skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I imagine the idea is that this system should eventually lead to ads that the community actually likes - but I'll admit that doesn't seem to be happening. However, I think that most ads that reddit rages about are pretty terribe ads. For example, a recent ad for a movie (Apollo 18) was hated on because clicking on it sent you to a Facebook login page. That's no good since many people now can't learn about this movie through the ad without signing up for a different website.

Another example: I think there was a recent Microsoft ad that took you an unrelated webpage. Again, that ad is no good.

The community comments on these things because there have been a lot of terrible ads - ads that don't even let users learn about the product being advertised. However, it doesn't seem like this is actually leading to better ads...
I briefly worked for AOL on the Winamp team right after they acquired both Winamp and Time Warner. The story that an AOL deal ends up in a total cluster fuck is 10 years old.

With any knowledge of recent history, it is boggling anyone thought this acquisition would work and I don't believe for a second Arrington is writing in earnest.
This is a silly comment. Do you think PZ Meyers doesn't have much faith in evolution (hint: he thinks evolutionary psychology is mostly junk science)? The problem with evo-psyche is that it is relatively new, very little has been proven via repeatable experimentation, but it is easily used to confirm existing bias. Rejecting some claims of evo psych and biological determinism is obviously not the same as rejecting all of evolution.
Where is he disclaiming journalistic integrity?

Seems to me like he is making a hands-off comment with regards to TechCrunch, as in - we wouldn't allow an editor of a regular property to invest in companies they write about, but TechCrunch has different rules.
Ghana Red cross website defaced By Ahmdosa Hacker
Well, first, I think plenty of people already hate AOL. Second, it was AOL's CEO that explicitly disclaimed journalistic ethics, not Arrington or anybody at TechCrunch.

Finally, Arrington is good at this, AOL never has been. No rationale person intentionally picks a public fight with Arrington. If this was intentional on AOL's part, it backfired badly, and is still attributable to stupidity.
Usually, I wouldn't put much stake in a statement like that. But for you sir, I make an exception.

Best of luck, and congratulations.
It is natural to quickly put out a fix in response to a New York Times article that paints a picture of your big company hurting Mom & Pop Highway Diner.
You underestimate the ability of a large media company to squash innovation and morale. They might get outside investment so they can iterate harder/better/faster but Advance wants to hold onto this goldmine.

From http://www.betabeat.com/2011/09/06/a-startup-is-reborn-reddi...:

Greater independence will mean reddit can go to a new board, which includes reddit OG Alexix Ohanian, who had been serving as an “advisor,” as well as representatives from Conde and Advance, with proposals instead of jockeying within Conde’s budget. Reddit doesn’t plan to seek outside funding at this time, Mr. Martin said, but it’s not out of the question. “It’s a lot more more of a startup,” he said. “It’s able to happen faster with less overhead.”
This thing is as old as DEFCON 2011 (see http://blog.thoughtcrime.org/ssl-and-the-future-of-authentic...) but in view of current events of certificate trustworthiness, there is quite a chance for anything that can successfully replace the approach of trusting CAs.

Please view this blog entry (from the core author of convergence.io) to get the idea of also why DNSSEC is not a good approach (he had put it in the way that it's worse than CAs.)
I'm slightly torn at Canvas' release. I understand that there is a desire for such a site and I think it can fill a void for many. Which is good.

However, for me even though I like the occasional laugh, I'd like for such a site to help clear out such memes and such from other sites (primarily reddit). The reason I'm torn is that as much as I think this is possible, I feel that the opposite may happen, as people now have a large source of repostable memes at their disposal.

I guess time will tell. Congrats on the site.
Why is "editorial independence" here being taken to mean the same thing as "ethical"?

Aren't these two separate issues? I don't understand how AOL having some editorial control over TechCrunch has anything to do with TechCrunch following standard journalistic ethics with regards to conflicts of interest - unless TechCrunch feels it should have the independence to not disclose conflicts of interest.
Why do I have the feeling that we (the public) aren't the real target for these posts? This all has the feel of a giant power-play within AOL that we are only one side of.

