skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FB's case is different. I think the term for FB's case is private data abuse rather than leak. Cambridge Analytica took the data through API just like every other app doing at the time, but violated the terms of use. FB is guilty because it designed the wrong way (no excuse) to share the information (still under consent). For example, banks share your personal info around all the time (say promo mails). For Yahoo, that's ... poor technology & management.
This should be the new official measuring units for all green, fusion and time-travel related articles
So much could be fixed simply by removing downvoting, which is no different to a virtual slap in the face or shout of abuse.

SO already has a variety of mechanisms for identifying issues with questions, why does it also allow people to yell random abuse without explanation via downvotes?

The most disheartening, but completely expected, result of posting a question is that it will be very rapidly downvoted...not welcoming at all. AND everyone gets this face slap upon posting a question, but I can see how minorities might feel that are being singled out by the sites typical negative response to pretty much all questions.

Sadly, even here on HN you can almost feel the joyful glee with which people can anonymously knock something down with downvotes and no need to explain.

Downvotes on SO should either be removed entirely, or it should cost 2 SO points to make 1 downvote.

Downvotes are nothing but pure negative, so hey, wanna remove some of the negative from SO? It’s obvious what to do.
That's how it worked at my last position. Some of these basic issues are not that difficult to address, it's just that most companies don't care enough to bother with it.
It wouldn't make any difference to those who own their homes outright, unless they were planning on trading up, in which case is it would be a positive, or down, a negative. Those who overleveraged could indeed find themselves in difficulty, however I fully expect they will get bailed out by the very people they priced out of the market by overbidding.
Congrats drusenko and team!
Yes; The following recent review article actually provides code samples: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.08823 which use an open-source version of our software called 'paysage' (https://github.com/drckf/paysage). This has currently not been updated too recently, but we expect to put out a new update quite soon. The update will clean up code, docs, features, but might not yet contain the BEAM training code. The latter is pending some decisions about IP, etc.
The Alternative to the Four-Hour Mindset
I'm not laid off, but expect to find another job when I retire from my current one (probably in another year)...
Am I naive?
> Please provide a way to flag a question

You can do those with prose. Explain that you know what you're doing. Give an underlying reason that shows that your X is an X.

Answerers can only act on a) the information you provide b) heuristics they have based on seeing many other questions. If you do not provide a) then they'll have to fall back on b)
Thanks so much. I run a small Amazon business so I have to make the following business decisions and I don't think I've been learning from my mistakes:

- Manufacturers/Clients: How do I choose the right people to work with? Sometimes manufacturers do not create great products, sometimes clients lie. What are some signs to avoid bad business relationships?

- Hiring: How do you hire people with "good" character? I learned the hard way of abilities/skills with my first few hires.

- Co-founder: I need a technical co-founder for a software I'd like to build, someone who has previous experience building a great team (my weakness). Because I'm terrible at team-building, I have no idea what to look for.

- Investors/Advisors: People have expressed interest in investing in a software I am building. I know I need help and guidance- but I don't think investing in me would be the right decision for them because I have 0 unicorn aspirations.

So far my strategy has been to be brutally honest but I have found that it doesn't work all the time.
I'm not talking about a steady state. I'm talking about the transition from a low interest rate regime to a high interest rate regime.
Correct, in that if supply increases you've either increased productivity, or the workforce. It cannot come on line otherwise.

I think it generally lags, and does not quite close the gap, outside of other deflationary pressures being present.
I still find great results from questions that the Most Holy Keepers Of Stackoverflow Purity deem "off topic".
I personally very much like SO.
I have <1k rep after more than two years of use but it is fine for me.
I answer a question maybe 1 time a month and ask maybe 1 time a year.

However a friend of mine (that I believe as a better level in programming than me) has the same feeling of "bizzare community" that you have, so I know that the issue is complex.

That said I really have zero ideas about what they could do to improve the way they are seen by everyone without breaking the way the site currently works.

Have you heard about the term "help vampire" ?
Do you know how many people how do not take 3 minutes to search ?
Do you think that the number of questions will remain manageable if the bar is leveled down ?
Do you know that you are encouraged to edit questions to make them more "well asked" (at least if that is humanely possible) ?

In my opinion SO is a specific tool that is very different from a forum, a chat or a mailing list. SO should not be the only tool that people have to solve their programming problems and it should not try to morph into it.
> We set them up for failure, and our power users have been asking us to help them for ages.

Your Power Users are the ones making SO toxic. They don't need better tools, they need to have their privileges pulled until they learn to use them responsibly.

The whole "SO is an encyclopedia not a help site" thing started this, and it encouraged a lot of "content curators" to the site, who view their role as squishing every question unless it meets their personal editorial standard (Wikipedia has this too but IS an encyclopedia!).

