skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Called. Thanks for putting this together! Slick experience.

I had some complaints that I was hard to hear; not sure if that was Twilio or that I was calling through Google Voice.
Sounds like bad news for these guys: http://pics.io/

For some reason I'm following their progress for over a month already. Sneaky, their progress bar has gone backwards one time. As if nobody would notice!
I wish them all the best though.
Much of what we consider to be profitable, high-growth business is about taking advantage of market failures. E.g. the advertising industry that bankrolls the internet is basically about taking advantage of cognitive biases to get people to make irrational purchasing decisions. Part of the success of e-commerce is due to the heroic efforts of UPS, etc, in reducing the cost of shipping over the years to make e-tailing cheaper than brick and mortar retailing, but a big part is also arbitraging on state sales tax laws.

This is not a moral judgment (I'm too old to make moral judgments). Fact is that purely competitive markets suck because there is no money in them (there's no high growth startups in the dairy industry, even with extensive government subsidies to offset the effects of vicious competition). A good fraction of the opportunities to make money are based on things like arbitraging regulations or exploiting market failures. Much of the rest involves focusing on markets with little competition (either because it's new or because others don't have the skills to target them), but I think people underestimate how much activity is in the former bucket. E.g. with AirBnB: are they in business because nobody thought to do what they're doing before, or because people thought about it before but realized it was illegal?
Definitely, thanks for the suggestion!
What’s wrong with using robots.txt directly or possibly something like fora.txt, following basically the same syntax as robots.txt? – allowing you to forbid all aggregators/social somethings/fora/a specific whatever to link to you.

Not that I would be particularly fond of a web where you have/are expected to check with a given site in order to be allowed to link to that site…
CGTrader's Massive 3D Print Competition
Ah, clustering. Understood, and entirely justified.

Prosody clustering is on the roadmap, but it's a tricky problem to solve properly (and I don't think anyone has to date). We've even had people switch from ejabberd clusters to Prosody, as ejabberd's clustering wasn't working out for them anyway (it seems to be designed more for spreading load than increasing availability).

Our view is that we wanted to get the foundations of the server right before we began tackling such complex problems. Nevertheless I look forward to welcoming you back some time soon :)
MOOC Professors Claim No Responsibility for How Courses Are Used
This doesn't match my experience at all. People with literally no programming experience do not magically understand what a for-loop does. In fact--at least among the people I've tried teaching myself--they don't even understand what a mutable variable is! (And it's not like I used that term: I try to explain it in a simple way.) Learning the syntax for Php or JavaScript isn't that easy.

On the other hand, anybody with some math experience already knows and understands what a function is. At least to these people, Haskell syntax is clearer because it more closely matches something they're already familiar with: defining functions by cases. Sure, if you use some weird operators from odd libraries, people won't be able to follow. But that's true of using odd libraries in any language: people won't inherently understand AbstractBeanFactories or __magic_names__ either!

Now, if you already have some programming experience and little math, it's a completely different story. Once you've seen one imperative language with loops, statements and variables, you've seen them all. But this says more about how similar they are them about how easy they are to understand without background.

The usual experience people have with teaching Haskell and Scheme is that it's actually easier for people without prior programming experience! Colleges starting with either of these languages use them partly to level the playing field, and it seems to have worked reasonably well.

Besides, C and especially C++ are both very difficult to pick up. This hadn't stopped them from being people's first languages and becoming extremely popular. There's definitely much more to the equation, and I think the perceived difficulty of learning is both less important and less pronounced many people believe.
Sorry for the ad hominem, but this attitude screams "I've never really used AirBnB seriously, so I don't know what I'm talking about"

I'd say the overwhelming majority of AirBnB hosts don't rent out their rooms to just anybody. They vet candidates to make sure they are respectful people with whom they themselves would get along and whom they think are going to be as respectful if not more respectful of their own property. At the end of the day, your long-term neighbors, people you apparently are fond of and trust have chosen to hand over the keys to their apartment to people they have decided to trust based on some criteria of their own choosing. It's perfectly natural to extend my trust with person A to person B, if I know person A trusts person B.

One of my friends is the number one AirBnB/Couchsurfing host AFAIK. Something like 700+ people have stayed with him between both sites over the past few years and I think he has had maybe 1-2 bad experiences, and those experiences did not involve the person being disrespectful of the building, property or neighbors, but just being people of a generally unpleasant attitude.

People treat hotel rooms shitty, but they generally treat an AirBnB rental with respect because they know that that is somebody's home and that someone trusted them with their home. The actual, implied or imagined presence of others does have a positive impact on behavior. Social influence, specifically compliance, most definitely is a factor at play, both in terms of the hosts expectations of the guest and the fact that each and every AirBnB guest has a reputation to upkeep in order to maintain good standing on the site.
Engineers need to do more art
Thanks for calling!

