skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I always find it amusing when Emmanuel feels the need to throw a hissy fit about the "correct" use of the word hacker."

Why do people get upset about correct usage and definitions of the word hacker. If one closely examine statements like:

'''
These attacks, in addition to being a misguided effort that doesn't accomplish very much at all, are incredibly simple to launch and require no technical or hacker skills. While writing such programs requires a good degree of ingenuity and knowledge of security weaknesses, this doesn't mean that everyone who runs them possesses the same degree of proficiency, nor should we necessarily believe people who claim to be doing this on behalf of the hacker community. '''

-- Emmanuel Goldstein

one understands Emmanuel's main concern is with correctly portraying the "hacker community." This means he believes in an ideal hacker community. One composed of certain types of individuals with certain types of beliefs. Whether or not such a community has every existed is unimportant. Emmanuel and others like him, hold up the community as what we should be striving for.

Emmanuel is not the first person to use such language. We can trace many of these sentiments back to RMS. See my article on the subject "Interpreting the Free Software Movement as Religion" (although perhaps I should have titled it Interpreting the Free Software Movement in the Context of Religion :sigh:). I intepret the Free Software movement's philosophy using a critical religious theory. What emerges is a portrait of a movement that from a certain point of view is concerned with highly religious subject: the demarcation of the sacred vs the profane. The sacred is this past ideal community, and the movement strives to return to it. For the detailed analysis see:

http://blog.hackthology.com/interpreting-the-free-software-m...

[edit: clarity]
Hey, cool, they used my Lisp program to make it.

http://wigflip.com/roflbot/
While retrograde, it's only "weakly" so in that it has a very slow rotation period (1 solar year == 2 solar days).
The PEP was/is accepted. The problem is all the resources with the knowledge to merge it have since been reassigned. It's still pending merge into py3k.
One of the great benefits of the publicity surrounding Wikileaks is that it's encouraging people to look into issues they previously might not have considered.

That said, the role of the oil companies in the Niger Delta unrest isn't exactly unknown, not many people labour under the delusion the Nigerian government isn't to some extent corrupt, and the page you linked to isn't even a particularly damning one, as governments do have a legitimate interest in monitoring activities of rebel groups and the effects on multinationals they target. The smoking gun would be finding documents suggesting that events like the Odi massacre were planned (and possible oil company collusion)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odi_massacre

What's been released recently seems to be the sort of thing that might cause discomfort to a few diplomats who've made rather unflattering and speculative (but in many cases justified) comments about their host countries but it's less than earth-shattering. The half-hearted attempts to discredit Assange feels like an attempt to appease the leaders they've privately insulted; perhpas they have more reason to be concerned about what hasn't been released.

Governments have willingly released far more inadvertently damaging material...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodgy_Dossier
I just ordered Do More Faster as a small gift to my self. =)

I would love some noise canceling headphones, they would be very useful for when I go to the library to study.
Join the ##solofounders channel on freenode
I just created the ##solofounders channel on freenode. As the channel name suggests it's for startups or ongoing businesses created by a single founder. Stop by if you are interested.
Actually, many big companies (like Apple, Microsoft, IBM, etc) have a huge arsenal of IP that they benefit from and enforce when needed.
get some legal advice where options are involved. good luck!
My favorite part, which clearly shows that PG understands what the dynamic of a news site and it's users, is when it states:

"The worst thing to post or upvote is something that's intensely but shallowly interesting."

Frankly, I think this happens way too much. Any post about Zuckerberg, Assange, Arrington, and others probably gets way more upvotes than necessary. While they have definitely created interesting things, the product is probably more important than the person.
A MacBook Pro

An iPhone

Loads of Nice People Around
Cloud computing: the latest chapter in an epic journey
Agreed, reading about a Shell executive boasting they've infiltrated every single branch of the government is pretty amazing. Also in Nigeria, there was also a cable about a guy from Pfizer telling the US that they were threatening the Attorney General with bad press to get him to drop a multi-billion suit (that was eventually settled for $75).

VOA has a good roundup of news about Africa:

http://www.voanews.com/english/news/africa/WikiLeaks-Revelat...
Especially considering they are playing the patent game and suing people as well.
Also, the effects of French vs British Colonialism:
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/11/16/how_helpful_w...
Unlikely. I get the impression that the channers and their friends care less about whether or not they are "hackers" (by whatever mostly-arbitrary definition of the word is being used this week), and more about (1) not being arrested, and (2) making a plausible effort at being useful.
There is a thanks-for-applying page; apparently, that's botched up error handling - that text box needs to have < 140 chars.
My company uses IMAP and has some employees who came from jobs with Outlook/Exchange, so we hook them up with Outlook/IMAP in the hopes that they'll be comfortable in that environment. But it's a far cry... it's like moving them to a whole new client anyway.
I really love ancient western history - there are so many relevant lessons to be learned.
Insights Into 10 Years Of Building Threadless With Jake Nickell
Wtf is wrong with this board? This is the place for getting shit done, and all I find are a bunch of whiney people, with the same complaints you would find on the democratic underground or counterpunch.
I kept waiting for the new ereader to be launched this Christmas that was going to be better than the Kindle3, but it seems that no new, better product was launched so I'm going to have to wait some more and just get some deadtree literature.
Last Cyber Riot
All that ever happens is that you "call the functions and pass-in the data", except that OOP languages know to pass this for you. The difference between OOP-style C and an actual OOP language in this regard is syntactic, not conceptual.
From the article

>They [Wall Street traders] can flourish even if the U.S. declines, as long as they can tap into growth in other regions of the world.

They can flourish by forcing US decline. This is part of the problem.
Did we read the same blog post?
Yeah, I always get voted down when I bring stuff like that up.

EDIT: downvoted. quelle surprise.
The article linked to is a summary of this article, which I think is better, and has less of this I-don't-know-what's-going-on-but-I-don't-think-it's-right language: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/12/07/apple_drops_ap....

Still, the appleinsider article says that the case was brought in the Eastern District of Texas which is "notorious for catering to patent trolls." Yet, the case was settled the day before argument in the USCA for the Fed. Circuit which is the consolidated court of appeals for patent cases. That suggests to me that OPTI had a defensible case.

There is the broader question of whether our patent system is broken, but there's nothing that immediately stands out as egregious in this case based on the facts that i read here and in the Bloomberg article (vs. the inflammatory language used in the linked article and the subject of the OP).
Rather unusually, the issues covered by the media have actually been the most important ones. The battle over the privacy of information is far more important than the facts revealed by a small number of actual information leaks.
How to use nslookup in Windows 7 to fetch DNS results.
Ethics and the Internet - rfc1087
That's great- I'm a relatively new user and I didn't know that page existed. I think you should have to read it (like a terms of service) and check I agree before you can create an account.
No, it's not dead, and I'm sad that this is sitting at the front page, because it's so misleading.

The fact is, it's stalled (https://www.google.com/buzz/bcannon/bZDN1jNZ3uC/Is-this-fina...) - http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3146/ was accepted. This means that a branch was made with the intent of merging US into Py3k. Unfortunately, this proved to be a greater task then originally planned. Stalled != Dead.

To quote Collin:
"Unladen Swallow is stalled because merging the code into the py3k-jit branch plain sucks: lots of new compatibility work to be done, lots of corners we had to un-cut, lots of drudge and suffering. It doesn't help that Google is full of far more interesting and influential projects."

So add in the fact that the resources Google had "assigned" to the project got moved/reassigned onto something else, and what you have is a very stalled project. Collin has stated that they hope(d) that other python-core devs would/will step up to help, but everyone is pretty tapped out as it is.

I'm as disappointed as anyone that it's stalled - given it's compatibility with C extensions, potential speedups and future potential, it has been one of the projects I've had the most hope for.

That said, PyPy is also coming along; when they hit 2.7 compatibility and they have drop-in replacement capability, the ecosystem will be very interesting. Competition in the interpreter space is good, and I feel that Unladen's aggressiveness helped spur/move PyPy along.

That said Unladen (in my mind) remains the CPython interpreter's best way of moving into the future. It still has the most promise for that code base.
do you care to elaborate on this statement? what about the integration isn't good when you have "a lot" of meetings? how many is a lot, btw?
Just found out via Engadget teardown: http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/10/google-cr-48-laptop-torn-...

16 gig Sandisk SATA ssd
1 gb hynix memory module

So I just answered my own question. But now here comes the real question: Will I receive mine? I have already created 3 Chrome apps.... Would love to run it natively! :)
Do you have any basis for your fact that "paid apps on the Android store are getting nowhere"?

I've seen a few things suggesting lower sales rates on Android, but since almost none of them adjusted for installed base, I'd be wary of drawing any strong conclusions. But even if they are correct in their inferences, they were still suggesting simply lower sales (e.g. a third or half iOS) not that no-one was buying apps at all. It's hardly a black and white picture, particularly with the introduction of iAds by Apple.
I don't think it's that the American people in particular are obsolete I think that we have over-population and that a proportion of the worlds population are not required for industry, food production. That the rich elite would choose to pay as little as possible in wages is simple capitalism enabled by a global market; it's basically a war for survival. Those in power offer barely enough to work yourself to survival and we get to battle amongst ourselves to see who gets those scraps - my view of the next few decades is pretty bleak.
It's ok for blogs to share content from other sites with their own target audience. But it doesn't make sense to post such blog posts to a site like Hacker News, especially when they add no commentary or other value to the original content.
No one was using Unladen Swallow jacquesm - it was an experimental fork of CPython.
SS 2011 Collection from Christian Dior
>Another thing I hate is the way that everybody loves to hate the other guy’s programming language.

