skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> though not always or in all cases.

Nothing I read suggested that every case was a problem. Simply that over time, most of these types of comments aren't helping anyone.

> Correlation is not causation....

It's useless as a comment. Spouting that off, and then adding a sentence on how bad science reporting is is where I see this most often. Or, often, it's applies to the reporting, not to the actual study. Thus, the study is dismissed because of the report.

> If you're not paying for it, you're the product.

It's mostly useless in the way it's used. Your condition of justification is where it makes it mostly useless. I mostly don't see it used with justification. Just a mere comment mentioning this, followed by a general rant about the state of being the product.

> [citation needed] Appropriate when someone makes an extraordinary, unsubstantiated, and difficult-to-source claim.

This appears all the time as the only text to a comment. First, it's factually incorrect. A citation is not needed. Merely requested. Secondly, it's usually used as a passive-aggressive way to assert that you disagree with someone. Don't have a way to argue around something someone said? Just place [citation needed] in a comment. Thirdly, I see it often used when, in the course of simple discussion, someone presents a hyperbole. It's not meant to be taken literally. However, a reply will seek citation on that specific point. Finally, it's also often used in cases where someone used a subjective adjective to describe something. People get robbed, no one will argue with. However, say "Significant people get robbed", and people want a citation, despite the fact that significant does not mean majority. It's subjective to the discussion and the condition.

> Premature optimization

Again, in the context of HN, it's most often trotted out when people are explicitly exploring optimization.

People always forget that there is such a thing as mature optimization.

> Dunning-Kruger effect Sadly, far too often appropriate, IMO.

Citation requested. =)

> Logical fallacies As with "citation needed": the quality of discourse is served...

If the quality of the comment doesn't move the discussion forward, down vote it. You do nothing by replying with a statement of the logical fallacy. Unless I'm mistaken, up and down votes do not apply to comments you reply to, or to comments that reply to you. Regardless, if you comment on a worthless comment, you are doing nothing more than contributing to the slow degradation of the thread. If, however, the comment does contain redeeming qualities despite a wart or two (as we've all had happen to us), then work to bring the thread back in order.

And the end of the day, this "you deserve to be called on it" attitude is that of a passive aggressive vigilantly.
> A browser engine which doesn't use HTML/CSS/JS

It uses pure JS, without HTML and CSS. It's basically a LightTable creator's dream. I don't get what's there not to get.
South Korea Unfolds Future Of Urban Driving
> You need to know English

No, you really don't. You only need to know English if you're selling to English speaking people. You'll probably need to learn English for a number of professions. But apart from that you can live and work perfectly well without using English at all.

English isn't the main language on the Internet any more, it is just one of them. The fact that you happen to think that English is the major language used on the Internet is possibly just a vicious self-reinforcing cognitive bias.
Bootstrap-wysihtml5
Y Combinator’s success rate shows 1 in 200 win
Come for the conference, stay for Paris. Seriously, if you've never been to Paris you really should do yourself a favor and hang out before or after the conference. It's an amazing city and October is a really great time to be there.
This is the best way to handle it, just a quick note saying "Sorry, maybe soon!" rather than out and out abandoning ship. Kudos to him, I hope he finds his desire for it again, he makes some excellent resources.
English is the QWERTY of languages.
She's not playing, she's the act.

Someone "wrote" her and (s)he is the artist.
Meteor, Derby, Sails
The article mentions some clear examples of people who have genetic advantages. Eero Mäntyrantas' advantage isn't difficult to quantify ( sixty-five per cent more red blood cells than the normal adult male ), so I'm not sure it can be dismissed so easily..
> I support his impeachment for the very same reason.

I share the sentiment. But we should keep in mind that the next president will be continue the same madness as the people before him/her. It's a systemic problem and can not be corrected by voting one of the "two" "choices" in.
This appears to be a great tool, for instance, for visualizing how widely an author has posted across a subject area. Nicely done!!
No, not really. I have the same opinion and I'm not a native English speaker.

English has some good properties for a common language:

- It has a simple grammar

- It is spoken by the entertaining media

- It already has a head start

Now, if they could actually fix the major flaws:

- Spelling is absurd. It's not just bad, it is absurd.

- For foreigners, the UK accents are terrible. It took me a couple of days in London before I could understand people; and I came from a base of being perfectly fluent

Come to think of it. Scratch that fixing the UK accent part. It's a cool accent, double-oh seven style.

For the love of god, fix the spelling:

-----

"Eye Rhymes, by Helen Bowyer"

Bear and dear //
Share, I fear //
The pointless deceptivness //
Of there and here.

Some and home //
Tomb and comb, //
Sin against the tongue //
Like from and whom.

