skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would really love an invite to this. Competition is good regardless of whether or not it was created out of spite. I often wish there were more competing sites to HN because the quality of the moderation and the way things work around here has really deteriorated as of late.

I don't know the reasoning of Paul Graham hell-banning people on this site for merely questioning the way it's moderated or for whatever reason, but the lack of transparency on HN is a big issue that needs to be fixed.

As much as I love HN, I think it's time for a change and whether it be Lobsters or another site, I am really hoping a successor breaks the ranks and perhaps PG and the moderator team will then make an effort to fix this place.
I'll take an invite as well, if someone has access.
1. Check out the up and down votes on reddit! 158,753 up votes 152,631 down votes with a net difference of 6k or so positive. That's crazy! Are those partisan lines or something? Why wouldn't everyone on reddit be excited to see the president?

2. Why has this had such low rank on HN given the number of votes? It had 200+ in the first hour and never seemed to get in the top 3.
Seems like the cost of slower adoption isn't worth the upside to spam control, given that that's a relatively small problem for sites like these with proper IP control and user moderation. Lower quality comments is the bigger problem and that wouldn't easily be solved by being invite only.
Agreed, I was thinking that as well. I wonder if the same factors in transforming those societies all those years ago could be used in the modern world? Or has the world changed so much since then that the same factors could no longer apply?

Things like much larger populations, greater mobility and communications may make the solution to corruption a lot different today than what worked in the past.
Well, compared to your numbers, I guess not that quick. Django is responding in 0.28 seconds. That is going over wifi to my server in a closet though. And i'm downstairs kinda far from the router.

Screenshot: http://wsld.me/J5zu

If I hit it repeatedly for a while it comes back in as quick as 0.14, but usually not that fast.

ping to server:

michael at Achilles in ~
○ ping -c 5 apollo
PING apollo (192.168.1.130): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.1.130: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=9.497 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.130: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=83.113 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.130: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=7.335 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.130: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=6.998 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.130: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=6.393 ms

--- apollo ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 6.393/22.667/83.113/30.241 ms
Then you've been selective about what you've bought. It's trivial to find devices that are Windows specific and/or have only gotten Linux and/or OS X support after extensive rounds of reverse engineering.

Low end printers and scanners in particular are notorious for skimping on the logic in the device itself and depending on a large blob of Windows driver code, with manufacturers that couldn't care less about supporting anything other than Windows.
That's exactly what a union does, just on a full time basis. So you have an organization you can appeal to every time there's need for action.
I'm surprised this is buried by people suggesting Rails or Postgres or what have you. SQLAlchemy as good a SQL ORM as there is, and it isn't married to a framework, or a SQL backend.

If you like Python and want to use a SQL backend, SQLAlchemy is a good place to start.
Oh, there's almost zero doubt I've annoyed a moderator at some point.

There's no list of moderators anywhere is there? I could tick off the ones I haven't annoyed.
Gimp is like the 'vi' of image editors. I hated it too but I slowly learned all the keys and now I find I can work at such incredible speed with Gimp that anything else seems awkward and slow. My right hand is on the mouse which never has to leave the canvas / work area and my left hand is dancing on the keyboard. Using Gimp primarily with a mouse is certainly a disaster of usability though.
I didn't offer any easy solutions, only the concept of a body that can represent many developers in order to have actual leverage against those companies. Twitter is just one example.
I expect in Australia that printing a gun will get you into trouble if discovered because it's an unlicensed weapon, just like making an improvised gun would today. The only difference is the ease of making and the quality of the result.
Well, yes. But there's also the curious fact that if you set the upfront cost for something to zero, demand is higher than if you set some other price on it.

I don't think the vertical fiscal imbalance is the causal thing here. People want as much medical help as they think they can get.
It is a HN competitor. The person who built says they did so out of frustration with HN.
A profession is a vocation founded upon specialized high educational training (Wikipedia). For example, you can have a doctor union - it doesn't mean that every doctor is a member in it.
There's also some more information here: https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters
Slower adoption? By default a site like this is going to have no traction, since there are a gazillion other reddit clones around. But make it appear exclusive, and you immediately have people begging for invites.

(Edit: I don't mean to imply that hype-generation was the real reason to make it invite-only. I'm sure that the stated reasons are the real ones. The interest generated by exclusivity is just a nice byproduct.)
No Email
So, first off I don't give a fuck about the story, or the counter story, or people who photoshop themselves with celebrities, or people who care about whether people really know celebrities, or techcrunch.

That said, I wanted to contrast the HN reaction to this story with the HN reaction to the kid who slept at AOL. I figure in both cases we're talking about someone who did something deceptive and wrong in the supposed name of entrepreneurial hustle. The AOL kid actually went as far as breaking the law, while it's not clear this girl did at all.

