skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone building a direct competitor to Wikipedia for crowdsourced biographies and news-based pages [1], I have come to the conclusion that the wiki software while responsible for the site's success, is also the cause of its inevitable decline.

The software causes almost every problem that people complain about, mainly because it lets real or imagined experts have too much power over the page. It's simply easier for an editor to reject new information, than to go through the pain of adding it. In one case, I struggled for weeks to try to get a simple sentence into the site, only to be harassed by the site's administrators, when I challenged a particularly ambiguous rule. Entrenched editors such as William Connolley [2] on Global Warming, act as guardians for whole sections of the site, and do not allow any dissenting opinion, censoring and minimizing views that do not suit their agenda. So much of this is simply unnecessary in a better designed system.

As a result of the open nature of wiki editing, Wikipedia has built up an increasingly restrictive, massive, rule set of how to reject information, which makes it increasingly difficult to add new information. Many of those rules, such as those for notability, conflict of interest, and reliable sources are ambiguous and arbitrarily applied, giving even more power to editors and admins, instead of content creators. This means that the site has become rigid and nobody wants to maintain it. The quality of pages is declining rapidly. It is also very easy to harass other people on the system, so much so that women and minorities are virtually excluded.

We have taken a different approach with great results. By avoiding the page-based metaphor and giving better tools to our editors have created a system that makes it easy to add information without being harassed. We also pay our writers and editors, and are implementing a revenue share system so they can actually get some benefit from their work. So far our writers have added 25,000 posts without a single edit war, and zero harassment. 80% of them are women.

[1] http://newslines.org
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Connolley
Such an important step for us to take.

Let's add SSDP as well.

I've never understood how enthusiasts about some rights can be so dismissive of others. Poignant critique is one thing, but there's a lot of, as I say, simple dismissism (?) going on.

Once again, I have to suggest Porcupine Festival. It's the only place I've seen that has such incredible unity on these fronts.
The people whose lives are being ruined by Airbnb
I've always wondered if basic income would remove the need for VCs; everyone in your startup is essentially fully funded then (as long as you didn't need to live in an expensive locale) and your only cost is AWS (or whatever infrastructure provider you're running on).
Perhaps they too readily blame the Chinese _government_, however I'm not sure that the chinas place in the spotlight is _totally_ unwarranted:

tail -n 50 /var/log/auth.log

Nov 12 15:33:28 VPS-3167 sshd[11950]: Connection closed by 122.225.97.110 [preauth]
[SNIP]

Nov 12 20:12:51 VPS-3167 sshd[12016]: Connection closed by 61.174.50.164 [preauth]
[SNIP]

Nov 12 20:40:44 VPS-3167 sshd[12031]: Connection closed by 122.225.97.72 [preauth]

The list goes on and on, and the ip's in the last fifty lines were all Chinese or Russian, still they could also have been hacked themselves.
It's a good point, and it remains to be seen how we'll look back at the 'achievements' of current Silicon Valley.

That said, I don't think the hubris is entirely unwarranted. I consider myself generally too much of a skeptic of new things, and yet I quite regularly marvel at what's happening.

It's not that the things coming out of Silicon Valley are hugely innovative, but rather, as others have also pointed out, the growing ubiquity of all this stuff, and not just in the West.

Perhaps a lot of the sentiment that often seems like hubris is really vindication and excitement: vindication because all the stuff we early-adopters loved and that others didn't understand (or even made fun of) is now used by everyone, and excitement because it means there's a market for the stuff we've been working with for so long.

Perhaps the younger among us are mostly excited by what they see as new possibilities and what are, to them, new discoveries.

For example, I remember making a game for Windows and I remember how excited I was that my parents and even some colleagues were playing it! I even put the game on floppies and printed my logo on it.

Now, I'm teaching my younger brother programming by building the same game. The first difference this time around is that we're using javascript and HTML/CSS. In one day I set up the basic project with him that he can push to heroku and immediately show to friends and the world, and in about two weeks he worked through a number of CodeSchools lessons and has access to vastly more resources than I do.

