skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Bingo. I love HN for this very reason. Each time I visit, which is several times a day, I can count on finding a batch of postings about stuff I'm interested in: tech, startups, theoretical and applied science, law, philosophy, and yes, politics, just to name a few things, and quite often the intersection of one or more of these. I'm not a HN old timer, so may have missed-out on the before-the-Fall HN, but I have no regrets about that because it must have been a duller place.

I was a Slashdot addict before discovering HN. At one point I remember being really, really impressed by the great variety of people who posted there, people who had subject matter expertise that was all over the board. I might see, for example, a posting of an article about research into controlled fusion, and then browsing the comments I find information and insight posted by actual researchers in the field. This is what HN gives me today, and it's fantastic.

Perhaps a bit OT, but another thing that I love about HN is the level of civility in the comments and the swiftness with which people who break those unwritten(?) rules of decorum face chastisement. Rudeness is called out. People often humbly admit when they've made an error and apologize for it. People who make spelling or grammar errors aren't childishly flamed for it. HN feels like a big room full of well-mannered, intelligent adults, whereas /. (now) is a room full of twits and children and trolls and vandals. I have a hard time imagining HN ever becoming THAT because of the quality of this audience.

HN seems to have become not just a forum full of hackers, but a forum full of intellectuals including the non-hacker variety. These intellectuals, hackers and otherwise, have a diverse range of expertise, interests, curiosities, and passions. I learn something new every day from HN, usually tech or business-related, but often not, and I think that HN would be a far less interesting place if it was narrowly tech/startup focused. For me, HN simply ain't broke.
Ethics and Power in the Long War
Why does everybody compare CoffeeScript against vanilla JavaScript? I find using underscore makes my code sufficiently elegant that I've never felt the need to switch to CoffeeScript.
Isn't this simply addresses using a basic classifier, it would be easy enough to build a classifier from the HN API and then write a ux with sliders to balance the content, so if one group are interested in political posts (or comments) then so be it, for other they might prefer vc/entrepreneur content, and then there's the hard core tech content. Some form of SVM or LDA would do the trick. I'm not sure if stories, or comments should be suppressed. I'd implement it similar to how eclipse folds "content" (imports for example)

If anyone thinks this is worthwhile, I'll build it.
Exactly. We remember the best comments, not the typical nonsense like first posts, lame in-jokes and the raise of online internet vapid celebrities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection
Take a look at Fastmail.fm. I've been using it for about seven years and love it. Let me know if you have any questions about the service.
Your argument would be much helped by actual anecdotes.
I fixed some other stuff (like the icon) while fixing the padding. I don't know if you'll have any use for it now that that pull request has been made but maybe you'll find something in this useful:

https://github.com/mparramont/metafilter-for-android/pull/2
This paper offers little with regards to future steps to protect your data, and basically accepts that we must give all of our information to corporations, and protect ourselves by improving our government.

But future technological advancements can help us escape giving our data to corporations. Imagine using a bittorrent style service to back up your (encrypted) files instead of drop box. Imagine using freenet to back up your files. Imagine using bitcoin to replace credit cards. Imagine using a mesh-network to avoid centralized ISPs.

A lot of these technologies aren't practical yet, but are moving forward. Changing the govenrment will be a long, slow, painful process. While we are waiting on the bureaucracy, we can work to advance decentralized technologies that will help put privacy back in our own hands.
I've thought about that watching old movies from even as late as the '30s - that every single person I'm watching (scenes with 10s if not hundreds of people) are long dead.
Start with $10,000, make your initial bet as $10, and walk away after winning $100.

Or take the $10,000, put it a CD paying 2%, and do twice as well, guaranteed.
Having a 'show' category right next to 'ask' in the menu would encourage that.
Although I suspect you didn't actually read what I posted fully.....

Yes we do know they do blackmail. Its one of the things we know very well. It is what happened through out the cold war. Blackmail is a tried and tested method, as old as it gets in intelligence and espionage.

