skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I don't mean everyone who uses a piece of software should have to know the code intimately; merely that they should have the freedom to see it, modify it and learn from it, should the need or desire arise."

Hopefully, in your ideal world, this doesn't take away the freedoms of the developers that don't want to release their code.

"You're mostly too young to remember the world in which code was closed, by default, and you had to learn without the benefit of an infinite variety of examples to peruse"

This would have happened even without the GNU license. Anything that can be digital is being shared on the Internet, regardless of the license.

"and so that the gap between the technology haves and have nots does not grow further and faster."

This doesn't really make any sense. Most people will never look at the source code...so the absence of a license that gives you the right to tinker with the inner workings of an application won't really have an effect on the "technology haves and have nots". We should be more concerned with people that can't eat.

"Note that I'm not discussing licenses here, but the general culture of software. If we have a culture of sharing, which RMS and the FSF has been instrumental in creating (and the GPL was merely a part of that), we have a culture in which young programmers can learn from the experienced, and a culture in which barriers to entry are not as economic in nature."

Which is funny because this right here is devaluing programmers' salaries every day. Because there are so many free apps out there, companies can hire less experienced developers for less pay (IE: mechanics instead of engineers). It's one of those things that nobody will notice until it's too late. I suspect at this point, we will start to see programmer unions to keep wages at an inflated level. So, when your company decides to replace you with someone cheaper or goes over to India or the Philippines, don't complain.

I also don't think the word "free" should be used to describe GNU software. It implies free, as in price. It also implies that you can do what you want with it. If a corporation decides to change the code around, redistribute, and close-source it, they will get sued. This doesn't sound very free to me.

Even if they closed-sourced the application, the original source code is still free. You just don't get the changes (which were never yours in the first place).
Nice way to showcase technology.
'Each line of text in your code should be at most 80 characters long. '
We recognize that this rule is controversial, but so much existing code already adheres to it, and we feel that consistency is important.

That's another funny one...
Just how terrible is Clearwire?
On the measure this is a small problem for something that is already relatively inconsequential.
"The same applies to the reversed, you don't have to be a programmer to suffer from DRM, vendor lock-in, or nag-ware."

ahh, so you don't want software to be commercial, is that it?
I'm more questioning why they thought that was a good idea when there are some drawbacks to overloading GET and some known ways[1] to work around browser limitations of PUT/DELETE/OPTIONS on forms.

For example, as a consumer of the API I would expect GET /clients to return a list of clients and not a OPTIONS-like response of possible paths.

I'm definitely playing the purist here which is not my typical role. The OPTIONS solution is not a well known one but it is something that I'd like to be picked up.

[1] http://guides.rubyonrails.org/form_helpers.html#how-do-forms...
We have treatment programs in place, most of the people in this article had given up on them. Given that this happens, and alcoholics do end up dying alone and cold on the streets... This seems to be the only rational thing to do.
Well, "500+ karma required to upvote" is pretty precise. You could generalize it to "increase the karma threshold for upvoting," "karma threshold for Ask HN posts," and so on.

What does "make the flag button more powerful" mean to you? I think that's the real distraction to me.
Lean Startup theory as a guide to life.
It occurs to me that all Steve Blank, Eric Reis and friends have to do to take on Tony Robbins and the other guru life coaches is broaden their horizons. Here's the insight they need - a human life is a startup. We stagger through its early phases in search of a minimum viable product (career, partner, family...) then we scale like crazy absorbing huge amounts of capital. Of course, some people don't run lean in these early years, get into debt and go bust. If they get back on their feet what are they? They're serial entrepreneurs. And if things aren't working out with our current life strategy, what do we do? We pivot, that's what. You may not have heard a divorce described as a pivot before, but that's what it is. And if we look after ourselves with a bit of luck we get what we all wish for - a successful exit.
I wonder if the public ever will become educated about the value of privacy. A few days ago I've tried to explain a friend who often uses Internet cafes how to use Google's two factor authentication for Gmail. Her answer was: "Why should I do this, this just makes it more complicated". When I explained to her that it prevents other's from being able to read her mails she responded that there's nothing interesting in her mailbox and she doubts anyone is interested in doing so.

A decade or so ago I still had hope that tools like PGP/GPG will be widespread amongst the Internet population. But this all completely changed. People who used to use PGP to encrypt their mails and who've used to run their own mailservers because they didn't trust their provider just use GMail today.

We're moving from a decentraliced infrastructure to a pure client/server infrastructure and there's not much you can do about this. There are a few areas where it's possible to avoid the cloud, but in most other areas the choice is either to use the prevalent centralized infrastructure or to not communicate with others.
That hides default logic in the signature. Why would you favor that over

def f(a=3, b=None):
b = b or a+1 # or use a more explicit version
return (a + b) / 2
Think of a first class continuation as a heap-allocated setjmp buffer - rather than unwinding the stack, it changes the stack to a saved stack (which, since it isn't unwound, can be returned to multiple times).