If anyone else has call quality problems, please let me know.
Createspace has great pricing. I'm guessing that was the source.
The biggest problem with the "this is how we are, deal with it because it's efficient and direct" is that it's just not true.

There is nothing efficient about being a dick.

There are basically two ways that being a curt dick can be functional:
[1] The other parties involved are extremely empathetic and look past the messenger to understand the message.
[2] The curt dick has enough power to brow beat / intimidate / badger others into getting their way.

Neither of these are long term sustainable solutions, because empathy between parties is a two-way street. Simply put, you can't sustain empathy unless the other party grows.

Hackers pride themselves on the "fuck you" attitude that disrupts stuff, and I get that, and I like it. But the flip side of that is that an inflexibility to understand and communicate with others ultimately will dull your edge and you'll wind up short of what you want to achieve.

It's not what you say, it's how you say it - not because it's a nice feel good thing, but because how you say something is incredibly important in efficiently disseminating your message, and often time the success of your goals depends on it.

Writing off people who push back on you being a dick is writing off an entire population of people who don't see the world 100% your way... you know, like everyone besides you on the goddamn planet.
Data Virtualization and Real-time Data
>> "I would say that it is news, and that it does deserve accolades."

I agree. My point is that the fact this deserves accolades is bad. Even modern 'open systems' like Android are more closed than most systems were 10-15 years ago. Installing an OS of your choice on a device you own shouldn't be a big deal.
My wife and I recently had a professional photographer come out to take photos of our newborn and it was quite frustrating. Apparently it is common for photographers to not give you your digital copies after the shoot. We _can_ however purchase separately a digital copy for an individual photo at $25 a piece. Want an 8x10? $50. Want to post the entire session to Facebook for your family to see? n*$25. I asked what she normally earns from prints on average from a shoot and offered to just pay that for the digital copies, but she wasn't up for it. Also, how long does she have to keep my photos to allow me to order more prints? 3 months? 6 months? What if I want a print a year from now? What if she goes out of business next week?

So for me, charge what ever you want to charge for the session, but for goodness sakes, give people their photos. That is what they are paying you for.
So I can send such an email to a woman as I am gay? But if I sent it back to Linus, it’s sexual harassment?

As I said, ridiculous.
HN's reaction to this is really odd.

I remember an article that was posted here a few months back where a photographer complained about this exact same thing. That people did not want to pay for high quality images done by a professional. He was criticized for not "getting with the times", that anyone can take a picture so he better drop his prices!

I guess this article is written much better and has hard numbers to describe how little most photographers are making. But I wonder if the developers who complain about people lowballing them for their knowledge/experience are the same ones who tell photographers that they need to charge lower prices.
I think it's time for this issue to move to the front of our minds.

So much technological innovation has turned computers into workers that compete for low level jobs. Huge swaths of the economy no longer support human life, and with every advance the future looks worse for taxi drivers, farm workers, etc.

I believe it's time to start thinking how we can create jobs with technology. Creating new industries that will use computers to enable human beings to do jobs they couldn't before. Groupon did an OK job of that, creating positions for 10k people, doing a form of sales no one had conceptualized before.

But I think in time we can do much better than sales jobs. Groupon was still developed to send investors further into the stratosphere, it just uses people in a way that makes them hard to dispose of, and needed in quantity. While that seriously rules, I believe the idealistic goal of growing an organization that treats employees as 1st class citizens, rather than clueless investor carrying mules is fully possible.
Ditto on this haha.
Apparently the first version was in Perl - did Brad himself rewrite it?
I'm thinking much the same, but even though maximum lifespan isn't moving very much, average lifespan is trending upward. You never know, and so it's not a bad idea, if you can swing it, to have a strategy that doesn't depend on time.

Plus, when the time comes and you no longer need it, you've got something to pass on to your kids and/or give your favorite cause a nice big shot in the arm. Not a bad way to go, really.
Yeah, call it a wedding and the price triples or more.
Name a community with coherent discourse (not Twitter) that does not have a problem with negativity.
ReactiveCocoa -- an Objective-C framework for Functional Reactive Programming.
I work in AR, and our CEO has a great observation correlating the early days of film with these early days of AR.

Basically, when they first came up with moving pictures, they didn't know what to do with them. They filmed basic motions in the world - animals walking, an arm swinging a hammer - as well as the existing entertainment (plays, from a fixed viewpoint). People would be really impressed the first time, but since the usage was, ultimately, "gimmicky", they didn't come back to it.

