skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What's the right way to do forums?
Open ended question. What's the "right" way to both conceptualize and implement discussion forums for the community around a product or service?

Forums stem from a desire to facilitate arbitrary and semi-structured user<->user conversations or user<->service owner conversations, possibly with or without moderation.

Is there something better suited to this desire than "forum software" (regardless of whether it does or does not already exist)? I know Get Satisfaction et all are a new approach to user<->service owner, but they really shut out the user<->user community aspect. I'm not aware of any new modalities of user<->user discussions.

If forums are still the best tool we have for this purpose, what are some of the latest and greatest implementations of forums? I like Vanilla quite a bit but their pricing seems a bit steep. phpBB and its ilk seem very dated and bloated. Something like lamernews could be interesting but there are no topical areas, just a pile of unsortable threads of discussion.

Reddit fits in here somehow too I suppose, although a service owner may want to "own" the users rather than outsourcing discussions to some subreddit.

Thoughts?
> Thus, it is more illegal for me to go and buy a DVD which I then play on my Linux laptop than it is for me to just torrent it.

Huh. I have several hard drives filled up with dvds that I've ripped. I always that it was at least slightly less illegal (if not completely legal) for me to do that than it would be for me to just torrent the content.

On the other hand, I'm in the US, so things may be completely reversed here.
I never thought that Google Search would be so laughable.
The price is still looking solid at $25 and $35 (you'll need an SD card and power supply on top of that)

Compare with the BeagleBone which is $89 and has no video outputs on board, but does have a better ARM Cortex chip.

Personally I want both for different reasons :)
With a company, all that matters from an ethical and legal point of view is what's written down on paper and signed by both parties.

Companies are comprised of people. If you break your word and cost the company money, you're costing those people (and the investors) money.

As a business owner, I find it very frustrating how some people's morals seem to not apply to their dealings with corporations. I wonder if it's a lack of familiarity with how businesses are run, and the ease of treating the company as a faceless entity.

You may let down a few people at the first company if you change your mind and take another offer, but if you're a manager at a company then you should be well versed in dealing with the mild disappointment arising from an individual choosing to act in their own interest rather than the interest of the company.

Acting in your own interest is fine. Acting in your own interest contrary to your word is not.

If working for the company is not in your interest, don't accept the offer. It's as simple as that -- nobody's feelings will be hurt. If you need more time, say so. If the company won't offer you more time, don't accept the offer.

However, if you accept the offer and then renege, the people involved are likely going to have a validly poor opinion of your professionalism, ethics, and maturity.
Apple Moves Production to Sharp for TV Debut
lol thank you. I'm luvin it.
"For no reason I know, works of philosophy are compromised by even a typo in the introduction, but in science you can open with a golden shower anecdote and no one notices. Oh well. To the experiments."
I'll have a quick gander at Mint but at the moment i'm favouring Ubuntu, purely because i've had some experience with it.

Excuse the elementary questions that follow, but i really am this ignorant to the whole Linux ecosystem!

What stacks are available? Are there relative merits which may influence my decision, or does it amount to simply picking the one i like the look of and stick with it?

What are the most popular text editors? I'm used to running Visual Studio as my IDE, is Eclipse the only editor that will offer similar depth of functionality? for example, integrated debugging, code completion, refactoring tools

I've actually got a GitHub repo already! What happens if i get bonus points before i get any normal points?! Some kind of exception thrown presumably ha. But then that was on Windows, and whilst i did set it up through the command line (GitBash) i later relied on a GUI tool in my IDE for further interaction.
After reading these comments I think I might have understated my original point - to wit, it's easy to overdo the fun parts, and you need to measure what you are spending on the fun parts, because the true cost might be that of future fun parts down the road (more time to work on cool new technology a year from now) or a lot of money.
Yes, and I meant that it would not be better to do this in JavaScript: It's far eaiser and simpler to have a real Python interpreter be doing the heavy lifting.
I'm unclear as to what you're trying to say there. Are you contending that nuclear power disrupts and ruins more lives than coal power does?
Node.js is awesome, and why I think so
Arch already has 0.6.3: http://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/i686/nodejs/
the article calls it a 'startup hack' but the complicated system it claims to instruct the reader in 'hacking' is the internal workings of actual humans. this should be avoided in favor of real hacking whenever possible.
Intelligence Squared Debate: Do too many kids go to college?
It's difficult to document all the factors that go into a decision because some are common context (and tedious to document all such assumptions). Over time, context changes.

In addition, decisions that turned out to not work are abandoned; decisions that work are kept... showing that the reasons for making the decision may not be the reason it works.

The article assumes we know what we're doing, top-down rather than agile/lean.
Backing out could certainly spike your chances of getting a job with the jilted company in the future, but unless your in a tiny field where everyone knows everyone, no one else will know. Just don't list that company on you're resume.

