skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did not know that about reddit! I had wondered how sites which depend on so much user participation get started. Now I know they cheat ;)

Anyway maybe you need to define more clearly what you want? What is a 'passionate' user? Your app doesn't appear to be social, so you don't need to create the illusion of popularity on-site, like reddit. Do you want evangelists, people going out and blogging about how great your app is?

I don't really know how to bring that about. Just make the best damn thing you can and then politely inform bloggers you read about it. If you look at the balsamiq (a mockup program) website there is a post on how the guy approached bloggers at the start.

I quite like the Steve Martin approach: "be so good they can't ignore you". Naively, I kind of think that if you make something great, that really solves a problem for people, they will want to share that with others.

So... I guess the answer is for you to very clearly define who you are helping, what problem you are helping them solve, and then approach them. By way of friendly criticism, your site could probably do with a better front page, in terms of a very quick explanation of what it is and why a reader might care. Some good examples:

http://rethinkdb.com/
http://basecamphq.com/

One question for you to think about (in general, but especially for the front page) would be who would need to implement a database but would not want or be able to do it themselves.
Agreed. The US spends something like $10 billion a year on marijuana prohibition, and what do we have to show for it?
I use ViEmu in Visual Studio as my primary "vi editor", and the clashing of Visual Studio and vi really adds up after a while. As I'm sure you can guess CTRL+O and CTRL+C don't work in ViEmu.

I think the real solution is to make vim my main editor for working in C#. That's a pretty tall task unfortunately.
The author of the article suggests using Caps lock as control but I've found it's a stellar place to have an escape key. After a few days it felt completely natural for my left pinkie to hit escape. For those on windows, there are a number of batch files that will help edit your registry to remap the keys although I found it to be a problem on Windows 7 until I tried Sharp Keys which worked great.

Another trick that is useful for people who compulsively hit the Ctrl+s keybind from other editors; the following is from my vimrc:

" Map Control+s to save a file
nmap <C-s> :w<CR>
imap <C-s> <ESC>:w<CR>

This leaves you in normal mode which is usually what I want when I hit ctrl+s.
The Cop Who Broke Into Gizmodo Editor's House In iPhone Search-And-Seizure
Dulwich - Python implementation of Git's internal formats and protocols
Are those comments directed at me? I'm not the creator of longform.org; just wanted to share a great site with everyone.
Can you enumerate on how the privacy settings are dwindling? Which ones? I feel like I've had greater control over my privacy with more recent changes to Facebook.
You should check out my follow-up project where I try to do better:

http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1272132621.html

And this post about two alternatives to DiP that are better written and easier for both expert and beginner:

http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1272216358.html
duplicate

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1295858
For a great response, see Glenn Greenwald's takedown: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/04/26...
The solution is for society to quit placing such a high value on am arbitrary piece of paper.

The value of that paper would go down if the government took away tax incentives, interest rate subsidies, and the ability to eliminate student debt liabilities after 10 years.
Class is more about your earning potential than it is about your current bank statement.
Yeah, this is why I never distinguish between jocks and musicians and other forms of "popular kids", quibbling over terms is pointless.
Great post. One thing I am torn about is the threats themselves. If we want to encourage freedom of speech and the media to publish whatever they want, even if it offends, it seems like a logical way to do that would be to make even the voicing of threats unprotected speech. That is, even if it is not a direct threat, but a veiled one, such as the one given by Revolution Muslim, the people that sent the threat should be quickly and forcefully prosecuted for committing a crime.

The moral dilemma is that this itself seems to limit free speech. How can we allow the media to publish any parody or mock any religion, and at the same time keep extremists from making threats? I don't think it's sufficient to try to find the killers after they've already killed. I truly think this needs to be dealt with in a "Minority Report" style of thoughtcrime, as scary as that sounds to me.
> So are you saying that that's not actually the case, that smart people aren't disproportionately unpopular?

I think they aren't. As an example, we could hypothesize that people have a few simple attributes - say IQ (math), physical skills (sports), looks (hot or not), empathy (good at getting along with others) and political skills (good at influencing others).

I imagine that looks and physical skills are the most important factors for popularity, with empathy and political skill next, while IQ is basically irrelevant - unlike good looks, high IQ in and of itself does not cause popularity.

So let's say that popularity is a function of a weighted average score of looks, physical skills, empathy and political skills.

When we say that someone is "popular" or "smart", we don't mean "average" but more something like "top 10%".

Obviously 10% of the population will be among the 10% most popular, and 10% among the 10% smartest. But if popularity and IQ is statistically independent, only 1% will be among the top 10% in both.

So people that are both smart and popular can indeed be rare even when IQ and popularity are independent, we don't need more than a random distribution to explain that.

