skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They won't need to raise their wages though. BI takes care of the minimum amount to survive, and McDonalds wages provides "extra" money. BI essentially takes over as the "minimum" part of the minimum wage, and low wage jobs become a lot more attractive (than they are currently).
What I'm really tired of is that off-topic, nitpicking discussion threads are often on top. I have to wade through a lot of comments to find the good ones. And I say that as someone who has myself fallen to the "someone is wrong on the internet" syndrome.

What I would like would be to have a tagging system on comment threads, so that I could filter out comment threads with rough edges if I didn't like them, or threads with endless back and forth nitpicking, or threads that have been covered endlessly before. Something like the old slashdot "Informative" or "Funny" system. Then the ones that wanted could troll and flame away to their hearts content, without disrupting the general discussion of a topic. The "no censorship" crows could turn off filtering alltogether and get HN exactly as it is today.
Prototype JS Framework in a nutshell
Previous discussion here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7377213
Brazilian Billionaire Creates Plan to Beat Death
Karma is going to be even harder to get now for < 1000 karma users. This includes occasional casual users. You do not want to constrain the power to just the hardcore users

For example: I pop on once or twice a day. I have been doing so for 1044 days. I have 478 karma points.
The whole wave of 2048 and the related AI problems are fascinating. Has anyone else started thinking using those at the start of a Computer science class using those as initial examples to illustrate the power and simplicity of algorithms, and motivate even non-coding-inspired students to think systematically?
Ask HN: Freely available web search APIs for academia research?
This was particularly infuriating back when browsers would commonly lose input state when going back then forward. For years, long after that was resolved, I still wrote anything longer than a single sentence in notepad.

Even if this is kept for inertial reasons (I do make use of it on a trackpad myself), I think as soon as you interact with any kind of text input it should be disabled for the page.
Mate we will have a communist "utopia" well before that ever happens.
Or Daft Punk MD5... www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAjR4_CbPpQ
I wonder why none of the calls for basic income considers how inflation and prices would be affected.
There is no way to hedge $100M+ on sports bets. Nobody will take that kind of action, even if he spread it around to every single book.

I personally think if I was offered $10M as a settlement, I'd take it.
> Why are the cheap teams turning down free money?

Hi, i double that. Also I understood your advice better now. Undercharging = making it worse for everyone (consultant profit, work quality, dumping).
I've read a number of pretty interesting comments by posters who wanted to remain anonymous by using throwaway accounts. I'd never see these with the new comment system.

FWIW I have showdead set to "Yes"; I want to see everything.
It's just terrible UI design on so many levels.

* It uses a text-input key in a modal way, when no other unmodified text keys are used modally in a web browser.

* Shifting between modes can happen inexplicitly and unintentionally.

* It's potentially destructive.

Add this all up and you have a recipe for users unintentionally and unexpectedly losing data. That's bad enough on its own.

The fact that the justification for it appears to be "because somebody made a poor UI decision 20 years ago and people don't like change" is inexcusable.
Stack (Overflow|Exchange) put up a modal dialog if you started writing something and then change the page. Which is annoying when you just want to navigate away because you're not going to answer anymore, but in most cases solves this problem quite nicely.

Disabling the key under certain circumstances is usually a support nightmare when trying to explain people that »Backspace goes back to the previous page, except there is text in any input field on the page that you entered, in which case it does nothing. Oh, but the back button in the toolbar still works, as does the side button on your mouse.« (The same problem with disabled UI controls that usually do not say why they are disabled. Some things, e.g. Copy being disabled when there is no selection, are easy enough to figure out but others not so much at times.)
The article had a few good insights in the first few paragraphs about the problems they were looking to solve: "pogosticking", structuring of search results, steering users toward the features that their data showed mattered most, etc.
If it becomes more difficult to participate in conversations because I have to wait for moderation on a previous comment then I lose engagement.

The end result is I'll probably just stop visiting hacker news so frequently (if at all).

