skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When did pointlessly mocking Rand become hacker news?

By my count, there are 3 jokes in this post, all juvenile:

* Atlas Shrugged is long. No really, it's a long book! Long books are stupid.

* Rand articulates questionable views on romantic relations based largely on notions of dominance. Ha ha, isn't she ridiculous!

* Rand's characters are caricatures. Or archetypes. Whatever.
No, they are neither necessary nor worthwhile. I like Bloomberg's approach of including contact information for the editors/authors of a news piece, which provides readers with a channel for feedback without providing a platform for trolls or people who are too stupid to string a coherent sentence together.

Elitist? yes, somewhat. But the 'comments with everything' approach which has become associated with Web 2.0 over the last few years has IMO demonstrated that there is a vast pool of stupid people out there, and a small but persistent group of troublemakers who enjoy baiting other readers. I don't know why so many companies - especially in the beleaguered media industry - have become so tolerant of the cesspool that most comment sections become. There is nothing more destructive to your brand than linking it to the ranting of ignorant know-nothings. Even on 'premium' news outlets such as economist.com, the quality of debate in the commentary section is execrable.

Any time I feel slightly guilty about this elitist attitude of mine, I refer to this funny-because-it's-true story from the Onion: http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/study_38_percent...

Sadly, I know of no serious research that has been undertaken on the signal-noise ratio of internet comments to content in different social media. So I can't send you back to your publisher armed with any statistical data to show that comment functionality will either help or hurt readership - I only have my own opinion to offer. Although I think 2 way interaction between publishers and consumers is valuable and can help to build persistent audiences, in my view the best way to do this is with a heavily moderated forum, in which some kind of threaded discussion structure makes it easier for readers and editors to prune unworthy contributions. Anyone running a large website with dynamic content needs to employ someone just to keep an eye on comments or reader feedback anyway, if only to be alert to the possibility of people deliberately taking a public crap in the comments; much better, then, filter and moderate visitor contributions proactively, rather than after they've polluted the brand and associated content.
And, yet, you still have the drum sticks...and everyone that happens to think highly of you will let a little of that goodwill rub off on the brand that's on your sticks. That sounds like an excellent marketing expenditure, to me.

The best you can hope for from schwag is that most of what you give away doesn't get thrown away, and actually gets used for a few months, or longer. Sounds like this one worked out well. At conferences, you can always tell what the worst schwag is by looking in the trash cans on the way out of the expo hall. The stuff that gets thrown away immediately is utterly wasted; the stuff that makes it into the suitcase and gets back home with someone is the good stuff.
YouTube is sometimes a strange place. After watching this video I found a short clip of KNBC’s live coverage with what can only be called truly great commentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC1V9Eg9Cfw

I then tried to find out more about the commentator and found this gem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7sYB1uxt6o

(I’m not from the US, so please excuse my ignorance about your TV anchors. The commentator is this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Shocknek)
Nexus One - New update enables multitouch
Twitch - a Chrome-only canvas game
In case you are curious, the "case in the 1980s" referred to in the article is almost certainly Moore v. Regents of the University of California ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_v._Regents_of_the_Univers... ).
I'm not so sure about things like vector graphics animations, but I'd be willing to bet that Flash has lost online video with HTML5. About time too. Flash is a plague of the modern browser and I will be happy when I'm rid of it (Click2Flash already does most of that). Google/Youtube HTML5 HD H.264 is amazing. What used to take up 95% of a core in Flash now takes 2%. Here's what I have to say about Flash: good riddance.
Actually it's an efficiency gain, rather than scalability. Facebook already have a system they can add more servers at, but this is designed to let them use less and save money as a result.

Also at least 90% of web apps are tiny or are startups that never made it, either way they don't need this for a long time, like you say.
Also reported via cnet. Twice.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1094857

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1095804

Many comments in the latter.
Are you serious? A magical framework that translates PHP/Python/etc into C++ code? I've got to be misinterpreting what you're saying...

Then again, you might be drinking a bit too much of that Facebook juice... :)
Well, the content of that particular blog has something to do with that. You need a certain level of sophistication to come up with something coherent to post, and most of the trolls out there know they'd be instantaneously obvious to everyone else on a topic like that.
You realize Python is older than PHP and Ruby is the same age right?
Linux Adaptation - The Backdoor Method
http://highscalability.com/
After the popularity of pointlessly invoking her, I think.
For anyone else who doesn't get the Endless September reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Love it or Hate it, Here Comes the iPad
And features such as comments.
Can you elaborate on what the network effects of using Visual Basic would be, actually? What domains does Visual Basic have significant network effects? How does this compare against the network effects of Perl's CPAN, which is a significant factor in my choice of programming language?
The authors are fighting Amazon, so of course Amazon attacks the authors. Macmillan is just the middle-man. In this case they are acting like the author's union and doing collective bargaining. Amazon shut the factory down because the workers asked for what Amazon thinks is too much. Some workers like the hardball their union is playing and some don't, but changing their union affiliation is hard.
I am kind of amazed that hobnox has not created an embeddable widget to help the virality and move it forward...cause it is a hell of a tool.
I'm frequently suprised by how many people are only aware of one zoom method or the other. Even back when the iPhone was released, I remember a couple of reviews lamenting the lack of arbitrary zoom for the times when the double-tap auto-zoom didn't get close enough, and some others complaining about having to mainly zoom and asking for something automatic. It's as if knowledge of one feature makes you less likley to be aware of the other.

