skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tell HN: Meta-comments typically suck
It seems unfortunate to me that the top comment on a story is often a meta-comment - someone will complain that a Chrome plug-in doesn't work on Opera, or that a video doesn't have sub-titles, or they don't like the font of the website, etc, etc. We're probably all guilty of doing this to some extent, because it's encouraged by the system - it's an easy way to score some points without thinking too hard.

I'd like to see one of the community guidelines be "Don't make meta-comments, and down-vote them where you see them." I think that would go a long way to getting relevant comments to the top of the thread.
Show HN: Converspace, kinda like what blogs should have evolved into
I always feel like somebody's watching me
And the truth he’s seen in the past decade is that our insecurity is getting the best of us. “The big problem in general is fear,” he says. “To counter their fear, companies make their standards too high and turn down people who would be great at their jobs. ... “Everyone wants the next Steve Wozniak to walk through the door, but really, they should be asking to see if they can do the job. … They want to populate their entire staff with engineering geniuses, and you don’t need the whole staff to be engineering geniuses. You need a couple really bright people who know what they’re doing, and then, just don’t turn down people who can do the job.”

There's definitely a misconception out there that a company can make it on "great engineers" alone. I've been thinking about this lately, trying to come up with a good way to describe to people what I do. So far, the best thing I've been able to come up with is that it's akin to being a load balancer: the person who takes on the tasks that can and will be optimized, but that are (for whatever reasons/ priorities) not yet able to optimized.

So maybe part of "the engineering shortage" is related to the shortage of people with enough technical competence to take on the tasks that the engineers could do, but don't want / like to do. So far in my experience, I've seen far more of a dearth of support people who know what they're doing, than a shortage of good engineers.
Hey man! Nice question. Our current system of education was designed for 19th century industrialism, yet today we’re preparing our kids for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technology that hasn’t been invented, to solve problems we can’t yet imagine.

We need to gear learning towards the 21st Century Set of Literacies: how well we can find information, validate it, synthesize it, leverage it, communicate it, collaborate with it and problem solve with it. And we need to be developing self-driven learners who are confident thinkers, socially mature, engaged in their communities, resilient in the face of life's challenges and adaptable to change.

How does this play out in the classroom? With a greater focus on critical reflection, teachers need to be Socratic and philosophic in their outlook. Teachers need to act as vital facilitators and motivators, reflecting the move towards a focus on self-directed learning. And they need to be highly trained in emotional intelligence, reflecting a greater focus on behavioural and non-cognitive skills.

I've written an essay about this on my personal blog if you're keen (thecreativefiles.com)
Why use website URL's for people when there's already a massively popular convention for person URI's: someone@tent.is. I think a "RESTful" protocol should follow this convention.
All the incidents to date except the first Bitcoinica heist were due to bad security practices one way or another. Even that one could be considered bad security practices by trusting that Linode was secure.

That said, I expect we will see some really hardcore Bitcoin security incidents in the future that rival state sponsored hacking.

Stealing Bitcoin requires no additional effort to profit. Since Bitcoin is money and easily made anonymous, stealing Bitcoin == profit. Therefore there exists an arbitrage opportunity between the cost of buying 0-day exploits and the Bitcoins that can be stolen by use of those exploits. I expect as Bitcoin goes up in value so will the cost of a certain class of exploit.

What kind of software stack would you run if you were operating a Bitcoin bank that held a large amount of funds?
I have some running code but it isn't ready for launch yet. Just putting this out there to get feedback on what you like and what you think needs improvement.
Can you link to the article you took this from? Looks like The Verge, but I couldn't find it.
Security scanners like nmap or Nessus were never considered malware, even if they can be used to exploit other servers. I don't see why would a DOSer, much less something like Megabox (which doesn't attack anything in any way) be considered malware.
Reddit: The front page of the internet
Giving yourself numerous insulin spikes as a matter of daily routine is bad anyway. Eat less, exercise more, eat less insulin-spiky stuff (high glycemic index food), perhaps even experiment with brief fasting once in a while.
It is because he is using, "nominalizations." (A word which is a caricature of the very idea it represents). It is difficult to explain what he is talking about because he isn't talking about anything concrete. The word, "abstractions," is loaded with implicit meaning that he does not explain particularly well.

I've found this post quite useful: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/zombie-nouns...
Unsurprising that a management blog would conclude that paying workers less would make them happier.
IOS 6.0 Supported Cydia Apps & Tweaks List
The author isn't forgetting people who are hard of hearing; he's just not addressing them. It's a perfectly legitimate choice to make. It sucks for you. It also sucks for the people who don't read Clojure. You can't blame the author because he isn't catering to your needs.

