skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The UN's HDI is as fraudulent as pretending PPP GDP is a good way to judge that someone in western China earning $1,000 / month is as well off as someone in Sweden earning $8,000.

It fails to account for a vast number of things that are critically important.

The notion of scoring high on the human development index while living under an extremely repressive dictatorship is more than enough to completely discredit it. Equivalent to the UN allowing Saudi Arabia on the human rights council.

People that have never experienced any meaningful freedom of speech, press or ideas - can have a high HDI? I think that's inherently impossible. What's the value of an education that occurs in the very narrow box of a dictatorship that doesn't allow for freedom of expression, for competing ideas, etc? I say it's worth very little, and it's a cruel joke to rank Cuba so high.

How can anyone properly score Cuba's healthcare system when it almost entirely lacks transparency?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Cuba#Criticism
I couldn't agree more. What gets sold to us as an idea that will reduce "gratuitous" negativity can pretty quickly tun into a tool that censors any valid criticism of YC companies that would have a material negative impact on their portfolio's value.
Relevant. https://xkcd.com/810/
I'm sometimes bothered by the unhelpful cynicism that pops up here and elsewhere, but if I'm bothered more often than I used to be, it's probably more the effect of me getting old than any objective change. Unhelpful cynicism was probably more common in my own comments from five years ago.

Arguing politely (read: effectively) is a skill that takes a long time to learn. These uncultured kids will show up every year, and it would be quite a leap to attribute it to anything but the steady passage of time.
Discussing it is one thing, dismissing anyone who disagrees with you as "the hivemind" is at the very least not constructive, at most actively harmful. Where's the proof of this "destructive behavior"? How are we supposed constructively discuss a problem that hasn't even been proven to exist?

Put another way, it's an extraordinary accusation (HN has a pro-Google bias) that demands extraordinary evidence.

We disagree that insults are ever necessary.
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Slashdot does this.

What generally happens is that instead of one argument about been downvoted/upvoted you end up with even more arguments about whether something is +5 funny or whatever.

I've no idea how you solve this in the general case tbh.
Exactly my thoughts. He should have linked to another article or some sort of table detailing the water quality.

It would also be interesting to know the air quality in that city as well.
"A software monoculture at least gives reviewers a fighting chance of spotting issues with software that might affect the validity of results."

If I understand it correctly, this observation shows just what a short distance we've come in programming languages and software development since the 1960s. Verifying the correctness of a program shouldn't depend on good naming or being able to execute it in your head.
being a cynic with startups and new tech is an easy way to appear wise and correct since ~90% fail, so it is no surprise many take it up as a position as you can appear a genius while offering no actual insight, base it on little actual understanding and it doesn't require much thought.
I think a very interesting question is "why does Cuba have higher life expectancy?"

It might be due to universal healthcare, or it might be that people simply can't afford "bad" food and mostly eat what they're given by the government. And the government doesn't give them fast food, it gives them traditional staples like rice, beans, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Cuba#Health_indi...

Just because the healthcare is universal doesn't mean that it's good. There are differing views of the efficacy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Cuba#Contrasting...

The main criticisms are that the government has the power to first game the statistics or outright manufacture them. And because journalists don't have the freedom to report honestly (repeat negative exposure means no more visas) we don't actually know if the stats are gamed a little or a lot.
Ha ha, this is so cool. Thank you.
I bet then you will be excited to know that the newest ECUs come with built-in GSM modules and OTA update functionality:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Connected-Drive-Glitch-Allows...
>The product is easy to reproduce while the act is not.

The act is getting easier and easier to reproduce, up to a certain basic level - which seems to be good enough for commercial purposes.

The arts have seen an unbelievable explosion of activity. There are more people writing, making art and music, taking photos, creating code, and everything else besides, than ever before - not just by a little, but by an astronomical amount.

The problem is that most of the work is eh-okay. Average-and-worse mediocrity is very easy to fine. Basic entertaining competence is less common, but still not rare.

