skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is one of my pet peeves as well; an awful lot of questions should be closed, but with a few exceptions it really doesn't do much good to close them years after the fact - that should be reserved for questions that time has proven are actually causing harm (attracting spam / misinformation / flame-wars) not everything that someone once thought was problematic but has been doing fine for many months anyway.

Over the past year or so, we've altered the mechanics of close voting to encourage fast closure and discourage gradual accumulation of votes. If you're interested in the details, see: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/250223/age-close-vot...
Washington DC keeps a dataset of all of their trees. I wonder if I should build some sort of application for interacting with the trees, or just learning or posting more information about them.

data set: http://caseytrees.org/resources/maps/dc-street-trees/
My new blog design
Yes I agree and the mappings are largely one to one. As you say magit-process with $ is great.

Next up to play with: whazzup.
"joke"
Does anyone know credentials of the people negotiating these deals? Are they well-paid?

If these deals' negotiations have to be secret and since so much is at stake, I'd hope my government would have the best negotiators, psychologists, economists, spies, or other personnel that money can buy.
It won't save you from having to understand git, but it will make life quicker.
Why do you think they owe you a response? Your comment sorta sounds like you think you're something special, maybe that's why people downvoted?
Tons of problems yes, but in 6 months this will be all but forgotten. It will become a part of internet lore. Reddit is not dead, reddit will live on and evolve slowly as its community changes and adapts.
> Fundamentally you're responding to someone saying "Reddit can't be fixed" with "this guy is an idiot; doesn't he understand Reddit can't be fixed?".

You're ignoring the part where parent said

> it's a tremendously successful community ...

Reddit's built a large community of people who don't mind partying next to the biker bar. An anti-authoritarian community that wants free speech, is not politically correct, and isn't advertiser friendly.

It may not be an easy community to profit from, but does it need to be "fixed"?
The problem is you've addressed your post to Brian, complaining about the fact that you cold-emailed him in 2012 about a job opportunity and never heard back. First, the advice from the article would be to keep trying and not get discouraged, so his non-response is not in any way hypocritical. Second, if you really wanted the job, what were you doing sending an email anyway? Go and talk to the man and take it as far as sleeping outside his door so you can pounce on him if he absolutely won't respond to you. I believe that some persistent phone calls would have at least gotten you coffee.

So, you've got some hurt feelings (this is understandable, nobody likes being ignored), your post sounds a bit like sour grapes, it's only tangentially related to the article, and that's probably why people downvoted you. What's the point of trying to embarrass the guy here? It just looks bad for you, I would just delete everything honestly.
Hotel Booking with Bitcoin Cashback (up to 5%)
is this post the airBnb version of the godadday commercial?
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIBfctISM9M
The downside of this is that it becomes self reinforcing. So people don't get to see what the wider society thinks. They only get to experience what like-minded people have to say. Despite the ugliness one is likely to come across, I think it's better for society if individuals get to experience the full spectrum of society. Else we're walling ourselves off.
Also the "cyber club" that gives patrons access to any fantasy from Minority Report.
tstartl made a very interesting comment here, but he appears to be hellbanned.
18,000 subscribed user accounts out of about 36,000,000. That's .05%, or 1 in 2,000. Except that it's localized in one subreddit that doesn't make the frontpage and is universally reviled on the rest of Reddit.

By all means, leave. People that will leave a public forum because "someone over there is someone I really, really don't like and that every else around me also thinks is vile, but who I am not forced to talk to at any point in time" are generally not valuable users in a forum that is dedicated to open discussion.
It's crazy, with 84mpg this is just dead on arrival.
A long, long time ago, that's how it tried to work. Long before they introduced subreddits, and before the signal/noise ratio made PG want to create HN.

Getting better recommendations was even presented as the reason why you should upvote/downvote posts.

But recommendation engines are very hard. Just look how poorly Amazon's work, despite its central role in corralling gigantic amounts of cash, the manpower and the raw talent that Amazon possesses. Reddit's smart customized home page wasn't better than the generic one. Eventually, multiplying subreddits and letting people [un]subscribe to them solved the problem better than going all AI.

As for fighting voting brigades, I believe they continuously work very hard on this, but rely on secrecy to keep their measures effective.
> Surface is one of the few things from Microsoft that is actually succeeding right now btw.

