skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Question - how could we use The Mediocrity Principle in our technology works, in our hacks, designs and developments?

There seems to be some fundamental opposition to the principle in the world we live and operate in:

User centered design implies that the User is special.

Business and marketing say that the Customer is always right.

Solutions that seek to make things better, to improve the lot may go against the principle as the universe doesn't care either way.
I've had to deal with bone-headed obscure bugs in the Linux kernel... Strange feature regressions, kernel-bundled drivers that used to work but have mysteriously become broken over a year ago and were never fixed because nobody gives a damn about making older hardware work. Seems unfair to treat someone like shit for a crime Linus must have been guilty of himself at some point. Unless he somehow thinks that Linux is so perfectly tested that no kernel ever gets released with really annoying bug that crash production systems. As far as I can see, the GCC people are fairly responsive, they're going to fix that bug, and that's probably the best one can hope for.
The trends for "russia" and "military" worries me.
How I ended up conducting successful tech interviews with just 1 question
I can confirm personally that you can lose flagging privileges :)

My advice is not to flag off-topic posts and just stick to flagging spam or obscene content.
Another cultural change - http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=gay..homosexual
The downvote button (and presumably the ability to downvote) is removed for direct replies to comments you have authored. It is also removed for top level comments on articles you have submitted.
I wouldn't use “robust” here. Just look at the errors types and the examples (below the table).

Yes, there are some features that Clang doesn't implement at the moment or never will (GCC has some really bizarre extensions and is sometimes less strict), but there is also a great amount caused by bad code.

I can't come up with a better alternative, though.
try this one for presidents: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=president%20nixon.pres...

Seems like "jobs" has somewhat replaced "employment" and "unemployed": http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=jobs.unemployed.unempl...
Awesome webdesign? Nice :)
Some interesting symbolic stats:

[1] http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=computer.smartphone.mo...

[2] http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=security.freedom

[3] http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=men.women

[4] http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=homophobic.homosexual....

[5] http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=love.money
This is very cool. I just compiled the source and it seems to be exactly what I'm looking for. I get an "undefined is not a function" error, though, when I try to import a key or send a message. I'll hang in there and wait for fixes or maybe try to contribute myself. Seems like the best option available at the moment.
The Secret to That Potato-Salad Kickstarter Campaign's Success
Ugh ... besides the fact that your comment adds absolutely nothing to the discussion, it is also stating (incorrectly) a possibility as fact.

There was one (not many) portrait of Hooke at the Royal Academy of Science which at some point was destroyed while Issac Newton was President. It is unknown whether the destruction of the portrait was directed by Newton or if Newton just did not bother protecting it (Hooke had gotten into conflicts with other scientists as well).

Thus, your comment in its entirety is a waste of space. I will be flagging it as it is non-constructive to the discussion of the article.
homosexual, gay, same sex, lgbt: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=gay.homosexual.lgbt.sa...
I don't. Looks like might have been using a wimpypoint server that didn't survive the closing of aD/aDUni.
Seems to me there isn't anyone for whom it would be more worth reading.
Yes, that's a pretty simple summary of how asymmetric cryptography works.
Thanks nqureshi for making these notes. Unfortunately, I couldn't travel to this Startup School and am really missing it (missed live stream, too, because I'm with my kids). I'm most curious to know if attendees enjoyed the talks and the overall event. I'd like to start looking forward to the 2015 version if there should be one :)
Doctors are always at risk of exposure. If you deal with patients with virulent diseases all day long then that's equivalent to playing the lottery every day all your life.

All it takes is a single mistake, or one vector of transmission that was not yet known, or one patient sneezing at exactly the wrong moment or simply not having the tools and supplies to do the work safely.

Being a doctor in this field is a very high risk occupation, doing it in Africa is simply very brave.
You said "prevent you from communicating at all" I pointed out that websites clearly and obviously do not have this power to do what you are literally suggesting and asked what you actually meant. You ignored my response and my question. At this point I think you are being purposely obtuse. Either that or you did not comprehend my comment.

I have already answered the question you think I am evading.
The Secret to a Tattoo's Permanence: The Immune System
In vim, one would type 64↓.
Actually, you might expect him to be a lot more likely to catch Ebola. He's coming into deliberate vicinity of the virus on what one assumes is a weekly or even daily basis. Frequency effect is in play.

For similar reasons, you'd expect the world's foremost expert on avoiding shark attacks to be attacked by a shark more often than the general population. He's out there practicing his theories and doing his research every day. The rest of us aren't going in the water as often.

The best way to avoid being attacked by a shark in the ocean is not to go in the ocean. The best way to avoid contracting Ebola is to stay as far away from Ebola as possible. An expert might be better able to handle himself around Ebola, or around sharks, than the rest of us. But he's also more likely to be around Ebola (or sharks) in the first place.
I couldn't watch the stream myself, but those notes were great! I especially liked the summary parts. Thanks!
Girls using Uber. So True
good luck man! I am sure it will work out for you :)
So I guess for the author, without the Mac App Store, there's no hope for commercial success?