BTW, have to ask. Would this have been your reply if a year ago I told you the NSA were spying in a comprehensive, industrial way on the American public? Would you have claimed it was fear mongering "bullshit", and banging on about mythical creatures?
Physicists Say That Teleportation is Unworkable
very true... and besides the activists, everyone here has always a lot to say; just look at all these long replies - too much drama.
I don't think tptacek is saying that good posts don't exist on HN, of course they do. The problem is that the signal-to-noise ratio is so low nowadays that it's hardly worth wading through all the hyper-politicized vitriol just to get to it.

The amount of horribly bad posts on HN has reached a proportion where they're no longer exceptions, they characterize the site as a whole.

Personally I've noticed my participation drop in the last few months because of this. There are fewer and fewer people interested in engaging in a discussion, and more and more religious zealotry where it's clear poster has zero interest in opposing views, and will stoop consistently to hostility and fundamental indecency when confronted.
A common theme where I work is me making a vociferous criticism, being ignored, and the things I say coming true later. (this is not to say that all of the objections I make wind up being correct)
bentlegen is probably talking about http://underscorejs.org/
Google Glass POV cycling descent
This is a video I made doing a cycling descent of Mt. Tam. I think it really shows off some of the way this new technology will get used. I was wearing Google Glass and so was my cycling buddy who is the subject of the clip (twitter me:@deekay cycling buddy:@moneyball).
This is a fantastic slide deck. The per slide comments below are great too. Particularly on an iPhone as you read them simultaneously.

We've been using CoffeeScript for a bit over a year now and never looked back. All of our front end code is written in CS and I can't imagine writing JS again. It's just objectively better. Less code to write, easier to read, minimal cruft, and a joy to use.

The only hiccup was getting the compilation integrated into the build process. We handle it with direct loading of the CS files while working locally with coffescript.js loaded as well. That way code changes are available as soon as you refresh the page. Our build script for the app (when packaging it up for staging/prod) pre compiles the CS files so there's no compilation lag in prod.

I've been experimenting with node.js for a side project and its pretty easy to setup a project entirely in CS. There's a pretty good template with CoffeeScript/Express/Mongoose to use as a template here: https://github.com/olafurnielsen/form5-node-express-mongoose...
"The content on HN became quite politicized after the NSA scandal.”

To me, not as much. The most poignant catalyst, at least in recent times, to me, was Aaron Swartz. It’s just grown from there.
then why is the modeling attempting to recapitulate biology? Why not run a simulation at a level higher than 'cells'?
In that case you should be reading David Brin.
Could you never resolve a HOA issue in a court, independently?
Tesla Nabs 8% of the U.S. Luxury Car Market
Anyone notice this:

>3. Bitcoin and all crypto currenecies set to absolutely CRASH as a result since the feds can not completely control this currency as they please.
A Tipping Point Against The Copyright Monopoly Is A Lot Closer Than You Think
Indeed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_Law
For an example of just how counter-intuitive infinity is, consider Hilbert's Grand Hotel. If a hotel has a countably infinite number of rooms, all of which are full, the hotel can still house new guests. In fact, it can accept a countably infinite number of new guests. That is why you can't simply divide infinity by infinity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_paradox_of_the_Gran...
> I think you meant "to me."

Maybe. You also clearly have a bias towards finding these interesting, so it's a moot point.

Taking rankings at face value is not ideal; there is a feedback loop, political posts are likely to engage an audience that likes and upvotes them, and bring more users with that profile to the site. Taking that to the extreme, you could have porn links take over HN in just a few hours if you let them through. It's a matter of setting directions, not catering to everyone's needs.
80% is probably on on the low side though...
ECMAScript 6 Generators
Surprise, surprise. No one is doing anything useful with the majority of them, just like many other potentially useful domain names online.

