skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was about to post much the same questions (minus the Fox sentiment).

How does one decide who is a journalist, and who is not? What makes a something a publication; what makes that publication a newspaper or a news source? Is it like jazz or pornography; you know it when you hear it or see it, but can't really define it?

I can understand wanting some distinction with regards to obstruction of justice, but I also worry that bestowing special protections on select groups is prone to political manipulation.
First comment at the article makes a rather solid point: when it ran an initial story this morning about the app being approved, Gizmodo characterized Forchan as a "porn app":

http://gizmodo.com/5445065/apple-approves-porn-app-in-under-...

But now that it's been pulled from the store, Gizmodo changes to representing it as "exactly the same as Safari" and downplays the porn aspect.

(and note that the two Gizmodo stories were posted 90 minutes apart -- amazing how quickly Gizmodo moved to completely reframe the story...)
After reading the first line of your post, I was prepared to up-vote you since you were already negative, just on the principle of guaranteeing your free speech.

However, the rest of your post was just poorly thought out, and deserves the downvotes you got, regardless of what side of the issue you're on.

If I went to a bar, found the biggest and dumbest asshole in there and called his mother a filthy whore, guess how much sympathy I would get in court.

You'll get a lot of sympathy. The courts (in America, anyway) do observe a doctrine of "fighting words", which incite irrational emotions in a person such that they lose control. This is analogous to what would happen were the defendent were unable to control himself due to some mental defect.

The question at hand has nothing to do with fighting words. Since the threats are greatly separated in space and time, no excuse about a temporary loss of rationality can be used. The treats against the artist were fully premeditated.

Legalities aside, defending the artist is the morally correct choice. The only way that we can grow as people and as a society -- and this pertains to both technology and to philosophy -- is by questioning our beliefs and our assumptions. Even when we are correct, we need and we deserve to prove it to ourselves. When we are offended, we can examine the injured belief, and the result should be either that we learn that we are wrong, or we verify to ourselves that our belief is true. Either way, we're better off. Do those offended by these cartoons have such weak faith that their faith will be damaged by them?
Satellite could locate hundreds of Earth-sized planets
Do you believe in magic? (Metaprogramming in Ruby)
I haven't acutally read what those application do in detail, but afaik apps cannot read data from other apps (that is, it's not possible for a 3rd party app to read the credit card information you entered in another app, atleast not without you granting it the permission to do so).
So, i suspect those were apps that pretended to be official (so, yes, phishing apps ;) ).
Just wanted to clarify :)
Care to tell me why you listed banking, creditr cards and financial? Also, I think I can speak for most of us in saying that the communications industry as a whole is pretty much one big cartel. Cable, landline, long-distance, voip, mobile, ISPs... the lines are getting blurred more and more by the day, and none of them have our best interests in mind. Bandwidth caps on mobile data plans, ISPs and net neutrality all hearken back to the days of anti-competitive practices with phone billing. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Health care, Big Pharm and insurance are indifferentiable, as well. It's all one big cash party with price fixing, tax write-offs, and lots of customer-screwing to go around. Government is getting tied up in there as well.

Sucks about your headphones. That's why I never spend more than $60 or so on a pair.
#3 sounds more like complete sarcasm, and just didn't seem to fit with the rest of the article in tone or meaning.

Regarding #8, have you explored the way that "Alternate Resources" [1] allows you to better handle fragmentation issues? I've found it at least to be useful enough to provide a few alternate layouts based on screen orientation, but it would be nice to get further feedback from fulltime Android developers about it. Things like how useful it is in the real world with real, fragmented devire types seems hard to come by...

[1] http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/resource...
This. I think it would be very beneficial to have some sort of approval for critical apps.
But, in regard to some stories we've all read about the apple approval process, i really wouldn't like to see that on android.
Probably not at all. This is just cloud storage, albeit at a low price per GB. DropBox's secret sauce is its seamless sync across desktops and to the cloud.

