skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"In the name of the great FSM (oh great and merciful one) I hereby declare thumb war upon you and call upon all my followers on hte twitters to hunt you down and dislocate both your opposable appendages for the great blasphemy you have committed in your public and offensive denials that trolls are also sacred to the sacrosanct principle of freedom of speech and thought."

Do you like that now punk?

Thought not.

You see, it stops mattering that they're puerile and reprehensible prats the moment you start to threaten physical violence.

By saying: "I will make you stop saying that even if I have to use force" you have guaranteed two outcomes:

1) They will _definitely_ not stop saying the thing which is making you so mad.

2) Any responsible person hearing this would start dialing 911 before you do something you will regret for the rest of your life.

The point of the original article was not to defend the trolls but rather to point out the fact that civil society is becoming increasingly tolerant of violent threats when they are made by members of fundamentalist religious movements.

Given that these threats, in recent years, are all to often starting to turn to action it becomes quite important to ask how much of this behavior we can tolerate before our society too ceases to be civil?
DRM and copyright enforcement law are --- for the most part --- orthogonal issues. The RIAA mass enforcement stuff has nothing to do with circumvention.
Your definition of metaprogramming is not the accepted one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaprogramming
I agree completely. How long will it be before there are many competing apps with the same branding? For instance, you may soon have 5 different Bank of America apps, and consumers who are less discerning have a 4 in 5 chance of selecting the wrong, malicious app. Perhaps the best way to combat this is taking the approach that Twitter has and "verifying" accounts. Otherwise certain industries chance at thriving in the Android app community could be compromised.
The idea seems original and the site's looking well, however you might wanna make the "Free Trial" button a little more visible by placing it near the top of the page.
They apparently let you customize the call that goes out with your own voice (http://www.instantloop.com/features/)

This seems like a good idea for being able to poll customers in a somewhat anonymous, yet personalized, way to gather better feedback than what you'd get if you just sent an email with "Now that your project is complete, are you satisfied with out services?"

I don't have a large enough clientele to take advantage, but I certainly see the usefulness of it.
Feeding Reddit to Hadoop (w/ Clojure)
I just read it, and it is indeed what I have just said. Unless you would like to quote a specific part of the article, instead of simply pasting a link to a page on Wikipedia?
use ack! - [http://betterthangrep.com/]
dear grellas: you are now the de facto news.yc lawyer. i am continually impressed with your clear, level-headed explanations of legal things which laymen just guess at, poorly. so i am a little surprised that you've added the word 'humorless' to the title, which doesn't exist in the original. editorializing in titles is frowned on here.

how about instead putting your own reactions into a comment here under the article. i'm sure it will be great and i'll read all of it, regardless of the length.
And how does it work?
Interesting enough. But honestly all I took away from it was that Second Life (all of it?!) fits on a laptop drive.

Storage estimation is a mind bender in the modern world.
I've had someone do that to me a time or two. I don't even have the power to down vote them back at this point! :)
Seems to me the best way to implement the "login-as" feature is to make it possible for an admin account with sufficient privileges to just enter the name of any user to start a "nested session" from their admin account (password of the user you're logging in as not required) where they see everything the real user would see but the logging somehow remembers that this is a nested session.

So you could differentiate between RandomGuy actually logging in, Hexstream logging in as RandomGuy and MetaNull logging as RandomGuy. No need to fuck with passwords, guys!
"soo-doo" vs. "pseudo"?

Other ones that come to mind:

* char (like "char-broiled"? like "care"?)
* /proc ("prock"?)
* SQL ("see-quel" or "S Q L")
* zsh - I guess that could be "zee shell" or "zed shell"
Does this mean red light cameras are illegal in Boston?
What I would expect from this kind of scanner is that it takes every form on my website and try XSS with the actual parameters that I use, not just parameters that I probably would use.
Everyone complains about the mobile industry but if I listed the industries that have or are currently screwing me mobile isn't even in the top 10.

Health-care, Insurance, Oil, Headphones, Government, Credit cards, Banking, Financial, Video Games, Cable then maybe mobile.

My mobile plan is one of the lowest monthly bills that I have based on amount of usage. To my knowledge it is one of the least subsidized industries. Are there issues? Sure. Could coverage be better? Sure. Would it be nice to have true consumption $/Mb pricing? Sure. Are they too locked down, Definitely, but the iPhone showed them what unlocking the phones to 3rd party developers can do.

