skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really enjoy reading Charlie's thoughts on just about anything, I loved Accelerando, and definitely don't mean to take a shot at him here.

When I encounter a title which includes the phrase "A Modest Proposal" I assume the words that follow are generally facetious. Swift wasn't actually advocating for the devouring of delicious Irish adolescents; I'm certain Charlie is well aware of that fact (in the case of other writers who invoke the title, I am sometimes less confident).

TPB's LOSS initiative is probably absurd enough to meet the requirements, as is Charlie's ratbot counter proposal. Except it seems he's sort of serious? Then he concludes by posing to his readers what appears to be a completely honest request for their dream implementations of Raspberry Pi. Many commenters both on his blog and in this HN thread have apparently taken the post at face value.

It could be that this was just a slam dunk bit of satire, achieving exactly the desired result. If that's the case, to me this post doesn't exactly live up to its namesake. Charlie's identified a ridiculous plan, and suggested an equally ridiculous alternate plan, without so much as a wink or a nod.

Now what?
Nvidia  Launches First GeForce GPUs Based on Next-Generation Kepler Architecture
It's a hot job market only in certain area.
Google is not an ad company. People just like to say that because they think it's clever or surprising or something. Google does not produce ads. They sell ad space. So does Facebook. So does NBC. These are product companies selling ad space.
I very much agree. Also, please add IP blocking, for testing purposes.
Who says it serves you better results? If I type in "tea", am I searching for Tealuxe in Harvard Square or am I searching for the botanical and scientific material on a common drink or am I searching for recipes? The new "social+local" Google biases my results towards the former.

A search engine used to be a tool for reaching out into the world and finding something new. Now it searches through what I already know? What's the point in that?
Scrolling the Z-axis with CSS 3D Transforms
Senate Passes Start-Ups Bill, With Amendments
5 Signs For  Small Businesses That It’s Time To Outsource
One of the lessons from our experience with remote freelance work is that it becomes much easier to work when:

1) The people who are working on the project (client and coder) are good and reasonable

2) When work is split up in short tasks/stories, allowing to always work on tasks of which the size can be reasonably estimated

3) The communication is well adapted to the medium, rather than a simple copy of what usually happens in an office

Although it sounds simple, in practice learning this is difficult, on both sides. We can help manually, as we are doing now, to learn ourselves what is the fastest way to get a new working relationship setup, and working.

For scaling, we think that that learning process can be made very efficient, and scale - you could probably describe our long term goal as to end up somewhere between the two models you're describing. Focusing on producing good matches that produces fruitful relationships, but maintaining enough support/advice to maintain a good level of safety.
I wondered about the pot luck thing, isn't the point of a pot luck that everyone brings something to eat for everyone? If she'd be the only one that had to bring something, it wouldn't be a pot luck any more, right?

At least, that's what I understand pot luck to mean? I like them a lot btw, very American thing, so we don't do it often enough here, but my hummus is always appreciated ;-)
Thanks. I think I must have flipped something when creating the table. I was copying each row above it, and editing.
I must have forgotten to flip that.

Fixed.Thanks.
I've gotten things to work, but even versions that are listed as "platinum" still have things that break here and there. I've found it's better to not try. Linux runs great in a vm. I've taken to using windows or OSX as my host system for my photoshop needs, then just doing everything linuxy over ssh to a vm. Not everyone is comfortable with that workflow, but I've found it's better than trying to run photoshop in wine.
You can click through on any node to drill down - that might not be as clear as it could be.
While the OP raises some good points, the letter which got them mention (on Mashable) doesn't even talk at all about what "buffer" is.

For example this paragraph ("paragraph one"):

"We have some big news for you. With the new release of Twitter.com, we have just released a way to post retweets via Buffer right from Twitter.com at a better time. It works seamlessly via installing our browser extension. You will have now, next to "reply" "retweet" and "favorite" a new option to "Buffer"."

Well that paragraph makes the assumption that the writer already knows what buffer is (and I will assume the website address (bufferapp.com is located in the email header).

While the writer (if interested) will certainly visit the site, a short description of what buffer is is essential.

My experience with doing this over the years (with mention in the WSJ, NYT, (multiple times) as well as online media (and blogs) has yielded the following formula:

1) Send occasional emails to writers before you need them.

2) In those emails compliment the story and add your perspective.

3) Invite the writer to contact you if they are doing stories on (something you know about) that is, to consider you a resource. By doing #1 your name will be in front of them and they might remember you and contact you.

4) Do this over the course of time. Then when you want to pitch the company they will pay attention to your email and message (which of course still needs to be well written) because they are familiar with you.

That is what has worked for me.
Last I heard they are working on a new MMO. The name Titan got leaked a while back.
> I don't understand the "as a man" part. That's further propagating the problem.

