skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reading between the lines of your post, I think you're suggesting that the Portugal experience is unique due to recent cultural changes, and we shouldn't try to apply these lessons elsewhere. However,

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.

This sounds very much like a typical experience in America.
This article fails to recognize Seaman as a member of the super best friends. Leave it to the NYT Op-Ed to get the facts wrong.
I didn't know about this and I'd love to get started using it. I wanted have an affiliate system for my own app but writing my own was not attractive at all.

I'll definitely be watching.
Blippy Issues, Resolutions, Plan
Status 2010 NFL Draft: Grading All 11 St. Louis Rams Draft Picks
Aren't there people at the airports, willing to fly standby? That's as close to a box as it gets.
I really wonder how useful the time-on-page metric is. Thanks to tabbed browsing, I might have your site open for 30 minutes, yet only look at it for 30 seconds.
"They lack social skills because they lack emotional intelligence." --> I agree

"nerds lack emotional intelligence because they have learnt to ignore the relevant emotions." --> Maybe.

"That is why bullies are able to bait nerds; they both feel that the nerds' denial of group emotions makes them culpable." --> I would love to hear you expand on this, and I loved that you invoked a concept of "group emotions", which I had never before heard formulated as such.
Previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1288910
I voted you back up from 0. It's true, even though it's not incorrect BECAUSE it's from Cato, it deserves extra scrutiny since the study comes from someone with an agenda.
This appears to be non existent, it uses a wufoo form... Has anyone ACTUALLY USED it?
If we're going to be that respectful of Islam, why are we not going to be that respectful of Christianity? Or, relevant to the current discussion, Scientology?

Because they don't threaten violence anywhere near as credibly? That's a terrible, terrible incentive to set up. (But perhaps you have another answer?)
This is pretty sweet.

It's great to see companies springing up to take the hassle out of building SaaS apps.

Chargify/Recurly and the other folks doing recurring billing come to mind as well. Thanks guys!
"Regarding prosecuting black ones instead of white ones.. well we already do that, so I'd say the reality has surpassed both of us."

After this statement, I can't really take you seriously. Do you have any proof beyond this statement?

"However, as far as what I think should happen, then yes, I would differentiate between gang bangers who own corners, run protection rackets, etc and the dude in high school who sells a little weed to his friends. But as far as consistency in the law, if you're decriminalizing usage and keeping dealing criminal, then you need to apply that consistently when you catch people dealing."

If drugs were legalized, most likely, dealing without some sort of license would still be illegal.
Ouch. I'm moving from an area with Optimum Online & Verizon FIOS to one with only Comcast & AT&T. If you had to recommend between the two, which one is less awful.
You win this round, The Simpsons Cartoon Guy.
If Programming Languages Were Real Persons
Can you really call a Wi-Fi iPad a mobile device?
Some very good points, like how Apple's i<whatever> ecosystem is more closed than TV (which allowed the advent of cable, VCRs and the Apple II), making that common dismissive comparison to the iPad a bit bogus.

On the other hand, this is one of the weakest arguments I've seen against the DMCA's protections of DRM:

"What's more, you can invent cool new things to do with your dishwasher. For example, you can cook salmon in it without needing permission from the manufacturer (check out the Surreal Gourmet for how). And you can even sell your dishwasher salmon recipe without violating some obscure law that lets dishwasher manufacturers dictate how you can use your machine."
Has anyone read an official statement from Comedy Central about this? This situation seems so counter to their reputation and public image I'm surprised they'd let it stand and not respond to all the trashing.
Interestingly, that "arranged marriage" thing may also compound it.

Dating/marrying intelligent, hardworking unattractive people is something that almost all of us approve of -- for other people to do.
I haven't taken a position on this matter yet, but is anyone (credible) looking into whether the hype around this story was generated on purpose as an attempt to smear American Muslims? See:

The Radical "Muslim" Group That Threatened South Park Creators Was Founded and Run by Joseph Cohen, a Former Israeli Radical Who Used to Live in a Settlement in the West Bank
http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/bvnsa/
Bizarre matter could find use in quantum computers
I find the quibbling over nerds versus geeks or whatever other term one wants to use silly. You may subscribe to that distinction, but most people don't - which makes it hard to communicate meaningfully with those terms.
Whatever you think of Mark Zuckerberg, you have to respect him for this. He knows his information is available through the API, he has chosen to make it publicly available.

It is ultimate dogfooding; equivalent to being able to see Eric's and Larry's and Sergey's searches.

EDIT: blackswan is right; tamed down the comparison to Google in the last phrase
Almost all of Greenwald's counterpoints referred to situations in which public resources were involved: public funding of an art exhibition, public funding of a play via a university, use of public airwaves.

