlantis up there in time to rescue the Columbia crew members makes the rescue plans depicted in the book/movie The Martian (the Iris probe, and the Rich Purnell Maneuver) look completely safe and sane. Any delay at all in getting Atlantis up would probably have made it too late for the Columbia crew, as their lithium hydroxide canisters would have run out and they would have choked to death on their own CO2. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board came to similar conclusions in their own report [2].

It would have made for great drama. But either having Atlantis get up there too late to save the Columbia crew, or, even worse, losing Atlantis as well, would have been a PR disaster from which NASA might well not have recovered. Hell, they barely recovered from Columbia as it is.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue-...

[2] http://www.nasa.gov/columbia/caib/html/start.html
Relevant: https://xkcd.com/1173/

You can get better a lot of ways in sport. Why is performance-enhancing drugs the way that is singled out as not acceptable?
It's creepy and tasteless to make the sound clip of his last words available for sale:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002SHRCYU?ie=UTF8&*Versio...
Your argument is sound

this seems fitting, though https://giphy.com/gifs/week-media-person-RL0xU1daTlMoE
The ideal of pair programming:

The student learns at the side of the master

The reality of pair programming:

"Why doesn't this guy ever wash his hair! -_- "
mruby – Fast, Embeddable, and Lghtweight Ruby Implementation
I am surprised that no one linked the What Have You Tried article by Matt Gemmell.

http://mattgemmell.com/what-have-you-tried/

This is how I almost never got my SO topics closed. I state beforehand what I have tried, how certain SO questions may look related but are still not giving me enough knowledge to solve my problem. I do my best to make a convincing argument that I need help and can't make it on my own. A few days later and I get my answer :) (and sometimes I figure it out myself which takes a while)

I agree with the HNers that say that someone needs to struggle a bit first. It's necessary to develop the emotional coping skills, because programming can have very frustrating moments. And they can answer "what have you tried?"

Beginners need to understand: why would I put more time into solving someone else's problems than the person asking me the question? I notice that a lot of friction comes from that place. Sometimes beginners don't realize it, but I've seen some lazy people as well. When I am on the beginning side I really try to take this into account and value the time of the expert.
There are only three reasons why people answer questions on stackoverflow:

1. fake internet points
2. a genuine interest in the question/problem
3. get paid to do it

I don't know anyone who sticks with stackoverflow very long if #1 is their primary motivation.

And group #3 is a pretty small percentage of users whose companies have off loaded support onto SO, but they are paid real money to answer whatever question someone posts, so they will put up with a lot.

But leaves, in my opinion, #2 is being the majority of people actually answer questions on stackoverflow. Which I think breaks down to an aspect of question-asking that is often overlooked. Given that I am not just waiting around to help you, then it is up to you, question-asker, to motivate me to want to take time out of my day to answer your question.

At the worst, are people who asks questions with a chip on their shoulder, as if the internet is broken or the people who wrote the documentation committed some personal foul against them, and its up to the rest of the internet to make it up to them. I have absolutely zero motivation to help that person. Then there are the people that but no effort into either composing the question or finding thier own answer, a question that can be answered trivially enough by copying the title of the question into google and looking at the results. Again, you have failed to motivate me to answer your question.

Then comes the good questions, the ones that tell a story, that entice me into wanting to help this person achieve their goals. I want to help you, but have other things to do, give me a reason to procrastinate and help you figure out your problem/misunderstanding. Tell me a story of what you are trying to do, what you tried and failed, let me see your thinking process that went into it. It's up to you to build a social bond that I care enough to help you.

That, to me, is your job as "the asker". Make me want to help you, and when it's done we can both feel good about what happened. If you can't take the time to do that, then there is little point in me helping you. I, honestly, have more important things I should be doing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11071521
"Conspiracy theory" is IMHO an intellectually lazy term in that as normally used it promotes blanket dismissal of an entire category of thing based on prejudice. Conspiracies can and do happen. If that weren't the case, the FBI would not have a "conspiracy" division.

As always it boils down to Ockham's Razor, which states that the simplest explanation is usually correct unless there is evidence otherwise.

Ockham's Razor in turn is probably a manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics. Complex artifacts in space and time (like conspiracies) represent higher energy states of the universe and therefore are less likely to exist. When the probability of something being true is below the median, the burden of proof shifts to proving that it does exist. The further below the median, the higher the burden of proof. For example: it would require stronger unambiguous evidence to convince me Bigfoot exists or that the Roswell UFO crash happened than it would to convince me that there were cover-ups in the Soviet space program. The latter is not terribly unlikely given what we know of Soviet behavior.
I think you're missing the point.