I am not sure what another unlocked phone is going to do. The life-cycle of phones is shorter than the term of a mobile contract. So it really doesn't help me. If the phone allowed me auto-switch between AT&T and Verizon based on the best coverage and I paid Google on a $/Mb. That would be a game changer and push the mobile industry farther.
.NET Reflector Pro is awesome
It took me a minute to realize what you were talking about, but you're referring to the "Free Trial" in the footer?

The "Try Now (with a $2.00 credit)" is equivalent and the first thing I noticed. When I navigated to the pricing page, it says "10cents per customer feedback". I'd suggest A/B testing the difference between the dollar incentive and the "20 customers' feedback free" incentive. $2 ain't squat for a startup, but being able to hit up my last 20 clients for free? Nice.
Baidu hacked by 'Iranian cyber army'
No, because red light cameras do not record audio.
There are larger companies who have custom built IVR systems dedicated to polling their customers regarding business interactions. The idea behind InstantLoop is to make that same capability available to anyone, with no upfront cost.
No, no. I'm just saying that given the amount of time that sea slugs have been around, the usefulness of photosynthesizing without needing to eat algae, and the fact that it hasn't evolved yet, it's probably really hard to evolve.
"In the 1990s, when I was writing paeans to the dawning spirit of digital collaboration, it didn’t occur to me that the Web’s 'gift culture,' as anthropologists called it, could turn into a mandatory potlatch for so many professions--including my own."

This is what I find, as a writer of nonfiction writings that take heavy research investment to produce. Twerps half my age think nothing of copying my Web-based writings in their entirety onto websites that bear only their name and not mine, and few readers indeed think of paying me for writing based on the Web, no matter how much value the writings have for the reader. I still need to study more current examples of more different nonfiction writers to see how they get paid for the best of research-based writing, but the trend lines don't look good for people being paid to write that which requires research, analysis, and careful expression. Opinion pieces that appeal to preexisting prejudices seem to have a ready market as blog posts that draw audiences with known demographics to view Web advertisements, but research pieces that might change opinions have an ill-defined payment channel in Web distribution.
In my next reply in our conversation I was going to quote exactly this article:

"The language in which the metaprogram is written is called the metalanguage. The language of the programs that are manipulated is called the object language. The ability of a programming language to be its own metalanguage is called reflection or reflexivity."

Reflection is what I was describing. Asking a function its arity is indeed accomplished by passing said function to some other function, but if you want to find the source code for this function look for "reflection" because that's where it should be defined.

"Metaprogramming usually works through one of two ways. The first way is to expose the internals of the run-time engine to the programming code through application programming interfaces (APIs). The second approach is dynamic execution of string expressions that contain programming commands. Thus, 'programs can write programs'. Although both approaches can be used in the same language, most languages tend to lean toward one or the other."

You seem to only accept the second kind as meta-programming. What do you base your description on? Knowing that would make it easier to see where you're coming from and hopefully what the source of the misunderstanding is.
Article says, "there are more young people who report anxiety and depression". Headline says, "More of today's US youth have serious mental health issues". (Emphases added.) Talk about a non sequitur.
There is a bit of Opinion in your thoughts. WM is a nightmare to program for? I would disagree, before Android it was the best phone to code for. Iphone is a nightmare. WM is elegant. I haven't touched android yet, but on this I think its each to their own.
The internet has saved culture from monotone salvages of the old media, and sparked creativity in the new.

What are some of your favorite examples of creativity in new media, which in your view were not possible before the information age?
Not true. T-Mobile is one of the only carriers (at least in the US) that offers month-to-month service. If you don't like them then you can just switch to a different carrier and pay no penalties other than what you've already paid for that month.

So far I've been very happy with my service, but if a cheaper US nationwide GSM operator came on the scene, you can bet I'm going to switch if T-Mobile doesn't drop their price to match.
"If normal programming constructs did not allow the programmer to choose behavior based on input, then every program would have a fixed execution path, would have the same output every time. and metaprogramming itself would not be possible."

There is a difference between program control flow based on user input and generating program logic during the course of execution.

I posit that you may have metaprogramming in a progam that has the same output every time.

To me, metaprogramming is writing code which generates or modifies behavior, logic or program flow control. This may happen at compile or run time. Wether generating a closure and setting an attribute on a JS object or using "eval" to define the function, the effect is the same -- the object's implementation was not defined by the original source or environment.

For instance, this is metaprogramming:

def decorate(obj)
obj.send :define_method, :yay, (Proc.new{ puts "woohoo!"})
end

a = File.open('tmp.txt','w')

decorated_a = decorate(a)
a.yay

Here, there is no eval, but a's implementation changes at runtime. The same is trivially reproduced in JS.

edit: the difference between the original article and this is that the original article makes modifications directly to the original objects, and not to arbitrary objects, which i suppose is why you object to referring to this as meta-programming.
There are a couple of different fruits being compared (and maybe making this more plain would avoid this kind of critique):

Apache, Nginx, the static servers are baseline connection costs.

