skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've honestly been appreciating Gmail more and more. I find their interface to be innovative and quickly becoming more and more streamlined and minimalistic. I love the new editing. RARELY do I need complex formatting, so their features solve my 90% needs well and sure I hit a bit of frustration 10% of the time when I need a feature i haven't used before.

With recent innovations I have less and less reason to use dedicated desktop apps. I honestly love every aspect of gmail.

The worst ATM is that desktop clients don't support the multiple inboxes that gmail introduced, so most clients think i have a ton of unread messages. So i wish google would come out with some desktop clients with multiple account support.

Edit: I usually see my email appear in my android app before I even see it in the desktop.
Ask HN: Is there a site like HN for content creators?
The down votes are faster and hides the posts.
So people use it as censor.
As all lefties like censorship..
Want votes? Talk how bad USA is but forget what European countries do that are worse.
(Ask the African continent )
If you are a developer bitcoins are not the best option. How many customers will prefer to pay you in bitcoins than in the local currency? very few and it can be an extra headache for them. Also bitcoins' fluctuations can play against you because you can't change your price all the time according its hourly value.
Next you'll tell me that their movies are compressed and not at the same quality as blurays!
cool dashboard, would be better if we could make more than just these fluff measurements
The value of brevity might be greater than you think...
The claim in the article, and I agree, and the Go maintainers agree, that it is a problem. It will never be fixed, but it is a problem (or, to put it another way, it causes serious maintainability and understandability problems, if this kind of behavior is common across API boundaries).

I also want to point out that I don't think typecasting itself is a bad thing in all cases. But you shouldn't type cast objects that don't belong to you.
Hellbanning is not applied by "mods", it's the algorithmic result of the community downvoting you, or you being caught in vote-ring detection.

The small warning period you get is a flurry of downvotes. I accept that's not much use if you can no longer edit / delete that down-voted comment, or if you're not online at the time.

I've heard that you can send a short email saying something like "I got hellbanned after {URL:this comment} - please consider un-banning me and I won't be a dick in future".
hmm, yeah the typography used on HN is very poor, that's true. I think that's intended, but it would have been possible to mark such posts differently and less disturbing to the eye. (Personally I don't think that the HN UI is going to get some overhaul anytime soon though.)
I remember, when he was still alive, a heated flamewar would break out on Bikeforums and he'd appear out of the ether and authoritatively quash all argument with his immense knowledge. RIP
I have over 13k yet have lost the ability to flag posts and articles. Quite mysterious.
I find it more worrying that people are hand-wringing obsessively over any service that collects any amount of personal data. Promoting innovation and finding creative ways to approach problems are both much more important than enumerating the nefarious ways that people or groups or governments can use the resulting data.

While it's an important cause to fight for, some privacy discussions that are consuming various parts of the tech community these days are just silly.

I don't find anything about this service incredibly worrying. I'm much more worried about what we don't know -- the data-collecting activities we don't knowingly participate in. But since we don't know what we don't know, I try not to waste away my life hand-wringing over those things either.
There's an outside chance that Netflix only has a license for the pan-and-scan versions, and the studios want more $$$ for the widescreen versions.
He's a racist schizophrenic religious fanatic who never, ever posts remotely on topic. Some of his posts advocate death and violence. How in the world could this be considered an edge case? It's the definition of creepy. Isn't Losethos/TempleOS/whatever more like the reference case for hellbanning?

The way I understand it hellbanning is supposed to protect us from both spam and abusive content. TempleOS is both.
I'm not a web dev, so I'm no help on that side, but I noticed something odd/wrong(?) about your main page:

When I scroll all the way to the bottom your footer bar appears (with your Facebook and Twitter icon/links). The footer then disappears if I don't move the cursor for a second or two. This happens on Firefox, Chrome, and Safari on my Mac.

It's kind of jarring for the footer to disappear when I didn't knowingly do anything to make it disappear because:

1. it disappeared

2. the rest of the page moves when the footer disappears.