I remember how pissed I was in 1998 when I tried to register my first website and found most names were squatted already. Truth be told, I'm still bitter at domain squatters.
Must Have Django Libraries for Beginners
I came here for the same reason a couple of years ago, but now I spend 90% time on reddit on the non mainstream subreddits.
That could be a good thing. It's very rare to see a deeply nested thread actually worth reading.
Which idea?

HM seems to be a place sympathetic to the types of people who need TOR, and as far as I know, its US, LotF, based. So, yes, to me, it seems a contradiction. Not sure how it could one could argue different.

If there is reason for the contradiction, then fine. Im not completely contradiction as such. Doesn't make it wrong to point it out though.
He's talking about underscore.js which coincidentally was created by the same guy, Jeremy Ashkenas, that created CoffeeScript (and Backbone.js).

Underscore actually is still useful with CS. You just don't need it as often as a lot of the list ops are built into the language.
A Unix Utility You Should Know About: Netcat (2009)
Heh. But to be fair, different technologies encourage different usage patterns, and it's reasonable to investigate how, given a goal, technological solutions could be applied. I'm plenty leery of "solutionism" [1], but that's not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

[1] Evgeny Morozov's coinage, see: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/05/evgeny-morozo...
The biggest collections of plate-scan data are private. It started with repo-men who pay to be part of nationwide networks where they all drive around scanning every visible plate in exchange for getting hits on plates they are looking for.

But, as always, those enormous databases were too tempting to just sit on and the maintainers have started looking for other ways to monetize them - if they'll sell joe lawyer a search for $10, you can be sure they are selling access to the NSA, et al too.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2013/07/10/data-broke...

http://www.star-telegram.com/2013/02/16/4626118/a-fort-worth...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/automobiles/28REPO.html
It looks like your emails are stored on their servers? My desire is to have more control over my data.
Some of this is because the HN demographic is young enough that many readers have never seen anything like this before, and thus think it's the Worst Thing Ever.

To them, it is. Humanity's progress depends in part on freshly disillusioned young people to overreact to life's shortcomings and fight to correct them.
Most systems that attempt to implement one time pads are just stream ciphers built from crappy random number generators; they're crappier versions of RC4. Real one time pads aren't particularly useful (which is why they're rarely used): they require keys as long as their plaintexts.

Schneier calls them "pretty much useless": http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0210.html#7

They are, at any rate, a sturdy indicator of snake oil crypto.
I see. Sorry for misunderstanding.
She's a writer and has a masters in social-sciences. Her interests are mostly helping people; making a fortune or even a living are uninteresting to her. We make a wonderful combination.
Wait, I can put a message in 2 IMAP folders... So how are tags different?
> Even though the quality of discussion on HN might ebb and flow, or there might be more negative comments than positive at times, the culture here isn't ever going to tolerate Natalie Portman, hot grits, or image macros.

HN suffers from a more mild case of it with people being compelled to link at least one or two vaguely relevant xkcd comics in nearly every discussion without additional content. I like xkcd, but there's no reason to create noise by linking to it any time a comment or story reminds someone of it.
Learn.js v0.4.1: learn javascript book (extra HN discount, early release)
Depends on your audience. If your website is geared towards developers, it's still a good idea to plan for 1280x800 (standard laptop), or really just make it responsive already.
Yeah, it isn't so easy to get to the important issues ... seems like their expectations is that users already know what bill they want to comment on when they get there. So, okay, not Stack Overflow yet. But more positively they've done a good job looking at it from the congressional staffers' perspective as well.
It would need to be adapted to work underwater, but Thalmic's MYO could make a great tool for gesture recognition without having to actually carry a keyboard. Just gesture to activate or deactivate, and then have gesture chords for common words or letters of the alphabet? It'd have quite the learning curve though.
Really? I don't think I've seen that before, but that sounds perfect for me. Do you have any advice on how to find such issues?
You didn't refuse the advances of Apollo by any chance?
By the "best-friend heuristic", as we say in the post, you should totally go with the kisses.

