skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't see anything about payment. I run both groovymag and jsmag - monthly PDF publications - and I share the pain of finding and curating good content on a regular periodic basis.

With that, one of the challenges I've had is that in some cases, some authors who might otherwise contribute won't because of the pay we offer. Those for whom payment is a concern end up needing to prioritize our articles lower than other commitments. I'm not complaining - I understand, and have been in that situation myself.

I didn't see anything on CQ about payment terms beyond the writer guidelines:

"Well, we’ll pay you. At the moment we’re not sure exactly how this is going to work, but the basic idea is this: We hope to make money by selling PDFs, print-on-demand books, and ebook versions of our pieces as well as from subscriptions to the print quarterly. That’s revenue. It will cost a certain amount of money to produce the Quarterly and run the web site, etc. That’s expenses. What’s left over is profit and we will split that with you in some equitable way."

For better or worse, with groovymag and jsmag, I committed to paying authors and putting out the issues before I necessarily knew I had paying customers. It was a gamble, pure and simple, but it's worked.

I'd talked with some other people who had suggested (and wanted to pursue) community publishing which would share 'profits' of magazine sales equitably with authors. Interestingly, very few of the authors I spoke to (basically 1) had any interest at all in that. The ones who wanted money just wanted to get paid, not wait around for weeks or get quarterly royalty payment checks from back issues. They just wanted to submit a piece and get paid. Fair enough.

The push for 'community sharing of revenue' doesn't seem to come from the authors that I know. Certainly, if we were talking about numbers with a couple more zeros at the end, they might care, but even people who write long form tech books generally don't do it primarily for the money, as they know they're not going to retire on royalties from a book on CouchDB.

P.S. - if you're interested in contributing pieces on advanced javascript or groovy, ping me at michael@jsmag.com

tl,dr - CQ might have taken off had there been an up-front commitment to kickstart the chicken/egg problem of content/readers by greasing the wheels a bit with some initial purchased content.
I don't this this is much use because it's pretty much made to be a stand alone library. I think what we all want int 2011 is a ways to lift validation rules from the server to the UI automatically. Otherwise we still obviously need to do all the work on the server. Maintain two parallel sources that need to match their behavior is PITA.
What is a QR Code? How to create them, scan them and be inspired by them
I appreciate the time you took to respond. And I just want to say, that in my case, I am willing to stay with Gnome and see what you guys come up with. Right now, I feel like this is an alpha release, and it will get better, and that the vision will be realized.

I am a little worried though. I have been a Gnome user for the past 10+ years, and this is the first time I don't understand the Gnome vision. I really don't know where you guys are going.

A lot of the rants on the web seem to point that before Linux was trying to copy Windows to lure users, then there was a moment of innovation that created the Linux feel. Lately I have read a lot about Linux trying to imitate Mac.

I don't know if it is true. Right now the vision seems incomplete, and using Gnome hurts. And Hurts bad. I can't seem to use a product that I don't understand.I guess I'll wait a couple of versions to see if I can finally understand Gnome.
I think a more apt comparison might be "Californy" or "Californ i a".
Underscore Cheat Sheet
Thoughts about gamification
After decade of social web, is it decade of gaming web?
The validation is being in the bookstore, not whether the book is self-published or not.

I'm willing to bet that if a self-published book is in the bookstore it will be better than 90% of the books in the bookstore because it means that somebody in the bookstore explicitly chose to stock that book rather than being the shovelware drivel that the publisher "recommended" they stock.
Note that this is a Non-Final action - which I believe means that Lodsys has not had a chance to respond. In general reexaminations take a long time...

"Based on our calculations, it takes more than 3 ½ years (43.5 months) for the average case to proceed through the basic reexam process to a final conclusion... A 95% confidence interval suggests an average pendency for appealed cases (again, assuming no rework) is between 5 and 8 years"
http://271patent.blogspot.com/2008/05/another-critical-study...

