skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Today" was hardly the bulk of April Fools' Day, and the front page was "clean enough" because people worked hard to keep it that way.

I've been keeping a close eye on this. What swayed me was how many more April Fools' posts were appearing on March 31 (where I am) than I previously remember.

I do appreciate that not everyone agrees, but I want to send a message about signal/noise ratio. That's HN's mantra. We can't have that and everything else as well; there are tradeoffs.

The objection that this and other meta posts I've been making are also noise is a good one, except that this is a special case while we go through a transitional period. I won't be making them forever.

I sure wish it were true that the community is already optimizing for signal/noise ratio, but it's not. We have a serious problem with that and we're going to try a lot of things to fix it.
Whether real or not, it does raise a question I've been wondering about for a while now - what about a f2p game that did state upfront that while playing, you are mining; so the more you play, the more it costs you. No IAP, no upfront costs, etc.

Obviously it would not be suitable for some game types (anything 3d heavy, basically), and has obvious battery/temperature implications on mobile, but it does seem to provide a plausible additional option for monetization.
[BREAKING] LovelyHeroku gets acquired by Heroku
CERN using comic sans was hardly funny, yet it made the front page.
Just don't upvote lame ones. There's a lot of lame news everyday too. You don't have to flag all news.
thttpd?

https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=thttpd
dang is one of the main official moderators, introduced a few days ago.
Interesting to see it announced with Linux and Android support.

If this doesn't signal a shift from a Microsoft-oriented (Intel) world to a new era, I don't know what does.
I've had jokes upvoted here. The ingredients, as far as I can tell, were that they were original, topical, and required a bit of thought about the subject. In other words, the opposite of memes, or generic jokes that are probably retellings from somewhere else. Here's one from yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7500889
Box, Microsoft, and the Next Enterprise Platform | stratēchery by Ben Thompson
GMail was awesome, but it got worse as time went on. I now just use IMAP so I don't have to inconvenience myself with the web interface anymore.
"It scans weirdly that you highlight that the phrase might be taken the wrong way, but then choose to explain it rather than alter it"

Edit: re 'enough?', this isn't meant to be a crushing, accusative comment, but advice for better expression in the future.
Exactly.

If you are smart enough to recognise that your choice of language is not ideal, it would be better to change it rather than try to justify it.

Agree strongly with jwise0's well-crafted comment: the justification makes it worse. You recognise that this is a gendered word, which a group of people might be uncomfortable with, and yet you indicate that you are deliberately using it.
Hou je hart gezond met de juiste voeding | Leef Nu Gezonder
It's a term of affection.
It's not as if one business unit can't give a "90% discount" to the other if the grand common leadership thinks it's a good idea... now, that would be anticompetitive to all other hosting providers, but it would makes sense as a tactic in the "great war against *nix" that they are 100% loosing on the server side :)
A "micro compiler" doesn't qualify as "real production compiler". I think pointing out that a lexer/parser could have been used is relevant in this case.
GLOBAL WARMING farce 2
A pretty poor April Fools stunt (I'm hoping that's what it is) IMHO, given that some people probably have/would do this...
The most prescient comparison to be made is the increase in self checkout lanes; the human element is left to frantically supervise while the customer has all the social interaction equivalent to using a DVD player. The future should be bringing people closer together.
Seems a bit unnecessary.
Okay, this is perfect for my low-cost Haiku box project. I'm definitely getting one to hack on. Well done, Intel, and the whole "launching with Android and Linux" thing seems to be indicating an interesting shift...
Lexer/parser generators aren't used in practice even for hobbyists, so pointing out standard tools could have been used is weird since the tools are obviously not that popular.
MS-DOS security bug bounty
Community is _extremely_ important; Arduino lives on its community despite losing on pure technical benchmarks against all sorts of other dev boards.

Pi isn't going anywhere, as they have a great understanding of the community they wish to create and do educational projects with.
You mean piling on a specific case? You're right. That was a mistake.

