skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reading Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" was eye-opening for me, I'd highly recommend it to everyone.

In short, while I think communism is roughly the worst idea ever, that book gave me an understanding of the world he lived in and why he was quite rational to view radically left-wing ideas as the best option for that time and place. A functioning, reasonably fair capitalist society like we have in the US today would have been unimaginable or unbelievable based on his life experiences.
ActiveModel::Serializers Rewrite (upcoming 0.9.0.pre version)
Tiger Mom doesn't follow the path of least resistance, and uses emotional and physical abuse to enforce compliance. That the child might achieve enjoyment at the endpoint is only one of many possible outcomes.
It's ok to upvote something just because you found it interesting. Emphasis on you.
Live code collaboration (with video chat)
I don't see any particular reason to eschew common or obvious references to history or literature because they are easy or common. If that is honestly something that bothered us, we would be complaining at the shear number of western authors who have been falling back on biblical allusion, or greek mythology for centuries (both in fiction and otherwise). It is easy to reference The Tower of Babel, or the story of Icarus, but we don't complain when people do.

(I know, I know, being an easy comparison isn't the real reason we complain about references to Hitler. I don't find the real reasons to be compelling either.)
Hard to disagree with the observation that people are putting more and more irons in the fire, but I disagree with the author's solution - asking people to disclose everything they are working on at all times is a bad idea.

The nature of this new world is that most things we dabble in at the very early stages end up fizzling. Like an author with a new book, people will be less likely to take important risks if they know they'll be scrutinized from the beginning.
I completely understand where you are coming from -- Just had this conversation with someone over twitter.

oEmbed is a standard, and I really think there are a lot of cool things that can be done with it given the opportunity. Currently, the API is not rate limited, but this may be something I will have to look into in the future (I have only load tested up to 250req/sec). I will be adding a TOS in the few weeks.

Where I do plan on charging, is expanding the api to include a "kitchen sink" where I include all data that I can possible grab from a URL. I think this will add real value to the API, and I will end up charging for it once it is finished (probably a few months down the road).

oEmbed.io will always be free. If you want to pay or don't like my conditions, then you can go use embed.ly. But I genuinely feel like this is a contribution I am willing to make to the community.

Hopefully that sheds a little more light on where my head is at with this!
Ban on gay marriage is not a political subject. It is a way of discrimination. It's against the human rights. Would it be ok for you if the person you're listening to supports a ban on Chinese having children? What if you were Chinese?

Freedom ends when you restrict others. Spreading awareness on such subjects helps individuals decide if the subject is important enough for them to personally show their disapproval. This is totally relevant.
Thanks! Hope you like High Five better.
Yes. I consider it an equally good book, though it's an entirely different genre.

The books in the Ender's Shadow series came much later and are more in the same vein as Ender's Game.
The Karma Hypothesis
> Only a handful of public universities even make the top 100. And even public schools are hardly "free", often costing >$10K/year just for tuition.

I just finished my PhD at a state school this year. I've gone to state schools through my entire education. In the past decade, every school I've attended has had a professor win a Nobel Prize. I've also averaged less than a thousand dollars a semester in tuition. I'm also not from California. My state has repeatedly ranked in the bottom 10 on SAT scores.

I'm not doubting that going Ivy cost a fortune and was a huge hassle to acquire aid. I'm also not suggesting that you didn't get a fantastic network of connections through your Ivy classmates. Buying a network is expensive. However, if you're looking to get an education, those can still be had for a reasonable price.
100 Best Self Growth Articles That Will Change Your Life
This is the ultimate list of best free articles around the web that would substitute a dozen of books that sell for hundreds of dollars.
I agree aside from the American jab. If it's happening to you, no matter who you are, I don't think it's unreasonable for that to be your primary complaint or motivation. It's human nature; we're selfish creatures.

Besides, most Americans I know aren't upset that it's happening to them to the exclusion of all others. That it is happening at all is the most common and most reasonable complaint. That it's not explicitly couched in concern for non-US-citizens does mean it implicitly discludes them.
Your heuristics are a very close match for my own. I've written similar options in previous threads here concerning flagging and the ranking algorithm.

Whenever this matter surfaces, I recommend the HN Slapdown user script [1] which indicates stories that have been moved below the position they would have based on points only. In other words, it draws attention to stories that have been flagged or otherwise adversely affected.

In my opinion, the homepage either weights non-upvote inputs too heavily or receives too many non-upvote interactions from users.

I can't be certain whether flagging or other measures such as the "flamewar detector" are more or less responsible for the volatility of the home page ranking. My only anecdotal evidence is that when I have (very rarely) flagged stories, I've witnessed an immediate and severe rank adjustment, often immediately sending the submission into second-page purgatory. This has given me great respect for the severity of flagging.

