skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Difference between 1st, 2nd, and 10th comes down to talent and a bit of luck.

In a sufficiently competitive field, the difference between 1st and 10,000th comes down to talent and luck.

Chess is incredibly instructive in this respect. Some players soar through the rankings in their teens with remarkably little effort; some battle on for years with little to show for it. Some very promising players just run out of talent and hit a hard ceiling on their rank, while others keep finding room for improvement.

I agree with the broad thrust of the linked article - there's a real cruelty to the 10,000 hour rule.
What's this got to do with anything in the OP? Did the OP say anything to the contrary?

It is appropriate that we readers/"consumers" have an interest in how our sources of information are controlled.
> If you want to be super paranoid, add a keychain usb stick as a required key to decrypt the filesystem so you get 2-factor authentication.

If you do this, make sure to have a backup! Flash drives don't last forever, and are easier to lose than a laptop.
Archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20170313124045/http://sangaline.c...
I didn't understand why the guy's PayPal story was removed from the front page -- the one about PayPal seizing a $40k USD balance without warning, allegedly due to a 2% chargeback rate over several years of doing business and hundreds of thousands of dollars in successful transactions.

I thought that the point of HN was auto-moderation? Perhaps now that HN has seen great increases in popularity, the quality of content has to be more carefully controlled, lest the quality of posts on the HN front page slowly enter a death spiral towards that of reddit.

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” ― George Carlin
And all of the code for the NASA HR system, and budget management tools, and conference system, etc. The Facebook code base is not just the web pages you see and backend to serve them, but encompasses just about everything used to run the company. It is also built and maintained by a much smaller group of coders for a much more ambiguous target domain. (And no, I do not think that the NASA domain is in any way more difficult than Facebook's.) I guess I have to question the relevancy of your counter-example.
First+impression+of+new+MGCOOL+Explorer+1S:+good+quality+with+low+price
As much as I like HN, I'm not a big fan of the secrecy around moderator interventions - what gets censored, what posts get re-titled, etc.

I can understand they might want to keep the ranking algorithm and anti-spam techniques secret, but stuff that are manually censored by a moderator should be indicated as such, maybe by some automatic message like "This post was removed due to [reason]".

Some websites manage to fight spam while remaining reasonably transparent (eg. StackExchange, where pretty much everything is documented - flags, closing reasons, edits, etc.).
Three Tactics for Improving Your Social Awareness
A different legal environment leads to different outcomes. Mostly my personal interactions with unions involve not being allowed to plug in my computer because "That's a union job" and so losing a day of productivity waiting around for them.

And then there's the actions of police unions in encouraging officer impunity.
Hey! Please take a look at our daily blog! http://www.vinta.com.br/lessons-learned/

We are compiling our daily learning on this blog. The posts are mainly related to web development.
It's very interesting to note the number one pulled story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13741276.

If you take a look at the comments, it's theorized there that the story got pulled not because of moderator action, but because people abused the flagging mechanism. Given the content, and given the principal person under discussion, this seems pretty likely to me.
How does one measure productivity?
I made a trello board, lot more fun and you can use an android widget to add things quickly into the inbox :) http://i.imgur.com/dbH8yGq.png
This is technically true but misses important social aspects: does the average HN reader know which stories were removed at all, and why? If a certain political viewpoint, criticism of popular companies, etc. is being moderated or flag-killed that'll come as a surprise to anyone who never saw it and would have been interested if they'd had the chance.
The Union has long operated as internal colonialism; this is just the next step in de-colonising the system.

It'll be interesting to see how often Conservative ministers promise that there will be no border between UK and ROI but there will be a hard border between England and Scotland, despite none of this making any sense.
WhatsApp is far from a CRUD app. Designing a messaging system to scale like they did, as cheap as they did, is a work of art.
Open Source Software with Mattias Karlsson (audio)
Perfect! It has solved the exact problem I run into. Thanks.
Historically, the mods have not killed a post for discussing Hacker News meta, although on occasion they apply a penalty to meta submissions. (the original post only had 32 upvotes, which is enough to get swallowed)

Indeed, HN recently allowed a post that advocated gaming the system because it encouraged debate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676362

A conspiracy theory, even backed by data, is not the best application of Occam's Razor.
He specifically said

> That's assuming there aren't artificial barriers put up to prevent competition
I agree. I thought the write-up was fair and reasonably level headed.

If something popular (and surely by definition of being on the front page it is) is suddenly removed, people are bound to be interested in the reason why? Was the source discredited? Was it just a copyright issue? A simple filter for spiked stories would be good, just with a note on the reason why.

