skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's one thing to suggest that there are plenty of things in Science (and even Math -- e.g. the Axiom of Choice) that aren't right or wrong (or where the answer remains undetermined) but the idea that the perception that science is binary -- relative to other pursuits -- is horribly inaccurate is a bit unfair.

Science may not be binary, but it's a heck of a lot more binary than Literary Criticism, Political Science, Law, or even Economics.
I'm originally from South Africa, and I share your amusement with the British fear of driving long distances. That said, the drive I'm doing tonight, is only 73 miles and without traffic will take close to two hours. The roads and the trains here are simply not designed to travel a decent distance in a short period of time. That said, people still don't even do the two hour drive to the next town to go visit places on the weekend, but part of that is because one accident on the road can turn the trip into a 3-4 hour trip easily on a Saturday. Oh, and the fuel price also has to be considered.
The only thing I would do with HN is to _force people to comment when they downvote_

How do you prevent a: 'Downvoted for being moronic->No, you are' kind of thread?
One of my frustrations about the perceived downhill spiral (as a relative newb, having been here just over a year) is all of the proposals for improving HN which keep making it to the front page, and inevitably spawn the same set of suggestions in the comments.
Phodphad - Learn Online. An Indian Startup.
I can see your point. But the objective is to just create a barrier, no matter how small. Many people wouldn't pay $2 for an account on some internet forum.
I wonder how many people here have from time to time pointed to one of their own posts? You'd see that HN has a longer tail than just the one-day front page most people think it has. And this is true for submissions that get many votes as well as for those that get none. So thinking you know what people want is nonsense. You just know what you want.
OP (what is the correct description here?) is perhaps exaggerating a bit, but to be fair I also noticed a general "Apple cannot do any wrong" culture on HN. I can't point off hand to specific threads but is just a feeling I got from checking comments and seeing what was down voted or up voted.

It is somewhat frustrating when a community like HN does this but on the other hand the upsides of the HN community by far out-weigh the downsides.
Great post - I did the same thing, and 2 years on, best decision I've ever made. It takes time but the main thing is to take the plunge and stick with it. Great job!
I agree with you. The embed does not have a non-autoplay option.
Have to disagree.

This has already been mentioned elsewhere but comments with little value are already penalized when people downvote them.

If you notice more crap comments that aren't being downvoted that's because a) the community standards are changing and b) there's no good way to penalize all crap comments anyway - some will slip through the cracks. And as a result of b) great comments will slip through the cracks, which means people will lose points needlessly even when they're not trolling.

I'm not saying your proposal wouldn't have an impact on trolls. But there would likely be an awful lot of collateral damage.
Ask HN: Can (or should) I use Perl to develop web apps?
To cut a long story short, I am about to embark on a personal pet project and it will be my first time developing a web app from scratch. I've dabbled in bits and pieces of Python and PHP (Ruby is on my to-do list) but never ever used them to do full fledged stuff. What I am very proficient in is Perl[1] and I'm thinking of using a Perl web framework[2] to develop my app since it is the language I am most familiar with.

I've been trying to look for examples of any recent web apps that use Perl but I can't seem to find any major ones. Also, a google search on using Perl for web development is somewhat.. scarce. Doesn't seem to be a popular topic. Which got me thinking about how viable it is to use it to develop my web app.

So, here are my questions.

Does anyone in HN use Perl or any of the Perl frameworks for their web apps? I know PHP and Ruby are probably the most popular languages used here but I was wondering if anyone had any experiences using Perl[3]? Is it good or bad?

[1] I primarily consult/work in the Telecommunications industry and Perl is very prevalent there hence why I am very comfortable with the language. Also, if you ever consulted for the telecommunications industry, you will know that you always, at some point, have to deal with the Server Admins and perl (along with shell scripting) is widely used.

[2] Did a bit of research and I found Catalyst, Mojo and Dance. I've never used either because if there was any web stuff that needed to be done, I've always relied on the good old cgi modules. Nevertheless, Dance seems to be the most intriguing framework for me.

[3] Maybe you found it difficult to use and decide to switch to a more popular (or more widely supported) framework? Or that you found Perl is never good enough to be used for web apps?
I thought the main problems on HN were

-Linkbait articles rapidly accelerating to the front page while good stuff like questions or Show HN gets lost in "New".

-The slight trend in the community towards vitriol and nasty criticism, which there was a lot of chatter about two or three weeks ago.

In both cases, in my understanding, there's a lot of upvoting of the controversial links/comments from new people with low karma, which is how they're kind of taking control of the community.

I came up with some ideas in the shower about this. First, I thought it might be a good idea to create some logarithmic mapping of karma value to vote weight. The weight wouldn't give the user more karma for being up-voted by a high-karma person, but it would factor into the site's systems. That way, people with more karma have more of an impact on the community.

