skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a fucking stupid rule.

(And I say that with the full knowledge that my phrasing will make you less receptive to my argument.)

Environments where you can't discuss mistakes are poisonous. People make mistakes. People do stupid things. If those mistakes are not dealt with directly, they become larger mistakes, and you end up in situations where people don't take minor actions that can prevent disasters because they're afraid that somebody's feelings might be hurt.

As an example, a few years ago the college I was then attending switched from internally managed email to gmail. For a month after the switch, you could log into anyone's email account without a password. This happened in large part because there was a culture of ignoring mistakes, and people who regularly raises issues were branded as "complainers". And so when they were doing the switch, nobody was willing to stand up and say "have we done basic testing?"

There are, of course, times and places where your goal is not offending people, and criticizing them is obviously a bad idea. (Telling a VC "that investment you made a week ago was really dumb" is probably a bad way to get them to invest in your company.) But much of the time, that rule causes many more problems than it solves.

It's also worth noting that phrasing and delivery matter quite a lot, and that's something that's much harder to convey in text. There's a huge difference, as I've said already, between insulting somebody and criticizing their work. The first is not productive--the second can be.
Wrong right from the start.
I think it's slightly ironic that you present the "know it all" complex as trait that hackers suffer from, given that the OP refers to a post made by a designer that is a prime example of such behavior.

This trait is far from unique amongst hackers, and neither are the negative reactions to it.
I hope users of crytpo software in critical situations look to more than Wired Magazine to evaluate the safety and reliability of their software.
To have ixquick privacy policies reviewed next to duckduck, and contact us via IRC (the #tosdr irc channel on freenode) ->

<a href="http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#tosdr>#tosdr irc channel on freenode</a>

thanks!
My Life as a Telecommuting Robot
They could have tried knocking on the door. That's usually what happens in warrants for non-violent crime with a suspect who has no history of violence. This was a copyright case with all the evidence across a huge ocean, no need for a paramilitary operation.
> So... Minecraft with an end destination?

Minecraft has an end destination: the End. It wasn't there since day one, but the "story" parts of Minecraft have been added gradually in game updates.
You'd only have to type in the password for an email you don't care about from the unsecured computer, as long as you knew ahead of time to forward the things you needed to print from the library computer. The web server method seems a little less secure since rather than having your files behind a non-two factor email account, they're publicly available. How is that better?
Agreed- there definitely seems to be some kind of mental hurdle people have about those $2 purchases. Like you, I'll probably end up purchasing it now that I've thought about it logically and because gregcohn took the time to respond to my post.

That said, my comment was more focused on the business decision of making an app like this paid. If you could effectively A/B test this kind of scenario, I wonder which approach would actually lead to more long term revenue.
A critique of the Apple indie developer community
How a lying 'social engineer' hacked Wal-Mart
Quintendf wasn't necessarily saying that apps shouldn't cost money. He/she was asking why this one, considering the obvious stream of revenue that it will bring? And why even ask why? The bar has already been set for apps to be mostly free or just 99 cents. It's a basic part of human psychology to be affected by an "anchor price", regardless of rationality.

anchor price, i.e. a suggested price, which in this case is the perceived status quo of free or 99 cents. In a famous experiment, students were told to spin a roulette wheel and then make an estimate about some world fact. Even though the roulette wheel obviously* had nothing to do with the question, students who got a higher number from the roulette spin on average made higher estimates.
You, sir, win the award for best product name. And shame, HN, for not complimenting him sooner.
The app is available in Canada. If you have trouble finding it in the iOS app store there, let me know.
I get: "The fastest route is 232 マイル, which will take approximately NaN to NaN steps if you walked it."
I would expect that too, but presumably they have already set up a law enforcement liason to handle those requests.
I think that this is basically saying "Computer Science is science because it uses science." But Electrical Engineering uses just as much scientific method in its research papers as CS does. Does this make EE a scientific field?

To my mind, every engineering field has researchers who use the scientific method every day to produce stuff for the engineers to use. The field is not defined by those researchers -- it's defined by the users (engineers). EE researchers often publish stuff based on the scientific method, or by proof, but the end product is meant to be used by engineers. CS researchers often publish stuff based on the scientific method, or by proof, but the end product is meant to be used by ... well, we call the "programmers". But they're engineers of software.
Running around in public, repeatedly using different payphones is a little different to sitting in your bedroom creating "temporary phone numbers at the touch of a button."
Uncertainty kills morale very quickly. I think the most important thing is to be clear about why they were fired, so your well-performing employees know they are safe.

Of course, if you tell everyone you fired someone because of X, anyone else who does X will be worried. That may or may not be a good thing.
Whatever happens the advertisers will lean towards tracking; there's just too much money in behavioural profiling not to.
There's a bit of a problem with having a binary do/don't track switch. For example if the default becomes "do not track" then that essentially make stuff like google analytics useless and removes a powerful tool for optimising and improving user experience on websites.