It took the invention of special effects; if I'm remembering correctly, merely the cutting and re-assembly of the film (editing), for people to begin to actually see what the medium was capable of and for it to start taking off.

This is definitely that moment for AR.
(Feels like there'll be more, but this is definitely one of them)
10 Benefits of Reading: Why You Should Read Every Day
> Their neighbours are more likely to be people there for the long term and with an interest in the community, rather than just renting out their place to people a night at a time.

Of course that is true, but no they can no longer choose to live in places that allow AirBnBing their apartments. Your argument seems more applicable w/r/t contract law. If you don't want those kind of neighbors you can live in places that prohibit AirBnB.
Graph Database Neo4j 1.9 GA released
Yesterday, in response to Dave's post, you wrote, "As a meta comment, Winer is a unfortunate last name..."

If that's the standard you hold yourself to, I'd encourage you to expect more from yourself.
Washington DC was named after George Washington, but that doesn't make it a person.
I would say no. I'd say especially no if someone else submits it!

I can't load up the article again (squid error) but IIRC the guy was posted to HN by someone else,d then received a bunch of abuse on his site and via email etc. Perhaps better to keep the verbal abuse here rather than there?

When I first started using HN, only a little over a year ago really, it did seem different to now. A lot less criticism (yay, no mudslinging or fanboi fights!) and a lot more bootstrappy startup speak (though that can get just as annoying).

Oh well.
Thank you for writing your point in a manner the reinforces your point. I have given your point a point.
I always wonder if this conundrum is not really more of an opportunity than a problem. Maybe its time we stopped believing everybody must have a job, and restructure our societies in ways that reflect that we can now get along just fine with a significant portion of society not being forced to work?
There were definitely a few overly harsh and trollish comments on the article yesterday attacking Dave, but looking at it now it seems like 90% of the comments were either defending Dave or attacking his critics or apologizing for the trolls. It sucks that the comments seemed to turn into a referendum on Dave but it was still orders of magnitude more civil and intelligible than how it would have gone down on any other site.

I don't know that HN itself is the problem here, it's still pretty exemplary compared to the competition. Maybe a broader point could be made that it's depressing that the site with by far the best comments can still descend into those kinds of discussions.

For context, it's also worth noting that Dave is no stranger to controversy and has angered more than a few people over the years. I have no idea whether he was right or wrong in those situations, but I'm sure that that animosity played a role in some of the comments people made yesterday. Many of the really negative comments didn't seem like typical kneejerk Internet comments so much as people with grudges against him personally, and those grudges bled out into the discussion. Again, no judgement either way here, just providing context.
>> "On the other hand, I do think the meanness of programming communities is a the biggest problem we have. Programmer-types are just not as supportive/empathetic as nearly everyone else I know. And I'm not talking about criticism, I'm talking about needless mean, shitty behavior that gets repeated and defended all too often."

I agree with this. I've noticed it in myself. The more involved I've got in the tech community the more argumentative I've been with non-tech friends. Spending time debating with other programmers on HN and in comment threads and mailing lists has lead to me trying to debate even small points my friends make. It's something I'm trying to tone down but it's definitely been a big change in my personality over the last few years.
> We each get little buttons where people vote.

Except we don't. I have an upvote button, but not a downvote button. I haven't reached the magical karma threshold for the downvote button, and my account is ~3.5 years old.

I think this may be contributing to the negativity OP is talking about. I don't have the option of using the downvote, so if I disapprove of content, the only way I can do so is to post a negative comment.

I know a lot of people in the community consider this a good thing, but I think it also leads to a lot of negative comments that wouldn't otherwise get posted.
Post- Mortem of a Website Project
Google doesn't control Android anymore, plus Chrome has always been a more web and media based OS.

I'm honestly surprised that Google hasn't partnered with a TV manufacturer to have the chrome OS installed out of the box.
I think Udo's reference to standards is a bit misleading. "Angels of our Better Nature" improve HN, and I take that to be his context. That said, I find it difficult to delete comments that have been upvoted. OK, I find it impossible to do so. Upvotes convince me that I am right.
"On the other hand, I do think the meanness of programming communities"

Disagree. Fluffy unicorn social hour, when discussed by a programming community, resulted in flamewar behavior.

Let me pick the most recent three "real programming" type articles. Phantom.py the headless webkit engine, Arduino Yun, and Nimrod the static typed language release. Behavior in the articles, by programmer types while discussing programmer type things, was fairly civilized.

