skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IMHO, the problem is not disruption by outsiders. The worst cesspools I see are entirely in-group.

It seems to me that the in-group echo chamber becomes not a discussion, but a means for all to signal their right-thinking loyal membership of the group. Just over the last couple of days I've seen some awful stuff along these lines on Facebook, regarding the new opening on the Supreme Court. Someone will share a meme that was posted by one of their in-group pages. This turns into a bunch of "me too" replies, but each of them needs to share a comment that includes a non-clever pun based on misspelling an opponent's name, and many of which declare how evil the other side is and deserves whatever they get. (notice I'm not taking sides: I think this applies equally across the board)

The problem here is that from a few cheers that get the ball rolling, any semblance of discussion evaporates. It's like when the neighbor's dog barks in the middle of the night, so your own dog replies, and then another gets into the act, and pretty soon the cacophony has everyone awake - but nobody's any better off from knowing that there are a bunch of dogs in the neighborhood.

I don't know what the solution is, but I don't think that the problem is outsiders being disruptive - it's insiders clambering to signal their tribal membership.

EDIT: missed the "not" in first sentence. BIG difference!
As a profession supplicant, I'd expect the people I beg to be at least professional as well.
I wonder if they just bungled the translation from French to English? The marketing blurbs under "Easy", "Scalable", and "Powerful" are pretty hard to read, almost like they were output from one of those online translation systems.
You asked this guy why there weren't more female founders, so he gave you his personal opinion backed with his personal experience with his wife. Would you prefer that he lie to you instead?
Agreed. That's all the more reason why I dislike a lot of these software vendors. They deploy all sorts of "solutions engineers" that are essentially just an extension of the sales team and their solution to every problem is either buy more licenses or buy this module you didn't get the first time around. Sigh.
I didn't say anything about whether I agree with those ideas or not. Stated simply, I'd rather hear any given argument from someone who is intelligent than someone who isn't. Extraneous factors, such as the arguer's humility or tone of delivery, don't enter the picture for me when evaluating the merit of the idea being argued.
Exactly - it's too easy to say that Twitter is simply a reflection of society itself, technology is not a completely neutral pass-through filter.

The 140-character limit strips all nuance out of conversation, so it's no surprise that when it comes to controversial topics everyone is an asshole. It turns out we need more than 140 chars when talking about complicated, important topics.

More than that, Twitter's choice of how users relate to each other also contributes to the nastiness - it's a medium specifically designed so that a single message can traverse a huge portion of the user graph, and this causes a lot of problems.

On Facebook, if you post something stupid, insensitive, or generally moronic, at worst you'd have your friends (or friends-of-friends) telling you off, it almost never goes beyond that simply by nature of how friending works. FB's privacy settings (by default at least) literally prevents anything from being shared past N distance from you.

Ditto on old-school web forums - if you post something stupid, insensitive, or generally moronic, you'll at worst be dogpiled by the forum's own users, but that's it. The link may be spread around, but few people will sign up to some new phpBB webforum just to yell at your stupidity.

On Twitter though your tweet goes viral and traverses many, many different communities, each of which get to layer their own outrage on. More than that, they are all free to respond to you, without filters. The pile-on effect is the scariest we've seen from any social network in existence.

Reddit also suffers from a similar problem - communities cross into each other almost too easily, so brigades are common. At the very least though most subreddits are moderated, whereas Twitter is really a free for all. We've seen how well Twitter's abuse team handles overt death threats and other far-beyond-the-pale abuse (read: lol).

This might not be particularly insightful coming from someone who never really got into Twitter, but their whole model of user interaction is fundamentally defective.
Well, yes, there's no system that's truly value-neutral. (What would that even mean?) But generally speaking, I expect that the large social networks will try not to encourage open conflict between groups that would otherwise keep to themselves, to avoid driving members away. So this is a bias towards peacefulness rather than conflict.

One example of this is how resharing a post on Google+ starts a new comment thread underneath it. This allows posts to cross communities while somewhat discouraging them from mixing it up in the comments. (You can click on the original if you want to.)

The web does this too: a web page can be discussed in any number of forums, independently of each other, without conflict, by sharing the URL. Comments directly on the web page don't work that way, which is why they're so often worse.

If people are deliberately trying to fight, things get even more difficult. Banning people from your feed can sometimes work, but is vulnerable to sock-puppetry and doesn't scale to large groups.
Top Dating Sites to Find Rich Men – True-Rankings
How do you decide which approach to take to solve a problem?
Wait a second. Is this author saying that as a woman, she doesn't have any special insight into female users, isn't closer to the female audience, and doesn't bring any special female viewpoints into tech?

And in fact, the only similarity between her and another person is if the person is also an entrepreneur? There is no special female perspective, and therefore we don't get diversity of viewpoints or other cognitive benefits just by having more women?

