skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People feel joy in different things. I once heard a very rough and gruff high schooler I went to school with describe standing in front of the original of Van Gogh's Starry Night and having a profoundly emotional experience. I don't have that experience from visual stimuli, but I know what he means, because I get it from many forms of music.

To the author, typography is a living creature; to me, typography is the process of arranging a font on a page with some aesthetics. We're both right, as are several other positions.

(Though unlike many cases where I see typography and can agree it is at least more aesthetic than average, that page struck me as not "minimalist" so much as "pedestrian"; am I missing a font download because I'm on Linux or something? I've seen good fonts for such minimalism but that's rending in my bog-standard browser serif font. Edit: Oh, ha, the problem is I have Georgia set as my default font! Thus my personal response to that font may be different than for someone who hasn't done that.)
They have an incentive: FB credits generates significant revenue to them already, plus games are a contributing factor to user retention. It may become more significant to user retention by filling the void now that social activity has peaked and everyone has caught up with their highschool friends.
This is a perfect example of why we can't have nice things: better energy systems, better laws, better public services, better social policy, better schools, regulations that are both simpler and more effective...

Everything has a vested interest behind it, and those vested interests are a bit like ticks. They burrow in, suck, and they're damn hard to pick out. They go by many names: special interest groups, contractors, corporations, political action committees, government alphabet agencies with funding tied to pet mandates, public sector unions, and politicians who only care about getting re-elected. Some play the left side of the political divide, some play the right, and some play both and don't care. They're all just parasites.

Unions and contractors are sort of the yin-yang of the whole thing. I recall reading about the California marijuana legalization proposal... the major opponents were being backed by the private prison industry and police unions.

Sometimes I think our society needs some sort of jubilee: fire everyone, dissolve every corporation, cancel every debt, end every politicians' term, and start over. Otherwise complexity and special interests just accumulate until we collapse from sclerosis and corruption. We're already teetering...
Would there be a way for those regulars to pool their resources into a non-profit that would keep the place alive?
Feeling Better vs Doing Better
I'd be interested in the quantum mechanics explanation of how the daemon reduces entropy. When I discussed the thought experiment with some friends we simply concluded that the very act of sorting the molecules is introducing outside energy into the system allowing local entropy to be reduced, just like any other machine. The total entropy of the universe would stay the same and the laws of thermodynamics are still intact.
Awesome that this is catching on.

Here's one of the reddit posts about one in Seattle: http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/huzr1/watch_profe...

And here's the NASL article about it: http://nasl.tv/News/Article/20110616nasl-barcraft
Apple lays out MobileMe transition, iCloud web apps coming this fall
Teneriffe, Curaçao and Kourou are, however, not part of Europe. There! ;-)
Well, right now there's no-one at all. So it would be an improvement.
> Many people find reading on a designated electronic reading device is no more difficult than reading printed books. You just need to keep away the interrupti­ons and distractions.

I don't own any particular electronic reading device, but I find that reading from a paper book gets me in a different mental state than reading from a computer. I believe this is a cultural bias because of my past experience with computers and books, but for me paper books still get me able to concentrate in a different way on what I'm reading.

I still have to try e-ink e-book readers, and see if I can rewire my mind to actually work in the same way as if I was reading a paper book. I've already tried with desktop and laptop computers, even turning off all distracting software, and couldn't achieve the same experience as with paper books.
> Hehe, I think this is the exact attitude the author is trying to prevent. Far too many CS students become too enamored and obsessed with language purity, the perfect design, etc etc, that they end up never building anything.

I build plenty of things. I just don't get why you'd focus on PHP, which has little business value anymore (no NEW, serious project is going to use it) or Python (which is itself less questionable, but in a big period of transition right now). I'm suggesting building something with technology you'll probably end up working with once you're out of school, and Python 2.* is probably leaving that list.

I don't know where you get "language purity" from.

> The LAMP stack (in both its variations) is by a really long shot the easiest stack to string together (honestly though, Rails will work too).

Nonsense.

> PHP is incredibly easy to approach from the perspective of someone who hasn't written too much code before, the documentation is way more extensive than just about any other platform, the user base is heavy and has a long track record for helping out.

The target audience here is CS students. Odds are they've got a bit of coding experience.

> The industry needs people who build things.

Actually, the industry needs people who can both build and learn. EVERY JOB you go to will have its own stack, with its own idiosyncrasies, and its own tooling. If you are not ready to learn something new every time you go into work, you probably shouldn't be in this career. Seriously. It's this sort of attitude ("Stop fucking around with all that learning and build something") that has screwed our industry over so consistently. It is possible, and mandatory, to do both.

