skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The mods seem to use it as their version of voting. I see perfectly fine stories banned all the time, consistently over a period of months. The same with users. Lots of times I'll look in a thread and see lots of dead people who don't know they are dead, posting interesting and useful stuff.

I've run forums and image posting sites before, the trouble isn't finding moderators from the community who will work for free. The trouble is finding ones that won't abuse their power.
That's the model of industrial labs. You get a salary. IP is owned by the company. Wouldn't it be awesome if there was some institution (a University is a perfect example), which similarly pays its researchers a salary (sure, it should match the private sector salaries) and the resulting IP is public domain.

Heck, it would promote the private sector to devote more resources to research ... if the private sector made a discovery, they could patent it and get exclusivity. If a University did it, it belongs to everyone.
WOW - that's crazy. Thanks for a recent real world example.
Have you tried out functional reactive programming? How does it compare to the mediator?
Whenever I hear about corporate influence in Washington I think of Lawrence Lessig's Ted Talk on the need for campaign finance reform:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_t...

"Change the incentives and you change the behavior."

And the key point: SOLVABLE.

I hope people pick up on his point that regardless of what a person's top priority might be, fixing this problem should be our first priority.
I think your philosophy is the more dangerous one. "Evil" and "Good" are highly subjective and not nearly as straightforward as you're imagining. You see yourself as battling evil. So do the creators of PRISM. Nobody does anything because they think it's bad for the country, or humanity. We are all the heroes of our own story. The greater good has been used all through history to justify horrific acts, and those people genuinely thought they were doing the right thing.

or you do something to defeat the evil as you see it (or, at least refuse to take part in it)

Refusing to take part doesn't absolve you of anything, according to your philosophy. That's exactly what Thomas says he does - refuses to take part. And by refusing to take part, you're still doing nothing to thwart what you see as evil.
Jacobian (of Django fame) has also been banned for speaking out against sexism.

There must be some moderators/admins with axes to grind. I mean, it's friggin' Jacobian, for Pete's sake.
Serious trolls know about hellbanning and how to figure out whether an account they're using has been hellbanned. The primary effect of hellbanning is to drive away well intentioned new users who are unlucky enough to break some of the unwritten rules in their first few posts.
I wish it was a joke. I had a comment killed and un-killed (after emailing info), and a similar situation can be seen at (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6151626). Thankfully, at least the moderators are willing to fix such comments after being notified.

The sad part is that most discussions will have died down by then, and it depend on the poster to noticing the killing.
> The average salary for a professional degree in New Jersey is $68k. How many teachers have master credentials?

That's highly misleading, because that lumps in MA's together with MD's and MBA's and JD's and MSc's in Computer Science, and skews up the average by the large number of MBA's in NJ who make a lot of money on Wall Street. By and large the MA's that most teachers have are worth almost nothing extra in the job market.

When I hear calls to pay teachers more, I think back to my own teachers in K-8, the majority of which were very average people.[1] Even if we posit that we need higher-quality teachers who will cost more, why do we have to accomplish it in a way that pays all of these mediocre people far more than they would earn in the private sector? If IBM wants higher-caliber people it doesn't just increase salaries hoping to get more qualified applicants. That's ass-backward. It tightens recruiting criteria, and if it has to pay more to attract candidates that meet the criteria, it does so.

I'm not opposed to paying teachers more on principle, but if its something we want to do, we can't just raise salaries and hope it attracts more qualified people to the job. We need to: 1) screen for quality the way other higher-paying jobs do; and 2) force existing teachers to qualify on the new scales to keep their jobs.

I'd be happy to pay $70k/year starting salaries to teachers if I knew that the school district required a teacher to graduate in the top 25% of their class at a school where the median SAT was at least 1200. But it makes no sense to pay our existing body of largely mediocre teachers even more money.

[1] In a 1990's study, only 40% of teachers scored in the top half of the SAT/ACT, indicating that the pool of teachers skew below average in terms of academic qualifications: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/do-tea....
and thus, TOR comes to an end.
It's not really any different with any other laws. I've seen police just lie about wearing seat belts and other things. If someone in power in the government wants to get you on something and they can get away with it, they'll do it.
> what measures do you take to reduce the increased snarkiness

> I'd love to hear how you solve the problem.

You've exemplified the problem perfectly. Next time, don't comment.
I've gone with Powerline, here is a sample[1]. I like it because it shows me what branch I'm on when I'm inside a git repo and whether or not I need to commit. The theme I'm using is Tomorrow Night Bright[2].