It's going to take me a while to get my balance with the public moderation thing, and I overdid it in this case. Sorry to all and especially the OP.
Speaking of moderation ideas, now that there is some new blood, here's another random one. I'm not sure it's any good, and it's kind of vague, but... how about if an article gets flagged enough, the upvoters are "named and shamed" in some (not highly visible) way. It might provide a small incentive to not vote for lame stuff.
It's also very buggy. Its only excuse is being old.
There already exists SETBIT (for adding items), GETBIT (for querying items) and BITOP (for union operation) that can be used to implement bloom filters altogether. HyperLogLog requires multi-bit registers (6 bit long in Redis) which would be inefficient with the current design, so I guess that's why Redis is to include a specialized implementation for that.
So much drama.
Less faffing around with even open-source projects that I can't be bothered porting.

Although for me, it's Haiku that I want to run on here, and for now it's x86 :)
This blog post is a nice survey about other interesting probabilistic data structures: http://highlyscalable.wordpress.com/2012/05/01/probabilistic...
For your last para, I think it is actually pretty common to use a lock free ring buffer. An atomic instruction takes the place of locking for swapping out data pointers. In fact I think modern adapters write directly into a buffer (DMA) and atomically update the data pointer in the ring.

Not an expert on these topics, feel free to correct. But lockless programming is pretty much critical section programming, just offloading the critical part to the consistency model.
SO: Why can't my program compile under Windows 7 in French?
In modern usage, you don't eval it. In modern usage is used for far more that just "javascript" applications.

Of the four letters in the acryonym, the "J" is the least significant. Yes, it's javascript-y, but that's it. So many misunderstandings come from focusing on the "J". So, as JavaScript has basically nothing to do with Java (aside from superficial syntax similarities) so does JSON to JavaScript, for the same reasons. This "JSON is a subset of JavaScript" is just not true - at best it's "inspired by and interoperable with".
Do you not think it's a basic human right to marry who you want? To get the legal protections of that institution? To be allowed to visit your lifelong partner in hospital, for example?
Introducing HackerEarth Date – a technical approach to finding love in life.
Show HN: Barrtr – Bartering for Small Business and Web Designers.
CERN to switch to Comic Sans
PHP Docs are making me dizzy
I'm not hung over, so the effects must be an April Fool's joke.
I sent the following mail to Dan, too, but for others who might be confused at why people take offense to an attempt at inclusiveness:

---

I'm kind of surprised to see you explicitly call attention to your usage of "you guys" in your post. I'd originally thought that I at least preferred it to leaving "you guys" there unannounced ... but given a little more thinking, I suspect it's actually worse. The subtext that you've provided there, to people who do not identify as "guys", is 'I know you're there, and I know that these words make some of you uneasy, but don't worry, I didn't mean to offend you, I just really really wanted to use these words anyway; I think they're worth the risk of offending you'.

I know what you were trying to get at -- you want to make Hacker News a better place for /everyone/. (And thanks for that!) I'm sure you didn't intend that meaning to non-guys, and I totally understand how that came about. But, given that, I think that you might want to edit those words. Can I recommend the usage of "you all", or if you want to be more colloquial, "you folks"?
I remember when Gmail was fist launched. It was the future. We'd recovered from the dot com burst and I suddenly could see how this was going to work again. To use Gmail then you had to get an invite which was a bit of a problem. I asked around for days, if not weeks (can't remember) and when I finally signed up, I also had invites to give away. I think there where 10. Later this was set to 100 and eventually I was removed all together.

