skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hope you realize that by titling your first piece on the matter "RubyGems: Nerd rage is optional (and discouraged)" and then following up with "RubyGems drama" that you were never really mediating. Maybe you brought people together over Skype and got some discussions going. Maybe you were just trying to be sensational. But I immediately discounted everything said from that point forward, as did many others I know, for the simple reason that you continued with the same attitude that we were all tired of. You were perpetuating the very thing we wanted to see changed.

The RubyGems matter isn't a technical one; SlimGems effectively dispelled that notion. It's a personnel matter. It's a cultural matter. The only way I'm ever going to have faith in that project again is when the guys running it value running, working software over theoretical, idealistic improvements. And I simply don't believe that will be the case until Eric & Ryan leave or are otherwise removed.

The sad part is RubyGems is so critical to the ecosystem that it really started making me question the value in using or relying on Ruby at all. The egos didn't help either. I can take a certain amount of crap if the system works and I can put up with broken software from nice, responsive people. I can't deal with both failings. In that regard, SlimGems has done more to restore my confidence in the Ruby ecosystem than anything else.
PepsiCo, Time Warner and Pfizer talk about how Social Media impacts them
What on Earth college are you talking about? "Almost nothing to do but think and create?" This isn't a commune, it's a school. There's coursework and homework and studying and some extracurricular activities, and once you're done with all that I suppose you can "think and create", but nowhere and nohow is that the goal or reality of college, except maybe a visual arts college.

If your college left you with nothing but "time to think and create", dropping out was absolutely the right choice! The entire point (until PhD studies) is that you should be learning and doing things according to some curriculum; if you're not there for the curriculum, what are you doing there at all?
Do we really have to be so imprecise in our language that now "spam" in a headline can refer to "blog spam"? How about "comment spam" as well? What else is there? How about I write an article titled "spam is now illegal" and by the fifth paragraph you find out I'm talking about unsolicited faxes? To 99% of readers out there the last thing they think of when they read "spam" is blog spam.
It's not a fight; Mike Ash was just using a tongue-in-cheek headline.
Interestingly, a lot of people who were making a living from online poker WERE paying taxes on that money. Come April 15th, the IRS doesn't care how you got it.
An athlete's high protein diet can't be used to say that anyone's high meat diet isn't a bad thing. Athletes eat lean meat, non-meat sources. Steaks (or is it stakes?) are out, I've never had one. The second survey, on women, is more interesting but lacking in detail. How is it split between lean and fatty, meat and non-meat, red and white meat?
No, it won't. Right now the G's pitch to merchants is "we have gazillion customers in 20 miles radius". You suggest to amend this to "we have gazillion customers in 20 miles radius and 5 of them are interested in buying widgets that you sell". I would hang up on that if I was a merchant.
I'm not sure where it falls into the whole debate, but there's always the Wayback Machine at archive.org. It doesn't have everything, but it does have this:

http://web.archive.org/web/20090502231940/http://www.freshma...

http://web.archive.org/web/20090430053741/http://www.freshma...

True, links suck, but there are more options than just "search crappy joke sites for ripped-off illegal copies".
Also, in a lot of costal cities, you can get on a scheduled floating casino, sail 7 miles out to sea, and start gambling.
I'm all for the sharing of information, but Metallica's new album and the new version of Adobe Photoshop should not be in the same category.
IMHO Jazelle and ThumbEE are just marketing gimmicks.

Jazelle was (is?) half-proprietary and is only useful for a really stupid Java bytecode interpreter. Nowadays, Java is JIT-compiled with much better performance.

And ThumbEE came way too late for it to be useful. It requires setup/teardown, doesn't work well with existing code and adds several other complications. It has very few features that may be of use for any VM that has already undergone some basic optimizations.

Believe me, you don't want to waste your time with this.
That's awesome. This should have been done a while ago, though.

The record/music industries must feel pretty screwed right about now. A judge declared that an IP address != a person, and now they can't unfairly cut people off. I'd say that's a win for free speech.
The posting is related to the rental property. They are asking them to list it on another site.
The Words "Facebook" And "Twitter" Are Banned From French Airwaves
Heh, same, I'm betting there's lots more on here.

Indeed. I'm another.

The amount of artists who are self-releasing is rapidly growing as the tools become available, and I'm excited to see which business models will emerge. The future of the music industry is in investment, marketing and management. The idea of treating it like manufacturing and selling of goods will die along with the CD.