This is to the point where I'm not sure the courts take reexaminations seriously as a defense. In the handful of patent cases I've paid attention to, the fact that a patent was initially rejected in a reexamination had little impact on how the court proceeded with a case. While it's possible the USPTO will fast track this particular case, if I was a developer currently being sued I would not have any confidence that the USPTO will bring any relief before I was due in court.
I'm reading this, and I'm just dumbstruck that, in over 15 years of development, that this is actually a recommended solution to PHP security. This isn't a knock against your configuration; I'm sure it's (probably) fine for your usage, but whatever happened to properly sanitizing and sandboxing uploaded content?

I mean, I'm trying to imagine another web application language where "attackers can upload whatever (X) file they want" is even a valid case, ever. I mean, imagine a war file being wholesale replaced-- it isn't possible without going out of your way to misconfigure your app server. This, I think, is the base problem with PHP; the default configuration is predicated upon content and code not being segregated at all, and hot redeploy is the norm, without any notification to the admin that it's actually happening.
"Google Mail. Google's gmail app UI is awesome."

Sigh, I can't use the default GMail app and instead have to use Samsung's inferior "Email" app. Why? Google for some reason will not let me add mutliple GMail accounts, and so I'm stuck with the one I initially registered - my silly-named account from my teenage years, which I no longer use to receive email. Apparently lots of people have the same problem, with no sign of a fix from Google.

Other than that, I like Android. Tried using my friends iTouch and it felt amazingly crippled.
(Note: this is dumb, country hick opinion, don't take advice from me.) Apple doesn't pay dividends. So if you are holding apple stock then you expect apple stock to go higher fast enough to be worth holding. What is going to drive that growth? The iPhone market is saturated. The desktop market seems to be holding steady for them. The iPad has been around over a year now so it probably isn't saturated but I doubt it will drive a 5%(or whatever ROI you would like to make) a year growth in the company's stock price.
schiptsov posted, in an apparently auto[dead] post:

> Yes, all those better ways to do the configuration, such as gconf2, oneconf, and other shit is really annoying, same like people who missing power and flexibility of a text file, not an XML but plain old var=value, or, OK, some Yaml.
But what can we do? The mediocre crowds are migrating from windows realms and they like to copy and paste, not to think and learn. ^_^

I just wanted to respond to schiptsov's comment by pointing out that copying and pasting is something you can do if you have a name=value or YAML text file, but not something you can do with gconf-editor. So if there are "mediocre crowds" who "like to copy and paste", they'll be better served by text-based configuration files.
I agree that points on old stories would be useful as it helps in search results - I find myself searching for stuff on HN quite frequently. Today, I was looking into a way of publishing software contracts to clients online so they could sign them digitally and found out about RightSignature, Tractis, EchoSign and SignNow all from searching HN, and some of the stories that were coming up were from 2 years ago.
Reply delays cause "I couldn't reply in the right place, so I'll just reply in the wrong place" comments, which I find even more annoying.
Unrelated, but I'm not sure where I should submit bug reports:

I just tried to submit a story for the first time in a while (weeks? months?) and got the error "You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks."
ev even has a watcher type, ev_async, specifically for waking up the event loop from another thread.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22now+find+the+umbrella%22
As someone in different part of the same field (programming-related writing and publishing), this is sad but unsurprising news. I've had very little success (with a few nice exceptions) dealing with third party writers, even those I offered handsome fees too.

It seems that developers who are actually pretty good at their game are rarely either great writers or the sort of people who really want to be published (enough to get over writer's block, anyway). The people who are good in both of these areas are.. writing books or publishing their own stuff! :-)

It's a hard game to play which is why I've moved more into the weekly newsletter side of things. Instead, I point to the best articles directly on people's blogs, rather than attempt to cajole them to let me publish it separately. It seems to be working, for now.
Startup Cash Crunch? Hardly.
What you say makes sense. But if someone were to learn a little math and then proceed to tell mathematicians how to solve theorems they would be labelled a crackpot.