Really?

http://thediplomat.com/2013/08/steve-ballmer-to-retire-after...

http://mashable.com/2013/07/19/surface-rt-failure/

https://bgr.com/2014/11/05/surface-pro-3-vs-ipad-air/
You might be able to use Plan 9 in userspace with 9vx. Thoughts? Or is it just too much hassle to deal with both worlds, when OpenBSD covers most of your needs?
As someone else asked above, who is "we?" And why is it any business of "ours" whether someone decides that relationships (in the romantic/sexual sense) with other people are something he/she wants?
Same as it ever was. Anyone who's been paying attention since the beginning of video games knows that game play is what you make of it .. "It's not a very good game" has been said of many stellar successes in this realm, where the position usually changes after people have actually, you know .. played .. with something.
He says it's "bootstrapped."
Ah, I need to start using this. Work's firewall is completely bonkers, and they just removed access to webchat.freenode.net, so I need to find a way to punch thru... You can't even ssh out, or use websockets etc...
Mosh (https://mosh.mit.edu/) might work better than TCP-based SSH connections for such a setup.
Well, yes, I was assuming that the elimination of suffering was a realizable goal, and if we assume it is a good goal, then accepting "there is suffering or nothing matters" implies that it is consequentially a goal to make nothing matter.

But like I said, it is the exchange of information that gives things meaning (that's what minds do,) and the only way to actually make nothing matter is to destroy all information-processing systems.
I meant "half of the statements", not "half of the comments". That was very obvious from what I said, so I suspect that you are being intellectually dishonest.

Regardless, to stay on topic, out of "a lot" of people, then "at times" some will want to leave. Expecting a 100% retention rate all the time is unrealistic.

Maybe a few of them saw comments about atheism in /r/atheism, a very major subreddit, and weren't comfortable posting in a place that isn't a "safe space" for Christians? Maybe, maybe not - who knows? But if you want to define what's "safe" to allow in open discussion, then you're pointing your community towards the metaphorical grave. Whether there's a possibility of afterlife for a doomed community is an open question.
The fixing strategy somehow reminds me how Digg has been "fixed", not long before the user base massively migrated to Reddit.
> I think a lot of VCs explicitly (or at least implicitly) prescribe

> to Warren Buffet's advice of only investing in things they

> understand.

This is very very true.

And entrepreneurs MUST not take money from VCs who do not understand the market. Sadly sometimes VCs think they do know but they actually don't know what they don't know.

The worst marriage is when both entrepreneur and investor don't know what they don't know.
My favorite explanation for the Fermi paradox [1]: we're not seeing any alien life because they have figured out a way to entertain themselves which is far more appealing than searching for ET life forms.

Anyway, before embarking on regular VR sessions with pr0n, see this video first [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

[2] http://www.ted.com/talks/zimchallenge
This is a curated piece.
The Argument Against Good UX Design
I am in middle of reading "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman, and he is discussing cognitive ease and cognitive strain.

Long story short, if you want to earn trust and familiarity, make sure it can be processed with cognitive ease (i.e. easy to read and understand with a clean UX)...

However, if your product, or blogpost, or whatnot requires consideration and thought to appreciate it... making it harder to process will force cognitive strain and activate the part of the brain that is more rational and less impulsive.

Just worth remembering that there are lots of great generalized advice out there...but some situations are different and require breaking the rules.
There can't be enough BOFH's in the universe, that is for sure, since they rule the universe after all ..
> the changes you need to make will drive away many more users than it ever attracts, because the "good" potential users are already turned off by Reddit, and the existing users will be alienated.

That's an assumption. Based on no data. I know plenty of people, myself included, that have no interest in Reddit as it is today. I know a few interesting sub-Reddits but I don't want to deal with that community right now.

If the community changes I would be more interested. I'm not going to spend my time contributing to a sub-Reddit if it's the kind of place that is shitty to people I'm friends with.

No thanks.
I have used many Git UIs over the years, and Magit is the first one that lets me work with greater speed and safety than just using the command line.
> I really don't get how you are taking that from what I said.

It seemed to me that you were suggesting that shedding users is bad for Reddit. I think shedding a very small select percentage of the users could be a huge benefit for the site.

Remove some of the worst who don't add anything positive to the site and make an example out of them. Draw the line in the sand clear and bold.

That will get rid of some of the worst elements, and encourage others to behave better. I'm sure you'll lose people at first but in the long run I think it would benefit the site and its growth.
This was before that. Interviews for W09 were in November 2008 IIRC.
Yes. And imagine that it's "domiciled in New Zealand" by a US firm with mandated lawful access by the FBI ;)
First, a reminder: Reddit is the commercial product of a for profit company which is currently losing a significant amount of money operating Reddit. Last I heard they were being valued at $500m based on the expectation that they would be able to figure out how to profit from Reddit. The people who run Reddit won't just shrug and walk away if it turns out getting "their" slice of that $500m is harder than they expected.

> Reddit's built a large community of people who don't mind partying next to the biker bar.

Reddit has built a large community of people, large portions of whom absolutely detest each other and very much mind "partying next to each other". And as Reddit grows, the tensions are becoming more severe, not less.

