skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Normally the writer's craft is so obvious that it buries the art. When the art buries the craft, you have something special.

This kind of formulation is upsetting because art and craft are the same thing (in many languages they're the same word, too). If you can't see the "art" "behind" the craft, then the craft is poor. The whole purpose of craft is to hide itself.

Now, the craft is usually so poor that we made a whole other concept for "good craft", and that is "art".

It wouldn't be a problem if "art" was just a shorthand for "good craft", but then it took a life of its own, and became associated with miracles, "gift of God".

- - -

That said, to me, "the best movie I've ever seen" is A Few Good Men, by the same Sorkin. I can't wait to see this one!
And a man who won't pay up $75, will he pay thousands once you've already put the fire out?

Even the american healthcare system people lets people pay for treatment if they don't have insurance. After the fact. This is what the courts exist for.

Not allowing someone to pay because there's a possibility they might default is completely ridiculous. Should we close all the restaurants now, too?
This is the most clear and well-written summary that I've seen of the tradeoffs presented by the CAP theorem. Hopefully it clears up a lot of the confusion out there.

I think this is the tweet that prompted the post: http://twitter.com/JamesMPhillips/status/26502076366
Yes, it boils down to a definition matter, which isn't very interesting.

I try to live my life in a 'minimalist' way, because I feel less clutter makes for a more serene life. Still, making money is quite important to me, if only for the security it represents. On the other hand I also sometimes wonder if I'm spending enough to optimize life joy; I drive a small Citroen Saxo but I'm regularly annoyed by the small amount of space in it, and the inconvenience that it has only 3 doors. I guess my point is that it's surprisingly hard to walk the line between stinginess (a generally negative trait) and minimalism (a generally positive trait).
Facebook was already bigger than Myspace two years ago.
What happens if you don't pay your taxes? You don't need to wait for an accident that may never happen like the house catching fire, armed men will shortly arrive on your doorstep demanding that you do.

Just saying that there are two sides to every coin.
I have .mn site registered with them. Either they forgot to renew their domain name, or they are out of business. Twitter and Google do not have any info on this.

Is it possible to transfer a domain name to a new registrar if the current registrar is offline or out of business?
That is a normal human reaction. Compassion for others in need is generally the default state for people in an civilized society.

but...

Public services cost money. Even with donated labor, there is equipment, training, storage, certifications, and insurance to pay for. A lot of places hide these cost in mandatory taxes. Some rural places cannot do that, so they take fees paid by local landowners. Unfortunately, some people opt-out and diminish the service for all others. It could be regarded as selfish and unneighborly behavior. In this instance, it had consequences. I could have some sympathy if the $75 was more than they could pay, but it clearly wasn't.

Would it have been better if the firefighters had tried to save the house and bill for the full service. If the laws allowed it maybe, but their is no provision to pay for something that is not requested and the firefighters might be held liable for all damages. Not to mention problems with their insurance if someone were to get hurt.

"It would actually be less cruel if there was no local fire brigade at all." - No. The local fire brigade provides a valuable service for a community and probably has saved a number of lives. People opting-out should not ruin something for everyone.

In the end, this is a case of a family that didn't band together with the community to provide a valuable service to all and are now suffering for that decision.
How to add a Hacker News Upvote widget to your WordPress Site
What "fiat"? Aren't these city governments with city councils, elections, and the other trappings of the democratic process?
How do you deal with the screen resolution problem?
Cool. That (drawing on an existing web page to mark it up) is the same use-case we had that led to building Twiddla. It's pretty much the same thing, but realtime & multi-user.

Good luck!
Poll: What video game console do you have?
I'm looking at buying a video game console for me and my wife and I wonder what console the HNewers use.

I'm including last, and previous generation consoles as well as portables. Vote them up if you still use them.
PSP3
Nintendo DS
Gamecube
And even if there were rebates (as there are on stocks) you can't make a profit just passing them back and forth because taking liquidity costs more than is rebated to the offerer. If liquidity hot potato were profitable then that would be the sole purpose of the stock market until the exchanges ran out of money, because it'd be coming straight out of their pockets.
Thanks! The article was long on CSI-style antics and short on actual science.
What's your view of way over the missed premiums? 10x, 100x? (Assuming 1/100 chance over 20 years - which is very high)

$75 over 20 years is $1500

So they are looking at committing $15,000 or even $150,000 if their house burns down. Now, bare in mind this person wouldn't even pay $75 so how are you going to get even $15k off them let alone $150k
Example of Thesis Statement is a Noble Orientation Fact
The thesis statement of any document will express the main idea of the paper. Every paper regardless of type will include a thesis statement. Therefore, if you wish to write a good paper, going through an example of a thesis statement will assist you.
Do you have any plans to support IE8?
Twilio and 99designs Join This Week's AppSumo Lean Startup Bundle
I just moved all my users over from directories to subdomains for my project AppRabbit and I think it's done a lot in terms of ease of use. They used to have to type apps.apprabbit.com/myapp/ but now they can just go to myapp.apprabbit.com. It's the same thing, but different, and it just feels much better. Setup was a little tricky to figure out, but in the end it's pretty much the same thing, as far as the app code is concerned, apache handles all the heavy lifting. It actually made things easier on a few fronts because before I had to inject the user's app name into the path for things like redirecting to the login page, etc, so this change made things like that easier.