My heuristics:

1. Most of all, I try to keep my interactions positive. If I don't agree, I act as if I don't care, by which I mean I do nothing. I see little value in downvoting something I disagree with. It won't change the person's mind—only a comment in reply has a chance of that.

2. I will downvote comments that I believe are objectively wrong and potentially misleading to other readers or are clearly intended to be offensive or mean-spirited. Still, I feel I am very sparse with downvotes. I downvote approximately one out of every 1,000 comments I read.

3. I've only flagged stories that are unrelated to technology, but even then only in extreme cases. I don't bother flagging stories about popular fiction, movie reviews, or other elements of geek culture because I don't think those stories are an epidemic at HN. Like you, I feel it's important to leave a comment when flagging a submission. I have flagged two stories if my memory serves me correctly.

4. I skim the new section on every visit to site; about once per day.

5. I upvote stories I find interesting or agreeable. I think this is the point of the upvote. Upvotes are where I can be entirely subjective. I upvote approximately one out of every 10 stories I read.

6. I upvote comments by the same rule as stories. I upvote approximately one out of every 100 comments I read.

7. I strongly disagree with downvoting or flagging simply because of disagreements. I don't think use of downvoting is as problematic at HN as elsewhere (e.g., Reddit), but I do feel there is still slightly excessive comment downvoting and moderately excessive story flagging (or other adjustments).

[1] http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/150452
"DNS propagation" is a really bad term that could conceivably cover two distinct things:

1. The "propagation" of fresh records from a domain's authoritative name servers to users' caching recursive name servers.

2. The "propagation" of updated zone information from a domain's master authoritative server to the domain's slave authoritative servers.

This tool attempts to check for #1, but no tool can actually check for this. For one thing, it's not really propagation; it's caching. If you query a caching name server and the name is not yet cached, you'll get fresh information immediately. If it is already cached, you'll get stale information until the cache entry expires. There are an untold number of caching name servers out there (you'll find them at every ISP, every company, and even in some home routers). If you look at the list of name servers this tool queries, you'll find only a small slice of the Internet's caching name servers[1]. If none of these servers have your name cached when you run the tool, they will all return fresh information, and the tool will report that your DNS update has "propagated" when in reality there are many caching name servers out there at other ISPs which still have stale information cached.

Fortunately, there's a better way to know when your change has "propagated" - look up the record's TTL, which is the maximum number of seconds it can remain cached. Until that amount of time elapses from your update, there are potentially name servers out there serving up stale information.

Now, a tool to check for #2 would actually be quite useful. Transfers from master to slave are supposed to happen immediately, and you shouldn't have to worry about this if your domain uses a good DNS service, but I've seen many misconfigured or over-complicated DNS setups where this doesn't happen reliably. A tool that queried all the authoritative servers for a domain to see which ones haven't updated would be quite useful for debugging these sorts of misconfigurations.

[1] Specifically, those which are misconfigured to allow queries from anyone. Wide open name servers like these can be used as part of DOS attacks. In a perfect world, the only caching name servers you'd be able to query would be the ones operated by your ISP, and public ones which have anti-DOS features, like Google Public DNS.
This is a great comment, but I disagree with it.

The hierarchy of secrets you've come up with sounds useful, but in practice:

* An attack based on entropy on a CSPRNG that ran months or even days ago, barring blatant flaws like zero cold start entropy, isn't realistic†. And, if you're paranoid about your "long term keys", generate them on a different machine than the one on which you serve up disk-wiping entropy. That's what you're supposed to do anyways. But I'm a little concerned that such a suggestion dignifies an unrealistic risk.

* Meanwhile, the notion that "lesser" secrets, like IV and padding, can deal with less randomness doesn't seem to bear empirical scrutiny. The attacks that have tended to matter against cryptosystems in the last few years have, with the exception of the P's and Q's zero-cold-start-entropy issue, not targeted long-term secrets, but rather have hinged on details like padding (random padding in the OAEP/PKCS#1 case, I guess; most crypto padding is deterministic).

* The mentality of "long term secrets" and "short term crypto parameters" that you laid out already missed a doozy: DSA and ECDSA nonces, which people who think like your comment did thought of as "undemanding", but for which it turns out that just being able to predict a couple of bits of that parameter can get you with a few thousand samples all the way back to private keys.

I think you'd be better off, cryptographically and from a software design perspective, with a single CSPRNG that was suitable for all cryptographic use cases, and, if users are paranoid, have them tap a physically different CSPRNG for their "long term keys" --- which they need to do anyways on the presumption that the systems that they use routinely are also probably owned up.

Also, I have to again point out that the Linux CSPRNG design doesn't handle any of these cases well. Its /dev/random is unusable by demanding applications in steady state, with the possible (terrible) workaround of reimplementing CSPRNGs seeded from small amounts of /dev/random data in userspace (and all the attendant flaws); its /dev/urandom is unsafe at cold start. Something's gotta give in that design: it's doing extra work internally and inflicting extra work on developers, all for a worse result than FreeBSD.