That sure seems to contradict the narrative.
Saying something like "look at how pitiful feminism has become" is very obviously baiting and not productive in the slightest.
I respect the writer drawing this conclusion based on a conversation. But can we have the chat from the beginning instead of just a few texts starting from Honestly- I'm the wrong person to ask. I think mothers have more important things to do ... be mothers?

I am not taking the VC's side but let's see the entire chat then form an opinion as the said VC isn't here to defend himself.
Quitting jobs and moving without having the next job lined up. I always figured I was a smart guy, I could land on my feet wherever I ended up. And that was true, but it took some time and effort to get a job that lined up with my career goals, and while that was happening I was pretty stressed out. I also feel like I've lost about a year of growth (and salary!), which is hard to let go of.

I realize that this isn't really a big revelation, but it didn't really hit home for me until I got into a real "career" -- it wasn't such a big deal when I worked retail jobs.
I think that mental overhead is the steep learning curve that everyone talks about. I remember when I first started learning Emacs it was hard. I just had to think in this new way (I was used to cua style keystrokes), but after a month or so my muscle memory developed and I started not having to directly think about what I was doing. Once you get to that point, the overhead is gone and things become very nice.

But I'll grant you it's a hard sell to say "this is great, but you're going to be unproductive for a month". Nonetheless, I think the payout is very much worth it, and if you are interested, make sure you are prepared, and stick with it for a good long time before giving up.
> Because you only have a hammer, what do you expect?

That's right. But it's not that I have a hammer. I am the hammer. Ruby is an extension of my mind, just like how a fencer's sword becomes an extension of his arm.

Why in the world would a champion fencer stop spending 10+ hours a day practicing his art and start picking up axe throwing? Doesn't make any sense. It's not something you would do by choice.

I used to think that devs who bounced around languages and tech stacks were getting more well-rounded. Now I believe they are cheating themselves out of mastery.

> That is obviously not true. If I want to write a decision engine then Prolog is a good tool for that, if I want to write a high volume web-api then Go or Erlang is a good tool for that, if I want to write a kernel module then C is a good tool for that. And so on.

That's ridiculous. I can write a decision engine in Ruby. I can write a high-volume web-API using Rails. You can even write a kernel module with Ruby:

https://github.com/utshina/mruby-lkm
California Dreaming – The Great Migration from California
Haha I agree. ELI9ish-and-already-quite-into-science?
The other company that should be able to do this well is Samsung (they make TVs, phones and other consumer electronic items). In reality (and I own a Samsung Smart TV and have owned Galaxys) I felt their software was extremely crappy and I just ended up avoiding it.
> baby w/ the bath water when trying to come up w/ an … w/

Would you mind writing "with"? It's two extra characters, but it makes the sentence much more readable. (Words are recognized by shape, especially the shortest ones.)
Please don't.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11102752 and marked it off-topic.
It is almost like humans are tribal and will defend their own tribe and attack other tribes.
This is still quite a bit more work than publishing to npm:

1. Jump to separate repository

2. Create a .tar.gz with sensitive filename

3. "upload somewhere"

4. Manually update formula, sha, version

4. Push

Versus:

1. npm bump && npm publish

I ended up automating the formula updating after getting tired of doing that every other day, for a private tap.
How to build a $200 smart drone with the Pi Zero
> When you ask me about having it all, or how am I going to manage my kids, I seriously think that you are insane. Because in my head, I can’t imagine a scenario where you trust someone with millions of dollars to run a business but think that they don’t know how to deal with childcare.

Is that not why they ask the question then?? If they don't think someone can handle childcare, then the author is right, they won't trust that person with millions of dollars.
What happened when a NASA astronaut got harassed on Twitter
Is there a PostgreSQL that anyone here can recommend?
The reason I choose to work with MVC frameworks is because more often than not other people work on my code with me.

If I would create my own abstractions it would be good for me but very, very bad for others.
Kanye album launch pushes Tidal to the top US app
My new year resolution was to learn Erlang. I am implementing a simple REST service with it and I'm loving its approach to concurrency and terseness. It is indeed a beautiful language.
I am student at UC Irvine. I genuinely believe there is a back-door allowing these kids to buy their way in. You can't believe the lack of skills and extravagances you see. I saw someone offering $250 for anyone to drop a specific class, so that room would open. I suspect fake degrees. There has been numerous instances of Paid Test Takers. Most classes we literally now have to show our ID when we turn in a test, as a result of this cheating
Changing the API design because a frontend dev doesn't like the style is definitely an anti-pattern. Customising APIs for every imaginable use case will get painful fast!