I'm proposing HN introduce a feature that exists on virtually every message board on the internet (i.e. blocking users). That's because its usefulness is well-recognised.

I fail to see what being here has to do with how precious my time is. My time is precious to me as soon as I start to value some experiences over others and decide which ones I consider valuable, and which ones I consider a waste. I don't have to be spending my every waking moment "hustling" to have a concept of value.

Reading comments from authors that I find interesting is a valuable use of my time.

Reading comments from authors that I find stupid and annoying is a waste of my time.

That's why I wish I could prevent that from happening.

"Not thinking" about the existence of such users is in no way a solution to that problem.
Why the Policy Fight Over Encryption Is at an Impasse
Yet, Google has announced they're playing with millimeter-wave networking from aerial drones and that was much better received for some reason....

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11009109
If this happens fairly often (within the last 30 years, according to the article), then how was the lake stocked with fish for local fishermen to have been making a livelihood on in the first place?
JC Penney just went through a complete meltdown because the CEO forced out honest pricing instead of the inflate-prices-and-have-sales that was their SOP for more than a generation.

Turns out their customer base really liked the sense of saving money, even though the straight forward pricing was actually saving them more money.

This kind of a thing feels unethical - especially to those with an analytical mindset like a lot of programmers. But the proof is in the pudding. People (at least older people in the U.S.) prefer bargain shopping to straightforward pricing.

Culturally, there are differences like this around the world. In Japan, they cannot grasp subscription models very well. In many places in the middle east, negotiation is just a part of shopping. In the U.S. we really like sales. In Russia, you get in line and then ask the people around you what it is that you are buying (granted, haven't been there since the 80s).
Just so I get this straight, you are claiming that America currently is the go to place for literature, art, philosophy, cinema and political thinking?

I'd accept such a claim for web scale technology and some other fields but for all of the above definitely not so much.
In Quebec, the CONSUMER PROTECTION ACT adequately protects consumers from such unfair practices :

225. No merchant, manufacturer or advertiser may, falsely, by any means whatever,

(a) invoke a price reduction;

(b) indicate a regular price or another reference price for goods or services;

(c) let it be believed that the price of certain goods or services is advantageous.

[...]

231. No merchant, manufacturer or advertiser may, by any means whatever, advertise goods or services of which he has an insufficient quantity to meet public demand unless mention is made in his advertisement that only a limited quantity of the goods or services is available and such quantity is indicated.

The merchant, manufacturer or advertiser who establishes to the satisfaction of the court that he had reasonable cause to believe that he could meet public demand or who offered the consumer, for the same price, other goods of the same nature and of an equal or greater cost price is not guilty of any infraction of this section.

I feel that the United States are a bit reluctant to protect their citizens.
If you check their comment history (which is very brief) you'll see they comment on a job posting for Talkfusion.
How do you decide not to read a comment before you've read it?
Endurance laser lab
https://snowdrift.coop isn't operating yet, but is steadily pushing ahead toward developing a new form of mutualised contract that works like this. Instead of a hard threshold like "nine others" it's "put in X per other who joins"

As, phkahler said, "Nobody wants to go first because they pay for everyone". That is the precise issue that game theorists call the "snowdrift dilemma" and that Snowdrift.coop is working to solve.
I have the camelcamelcamel chrome extension which shows me a price graph over time for any item on Amazon, and you can set alerts for when prices drop to a certain level. It's very useful, and because of it I already knew that the vast majority of amazon deals are not discounted at all.

Amazon items fluctuate a lot, maybe especially for baby items. But I got 30%+ discounts on car seats and strollers by setting a price alert and waiting a few months.
Life After Parse: What to Do Next?
Scrapinghub changed not only their pricing, but their pricing model! Guilty! :)

http://scrapinghub.com/pricing

https://web.archive.org/web/20150302014145/http://scrapinghu...

Edit: Joke was easier to get before they changed the HN title for this submission.
This image is actually from a recent earthquake in Taiwan, whereas Tofu dreg projects are mostly referring to low quality constructions in mainland China.
You're the worst kind of intelligent person tbh.

Why be a nitpicking pedant when it is clear this is intended as a throwaway exercise whose only application is predictive...?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11067166
> If someone lets a few rough edges on SO dissuade them from learning, they probably didn't care for any of this to begin with.

