skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it should be a more aggressive approach.

Delete insulting comments that cross the line. Trolling is like pornography. You know it when you see it.

After three offenses, delete that person's account. After 5, ban their IP address.
Windows Media Center for Windows 8 to cost $12.79 for US?
That's just wrong. According to a test – admittedly somewhat unscientific, but good enough for our purposes – done by developer Benjamin Mayo and vetted by TNW, third-party apps only contribute to ~25% of twitter's activity. Tweetbot is in the upper echelons of that 25%, but it's not even in the top 10 overall.

I'm sure they do well, but they definitely don't have a monopoly.

Sources:
http://benjaminmayo.co.uk/how-many-people-use-twitter-s-own-...

http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/07/23/only-an-estimated-2...
FYI I knew the reference, but was wondering if the agitated OP did. You explained it better than I would have.

"To really understand something REALLY well".
There are plenty of things I am not good at. But, yes, I believe I have the aptitude to do them. I am capable, but not willing. There is an enormous difference. The importance of the difference is: anyone who has to the drive to learn to program can do so.

Whether or not they'll be good is a different question. I'm just talking about competency.

To repeat myself: there is a difference between things you can't do because you have not pursued them, and things you are not capable of doing no matter how much you pursue them.
I find it funny that people are already assuming that the "bubble" has popped.

Yeah Zynga and Facebook are doing badly. So what? LinkedIn is killing it. There are other success stories. Maybe the bubble in these two company's valuations has popped, but they were overvalued to begin with, not a big loss for me.
I think you're taking a huge leap in your reasoning. Sure, I want lots of people I know on the network. But beyond the roughly 200 of those, I don't care if the network has a hundred thousand users or a hundred million.

Before facebook, social networks could provide a lot of value by saturating small demographics. Example: If all Swedish teenagers are on playahead.se and can all talk to each other there, they don't gain much from network expansion. The reason those networks need to grow beyond the clique where they're successful is that their business model can't sustain itself on a small number of paying users.

If app.net saturates the demographic of "people who care enough about Twitter's new API to chance $50 away," I could talk to 50% of my Twitter circle even if the total number of users on app.net is only 1% of Twitter's.
I am quite new here, but one thing that I have looked in the last months or so is that more and more new submitted links are mainly personal rants.

Not trying to attack sw007's post specifically, but I am talking about blog posts linked from here that seem to be added only to spike controversy.
Let’s Nationalize Facebook
I did always like Slashdot's commenting system for precisely these reasons. It seems like their meta-mod system worked pretty well too to ensure that people's votes were actually meaningful. Oh, and the limit on the number of votes you could give really made it feel like your vote mattered and you couldn't waste it.
Protein structures can also be resolved via other methods such as x-ray crystallography of crystallized proteins. Unfortunately, that process can be rather time intensive and isn't viable for all proteins.
True, but wouldn't it better rally the rest of the community to keep those offenders in line? If their harmful comments don't get upvotes, they lose their audience.
Your anti-anti-semitism has no place in modern society!

Without the snark, I can only say that the racism and ethnic superiority complex of the ruling portion of the Israeli population is startling considering the last 100 years of history. I've met many Israelis who say "I don't feel that way or agree with what goes on," but I've only met a few who have actually spoken out against it in a meaningful fashion.
> The only thing stopping me from doing any of those things is my own lack of interest in doing them.

That's some powerful positive thinking you've got going on there.

You obviously have no idea the work and training involved in some of the examples I gave (fighter pilot, F1 driver.)

Yeah, maybe you could spend the next 4 years getting a degree in civil engineering and maybe you'd be good at that one, if you're already an engineer of some type. But that was just a random example I chose. There's plenty of other fields where you do not have aptitude.

I'm not saying you have to be in the top 0.0001% to count. My point is that of all the things you can do, you have varying aptitudes for all of them.

And whether you accept it or not, there are some things out there that you are going to be completely worthless at. That's just reality. Everybody's great at some things, and shit at others.

Some people are shit at programming. Some people are shit at football. Some people are shit at painting. Nobody's good at everything -- despite what some overly romantic biographies about historical figures might have you believe.

> If you're going to have a shit attitude, then you're probably right, and you're a loser and you'll never do anything.

Nice ad hominem, buddy.

I don't have a shit attitude, I'm a realist. I think everybody's probably good at some things. Some people unfortunately never find what those are, or they don't pursue them, which is sad.

But not everybody can play the piano. Yeah everybody can memorize how to play "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" or "Chopsticks". But that doesn't really count as playing the piano, unless you're defining your standards so low that a cat can play the piano.

Likewise, some people are never going to be able to program beyond following rote instructions -- which, IMHO, doesn't really count.

But unlike some people, I don't see that as a bad thing. It's just how it is.
Some people can't learn to code because their mind just doesn't work that way.

