skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was hellbanned for a while without realizing on a different account. I was incredibly upset when I realized: a bunch of posts asking or answering meaningful on-topic questions had been blackholed, wasting a lot of my time, and (in my view) lowering the value of this site to everyone.

I never did figure out why I'd been hellbanned; my (polite and apologetic) emails were never answered. I'd never been impolite, trolled, or called people names, and although I was a fairly new user, I'd built up karma quickly in that short period. (Around 100 karma in 30 days; not too bad I thought.) I'd hardly ever been downvoted, and even now, looking back, I have absolutely no idea what I might have done to warrant a hellban.

Hellbanning "normal" users is just cruel. If your spambot/troll problems are so bad that you need to resort to hellbanning, it should be used rarely and sparingly. But on HN, apparently, it's not. If you browse with show dead on, I'd say 9 times out of 10 the hellbaned people you'll see should never have been hellbanned. And, take it from me, it really really sucks to realize that someone you don't even know has taken a couple seconds out of their busy day to screw with you and waste hours and hours of your time, without any possibility of recompense, or even a dialogue.

shrug Of course, I'm still here. HN has a great community. But I question if we need quite so much arbitrary cruelty to enable that community.
Thinking out loud, I wonder how effective the tech counter-lobby can be in a situation like this. Google and Facebook can cut all the checks they want, but if the congress critters have made up their mind about this bill, it would take a huge lobby to make even small differences. I mean it can't hurt - every little bit helps, but it would be super-interesting to know which tactics were most effective compared to everything that's been done to defeat these proposals.
Yeah, yeah, rub it in. In all seriousness, the taxation of contractors is a big problem here in the US. And you'll love this: it's only the first 100,000 USD of contractor income that is taxed at double the rate of regular employees The doctor's lobby is powerful here and wanted to ensure that the majority of their income is not taxed as such a high rate since many (most?) physicians outside of hospitals here are technically independent contractors.
Doesn't it make sense that the website loads quicker when you're not logged in? Not only will the caches be hit more frequently, but the queries are likely simpler than having to include lookups to see which articles on that page you've already upvoted, etc..
Google's Response: "The two people who made these changes were contractors acting on their own behalf while on the Google network. They are no longer working on Google projects."

This does not mean they were sacked. This does not mean Google were actively seeking to destroy OSM data. I'm pretty sure if they wanted to do that, they could do so without anyone finding out.

Two people, changing some OSM data (maliciously or otherwise), from their work PC's, is NOT newsworthy in my opinion. The original accusation, yes. If they provide more details of the attacks, definitely. This post however, is not.
I think we've reached the stage for an "Ignore" button. Clicking it would make that user invisible to me in the future.

There are some people who I am never going to agree with. Their comments are invariably ignorant or proselytizing or cruel to my eyes. I'd rather not have that.
That helps, but it still totally doesn't work for me in iTerm, and I'm not sure why. I basically get sometimes nearly-correct but mostly just messed up rendering.
Indeed, and these things lead to unnecessary deaths. Very dangerous.
isn't every business model under attack ?
There might be an opportunity cost but life is short. On your death bed you're more likely to fondly remember the time you had that delicious cheese in Paris, or lived with that little family in the Himalayas. Certainly more fondly than the nine months toiling away in a cubicle.

In short give it try and find out. But don't bother if you can't summon a positive attitude, you'll just waste your time.
At least the audio book isn't delayed. That how I've listened to the entire series. Just ordered it from audible.
http://www.audible.com/pd/ref=sr_1_1?asin=B006L7BE8S (no affil)
The vitriol is unwarranted, for sure.

But I can't help but feel sad and sorry for jcitme. He's a bit abrasive, but so are non-hellbanned folks sometimes. I think 198 days in purgatory is a long time and it starts to seem a bit cruel.
Oh... so [dead] means the person is hell banned?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3235848

This poster is perhaps an example of your category -- someone who is a cultural misfit and is banned before their Karma has a chance to recover?
Technically, a CEO doesn't have fiduciary duties. The board of directors does, and the CEO runs the company/reports to the board. I know what you mean, of course.
So, if you visit HN from your place of employment, your employer should be held responsible for every single obnoxious act you make? Or if you go to Amazon.com and post a negative review on a book, the author should sue your employer?

