skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Which is the point, it's never been explicit IMO that shadowbanning and URL black lists are part of the site. Finding out that's the case is unnerving, what other manipulations are going on under the hood that normal users aren't aware of. That's why I say IMO, to be forthright, one should make these things publicly known - there should be a page giving the list of moderators, what powers they have, what URLs are banned, what procedures (like shadowbanning) are used, ...

The FAQ says there are editors, and indeed it tells us now that there are 30 of them. It says they can edit, ban users; but it doesn't say that they block entire sites or anything of that sort. It doesn't mention hellbanning/shadowbanning and such.

The little inklings of the secret undercurrents strongly suggest that there would be, for example, manipulation of story rankings and such. I'm not saying that happens but with such an opaque system it seems most likely. The feeling starts rising then that one is in a "Disney for adults" where you're being manipulated to the extreme but you're not really conscious of it.
There are a lot of good use cases for throwaways (suppose a former cult member wanted to share their experiences, for example). And the fact that an account is brand new is also a data point. You'll notice that Reddit/HN have produced a lot of insightful/informative comments from throwaways.
Thats not much information. Depends on who took the survey, whats the goal etc..
Indeed... now more than ever it seems that computer technology is under assault by different fractions furthering their own political ideals... My bet is it was ultimately caused by money - as there is more and more money to be made in/with tech, more and more people who cannot compete with ideas start competing with politics coughmanagerscough :) Why can't we just work together, and view other people through the lens of how exceptional their work is?! Ironically, GitHub's Meritocracy Rug was one of the first victims.
Your comment reeks of being the sort of claim that you will pretend you never made if nothing changes, but you will hold up as evidence of your incredible knowledge of it isn't.

There's literally nothing of value in your comment (unsurprising, as nearly all of your comments are just you restarting your tired and dullheaded Libertarian beliefs).

You're upvoted solely because HN is a shithole that was long ago ruined by nontrepreneurs like you.
Does this report say that the investigator talked to Julie, or atleast tried to talk to Julie?

That was one of Julie's original complaints about the original post.

If I'm investigating a complaint by someone, it seems reasonable that the person making the complaint would be the main person to talk to. Otherwise its impossible to say you did a thorough investigation.
Definitely firing was the right thing to do here. I mean, it's unacceptable, a CEO acting like an asshole, that's totally unheard of. There's no room for reproval or a 'three strikes' policy here, companies should immediately fire their founders for the pleasure of the audience. It shows character, morals and strength of leadership, which inevitably lead to robust success.
Actually the investigation found problems with the way they treated a range of other employees.

Also, you ignored the part about them not being able to find anything in the commit history to support her most concrete charge of sexism (having her code reverted by a male who wanted to have sex with her).
TBH if on one side I appreciated Github transparency I feel this story made the company very vulnerable to a point (of no return?) that I think will be hard to recover.

Also, I wish false allegations in this world will be treated in the very same way if were true: so instead of "We apology with Julie ..." I prefer "Julie said in public false allegations, we'll made a lawsuit against her"...

I mean Julie put tons of "bad" on top of a company without any proof (about sexism) and she exasperate (seeing the report) mostly everything.

Should this be allowed to do and be unpunished?
Do the radar systems on these vehicles have any effects on health?
yes, for those who looked for it...

(which, if I remember high school correctly, would probably be just about everyone....so you may have a point).

It does seem though that the novelty would wear off after a bit as the deluge of unsubstantiated (and likely repetitive) gossip got less interesting. A flood of information is almost as good as no information for getting people not to pay attention in my experience.
Please. "Plain old heatstroke" -- in northern California in springtime? The high temperature for that day was 63 degrees, according to:
http://www.timeanddate.com/weather/usa/berkeley/historic

It was not heatstroke.

"Going beyond your physical limit" -- what, exactly, does that mean? Thousands of times a day, people get on treadmills in cardiologists' offices, and are taken to their physical limit with a "maximal effort stress test." Even this doesn't precipitate life-threatening complications unless cardiovascular disease is present.

There are some genetic blood disorders that can cause sudden death during extremely heavy exertion (e.g. professional football drills) at altitude, but they are very rare in caucasians, and Berkeley's hills don't qualify as "altitude."
Yeah, the 'male scent' (original) title is better. When I read 'Experimenter gender' I was expecting to read an article about some sort of gender-originated cognitive bias.
TDD doesn't preclude one from doing whiteboard design and thinking things through. It just asks that you write a test case before you write your code.

It's sort of like enabling the feedback of a REPL to any language. Why wouldn't you write a test case to test the O() access time of a function ahead of time? Or test the memory layout of a data structure?