Or perhaps people have different levels of emotional sensitivity (for environmental or genetic reasons). I detest conflict and go to extremes to avoid it; thus I try to stay away from situations that entail a lot of negative interpersonal interaction. If I was just now learning to program, an abrasive comment on SO would not turn me off to programming, but it would make me dislike certain types of people more, and in the future I would steer clear of that particular website.
Tree-shaking versus dead code elimination
An Interview about Bitcoin and UK Regulatory Bodies Such as Bank of England
Show HN: KeepAndPlay.com Here is my 5 days side project
I was wondering whether it’s possible to successfully create a weekend project and if so, with which quality. Here at HN I’ve read many stories of random people (to me they are like teachers) creating “Show HN” projects in 48 hrs which are amazingly awesome and also hit the top site of HN.
So here I’m presenting mine: http://keepandplay.com. This is actually not a weekend project, I tried for it to be, but I failed. It actually took me 5 days to have it as it is right now. So I’m still profoundly skeptic on how to realize a 48 hrs side project with the look and feel and quality I would be satisfied with.

Here is how I spent most of the time. I worked between 8 and 14 hrs a day (I’m on vacation) - Searching and choosing a keepandplay.com domain - 2 hrs.

- Keepandplay backend - 1 day

- Logo design 6 hrs. I created 18 different prototypes

- Frontend design - 3 days. Even though this site looks really simple, designing it was really hard for me. Sometimes I found myself spending more time on design than on code. I basically took screenshots from similar sites (youtube, courser, onreplaytv, soundcloud, vimeo, vine, itunes, vevo) put them on an Omnigraffle page and compared all of them. Keepandplay is a combination of Soundcloud, Vine and OnreplayTV.

- Dealing with not required but necessary settings - 6 hrs

+ It’s hard to believe, but developing a “simple” (48 hrs) website has a lot of stuff going on:

- Responsive design from 320x480 to 1920x1080, not forgetting portrait and landscape

- Favicons - which sometimes requires different logo design since the image is not big

- Setting some analytics tracker. i.e. register, generate code…

- Register site on Google SEO site

I’m glad I’m finished now and I hope you guys like the outcome. If you do like it, do find it awesomely handy, then share it with all your friends and after that come back here and give some feedback. Thanks!
> Although we were part of the 20% (from that article) that didnt make it, we learnt a huge amount, and it helped inspire me to continue to work in the ed-tech space till today.

I read the article several times but I can't see where they talk about companies that didn't make it.

Also, I am sorry that your company failed. I know from personal experience that it can be hard to get people to use your education product, so glad that you are persevering and still working in that field.
Ask HN: Looking for a Windows 7 Update curator
In the past few months Microsoft has been pushing Windows 7 users hard to upgrade to Windows 10 and I understand they will be pushing harder still in the near future. Even after I have disabled and removed the GWX nags, other updates restored them. At best this is a game of whack-a-mole, but I consider it a violation of CFAA, because by removing GWX I told Microsoft I don't want it but they reinstalled it anyway and so that is an unauthorized access. (People have been prosecuted for much less.)

They are also adding what they call telemetry, but which I classify as spyware. Spying and ads are what some people accept as a consequence of receiving free hardware or software, but I paid for my computers and licenses, so I expect my OS vendor to respect that.

It's not necessary or useful to debate me on these issues. These are my current opinions, and until I learn otherwise I intend to manage my systems accordingly.

An inadvertent or forced upgrade to Windows 10 would be catastrophic to our workflow. Also, I will not be ceding control of my systems to unstoppable updates like we all have been forced to accept on our phones. Therefore, I turned off automatic updating, and now I am being forced to update manually, all because Microsoft blended their threats into their security update channel.

Sadly, the task of reviewing each update to evaluate whether it is benign or harmful is daunting. Microsoft's KB pages can sometimes help but are also very opaque and I would rather place my trust in a third party. I have accumulated a list of updates to avoid, mostly by combing through various forums. This method is inefficient and very likely fail-prone.

So, I just joined HN to ask: Does anyone know of an authoritative and trustworthy website that reviews Microsoft updates and provides lists of updates to avoid? Basically, I'm looking for a Microsoft Windows 7 update curator. What are my hacker friends doing about this?
"Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory" is an excellent book on related subjects.
What are the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris?

What would compel those who hang around Stackoverflow to be complete assholes to those who ask questions? Definitely hubris, and most probably impatience.

As a mediocre programmer I've been subject to ridicule from experts. I remember when I was trying to learn ExtJS (before is was Sencha) and for the life of me I could not get past a bug. I went on the ExtJS posting board.

