skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All communities have some degree of self policing. Those that allow any commentary to go by usually end up embroiled in vitriol and snark. HN strives to keep a specific level of intelligence (to varying degrees of success). As was stated elsewhere, and I mean no disrespect by this, if the community-enforced standards of comment quality do not appeal to you, you have the choices of (A) not commenting, (B) spending more time asking yourself if your comments will be deemed acceptable by the community or (C) leaving.

I too like to fire off witty, snarky comments. But after a few of them got torn apart vote-wise, I now spend more time asking myself if I will be adding anything useful to the discussion. While I try to refuse the allure of groupthink just so I can get the rush of seeing my karma count move up, I do attempt to at least find a way to state my opinion in a way that is palatable and intelligent.
Kinda ridiculous that you can only log in using Twitter. Talk about unnecessarily high platform dependency.
Are peoples lives that much worse if don't have access to certain TV Show/Albums/Movies? People can be so entitled sometimes.
yes, that's correct - max of 8 inches. All of the above ideas would work within 8 inches.
The author of the article is no member of the US government and doesn't speak for it. To accuse him of hypocrisy on the basis of actions his government takes seems wholly misguided.
No, Apple drives don't fail at a disproportionately higher rate. They have the exact same failure rates as the rest of the industry since they use the same parts (with minor modifications apparently).

I've had many hard drives fail. Just recently a Western Digital hard drive in my server that was the second drive in a mirror started having issues with the ball bearings making a high pitched whining noise, going over into no longer spinning up. This is by no means the first drive to do so to me. Hard drive failures happen, the more of them you have, the more likely they are to fail at one point or another.

I've had my MacBook Pro for almost 4 years now and I haven't had the hard drive fail in it at all. I wouldn't be worried, unless you abuse your laptop while it is running most likely nothing will happen. Just make sure that you have backups, TimeMachine is excellent for that.
so what are the device requirements for the end consumer (me) and then for your consumer (store/merchant)? If I get something like a keychain tag (like cvs, etc) whats the explicit advantage of this over barcode/scan ?
Tell HN: Nokia Ovi Store - Guilty until proven innocent
The Nokia Ovi Store appwizard makes it look enticingly easy to submit an app to the Ovi Store. So I just did that two days ago. Today I received this email:

FAILED: Potential Copyright Violation.
SUMMARY: It does not appear that you have the rights to distribute the icons, screen shots, or RSS feeds used in this application. If you believe this has been failed in error, please contact publishtoovi.support@nokia.com with documentation which indicates that you have permission to submit this content to the Ovi Store.

I have conceived, built and grown the web-application based on which the Ovi App was submitted to Nokia. Now Nokia, in an all-powerful way seems to have determined that the icon and RSS feed was not created by me. Unlike Google Apps which has figured a fairly elegant way to detect and know if you own the domain that you are signing up Google Apps with- Nokia seems to have figured its best to unilaterally decide whether you actually own the content that you are submitting to them or not.

Maybe its just me, but based on the stories I have read about how Apple and Nokia treat the Apps that are submitted to them- I am somehow reminded of the 1984 Macintosh commercial (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8)

I wonder if Microsoft would have chosen this path of approving applications for the Windows Desktop- where would the state of the computing industry be today.

Why are App developers treated guilty until proven innocent?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2460925
I own both the cr-48 and a tablet, and the cr-48 is much more preferable because of the keyboard. Also its super hacker friendly. I run Unbuntu and chrome on it and Ubuntu runs very well on it. I wish they could get Android running on it as well. You get a full featured browser on the chromebook. Its light, great battery life and from their pricing point looks to be much cheaper. The free 100MB of 3G have come in handy more than once.
Which would you rather be? Is it a close decision?
LivingSocial’s Founder: A Multimillion Dollar Hit Is Not Enough
Right, so more than $45,000.