PHP, Jetty/JSP, Mochiweb templated are one tick up, baseline connection plus the template cost. I'd like to see Tornado included here personally.

Rails and Django are full stacks. It would be nice to see Cake or Symfony included here and I personally would like to see Compojure as well but that's much more niche than the others.

Edit: If nobody beats me to it I'll do the date/time template in Tornado and Symfony this evening.
The main problem with the term "metaprogramming" is aptly considered here. "Meta" has been present since programmers started using macroassemblers. We've just added a lot more techniques since then.
jQuery 1.4rc1
AIM Mail - Inbox
Programmer Barbie's Clothing: black stretch pants with pockets, white t shirt, purple hoodie jacket with pockets, black blazer for business meetings, cool black sneaker shoes, long blonde hair styled in low ponytail

Accessories: iPhone with case, 8 core (16 cores with hyperthreading, Intel branding opportunity:-)) laptop (for multicore parallel programming), iSlate, purple leather backpack/tote to carry it all

Comes with: programmable girl toddler Robot "Skipper" and book that shows girls how to program their robots to do different things - say phrases, wave hands, go to sleep, etc.
One difference I found is that Javascript has no "method_missing" call. Firefox is ahead of the pack here, as it implements a non-standard __noSuchMethod__ call, but that doesn't exist in the latest chrome or safari.

In addition, there's no way (that I've found) to override the subscript operator [] in javascript.
I agree with you completely, but Muslims believe that the Koran is literal and that everything in it is 100% true. They believe that the Koran is the result of a scientific method, and that every character in a story is a 100% true eyewitness account, and that the Koran is as 100% accurate as a well researched book on World War II would be today.

I've noticed that people of other faiths (Christians, Hindus, Jews) tend to take their holy books a little bit more allegorically.

Personally, I believe that this unyielding approach to the Koran is a major cause in Islam's adoption into a modern day society.
No, you're not wrong. Exceptional equity grants are a pain in the ass, unless you've already set up the legal infrastructure to do them.
I would quite enjoy seeing additional data.. founding of new 'accelerators' over time, number of companies funded, companies/year, etc. Primarily when they were founded. Last I checked, I found only 3.

Would also be fun to see an evolution tree starting from YC. It's too soon for weak variations to have died off yet, but I reckon we could check back in a decade..
Well, sure. Profit isn't a dirty word. But it is a mutual relationship in most cases, cash in return for goods or services. My relationship with Google is far murkier. I can't look at my account and see what is the cash equivalent I've paid them for Gmail this month - and make no mistake, if we weren't providing Google with something of cash value in return, we wouldn't be getting all these "free" services. What am I worth to Google as a "customer"? I've no idea. What level of service do they "owe" me? Well, none actually, there's no contract between us. That's a little disconcerting.
Perhaps smartphones with app stores need an OS-level keychain of sorts?

You could then teach users to only give passwords via the proper OS interface. (One which would be able to display some sort of 'trust phrase' established earlier by the user.)

If the phishing app doesn't collect and retain your usernames/passwords directly, risk is mitigated.

It wouldn't hurt to prominently display certified sources either. Some sort of interface cue that the App you're downloading is verified to have been signed by the same people who run the site it's trying to access.
Tell HN: Our iPhone app, Broadersheet, is now on sale [50% off]
>the privacy argument is a joke if you are in a public place

Surely not always a joke. If, for example, a couple is kissing in public then recording them against their will seems wrong to me. Whether it ought to be illegal is another question.

OTOH it seems to me that the actions of police ought to be regarded as public acts, and recording them in the public interest ought to be legal.

>Keep in mind that there is a big difference between taking a picture and publishing a picture

Yes, although the person being photographed doesn't know what the picture will be used for and so he may feel constrained nonetheless.
Looks like you'd rather be programming in Lua.
They are interchangeable: http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutgrammar/orie...

I personally used "oriented" - why use a longer word when a shorter one is precisely equivalent? Also, I'm used to it.
PG does some detection of voting rings and nullifies the votes. He does this for upvotes, not sure about downvotes.
The choice between the Android store model and Apple App Store model is a false dichotomy. I see no reason why it wouldn't be possible to combine the two - provide an open app store like Android, but for critical apps (email, banking, etc) have some sort of verification process. The computer industry has done a good job helping users determine if a website is secure (lock icon, yellow bar in some browsers) and I think the same can be done for the various app stores by training users to look for a lock or checkmark in the app's description.
For everyone saying: "I'd like to see ...", give me some instructions on how to set it up on Ubuntu, and I'll see about adding them. That is part of the reason why it's a "Part I".
How To Spot a Sucker
Everyone seems to be siding against the police here, but I for one agree that recording people in public against their will should definitely be against the law.