† Re: realism: it's always easy to argue "attacks always get better, we should account for every attack, realistic or not". But engineering is about tradeoffs, and here the tradeoff Linux is making is to service an attack unknown to the literature that is likely precluded by the basic design of a modern refreshing CSPRNG, and doing so at the expense of protecting against very realistic attacks that have been discovered in the wild; it doesn't help that Linux (in general) seems to respond to that point by suggesting that userland devs should have done a better job.

Oh, dubiously-informed CSPRNG opinions; I sure do have them.
"The best companies didn't have political alliances because their product was awesome and they mostly knew it"

Even if you have a great product, some industries, like advertising or public sector, are an order of magnitude harder to sell to if you're not really well connected.
Not arguing that the discussion is particularly useful, but clearly it is still desired among a large enough subset of HN readers that such stories get voted to the front page and commented on.

--

pg has a very known bias against "political discussions".

I would argue that all discussions are political, and anyone that can say with a straight face that they "don't like politics" doesn't realize how political that statement is.
I guess we will never know how the conversation could have developed since the stories were killed prematurely.

Do you think the comments section of other types of HN stories are held to the same standard? Or do you think the promptness with which these stories are flagged has something to do with their subject matter?
Thanks for the feedback! Pneumonic devices are really helpful when you remember to use them, but I think one of the core tenants of modern computing is the ability to more efficiently offload tasks. If I and everyone I know has gone our entire lives being terrible at remembering names, I think "actually, remembering names is easy" may not be the most effective mantra at this point.

Edit: changed "efficacious" to "effective" because oh my god why did I use that word.
Every language has advocates that believe that. The reality is that no one writes WordPress in any one of those languages because PHP, warts and all, is a language for getting things done.
But would they have done this without Mozilla pushing the performance with asm.js, or that fast? Competition is great, and it also makes me wonder, if they keep this up - maybe NaCl won't be needed either?
You misunderstand: Free as in speech.
This has not been my experience. Any problem that can be solved by buying another server is generally considered to be a solved problem.
/trv/ has a remarkable ongoing discussion on living and working in Antarctica: https://boards.4chan.org/trv/res/751390. There was also one about working on freight ships.
I'm going to lose a lot of karma of this one, but here we go. The organizations I know of that have switched from Ruby to Java have done so for the following reasons:

1) Performance. The JVM simply scales better, it is more cost effective in the datacenter. Without mentioning names, I know of significant Silicon Valley darlings that spent huge sums trying to scale Ruby, got crushed, and eventually ripped-and-replaced the backends with Java.

2) Skill Availability. There are 7+ million Java programmers, it is easier to hire Java programmers.

3) Tool Availability and Maturity.

I think Ruby is a fine language, but I see it like PHP, great for rapid prototyping and productivity in the small, but it's version 1 for the lean startup or for the corporate departmental app. Version 2 is Java, C#, etc using the UX and product feature lessons learned from the Ruby prototype.

IMHO, Node.js is the new Ruby. It has the benefit of having the same language on the client and the server, but once again, it's going to run into similar scalability issues when large organizations try to use it. I think we're going to run into the same issues, of it becoming a cool bandwagon, the platform being stretched to its breaking point, followed by the realization that there are serious problems.
Introducing the Firefox OS App Manager
Former China Google Chief 李开复 Faces Online Attack.
That explains some of it, but I think it's even a narrower focus than that. I participate in several communities that are broadly technology/programming/science, and they're quite different from HN (and from each other). For one thing, my impression is that there are relatively few scientists and engineers on HN. I occasionally will see a post by a biologist or a civil engineer, but it's not typical. Even among computer people, it seems like a particular social subset, perhaps due to being hosted by Y Combinator.
Hi, I interviewed Jos (the designer turned typographer from the link inside the other tread) once. Ran it through Google Translate, perhaps you'll find it usefull: http://translate.google.nl/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A...
You still have the pthreads issue. NaCL can leverage SMP in a way that single-threaded JS can't, and the idea of introducing concurrency into JS sends shivers down my spine.
Shamless plug: Fed up with there not being a dead simple library for stubbing stuff when writing Javascript tests in Jasmine (I come from the Ruby world), I wrote Why.js. It let's you stub anything and everything, and is optimised for tests written in Coffeescript.

Example:

why.stub 'User.find', (userId) ->
{ name: 'Bob' }

https://github.com/lucaspiller/why.js
>The appearance of risk is more important to most businesses than actual risk. Ruby isn't dominant, therefore it is perceived as risky ...

