skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A Cease & Desist would be a pretty good explanation. Part of that process is showing that you respected the owners' rights, etc. Taking down the whole site if just one publisher went after them is unlikely.. seems like there's something much bigger here.

Maybe a few publishers all attacking at the same time? Getting buried in legal isn't fun.. Or maybe not enough revenue? Or maybe a buyout or...? No inside info here.
Sorry, makes no sense to me.

If your app needs a memcached instance then those $20 bucks are likely a rounding error on the hosting bill either way.

And If you just want one for testing then a tiny <50M memcached on the local instance will carry you a long way.

Even ignoring the glaring security and technical concerns, I just don't see a use-case for this.
The owners, CD Projekt, may have been bought out[1][2]. Supposedly, it's likely to be announced around September 22.

In general, I encourage people to check out the relevant Quarter to Three thread, as that's where all the game developers tend to hang out (GOG.com's Tom Ohle just to mention one):

http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=613....

On another note, this is so friggin' weird and impetuous.

[1]: http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=23853...

[2]: http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=23853...
And, it's worth pointing out, I'm pretty sure that in the space of 29 years, something terrible is going to happen to my laptop. In which case, I've come out ahead.

I'm not sure of that at all. If it's true, the insurance company is run by fools who are guaranteed to lose money. For starters, I'm pretty sure that if it breaks 5 years from now you won't be getting a check for the original inflation-adjusted purchase price.
Good point! Theoretically, you could have Montana come and run a prison in California. Of course, that would never be allowed, for the same reasons that it costs so much to house prisoners in California now...
That would explain why Apple have been stonewalling companies who've asked for a subscription feature.
I was thinking the same thing. Take the emailer up on his offer to back up whatever data you need, then offer to cut him deal - him the laptop + reward money + amnesty/immunity if he tells you who the thief was.
Indeed, it seems that whoever is running this site is willing to entertain or provide a platform for some highly toxic beliefs (i.e. racism).
History Research Paper Topics – Select with confidence
The toughest project of writing a history research paper is the selection of the history research paper topics. There are many elements which need to be apparent in the topic selected. Without these elements your paper will fall short. Having knowledge of them will help you to select with confidence.
One possible hack you could try is defining three categories:

1. Definitely violent crimes, like stabbing someone and taking his wallet.

2. Definitely non-violent crimes, like selling illegal drugs.

3. Crimes we're not entirely sure about. If you imprison people whose crimes fall in this category, they should only go to prisons with other people in this category.

Of course nothing is a perfect solution here, but I think this might be a helpful way of thinking about it.
Downvotes are the new upvotes.
Exactly. To draw from my experiences, working on historious is so amazingly fun that I can't wait to finish whatever else I'm doing to work on it.

It's not work, it's a hobby that (sometimes) pays. It's exactly the same as playing WoW, only more socially acceptable.
What the heck?

I've bought more than 25 games on GOG and I was just thinking about buying a new one (Still life) today - were there really so few people buying the games? Were the prices too low?

I hope I can still buy some of the games on my wish list - I would have already bought even more if only I had the time to actually play all these games. (I've played about half of them to date.)

I'm sorely disappointed by their sudden decision and complete removal of all access to the page. This could have been handled more professionally - why not announce closure a month in advance so people actually had the time to download everything and buy games they still would have wanted to buy?

Well, felt good to vent about it. Now to find an internet connection faster than 80kb/s to download some gigabytes of games. :-(
Yes, to put it as inanely as possible. More importantly, they're willing to pander to certain "safe" beliefs in order to lure people in, by expressing things in a way that appeals to would-be intellectuals, using their terminology, and their commonplaces, to persuade them of not only highly toxic but fallacious conclusions.
How about if users could rate other user's comments? For instance, if someone posted something totally out of character for the app, then other commenters could rate that comment as valid, invalid, and leave additional comments explaining why that users is a troll.
Facebook: We Are Not Building a Phone
Your coffee shop doesn't have: phones, copiers, fax machines, professionally-managed high-bandwidth internet, copious power outlets, comfortable workstations, secure entry, indoor bike storage, whiteboards, etc. How about we call it a toss-up?
Well, just slip a copy of Ulysses into his room. That should buy you until he goes to college.

Seriously, though, there's no way to avoid this battle. I haven't got any magic wisdom on how to win, but our culture is incredibly wealthy, the temptation to consume rather than learn is always going to be there and the temptations are only going to get worse, and the need to learn how to resist those temptations is only getting more acute. If it's not video games it will be TV or movies, if not that then books, if not that than online social media, if not that then something else. The only way to dodge the problem is to become a modern-day hermit.
Agreed; getting the info from the service provider can take up to 30 days, if you're not quick their records go stale (no matter how long they are supposed to keep them).