[1] - http://i.imgur.com/86B9B5N.png

[2] - https://github.com/chriskempson/tomorrow-theme
You're right, though I wasn't thinking of penalties outside of Congress. Congress can only go so far as to expel a member, right, or can they put a sitting Representative up for impeachment? Assuming they can, I suspect the fallout from that would be...impressive.
This is exactly why it got flagged. You didn't bother to even look at the story (or read my comment past the word Benghazi, apparently). It's not a political junkie story, it's an intelligence community overreach and abuse story and a "War on Leakers" story, in the same vein as all of the NSA stories. They are polygraphing around 35 CIA agents monthly and threatening them in order to squelch any possible leaks.

Here are some of the HNer comments from the killed thread, to help illustrate:

wisty 23 hours ago | link

> In exclusive communications obtained by CNN, one insider writes, "You don't jeopardize yourself, you jeopardize your family as well."

> Another says, "You have no idea the amount of pressure being brought to bear on anyone with knowledge of this operation."

I think the implication is pretty clear here.

-----

pgeorgi 23 hours ago | link

"The goal of the questioning, according to sources, is to find out if anyone is talking to the media or Congress."

Media: okay. I can sort of see why. Congress: What the ... are they hiding?
Why do you call GPL3 a poison tree license?
How can you tell it was flaggeD?
I'd like to get away from Google. And since they don't offer any more free accounts they offer nothing special, except the large amount of apps like calendars and stuff, which I don't need at all.
Except that it is, in fact, possible to instill discipline in a person. Armies the world over do it by the hundreds.
No dude. It's just you. They knew it was jgaddis from UnderNet days... and they said... /dev/null that punk's post. :)

hey man. Long time no talk. SuperLag here. Still have those 25xx Cisco's I sold way back in the dark ages?
Sounds like the PHP docs
Well, the NSA allegedly wiretapped Obama when he was running for senator.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/20/russ-tice-nsa-obama...
Not exactly accurate. pg modified the required karma for flagging a few months ago.It's probably over 1000 now.
The slide deck has an impressive list of authors, but slide 55 (about TLS and ECC) appears to be misleading without the context of the talk itself.

I didn't see the talk, so I don't know what they were aiming at, but ECC works the same in TLS 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2. Hybrid chains (i.e. an ECDSA public key in a certificate, signed by an RSA certificate) work fine too.

(Not all implementations of TLS support ECC of course.)
It is true, and for me it is not a sad state of affairs. I've seen more sites killed by excessive meta-discussion than almost anything else. More, true "transparency" frequently just leads to more meta-discussion about the minutiae, and constant bickering about nuances of interpretation.

Personally, I think PG is striking a good balance. If you disagree you are, of course, free to go elsewhere and/or start an alternative community, and solve all the problenms in your own way.
Foundation 4 Is Better Than Twitter Bootstrap 2. Here’s Why.
Enterprisify your Java Class Names
That doesn't make it acceptable / useful as per my question.
Not at all, I don't support what happened in any way.

The parent comment was stating that making a resource scare only makes it more valuable... my point was that the market for child porn is so small that using the scarcity argument is not a great comparison.
When I first posted it, it rocketed to the top of the front page right away, then disappeared to a few pages back, then a few minutes later came back to the front page. That indicates that lots of people were upvoting it very quickly, and then other people were flagging it off the front page just as quickly. After it see-sawed like this a handful of times for an hour or so, it was permanently marked [dead]:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152006
Police cameras busy snapping license plates
12 Things I Have Learned After 7 Years of Freelancing
I'm sure you meant Jacobinian? ;-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin
I was a passenger in all of them.
10 Counter intuitive Ways to Increase Productivity without a Productivity App
It’s common knowledge that not everyone shares common ground with what others consider as common sense. We are constantly surprised to find cool new facts that affect productivity...
Sync Facebook events to your calendar without getting "spammy" unanswered events
A Sea Change for the America’s Cup
Steps Towards an Accessible Web Form
Fruit of the poisonous tree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisoned_tree
So you assume they are hiding something in Benghazi? (I hear Michelle Bachman and Sarah Paling in my head now screeching the word over and over) From what I read, they are cracking down on leaks in all areas and at all levels of government and military, not just a few agents in the B-word.
this article takes awhile to get to the point, but the point is correct which is:

> In other words, this is how it should be, that you write your code once, and you can use any supported language version to run it/compile it, or develop in. But for some reason, this obvious solution has been discouraged by Guido and other Python documents, as seen above. I just looked up the latest official Python docs, and that one is not upfront negative about a single code base. But it still does not recommend this approach as the one. So let me fix that: I do recommend a single code base as the solution.

2to3 is definitely useful to do the initial conversion of a codebase from something totally 2.x into one that is 3.x compatible. But from that point on, you need to put it away and not look at it again. Now that it's socially acceptable to target 2.6 at the lowest, libraries that wish to target 2.6-3.x still need to have a little bit of conversion code present, i.e. a subset of six, but other than that the code can be fairly py3k-ish.