In the AOL kid's article you wrote:

"However for a potential investor this is a great demonstration of how committed someone is to their idea, and their passion. I don't doubt for a moment that Eric will be successful at what ever he sets out to do, you can't buy that kind of focus."

( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4019755 )

Then went on to at least play devil's advocate to the commenter who called it an 'ethical failure'.

Honestly not trying to call you hypocritical here.. I'm genuinely curious what gives the AOL kid 'moxie' while the girl that plays up her relationships with folks is less admirable.
Google is unrepentant in spite of the thousands of terrible reviews online of their (often, not always) disrespectful way of treating people. Nothing happens while those don't reach mainstream news.
Do: email pg if you're hellbanned.
Do: Be civil and respond politely.
Don't: create a throwaway account and whine about being hellbanned.
Don't: create a new account without talking to pg first.
Don't: take it personally.
I hope we won't see a "what killed the android phone" post sometime in future :(
Alternately, for my emac brethren:

http://emacs-fu.blogspot.com/2011/02/keeping-your-secrets-se...
I suspect the much bigger issue in the UK at least is the availability of ammunition. It's been really quite easy to manufacture weapons (which, at their simplest, are just a tube strong enough to stop the cartridge walls bursting)

It seems a relatively common technique is to rebore the barrel of a starter (blank-firing) pistol or modify an air-rifle, there was a guy caught not that long ago with his own machine shop making full-auto capable weapons, iirc.

But bullets; I'm sure they're easier to smuggle, and there are legitimate ways to get then (rifles only, pistols being banned entirely) Making your own is also difficult, although buying a sack or 2 of spent cases and a tumbler is possible, there aren't really any decent sources of propellant, nor primer/caps.

It's hard to say objectively which is the harder component to manufacture/acquire, but I'm going to go with ammo right now. Not sure where the enforcement effort will be best spent in future though. It may be that the focus is moved towards detection, perhaps with something like the directional microphone arrays that can do gunshot detection/localisation. We could even mount them on all the millions of CCTV cams we have scattered around the place, what could possibly go wrong?
Can anyone spare an invite? I'd really like to join up!
It's funny you mentioned this, as I did the exact same thing. Except in my case, AirPlay worked flawlessly with Alien on my Apple TV.

I suspect the only difference is that I'm using the Canadian iTunes store. But I've also read in an Apple developer doc that all iTunes content is AirPlay enabled, that it cannot be opted out of.

I would highly recommend contacting iTunes customer service to get a refund on your rental, or at least some kind of confirmation.

http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/contact/
Help Karl Kesel save his baby
The grandparent to your post says "Apple did genuinely develop independently". Not "Apple did legally license from Xerox in exchange for stock". So the point still stands.

The amount of misinformation surrounding how much of the modern computing experience Apple independently invented is also dizzying.
> Bushnell explained that “Goobuntu is simply a light skin over standard Ubuntu.”

Given the headline, I was hoping for a bit more.
I'm likely denser than you. I find gpg so obtuse that one of the first things I built at Elation was a python app that wraps it. We keep passwords in structured text files which are encrypted using gpg, then the python file wraps all the gpg bits, keeps the stuff organized, and lets us do things like tab-complete the username we're pulling a password from, and copies the password to our clipboard so that we don't have to ever see the passwords, much less all of them.

In fact, we're interesting in open-sourcing it since it's really rough around the edges. If anyone is interested in working on it with us, hit me up and maybe we can toss it up on github and make it more nice together.
I'd love to contribute to this.
Sorry, I'm still not really following.

You mean that big, international corporations would bring more cash back into the US, which they could potentially spend more to acquire smaller companies? Seems like a long shot.
Not based on the article at all -- just the general argument of "someone holding a board seat at a company is more of an endorsement than merely owning stock". There are people I respect who have board seats at really dysfunctional big tech companies, too, so maybe the argument doesn't work.

He's a great CEO (at least in the context of 37 Signals), and has a set of values which are internally consistent, and sits on a board of a company which is inconsistent with those values. I'm not sure how to reconcile this with my belief that boardmembers have a responsibility to exert governance and oversight over their companies.

Based on reading his responses elsewhere in the thread (left the board in 2010, was his first board seat, novelty, etc.), it makes more sense. I guess I am overly sensitized to passive board members from watching HP, Yahoo!, eBay, RIMM, etc.
Looks cool. But what about people like me who don't have any friends but still have interesting ideas?
I don't think you're giving him enough credit.

He speaks in public forums all the time. He speaks for himself just fine there, why would an internet forum be any different?
However people are hearing about the site to even care about getting an invite, or know what it is, those are the same circumstances that they could happen upon the site and want to register. I don't think I've ever heard of a principle that stated invite only leads to greater adoption for a new site than open register, it's rather done to retard growth so the new infrastructure can keep up, or in this case to control spam. I believe slow growth, in absence of traction, is a perfectly valid way for many sites to grow and eventually gain traction.
Wrong. It's Google's decision to abandon direct mounting Android drives in ICS in favor of the MTP standard.

