skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's a bit of a jump to imply that if I don't actually delete the data that I don't care about ethical practices nor my users.

For me, at least, it all depends on what 'delete' means to the user. There are some people out there that want 'delete' to mean "I don't want this stored anywhere anymore". There are other users that want it to mean "I don't want to see this anymore".

Unfortunately, people in both groups sometimes regret deleting stuff. Those in the first group accept the responsibility, however some people in the second group feel as though it's a problem with the system that they are using when they cannot restore the data easily. There are a lot of people that appreciate the "Recycle Bin" in Windows and never empty it.

Now, I've written a number of systems over time and I've implemented 'delete' in most of them. Sometimes I do an actual delete, sometimes I set a flag. It all depends on what I expect my users to actually want. It's got nothing to do with trying to exploit them for capital gain though, that's for sure!
Spotify support staff quote from that discussion thread

--
Hey Guys thanks for your question, Unfortunately you will need a Facebook account to access Spotify from now on, unless you already have an account set up.

This does not stop you creating the Facebook account adding nothing to it and making it totally private as the Facebook account does not have to be actively used.
--

Couple of things to note:

1. If you already have a Spotify account, you don't have to connect to Facebook.

2. They seem to be encouraging a bogus Facebook account as a way to use Spotify "privately"?
This is as good a thread as any to say this:

I'm getting tired of these "launch to gauge interest or collect potential users" pages.

I've seen a lot of discussion and encouragement of these things, here on HN and related sites, within the last few months. It sounds like great advice and a good practice. It may even work. I signed up for one or two when I first started seeing them, in the context of "Oh, this is what those HN posts are talking about."

I don't bother anymore.

When I land on one of these, it leaves me absolutely cold. I click on a link because I'm interested, even excited in rare cases. These things throw cold water on me. "Here's a cool thing! ... But we'll show it to you later. !"

But that's me. If they work, great, I suppose. Maybe I'm not part of the desired demographic.
"What's in a name anyway?"
yeah, there's something in a name, it is always good to have a good convention and style in programming

But I agree with @Kototama
Facebook continues to track you even when you've logged out
I'm sure they will go bankrupt now because you decided not to sign up.
Are there alternatives to Spotify's current business model of free on the PC?
It's useful because 3 hours and 2 minutes are figures that I can easily remember, 53B and 600M not so much.
A reply from Darren, a Spotify employee:

"Hey Guys thanks for your question, Unfortunately you will need a Facebook account to access Spotify from now on, unless you already have an account set up.

This does not stop you creating the Facebook account adding nothing to it and making it totally private as the Facebook account does not have to be actively used. "

This is asinine.
There is actually, and here on HN it's encouraged behavior to expand upon your opinions and debate the subject in detail.

Why is it "ewww" for you? What would be a better solution? What are the pros and cons of this decision for Spotify, for FB and for the user?
A baby who do not have diapers, but a paper cup
The word programming is distorting the real value of the subject, I think. It's easy to think of programming as something that is done with and to computers exclusively, but that's a sort of guilt by association.

Programming, at its base, is really a method for understanding and defining a process. It's about breaking a big task down into its component pieces. It's about turning one large, nearly intractable problem into a series of easily understood and fundamentally soluable problems.

If programming is taught in this context, with an emphasis on methods for problem-solving in general rather than language syntax in particular, its utility in the everyday life of the average person becomes a lot more obvious. I used simple programming as a part of a worker re-education program that included basic literacy and numeracy, and it proved to be very effective in the overall success of the students -- even with no expectation that programming would play a part in their later lives. It made other things easier for them to do, and if that's the only value that the "average" student gets out of a programming course, it seems like enough, doesn't it?
I am outside the poll options, multiple times a day but nowhere near one hour.
Blending With Noise
I just signed up days ago and they only required email. I guess I got lucky.
The point is they should've been making money a lot sooner. I'd agree they aren't real businesses because they AREN'T MAKING MONEY. That is sort of the definition of a company no?

How young they are? That is a criteria for whether a company should be making money or not? The point of any company really is to make money. These "startups" aren't filing as non-profits right? So they should be making money. If after the first couple months of being open you aren't figuring out how to make money you've done something wrong.

EDIT: Let me edit this to make it more clear. They should be self-sustaining. They should be able to pay their bills and employees. Whether they make a profit or not isn't the point. But if a company doesn't get funding and that alone causes them to disappear then they've done something wrong.
It's not a paid site, they use the freemium model. I have an account and they don't have my billing info. Millions of other people are in the same boat.