On the other hand I really don't like it the idea of a website trying to glean my "real" identity and use that to do things which may be anti privacy.

I'm going to brace for Windows 8 release when clients suddenly start asking why their traffic has dropped off a cliff.
Agreed. A lot of terrible design practices get voted to the top here. Since it isn't a design-centric board and because we can't downvote (and it's rude to downvote without stating the reason anyway, generally), the best way to convey bad practices is through writing a reply. A good portion of people here have never had to deal with a real design critique and don't know the lingo.

At the same time, this redesign is supposed to be an advertisement for this agency, so much so that they bought a domain for it. It's not just something they did for their mother's crochet club. It is supposed to show the depth at which the agency thinks. It is supposed to show their design chops. It is supposed to illustrate that they can tackle large problems. It fails, incredibly, at every single one. In an industry where everyone bandwagons onto concepts and ideas due to a lack of their own, this behavior needs to be called out. The scale at which they completely botched this project is astounding and people need to stop thinking colors and minimalism will solve information issues.

Take for instance the thread on .Mail (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4291803). The designer does good work, but didn't display the app as well as he could have. The discussion delves into everything from ways to better present the information to does this app even have a place in the ecosystem to I would never use this !@#$%!! While a good portion of the comments are harsh, if you drill down to the intent, there's a lot of good stuff there.

These are the conversations I love about HN, even though they tend to be a little dry. I've yet to find a more passionate group of people who understand the web and have played with and built enough of their own products to know what they're talking about. And not to generalize, but that's how the programmers I've worked with tend to be, and I love that about them.

While some people might see this Wikipedia redesign as a playful experiment and treat it as such, it's intention was to sell you on the agency's talent. When you look at it through that lens, there's a lot to complain about and I don't think it's out of bounds to do so when we all work in this industry and these are the types of people we're (indirectly) competing against.
If by "most" you mean "Verizon and Sprint" versus "AT&T and T-Mobile", that's a curious definition of "most".
Ask everyone in the world if they "don't want to be tracked, understanding that is the economic foundation for almost all of the content they enjoy and thus they will either need to directly pay or go without" and somewhere approaching 0% will say yes.

In other words, lie to them? Of course some consumers would change their minds.
>> SO SAY I, OFFICIAL INTERNET CURATOR KAPOWAZ

Honestly, click the down vote button if don't think the article is newsworthy. Even so, the community votes to decide what shows up on the front page; not you specifically.
As IE10 sending DNT isn't a response to a conscious user decision

Suppose John Doe sets up a new browser and wants to make sure the DNT header is being sent.
Quite a lot of places have tap water that tastes foul but is perfectly healthy - personally I think the water in London tastes disgusting compared to the water here in Edinburgh, but that's because I am used to the latter.

When I moved to Edinburgh from a small town in Moray that got its water from the Spey I thought Edinburgh tap water tasted disgusting.
Do you know what the bigger story is here?

You can purchase a mineral salt-rock crystal (it's a smooth solid peace of salt, about as cheap as it gets) "de-odorant" that you wet and apply, it leaves nothing behind except an undetectable amount of salt on the skin. That is ... no chemicals, no fragrances, nothing but salt.

That salt kills-off the bacteria that are responsible for odor (through various means, directly and indirectly).

After a week or two of this, you're done. Your sweat lessens, and becomes clear and odorless.

No more deodorant is required after this. Just shower and apply some soap to your skin.

The bigger story here is that advertisers have convinced you that their more expensive "formulas" are required, and there are no good alternatives.

Their products are specifically designed not to kill-off the bacteria, and hence to keep you purchasing the product.

They do this because you can't make money selling a $1 peace of salt-rock that lasts the customer a life-time.
Shouldn’t it be called “Burnr”?
I know about that, I'm meaning Minecraft pre-End.
Reducing Code-Build-Test Friction with NCrunch
Yep, that is exactly me.

Are we hardwired to not spend when we get nothing (physical) in return?

Do movies "hack" this behavior by handing you a ticket?

Will my 6 and 8 year old daughters not have this behavior "tick?" They already see no problem with asking to spend $50 on a chest of gems.
I had that same opportunity and I passed on it. It's dirty money. I prefer to earn the money I have. It gives me satisfaction when I use it.

With the government, you know that money came from some hardworking individual who paid his taxes ... and the only reason you have it is because some corrupt piece of garbage was drawing a salary on that money and you ended up being his victim.

Not how I want to live my life and certainly not something I want to be reminded of every time I take out my wallet.
What is it that you are curious about? He has done covert, paid PR work for controversial industries, like Big Tobacco.
Is this true? Any references? Experiences?
Software idioms
Sexual Harassment in Online Videogames: How to Fix the Problem
Unfortunately that is still most peoples solution to the problem and they still stink to high heaven.