Armin's article here is the most up to date discussion of this: http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2013/5/21/porting-to-python-3-redux/ (though lots of us disagree with his decision to dump 3.1/3.2). This article has lots of great advice like "test for py2k not 3k" as well as his metaclass decorator that is a lot nicer than six's. SQLAlchemy's second py3k port (yes, due to the original advice we all have had to port to python 3 twice) makes heavy use of these techniques.

At this point I have all of my major codebases supporting 2.x-3.x. Particularly, Mako templates supports python 2.4 all the way through 3.x with no conversion - and Mako deals heavily with unicode and Python AST structures.

So hopefully the Python docs can catch up with the reality soon. The original advice to think very separately about your 2.x and 3.x codebases was very wrong, has wasted a ton of time (since you end up porting to python 3 twice), and overall slowed down the adoption of py3k, a slowdown that fortunately is finally lifting.
Yes, Ruby is unbearably painful to use on Windows for this reason. Your dev environment will be brittle and you'll have to spend lots of time dealing with platform issues, which you won't find easy help for.
You're not going to realistically get a tablet with those features at that price. You're best bet is probably to go with the Galaxy Note 8.0 or buy a used iPad and a capacitative stylus (with the Notability app, this is an amazing solution despite the fact that it uses a "finger-sized" stylus - Wacom tablets are expensive).
This is sort-of what bounty hunters do: unlike law enforcement, they can enter private property without a warrant to apprehend their target.
as im writing this i think im about to be ba
Can you post an example of how it looks?
Their audience is mainly comprised of web developers and marketing companies, I presume. I don't think this would be a good audience to show AdSense ads.

On the other hand, it's a good audience to slap an invite to open their wallets, give NerdyData $99 a month, and they'll let them use this thing that will help them make more money.

I don't think they've nailed the business plan yet, but they're on the right direction.

People who want to use their search engine for non-professional, hobbyist interests can use the free plan: 200 credits, 10 results, although it lacks some features that are interesting for web development and web marketing.
GitHub and my open source life
It's a silly word that last.fm uses to mean streaming metadata of all music you play to them so they can mine it and do all the crunching they do to run their service regardless of what player you use. A scrobbler can also refer to a plugin to some music player application that sends said metadata to last.fm.
It would be a great blessing for Django beginners like me if some noble soul(s) could turn this into the go-to project template for Django based webapps (by making Mozilla specific stuff more generic).
I am understanding it differently, may be because after much deliberation I fell into the same position. I interpret the parent comment to mean that the questions posed are very, very relevant and worth grappling with, but knowing the answers is not a pre-requisite to work in the chosen field.

I don't know about the original commenter, but I fell into this position as being the best for me based on, "I am overwhelmed by the number of things that I need to know to make a judgement of good/bad over here, but don't or cannot know. There is too much random chance in my life to figure out how my actions play out. Until I grow wiser, let me do what that chance has laid my way, knowing fully well that I am operating in the dark."

The big, muddying parameters for me to answer 'is what I am doing right?' were:

1. In what context?

2. Over what timeframe?

The larger the context, the longer the timeframe, the more the number of competing principles I had to prioritize, often in inconsistent ways over different aspects of life. In the end, I defaulted to the original commenter's position, with the blind optimism that I would somehow, somewhere in the future get more clarity and wisdom through experience.
Why do you take it as a foregone conclusion that sometime you'll have to "go Cloud"? For all its hype, cloud hosting is not the end-all-be-all.
"Saved links" might be one reason. While I wouldn't advocate using HN as a personal bookmark service it does lessen the burn a bit if nobody else comments/votes on it. The good thing is that if you use saved links for that it makes you think twice about what sort of things you should be submitting.
>it would have sent a devastating precedent that is in nobody's interest.

It would have made immediately obvious to everyone the need for patent system reform.
I've always been fascinated by these functional time capsules, intended to communicate ideas rather than just entertain people with the novelty of historic artifacts.

One such project relates to how to communicate danger (nuclear waste) to a society 10k years hence - one possible answer being: you don't bother, they'll just have to learn to avoid it.

http://www.wipp.energy.gov/fctshts/warned.pdf

[edit] this is a nice summary of the full report, with a link to the original document (350pp)

http://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of-...
Thanks for the explanation. In that case I will stick to winamp and my circa 2000 minidisc player, neither of which puke my playlist over the internet.
Some thoughts after porting my javascript game to native Android and PC apps
Vague wording in legislation ends up as an excuse for doing bad things because when you get enough people together to call them a government, you're bound to end up with a few bad eggs. Online discussion sites are small enough that that's not necessarily the case - it's quite feasible to maintain a core group of people who don't abuse that power.

