skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Moderation under Paul Graham was entirely, completely, absolutely opaque.

That is not correct. Fairly often pg responded to questions about whether a post was getting flagged.

Anyway, you're right that my comment wasn't really related to your original comment. I guess just the defensive tone of your comment set me off, because I keep seeing rampant censorship on HN, perhaps even more than before, and that irks me.

> they can mail hn@ycombinator.com and be virtually assured that they'll get a personal, candid answer from the mod squad about what's going on. That's not as gratifying as snarking about it in public, though.

So, the problem with jacquesm -- who has been publicly complaining about his inability to submit articles for a long time now, is that he just never emailed hn@ycombinator? That is a _necessary_ step to regain the ability to make submissions? I think in a healthy community it would not have been. I've known jacquesm for a long time now, he's a genuinely nice guy who's always willing to spare time to give tips on everything from programming to startups, he should not have had his submitting privileges revoked in the first place.
- An app that keeps track of what websites you browse and at the end of the day shows you how much of your time was actually spent on useful activities versus browsing Facebook for 2 hours.

Have you looked into rescuetime.com for this?
I disagree with most of the points made in the second paragraph.

I also think moderation should be used more in moderation.
5 Android mobile come soon
I personally have been able to get it all the way up to 1.4 on my ZTE Open. It's a mess to do, you need to build the OS from source then splice it into the boot file provided by ZTE and edit some init scripts. It runs perfectly fine after that but I can't comment on stability since I only use it for app testing
> 3. During disputes, the arbiter can side with whoever offers them the biggest fee.

Then he would be left a negative review. Arbiters will be chosen based on fairness.
Yes, we agree that the optimist's imagination limits the list of things that could possibly go wrong to the absurd. And as you suggest perhaps an optimist's optimism derives from a concept of professionalism born the love child of dunning-kruger. Or perhaps the horns are grown on a strawman dividing the world into naught but optimists and pessimists according to the law of the excluded muddle.
I see Daniel and Nick working their assess off to improve quality on the site, and I see quality actually improving. Whatever they're doing, it's working, and I appreciate it.

I think it's totally inappropriate for me to discuss 'jacquesm, or really most other HN commenters, with random people on HN.
Jony Ive isn't a programmer. Your question is about as germane as asking what a version of the iMac reimagined by Keith Richards would look like.
I didn't say there weren't interesting underlying phenomena, only that the HN threads don't reveal insight into them—and if I may, I think your attempt here, though well-intentioned, mostly reinforces that. Every sentence strikes me as projecting way beyond the available information.
Solar Powered Ubuntu Laptop Readies US Release
Data Scientist Interviews
So you are behind Heartbleed?
Thank you. In that case it's a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7240122.
This misses some of the point of the front page. "Featured Article" (FA) status is one of the most important incentive schemes on the site. It's a case where what's good for the front page is also good for the community. There's nothing intrinsically good about having a nifty icon for a story, and not every contributor working to lift some obscure article to FA status is going to have that resource available.
Filepicker SSL cert expired
Sure, but making new identities is cheap in such an environment. Not that I am saying there are no fairly easy solutions, that could be implemented to prevent this, or that this is a big issue.
Go’s map iteration order is random
Absolutely. Outside the tech echo chamber, the economy has never recovered from the "jobless recovery" of the 2000s.

I read a good point about this somewhere: renting out an apartment on Airbnb is a good way to make money now, but the free market being what it is, that extra value will be captured by rent eventually. Landlord knows you can make $500/month renting on Airbnb? Add $500 to the rent.
[Show NH] Erlang based chat bot
Timing, Money, and Parenting Within the Standard Possession Order
I'm surprised no one has commented on what I thought was the most interesting aspect: using the block chain and digital signatures to create and verify identities. They're using it for a reputation system, and given the distributed nature of their marketplace that's a pretty smart way to do it. By putting it on the block chain you have this externally verifiable (at this point) directory. One of the more creative uses of bitcoin I've seen yet.

