skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've joined Meetup just recently as I moved to a new area and wanted to peruse the local tech scene. As soon as I joined, I was spammed by an invite to join pitchbox.com,- meetup.com was the only service that knew about my new consultant firm address. First sentence cordially read: "Hey friend, welcome to pitchbox... "

So while I like their service, color me not impressed and please stop spamming us guys.
I agree with mikeash here. If a hellbanned person still wants to remain part of the HN community, it's really not that hard to create a new account. Sure, sometimes they get it wrong, but the vast majority of the case, they get it right.

That means, that by you turning on dead posts, you are subjecting yourself to the 80% case where they get it right. If one of them is spamming with huge blocks of text, etc... well, you signed up for it in the low-probability case that one of the dead posts actually contained valuable information.

Keep it simple. Don't start adding multiple layers of hellbanning protection just to fix a low-probability edge case.
I've always thought Facebook has been awesome. In my experience of the web, they were one of the first websites I used daily that pushed that much ajax.. and I loved it.
Agreed, and also: total banning is on balance less effective than hellbanning, because it's obvious to a troll when they've been banned... and they immediately get a new username to start afresh (via a new IP if needed -- you don't have to be highly technical to know restarting your DSL router will often let you back into sites that banned your IP...).

The whole point of hellbanning is that it's not immediately obvious to trolls that they have been banned at all; so they keep on trolling (in the hellbanned account) without troubling other readers.

Obviously some trolls are clever enough to grok hellbanning, but it still weeds out quite a few. Total banning is simply whack-a-mole.
Self-examination is the Secret Ingredient for Success
Now SparrowOS.

Some of his comments are actually pertinent. Notably regarding OS design.
False positives are understandable and expected. I think the larger issue is how to handle them. Meetup's method is to completely delete the event, registrants and all info related.

I think it'd make more sense to flag it with a delay for permanent deletion.
I use Dropbox, Quora and Scribd
Well, when I quit flying I wanted to build software and avionics for the aerospace industry, it didn't work out, you need to be ready for extremely long stretches of time without any income to cold start something like that.

I even started building some toys, I built an artificial horizon and was thinking about building a GPS navigation for private pilots (garmins are too expensive). I even pushed to github some of that code. (https://github.com/eduardordm/inav)

In that time I found the path to actually have some chances of succeeding without expending millions of dollars: start as a sub-contractor.

You see, flight in general is a huge industry. We all praise Elon and SpaceX but we tend to forget that there are hundreds of smaller companies that made his venture possible. From QNX to a small paint factory in Florida.

So, concentrate in getting involved by doing work for those smaller companies, with time, you will have the expertise to open your own.
That post is from a couple of hours ago, so maybe give them a little time. Reading down through the wall they seem to be responding to most requests posted there.
Indeed. This was the first time I really compared the two and using this method got me 17/20
Missed American Airlines. But I think it actually looks more balanced with Arial, the original feels a bit squeezed.
The possibility of rescuing hellbanned users is interesting.

But "banned permanently" is possible only for usernames, not actual users, and certainly isn't a punishment more severe than hellbanning. A "permanently-banned" user will presumably be notified they've been banned immediately... so instead of wasting time making posts that are hidden, they'll switch IP addresses and grab a new username immediately. And presumably they'll get some posts seen by normal readers before the new username is banned as well, unfortunately.
I think Lanyrd can do CfP and selecting these days?
I played a different game called 'which one appeals to me more on first glance'. I ended up with a perfect 10/10 split.

Could it be that different fonts will be more aesthetically pleasing for different uses? Even if they're typographically similar??
I can show what it takes to be "hellbanned" so you can decide if you might miss out on good posts by turning off show dead.

