skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When stories are negative about YC or YC-funded companies, we moderate them less than we would if they were about something else. That doesn't mean we don't moderate them at all—it would be foolish to leave open any loophole that large on the internet—but we're conscious and careful about doing it less than we usually would. That is literally the first thing pg taught me about how to moderate HN, and the first thing I've taught every other moderator. I've written about this many times: e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... and https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&date....

An example: the other day someone reposted an old (2011) controversy article about Airbnb. It was a me-too post of the kind users frequently submit in response to something currently on the front page, which tends to be bad for HN because it's repetitive. Also, the article was misleading in several ways (as I understand it) and long out of date in others. Our usual moderation practice is to penalize such stories—i.e. that are derivative of something else or clearly misleading—but we didn't do any of that because it was about a YC-funded startup. We're very clear about this with all YC founders and everyone who works for YC.

Stories about HN itself are a little different because of the evil catnip power of meta, but it's still the same principle: we don't suppress stuff because it's critical of us.

The idea that more data would clear everything up is a fallacy. "Just make everything public" is the sort of argument that sounds great on paper, but I think it would more likely cause just the opposite. People already take things out of context and construct fun, rage-inducing narratives about how awful we are—not because we're special, it's just a fact of life on the internet. Why would it ever stop? Of course it will never stop. What it would do is consume far more of our time and energy than it already does. That would steal resources from the things we should be doing to make HN better, basically giving a small number of users (some well-intentioned, others not so much) the power to do a denial-of-service attack on the good things of HN. Hacker News doesn't magically self-regulate, unfortunately; it takes a lot of work to keep it interesting and stave off entropy, and that's what we need to focus on. Every time one of these things comes up, it takes hours, sometimes a whole day, to answer people's questions about it. There's a burnout risk too.

So I think the balance we gradually arrived at over the years is the right one: be open about the principles we use to moderate HN and answer questions in specific cases. Unless something big happens to change my mind, that's how HN will continue to work; I believe it's what serves the community best as a whole.
What I do not understand: Why not write a simple IRC (or even XMPP) client – but an “IRC-like” client? The documentation is out there. Do people feel special when their software is incompatible with older software without having features that make incompatibility a necessity?

Internet Relay Chat: Client Protocol https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2812

Internet Relay Chat: Server Protocol https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2813
I guess. This is a semantic argument but I'm actually a little curious. Does this mean that Europeans who settled in lands not specifically claimed by native Americans or European powers aren't immigrants? Also what's your opinion on whether you call someone am immigrant if they took the land by force and just declared it their's?
I just meant, that, not only is the premise of commitment contracts well thought through, the smaller choices, like the 1 week delay on changing a goal setting, to why the exponential increase in punishments is closer to tripling than doubling, are all thought through and justified on the blog and have been clearly tweaked over time.

You guys even have super transparency, and iirc mention you provide it because commitment contracts would incentive you to encourage failure, and that's not what you want at all.

Compare that against e.g. Trello, which is good looking and usable, but it's kanban without queue limiting. That defeats the whole point! (I explain this in more detail here: https://gen517.com/queue-limiting-the-whole-point-of-kanban/ )

The difference between trello and beeminder (to me, at least) is that the beeminder people think about how to provide anti-akratic tools a lot, and embed their thoughts and discoveries into their product. The Trello people basically provide nice CSS for a tool so flexible it has nothing to say at all. If I want digital paper, sure, Trello is nice. If I want _actual help with something_? I'd prefer software developed by people trying to help me.
I seem to remember that there is a cured meat product... salami maybe, which was shown to be improved when cultured with um... baby shit.

Ah yes, here it is: http://www.livescience.com/43465-baby-poop-sausage-probiotic...
I can't really think of any good forms of 'security through obscurity'. Is the elimination of buffer overflow vulns and sql injections a form of obscurity? Is SSL a form of obscurity?
The drivers are going to be removed from the equation no matter what though.
That 41% assertion is wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13861267
incorrect. That changed recently https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-immigration-a-ste...
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/visulsign/e/7e3c1a84f9ebc58f5eb97b5203...
I think this is pretty unfair. Conservatives and libertarians in SV and tech in general keep their heads down and their mouths shut. They have absolutely no love for this tiny fringe "alt-right" movement, whatever it actually is.

This article seems like a crass attempt to further squeeze mainstream tech conservatives by amplifying this tiny group of nobodies.
Hectares of forests cut down or burned globally, this year
You're not supposed to learn ideas in depth in your undergraduate. It provides a foundation and exposes you to many different topics. That is it. If you want to learn in depth you should go to graduate school or start learning on your own.
Bullshit. Mobileye dumped Tesla after they used the Mobileye tech for the aims it was not designed for, causing those crashes.
Any school were admission is wealth driven has a diversity problem, and it is self-perpetuating.