It's unfortunate that they see this as a "next generation black market;" why couldn't something like this also disrupt eBay or Craigslist? Or something more important in places that have less free markets? The basic tenants should also work for good, not just drugs/guns/etc.
> When these points fail, Metro-North — the nation's largest commuter railroad with 280,000 daily passengers — is completely cut off from Manhattan.

It's the nation's second largest when going by ridership (the number cited) to the LIRR with 334,000 passengers[0]. Both the LIRR and Metro-North are commuter rail systems for New York and are both MTA-owned/-operated, along with the subway, bus[1], etc.

The MTA is launching a $120 million project to "storm-proof" the Long Beach branch of the LIRR this year (among a myriad of other plans).[2]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_commuter_...

[1] Except out in the 'burbs, our buses got spun off and privatized somewhat recently

[2] http://www.thelirrtoday.com/2014/04/storm-proofing-long-beac...
No. A good part of Wikipedia is that it works and renders properly on almost every device. Making such a HTML5/CSS3/JS-oriented redesign could heavily ruin that.
Does anybody know how the TeXbook source yields a compilation error? I mean to ask, is it enforced by the TeXbook source or is it hard-coded in the TeX source? (Or neither?) Not trying to get around this copyright enforcement, just curious.
"My Top Priorities" App.

* Ideally no downloads or installs required, you just list your top x priorities (up to 3, because we all know that if you have more than 3 priorities... you have none).

* Each one limited to 50 characters or so (e.g. "Write Chapter 3 of my book" , "Buy food for Sunday's cookout" , etc.)

* You get a custom link that you can edit at any time, so when in doubt you reference it and know instantly what you should be working on

* Analytics would be extra fun, high potential for interesting trends. Basic sentiment analysis would yield "priority" trends and tendencies by city/state/country
The Computing Curriculum
We buried it as a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7647958, which covered Musk's news conference. The ULA suit wasn't mentioned in the title of that post but it was discussed quite a lot in the thread.
That's what I'm thinking as well. You can't leave land mines lying around and then blame the poor guy who steps on one.

If you find yourself afraid to pull old code out, you've got probably got a combination of technological and cultural problems.
> Because processors are made with C in mind, as it's the lingua franca, and so they end up being optimized for it.

No, Rust exposes the C memory model pretty directly, and it uses the backend of an industrial-strength C++ compiler (clang/LLVM). The difference here is algorithmic.

(Rust does have some codegen bugs that affect performance, however, though I suspect they won't affect this code.)
If you're interested in a more narrative take on Caracas' slums and how Chavez's policies contributed to their rise, the New Yorker carried a fantastic essay on the topic a few months back [1]

1: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/01/28/130128fa_fact_...
Full quote: "it's a little creepy when someone has a 35 year old looking face and 70 year old looking hands"

How is this an appropriate way of looking at people, and --worse-- publicly talking about them? There can be many reasons the skin on someone's hands have suffered (accident, work, disease, genetics, ...). It's not only a bizarre message to send out, it seems to indicate a rather shallow perspective on people.

What does this kind of statement indicate about YC and its relation to people who are in their 30s and above? I do hope it's not a public judgment about someone who interviewed recently at YC. Either way, such utterance does not reflect well on YC.
Is there something special about 3? I would think the result would be true for any positive finite n.
My high school CS teacher always told us, "Weeks of coding can save you hours of designing!"
"That combined with the fact that you're not a Haskeller, you're not familiar with what they've built."

On the other hand, I don't have to be a php'r to know facebook was built in that language or a C++ programmer to know what google has done with it.

The negative-nancy is Timothy Baldridge, an employee of Rich Hickey's company Cognitect.

