skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
games that need any kind of UI must link against heavy-weight UI libraries (GTK, QT, etc) which typically impose some kind of application framework

Library makers need to be aware of this danger and prevent their libraries from unnecessarily becoming frameworks. If you want to provide framework-like functionality, separate the core functionality from the framework and make it available separately. You don't want to impose your build tools, application structure, and a bunch of application infrastructure on some poor guy who just wants to pop up a dialog.

Even libraries that are advertised, documented, and distributed as simple libraries tend to acquire framework-like restrictions if the authors aren't careful. For instance, a few years ago I wanted to add some simple visualization to a program I wrote, so I linked in SDL and added a thread to plot the state of the program periodically. (It was the only graphical element of the program; the program's input and output were files.) My sample code worked in standalone tests, but it didn't work when I ran it in my program. Logically it had to be a threading problem, but I was only making SDL calls from a single thread in the application, so I was left scratching my head until I talked to a developer on IRC and discovered that I had to make all SDL calls from the main thread. I was flabbergasted. (It was clear in the documentation that you couldn't make calls from "other" threads, but I didn't realize "other" meant "other than the main thread.") Anyway, I was kind of stunned that this library wanted me to completely restructure my application before I could make a few simple function calls. I ended up sending state information to standard out and piping it to a separate process that used SDL to do the visualization. By that point I was pissed that I had chosen SDL, but I didn't want to throw away all the code I had written.

I could have changed the application to reserve the main thread for SDL, but the program was usually run without visualization, and besides, what would I do with the next library that forced me to make all my calls from the main thread? Create a main thread pipeline that did nothing but make calls to various libraries? And that's the final straw for self-centered, overly restrictive frameworks: they don't compose with each other. Even if structuring my program around your framework is totally worth all the awesome functionality, it won't be possible if I'm already committed to a different framework.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnout_%28psychology%29

I'll add that link to the article. Thanks for identifying the oversight, I thought the term was common enough not to have to define it.
I get upmodded when I criticize Lisp or useless startups. I think people are generally receptive to things that are contrary to the party line. Most of my Apple-hate comments don't even get downmodded anymore.

I don't think HN has jumped any sharks in this respect. But we do get a lot more "popular" articles now, and these lead to a lot of controversial-but-substanceless comments, which are annoying. (And I'm not saying I'm not guilty of writing comments like that, BTW.)
We use apologies as a cheap substitute for empathy. A wronged party would like to know that you see their hurt and if you could do it all over again you wouldn't because of that hurt.
The outcry is about censorship of a "depiction" of Mohammed on Comedy Central. In order to respond to this censorship we are drawing Mohammed. We're not targeting a particular group of people. Offence is a side-effect. The aim is to stand up against censorship.
Now we're mixing up two criteria. Contest problems are small enough that an optimal solution can be found in reasonable time; but since packing problems usually end up NP complete or NP hard, in the real world you'll end up using heuristics.
We should take away the tax breaks for small businesses like 37signals. Oh, I mean, all the "entitlement programs" except that one...
because sometimes, with my android smartphone, I find myself out of range of my local network
This gives me a yahoo 404 page.
Why wouldn't you want the above?

If you never really used it anyway? As you showed there are plenty of valid reasons for wanting Flash on your phone, it's just that those might not be important reasons for everyone.
I don't understand why publishing pictures of Mohammad stops being offensive to Muslims when it becomes part of a political demonstration.

What's childish is the notion that there's no cost to offending people, or that the cost must not matter because there's a principle attached to it. You have free speech whether or not you choose to use it to offend Muslims. Muslims will tolerate your free speech, because that's the social contract, and we enforce the social contract with the enormous, virtually unstoppable resources of Western Civilization.

We knew that before this demonstration, we'll know it afterwards. The only thing that's going to change is that many tens of thousands of people will be pointlessly alienated so that people like you can feel good about themselves.
It also seems problematic to use "visible on brain scans" as evidence that it's a disease. All mental activity takes place in the brain (there is no magical free-floating, non-physical "mind"), so any set of mental activity you choose to characterize can in principle be seen on brain scans, given good enough equipment.
Lars Rasmussen on The Philanthropic Use Cases of Google Wave
That's great, but you are aiming very broadly. The vast majority of people won't know or care what was your aim and what was the side-effect. You are responding to censorship by Comedy Central caused by a subset of Muslims by doing something that offends many Muslims. My point was - if you are already broadening the people you intend to attack for the cause of defending freedom of speech, why limit it to only some that are innocent? You may not be aiming for every Muslim, but that's like me blowing up a building and claiming I was only aiming for one guy in the building that we can all agree was a bad guy.
Clicked the [scribd] link and got this (and only this):
"Hello, you have an old version of Adobe Flash Player. To use iPaper (and lots of other stuff on the web) you need to get the latest Flash player."

