skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This issue hits a home run with me: "Ideological Moderators".

I was a very active Quora user on 2010-2011, I'd visit the site over 10 times a day, I would write any answers on Word, make sure they were thorough, well written, etc, before I replied to question. I made an effort, both offline and online. What I really enjoyed was the initial community, the well thought questions and answers. During this 18-24 month period I also got thousands of upvotes, lots of thank you messages for my answers, etc.

One day an army of moderators came along. These moderators weren't Quora staff, but volunteers. I get it, it takes considerable man power to go through many of those questions and answers. I can work with that.

It was when I asking a question on movies & documentaries that I had my first encounter with them. I can't recall the exact question I asked, but it something along the lines "what are the most interesting documentaries released in 2011?". One moderator, without contacting me, changed the question to something more specific, he added a sub-genre to the question. I got notified of the change, went back, and changed it to the original question. After a couple of hours I get a message from the moderator telling me that that question isn't a "good/relevant" question (I'm paraphrasing). I ask why, and I get told that "You can't ask generic questions". Once more, I change the question to the original one and ignoring the random argument by the moderator. Then this moderator contacted a second moderator in order to gang-up on me, supporting each other random policies in order to make a statement.

It was then that I realised that these people didn't like to moderate Quora for the content quality, but for the feeling of 'power' and control moderation creates. I noticed that these guys liked being moderators because they enjoyed telling others what to do, with no regards for the content, quality, or users. That same day I deleted all of my questions, answers, and Quora account. I haven't used it again since then, and it feels great.
Sure it is. All advertising is manipulating user emotion, and A/B testing different advertising methods / button layouts on your site to improve conversions is one such use.

If this is something that upsets you I suggest being upset at every commercial on the radio / newspaper / tv / billboard that you're unfortunately exposed to every day.
I agree that A/B testing is not the same thing.

A real-world comparison of the two different types of experiments:

Grocer wants to see the effect of a product demo's effect on sales. They have a worker offer a product sample, then recommend a pairing of products vs offering a coupon for that product. A/B testing.

Grocer wants to see the effect of a product's demo on the customer's emotions. He has the demo worker gripe about their boss, or talking positively about the community, then asks the cashiers for followup feedback on the smalltalk at their counters.

One of these is OK. The other is seedy.
Most of the people commenting here haven't used those tools.

In a modern CAD system, like SolidWorks and Autodesk Inventor, the systems retain much more than geometry. There's lots of structure. "This is a round hole" (STL doesn't even have that.) "This part is a 6/32 screw, pan head, 3/4 inch length". "This edge of this part aligns with this other edge of this other part" "This part is made of mild steel". "This subassembly is made of these parts and is used in these larger assemblies". "The holes in this part are projected downward from the larger assembly so the holes will line up".

All the serious CAD systems today understand those kinds of things. An object is represented as a series of operations in constructive solid geometry, not a mesh. Relationships between parts are modeled. Many parts are parametric - some dimensions depend on other dimensions, and you can change one and have the others change appropriately. ("Appropriately" means this is more than scaling; making the thing longer doesn't turn round holes into ellipses.)

Capturing all that structure is complicated. Open Cascade doesn't do any of that stuff; it's just a geometry library.

Revision control for models is available. Autodesk has Autodesk Vault. Solidworks has Workgroup PDM. Revisions can be compared visually. It's a hard problem, and errors tend to have serious consequences, which is why most engineering shops have a rather rigid workflow.

Over in the animation world, there's Alienbrain, a very expensive revision control system for big animation and game projects. There, you have many different formats to coordinate - video, background art, motion capture data, textures, etc., with different people working on each.

These tools are expensive because the market isn't that big but the value they add is large.
I tried a Japanese wonder toilet
You can make a direct donation. http://www.openbsd.org/donations.html

I agree that the CDs are becoming an anachronism, but they still provide an easy way to contribute to the project. Buy the CD, throw it away if you don't need it.
If you don't have the $1k to pay a designer, do you have money to host the site?
The Unrepentant Bootlegger
The Greatest Books of All Time, as Voted by 125 Famous Authors
"What's a list of good books about programming language X?"

"I'm switching from this programming language to that programming language; what are the important gotchas?"
Exactly an hour, in fact: https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc#L11...
Exactly this

Don't sweat it. And webfaction (or other shared host) allows you to run something else if you need it, like a simple PHP (or something else) app
Weird. I know next to nothing about Quora. I was actually hoping to read a well-reasoned takedown of a company that I don't think generates all the much value. This just isn't that.