By personally attacking a critic of your claims, you're only making your case weaker.
Not to get into an argument, but I find Go and (modern) Java almost identical. Not in exact features (they treat interfaces and exceptions differently), but in the general philosophy of the language (i.e. "blue collar") and the level of abstraction. Go is simpler than Java, so I agree with the "lite" as well. I would use Go for simple, relatively small, self-contained projects, and Java for bigger, heavy-duty stuff. The languages are so similar that I hardly feel it when I switch from one to the other.

Obviously, you can't compare small Go projects to huge Java monstrosities that were written in the old Java style (lots of XML configuration etc.), but modern Java and Go are hardly distinguishable (in approach; not syntax). Maybe I'm particularly prone to this view because I've implemented true fibers (goroutines) and channels for the JVM, so I sometimes transliterate Go code to Java (the resulting code is always of similar length, perhaps with a slight advantage to Java, now with Java 8's streams and such).
Home Remedies to Get Rid Of Acne Scars
Newspapers aren't really about being the first to inform people about something that has happened, but more about being very informative, well-written, objective and complete. Many articles are somewhat timeless, anyways.
Sure, but making new identities is cheap in such an environment.

Yes, but the real question is how easily can trust be manufactured?
I grew up in the Hudson Valley -- this is truly one of the most beautiful stretches in the world. At points, you're essentially surrounded by the river on both sides.

I really think climate change needs to be presented to the public as an economic problem. Our infrastructure is going to continue to get hammered, costing billions, and we're essentially subsidizing it.
Microsoft sent out a high level research team to a company I worked at to collect data and feed back on Outlook. During my interview I asked the lead researcher why he's going through all this trouble to collect data, when he uses the same product himself, and can pay attention to how he's using it and see the disconnects between the use cases and the UI directly? It was a fair question, but I don't recall him having a good answer, other than jotting a note and agreeing. My follow up question was surly there's innovation in Microsoft around UIs, why not interview those folks? To which he and his team laughed and said you don't want any of those folks ideas. Amusingly honest, which I didn't expect.
I wonder how many climate-changer denier politicans will attempt to legislate to prevent Metro-North from considering climate change in their future planning - the same way NC did that:

http://abcnews.go.com/US/north-carolina-bans-latest-science-...
How bad was the latency? Did it make anyone sick?
Amtrak also rides those rails, which I believe are a connecting point to the entire north east above New York City.
No, it definitely isn't. It's not enough to have zero negative reviews, you also need to cultivate hundreds of positive reviews.
We might consider that the existing, originally successful designs are products of competition and natural selection of early alternatives, both within and outside of the company. In other words, it's plausible that good design is evolutionary. The rest of my comment explores this idea.

If so, these existing designs are really the best-of-the-bunch, beating out the competition, and perhaps this is because they are better on criteria that have been overlooked or not fully understood.

Now that Facebook, Google, Wikipedia have "won" the competitions in their original space, we might believe they are no longer under strong selective pressure of competitive evolution.

Facebook and Google might therefore be inclined towards major redesign which benefit them more for commercial reasons. This alienates some people, yes, but since the companies no longer have to fear immediate challenges from competitors, they can afford to provide users with a less optimised and more profitable design.

Wikipedia has no real motivation to change the design away from one which is known to be good: nobody strongly benefits from a major redesign.
Knuth's definition of 'bug' is a limited one, that seems to be mainly about logic errors. Allowing a user to incorporate bitmap fonts in a document (which very few users actually wish to do in 2014) would be considered a bug in other typesetting software.