If we add the fact that people tend to focus on (and thereby improving) things they are good at and ignore (and thereby fall behind in) areas where they suck, it will only strengthen the trend.

I think nerds and jocks both follow the path of least resistance by putting most of their efforts into areas where they have a natural advantage. But doing so is rational behavior, it's hard to argue against it.
This is an interesting article as well I think:
http://www.badscience.net/2009/06/this-is-my-column-this-is-...
This seems to integrate exactly with your existing privacy settings, so I guess there was no real surprise here. Mine were pretty much on lock-down anyway. I found myself, and every single link except my profile picture and my likes showed "data empty".
The only problem I've found with remapping keys (and getting used to it that way), is that you look like an idiot when using someone else's machine.

This was particularly unfortunate in a coding interview:

"I'm used to a different keyboard layout, seriously."
What do you mean "yet"?

vim has had code folding for years:

:help fold.txt

If you want to indent code, < and > are your friends. (Really? Indenting code with search/replace? What are we, barbarians?)
Escape used to be located closer, IIRC it was next to 1 (on `) on some older keyboards. (Much like Ctrl used to be where CapsLocks is now.)

Moving it is easy, of course. Also, Ctrl-[ is usually the same key as Escape, and if you have CapsLock remapped to Ctrl, they're practically on the home row. (The article hints at this, but doesn't explicitly note that C-[ is Esc.) You could also remap CapsLock to Esc, of course.
They're the only entity I know of that can get away with charging you to cancel a service. They're one of the few I'm aware of that can "give" you a mandatory "upgrade", requiring you to physically go to one of their locations to exchange hardware in order to retain the same service you've always had.
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.

When heroin had a comeback in the United States in the nineties, my father said, "Of course heroin's coming back. All the people who saw their friends die of it are too old to have any credibility in youth culture."
The Power of Stretch Churn
Merging and rebasing both have their benefits and use cases. Just do not fall for the "squash everything into one commit and rebase" BS recently afflicting otherwise rational people.
Ask HN: why is SMS so expensive
I can get an unlimited 3G data connection for 50 bucks (in my 3rd world country!) these days. SMS should be replaced in the next years as more people do email/tweet over 3G... So, why is SMS so expensive?
Depending on the area you want to indent, you can use visual mode with % to select the block and then >> it over, or, for more specific regions, use visual block mode with ctrl-V to highlight the first column of the text you want to indent, hit I, indent the line by hitting space, and hit escape. When you move the cursor the other lines will indent.
At least for curly bracket languages.
>iB indents the block
<iB deindents
dunno which languages it works for otherwise

http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Indenting
http://en.wikiaudio.org/index.php?title=Audiotool_Firestarte...

:)
I disagree with part of #3. I really like being included in some of the business decisions, or at least being aware of why they were made. I don't want to spend 8 hours a day in customer meetings, but I do like having quick meetings with BD people on why I am doing what I am doing. A lot of times it gives reasons to tasks that seem stupid. (ie we are implementing this bad feature b/c it will give us some sort of negotiating advantage)
7 mins to Backup and Launch your custom EC2 Ubuntu machine from S3?
My first action on a new machine is:

git clone $myserveraddy/homedirpublic .

which includes a relevant vimrc. Helps alot. (get permission first with explanation of why...)
Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.
Great idea! On a side note, the hover effect on the buttons hurts my eyes - maybe it's just me.
I think it's mostly the yammer about testing to actual yammering ratio.

You also have to look at how many conversations you can bring up testing in. If you can do it for at least 90% of your conversations you're doing pretty good. It's probably not worth it to cover 100% of conversations though.
Consider me disappointed. That was merely a weak "tu quoque" argument, or even a rousing round of "what-aboutery", but it was no counterpoint. (Definition of "what-aboutery": http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-har...).

I'm disappointed, personally. I would have loved to read someone actually argue that satirical depictions of Muhammed should be censored. (Well, someone who isn't threatening to kill people for it at least.)
His stuff is often very literal, you just never worked for the company he was writing about (former Pacific Bell/SBC/AT&T employee here).
What the heck, flag this. No need to drag more individuals into the gutter over this stupid gadget drama. :/
isn't this a bit excessive over something that would have been out in ~3 months anyway?

An engineer leaves phone in a bar. Gizmodo purchases phone, does their expose, then returns phone. Cops seize all of authors computers, phones, etc.
For those that don't want to download, I'll give you a major theme in this after a quick perusal.

1. It's very hard to bid on trademarked names. For example "Disney" may take issue with your "Orlando on $20 a day" clickbank ebook ad.

2. It's a little less competitive if you use misspells. So bidding on "Dinsey" could provide higher CR. This is a fairly well-known theme.