I created an account for work to post open jobs on monthly "Who's Hiring" post. I literally made 2 comments that weren't job posts (I'm assuming job posts don't get you banned) - so those must be the ones that got me banned?

you can see them here, halfway down:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ginkgoo

I'm pretty sure there were 3 or 4 months of job postings that were hell banned before I figured it out. Moderating sites is hard (I've been there), but this is a bit extreme IMO.
I believe that is what he's trying to say. You don't use Arial because it terminates at right angles, you use it because it feels different.
I agree. I see thoughtful posts from hellbanned users and wish there was a way to help them restore full posting status.

When looking through their post history, it looks like one post that the community didn't like was enough to get them hellbanned and there's no recourse once it happens.
is that site owned by zed shaw?
Self-help books plus support 'treat depression'
> It's slightly annoying that Oracle/Sun bundles the Ask Jeeves toolbar with Java, for instance, but it's not any more annoying than having to pay $6 to cross the bridge.

Yes there is a difference. I teach people to work with computers, some are really clever and do amazing things, and some of them have trouble with relatively basic things such as navigating an "Open file ..." dialog window.

None of these people would have any problems grasping the idea of having the options 1) pay $6 and cross the bridge, or 2) don't pay $6 and find another route.

But neither the 7-year old kid, nor the grandmother will be able to figure out how to uninstall this Ask toolbar.

And maybe one Ask toolbar doesn't mess up your computer, but it is one more thing they did not ask for, and those things do add up to a slow and unusable computer.

That sucks. And here's the reason why it in fact is inherently evil: But even then, they did not ask for it, were never in the position to make an informed choice, and do not know how to revert the choice they did not wilfully make. It is preying on the weak.

I have seen cases like am 8 year old kid, who had just obtained his first PC (looked like it used to be a thin client, must've been real cheap, but not in terms of weeks pocket money!), it was infested with crapware, I swear I turned my back for a few moments and saw another toolbar had appeared. Unfortunately, as you probably know, fixing a computer like that takes a whole afternoon, but that's not the job I'm there for (I can make that kind of time to help out my parents occasionally but that's about it). This kid came from a low-income family, his two parents not exactly the brightest when it comes to computers either, so, what now? Breaks my heart, really. Paying someone to clean a computer is expensive, and they don't always do a good job either (or leave some remote desktop tool in place, etc etc).

How is this not evil?

If you want to make a non-computer analogy, how about being tricked into accepting some ridiculously overpriced service in a foreign country where you don't speak the language? Classic tourist con. Those who do speak the language say "No thanks", and walk away wondering what suckers fall for such an obvious trick.
Great, thanks for the reply. I'm also working on something to compete with Easybib. But at the moment it definitely falls into the 'non-comprehensive' category that you mention.
>Communism, no matter its form, only leads to slavery and poverty.

This statement is at best unprovable and at worst meaningless. Communism is a theoretical form of economic/social organization (like capitalism) and has never been purely implemented (like capitalism). The aim of communism is to create a completely classless society in which private ownership is not a thing, i.e. the concept of slavery wouldn't make sense, impossible by definition. Unless you have a society without stratification, you do not have a communist society.

You should revise your statement to something like "some societies partially implemented elements of a communist philosophy and ended up impoverished, with some members of said society ending up enslaved".
I don't even think this is a false positive. They claim the conference is 'not for profit' which sounds all nice and fluffy, but it is sponsored by three orgs [1]. Even if they don't turn a profit on the first year they're still building the brand of the conference.

The takeaway here is don't try to use Meetup to promote your conference.

[1] http://summit2013.reversim.com/
I picked the one the "looked" better and got 5 out of 20 right. Guess I just prefer Arial.
Also:

>By winning a prize in this event you agree to transfer ownership of your submission to TopCoder.

So do TopCoder resell the submission to NASA?
The forbidden railway: Vienna - Pyongyang (2008)
That's far too reasonable and moderate an attitude to enrage, goad or inspire a new Movement.

I hope more people adopt it.
I stopped taking this article seriously at "If you want to do serious commercial development, you’ll have to spend a considerable amount of money on a really good suite of tools to do so".

