skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
EDIT: updated as tptacek appears to have deleted all his contributions to this thread.

Agreed (with tptacek's deleted comment that people should lay off Weissman). Imagine if we all entered discussions assuming the other party was in an extremely fragile state. No skepticism, speculation, conjecture, kid gloves, boring.

Anyone who's cultivated an online persona has dealt with a variety of debating opponents. I can't imagine Aaron would have been moved either way because one HN commentator questioned the rightness of his fundraising effort. The pitchforking of Weissman by anyone angered by the prosecutorial pitchforking of Swartz is rather absurd.

However what I found more interesting in that thread [0] was additional examples of tptacek's strident establishment stance and how it really irks some HN commentators.

I'd already gathered from his vocal opposition to Wikileaks, and lukewarm opposition to SOPA et al that he's not a CCC-type hacker (a more generous characterization would be that he refuses to drink hacker kool-aid). I think part of that irked me in an irrational way, because really, if you're running a security consultancy in the US then adopting any philosophical position similar to Swartz or Assange would be a complete commercial non-starter.[1]

Perhaps some here expect that any notable hackers should all be Swartzs', sharing a similar social and political outlook, which is a little unrealistic to say the least.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529484

[1] I'm also not implying you hold contrary public and private positions. Your advocacy of a more government / corporate friendly position goes well beyond devil's advocacy.
Aren't Dell and Apple still the only two companies where you can have a computer built to order?

The difference is that Dell never managed to create a web interface to their shop that doesn't suck.
I stopped blogging a while ago. Aaron's death brought to my attention how important his own writing was as a form of expression for him. He moved me to take up blogging again.
It's not, though. There's a perception that showing emotion is a sign of weakness for men. However, think about how you actually react to men who show emotion. How did you react to Lessig's or Doctorow's posts about Aaron, with all their emotion? Did you think them less of a man for it?

I think there is a strong taboo against men appearing out of control of themselves or their situation. But that's not really gendered: when women appear out of control, we label them "crazy bitches".
This is creepy enough to be a Hacker News comment.
People are less finicky than computers, even if their interface is a little less standardized.

Brilliant, made me smile :)
I dont think you know what I thought it meant.
A sampling profiler for App Engine
I had to scroll to the second page before I could tell what programming language/platform this was about.
I'm pretty sure that he believed strongly that he was doing something right and that he must have been very upset at being persecuted in the way that he was for doing what was right.
I had to laugh at "without a warrant or subpoena".

Didn't need one. It's MIT's private network, and this was unauthorized access and intrusion. MIT can legally do whatever they want with the traffic dumps, packet traces, etc.
1 to 3 are useful because you'll be doing them so frequently you can't ignore them.

Getting code to a working public server was a point of revelation for me as a new rails developer. It was hard, but rewarding.

4 can be safely skipped until you're ready for it.
Simple Cyber Security is a service that just makes sense. I've been getting requests for such turn-key solutions for a while and never knew where to send them to. Could you talk more about the offering? Give us more details (anything you might want to add).
If he didn't think he was doing anything wrong, why didn't he just ask permission?
My project is called Whiptail (http://getwhiptail.com) and it's a service that sends you text messages when you're at the bar or a house party to encourage good behavior and discourage doing things you'll regret. We'll be offering a few different sets of messages to choose. From with generic "Would your mother approve of the text you want to send?" to something targeted towards appropriate behavior around an ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend, and we're even working on a set built for students with social anxiety to help keep them calm in party situations.

It was definitely a side-project that I created for my own use, and due to PIC-PC encouraging me, I am working with a few friends into making to something that anyone can use. We just put up a pre-launch page yesterday and a logo is still being designed, but we hope to ramp up our efforts and have a public MVP in the next week.
Show HN: FlightOwl, flight search history
Just realized the title was misleading so I removed the word "render."

I don't think the calligraphy is rendered automatically at the moment. Looks like the author is doing it manually. I'm guessing automatic rendering is planned, but not sure of that.
"The big take away here is that words matter and maybe if you don't have all 'the facts available' you can give someone the benefit of of the doubt. Or the next time you feel like making a 'meh' post, just say nothing at all"

Couldn't have said it better.
There are many charities more deserving than the coffeeshop you go to, those nice kickstarter projects you backed and the companies who make your clothes. One thing doesn't null the other.
Sandy Hook Promise
I don't think that abuse would be an effective way to get someone into the zone. In fact, I think it would be a good way to keep people out of the zone.
I don't understand it that way, but I grew up with a father who fought in two wars and was not afraid to cry in front of others.

Maybe you missed my general sentiment: Fuck sexism though. I think you and I are talking at cross purposes.
This acts simply as a direct translation of what looks like some sort of lisp into Arabic symbols. I once did something similar with #define in C. The calligraphy bit is a side effect of using Arabic letters, which tend to be intrinsically good for calligraphy.
> npm is increasingly being used for browser packages.