I feel happy and vindicated, in way, that my weird hobby is now practiced by someone who is not very nerdy, and my brother is getting excited about all the stuff he can imagine building and releasing into the wild. No need to buy floppies and hand out his game: it's instantly accessible to everyone with internet and a browser.

Now this is just one example. Consider also the access to all kinds of roboty goodness that can be programmed with the same javascript, the fact that there's a huge potential paying audience through various app stores, and the huge (but probably rather unattainable) carrot of making the next Flappy Bird or whatnot.
Of course they are. I would be seriously worried of using M$ products if their developers still used IE for development. That said, I yearn the day that IE is happily buried in its own filth. No later than today I had spend 3 hours fighting unexpected IE behaviour. Sigh..
DogVacay raises $25M. Is play time over for Rover.com?
How Lyft Converted Me to a Brand Loyalist
Spending three hours a day on the South Shore Line would make anyone depressed!

I bet you can get a software internship gig near you. Contact professors doing computational work at Notre Dame (http://ibms.nd.edu/clusters/computational-biology-bioinforma...) they may have room in their budget. Though the pay will not be extravagant.

Indeed shows 300+ software gigs in South Bend: http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=software&l=South+Bend%2C+IN

But DELETE THE FUCKING ARTICLE man. Obviously, it isn't helping your cause.

Also definitely sue your former employer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8597953
I for one endorse the ban of that terrible form of "meta syntax".
I wrote an article about the ADA amendments a few years ago:

https://www.scribd.com/doc/246397486/The-ADAAA-Congress-Brea...

Major depression, or the perception that someone is depressed, is now considered a disability that the ADA applies to.

If an employer takes a hostile action (denial of promotion, firing, etc.) against someone based on their disability, the victim can sue the employer.

Proving that they fired you because of the article will be an issue, but a skilled disability attorney can probably do that. Presuming that you were otherwise a good employee, it probably won't be too hard to prove that the article was the reason. Talk to a disability attorney, or just contact the EEOC.

http://www.eeoc.gov/employees/charge.cfm
It is probably less Hollywood-like, such as predicting cloud cover over areas you'd be interested in using your satellites to look at. Or maybe they had a cyberhacking campaign and broke into as many US orgs as possible simultaneously, but each department discovers it at different times. Or, as others have said, maybe it isn't China at all but some other party?
This is a bit contrived example because if just searching for an integer in a large array, the memory bandwidth is going to be the bottle neck.

When dealing with small arrays (like the example of 0-250 integers, ie. less than 1 kilobyte), the figures are around 20-120 nanoseconds. In other words, the difference is around one main memory reference ("cache miss") between the best and the worst case.

While this is somewhat interesting, the lesson to take home should be that most of the time, smart memory usage is more important than what the CPU executes. Warming up the caches (e.g. __builtin_prefetch) is as efficient an optimization as rewriting and unrolling the entire loop and should be done first. If the caches are warm and the search is still the bottleneck, then it's time to consider the other optimizations.
This is a great time to reiterate that startups receive Microsoft's software for free, obviously it's a trap and you should not be hooked to Microsoft technology if you want to iterate quickly.
It's seasonal help. People bolting is a Best Case Scenario.
Maybe technology is both exciting and disappointing. And maybe we are dinosaurs, but I can tell you this: my grandparents were really impressed with PCs, cellphones and the internet; Snapchat -- not so much :)

Even if you're 100% right, I think it's safe to say that there's certainly no more innovation today than a decade ago; or two, or five. This is what makes the new SV religion so fascinating.

EDIT: I think mercer nails it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8597947
The video of Rosetta's 12 year journey in space is both impressive and informative:

http://www.esa.int/spaceinvideos/Videos/2013/10/Rosetta_s_tw...
> - Netscape

If you are referring to Microsoft's bundling of IE, that did not kill Netscape. It just buried the rotting corpse.

