skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think having some threads about politics--at least the main issues most people here care about--is very valuable. HN provides a particular perspective that is fairly hard to find outside other tech sites. Sure, the comments are not always up to quality and are sometimes quite extreme, but they offer a very interesting and often reasonably well-supported perspective.

The real problem is how many different articles and threads get upvoted on the same topic. One or two Snowden threads? Great! But ten or twenty? With more than one at a time? It's all too much. Not only does this take spots away from other relevant topics but it also fragments the discussion. And so we get repetition. Repeated comments, repeated ideas, repeated arguments... ad nauseum. I only have so much to gain from reading the same opinions over and over--especially if I agree with them!

This happens with other common topics as well, but it seems particularly endemic with certain political themes. Moreover, the political articles tend to be fairly similar to each other in nature and content. Sure, we get a fair amount of Go and Haskell articles too, but at least the articles themselves tend to vary quite a bit.

Of course, a very important aspect of HN is that everything is ultimately implicitly decided by the community. So here's my plea to everyone voting on articles: try to vote for fewer political articles, especially on "hot" topics. Don't completely ignore politics, but try to avoid having more than one every couple of days or at least more than one at a time.

Now, how do we actually go about doing this? I actually have no idea. Hopefully somebody else can come up with something :).
I think someone like Elon Musk is capable of doing such a thing. But the complexities of the law around the medical industry definitely don't make it easy and even after you're up and running, infiltrating a lobbyist dominated niche is the next hurdle.

I'm not sure if you've heard the story but there is an American inventor by the name of Thomas Shaw. He invented the first safe, retractable syringe that was more reliable than any existing solution. Companies tried copying his design and managed only to produce sub-par copies, it's an interesting read. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1007.blake.ht...
Here Comes Clojure: A Clojure Talk in Clojure in Vim
> I prefer to define peace as an absence of war

The absence of war is relative. The late 20th century was remarkably free of the kinds of conflicts between major powers that defined the 17th, 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries.

What relative peace coincident with the ascendancy of Rome, Britain, and America have in common is that a global with overwhelming military power keeps major wars from breaking out between lesser powers.

After all, do you think Europe suddenly just got religion in the 1950's after hundreds of years of infighting? Human nature didn't change that suddenly--what changed was the political balance of power: there was no room for Britain to war with France or Germany when the Soviet Union and the U.S. were internationally dominant.
GamesRage: a pay-what-you-want bundle of Polish indie games
Most of the political posts are related to the delay (or inability) in legal/social systems catching up with technological change. This is not really new but the frequency of these mis-matches are probably increasing as the technologies improve and get more widely used/deployed. There will be similar debates when each wave of change (3D printing, genetic engineering, etc.) hits the mainstream.

This all points to a greater requirement for technologists to be aware of and indeed in control of the political aspects of what is being created. The days of tinkering for tachnologies sake are probably becoming rather limited.
What's the difference between "big corporations and private interests" on the one hand and "state" on the other? They seem in all cases to be organizations of human beings with the capacity to concentrate and assert power over other human beings.

The difference seems to be in the scale and scope of that concentration and assertion of power. So, if you're inclined to minimize the capacity of any external institution to shape your life or to exploit you, which option is most optimal? Do you prefer option (a), which admits at most a haphazard and ad hoc system of institutional control - one which can, with some effort, be evaded - or option (b), which establishes a universal and de jure system of institutional control, evading which requires resources inaccessible to most?

I've always found it odd that so many think the solution to the concentration of power in the hands of a plurality organized institutions is to concentrate all power in the hands of a single organized institution.
Dude, https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=Bootstrap+3
One could add a new political page, there is one for 'ask' and 'jobs', maybe there should be one for 'politics'.
Talk about smugness.

>Opinions are just that - opinions.

Except when they're not in line with yours apparently. wow.
2go password hacker application - JAR Search - findJAR.com
A new argument against Monsanto
Once Reddit turned into a liberal orgy I left and found HN which for a long time haven't been occupied by political discussions. (and I am not a republican)

Now it seems that the same tendencies are trending, which is sad because it's very hard to not see how this can spin out of control and attract the "wrong" people.

We should discuss things like healthcare, snowden, patent law etc. but try and keep a focus on the mechanics of these things, rather than the morals.
Thank you, I've missed this part and additional reading is all over my head
if your TV supports it (HDMI CEC) it already does this .
http://gigaom.com/2013/07/24/chromecast-hdmi-cec/
No they don't. One guy started a major rewrite of a broken piece of infrastructure, and "the Go team [which he is part of] now regularly volunteers to help other teams with small projects", so as to learn more about how Go can replace and augment existing systems.

This headline is so far beyond journalism as to be a joke. It's just making shit up for the sake of having a "story".

