skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Others have done a good job at critiquing the automated analysis, so I will concentrate on the hypothesis.

>There is a perceived phenomenon among online social news communities (e.g. Digg, reddit) that as the popularity of the community increases, the average member becomes baser and the overall quality of discourse decreases.

I think that's not an accurate portrayal. Having been through the "decline" of Reddit (been reading it even before it had comments!), I observed that the real decline was in the quality(as perceived by me) of stories that made the frontpage(s) and in the quality(as perceived by me) of comments that were upvoted.

In 2006, I would literally read almost every story on the first few pages and the content was very interesting, there were long essays and articles that were on the front page. Now? After the influx of the general public and the juveniles(not saying this in a demeaning manner), quality has dropped in every way. Pun and argumentative threads were the ones that were on top. I do like humor but not just endless pages of snark and humor. Pictures or story-in-headline posts requiring an attention span of 3 seconds tend to get the most votes,

>If a community were suffering from SND, there are a few symptoms we might observe:

>Anxiety, hostility, and depression would rise.

>Confidence, compassion, and happiness would fall.

>The ratios of anxiety/hostility, hostility/compassion, depression/happiness would rise.

>Since each of the negative emotions has an opposite emotion, the last point enables us to measure the general negative/positive trend in each of the three main categories.

How does this analysis address the above points? All the supposed-to-be-funny short comments probably would count as a positive under this analysis. Reddit's community now is pretty happy, confident and compassionate. The analysis is pretty lacking when applied to a supposed-to-be intellectually stimulating social site.

Anyway I see that Slashdot(although not as popular now) and HN seem to have bucked the trend. Although there is some decline on HN, it's not as as steep or as bad as Reddit so far.

Edit: Here's an idea, do your analysis of all the comments of the first x posts of Reddit vs. the same on HN. Could be interesting since they both have almost the exact same format.
Is it just me or does this post read like an Oscar acceptance speech? I mean, I get that he put in a lot of work and a lot of people helped but -- I just found it kind of off-putting. Like he won an award or something.
Three Days Inside The Bubble
definitely not "hustle". Sorry.
That's rather stereotypical and prejudice.
"Massive Preferences List"? Are you serious? You sound like a stereotypical mac person who ventured out in the real world.

(and I sound like an ass for saying that but anyway...)

- The favicons over text in the title bar are no different than icons over text in the OSX Dock, yes?

- Also, I LOVE that the options and downloads open in a tab and not a new window. It keeps everything chrome related in a contained environment. I HATE managing windows, managing tabs however is easier and faster for me, you can also just drag out the tab and it'll become a window.
Parsing Html The Cthulhu Way
I am slightly disturbed. I don't mind startups using Craigslist to market and heck, they might even be allowed to do this if they have an option on AirBnB to "market my property on my behalf" to just post the properties on CL every two weeks but what bothers me is this:

1) They explicitly violated the posters request to not receive "commercial" mail of any kind. This is basically the same thing as SPAMing. Would HN condone any type of unsolicited SPAM from a YC startup? I think not. The intent of the poster was to receive only credible inquiries from people interested in renting their property, not from competing services or people wanting to sell them on services, etc.

2) They tried to hide the fact that it was SPAM by using fake Gmail aliases and pretending to be normal folk just trying to help that vacation rental owner out. If you're going to push your service out there to people, be transparent about who you are and allow people to tell you to not contact them anymore.

I think startups are held to a looser standard and of course we all love to be "hustlers" but the idea that this behavior should be applauded regardless of it's ethnical nature seems wrong.

The analysis seemed to be from 2009, perhaps things are much different now.
Deeply invested indeed. Just make sure you've got a clean exit strategy though!
is it justified or is this just my lack of experience of living in the states running amok ?

The latter. Most of us live in places where crime is not a problem. We're not all in mortal fear for our lives, having property stolen left and right at gun point.

And .. the modest amount of actual crime I've seen, no guns were brandished.

I'd rather be threatened with a gun than by a big palooka with his fists.

