skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hope you don't think that a campaigner with as much experience as David Plouffe is going to neglect to hire a social media firm to handle Reddit and HN stories about Uber.

This is what (a small part of) Uber's venture capital is going towards: hiring people to downvote and bury critical posts. It would almost be negligent not to do so, at this point in the internet's development.
Not in safari or iOS
Learning XSLT definitely helped me write much better views in any MVC/MVVM project I have, because the whole approach to template matching is useful as a general design principle. When I'd first started in web development, my views were all very top-down and rife with control logic. After spending considerable time rendering my pages by building XML and applying XSLT, I found a lot of the skills transfer.

Lately I've been working a lot in React, and I've found that just understanding the new syntax can be learned in a weekend -- instead of transforming an XML doc, I load JSON into my state, and instead of writing <xsl:template>s I write React classes. The sort of skills that one refines over years, namely how to think of your rendered page as being composed of various smaller templates, benefit me everywhere. XSLT was a really intensive way to force myself to learn to think that way. Even my mixed PHP/HTML that I occasionally still have to write is considerably better.

to your point about XSLT v1, I can speak to why it's so rarely used at least by PHP devs: v1 has been included as a default extension in PHP builds for many years, but v2 has always required a separate installation of saxon. I just checked on my reasonably up-to-date ubuntu default install, and it's XSLT 1.1.28. That's still far better than Go, where the only approach I've seen is to just install command-line xsltproc and execute that. v2.0 isn't going to catch on while v1.0 is what's considered the de-facto standard, and v1 being the de-facto standard is a big part of why so many have a poor opinion of xslt.
Flagged. And I don't think I've ever flagged anything on HN before.

HN has made _huge_ improvements in quality around discussions related to racism/sexism/diversity in the tech scene, but even I know that any #ferguson/#blacklivesmatter/etc comment-threads will quickly become an unapproachable nuclear meltdown.
Try stayfocused- I used it all through med school. Half an hour on my 'big 4' - smh.com.au, HN, facebook, wired and later reddit a week.
During exams I'd hit the nuclear options n and only allow wikipedia and university sites.

Great productivity booster

Edit: whoops forgot the link. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stayfocusd/laankej...
It's a curse, in a way, to have (be?) a brain trained to recognize and solve problems, optimize expected outcome, and see through bullshit when the popular solution to existential debilitating dread — religion — crumbles at the slightest analysis. Ignorance is bliss, to add to Puchner's ostensibly empty bromides.

There are a lot of very intelligent people who believe in an afterlife. They aren't ignorant about the reality of death, nor are they practicing "bullshit". They honestly and earnestly believe in what they advocate.

The disagreement is fundamental in nature. The afterlife was never demonstrated to be false. It was rejected because it contradicts naturalism. Believers didn't make some mistake in logic along the way, they started from a different set of assumptions.

To rephrase your original statement:

It's a curse, in a way, to have (be?) a brain trained in logical positivism, to only accept scientific answers, and reject out-of-hand any other possible answers which might provide hope rather than existential debilitating dread
"It's little more than a tight loop around a pseudo-random number generator." One locked against concurrent access.

Yes, put a lock and context switch in a tight inner loop, and your performance will suck.
Very cool, easy to test as well.
That is too bad. But if you try hard enough, you can feel insulted every time someone says something. So I suppose it is not really possible to succeed, especially on this topic.
> none of these new planes actually come anywhere close to fulfilling the close ground support role the A-10 offers

What makes you think that way? Low-end missions can be fulfilled by drones and apaches, and high-end obviously by F-35.
A-10 is obsolete mostly because high precision bombs and missiles combined with good sensors are much more efficient than what A-10 has.
We were probably using it for very different things (I used it to render my HTML for a PHP site), but I actually found the debugging part to be a huge advantage of xslt. The errors I had relating to basic config and encoding issues were all big headaches, sure, but debugging issues caused by my own incorrect assumptions about how my data was structured was great -- I never felt lost and every message gave me a clear idea what I needed to look at.
Oh come on. The classic Nigerian email scam was the first thing I thought of when I saw the headline. I half expected a parody but saw that it was Forbes.

People are too sensitive these days. Especially people who get self-righteously offended on behalf of someone else.

Relevant: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/01/chris-rock-colleges...
Please don't post "meta" stories to HN. Email hn@ycombinator.com if you have concerns.
FWIW, this very submission is technically against the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):

Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to hn@ycombinator.com.
Does anyone's else other than a 12 year old (mentally if not physically) actually care about secret?
>"I’d given up on the system....But then I realized something important: I’ve got you. And you’ve got me. And we’ve got them. And we all have each other."

What the? Worst opinion piece in ages.