Good luck!
I love this guy. He was the only place online that I could find an explanation for why the left pedal of a bike screws on opposite to normal direction. Everyone that fixes bikes knows the left one screws on "wrong", but no one at any bike shop could explain why the left. Because on a first analysis, it seems that it should be the right one that needs reverse threading to keep from getting unscrewed.

http://sheldonbrown.com/pedals.html (scroll down to "Pedal Threading")
Movies are shot for theaters, not your devices.
I don't think all Americans are in work ...

edit: Brief searching gives around 135 million Americans in work (this number maybe excluding farm work).
(For better statistics see gapminder.org, it's quite fascinating)
If you accidentally re-submit an article you get taken to the previous submission, which now also has another upvote from you.

I've posted a link from a banned domain before, and it was dead on submission but my account was ok.

I strongly agree about /new - I feel it's important to visit and to upvote the interesting articles.

(Sorry, my sentence structure sucks.)
After receiving 5000 karma points in June alone, due to the intersection of Snowden news and my 27 years researching China - I noticed that my posts started getting downvoted heavily by HN management.

HN management apparently does not believe Snowden news is hacker news. Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, and Snowden have more than proven their hacker skills in software, and censoring that news is not tolerable to me. All the YC companies combined are insignificant compared that important work.

Personally, I believe we've already reached "peak" Hacker News and "peak" Y Combinator. Even though I respect YC, HN, and PG, the main problem is that the number of users continues to grow, and the basic code behind HN hasn't changed in years. Indeed, what new code there is seems to be refinement in excluding people.

Journalists worldwide are descending on HN as a clear cut seminal news source, and no software is being written to maintain the integrity of HN, given the new influx of lay users. Banning is a blunt, ineffective tool to manage HN growth.

I am one of the earliest software engineers on earth (42 years), and remember/prefer the early pure days of HN (as we all do). I have many ideas how to solve that, however more and more hell banning wont do it. Give a man a hammer and everything looks like a nail. Ward Cunningham's (inventor of the wiki) new work on federated wikis is excellent, trailblazing work on maintaining purity in an fast growing editorial environment. Allowing multiple "views" of HN is a better approach. Google Search does it well - every Google user has a unique "view", even on identical search terms.

Partly, I think PG would rather maintain his personal bully pulpit (he's earned it) than build a better mousetrap at HN. Editorial monoculture is always easier to build than an open multiview.

Funny part is, an open design would allow the original pure HN to be one of the "views" (and likely the main view). HN will never ban its way back to purity.

Attempts to return to purity via downvoting, censorship, and hell banning alone are bad software. The fact that HN leadership thinks this way is the primary reason for the fall in quality at HN. The growth in readership does not have to dumb down HN. Write better software.

I've contributed solidly to the HN community, especially with early breaking news in China technology, censorship, and gov't sponsored hacking. Yet, I'm 80% banned, even though my careful submits ranked #1 on the HN leaderboard in June.

I have never spammed, never organized up voting, and have abided by the the rules as I understand them.

The ban hammer is a tool, but a relatively an ineffective tool. It won't solve the problem.
New dinosaur found
Actually I missed this! Thanks, looks very interesting :)
You are right, but I am not sure which social model would fit to everybody as comforting. Many people are offended by Anarchy and it remains a question to me if communities would actually be able to manage themselves or not. Do you have some more food of thought to share, that's quite interesting? :)
Apple’s Move Into TV Relies on Cooperation With Industry Leaders
It's an edge case in that he doesn't represent the typical hellbanned user. I agree that in his case, it's for the best that his posts aren't public.

I'm also convinced most or all of his posts are script generated anyway, not that it really matters.
Well right, that's fine, but a police officer who in the course of their job may have to encounter dogs, should most certainly have even the minimal training in animal behavior and guidance in how to handle potentially dangerous animals short of shooting them.
I'd love to see Yahoo! differentiate itself from its competitors by becoming a privacy conscious company.
65. started programming when I was 20 years old.
Giving the 'showdead' option is a form of openness.