Today Gmail is a bit of a shadow of it former glory, after the Google UX nazis got their hands on it I guess...
Did you check to see if the phone/ipad heats up while playing?
As the voting seems to have mostly calmed down, here are the results.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1MsHsMskdVWzFebVIltHogUBuR8I...
I think people are trying to read too much into this device. This is one of many small board computers you can buy today, many of which particularly in the industrial market have x86 processors. If this sells a few hundred thousand boards like the Beaglebone Black it will be a smashing success. This isn't a statement about Intel moving away from MS.
Update to homestarrunner.com
OKCupid says avoid Firefox because Mozilla CEO opposes gay rights
Demonstrating Sketchboard Freehand Drawing [video]
You can see the results here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1MsHsMskdVWzFebVIltHogUBuR8I...
i, for one, love the humorlessness. it's a haven from the lamers at Reddit.
Yes, but we have up and down voting of posts, which is inherently democratic - if we like stuff, we'll upvote it, and if it's a lame joke, we'll downvote it. And thus SNR is maintained. Why is there a problem here? Surely what you're kind of verging on, is telling us what we should and shouldn't enjoy?
I'm very glad for this. The only problem I can foresee is knowing what is/isn't an April Fools' joke. If I remember correctly, Gmail looked like it might be an April Fools' joke when it was first announced on April 1. The amount of storage on offer was so much higher than other webmail services that it seemed almost too good to be true.

(Gmail is turning 10 today!)
If the social interaction equivalent of using a DVD player means I can get my shopping totalled and paid for in 2 minutes instead of 10, I'm all for it. Human checkout operators - whilst skilled - generally have much lower throughput (lower space density, one customer can back up many, etc.)
Epic. Scary to recall how many of your 'steps' I've actually been through irl and I wasn't even in a prison cell...
Thanks, I opened 'zite' up on my tablet and it was mainly really uninspired/mundane/transparent/poorly executed attempts at humor and I was quite put off by it. Be glad for that crap not to surface here.
I can recommend the Pi to someone who has never used Linux before because there are so many resources available that are Pi-specific. It's the same reason I recommend Ubuntu for newbies even though I prefer other distros for myself.
It feels wrong to out people's votes, which are normally private. The objections I've been making to inappropriate comments are public only because the comments themselves are.
Well, why restrict it to one day a year? We should be thinking about the world we live in more often than that.
This is interesting in that regard: http://dualec.org/. If this research is true, it seems that a number of servers use it.
This is what the down arrow is for. If enough people agree with you, then these articles will not appear on the front page. Problem solved.
Interesting point, since personally in my experience, lambda calculus is overly held up as useful to learn. While simple models are very useful, it has a geek culture/hierarchy aspect too. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_of_the_Lambda_Calculus)

In explaining things, I find it very important to deflate intimidating-sounding jargon; and discover for oneself if something really is important, or whether it has more of a dysfunctional social purpose like mystery-of-the-priesthood for initiates.
Let the system optimise for signal/noise ratio, not just a blanket 'voluntary' ban of April Fools gags. Don't encourage people to follow your personal opinion of 'dreading' this day, it's an abuse of your position to try to persuade people that way. You're a moderator, please remain as objective as possible.

The tech world is having a day of fun, people interested in tech have to make the personal decision of whether or not they like each individual gag. If the masses approve then it has a place on a tech news feed. If you don't like it, feel free to make your opinion heard, just don't ask others to follow your opinion thoughtlessly.
Thanks for the book recommendation!

> The deserved disaster will come

It's still hard for me to see that. I don't know any person who started to more encrypt. And the companies will always have to fullfill the requests of the state:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/03/don-t-...

There's still a lot to be done to induce the significant change.
There is a working prototype. Steven Jewel, the original author, wrote the spec and an initial prototype in Ruby. To support a wide variety of platforms, it was decided to rewrite that prototype in C++. The Ruby prototype, which I believe is no longer being maintained, can be found here:

https://github.com/jewel/clearskies-ruby
Quite useless post in my opinion. Since when are we told what to upvote and what to flag? Do we get a "please flag Microsoft posts" when there's the next big Microsoft event (example)?

If you can't handle a few bad jokes and lame stories, then stay of the news for a day and come back the next one, instead of getting emotional about it...

And there's no need to justify "guys" as "gender-inclusive". It's already known as such.