The author must be still stuck in the 90s. With mobile app development rapidly reaching its peak, software is a gold mine, and it costs very little to be able to earn some extra cash off of app development.

Also, I didn't like how the author recommended Visual Studio. Visual Studio is a closed-source, slow, resource-heavy piece of software that ONLY works on Windows. Windows is not a very good development platform, and I'm surprised that the article didn't mention any software for BSD or GNU/Linux (Geany?), or any mention about standalone compilers like gcc. He just jumps straight into the IDE portion without properly explaining how to use a compiler.

This is a decent article for anyone wishing to dip their toes into the world of programming, but for beginners, I'd recommend a good Sams Teach Yourself book instead.
The Faraway: A longer short story, perhaps more focussed on theoretical physics than math (but physics is sexy too).

http://www.amazon.com/The-Faraway-Chance-Rain-ebook/dp/B00AF...
> There is no export or even access to the data of 'your' members.

Er...doesn't this pose a privacy issue that Meetup has to be concerned about? When someone signs up for a Meetup group, do the TOS include the possibility that your information and associations could be exported somewhere else?

Because I would be annoyed that if I had signed up for a Meetup group, where, IIRC, my email address is not explicitly known...and the group's admin decides to export all the data and import it into a Facebook Group (if that were even possible). What actual group data do you want from Meetup?
I am the product - and that is fine
I only missed one, which was do to negligence and not ignorance. Moreover, I'm not even cursorily trained in design or typography.

This doesn't seem that hard. Any perceptive person can determine the differences immediately through deduction and use them to differentiate throughout the test.
And the generation before could complain similarly that we don't do anything in assembly today. There's a reason the author wasn't using assembly, same as there's a reason people use frameworks like Joda.
Fucken retards.

Pride before a fall; humility before honors.

I get melodies from God and get puppeted. All of reality is due to God and angels. "Luck" is what some call it. God says,

"sensitive repeat_after_me bond don't track underline neither lo humongous rights uninjuriousness sufficeth jeer self-willed seduction would-be wheresoever white_trash compliance praised withered openly betters dispraisest fretted All-wise capacities outrages wishing approach forgivest impression flower thirsts folks' Tonga fulness ships unsuitably felicity owns flour Gospel huh forementioned nest perils crowned blush calculate gift heal purchase baptise swoon loveliness liability delights mariners muttering dearest impressing wrath judgest goodness stealing cakes wither Afric stolen Either realisest quoth unarranged whatever diverse beggary I'm_feeling_nice_today shonest cauldron necessaries Well observing stank absurdly shonest fellow-pilgrims MERCHANTABILITY South I_was_just_thinking Seek polluted mortals Since knowledge heaven door-keeper lowlily wronged piled Rebuke abiding God_is_not_mocked speaks Italian prefect directeth chaste scoffing denied converse deceit obviously alterations fragment forgave pilgrim venturing run_away exigency dormant felt nevada claim lip-labour furnished insultingly bands calamities propoundest reconcilement comment spending wickedly mother-in-law previous helper "
Edward Tufte’s defense of Aaron Swartz and the “marvelously different”
Hellbanned users can create a new account.

Sometimes hellbanned users can write a short email to PG, with a link to the post the triggered the hell ban, and ask for an unban. (If it appears to be a mistaken ban.)
I think it all hinges on what's meant by "with three nines".

Are you allowed non-digit symbols? In that case, there's obviously no upper bound. Just e.g. keep adding !s after a 9 and the number gets bigger and bigger.

Are you only allowed the 9s, with the only possibly difference in meaning being the positioning? Then 9^9^9 (where the ^ is represented purely by positioning on paper) looks to be the best you can do. I don't believe things like up-arrow notation can be represented with just positioning.
I think hellbanning is a useful solution for his posts; for now he is not posting content that adds to the discussions, but he is compelled to post what he does, so it's fine with me for him to post as hellbanned -- enough people keep showdead on that it will be noticed if one day he manages to surface enough that his posts would be positive additions to the conversation again... and his account can be restored to normal status.

