skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I created TalkSparks because I was fed up with having to go to a bunch of different forums everyday in order to follow different things that I'm interested in.

The concept is very simple: it's where you can discuss anything you're interested in with other people who are interested in the same things. If you're interested in something, you just follow that category and the news feed aggregates all discussions in that topic (very similar to how Facebook shows you updates about the people you are friends with, only here it's about topics that actually interest you).
I've set it up with over 40M different categories so pretty much any topic already exists, which solves the problem of having tons of users creating "groups" or categories about the same thing. If you're interested in Breaking Bad, there is one place to discuss Breaking Bad, not 20 Breaking Bad categories that each have 3 followers and nobody knows which one to post in.

The site is still very young, in closed beta, but I would appreciate feedback from the HN community so here's a beta code you guys can use to sign up.

Just go to http://www.talksparks.com and sign up with the beta code hackernews100

Please share your feedback.

Much appreciated,

Guy
No it is never a good thing when corporations discard people, anywhere. It is like they are throwing out an old sponge they have squeezed every drop out of.
A funny little detail I just noticed about this article as I was reading it is that cannot be bookmarked from my normal view of the article in Chrome, even though all of the other dozen tabs I have open just now can be bookmarked. When I viewed the source code on the page, I was able to bookmark that, and I will definitely be coming back to this article in the future. (I have already shared it among my Facebook friends.)

The comments here are interesting, as the last time this issue came up on Hacker News, I was reading more anecdotes about public data searches on individuals that mostly turn up junk data (which has been my experience). Way back in the 1980s, I attended a presentation at a law firm where I then worked and was told that with simply a former telephone number, all kinds of interesting information could be found about a person. So I gave the company representative one of my previous phone numbers from childhood, and he found next to nothing about me, and some of what was found was erroneous. I was not impressed.

By the 1990s, I had a lot of online presence, and when AltaVista was still the dominant search engine a friend of mine in another city (we had met in Taiwan) began using my name as a search term in training his colleagues in how to do online searching, as a search on my name reliably turned up a lot of hits. Google finds plenty of information about me, of course, and has become better and better at sorting the most useful information about me to the top of the search results over the years. I am aware that cyberstalkers, like point-of-view pushers who have tried to drive me away from Wikipedia editing, can go from my Wikipedia screen name (unique to Wikipedia) to find out other information about me, including telephone numbers. But I'm still on Wikipedia after they have been banned, so all's well that ends well. The harassing phone call trick to suppress my free expression of fact and opinion on online forums was tried as long ago as 1993, so I'm used to it.

Most of the emails that come to me off-forum about my Hacker News comments address me by name, so it's not a hard research problem to link my Hacker News screen name to my real name. (A harder problem is distinguishing me from the subsequent people who began using my screen name here after I first used it on another forum, beginning in 2004.) Yeah, foolproof privacy is difficult to achieve. I usually don't go snooping, and for the most part I have no idea who I am talking to here on HN. I figure that the old days of living in a village with a small group of people who were mostly all extended family relatives probably didn't offer much privacy either, so I'm not particularly worried about the modern world, but I wonder how much more Privacy by Design

http://www.privacybydesign.ca/

concepts can catch on in everyday practice in most industries for more of what we each do in daily life.

If you would like to comment about this, I won't try to figure out who you are away from HN.
If it's about the NSA or Bitcoin, everyday.
That's how you can tell if newspapers are objective or not: you don't hear much about him in "balanced sources of information"... and you definitely don't hear about his banner or car.

He has complained in court against these actions... We'll see how it goes.

In the meantime, you can watch his videos, and see the cops take his car (quite objective and balanced source of information :-)
This is adorable!
The Black Hole's Tale
Took me forever (~10 seconds) to figure out I had to press up to work the bird.
7 Tips for DIY Mobile Market Research
"Not because of the missing functionality, but because you can't talk about go without somebody bringing up [the GIL]."

It's better these days, but for a while it was a common point of contention.
>widen that definitions in order to suppress adversaries

Billionaire Compares Outrage Over Rich In SF To Kristallnacht

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/01/26/266685...

JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon: Anti-Banking Sentiment 'A Form Of Discrimination'

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/25/jamie-dimon-discrim...
I click the join the waiting list and I get an error

http://i.imgur.com/3Jzbniw.png

Browser is FireFox26 (minor changes for how things are cached, and a few crypto-suites disabled), a few addons adblock plus, https everywhere. Windows 7 x64
This is the best day of my life.
I tried to create a startup to allow home owners to track items in their home which require periodic maintenance, receive notifications, and monthly summaries. I was then planning to help connect them with local service professionals with targeted leads to make money.

I tried to do this as a bootstrapped startup, while maintaining a day job.