That very assertion is what I am saying is false. That is a belief you have about how our minds work. I have not seen evidence for it.
I live in a metropolitan area of around 500,000 and there are close to 200 markers indicating an IP address that's advertising CP availability.

We have methods of rating each marker (e.g. how many CP files, how many are teen, child, nudity vs. intercourse, etc). Of those 200, there are a handful of the worst offenders that law enforcement will use resources to pursue, a group in the middle that have downloaded a large number where victims are 12-18, and then those who have just a few random files from the known list.

Does that help?
I need to know if the nanny has an issue, just as I need to react to critical professional demands

How often has this situation happen?
"this was an unauthorized move by a subcontractor" works. Ask airbnb, etc.
Moving the snarky comments from the top of a comment thread to the bottom won't help much. The snark sets the tone of the thread and disuades better comments. You need a way to remove them.
It's not a matter of handling negative comments or constructive criticism as an adult. That's been here for at least as long as I have been here (5+ years). It's a matter of those comments being derisive, abrasive potshots (oftimes at the person rather than product) providing no value. Assholeism for it's own sake, the net effect of which is to lower the level of discourse here a la the broken window theory.
Way to quote me out of context.. I specifically said I wish they'd correct me more often. I never mind, and wish people could flag themselves as language learners or forgetful ^^

That said, I still agree with your complaint. Marking a reply as off-topic (voluntarily, though of course admins should be able to override this), with each comment potentially having a sub-thread with off-topic replies, is something I'd like to see here, and have planned for my own CMS. Best of both worlds, and with unlimited nesting of that, you could even go off-off-topic, or off-off-off-topic.
If you're not running an exit node, you don't have much to worry about.
i wonder if karma should be used in a more constructive way, say to make sure people earn the right to comment on the popular stories..

I guess this assumes the community as a whole still contains more positive rather than negative people, But i like to think it does still
Ok. How about this...

I promise to do my best to make my comments, submissions and votes more constructive and relevant.

As simple as that.
Podcast Apps Showing Up Again in iTunes Search
> To repeat myself: there is a difference between things you can't do because you have not pursued them, and things you are not capable of doing no matter how much you pursue them.

I would agree with this statement. And my point is that for some people, programming is one of those things that even if they pursue it they will never be any good.

I think that applies to pretty much everything that takes training/skill/practice. That's my whole point.
The live evaluation is nice, but seems a little limited. If I have:

(defn my-add [a b]
(+ a b))
(my-add 3 45)
(my-add 1 2)

Only the "1 2" version is followed into "my-add". Is there anyway to force it to look at "3 45" other than commenting out "1 2"?

I greatly prefer the idea of showing the value propagation explicitly as you click on things. For example, using lines and arrows to show that this came from there and that came from here.
Well, there is PyCoreutils [1] for the userspace and supervisord [2] for pid 1. This is certainly an interesting idea - too bad the world isn't in dire need for more distributions.

[1] https://launchpad.net/pycoreutils

[2] http://supervisord.org/
you always feel like a n00b with vim :)
Accessible and valuable data at a cost-effective price point for those interested in, or already involved with, the Android market. Excellent idea, Winnie!
Help NASA choose its direction
LPTHW, without a doubt. I've tried everything out there - codecademy, udacity, coursera, codeschool, khan, etc. Nothing has taught me as well as LPTHW -- probably from just repetition of exercises alone.
I was at this conference (CUSEC 2012[1]), and he (Bret) gave a truly awesome lecture.

Also it was my first conference ever, so it's even better.

[1] Canadian University Software Engineering Conference, in Montreal.
Yes, that's true. However, giving proper guidelines can help in a lot of cases. When a person uses a site for the first time, he'd search at least somewhat for some basic guidelines. After that, he'd be tied to the same routine, and might not easily change with the changing guidelines.

I know that the worst offenders won't read the guidelines, but a little faith in the rest of them would go a long way improving the quality of content on this site.
And my point is that that is a belief you have about human intelligence. I am not aware of any support for this belief.
Ok, first question, why aren't we all using Plan 9 instead of a linux-based OS? Maybe more importantly, what could the next upstart kernel/OS do different than Plan 9 if it wants to be more successful?
Really well done.

Just an FYI: When you're using the Facebook API to get profile photos, specifying ?type=large gives you a photo with variable width and height.

What you're then doing with CSS to display it (giving it a fixed width and height of 128px with a 64px border-radius) is distorting the picture.
When are you guys planning to add python support? BTW, will it be python 3 or 2?
Phew, thanks.
Looks remarkable! Can't wait to try it.
How we increased our revenues by 23% with just a Python script
From IGN: http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/08/17/onlive-possibly-being...