Especially since, unlike in government, that core group of people is beholden only to whoever is operating the site, and not to a popularity contest that sees them being replaced with an entirely new group every so often. This is also why you absolutely can have poorly-defined rules and opaque moderation - the operator of the discussion site shapes what they want it to look like, and if too many people disagree with that vision then another discussion site springs up tailored to what those people want. And if the original operator is too arbitrary or capricious in their moderation, their own site dies or becomes an insular hugbox or something like that.

--

Ultimately, when people say they want stricter interpretation of the rules and more accountability on an online discussion board, what they really mean is "I disagree with some of these decisions and I want them to make the decision that I would make next time". Which is fine, but having seen a lot of the proposed alternatives in action I can't really see them as being an improvement.
I'm surprised that you didn't also write the Authority application in Haskell. There are good Haskell web frameworks, such as Happstack and Yesod.
pdf (who disables save anyway?): https://media.blackhat.com/us-13/us-13-Stamos-The-Factoring-...
I've written large applications in AngularJS, the dirty checking is generally not a problem. If you write complex directives that need to pass non-trivial data structures around, you have to know what you're doing, but it still works fine.

I don't get your reference to $timeout - $timeout is Angular's more testable wrapper around setTimeout for an asynchronous operation. AFAICT it's entirely unrelated to dirty checking - sometimes you just want something to happen later. Am I missing something?
I'd be happy to read :)
Just to be clear, I personally believe distribution both encourages production and further harms victims.
Speed focused development - Tips on cutting down development time
>you should consider the possibility that your posts are not adding anything of benefit to the site.

...such as when your thoughtful posts don't show up because you got hellbanned for a single post the mods/algorithm didn't like. And when considering the odds, it makes sense to create new accounts.
How do you know this? Have you run a forum or community website, or have you been on the other side? Serious question. Must know data and provenance of data.
Urrgh, if you're going to ask for money, at least ensure you use 'its' correctly on the fundraising button (i.e. it should be 'reach its fundraising goal'.
I really wish everyone would read the Oatmeal piece on apostrophes http://theoatmeal.com/comics/apostrophe
Wikipedia visual editor
That's true! Also, if you reverse your username, add a graphic "1" to the first letter and add 2 and 3 to the next two (don't forget to wraparound!), you get "duck". You can't fool me, mallard!
Still can't be bothered to read it, huh? Tapper's a really well respected journalist, and this piece has been picked up and heavily covered by major news outlets everywhere. If you can read that article and not have some real concerns about the matter, and not see how it relates to the broader intelligence debates we've been having on HN for the past couple of months, I don't know what to tell you.

This has nothing to do with the Fox News crowd or shrill former politicians, and I think you're betraying your own political biases by refusing to engage with the substance of the matter.
I'm trying to learn Lojban, because I think it might make a good general interlanguage between people and computers.

I've also heard interesting things about Sanskrit, for the same purpose.
John Carmack: The Physics of Light and Rendering (Quakecon 2013)
There are quite a few examples of open source but paid applications. One that comes to mind is Gina Trapani's Todo.txt app that someone forked, cleaned up and put on the Google play store. She went into that quite a bit on her podcast: http://5by5.tv/inbeta/47. If your app is open source, don't be surprised if that happens. Such scenarios are part of the value you are claiming.
I've noticed this too, though it's never happened to me (probably because I've been around for a while and don't even try it anymore). You can post any link to Daring Fireball, no matter how random or irrelevant—even if it's just recycled news with a sliver of Gruber commentary—and it will probably get karma. But no Android in-depth breakdowns, reviews, or nerdery. That is seemingly not permitted.
I did this for years. From ccmail, to mbox, to maildir, to exchange.

Then one day I just deleted it all. I haven't missed it since. I keep my inbox at zero. Everything goes into tickets and is actioned or is saved as a document if required still and the rest goes in the bin.

In fact its been better for me. Less stress, less crap to backup, less worrying about losing stuff, less window of opportunity if someone manages to root my kit.

The best thing is that I've worked out things can wait.
You can see the important difference between Amber and AngularJS in the 'computed properties' snippet of Amber:

App = Ember.Application.create();

App.ApplicationController = Ember.Controller.extend({
name: '',
greeting: function() {
if (this.name.length < 1) return '';
return 'Hello, ' + this.name;
}.property('name')
});

You write this to use a property 'greeting' in a view that's calculated from a different property 'name'. This works for one model, but imagine you have dependencies across different model objects, nested properties, and so forth. Seems like it'll get complicated pretty quickly.

In AngularJS, that's just (in the template, or a controller function, or where ever):

{{name + greeting}}

AngularJS uses dirty checking, which makes it trivial to implement complicated interdependencies between various fields. Any plain JavaScript code will work, including model objects that were not written as Ember code.

This comes at the cost of the dirty-checking loop (checking each expression in a tight loop on every user 'event'), but in my experience that's at least not a problem for normal desktop web applications.