skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a great idea! So many people just know they want a good camera/laptop/etc but dont know or want to research the various options.
The best mid-range kettle (Breville JK144) has a higher average review than the best high-end kettle (Dualit Axis 72501)

Considering how much tea I drink, I would have been most disappointed to discover price doesn't always correlate perfectly with quality ;-D

Otherwise I like the site; it fulfills that "family member asking for advice on electronics" niche well.
This is my first project written in Node.JS. Really cool platform. I'd be happy to answer any questions about the implementation.
So the sound system is actually working again so lets break the display system next.
I didn't think I'd meet a fellow from EKF on HN.
When I saw the domain name, I thought it was about you giving it a couple e.g. laptops (that someone probably recommended you) and the site would compare them them automatically and tell you in plain english how they stack up.

For this, you'd probably need a huge database of product properties (let alone products), but that's conceivable. See, for example, http://market.yandex.ru/guru.xml?CMD=-RR=9,0,0,0-PF=21425576... – these are all TV models with WiFi and 3D support that Yandex knows about (see there are a lot of filtering options on the right)

Anyone would like to implement such a service?
How to Think Like a Computer Scientist.. A lecture in Programming in C..

http://prof.beuth-hochschule.de/fileadmin/user/scheffler/Leh...
Why no Firesheep for IM?
After hearing your interpretation, I realize that probably does make more sense within the context of the paragraph.

But I certainly heard it the other way first. That's probably another good example of meaning being lost in text compared to spoken word.
Slogans & sound-bites are designed to efficiently (i.e. at low cognitive cost) deliver a message which will inform a voter

Have you ever been in the back office of a typical political campaign? All slogans and ads are designed foremost to elect the candidate, not to inform the voter. An ad will be as deceptive as possible without overstepping the bounds into an outright factual lie (simply because factual lies are easy to double check). This is politics 101, I'm shocked that anyone could believe that slogans and sound bites are information devices.

Since the purpose of a slogan is to deceive, the more susceptible voting is to slogans, the worse the outcomes will be. Also, the feedback loop is such that overtime the candidates out compete each other with the base, negative, demagoguing slogans.

The all time worst case of this Germany. Under the non-democratic, absolute monarchy of Frederick II the government invited the Jews into the country to start businesses and grow the economy. But over the course of the 1800's Germany got an elected parliament, and then a universal suffrage. Over time politicians out competed each other in blaming problems on the "other" (the Jews). The first anti-semite politicians in the late 1800's were fairly mild, but the feedback loop made things worse, culminating in Hitler. Only after World War II the did the U.S. written constitution ban jingoistic and racist speech, and restore some sanity to politics.

In general, there are far more ways to be wrong than to be right. Any selection factor which does not select for truth, will select for falsehood. Since the selection process for sloganeering does not reward truth, we can expect it to reward falsehood.

Education is a partial-remedy, but there are limits to how well you can educate anyone. Plus, it raises the new question - who chooses the educators? What if say, one political party captures the education system (which is what has happened in the U.S.)? Essentially what you end up with a hybrid between theocracy (government by the ideological/information authorities) and democracy. Since theocracy is also quite a lousy form of government, if I wanted to improve democracy by splicing in a hybrid gene, I would choose one other than theocracy.
Taleb Aphorisms
A Yearbook Dedicated to Inclusion
Typeclasses in Haskell.
You're almost never going to get perfect genetic discrimination in all-or-nothing fashion.

The final figure is very interesting: the key SNPs that affect controller status are located near one another in 3-space in the HLA-B binding groove at a key site for antigen presentation. The fact that the genetics are all pointing to specific parts of the molecule in 3-space is extremely helpful.
Cheers, thats a nice idea i'll look into that.
Disclaimer: I'm commenting on this thread only to help Zed generate more publicity/buzz for his book, which was surely the reason why he was a dick to Martin about it :)

People understand clearly when someone like "The Situation" acts like a dick to gain notoriety, but many programmers seem not to be able to understand when a programmer does it. This is very effective schtick, and Zed has inspired a few others of late.

