skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here in Britain, user numbers are plummeting for most libraries. Service use is shifting heavily, with lending rates of non-fiction falling rapidly in favour of bestseller fiction, DVD and CD rental and internet access. Libraries are experiencing an identity crisis.

The majority of libraries simply aren't being used as a learning resource anymore, but as a leisure facility. I'm incredibly sad about it, but I can't deny it either. My local library is a place for teenagers to use Facebook, middle aged women to borrow romance novels and the homeless to masturbate. The librarians hate the fact that they spend more time shelving DVDs than books, but they prefer it to standing idle.

We're not closing libraries, we're closing facilities that used to be libraries but are now something else. My favourite library is currently closed for a £50m refurbishment, which will remove most of the books and double the number of computers[1]. I will miss the old library more than words can say, I love the place dearly, but the old library just wasn't a useful service anymore.

Either close libraries and spend the money on schools, or rebuild them as community learning facilities. Paying people to tend a moribund medium just doesn't make sense.
Personally, I don't buy the argument that this change is because Twitter wants users to use the official twitter clients.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlons_razor
You can read the full text of the bill here: http://www.publicknowledge.org/files/docs/Bill-PROTECT-IP-Ac...

Checks and balances are in section 3 (f), which describes how to file a motion to "modify, suspend or vacate" an order if the site removes the offending content or the order turns out to be in error.
Did you use port knocking? It seems like the perfect solution for that situation.
Everyone's definition of "asshole" differs, of course, but I think someone can be an asshole without necessarily being abusive.
No they don't. They require a powerful interface. Complexity just comes with more power, but there's nothing to suggest that an expert would perform better with a more complex interface than with a simpler one, if both offered the same functionality.
United Airlines CEO considers United a Tech Company with Wings
I'd love to see a comparison between this and Pickle.

(Pickle) http://docs.python.org/library/pickle.html
(Shelf) http://docs.python.org/library/shelve.html

EDIT: Ah! Shelf depends on Pickle for serialization. Shelf is just a back-end for Pickle. Very cool!

The difference with “dbm” databases is that the values (not the keys!) in a shelf can be essentially arbitrary Python objects — anything that the pickle module can handle. This includes most class instances, recursive data types, and objects containing lots of shared sub-objects. The keys are ordinary strings.
That's very true, an asshole can wreck productivity. But we're human beings, and we excuse deficiencies in one area for excellence in another. If the asshole produces more than he destroys, it might be worth keeping him on board.

ymmv, and all that, of course.
I'm annoyed by the change. I was the DevNestSF meetup last week though at TwitterHQ and they said they didn't mention that were going towards doing this and instead praised the developer community for making them what they are.

When they surprised us with this, they claimed it was because most users didn't realize that they gave up that level of access to their account. This change allows them too, but at the cost of bad UX for mobile and native apps, while breaking all existing apps so far.

They moved the deadline back 2 weeks. That gives you less than 4 weeks to make the changes and if it's iOS, you have to get the app approved by Apple which takes 1 to 3 weeks (accounting for one possible reject and Apple being slow).

Then you have to hope that all your users upgrade right away and when they do upgrade they have to reauth everything again with the crappy experience.

These UX issues were what drove the design of xAuth in the first place durning the basic auth switch. xAuth was manually approved and was for clients and not for services that had a web side. These clients are more likely to need DM than most simple web app tools, but xAuth retroactively and going forward doesn't get DMs.

This will break TweetBot, older Seesmic clients, Twitalator, Twitterific, TweetDeck, TwitDroid, etc. Even the official Twitter client (formally Tweetie) would break because it uses xAuth but I'm sure they are hard coding exceptions for different clients.
I thought the same thing but I doubt it'll take away from the HN comments since I link to it in the summary. I'm hoping the comments on the site can help me build my own community of people who favor this style of writing.

