skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That was betabeat, not the people behind the course.

I think it's a bit silly to gripe about a course being available. Just don't take the course! I understand proposing better alternatives on the list but I don't understand saying that the course shouldn't exist. Maybe the alternatives are better for most people, but for a few people the course is better!
LinkedIn is probably a good comparison. I too heard about it years and years ago, but only got around to signing up for it this year. I figure Google+ will be similar for most people, as long as Google keeps the updates coming like they have been.
funny title
Ask HN: Why are off-topic articles upvoted on Hacker News?
I'm confused as to why the Hacker News community supports the submission of blatantly off-topic articles. For example, currently the number 5 submission is "I Think You're Fat", which is an article about lying. It has 102 upvotes in 3 hours. Why are articles like this upvoted?

I understand that not all submissions should be about the tech world, but they should be intellectual at a minimum. Although there is some definite gray area, here are the Hacker News Guidlines:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
It's so disappointing when people get up in arms over things like this. So someone decides to put on a class for $2,800? If you wouldn't pay that, don't go. If you don't think it's a good value, you should be free to voice your opinion: "I don't think this is a good value because of X, Y, and Z." There's no sense in getting worked up over it.
The sort of people who are motivated enough to buy a book or download a tutorial, read it, and build something aren't the audience for this class. These simply are two different groups of people.

You see this in the gym: there are two groups of people that see trainers. The first are highly motivated people who go occasionally because they want a technique touch up or training tips or to discuss their routine with someone more knowledgeable. The second are people who go three times a week because they need motivation and affirmation. These classes are the same.

Hell, you could probably hire zed shaw or someone similar for $200 per half hour to give you hands on tutoring for any sticky spots and come out way ahead.
> I would like to further suggest we end the use of the word "war" in contexts that do not involve mandatory conscription and the deaths of large numbers of combatants until one side totally surrenders.

This is totally orthogonal to your main point, but by this definition the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan would not qualify as wars.
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Ask HN: Is it time to take SOPA protests to the streets?
We have collectively written thousands of articles educating about effects of SOPA. We have made phone calls and created special websites etc.

But, we are still on the same stream of funny cats and Lady Gaga. We may know the magnitude of effects of SOPA, but general public cannot gauge it, because they may very well misunderstand as, yet another "save whales", "drunk driving" campaign.

I think we can do better, when freedom is on the line.
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Apparently EngineYard was pressured behind the scenes into merging Merb with Rails because they didn't want to lose their status as an 'official' Rails host.

You're probably in the best position to shed some light on this, since everything I know about it is hearsay.
I think the Radical Honesty approach goes too far, but the kernel of truths that I've personally found useful are:

1. vulnerability (i.e. telling the truth about your feelings) promotes intimacy

2. boldly saying what you think does indeed help with picking up women
Samira The Girl in the Bubble (HTML5 game)
I've made another reply at the site:

So the invading force goes into the Oort cloud, picks a chunky rock, attaches a giant thruster to it and begins accelerating it towards c. A day later, the speed of the rock has reached 0.5c.

Hours later, a defending fleet arrives, shoots and kills all the invading bds. The rock however, continues at 0.5c even though the thruster and guidance systems were destroyed. It reaches the asteroid cluster, and hits... nothing. It keeps going to the other side of the solar system, and as its speed was so high, exits orbit.

Accelerating a giant rock to c takes throwing out alot* of gas. The asteroid based civilisation, to prevent random impacts with random asteroids, would've been tracking every object in the belt. One of the rocks suddenly accelerates, I think it will be picked up.

Also, when the asteroid was accelerating, its direction would've been picked up. Once accelerated to c, it will still take hours to arrive at the designated target. The home asteroids simply have to maneuvre away from an intercept course. And no, guidance systems on the accelerated rock won't help. It's travelling at c, and by the time the system finds out the target has moved away, the asteroid would've missed it. Unless the asteroid have 100% maneuverability, and energy to change course whenever, however it likes. But if the asteroid can do that, any asteroid can do that. ;)

So your only option is accelerating the rock from the next system onwards. It will now take years for the asteroid to arrive. To reduce the probability of a successful attack, just have a "random thruster day" every 30 days where all the home asteroids just move randomly to different locations. By the time the enemy asteroid arrives the location of all the home asteroids would've been different. The probability of hitting anything worth hitting will be very low. Even if you have 1000 incoming asteroids.

