skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The dads are probably all child molesters anyway. What possible reason could a grown man have to spend time with a child other than to sexually abuse them?

In fact, we should probably take their own children away from them.

/'tis a sad world we live in :(.
How would you fix the repetitive and boring gameplay of today's (MMO)RPGs?
I've just tried World of Warcraft and I don't really see why people play it.

It just seems repetitive and boring to me.

There must be a huge opportunity here for creating (MMO)RPGs with a lot more variety of gameplay.
Apple fights back: Seeks to ban all imports of Nokia phones
In other words, Yahoo makes money in China indirectly so they can't be as easily blamed for their behavior.
I didn't even read this comment, but I'm going to re-clarify anyways.

When I see something overtly bad: a troll, something irretrievably wrong from a technical perspective, or an over-the-line personal attack with no redeeming content, I'll reliably downvote it.

Otherwise, I don't vote. I'd rather reply to something than vote it down anonymously, and if you're going to reply, downvoting the parent is counterproductive; it effectively asks the site to bury your comment along with the parent.

I'm sure I routinely downvote things out of pique just like everybody else, and I'm sure I occasionally upvote things too. Those events cancel each other out. Meanwhile, I'm still reliably downvoting bad stuff. Hence, 65%.

To be honest, I don't really care what you think of how I use the site. I just want to speak up in defense of the idea that up/down percentages don't matter. Like short sales, downvotes contribute to the efficiency of the site, just like upvotes do.

PS: Now I have read it, and I'm glad I didn't before I wrote the comment above. Come off it. If you want to know how I got to ridiculous levels of karma --- besides commenting a lot --- I'll tell you: once you get to a certain level of karma (which we'll treat as a proxy for all sorts of other reputation effects on HN), it becomes self-reinforcing. You and I could make the exact same comment and I will reliably get voted higher than you, because fewer people expect "good" comments from you. So, go ahead and downvote me as much as you'd like. You'd actually be making my comment scores more accurate.
Was. :'-(
I can't seem to find the original studies right now, but it is fairly well established that men and women are mostly the same except for then it comes to negative and positive extremes.

Men are over-represented at both ends of the spectrum. A possible explanation for this is male productive capacity which varies greatly compared to women.
I know. To be fair, Luke didn't realize she was his sister with her tongue down his throat, so they're all a bit of a messed up family. Hopefully Luke would have figured it out before he tried to get into Leia's pants.
I'd take what the author says with a grain of salt; he has a history of making stuff up from whole cloth.
I made nitrocellulose in high school chem in 2005; the teacher gave me the instruction sheet and told me to go at it. The teacher also made thermite and welded a cast iron pan to an iron plate. So, I don't know when or where you went to school, but we did the same things you did (thermite and nitroglycerin) only 5 years ago, and this in a little farm town of about 2,000 souls.
This article completely misses the point. If "Tunnel Rat" made death threats, that's illegal and a matter for the police to deal with.

The EFF is opposed to prior restraint of free speech: they are shutting down the entire website (including whistleblower documents about Apex Tech) and preventing Tunnel Rat from speaking in the future just in case he does something illegal.

People who want to attack free speech will start with racists and pornogrophers. Unfortunately, to defend free speech, those are the people the EFF needs to defend.
Thankfully most of the complaints are already resolved or are in the process of being resolved. A BIG reason why we ended up choosing Zoho discussions was their willingness to work with the team and accomodate our concerns. They even did all the hard work of importing all the old google groups posts and the old jqueryhelp.com forum. So yeah, it's a bit quirky at the moment but I fully expect the issues to get ironed out either before launch or in the next couple weeks.
The student and parents are being encouraged to go to counseling!? It's been awhile since I've been as outraged by a story as this one.
I notice the author has nothing to say about the over-valuation of the Yen, which for the past year or two has been crippling Japan's balance of trade by making exports way too expensive on world markets.
I thought it was entirely inconclusive and I thought the author's implication that it should be obvious ought to have been slightly offensive to whichever gender was being stereotyped.
Yes, fear will keep us safe, eh?

