skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's so sad to see so many HN and Redditors so intent on their "upwardly mobile", morally relative dreams
that they fail to take account of the totalitarian state they have come to live in. You will NOT be alright, jack.

Listen. As of September 2012, the AppForThat, Startup, bubble is just about over. I say this as someone who warned others of the
dotcom and real estate bubbles. If you want to think of it as a "technical", or chartreading thing, fine. The bottom line
is: GET OUT NOW, the shit is about to hit the fan. Yeah, I know you don't want to hear it. Sorry to bear bad news.

If you haven't heard of it, this is the Fourth Turning. (Startpage.com it). If you think life is going to go on as as usual, think again.

Get ready. Hunker down. This is for real. Don't trust the government.
If somebody would be kind enough to invite me, it would be much appreciated. Email in profile...
Node ID Page Templates
I really like the Pilot G-TEC-C4 - ultra fine (0.4mm) and don't smudge/bleed much
Shrug. And people promote their own projects here, too. I am also not using a voting ring to get crap to the front page.

But this is generic blog spam. Abuser of the commons etc etc.

Not sure I get your point re reddit?
That may mean you've been slowbanned from HN. If you slightly annoy a moderator around here they'll flag your account so you see very long page load delays.

Try logging out of HN, and see if the long pauses go away for you.
Author is posting it here and gets it voted up by cronies.
Roll back the bankruptcy laws to pre-2005 to reduce the cost of risk.
It seems tech journalists aren't aware that people can already build weapons at home. I guess it will be easier now, but that's just technology's way.
> He has so far answered a total of 10 questions

I'd point out that he did say he only had 30 minutes, and given how poorly reddit handled the traffic, I'm surprised he managed to get 10 answers in, copy/paste jobs or no.

How would you have preferred it to go, anyway? Seems like he's not going to make everyone happy no matter how its sliced, so perhaps he should have just not done one?
Only that both the success and death of Linux on the desktop is vastly overstated.
This looks pretty good but a few things come to mind:

- no comment collapsing, long comment threads will become a problem just like they are here which ends up sucking, I'd love to see something like reddit's threading / collapsing and I'd really love to a see a whole other forum-ish way to browse stories as well so discussion is even more emphasized

- no registration sucks, there are easier ways to identify spammers such as their obvious affiliation with particular website(s), auto-submission honey pots, even a manual glance at submission and other stats can be pretty revealing

The biggest concern though is the site's own affiliations ... digg needed their widget everywhere which ensured the quality was locked into a downward spiral. HN gives TC traffic in exchange for publicity, and of course all the preferential treatment and posts by YC startups is less interesting now that their batches are so large. What happens when it's time for lobste.rs to pay for itself?

I really do think it's time to replace HN though, it's mainstream and it's targeted by rubbish publications and it's full of users who are here to exploit it or to be exploited by rubbish sites who manipulate them with stunning precision.

I'd love an invite if someone's giving them out.
After 4.6 years of using HN obsessively, I'm surprised to find that I'm really hoping this takes off (I was ready to hate on it).

After hearing the JCS story and remembering my own experience of PG manipulating headlines + killing my own frontpage submission, I'm all for this.

I'm also tried of the YC job listings from companies that launched 4yrs ago flooding the homepage.
acquisitions
Note: the author of the article (trek) posted a comment on the gist, so it's worth a look even if you've already read skilesare's comment.
Math ability requires crosstalk in the brain
I want a site for discussing software development news that has the equivalent of a kill file. There are a handful of prolific users at Hacker News who post multiple low-quality messages every day. I avoid Hacker News because of users such as these.

I honestly believe that at least a few of these users are secretly employed by the companies that they promote and defend daily. I don't know if they're paid to post here or that they're simply blind loyalists. Either way, they deserve to be plonked.

Below are two examples (posted by a prolific user) of the type of messages I would like to see less of, which could be filtered by a kill file feature:

"HN is going to hell because its overrun with people who practice an ideology of socialism -- pro-google because its "Free" and anti-Apple because they actually innovate and have the audacity to charge for their products."

"Apple has done far more to make the world a better place than any corporation I've ever heard of. Far more than any government in history ever has. Far more than any charity every has or ever could."
Why can't Apple support MTP? Linux gets cited for lack of hardware or protocol support (MTP to an Android device works fine in Linux, btw), but it's not Apple's fault when they can't or don't provide drivers for common, standardized consumer electronics?
There is an entire talk about this at some Ubuntu conference a few months back.

