skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Help me understand developers in US
Hi,

I am Vivek, CTO & Co-founder of HackerEarth. It's the largest developer community in India where developers solve coding challenges, network with other developers and get job offers from the best product companies. The employers also have access to the best SaaS application to assess coding skills of a programmer as part of HackerEarth Recruit. View details at http://www.hackerearth.com/ and http://www.hackerearth.com/companies/hackerearth/.

I am in Palo Alto for 2 weeks and I am curious what drives the developers here, what kind of jobs are they looking for, how big is the issue of talent crunch for employers? I would love to meet and discuss all these, share my insights from India and understand the ecosystem here.

I also hack on Python & Django and we run the largest Django deployment in India. Engineering posts are here: http://engineering.hackerearth.com/. If your technology stack is similar, we can sit down together and have interesting tech conversation.

All I am looking forward to is meeting you in your office if this interests you. Help me understand the Valley culture and developers here and I would be grateful.

From a fellow hacker and founder.

Vivek Prakash
vivek@hackerearth.com, @vivekprakash
Being evil with setTimeout
Great and all, but I really wish they'd work on making it available outside of the US, as well. I'd love to be able to order some up in Canada, and have three other friends looking to try it.
I would be interested in a combined content and comments link. I am often more interested in the HN commentary than the article itself, so I am always opening the comments as well. This would mirror a feature in the Reddit Enhancement Suite that I enjoy.
"As the startup, you have all the leverage before you sign a term sheet. Once you sign, you have almost no leverage at all."

A breakup fee would help mitigate this. Is that uncommon and difficult to negotiate for?
> Well, yes, actually, Go does help prevent errors in untested context-free code snippets... by being really really simple, and not trying to mash a ton of logic into a single line for no reason.

Sorry, I don't see the benefit of "preventing errors in code that's never actually executed" as a design goal.

> The amount of language trickery is at a minimum with Go, so writing something out in plaintext often just works. It's hard to screw up for loops and if statements for people who have been programming for any significant period of time.

I just demonstrated a counterexample in this thread.
FCC Chairman Wheeler's Statement about Obama's Statement
The actors are members of a larger system, the government, and act on its behalf and in most cases with its explicit approval and support. They're all parts of the same entity and by trying to distance the actor from the system would be to remove some level of responsibility that all parties share in.

Also, I don't think there's a world of difference between saying the CIA launched a drone strike and America launching a drone strike. I know the general public would like to believe they are not personally responsible for what our country does but as citizens, we collectively share in what we as a whole have decided to do or what those we've put in charge have decided to do.
http://www.newsweek.com/postal-service-photographs-every-pie...
Yeah I would honestly prefer Apiary since it's more flexible.
Is there any guidance on what stories are appropriate to flag? Is it just spam, or is it looser than that?

I sometimes flag blatant political stories, because I don't think they belong on HN, so I guess if I suddenly can't flag anymore then that was the wrong answer.
Yes, it is open ended. What are your examples of such differences?
> The thing that bothers me in Firefox is the Private Mode (Incognito in Chrome), as it doesn't disable add-ons. And I use private mode quite often.

I understand why this is important, but at the same time, I would be upset if NoScript or Adblock Plus didn't work in Private Mode.
If I understand the rules correctly, downvoting is used for not agreeing with a comment, and flags are used for inappropriate comments.

But is fading the comment really the correct behaviour. Isn't the position on the page deciding whether the community agrees with the comment?

My suggestion is: remove the fading; let downvoting only move the comments down, since the comment is appropriate yet the community doesn't agree with it; and let flagging remove inappropriate comments.
good call. checking that out
Hopefully this isn't followed by yet another "hey, six+ more weeks for your order placed in June" email like the last couple of announcements were.

It all sounds wonderful, but I'd like the chance to actually try it.
What constitutes flag abuse? I only do it for stories which I know will only produce flamewars.
In my opinion the only real annoyance with HN is when story titles are edited.

Maybe it will take an updated policy to fix the core issue, which is that while linkbait headlines are annoying, some original works are titled very badly and the poster may actually add useful information by customizing the title (often by highlighting what is most interesting/relevant about the linked article).
Dare to dream big!
Cryptanalysis of the Enigma
Your own article contradicts you.

>Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images.
I called "bar" with "<int&&>" to demonstrate that you can bind an rvalue-ref to an rvalue-ref, not to suggest that's how it should be called.
Why can't computers program themselves?
WHY FACEBOOK IS MAKING IT EASIER TO LOG ON WITH TOR
Extracting More Value from Investors
>There was no concern for his vegan diet

I can't be the only one that thinks it's ridiculous for a prison to accommodate voluntary diets like this.
The logo for madrassa is simply a glasses with a (commonly used) loop icon.
No, was it sensationalized? Dammit.