Bottom line: Zed is a nice guy and Martin is a nice guy.
Lots thoughts of interest to hackers. For example:

"Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain
during the hours not officially spent working; be selective about professions."

"Most Info-Media-Web-Newspaper types have a hard time
swallowing the idea that knowledge is mostly reached by removing junk from peoples' heads."
Not HTML5. HTML5 Canvas. Makes a little more sense when you put that back in the title.
Here in Seattle, Ticketmaster is in a lot of smaller venues. e.g. indie art band Cloud Cult was here recently at The Showbox, and that (and all Showbox shows) was a TM event. Point is, that and many other similar events in Seattle are hardly arena shows.
The only thing crazier than fiction is reality.
I don't think irony is the right word, but I got a good chuckle out of this martimeemde guy.

He is quite literally the embodiment of why zed left ruby. Someone profiting from Zed's work on mongrel yet at the same time giving Zed shit. Zed wrote a Python book and explicitly said it shouldn't be ported to Ruby. Then this ruby guy comes along and misappropriates the book and then whines that Zed isn't giving him enough for free.
Please consider reading a book called Procrastination [1] instead of articles like this.

From the product page: "Based on their workshops and counseling experience, psychologists Jane B. Burka and Lenora M. Yuen offer a probing, sensitive, and at times humorous look at a problem that affects everyone: students and scientists, secretaries and executives, homemakers and salespeople. Procrastination identifies the reasons we put off tasks—fears of failure, success, control, separation, and attachment—and their roots in our childhood and adult experiences. The authors offer a practical, tested program to overcome procrastination by achieving set goals, managing time, enlisting support, and handling stress. Burka and Yuen even provide tips on living and working with the procrastinators you may know. Wise, effective, and easy to use, this new edition shows why for 25 years Procrastination has been an immediate must-have for anyone who puts things off until tomorrow."

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Procrastination-Why-You-What-About/dp/...
I think parent was referring to incarnations of point 4 of this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html
Hah wait that's not actually what you said, which still doesn't sound reasonable.

Also a better formula might be something closer to

karma per vote = thread karma / total comment karma in thread
I'm not even sure this is worth replying to, but what the heck...

Zed has absolutely no moral obligation to write stuff for free and release it for anyone to do whatever they want with. Do you express the same moral outrage over every book in the library with a copyright notice printed on it?

I surely hope that every piece of code and content that you ever create is released under a license that allows anyone to do what they please with it, otherwise... you don't have a moral leg to stand on.
This is not true with Nintendo. They're anti-loss leader. Their philosophy calls for them to turn a profit on everything they do. Here's a quick blurb about it:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2006/09/7752.ars
New statistical model moves human evolution back 3 million years
Why are a lot of people missing stuff like this: "have some class and use your own words and write your own book" and this "Guys like you are the reason I stopped doing Ruby"?

I agree with Zed that the idea was borderline useless since both languages have their ways and a direct translation lacks focus anyway. I also agree that it's Zed's work, and he granted use of his work with a license which doesn't allow this type of derivate work. Zed was totally in the right here, and Martin was totally in the wrong.

That being said, that doesn't automagically grant Zed the right to be a douche and insult the guy, specially since not only he complied with Zed's request, but tries to explain that he did so in good faith. There's no 'tone' here, it was obviously an insulting and condescending attack towards Martin. A simple "Hey what you're doing is not permitted by my license, take it down" or "You're infringing my copyright, take this down" would have been more than enough. The reality is that Zed loves to pick a fight and demean people, and in this case Martin made a mistake in good faith and did not deserve such disdain.
Well, the problem is, how would they know? I wonder if they can differentiate between their own thoughts and their twin's thoughts - they could all just pop into both of their heads, just like a "natural" thought. Also, I'm not sure if they would understand the difference, since they've never experienced anything else to compare it to.
Is App Store Success Closed To New Developers?
The first things that come to mind are all things you can't say, and about those I generally follow my own advice, and don't say them. But I'll try to think if there are any that are uncontroversial.
HN filtered out `<canvas>`
You're about to read another book online:

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M...

