skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would give this 50 up votes if I possibly could, mostly because it struck very close to home.

I've been in a leadership role in a couple of smallish online communities that, on further reflection, died just because of what this article is talking about. Fear of doing anything because of not wanting to be labeled another mod abusing their powers, or what have you. I've been members of communities that died or were damaged due to outright mod abuse - figure the converse is better, right? Death through inaction and allowance is better than death through action and disallowance, right? Intent doesn't even begin to enter into it.. right?

Not so sure anymore.

So like most things in life, it's a balancing act. As a commenter on the article said, 9 times out of 10, your guess that a comment is crap, will be correct. Don't start second guessing yourself. You probably have a very finely tuned crap sensor.
Also in the video editing space Lightworks might prove to be an acceptable (if not even better) alternative to Avid and FCP.
I'm trying to learn stenography, using Plover (open-source steno software: http://plover.stenoknight.com/ ) and a $40 gaming keyboard.

A steno keyboard has 20 buttons and you can press any number of them at a time (chorded). You write syllables and it unambiguously resolves your strokes into English text. Experienced stenographers can get 220 WPM that way.
None of these you mention qualify as being "the best in the industry". Neither do Gimp and Kdenlive or any other video editing software on Linux.
Disagree. Besides that it's not in silicon valley, it made huge progress in a notoriously difficult yet humongous service category: local and small business marketing. It could have remained a tiny player like the 100s of copycats but instead decided to "go for it" by raising lots of money and expanding rapidly (the best use of vc and ipo money). People are much to focused on the original daily deal business (which remains massive and growing) and fail to see that Groupon is amassing an arsenal of valuable local/smb services. For example, it now offers both a cybersource and square competitor. And calendaring, loyalty services, etc.

If the company can continue stringing together solid quarterly results, it should get back to its ipo price and more.
Wow @ the mobile version. How many posts typically fit on a screen these days?
Well when it comes to 3D Linux is actually well off due to it's strong position in SFX, you have the latest Maya, XSI, Mudbox, Renderman, Houdini, Lightwave, 3D-Coat etc available in native Linux form.

And as others have stated there's also great free solutions like Blender.
This is a fabulous speech. Should be required viewing for HN folks.
Things to know when using Google Products.
Link to GitHub project: https://github.com/dmfrancisco/slideshow.html
Krita (www.krita.org) is also very great piece of software recently, sometimes called "best-kept secrets among Linux applications". See this blog-post from professional illustrator http://www.davidrevoy.com/index.php?article98/krita-2-4-beta...
It makes me wonder what the domain name market will be like in 5-10 years. Will a 4-letter domain be impossible to acquire? 5-letter?

I feel like in 5-10 years I simply won't be able to name my product.
Parts of it are served from the internets.
Valgrind (and tools using its methodology) isn't the only way to solve these problems. Libumem finds memory leaks too, and without imposing an immense runtime cost. It also finds many types of memory corruption without the runtime overhead that often changes the program's behavior that you're trying to debug.
Oh, thank Gabe! I've been waiting for this for a decade now!
As far as I know, it uses Webkit for the entire UI--and possibly a rather old version of it.
The we'll route around it/facts on the ground/eat away at the edges vs. engage and be corrupted thing is something that does not have easy answers. It seems likely that the circumstances around these issues will continue to shift and are possibly cyclical, with different levels of engagement, tactics, techniques, and have elements of an arms race (in terms of the implementation of the technologies, countermeasures, and counter-counter-measures.)

One thing seems certain, however, and that those who believe that they won't be touched by these issues are likely mistaken. We're still in the very early days of this new, highly connected world, and with the rate of technological change that can be frightening for many; the sometimes glacial pace of legislative processes; knee-jerk laws and clamp-down-by-default mindset in certain places; and a wide gulf of knowledge between technologists and many policymakers. It doesn't seem like something any of us will be able to avoid, whether we like it or not.

RMS' quote sums it up well: "Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone."
I think you've got to be more proactive about securing a domain name nowadays. You wait and it could be gone (it's happened to me before).

It sucks though, because I end up with lots of domains I thought were good and had every intention of using, but now are just an expense.
I think that you need to specify which type of CAD software you have in mind. CAD software for Semiconductor designers have an incredibly strong presence on Linux.
Depends on what you're doing.

I've used calculus for physics simulations in games.

I had to do a bunch of performance analysis, and a little bit of knowing what distributions actually meant helped a lot. I regret not having taken more statistics in college.

I was talking with a philosophy prof once, and somehow we got to DeMorgan's theorem. "I use that nearly every day," I told him, and it kind of floored him -- apparently he considered it "advanced" logic.
The WSJ has an interesting article on Groupon today also. Actually, it is more of an excerpt from "Groupon's Biggest Deal Ever" (http://www.amazon.com/Groupons-Biggest-Deal-Ever-Unbelievabl...). "Behind Groupon's $6 Billion Brushoff" (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230364010457744...)