I've made webcast videos before. It's not easy. I also didn't caption them because it's a hell of a lot of work. Sorry. You can ask, but you can't expect.
Not quite $180. More like $300 dollars for the first year, and potentially at least $800 a year after that. Apple's offer is generous by comparison. Or did you miss the part where the pricing is introductory on the required certificates?
Totally - I only know a small subset of developers, and that was low on their list of complaints.
This guy didn't shatter anything. It's basically a big advertisement for his services. Those of us on the ground know there is a real shortage due to the current tech boom.
Need funding for your startup?  Seduce this woman.
Bonus points if you use Crowdtilt (YC W12) to raise funds for your trip to Hong Kong.
I sort of long for the early days of programming back when you could just walk in the door and take an IQ test with an employer to see if you were capable of being a programmer

Unfortunately, that's how you end up with a team that is incapable of communicating, because you never evaluated an employee based on their social skills.

I do get what you mean, but I think that tech is actually an amazing field for self-improvement, if you try. I wanted to work at a company using a software stack unfamiliar to me. I downloaded it, got to grips with the basics and said as much in my interview. There are very few other fields in which you can do that.

If you're unhappy with your current job, then it might be time to learn some new technologies and post some examples to Github. I know, it uses up free time you don't want to give up. But you have to sacrifice that stuff every once and a while if you want to move ahead in life.
IOS 6.0 Untethered Jailbreak Release Status
This article is one of many that throws in "Processed food" as a presumed unhealthy food type. For example, "The good news is that laying off soda, doughnuts, processed meats and fries could allow you to keep your mind intact until your body fails you". Soda, doughnuts, and fries I get; they're essentially low-nutrition sugar sources, sometimes with ω−6 heavy vegetable oils thrown in for flavor. But how is processed meat any worse than any other sort of meat?

Later he complains about how Americans "overconsume hyperprocessed foods" without further explanation.

Is there any evidence or even a credible physical hypothesis why fast food processed mystery meats would be meaningfully less healthy than the roughly similar unprocessed cuts from the same animal?
"Burn Your iPhone?"
Like having ONE issue, the Maps, and everything else being better?
Easier said than done. As a general principle, existing features introduce maintenance and create drag when adding new features, so they better be worth it.
You'll be wanting to look at defadvice in Common Lisp and elisp, then, which let you attach code to the entry and exit of a function. Python has decorators, as well, which are similar, but the entire purpose of defadvice is to do exactly what you're talking about.
It goes on top of the bar :). This means the game you are playing is depressed much lower than usual.
Why would multiple authors make a difference?
Most PCs still have an optical drive. Everyone I know has a couple of usb thumb drives. I don't think people are struggling with the concept of a "drive".
Please do, I'd love to learn from somebody else's experience with them
Hey man, that sucks but it's nothing you can't get out of. If you have to go work consulting, or some entry-level thing for a while. Apply everywhere. If you are a decent developer with a CS degree, you should eventually land a job. It may not be the perfect role right away, but there's nothing wrong with climbing the career ladder.
It's only malware if it doesn't tell the user what it's doing. There's no reason for Megabox to do that, so I don't see why would you assume so. Or do you really think these users will care if the ads come from Doubleclick or MegaAds?
Read the article and the tryoll again.
I can't help but think there is a better way to format this article.....
Why Codecademy is overrated and missing its target audience
It has been shown recently that you consume more calories the same amount of processed meat as you do unprocessed meat. The definition of processing is broad, it basically includes anything you do to the meat except eat it raw. It likes having a machine prechew all your food so it's easier for you body to extract energy from it.
I've noticed a lot of YouTube videos have a CC button which enables subtitles. This appears to be some sort of beta feature, and the captions aren't always perfect, but I've found it useful for videos where the sound isn't clear. Why isn't it available on this video? Is it only for listed videos? Does the uploader have to enable it? I thought it was universal since I first noticed it.
I wasn't expecting so much hostility, but I'll answer the question. At the time I believe I was comparing 10.2 - 10.3 and I didn't see any value there. It is doubtful that I would still be on 10.2 after 10 years, but I didn't enjoy my time on mac so I never bought another one.
Thanks! I enjoyed the way you approached the explanation by exploring the problem instead of the solution.
Maybe within the HN ecosystem, but there are 10s of millions of wordpress installs running on the web. I would imagine only a very very small minority of said installs has any idea what a PaaS is. Those types of people are install wordpress on their $5/month hostgator accounts all day long because of stuff like fantastico making it a one click process as well.
To be fair, he says exactly that:

“Oh, there’s definitely a shortage of people as the tech industry expands,” Marcus says. “The economy is expanding here, and they need a lot of engineers. You just need more and more people to code all this stuff.”
You vastly overestimate how much anyone cares about the gap on your resume. Sounds like your depression is what is blocking you.
I don't think that is right, it says that automattic has 2000 servers but they also run things like gravitar, akismet, and vaultpress. Which makes me think that using that number is completely wrong. (Also these are just the load balancers not the back end, which could be taking up a large amount of that 2000 server count)

From the article it seems more like they have ~100, maybe less, for the load balancers which comes out to 175 requests/second per cpu which is getting a little more reasonable.
My first instinct (as a developer) is that if someone is difficult to find, it's quite possible that they're not interested in being found. If they were looking for a job, they'd be visible.