On the ethics debate, all I'll say is it reminds me of 'The Shining' where Jack, as he's working himself up to kill his wife, argues that her suggestion to leave the hotel is an ethical no-no because his employers have placed their trust in him.

"Do you have any idea what a moral or ethical principal is?" -- Jack Torrance

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfnmwACXvBg

-G
25 Striking Framed Papercuts by Peter Callesen
What happens to authors' commissions with a sale like this? It says on the site that authors get 50%. Do they continue getting 50%, just of a smaller pie? Or do they receive the same amount per book sold and PragProg eats the discount? If the former, do you have to get permission from the authors to do the discount or is it baked into the contract when they sign with you? I have no idea how the publishing industry works and I'm just curious. And thanks for the discount!
Rich - great post. Think your points about SaaS companies and the multiple smaller "seed-esque" rounds makes a lot of sense. We're a SaaS (or perhaps DaaS company for the acronym inclined) that thinks similarly.

One question I'd love to get your perspective on - how did the capitalization raised by competitors such as Get Satisfaction impact your thinking (they've raised a lot more - we track this data). If more money helps acquire more customers more quickly ultimately helping you "own the market", did the idea of raising less ever seem like it could be disadvantageous over the long-term? If what competitors raised didn't impact your thinking at all, why not?

I ask because we've discussed the same question ourselves and so would love to hear your perspective.

And finally of course, congrats on the raise and on building a real business. We have your current round as a Series A and your last year's raise as Seed VC on CB Insights for what it's worth.
Erm, she doesn't really tell us about her Emacs setup, so what's so advanced about it? Especially considering the long list of auxiliary apps that could potentially be replaced by sundry Emacs modes (Mail.app, iCal, Notational Velocity etc.). Her .emacs directory isn't that complex.

I do like the usesthis posts, including this one, and I'm not trying to be too negative, just wondering about the title…
To look at this another way it took 10 years for this crack to be feasible. Not many content protection systems can say that they have stood the test of time for that long.
> You're mixing things up.

I actually agree with him. The point of "at will" employment is that usually firing happens if the employee has done something terribly wrong. Usually they are "let go" for "no reason." It avoids a potential legal mess. Well a reason is given but it is a safe reason "we are restructuring" and such. The real reason could be anything, heck it could be race or gender, as long as nobody puts that in writing it doesn't matter. It would take a long established pattern of lay-offs to prove that a certain group is targeted. But that's besides the point. The point is that the law is presented a "wonderful feature" to new college graduates -- "amazing, you have the freedom to leave anytime". I would guess that most often than not, it is used by companies to get rid of employees. BUT in this one instance, that law can (and should) be applied by the employee.

I really don't like how all of the sudden "morality" starts playing into in. Morality in such instances (mortgage payments and employment) is what is used by the more powerful entity to (company or bank) to keep in check those that are in a less powerful position ("it is immoral to stop paying your mortgage", "it is immoral to quit after 3 days").

The point is that morality doesn't and shouldn't play into it. Usually companies don't follow moral principle but rather legal principle. Smart individual should do the same thing. Otherwise they are and will be abused and taken advantage of.
Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions - Gary Klein
http://www.amazon.com/Sources-Power-People-Make-Decisions/dp...

Also, Gerd Gigerenzer is a good name to look into. My degree is in Decision Science, so I'm slightly biased against some of the pop-sci authors. However Gigerenzer has a number of books that range from highly accessible to the academic. Also, he has served as an editor on volumes that relate the study of mental models/cognition to other fields.

One example is: Heuristics and the Law
http://www.amazon.com/Heuristics-Law-Dahlem-Workshop-Reports...
Today for example, after buying a pack of four HP ink cartridges, I was recommended to buy each of the four ink cartridges individually. Brilliant.

As a book, apparently I'd really enjoy Twilight. Can't wait for that one.

And I have a hundred Kindle sleeves being recommended to me after I bought a decent case for the thing.

So the recommendations vary between things I definitely don't need, and teenage vampire novels.

I want their recommendation page to recommend me good stuff. I adjust the recommendations, but still I get nothing useful at all. sigh
I don't believe that's the case here. This specific instance speaks nothing of how "connected" everyone is, it shows that if you are notable (enough to warrant a mention somewhere online -- as this guy was and that's how he was found) then you can be located easily.

If this guy had been anonymous and unknown I doubt we'd have seen the same result. This also has nothing to do with google+ beyond it being the platform for discussion used, the post could easily replace "google+" with any online discussion platform, hackernews for example.
No I haven't, but I will. Thanks.
Ask HN: Made my first github project, how do I get exposure?
I've just completed my first useful library and have shared it on git-hub (https://github.com/anfurny/ALive-Fields).