This is actually a fantastic illustration of the gap between academic and industry concepts of computing.
You're right, but the parent statement is the opposite: the questioner wants to put the burden on users, not developers.
The biggest problem that I see with having heavy QA as a gateway to release (from a lean production perspective) is that it tends to encourage deploying large batches of changes at once. When something goes wrong (which it will) which one of the n changes (or combination of changes) caused the problem. How can you roll back/roll forward a fix to just the one problem?
Looks like something like this debuted last week: https://gofuckingdoit.com
Someone over on reddit identifies it as Quikscript, it certainly seems likely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Quickscript_alphabet_revi...

http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/243agf/identify...
I remember watching the Homeland episode set there and thinking "This can't be real". Even in that over the top series, it felt too much...
Reducing the number of characters per line on Wikipedia is as easy as making your web browser narrower.
I don't know -- I didn't downvote you, but you might want to edit to indicate that x and y are not necessarily finite sets. (For finite sets, the result is trivial.)
Hitlers Time Machine, “Die Glocke” The Nazi Bell
"Moon Machines" -- an incredible series if you haven't seen it, with episodes on building the flight computer, etc -- has an excellent episode on the story behind the spacesuit:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xxxikn_moon-machines-2008-p...
Let's not hide behind euphemisms.

[EDIT2: OK, I agree that calling it the "FreeMarket" may be a wise move, it nevertheless reminded me a bit of the same game that the politicians play by using words like "criminal", "illicit", etc. in reference to the War on Drugs: manipulation via the negative connotation of words. If on the other hand, like Riseed pointed out in a reply below, what you're saying is that it's simply more accurate to call it a free market, then I agree, that's a strong stance to take.]

We need to turn the tables on these politicians. The truth is that they are the inhumane ones. They are responsible for millions of deaths and atrocities thanks to their support of the War on Drugs. [EDIT3: for citations see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7656095 ]

"Illicit goods"? How about illicit politicians? War criminals whose face is framed in your neighborhood government office?

Call a spade a spade. The War on Drugs is a War on Humanity. It is literally responsible for more collective human suffering than the Holocaust.

EDIT: Unfortunate to see fellow HN'ers downvoting me on this issue. Don't want to here it from me? Maybe you'll find Richard Branson and H.L. Mencken more appealing:

http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/06/opinion/branson-end-war-on-dru...
Rust is the language I'm thinking of right now. If you declare a trait (what Rust calls interfaces), you can also implement that trait on any type.

The basic rule is you can implement a trait on a type if you declared either the trait or the type yourself. You just can't implement someone else's trait on someone else's type.

But Obj-C also allows for the same thing. You can declare @protocol (interface) conformance in a class category, and you can declare your own category on someone else's type.
And when we moved away from C for a lot of really important things, we saw memory issues and buffer overruns replaced by other trivial mistakes. In the late 90s, buffer overruns became a joke bug/security issue. In the late 00s we saw SQL injection (and similar injection attacks), XSS and other parser confusion tricks become the joke bug/security issue. Using python or ruby didn't magically fix these, and there are still fairly regular issues in using the libraries that enforce input and sanity checking. Heck those libraries still get big holes - there were a few active record issues not that long ago where the tool to sanitize data actually opened a hole! (Not to pick on any tool/framework - that one was just well publicized.)

I think the main point speaks more to the old saw "If you make something idiot proof, someone will just make a better idiot". Tools that automatically "fix old problems" are generally complicated an imperfect, and it becomes easy to accidentally trust the system to do the right thing on an edge case it doesn't handle. Having the automation of as many cases as possible is good, but having a full system to do in-depth knowledge preservation and issue capture is even better. The two things complement each other well.

Going back to the OP's original example/analogy - planes these days are full of automated systems, higher reliability parts, better interfaces, and all sorts of other improvements and failsafes so some errors from the past just can't happen. That doesn't mean they still don't do checklists and other manual checks to prevent the new issues from happening, nor have they abandoned some of the old basic checks, even if they "can't happen".

tl;dr - better tools are good, but they don't fix everything
[I am not a tax lawyer]

In the US, no fucking way. As property, bitcoins are collateral against business loans and therefore subject to claims by creditors even after they have been used as 'payment' to employees [or anyone else].

http://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2014/03/is-ucc-articl...

