skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's entirely relevant that the author's app, secret, didn't likely fail because it was an anonymous, but rather the opposite -- there was a drop off in usage when it became public that messages posted on secret weren't really secret http://www.wired.com/2014/08/secret/.
I think the larger context is being missed. Any sort of open-to-the-masses forum will be gamed by people trying to get more out of it than you. More karma, more exposure, more information, whatever. Every system like this is eventually taken over by people who increasingly amass more power or influence, drowning out the "little" guy. It's probably easiest to see the direct actions taken by marketers and promoters, and you can say that all the voting and influence is just the way the systems work, but it's all politics and wrangling, in every platform, including this one. The key is to find ones that do a good job mitigating this gaming, as I believe HN does. It's ironic. If you have something to say, you want to do it at a place that can help amplify you, but if a place is good at that, it will attract bad actors, and it becomes self-limiting.

EDIT: I think this is why I continue to use Reddit. I created an account to subscribe to only a sub-section of subreddits, and none of them are defaults. It's what Reddit intended to be before it became what it is today. I get most of the benefit of "the platform," while avoiding _most_ of the bad actors.
Yeah, soon we will be like "God forbid if we run out of terrorists.." because peace could really ruin our economy.
The recent use of PMCs is odious and outsize, and it contributes to domestic problems like police militarization, treating protesters like terrorists, and overall brutality in policing. People like Erik Prince earned their reputation for evil. nobody is required to participate in massacres, torture, and other accoutrements of a war of aggression. Anyone who chooses to do so is culpable. Erik Prince is not just culpable, he is a willing enabler.
Yes. Many mathematical concepts didn't click for me in the math lectures.

The "aha"-moments I got in "computer graphics", "audio engineering", and "artificial intelligence"
That's decidedly not true. Nor is this about customization of workflows. I am talking about actual unadulterated power to do things you cannot do in an IDE. All IDEs optimize for the average use case. If they do expose a set of advanced commands or transformations, they are hidden deep in the menus and what you can do with them is extremely rigid and limited. At most you have a few dozen commands (you would call them menus) available.

Compare that to couple of thousand commands available on the command line that do all sorts of things and that can be combined in useful, creative and often times unexpected ways. All that in addition to having a programmable command interpreter (i.e. the shell itself) that allows you to automated things you do often. Vim is often described as programming your text transformations, well command line is programming your workflow, but it is also more powerful because of the shear number of commands available.
I think because in Italy the different models are called "man bicycle" and "woman bycicle" ("bici da uomo" and "bici da donna", respectively). How are they called in English?
Your point suggest people are actually thinking about it, while discussions I had in the past show, to the contrary, a complete lack of thinking and a full emotional reaction, even way after the fact.
The marketing "assholes" would be the ones most capable of paying to publish. (Publish press releases actually costs money!)

The supposed problem on Medium isn't automated spam, it's marketing.
Where the hell are great senior developers and hands-on engineering directors?
You let entrepreneurs make billion-dollar fortunes on war, they're going to make wars keep happening.

Roosevelt said 'not one war millionaire' from WWII and it's one of the things that made WWII legitimate and successful.

Adventurers wearing the mantle of patriotism while enriching themselves and leaving a trail of destruction and hatred that will last for generations are one of the things that made Iraq and Afghanistan a travesty.
Probably because more people haven't heard of it and Hugo doesn't spend nearly as much on brand awareness as Medium does.
How does this apply to open source? Eg, if two people used PGP, their email providers couldn't decrypt their communications. Would the PGP authors/maintainers get in trouble for being unable to help? Does this effectively make it illegal to create end-to-end encryption tools for users?
The Most Important Question to Ask When Designing a Mobile App
GE 3D prints prototype desk-size CO2 turbine that can power a small town
What I meant to say, sorry for my poor English, was that there isn't one single reason. Lack of resources is one reason, lack of Guanxi is another, lack of money management skills is another, lack of a mindest to improve oneself is one as well, etc. There are also indirect causes, like not going to the gym, therefore having poorer health, therefore perform worse and spend more money/time on medical treatments.

Not having a single dimensional problem means you can't resolve one dimension of the problem and expect the problem to go away. E.g. you give money to a poor guy, he will still be poor 5 years later, you give education to a poor guy, he will still be poor 5 years later (if he even accepts it in the first place).