One thing that I don't get now, or at least I'll have to work for it, is sharding my setup, when I get to that point. Before I figured I could just move people to app1.apprabbit.com, app2.apprabbit.com, etc, but now I will have to handle the redirecting in my configs when I get to the point where I need to split things out for performance. On the other hand, this makes it that much easier to move a big customer off of a shared host and give them their own server without changing anything public facing.

In the end it definitely has it's perks and drawbacks, but I wanted subdomains, and so far I haven't had any problems with them.
Python Webkit DOM Bindings
thanks for a good idea.
There's a branch with this feature: http://github.com/goosemo/fabric. The current work's in the "mutliprocessing" branch. I'm using it for a big deploy right now, and it appears to be working well.

[edit: fixed my mistake about where the most current code lives]
Definitely. IE7+ support is on the way.
Tesla Model S Batteries
These guys volunteered for a job that might involve getting burnt alive. So I think their value-system likely precludes corruption of that sort.
Monty Python is pure classic comedy gold. To me it's funny with or without a few wording changes.
Sure. But not because of his supposed larger-than-life PHP skillz.
The one thing that's started to bother me about Namecheap is that they don't maintain an https (SSL/TLS) connection during record management. My DNS entries' ownership and configuration are important to me, and I'd prefer to minimize the risk of a MITM situation.

Further, I find it somewhat ironic as one of the product classes the company pushes is, obviously and prominently, authorized certificates.

Also, their https connections (login, purchase) are quite often bog slow.

Other than that, I like their service. I'd prefer they fix these issues, rather than finding myself compelled to move away from them.
Would you mind to elaborate how to communicate with clients not local to you?

Thanks.
Suppose they did help and one of the firefighters got hurt. It would probably be a violation of their insurance ("Why were you protecting a home not on your coverage list?"). Would the family who was too cheap to pay $75 a year pay for medical costs for that firefighter?
Chuck Norris can get funded by YC without a cofounder who can code. Others we decide on a case by case basis, but the odds are a lot better if you have a hacker cofounder.
I got a checkbox to say "Yes, you can tape this and use it for promotion." It was fairly straightforward. (I presented a lightning talk. It was fairly well received. You'll see on my blog when they post it - it worked better with the crowd than it did in my practice runs, and since it relies on a few reveals I won't spoil you.)
Chaps with guns inconveniencing you is a risk anywhere with law enforcement. Or without it, for that matter. Taxes aren't the root cause of it.
Remember that there's really no "official" source for any of these infection figures. Often, when you trace them down, they lead to antivirus and malware firms, and their sources are anecdotal. The vested interests in promoting the epidemic nature of the worm are obvious.

Likewise with the notion of how hard this piece of malware was to create. A better metric, one you aren't seeing, is how hard this worm was to create compared to other worms. Most other worms aren't even "criminal", per se; they're pranks and dick-swinging. Apart from the SCADA components, is Stuxnet more complex than any prior worm? I think that question is very much up in the air. And by whose estimate did it take 6+ people to write?

You will be well served by skepticism when evaluating these stories. A similar conspiratorial pall could have cast Slammer or Conficker in the same cloak-and-dagger role (look how Mark Bowden, a reporter of no small repute, managed to write Conficker up).
Then try watching the interview with the victim on MSNBC. They can waive the fees, as they have done before. And both him and his neighbor said "we'll pay however much you say". Their responser: burn it to the ground.
Then the issue of determining what the fee has to be, making people pay, keeping track of everyone who is paying the fee vs everyone who is paying the insurance, etc.

Which, especially for a volunteer organization, seems like a lot more work than just keeping track of who paid insurance this month and who didn't.
Phusion Passenger 3.0.0 RC 1 released – Phusion Corporate Blog
I like this a lot, and for quick notes it's easier than Notable. I like the implementation as a bookmarklet, but here are two big problems:

1) Starting MarkUp clears any info you've entered into a form on the page
2) There is no easy way to exit/cancel (how about trapping ESC or adding a little X?)
Good idea. We can use this for design dev. Bookmarked.
Exactly!! He made a big deal of it, saying he was done with it. People seem to have a bad memory!!
Exactly. The $75 is an insurance fee, not a club membership.

