skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I fear that as well, but if there's enough pressure, the "always on tape" mentality might win out, and good cops could get the recognition they deserve, as well as significantly more evidence (and more accurate - witnesses are pretty bad) for many crimes. If nothing else, it's better than the alternative; when it's your word vs a cop, who's going to be trusted? Disallowing this would encourage abusers.

Honestly, I see this as a publicly-run oversight committee. It should be hard to be a cop - a lot of power and respect goes with the title (typically). And if there are fewer abusers, that's likely to increase.
The Problem with Web Analytics 
Is a unique visitor really unique? If other people browsing online are anything like UNI0N Square Ventures' Fred Wilson--who accesses the web from seven different browsers and multiple devices every day--chances are your web analytics software is counting people as a unique visitor more than once.
I appreciate the positives and the logical motivation behind this move but does this not provide an opportunity for end-users to torrent more nefarious files?

Surely Swedish pedophiles are having a field day?
Am I missing something?
I agree completely. Taping and photographing policemen actions during service is a GOOD thing. Helps to control police abuse.
Depends whether you think of law as being the ultimate good, or something else.

If you had civil-rights objections to copyright then you'd perceive the GPL as a neat hack around it but be looking for something to destroy it.

Thinking about the rule of law as an ultimate good is a valid position.

I've actually tried this, and you get into contrived situations like this one: the boss shows you a four line perl script in use at a client site that another company wrote ten years ago, and asks you to modify it in a trivial way to solve an important problem. You'll respond that you aren't allowed to do that for breach of copyright - unless the client company specifically relinquished the code then the rights vest with them. Further, you will explain that you can now no longer write code to replicate the functionality of it because you have been influenced by having read the code of the client company.

Advocates of the rule of law should oppose laws that are selectively enforced, and absurdly complicated.
It's nice to see someone tell you that their benchmark is flawed and why. Most try to pass off their benchmark as the end-all-be-all measurement of whatever they are testing
I disagree with that quote he throws out at the end there about A/B testing not being able to construct things. Isn't that essentially what genetic algorithms do? Granted, we don't use that sort of process to make a website because it would be slightly insane, but who knows?

And even starting from one sub-optimal site, isn't arriving at some better, more refined experience a form of construction? If you're not discovering something unexpected or seeing something new form from A/B testing, I think that speaks more to your lack of imagination or unwillingness to try than it does some inherent limitation of testing.
I do the exact same thing.

For ideas that reach the "tinker" stage, I create a folder into which I have "designs", "html", and "notes" subfolders.
Noone would care?

The whole point of the GPL is to stop companies from profiting off of other's programs without also giving something back to the community. Noone in the "pirate movement" supports for-profit piracy or copyright infringement.
JQuery deconstructed
Good grief - that's almost 1%. I thought the UK rate was rather high but that's about five times more!
If You Want Investors, Don’t Say ‘Research’
One of the most amazing physics engines I’ve ever seen
On the other hand, the plethora of police abuse videos is causing them to have much less impact. How many riots have we seen like the Rodney King incident? Even the response to the BART incident last year was relatively quiet. The issue around the individual's right to photograph the cops has garnered more attention.
" The only reason AT&T is still in business is because of Apple. "

That's a little over the top. Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile are all still in business without the iPhone and AT&T was a very large carrier before they had the iPhone. AT&T would probably be doing worse than they are now without the iPhone but I seriously doubt they'd be going out of business. I'd go so far as to say that AT&T's reputation would be somewhat better without the iPhone since it seems like most of their network problems were caused because of the demands that the iPhone created.
The problem, of course, is that you can only afford a certain number of big experiments. Life is finite.

And big experiments can be hard to A/B test against your mature product. This is what that whole "chasm" thing is about: the audience for new things is different from the audience for old things; present a radical new thing to someone who isn't an early adopter and it will get low marks. The automobile had really bad A/B results against the horse, for most audiences in the late 1800s. It is hard work to attract a new audience, when you have the alternative of incrementally improving the experience of the old audience.

And, of course, the more time you've invested in building your radically different idea, the more crushed you will be by bad A/B data. A/B testing of tiny differences that can be toggled in five minutes is the least emotionally painful form of A/B, so no wonder it is so much more popular, to the extent that Atwood thinks it represents the entire field.

Atwood's metaphor is still perfect, however. The movie Groundhog Day covers all of this. It's an astonishing work of art.
Objective-C Tuesdays: Unicode string literals
Posterous Isn't Done Throwing Punches At The Competition
Opacity (A Philosophical Notebook, by Nassim Taleb)
No need to down vote. This is a thinly veiled compliment. It's a good question. Zed's output has been insane for the past few months. How he manages to keep up the pace is a very valid question.
I don't understand why this is downvoted into almost oblivion - I'm in India, and the only reason I've watched the show and can appreciate the post and this discussion is because of the resources mentioned in parent.
I've experienced this too when I logged into from a different computer than usual. It's very misleading from Facebook, since it's not a re-authentication, it's just a login. I'm also pretty sure they just use this as a simply way to get their photo archive tagged by forcing people to go through this procedure.