Angular does have powerful services to transform objects. For example last week a library (ngTagInput) was expecting a list of objects with {id, name} however the server was returning a list of integer id's. It was trivial to replace the id with the {id, name} object in the service, without requiring changes to either the library or the back end - the API is still generic.
The problem isn't the occasional disagreement, it's when communities raid each other, since people are much more brazen online than in person. In person, thousands of atheists would never march into a church during mass and start berating members for their beliefs, but that's very common in unmoderated communities. Moderation solves this issue when you can shard your communities (see reddit), but Twitter is just a global blob. Whose going to moderate it?
Synthesizing position from multiple inputs sounds like a process analogous to a Kalman filter.
> That means you'd like to get results from that person earlier than he/she leaves.

You don't invest in capital just to solve problems. You hire a specialist / contractor / consultant. You invest in capital if you expect the problem to recur often enough to make the investment worthwhile.
UX is hard indeed. If your UI improvements need back-end changes consider having a look at GitLab, we would be happy to collaborate.
That would be referring to this? http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/304/media/images/61357000/jpg/_...

Sorry but no. That's visually like the iOS 7 implementation which is so hard to use. The exact one I complained about.

There's far more to a good UI than just the basic idea — even the requirement of the iPhone's 60 FPS prioritised animation rendering and good finger tracking helped make that digital representation so intuitive.

Also the recovery animations (what happens when you don't finish the slide), the ability to slide back and forth with tracking (e.g., in that Neonode screenshot it says "swipe" indicating a single gesture, not a continuous one). And how the screen transitions from completed slide to home screen. These are important details that you have completely overlooked in your claim.

I even mentioned the important element of the visual "track" in which the button slides as part of the key features, which is nowhere to be found in the images I saw for Neonode. Apple even used a text-sheen animation in the direction of the slide to visually hint at the direction, that required masking an animated gradient into text back on the original iPhone hardware.

Obviously sliding mechanisms existed in physical reality prior to iPhone. I'm not sure why that's relevant as it's part of what makes the digital version intuitive.

Apple introduced this interface. The Neonode one is not even in the same universe of usability, design or details.
This article reminds me of a great talk by Truecar at Hadoop Summit 2015 in San Jose about how they build their Hadoop cluster. One of the takeaways from the talk was that Truecar focused on training their team on basic Hadoop programming techniques, such as teaching everyone how to implement map/reduce in Java. The presenters felt this was critical to their success, which they measured both in cost of the analytic processing compared to existing solutions as well as the new analytic opportunities it opened up.

Among other benefits, training allowed them to step up quickly to solving real problems rather than doing time-wasting POCs.

Unfortunately the talk is not posted online that I can find but it was a great antidote to silver bullet technology fixes. Ironically the conference had a huge vendor pavilion with about 100 companies trying to sell silver bullets.
I've been forcefully switched to OS X recently because work, and overall it's been pretty great (I view it as a well-integrated UI over FreeBSD). A couple of things drive me nuts though:

* (the window manager sucks, but that's not the topic. I had to get it out)

* it needs a good package manager

For us ol' bearded folk (at least spiritually), OS X comes with a slew of unix tools we love. It already includes both vim AND emacs! However, these tools are hopelessly outdated: Despite OS X 10.11 "El Capitan" coming out last fall, Vim is still 7.3 (that's from August 2010. 2010!), and Emacs 22 (2007. That's right.)

So some enterprising folk come to the rescue: Fink, Homebrew, Macports...

Homebrew installs over /usr, so come the next OS update, all that gets squashed. Macports installs into /opt/local, but somehow doesn't survive an OS update. Also, when I tried installing SciPy it went and recompiled GCC4 from source. Guys, the 90s called, and it's been shown that recompiling from source for each user isn't worth the effort.

Apple gave MacPorts some support in the form of equipment, so there's some hints of their preferred method. But the core WTF is this: why doesn't OSX integrate a package manager for its unixy side?
That's the job of good moderation I think.
We're hearing about troubles at Nest
Your personal info on Facebook really stays on Facebook?
These threads on HN are always extremely rough to read. I wonder what would need to happen for a more productive conversation around this topic to be possible? More participation, more moderation, better understanding, what would it take?
A VC should focus on the profitability of the investment, everything else is potentially noise.
I find the method described in the post to be cleaner UX. Sure, it requires a little extra work on your part to setup, but running a single `brew install octavore/tools/delta` is much nicer and easier to remember than

brew tap octavore/delta https://github.com/octavore/delta.git
brew install delta
Traits are available since PHP 5.4.
I have an analogous problem with my UI guy hat on.

I want to develop a UI that makes a complicated product simple, so users can actually use the features effectively and get their job done. I don't want to build a system that is just putting pretty colours on a convoluted mess of configuration settings and interacting corner cases. That's what some of my clients' competitors do, and their customers have to spend a fortune on consultancy just to make the box work, and my clients pay me because hopefully I'll do better.