"Spring to the defense of the Github founder who left in disgrace"? Another really weird thing to have said.
Things That Sound, Move, or Smell Like a Nuclear Explosion
Show HN: Shkeleton – CLI shell scripting for lazy people
Why not have N channels for N listeners? These are very lightweight (no persistence/retry, etc. -- essentially just a way to avoid SELECT polling by consumers).
I would have a very hard time believing that an investor wasted 5 minutes writing several paragraphs about "PC" and "social justice" and stuff like that. Like I said, I think most of this writeup makes sense only if you spend a lot of time on Quora. Who does that?
That's why we call them Freedom Fries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_fries)
I thought it was an amusing way of referencing the fact that wikipedia editors are 90% male. But perhaps that's just me?
Of the substantive criticisms in this piece, most of them have been leveled even more vehemently at Stack Exchange, which from what I can tell is doing just peachy.
Wearable Drone Camera Flies Off Your Wrist to Capture the Moment
Most of the optimizing I do has to do with DOM manipulation and replacing slow generic library functions with native and/or custom-written ones. I've got a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick before I get to things like bitwise operators. Most optimizations I've seen are very language-specific and it can be hard to guess what is faster. Which is why profiling and a tool like http://jsperf.com/ are critical.

By the way, from what I've read bitwise operators aren't very efficient in JavaScript because of the overhead of conversion from generic duck-typing to binary.
I was talking about the destinations "visited" in West Europe by vikings at the time. That was what the quote marks indicated. (It is a bit simplified, Ireland still had partly a tribal society of course.) Sorry I was unclear.

If I should say anything else on the subject, it is that the frustration about all this, like most history, is all the things we will never know.

I read ~ 10 years ago a fascinating theory about berserkers using self suggestion and being influenced by Roman warrior cults (the Roman empire had camps quite close to Denmark a few centuries before the viking age.) It was so frustrating that we almost certainly never will know.
People know ads are trying to manipulate them, they don't know that Facebook is actively trying to make them feel happier or sadder. Just because two things are similar does not make them morally equivalent.

People have been calling out various bad practices in conversion: http://darkpatterns.org/
+1 for Squarespace - clean & easy to get up and running. Tutorials and 24/7 support.
I'll answer for him: yes.
If you are that busy, please don't create a Wordpress site with plugins and themes. They are hacked very often - the extensions, php and wordpress itself are vulnerable and have to be updated often to stay safe.

Make a simple static website, maybe even a site-builder like wix. Backup your content (the text and pictures) and don't rely too much on trendy graphics - they'll go out of fashion in 2 years anyway.
I'm not sure what type of ads are on facebook since I don't have an account, but you can block tons of ads with adblockplus and it's open source (check github and mercurial repo - hg.adblockplus.org). You can monthly donate to this project instead of facebook.
I've just spent all afternoon watching numberphile videos.
> Honestly? I think they're reading far too much into that.

I honestly hated them for their login policy. They deserved to fail purely for that stunt alone.
I'll be honest -- I don't find this sort of thing terribly interesting. I feel when reading this as if I'm being pressured to ooh and ahh, but to me the magic is just not there.

It also strikes me as backwards that people are referring to these incredibly deep algebraic connections as explanations. They're not explanations -- they're just connections. I don't need any of that stuff to prove these identities. I just need a pocket calculator. The algebraic connections might be useful for discovering these identities in the first place, but are not necessary for proving anything here. For any given arithmetic identity I'm sure you can find some remarkably obtuse algebraic connection which illustrates the same identity. These connections are interesting only insofar as the other stuff is interesting. The Monster group is interesting, but this identity itself is not particularly amazing to me.

Finally, is .999 really "extremely" close to an integer? In engineering, maybe. But in pure mathematics that seems "extremely" far from an integer.
Not using Wordpress: yes.

Avoiding Themeforest themes because of security concerns: no.
All this makes me very happy I nowadays work almost exclusively in Scala. No language is perfect, but Scala supports all the things Java 8 does (a few things are experimental until the next release), has straightforward FunctionN interfaces (as the article mentions) in addition to SAM synthesis (I mean, why not just do both?), and while a recent emphasis on compatibility means it's starting to accumulate its own cruft, it at least drops the first ~10 years of Java's backwards-compatibility awkwardness.
The designers I've talked to (and trust) generally see $1k as an amount they'd want to set up a very basic customized website. Much beyond that seems to come in more like a $5k-$10k range.

I'm sure I could outsource to the internet and get a better "deal", but that makes me very uncomfortable. I know that's not always rational, but basically I trust myself to put in whatever time it takes to make it meet my needs, so long as the tools are available.
O'Reilly Webcast: Unboxing Apache Spark 1.1
Not regularly, but I've found bugs twice whilst dreaming ... and it's amazing when it happens!

