skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I strongly dislike everything about waffle.io.
I feel bad about it, because these are good people who more than likely love their product and it's getting a lot of hate here despite them coming here to respond to feedback... but.

1. Most people here are confused about what this is for. After understanding what it's for, I find that it's not even a solution looking for a problem... it's a force-fed solution to a non-existant problem for most people. This solves something maybe 1% of us have encountered, but makes the assumption that everyone on Github would benefit from this.

2. "waffle.io" seriously? Is this the result of an internal "I need a random english word that is available on .io" poll, or is there a deeper more disturbing connotation with the pronounced blue theme on the site?
I'm sure naming your service like this doesn't help the "I have no idea what this is about" crowd.
I can't be the only one tired of those completely meaningless names... I mean specifically the hyper-generic names of services targeted at specifically the github/bitbucket crowd. I cannot quite put my finger on it, but some of these names are trying too hard to be cutesy and random. Maybe I'm seeing something that's not there though.
It's how my children are going to be treated this way by anyone who thinks that this kind of behaviour is acceptable. I'd much rather have my children think for themselves and know how to deal with people who behave in a way they think is unacceptable to them, than futilely protest against something that many people find absolutely fine.
What I think is the problem is actually the SE way of never giving notifications for bad stuff, only for good stuff. Your questions are silently closed or edited, your bad "suggested edits" are silently discarded etc.. So a lot of users do, and continue to do, "bad" stuff because they don't know they're supposed to do differently.

This means that single users act up, directly towards the offenders of the rules. This creates a lot of drama. I think that shouldn't be necessary, it's the job of the system, not single users to notify them about bad behavior.
if you guys think this is cool, check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonaguni_Monument
SO is brilliant for classes of questions that have black/white type answers and infuriating for almost any question that has an "it depends" somewhere in the answer. Unfortunately many legitimate and serious programming/technology questions can only be answered with "it depends" and "this is my opinion".

For example: "Should I use NoSQL or an ACID based approach to my xyz development issue?" This is the type of issue that is common and without an explicit answer and is the type of question that will be closed because it requires an opinion or may lead to arguments.

It is almost unbelievable to me the number of times I have found great information in SO questions/answers that have been closed by some mod for the above reasons.
No moderators were involved in the closing of your question, just normal users above 2-3k (can't remember) in rep.
Today's tally: 9

It crossed the line quite a while back, but I'm not particularly interested in taking a principled stand here.

I'm just curious as to how they are doing this.
Thanks. Creditors means Mtgox users like me who had BTC and currencies in mtgox? What if the trustee couldn't make an enough revenue to pay all the mtgox users?
well, the BTCs are stole, but what about the MONEY (USD) every users had in mtgox? Won't they be paying it back?
As well, Javascript's single-threaded execution means blocking execution halts your whole program. IMO, the way to tackle complex asynchronous callback code is with smarter code structure and frameworks — just as you should avoid shoe-horning inheritance OOP into JS, you should write async callback code with readability and flexibility in mind (without complaining you "have to" write bad code)
At least they've finally switched to preassigned seating a la Easy jet though. Alleluia, it's so much more relaxing!
I'd rather USB cables worked for the majority of users rather than inconveniencing everyone for rare use cases.

Surely you could build some sort of retaining clip for a usb cable is you had to?
List of permissions in mobile ad SDKs
100% of Facebook's value is real names.

That is it. There are hundreds of other services for instant/asynchronous messaging, photo sharing, etc. but only Facebook knows everyone in my life by the same names I do.

I can discover and communicate with anyone I might have heard about in my real life on Facebook because (and only because) they use their real name on Facebook.

Discoverability by real name is the point of Facebook. There are certainly other social networks (i.e. Tumblr, instagram, HN) that people use as online personas separate from their real identities, but Google pretty clearly wanted a piece of Facebook's pie. Pseudonymous Google+ would have been an entirely different community. Maybe a more successful one, but not in the same space as Facebook at all, and not what Google was trying to do.

Interestingly, people use Tumblr as a much more intimate venue, in part because you just can't hold that many people's pseudonyms in your head - at my school, only fairly close friends got to know each other's Tumblr URLs.
I think that's being rather harsh - to me it's trying to link a Trello style community/team tool on top of Github. And as someone who has tried to get a largish team, including non developers, to collaborate using existing Github features this might well be a good idea.

Also the name - very few domain names seem to have much connection with the domain anymore, picking on this crowd for having a weird domain name hardly seems fair when everyone pretty much has weird domain names these days (unless they have boat loads of cash).