What's somewhat frightening about the South Park censorship is that cable is not regulated by the FCC for indecency as it's not a public resource.
What's really frightening is that the cable company was able to censor the Internet "broadcast" of the episode.

I don't have a problem with Janet Jackson's breast on CBS, but I respect the complaints of those who do. Spectrum is a scarce national resource, so we should democratically allocate it. Cable, and especially the Internet, should be afforded a much greater degree of freedom of expression.

We no longer live in an open and free society when a man with a web site gets to decide what millions of people can and cannot watch.
This strikes me as disingenuous. The title STRONGLY implies "how 30 seconds of work dropped my bounce rate".

It's really hard to come up with any other interpretations of the subject line a priori.

It's stunningly good link bait, and the article is deeply disappointing compared to the promise.
Most beta testers seem to barely use the software. Definitely few "Breakers" in my experience.
How to Keep Crappy Programmers
Love it!

Perhaps a simple tagging/categories mechanism, crowd-sourced or by the editors. Sometimes I'm in the mood for a certain type of article, and having the simple recommendation that it's of the "US/National/Politics" genre is enough to make me hit "Read Later" when I otherwise wouldn't.

A nice layout, as well. Kudos!

Also, were it to be extensively curated and organized, perhaps with 1 sentence blurbs about the articles, and frequently updated, I'd pay a nominal fee for it, if that's a direction you'd be interested in going with it.
the point of listing them all wasn't to justify it but to show that such threats are not uniquely muslim, as claimed in the original piece.
It's an MVP, we're in the process of building it. We could either send mindless PDFs and talk about it or we could show it off. The screenshots are from the actual ui.

We're all about releasing products fast (cloudomatic and cloudomaticstart were released in <30 days). This isn't something done in a few weeks though sadly.
Is there another posting for this? I can't get to the article through the link.
So it seems that by making a death threat getting what you want is possible in the western world today. If you don't want SP to make fun of your religious leader? Just make a few death threats and they will censor the episode. And on top of that all other shows are afraid to touch the topic too.

By what will happen is, for instance, Paris Hilton activists will start making death threats to the SP creators? Will Comedy Central start censoring all references to Paris Hilton too?

Probably nothing will happen since Paris Hilton activists haven't killed anyone yet.

So in fact you can conclude that terrism does work to get what you want in the world today.
Isn't better to use a threads library for achieving this?
[most of this was incoherent - sorry]

Perhaps the suggestion of be respectful is the wrong choice of words; probably I mean "avoid inciting the extremist elements" instead (till they become irrelevant).

What would you suggest as an alternate solution?
Creating an iPhone physics game in an hour.
I'm not sure how you can call that.

Also I'd dispute your statement "It's business model fundamentally relies on invading your privacy".

Without any invasion of privacy, they can probably make a few hundred million a year from random ads. Using your demographics to target ads better at you probably raises that to a few hundred million more.

So IMHO, invading your privacy is in no way necessary for Facebook to operate. It just allows them to optimize a little better.
Hey mnemonik. I had the same thought. It's in the todo in the readme on github.
Thanks! Infrastructure for distribution and monetization are really important for saas apps. The guys at chargify/recurly/spreedly/etc. are building some really important infrastructure too.
This is scalping: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1295597
Psyched to try this on my iPad! oh wait...
I am also from Portugal. After reading your post, I was wondering whether we lived in the same country. I suspect I am from a generation younger than yours, which may explain a lot.

According to your rationale, oppressive regimes lead to increased drug abuse. Well, Spain also had a dictatorship for decades. The entire "Eastern Europe" lived under Soviet oppression for decades, too. The USSR didn't have a sexual revolution in the 1960s. I would love to see data that suggests that oppression causes people to go crazy and indulge themselves with drugs once they are "free". I am not saying it's not a possibility, but there's talk, and then there's data...

Almost all my friends in Portugal smoked Marijuana. They were not all that open about it, but everyone knew. By contrast, none of them ever touched cocaine or heroine. They were not stupid. Everyone had seen heroine junkies dragging themselves around town, their lives destroyed beyond repair.

Personally, I think the ones drawn to hard drugs are the weak people who can't deal with reality. Many of them die, but then... perhaps the purpose of their lives is to serve as warnings to others.
Interesting, I hadn't understand that possible meaning in the sentence at all until reading the comments. I had assumed it was a 30 second reduction in page load time or some such (Though I suppose it should've been obvious this wasn't the case... A website with a 30+ second load time would likely not be able to gain a large audience). Either way, a confusing headline...
I'm unique in that my experience with Comcast has been pretty good. Internet service has been solid. When I have had issues they've sent people out and fixed them w/o cost.

While they were late to the HD game, they've come on strong. Lots of HD channels with reasonable quality. And the OnDemand content is probably the best of any cable/satellite provider in the industry.

