skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Always great to see the quantitative bent to my anecdotal observations.

"Interesting idea, but I don’t think it’s that simple. I think the reasons for the AMA style posts are pretty obvious..."

Good point, and not one I had considered - that the reason for more 'negative' comments was that there was more to comment on if you were in the negative.

Part of me not seeing that is that I'm actually not sure the 'positive' reasons are that obvious - it's not self-evident to me that better quality and more technical Q/A would be created by AMAs on HN. But don't take that away from the good point about why the difference may have been created.

As a footnote, you creeped out my co-founder who found himself talking to me across the table one moment, and reading me quoted online the next. A good moment!
I'm looking forward to purchasing a Volkswagen XL1.

http://theage.drive.com.au/motor-reviews/worlds-most-efficie...

Since it gets 261 MPG, I can drive across the entire United States and only make one stop for refueling, using around 9 gallons of diesel for the whole trip. Driving with a friend at 60mph and bringing a sack lunch, we can even make the trip in only 38 hours since there will be no overnight recharging stops.

And when the 5.5kWh Lithium Ion battery fails, it will only cost 1/15 the replacement cost of a 85kWh Lithium Ion battery.
how can I hope to secure my web app if corporations with entire security departments are failing to secure theirs

Excellent question. The answer really is, if you are running a "web app" with any kind of sensitive information, you need to have a security expert configure and administer your systems, or become one yourself, and you need to stay on top of every update.

Now, there are basic things you can do that will eliminate most of the casual script kiddie attackers. Firewalls. Defense in depth. Keeping up with patches. Google or any good book on computer security will provide this information. But the sad truth is, if a smart, determined attacker has you in his sights, you will most likely lose. And even the automated tools are getting better and better.

I think we are starting to see a tipping point in the web. More and more high profile sites are getting compromised. We have learned that China has been inside US government, utility, and industrial systems for years. Right now I would not trust any sensitive, personal information to any website or cloud service. I think we are going to see some major, consequential attacks on government, banks, and other commercial entities in the coming years. At some point I believe we are going to need to rethink the cost/benefit equation of having everything connected to everything.
This site reminds me of "News of the Weird":

http://www.newsoftheweird.com/archive/index.html
To suggest that the 62M population of the UK is "small and homogenized" and needs no specialization…is the height of folly. The same can be said of Canada's 33M population. Both countries have world-leading treatment centres for a number of conditions (including some "edge cases").

Doctors here in Canada can still be sued for malpractice (and with few exceptions, doctors are NOT employees of the government; they are independent contractors), so that entire line of argument is bogus, like every single American argument I've ever heard against a true universal health-care system.
yes, that's the crux of the problem.
Doesn't the Bureau of Engraving and Printing (part of the Treasury) print money?
Canonical answers Ubuntu phone critics
Lessons from Day 1 of Geeks on a Plane, India
If this story went down exactly as Mike suggests the agent will lose her job or at least her federal law enforcement qualification.

On the other hand, Mike is pleading his case in the court of public opinion, and his reputation is likely going to get him a lot of popular support either warranted or unwarranted.
This doesn't make too much sense. DHS isn't one thing; it's many things glommed into one, including INS, CBP, FPS, TSA, APHIS, FEMA, the strategic medical stockpile, the Coast Guard, and the Secret Service, among others.

I don't like the TSA any more than you do, but can we hold on to the Coast Guard?
I'm not saying that it happens without advertising :) but it happens, right?

Also, I am not trying to be superior or critical - I'm not slamming Mac owners, I own Apple products. There is nothing wrong with not knowing the GHz on your CPU. It doesn't matter for many people, and that isn't an arrogant judgment (or at least I don't mean it to be). I just think it's silly that we sometimes assume all people will evaluate technology the way we (tech people) do. Just because a thing is more/less expensive, more/less powerful, has more/less storage, does not mean that it might not be the perfect solution for someone else.

edit: I should add that I buy things for weird reasons all the time. I know nothing about fashion - I assume that the $80 jeans are nicer looking than then $40 jeans. Or I assume that the BMW 3x is a better car than the Accord. I do of course try to look into these things thoroughly, but sometimes I don't care, and I just want to buy a credible product. I suspect that lots of people do this with lots of things that aren't their primary concern - that's all I'm saying. A well-marketed, slick Chromebook could find an audience if for no other reason that there are a lot of people who think about computers like I think about cars: "I want a good one. This one looks pretty good to me, I haven't heard anything bad, it has a good reputation, it looks well-made, I don't want to spend the cycles endlessly investigating it, it's in my price range, I'll grab it."
Tizen 2.0 Linux Based Smartphone And Tablet OS Source Code Released
What's with the origami crane as logo? It's like the 20th startup to use it...
The Coast Guard was placed there for financial gerrymandering. The idea that they are part of DHS is a horrible joke.