In the end, it failed after about a year of my working on it and launching a private beta. Here's why I believe it failed:

* I should have launched with a mobile app first. Desktop web apps (which we focused on) were a non-starter. But this was 2010 so the rise of mobile was still unknown.

* Sales to service professionals is tough since many are small, family-owned businesses. This requires a high touch sales process and an army of sales people to execute on it.

* Doing a business like this while bootstrapping and working full time was impossible and I moved slowly as a result. To make it work, it would require going at it full time with VC funding.

Since I shut it down, I have noticed a few startups penetrate this field (RedBeacon, Thumbtack, HomeAdvisor) and it's been interesting to see how they tackled the same problems.

I learned a lot from the experience, both professionally and technically (it was my first Rails app) which I've been able to successfully leverage into a career working with startups. So I don't consider it a loss at all.
I am also an old fart who decries the lack of respect by the young'uns these days. OP claims that's not his point; yet he is part of that demographic.

Cogent points: there is dilution of the coder's message (code is hard; skills are needed) by the fire hose of media including the internet.
Citing the article: "These findings suggest that sex differences in gene expression in human brain relate and may even help explain well-recognised differences between men and women in disease incidence and presentation"

I think that's a useful study, since male and female organism react differently to some illnesses (check out sex differences in heart attack symptoms; here ignorance can literally be lethal).

What I do find funny is how quite some people here didn't bother to read the article and, upon seeing the title, so happily shout "FINALLY! DIE FEMINISM, DIE!" Sorry guys, wrong cue.
To be fair if your phone is locked with a pin then we're still at least roughly in "something you have and something you know" territory.
That's pretty awesome. Always have to give props to the folks who build epic stupid projects...
Layoffs are not that common in Indian tech industry like here. So it is bound to affect the perception.
This was the first time i really understood the problem with this "bug" that mtgox and bitstamp is having - very well written!
Show HN: Social Jukebox – A social jukebox
This does not come over as a realistic project.

The "use cases" are woolly. It might be a cut down version of an Open source attempt to replicate Windows NT - or it might be Linux.

They will try and recruit some Russian programmers and interns to work on the project (fills you with confidence that bit - and no disrespect to the skills of Russian nationals) and erm might deliver something that you could just possibly use at some time...

I am out!
Shit, checking
I am not defending this project, I have complaints about it myself but some of your issues are ridiculous.

> Not a composer package

Thats like saying "its not web 2.0" frankly. If you can't manage to checkout a library/framework and make use of it without being reliant on a specific package manager, you shouldn't be writing software.

> Uses arcane define() statements to set configuration

I don't think you know what arcane means.

Also, using constants to set application options can work very well if used properly.

> Uses singleton classes

I'd much rather a project that makes smart use of Singletons than the ridiculous SuperMegaObjectFactoryConstructorHelperFactoryFactory shit that is apparently the "in" thing.

> make it PSR-1 and PSR-2 compliant

PSR is a fucking joke. Code consistency within a project is important. Between a million different projects? Not so much.

The "goal" of PSR has never been "hey heres the best way to do things". Its purely an exercise in documenting the MOST COMMON way a set of projects do things.

> make it fit within the composer packaging system

Also, the author must only eat fishes on fridays and must devote his sunday to the FSM.

Composer is not jesus, PSR is not the bible. Stop acting like they are magical items sent from the heavens.
Very interesting first draft. Looking at the simpleness makes my mind go up in fireworks of all the possibilities to add to it.
This is great for writing scientific articles, manuals, tutorials, text books and the like. I'll start using it right now :)

However, as far as literature is concerned, I'd not be using it. The title is misleading in that respect. Something along the lines "simple", "clean", "focused" writing would be better.

BTW: I have to paste some page-sized sentences from Thomas Pynchon in there.
I like and use Writer's Diet which seems quite similar and has been around for a few years.

http://writersdiet.com/WT.php
I don't trust those benchmarks: what configuration are they using? rails in development or production mode? behind web server or pure application server? if yes, socket or port? which database? socket or port? which drivers? there are too many combinations in my opinion to trust a single benchmark
I Painted a Dictator
Interesting, we haven't really run into big asset ordering issues, we tend to stick jquery plugins and libraries in /lib or /client/lib
Towards the idea that you can write them in another language, we in the Perl community ended up developing something of that nature[1]. It was originally intended to make writing daemons in Perl easier by pulling out common functionality (double fork and such), and giving a consistent clean interface. One of the bigger requested things was the ability to use it as basically the entire init script ([2] for an example).

[1] https://metacpan.org/pod/Daemon::Control
[2] http://hashbang.ca/2012/04/16/wherein-i-realize-the-bliss-of...
I love this, and I love your test for the desktop version.