Seems to me those are great examples of tests I would write to help me flesh out the results I want, before I go and implement it. They help one specify _exactly_ what they want.
This is a pretty valuable insight. Even without some kind of innovation to intelligence itself, simply taking the human cognitive process and mapping it onto a strata with several factors more bandwidth (an expectation that isn't unrealistic, given the current implementation is low-speed potential flows and chemical squirting) could significantly push science forward.

This one is an easy bet, since we're already doing this; modern researchers (even the professionals ;) ) use Google and more specialized search tools, which are little more than machines that can read, digest, and correlate symbols at speeds much, _much_ faster than a human (though in a far more narrowly-scoped domain than a human).
I built something similar for a client once.

Starting up the server without ensuring a connection to mongo seems dangerous, no? https://github.com/jazzychad/PushServer/blob/master/app.js#L...

Basically, you want to listen for the 'open' event and then start the express server... db.once('open', function() { start express here })

A very important future feature would be to handle apns feedback service too (I see that in your TODO). I hear that if you don't enable this, apple will throttle your messages.
I would argue the voting system at least partially alleviates malignant throwaways. Trolls, etc, typically get downvoted into oblivion.
amazing. I've always fantasized a "diverging diamond" for the I-5/Genessee exit in San Diego. There are space constraints (the freeway is in a canyon) that prevent more traditional designs, and the exit is a nightmare, causes atrocious traffic snarls.

I had no idea that someone had actually made one.
> There is no easy solution short of the government seizing the cable infrastructure, which would set such a dangerous precedent that it would probably destroy our economy.

Sure, I mean, there's no way that the government could simply recognize the monopoly and regulate it as such.
I think I'm missing your point. Why do you need a GC language for that?
JavaScript: Use === Instead of ==
Yes, but I would argue to a lesser degree.

Persistent usernames on Reddit create a culture of identity on the site. Throwaways with no user history that post inflammatory comments frequently tend to get called out and downvoted. That's a very different setting from something like YikYak.
It also means people will censor their true opinions or just neglect to post if it puts their internet point cache at risk.
The speed might be different but slander and gossip on a smartphone is still.... just slander and gossip.
I don't think that your parent poster (who might or might not be male, I haven't checked) is disagreeing with her; s/he's just considering what was written in the blog post. With regards to her claims, taking the blog post at face value, the only one which could be unambiguously dis/proved has turned out to be false.
How long do you think the experiment needs to run before the Hawthorne effect you allude to is no longer a confounding effect? 2 years? 10? Longer?

The relevant Wikipedia page suggests that two months is about the upper limit for excitement-based productivity gains, so 1 year should be enough.
Actually, we just started a paid plan with them. We had been considering the move to GitHub, but wanted to see how this scenario played out before doing so. The issues Julie-Ann faced are important to me personally and to my company, and we couldn't support an organization that allowed such behavior to remain unchecked.

I was impressed by GitHub's response in this case. A founder being forced out* of the company s/he founded, especially one as white hot as GitHub, is not a decision made lightly. It signaled to me that the issue had been taken seriously, albeit too late. But I am comfortable supporting them going forward.

*That Mr. Preston-Warner was forced out is my own between-the-lines reading of his resignation once he lost support of the board.
Researchers Track Isolated Amazonian Tribe With Google Earth
No, the reason you don't have an option to switch to another service provider is that running a wireline provider is really expensive. Building one is even more expensive: you literally have to run cables to every household in a city thanks to the FCC's equal access laws (i.e. you can't ignore the poor parts of town when providing service). Each household probably has a fully-loaded cost of around $1000 (this includes switches, routers, a few thousand miles of cable, teams of guys in trucks to run the cable across the poles, etc), so for a small city of 500k households (~1 million people), you're looking at a ballpark of $500 million.

Even if the regulation allowed you to start your own cable company, what investor in their right mind would put up the money to do so? Trying to VC pitch a startup ISP would be the worst pitch ever. "Why am I going to give you a billion dollars for a 10% margin business that you're not even guaranteed to be successful in?"
Yes, if HATEOAS were actually done, all you'd need to do is have libraries for handling the content types used in the API, and with a suitable generic client library everything else would come for free.

But virtually no one does that with their APIs, and virtually no one builds client libraries on the assumption that services will do that, so there's something of a chicken-and-egg problem.
> If someone else comes in and is able to radically undercut their costs at $600 million while simultaneously winning 50% of the market, both companies would still only make $500 million and lose money.

Emphasis added. This is not what "able to undercut" means to me. Furthermore, the situation described is great for consumers.

And yeah, it looks like Comcast has low-ish margins, for a monopoly:

http://ycharts.com/companies/CMCSA/profit_margin

But they also have nation-wide monopoly and revenue, so 10% of that is "a lot."
That should be true for Black, White and Latino immigrants as well. The assumption that Asians are immigrants while others are not is a prejudiced one.