That's ridiculous. You're basically arguing that all employers should strictly limit the websites that any employee visits, since the employer should be held accountable for their employees actions.

If the contractors did something against the terms of their employment and got fired, that's one thing. But to hold the employer responsible and say they should "make good" on the actions of their employees is wrong.
BrowserID looks interesting, but what about on public terminals? The average user may not understand that they're logged in to your site and BrowserID, and as such would leave themselves mistakenly logged in.

See the BrowserID demo site - http://myfavoritebeer.org/ - as an example of this. Once you're logged in, the "logout" button does not truly mean logout - anyone could log you back in in two clicks.
Pandora sees huge jump in audience - 68% of Internet Radio
Credit Chris Dodd with this: the man knows how to troll.
Traveling has taught me that the majority of everything the media tells you is garbage.
So here's a guy who lives in California, which used to be part of the Wild West. He wants to broaden his horizon by visiting some other countries. Then he comes back from his trip and writes:

"the world isn't the wild west that some people seem to think it is"

Precious.
HN implements both hellbanning and slowbanning[1]. Slowbanning makes the pages load very very slowly, and it's used as a warning step before hellbanning.

You've almost certainly been slowbanned. To check, create a throwaway account, and log in - you should find HN is fast. Log out, log in as your main account - you should find HN is slow again.

If so, then cnsider this your one and only warning. Someone didn't like something you did. You'll probably never know what it was exactly, but if you do it again you'll likely be hellbanned.

[1]: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-h...
Saw http://coderace.me on techcrunch which is similar. Also stumbled upon http://CodePupil.com yesterday on programming zen.

Though I think there closest competitor is teamtreehouse but it's not free. I did subscribe to treehouse for a month but I preferred Codecademy's style of teaching.
Except for that stubborn 504...
Xiaomm
有道了
tryruby.org is totally unrelated. It's not directed learning - it just drops you into an REPL, what good does that do people who have never coded before (the primary audience of codecademy)? It has a help feature, but it's clearly not the main point or call to action.
Are you running Ruby 1.9?

For some reason it has crazy rendering problems in Ruby 1.8, which we haven't got around to debugging yet.

If you're using iTerm2 and the window is sized large enough, it ought to work.
IMO it is a combination of effective product, great marketing and hustle, well timed pr, air of inevitability making people forget their competitors. (disclaimer, Twilio is a Codecademy partner -- I suppose you could also read these as reasons why we are a partner)
Why would the caches be hit more frequently, particularly with the continuations-based setup of the site?

And seriously, it applies to the list views, too. All the same things, including the links to upvote articles, get generated when you're logged out. You just get redirected if you actually click on one.
Because the U.S. won't ratify the Treaty if they don't. Same thing happened here in Australia.

From Singapore's perspective, the FTA brings trade benefits. Presumably they judged that those outweighted the negatives.
More specifically; your terminal must be at least 120x40 characters. Larger than that is fine, smaller wont work.
Please share these other products with us. I genuinely want to know - out of curiosity and because Codecademy tops out too quickly as it is (I had a relative of mine try it out.)
Generally, it's because it got duped or otherwise hit a spam filter.
I was equally surprised and dismayed when I learnt of this initially, but it is already established as a point of law. See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicarious_liability

So in the case of the luxury cruise ship sinking, or Exxon Valdez, the ship owner is responsible the cost of cleanup.
A Seed Fund Grows in Brooklyn
Without visitor input, PG has no website.
I stopped buying DVDs back when I stopped being able to skip the 15 minutes of commercials and 5 minutes of copyright notices, because apparently I need to be warned in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, etc.

I'm not paying to be advertised to. I'm not paying to be threatened with FBI notices. So my solution is I'm just not paying.
[dead] can mean hellbanned, but can also mean a duplicate post, it tripped a spam filter, that sort of thing.
And worse, I just created a new account, and everything is lightning fast. (Yes, I'm Semiapies.)