Dream consists of looking through code... then suddenly notice something in my dream-code that isn't quite right and fix it.
If I wake up I know it was a dream but am left wondering if it's a bug in real life...

Twice it has been. Brains are weird.
This is a great project, and I really like where it's going. I'm glad you're upfront about bootstrapping this project using third party services, but even more happy that you've architected this in a way where removing those third party dependancies will not be a problem. That's going to be killer for a gateway like this.
I'm a big fan of Ken Shirriff's blog. If you're interested in learning more about bitcoin I would also recommend reading his post titled "Bitcoins the hard way: Using the raw Bitcoin protocol".
Sounds like a whole lot of bikeshedding to me. Most of what you're suggesting doesn't apply, won't improve things, is a higher standard than we require of competing implementations or are being done already.

It's fantastic you care though! I highly suggest you write some additional tests where you feel that there are test gaps or write a comprehensive test plan. I bet they'll happily accept test code/plans!
So, on the one hand, I think that it should be obvious that all officers on duty should have cameras running all the time--there should be no reason to ever need manual on/off of cameras.

That said, there's a lot of trouble there. Consider the recording of normal daily banter, of normal procedures, or of just really heinous shit at an accident site. Maybe we don't actually want all of this available.

The big problem is: what happens when a cop comes out on a call and there is clear photographic evidence of a crime being committed (very likely, considering the sheer number of things that are technically illegal)? When there is clear video evidence of, say, possession of paraphernalia, assault, public intoxication, or whatever else, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to pick on citizens.

In turn, why would anyone want to interact with cops, ever? They're recording everything, and it's trivial to go after these minor issues.

I suspect that the deal going to be presented is "Okay, you want us on camera all the time? Fine. You get what you want--and we're going to handle 'evidence' collected in that way differently than normal." Recalling, of course, how expensive it is to defend yourself against the state in such matters, I expect this to be yet another massive push in favor of police power unless managed very, very carefully.

Also, consider that the desire to film the cops may go away if it is common knowledge that they're already filming--nevermind that, perhaps, the cameras or videos are mysteriously corrupted when it comes time to review them. It's really a great way of defusing suspicion without having to risk actually changing procedures.

And, to tinfoil further: how long until all these video feeds are being run, in real-time, through some sort of computer-vision system (much as license plates are today in some places)? Are we really wanting that?
I agree this article is bad on many levels. But I also think it catches one important point.
People who are pursuing a goal, that they themselves have committed to will be more productive
Checkout Handyland.in should be able to help out.
This may be a dumb idea, but how hard would it be to put a camera on the gun, and activate it via the trigger. It seems like even a few low res photos of what the gun was aiming at could go a long way in investigating office involved shootings.
> evangelism guide for people in open source projects

There are, tons of them. OpenBSD traditionally doesn't give a fuck, and backs up that attitude by shipping solid products.

Not exactly surprising given the history of the project (started by de raadt after being kicked out of NetBSD for being hard to work with).

If external reviews, github pull requests and documentation galore are important to the GP, they better stop using OpenSSH, which is developed using the same unfathomable development methods as libressl.
I don't feel like you make an adequate case for some of your counter-objections.

#1 is particularly troubling since you seem to argue it by misrepresenting his argument instead of addressing it directly. The alternative is to perform the experiment w/informed consent, not to keep the results of your unethical experiment secret. I think this is actually an issue that is important when considering whether an experiment is 'good' or 'acceptable'. Tuskegee is what I think of when people try to argue that informed consent is unimportant. Even though anyone can tell you that the stakes in this kind of experiment are incredibly small in comparison, there IS a measurable risk of harm when manipulating emotions, so ethics matter here.

#2 - you seem to make no effort to address this either. To me, it is particularly troubling if the business and academic sides of FB freely interacted here because each side has an incomplete understanding of the other side's motives and priorities and constraints. The business side is focused on revenue and actionable metrics and legal liability (that's their job), while the research side is naturally going to have different objectives and have a perspective that is more rooted in the practice of good, ethical science. There's real trouble if research ethics & principles end up subjugated to the interests of the business people (which they often do).

Seeing you utterly dismiss the first two points with 'Oh good, so the author isn't a complete idiot.' is not exactly a revelatory argumentative triumph. You can do better.
TLDR: "Yale lemming tries to make Vikings seem safe and nice."
There's a reason the Byzantine emperor used Varangian guards. It wasn't because they were safe and nice.
I much prefer Metro to Material, but following either would lead to better experience at least for me. That said, design "once" didn't really work with Windows and it's gonna be interesting watching Google try the same.
> Perl never managed to enter this league

For a while at least, Perl did find a home in Linguistics. While it was because of the excellent text parsing tools, it makes a strange kind of sense as well, since Perl was designed to be a bit more like a human language and I think Linguists appreciated that. But that's such a small field that the impact was negligible. Most of the modern Computational Linguistic work is done in Java and Python these days, but for a while, many people working in Linguistics came out of their undergrad with at least a passing familiarity with Perl.

