skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> He was prepared to molest them but an alarm was raised and it upset him. He shot the girls spraying bullets that killed seven of them on the spot, while the eighth died in hospital.

That's not quite true. He killed 5 and injured another 5. The molesting part is only speculation, though he did bring a tube of lube with him.

> Noting that the village and the school where the killing took place had become a visitors’ attraction, the Amish elders had the building razed to ground overnight

That's also not true. It was demolished 11 days later by diggers.
Computer-Brain Interfaces Making Big Leaps
It would also prevent throwaway accounts. Sometimes throwaways do provide insightful comments.
You don't have an insurmountable problem. It might take a week or two for one or two individuals to catch you up on filtering out junk submissions and organizing the rest. But a volunteer, unless they are familiar with your priorities, resources, and the nature of valid issues in your systems, probably can't do it.

But that beats dealing with complaints like this pedagogical complaint on an ad hoc basis. If they could track their issue and see progress being made, they wouldn't be yanking your chain. In fact, in my cursory examination, I didn't see content issues being tracked. You must have a few of those.
A fourth possibility is that the growing user base has made HN a larger target for social media marketing.
The UK and every other developed country also has to somehow finance their healthcare system. Regardless of whether people pay privately or via taxes (or insurance or…), the cost still has to be covered somehow – of course, these costs can be distributed more evenly among the high earners and those earning less if they are re-routed through the tax system, but the value still has to be created somewhere.

Note that this holds even though (or in addition) the cost of healthcare per person in the US seems to be slightly higher than on average in the western world.
For Twitter, Free Speech Is a High-Wire Act
I don't have a great answer, but maybe:

Due to the reasons listed above men work long hours. Women, which in many professions are the minority, must then match those hours in order to not look bad.
>We have simply discussed the surveillance scandal enough. There's just nothing more we can say or do that will matter right now.

The opposite is true.

For too long the minimal to zero reporting these issues have received in the majority of news outlets was met with an abundance of silence and indifference. Outside of a few communities on the net (and fewer offline), there hasn't been discussion on these issues. The Guardian finally breaks one story that manages to have legs for a week or two in the mainstream press and we're done here?

No. Just no.

>I, like you, appreciate the possibility of a board devoted entirely to technical content...

This has never been the case for HN, nor was it ever an ideal for HN:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

From the first line of the first question about submission guidelines: On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups.

While most (read: not all) political posts are discouraged, the discussions around surveillance have been more technical here than anywhere, and it would be hard to conceive of a discussion with a political element being more on-topic and imperative than the discussions of late.
A hack writer is a term that massively pre-dates the usage of the word hack in technology, often used to describe journalists or pulp novelists, so I would assume that it is a deliberate play on words marrying more than one meaning of hack.

Which would also mean that the term "hacking text" in this context is itself a bit of a hack.

...

edit - I went for a look at old uses of the word hack as it pertains to writing and found that there is another variation in meaning, that of "hack words".

Here it is in use from the 1858 periodical, "The Ladies' Companion", in a passage that as chance would have it is discussing the creative usage of words -

"Of the influence which German literature Jean Paul and others has had on Carlyle enough has been said elsewhere. This influence certainly shows itself markedly in his style though by no means detracting from its originality.

It has given to him a somewhat burdensome richness of compound words and a few unfamiliar derivations. He is fond of seizing upon the primary meaning of a word and bringing out that meaning forcibly by contrast and repetition. He introduces innovations of foreign words to a great extent and not unfrequently uses simple ones in an obsolete or new sense.

These may be looked upon as faults but it will be found that his foreign introductions are mostly from languages which form the basis of English having an affinity to accepted English words and that they invariably have a peculiar significance which could not have been given by more common expressions. His obsolete or new senses too show generally an evident reason for their adoption.

He is fond of hack words - a kind of slang of the day; for instance, "sham", "jargon", "gigmanity". He uses such words as watchwords of the time wherein he writes, as bearing in them a nineteenth century view of things."

from here - http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=gLIRAAAAYAAJ&dq=%22hack%2...
While I initially agree with you and can understand your view point based on your previous experience, I think there are two categories of tech:
-Business Value Add
-Hype / Marketing

I separate these out because we've already gone through a terrible economic downturn that is sputtering to produce jobs and yet we see an explosion of jobs in the tech sector. That's because of the value add software that is reducing the number of employees, paperwork or steps in a process a business needs in order to operate.

Those types of companies are going to be fine through another economic downturn because their clients have realized how much their saving by using the software. These value add tech businesses may see a slow down, but not a collapse.

The biggest example that is here to stay is E-Commerce. Look at how many companies / businesses are realizing how much easier / cheaper it is to go online than build a brick and mortar store with employees, rent, utilities, taxes, repairs, maintenance, etc.

