skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First of all, this post is 4 days old. It remains to be seen how the story will unfold.

I had some trouble finding background information on the Church. Some of the below links may be a result of the Anonymous campaign.

* Wikipedia: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Westboro_Bapt...

* Official website (I think): http://www.westborobaptistchurch.com/

* Official website (according to Wikipedia): http://www.godhatesfags.com/ [1]

* Description on ADL.org (The Anti-defamation League): http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/WBC/default.asp?LEARN_Cat=Ex...

[1] I am listing godhatesfags.org, even though I suspect it isn't actually run by the Church. I am behind a filtered ISP and I cannot preview the domain myself. The Church's own about page is so absurd that I can't be certain both websites aren't hoaxes. (See [2])

[2] http://www.westborobaptistchurch.com/wbcinfo/aboutwbc.html)
The amount of logical and economic fail in this article is overwhelming. The Atlantic version was better, probably because it didn't have an axe to grind: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2072200

Disclaimer: I lean socialist but not nationalist which means I'm biased against the basic premises of the article. But it's not the premises that fail, it's the reasoning.
Poll: How many spam comments or attempts does your blog get per month?
I'm new to blogging and have no idea if what I am experiencing, spam wise, is normal.<p>Note: Though, a ratio of spam comments or attempts to page hits might be a better indicator, it would also make for an overly complex poll.<p>Thanks.
1 to 10
11 to 25
26 to 50
51 to 100
101 to 500
501 to 1000
1001+
That quote is not from a scientist. Also, note the use of “almost certainly” and “probably” in the quote you are criticizing.

(“TFA”?! Really?!)
A friend of mine wrote up a very nice review of his experience with Startup Chile [1]. If you're looking for an objective review from the eyes of a founder, check it out.

[1] - http://www.shaharnechmad.com/2011/02/19/building-your-dreams...
Ask HN: Does anyone actually code at a hackathon?
This is really to vent my frustration. I've participated in about 6 hackathons in the last year. 4 in the SF Bay area and 2 in NYC. Today, I'm at the Foursquare hackathon in NYC. It seems the majority of people are just talking and networking. Now it is possible that these guys have learned to code without keyboards but I highly doubt it. I am not pissed that people are networking ... this should not be the primary activity. Otherwise, we should call it a bloody mixer!! The thing that really pisses me off is that these chatterboxes are going to show off completed apps ... ones they have not built at the hackathon. Now seriously ... in the few hours at one of these events, you simply cannot create a polished app unless you have a large group of developers who are seriously coding. I have seen such efforts (e.g. at the iOS hackathon at Paypal earlier this year ... people were actually coding inside the auditorium and talking outside).

I'm really frustrated by this state of affairs. I don't come to a hackathon to pitch my latest startup app ... I come to code. In some instances, I've decided not to present at all the end of the hackathon cause most of the other teams are presenting an extremely polished piece of work (again, I have BIG doubts that some of these are done during the event).

Anyways ... vent complete. It would be nice to know I'm not alone.
Every Australian Borders store has a Gloria Jeans... And they independantly went into recievership 2 days after the US company did.
That's almost as good as this twitter feed: http://twitter.com/DalaiLamaInBed
OK, my other problem with Free Software is when Free Software proponents try to tell me that GPL is more free than BSD because GPL stops the software from becoming part of non-free software.

It's like saying people in the US are more free than those in the EU, because the US restricts travel to non-free Cuba.
Hmm...
I think the p-tags are a bug within HN.
This jives with my personal observations of my work.

I'm a very busy guy, but I easily spend 40% of my day not focusing on work. Probably another 20% is walking around talking to the people. To me, "focusing" on random stuff (ie. Hacker News, the newspaper, work-related or personal research) and completing tasks with minimal time is the best way to get things done -- the pressure helps me cut to the essence of whatever I need to do.
Use IronRuby to develop a Windows Phone 7 app
Here's a link to the "article", instead of to a random comment:

http://www.infernodevelopment.com/python-becoming-most-popul...
This seems obvious to me, but I've seen people, time and time again, "optimize" pieces of an application which doesn't actually have much significant impact on the application, and which increases the complexity of maintenance substantially.

If you can't tell me how much of an optimization a given change is, with empirical numbers (4.6% faster view code, which is 64% of the pageview, which is about a 3% overall performance increase), you don't have any business making that change.

Even when you have good theoretical numbers (current approach is O(n^2), new approach is O(n)), measure it. "Bad" algorithmic complexities don't always mean "slow", and if I'm going to get 3/1000s of 1ms runtime improvement for six hours of optimization work, and you're not working on a game engine where micro-optimizations make and break you, the change isn't worth it.
Imogen Heap - 2-1 (Murdok Remix)
I don't think Barnes & Noble is out of the woods yet. While the company has certainly fared better than Borders, the company is going to face a difficult road going forward.

