skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't agree with the author here because mastering a single language will only give a narrow perspective on programming in general. I'll explain with my personal evolution through languages:

The first programming language I ever got very proficient with was PHP4. After a while I could feel there wasn't much more the language had to teach me, yet I couldn't explain the first thing about how its C implementation worked.

So I started teaching myself C to discover whole new world of programming: pointers, structs, a link process, calling conventions and more, even what happens when you dereference null - heck, the main() function was new to me and I had been programming for 3 years. PHP suddenly felt like a tiny little world living inside an http request within the apache process - the request had been my main() if you will.

Then the same happened with C++, once I got past the headaches trying to understand boost. Until the point after 10+ years I could tell the semantics of even obscure features in any of PHP/C/C++/D/Java/JavaScript and was proficient in a few dozen languages with at least a dozen I actually used to ship products with. Every new language I learned completely redefined the world of others, with the exception of Java, which I decided to quit forever after less than 6 months doing it for a living, what a horrible, horrible language.

What happens when you learn more languages is that the larger perspective gives you a deeper understanding of how they all work, which in turn makes remembering obscure facts easy because you understand why they need to exist in the first place.

"Mastering" something isn't hard, it's just long and requires a bit of dedication every day. Learning about as many things as possible gives perspective which in turn helps to determine where that mastery should be focused.

I quote mastering because it isn't a goal but a process; you don't reach mastery but you constantly pursue it.
Jeff seems to have had a rather different experience with threaded commenting systems than I have.

there's always this looming existential crisis of where the heck am I?

Threaded comments aren't some expansive, complex network I have to navigate like a city. I don't find my way to some place, then find my way back. Most of my time in comment systems is spend reading linearly, where the only thing that matters is what I'm reading now. "Where am I?" only matters if you care to answer it relative to the wider context, which I find unnecessary.

You're talking to everyone

Of course! You're commenting on a public web site! Threaded comments aren't for any semblance of privacy, they're an organizational mechanism. That organization is a key enabler for in-depth discussions- discussing a complex subject in any depth becomes tricky in a flat environment- it's hard to keep up with what topics are even being discussed, and who's quoting whom, for any serious discussion in a flat comment system- much harder than keeping track of stuff in a threaded comment system.

However, threaded comment systems do have their faults, as Jeff points out: keeping abreast of all discussion as it evolves is difficult, and lack of a nesting level cap can make things look awkward (however, I don't see a whole lot of discussions progress to the point that the "far right" problem actually becomes a problem).

Jeff's idea of capping comments at a single reply level is a sensible compromise; it allows a rudimentary sense of organization without introducing most of the problems Jeff criticizes.
Yes - no idea if it would actually take off, but it would be different from what's out there now.
Okay, so then you are probably under the misapprehension that this is the main driver for improvements.

For giggles, if only 10% of people with iphones report one error a week, calculate how many full time people it would require to process them.

In reality, their biggest problem is probably operator (IE people reading reports) time, not lack of error reports. I would take a massive data entry operation to handle them all.

If they are smart, they will have realized by now that relying on user reports to correct things is basically impossible, unless it's an automated system, which has it's own issues.

In short: If you think crowdsourcing is the way they will solve their data/data quality issues, you are probably wrong.
It's only been a few hours. Do whatever it is you do to relax / clear your mind. Go for a run, listen to some music, etc.

Long term success has a great deal to do with how you respond to challenges or failures along the way. Also, it's important to try for some perspective. It's easy and tempting to view college admissions as a referendum on your worth as an individual.

After all, for many folks it's a first chance to actively choose / be chosen by a group, and the "start" of your independent adult life. But as much enrichment and opportunity as any good school will provide, it's not going to define who you are and what you do with your life.

That's up to you.
Moving away from flash sales could be considered a pivot. They may have discovered others (i.e. Gilt) where buying up all the good seconds, or that their buyers where buying the wrong thing and their flash sales where not selling out.
We just call it introducing new product lines and/or expanding business.
Was that just a way to bring up that earthquake, or do you actually live in fear of natural disasters day to day?
I would combine your Adword budget with an investment in a suite of analytic tools to answer assumptions you've made about your customers and discover how you can you can improve your application.

My recommendations:

KISSmetrics, Google Analytics & Crazy Egg
> an obvious mechanism to indicate (and link too, ideally) the comment you're replying too.

Like say quoting the relevant bits you're referring to? :)
> It is extreme to suggest that citizens either acquire a high-level of education (which many simply cannot complete)

why is that a wrong ideal to move towards to? I agree that current education is poor, but thats an implementation problem. The idea that every citizen should be highly educated is a good one, and that in the future, in order to provide value (which is rewarded in the form of money), you can't just labour.
Contactless payment | Transport for London
I do not believe that was your point at all. Your post suggested quite the opposite. To me it read as though you think people are ignoring the impact easy divorce has on children because of ideological reasons.

