skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of those questions simply tie back into the age-old debate over capability.

You can talk about checks and balances all you want, but if you hand a "trusted soldier" a rifle he may yet kill many of the wrong people before he can be stopped. Yet people don't typically lie awake at night staring at the ceiling worrying about the local National Guard violating Posse Comitatus and imposing martial law.

But on the other hand the capability still exists, so we do make at least cursory efforts at mitigating this risk. We perform nominal screening of recruits into the military, we keep most weapons locked up in the armory when the soldiers are at garrison, we train soldiers at all levels of where their allegiance lies, what Posse Comitatus means, etc.

So it is with the NSA. Let's say they determine that the NSA needs the ability to perform surveillance, but that Snowden's revelations have demonstrated that better checks-and-balances are needed, even though there's no evidence of "Stasi-like activity", just to be safe. They go and add these required checks-and-balances.... do you still feel ultra-threatened by NSA?
Very good point. I would, however, write that as 0.15%.
Remember: HN algorithm has a hidden message from PG for startups - randomization exists in startups, but the weightage should vary:

http://statspotting.com/pgs-hidden-message-in-hackernews-alg...
Why getting the Obamacare exchanges to work was difficult
Link doesn't appear to be pointed at anything relevant?
Was it taken down? Link or mirror please? Thanks!
I remember when YouTube tried contextual upvotes for their comments.

Somehow, that made things ten times worse.
Just wanted to say, thank you for this! I've been using it for a while and it's so useful :)
Man, this just misses the point by miles and is consistent with the cynical narrative that the Republicans are now trying desparately to establish. That is, "the Constitution grants Congress the power of the purse, blah, blah, blah".

The bottom line is that the action of shutting down the government as a means of forcing a completely unrelated concession from the White House/Senate is just plain wrong and damn near extortionate. They put the ACA to a vote 43 times since its passage and couldn't do anything with it. You really think it's healthy Constitutional politics to then subvert that expression of the people's will by inflicting harm on the entire country unless they meet your demands?

But, if you want to pull out the Constitution, then cool: let Mr. Boehner put it to an up-down vote so that the will of all of the people can be expressed via their elected representatives. But, what is this handful of people shutting down the government nonsense?

The past five years have nothing to do with this. Both parties are not at fault. Both houses are not at fault. A small minority of Republicans and a gutless Speaker are at fault. Period. Anything else is just a cynical red herring. Discussing the merits of the ACA in the context of the shutdown simply indicates that you're either following the red herring or dragging it.

BTW, yes, I voted for Obama and have had mixed feelings on his performance. But, this truly rises above partisan politics to what's good for the country. Just a handful of people are ready to burn the place down for one very narrow ideological obsession. There is a real threat/problem here that should concern everyone.
The man who lives without money
Why work at drchrono?
Ssshh...
I think you've just predicted the shape of the iWatch.
I like the simplicity, but how can it deliver it every morning without asking for your time zone? The confirmation says it'll deliver at 9am. UTC?
Boston Dynamics Unleashes Wildcat, the Sprinting Quadruped Robot
Ugh! Spot on :(
Vary the number of items on the first page between 20 and 30 depending on screen size and a random +/- 1.
The same thing happened with Physicians Formula Holdings (NASDAQ:FACE) before the facebook IPO
Talk on graphs in Clojure at LispNYC
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3004254
I went on Twitch for the first time ever tonight as I was reading the linked article, clicked on World of Warcraft at random, and 6 of the 11 featured streams visible above the fold included a picture-in-picture of a cute girl with lots of cleavage. I clicked one out of interest and she wasn't even playing a game...she had the twitch chat up on her screen and was soliciting donations while people spammed the chat with "I wanna cum on your tits" like I was on some awful video game camgirl site. Anyway, clearly you're not watching WoW videos, but statement above was not 'apropos of nothing'.
The Eerie Playground: Videogames and Autism
I created HNMention (http://www.hnmention.com/) a while back.

