skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good stuff, but doesn't Hack language also solve this need? I'd guess a more likely route is PHP shops switching to Hack than to Haskell.
This appears to be prompted (EDIT: related to) by my discussion in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9317028 .

As I mentioned there, it may be helpful to explicitly differatiate negativity vs. gratuitous negativity in that case. (Most examples of gratuitous negativity I've seen are low effort "this site sucks" comments, which are downvoted for reasons unrelated to negativity, and ad hominem attacks are already covered in the guidelines.)
Could anyone develop some arguments for "gratuitous negativity". An attempt would focus on the adjective "gratuitous" which contains a lot of subjective bias and could be interpreted this way or that way depending who rules the domain.

Moreover one can claim "gratuitous positivity" is the bigger danger.
For sure. I am guilty of it too. It's rather counterproductive (myself included) to get sucked into various "America starts wars" or global warming discussions. Healthy political debate is great but unless it's extremely relevant to tech/startups, this isn't the place. Plenty of space on Reddit for heated religion or politics debates.

I am not so egotistical as to think this policy change was because of me, but I certainly, at times contributed to the fray, especially in political oriented threads. In terms of Show HN, I really think that constructive criticism is helpful, but also encouragement and praise is equally important. We should be rooting for our HN community, not trying to snipe or tear people down. The rest of the world is already really good at that!

I welcome the reminder to seek the best from each other and build each other up as a good mentor would do. No smoke-up-ass platitudes, but certainly we should think of ourselves as part of a huge team out to change the world and do something amazing.
He definitely sounds like he formulated his opinion before he visited, and then shaped what he saw into an article justifying that opinion.

You can tell because of all the presumptions he makes and suggestions that he never backs up with fact.
You are right. I read this somewhere, something along the lines ... that when you disagree with someone, you should first make sure to repeat and restate the arguments of the opponent you disagreeing with, in your own words, before making any of your own arguments.
What would be the advantage of owing dollars over euros when they control neither and dollars are gaining value?
The guidelines aren't asking you to behave like Pangloss and think everything is perfect. It asks if you do have criticism then address it respectfully and constructively.
The problem is, the linked "article" is not the article.

This is the article: https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?org=NSF&cntn_id=13466...
You could have done the recent Heterogeneous Parallel Programming MOOC ( https://class.coursera.org/hetero-004 ).
I agree with this. Conflating disagreement with downvoting seems to be mixing unrelated concerns. It is currently inconvenient (in karma terms) to hold dissenting opinions.
> It applies to all content, because there's so much competition for limited attention and the tools to produce content are so widely accessible.

What isn't widely accessible however are the tools needed to filter and find the content a user might like/need, which is now far more important to a work's success than any other factor.
This wasn't prompted by any recent discussion. It has been a long, long time coming.
Ask HN: Is there an A/B test service for developers?
I'm looking for something one level more abstract than Optimizely or SendWithUs that makes it easy for non-developers to start a test, add variants, and view results, but has a developer focused api for integrating a test with webpages, emails, and mobile apps, and reporting results.

As a developer, I'd like more control over the performance impact of running a test on web and mobile apps, and the opportunity to validate emails and webpages after pulling in test variants to guard against misconfiguration.

Does anything like this exist as either a paid service or an open source project?
Ask HN: P2P co-signing services?
Are people here willing to co-sign loans, rental applications, etc. for other people if they are shown info from facebook/linkedin/credit profiles?
Why or why not?
The first link is a low-quality comment / ad hominem, the second link is off-topic / ad hominem. Both of those were already against the rules.
I'm very glad to see this idea turning into a community mechanism. HN has some great minds, and I love seeing the solutions they come up with to problems. It's a very technical, analytical, and rational community.

Unfortunately, some of the qualities that make a good technical problem solver can also lead to nitpikcing. It feels like trying to find the bugs in an argument. That can be useful, but only when it ties to the core idea rather than some tangential point. Top comments often sound like, "Well, technically, you're wrong on this one unimportant fact you mentioned briefly."

I'm glad HN is taking steps to ensure that feedback is constructive.
very good.

do you get to build a portfolio through the nano degree program?

Which of the three nanodegrees did you find most useful? Does the full stack and front-end nanodegrees cross over? doesn't the full stack not cover front-end stuff?

The data-analyst is really interesting, do you need to brush up on statistics and such before you get into it?

Did you receive offers for data analyst/scientist positions?

How did you land job offers?

Does udacity teach how to perform on technical interviews?

Did you pay $600/month for all three nano degrees?

Basically I want to take it to learn all the stuff. I already have worked as a developer but just want an complete upgrade (been a LAMP dev for too long).
A rare LHC tour
This isn't a general news forum. The history of this board is not one of general news but items of specific interest and relevance to startups.
Sorta feel like there needs to be more teeth to this than simply guidelines based.

