skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm pretty sure I end up getting more information overall out of the comments, but if you weigh it based on uninformed vitriol versus useful content, using an article-only feed wins out pretty easily.
Yeah I was trying to decide if I should post a link explaining what it was, but I couldn't find one so I left it...

Here's the basic idea: Everyone has access to view basically everything, but for the right to discuss or post things you needed to be invited to that forum/group, so you start out kinda small in the general, "everyone can post here" community and then you were slowly invited in (or kicked out) depending on how much you contributed (and it's quality).
Google Talk discontinued
When I posted this page last week with an "email your reps" form, a lot of people commented to say that calling your representatives is much more effective than emailing.

So I scrambled around, and was eventually introduced to the folks at Call2Action, who've built a Twilio integration that makes calling really easy. It took a couple of all-nighters (mostly because I redesigned the entire site), but the page now has a number that you can dial that'll request your zip code and then connect you to talk to your representatives.

At the moment, the leading bill in Congress on this issue is the "Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act." That bill is proposed by the heads of the judiciary committee. It does absolutely nothing to correct the problems with Section 1201 of the DMCA; instead it simply reverses the Librarian of Congress's removal of the unlocking exemption. The problem is that those exemptions only cover personal acts of circumvention, and not the tools and services needed to make it happen. I'd be willing to bet that even here on HN, very few of us have the skills to unlock a smartphone from scratch. For unlocking software to exist, it needs to be feasible for developers to invest time in building those tools.

The "Unlocking Technology Act" would not only make tools and services legal, but would amend the DMCA to make circumvention of "technological protection measures" legal as long as the purpose isn't piracy. That'd cover unlocking, jailbreaking, modding game consoles, but also it'd enable removing DRM for "fair use." For example, it'd make it significantly easier for documentary filmmakers, teachers, archivists and remix artists to access content for use in the course of there day to day work. And it would prevent security researchers from being threatened under the DMCA when they try and publish research about DRM.

This has become a bit of a personal project for me while I'm between startups, and I'd really appreciate you taking the time to support it.

tl;dr Please take a few minutes today and call - this bill deserves our support.
I wrote a long guide for Reddit's photography section about how to monetize a photography hobby: http://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/1bxf6e/the_busi... , but the subtext is "Don't bother." For most people there's not enough money in it.

Photography as a profession is currently bifurcated: there are a smallish number of high-end shooters (of whom it sounds like Bickley is one) and a very large number of Guys With Cameras (GWCs) on Craigslist, Model Mayhem, and elsewhere. The temptation is obvious: photography is fun, it's possible to product decent images with cheap gear these days, and a lot of people want to give professional shooting a go.

But the reality is a lot harder:

Let's say you want to make a living as a full-time photographer, and let's set a reasonable middle-class lifestyle at $45,000 a year (your number may be higher or lower). If you're trying to bill at $50, your take-home is probably closer to $25 an hour. To make $45,000, you'll have to bill at least 1,800 hours per year, or 35 hours per week, 52 weeks a year, paid. Adjust those numbers accordingly for vacations, illnesses, etc. (you don't get two weeks of paid vacation as an independent contractor).

Yet a lot of people are comparing real professions with GWCs who just got a D7000 and will shoot for $75 to "get experience." There is a demographically infinite number of these guys. So when average people see how much real professionals cost, they blanch, because they're often comparing pros to GWCs. Some GWCs can be reasonably good. Almost everyone charging over $100 an hour is really good. But there's little middle ground anymore.

One other note: Bickley might be shooting with an $8000 D4 or 1D-X, but by now many of their predecessors can be bought for $1000 – $2000. The OMFG AMAZING cameras of 2008 (Nikon D700, Canon 5D II, Sony's FF camera the name of which escapes me) that lots of pros shot with are $1000 - 1500, and for most purposes at base ISO they're still awesome and overkill. There are still reasons to buy $8000 in gear, but it's possible to produce equivalent work in many situations with much less.

edit: Also, the first $8000 camera one buys is absurdly expensive, but when a new model appears most people sell their old one and use the proceeds to buy the new one, while using the cost of the new one as a tax write-off. Almost no one buys a new $8000 camera from scratch every year.
I don't care if it takes 15 minutes or 15 hours, if you are going to call a person or company untrustworthy (or worse), you better be ready for blow-black.
Well no, the point is not that security questions don't add security, it's that they greatly subtract from security.

Sometimes security questions are used to augment a password, but in many cases, including the one given in the article, they are provided as an alternative to a password, and one that's often much easier to guess.
Offering a huge amount of storage is a great way to grab people's attention, but then most people won't actually use anywhere near that amount of space, so marketing wise it's a big win without actually requiring much technical change. Adding new features requires designing and implementing those features which is hard work.
Good post. It bears mentioning that any time you press reply it's prudent to think about whether your comments present you in the light you want people to see you.
>We should be able to grow enough food for everyone as it is.