Even some apps are here to stay. AirBNB, for example, is a personal value add when I'm traveling. I have no problem paying them a couple dollars to reduce my overall travel costs by 15-30%.

What will collapse almost overnight are the apps, websites, etc that are simply fluffy websites, marketing materials, or buggy unusable software.

My thought is stick with the people helping other people make or save money, and you'll be safe through the next one.
I envy the time when everyone is wearing a suite and a tophat with an awesome mustasche, aswell as acting like a true gentlemen.
lobste.rs is invite only, isn't it? Do you think that's been their main problem, or are there others?

I ask because a forum project is on the back burner for me and this kind of thing is relevant to my interests.
I see the first two sentences of your reply as inextricably linked and contradictory. You don't think it's the culture of it being acceptable to make sites that won't work without JS that is ultimately forcing the Tor folks to enable it? For instance, reading up on this subject I found this:

> Why is NoScript configured to allow JavaScript by default in the Tor Browser Bundle? Isn't that unsafe?

> We configure NoScript to allow JavaScript by default in the Tor Browser Bundle because many websites will not work with JavaScript disabled. Most users would give up on Tor entirely if a website they want to use requires JavaScript, ...

https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#TBBJavaScriptEna...
I think it'd be interesting if any account less than a year old had their comments put into the 'pending' state pg has been talking to.
Floyd is from Lancester PA but he is not Amish. He is Mennonite.
From my perspective, the RSS reader mostly killed Slashdot for me; Slashdot was great when it was able to surface things I normally wouldn't have seen otherwise. Once RSS (then Twitter) came along, the sites that were generating their own content were easier to find/skim directly rather than waiting for Slashdot to throw them a little publicity.

I frequent HN because it does serve that purpose that Slashdot once did - bringing content to my attention that I otherwise would have missed.
I think part of the problem is in the mechanics of the editing/modding process. Too many similar articles (and sometimes, the same URL, but slightly altered) make it to the front page in a short time span. Even worse, the desire for advocacy is so strong that people tolerate and upvote blatant blogspam. Otherwise, I think an interest in current events - i.e. this is the world we live in -- is not too orthogonal from tech/entrepreneurial topics, and can often be highly complementary. Also, while there are lots of places to discuss politics and advocacy, I think HN's quality of comments and a desire for thinking outside-the-box makes HN's comment section worth visiting for any topic.

I read Slashdot for years and there were also great comments...but a much higher number of top-voted/expanded comments that were akin to the clever/cute/meme-funny comments that plague Reddit today. Also, IIRC, Slashdot's commenting system required a lot of clicks to expand discussions...I pretty much never did that...which meant that Slashdot discussions required work to get past the witty upvoted one-liners...whereas with HN, it's just a quick flick of the mousewheel to get to more substantial comments.
I would imagine that the analogue nature of the brain is going to always entail a lot of approximation on simulation. I am not sure you could even accurately simulate even 1 neuron.

Disclaimer: this is completely out of my field - just a layman speculating.
If I break my leg and need nothing more than some X-rays, a cast, and some opioids, do you think the hospital will hand me a bill equal to the inflation-adjusted 1970 cost of treating a broken leg?
You seem to have ignored the gist of this whole discussion.

As someone brilliantly put it in a recent thread: I assume you have taken some space from your company's meetings for discussing the NSA, SOPA and related subjects every day?
Was IE dominant in the browser space in 2007? It feels like Chrome or Firefox had surpassed them by then. Microsoft still got hit because it was the Most Favored Browser on the most dominant OS platform.

Again, having a monopoly isn't illegal. Abusing a monopoly to force unfair competition in a new market is illegal. Apple isn't taking the hit because they're dominant in ebooks, but because they're not playing fair with ebooks when it comes to the mobile device market where they are a strong player.
Yeah, I saw it yesterday: that's how I came across this.
While the Amash Amendment was defeated, it surprised a lot of people how close the vote was. [1] Pelosi wrote a letter to Obama that though she defended it, change was coming. [2]

[1] http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/313853-n...
[2] http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/07/29/us/politics/momentum-bu...
Just say NSA this or Snowden that.
I have a theory that "upvote for visibility" instead of "upvote because it interests me" is when any up-vote-down-vote arrow community crosses a line that cannot be easily uncrossed. Every "awful" subreddit is a place where a bunch of people upvote a story because they want other people to see it, in some form misguided activism. And this is everything that is "wrong" with those communities.