The DVR is pretty sucky, but stability has become rock solid. I used to get a lot of missed recordings, but haven't in literally a few years. Oddly, this was fixed when I just happened to mention to a Comcast rep that my DVR was flaky and he said, "We have a fix for that." They sent it, and no more problems. My only complaint is that I had to get this fix out of sheer luck from a rep.

I'd definitely rank Ticketmaster or Sony or my credit card company behind Comcast.
Verizons case against full disclosure / "Narcissistic Vulnerability Pimps"
How come nobody appreciated the UI!!! I personally believe HN has an awesome UEx quotient and would look the same even 3 and more years later!!
The last Miles & I heard from his friend, Nick B was/is alive. After that we didn't pursue it.
Has anyone credible raised the question that Theo van Gogh was really murdered by someone out to make Muslims look bad?
Upvoted for some very good comments in that reddit thread (a lot more balanced than here, surprisingly.)
Cool. I plan to be one of those parents that don't own a TV.
No concrete plan yet, but we have people requesting Android as well as PSP. Thanks.
So Apple loses this thing that's worth a lot to them. Critical "trade secrets". He tries to return it, they don't say anything. He could give the super-valuable thing he recovered back to him for free, but why should he? What obligation does he have to work for Apple for free?

Instead, he decided to cash in. Seems reasonable to me.
At the end of the day, personalized education, in many forms, is the future.

I think that'd be a pretty disastrous future; the purpose of "higher education", if it's to continue in any organized or disorganized form, is not to be personalized. The purpose is twofold:

* Give the students a common background of ideas and basic knowledge of their culture.

* Through study, discussion and debate of those ideas/culture, give them the ability to absorb and critically reflect upon arbitrary information.

In other words, there's a reason why, if you look at the bits which make them up, the terms "university" and "diversity" are practically antonyms.
As a loyal consumerist reader (but someone who didn't participate in the worst company vote) - At a quick glance glance it looks as if the companies that tended to do the worst were companies you'll find a large number of popular articles about on consumerist. Consumerist has had it out for cash4gold for awhile now (with good reason) and they run a large number of BofA articles and this goes doubly for Comcast. I suppose it's only to be expected that the readers of Consumerist would vote in the companies that the consumerist runs the most negative (though not unfairly so) articles about.
It is silly, and I wasn't being entirely serious...
> Drug violence is rarely about cartels vs cops -- more often it's cartels vs cartels and dealers vs dealers.

Precisely the point: If the cartels come to intimidate grandma, she calls the police, because her operation is legal and the intimidation is not. The police, because her operation is legal, then go after the cartel and shut them down.

Additionally, contract laws and theft/burglary laws and so on work in grandma's favor, because the legal system is at least potentially on the side of her legal operation. This alone greatly reduces the need for violence.
Facebook vs Google Part II:  Is a better Internet smarter or more social?
Someday, you will learn that life is long enough to both learn and have fun.
Note: I consider myself a nerd.

But honestly, all of this pointing at other people is kind of annoying. We are just as culpable in our social ostracism as everyone else.

Nerds lack emotional intelligence because they have categorized it as pointless - at least seemed to have convinced themselves of that point. I disagree that they've learned to ignore the relevant emotions, it's more like they've convinced themselves that fitting in and being part of society is unimportant, and that the world is simply out to get them with their dumb social expectations.

Of course, many nerds never truly believe this deep inside, which causes all kinds of angst for them, but that's another topic entirely.

IMHO nerds on the whole have developed this giant victim complex. It's not us refusing to fit in with the group that causes our ostracism - it's clearly because we're smart and they fear our intelligence. Yeah, that's it.

People don't like us because a large portion of our community are quite simply arrogant jackasses. They pride themselves in being nerds, see themselves as smarter than the rest, and generally just lord their intelligence over everyone else. No wonder people hit us at our weak point: our lack of social skills.

This isn't meant to be a complete diatribe against nerds - I love being one, but honestly, a lot of the responsibility for the anti-nerd thing is our fault.
Excellent. The facial expressions and choice of characters are just perfect.
Suggestion:

instead of this:

<code>
function add (a,b,c){
if (arguments.length < this.add.length) {
return curry(this.add,arguments,this);
}
return a+b+c;
}
</code>

we could have something like:

<code>
function add (a,b,c) {
return curry(arguments, 3, function (x,y,z) {
return a+b+c;
};
}
</code>

which is arguably simpler and cleaner. However, one extra closure is used.. maybe it makes it more complicated for some?