>"Will you declare interdependence with me?"

No.
For me the two lessons of the No Free Lunch Theorem are:

1. Stop trying to prove that your solution is the "best overall"

2. Hooray, we can pick and choose our tools.
I used to be similar and here is what I do now:

- Avoid the news. 99% is rubbish and the other 1% isn't going to have any effect on you. If anything is important enough you'll hear about it anyway (from talking to people, Facebook, etc). I only read HN and a few Reddits regularly now, but even most of that is rubbish. If you hear about a news topic that is interesting to you, sure go read into it, but you aren't going to gain anything from constantly checking the news 'just in case' you miss something.

- Don't care about TV / movies / books / articles. Nothing you read / watch is going to dramatically change your life, so don't feel you are missing out. Again the good stuff will bubble up to you somehow. (Don't care doesn't mean don't consume, I still take a break to watch shows and movies every so often, but I don't do it religiously). After Google Reader shutdown I didn't bother finding a replacement and I don't feel any less of it now.

- Meditation. There are lots of different branches of meditation, rather than focusing on a single problem the one I do has you focus on thinking about nothing. You just need to observe any thoughts instead of following them, and eventually your mind will be silent. It's leads to greater mindfulness which means being present in the moment rather than thinking about the past or future.
I don't even believe he does his main comparison correctly, since when he tries to remove the effect of valuation he doesn't account for valuation during the period in question. For more see here:

http://3rdmoment.blogspot.com/2014/12/stock-performance-in-e...
I don't blame the founders so much as the investors here. They really should have known better.
The Deadline – notes about the Tom DeMarco book
Are you using a definition of maximising shareholder value that doesn't mean what it appears to say on the tin?

Berkshire Hathaway exists solely to maximise shareholder value, prima facie. Why else would people buy and hold their shares? Altruism? Warren says it exists to enrich shareholders in the long term.

Are confusing shareholder value with a short-term focus on return?
The State of Perl (2004)
No it was not stupid, it was far worse than this. It was a nasty tool that allowed nasty people to do nasty things.
Ugh.

1. You can't have 24/7 real-time surveillance of the police and have them function. Bad guys knowing where the cops are is bad.

2. This doesn't change the incentives of prosecutors who don't want to alienate the police they have to work with.

3. This doesn't guarantee that footage will make it to a jury

4. This doesn't target police unions or statutes that make it more difficult to fire / imprison police.

5. It emphasizes the us vs. them mentality and is likely to cause dangerous confrontations.

6. This doesn't breed empathy through public sacrifice which is a key tactic underlying most successfull non-violent protest movements.

I could go on ...
The article means "copwatchnyc.org", not "copwatch.org". Copwatch.org has been around for years, but doesn't seem to be getting much traction. Someone might want to volunteer to bring their web site out of the 1990s.
> Here’s a suggestion: Hire some people who will answer the phone.

Lucky a $40 billion company has some hack at the NYT to give them advice.

Pet hate: When a company specifically doesn't want people X as customers, X thinks it's because said company is dumb. A great example of 'unconscious incompetence'.
There was a time when people gorged. They wisened up and figured out that a certain economy of intake was better for their health.

I think people do the same now with intellectual material. An economy of what you take in is a good thing. It makes you healthier and less worried. There's going to be a lot of stuff that you'll miss but that's okay. Most of it is going to disappear soon given the churn rate of tech. If you do need to indulge, do so in more foundational materials rather than the "library of the week" or "language of the month".

Another thing is to take up a hobby. Something non intellectual. Something physical is good, something artistic is fine too and explore that area on a regular basis - preferably daily. Don't (and this is serious) track all aspects of the hobby as many people do with devices. Stay offline and just lose yourself in the hobby for a while. Don't feel compelled to share every bit of your life social media networks notwithstanding. You should have private compartments that are your own space.

Another useful bit of advice to have a "dry day" once a week. No going online. It's great to get yourself aligned again.

As much as technology has given us, I think it has a dehumanising effect. disconnecting on a regular basis is a good thing. You only gain from it.
This makes sense. It still seems suspicious to me.
That is an interesting idea.

As long as HN's code has the ability to detect such co ordinated flag kills and alert the mods, all good (imo).

Just to be clear, I have no position on whether HN should or should not discuss such stories (I can see arguments for either side, and lots of grey areas). I'd be personally fine with a 'tech only' focus (say).

My question was about why these stories were getting killed moments after submission, since many discussions have happened about women in tech, diversity, company business model unethicalities etc, without triggering flag kills.
It failed to gain much traction here in Japan, apart from Brazilians posting pictures of butts and (visiting? expat?) gay guys endlessly posting about saunas in Shinjuku...
There are so few places on the web to have intelligent, calm conversations with interesting people about tough subjects. I find it sad that HN seems to want to steer clear of addressing them, especially because I think the site attracts the type of people who might propose creative solutions.
hmmm ....

https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&safe=off&site=&sou...

http://perplexed.co.uk/545_php_smtp_server_for_receiving_ema...