If I shoot myself in the leg and go to the hospital uninsured, they fix me up and then bill me for the cost. They don't let me bleed to death to "teach others a lesson."

We can't have people buying insurance whenever they need it, but it's perfectly OK to have people buy the service that the insurance pays for directly when they need it.
Hell, a beer costs more than that in some towns.
Tell HN: facebook now seems to support TLS beyond login
facebook urls now seem to allow swapping http for https, though following links will switch you back to http.

This and the "download your data" feature are both excellent steps in the right direction.
What happens if I don't pay my taxes? Lots of annoying letters and then, eventually, maybe a court order plus fines etc.

They don't demand money at gunpoint. And they'll still send the firetrucks if my house is on fire. We're a little more civilized than that.

One of the reasons for universal fire service is to avoid the harm that comes when people try to do it on their own. You don't want random people - the homeowners, their kids or passersby - jumping in to fight a fire without the proper training, backup, and equipment.
To be honest, it doesn't really matter what personnel you have on board or whether you feel there's some moratorium on bad press (I don't know why the other commenter got down-voted, because you do really state that), it's about the games Zynga produce. The games that Zynga are designing are pretty much bankrupt in terms of enjoyment in and of itself. They're a Korean MMO grind, with the key difference that you have to force your friends into that grind, or pay up.

I really did enjoy Frontierville for the first week or so. There was something therapeutic about tending to my farm, hitting snakes, adding some new trinkets. It's the same pleasure centers as Animal Crossing hits. Then I need to build a building, which requires all sorts of tools, which you can either buy with real money, or get from friends. Those took a couple of days to acquire from my friends. "I'm glad I don't have to do that again" I exclaim. Lo and behold, it's revealed to me that if I want the next building, at my rate of tool acquisition, building the house would take months. My choice was "Pay up, spam more friends, or I dare you to quit." I quit.

Does it matter that a game designer I greatly admire was putting me in this ridiculous situation in his game? Actually, yes it does. It makes it burn more when a man I respect is telling the press how great Zynga is and how much freedom he has, and then he's producing games like this. It's hard not to feel he's simply happy cashing pay checks, players be damned.

I'm not adverse to the idea of paying for games that are Freemium, I put a decent amount of money into Free Realms. But FR was careful to make the transactions in there not required: much of the game (apart from some jobs) was available to you, and that game design didn't require a microtransaction sword or whatever to progress. No money was required, which is the difference with Zynga's games.

Facebook games are a great new place to be. I have no chip about Zynga's Scrooge McDuck money bins, and respect them for their success, the metrics-based technology they have at the backend, and the amazing team they've managed to put together. But the products they produce are cynical and anti-player. And that's why people hate them.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect any business to cut their revenues in half because they see something coming that might hurt their business more in the long term. Especially without any assurances that cutting revenues now will defeat the new threat. It's so easy to sit here now and say "oh the papers should have done x y and z", but even then you don't know if it would have worked. I remain unconvinced.
I quite agree with the suggestion that a startup be founded with a designer. IMO, founding engineers should ideally be able to wear product and design hats, but a dedicated designer probably doesn't probably doesn't make sense in all cases.

As TamDenholm said below (paraphrased), design is important, but no engineering == no product.
Whoaa. This is excellent. Thanks!
It's not "not allowing someone to pay". It's "not providing service to someone out of a hurried promise of later payment". What restaurant will kindly let you pay them next Tuesday for a hamburger today?

And sadly, no - if you're a homeless person and walk into most hospitals with cancer, you'll get some painkillers if you need them (before being sent on your way), not a walk to the oncology ward.
So genius is defined by success?
How Much Action is in a Baseball Broadcast?
I find http://psdtuts.com pretty inspiring. However, their tutorials are often WAY over my head.
These are all pretty reasonable complaints, except for the one about being added by your friends. I think that's fine by default although a setting would be nice, the problem stems from people friending others they don't know. I wonder how long it'll be before some of these are addressed.
http://www.ukazoo.com/

edit: awful website, neat technology behind the store though.
This was worth the $42 just to add $200 to my Twilio balance. No way to look at that as less than a gain since I use their API. All the other pieces of the bundle are just great bonuses.
Don't you mean the National Association of Marlon Brando Look-Alikes?
One important difference is that Zynga games require you to pay for the next dose, the other games you mentioned don't. MMOs are slightly different as you're also paying for the development of content updates and social areas and the like.
Contest to build an R package recommendation engine
A difference in detail here is that that fire was outside the city. Residents of that city don't opt-in, they just pay taxes to support firefighting services. There's no county-wide firefighting service in that area, so the city provides optional service to county residents whom the city can't levy taxes on - if they pay that fee.
Well, for brevity's sake I missed out the bit where you ignored the court order etc :-)
The branch actually does client side forks, one for each server in a task. Then each call inside a task is run sequentially, as expected in normal fabric usage. I've also included the ability to set a pool size, so that one can manage the number of ssh connections open simultaneously.
Most unlikely. The insuredness or not of a property has little bearing on the dangers it poses compared to any other burning building; it's the accountant who'd be upset, rather than the insurers.
Well since this pricing scheme doesn't already exist, it's up to the fire-fighters to create it. The price can be wrong, it doesn't matter, the point is that the price gives the fire-fighters the opportunity to save the house without compromising their principles.