Oh, yeah, that never happens with non-OOP languages.
It would be cool to have this map animated, so we can visually see the blues slowly encompassing the globe.
Same as every year: Peace on earth and good will toward men & women.
Your ideas fascinate me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
While labor is shifting overseas, consumers are not.

America is the most consumer driven economy in the world and should remain so for a bit even given the recession (thank quantitive easing and low interest rates for that). All those trade surplus countries like Germany, China most sell to someone when their domestic consumers are not buying.

China will probably catchup at some point (in consumer demand) but that won't be for another generation or more.
Their 2008 petition on Tibet got to 1,000,000 in seven days; this one seems like it might be on track for getting there in four.
Whether FB wants to call it hackathons, hack-a-tack, tick-hack-toe doesn't matter.

But the message from the parent here is that it's cool to build a product by pulling one-nighter. (And we all know that's the culture in Facebook).

The same theme again and again that sort of... screw our industry as a whole: romanticizing the notion of hacker.

On the other hand, I don't think FB Chat was written in one-night.
>before building a car, you need to have a blueprint first.

But the blueprint is not the class; it is a copy of the instructions on how to instantiate the class.
Does this imply that each of the gas giants has an Earth-like core buried in the gas, surrounded by an orbiting swarm of rocky asteroids?

Because that would be awesome.
Diagrams in comments stored with code, that get rendered nicely with a presentation style for the code. Useful tool in a literate programming toolbox.
Time with family.
I get and agree with what you are saying though the design has stayed the same since 2000. I am sure people have complained in the past but others (maybe even the majority who read 2600 on the regular not just the occasional view from a news aggregation site) have grown accustomed to it. Just a different way to look at the issue.
I ordered myself a TypeMatrix 2030 keyboard with a DVORAK skin.

Can hardly wait for it to arrive.
This is a really fine answer, thank you.
But that only affects people who are already schizophrenic, doesn't it? If I'm not at risk for schizophrenia, it's not going to make me a schiz.
"Why do you feel it is bad for the American people to have our computers and televisions made in China?"

I do not see this claim in the comment you are replying to.
Crowdsourced Wikileaks content
Yep, someone here added a type check to Ruby, there are some functions through the codebase that check each argument but I've not seen any real life benefit.
I totally understand and can appreciate that....my problem is: who gets to decide what constitutes "the hacker community" and what's accurate about it?

That's where I take umbrage... I don't think Emmanual is concerned with correctly portraying "the hacker community".

I think he's concerned with it being portrayed the way he considers it to be....that is:

"The hacker community is the stuff I approve of"

In reality "the hacker community" is disjointed and comprised of a lot of individuals of varying skill levels, morals, and politics.

The problem is Emmanuel doesn't seem to be saying "Hey hey now...these people do not represent the entirety of the hacker community....they possibly represent part of it's darker side...but let's talk about the positive aspects."

Instead it seems to me, he seems to be saying "There is no bad side to hacking! Everything I approve of is hacking, everything I don't is not! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"

The problem is no matter how much they may overlap and be intertwined, hacking is at heart something removed from politics and ethics.

It's a state of mind....

It's true there are certain tendencies in the Hacker community...laudable ones....but the same is true of Artists but nobody pitches a fit about Hitler not being a painter because he was an asshole.

To be a painter, you must apply paint to a canvas...end of story. To be hacker you must hack.

Hacks are big, hacks are small. There are easy hacks and hard hacks...hacks for good and hacks for bad.

Better I think to distinguish the good painters who paint well and for the right reasons rather than trying to twist the definition of what it is to paint to only cover the painters you like.

I completely understand wanting to distance yourself from the script-kiddies....but I feel the way to do that is by adding information....not trying to remove it. A meme is a hard thing to beat...
How to Benefit from Your Flaws
If HN were to do that, I'd leave.

Not allowing new registrations would end the "hacker" part of hacker news. Hacking is about being open, sharing information, and ALLOWING OTHERS TO SHARE BACK. To disallow new registrations would be to disallow others to share back, as well as kill the "open-ous" of this site.

In short, what you suggest would kill the site, not save it.
+50 Christmas Templates, Icons, Brushes and Illustrations
I found that this article had a lot of conjecture and not a lot of facts.
How to get screen orientation lock back on your iPad
I've been playing around with it for a bit and it seems that the most important factor here is viewing angle. If I tilt the monitor the text goes from absolutely illegible to somewhat legible. It's never 'good' though, no matter how I tweak the settings.
Highly Sought Commercial Realty in Corporate District of Birmingham
Sentence one is good enough for me: I'm of the opinion that online communities that focus around a specific topic or group of topics... That's not really the kind of community that you expect to last very long, is it? At least without a change of topics.

