skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lazy? No way. They are right. Comments on news stories never added anything, and publishers only provided comment sections because they thought they "should."

It provided a veneer of user engagement, but how often did reporters or editors participate in comments? How often did reporters change their reporting based on comments? How often did they credit comments in their reporting?

Newspaper comments have been a ghetto for years.

BTW, the same criticisms apply to the comments of most newspaper Facebook pages. Facebook for most publishers is simply a distribution channel--post your stories to your page, hope EdgeRank pushes them into enough user news feeds, and then wait for the traffic to land back on your site. The comments don't matter at all.

The real conversation happens on Facebook when users share the news content--either by re-sharing what Reuters posts, or by sharing it themselves from the website. Then they talk about it with their friends. That's what Reuters is referring to when they say that the best discussion is now in social media. And they are right.
Ah yes, I understand it now. Took me some time to get myself thinking on that abstraction level again :) Thanks!
Please don't trot out that rubbish.

Not wanting to run a relay is up there with things like not running an open Wifi access point, or not leaving your door unlocked. Willingly offering your personal internet address to complete strangers with no interest in your well-being is insane. It can only end badly.

Like the OP of this story, if you do not understand the risks of TOR, you should definitely not be using it.
If your job is to catch drug dealers on the Internet, I would expect you to be undercover on all these sites.

You could either hire lots and lots of cryptographers and hope for a theoretical breakthrough, or you could hire police officers and let them work undercover.

It's the reasonable thing to do.
This particular post took roughly 20 hours, spread over four days. That's rather longer than typical for me -- usually, I get a post out in a single workday, but this ended up being longer than usual and it needed a tone edit or three. (The first draft felt bitter/cynical, which is a piece of my relationship to salarymanhood, but only a piece.)
The problem that Reuters faces is that its commenters are essentially trying to grab Reuters' carefully built and maintained megaphone and yell their own stuff. There's no way to reconcile the commenter's desires and Reuters desires to not share their megaphone (as such sharing degrades the utility of the megaphone precisely to the extent that the commenters are successful in shouting their own stuff).

There's no "laziness" here, because I'm yet to see even a hint that there is a solution to this problem, despite massive efforts. There's a fundamental conflict of interest. Consequently, commenting on "primary" news sites is uniformly atrocious.

Show me one news site with the reach of Reuters... no, that's hardly fair, show me one news site with a tenth the reach of Reuters that has anything resembling an edifying commentariat.
Hope so, thanks for backing :) Looking forward to what you do with it.
Graphene aerogel – the world’s lightest material
Twitter Skybridge Complaint: Can you someone help me understand this?
Don't leakers generally initiate contact with reporters? You raise a good point (eg whether people who would be committing a crime by revealing classified information might feel chilled), but I think you're overstating the severity of the effect. If I was working with classified material and someone approached me as a reporter soliciting classified information, it would be part of my job to suspect espionage and report the contact. Instances of legally privileged rather than classified information would be broadly similar, possession of privileged information usually involves some sort of fiduciary obligation towards the person who entrusted you with it.
What is the probability to have a hash collision of two functional pieces of code? For example one could possibly replace a hard-coded domain "http://example.com" with "http://exàmlpœ.com" (assuming it results in the same hash), then register exàmlpœ.com and do a man-in-the-middle attack with it.
If the paywall comes up google "Elon Musk’s Next Mission: Internet Satellites" and click that link.
As long as everyone has someone else to point to who is responsible, these things will continue to happen. It's the same pretty much everywhere in the world.
Yeah, agreed, and we still use it so we made a little C like language that compiles to tcl byte codes. Makes coding there far far more pleasant (for me at least).

http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/L/L.html
2015 Half Life 3 can be announced
DevDisasters – Out of Time
Yes. Rather than antitrust law, the better analogy would have been to the minimum wage.
Ignorant racists piss me off.
Doesn't excuse them? They're under obligation to provide you a voice on their Web site now? Your insight is so invaluable that sites are obligated to provide a commentary mechanism? Just look at the comments on this announcement. "State run media." You need someone full time to delete drivel like that, and you're saying they're obligated to do so and have no excuse not to?

I'm tired of this opinion that one deserves a chance to speak in a comments section. While I understand the irony of my saying this here: I have never once in my entire life found value from an Internet comment on some random site. Some discussion communities, a few on Reddit and barely this one, sure, but the comments on CNN? Fox News? Joe's blog? Even your beloved TechCrunch?

If you have something to say, develop an audience using your own resources. Personally, I'm tired of every site on the Internet having a comment form because they are always a cesspool of spam, idiocy, and a waste of pixels. I've come close several times to extending my browser to remove Disqus and other comment systems.