We already grow more than enough food, and have for a long time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_waste
Wakari (in-browser analytics) out of beta
Context? I'm not up to date :(
Do you have any advice on regreasing the bearings? I've got one of those fans but it's starting to cease up on me.
Wouldn't it be smart of airbnb to not allow people in cities known that their services are illegal not to allow people to post those apartments ?
> You can't, for example, run a tannery in your apartment.

I would prefer that you could, in the (perhaps unlikely) scenario that it was allowed by the terms of your rental agreement. If it's your own property, go right ahead.

> What's more, as a resident (and especially if I were an owner) I wouldn't want my building being a de facto hotel.

Many residents would probably agree, and if enough agree, then there's no reason why the property owner couldn't prohibit the practice in the rental agreements. I live in San Francisco, where airbnb is legal (as far as I know), yet my property owner explicitly prohibits "short term subleasing," effectively banning airbnb rentals. No law or government action required, no criminals made, no taxpayer-funded enforcement, and no problem.
Well that didn't take long.

I figured this would happen eventually, obviously yahoo will spend a considerable amount of time trying to detect this and remove it...
I agree with Dave. Many people on HN don't even try to apply critical thinking and judge facts as they are. They prefer to go with conspiracy theories or versions of stories that fits their existing ideas or make their favorite team look good, without considering any other possible explanation.
Yes, it doesn't work for a road analogy, especially a "real road" one
I've never once been asked for this info by a recruiter. Any background or credit checks that been conducted on me in the course of finding employment have always been done by the hiring company, never the recruiter.

Personally, I would consider requiring this kind of info a Red Flag.
Actually NYC pays for itself, and upsate sucks money from Long Island and Westchester, whether you account by where you live or where you work:

(This is by where you live)
$Paid $Recd Pop
Capital Region 3.8% 7.0% 4.2%
New York City 45.1% 40.0% 42.9%
Downstate Suburbs 27.4% 17.7% 21.7%
Rest of State 23.8% 35.2% 31.2%
Modern agriculture is very, very far from 'low-tech.'
Aren't there already plenty of other places on the internet to go find that?
Deconstructing the MOOC madness
Already done 7 years ago :)

http://search.cpan.org/dist/Net-FS-Flickr/

Stores versioned files by encoding them in the lower order bits of PNGs in a Flickr set.

Example stored file: http://www.flickr.com/photos/simonwistow/sets/72057594097765...
I already addressed this in another post. My point wasn't about desirability, but merely about the fact that I don't have an unkempt look that would evoke creepiness.

(So, basically, my profile pic isn't this: http://www.kindofcreepy.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/creep...)
You need a lot of interior baffling or insulating material stuffed inside an air mattress to get the R value up to 3 or 4. In a big open tube you get convection, which speeds up heat transfer.

Note that the original NeoAir, which is about the same thickness, is only R 2.5, but that's with a lot more interior baffles plus reflective coating on the inside. The exped mats are filled with down or synthetic insulation.
What If Experts Are Wrong On World Population Growth?
I bet you have an HOA. Use it. This issue should be an HOA thing, not a state/city thing.
When developing for Google Glass, simplicity is key
Direct link if you're in a hurry: http://pmarchive.com/
There are so many problems with housing in Paris that I feel that short term rentals are only a small percentage of a percentage of a contributing factor. Even if short term rentals were forbidden it still wouldn't put a dent in the costs.

I do agree with you on the constantly new people problem. I recently found out that the reason the front door to my building is broken is because one of our neighbors is a prostitute and the johns were letting themselves in and buzzing random doors to get the second door unlocked. Since we aren't a hotel the burden of safety and security has been placed on her neighbors.
One step closer for Levitra generic park
Sexual activity involves physical activity that can be contraindicated for some category of men. Therefore, the health care provide needs to examine patient's cardiovascular system to analyze the risk of cardiovascular complications during the sexual activity.
I like and value most HN comments, but I agree that there is quite a bit of negativity. One way to look at it is that if the average commenter even accidentally makes a negative comment once per year, and if 10,000 people view a thread, that's the potential for 27 destructive comments.

It doesn't help that negativity enforces itself, so it doesn't take long before a thread can be inundated with a hostile attitude. But how to address that?

I don't know how it might work, but what if there was an option for the author to include a picture of themselves (on HN)? That might humanize the discussion, by reminding people that they're talking to a real person...
Theoretically, the size of the community is not exactly the issue. Certainly, as it grows, so do the challenges. But ultimately it's the core culture and the self-governance within. The tools and structure of the site help to build the culture, as do early members, but as the population grows, the culture can shift. Sometimes tools can be updated to better handle this.