Continuations and longjmp can't return an arbitrary number of levels up the call stack without placing some sort of marker there first, but IMHO that's a good thing. Continuations are a "structured" version of that Tcl return construct. While I haven't done much with Tcl, is it typically used to implement other language constructs with more specific semantics, or is it typically used directly?
Why would you trust Twitter?
I did not say there was not a S/N problem and that was not the focus of my comment. The comment "if you're saying" when I wasn't feels a lot like an attempt to discredit a comment by reframing the debate by assigning statements of intent to a post that clearly are not there. I hope that is not the case as such tactics are not productive.

My comment is that I read the proposals in the form of a poll and do not see what they are expected to do to solve problems. Perhaps more explanation of their expected virtues is in order. I asked about one in particular as an example, the flag.

I know flagging from youtube, it is used much for erotic and violent content which after being reviewed manually by employees of youtube (which undoubtedly has significant labor costs) has a warning label assigned and age sign-in or click through added. Perhaps it means the same thing here. If so it's not clear what sorts of posts it would be used on since I have not seen violent or erotic posts here, or even spam. So that is why I asked how does it work and please give some examples of actual posts is should be used on. Also discuss how introducing new punishment features will not have unintended consequences. A discussion of these sorts of things should precede any vote on what actions to take, that's how they do it in various congresses and parliaments.

(Regarding the other topic, I don't know if there is a S/N problem or not. There are different kinds of posts than there were a year ago. There are more people here and different people. This is not what my comment was addressing at all though. I assume as a starting point that there is a problem with wrong posts and here are some proposals to solve it. I don't know if that is the case but I am assuming it to move on and discuss proposed changes to the board. The question I had was how will these solve the problem. The mechanisms of how these would work to improve things is no doubt clear to the OP, but is not obvious to me. Then again, since we are being asked to rank them, perhaps it is not so obvious even to the OP. If it is very obvious and clear to all we would just be told these should be implemented, and not asked which ones we have a gut feeling might work.)
People have this notion that if you create a digital application or product and don't want it to be shared without your consent, that you have a monopoly over it.
I think there're 3 reasons for the (perceived) degradation:

1. There's a significant increase in the number of submissions over time while the number of frontpage articles remains the same (30). This leads to shorter articles lifespan. So if you visit HN as often as I do in a day, you will encounter a lot more good articles and also a lot more bad ones (the good to bad ratio may be the same, but our brain doesn't compute ratio intuitively, so it just gives more weigh to the majority bad articles). Note that 'bad' here just means stuffs I don't find interesting.

2. Wider range of topics (kind of related to the first point). So any given veteran will be less happy now that there are more articles that won't interest them.

3. Points inflation as the result of more users. 2-3 years ago, an article with score above 50 points is decent, now they're so common (may be a points exchange calculator to convert current score to score x days ago? ;-) )
Follows the AOL playbook perfectly:

- Google (popular topic)

- Native Client (interesting tech)

- ActiveX (famously hated)

- lots of internal links to reinforce SEO

- via another AOL property to reinforce SEO

- solitary non-AOL external link that might leak traffic is well positioned to minimize damage

- 'article' is small + shallow, improves odds it will make the 7k pageviews or w/e rev they're targeting because const to produce was close to 0.
I think your description of the problem is about right.

But: As a SO-consumer this particular problem doesn't phase me.

The better answers usually have more votes and sometimes the green checkmark is even on the best one - but when it's not, who cares?

To me as a SO-consumer a bigger problem recently has been the duplication. For any given question there may be dozens of threads which makes it harder to track down the good one(s). If SO wants to improve they should imho work on their deduplication efforts.

This might even be automatable to a point; let users vote on questions to be merged, and perform the merge when either the author agrees or a vote-threshold is met.
I agree, I can do the programming but not the design and themeforest has a selection of excellent themes. Used it on one called http://www.venturesocially.com
http://www.metafilter.com already exists; I'm not sure why Hacker News should try to become it.
S-expressions for fun and profit
I know that the meaning of REST has been diluted a lot, but this mostly RPC with pretty URLs.

I don't understand why they don't support PUT and DELETE. They are already using jQuery on the HTML implementation of their API site, so could use its Ajax library to provide cross-browser PUT and DELETE. If they wanted browser usable methods, they could have used the standard "_method" parameter along with POST, and convert it server-side.