Can we now get back to the Hacker News without rules on what we have or don't have to do?
One thing to consider is that some of the April Fools' "jokes" are pretty awesome hacks in disguise, such as this year's "Headdit" with actually working head gesture recognition, etc.

So, I'd propose flagging lame pranks, but up-voting fun and inspiring hacks, seeing as how this is Hacker News after all.
I was also keeping an eye on HN (mostly because, well, my country has seen the April Fools' Day hours before US and I was procrastinating sigh) and the trend so far was out of my expectation. I first thought that the moderators are working very hard to keep jokes out of the front page, but after some hours I started to think that the community keeps posting lots of signals in order to combat higher-than-normal noises.

Given my observation and the circumstance that you have posted the original post in the middle of April Fools' Day over the globe, I thought your post was quite inappropriate and it would challenge trolls instead, hence the flagging (as a substitute for downvote). I appreciate your concern and thank you for your service, but please keep it mind that not only moderators are concerning.
I'm not sure I agree in this case. The Oxford English Dictionary gives ones of the definitions of guy as 'people of either sex' [0]. There's value in defending this meaning, and not running away from it because it could be misinterpreted. This is similar to how geeks like to defend the positive definition of 'hacker', rather than avoiding it.

To be clear: I'm not trying to minimize the feelings of women or other marginalized communities. Rather, I'm just saying that one way to respond is to aggressively 'colonize' words so that a positive meaning becomes the dominant meaning.

[0] http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/guy
First Fortran PaaS
This is the specific example that happened not long after I abandoned Windows development altogether (I'd been using RoR since 2007, and Linux since 1995, but hadn't gone full time with both except through my own company):

https://github.com/sparklemotion/nokogiri/pull/554

Gave me the warm fuzzies, even though I broke everything temporarily :)
Apple Siri sings Notorious BIG
I think this is what bothers me. No disrespect meant to dang, but because of their position, it is difficult to figure out whether this is a plea or a mandate, which makes it problematic as people clearly aren't sure whether this is up for debate, or overrides the existing method we have of keeping bad things off of the front page in favour of moderator discretion (which I'm aware existed anyway, but more for posts that were clearly garbage/spam/trolls).
So are 'you folks' and other options. The thing is, you turn a comment that has nothing to do with gender issues into one that highlights it with things like your parenthetical remark. If you think it's not inclusive and that's an issue for you, then find another way to say it.

I'm not offended by the comment, nor do I have trouble understanding it. It's just odd to express inclusiveness by highlighting and justifying a term rather than adjusting it.
I looked at this, but it seems horrible? Why is everybody enthusiastic for this
;)
I disagree, because I think the 1st of April has turned into a challenge towards our own perception of news. While it is most often easy to detect an April's fool, it is hard to rule out false positives. So many news stories are so strange, so meaningless or so predictable that they might qualify as a nonsense joke.

One day a year, we are asking ourselves for each and every article we read: Is this story too odd to be true?

I think that's a good thing.
Those gags were off the front page because we penalized them.

I'm afraid I don't understand your second paragraph.
Show HN: Go based Snowflake unique Id service. Now with Thrfit support.
Weighing in here as a random user ...

You have a valid question, and I've thought about this a lot. When you have a very large audience it's depressingly easy to have lots and lots of quick upvotes for something that's genuinely content-free. There are plenty of places on the interwebs where you can find amusing material, but it feels to me that there is a real danger of the intellectually challenging and enriching material being swamped as we "amuse ourselves to death."

I don't think this is a case of telling people what to enjoy, it's more a case of trying to keep the original flavor and culture. HN is certainly an unusual corner of the 'net, and I value it.

Added in edit: And you can't actually downvote posts, you can only flag them. Unless I'm missing something, or possibly haven't hit the karma threshold yet. Which seems unlikely.
re 1) one of the primary limitations of the lambda calculus wrt concurrency is that it does not model time--there is no way to determine how long a computation takes. An example of a function the lambda calculus cannot define is f(x, y) where the fastest computation of x and y wins. You'll see that function pop up in a number of places in the Haskell world, where it is called "amb". This function is obviously important from a pragmatic POV but it turns out it is also important when doing formal work as well: see the parallel-or/full abstraction problem for PCF[0].