Perhaps users who have more flags than karma/upvotes actually disappear (along with their comments) for a time period and/or lose their ability to post for a while?
Not really. Print on demand for a 170 page book costs about $4 per copy. That's not really a big profit margin hit.
I've been a reader much much more than a commenter here. But I developed a habit of ignoring any negativity expressed here. I think it is a skill not less important in dealing with life in general and in organizations.

However, yesterday I was really burnt out emotionally on some personal matters. And I've yet to fully recovered...
I don't make my living as a professional photographer, but have done enough jobs and shoots to have a good feel for it. People who think photogs charge too much have the wrong perception of photography: they think that the hard part of photography is taking the picture (and perhaps knowing how to operate the camera)...and since anyone can, once in awhile, take an amazing photo with something as simple as a phone camera, then why should pro photographers get paid so much when their "work" can be done by amateurs?

In my experience, shooting the photo is the easiest part. Being "there", as in, the right place to shoot the photo, is even more critical. Is your child getting married? Do you really want to experience their wedding vows with a 10-pound camera held in front of your face?

If your photoshoot is non-documentary...i.e. you want to photog to help create a scene...well, now you're not paying for just a photographer, but a creative director.

And of course, a good camera is just a part...sometimes a very small part, of a good photo. Lighting equipment matters much more...and while you may have a great $1000 prosumer camera, you probably don't have $1000 to $10000 in lighting equipment (or the assistants needed to operate it).

And finally, the least fun part of all: editing and organizing the photos. I've heard that editing video takes about 10 hours per minute of usable video...the ratio isn't as drastic for photography, but even photogs with a good workflow (such as a Lightroom setup), can spend hours editing down to the best dozen photos out of a thousand.

To reiterate the point: shooting a photo with a camera is the fun and easy part. The rest of what it takes to make a great photo is what you're paying the big money for.
This is the same exact tactic employed by many of the e-book authors at Clickbank. You're basically forcing visitors into purchasing more than they originally wanted.
There's about 6 top level comments that are negative.

In the big thread, there are 9 negative comments (the rest being sidetracks or push back). A couple of the smaller top levels have a second or third negative remark.

Of course these numbers are highly subjective. I wouldn't call it a torrent. Much of it certainly served no purpose.

Was there some other negative activity?
At the very least, there needs to be a rudimentary troll block. I so tire of HN comment threads littered with discarded opinions from one-off accounts. Make accounts read-only for the first two-weeks and make sure they're actually being logged into and aren't being harvested.
> this is the Internet,

The Internet is a big place. If you want YouTube comments ("Lol yuo dikk yo mama haet you die of cancer!!1!" you can go to youtube.

> at least it's one in which it's possible for any participant, big or small, to improve the discussion

Yes. Let's keep working at making HN better.

Comments like this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5731152) should be vigorously downvoted.
I think we are talking about different things.

For example, if you integrate x^2 dx from x=0 to 10, x changes continuously.

It's clear that x is not fixed to any particular value.
I like the name, but one barrier is that DuckDuckGo doesn't verb comfortably.

I can't imagine ever saying "I DuckDuckGoed it" - since that breaks the verb 'to go'.

Although I've conditioned myself over several years to say "I searched for it [on DuckDuckGo]", I sometimes still find myself saying "I Googled it".
If your heart is not in it 100%, "don't bother" is good advice.

Photography is a profession for those who either "picked their parents well" or can't stand not to do it, i.e. your life's passion.
I think it has a lot to do with residential rental inventory as well. Rent control. There is such limited available apartment rental inventory that to take units off the market, carve them up and sell them as hotel stays completely skews the real estate market and drives up the rent. If every landlord did that no one would have a place to live
Yes. In fact, one listed on airbnb.
https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/62891
Unemployment doesn't cover all of their living expenses? My first project manager at HP went into photography several years ago...and so did many of the other displaced workers during post-2008.
High schools are like prisons to smart kids.
Wow, this is awesome.

dtrace4linux still tanks my box. systemtap is more like systemthwack. We need this, folks. You might not be familiar with dtrace, but trust me, you need it.
Yikes, pg is not gonna be happy.

Communities like this are like water: it changes constantly sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worst. The only thing to be happy about is whether or not it's thriving.

And, in my opinion, limiting the number of participants in this community would be a terrible mistake. Perhaps there's other ways to limit trolling, such as limiting the number of comments you can submit per day based on your karma, but it would unfair to exclude people to the great content here.
"It's important to acknowledge that most commenters on HN do not behave that way, but some do and they are very loud."