I may just have to dump this account that I've had for three years.
Stradivarius not always better than new, cheap violins
Oh, I'm not Codecademy staff, I just read the post a bit more careful than jleader had.
Fixed, sorry!
For some reason, I refreshed the page after reading it, and noticed that the number of pledges increased drastically...

Turns out this is reporting a sign-up rate of over 100 pledges per minute!

A fairly impressive growth rate for email signatures I have to say. Good work!
Not sure why I'm getting downvoted for this. Anyone care to shed some light?
Eye on Japan 25: Good bye Hudson
There's an easy way to protest the MPAA. Tell your friends and neighbours; they're called Torrents.
What Is Your Brand Personality?
Microsoft & Amazon issue SOPA opposition statement
TheCHIVE will be going dark tomorrow to protest SOPA/PIPA
NSA releases SEAndroid
You could do that too, only problem I can think of is if you also want to install OpenJDK from the Ubuntu repos.

Presuming that, in addition to what you said, you also add your new $JAVA_HOME/bin to your $PATH, then you'll have a namespace collision in your PATH between $JAVA_HOME/bin/java and /usr/bin/java (OpenJDK linked via /etc/alternatives/java via /usr/lib/jvm/openjdk/bin/java, which is the default install setup for openjdk, on 11.10 at least).

If you're installing OpenJDK manually too, instead of via repo, or not at all, then keeping all your jdk's in ~/lib might be a better option overall.
NYPD Developing Body Scanners To Detect Concealed Weapons
You're again wrong on the history of the Agile movement, and I'm disappointed that you entirely ignore the meat of the point that you're replying to.

As to your assertion that everything good was in wide use before: that's not how I recall it. For example, CI: the Joel Test, written in 2000, suggests that the vast bulk of shops couldn't even manage to do a daily build, and he didn't even mention CI as an option. Also, it's not clear to me what a 13-year-old's imaginings proves about what a majority of development shops were doing in the mid 90s. My recollection is that waterfall was the majority, with most of the rest of the shops doing code-n-fix. And the first edition of McConnell's Rapid Development, which was a mid-90s book, either doesn't cover or treats as exotic most of the Agile notions.

But honestly, I don't know that it matters. I'm not sure why, but you seem eager to prove that there was nothing good about it based on your incorrect version of the history. The good news from your perspective is that what's sold as Agile has turned almost entirely into dismissable buzzwords, and as a fad I expect it will be extinct soon. There's nothing left to fight off.

But personally, I plan to keep using and evolving what I learned from it. If you want to see what a shop like that looks like (including all those practices you mention above), feel free to drop by in SF sometime. We like visitors.
A lot of losethos's posts look like they were constructed by Markov chains, however. Or are just psychotic.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3469320
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3469209
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3464110
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3464021
On the theme of a very rewarding change of perspective and exciting new possibilities, I'd heartily recommend everyone try their hand at developing for a small, embedded microcontroller platform. I don't know why sequencing and flashing LEDs is so satisfying.

That being said, I am excited about the possibilities of Raspberry Pi's, and hope they can meet their ambitious price point and stay well stocked. The design is impressive, and I hope they find equal success with the logistics and supply chain management side of the equation.
British Airways tells passengers "We're gonna crash". By mistake..
Ask HN: SOPA activism - preaching to the choir?
I feel like all of the recent SOPA activism on HN, Reddit, etc. is preaching to the choir. Upvoting 10 SOPA topics everyday doesn't teach anyone anything...it just creates another echo chamber. I think I'm safe in saying that most of the people on HN are aware of SOPA and are against it.

Anyone else feel the same way? Seems to me that the real effort should be focused on people unfamiliar with computers, the Internet, and technology in general.
Yes, I just tried this.