This post feels hollow. It is nice they're taking blame, but SO is still rotten at the core, the site needs something akin to a constitution setting out what the purpose of the site is. Everything else should flow down from the site's core purpose, not up from rules and "more <3!!!"

Is SO a "help site for newbies" or a "encyclopedia of programming knowledge?"
When you realize that all your time is free time, then you try to maximize what you get out of it. Whether that is money or something else seems like it should be up to the particular individual.
The "even higher scoring person" was definitely a moderator, only they have the power to delete comments and lock posts.
Why are there soo many UFO's depicted in ancient European paintings?
SO could make a site with all the same content, downvotes disabled, comments disabled, and all flags disabled. You would also get random upvotes to reinforce that your question was good. That would make everyone feel safe and appreciated since they are unable to see any negative comments towards them and their question.
To any older guys out there who think they might be looking in the near future -- my advice is to learn the "current stack", or really, just to keep up to date and messing with the new technologies that come out.

My story: A couple years ago I started job searching, at 38. I had been at my current job for 5 years. I had a hell of a time getting anyone to bite. I had a dozen phone interviews that I felt went well, but no callbacks. This stroke me as odd, as when I had been searching last time, I had to fight off people and had multiple offers.

I noticed a trend in the jobs I was applying for. Kubernetes, Node, C#, etc. Things I didn't have on my resume, although I knew I could learn with ease. But your prospective hirer doesn't want to hear how good you are at learning their stack. There are enough candidates to choose from that already know what they need, and I was told that more than once.

The jobs I was applying for were the same description, same mechanics and job duties I had been doing for 15 years already, but since I didn't work with the latest stack -- too bad.

I eventually got lucky and found a job that was transitioning from what I already knew to one of these newer stacks.
If I do, I'll be waiting to be recalled when the dreaded "Year 2038 Problem" happens. ;)
Flask is an interesting project. Created by a true Python master only to be nearly abandoned, and yet it remained so popular it was later revived by a new group without a major fork. How often does THAT happen?

The post describes it as "stable for a long time" :)
I think you've touched on what's missing that could make it a more personable community--better communication.

I posted an image as a part of an answer once and it was removed with the reason "don't use third party image hosts". Thing is, I used i.stack.imgur.com which is the only method provided in the answer form on the site! I knew the user who did it but since my answer had been deleted, I had no way to contact him for any sort of appeal. It was a while before I tried contributing to the site again.
Heh. I stopped at page 18 of the new styleguide at the body font section . So the Go font remains the official font for the display of source code. Yay!!
The thing about trades is you don't need to be smart- just hard working.

Three years out of high school, with 4 more to go before I finished my University education, I was back home for a weekend. I met up with a buddy of mine from high school to grab a beer at the local pub in town and we ran into another guy from our year- Let's call him 'Jim'. My friend had been sort of friends with Jim in grade 8 or something so he wound up sitting down with us for a bit.

The most astounding part to me was that Jim wasn't in prison. I mean, Jim had been the kind of guy even in high school where he probably should have been arrested a dozen times for the trouble he got up to. Seeing him a free man was like "wow, he made it" on its own. He wasn't a dumb brute, but he wasn't the type for University either.

We got talking about what we'd been up to. Me: education and debt; my friend: similar story. But Jim had gone out west to Alberta and gotten himself a welder's license. Training for 8 months right after high school, paid for by the oil companies. Making $80k/year[0], more if he put in the extra time. Had almost saved up enough to buy that welding rig for his truck and then he could go independent and probably bring in $120k or more- again, depending on how hard he wanted to work.

We were 22-ish, and in terms of lifetime income, Jim was probably close to $200k ahead of us with zero debts.

I suspect that in the last decade, I may have caught up. Maybe. I've had a good career so far. But not if Jim's been working hard that whole time. If he has, and if he's saved and invested wisely, then he's still long ahead of me. (Or if he's in prison- then I might catch up!).

[0]All monetary amounts in Canadian dollars, but you know around 2007 we were above the USD in value.
One theory I have is that the tech community was a lot more nerdy in the past, and we've gradually been diluted out as the tech population has grown. The whole "culture fit" thing just seems creepy to me; I used to work with all kinds of crazy people.
I think this gets too many downvotes. Yes, static vs dynamic typing. Yes, imperative vs functional language. On the other hand, CSP is conceptually fairly close to the Actor Model, so there are definitely similarities. I've written go code that looks similar to Erlang (a go routine receiving messages from an `interface{}` channel in a for loop and then dispatching based on the type.
I'm just wondering why this guy wanted to work for Google at all.
Well, the implication is still that hostility is somehow less serious or meaningful when directed at white men... I think you can imagine why that would make us uncomfortable.
I hadn't seen these yet. Thanks for linking.

