skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lets all bully the muslims.

I don't think this is a very productive line of action, very agressive and confrontational. This comment does not mean I am defending the actions of an extreme minority who threatened the South Park guys.

However, with freedom of expression comes a responsibility to not offend others. What did the South Park guys hope to achieve by portraying the prophet onscreen? It smacks to me of a cheap publicity stunt, hidden behind the banner of freedom of expression.

If someone finds something offensive, would you go out of your way to deliberately offend them? Why? At the very least it is bullying, at most it is a very agressive act.

The muslims who counter this threats, and acts of violence are just as ignorant, and deserve to not be called Muslim. Look back to Persian (and even Ottoman too, I believe) art, there the prophet is depicted, granted not in a derogatory way.

Live and let live everyone, why do we feel we have to go out of our way to offend others (on both sides)? Are we doing it because we want to exercise the fact that we can? Less of the dick waving, be humble and respectful of others, and their beliefs. Its not hard.
Not bad, could use a decent tracker style sequencer.
Although python's lexical scoping is all screwed up (python 3.0's nonlocal keyword fixes this, but it is still ugly).
I posted it in response to this complaint: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1294854 which I agree with. The more these stories are recognized as part of the background of our culture, the less they will be posted.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned his freakout over JSON, yet (http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/04/26/theToxicCoralRee...). Apparently, Twitter turning off XML output and standardizing on JSON is "even more dramatic" than the Basic Auth-to-OAuth transition.

Frankly, I don't get it. Dave's argument appears to be that because the tooling he uses (Radio Userland?) doesn't support JSON, and therefore he will stop writing tools for Twitter (he wrote Twitter-related tools?).

He's the only person I've ever read who seems to prefer XML to JSON. Is there anyone else out there who feels the same way? What's the perceived advantage of XML over JSON? Can anyone shed some light on this?
Coding as Performance
So while the #2 link at the moment is HN 3 years ago and we say hey, those links were interesting back then.

And over here at #1, we have 88 votes for a comic strip. With the top comment saying 'well put'

I like Dilbert as much as anyone else. But ask yourself: did you learn anything? Long lasting interest doesn't come cheap. Some may say, 'hey, lighten up', but I'd say, 'hey, we already have reddit'.
The price difference can be invested in an SSD and memory.

I wonder if it can surpass the i7 benchmark.
If so many people are stranded, why are planes flying with empty seats?
More American Expatriates Give Up Citizenship
First they came for my cassette loader ...

About a month ago I had some PC trouble and needed to make a Trinity recovery disk. Needed a writable CD. Used to have them all over the house. I go a look and ... nothing but writable DVDs. Finally found how to write a CD image to a DVD and make it bootable.

But I wonder when DVDs will become the new floppy.

What do people use for archiving stuff?

Has anyone thought about migrating their older archives to some newer media?
Towards a real distributed social network protocol
Natural Defenses in Preventing and Treating Cancer
Sun Tzu would have been proud.
The edw519 era has gone

Oh I sure hope not. I love building things. I love hacker news. And I love talking about building things on hacker news.

It just seems that lately, I've been doing a whole lot more building than talking. Whenever I take my hn breaks, not much on the front page jumps out at me, so I just get right back to work. (This is a good thing).

It's probably just another phase. For the edw519 era to be truly gone, they'd have to pry my keyboard from my OCD hands.

[Ditto on patio11. Great stuff.]
A little known gem: The Elements of Computing Systems

http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Computing-Systems-Building-Pr...

This book takes you from logic gates to writing your own (extremely simple) virtual machine, programming language, etc. It's a bit fast paced and project based, but it'll run you through a very high level overview of the whole gamut.
Suspicious, but given that this is a group of obvious control freaks we don't have to look further than "You will use the school's supplied computer and only it because I Am The Law."
/We'll never truly run out of oil as long is there is a free market/

That is a completely absurd statement. Oil is a finite resource that cannot be reused (at least when it is used for its main purpose). By definition it /must/ run out someday. We can hope to keep pushing that date back, but not forever.
I upvoted the comment. This is a "news" site, not a "recycled story" site. There's enough new stuff coming through the firehose that we don't need to start reposting the Internet from a year ago.
Äktenskapsförord - Beställning av äktenskapsförord
IMO The changes in content probably stems to new.yc's name change from "Startup News" into "Hacker News".