Edit: If anyone from waffle.io is here, first of all well done - looks like an interesting tool, secondly I'm not sure your "Why don't you open source your workflow?" is doing your product justice - I was slightly confused when trying to understand that first diagram, but maybe that's just me. When I scrolled further down the page and saw the example it all seemed clear - but not everyone might scroll down.
What was it formerly written in?
Nice, I never knew about that feature, thanks! Just tried it out on some of my work, and it's a breeze to use. However, seems that scrollbars behave slightly differently in it. In my case they aren't appearing in certain sub-containers. Have you had any such issues with it?
Tap the internal market at your Accelerator
Yes, but Google+ was supposed to be Facebook. Those communities are just that - online communities - not venues for real-world friends/acquaintances to interact.
I believe that there should be a higher burden for beginners to ask their question, before it can go live.

New users need to prove that they have done research, this can be done with a few questions like "name the three google search terms that you have used to find a solution", "how much time did you spend on researching?" (easily faked, but maybe it gives people a hint to step back and try harder).

There could also be a new-user queue where higher reputation users would review a question (but are unable to answer it) before it can go live, with the possibility to go back and forth before the question goes online.

In my blog post I have detailed what I'd propose:
http://alexander.kirk.at/2014/04/26/stack-overflow-ways-out-...
> That's the wrong question. Plus you've precluded any ability for me to answer with an example as "at that scale" requires something equal or bigger within the limited Q&A space.

You're basically saying SO system is broken, I say it is not because nobody has done better at that scale. Doesnt mean it is perfect,just mean it's the best thing we've come up with yet.You cant prove me wrong on that.

And SO is a QandA , it's not an image/link/sharing recommendation system, you talk about all these sites and pretend like they play in the same category as SO,that would make them comparable to SO.They are not.
Expanded from a comment I left:

I think he is missing a camp, to which I'd count myself: 5. Those users who visit the site to solve their problems, and who like to help others.

Like 1 they want to have nice content on the site, but their number one criterion is "is it helpful (and civil)"? They don't care much about "is objective/it a good match for SE/constructive" and are frustrated by the wikipedia-like deletionism of 1. They would enjoy and benefit from even the "worst cardinal sin" kind of questions, like "What is the best node.js framework as of early 2014?". (The question would have many answers and would be a bit messy, but a novice could quickly gauge what frameworks there are, which ones are popular, and around which ones there is controversy.)

They dont't care much about 2 ("help vampires"), answer the questions if it is not much effort, otherwise ignore them. They don't like the term, and absolutely hate it when 1 accuses them of being one. It is incredibly rude when one closes your question for supposedly being "homework".

They don't care about 3 ("rep whores") either, and find the grudge of 1 against 3 silly. Let them have the rep they can get, if they're having fun and contributing useful content! Like 3, they enjoy getting rep (or XP), and try to unlock new features on the site, but isn't that the point of gamification?

Basically, these are the people who also care about the site and the community, but are less obsessive and deletionist (I'm looking for a less offensive word for anal-retentive...) than the vocal majority on SO and Wikipedia.
Scientists characterize a new shape using rubber bands
The Internet is just a CIA project, Vladimir Putin says of online communities
This looks great, I've bookmarked it for the next time I want to learn a new language.

Speaking of which: I haven't been keeping up with the Rust news, is it stable yet? Or are they still introducing breaking changes?
I wonder if it would work if they were left open but marked norep and allowed voting etc. but did not count towards Karma scores or scaled to a much reduced level.
Start using screen reader such as NVDA/Jaws on Windows, VoiceOver on Mac or Vinux (a ubuntu fork with Orca screen reader).
I have a little vision left but I do dev with only TTS. It's not that hard (considering I've been doing it for over 9 years) but GUI tools (IDEs and texteditors) are your biggest pane points.

Visual studio is quite accessible and I use it a lot.

That said, I've been programming for nix as well though Sublime/etc are completely inaccessible (at least on Windows).

Managing *nix servers with SSH is by far the most accessible and rewarding experience I've had. VIM is my personal choice for editing. text-based terminals are ridiculously powerful and accessible and they level the playing field IMO.
Yeah, I think that's what he meant. The problem are often not the actual `moderators` in the strict sense of the word, but the moderating community members, the "hall monitors" of the site.
Edit: We're working on a new landing page that we think does a better job of describing what our product does and is responsive and mobile friendly: http://screencast.com/t/IZnoWChXyQ

At the risk of sounding too "corporatey" again, but to answer the original question of what Waffle does: Yes, Waffle is a kanban-style, "Trello-like" board view of your GitHub Issues. Waffle allows you to effectively use GitHub Issues more effectively for project management (for instance, the board view helps with prioritizing work and visualizing what in progress. You can also do things like view all of your Issues across multiple GitHub repositories on a single board.)