I'm not sure if Google would even want to support the DropBox model, which makes desktops play nice with the cloud, whereas Google would rather have the desktop die. EDIT: Looks like Google does allow 3rd party apps to implement desktop sync though.
North Face says Winkelmann, a biomedical engineering student, has caused it "irreparable harm" by producing his parody clothing line, The South Butt (motto: "Never Stop Relaxing")

The student didn't cause North Face irreparable harm, suing the student and attracting the attention of the media did. Big companies need to learn when to step down, because a victory in a court of law is not necessarily a victory in the court of public opinion. And it's the public that buys your products, not the Law.
Regarding (2) to (3): sorry, I think it is --- in large part --- the fact that CRI is just much much smarter. They're a peculiar company: they do real-world implementation and high quality research. Yes, there are Dan Bernsteins and Dan Bleichenbachers in the world, but for the most part those people don't get a lot of exposure to custom hardware.

Regarding (1) to (2): sure, maybe CRI would have published even without compensation. Just like maybe I'd do my job part-time for free anyways even if I wasn't getting paid. You can say that for anyone who's doing what they love: musicians, lawyers, architects. But what's the win for not compensating CRI? Huge consumer electronics companies have to pay slightly less NRE to build new products. I'd rather have CRI in the world.
I guess in javascript, that's true.
The brand is the entire point of the company. How many cheap knockoffs of North Face fleeces are there? Any competitive advantage he has is that his brand is poking fun at The North Face's brand.

If he wants to stay in business, changing his brand to something vanilla is probably the worst thing he could do.
In the context of a blog, I frankly think you are wrong. I think it's important to remember that the language in their blog doesn't match their marketing message at all - if their front page emulated the same tone, I would be with you 100%. But it doesn't.

I don't think broad claims of "effective" really make much sense either. It seems silly to view someone's blog message from an outsiders perspective and make claims to it's effect on sales. Did it turn you off to purchasing their product? Do you know how many people it turned off? Were those people even in the market to buy it in the first place?

Patrick also uses vastly different tones in his marketing messages and his blog. His blog is about programming & business topics + the occasional silly thing. His marketing is a rock-solid battle-worn message tested over hundreds of iterations. Do you think that's ineffective?

There is plenty of place in the world for companies that act like humans are running it. A blog is an appropriate channel for this to happen. Zappos has shown that a human-sounding company approach can work. You are welcome to your opinions - they very well may be right - but I would rather see the stimulation of discussion instead of brash opinions. Saying "this sucks, don't do it" doesn't get these guys any closer to a better business.
graphing buzzwords makes them more important looking.
Born Rich: How to Launch a Startup without Really Trying
Or Ruby. I've does Lua before, and found it pretty easy, though I hadn't done too much metaprogramming there. But from what I saw, its minimalism is like javascript, and its metatables like ruby's metaclasses and javascript's prototype inheritance.
France wants to forget; Facebook doesn't
I personally parallel your views sir, and that too to a very great extent. But to a general high school student programming and computation is more about java and/or c++ or other such high level language. The bombarding the poor fellow with asm at the very first semester would be way too much for most of them.

Not everyone is able to understand and appreciate the beauty in the functionality of asm. I do not wish to deny that this is the best way to put forth the world of CS but we must first understand is the student ready for it or not.
Then your talent is the ability to work hard.
They should really update that website; I just want to learn about JQ 1.4 in general and its changes from 1.3, but that site just talks about the event and the RC release, I want general info.

Even though I could probably find it if I looked harder or checked jquery.com, one would think jquery14.com would have more blatant information about uh, jQuery 1.4.
For sure. A HN homey!

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=homey
You are oversimplifying Google. Google's philosophy is that doing right by their users is always the best thing to do.

Remember, Google got where it is by doing what they think is right for users, not by doing what advertisers asked for. That philosophy is pretty deeply embedded in the corporate DNA. Humans being human that is sure to change over time, but I think it will take a long time. And until it does, I wouldn't worry about it much.