Written by http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Eliezer
Somewhat tangential, but Jaron Lanier has some interesting comments/criticisms of MIDI in his book "You Are Not a Gadget". I'd quote him, but it would go against the spirit of the book. ;) Well worth reading in full.
I once played a song at a gig in 2000 (amongst other songs), which was just me pressing keys to trigger samples on my Psion Series 5 handheld. I had wired the speaker to a 3.5mm socket to go directly to the mixer!

I'm sure it was a first.
On behalf of everyone who tries to communicate over the internet, I'd like to thank you for assuming the nicer interpretation. It's easy to misinterpret someone's tone, and written communication goes so much more smoothly when people avoid making angry assumptions.
Help, I'm getting killed by international wire-transfer fees
I found a really great and affordable SCRUM based development team that is based in Argentina. The problem is is that their bank charges $70 wire-transfer fee and mine charges $35. Which means I am paying an extra $105 per invoice.

As a self-funded startup this is a hard pill to swallow. Any tips or advice on ways to avoid these fees?
He was still at CMU when he was hacking Wii-motes: http://johnnylee.net/projects/
And when you wrong people, sometimes they say mean things in response. Sometimes (often), you should just suck it up and say nothing more than "Yes, I was wrong to do this. I'm sorry."
Why is it troubling for a company or organization to do what's in their best interest?

Ubuntu's goals do not seem to be nefarious, and almost everything they're pushing for the community is open-source, except Ubuntu One and the Software Center ability to purchase apps.
No problem; I created a Wikipedia redirect.
You seem to be wording your reply as if you're somehow disagreeing with what I posted, and you've gotten the corresponding upvotes.

-He needs to set foot on actual Canadian soil to claim refugee status

-He can't walk to the border. He needs to make use of a boat or a plane

-Air carriers enforce requirements on behalf of the countries they fly to, like "you need a visa to go to Canada if you're Chinese". This is because countries like Canada like the concept of refugee protections more than the actual practice of them: they want to put barriers up to stop people from actually claiming it.

Bit of a conundrum there, no?

-So he used the ID of someone who wouldn't need a visa/passport, along with the mask, to essentially get past the barrier that the air carrier would not have brought him to Canada otherwise.

The original person claimed, wrongly, that " And he didn't even use it to try and get into Canada, just out of HK.", yet he used the mask to get into Canada by way of getting on an air carrier that wouldn't have let him on otherwise, at which point he was assured entry to Canada and consideration via the refugee program.
can you use western union?
Thank you for the lesson in morality.
OS X Server is just OS X with some additional services and admin tools, and probably less effort to maintain than a whole different hardware form. Given that the Mac Pro Server was only just announced, it looks like that's the tactical fix to fill the gap in the lineup left by the X-Serve.

After the X-Raid line's name was already passed onto a third party (Promise) this isn't really surprising.
Not strictly in the spirit of the post, but I use a nice VM setup I thoroughly recommend:

- Host: OSX (2.4GHz i5, 8GB ram)

- Guest1: Ubuntu 10.10 (1.5GB ram allocated; acts as a LAMP server, available to Host and other Guests)

- Guest2: WinXP (1.5GB ram allocated - I use it for IE and for Xara)

This config eats RAM, but affords so many advantages:

1/ Makes my LAMP server portable. Can set up on new computer in no time

2/ Means I can experiment with server software and can revert when I break something

3/ Enables easy cross-PLATFORM browser testing which is vital if you care about fonts and pixels

4/ Can easily fake slow internet connections etc for web dev

5/ Gedit :P

6/ Nautilus :P

Major disadvantage is filesystem access speed.
I suppose I am famous in some circles. It hasn't had the effect you suggest; but it has led people towards forming (not necessarily accurate) opinions prior to meeting me.

