skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is it really much different than Jews keeping Kosher or Muslims keeping Halal? Prisons are for punishment for crimes that we consider significant enough to jail people, they don't have to dehumanize the prisoners.

The cost of 'specialty' food for a few tiny percent of prisoners is a minuscule figure in the total cost of imprisonment, and could easily be accommodated within the wider food offerings. If every meal had Kosher / Halal / Vegan offerings as a subset of the total meal, we could both imprison people and treat their ethics and morals with respect. Seems like a win-win.
So it's called "Just Mayo," mayonnaise being a food product that contains eggs by definition, and has a picture of an egg on its label. But it isn't mayonnaise and doesn't contain eggs. Maybe the hipster irony is just lost on me.
> Because it will never pass with a Republican majority

The FCC has a 3-2 Democratic majority (all current members appointed by Obama, but under law which imposes a limit of 3 members of one party), and is the body through which this needs to pass.
And you can make your points better by attacking my central point. Besides, tracker1 isn't a child. If he is feeling uncomfortable with my prose, he can talk to me directly.
Like you, I pay for Evernote's premium service, love the idea, and - until recently - thought their execution was great.

Now, I think they're too distracted by the "accessories" market and ill-fitting social features that don't fit what the service was sold to be... a digital shoebox.

I don't need WSJ or Nikkei articles to appear in my Evernote searches. Sure, I can turn this "Context" feature off but it's on by default and doesn't do anything I don't get with CMD+T in my browser. Resources were spent on it.

I feel the same way about the Chat feature. Who are these people who want to chat with friends/colleagues from inside of Evernote? Again, more resources spent on that.

In the meantime... Premium features are broken on iOS (passcode security turns itself off), the Windows version doesn't work with HiDPI displays, and the editing/formatting of notes doesn't sync correctly across Windows->Mac->iOS.
Could not access the site in Chrome. Just got the message "Tnx, we will notify you when new courses become available."

No content available. Seems like it's premature to launch an announcement on HN when you're still invitation-only.
> I am not sure what C++ brings in as a language.

C speed of execution, while offering support for large scale programming, OOP, functional, generic and plain old imperative programming.

Ability to treat user defined types as first class citizens.

Standard library that offers all mechanisms to avoid the traditional C pitfalls in terms of memory/resource leaks and out-of-bounds errors.

> 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.

Except for Ada, very few languages offer similar capabilities and Pascal like syntax is out of fashion.

> At least, C can fit in a brain.

Can you master all compiler specific behaviours not covered by the standard?!?
This has been discussed much on Stack Overflow earlier, by the name of "Fastest Gun in the West Problem". http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/9731/186983

However, I often see new (top level) comments on the top when entering a discussion here on HN, so it seems they at least get some exposure.
> First, I want to thank the community for all the work people have done over the past six months to downvote, flag, and comment on content that doesn’t fit the site guidelines

Sam & co, great job on experimenting and improving quality, it shows. I find this statement to be really confusing considering there is no guidelines[1] for downvoting and, in my experience, it is highly used to put opinions you don't personally agree with out of reach for the majority of users to read.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Doesn't the name have seriously negative connotations... at least in English-language media. Until I looked it up right now, I didn't know that is a positive word in Arabic. I have always seen in portrayed negatively and associated with Islamic fundamentalism.
I'd try this if the time to shipment were remotely reasonable.
Even if this is true, I doubt his comments are undesirable enough to passive-aggressively try to get him to stop using the site by silently slowing it down (if his claim to be on slowban is true). This kind of behavior seems like it should be reserved for trolls and other highly noxious personages.
Unearthing an Old Programming Document
"To prevent abuse, moderators review flagged stories and comments and revoke flagging privileges from users who flag inappropriately."

When I first joined HN, I aggressively flagged stories and comments that didn't meet the guidelines. I thought that's what I was supposed to do. However, one day my comment flagging privileges disappeared with no explanation. If someone had contacted me and explained how I was misusing flags, I would have happily self-corrected.
> I hope downvoting has nothing to do with a agreement; I thought it was for comments that aren't valuable to the conversation (e.g., not substantive, poorly reasoned, false, or poorly communicated).

That's a weak distinction when there is a factual disagreement, since most people probably believe that factually incorrect statements are not valuable to the conversation.
Never say never - it happened to me a month ago.
I ordered mine about 4 months ago and still waiting
Which makes no sense because michaelochurch has a high comment upvote average and is one of the more prolific commentors. Even if the comments are off-topic, a high average suggests people like them.
They will absolutely put high-voted comments at the bottom of the page. This happened to me when i posted a post with a lot of constructive criticism about a product i wanted to pan out, but which had a lot of problems in countries other than the original country (to the point of threatening human lives). Others agreed, even the makers of the product were happy about the feedback, upvotes happened. Yet my comment is dead last on the page.

