skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are some pieces of content for which it's entirely impractical to "grant access via e-mail". On occasion people ask to be e-mailed extremely large blocks of data, where it would literally be faster to burn it to a pile of DVDs and then FedEx them than to upload-and-then-download the data. Depending on the size of the medical images mentioned in a previous post, that might actually be the case in that circumstance.

It's a failure of technology when it's difficult to send ordinary-sized files like a few photos or a couple pages of documents. But it's a failure of people when they don't recognize the possibility that some types of data (video, large numbers of images, scientific research data, whole databases) simply can't be sent quickly, yet they fail to plan ahead to gain access. (I've also entirely skirted the issue of "some data should have its access restricted physically"...)
After reading a few comments, just have to clarify that this is not necessarily a bad thing. HN is the only site that i sit on all day. It used to be Slashdot, brief flirtation with Digg and Reddit. But now it's HN.
Yep, it's /r/politics now. I don't check HN nearly as often as I used to.
Arguably it's obvious, but an optimistic vision of a future of happy idleness sells a lot better than a dystopia of near-total unemployment. What's more, the owners of newspapers and TV channels have good reason to portray machines as beneficial to everyone - after all, it's their income from the many other industries they're invested in that's being improved in.
As far as I can tell, this is the third major shift in the tone of the site. When it first started out there was a lot more technology discussion, but quickly the whole VC/fundraising aspect became very prominent. Recently, legal issues have become very prominent.

I think this reflects a real-world trend in what's relevant to "hackers" right now. The financial aspect of the whole technology industry really seemed to take off after the Wall Street meltdown, after other financial avenues darkened (remember all those articles a couple of years ago about "why we're in a bubble/are we in a bubble?"). Right now, a number of legal issues are impacting technology (software patents, NSA spying, etc) and hackers are unsurprisingly interested in discussing them.

I don't think these are necessarily bad trends. I think you're seeing a bit of the maturing of tech industry and you're seeing that reflected in the discussion. But there is still a lot of great technical discussion on the site (the front page right now has a great story on a scanner bug, a compilers blog post, a theorem-prover as programming language article, etc).

And at the end, what happened to Slashdot is that reddit happened and all the smart people left, and what happened to reddit is that Hacker News happened and all the smart people left. Until there is a credible alternative to HN, I think you'll still see a lot of signal, even if there is more noise than there used to be.
That's true. On the other hand, maturity often comes with apathy to real societal problems and abuse from bad actors, masked as greater insight: a sense of "that's just the way things are".
How would one handle the case with the tiny boxes? It seems to me that these ought to be treated more like line drawings and not unify them as symbols at all if you can't properly decompose them into lines of Latin alphabet glyphs. JBIG2 of course cleverly doesn't tell you how to do the "smart" segmentation...
Yeah, see for example http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/economics-blog/2013/aug/0...
I have fond memories of it, and a user id in the ~10000 range. But I haven't been back in ages, and I can't say I've missed it.
Actually that might remove some of the grunt work for experienced editors. It's a lot easier to prettify existing data than to do it all from scratch.

There's a lot more to advanced editing than "learning simple patterns". Eliminating some of the trivial editing will free experienced editors for more important tasks.

Wikipedia is not about users ideas or opinions, it's about citing ideas and opinions from authoritative sources. This isn't 2003 any more.
Agreed. But good things become popular, and popularity changes good things. Not always for the worse. But this time, yes for the worse.
Again, i would assert that a cell is 70% water. some tiny fraction of water that's actually used in a reaction would just be special cased, and modeled independently.

My understanding of "solution" is stuff floating in water. If there's some value in breaking out each atom, i'm all for it, but i kind of suspect the spherical cow is good enough in that case.

Even if i'm wrong there, each atom would introduce at least 6 degrees of freedom. IIRC, water is slightly polarized, and that's likely relevant to at least some reactions. Replacing the 18 degrees of freedom with 6 to represent a rigid water, or perhaps 10 or so to represent a flexible version, modeling as the molecule will dramatically lower complexity.
I just found one, I think. Very cool.
In this particular story the answers are easy.

The work of a steveadore, one of the examples given, has been vastly automated and unionized. The work is much physically easier than before: operating a crane vs. manually moving cargo. Dockworker's unions have negotiated strong agreements related to overtime pay which guarantee time and a half. There are a far smaller number of employees needed, and those employees want to pack in as many hours as they legally can, to reap the overtime benefits. Automation of an industry can actually lead to longer hours for the fewer employees still working in the industry.