Same with most of what you mentioned. Bush/Obama has shoved everything in there to create a psuedo military branch so it can't be declined in the future. Disgusting actions, honestly.
Blatant Design Ripoffs in Social Media
Less fun? Are you high? I get more intellectual stimulation of a single site's content on one day than I've ever gotten from every dumbed-down newspaper editorial I ever read before the Web took off.
I noticed a few photos of folks chillin' in storm drainage tunnels. Seriously, be careful. Check the weather forecasts before exploring these. We used to do that as a kid... until a neighbor boy died during a flash flood.
Fair enough... but you're acting like that card in your hand just appeared out of thin air. Are you saying you've never had a bad experience with a credit card company?
Built my own a few months back in node for publishing using git to Heroku. Markdown flavored micro blogging is hip!
It doesn't sound like the investigation is complete, so we really don't know what was exposed. If this was a sophisticated intrusion, the attackers may have covered the evidence that a lot more was taken, but just didn't quite get it all cleaned up.
We Don’t Need More Frameworks or “Best Practices”
How can I test the integrity of a production deployment?
USCG isn't part of TSA; they just happen to report to the same cabinet secretary. I'd guess that the boating run-in here was with CBP.
Ah, procedure. I'm particularly fond of situations like this where the procedure is, for the normal person, a once-in-a-lifetime event. But the flunky on the other side of the desk does it every day. And they think you are yet another stupid person who doesn't understand the simple procedure, and they have nothing but contempt for those who don't understand the procedure as deeply as they do (especially which parts of the paperwork are important, and which really are not.)

Nestled deep within this fucked up situation is an asymmetry of information that gives the flunky incredible power over someone who is, in almost every other context, perceived to be better than they are (especially in this case involving a young rich kid with an expensive toy). Most human beings, when confronted with such an imbalance of power, are not going to be able to resist abusing their power.

In practical terms, there are only two solutions to this problem that I know of. You can learn the procedure better than they do, and beat them on details. This can be effective, but it's boring and the payoff isn't very good. The other solution is to be really, really nice. To be incredibly accommodating. To engender a spirit of goodwill, joviality and kindness such that the flunky wants to help you. CHP officers call this the "personality test" - and they administer it every time you get pulled over, BTW.

It sucks. It's a form of psychic bribery. It's like they are saying, "If you can at least pretend that I'm a good person, just doing my job, then you won't have to suffer. However, if you annoy me, disrespect me, I will make you suffer like you've never known. Remember: I can check a box that will consume months of your life and untold amounts of treasure."

God bless the USA.
The Secret Sauce Behind Netflix’s Hit, “House Of Cards”: Big Data
I like to think I have a hacking mindset, a non-technical one of course, but it is a big factor in my determination to become a proficient programmer. Thanks for the advice though!
A guy I know was in a similar situation when trying to enter Australia.

20+ years ago, when he was 18, he was arrested for the afternoon because of a student protest.

So now on the visa forms, when entering Australia on vacation, he was asked if he had ever been arrested.

He checked yes. The border control people in Australia denied him entry, and put him on the next plane back home.

When he told the border guy the full situation, the border guy said, "Next time, just check NO."

Then, this interesting quote: "You give us the papers we want. We give you the papers you want."

Meaning: make the papers (visa forms) look the way we want them to look, and we'll give you the papers (tourist visa) you want.

I remember that rule of thumb when crossing borders, or filling out paperwork to open a new bank account in a foreign country. Luckily, I've never had to lie, but it sure helps to make the forms look the way they want them to look, instead of treating them as an opportunity to express your individual quirks.
That's not minimal. 18LOC is minimal https://github.com/kaihendry/sg-hackandtell/blob/master/Make...
I think he's saying we need cheap capital right about now, and this quasi-government lending machine is just about the only practical way to do that. But it's not a forever thing, and it's going to break again.

Or as a character in Margin Call put it:

"If you really want to do this with your life you have to believe that you’re necessary. And you are. People want to live like this in their cars and their big fucking houses that they can’t even pay for? Then you’re necessary. The only reason they all get to continue living like kings is because we’ve got our fingers on the scales in their favor. I take my hand off and the whole world gets really fucking fair really fucking quickly and nobody actually wants that. They say they do but they don’t. They want what we have to give them, but they also want to play innocent and pretend they have no idea where it came from. That’s more hypocrisy than I’m willing to swallow. Fuck them. Fuck normal people."
One can certainly hope so. But I don't hold high expectations. A note in her personnel file perhaps.
And this is why I love HN. Thanks a lot, I will jump in on one of those!
That actually answers my question pretty damn well, thanks.
Rate limit inserts? SHMEE is bombing you!
Thanks Aashay. Yes, we'll work on the homepage to make it clearer what we are doing.
How to Get User Feedback
This is unsurprisingly incorrect.