Along the way I noticed one guy who answered replied to a lot of posts, but frequently not with an answer. It was more often than not to ridicule the original poster. Sometimes he would help but more often than not he would make a derogatory comment. I eventually broke down, and decided to post a question on the board, and within a short period of time the aforementioned guy replied, but did not provide a real answer. Something about 'you clearly don't know how to debug'. Yes dumbass, I can't figure it out that's why I'm asking.

I don't think any particular field has a shortage of arrogant know-it-alls that take pleasure in lording over the masses and gain pleasure out of humiliating those who they perceive as being beneath them. However programmers can be a funny lot, and without going too far out on a ledge there are quite a few of us who are brilliant at code but not so much in other areas of our lives.

Plus I have to wonder how many of us programmers have been on the receiving end of abuse in other areas of our lives, and take that repressed frustration out on others in the area we have confidence in.
More accurate spatial reasoning could also be due to the need to navigate a complex environment, such as during hunting.

It could also be due to males having larger brains.
Stupid Hackathon. It takes great knowledge to create stupidity
Stupid Hackathon took place last weekend. Once again, I'm blown away with the level of knowledge required to craft such stupid ideas.

Not just anyone can deconstruct how we interact with technology and then twist that on it's head to create insightful projects.

http://www.stupidhackathon.com/
Isn't C capacitance?
Where to find a web designer – 2016 version
forgive me for posting such a basic question but I have not had much luck with the elance's of the world. Where can one find a great designer these days for a single website design?
Technically viruses are not considered "alive" either
There actually has been quite a bit of work on this front. DrScheme, for example.

It's a very, very hard problem, though. And computers cannot, in general, figure out what's wrong with broken code.
Um, the fishermen stocked it. Lakes near any significant human population are stocked or they don't have fish.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11072467
> I had a friend who used to do that all the time. We'd be at a store, and he'd see something on sale that he had no intention of buying before he walked in. He'd buy it, and congratulate himself on "saving" money. I'd point out "no, you just spent $50 that you hadn't planned to spend." He just didn't see it that way.

Your reaction to this is to just be okay with entities profiting from the delusion of your friend?
The Robin Hood of Science
Seems to be geared towards mobile dev, how soon will this be web ready?
*second link should point to this: http://scroll.in/article/802128/indias-internet-regulator-ju...
Ok, we changed that phrase to a more neutral one in the title.
Opera Software Gets $1.2B Buyout Offer from Chinese Consortium
The company might be rogue but they do have a very strong security team.. maybe the best in China and one of the best in the world.
This was literally in the article.
Maybe you think I'm stupid and annoying today.

Maybe you forget my username and after some time you see a comment of mine that is insightful and meaningful.

Do you recognize the flaw in your logic?
Everyone's opinions are different and we all read for different reasons, but just because an article isn't a strictly factual, question->answer piece doesn't mean it's poorly written. As the article makes clear the answer is still unknown, therefore the purpose of the piece is to both show how science is done, even when it doesn't go as planned, and to get the reader thinking about something they may have never considered before about an animal many of us spend a lot of time with.
Feds Eye the 'Internet of Things' as Next Frontier in Spying
"Overcharging" compared to what? If you mean, compared to other stores selling the same product at the same time, consumers have access to the same information that this study did. If it's worth it to them to seek out a better deal, they have the information to do so. If they decide it's not worth it to them, how is that the store's fault?

What you are calling "overcharging" is actually just the free market at work. Stores vary prices in order to find out what the best price for them to charge is--"best" meaning the price that maximizes their profit. Customers evaluate prices in order to find out what the best price for them to pay is--"best" meaning the price that maximizes their benefit from the purchase--the value of the item to them minus the cost. But "cost" includeds the time and effort spent price searching, and different people place different values on their time and effort relative to other things.

So in a free market, you should expect to see different prices for the same product at the same time at different stores, because they are selling to different customers with different relative priorities. It would be a lot more suspicious to see the same item sold for exactly the same price at every store--that would mean the market is not a free market any more.
BTW - site is www.qonfigure.com
I'm from the Atlanta suburbs, and Comcast has been terrible here. 300GB data cap (as mentioned in the article), and they've been steadily jacking up the price (now $70 a month) for unimpressive (30 MBPS) speeds. For people who don't live in the area served by Google Fiber, the only real option to avoid the price hikes is to switch between Comcast and AT&T once per year to get the introductory rates.
I hate to be linking to Forbes but no one else is reporting on this besides some Chinese sites.
Deco Software – React Native IDE
Zero Day Initiative Announces Pwn2Own 2016
I don't understand, isn't it easier to get around this by keeping your foreign bank account balance low (less than 10k) and transferring money on a regular basis to your US bank accounts to make sure it stays under 10k?