Basically exact information, this article is just a rehash

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fu3pT_9nb8o&feature=playe...
Does the chrome secure shell support keyfiles now?
Graham allows the dumbest people on the Internet to come onto this site to berate startups he all but begged people to create, but hellbanned a guy who pooped out a better version of HN in his spare time, for nothing. For fuck's sake.
John Hunter [matplotlib.sourceforge.net] has died.
Here is a talk from May 2012 by Thomas Bushnell (the same guy) about Linux on the desktop and Google. Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fu3pT_9nb8o
This. Using tools in creative and unexpected ways is what human beings are. When a service no longer permits that, it has officially made itself Part Of The Problem, regardless of how much money it's bringing in.
Time is valuable. Why waste everyone's time if you know it's not going to work? I think the key is to do it respectfully and explain why. It's actually helpful for the company to hear the reasons.
Can an existing user of Lobsters please send me an invite? (My email is in my profile.)

According to https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters, the only reason Lobsters is invite-only is to prevent spammers from signing up. So if you want to check that I’m not a spammer, just glance at my past comments (http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=roryokane) and submissions (http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=roryokane).

If you still want another reason to send me an invite, I support the idea of an improved Hacker News – pg seems to barely care about improving HN. I might contribute to the Lobsters code at https://github.com/jcs/lobsters.
I don't have any statistics on this, but your statement does not match my observations. Even within the US, the exact same product in a Kentucky supermarket will often cost twice as much in a California supermarket. I shop in both and my food costs are dramatically lower in KY.

In Central America, I found local food prices to be highly correlated with affluence. Food (both served and in markets) in Costa Rica is significantly more expensive than just north in Nicaragua. Rural Panama is a lot cheaper than Panama City. Honduras is generally expensive; Guatemala is generally cheap; but there are zones of relative expense within those countries. Food in general is dramatically cheaper south of the US border, especially if you shop in public markets.

I have not been to India but I am told by friends that food prices are significantly below US prices.
dont like the white background. at all.
That's by far the least of the objections raised. 10 interesting, insightful answers that offered new information would have been fascinating. But we got 10 canned answers that told us nothing we already knew. That was the real problem here, although nobody should have been surprised.
I enjoy how easy it is to have good encryption these days. I still lean too heavily on TrueCrypt when I need a cross-platform portable encrypted device, but when I'm in only-linux land I have all sorts of awesome choices as well
It's not a tablet, it's a .. table.
Here in Australia we spend a lot of time fretting about waiting lists

It might be worth pointing out that the waiting lists are typically for elective surgery.

This is mostly because our hospitals are overcrowded. There is no single cause of that, but one big problem is that health systems are mostly administered by the states but funded federally. The tension inherent in that model is pretty unhelpful.
Can I get an invite as well? Thanks.
It's precisely what I'd expect, but that doesn't mean I can't be disappointed by it. I expect the worst from our politicians and my expectations are usually met, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't like more.
Yep they sure are taking it nice and slow... at this pace, collection-level locking is probably only 2 more years away. Other nosql databases are nipping at their heels.

David may use MongoDB at really high scale, but since when is that a reason to call someone an expert.
You're doing it wrong.

This is the HIG quote from above:

> "In general, quit when users close the last open window in your app. [...] If users close the last remaining document window in a document-based app and switch to another app, it’s appropriate to quit the app" (emphasis added).

In TextEdit, close the last document and then _switch to another app_. You're missing the last step.
I don't really see what you're getting at. Do you think the Whitehouse policy on drugs has changed since the last time they addressed legalizing marijuana [1]? If not, how is anyone served by hearing the same answer rehashed?

[1] https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/legalize-and-regul...
Reasonable people all understand that the reason why an ISP would offer a lower rate to phone users is the anticipation that either phone users would use the service less, or that users who have only phones and not computers are less interested in paying a premium for Internet access.
I'd like an invite...
I immediately thought Robocop.
Thanks for this, enjoy hearing about Github as a company.

> I'm also quite sure the number counts deploys across all of our applications. For instance, deploying a change to github-services counts as two, since I have to deploy changes to GitHub.com also.
That might explain a lot. Still a lot of deploys, but a more sane count :-)
Facebook Buries “Unsubscribe” Feature
Building Blocks and the Three Bears
That happens to me most of the time and Why would that happen to me when I have posted very few comments/posts?
Precision Agriculture for the World
Samsung ATIV S Revealed
Bradley Fucking Manning?
from you page: ... No. Mourn for your data ...

I like that.
Patents aren't supposed to be about property rights in creative work that is easy to replicate, they're supposed to be about work that is hard to replicate.

Remember, the closest alternative to a patent is a trade secret. The patent bargain is supposed to be: Tell us the secret (so it won't be lost and others can build on it) and we'll give you a temporary monopoly on it.

Looking at how the bargain plays out in practice illustrates the big problems with software patents:

1. The inventions described are easy to independently invent. The public is not getting much of anything when told the secret.

2. Software patents don't have adequate disclosure. They're deliberately written in opaque language that practitioners don't understand in order to make the invention sound more significant and to make the claims as strong as possible. They also don't include source code or any guidance on the software engineering tradeoffs required (e.g. performance, flexibility, modularity, etc.) required to practically realize the invention.