Second, I thought that the quality of a user's previous submissions should factor into their reputation or something on this site somehow. Maybe HN could look at the trend of votes earned on recent comments and the ratio of downvotes:upvotes or downvotes:views (since controversial comments get upvoted a lot, we want to look at how many times they were downvotes, not the total score since that will probably be very positive regardless of how many downvotes there were) and use that information to somehow affect the user. i.e. if someone is getting a lot of upvotes for mocking someone's project in a nasty but particularly clever way but also getting a considerable number of downvotes, the system should say hey, this guy writes posts that a lot of people don't think belong on our website, and then take action on that somehow.

Note, I'm "new" (198 karma, joined about a year ago) so I may not know what I'm talking about.
Yeah, you're right. I can't quit you Apple!
I get frustrated when I post a massive comment on an article which never gets read, I don't believe it would add to the environment of the website to have it cost me 'karma' also, it would effectively take away my inclination to comment on new topics.

I do care about Karma, it's how I know I'm doing a good job, that regardless of my opinion, people agree with my reasoning and the argument I've put forth, I put thought in to my posts, not just posting for the sake of it and it would be a shame to see that go to waste by being penalized before I've even had the chance to be heard.

This aside, I believe that HN doesn't need improving, I'm a long time reader and it annoys me when people seem to see some kind of downwards trend in the content, it's a news aggregation site, in essence, so perhaps this "downwards trend" people seem to be observing is merely the winds changing direction in terms of news.

HN has always been start ups, HN has always been popularity contests between brands and programming languages, the fact that it seems to be consumed these days by Apple-Samsung etc, is because that is what is in the news at the moment, eventually that will change to some other dominant topic and people will claim they are sick of seeing that too.

As I said before, this is a news aggregation site. The sum of all the content in a particular genre is the overwhelming majority of content on here. That only changes when some other trend starts to emerge, until then we have to wait.

For the record, I for one am also sick of reading about Apple-Samsung, but I'm more than content to sift through it to find the quality content which exists on here (not that the content isn't quality coming from Apple-Samsung, just that it is fairly monotonous now.)
Am I the only one who hasn't noticed this huge drop in quality that has everyone bitching and moaning lately? The signal-to-noise ratio has dropped slightly compared to when I started reading about four years ago, but this is still a great place for technical discussion. Comparisons to Reddit and other such nonsense are baseless. HN does not need any major overhaul or whatever else. I think a lot of this is just old-timers starting to see the same shit over and again. Try giving it up for a few months, then come back and see if you still feel that way.

One thing that has happened, that I suspect may have ruffled some feathers, is that HN is not the objectivist echo chamber it used to be. This is still a board for entrepreneurs before it is a board for hackers, but some of the more out-there John Galt type stuff will now get picked apart and downvoted, or even just ignored, where before you either clucked your tongue in agreement, remained silent, or donned your flame suit.
I'd like to think that's not rare enough for websites to have assumed they were always six characters - half of London lives in postcodes like "N1 2BC". The bigger problem I've found with postcodes was sites insisting on five digits, or even insisting on postcodes at all - not every country uses them!
Curiosity doesn’t kill
Why? When an article is bad it can be down voted appropriately.
Dissecting Phonegap's architecture
مباراة السعودية واسبانيا بث مباشر 7/9/2012
The docs are stronger than a lot of other frameworks I've looked at, the google group has a nice friendly community behind it, and Fabien and Christophe are very involved and open to the community there and on github.

Shameless plug for what is currently vapour. Hopefully in December and January (if projects finish on time) I'll be writing my introduction to Symfony book, a large chunk will be free online and expanded on as a leanpub ebook https://leanpub.com/philrenniesymfony2
Ok, as a trigger. But isn't it backwards to have the generator suggest where to put trigger points instead of the consumer?
How I sold 2000$ of self-designed electronics in ONE day
If it's too little, people will feel it's not worth the effort to pay for such an amount.
I have been reading HN for years, and I disagree with the premise that there is a "downward slide". For people like me, it might be helpful to provide some sort of evidence to support your claim.

The solution you are proposing also would silence users accounts permanently without any chance for redemption, those users would become disaffected and resentful, and with the trivial nature of account creation here, might cause new problems.

HN is a community, and I think a system that promotes corrective behavior (like the current one) works best when it exerts negative social pressure for "bad" posts and helps new users integrate themselves into the community.

If you've ever seen the movie "Hackers", the character "Joey" is a total noob, and the other characters are constantly giving him negative feedback when he does something stupid, eventually he learns a few things and becomes more useful.
This is a very short-sighted response in my opinion. They've been finding zero-days in a wide variety of software, so if you are a target, not running Windows isn't going to help you much.