(I also will never use anything that requires a Facebook login other than Facebook itself.)
Not a spotify user but I feel gross and icky just reading about this. This is so transparent. I wanna take a shower
Hilarious that internal staff are recommending ways to "get around" the requirements. This shows, or possibly proves to me that this decision was a last minute condition set by FB and the Spotify staff are probably not uniformly thrilled about it.
1and1 major outage [up again]
Tech City UK: Britain’s Silicon Valley? How about Silicon Alley?
http://blog.untogether.co.uk/post/10662779150/tech-city-uk-britains-silicon-valley-how-about
Grooveshark? Although legally, it's in a grey area...
There's an unanswered question on this in the class's internal forum: http://www.ml-class.org/course/qna/view?id=17
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3035418
The intersection of stimulating-to-develop-projects with those that people will pay money for is quite large. However, the intersection of liberating-and-enjoyable-life-opportunities with i-don't-have-any-money are not that large.
Permanently delete Facebook account (not just deactivate)
Dippy Bird Binary Clock
Nothing before in the history of man has had so much potential to change lives as programming does. And at little more cost than time. Incredible advances in every conceivable field are enabled by computers which must be driven by programmers.

We need more people to understand programming from a young age so they can intuitively understand and more effectively use their devices' capabilities, and also so there are more people in more fields equipped to identify + communicate positions where software could provide automation or assistance.
Am I not the only industrial automation guy lurking around here?
Let this be a reminder. If you use a streaming music service, they can pull you any stupid trick. If you do not accept, well, you'd better hope there is an alternative the provides a comparable catalog.

Once you own non-DRMed music, they can't take it away.
Apparently not, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas_generator

You can see one in an old movie clip on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11FB83YxoeM skip up to about 3:10.
This is a sign of desperation from Spotify. Their product is far from unique, and only really interesting because it has better PR, more apps, a better library, and a slightly more legit licensing setup than the competition.

None of those are big enough barriers to entry to keep even the small players away, meanwhile the big dogs are starting to show a lot of interest in streaming music (admittedly for music you "own" at the moment, but it would surprise noone if this were to change overnight).

Apple has the marketing weight and a history of solving music licensing issues, Google has a track record of throwing money at problems to solve them, and Amazon is just about to make a major hardware play.

Spotify's only real hope was to latch onto the latest big thing (conveniently an infrastructure provider, so unlikely to launch a direct competitor) and hope to ride to success on someone else's coat-tails.

I have no idea what the contracts between the two companies look like, but I would have to imagine that they are heavily in Facebook's favour. After all, it would be a lot easier for Facebook to replace Spotify with another provider than it would be for Spotify to replace Facebook.
Good code isn't written, it's re-written.

Omit needless code. Omit needless code. Omit needless code.
> Trader Joe's

TJ's and pretty much all grocery stores just relabel another brand that's out there.
If you object to Facebook on other grounds, you're basically screwed. Some people refuse to eat shellfish or ham. Why is not using Facebook any different?
Borland's Turbo C editor -> Emacs.
>I'm not a engineer, I'm an entrepreneur.

This is what turned me off the most, actually.
Partial application in Javascript
A few videos on implementing partial application in Javascript.
The new iPhone...
The legality of Grooveshark's business model is Groovehark's problem. Just using it passively as a music consumer is likely fine.
I read that too, with a grain of salt and subsequently did a 'find . -name "*er.java"' just to see. 23 out 148 matched in one of my projects. Cursorily, half of them are nouns and the other half are a combination of Loader, Manager and Handler. :)

I think its more a case of doing what I've seen done before. Maybe some "angry monkey" but maybe more like "Hey, that seems like a good way to do it."
>But if the U.S. does conquer salt, what will we gain? Bland french fries, for sure. But a healthy nation? Not necessarily.

This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure."

The article goes out of its way to dismiss the other impact of "French Fries" on health, obesity, and the role which salt plays in making manufactured food with low nutritional value habit forming.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061101151027.ht...
Food has become a statement of moral worth for at least some people. For them, there are morally righteous ways to eat, and other options are sinful. (Swap food for sex if this distinction is a bugbear to wrap your head around.)

If you believe that fast food is essentially sinful but also that poor people are essentially good, then there must be a reason why poor people can't eat like righteous people like yourself eat. Hence things like the economic argument.
For whatever e-petitions might be worth, here exists a "Teach our kids to code" petition http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/15081, started by Emma Mulqueeny (http://mulqueeny.wordpress.com/2011/09/15/teach-our-kids-to-...)
Both PeepOpen and CommandT for vim offer superior file switching functionality (by fixing a problem with Textmate's version whereby it does not take the directory into consideration, which can really help narrow down a search).
I don't see this as different than from the last time the developer said "Hopefully an alpha version will be ready before too long..." back in 2009. I hope he proves this wrong, though.
Smaller functions tend to be more reusable leading to fewer LoCc per codebase, which could overcome the bugs/LoC penalty.