(Disclaimer, I started at Google about a week ago. This gives me both insight and a predictable amount of enthusiasm.)
I only see pricing pressure on Dropbox at the moment. This is an opportunity for someone else to replicate Dropbox with Google Docs backend. I presume, such a replication will start off with a platform with additional functionality (like, Google Docs tie-in) is the advantage and perhaps existing Google customers to convert is easier.
I had a sense that this would end up being quoted quite a bit.
The difference in price between amazon S3 (on top of which dropbox relies) and google is too big for dropbox to be competitive as it is now. Things must change.

Scenario1: Dropbox will have no other choice but switch their client to support google's API and, consequently, lower the price. They will gain a new load of customers and do fine.

Scenario2: google acquires dropbox. See scenario 1

Scenario3: google releases their own sync client/dropbox clone. Dropbox dies. Google wins doing evil (is competition evil?)

Scenario4: Google does like Pontius Pilate: releases API and let the market decide. Dropbox still likely to win.

Did I miss anything? It seems to me Dropbox has 1/4 chance of getting screwed, 3/4 of win.
Are you afraid by the fact that, later down the road, this architecture of perl scripts may be a burden

I mean, everybody writes shell scripts, but usually the mindset when writing them is "let's get something done" instead of "let's get it done right".
Thanks for the feedback. #3 was meant to be a more than a little sarcastic, but I guess it didn't mesh well with some of the others.

There are really two types of fragmentation. The first is UI screen size, which isn't too hard to work with. The second, and uglier, is code fragmentation. This is where a piece of code might work totally differently on two separate platforms. Right now Android has a lot of the former, but it's looking like there's a lot of the latter to come.
Stop Blogging.
Is there a hidden pop culture reference here (goats teleporting), or is the humor random?
The abstraction makes it easy to reuse parts of your "one-off" scripts. For example, look at the number of CPAN modules/programs that implement some sort "restart when file is changed" functionality. There are a lot.

If you use MooseX::Runnable, though, you write an introspectable class instead of a script. Now a plugin can handle adding this functionality to your script in a structured way, and all you, the developer, have to do is say "mx-run +Restart::Auto My::Class" instead of implementing that functionality manually in your script.

Reuse is always good. Not writing code is even better.
On the contrary, it was quite possibly the best video of all time.
What makes you think their DAS doesn't contain SSD's?
That fix is already in the works.

Thanks
I think the difference in perception comes from Google "screwing" large companies rather than small-to-medium sized ISVs. In fact, they're mostly improving things for small vendors and consumers (at least in the short term), which is why there's positive perception.
How to build a better web browser
Because we're consumers here. Always remember that the economy exists to serve consumers. Hell, our regulators tend to forget.

I'd argue that Google's in the right here, and that we ought to remember it when, as software developers, we complain about some big new competitor moving into our market. The end goal of business is to serve consumers. If some bigger business can serve consumers better, that's the why we have competition in a market economy. Either compete, or get out of the way and find something else to do.
The Apple App Store Economy
That is conventional wisdom. However, if we pulled the patents from pharmas, the demand for drugs would not go away. I suspect things would open up and researchers would share and open-source their work. The total research may actually increase, but just get distributed very differently, much like software changed from Enterprise to open source processes. Of course this won't happen any time soon as making such a change would destroy the market caps of pharma corps.
Installing Starcraft on the Nokia N900
Keep your eyes on senses.thirdi.com. We'll be posting all kinds of stories and lessons from this project (and a few other neat projects we are working on right now).