Waffle uses GitHub Issues as your board's data model, so any changes you make in GitHub are also reflected on your Waffle board (for example, we'll move issues into the "Done" column of your board when you merge any commits into your default branch that use the fixes/solves/closes GitHub Issues syntax.) We're working towards automating even more movement of Issues across your Waffle board based on actions you already take in GitHub.
Serendipity or sarcasm?
Not quite stable (current version is 0.10) but they are trying to keep the breaking changes to a minimum.
At first, it seems that the needed data is already there: karma points are associated with tags, so it should be possible to set answering, voting, modding threshold based on the questions tags, though one would have to decide which tags are valid for a given question. And then there are subtopics: if I post a question on functional programming for instance, should a more specialized developer benefit from his clojure karma to gain privileges? Should it be a ratio? And then, if I update the question to focus solely on lisp, what happens of previous actions performed on now invalid privileges?
Interesting quote, but there's no there there.
Having something like the Geek Code of ancient Internet times might be fun to auto-generate from user submissions to HN:

http://www.geekcode.com/geek.html
Not really, and there is a ton of case law on the topic. The way (civil) discovery works makes the SaaS concern far less of an issue.

Civil cases are NOT criminal or national security -- this is not the CIA, it is not a secret court, it is not being tapped... it doesn't even rise to the level of a search warrant. It is up to the party being requested on to produce the documents. So, if we get a discovery request, we have to deliver the documents to fulfill it.

For example, we have an automatic email cleanup after 90 days -- both technically, and in policy. This means if we are served with discovery, we can show the policy, show we have taken steps to follow our policy and produce the last 90 days of email. Same goes for Hipchat logs.

Now, they could make some crazy play to extend discovery to Google or Atlassian. There are a couple problems with this, the first of which is such an insanely broad request would be flat out denied as fishing. If it wasn't, they would fight it kicking and screaming because they don't want to be involved in every civil case of every one of their of clients. They then would have to actually have the data, which in the no logging situation, hopefully they never had.

Discovery is often used as a tool of attrition, to wear down the guy with the smaller wallet -- run lean (by policy and design) and if you ever get a request for discovery -- you can fulfill it quickly and completely.
> you talk about all these sites and pretend like they play in the same category as SO,that would make them comparable to SO.They are not.

They are.

They are all a form of content management system for a community or group.

And I'm not saying SO is broken, I'm saying communities don't scale. You can certainly tweak a community to get it farther down the road than other comparable communities (tags do this well for SO), but to imagine you've dodged the reality that communities don't scale is wrong.

Instead we should look at how things scale in societies, and they do so by splitting themselves into manageable sized groups... cliques, microcosms of the whole, each potentially a part of a larger clique and host to ever smaller cliques but all with the same capabilities.

You cannot scale a single community, but you can perform a sleight of hand (e.g. subreddits) to allow a natural sub-division of the whole into many smaller communities that collectively have scaled the parent microcosm (the parent itself is a subset of a society or the larger global population).

Disclaimer: I build community software, and I realised I've gone and used the company name in my writing.
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Facebook becoming So Lo Mo with Nearby Friends
I don't know... I'm not bothered at all by new users or dumb questions. What bothers me are experienced users questioning my intentions, being patronizing and thinking I am dumb. I have to include a disclaimer with almost every second question: "Yes, I know what I am doing. No, I am not suffering from the XY problem. No, I will not treat you answer as legal advice. Yes, I have tried to solve the problem on my own. Here is a bunch of useless code to prove I am worthy of getting an answer." If I don't do that, I'll get - within seconds - comments like "show what you have done" or "don't do that! what are you actually trying to achive!"

The other thing is that, increasingly, the kind of questions that would a) help me and b) I could answer with expertise are the kind of questions that are banned on the various SE sites. SE has ceased being useful to me a while ago.
gq for reflowing.

The main problem I have is when I'm authoring in vim and pasting to another editor which interprets hard returns as, well, hard returns.