Hard to read was the article because it assumes this multidimensional problem to be one dimensional and then argues that the source is not single-dimension A but single-dimension B. Both is based on an assumption I disagree on, despite all the details possibly being correct.
If you can drive 5 minutes and still be in town, it's not "small".
If this were to be deployed, I wonder what the comparison between the number of people that would be killed, assaulted, strip searched, scared, delayed etc. by false positives vs. terrorism
It’s a video game convention as well.
Exactly, terrorism is a high-variance event and we can't extrapolate that future violence will resemble current violence. A single catastrophic attack, like a nuke in a city, makes everything that happened before irrelevant. 9/11 itself was a huge escalation, the most deadly terrorist attack in history by far. Future death tolls are limited only by the capabilities of the terrorists and our ability to stop them. They would kill millions of us if they could.
Yes, it's argument from the classic "80/20 myth" post by Joel Spolsky (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html). The more people you want to reach with your software, the more bloated it has to become to be successful. The only choices are to accept and embrace that fact, or split the feature set and write variations on the software aimed at different niches.
Coal giant Peabody files for bankruptcy protection in US
Medium's openness to everyone - even, shock horror, businesspeople - rather than a pretentious clique of self-described artists with rich parents - is its great strength. It's why it's succeeded over the likes of svbtle. The democratization of content is the heart of the web's success, and you have to take the bad with the good.

Curation/recommendation is a hard problem that needs work. But I sincerely hope that Medium continues to offer a great platform for anyone to write, about anything. That's worth paying a lot for.
What I hate is that good tools for this like UCL go ignored or forgotten while JSON formats grow like weeds, and even excellent people like Hashicorp wind up contributing to this serious problem.
He complains in a very infantile way about "Business types" who only cares about selling an idea, but ultimately he's leaving Medium because it's a bad marketing decision for him. He says he doesn't want to be associated with medium because it conveys an image of bad content that he does not think it's good for his artwork. He's leaving Medium because of his personal brand.

There's nothing on Medium itself that inhibit the display of the art he wants to share. Medium as an platform, it's enough for his needs. But it is the brand and the marketing aspect of it that he does not like. He is not that different from those "business types". He doesn't see just a platform for sharing content, he sees a brand, and this brand is bringing a negative value to his own brand as an artist.

Besides, this world view of "business types" and "artists" is simplistic and childish, is a persuasive argument to convince us of the legitimacy of his artwork. It is Another marketing strategy: I am the real artist, my artwork is of original legitimacy, different from this capitalist world we live in.

He is obnoxious, loud, and his reasons are contradictory.

Even though he has a point: There's too much self-help on Medium.
Turning Central Asia's Ancient, Mesmerizing Patterns into Code
I think humans have a cognitive bias that makes them fear risks more if they perceive "ill will" behind it.

A natural disaster is scary and can kill a lot of people, but to most people it feels more impersonal.

When someone is targeting people directly (serial killers, murderers, terrorists) it feels scarier because there is an intention to harm.

This bias is stronger that probability. Even if someone lived near a volcano that had a 5% chance of killing you every year, I bet that same person would be more scared of a terror attack that had .01% chance of killing you per year.

This is reflected in our legal institutions. If you kill a person accidentally, even through neglect, that is involuntary manslaughter, but if you kill deliberately, that is murder.
That is an honourable goal. I wonder whether it would be the best bang for buck in terms of quality adjusted life years gained per dollar spent?
I have not found this to be the case with Spacemacs. Almost everything you need is bound to keystrokes using space as the leader key in the spirit of vim. As a long-time and fairly advanced vim user I recommend Spacemacs highly.
Speculating on how a stranger's emotional state influenced their stated opinion, based only on their internet posts, is impossible to judge and that isn't terribly productive in conversation.
You pasted the quote twice.
So...silence the people calling for silencing?
>They love to move into places where artists live and raise the cost of living and build their crappy chain stores and push us out.

To be fair, they're still part of the gentrification cycle.
Plan?

First, get news media to lift their embargo on trying to understand the motivations of people who perpetrate these awful attacks. Right now, it seems the only acceptable explanation is comic-book evil plus religious prejudice ("they hate our freedoms!"). This is basically a taboo on the application of reason, and we'll get nowhere until it goes away.

Second, reflect a little on the possible motivations of these people.

Third, I suspect, attempt to persuade Western governments to stop (or significantly scale back) blowing people up, murdering them without trial, etc, in other parts of the world. Best estimates for the body count in Iraq, for example, are in the many hundreds of thousands, and many of those cannot be combatants. I absolutely condemn terrorism, but if I were a terrorist, I'm pretty sure this would be my motivation.
Not a Slump for Some
I think, this is one part of the terror: they show how they can hurt while using inefficient techniques (craft knives for the 9/11).
A deal is a deal. If you want to retain the option to change your mind and sue people over IP, then that is your decision. I won't be enabling that kind of behavior, nor will I donate code to it.