I can imagine it now. They heard "gopher", thought of another animal, then thought about how awesome some of the coders on the Go team are (look at the blinking lights!), and BAM! invented an elite squadron of coders who fix whatever problem you have based on a combination of the navy Seals and the A-team.
In fact, I love the French. But I'm not above making a low-brow joke for easy karma.
I've never seen a TV that has Netflix/YouTube built-in that doesn't have a horrible interface. The [low] cost may be worth it just for less pain.
Living Surveillance Free for a Day
This is an awesome article. Liked and upvoted :)
"If the difference between the exchange rate between two countries doesn't change for a long time the prices of goods in both countries end up being roughly the same."

Simply not true. Compare the cost of a beer in, say, Thailand and Norway. Are you suggesting if the exchange rate were fixed they would reach parity over time?
When I started working with computers, nobody had one. People who programmed computers wore suits, and went to work in special air-conditioned rooms. Then we went through a stage where anybody engaged in commerce had a computer. My dentist had several computers. Finally, we're at the point where everybody in the world has computers -- many times several of them.

My point being that it's very difficult to distinguish between a computer story and a dentistry story. Computers are everywhere. They are part of everything. Likewise, people who hack and busy hacking everything. As hackers, we are involved in most all of the world's activities.

As several other commenters have pointed out, it's not that hackers are suddenly interested in price subsidies for turtle farmers in rural Texas. It's the other way around. It's that politics has invaded hacking. Political-types are taking the tools we have developed to help people and are using them for massive surveillance.

I think we do a great disservice to technology and ourselves if we view anything outside of technical, startup, and nerd-bait topics as not germane here. I think there is a difference between partisan bickering about some issue where one party is wanting to fight the other, for instance the issue of minimum wages in the U.S., and an issue like the extent of foreign participation in Echelon.

So sure, divisive political stories on social issues that only create strife and division? Count me out on those. Stories about how the tech we use and develop every day is being used to harm people? If that's not hacker-related, I don't know what is.
Here's a few:

http://failex.blogspot.com/

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction

http://fvisser.nl/post/2013/april/23/slide-cfams-talk.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5688803
I didn't know that GB consoles didn't have a flat memory model. That was horrible to program with x86/DOS and must have sucked even more on a tiny hand-held.
The times we could tinker with the Internet and no one else cared about those 'bunch of geeks in their basement' are now over. The Internet went mainstream, everyone and their dog uses it for half of their life things. The Politics, once mostly irrelevant to tech, is coming for us, whether we want it or not.
As a temporary workaround I access YouTube over an IPv6 tunnel through Hurricane Electric. Since I set it up almost two years ago I have had no issues with YouTube. The only downside has been the IRS's quarterly tax site which seems to be misconfigured for IPv6 access but works if r over IPv4 (/etc/hosts FTW).
Apple TV is 3x the price and doesn't work well outside of the Apple eco-system (you can watch Netflix, but other than that you'll want an iOS device or Mac).
Two-Day Diets: How Mini Fasts Can Help Maximize Weight Loss
First, adjusted for PPP that is more like $3,000. Second, nearly all personal and professional services cost way more in the U.S. Try hiring a nanny in India versus the U.S. and compare the prices.

In any case, whenever you talk about prices, it's important to try and think about it in terms of supply and demand. Why might prices for similar services be lower in India? In both countries, the price for that heart surgery is roughly the same order of magnitude as the per-capita income. But the median Indian is living far closer to subsistence than the median American. India's population is 70%+ rural and slightly over 50% are dependent on agriculture. Heart surgery isn't really an option for the median Indian.[1] While it may be financially catastrophic for the median American, between insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, etc, it is an option for the median American. The net result is that demand for heart surgeries, relative to the population, is far lower in India.

At the same time, the supply of doctors is higher. Being a doctor is considered socially desirable in India, and as a result there is a good educational infrastructure in place and plenty of candidates.

Higher supply and lower relative demand = lower prices.

I bet you can explain a lot about the U.S. healthcare industry in terms of regulatory issues, etc, but the magnitude of the impact of that is probably the difference between the U.S. and the UK, not the U.S. and India.

[1] It should be noted that when people give anecdotal reports about what things are like in India, there is tremendous perspective distortion. People will often pretend like relatively well-off people living in the cities are the "typical Indian" when in reality they're probably in the top 10%. It's as if the vast majority of India, poor and rural, doesn't exist.
Two’s complement and absolute values.
Jaybird 2.2.4 snapshot with basic Java 8 / JDBC 4.2 support
The ending on this article is horrible, it's suggesting vitamin C use killed both Linus and his wife. Everyone knows he was a nut job when it came to vitamin C, do we really need articles almost 20 years after he died still poking fun at him?