I was thinking of pulling comment count and also vote count. I've got to make sure it's done in a way that's not too taxing for either site.
I wish someone had a patent on the business process of buying patents just to sue companies that actually try to provide some value to the world and then went around suing these parasitic lowlives.
I think the reactionary ideals you promote enforce and enable sliminess. The person with the best presentation and fakest smile wins over any actual merit. You are actively endorsing the world of used-car salesmen, A&R reps, and so on, where substance and a solid stance are detrimental to success.

Pathological extremes at both ends are still pathological, the correct response to an extreme is not its opposite, but a reasonable alternative.
The way I see it is: if you have to ask if you're in a speculative bubble, odds are you're in a speculative bubble.
I am sure that there are at least half a dozen different definitions of "asshole" being used in these discussions making most commentary highly ambiguous.
Now it is much harder for people who haven't got any billing needs to try GAE seriously.

So people can only make testing app that doesn't cost anything or $9 for each paid app. Judging from the "tick" list (marketing props) there is not much you would get for $9 one.
I appreciated pg's numbers:

'Paul Graham, the head of Y Combinator, the high-profile incubator and investor, answers with some numbers. Of the more than 310 start-ups that have passed through his startup factory, a mere 25 have been sold and about 18 of those were talent acquisitions. he said. That leaves more than 285 that are still toiling away. While some of those are hugely successful — Airbnb and DropBox, for example — many are not.

“You cannot get yourself acquired on demand,” Mr. Graham said. “You have to do the start-up like you mean it.”'
Most of what you wrote made some sense until I read the bit about linked-in being indispensable ;)
WANdisco Named a Finalist for the 2011 Red Herring Top 100 North America Award
They're almost always jerks in response to some slight (either imagined, or blown way out of proportion).

Either that, or they're just clinically certifiable narcissists. True narcissists are world-class pains in the ass like nothing else on the many spectra of personality disorders.
"Intel specifies a mean time between failure of 137 years for the drive and a "useful life" of 5 years."

Remember, almost all products have some sort of bathtub curve[1], and the MTBF is the inverse of the observed failure rate at the bottom of the curve, while the useful life (or whatever the manufacturer calls it) takes the shape of the curve into account. Many products, including magnetic hard drives, have similar discrepancies between their MTBF and their useful lifespans.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve
Patents are a civil matter. You'd end up involved in civil litigation, which means you pay an attorney to defend you, or the plaintiff would win by default. Usually, the goal is to settle prior to litigation, because litigation is incredibly expensive.

If you litigate and the plaintiff wins the case -- or you don't fight and lose by default -- the plaintiff gets a judgement against you. The judge/jury determine what you must pay to the plaintiff. With a judgement in hand, the plaintiff must start collection proceedings. This is a not-so-straight-forward process, and can take months, if not years, depending upon how evasive the defendant is and how aggressive the plaintiff attorney is.

Expect to receive garnishment orders for your pay, as well as other treats, such as having your checking account emptied without notice. Being evasive may also require additional court appearances and court orders. Failure to comply with a court order can result in charges of contempt. This usually means a fine, but can also result in jail time if the act is egregious.

At the end of the day, you may find yourself filing bankruptcy, in which case the trustee will be the one after your assets.

The whole time this is happening, it's very difficult to operate. Having someone chase you while paying thousands of dollars in attorney fees makes life very difficult.

The bottom line is that you cannot simply "refuse to play their game".
The OP also argues that the patent could be defeated by a patent review.
"Virtually none of the patents that patent trolls buy would be issued today. The vast majority of these patents would not survive a U.S. Patent & Trademark Office patent review. Most were issued during the 1990s when the standards for business process patents were very low."

The OP goes on to say that the victims of patent trolls band together to finance the review to make it cheaper than settling.
Not only that but there will be times, for whatever reason, a nice person will occasionally behave like a jerk. be it because something bad has happened at home or they are just having a bad day.

Always a good idea to consider that the other person isn't having the same day/thoughts/experience as you.
Thanks. I got a team of writers with a job post on ProBlogger.net. It's a great source to find good writers. $50 and I got a ton of responses.