Which is the right move in the long term, although it's certainly causing some pain in the short term.
can anyone spare an invite? :)
In the dev release it does. Info here [1]

[1]https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/?fromgroups#!...
Developer work is too varied to have a single consistent voice. Drop the union idea, the word has too much baggage and becomes a huge people management issue. Turn it into what developers do best, build an app/api.

I'm not sure if this idea will make too much sense; I need to see if I can find some time to explore it a little more. I could see building an app/api which is a mixture of a news/issue aggregator and a remote config editor.

Figure out how to surface issues to developers in a consistent way. Then let developers decide which issues matter to them, and how to deliver updated configs. Then let developers decide how to use the api/config from there. Maybe some apps will decide to disable in-app purchases for some time period, maybe some will alter code-flows to use a competitor of a big company, maybe some app will praise some company for their stance on some issue. The developers need to be in full control at all times though. The api would let developers read the remote config from their apps.

Maybe it just turns into a remote config service, and the activism part gets lost... but it might work as a vehicle for this kind of activism too.
An engineer working in a steel factory. Question: Can he carry a screwdriver. Answer: No. Reason: Union rules.

Please just drop shit you have no knowledge of.
Australian team hails bionic eye success
Okay, he answered top voted questions at the time, all of which were generic questions that he's answered time and time again. What exactly would you expect? There weren't any different or insightful questions actually asked [and voted to the top where he'd see them].

I mean, I wonder how many times he's been asked "What was the most difficult decision that you had to make during this term?". Probably quite a lot. Hell, I get asked basically that every time I interview for a job.
It's a shame there isn't an about page that suggests what will be different (or better) about lobste.rs from HN. If it's just a clone site where a different set of people post the same articles and similar comments, I won't waste my time.
Nope, no list of moderators. You'll never know who, and you'll never know why, and you probably won't be able to get it reversed.

Also, Macro: The step beyond slowbanning is hellbanning, where nobody can see your comments except you, and users with "show dead" on. You've been hellbanned for over a year. As to why...maybe some mod thought your first comment was a bit content free. Maybe they were just having a bad day. I'd recommend getting a new account.
That's the thing! This article is incredibly shallow and manipulative. I have no doubt this girl lied about being affiliated with Founders Fund but that's all the article says. The article never says that the purpose of the photoshopped photos was to mislead. It just puts them out there and tempts you to draw your own conclusion from the biased context. People Photoshop themselves next famous people. All the time. It's all in good fun. I'm not saying she's innocent but what I am saying is that this article was lazy and really does belong on TMZ.

I'll sum up the article:

"This random girl lied about being affiliated with Founders Fund but it's unclear who she lied to exactly. We're going to beat this horse to death and here's some Photoshopped photos of her with famous people that could be innocent but we're not real journalists here so we'll make an implication and let you draw your own conclusion thus getting us off the hook for doing any real journalism"

That's how that piece should have read. Whether she's guilty or not this article is a steaming pile. I wonder if this was ordered by Founders Fund itself. (See what I did there? I asked the question and now you get to go all conspiracy theory with that while I get to say I never made that accusation... Kind of like this article)
I disagree with that notion.

I've been a contributor on HN for around 5 years and over the period of time I've seen a constant decline in the quality of comments, community support (read some of the 'Show HN' posts) and to an extent even the quality of the stories submitted.

A new improved hacker/startup community can be a serious contender for replacing HN (in its current state), just like Reddit is/was to Digg and others.
So a union would help workers negotiate things like wages, benefits, and overall treatment of workers. What you are proposing with this analogy is some kind of organization that would somehow have the power from outside of a given business to force that business to adopt practices preferred by third parties. Not really the same thing, not sure how you would go about forming such an entity, and frankly it sounds pretty terrible for the business climate as a whole.
The GIMP has "layer modes."

http://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-concepts-layer-modes.html
This. Silly journalists don't realize that its always been possible to build guns at home. One of the advertised benefits of owning a Smithy brand combination lathe and mill is that you can do gunsmithing. Bullets though, and by that we mean ammunition you would want to carry around, is quite a bit tougher.

My Dad and brother-in-law are both fans of black powder guns, and have made their own powder for them. But while a musket is still a solid defense against someone who isn't armed, its not much of a threat to someone wearing ballistic armor and carrying a M4.