He also seems to assume a priori that effective moderation is impossible, and thus that off-topic and banal discussion is inevitable -- which seems to me like assuming the conclusion.
I'll admit it did - but I just wrote it up quickly during lunch.
I thought the "recommendations" for action at the end were a bit superfluous.

Besides that, what parts of the analysis in the article do you find inaccurate, specifically?
I agree with the premise, but believe the author cites the wrong reasons.

What happens to online communities over time is the same that happens in any social organization. A few, more aggressive and hardcore members gain the power to snuff out dissenting viewpoints and opinions, thus overwriting any chance for diversity or originality.

To make matters worse, those that use downvoting systems wind up alienating new users that can't seem to figure out the "game." Those without voting systems use humor, belittlement, and castigation to do the same.

In the end, the scene is controlled by those holding a majority opinion, and any objectionable opinion is pushed out. This happens in any community, whether it's your local church, a football forum, or a place like HN. Where they fail in terms of diversity, they succeed for the group that holds the power.
> Emanual Goldstein

It's Emmanuel.

Also, he spends less words on the 'hacking' terminology issue in his piece than you do here and there is far more in the piece than just that. So I think your 'more accurate headline' only applies to the first part of the introduction, roughly 1/3rd of the text, the rest is about his problem with the activities as such and the effect on the reputation of WikiLeaks and what can be done instead.
Spammy shitty article. The author has no idea how multivariate testing works, he completely misses the most important aspect of it. Multivariate testing actually does not require to show every possible combination, it can eliminate many combinations using statistics.
Ha, you spent an entire day and managed to get three (watch the video) three signatures on a petition to ban water. Three out of the thousands of attendees didn't pay enough attention not to sign your petition.

That must prove global warming doesn't exist. Good job!
I was surprised this hadn't happened sooner (or maybe it did?). What will they do to stop this I wonder...?
"We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing."

-Sneakers
Facilitating Collaborative Design Workshops – a step by step guide
Want to stop war. Bring back the draft.
Who decides what is right Christianity or Islam or Buddhism? These questions dog every religious faith, every philosophy. Is it any surprise we have such argument in the theoretical "hacker community." Understand, your clash with Goldstien and others is not about definitions or who decides but rather core beliefs. They have one belief about the hacker community you have another. Their language "Others" you. Which means it places you on the outside as an alien. You language in a mirror way Others them. In my opinion, both sides need to respect the point of view of the Other. Not reject it. See the philosophy of Levinas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Levinas
You could almost make a rule that any article that had a famous person's name in (including pg) should get some kind of karma deduction.

Don't get me wrong, some of these articles are very good, but way too many people vote up celebrity instead of content.
"New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently revealed the plutocratic perspective on immigration when he defended illegal immigration by asking, "Who takes care of the greens and the fairways in your golf course?""

Any ambitions Bloomberg may have had to run for President, are pretty much put to rest by this quotation.
It is worth remembering that the average American consumes an exceptional amount of resources. Compared even to the relatively profligate Europeans, the average American consumes twice as much energy, twice as much water and lives on more than twice as much land. The disparity with even wealthy urban Chinese or Indians is greater still.

This lifestyle has in part been justified by the very high historical levels of American productivity, but it is clear that American productivity is not increasing at nearly the rate of that in emerging markets.

We are left with an obvious conclusion - as a factor of production, American citizens continue to be very resource-intensive, but are becoming comparatively less productive.

It seems to me that America is unique in a culture that sees consumption of scarce resources as tantamount to a human right. Much of the cultural divide in the US seems to rest on this basic notion. Many political issues in the US are really debates about resources that no-one seems prepared to engage with - the US healthcare debate ought to be a debate about why Americans spend such incredible sums on medicine, but is instead primarily a debate about what kind of accounting we use to pay those incredible sums.

The idea of what it means to be American is obsolete. The sprawling suburb, the hour-long commute, the SUV, the McMansion, all artifacts of an empire in terminal decline. American citizens simply cannot consume such vast resources if they do not have the productivity to match. I see every reason why Chinese and Indian productivity will continue to rise, but little reason why American productivity would suddenly rally. The American people are left with an obvious choice - produce more or consume less.
Exactly. And this case is even worse since they are willfully cooperating bot-net nodes, they are not even script kiddies. What about "bot sheep" or "script sheep."

Those websites claim running a node is "virtually zero risk" or something along the lines.
making sounds on a violin does not make you a musician just like coding up some statements does not make you a programmer. But it is how everyone, great or small, starts. Nice read.