I never watch the videos on news sites. Too disruptive for my work environment.
> The threshold for flagging is low (only 30 karma), so everyone can help there.

So I guess I am not able to help.
Hungry bats compete for prey by jamming sonar
How do you see the scores of comments? I only see the points of my own comments.
A lot of times people like the idea of a thing more than the thing.

Meanwhile, a lot a people hate on C++, which they're only able to do because they learned its nuanced spec, which they only did because it had already reached critical mass in the wild, because it worked everywhere and was, despite the complaints, comprehensible, if hard to get perfect in the language-lawyer way.
The "Mac Pro vs. CustoMac Pro Socket 2011" comparison is completely bogus, because the CustoMac has space for hard drives and the Mac Pro requires the purchase of an external bay that runs $1,500 to $2,500. That moves the base up to $4,500 and $5,500 for people that need more than 3 hard drives (me). Now you're talking $1,550 vs $5,500 and that is the precise reason I didn't buy a Mac Pro and I did build a hackintosh.
Lots of us flag politics, or anything else that (subjectively) doesn't fit the guidelines. It's definitely not just for spam.
> A superpower also needs to develop political democracy, economic freedom, military power, legal system, quality of life and high tech creativity. In all these areas China lags far behind the United States.

Untrue and uncited. By that logic the USSR wasn't a "superpower" which is absurd.

This article is clearly aimed at an American audience and is little more than a list of why the author feels the US is better than China. The title is click bait and the author never establishes any reasonable degree of truth behind it.

Also this is the author's first article on the site and they previously worked for a company with close ties to the NSA, DoD, and other security agencies in the US. They seem like they were hired to produced papers for the DoD on the Soviets. Additionally they also work for a neoconservative think tank called Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) who seems to spend their time producing anti-China/Iran/Syria media for publication.
How about his Tuesday lunch with his mother? And his yoga lesson? Prison sucks.
well this will never happen to me so I'm just going to close this window and go back to work.
I wish there were something between "do nothing" and "remove this story." Like a downvote button. But this is an experiment.
The idea behind giving the crypto community a social network of their own is to give them a place where they don't have to worry about privacy as much as they do on the current large social networks. We don't track user behavior for anything more than making the site better for the users and give the ability to have a completely private profile if you only want to lurk.

SSL is on our long task list. We will have it implemented within the month.

While I understand that hardcores in the community value "cryptographic solutions to common problems", I also understand that 99% of the community couldn't explain to you what a hash is or what "cryptographic" even means leaving much room for projects such as this.

It's been just over a month, we're approaching 1000 users. I'm happy with the slow, steady progress we're making! :)
UK police departments are not funded by councils. They are funded in two ways: A precept issued to council tax collection authorities, and grants from the Home Office.

Note that the precept is set by the police, not by the council - the councils have no authority over police spending.
I'm wondering if there's any official policy on linking to articles that are behind pay/register walls. I've flagged two such submissions, and only one got flagkilled.
Agreed. I didn't even know I could flag comments until I read this blog post.
Comment scores are visible to the Algolia API after a period of time. Otherwise, the API returns a "null" for the points field. (example: https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/2921983)

This is apparently unintended, as the official API has no points field. (example: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/2921983.json?prin...)
Alibaba just sold $1.8B worth of goods in one hour of online shopping
Zopatista – Martijn Pieters
You are completely ignoring being laid off, that is a major reason to look at job duration.
The irony of your comment being faded should not be lost.
Interview with Alex Lawrence – Creating a Startup Community
"Vehicle sensors. Exceeding the speed limit, making an illegal turn, failure to maintain safe distance, littering or any other violation automatically relays infraction details to relevant government agency and ticket is automatically issued"

35,000 people die every year on our streets because of careless driving. There's no right to privacy in what you do in public that endangers the lives everyone around you.

Killing a cityfull of innocent people every year is not some kind of civil right.

People who can't drive safely and within the law don't have to drive at all. Those who do have a responsibility to comply with public safety measures, including traffic laws and enforcement tracking. It makes little difference if that means cops or electronic tracking, except that electronic tracking can do a better job keeping us safe.