1 Canadian dollar = 1.0324 US dollars
$45,000 Canadian dollars = $46,458.90 US dollars

It's been a few months since a US dollar was worth more than a Canadian dollar.
Plus if there is an exchange of at least $2,000 dollars I would like to at least see your face.
Entire text of TFA follows:

--START--

http://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/market_cap

For just $7.5 billion, you could have bought Apple — in January 2004. That leaves $1 billion to create your time machine.
Yep - we broke the form - had to turn debug back on - fixed now! (debug is off)
yes, you are correct. all of our use-cases currently can be implemented with the short-range nature of NFC (1-2in). however, our platform also supports long-range readers (UHF - 10-15m) as well.
> Apple's trying to build the best integrated product, and they're willing to give up some standard parts and interfaces to get there. If you want to be able to swap out components, an iMac may not be the best choice for you.

Then their policy on hard drive replacement capability is fairly inconsistent. Why do you forbid hdd replacement for imacs and let do it on macbook pro?
Hahaha, nice!
I believe this is a satellite view of the Yodok concentration camp based on an image in the article.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...
Woo hoo! Now we need an equally awesome Chrome plugin for delicious
That really pisses me off.

I played through the whole (mediocre) game without sound.

The sounds MAKE this game! They could have mentioned they only did a half-assed HTML5 implementation and used Flash for audio.
I believe North Korea is number 1 in terms of percentage of its population in (formal) prison. The U.S. is number 2.

The percentage of people in prison in the U.S. is grotesquely large. It's much larger than any other nation with comparable economic/religious/political freedoms. The U.S. judicial/prison system is quite bad in my opinion but the exact point that fijall was making was lost on me. Hence my request for a clarification.

I will add that the entire nation of North Korea should be viewed as a giant prison. This makes North Korea incomparable to other nations. It's unique in this respect.
you as the developer (cause they are the hypothetical consumer for us)? or you as a person who was given a tag?

for our purposes here, we're like twilio in that developers are our target market. they then develop & sell solutions to businesses (like callloop.com does on top of twilio.com)
I'm not going to defend the behavior ethically, but this isn't clear to me legally. It's not at all clear that their "dominant" in either of these sectors. Currently Android is just barely ahead of iOS in smart phones, and at the time of the detailed events lagged substantially.

There's nothing legally wrong with "bundling" one product with another. It happens all the time, in all sorts of markets. It only becomes a problem under antitrust law, and I don't see Android as a monopoly yet.

But yeah, it's a little shady. Clearly there is harm to the user base if there isn't robust competition for location services.
Ah, I simply misread the wakeboard idea then. Since I never skied, snowboarded or wakeboarded or did any of that kind of sport I only know what I see in movies. I assume there's a place you're standing on at some point which will always be close enough?
The title of this article reminds me of Gary Vaynerchuk's famous talk where he says:
"Stop saying 'Well, we're the Facebook plus Digg minus Flickr and del.icio.us on the flip side.' That's horse sh1t. Do what you're about, please"
That's not the case if `offline_access` has been requested.
yep sorry about that - we broke the form and had to turn debug back on - thanks for point it out!
And so is our lifestyle. We rely on the exploitation of the rest of the world but close our eyes and pretend everything is fine. After all, the bad things happen in far-far-away to people of different races and cultures.
Would it be smarter to go the future and come back to buy stocks from the next Apple-Google-Facebook, or go to the past and buy early Apple stock?
No way that camp could be holding 200,000 people.

Anyone who has studied any geography could see that would be near impossible.
The personality of the CEO trickles down to the rest of the organization. His VPs take his philosophy to their subordinates, and so on and so forth. Not only that, but the CEO's policy decisions directly affect the culture of an organization.
Ask HN: Is there a list of charities that accept donations via PayPal?
I'm developing an android app which allows people to donate to charities via paypal, simple stuff.
The hard stuff is getting email addresses of paypal accounts of charities that accept unsolicited donations. I tried mailing missionfish.org if i could send them money to their account but they answered with:

"We do not accept donations unless they are done via our programme. Our PayPal account does not accept unsolicited donations.
If you'd like to donate to charities in our programme, you need to do so within our guidelines."