I don't think any part of this is scary because, let's be honest, none of us are likely at all to ever be the target of such a sophisticated attack.
Video from Sitecore Symposium Europe 2012
I just got my wife (Taiwanese) to read it, and she translated the red block of text. She wasn't very clear, but it says something along the lines of:

"Beware of imitation products. The genuine goophone has a 'small bee' logo. If you see any phones with a similar design to the goophone but without the 'small bee' it is an imitation. Report counterfeit products by calling 0755-88877119"

I've been laughing for the past 5 minutes ...
Bing vs Google blind comparison test
edn is a mechanism for the conveyance of values. It is not a system for defining their semantics, types nor schemas.

That said, there should be no problem using edn to convey the values of types whose definitions are algebraic or recursive.

In particular:

"A tag may specify more than one format for the tagged element, e.g. both a string and a vector representation."

admits unions.

And the system itself nests arbitrarily, i.e. a tagged element can be defined in terms of others.

Values of this type:

data Tree = Empty
| Leaf Int
| Node Tree Tree

could be conveyed like this:

#tree/Tree Empty
#tree/Tree [Leaf 42]
#tree/Tree [Node #tree/Tree Empty, #tree/Tree [Leaf 42]]
Twilio's Definitive Brogrammer Primer
eMachines developed a computer that looked exactly like the original iMac similar to the way the Galaxy S looked exactly like the iPhone 3g. eMachines did end up getting sued by Apple.
"... the company has actually patented the knockoff design in China and is poised to sue Apple if it launches the next-generation iPhone in China later this year."

Take that, Apple!
An introduction to libuv
My dad didn't understand why his (admittedly quite old) laptop really struggles on some websites. For most of his usage - buying tickets, checking emails - it suffices just fine, but a badly coded flash advert can bring the entire machine to a crawl.

It was very difficult to convince him that yes, it was actually the crappy slideshow advert on one tab that was making his entire computer unusable.
True. It would be fair enough if I were signing up for a mailing list, but it's rarely clear to me as a user why any web site wants my email address. Is it to send me emails reminding me to check the site? Is it to help me "keep in touch" (with my new friend do-not-reply@morons.com)? Is it just standard practice taught in web-dev school? Am I being overly cynical to think someone is trying to turn my inbox into a billboard, that we both know I don't want that, and that the confirmation link is used to stop my little brain from outsmarting him with a bogus address? What do those of you on the other side of this issue think about it?
I'm relatively new to HN, and also learning to program. I don't comment much. I rarely submit. But I read pretty much everything, including the comments.

And when I see posts about improving HN, I must admit that I just don't see it. Yes some comments are not constructive, but you'll always have that. I'm surprised we don't have more of this to be honest.

So is there a correlation between time spend on HN and your personal view of it's quality? Good question. How do you measure quality then? How do you separate yourself out?
off-topic: I though it was called _Hacker_ News because it used to be a hacking oriented board. Apparently it has always been for entrepreneurs, so where does the name come from?
Titans of tech: Why I'll never trust 'em
Book Review: R Cookbook
I don't know about you, but I don't keep copies of NDA code laying around, as it's not my code.

Not only because it just feels wrong, but if the owner got sued, I wouldn't want some cut-rate hack derping his way merrily thru my files doing discovery.
Ask HN: What is the unit in unit testing?
I have been reading a log about testing these days, and luckily have been writing as well. One thing that became clear to me was, testing was good, but there were many school of thoughts. Coming from python background, there was nose, unittest, mock, py.test etc. Each school thinks they are right.
There is however an ambiguity on how we actually define unit in a unit test?

How do you define a unit? Is it the assertion that a response is 500. or is unit all assertions inside a test class. In that case how long should a class be? aprox lines of code?

It will be great if people can share their opinion/experience about it.
Appreciate your reading it, thanks!
Great tool, I'd maybe change font and line-height to make for easier reading -> http://i.imgur.com/7PSvi.png
I've had similar thoughts: everyone seems to be chasing the developer with 5 years Rsils experience, worked at Zynga, lives in the Bay Area, went to Stanford, (probably) is willing to take stock options for a reduced salary, and is a JavaScript genius on the front end and server-side.

So, of course you csn't find your rockstar.

It seems in the tech world today, the answer is to not lower your requirements, or find one Ruby person and one JS person, or look at non-Zynga alumni, or (gasp!) look at remote workers, but to LOOK HARDER AND LOUDER for the same thing. Which is, from someone slightly on the outside of, well, the Valley, grating.
Apple working on Pandora-like music service, WSJ reports
The original definition of "hacker" before it entered the media.
its not really that trivial.
I really like this, it makes skimming the major news sites very easy. It looks like a quick way to view the news in the morning. I could probably scan all those and open the ones I want to read in under a minute. The only thing I would change is the social buttons at the top but from the other comments I can see you're going to remove them.

