skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe, but determined trolls will adapt to just about any environment - here, for instance, people just create sockpuppet accounts (HN doesn't track account IPs I guess)

When it applies to the most egregious of problem users then it works as intended, but there have been cases where people have been, apparently, posting while banned for some slight, and providing reasonable content. That suggests to me that some banned users might be amenable to a warning or might well change their behavior if they were made aware that their actions were intolerable.

Also, it makes no sense to me to continue using up the site's resources stringing people along who, by definition, the staff doesn't want there. Although I admit I have no idea how much of a problem that is with HN itself, since it doesn't use a database.
That would be interesting to find out. I feel pretty refreshed after about 6 or 7 hours. I'm sure everyone's slightly different. It might depend on how active one is during the day too. If you ride your bike 10 miles to work and back every day, I'm sure you'd want/need more sleep than someone who works from home.
Answered to another question below, from my G+ reshare, in the context of a question about account caps:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DanielEstrada/posts/hQfNmirDfsm

> I suppose one way around the cap would be for users to maintain multiple accounts. I have no objection to this in principle, although it has an impact on the networks they can develop on any one account. If I have 20 Strangecoin accounts all coupled to and supporting each other, but are only receiving income through one account connected to the external network, then my subnet isn't going to grow larger as a whole than the one node connected externally. So I can't use multiple accounts to inflate just my identity. If I'm using multiple accounts, it's because I want to maintain multiple identities. Again I have no objection to this, or at least the protocol I've described doesn't rule it out. ﻿
Is Raph Koster involved? It doesn't seem like it. It's great that this project has some of UO's developers, but without the person who designed UO and made it such a wonderful sandbox... I don't know, I have my doubts.
I feel like we've gone full retard about the potential of VR again. Facebook has bought a promising headset technology, but we're a long way off people living in a virtual world controlled by Facebook. While I fully expect Facebook to data mine any hardware they control I'm not certain how it corresponds with the nightmare vision here.

If anything Facebook buying Oculus so early is a good thing for people scared of Facebook's impact on VR. I think there is a long and involved period of VR being refined by hardcore gamers before it tentatively ventures into virtual sports and virtual meetups et al. I just don't see the big gaming companies wanting to do deals with Facebook - they hate Steam for its platform control and its communication overlays - they'll be very wary of a Facebook chat overlay finding its way into to Oculus driver v1.2. And I just don't think Oculus as funded by Facebook is going to be living or dieing with gamers feedback like they would as an independent company. I doubt they are going to sacrifice enough to meet those demands and be reshaped by them.
A concerning statement from a link in the Forbes artcile - 'Marissa Mayer admitting to 130 hour work weeks at Google' [1]

> "Burnout is about resentment," she said. "It's about knowing what matters to you so much that if you don't get it that you're resentful."

Is this statement implying that burnout is a psychological condition related to 'resentment' rather then the physical symptoms? I can't help but feel that one could interpret Google's VP as pseudoscience ...

[1] http://it-jobs.fins.com/Articles/SBB000142405270230340470457...
I disagree. Automata theory has important practical applications -- most string processing turns out to be finite automata (hence regular expressions), and push-down automata are very important to understand if you're writing a compiler.
There is no such thing as "Europe" when it comes to wages, laws, culture, etc. - these things vary to an extreme degree within Europe and even within the smaller subset of European countries known as the EU. http://soimovedhere.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/stop-generalizi...

Some European countries have higher wages, but that doesn't necessarily mean that employers end up paying more than they would have in Silicon Valley - partly because US employers often pay for health care / dental (not always the case in Europe), and partly because high living costs in Silicon Valley have pushed wages up.
You are arguing the wrong thing.

Here we are telling you to ignore his personal opinion. He is not going to commit a career scucide. If a President wants to get re-elected he will not veto on a bill that is overwhelmingly supported. If most Mozillians believe in marriage equality then Eich will not oppress the majority opinion and discriminate the gays as CEO. He can continue to do so as a citizen of US and as a resident of California.

> He should not be CEO of an "inclusive" organization.

You will get never that inclusiveness. Never. I am sure among the gays there are people who are pro-life over pro-choice and thus "discriminate" those who believe they have the right to freely choose what to do with their fetus.

Supposed Eich is pro-gay but pro-life. Now he will be seen as non-inclusive by the pro-choice community.

You are looking for someone who share the same view as you and those agree with you. What about those who disagree with you?
I was a fan of the essays from way back. It seemed to me like HN was an extension of that process. Almost like "the final essay". The one that is still being written.
Why is this a big problem? If your scenario plays out after VR is really viable because of the extra millions that Facebook puts into the product, so be it.