Anyone posting a new article gets dumped to '/new', so it may get visited more than one would think; it would be interesting to see some data on how frequently it gets hit (or on upvotes originating on /new vs on the main page.)
I find it interesting hell banned users are still posting. For instance, i'm sure TempleOS is aware he's banned.
You write posts like this, but complain that it is "lefties" that are censoring you?

I really hate the attitude of "the downvotes prove me right". :-/
I don't think it's "fear of change", but rather that people in the civilized world, who live in urban areas, are rarely faced with dangerous situations and don't have developed a judgement of when a situation is dangerous. They are not in fear when a fire breaks, they are passive. Fear would make them think quick on their feet.
That's for everyone, not just workers. The figure for Americans who work with some non-zero salary is $29,000.
4 Leadership Lessons From the Boxing Ring
I really think Yahoo Mail has seriously improved over the past couple of years. I've had an account with them for over 10 years and while gmail originally had more features, I find Yahoo Mail's UI experience superior.
Cheap knock-offs drive acceptance, I wouldn't get one either but I'm happy to see it in the market.
By the way, this "ask PG" post just dropped from #5 on HN to #32 in just a few minutes. Management at HN, if you can't stand the heat, why build the kitchen?
Agreed. From what I've read [1], the syntax rules and semantic rules take up about 40 pages with the rest of the book being "introduction, exposition, core material, appendices and index".

[1] http://mythryl.org/my-Mythryl_is_not_just_a_bag_of_features_... (go to the middle of the page or search for "pages")
The false positives are kind of the point.
Happened to me. I was a member for a long time. On a single occasion I believe I accidentally responded to the wrong comment and I got banned. I was posting for a long time before an admin informed me I was banned. I had no idea why until I looked back at my responses and I noticed one out of context.

I had always been a fan of this site and try to join in a discussion once in a while to be part of a community. It really ruined my day when I found out I had been banned. I felt betrayed and lost my 100+ karma.
>> hellbanning is a generous form of dealing with the unruly by at least letting them visit and talk to those who want to hear the unruly, without either letting the unruly annoy all the guests or throwing some out entirely

That argument is convincing, but I still believe that it's not fair treatment to not letting them at least know about their ban. I didn't know that the unruly can still talk to others. That's changing things completely!
Collin is doing an IAMA on the story: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1iiyxu/i_cofounded_app...
Make Crap. Now. Not Later.
It's supposed to be passive aggressive. That's the point. It's not supposed to get any point across. Hell-banning is a form of "do not feed the trolls".

Some people enjoy making useless posts. They can continue making useless posts. Just with hellbanning most people no longer see those useless posts.

Some people are accidentally hellbanned. It sucks for those people. But they can sometimes become unbanned, or they can start a new account.
I didn't get a flurry of downvotes. It was one comment that got me banned. In fact my comment had at least a neutral karma rating at the time I was hellbanned.

My questionable comment was replied to by someone claiming to have moderator powers here, and the mod / person said that I was an example of unacceptable behavior on HN. After that my user account was hellbanned.
Well your example was stupid. There are always exceptions, but "the public" as a whole is stupid. Why do you think election campaigns run on negative advertising instead of talking policy?

http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2012

"Lincoln" was #13.

Here, let me rub your face in the stupidity: apparently almost half the United States population believes in ghosts and does not believe in evolution: http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500160_162-994766.html

I'm in no way coming from a position of intellectual superiority, rather from observational despair.
Interplanetary Photobomb
RaspberryPi: Build Your Own Google TV
You can try on Reddit.
Select subreddit like http://www.reddit.com/r/graphic_design for example.
Good customers might not mind or find it much of hassle.

Compared to sending hard currency to a an Argentinian, it might be far less hassle, especially for the developer.