Since there are far fewer well paying positions like being a longshoreman, people who may have once gotten a job on the docks have to compete with everyone else for service jobs. The service jobs don't pay enough, so many need 2 or even 3 jobs to keep their families afloat. The need for multiple jobs explains why this class of people is working longer.
David Yurman -- New York, NY -- Full-time contract, 3 months+
http://www.davidyurman.com

Project Manager (mid-level)

David Yurman is in search of a project manager experienced in e-commerce to manage the re-platforming of our main site.

The main responsibilities of this position will be to manage the day-to-day workflow and production of digital creative projects including but not limited to davidyurman.com e-commerce re-platform, site refreshes, campaigns, homepages, landing pages, mobile / tablet, e-mail marketing, and managing creative development of assets such as photography and video.

•	Project management - Candidate should be comfortable managing projects from concept to execution, and should have past experience managing the launch of online product as part of a team. Successful candidates will have experience with e-commerce platforms and workflow as well as interest in the fashion/luxury space.

•	Technical Team Management - Candidate should be comfortable managing a mix of UX and front-end and back-end development teams working remotely. This includes being familiar with HTML/CSS & JS. A basic understanding of Java and Java-based platforms is a plus.

•	User Experience - Candidate should be familiar with reviewing user flows, wireframes and functional spec documentation. Experience with large-scale e-commerce sites (3,000+ SKUs) is a plus.

•	Creative Management - a creative background would be ideal, however the candidate should be familiar enough that he/she can communicate creative needs to our agency partners.

•	Familiarity with Photoshop and Illustrator - Position does not require previous Photoshop/Illustrator design work, but a familiarity with these programs is helpful in our everyday handling of assets.

resumes and introductions:
jacobcohen [at] davidyurman [dot] com
A noble thought, but given the way TechCrunch, et al. scour the site for something, anything to blow out of proportion, a policy section could be asking for trouble. Nothing worse than bloggers conflating your personal politics with would-be thought-leaders whose endowment of idle time is surely coincidental.
To tackle it on the user rather than keyword level, I'd personally use a highlight/killfile extension for users, if one were available and didn't break things. Add some kind of highlight around the comments of users who are listed in the highlight file, and just remove the comments (and associated sub-thread) posted by users in the killfile.

At the moment I think I would highlight 10 users and killfile 2, and I think both moves would improve my HN experience.
Docker To Run Elasticsearch
On Linux at least (not sure about OpenBSD), every open file has a name somewhere in /proc, so you could pass that.
Is it justifiable to assume that the cost of health care has been rising to approximately match the quality and technological improvement worldwide?

Or is it more likely that the cost has sky-rocketed out of proportion with the quality of health care (in this country or in the world) with no good reason?
Ruby+Rails Hacker wanted to eat amazing food from across the country
We are Goldbely! (YC W13)

We are looking for a mid-to-senior level RoR hacker who appreciates amazing food. If you like eating pizza, ribs, pie, cake, ice cream, more pie, and steak from the most highly regarded food creators in the country then maybe we should hang out :)

You will play an instrumental role in the dev-culture of our tightly knit crew. You're a pretty kick-ass hacker (come on, don't be modest) who can jump into our engineering team of three to build out the Goldbely platform. We want the bestest, hungriest, food hackery-est engineer out there!

As an early hire at Goldbely you will help build a sick work culture of eating, hacking, and happiness.

Let's throw some keywords out there: Git, Ruby (again), TDD, Postgres, Redis, Heroku, bears, beets, Battlestar Galactica.

Bonus points:

4pts - Experience in the e-commerce space
9pts - Firm command of Ruby on Rails
7pts - Lives and dies by TDD
+1pt for each year of working experience

Send us a resume, any code or live products we can check out, and let us know what kind of food you would kill for. We'll see if we can make you an assassin.

Please only respond if you're in San Francisco or willing to move there. We're open to helping the right person move their life to SF if needed!

https://www.goldbely.com/

Email Joel and Trevor at dev@goldbely.com
You have it backwards. For the first few months of existence, Hacker News was called "Startup News."
It is official; Alexa now confirms: Hacker News is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Hacker News community when Google confirmed that Hacker News market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all web traffic. Coming close on the heels of a recent Alexa survey which plainly states that Hacker News has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Hacker News is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent web community IQ test.

You don't need to be Paul Graham to predict Hacker News's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Hacker News faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Hacker News because Hacker News is dying. Things are looking very bad for Hacker News. As many of us are already aware, Hacker News continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Unfortunately, I think you're right. I've originally moved from Reddit to HN because of higher quality, but now r/programming and language/technology-specific Subreddits have a much higher content/noise ration than HN. I guess this is mostly because all the folks who think more stories about Snowden are actually more interesting than programming have moved here.
The problem for me is that the political stuff has perfect substitutes that I can easily go to, but I don't know of any alternatives for the skeptical, intelligent tech+business discussion.
Simplifying Big Data with toons
I remember when it was good, but I don't really remember a time that there wasn't a fanatical vibe to it. The content there has always been strongly pro-Linux and anti-Microsoft. There was a time where people actually used the phrase, "Year of the Linux Desktop" without being sarcastic. Oh and writing "Micro$oft" was popular too. And there was always stuff about open source and GNU and GPL and etc.