Of course HN don't have to implement this, but it would be of benefit to the community.
I've recently switched to DuckDuckGo as default search engine in Chrome, and have quite liked it. I still miss Google sometimes (especially when looking for physical places etc.), but its easy enough so surf to google.com on those occasions.
US startup Mango Materials tests new process for biodegradable plastics
I'm not sure how more concentration of people in cities is such a good thing when so many already can't afford it. It seems like what you suggest would make a significant portion people go from living comfortably I'm the suburbs to being homeless in the city. Being homeless has a cost too.

From the way you describe it, it seems to me that the suburbs are/were an effective social program to reduce homelessness.
> when they run into an interesting problem tend to search Github or Stack Overflow, even when it is a basic algorithm problem (I’ve met programmers with years of experience who couldn’t write code to maintain a linked list)

This comment feels incongruous with the rest of the article: why wouldn't I refer to a standard implementation rather than trying to solve it on my own? Isn't that a commendable case of not ignoring the 'old junk'?
As Farage said: "In a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way. If the remain campaign win two-thirds to one-third that ends it."
Don't forget that HN tries to detect vote fraud.

So some articles might simply disappear because the OP asked too many friends for upvotes or because of false positives.
Are you in the US? Maybe look into the public sector. State government, e.g., perhaps in a state without a high concentration of tech industry. There's a definite ceiling in terms of pay if you want to stay technical, but I've found it very easy to get hired, and the hours and benefits offer a lot of stability, if that's what you value.
True, but still, it's not like you are going to say "here's my github, CS diploma and references from previous jobs" and hear "alright then, let's skip reversing those red-black trees on a whiteboard for 4 hours, welcome aboard".

I understand why those are not enough, but it would be nice not to have to prove you are competent from ground up every time you want to change a job. Hence, certification, etc. But I have no idea how to do it well, though I do hope someone else spends couple of years figuring it out :)
This goes against one of the points of Syncthing (but I'm more interested in its other features): are there any good 3rd-party hosts so I don't have the hassle of maintaining on myself?
Original source:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/03/how-you...
Wall Street Has Found Its Next Big Short: The Mall
code available here: https://github.com/abhishekkrthakur/clickbaits_revisited
If you notice something weird happening with your submissions you should email the mods. They're happy to explain what's going on and to have a look to see if the flags are fair.
Yes. And the problem exists only when a select few can manipulate photos. If everybody and their mother can do it, then indeed pictures will lose their credibility, and there is no problem (but there may be other problems, such as where do we get real evidence from now).
Yes, although that's entirely a result of FPTP in a non-proportional system.
It's probably a combination of flagging and other factors. Obvious the mods aren't going to want to make their algos transparent. Flagging removes story completely but perhaps mods have the power to bump a story off the page but without flagging it.
I'm not sure I understand this idea. By "read code" do you mean run the program in your head? As in, "start with main(), follow this loop, go to func()..."? Because if that is the case, then I think it is really debugging not reading. It would be great to debug projects and there are many projects that include unit tests which can help guide engineers along a slow path to greater understanding.

Personally, I like writing code and borrowing ideas from other, better engineers. I also like my code to be clean and without cruft: https://github.com/keithb-/Valley

But I don't even know if I could "read" my code. It's a web app; there isn't a main(), there isn't a loop. In order for someone to read it, they would need to mentally "send a request" which means they need to somehow have the concepts or the context in their mind when they sit down with the source code. I just don't know how that is supposed to help an engineer, regardless of age or experience.
Could people stop just reading one thing and then living their lives by it?

Whether it's Myer's Briggs, or 10,000 hour rule, or some other self-help book with a reasonable premise -- I feel like most of the time it's just some reasonable premise taken to an extreme.

Yes, if you want to be good at something, you'll have to practice a lot. Yes, practicing mindfully is better than just putting in hours. Yes, there are different kinds of people and you can (sometimes) broadly characterize them. I find it hard to respect people that read points like those, take them to the extreme, and then it becomes their sole mindset for 6/12 months until the next thing comes along.
I have to agree with the commenter here...a solved problem doesn't get you purchased for $20 billion with closer to $20 million in revenues.

WhatsApp is not a good example.

There's a reason that company's success drove a huge amount of attention to Erlang, led to the popularity of Elixir and caused a whole lot of experienced developers to look deep enough to go "Holy crap! This solves so many problems!"
Since no one is complaining: I find Syncthing too complicated to set up. You must create a folder, then get a number for a computer (which you end up writing in a pastepad or something like that because the two computers don't communicate), then go to the other computer and place the number in, then do the same for the second computer to the first.

Repeat it for 5 or 6 machines.

If any machine is switched what do you do? Start over again establishing the link with all other machines.
I don't think the Paypal story was "removed". That story is now on page 2. Yesterday, it stayed on the front page all day. It's decay from the 1st page to the 2nd page a day later seems comparable to other stories with ~200 comments.