I'm interested in alternative means of distribution, including mobile apps but also new physical embodiments (something perhaps that uses USB or SD or whatever). I don't want to see the object-ness of "records" gone, but expanded.
The answer is a firm "it depends", and you haven't given any relevant information to narrow it down beyond that. You haven't even given any useful information to grab on to to start asking questions about.
The issue with this is that of the businesses who run deals, many operate them at a loss. As a result, they actually do not want the maximum number of new customers that Groupon can bring. "High-value" is a different issue altogether. In my opinion, Groupon does not have ability to judge what makes a "high value" customer to the merchant as they don't ever see the customers on-site purchase pattern at a given merchant. The real value here would be separating "deal chasers" from people who actually go back to businesses they bought a Groupon at in the past which currently they have zero ability to do.
I don't think comments are truly necessary at launch. IIRC, Reddit launched without comments.
Cool, but what are the total expenses? You said unusual expenses are 16% of revenues, but how much are "usual" expenses?
Great, so I don't have to pay my Comcast bill anymore and they can't take my internet access away?
> Assume all those surveyed say they don't like what they see in Mathematics at all - its all greek symbols and stuff. And then we do what?

Go to Adobe and get them to create the ColdFusion equivalent for Mathematics!
YouTube - Crux Loaded Converts iPad 2 Into a Laptop - Iq187 Tech Talk #13
Yes, but the solution landscape to this problem domain is different. Automatic variables have well-defined lifetimes; they die when they go out of scope. This means there's greater scope for the compiler to take more initiative about lifetime of captured variables (which will all be automatic one way or another, i.e. implicit 'this', a local or a parameter; assume reference parameters etc. cannot be captured).

When I designed and implemented the same feature, anonymous methods in Delphi, I used reference counting to keep alive a heap-allocated activation record containing all captured variables. This works well for most scenarios; it can get into knots in more obscure situations where you have recursive lambdas that call themselves via a captured variable, but those are usually pretty rare.

You're right that GC is a help. The biggest thing GC gives you is freedom from having to worry about who controls the lifetime of parameters and function return values, in most cases. In the presence of GC, you can get more clever about your algorithms and data structures; you can cache and memoize, without paranoid concern for things disappearing behind your back. Consider a querying API that takes in closures for sorting and selection functions; I can see it building up temporary results and caching them, or streaming results in a multi-threaded fashion, but it can only do that if it can reliably hang on to closures after the select/sort/etc. function has returned.
Excuse my ignorance but at what stage in an acquisition do you have to open your books to the acquirer? Any chance that they didn't want to give google this opportunity?
I knew about most of those projects before but the Haibu node.js application server is new to me:

https://github.com/nodejitsu/haibu
Interview: Damien Katz, CTO Couchbase
All those are for opensource apps, which of course WordPress is. Maybe not a market for WordPress, maybe there is, for servers that don't have one of those options installed. The idea in mind was for commercial applications as well.
Whether to have commenting or not depends heavily on your specific site/app, there's no generic answer. Depending on how much user interaction you want/anticipate, you could have like/dislike, rating/stars, or comments.

If you would like to have comments, but don't want to waste time on building them, you could use external comment system like Disqus (or even Facebook comments, if it makes sense for your case).
The Shortest Possible Baseball Road Trip
I wonder what consequences this is going to have for countries in the long run with big firewalls or filtering. UN doesn't have much jurisdiction and can't do much, but these maps always paint an interesting picture: http://map.opennet.net/filtering-pol.html
The author in the rush of justifying her feelings of moral suffering has put some factual lies and false notions.

First, she claims that the standard of living in India is plummeting and goes on mentioning slums, filth, corruption, bureaucracy etc. If one checks the recent national census and other survey results, the poverty has been steadily declining [1], the illiteracy has sharply declined [2], Indian consumers are the most optimistic in the world! [3], and ironically - Indian entrepreneurs are the most optimistic in the world! [4]. The rest of her complaints are just nitpicks.

Second, the notion that happy existence or perfect system is the prerequisite to creativity and success. This is false. If one studies Anthropology, creativity/art/culture/economic-activity/entrepreneurship exist everywhere, even in the most failed country. It is the nature of man to grab every little opportunity. The fact that Mercedes has opened R&D centre in India only shows their creativity, their ability to grab the opportunity and their entrepreneual spirit. More power to the potholed roads! There's nothing called perfection in this universe.

Third, not a criticism but, one doesn't need to be overly pessimistic. India and other emerging economies are yet to see several decades of growth. Especially India and China, because of their huge population, will continue to see high economic growth for very long (ask any economists) [5][6]. And no, the moral suffering due to inequality will not disappear anytime soon. China even after growing at a breakneck speed of 10% a year for last three decades and pulling millions of people out of poverty has more inequality than India (Gini coefficient) [7]. I think we'll just gradually evolve to live with it.

[1] - http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/current-affairs/indias-pove...