And that seems to be all most consumers want - hence the success of 50 Shades of Grey, Twilight, and the rest, and their equivalents in other media.

In the past, culture was good at distilling out the extreme talent, so historically the arts have amassed a fine collection of game-changing geniuses, while allowing the eh-okay creators to drop into oblivion.

It's Salieri vs Mozart - commercially Mozart was the loser while alive, but not so much a few centuries later.

Today it's harder to find a Mozart because the modern equivalent is probably working for an ad agency, and has limited time to produce truly game-changing genius-level work.

And it might not sell anyway. And it would probably get lost in the noise even if it did sell.

The answer is probably the much-discussed living wage. Let everyone who wants to make art get on with making art full time, without having to worry about starving or being homeless.

Most of it will suck, some of it will be okay, a little of it will be jaw-droppingly awesome.

tl:dr; It's the socially-enforced dogma that art exists primarily for profit that causes the problems. Get rid of that, and a lot of the issues go away.
I agree; not sure it was a naive reporter or just one looking to report something sensational (truly objective journalism is harder and harder to find).

But I would disagree that even here on this forum a lot of people are really aware of the true environmental impact of tech manufacturing. We've pushed most of that off to remote regions of asia that nobody in the west regularly sees or worries about. We just see the end product, be it finished hybrid or electric vehicles, wind turbines, or the latest gadget conspicuously packaged in recycled paperboard.
You can tell yourself we fight for honor or pride or all that bullshit, but it's always been about money. The question before going into war has always been: how many lives is it worth? i.e. what's the profit?
> Why should I try to interpret comments in the best possible light?

Because doing so contributes to the community and not doing so harms it.

When you respond to the strongest interpretation of a comment, you're responding to what's most substantive in it. That raises the signal/noise ratio for everybody, and curiosity is what we're trying to optimize for.
I see it as a way of ignoring the "just following orders excuse".

You're going to Godwin the thread? Really?

If you do want to make that argument, please consider firstly that the Nuremberg defence failed, in that particular context, because it was considered so obviously inappropriate for the defendants to act as they did just because they were ordered to do so that they should have known better and refused to comply.

Secondly, please also consider that the Nuremberg verdicts stand in stark contrast to normal military discipline in basically every armed service in the world, where refusing to follow a lawful order from a superior officer is grounds for a court martial and potentially a severe punishment.

In particular, the current situation recognised by the International Criminal Court and the 100+ signatory states to the Rome Statute lists only genocide and crimes against humanity as manifestly unlawful, potentially admitting the superior orders principle as a defence in other cases where the defendant believed they were complying with a lawful order. This is even noted in one of the links you gave yourself.

In any case, I would hope we all agree that being instructed to implement a software safeguard against criminal production of counterfeit currency is not on the same scale as being instructed to execute millions of innocent people in gas chambers.
Aside from "this is rubbish" the rest of that sounds very constructive.

Anyone with a product to share should want feedback. Doesn't mean that person needs to act on it.

Also, if you are criticized, take a second to think about it before immediately defending yourself.

The worst Show HN threads are where the OP feels the need to respond to every comment on the board to defend his or her project.

Learn to take the criticism.
The New York Times - www.nytimes.com - New York City, NY - Backend Developers (Java) & Frontend Developers (JS/CSS/HTML)

- Solid understanding of modern web app architecture and design patterns

- Experience with modern dev tools/frameworks (e.g. Git, Grunt, Bower, Gradle, etc)

- Experience writing solid tests (unit, integration and acceptance) using common testing frameworks

- Experience with Agile/XP a huge plus

Send your resume to:

kim dot gardner at nytimes dot com
and rust ?
Dynamic Pricing for in App Games
Well, Apple tried to be a major advertising firm (and still tries) with iAd.