With their current market cap just above 6bn, it may have actually served everyone better to take the Google deal. Apparently the board did not approve the deal because Google would only agree to an $800mm breakup fee, and antitrust approval would take up to eighteen months. Eighteen months from when they turned down the offer in December 2010 ends right around now! Still I have the highest respect for any founders that turn down a 6bn buyout.
Writing a boggle solver was the first assignment in CS106X at Stanford, which was still taught in C when I took it in the fall of 1994.

The trie code as well as the display UI were provided - you only had to write the board-walking code.

Being as this was the first time I had ever written any program, I remember it being quite challenging but also really fun. It was great to see your own program utterly house you when you played against it.

I wonder if I still have that code somewhere ... it would be fun to look at / cringe.
Thanks for informing me of this, I honestly didn't know they worked in native linux.
The thing I love about the TSA is that their record of failure is so numerically concrete.

FTA: “The experience to date is 50,000 false positives and 16 known terrorists not flagged,” says Thomson. “No known terrorists have ever been flagged.”

That's some pretty obvious and epic fail on the part of the Agency. Why hasn't it been eliminated or reformed by now?

Government's inability to allow its ideas to fail, or at very least its inability to pivot toward success is so disheartening. This has really been on my mind a lot today. I watched "Waiting for Superman" last night and I can't get the images of the poor kids just looking for a decent public education out of my mind. The crimes against humanity perpetrated upon us with our own tax dollars should really be prosecuted with all vigor.
If it's not trivially easy to make a profit on a company like groupon where they split revenue 50/50 with the companies they advertise for, there has to be something deeply wrong.
Listia is growing fast and hiring talented developers + growth hackers.
Define "so unresponsive".

Recently (less than a year ago), I had a switch in hardware from a Athlon X2 3200+, 4GB RAM machine to an i5-2500K, 8GB RAM and 2 SSDs. Sure there was a noticeable difference in responsiveness, but never on either machine would I consider Steam "so unresponsive".
I don't think the opinion, as the other poster actually expressed it, is generic at all. Turn back a few years to the Google IPO and try to read the two sentences with the word "Google" (of the time) and see if either the first or second sentence still reads the same. Or pick another company of that period and try it.

The post just doesn't seem general enough to cover a different climate (which you might not have been active in, and which I personally hope we will return to eventually.)

That's all I have to say. I don't mind the current climate as much as the OP does. You're still free to disagree, but the sentiment as expressed is pretty clear and specific.

Still, glad you shared your thoughts.
I bet that's exactly what Blackberry thought right before the iPhone came out, too. Not saying it will be that level of game changer (or that it even exists), but I think we've seen incumbents are notoriously bad at predicting when a new technology or competitor is about to take their business away from them.
Ironically LessWrong is going through a phase of struggling with increasingly meddlesome trolls, without terribly much moderation in evidence.
Ask HN: Does all HN related stuff that is published in HN gets to the top in HN?
It is almost a daily thing now - you point your favorite browser at HN and sure enough, one of the top link you'll find
in HN is something that has to do with HN.

Is HN imploding ?!
"His son, now 25 years old, graduated in 2010 with a degree in classics from St. John's College and couldn't find a job."

This is the problem right here. Gee I wonder why you couldn't find a job in "Classics"? Because there aren't any, at least with an undergraduate degree. People pay you to work because you can perform a given task with a level of quality and consistency. We tell kids that they should study whatever makes them happy in college, but then when they graduate and can't find a job it's not their fault. Fine you study your BS degree, but don't expect to be handed a job when you graduate. Expect to work some menial job, or do what this kid did, go back to school and learn a trade. You'll have to prove to someone that you have some employable skill if you want to earn money. Having a job isn't a right.
Top 15 Worldwide Professional Logo Designers
In order to become a successful maker of designer logos, you need to have certain qualities. Follow certain guidelines in order to become a successful maker of designer logo.
I immediately rethought my assertion when I submitted but left it for argument. Like Picasso saying "computers are useless" to encourage deeper discussion. Mathematics lends rigorous proof, like with an induction proof. It takes a level of abstract thinking to decipher recursive code, the kind of training helped by a mathematics education. Software programming gives you exposure to existing abstractions but direct mathematics training gives rigor to developing new concepts. University disciplines, within the university, do have ownership over domains of knowledge. So computer science is really math and engineering.

Like philosophy, mathematics is about ideas. Understanding the underlying philosophical and mathematical ideas are enlightening and often practical. Benefiting from understanding these ideas or methodology does not necessarily mean I have to be good at the level of philosophical writing, or solving proofs.
Forwarded to a pal at Flickr.
I also have that mentality of wanting no friction but I guess I was really saying that users like me and you can deal with it in most cases while the average people won't tolerate it.