> An anti-authoritarian community that wants free speech, is not politically correct, and isn't advertiser friendly.

No. A very, VERY small portion of the community could be described that way. Most people just want celebrity AMAs, cat videos, dank memes, swapping funny stories, and maybe some chat about their local city or favourite sports team. (Or relationship advice, or sex advice, or trading candy with people from other countries, or whatever it is that attracts them to Reddit.) The number of people who are ideologically committed to free speech (and not just for the things they personally like) on Reddit is, as in real life, tiny.

(Edit: If you disagree, feel free to cite a study or whatever. But I'm active on reddit, moderate a moderately popular subreddit, etc., and I don't think you're describing the Reddit community as it actually exists. I'm not even sure that a Reddit community could even be said to exist.)

> It may not be an easy community to profit from, but does it need to be "fixed"?

See point one. Absolutely, because Reddit will stop existing the moment Reddit Inc turns the lights off because it's too hard to profit from. (Yeah, sure, maybe they'll hand the domain name off to a non-profit that can try and cover costs with donations first. Assuming there's anything left by that point, the resulting website won't look much like the Reddit of today.)
Circumventing your companies firewall is not a great idea in the first place.

Additionally, if they have aggressive egress filtering, its likely that the only DNS communication will be via an internal resolver which is going to be monitored - iodine is going to leave a LOT of shit in those logs.
I teach in a college. our challenges are four: pot, porn, poker, and playstation. This combines porn and playstation. I fear they will next find a way to bring in pot. That'll be a problem.
My desktop has 32GB, and if I could I would have more. Why? Because RAM is always useful. Caching in RAM is such a nice feature, speeding up your daily work-flow.

Same thing applies in the phone. IMO, the biggest RAM increase drive is graphics and UI. With 1080p screens things are getting big: textures, icons, UI elements, photos, videos, etc...

And why would we artificially constrain ourselves? If the current manufacturing process makes 4GB feasible or even cost efficient, than it makes sense to use this size.
While you fall squarely into Consumer Reports crowd (such a category exists, according to the dealer I bought a Consumer Reports top pick from), a good portion of auto industry markets to early adopters. Saturn, Scion, Tesla (with Roadster model) and even Fisker did not have much of a sales problem at their respective early stages.
That seems a bit different. A unique subdomain for each web page load might be common, but from my reading of the article, it looks like every packet of the tunneled conversation gets a unique domain. So for transferring any amount of data, I'd expect to see hundreds (thousands?) of subdomain resolution queries in a few minutes. That could raise a red flag.

I suppose if the malware wanted to be more stealthy, it could slow transfers way down, intermix unrelated queries and spread the tunnel across multiple unrelated controlled domains.
You can do that while i enjoy my virtual reality porn.

You should be more concerned about Dihydrogen monoxide than porn: http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html
Yeah, really. I have extremely left-wing opinions, to the point that most Americans would indeed consider me a left-wing extremist. However, these questions seem to me to fail to capture the interesting degrees of variation. For example, there's no option given for the right-wing position that poor people are not merely poor due to their own faults, but that in fact government policy should be used to appropriate what little they have and make them even poorer, or that foreigners should not merely be left outside the United States via restrictive immigration, but bombed into oblivion. Neither is there an option for saying that we should not merely use taxation to redistribute wealth to the poor, but actually seize the means of production and abolish wage-labor. The statement about Irish, Italian, and Jewish Americans fails to capture what really happened in the post-WW2 decades to integrate those minorities. The questions on science versus religion contain no options for fundamentalist religion or transhumanism (despite the fact that Evangelical Christians make up 20% of the total population!). The question about marriage doesn't ask whether husbands should be able to beat or rape disobedient wives. I can't even answer the question about driving a car, because I don't.

The interesting thing about studies of extremism lies in finding out exactly which views are considered the normative mainstream, and which views are considered "out-of-sight".
I think it's a little sneaky that they only time they use to word 'car' on their materials is in a quote from a newspaper.

Technically it's a motorcycle very similar to the Spyder - http://www.brp.ca/spyder/ - and (as of 12 months ago) some states would require you to wear a helmet and/or take a motorcycle test for you to legally be able to drive this thing.

https://eliomotors.wordpress.com/2014/05/16/lets-talk-about-...

(I have no idea what progress they made on getting those laws changed in the past 12 months.)
I dunno, crowdfunding a company's investment rounds sounds a lot like an IPO to me. But with less oversight. I can't really see how this is a good thing.
Ah, this appears to have a little more information, thanks.
To be fair, their original idea was to rent out a couch for people to crash on, much like couchsurfing. I don't know if even Chesky imagined it would grow to it's current state. Uber was similarly silly when it started: expensive limos on-demand for rich guys in SF. Investing at this stage is just like signing a new band, it's just a lottery ticket.
The article is not complaining about the fact that some investors did not reply. Neither should you as a job seeker.
In this kind of discussion I think most of us would assume that "instability" means a threat to continuity of supply. High prices are hardly evidence of that.