Nice work.
Private Twitter Alternative - to Talk About Twitter
This is cool. Can you make the HN links point to the HN pages? Besides getting easy access to the discussion, it sorta de-dupes the links.
The biggest thing to take away from this isn't just they get to say made in Britain but that they've created an additional 30 jobs. Not only are they making a difference in encouraging people to learn from the hardware but they're also now creating another positive effect on society through job creation.

Not bad for a small, charitable business.
Nice but not enough to make me switch from CakePHP or make me sad I didn't pick Symfony to begin with.
Since the dawn of globalization and the post-Cold war era, a number of countries are getting slot marked into particular sectors like:
China for manufacturing, US for design, software, German auto mobile, India for outsourced services etc.

But to have a thriving and healthy society in a country, the variety is important so that people can pursue different interests and are not forced to migrate because there is no high-quality work in that area in that country.

Only way to do this is to protect the domestic market from foreign investment and give some time for high quality local players to grow. Then open for competition. But if a second world government does it, it is blamed for not allowing reforms and accused of denying progress to its citizens

So now another way is opening up.

So it is good for China too if such things happen. If a bunch of high quality companies open up in stuff that UK is traditionally known for (financial services?) then
the balance will be stuck.

I hope financial institutions like IMF, World Bank take such things into count and come up with measures to increase variety in every country. It will make life a lot
better for a lot of people.
Thanks for making me chuckle with the comments at the top of the source.
If everyone who made a big pronouncement about HN's sad demise instead submitted a great article, went through and up-voted every story and comment they thought was interesting, and left some thoughtful comments, we would probably be in much better shape.
A small question, how can you even increase the karma if you have no ability to post? I think this is a bad idea and I haven't noticed a decrease in the quality.
Yeah, I agree, piracy is not theft, but new business models are needed.

For the record, I also pirate movies and music from time to time, because I live in Romania and getting certain music and movies is difficult - most content available in the US is either not available in my country, or is made available with a significant delay. I don't have access to services like Netflix, the content on iTunes is a fraction of what's available in the US, the local bands still sell packaged CDs and we don't have a local Amazon/iTunes, etc...

Fortunately for HBO Romania, they are airing shows as soon as they are available. I also go out to movie theaters, but I only go to movies that are worth it. I'm not going to go out for a subpar movie, but I would pay $2 for viewing it in my home, if only such a thing was possible as soon as they are released.

Basically these media companies are shooting themselves in the foot by restricting the availability of content. Too bad that we don't have a "piracy subscription" to be paid monthly, because I would gladly pay it.
Show HN: Follow-up to Python/Django/HTTP/... notes/docs 
http://my-notes.readthedocs.org/

Some time ago I posted this question: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4024938 where 100% of the top-level replies were positive ;). So here is the follow-up.

It doesn't focus on anything specific, it's more like a collection of "loose" notes related to the Python/Django/JS development. The value here is that I try hard to filter out the noise to make those docs useful for myself. For instance, when I need to learn something on a specific topic, I check e.g. 10 or 20 threads on Stack Overflow, and pick just a handful of answers. And only those few high quality answers make their way to the docs.

Let the bashing begin!
My favorite recent ruby drama was rails including Coffeescript by default: https://github.com/rails/rails/compare/9333ca7...23aa7da
(You have to scroll down for the images)
Body Camouflage: the 8 most incredible artists of the world
Some great points here.

>> "29. Please, please, please spend time hanging out in the latest and greatest apps, regardless of their personal relevance or interest to you. If you do, your expectations of a “good experience” will be raised. Archaic team communication tools are often a good indication of what the decision makers believe qualifies as “good.” (Hint: it’s often a very low bar relative to what’s possible!)"

I can't emphasize enough how important it is to use well designed tools, they will influence your product.
I cannot disagree any more. I haven't used a terminal that can't wrap in probably 15 years. The point of a commit message is to convey information. If you could point me to a study or something showing people retain info or learn better with a 50 char limit, awesome. But until then, I stand by it being a completely arbitrary restriction.
I propose that HN hold a contest a la Netflix whereby identity-sanitized user activity is made available for various parties to run algorithms on in order to improve the general quality of comments and articles.

Basically, the contest metrics would be:

* Given ALL identity-sanitized user activity
-> Predict the average voting behavior of individual users.

I've watched online forums deteriorate for almost 3 decades now. It's a shame to see HN following the same pattern of trolling, populist reputation seeking, post-spamming, account spoofing, and just generally immature behavior.
I'm no expert, but wouldn't a startup want a designer who wasn't so picky? Instead wanting a "full stack" designer; who could solve all their visual worries?