First, the company is still heavily dependent on its brick and mortar retail operations, but the demand for physical media (including books) is declining rapidly. Second, the company's future depends on its ability to transform itself into a digital distributor of content. In digital distribution, B&N must contend with Amazon, Apple, Google, and others (e.g., Sony). These competitors have significant advantages in the areas of economies scale and scope and technology.

Borders bankruptcy will give B&N some reprieve, allowing the company to direct cash flow from its bricks & mortar operations to its developing digital strategy (e.g., BN.com, Nook). Nevertheless, I think B&N will face a rocky future. Investors seem to agree, with B&N trading at close to a 5-year low.
I find Lehrer frustrating. He's sort of a psychological Malcolm Gladwell. He's good at framing things in a pat and interesting way, but he's often making a lot of compromises on being thorough and accurate on the way to that narrative.

I would say it's good to read his stuff as a jumping off point, but it may be good to follow that with something more scientific on the subject.
I think the common answers to this question are a good illustration of people inventing logical reasons post factum for something they don't understand, much like described in the Black Swan.

My experience is exactly the opposite to what most people are saying. I know of plenty of Borders locations, and almost no Barnes & Noble location. Borders stores are always excellent - well stocked, pleasant atmosphere, etc. The checkout lines are always full, people browse for hours and buy a ton of stuff.

I suspect the problems have much more to do with the economics of running their operations which you can't see with a naked eye. Their customer experience is top notch - they just couldn't do it in a scalable way long term.

BTW, what exactly is Barnes & Noble's eBook strategy? How many people do you know that bought a Nook?
I am not sure if your question is meaningful. From my understanding, there is no organized structure to Anonymous. "Anonymous" is not a group. It is a collective name used by hackers who align themselves with the goals and beliefs that have been expressed in Anonymous' name in the past.

At least that is my understanding. I have no real source or citations, asides from a few HN posts that I recall reading in the past.
Well at least the guy isn't masturbating at work. A coworker of mine did that in front of me one afternoon & the next day I was fired.
I produced a movie about what everyone did with their time in that office. http://BudgetJustified.com
I'm guessing it will come to no surprise that it was the federal government.
>But ControlJS, HeadJS, and many other script loaders like them are doing the same thing. They aren’t necessarily using the exact same trick as LABjs used, but they are pinning their entire loading functionality on hacky, non-standard behavior.

Well, yikes. I'm using head.js because I figured one loader was just as good as another, but now I'm having second thoughts. Dang, everything is complicated...
The Quietest (Powerful) Computer In The World
I really don't want this to be a flame war. I want a culture or sharing and learning, too. I think that culture and community are by far the most important. Since we've at a point where we largely agree, I'll take it as a good point to stop.
I loved this reading. Can I translate it to my native language (brazilian portuguese) and publish on my blog (referencing to the original post)?
"What do you think about going to you directly vs going through PSS?"
> Computers adore XML. It's nice and easy to parse, so structured and precise. Computers love that shit.

It's not the easy to parse, without interpreting complex schemas that are sometimes missing. It's not even easy to map, you have the attributes, the children and inner text, this makes it a pain to map to native objects.

There may be good tools for this, but I wouldn't call parsing it easy especially compared to other formats out there.
Wouldn't you hate it if you did something, like giving money to a poor fellow, and then people are using your good deed to market their ideology (like communism perhaps); even though you think it's wrong?

Now imagine how some open-source authors feel.
The lives and deaths of mobile platforms
Too bad there was no RED camera back then!
Alternatively, do what we do for our customers and put the machines in another room and run long cables or kvm to your monitor(s), keyboard(s) and tracking device(s).
I think the title is misleading.

"Distract me, i am working" reflects the idea of the article better.

Distraction may not be irritating but bothering someone is always irritating and annoying and leads to stress. But creativity comes from relaxed state (daydreaming etc).
So question - I have seen this before and it is very intriguing. But the worry-wart in me says.. "Hmm what's the catch??" Does the local govt own a large piece of your startup? Can you leave anytime and take your company with you? I have seen other offers such as from Dubai, but they turned into horror stories. Now granted we are talking about 2 VERY different cities... help a skeptic out.. :)
October 2009 US statisics:

College students over the age of 35 = 1.18 million full time + 2.01 million part time.

[http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/school/cps2009/tab0...]