Oh, wait, back up. My clients' competitors are making a fortune in consultancy because their customers can't make their boxes work. Good UI is an anti-feature if you can sucker customers into paying for consultancy as well as your product but you can't reliably convince customers to pay more for a product that is better in the first place even if it's cheaper overall, and both of those things may be true more often than we'd like to admit.

This does not leave me in a comfortable position either commercially or ethically.
Seconded, artist mode is great for this stuff.

Separately, check out plantuml for diagrams from text http://plantuml.com/
> PDP-11 command line experience is not even there.

Are you saying the modern unix command line is not as good/better than the "PDP-11 command line experience"?

Also, which PDP-11 command line? RSTS? RT11? Unix? or maybe that awesome front panel where you had to manually input your boot loader in binary every time you started the machine?
List 24K dirs takes 1700 seconds in AWS S3
I think the "natural" structure of the big-data/data-science/data-analytics/machine-learning market is that of a number of small vertical-focused consultancies, each using a handful of very narrowly-focused tools to solve specific problems.

Data science is an interesting market for three main reasons:

1.) The client owns the data.

2.) The skills needed to effectively manipulate the data are very tied up with domain knowledge of the data itself. This tends to throw people accustomed to the rest of the software industry for a loop: if you're a frontend engineer, your effectiveness is much more based on your knowledge of JS/iOS/Android than on your knowledge of the clients' problem. But when I watched the best data-scientists at Google work (and did some unstructured data-mining and machine-learning myself), I found that the majority of your time is actually spent looking at data - it's pulling examples, collecting golden sets, determining outliers, graphing data, etc. And it's often non-transferrable: people who were very effective with the News corpus were often totally ineffective with Social, people familiar with the Web corpus might be ineffective with News, etc.

3.) You often need an interdisciplinary grab bag of tools to get useful insights. The most effective data scientists at Google were the ones who knew some basic HTML and JS or Flash charting libraries, because they could really quickly graph their data and send the graphs around for comments. Deep knowledge of machine-learning is usually less effective than pragmatic knowledge of machine-learning combined with a basic knowledge of stats combined with an intuitive sense of the users who're generating all this data combined with basic presentation skills.

This makes it very difficult to develop effective all-in-one tools that are broadly applicable. Unfortunately, many VCs follow the hype machine and aren't interested in consulting businesses, which means that a lot of money has chased the last wave and not gone into efficiently solving problems. There's probably a tradeable business opportunity here, but I have little interest in going into consulting, so unfortunately I'm not the one that can take advantage of it...
Yeah, they have the power to make decisions on whatever backwards reactionary criteria they want, since they have all the money (who's arguing that?), but super hot take here: that's actually bad. Actually, that's pretty much the definition of structural sexism (which is bad).
Demo of “sense2vec” (word2vec on tagged and parsed text) on 2015 Reddit comments
> "defending family values"

Which is what I hear exclusively regarding Christian activists. They disregard any non-Christians whom have families, or of other value systems.
Show HN: Parsing HTML5 in OCaml, concurrently
That's not playing devil's advocate, it's constructing a false dichotomy.

As a counter-example, are you saying that the best way to have a discussion about Young Earthers is to give them equal space in every geology textbook?

I don't think you're saying that, and I don't think I'm saying that we as a society should mask our problems.
Might have been spending too much time on the internet.
For those asking about an ELI5 explanation, MIT released a video on Youtube that's very clear:

https://youtu.be/RLI6QW2x4Lg
And suddenly it appeared again without comment. The ways of HN are mysterious :)
"There is no friendly way to say it, the mass market are morons."

Yes there is, to some extent. The trick is to start with observations, not interpretations. If you ask a really angry guy "Why are you angry?" chances are the reply is "I AM NOT ANGRY", possibly combined with a punch to your nose. Instead, ask "Why are you slamming with doors?". That starts the discussion with something that is harder to deny, and doesn't directly relate to the person, but only to his behavior, which he can change. Because of that, you are less likely to be punched, and it is more likely that you will get the answer "Because I am angry", which can be followed up with a discussion about the why, about whether he likes to be angry, and about the fact that you don't like it, either. If you want to be really inoffensive, start with "I don't like the noise of those slamming doors", but that feels a bit too indirect to me.

Similarly, don't say the mass market are morons, say they behave like morons or, even better, that they come over as morons on the Internet (my theory is that that is because people do not see facial expressions there) That not only is more polite, but likely also closer to the truth. At least, I haven't met someone who is like a real life Internet troll.
At first, I was thinking that "your wife" was a stand-in for someone who is not involved with your business, in the context of figuring out who your customers are.
Given both the outdated vim/emacs/etc. releases and they've handled the Mac App Store, would you want Apple to be running the platform's main package manager?

Do I wish the 3rd party ones could be better integrated with the OS? Sure. But I'm definitely thankful it isn't Apple calling the shots (or more likely, releasing it and then refusing to call any shots at all for 8 years).