The IRS can probably claw them back too should there be an unpaid tax liability.
C++ and Java did not fail. Their goal was adoption, and they made compromises to achieve it. Scala is no different.
The arbiter is going to be left with a negative review no matter whether they were fair or not. There's often some measure of uncertainty in arbitration - you can barely ever prove beyond all reasonable doubt that one side attempted to scam the other.

Basically, you're going to have to trust yourself to see which arbitrators are scammers, based on reviews, some amount of which are likely to be fake. This doesn't really help the whole situation of avoiding scammers, just moves it around slightly.
Thanks. I think mjw's comment, and yours, now correctly cover this :)
This is very similar to an idea I came up with in 2006, for decentralised financial trading, with counterparties trading directly with one another and trust provided by central counterparties who would novate the trade.

Details here: http://jackgavigan.com/?attachment_id=796
Yes. It's a reasonably faithful port of RE2, which elides features like backreferences.
I really think climate change needs to be presented to the public as an economic problem.

Doesn't matter. If you don't think it's going to happen it doesn't matter what kind of problem it is...
How do legitimate people get their first positive review?
> The story is being flagged by users as well as a relatively mild moderation penalty.

This is fine.

I don't necessarily agree with the 2nd paragraph as this is merely an update to an ongoing story that does have some importance given it's context within the current efforts to have the startup world and programming be a more equal place.

I know that comment points have been hidden, and largely I think that works really well, but is there any chance that the stories could have some indication made public when they become subject to a moderation penalty.

Simply, if you could let people know why things appear to change place wildly outside of the params of the position algorithm then people would know that this was a result of community intent rather than any kind of interference. A bit like Slashdot's comment level "-5 Offtopic", but for stories.
Anyone else?
Ask HN: What are your favorite videos relevant to entrepreneurs or startups? 
Here are a couple of mine:

- Vinod Khosla talks about the importance of team building, the startup life, and what it takes to be an entrepreneur. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5J7bd7nzmw

- Marc Andreesen talks about venture capitalist and the future of startups. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLNQZegq7KA

- Eric Ries gives a talk on his Lean Startup theory at Google. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEvKo90qBns

- Harley Finkelstein CPO of Spotify gives a talk on unique marketing tactics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBDOq5B4nTo
I know on Airbnb Facebook validation shows number of friends. That's still fakeable, but harder. You need a mobile number + email to verify the FB account, then to build fake friends.

Airbnb usually combines FB verification with mobile, ID and passport verification, + reviews.

The effort to fake all of those is high, relative to the potential reward.

I've never had a problem so far, but I'd be interested in statistics on whether faked accounts occur much.
You can view the source on CTAN [1]. The first few lines look like this:

% This manual is copyright (C) 1984 by the American Mathematical Society.
% All rights are reserved!
% The file is distributed only for people to see its examples of TeX input,
% not for use in the preparation of books like The TeXbook.
% Permission for any other use of this file must be obtained in writing
% from the copyright holder and also from the publisher (Addison-Wesley).
\loop\iftrue
\errmessage{This manual is copyrighted and should not be TeXed}\repeat
\pausing1 \input manmac
\ifproofmode\message{Proof mode is on!}\pausing1\fi

[1] http://www.ctan.org/pkg/texbook
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_rapid_tra...

#1 and #2 spots differences in ridership..? Is that a typo?
It's interesting to see what this approach does for reporting, as the whole economics of news reporting relies on bundling. You have a bureau, say, in Paris and in Iraq. When something interesting happens in Iraq, people buy the paper for that, and it subsidizes the Paris bureau. When something interesting happens in Europe, it subsidies the Iraq bureau. If you let readers unbundle the package, this would no longer work. Or would it?
Thanks for the clarification and link, I missed that post and comments.
> so I sometimes transliterate Go code to Java (the resulting code is always of similar length, perhaps with a slight advantage to Java, now with Java 8's streams and such).

How does performance compare?
I'm from Iceland and I've never seen those. I saw these drawings a few years ago, but as far as I know... they're not being built.