I think part of this is just the dynamics of community-moderated comments. In my experience, the way to get upvotes in any such forum (not just HN) is to express an opinion in the strongest terms you possibly can. "X is dead" gets upvotes. "X has some challenges to overcome, and it might" doesn't. People like and respond to simple, clear arguments that don't admit weakness or uncertainty.

This dynamic then feeds on itself, as the people who are the best at forcefully stating their opinions become top commenters, crowding out more cautious voices and providing a bad role model that the next generation of would-be top commenters follows.

How do you fix this? It's poisoned so many great communities I've belonged to, so I wish I knew. But I don't.

EDIT: I have seen one mechanism that helps mitigate this: hide the users' actual karma scores.

Karma is a scoring mechanism. That turns forums that use it into a video game (of the type very well parodied by http://www.forumwarz.com/about). Participants compete with each other to see who can get the highest score. Hiding the actual numbers from users takes some of the fun out of this, which cuts down on trolling.

Slashdot used to show your exact karma score, and they had these exact same problems. Eventually they switched to just a text label ("Excellent", say, for high-karma users) that indicated your general karmic position, and the comments got a lot better very fast. Nobody's going to put as much time in to go from "Excellent" to "Excellent" as they might to go from, say, 2,500 to 5,000.
I would much rather run my own identity provider where I can control exactly what it takes to authenticate (multi-factor, etc.) and only need to keep that secure (which is a lot easier, because it can be some locked down server) instead of needing to keep my passwords on my devices I carry around.

One of the major benefits of identity providers is that we eliminate the need for a million passwords for all the sites you use, the only thing this does is provide a perhaps more convenient way of living with the problem instead of a solution to eliminate the problem.

Also, http://xkcd.com/927/
I try hard to avoid attacking people (even if they attack me), and address the points of whatever argument, observation or value judgment (if any) was made in a comment. I figure I won't change the mind of someone so obviously misguided, but I can still make the case for the reader who is trying to sort things out.
There is no surprise here. As http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.htm... makes clear, we consider someone "intelligent" because they possess many abilities of interest. But the possession of one ability (eg mathematical reasoning) is not well correlated with the possession of another (eg verbal ability). Unless you possess all of those, you won't score at the top in IQ.

But to excel in any specific field does NOT so much require top mental abilities of all kinds as exceptional ones required by that field. Not having a decent baseline of all abilities will be a handicap - you need that - but a Richard Feynman does not need to be a genius grammatically.

IQ tests are a very limited tool. They test a breadth of abilities and can indicate that you can do reasonably well at many things. (Indeed for a wide range of jobs, an IQ test is a better predictor of performance than your performance on the job interview!) However they can't recognize that you're truly exceptional at any particular thing.
I applaud your mission to try and improve lives, and I believe that every start-up should focus on just that. I would also like to give it a little perspective though.

There is generally an inverse correlation between the effectiveness of solving a problem and the directness of the approach. If you would like to cure cancer, the most effective way is to cure cancer. The next most direct approach is to help the doctors who are curing cancer. The next most direct approach is to help the medical companies who are helping the doctors who are curing cancer. And so on.

Having "a mission" is of paramount importance to succeeding, but it bothers me when we believe we're on a mission to solve a problem that we're simply not solving. A photo sharing application could say they're improving the lives of cancer patients by allowing them to see photos of their grandchildren, and yes, by the letter that is a true statement, and honestly maybe that's all the patient really wanted -- to see photos of their grandchildren, but to me it seems like an indirect drop in the bucket toward solving the real problem.

I feel like this thinking is actually poisonous to the ecosystem. It prevents us from solving the real problems we've set out to solve by deluding us to think that by building some indirect tool for people who may help people who may help people who may actually solve the problem, we've accomplished our mission. We haven't. It's a text editor, and you have to see it for what it is. If we want to cure cancer, we need to sit down, understand the problem landscape, and solve it without five layers of indirection. Otherwise, we shouldn't be stealing the thunder of those whose actual mission is to cure cancer.
It makes me sick to my stomach to read the tactics of those in my industry and it is a real shame to see an industry which should be there to help, in fact becoming a hindrance.

I wish all the terrible recruiters could just be weeded out and removed...

Since this is nigh on impossible I agree with the article's point about keeping a record. Some of us are passionate about what we do, some of us love startups, or tech, or people, or all of it and will give you a service worthy of a fee.

I do not work withing the UK industry, as I became disheartened by the hate (if you need help in Germany however...), but I can highly recommend companies like The Up group - to whom I have no affiliation - as I understand their service is brilliant.

Those that are less worthy of praise are pretty obvious - just search out Milo Yiannopoulos' Kernel mag articles....