The best option would of course be that the law was changed and IP abolished by political change. Copyleft and permissive licenses would go away, artist could stand on the shoulders of giants without fear, and compensation would be addressed before the art was made rather than afterward. A fitting end to the flame wars.
Even inherited flats are often very old or located in abandoned cities. And also it means young families have to live with parents, and it's just the worst part.
I read the Elon musk biography, I was pretty disappointed with it tbh, it focussed very little on the company side and was mostly a fluff piece about all the drama surrounding him and his companies.

I get why they did it that way but I walked away not really learning anything I didn't already know.
Banach-Tarski is a good argument not to rely on AC and stay within, for example, constructive analyzes if one wants however small but a notion of practicality in the results.
If panic is to be averted, the leadership of the West has to show that they take the problem seriously. As long as people are tiptoeing around even calling the problem what it is, hard-line sentiment will grow.

Tony Blair had some good thoughts on this lately:
""The centre has become flabby and unwilling to take people on. We concede far too much. There's this idea that you're part of an elite if you think in terms of respectful tolerance towards other people. It's ridiculous [...] You have to give a real solution and not one which is populist but false. If you don't give a solution, and you leave people with a choice between what I would call a bit of flabby liberalism and the hardline, they'll take the hardline I'm afraid."
Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/education-35862598
Yes it was. And now Vim is getting those features as well.
I hope Medium have stayed invite-only. It's really hard to keep the content high quality when a lot of people flood in. The atmosphere changes, and that changes the culture and everything.

And I'm really sad that Signal v. Noise has moved to Medium, too. I miss the "Happy Monday" every time I come to the site. It feels like walking in a local bakery and having a friendly chat with the waitress. It's a warmth and sincerity I seldom find in today's websites.
I've never been comfortable with the FB app phoning home so I too use the mobile website. The thing about it is that the text fields don't work well at all. Slow response times, no way to go back and correct my errors without erasing everything, and repetition of words. Over the years and across browsers the issues change but they've never worked like most other text fields on mobile websites. I wish I knew what they were doing to make them behave so poorly.
This is definitely the case in photos. When I draw a bike it's always pointing to the right, because that's how most pictures I see/take are.
> trains

Speaking of which, the dumbest NYT editorial I've read in the past decade was their nonsensical insistence on airport-style security for "international trains" in Europe.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/opinion/heroes-thwart-a-tr...

Trains are not an especially interesting target for terrorists! I have no idea how this piece could have been written without any of the editors putting the tiniest bit of thought into the basic premise.
Doesn't YAML fill the same slot, allow comments, and allow much saner human interaction? And as a bonus it's 100% (?) convertible to JSON (minus comments of course)
I think the best bit is, Site Best Viewed in 1366 x 768 Resolution
Don't you feel like you're pushing a square peg into a round hole? Or do you actually find yourself taking advantage of elisp in harmonious combination with Vim's editing UX?
> I hope Medium have stayed invite-only.

They haven't. Anyone can sign up now.
Singapore PM Lee Hsien Loong's Interview with Wall Street Journal
Wasn't the internet a direct result of government funded military research? I'm all for boycotting war but I think there is some value in that research.

EDIT: Okay, he addressed that point in his article. However, I'd like to double down on that objection. In this fantastic video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87WK_7lkrVg ), Physicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson argues how great projects come into being. He names 3 main drivers: 1. Religion and serving deities (mostly irrelevant in the western world, how the pyramids got built), 2. through economic incentives and 3. as a survival instinct (war). Historically, it's always been one of the three. I think military research is essential for progress and we need other paths to make sure that our nation does not go to war. The solution to war is not scientific ignorance, it's a pacifist population.
A reactionary is a person who holds political views that favor a return to the status quo ante, the previous political state of society, which they believe possessed characteristics (discipline, respect for authority, etc.) that are negatively absent from the contemporary status quo of a society. As an adjective, the word reactionary describes points of view and policies meant to restore the status quo ante.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary
I wasn't trying to disprove your point!

It's interesting that there is this huge contingent of programmers who have a picture of what they would do if they had basic income, and that that picture is very different from what they do at their "day jobs."

It's part of why I think basic income experiments are so very interesting. Just this question of what would people do? What new things would happen? How would software change? How would everything else change?
The article doesn't even begin to tell us why it's harder to stop multinationals. How to stop them what?

This seems like a PR piece for multinationals. Having set the tone of the article he barely touches multinationals aside from how accountable they are. Which clearly they are not. He's talking about national organisations in developing and corrupt locations. That's not exactly new.

If the conditions in Angola or Bangladesh are so bleak and unregulated why do we permit any trade or multinationals to do business there? If the country couldn't trade on the world stage until some level of accountability and minimum standards of treatment were met, perhaps things would change.

Our systems never evolved to cope with trans-national corporations, having evolved to regulate national corporations. We're comparatively powerless to regulate a multinational.