I know that this is TechCrunch, but do we really have to be exposed to the drama that is normally reserved for office politics? Or is this all just an attempt to give Arrington, et al. cover for when this whole thing just blows up?

Or, it could all be for the pageviews... has it been a slow news month?
Seedcamp Flexes Upwards With Its Biggest Week Yet
I don't understand. How is saying "TechCrunch doesn't have to have journalistic integrity" not disclaiming journalistic integrity for TC?
Simplified synopsis: digital RF frames have preambles, sync symbols, and then bodies. When RX errors occur in the preamble or sync, the radio may "seek" to the next valid-looking preamble or sync. Since most digital RF protocols encode the preamble or the sync using the same symbol set as the body, there are byte sequences that mimic the preamble and sync of a wireless frame.

The RX errors we're talking about happen frequently.

So for instance, if my wireless network was unencrypted, and you DCC'd me on IM and sent me a giant file, and that file had repeated byte sequences that mimicked RF frames, you could inject frames onto my wireless network.

This is the moral equivalent of +++ATH0 for modems back in the day.

Crazy.
Is bundler like pip + virtualenv in python land?
Could this be another reason why 2nd mover in a field actually has an advantage, above being able to learn from the first mover mistakes?

The first in the market educates, and all but a few say "I don't want that, that's useless". Then a competitor arrives, and now the idea is no longer as creative, it is now somewhat familiar, and a much smaller leap for people to grasp.
Right, it's not tamper-proof. It's not really intended to be. As long as it forces them to make a habit of clicking the link then we can get more of those people to read the article.
Thats a great suggestion, I usually listens for some time and ask a few from my point of view meaningful questions.
I usually finish off by asking them to send me an email and summarize their thoughts and to explain it in more detail.

Most of the times, the email never lands in my inbox, but when it finally does, theres usually something to it.
Do I really need a guide to play Empires and Allies?
I agree. But let's bring in an advocate for the devil:

"As if the millions and billions of years of Nature's invention and innovation should be discarded..."

Great. Now I sound like Edmund Burke.

Maybe strong would be a better modifier than hard, as it implies a little more flexibility. Nevertheless, I think some ideas are being conflated here:

Do strong biological tendencies exist?

Can they be hacked or circumvented? Should they be?

What's the cost/benefit? Are you willing to make the investment necessary to do so?

I favor exploring, and acknowledging where warranted, the hard limits so that we may more effectively and humanely answer these questions.
I'm reminded of the link posted last week [1] arguing that founders make better CEOs. TechCrunch was a valuable asset for AOL to pick up precisely because of the way it was organized and managed.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/steve-jo...
IPad App for Reading Classic Literature | Technorox
NBC is owned by GE, that doesn't restrict NBC Nightly News from reporting on the weapons made by GE that were used by and against Libyan rebels. I understand the levels of separation are a lot deeper with GE/NBC, but as long as full disclosure is given about his relationship with Crunchfund companies I don't see a huge ethical problem.

That said, I really don't see why Arrington would want to try wearing both hats. It brings a huge magnifying glass onto the bias in his articles, and possibly the articles of all those at TechCrunch.
Glad more people are getting introduced to the term editorial independence.
He shouldn't change anything for Tumblr. It's a browser extension and Tumblr has no right to dictate how people use the content they give away for free.
The ones I've tried still make a terrible humming noise much like a fluorescent bulb in a ballast, and cast a somewhat pinkish light. They also don't fit well in fixtures designed for incandescent bulbs, sticking out at the end (looking at a bare lightbulb is no fun for the eyes).

I really want to like CFLs but with all of these disadvantages and how much more difficult they are to safely dispose of than a plain incandescent, I still haven't switched.
"Ordering drugs from Canada is not unsafe."

