skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On other forums, when you've been banned, you get an email or message telling you why and you no longer have access to that account. You also probably will have gotten a few warnings from moderators before that point.
2.4ghz is heavily regulated in the US. Did you mean public domain vs privately owned or something?
Oh Java  Where thou art thee on (on my Mac)
I'm glad you have your opinions.

Many other disagree with your opinions, and instead put the line elsewhere.

Here's a first-grade teacher who was fired for posting her private views on Facebook. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/teacher-should-be-fired-f...

> "The reason why she was suspended was because the incident created serious problems at the school that impeded the functioning of the building," board president Theodore Best said in a statement at the time. "You can't simply fire someone for what they have on a Facebook page; but if that spills over and affects the classroom then you can take action."

A judge agreed with the decision. The final decision is described in http://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/new-jersey-district-dismiss... .

> The ALJ noted that generally public reactions to an individual’s statement cannot limit their rights to free speech, but that “in a public school setting thoughtless words can destroy the partnership between home and school that is essential to the mission of the schools.” The appellate court agreed with the ALJ’s findings.

So even in a place with 1st amendment protections, it's still possible for people to call for someone to be fired, and have it happen. Completely legal, even. A bunch of people complained:

> Two angry parents went to her principal’s office to express their outrage, and one parent threatened to remove her child from school. The school also received at least a dozen irate phone calls. Twenty to 25 people gathered outside the school to protest because of the statements, and news reporters and camera crews from major news organizations descended upon the school. At the next Home-School Council meeting, the majority of the meeting was devoted to O’Brien’s posts and parents expressed their outrage over the posts. When O’Brien was made aware of the outrage against her posts, she was surprised that her posts had led to such a reaction.

Certainly those people disagree that your line exists where you think it does, because they do believe that the teacher's private actions certainly are relevant.

BTW, this is not bullying. You are misusing the term. There is no sense of physical or social imbalance of power used to intimidate.

People call of the resignation of other people all the time, even for events from private lifes with no direct, significant effect on their professional life.

Here's one example: http://voices.yahoo.com/san-francisco-mayor-newsom-admits-ad... . Supervisor McGoldrick (of San Francisco) called for Mayor Gavin Newsom's resignation after Newson's affair with Rippey-Tourk become public. I think that who one has sex with is a private matter, so long as both can give legal consent. But it was enough for McGoldrick to say "the mayor failed as a leader and a role model."

Your view, if I understand you correctly, is that McGoldrick was bullying, and crossed the line? April Davila, author of that yahoo.com link, disagrees: "McGoldrick can say what he likes, it is (at least for the time being) still a free country, but I for one hope Newsom stays."

So you see that many people clearly disagree with your opinion and also with your framing.
Show HN: howldb / Read News Faster.
I'm honestly curious. Is a large portion of the Hacker News audience just less operationally experienced compared to the programming side of things? It seems like Linux 101 lists like this make it to the top of HN pretty regularly but I'd equate this to a post about Python that listed for/while loops, if statements, how to create a class, etc. Am I blinded by my own experiences or do very basic Linux seem to do very well on this site.
So even though the US is allied to the state I am a citizen of, should I ever work for any sort of communications company, I'll be fair game for US intelligence services.

Got it. For practical purposes, the alliance is worthless then.
we like our signal to noise ratio to be as high as possible around here

That may be true for select individuals, but I'll posit that it's no longer broadly true for the majority of the people on this site who vote.

Going by my own comments (since those are the only ones I can see the score counts for), and comments which are obviously mass-downvoted (grayed out), I see cases all the time where "serious" posts - which are well researched, features citations, links, and serious discussion - languish. Meanwhile, the occasional angry rant directed at a popular "bogeyman" (like the NSA) gets massive upvotes.

Honestly, I feel like most of the talk about "signal to noise" ratio here is just a meme itself at this point. Sure, the gratuitously silly stuff gets downvoted to oblivion,
Ask HN:  Glasses that act like a flashbang?
I had an idea and was wondering if it was workable from an engineering standpoint. (It's a stupid idea, but that's beside the point. It's for fun, and it's funny to think about.)

The idea is simple: if you're in a situation where you're being threatened... well, you do what your assailants tell you to do, give them whatever they want from you, then call the police afterwards and try to retrieve your stolen property.

(I'm saying this to be clear that the idea isn't serious.)

Okay, so, the idea is simple: It's a self-defense tool in order to escape a situation where you're being threatened. At night, a sudden flash of bright light is usually enough to disable an attacker for a couple seconds, which is desirable for obvious reasons. That's the whole goal: an extremely bright flash pointed at your attacker's eyes. Like a flashbang, minus the bang.

So I was wondering, what's the brightest flash that can be emitted from the smallest and lightest electronics?