Before IE was bundled with Windows, it was sold in stores as a boxed product, right next to Netscape's boxed product. Going head to head in retail software stores (Egghead, CompUSA), IE massively outsold Netscape. This is what killed Netscape.

The reason IE outsold Netscape at retail was simple--it was a much better browser. Netscape introduced a lot of proprietary tags, which Microsoft included in IE. Microsoft also introduced proprietary tags, which Netscape often ignored. For the end user, the result was simple: IE correctly rendered more pages than Netscape. It was also better on resource usage, if I remember correctly, which was a much bigger deal then than it is now.
It's not the job of the ISP to do that. Full stop.
It is just me or has the story evolved into something a bit less jubilant in the course of the last two hours. It's an amazing feat, but this stuff is always a huge gamble.

As someone's who's worked on a few spacecraft project I feel really bad for the team(s) (recently worked on one which didn't go so well, years of work down the tube). Even if it didn't go perfectly I hope they're commended for the work they've done so far & the landing they achieved.
> I understand the problems with adding a random delay to try to add "noise" to the measurements

Actually, this isn't problematic at all... it's called random blinding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinding_(cryptography)

It's a commonly used method used to implement things like RSA in constant time.
Here is my anecdote:

I wanted to know more about my representative to the state legislature. First I went to Wikipedia. It had a stub page, with only basic biographic information. Checking elsewhere, I found that the FBI and IRS raided his office, home, and business some time ago. His chief of staff, his business partner, and and a former staffer that became a judge were all convicted of fraud and/or tax evasion. Other than this, his political career was a whole lot of nothing.

So, having done this research, I put it into the relevant Wikipedia article, with appropriate references to news articles and legal documents, carefully noting that he himself was never charged with anything. Reading between the lines, I realize that the authorities tried to get his subordinates to roll over on him, but failed - but that kind of subjectivity doesn't belong in an encyclopedia article.

Anyway, less than a minute later, the change was reverted because of "vandalism". Whoever reverted it had either not even glanced at the change, or was a supporter of this politician, protecting his page from negative information. Probably the former, but who knows?

This was the last, and worst, example of me wasting my time trying to contribute to Wikipedia. I have had every single change I have ever made to Wikipedia reverted (going back years). Sometimes I have done it anonymously, sometimes I have logged in; it doesn't make any difference in my experience. What seems to matter is if you're willing to put in the time to master Wikipedia's bureaucratic procedure, which I am not. I just don't bother anymore. So to me, this article makes perfect sense.

But I have to admit that I still read Wikipedia all the time. It is without question, the most useful web site there is. It's not as comprehensive as I would like, and for subjective information it's actually quite bad, but I think that in general it seems to be getting better over time, on both counts. So I don't know if you can say it's declining.

By the way, despite him either being a crook, or merely employing crooks on his staff, I voted for him anyway, just last week. I really don't have a vendetta against this guy.
Maybe bait and switch?

I don't know if Microsoft is among ones practice this approach, but they can potentially discontinue and force users to move on to paid version, once they gain enough user hooked to it.

Though, it seems like Microsoft has been consistent with their Express SKUs for years, maybe this is purely theoretical. (One instance I can think of is TechNet -- but this one, they discontinued it without alternative path, so I guess it's a little different...)
Or perhaps VCs would shift to more expensive fields like hardware, internet of things types of projects.
I don't understand how the Container Store fits in to this story, other than the fact that she was denied a job. Also, I disagree with this:

Because seriously, if an Emmy-award winning, New York Times bestselling author and Harvard grad cannot land
a job as a greeter at The Container Store—or anywhere else for that matter, hard as I tried—we are all doomed.

Being an author does not qualify you to work in Loss Prevention. It may, as gdilla pointed out in another comment, even make you overqualified for the position.

