skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't help but see your comment as a symptom of the problem it's describing. Not trolling, but geek bias... specifically the blind spot of assuming everyone is as sincere as you.

The big problem with comment sections isn't "trolling", it's that most people aren't there to have a fair, rational discussion in the first place. They are there to be entertained or distracted, that will be the main motivation of people doing the browsing. They want to see their opinions and choices validated, while uncomfortable and inconvenient facts are hidden or mocked. At minimum they will avoid anything that reflects badly on themselves and where they can't shift the blame easily. See for example the latest wave of "criticism = harassment" in news sections and on Twitter, where being called out for saying stupid things in public is frantically derided as "sea lioning" which must be stopped.

So trying to fix comment sections behaviorally does not work because they stop being comments. At most you can do something like StackOverflow, which follows a strict Q&A format and bans repetition. It's not really a forum, it's a wiki of googleable questions, and like Wikipedia, is mostly unappealing and unwelcoming to outsiders with fresh ideas.

Besides, the appropriate answer is not to censor and hide, but to confront and refute. You want bad ideas to be catalogued and paired with their antidote, not let people remain blissfully unexposed, their mental immune system ready to overreact to the slightest provocation. The only forums I know of where everyone gets along with everyone are echo chambers. In real discussions somebody's toes always get stepped on. Real names do not help there btw, people still make plenty of dumb comments with their face next to it, it only helps the offendees play the victim card.

I think your "inevitable descent into trolling" is a bad description of how intellectual forums grow their audience: they become more superficial, more emotionally driven and more focused on presentation than merit. Like TED talks. But if you don't grow, you stagnate and turn into an echo chamber. Neither is desirable, you can only try to grow responsibly. You have to allow disruptive voices no matter what.
Try taking my dessert away from me sometime!
15 years and Perl 6 is still "just around the corner"
Does anyone care anymore ?

Perl is largely irrelevant, killed off by the advent of better scripting languages.
The inordinate length of time that the incompatible Perl 6 has taken has not earned it any friends either.
The evidence for the longer life spans of eunuchs is actually pretty thin. Endocrinology textbooks regard it as unconvincing.

What is very clear though is the association in non-eunuchs of low T levels with a host of very harmful medical conditions including heart disease and osteoporosis.

Studies have consistently shown Low T is associated with these conditions and many more, but the evidence that T fixes them is unconvincing.

From my extensive review of these studies the problem is that the studies were too small and that those running the studies were too often, like too many people doing medical research, statistically illiterate.
It looks like they're at least trying to muddle the concepts of an ISP and a search engine. But I found the complaint to be overall pretty hard to parse.
Exactly. And wouldn't this mean that all telephony services carried over the internet wouldn't fall under Title II, which defies common sense?
Same with any cash business. If you don't have volume or capital as a risk mitigation you shouldn't be engaged in it.
The problem with MetaFilter's moderation is that it is both heavy-handed and entirely opaque.

If they decide a comment is unacceptable, for whatever reason, it is simply erased from history. The poster is not informed this has happened, nor told why.

There are two enormous disadvantages to this model - it doesn't encourage commenters to improve the quality of what they post, and it ultimately creates an atmosphere of mistrust, from those who have been silently black-holed.

The Reddit model of public votes is better, even when layered with admin moderation, because at least users can see what is happening, and why.
I know there's got to be a lot more involved with buying/owning an island than just coming up with the money (a boat, for one), but it's fun to think about the fact that you can buy an island in Maine for roughly what a decent house costs around a lot of major cities in the US.

Granted, the really nice islands with really nice houses on them will cost a heck of a lot more, but it's still fun to think about.
They used to separate kids at every corner - thus the various school types. Same for Austria. This is ca. 2-3 decades ago. ADHD was unknown. Kids that had consistent learning problems would keep repeating classes until they reached the minimum age at which they would train at vocational/trade schools.
Of course COBOL, though it has packed decimals, doesn't have general rational numbers. Zetalisp (aka Lisp Machine Lisp) was the first language I know of that had general rationals (ratios of two arbitrary-precision integers).
Aaaand this is why we can't have nice things.

It's really hard to protect freedom of speech with folks like this saying these things. :(
The Economist's recent article on net neutrality and common carriage is fascinating and related: http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21641201-why-network-n...

Part of the interesting piece is the history of "common carriage": "The idea that certain businesses are so essential that they must not discriminate between customers is as old as ferries. With only one vessel in town, a boatman was generally not allowed to charge a butcher more than a carpenter to move goods. This concept, called 'common carriage', has served the world well, most recently on the internet."