(Also I find it really odd that your claim to fame, as you say, is TechCrunch comments. Is that some kind of badge of honor for you?)
Same here. My father worked for IBM research and we would use APL to code up spirographs and Lissajous curves. I would type in a slightly different number and get a new sprirograph which was neat for 10-12 year old kid. I am doing the same with my kids now though with Python. Anyway just for a play/fun side-project I am writing an APL interpreter in Java. But what I would really like to see is a Pythonistas type app but for APL with the tablet virtual keyboards supporting the APL glyphs. I wish I had more time, I would tackle this myself. I would also like to see APL in an IPython Notebook-like environment (now project Jupyter, I believe). Jupyter is meant to support R and Julia, but hopefully APL can be plugged in perhaps with NGN APL. With virtual keyboards I really believe we could see renewed interest in APL.
> up there with things like not running an open Wifi access point

I always thought this is being a nice person.
Musk is spread to thin. Period. Any one of his ventures is a full time job. Hard to understand what type of personality needs to branch out on in different areas as he has. And how can you make good decision, no matter who you are, or what capabilities you have when you only have so many hours in a day?
Can you explain how this is astro-turfing?
> This isn't an individual case like Nixon but rather an industry-wide epidemic of sorts that would have pushed the very inter-dependent markets into chaos.

And in the Nixon case, it wasn't a case of leaders of private institutions, but the President of the United States at a time of deep national division even aside from the proximate issues with which he might have been charged, and it was perceived that charging would have thrown the whole nation into chaos (and not merely financial chaos, but actual fighting-in-the-streets chaos.)

There's always a reason why accountability for elites in powerful positions is a special case that can be asserted to be sui generis and requiring special exceptiosn to the normal rules of accountability. But the impact of accepting the temptation to do this is that it rapidly becomes clear that elites are not accountable in general, leading to more elite abuses and less long-term faith and confidence in the very systems that the exceptions are intended to protect (short-term) faith and confidence in.

To avoid the long-term erosion and destruction of this faith and confidence, you have to accept (publicly) that the system at issue has been broken when it has and hold people accountable, even though there are severe short-term consequences. Otherwise, the long-term consequences are more severe.

Or, as a much better writer than I put it -- "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" -- you cannot save the integrity of the system if you are overly obsessed with preserving the myth of the existing integrity of the system.
Slack CEO Explains Why He Thinks His 8-Month-Old App Is Now Worth $1.1B
Genetically Modified Potato Is Approved by U.S.D.A.
And don't forget company size.
GNU's child Debian provides access to non-free software. Any OS provides access to non-free software.
The reason it's internal is because system code takes priority over third party libraries given the same package name. If there were any changes to the library, you could never use the newest version because it would be dominated by the system version. This is what happened to the Apache HttpClient and why there is a fully repackaged version[1] for people who want to use a newer client than the one in the Android System.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/httpclientandroidlib/
Astonishing landscape and snow art illustrates the cold beauty of mathematics
I would put it one level below those. An exit/entrance node is like an open wifi. Just being a relay is not as bad but it is still sticking a middle finger up to some powerful groups.
Why would Amazon in Automobile domain? Is this something to do with their OS?
Should HN come up with a generic way to handle burn accounts? Is there a large graveyard of them?
Couldn't you at least narrow it down to the AS by correlating outages, if you're watching it for an extended period of time?

The rest should be possible with more standard police work, once you know where to look (there are probably not more nodes in an AS that you could check them all, disregard known relays etc.).
Lambda the Ultimate's discussion http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5079 is pretty interesting.
Yup. What pisses me off is that they're so expensive to compute :-)

Not in this data set of course, but if you do any kind of image processing ...
The solution in this century's financial crisis has been "handcuff none of the bastards", but it wasn't always so. I'm surprised you cite the savings and loan scandal as a case of criminals not going to jail because in that crisis there were over 1000 felony convictions of high level people (usually the CEO and CFO). Since that crisis was 1/70th the size of the recent crisis, by strict proportionality (all things being equal, etc.) there would have been 70,000 felony convictions of high level people in this crisis. All thing are not equal of course, but there weren't 70,000 or 7,000 or 700 or 7 convictions of high level people in this crisis. There were none! Things really have change dramatically for the worse.

William Black on Moyers and Company[1]: Sure. The savings and loan debacle was one-seventieth the size of the current crisis, both in terms of losses and the amount of fraud. In that crisis, the savings and loan regulators made over 30,000 criminal referrals, and this produced over 1,000 felony convictions in cases designated as “major” by the Department of Justice. But even that understates the degree of prioritization, because we, the regulators, worked very closely with the FBI and the Justice Department to create a list of the top 100 — the 100 worst fraud schemes. They involved roughly 300 savings and loans and 600 individuals, and virtually all of those people were prosecuted. We had a 90 percent conviction rate, which is the greatest success against elite white-collar crime (in terms of prosecution) in history.