[2] - http://www.deccanherald.com/content/150267/indias-literacy-l...

[3] - http://www.afaqs.com/news/story.html?sid=30621_Indian+consum...

[4] - http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:5wJKiOx4osAJ:w...

[5] - http://www.livemint.com/2011/05/25191535/India-could-be-worl...

[6] - http://www.deccanherald.com/content/140463/india-likely-worl...

[7] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gini_Coefficient_World_CIA...
What exactly Microsoft wants to do with Windows 8?
Google to offer for-pay Translate API
Other hot companies are clearly NOT Ponzi schemes, such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Zynga. Everything is not a Ponzi scheme, but some things are.
I think you're being a tiny bit silly in your objection; the amount of rebate will, in all probability, be a normal distribution and will be in a reasonable range to a high degree of certainty. If you get a rebate of 90 one year, but 110 the next, you may not find an additional tax burden of 100 especially onerous, particularly if it builds up in an incremental way.

I have only a little idea of what counts as community service in the US, but from what Wikipedia lists, community service labour would enable cutbacks in state expenditure in those areas.
DBpedia: query wikipedia as a structured database
Actually, it's just wrong. Copyright is an artificial, state-enforced restriction on competition. In a free market, people should be able to compete.

Copyright is the opposite of the free market.
I wish, but http://www.marco.org/2011/04/16/rumored-apple-hdtv

I have a Sony HDTV, and a Sony dvd/hdd both with freeview, I don't really know the troubles of a cable box.
In some states it is supposed to go to schools, so the police departments route it through the fed and back to them instead.
So if there are changes I'd like to see in Python, I should lobby Guido in person?

Yes I know, Python has a fairly decentralized control structure and a nice open process in the form of PEPs. There was just something about this post that made me a bit uncomfortable...scratching phantom itches from old, somewhat exotic languages...
Agreed. I'm surprised they're all moving to MV when there's a Google office just down King street. I hope they don't forget their Waterloo roots when they're all rich in Silicon Valley.
In a way, you're right. However GitHub's model is subscriptions fund the free yet small open repositories whereas SourceForge's model is advertisement (I can't find a way to on SF though).

So naturally, GitHub had to appeal for subscribers. While for SF, I always thought ads was stupid due to the educated demographic that would likely have adblock.
Where I grew up, entreprenuership without a college degree meant being on the other side of the law. Without my Ivy League degree I'm afraid, most of the people I know now would be clamoring about ending my food stamp benefits. College was often boring, and I sucked at Technical Writing, but I'd never have the opportunities if I "unColleged" myself. Maybe if I grew up in the same neighborhood as I live in now, I'd think like him too. For many kids growing up in the inner cities, places where "local VCs" will litterally take your knee caps, college is a much wiser choice.
This is a technicality, but there's a difference between a Ponzi scheme and a pyramid scheme. A Ponzi scheme needs an information asymmetry: investors don't know that their money is being used to pay off previous investors. A pyramid scheme is open about the way it works and the pyramid nature, but people invest anyway.

Since Groupon's investment and revenue strategies are known to all, this would be closer to a pyramid scheme than a Ponzi scheme.
Every VC firm should have a page like this!!
Property law is an artificial, state-enforced restriction on competition. In a free market, people should be able to compete.
Ask HN: How do you prepare for design interview questions?
I've been interviewing with several "A-list" companies and I've made it to the final in person interviews, but then I'm asked to design some system, like orbitz, monopoly, a cache for some web service or a library computer system, which is something I have very little direct experience with (my participation has always been second hand/passive in architecting), and I end up stammering and just not doing well on it in general. I'm sure my last rejection was primarily because of this.

So, interviewers, what are you looking for when you ask these questions?

And in general how can you prepare for these questions?

Also, any advise for in person interviews where I do well or good even, but not great. How do I get that little performance bump I need to get the offer?
I left college two months ago because it rewards [...] competition rather than collaboration

Let me get this straight -- the whole premise of the Thiel Fellowship seems to be to get bright kids out of the doldrums of higher education and into the real world where they can start competitive businesses, and yet this kid says he doesn't like college because it rewards competition?!

And, I don't really agree with that premise in the first place. If anything, college rewards the appearance of collaboration -- when I was college, I ended up in numerous group projects where at least one person was completely worthless and contributed nothing besides their name on the written report's cover page.
In my opinion, the second type is not investing. It's speculating.

"An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and an adequate return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative."

-Ben Graham, from chapter 1 of The Intelligent Investor
When announcing things with cute names, can people please put a short description in the link?