A person who cannot enrich themselves by learning programming in order to better able communicate their ideas without tempering it with humility and awareness of the vast size of the subject has problems that "learning" to program only made more clear. Like violence and videogames.

Indeed I would argue that they did not learn to program for communication or enrichment purposes. Great Insecurity and megalomania come to mind. That person in a more perfect word should not be leading you.
Priv3, an addon that protects you from being tracked by social networks.
(disclaimer - Puppet Labs employee)

2-3 months is a long time.

We consistently hear 2-6 weeks to get to full production, with 30-120 minutes for some proof of concept work.

And one of the great things about Puppet is you can start very small - automate the parts that are hardest, most critical, etc., and do bits manually as it makes sense for your problem set.

And yeah, managing dev and prod the same way is absolutely critical for clean deployments.
Thanks for your response, is the data you are viewing publicly available?
No one can make an intelligent decision until they know what an intelligent decision is. And everyone starts off at the beginning when they're picking up a new language (or want to start learning).

To be dismissive of those who 'don't know what they're doing' doesn't necessarily help make those intelligent decisions better known and easier to understand, or why they're the intelligent decisions in the first place.
Google JS Test, now in Open Source
So of all the things that might classify a first-world country, you picked a bathtub? Not sanitation, not drinkable water, not reliable electricity... but a bathtub!

Look, some apartments have small bathrooms. For historical reasons, some old apartment buildings even have external bathrooms (or toilets) that are in the hallway/stairway. This is not true about all Copenhagen buildings. But it's true about some, just as it's true that a lot of buildings in London are afflicted with damp, bad plumbing, shoddy wiring and ugly wallpapers.

But I don't think it's fair to dismiss an entire city as being somehow not "civilization" based on the layouts of a minority of its bath facilities.

In fact, it sounds to me like you might just be a bit spoiled. Have you visited any non-first-world countries? Try Ukraine. You will feel like a billionaire.
This is a pretty unfair. He seems self-aware enough to know he probably shouldn't be releasing stuff to production. But there is a long way from "learning to code" to "releasing production code."
Another video about Games for the realworld http://blog.ted.com/2010/08/20/building-the-game-layer-on-to...
I'm not able to quickly find gems within subcomments without actually reading thoroughly

I find, however, that reading subcomments thoroughly is the one and only way to know which are gems and which are just popular cheap shots. There is no royal road to learning mathematics,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Road#A_Metaphorical_.E2.8...

and there is no way to get good information out of written material except by reading it carefully.

After edit: for readers who haven't seen all this before, here is historical background on why Hacker News changed the interface to not showing publicly the karma score of each comment about half a year ago. The site founder, pg, asked for suggestions on how to "stave off decline of HN" in a thread he opened 197 days ago.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

He then announced and experiment of not showing comment karma scores 189 days ago,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2434333

noting that he might change settings back and forth as the experiment continued. 186 days ago he opened a simple yes/no poll about the experiment

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039

and 180 days ago he replied to a question with a preliminary report on how voting behavior has changed,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465271

and now today he has said that he is satisfied with the results of the experiment. He runs the site, and I defer to his judgment about how to run the site, but I must say that I agree that the site has improved since visible comment karma scores were turned off. I can still see MY OWN comment karma scores, and so there is still a reason for readers to vote--to guide the behavior of other people posting comments so that the site guidelines

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

are fulfilled in letter and in spirit and this is a thoughtful, civil community.
I don't think there are. Most of the pieces I publish are in the 2000 word range - some are longer-form series that it takes several months for the authors to put together, so the 'final' series might be 10,000 words or so, but it's done over a long time. Writing and editing that much cohesively is simply too time consuming for most people to do quickly.
If Mark Zuckerberg rubs you the wrong way does that make you less likely to recommend Facebook?
Download Adobe Reader App For iPhone & iPad From Apple App Store
Two points that are specified but somewhat hidden in the article: 1) the 400% number is between Cassandra 0.6 and Cassandra 1.0, 2) the test is CPU bound because the dataset fits very easily in memory.