As for whether it is fine, that depends on whether they actually care about their diversity goals, and whether prestige is in fact more important to them than job performance. I'd argue that it is likely "prestige" here is simply used to enforce informal social connections and to some extent to avoid diversity at the cost of job performance. If I'd been an investor of said bank, I'd consider it a major concern.
While the author wrote this article FB made millions of dollars.
A taxi company isn't a unicorn.

A taxi company has well understood financials and valuation and would never be given a crack at VC Lotto.

In addition, the kind of quality control that Uber/Lyft exert over drivers almost certainly places the drivers in the position of being employees which makes things even more unprofitable.
If I get paged I'll step out to deal with it. Other team members can also handle pages, though I'm primary on-call.

Note that Oasis is extremely stable. We haven't had an incident requiring human response in weeks -- and the only kind of issue we regularly had before that is now automated.
You have a really sad view of what "art" is, if you think "oh, he can just be a <insert equally time consuming profession>"
>I self-identify as a neoliberal (fiscally conservative); is that part of the left?

No. The left believes in the workers controlling the means of production and stopping capitalists from exploiting labour by appropriating value that they have no right to. I am for the concept of open borders, though. I wish for the destruction of nations, and like Marx, I am only in favour of 'globalisation' for this purpose - to break down and dissolve those old traditions and natonalities.

The dialectic of immigratation asks to investigate the reason why people immigrate - to move from one state of exploitation (or even a feudal way of living) into a slightly better one (such as you would find in the US). They also immigrate beacuse of war, moved on in no small part by the capitalism of the military industrial complex.

Rather than selfishly trying to 'fix' immigration by building walls, perhaps we should destroy the reason why people want to immigrate. It's unfortunate that world leaders have such little foresight to do this.
They probably mean network effects. Facebook is the prime example. For Uber, a critical mass in users and drivers makes it hard to unseat.
The author of this article did a poor job of refuting Susan Hennessey's statement that reverse targeting is unlawful and not practiced. Taking an excerpt of a Hayden speech and then highlighting his statement that "communications with one end in the U.S." are the most interesting doesn't really prove this.

The author would have a stronger argument by sticking to the facts. Searches of U.S. persons without a warrant are directly at odds with the language in the 4th amendment of the Constitution, full stop.
>I still find it disturbing that you think women enjoy wearing hosiery.

Considering how many young women and college girls wear tights for casual wear, I find it disturbing you have this viewpoint.

>The high end hosier is made out of silk

Since when? This hasn't been true for decades. I challenge you to find any women's hosiery still made of silk. All the really high-end stuff like Wolford is made of nylon (+spandex of course), just like the cheap stuff.
What your saying may have been true hundreds of years ago when the number intellectual jobs was much smaller and far less diverse.

But, today, professions are far more specialized than people realize. How much of what you learned in your degree do you still remember? 1%? of that 1%, how much do you actually use on a daily basis? and of that subset, how much of that knowledge is things you couldn't have easily learned on the job.
To me it seems like the Uber executives know the music has stopped playing, and are now trying to do anything possible to save the company.
I was thinking more about the "optics." What says you are serious about sexual harassment in the workplace then putting a woman in the role of being able to evaluate and fire the harassers. I also think Marissa needs a bit of rehabilitation in her career, the Yahoo! period did not, in my opinion, improve her 'brand'. So the COO job where the 'company killing decisions' are someone else's and the execution against goals is all on her, would give her a chance to show that she can move the company to achieve its goals, and thus burnish her reputation for more than just product focus. In my experience watching the comings and goings of executives in tech it's rare when there are two executives that need each other this much.
How to Spot Arial
Lucky Butterfly  – Cat vs. Butterfly Fight
> That's a really strange and horrible viewpoint you have.

> In my world, it's always OK for someone for someone to enter someone else's land/property if they've been given permission.

Good.

> If's not OK to do so if they haven't.

Yes, because that suits you well. Because you only recognize those kinds of hardship that you yourself would want to escape from and ignore those that are actually in play.

> However, holding people prisoner is always morally wrong. That's pretty much the definition of slavery.

No, it isn't. There are some points in common but that's not slavery.

> IMO, it's always OK for people to forcibly leave someone who's enslaving them; the complication is finding someone who will take them in. Assuming they've found such a place, what possible defense can you have for people who want to imprison them?