The community is boring to people who want interesting things, but interesting to those who want to advocate some position. And the upvotey-downvotey nature makes non-activism and contrary opinions go away, since activists tend to be poor caretakers of the community itself, instead looking to push a particular position (ie, they downvote everyone else away).
Thanks. Definitely an interesting read.
As long as you assume whatever you're testing moves around or communicates instead of constantly naval-gazing, I'd bet even crazy-alien intelligence can be seen to be intelligent.

Sure there might be higher levels, but we're not talking about higher levels?
This is awesome advice. All of the popular company-starting frameworks out there right now are popularizations of the age-old idea of de-risking. Shed risk as quickly and cheaply as you can; if you are going to fail, fail fast. But the one thing both Blank and Ries seem to gloss over is that the cheapest way to de-risk is to do it before you have a MVP, before you start doing customer discovery. Do it by knowing the industry and market and customer you're targeting. 50% of this can often be done in a few days of reading stuff you've searched on the Web. And an additional 30% of it can be done by talking to knowledgable people and asking them what they think of your idea. (The other 20% you have to learn the hard way, by doing.)
Elon Musk: Reasoning From First Principles in Disruptive Entrepreneurship
You are missing the fact that you have multipolar primaries.
I read HN to find out what Slashdot is going to post three days later :)
Didn't Clang/compiler-rt have full support before GCC/libcxx (or whatever it's called) did? In my mind, and the minds of most others, this means actual full C++1 support. GCC claimed it early, but only because the compiler supported it fully, though afaict there were features which weren't supported in the runtime. Clang/compiler/rt fully support the language, and I believe they were the first to do so.
Your point isn't clear.

I don't believe I ignored anything, and where I was responding to the poster and the discussion, I quoted him/her so it would be clear what points I was responding to.

If you have something specific to say, spell it out and maybe I can answer it for you.
What do you hope to accomplish with this comment? Why are you blaming the 400 people who showed up as "shamefully pathetic", instead of focusing your anger on those who did not show up? How do you think it feels to spend your free time working hard to organize event, only to have someone mock you for turning out a "shamefully pathetic 400"? Do you know how difficult it is to get people to show up for a protest, largely because of attitudes like yours?
At least you can tell what the names of arguments are and if they have defaults or not.
So there was a shortfall in planning at the last event, and thus you've decided not to participate in the future? Wouldn't the proper solution be to contact the organizers and identify the problem, or to help organize yourself so that things would run more efficiently?
Three minor comments:

In the example the asteroid is fixed and the stars are moving. In the samples to analyze is the other way around. It's a little confusing.

Even if I touch "Done"/"Poor Quality" without selecting any asteroid candidate, the web page ask me about my email. I guest that in the images I saw there were no asteroids :( so you won't need my email. (An even if there is an asteroid there, if I didn't locate it my contribution is legible.) (Are you going to publish the emails of everyone that participated, on only the persons that discovered the asteroid?)

Add a game/cheat mode, were at random one in ten images contains a known asteroid. When you identify it the page give more information (name, size, discovery date, ...)
Do you think the Maker movement will become an "industrial revolution?"
I'm think it will be big, but my partners and I keep going back and forth on the market size. We can't find any data on the size of the market / market potential. To me it seems like open source software - maker/open hardware market will mature over time and become massive (but that is just a gut feeling).

What do you all think?
I realized a long time ago that indignation about political issues was for forums what bad currency is in Gresham's law. We actively compensate for that in various ways. Sometimes when an issue seems a genuinely big deal and/or of particular interest to hackers, we compensate less. It's always a judgment call. But don't worry, if HN declines through indignation about "issues," it won't be by default. We've fended that off for years, and I'm optimistic we'll continue to.
That's not true. In fact, this site has been embarrassingly bad about the technical issues of surveillance, for reasons ranging from gullibility to capriciousness. Witness for example several weeks of intense belief that Google had allowed NSA logins to its own servers in order to pull information off of them, the certainty with which people argued that NSA must have been helping the FBI track pressure cooker searches, the security implications of hardware random number generators, or, my personal favorite, the belief that Palantir must have a key role in NSA surveillance because of In-Q-Tel and I mean just look at their name.

And let's not get started about the legal acumen of the site as a whole.