Who said anything about keeping us safe? Fear puts butts in seats, which is the entirety of the media's interest in the matter. Now stay tuned for the shocking truth about child abductions in broad daylight - a report no parent can afford to miss!
Monkey tool usage: Hammer and Anvil [video]
Developer Must Haves
Much ado about what is most likely a misconfigured caching proxy. The only way to not constantly be scared and suprised by the Internet is to understand a little about how it works.

Yawn.
My recent experience is that "software engineer" ~= manager and "architect", farming programming tasks out to overseas employees.

That's the distinction: We in the U.S. are (supposedly) going to retain management (and maybe design) while outsourcing the "lower level" work.

I originally continued with a longer comment, but it summarizes to: "Good luck with that."
"Since the population is split 50-50% between men and women you should expect the same balance to exist at the top. "

Why? If getting to the top were pure chance, then sure. Otherwise you are assuming that men and women are, in all ways relevant to getting to the top, identical, and that's not established.

"[H]ow could you sensibly object to a school of though that wants to gain equality for women?"

Because people have widely varying ideas on what "equal" means.
I really like having two 80-char wide Emacs buffers side by side.
I did not mean equality of outcomes should somehow be regulated. I didn't say nearly enough to clarify my position, so that's my fault. However, nothing I did say suggested or implied any kind of quota or regulation. That is your assumption - perhaps reasonably based on past experience.

When I say "There should be more women in positions of power," I mean that even if we assume a great deal of biological, inescapable, gender-based differences in psychology and physiology, the number of women in positions of power seems staggeringly low (and staggeringly low across time and space). Given that, and given what I know about history, I believe that another factor is at work here: sexism.

I also seem to be in the minority here insofar as I find most evolutionary arguments that attempt to explain modern-day human psychology to be entirely wrong-headed. I wont try to have that debate here, but for an idea of why I believe this, see this article by Jerry Fodor (nb: the link is to a pdf): http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/faculty/Fodor/Fodor_Against_Darwini...

Another link with specific reference to something by Tierney: http://slate.msn.com/id/2124503/
It's not that essays should be tweets, it's that I and a lot of other people here prefer a particular style of writing. Think of "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", a fact heavy almost detail free style.

But most people prefer a longer story based style and I suspect most people on HN today are of that type.
Nike Launches Impressive Hyper-Local iPhone App
I've never liked that phrase, even though I recognise it's true most of the time in the public school system. But the idea behind it, that teaching is a last resort job for losers who can't do anything else, is very damaging to society, IMO.
Writing is definitely a skill. You need that to write good blogs. Being able to create an account on Wordpress.com and write some random bullshit doesn't really count.
> Isn't that statement predicated on the assumption that men and women, in a general statistical sense, have equivalent ambitions and abilities as men?

Yes. Nobody has ever given me sufficient reason to believe otherwise. (The only argument I've ever heard that has any pull is simply the one that points to the world as it is. That is, someone will say "Women's ambitions and abilities must be different from those of men. Look at how few women are presidents." But of course that argument begs the question.)
Can you provide some references please? I'm unfamiliar with his work.
This reminds me of Star Simpson, the (former) MIT student who showed up to Boston's Logan airport in 2007 wearing a sweatshirt with a light-up LED circuit on it. She wasn't even flying, just waiting at baggage claim for a friend, when one of the airport employees concluded that a 19-year-old girl with an unusual sweatshirt might be a suicide bomber. 40 (that's right: 40) police showed up, and she was charged with possessing a "hoax device" (http://tv.boingboing.net/2008/09/19/star-simpson-once-mi.htm...). I'm still pissed at MIT for throwing her under a bus; instead of saying "This is ridiculous, clearly the airport staff and police overreacted", they bent over and supported the authorities 100%.
Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle
Don’t let another startup throw you off your game
I would let players construct quests and reward them according to how these are rated and how much they are played. No sure if there should be separate or a combined rating system for constructors/players. Rewards for constructors could be more land/resources dedicated to their quests + maybe marketing points that regulate how much NPCs advertise their quests.
Wish I could join you at laughing at the stupid yanks, but my own country is headed down this path just as fast as it can, along with pretty much every other liberal western democracy.
Although its a bit tongue-in-cheek, it really shows why Apple investors pay so much attention to Jobs' health. Apple is a very centralized and secretive organization with the appearance that all important decisions, from strategic to design decisions, going through Jobs. No wonder people wonder if Apple can keep being great if he leaves.
Knowledge is out, focus is in, and people are everywhere
That book is a troll with an ISBN. It's funny, intelligent, odd, and irritating. But it will not teach you any Lisp.

