skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Downvotes exist to curb destructive behavior.

Sometimes the destructive behavior is actual and embodied in the comment being downvoted.

Sometimes the destructive behavior is potential and in the person down voting.

I've downvoted bad comments. I've downvoted comments instead of arguing with them. I've downvoted comments because I was feeling ill-will toward the ideas it expressed, and I've even downvoted comments because I didn't hold good-will toward the poster.

In each of these cases, I had more destructive alternatives to the down vote. Was it fair? Well when a person has been around long enough, the recognize that these things even themselves out over time.

BTW, a community in which everyone votes in assent and descent according to some set of rules, isn't really voting.
Exactly. This country was founded by terrorists.

"The first recorded incident in America occurred in 1766:
Captain William Smith was tarred, feathered, and dumped
into the harbor of Norfolk, Virginia, by a mob that
included the town's Mayor."[0]

Claims of US perpetrated terrorism aren't even limited to the founding of the country. Take the downing of Cubana de Aviación Flight 455 and the Contras in Nicaragua for example[5]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarring_and_feathering

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sons_of_Liberty

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaspée_Affair

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Marion

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubana_de_Aviación_Flight_455

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contras
That's silly, he was an American through jus sanguinis already.
Oldest Parliament in the world...
Meaning they give you your own money back to you for doing something they like. How generous.
A small coffee shop would align with the author's intent. The post favors distribution over centralization; federation, so long as it's into small-enough chunks, tends to do the same thing.
Being french too, when I first read about PRISM, I thought the american people would fight it fiercly. I just read about the french equivalent and I know the french people will never try to fight it.

Legal or not, it's our liberty they're taking away from us.

The people of the USA and France now feel powerless against our respective governments. We gave our votes to the executioners of our liberty.
Ack, you're right. My French teachers would not be impressed.
I think it's better to leave citizenship out, or focus on treating your own citizens. The rest should follow (this is also what Scahill says in the following story): American citizenship does not protect you from targeted assassination.

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/4/23/jeremy_scahill_the_sec...
The real problem with little distributed websites is attention. The same problem websites had since the 90's. How to get indexed by search engines. How to be go to places.

Poogle Glus, F*book, Shitter are tools for managing attention. Who is paying attention to you? Random visitors or people from your address/contact book? How easy is it to get? On Facebook everyone can get a few likes. On old websites you dig through analytics to figure out if someone liked it.

It seems hopeless to spread new tools for publishing and uncensored networks when there's little commercial advantage to them. They'll be used by furry porn enthusiasts and freedom fighters. But you still have to fix the problems of discoverability and attention for regular users to adopt them en masse.

A distributed web that would be used by enough people still has to have all the features people came to love in FB/Poogle+/Twitter/Google Search Bubble. Many freedom fighters ignore this reality and seem nostalgic for the bare bones sites of the 90's but easier to publish.

Today's centralized networks are hacks that exist because the fundamental design of the web was ill conceived in the 90's.
> (cooking by fire to walking on the moon and nuclear power in under two centuries),

I really don't know what to make of this. You surely can't think that "cooking by fire" was the height of technological sophistication in the year 1813?
There's nothing inherently wrong with collecting or collections.
my response: http://eleventymedia.com/
I agree with your point, but think your wording sidesteps the issue. Google has been our allies because the same things that we were against (IE a closed internet) directly endanger their revenue. They won't change their attitude when they see a huge threat to their revenue, although we may notice that their motives have always been revenue, and that does not necessarily align with ours.

Additionally, I'm not sure decentralized/anonymous services are necessarily a bad thing for Google. At the moment they have alot of competition from site like Facebook, and online shops and such. However, they are still the gateway to the internet, and are probably in the best posistion to continue to provide targeted advertising in the new age of anonymous internet. Consider the value of having your shop get a prefered listing everytime someone searches for shoes. The value of this would go up when your ability to do directed advertising through other means goes down.

Also, even with anonymous services, information still leaks, and the larger you are the better you can take advantage of it.
Evolution itself is evolving.
Unfortunately, even if you run a VPS on DigitalOcean or Linode or the like, you are still using a very centralized service. These services concentrate many servers in a few data centers. The US data centers are mostly on the coasts, though Linode has one in Dallas. Sure, this is efficient, but efficiency has its downsides.

I think we need at least one competent web hosting provider operating in every state of the US, and more for the large states.
In real markets, every person is not aware of every product. While marketing can be used to push inferior products, it can also be used to raise awareness of superior products.

You could also view advertising as a way of adding intangible value to products. I.e., maybe the warm fuzzy feelings Apple fans get from supporting their favorite company constitute extra utility that would not have been created without Apple's marketing and branding efforts.