Also, considering the date, this research could be influenced by the bug-prone-ness of parameter passing in C as a non-memory-managed language.
The VC - Excellent Comic on VCs and Startups
It's interesting that this question keeps getting mod'd up and then mod'd back down again. Elephant in the room? For as successful as Tumblr's growth has been, my guess that it's in large part due to the platform distributing a bazillion free porn images and videos. I would be curious to know how much of their traffic is actually porn. My sense is it could be > 80%.

Fwiw, I have nothing against porn. I think it is part of what powers the internet. But I think it's disingenuous to tout the success of a site when you're giving away something for free (much like free music or videos) virtually everybody wants.
This is the way everything is going, like it or not. The benefit to the publisher is too great. This seems to be one of those things that developers can't stand but normal people either don't care or actually prefer.
What I personally think is interesting is that, as close as we are to OpenBSD 5.0, there are still no patches for 4.9. I don't recall a release that went without patches.
Agreed. The reason I end up with some '-er' classes is to separate out immutable definitions and the classes that work on the definitions. In your example, by making the FlowchartShape a simple definition class, you can then write that to a file or send it over the network as a snapshot of the state of the -er classes.

If the article's advice was taken, you'd end up renaming WebServer to be WebPage, but then would have nothing to name a WebPage. (Maybe WebPageSnapshot?)
> Guess what a photocopier does? Or a scanner? An eraser? An elevator?

Or a Coffee-Maker... Instant factory pattern.
Looking for co founders
I'm looking for co founders for a project.

Preferably a designer but would certainly consider taking on another hacker and designer.

Any routes you guys would suggest?
Everything old will be new again, just give it a few more years.

Once everyone is on a single service that all looks the same, individual websites will become the "cool" thing again.
Those guided missiles while very explosive can be delivered with some shockingly accurate precision. I believe it was a recent Frontline where I heard they could guide these missiles through a car window (no reference sorry) of a moving vehicle.

The high explosive part seems more for insurance than a requirement for a successful hit.

Civilians of course don't have access to this stuff, but if the military has the capability now, it will eventually trickle down.
I'm sure you're right, and not necessarily in any insidious manner. There's any number of entities that we won't actually purge when deleted from our system here. For example, when a sales rep wants to get rid of a Quote, we can't necessarily dump it, because we'll need a future record if there has already been a customer order placed against that quote. Sometimes the integrity of the system, and the ability to look at history in a (unfortunately necessary) CYA view, demands that some data be "deactivated" rather than deleted.
Good thing I have no desire to use either one.
Or that they realize that a tiny but vocal minority is going to gripe about the decision, and that for these folks a work-around might be the best solution.
Microfunding for Solar Energy
typical hacker news: someone says something that someone else takes too literally and subsequent blog posts/arguments/flame wars ensue
MIT Startup Bootcamp 2011: Notes and Musings
I check FB every day - but I'm a somewhat reluctant user of it. Whilst both Google and FB track my personal usage of the web, I actually trust (in loose terms) Google more - mainly because I know they use it for advertising (which I'm fine with), but that others (general public, friends etc) can't see what I do.

I have a huge aversion to FB cos I'm never sure what info I have is private. Their 'privacy' measures are a joke when every update they make to FB means I have to double check what my settings are, and test to see what is being published that I'm unaware of.

As a result, whilst I still use FB to stay across what my friends are doing, I've stripped out all profile info on my account, any photos that I'm tagged in (by myself or others) become only viewable by my 'personal friends' group, and my privacy settings are set pretty high. I have also found that the frequency that I post status updates has dropped to almost zero. So the more FB tries to make 'frictionless sharing', the more I find I'm moving to other places like Google+ and Twitter - places I feel I have a degree of control.
VoIP packet Loss - What Is VoIP packet Loss
When internet is being used for communication then sometimes there is a chance that the data that is sent to specific destination may not reach there in time or even it may never reach the destination
I'll take a guess at the pros and cons for spotify:

Pro: some users like the integration and the social features that it gives them. This doesn't explain why it's now mandatory, or why it's become mandatory right now.

Pro: Has Spotify done some kind of deal with Facebook, and Facebook insisted on this? I put "pro" since I assume that Spotify also got something out of the hypothetical deal.

Con: There are some users (like myself) who think that facebook knows enough about me already, and really do not want to integrate them into anything. I like the face that the web is not an extension of the facebook machine.

As an existing Spotify user this policy does not apply to me (yet?) but it's repellent. As a paying Spotify user I don't feel that I would be obliged to put up with that. I don't complain about FB too much since hey, I didn't pay anything for it and no-body actually forced me to use it. I know, "if you're not the customer, you're the product" - but with Spotify, I bloody well am the paying customer, they've got my money, they don't need to sell me to Facebook. They can take their Facebook integration and GTFO.