Here's the post http://jobs.problogger.net/view/4718
Flossmopolitan.jpg
It's a gross oversimplification, but I try to live according to the dictum that it is easy to bifurcate behaviours into good and bad, but people are complex and subject to change, thus it is very difficult for me to brand someone as an "asshole."

http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-05-0...

UPDATE: Thinking about the OP, I wonder if seeing behaviours as simple and people as complex actually helps you be intolerant of bad behaviour.

If you believe that some people are assholes, you have very little in the way of options for dealing with them: Purge them from your life, wall them off so their damage can be contained, or accept them and their behaviour wholesale.

But if you focus on the behaviour, you can try to negotiate: "You are a genius, your work on ___ is brilliant. However, this behaviour ____ is unacceptable, please stop doing it. Here is why..., Here is something more constructive you could consider..."
It's all manual for now but I'm exploring tools to help with the process.

Popular article is defined by reaching the top 5 with about 40 votes.
Promotion and connecting writers and editors is not an insignificant value. I don't know what cut they're trying to arrange for themselves, but these are services that the writer is going to pay for one way or the other.
HELMET: Who made that man a gunner?

MAJOR: I did, sir. He's my cousin.

HELMET: Who is he?

SANDURZ: He's an Asshole, sir.

HELMET: I know that. What's his name?

SANDURZ: That is his name, sir. Asshole, Major Asshole.

HELMET: And his cousin?

SANDURZ: He's an Asshole, too, sir. Gunner's-mate, 1st Class, Philip Asshole.

HELMET: How many Assholes we got on this ship, anyhow?

ALL: Yo!

HELMET: I knew it. I'm surrounded by Assholes. Keep firing, Assholes.
Thanks! Looks like results may vary based on the problem set, I will have to check out both languages
I think you are confused. Twitter had basic auth and they gave us transition period.

xAuth is OAuth but doesn't require a web based interaction to authorize. With xAuth, apps ask for a username and pass but get a token and only store the token (instead of storing the username and pass like with basic auth). This was created to help with UX of non-webapps like mobile and desktop. The first release of xAuth was Seesmic Look which was after basic auth was in the count to shutdown. xAuth is only given to apps that are approved by Twitter that prove that they are not a web service and need the improved UX.

The issue is that these apps are usually clients that desktop and mobile and probably need DM access, but xAuth clients can't ask for DM access (they are only allowing that access to clients that web auth).
Goldman leaves LinkedIn party early (by selling 100% of its stake)
or /r/forhire
The short version, without references or argumentation:

Science can't prove that there aren't any supernatural requirements for a sentient mind.

However, Science has proven that most of our intuitions about our own cognition are wrong.

Since intuition is the only evidence we have that subjectivity and qualia can arise from mysterious nonphysical processes but not computational, physical processes, Occam's Razor demands that we accept the explanation which accords with proven laws of physics.
religion == fanatism
Or $1000 for every person sitting in a coffee shop in SF.
When driving a stick shift, you'll frequently need to shift gears while either accelerating or braking, meaning your left foot must always be free to operate the clutch while the right foot is either on the throttle or the brakes.

If you get into the habit of braking with your left foot while driving an automatic, you'll have real problems whenever the need arises to drive a manual. I think that's a much better reason.
Interesting, FreeBSD/PcBSD is not on the list. is it due to lesser popularity?
Soon enough, my friend. I'll be back in another month. I'm going commando (the Vietcong style, not the nude style of course) for the next month hopefully. When that time comes, I would love to get your support.

Once again, thank you for your kind words and encouragements.
Macbook Air. I'm an MS guy, it can actually handle having a Win7 VM w/ Visual Studio alongside Xcode (not brilliantly, but adequately).