Reminds me of the idea I've hear taught in programming: give users only one way to do something, and you dissappoint some people, but give them more than one way and you'll confuse everyone.
Shopify, a Start-Up, Starts Its Own Business Competition
My god, it's a real word. Kudos.
I was in college that day; in Orlando (University of Central Florida). I didn't see the actual explosion, but if I were outside at that time, I would have. I walked out maybe 15 seconds after it happened. I can remember looking at that trail, just like you see it in that video and the confusion going on in my mind about it. The news around campus spread quickly though, and it wasn't but a few minutes later that everyone knew what had happened.

It was something I will never forget. I wasn't alive when Kennedy was shot, but people say it was like that.
efficiency -> scalability, in the sense that serving the request faster will free the server to serve another request.

My point is that for nearly all apps, executing PHP is very small part of the total request handling time, so even a significant improvement will have little overall effect. I bet many people excited by HipHop could get a much bigger performance gain by adding some simple caching)
The real book is a much better read.
Uhm, if the guy down the hall WROTE the language, that's gonna be a hell of a lot more useful than posting to a mailing list. Especially if you can't post your secret source code, so instead you have to spend a lot of time coming up with a simple test case you can post which demonstrates the problem -- whereas with the guy down the hall, he's allowed to see the code.
Simple Authentication for a Rails Application via Twitter
Many companies and people are building decent-enough web-based substitutes for their stuff now. (I just used pixlr today, for example.) Adobe as we know it is probably toast.

The important products (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign) were mature about ten years ago, and there's not much they could have done to improve them, aside from porting them to newer OSes and adding minor features. So there was a push to use their resources in some other way, which has obviously been to build platforms. The trouble with this is that Adobe is awful at it! They moved far away from what they were competent at, ruining their products along the way. Think about the terrible things Adobe has done to their products in the last decade:

* Acrobat reader is a ridiculously slow and bloated product. Preview.app is much faster and nicer-looking. I uninstall Acrobat whenever I can, and tell other people to do the same.

* Their creative suite has a ridiculously slow installer. Just let us drag the app to the Applications folder and leave things alone!

* They don't obey user interface guidelines (they never really did), but what they come up with now is almost always worse. (It wasn't always that way - the vertical toolbar was beautiful.) They really didn't need to add that crappy horizontal bar thing to Photoshop and Illustrator.

What should they do? Sell to Apple at a firesale price (which will seem really, really high after Adobe craters over the next five years). They should then get rid of everyone that manages all of this redundant platform-building bullshit (this would save Acrobat on Windows by making it decent - but then again, I'm not sure that Windows will be a major consumer platform in five years), and focus on building the beautiful creative tools that made their company great once. While there's a lot of work left to do to make Photoshop and Illustrator take advantage of the multitouch technologies that are coming in future Macs, we may rest assured that Adobe's present management will find a way to fuck it up.
A private API violation, not an epic dramatic struggle.
Ok, but all those empires, what were they built on? They were built on the megalomaniac greed of a bunch of predatory monarchs and their clerical stooges. None of it came from the people. That's very different from today's US.
You spelled it wrong :-). "...silico..."

(I've always been disappointed that it's "...microscopic..." rather than "...microscopo...", which seems rather unnatural.)
Say there's a hole in your web browser that lets an attacker run arbitrary code. That's bad news for your home directory, but at least if the binaries on your machine (under /usr/local or wherever) are owned by root, the browser is running as "you" so it can't overwrite them with malware.

Then again, making /usr/local writable by admins goes along with the OS X convention of giving admins write permission to /Applications but I'm not a fan of that either.
One of the things I see almost no one addressing in all of these flash arguments is how there is an inherent problem with flash games on a device like the iPad, iPhone, or any other phone on the market with a virtual keyboard.

Most analysis when questioning games, this one included, point to the app store and claim it is due to the existence of the App Store and Apple's desire to control game content on their devices.

But they seem almost always to gloss over the fact that the controls would be a huge stumbling block. First, most Flash games use the keyboard for the user input. How would this work on something like a Nexus One? If the controls for the games use the arrow keys to navigate and the virtual keyboard has no arrow keys, how does the user control the game?