Not so sure about that. A lot of talented engineers are already in a job. They might be receptive to looking at another job for a period of months or years, but never actually looking. So a lot of the skill in recruitment is reaching those engineers with opportunities that will entice them to consider a move. Yes, sometimes this happens via aggressive recruiters, but it can also happen via "softer" approaches like publicity, sposnsorship, advertising etc.
It would appear that the connection between type II diabetes and Alzheimer's disease is pretty tenuous at this point.

The important thing to remember is that insulin has effects on the human body that go far beyond controlling blood glucose levels. The first one that comes to mind is it's roll as a growth factor.

It's an interesting hypotheses, but I think a lot more data has to be collected before anyone could claim an actual connection between the two diseases.
You need to look not at the cost of specific versions, but at the cost of staying current over a period of years. I haven't done the math on that.

With windows I always upgraded because I wanted the new OS. I've never felt compelled to get the newest windows in order to get something to work (In fact I've had the opposite experience -- upgrade windows only if you want something to break!).

>You could run your old Safari just perfect. You just couldn't run the latest versions. Which you kind of caused on yourself.

Yes, by refusing to pay the $80.
The monthly freelancer post and with blog posts. Though I have enough work now to not have the need of blogging. It works, though.
>"We used to think there were two types of diabetes"

We still do.

Honestly what a ridiculous way to introduce the article. Like there's already widespread consensus on there being three types of diabetes.

The cited articles barely prop up the authors assertions.
A bit earlier today I read from here an article about Metformin (a drug lowering insulin) to reduce cancer onset by 20% - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-25/five-cent-diabetes-... and discussion on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4576555

This begs a simple question: can't we use the same analysis to test the hypothesis whether insulin is indeed linked to Alzheimer - simply by taking the same approach and replacing "cancer" by "alzheimer" in the database query?

After all, if we know these same patients have had a lower rate of cancer, maybe we know also about which other diseases they may have had at the same time.

If the data had been openly available, it could have been done, maybe easily if the data is properly coded (using ICD codes, replacing cancer by alzheimer or even broadening the query to other neurodegeneratives diseases is just a "or" away in SQL)

Yet with the current closed-garden-behind-a-paywall approach of science, we can't.

There are many wild hypothesis about nutrition thrown around.

But until I see actual data, I will not call any of them "hypothesis".

EDIT: added HN URL for the discussion about metformin
Ober on the Ancient Greek Economy
I just bought 20 bit coins yesterday, in a wallet at CoinBase.

I saw YC funding for CoinBase as a fairly strong signal, and I feel buy and hold might be a good investment. The more liquid bitcoins become, the more they will be worth, and they aren't even remotely liquid yet.
and... a wireless charger :)
To understand this I feel like I need to see some examples or mockups showing how it would be used.
I was one of the core engineers @ layeredtech who managed the servers and HA for wordpress.com when they launched in 2006.

If I remember correctly we were using DNS round robin and haproxy -> apache -> mysql all on freebsd systems wow have things come a long ways since then also it's incredible the sustained growth of Wordpress after all this time. good memories... congrats Matt on all your success.
I don't get 931. He is saying the same thing twice but drawing a bigger picture.
Android phones can be remotely wiped by hackers, here’s how to check yours
The inventor of hypertext
This is the downside of Bitcoin's operating in a cash like nature. There is no FDIC for these "banks", the bank walls are digital and porous in ways unknown, and the bank can be robbed across international boundaries. What these companies need is insurance, but that insurance would be very hard/impossible to obtain.
I was going to point that out as well. The article is about insulin and throwing "processed meats" in there is simply confusing, since protein and fat are fairly minor players in the insulin game.
It seems "visionary" is turned to jerk when he's pushed down the ladder and stripped of any ability to do anything.

Even the author says "When we hired him, we hired over our heads."

I fail to see how this is a cautionary tale of hiring and firing "brilliant jerks." It reeks much more of incompetent management.
I think Mr. Granger should refrain from using inaccurate remarks about the history of programming. Light Table is neat but it is not the first attempt at an interactive development environment. His ideas were quite common 30+ years ago (20 years ago would have been right about the time when this style of programming started falling out of vogue). Alan Kay does a far better job than I can in explaining some of this history:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc&feature=youtu...