WTF? I thought Scribd was HTML5-in’ it up?
We have a Firefox extension and bookmarklets for other browsers....?
they were showing video cassettes?
The evidence seems to indicate that the electrical potentials are significantly lower, in other words, that there is a hard physical component to being burn-out.
Just curious, why do you use Apple Mail instead of Gmail (with offline) or even Mailplane?
"where are the articles pointing out the problems with HN"

This one's on the front page.

"where are the articles which denounce venture-capital-funded startups as the snake-oil of the modern age"

Anything and everything from 37signals usually hits the front page.
YouTube Leanback
The Mathematics Of Proving (Or Disproving) Identity Fraud
That use maybe should have been "simulated life" all along, so as to be more exact. This is a living organism that is artificially made, "artificial life" applies to it just as much as the other subject. Though the more specific terms that capture the way in which their somethings are artificial are good too.
Personally, I like it when news media posts a direct link.

My local paper does exactly the opposite all the time -- For example, they'll say how there was a huge uproar over some local police man kicking a thug the other night and it was caught on youtube. Guess what they never post the link so now I need to search youtube, arg.. just makes scene to post direct links!

Hacker News would be fun if we didn't post direct link ;) haha
Apple files trademark for “distinctive” design of Apple retail stores
>>"christian atheists" -- they are still 100% atheist, but apparently they miss the influence of Christianity.

The French got their church out of their daily lives -- and don't seem exactly nostalgic for its influence... I'd guess they use the term to mean that they come from a culture with Christian influences.

(I call myself "Protestant atheist".)
I heard an interview with him on Radio 4 a couple of years ago. The pin number was going to be 6 digits but he tested it on his wife and all she could remember was 4.
Hey swombat (super-wombat?)
You can set reminders on any of your contacts in our interface (in fact, you can sort by days since contact to find people that you've lost touch with).

It also includes people you used to email a lot but have forgotten about recently.

Howie
Wanted: Lead engineer for social commerce startup (SocialFeet) in NYC
This is a great example of well executed idea. As we all know the tablet idea isn't a new one. But Apple is first to execute it well.

That's why bare ideas aren't worth too much.
Story updated: Willow Garage's Brian Gerkey responds.
If you're not a power watcher you can make this work at that price point.

But as pointed out elsewhere Hulu is a trial service and still working out their model. It has quite a few shows but its totality is actually quite small. They're controlled by the networks and if you follow their TOS you should only be able to watch their shows on a pc NOT on a TV.

Netflix's service is awesome but again quite limited.

Sports is completely ignored in your model. ESPN makes $2-3 per cable subscriber whether you watch them or not. This equals about 1 billion (no joke) a year in revenues for them. So just to get ESPN it would cost about ~%10 of your viewing budget. Now its not just ESPN every network thats older than 5 years old gets a cut of your cable bill. Let alone the fact that you can't stream most local sports over the internet at this point.

I see both sides of the argument and I thought as you do that cable is becoming more irrelevant. Heck on Monday the UFC's Roku channel launched - which allows users to bypass cable for PPV events. My company built that. But the truth is that the TV Networks are pretty inextricably tied at this point to the cable operators. Internet delivery of on-demand content at a reasonable rate doesn't yet make sense.
I'm not sure that proves a "hard physical component" in the sense of which direction the causation goes. How else can mental activity take place except through some change in either electrical potentials, neurotransmitter release, physical configuration of the brain, or some other such "hard physical component"? There's really no other way for any mental characteristics to manifest themselves except through these physical mechanisms.
You can hack the Apple TV and put Boxee on it. The fact that so many people did that should've clued Apple in.

What Google has, that only Yahoo and Microsoft can match, is federated search for video content. Apple should buy a search engine and apply it to search video content.

Google also has the brand clout to take on Microsoft and Apple. Yahoo has less brand power, but it has enough to leverage itself into this market.
Brad Feld ditches his iPhone
He seems to be telling his younger self to do an awful lot of stuff. I'm not sure that advice would have the intended effect. It'll lead to an alternate world where he advises things like:

4. Stop it with the relentless busyness -- take some time to just be, to stop and enjoy the life you have.
This just in: Apple ALSO selling more iPods and iPhones than Macs! Compelling! After the break: the shocking story of a Bear who shits in the woods, and is the Space Pope REALLY reptilian? Back after this...
Nice, my first credit on hacker news :)
Optimal packing problems are fun 1-hour programming contest fodder - so many problems that you might solve in Prolog are trivially written imperatively or functionally as combinatorial or permutational recursive searches with pruning

This is true when the problem is stable and well-specified, but when constraints are being added and removed, when there are "nice-to-have" constraints that save money but may become less tractable as the problem scales, when customers want you to experiment with novel constraints -- you do not want to maintain a homebrew imperative implementation. (I can't say anything about a functional version.) Making your implementation maintainable is tantamount to re-implementing a powerful, general-purpose system such as Prolog.
> drawing Mohammed is still legal, but for the sake of everyone getting along on this big lonely rock, maybe we shouldn't.