I liked the parts of it that I have seen, but in a perverse, guilty-pleasure kind of way.
I did not assume you live in the US, btw.

I suppose based on your argument we should all shed a tear and not expect anything to change. But then it seems awfully pointless to display ire about something we have no intention of acting on.
Which distro/OS, out of curiousity? The bane of my experience with low-memory VMs has been finding the lowest-memory server OS.
The thing is that blogging in itself encourages more organized thinking about a topic. When you go to write a blog entry, you inevitably find that what was in your head is not nearly as coherent as it needs to be in order to write it down. Writing it down forces you to put your thoughts in more order. Do it enough and your thinking naturally becomes more organized in general. You know, like programming does for you.

So blogging in itself does have some value. Tweeting only has the value of forcing you to select what seems most interesting. Which is still of some value.
First paragraph: "The biggest myth about starting a tech company in NYC is that it's difficult to hire top tier programmers."

Second paragraph: "The reality is it's hard to hire top tier engineers no matter if you're in CA, NY or Vancouver, where Flickr was based."

Contradiction?
Stack Overflow: New, Improved Comments with @reply
It also introduces a lot of "friction" and inefficiency into the development process, at least in my experience.
What makes you think reddit stores passwords in the clear? We haven't done that for years, ever since Steve learned his lesson.

You can see the code for yourself at http://code.reddit.com if you'd like to verify.
I really enjoyed Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours (a Haskell tutorial): http://jonathan.tang.name/files/scheme_in_48/tutorial/overvi...
I used AppViz for most of the charts (it's a great program to keep track of your sales and visualize them in different ways). The chart with colors it's just generated from Pages since I had to do some aggregating of the different IAP items myself.

You're right about the lack of labels (that's how the program does it), but I made sure it was explained in the sentence following the first chart. I wanted to stress that the vertical axis is profit in US$ and not unit of sales (since Flower Garden is $2.99).
OGF Open Cloud Computing Interface Spec
Now in a phase of accepting public comments before release. OCCI would love to hear feedback!
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/tifinagh.htm
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ethiopic.htm
http://www.amazon.com/All-Nonparametric-Statistics-Springer-...
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
The QuickTime API in C is horrific. It requires tons of unsafe-looking casts and even memcpy()-like operations between types. QuickTime Kit (an Objective C API) was released with QuickTime 7, which can only be better.

Here are excerpts from some code I wrote back in the day to import audio files into Audacity using QuickTime:

// GetMediaSampleDescription takes a SampleDescriptionHandle, but apparently
// if the media is a sound (which presumably we know it is) then it will treat
// it as a SoundDescriptionHandle (which in addition to the format of single
// samples, also tells you sample rate, number of channels, etc.)
// Pretty messed up interface, if you ask me.
SoundDescriptionHandle soundDescription = (SoundDescriptionHandle)NewHandle(0);
GetMediaSampleDescription(mMedia, 1, (SampleDescriptionHandle)soundDescription);