One suggestion, make the price a slider from $0->$100 and instead of asking "Would you pay $5 for a desktop version of Hemingway? It would add the ability to save and open text files." ask "Please suggest a price for the desktop version"

This will give you a better idea of the true value of the application to people without being suggestive.

Awesome idea and implementation!
Parody - "an imitative work created to mock, comment on or trivialize[citation needed] an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of satiric or ironic imitation"

sounds like parody
I'm pretty sure that level of nitpicking is outside the scope of what the the (non-native English speaking) poster meant when they said 'their english is terrible'.
Show HN: todo-sh, a simple todo list implementation in bash
Seems a whole load of lemmings jumping off the cliff!
You should be more specific when negating things. I don't parse anything that jnbiche said as an incorrect assumption.

Ripple provides a market exchange methodology, among other things. Bitcoin can't do that natively due to the lack of looping in its scripts.

Also, check out Ethereum. If they pull it off, it'll twist your noodle with the possibilities.
Might I ask what is the stack behind this?
Nice! I love good quality code: http://www.hemingwayapp.com/js/hemingway-doubleup-obf.js
Right. And you can add "+whatever" to the end. But he mentions that the other person has a hyphen in their address.

More info from Google on "." and "+" at http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-m...
I've worked with multiple teams in multiple divisions, and I've never experienced a manager like the one described. In fact, Apple has had the most professional managers I have ever had the experience of working with.
considering all the other advantages. benchmarks are less important..
Argh, someone beat us to it. We have a massive-multiplayer tournament planned for Saturday: http://ddnet.tw/#news
Not normally you normally get PILON (your notice period paid in one lump sum) which is taxed normally then the tax free redundancy payments.
I agree with every word. Of course I am incredibly biased because this is the kind of internet interaction that I prefer. It is just a different kind of internet culture and is obviously not for some people.

If you want every possible opinion on something whether it be the most popular opinions or the least popular opinion and everything in-between then anonymity is the way to go. Preferably without internet aliases for a true representation of unfiltered opinions.
> They keep saying this is 2-factor authentication, but without the first factor (something you know e.g. a password)

I always wonder about this even when there is a password. For most services, a phone compromise would be a total compromise. I rarely get prompted for a password on my phone (nor do I enjoy typing one when I'm trying to do something quickly.)
Cheap Online Windows Licenses
In its first year on Mars, Curiosity only travelled about 1.6 kilometers. So I imagine it'd have to be pretty damn close for them to risk driving her over there.

EDIT: source: http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/06/tech/innovation/mars-curiosity...
GoldieBlox vs. Beastie Boys
Is this game generating any data? Like, what's the % of birds that die on the first pipe? The distribution of scores?
How can your mobile game earn more money?
What are these "other, larger US companies"? Apple and Google are two of the largest US companies by market cap.
No, but the "user is ignorant" attack vector is still the most common. And for good reason.
The assumption that some kind of camp is needed. I say, camp can stifle the youth's initiative, as it provides a constant irrigation of the senses with no effort (other than the activity of course).

Spending weeks with your friends wandering, making up games, looking at the world and thinking - happens on lazy summer days, not at camp.
Not only did he start using revision control - he went ahead and implemented a completely new one!
Seriously, what obfuscator is used here?
This is the talk in audio form:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssDY74nLuLg

I love listening to Alan Watts speak and have heard hours upon hours of his talks. In general, they're pretty good and make you think.
You did say you'd have more time on your hands.
While I don't think the proposed edit would help, the commenter isn't actually wrong - in modern usage, it is more correct to say "fewer corrections" than "less corrections." Language doesn't form in a vacuum, nor is its growth confined to dictionaries. Rather, language is a living, breathing thing and grammar is closer to history than mechanics.

Consider the less v. fewer debate. Yes, several hundred years ago, it was just fine to say "less corrections." However, for whatever reason, the upper crust decided that "fewer corrections" both looked and sounded better. Consequently, "less corrections" evolved to be less correct. My inner smartass wanted to say "fewer correct", but that would be a silly joke.

It's like Russian. If you speak French, you can understand many Russian words. This isn't because French and Russian are linguistic cousins. Rather, it's because French was the language of nobility and words trickled down.

Or heck, we could talk about the word "you." You was originally formal, whereas "thou" was more relaxed and informal. Yet, today, if I started a comment on Hacker News with, "I fear thou are wrong", it would seem needlessly formal.

To conclude this long mess (it was supposed to be four lines and turned into paragraphs), language evolves constantly. Though certain distinctions didn't exist in earlier English, they exist now. However, if you know much about the history and formation of English, you should be less pedantic. It should also make us much more tolerant of people for whom English isn't their native language. We speak an intensely complex language with random rules that apply in some cases and not others.

Thank heavens we don't have to compile our language before we speak it...:)
Corporations literally ARE the government?