So if someone has experience with handling donations to charities on paypal i'd be thankful for response.
Thanks! Since I'm only following the news about NFC & Co. on the side, the ranges and possible applications of the different technologies are somewhat confusing. This really helped making it a bit more clear.
A lot of the approved video is disturbing to me.
It's a weird thought experiment; $7.5B adjusted for inflation from 2004 to today would be ~$8.9B. (18.3% inflation.)[1]

By this logic, Gruber would still be short of money.

[1]: http://www.usinflationcalculator.com (or any other inflation calculator).
Wouldn't it be sweet if they did know about his reputation and specifically sent this to him so that Facebook would be found out.

Cool - this idea is being downvoted, maybe you misunderstood my point? If an employee of facebook specifically sought to submit this to this particular reporter knowing that it may result in exposure of this plan to the world...

I hate being downvoted without an explanation. What is wrong with this idea?
Square was my first thought, too. Yes, they could most certainly take on MC/Visa/Amex/etc. Maybe that is why Visa invested in Square? You have to get the POS units into retailer's hands. Then, at the same time, you have to get consumers using it. Where square differentiates themselves from the competition is that they make it very easy for anyone to become a POS node.

Now, the difference between Square and the CC companies is that square is really a gateway to those CC systems and not a credit provider themsleves... BUT once they have traction with POS merchants and acceptance by consumers could they start their own credit department? Sure. Would they want to? That is another debate. I'd wager it's much easier and still very profitable to be a gateway taking a small slice off each transaction than it is to be the credit provider.
Is stealing a bike not immoral until the owner of the bike notices it? Or until he misses it? Let's say he has a bike that he never uses, and never will. Is it not immoral to steal that bike?

If you really mean what you say and understand the implications, I am disturbed by your ethics. I'm usually disturbed by utilitarians - they're the ones who end up saying 'torturing a couple of terrorists is morally OK when it means that we can save the lives of 50 innocent civilians'.
PR agency confirms Facebook behind Google campaign
There's more that one camp.
"No commercial support" is addressed now, right?
23.9 million North Koreans -- all of them -- are effectively in prison.
Would be interesting to see how the performance is affected when using SSL
Skype.

:)
I imagine it will take several years, but thats probably the path. CTOs look for this kind of (enterprise) support ecosystem before investing in new technologies. Given Scala's documented easy transition for Java developers, and the fact that Java is getting really old, I'd wager this is the next big (non-MS) enterprise language. The training/support/tools company is the inflection point.
It would be good to also mention tox which makes it easy to install and test your Python project (and its dependencies) against multiple Python versions/ interpreters via virtualenv:
http://codespeak.net/tox/
It does not appear that you have the rights to distribute the icons, screen shots, or RSS feeds

Note the "or"; do you own the rights to the RSS feeds you're using? Also, it's great and appreciated that you're getting the story out, can you show us your app anywhere?
It lists it based on an automatic scan of which APIs the software uses. However, it can't tell if there's dead code and the package doesn't actually use a certain permission, or if there's an additional permission process within the app, etc.
What is so important about website security? Review of Incapsula
I have the most secure kind of facebook account one could ever dream of... No facebook account.
Indeed. I flagged this. Digging up 3-year-old flames? Is that really the level of discourse we want?
It's not targeted to consumers (yet) the subscription model for businesses and schools is it's main advantage, hardware + software as a service.

They might be using this type of subscription model on consumers with their gigabit project or with other ISPs as part of the net package.
As I see it, the difference is only in degree.

In both cases, people are being denied their freedom and taken away from their families, for engaging in activities that hurt no one, not even themselves.