Unless the records are 100% solid they won't be able to get a search or arrest warrant based on it.
4Chan To Target RIAA Next
Really sad :-( One of the few internet sites I spent money on.
Dear Intel: Sue Me
Intel's recent threat to sue consumers or companies who choose to unlock the capabilities of their processors spurred this rant, I apologize to those who did not enjoy it. thanks for reading
Yikes - reading this on my iPhone and accidentally tapped tiny downvote arrow instead of tiny upvote arrow. Can someone upvote Mike for me? Thank you.
An epic fail that a company that is still so new in many markets (I was considering Zipcar for having a second car for the winter in my town when the biking weather becomes bad) would be so customer-unfriendly. I'll never be a customer for the first time if this is how the company treats early adopters.
Reckless Photo CouchDB App in 60 seconds
Hilarious Sport Pictures
These are some of the most awesome moments in sport history that will make you laugh and give you the goose bumps when you see these photos.
> Here[1] you can see that the standard places no restrictions on what can be entered in the <meta> name option

Just because the standard places no restriction on it doesn't mean it's a good idea.

> doing a CSS hack

Setting a CSS property is not a hack.

> so that your <menu> hack

Using existing, well-defined elements whose purpose perfectly fit the needs of the situation is not a hack.

> is worse than doing the standards-compliant method of implementing the browser-specific feature via the meta tag.

There is nothing non-standard-compliant about using a <menu> object for defining a menu.
Questions for Arne Duncan - The School of Hard Drives
NES has been done as well: http://benfirshman.com/projects/jsnes/
Driving Detroit Out of Its Ditch
> What about screen-readers? I don't think he thought this through.

yes, what about screen readers? Screen readers get a well-thought-of menu of accelerators to existing features of the website. If the website is well coded, this can even be one of the website's own, displayed menus.

What is there not to like?

Instead, by embedding it in random meta elements, screen readers have to download the useless code (as does every other browser out there) and can not use any of it.
In paragraph 2 he seems to imply that the curriculum isn't broad enough, lamenting the loss of "useless" classes, but then in paragraph 4 he seems to claim it's too broad and that new classes are useless, as evidenced from his claim that no one is making money off of Statistics or Machine Learning, and his implication that someone who didn't start their own company would have been better off as a police officer.

He seems to imply that perhaps grading is not as strict as it used to be, referring to some higher education as "virtuous slacking", but doesn't provide any supporting information to make such a claim.

He calls higher education a status symbol, referencing the increasing prices, mentioning that many take out loans for higher education, briefly going out of his way to mention government. He reinforces with a claim that people go to college because others do, rather than because they've simultaneously converged on the idea that it's a good investment. He doesn't provide any evidence that higher education is actually viewed as a status symbol.

More significantly, though, the author doesn't propose or imply any solution for the system as a whole, or even one of his pain points. The article is vacuous and unfocused. What I've learned from this article: The author doesn't like the current state of higher education, and his mother had to walk uphill both ways to get to school.
We have a user on one of our games who repeatedly reposts his review every few days complaining about not making it into the high score list (top 100). He even lists the scores he has gotten that didn't go in. This is all despite the fact that all of his scores are lower than the lowest high score in the list! I think we have even posted reviews to try to explain this to the user and to get him to e-mail us at the support address but he hasn't done that or stopped posting his review.

I think iOS (and Android) needs to make it easier to interact with customers and address their issues in the market. There could simply be another section besides comments called "feedback" or "support". In this section, your posts are only visible to the devs (and I guess Apple) and you can maintain an ongoing thread of replies to a post. This would allow users to give feedback and receive support without filling the reviews with bullshit, and without having to e-mail the support address (and thus give out their e-mail).
This does seem somewhat unusual. Forcing auto-renewal upon customers (and providing no way to turn it off short of actually cancelling the account) is, alas, common, but most companies won't go so far as to turn the auto-renewal over to collections. They'll send you an email or two complaining, then cancel the account. I think all the times it's happened to me it's actually been stated like that in the emails pretty explicitly; something like, your credit card is no longer valid, please log in and provide new details within X days or your account will be canceled.

Does this kind of thing meaningfully damage your credit, though? I wouldn't think that someone sizing you up for something like a car loan would consider a $50 dispute over an annual fee to be a very good predictor of your creditworthiness.
FWIW, I don't use zipcar, but this blog post is 18 months old... The plural of anecdote is not research.
Will Smith is STILL awesome!
That article you linked to was not written by Scott Locklin, in case you haven't noticed. Does the fact that an article is hosted at a crypto-racist website invalidate its thesis? Rhetorical. By the way, weeks ago Locklin's post on nanotech was upvoted to the upper stratosphere here on HN.
> A jump list isn't an HTML document

A jump list isn't a bunch of metas either. An HTML <menu> or a specific, custom XML format can be ways to describe jumplists. These descriptions are then translated into whatever actual format jumlist specs use. No problem.