--
"supervision of every trade (whether monetary or barter) for taxation"

I don't know why you're shilling for tax evasion, either. And I'm a libertarian: I don't like the taxes, but that's no excuse to cheat while they're still the law.
They certainly had issues with scaling. But once you're "in", your shipments come a lot faster.
Check out the whitepaper they published along with the article. It goes into more detail about the attacks. It appears they have a record of the traffic from the hotels' networks, probably from an IDS or something similar. Some relevant quotes from the whitepaper:

"The Darkhotel APT’s precise malware spread was observed in several hotels’ networks, where visitors connecting to the hotel’s Wi-Fi were prompted to install software updates to popular software packages." - page 5

"As a part of an ongoing investigation, our research led us to embedded iframes within hotel networks that redirected individuals’ web browsers to phony installers. The attackers were very careful with the placement of these iframes and executables on trusted resources - the hotels’ network login portals themselves." - page 6

"We observed traces of a couple of these incidents in late 2013 and early 2014 on a victim hotel’s network. The attackers set up the environment and hit their individual targets with precision. As soon as their target’s stay was over and the attack-frame was closed, the attackers deleted their iframe placement and backdoored executables from the hotel network." - page 6
>>I only do it for stories which I know will only produce flamewars.

You shouldn't. For example, stories about big players (e.g. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook) almost always produce flamewars, but the discussions can also be interesting and informative.

You should flag stuff only when it doesn't meet guidelines. For example, most news stories (e.g. "Man murders family, followed by car chase") are inappropriate for the site.
You can't. That feature was removed around 3 years ago, I think.
I'm sure you are not the only one, but why wouldn't the prison do that?
Yes! (I automagically got firefox dev from that PPA)
Url changed from http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/10/president-obama-calls-for-a..., which points to this.
Moving comments down completely can break the threading - e.g. you could have a highly upvoted parent comment with a single child comment that was heavily downvoted. You can't move the child any further down the tree.

You CAN indicative that the comment has been downvoted - the fading accomplishes that objective.
I think it's just lazy when a page like this that doesn't have media queries. Seriously.
I generally buy organic for fruits and vegetables where I will eat with the skin on due to surface exposure to pesticide sprays.

Being in the Bay Area, we have access to lots of organic strawberry farms relatively close by. I would suggest you try a day trip down to Pescadero when U-Pick is in season to do your own picking at Swanton Berry Farms. They had some of the best strawberries I have ever had and the price was better than at Whole Foods ($2.50/lb + freebies you eat while you pick). You can make a whole day out of it by checking out Harley's Goat Farm or head down to Santa Cruz.
There are those of us that swore and reswore an oath to defend those principals, some of us continue to uphold that oath personally, even though we have taken off the uniform, that doesn't mean we have taken off the oath. For me, It seemed obvious, I had to become a cypherpunk, or at least support and defend them. I agree with your assessment, and have concluded that I am not willing to let others give my and mine posterity's rights.
I took a quick look at the logs and it seems to always have been techcrunch.com until we changed it a minute ago.
your name is bad for the site and you should change it. nomen est omen.
Upvoted for "big mayo" reference, but this is a pretty obvious case of severe editorial slant.

> Now it’s true that FDA’s "standard of identity" (i.e., definition) for mayonnaise includes eggs; well specifically, "egg yolk-containing ingredients"

Okay. Case closed. It's not Mayo.
Then Vietnam / Korean War, the Iranian Civilian Plane the US blew up in 1988, Iran-Contra, and the platitude of covert ops that pissed off South America.

There is a platitude of terrible wars that the US has partaken in through the years. At least Bush's war started with 5000+ US Citizens dying. The war of our generation was the first American blood spilled on American Soil since Pearl Harbor.

Osama Bin Laden was the first successful attack on New York City by a foreign entity since the War of 1812. Keep that in mind.

The legitimacy of Bush's war is far more than any of the other massive mistakes of foreign policy the US has done over the recent decades.

Come on, the US actually has had its best run of Foreign Policy in decades, mostly because US Citizens these past few years are actually keenly aware of US mistakes abroad. In the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and even 90s, US Citizens routinely ignored American aggression worldwide.

As bad as Obama's / Bush's wars were, they didn't drop Agent Orange across a country and poison the population for decades to come.

>>> The surveillance tools being used today far exceed what was used even in the 60's.

Compare COINTELPRO, which allowed warrantless surveillance against American Citizens for decades before being disassembled in the 80s.

Contrast that with the NSA leaks, which are about metadata collection.
I still read HN. There's a good article or two per day. That said, the moderation needs work. (Or, more accurately, to be put out of work.)

I've been under "rankban" for at least a year, if not longer. This means that my posts, even if they get a lot of upvotes, fall to or near the bottom. I don't really care, and while I could use sock puppets to get around that, I'm too old for that shit and I don't really care. Still, it's irritating.

I've used HN Search (https://hn.algolia.com/) to verify comment karma and validate my suspicion.

I'm also on "slowban", as Hacker News performs worse when I use it while logged in than when I do so in incognito, logged-out mode.

It's dishonest bullshit. My main reason for continuing to comment is (a) to spite the moderators and (b) because there's a certain joy in getting +10 karma even when your post falls to the bottom.
It seems like early comments on any article generally have a huge advantage in garnering votes.