"I wanted to send a note that by the end of the day today, OnLive as an entity will no longer exist. Unfortunately, my job and everyone else's was included. A new company will be formed and the management of the company will be in contact with you about the current initiatives in place, including the titles that will remain on the service.
As an entrepreneur I can see how this verification process is very important to save time but it definitely can ruffle feathers. It's disturbing how much publicly available information about us can be found online and when combined can be extremely powerful.
I've observed that simple, positive feedback like "Looks good, keep it up" gets downvoted as nonconstructive. Karma is more than internet points here since the thresholds drive so many features, so I bet people who would otherwise comment in the affirmative simply don't. Paradoxically, nit picking and verbose argument can score a lot.

I don't want to offer any particular suggestion because I don't have any data to support anything. A hunch, though, based on your idea: if someone want to downvote, a comment must be provided.
Groupon didn't "fail", instead it has been astonishingly successful.

However, around the time of it's IPO it was receiving so much undeserved hype that in comparison to THOSE lofty goals it appears to have failed. HN readers at the time were pointing out the hype, and I think that is a GOOD thing.

Nevertheless, I agree that the tone of the community could be better and I will strive to adjust my own comments to reflect that.
Want to see evidence?

1. Go to a mental hospital.

2. Find the most insane person there.

3. Teach them how to code.

Once you've done that, I will grant you that anyone can learn to code.
or YourSQL
I have one solution for this. I just read some another post on tor networks and taking ideas from it I think it can be really good if hackernews is removed from this ip addressing layer and taken inside the tor. This would help as hopefully nt many ppl wud be willing to install tor and taking too many pains to come to hacker news :)

PS: I hope
If you don't have money and you don't know how to program, don't quit your day job.
> why aren't we all using Plan 9

Plan 9 wasn't always free.

Also, its GUI sucks. That's sort of important for end users.
Ugh, that license.
So far I've had good luck with the British postal service. Slower than UPS and FedEx but fewer issues in my experience. EMS also doesn't seem to require it either.
It will never be as simple as throwing in a single tweak like that.

Google is the best example to learn from. Search is a misnomer, Google is about ranking. They've put many PhD-centuries of effort into deciding which of the three million matches to put first (ranking). Choosing the three million matches (search) isn't where Google adds its value.

Lots of lessons have been learned there, I'm sure HN can tap into that pool of knowledge by opening up data to the right people.

HN is an awesome resource. I often read the comments before the articles because I expect them to be more useful.
It's completely worthwhile to invest a lot of effort in maintaining that greatness as it scales.
There is a difference in tone between the commonts of the favilous site and the newer one 11k...

I wondered though, if the new site was a significant part of it. People don't seem to like signing up for something they don't know anything about.
hjkl may have started because the Joy was working on an ADM3A that had no home row, but the elegant and efficient consequence is that your hands fingers do not move from typing position.

you just have to map your tab key to escape to get the original layout back[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_Terminal_ADM3A.svg
As I said, pretty much anyone with the motivation to see their own education through is probably just going to go to a cheap college and get a degree as well, since the cost floor on a degree is pretty low for most people in, say, the US. However, I suspect that the advent of ebooks and educational software is going to radically change the landscape. To the degree where people 40 years from now will look at the higher education system we have today and think it is utterly preposterous and primitive.
"... community should have a default position of supporting entrepreneurship (and, more generally, of supporting attempts to build anything) --- and, that should be a norm."

I disagree and find such a community engineering approach dangerous for the health of the very community it's trying to "save". I think there are two big problems with it: (i) It gives too much power to the gatekeeper(s), be it software or human, and (ii) it creates a bias for positive comments.

This is the typical dilemma: Bad comments and a free forum are two sides of the same coin. Although I hate snarky, nonconstructive comments as much as everybody else, I think that trying to curtail one may also damage HN's innovative and free atmosphere, which is its main asset.
Much like when you complain about parenthesis in Lisp, if you complain about windows in Smalltalk (or key combinations on Emacs) you are probably focusing your attention on the wrong thing. Stop fighting the environment. Let it flow around you.
I like your site but I would love to also use your site as a reference point for setting up my own station. I imagine you can monetize this lead generation process in some way as well.
Filepicker.io (YC S12) lets content flow without worrying about bandwidth
Ok, but what are you bringing to the table? Coding is hard. Talking people into giving you money is hard. Either one is sufficient for making a demo.
Wait - didn't he have a photo that showed the employee tearing up his documents?

Doesn't that mean the McDonalds executive is outright lying?
Environmental depleted uranium is far-fetched because there isn't very much of it, it is not retained or accumulated in the body, it tends not to move through the environment, and compared to many other elements widely found in the environment it has a lower health risk, both radiologically and chemically.