Howl and bowl //
Foul and soul, //
Mislead the ear //
Like doll and toll. //

Give and dive //
Live and thrive, //
Bewilder the moppet //
Of six or five.

Love and hove //
Dove and strove //
Sound no more alike //
Than glove and cove.

Pew and sew //
Do and go //
Fail expectation //
Like now and slow.

Laid and said //
Must be read //
As if they rhymed //
With neighed and Ned.

------

As I said before, English spelling's bonkers.
I stand corrected about JS - updated comment above. I still don't understand what this is, though.
Or even just use a runtime they already have installed.
Because comments probably aren't the best place to talk about conclusive anything: it's a discussion. If you've done the leg work to get something solid it can at least get the discussion it deserves if submitted to HN.
The Dark Side of Inbox Zero
On http://scicurve.com/ you can visualize networks of papers based on biomedical data.
They claim no HTML in the video though, so I expect to be more like programming a GUI toolkit than a web application.
Of course. Let's equalize it all. Same genes, same education, same training, same food. 120% pure clones. And then let's who's able to stick his head ahead of the others. We can dig out our beloved Guillotine to see it that no one ends first.</irony mode="dang">
This is starting to become a trend, which was to be expected. When you spy on your allies, and they find out, they won't trust you or your companies anymore, and they will isolate themselves from you as much as possible.

Maybe this will lead to the decentralization of power in the world, and EU and Latin America will start challenging US in services and economy - which would be good for everyone in the world.

Brazil Wants National 'Antisnoop' Email

http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/world/2013/09/...
indeed - the video is flashy, but i only watched less than 1 minute of it, because after 1 minute, i still have no idea what they are going on about, and my time is more precious than that. Pressed stop.
Shedding new light on the 'electron highways' of organic solar cells
Owned by a chair
A chill went down my spine reading this. That's a good sign.
What?? It doesn't seem that contrarian to me!

Sorry, I just couldn't resist.

Edit:

To actually add something to the conversation (and sadly, to be just a bit contrarian), I hope nobody reads this as "oh darn, I better not take an opposing view for fear of being voted down as contrarian." I actually do like reading respectfully contrarian responses. Not the childish ones you describe, but the ones which have a bit of thought behind them. I think a better term is "devil's advocate."

Please people, keep doing that, at least.
Indeed so - see http://gradvs1.mgateway.com/download/EWDLite.pdf
I mean the former. People communicate with each other just fine - with or without accents, with or without stutters, with or without lisping.

Accents are part of people's identity because of the nature of their mother tongue. The Italians have strong accent, as well as Russians and Indians. They are fine - they are not a deficiency.

Ban Ki Moon is a UN Secretary General - and boy, he has an accent. It works fine for him being a diplomat whose job is to talk and talk and talk.
Very clever, the ol' switcheroo.

I'm not talking about the comments from genuinely confused people, I'm talking about the nastier snipes which seem to have conveniently disappeared after myself and others called them out on it. Here's one that's still floating around: "there's nothing in that horrible presentation that a modern browser can't do".

And you're calling me a dick for calling out comments like that? Come on, please. I realise that my original comment AND this comment aren't adding any value to the conversation either, I'm just saying we aren't doing much in creating an environment where people are confident in sharing their work without fear of hours of work being instantly dismissed by snarky commenters. I'm sure you wouldn't like it.
> Do Genetic Advantages make sport unfair?

Our LIVES are determined by 2 factors:

1. Genetics

2. The environment in which our genetics are applied (social, economic, ecologic, etc.)

Everything in our lives is caused by these two. So no, there is no real free will and nobody is ever treated fairly.

And yes, our entire culture is still medieval with regards to accepting this fact and taking it into account.
Yes it is! We will also do a RailsGirls event on the weekend after the event. And we will be happy to help anyone organize a longer stay in our city ;-)
No, this was submitted twice before in the last few days.
> Don’t get too comfortable. Don’t get locked into a language. Don’t burn bridges for short term gain. Keep your tools sharp. Learn soft skills. Build an audience. Save some money. Network. Read.

This is great advice. The big issue with the rust belt is that building cars was all car builders knew how to do. Most didn't have the sustained practice with learning new things to adapt to a changing environment. I wouldn't keep it to programming languages and technologies, or even auxiliary skills like marketing and advertising. Keep your mind sharp with as much depth in as many different topics as you can stand.
Would you be upset if you found out Mexican secret services have been listening on Obamas calls? What about your calls? Do you like to be spied on?