I thought the Mac App Store might take longer to gain full traction - the buy-and-download from the developer website model was pretty prevalent. I guess it happened faster than I expected.
Imagine A World with Multiple Internets
Are you also planning on adding dialysis cost comparisons?
Well that is awesome then - either I have to agree with him, or I am a nationalist. This is straight out of the What you can't say playbook.
It seems he actually ended up resorting to scientific fraud in order to defend his thinking on optics. (See chapter 3 of Plastic Fantastic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/9780230224... .)
It also ensure you that your usage of localstorage won't ever throw exceptions and break all your thread in the case of cookie-less anonymized sessions
RSA has this property, but the public and private keys are not chosen arbitrarily. The public key can easily be derived from the private key, but there is no obvious way to determine the private key from the public key.
On the other hand if it were easy to contract, he would have got it ages ago.
Data Architecture Reading List
>The poster is distinguishing between discrimination and the term racism.

You and the poster seem to misunderstand what racism is. Racism is a type of discrimination. The term discrimination covers a wide range of things, it doesn't only deal with race. You are free to disagree with the actual definition of racism, but you don't get to reinvent the english language. Whether or not something is racist has absolutely nothing to do with power.

Its as if you and the other poster read the definition of racism and decided that the words used to describe it weren't horrifying enough, and so you made up a definition that better represents how you feel about it.
Lol I certainly don't think I or the majority of other black people are too incompetent to think. What I am saying is that if a white person has stupid racist views, I don't care. Unless that racist person is in power, what difference does it make that they are an idiot? Of course black people can hold racist views, just as whites can but blacks aren't the majority in power, and so those stupid views have no real effect on society. Since whites have been the power holders in society, their racism is the only racism that actually matters.
Not sure what you're referring to? I can tell you, though, that HN has never been a purely vote-driven site, not in 2007 or any time since. It has always been a blend of user votes and moderator curation. What has changed is that (because users asked us to) we've been more transparent over the last few months about how the site works. It's a mistake to misinterpret this change in reporting as a change in HN itself.
Indeed - it's not very flexible! If anything the principle says that nothing is more important than anything else. Which is humbling and a good thought experiment, but I ask whether we can actually go about our lives using it.
Here's an encouraging one:

http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=beatles.bieber
Most of what happens in the world is just a consequence of natural, universal laws

Everything that happens in the world is the consequence of natural, universal laws. That's what makes them universal.

The mediocrity principle simply states that you aren't special.

The universal laws of nature have led to beings capable (among other things) of discovering them. That seems pretty special to me.
These Are The Happiest And Unhappiest Regions In The US
Cursing is the symptom of a small vocabulary and little self-restraint.
That depends on what you mean by "here". This thread? Yes.
Why not?

It worked for King, it worked for Ghandi. Do you really think there could have been something like the civil rights laws -- born primarily of white people -- if the primary black person had been X and not King?
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/securi...

The following app behaviors are incompatible with App Sandbox:

[...]

Use of accessibility APIs in assistive apps

With App Sandbox, you can and should enable your app for accessibility, as described in Accessibility Overview for OS X. However, you cannot sandbox an assistive app such as a screen reader, and you cannot sandbox an app that controls another app.
There's a project called CakeBrew (https://www.cakebrew.com/) that was featured on HN a while back. It adds a GUI to homebrew.
You essentially got it right. The Mediocrity Principle mean it's proper to put your users before yourself.

From a code standpoint, it means you strive for "it just works", even if it means a lot of redundant code that doesn't match common expectations of best practices or adds a lot of "useless" work for the devs.
I wonder if I'd be down-voted so harshly if I was Linus Torvalds.

From me, the answer is yes, and I hope that is true for others on HN as well. I'm sure it's not always appreciated, but I think it's important for influential people to receive honest feedback. Although in the rare cases when I downvote 'pg' on this board, I do wonder if some 'all-future-downvotes > /dev/null' switch might get flipped. For what it's worth, I downvoted your sarcastic grandparent, and upvoted this somewhat more constructive reply.
On the other hand, international commerce is largely mechanized in the age of container and bulk shipping and happens without much human contact.
Mrs. vs Ms. is even better with "Miss" as well:
http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=mrs.miss.ms
No surprises here: pretty much Meyers entire career has been confusing the word "metaphysics" with the word "science."
The voices that interrupt the stillness are the ones
that are the daemons.

Redefine success as "learning something interesting".

External success is a mistake.