I was a little late for 1979, but I still enjoy the aesthetic.

edit: I've been using Iosevka for a while now— which I guess a mildly similar feel, but narrower.
From what I've read, gold and other PM generally perform inversely to real interest rates (vs nominal FED rates). This somewhat makes sense, as gold has a carrying cost (storage, security, etc.) and earns no interest, whereas when real interest rates are high, the money will produce better yield in bonds and similar investments.

In a situation of runaway inflation, nominal interest rates are insane also (I've seen double-digit percentages per month in one hyperinflation event in a country I visited), but the real inflation is likely even faster, making real interest negative.
After reading about Weebly's growth on Hacker News, a few years ago I interviewed the founder about how they did it:

https://mixergy.com/interviews/david-rusenko-weebly-intervie...
If there is a correlation, it's more likely that the sort of petty asshole who likes to feel important will prefer to invest more effort in a site that is valuable.

So the more valuable a site becomes, the more it will attract highly motivated but slightly sociopathic moderators.
It's funny reading this article after seeing one of my questions from 2011 edited today, to remove the word "Thanks!" from the bottom.

I've been on SO since 2009. I can confirm the community is getting harsher, less patient, and more exact. HOWEVER, I can see the other side. I see tons of questions that are not fit to be on the site: one-liners, opinions, "help me with my homework", and utter spam. Not to mention people who clearly did not search the site, or even Google (many of Google's results come from SO), and ask a simple question asked a thousand times before. Bad questions and answers will stay online indefinitely, coming up in your future Google searches.

There has to be a balance. Comments should be less hostile, but posters should vet their questions before asking.

Perhaps the suggested structured form is the right way to go. If people will take some time to document their effort, and code, they'll gain appreciation for the time spent by someone reading their question and providing an answer.

PS: +1 on using Zuckerbot in an article not about Facebook :)
Well said. I didn't understand this at all until the post yesterday "Walking While Black". Essays like that and comments like this are eye openers and should be spread wide to people of privilege. Perspective is powerful
Win more social-media followers with this trick
Probably https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

>Nothing about any of the protocols we’ve developed requires centralization; it’s entirely possible to build a federated Signal Protocol-based messenger, but I no longer believe that it is possible to build a competitive federated messenger at all.
Similar things have been said about female coders, founders, and technologists, including in the comments of HN. Yet it's also been demonstrated that women get paid less, have a tougher time advancing, and often experience harassment that males never have to deal with.

https://www.fastcompany.com/40525199/just-2-of-vc-dollars-we...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/05/tesla-sex...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14621765
That comment doesn't contradict my point at all. All it says is "Someone who has been bullied may interpret future slights as more of the same bullying."

That has absolutely nothing to do with race or gender, and I still think it's for more insulting to imply that people in specific demographics are more sensitive or insecure.
Try SimCity 4 with NAM[1]. It adds quite a lot of features to bring it up to nearly the level of Cities: Skylines without any of the stuff you might not like about that game. Essentially NAM enables unreleased transportation simulation rules and adds more building pieces, making it a lot more realistic (in both how sims travel and how you design cities).

I prefer it to Cities: Skylines but it's extremely buggy and you'll probably face a ton of crashes (and lose data in the process).

Someone needs to make a FOSS clone of SimCity 4 or 3000. I'm not the only simcity fan that dislikes Skylines.

1: https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/73555-simcity...
That's not what they said though. They said "if you want to know if someone feels welcome, and you ask them, and they say they don't feel welcome, then you're done researching whether or not they feel welcome".
They're not all within the "Technology Sector"?

I understand the nuance, and Amazon is a black swan that we could debate endlessly.

Isn't the more relevant consideration here how they're categorized in market/investment terms?
Investing in the total market: vtsax because yes it will crash, but it will also recover.
Back home in the rust belt, you can get a 2,000+ sq. ft. home for like $100k (no, really), so $60k/yr there is actually a pretty sweet gig. Doubly so if your spouse also earns that much.
Ratings already take care of curating. Why do you need assholes to curate?
I won't be using a 'secure' messaging app built by the govt any time soon...
Quite. Since those locally produced goods are more expensive (otherwise they’d have been locally produced already), everybody buying them now has less money to spend on anything else, reducing consumption and hitting the rest of the economy. Then you’re trapped, because if you try to unwind the damage, those jobs you did create go away again.
Great list, business intelligence has never been an easy atmosphere, especially in the face of ever increasing competition and diverse buyer behavior, that's where actionable data plays a key role.
Seems like you could still "downgrade" via an upgrade:

1. Disable firmware digital signature verification (not sure if this is at the hardware level or not)

2. Modify the older firmware such that its reported version is newer than your current version

3. "upgrade" to the older firmware version
It includes rent just not house prices because house prices reflect investment (cost of consumption in the future) more than immediate consumption. House prices are converted to a kind of rent equivalent before being included in CPI.
Not according to the linked post, at least:

> Let’s reject the false dichotomy between quality and kindness. Quality matters because it means posts can help more people. But a larger, more diverse community produces better artifacts, not worse ones. We need to stop justifying condescension with the pursuit of quality, and we need better tools and queues to help power users trying to keep quality high.
I would argue there are way too many variables in that question to present a strong argument either way. One thing I will say on it though is how much of our humanity are we ready to sacrifice on the altar of this mythical "meritocracy" that every online community, especially those built on or around code, seems to aim for?