Mostly I play games with piping through a formatting tool or join up lines manually before pasting them. Hrm. Now you've got me wondering if there's a good way to do that generically.
Ask HN: How to promote a indiegogo campaign?
Hey,

I am working on a indiegogo campaign for a book on creating a cryptocurrency (https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-crypto-ride-creating-a-cryptocurrency-from-a-to-z) What is the best way to promote it excluding the case where I ask for ideas and tips on HN and discreetly provide a link?
Thanks. :) I posted this below, but in case you missed it, we agree. We have a new landing page getting ready to launch. Here's a preview of what we're working towards:

http://screencast.com/t/IZnoWChXyQ
While concerning with regard to their stance on security, you should really assume all web services store their passwords in plaintext. Passwords have always been kept in confidence on the web, without any guarantee of secrecy. Until web standards improve and address this with client side hashing this is an uphill battle, like trying to get people to use prepared queries instead of escaping. Use a password manager with a random per-site generator and just accept it.
Monument Valley – 'making of' video
Pi-web-agent
As someone who has learned to program and embarked on a career as a game developer in the past few years I found stack overflow to be invaluable.
I was, and still am, certainly a 2 (help vampire) If I encountered something I didnt understand or could not get working I would often post a question there. I was amazed at how helpful the 3s (repwhores) were. Their answers saved me a lot of time and accelerated my learning, though I have to say I was quite baffled by how helpful they were, I always wondered how people had time to be answering questions there.

Anyway I think for the purposes of learning programming nowadays this help vampire / repwhore relationship is very pragmatic, also I think it is the most important function of the site (1s be damned!) to help people learn.

I've found learning programming that often the initial learning curve is quite steep, and there is often not any proper documentation for things nowadays, there are things you could never figure out yourself and in those cases you just need to be pointed in the right direction by someone who knows.

Here is an example of a "bad" question I asked. It got downvoted, with snarky comments and answers but I dont care + it was very helpful for me mainly because in one of the comments someone mentioned the word "easing". It turns out What I was doing was easing but I just didnt know that word, learning that this kind of stuff is called "easing" was a huge help as now that I know what its called I can just search for resources on it.
Theres no way I would have been able to figure out that these things are called "easing" by myself

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22070187/making-a-sine-wa...
Ask HN: What does your home office look like?
Please share some ideas regarding style and design and maybe post some pics.
Rust feels a lot like C++ with smart_ptr/unique_ptr by default, just with a different syntax.

Bad things they imported from C++ :

- Traits (a.k.a. I don't known where this method is implemented).

- Over-complicated and compile-time-specialized generics (feel a lot like templates).

- Copy traits feel a lot like C++ copy constructor (a.k.a. I never known what simple things like assignments or passing an object around will actually do) ( https://rustbyexample.github.io/examples/clone/README.html )

- Explicit allocations (stack vs heap) and ownership management.

Yet they added some bug-provoking things like "The final expression in the function will be used as return value". And crazy syntax rules like "ho, only if the expression is not followed by a ;".
Agreed. There is a real problem that Stack Overflow comes out on top if you Google for most of the "best X framework/library/... for Y" questions.

Thus, many if not most of my encounters with SO are with closed, marked-as-offtopic questions that are still often the best resource to get an overview of the available alternatives.

I would love for someone to sift through the SO dataset for such questions and create a new, separate community catering to this specific need.
I think the being patronized is an effect of the flood of the huge amount low quality. It is assumed that you did little to no research because this is the case most of the times.

What kind of question are you referring to that are banned?
It's an interesting question but it has no place on SO,it's open ended and ask for a recommendation.

It depends on too many factors to encourage an accurate aOnly you knows your requirements.

a good SO question is accurate,non trivial,with a reproducible test case.

Why dont you try Quora instead?Quora is made for that type of question.I'm personally not interested in Quora as I find its content quality quite poor.
That doesn't make sense. Due to the nature of bitcoin we might actually be able to know where the coins went. what do you mean by nature of Bitcoin? if someone steals yoir wallet, then due to the nature of your physical wallet we will never 100% be certain where it went. Due to the nature of Bitcoin there is a trace left in the blockchain.
It's not that you are not supposed to use ORMs in Go. ORM take away control from you and your code. ORMs are a blackbox.

I prefer writing plain SQL when dealing with databases. And in Go, this can be done with a few lines of code [1].

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11353679/whats-the-recomm...
That question is clearly not a programming question and, therefore, not suitable for a programming q&a forum. I think the moderators got it right on this occasion. You could argue that SO should be for all kinds of questions, or all kinds of questions that are anything to do with computers, but the founders chose to handle that with other sites in the Stack Exchange network.
How to Shape an Effective Cart Abandonment Email Campaign (Part 1)
NetBSD and FreeBSD were already ported to Neo Freerunner few years ago, and you actually don't have to start the graphics layer on any OS. You can also already use whatever programming language you like, it runs just a standard operating systems like your desktop do, just compiled to different cpu arch (arm).

If there's any BSD running on OMAP3 boards like BeagleBoard, then running it on Neo900 will be trivial and you can do it by yourself. Any documentation needed for more specific support will be public, so you can do that by yourself as well.

also, Openmoko is long in the past. Long live OpenPhoenux! :)