But nobody cares, or more realistically, nobody is encountering it. Basically, I've spent a lot of my time sharing this library, and I think people could use it, I just don't know of any good place to connect with those people.

I don't have a blog or a twitter or publicize on (and even if I did I'd still not be sure how to publicize those).

P.S. If this project is redundant because somebody else is already doing it better in PHP, let me know, but I haven't seen anything like it yet.
Add your friends to folkd.com
If you have a cursory understanding of JavaScript and it's syntax i highly recommend you check out some of Douglas Crockford's content: http://javascript.crockford.com/. He is the man who invented the JSON format (if you don't know what that is yet, don't worry, you'll come across it soon enough), and wrote an excellent tool called JSLint. He is an authority on the language.

His website has innumerable musings, explanations and interesting perspectives on all things JavaScript and he links to lots lots of videos of his various talks. His YUI Theatre videos are of particular interest as they are very comprehensive.
One non-obvious benefit of PDO is that it lets you separate data from the query, making it much more secure to SQL injection attacks.

Also, as a rule, never put SQL in the page you're rendering... you want it in another class, away from your code so that you only have to write it once if it's used in numerous places.
By all accounts Wei is a badass hacker in the truest sense of the word. Being able to source the parts on the cheap and basically put it together by himself is remarkable and a testament to good old-fashioned hard work.

I'm going to make a generalization here and say that most Americans have lost this kind of DIY spirit. Instead we just whip out our Visa/Mastercard and decide to just buy what we need on credit. Yes, a solution to the problem nonetheless. But the amount of learning that you gain from doing a project like this should not be underestimated.
By reneging on an offer you may cost the company time but you almost certainly won't cost them money.

More than likely they'll go to the next candidate on the list that they've already interviewed. If there are no other candidates... sorry but that's not the employee's problem.

Personally I'd be more concerned with people who start, work a few months and then up and leave because something better came along. By that point they really have cost you time and money. You've invested in them.

But before they even start? The investment (and thus the commitment) is minimal.

If you've applied for a visa on their behalf, you may be out of pocket (which I'd have a problem with). Relocation expenses? You can pursue recovery of those. If you used a recruiter, a candidate who reneges won't cost you (typically the recruiter must given partial refunds on commissions should the employee leave in the first three months).

As for not accepting in the offer in the first place, this is fine in theory and certainly fine for someone who has experience and is in demand. A new graduate is at a severe disadvantage and may think it's either accept this or get nothing.

If someone reneges on working for you it's typically a minor inconvenience.

If an employer reneges on an employment contract it can often be devastating (personally, professionally and financially) for the candidate, particularly if the typical recruiting season is over and they've declined other offers.

This is not a meeting of equals. When one party is dealing with survival and the other with inconvenience, sorry but you're just going to have to suck it up that some people will accept offers and then renege on them later.
Modify Jekyll for Use With External Links
Possibly on P2P somewhere, but McDonalds guard it zealously.
Great DIY project, but I don't think it was because he couldn't afford one... for $125, you can get a pretty decent tablet in China (a good iPad knockoff or even one with a unique design and a capacitive touch screen).
I do agree with a lot of what you say. But an individual is very much at the mercy of a corporation, which has vastly more resources and more experience of this kind of thing.

Also, a company isn't the same thing as the individual shareholders. They can have the company enforce stricter employment contracts and offer bonuses on signing if they wanted/voted to.

In my view, I don't think you are reneging on an agreement to commence work for a company if you change your mind before that date. Perhaps someone with some legal experience in this area could clear this up.

What I am absolutely certain about is that no individual should feel obliged to go through with what would be a comparatively "onerous contract" willingly.

If a contract does not specify a penalty for changing your mind then you are not only free to do so but, IMHO, obliged as a free human being to take up any better offer in the interim.
This won't solve the immediate problem, but if you use "%r" instead of "%s", python will do the repr() for you.
If you're a lazy person with no work ethic, pickup up trash will improve that. That is inarguable.

I think you're just trying to be difficult because you've posted that you don't like the author. Fair enough, you don't have to like him or even agree with him. But I think you understand the point by now.
Thanks for that. It does seem like Javanco would have prevailed in court had Sun insisted on pursuing the domain. It does make me wonder, if that exact situation arose today, whether the outcome would have been different!
Have you considered putting a caching reverse proxy in front of the arc app to keep the backend from having to render all of the old pages?

It seems like the only dynamic element of old articles is the "$x days ago" bit and that'd be pretty easy to turn into something static by instead just putting in timestamps in the actual HTML and using Javascript to transform them into how many hours / days ago they were. Then the crawlers would just be pulling out cached, pre-rendered HTML.

There's an example of doing such with nginx here:

http://serverfault.com/questions/30705/how-to-set-up-nginx-a...