> Whether or not you're familiar with Silicon Valley's Incestuous Circle of Hot Languages And Platforms is strictly secondary.

Not if you'd like to be employed.
Alright, maybe slightly more than minimum.

But yes, I would. If their job was to sort through and find questionable bans, and they knew their job would be on the line if they missed too many, they'd do a decent job. Certainly better than is being done right now.

After all, for the same wages, they could be flipping burgers instead. I know which I'd pick. The nice, cool office.
You're welcome. The Volkshochschule have ridiculously cheap evening classes for all levels of German ability. In the unlikely event that you're at a loose end for weeks at a time the Integrationskurse are ~free. Google 'em for more info.
I know there are plenty of Facebook people reading HN, so I can't help but wonder why complaints about FB are never addressed here when they come up, especially when they're of this nature (this particular problem seems like a glitch in code, not something that would require a massive business effort to fix). The instant someone makes a complaint about some aspect of Google's search algorithm, Matt Cutts appears out of the wild and addresses the situation; I've seen many other Googlers comment on various issues, too, letting us know that they've escalated issues as appropriate, or even just that they're aware of problems but can't do anything about it.

What's up with the silence from the FBers in the crowd? Not allowed to say anything? Don't know who to forward the issue to? Just don't care?
Congrats on the site. I'm not much of a fisherman, but I've been out on the Columbia here in Oregon a few times for Spring and Fall Chinook. Good eats.

I'm not formally a designer, but I fancy myself a fairly decent UX/UI guy and think I can offer some basic suggestions.

1) In your header, I would keep the Fishblab logo where it is, move the "Map Driven Fishing Community" tagline up next to/under the logo, and move the Login/New Account creation to the upper-right corner. Then, move your menu down to where the tagline and login currently reside. Right now, there's a lot of wasted space where the menu could be, and it seems awkwardly balanced to the left.

2) Remove the huge "Fishblab" logo in the main section. It's redundant, and doesn't really do anything for the users. What to put in its place? Add something for the user to do, like input their location or a type of fish they're looking for. Or, make this space a dynamic feed for other site content, like photos and forum posts.

3) Minimize your use of tag clouds. These were cool a few years ago and you still see them a bit today, but users may be overwhelmed at the sheer amount of them on your homepage. Think of your most prominent use cases for the site, and mold your homepage content around that.

4) Move the menu in the main section (Photos, Catch, etc.) over to the right or left side and turn them into actions the user can make. Instead of "Photos", make it "View and Submit Photos" or something like that.

5) Please, please allow for authentication from other sites like Facebook and Twitter. This will increase your trial and retention rates and allow you to leverage the size of those networks with your users and gain greater visibility. Let people tweet stuff and post stuff to Facebook!

6) Not really a UX/UI thing but it'd be really cool if you pulled information from each state's Fish & Wildlife Department website. You could probably write a fairly simple program to pull this info and dynamically display it on your site according to the user's location.

I could make a dozen other small suggestions but they'd mostly be nitpicking and personal opinion. Overall, I really like the concept and see a real need if there's nothing currently in this space (well, even if there is). I see you guys as a sort of "Yelp for fishermen"; you could probably take a few design and functional cues from their site to kickstart the ideation process.

Cheers and good luck!
The highlight of this article for me was the introduction to Gephi, an amazing open-source visualization package. This will be very helpful for generating displays of quantitative information for clients.

http://gephi.org/
Apple makes more from sale of 1 Mac than HP from 7 PCs
The "receive no value" language is not in the original contract -- that's from a June 13, 2011 letter from one of Skype's attorney's.
On an unrelated note, does Disqus not work for anyone else? I'm clicking on the text area and it doesn't do anything.

Anyway, congratulations! Sounds like you're really excited, which is a great attitude to have for this sort of thing. :)
I hope they get it right this time!

I'm excited about it...
I don't totally understand the issue but here are two thoughts:

1) You can set a cookie for subscribers and show pricing based on that

2) I would think for people who are going to buy you can have an optional (or not) registration before, during or after the checkout which would be a convenience feature for repeat buyers.
Ask HN: Poker game in the Bay Area
Does anyone know of or run a poker game in the SF Bay? Would be really interested if it were all start up engineers/founders/investors but that doesn't really matter.

If you know of something let me know @MrTravisB
There's a $10/month "playpack" package (in the US, at least). Some games are only available in the playpack, some games are only available separately. I would argue that on Steam you don't own the game either.

They use their own hardware, not EC2 or anything like that. They need gaming-level GPUs and they have their own compression hardware.
Wow Mad Dog is a block from my house on Haight.
The general consensus is that phone calls are for super urgent problems (server is down!) and/or paid phone support. Did your contract include paid phone support? I wonder how you would have been treated had you sent emails.
I think it's because you need the rest of the platform to make it work. FB games took off by spamming your friends and getting them hooked, too.