It's also not wise to provoke animosity against immigrants generally. Most of these people are going to become "Americans" soon enough. They are here, contributing to the economy and culture, paying taxes etc.

We are a nation of immigrants .. cliched but true. Newcomers should be welcomed and celebrated.
I read this as an apology for not having the preventative processes or environment in place. Despite no legal wrong doing, they still failed miserably when faced with this situation. To their credit, they know this and are working to fix it.
Most all the sexism issues in the industry start in elementary school and persist until anyone, male or female, enters the work force. Teachers and parents (male or female) all participate in fostering and perpetuation the issues encountered in industry.

To claim its an "industry thing" is naïve. Open-source isn't an industry and almost every single open-source community begins and matures absent any industry involvement at all. By the time business opportunities arise in a community, the culture is already mature and well-formed.

NodeJS for example is a viable part of the tech industry now, but 4-5 years ago it was a bunch of hobbyists. There was no industry to speak of. I imagine that most of the members of that community back then were men, just as it is today. This suggests that the entire NodeJS like almost every other tech community has formed its identity well before every being an "industry".

Want to solve this issue? Find out how to make sure future new tech communities are more egalitarian and inclusive from day one. Trying to bolt that on afterwards may mitigate the harms, but it certainly isn't going to fix them. Path dependency has presents problems, but you can't just ignore the role of path dependency in getting us to where we are now.
I have to agree somewhat with this statement. Forget about the whole story for a second, then look again at Horvath's Twitter, and compare it to the stories written on this topic. That's what happened to me.

I was super sympathetic, too, and excited that there was such a good example of a woman fighting for her rights, until I saw her complaining about some guy deleting her code because he wanted to f* her. That's not what GH's investigation has found, and it's much more about the Preston-Werner's wrongs now.
They will be just like highway intersections in Vietnam where 50kph traffic merges at right angles and percolates across lanes head on. You time it right, or you die.

edit: which is exactly like this http://vimeo.com/37751380
Asian representing more than 50 percent of the tech company workforce in certain counties does not indicate their salary level, titles, or how much they allocate towards housing, which would be a be better indication of the impact on gentrification. "Funny" how that works.
Nothing can't travel faster than the speed of light – including Electric current. So in a hypothetic 5 gigahertz CPU, there couldn't be a path through the wires/transistors longer than 5.99584916 – otherwise, the end result couldn't be correctly determined. That's why CPU's got smaller and smaller. But since the transistor shrinking slows down, and Adders/Multiplyer/Register/Decoding Logic etc. all takes some time and length, it's harder to make a CPU with a shorter longest path.
My problem with Yik Yak isn't that its anonymous, its that I cannot conceive of a way that it could be used to do anything but hurt people. I read an interview with one of the founders who described a story of how Yik Yak was used for good. A user needed a place to stay and another user offered a spot on his dorm room floor. The problem with this example is that it breaks the design of Yik Yak: in order for this "good" example to occur the users had to give up their anonymity, effectively ruining the point of the app.

Last month I visited a new city and was curious to see what their Yik Yak was like. It was essentially a stream of abusive posts like those featured in the article. While refreshing the app I saw a glimmer of hope. Someone wrote "X is a really nice guy." The post was down voted to invisibility in literally less than two minutes.

I have my beliefs about the importance of freedom of speech and safe, anonymous places for whistleblowers etc. But this is something else. It makes my stomach churn.
I'm readily admit that I am biased on this issue, I've seen first hand how much pain this app causes people.

I'm told that at my old high school there is at least one student on suicide watch who would not be without Yik Yak. Putting aside arguments about freedom, if taking down an app could save a kid's life then shouldn't we do it? If Formspring didn't exist then it is very possible that the four minors who committed suicide in connection to the site[1] might still be alive today.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formspring#Controversies

EDIT: Keep in mind there is a difference between free speech and hate speech (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech). Ditto for libel (ex the article's quoted posts accusing the school principal of molesting children).
Afaik, the cable companies got virtual monopolies to certain regions/cities/neighborhoods with the claim that they were like utilities. Laying cables and maintaining them was similar to what power companies do.

And now, we are finding out the rates of the cable companies are going up and up because we are basically financing their expansion into other businesses.

It's like my local power company raising rates so that they can go into business of running data centers.
Skype has only one purpose for Microsoft: to sell Lync.
But there's a difference between a minimalist design and a design that looks minimalist. A minimalist design wouldn't need a physics engine because the things that need the physics engine are glitz effects. iOS 7 merely looks minimalist.
Bullshit. The dose always makes the poison.
Up until know, when evaluating GitHub's reaction, we assumed the other co-founders wouldn't have known about this.

If they had a similar thing happen a while ago where someone was let go, in a company that prides itself for employee retention no less, that changes our evaluation.