Plenty more lessons to be learned, too, I suspect.
The tiniest sort in most other languages: "sort". And it probably runs in not-O(n2) time...
Location-aware search with Apache Lucene and Solr
Ask HN: Best way to remotely demo your software?
What software or services do you use when remotely demoing your software to press or potential investors? Webex seems kind of overkill, and Adobe Connect is expensive. Or, are there any start-ups that have solved this problem really well?
Never Mind the Valley: Here's Boston
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that "metaprogramming" techniques have become more integrated into conventional programming in the language?
How To: Build & Launch a Design Centric Web App | Inspired Magazine
This is awesome. Dr. Drew picked this up http://twitter.com/drdrew. Adam wants a phone call from him to discuss it! :)
Speaking the Java language without an accent
Ask HN/PG: Leaderboard acting strange?
This morning I was about 100 short of the leaderboard and made two submissions that got me about 60 points. A minute ago I was 95th and the 100th spot was at 3900 but now I'm 98th with the last spot at 4072. Any idea what's up with the fluctuating numbers?
Bright – A C-like Lua Derivative
> while I don't think the overall picture will change much, measuring VSZ is just inaccurate.

I agree... which means that your "it's just wrong" comment is inaccurate too, because the general relationship of the various systems to one another, in terms of memory usage, is not likely to change much: it's obvious that one way or another, Rails doing complex dynamic stuff with templates is going to use more memory than nginx serving static files, with other things falling in between.

Thank you, in any case, for the pointer to ps_mem.py. I am using a similar script, but it doesn't look at smaps, so I'll improve the one I have or use theirs.
Why Why Functional Programming Matters Matters
http://ankrom.org/images/slideshows/happy_lion/pages/Gary%20...

My guess is this order: bottom left, top right, top left, bottom right.
Lift the 250MB per-file limit and I'm there! $0.25 for GB-year is the cheapest guaranteed price I've seen so far.
I find Google Wave to be still too buggy for business use. For the time being I'm using other solutions (mainly Google Groups + Sites).
What if HP Lovecraft had co-invented C?
(via metafilter.com)
"For standard Google Docs users this will be 25 cents per gigabyte, per year, while Google Apps enterprise users have to pay $3.50 per gigabyte, per year"

Looks more like $3.50/gigabyte for business users. That's a pretty massive difference between consumer/business pricing.
I almost got nerd-sniped by this (too busy today), but for anyone wanting to try:

http://code.google.com/apis/documents/docs/3.0/developers_gu...

http://github.com/fizx/fusefs-osx #Mac OS X fuse-ruby

http://rubyforge.org/projects/fusefs/ #Linux fuse-ruby

http://github.com/fizx/fusefs-osx/blob/master/sample/openuri... # Sample FS
Indeed -- it was a mocking reply to a snarky article. Unfortunately it seems inventing absurd positions to justify someone else's behaviour is a form of humor lost on people here.
Great post!

I feel exactly the same way. But one thing I do think I have (and you do too, obviously) is taste. I can look at my code and see it as good or bad (most of the time bad). That means I can keep striving to make it good. And my eye for what is good and bad keeps maturing so when I go look at code I wrote two years ago that I was pretty proud of, I see bad code now.

Without the ability to see that your code can and should be better, your work ethic cannot kick in.
uhh, that's $0.25 per GB-year
10 Big Myths about copyright explained
I had a coworker once that used a library of his in all of the company's main applications but kept it out of source control. If you ever asked to see the code, he would say "what do you need, I'll do it for you?" One day after chasing a bug for hours, I begged him to allow me to see the code and he refused. I calmly walked back to my desk and Reflectored it and found the bug in less than 10 minutes.
It is nothing more than a image-only web browser, right? How does Gizmodo's framing of the story change the facts?
I think we're talking about different definitions of "physical access"--you're probably meaning "being able to type on the keyboard and have the computer respond," while I just mean "being able to grab the HD and run." Encryption protects you from physical espionage as long as the computer is off, and they have to turn it on (and encounter the passphrase dialog.) Encryption doesn't protect you when it has already been unlocked, of course.
of all time
Yes, but you didn't have that from the start. Taste comes with practice too.
I think we should look to history to find any clues if Google would release an actual client that would be on par with the dropbox model.

They are notoriously reticent to do anything that installs on a client machine, Chrome being an obvious exception. I'm still skeptical they would release a client but it's definitely within the realm of possibility.