I agree that sometimes marketing leads to outcomes that are economically inefficient, but saying all or most advertising falls in this category is a much tougher sale.
I think it'd be a shame to sacrifice all the utility of the Internet and telephone services because of mass surveillance. I'd rather sacrifice some of the capabilities of GCHQ and the NSA instead.
No, it makes it easier. All the private sector has to do is offer $11k.

With a guaranteed income, $11k would likely be insufficient - why work for $11k when you can enjoy a life of leisure for $10k?
TMDb only allows you to browse different movies based on the parameters you already know. SynopsiTV on the other hand, will recommend movies and TV shows based on the movies you've already seen and rated. Simply put, TMDb is just a database whereas SynopsiTV is your personal recommendation system.
As the middle-class son of an uneducated single mother who didn't get a high-school diploma until after I did, I'm having a little trouble buying that...
Top Countdown: Most Popular 3D Printing Stories in June 2013
"It's just you. http://eff.org is up."

http://isup.me/eff.org
A lot of American bills start with at least a dozen "BE IT RESOLVED" clauses that give some background, justification, or just anecdotal stories.

It's like you can't declare anything without four pages of legalese.
Trying to actually reach intelligent humans at these large companies can be a real pain. I've had similar issues with large providers doing stupid things, my customers blame me, and I can't do anything about it because I'm the small guy.
It's still a Really Hard Problem.

How would you account for LoC nuances, exactly?

As I pointed out, the better the developer, the fewer LoC produced per "feature point" or however you want to measure it. So any analysis that doesn't take into account the nuances would be skewed against the expert developers.

This would mean that, if the study purported to prove that two average programmers were more productive than an expert, I would have to take the conclusion with a grain of salt (or reject the analysis).

But given that despite the disadvantage, experts were still shown to be more cost effective without pair programming? I don't see why we'd need to reject that conclusion.
If torrent sites and bitcoin accepted credit card payments, and a significant fraction of those payments involved stolen credit/debit cards (significantly harming the true owners of those cards even with liability protection), merchant account providers should have the right to not do business with them either.
The Best and Worst Traits of an Entrepreneur: Which Do You Have?
Essential lessons in innovation from Lady Liberty
Thanks for the write up. Definitely good to see core.async and goroutines side by side...
I suspect that the politicians in
Congress are still of the same mind
they were when they passed the
Patriot Act, etc. to begin with:
They want to be seen as doing something
so that when there is another attack,
e.g., the Boston bomber, no political
opponent can get votes screaming
"soft on terrorism". The politicians
are trying to cover their asses (CYA).

That situation hasn't changed.

For violating the First and Fourth
Amendments of the Constitution,
the politicians are willing to
do that to CYA.

Yes, the Patriot Act, etc. are likely
unconstitutional,
and voters can scream that to the politicians,
but the politicians still just want to
CYA against another Boston bomber or
a charge of "soft on terrorism".

But the US founding fathers saw this situation:
Someone with 'standing' brings a legal
case, and eventually the case makes it to
the Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS)
which can accept the case and rule
on the constitutionality of the
laws. So, the politicians just took advantage
of this solution and hit the ball,
the hot potato Cthey didn't want to
handle, across the street to the
SCOTUS.

Standing? Maybe 120 million Verizon
customers have standing.
Maybe there is a huge class action
suit on behalf of all US Internet users.
And apparently Google has started a suit.
So, maybe there are enough suits with standing.

Then if the SCOTUS strikes down the Patriot Act,
etc., the politicians can blame the SCOTUS
and still have their CYA.

Uh, politicians tend to be 'chicken hawks':
Talk like a hawk (tough on terrorism),
walk like a chicken (CYA).

"Peck a little. Talk a little.
Peck a little. Talk a little.
Peck, peck, peck, talk a little more."
-- extra credit for the source!
JSON vs hstore
We're talking about future developments of society in a rather abstract manner, so the whole discussion is always scraping along the edge of BS territory. However, I've stated clear assumptions each step of the way. Some of them may be wrong, but I am (unfortunately) confident that they're not.

Let's take the data usage expansion hypothesis. Already in the discussion about the EU data retention directive many stakeholders stated that they want access to the data for persecution of activities such as tax avoidance or file sharing. Even now, after they (mostly) lost their case, these people try again every few years. If they continue to persist and if they get a little bit of what they want every now and then (which has happened), we have the million steps scenario. I consider the situation unstable, because the resources of those that want to restrict the usage of gathered data (at least here in the EU) are dwarfed by the resources available to those that want to expand the usage.