Programs may be written in any language you as a developer are _most_ comfortable with. Of course -- we can all argue over what the _best_ language is to develop X in.
In most cases, this should actually cause bad reputation for the countries, these languages originated. The difference is, that England and other countries glorify things, they fucked up in the past.
Gangnam Style Breaks Guinness World Record (Viral Video) – DP2Web
clickable links:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8711222

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8711196

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8711178

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8711146

note: Yes, as OP mentioned, clickable links are all dead anyways.
On the other hand, writing an "X is crap" post gets you tons of upvotes.
> Side note: the only pilots that ever allowed us to shoot 81mm suppression over the top of the ingress routes to target when training to run CAS were the ANG A10 guys. All the active duty fast movers weren't game, and that included the MC Harrier pilots....

For those of us not in the military, can you translate this for us? It sounds interesting, but I have no idea what any of it means.
I am firmly convinced these types of organizations often induce strange mental problems of their own which are often far worse than the sins they are trying to cure.... And I guess I really question whether this type of thing helps humanity as a whole.

I agree entirely. People well served by their community have little motivation to question it, but that doesn't mean that everyone would benefit from membership in that community, or even that the community is beneficial to society as a whole. I have many thoughts on the subject, and maybe one day I'll write more.
A note to our future selves: We wish we knew this before starting our startup
You're right. Hopefully one day HN(or any online anonymous'ish forum) can reach a point where this conversation can happen, but that day is not today.
Great explaination. This is the sort of post that makes me love HN.
Or perhaps they just completely botched their moderation implementation. Starting with the same information, ending at nearly opposite speculative conclusions.
Deep Habits: Never Plan to “Get Some Work Done”
allowing the browser access to your camera...

What could possibly go wrong?
It's a legal distinction. Code which is 'trivial' or 'functional' cannot be copyrighted, so therefore the GPL doesn't apply.[1] The example given there is a Hello World dialog, but certainly I have written tons of DOM manipulation JS which is purely 'functional'. The contents of underlying HTML elements might have more copyright protection than the code.

(As to what it actually means, the case law is complex and the FSF would probably tell you to go ask a lawyer if you really want to know. Otherwise they will just offer you some arbitrary guideline, somewhat like their prohibition on linking to GPL C programs.)

[1]http://www.iusmentis.com/copyright/software/protection/
The Majdanek Gas Chamber Myth [documentary]
I started by creating my own product and consulting companies, and as my monetary needs increased and revenues decreased, kept them running on the back burner while adding full-time remote and in-office web development work. I consider myself very lucky to have met the people who could connect me to projects that didn't care so much about daily schedules, only results. And if I may say so, I definitely deliver results.
It's quite interesting to me that people (you, Puchner, some others here) would experience literal "breathless terrors" at the thought of one's own death. It's never come close to that for me. I've seen both my parents as well as several friends die rather unpleasant deaths (cancer) and I myself have been robbed at gunpoint but I have never felt terror contemplating my own death. It just seems to me to be the natural end of things, and it will come when it comes.

I certainly don't want to die any sooner than I have to; I'd like to see my own kids grow up, be sure they are given the opportunities I had (education, etc.) but I don't really fear dying. I'm not sure why anyone would, it's inevitable after all.
In my experience, just passing messages around w/ dummy logic should be yielding numbers about 10x greater at around 10x the reduced latency.

With architectural tuning, the messages/sec in the various scenarios can be increased 5x (~4M msgs/s) while decreasing the average latency of processing a message to the theoretical minimums of around 5-6 microseconds to get from wire to application memory and back out to wire.

Even with efficient protocol formats (mold64), one reaches ceilings too soon. The fact that the author mentions that they are neither CPU bound or network IO bound leads me to believe that they are probably bound by memory IO and lost efficiencies to context switching.
I think it says something to ux.
I presume this is another way to avoid the infamous Emacs pinky.

What I am currently trying out is sticky keys (on Xfce). I find that it slows me down a bit, but I'm extra careful as well. I still hold my fingers on Control and Shift when doing Copy in Paste in the browser, though.
Russia threatens BuzzFeed with ban in escalated campaign against news outlets
I just reread the HN guidelines (it had been a while), and was surprised that flagging stories is apparently intended to be used more liberally than I had thought. The relevant sentence is:

If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link.