> I'm not sure describing it with html tags makes sense

A jump list is a menu. So is a <menu> element. You could hardly make more sense.
This is the most intelligent interpretation I've seen so far. It makes excellent sense.
Haiku Comments
What I've found really interesting is that I've noticed that users of free apps have the same exact psychology as someone who paid. In that a user of a free app feels equally as "ripped off" as someone who paid for it.

I asked my wife about this (she's a behavioral researcher) and she's not surprised. There is apparently some research that suggests this is the case. She's out of town right now or I'd see if I could dig up the actual abstracts. It's something that definitely needs to be studied more, but I think there is something to it. Particularly among the under-30 crowd.
He couldn't be more dead wrong about the mom-usability factor of the iPhone.

I know this because my mom bought one a couple years ago and was able to set up her email and start emailing me photos from the camera before I even knew she had it. This is someone who can't set up her desktop email client without calling me for help.
Romanies and terminology
Yeah but when your startup isn't covering the bills and you're already eating and living cheap - what do you do?
If you think there's room for improvement, get consulting gigs. Otherwise, found a new startup.
Ask HN: Is there an app/website for gathering market research?
Part of the process of launching a new product is asking the people that you THINK would buy your product if they ACTUALLY would buy your product. But as I prepare to start a new business selling a subscription based web application, I'm having a hard time finding a significant number of people to ask that are qualified. Google is helping me find a place for running market research on a mass level with targeted results. Can HN help?
Of course. What I meant was: when a rule no longer applies, remove it and declare so publicly.
I think this comment itself would make a great HN front page item.

The knowledge that we get ideas while doing is important.
The blog chatter leading up to the housing crisis was exactly the same. The fact that people are just starting to talk about this within the last year means it will be another 5-7 years before anything happens.
The girl has entitlement issues.
Better: With a business review site I worked on previously, we tinkered with a system that allowed business to openly respond to reviews. It worked really well. It gave the other side of the story and provided a LOT of engagement with the user. I believe yelp has adopted something similar now.

We tried it with a private system (rebuttals not viewable by the public) and a public system. The private system showed FAR less engagement in terms of the business and the user working out their differences. When it was all done out in the open the users seemed much more willing to engage with the business owner. In our test greater than 70% of the conflicts were resolved. In private the number was much lower (I don't remember the exact number, but it was less than 40%).

I'd love to see that on the respective markets.
Steam is becoming a package manager for windows?
"The World's Most Mysterious Manuscript"
Problem is, it's usually not 'someone' sizing you up - it's an algorithm like a FICO score that gets spit back to anyone looking you up for credit considerations. When dealing face to face with someone reviewing a report for a score, they might take that in to consideration, but it's not always (or usually?) the case.
مسلسل العشق الممنوع الحلقة 67 
مسلسل العشق الممنوع الحلقة 67 مسلسل العشق الممنوع الحلقة 67
Don't you have to plan in order to prepare? And part of planning is using the prior knowledge of people who have experienced things that empower them to plan better.
What's extraordinary is that those books remain the favorites of small boys everywhere. The Hardy Boys franchise has turned out hundreds if not thousands of more contemporary knockoffs
over the years. These are all quickly forgotten, yet those original McFarlane potboilers, disdained by everybody with fancy taste (including the OP), still excite passion among early readers.

Is anything comparable? Children's literature that survives that long is usually regarded as classic; but these have survived whilst being regarded as trash. They keep going on the literary pleasure of children alone - an audience that can't be fooled. Each new generation just seems to discover them.

The passion of those first adventure novels
only lasts a year or two before one begins to find them a little embarrassing. So even older children share McFarlane's opinion on the "juveniles". My son mocks their stilted dialogue now. But he devoured the entire series with fervor.
It's javascript injection.

But the clever method of finding the result seems as encouraging as clever methods for finding null pointers. Sure, try initializing your memory beforehand to a call to the debugger - (or just 0 and have that trigger the usual exception handling). Sure you can do this but those null pointers keep popping up. I'd assume you could find analogy for SQL injection too.