Having got to the size and power they are they can bankroll, fund, lobby and threaten to move their 20k employee operations elsewhere. They can play creative games with national tax codes, and may have an entire department with some very clever minds doing just that. Governments are impotent in response.

It doesn't help that modern-day politicians are almost always wealthy, even those of the left, meaning they're investing and thinking in the same way. It's a rare bird indeed that votes or instigates legislation against their own interests.

The olde-worlde politician who had made their way in the world as businessperson, doctor, union official or what have you then became a politician to give something back to the world is a quaint memory of former times. Altruism isn't profitable.

The young property and investing MP worth millions is less likely to introduce measures to produce genuinely affordable housing (build enough homes), or to severely clip the wings of the investment banks or multinationals. They'd be killing their own income for life too.

The chief shareholders in these businesses, the pension and investment funds, would also have to vote against their own interests. Return is everything. Free trade is everything. Advocating for better worker conditions does not provide a return to their pensioners.

The OECD exists to promote the market as the answer for everything.

So who is left to "stop the multinational"? Greenpeace? I'm not even sure from this article what we're stopping them from. Or are they all acknowledged chronic abusers of human rights?

I don't have a fix. I'm not even sure it's fixable at this point. Certainly not by writing pieces telling us how bleak internal conditions are in Zimbabwe.
I think they mean Anil Dash - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anil_Dash
Vim stands for vi improved and started on the Amega in 1991 so almost 25 years old. Certain people still use vi which was an improvement over ed August 1969 (Though I have been known to use ed in scripts from time to time).
Brooks saddles are a nice touch :)
>America's use of PMCs is as old, actually older, than the country itself

That doesn't make it right.

The use of slaves is older than the country itself too...
... the same job in the same environment coming from the same background. If you've spent 5 years at university training yourself in vim or emacs, it makes sense to keep using that; if you've started on the job with jEdit or whatnot, it's hard to justify giving up high productivity for several years for some random promise of even-better riches down the line.
> Future death tolls are limited only by the capabilities of the terrorists and our ability to stop them. They would kill millions of us if they could

This is rather sensationalist. There are infinite ways that anyone with a bit of intelligence could hurt or kill large numbers of people with small arms, explosives, chemicals, vehicles etc - and yet we see time and time again that terrorists usually display extreme incompetence (e.g. underpants bomber). The few terrorists that there are, just aren't very good at it.

The idea of terrorists getting hold of a nuke and actually being able to use it effectively is, frankly, ridiculous.
Agh. I have a sensitive Insert key - I can just tap it without depressing it, and it fires. This is the first time it's failed me this badly :D

Fixed, thanks!
You'd have to add a validator to disallow some of the weirder YAML syntaxes. And once you have such a validator, you have neither JSON (it won't parse) nor YAML (it's dangerous to parse the file as YAML without running it through the validator first).
> Tony Blair had some good thoughts on this lately

Sorry, but Tony Blair is a war criminal - why on earth would anyone care what he has to say?
Inside the Nondescript Building Where Trillions Trade Each Day
> renders -> photoshop clarification was genuinely more useful

Except 'the clarification' is wrong. If you have a render, it doesn't mean it's 3D. It can be 3D, 2D, a mixture of both (last is probably the most frequent). It's a render.

This question can be more important than you think, since people may have the wrong expectations when they get a 'render' from the industry. Good post-processing (color balance, a bit of motion blur and other small effects) can work wonders to show off a product (e.g. video-game), while not being so representative of the end result. Which explains then the disclaimers on trailers and screenshots, which are not there to be pedantic.

Anyway, I'm off sending Wittgenstein to the camps.
He's leaving Medium because of his personal brand.

Congratulations. You possess exactly the lack of irony necessary to have just proved his point for him.

What if I told you there are more ways of looking at the world than market-capitalist terms? That some people value things on whole different axes than what will and will not make them more money?
I wanted to write a technical article and medium seemed like a good place to publish it. The analytics were simple and didn't require additional set up and I was hoping to reach a different audience from publishing on medium. Overall I was satisfied, but might switch to a static site generator like you said for a couple reasons. The code style is clunky and doesn't highlight syntax and I believe HN penalizes medium articles in its algorithms.

A couple other people have submitted my article and I've watched the posts climb in (~10) votes and almost make it to the front page and then magically disappear. I've tried resubmitted a number of times to no avail. From what I've read it's because medium articles are devalued here. I put a lot of work into that article and while it did get a decent amount of views (~15k) and was on High Scalability, I am pretty discouraged that I couldn't share it with the HN community.
Private firms at heart of US drone warfare
Oh they are. They just haven't applied for the proper permissions, while Embraer has. The problem here seems to be that Prince wanted to modify planes in secret, without obtaining necessary permits.