skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Twitter? Maybe. iCloud? Not a chance. A proprietary service that you can only access on a limited number of proprietary pieces of hardware (with absolutely zero transparency) is never going to reach a large mass of users, never-mind if you attempted to shoe-horn a proprietary social network on top of it.
The effects of this vocationalization of the university extend beyond school, too. It used to be that just having a college degree meant a good chance of getting a job in a wide range of fields. Now, though, if you don't specialize or target your degree at a specific field, you're out-competed by people who did.

(Yes, I'm whining about my Comparative Literature degree again, but I pursued that field seriously and rigorously, unlike many of my colleagues, and I feel like I'm being judged unfairly because of it.)
How well does WebGL work in Chrome Frame? I'm gonna be releasing an MVP of a product centered around WebGL and I've been thinking that GCF might be a good way to get it working on IE, but haven't yet tested. Would love to hear some experiences.
typical link bait...bait the bloggers, so they write a scathing response...in the process linking to Calcanis and Mahalo.
The article states that only the filename needs to be passed for CSS url() resources. However, using that method, there appears to be no means to append the MD5 to the precompiled asset filename while in production. The result is an unnecessary trip to the application to generate the asset, bypassing the compiled assets completely.

I believe the preferred method it is to generate your CSS with ERB, using the asset_path method. Though hopefully someone can correct me if I'm wrong.
@jevinskie I can so relate to you! It was such a pleasure talking to him. The fantastic part was knowing that his team actually had fun all the while. It was like they never had a drab moment:)
You mean beyond all the obvious things like mass transit, bicycles, recycling, energy-efficient light bulbs and appliances, and better building designs?
Yes, he stretched the term "free market" way too far. My definition of a free market is: any group of individuals who produce things and trade with each other on the basis of mutual consent, never initiating coercion against another.

Clearly "the death penalty" or "incarceration in a Siberian work camp" for the "crime" of trading eggs on the street is an initiation of coercion, so the term "free market" does not apply.

Also things like "shooting your neighbor and taking his land" are clearly beyond the pale. There is property after all, which I define as (1) anything you receive as a gift, such as your body and mind at birth, (2) anything you produce using the property already at your disposal, and (3) anything you obtain in a mutually consensual trade of your property for someone else's. Your neighbor's land does not meet any of those three criteria.

Certainly there is nothing magic about a free market: after all, it's just a group of human beings. But there's nothing magic about coercive force either -- and I would go further and maintain that it's fundamentally destructive.
That seems like you're taking it to the extreme-PC end. He didn't say farmers were idiots, he said they are generally not adept computer users.

It's possible he's way off on that assumption, but I would say devoid of data it's a fairly safe one.

I'm sure you could find quite a few insulting fill-in-the-blank nouns.
Burdensome is an understatement. Between cities, counties and states levying sales tax, there are thousands of taxing entities. In some cases, it's impossible to determine the proper tax rate without a nine-digit zip since city boundaries may split zip codes, meaning city+county or just county might apply in different parts of a zip code area. Forcing the customer to enter a nine-digit zip and then possibly choose between multiple tax options when it's still not clear leads to an incredibly high friction checkout. The main winners in this fight are the companies that provide sales tax computation components or APIs for web services.

However, I think having a sales tax based on location of seller rather than buyer doesn't make as much sense. The big companies like Amazon would find loopholes that allowed them to originate from low/no tax areas and smaller sites without the ability to relocate would be stuck with most of the burden. This just changes the fight from big box vs. internet to small site vs. big site.
Educating India's Most Disadvantaged: Museums as Schools
The design of BitCoin only includes very weak anonymity. A medium-to-large scale network analysis could most likely break any anonymity people thought they had.
Fishing With The Reverend and The Deacon - Memphis Travel | Examiner.com
I wouldn't be surprised at all. I think the traditional CS curriculum, at least at my university, induces learned helplessness, so that by the time students get to a 300-level course they're so convinced they can't do a project they don't even try.