As without the ability to have conversations with people better than me at interesting stuff what does this place offer that reddit doesn't.
I think the biggest problem here is a context one. When you use a shortcut inside a software, you don't (usually) think about the field focused. As I, like most of us here, use an IDE or a code editor every day, I think best context-free shortcuts involve more than one special key.

Even the alt + arrow shortcut is a bad idea because it mean "go to the beginning of the word" in Mac OS. I had very bad issue with the CMD + Arrow in my Chrome, because when I type I don't use the mouse.

Ctrl + CMD + Arrow is the perfect shortcut for me (and I think, for every XCode users).
according to a comment in this thread, there are 5500 users with over 1000 points. Whether they are active or not is unknown. Whether they want to view pending comments or just read and comment like normal users is unknown.

If you are in this >1000 karma club, please approve this comment. I have been a user for 1044 days.
FBOpen (pilot) – a new search for government procurement data
Programmer here, I get pissed off with a lot of things but backspace-in-a-browser isn't one of them, I like it and always have. Maybe I take for granted my intimate knowledge of how html and browsers work. I get much more annoyed with some of the seemingly nonsensical Mac conventions coming from Windows.
Focus on Branding first
I wonder how soon this will be developed in large quantities. Funding from places like Bill Gates' foundation is almost certain, but there seems to be a lag, as the TED talk is from June 2012, while the arXiv paper [1] as well as the linked post from March 2014. Maybe hitting the 50¢ mark would require lots of units?

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.1211
It's an interesting problem to optimise for.

When is the best time to push new changes to production based on probability they will fall over, usage patterns and day of the week.

I'm relatively lucky as the stuff I do is mostly for businesses so the (obvious to me) push point is 8am Saturday morning, that gives me two days to sort out any problems and there is always some low level usage.
> As without the ability to have conversations with people better than me at interesting stuff what does this place offer that reddit doesn't.

It offers the opportunity to read insightful thoughfulncomments from people who know what they're talking about, without also having to tolerate vicious and stupid comments.
I must say I've never had a problem with the feature, and it's been highly useful to me. It must be something of a blind spot to some set of people, because IIRC it has never even occurred to me until now that it might constitute bad UX. In retrospect, though, I can see how it can be problematic.
I suppose if you want to answer a question you have to understand the context, and as with reproducing bugs, you have to know the steps to recreate the problem.

It's not like they're being purposefully obnoxious - no more than when people answer with, 'why would you want do that?'
It sounds like the limit is 1000, so some of us with over 500 karma also would not be able to see them either.

I'm skeptical about the hypothesis of how this would play out, but I'll reserve judgment until it goes live.

I just hope this isn't abused by users with over 1000 karma as a way to stifle dissenting views on topics some users may feel strongly about.
This may be helpful for people like me who don't know anything about health insurance:
https://www.healthsherpa.com/learn/how-insurance-works
I think it's because that particular statement is the foundation of the complainant's argument against the shortcut. And for someone who never experiences this failure scenario, the vitriol against the backspace key is nigh on impossible to understand.
That's understandable if they use a desktop PC most of the time, and a lot of people fall into that group.

Even with the clever "palm detection" (or whatever it's called) feature that is built into most trackpads nowadays, the very location of the trackpad on most laptops makes it too easy to click on something you didn't mean to. It's much easier to keep the focus in a <textarea> if you just type on a standalone keyboard and the mouse is 14 inches away.
Yes, I've since had mine restored. However, for mine at least, it happened the day after I posted a comment much like the one above. I suspect it was manual in my case. It could be that they reviewed/changed a whole bunch of people who lost the flagging privilege around that time as well, or it could be a timeout - I don't really know. I just know that, given how quickly my flagging privileges were restored after I made a similar comment in a popular thread, it appeared to be related to my comment.
A Civics Education for Privacy
If it works how I understand it does, getting the right combination of substances is probably just a matter of solving a linear programming problem.