If the platform only has games, there's nothing really to spam... It's not like people are watching their wall for activity at that point.

There ARE gaming networks out there, BTW. They just really haven't taken off. Search for 'social gaming site' to find some.
Maybe they process batch transactions overnight. Maybe they want to reserve a nightly maintenance window.

Or maybe it's an instance of the "12:01" effect where they're scared to do anything too close to midnight. :-)
Hacking Education: A Contest for Developers and Data Crunchers
Advertisements particularly for local businesses are limited in their ability to track conversion. If a user sees an ad on Yelp, for example, there is no good way of telling if the ad converted or not - that is that the user saw the ad and made their way to the business due to the ad.

Groupon has begun to close this loop - a business automatically knows that a customer came in due to Groupon. There needs to be a more sustainable way for a business to gain traffic though, like Adsense etc offers for online businesses.

I would suspect Google Offers + Google Wallet will be an extremely effective solution. Companies will be able to advertise AND track how much customers spent. I would say those metrics are extremely important in order to optimize the ad experience.
A big part of business is who you're in bed with. MS should cancel the Skype deal, if at all possible. That would be one sign that they've turned a corner. I will never fork over a dime for any Skype service. This, while legal, is clearly unethical on a broad scale. And its the worst kind of unethical. Apple and MS play hardball with competitors -- but you don't do that with your employees.
I'll do it from home. Don't even have to provide an office!

Course, what's it cost to buy someone in india an office and pay a wage?
Don't know about any YC but subhublite,acquia gardens etc do it by building a distribution(with features usually) and using aegir+ubercart for saas. Check drupal gardens, subhublite, officemedium, (some wedding website saas whose name i don't remember). Basically:
Open Atrium + Aegir + Ubercart = Basecamp Clone

Check : http://drupal.org/node/993166 (Pagabuild Case Study)
Htpasswd & FrontPage Password Crack
Benchmark your Startup - Startup Genome
If you isolate GoDaddy as a domain registrar then I would be likely to agree. However, I have been forced to work with hundreds of people that use GoDaddy hosting for instance which is certainly not standardized. GoDaddy has thousands of products - just try buying a domain and see how much upsell there is.
What Zynga Will Look Like as a Public Company
Everyone knows that GoDaddy isn't a great company (including the small business owners that use them); it's interesting that they don't have a strong direct competitor. There are many registrars, but none that have nearly the level of traction that GoDaddy has.

Seems like an opportunity for some company to be the Zappos / Southwest / Amazon of domain registration - easy to use, no-frills, low-cost, excellent customer service. I wonder why that company isn't out there yet.
I think of social infrastructure like the prison system (including the private prison system) as like a gigantic potential well. As we build out more and more of the tools of a totalitarian fascist state embarking on a genocidal project -- we become more and more likely to fall into that potential well and actually become exactly such a state.
I can't speak to PowerMeter but on Google Health they have no one to blame but themselves. I desperately wanted to employ it here (I work for an agency that takes in abused children and had envisioned putting the kids records into Google Health so they would start out being able to carry their records wherever they go).

But after just an hour of research I'd already identified over 20 serious issues that could open us up to major liability claims.

To give just one example. This is from Google's own Google health page...

"Unlike a doctor or health plan, Google Health is not regulated by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), a federal law that establishes data confidentiality standards for patient health information. This is because Google does not store data on behalf of health care providers. Instead, our primary relationship is with the user."

Well...ok...but then how are health care providers supposed to put information in for their clients? The whole point of this is for the patient to carry around accurate information. But if the Doctor has to trust the patient will put the information in themselves there's no way to guarantee all the information will be put in correctly. Meaning the records could be more harm than good. Imagine a scenario where the patient forgets to put in allergy information leading a future physician to assume they have no allergies.

(Yes you could provide patients with a zip file to just upload but there's still no guarantee the user won't unzip it and upload it manually or any of a million other stupid things that users sometimes do)

Had Google actually engaged the industry rather than throwing something at them Google Health could have literally changed the world. Which is a far cry from the quick death it has found itself suffering.
Report: Avatar Kinect to launch 'within a few weeks'
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i remember that. that was stupid. why is this being posted in HN?
Agreed. TC commenters do not reflect reality.
I'm not sure its being totally readable to a law professor who teaches contracts helps Joe Engineer.
Thast why i would never rely on closed platform.

I will never waste my resource in build apps that solely rely on closed commercial entities like facebook, apple. If they choose to ban/block/delete you then all of your hard-work is gone in a second and will leave your users unhappy.

and this can happen to any of us
Well, Java is just a pain in the arse to setup and configure. And PHP lacks the same sorts of tools you can get with the Ruby community.