I sympathize with the author, and I think there is a compelling story here about healthcare, but the title undermines it severely by making it about how she failed one attempt to get an entry-level job; and it almost feels like a form of blackmail: The Container Store now has to deal with this widely-shared article about how they didn't give a poor, cancer-having mother a small little job.
Spark Photon: a $19 kit for building your own Wi-Fi enabled products
So, you'd rewrite in JavaScript versus dealing with Mono?
> I have never had the need to reveal a weapon to a would be attacker. If someone is going to mug me their weapon will be already pointed at me and revealing any weapon I have is just going to get me shot.

I don't speak from personal experience; I've never owned a firearm. However, a number of my friends have had this experience. One possibility is that this is more important for women? A women, being threatened by an unarmed man, can change the complexion of the power balance by revealing a weapon.

I don't have a good source for this; it's very possible that I'm wrong.

Even if it rarely happens, it's still an easy way to picture the 'purely' defensive capacity of a sidearm.
BTW: Thanks for downvoting this.
This is not a naive statement by me caused by assumptions. I actually did exactly this with a patched modern browser and good antivirus and my system became infected in the process.

Mind you I indiscriminately clicked on known "bad" advertisements in the process of doing this. Don't believe me? Try it for yourself. It is actually very easy to get malware if you click around foolishly.

Also, I have written multiple web crawlers, and have collected a large variety of JS based malware that can and does break modern browser security just in the process of fetching domain homepages. ( JS code embedded directly in index.html on domains )
Don't forget Scott Hanselman... I don't think this all would have been possible without any of these persons though. They all deserve some respects.. Even the ones who aren't always visible or the ones who already left Microsoft ( Eg. Phil Haack has made the switch to Github probably because of his opensource work in Microsoft)

They started opensource within Microsoft under Ballmer, so he deserves some respect to. But i'm sure Nadella is making more room for improvement and betting more "all-in"

I just know some people at Microsoft use *nix tools all the time, Asp.Net MVC took over some awesome RoR features, they integrated NodeJS, LocalDB is the alternative for SQLLite and etc...

Microsoft does everything it can to integrate good features and they won't go away anytime soon. They also have the best compatibility in any programming language i know (with .Net) to be a safe bet for businesses...

Hell, even VB6 still works (any Windows Server and a RDP connection) and that has been released in 1998 => 16 years ago!
I know nothing about IOT.

Is this revolutionary? It does look awesome.
There's nothing stopping Google from making HAXE work properly (it allegedly does now, but it practically does not) or just shipping genymotion, asides from they don't care enough to do so.
I suspect the alternative is really just more material on "long-tail," open-contributor sites that cover many of the topics that Wikipedia does, but in more detail and with different policies. For instance, the http://newslines.org site linked above, or the non-profit that I help run, LocalWiki (https://localwiki.org). Let Wikipedia just be a really great general-purpose encyclopedia -- it's not supposed to replace the entire web.
Why scraping and ecommerce are a perfect fit
This vindication, as you call it, might actually explain the rise of the SV religion. When nerds build cool stuff it makes them happy; but when the cool(ish) stuff they built is used by masses it makes them feel like gods :)
How is Cafe different from Medium? It looks identical.
I attribute much of my expertise at software development to learning languages at school.

Translating a piece of text from one language to another consists of abstracting the core ideas and meaning from the text using the first language and reimplementing them in a natural way in the second. This is a very similar mental process to taking real-world concepts and reimplementing them in software.

Among the languages I learnt was Latin, which is a very "elegant" language. Ie, it conveys much meaning in few words. Being able to do the same in software still gives me a buzz after 25 years.
But Josh, don't you understand that 120 days in a past market is just the same as 120 days in the future market? As we all know the stock market is innately tied to certain magic specific numbers of days that are ever unchanging. Like 14, 30 and 70 will always be relevant when you're RSIing.