It will notify you when someone mentions you in comment like how mention works on Twitter (@username).
Bitcoin is like the early internet
This should be renamed; the punch of the article is not that startups should be evil, but that "Don't Be Evil" is too simplistic.

Which, by the way, is kind of too bad. Everyone's so idealistic nowadays; I'd love to read a blog post to the effect that "the masses are stupid and incapable of making their own decisions, and we aim to save them from themselves, whether they like it or not."
I've hypothesized a few times that: when many people submit the same url, x>1 of them are very likely to submit the actual title of the article while people who editorialize will tend to do so uniquely. Because of this HN can rely on an algo to update the title.

I realize there there are moderators for HN and they are confirmed in some cases to have changed titles but I don't think this necessarily means they are responsible for all the title updates.
The 'new' page depresses the hell out of me. I read all of these articles about the best time to post to get maximum exposure, but you know it makes very little difference if you're going to end up with 1 vote anyway.

I looked at the 'new' page this morning while thinking about the "optimal" time (it was around 9am EST, which is supposedly one of the best times according to several articles). Almost every post had a single point. Since your post starts with one point, that means most posts have received absolutely no support whatsoever. I suppose this is inevitable. Only a small percentage of submitted content can get on the front, but nonetheless it's still frustrating to put effort into something and then... crickets.
I've found a very strange case of getting better results from posting at off-peak hours. My theory is that my post stays on the first page of "new" long enough for enough people to vote for it. If I post at peak hours, then my post gets pushed off the front page within an hour, meaning too few people have seen it to get it to the front page.
Alternative Sleep Cycles: 7-10 Hours Are Not Needed
The better question might be to ask when ESPN will buy up Twitch.
poindexter
Very cool!

Minor nitpick, though: "news" is most commonly singular, so your tagline should probably read "news that matters."
Did you ever think of modifying "best" to apply to submissions? A measure of how quickly an article is rising would be a pretty good metric for determining its rightful prominence.
Healthcare comes to iOS 7
I tend to use browser tabs as a 'to-do list'; and as a result don't often get back to the listing to upvote it. A different setup might get better ranking data... at least from me.
The suggestion appears to be to randomly adjust the scores of articles, but ISTM it would be more democratic to randomly adjust the scores of articles separately for each user. There's no reason we all have to see the same random posts.
I think there is counter-intuitive explanation. I've found a very strange case of getting better results from posting at off-peak hours. My theory is that my post stays on the first page of "new" long enough for enough people to vote for it. If I post at peak hours, then my post gets pushed off the front page within an hour, meaning too few people have seen it to get it to the front page.

It seems that, if the volatility of posting is greater than the volatility of reading, then it is best to post at off-peak hours. It is only good to post at peak hours if there are more readers than posters, i.e. there isn't a large corpus of users that aren't trying to game the system.
I can't read this article. It requires an account of some kind.
I remember giving Oberon a try in the late 90's. As I recall, Oberon was available as both an application and as a stand-alone OS.

I really liked the interface of both Oberon and Plan 9. I wasn't really able to get much done with them back then, as I was a real novice, but I did find the UI attractive.
This is a valid approach. This is actually exactly what dithering [1] is in signal processing. You spend a little additive noise, but gain a much more regular distribution. The pagination is adding a quantization error of sorts in the amount of exposure each article is getting.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither
You have some parenthesis issues in "if rand(2^x == 0) x++" that my tired, C-laden mind had problems parsing just now.
That'll take a bit to read, so don't take my non-response as ignoring you. Thanks for the link, I'll get back to you.
>Running an all layer2 network requires devices that have large enough CAM tables to support all connected devices, many vendors newer full line rate cards were coming out with smaller CAM tables, as such layer2 simply wasn't an option in some cases.

Does this imply that mac forwarding tables(on switch) and arp cache(on hosts) need to have entries only for their immediate neighbours ?