For a briefer spell, I seem to remember Perl finding a home in bioinformatics for much of the same reasons. I have no idea what or if that field has moved on to.

For me personally, Perl was the ultimate hacker language when people needed to get shit done and that shit involved munging lots and lots of files in text. But I think these days the world has moved onto other things that Perl isn't any better suited for than some other language (which is then conversely better suited for a bunch of other stuff than Perl).
Apple Release iOS 8.0.2 Broken Touch ID, Cellular Reception
I would recommend checking out www.weebly.com. It is a drag and drop website builder which I think would meet all of your requirements. You could easily have your website up and running in 1-2 hours with a nice design, and the costs are very reasonable (~$4/mo with hosting included). Best of luck!
Wikipedia is a terrible example to use for a community.

Wikipedia is a great guide of things to avoid.

Take signing up for an account: the software has some control over what username you can create. Then there is some level of admin on top. So, as well as the software limits there is the username policy.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Username_policy

That page has nice advice about what to do with bad usernames - starting with do nothing.

There are two templates for bad usernames (templates are generally a bad idea) -- {{subst:uw-username}} or {{subst:uw-coi-username}}

Then there is a Request for Comments http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RFC/N

And then there's an admin noticeboard http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Usernames_for_admin...

But the noticeboard has two parts - a holding pen and the main board.

The RFC/U is the problematic part. Children rapidly post all possibly risky usernames as part of their gamified run to adminship.

You kind of expect editing topics like Palestine or Ukraine to be risky. You really don't expect simple uncontroversial punctuation gnoming to be horrible but it can be a really nasty toxic experience.
sanitizing inputs, protocols... the list can be very long.
>>The big problem is: what happens when a cop comes out on a call and there is clear photographic evidence of a crime being committed (very likely, considering the sheer number of things that are technically illegal)? When there is clear video evidence of, say, possession of paraphernalia, assault, public intoxication, or whatever else, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to pick on citizens.

I think this highlights a bigger issue with the justice system in general. Those minor things shouldn't be illegal to begin with. Or at least, not wreck your life with an insane fine or criminal record. Those issues should just be some kind of $50 - $100 fine, maybe an evening in a single person cell, and that's it. e.g., BART(www.bart.gov) does not want people eating/drinking on their trains or within paid-areas of the stations or you risk a $250 fine. I break that rule from time to time because... whatever. A bunch of people break that rule in fact. No law should be absolute in its application or punishment. They should be evaluated in case by case basis and context of the situation.

If it's July 4th, people are partying and one of drunk party-goers happens to run into a cop after stumbling too far from the beach... he/she doesn't deserve their life to be ruined.

Major sporting event, 2 people from opposite teams get into heated argument. Both people continued to escalate the situation until eventually a fight breaks out, I don't think their lives need to be ruined with assault charges.

Our legal definition of "paraphernalia" is messed up, so I won't get into that. I'll just say that a person who isn't a major drug-lord or drug-pusher on the corner shouldn't be wrecked by the legal system. Some young person just experimenting with a small amount of a controlled substance probably just needs a night in a cell and mandatory drug education class for a week or something.
Cassandra is, but you're forced into a very simplistic data (sharding) model. (And probably Riak is too, but haven't used it.)
prostitutes? I could actually believe what you said until that point. Making a day computer-free is something a crazy startup CEO would do (I could actually see myself doing it but once a month maybe, definitely not once a week).
10/10 would fund. Replace ZeroCater with Caviar and you have a deal.
iPhone 'Bendgate' May Be Overblown
OpenPDS: Protecting the Privacy of Metadata through SafeAnswers [pdf]
Question for someone who may know:

Obviously "mass extinction" does not mean "total extinction of all life", or else we wouldn't be here. Do we have any idea to what degree the bio-diversity of the planet was reduced in prior occurrences?
Military cameras, high frame rate cameras, etc. Military cameras in particular since they used uncompressed data (think tens of gbits/s to deal with) and tend to be in mobile environments. Lots of image stabilization and other such things going on.

These types of cameras also tend to be low volume and high cost like wcunning mentioned.
The overzealous modding is a feature not bug of SE sites.

I find some of the moderation really frustrating but it's worse when the people closing threads and answers are also the ones leaving zero-content comments.