I've never doubted my support for net neutrality, and the legal history of "common carriage" makes this even more obvious.
I harbour a vision to live a location independent lifestyle, which almost of necessity would require some element of homeschooling (though I shared here yesterday why this part hasn't moved from vision to strategy yet [1]).

That means keeping my eyes open for any similar experiences, and I've recently fallen in love with these guys [2] because they're the first "family nomads" I've come across who also talk about managing a mortgage back home etc (most people on a permanent holiday are singles in their 20s and 30s - I need assets, not cheap laundry tips).

This article in particular looks at the challenges they've overcome, and extensive research they've found, in deciding positively to homeschool their children abroad - http://www.escapingexpectations.com/are-homeschooled-kids-de...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8994656
[2] http://www.escapingexpectations.com/

[Edit] Let me also add, in case he's too modest to, Karl's excellent homeschool resource site Learn in Freedom - HN context and link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5094480
Laphroaig does something like this for their fan club. Sign up and you get a plot of land for life on their grounds. For rent they will pay you a dram whisky annually, but you have to go collect it in person. They are located on the Isle of Isley off the coast of Scotland, so unfortunately I haven't been able to collect my rent yet. Hopefully someday.
Stores and the law are set up as if there is a real distinction between recreational and medical cannabis. It's sort of silly because it is all the same strains, grown by the same people who are growing it for the black market 10 years ago, or still may be. There are some legitimate true medical strains, like the ones high in CBD or CBN. As far as your standard cannabis though, the goals of people growing your average medical cannabis are exactly the same as the recreational… Make it as potent (high THC by weight) and flavorful as possible. At this point stores use the quality and price difference to try to encourage you to sign up through their clinic service, which they make money from. Medical in CO is about like a club you buy into.

Here in Colorado, the best thing to do is to still just go to my friends house, where I can get an ounce as good or better as the highest quality medical available, for 50 or $100 less with no government involved - just like 10 years ago but cheaper and higher quality.
Keeping tabs on bestseller books and reading habits
Well of course one cannot prove that global financial collapse would not have followed from a decision not to "make whole" some of the various counterparties of AIG and some other failing institutions. (Perhaps some would say that we got something of a GFC even with those heroic efforts?) Neither can one prove that pension and other benefits defaults on the part of two of the fourteen automakers with factories based in USA would not have had some knock-on effects beyond the retirees of those two companies. We don't get to react to the same economic situation twice. Those who staked their reputations on the interventions aren't going to publicly regret them. Likewise, those who at the time worried more about the long term have seen nothing to change their minds.

But that is just my point. There is no empirical reason to believe or disbelieve in 2B2F. There are myriad political reasons to do both. Not all questions must be answered, and if this is the only sort of answer available, I'll pass.
Ta-Nehisi Coates's commentary is explicitly political and ideological, and those ideological affinities defined the limits of acceptable discourse in his comments section. You may or may not be sympathetic to those politics (I am, to a degree), but here's another way to describe what made this 'the best comment section on the Internet': it intentionally excluded any viewpoint too far outside the mainstream of the community (and, contra the author's implication, those comments were not necessarily racist trolling).

A similar phenomenon happens on HN; the community centers itself around a particular set of values or opinions, and opinions which differ too radically from the center are very effectively marginalized - like a wave losing strength as it ripples outward. This allows for productive discourse, but explicitly describing the benefits of collective censorship as such makes some people uneasy.

(It's important, then, to ensure that you participate in communities with many different "opinion loci".)
http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2015... , page 3, first paragraph.

Thanks for the downvote.
The avalanche has already begun, it is too late for the pebbles to vote.

Everyone knows it as Perl 6. Therefore, everyone who would write about it after this proposed name change would say "formerly known as Perl 6," so that people know what you're talking about. All the conceptual baggage remains.

(And the reason the Perl name is a boat anchor is because someone hooked a chain to it and sank it to the bottom of the ocean. Perl didn't die from natural causes, Perl was killed by neglect - neglect caused because Perl 6 was always right around the corner and why sink more effort into maintaining Perl 5 than was absolutely necessary? So now OG Perl is stuck on 5.x from now until the heat death of the universe, because this project poisoned the well.)
React Native provides the React way of managing the UI and provides a bridge to Objective-C (and Java, once they've released the Android version). It doesn't provide JS bindings to all of the host APIs in a cross-platform way, so you can't just build a full featured app in JS and run it elsewhere.