* Fists or a gun, you're going to do what he says. He's got the drop on you, we can assume he's picked a place where help is unlikely to come, you can't get away quickly.

* A guy like that is big, likes to fight. He's going to do some damage. If he gets into it, he can cripple you for life, rack up some serious hospital bills.

* Criminals with guns don't seem to have much of a chance to learn to use them well. Contrary to TV, while shooting a gun is easy, actually hitting something is difficult. It takes practice.
The True Confessions of a Graduate Teaching Assistant
ATI GPUs are extraordinarily fast at hashing (just go look at any of the serious bitcoiners), but this is why we have things like bcrypt. Power goes up, difficulty goes up, passwords remain secure.
Embeddable Bitcoin Miner for Websites
I started my own company to get away from the do-anything-for-a-sale attitude of corporate america. I do not admire or respect AirBnb for this behavior. I don't care that it worked. I don't care if it was legal or not, it was dishonest. I know it's common, but it takes a fundamental lack of respect to lie directly to another human being.

I'll just continue to toil in obscurity; self-respect intact.
Just being proactive about the otherwise inevitable "that's why I use 64 bit salts" thread, is all.
If you live in the country, getting a rifle isn't thaaaat dificult. There are still a bunch of hoops to jump through, of course, but it doesn't take a lot either. And if the local Superintendent says no, then you're out of luck, of course. I do feel safer knowing there aren't a lot of guns around.

I lived in Ballymun for a year and witnessed all sorts of craziness - arson, vandalism, stabbings - but not once a gun crime. I've never been attacked or robbed myself either, thankfully.
Does his religion matter or are you saying that non-Muslims in US never stole anything?
Underpaid? Really? I don't have a reference, but I saw an article a couple of years ago that with overtime it was common for Oakland officers to make more than $100k.
No. You can get movies and bands from the graph. But any likes related to articles (web pages, etc.) they do not share.
Instant link bait if you let us look up our own charts.
As mental exercise, it's certainly helpful, but the marginal benefit is probably lower than going from monolingual to bilingual.

The second language is crucial because it provides basis for comparison. If all you've ever used is Internet Explorer, that's the entirety of your internet experience. But if you've tried just another browser, you learn to appreciate the difference.
C&A does much more than password cracking. It has ARP poisoning capabilities, and it also comes with a trojan (Abel) that can hijack computers remotely over Windows networks. For a free program, it is very powerful. Even the NSA uses it [1].

I think this also means that one-factor authentication will soon be obsolete. Of course we can keep making passwords longer and more complex, but we all know its really the users that are the problem. People have shown time and time again that they will chose bad passwords, and to make matters worse, they will use the same password for every one of their logins.

Furthermore, this demo was done with a single card. Any attacker with knowledge and resources could easily link up a ton of graphics cards (or even use AWS GPU instances) giving them the ability to bruteforce most rememberable passwords. I can only imagine the scale of the massive GPU clusters that the NSA & other SIGINT focused intelligence agencies employ.

[1] - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/photo/postphotos/orb/as... (look under latest tool versions)
When you get into special-purpose computing devices, this is actually an argument for scrypt over bcrypt as well.
Virginia has a lot of urban areas and population and almost anyone can get a concealed carry permit in short order. Many people do concealed carry. I really don't know the stats, but I've never heard of a mugging in Virginia, whereas ten minutes away in DC (very strict gun control) crimes like that are common place.
what a bunch of f*&%en pussies...
though successful.
Yeah it was intended for people who don't understand RSS (or who, like me, subscribe to 800 feeds. The problems are the same at both ends of the spectrum).

And yes I'm sure there's lots wrong with it. I built a recommendation system, but I stopped hacking on it when I realized that people liked a story more if I lied that their friend shared it. That's what twitter has: social proof.
The Anatomy Of A High-Tech Bicycle (1987)
So the current facts are that:

a) the guy owns a laptop
b) he took pictures using it

Sounds like he's in the clear to post them anywhere he likes then?
This chart makes it look as though Matt's fine as long as they're no worse than Bing. Somehow I doubt it's as simple as that.
Black Hat (I think, could be DefCon) has a presentation on this stuff this summer. Guess I'll make sure to attend that preso.
If you're trying to sell any kind of professional service, especially one where you will be designing a brand and its identity, you should not use "I can haz design" as the name of one of your packages.
Blackhole Toolkit Running Wild
The pro/cons are arguments extracted from the mailing list. So the guys on the pro side said it was readable, the guys on the contra side said unreadable.