To me this is just another lame move from Facebook to get their hands on personal data for their own advantage. Considering that my benefit from Facebook is to see friends' vacation photos, some random things they do and wish them happy birthday, I don't see the need for Facebook to know much about me.

To sum it up, Facebook needs to take a chill pill.
Neighbors can be the worst people.

You think you bought your dream house, and someone moves in next door who is a total nightmare and makes you feel completely trapped and miserable.
By digital garbage I mean information without any useful purpose, only filling up space. I assume that temporary account are rare at HN, thus this isn't really a problem.

However, I ask - shouldn't this use case (anonymous posting) be accommodated by the system, instead of relying on a hack?
"finished" is a dangerous concept.

I'm not clear on what you mean by "losing faith in the product". Do you mean that you stopped believing that it had any value whatsoever; or that any/enough customers would ever like it; or that you lost faith in your own ability to accomplish it? Or do you just mean that... you ran out of motivation?

The key idea is not that "it takes time", but for it not to take time. In other words, to get something done ASAP. I'm talking like 2 hours, not 2 weeks or 2 months.

esr said to launch a product you need something that (a) runs; and (b) has a promise that it can be turned into something really cool in the near future. It's code + words. Note: this means that the thing that runs is not really cool. [many others also state this idea, but I really like esr's formulation]

For motivation in general (not just for launch), the same thing is true: you want to get something that works ASAP. Fred Brooks says of this style of incremental development: I was stunned by the electrifying effect on team morale of that first picture on the screen, that first running system.

I wrote the first version of my product in 2 hours (though I'd been thinking about it for a couple of weeks; and it took a 9 hour day to write the website). This isn't because I'm some great coder, but because the product was that simple. It wasn't "finished". It took a year before the first sale, and eventually I made enough to retire (for small values of retire).

tl;dr release before it's ready.
This sounds like a Monty Python sketch waiting to happen. "But you've got a bloody black flag!" "Its the flag of fighting the patent system!" "And you want to host torrents out of Parliament!" "They're personal integrity torrents!" "And movies!" "Doubtlessly movies about personal integrity!"
Silverlight contains a large subset of the .Net Framework in that 5Mb install. You don't need (and it can't use) the full .Net Framework.
Text file. Write it down and move onto something useful. Don't waste time trying to find a better way to do this. GTD, in particular, is way too much for just this.
Do typefaces really matter?
You draw an unusual bow there (ahem). If I was going to bring Robin hood in, I'd have made the analogy between Robin Hood and the defenders of copyright, not the infringers.

Copyright and Robin Hood ethics both breach the principle of live-and-let-live.

Robin Hood's takes away from some people. He justifies this with claims about the welfare another group.

Copyright applies the same principle. Defenders of copyright will say that in order to protect artists, engineers, etc, all of the rest of us should have less rights. We are not allowed to do certain things with magnetic signals on pieces of metal the we own, even in the privacy of our own homes.

It's not clear that it gives actual benefit to the recipient group. In practice, these people aren't defended well if at all, and the cost to the system is huge.

There'd also be a cost to the local economy if you had a brigand raiding merchants. I wouldn't operate in a region with those issues. Maybe if the people didn't have trading difficulties they'd have been able to lift themselves out of poverty, rather than being pushed into the arms of a revolutionary-come-nobleman.
Now, I could be very wrong, but it is my understanding that Lazy Evaluation will provide the main benefits of memoization, without any action on the part of the programmer.
Puma Voltaic Shoes
Post job at Hacker Monthly for free
Python is not purely imperative either, and I'd guess that monads would allow programming Python with more functional style.
Why can't they separate the audio?
Don't sound like a nut-job to me.

It's insane the degree to which people are willing to record and distribute every little bit of their lives. And by insane, I don't mean a good thing.

The techno-wonks will tell you that it's all evolving to some kind of wonderful singularity nirvana.

But do we really want to become The Borg? Because either we either fiercely keep our lives and thoughts private and personal, or we share everything. Right now there's middle ground, but it's eroding quickly.

Seriously. I don't think most people have a clue to how they are giving up their personalities and inner lives or what impact this is going to have on the world.

It's like boiling the frog. Each year we share more and more -- first blogs, then tweets, then FB status updates, then location-aware tweets. Soon it will be lifetime webcams that you wear. Each little step folks come out and try to say something like "gee! It's getting hot in here! The water is going to boil!" but then they get shot down with a variation of 1) it's just a small change, and 2) it does more good than harm.