In terms of implementation / form factor, there are a few ways this idea might make (a small amount of) sense. People sometimes wear headbands while jogging, so the "flasher" could be embedded into that. Kind of like this, except instead of an MP3 player, it's something that emits a big flash: http://i.imgur.com/afoiHxW.png

A solution that's more likely to be there when you need it is to mount it on top of the lenses of your eyeglasses. I was thinking that if the electronics are small enough, then it may be possible to make it look like a nondescript strip above the rims of your lenses. It could be activated by a button on the glasses behind your ear. (If your hands are up, your ear is pretty close to your hands.)

Can modern electronics emit a flash on par with something like a high-end DSLR camera while being small and light enough to wear on your face?
The 'appointment reminder' functionality that you stressed on the linked page has been done, almost ad nauseum.

The biggest ones I'm aware of are AppointmentReminder.org, which is helmed by our very own Patio11, ReminderCall.com, and Inphonite. Beyond that, there are specific appointment reminder applications per given niche (there are like, 3 very large, very expensive ones geared towards health care appointments, for instance).
I don't think the problem lies in transparency. The problem is scaling the community. How to keep the signal high? Naturally, people are trying to organise things by adding rules when you simply cannot relay on "level of trust". Sadly, there is a hidden cost with every regulation. For example, I stopped actively participating in StackOverflow. I pine the days when SO was a lot smaller community with high signal to noise ratio, but, more importantly, it had that human feel.

These days, it's very different. Topic are being parsed and filtered by robotic moderator that cannot possibly let something even remotely option-based slip through. Comment that are relevant, but with subtle jokes are deleted. I remember when Joel and Jeff were actively answering questions to have the critical mass. Now that answers and questions would be closed or moderated. e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/652788/what-is-the-worst-...
Sooner Than You Think, We Will Connect To The Cloud Directly From Our Brains
or laptops apparently
Ask HN: Is there any crowd-sourced AI project?
I was thinking about this, and I've love to know if there is any project already running.

Of course I'm not talking about the kind of project that tries to emulate the brain, but something like a chatbot powered by the community — à la wikipedia — where users can input the "inputs and answers".

I know there's something called AIML, but doesn't seem very user friendly.
+1 on this. Impressed by the submission list.
There's already https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363

It doesn't get closed and I guess they are paying attention to it. (the link to it is in the footer)
Show HN: Add Bitcoin donations to your iOS app in 1 line.
It's absolutely possible, perhaps even likely. The point is, without any transparency, we don't know. People have a fairly reliable tendency to assume the worst option - the simple cure for that is transparency.
- Base salary for fresh out of school engineer is about 40 kEUR

Are you talking about France?
Bitcoin is Land
A Watershed Moment for Stockholder Participation
Ok, now you have me worried. This is a problem. We want the best stories on the front page as well as the best version of each story. We certainly don't want knockoffs.

One thing you can do when you know of a better version of a story is post its URL in the thread along with a clear explanation of why it's better. We see most of those, and often use them. (Edit: and maybe we should have a textually unique string, à la hashtags, that people can insert in such comments. Then I can write code to make sure I see them all.)

That, however, will do nothing to help HN get stories that it's missing completely, since there won't be any such thread to comment in. You seem to be saying we're missing most of those. How can we fix that?
Car security is a big deal. The amount of code running on cars compared to the amount of security researchers working on it is incredible. I can count the car security researchers I know of on one hand.

This is really something we really need more of, even in cars without nice pretty APIs like Tesla's because they have a lot of code on them too.
>AMD's been making free drivers for seven years.

It takes lot of time and effort to get GPU drivers usable with all features. I would say they actually did a great job hiring OSS people, contributing documentation after lengthy legal reviews and they kept up with most older and newer GPUs. And they now have dynamic power management! That's great progress for me.
I love this. Although it is a bit more advanced than what we had, we suffered a similar problem:

On Friday when the boss shouted us pizza, we had a problem with everybody trying to order various pizza's, various half pizza's, and various sized pizzas over email. Then the orderer had to collate all of these into a coherent order for the pizza shop.

In the end, we wrote a new module for our internal project management system called "The Pizza Module".

The Pizza Module would be pre-populated with the menu of our favourite pizza shop, so that you couldn't place an order for something that didn't exist. It would then allow people to enter orders via intranet, and then resolve things like four people ordering "half a mexicana" into two mexicana's. It also came with the "fat graph" report, which always had the orderer with the fattest amount (due to people who didn't have access to the intranet ordering through him).

Finally, it was fitted with a feature that prevented ordering, unless your timesheet was complete for the past two months. For a long time, it was very successful, and worked perfectly as intended).