- Paul Buchheit

His goal for Gmail was to get to 100 happy users. "What would it take for your to be a happy user."
How can your server blacklist requests to doubleclick.net?
Oh, I didn't mean at all that HN is anti-Christian. I just didn't think that church software (a very specific niche) was all that interesting to the HN crowd. I'm very pleased with all the support!
He should dig deeper...

http://arxiv.org/pdf/0704.0646v2

http://arxiv.org/pdf/0707.2593v1
Those situations have very little similarity.
> It's your responsibility as a vehicle owner to not let bad drivers use your vehicle.

I read the fine print in everything that I sign. I never noticed any such language in either the state driving regulations, or the restrictions imposed by my automobile insurer. I did notice obligations to operate one's vehicle in a safe and prudent manner at all times.
Fortunately, I don't have to spend part of my vacation wading into that cesspit to satisfy your faux-curiosity. Others have already done so. The canonical example, of course, is Sarah Sharp.

http://sarah.thesharps.us/2013/07/15/no-more-verbal-abuse/
https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/15/329

There are also plenty of examples here.

http://fortunes.cat-v.org/kernelnewbies/

Just look for "crap" or "s--t" or "idiot" or "Viro". Note especially that these are presented as humor, i.e. approvingly and not necessarily showing the worst examples that are just mean without even the saving grace of being slightly funny.

This is not an illusion, not a new or unremarked-upon phenomenon. You're the one making things up when you act as though some reasonable person might believe otherwise.
How later IPOs and other big trends are changing the structure of VC industry
Great idea. The next progression would be cross browser benchmarks, and perhaps something suitable for browser extensions (unless this already works for that use case).
For the record, I did not downvote. Curious if you had a bad experience in a church, or in general why the negative sentiment.
Looks really contrived and overengineered if you ask me.
Submission and discussion from 5 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7224225

My question then, as now: why not standardize an API like this? Mozilla obviously spends a great deal of time thinking about and advocating for the future of the web, so I imagine they've thought about it.
Many scientific theories have a history of the following sort:

1. Huh, those are some weird observations. What could explain it?
2. Maybe it's X? That could explain it.
3. So could Y?
4. Here's an experiment we could do to rule out Y!
5. Hmm, actually the result of that experiment was consistent with Y, but constrains some of its free parameters. And Y could still be false.

And so on.

Science doesn't require that you have something in a lab, just that you make hypotheses which are testable by some sort of observation. Otherwise we'd have to throw out nearly all of cosmology.

There are competing hypotheses still with respect to dark matter (e.g. that the force of gravity works differently than we thought over long distances), precisely because we haven't yet figured out how to do the experiments to rule out all but one hypothesis. But that's why it's called a hypothesis. We haven't yet figured out the answer! That's the beauty of science.
Don't be quick to follow this part of the advice: Don’t let immigration issues ever be a major factor in your long term career decisions.

Maybe it wasn't an irreversible decision for the blog author personally. But it can be an irreversible decision. I've seen it.

And a question: is the incredible laywer who gave you this advice an immigrant?
Do you think those people exist in some sort of vacuum where they don't have access to (or will become aware of) the kernel mailing list thread?
And yet we have hordes of white collar workers who never interact with customers face-to-face, but are still expected to come into the office in business or business casual clothing.

After a certain period, you start to understand that "proper business attire" has nothing to do with customer interactions and everything to do with providing yet another avenue for bosses to exert control over their workers.
Sorry I didn't mention it, I followed the wiki install which sets up the production environment. Just noticed after seeing your post that there are pretty simple instructions for the development setup, if I just kept looking past the wiki link.

I ran it in development mode first with the only hitch being I needed to re-run the mysql user/table creation with _dev, but once I did that the development started up flawlessly on localhost:3000. I then went back to the apache/production server and suddenly it looks a lot better, but I still have some missing images (FATALs in log for GETing assets still?).

I'm still confused about how to point my rails server to production instead of development, but I'm completely satisfied that it is working perfectly with rails in development mode. Here's a screenshot showing the images missing on my production/apache/passenger setup:

http://i.imgur.com/XVLz7lt.png
Here is text from Wikipedia:
"One view holds that racism is best understood as 'prejudice plus power' because without the support of political or economic power, prejudice would not be able to manifest as a pervasive cultural, institutional or social phenomenon."
So I'm not making things up. To address issues affecting people as a group and not as individuals, anti-racist people would see the benefit of acknowledging the relevance of power to the perpetuation of racism being institutionally enforced.
Hack school alumni, was it worth it? Why?
I'm considering going to a front-end hack school. I respect opinions here more than random reviews elsewhere. I just want to ask where did you go? What did you enjoy or not enjoy about it? Was it worth it and why or why not? Thanks!
Manic malware Mayhem spreads through GNU/Linux and FreeBSD web servers
What Book Should I Read Next – Deliberate Software
Erm, what country are you in? In the US, the media hysteria over what is very obviously an accident seems to be calling for WW-3. Has been since the olympics, really.
Could it be that your understanding of the issues is simplistic, and scientists are actually asking all the relevant questions and dark matter is still the best answer they can come up with?
Does anyone have data on how big fonts have to be, to be legible on a DK2? Ie, if you embed a terminal in a virtual world, and give it about 30 degrees of horizontal space, how many characters will that fit?
Not necessarily. Getting enough sleep is incredibly important.
Agreed. I don't even understand the point of a CHANGELOG file. It seems like that whole idea is left over from before source control.