Water's going to boil soon, folks. Hope you like it that way. 'Cause there is no stopping it.

(It's like if we all got super-powers over the space of 50 years. People think super-powers would rock, but in reality the world would go into the shitter. People would be flying all over the place, knocking of banks, etc. It would be a catastrophe. But it would happen so slowly that there wouldn't really be a moment that you could point your finger at and say there! There is the place where we crossed the line. It's always little good, little bad, works for some folks, sucks for others, etc)

It may be a great thing that we're moving towards. But it's not going to be human.
That's http://www.getinvisiblehand.com :)
So buy two packages, put an Ion drive in one, payload in the other, have them mate in orbit.
I haven't been to the Computer History Museum (it's been years since I've been in the Bay area), but I did stop by the American Computer Museum in Bozeman, Montana once on a cross-country drive. For something literally stumbled across in a tour guide I was honestly impressed with the collection. It's worth a look if anyone is ever in the area.

http://www.compustory.com/
Great article. But for Reddit, not HN.
This is fixed in the new update. The bars are now linear.
The UK equivalent:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jul/21/police-search...

According to the Terrorism Act you aren't allowed to take pictures of police if the pictures might be of use to a terrorist - which seems to have been translated into a blanket ban on taking any pictures.
I simply don't always have the time to jump on implementation of the ones I consider "good" when I have the idea.

An idea you can't execute is worth about as much to you as no idea at all. The concept of an idea being so timeless that it will be both relevant and somehow forgotten in the future if not recorded is not one I accept.

Either your idea is so great that you'll a)make time for it or b) remember it in the future, or it probably isn't as wonderful as you initially thought after all.

hmmm nothing to do, wish I had an idea!

A person who generates so many ideas that he's considering recording them won't find themselves in this position: You'll always have more ideas than time to implement them, so don't sweat it.

Not recording ideas is both a way of validating them and focusing your mind on implementation. "Idea people" like us can easily lose ourselves in the mental masturbation that is the generation of "ideas". The last thing we should be doing is encouraging staying in that stage longer than we have to.
Even if you make drugs legal, we still need undercover operations to deal with criminal organisations. What about the groups that kill people for money, or extort 'protection money', or groups that rob banks? Unless you want to make murder, arson and theft legal, you need to go undercover in these groups.
This. The best user feedback is someone actually giving you money for your creation. I feel that I owe each person who buys my iPhone app the best type of that app possible.
Let me also recommend adding the subreddit for your favorite programming languages. Those are generally very high quality in terms of signal to noise ratio.
The Five-Second Rule Could Actually Apply, But Mostly Outdoors
Wow, the tardy thing is excessive imo.

My wife informs me that the 10 days thing was because the child was in kindergarten. My wife had gone down to the school and talked to the teachers about the matter so she knows more about that than I do. Apparently kindergarten isn't considered a "real thing" or something. If the guidelines are stricter for 1st grade, and I hope they are, then hopefully there will be more involvement once the school year starts back up. The case is still open and DCF still drops in occasionally afaik, but I hope additional reports/complaints would cause the process to intensify and/or work faster. The kids are in danger every minute they are with that woman, so I will be pleased to see them removed.
I feel like a cow... Just visited it, and bougth elasti.co
Maybe Sedo will work out some $ for me.. wait& see !
Reminds me of an academic project I ran across once that has had a mixed record of success ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat
Sadly, my privacy is probably slightly more protected from such things on this highly monitored Army owned machine running on a secured and monitored network, than on my home computer. The DoD actually seems to care more about PII (Personally Identifiable Information) more than most other organizations, I suspect in large part because the people setting the regulations are also susceptible to them.
For an example of a backfiring "high ground" maneuver, take a look at Mark Zuckerberg's Hoodie.

http://www.switched.com/2010/06/07/mark-zuckerbergs-illumina...

Really, the message he wanted to convey included goals that sounded as lofty as Google's. In short, he seems to want to organize the world's connections in much the same way Google organized much of its HTML information.

Why did it backfire? Well, the intent was obvious to Mark, but not so obvious to the audience.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/il/hindsight_bias/

Also, a flop sweat during your interview/presentation is a big hurdle to overcome.
Yes. :) However, showing a centerfold spread on TV doesn't. I remember seeing _Dead Poets' Society_ on TV when I was a teen, and wondering how they could get away with showing the centerfold's breasts on broadcast TV. Somehow it doesn't count if it's a painting or photo of nudity.
See this for a start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Samaritan_law
Amazon doesn't need to distribute an app for the Sony reader touch. Just the books themselves in epub format instead of their current kindle/mobipocket format.
It's a valid question and I am looking forward to the answer.