I'd much rather have an article about modern studies and the benefits of vitamins to those with poor nutrition (I.e every ramen fed college student and entrepreneur).
I'm not calling you a burglar.
Your last point is why I've basically stopped trying new apps at all. I've been burned a few times now. And it really sucks to put X hours into something only to be beaten over the head by a hidden cost.

I'm hardly a mobile app power user, but I've dumped around $150 on apps. Almost all of that was before in-app purchases. Now even paid apps can have in-app purchasing, making it impossible to know what you're actually paying for without thorough review. So I no longer make impulse purchases and I hardly spend any time doing app discovery. I don't mean to speak for the author, but maybe this is what is meant by drawing money away from the ecosystem.
Nothing is wrong with it. There's no basic human entitlement to a cheap copy of Adobe Photoshop, so the ethical dimension here is extremely limited, and I'm disappointed to see you're being downvoted for making a very salient point.

I have no sympathy for those of my fellow Australians who think they have some valid complaint that the price of digital assets is "too high".

Australians simply do have a higher willingness to pay, and lower price elasticity of demand, for a whole host of economic reasons. Companies charge the price that maximises their returns, and this means price segmentation wherever it is legal.

Moreover it is, of course, also impossible to legislate against: the same laws would effectively peg the Australian dollar. This is just political grandstanding; nothing will change.
Sure. I did use the phrase "other countries". I don't know enough about Saudi society to counter your narrative that it is only laws that mean that every single woman is clad in a burkha (which I find suspicious). So I took an anecdote from a society that I know.
So what. Now all the people that haven't seen it will notice. heh
I've just returned to the UK after living in Western Australia for 3 years. I'm a runner and was absolutely shocked at the markup on running shoes.

Many high street shops selling shoes for $200 + dollars when you could get them for $80 dollars delivered to Australia from the UK, by buying online.

I have no idea why people would shop these high street stores.
Mapping Urban Perception - Which place is more wealthy?
Scraping Google Maps Search Results with Javascript and PHP
What's wrong with complaining about being forced to pay more and engaging in activities to level the playing field?

I've always found this style of argument to be innately humourous, a sort of "oh no, they're fighting back somehow - only businesses should be able to make things more favourable for themselves!"
Counterpoint - as a molecular gastronomy enthusiast, I'm very excited about this and similar developments.

I've already seen the huge opportunities that comparatively simple techniques like sous-vide cooking have afforded me, and I've eaten at restaurants like the Fat Duck which turned a lot of my concepts about food on their head. A food printer sounds like a fascinating way to develop new flavour combinations, textures, presentations - I can't wait.
The nav bar that automatically collapses for mobile is an excellent addition. This is one of the main things lacking in quickly made prototypes.
"Western Europe" is an odd and outdated term as it is the EU that is acquiring political and economic powers and which some seek to federate. Leaving out the most religious EU countries like Malta, Cyprus, Romania, Poland and Italy you will get a very skewed picture if you are mentally equating Western Europe with the European Union (which is a term often conflated itself with the ambiguous "Europe"). Large portions of legislation in "Western Europe" are decided upon by Southern European politicians in the European Council and the European Parliament where representation is weighted by population in various ways (QMV and MEP caps).

Some "North Eastern America" with a selection of blue states would give you pretty different results to the USA mean as well. The question people would ask though is: what justification do you have for putting that geographical constraint on your study?
The inquiry recommends bypassing geo-blocks, which is quite telling.
Great Products Focus On A Motif
There’s a cumulative “in-hospital” time cap of 80 hours/week (88 for neurosurgical residents). In practice, however, this means that (a) the cap is regularly broken or (b) residents end up doing preparatory study, reading papers, doing research, etc outside of the hospital to remain under the cap. They are still working more or less the same hours.

Also, the 16 hour/day rule is only for interns, IIRC. Resident shifts can go up to 30(?) hours.
The obvious difference is that corporations are not democratically governed by the people whose lives they affect. Or are even required to pay attention to those people.

Yes there are exceptions when the reverse is true. (but note that I am calling large corporations)

I'm pretty sure there is no large corporation whose management is democratically elected by all the people it employs and whose life they affect, with each vote counting the same, be it a janitor or a CEO.

I know the above idealistic view of a democratic government is also not true in the real world, but governments do get a lot closer to that ideal than giant corporations ever have.
Because it works very well and the tasks aren't really all that different? Push changes, synchronise files across machines.
> draconian copyright regimes

What are you refering to?
Can someone explain Gödel's incompleteness theorems in layman terms?
Also...