To put it in perspective approximately 1.00 million students enter German universities each year. Considering the three year structure of German University education - a crude approximation would be that there are roughly as many US college students over 35 as there are German university students.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Germany#Student_Po...
If they're dumb enough to judge the innovativeness of software based on something like that, their opinion is probably irrelevant.
This has already been discussed: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2238230
wow.. good stuff
The more I work with XML, the more I'm convinced that Naggum was dead on:
http://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html

XML is, for me, the classic example of the problem of reinventing things badly. The sad thing is that we've barely been programming for 60 years and we've already reached the point where much of our work is wasted in this process.
I tried this a long time ago -- maybe 10-12 years back, not long after they first introduced the affiliate program -- and got a friendly but pointed letter from Amazon to knock it off. Have they changed the rules?
Yes you are right on this is a decentralized group: see this wikipedia article for more information. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group)
Fantastic, I hadn't seen all of this interview before, and Bruce Lee has always been one of my heros.
Figuring out whether to use a carrots or a stick is the problem.

There are already tax credits for certain behavior - various home improvements, research and development, etc. Why not a "employee retention" tax credit - for every year you keep a person on board, after the first, you get $100 * Years (up to a cap) or something, which covers part of the employers side of payroll taxes.

The downside of this is that carrot's don't directly generate revenue, which is what Mr. Frank is going after in this article.
s/selling/reselling
> This is fine.

But not for RMS since it doesn't address the founding concern of the FSF! You sort of glossed over that. If you write BSD code, and it gets put into OS X, your ability to tinker with your own code in that context is gone.

I don't think you can clearly claim one license here is more free than the other -- they're both securing different kinds of freedom.
I recently attended a NightOwls meetup in Tel Aviv and had the same reaction. I still plan on attending events like this, because:

1. I can program at home any night.

2. Hackathons allow collaborating in person with other hackers. This is much more valuable to me than pure programming.

3. Hackathons are perfect places to find co-founders and developers, because they mix of programming and networking. I can demo apps and informally meet the people behind them all at once.

Edit: In all fairness, NightOwls isn't meant to be a hackathon. I used it as an example because it emphasizes working and getting things done.

http://www.meetup.com/Tel-Aviv-Nightowls/
Warning: I am not going to answer your question directly, but hopefully provide useful info..

I live here in Austin and I have been around SXSW a few times. I think before you do something like this, try to network and pitch your startup the casual way.. by saying "Hi" and introducing yourself. It sounds soooo lame, but people there are really friendly and are as excited as you are to see and hear about everything. You might actually make some very strategic partnerships (friendships?) in the process.

I will leave the "purple cow" tips to the experts though ;)
The reason founders get more is because they are less willing to accept a bad deal, and more able to turn a bad deal into a good one. An employee who brings strategic assets to a company will make a lot of money, neither Eric Schmidt or Tim Cook are founders of their respective companies but they do VERY well for themselves.

The best explanation is found on Ribbon Farm in The Gervais Principle.

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...

And yes, Founders are 1000x more valuable to the market than their employees. They may not be more valuable according to any other logic but the market is the person who cuts the cheques.
The Death Of The Recordings-Sale Industry
Your question shows why this is so hard to grok for most people.

Imagine, if in America, anyone could stand up and propose an action. For example, they might say, "We're going to build this road from pointA to pointB. Who's in?" and then all the people gather together their resources (time, money, etc) and then go build it if they get enough people. This is basically how anonymous works.

In all reality, Anonymous could be any group of people that collect enough resources to take a particular action.
I don't know if the goal is to make money or what, but it seems very obvious to me that they are coming up with the most vile things they can think of for the sake of getting a rise out of people.

I don't know why anyone would waste time arguing with them when they are clearly just looking for attention and may not even believe everything they're saying.
Amazing content:

It's 'business news' and a 'business case study' and for business better information than on Bloomberg, Forbes, Fortune, etc.

So, generalize and formulate the implications for the future of media?
Given than anyone could claim to be kicking off an Anonymous action, claims alone should quickly be devalued... a sort of Gresham's Law for unattributable threats of decentralized action.
Or partner with Apple like Best Buy did. Seems like a perfect replacement for the huge CD areas they ripped out.
>There just isn't a really nice way to represent a tree structure in something like JSON.

What? They're trivially identical! Here, an algorithm to convert from XML to JSON:

< => {
> => }
attribute="value" => key:"value"
contents => $:[{},"",{},etc,"look ma, multiple text nodes!"]
node name => #:"name"

Actually, there's one that most JSON parsers can do that XML can't:

key: function(){alert("Oh joy, someone used <em>eval!</em>");} => ???

edit: thought of another one:

{"spaces in <key name{w00t}>":value} => ?

I have absolutely no idea how people come to the conclusion that XML somehow magically does X while nothing else does. XSLT can be modified to work on JSON, schema definitions too (how about: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-zyp-json-schema-03 , or a pre-defined set of rules like JSON-RPC?), and XPath == CSS-like selectors with a different set of characters.

The only difference between XML and JSON is the character set and the tool-chains available. JSON is rapidly gaining the same capabilities through tools, while XML has tons of non-compliant libraries (I've had to deal with other people's XML APIs in cases where attribute order mattered (likely hand-rolled, I know), or they couldn't parse a standard schema doc, or they couldn't handle namespaces properly).