And you can quite easily change your BTC price all the time: negotiate the rate in USD, but always settle in BTC, using the exchange rate at the moment of payment.
Robots Could Take Over Fast Food Jobs
Sorry, I don't mean the links someone posted. But the IP and other "meta-data".
Obviously chemotherapy causes cancer, because all the people who have chemotherapy end up having cancer.
I don't think it's IP based, no.
Because then people will use the "name that gets associated with Bill Gates upon donating", to further their own cause and popularity. Besides, they are rich enough to sustain their charity's causes, I am pretty sure they know about budgeting.
"Management at HN" is probably just pg rolling his eyes and muttering "not this shit again..."
Its nice that you're feeling PC, but do you really want to contend that there's no link between skin colour and crime in the US? I thought that was a fairly massive social issue over there, well-deserving of a wikipedia page.
We Can All Go Home Now. Piracy Is Mostly Dead
Three things jump out at me in that post:

1. Using any online 'appraisal service' or what have you as a pricing guideline is not something you can depend on. There have been numerous tools like this and sometimes their results are so wrong it is funny.

2. People who own domains get do get a lot of mail, often of the "let me scam you" variety. Standing out from these is the trick.

3. A good domain name is worthless without good content. Don't pick a bad name, by all means, but what lives at that name is much more important than the name imho.
> getting downvoted heavily by HN management.

Do you mean your posts were turning grey? Or that your submissions were being flagged?

Because neither of those is necessarily done by "HN management". This is something that is done by the community.

Many people - I'm one of them - were flagging the Snowden posts.
Meta posts, and posts about hellbanning, are common and unpopular. They always get flagged pretty heavily.
I actually went with 111 in practice, but trust HN users to optimize anything.
The last arcade
Since we've established that less than half of the population are in work, it follows that the median for everyone is 0...
You're right, but I don't have a clear picture what the typical hellbanned user looks like. There are spam bots submitting stories, but you don't see them in discussions. Hellbanned users you actually meet in threads are, at least as best as I can recollect, most often posting normal stuff that wouldn't rank as low quality. Sometimes I click on their history to see where things went wrong and it's usually not hard to find this one post that ended their account. It doesn't matter if all the rest of it was pretty good, that's all it takes: one glitch.

I'm not sure if I'd say this is a good system or not. Maybe it would be more productive to have a time limit on bans that result from one-time offenses.
I'm not saying its well done but just "cropping" would crop to the middle "lopping off the left portion" is a film thats "panned" to the right.
This is known as the efficient charity problem. GiveWell is the one of the few groups trying to solve it: http://www.givewell.org/
8 Years of Income, Graphed and Analyzed
There's a demo of a commercial implementation in an earlier post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6058447

But here are opensource solutions:

http://musicbrainz.org/doc/Fingerprinting

http://echoprint.me/

http://www.politepix.com/openears/

http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/wiki/
Engineering the life I want to lead
Ah, gotcha, the wording just made it seem like you were saying : "The north is bad, Anchorage, for example...ect."

sorry.
U.S. Can No Longer Be Trusted To Protect The Internet From Power Grabs
Tabbed inbox is terrible.

Click the gear icon on the right, then click 'Configure Inbox'

Untick every checkbox but Primary, then click Save. It's now saner.
Gaslight leads effort to create training program for Ruby app developers
Glass is 100% hype. If it were released tomorrow it would flop hard. Any review you read of it is meh, it really does nothing different than your phone and isn't practical to use in social situations or life in general. If you want to see 'real' new technology that people would actually pay money for, check out the Oculus Rift.

I'm not saying the Rift is the same. I'm saying both Glass and the Rift have been hyped a lot. The difference is the Rift really is practical - you see a lot more 'real' people using the Rift and enjoying it vs. Glass.
Not true, I've received a letter from HN management, and have witnessed a subtle, concerted effort to censor content.
Not really. You can't dynamic_cast across across protected or private inheritance boundaries, even if the function attempting it is a friend. As long as your public inheritance hierarchy maintains your contract (and they should) you're fine.
Correct, and not only is it never in the clear over the network, the key is stored such that Mozilla cannot decrypt your content.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-sync-data-secur...
I sold RebelSpirits.com for $500 to a winery business owner last year. We scanned and emailed each other our drivers licenses and he sent a check for $500 in the mail. I released the domain to him after I deposited the check. His check was from a major bank.