@SamA what more "severe" approaches did you consider and why did you decide they wouldn't work? This is a difficult challenge.
You chose an example of copyright, which is the most complicated and controversial example you could have chosen, in order to make a claim about about the general idea of ownership. Why not choose one of the other 99% of things that we purchase?

>But you aren't allowed to make copies of that disc. And you absolutely can't makes copies and then sell the copies. You can't even use that disc whenever and whereever you want. For example you can't play that disc through stadium speakers at a sporting event. Nor can you use host a concert and play parts of that album. You can't do it to mix with other music and you can't even play it directly.

You can own a knife, but still not be allowed to stab people with it. That's materially different than owning a computer or car and not being able to look at the inside, modify it, or repair it.
Sounds like GC pauses. Next to unavoidable in javascript unfortunately.
You CAN actually do all the things that you write down.

But it has consequences depending on the law if you don't have a license to do it.

Some of the things you say, like making copies of my own disc is totally legal in countries like Spain. It is illegal to distribute them.

In fact, in a democracy if more than 50% per cent of the people consider that they could do something, they can do it, think on the Prohibition.

If those in power reject the majority, they could be kicked out.
With regards to security and privacy, Feinstein is a hypocrite, scab of puss and utter filth.
Hah! This is excellent and exactly what I see happening out in the real world. People don't like the unpleasantness and turmoil of disagreeable ideas and people with those ideas, and so the solution is not to burst the comfortable down-pillow bubble of their existence, but to pad it further by "eliminating" "negativity". Even better considering who gets to decide what constitutes "negativity". Fantastic job, guys. Bravo.

Edit: There are some salient points here about downvoting and how it's affected the community, and I am extremely interested in how "to turn more moderation power over to the community" is going to compound the problem of incentivizing positive-only feedback, id est if and how this "community moderation" mechanism will couple with downvoting to make disagreeing even more hazardous.
The Master Writer of the City
I agree, I see so many comments downvoted to oblivion simply because the comment betrays a lack of rockstar ninja coding ability even without being egregiously wrong. Downvoting should be reserved for trolling, bullshit, and objectively wrong information.
Right. Trolls aside, everyone thinks their negativity is completely appropriate...
How is repair and modification a red herring? It's commonplace to repair or augment vehicles with third-party aftermarket parts. Do you think we should live in a world where you must buy spare parts from the original manufacturer? Because that's where this ends up if they get to exercise this level of control.
No, that's one of the exceptions that both the law and most people agree with.
This is great, my only (unconstructive) complain is why you didn't start with this before :)
I disagree with the presentation a lot.

* There's no widely used successful system written in Haskell. Yes, there's GHC, Agda, Idris and other research tools but they are marginal.

* It's untrue that mutable state is the main reason of problems with code. You can manage state in Java and C# in any other language.

* Haskell programmers are usually smarter than Java programmers, but they often don't want to work on tasks which they aren't very interested in, which are almost non existent, or have little business meaning.

* Haskell, actually has a lot of design flaws. The worst of them is the scope of record fields.
I agree about the downvoting. The harm it's doing has increased in recent months, and it's common to see perfectly reasonable satements of fact (much less opinions) that someone else doesn't like be downvoted. It's discouraging to see when it's not even your comment, and really offputting when it is.

It's gotten to a point that I'm not sure downvoting is a net positive for the community any more.

EDIT- example, this comment was downvoted in less than 2 minutes after it was posted. Did this voting improve the conversation or the community?
I think you're right! It's difficult to communicate tone and other 'out of band' stuff through text. This is what Wikipedia's "Assume good faith" guideline is to addresses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith
Interesting points. It may not have been clear, but I kind of glossed over the idea that this would be a standard. So, for example, perhaps embedded in HTTP headers like Content-Type values.

So, I was being lazy in terms of the details, but to be fair I wasn't trying to be too technical.

Also, I may not understand the point, but I get the impression that a meta browser would make it so "cats can be cats" without the need to herd them, and without worrying that non-compliance could potentially disrupt innovation.

The meta browser would (in my mind) become the new browser, and all the meat that you get in Chrome, FF, IE would be encapsulated behind the scenes.