Likewise, many follow the mouse movement. However, on touch screen devices, there is no graceful way to track the mouse movement because there is no mouse. Swipes are generally used to indicate scrolling and touches selection. (like a mouse click)

So even if they allowed Flash on these devices, many users would be screaming about how Game X doesn't work and Game Y doesn't work only because the interface doesn't translate gracefully.

I am just constantly surprised that I haven't read any blog posts that address this (seemingly) obvious issue.
Ask HN: Please Review Our New Site
http://www.madebysofa.com

Designing for yourself is very tough :-) We improved the old one instead of starting from scratch. I am especially proud of the design page. Big blog post on how we got here by Jorn: http://www.madebysofa.com/blog/georgia-on-my-mind/
Clickable links:

http://www.madebysofa.com
http://www.madebysofa.com/blog/georgia-on-my-mind/
First question that should be answered by anyone trying to selling this:

Why is it better for me than MacPorts and why should I use it?
Metafilter also deletes too many comments.
Okay, I think there are use cases for certain.

Two more questions then:

How will moderation be handled? Public discussion that are open to join will encounter this problem at some point. Will the person who opened the discussion have carte blanche powers to delete replies? If so, does this limit the use of the platform for honest discussions if one side of the conversation can censor the other? Or will you simply trust that the user will apply his best judgment? If the moderation isn't handled by the discussion starter, then what?

What's the plan to distinguish yourself from competitors? Assuming the concept takes off, it doesn't look as if the site functionality itself is too challenging to duplicate. What'll be your advantage?

(edit: I hope you find these questions useful, rather than annoying.)
For an equally scathing but more contentful review, it's hard to beat Cosma Shalizi's at http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/ -- I love the title: "A rare blend of monster raving egomania and utter batshit insanity".
First step:

# Take ownership of /usr/local so you don't have to sudo
sudo chown -R `whoami` /usr/local

Hell no, bad idea, do not want.
12 Ways to Tell if You’re Confident – or Arrogant
It is not clear that anything could be quite as important as Wolfram believes ANKoS is.
True, but this is OS X. The dominating use case is solo workstations. Who uses OS X Server?

I'm actually pretty excited to try out homebrew and install everything in ~/ with my new MBP which I'll purchase as soon as the next refresh comes. Currently I'm still on 10.5 with a system that has been forward ported via Time Machine backups and account copy-on-install going back to a 2004 PowerBook. The prospect of having a completely vanilla system with all customizations isolated to my home directory is pretty exciting.
Apple's Secret? It Tells Us What We Should Love
Has anyone proposed limits on what certs could be issued by root CAs? e.g. What if Firefox only accepted CNNIC certs for .cn names?
Completely depends on the content, audience and commenting system. Having conversation around your content is fantastic. If your audience prefers to discuss with their own social circles on Facebook, Twitter, etc then having a commenting system on your site may not do anything for you.

On the other hand, if visitors are encouraged to share their own travel stories and contribute to the content, then having comments could be of great value. In this case, it's part of your strategy, which means you'll also need to dedicate time and energy to make it work.

Having comments for comments sake is not worth it. I'd add some options to share content via other social sites/services instead.
Have you ever worked in construction? There are all kinds of hazardous materials that require you to wear a respirator or at least a breathing mask, and many of them are on sale to the public, albeit with stern warnings about safe methods for use. I see no reason that this product can't be used equally safely - that is, with a mask and proper ventilation. I have the impression from their datasheets that brushing is possible but spraying is preferable in order to obtain an even coating.

In any case, their primary target seems to be businesses that want to add value by adding a highly dirt-resistant finish to their products.
It is less expensive to do it inefficiently
There's a pretty big difference between converting a very widely used language to C++ for performance reasons and inventing an entirely new language (which converts to some other, very similar language) for the purposes of tackling the unique and fundamental problems that arise when writing a bug tracker. Difference being only one of these is tremendously silly.
Yes, because there're aren't Last.fm and Pandora apps, not to mention thousands of games, for free in the app store. The app store that comes free on the hardware. And I totally bought every singe one of the 9,358 songs in my library from the iTunes store.

Say what you want about Apple's approval policies or how the iPad is going to kill babies because it's closed, but the lack of flash is clearly a performance/user experience decision over a political one.
The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX [pdf]
Vaccine-Autism Study Is Retracted
The problem with this suggestion is that the floor that Starbucks occupies costs a fortune. The author says it himself: he'd be willing to pay "a small" fee to hang out in a Starbucks for 3 to 5 hours. If you were to actually look what this space costs Starbucks to rent, I'm sure it would amaze you.