Do note, my example was not included in the file.
I haven't used instapaper before, so I might be missing something. But I just signed up for instapaper, then clicked on one of the "read later" buttons on the longform page. This took me to a registration page for instapaper, which nonetheless recognized that I was logged in to the email address I'd given it.
I remember when all my friends joined Facebook - it happened between high school and university. A couple of them had MySpace during high school but everybody had Facebook by the end of the first year of university. Back then I distinctly remember some friends motivating their getting Facebook when they didn't have Myspace by explaining how Facebook only let your friends and university peers see your profile - as per the excellent parent comment.

I recently explained to these same non-tech folks that applications they have installed can see and now store all their data. They didn't realise this and I don't think they really believed me - perceptions, once formed, take a lot to change! And when only the tech media really discusses API access etc. it's not surprising that most people have not registered the change in how Facebook treats their data.

I quote a non-tech business major friend who was in the above conversation: "It's unintentional bait and switch man - he got everyone signed up by making things better than the other sites and then his investors realised how much money they could make, changed the way data is handled and all the clueless users won't realise it until its too late and Facebook runs the internet!"
Yes. You have absolutely no idea what it's like to grow up in the projects and any attempts to map your life experience onto theirs are completely compromised by your predilection to think, "hey, they could've just tried hard in school and gone to college like I did".

I don't know what it's like to grow up in the projects either, and I don't even have a huge disagreement with you in regards to this particular niche of policy.. but I'm wise enough to know that I'm pretty average, maybe a little bit brighter and harder working but nowhere near special enough to claim I would've made it out of the projects.
Well, maybe most professors at research universities. However, most teachers of higher education are not at such universities and are not conducting research.
It's pretty unfair how the cops can take all of the tools you need for work without ever charging you with a crime. Jason's lucky in that he can easily loan another computer/camera, but many hackers would be in a serious trouble if all their computers were seized.
Android Marketplace hits 50,000 apps.  Paypal support coming
"Texting is the closest thing to pure profit ever invented" -- Sir Chris Gent, founder of Vodafone.
Oh, please. The set of western countries which are not-(Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Netherlands, unnamed etc.) is not simply (USA).
Self-answering: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=449670
So in fact you can conclude that terrorism does work to get what you want in the world today.

It doesn't work for white people though -- that guy who flew his plane into the IRS building didn't get what he wanted, and neither did the Unabomber or Timothy McVeigh.

It seems that we are more afraid of different-looking people than we are of being blown up.
TDY (test driven yammering) would suggest that you always shoot for 100% coverage of your yammering.
They purchased known stolen property and used it to make some money before returning it. That's illegal and I don't see why they shouldn't be held responsible for what they did.
Respect does not enter into it. It's a word you are using out of context.

One shouldn't be giving any special treatment to faith-based ideology regardless of whether they can amass whacko proponents or not. This isn't anything like 'shutting up and walking away from a fight', it isn't a personal experience or situation; this is a matter of policy and public fucking health (mental too).

(edited for clarity of language)
The articles were really only the gravy. The meat and potatoes back then were the discussions and comments.
Well, citation is needed as well for the belief that sports brings in money. Do some research on the Google. Sports is a money loser for all but a handful of universities. You especially have to be careful when doing this research because universities are creative when it comes to accounting for sports expenditures.

Your perception is almost entirely wrong.
I suppose this chain of comments just goes to show how differently we all think. That was the first title I thought of to describe the topic of the post in limited space, nothing more.

If you look at the other posts on my site, it should be obvious that I'm not good at (purposely) writing link bait type titles. Sorry if you feel like I tricked you. Wasn't my intention.

I only submitted it here at all because I found Clicky's new bounce measure profoundly helpful. That data would have been invaluable to me years ago. I thought anyone working on a web startup would surely also be interested.
I generally agree, but I've submitted articles that I didn't like, just because I thought they were interesting starting points for discussion.
just six pages of applications. One of them was Facebook.
And there, on the Facebook screen, was the Apple engineer,
Gray Powell.
"Known stolen property"

When was that ever established?
Because people indicate that's what it's worth to them, as demonstrated by their willingness to pay so much.
Vi(m) out of the box is a fantastic editor.

As a code composing environment it leaves a lot to be desired until you've tacked on enough plugins that it looses a lot of it's vimmy goodness (imo obviously), as a result I tend to do my first draft in various places (FlashDevelop, the Factor Listener, Dr. Scheme etc...) and then use vim for all the follow up work.

I don't know that it's a failure of vim but I think it's part of the reason articles like this keep getting written. The people not already deeply invested in an editor/IDE (me for instance) are the ones who spend more time writing new code than maintaining or adding to a significant existing code base.