It's certainly true that American prisons are better. But given the OP's definition: "enduring starvation, torture, and rape while performing hard labor", we do hit a couple of checkboxes. My understanding is that prison rape, with guards just looking the other way, is still a real problem in America. And take a look down at Guantanamo for (an admittedly small number of) people who are imprisoned and tortured "without legal recourse", as the OP says.

So it's just a matter of degree. There's certainly a good deal of ground for comparison.
US prison population: 2.2 million

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/54/US_...
The "Any disclosure or dissemination in whatever form, by another other than the intended recipient is strictly prohibited" is laughable.
NFC is great precisely because of it's opt-in user experience. in other words, people need to make an effort to get their tags read due to the 1-2in range. this makes for more accurate tracking yet preserves a user-in-control notion different from shopkick. we have an app that let's you checkin to an event that can easily be made to create an email subscription.
this really is not anything so new
If you watched the video they said it was all in 2 valleys.

200,000 in those two valleys? Impossible.
A piece I may have just missed in the article is what the advantage of using Skyhook is/was over the Google offering.

From the Skyhook website:

Skyhook's Devices can easily provide location-awareness to any Wi-Fi enabled device. Its portable architecture delivers location while minimizing device-specific implementation time. Skyhook's Core Engine is an entirely software-only location system and does not require specialized hardware chipsets. The lightweight client can be configured to run across a broad range of mobile operating systems, devices and platforms.

So was the advantage just speed of implementation and the cost of the hardware?
Yes, you're right. I just found the same place independently. http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...
You know what you could buy for $1 ten days ago? The winning lottery ticket for one million dollars in yesterday's draw.
To be fair, it also needed eight years to get here, PyPy inherits much standard lib code, and the py3k effort wasn't limited to the interpreter but also involved a lot of standard lib development :-). So, apples and oranges. Still, amazing work by the PyPy folks any way you look a it.
You can assume the worst – Apple's looking for a way to nickel and dime customers, and to lock them out of their computers! – or you can assume the pragmatic – the thermal envelope of the new iMacs is so tight, thanks to the Sandy Bridge chipset, a beefier GPU and an aggressively designed enclosure, that more careful and accurate monitoring of the HDD's internal temperature was necessary for reliability.

Why would Apple decide source more expensive and non-standard HDDs just to "lock customers in" or "force a higher BTO price"? The new iMacs' chipset and GPU are probably already more expensive than the previous generation's and Apple's almost always unwilling to bump the total cost of the machine or the cost of any BTO parts because they're guaranteed to get more backlash over those moves. Using more expensive and uncommon HDDs does nothing more than eat into their margins and complicate supply chain logistics, two things I'm sure Apple loathes.

Moving to a non-standard HDD was probably entirely motivated by engineering, not business, reasons, and most likely done to preserve the machine's thermal envelope or reduce failure rates seen on pre-production or previous generation iMacs.
> And she's made great use of her political skills, praising subordinates in public and keeping reprimands private.

So so important. Public image is not just what you think you're projecting to the world but how others think you are doing. Criticizing someone in public is one of the worst things you can do to a relationship. I once threatened to quit a job in public (angry, loud shouting) over some silly technical implementation detail - and I got called into the boss' office because I had disrupted the office environment. People outside our team were asking my boss what was going on...
The fact that the U.S. might have ridiculous regulations has nothing to do with it. If you're a business, you might be willing to wade through all that red tape once, especially for the biggest consumer market in the world. Are you willing to do it 30 times? 195 times? If the Estonian market represents a paltry amount of money, why bother?
Forget Watercooling, it's all about Thermoelectric
I do not know much about NFC, but I would flip the model. Consumers first, developers later.