However, in the end, it broke down when we moved away from it as we shifted to a different project management system. Nobody could be bothered writing a new pizza module (or refactoring the old pizza module to work with various project management systems), so we now use a collaborative Google doc with a table that people can place orders in. This is a Bad Idea™, and is far more open to gaming than the system described in the article. However, it is good for 5 minutes of entertainment on a Friday morning, watching people going back and forth on the shared doc.
Not without a fitness function for measuring "quality".
Ways to get the Tor Browser Bundle
I use SourceTree for most of these same reasons.
You know what I love about Tesla? They continue to innovate and create change in the auto industry, most of all as a company they are powered by transparency.

Similar to other luxury auto companies they facilitate innovation. While luxury car companies strive to create beautiful, seamless and future-forward vehicles at a high cost, they can afford (similar to startups) to bring in new ideas to not only rule out competition but give them a market advantage.
For example - recently McLaren came up with a way to introduce sound waves, instead of windshield wipers, wipers are a pain! (Not to say that the device generating the waves wouldn't be) Can you imagine toyota, chrysler, or ford doing something of the sort? Of Course not - it takes probably 20 hours for them to build one of theirs, where it might take Rolls Royce 6-7 months. However there are different profit margins and reputable name sake.

I like to think Elon has engineered his company nicely in between :), he surely got pissed off by the media and had fun adding that ballistic plate to the bottom
Miura fold
I think a bigger issue is that the front page is too important. It's always going to be the page with the most views, but compared to most other aggregation sites, Hacker News has very little memory and makes access to the archives difficult.

This is part of what shapes its community, of course. There's probably at least some reasoning behind why it works that way, but it seems to me that the lack of memory distorts the importance of the front page.
Yes: CMake is a little weird, but it's less bad than all the other options for cross-platform projects, and CMake+Ninja is wonderful. (that said, I do hope something Lua-based like Premake catches on).
> the potential tax savings of incorporating in the US

Whether there are tax savings at all also depends on your specific situation. If you're an employee, income taxes are almost certainly lower in the U.S. than most of the rich countries in Europe. But if you're starting a company or working for yourself, it depends a lot more on which U.S. states and/or European countries you're considering, and what kind of business you're planning to do (sector, number of employees, etc.).

Two places Europe can sometimes end up cheaper:

1. If you're a one-person sole proprietor. American income taxes are relatively high here, and the need to cover your own health insurance, disability insurance, etc. adds some extra expense and paperwork. Here are some numbers I estimated a few months ago for Silicon Valley vs. Copenhagen tax rates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6192339

2. If corporate income taxes are relevant to your business. There are ways to minimize their impact (especially if you're willing to pay for good tax consultants), but the headline rates are generally higher in the U.S. than in Europe, though rates vary widely in Europe so it depends on where you're considering in particular. Ireland generally has the lowest rates; in the U.S., NYC has particularly high rates (and some complex rules for registering businesses).

3. If you want to do your taxes yourself. American business taxation is nearly impossible to figure out correctly without professional assistance, and there are myriads of pitfalls and penalties.

One that varies a lot is "flexibility". My impression is that the French labor market is rather inflexible, and in general the American one is the most flexible. However on specific issues the American one is somewhat inflexible. There is a particularly big difference between "full-time" and "part-time" employment in the U.S., because the employer is expected to provide "benefits" (at least health insurance, often many other things) to full-time employees. In some of Europe the employer doesn't need to worry about these kinds of things at all (which also cuts down on the amount of HR you need to do). In Denmark it's relatively common, at least in tech startups, for people to work part-time schedules, e.g. 2 or 3 days a week.
Woah, 40kEUR for a fresh out of school engineer is a lot considering my zone (IT, GE, FR). Maybe in a corporation or something like that, but in startups and similars it's already a good start to have 20kEUR out of school (taxes included)

If you have a stage/intership contract it can be also less then 12-15kEUR (taxes included)
This is the old debate whether applications should be tightly or loosely coupled. As the article concludes, there are tradeoffs to consider - the broker is a SPOF indeed, but on the other hand it'll take care of all the queueing logic (which is not that simple as it seems - acknowledgements, backpressure, redelivery, timeouts etc etc). It's also much easier to scale the system out if applications are loosely coupled.

Furthermore, a good broker supports some kind of failover. We run a RabbitMQ cluster behind a load balancer, and it works great - once e.g. we had a hardware failure, and the applications did not notice anything from it. Of course we also have to monitor the queues on the broker (one of the few ways to bring down Rabbit is to fill up its disk). But having a central broker for connecting apps also means you have a central point you can keep an eye on to check where your bottlenecks are (which queues build up).