I taught an intro to comp sci summer course that was evenly split between over-achievers looking to get the intro course done before starting their freshman year, and demoralized post-freshmen who had failed the course during the regular year.

By the end of the 9 week summer session, they all had a working Minesweeper game written in Java. I set out levels of achievement they could attain, from very basic working mechanics (including a timer) up to marking a space questionable and revealing all blank spaces surrounding a blank. I demonstrated how to do that using recursion, which our curriculum doesn't even allow teaching until 3rd year, but which my students didn't seem to have any trouble with. I believe recursion is actually a very natural way of thinking, but we prime students to fail at it because all they hear before learning it is that "it's so hard."

I see our curriculum, at least, as one of the biggest hindrances to learning CS. The students who succeed do so despite the adversity of a hostile curriculum.
Is this the beginning of world war 3?

So the past couple of weeks I can remember the following sites getting pwned:

All Sony sites.
GMail.
The I.M.F.
Citibank
Pron.com
Nintendo
Epic Games
Senate.gov

From all the high profile services hacked one can start making the following hypothesis:

> There's a major hole in the linux kernel or OS and they're just having so much fun with it.

> They have infiltrated all of these organizations and have people from within opening the doors

> They are the X-Men of hacking

> They're the Chinese government X-Men of hacking

> Or security on all of these websites really sucks

(Keep adding your hypothesis)
If all else fails, I would happily consider recommendations for colocated dedicated server vendors in Europe, assuming they fit the requirements: Reasonably priced, flexible range of hardware configs, ability to set up or remove hosts through a web GUI. Oh, and the ability to run Ubuntu.
>But "finance" means theft these days. It's only wildly profitable because our economic/justice system is fundamentally flawed and nobody is allowed to stop playing.

'tis the voters' fault, though, isn't it? The quants didn't ask for the system to be the way it is.

If anything, they, by exploiting this flaw, act to expose it, making it more visible and more likely to be fixed. Imagine if more grad students did this. You'd drive the stock market to collapse so many times -- at least in theory, 'cuz you're basically draining it like a pool, and it's a finite pool -- the government would be -forced- to give up on its newfound policy of Too Big to Fail.

Conversely, the fact that students continue to enter grad school despite the skyrocketing financial inadvisability therein, this only serves to swell what is apparently a labor excess even further. If universities had to compete for grad students on price, stipends would increase! Those who enter grad school out of some sense of altruism actually do their fellow students a disservice.

...so, having read that, what the fuck am I doing, you ask? Well, I'm just avoiding people I can't stand to be around. I like professors; I hate managers. My perceived-value-of-research is skewed. As an added bonus academics posess a level of freedom on par with the super-rich; if some University wants you to immigrate to a country in order to do research, you're waived right in. A PhD carries the sort of international mobility that's I think is kind of useful having been born in a sinking ship. In America it's called the O-1, but most countries have an analog. Paul Erdos was one of the only people who could cross the Iron Curtain unscathed. My aunt and uncle, who inspired me to go into physics, worked whatever hours they felt like and could wear t-shirts and sandals to work -- they were physicists working for the US Navy.
Wait if I buy an item in state Y and pay their state tax am I supposed to go back and pay state X where i live another tax on the same item? If not just have Amazon collect consumer taxes based on the state they are incorporated in and pay those back to that state. Then states would compete on corporate tax rates to attract business for the infusion of cash and the tax collection mechanism for online retailers is dramatically simplified.
Nice try, Meizu marketer. :)

On a serious note, my MacBook Air 13 is 1440 x 900 - not 1280 x 800.
It's not just 50.

Every locality in Washington state potentially has a different sales tax rate. And, Washington just changed their rules so that the sales tax for instate merchants is not based on where the merchant is located, but where the customer is. So, for every small business that does any business other than through a physical storefront, they need to go based on (at the very minimum) the zipcode. (http://taxrates.dor.wa.gov).