I was mostly talking about keeping this in mind when developing new software. It definitely will be hard to make big departures from what's already in existence. It's not impossible though. You can always give users the option to add X toolbar to a window and choose which buttons appear by default and such.

Of course, these solutions don't lend themselves to all software and that's okay. What's really important is just to keep these ideas in mind and not write off design as just unnecessary ornamentation in the future. Obviously we have to be thoughtful about where these ideas would work best. The easiest way to do it is know your target users and design for the least common denominator among them. Your software can launch with a design meant for the least common denominator by default with options which can be displayed and remembered later for more advanced users. I can't repeat this enough though: this can only work on a case by case basis and by knowing your users. Remember too that incremental departures are swallowed much easier.

Design may not be the number one thing holding back FOSS adoption but it's high on the list I think. When the FOSS community can offer equal or better alternatives to what's out there, market share will skyrocket. I think Linux is pretty much there already. It has a few blemishes but the big thing is probably that normal folks are just scared to try it, won't go through the trouble of installing another OS over the one that came with their PC and the appalling lack of computers that come with Linux pre installed.
>That's some pretty obvious and epic fail on the part of the Agency. Why hasn't it been eliminated or reformed by now?

My guess is the TSA's long-term purpose is not to prevent terrorism, but to provide the federal government with a means of visibly asserting authority over the travel of citizens (and the opportunity to intervene in the travel of dissidents). Otherwise it makes little sense.
Being funny is a poor quality to require of something in order to consider it a joke. Firstly, because it is subjective, secondly because unfunny jokes are still considered jokes (why did the chicken cross the road...)
Steam works beautifully under Wine on my Ubuntu laptop (A Thinkpad T420).
Brain simulator online, where people are neurons
What about "makes problems disappear with a minimum of effort"?

It is true that powerful systems require some learning, but there also are a lot of things that programmer's would not have to learn if UIs were better.

As an example, consider the time wasted to learn the idiosyncrasies of the various Unix tools. Standardizing simple things such as the way to query a program's version (-v, -V, --version, probably others), or the features of the regular expression grammars of tools X, Y, and Z would have made live quite a bit better. And yes, it would break existing code, but sometimes, the price of change is worth it for the benefits it brings, accumulated over the years.
I love Linux for general hacking, but not having Adobe tools is a huge blow when it comes to working on a design. It's almost insurmountable.
They use their own UI toolkit called VGUI, the same one they use in HL2 and their other games (https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/VGUI_Documentation). So, there is a layer on top, but in terms of rendering it should be all native. In their games, it uses Direct3D calls, and in Windows I would guess it uses GDI+ or something in the DirectX family.

Edit: Just to be clear, I would consider the VGUI layer to be pretty lightweight. There is no virtual machine for any language runtimes. It is purely a layout engine, with some very basic styling defined mainly by the rendering of images and gradients.

Outside of rendering, from my own experience with using it, there's nothing in particular about it that makes it slow, except that it has no built-in asynchronous facilities in place for you to use. You have to make sure you never block the UI thread.

This is really just a guess of course, but I would pin the slowness on too much IO waiting (ie. poor thread design). To be fair though, Steam in most cases has stayed pretty responsive.
Absolutely. Also the gcc mudflap library, splint static checker, Torvald's sparse have really helped.

And that's without the commercial tools such as Coverity.
The problem is you might identify as "fool" someone who simply doesn't agree with you or the established groupthink. Re-read the first few paragraphs and replace the word "fool" with "person who doesn't agree with you" -- now it says something very different.
"It's perfectly safe to drink the water out of virtually any tap in America."

Safe may be, but on many occasions with a strong chlorine smell, something that stops me each time from drinking from such taps, even if they're perfectly safe.
Google shopping will give preferential ranking for paying customers
When (profitable) small businesses can’t raise money
So... http://mail.google.com/a/twitter.com ?
Oh, I agree with all that. I'm just saying that you can be stopped for no reason even in the USA. I believe they call these pretext stops.

That said, I didn't give him a hard time so the cop remained very friendly the whole time and I didn't have any trouble after getting stopped.
Seems to me the key is topics - it's easier to stay perceptive when discussing Python micro frameworks than the Middle East.

When HN started featuring contentious topics like that, it brought out the judgmental side of people, and later influenced even technical threads.

I remember first being impressed by HN when seeing a discussion on some PHP framework that didn't contain any of the inane "PHP sucks" slogans I've gotten used to on Proggit. That impressed me not because of my opinion on PHP, but because it was clear these people deal in building things - a language is a tool for them, not a fashion statement. As more recent PHP-related threads show, that's not the case anymore.
In the UK the govt wants to implement a report commissioned from a hedge fund friend of the PMs - one of the key "political" recommendations was to introduce no fault firing - making firing staff ridiculously easy because that is obviously want is wrong with UK PLC. The elephant in the room is that if you have hired large numbers of crap staff and you can't get rid of them because it will cost too much or they will all sue, then clearly your past hiring practises were wrong.