So it certainly would not be a trivial project (although I agree on the surface having a meta app whose only purpose was to encapsulate another application would be somewhat trivial) the ideal scenario would call for standardized apis that the meta app could interface with the browsers so things like browser preferences could be integrated in the top-level, and each app underneath would be able to read from that same set of options. Of course each browser would need to have name-spaced options as well for things that weren't globally recognized / standardized, but those kinds of problems I think have fairly straightforward answers at this stage.
I agree that we should try to reduce "this is a stupid idea" comments, but does that include "this doesn't belong on HN" comments?
This is actually easier than you think currently. Most muscle cars (like mustangs/camaros) allow you to change your rear end gearing. Different size rear end gear ratios are different factory options. There are programmers that allow you to tell your computer what gear ratio you running so your speedometer is correct. There are also changes that can be made for bigger/smaller diameter tires. You could change the computer's gear ratio setting and tire size setting. Your speedometer would be way off but you'd also be accumulating fewer miles. It's not directly modifying the mileage of the car, but over time the numbers of miles on the car would be far lower than what they really were. Then once you sell or trade-in the car, just set the settings back to the original ones.
What benefit would why I have to co-sign someone else's car loan? I don't get to drive their car... But if they defaulted, I would be on the hook.
How about having two OSes on the camera? One will be minimal, just as it is now, to take pictures, and the other one will be an Android like OS to be able to do things like modifying the pictures. The camera would have a dual boot, so when you turn it on, you decide if you want to boot the "take picture" OS that is kept minimal for stability, or the Android one if you want to do something else with the camera.
" I really do kinda hate you people."

Seems you have broken this rule:

http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-hacker-news-guideline
I think you nailed the real problem, which is that people have become so quick to write off anyone who ruffles their feathers at all.

Drew Houston describes the HN feedback he received for Dropbox as all the motivation he needed to keep going. He also explained that he knew it was a hit because of how many people were saying negative things.

Today though, any truly critical comment means you're either a hater or a troll. Every person is either a friend or an enemy. Inside the club or outside the club. You can't sincerely like something, and also be very critical about aspects of it, without instantly transforming into a jealous hater.

Assuming the worst about other people is probably the most negative thing you can do. Everyone is a mixed bag.
Can you see why this is a complete strawman? You just claimed that, because a completely random algorithm would be "fast" but incorrect, then there is no tradeoff between being fast and being correct.

What cbsmith makes complete sense:

The advantage of trading stupider, but slightly faster, than the other guy is too huge.

This does not mean choosing at random, it means we are greatly advantaging simplistic algorithms that are just barely good enough.

The fitness landscape for these algorithms hasn't been designed by computer scientists, it just kinda happened through circumstance. As society gets more computerized, this sort of explicit design of computational spaces will become increasingly important.
But the context wasn't people saying we shouldn't have sympathy, but that they should be illegal.
Yeah, sure, your average end-user is totally going to do that.

That's the difference between the two scenarios. A sysadmin will know what to look for and will know how to appropriately react to it. Your average end user probably doesn't know, care, or know how to react to it. And a built-in browser implementation will never happen because all the major companies have it in their best interests not to implement such a feature. If that weren't the case, we'd have had that feature long ago.
> I mean, what if Linus hadn't posted what he did when he did about his little "toy" OS, and what if several others hadn't started sending patches?

In addition to what's been said about BSD and Hurd, Minix could also have spawned a directly related Free Software variant (Torvalds had access to Minix and used it but Linux isn't really based on it), and someone else entirely could have done essentially the same thing as Torvalds.

Torvalds and, therefore, Linux was in the right place at the right time in multiple respects, but others were pretty damned close, and could have been there had Linux not existed.

> What if VMS had been subject to the same licensing quirk that UNIX was and was able to be produced by many vendors and eventually and Open Source version? Would we be using "Livax" today?

In fact, there is a FreeVMS project: http://www.freevms.net/

It's perfectly legal to copy APIs and the "look and feel" of an OS.
Spending my formative years in Las Vegas as a youth I was really impressed how good the dealers were at catching fake bills. Lots of people seemed to assume that because of the rapid pace of the gambling such things would get missed. I was playing poker at Circus Circus and one of the players put down a $100 bill and said, "chips please" and the dealer looked up and said "Well once we get a real $100 I'd be happy to." The argument was short, the player looked affronted and the dealer said simply, "You can insist and we'll detain you for the police, or you can take your fake money elsewhere." Very surreal. It is entirely possible the person was a "known" bad bill passer or something but it really impressed me.

Of course Steve Wozniak having $2 bills made into pads so that he could peel them off the pad and pay with them always cracked me up. That was the case where the cashiers always assumed they were fake, but in fact they were legal bills. Very hilarious.
I'd imagine that such a bank of tests would be helpful in tuning performance too. Though perhaps the reality of each tweak only contributing a fraction of a percent would be considered depressing compared with the standard practice of saying that a microbenchmark is now 2x or 4x faster.
Also - potentially interesting but controversial threads in which the first post is inevitably blotted out into oblivion. This to me is a sure sign that the fade effect of downvoting doesn't work as intended, either to prevent people from making such comments, or to prevent others from engaging them in conversation by making it slightly difficult to read them.
Dang dude this is super impressive. How did you get started learning how to create games like this?
According to what moral framework are you precisely defining "respectfully" and "constructively"?

