skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And for as long as cracking a DRM scheme to gain your rightful property is illegal, I will advocate piracy.

I buy movies on DVD when I like the show. I also buy books. And occasionally, I also buy music.

The rub: I buy from Half Price Books and other used merchants. For some reason (PROFIT), I cant do this with ebooks and other e-media.

When I'm treated as an enemy, acted upon as an enemy and evil pirate, and charged an arm and a leg for media then proselytised to 'not pirate'... Yeah, Ill pirate.
First, he thrusts the knife in, then violently twists it -- "Accordingly I have authorised the thesis to be issued as a Computer Laboratory Technical Report. This will make it easier for people to find and to cite, and will ensure that its presence on our web site is permanent....". Classic.
Sasa v0.9.3 Released (Extensions to the .NET framework)
A New Way to Give Allowance
>A short commercial that says "Support our troops!" may not seem like propaganda to you until you've seen one where there's a Communist flag waving in the background.

When I watched a movie in theaters in the US last year, I remember being jarred by the strident nationalism and militarism in an ad for the Army shown before the movie. On the other hand, right after that, a movie trailer I'd seen in Canada a few weeks before had some mildly gory scenes stripped out in the US version. Go figure.
How a quartz watch works
Agreed. We can sit here and think about your personal investing decisions, or think about how Groupon will use this new funding to expand their business. The latter is relevant to aspiring entrepreneurs.
where TDD and refactoring fall apart

This too is what I find most fascinating: Up to a point refactoring is far easier without TDD, but after that point, it's much harder without it.

I know it's not popular, but I think aspect oriented programming may be a nice way to eliminate this conflict.

One question for HN is: Why is it considered bad practice to worry about the range of valid inputs and outputs for a method? Wouldn't this basic consideration, combined with functional testing, offer a far greater degree of confidence in the system than hundreds of unit tests alone, and be far less brittle?
Adsense is great when you don't know any demographics about who your website audience is. Once you do know, however, you can make a hell of a lot more with targeted affiliate offers.
If your ebook reader is a Sony, Nook, Literati or Kobo you can lend ebooks from hundreds of North American public libraries: http://www.overdrive.com
Everyone should read Manufacturing Consent.
Actually, look through Fred's archives and you'll see that he's lumped in games as well.

I happen to disagree. As a consumer, I would rather pay $60 for an xbox game than get it free and get nickel and dimed my way to $60 over the long-term. Same with something like Angry Birds. I'll pay my 1.99 for the HD version and be done with it.
Las Vegas casino discontinues $25,000 chip to thwart thief
Alternatively, I've gotten a lot of mileage out of using redis as a cache to selectively optimize data piece by piece.
I had to move it since my VPS is capped at 5mbps and it was overloaded. Ask for the link via email (in my profile).
Man Receives Chrome OS Laptop From Google Running Windows 7
I agree with Wilson's viewpoint except for one problem: inadvertent ad clicks are much more likely on mobile devices than they are on computer browsers.

This must inflate click-thru rates and deflate return on advertising, and I suspect that mobile advertising rates are inflated right now because of this.
The author should add "Founder's or CEO's promises of grandeur, huge exits, and unbelievable equity". I'm currently leaving for greener pastures (after three years), but this is so common in our industry that it's not even funny. If you're promised fame, fortune, equity, and power, and in two or three years you're not at least one step closer to those goals - you're being played. Over confident founders with delusions about how great their idea really is are the life force of said Stockholm Syndrome for employees.
Sounds like an interesting problem... I sent you an email.

EDIT: Could you email me? The only email address in your profile bounced...
Subpixel Rendering, Blending, and a Bug That’s Affected All Mockups at jMockups
Google: Your new phone carrier?
The thing that bothers me the most about TDD is that it really seems to mean unit test driven development. Unit testing has its place, to be sure, but it is only one tool in the box.