So naturally on a market with higher purchasing power and higher overall price level

Median wage in the US and Australia are equivalent - in the mid- to high- 40k range.
That culture is down to several factors:

* price

* availability

* quality of our TV Networks
Is it really less pain if you can't use the thing if your phone is charging in the other room?
Your assumption is askance. It is perfectly fine to charge people different amounts for a product based on their wealth.
So a thought experiment ...

Is it ok to charge different prices to black people vs white people? For the sake of argument, assume there is a genuine difference in demand between races (I would imagine it is true, but let's not debate that).

If it is not OK, why is it OK to charge Australians differently to other people, beyond the genuine differences in actual costs to deliver software here?
Oh yeah, more articles about Bootstrap 3 please. I hear it got released or something, and it has flat buttons.

Great minds could be focused on better things.

For that, great minds would first need to stop patting themselves on the back, and be concerned about more than what's on their desk or in their bank accounts. Supposedly great minds built drones and surveillance technology the not so great minds get to clean up after. Oh so great minds are giving politicians who can hardly spell "web" correctly these fantastic toys because... hmmm, why, actually?

Maybe it would help if you defined "great mind" first? Consider Einstein, Russell or Chomsky, for example. Consider Socrates or just about anyone... If they had two brain cells to rub together, chances are good they cared about politics. Saying that politics doesn't have any place on HN is itself a political stance in a way, and it's hardly like all stories are about politics now.. we simply have those, too. What's so horrible about that? What kind of fucked up beauty sleep does it disturb?
Belek vakantieparadijs aan de Turkse Rivièra
I was just about to post on the same topic. I really hope to see this project fly!
A while back, the Australian dollar was about US 60c. I would suggest this was the basis for which software was pegged against. When the exchange rate changed, the priced stayed fixed because it maintained status quo for the locals. Over time, it became the norm for others to follow suit.
It's actually quite simple: if you think it's too expensive or loaded pricing, don't buy it.
This is not something worth being angry about.
I've had the idea for a while for a new thread-management model for social bookmarking sites like Reddit or HN, and I think it would help to avoid this quagmire.

• In the new model, multiple "posts" (outbound article links or textual self-posts) could be attached to a single comment thread. The thread, not the post, would be the root-level object tracked by the system: Thread HAS MANY {Post, Comment}.

• New, hot posts which were started as their own threads, but which "should belong" to an existing thread, would get merged into that existing thread by the mods.

• The combined thread would then appear, under the title of the newest "post" in it, on the index pages, with a single aggregate score from all the posts merged to create it (though any "freshness"-based calculations would presumably look at the age of the newest post merged into the thread, not the age of the thread as a whole.)

• Clicking through from the index page would always take you to the thread page, not directly to the outbound link URL of the newest post.

• On the thread page, you'd see a header section containing all the actual outbound links and/or textual self-posts, newest first; and then a single unified comments section (also merged from all the post-threads.)

• Comments would be encouraged to take all the posts in the thread so far as prerequisite reading for their comment, rather than just the newest one. In other words, to speak to the accumulated knowledge of the thread so far.

• Older topics, still attached to the thread, would remain open for dicussion; you'd never have to rehash your old comment about X from the old X thread in the new X thread, since your comment would still be there in the new X thread (it being the same thread.)

---

So for example, in this model, there'd only be one "Snowden/NSA/PRISM" thread. When new articles came out regarding all that, they'd get attached to the thread, the thread would pop to the hot page (to roughly where the article-on-its-own was trending), and the previous discussion in the thread could be continued in light of the new article.

Thoughts?
Samsung wins not-so-final 'final' pinch-to-zoom patent decision
Converting JSON to a CSV file with Python
We are at war with [REDACTED]. We have always been at war with [REDACTED].
The problem with self-moderation is that it's not a stable solution. Political stories draw in people interested primarily in politics, and since it's so easy to be interested in, it draws in lots of people who are primarily focused on that.

Anyone can have an opinion on politics, whereas finding people to discuss actors vs CSP vs threads as methods of concurrent programming is much tougher, and sacrificing that to reenact liberals vs libertarians for the 37898289261st time on the internet is a tragedy.
Largest space battle in history claims 2,900 ships, untold virtual lives
Great! Thanks for the link. Have to figure out whether mine supports it.
I'm going to have to point out that "One of the most admirable things about hackers is their ability to accomplish great things without - or in spite of government." is in itself a pretty political statement.

But I definitely think it would be nice to not have the entire front page blanketed with posts on the same current affairs topic. Not sure how to do that though, without introducing tags, or categories, or asking/forcing people to post links as comments if there's an existing post on the topic.
I would say most people are just as opinionated about language, hardware and software choices as they are about politics. Though the participation threshold on most political topics is probably lower as politics tends to have a wider appeal and more inclusive than say a more narrowly used programming language or software tool.