Gun control has never been about guns anyway, it has always been about a society that thinks killing people is an acceptable way to settle disputes.
He does not sit on the board of Groupon and hasn't for a long time.
The motivation for creating something is not necessarily its primary purpose.
It's great if you're a kid, but when you grow up you should work on solving cancer or making spaceships.
It takes a lot more effort and skill to build a weapon manually now than it would to print one with a 3D printer, so I see the concern.
Scotiabank to buy ING Bank of Canada for $3.1B
+1 for a kill file. I'd also love a 'follow' mechanism. Only a small subset of HN users post deeply insightful posts and if I could see only their posts and comments, that would be a great time saver.
A union doesn't have to necessarily regulate wages - just be a source for developer grievance against companies that generate value from their work. Also consider that you don't have to be a part of the union if you don't agree with its principles. The only power a union has is from his members willing to negotiate collectively, there's nothing more to it.
Anyone who proposes that the discussion should focus on profitability rather than funding rounds is presumably not proposing that we simply talk about it as one bit of information: profitable or not. That would make pretty short articles. It also wouldn't be very interesting; there are hundreds of plumbers and barbers and cafes within a few miles of me who are profitable.

And plenty of these plumbers and barbers and cafes probably do great work and treat their employees well. Do you really want to read articles about all of them? I don't. What makes a company newsworthy (unless it's as a case study) is its size, or potential size.
Where Does Consumer Tech Go to Die?
"Jeff Han's multitouch demo makes a courtroom appearance as Samsung argues patent validity"

Is the title of the article. as of 08/29/2012
While I do agree that most attempts to "look better" will lead to better overall health, there's some ugly sides to that, as well: bulimia, anorexia, stimulant appetite suppressants, etc.
>Okay, he answered top voted questions at the time

Well, for example, he was asked if he'd consider raising the budget for NASA, his answer didn't directly respond or answer the question, just re-quote his campaign piece on the issue. He didn't answer if he'd consider raising the budget, he just gave some purposefully vague reply about the notion that "we should stay at the forefront of space exploration."

>There weren't any different or insightful questions actually asked

More commonly AMAs are deemed "good" if the subject doesn't blatantly just answer the easiest questions asked and goes out of their way, even just a bit, to offer some unique or exclusive insight. Which Obama, or whoever it was, did not do.
Perhaps "union" is too loaded of a word. My intentions was for a body that can collectively bargain on behalf of developers against companies that right now are treating them as they will since as individuals they have no leverage or recourse.
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I don't understand why a co-editor of TechCrunch would ever write "this is the story that no one was writing". Er, if you were wanting someone to write it, why didn't you commission them to write it already? That's surely your job!?!
Wanted: IPv6 Multicast as a Service (MaaS)
Here's what it would look like:

1. An IPv6 client with a globally-scoped IPv6 address (the Source) requests an IPv6 multicast address from the service. The address is valid for a particular amount of time, unless renewed. The address can be renewed indefinitely.

2. Other IPv6 clients (the Clients) are given the multicast address and join that multicast group, using the (S, G) method.

3. The Source sends packets to the multicast address and the Clients receive them.

I have no idea what the billing would look like, perhaps traffic sent over the channel? I just know I would use this service if it existed.

Thanks!
Huffington Post Now Has Its Own “Labs” Site For Online News Experiments
I should have asked a better question. Still happy he answered mine.
> For 90% of web development cases, simply storing and retrieving objects from a persistent store is enough of an API.

"90%", that's quite a specific number.

Most of what I've written for the past fifteen years is web apps, and I'd say about 10% fall into the "all I need is put and get objects" category. Especially once I knew how to use SQL effectively, especially once I knew how to work with ACID, these features became irreplaceable in almost every project I've worked with.

IMHO it's all about what you're familiar with. Rich Hickey thinks we're morons for using OOP, as he's a brilliant functional guy. Shrugs.
* clone HN

* put a link to it at the top of HN

* expect something different to HN?
I feel it's pretty hard to look at. HN is simple, but still designed well. This, on the other hand, feels cramped.
What You Need to Know About Hiring a Contractor
wow. Macro posts one slightly vapid but inoffensive comment and is struck by instant death lightning.
Why is the logo of such poor quality?
Note that GPG is not FIPS 140 compliant, so if you encrypting for compliance purposes, GPG may not be considered encryption by your governing policy.
One thing I liked right off the bat was a good mobile experience. The fact that you still can't get this on HN is quite appalling to me.
I honestly can't tell if you are agreeing with what the parent wrote or disagreeing.

I'm leaning toward disagreement.
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I would like to see an invite only site that had an application process where an inviter can pick out applications they like from the pool. This way the people of value but without networking are fine.
Very similar color scheme, layout, and design in general. Big no-no for me, but I applaud the effort.
From Japanese history to Thief: The inspiration behind Mark of the Ninja
I can't imagine that making an echo chamber at all. The likelihood of me getting an invite is next to nil, as I don't really fraternize with people around here. Guess I'll stick around here.