Just my thoughts, not really a comment on the article.
Can you think of a better way to investigate computer crime?
Although uniform spacing tends to look better from the macro view, I actually find this incredibly hard to read. My eye jumps all over the page, ignoring many of the articles because they are hard to skim. I went to a few of the demo sites and ended up leaving without reading anything.
The New Utility Belt
Apple is making overreaching an art form these days.
nerds lack emotional intelligence because they have learnt to ignore the relevant emotions.

I disagree. I never learned to ignore specific emotions - I was simply unaware of them. It took me a long time to learn to understand emotions.
OK, I'll be generous and give a link.

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/college_sports_a_m...

Do you have sources for the belief that sports pay for themselves?
More Intel DMI decoded on Linux, but if you didn't know about DMI decode then a good article.

Tip: modern Linux kernels expose all those info via seperate files in /sys, which can be easier to parse.

PS, if you're on a Windows box, run:

get-wmiobject

To see the same stuff.
"A citation ought to have been provided, but for most people interested in this topic the disparities in prosecutions and sentencing are so well known that it might not seem necessary."

Here is an excerpt:

"Whites are primarily sentenced to prison for violent offenses and white prison admissions for violent offenses grew in the 1990s, while drug sentences actually declined somewhat"

so does this mean that the system is being racist against whites in regards to violent crime?

More African Americans may be getting arrested for drug-related offenses, but there is no mention if they actually interviewed a cross-section of those people to see if they actually committed the crimes.

How do we know that there aren't more African Americans, on average, using more illegal drugs?

Some interesting points from the article:

"The second is more complex: high Black male imprisonment is associated with a rise over time in the proportion of Black children living with mothers who have not graduated from high school; this rise occurs despite an overall rise in Black mothers' education and a positive association between Black male imprisonment and the proportion of children living with mothers who are married college"

So it might not have anything to do with racism. A higher percentage of black families only have a mother..and a father in Prison. I heard stats elsewhere that said that this was the case with something like 75% of black families. Children of these broken families have a much lower chance of becoming successful adults and I would say a higher chance of getting involved with illegal drugs. Racism does still happen, but not nearly as much as you are saying.
A conspiracy theory blaming radical Islamist violence on Jewish people? I've seen that one before.
So the result of this censorship is going to be that the only time muslims are seen on TV it will be in news reports about terrorists. Way to go guys!

What do Sikhs have to do with Muslims other than the fact that ignorant Americans have trouble telling them apart?
Every other country offers those services without the taxation of expats.
Grr. Why can't ^W be something less harmful in most programs?
Yes sir. I have heard alot of business owners / entrepreneurs have ADHD.
Re: 4chan

The $/impressions ratio sounds too good to be true. And that's exactly what it is.

If you've ever used 4chan there would be no way you'd actually spend money advertising there. The site is process based where users constantly look in the center where content appears. Ads are on the side (separated away from content) and become totally ignored by the community. Plus, most users block ads - ask how they calculate those users.
No. They purchased a phone "found at a bar". They acted in good faith that it had been lost. When asked to return the property, they did. There are exceptions for good faith actions in most "receiving stolen goods" type laws for a reason.
I can see squashing a bunch of commits when you make 30 junk commits just so you can push them off your box for safe keeping. Assuming that no one is gonna pull from where you pushed, or you just don't care about other people, I see no problem with that as long as the new commits are smallish discreet units. Making huge commits will hurt you when you try to git-bisect.
Handstand week on ninja 2 http://www.myspace.com/king_moe_foe - NoF-ingWay
Police raid Gizmodo editor's house
I will never respect Islam so long as it wants me and my society dead or radically changed for the worse. And it doesn't just stop at freedom of speech, as this story only points toward. The fundamentalists are what Islam is all about, it's not my problem that Islam hasn't reformed in the past 1000 years, or that the moderates can't moderate the fundamentalists. The fight for freedom never stops - and you don't win it by taking away someone else's freedom.
Looks like they paid some attention to what they did wrong in their previous updates.

One hopes that represents real education, not just real PR.
If you can't make clear judgement while drunk, such as not driving, then maybe you shouldn't be getting drunk in the first place. Driving is a privilege you kill someone while drunk and you should NEVER be allowed to drive again.
Millions? Citation needed.
Copy the drives? There's no reason to sieze a digital camera and both of the guys phones. Realistically they are simply looking for emails, there's no reason to take every bit of equipment the guy feeds his family with.

If anyone has to be inconvenienced it should be the authorities. Someone who has not been found guilty or even charged with a crime should not lose their livelihood so the cops can look for a theoretical crime.
Wow, really Apple?! Don't you think that's a little much?
It's annoying but you should at least have an offsite backup in case of fire, seizure, or other type of loss/theft if you depend on your data.

This is making think of pulling the trigger on using truecrypt or the like to encrypt my on-disk data as well.