Good question. Ask those who want to build a wall. You do realize that building that wall essentially says: Mexicans, you're on your own, you won't be able to vote with your feet any more, and we will not allow you to come to work in the USA to send money home in order to slowly increase the standard of living South of the border, made worse by American companies being strong-armed into operating North of that same border?

> You're assuming the country they're immigrating into hasn't given them permission.

I'm not aware of any of my friends who 'made it' having received prior permission to enter the country they fled to.

In fact, without exception they ended up in 'internment camps' after which they were allowed to apply to a number of countries around the world who might want to accept them.

Effectively they were in no-mans land.

> This is a baseless assumption.

No, in fact this is the way it goes. Given that I've actually lived on both sides of such a wall for a while I figure my assumptions are anything but baseless.
Facebook Is Signalling That It Wants Messenger Apps, Not Just Chatbots
> has been a collection of dismal white-collar jobs—in a call center chasing down delinquent customers for Baltimore Gas and Electric

That's not a white collar job.
happy syncthing user here; I agree with comment above, syncthing purpose should be explained better, probably something along the lines

similar to dropbox

many separate sync folders

many computers to many computers syncing.

Personal storage, no data in the cloud
If you're running a founder-team-only private company without any real assets, the company only really "exists" for as long as the founders can be considered to be its employees. So, if another company comes along and makes an offer to the people to hire them as individual employees—not a company, not even a gelled team, just individual offers—then the company-that-was just sort of ceases to exist, because it now has nobody working for it. I think that's more what happened here.
Because you apparently base your moral viewpoint around illigal immigration (rather than the other way round), why does the fact that it's illegal change whether it's right or not?
Re: need custom hardware for each algorithm

Something tells me, for an intelligence agency, building a quantum computer only for the purpose of breaking cryptographic keys would be a worthwhile investment.

An investment they have already made:

The effort to build “a cryptologically useful quantum computer” -- a machine exponentially faster than classical computers-- is part of a $79.7 million research program called “Penetrating Hard Targets.”

article

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-s...

leaked document

http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/world/a-description-of...
Didn't Apple start rejecting apps recently which do 'hot code' pushes to update apps remotely? (As the video on the Expo.io site says)
To be clear, the "wage-fixing" was a no cold-call agreement that involved Apple and Google, not the rest of the companies mentioned. [0]

I'm all for criticizing giant companies but can we at least get our facts straight and not sound conspiratorial about it?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
I wonder if there's a reason their extremism tends to the conservative. Where are the radical leftist engineers?
Back when I worked at Google, my favorite weekend activity honestly was working on open source side projects. I'm a workaholic like that.

Even while working full-time on Sandstorm, on weekends I'd work on "things I want to code" rather than "things I need to code".
Nintendo Switch ships with unpatched 6-month-old WebKit vulnerabilities
I've heard this same argument, "I've got nothing to hide." I personally don't understand how, even if that's true, someone would want to freely provide many personal details of their lives for strangers to look at. Maybe certain privacies are becoming uncommonly valued.

Even though I feel I don't have anything worthwhile to hide, I don't like the idea of random strangers finding out the details of my personal life and habits. I don't understand why some(most?) people are totally fine with that...
Ask HN: How would you interview people with much more experience than you?
I'm a junior developer. Candidate could literally be my father and is for a manager position, with solid background. FWIW there're are also rounds of interviews with seniors.

Algorithm questions could be last resort, design questions might end up making myself the interviewee...what else then?
I do believe that this is true, but I can't help but also believe that the timelines that the tech community has in mind are absolutely too optimistic. I think like many promising innovations (AI, VR, etc.) it will have periods of rapid innovation followed by contraction and lull, repeated many times until general adoption is realized.
>Just imagine a gardening and cooking class where you could teach:

>1. Plant biology and genetics of seeds 2. Chemistry and Soil Biology, Composting, Decomposition. 3. Use geometry to design raised bed frames 4. Learn some vocational carpentry to build raised bed frames 5. Plant in different environments, track growth, production, measures in a scientific experiment 6. Learn to cook some different recipes with what you've grown as well as how different temperatures affect what you're cooking (caramelization of onions, etc)

That's already pretty close what happens in elementary schools.
> "Successful people have better things to do than arguing on reddit/hn"

A priori ad hominem. Very clever. I think I am going to end all my posts like that from now on.

Remember, kids! "Successful people have better things to do than arguing on reddit/hn" -nzjrs
Can you please go into more detail about how the things it does serves no function in today's world in your view?
I don't know what to say other than chill out. You have completely hijacked the original thread with your ill-argued cliche talking points.