By its very nature, unit testing will always be limited to checking simple, well-defined, low-level behaviour. There is no unit test to tell you that you made a good choice of data structure or algorithm. There is no unit test to tell you that your domain model is sound and relevant. There is no unit test to tell you that your calculation code is a faithful implementation of incorrect mathematics that you thought was correct. There is no unit test to tell you that your requirements were the result of poor analysis and as a result you're building a product your customers won't buy.

If we take a single tool like this and elevate it to the point where the entire development process is built around it, then must the process itself not be limited as well?

The TDD community seem to compensate for this by adding the well-known third step:

1. Fail.

2. Pass.

3. Magic happens.

During that final step, we have an opportunity to compensate for any failure of the small-increments, simplest-thing-first approach to converge efficiently on a good end result. This in itself doesn't seem unreasonable, but I have never seen a single piece of TDD advocacy or training material that explains how this is supposed to happen, at least not in any serious detail or in any form that is amenable to training developers in how to do it.

The trouble is, almost all of the hard stuff in programming is in areas that unit tests don't address, such as those I mentioned above. That being the case, the whole TDD process can also only address the easy stuff until the "refactoring" step is explored in very much more detail than it has been so far. I think perhaps this is what Michael Feathers is starting to realise and trying to highlight in this article.
And also a reminder that the market will efficiently execute pretty much anything, regardless of the desirability of efficient execution.

A couple of things here: 1) Many trained economists would say this is a woeful oversimplification or flat-out disagree. 2) Exactly what is meant by "efficient" and "pretty much"?
Heh. I've been that engineer. You're dragged along for the technical support and help in getting set up, but god forbid you get invited along to all the fun parties and company-paid dinners. Those are for the salespeople.

So screw 'em. I'd talk openly to anyone who listened. But yeah, nobody tends to pay any attention to you once the show floor is opened.
If it was pegged to gold, shouldn't it have gotten kinda huge of late?
Other: Groovy.
"That may be true of a couple of the others, but for some (like CouchDB) it isn't a design goal at all."

actually it is, you might take a peek at BigCouch[1], it puts the C in CouchDB.

[1] https://github.com/cloudant/bigcouch
Over $25,000 Raised For Charity: Canabalt Goes Open Source
I think this whole debate is curtailed by a misleading metaphor.

Yes, certain parts of the web are free...these are the ubiquitous and dominant pieces, like Google, Twitter, Facebook, and news sites, etc.

Then you have SaaS, which is smaller on an individual scale, but makes up a large portion of the overall web economy.

Most games aren't free.

Some of my favorite pieces of software cost me money every month.

Are we talking freemium here? I can't really tell because the argument, to me, seems generalized.

Just yesterday on HN, there was a post about a fun project called threewords.me - it blew up because it was free and built to go viral on Facebook. That type of thing will probably always be free, either as an ad-supported simple product, or a feature of a more expensive paid product.

I have a hard time believing that mobile will be free when much of the web is still not.

The reason magazine apps aren't doing well is because they're complicated, and I can pull up wired.com and read almost everything I need to, from the same device, so an app is useless in that context.

Other pieces of software, which might not exist outside of mobile, have much more value to me, and I'm willing to pay for that value.
It's not like that at all, actually.
It wasn't feedback so much as it felt...disconnected and impersonal. The candidates didn't offer opinions, just descriptions of the interview flow (number of interviewers, how it was structured) and the types of questions asked. It felt like I was reading a transcript of a wiretap or something.
That's not Github you're thinking of...
They're not legally required to be so badass about it.
I'm going to try working part-time, and go back to school within the year. I'll be much happier after I finish.
"The versioning system in couchdb is only there.."