I think it would have been a nice addition...
Thanks for the pointers. I'll read it later tonight...

My own personal theory is similar to yours: among the genetically very tall males, there is a lot of people with the innate abilities of Michael Jordan (let's make it 40% of the original set). From that subset, those that put the 10,000 hours with great teachers plus other things will become the likes of Michael Jordan.
Whatever interests you naturally is the most important thing to work on
Free Software Faces a Test With Qt
Wow. I'd like a list of sites that use this, so that I know to never do business with them.
http://www.geekwire.com/2011/judge-rejects-exmicrosoft-gms-l...
Doom on the web
Launching Soon: The Basecamp Calendar
Generally, sound to somehow include the SHA1 of the filename in the filename, and to map [^A-Za-z0-9\.] to "_". If there's no reason to store a semantically valid filename on the filesystem, we usually just use the hash. It's easy and fast.
Random events by "higher powers" are exactly the sort of things that cause people to invent religions, conspiracy theories, and other 'beliefs'.
AMD Betting Everything on OpenCL
$a1 = [1, 2, 3];
$b1 = ['foo': 'orange', 'bar': 'apple', 'baz': 'lemon'];
$b2 = ['foo' => 'orange', 'bar' => 'apple', 'baz' => 'lemon'];

$a1 = array(1, 2, 3);
$b1 = array('foo' => 'orange', 'bar' => 'apple', 'baz' => 'lemon');

It would be a nice change to have, but the syntax isn't -that- much better. A compromise might be:

$b1 = array('foo': 'orange', 'bar': 'apple', 'baz': 'lemon');

But even then, you only save two characters per key:value.
"Bad programming? Use good programming!" Got it.
Also, what's with the html? It seems to have been generated given the alt text, and it also seems to have been saved by IE and then reuploaded? Or, did you, for some odd reason, specifically decide to manually add that, even though a bulk of your audience will definitely not be using IE?

<!-- saved from url=(0033)http://madeforhackers.com/ -->

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537628(v=vs.85).as...
I love that Danny Sullivan put an explicit "Is it on Hacker News?" question on the flowchart. :)
You shouldn't literally copy/paste anyone's stuff. That's not only unethical it may land you legal trouble.

You should take significant inspiration from other people, as long as you re-create it yourself and change it in a meaningful way.
A year in school from ages 4 to 18 inside this insanity costs $30K to $40K a year.
People are spending $500K on their kid’s education -- before college! Insane!

I'm dumbfounded by this. I went to a state school (well 4 actually, parents moved a lot) in the UK, left at 15 years old and haven't had any formal education since. I consider myself reasonably intelligent, i'm an autodidact and i only started real learning after realising there was a difference between education and school, after that epiphany i began to love learning.

In the 10 years since leaving school, i've done pretty well for myself, i'm financially stable, know my shit in my chosen field and earn a good wage when i choose to work.

While i'm not arrogant enough to think i've got everything sorted, i've always wanted to be a mentor to others and hopefully show them that school and education are different, i know i'd have done better if i had a mentor when i went through my learning experiences. Although, i suppose its still not too late for me to find some.
Rasmus voted for it!
Guess this just means what's readable to one person is not necessarily readable to another.
Lodsys now going after Android app developers?
Can I ask why?

The way I see it, websites with advertisements use your mind (by grabbing your attention). This only uses your computer. Which would you rather have a website try to take over?
>> Don't accept some latin-1 data. Accept only UTF-8

I think I get it. You are a web programmer and hence always get encoding specified and are never fscked by something else?

Or you've never had the problem of recognizing whitespace (as was the jrockway example) or sorting?