There are dozens of universal healthcare systems to study and implement against. Most are single-payer (France, the UK, Canada) but some are based on heavily regulated mandatory private insurance (Germany and Switzerland, IIRC; I could be wrong).

In every case, the government says "this is the price that you are allowed to charge for service X", which is based on cost-to-deliver plus a reasonable overhead (like the Medicare price in the U.S.).

Eliminate the for-profit healthcare crap like was described in this article and most of the American overspending on health services goes away. Not all of it, but most of it. As a side-effect, the health care system will become more efficient and could finally become an effective partner in providing health security (both for individuals and for the nation; having a functional health care system is arguably important for national security in an age where biologicals are a fear).
CPanel was also hacked which is a way bigger deal imo- Led to thousands(!) of other server compromises:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1235797
It could be that the MSVCRT implementation is the most used one (actually maybe the one in HeapAlloc and so). How would one know for sure :)

It's probably also used in all Xbox-es too...
The Future of Digital Publishing will be via HTML5, not Apps
It's worth remembering that 99.999% of ordinary users will never switch to a static generation blog system, no matter how carefully it is explained.

The problem really is that somebody has to pay the piper.

I'm going to create a new rule.

Chester's First Law:

Essential complexity in the problem domain
is a conserved quantity.

Either your system absorbs and obscures it; or you push it back on the user somehow. Even within a system you can push it around to different places, but it never goes away.

Consider: the problem domain for a blogging system is take stuff from an author and produce HTML for readers.

Movable Type used to "build" a whole site at a time. Wordpress does it per-view unless you use caching. Wordpress won inter alia because the cost of the complexity was pushed from the authors to the readers -- and it's authors who pick the blogging engine.

Static site generators are like Movable Type, in that they take the essential complexity that used to be on the readers and push it back to the author.

A more complex system would strike a balance by proactively generating new cached output based on POSTs, not GETs. That would push both halves of the essential complexity into the system itself, away from both authors and readers.

At all times, the sum of essential complexity has been conserved.
I disagree, regular people do know "Android." Many people that are not "geeks" know that phones are basically iPhone vs Android (they may or may not think of "iOS" but Android is out there).
Ask HN : Postcards startup
If you refuse to sign a form because it has an error on it, it's your problem. If that form is what enables you to take custody of a boat, then you don't get to take custody of the boat. On the other hand, if the form that you signed has handwritten errata on it near the signature, and you weren't sneaky about it, then it's the bureacrats' problem instead of yours.
What on earth makes you think the agency wouldn't cover for her even if it knew everything was true as stated?
> It sucks. It's a form of psychic bribery.

That seems like a terribly cynical way to view the idea that, if you're nice to people, they will be nice to you.
This is outrageous. Its police state behavior. "Confiscating" property should require documented probably cause and something like a warrant. What if the boat was your house? What if you were living in it with a family which my parents do? What then? One agent has the power and authority to do that? Ever read the comic strip or seen the movie Judge Dread?
>> The other solution is to be really, really nice. To be incredibly accommodating. To engender a spirit of goodwill, joviality and kindness such that the flunky wants to help you.

That is not a practical solution. It sounds almost like a bribe. I'm not saying that you should be rude to anybody, but you shouldn't have to kiss somebody's ass just so that they do their jobs. Is a slippery slope. Now you are kissing their asses, latter that will not be enough and the demands for bribes will be the next logical step. No, the line has to be drawn here.

Politeness is fine, more than that and you are kissing their asses.
I use LaTex for a lot of my note taking (for typesetting all equations certainly). When I first started using it, I remember the absolute horror of trying to get it to work with BibTex. The learning curve is relatively steep for non-programmers (I learnt it basically in parallel with learning to code) but it's certainly one of the most valuable tools I've learned and one I continually come back to for a huge range of projects. Certainly in an academic environment it continues to surprise me that everyone isn't taught LaTex in their first year of a PhD.
There's a pretty big difference between government seizure and stealing.

There is? Coulda fooled me. If an individual took your boat without your permission, it's stealing. How is it different just because a large group of individuals got together and did it? Just because they give themselves fancy names like "government" and "State" and "DHS" doesn't mean they actually have any authority to take your property.

I'm reminded of what Bastiat said in The Law[1]:

Every individual has the right to use force for lawful self-defense. It is for this reason that the collective force — which is only the organized combination of the individual forces — may lawfully be used for the same purpose; and it cannot be used legitimately for any other purpose.

Personally I think he hit the nail right on the head.