What is a browser package?

If you mean something that's intended to be fed through browserify, it should start with browserify- or end with -browserify

If you mean something like bower or component, which one should be standardized? Hell, both use the same component.json file but they do so in completely different ways
Hopefully they'll guard against the region's crazy storms from knocking it offline.
A similar rote recitation exercise I recall from (a british) school was of the form '[Seven] [Seven][s] [is|are] [Forty-Nine]', of which only the 'is' is redundant, and is a single short syllable.
Implementing a Python OAuth 2.0 Provider - Part 2 - Authorization Provider
It was known well in advance of that thread asking for help on HN that Aaron was facing major prison time from the prosecution by the feds, and we also knew a fairly detailed description of his 'crime', i.e. how he didn't really commit one.
> One reason I don't enjoy HN as much as I did several years ago is that the default behavior seems to be to attack civil libertarians, free software enthusiasts, file sharers, builders who place idealism over profit... basically everyone but the sellers.

Don't get me started on smug narcissistic assholes who engage in self love at every opportunity and make every issue on here about themselves and their self promotion. Some individuals on this board sicken me (just look at this thread), it's a living proof that people will be people and that just because you're a young entrepreneurial hipster who likes to think of himself as a hacker doesn't make you better than other people... more likely than not, it makes you an arrogant dipshit.
It depends.

But in this particular case, some trivial extra code inserted inside that if statement may break things. Like breaking vectorization of that 'for' (note, that we are going over vertices).

When you are writing the code, some times you may want to put additional constraints on the allowed operations, modifications, etc. A trivial example in C++ would be using 'const &' instead of '&'.
Depends on the context and situation. Between friends, its a pretty good phrase to tell your buddy (regardless of sex), to be the responsible party and take some positive actions. I would never say it to a stranger or someone I didn't know well, but to a friend that needs to hear it, yes.

The women I have hung out with haven't taken offense when they had the phrase used on them, and one did use it on me (it was something I needed to hear at the time although I was in a bit of a snit for a couple of days because of her saying it).

Thinking about it, there are a lot of phrases and ways to express things that I wouldn't use on a message board or to people I didn't know well. To the people I know well, I'll use any phrase or approach that I think can reach them.

Also, I do not see and equivalence between "man up" and "get over it". The former is asking a friend to take some responsibility and action, the later is asking them to get beyond their feelings while assigning no responsibility.
Well 'lock-in' sounds like they had a plan, gratuitously changing the position of four pins in the power connector for no reason sounds 'stupid' and I don't think Dell is stupid.

Like Google, they played around with form factors, and they also did weird things like made the back panel look like a video card was plugged in when the board really just pulled up a connector from the mother board. Something that was arguably 'started' by people using the PCI chassis barrier strip as a holder for the 'extra' serial port or a parallel port, but Dell carried it further than anyone else that I know of.

Dell has never impressed me as a 'design' company, but making things cost effectively was their motto. And being able to customize just before shipment.
Then why are you using a statically-typed language?
If everybody withheld comment until they knew the full story, nobody would post on Hacker News. Hell, people still don't know the full story of the Aaron Swartz court case, and yet you see an awful lot of folks willing to comment with the few tidbits they do know right now.
Not to mention that it's essential for initializing some constant variables; I have yet to find a better way to do:

const int count = argc > 1 ? atoi(argv[1]) : 1000000;

For quick test programs where I might want to change some number of iterations without having to recompile, but I also don't want to have to provide an argument every time I run it.
Absolutely. This is a perfect example of how restrictive gender norms (or, what some might call "patriarchy") can harm men as well as women, and are something we all need to care about.
This is interesting background I didn't know before.
Tokenadult, I always enjoy your well-informed comments on topics such as this. I think you may have misinterpreted Stigler's 1999 "The Teaching Gap", though, as many of us did. In that book, he reports on a study of math teaching in the US, Japan, and Germany, and finds Japan's results to be far superior to the others and their teaching methods very different, and different in exactly the way you describe.

But he did a followup study involving more countries to see if most or all high-performing countries used the Japanese approach. It turned out that they did not. Some were more like the US than the US.

Here (http://timssvideo.com/sites/default/files/Closing%20the%20Te...) is one place where Stigler reports his updated findings and attempts to debunk your (and my) initial conclusion---a conclusion that seemed strongly justified by his 1999 book---that, as you posted above, "The more important difference between mathematics education in Japan...and the US is...the encouragement to pupils in Japan to try to figure things out for themselves."

He points out that another high-performing country in his second study, Hong Kong, was more US-like and less Japan-like on this spectrum than the US itself. On the dimension you're calling "more important", the low-performing US is between the high-performing Hong Kong and the high-performing Japan.