I should start changing the content that I post.
I don't think the likely corporate users of ie would be programmers. Rather, they would be accountants seeking occasional entertainment on the internet.
Court to Decide if State Can Regulate Video Games
The complexity of cancer: A science-based view
DuckDuckGo! I have to check that out. Keep hearing about it.
Misdirection. The most sublime tactic of war, football, and chess.
Nook Surpasses Kindle in March Sales
Steve Jobs' Advice to Nike: Get Rid of the Crappy Stuff [video]
Interview with Chris Campbell, Co-Founder, Wufoo.com
No you shouldn't, most likely files in the repo are not under CDN due to the nature of it. They change frequently so there is no point to cache them.
Any suggestions on what to get? I'm thinking the books by Steve Souders are a good place to start.
Orthopedic transcriptions online
Web-based orthopedic transcriptions for orthopedic specific EMR software and orthopedic templates offered, call toll free 1-877-323-4707
As far as I know, you can surely download podcasts over the air, but your subscription won't be updated the way they are through iTunes on desktop.

I just checked and couldn't find anything to update my subscriptions automatically from the phone.
Probably the pharma hack: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22we+always+have+special+off...

More info on: http://www.wptavern.com/forum/general-wordpress/1493-pharma-...
I'm portuguese (lived there until I left for my PhD a few years ago) and I've always found this system a bit odd. You can own it and use it, but you can't produce it, sell it or distribute it.

Maybe the government believes in the spontaneous generation of drugs?

A couple of quick points, though:

rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty
needles dropped

This isn't directly connected with the decriminalization. There is a program that allows anyone to switch a used needle by a new one (plus a condom, a bottle cap and instructions) for free in any pharmacy/drug store. This program started years before the decriminalization and had a reduction of HIV infections as a goal (hence the condom and the instructions)

One of the main advantages of decriminalization was that is open the doors for a lot more treatments. Before, you had to admit to have committed a crime (with legal consequences) before you could be treated. The decriminalization eliminated these consequences and helped people find the help they needed
Absolutely. Or at minimum place equal value on other types of training such as apprenticeships or vocational programs, where appropriate. I've always thought that it's a shame these practical types of education are looked down on in the U.S. There's no reason many degrees - lets say graphic design, or journalism, for example - couldn't be taught equally well through these options.
Your athletic program did harm students - it raised tuitions for everyone. You probably got more benefit than the average tuition increase, but most students did not. Universities should not be in the habit of forcing all students to pay for the recreational activities of a select few.

Incidentally, universities pocket about 50% of research money and put it into the general fund, which then gets spent on stuff like varsity sports.
Start educating your social circle then, they are part of the electorate. At least, that is my view. I don't like things being unmovable :).
The differences between good designers and great designers
And they probably had to make it work without problem for the iPhone, since a phone call can pop up at any time.
>> You can own it and use it, but you can't produce it, sell it or distribute it. Maybe the government believes in the spontaneous generation of drugs?

I am sure the point is for the Govt. to prosecute the producer, not the consumer. This is similar to some countries outlawing 'consumption' of prostitution services, but not offering of such services.
Rands:

A Twinge is your experience speaking to you in an unexpected and possibly unstructured way, and while you don’t want to base your management strategy on these amorphous moments of clarity, I do want to explain their importance in the organization. ... As a manager, when the story doesn’t quite feel right, you demand specifics. You ask for the details of the story to prove that it is true. If the story can’t stand up to the first three questions that pops your mind, there’s an issue.

Gladwell:

When it comes to something like dating, we all readily admit to the importance of what happens in the first instant when two people meet. But we won't admit to the importance of what happens in the first two seconds when we talk about what happens when someone encounters a new idea, or when we interview someone for a job, or when a military general has to make a decision in the heat of battle. [1]

[1] http://www.gladwell.com/blink/index.html
How I gained more confidence as an Entrepreneur by focusing on what I don't know
I don't support the use of drugs either. But we are living very difficult times and a lot of truly innocent people are suffering. We need to find a better way, but the first step is to have a better understanding of the problem and that is why I think these articles are good. I'm writing this from one of the most violent places in Mexico.
That's something I've never understood. How come the drug buyer is the victim, and so is the sex seller?
I'm from Portugal. There's something important missing from the article which might be useful to explain why there were so many people using drugs in Portugal. Before 1975, the country was under a dictatorship and drug use was obviously low. Then there was a revolution and people were free to the outside world's culture. On the years following the revolution, young adults were pretty much amazed by all the things you couldn't see in Portugal before like Coke or rock music or, right!, drugs. I don't know many people with the age of my parents whom didn't try drugs, soft or hard, back then.

This behavior was also common on the generation which was born during the revolution, like my brother. There was more information on the end of the 80s and teens were still trying soft drugs but starting to avoid hard drugs. I can't really explain why this happened but I know bad stories about drugs were all the time on the news. For instance, in my house my father always said: "If you ever try drugs don't ever come back." He never knew about my brother but there was a cousin in the family completely addicted, he died recently.