Lets see some marketers do some good in the world, get them to realize that BO smells bad, a gallon of perfume/cologne smells bad and BO and a gallon of perfume/cologne together makes you smell worse.
Wow, wired really has hit a low point here.

This feels like little more than linkbaiting trolling, but I suspect that it was in earnest which is almost worse.
> Is reality really a "position"?

Both of the wordings you provided are positions. The first contained no context and the second is opinionated.

> Personally I think sites should honor the DNT header by implementing a paywall for such users (really the same holds true for Adblock patrons).

Personally I think tracking should be opt-in (by law) and that websites should have to adjust accordingly (whether that be putting up a pay-wall, finding an alternative revenue stream, making less revenue, or going out of business).

> Ad-supported sites have an implicit two-way contract that you get content that you obviously want in return for providing advertiser value.

Contracts which potentially do harm upon a person should never be implicit. Knowledge of cookies should not be a requirement for internet use. All contracts should be explicit, and agree upon by both parties.
Only 55 points and 8 comments... Imagine the uproar here if a Jewish charity was being wiretapped; the media would be throwing in Holocaust, Antisemtism, Hitler, Nazis and all the history of Jewish persecution and the good Samaritans here at HN would have been up in arms. Some Muslim charity was torpedoed and brown/Muslimy citizens wiretapped? Who gives a shit, let's post another link about an awesome new startup that Israelis built on the newest stolen land while the brown Palestinian (doesn't matter whether Christian or Muslim or Druze) is being kicked out of his home that his family owned for several generations so that some Australian or Russian born folks of the "Chosen Race" can live there.

And while we are at it let's continue to cut social services at home as we hand over another 3 billion to Israeli apartheid and a few billion to Egyptian Yemeni and Saudi butchers so that they can continue suppressing the people that don't belong to the chosen race.
India can monitor BlackBerry e-mails without RIM's help
>>Open your mind a little. Not everything is about the profit-making horserace.

At the end of the day, it's money that makes the world go round. If you're making more profit than your competitors, you're getting ahead, because you have more money for R&D, more money for marketing, more money for buying promising start-ups, and more money for lawsuits.

I mean, the fact that Apple has a war chest of tens of billions of dollars in cash - more than the treasuries of many countries - paints a really bleak and hopeless future for Android.
You don't start with using a lock either.

You start with the general consensus that stealing is socially unacceptable, and you make it illegal.

Which is exactly what will inevitably happen with tracking unless tracking with permission becomes the exception rather than the rule.

It might even take a few decades, but being tracked by corporations anywhere you go online is socially untenable in a free society.

Microsoft understands this, although their enthusiasm is probably more inspired by the fact that a certain competitor that has a major part of its business model depending on it than by ethical considerations.
When you say build quality is crap, what exactly do you mean? Is it because it doesn't feel "heavy"?
Thanks. It compares misspellings to correct spelling counterparts (anyways:anyway), so that, in itself, should account for sample size changes in Twitter. The Reddit sample size (should) stay constant, as I'm grabbing /all/comments every 15 seconds, which from everything I've seen is about 3 times longer than it takes for it to turn over.

I have been thinking about subreddits and hashtags, but I'm not sure what would be interesting to people and still have enough statistical significance to update every half-hour/hour. If I were going to release this on Reddit, I'd have probably arranged it as a comparison between all the major subreddits. As for hashtags, their impermanence makes them a difficult measure.

I don't have the source up yet, but it's pretty simple. I just get the json output of /all/comments and get the Twitter streams for the words I'm checking with ntwitter and then do the basic math to analyze it every half hour. I render the page myself with the backlog of values and then send it updated info as I process it, so if you leave the page open, it should keep fresh.
Fortune Cookie Advice | Strong Opinions
ZFS already has great support on Solaris and FreeBSD. If you're running linux check out http://zfsonlinux.org/ - native kernel support that avoids the GPL incompatibility of Sun's zfs implementation (CDDL license).
What exactly is Twitter sample size? If it means "the number of records processed", why does it vary over time?

One way to approach the "significance" problem for smaller communities like HN is to create larger bins of misspellings/correct spellings. However, I don't think you're going to see many "anyways" or "yea" on HN at all, much less significant fluctuations over time.

Finally, an interesting question might be to what extent individuals fluctuate in their ARI/FK levels in different contexts. What if a poster in /r/lolcats writes a very asinine comment but then goes five minutes later to /r/programming to speak intelligently. Or is it the case that an idiot is an idiot, regardless of context?
but this is how conversations about what should have happened instead are perceived by us Jews.

Not all of them.
Is there any good use of this app that is not basically to annoy people?