3. Even if the disclosure were adequate, the incentives of the patent system (in this case, willful infringement) mean that practitioners never look at them. This is everything from the patent attorney coming to your office and telling you to never, ever look at a patent to Groklaw posts that say that if you're a software developer, you might not want to read posts that discuss patents in detail.
This reminds me of a tale from the Internet of yesteryear...

Long ago, circa the year 2000, I was a member of the very first niche social network, makeoutclub.com (MOC)[1], a site originally about indie rock music. One day, a group of members got tired of gibby's (the owner) benign dictatorship and mutinied. The group started lipstickandcigarettes.com (L&C), which is now a parked domain. At the time, L&C targeted the same demographic, but was very restrictive on which hipsters could join and had a more savvy GUI than MOC. It had great early success in attracting members interested in indie rock from MOC. Eventually, though, the proprietors of L&C lost interest and let the community there dissolve in order to pursue other interests (there were rumors of drug addiction at the time, IIRC). MOC, on the other hand, is still going strong and presumably making money for gibby.

I suppose the moral to my story is this: unless your social network fiefdom actively feeds your pocketbook (as MOC does for gibby and HN does for pg), expect to lose interest in maintaining it once the novelty of protest has worn off.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makeoutclub
Why RTFM is Some Bullshit
What are 'blended threads'?
Wait, what's going on? I want to understand but I can't decipher your words.
I cannot see how this is a reply to edw519's comment. Perhaps you could clarify.
I thought you were wrong but then I found this Government of Canada report: http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/061.nsf/vwapj/SEC-EEC_eng.pdf/$...

The important figure is on page twenty. 5.5% of Canadians are self-employed with incorporated businesses compared to only 3.6% for the USA. Assuming this figure corresponds to entrepreneurship then there is definitely significant correlation.

Still, as a Canadian I am 95% confident that universal health care is worth it even without an entrepreneurship boost.
SmartType - New Keyboard from the man who invented the DiskOnKey
agreed. however, in the article it praises the mongodb defaults. but time and time again we've been bitten by open files issues that are easily solved by shipping better init.d scripts. I also feel that scaling out mongodb clusters is unnecessarily complicated.
I don't think Chris Dixon is necessarily saying that founders are better, more worthy people than non-founders. I think he's just saying that being a founder is super hard.

I agree with you that there are many paths to happiness :-)
Thanks for the reply. In the talk, I missed the point that transaction functions are able to implement "optimistic CAS" (which I assume is the same as what is more traditionally but inaccurately called "optimistic locking"). To clarify, though: Wouldn't precondition testing have to be done /inside/ the transaction, not before, in order to be effective?

That's a nice model, I suppose, but doesn't strike me as particularly novel. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the idea that read-only operations can avoid creating a transaction is not particularly important per se. What's more important is avoiding locking, and this is already available in several DBMSes. Indeed, in the sense that reads are consistent "as of" a certain point in time, Datomic really does have a notion of a read transaction. I saw in another of your replies here that you consider these to be more flexible than transactions because they are in effect immutable snapshots of the database state, and independent of a single process. I guess for some applications that could be important, but for many applications the process independence is irrelevant (perhaps it helps with scaling a middle tier?), and the eventual storage cost of true immutability will become intractable (although perhaps you'll eventually have ways to release state prior to a point in time). Coordinating different parts of code within a single process over a specific span of time doesn't strike me as any easier with Datomic's model than with traditional transactions.

This talk just didn't focus on the kinds of data modeling problems that are important to me and which I consider difficult, which mostly have to do with maintainability of the data model - except, possibly, for the ease of dealing with temporal queries. And I share others' unease with what seemed to be inaccurate characterizations of current DBMS implementations.
Everyone just 'knows' what is in Sarbanes Oxley but when you ask them to point it out to you in the legislation they cannot find what they were so certain about 2 minutes prior. We have compliance people and auditors are always coming in, but when someone claims something is required for Sox compliance, challenge them on it as 99% of the time it is a convention because someone told them, or they did it like that somewhere else once, rather then what is required by law. At the least it will make them justify the compliance/overhead they are causing you to do as an engineer.

Here is the legislation if you want to read through it or use it to challenge someone's assumptions about the Sarbanes-Oxley; http://www.sec.gov/about/laws/soa2002.pdf
The USA is generally accustomed to guns as a society. I'm more interested in how this is going to affect countries like the U.K. and Australia with very strict gun laws.

I'm especially interested in the U.K. because people don't even like the idea of the police using water cannon, but if any 3D printer can produce a gun, I think they're going to need to arm all police.