Isn't it a bit egoistical to assume this affects or is interesting only for American citizens? "Well my Constitution says they can spy on everyone as well as they are not US citizens". Well a lot of other citizens are not US citizens and they don't really give a crap what is written in the US Constitution. They care that they are spied one. And it doesn't even matter if their own government turns around and spies right back on US citizens. They don't like it. They didn't like what NSA did before this either. NSA is in the news now and know more of what and how they do it. That is why there is talk about it.
.
"I'm just saying you cannot give people free money and not take that money from somewhere else"

No-one is saying that you should. A theoretical BIG would be funded by the money that is currently spent on inefficient and mismanaged state welfare. It's money that is already being spent, used in a different way.
Don't confuse correlation with causation. It may not be that more lines is the cause, but that the method of thinking that some languages require you to think in is error prone, and it just so happens that such a language also needs more LoC.
The number one rule I have taught to people who speak English as a second language is to always always always learn polysyllabic words, especially those with 3+ syllables, to learn them back to front and never from front to back, which is the natural way to approach learning long words.

Instead of learning a word like onomatopeia like this:

on...
ono...
onomat...
onomato...
onomatopei...
onomatopeia

Try saying it out loud this way instead:

...a
...peia
...topeia
...matopeia
...nomatopeia
onomatopeia

This will almost always result in learning to pronounce the word much better. I say almost because there probably are words out there that violate this rule, but I haven't come across any of them yet. The reason this approach works is because the first syllable of almost all polysyllabic words in English is pronounced in a more drawn out fashion than the latter syllables. By learning from back to front, you force yourself to learn to draw out the first syllable and shorten up the last syllable(s).

I have found that this rule is also applicable to almost all Romance languages for English speakers learning, French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.

If you are a speaker of a second language, I strongly urge you to try this out yourself and get feedback from a native speaker on your pronunciation.
Thanks for mentioning this book, I've wanted to dig into cocos2D for a while but the lack of a good beginner book kept me from getting too far. I picked it up last night and it's exactly what I've been looking for. Awesome thanks!
There wouldn't be the Paralypmics if genetics were fair.
It doesn't?

As it's an act of aggression, the people suffering may well demand the factory compensates them for the damage.

But actually, knowing that it will be held liable, the factory will spend more money on researching how to minimize pollution and will generally be placed in places where it does no damage to anyone.

It's all about aggression, really. The factory takes someone's rights unlawfully, it compensates for that. (And knowing it has to compensate, it'll avoid damaging in the first place.)

On contrary, a utilitarian government may decide that having some factory working is beneficial to the whole society so it's in "public interest" to let it infringe with people's rights to their property. So it says, "okay, it's bad; but it's in the public interest! we are going to allow this factory to work and it doesn't have to compensate you anything!"

Libertarianism says that even if having this factory running brings more "good" than "bad", it's still bad, because it aggresses against people's property. Property rights are above any "public good". Period.

(Oh, but if a group of armed criminals has control over some area of land, then it's probably okay to place mysterious "public good" above anything else.)
Not everyone here is American. YOUR liberties might not be threatened by the NSAs spying outside the US, but given the US decades long history of interventions up to and including coups, invasions and destabilisation of democratically elected governments, US spying on foreign heads of state does threaten the civil liberties of a lot of people outside the US.
Nicely handled. Good for you, take your time Ryan. You've given so much quality free content over the years, the least the Rails community can do is hang back and let you figure this out on your own good time.
Correct. Let me add Ireland as a good example of that as well
I've been implementing a similar set of algorithms. Should resume again. https://github.com/thameera/cppalgo
Just another example of the overzealous moderation on Stack Overflow to close any and every question ever asked because it in some way managed to be useful to anyone but their narrow minded view of what constitutes a programming question that didn't fit their formula of Q&A.
Load of carp.
GET your Webshell While Evading Detection
spf13-vim is pure vim script. No ruby required.
spf13-vim is cross platform and works well on windows.
spf13-vim uses a bundle system to make easy maintenance. Git submodules lock you into a specific hash of each plugin and maintenance in keeping these up to date only increases your commit count with empty commits.

spf13-vim is built to be a base and completely customizable. This is built to be your vim config.

Lastly spf13-vim has dozens of contributors supporting a variety of plugins and languages. This seems focused on squares stack, ruby & coffeescript.

Disclaimer... I'm spf13, so a bit partial, but if you look at spf13-vim from 2 or 3 years ago it looked a lot like this... and we've learned a lot from making some mistakes present here.
It's already happening. As a freelancer, I often find people who want their "corporate" site built in WordPress for less money than what they would pay to a car mechanic for a similar amount of time worked. Sames goes for Magento and similar platforms.
Could be worse. Like say German. der/die/das would cause many suicides.
Doesn't it bother anyone else that the only source for the recent "NSA spied on <x>"-type news seems to be Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden? Has their claims ever been independently verified?
I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I actually don't think the recent surveillance scandals are the best example of corporatism. It is very unclear that corporations (for instance AT&T, in the article) are actually colluding with the government, rather than being legally compelled to comply.
To be fair, the article is ALSO not talking about the case anigbrowl is talking about.