Curious to know how much modified the host network stack is. Also, how do you provision a new server with the right IP ? Is this mechanism in L2 ?

>There are many other reasons that layer2 wasn't a good choice for us, and that layer3 makes a lot of sense. I'd be happy to discuss more of these as well.

I am sure people would find that very useful. Thanks for the excellent writeup !
Why the NSA Hates Tor
How Twitter Is Going to Take a Billion Dollars From YouTube
> It might be an interesting failure scenario for algorithmic trading.

It's not how auto trading works. Traded instrument ranges are preset before the algo is started. I've never heard of an algo that tries to pick stocks to trade dynamically based on a name, it would be astoundingly risky.
> But there's not much gentrification going on, since Twitter keeps hundreds of staff inside, with free gourmet meals, plus a slew of free services, dry cleaning, even cleaning staff apartments. It is competing with local businesses rather than helping support them — it's the opposite of gentrification.

It's not as if Twitter or Google provide those services via their own full time employees, right? They hire local companies to provide these services. We're talking about catered food from local companies, apartment cleaning from a cleaning company, etc.

If anything, we'd expect a _greater_ level of commerce with local businesses, since employees might not choose to spend their own income on those services. By providing the services to all employees, those companies actually create more demand for local business than would probably otherwise exist.

The fact that they're being provided as benefits is irrelevant - they are increasing demand.

The article seems to ignore this, and as a result it does not make sense to me.
The first thing we added was the "rising" page

I think the problem that the randomized algorithm solve is not missing good content. It is to give the same chance for equally good content - or at least to minimize the error due to page limit.

to have an up-and-coming link placed at the top of the list on the frontpage

Two things:
1) either the up-and-coming are a few borderline posts taken in order and then here you'd just extended the front page with a few more posts (ie. it changes nothing)
2) either you'd carefully choosen a heuristic for those posts which is pretty much what is suggested here.

Anyway, thank you for sharing your experience with this problem, it's very interesting.

An other idea would be to fix the content quality and make variable the number of posts in the front page.
C++ multi threaded: https://kidoman.com/programming/go-getter-part-3.html
Enterprise customer acquisition?
A Breakdown of Twitter’s 200+ Million Users (Comic)
Elon Musk Explains Why Model S Caught on Fire
DOJ Hasn't Actually Found Silk Road Founder's Bitcoin Yet
Viral Marketing Successfully Modeled By Network Theorists
Go vs C++: Ray tracer (part 3)
Perhaps, but I don't think the link titles should be changing at all unless it's clearly necessary. They should reflect the content as the original site intended it to be presented (where possible or acceptable), if they provided any metadata to describe it. That's what metadata is for after all.

There already is a "title" bar for submitting links which is fine, but I think the temptation to tweak and try to game for karma might make that more suitable as a byline.
The bottom line is that posting your content to a social news website is usually the wrong way to gain exposure.

With sites like Facebook and Reddit, you're simply shouting from a mountain top and hoping someone listens.

To be fair, your odds of gaining exposure for a tech-type story are greater on sites like HN and subreddits devoted to technology. In these places, you can count on listeners sharing some of your interests.

Tweaking the ranking algorithms may improve the situation, but the fact is, many of us have become complacent; we resort to throwing our content into social news forums and expecting a lot of exposure instead of doing our homework to determine who the appropriate point people are.

For example, if you're trying to pitch a new web app, maybe you should forget about Hacker News and try strategically emailing / calling a few friends / colleagues. When it comes to early exposure, quality can trump quantity.
In considering whether to buy a Tesla, I would evaluate the safety of the alternatives. Most in the market for a Tesla aren't going to buy the 23 year old Buick LeSabre whose oil leaks caught fire on the Jersey turnpike last week. So I think it's reasonable to compare the safety with a modern luxury sedan. I don't think as many of those catch fire without a collision.
So every time I see these threads about classic computing systems that did something interesting or novel (Oberon, Plan 9 Symbolics OpenGenera, BeOS, Amiga, etc), I want to be able to try them out on my own machine.