How countries in that situation handle the problem is going to be really interesting. Especially how it affects 3D printing. Is it going to be dying business models all over again? Or will the countries adapt to a new reality?
"But we got 10 canned answers that told us nothing we already knew."

What do you mean?
Any button kills people if you throw it hard enough.
This is a fair point. Journalists are just using available public information.

37Signals' numbers are not public. "Talk is cheap" as they say.

I don't disagree with what he is saying in the quotes - that people focus too much on raising money as "business success". This is without question. But then again I still do not understand the value of 37Signals (compared to any other software company with aggressive marketing), at least not from the press they get. How are they being any more transparent?

All I know from recent reports is employees supposedly work 4 days a week and they have some sort of brainstorming sessions to come up with new ideas. What does the 37Signals software do? Specifically, not just some marketing buzzword. What does it do that I can't otherwise do without it? Are there some YouTube videos showing the software in action?

How do I know it's not just a Ruby on Rails consulting business for a few steady clients (who have an inseparable attachment to Rails), as opposed to a "unique" software company with amazing products? How do I know they're not just selling a Rails framework? So I have to install Ruby, Rails and a gazilion of their custom scripts to use their "product"?
Neither does anyone else, but when faced with a kernel issue that's what you're stuck with regardless which OS you use.
Ability to tag a link and filtering ability based on particular tag.
I don't think this is necessarily broken behavior. Photoshop has a splash screen too, and from what I understand, it's there because of the long loading time.
An Evening with Pirate Amelia, the Youngest Member of the European Parliament
It's definitely really hard to find out what's going on with Couch lately. Even checking the bug tracker isn't very helpful for finding out what's going into the next version and when it's releasing.
I did not know about this project.

I agree, Google does open up a lot of projects and publishes a lot of papers as well on their work. I guess my comment was a bit of a gut reaction to the wording used that entailed "our problem are unique" which are many times used to justify brand new proprietary projects.

I imagine whats used is based on a combination of open source projects (either theirs or others) with their own secret sauce. Which is pretty standard process I guess.

Alright, maybe I commented too early. The wording threw me off.
The problem with drawing a circle is that it interferes with ordinary drag actions. How would Google Maps know whether you meant to drag the map or were trying to zoom?
Interestingly, you can see the user invitation tree here:

https://lobste.rs/u/

So if you want an invitation, you should see if you know anyone on that lists.

[edit: "If spammers are invited to the site and banned, the user that invited them may also be banned, going up the chain of invitations as needed." If your parent gets banned, do all children get banned?]
It seems to be one of non-Mac users biggest complaints but I love it. I can close my Chrome windows and remove the clutter without having to pay the cost of having it start up again. It's a good-bad habit because then I go to Linux and Ctrl+W all my tabs and then hit Ctrl+T and realize my mistake.
Visit it now on YouTube -- in under 2 minutes -- in "Shit Silicon Valley Says":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR8zFANeBGQ&feature=play...

"It's like AirBnB for Facebook games"

"It's like Pandora for Cats"

"Think of it like an Instagram for hamburgers"

"Think of it as a Netflix for Youtube"

All this and much, much more...
https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters says nothing about trying to break from the culture of HN. Lobsters differs from HN in features, moderation transparency, and spamming-prevention techniques, but it doesn’t say it tries to have a different user culture. So rauljara conforming to HN culture would not be a reason to avoid inviting him to Lobsters.
I'd love an invite as well! I love how damn fast and nimble it feels, and I've already enjoyed some of the discussion.
"Fourth Turning", eh? Your Strauss and Howe is showing. Sadly, they are kooks and so are you.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/167253-the-fourth-turning-sh...

> Among quants there is a saying that goes “don’t torture the data until it talks”, which is another way of saying don’t over-fit the data. While Howe & Strauss’ analysis is very intriguing, I find many disturbing signs of data fitting that make me uncomfortable.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/William_Strauss_and_Neil_Howe

> William Strauss and Neil Howe think society turns on a repeating set of four 20-year cycles and try to predict the future based on this.

[snip]

> According to the authors (writing in 1997), the U.S. was in an "unraveling" in the 1990s and due for another crisis in the 2000s-2010s, which will be followed once the crisis is resolved by a new "high" of economic liberalism and social conservatism a-la the 1950s.

It's interesting how all these cycle-meisters (a subset of woo-meisters or just plain frauds) always say that the crisis is near. Always. Their magical cycle theories never predict a distant crisis.

Onwards:

> The generations themselves are arbitrary constructs. They have an age range of about 20 years each, but what gives somebody born in 1965 (a Generation Xer) more in common with a Generation Xer born in 1980 rather than a Baby Boomer born in 1961?

It's crap. It's one of many cycle theories that gets promoted every so often, and it's based on torturing the data that isn't ignored entirely with huge amounts of retrospective predictions (predicting the past, so much easier than predicting the future), just like the others.