The same could be said of people who think marriage means a happy and stable home life.
You are right, free was an euphemism. However, you could use a cheap webhoster, those can be had for as low as $0.50/mo and usually come with FTP.

I'm definitely sticking with skitch as long as it works and until a suitable replacement appears.
The summers were amazing. For those 2, maybe 3 months if we were lucky, I enjoyed the hell out of life. But as soon as the rain started, I had trouble staying motivated. I wasn't depressed either, cause I was happy and had a great time there, but there is only so much you can do while it's raining and cold.
What happens to my data on the website when I revoke my permissions from google/Facebook ?
Although I can't use it myself (I am European), Stripe.com, an API to accept payments.
Having participated in in-depth discussion on both threaded and flat systems, I can't stress enough how much more comfortable I find threaded fora. It allows multiple digressions without them getting in the way of each other, which can be problematic in some narrow contexts where you need to keep everyone on the same page, but is such a tremendous win when you're exploring ideas where you need to collectively pin down all sorts of pieces of the problem.
FLOPPYTABLE 3.5"
Gave me a large smile
Exactly, the summer only lasts for July and August. November to February it rains non-stop, and every other month is hit or miss. You can't really plan any trips because those clouds come out of nowhere. And that was the worst part. I would wake up and the sun is shining. I decide to go ride some trails on my bike, half way to the location it starts to rain. Plans ruined.
It's good in that it's efficient (consumption = income-savings so it is good that it does not tax savings), but it's bad in that it's regressive. The easiest way to make it progressive is by offering a rebate check to residents for poverty-level spending (or 2x poverty perhaps). This makes it highly progressive: low income earners actually get money from it on net. The problem is that a rebate check provides a perverse incentive for people to claim residency in the state.

Another way of saying this is that it's regressive because it's flat, but it's a better tax overall if you could unflatten it.
This could be great. I have endlessly thought of how obsolete the current UI is on the system trees are. Really wish the best for you guys, of course signed up!
Requiem For A Temporary Autonomous Zone
> Rigid hierarchy is generally not how the human mind works...

Jeff's sneaking a lot into the qualifier "rigid" here. The human mind loves hierarchies of many sorts, but most when the hierarchy is based on the context. For example: house cats could be mammals (near tigers) or pets (near fish).

A concept or object that is relevant to different contexts needs to show up in differently-organized hierarchies, or failing that, probably ought to be organized non-hierarchically (e.g. flat or "tagged"), so as to reduce cognitive dissonance.

Over-simplifying considerably, comments on Reddit/HN tend to be interesting mainly in just one context, so a hierarchy is probably helpful.
Curation And Incubation: The Evolution Of ‘Saving’ The Agency
I have been on Twitter since the beginning but I have no idea why people use it. The length restriction is totally lame, UX is rough, and it seems infested with wannabe's (followers), selfish people that live to share their lives with hashtags and pics of innane shit, Ashton, self-proclaimed "social media experts"), and hookers. Facebook has old people, and I'm one of 'em.
It really depends on the style of conversation. It's not unusual on some forums to use the quote block (linking to the the comment being replied to) but leave it completely empty to respond to the whole comment. people can click the link to see the context, but don't have to re-read the whole thing again if they're following the conversation already.

On the other hand, quoting individual lines to comment on a specific section happens plenty too.
The site is obviously image/ad heavy, less so text heavy.
The house is free for startups. We're putting the last room of the house on airbnb in an attempt to help pay the bills to let the everyone else stay there. We would need to rent out that room about 16 nights a month to break even. It's not realistic to expect anything as close as that, but every little bit helps.

If there's no demand on airbnb for the last room, we'll simply let another startup take it.
Webcam on all the time concerning to you too? Privacy info: https://flutterapp.com/privacy/
Number of Bits in a Decimal Integer
The situation is more complex that that, because the mowing company uses a great big machine, and they constantly try to improve it. Say it now only takes $40 to mow instead of $80 due to efficiency increases and whatnots.

Do you now fire joe and hire the mowing company? or do you instead choose to pay hin $4 an hour?
Ovbiously joe can't increase his speed of mowing beyond a certain limit - he is human after all.

The real underlying question is - if the value that joe provides can be instead provided via a cheaper source, then the business _should_ use that cheaper source, joe's life shouldnt and won't come into consideration. This method of thinking seems incompatible with the concepts of compassion and empathy, but it seems this is the way the real world works...
Iirc they're supposed to delete it, but whether they do depends on them.
Am I the only one who thinks twitter is terrible for conversations? "@somebody @somebody shortened url ..." That does not stand alone. And every flat comment system now includes people using @previous-poster to compensate for a lack of threading, but without the proper context.
We get our interviewees to sit in front of an IDE of their choice and write some simple code. And I mean simple! No fancy algorithms or tricks.