After discovering that OpenGenera was available, I tried a bunch to find a way to run it in a VM in OS X and had no luck finding an Alpha virtual machine host on which to install it.

Is Oberon one of those systems that I can get up and running in a virtual machine on OS X in an afternoon?
That's awesome -- you can hit me up at matt@sendwithus.com with any feedback, I'd love to hear what you think. Also willing to give out HN-discounts, just ask :)
Thanks bliggs! We're looking at many different integrations, good to know what people think would be valuable.
Indeed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_agent

Some slides on a way to do this: http://prezi.com/p5et9yawg2c6/ip-packet-staining/

Their solution was to re-route traffic to a package management device which clamps on a stain. Ipv6 makes this easy, if the traffic is Ipv4 they tunnel it inside Ipv6 with the stain header in Destination Option header.

Not sure how you would prevent this, besides the obvious answer (dont visit terrorist forums). Jondonym routing traffic through 3 mix servers might help so long as they don't stain your traffic at source by compromising your system. Making your own Tor bridge node is another solution to at least have some sort of safe entrance into the network. Seems they are unwilling to exploit relay nodes and bridges in the leaked slides.
It doesn't just sprint; the thing gallops. Like a horse. Also, as it warms up, it does a weird jitter-hop and walk-in-reverse thing that is just begging for a remix to an electronic beat.

(Sometimes I miss Slashdot. This one deserves an 'overlords' reference).
Full paper [pdf]: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1309.6369v1.pdf
I'm pretty sure the directly sold Nexus 4 did quite well in the US, to the point that google had problems with availability.
And only issue 140 shares.
Yes, you should be able to get Oberon running in VirtualBox through Blue Bottle OS [1].

Some tweaks do need to be made though [2]

[1] http://www.a2.ethz.ch/download.html
[2] https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/pipermail/oberon/2008/005536.html
6 Ways to Weatherproof Your Business
Man, I miss Tweeter. Where I grew up, they were the one store that you could go to and talk to a guy who really knew the technical ins and outs of electronic hardware, and wasn't trying to upsell you on something you didn't need.

I remember walking in with my dad one day when we were looking for a new TV (ours had just died). The guy working the floor directed us to a model that cost 30% less than what we were originally looking at, explaining (correctly) that it fit our needs much better.
> Life, liberty, freedom from discrimination, due process--these things I understand, and there are well supported philosophical frameworks (rule utilitarian, Kantian, libertarian etc.) for deriving them from first principles.

Well, if you take liberty as an understandable goal worth pursuing; true free speech is only possible when the speaker is anonymous, that is, free from the repercussions of anything that they have said so they are able to say anything that they desire or believe.

In exactly the same way, true free markets are only possible when the participants are anonymous. Of course, some random anonymous person speaking freely or attempting to engage in commerce with you on the net is extremely suspect at first glance, but just because you can't link a person's speech or market activity to a meatspace identity to point a gun at, doesn't mean that person can't accrue a reputation for accurate analysis in speech or fair dealings in a market.

Look at Bitcoin itself for an example of the reputation of anonymity; Nobody knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is, but he has a reputation far beyond that of your average random anonymous person if he chose to use his keys again to launch or endorse any other project. Silk road, Black market reloaded and the newly activated proxy stock ownership services on Tor similarly allowed people to accrue market reputations which had real value and were linked to an identity that they controlled, but simultaneously did not paint a target on their backs for people who wanted to sanction or extort them with violence in meatspace.

In both examples, true free speech and true free markets are only enabled by breaking the link between an entity and their meatspace representation which is extremely vulnerable to coercion vs their cryptospace representation which has almost unlimited free reign to do and say what they choose within that cryptospace without vulnerability to coercion.