And that's just Washington State.
A good take-away from this might be "don't do two-level ACL until you have user traction".

DavicMcLaughlin says, "we were getting absolutely ridiculous user engagement..." When you are starting a site, you want as little resistance to usage as possible, and this helps with that. It makes it one step easier for people to use your site. It helps reduce the typical chicken/egg problem, or any other "it's hard to get users" problem.

Once you have the users, and security becomes more of a concern ("But security should always be a concern", yeah I know.) then you should start to think about something more secure. Until then, do all you can, within reason, to get users.
> instead of a currency that must be exchanged for goods.

My prediction is the bitcoin market will correct itself, as markets without interference do. Bitcoins are intrinsically worthless, like the USD, unless it can be exchange for goods/services.

> Imagine if the dollar was appreciating in value big time every week and month.

As long as a central banking authority (Federal Reserve) can legally make dollars from thin air, this will never happen.
You can't "reject attacker nodes". There is nothing in the blockchain that identifies a given miner.
Could a hacker move the file somewhere else and ask for ransom?

If so, that's a lot easier to deal with than losing everything outright, but not risk proof.
Yes you do have to keep up. Because one day you'll go install your 2.3 app on a new server, and you'll have an incompatible version of some library because Rails 2.3 didn't specify version number dependencies.

Like what happened to Rails 3.0.7 and Rake 2 weeks ago.
Simple and Easy JavaScript Inheritance
Apple iCloud vs Google vs Amazon Cloud Drive vs Dropbox vs Microsoft SkyDrive
Any service that converted between BTC and USD would probably require at least 1 confirmation - i.e. it would take 10 minutes before the USD were sent to your account.

The market value could change in that time, perhaps by 10% or more when the market is unusually volatile. However, assuming that these rises and falls average out over the long term, a web service could guarantee the quoted rate.

So the user would buy the product using $20 worth of bitcoin, which would manifest itself as $20 (minus a percentage fee) in the merchant's account within 10 minutes. Any hit (or gain) due to fluctuating exchange rates would be taken by the web service sitting in the middle. Over time the fluctuations would average out - at least that would be the hope - or at least covered by the transaction charge.
Thank you for advice about cert service! Awesome. Will request SSL cert right now.
I consciously left scripts uncompressed, so anybody can look what going on behind the scene. Also, I'll publish source code on github as soon as clean it up. Then I make compressed version.
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NOW will they PLEASE ENCRYPT the wallet.dat file?????
Uh oh. Cue flame war.
"I have a moderately complex Rails app that I want to upgrade, but I don't have much confidence in my tests, I maybe don't have proper separation of concerns, and I just know that one hacky thing I did a while back is going to bite me in the ass."

This says it all for me. Upgrading an app or parts of an app that have great test coverage is really pretty straightforward. It's only more difficult if you weren't following best practices all along.
New features: slow as hell, random fade-outs and GC thrashing in less than 4Gb RAM, sometimes crashes dead with no warning, no automatic/incremental saving of configuration state or work-in-progress files, intrusive "tasks" UI you don't need or want, knows perfectly well a file has changed but won't refresh it on your behalf.

No wait, those are old features.
Im from Switzerland im well awair of what you translated I agree that the phrase is (ab)used by the extremist but just because somebody sais it I would say he is a extremist. A person that hacked NPD isn't like an extremist just somebody that probebly is just a bit to much of a patriot. You can find enought people like that and the are not all extremists.
Well as long as you're consistent I don't mind. I imagine it's easy to be self-righteous when it's not your safety on the line. I don't pretend to understand the security concerns of those countries with regards to their facilities.
pretty sure it can since it is used to treat skin pigmentation disorders too
Also: this is the perfect crime for those so inclined to do this. What authorities are going to give a damn about your missing Bitcoins?
My point is that just because somebody sais something like that you should just juge him to be a nazi. Spezially if that someone just hacked some nazis.
Ask HN: 1k magazine titles, 10m readers, no digital. Can we fix it?
I had a chance encounter with a medium-large printing company in the US that is looking for a digital solution. They print 800-1,100 distinct magazine and trade publications per year and have exclusive or non-exclusive options to the digital publication rights to those magazines. The estimated readership is ~10,000,000, mainly US subscribers.