Edit: a friend has suggested that Spotify are angling to be bought by Facebook, and this will help them integrate for that.

It's worth noting that Spotify used to have optional facebook integration, i.e. "the standard Facebook - or - Default sign up page", and they have taken the effort to remove this for new signups. There must be some reason for actively removing this choice, and I don't think that "mass-market users are confused by having 2 different choices" is it.
Supplementary information
http://davidscameracraft.blogspot.com/2011/09/occupy-wall-st...

http://twitter.com/#!/search/bologna
Quake reignited my passion for computers after I spent several years off focusing on automobile related hobbies.

I had been exposed to Linux before but Quake was what caused me to run it on the desktop at first. The networking stack was significantly better than on Windows. It also caused me to learn scripting in a unix environment to parse logs on the server we placed at my brother's office.
The composable programming evangelists (off-shoot from the movement to minimize mutable state) ague that the hifhest-quality software is always a small program that composed other small programs, recursively until all the desired functionality is accumulated.
Ask HN: Who is innovating in online health & medical startups?
I've been hearing lately a lot about that a huge wave of innovation is happening in online/mobile health.

What examples do you know about innovation in health?
The argument seems to be:

1. I was told not to do X.

2. I did X and I like it.

Therefore:

3. “Learn from your own experiences and beware of anyone espousing the virtues of the One True Way.”

This is motherhood and Apple pie. It sounds like wisdom, but it doesn’t follow logically from his example even if you agree with his feelings about his code.

By way of a counter-example, We could pick millions of lines of terrible PHP and Javascript. These were all written by people who learned from their own experiences and didn’t follow any dogmatic rules or guidelines.

Why is it that sometimes breaking the “rules” is a good idea but sometimes it isn’t? For a blog post to be useful, it should propose some sort of repeatable criteria for when to defy thirty years of experience/folklore with OOP and when to respect it.

Again, I am deliberately avoiding agreeing or disagreeing with his example, just pointing out that the conclusion as stated isn't really useful.
BBEdit's find functionality is _much_ better and doesn't require you to set up annoying project files. (Needless to say, BBedit is also well-supported.)

Textmate was an inspiring piece of software when it first came out, but it barely runs under Lion (I fired it up to verify that find-in-project was as I remember, and it crashed on the way out), and still has one-character-at-a-time undo/redo which is unbearable.
Bottom line on why auto-sharing sucks: Just because you read an article on the Washington Post or click play on a random song you found doesn't mean you like it and want to share it. You might be promoting a article you hate, disagree with, or find boring.
I think it's the "skin color" part of that statement most would object too.
The tradeoff between "Lost registrations" and "Extra engagement through everyone having a linked Facebook account" must be an interesting one.
Wow, a Rover SD1 that's actually still running.

I think that's much more impressive than people finally finding a good use for coffee.
Ha, awesome :) Love the picture of the Saab, in the Wiki entry.
Tumblr is one of the few companies who can potentially dethrone Facebook (if you have younger family members ask them if they use Facebook or Tumblr more), a company which has a multi-billion dollar revenue stream while still in the early stages of monetization.

It's easy to forget that Google didn't have a revenue stream for a long time. If you're solving a problem for users then there's going to be a way to monetize it, the bigger question is if the revenue per user is higher than the cost per user. Given Tumblr's costs per user is relatively low that shouldn't be a problem.

If they chose to switch on ads tomorrow even using remaindered ad suppliers they would have $100m+ in annual revenues.
This is just the beginning. Facebook and Spotify set a nice precedent there to make it en-vogue to just provide a Facebook login for services in the future.

For whoever builds the service, it's (marginally) easier to just use FB as an authentication provider and they even get to spin it as "with us, you don't need to store the 1000st password - you can just use Facebook".

For Facebook, of course, it's great too as it is one more thing to force people to stay logged in, which in turn is much better data for them.

The end users probably wouldn't care either as they are mostly logged into Facebook anyways and if not, it's easy for them to just log in.

The only losers are us professionals who know about the implications of such a move and who care about the loss of privacy.

And of course the people who had their facebook account suspended for either legitimate reasons or just some oversensitive SPAM protection algorithm. These people are now locked out of their, possibly even paid, account, unable to access it (and remove credit card info). Of course these will be the minority and people won't care.

Until it's them that are affected.

I can understand that in this day and age you want to provide the users with an option to authenticate with something else than yet another username and password. Google, Twitter, Yahoo or even any OpenID provider (maybe your own). Sure.

But just Facebook? This is trouble waiting to happen.

I'm saying this as somebody who can't have Spotify anyways due to the complete brokenness of the licensing market, but this still concerns me as it's just another precedent and I'm just waiting for another service I love to force me to use Facebook.