Also you're assuming you won't get picked up accelerating an asteroid to c in the next system; Remember, asteroids have no atmosphere and 100% visibility. You might miss 1, but 1000? I'd doubt it. if 1000 asteroids are really incoming then you just make every day random thruster day. ;) They have so much energy, you should too.
Frankly, I don't use other distributed file systems. All seems more complicated than necessary. Please correct me if anything here is wrong.

Compared to MogileFS: WeedFS has 2 components, directory server and storage nodes. MogileFS has 3 components, tracers, database, and storage nodes. One more layer means slower access, more complexity, more fail possibility.

Compared to GlusterFS: WeedFS is not POSIX compliant, and has simple implementation. GlusterFS is POSIX compliant, much more complex.
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Nope. Dick is a nickname that many people with the first name Richard use, but it's both rude and incorrect to use the name Dick for a Richard who doesn't go by Dick.
It means you know where to look for unencrypted credit-card data. That could come in handy!
Echoedd.com - exchange of news, ideas, informations in general. No noise. Crazy?
For the ones who do not prefer reading longer posts: please go to echoedd.com, check it out and tell me what you think. Thanks<p>For others that don't mind spending a few minutes on a, hopefully interesting, story...here it is:<p>I've made a system like a month ago, which would enable people to submit to and get the most interesting ideas, news, videos...etc...from the world (each city, country..would be included, big or small... Big dreams right?). I guess I could describe it as "Twitter (or even Facebook) without the noise...oh and it's location based".
Up until now I was thinking whether I should publish it or not, but considering the fact that it's my b-day today (yeeehuu)...here it is (http://www.echoedd.com). Hopefully, someone will find it useful.<p>I'm embarrassed by the design, part of the code. and a few more things.
I know, I know, not everything works, but it will - very soon, but even besides that feel free to be brutally honest and tell me what you think.<p>It's 6a.m. here. Time to go to bed...<p>Thanks.<p>Mladen
@madmadjo (twitter)
@max (echoedd)
>I find Wikipedia to be an assortment of western media biases.

That you find that I won't contest. I'd point out that one might also see local biases in non-western language wikipedia articles. So to me, that point is kind of tangential. I'd rather say that everything has some inherent bias, rather than couching it as wikipedia having an especially (western) bias, as if other sources could be bias-free.
There is another issue here as well that isn't being considered.

If you look at the 2010 Financial Report that lists contributors there are a few foundations that give wikimedia more than 1 million. And there are 6 that give between 100,000 and 999,999. And then even more that give other varying amounts. As well as obviously individuals.

That's money that isn't going to other non-profits and potentially non-profits that wouldn't be able to sell advertising and raise money that way. They can only rely on donations and foundation money to support their cause.

https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports#2011....

(pdf:)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/common/4/48/WMF_AR11_...
So, in the absence of strong AI, it's vastly more efficient to actually have a few humans on board the ships.

Have you done the math on that? Humans (and more importantly their life-support systems) are hugely, hugely expensive in terms of the carrying capacity of a space ship.
Well, that may be what you were thinking, but it isn't what you said.
This post seems a little too narrow in focus. Sure, there are some hands down winners like white board markers and video dongles.

But your own printer? Coffee and soda at your doorstep? It's healthy to get up, stretch out and walk around a bit. Healthy to socialize in the copy room too.

Are the productivity gains really that great at the margin? I suspect the extra minute you save by not walking to a printer is just shifted to an extra minute on Twitter or Hacker News.

The general concept is a useful one to keep in mind, but as with all productivity pron, there are limits.
From what I understood, small claims court are limited to monetary damages only. I.e. if you can not clearly show what monetary damage you suffered, there is no small claim case.
The proprietary license makes the images all but useless.

I guess I can look at them without fear of being sued. That's something.
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I find the comments given as examples of the "blowback" against the post very typical of programmers and fairly revealing.

First, does anyone doubt the value of learning Ruby is much greater than $2,800? I imagine the course is targeted at someone without any programming experience[1], which only increases its value.

Second, not everyone can teach themselves to code. It's an easy trap for us programmers to fall into, since we can often pick material up on our own. But we do call it "code" for a reason -- this is difficult stuff!