As I understand the explanations, the basic measurement is obtained by illuminating the coin with light of wavelength λ_1, and measuring the intensity coming back of another wavelength λ_2 - let c be a putative coin, and I_c_{λ_1}_{λ_2} be the measurement. To detect a valid coin, the machine has a set of n standard values for a real coin 'C' at a range of (λ_1, λ_2) pairs I_C_{λ_1_i}_{λ_2_i} for i in [1, n].

To pass, a coin c has to match within a tolerance, i.e. for all i in [1, n], |I_C_{λ_1_i}_{λ_2_i} - I_c_{λ_1_i}_{λ_2_i}| < ε.

I am assuming that the set of I_C_{λ_1_i}_{λ_2_i}, and the (λ_1_i, λ_2_i) values will be public knowledge, because they are needed by privately manufactured machines working with coins.

The aim of a counterfeiter is to find substances s_j and the concentrations in which to mix in α_j for j in 1..l (to a base that has no fluorescence), so that the mixture c passes the intensity tests within tolerance. If we assume the substances do not affect each other significantly, then we can expect that

I_c_{λ_1_i}_{λ_2_i} = Σ_{j=1}^l α_j I_norm_{s_j}_{λ_1_i}_{λ_2_i}.

Using an off the shelf spectrofluorometer (or even a modified coin reader) a counterfeiter could obtain the I_s_{λ_1_i}_{λ_2_i} for a wide variety of substances s, which can be normalised to be per unit of concentration.

Given a bank of substances s_j for i in 1..l (the counterfeiter can choose an l that is large enough to make the attack work), with known I_{s_j}_{λ_1_i}_{λ_2_i} values, it is easy to solve for a least squares concentrations vector α. Let A be an l by n vector such that A_ij = I_norm_{s_j}_{λ_1_i}_{λ_2_i}. Let y be the column vector such that y_i = I_C_{λ_1_i}_{λ_2_i}.

Let t(A) denote the transpose of vector A. Using the simplex algorithm, solve t(A)y = t(A)A \hat{α}, subject to all concentrations being greater than or equal to zero, yielding the least squares solution \hat{α}. If the result is within tolerance, the counterfeiter has a viable solution, if not they need a larger or different pool of starting substances.

In practice, they might want to reduce the number or cost of substances they use. They could use an optimisation method such as a genetic algorithm to find the lowest cost set (taking into account set size and the price of substances) that results in an acceptable \hat{α} solution.

Of course, these coins are fairly low value, and in practice counterfeiting the coins might not be that profitable anyway given the low value of the coins and the amount of labour needed to get any significant amount of real currency in exchange for the coins without detection, so someone capable of making a counterfeit might be able to use their skills more profitably elsewhere.
While I agree that prison is a very bad system, I strongly disagree with this:

> cure them

Why would a violent behavior necessarily be a disease? We are violent creatures, that's part of our nature. (Many other mammals are violent; some species of monkeys kill their own offspring for no apparent reason; lions kill the offspring of a lioness in order to mate with her, etc.)

We can choose as a society to try to eliminate all occurrences of violence, but it would be foolish to think we can change human nature (not with societal systems anyways; with eugenics maybe but that doesn't look very palatable).

Besides, a majority (or a great proportion) of the people currently behind bars in the US are charged with non-violent offenses; people are routinely imprisoned for crimes that make no other victim than themselves, and that's the greatest scandal of all.

There should be no crime when there is no other victim than the perpetrator; that should be part of the bill of rights of all nations (if we need nations, and constitutions, and "rights").
I used to work as security consultant for a while and final cost depends on how thoroughly you want to go. There's never "i'm done" state. There's always something left to check.

1) app-agnostic bugs, such as XSS/CSRF and other blatant issues

2) app-specific bugs such as access bypass, goto-fails, other obvious bugs like eval(params[:serialized]), security measures switched off, mass assignment :)

3) complex bug chains. Usually I end up with account hijacking or similar severity bugs by chaining few of unrelated and barely exploitable bugs, such as redirects, cookie encodings etc. This requires at least a week (which is $12k if you work with me).