Or to paraphrase something I've heard from several people in the past couple of years: "You're not nearly as arrogant as I expected".
Well, there's copyright's all over the web, and anything without it is common law'ed into being copyrighted - so no.

Personally, I go by the mantra of "if you post it, anyone can use it how they like".

Sure, Zed is within his legal rights to ask for this, but I'm surprised no one is viewing this from the angle of the Ruby community losing a (possibly) valuable resource because "Zed's brand" has to be maintained... Seems like everyone is so sensitive about the sanctity of their ideas.
I've always been impressed by Safari's integrated PDF reader. It's still more polished than what Chrome has, though I look forward to Chrome closing the gap before too long.
Very good book, full of more information than you will be able to take in at once. I have read it three times in the last 25 years, each time gaining a bit of useful information.
Another good one is Rubin's Overcoming Indecisiveness, it has more immediately useful tips than Burka and Yuen's book, but less long term value.

http://www.amazon.com/Overcoming-Indecisiveness-Stages-Effec...
It's Google's data - they collected it from the user, to be used as they see fit subject to the terms of service.

Of course it's the same situation for Facebook. They can prevent others from using their data if they want - that just means that they don't get to use Google's data.

Personally, I don't know if a user's bill of rights is going to be helpful - If you don't like the terms of service, don't give your data.
For me the most interesting part was reading this, pondering about text as medium that lacks a lot of - erm - subtext _and_ I guess it's especially interesting if english is not your native language. That by itself usually leads to "wait a minute, what is the author trying to say here" moments more often.

What I mean: Write german and I tend to interpret a lot more - I assume that I _know_ the language really well and therefor just _know_ what you're trying to say here. Maybe it's an advantage to read most of my internet stuff in english: Less "Someone's wrong on the internet" moments and more "Did I get this right" reflection.

On-Topic: I respect Zed's work, tried the book recently and liked that quite a lot either. I do wonder if the tone was necessary though: Except for the "WTF? I didn't _meant_ to violate copyright" I couldn't read anything insulting in the author's comments, while "lacking class" and "I left ruby because of people like you" is - personal.

Yes, it was wrong. Others commented that he could even hired a lawyer (seriously? For a no-profit, partly done, public github project? Overkill?), but I really think this could've been solved in private, easily, without much hassle.

For me, for the most part, the original author sounds/reads like a real, authentic (ex-?) fan of Zed..
Article says near the end that their communicative abilities are limited to badly enunciated short sentences. AND they're four years old. Four years old tend to ignore difficult questions in favor of something more fun.
The should have taken the costume when he boarded the flight, not mid flight...

He should have gone to the bathroom right after he put his bags so no one would remember when he got back to his seat...
While their verbal development is delayed, it continues to get better. Their sentences are two or three words at most so far, and their enunciation is at first difficult to understand. Both the family, and researchers, anxiously await the children’s explanation for what they are experiencing.

Direct quotes from them: "come play" "No" "Bounce it!" "Stop that!" "Hug!"
For people who are still using Acrobat Reader, this is a huge improvement since it doesn't involve Acrobat Reader. That's something.
When you act in a classless way, whether that's making fart noises in a restaurant or plagiarizing someone's work, you risk the pain of being told to act with more class.
Very cool, good brainstorming tool.
Kevin Mitnick's business card... lockpicker now?
Generally speaking, that's even worse than bank transfers...
You're relentlessly modest.