His conclusion was that the main factor was not having kids figure things out for themselves but having teachers carefully teach kids the relationships among things. It didn't matter if the US kids spent time practicing procedures. The Chinese kids spent MORE time practicing procedures and did better, but then the Chinese teachers spent time directly pointing out important relationships, which the US teachers didn't do much of. The Japanese kids had to spend a lot of time figuring things out for themselves, but then the teachers would gather them together and carefully lead them to see relationships that they hadn't seen when working by themselves. The US teachers would tell kids to figure things out for themselves and basically leave their learning to whatever they managed to figure out.

Given equal IQ, time on task, etc., it's the effectiveness with which mathematical relationships are made clear to the students (part of which requires significant procedural drill, which Japanese kids do after school) that matters most. A lot of time is wasted in the US doing procedural drill with no conceptual understanding, with even more wasted on constructivist "discovery" methods whereby kids are supposed to somehow teach themselves and each other the mathematical relationships, and all of this led by teachers who aren't required by their union to even know anything about mathematical relationships much less teach them.
How the Legal System Failed Aaron Swartz — And Us
I disagree - I think if anything this should be made an example of how we as a society are really quick to judge and attack someone based on minimal facts. In an age where depression is more common than a common cold - this sort of behaviour only perpetuates our psychological issues. Why do we need to be so judgemental to start with?
I've observed similar behavior in companies that are losing ground and trying to find a 'hit' to pin the company on. A series of initiatives that run for a while and then get pulled. This is especially true for a company that is too afraid to invest in building a new market that may or may not develop, so their 'me too' products come out fairly close to the existing market leaders with a small amount of differentiation.
Facebook Preps Radically Visual Redesign Of The Mobile News Feed
"We can rightly judge a society by how it treats its eccentrics and deviant geniuses—and by that measure, we have utterly failed"
What a sorry post. This is the kind of thing I expect to be banned from the front page.
This isn’t Ed’s fault, nor is it yours. But TechCrunch is completely right to call us all out.

Aaron asked for our help and yet it’s difficult to find a single compassionate voice in that whole thread. Both Ed and yourself eloquently shut down anybody arguing on his behalf.

“There is virtually no chance Swartz is going to spend time in prison.”

That was you in the thread by the way. You also devolved the conversation into an argument involving Nazis at one point.

I think it’s definitely worth all of us thinking about how we could have responded differently. There’s no use in us defending our actions.

Did any of us drop him a tweet or email just to ask him how he was doing, or whether he was scared?

I am ashamed.

I hope that in the future I will be able to recognise when another human being needs my help, that I will not be swayed by popular voices, and that I will show honest care.
Well, does karma have any value?
No, you clearly didn't understand my point. I am talking about maximizing the rate of successful features implemented. Programming things in assembly language is obviously not going to do that.

I don't know, man. I have 31 years of programming experience. I am not detecting from your argument that you have anywhere near this level of experience, so I am inclined not to get into this discussion. But I will say that your code example at the end of your comment is exactly what I am talking about. It happens all the time that I want to put something in front of 'return b' (or, in fact, I just want to put a breakpoint on that line in the debugger! Not going to happen in your second example...)
Push anyone far enough and they'll take their own life. The threshold varies from one person to the next, but blaming his suicide on mental illness is IMO disingenuous.

Which causes deserve funding is a matter of personal choice.
"One reason I don't enjoy HN as much as I did several years ago is that the default behavior seems to be to attack civil libertarians, free software enthusiasts, file sharers, builders who place idealism over profit... basically everyone but the sellers."

I've definitely seen a lot of this behavior on HN, but I think it used to be a lot worse than it is now.

HN used to be mostly made up of startup founders and others very close to the startup scene, who are typically strong believers in capitalism, with an instinct to sympathize with business owners and valorize profit making.

As HN has grown, lots of others unrelated to the startup scene (even unrelated to technology) have joined. As a result, the views getting expressed on here have become a lot more varied. There's actually quite a nice balance now, with representatives of all those you mention: civil libertarians, free software enthusiasts, file sharers, and builders who place idealism over profit.

Look at threads about RMS, or even the thread linked to here, where Mr Swartz was attacked.. plenty of people come to their defense and express their idealism. Your own post is an example of this.