Update I wasn't being terribly fair. Granger might simply not have been aware. In that case I hope he sees my comment and watches the above video. :)
They might as well have called the drug "snake oil". It would have made more sense :-)
Read the end of the article. He definitely thinks this is the future of programming.
SS3 vs jQuery Animations
How can they claim that developer interest is 'stagnant'? The number of apps is steadily increasing. What makes them think that Microsoft is worried? This story has almost no basis in fact.

Another report of this story on another tech news site did point out that developers may be aiming their releases for the date when Win 8 is generally available. So we may see an increase in the rate of releases as that date approaches. This is just speculation, just like the story, but at least it brings some balance to the argument.
Google adds ability to download all of your YouTube videos from Takeout
I just wanted to say, I totally understand where you're coming from here. I often end up writing libraries in C explicitly because that's the easiest way to hit as many targets as possible and not impose any unexpected runtimes on other languages, even if I know it would be easier to write in another language. So, I would say that not enough language designers think this way, and it's really refreshing to see you describing this point of view.

I've often thought that a useful exercise would be to come up with a language that adds just a bit more power than C but stays within the boundaries of the C runtime, just for this purpose.

However, if new languages like Rust can deliver this, all the better! One language that I once looked at with this in mind was Clay[1], which seemed to basically be C with more safety and generics. However, it doesn't seem to be as nicely supported as Rust, and perhaps Rust's static analysis and concurrency support will be more powerful.

[1] http://claylabs.com/clay/
I've primarily worked on the backend and have been some sketches on paper but nothing concrete to share yet. If you have any specific questions I'd be glad to answer them.
A Conversation With Randall Munroe, the Creator of XKCD
Thanks! Yeah, sometimes solutions alone are opaque -- it's often illuminating to explore other approaches, and to understand why they don't work so well, in order to understand why a solution is the way it is.
The author of this article gets so many basic facts wrong that it's difficult to take anything he writes seriously.

Straight from the American Diabetes Association's website:

'Myth: Eating too much sugar causes diabetes.

Fact: No, it does not. Type 1 diabetes is caused by genetics and unknown factors that trigger the onset of the disease; type 2 diabetes is caused by genetics and lifestyle factors. Being overweight does increase your risk for developing type 2 diabetes, and a diet high in calories, whether from sugar or from fat, can contribute to weight gain. If you have a history of diabetes in your family, eating a healthy meal plan and regular exercise are recommended to manage your weight.'
The data attributes work great. They can fool you when you're not looking out for specific sitatuons. Like a typical error page will be show create or update action and not edit or new.

The killer feature for me is being able to organize my coffeescript code into various classes and execute it all on one page. Makes it much easier to get other developers up to speed on the javascript code.

I'm still looking for a way not to load specific javascript files from the asset pipeline and not litter my views with content_for :head. It's better all in one place.
I wish journalists would stop using headlines that would allow the article to be summarized as 'no'.
FWIW, One of the links in the article http://www.doctoroz.com/videos/alzheimers-diabetes-brain indicated a correlation between nitrates and Alzheimer's. This has also been published elsewhere http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090705215239.ht...
Every time an article is created, saved or published, wp uses hundreds of non-cachable queries.

Every time an article is published, it causes the cache to be deleted for not only that article but related pages, which means all those pages have to be rendered again.

For one author, that can be managed. Many authors, the cache is constantly being defeated.
Article author has dumbass written all over him.

Would not bang.
The Human Face of Big Data
Before i incur the wrath of the "pick yourself up by your own bootstraps" crowd, my goal was not to say "poor me", even though that might have been how it came out. I'm not trying to get advice, or someone to offer me a job. All i was trying to say was that there are more people like me out there, loads of people that are still pretty darn intelligent but look horrible on paper.

Personally i'm sick of the whole process and all of the fakeness involved in trying to land a job. If you're unconventional, you better be good at faking looking conventional so you can get a job, otherwise you're out of luck. Not for me.

If a business is having trouble finding qualified candidates for a position, maybe they should spend a little more time considering that it might not be that there's a lack of people that can do a good job in that position, but that their conception of what makes a "qualified candidate" is overly restrictive and broken.
Another language that adopts a different syntax for the sake of adopting a different syntax.
If you are going to ask me to adopt a different syntax, you'd better have a good reason for it, because I can do everything I need to do with the languages I already have.
I couldn't find it either. That's why I just took the Google image. But I remembered it from reading that article on TheVerge.
Upgrading to Ruby 1.9.3: Maximizing Performance | Sport Ngin Pulse