Do you know C or would be interested in learning it?
Do you think that Google thinks that Facebook is going to give in because of this? They're not fighting anything. It's a convenient excuse for getting their users caught in the crossfire. If Google believes that open data is the right thing to do, then they should be doing it unconditionally, not using it as a bargaining chip.
I'm not sure "Hey, I write stuff using your software, you should tolerate my mistreatment of you better!" is a nicer interpretation.
He doesn't come across badly here. Stern, but fair if a bit harsh. And the other guy comes across as a working device of non-standard proportions.
Why Peter Thiel’s $100k Dropout Grant is Good for Education
Poor man's remote command execution (when compiled with -DGAPING_SECURITY_HOLE):

nc -l -p 80 -e /bin/sh

And then just telnet or netcat to that port and you get yourself a shell.
I just can't see myself flapping my arms to lower a projector or jumping up and down to mute a microphone.
Nobody's saying it isn't their right. But, it's also my right to criticize their decision as being irrational, mean-spirited, or whatever. I do question whether Microsoft should have a "right" under the DMCA to prevent me from reverse engineering their protocols though. However, that's not an argument specific to any one product encumbered with anti-circumvention schemes.
There are some groups within the Broad Institute that I think have the tools to more or less resolve the question of the missing heritability (genetic variance), and I'm sure you know these folks too. This work isn't published yet, so sadly we can't really talk about their answer.
>Then you'll never be happy. Your definition of success will keep changing, and you'll never get there.

If chasing success is what makes him happy, then he'll alwys be happy, by your interpretation.
Using an acyclic graph of chained hashes to represent change history has a long history in revision control - it was used in Monotone (which Linus considered as an option instead of writing git, but rejected as it was written in C++), in OpenCM, in Xanadu, and probably in at least half a dozen other systems I've never heard of.
You seperate the two's sensory perception as far as possible (blindfold, ear plug, make sure they can't touch), tell one to think of something, and ask the other about it?
whiney?
The more accurate "PDF decreased badness" doesn't roll off the tongue quite as well.

But I must take issue with the way you make a distinction between viewing documents and surfind the internet. A lot of web content, unfortunately, happens to be in PDF format. Why shouldn't your browser support quick-and-easy viewing of PDF files?
I think that I have decided to continue reading SICP and work only the exercises that are absolutely necessary for understanding new concepts. I skimmed the remainder and I think that there is some essential information that I should know.
I upvoted you cause I like the question, but I guess the answer is that this site is better because it makes a decision for you. I tried your idea on Amazon for televisions and sorted by customer rating, but it just felt very intimidating. The first result was $900, and maybe that's more than I want to spend. So I start scanning down the list, and all of a sudden I'm doing something that feels a lot like researching, which is the whole thing I'm presumably trying to avoid.

Now that said, would this actually be useful to me? For the stuff I care about (like, say, a computer) I definitely would not use this site. So it's for stuff I don't care about. Like a kettle. But I'm fine just buying a cheap-ass old school kettle that you don't plug in. So it's probably ultimately not for me. Super clever though!
It could be a form of escrow. The person fundraising would have to be someone people trust.
thank you, I was just having a down moment (rough day in startup-ville) and this totally made me laugh.
Oh I wasn't knocking the need for non-developers. But the emphasis on "MBA" as requirement for these positions as from the posts above. I just thought an MBA wouldn't mean much at a place like google.
Thank you for this. It's been my intention this whole time to point out that I really enjoy all of Zed's work. And felt a attacked when I thought I was doing something good. I felt a translation was helpful, but I took it down immediately when I received a complaint. I like what Zed has done and use it daily. Working at Engine Yard is not something I see as being better than any other job, only that we're a prominent user of Mongrel, possibly the largest in the world.
I agree (up to the point where people try to start businesses based on circumvention techniques), but note that Microsoft actually doesn't have the right under DMCA to stop people from researching ways to break Kinect.
Speculation about interpretation and motives notwithstanding:

Not knowing the ins and outs of copyright law and licensing is neither excuse nor reason to blow up at a takedown request. Innocent mistake or not.

The parody and citation exemptions would presumably not allow verbatim lifting of large sections of prose, though. (presumably hence "may")

Based on the thread following the initial reaction they probably both owe each other an apology.
This book seems to prove yet again that arrogance packaged nicely can appear to be the fruit of intellect. It is like a pale shadow of a modern Poor Richard's Almanac.