A "warning step", I suppose, absent anything like a warning. But then, a warning would imply that a human being made a choice, as opposed to some arcane calculation in the backend of the server that's hidden from the user by design.
Oh, my apologies. I was too excited and signed up quickly without reading it. Now that I have, it more or less answers my question: "You can meet weekly to discuss each Code Year lesson or whenever you’d like.".

Thanks, anyway! (:
Which doesn't say anything about the point I'm questioning, which is your claim that teachers are part of some closed guild that drives up wages by forcing out newcomers.
To me this is one of the rare cases where technology really is the answer (or rather: where technology dictates the answer).

SOPA-proponents can pass any bills they want, nothing can push the cat back into the bag.

Filesharing is easy now. People like it. The tech is out there and can't be blocked (see magnet links). Even if the laws pass; for every file-sharing "terrorist" they put in jail there are 10 more. And they're losing mindshare with every action they take. Bills like SOPA are merely delaying the inevitable, they can't turn back time.

Of course that doesn't mean we shouldn't front them, as we are.
It's an old idea, but one usually dismissed as ill-advised BOFH tactics which you shouldn't really implement. It's less "don't feed the troll" than "let's troll the troll at the expense of community trust."

I'm disappointed to learn that it's in use here.
Codecademy appears (for now) to be entirely free - which is not the case at all for Codeschool.com. To me, a free site is "way cooler" (to use your expression) than one that requires a fairly pricey monthly subscription.
Here's a quick list:

http://teamtreehouse.com
http://tryruby.org which I believe is an extension of http://codeschool.com
http://learncodethehardway.com

Then of course there are sites like Peepcode, Udemy, and a host of others that offer tutorials, which aren't quite the same, but stil serve the same purpose.

I'm sure there are more I don't know of.
Yes, slowbanning seems to be what has recently happened to me. I was wondering why my connection had gotten so slow on this site alone over the past few days. Why in the world?? I try to be polite always, although I don't hesitate to disagree with someone with facts and politely. If I was slowbanned because I made a comment about the Google Mocality issue, I'm going to be very, very sad about this wonderful community I thought I had found. Please look into my history and tell me why I've been slowbanned. My connection is super-fast when I'm logged out, and super slow when I'm logged in. I find this very distressing, particularly since I have been so happy about finding this community.
N00bz Guide To Metasploit (101)
The Building Blocks of Modularity
I could be wrong, but I think ClojureDocs predates most of the major Clojure web app infrastructure. So presumably nobody has thought rewriting it was the best use of their time.
Yes, I agree. I think it sucks to have these hellbanned folks who didn't actually do anything wrong.
Help the Media Industry Innovate rather than legislate #SOPA
Ask HN: Laptop recommendations
I'm planning to buy a new laptop next week and thought HN could help. My main OS is Ubuntu and mostly do web programming. I really like the MacBook Air but it would be great if I can find a cheaper alternative.
How I got press in Inc., Mashable and Wall Street Journal
"Employers are vicariously liable, under the respondeat superior doctrine, for negligent acts or omissions by their employees in the course of employment (sometimes referred to as 'scope of employment')"

So the contract company, the actual employer of these people should be responsible from the sounds of it, not Google.
Seems to me that they have a similar learning curve and call to action.
Sorry, I wrongly assumed that the front pages like Top on Recent were the main slow pages. Also I have definitely seen slowdowns on my two week old account, and I only have one comment that has zero points (and none with negative.) I haven't submitted any links or anything so I dont know why HN would care to intentionally slow down my pages, if that is what's happening.
Or just use Encarta 1996 on CD-ROM, as I'm sure Mr. Smith does. How much could the world have possibly changed?
You can now change default language in iTunes Connect
Long waiting feature was introduced by Apple yesterday. If you mistakenly select wrong default language when created apple developer account then now you can change it without necessary create new account. Its long waited feature for non English developers
Yup. My bad. There are python bindings, though.
"Dr. Strangelove: Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?"

I tend to agree with the subby. Shadowbanning, slowbanning, hellbanning are petty, vicious, and passive aggressive tools.

Before you implement them, you should make it clear that the person is treading on thin ice, and why.

Yes there are spammers and worse.