I ask them to write a method that takes a list of Strings and returns a single String which is all those Strings concatenated together with spaces in-between. And oh my word, how people fail. It's truly frightening.
If the quote doesn't automatically give you a back-link, it can still be a pain to get more context. If it does, then that's probably passable but it still might be a few hops to get back to the start of a discussion and you don't get it all on one page (in a traditional flat system) if there is much activity at all. Twitter may be able to do better with a loose grouping in of related tweets (which should include all tweets being replied to) while still preserving some semblance of a flat system, but I don't know if they do - I don't use twitter extensively. I do know that I've found it sometimes difficult to figure out what is in response to what in the little I have used it, though, so I am skeptical.
Very exciting, it's hard to keep up with all the moving parts nowadays, I like it. Reminds me of rails composer a little.

as for feedback:

* would love it if you'll add TypeScript support somehow. I come from the Java / Scala world and it will be an easier transition to node dev this way

* best download to launch-in-browser sequence Iv'e seen yet. (roots create foo, cd foo, roots watch) browser actually opens for you, nice touch.

* you seem to put a lot of effort on usability and convenience, please continue.

* good documentation and usage print-outs

* the js client side package manager is a great addition, any dependency management there?
This neatly summarizes how I feel. Or how I think I feel. Or how I want to feel?

There's no getting over the fact that Seattle isn't Silicon Valley. But, it's become so clear that Seattle isn't as static as it used to be. So even though it's insular now (and always has been), I just have a gut feeling that Seattle will open up and blossom more. Can you imagine a Seattle with SV's good parts, and none of the bad parts? Or is that just inherently impossible because it is Seattle?

In between the legal weed, fast internet, social entrepreneurship community, and it now being the 'it' place to live and play, it's almost a tossup for me. If there were money in Seattle and the funding climate there not being so stingy, maybe I would've stayed.
An interesting take. Collections seems to be a sort of compromise in the native vs cloud debate.
I too, have no idea how I ended up on their mailing list. I certainly never gave them the address they emailed me at.
Interesting idea. Looks promising. Good luck!
> I have almost 500 HN "rep" and I still can't find any way to downvote. Is this documented anywhere? At Stack Exchange downvotes require 125 rep to cast, and cost you 1 point of rep for each answer downvote. (Question downvotes are free, but still require 125 rep to cast..) This is all listed in the FAQ.

The min. requirement to downvote, I'm told, moves upward ever so slightly. I think I managed it just past 500, but that was several months ago (I lurk and/or comment on obscure communications articles). You're sitting at 496 as I write this so you're still a little while off.
Elite and Star Trek - sounds we had similar childhoods! I never did have a dog though...

I'm publicly rather derisive (in a joking way) about adults playing computer games but I know in my heart of hearts that if Eve (or indeed the new similar ones that are currently under development) is all it's cracked up to be it would be a really REALLY bad idea for me to ever try them.

As a rule, I steer clear of heroin, crack and Elite-type MMORPGs... ;)
Show HN: Weekend Project, Social Network Without Users 
A proof of concept i've developed several months ago . The idea was to build a social network without users and learn Django.

Warm Regards from Argentina.
Martin.
It's actually $1423/NIGHT, or $9963/Week, or $43162/month...

If that's not a typo on their part, then it sounds freakin' expensive to me.
I'm always open to Finder replacements. I use TotalFinder to add tabs, but there's definitely room for improvement.
US, Canada, Australia and UK refuse to sign UN's communications treaty
Dan Harmon: Why You Shouldn't Take the Internet Seriously
I thought the Facebook comment was pretty telling. I'm not even sure what FB's target demographics are, but the sense I got from the OP was Facebook is just a scene which was cool for a while but is now passe and they're moving on to other social networks.

It would seem FB for the younger folks has simply run its course as trend.
It's also true
What if I told you that people use these services in different ways?

My usage patterns are quite different from yours. Facebook is my primary service. I don't post on Twitter at all, and I rarely even check it, but sometimes I'll retweet something. I have friends that use twitter a ton, but they're actually the few power users. The majority of my friends either don't have a twitter or never post at all.

I also use Instagram very sparingly. I have an account but that was just to see what the hype was all about. I've posted a couple of pictures but a majority of my pictures and albums go on Facebook, where I can tag my friends, and have the vast amount of my friends see it in their feeds. A lot of my friend do have Instagram account but either they use it a lot or they don't use it at all, so again, it varies between those extremes. Those that post their pictures to Instagram, also post their pictures to Facebook, and since Facebook owns Instagram, I feel like it's a win-win for them (driving traffic in both places). They also recently blocked out twitter, so there's that too.