Well, OK. The Arduino Yun is yet another product that is not terribly well differentiated from a zillion other products in an extremely crowded market. And there was a smoldering birthday candle sized flame in the nimrod comments about unicode, but not that bad. Phantom.py had some minor war story about a competitor being a nightmare but Mostly on topic and interesting discussions.
GPGMail for OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion is finally here
> If it's your own property, go right ahead.

Yep, this is the problem with services like AirBnB and Uber. It's embraces a purely selfish attitude in individuals with blatant disregard for the rest of the community.
I started talking about supporting the bill and the lady answering the phone (for Nancy Pelosi) rather abruptly switched me to the dedicated voicemail system for these types of calls. I was expecting her to listen to it, but I guess this would more efficient.
GNU epsilon, an extensible programming language
Watson doesn't deal in "blobs" of information. It has a semantic structure that holds all its data. When you ask for a piece of data, it understands the context of your question and the connections among all the parts of your query.
> It's basically just, "HN readers are 'trolls' and 'assholes' and 'they' are Wrong About Dave Winer."

Well to be fair it is mostly true, and it doesn't hurt to repeat it every once in a while.
Live from Microsoft's next Xbox event
Can't you get the same thing by choosing to live somewhere that contractually prevents AirBnB rather than prohibiting it for everyone?

> This is a hotel no matter which way you try and paint it.

How is renting out your apartment 3 weekends a year a hotel? You can currently do that on craigslist, it's just harder to connect buyers and sellers.
Hard to say "duck it" slightly flippantly in conversation without the risk of being more offensive than intended. ;)
Non-profit seeking volunteer technology advisor
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I hear-by release that quote to the public domain with no attribution required.
Isn't this another misuse of Kickstarter?
Introducing "Boot to Qt"
Emory represent! :)
Microcaching for a Faster Site
Yup, HN commenters can feel like a stampede of negativity bearing down on you sometimes (and with increased frequency it seems). But then you can't really post your thoughts and ideas to the web then take umbrage when some people don't like it.

That said, I don't have a fugging clue why people objected to the original article, or what the point of their objections were.

So in summary: Eveyone's wrong.
There is no fundamental incompatibility between being honest and being respectful and understanding.

You can tell someone “you suck, go back to the corner of the Internet you came from, I don't have time for this”, or you can tell them “your skills don't seem to be quite at the level where we can accept your contributions; in particular, you don't understand X, Y, and Z very well and it shows in your code. I'm short on time, but if someone else has time to explain why that would be great.”

The difference is almost immeasurable between those two interactions, even though they are saying the same thing.

I've made this point before regarding derision, which I think is the true issue. I'll quote myself, since I've already written the thing[1]:

“Derision is not curtness. It is not impatience. It is explicit, intentional putting-down of someone because they aren't as good at something as you are or think they should be. And it is a poison. Unfortunately, if you take it frequently enough, it becomes habit. It becomes second nature. And you stop noticing it's poisonous. And so, unfortunately, it is an oft-enjoyed poison in intellectual circles. It doesn't help anything. It doesn't help you understand the world or other people. It doesn't really save you that much time. It simply makes you feel better about yourself.”

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4921579
The takeaway from that story - argue before that about this being work for hire with all IP transferred to you with some kind of non commercial licence for the photographer.
A friend of mine did something very similar for his homepage: http://jimmyl.ee/
I thought I'd respond to personal accusations.
> Now 4chan has the reputation of being somewhat of a sewer,

/b/ has the reputation of being a sewer, and people who don't frequent 4chan see them as being equivalent.

Outside of /b/, 4chan is great. In fact, one of the reasons that /b/ still even exists is that they just post in /x/ and elsewhere. Best to honeypot them.
I duckduckwent there.
Whoops. I fixed Ed already but Jennifer will be fixed now.
These are all ridiculous routes to follow.

I remember reading once an author who refused to e-mail or respond to e-mails, because he was concerned that every piece of text committed to a private commentary between him and another person would never have been published in a book, and will potentially even become a privileged (private) conversation, that nobody else can benefit from, ever.

There is an obvious difference in tone between the 'polite disappointment private note of passive-aggressivity' and the 'verbal ass-chewing' that you issue when someone 'breaks one of the rules'.

What happens when this person gets chewed out on a forum on the internet?

People talk about it. Word spreads. Now I know that linux kernel devs are not meant to introduce breaking changes into userland, because of the power of his words.

Would I have heard if he had chosen other routes? Isn't it possible that he can keep a (potentially) helpful developer on the staff (we try to keep them, especially when they are unpaid, since they are harder to come by) without permanently or temporarily revoking his commit access? I don't know if he still works on kernel, but don't you think he would have been more alienated by forcible removal from the working group, for any period of time?

If my boss tells me to take a vacation, I would get worried.