(English isn't my first language, but I'm not good with UTF-8 anyway. I tried to understand why you guys are talking past each other.)
The Engineer
I completely forgot to consider that, so thanks for pointing it out. Personally, I would feel much less safe 10 feet away from someone with a gun than 10 feet away from someone with a knife, so I suppose that that and popular culture were biasing my view.
The website appears to have been created in response to the inability of the police to bring the person, allegedly responsible, into a courtroom to explain why he is in possession of a stolen laptop.
Visible light definitely does penetrate the skin. A typical light bulb shines through your fingers, making the veins visible: http://www.flickr.com/photos/exquisitur/2699850137/
Again, stereotypical and prejudice.

Last I checked, Spain was in Europe.
Last place I lived the dude in my basement had three guns and the guys on either side of me each had shotguns and rifles. I felt very safe.

I think the difference is that due to demographics the Irish don't face the constant threat of the urban zombie hordes attacking.
Other than perhaps iMac, which of Apple's i-products doesn't have their i paired with an every day word?
I've wanted this for soo long. It's little things like this that make PHP feel so much clunkier than other scripting languages...
XBOX and Entertainment
Steganography hides the existence of covert communication. The message is hidden in an innocuous looking host (say a picture or video that noone would get suspicious about). So in that sense, the existence of actual communication is not known to a third party. I did a PhD theses on this topic :)
No, they just use knives and bayonets.
HTML 5 Spec Advances to 'Last Call' Status
Not US but Exeter, England. Long, rambling, poorly structured story ahead. TL/DR, bike gets thieved a couple times and police were useless. Vigilantism sometimes works.

My motorbike was stolen the 12hrs before I went sitting in a hedge in a field where I found some tyre tracks in some mud (nobody sensible would have a trials tire on a chicken chaser) of my bike earlier that day ( skipped classes at my EE uni course). After ~4hrs sitting in the cold and dark I hear the bike near to the field and set after it and try to pull the thief off as he goes around a roundabout (he just wobbled into the curb and goes off and I get flung to the ground). I phone the police telling them where my bike is ( I had reported the theft hours ago). I chase after the guy and he drops it somewhere (it went quiet) so I phone for my housemates only for 1 to drive home because he "doesn't like this one bit". I spent 20minutes waiting for the police only for me and a friend to fail at tackling the guy off the bike when he comes back and rides off.

I go looking for the bike with a friend (I hear it stop a long way off somewhere in a council estate) and interrogate one of the thief's friend who tried to follow the thief. Waste of time, it turned out the friend had put fake plates on his scooter. My friend miraculously spots my bike in a dark alley and we push it home. Then 3 fucking police cars turn up almost an hour after I tell them and I convince them I phoned them but I have nothing on me (I was certain I was at least going to get beaten up that night) so I get put in the cop car and taken home to get ID. Then they are happy that I wasn't the thief.

That was the 2nd time my bike got stolen.

1st time it was in a locked garage blocked by a locked car (smashed the window of the car to release handbrake and crowbarred the garage door and cut the lock. A few years later they torched the both and my bike along with my stuff stored in it [i was at uni]). Usual stuff first, police come down, take info and tell me they wont be able to find it. I bunk off school and go riding around on my mountainbike checking out all the council estates and woods near my home (Plymouth, England). Sure enough I hear it come down a path and see 2 people on it. I throw my mountainbike in front of them and they came crashing down and I banzai charge at them screaming. One of them runs for his life and the other just hung around claiming he didn't nick it (was offered a "go") and wanted compensation for damaging his "trackies". I believe him though as I had an inkling as to who knicked it. I ride out of the woods away from home with the mangled bicycle on my lap and I get my dad to come by to pick it up(http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonnobleuk/5783020123/), clear the woods between me and home and then I ride back.
Police's response when I tell them I retrieved my bike back "oh, good for you."

For some unknown reason this heap of a bike got stolen 3 times. The 3rd time I gave up only for the police find it dragged 50meters away from my home where someone tried to use bolt-cutters on it. The police then tried to charge me £250 for retrieval fees. I slipped off from work to avoid that scam.
How To: Add Twitter Follow Button In WordPress Blogs
Before I switched to Apple hardware, I developed one app in a VMWare VM that was successfully approved and is currently in the app store.