The author's meaning of "remove from the frontpage" means abruptly disappearing from the front page and you still don't see it in the subsequent 6 or more pages.
Thanks for the nice, condensed article. Generating features from BeautifulSoup isn't something that I've considered before.

I'm still going through Yoshua Bengio's new book on DL, but if anyone is free to comment: what are the justifications for the general architecture? Why use LSTMs with the Glove embeddings?
I don't really read this terribly as complaining. It is an interesting analysis of some posts (including his own) that seemed to behave atypically in a non-transparent manner to the user base, that may suggest some manipulation of the ranking. At no point does it seem to take any accusatory tone, or complain. The hypothesis may be incorrect, but it is not unreasonable, and it does seem relevant to readers of hacker news.

I don't think being "bored" by something is generally considered a good reason to flag content. I don't see how it could possibly be considered off-topic either.
>> My question these days when I read such article, "What has the author done that is equivalent?"

Well I happen to (vaguely) know the author and have worked with him in the past and he has done a lot of great work, not all of it in the public domain though.

Comparing him with an organisation that employs 17k people is a little unfair but he comes out of it favourably IMHO!
With angular there is no easy way of mixing it with html content from a CMS (something that was powerful with angularjs).
makerbase.co[0] isn't exactly what you want (reviews of software), but I think it is closer to IMDB than anything else. It tracks and databases contributors to projects, much like IMDB tracks writers, actors, etc that contribute to media.

[0]http://makerbase.co
Just as you'd be happy to have a lawyer if you wanted to commit a crime - your point being?
Intel Acquiring Mobileye for $15B
Blog: Why We Love Mobile Apps (And You Should, Too)
But it's not a distributed system: you use it to implement distributed systems. Each runtime is present on a single host & it provides some well-defined methods for RPC. Your application has to be aware of this to take advantage of it.
>My question these days when I read such article, "What has the author done that is equivalent?" There is rarely anything to be found.

The thing about critique is that you don't need to have made an equivalent project/effort/artwork/whatever to be able to critique it with a valid objection.

You just need to be able to spot an actual issue.

Sure, some might think they've spotted an issue when there is none. Or not understand that the issue exists for a reason (e.g. engineering tradeoff).

But those are orthogonal to the subject.

The key is that critique can come from any source, and it doesn't need someone to have done something "equivalent" or to have specific credentials to be valid.

The latter can at best serve as a rough filter to throw out some noise. But they will throw a lot of valid critique as well, which can come from everybody, including a layman.
Sustainability of infrastructure is all about the funding stream. I'm an IT Director guy with a healthy six figure salary. It's sustainable for me to spend too weeks on the beach every year. If I made $50k and had a $2000/mo mortgage, that would not be sustainable.

In my city, a tax/ratepayer base of 100,000 people bear the burden of supporting hundreds of miles of streets and other infrastructure. Guess what? They cannot afford it.

1 mile away, most of those costs are supported by 20 million state taxpayers.

This is precisely the same as the problem with schools. My City School District is struggling to get funding to cover basic services because they have to deal with a larger, poorer and sicker student body. That district one mile away is debating whether or not they should have a full size Olympic swimming pool or not. No poor folk, fewer disabled kids who need expensive intervention and a larger tax base.
I came to wander if there was market demand for some kind of "Syncthing Admin" that would centralize this process for corporative users, and provide other kinds of features (commands from "Syncthing Admin" could be transmitted through Syncthing itself!).
Right-sized? You have almost no tanks anymore, and the ones you do are 80's era. The Royal Navy is a shadow of a shadow navy. The RAF is woefully under-equipped to protect against Russian incursions.
No one is forced to drive for Uber. The title is misleading and inflammatory. Fodder for the majority who are addicted to manufactured outrage.

Ironically, the title and the comments in hacker news are pro-union propaganda.
Can anyone share their experiences with Syncthing compared to Resilio Sync (aka Bit Torrent Sync)?

I am using Resilio Sync since its beta version, but they have added a lot of restrictions since then and made some functions only available for paying users.

I am concerned about ease of use (setup and everyday usage) on Windows and Android.
AWS is huge. You could argue that this is selling "physical stuff," but I view it as heavily abstracted away from the physical infrastructure, especially with products like Lambda. I don't think they even offer a baremetal option.
Borg is similar, but it saves the snippets to a centralized* server: https://github.com/ok-borg/borg

There is also a web interface https://ok-b.org/

Anyone can edit the public snippets (only bash for now, because it is such an obvious usecase), but private ones are coming too.

The plan is provide a way to save and search snippets from anywhere, terminal, web, phone, whatever.

It is also written in Go.