Starbucks isn't your office. Hanging around and having a chat is one thing, but staying for upwards of 5 hours is just excessive.
I'm not arguing against the efficacy of the drumsticks. They're vastly more unique and useful than the heap of lanyards, mints, and stickers that accumulate after conferences or career fairs. They're one of the few pieces of schwag that I'll probably have with me 6 months from now. So, in terms of their goal as marketing tools, they're perfect. My only issue was with the overuse of the "rockstar" title being applied to developers.
Oracle Begins Picking Its Sun A-Team
The world's most generic news report
JBCrypt security advisory
Run Node.js as a Service on Ubuntu Karmic
Is your comment in reference to Femtoo? Femtoo can notify you of any new comments.
Ben Huh: "The worst candidates focus on money the most"
Well i'd say it averages around 3 hours. There was one session that went up to nearly 5. It never actually went past 5.

If there were multiple parties that were attending, and regularly at that, surely their menu spend would make-up for it?

Without my regular coaching sessions, i would visit starbucks, at best once every 5 or 6 weeks. This way, they see me every week, and i spend with them every week too. As a group of us, its guaranteed spend each week.

Arent subscriptions the new black?
What's better? Aside from the easier pkg generation, I don't yet see a difference from the handful of articles I've read.

Explain to me a pain point of Macports that homebrew solves.
Rupert Murdoch is not a fan of Amazon e-book pricing, prefers Apple
I would bet that Wikipedia is more database bound than CPU bound. HipHop would probably help, but not tremendously.
My blog is very low traffic, so it's not that big of a deal, but using disqus allows me to go through and respond with "delete" in the body when I get a spammy message. Takes about 10 seconds and I can do it from my phone.

Of course, I always end up missing some, so I tend to go through every few weeks and prune those that I missed. What we really need is gmail-esque spam filtering in disqus.
" so users and content creators would be thrown back to the dark ages of video on the Web with incompatibility issues."

I'm already living here in the dark ages with Flash performance on OSX. Things can't get much worse.
I don't understand why they would want to go grey when they are zooming in. They have the tile for the old zoomlevel, they should just scale it until new data comes in (and overlay the new data on the old). This is exactly what happens in the browser when you zoom (as long as you're not zooming, say, 6-7 levels).

Also, I think it would be better to render the whole page at once, with a width of something nominal like 800px or something, and then you can pan and zoom (with or without smart zoom) super fast in hardware. It has always been a dissapointment that the zooming is not as smooth on Android because the browser tries to re-flow all of the "fluid" pages to it's new width and height. (it also breaks some pages, where they try to float something to the bottom of the view, but the view on Android is just slightly larger than the screen, so it's unreachable)
> It's our sense of mission and purpose in the world. It's something that nobody else has. Only we have it because it's in our cultural fabric.

Really, you believe that stuff? That sounds like some kind of propaganda or something you would tell a child. Do you think the Chinese tell each other "We have no purpose in the world, we are a silly nation, we'll never amount to anything."? On the contrary!

Yes, we are what we are because of culture, but mostly because we won WWII, and happened to have lots of nukes, tanks, ships.
Having a large user base is not an indication of technical authority.

Myspace had (and still does to a lesser extent) extremely large user base, and we know they had some stability issues (Honestly though, I've listened to their tech presentations and am more impressed than the things I've seen Facebook do).

No, I don't imagine Gacebook is programmed by a bunch of incompetent monkeys, but compared to Google, Amazon, Yahoo, or many other companies that have had to deal with large scaling issues, their approach seems amateur.
Watching those videos makes it feel like we lost Challenger just yesterday. :-(
I believe it was Dennis Ritchie who said something to the effect of "Unix bloat began when cat started taking options," or some such.
Pinch-to-zoom is extremely useful on websites that use either small fonts or small graphics for links placed closely together or cases in which zooming to a column is still too wide for the screen (Hacker News for example)
Be above the law? No, never.

But (and in practice this is very similar in effect) there are situations where the law should and does have exceptions for law enforcement officers acting in an official capacity. The obvious one is their privelege to ignore many normal traffic regulations under appropriate circumstances. Similarly, many law enforcement agents are authorized and required to be armed in places where it would be forbidden for anormal citizen.
There's a huge difference between Macmillan and a writers association that you clearly don't understand.

Macmillan buys a finished product, refines it and mass produces it. No different than buying iron ore. Amazon is a distributor. This is an argument between Macmillan and Amazon, all the authors under discussion are already locked in binding contracts.

The authors may get some benefit out of the increase in e-book prices. However 90% of Macmillan's income isn't coming from its genre imprints, it's likely coming from its imprints that handle their 'best sellers', that won't get many sales through amazon and will be getting virtually none through e-book sales.

Why you'd assume Macmillan is acting as the 'union' for less than 5% of its authors is rather strange. This is what the specific writers associations do.