It may be more likely that either dropbox or other 3rd party tools will get into the game and start integrating their offerings with this.
Implicitly returning int is not the same as implicitly returning 0. If it falls off the bottom, the return value is undefined. No additional machine code.
I use Skype to communicate with a lot of people much in the same way Max says he uses Wave; we have several group chats open. Wave sounds like it would be a good fit and more flexible than Skype, perhaps.
Personally, I think it would suck if people started coming here to dump their companies. I don't think that's why most readers come to the site, so it's just more noise.
I'd love to use Wave, but I don't have a lot of people I collaborate with outside of the company I work for.
Very interesting...I feel like I understand the Amish culture and mindset a lot better. I can respect their views a lot more now that I know where they're coming from.
Newest Android phone from Motorola
When i read the article, it makes me say that author feels one cant be productive without google wave...Hmm..That is tough to accept..a Large part of the world is still productive and making money without using google wave..
He's saying that now he's as or more productive with less work. That's the point of any new tool.
Phishing app submitted to, and approved by, Android Market
Drunk Teens and Drunk Girlfriends
Young drunk teens exposed online! Free Porn Videos and Pictures! drunk college girls, drunk moms, drunk, drunk sex, drunk teens, drunk girls kissing, drunk girl, drunk mom
C99 has a sort function that is a part of the standard library. Clearly, the point of the exercise is not calling a library function, but how most compactly one can express a sort algorithm.
Tell HN: Maybe this could be arc's icon (if a bit noisy)
The two articles were even written by the same person, Jesus Diaz.
And runs on an operating system of ancient '70s design!

The overwhelming part of the codebase is really PHP. There's a small smattering of perl to handle a couple of async tasks, as Maciej described.
I am addicted to the phase of working with something new when I feel totally humiliated because there's too much to understand. the feeling of victory when things work properly is so great, but it takes hard work and perseverance.

I'm getting back into rails for a project and this time I really try to not hold back on looking things up and doing it right. I feel I can pull it off in a rather good way this time, it takes a lot of work and research to know enough to be able to read the docs efficiently and when to expect a one-liner solution in the framework. But I still feel totally stupid. It is also easier to judge plugins. There are so many juicy things in rails these days, like nemed scopes that take lambdas, it's really getting there.
Are there any alternatives?

I highly doubt DynDNS would let EveryDNS remain free when it would cannibalize their own $30 a year/domain business model,
Agreed. However Im sure a smart entrepeneur could come up with a logo that rides off the back of the "infamy"/publicity but doesn't leave him in court.

I cant see that the smart approach is to let them litigate... the comparative size of the companies means it is incredibly risky.
That's probably true. But one thing that was always innate in me: the ability to sit in front of a computer for 12 hours without going insane ;-)

I read a lot of other people's code. I think that's important to developing taste -- at least as important as writing a lot of code if not more so.
Scheme from Scratch - Bootstrap v0.8 - Quote
People say "I wish I could do that" about everything. Playing a musical instrument, for instance. It's not that they can't--it's that they don't have the time in their lives to devote to practicing it. "I wish I could do that" really means "I wish I had the extra time to do everything I'm currently doing, but also fit in something low on my priority list, like that."
Or everyone can agree to live and let live.

I really do think there is a qualitative difference between the U.S. and Europe in this regard. Europe seems to be lurching from banning some forms of Muslim identity outright (veils and head scarves) to banning anyone from saying anything bad about Islam. In the U.S., we insist that Muslims abide by the same laws as everyone else, and that's pretty much it. They don't have to dress like us or adopt the same social mores. We are also used to people with strong religious beliefs freely expressing their opinions, because we still have a lot of practicing Christians, unlike Europe. So strongly held religious beliefs don't seem so intimidating to us.

Yes, I know this is all a generalization, but from the anecdotes I read in the press, your comments, and anecdotes from some Europeans living in the U.S. I've talked to, I think there is some truth to it.