// If this is a compressed format, it may have out-of-stream compression
// parameters that need to be passed to the sound converter. We retrieve
// these in the form of an audio atom. To do this, however we have to
// get the data by way of a handle, then copy it manually from the handle to
// the atom. These interfaces get worse all the time!
Handle decompressionParamsHandle = NewHandle(0);
AudioFormatAtomPtr decompressionParamsAtom = NULL;
err = GetSoundDescriptionExtension(soundDescription, &decompressionParamsHandle,
siDecompressionParams);
if(err == noErr)
{
// this stream has decompression parameters. copy from the handle to the atom.
int paramsSize = GetHandleSize(decompressionParamsHandle);
HLock(decompressionParamsHandle);
decompressionParamsAtom = (AudioFormatAtomPtr)NewPtr(paramsSize);
BlockMoveData(*decompressionParamsHandle, decompressionParamsAtom, paramsSize);
HUnlock(decompressionParamsHandle);
}
This is Noel, the author of the post and of Flower Garden.

I was planning on leaving a detailed analysis of the effect of IAP for a later post, but you're right that some people didn't like it. Especially in the Facebook group at one point there was almost a small-scale riot from people feeding off each other's negative comments. But as usual, that's just a vocal minority.

I had to intervene by explaining why I was charging for extra content (http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?topic=10677&uid=748971...) and I think that once people realized it was just me and not some faceless corporation, they were much cooler about it.

So my comment about "people loved it" referred to the fact that I got tons of positive feedback and the fact that IAP sold very well.

Frankly, I knew some people wouldn't like me moving in that direction (especially if you're used to the model of free updates for life), but I'm surprised that I didn't ruffle more feathers and most people took it really well.

Also interestingly, I think this has gotten people who had cracked versions of Flower Garden to purchase in-game items, so that probably helped too. But unfortunately I don't have a really accurate way of measuring that (I'll try for my next post).
Techies unite to brainstorm help for Haiti
Bjarne Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language has all the code set in a proportional font: bold italic Times. I found it at least as readable as any other programming book. The ideal typeface is different for print than for screen, of course.
> hostel life

Eh, a bit, but not really.

> exam pressure

Again, a bit, but a lot of people are quite unconcerned about their exams.

> going out for ice cream to check out the girls

I don't know anyone who has ever done that here.

> their conversations about the future

Yeah, pardon my French, but most people don't give a fuck about the future. Most people just want to get their four or five years done with and then get out of here. There are a few people who genuinely care about the future, but you won't find them discussing anything in the manner given in the book.
Copyright infringer offers to pay for stolen ebook. Author refuses the money.
From the link: "Today, we're happy to announce the launch of Google Groups to Google Apps Premier and Education Edition users". What does this mean for non-premier, non-edu-edition users?
I wasn't asking for both. I would be very happy if the world were moving towards equality of treatment. That's my focus. (Full disclosure: I work at an all-girls school, and I also have a wife, mother and sister. So perhaps I'm biased in favor of getting those people equality of treatment.)
'kay. HN just turned into Slashdot. I'm outtahere. Cheers, It's been fun while it lasted.
> What possible sane school policies could exist at the "Millennial Tech Magnet Middle School" that the student could have violated? Don't do anything with what we're teaching you outside of school?

> I suppose there might be a rule of "don't bring in anything unless you get it screened first", but ... geez. Given the level of screening they considered necessary for this device, that doesn't sound likely.

Their policies are available at http://www.mtechmiddle.org/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=5881...

I don't see anything relevant to this. Perhaps the word policy is congruent to ``whatever we make up'' at this school?

In case they decide to change their policies, I've downloaded a copy along with the time of retrieval. Others may wish to do the same.
To be fair, it was the vice principal, not a teacher, who was concerned that "it might be harmful" and notified the police. Certainly, school administrators get promoted based not on their teaching or academic credentials, but on degree to which they adopt the "erring on the side of caution" mentality. What's terrifying is that it takes just one call of an ill-informed, over-reacting person to set this kind of disproportionate response into motion.