It's interesting how we still run to the government to solve our own past mistakes.
Thank god AOL is here to write HN so we have something to talk about today!
It returns a copy of it.
Example:

#include <stdio.h>

struct foo { char space[1024]; };

struct foo f()

{

struct foo f;

printf("address of f is %p\n",&f);

return f;

}

int main()

{

struct foo g;

g = f();

printf("address of g is %p\n",&g);

return 0;

}

produces this output:

address of f is 0x7fbfffec30

address of g is 0x7fbffff050
That's not what he meant - he meant (I think) that a US liberal is still considered right wing in Denmark, i.e. that the Danish 'liberals' are US 'pinko commies' and US right-wingers are in Denmark either 'capitalist oppressors' or 'crazy religious extremist', or both, depending on context.
Great tip for adding your iCloud Photostream to Finder
identify -verbose <filename> if you have imagemagick installed.
"Hello, Want to Buy IPO Shares?" 13 Years Ago I Said No.
What did Theo van Gogh's assassination have to do with demographics, geopolitics, or relative power differences? The simple fact of the matter is that he was killed for insulting (or more accurately, criticising) a religion.

Are some issues, such as the issues surrounding Israel, a lot more complicated than religious differences? Absolutely. Are all of them? Absolutely not.
At first I read valve FIRED their first wave of linux developers...
It's probably also what Sega and Sony said before Pippin[1] came out.

I think there is room for a game change. From the juggling of remotes, to the horrific user interfaces[2], and just plain broken device interfaces[3]. The industry tolerates user abuse.

EOM

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Bandai_Pippin

[2] Toggling subtitles in less than 18 remote presses would be a nice feature. I'm looking at you AT&T.

[3] If I have had the same TV plugged into the same DVR for 2 years, it probably should stop choosing random resolutions and aspect ratios and just stick with the one I move it back to three times a week. Also 10 seconds seems like a long time to switch from one HDMI input to another. Audio that is synchronized to the picture, like in 1950, would be pretty cool too.
So that essentially means that pizza tossing skills is not high demand?
This will be welcome by me, steam on Linux that is.

I've bought a number of games from steam when they have been on sale, games that have a Linux port available.

Of course I am unable to run them without buying the Linux copy separately at present but once this is implemented I will already be able to play a fair cross-section of my games on Windows and Linux.

Of course this could be a net negative for my productivity.
I just used bit.ly yesterday and was extremely confused by the interface. I understand they are looking to do additional things, but I couldn't even understand how to do a simple task of looking at my past history.
A potential security hole is very different from someone being locked out of their account (as annoying as that is). Most web companies by now have sound procedures in place to quickly escalate those reports.

And yes, realistically, a larger service like CloudFlare is going to get more attention than any individual. It might seem unfair to the individual, but overall, it's in everyone's interest when a situation like this arises.
Answering a troll: will Mahalo return the $21M invested?
Now replace fool with dragon. Says something different again. Whoa!

Good mods can tell the difference between people who have other views and idiots. If the moderators in your community of choice can't, you should probably choose another community. But your equivocation between silencing other viewpoints and eliminating unhealthy voices is not useful.
Yes, that is true to an extent. For the web portions of the UI like the Steam store, it uses the Chromium Embedded Framework: http://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/
Interesting. Ultimately just one person's opinion. I don't use any college math (since I didn't take any) and dont't find a need for it in most programming. In fact, programming is a lot more like writing. Maybe that's why they call it a programming language. Too bad when I was doing programming using more interesting math, more interesting math was not taught in school (US 7th grade and on)
Netflix was really close to disrupting Cable TV. Unfortunately, the cable providers and satellite providers can pay more to the content producers. I imagine that Showtime left Netflix because they realized the cable fees brought in more cash. Someone is going to have to show Internet distribution will result in more profits.

DirecTV's technology is already obsolete to be honest. Their ability to make changes is so slow.
I just went to the site and nothing is being presented to me. I would assume I am supposed to see a graph?
Bitly has received a total of $13.5 million in funding till date. It's high time they tried to experiment with this huge amount of money to diversify their business and tweak their business model.
Go Online, Beat a Puzzle and Become a British Spy
Namespaces in C
I'm a bit cynical, but I don't think that it's anything quite that sinister. The TSA is just another agency that gives budget dollars and a corresponding amount of power to the bureaucrats and government representatives who run it and a lot of contract dollars to the crony companies that supply it.

Because Americans are so terrified of "terrorism", they don't even have to prove efficacy of their methods in order to continue existing.

It's a whole lot of easy money for a bunch of pigs with their snouts in the trough.