...

> You see, you are still treating her differently, where ultimately, no one treats her differently.

Actually, everyone is treating her differently. The problem isn't just that people see men and women differently. That's almost impossible to change in the short term. In the short term, all you can do is try to get people to treat each other fairly.

I've no opinion on whether or not "Black History Month" is a good idea or not. Maybe it's a piss-poor token effort. Maybe Freeman doesn't care, because people treat him fairly, as he's outrageously successful, but other African Americans don't get treated fairly unless people make a big deal about doing so (which they usually do, thanks to a huge amount of anti-black-discrimination sentiment ... Latinos aren't so lucky). I'm not an American. I don't even know what "Black History Month" is.

There's three things that should happen - everyone should try to treat everyone else fairly, people should stick up for groups of people who are treated unfairly (whether they are a member of that group or not), and people should try not to think of people as belonging to any particular group. But when a group is treated unfairly, if you don't think of them as a group (on occasion), you can't stick up for them.

What I'm saying is that your shouldn't primarily consider someone to be defined by their (race / gender / height / whatever), but should occasionally stop to think about whether people might be getting treated unfairly, and do something about it if they are.

I'd consider saying "maybe I should take notes, because it's not fair that the girl always seems to do it, and (name) is busy with her presentation right now".
Story-centered design: Hacking your brain to think like a user
> It isn't that anymore, though. Searches are geospecific and social network-dependent. All of which is fine and useful, but that's not what made us love Google's search engine.

What makes you love Google is Google giving you the right answer.

If you live in the US, do a google search for dmv.

Did it pull the one from your state?

Do you really want an averaged across all searchers answer? California is probably the state the generates the most Google searches for dmv, but the California DMV is likely relevant iff you are in California.

This idea of one best search page for one query, independent of any other factors based on the user or users geography is really overly romantic and simplicistic.

On the other hand, the filter bubble stuff is a nice narrative, but it mostly makes for an interesting story rather than real problem. Having worked on search personalization at Google about 5 years ago, it's just hard to make that big impact on search results with personalization. "dmv" is a nice example where it's works brilliantly, but those ambiguous queries are pretty rare, and hence the more bread and butter stuff is still really driving most of the quality.
You are omitting the time value of money which can make a huge difference in such a large time frame. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_value_of_money
I suppose that's a matter of anecdotal evidence on both of our ends. I have friends who have applied for jobs and had more than once been asked for this information- either to login to facebook in front of them, or provide login info. While maybe it's 3 or 4 times that I've heard of it personally, my impression is that it's probably wide-spread just looking at those statistics.
France announces crackdown on people not using VPNs/TOR to access extremist websites.

In other news a lightbulb went off in the mind of yet another hacker, this time in France, who decided to devote his time to liberating the internet from the draconian control of governments and large corporations and working toward a censorship resistant infrastructure.
The built in GPU acceleration depends on quite a few libraries. Not only that, but the interface is entirely custom (based on air). Photoshop isn't some little stand alone app. It's a 2GB behemoth. Why wouldn't it have an installer?
I agree Google has gone into a filter bubble, but the article very speculative and provides no statistics or examples to make a good point.

This is a pop-science article, so I don't have high expectations.
I love this,i wanna slam dunk that hoop!where i can play like that?
Who knew so many Nigerian scammers were hearing-impaired?
Alexis Madrigal reaches a subtle and thought provoking conclusion "The aggregation of individual data does not a commons make." This would seem to be at odds with a lot of "Big Data" evangelism but I think he is right.
Titan is mentioned in the article. According to the author it is targeted towards a more causal gaming audience and not intended to be a WoW replacement.
I've got a feeling its a few marginal cases of completely terrible employers who are doing it and it makes a good news story.
Randall does a pretty good rundown of why the old comment ranking algorithm (which is similar to HN's) was bad here:

http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-s...

I wonder if pg would consider implementing the confidence sort on HN. It's certainly been effective on reddit.
Honestly, I'm OK with the first part of the comment. It's the latter part which irks (most) people.

Had it been "Katie's got the low cut dress on today! Going out tonight?" then I think it's acceptable.
Do The Data Tell It All?
تشکر دایی از FIFA، AFC، بایرن مونیخ و هرتابرلین
from the screenshot ( http://imgur.com/a/cfblx#7 ) it looks like it was github.com/codahale who has written a couple posts on male privilege:

http://codahale.com/foss-and-male-privilege/
http://codahale.com/ruby-and-male-privilege/
Milk Production Records
Milk Production Records and Reports
Amazon Taps Eucalyptus as Private Cloud Partner
Here's a SQL implementation: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/sql/functions.s...