For example, thorium in the environment is a much greater health risk and far more common as well. One of the problems with studies of environmental non-depleted (read: worse) uranium exposure is that results tend to be dominated by effects of environmental thorium such that any effects from uranium are below the noise floor.

Depleted uranium is a pretty harmless environmental contaminant as heavy metals go. In the US we routinely dump thousands of tons of uranium around population centers in the form of coal ash. There are small but measurable health risks to living around coal ash, but those risks are attributed almost entirely to other components of coal ash (like the aforementioned thorium).

Environmental contamination by industrial organic chemicals is vastly more probable than uranium as a cause.
ahh yes, if you are reading this thread please go down and then back up here.
OnLive confirms it will not be closing down [updated]
Try getting to know more non-technical people I guess?

It's mostly the abstractness that people have difficulty with.
Vast Mexico Bribery Case Hushed Up by Wal-Mart After Top-Level Struggle

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/business/at-wal-mart-in-me... (paywalls, etc.)

By DAVID BARSTOW
Published: April 21, 2012

> MEXICO CITY — In September 2005, a senior Wal-Mart lawyer received
> an alarming e-mail from a former executive at the company’s largest
> foreign subsidiary, Wal-Mart de Mexico. In the e-mail and follow-up
> conversations, the former executive described how Wal-Mart de Mexico
> had orchestrated a campaign of bribery to win market dominance.
> Or customers will go the store where a dozen busybodies aren't filming them.

You have this option as a customer, but you don't have this option as a person walking around in a public space.

> I don't think any of us know how this will all shake out in the end.

True, but I'm going to throw my ticket into the "ubiquitous sousveillance" bucket. In the US, at least, a lot of laws would have to change to forbid recording people in public; that's a pretty big barrier to overcome.
Steve Jobs' Stolen iPad Given as Gift to Bay Area Clown
It's cause a bunch of redditors have moved in, I hate reddit, it's pointless. ;)
The SMF forum? Or another forum running SMF? I only ask because SMF (well actually its predecessor YaBB SE) was what got me active in contributing to open source projects. Solid software that SMF.
They're basically telling people not to worry, everyone should still buy their app, because they're not going to be shutting it down in the near future. This is done purely in order to sustain their sales, and likely incidentally to ease their relationship with Twitter as they help diffuse some of Twitter's bad PR pressure. Don't mistake this for an indication of a lack of panic at their offices.
Ask HN: Is there a Sublime Text 2 mod for this functionality?
Here's a picture for what I'd like to have:

http://www.chris-granger.com/images/lightable/codedocument.png

Just show a distinctive separator between each function. I would love this functionality for PHP.

Thanks!
Although, logically, it doesn't allow for infiltrators (e.g., police) to enter the forums and attempt to build enough cred to initiate convincing these predators into doing something stupid, for instance dangling financial rewards in front of them for real world meetup for exchange of goods, etc.

This is how law enforcement has been working on carding forums. And while I don't think the enforcement is effective for that, since the financial incentive is always there, I do think there is a finite supply of people willing to prey on children for money and that there's a possibility of capturing the vast majority of them.
I would suggest focusing on visual design even if you are only interested in UX. Aside from technique, the core competency for both kinds of design is learning how to see. IMO, this is an easier skill to develop in the context of visual design. I would also recommend studying drawing, photography, motion graphics or interior design to improve your UX skills.
This is an important point and one which many overlook. I don't blame the shuttle designers, it was a new kind space craft. The truth was that the more folks looked, the more questions they asked, the more problems were uncovered that could only be fixed by 'a complete redesign of that subsystem.' And ultimately there were few places where a complete redesign could be undertaken.
Google Employees Find 60 Security Holes In Adobe Reader
This is surprising to the OUYA folks I bet, who were very recently touting that OnLive was coming to their box.
Source: http://griffsgraphs.com/2012/07/03/graphing-every-idea-in-hi...

It is fascinating to me that comedians are included in this list. Perhaps because who they are influenced by is readily available information. It would be fascinating to see one of these tailored to specific communities such as scientists, business or politics.
As others have pointed out, they use an identify verification service. In most cases, any org that uses such a service doesn't even see the data the form is asking for (i.e. it's just a pass thru, much like CC# forms in IFRAMEs).

Granted, it is scary what is aggregated about you and stored in some giant data warehouse somewhere (prbly not protected very well). But I'd rather an org use a third-party such as this vs begin to aggregate similar data on their own.

However, think about what else UPS knows about you (without this data). They have your name, address, phone and know precisely (for all things they handle) how often you receive shipments from where, how much they weigh and potentially other data (depending on whether they've done any scanning or if there is any hazardous or perishable labeling on it). If they've ever tried to deliver and needed a sig and you weren't there, they have a record of when you're not home as well.

I wonder if they (or FedEx, et al) have a policy whereby you can request all the data they have stored on you like this…