I mailed the moderators and one of them confirmed it had been marked "off-topic", and left it there, despite admitting it wasn't off-topic, because he did want to cut down on "negative" comments on new products.

I understand the stance, but disagree with it, and have taken it a fact of life that both the moderatorship, and the userbase at large, are unwilling to consider strong posts that aren't full of praise as worthwhile. I can even mildly understand that, since it takes more effort to verify strong criticism as being grounded, than it takes to verify strong praise. It's disappointing nevertheless.
It would only work for manufactured good, often linked to fast-food. I think in that regards, it would be a great idea.

For everything else, it would be impossible due to the nature of cooking itself.
pg has said many times that it's OK to downvote out of disagreement (particularly since it's OK to upvote due to agreement.)

I generally don't unless the disagreement has another value-subtracting component (lack of substance, poor reasoning/phrasing, factual errors, unnecessary incivility.) For disagreeable but worthwhile comments, I prefer responding instead. But I recognize the value in having differences of opinion over the use of downvotes -- comments of marginal quality (which some people disagree with, and others don't find valuable enough to upvote even if they agree) will end up dropping down the page.
They are stolen because cameras don't stop you stealing a car. Often, by the time the car has been reported stolen it has long since been dumped and set alight.
Tell HN: All you delivery startups – please reinvigorate community retail
Seems to me all these delivery startups are created by kids in their 20's who can only think in terms of getting pizza and sweets delivered.

Here's a real issue you can solve......

In our communities the local retailers such as butchers and greengrocers have had their businesses devastated by supermarkets.

You can change this. Be an ACTIVE conduit between customers and local retailers.

For example, call the butcher's customers each week and take their meat order, then deliver it. Same with greengrocers. Make the phone call personal and friendly "Hey there Sally, calling from SuperHeroDeliveries for Bob the Butcher, just confirming this weeks meat order."

The temptation of course for tech minded founders is to just build an interface and use alerts and reminders but the critical piece to the puzzle is the ongoing-forever weekly phone call to have a personal relationship and confirm the order.

The reason people buy from supermarkets is because they are in there anyway and its late and they are tired and the butcher probably closed at 6:00PM anyway so why not just do the easy thing and get the lower quality meat and veg from the supermarket.

Individual butchers aren't set up to run an active outreach to their customers, but your delivery service could.

So stop being obsessed with delivering things that 20 year olds want (i.e. takeaway food) and think about what both the retailer and adults people want delivered. Solve a real and deep community issue that is turning retail into a supermarket monoculture. Reconnect people back to their community retailers.
I expect that there is a strong correlation between how soon a comment is posted and its points. Two thoughts from a relative noob (sorry if these ideas already have been discussed or tried):

* On threads with many comments, few users have time to read all or even most of them. Perhaps find a way to shorten the list, improve signal-to-noise, and surface newer comments by burying older comments that haven't received votes.

> This appropriately rewards engagement

* It rewards engagement by people who have the time to frequently check HN, read linked stories, and comment throughout the day. My guess is that the smarter someone is, the less availability they have for such things. I would create a system that rewards engagement by busy people.
I read an anecdote about the Swedish language today that's just too good to check[1]:

Being fluent in both Swedish and English, I know there are certain concepts, such as the difference between belief in an opinion and belief in a fact, where the Swedish language makes clear distinctions (tycka and tro) and English does not. English speakers spend ridiculous amounts of time arguing about these things, and Swedes simply don’t need to. It’s not that English speakers can’t conceptualize the difference between opinion and fact, but doing so is way more difficult in English, because the word “belief” in English is quite fuzzy, whereas in Swedish, the language makes it simply impossible to confuse the two.

HN voting seems to suffer from an inability to make this distinction: I think it's terrific when comments are downvoted because they're factually inaccurate, no matter how well they're written. So much nonsense ends up at the top of some comment threads simply because it reinforces existing beliefs or loyalties. On the other hand, if you make a good case on one or another side of some live debate, I don't think it should matter whether I agree with you or not. The discussion is always enriched by quality arguments.

[1] http://ken.arneson.name/2014/11/10-things-i-believe-about-ba...
yeah it simply means 'School'. But tnx to mainstream media, it might have some negative taste to it unfortunately. Will have to see if I keep the name or change it.
Vegan doesn't mean higher quality. It can mean a large serving of beans and broccoli.
As other users have pointed out, to flag a comment you have to click on 'link' to go to the comment's item page [1]. I don't know why PG designed it this way but have always assumed it was a speed bump to reduce impulsive flagging, since flags are more powerful than downvotes.

We never remove flagging privileges because of just one flag. The concept of a mistake is all too familiar over here.

1. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=author%3Adang+flag+link#!/comment/...
This sort of thing is pretty off-topic, but at least in the US, some states (like Florida) have laws requiring prisons offer kosher meals. Considering both diets are voluntary, it does seem unfortunate that certain ideologies are state sanctioned while others are not.
Reddit/HN create one interaction with the comment(upvote/downvote) and then expect that they must use this button to make the post more prominent or less prominent, even though the most strong emotional reaction is agreeing/disagreeing.

Its like you invite people to a debate, where you say "please only boo when someone is saying something obscene and nasty or breaking the rules of the debate, not when they are saying something you disagree with".
It's not invitation only, can you try a different browser? You should be able to play around with it and access the course.
It only takes a single person disagreeing with you to fade your comment.
Yeah, I didn't try to address that claim, I don't have any information about it.
That's a reasonable take on what downvoting is for, but the HN take is that it's better to downvote a disagreement than to write a noisy bad comment to express the same disagreement.
The service will scan the content of PDF attachments for searching, which is nice. The two bigger premium features, for me, are offline notebooks and passcode security.

Unfortunately, the latter feature has been broken for well over a month on iOS. The most release was supposed to fix it, but passcode security still turns itself off after a few hours.
>public utilities and common carriers are not the censors of public or private morals

Well of course they are, to a limited degree. They are not the sole carrier - I sometimes find it hard to express or notice the plural distinction - of moral, but neither is the justice system, although it likes to paint itself that way. As can be shown:

lt. moralis: proper behavior of a person in society

They have to decide a proper course of action for themselves. It would just be nice if it was in accordance with the censorship of the law. OTOH, i find the result proper.

>nor are they authorized or required to investigate or regulate the public or private conduct of those who seek service at their hands

Clearly not authorized, but morally, they might be required to regulate, therefore to investigate, if possible without violating privacy rights, which with automation can be ensured to a degree. Even if warranted by a judge, or done by the police, it meant massive overhead for the providers, too. So it would be nice if we can go on without all that hassle. Maybe it would require relaxing some laws, that require those investigations; Or moving on as society, as calling on moral draws in a bag of huge implications.

What if crack junkies buying crack on silkroad steal copper cables from the grid? The Telcos are indirectly affected by that, when the users get unsatisfied and directly they have to pay for replacement.

The users are directly affected and responsible, so in first degree it's their responsibility. (not as implied, the court's or w/e).
Ah, so this is only for stories actually killed by flagging, rather than just for stories demoted by flagging?
> Although Sunde did not provide Ars with specific financial details regarding The Pirate Bay's operational expenses, he did argue that the site's high bandwidth, power, and hardware costs eliminate the potential for profit. The Pirate Bay, he says, may ultimately be operating at a loss.

Source: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/02/pirate-bay-big-re...
That's all their claims. They were not able to show that they were losing or making money in court. There were no records, at all.

However, they would have to been incredibly incompetent not to make millions off the advertisment, based on their amount of traffic. This was key in the procedings.

I mean.. right now thepiratebay.se is at top 90 in the alexa ranking. More traffic than e.g. nytimes.com, ebay.co.uk, redtube.com, dailymail.co.uk, etc etc.

Meanwhile, the hosting cost for this service is comparatively extremely small. Saw some list recently of 20 servers. Perhaps true, but seems inefficient. Still, at that level, peanuts compared to the ad revenue.
Eh, I'd argue the age of innovation for foods started 25 years ago, when we figured out how to make chocolate tasting things without much chocolate, and maple-flavored corn syrup. You can't call that chocolate or maple syrup, so I don't see how mayo is any different.
> Okay. Case closed. It's not Mayo.

Well, that means it's not mayonnaise. But if they call themselves "mayo" (which doesn't have a standard of identity), and never "mayonnaise", I'm not so sure it's as clear that it's not Mayo.
Downvoting and threaded view is hard to combine. What you describe is the trivial way. It has the downside that if a comment has few subcomments, downvoting them don't accomplish very much.
This. Also, it is not the top that matters, rather the quality of life of the bottom percentiles. We need to raise those up, and as long as we can do that, the top doesn't really matter.
Maybe because it was their first (and only) EMR system, but in the practice I worked at, all the initial infrastructure was put in by Allscripts explicitly for EMR, with all other applications being secondary. They sold the boxes, set up the Windows domain, and managed everything. Only relatively recently did they start using it as their own infrastructure, instead of just the magic to make Allscripts EHR work. In that kind of scenario, it could just as easily have been Linux.
I fully agree. I also don't find the new "flat" designs an improvement at all, and that applies both to Google's new designs and to Apple's work.

What's wrong with them, you ask? Well, in brief:

* very little indication as to what I can interact with,
* you have to know the interface before you can use it, discoverability is abysmal,
* touch-interface-specific: lots of actions require swipes, which you have to learn in advance and remember,
* actual tappable areas became smaller (an example: "<" instead of a "Back" button).