Interesting here to also see their "controversy" algo
I have to say, your annoyance likely (assuming you're a man) from a fairly privileged place. You can afford to be "annoyed" by other people voicing concerns, because this issue doesn't affect your professional life everyday.

If you want to learn more about why the video itself offends some people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_objectification
Sorry but I don't see how your example of a guy initiating a dialogue with women he just met is an example of a power imbalance. Partly because you're guessing at how he feels - maybe he feels entitled or maybe he feels nervous at hell, because he knows there's a chance of rejection/getting rebuffed/etc.

Of course, maybe I'm biased since I met my wife by simply going up and talking to her while she was waiting in line to purchase a ticket for a boat ride :-)
I actually like Knockout.js much more than Ember or Backbone. Its two-way binding is simple to use. Ember and Backbone feel heavy weight conceptual wise and code wise.

Knockout doesn't have routing but there are so many little routing packages out there. I just use Crossroad.js for routing.
IF open source is The Way, it wouldn't need subsidizing. It sounds like all utopian arguments: If Only everybody came around to the right way of thinking, we'd all be better off.

Sure its true, but it aint gonna happen.
Dear Katie,

Welcome to business, now grow up. I agree that the "lighten up" strategy is tiresome and ineffective. I don't know you, but it seems you need to grow some thicker skin and learn to hit back.

Do you think Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorna, or Arianna Huffington take shit from people? Hello no! It is called assertiveness and standing your ground.

Grow up, Katie. The real world has all kinds of people. People who grew up believing in gender roles. People who grew up thinking homosexuality is bad. People who grew up with no discipline from hippie parents. Putting all those personalities in the room can be chaotic. There are two lessons you need to learn:

1. assert yourself, and do it in a way that the offending party understands. HR and all these laws are crutches for solving the actual problems.

2. stop worrying about what others think about you.
I don't think resources are really the problem. There's a ton of money out there that pays for full-time open source developers. Basically all the core contributors of all the "serious" projects (i.e. things shipped in high-revenue-producing contexts) are already on staff somewhere.

It's true that there's a much larger population of people (like me) who want to work full time on open source and would take a job if it was offered. But that just gets to what the linked article is talking about: companies don't generally "staff" free software projects with new hires. They hire the projects that already exist.

So basically the solution, if you want one of these jobs, is to get off your butt and make something people want. Then give it away. :)
In 1729 Jonathan Swift anonymously published “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick” [1], which suggested that poverty and overpopulation in Ireland could be alleviated if the poor would either eat their children, or sell their children as food to the rich. In allusion to the original, the phrase “A Modest Proposal” is used to introduce suggestions that are satirical, hyperbolic, and sarcastic. Not knowing the origin of the phrase, some authors use it to introduce proposals that are genuinely modest, much to the disappointment of this reader.

fn. 1: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1080
I'm afraid the statement that "every programmer tests code" is not a fact. Not by a long shot.

In fact the vast majority of bugs are the result of not testing changes at all, in any way shape or form. Committing code changes without even running it (or only running it to the most simple and predictable of scenarios) is not an exception.

Many programmers, especially those that don't like writing test, simply assume it works "because it was simple". It's this utterly unrealistic and unprofessional hubris that gets condescending reactions.

Given the damage it does to both the product at hand and our profession in general, I would say condescension is a rather mild response to this behaviour.
A little off-topic, but...

Why is this getting down-voted? Is it because you disagree with what this person is saying? I thought down-votes were only for things that didn't contribute to the conversation.

It feels like this is getting down-voted because people don't like that Google is doing these things. So, this person is getting down-voted 'cuz of Google? Huh?
It'd be great to be able to segment logged in/out users.
Wow, this post even links to a pirated version of VMWare :/
this was a great post, and the fact that much of the information is repeated elsewhere in posts indicates that 1) there is a scalable strategy for pr that works and 2) not enough people are using it! i covered some of my advice for pr for startups here, as an extension to my post on mixergy on pr for startups http://startupstella.com/2011/10/14/dos-and-donts-of-pr-for-...
The Downfall of Video Chat
One thing I wish was different about the way Reddit's algo worked is the way it treats downvotes. Basically, if I am average Joe redditor, there are two potential reasons for a downvote:

1) The post is something I personally disagree with.

2) The post was written by a moron (for various definitions of the word moron).

What I wish is that someone (smarter than myself) could come up with a way to reliably determine the motive behind a downvote. I know that's no simple task. But I actually want posts that are slightly more controversial to rank higher than posts which don't generate a lot of downvotes, simply because I'm more interested in reading something thought-provoking than checking out the latest batch of meme-gen.