This actually makes it a lot less discoverable for those of us not using the HTML view. For instance, when using curl to browse to /vi/client/list, I expect to get a list of clients. Instead, I get the following (I'd prefer to show JSON here, but I get a 500 when I try it.):

curl -H "Accept: application/xml" https://api_test:submarine@api.snapbill.com/v1/client/list/
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<response xmlns="https://api.snapbill.com/" status="ok" type="form"><fields><field type="textbox" name="query"><caption>Search query</caption></field><field type="number" name="page"><class>number</class><default>1</default><caption>Page</caption><min>1</min></field><field type="number" name="perpage"><class>number</class><default>25</default><caption>Clients per page</caption><max>50</max><min>1</min></field></fields></response>

When I try to GET https://api_test:submarine@api.snapbill.com/v1/client/list/?..., I get the same response, which I was not expecting. I had to POST to the same URL in order to view the list, which is the wrong method.

There's also the issues of assuming a certain view in the end representation, including CSS and JS in their HTML representation, and having different default formats for different resources. All these make working with the API annoying.
I don't think they do. Print journalists compete directly with the 6am/12pm/5pm/10pm news on radio and TV in that they're providing exactly the same material.

An author isn't competing directly with Radio, TV or Cinema, in fact the three are generally seen as complimentary markets. I've barely seen a good/great movie in the past decade that hasn't come from a book. From these films made from books, they explode the sales of the books.

Movies and TV is never going to replace literature, the cost->outcome ratio is far too big for movies than it is for books. I'm a writer, I'm currently working on a novel and I only have to do a couple of hours a night to be doing 1,000 words a day. Supposing I'm hitting only 250 words an hour (about 1/2 of what I usually do and I'm by far from the ideal writing situation that I used to have when I was working as a reviewer; this would easily factor in editing and other work for sale) it would take about 320 hours to write a novel length book would cost me as an author about 3300 dollars (as I'm unlikely to get paid any more than ontario minimum wage if I get a second job), which would more likely be 2500 after taxes.

That's 2500 dollars for a book you could publish. Worst case, self-pub an eBook on Lulu at $0.99 with their 50% royalty rate and you'll only have to sell to 5,000 people to break even. If you actually sold the book, you're likely to see between $2,500 to $5,000 for a first-time advance at a genre imprint, which means break-even or profit from the get go.

Break even for a movie is in the millions of dollars. Survivability for most TV shows is in the millions of viewers.

There's such naivety, yes traditional publishing sales have diminished and hasn't been immediately translated into eBook sales of the same figures (no shit sherlock the books cost a lot less, meaning there'll actually be market for more books for the same dollar value). In the 1940's 60% of the US population went to the cinema weekly. Since the late 1960's it has been steady at 10%. IIRC Nielson reported a 6% decline in TV viewership between 18-34's during the 2010 summer months.

Markets change, which is a fact of the free economy. The written word isn't going to die off because the paperback declines. Video isn't going to die off just because we stop going to the cinema or watching TV.

Just look at webcomics and the dozens of artists who are self-sufficient because of it. Look at Mike and Jerry of Penny Arcade, they employ eight people besides themselves because of a webcomic and this is before the traditional medium (comic books) are seeing the kind of declines that newspaper comics are.
I just noticed karma thresholds connect up to the leveling up Jacques Mattheij is talking about (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2241945 on the front page, section "Black sun"). You can segment people in a 'community' either with outsiders looking in (privileged users and a peanut gallery) or with insiders looking out (privileged users getting a filtered view). Karma thresholds do the former, and feedreaders/twitter/facebook kinda-sorta do the latter.
Totally. StackExchange sites welcome you with a display of their goods as soon as you approach the front of house, but having just headed over to Quora for the first time ever, I felt like I had been chased up a blind alley and couldn't find a doorway. I managed to sneak in through a crack in the fence (by going to another page as suggested in this thread, but the site front end seems to be designed to put off visitors.
As long as his work is not directly setup so people can pirate content

I really don't see how you could read the law you quoted and reach that conclusion.

If you post a tool that breaks DRM and you don't fit into one of the very narrow exemptions (and geohot doesn't), then you broke the law. It doesn't matter if you intended the tool for piracy or if it was "set up for piracy" or if anyone ever used the tool for piracy.
I would like an option to hide the downvote arrow. I very rarely downvote anyways.
If you looked carefully, you'll find out flaws that prove that he is using an already designed theme and has poor design skills.

1. Look at the images in the sliders. They are poorly chosen, positioned

2. The Tour and Facebook button on the top.

3. The icons are also poorly chosen.
The main reason at the end of the day is to land up with an API that is:

a. Fully browse-able with standard web browsers.

b. Acts in the exact same way with a browser as it does with any other client.

The api design functions on the simple idea of having a "GET" request act as a discovery mechanism while "POST" requests perform operations and searches -- much like how most websites function.