I had been considering story flagging to be used for abuses like blatant spam or flaming, but not merely to express one's personal judgement of whether something is on-topic ("anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity"). Obviously, different people's intellectual curiosities are satisfied by different things, and I had thought that story upvoting was the means to express that judgement.
I was going to post the following (below -----), but I read the stories and they mainly focus on the signup process for Uber. While I still mostly feel like my original post, it is troublesome to hear that Uber employs people with no background check or verification into a job which, if you think about it, entails a trust-relationship not unlike that of a doctor or cleaning lady/man: someone in in an intimate setting who you entrust to care for you. For a doctor it's obvious, a cleaner enters your home, where you trust they don't steal sneakily or assault you. And for a taxi driver who drives you home at night, you expect when you hire through a large company that you're in the hands of a professional you can trust. Not a person who went through background checks/verification/training as much as if you took a random stranger and put them in a car.

So to that extent I'd say Uber has a lot of work to do in its signup process. But beyond that, it still feels like an incident that doesn't justify a post on HN. I wonder what the process is like for regular taxi companies in India and if it's much different. Did you guys remember the Polish woman who was raped earlier this year in a non-uber Indian taxi?

------ original post below -------

As horrible as this is, it's a non-story for me. That's not to say the rape isn't horrible. But we need relevance, we can't just report any horrible fact. About 17k children die each day, it doesn't make sense to fill HN with that daily unless there is some direct relevance. If we didn't have a 'relevance filter', I nor anyone else would visit this particular community anymore.

Now what's the relevance here? Uber? And...?

Imagine an employee from Microsoft raped someone (pretty much 100% guaranteed one of them did in the past decades). Should that be a story we talk about on HN, just because it's bad and because it's a tech company and no other reason? Of course not. So why should it be a story that a non-employee freelance driver rapes someone in a country of over 1 billion people?

Look if this story had a sociological context about gender relations in India that was interesting for HN, sure. I'd love to read about that. My girlfriend was just in India this summer for social work and we chat about this every now and then. If it was a story about gender-violent policies at Uber, sure, that'd be interesting. If this was a story about how Uber attracts disproportionately higher rates of criminal drivers, sure. But there's none of that.

So I don't see the relevance, and without any kind of trend, evidence of bad policies or whatever, it's just a single incident. Shit happens, and without context this is a story that smears a company. I'm no fan of Uber, but there's a lot better things to focus on IF this was an incident.

Anyway I'd be happy to hear otherwise, I could totally be missing something.
From that same page:

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site.
I'm against companies taking over simple words. I think Uber is worse than Apple. Apple is a common noun. In German über is a common modifier. Much more confusing than adopting a noun. I don't think it would fly if Uber started in Germany so I don't appreciate them using the name in English-speaking countries to get started, and having it expand.
DX.com will mail them to you no questions asked. Ive ordered several sets for myself and as gifts.

They aren't super illegal, but they are classified as burglars tools in most places (misdemeanors). I'm not a lawyer nor is this legal advice, but crowbars can be burglars tools too, most things are about context. Unless you get caught breaking into something while in possession of lockpicks, you probably won't have a problem in any other situation (plus many cops are largely ignorant of odd niche laws like these, since most burglaries are more of the opportunistic smash and grab type).

Also, from the hobbyist at-home perspective the chance of encountering any legal problem is almost nil.
But they've also said (IIRC) that if you flag inappropriately, they may remove your flag privs.

So if you flag, but they disagree....
Are you passing messages on the same host? When doing message passing between processes on the same machine, memory mapping and shared memory will be your friends. Check this architecture out for intra-host message passing: https://lmax-exchange.github.io/disruptor/

If you are doing tcp over loopback, the MTU is 64K, IIRC. You should be able to pack more messages per packet. Since you aren't CPU bound, you are probably memory bound.

Also if you on a non-kernelbypass accelerated host, wire-to-application memory takes about 10 micros, so wire-to-memory-to-wire will probably land somewhere around 20 microseconds.
There do exist object-oriented functional languages (Ocaml). Functional vs OOP is a false dichotomy, though a very common one. I prefer to use functional techniques in imperative languages with simple objects.
"Imagine an employee from Microsoft raped someone "

This is somewhat iffy logic. If Microsoft's purported USP was "our OS is way safer than the alternatives" (this is, partly, how Uber positions itself in India[1], which is smart, given the horrible "rape in moving vehicles/by taxi drivers etc" history in India) and then it turned out that Windows was much easier for cybercriminals to hack into and steal your credit cards (than say OSX, which made no such claim) that would be worth discussing on a site about OS es.

Or maybe not. Hence the question.

[1] Uber Delhi used to have this in their marketing copy (emphasis mine) "Uber is New Delhi's best way to request a safe, reliable, affordable ride"