Even the most extreme statement in my tale (the one about the caste system) has some footing in reality. When we still had the STASI here in Germany, the nature of what they did basically made them such a caste. Because STASI operatives had the job of spying on their surroundings with the tools available at the time, they had a general information advantage compared to everybody else. However, the rest of society avoided any contact with them (obviously only possible when they were not undercover) because of what they did. I once heard that children in school had to proclaim the professions of their parents at some point during the school year. If a child did not state a specific profession but just said "worker", everybody knew that the parents were STASI. Of course the child was then shunned by the other children.

While falling short of a fully developed caste system, this little example shows that a society with an extremely developed information gathering and processing apparatus can move in that direction.

I admit that using the word thought experiment was most likely wrong, but then it follows that one really can't make a Gedankenexperiment about the future of society, doesn't it?
Thousands of trillions? At what point do we start expressing numbers in terms of the number of known atoms in the universe? This is big data. Civil liberties aside, this is awesome.

I'd express this as .19, or 15/78 due to the French dataset containing 10^15 and the number of atoms in the universe, at a speculated lower bound, being 10^78.

The one good thing that could come of all this surveillance, maybe we get a better version of Sim City that actually does need cloud computing.
> How about Visit my distributed website at http://198.199.80.174/

FTFY. DNS is a centralized service.
How is reading my email without a specific warrant not a violation of the 4th amendment? Seems cut and dry to me.

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized"
That's a nice constitution ya got there.

It would be a shame if anything were to happen to it.
And the media is the next best thing to an online petition surrounded by ads... ephemeral bullshit to hold attention while we show you commercials.

If they aren't afraid of you burning down their palace, they are not about to change.

Why do people in the US think that change comes from meaningless, one-click bullshit? In Egypt, the military says GTFO. In Syria, they can take up arms and say GTFO and have it not work. You didn't see arabs using twitter for the "retweet this if you want change." It was the get over to street a and b and mob.

Peaceful sit-ins on unused public land, out of the way of the entrenched interests is something to lampoon... nothing to be afraid of. You can't put a poster of Ghandi up on the wall and be taken seriously.

Peaceful resistance is standing in the way of the tank and letting the entrenched powers present themselves to the horror of the world. They will either turn popular sentiment strongly enough that they are taken away, changed, of they will stand down from stupidity.

It's like not forcing legislators to actually filibuster on their feet. Tweet-it-in resistance is worthless.

Stand up, step in, and cross the line if you mean it. Otherwise STFU and GTFO.
I'm not sure if I should vote you down or up, as I can't tell if you're in favor of scrapers "pick[ing] up money that CL is leaving on the table."

On the one hand, you're correct in identifying the scrapers' intent, on the other its an ugly sentiment and the sort of thinking I would prefer to discourage if you are advocating for it.
If elections matter there is a strong case for anonymity. I'm not US based but as I understand it the primaries are in practice quite important but the ways they are run are highly variable and the choices of the parties (are they even constitutionally necessary or just common practice?). If they are currently not anonymous there is probably no harm in going online but I haven't fully thought it through but non-anonymous election processes are substandard anyway in my view.

Outside elections seriously massive scale public protest or large scale civil disobedience and general strikes really can change things. For smaller things mass lobbying of politicians can swing a balance.

Edit: Actually online is still worse than a good recountable, auditable paper based system although maybe equal to a Diebold polling station based one.
> It's a great service, but it's a bit much for the non-technical.

IRC was full of non-technical people in the 90s. #teenchat was consistently the most popular channel on a number of networks! IRC used to be filled with the sort of inane chatter that seams to be the bread-and-butter of services like Twitter and Facebook. :)
design bug on ios!!!

possible to submit links to u?
Absolutely, if and when the Lemote people get marketing sorted in the UK, and when I retire and need not use large monitors/large storage/media codecs, moving off binary blobs is the goal.

Until then, crusts must be earned. Trivia of the week: blackberry handsets support .ogg files. Wonderful.
Given that few if any of us are in a position to do the sorts of filtering Google can or afford to do outside of the interview (e.g. it's been said they're enamored of Ivy League and equivalent degrees), I'm not very interested in claims that proving a candidate can code is worthless. Whereas I know from being in companies that didn't do this before I learned it in 1997 that failing to do this results in bad hires, which can be fatal, if you'll excuse my vocabulary, for a start up.

I'm sorry I wasn't clear, specifically:

The find bugs test was code we supplied, sprinkled with bugs subtle and not so subtle, and simple syntax wasn't being tested, but things such as using an uninitialized variable. The candidate had to find "some" of them, but there was never a problem in deciding who passed and who failed the test.

We also weren't at all particular about syntax in the examples that had to be written from scratch; the interviewee did had to signal to us he did knew proper syntax, but, come on, getting it all right is the job of an editor (well, so I, an EMACS user since 1980 think) and of course the compiler.