Agreed there's no good reason to try to block him from the site.
I knew nothing about typography, guessed the first one with a lowercase r right, used that to get the rest of the lowercase ones. I only failed the uppercase ones. 16/20
Is the form definition-to-JavaScript code open source, by any chance?

I ported django.forms to JavaScript so I could use it with Node.js, but it also runs on the client: https://github.com/insin/newforms

Could be useful to plug the two together.
Do you have an explanation for all these examples then (they seem to contradict your statement)? Or have you just worked with really bad customer service teams?
Not just short stories - Carl Sagan's Contact is there. The book had a terrific payoff idea that the movie didn't acknowledge at all, so if you've only seen the movie then you've missed the important stuff. (Avoid the synopsis at kasmana.people.cofc.edu if you have a low tolerance for spoilers.)
From a Django background which also provides form errors very easily, it seems at first glance that this would not be needed (and it technically isn't). However, it's often nice to the user to let them know of silly mistakes like passwords not matching or invalid emails before they hit submit and get bombarded with everything at once.

Javascript validation provides convenience, not security.
Fair enough. In my personal experience, C is the big coding skill looked for, but I mostly work for defence companies and major manufacturers. If you don't look at job listings for that sort of company, or your country simply doesn't have those industries in significant size, you'll see something else. I regularly see skilled embedded coders being poached with ridiculous pay rises because they're so useful and so hard to get (40 or 50 percent increase in salary upon being poached/headhunted isn't uncommon for someone a few years out of university who spent those few years learning how to code for embedded systems, but that's usually being poached between defence companies and major appliance makers - Lockheed, Thales, Honeywell, that kind of thing).
The thing that gave away the Mattel logo was the E. Apparently, the middle bar of the capital E in Arial is not equidistant from the outer bars, whereas the E in Helvetica has equally-spaced bars. (Or legs, or whatever the hell they are.)

This was just something I noticed for the first time while going through.
They probably get a constant amount of spammers making fake meetups to collect information from people who sign up. That's why they delete them so easily. Much like how Google kicks people out of AdWords so easily because people are always signing up and getting robots to click ads, bans them on Google Groups so easily, etc.. I can get banned on Google Groups just by opening a bunch of tabs to read later. Makes me look too much like a bot.
flat ui is a design trend and like all trends it'll go away.
There actually is an API to access meetup data. I've used it before to get the names of attendees to provide to building security before. Maybe it didn't exist last time you used meetup, though.
I'd rather most 'CRUD' developers spent their time getting better at UX and solving user problems than they spent it learning algorithms.

I'm never going to write a compiler and don't especially want to. However I hope my attention to detail for user-facing features and my ability to solve real-world problems keeps improving and I think we need more of that type of programmer than we do the computer-sciencey type.
I guess you meant it the other way around:
"Its the one leading the design with minimal layouts." E.g. Metro UI.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph thats what Apple is famous for, e.g. with their calendar app.
"Flat UI" seems like an immense reluctance to give Microsoft credit for their work on Metro.

I am reminded of this definition of Microsoft's Metro aesthetic by Andrew Kim: http://static.squarespace.com/static/50271a61c4aab6c54f9af5e....

~ http://www.minimallyminimal.com/blog/2012/7/3/the-next-micro...
Very inspirational.

It's a terrible feeling when you unpack a crappy little booth with those rented chairs and see all the really awesome booths of "real companies".

It's a feat of strength, no doubt.

Best of luck to you guys.
This blog post doesn't do Creativity much justice, especially this nice little summary quote at the end:

The best models come from biology, physics, mathematics, microeconomics and psychology. Just think about what every freshman knows, and thats what you need to know.