They are hard to use for me, and even harder for my Mom.

I think this case is similar to what often happens in architecture: form over function. You get beautiful buildings that are dysfunctional. Architects hold conferences and assign awards for the beauty (light, form, straight lines, whatever), while people crowd in passageways and make their way to work next to the garbage dump, because that way is more convenient than the main entrance.

I really hope the pendulum will soon swing in the other direction and we will go back to more "meaty", discoverable interfaces with more visual hints as to how to use them.
Blend it with peanut butter. It's quite delicious this way to me. Apologies if you are allergic.
DevOps Enhances Software Quality
I once had my flagging privileges disappear. I e-mailed the moderators, and they restored them.

It wasn't clear either to me or the moderator what had resulted in the loss of privilege. On the one hand, that made it easy to decide to reinstate the privilege; on the other hand that made it hard to learn what I'd done wrong.
> I think the point is not whether it fits the current standard but whether those standards make sense in an age of innovation.

How does an "age of innovation" benefit from inaccurate product labeling. Its not like mayonnaise-substitutes that vary from the defining ingredients are new -- usually with branding that is evocative of mayonnaise without claiming to be mayonnaise, clearly indicating that it is: (1) something different than mayonnaise, (2) intended to fill the role of mayonnaise.

> Who cares if it has eggs, and why are the Feds getting involved anyway?

The Feds are concerned about accurate and meaningful food labeling because people being able to rely on food labels and no what they mean is important for both health and safety reasons, and for the ability of consumers to make informed decisions in the marketplace.

Misleading labeling benefits only fraudsters.
There's no reason an instacart or doordash couldn't become the backbone for this type of service. They just need to allow local merchants to add their store/products and when users order, one of their drivers get a pickup and dropoff alert. The local merchant should promote the home delivery option via some signs they can print out and put in their store.
Plenty of us read and appreciate your contributions and ilk of ill-fated on HN (not to name names).
The Web does not need to be VR. VR is another type of media with its own strengths. The Web has to be able to deliver it as it currently can deliver music, video or text content. One does not replace the other. The 2D traditional Web sites will still have its place. I believe that VR will be too important to let it be owned by a single company closed platform.
October 28.
What about the announced update to the rendering engine (http://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news-api)?
I believe the correct term for these products is "egg-free mayonnaise-like spread". Mayo*, if you will.

Anything can be a spread. Think that's jam? No! Fruit spread.
"For one thing, the Chinese may be assuming that the postal service is more like theirs — a state-owned entity that has vast amounts of data on its citizens, said James A. Lewis, a cyber-policy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies."

State-owned? That is true. "has vast amount of data on its citizens"? Please do some homework before speaking.
Can you mark comments with the score of 1 in some way?

I suspect that I'm not the only one who downvotes the comments he doesn't like or disagrees with, but who'd very rarely want to push a comment into gray. I mean, it's one thing to vote a comment down so that it won't float at the top and another is to punch its author in a face with a negative score.
Your job is not to write code
Unfortunately they are the tools of warfare used by enimies of the US as well as domestic terrorists as well. The werent used in the 60's simply because they were not available back then.

Oh, but our government had giving small pox blankets to Native Americans, or syphilis to African Americans or rounding up Asians and putting them 'segregated camps'.

That American History class may not be a bad idea. Just sayin.
Show HN: Talker, a JavaScript Library to Wrap PostMessage with Promises
How about "I can't believe it's not mayo"?
Mouthbreathing Machiavellis
I did this too. I unflagged them in the past, but it's happened repeatedly. It's because the UI on mobile is terrible.
A tiny percentage of app users account for over half of gaming revenue
>For example, I'd love it if my work VPN could be prioritized over someones pron torrent during internet rush hour.

That would be great for you of course by why should ISPs get to determine whose packets are more important especially if the entry criterion to being important is basically "pay up"? What if the reverse were true and other users' packets were prioritized over your work ones simply because Netflix, YouTube, Valve, etc. could afford it and your company decided not to?
The really important point here is not just delivering, but actively reaching out on the phone at an appointed time to take that order.
Show HN: BoxParty: Fast-paced block breaking game
How do you stop a competitor from making a fake offer just to get a look into how you do things?
Virtualization in Software Development and Testing
Neither are a lot of Hellmann’s products. Lots of their products are called "mayonnaise dressing" instead of "mayonnaise" probably because they don’t fit the criteria either. Do you care though? You probably never noticed, and just had a really nice sandwich.

The standard is actually super specific:

http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFRS...

for example you have to have at least 65% by weight oil and at least 2.5% acid.

If I buy something that has "mayonnaise" on it, then I’m buying "mayonnaise". If my sandwich sucks, then I won’t buy it again. No need for the government to tell me what is and isn’t mayonnaise.