That way you can use it as your laptop too, and it's a frigging nice little laptop.
Can I get some mail too?
Thanks! I actually meant links to the comments lower down on the same page (eg for clarity: <a href="#87">87. What got you "hooked"?</a> ... <a name="87">87. What got you "hooked"?</a>), and then people could link to specific entries - but I like your interpretation better.

[I had trouble expressing this in the GP, and went for over-conciseness, as "comment" is ambiguous. I still can't think of a brief but clear way to say it - there's probably some TeX typesetting terminology for it].
What if suddenly your app gains traction somewhere else? Then people search for it like mad at Amazon's store and don't find it. Amazon gets blamed, not you. [TYPO EDIT]
> Amazon already has built up warehousing/delivery infrastructure and must maintain it because their retail business isn't going away.

Amazon's retail business is expanding, and is currently building new facilities. Storing and shipping fewer books means less new warehouse space they must build.
If anyone has used or built anything using census data from 2000 or 2010, I would love to hear about it.
I'm also struggling with deciding whether to buy a Kindle.

For me the biggest deal breaker is that it's not an open platform.

As much as I crave a Kindle, I think I'll wait a bit until the technology matures and more open alternatives surface.
The page asks for a permission to install a Chrome extension. That really causes a reaction in my brains.
Perhaps this will be rolled out in Europe and Asia before the US.
I honestly don't know perhaps instinct. I see a need and I feel that if I set out to solve that need, people would want it. Who knows, but I need to believe that what I am doing is going to work. I will validate it soon with an MVP and we will revisit this question again when that time comes. I hope you and I can have that discussion again then.

Thank you for your support.
Microsoft Giving Free Xbox 360s to PC-Buying Students
Because SATA/IDE interfaces abstract away information that would be crucial to doing this. There are filesystems that currently do this in the embedded world, and AFAIK it might be possible in the future to have a SSD PCIe card or something that this could work on. I don't expect that to happen any time soon, though.
The article emphasizes a need for search to get more social and better understand intent. In my view, understanding content is much more important.

Example: What do I want when I search for a product review?

I want the top few hits to be:

* reviews of the exact product I'm interested in
* well organized, well written, and thorough
* mention pros and cons
* if appropriate, compare to other competing products.

What do I get?

Spammy sites that have mastered SEO (primarily links)
Very popular sites that have shallow reviews
Very popular sites that just have a few sentences and a link to another review
Product pages for Amazon or other online sites.

The actual best reviews are hard to find. They are occasionally on large well established sites like ars technica but more often than not are on small niche specialist sits or small blogs. One is lucky to find even 1 such link in the top 10 search results.

Social can help with this type of query (i.e. the Amazon review ranking system) but not every kind of query is amenable to ranking in this way.

What a human can do that search algorithms currently can't do is determine which reviews are of high quality. In other words, understand and evaluate the quality of the content. Perhaps this is currently too hard to do, but I'd love to see search move in this direction.

It's easy for SEO specialists to fake link strength and perhaps even social popularity. Much harder to fake quality, I would think.
PSN logins were exploited again; No hack involved.
So, you come on to a project and someone fits your definition of "asshole". Getting them fired will allow them to "learn their behavior isn't acceptable". No need to actually put up with that person, there are plenty more fish in the sea.

Maybe your "nice guy" teammate doesn't actually keep the production db running correctly and who cares if the "asshole" has to cleanup. It really shouldn't matter that to not get blamed the "asshole" needs to do the work themselves. Maybe you send some e-mail not knowing what is going on and that sends the "asshole" up the wall. Heck, you did the "asshole" a favor since the "asshole" needs to learn a lesson(2).

1) author of article says all "assholes" are guys, which I find quite unbelievable.