Though I don't know that I'd say that they are such a firm.
Show HN: Status – an automatic away message for your phone
I think you're being a bit optimistic here. Downvotes will happen regardless of how well reasoned your argument is, and they'll come in a hurry if you hold an unpopular opinion on a sensitive/political subject. It's definitely my biggest gripe with HN -- there's too much of a political echo chamber here.
Help Create a Global Co-Working Map
I started keeping track of co-working spaces in the SF Bay Area and then started sharing it with friends.

https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=z9WK9ogceWic.kTRVsPgndUas

I'd like to open it up for others to contribute to. There's different Layers for different cities, and then just drop in a pin with the co-working space's name, address, and URL.
Excited about this. I would love for this to be implemented all over the internet.

It is fairly easy to be negative. In fact, the cynical approach is the easiest point of view you can take. I have been working on this myself, and I encourage everyone to try and go the whole day/week/month practicing the opposite.

I think this has to do with how we are taught. Critical thinking somewhere down the line gave justification to being 'gratuitously negative'. I went my whole life thinking that I was being helpful when in reality I was just hurting people.
It's "the programmers way" to try to come up with some sort of moderation/policing system to solve this. Please do not come up with a moderation system.

There should simply be a confirmation step after hitting submit, reminding the poster that they are valued for their positive contribution and giving the poster the chance to rethink their post and cancel if its too negative. Additionally when posting, require people to self-rate the level of negativity of their post when they submit from one to ten. Publish that number along with the post.

There's nothing at the moment that explicitly asks or reminds people of expectations when they post. What is it that makes you think posters know there is an expectation not to be negative? People don't read the community guidelines every time they post, UNLESS key points of the guidelines are presented to them.

The community moderation system, what it ends up being, will be gamed and abused and alienate and anger people. Don't do it. Witness the toxic mess of StackOverflow.

HN is not in a position right now to express concern about negative posts because it is not explicitly asking people to avoid negative posting, at the time that they post, and requiring the user to think about it. That is step one.

HN would be implementing a passive-aggressive solution by going to an indirect system that continues to allow people to post negatively and then gets the community to police it later. Address it up-front, at the time of posting. Let people be responsible for their own posts. Asked to think it through, posters will dial back the negativity.
thanks i'll check it out. I wasn't thinking to show the stats to others, possibly to provide feedback to the poster that they're 'above average' on the 'mean' or 'not relevant', etc scale.
Released on Apr 1st
It's easy if it's a lifestyle change and not just a diet until you're thin. If you give up cake so that you can lose weight so that you can eat cake again... well, you're gonna have a bad time.
Why does not trading with one country have such a negative effect on Cuba? I dont think if Japan were unable to trade with Russia if would find itself in the same predicament.

They have Europe and all of their natural" trading partners in Latin America.

The us is not the only place they can sell sugar tobacco and bananas. Also why not buy cars from europe or Japan etc? Why must it be american cars?
Not really. Lucid took the money from Lisp sales and invested it into C++. Read it in Gabriel's book.

> As it became practical to put enough gates on a single chip for a Lisp Machine, it would have taken a great deal of adroitness to make the transition, and that wasn't in the cards.

TI developed a single-chip microprocessor. The later TI Explorer and the MicroExplorer were based on microprocessor CPUs. DARPA financed it for the 'Compact Lisp Machine'. Symbolics did the same - they redid the CPU as a microprocessor, the Symbolics Ivory. Many Symbolics machines were based on that chip: XL400, XL1200, XL1201, UX400, UX1200, MacIvory 1/2/3 and the NXP1000. Symbolics did three iterations of the CPU and had a full design of a RISC cpu ready.
You can provide negative feedback in a useful constructive way. I don't get the impression that HN wants you to stop doing that.
I think the bigger problem is what to do with the extra information.