All of this content is digital, and is available in PDF and XML formats. Much of it is pretty niche, like the top three nail salon industry publications, or the leading root vegetable farmer magazine. Very long tail for some of these publications.

They have no current strategy for the content, outside of eventually posting it to a website and placing Google Ads there.

Is there a better business model here? Magazine publishers have struggled over the move to digital. Hearst, Conde Nast, and Meredith were working together on standards, I believe, but I haven’t seen it go anywhere. Adobe just released Adobe Digital Publishing as a content delivery mechanism.

Can we disrupt this industry before it settles down? I’m committed to building a team from the HN community—you’ve taught me so much already.

So, assuming we could secure the online rights for this portfolio, what revenue model and content delivery system would work?

Please discuss below and email me directly if more information is needed or if you have specific experience you’d like to offer confidentially.

The plan is to (1) build a pitch for this printing co. with your help, in order to (2) get funding to finish due diligence and create the MVP with some fellow HN members.
I think there are lots of factors.

Saturation and Fatigue
You can only see so many drunken weekend pics before it gets old.

Everyone's On It
Friending your Mom, boss, etc. really makes it suck.

Social Games
Pretty much raped the platform. I'm guilty of spamming friends for poker chips.

Too Many Links
News feed is flooded with regurgitated links that are supposed to be interesting.

Event Spam
If the inbox was a real email inbox, some of those invitations would surely violate some spam law.

It's Everywhere
It's hard to find a website that doesn't have like buttons or commenting or widgets (many have them all). It gets to be a bit much.
Yep, which is why if you have $500K you keep it in the bank and not in your wallet. (Err, not that $500K would fit in your wallet, but anyway...)

Bitcoin has no "bank" equivalent.
That's no excuse tho'. For most of history 13-year-olds were considered adults.
It's not just security (and other) patches for Rails, it's maintenance for the assorted plugins one inevitably ends up using.

If you've a Rails 2.x app with plugin ActsLikeWhatever, and you run into some problem with that plugin, chances are the fix will only be in the newest, non-Rails2, release.
Writing is a useful skill.. Stupid people who write may become less stupid., although having read the comments on such sites as Huffington post, I dont hold a great deal of hope. But I say let them write. However, I would like to see an IQ setting on my browser, so I could filter out any post with an apparent IQ of less than, say, 130.
I don't necessarily see the problem as tenure, but that "computer science" has always been an ill-defined discipline with strange bedfellows. In my department the professors work on such different areas that they can't even communicate, which makes agreeing on a common curriculum difficult. The theory guys say "oh, of course theory is fundamental to computer science, everyone needs to take it." And then the systems profs say the same thing about networking, databases, and OS. Then you have the GOFAI (good old-fashioned AI -- logic and symbol-pushing) and machine learning crowds, who operate somewhere in the middle of theory and practice.

I'm sure I've left some areas out. I think how to unify a CS curriculum in light of such diverse interests is a hard problem worthy of study and debate, and dismissing the problem as "tenure" does not provide a useful frame for addressing the problems.
It took me five minutes of reading the changelog to figure out what I have to stop using in 3.1. There are additional features that can be integrated into a workflow at whatever pace is desired. People are making a bigger deal of this than they should, I think.
Jason's point is valid no matter your opinion of Mahalo. Reputation may soon be the most important determinant of the value of content, as opposed to social indicators and in tandem with interest- or location-based relevance. We already do this manually today. When I access Google News, I choose specific news sources over others based on my understanding of their reputation for accuracy and thoroughness.
> we've all seen OK/Cancel prompts before

It's interesting to think about common patterns and if they really are in the user's best interest or if a new pattern might offer some benefit. I'm undecided in this case.