The original statement was "I'm appalled by the need for statistics showing how "useful" immigrants are." Mine response is that it's a necessary framework. I in no way gave any conclusions about what I believe is the result of thinking in that framework, but you seem to harbor some sort of prejudice that makes it so you've assumed what I think.
Interesting. From what role or position do you derive the authority to set policy for Hacker News?
If this goes to a jury, could the damages shut uber down?
Mark Zuckerberg: calls to kick Peter Thiel off Facebook's board are 'crazy'
No, No, No, NO.

Look I know TZ's and dates are hard, I work with them quite regularly, I have written code to handle things like recurring items, and I have written a lot of code around knowing what TZ to show a date in to an end user (in my case you have to deal with things happening in a participant's TZ, their supervisor's TZ, our call center's TZ, and whatever the TZ is of the browser the end user is accessing the site from, all of which could be different). A bad UTC time due to mismatched timezone databases is by far the least of my worries, in fact it's not even on my radar nor do I plan to add it to it. You HAVE to standardize, period. UTC makes the most sense (epoch timestamps if you can get away with it) and it's up to the client to format that however they want (moment.js is your friend if you are a web dev). Yes, keep your TZ databases up to date and know which DB your software is using but use UTC. Anything else is a recipe for disaster.
Is that why the software they run looks like Win 95 era GUIs and, if you listen really closely, makes the GP swear under their breaths?
> They were in a prime position to be "the" self driving car company, if anyone was.

I disagree: they don't make cars. That's a huge impediment. The prime position company is surely Tesla. Or, really, any car manufacturer.
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Not any elementary school I or any of my friends went to...
College is as real place as factory. The construction worker does not know all that much about parts of real world that are not his immediate surrounding.
I think you meant bare bones.
Well sure, because that travel ban was ridiculous. I'm just saying most of the time "Trump" and "immigration" are mentioned together it's regarding the southern border, not ME immigration.
I can't tolerate ads that mangle content.

If the ad floats over the content. If the ad overlays my screen. If the ad forces me to do something to dismiss it, I don't care what the product is. I'm going to be less inclined to buy.

Put a normal, rectangular ad on the screen that doesn't dynamically resize itself while I'm trying to read the content and don't spread the content across 31 different pages just to increase the number of ads you show me.
"Create any app you can imagine, by remixing working code into exactly what you need."

Well that just sounds like nonsense.

"I was worried that I had no good ideas, but thankfully I was able to remix facebook with a little uber and snapchat and boom now I'm a millionaire."
I'm a bit unsure about this decision. Because this is tying React Native to a private entity, namely Expo, that has not open sourced it's toolchain used here. Expo takes your code and builds it on their servers and then serves it to you. That toolchain unlike React Native is not open source. This is creating a walled garden around Expo who can easily decide to charge for their server fees. Yes it is a much easier of an boarding experience then installing Xcode and Android Studio but at least with Xcode and Android Studio you own the whole toolchain. Because of this fact I don't think this is comparable to React Create App, which is excellent.

Edit: Expo has open sourced their code, see below. And CRNA does not build code on their servers, I assumed it had the same workflow as their XDE tool. It does not. But I'm still unsure of this decision. It makes Expo a vital part of React Native, or at least puts them in the position to have that position.
I think it was just apps that pushed updates for native code, and javascript updates are still fine (for now).
One fun fact: MUMPS had an early "NoSQL" precursor key-value storage engine (the "M" database), that could be directly accessed as if it were a global variable.

"The M database is a key-value database engine optimized for high-throughput transaction processing. As such it is in the class of "schema-less", "schema-free," or NoSQL databases. Internally, M stores data in multidimensional hierarchical sparse arrays (also known as key-value nodes, sub-trees, or associative memory). Each array may have up to 32 subscripts, or dimensions. A scalar can be thought of as an array element with zero subscripts. Nodes with varying numbers of subscripts (including one node with no subscripts) can freely co-exist in the same array." [1]

I had to work with MUMPS once in the past when I was working in the green-screen world in healthcare. I also had to work with Pick/D3 and Basic. It was kind of nice to start there, then move to relational databases, and then see the world get excited again in older models of databases with the NoSQL movement (albeit, much more scalable and distributed).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS
Ethereum price goes up nearly 50 percent in under a week
What position is that? Having a popular taxi app? That really isn't much; that advantage can disappear in an instant when a cheaper/better competitor appears.

Actually developing self-driving tech and then deploying it is almost entirely unrelated to the business that Uber has developed thus far. It's an enormous undertaking, and they were starting from almost zero.
I believe that was only for apps that could talk to Objective C API's natively, in other words, essentially bypassing the native code review process. React Native can only do hot updates of JavaScript (which may call existing Objective C API wrappers, but not create new ones).
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