(I'm pretty sure we'd not have batted an eye at that. :) We're talking about emoticons, right?)
Given the challenges of JBIG2 it seems one should be able to construct a 'test' page which, when scanned, will test the algorithm's accuracy.

Once you have that, you can turn it into a sales too for folks selling Multi-function Printers such that there are "good" printers and "bad" printers, and then everyone will be forced to pass the test or be labeled a 'bad' printer.
There are so many different variants of netcat:

nc, netcat, ncat, socat... I can never be sure of which syntax I'm going to get on an unfamiliar server.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway

Andrew Tanenbaum
Anyone know what the music in this video is?
Opinions run the gamut. I'm firmly in the "email should be plain text" camp but realized that battle was lost long ago.
There is a better utility available for folks. Ncat - part of famous the Nmap (5) project. It has more features than netcat that people might find useful - like SCTP, SOCKS, etc..

You can find out more about it: http://nmap.org/ncat/
A large community often contains many subgroups. When a system allows any subgroups to take over and represent their sentiments as community's sentiments, the community starts to breakdown. To avoid this system needs to allow enough expressiveness. This would mean at least a upvote button as well as downvote button. By only allowing upvotes, HN steals away expressiveness of the community. Any jealous subgroup can essentially upvote a story they had like others to read and get it on top while other members of community have no recourse but to upvote something else and spread their expression thinly. We have seen this many times now. I can see marketers and activists coming over to HN and push a story on top with as little as 100 upvotes while rest of the community just sits back unable to express their preferences.
>The very best simulations of reality that we can perform handle at most just a few H/He/C atoms.

On a deeper level, we still have trouble simulating even a single proton.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_gauge_theory
Coding is not the most important bit of a startup
Ask HN: What is a good reason to take a gap year?
Me: Top high school student.
How many Moore law doublings before it is real time? Seems like ~23 generations or ~35 years. Of course, if you leave out the bits constantly thinking about sex, we might get there a lot faster :)
Some projects that have gone through the GSoC process have triaged bugs/features like this. I'm trying to remember them now - blame Monday.

http://fedoraproject.org/join-fedora is pretty much the best "How to Contribute" example I've seen.
Ask HN: What are the easiest ways to make money on the internet?
White, Grey, or Blackhat.

The question stands: How can a programmer make a buck?
Yeah, you need to simulate an entire universe as well. ;)
Dropbox Uploader: Bash script to upload, download, list, delete from Dropbox
Yes, let me learn this domain specific language for a domain specific language so that I can learn another domain specific language whenever this one stops trending.
I'm working on a Symfony/CoffeeScript/AngularJS/Bootstrap3 project right now. Haven't tried Ruby or Rails yet.
Netcat is indeed very versatile and useful but most of the time it's used improperly when used as a server (-l mode). Unless you're doing basic network diagnostics (ex: testing if firewall ports are open) you're better off using openssl (s_server mode) or more likely good ol' SSH port forwarding.
It used to be worth being an XKCD 386 [1] guy when political discussion came up here. If someone said something you thought was wrong, you could spend 30 minutes or an hour writing a well researched response citing primary sources, and good discussion would result.

This is no longer true. Most of the political discussion here is now indistinguishable from /r/politics and /r/technology, where people are only interested in things that agree with the existing beliefs.

Lately, even conspiracy theories that are refutable without outside sources since they are internally inconsistent are getting traction here.