CouchDB does not version, period.
I wonder if there are a lot of edge cases (large numbers that aren't easily decomposed into shifts/additions) where the performance decreases a lot. If these optimizations are cheap, why aren't they used everywhere?
(Num t) => t means that the value can have the type of any member of class Num, but it can't be more than one type at a time. There are no subtypes in Haskell.
probably worth to note that Disqus uses Redis as well, not for storing the comments, but for analytics: http://disqus.com/analytics/
True, certainly, but you can't expect people to invest and wait until the business is "mature" to collect anything in general. A business may take 10 years to mature or more, and it doesn't take much of a discount rate on your money 10 years from now to make the investment very unattractive under any realistic risk model.
I turned a free (gifted from a friend) Powershot into an intervalometer - dead simple and works great.
Interesting for two reasons:

1. More charity provided by the gaming community. This is well-documented, but it's nice to see another example.

2. An example of a developer open-sourcing his or her product once the marginal cost of doing so approaches $0.

We can assume that the "market" for Canabalt is already supplied with the game. There is probably little, if any, demand left for Canabalt after this Child's Play fundraiser. So if Semi Secret has extracted most of the producer surplus, why not open source the game and share its dynamic level generation with devs?

Brilliant idea.
Oooh, hey this is bad. If you go to http://threewords.me/username.xml you can see the user's Facebook access token, secret, session key, and hashed password. You should probably remove that view or modify the to_xml in the user model.
PostRank in Numbers: 2010
He's a good lecturer too. Funny how being a good lecturer and being a badass correlate.
"/" searches everything, "," searches links. Both very useful.
That would be really nice if it were true.

For some people it is; for many more it simply is not.
To start with: IAAPL.

I Am A Programming Language?
"Example: the software supplied by Apple with a Mac does not have any themes except for the choice between Blue (colorful) and Graphite (subdued) in the Appearance system preference pane."

Both of which I find strikingly unattractive. Overall, I find the OSX UI annoying to use, and the relatively lack of choices in things doesn't help.

I like the idea of a useful out-of-the-box set of defaults, but that should prevent offering users options to tweak to their hearts' content.
Ask HN: If I have tax-free income, do I want a pension plan? 
I am trying to figure out if I am better off just going to brokerage houses and form a portfolio of assets of my choosing - and contribute to that portfolio monthly as an income deduction - rather than going with one of these 'off the shelf' pension plans.

I know the question is pretty generic, and I don't live in the US, but as far as I know these pension funds tend to operate the same.

You make a tax-free deduction from your monthly paycheck into a pool of funds that are managed by someone else. The allocation of those funds change by age. The younger you are, the more exposed to equities and such you are. As you get older and have income needs, your portfolio shifts to fixed income instruments and cash.

So I guess my question is, if I have tax-free income (regardless of the pension plan), am I better off going with a brokerage house where I have more say over what assets my portfolio makes up.

I am pretty financially savvy, so I think I can do a decent-ish job.

Trying to figure out if there are other benefits for 'pension plans' than I am realizing at the moment.

My biggest fear is, I go with a pension plan...all it does over the years is keep up with inflation and then I get a negative real return because of the fees I have paid.

How do I avoid that ?
The similarity he's talking about is a lot more than superficial:

"You have to go back a thousand years to find a time when the world was genuinely western and eastern at the same time.... Now, globalisation is again doing much the same, diffusing power away from the west in particular, but also from states and towards cities, companies, religious groups, humanitarian non-governmental organisations and super-empowered individuals, from terrorists to philanthropists."
MIT Researchers Build A “Hot Or Not” For Twitter
Mmmm... are you taking this very literally?

I indulged in hyperbole. I mean that I would really like a four day week. It would be good for my personal research.

If I have kids, I would still like the option to work a four day week, but for different reasons. By kids, I mean children, not baby goats. I used slang just there.
I would like to see something like this for NetBeans.
Membase?

Using it in a recent project and it's been working great for us.
Wouldn't it have been far nobler to approach the banks affected by the exploit with these findings rather than publishing schematics for the exploit into the public domain?
Quickload - It is Quickload time
linkedin.com
Cutting the fat: doing one thing well
Seems like an interesting project too, will try it! Thanks!
Beer Kitchen across the street is also delicious. Bump for anywhere westport.
Tip: on your Kindle search the store for "ck-12" to bring them all up at once.
It probably would. Remember that we're a very mobile society (in the US) and towns have new arrivals every day.