There are plenty of examples in the world where bringing up logical, concise, and polite criticism invokes the wrath of a cabal of power-holders and social media demagogues, especially in a world that promotes the postmodern idea of "interpretation, not intent, is reality"
There's a good chance this will be sufficient. If HN discourse doesn't improve I'm sure sama and others will try something else (perhaps with more teeth, perhaps a software change).
It didn't really do jack squat. People weren't going to respect it anyway, so what Microsoft did couldn't possibly have changed their mind.
SAS a bit, but as another comment notes, nothing like CRAN. SPSS not at all, at best you could publish some sort of script.
Obviously, I meant below the application layer.
Key safety systems have passive modes that work regardless of the software. Steering and brakes are among these. You might lose the power assist, but you can still steer and stop.

Killing the brakes on a car would require mechanical interference/sabotage, not just software hacking.
Clojure Success Stories

http://cognitect.com/clojure#successstories
Good example, thanks.
True, it isn't a publishing platform. I assumed it was blog platform du jour. I missed your last point, for that I apologize.
disagreeing with the hivemind

Using terms like "the hivemind" (which doesn't exist) is actually a good example of the thing the new guideline covers!
XOR is only one implementation of one time pad, it is also commonly used with modular addition. If you do it with letters then it effectively becomes a Vigenère cipher with a long key.

The one-time-pad is a special case of any number of poly-alphabetic substitution ciphers, XOR just being one that happens to be implemented on lots of silicon. Considering this is all about an app that has very short keys (a few numeric digits) it's perfectly legitimate to criticise the use of a substitution cipher as they are especially poor when used with short keys compared to real crypto libraries that will use that short key as the passphrase for a real key.
Unknown Fields’ Liam Young collected some samples of the waste and took it back to the UK to be tested. “The clay we collected from the toxic lake tested at around three times background radiation,”

Three times the background radiation is hardly noteworthy. It would have been much more interesting to know what they found in the waste water. Sulphuric and nitric acid?
Thanks, John! I really appreciate your response; you’ve got a lot of good advice there. I’ll quickly respond here from my phone.

I’m trying to learn some other languages/architectures, and side projects are basically everything I’ve worked on so far. With school in the way it’s hard to find enough time for everything. That’s why I’m trying to find something really interesting to work on this summer.

Also: I looked into those laws a bit and it seems like once I’m 14 (I will be once an internship for me could start), I can work 8 hours/day while school isn’t in session.
In Vietnam, Rampant Wildlife Smuggling Prompts Little Concern
> It's interesting how they list targets that have "practically become a convention", yet they're missing "all".

I think what he means is that their Makefiles effectively start having a common API across projects, by having similar target names.

No need to use "all" if you put the default target first (see `default` subsection in the post).

> I'm also intrigued by their claim they used @ in the recipes, yet they never did.

Yea seems that got stripped out.

Still, this is a good practical example for using a Makefile. I'm a fan of this too.
I assume the hands have a set of human fingerprints built in, and the gloves are used when to you need to use a fingerprint scanner and hide your identity.

So the liquid adhesive wouldn't have worked, but I'm not sure why he couldn't make a set of fake prints using a small rubber mold that would only cover fingertips.
"Manipulate" is a just a loaded term for influence, which is what every investor does by buying and selling.

If one buys shares because some other person's algorithm pushed them up, isn't (s)he gambling just like them? Why should (s)he be protected?
Random idea:

How about an extra pair of vote-buttons to classify a comment as "positive/negative" (karma-neutral)?

I often find the karma-system frustratingly one-dimensional.

Experiments in that direction are of course a slippery slope, but what place other than a hacker forum could be a better petri dish?
The corrections I find the most frustrating are the ones that attempt to frame something that is reasonably a difference of opinion as a black/white, right/wrong issue.

A made up example using something that is about as subjective as possible: No, that's wrong, strawberries are awful.

(just changing that to "I disagree, ..." gets rid of a lot of the nonsense)

There also ends up being a lot of what is essentially squabbling, comments going back and forth over what someone meant, or pedantically squishing some point that had done a good enough job of transmitting the idea (I'm all for being careful when it matters, I'm pretty sure it doesn't matter all the time).
rampant negativity...seems to have gotten less common recently

HN does do a good job of weeding out uselessly negative comments and other trolling behavior. If you want proof of that, go to your profile and turn on "Show Dead". It is amazing to see how many people are shadow banned yet continue to post on a daily basis. I've seen several accounts that have posted daily for years completely unaware nobody is seeing anything they post. They know nobody has ever upvoted or downvoted their comment or replied to it but just can't seem to make the connection that they're shadow banned.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9318001