It's just a really creepy thing to do and disrespectful of your fellows.

Wouldn't a better approach be to actually confront the police once the arrest has been made and let them know you saw the entire incident and considered it excessive and will be making a report after gathering their badge numbers? What are the chances that this video would only be used to file a complaint or in court, rather than showing up out of context on youtube?
Yeah, I think this would be a great idea. I'd like to see a set of traffic generators that exercise actual functionality not just ab/pageload tests too, that works more of the stack.

It should be reasonably easy to automate a deploy/test run in EC2 too, then you could do a big batch of comparisons with configuration changes, different db backends, tuning parameters, etc.

Sort of like the programming language shootout but for webapps.
Does anyone have any experience with any of these firms?
Nice to see the Streisand Effect is still at work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Hey J. If you wouldn't mind sharing, I'm really curious about what made the direct messaging engine so tricky/special.
How is "word choice" similarity calculated? If you have a high similarity with someone, does that mean your range of words is the same (perhaps because you write on the same topics) or that your word frequency is the same (because you have similar patterns of speech)?

Are quoted sections filtered out? URLs?
I have a little website that i've been working on http://www.whyspam.me its a more advanced form of mailinator. It gives you a disposable email that forwards to your inbox. It's free, it never expires, so it is possible to never ever give out your real email to another website again.

In addition we track the disposable emails that get deleted by users, and we ask each user to generate a new email for every new website. That way we can track the websites that spam.

Anytime the word "malicious" and fighting come up in the same sentence, i get a little worried. Our goal is to give the user complete control over their inbox, the problem with having a few gmail, hotmail, whatever accounts is that if you sign up for a few semi-important things (like HN!!) if you delete the email you delete your "forgot password" functionality. Also if you give your web address to someone and they choose to sell it, you have no way of tracking it, or stopping the additional spam sources. I'm trying to fix that with my service.

While it might not be for everyone, its extremely useful to me...so i'll keep improving it and making it a service I want to use. These spammers essentially make money off of your data (email), so why don't we put some data back in your hands, like a listing of the source of spam!

Let me know if you have any comments about the site, its a fully functional beta...but not quite ready for a "Ask HN: Review my site". I'm also open to new anti-spam technologies techniques or methods (preferably non-malicious), so feel free to leave a reply.
I hope EveryDNS keeps it's dead simple interface and doesn't get integrated with Dyn...

Some more info http://www.everydns.com/acquisition.php
EveryDNS acquired by Dyn Inc. (DynDNS.org)
Is there a changelog? edit: I can't read

The final release (along with the full changelog) will occur this Thursday, on January 14th, coinciding with jQuery’s 4th birthday.
Zed Shaw wants tptacek to apologize
But there is great value in telling that new user "Hey this doesn't look like an email address, please check it before continuing". Then accept whatever they put in (because really, email addresses are stupidly complex).
In general, yes, I would consider the second kind as more meta-ish. Even though I think literal strings are a terrible way to accomplish metaprogramming, a set of API calls for introspection is not what I would consider metaprogramming, since they will almost always be accomplished through runtime calls and do not actually generate any other code that can be further manipulated.

Reflection as it is defined in that passage is more of what I am talking about, yes. But I think most languages lack this, including JavaScript. Some good examples are Lisp, Template Haskell, and the macro tools available in OCaml. I have nothing against runtime features, but I do not really consider it metaprogramming if that is the only way to accomplish it, since you are effectively being locked out of a true meta-circular system as a programmer. This style of programming is what defines Lisp and many other languages in the functional realm.
What does "aggressively" mean? And who judges if you've been "aggressively" defending your trademark?

In this case it's pretty obvious that the best thing North Face could have done was to completely ignore South Butt, because their actions have only led to South Butt selling more of their stuff. It's a perfect example of the Streisand effect. Shouldn't that amount to something if they later have to defend their North Face trademark?
I don't agree ... votes should be given for any reason a reader wants. Sometimes the actual post is so stupid and off-topic that it doesn't deserve a response ... and the rating system is there in the first place to distinguish between the good posts and the bad ones.

Granted ... this particular comment was pretty much on topic, and contains a very popular point-of-view in many circles ... so personally I haven't down-voted "theotherside", preferring to give him a reply instead.