I've seen "[citation needed]" abused more often as I've seen it used when somebody is "[making] an extraordinary or absolutist claim absent any evidence"

And the main claim still holds: provide a link that disproves, descredits or calls into question the extraordinary claim. Or at least explain why you think it's extraordinary.
There is always pubmed[1].

[1]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/
Ask HN: Project Management Book - stories from the trenches?
I have been doing more project management recently. Though the projects are delivered on time and the scope creep is very limited I don't come out of those meetings feeling positive or satisfied. I want to read up on common mistakes, pitfalls, myths etc. and learn how to avoid them. Can you recommend books on Project Management.
Would You Be Able To Deal With A Startup Failure?
"So what's my incentive to work? Screw this, I quit"

Your incentive to work is that you earn $100k instead of $12k. I certainly wouldn't quit my job if it means that much of an income hit. This is actually a real situation for me - I could quit my job tomorrow and get more than $12k in benefits, but I won't.
spf13-vim is completely cross platform and has about even distribution across the different platforms of users.

http://vim.spf13.com
I see that the submitted article, and many of the interesting comments in this busy thread, relate to the issue of the bizarre spelling patterns of English. As a native speaker of General American English (the dialect of English I recommend to foreign learners of English ;) ), I have two perspectives on this.

1) As a parent of English-speaking children, I thought it was VITAL that they learn well the main consistent sound-symbol correspondence rules of English spelling. (This is called "phonics" in the context of teaching reading to native speakers of English.) My favorite book recommendation for this is Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach, by linguist Leonard Bloomfield and lexicographer Clarence Barnhart. All four of my children learned to read well with this book. The book is now in a second edition

http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Read-A-Linguistic-Approach/dp/081...

prepared by a second generation of the Barnhart family. Learning to read with an approach like this is dialect-friendly (the book is specifically organized to take into account dialect differences, at least within American English) and systematic for understanding what is consistent in English spelling and what is not.

2) As for spelling reform in English, I think it was HN user gnosis who once shared a very interesting link

http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ortho.html

about English spelling reform by a commentator who knows linguistics well. English spelling reform is often desired by native speakers of the language, but it is a tough problem. See what the link has to say about various proposals for spelling reform.
> Who is talking about building "websites"?

OP

> wanted to be able to use the power of the browser for standalone, cross-platform desktop applications.

considering the power of the browsers is to run web applications, it makes sense that the standard and cross-platform APIs they expose are web APIs.

> Imagine you chose to build an IDE using Webkit and it lets you access everything via JS api that you could access using Cocoa or GTK+.

You've got XUL, you've got webviews, you've got node bindings for Qt, wx or opengl. If you want to write desktop applications in javascript there's no dearth of ways to do it.
I knew, before I clicked this, that it was not going to be about "developing" in the conventional sense, because that's basically impossible by design on an unhacked Chromebook. It should be titled "State of web development on a Chromebook".

I wish there were more recognition on HN and associated cultures that "development" is not short for "web development" and "startup" is not short for "missed-the-dotcom-bubble web startup".

I also think it's very telling that the author had to use a program written with natively compiled code to get a "very slick terminal emulator".
His division between an entrenched 'class in power' and a utopian ideal consensus-seeking liberal 'digital generation' also seems like a bit of a fantasy, which he admits - "Despite the popularization of tools such as Twitter or smartphones, this divide was not resolved. Instead, it only gets worse."

Yet even accepting strong evidence that his world view is at least flawed, and more likely completely fanciful, this doesn't in any way stop him from persisting in vigorously applying it to everything that's happening around him.

Watergate was a clear case of a president implicated in patently illegal acts. In contrast, the NSA's activities were overseen by a court and a few self-confessed infractions aside were entirely legal. We can argue whether they should be legal, or whether the legal framework is constitutional etc, but everyone involved in the NSA's activities can honestly and truthfully claim they had very good reason to believe what they were doing was legal. I'm not supporting what they were doing in any way, but there's simply co comparison whatever between the Snowden case and Watergate.

Comparisons with Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers are far more apt, but if it wasn't for the FBI's inept and illegal harassment and wiretapping of Ellsberg fatally tainting the prosecution's case, it's quite likely Ellsberg may have faced a prison sentence just as much as Snowden might. Certainly there's no particular reason to think that prosecution of Snowden is unprecedented. Furthermore the harassment of the press relating to Snowden's revelations has largely taken place outside the US. Within the US the press is publishing away with little to no legal restraint or obstruction and until a journalist in the US actually faces prosecution or restraint over the affair, rumblings about such being in the works are just noise.