But the silent treatment and similar is recognized as a form of psychological abuse (remember that in your relationships folks. Someone giving you the silent treatment is abusing you as much as physical abuse is.)

So if you're going to implement hellbanning, shadowbanning, slowbanning, I really urge you to implement one or more intermediate steps like

+ warning
+ coloring/greying/dimming/shading/collapsing the post
+ limited time timeouts.

Some of us are well meaning, but dumb as dogs, and we need and even deserve to have our errors pointed out to us to help us learn.
Physarum Polycephalum (Slime Mold) Can Compute Shortest Paths
Episodic TV patent credited to Steve Jobs could be used for rumored Apple TV
I don't understand why the rpi is so special. Any half-decent hardware engineer could have built this. They just optimized the BOM to get it to $25 bucks? Someone explain this to me.
Codecademy received their initial upswing in users (200K) once they announced their product and funding after going through YC. The initial HN post received around 700 upvotes because the use of the repl.it project was somewhat of a novel approach to teaching a person Javascript. They later gained the 100K users when announcing CodeYear. AFAIK, nearly all of their growth has been driven by the press. Crunchfund is an investor (TechCrunch has written about them 12 times in the past 5 months) and Fred Wilson is a prominent blogger who mentions them since USV is an investor.

It's partially their investors, partially the ease of starting with Javascript, partially the game mechanics and point system to incentivize engagement, and the focus on conversions by putting the editor on the home page for example. While the JS lessons are simple enough for almost anyone to start off with, it's questionable how far a user can go off those alone.
So here's a question from someone getting ready to raise an Angel round. Do investors help bring groups together in this fashion, or am I reading into it too much?

I'm not saying that to judge, I truly want to know.

When you say well timed PR, how does that work? Is it a PR person on staff, or friends in high places? Coming from someone on the outside looking in, it's amazing, and I'd love to generate just a fraction of that type of publicity.
Do you agree that "Having Google's DNS blacked out because Google linked to a copyrighted sitcom transcript" a possible outcome if SOPA passes?

For what it's worth, this is an unlikely outcome with Google (or Wikipedia) as it is now. It would have easily been possible with Google (or Wikipedia) as it was back in 2000.

That's the real danger: SOPA is unlikely to shut down Google or Wikipedia, but it could easily prevent the next Google or Wikipedia from getting off the ground.
Codeschool.com has some free courses, so they already have way more "free" content than codecademy. The paid courses are just great addons to that.
Most people are dissatisfied with Congress, but I suspect that if you asked them to compare America to anywhere else in the world, they'd immediately jump to America's defense. My favorite line I've heard from some of my friends: "Our system may not be perfect, but it's the best we've got."
Slow response to East Africa famine 'cost 'lives ~ Daily World News
It's just novelty seeking, as best I can tell

I suspect that the problem here is simply that you are wrong.

I'm not sure why, but you're consistently trying to be condescending about those who value travel. What do you gain by categorizing and marginalizing others? Living somewhere is okay, but merely traveling through is just "novelty seeking"? As if "novelty seeking" cannot itself be an activity that leads to personal growth?
Fair point. It's also possible that maybe the contractors' manager knew or was complicit. I just find it difficult to believe that multiple such infractions (Mocality, OSM, fake Chrome reviews etc.) can all be blamed on rogue/stupid contractors, there are likely to be some rogue/stupid employees involved as well.
Do you think that nobody at Britannica has ever vandalized Wikipedia for fun?

Hell, I do it, and I don't work for them.
Asus Zenbook UX31 has same weight and size but more powerful.
But personally I will buy Air next generation(15^)
I'm genuinely mystified by your response. Art is an entirely subjective endeavor. You seem to think that you can decide what is and is not art. Frankly, you're not qualified for that task (read: no one is).

> A large subset of photography isn't art

> a thousand sunset pictures, while maybe pretty, aren't generally art

Seriously? Because you get to decide? Your response just seems incredibly egocentric. You can define what art means to you all day long, but you can not define what art means to everyone.
I thought Mozilla was blacking out?