I'm on my twenties so I'd say I'm from the generation after my brother's. I never tried drugs but all my friends did, no exception. They just aren't addicted, don't know why. It's pretty common for them to carry small dosages of marijuana which are allowed by law but there's one thing they don't know: it's legal, like the article states. It has to be a really small dosage but it's enough for you if you're not addicted. And that's what's funny: I never met anyone who knew it was legal (and I knew it because my brother worked at the courtyard) and everyone still looks at Amsterdam like the holy place for drugs in Europe. It's like a taboo, nobody is supposed to talk about it being legal, and it works I guess.
What did I miss? I didn't see a "why" in there. Is there further reading somewhere?

That being said, my experience with Comcast has been REALLY GOOD.

I don't understand the hate. Is it their policies maybe? Policies that just don't affect me I guess.

The bandwidth cap... I'm a super heavy Internet user. Vidoes, audio all day, MLB TV, etc. I barely even break 40-50GB per month according to their system.

Then there's the service. I had a problem with one channel not showing HD correctly. They gave me Starz for a year for free, then they sent someone out THAT DAY, they gave me a new DVR and a new remote, checked all connections, crawled up the pole in the back of the house and checked the connections up there, and stayed until everything tested out perfectly.

When we first started with their IP phone service, we had problems with connections. They replaced our router within a day and it worked perfectly after that.

I'm sorry, but I couldn't expect better service from a company.

Maybe it's that they have a lot of crappy old hardware that needs upgraded (apparently), but that aside, I don't understand why they got the golden poop award.
iPhone's iTunes will refuse to download a longer podcast over the air; only works on wifi. On my Palm Pixi, I can download/steam anything I want over EVDO.
Startup Lessons Learned Conference Coverage Roundup
Why Are Nerds Unpopular, An Alternative To PG's Essay
I think it has to do with the fact that they:

+ are a huge monopoly
+ want to filter and tier the internet and have done so in the past
+ move into markets with low prices, then inflate them once they take over
+ don't want to be seen as a utility, even though they are
+ have horrible customer service if anything goes wrong
+ scare the crap out of people with the whole NBC merger thing
Ctrl-R Searches History and Other Historical Tricks
Scottish scientists develop new technique for killing cancer cells
I'm slowly coming round to this as a good idea - at least to trial. If you have the requisite support (like in Portugal) to go with it and are not just decriminalizing possession alone then it should work well.

The only problem I have is that it might encourage the use of drugs; which is potentially dangerous for people.

Worth a trial for sure.
In two short sentences you've managed insult the developer for doing some good work and making something people want,and insult users by suggesting that can't understand what an app is.

Negging seems to be big in the iPhone developer community.
3x the price after you normalize for performance

The relationship of price and performance is not linear.
The funny/sad thing about releasing software is...
I found that pretty much the only applications I use on the Mac are Terminal, Macvim, Chrome, VLC, and BitTorrent, all of which are just as good or better on Linux. Plus, I like to play around with advanced programming languages and other command-line only programs, and usually the apt-get packages are a bit stabler and more problem-free than the MacPorts ones. I'm perfectly familiar with Ubuntu - I use it at work - so the usability/eye-candy benefits of a Mac don't apply to me. In fact, I found it harder to get used to and learn a whole new set of keyboard shortcuts, because I'm so used to Linux.

If I'm just going to use it like a Linux machine, I might as well pay half the price and get a real Linux machine.

The Mac does have some nice points. Two-finger scroll is great, as is the magnetic attachment for the power cord (I can't count the number of times I've tripped over that). The battery life is significantly better. I can get more & better games for the Mac than for Linux. But the screen on the Pangolin is better, and for half the price, I think I'd end up liking that more than all the little fit & finish on the Mac.

Plus, the Mac had a firmware bug when I bought it (thankfully been fixed since) that randomly would lock up the computer for 30 seconds at a time. Not impressed, Apple.
While the original 78% bounce rate missed people who happily read the full page and then were done, the new 15% "<30 seconds on page bounce rate" overcounts people who leave the page up without reading.

When discovering new material (as from HN or long lists of search results), I'm sure I'm not alone in that I open a bunch of tabs, then slowly work through them. Sometimes, when I reach one, even if it's been open for minutes (or hours!), it's dismissed immediately as uninteresting or obsolete.

I've noticed some video sites manage to defer auto-start of the video until I bring the tab to the fore. Other sites seem to only load (or fade-in) inline images as I scroll to them. Has any analytics tool added similar monitoring of foreground-time or scroll-to-end-of-item sensing?
Now that would be a fascinating study indeed! The correlation of misspelling and impulse shopping :)
While I strongly support your conclusion in this case, I'm infuriated every time I hear a call for a policy change based on "common sense". As far as I can tell, this is just a euphemism for "I am unable to articulate a rational basis for my position", or even "I refuse to let the actual evidence interfere with my position".
Anyone else having trouble playing anything from the timeline? I don't get any sound.