After they save the house, they can then worry about whether the price was a fair one or not, and publicise this. People would then realise what a good deal the premiums are.
I've taken this approach, as well. Given Google's rather complete lack of individual customer support, I do not relish the idea of trying to get a name transferred away from their registrar, in the event I need to.

I don't have any particular experiences with doing this; rather, I'm just being pre-emptively cautious.
Fun project:

Build an OCR product that can identify a whole shelf of books at once - the title and author are almost always on the spine, which should be able to uniquely identify 99% of books.

It should actually be technically feasible. This would be a great project for someone doing graduate work in OCR or machine vision. Bonus points for doing it on a live video feed so you can just walk down an aisle pointing your iPhone at the shelf.
It should be easier to do something similar for Star Craft 1 as a proof of concept, first.

You can even recreate the real graphics, instead of the abstractions presented here.
Indeed.

~ epochwolf
"People rarely schedule working time. And when they do it’s viewed as second-tier time. It’s interruptible. Meetings trump working time. "

I have never worked anywhere that a meeting trumped working time unless it was crucial to meet before doing the work. What kind of place is this where meeting after meeting is scheduled? I suspect high level managers in large organizations have that kind of schedule, but not the "workers". They should be working.
I'm not a UX guy, but I found this to be a good infographic to encapsulate what UX actually means:

http://uxbasis.hellogroup.com/
They're "bad games" by any usual metric bar with which games are critiqued, unless your metrics are "money made" and "addiction." But they're businessmen metrics, not the ones a game designer would use.

PopCap are definitely the company to look at here. They spent a decent number of years cloning smaller games, which was not to their credit. In the last 4 years or so, they've been creating amazing original IP. And those games are doing gangbusters with all sorts of audiences. You don't have to create bad games in order to engage new audiences, you just have to tap into what they are interested in.
I think the UI needs attention most. I want to use it, but I want the searches to be done at once, so I can just skim across the sources. Maybe on hover-over?

It would also be good if adding a new engine were easier. The language is a bit confusing. I think there should be an explicit "add another search provider to this list".

Keep it up! I'll be checking back!
The law might have been on paper, but the public reaction there, and that of the media, has been one of shock. I have looked into the subject when it arose a few days ago, and this particular policy was one made without public involvement. The entire leadership, every seat in that town was held by GOP members; they cooked up this policy in an attempt to live up to their own idealized expectation of a tax-less government.

Serves the American public right though. They're well versed in toy, divisive issues of "morality", but they're ignorant of laws that affect their lives everyday.
Even though Facebook has only been around for 6 years, don't forget the years of him working on programming.

If an engineer who has worked for several years on the field, but finally gets a big project that's completed in a year, you don't throw away his previous experience and say that he's just a lucky guy who landed a big job. It's the sum of all the work before that adds up to the current experience now.
DIGG's tacky BP Oil sponsored post via Reddit Thread
Quick hits:

1. Train the developers. This is probably the highest-value thing Microsoft did, but they were starting from zero.

2. Do threat modeling. Startups, as a rule, never do this exercise, which involves plotting the roles of users and attacker objectives and mapping them to inputs to guide development and testing. Not a high return on investment for a small team.

3. Use the tools. The author is oddly fixated on the tools provided by the Ruby/Web environment, especially given the fact that there's one tool they really need --- Burp Suite --- that has little to do with spec testing.

4. Include security in the software lifecycle. This means something at Microsoft (security is a gating step at design, at implementation, and in testing), but doesn't mean something for a team that has gotten a minimum viable social network out the door with little to no testing. You might as well ask them not to be a startup.

5. Be wary of legacy code. What legacy code?

6. Reach out to the security community. If they had just set up a page for security contacts, they probably could avoided most of their recent security drama, so this rings true.
>> Insurance doesn't work if you only pay it -after- you have a problem.

It's been said in several other places but this sort of intellectual dishonesty can't be left alone.

There are a plethora of examples currently in place in society that work well where if an uninsured person requires assistance they pay AT COST. If they can't afford out of pocket they set up a payment schedule.
"Whaddya say you go ahead and launch? Don't make me come back here again... you won't like it if I have to come back here again."