Because I can't really come up with any.
I love that those are actual apps. We're running out of names, folks!
Anonymous Attacks Ukrainian Government After Demonoid Takedown
Using CSS (and no JS) to get a Retina-ready website on Chrome 21 and Safari 6
1) hard to say. i started 2 month ago, and maybe spend about 3 hours a day on average on app-related stuff. when i started i only had little experience in rails, but had absolutly no experience in backbone. so it took me quite a while to get into it.

2) to start out i read this http://coenraets.org/blog/2011/12/backbone-js-wine-cellar-tu...
and then everytime i was stuck i search for a solution on stackoverflow. i'm not using nodejs btw. just backbone for the frontend. once you done a couple of tutorials, i recommend using http://www.brunch.io

3) the themes are coming from my rails backend. i have a mongodb database on http://www.mongolab.com. the backbone app makes a request to my rails server and gets a respond as json. you can see how that looks like at http://www.themescroller.com/themes.json
One thing about NFC is that it does not require an active data connection, whereas Square does. That may not seem important, but for those of us who live in the middle of nowhere, it's relevant. I'm not sure that it's relevant enough to change wide-scale adoption patterns, but in my small town, there are multiple locations in CDMA black-holes that are PayPass enabled, thus accept Google Wallet. Every single Mobile station, and nearly every other big-chain gas station is already set up for NFC.

According to the Square App, I have to drive 11 miles away to find the nearest accepted location.

Ultimately, I think both will operate in parallel for quite some time until Apple decides to release something and takes over the world of payments overnight. :)
Use this to be safe: "a multi-user, on-demand, sharded relational database"
My sister has a brain tumor. The tumor, near her spinal cord, disrupts her body movements. She would love to have her body act normal again.

I am always looking at medical procedures that help the handicapped. I find it fascinating. I believe that if the technology was available to turn my body into a cyborg, I would do it. Maybe I watched too much Ghost in the Shell.

Im not talking about super human strength or even living longer, but I would like better vision or quicker reflexes.

I remember seeing this on here a couple weeks back.
A video about augmented eyesight.
http://vimeo.com/46304267
My comment wasn't made in my official capacity :)

I'm mostly just remarking with bemusement that such a thing would garner attention. But I guess it takes all sorts.
Help create a collaborative building game inspired by Lego (YC S11)
Heh, okay, thanks, it's done. I'll see if it improves.
Odd - I found the inverse when going to iPhone (unintuitive and low battery life), from android.

With my Galaxy Note, the battery life improved, considerably after 5 or 6 charge cycles.
OK, I don't know what other companies do (or will do, or claim to do), but what I'm talking about, vis-a-vis the company I'm working on, is not a situation where we have "novices doing the work." We're definitely working on hard problems that require smart, experienced people. All I'm talking about, is having a mix of both very junior and very senior people, and then focus on adding senior people by helping the n00bs advance to that level over time.

This may have veered away from what original article was proposing, so I may be muddling the conversation here a bit.. but I definitely believe we can build a company that has a strong "promote from within" culture, that provides a very supporting environment that helps people grow, and provides a career path for technical people that doesn't require them to move into management in order to advance their careers.

It's not economical to promote and pay more just for the sake of promotion.

But you don't do it just for the sake of promotion... you do it to keep a person's compensation in line with the value they create and to stay competitive with the market. As people gain new knowledge and skills, and gain experience, they become more valuable.
Im also about 20% done with the same book, and followed the link to this article for EXACTLY the same reason. Great article, great book.
I don't think this includes battery cost, and not sure about the energy management system.
wow lots of great advice. thanks for the feedback, especially the long-url-thing blew my mind...it's so obvious..but i never thought of it!
Boingo gravitates toward “free” Wi-Fi - Purchases “Cloud Nine“
This explains why they are ex girlfriends! Why on earth would the app get involved in how the app is used, that's th responsibility of the user, just like when you buy a kitchen knife, the designer wasn't giving much consideration to reducing angst caused by its misuse.

Please let's stop with the nanny state nonsense. As others have pointed out its no different to pay phones.
Several geocities archive projects have collectively been hosted at reocities.com. A bit redundant in this case but for example http://www.reocities.com/tablizer/science.htm
FinFisher Spyware Reach Found on Five Continents: Report
When my brother showed photos to his young son, he'd say "...and that's me" when pointing to himself in the photo, so my nephew assumed that was his name. ("Me, Me, what's for dinner, Me?") He now understands pronouns, but seems to have also kept "Me" as his dad's name.
Debit cards require a pin, but credit card transactions less than some amount(I think it is $10) don't require anything other than the swipe.
"Do Not Track" should not be a default in a browser.

It should be the default for every individual in a free country, from birth.

The fact that I'm living, breathing human being with a right to privacy should already be enough to imply that no corporation has the right to track my movements with my very explicit, informed and legally verifiable consent.

Browser manufacturers should not even be a party in this.