Can some one tell me if my method was smart or stupid? What could have gone wrong other than check fraud?
I've been a fan of his since the '90s. I once had the opportunity while visiting a relative in Boston to ask Sheldon in person at the shop where he worked (Harris Cyclery) if he could help me find a rather obscure part for my old Raleigh. I really had no expectation they would have it, I just wanted to see the shop and maybe encounter him. Sure enough, they had it, and my encounter with The Oracle only cost me about $5.

Was a sad day when he passed.
The New York Times wrote an article about the Lyme disease vaccine in 1999. It gives a bit of a different perspective. The long and short of it is, it seemed too new and too much of a pain, and a lot of people didn't see a benefit due to the presence of other tick-borne diseases that necessitated the same checks for ticks even with the vaccine.

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/13/nyregion/lukewarm-response...
Hey. Whats your email, Id like to feature you on something to help you get a little more eyeballs.
Mandela making "dramatic progress", turns 95 in hospital
Here's a video explaining it:
http://youtu.be/r5iuwrvKz_g http://youtu.be/ynwz8H66chY
Reminds me of a higher-tech version of Chaos Zone in Continuum/Subspace. All formal etiquette was out the window, it was always funny to see zone newbies complain until the penny dropped.
Cool site; thanks for the link.

For all of us on mobile browsers: http://www.gapminder.org
Hardcore or bust: New wave of mobile strategy games target the core gamer
You got 9 features on the landing page which looked like a wall of text. Distill it to 3 perhaps?
Some police scanners are open to the public, and I don't think anyone ended up in handcuffs for listening in.
dynamic_cast downcasts in C++ only work across public inheritance. In particular a object that inheritance a Closable interface privately and a Reader interface publicly wouldn't allow a cross cast.

dynamic_cast isn't a loophole in the type system, it's there to strengthen it.
Good customers tend to be a rare too though.

It's less about the fluctuation and more about other services not accepting Bitcoin at the moment. If your utility providers accept Bitcoin that could grease the wheels a bit toward general acceptance.

I don't even consider Bitcoin's privacy as a selling point; more than that, it's that real forgery is impossible like going back to the days of trading with gold*

*Of course there were crafty forgers mixing in lead and the like to make fake coins and bullion, but crypto makes that harder.
He inspired me to start building my own wheels, to experiment more with 70s-era French steel frames, Raleigh 3-speeds, Raleigh 20s, flip-flop hubs, fixed 3-speed Sturmey-Archer hubs, and on and on. Wonderful man.
It's easy to send USD to an Argentinian using a "cave".

Try to ask a customer to pay you in bitcoins and please let me know your experience.
Google Opens The New Google Maps For Web To Everyone
Agreed that these are pretty low-level issues - even testing w/ a separate PCIe controller didn't help much. For routing and hackability I'd go w/ a Mikrotik RouterBoard, or for pure price/performance (and a really polished UI), I'd go w/ Ubiquiti's Edge Routers.
I still play SS, I feel ancient.
Ask HN: How does your business manage passwords?
I'm curious how the startups and small to medium businesses out there manage their passwords. I work for a company that's experiencing massive growth and up until now, Keepass had worked for the Operations team as it was made up of six people. Now there is almost 40 of us, it's unmanagable. We don't know who's doing what and we can't revoke access to the files after someone leaves.

Unfortunately, most 'enterprise' grade software out there is horribly designed, has a terrible UI and is very hard to use. Does anyone have any recommendations for a product? Would be particularly interested to hear if there's any startups in this space looking to help with team password management.
It might even replace the use of atomic vector plotters suspended in a nice hot cup of tea.