2) add one of the "asshole"'s parents getting cancer and I've seen that one (with sleep deprivation)
But if the public is buying the stock at the $80 range minutes after it opens, isn't that enough to say that the initial offer was lower than what it could be? I don't think you need to know what price the stock is trading at three months from now in order to judge the initial sale value.
Step 1: Download the 4GB XCode.
Apologies. If I could, I would change the gender of my words, but I can't edit my post.
Considering the Kindle has about 3GB of space, I doubt people will ever really fill it.
Windows does something similar, but it uses the swap file as temporary storage for the crash dump. On next boot, the system checks the swap file for crash dump signatures. If it finds a crash signature, it creates a minidump out of it and stores the dump in %SYSTEMROOT%\Minidumps. It also optionally prompts the user to upload the dump to it's automated analysis servers. I think it stores a bigger dump in %SYSTEMROOT%\memory.dmp too depending on how the machine is configured.
Experienced programmers everywhere recommend: "/ignore"
I think there are / have been probably places way worse than China.
Great quote from Jason: [paraphrased] "Startups are more like Rocky than The Social Network - it's nothing but work and in the end you don't win until the sequel."
Every IPO underwriter has to make an educated guess as to the opening price of the stock. Again, the "apparent gross underpricing" won't really be apparent for months, and it certainly wasn't apparent at the time the IPO was priced, since we can assume that their underwriter does not possess True Financial Clairvoyance(tm).
Wolfgang - A Wolfram Alpha clone in Haskell
A large part of this is "The Greater Fool" syndrome. Doesn't matter what you pay for the shares, you can always find a greater fool to sell them to!

Oh and 4B$ will buy about 1/10 to 1/20 of Facebook
Thanks. Link - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fortitude
The price is set based on market analysis. That's what the company thought they could get for it. The transaction requires willing participants.
May 18th Spreedly Downtime Retrospective
I remember hearing a talk by Philip Zimbardo, one of the main figures in the Stanford Prison Experiment.

He concluded that 'evil' behavior is a product of a combination of:

1) Mindlessly taking the first small step (eg Milgrim Experiment - the first 45volts couldn't be felt)

2) Dehumanization of others (giving them numbers in a prison)

3) De-individualisation of self (anonymity)

4) Diffusion of personal responsibility (saying a higher authority takes responsibility)

5) Blind obedience to authority

6) Uncritical conformity to group norms ('Everyone else is doing it')

7) Passive tolerance of Evil through Inactions and/or Indifference

8) New or unfamiliar situations (default actions don't apply so morality can become disengaged)

If you take this in the context of anonymity online, a substantial number of these factors are heavily involved(2,3,4 and potentially 1,7&8).

Anonymity has its advantages, but the encouragement of it diffuses people's responsibility, potentially encourages 'evil' action, and has subsequently risk of escalation...

I think my vote has to be transparency.

TED talk link:

http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_o...
...how did you make that leap? Where does "it should be possible for being a jerk to get you fired" lead to "enforcing and enabling sliminess"?

It is entirely possible to hold a firm stance on what you think is the correct approach without being a jerk. It is equally possible to create a friendly atmosphere without acting like a used car salesman. I think you're reading more into the GP's statements than was intended.
Maybe someday Schneier will write a book which I can recommend to people who are getting started in cryptography, but I'm not holding my breath.

Schneier wrote Applied Cryptography, which is the best way to get started in the field. I picked it up while I was still learning programming (and not exactly confident in my math abilities) and still found it incredibly well written and understandable.

http://www.schneier.com/book-applied.html

From the Preface:

"I wrote Applied Cryptography to be a both a lively introduction to the field of cryptography and a comprehensive reference work."
I think it's important to ask if laws and the justice system are meant to punish those who have broken moral codes or if they are meant to maintain and protect society.

Where you fall on that gradient is going to effect how you view things like rehabilitation programs, issues of human sexual abberations, fidelity, drug abuse, and so forth.
In the end, it's your fault because you don't want to learn. Emacs does not have "cut" and "paste", it has "kill" and "yank". They are different terms because they have different semantics.

Enjoy programming in Notepad.
While, I don't disagree with you at all, if you've ever seen Jacob respond to a jerk online, It's really great. Not tolerating something is not equivalent to getting on the same level (which, also should not be tolerated).
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