For everyone else: Lucy's apparently a full-text search library written in C targeting dynamic languages, with Perl bindings to start with.
I'll look into fixing then. Do you have any suggestions for good syntax highlighting to use from either clojure or javascript?
Do governments care about human rights? How is canceling someone's Internet connection for downloading a movie worse that putting someone in a metal cage for 30 years because they made some drugs?

There is only one human right: the right to kill yourself. Everything else is a privilege that can be taken away for no reason.
Google would have reviewed their books and could easily see how shady it was, but likely didn't care. Look at Youtube and how long Google bankrolled them before they hit profitability. Adding Groupon to their portfolio and integrating it with existing and upcoming products would have been a big win for them.

I'm guessing what others have said is right: Groupon management figured they could get more value by pushing for an IPO. They're likely right, although I can't see Groupon surviving long afterwords. If Google had bought them, then it had a chance to be a long term company. Now, it's an excellent investment for the founder and early investors, and the public will get screwed.
I have roughly 1200 people paying $10/mo. I also allow people to play for free, but capped at level 20 (out of about 1000 meaningful levels). There are maybe 1000 active free players, but not nearly as active as the paying players. At any given time, about 3/4 of the people online are paying subscribers.

It's hard to say how sensitive the game is to critical mass, since the game has grown over the last 7 years with the number of people playing it. When it first started out, there were only a dozen or so star systems and it was a much smaller game in scope. Now we're up to about 6000 systems. Basically I keep growing the game / universe as more people join.
If you know it's a fake, then why does it matter what the label says?
"Part of the problem with college is that it doesn't do a very good job of preparing students to go to work."

Depends on what you mean by "work" and what you think the purpose of college is. That's one point of Louis Menand's recent article, "Debating the Value of College": http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110... and his book, The Marketplace of Ideas: http://jseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis... . Should college prepare people for work, or for general kinds of abstract thinking? At the moment, colleges do both (and neither).

The other big problem I see is that the word "college" can now mean so many things in so many places that it's hard to compare them. Does a random community college have much to do with a four-year party school, an Ivy-League school, a Midwestern technical school, or a Cal State school filled with first generation students? Probably not.

And even if college only filters students ("Theory one" in Menand's article), it does still serve some kind of signaling function. As you note, "As far as software engineers are concerned, students need to do 2 years of pro work before producing decent code. Yes, 2 years. It is a difficult, painful process for the worker, but the results are fantastic." But most programming jobs do still appear to require a college degree. There's probably a reason for that: even if it is too low a bar, it is still a bar that not everyone can hurdle. People capable enough to be self-taught can hurdle it and, ideally, learn more; those not capable enough can't accomplish even that.
We've disassembled and decompiled the "obfuscated" bytecode, and we have to say that a few of their constructs are very interesting. The custom memory allocator is very nifty, and along with a few other things gleaned from their binaries has proven very useful and educational to take apart and discover.
Measuring the Human Cost of an iPad Made in China
You are correct. I should have used a more general word.
If Groupon Is Right, Hyperlocal Sites Are In Trouble
You should check out ExtJS, which has been put to stunning use by Synology in their range of network attached storage products.
Radish: Redis analysis and monitoring service
When You Go Hunting for Psychopaths, They Turn Up Everywhere
That's not how human rights (usually and also in this case) work. You yourself are responsible for getting internet access.

Newspapers that don't pay their bills have no right to be bailed out. One reason for this is that freedom of speech and freedom of press are negative rights: the government is not allowed to stop you from publishing your newspapers but they also don't have to provide you with the means for publishing newspapers[#]. That's your own responsibility.

The second and related reason is that private entities like companies or people are (usually) not limited by human rights. Those rights (usually) protect people from the government, not from each other. A journalist can't sue her editor for not allowing her to publish an article. (Well, she can sue but wouldn't win.) Only governments have to respect human rights. (Again, usually.)

[#] As always, plenty of funny and interesting edge cases are worth discussing. What if the government bans paper? Or requires all print products to be printed on super-expensive paper that's not economical for newspapers?
I don't know, but I recall this post from 2003 which still seems relevant here: http://code.activestate.com/lists/python-list/326948/
Really? That's what you concluded from reading my comments? I'm almost tempted to call "troll" and not respond; but against my better judgment, I'll bite.

Any business that does not generate profit is NOT a ponzi scheme and I did not even begin to imply that was the case. Any business which pays out dividends to their investors based ONLY on money secured from later investors is operating a de facto ponzi scheme.

[edit]
It's fine for early business to operate at a loss; it's not ok for an early business to funnel money to early investors while still operating at a loss.
25 Common-Sense Tips for Tech Startups
MI6 Hacked Al Qaeda Website, Swapping Bomb Recipes With Cupcake Recipes