But it is illegal.
Perhaps it is, but having a member of the senior staff also running an investment fund that invests in the very subjects of the TechCrunch site is a huge integrity issue. Armstrong seemed to be dodging the question to me, a way to avoid having to answer for what Arrington is up to.
TaffyDB 2.1 (JavaScript) adds query caching
"Being sued by shareholders is a 'cost of business' for a public company."

And if settling with the DOJ for knowingly etc is also a cost of doing business (which you do not claim), then we're in a sorry state.
15 Inspiring People to Follow on Twitter
Is TechCrunch promising to always give full disclosure? The earlier articles this morning seemed to be very upset that anyone would think they need to do something like this, something so "old media" like.
Why I Am Sponsoring PyCodeConf (and what it means to you, hint: cheaper tickets)
However, Reddit users are notoriously cheap and anti-commercial.
A lot of this comes down to a) non-technical types pursuing their ideas with an unconstrained mental framework and b) non-linearity of good ideas.

a) Unconstrained mental frameworks: "I want a location-based photo-sharing app that comes with angry birds integration" It can't be that hard. There has to be some plugin on github that solves that problem for you already, since it's a great idea."

Since this idea is guaranteed to produce a billion dollars, any developer would have to be irrational to turn down even a 10% equity offer.

b) Non-linearity of good ideas - I'm finding that it's often fewer features and fewer things that make compelling business ideas / user experiences. See Dan Ariley's TED talk [1]. It's intriguing how a negative feature delta (less is more!) often results in something more compelling.

Understanding if something is a good idea is a problem more akin to finding the optimal way of loading an aircraft, where the problem has to be tested, exposed, and simulated; not a simple forecast model where the answer is binary. People will never know whether they're sitting on a great idea until they test their strategy and see how it turns out.

On a side-note, a friend and I have a small service that attempts to solve this problem. It's called Casual Contracting [2] and tries to frame this problem in a positive light for both devs and idea people.

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_o...

[2] http://casualcontracting.com
I would become a lot more suspicious of this being a pageview drive if Arriana replied using huffingtonpost.com
Sean "Day[9]" Plott Talks Starcraft, eSports and Nerd Pride
Tables Are No Domain Objects: Table Relation Transformations Part 1
However, their pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo about "what the eye desires" aside, Wired is right that people hate non-yellow light.

Hate.

This is a hard psychological limit. No amount of energy efficiency will get around it. If you make LED lighting, it must reproduce the color profile that people are used to from incandescent bulbs.
Mashape Raises $1.5M for API Marketplace - AllThingsD
Yes, if most young designers demanded respectable wages, it would help established designers. But to claim that that's the only motive for this kind of plea isn't fair to the people succeeding in the industry.

I recently graduated from art school. Nearly ever one of my illustration professors (all established illustrators) harped on this issue, encouraging us to demand industry-standard wages, and to turn down jobs that paid dirt.

It wasn't hard to see that they love the profession, and want to see it supported in perpetuity. By making sure that the next generation of designers continues to convince the world that illustration is an art form worth paying for, they're supporting an endeavor they love.

Call it passing the torch. That it helps them continue to earn a living is fully beside the point.
And what about system configuration? Your chef cookbooks repo is not updated for a long time. Do you still use chef, switched to puppet or use something else?
This change is all about setting up reddit so that it can better handle future growth and opportunities.

FTFY: This change is all about setting up reddit so that it can be be sold.
Semester of statistics required for mine.