At this point, the awesome feature issue isn't even really on the table based on my understanding. Getting the technology to be stable and solving all the issues with it is the main focus. I don't see Facebook getting in the way of that. If that does become an issue, Facebook will have earned the right after having likely spent millions in the three digit range to get it going.
This is a likely explanation for the myriad of terrible ideas and the people willing to fund them. The problem with sleep deprivation is that the person who is depriving himself of sleep oftentimes cannot see the obvious (to others) degradation in the quality of their work, thinking, and life in general. To the sleep deprived, things look like they're going well to the point that they will deny that there is any loss in quality. This degrades to the point that sleep deprivation is now a badge of honor amongst people who are cranking out worse and worse work with each day that passes.
" When I first read about that, it was impossible to believe. The site was saying that the blog works without data, which is essential for any blog."

What? There's never been any really good reason for blogs to be database-backed in the first place. Blogs are just static websites with new pages added frequently.
I think success in this context is less about hours of sleep and more about manic focus. You can sleep 8 hours, spend 2-4 hours on random crap, and still work/be around work for the other 12-14 hours. I've been either inside or involved early on with a few very successful startups and none of them felt like an environment of balance or moderation. The founders and early employees (especially technical employees) are maniacs who focus on their product, vision, or whatever it is, at the expense of all else. Founder types especially seem to think about work 24/7 and never really switch that off until the companies have matured significantly.
I don't even understand the purpose of the comparison, other than syntax?

It is also a pretty bad example of C# threading capabilities.

From ThreadPool[1], Tasks[2] and more recently async/await[3], there's a lot more than vanilla threads in C#.

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/3dasc8as.aspx

[2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd460717(v=vs.110).a...

[3] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh191443.aspx
Thats because they didn't buy equity. They bought the rights to a future copy of a product. If they didn't deliver maybe you can sue them.
I particularly want to do more in this area. HN ought to be a hotbed of experimentation and maximum technical aliveness.
He probably had a boat load of options or outright shares that just got closer to being turned into Ferraris.
This is really it. We in our techno bubble care about these things. For normal people, its basically a non-issue. Heck, I even forget that Facebook bought Instagram unless I'm reminded of it here and there. This goes to Facebook''s credit that they do seem to leave their acquisitions alone.
Calling from the registered phone number and verifying address is all you need to get OnStar to unlock your car (I am not sure if its still the case now, but it was the case two years ago).

Same thing for username and password. That's all you need to log into their app. Not sure about failed attempts, but there are no other authentication methods.
Unfortunately, the people used as examples do not support the claims (Marissa Mayer and Jack Dorsey). Perhaps those two are part of the 1 to 3% of the population who can get by on four hours of sleep at night. One of college professors had this phenotype.

Personally, I need between 8 and 9 hours to be at my best.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405274870371250...
Both of these positions on the subject are needlessly binary. I often find it the case that, even though I erect careful boundaries between work and non-work, when I leave a problem on my desk, I will continue to ruminate about a solution throughout the weekend, say. Similarly, I will Strategically avoid email when I'm recharging. I don't think it's so easy to boil down as black and white.
This study from a nephrology journal shows that urine creatinine levels are associated with lean body mass, degree of vigorous exercise, and meat in the diet: http://cjasn.asnjournals.org/content/3/2/348.full Did these authors control for any of these factors?
The Mozilla Foundation (and Corporation) are in a difficult position here, because they are being blamed for someone else doing something unethical, but it would also be unethical for them to do (or have done) anything differently in response to it.

Brendan Eich's behaviour in 2008 in trying to take the choice away from couples to marry just because they happen not to be straight is a despicable step to interfere with the rights of others. His apology this month (https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/) didn't express regret for making the donation, only for "having caused pain"; nothing in the apology suggests that he has actually changed his views. It fits the classic pattern of an apology for how other people reacted to what he did, rather than for what he did.

As abhorrent as I find his personal actions, it would not be appropriate for Mozilla to take political activities into account when making employment decisions, such as about promotions or dismissals. If employers could fire people for their political views or activities outside of work, it would be a net loss to our civil and human rights, even if in some cases such laws shield advocates for stripping away freedom and non-discriminatory treatment under the law.

The Mozilla Foundation has acted entirely fairly and appropriately here, and it is not fair to blame Mozilla for the actions of Brendan Eich or for not discriminating against him on the basis of his political beliefs.
I think a better comparison would be the higher level constructs that each language's standard library provides.

For example, the Task Parallel Library is built in to the BCL [1] with some extensions [2] shipped out of band.

Although Java's constructs seem less comprehensive than what's in .NET [3]. (Disclaimer: I'm a .NET programmer and I don't know all the Java namespaces).

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd460717(v=vs.110).a...

[2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh228603(v=vs.110).a...