That's why the US has the highest corporate tax rate in the OECD?
Let's guess that Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast is relevant http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html
I appreciate you haggling over the definition of government. The difference between a government and a private entity in this situation is that the government can force you to pay taxes to pay for this river management whether you interact with the river or not, or else you get imprisoned. On the other hand, if you don't want to interact with the private owner of the river, then you don't have to. The world is round; go the other way. The river is only so long; go around it. The river is on the surface of the planet; fly above it.

Now, I have NOT said that I subscribe to a full-on anarcho-capitalist system; I mainly understand the theory behind it, and think that it makes the best theory ON WHICH TO BASE A PRACTICAL SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT. I do think government is needed for some things. I'm a huge fan of our original form of government in the US, namely federalism — though I'd have some cuts I'd make there too.

And I mainly felt like leaving this conversation because you seemingly try to insist that I don't know what I'm talking about. I do know what I'm talking about. Just because you don't agree with me, or you feel you've thought about this more than me doesn't make it so.

Did you even watch the video of Milton Friedman on market failures? He left it open at the end to say there are times where government might be best, but you cannot immediately and automatically say that government is better — which is exactly what the progressive movement in this country tends to claim.
I still use "One" quite a lot in writing (especially forums) when I need to discuss your personal opinion without implying that I'm speaking for the other parties in the conversation. i.e.

"You often see cars speeding along this road" <- perfectly valid and the context can be taken from the way it is delivered in speach, but could be misread to imply that the writer thinks the person they are addressing sees the cars.

"One often sees cars speeding along this road" <- unambiguous.
Yes, for many customers it's the right solution. In early 2011 we were setting up some IBM technologies on Amazon Web Services for a Houston power company and IBM had just released some EC2 AMIs for Websphere, Portal, etc. If they didn't want to build their own cloud the way HP is trying to, it seems they could've just struck a deal with Amazon to have their own corner of AWS.
There are a lot of prescriptive "rules" in English that aren't really rules. Ending sentences in prepositions is probably my favorite.
xp keys? really :)
http://windows8online.net/xp.html
I'm glad there's movement in this space. It's desperately needed. Password managers are great but difficult to extend to all use-cases. When a generated password cannot be easily copy-pasted, the whole system feels unwieldy.

But Clef doesn't seem to solve anything in that respect. It solves some of the same problems that password managers do but with extra environmental requirements.

I can see the Clef mechanism being useful for 2-factor authentification. But I'm unenthused with (and wary of) its current instantiation as a login skeleton key. If I were Clef, I'd set my sights lower and rebrand as a drop-in 2-factor auth system to be optionally enabled by users.

> Clef puts military grade cryptography in the hands of every user

This kind of line is deceptive for 99% of end-users and turns off the 1% who might be helpful as developers.
hmm yeah but i wonder what they had to say about it
These people [1] had a clue regarding leveraging deep competence in specialized domains that made their contemporaries' eyes glaze over.

The world runs on software. Just think about it and it should be clear what are the necessary steps to take.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Templar
Glad to see the opinion of an actual professional writer rather than just someone with an opinion for the sake of it.

I'm trying very hard to improve my writing at the moment and reading Zinsser's book. I understand what Zinsser is encouraging us all to do, but putting it in practise is over 30 years of un-learning that I need to do so it's not easy.

I'm glad that you said the tool is useful because i was having doubts about it after seeing the other comments. Im going to use it to assess my next blog post and see how things pan out.

Thanks for the tip.
To write software, you used to have to be a physiscist. Or a least a mathematician with a deep understanding of why the registers were working.

Then, the physics was more or less mastered and the profession split into electrical engineering (the physicists lamented this degradation I'm sure) and applied mathematics.

Then, the math was more or less mastered to a level it could safely be abstracted away and math spun off computer science and software engineering. I'm sure the mathematicians were upset then at the degradation of the profession.

Then, software engineering advanced to the point that ever higher levels of abstraction were present on ever faster computers, no longer did you have to get the logic right _and_ the math perfect for your program to run in acceptable time. And higher level languages emerged, assembly leading to c leading to python and JavaScript. And at every stage there was moaning, and excitement.

Now, we stand on the precipice of the next great division. People can get a reasonably complicated website up by configuring Wordpress or Joomla or Drupal without writing a single line of code. A 14 year old can run a mcafe script at the geek squad counter and get the users computer back in decent shape. We are at the point of adding moderately skilled technicians to our field.

We can piss and moan about the division, or we can recognize that it's part of the process of the industry and vocation maturing.

The engineers at GM aren't bemoaning the fact that "car maintenance gurus (mechanics) don't have to understand the heat displacement of aluminum vs steel"

Having mechanics makes the car industry more efficient and lets the engineers focus on the real hard problems. The same will be true of software, eventually.