Of course they have since dropped the stats requirement. And the calc 2 requirement. So now it's a semester of calculus and a semester of linear algebra. I guess too many people failed calculus 2 and stats.
There seems to be some discussion about exactly what "standard journalistic ethics" is. Some people would probably prefer disclosure in a case where, say, MG Sigler writes about a company that Arrington invested in. TechCruch feels that no disclosure is required in such cases because of their unique lack of editorial oversight (translation: apparently "TechCrunch" is just a bunch of independent writers who don't talk to each other).
(Mostly) Good Times for Software Developers
Top Four Reasons Why The Coffee Break Rocks
Web Application Session Hijacking
Though there is a bookmarklet to add various controls to animated gifs at http://slbkbs.org/jsgif/ and also http://playgif.com/ (I believe the first one appeared on HN a couple of months ago)
"When a young woman is in desperate need of money and a wealthy man comes along and uses that vulnerability to get sex, that's the definition of exploitation."

Seems like you could also say: "When a man is in desperate need of sex and a young woman comes along and uses that vulnerability to get money, that's the definition of exploitation."
I kinda see what you're getting at, but it doesn't really make any sense. Armstrong was actively working with Arrington on the fund. It wouldn't be answering for Arrington (or at least not just Arrington), but for himself and AOL as a whole.

This wasn't something that Arrington just announced out of the blue that AOL has to scramble to react to. Armstrong was active in setting the whole thing up, and AOL was investing in the fund. They knew this was happening way in advance, and announced it with Arrington. Then everything went to hell. To whatever degree this could possibly be construed as Arrington's fault, it must also be seen as at least equally AOL's fault.
This code he calls good:

DictionaryPresenter.new(PostCategorizationPolicy, Post.all).as_dictionary

Well, it smells like typical java overengineering. Why stop at that, let's go full way to:

DictionaryPresenterFactory.new(PostCategorizationPolicyStrategy, Post.collect(CollectionStrategy::All)).present
Appropriately for a discussion about Reddit, downvoted for having a minority opinion :)
Arrington frames it as a matter of "editorial independence" and doesn't talk about ethics and conflict of interests.

However, I don't see how anyone else (and least of all, the owners of TechCrunch) can ignore those two matters - and the resultant impact on the credibility of TechCrunch.

Ultimately, Arrington made a conscious decision to sell TechCrunch to AOL. He made another conscious decision to become the founder of CrunchFund.

The two-option ultimatum in his post seems like simple posturing. It seems like he is ready to finally leave TechCrunch, but doesn't want to frame it as a simple matter of leaving TechCrunch to become a full-time investor (who also blogs - the Fred Wilson model).
Looks like a no on that front: The professor has said in comments to his blog that he will not.

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=755#comment-27693.

> Regarding recording, the main concern was that I didn’t want to inhibit open-ended discussion by recording everyone’s umms, uhhs, and half-baked thoughts for posterity. In addition, there didn’t seem like a pressing need for recording, since I’ve already essentially written a “course textbook” in the form of my essay (http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf). But as I said, we will have student reaction essays for each class session and they will go up on the website.
There is something wierd here; in Google Chrome 13.0.782.220m it doesn't looks so nice as you but not so ugly as the parent comment.

http://i.imgur.com/NC0fH.png
Macports helped a lot with open-source on the Mac, but I wouldn't say it solved the imagemagick problem.

Imagemagick, or one of its many dependencies, would often be broken, and when it worked it would still take a ridiculously long time to download and compile (unless you remembered to specify "no-x", setting aside the fact that you had to know that variant existed in the first place).

I used Macports for a long time, and it worked well for installing mysql, git, and all the other open-source software I used, but the imagemagick install was painful enough that I still kept around my own script to build it until homebrew came around.
It occurred to me as I read the article that SeekingArrangement.com actually could not have asked for better publicity than this article. Sure, there will be a round of condemnation and so forth, but there will also be a great many thinking "hey, that's just what I need".
Cloud service Morphlabs grabs $5M to serve international companies
Sad to see them hiring an outside CEO instead of promoting from within. I don't think hired CEOs work so well for products that are still at the stage Reddit is at.