In that light, something like "too far off topic" is probably more useful (I think the too far is good there, as a reminder that things probably ought to range a bit).
The Importance of Naming Your Emotions
I very much doubt that is the main category of comment that the new rule is addressing.
He/she added:

- facts are sometimes downvoted
- it's gotten worse

I don't like being negative, but if you had actually properly read and comprehended the comment rather than downvoting it, that would have been preferable. In fact this is a perfect example of why downvoting doesn't work properly.

PS, I've upvoted both your comments.
> HN will still be a place where actual crap gets called crap

I daresay that this is the problem. When one has the option to say "I think this isn't good from perspective X, because of thing Y", and one says "this is crap", one is being unconstructive and mean.

To say that something that someone did or thought is "crap" or "rubbish", the way I see it, is just needlessly inflammatory. I think a lot of people conflate being inflammatory with being frank and straightforward. "Look at how non-PC I am, I told it like it is!!"

The truth is option A above is just as frank, but much more civil, and isn't creating enmity when there isn't cause for any.
I havent put a lot of thought into an ideal solution to this problem. But heres the best I have so far. Change the definition of karma to capture notability which would be a monotonically increasing number. So when a person mark a comment as notable, it increases your karma score by 1. Seperately have a agree / disagree score per comment whose lifetime is limited to a particular thread. Within a thread a reader can use the agree / disagree scores of comment to selectively read both sides of the debate.
Throw IRCCloud into that list, my go-to IRC client that I've been using for nearly two years.
Great work!

It's amazing just how many arguments reduce to nothing if you discard those that don't apply the principle of charity.
CTO Chris Satchell on Nike's Continuous Delivery Strategy
That's a lot more probable, yeah. I doubt anything were to happen on the end user side to enforce this.
Oh, no question. But by "getting the idea" I mean the intent. Reasonable people are always going to differ on the precise meaning of these terms. That doesn't need to be a problem.
If everyone makes a good-faith effort to avoid gratuitous negativity however they best understand that, HN will be fine.
Author here. As far as I know there is no way to do blur with CSS in IE10+ https://github.com/Schepp/CSS-Filters-Polyfill#a-word-regard... so we must use canvas to be cross-browser.
I've been pointing out problems with Apple and seen little punishment.

Then again I am kind of thoughtful when I do and often make sure to point out that I like Apple, and recommend it to others, -I just personally find their products annoying to use for specific reasons
>How are we supposed constructively discuss a problem that hasn't even been proven to exist?

We can't even begin if people demolish all introspective criticism.

>We disagree that insults are ever necessary.

There's insults like "fuckface" and "idiot," and there's "You're nothing more than a rich white guy whose money makes him feel like his opinions shouldn't be criticized."

Personally I find the second more insulting. Basic namecalling isn't really my concern here as something worth defending. Describing the factual nature of someone's motivations and political manipulation is another matter.
The parallels to other socialist countries are interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_won#History

In the 80s, North Korea issued separate types of "foreign exchange certificates" based on whether you were from a socialist or a capitalist country. Andrew Holloway describes the arcane system in "A Year in Pyongyang." Local currency could buy a few simple things. The red won used by visitors from GDR or USSR could buy substantially more, but the blue won from capitalist countries was at a premium and allowed access to the best shops for tourists.

It reflects the awkward North Korean currency paradox: a hatred for the capitalist West but a deep need for Western capital.

It's fascinating and frustrating to me how much more there is to unwind from the Cold War. Lingering soviet satellites like Cuba, North Korea, Belarus, maybe Vietnam... all very different situations, but each has to grapple with its own basket of leftover problems from that era.

Hopefully Cuba will prove that softening relations provides a way out of some of these dilemmas.
> Put another way, it's an extraordinary accusation (HN has a pro-Google bias) that demands extraordinary evidence.