Basically I want comment rankings to look like this:

a) Lots of downvotes, few upvotes == total asshole. Maybe racist, maybe a general troll, but I want this ranked at the rock bottom.

b) An equal number of upvotes vs. downvotes == flamebait. I'm not interested in the latest holy wars, so we call this the next lowest in rankings.

c) Lots of upvotes, few downvotes == uninteresting. Rank it lower.

d) The ratio upvotes/downvotes is greater than 1, but less than some finite number N. These are the stories I want to read.

I want a ranking system that works something like the above, albeit with more finesse (e.g. perhaps we swap the ranking position of b and c). I'm just not interested in the latest round of adorable kitten pictures, and on HN, too much emphasis on the sheer number of upvotes manifests as groupthink. Also, I want the downvotes that are received by slightly controversial stories/comments (again, slightly controversial as opposed to PC-vs-Mac style flamebait) to have a smaller effect on the poster's karma, so that people will feel free to express disagreement on sites like reddit and HN.
PhoneGap Explained Visually
GNU glibc 2.15 released
I once worked for a company that did a lot of military contracts. They would ask some of us to get security clearance to be able to work certain projects (and enter the 'secret room'). It was still optional and I never felt it pushed on me even though it would have had career benefits. I opted out because the requirements and paperwork were nuts and part of the deal was that the government would potentially track whenever you left/entered the country and a whole bunch of other things.

I thought this was a really nice way of letting your employees have a choice even though in this particular case they probably could have forced everybody to do it. Now you have companies which do not really need to have this personal information asking employees for it. Here's the thing though. If my employees had lots of nasty things to say about my company then my reaction wouldn't be to stop them by monitoring everything they do. Wouldn't you want to try and fix the problem?
??? What utopian world did you live in? Before Microsoft and Apple was before the Internet. Open Source was a dream, everything was proprietary, software engineers were just Coders.

What does it even mean to say "When you bought a program..." in the context of Open Source? Of course if you paid for it, it isn't open source.
A cloaking device from off-the-shelf superconductors and magnetic tape
Making Hacker News Faster: Two Approaches
We look at past work publicly available - one of the first links we visit is the GitHub profile. We then take into account the demonstrated skills to evaluate the price asked.

Then, when we do the matching with clients, we take the qualification into account - does the project require high skills? What kind of developer does the client seem to be looking for? Would it work?

The key here is to acknowledge the difference between acquired skill, and ability to deliver - it's ok to be learning, as long as you're in habit of delivering.
It literally starts out in its first sentence by undermining itself.

It's first sentence is "Hi everyone." Is that the sentence you feel undermines itself?

It's second sentence is "We never meant to offend any person and are very sorry as we clearly have."

In that sentence they acknowledge that they have offended people and take responsibility for that, and unequivocally apologize for that.

The usual undermining apology sentence is more of the form,

"We never meant to offend any person and we are very sorry if you felt offended."

In that form, the authors are not taking responsibility for their actions, and not apologizing for their actions. They are blaming you that you feel offended.

I don't see that at all as to what Geeklist did here.

Then again, while I understand why the original viewer was offended by the video, and I agree it's a stupid video that shows the woman in her underwear, I would not call this one video fucking disgusting, nor would I attribute one video, made by one speficic woman for one specific company associated with "IT" as representative of IT, or CS or startups or entrepreneurship or geeks or men as so many people here at HN and elsewhere have done.

It was one stupid video and one stupid promotion in a world of stupid videos and stupid promotions many made by men, many made by women, and many made by men and women.

In the pantheon of fucking disgusting problems that IT or CS or startups or entrepreneurship or geeks or men or humanity or this country or the world faces, this video by one specific woman for one specific company is not present. It's out beyond Alpha Centauri.

If you would, I appreciate your elucidating why you feel this apology was so poorly done, instead of just branding it as bad and letting others fill in their thoughts why.
Sorry, there were some problems. Now everything is ok :)
Just How Much Is Your Privacy Worth?
Actually it seems that the article was changed before you read it. One line in particular was "We never meant to offend any woman and are very sorry as we clearly have" instead of "person." Someone went through and corrected most of the language to be gender-neutral but the original was actually an interesting read in itself.
I agree with you that it's silly to think of special laws being created specifically for facebook and the like. The problem with laws in all areas right now is that the internet and everything that came with it is so far "out there" that there's no way that lawmakers 50 years ago could imagine its impact. That's lead to now, where some laws are wholly inadequate to deal with real issues that we face.

In hiring laws, it's the applicants that are getting screwed by the lack of these laws, because their choices are to either acquiesce to the hiring manager's demands or lose the job. While it's easy for some people to say "I'd just walk out," a single mother who needs to feed her kids probably wouldn't be so quick to do so.

In the end, it's a matter of the job market. If the market were flush with openings, hiring managers would have to be on their best behavior for fear of losing a promising candidate. Right now though, that's unfortunately not the case, so it's up to regulation to give people some basic rights. In my opinion.