If I just moved to a new town, I probably don't know where the nearest dry cleaner, or Thai restaurant, or carpet cleaner is. Rather than spend valuable time driving around searching, my first inclination will be to google it. If they get my business and do a good enough job, odds are I'll continue to patronize them for years. People rarely change service providers unless they move or there's a major problem.
(1) Can someone, perhaps an Amazon employee, clarify if "loan once" means exactly what it says? Can we only loan a kindle book to one person one time only? The book cannot be loaned again to anyone? Or cannot be loaned again to the same person?

(2) As an early adopter of Kindle, It's particularly sad that, as I peruse my Kindle collection, the vast majority of our books are not loanable. I can't say that I'm surprised. But I am annoyed by it. This is perhaps a large factor in the soft launch of the loaning feature.
Entrepreneurship is All About Flow
I did a PhD, a postdoc, and I worked from home for a little while. Home time mostly seems unproductive. I find it useful not to regret and just to try and do a little bit more each day.
all right, guys, group-think wins, I lose. Have a nice day!
"Many trained economists would say this is a woeful oversimplification or flat-out disagree."

Many trained economists would also have to blow out the HN comment limit to fully explain what they meant. Accusing someone's economics of being "simplified" is a bit of a cheap shot, a PhD thesis is also "simplified". I don't think very many trained economists would have a hard time expanding my sentence into a reasonable claim. The propaganda market in the US is brutally competitive, and it almost all ultimate boils down to money for somebody in the end, no? (Some exceptions for truly ideological-only propaganda, sure, but those are the exceptions.)
Interesting, but hardly conclusive. Two problems with the conclusion you are trying to make:

Cheaper health care != less money spent on health care. Consumers might purchase more health care even as prices come down (resulting in more money spent).

This data doesn't show the direction of causality. It could just as easily reflect doctors chasing money as it could reflect prices increasing as a result of doctors becoming available.

(Similarly, states with more illegal immigrants tend to spend more money on farm labor. Do illegal immigrants raise the prices of farm labor?)

Still, it's interesting data to see.
I like this article: while it is for sure not the definitive guide to NoSQL, it is a short description mostly about facts that people new to the field can use to get an idea about what a good candidate could be for initial experimentation, given a defined problem to solve.

That said I think that picking the good database is something you can do only with a lot of work. Picking good technologies for your project is hard work, so there is to try one, and another and so forth, and even reconsidering after a few years (or months?) the state of the things again, given the evolution speed of the DB panorama in the recent years.

While I'm at it I like to share that in this exact days I'm working at a Redis disk back end. I've already a prototype working after a few days of full immersion (I like to use vacation time to work at completely new ideas for Redis).

The idea is that everything is stored on disk, in what is a plain key-value database (complex values are serialized when on disk), and the memory is instead used as an object cache.
It is like taking current Redis Virtual Memory and inverting the logic completely, the result is the same (working set in memory, the rest on disk), but this implementation means that there are no limits on the data you can put into a single instance, that you don't have slow restarts (data is not loaded on memory if not demanded), and there isn't to fork() to save. Keys marked as "dirty" (modified) are transfered to disk asynchronously as needed, by IO threads.

If everything will work as I expect (and initial tests are really encouraging) this means that Redis 2.4 will exit in a few months completely killing the current Virtual Memory implementation in favor of the new "two back ends" design, where you can select if you want to run an in-memory DB or an on-disk DB where memory is just an LRU cache for the working set.
Well they clearly restrict the free use of ideas. An idea that I can't use is of limited interest to me.