With that you'd just have to send out the HTTP header from the arc app saying that current articles expire immediately, and old ones don't.
If my washing machine emailed me that would likely get lost in the noise. A Twitter DM is, relatively speaking, more noticeable.

(Although; an actual direct notification service would be even better)
You don't need multiple local copies. That's why "svn switch" exists. That's all I was addressing. Some of the things you knock SVN for are either non-issues or issues with git as well. E.g., "branches exist for all users" is a non-issue. Otherwise it's also a problem when I push a git branch (which is a wise thing to do).

Cherry-picking and speed are legitimate benefits of git.
Turn Your Nervous Speech Habit into An Awesome Presentation Tactic
Can't you take te same approach ClojureScript took, i.e. to generate a straitforward translation to JavaScript, and then let Google's closure compiler take care of the optimizing thing ?

For instance, for this Roy generated JS:

var True = function(){};
var False = function(){};
var getBool = function(b, ifTrue, ifFalse) {
return (function() {
if(b instanceof True) {
return ifTrue;
} else if(b instanceof False) {
return ifFalse;
}
})();
}

The Closure compiler generates:

var True = function() {
}, False = function() {
}, getBool = function(b, c, d) {
var a;
b instanceof True ? a = c : b instanceof False && (a = d);
return a
};
Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous to see how often this proves to be true on the various social networks (especially reddit).
I can't speak for the publisher, but my understanding is that you get 50% of a smaller pie, and the publisher is free to run any promotion without having to ask for permission.
Private news-servers (with strict community standards and moderation or after-moderation) is one method; although it's pretty tricky explaining it to most of your users and it's not fun to set up.
http://www.codecademy.com
This is an interesting question. I'd say it's a mix of technical and social factors. Technically it's a solid abstraction (versioned directories), it's ridiculously fast (specially when compared to most alternatives at the time, even local ones), and somewhat space efficient (if you're not keeping binaries around). Because the format has been specified from the beginning it's easy to build all sorts of tools on top of it and add as much knowledge as you want, including line-by-line diffs, rename tracking, etc. It also ignores some hard problems people were focusing on at the time (merges, for example).

Socially, it first had a big userbase because the kernel is a large enough project and the switch was made top-down as far as I remember (not everybody was forced to do it but it was much easier if you could). This means a lot of people had to get acquainted with it, and this set of people turned out to be somewhat competent at changing it to make it faster, more stable, and easier to use (up to a point). Linus's personality played an important role here, as he entertainingly made a case for why it was good, which created a certain "cool factor". Second, there was the github factor which allowed this user base to explode exponentially by making it really cheap and easy to use.
Didn't they declare DVD ripping legal recently in UK?
If someone can't figure out what it is in the first 30 seconds, they move on -- and that's being generous. The truth is probably more like 8 seconds.

And in 30 seconds I have no clue what your project is, does, or what problem it solves.

Oh and your README isn't IN the README. Seriously?!
Anyone know if this is also a common issue with BingBot? Our site is doing fine in Google at the moment, but was completely deindexed by Bing, and we're totally baffled.
Seriously, how do you determine that his blog is low quality?

Disregarding your insult, your question is an interesting one. If someone could bottle the answer, they would have all the freedom they needed.
> Sure, it might be im(ex?)plicitly allowed by the contracts you sign, but that doesn't change the fact that you are acting unethically.

But why does that matter? The point is that it should be irrelevant. Ethical considerations are obviously not deterring these companies from exercising their offer strategies. Why should young graduates be made to feel guilty by also playing a counter-strategy?
I think it is a legitimate question.

I picked up git because I know I needed to use SOMETHING for version control. Looking around a few years back I saw CVS, SVN, and the rest.

So I Google/ask around. I see that git is getting mentioned pretty regularly. I also see Hg being mentioned. I basically search for free hosting for both. Github just seemed more friendly. The UI was bigger and easier to read than bitbucket. So I just went with git.

Often it is the stupid reasons that people adopt something: it looks nicer, my friends are using it, I can pronounce the name.
There was funny slide in our deck where I list out us, our competitors and the amount raised:

GetSatisfaction - $21MM

Zendesk - $25.5MM

UserVoice - $0.8MM

:)

My take away from that is that the delta is so large that we're not going to beat those guys by out-raising and out-spending them. I don't know that we would really know how to do that anyways. It's just not who we are.

If we're to "own the market" we'll do it our way: by building the best product and creatively marketing it. We don't (currently) need tons of money to do that.
If you have family or anyone near to you that feels the holiday is important then please take the day off. It makes life easier for them and I'm willing to bet that you could really use a day off, too. It is only one day.
I was quite surprised by Tellme thinking that 10 am was 'teen anal'