Of course, the startup-loving, pro-capitalist types still tend to dominate here, but not nearly to the extent they used to.
I don't think it's showing emotion, I think that it's that we expect men to be self-reliant and should not need or want help from others. Men are responsible for their own outcomes. Women aren't seen as any worse for wanting help, and it's acceptable to attribute their outcomes as caused by their relationships or social environment.
> there is a strong taboo against men appearing out of control of themselves

Exactly. This applied to Aaron asking for help he badly needed for his legal fund. This did not apply to Larry or Cory. They may have been sad or angry, but they were not personally scared, threatened, unable to fund their own legal defenses, etc., so they did not violate the taboo. Their posts were more along the lines of a father mourning a lost son. Emotion is expected there.
"In another time, a man with Swartz’s dark drive would have headed to the frontier. Perhaps he would have ventured out into the wilderness, like T. E. Lawrence or John Muir, or to the top of something death-defying, like Reinhold Messner or Philippe Petit. Swartz possessed a self-destructive drive toward actions that felt right to him, but that were also defiant and, potentially, law-breaking. Like Henry David Thoreau, he chased his own dreams, and he was willing to disobey laws he considered unjust."
Hmm, I see. Do you know if the calligraphy itself could be executed/interpreted? The idea of a visual representation of a program being art but also executable appeals to me.
Why wait for hmexx, right?
I think the problem is not the Law itself. The problem is that in order to protect yourself (even if you're not guilty) you have to spend ENORMOUS amount of money. From this perspective rich people have more access to the basic rights (in this case ability to defend themselves) rather than poor.
Programming boot camps reviews and side-by-side comparsion
Bootcamps.in is a programming boot camps review and side-by-side comparison site. You can view boot camps by location, specialty (Ruby, Javascript, Objective C, Java, .NET, PHP), price and a job placement.
heh - ironic is people asking others not to judge edw based on thin information - when that's precisely what HE himself did.
I dispute this. I just sold my house, and will buy another one soon. I don't know the timeframe however, so there's no way I'd put the cash into the highest return vehicle because it will likely have a high volatility and I might need the cash at an inopportune time. As a result, I've dumped the cash in pretty much the lowest return vehicle, simply because I can take it back again whenever I need.

The timescale of the investment should definitely change the priorities.
> I'm starting to suspect that HN discussions have a pretty strong snowball effect where it begins to seem like everyone agrees with the early comments near the top.

There are several 'patterns' that have emerged over the years, the snowball is definitely one of them, especially if one of the first commenters is one with name recognition on HN

> This also reaffirms my principle of siding with individual humans (Aaron) over institutions (JSTOR, MIT, DOJ).

I've tried to make that point elsewhere but unsuccessfully.
I may or may not have something to say about this, but not here, and not now.

Can we please just let the family grieve?

We are the family.
Another theory on Apple’s stock price
By not coming to HN very often, it's pretty much guaranteed that you won't have high karma.
Flagging as spam. Registered for a new account five days ago and posted a link to a casino. "my friend and I are building..." - maybe so but if it smells like spam, it usually is. Google doesn't even have it in its index which I also find suspicious.
Liability vs. leverage
Aaron Swartz, Suicide, Depression, Enough.
I don't know how to start this.

Maybe a little background info. Early 30s, depressed for many years. Tried committing suicide once, thinking about it all the time.

January 11, 2013 was another normal day for me. Woke up hoping that I'll feel better that day which I did. Started my daily routine in my bed by checking twitter, reddit and this website. Both twitter and HN were full of Aaron's news. Sad.

Someone made a comment saying everyone should be careful because this news might trigger suicidal thoughts on people with depression. Like myself.

I miss those days that I couldn't put myself into shoes of a suicidal person. Many of you are lucky.

Yes, the news triggered a lot of things in my mind about disappearing. Yet, I tried to approach this in a positive way.

Even though it was only 3 days ago, I can not remember what those positive thoughts were. Sorry.

The only positive thing about the event that I can think of is... that... Aaron is in peace now. He found a permanent solution to his problems. And he is not suffering anymore.

My psychiatrist appointment is in 16 days. Sorry, 17. I'm going to start taking medicine again. I thought my depression was getting better and I was able to function like normal person again for awhile. I realized I was wrong so I tried making this appointment last month.

My old therapist gave the information of this psychiatrist. I don't want to search for a psychiatrist. You don't know how hard it is to do it. Finding psychiatrists, looking up online if they have good reviews, calling them on phone, telling your life story... on a phone... to a stranger... again... again... That's why I followed my old therapist's recommendation and got an appointment from this new psychiatrist. I had one bad experience with one psychiatrist and heard many bad stories from others. Nightmare.
Wonder what the build quality will be like...
Well, they appear to have decided it's a carbonaceous chondrite through visual examination alone - you can only really be sure by whacking it through a mass spectrometer and seeing what isotopes you've got.

Either way, I think panspermia is perfectly possible, but the jury's out until this is independently verified.
Someone should update the title: "Zack Snyder Denies Report of New Star Wars Film Based on Seven Samurai"
How can a judge gag the defendant from speaking out? I don't really understand this.
Preparing for Coding Questions in Engineering Interview (after 500 interviews)