Incidentally, your biorhythm cycle may be at a low point atm, so take care. Especially as you were born under the astrological sign of head and shoulders. Meanwhile, however, I've heard about this guy who tells me that at least on the Australian ASX you can't even rely on the number of shorts having been placed to predict whether a stock will go down. But to that I say poppycock, there's no way, after all, that the stock prices reflect the currently public knowledge and thus have already assigned a reasonable price taking into account all that is reasonably known about the future.

Never forget - the average market participant is always smarter than the market and therefore TA works for them /s
Design Away Error Handling?
So frustrating that we've actually landed on a comet, and the only picture we get to see is a surreptitious over-the-shoulder shot from a phone: https://twitter.com/serpientes72/status/532588729945587713/p...
How to Wear Menswear While Keeping Your Femininity Intact
I think in a post-Snowden world, innovation in information sharing and access technologies is met with a lot more skepticism and cynicism.

I was actually surprised how cynical the coverage of Amazon's Echo was. I expected to see at least some geeking out about the specs or the engineering that went into it. But the conversation was dominated by half-serious-jokes and comments about increasing Amazon's ability to sell you stuff, and giving the NSA and much higher fidelity recording of our daily conversations.

I believe we have now passed the point where the first questions we ask about new products and technologies aren't about how cool and innovative they are, but cynical questions about what the corporations selling them are really up to.
I also thought about faith, but from a different direction. I think there are a lot of people, making decisions, who could do with a little fear of eternal damnation.
This is a fairly weak and circumstantial list, in my opinion.

Also, name a player that isn't equally or more abusive? If you mention Apple, Google, or Amazon, I'm going to disagree.
How come the Getting Started page link from the Newslines front page[1] returns a 404 error? A different link that has the link text "Click here to get started"[2] from a different page does work. Why aren't the link targets consistent?

[1] http://newslines.org/getting-started/

[2] http://newslines.org/newslines-rewards/
Bitbucket is better than Github anyway. And you can use Mercurial there...
One thing I played with is what I called a "partially chorded" keyboard, where chords in one section determine a mapping for the other. I used this to let me type on a midi piano keyboard (where the two sections were neighboring octaves), and it was surprisingly useable for the minimal experience I had with it. Of course, ease of use at the outset is only a poor proxy for capabilities in the long run...

I would note that it doesn't suffer nearly as much from the problem you describe, as changes of chorded position happen more rarely. It might well still have grown painful as I got faster, but it was interesting (and fun to be able to type on a piano keyboard - I've been wanting to rig up my organ to accept input that way).
With a database that small, performance shouldn't ever be noticeable. Are you running the DB on EBS?

1) If you are having trouble with tweaking my.cnf, give the perl script `mysqltuner` a go. It is pretty good.

2) The biggest improvement would be moving the storage to SSDs. I personally prefer Linode to DO, but both are cheap, and good.

My linode servers can do full text non-blocking backups at about 100MB per second, so depending on your outage recovery requirement, you may be able to get away with a simple cron job.
IntelliJ is written in Java, but has entirely separate distributions for each supported OS. As an user of the app, why would I care if it's the same executable?

Even as a developer, cross-platform binary compatibility doesn't enter my top 10 list of important things for a programming language. Java is paying a pretty hefty price in language features (like type erasure) because things originally compiled for Java 1.2 still has to work on the Java 8 runtime. Is it really worth it?
Response to HackerNews comments on my trading
I think AngularJS is too much effort to build the simplest things. I don't even see the benefit at all. I build all of my javascript apps (I hate using the word front-end apps) using jQuery and Flask backend. I don't even use asynchronous . I just don't see the point.

What's missing from jQuery that limits you but does not in AngularJS?

What's missing from Flask that limits you but does not in Node.js?
So when are they going to stop suing android for having the nerve to try to interoperate with their shit FAT filesystem?
My understanding is that the software is not free, but that you have to pay license fees down the line, if your company is successful.

Is that not true?
Stalin Died (1975)