Plus, the React people stress that you should use custom UI on each platform. The key is that you get to build the UI using the techniques that work so well for the web.
hmm :3
Extensive discussion on front page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8999644
At glance I read "Aging Boners"
Finally the Difference Between All Those Rental Car Startups Explained
I think the value proposition of Disqus is just comparatively low maintenance. You include a snippet of JS and you get a minimally functional commenting system that includes antispam and requires running no backend server software or security risks. In return Disqus gets analytics and a little bit of ad space. It's not imo going for discussion, it's meant to be flypaper for readers who get a good-feelings boost thinking they're being heard, so it's a monetization tool more than anything. The extreme end of this is Youtube comments, which accumulate so fast and so voluminously that actual discussion is near impossible, and the limited nesting actively fights replying. You can't follow anything. But millions of people pile their worthless comments into the void because it feels good to have your say. Old, crusty ugly forums are better for conversation than new, shiny JS comment systems because they were actually made for conversation, that was their raison d'etre.

Have you tried Discourse? It's almost as good as the hype.

So this is kind of related. I've been reading OSNews since the very beginning, and I really, really love it. It used to beat out Slashdot for me, which is about the highest praise I could give a site. In large part it's because it covered stuff I couldn't see anywhere else and the commenters were positive and knowledgeable. But in the last few years there are so many articles about non-OS political stuff, which in turn causes fighting in the comments. Don't underestimate that the types of articles published determines the type of commenters :-(
Another factor often forgotten is that HRT very poorly mimics the natural testosterone fluctuations in the body.

Testosterone fluctuates on a regular daily cycle, the reason for which is not known. Therefore it is not reproduced in treatment. The assumption is "we don't know why, so it mustn't be important".

Also the typical cycle of quarterly shots of T undecanoate or other similar regimes produce unphysiological fluctations from one injection to the next of over 110%. The patient goes from very high levels of test (close to 1000ug/dl) to very marginal levels (around 350).

Perhaps because of this, side effects from taking T supplements, such as hematocrit (excess red blood cell volume) are far greater with supplements than with those experiencing the same level of T from endogenous sources.
8 lines of code
If only Americans were separating themselves into merely two distinct groups. From what I can tell, it's more like they're separating themselves into about 320 million different groups. And everyone hates everyone else, and if you think the elites aren't fanning the flames of this with every tool at their disposal, then you really haven't been paying attention.

The buckets you're talking about are an illusion. "Clash of cultures" is bullshit - it doesn't exist. Let's assume for a minute that I'm not very unique, and so these opinions I hold are common, and try to figure out what it means:

If I think transgender people by definition have gender dysphoria, does that make me an intolerant bigot? What if I also think that if an operation is the best way to relieve them of the stress of that condition, then they should have the operation? And if I also support universal health care, so that I think the state should end up paying for that operation, well now I can't tell if I'm supposed to be an intolerant bigot or a bleeding heart or what.

If I think that, strictly speaking, a person does actually choose to be gay, in the sense that the state of their mind is informed by both physiological and psychological factors (like just about anything else), does that also make me an intolerant bigot? What if I also think that, well, if it's a choice, it's still a person's right to make that choice, just like they ought be able to marry whoever the hell they want and otherwise be totally unaffected by that decision, seeing as how it has absolutely no consequences to anything at all other than what happens in that person's bedroom, which is of course nobody's fucking business.

A lot of LGBT people will take great offense at what I've written, despite all of my relevant policy goals pretty much aligning exactly with theirs. And, likewise, few people in the family values camp will be able to find much common ground with me, even though I've echoed some of where they are coming from culturally. So, what am I?

Well, I'm a member of homo sapiens from the planet Earth, like everyone else, and if everyone could just shut the fuck up for a minute and keep that in mind when they interact with other human beings - and I'm glaring now mainly at the far Left and the Religious Right - we'd have approximately half the problems globally that we have now, and we'd be giving the psychopaths at the top of our social order a lot less leverage against us, which is also probably a good thing.
Fuel your Business Growth with these awesome tools
I would have reached out personally to the CEO, instead of publicly shaming.
Your comment reminded me of this HN post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6395148
Show HN: Fireballs in the Sky – Meteor sightings app
I have never understood this 'No ReSharper,...' argument. I've been writing C# for 10 years and the times I've used ReSharper it's just got in the way and is slow as hell. Effective C# development doesn't require ReSharper. CodeRush? I have literally never heard of it. So again, clearly not essential. No Roslyn? What? No C# compiler? Of course F# doesn't have Roslyn. Until very recently C# developers didn't have Roslyn either and they managed to develop software just fine. So clearly not a deal breaker.

F# is a fine language, and because of its heritage doesn't come with the mistakes that were built into C# because of its C++/Java heritage. 'Better' is clearly subjective. I subjectively find F# better than C#.