You should build a simple app around it and distribute the cards for free to consumers. Once you have it in their hands, open the platform and let developers build apps which connect to YOUR cards. Maybe consumers can go to your website and add apps to their cards. Another benefit would be that each consumer will just have one card, but they can hook up 100 apps.
Would a company such as Facebook even want to go solo in being a credit provider? I don't see it. I do see them partnering with one of the big credit providers to create a FBCard. Then they could say that to use or purchase FBCredits you must use the FBCard which would also be a normal Visa/MC which could be used in any regular bricks and mortar place (with FBCredit rewards?) Imagine the data mining they could do on that! Now you have a FB user buying FBCredits for games/whatever AND they know what restaurants you frequent, what groceries you buy, if you smoke or not, etc., etc. And they would be able to do it all without the hassle of setting up their own credit department and collections issues. And they could probably do it so that a parent could sign up their under 18 kids for the card so the CC companies would love to get in to that market!
It serves its purpose. Just like C++, Java, C#, Ruby, Python and Haskell all serve their respective purposes. Fact is, not everyone agrees with your position, nor do they agree with my position.

I would be foolish to attempt to convince you of my point of view. You can write a blog complaining about a language and get commentary from people. I will write code in that language and get money. This is okay with me.
No, the severity of the NK situation is not diminished in the least by US prisons. Neither is the severity of the problems of some people stuck in prison revolving doors in the US diminished by the greater injustice in NK. It is hypocritical of anyone to try and deflect justified criticism by pointing somewhere else. Other countries are not beyond criticism, but many people feel that they should be beyond the "lets invade them" policy.
You have to confirm your account first before it gets added to your profile.
With technology from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation! (Share and enjoy!)
That deal would have had a snowball's chance in hell of getting the regulatory approval in US & EU.
This is a good statistic to raise, but it's not a direct comparison. The US prison population probably has much more in common with ordinary North Koreans than these individuals.
Red Hat Summit 2011 Presentations
But, pointing the finger at one particular government for their failure to sanction/punish/invade/liberate another country when they could "easily" do so seems totally justified?

How about pointing the finger at the offending country, rather than at it's bordering ones?
I have 157 torrents running. I have licenses for all of them. Well, except http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/archives/2698 (an archive of Geocities) which I consider to be historical and, since it was posted online noncommercially anyway, I don't think it's hurting any content creators to torrent it.
I think it really depends on your specific set of skills. If you have a niche skill that a lot of $2-3 an hour programmers aren't going to be able to duplicate, there will be a few higher paying gigs. I only joined oDesk recently but have already had some luck with Haskell development. If your primary skill is, say, PHP or Ruby you might have more trouble.
I'm guessing you've never actually proven type safety for a non-trivial language, if any. While there are many ways type safety could be stated for Scala, I'm pretty sure most Scala programmers would like the version of type safety that states "if I never use a type cast, I can never get a class cast exception." If you think that is too strong of a statement, then fine, but I think most people would agree this is a reasonable expectation for Scala.
Is Facebook trust worthy?
have you read this news? http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/12/facebook-loses-much-face-in-secret-smear-on-google/
Can anyone comment on startup latency and performance early in a run?

One of my use cases for Python is relatively small, short-running scripts, and JIT engines often take a fair amount of runtime before all the optimizations kick in. So I wonder how PyPy does at startup time and whether it's able to leverage its execution speed prowess over brief runtimes - is it still a net performance win in the end, or at least not-worse-than-CPython?
Come on muhfuhkuha, you're taking this out of context. The author is saying that China is an accomplice in crimes committed by NK because it expels refugees who face imminent threat in NK, thus making China an accomplice. China cannot push escapees back into shark waters and say "I am not the shark", I'd say "Yes China, but you kind of fed this person to the shark."

The US has a very generous amnesty and refugee program, and if you can prove in court that you will be killed or prosecuted in your home country then you're granted residency. I personally know 3 people who have undergone this process. If they tried the same in China, they would have been swung right back over the border.
Gamification Could 'Eat Itself' & Kill a New Industry
I'm sorry, but ... seriously, a nation that still hasn't closed Guantanamo Bay.
Don't throw stones if you live in a glass house.