Otherwise you might try rereading what I wrote, e.g. I said "performance anxiety" in the context of writing the from scratch code examples. I.e. if we'd cued into that, or the interviewee had asked, we would have left them alone to write them, or put them in front of an edit buffer to do so while we didn't hover over them.

Counterwise, wow, I must really be coming across as a hard case, for "while a senior engineer watches you like a hawk (without any intention of helping you out)" was very much not true, see the above not watching option and we most certainly helped the interviewee out if he asked the right sorts of questions or paused at certain points while writing it.

I.e. while it would be a negative to have forgotten the difference between * and ->, we would have told them and then seen if they grocked pointers, that and recursion were the higher level things we were looking for (they were requirements for what we were doing). But it was never even close, it was never difficult deciding if someone passed or failed these three tests.

Seriously, deadly or not, while it was possible we had some false negatives, it really didn't seem to be the case, and enough other people I respect endorse this that I'm not about to stop advocating it.

As far as I can tell the Fizz-Buzz test, which is intended to be easier than reversing a linked list, has no connection to Google. "Google has been the foremost purveyor of this method since it began hiring engineers" might be true today, but in my days Microsoft was best known for this, before Google was even officially founded.

This was of course back when Microsoft was famous for being fairly well run, and their "hidden" "secret" was being consistently able to write software that "worked", i.e. didn't core dump (much)), one of the reasons all their big DOS era competitors fell behind or died in the transition to Windows.
I thought the discussion here was basic/universal income. Isn't the idea that the person paid $11k ends up receiving $10k + $11k - %tax.

Otherwise you end up with 100% marginal tax rates, like in traditional benefit regimes.
Kudos -- that's awesome :D
Do you seriously believe that anyone living in the US on $10K/year is "enjoying a life of leisure"?

This is the same category of lunacy as the "the homeless are just too lazy to work" argument. Anyone who has even seen the reality on the ground for people in these situations would know not to make them.
But at the moment, Medium is a small(er) platform. If my local coffee shop does a hugely successful business and is pushed by the market or management decisions to resemble the Starbucks he describes, I will probably find a new one.

I don't understand why the author thinks Medium is already Starbucks just cause of its pedigree -- if Jerry Baldwin or Gordon Bowker (Ev Williams) started a new coffee shop, partially cause they were dissatisfied with what Starbucks (Blogger) had become, I think I'd be willing to give it a try at least. But maybe that makes me foolish.
Surely the NSA has a pretty thorough screening process that you have to go through before you're allowed to work there.

Also, when you think of the consequences of leaking ( basically giving up your life in the USA) I'd guess most people would think twice about it and go with the pragmatic option, the same way that most of the population is ok with the NSA's actions as long they protect us from the terrorists.
Hi, I wrote this post. I see that everyone is as confused as I was with the "milliards de milliards" :) "Millions of trillions" is the right way to say it in English I believe (if you don't want to go over trillions). I edited the headline a couple of minutes after publishing to correct my mistake. Sorry!
The population of Facebook is exactly the sort of people that need this sort of outreach. It makes perfect sense to have a resource there, especially since some people's entire Internet usage centers only around Facebook.
The teenage scientist revolutionising cancer detection
That's because the name "Restore the 4th (including the 'penumbras' and 'emanations' of other constitutional protections found in the 4th, 5th, and 9th)" was already taken by a pedantic moron, so they had to settle on something that got the point across without taking up pages of text.
With respect, you seem to be generalizing from some wealthy people to all wealthy people. There are people who became wealthy without screwing other people in the process.
By following your own logic, it wouldn't be an oxymoron. It would be a pleonasm.
The teen chatters of the world—the ones who set the cultural trends—got a handle on it, but did their parents? :)
The birth rate for unmarried women is 4.7%, and the pregnancy rate for unmarried women is about 9%.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/unmarry.htm

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr56/nvsr56_15.pdf

The "perfect use" (i.e., use a condom every time) failure rate of condoms is about 2%.

So at least 60% of unmarried women who give birth and 80% of unmarried women who get pregnant did so as a result of choosing to have sex without a condom.
"Past income", meaning people who paid more into the system get more when they retire. But payouts are capped on both ends - you get a lot more back than you put in if you're on the lower end. You get screwed if you're on the top end.
Cool ! I hope this goes on for ever
The Secret Story Behind Obama’s Assassination of Two Americans in Yemen
I Agree. The sun is also just another star. Humans may have colonized lot of other star systems in a billion years, so the loss of a single one is not a threat to mankind and the species that originated on earth.

It may be sad to lose the home planet, with all its historical importance, but maybe then we are routinely terraforming other planets and moving them around.