[1] http://xkcd.com/386/
I've written my fair share of coffeescript and right now I'm working on a large node/angular project and I'm glad we stuck with Javascript. I definitely miss some of coffeescript's features and having cute, ruby/python-ish looking code, but at the end of the day, it's another dependency that can easily be circumvented.
It looks like the third train is pulling some kind of open car behind it that has the lights mounted on it. At about 3:50, you can see a guy step from this rig into the back door of the train that's pulling it.
Actually coffee's js is currently compatible down to IE6, which the author said is what he wants to support at this point. So unless MS were planning to backport ES6 compatible JavaScript to the dead IE6, CoffeeScript supporting ES6 will either change/break at some point or become a unreasonable backward-compatibility clusterfuck (probably the former). ES6 becomes official in late 2014 so there is probably enough time for a lot of changes to happen.
It was not humanly possible, given the time scales involved, even in the most generous interpretation, for Manning to have reviewed all or even most of the material he released.

Also: how would Ellsburg know what Snowden had access to? That knowledge is part of the premise of his assertion.
How will Elon pull off a 30k dollar Tesla in 2016? And will the range be more or less than the current Model S? (~250 miles)
I don't think it has sunk in for people, but TypeScript is one of the most elegant language hacks of all time. It's so simple and blindingly obvious that it took the genius of Anders Hejlsberg to see it.
Competition must have been stiff if the #1 mobile startup is imgur, a 4 year old website with only moderate success on Android and no success on iTunes.
The more I hear about Tesla the more I fall in love with them. I think this may be the AAPL of the 2010s, gentlemen.
> What I find sad, though, is that most people who dislike CoffeeScript don’t truly know it. They haven’t taken the time to really learn it, or even try it. Their reactions are usually knee-jerk, or based on fallacies. [...] The explanation for most people’s dislike of CoffeeScript is probably our natural resistance to new things and our comfort in what we know.

Oh, wow. I've been using CoffeeScript for about a year for the usual front-end crap, not long ago I re-evaluated Coffee for the second time before starting a full-JS project and certainly won't use it. While I'm a fan of bracketless whitespace significant langs (Python, Sass, Haml) CS's is just bonkers and you never know when a single space will bite you by compiling to a completely different code you had in mind. The ecosystem is weak not to say non-existent comparing to JS, and every JS solution and example out there from minor jquery stuff through SPA frameworks to mobile UI builders is in, well, JS (duh!), so public code reusability becomes a ridiculous task of converting to CS, only to compile it to JS once again. I still use CoffeeScript for small front-end work, meanwhile for any bigger work I find CS an obstacle over JS, and an unnecessary step between my idea and working code; especially when the JS ecosystem has grown a lot of tools to help you deal with what pisses you off (underscore/lodash as an example come to mind).

And from the slide:

> And as of July 2013, it's also the tenth most popular language on GitHub! That's more than Objective-C, ActionScript, C#, Clojure, Go, Groovy, Scala

Yay github charts as evidence of industry value.

Knee-jerk, fallacies, resistance? Call it what you want and good luck. Meanwhile, I will use coffee to keep me awake, not to write apps with.

//edit: care to explain the downvote?
It's easy to evaluate a Teacher by those metrics but that does not guarantee that the content the teacher is teaching is correct or accurate. Thus my point above.
You should also know about the so-called "netcat mode" in OpenSSH:

-W host:port
Requests that standard input and output on the client be
forwarded to host on port over the secure channel. Implies -N,
-T, ExitOnForwardFailure and ClearAllForwardings. Works with
Protocol version 2 only.
>For example, it's okay for me to complain about sweatshops but still buy running shoes that are made in them.

I don't think that's actually true, even though I do the same.

I think it cheapens my character. I believe even if I'm vocal about my feelings about sweatshop labor, that doesn't really matter when I still support it financially.

It really just means that I'm not as good of a person as I'd like to be.
Show HN: RegExpBuilder.js
You do it with the stories, by weighting them manually. You do not do it with the commenters. But there are factions of commenters who are introduced to the site by following stories onto it, and they stay, they promote bad sources, and they inject both politics and a particular inflammatory mode of debate into all the threads.

There are overwhelmingly more people on the site saying quality has degraded sharply --- most of them citing politics as one of the reasons --- than there are people defending it. Also, a close look at the people who do defend the current quality of the site might be instructive.