[1]: http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html

Edit: OK, please don't upvote this. It doesn't deserve it, and it doesn't even really belong on HN at all. Neither does this article, really. I just realized that I let myself get drawn into a politics discussion by an inflammatory post, and I regret it. I mean, I stand by what I said, this just isn't really the place for it.
So can someone tell me what the monetization scheme is for Meteor and other frameworks like it? Is there one? Or is this purely for the joy of the code? Seriously...
I've had mixed feelings about tcmalloc on Windows - that was 4-5 years ago, so things might be better. It was doing some hooking, looking at places to replace standard malloc/free/etc. throughout the whole address space, and on new dll's coming. Other than that, except when it was crashing for no reason (on some Windows 2003 servers for example), it was pretty good.
The Reason Facebook Is Buying Atlas
If you think you are not our audience, it means we are not talking well enough. That's it. I'm sure that with a better messaging on the home page and better examples, we can be friends :)
WTF does this have to do with tech news, in any way?
I use a agent to rent my unts, the fees are nowhere near what this article states though. 1 month rent is the fee I pay.

Also, through the contacts and lead-flow my agent has, he ends up getting better qualified tenants who pay more than I would do myself, listing on craigslist.

He also handles all credit checks, background checks, etc.. on his own dime.
Seems pretty interesting. Definitely a useful bookmark.
That is rather a specific prediction. It seems we will know by Monday whether you are right.
What's your favorite motivational quote?
That little dent is actually what I hate most about my current MacBook Pro. It looks nice, especially when closed, but the radius on corners is way too small, so it's pretty uncomfortable when you poke yourself on it.

2nd worst is not having a USB port on the right side, but they've changed that in the 2+ years since mine was made.
Day 52: Onboarding User Flows
I heard a story where one famous computer scientist (Dijkstra, McCarthy, Hoare, or Knuth?) said something about how using punch cards encourages writing code better because the compile/debug loop is so long and annoying.
After 14 years, GameSpy closes down
The Coast Guard is part of DHS, not the TSA. The point is that DHS is a big organization with many parts that have long-existing structure and control systems. It's not just the yahoos looking at full body scans at airports.
The basis of this article is a May 2012 IMF Working Paper called "Quantifying Structural Subsidy Values for Systematically Important Financial Institutions" (http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2012/wp12128.pdf).

The subsidy discussed is not an issue of economics directly, but capital markets, i.e. finance.

The paper infers a subsidy level for state-supported financial institutions by comparing the level of state support embedded in credit agency ratings and comparing them to their long-run average value. The authors control for the factors such as the sovereign's own ability to support, because sovereign debt is also rated by agencies, and for institutions intrinsic rating values.

Credit ratings are used directly and indirectly by capital market participants to determine the level of funding costs across all debt markets. So, they are the best available proxy for determining at least a floor for this preferential rate. As can be seen from previous financial crises, actual bailouts would be highly dependent on the nature of crises and may be substantially higher than expected.

How do those particular banks get that subsidy?

- from other market participants. In a sense, governments are permitting the misallocation of capital from other market participants, including governments and government agencies (hence taxpayers are directly involved), into the state-supported institutions. It is not a zero-sum game because of how that capital is then used.

Why not charge all banks the same rate and let the size of these banks eat themselves.

- there is no central rate allocation. Market participants use market prices and their best available information for funding costs. A state-supported institution is naturally considered by many participants to be a lower risk than a non-state supported institution.
Perhaps my understanding of the USCG is underinformed then, I was under the impression that they were moved from the command of the Marines into DHS years ago. Are they simply an independent police organization then?
Wait, what? Trading is not a zero sum game except for maybe options and futures contracts.
In practice the Federal Reserve "prints" money when it purchases Treasury Bonds. Where does the Fed get the money from? That's the whole point--the Fed is able to create money out of thin air.
I'm always surprised when people get away with this. And especially when investors reward them with more cash
>That seems like a terribly cynical way to view the idea that, if you're nice to people, they will be nice to you.

I'm saying that if you're nice to someone who wants nothing more than an excuse to hurt you, and who has no compunction about doing so, then perhaps you won't get hurt.

The end goal is not for them to be nice to you. The goal is for them to refrain from making your life a living hell.
Not the person you're replying to, but I never have. Chase has been very friendly to me and even gave me a credit extension when I needed a new computer. Their customer support has always been helpful, and I have the security of chargebacks should someone scam me.

Then again, the person you're replying to was probably talking about debit cards, which don't come with the same securities as credit cards but are just as easy to use and don't charge interest. So really, one must wonder why you weren't using a debit card if bitcoins would offer you an easier experience than cash?
But not at all untrue.
Another person trying to make this a "Hacker News vs. Reddit" thing, which still doesn't appeal to the reason sectors of my brain. Definitely not a ripoff; Mashable's clearly grasping at straws again.
That was just a mistype from looking at previous post, I'm halfway through a bottle of whiskey here after being snowed in the house all day, so be lenient.