Creativity is a function on a lot of different things at once, and is different for a lot of people. For one, it's a function on curiosity. Highly curious people tend to have the inherent drive to learn new things, new domains. This is in marked contrast to those that learn by being forced to through school or extrinsic pressures. The intrinsic learners are looking for understanding and knowledge, while the extrinsically motivated folks are striving for grades, money, societal acceptance or something else entirely. This is a very important distinction.

Next, creativity is a function on playfulness. John Cleese gets it absolutely right in this 30 minute talk [1]. You've got to dance around the problem, don't worry about wrong or impossible solutions, since the best solutions are usually arrived after jumping through intermediate impossibles - things and ideas that aren't realizable but make disparate connections in your brain and thinking patterns that lead to ideas that are novel and that can be realized. This is also very important. A childlike playfulness with concepts, ideas, words and humor are necessary for driving creativity.

This playfulness directly correlates to a lateral thinking style. "Lateral thinking is solving problems through an indirect and creative approach, using reasoning that is not immediately obvious and involving ideas that may not be obtainable by using only traditional step-by-step logic [2]." You've got to break the habits of being a rigid logician; it comes back to connecting disparate thoughts, ideas and knowledge domains in your head. This is imperative too.

The last point I want to make is that creativity is a process. Cleese talks about it in the video mentioned above as well, but this is very important. You can't worry about the details of implementation or the stress of time if you want creativity to flourish. Your mind needs to be unbounded and free to roam, free to explore the cosmos without being brought back down to Earth, if you will. Cleese calls this "open mode." When you have your great idea, you should switch to "closed mode" - a mode where you actually implement or create your idea, because it's fully in your head. It may take a conscious effort for a while to train yourself to get into open mode and stay there, but that's great mental training.

It's also wonderful to remember that creativity applies to everything, from acting to aerospace engineers saving the crew of Apollo 13, so the domain knowledge the author listed in the quote is good, but for sure not the extent necessary for unbridled creativity. It's also not the only factor.

-----

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VShmtsLhkQg

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateral_thinking
Finally a place for sheldon cooper .. :)
But only if they are aware of it. That's kinda the point here. It's not a regular ban, so you don't know.
On two wheels, it's all open road
A much more interesting question than "Arial or Helvetica" would be: "Which one looks better?" Then you could ask how well the answer correlated with Helvetica vs Arial.

This question is good for seeing whether people know what they're looking at, but the point of using one font over the other isn't to show you prefer the 'correct' font, but to be invisibly better than other choices in one way or another.
Performance Marketing Brands (Ebates/FatWallet) Acquires Grocery App Pushpins
Another point to consider: I think regular users prefer a bit of textures, gradients and real-life counterparts. It gives the UI a more friendly appearance.

Never forget we're just monkeys.
This program is exactly what we usually recommend for people who aren't using SML/NJ inside of an Emacs inferior window (which is far and away the most common usage mode for experienced SML/NJ programmers - all ten of us <grin>).

I personally apologize for my laziness. Two or three different times I've started in on making something similar to the haskeline package in GHC to provide readline-style support to make life easier for students, but have never quite finished it up. Unfortunately, "just linking" readline/libedit isn't a very friendly solution given the way that the interpreter is currently architected, as it's written on top of the ML basis library primitives for reading/writing individual characters from the input stream.
Not saying that Meetup is great, and Eventbrite might be vastly better. But a simple 2-strike rule is worthless. You need to look at the actual error rate (in this case, essentially a spam false positive) to determine if Meetup is truly a poor service. Otherwise, any smaller service will look better because they will have less complaints in absolute terms.
Oops, apparently, one can get upvotes for giving a reference to the thread one is posting in. That first link should have been http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3643899.stm
I always wonder about the use of the word "neu", is it meant to be pronounced "noi" as in German, or "new" as it might be phonetically pronounced in English?
What's the restriction on Quebec?
Does that imply that you can just make up a word for whatever the medium of publication is?