The author claims we should use monads in Python code. However, he leaves the explanation for another day. Hopefully it will be quite enlightening.

I can't really see what Monads offer that Python is already well equipped to handle. We have weak-typing and exceptions. These are tools enough to call a function who may give us a random value of any type and we go off and start using it. If something blows up, we beg for forgiveness and can even try again... or whatever we need to do.

Then again, perhaps I'm missing the point as well.
Genetic algorithms do create things. It's the randomness seed at the start that creates the new thing.
Here is a list of "debate tactics."

http://www.johntreed.com/debate.html
That's not generally true, although you can make it work out that way in some cases (I think threads mean that some work may be duplicated).
Yeah I'm suprised by the popularity too. The jokes are way too obvious, even for non-techies, and the characters are overdrawn caricatures.
The article shows he has a $0.050 max price during a period where the price was $0.031, for an m1.small in us-e. The current spot price is not the only reason. (Which is why the delays are strange, unknown, and frustrating.)
"A truly rich man is someone whose children runs into their arms even when they're empty"

"My daughter one time said... We were leaving church, like a church party. We were driving home, in the car. And she didn't want to go home. She was like 3 or 4 at the time. I don't want to go to Mommy's house. I don't want go to Mia's house.

OK, we'll go to Daddy's house. OK.

We pulled into our house and she started freaking out crying. Why? She thought my house was the office.

And that's when I realized I needed to start pulling back.

To step it up, be a baller at home"

-Josh James
Yes. It's a kind of pro/cons.

The subconscious starts to think of all reasons why this will fail for sure.

Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: You work less, waste time and focus, procrastinate.

Then it's over.
The post is from 2008, and this seems to be the follow-up: http://www.valuedlessons.com/2008/02/pysec-monadic-combinato...
Think of a monad as a programmable semi-colon (who coined that term again?). Then you can build a monad for error-handling, backtracking, continuations, or whatever control-flow primitive you need. You probably wouldn't use the IO (to sequence IO operations) or State (to maintain state) monads in Python, though.
I have just published a gem and a sample Rails app that show how you can directly upload to S3, then call the API at uploadjuicer.com:

http://github.com/uploadjuicer/
Do you get to regularly interact with the dude from the commercials with the creepy, yet soothing, voice?
He saves us time that's why.
MOG’s iPhone, Android Music App Shines Through the Cloud
Being overwhelmed by data from a man named Galbraith--- who would have thunk it...
The whole pirate theme is intended as humour, and a lot of us love Monty Python. The point of defending the Pirate Bay is that it is in fact not the site itself but it's users that distribute files with copyright-protected content. The Pirate Bay is a neutral medium.
MOG arrives on iPhone, Android with 7.8 million songs...
It sometimes pays to run your tests at different levels of optimization. There are optimizer and code generation bugs in compilers. Running your tests at different levels of optimization can detect some of these.
Fair point, but it has a couple of differences which line up with the reasons people give for not using buses, trains, and planes. Those are: no need to fit the travel plan into the bus schedule and having a vehicle in the destination city for no extra charge. People aren't always right when asked about their own reasons for choosing one option over another, but I think in this case these are important motivators as they add to the cost in terms of both money and also the psychological "hassle" factor.

Further there are social signals sent by how one travels, and buses have let themselves become, or targeted being, the option for low class travel (unless it is one's personal bus, but even then it is still below the personal plane). Autonomous cars would have the opportunity to aim their marketing toward them being seen as a desirable, upper middle class travel option (or the un-extravagant option for the more wealthy). The cars themselves will likely be more expensive than cars with no autonomous capabilities, so they easily send a signal of "well-to-do".
> release before it's ready.

The technical community seems to have these virulent quality assumption: Everything test driven, inside out, full stack, behaviour drive. This is great and a must if you have a clear product requirement and/or a clear vision.

But I think this is conflicting with the "release a MVP, crappy, early" philosophy. Maybe I'm to "slow" when doing tdd things. Maybe I just aim too high?

Maybe I've a low frustration tolerance that does not allow me to survive the gap between "end of initial euphoria" and "the first paying customer". How to to improve?
From most of the comments, what I get is that people don't like British humor, because they are pros at making fun of everyone and everything.

If you don't believe me, go find a relatively comprehensive rhyming slang dictionary.
Ask HN: Kindle unicode support
Does anyone know why unicode/international fonts are not supported on Kindle?
I like parser combinators, this library is currently my favorite. Pysec is referenced at the bottom of the page.

http://code.google.com/p/funcparserlib/
Are you willing to give up all manner of personal privacy if that means you're able to more easily apprehend criminals of various kinds?

Is monitoring filesharing sites the most effective way of fighting pedophilia?
I just coded up a quick javascript solution using PersistJS and jQuery. This comment is to test it out.