EDIT: Nevermind, I see you have to connect the outputs.
Add multi-finger functionality to your Windows trackpad
These surface on the SEO underground every once in a while. I personally don't think the data is that valuable except for getting less-than-savvy folks to pay scads of money for a CSV file (present company excepted, most folks who buy this are going to be the DigitalPoint "How do I make $1 a day with AdSense!?" crowd that buy most Make Money Online products).

That said, the existence of lists like this always makes me shoot a baleful glare in the general direction of Google's "transparency." They are very happy to give away all the rest of the world's information, but anything Big G thinks is commercially sensitive for Google is guarded like Fort Knox. (Did you know AdSense users can't even tell you the CPC rates they get without violating the TOS?)
It might be the case for your school but the funding for sports at my school came from alumni, the overwhelming majority of whom were former athletes from the school.

The university did charge an athletic fee. This was to cover the publicly accessible tennis courts, basketball courts, football, baseball, and soccer fields. They also provide buses for the intramural teams. And part of it went to subsidize student football tickets to the nationally ranked football team, played in a stadium the football boosters paid for.

I've watched the college next door to me transform from a small community college to a full fledged university. And they got there by having a serious athletic program.
> If someone in our society wants a college education, it should be provided for them.

Why? If you want to give education away, start with free kindergartens. The guys who are ready to go to university have already have already made it into the middle class.
Does anyone conclusively know what happened to nickb?
I hope they're right up there next to AT&T :/

Comcast and AT&T are the only choices for broadband where I live. I've had both. It really is awful either way.
FYI, exactly 1 year ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=580060

Same time.com story, 220 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=828538

Original article, 407 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516678

It is an interesting issue, and an interesting policy result, and one we should consider adopting here. I am wholeheartedly in favor of reducing government interference in people's personal lives, and I can even consider it hack-worthy insofar as it involves tinkering with legal rather than computer code.

But this particular story is no longer news. Not included are about 10 other HN threads referencing the same article, which you can find by going to google and searching for 'site:news.ycombinator.com drugs portugal'. This gets posted in some fashion every 90 days or so.
Just to give people an idea what "have horrible customer service" means, I called comcast saying my remote was broken and they said they only way to pick another one up was in person. That's right they where unable to mail me a new remote even if I was willing to pay for the shipping.
Just because something is old doesn't mean it isn't relevant or interesting.
If you just want single page view stats, my stats give me "time spent on site" broken down by "new visitors".

I don't understand why you have to redefine the term "bounce" in order to achieve that. You could simply say that "bounce" wasn't the metric that you were looking for, or that people put too much emphasis in it. You don't need to "fix" it because it isn't broken.

"Bounce" is a measurement of people that do not continue to interact with a site after the first page they visit.
Look, I wrote a Rails plugin that rewrites your code, placing it in a new location, and hooks the class loader so it finds the new files instead of the old ones. I'm very proud of my work.

But.

It's a hack. That makes it useful for me and my projects, but it isn't a product. It has too many dependencies on things that weren't intended to be hooked the way I hook them. It broke when Ruby 1.9 was released. It broke when Rails 3 was released. Hacks are always fragile, it's their nature.

The description I read talked about an app on the desktop side that pretends to be an iPhone so it can sync with iTunes. That is absolutely, positively a hack, and one that got Palm into hot water with Apple's lawyers. It sounds like it's very fragile and could easily break accidentally with an iTunes update.

Now really, honestly, this is Hacker News. I mean no disrespect to anyone when I characterize their work as being a hack. But the point of my commentis that I can't see Apple wanting a hack on their platform.

Now as to users: HN readers are not a representative sample of iPhone users. Apple goes way out of its way to make simple things that just work. Their market for iPhone is the group of people that don't want to consult a huge list of what works and what breaks when they release an update.

Apple especially don't want to dig themselves into the hole Microsoft created by working so hard on backwards compatibility for Windows. Apps like this are a backwards compatibility nightmare. Right now Apple can do anything they want with the iPhone to iTunes synchronization API by updating both apps simultaneously. Approving this app would end that flexibility.
The State of Web Development 2010
Yikes, let me point out smcfancontrol:

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/31029
I've been using git for little while now, and started out using rebase in the manner described here. I did some experimenting first using gitk and a few git branches to grok what rebase actually did, and then figured I pretty much always wanted to rebase, unless working on a branch that was 'public' (which other people will pull from).

So my strategy has been, rebase for all local branches, merge for all public branches.

That being said, I'm still quite new to git, so if anyone can explain why that strategy is flawed, I'm happy to listen.
It was decided by voters in a March Madness style tournament. Comcast beat out Ticketmaster in the final round.

Here's the bracket: http://consumerist.com/2010/04/meet-your-worst-company-in-am...

It's obviously biased toward consumer oriented businesses. As far as I know Comcast hasn't killed anyone like health insurance companies or squandered billions of dollars like AIG.
Paying for something to get something "free" is not free by any definition. The title is misleading and smells spammy.