OK, here's what offends me about this:

The radical Muslims got this concession solely though violence and threats of violence. They aren't promising to stop trying to impose Sharia law, they aren't promising to consider re-evaluating their stance on Israel, and they aren't promising that they won't find someone or something else that mortally offends them tomorrow. From the Liberal Democracy perspective, it's all give and no take.

Also, can we really say a freedom even exists if we've pledged to never, ever exercise it? In theory, Queen Elizabeth II has the freedom to refuse to grant royal assent to a law and stall the whole political process. In practice, she's pledged to never, ever do that (implicitly on pains of death, which Parliament has done in the past). The upshot is that she has, at most, a very weak advisory role in the political process. A freedom ignored, or a freedom consistently unused, is a freedom lost.
Thx--I've noticed that too.
>>The only thing they need to do is uphold our social contracts, none of which require them to be OK with people intentionally offending their religion.

The social contracts are codified in our laws. And the laws says that blasphemy is legal.

The other, Christian, side of the Swedish krona:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_%28exhibition%29
Ask HN: How similar is too similar?
Hi there. Recently I was searching for a specific kind of web app, and found quite a few options, none of which were quite what I wanted. However, one was very close. (I'll call it Smokey.) Unfortunately, it has a few problems.

It seems like the Smokey's creators worked hard on making sure its core functionality performs well and is usable, but the site is fairly rough around the edges, and doesn't have a few features I'd enjoy having. Maybe more importantly, the creators seem to have moved on to greener pastures - while the site is still running, and ostensibly generating some income for the owners, it is barely supported (as evidenced by user complaints and topics about that very issue in the support forums).

I want to make my own version of this kind of web app, and likely even try to sell it once it is polished. My problem is that I'm enamored with Smokey's basic structure, and what I really want is to improve on it and add to it, rather than go in an entirely different direction. Obviously, though, if I did exactly that, I'd have ethical (and probably legal) problems.

I want to make a website that's similar to Smokey, but improved and more featureful. How can I do this without being a scumbag, and without getting into sketchy legal waters? How different does my site have to be? Thanks for your help!
I didn't say it wasn't offensive. I said it wasn't intentionally offensive. NB that is different from knowing it would cause offence. Of course we did, but it was an unavoidable side effect of our defence of free speech.

The only thing that's going to change is that many tens of thousands of people will be pointlessly alienated

I disagree with that. I hope that -- and the reason I support this movement is that -- we will all feel stronger as a society which values freedom of expression.

It certainly was not about feeling good about myself. I feel bad about offending anyone, but I think demonstrating our belief in free speech is more important.
Nice analogy. Or a free trip to Disney World if it was full of advertising.

Perhaps it shows how valuable user attention is.
This is mysterious to me. I have an iPad, but I think it's a toy. Probably the best use case is airplane entertainment.
As long as you don't copy any of smokey's code you should be fine, the rest is 'look and feel'.

I'd stay away from copying their lay-out exactly, even if it might be legal it is bad form.
Why I think “Draw Mohammed Day” is a bad idea
I don't think you're targeting the right markets. I don't think anyone would ever want to use something for the purpose of explaining how they would pronounce a word. Its educational in a way, but not really "fun".

You need to adjust your product so that anyone can use it. Maybe think along the lines of music/singing/mp3 upload sharing.
But by aid of a car, you can travel faster than a cheetah.

You can make the argument that evolution does produce wheels, if only by the circuitous route of producing an organism smart enough to invent wheels.

The goal of engineering isn't to beat evolution; it is evolution at work, probing an as yet unexplored avenue of development.
I disagree. If I really was killing other people your argument would be valid. Causing "offence", whatever that means, doesn't even rank on the scale upon which killing is bad.

A more accurate analogy would be like blowing up one bad guy and the blast knocking the hats off some nearby good guys. They might get mortally offended that you knocked their hats off, but they should get over themselves. There are more important things to worry about in life.
I have no intention to copy any code - it's the "look and feel" that interests me. The bad form is what I'm trying to avoid - I want to do this, but I want everything to be on the up-and-up. I'm just not sure what that entails.
That is the core of the problem. Nobody likes to say no - especially politicians whose constituents will lose something from it. They might vote for someone else at the next election.
A total rewrite: costly, time-consuming, but worth it?
Why you shouldn't worry about investors stealing your idea
From what I know about it, and that's pretty limited, normally it is the frequency of excitation that determines neural activity, to find a lesser potential could indicate a chemical deficit of sorts.