Edit: the mobile version of the site is not too responsive, but a new version of the UI is coming :)

*Edit 2: You can also self host the server/frontend yourself and change your terminal client to point to your own.
That reminds me of CrashPlan. They throttle uploads and deny it – and they have been promising a native Mac client for years. Scanning of new / changed data is rather slow too. I was testing SpiderOak two or three years ago. The client was awful but slightly less awful than CrashPlan's Java-based client.

These days, I use a mix of Backblaze and Arq (with Amazon Cloud Drive).

Backblaze is great but versioning is limited to 30 days. More versioning is probably not feasible, i.e., other cloud backup providers with unlimited versioning have to find other ways to keep their data usage under control.
Just because it isn't automated doesn't mean it's not spam.
Are you sure? Is that really the case? They have a legal duty to defend you against all charges whatever the evidence? I don't think so. Certainly not in the UK. I know people who have been dismissed by the employer with the union rep present to ensure it's legal and above board and the worker is represented. Representation isn't equal to defense.

Edit : Spelling
Transparency is nice but most social news sites don't care for it.

If there was a middle ground it probably would be a section where you can specifically view threads that were removed from view.
This blog suggest that moderator action must have been necessary, but seems to say that flags are unimportant.

I disagree. Just a few flags can cause a story to drop off the front page.
>There is no such thing as intrinsic value

Intrinsic value usually refers to the present (discounted) value of future earnings.

>There is price and price ($16B) is determined by the market.

How is it determined if all valuation is supposed to be pointless?

>Talking about PE and multiples is pointless for tech companies where synergies and rapid adoption/changes are common

For a public company that has existed for almost two decades it absolutely makes sense to consider revenue multiples among other factors.

It may well be that the value of the company in Intel's hands is worth more than it is worth for other, non-strategic, investors. I agree that there is a lot of potential variability in tech, but that doesn't mean any fantasy price is right just because some people buy some shares at that price (which is what market prices mean)
Too late - Corbyn already said that he is "absolutely fine" with a new referendum.
A technical approach to choosing the right WordPress plugin
> Posting on a social news site is a privilege, not a right.

I certainly don't share the sentiment. There are lots of places I or other people can visit and post to, what makes this particular site commend value is precisely the community and user-base it has fostered over the years. Thus, I believe that this kind of meta discussion does provide considerable value to the community.
I can comment on the "Books that Aaron Swartz read, loved and hated" story. OP posted that link to HN and it made the front page. The story was soon flagged by the community (people viewed it as Amazon affiliate spam) and it fell off the rankings. When the moderator dang noticed that the story had been flagged, he decided to restore it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13840869). So yeah, that explains why this particular story fell off the front page quickly but does not have any [flagged] or [dupe] tags attached now.

I've learned that it's best not to jump to conclusions based on what you think is true (however sound your analysis might be). Always ask the other side(s) for an explanation. In this case, you could have sent an email to the mods asking for an explanation. If you find their response unsatisfactory, go ahead and write a post explaining why.
I haven't read Outliers, but I've always understood the "10,000 hour rule" as a means of expressing the fact that all meaningful skills take years practice to truly become an expert. It's _necessary_, but not necessarily sufficient. Did Gladwell actually assert that 10,000 hours is sufficient for anyone to become an expert at any skill in Outliers? Or is that just a convenient way to misinterpret the book and the rule to be able to write snarky articles like this one?
There are tools like gocryptfs or cryfs that solve that problem to a degree. cryfs even makes the directory structure and file names opaque with chunking the encrypted data in small blocks but this turns quickly into a benchmark of your sync software (i.e. don't use it with Nextcloud, the client can't cope well and fast with lot's of small files at least for the initial sync). Not sure if syncthing is better.

Didn't came around to testing gocryptfs, but if you don't need the chunking it looks like the better alternative.

https://nuetzlich.net/gocryptfs/comparison/
https://www.cryfs.org/comparison
You're making an implicit assumption in this comment; that Facebook is in an optimal position and every decision they made contributed to that optimal position in a positive way and so any change is for the worse.

But what if they aren't in an optimal position? What if having a higher quality code base all along would have let them dominate social media more and faster, and perhaps be more successful in areas they have stumbled in the past?

A lot of people (especially non-technical folks and inexperienced coders) seem to think that code quality comes at a cost and that a bad code base full of technical debt is just a side effect of fast iteration and the cost of being quick to market. I say that's crap. A higher quality codebase with less technical debt actually improves speed tremendously because it lets you iterate faster with fewer rewrites down the road and it will be more stable and result in fewer distractions from having to put out fires with unforeseen bugs making it into production.

A sloppy codebase with technical debt is much more costly on your ability to go to market and add features and iterate.
This will revolutionize the meme industry.
> I'm not a big fan of the secrecy around moderator interventions - what gets censored, what posts get re-titled, etc.

This feels pretty transparent:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=sctb