A lot of awesome work has gone into Cassandra 1.0: many thanks to the Datastax team.
There is also the validationEngine ! not that i'm a developer on it
https://github.com/posabsolute/jQuery-Validation-Engine
PayPal's Identity Service, Gone Too Far
In general, useful is a good thing. A tool that washes your clothes for you is useful, and good. A tool that hammers nails for you is useful, and also good.

Now, a tool that judges what you are reading is useful, but is it good?
Multiple inheritance in programming being so well defined...
The Halloween event that feeds your tech hunger - Techalloween
What are the patents in question? We have no idea if it’s frivolous or not without answering that question.

(It’s fine not to be happy about it, but that’s very different than arguing the merits.)
I'm really surprised that there was almost no mention about the competition between these companies for hiring engineers. If there is indeed a "tech war" coming (and I believe there is) then the company with the biggest and best army of engineers will win and there is a fierce competition among these companies to build those armies.
What's your point? If courts were not aware of such things, there wouldn't be the potential for a large number of convictions to be overturned, would there?
So if the patents are overturned what kind of damages do you get against MSFT for forcing you to license them?
Fair enough. I actually like the way instapaper puts it all together in to one file - i get a kinda of 'personal newspaper' that has it's own contents page etc. And no way I would get through more than 20 articles of reading daily.
It would be pretty easy to add a feature such that once you've seen the karma scores of comments in an article, you can no longer comment on them. That seems like a fair trade to me.
I'm sorry, but he's a fucking moron and an asshole. Even if he'd never learned to code he'd still be screwing up your day. You're confounding his personality with the fact that he learned some programming.
The most important speaker you’ve never heard of, but have definitely heard
Maybe you could sue for damages if you can prove they actually lied about it.
Disallowing access to information, especially if it was previously available, seems contradictory to any hacker ethos.
Do not use viper mode. Use evil, a much better emulation layer from the authors of vim-mode and vimpulse. I also recommend evil-surround.
That worked! Thanks! +1 for you!
I actually liked that post, though I can see why Patrick didn't.
huh, don't know why my search came up empty. Too good to be true :)
Well we know Google can classify what spam sites are.

And assuming they could (despite your arguments against) determine the method of monetization on a site, then simply compare the models they see on spam sites versus another metric which would track the user's reaction to certain types of monetization models.
I think the parent comment is referring to: "PROSPECT SCORE This API enables you to know the purchasing potential of a user visiting your site. Users are classified into Gold, Silver, or Bronze based on their average spending value, frequency, and online transactions. Product details..."

Which, if you had been a Paypal customer prior to this, it might prove difficult to get your spending habits scrubbed if you no longer wanted to be a customer/didn't want your data available in this way.
Freakonomics, Stuff You Should Know
So the essential part of the publisher reduces to a provider of domain-specific loan insurance, where their knowledge of the industry and evaluation of the commercial prospects of your writing informs the risk premium that is charged.
Joe Damato has a great albeit infrequently updated programming blog, http://timetobleed.com/ . I think he wrote the memprof ruby gem. Posts HN may really enjoy:

an obscure kernel feature to get more info about dying processes [1]

a presentation from some ruby conf, particularly slide set 2 which details how memprof works and talks about the abi, etc [2]

plus a bunch of discussion of profiling tools to look at exactly what gcc or your vm of choice are doing. Highly recommended.

[1] http://timetobleed.com/an-obscure-kernel-feature-to-get-more...