Third, many objections focus on the high price of the course. That's absurd -- it only establishes a higher value on the skillset those programmers already possess! We clamor for managers and sales people to just learn to program a little bit -- one way of conveying that value is to capture more of it in the training programs.

Fourth, these courses are just an option. Their existence doesn't threaten all the awesome free Rails courses out there.

It strikes me as a little bit of trademen unions. As if we want new programmers to pass the "self taught" trial by fire initiation ritual.

[1]I also understand the objection to the forum in which this course was offered; however, the primary objections in the article seemed to be focused on the cost of the course, rather than the manner in which it was advertised.

(edit, formatting)
Maybe we're witnessing the diluting of the community? My first instinct would be to say "yeah! Seriously! What's up with that?" but then if you think about it for even a second you see that the reason is because these are the kind of stories hackers are either finding interesting or are intellectually stimulating to them.

The problem with vague guidelines like the ones here are that what qualifies as meeting those guidelines changes with the community. This could be a good thing in cases where the community is made up of all high caliber individuals that are simply maturing or changing as a group but if those changes are a result of the community simply being diluted with riff raff then it turns against us.

Anyway, I know what you mean. I don't think anyone can definitively say you're right or wrong or if this is a good or bad thing. It's just a pattern to be interpreted.
I don't understand this defeatist attitude, just because other people have complained and nothing has changed doesn't mean that people shouldn't continue complaining, especially a prominent blogger like Dave Wiener. If people keep shouting into the interwebs maybe something will happen, maybe the next registrar searcher will find this article in google or maybe enough people pull out the pitchforks that it forces GoDaddy to at least pretends it's changing. We don't have to live in the crappy world that we do, we can change it.
Edit: Well wouldn't you know, this just happened:

http://i.imgur.com/ESojw.png

Typical of what I see. This is a fresh Firefox profile, no cache, no extensions. It's also not a network problem, since I don't see this on other sites, even other Google properties like search or Gmail. It's unique to G+
You are thinking of a space ship as similar to an airplane, a tank or a ship.

In truth it is more analogous to a bullet or bomb - point it in the right direction and try and get it there as fast as possible.
That's what I do also. But isn't it avoiding the problem? If IDE would focus more on "unconfusing" nesting I wouldn't have to do this.
Well my point stands, ambushes can be held in atmosphere.

Let's say enemy fleet regularly uses the planet to make a "gravity-assisted course correction"...
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But it doesn't make any sense. It's like a final clause was left off.
But then you end up with coffee queues before meetings, people who don't clean the machine when they're done, and (in the case of the Keurig) tons of noise.
Gladwell vs. Shirky: Year later scoring the debate of social-media revolutions
If you have dedicated sick leave pay that's fine. However, sick leave is unheard of in some countries. Why would you force someone to take annual holiday time off to be sick or, worse, unpaid leave. Then they would be even more miserable than just being sick.
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I call this saturation - if I spend five minutes looking for the scissors, I've already spent more time than another pair of scissors is worth. So I increase the concentration of the scissors solution by buying another pair of scissors. Eventually I reach an equilibrium between known pairs of scissors and whatever process is removing them from the knowable - at that point, my scissors solution is saturated.

Repeat for all other items in the solution until you have a broth you can work in.
New Amazon S3 Feature: Object Expiration Using Bucket-Level Policies
Gmail might be 'the best', but not enough to get a everyone to switch. So, IMO it's a question of where your suck threshold than anything specifically wrong with Hotmail / yahoo.
Say if Facebook donates a million dollars a year, Wikipedia would be incentivized to treat Facebook favorably.

Obviously this doesn't happen, but that is one of their arguments against advertising.
Because the boxes draw the attention away from the code you're working on & to the boxes.
Exactly. XBox's and iPhones are not the "world's infrastructure". The real infrastructure of the world runs on big iron mainframes, SCADA systems and whatever Cisco puts on their hardware.
Letter to StraightTalk
I purchased phones through Straighttalk for my wife and I several months ago and have been very happy w/ the service received until now. I’ve been waiting for Straighttalk to come out with an Android or Microsoft phone that I liked so I could upgrade both my service and phone. Unfortunately Straighttalk has been slow offering Android choices and no Microsoft at all. I did not like the Android Straighttalk offered, and chose to go with VirginMobile while leaving my wife’s phone with Straighttalk. She was happy w/ it and I saw no reason to change.