I'm more interested in techniques which prevent this from happening to begin with. The clever techniques often only help you find stuff you have a good idea is already there.
And its down...
Though, I gotta wonder how useful it is to take down an almost useless website on a weekend. The email infrastructure would be far more damaging I would imagine.
Too much planning can certainly backfire, hence this article: When planning becomes a crutch - the woes of reaction and inaction: http://dontgetburnedblog.com/planning-becomes-a-crutch/
His links from "everyone" and "knew" are both from today... so how would everyone know this already?

That said, if they can penetrate the high school crowd, this might be a success. I don't think his mom is really the target market, but I could be wrong.
Nice trick. I didn't know, that firebug & co support soft breakpoints by inserting the javascript command "debugger;".
I received an email this morning from someone thinking of buying my app but saying this: "Yours seems like it is headed in the right direction, but I am unwilling to shell out $15 considering the UI and stability issues that some users are reporting."

People were complaining in the reviews when the app was getting killed by the memory watchdog (i.e., "crashing") when they were trying to use photos larger than the iPad's RAM allowed. In the in-store version I put in a hard limit to the pixel size it would process, and now they're complaining in the reviews that it refuses to load their photos (my specific phrasing in the error is "exceeds iPad memory limit").

Of the users that have posted negative reviews, less than 5% have contacted me through the support line.
At the end of the day, a "true entrepreneur" is someone who builds a business.
I'd be very interested in just how much social plays into the mobile experience. For example, although Facebook is one of my most frequented apps, I also to check news, play casual games, view website statistics, manage email, listen to music, check my finances, track my weight, calculate tips, read ebooks, watch Youtube and Netflix, and manage to-dos.

Is it entirely certain that designing the operating system among sharing photos and posting status message updates will be optimal across all mobile functions? Not sure that it's the case.
I didn't think (s)he was calling me brilliant but unpolished. ;-)

I took it as more of a general observation, which I agree with but I don't think it makes for some of kind of rebuttal to my conclusion, which basically amounts to: If you really are extremely good at something, asserting that you are that good is likely to sound arrogant to other people even if it is simply factual. I try to keep stuff like that in mind and not jump to conclusions about the size of a person's ego based on limited data. Other people seem to generally be very willing to jump to such conclusions on very limited data. I offer the anecdote to suggest that, if programmers are generally competent and intelligent, it won't much matter how humbly they present themselves. Their competence will rub plenty of people the wrong way, no matter how many sets of velvet gloves they have for all social occasions.
It might be an idea to data mine submissions to HN to try to uncover if there are any special interest or extremist groups trying to gain leverage in this way by posting articles with relatively plausible titles.
If you live in the Bay Area, a nonprofit alternative is City CarShare:

http://www.citycarshare.org/
I hadn't missed your maybes. You're pondering the subtleties of this argument far more intelligently than my blunt comment does. But perhaps that's because you've had time to mature and reflect on your brush with arrogance, while I am still reeling from a recent encounter ;-)
Not so specific, but fecious reasoning is a broad spectrum disorder that might be applicable...
That particular article may not have been written by Scott Locklin, but a quick browse of his other works on the same site validates ahoyhere's point.

Regarding the nanotech article:
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2010/09/scott...
I was wondering myself why that article got so many upvotes.
Ask HN: How do you when to add a language to your skill set in resume?
Hi guys

I'll be going job hunting in a few months. How ever I'm a bit confused about the skill set I should list. I work with Python & Ruby mostly, have used C/C++ sometime back (univ stuff) and use Java for Android. But I'm reluctant to list Java under my skillset although I list Android (under platforms/frameworks), since my experience with Java outside of android is nil.

I've begun writing simple modules for Node.js (for fun) and have decided that I would list a language in my resume only if I've written some library/pkg for it or a significant app.

Curious as to what (self-laid)rules others go by when listing stuff under their skill set.

P.S: by 'significant' I mean popular or really useful/cool to show off.
Regulations rise as VCs exit health care
That's not "crypto" anything. You can't spell out "I'm racist" any more clearly than "But the real black is not on television, and you pull your purse closer when you see him..."

Or, by the direct author (and not the one wholly quoted), "It is clear that the few who purchased Black slaves in their day made a lamentable choice." -- and he doesn't mean that, oh, I don't know, slavery is immoral. He means it was a lamentable choice because the goods were bad apples that now will spoil the bunch.

Does this article's presence on the same site invalidate the thesis of another article? No. But does it put everything argued into question? Yes. Because there's no such thing as "the facts." You cannot ever have all the facts. The map is not the territory.

Therefore, you must the consider the motives of anyone who presents "facts" to you -- because they had to pick and choose, and could not represent all facts (map, territory), and why did they pick the ones they picked?

Dry-humping the idea of pure logic doesn't work in a non-platonic world where you can never, ever have all the facts. Context matters. Source matters. Motive, intent, and background matter -- a lot.