4) infinity. Checking some unpopular ruby gems project uses. Checking popular ones. Checking rails codebase to be sure methods don't have "magic" arguments. Nobody goes that far usually, because attackers will have to do 2-4x more work to get same bugs you may find.

TL;DR, for quick & budget auditing a website like npm $3,200 and one day of work is enough, for any medium sized website people should take 1+ week.
Because you're not in VIM and text input actions shouldn't be used as shortcuts. Or be consistent and use every letters of your keyboard as shortcuts without Ctrl (or CMD) combination..
Well, in 1665 at least it could hardly have been otherwise: modern co-ordinate geometry was only about 15-30 years old.
The source code for Unreal Engine 4 on GitHub
I predict a cottage industry of sites that provide unmoderated discussion around the HN frontpage articles in the wake of this decision. It might be interesting to provide a site to do incline, anonymous annotation of/replies to existing, approved comments. Sort of a meta-HN meets Statler and Waldorf.
What is CNN going to do if we never find this plane?
PSA for anyone who is tempted to copy and paste the jQuery example posted by 'pathfinder': Make sure you account for "radio" and "checkbox" input types. They don't handle the backspace key the same way an <input type="text"> or <textarea> would.
It seems to me it's just a matter or priority. The line share of US Gov spending is Healthcare (+ medicare / medicare) covert that to a BI + take a bit out of defines and "income protection / veteran benefits" and you wouldn't have to raise taxes at all.

The question is would it be more effective than "specialised" programs, and all the literature I have read seems to say yes (although, it's all based on educated guesses). So switch all the "specialised" programs to BI plus take a bit extra from defense and your there.

What's more important? Total domination of all oceans in the world, or peoples happiness? (Assuming that BI actually works as described in the article)
About the MITM attack: TurkTrust, the only ssl certificate authority in Turkey, was recently involved in a huge scandal: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/01/08/the-turktrust-ssl...

Do you think that it's possible for the government to force TurkTrust to generate fake certificates for Google & Twitter and intercept the SSL traffic using TTNET?

They did that, apparently by mistake, on the EGO(government company in Ankara) network by generating fake Google certificates.

Is there something to stop them from doing this on national level? I don't think the ISP's would reject cooperation.
> I think this change makes the mistake that people with lots of karma are good contributors.

You're making the related mistake that comments with lots of karma are good comments.

By coincidence, I (at the time of writing) have roughly 1500 karma at 2.2 / comment. Here's a selection of some of my sub-10-karma comments that I happen to like:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203273 (for reasons I don't understand, 0 karma)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7276538 (2)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7156141 (3)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7396659 (4)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7239733 (4)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7352327 (5)

Here's every 10+ karma comment I've made in the past 50 days:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7206460 (10, with a 12-point comment two levels down)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7329150 (12)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7296981 (11)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7206436 (14)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7194772 (22)

Weirdly, the intuition I got from going back over these is that I'd probably use a threshold of 8 to divide "popular" comments from "unpopular" ones.

Anyway, I see a clear trend in the 10+ comments: they either openly mock someone, or they take a stand on a contentious political issue (the 22-pointer does both!). My favorite of them all is the 5-pointer, and I dearly hoped that someone would reply to it... but no.

Obviously, I've got plenty of less-worthwhile 1- and 2-point comments to my name. But I'm not at all convinced that someone with 10 average karma per comment is making better comments than someone with an average of two; it seems more likely that they're either demagoguing or just witty, possibly nastily witty.

postscript: average karma of some bright lights:

patio11: 15.2

cperciva: 11.3

tokenadult: 6.1

tptacek: 5.4
Ok, so there's a claim I don't understand: ""One in 30 pound coins is counterfeit, and that costs businesses and the taxpayer millions each year," Mr Osborne continued." - but if they take ~2M of them out of circulation every year (which I assume means only a bit more are added), that means we effectively cancel (using £2.2 trillion M4 money supply in 2010) 0.00009% inflation. Since the current inflation is at ~2%, this should not even register. I mean, for others it doesn't matter who produces the new money to regulate inflation (apart from the problem of someone gaining <£2M from it, but if that's spread between many parties... who cares?). 35M 1£ coins were minted in 2013 anyway - I get an impression that the cost to businesses and the taxpayers would be lower if they just subtracted the predictions of fakes from the next year's minting.