The thing that made it good was the camaraderie, the general helpfulness, and the quality of posters. You used to be able to find some really intelligent content in the Slashdot comments, since some the smartest people related to that particular topic were probably Slashdot users themselves.
Spam is often added by bots anyway.
> Of course, I think this is partly the result of not teaching civics in schools.

We have civics at high school (of course not in the Finland sense, sadly), and I somehow fail to see the correlation.
Planning a trip to Mars? the Intergalactic Travel Bureau can help
Taking that idea even further, how cool would it be to have one binary that ran a pre-built docker container?
When a machine replaces the work of a man, that man (who had the ingenuity to create a machine, say a fishnet, and take a risk) can make his products to you a lot cheaper than it otherwise would be if he had to hire tons of laborers. That is where you benefit. When the price of a car becomes reachable all of a sudden, or a tv, or plumbing, or common items like socks are $5 and not $100. The standard of living should rise through automation and increase productivity. Instead everyone is fighting for higher wages, higher protection, weaker currencies... and ever-rising prices across the board.
That's an interesting way of putting it. I first came on here to learn about Arc. It was just tech. Then it became tech+business. What you're seeing is simply that at scale, politics is inextricable from tech+business, just as, at scale, business is inextricable from tech.
Use the search box at the bottom of the page on HN, or hit hnsearch.com, search for "Homakov" (click the radio button to limit to stories), and if that's not enough, add in key words from the parent post (iframe, domain, cross-domain, sandbox, etc.).
Hope you are right, I hope that HN does reduce market share, and head back to its roots, as a niche site for hackers.
I was a) too young and b) too sheltered from it we were only just getting consumer dial up in homes about that time in our country. But as i understand it yes although that was more like a gold rush in peoples living rooms. Unlike what we have today, a multibillion dollar industry walking around in peoples pockets every minute of the day. Dont gete wrong the desktop isnt going anywhere soon we just have a new poster child while the old one has mostly sorted all its teething problems out.
HN needs tagging or even general categories, so we can filter topics out.
In fairness, at least it isn't becoming 2013 Slashdot.

HN has always had a small smattering of political stories upvoted and discussed, with a specific focus on those that actually matter to hackers. Recent events have increased the proportion of political stories that get upvotes and discussion, but not across the board: there's a specific focus on NSA/surveillance stories, and in the absence of those I think the political content has not dramatically increased. Thus, I wouldn't conclude that the HN audience has become more political, but rather that HN has a higher threshold for wanting to talk about politics and recent stories pass that threshold far too often for comfort.

Politics on Slashdot has so little impact, because it shows up far too often. Politics on HN tends to focus on the most important issues, filtering out the noise. And the recent NSA stories are by far the most important news in tech politics in years. As long as the political stories remain confined to issues of that level of importance, and leave out the daily sources of new outrage, I wouldn't fear for the future of HN. (It also helps that HN doesn't have Slashdot's blatant editorialization to stir up those types of stories.)

HN may be an island away from real-world news, but that island still carries tsunami warning stories.
It sounds like she's asking for average people to be role models, but aren't role models supposed to be exemplary? To show us what we can achieve and encourage us towards that?
Any alternative sites. It seems there is usually a shift from media sites every couple years.
You dont. Just support python 3. If you HAVE to support python 2. Then use a symbolic link.
Snowden/NSA articles frequently contain impassioned defenses about how relevant they are to the tech community at large, and I agree, but the problem with their proliferation is the topic bleed they lead to. Once political discussions feel normal, you get things like this completely pointless rehashing of "socialism" vs "Randianism" this afternoon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156035

I have generally come down on the side of considering complaints about the downward slide of the site as mostly rosy-painted nostalgia, but I do think an article as blatantly off-topic and political as that would have quickly been flagged as recently as 3 or 4 months ago.
Android one-click Google authentication method puts users, businesses at risk
Most of the consumer compact cameras have a "purikura" setting or a "beauty" setting with special treatment for the skin, whiter eyes and whiter teeths, and eventually bigger eyes and smaller mouth (yes, that's a thing).