My personal favorite concurrency formalism is the Chemical Abstract Machine[1]. The y-calculus is a neat extension that preserves the spirit of the lambda calculus, but also permits (purely non-deterministic) concurrency.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_abstract#Abstraction

[1]: http://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/~fvalenci/papers/cham.pdf
You correctly picked up how "you guys" could be read as non-gender inclusive (and I speak an English dialect where it is gender inclusive), but you then used "lame" which is a mild insult against people who are physically disabled. Maybe choose a better word? I find insults based around poo to be better :)
I suspect that's not what the sponsor wants to see, and therefore will not be seen.
Indeed - I think accepting some degree of silly humour, even if it is lame, is important, as otherwise even when you consider yourself to be not taking yourself seriously, you are in fact maintaining some degree of elitism.
This is awesome on so many different levels.

Check out the implementation: https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/unstable/src/hyperlogl...
I sympathize with the attitude, but if people wait until the bulk of the work has already been done to donate to crowd fund open source projects, that means crowd funding is not a viable way to fund the bulk of open source projects. If true, that's a shame. I'm not sure how to fix it and mitigate the funder risk. Maybe have payment go through only after concrete milestones are delivered?
I like the idea but I think it's probably too complex to implement fairly.
Dude, April first is 'national do something besides read news' day. That's why they post all those false stories. It's there for a reason. Go, get some work done. Or go outside. Get laid. go for a walk.

April first is a day to sit back and contemplate something besides your echo-chamber. Step outside of your filter bubble!
I see your point. What I wrote was the way I would normally say it when I was trying to be friendly to a group, such as a team. Then I realized someone might think it was exclusive, which I certainly didn't intend, so I added the other bit. It's colloquial English; the phrase has clearly morphed to be gender neutral. The confusion comes from the fact that the word "guys", standalone, has not. I probably should have known better than to use it, but I like my English to be alive.

"You folks" sounds corny. No one says "folks", in my experience, other than corporate managers in emails.
Fair enough. I wouldn't want my comment votes public, but I can't think of any stories where I would mind terribly. I could see reasonable people thinking otherwise, though.
AF has gotten annoying as hell. The only time it's actually cool is when it ends up into cool tech but that is rare enough - Google's pokemon game is neat I guess.

Like many people in tech, I dread Aprl 1st. I have to stay away from my news and social sources because they turn to utter crap.

I'm glad HN is quiet regarding AF this year. Let's hope this tradition dies down as more and more people find it lame every year.
The second word isn't necessary. "You" can be singular or plural.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/you
but maybe the joke is on us and he meant it as a joke?
In that case sarcasm/irony level: master!
Show HN: Trac Ticket Notifications for Slack
There’s a 24/7 culture, where people expect a response. It doesn’t matter that it’s Saturday at 2 a.m.–people think you’re responding to e-mail. People are no longer going on vacation. People have become slaves to email.

It’s not a technical problem. It can’t be solved with a computer algorithm. It’s more of a social problem.

Wouldn't a "do not disturb" feature that queues email in a hidden label until an appointed time work here?

Also don't most people who want instant responses use IM nowadays?
How would you write a program which compute the speed of the ball in your example, and how would you ensure or prove that your program is correct? That's what lambda calculus and all its derived works give you. Others have described it more elegantly here, so please refer to their posts, but if you want references, check out the Curry-Howard isomorphism, Hindley-Milner type system, System F, or what Coq, Agda and similar languages bring on the table.

You could also look at the answers given in the linked stackexchange page, of course.
I agree on both points. Therefore, when the time comes, change it. No need to over design if unnecessary. The reason I agree to using .format is because it is more expressive in describing the output vs inference in using print.