Loosely coupled applications are also much more unix-like in the sense that you can make them do one thing instead of baking in your custom restart logic (over a network? please don't).
For the collapsible comments, I've been using Greasemonkey along with this user script: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/138037
I don't want more transparency. It just gives people something concrete to argue over, and you can't please the haters, so don't waste your time trying.
$7.50? Try living in New Zealand where the only option is $49.50 shipping: http://i.imgur.com/PR6V6SN.png
Posts drop off the front page because of a variety of reasons, from flagging by users to being hit with the penalty for having a poor upvote / comment ratio.

It's not the staff's fault that people jump to assume An Act Of Malicious Moderation if a story drops.
There's a whole other axis of pain around message queues that isn't mentioned, and that's regulating delivery. If you're pushing messages to workers using HTTP or whatever, then you can regulate delivery at the sender, or at a load balancer in between. If you're pulling messages via an MQ protocol, you can only do it at the receiver. I'm not aware of any message broker that lets you throttle messages on a per-consumer basis, much less one that does this automatically based on load or health checks.

Deploying a new worker instance? With HTTP, you don't add it to the load balancer pool until it's ready. With an MQ, you have to tell the app to add itself.

Worker failed a health check? With HTTP, you take it out of the load balancer pool. With an MQ, you have to tell it to take itself out of the pool, and hope it can still do that even though it's sick.

Worker failing to process messages? With HTTP, there's a good chance you'll notice straight away because it's returning 500 errors. With an MQ, you have to hope your monitoring will detect the problem.

Workers loaded asymmetrically? With HTTP, the load balancer is in just the right place to, er, balance load (think of Apache mod_jk or mod_cluster). With an MQ, no component of the system has a global overview of load.

You can make the workers do the right thing in these scenarios even when using an MQ, but it's extra work. It seems to be considerably more involved than doing it with HTTP. Basically, using a message queue pushes a concern which should be external to the worker into it, and that creates work that needs to be done.

I am coming to think that whilst it's okay for apps to send messages to a queue, they should never receive consume messages from one. Rather, i suspect there should be some small infrastructural component which pulls messages off a queue and sends them to workers with HTTP, via a load balancer. I think this component can follow some simple, generic rules, and leave the smarts in the load balancer as normal. I haven't fully fleshed this idea out yet, though.
Why?

Ignoring questions about the honesty or self-serving nature of the invisible-hand moderation, HN's rise came at the expense of a number of other sites, including reddit's /r/programming, Slashdot, dzone, etc.

The draw of HN, despite serious (and continuing) technical deficiencies, were hordes of young programmers who wanted to gain the attention and favor of Paul Graham and YCombinator.

So it's a serious question when I ask whether the technology community has been made better by Hacker News. I would quite sincerely say that no, it has been a net negative for the community, even if it serves Paul Graham and YCombinator well. The technology world is worse off for it.
This. Europe, because of lingual and cultural differences, lack the sort of high-density clusters you get in the US. There's no Cambridge, MA or bay area because moving around is such a big deal here. Berlin is the closest we have, but it's not nearly enough.
Basically, Europe is too spread out. Americans always talk about the US' low population density, but the population density of NY and LA is incredibly high. It's in the cities that most creative endeavors get done. The flyover states and the countryside is only of interest to cartographers and the people who live there.
Well, if this is serious(I hope it's not just more bad journalism from the washington post), I'd be very happy to see software patent go off the table. It would mean I could finally stop worrying about submarine patents on software, and get back to actually making good software.
I think every MMO since Everquest has promised unparalleled freedom during development.
I use "cd -" all the time, it changes to the previous working directory
You know what will make me cry in the future? The current generation has trouble picking up books, staying away from screens and focusing.
Many of us have learned in this traditional path of, search, research/read, analyze, practice, repeat.
When the generation that has such a feature existing where they don't even need to open a book for knowledge or pull out their phones I will cry, not from jealousy because of the way we have spent learning but because of the way they have not. The lack of need to actually gain information will be destroyed. Who will need school (except for when the wifi is out)? Who will needs real hard cover books? What will happen to the constantly connected brains...
Hi Josh. You might be interested in a Reddit thread discussing a Python-based build tool 'Meson'.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/21i19h/a_generi...

https://github.com/jpakkane/meson-mirror
Made in the U.S.A. (Again)
I think that is the case. Even though the name is Hacker News, I suspect that most visitors are interested in the startup/business side of things, even though there is an important core of technical people.
Given how Toyota has had the opposite problem, I would not be comfortable if the engine could not be stopped in this manner.
If this has a level based system its an instant fail.
Introduction to Theory of Computation [pdf]
Are there any plans to opensource HN? A while ago there seemed to be an indication it would happen eventually but it was removed about a month later: https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/commit/350fba6dfec1c23a0b76...
I guess we don't need BSD either then (or the other way around). And directx. And so on. One tech standard to rule them all!