Happy to be proven wrong of course

(I couldn't find an official estimate of number of coins lost every year, it would be interesting to look at that too)

(sources: m3 supply data http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/money-supply-..., inflation http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/inflation-cpi, minted quantities http://www.royalmint.com/discover/uk-coins/circulation-coin-...)
Some sites are autokilled. For example, because they create new accounts to send spam. A few years ago pg posted a list and it was longest than I expected.

Most of the URL shorteners are autokilled, because someone can hide a banned site using it.

And I guess that Youtube has some kind of penalty, because there are a lot of off-topic submissions and many of them are dead, but not all.
This is probably just to make it look like they do learn stuff on computers, but the level of poverty in NK is so appalling I doubt they have computers in most schools.
> It offers the opportunity to read insightful thoughfulncomments from people who know what they're talking about

So do many other sites, for me the main draw is the ability to take part in the conversation.

> It offers the opportunity to read insightful thoughfulncomments from people who know what they're talking about, without also having to tolerate vicious and stupid comments.

I'll take having to read the odd vicious/stupid comment (and on here they are the oddity) if it allows me to take part in the conversation.

I'll resist the urge for a knee-jerk reaction but as it currently stands I'll probably just stop using Hacker News if I can't comment, I don't see much of anything on here I wouldn't find by subscribing to the right sub-reddits, it really is the conversation that sets this place apart.

I guess we will see what happens.
Google's Project Tango headed to International Space Station
On the plus side, it's a large key that does not require simultaneous key presses: holding down multiple keys at the same time is not user friendly, especially for noobs.

The backspace frequently has a backwards arrow printed on it, so symbolically it feels right.

Personally I find web pages that break common shortcuts, and navigation paradigms more irritating. Google+ changes the behaviour of CTRL+PGUP/PGDOWN, some sites hijack the spacebar (normally I use for paging), some sites hijack CTRL+CLICK that I use to open links in new tabs.

I never hear people bemoaning the use of the Home key to go to the home page, and its different behaviour in text input areas. But I can appreciate some people don't like it how the controls appear to change, depending on what you are doing, it's far from obvious for some people.

I find The issue with text controls in browsers, is one of focus, thinking that you are in text area, when you aren't etc. The browsers could really help here, by making it really obvious which form element has the focus. It's doubly annoying when you are have focus on a flash component, and none of your keyboard shortcuts feel like they work. I'm a keyboard fan, but really without having some exotic setup, you are reliant upon the mouse with the mainstream OSs because of irritations like these. Which is really irritating for me when I'm trying to do simple things with just the keyboard sitting on the sofa with a computer connected to the TV.
64 bits of security is not true
This could be it. I mostly use desktops. When I use a laptop I always use a connected mouse because trackpads are an impediment to me. So to reproduce this frustration you'd need to accidentally move the cursor away from the text control and then accidentally tap the trackpad again to invoke single click and move the focus away. I can see how this might seem like the browser has a mind of its own.
What is with this constant stream of bullshit pro-Google articles, each of which is successively less clearly worded and makes a stronger anti-NSA claim which was non-existent in the in the original Google announcement? Nothing about the announcement makes me think GMail is any safer than it was before. Bruce Schneier has talked extensively about how the surveillance state is robust, politically, legally and technically:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/01/how_the_nsa_t...
Google: Project Tango
To avoid loss of form input, there are several auto-save-to-localstorage solutions like http://garlicjs.org/. Just add data-persist="garlic" to the form tag and everything is saved until successfully submitted.
http://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/

They already do that (and ironically that was one of the suggestions made on the Pending Comments Post).