It may be on by default for the cameras targeted at a female audience (in a rapidly shrinking market, female bloggers for instance are a big target), otherwise it won't even be available in more specialized or "hardcore" markets, like DSLR or mirrorless (4/3rds, Nikon 1, EOS M etc) for instance. For the anecdote, I bought a shockproof/waterproof compact camera last year and there's nothing so fancy on it.
And the converse: sufficiently clever sabotage is indistinguishable from a bug, as evidenced by the "Xerox copier randomly prints penises" prank:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157422
I kind of like this idea although a lot of people will probably disagree with it. My variation: instead of restricting new users from signing up, maybe just restrict their ability to comment. An account must be x months old to contribute to the discussion.
I have a 5-digit uid there and remember when it really was a great site. But the comments started to become pretty terrible almost immediately.

I still visit it every day just to skim the articles, but only about 20% of them are interesting/something I didn't see posted somewhere else.
It's interesting you posted this because I was just thinking about posting an Ask HN to see what things people would change or want to make better. A lot of people seem to believe that newer users are ruining the culture. TechCrunch also had an issue with spammy/trolling behavior in it's comments until they implemented Facebook comments which sort of provided accountability. Another method could be an invite system, but I feel like I would have never been able to become a contributor if I needed an invite.

I've gained a lot of useful information on HN in my past two years as a user and I hope I've helped a few a long the way as well. I do find myself skipping over a lot more posts, especially during the whole Snowden fiasco. I don't know how it used to be "back in the day" but I wish I could have experienced it.
Am I the only one who finds this thread to be hypocritical. Instead of posting this diatribe, as have others, lead by example and post content you'd like to see here.
I took a look at your introductory video, which specifically calls out what I found to be a horrible weakness in dropbox, that everybody who shares a file, that file counts against their quota.

However, if that is your value prop/differentiator, why don't I see that on your homepage? Store, protect and share, makes you sound just like any other online storage. How about 'fairer sharing' or something like that.

Also, your video button is very small. Actually, gone at the moment because I closed the popup, and when I clicked on the link it took me to Youtube. Why? People coming to your site will watch the video if it is right in front of them. You've kinda hidden it, and then when I do find it, it takes me somewhere else.
The Operations Report Card 25 good tips
There is another family of Unixlikes that has significant market share, and isn't chasing Linux's API changes.
If they are, by default, order-insensitive, then it should pose no problem at all to make them order-sensitive, since you would not know what order they would appear in either way.

Now, if you had said the other way around (ppl expect them to be order-sensitive but they are order-insensitive), that would have made sense...
"My understanding of "solution" is stuff floating in water."

In that case, don't even bother with trying to work out what it would take to mathematically model biochemistry yet. Go study some basic physics and chemistry for a few years instead.
> But how in hell can't you make it possible to use map(print, ..) in python2.x?

`from __future__ import print_function` lets you do that in >= 2.6.
Spending money is giving away time. Look at what you spend money on and you will know why you work so much.
The only reason I would disagree with that idea is that it would prevent the author from a linked site from joining the discussion if they didn't already have an account.
Facebook shares close higher than its IPO price
As if guns are the only things that can provide this kind of protection or have this kind of influence.

Yes, guns are powerful. So are four people with long knives. So are traps. So are the "half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, ...". The statement seems to be saying more about people's will to resist, not the necessity of firearms.

I suppose one might make the argument that guns increase people's willingness to resist, but this might not simply be because they make it easer ... in this case, the most ironically hilarious role that guns play is to provide a concrete freedom that guns, themselves, might be used to protect. That is, the best reason to have guns as a protected right might not be because they are a means by which to resist tyranny, but a right that's so painful to lose to so many that it motivates resistance.
I think there is a large insight to be had by all this.

State can and will use computer exploits in military and law enforcement. Like with PRISM, its no longer just the tinfoil - Its confirmed. The businesses model for a few companies are to hoard zero-day exploits, and sell it on the market. The military, police, "business intelligence" a.k.a industry spying, and criminals are their customers. In contrast to disease research, software virus research are not regulated or illegal, so both good and bad is the result. It is good when independent research find vulnerabilities in software we use, and less so when its hoarded and sold to be used against us.
> It's [sentience is] very easy to test for.

Isn't that only true if you assume that our definition of sentience is universal or that there is no higher development of consciousness? It seems to me that it doesn't even require a very skilled science fiction/fantasy writer to develop such a concept or ability.
Why FRONTLINE Isn’t Doing Android — Yet
I just have to point out that your username is only 4 months old. Maybe you used HN before signing up... but if not, then I'd assume you don't have the proper context as to why this community considers this a negative change.
From what I'd heard, Freedom Hosting was knowingly hosting websites for what you refer to as the primary market - groups where people can trade their own videos of children being sexually abused for other members' videos.