[3] http://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/concurren...
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7201428:

I'm a trained nuclear physicist, and a biblical literalist.

You're probably a talented, hard-working, good person. I wish you no ill. In fact, all else equal, I'd prefer you to lead a happy, successful life.

But I'm as likely to hire you as I am to hire a believer in alien abductions. Such beliefs are evidence of a person's thought patterns and general mental stability. Even if otherwise competent, hiring would be risky. If ever "social fit" were an excuse not to hire, this would qualify.

I'm sorry if that sounds bigoted or close-minded, but beliefs affect behavior. This is true no matter how much one tries to keep quiet at work.

Edit: I realize this is religious discrimination, which is illegal in the US. Obviously I would never tell the person the true reason for not hiring. To those who think this is abhorrent: Would you hire a Scientologist? How about a member of the Westboro Baptist Church? We all draw a line somewhere.
Author is ridiculous: http://pando.com/author/ylevine/

Edit: evidently a Russian tabloid guy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_eXile

Why is this blog acting as soapbox for this guy's Google focused hatchet jobs? I mean I'd understand if these contained actual content but pseudo-journalism about how evil Google is because they offer a government tier of Google Apps and receiving DARPA money through robotics contests is beyond ludicrous.
Until the deal Carmack didn't even have a FB account. If that isn't a clear signal of what he thought about FB I don't know what is.

He's feverishly working hard on damage control so that the metaverse he's intent on creating isn't either a ghost town or second life.
> You are arguing the wrong thing.

> Here we are telling you to ignore his personal opinion.

I don't know how to argue with that. You seem to think I'm the lone person who disagrees that his "opinion" is irrelevant, and that is demonstrably false.
Yes! If only our nation could get its act together and get with the times! I live in Michigan, and it's been a mixed up mess for gay couples here.
Oh, good grief. "Grovelling in front of the abuser?" I've been doing this job since October 2012 and I can't remember a single case where we refused a polite request, or even most rude ones. I'm pretty sure it's not we who are committing the abuses here.

One of the secondary reasons why I asked PG to out me is that it's super frustrating not to be able to defend the site and the team when people make sinister and unfair insinuations. I'll probably get it out of my system in a few days, but hoo boy has that been frustrating.
Causes for the Persistence of Impact Factor Mania
I really don't like to tell people about killall. Mainly because it's burned people on non-Linux systems more than once.
Every time I've looked at message brokers, I've been struck by how over-engineered they seem to be. For e.g. the distributed crawler example he gives, I'd rather write a database-backed RESTful service myself than use something like RabbitMQ, because with the former at least I have a nonzero chance of understanding what the hell it's doing and what the potential failure modes are.

Whereas every message queue system I've ever seen has incredibly complex documentation, and you have to study it for quite a while to even figure out what the message broker's model of the problem domain actually is.

I don't know enough about message brokers to say for certain they wouldn't be right for certain really complicated commercial sites with extremely high load, where you can afford a full operations team with one or two people who specialize in understanding message broker technology, but for anything smaller than that, to me it seems like a message broker is an over-engineered piece of garbage you shouldn't ever use in projects that demand reliable, well-understood technology.
Why Category Theory is important and interesting
author: don't use a url shortener or HN will kill your post. For those who don't have showdead turned on, here was his response:

From my G+ reshare, in the context of a question about account caps:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DanielEstrada/posts/hQfNmirDfsm

> I suppose one way around the cap would be for users to maintain multiple accounts. I have no objection to this in principle, although it has an impact on the networks they can develop on any one account. If I have 20 Strangecoin accounts all coupled to and supporting each other, but are only receiving income through one account connected to the external network, then my subnet isn't going to grow larger as a whole than the one node connected externally. So I can't use multiple accounts to inflate just my identity. If I'm using multiple accounts, it's because I want to maintain multiple identities. Again I have no objection to this, or at least the protocol I've described doesn't rule it out. ﻿
I recently bought a mechanical keyboard (razer). It has programmable macro keys, but in order to install the driver I have to create an account on the manufacturer's site and log in before the installer will continue. It's complete crap and I will never buy anything from that manufacturer again.

Am I going to have to log in to facebook to use the occulus headset or install the software? Probably.
The vision of Free Software & Hardware is now more relevant than ever.
Banned In Turkey?
You're missing the point. This discussion is about the announcement that is the topic of this thread.

The survivability of the passenger is amazing engineering. That happened pre-announcement.
but again, to what end?

Not everybody is coming from the same place. I was just looking for a freely available text that covered automata stuff, so I could brush up on a few things that I ran across reading an AI book. This one caught my eye as being both very recent and licensed under a CC license, which is a sweet spot to me.