[1] http://billmoyers.com/2013/09/17/hundreds-of-wall-street-exe...
>> Not entirely sure how this made front page, but it is a super handy lib.

Sad that nowadays a statement like that isn't even considered ironic :). A cross-platform library handling an ugly necessity of development has to fight for its life in a sea of "growth hacking 101" links and the like.
"No problem!"
You made an account just for that?
You are voluntarily choosing to fund murderers by merely circulating the US currency, and obviously by paying taxes.

We all weigh these things out. Maybe the cocaine buyer is funding wars, but it's not his fault, just like it's not your fault that there's a war in the Middle East.
I would speculate that the reason why is so that Google doesn't have to maintain several versions of the library within the Android platform.

If Google is the only consumer, then Google only has to test internally that they didn't break something with an update. If tons of apps are consumers then they need to either test with many more apps, or worse just simulate buggy old behaviour for apps to keep things consistent (see Windows/Win32/etc).

If apps house their own copy of the library, then that version is static for that app's context, which likely means it won't break randomly in the future. That's good for the app developer (better back and forward compatibility), better for Google (less testing, less maintaining compatibility), and less headaches for consumers (as apps won't break as often when updating Android).

This reminds me of one of my favourite quotes: "If something in software doesn't make sense, then assume it is there for compatibility reasons." Which I think is a Raymond Chen quote that I've mangled.
The graveyard is the right spot for them. Flag it and downvote it.
Hey, Max. Good to see you here. I disagree. I think removing comments is a perfectly reasonable and even forward-thinking thing to do. I actually wrote a thing on TC a while back that, amazingly, you didn't comment on:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/13/shouts-and-murmurations/

The truth as I see it is that comments are only there because they're expected, while communities and discussion are no longer limited to the comment section, and in fact better communities and discussion are had nearly everywhere else. I don't think "everyone is talking about it on social media anyways" is a terrible excuse, in fact I don't think it's an excuse at all. It's a powerful and real reason not to provide an inferior parallel service.
Title color agreement aside, I feel the login form contrasts too much with the orange (and the blue forgotten password link is out of nowhere, as well). I can see why the designer would try to stick that general hue, but the reason that the use of the color currently works as it stands is because the top bar is very thin and provides the obvious functionality that it needs to. It isn't their fault though necessarily as orange is a tough color to work with.

Beyond that, the larger text for titles is nice if only as it makes scanning through them easier. Simply darkening them to a black or near-black would make for a large improvement alone.
You don't really see vague umbrella parties without clear agendas as much in systems which have more effective electoral systems than the US's FPTP system. In an FPTP system, such parties are natural, since once you have established a position as a major party, you can win by the other side being disliked more than you, even if you aren't people's first choice (because the incentives in the electoral system are to vote for the least offensive of the major parties.)
I see they added carrier lookup by phone number since I last looked at it.
This should be especially exciting to tech feminists who are striving for gender equality and are surely outraged about the crime sentencing gap which jails men for 63% longer than women who commit the same crimes.
Pretty critical review - although I already discount "how to" books written by widely successful people as often their new-found business wisdom cannot be tied directly to their success.
Fantastic in depth guide.

The salaries have kept me from returning to Japan for years now.

One question - I was informed that only a Japanese citizen (national) can create a traditional company... Is that not true (OP kind of touches it but kind of doesn't answer my question as far as I read)
"If we're just going to let corporate malfeasance go unpunished, why even have the laws on the books at all?"

Because the point of laws is not to punish the elite. They may be written to appear fair to the common reader, but they are intended and designed to not apply to the elite.
This was utterly fascinating. Is there a Japanese version of this? I would love to rub it in some people's faces.
Having recently learned Elixir, I really wonder why the C# people decided to add async/await rather than coroutines (like Erlang processes or Goroutines).

It feels to me like async/await is the malloc of concurrent programming, and coroutines are the garbage collection of concurrent programming. You hand in a little performance in exchange for a lot less complexity. Go has shown you can also do this without only-immutable data.

Am I missing something?
I like the modern look, but I actually think the UX suffers.

In your design, the focus is on the up vote arrow. I use HN for content discovery. So I think content is taking a second seat against up-voting in your design.
> Comments on news stories never added anything, and publishers only provided comment sections because they thought they "should."

Many news sites do include comment sections on purpose, and from what I heard sometimes even seed them with controversial statements, because they're an excellent way to drive pageviews, and through them, ad money.
Facebook bug reported a year ago stays unfixed till now
A good leader delegates to trusted associates. There's plenty of time in the day once you have put the right people in place to do the heavy lifting. If he's spread too thin, which I highly doubt he is, he's micromanaging.
What integration test frameworks do you use to test your whole stack?
Can someone explain why this is? Is "crack cocaine" 500x stronger than powdered cocaine?
This is crazy and makes me sad and angry.