That's not quite right. Anecdotally, I've seen or read about big corps using hot JS front-end frameworks like Angular and Backbone, server frameworks and databases like Node.js, MongoDB and Redis, and programming languages like Python, Erlang and Scala in production. Even if you look at the big tech corps (such as Yahoo, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon), internally there isn't a whole lot of Ruby either. The big poster-child for Ruby, Twitter, is now most known for migrating away from Ruby than for actually using it.

I'm not a Ruby guy, but it doesn't seem like cliche corporate conservatism is what's holding Ruby back. It looks like it's Ruby, and specifically the Ruby platform. Maybe pretty Ruby language semantics aren't enough to make up for Ruby platform downsides. Maybe there just isn't a good reason to use Ruby.

>Java's complexity might actually threaten the survival of a small project

The choice of Java would not threaten the survival of any small project. Though Java is (still) not a very pretty language, the tooling around it has gotten enormously better from where we were in, say, 2003. Current frameworks like JEE, Spring and Play are actually pretty great to work with.
I think its not an issue of anyone thinking that rails can't do those things. Its just that there are other things out there that are not as thick, which can also do restful routing. Unless you're already entrenched in Rails, there isn't much benefit to using it over sinatra or express, which allow you to modularize the other components that you need, while also having a lower barrier to entry.

I don't think many Rails developers are abandoning the platform though, so dying probably isn't the right word for it.
> I've given up on upvoting/downvoting any such discussions and simply don't read them anymore. This includes everything on sexism in tech.

You know, I've noticed a lot of the 'superstar commenters' on HN have polar opposite views from each other on a lot of these touchy issues. So, it's sad to see that what ensues out of smart people disagreeing is a plain refusal to talk about these very things.

Why does it have to be this way? Why are some of the most respected and the smartest commenters on this site unwilling to have an intellectually honest debate?

Is it because of time? I've noticed that if I just sound the first thought in my mind, it's likely to come out as being rude ("wow, this sucks", "this is the 100th time I'm seeing this", "why did this person make this obvious mistake?"). It takes effort and time to structure these first thoughts as positive criticisms. Presumably, the smart folks here don't have a lot of time, so maybe it's just that they end up sounding terse and rude only because they don't have the time to reword things to sound more polite and supportive?
Slideshow for beginners: git & github
I don't see anyone suggesting to put anyone in jail. It is important for a lot of people to know the stance of person they're supporting (by buying tickets or listening) towards such subjects. There's no harm coming from informing people as long as it is not a call for a witch-hunt.
> They reject it because they're inherently conservative

Not just that. They reject Ruby because

1. It's very slow and continues to be very slow despite all the performance work being done on it (nod to JRuby).

2. It's just hard to hire Ruby developers, who are getting more scarce every year.

These are the symptoms of a dying language.
best online programming tool i've seen.
More like 20 years, but yeah, I guess 20 Internet Years equals around 80 standard years..
Compared to e.g. Java API documentation, I find node.js documentation to be an amateurish attempt at best.
let's have some dissenting opinion here.

not all kids are equal. not all kids want to learn. in each and every discussion over this topic people bring up quotes by very smart people, like kubrick, sagan, etc. on how organised learning is not needed, a young mind wants to learn, grows like a flower, all by itself, even better without the shackles of structured education.

i call bullshit. this is biased through the people stating these arguments. if you're a genius or borderline genious then of course the standardized school system is not for you. if you're smarter and faster than your teachers the whole thing can't work.

but the vast majority of kids is not like that. yes, some people are plain dumb. nothing to do, not a bad thing, pure nature. might be great at something, sports, fine manual labor, but simply not good with high mental tasks. some kids don't like reading, it's too hard and does not bring any value to them, nothing sticks, no mental images are formed. just letters stuck together.

this romantic view of humans is the root of a lot of failed social experiments. from open school systems (montessori, waldorf,...) to the new humans that communism wanted to create.

the modern school system is built to provide a base level of education, targeted for the medium range intellect. learn basic skills, through repetition - tried and tested method, from sports to art to education. reading, writing, counting, calculating. if you're one of those kids that taught yourself how to read at age 4, well, guess what, your experience in school will be subpar. but just don't go around and push for school reform to have schools fitted for your style of self learning. the vast majority is not like you.
It might help the discussion to provide an example of something really borderline rather than theoretical exploration.

"Bird Bath: The Conservation of a William Morris Textile"

I didn't click flag because I have a certain fondness for dead media preservation, someones going to be writing something very much like this in 50 years for preserving 5.25 floppy media, or flash drives, or a museum preserving its vintage iphone 5, which gives you something to think about. And, after all, its jacquard woven which means a lot to CS/IT/tech people who know what that means (which is probably not many). But its really darn close to the line and I would not feel its excessively outta line for someone else to click flag, if they want to.
R is the flavor of the season