Have you ever read a software patent ? The ones I have seen have been written in a very strange way (ie use of non-standard terminology for technical concepts) which seems aimed at obscuring the nature of the ideas being patented rather than clarifying them. If patent descriptions were really intended to convey useful technical information they would read more like journal articles rather than some strange dialect of American legalese.

I'm sure that some innovation occurs through efforts to work around existing patents however I doubt that effect comes close to matching their effect of preventing ideas, even if independently discovered, from being incorporated into new technical solutions.

As for the notion that people are going to read 20 year old expired patents for their ideas that seems pretty unlikely to me given the pace of technological development.
There are two differing styles[1].

----

[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fypq2qhRZnI&feature=relat...
Hunting with your feet and first reactions to Born to Run
IMO, I don't think America is represented at all by SF or NY, in fact I think they're the exceptions. Other than a few regions and city-states (New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Dallas, Silicon Valley, Seattle, Portland) in the US I'd say the US largely lives in perpetual willful ignorance and continues to pat itself on its back for World War II.

To quote The Wire, "We used to make shit in this country." Now? Some do, but not so much anymore. I feel like more than every America is diverging.
I like the idea, however some of the things I want to do aren't on wikihow. So I would like a way to add them without assigning them to an existing wikihow list. Can you add a feature to create a custom list?
The two towns are a framing device for the article and provide a rhetorical starting point for an investigation of various issues and trends with health care in America.

I'm pretty sure that you could skim the article and find some numbers if you wanted to.
Based on their response it wouldn't be effective - they would just try to cover it up.

Plus it's likely it's already being used secretly by those with nefarious purposes, publishing just means the average person knowns about it - it's not likely to change how many actually use it.
Skype crash: Software bug and server overloads blamed
Maxing Out Your Triangle
Not sure if you're kidding, but I think it's I Am A Patent Lawyer.
"Why is it considered bad practice to worry about the range of valid inputs and outputs for a method?"

Is it? I don't think I've heard people complain about ensuring valid arguments and return values. But they do argue over what's the best|right|coolest way to handle it.

"Wouldn't this basic consideration, combined with functional testing, offer a far greater degree of confidence in the system than hundreds of unit tests alone, and be far less brittle?"

As would appropriate use of automatic type checking. Rather than having my method call explicit code to check that an argument is an integer between 0 and 100 (for example), I'd rather define the method signature such that the argument has to adhere to the behavior of type IntBetweenZeroAndOneHundred. Basically, move some unit tests or explicit method code for argument properties into a type.

But, as the article suggests, this gain in cleaner code or a nicer abstraction may reduce the granularity, making it harder to change later.
One thing the author gets exactly right: loyalty accrues to those who reliably delivers the goods. And the tendency to trust states, companies, unions, or even families by default is busy eroding at a remarkable pace.

Different people in different places will find equilibrium in very different ways. Or they won't. In either case, they're unlikely to share a common conception about where it 'should' come from.

And once that widely shared framework of "what works for everyone" goes, then the world does look considerably more feudal and transitional than it did a generation ago. In that regard, the 12th Century is a useful source of patterns. So is the late 15th - early 17th. Maybe even more so, since this is when empirical science, truly global trading operations and commercial printers all came to the fore.
Spotify Is the Coolest Music Service You Can't Use
Whenever I receive emails from LinkedIn telling me to create an account(mailed by those clueless people that give his/her whole contact list away), I click report spam. If there was a easy link on the bottom of the email to opt-out, I would do that. Since there isn't, I assume it's their problem to deal with my spam report.
By promotion method, do you mean your landing page or the way you promote your landing page?
Why did you change the title? I feel like the original headline was a better description.
antirez, it's a honor that you commented, thanks! :)

The new inverted logic for the VM you describe seems very interesting; I'm very much looking forward to see 2.4!

Redis is already more than perfect what we use it for -- keeping track of stock price data, and distributing it. The size of the DB is known in advance (the amount of stocks does not grow very fast), and the performance is perfect.

Keep up the good job! (And have a nice new year)

Kristof