Not to mention PHP only really started making an attempt at OOP with PHP 5, and Ruby was designed from the onset to be OOP. Everything in Ruby is an object, so you can do some really neat stuff like 1.to_s to turn an Integer into a String. Add Ruby's cleanliness and readability to the mix, and it's a standout winner over PHP.
Was thinking about this. Sort of a "donation fund" to save the restaurant.
I'm in the health tech industry and thought Google Health was a great idea, but it all boils down to the doctor's office adopting the process. Many Dr's don't grasp technology very well and are usually too busy to care.

I guess they would rather have their customers sit in the waiting room filling out forms than getting them on with their day.

This will eventually be popular, just a little ahead of its time.
Is an iPad facebook app really going to change their minds if they hadn't been already? It's not like that wasn't an option for getting them to work on the iP(hone|od|ad) browsers already.
Spies, military looking for hacker-, backdoor-proof circuits
How come no witches ever show up to our witchhunt?

The vast majority of fb employees wouldn't know anything about this. They couldn't say anything except something w/o any knowledge and cause more problems.
Just to clarify, these photos were uploaded directly into the user's own Facebook albums. They viewed the photos outside of the scope of our application, along with all their other Facebook photos. It was these photos that were deleted when our application was banned.

Even if we had backups, it wouldn't mean much. Facebook revoked our OAuth access. So we're unable to re-upload the photos for our users.
I mentioned this to someone and they thought it might start a religion (eventually) - I think it just might.
Microsoft research does some amazing things. But like Xerox PARC they never seem to ship anything. Except for the kinect, that's been a reasonable success.
Hover.com
A lot of servers I've seen have had 'chassis intrusion detection', which is a fancy way of saying they had a microswitch hooked up to one of the SMBus lines that could detect when the case is opened.

Take one of those, and a Google-style Lead-Acid internal UPS, and you'd have an incredibly hard time getting access to keys held solely in memory.

For the extra paranoid, accelerometers or a simple mercury vibration/tilt switch would make it even harder, at the risk of losing/hanging your server every time someone worked on the rack, or drove a heavy pallet cart nearby.

I recall seeing somewhere a device designed for law enforcement, which was essentially a cart-style UPS with probes designed to be clamped onto, and penetrate, the power cable, allowing seizures without any power-loss, which I assume is for this eventuality.
Using yaourt makes this process as easy as pacman.
I beg to differ. Because I consume vast quantities of text, seemingly small improvements in aesthetics make a disproportionately large contribution to my quality of life.
I'd go further and suggest completing most of these before entering a CS program. Consider it the start of a long career of self-education and improvement.
Interesting. I'd like to know how you met the team you ended up joining. That is something I am looking to do as well.
@ianterrell, consider how often you've had to struggle to make sense of someone else's source code -- it's much the same with contract language. Seldom do lawyers go back and refactor their contract language for improved readability.
I'm talking about connected to politicians
I understand that Skype is a private company, and so that when they grant options it will have some odd terms that employees of public companies don't have.

They shouldn't use the terms "vested" and "unvested" then. His options were vested, yet were callable. That's not what vested means. They should call all options unvested until the company goes IPO.
I kinda take issue with any law that allows collection of evidence without a Warrant. If you're looking for evidence, you had better have enough cause to get a warrant from a judge. Else, that's witch-hunting.
Single long column, not adapting to size of browser window.

What? You want multiple columns? That would require scrolling down, then up, then down, then up... I'll take one column, thank you. Also, the idea that you must fill the entire browser window with content is nonsense. The column width should allow for a comfortable reading rhythm. Too short and you break rhythm from changing lines constantly. Too long and it's difficult to find the next line. Most people seem to like 60-80 characters. Why screw that up by letting the browser width determine column width?
Especially if your app was offering something that Facebook plans to launch itself if a few days. Basically you've been doing marketing research for them. When you're not longer needed, they kick you out.
These corporations aren't paying for IE either (comes for free with Windows), but IE has some form of support with security patches.
The origin of the name Posix.
In a related anecdote, through Reddit and /r/pittsburgh, I've found about a dozen or so local SC players. We've formed a mailing list and I'm holding a viewing party at my apartment next week. We're still looking currently for a local bar which might let us watch SC.

SC2 and the pro-gaming community has never been better!
Those are the results of Operation Developer Love: http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/417/ . Imagine what would happen without love ...
Is Today A Good Day To Die?
for new projects yes, haven't started migrating old stuff yet. Rails 3.1 will be when I migrate my client's javascript.