Sad because of the unfairness bestowed on this parent and his kids and sad and angry with myself because I never realized how deeply racism is ingrained in our society.
I disagree. Delaying things is all fine and good to do maybe once, but after the technique has been seen subsequent offenders will spend the time between the crime and being charged with a shredder. Don't forget that these crimes are still hurting people on the other side of the world. An immediate legal sledgehammer sends a clear message that bs won't be tolerated. Short term pain for long term gain.
Edit: just to emphasize the point, people I went to school with are having trouble borrowing money right now as part of the fallout from this saga. That's far away in New Zealand. At least there is hope for change and ways of trying to get it if you live in the US. What's someone in another country to do?
A bit off-topic, but why not make it a referral link? I clicked it (when it was still broken, unfortunately), and imagine others will, too. You have a popular blog with not-insignificant hn traffic, I believe -- I don't think many here would begrudge you that.
Thanks for the very sweet blog post, Kamens!

We would love to answer any questions about KA Lite or Learning Equality, and where we're headed. I'll be on a plane for the next few hours, but others on the team can chime in and I can respond a bit later as well.

Also, note that we're hiring! We're building a scrappy team of passionate, dedicated devs down in San Diego: https://learningequality.org/about/jobs/
Much of modern satellite comm technology came from amateur radio experiments. Have you heard of OSCAR:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSCAR

"Throughout the years OSCAR satellites have helped make breakthroughs in the science of satellite communications.... Most of the components for OSCAR 10 were "off the shelf" and tested by group members. Jan King led the project. Solar cells were bought in batches of 10 or 20 from Radio Shack..."

Also, OSCAR 1 was just four years after Sputnik (the first artificial earth satellite). Many Ham radio enthusiasts, from all over the world, are hard-core engineers.
I would like a book, Introduction to American Society. While there are thousands of books addressing some slice or theme, I don't know of a single-volume overview.
While you're talking about Erlang specifically, the concepts you bring up can be applied to programming in general.

Why does Erlang (or any other language) have modules?

The biggest reason for me (and I think the one with the most merit) is for clarity and usability.

Modules exist as ways of grouping units of code by the responsibilities of that code. If you removed this hierarchy, wouldn't things become a lot more difficult to navigate and understand as a developer?
I read/skimmed the article (not the linked article, the actual PDF), trying to deduce the novel contributions that were not already reformulations.
He could just be really good at delegating - which if course requires really good people. I too will often think "why is Elon talking about THAT" as it is seemingly out of his expertise but after witnessing many examples, it seems Elon ponders many more subjects than are reflected in his existing businesses.
A creepy website is streaming from 73,000 cameras; some in the bedroom
Most of you, yes. And I'm not talking only about software. I heard some horror stories about lawyers as well.

Plus you're nuts with your education loans, no matter what those colleges offer!
At the time everybody believed that if Rafael was not sent to Barcelona to a tennis Boarding school without seeing their family and giving it all to tennis, he couldn't make it.

That's hustle. For those of us who are not gifted, we "make it" through hard work and sweat. Whether it's worth it or not is another question, but for most of us giving it your all is necessary to climb high.
Perl 6 might have 'Perl' in the name, but it's essentially a new language. Objecting to having both P5 and P6 on the same computer is like objecting to having both C and C++ compilers on the same computer.
Apropos of this discussion, the reason I didn't comment on that article was because TechCrunch had switched to LiveFyre, which was barely functional.

I mention that because TechCrunch switched to LiveFyre, ironically, to help promote quality discussion. In fact, it made discussion on TechCrunch worse, as it encouraged anonymous troll comments instead of those under a Facebook identity: http://minimaxir.com/2013/01/its-a-metaphor-maybe/

TechCrunch eventually switched back to Facebook comments. Again, there isn't a perfect solution to comment quality, but there are options.
Why are you assuming capitalism and free markets are mutually inclusive? Not to get into a discussion of semantics, but US Capitalism is very dependent on the free flow of capital via investments and loans. The government sets all of that up and corporations essentially just handle the operations for it. There's definitely some free market aspects, for example there are usually a couple corporations competing to obtain as much of the market share for that responsibility, but there never has been, at least in the last 100 or so years anything like full on laissez faire free market economics in the US. The companies are not a whole lot more than government utilities with a little bit of free market competition and flexibility mixed in on top.
My biggest gripe is that you can't collapse threads a la Reddit.
False, though depending on your status of residence that could potentially create trouble for you with regards to immigration. Speak to your friendly neighborhood attorney if you want confirmation.
Google Brings Its Dart Programming Language to App Engine