They need someone with deep, intimate knowledge of the community and the product. The best source for that in my opinion would be internal.
Boston area tends to have relatively low salaries, both compared to competing areas (like the Silicon Valley, NYC, and Washington-Baltimore corridor) and relative to the cost of living (real estate, primarily). The difference is not trivial.
Sound, the Way the Brain Prefers to Hear It
And Bankoff (the guy who orchestrated the Weblogs, Inc. merger, and subsequent editorial strategy of the NewAOL which Armstrong is executing on today) would probably be more than happy to welcome them into the fold.
Traffic growth is a cost, not a revenue. Usually there's some revenue associated with that traffic growth, but there's no indication Reddit's infamously anti-commercial user base is very easy to monetize.
I don't disagree with your advice, but in this case I think it's not so bad. It's a current sensor, there's practically no voltage across those power wires. And assuming he wired it into the ground part of the circuit and not the phase, no voltage to the electronics either.

(However, low voltage doesn't mean that an accidentally dropped conductor wouldn't ruin your day, so insulating them would still be a good idea.)
Oh god. Its like 4chan but with more... more... /brains/.

I think I just found God. He was hiding in the canvas.
In wake of PSN hack, Sony recruits Homeland Security official as security boss
I think it would be more accurate to characterize that dispute as being between TechCrunch and the rest of the entire journalism industry. I don't think anyone else thinks that what TechCrunch would like - selective disclosure, because "you can trust us" - is a good idea.
My preference is still a *nix virtual instance running locally (or on a LAN server/my desktop) so that I can keep even better control over environment, keep discrete projects separate and clone dev environments quickly to peers.

VMWare Fusion works out great for this, but FOSS VirtualBox works out too if you want the free route.

The rest of the 37 Signals advice is sound, just do it within the virtual instance.
Also see: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hhedbplnihmkekhgma...
I would think that XMPP would be better fitted for this kind of work for its extensibility. And there is already some work done on end to end encryption for XMPP which maybe could be of use.

Couple things I noticed: The key exchange/renewal seems somewhat centralized to some Dave guy, which I don't like too much. Also the protocol seems to require an additional, new, username for each user which seems kinda odd design for me. And lastly there is the UI problem when mixing encrypted and plain text communication in the same system.
Probably because you didn't add anything meaningful to the comments
The thing is, Reddit started at the same time Digg did. It's been growing slowly and consistently ever since. Their growth rate actually hasn't changed much over time.

Reddit figured out how to support subcommunities in a way that those other sites never did. In my opinion that's what's different.

See also: social networks. Every social network was a passing fad...until Facebook wasn't.
I agree wholeheartedly on that last point - it's all of their fault for not making sure that a giant firewall existed between Arrington and TechCrunch as a part of this announcement.
It's obviously not a pageview drive... This is making AOL look really bad, so if it's a pageview drive AOL is stupid. Especially because of the post MG wrote last night which sounded very honest and blunt.
Remember Reddit Only has one ad per pageview
As the user base grows there is a growing amount of thinly disguised commercial content that sneaks in, often through strategic product placement in pictures.

Since the community is less vigilant than it used to, I assume that the newcomers are less concerned about commerce.
Don’t Style Headings Using HTML5 Sections
Saving all this clicks and checking who clicked in what will require resources and will have a small return.
SHOUTcast's recent week-long on and off outage and subsequent crippling of their APIs is evidence enough of how seriously (or lack thereof) they take some of their properties.
This whole saga is nothing short of confusing. I guess the owners of TC lost sight of the picture when they saw a nice financial exit. They've covered AOL long enough to know how bad things might get. What's really interesting is how AOL managed stay alive all these years and even acquire properties with life in them.
>they're not in immediate danger of being replaced by another aggregate news and/or niche site //

I'd say they're not in immediate danger because they're not making a profit and most businesses that have the sort of money needed to support such an effort (ie the large traffic) don't want to waste money on something that's not going to make a profit. Indeed Conde Nast appear to have only recently and quite reluctantly allowed reddit some more resources.

Explosive growth in traffic, yes, what's the balance sheet look like.