When it comes to non-standard button labels, when there are more than 2 options, or on dialogs where the user should think about what they are doing (e.g., actions which cannot be undone) having the most used option last doesn't sound like the worst idea.
who are foolish enough to believe that "a degree is a degree"

That is foolish, but OTOH, an undergrad is 18. They're an adult and ought to be able to make decisions like one. Or if they're not, let's raise the voting and drinking age to 21. Can't have it both ways!
Oh it's awesome dump. Are these mainly from US?
Possibly. This was being discussed on NPR a few weeks back and I seem to remember the expert saying the real key, as usual, is catching it when people are young and spending more time with fundamentals like counting/sorting physical objects.
Maybe I don't 'Get' this game either, but the examples he cites just don't sound funny. The label on a carton of cigarettes is 'faggs'? That's not funny, it's not original, and it's not creative.

Sure, that is an offensive word, but that's not my problem with it. I was practically in tears laughing at a Tosh.0 skit the other night that was basically a 5 minute long gay joke. But it was witty and original. Just saying the word hasn't been edgy or made me laugh since about the 6th grade.

I'm not saying we should ban this game. But I do think there is a very big difference between the reviewer not liking this kind of comedy and the reviewer being humorless. I love comedy, I pay to see live standup all the time, practically the only things on my DVR are comedy, but I would never buy this game. Their 'funny' and my 'funny' are two entirely different things.
The problem is that people are using BitCoin as a 'Get Rich Quick' scheme instead of a currency. While this does drive adoption, some lives may be destroyed on the way because of market manipulation by malicious parties. How many legitimate transactions are happening compared to transactions with an intent to hoard BitCoins for future gains?
Ebook being written via github
Apple had no choice over starting the feud, since nokia sued them first.
I've only played through the first 20 minutes or so and had a blast. Sure its not cutting edge at all but you can see the old 3dRealms touch of being able to interact with a lot of things.

Users should set their expectations of the world's greatest game aside and just taking Duke Nukem Forever with a grain of salt. To me its like an 80's or 90's action movie.

I would have payed to play this even if it was a 2 hour tech demo just to see what they were working on all this time.
How to undo Twitter.com JS t.co clipboard hijack
I found the review persuasive. The points about misogyny resonated with me, but everything he criticized about the gameplay resonated as well.

Linear gameplay with cutscenes, bleah. Regenerating health, meh, not in this kind of game. You can only carry two guns and they aren't fun to shoot -- what are they THINKING? This is DUKE. I don't know what era they grew up in, but my action heroes can carry at least six guns, maybe eight, and at least half a ton of ammo.

Nothing as fresh and silly as the shrink gun was? It was little novelties like that made Duke fun to play. If you want to make penis jokes, make a penis gun. If you want to make a joke about homophobia, make a leather gun that decks a bad guy out in a leather outfit with assless chaps, temporarily incapacitating his friends as they laugh at him. Blammo -- joke's on them! It wouldn't have any point against the big bosses since they work alone, but it would be fun to use anyway -- what is this big blob of alien going to look like in leather? It would also add some sexual interest without being too misogynistic, since you could shoot women to give them a bad-ass leather and sunglasses look, which would give them a lot more class and dignity and real sex appeal than they usually have in Duke games. Maybe they'd grab a gun and fight on your side for a while.

How did I just think up a major improvement to the game while writing an HN comment, and they couldn't do it in... how many years?
A BTC "block" is currently 50 BTC, I think.
Generally, use tax covers only items not taxed otherwise, so certainly no you do not owe X any sales tax if Y charged you. But this is a summary of a summary of a summary, for more details you can start at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_tax and start following links from there, because details will certainly vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.