I purchased the VirginMobile phone and requested a number port approximately 2 days before my Straighttalk phone went inactive. Straighttalk took longer than normal to port the number and I called VirginMobile after 3 days of waiting. VirginMobile contacted Straighttalk and verbally requested a port but they refused saying my phone was now inactive, so they would not be porting the number even though the request was made while the phone was active.

I called Straighttalk myself and spoke with an advisor but she and her supervisor both refused to do the port. I realize there are company policies, but policies are just guidelines. I’ve worked in retail long enough to know there are situations where it is more practical both from a customer service standpoint and a monetary standpoint to not follow policy.

Because you were both slow in performing your responsibility in porting my number and showed poor customer service by not relenting from your company policy you are not only losing my business but I will be changing my wife’s phone to another carrier as well.

From my viewpoint you have driven away two happy customers for not performing a service that probably would have cost you only a few minutes of an employee’s time and possibly a couple of minutes air time to do. Sounds like corporate greed to me………….
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Or just put some chilled water next to the Coke. There's just so much Coke you can drink, but if people are going to get all hairshirted about it, it rankles.
Agreed. Piracy denotes the theft of goods or money. When you can print goods, money is worthless. Your soul resources become matter and energy, and most matter is easy to come by.

Piracy would likely extend solely to the theft of energy resources. Similarly, so would war but on a bigger scale.

Piracy of goods would only extend to things not easily replicable by the present technology, or not easily replicable on many colonies. Even then, you're looking more at the theft of raw materials or for material value. Piracy would likely resemble robbing armoured vans today than any kind of piracy we've seen before, but they'd likely be trying to get precious metals or power like uranium.
'cause enough people who are on the site like it.

I personally think that most of that off-topic content that you mentioned sucks to have here (even if I do enjoy it elsewhere), but despite my flagging, they still get up there. So, I visit HN less.

The majority has spoken, what else is there for me to say, really?
Some of us had to learn to not be like this.

http://stuffaspergerpeoplelike.com/2008/11/30/28-brutal-hone...
Arctvfoundation
You have to do good work, yes, but that's not sufficient in most places to advance to the top. To maximize individual success, you have to lobby for important work, then do a good job at it, then lobby for more important work. By making connections and growing your network, you can: 1) find that more important work to be able to demonstrate your talents; 2) add value to the company in ways you couldn't by simply doing a little bit of a better job on the work you're given.
Congrats! It's great that you didn't just sit around on your off time and instead got up and started coding. It's definitely the way to do it.
Generally I agree with this analysis, but I think there is an attack that would work:

Strap small N-bombs (or conventional bombs?) to as many as asteroids as possible, launch them at the target area, and then blow them up ~500,000km away. Suddenly you have thousands (millions?) of significant chunks of rock travelling at 0.5c and spreading out. If you got the explosion point right and had enough asteroids you could cover a reasonable amount of the likely positions, even based on random movements.

It's unlikely to destroy an entire asteroid-belt based civilization, but wouldn't be trivial to evade either.
Amazon, Apple Soar In Customer Satisfaction In 2011; Netflix Plummets
Major DoS vulnerability being announced tomorrow
Ask HN: Are you doing anything to fix apartment rentals?
Craigslist SUCKS due to spam, 1996-era search, misposts, an overlimited posting format, a lack of keyword filtering (I could go on for days on why craigslist sucks. So could you, even if Craig gives us happy feelies) but they're really the only game in the bay area. Rent.com and Apartments.com have been a joke since their inception. Padmapper is alright, but definitely hampered by trying to sharecrop Craigslist without an api.

This market seems ripe for innovation and disruption. Before I jump into the game, I figure somebody else, or many other people are trying to build a better apartment search site. So, what's out there?
I (and many others) spent many times this amount at college to learn "heavier" (yet much less valuable in my opinion) languages like C, Java, Lisp and Smalltalk.

I taught myself the languages I write today and turned out fine. But for many of the people in the classes around me? This would have been an awesome value.
You can save your SHSH blobs without jailbreaking by using desktop-side tools like TinyUmbrella.
Watched the video. Looks very solid. I'm interested in getting this setup for my HTPC/server and lamps. It could certainly save some energy as well as look cool.
What _is_ good is telling that girl or guy you like what you really think about them.