[2] http://timetobleed.com/slides-from-mwrc-2010/
A video shot on the iPhone 4S
As a web developer, the Android web browser is now a constant nemesis for me. It's painfully slow and it doesn't adhere to HTML5 standards worth a damn.

iOS5's mobile safari works just like regular Safari, Android's browser, I don't know what it works like, but it certainly is the first thing I'd replace when I got an Android phone.
Agreed. When I'm researching a new topic, I always search hacker news for anything on point. Sometimes that's enough to find exactly what I'm looking for. The collective knowledge here is astounding.

(my first post. Thanks to everyone who contributes, it's been an incredible learning experience since I learned about hacker news 8 months ago. And I say this as a non-hacker. This site has been immensely practical.)
have you guys not tried the search feature at the bottom of the page?
I'm sure the Reddit admins appreciate this. :D
The points don't judge if what I'm reading is useful, they merely indicate how useful others found it. This helps give me context in situations where I am a) inexperienced or b) short on time.
I can't think of any famous lumberjacks for them to interview, but Hell, I'd read it. Even if it was on the order of "this axe, this chainsaw, and this old phone I can use while wearing workgloves", I'd learn a little.
The Case for Downtime
Microsoft is not licensing Google's products. They're licensing their own intellectual property, which happens to be used in Google's products.

I know this sounds absurd to a lot of people, but it makes sense on some levels. Take the names out of the mix and it's a bit easier to detach your emotions

* PhoneCorp invents a new interface that is unique, useful, and makes phones very easy to use

* BizPhones thinks this technology is good and would also like to incorporate it in to their product

* BizPhones negotiates a licensing agreement so they can use the technology, making it possible for more consumers to enjoy the benefits, and fairly compensating PhoneCorp

Things get a little confusing when you have more parties involved. Google doesn't "sell" Android, so there are no fees to extract -- and they'd be expensive to sue -- so rather than chase that ball, Microsoft looks for companies that are making money by selling devices that use Android. Microsoft holds patents for technologies used in the product and is asking for royalties. If a handset manufacturer and Microsoft can find terms they agree to, it makes sense to just license the technology and keep on moving down the road to making more money.

This, in and of itself, does not represent a broken system, IMO. Those who invent important technologies deserve to be compensated. Where the system is broken is in the award of patents for obvious solutions to problems. Or award of patents for systems that cannot be worked around, effectively granting an IP monopoly.

A major roadblock to changing the system lies in the fact that large companies have tremendous amounts of money invested in patent portfolios. We're talking billions, maybe trillions of dollars in aggregate. No one wants to see all that investment washed a way with the flick of a legislative pen.
The kernel folks shoot people regularly for far milder offenses, so that's not really surprising. That said, I don't think we're reading commit logs for the same kernel. I see two-liners routinely in the log (because checkpatch wants the shortlog and a body -- but note that these are often just rephrasings of each other). And the kernel workflow encourages batching up what would otherwise be many small changes into well-formed patch sets, which means that you get a coarser granulatiry of changes than many projects.

And sure, there are patches that go in with elaborate analysis in the commit log. Where those provide good information, I think they're great. Most of the time, they just amount to a BUG() trace stuffed in for no good reason and I find them to be noise.

And I don't see how git blame helps my problem. I have a regression, and an intuition of what kinds of changes might have caused it. A commit log will tell me whether a commit seems like a good candidate to inspect. Git blame just tells me who touched specific lines. If I knew the specific lines to look at, I wouldn't need to be applying intuition here, I'd just fix the bug.
alright, emergency hacking done! you can now add your username to be scraped :)
Sebastian Deiterding's review of O'Reilly's "Gamification by Design"
Real Madrid vs Lyon Live Online Champions League 18/10/2011
WebGL cube reflection
when it comes to unhelpful comments being (sometimes) voted to the top, why is hacker news "one user, one vote"? why not weight the votes? eg. why not weight users by running pagerank over the vote graph?
Noisy? Too many items? They have been growing over the months, admittedly, but there's a lot of noteworthy stuff happening :-)