About the only thing you can say is that JSON is XML "lite", currently, and is a new chance to do things differently / correctly. The problems many people have with XML relates to just that - non-compliant libraries that clog the XML tubes, making working with it a total crap-shoot often enough that it's worth avoiding.
as someone who regularly competes in hack days and has won a few, there is nothing more annoying than having someone come in for a few hours, add a new feature to an already developed product then enter the whole thing in as a hack, a lot of the time the Judges don't know and it just promotes the tactic to other people...
I live in Japan and have the same problem, to some extent. News coming out of America is largely negative. But then again, news in general is largely negative -- negative sells. It's not just how we rate things, but also what people choose to report.

When I want to sigh and get depressed about America, I look at the news that I see about Japan and that reminds me that people only really want to report/read about the worst/weirdest of a country, really. Japan isn't all herbivorous otaku, whale killers, and child molesters. America isn't all idiocracy, TSA gropers, and embezzlers.

Another way to look at it is that every single American startup post or Ask HN you see here is a positive post -- these are people trying to live the American dream and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Idealized? Maybe. But it's certainly not negative.
meh, we might remove jQuery next version.
My point is still relevant. A bunch of idealists looking for patters of conspiracies in text will find them.

You need some verification subsystem; a scientific method, if you want. Otherwise, you'll reinvent an even worse version of:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_studies

Edit: Good luck inventing something new. I mean it.
Ask HN: Does anyone know of a good copyright lawyer?
I have a heavy content based site going live in the next month or so and I really have no connections to great (and reasonable) copyright lawyers. Any experience / thoughts in this realm would be greatly appreciated!
I know nearly as many people with a color Nook as I do that own a Kindle. But I know probably three times as many people that own an iPad.
your competitors are constantly developing new features, you'll lose market share rapidly unless you keep up

This, in a nutshell, is why IE9 is not oing to be "as good as it gets". To be sympathetic to IE9, it's a good start. But only a good start. The people inside MS who plan IE must know that there's more work to do in order to keep up with the competition, let alone speed up and overtake them. MS is used to running marathons when they have to, not betting it all on one version.
aggregate demand has recovered

Wow. Ok, I lean left and you lean right so obviously we're going to differ on some things. But, conceptually, you'd think those things would all be values-related things. In this case what you're saying conflicts with my mental model of the world. The basic "reality" that I live in.

I don't have a point to make, just expressing how weird it is to me to see someone write that.
Haskell first appeared 2/3 years after Clean. The right description is more like 'Haskell and Clean are the twin Free offspring of the lazy FP language Miranda, which unfortunately was proprietary; they both have different but related approaches to being pure'.
On a related note, I found an interesting project last night with a more evented slant:

http://hawtdispatch.fusesource.org/

Another tangent: it's too bad java's servlet API is defined in a blocking style. Is there a JSR to remedy that deficiency?
Does this go along with your strict "NO WINDOWS" and "NO FUN" policies as well?

Seriously, there are places where XML is the right tool, which the poster does a fine job of bringing up.

There are a lot of places where it is not, but was used because something better for those specific use cases hadn't been invented yet - JSON is barely 10 years old, whereas XML's SGML roots go back over 30.

Whatever the case, we're better off with ANY structured data format than old delimited and fixed column width formats from the dinosaur days.
Without repeating the same boring arguments about whether everything should be covered on Wikipedia, and just stipulating, whether you truly agree with them or not, that we'll confine ourselves to Wikipedia's policy of requiring that articles both assert and document notability:

Doesn't it stand to reason that most "hackerspaces" aren't notable?

Wikipedia doesn't even have coverage for every major office building in Chicago. A typical hackerspace wouldn't even take a single floor in a typical Chicago high-rise.
Exactly, I've always argued that Free Software is best for infrastructure and developer tools, and Open Source is best for everything else (like libraries for end user software).
According to the LABjs homepage, Steve Souders is now working with the author on LABjs.

http://labjs.com/
Then we can change it back to French Software later.
And now things have changed - it will take a very, very long time, or more likely never happen, for the Firefox, Opera, Chrome, iPad and android community to be small enough again for MS to ignore. So IE has to progress.
I've often asked myself whether some activity is useful, or entertaining, or just a waste of time. But I've never once asked myself whether it's "something grownups do". That smacks of ignoring any actual merits in favor of identity politics.

The article is basically a rant from someone who thinks their parenthood hobby should be universal, as though our little tribe of 6.7 billion still needs reinforcements.
that's subjective (unless you can post tests). for example, one of the primary deficiencies of the dom is live node lists, which is an optimization option in jsdom. (also, we do create a fragment and then attach, as perf opts state)