So if this was just a psychological issue you would not expect to find this correlation with a physical value that is at first glance not directly related to the ability of the brain to think (which is the pre-requisite for being productive in the first place).

If thinking about stuff really is harder for people that are burned out because of an underlying physical cause it would explain a lot.
StackOverflow API public beta starts
Apple have die hard fans. If Apple release a computer with a circular screen, they'd sell a ton. That doesn't mean it'll translate to widespread adoption though.
Can someone describe the basic business model of etsy, and how they manage to make $ (and how much) first? traffic, ...
How Facebook Is Redefining Privacy
Actually I think there's some legs on the dark horse in the race with Vudu. Considerably weaker w/r/t brand awareness, but shelf space in WalMart is pretty precious (Vudu's new parent). I could see Wal-Mart using their considerable clout to get Vudu onto TV's sold in their stores.
Reminds me of an oldie but goodie from the Onion:

http://www.theonion.com/video/apple-introduces-revolutionary...
Thanks!

At this point we're just doing them through the browser. I don't think 'compiled as native apps' is the right description. They're converted into Air apps, but they're still using the Flash runtime: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Integrated_Runtime
> "A prominent Iranian newspaper says it is going to hold a competition for cartoons on the Holocaust to test whether the West will apply the principle of freedom of expression to the Nazi genocide against Jews as it did to the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad."

Oh, this is the one all those Jews entered, isn't it? The one where all the best (most offensive) entries were made by Jews? Yeah, I heard about that. They could have printed all of those cartoons over here in the Great Satan of America no problem.

My point is they're trying to draw parallels where none exist. Jews are offended by David Duke and the Klan but they don't assassinate them. Christians are offended by Dawkins but, to date, none of them have taken potshots at him. How many people have radical Muslims assassinated?
So does this read actionscript, or straight from the .swf?
Friendfeed?
In this case I believe there is a strength in numbers; if one paper publishes a cartoon they can threaten it's editor if a thousand do they lost; the solidarity inherent in publishing a cartoon today is, to be a bit dramatic, of the "then you'll have to take me too" kind. It will take care of the "moderates" they can't and they won't keep protesting forever. About those willing to use violence. What is the most successfully suppressed group of violent extremists in europe and america? Neo-Nazis. Was this done by appeasement? By appealing to the "moderate" nationalists? You know the answer. To me the right to offend is sacred and to threaten those who (only) offend you is sacrilege. The radicals can and should be dealt with in the same manner as neo-nazis.

In norway 80 years ago christians tried to have a professor punished for publishing a text not unlike one of Hitchens in it's style and level of aggression. About 40 years ago Life of Brian was banned. There were protests, and book burnings too.. They lost, not thanks to people like the author of this comment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfW95sSaVVo, I imagine this make me feel like some muslim radical does when he watches a Mohammed cartoon
I definitely agree, this is stupid.

The wikipedia page on freedom of speech (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech) says this:

In practice, the right to freedom of speech is not absolute in any country and the right is commonly subject to limitations, such as on "hate speech".

[...]

According to the Freedom Forum Organization, legal systems, and society at large, recognize limits on the freedom of speech, particularly when freedom of speech conflicts with other values or rights.[30] Limitations to freedom of speech may follow the "harm principle" or the "offense principle", for example in the case of pornography or "hate speech"

And the page on hate speech (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech) says this:

Hate speech is, outside the law, any communication which disparages a person or a group on the basis of some characteristic such as race or sexual orientation.[1][2] In law, hate speech is any speech, gesture or conduct, writing, or display which is forbidden because it may incite violence or prejudicial action against or by a protected individual or group, or because it disparages or intimidates a protected individual or group. The law may identify a protected individual or a protected group by race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, or other characteristic.

The one thing that bugs me the most is how quickly different aspects of the discussion quickly get muddled into a big mess

1 - You're about as free to draw Mohammed as a protester is free to say "burn the infidels". Heck, when it comes to controversial issues, people make life threats all the time.

2 - If you say something and someone kills you because of it, that's not a free speech violation. It's a criminal offense. They are completely different things.

3 - What a broadcasting corporation elects not to show on their air time doesn't have much to do with what you, as a individual can say, according to the law.

If the government told the TV station not to air something, then we have a free speech violation. If the government throws you in jail for saying something, then you have a free speech violation.

Did any of the two happen? No. Then, don't even mention free speech.

Did you insult your neighbour and subsequently got beaten up? That's 1) your responsibility to not say stupid stuff and 2) criminal law jurisdiction if you do get hurt because you said stupid stuff.

(edit: s/you/one).