Having a CHANGELOG file was one of the absolute worst parts of contributing to WebKit since everyone is required to edit it with every commit its the biggest source of conflicts. Of course automating its generation I guess is trying to fix that but I just don't get why you can't just do `git log` or equivalent when you need info. Why does a CHANGELOG file need to exist at all. I also don't get why anyone cares. I never looked at CHANGELOG ever. I'd use the various source control tools to find changes, who modified, etc.
It is patently absurd to give MLK's non-violent movement 100% of the credit for civil rights reform. The political situation during that time was unbelievably complex, and the changing attitudes of a turbulent nation cannot be so simply explained.
Race (as opposed to say, skin color) is a social construct that changes over time. It's an us-vs-them delineation.

This puts it better than I can, so I'll just provide the link: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/what-we-... (And I'm aware of the irony)
T3xtm0.de | A collection of text graphics and related works
GitHub and BitBucket's SSL Provider's Cert has expired
It was a great day and a great event, really inspiring!

Definitely worth going next year if it comes to Europe again.
"When one condemns a group for the actions of a few -- i'll never believe that to be correct."

Racism in America is not an act, it's a caste system. It's not something you do, it's a form of social structuring. Black people are systematically disadvantaged, and white people receive privileges due to their race.

So you're wrong that racism is just "the actions of a few". This implies that you are a neutral white person, and shouldn't be blamed for hate crimes or whatever, which are done by a minority of bad white racists whom you don't even like.

In fact, the caste system of racism is maintained by all of us, in the same way the rest of the status quo is maintained. Mostly just by people being comfortable enough with the status quo that they don't try very hard to change it, and end up reinforcing it without even realizing. The caste system puts in place all the preconditions for the police brutality, the hate crimes, the denial of employment, etc. None of those things could happen without the caste system supporting and incentivizing them.

So we're all responsible for the existence of racism - the whole society. But in particular, consider the group of people who systematically benefits from said caste system, and who despite having drastically more power, are doing pathetically little to eliminate the caste system.

Were I looking at the situation from afar, it would seem completely reasonable to say "hey, fuck those people".
It is very much twisting his words. There's no argument that he seems rather anti-management, but your claim is that an anti-management bias is an insidious proxy for minimizing fields favored by women . I'm familiar with this argument and it's not invalid per se (usually you see it targeting things like literature majors in college or whatever), but claiming that he's using management as a proxy for "soft skills more associated with women" is ludicrous. He's saying mayer's position is a waste of a good brain because she's a manager, not because she's a woman.
You don't need a cloud. You can deploy it on whatever hardware you have as long as you have an SSH connection:

http://www.octohost.io/knife-solo.html
Perhaps it feels that way because your farmland is not being poisoned by cocacola giving you industrial waste and calling it fertiliser; or because your children are not being killed by Nestlé miss-selling formula; or because your family is not being tortured and murdered by Shell Oil and the like. Perhaps you don't know anyone who died at Bhopal?

This is a tiny fraction of the fucking scary things that big companies do today.

CocaCola- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/3096893.stm

Nestlé- http://www.babymilkaction.org/nestlefree

Shell torturing and murdering campaigners- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8090493.stm

Bhopal- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
You've asked a complex question. The rules in the US have changed. Quoting http://www.ccfa.org/resources/diagnosing-and-managing-ibd.ht... (and as of 1/1/2014):

> that health plans are now required under federal law to cover all patients, including those with serious medical conditions. However, levels of coverage vary and you may well want to make changes going forward with a chronic disease diagnosis like IBD. To find out how the new law will affect you, the US Department of Health provides information at www.healthcare.gov.

You can also call +1-800-318-2596.

As you found out, the actual price will depends on where you live, your income, your employer, and more.

Based on the answers at http://www.eb5investors.com/qa/how-restrictive-is-medical-sc... , the US does require a health screening, but it's mostly to check for communicable diseases, and not chronic diseases. (In that case, someone's heart problem shouldn't be a reason to reject the application.)
Negativity in Talks
NASA e-Book Features
I was speaking specifically of commercial success and the App Store, not notoriety or use in the wild.

I realize money isn't the sole measure of success for software.
“Hemingway” on Hemingway App