It just means they condoned Tom's behaviour knowing first hand that it was problematic and had been for a long time; essentially lending credence to Julie-Ann's statement that the culture was toxic.

Based on the response I'd say that there's a good chance the toxicity might have largely stemmed from the management team not wanting to oust a co-founder, so there's a good chance it's ""fixed"" now, but that still doesn't excuse their lack of inaction until now.
Most people go to the bathroom at least once a day.

It's obligatory.

Checking something someone told you about on the smartphone not so much. (Unless you are in high school... then the reverse:)
To add more: https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/459358875213238272
"[...]a year-long trial that would divide some municipal workers into a test and control group"

We should need more scientific approaches like this to decision making in politics.
I think the Online Disinhibition Effect [1] and Greater Internet F*wad Theory should have some kind of multiplier based on age.

Online anonymity–while necessary IMO–has a dark side. You can say "don't blame the medium" all you want, but I don't think it's that simple. When the medium increases the volume/frequency of bad behavior, there will be more bad consequences. Some poor kid will commit suicide because of an app like this. Being a father of 4, that makes me grieve.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_disinhibition_effect
This is actually less of an issue as you think it is. You can use asynchronous communication. But leaking 5GHz outside your cpu is a BAD idea.
This kind of response by lab animals to stressors in their environment reminds me of the "Rat Park"[1] experiment, in which rats who were stressed out from being kept isolated in small cages (rats are social animals) had a tendency to become addicted to morphine, but those who lived in a pleasant environment did not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_park
Man assumes hacker news commenter he disagrees with is male. I sincerely hope you see the irony in that.

Also you mischaracterized what I said. I asked if she was delusional for claiming the github blog post (which we can all read right in front of us) substantiates her claims. Not the initial claims of sexism themselves.
State of RDMA: There can only be one
With the karma system, there is no difference between "trolls" and "people whose opinions you disagree with".
Strawman. Rapes leave evidence [0]. Spoken words don't.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_kit
"And we all know how that's gone in America with the simple roundabout."

Roundabouts are not unpopular, and exist in cities like DC with no one complaining. The reason why roundabouts are unpopular is because city meddlers often put them in places where their purpose is not to mitigate accidents but to attempt to limit speeding through side streets, with negligible (if not negative) effect on traffic safety.
This is almost always the case to help avoid type coercion where one does not want it.
Yes. This is about picking your customer. If your customer is the advertising network then their desires are very different compared to, say, somebody who wants a network analysis tool.

It's a good idea to pick customers whose interests align with yours.
Stealing bikes is a crime of convenience though, so criminals will do whatever is easiest: pick the lock, cut the lock or destroy whatever the bike is locked to.

Ten years ago, Kryptonite made a bike lock that could be picked with a Bic pen. They've changed their design, but a lot of locks are still on the street that can be easily picked, and criminals know exactly which locks can and can't be picked. The benefit of picking a lock is that the act of picking a lock and using a key to open a lock can look very similar to people walking by.
"Everyone who has had problems with the teaching of mainstream economics as a means to lessen inequality now have more evidence."

So when I read most of the articles regarding this book, all I can picture is a slew of angry mob-like people shouting: Those pesky economists must be wrong! This guy is saying stuff we all like to hear, therefore he is correct! Indeed, the public is fickle, and will naturally gravitate to what feels good and re-affirms what they feel is true. There has been a growing mistrust of intellectuals of late, and it's because people are dissatisfied. Intellectuals have been losing the media war with the government.
If you're only "reasonably certain" you've been raped, then yes, you should stay silent until you can figure it out for certain.
You should get an appointment for the Genius Bar so you don't wait, at least in Turkey. I'm assuming all Apple Store's are the same?
The fact that you think people are making excuses to use proprietary video conferencing platforms (or other communication platforms) is why things like TextSecure and Jitsi will likely never take off. You're really just making excuses for the TextSecure and Jitsi teams.

For the most part, no one cares whether they're using something that is open source or proprietary. Most people don't event care much about abstract concepts like "security" or "encryption" when it comes at the cost of their real goal -- communicating with family and friends. Once some secure platform is as easy to use[0] and as prevalent[1] as Skype or Google Hangouts, maybe people will start using them.

[0] A sibling post suggests setting up Jitsi with IPv6 and starting the program with the -6 parameter to fix some connection issues. I would hope it's clear why needing to use certain command line parameters and understanding "the implications of having a public address" to use a chat program makes it a non-starter for a vast amount of people.

[1] As it turns out, advertising and marketing matter! You can't have a popular chat platform if no one knows you exist!
In this case a flood is likely to soon be taken less seriously in my opinion. If anyone even still thinks it's cool or checkworthy in 6 months.