But, overall, pretty clear and interesting article :o
<-- Fail with <code> !
On the other hand, his celebrity is now giving greater exposure to the activities of his associates -- they're getting dragged in without much of a choice. I don't think that's very noble of him at all.
I learned a lot about my cultural assumptions on the meaning of high intelligence when I traveled from the United States to Taiwan to study the Chinese language twenty-eight years ago. Here in the United States, I had imbued the idea that high-IQ people are disliked because they are smart, and that above a certain IQ, a person has no hope of having a friendship relationship with a person of average IQ. (I especially got that idea from a short story by Philip K. Dick

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick

I read when I was in ninth grade, but in fact this idea that high IQ causes an inherent social gulf is commonplace in Western literature on education of gifted children.)

I got a big surprise when I arrived in Taiwan. I found out that in east Asia, the cultural assumption is that there are few finer uses for intelligence than getting along with other people. It is expected that anyone who is generally smart will be able to make friends with lots of people. (This emphasis comes straight from the writings of Confucius and the successor Confucian philosopher Mencius, which I studied in the original literary Chinese as part of my language studies.) It helps, of course, that Chinese-influenced culture in general also honors literacy and intellect in a way that is not quite as direct or pervasive as in Western culture, but the main point is that the 知識分子 ("intellectual") is a person who has his own responsibility to get along with other people and lead society (by EXAMPLE) so that all of society is harmonious. Once I learned not to whine to myself so much about how people don't appreciate me because I'm so smart (doesn't it sound gauche to hear me say that?), I learned to appreciate my fellow human beings a lot more, and succeeded in making more friends. I'm glad I went overseas to learn a new perspective, a perspective that helps me now that I am back in the United States. Confucius had a great saying about how to appreciate other people and learn from all of them: 三人行，必有我師焉 ("wherever three persons are walking, my teacher is surely among them"). I can learn from anyone in my environment, and I can make friends with more people than I realized at first.
Ask HN: Please review AppSnap - Snap the icon of an iPhone app to get it 
Hi,

I'd love to have some feedback from HN readers about my very young iPhone app:

http://www.getappsnap.com

It's name is AppSnap and it lets you install any other app by taking a picture of its icon.

This is useful when you meet a friend and you want to install an app she's demo-ing you (snapping her iPhone screen) or if you want to install an app you're reading about on a web site (snapping your computer screen).

I've been working on the icon-matching backend and on the iPhone app for the last few months and I've released the iPhone version of the app a couple of weeks ago.

I've got a lot of (almost all positive) reviews and the hacker side of the thing is working pretty well (autoscaled ec2, high-speed query engine [all C], robust iTunes scraper, etc); on the business side I'm still trying to learn the black art of marketing (I've a ton to learn!).

Would love any feedback, thanks!
It depends completely on the quality of curating, but yes I agree. I feel like I've been looking for something of this nature. Reading long articles won't hurt my shortening attention span, I hope.
In the US, not in all of the western world. In Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Holland etc. the media printed/reprinted the cartoons.

In USA, the land of the free, home of the brave, the big mainstream media seem to censor themselves because of threats of violence.

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
"A lot of things people ingest are toxic, the trick I feel is making that well known and public knowledge, not necessarily illegal. For example, the surgeon generals warning on the pack of a cigarette, or the chemical warnings on a bottle of bleach, I feel are a better way to approach the problem."

This still won't stop people from trying to sue companies that try to sell them something that knowingly harms them. Hell, even fast food restaurant chains have been sued in the US for making someone fat.

My problem is that the same people that want drugs legalized then want the tax payers to pay for an addict to get clean.

Most people aren't born addicted to drugs. You have to make the decision to start taking drugs. I have no problem allowing anyone to have the freedom to put whatever the hell the want into their body as long as it doesn't affect other people. This includes leaching off of the government.

This may seem harsh. But if you take the risk you also need to be prepared for the consequences (good or bad).
Really?

You're really under the impression that black people aren't systematically questioned/harrassed/arrested in proportionally higher numbers than white people?

I mean that's its own whole discussion but I'd say the number of young african american men currently in jail pretty much proves the point.

If you have any black friends, ask them about profiling sometime.
You can't take the isolated circumstances of 'customer helps prostitute feed herself' and proclaim everything peachy, because the reality of the situation is that it goes beyond individual prostitutes, and involves a global dynamic of human trafficking, sexism, class discrimination, income inequality, media stereotypes, and more.

It's easy to read some article and say, if A then B so therefore C (or not C, whatever, etc.), but if you don't have experience with people who actually suffer through these experiences every day, then you have no basis from which to say "In fact".
> "they increase the price over time etc."

Interesting note: I have a friend in the airline industry, and according to him time-to-flight has no effect on ticket price. Rather, airlines assign prices to seats - and sell from the cheapest first. So theoretically if nobody buys tickets to a flight, it will still be cheap even the day before departure.
No, that's decriminalization. Leaving the laws on the books but not enforcing them is decriminalization. Taking the laws off the books is legalization. The societal view of whether it's bad or not can't be legislated directly, but it could change as use patterns shift over the years.
old.ycombinator.com?

;)