Personally, I think this story has broader implications than simply that American students are discouraged from pursuing interests in science and technology. I think it illustrates two socially destructive trends:

1. To perceive anything science or technology related that has not been marked with the corporate stamp of approval as a potential threat. Any device with exposed wires that are not hidden behind a slick case with a logo must be a bomb. Anyone that's using command-line instead of a slick GUI must be a hacker, etc.

2. To consider perception of safety above all; that is an over-reaction on a massive scale is not considered anything short of normal. It's normal to send a bomb squad to a kid's house on a mere suspicion of a school official. It's normal to close down a major airport because of a battery explosion. And so on, and so on.
You didn't notice I right justified then.
My peeve with embedded tabs is they are editor-defined and generally too wide.

i = 0.0;
Tomato vs. Tomahto
Integer vs. Doubles
Integrals vs. Derivatives
I expressed a similar idea here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1052676

I don't know if it's inherent in the geek mindset, but I often find that ideas are frequently met with overwhelming negativity. One flaw - often not actually fatal - is found, and the entire proposal or idea is rejected as inane. The startup community is generally more encouraging, and perhaps that's why here on HN there's usually a good mix of constructive criticism and cautious encouragement.

I can understand where the author is coming from, and I'm pleased that HN is much less aggressively dismissive.
Chaining vs. Nesting
Deep down in the comments Alan mentions that he will re-open oink.
According to evolutionary psychology, you would have been yourself no matter what. For example, Steven Pinker sustains in The Blank Slate that the influence of parenting on personality, IQ and other more specific traits is pretty much negligible (as long as you have "reasonable" parents). Variance in those traits is 40-50% heritable, 50% due to factors outside the control of parenting (accidents, diseases, peer groups, randomness during development) and 0-10% due to parenting.

This sounds very counterintuitive to many people because it's not the way we would like it to be. Many studies of adopted siblings, twins separated at birth, and natural siblings who grew up in different families support this hypothesis.
I go to a public school (and one of the best ones in the country (the US)). Even here, that statement is so close to true in some cases I don't know whether to laugh or cry... It's even worse IMHO with middle schools, because that's the time period when a lot of kids internally decide 'oh I'm going to be solely a sports person' vs 'wow! math and electronics and physics are so cool.'

What gets me is that in our school, in one of the best schools in the country, there's so much idiocy - I can't even imagine the levels of stupidity and prison-like institution present elsewhere. (Funny anecdote: at one point last year, the school staff started putting up bars, expandable bars, in the hallways to prevent people from leaving the cafeteria during lunch. There was quite literally no way to get out and go anywhere, without bumping up against an angry security guard.)
... or, why heroku is worth the money. Especially for an app that would never need to grow beyond the free plan.

3 hours? are you serious? For one, if he used passenger it would have taken half an hour max. But really, for tiny apps like this that are totally standard, heroku is the right way, no doubt. Only in very rare circumstances should anyone follow this guide.
From what I understand, they told it was a sophisticated attack because it involved several layers - the IE exploit just being one bit of these.
What's a motto?
Two major flaws I see here:

1) Those (tech hubs) are primarily CA and NY, with some other cities having their own smaller scenes (Boston, Austin, Pittsburgh...)?

It's more like SF/Bay area, then Cambridge/Boston, then Austin/Boulder etc. NYC has a decent tech scene, so does LA by virtue of their size, but they're not tech hubs like SF or Boston/Cambridge. Maybe she forgot MIT is in Cambridge?

2) Great engineers are everywhere. Sure there are a lot of crappy ones but in my experience it's a lot harder to find good front end guys, engineers that understand the ins and outs of javascript/DOM/browser that also have an eye for good aesthetics. Now those are hard to come by.
Also, the first thought that comes to my head (after all the bad teachers I've had anyways... ) is that Feynman loved to teach. And I'm pretty sure he could "do".
You seem to have missed the sarcasm.
Foursquare is changing the world
Around here we have an extension. "Those who can, do. Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach, administrate. Those who can't administrate, teach gym. "

It's a phrase true mostly in the public school system. Doesn't hold so much for universities or other educational institutions.