I understand that balancing supply from numerous turbines is difficult, but is that a solved problem? Is there evidence of customer supply problems or not?
Your friend was quoting a very old joke. The earliest example I could find in a quick search was 1919: http://forum.quoteland.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/99191541/m/600...
Masturbation and internet porn are not directly related, like if "the first exists because the second exists". People masturbated since the start of humanity with different medias: imagination, porn magazines, remembering that other hot human being you saw yesterday, and so forth. So I don't think online porn is particularly changing the essence of it.
Exactly, I was kinda shocked at how much they've raised (via crowdfunding) given the absence of vital information.
Do you have to physically be in the office?

Would it work if you were in the library or a coffee shop 5 minutes away?
My comment was mostly in jest, but to address one point seriously, 'boffins' is fine, if nowadays rare, in British English, and since Reaction Engines is British company, its use would be completely fine here.
> Sentence people based on the crime of which they are convicted, and take into account their past criminal history. If they misbehave in prison, add time.

That's essentially what we do in most states. The federal sentencing guidelines, for example, are a grid indexed by crime, criminal history, and aggravating factors.[1] Good time credit allows prisoners to work off 15% of their sentence.

And the net result of that has been inhumanly high sentences. Because voters thinking about situations in the abstract are much more comfortable with 5 and 10 year mandatory minimums, with 10 to 20 year mandatory minimums for repeat offenders, than judges and parole boards that have to look human beings in the eye.

[1] E.g. here is the federal sentencing guideline for robbery: http://www.ussc.gov/guidelines-manual/2011/2011-2b31; here is the sentencing table: http://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/guidelines-manua.... Consider robbery with a gun, but nobody hurt, $15,000 taken. Base offense level of 20, +6 for gun, +1 for amount taken = 27. With no prior criminal history, you get a sentencing range of 6-7 years. Someone with a string of offenses can easily get up to 10 years.

In Norway, second degree (heat of passion) murder apparently gets you six years.
Killing the European Project
I find that a better approach is to try and isolate pieces of code that needs access to specific resources, such as configuration files or standard output. Performing IO tasks, from every module in a code base, is an easy way to create very unmaintainable code.

Of course this is all a tradeoff with other code structuring ideals. Programming languages with Monads tend to be very good at isolating such things.
And how do you represent an unknown base in that representation? Or, how would you do the comparison with a gap in one of the sequences (which is incredibly common). I've benchmarked it all too, and it is really difficult to represent DNA with just two bits. Once you start to get out from the simplest use-cases, it gets significantly more difficult. The most efficient mechanisms require three bits or at least some mechanism for denoting where the ambiguous calls are (see UCSC's 2-bit format). And now that you're dealing with three bits, the numbers start to get funky quickly - you end up dealing with 24 bits for 6 consecutive bases, and you still have the problem of representing gaps efficiently... have you ever tried to insert 4 bits in the middle of another number?
With regard to a brand not wanting to get associated with the unsavory elements of society, what is the difference between advertising on reddit which has unsavory subs and advertising on the WSJ. It's not as if all readers of the WSJ are all upstanding citizens. I'm sure most are, but there have to be a few who aren't. Why is association transitive in one medium but not in another. Is it because one is a platform and provides a medium to these elements? But even so, how does that imply these communities "represent" the larger community as well as the management?

Surely we are capable as a soviet of making these distinctions...?
I came here to say something similar - my exact choice of subreddits varies (ever so slightly) from this list, but there are a lot of small, focused communities that are full of knowledgeable, kind people posting useful information that I would otherwise have no easy mechanism to find. Hacker News is great - and there exist other sites to find interesting news, reading, and products - but only the various specialized subreddits thus far cater to my more esoteric interests. Esoteric interests like academic subjects, not like racism or dumb jokes. I think the key to getting a lot out of reddit is to make an account right away, and tailor a list of actually-interesting subreddits. The front page is a cesspool not just in terms of vitriolic, hateful posts - it's also full of gifs of cats, silly jokes, etc. - and if you use reddit without filtering out such subreddits you'll end up wasting a lot of time on vapid content. All the dumb racist or sexist "humor" is vapid content too - but I'm willing to put up with both sources of worthless links, since I can easily log in and participate in interesting discussions/link-sharing with people who have similar interests. And I have not yet seen a community that enables this as well as reddit does, so I'll be sticking with it for the time being.
Same goes for speed limits.