I actually think people are using Facebook more than ever from what I've seen. It's trying to do everything, but at the same time, it's doing everything well. It's powerful, and all your friends are on it.

The iOS app used to suck but it's actually one of the best apps I've seen now. It's super duper fast and they are continually adding functionality to it. Combining the FB and Messenger apps was such an awesome change and I haven't heard people complain about the iOS app ever since the redesign. I still hear complaints about the Android one though, and they definitely are working on that.

So yeah, I think different types of people use these platforms in different ways, but at the core they're all using Facebook, and also Facebook Connect, so I don't think FB is having an identity crisis at all.

EDIT: Another point I'd like to make is that above I pointed out how a lot of users use services like Instagram or Twitter in an "All or Nothing" manner. However I think we can agree that people on Facebook use it on a much wider scale. However,the important thing is, you don't have clustering at the extremes. More importantly, you don't have the clustering at the "Nothing" end. There are some people who don't have Facebook, but those that do, tend to use it in SOME manner in varying degrees which works out to FB's advantage.
It really bothers me when I click a download button only to be greeted by "Hey, you can't actually download our app, but why not sign up for our newsletter?"
I tried g00gle but didn't think of goog1e. good thought!
I wish you good luck! Will be using it ;)
This is important in order to track all of my personal assets that reside (somewhere) on the web.

Looking forward to a good product - don't dissapoint! ;)
Sorry to single you out and jump down your throat a bit!

Wholeheartedly agree in fighting the good fight and preventing HN from drowning in noise like everything else :)
Our app works locally on your pc/mac so no webcam images ever leave your computer.
jsperf doesn't seem to work in IE10:

'Backbone' is undefined.
I'm not sure, maybe it's a more fundamental thing.

It was 8 years ago when I was in high school, and back then everybody used AIM (AIM profiles anyone?). And before that, kids in the 80's used BBS's. I guess kids today use 'gtalk'.

It seems teenagers at a certain age just really want to be able to talk exclusively amongst friends, away from parents and prying public eyes.
This post blew up quite fast. 31 votes and 6 comments in ~30 minutes?
Are you interested in building this?
I've mentioned this on here before, but the live-updating approach taken by SBNation sites (I'd guess The Verge, too, but I don't have an account there to know for sure) solves a lot of the issues, including the big ones of "where's the new content?" and "I just want to scroll down" (cause now you're using keyboard shortcuts to navigate to the new stuff).

Since I haven't seen the live-updating-with-keyboard-control threaded model on other sites, and haven't seen anyone else on HN comment on their model, I'm curious if there just isn't much overlap between HN and SBNation—though since the launch of The Verge, I would've expected more HNers to have seen it.

The complaints about stuff getting pinned to the far right are specious; a flat discussion thread is equally prone to getting hijacked over by two people having a fight. And when it happens on a flat discussion thread, it's not sequestered off to the side by itself, it's constantly being reinserted into the main flow where other people are talking too.
I was literally thinking about how much I needed this five minutes ago, but I want it for Flickr! Any chance you'll be adding support for other services in the future, or adding a plugin model so I could do it for myself?
I grew up just north of Seattle, in Victoria, BC.

Concern over the possibility of that earthquake happening in my lifetime is one of the reasons why I do not want to return there, or want my children to put down roots there.
McAfee in Miami, buying shirts and talking to reporters
Neat idea. I love the video. How would you recommend creating a video like this? Just get someone good with after effects?
How we should feel & react, perhaps. Will we, I doubt it.

Video does make me realize... we give up a lot of privacy to big business that we wouldn't give to a 'harmless' dude on the street.
If I could add anything to HN, it would be branch collapsing.

And of course I can do that indirectly, via a bookmarklet of Greasemonkey.

Branch collapsing makes most of the navigation you describe easier.
I think the better solution is to just hide the "discussion" part from the content by default. If you are in a comment section, you are looking for one of two things - information on the topic (usually restricted to the top 2 levels of a comment thread) or discussion (the deep trees Jeff complains about).

Making that discussion flat doesn't make people want to read it, get involved in it, or understand the exchange. Comments / forum threads are trying to serve two distinct purposes.

My solution would be to have the comment tree hidden by default.(tangentially, I wonder if a system where comments move to the right relative to their time posted, not just in order, since that is why we are moving comments rightward anyway - that way a comment thread would map the post times out rightward. Since replies could only come to already posted content, the flow still moves right, but the active discussions still show themselves off) If people want to see the discussion on top level comments, it should be a very obvious and very apparent mechanism to reveal a discussion tree, but otherwise, let people browse the top level first (with a ranking system, not just by time) and find discussions they are interested in. That is my biggest problem with all the reddit-esque sites where discussions take up tons of my vertical space by default even if I don't actively seek to engage in them.