Is it the best possible book for some particular class, or for any particular student? Who's to say? But I reckon a few HN users might find this useful.
I disagree. The difference between AR/Glass and VR mirrors the difference between PC and mobile machines - one is a fully-engaged immersive experience, and one is a mobile experience that's meant to compliment your interaction with the real world around you.

Expect AR devices to take off in the mobile space while VR devices take off in the PC space. Would you want to use a VR device on the train? Completely blind yourself? Walk around in public wearing one even though you can't see a wall in front of you?

Conversely, would you want to play an immersive VR game where you still see the walls of your geek den?
Go the extra mile. Always. Designing a good product is about iteration.
If public outrage becomes so effective at creating a policy to not hire people with certain opinions, and to purge people who are discovered to hold certain opinions, indeed purging people from entire professional fields to which they may have devoted significant portions of their lives mastering, then we are condemning those people to a kind of economic death. This is only marginally better than actually condemning them to death (which doesn't seem beyond some of the "die x-scum die" types).
I like to think that Google staff would be able to remove a couple of bullet points without trashing the data on one of their product sites.
Set up some experiments using http://www.quantified-mind.com/ to see whether there's any difference in your cognitive performance when you've been sleeping for 6 hours vs. for 8. Practice the tests a few times, then start a custom experiment with your sleep variable in there. Alternate back and forth between each, maybe a week at a time, for a few weeks–test at the same time of day each day. Hit the Data Minding and see whether there's any perceptible difference in performance.

(Disclaimer: I wanted this to exist, so I helped Yoni build it.)
One of the fascinating parts about needing "x hours of sleep per night" and in the past people slept "x hours a night" is I never see anyone take into account the seasons. For all of us at one end of the year we're in a place with 14 hours of darkness and later we're at 14 hours or more of light. I think that impacts how much sleep we need probably by 10 - 20%. I for one hate 6:30am flights in winter when it's dark but don't find them nearly as hard in the middle of summer when the sun's been up for an hour.
Some people obviously do not agree that "allowing it would have harmed no one".
This explanation makes sense to me. I have seen a sort of reverence for people who don't get enough sleep, as though they're a good example of people doing whatever they can for their company, when really they're making themselves much more likely to do things that have a net negative impact.

As an aside: "my startup" is the new "that novel I'm writing".
On the point about scaling, the knowledge of how to do that lives with people. I seriously doubt that Oculus would have a problem hiring the right people (or raising enough money to do so).
Facebook coming to the table gives Oculus a high valuation. They could have easily found other investors with such a high valuation. It's a bit unsettling how quickly this deal went through.

How much autonomy does Oculus have? Can we trust Oculus with privacy? Will Oculus be an open platform?
I don't think it's necessarily that simple.

Many people on HN run on a logic system, many seem to be emotional.

So when someone post some cute puppy that has cancer logical people might flag it. Many puppies die of cancer everyday, we don't hate said puppy but we just like to look at the bigger picture ie curing cancer and perhaps not eating animals if we love them so much.

But emotive people don't get it and I can see it quickly turning into a why do people on HN hate puppies so much conversation.

Plus logical people don't want to look like assholes.

Meh, but who knows maybe it'd create constructive conversation.
* Elsewhere this is prevented by unions, regulations and the implicit understanding that allowing the next man to devalue himself today will devalue the group tomorrow.

yeah, but we make 3x as much as the union protected workers. It's union protection that ruining this country, look at the entitlement problem, hell, you only have to look at the train driver in chicago who fell asleep at the wheel, it a non union protected area she'd have been fired, instead she goes right back to work and drives a train up an escalator asleep again.
I'm an atheist (like I assume you are), but what you just described is straightforward religious discrimination, which is illegal in the US and many other places, for good reason.
He should still be consulted.
>over half the population of California had the same opinion as Eich, back in 2008.

Well, over half of the population that voted had the same opinion. Voter turnout was around 60%, iirc.
Additionally, even if 60% of people held the same views, it's still possible to choose not to work for them.
"Facebook will have earned the right after having likely spent millions in the three digit range to get it going."

This is true. That's exactly why people find it sad.
The problem with buying them early is that Oculus could become the Microsoft of the industry on PC. They could set precedents/biases we'll have to live with for decades to come. For example there might be other headsets that rely on Oculus API/SDK, etc. IDK we'll just have to wait and find out.
On the one hand, I don't see how Oculus could have survived competing in the consumer market against the likes of Sony and (eventually) Microsoft without large-scale financial backing. On the other hand, Facebook is not a consumer product company, and Oculus has never successfully brought a tangible consumer product to market. I'm not convinced at this point that money is enough to make them successful, but it'll be interesting.
Instagram and Whatsapp are really different than Oculus, though.