I understand you might expect the client listing at GET /clients, but I believe within a few minutes of looking at our design most people can work out its rather a POST /clients/list. You'll be looking at the documentation for almost any api you use, so I didn't really find that to be a major factor.
You are oversimplifying the educational system to a very large degree (pun intended).

Education isn't about the 'information', it's about the collective sum of benefits that a university provides. If it were strictly about the education (courses, books, etc.) there would be no purpose -- most of it can be found for free online.

University is about the whole package, of which a strong alumni network is often a major piece. Without a strong sports program, many of these schools would lose a large fraction of their alumni's attention - and I don't mean dollars and cents. To use a previous commenter:

Ding ding ding. I went to a D3 school for football, and when considering a possible MBA, something I was looking at half jokingly, but half legitimately, was whether the school was large - because I thought it would make watching sports on TV for the rest of my life, and having true attachment, a lot more fun.
Undoubtedly, as I progress further in my career, that fervor would have grown with team success, and also made my attachment more real - while my current alma mater (Chapman University in Southern California) - would have fallen away from consciousness with no legitimate way to grab my attention.
Whether I make a donation to any school in the future is up for debate, and I am now not likely to get an MBA based on many of the points raised here and elsewhere - but the point made on this comment hits the nail on the head.
I find it extremely unlikely that I will ever donate to my small private school in Southern California - because the thoughts of how it's helped me depart with every passing second, and they have no way to get it back.

This obviously leads to a weakening of the school on a whole, in terms of future enrollment and overall reputation, leading to a decline in the quality of education.
I think I can explain the author's point of view. C# 2.0 was still the cutting edge for most of 2007. Most shops were still using 1.1.

The author's qualm, coming from a Lisp POV, is most likely that if you are a consumer of C# 1.1 you can't just build C# 2.0 or 3.0 or 4.0 features. Using Lisp, he had access to everything that would eventually become C# features and then some, because if you want a fancy new language feature in Lisp you just add it. You don't have to touch the compiler (you write functions, macros, or a micro-compiler at the limit).

So there's some hyperbole there, but it's true that C# 2.0 or 1.1 was really not anything special and felt a lot like "Microsoft's Java" at the time.
As silentbycicle said, list insertion at the head is constant time.

About allocation, I agree with you that it is "slow", but all reasonable computation models count a memory allocation as a constant time operation. If we want to go down that road and measure also memory operations, even random memory access would not be worst-case constant time: the MMU has to map the page to the physical location, and this is usually a logarithmic or amortized constant time operation.
Prospecting in the 21st Century
Re: The Black Sun

I'm thinking about how one would bootstrap such a system. When the first users have to level up to create a new level, they are in some sense starting from scratch. It's an opportunity for them to shop around, move to a more cliquey venue (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2242542 suggests this happens on HN). Why would they stay on to use the original forum? There'd have to be a compelling reason.
what do they use to produce this page, would be useful to reuse
I don't necessarily agree with you in that there shouldn't be a overarching consistency to their products (no matter how subtle), but Google definitely isn't the strongest when it comes to design.
Funnily enough, Perl (since version 5.10) actually has a solution to this. The expression

$foo // "default"

evaluates to "default" if $foo is undefined, and to $foo otherwise (even if it is defined but false).
Not really. It's completely fair for taxpayers to question the NPV of their employees (aka government workers).

Questioning it doesn't mean the NPV is negative. After all, private employers do this all the time. They decide a line of business provides an insufficient return on capital or doesn't fit the core, and they shut it down. Other times they find the NPV is awesome and pour on the investment. Since taxpayers are "the boss," this is completely appropriate.

If anything, the pernicious assumption runs precisely the opposite direction: that anyone who dare question the value to cost ratio of our bureaucratic overlords be attacked.
Clearly, StackOverflow needs more colour gradients.
Hehe, thanks for the constructive criticism, as you've shown there's a lot of work still to do design-wise.

Oh, and I don't mean to give you nightmares, but just think what it would look like if I wasn't using a theme ;)
It's faze. Read more books.
From the article, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association is quoted as saying that "Sony/Google are asking the Commission to ignore copyright, patent, trademark, contract privity, licensing, and other legal rights and limitations that have been thoroughly documented." Such dishonesty defines the terms of the conflict, and makes it clear that the conflict is not at all about who is right, or what is best for consumers, but rather what makes the most money in the very short term.

Not, of course, to say that the AllVid Alliance isn't also pursuing similar motivations. Rather, it seems that in this case that the NCTA relies heavily upon dishonesty about the AllVid Alliance's position in order to make their case. That should say something about which side consumers, developers, activists, etc. should be most comfortable supporting.
Love the idea, but what a douchebaggy presentation. Take your fucking sunglasses off, you're indoors, and it's dark outside.