More to the point, IMO, whether or not discussion of whether or not a hivemind exists in HN and, if so, what its features are is a useful discussion to have in its own right, and whether or not the characterization would be appropriate in some context with appropriate support, that kind of meta discussion is tangential and a distraction to substantive discussion on any thread that is about something other than HN itself, or the social dynamics of online discussion groups, or some similar topic, and so rightly deserves to be directed out of such threads. Failing to do that results in every thread being overwhelmed with self-referential disputes over the nature of the community itself.
The dual currency system is fascinating. When I was there a few years ago almost all of the local business exclusively took CUP, although a few vegetable or meat markets would accept CUC and give CUP in change.

As an American tourist (with a French bank account), we were restricted to taking out CUC exclusively at ATMs, and most tourist-facing places would accept only CUC from us (though a few of the paladares and casa particulares preferred USD). The National Museum for the Arts in Havana, for instance, charged the same price in CUC as CUP but only accepted CUC from us (25x the "locals rate").
I agree. This reminiscent of a manager that wants to make a mark by creating arbitrary, vague rules out of the blue.

This a community. Was there a "we think we may have a gratuitous negativity problem" discussion?

Thin end of the wedge, perhaps. I hope not.

(From the article) "Too much gratuitous negativity might be the difference between someone giving up on a crazy idea and building the next Airbnb."

If negative, anonymous feedback here disuades and disenchants them, what hope is there?

Are we going to have a Safe Place section of the site, to protect applicants from all bad things?

Bad things happen. Mean people will say mean things on the Internet. Life is hard.
I don't have a strong opinion on whether that'd work, but it sounds a lot like the Slashdot comment moderation system. Perhaps someone with a good level of experience of posting on Slashdot can help shed some light on how it works out in practice.
Quick way to destroy a CD or DVD if you don't have a shredder is to pop it in the microwave for a few seconds.

I have been gravely disappointed by the durability of optical media, particularly DVDs. At least in terms of resistance to accidental damage, in my experience video cassettes were far superior.
Working as a programmer but like game programming on my spare time. But I'm still a novice game developer. But it's fun :)
> I know that the hw had assembly instructions that mapped almost one-to-one to Lisp primitives.

In my example you see the assembly. You can see how much 'one-to-one' it was...

The C compiler compiled to Lisp and then to machine code. Same for Pascal. For Ada, I don't know.
Fun stuff.

But why only take n up to around 4 million? Not too long ago, I was able to compute the billionth Fibonacci number on a pretty ordinary machine, using a Haskell implementation of the fast doubling method. (The number took 20 minutes to print out in my console window.)

By the way, I did a Python implementation, too. And I learned that GHC large-integer multiplication is a lot faster than CPython large-integer multiplication. I wonder why. (No, it has nothing to do with dynamic typing; almost all of the time is going to be spent executing internal integer-multiplication routines written in C.)
Your comment is bad and you should feel bad. :)

Niceness/meanness is more often than not entirely subjective, relative, and arbitrary. Trying to create an objective definition for a subjective concept is going to end in frustration for a lot of people.

Personally, I started frequenting HN mostly because the community was not only smaller, but also more up-front about its opinions. I've come to expect and appreciate a blunt, direct criticism from the folks here, and would hate to see even the harsher end of that go away. The Theo de Raadts and Linus Torvadses of the world say "mean" things sometimes, but 93.8% of the time, those "mean" things need to be said.
A related issue is people downvoting comments that they haven't properly comprehended. Instead of asking "why do you think x" or "do you mean x" they just downvote the comment. Sometimes it happens with controversial comments, even when the controversial comment is based on facts. Sometimes going against HN groupthink (e.g. saying something bad about libertarianism) results in downvotes.

EDIT: I'm surprised that I got a downvote on this comment. I think that illustrates the problem.
IMO there's a noise problem in Show HN, so I tend to avoid the section. Not that people are building lousy projects (probably the opposite), but most projects just aren't particularly relevant to me. When so many people are submitting projects, I'd only ever be interested in maybe 1 project out of every page.

Meanwhile in Ask HN, I click on about 5-10 links at any given time.