This site has basically one method of digesting technical information about surveillance: catalog the competing claims, choose the one that assumes the most spectacular abuse by the state, and fiercely defend it regardless of evidence. It's also trivially game-able, which is I suspect a fact not lost on commenters like 'mtgx. The site isn't merely the boy who cried wolf; but rather a boy with a wolf-oriented case of Tourette's.
Please let us know when you've scheduled a date for your well-planned, confidence-inspiring protest.
If a general technology forum inevitably develops to have a substantial (not a monoculture, but substantial) portion of its content devoted to the intersection of technology and law, what does that say about the underlying salience of these issues?
I can remember quite a few recent product/tool launches that received just a couple upvotes, while I'm sure they would have been in the front page for a whole day just a year ago.
Hi nakedrobot2 , I was wondering if there is any way for us to use the technology that you used to make this photograph. Let me know how we can contact you.
I really love Python, it is my language of choice, bread and butter, and I've been using it since 2005. However, this backwards compatibility break is probably the worst thing that happened to the language, as I think it's creating more project stalling and work in total than is worth any improvements specifically stemming from backwards incompatible changes. It could be because python3 still has not become my target, but that's kind of the point. When is it ever going to be?
Wow, lazy parents...care to provide any metrics to back up that ludicrous assumption? The lazy parent excuse is what come out of the mouths of teachers to justify themselves and the status quo.

Having grown up in the inner city, there were plenty of parents that did not care, they were too busy wallowing in the despair of poverty. But there were plenty of other parents that fought to get their kids a better education and were stymied by a system that simply did not appreciate or care for feedback or parental participation. So those that could afford it sent their kids to Catholic schools, the only place left in NYC to ensure kids got a decent education. I was fortunate enough to be one of those kids, but my parents stretched to make the tuition. Today, it is even worse as parochial schools shut down and magnet schools are not able to meet the rising demand by parents fed up with the public options and desperate for alternatives.

This is not an honest debate. Obviously you are coming from one particular viewpoint and I am coming from another. Part of it might be political views and part might be personal interactions with the US educational system. I have children now in public school and can see how misaligned incentives have created a system that simply does not rewards quality.

As for bringing up Finland, that is a country that has less people than Chicago, a completely different culture, and a homogeneous population. What works there simply does not translate (just as the hagwons in Korea do not translate to the US). What does translate however is making quality the pinnacle for reshaping the US education system, something that oddly liberals resist. Instead they protect the unions and the status quo and that sounds like the camp you support.
People didn't discuss it before because it only affected minorities.
When former President Jimmy Carter is on the record stating America simply has no functioning democracy at this point, it might be more of an uphill battle than voting. And anyways, there's not much to vote for. I vote green because Republicans are terrible, Democrats at least seem to pretend they care but won't stop any of this, Libertarianism scares me. So even though I don't agree with everything the Green party says, at least it's different. But we don't have socialist factions really, or pirate party candidates yet.

President Carter's quote: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/17698-president-carter...
This whole Old Reader debacle is just absurd to me. According to this blog post[0], life for the developers has become "hell in every possible aspect we could imagine" as a result of all the users they've gotten since Google Reader shut down. But this makes no sense - why wouldn't you just start charging for access so that you can hire more people to run the site, and so that you don't get overwhelmed with more users than you can handle?

0: http://blog.theoldreader.com/post/56798895350/desperate-time...
Got a source on that claim about the incompatibilities of cheese and orange juice?
Speaking as someone in the field (I know people from Endgame, and work in a similar place with much more discretion), this is a load of shit. The FBI wouldn't be deploying Endgame product like this.
distract the NSA and pay for it with your taxes
What do you mean by the US taking over the internet? In a lot of ways, the US has always controlled the internet.
This comment I think has significant merit. It is not really a per-se partisan issue, although it is a profoundly political one. With as you point out pervasive impact, ie on The 'tools of the trade'.
If you had rapid iteration - elections every month - then a tertiary party would have something of a chance. As it stands, the iterations are so slow, that with FPTP voting, the two main parties will just move slightly to diminish the threat - the incumbent edifice carries on.

With preferential voting (or similar), you actually have the realistic probability of more than one party being in power. Here in Australia, the current government is formed from one major party, one minor party, and a couple of independents. It's not just 'mathematically possible', but a plausible outcome. That can't really happen with FPTP voting. Well, it can happen, but it's an oddity - see the current situation in the UK with the lib dems.

"I won't vote for who I really want to vote, because they'll never win, because everyone else won't vote for them"

The problem here is that by voting for someone whom you slightly prefer, you split the vote in a FPTP system, making them both lose out to the third person you didn't want in. If 60% of the population want a left-wing candidate, and they're split evenly-ish, they'll still lose out to the single right-wing candidate who only has 40%. It sounds self-defeating on paper, but in real terms it's more like self-preservation.
> but eventually robots/machines WILL do most everything and we just won't need to be employed (or everyone will have to know engineering?).

Yeah, even now I'd say working is essentially about making more money than the government will give to you through welfare programs. When/if welfare payouts increase or a basic universal income is implemented there will be less demand for jobs and people from all classes will actually begin choosing whether to work or not. I think it will be a long time before basic incomes are implemented or welfare is increased in the US though.