This is the ideal being pursued by anonymous cryptocurrency denominated markets; freedom from the friction of predatory parasitic elements that prey upon existing semi-free markets coupled with the ability to still hold market actors to account for their actions by way of their building a digital reputation and that reputation being a thing that they value and protect.

So, if you value REAL free markets and REAL free speech, anonymity should be a desirable goal.
The national tourism bureau where I live recently switched to http://www.fiji.travel/

Strangely enough, they kept the www
When the difference between shouting off a mountaintop and not doing so is 30 seconds AND the upside can be so great (thousands of page views), why NOT submit your content?

> quality can trump quantity

Maybe in general, but submitting a link online is so damn easy that why wouldn't you spend 30 seconds doing it?
There are currently laws that require the executive branch to submit a budget every year (the Budget Control Act of 1921), which the president violated for a few years consecutively, forcing the past few years' continuing resolutions (and in part, the sequester).

There are additional Budget Acts (passed in the mid-70s, 90s, etc.) that require those budgets to be acted upon by Congress or reconsidered, which have all been routinely violated for the past few years as well.

The issue with these bills is that they are only enforced by those with the power to break them, which means that they are de facto never enforced.
Awesome!

Hi guys, I'm the creator of TextTeaser API that was used by Bit of News. :) I first thought that bitofnews is just a bot in Reddit. I'm really surprised that this is now a full blown website/app.

Thanks for Bit of News for using the TextTeaser API.
The NSA shouldn't just be an attacker it should also provide defence. If one of their many contractors can leak details to the press for idealogical ends it's pretty safe to assume that much worse secrets have already been leaked to other nation states (China, Russia etc....) for financial gain.

I think it's entirely reasonable to assume that a lot of exploits the NSA has discovered and not revealed (because it thinks they are "secret") have actually been sold to other governments by it's own contractors. By not revealing these exploits to citizens they are actually leaving them open to attack by foreign governments. Large companies trying to defend against industrial espionage are probably most at risk.
Well, why not try the TextTeaser API yourself (http://www.textteaser.com/)?

I'm the creator of the said API and thanks if you think it's impressive. Also thanks for bitofnews for using the API.
Its a good question on impact, but my point was to the pricing authority that Television has, which it got through a historical and perhaps no longer relevant understanding. My point is if Twitter is competing with web search which is both cheaper and more effective than TV. When people follow Ashton or Miley they care what they say, not some random ad that comes through from them following them.

Anyway, the feeling of "its really big" but not a lot of specificity about the bigness was, for me, one of the hallmarks of the dot com bubble. I remember Eric Schmidt (which I was at Sun) remarking that if anything he felt the Internet was under hyped. And while he was ultimately correct, the people who were hyping were actually quite mistaken about "how" it was under hyped. (That is so to illustrate my comment about a 'sense' of bigness without specificity).

As I watch Twitter's evolution I am on the look out for either new value they create or captured value they take from other sources. One candidate for losing value is 'nightly news' which already took a huge hit to 24hr news channels. It may not survive another :-). But the 21st century newscast is a very different thing. Exciting times.
was literally just thinking about this earlier today

would be nice if there was a chrome extension that added this via reddit-like functionality instead of having to send me an email
> Perhaps you can add up the numbers and claim that more suffering has been inflicted in total by governments (in the course of wars, or whatever, some of which were more justifiable than others) rather than isolated individuals.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide

His research shows that the death toll from democide is far greater than the death toll from war. After studying over 8,000 reports of government-caused deaths, Rummel estimates that there have been 262 million victims of democide in the last century. According to his figures, six times as many people have died from the actions of people working for governments than have died in battle.
Thank you. I'm ranting for the same reasons as you, but didn't have the energy to explain it that comprehensively. That quote is such blatant propaganda I had to check twice if it's actually Elon's post, sad to see him engage in bullshitting.
Alaska National Weather Service office begs “please pay us” in secret message
This may help:
http://i.imgur.com/N6XipNQ.jpg

From:
http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1nr3oh/subtle_noaa/