The OP is clearly interested in machine learning and the like, which would be much, much, easier in F# than either C# or C++ (not that they can't do it, mind).
hello - pierre from sunrise here
we wish we could use a better scope just for milestones in github but unfortunately in order to have milestones and issues in Github API we need to ask for the private repo.
https://developer.github.com/v3/oauth/#scopes
feel free to ask Github about that too :)
I don't think saying you don't agree with him means he's stupid.
Controllers and Views in Go
It Took Four Million E-Mails to Get the FCC to Set Net-Neutrality Rules
What am I missing here? How does seeing tweets (unless they are intelligently selected) help me when searching for something on Google?

As of late: I only rely on Google for finding the best place to get an answer for a question I know exists in reliable places for the subject matter (re: programming, cooking, etc.). If I suddenly start seeing tweets in my search results, how does that improve my search experience?

The immediate exception that comes to mind would be related to real-time events, but even then...how much value can 140 characters be for the website that has indexed "everything?"
Health insurer Anthem has been hacked – 80M records
I wish I could have done this too. Braces were painful and actually scarred the inside of my cheeks. I can actually feel where the wires sliced my cheeks.

Something similar, in another domain, is PocketDerm. They are also pretty cheap, and hopefully a good sign of things to come: cheaper access to specialists for simple problems.
This sounds like trying to make it illegal for Uber to own a telephone number because they are operating an illegal taxi service. It doesn't make sense. Go after the company in court, don't attempt to find ways around the court system.
Discussion on front page yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8992376
May one accumulate the rent over the years? Because I could see visiting there after several decades …
While the main point of the article is interesting, some of the details don't really make sense.

For example, it would be difficult to make an instruction like fyl2x or fadd cause a privilege level change. The reason is that floating point instructions are executed on a separate unit (the FPU), with a separate decoder. This unit would not have the means to communicate back information such as "change privilege level" (normally it can only signal floating point exceptions, and other than that its only output is on the floating point registers). It would make more sense to encode the backdoor on an illegal opcode, i.e. an opcode that under normal conditions would generate a UD# exception, but with the correct values in the registers it would trigger some undocumented behavior.

Another question is how to hide this backdoor in the microcode. Presumably, at some point someone might stumble upon the backdoor and ask around about it. If the backdoor depends on some "magic values", it would be relatively easy to spot just by looking at the microcode.

There's also the point that the author mentioned of "fixing" the processor at some point during the production process. I don't think that the author understands the way mass production of microchips works. It's very much not possible to do something like this while keeping the production price on the same level (or someone noticing this extra step in the production process).

All in all, it sounds much easier to find security bugs in other parts of the system.
I remember that one! I was actually visiting Maine when it was posted, so it certainly got me thinking.

Even if buying an island isn't in the cards, it really is a beautiful place, and worth a visit.

Oh, and poutine and cheap lobster rolls everywhere.
In the past on Metafilter, if there were some unacceptable comments they were deleted but the moderator would add a comment that simply restated what was not allowed and asking people to stay civil. I think this can actually work really well, because it doesn't shame the people moderated and they can move forward without feeling personally slighted. This is in stark contrast to the person's name next to a big [DELETED] or Boingboing's mocking "disemvowelment".
It's $235 because students get student loan money and compared to $24,000 a year for an undergraduate education it's rounding error in a system structured to separate students from their loan checks. College is an experience to be consumed...that's how the meat hangs on "run more like a business".
Discussion on front page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8999644
The good thing is that flavor of homeschooling is fairly rare. Growing up my parent were involved in a fairly rare/fringe homeschooling movement (IBLP/ATI) that espoused all the things that ika8god mentioned. Out of the ~30 families in our area homeschool coop I think only 4 were that far out.
I (fellow Aussie) picked it up when living in London a few years back. We'd kind of been inculcated into the whole "the UK does Gastronomy" thing so it didn't seem weird, but it would take more Heston and less Buscopan in Australia before it would take off here.

Interestingly, the first Gastropub I ate at was owned by Guy Ritchie. I figured it had to be good, since he named a film after my favourite food...
We do transmit "changes" to large files in 10 MByte chunks. In other words, if 1 byte changes in a 50 MByte file it SHOULD only transmit one single 10 MByte chunk.

The absolute worst case for Backblaze is if you insert a single byte at the start of a large file. This "shifts" the entire file along by the one byte, effectively changing every single 10 MByte chunk.

The BEST case is if you append a single byte to a large file, because the final chunk then is probably less than 10 MBytes.

I actually thought we would be working on that area quite a bit over the years but it kind of worked well enough. :-) Most people don't edit large files, with the exception of Outlook.pst files, we see those appear as bandwidth burners.
I guess even the offline thing may not be a problem as long as the messages are in a room that is hosted over an always-on server. The bundled server will be able to sync up its history from the always-on server.
I am on 4.4.4 (Samsung though). The default calendar and email apps are still on there. Doesn't Nexus remove the default Android browser and replace it with Chrome too?