And how long until we're ready to confront the fact that a lot of these meritocracies strangely produce very similar "top contributors" in terms of demographics, i.e. white, straight men?

I'm not getting into either side of it, I'm just saying that you have to admit it's an astonishing coincidence that online communities, started by, moderated by, largely inhabited by, and currently operated by white men seemingly always have a cadre of white men on the top as the "most valuable contributors" and nobody ever seems to wonder if all those things are connected.

Maybe the fears of POC/women are invalid. Maybe it's all a big damn misunderstanding. But I don't think it's right to have white men deciding if it is or not, and I don't think the best damn catalog of coding answers on the planet means a thing if everyone who isn't part of the in-crowd is too damn terrified to ask a question of it.
> the point of SO being a canonical source for generalized questions relating to CS/programming.

NO.

The point of SO is NOT to be a "canonical source for generalized questions [and answers] relating to CS/Programming".

In fact, if you ask a "generalized question" it will be smacked down as "too broad". If you ask a CS question, it will be downvoted as off-topic.

SO is a place to ask certain kinds of very specific and answerable questions. Anything outside of that narrow band (hell, even most stuff that's perfect appropriate) gets smugly dismissed by petty assholes.
Erlang is so much more than just green threads. They're not at all comparable.
I have extensively used OpenCL on both AMD and NVidia for a few years and never had such problems. If anything, found a few more bugs with NVidia.
It's really bleak, really awesome art. Whether it wass intentional or not it really makes one think about how zero-sum and exploitative a lot of our activities are.
A simple heuristic would be to search for the word "please" - I'd bet it's almost never used to be polite and instead used to veil rude comments.
Ha, ha, ha, I just got laid off Monday along with most of the rest of the team with no notice. The market seems to be fairly hot here in Fairfield county CT so I'm jumping right back in and expect to pick up another job/contract in the next month. It's just a matter of rate and commute...

It is tempting to just do my writing or something else but I love the work, it pays well and it's fairly expensive to live here.

Speaking of writing, I wrote this the day after the layoffs and it pretty much sums up my feelings...

A tree fallen; the turn of a leaf

Why is the HR team here with crisp manilla folders?
"There's an announcement at 10," please assemble the soldiers.

Somber words were spoken and no questions were asked.
Then with cleaning out our desks most of us were tasked.

The screen turns red, system down in sector 4!
I tense for a moment and then gleefully ignore.

We pack the last picture and hold back a tear,
And say "it's still early, but let's all get a beer."

We relive the drag-out meetings where we battled for the truth,
And the late afternoon YouTubes bordering on the uncouth.

For some it's a blow; for others relief.
It's a tree fallen; the turn of a leaf.

So I'll join another startup, yes that will be fun.
Or even a bank, if they really want to get shit done.

The joy of building and creating with keyboard or pen,
Is what I live for over and over again.

If you're team's on a mission with problems quite hard,
Tell me about it. Please call me. The number's on the card.
Pretty much every simulation game encodes neoliberal assumptions, which I'm sure is unintentional but it makes playing them very restrictive. But it's why "simulations" lead to articles like "Capitalism shown to be most efficient system through Minecraft simulation".
High rates and inflation tends to reflect an overheated, strong economy. This usually signifies higher demand for real estate and lower cap rates (higher valuations). Nothing happens in a vacuum so it depends on relative opportunities elsewhere too.
Creepy (the fuzzy gopher-dalek, not you)
Κλειδώνουν θέσεις στην βαθμολογία
Do libertarians think it's wrong for the federal government to require hospitals provide emergency care regardless of the patient's ability to pay? Surgeons are forced to operate, which violates their personal freedom?

Edit: https://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/09/l...
International Y/Y net sales growth is 34%, but adjusting for the forex tailwinds it’s 21%.

North America Y/Y net sales growth is 46%, but adjusting for the Whole Foods acquisition it’s... unfortunately they won’t tell us (maybe 25%?).
Sneering comments from neckbeards are worse than downvotes to me. Some days are just Monday and you're not on your game, but that doesn't stop the neckbeards from trying to light you on fire, despite the fact that you spent 30 minutes massaging the question or half a day agonizing about asking the question. You know the neckbeards are lurking in their basements.