This appropriately rewards engagement, but also pushes down other worthy comments that come slightly later, often to effective near invisibility when replies to the top comment dominate the discussion.

I wonder if there is any mechanism that could help counter this.
Welcome back Peter.
Show HN: Loopdago – Learn to dance via web app
I am not sure what C++ brings in as a language.

If you want to get an idea how your code will work or even if it going to work at all you have to first understand type deduction rules which are seemingly completely unprincipled. When I compare the "rules" of C++ type deduction to functional languages' type inference algorithms I can easily understand how the latter work but I have no clue about what justifies the former.

Yet, in C++, if I want auto type inference on my recursive factorial function I have to write "return 1;" syntactically before (i.e. where the order is the relative position of bytes fed to the compiler) "return n*fact(n-1);", otherwise the compiler is unable to find the type. I just don't understand. The type deduction rules (say reference collapsing) are rocket science and take a full blog post as their justification, but basic unification algorithms known in the PL community for literally decades cannot be implemented in the standard?

This language seems plain crazy, this kind of article makes me wonder why people think it can be a reasonable choice for any kind of software project.

At least, C can fit in a brain.
Very happy to see that Soylent will now be free of animal products.

I had no idea that you could produce oil rich in Omega-3 fatty acids from algae. And looking it up lead me to learn that you can also product more traditional fuels from algae as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel
Very cool! I've been wanting something like this for a while. Going to make my life easier. I think it'd be great if you could implement a plugin feature so people could import custom protocols.
This argument reduces to saying that anything popular and widely used is actually better than anything unpopular but beloved by language enthusiasts. This simply isn't the case. Many, many factors beyond merit contribute to language popularity and usage.
Yes, I think that was the actual intent of the system. However, bad != disagreeing with the majority. If the up/down vote functionality is to be used to express agreement or disagreement, which is a change from the original philosophy, then the system should change accordingly. angersock's point is that, as it stands now, a faded-out comment may simply be expressing a good but unpopular opinion.
I am not a Soylent fan but I do like this food-versioning idea. What if all consumer food products were required to have versions numbers and a change log to detail out modifications?

Oreos version 2.3: Reduced count from 36 to 34. Increased price by 15 cents.

Pepsi version 3.0: Swapped sugar for high-fructose corn syrup.
The NSA spies on far more people than the Stasi could have ever hoped to. The NSA is just the intel branch of a government that has killed and imprisoned more people than the East German government did.

Arguing about the niceties of barbaric practices is fruitless anyway, but we can argue about the size of the weapons wielded by the barbarians.
That sounds like an incorrect fix. Since the comments are separated by trees, they should be positioned and compared to comments relative to that tree, not relative to the master tree. Being at the bottom of a sub-tree marks the comment automatically as the most downvoted in that tree.

Applying fading to all the comments just because a downvoted comment has a parent that happens to be at the top, seems wrong.
An earlier draft of this post that Sam sent me had "nearly everyone can help there". I'll ask him to put it back. But it's not like this is much of a barrier. Even this one comment moved you significantly (as of right now at least).
Ontario Provincial Police Recommend Ending Anonymity on the Internet
An alternate explanation would be that your comments are frequently marked as off topic.

(dang has commented about marking his own comments off topic, so the support for that is in there, but I'm speculating about how it might be used.)
Any chance we'll get some better text formatting options?

Here's what is currently offered:

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Basically italics and code blocks only. No lists or no bolding.
Funny how you didn't address the increase in productivity bullet point. Guess it didn't fit your worldview/agenda.
Docker In-depth: Volumes
Manage your invoicing for free with Hiveage
> To prevent abuse, moderators review flagged stories and comments and revoke flagging privileges from users who flag inappropriately.

This seems like one of the cases where HN's moderation is both draconian and completely opaque. I can't flag comments, and I have no idea why. I certainly don't think of myself as an abusive user.

Maybe I accidentally clicked the "flag" link once. If that gets flagging privileges removed, HN should at least consider creating a way to undo an action!
Very well done. Despite my skepticism around graphical programming languages (Dijkstra...) I must say this is quite impressive.

I think I would hit its limits pretty soon with the type of projects I work on, but for 99% of websites this is all that's needed.
The Monty Hall Rewrite
NuBits is as stable as the USD. 1 NuBit = 1 USD, always, meaning NuBits are pegged to USD (Though there is discussion of pegging it to a different currency one day if needed).

People who don't live in the U.S can still us NuBits, just like people who don't live in Europe, can still use Euro. NuBits just acts as a way to digitally send money to someone using a currency that is pegged to the dollar.

If you have any more questions, you can ask them at the forums, which can be found at: http://discuss.nubits.com
Bugzilla? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/