A previous comment of my own that might lead you down the right path: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1262569
I think "search engines" might be a little misleading, it's not readily grepable locally either.
This is apprenticeship. It's how the trades are taught and learned. I'd love to see more of it in the white collar world as well. Been thinking about how we can do more of this at 37signals.
Does it hook Control - Tab? My understanding is that as of Chrome... 5 or 6, I believe, the ability to hook default keyboard shortcuts was disabled, as a security measure.

I'd be interested enough to take a look. Thanks!
But that is common to most languages. Arrays are something fundamental enough to warrant a place in language syntax.
When Sony got pwned, I had mixed feelings. That would not be the case here.
That's definitely required before bringing the resources of the state to bear in punishing the person.

If you're not doing that, then no, it needn't be.
In what jurisdictions is it illegal to recover your own stolen property?
Good god do we ever wish there were...
Highway patrol, too: http://www.chp.ca.gov/recruiting/osalary.html
Why limit it to just kids? We all need someone to give guidance and support some time in our lives. There seems to be some mentorship matching services but they're geared towards matching local mentors and mentees.

How about an online mentoring matchup where:

- Mentors and Mentees create a profile and upload bio (preferably a video bio) about why they are qualified to be a mentor and who they want to mentor and mentees talk about who they want to be mentored by and what they need help with.

- Both groups can apply/offer to each other and they set the time frame and hours committed to being mentored. After an engagement is complete, mentees are invited to post ratings and review their mentor.
I'm totally down to go gangbusters on this dude and help get this laptop back, FWIW.
Dependencies in the Product Backlog
I'm not sure this is entirely accurate, last time it was voted on the dev list it was narrowly defeated.

The topic was then resurrected about implementing in the 5.4 release and the objections didn't seem to be as strong this time around.

So the rejected status doesn't mean that it won't happen in 5.4 just that that was the previous status of the changes.
I would tend to agree. When they interviewed one of the FD guys, he said if he wasn't on duty he would have rescued the guy. However, because they aren't certified, it opens the department up to lawsuits if something goes wrong. That's great. So now we have public officials that are doing more harm than good because of the lack of resources to train them and the fear of liability if they don't successfully save someone's life. I'm not sure which is more frustrating.
The Growing Myth of the Shrinking Man
No I meant "syntactic sugar" in a good way, i didnt realise it was a pejorative.

I mean it as per the definition on wikipedia:

Syntactic sugar is a computer science term that refers to syntax within a programming language that is designed to make things easier to read or to express, while alternative ways of expressing them exist.
People have actually paid me to do editing (the fools!), and I know the standard proofreading marks backwards and forwards, but I still didn't read the graphic on the key as "delete". I might have been able to suss it out if you told me it was supposed to represent an editing mark but looking at it absolutely cold? No way.

The person who designed the keycap probably had to cobble it together from a set of standard characters/symbols. If they'd used a more freehand representation, like the one shown on the 6110344 layout further down the page, it would have been immediately obvious.
I'd show some stats on the website, like how much mined in previous 24hrs, how much the individual pc is contributing, other sites that run the widget.

Make the user feel appreciated.

Give them the option to turn it off, or throttle down. Check out the Wibiya toolbar and how that can be switched off. Build a network.

Also, consider making the mining as part of a captcha mechanism.
I'm both Egyptian and speak Arabic. No racism here.

In telling the police more about the identity of this individual (who might be the thief or someone who bought the product from the thief), gathering any additional details can be important.

That's all. This is like an eyewitness report. Sorry if it seemed malicious.
Using this website induces LSD effects... maybe.
Pentagon Declares Cyberattack an Act of War
Ah my misunderstanding. I'll just add then that I'm personally excited to see where iCloud will land on the speculation spectrum from a full AWS cloud infrastructure to a simple online iTunes media player. ;)
Lodsys ignores Apple, proceeds to sue iOS developers