skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I don't see how that could be the only reason for ditching your kindle.

What other reasons do I need besides cost and true ownership? What an odd response. Do you think i have some ulterior motive for ditching a device I paid $260 for?

I literally handed a book to a friend last night. She doesn't own an ebook reader. Now she has the book and can hand it off to someone else.

My father doesn't own an ebook reader and I give him plenty of books. Although now that I think about it I should probably just give him my kindle so he can increase the font size (an actual use case!) and stop leaving reading glasses all over his house.

Your response is essentially "Just torrent the book" because stripping the DRM off an ebook and emailing it someone is just the same as that person going to the pirate bay for content.
I started my career as a developer working on the Microsoft platform. In fact, I'm probably still most comfortable in C# more than any other languages. My current job I work in a mixed environment of C#, Java, and Ruby. I'm not sure why the sarcastic comment without knowing my history as a developer?
Boss: How long will it take for you to make the program? We're running low on other work.

Me: 30 seconds.

Boss: That's too long. #### could have it done in... wait, what did you say?

Me: Well that sheds some light on your style of management.
Challenge HN: Share your checklist for training yourself to be a better hacker. Or to have more successful projects.
Building Legal Language Explorer: Interactivity and drill-down, noSQL and SQL
UX Tip: Don't Make Me Curse The Day I Decided To Sign-Up
raises hand

I've read the writings of Karl Marx.

This guy advocated a "dictatorship of the proletariat", wherein the proletarian party seizes all capital and crushes, with force, any capitalist influence, any attempt for capitalism to re-establish itself. This alleged workers' government maintains control until the world is ready for communism, which might take quite a while. Meanwhile, there is "communal" ownership--via government--of the means of production.

Furthermore, Marx felt he had "proved" this to be the future of history with his "science" of dialectical materialism. I'm not talking about a rhetorical use of the word proof, I'm talking about proof proof. If you're a true believer it's easy to see how a little murder is OK, since you're provably bringing about a communist paradise.

Marx didn't advocate the terrible oppression characteristic of people like Lenin, but he advocated everything but, and it's easy to see where Lenin got this from. Remember, for quite a while, Lenin was considered by many in the West to be a hero, a brilliant Marxist thinker.

I've been able to surprise a few Marxists these facts--all present in Marx's writing. Amazingly, people are somehow able to become hardcore Marxists without realizing their founding figure was a maniac, something like Christians who've never read the Old Testament.
What happens as more and more people, including already successful authors, self-publish? The pile of ebooks whose price can be artificially inflated will get smaller and smaller.

Publishers need to figure out how they can better provide value to authors and readers. Collaborating to keep prices up shows how screwed they are. They're kicking and screaming against a shift in culture and technology, where if they don't adapt they'll go extinct.
Live behind the scenes experience at LeWeb 2011 (courtesy of Babelverse)
It's impossible to create anything at all "without" design.

Design is not graphical embellishment. Design is decision making of appearance and functionality.
Except that these are normal aspects of their job. Not liking the sight of blood is a normal human response too, but shouldn't be if your career choice is butcher or surgeon.
The suggestion that the photo/video toggle be converted to a three-way should be taken out back and shot. Currently, those little toggles work with a tap, which is the only reason they're tolerable.

I'm not a big fan of them in the first place, because most people I see interact with them attempt to flip the switch. This action works, but it's tough when the widget is rendered at the smaller size (e.g., camera photo/video: small, prefs: large). Changing that to a three-way switch would make it an absolute nightmare to use.
This kind of thing really appeals to me, I'm very tempted to give it a try.

I have tried emacs and vim a few times, but the problem is that I don't want to use them for everything, and I have trouble getting my head around two totally different ways of working. I recently did a check of the programs I use in the average week. The current list is (in no particular order)

* XCode, for Objective-C / iOS development
* Eclipse, for C++ / Android
* Apple Mail
* Chrome
* TeXShop, for Latex editing
* Sublime text, for other bits of C/C++
* Vienna, for RSS reading
* Evernote, for document ordering
* Wunderlist, for todo lists

And what is great is that all these apps share 90% of my frequently used key-presses. In particular, I'm never at a loss as to what quit/find/open/save are. Each of these tools I have found the best at what they do.
You're right, of course, but it's entirely possible that parfe doesn't want to find himself on the wrong side of the law just so he can share "The Art of Fielding" with his friend.

That is, you or I or parfe may completely agree that e-books shouldn't have DRM, and that removing said DRM shouldn't be illegal, but doesn't mean parfe is willing to consciously violate the law, no matter how objectionable he finds said law.
How Ignorance Could Improve Group Decisions
Rypple, Revenue and Canada’s Startup Ecosystem
Cloud hosting can be an amazing cost reduction, but it really depends upon a lot of factors.

When you're first starting out I believe most businesses would be much better off hosting on a small VPS at a place like 6sync or Linode. Once you reach a certain scale, the low-cost VPS model starts to fall apart and cloud hosting on places like Amazon tends to be a lot cheaper than doing the old school dedicated server/data center model.

In any case, though the point of this article is how cheap it can be to start a business these days, I think they may have preoptimized and spent too much on some things --

I would have gone with a cheap VPS solution to start while keeping a move to AWS in mind for software selection. I also probably would have gone with something like bugzilla or another totally free self-hosted issue tracker.

This is not to say AWS isn't a great value at a certain level or that hosted issue tracking systems aren't worth it, but rather that those things are probably best worried about later on once the business has proved to be at least somewhat viable.
This is "fastest rising", not "most searched".
The students' anticipations of the exam are their anticipations of the exam. I don't see the circularity yet. It's clearer in the Liar Paradox.
If you read Revelation and take only one layer of meaning from it, you didn't really read Revelation.

I find myself writing the ridiculous sentence that Hitchens perhaps took a religious prose poem/vision/prophecy/allegory/history too literally.

I understand that he had an axe to grind. But he hasn't done justice to the thing he argued against.
A bunch of babies. Start your own company then.
"You're just doing X, how can that take Y days?!"

Where X is something seemingly simple. What makes it more frustrating is that it is often very difficult to precisely describe why it is that X involves so much unintuitive complexity.

Also

"The users don't care about how it's developed"

Except that code quality defines the readability, maintainability, and often-times performance (deeply coupled code can make optimisations very difficult, for example) of an application both during development and afterwards.
Java is the slowest of all
Eric Ries speaking in London, January 16th
"You can't seriously compare teaching command line kungfu to some wannabee geeks in their spare time with the hardcore brainwashing given to infantry troops so they acquire enough Pavlovian reflex to stand and run below a shower of bombs and bullets."

1. All geeks learned the command line at some point. Even Linus. Calling the next Linux a "wannabee geek" is wrong.

2. basic training is for all soldiers, not just infantry soldiers. You choose infantry for the baggage it carried, and you didn't care that you were flat wrong.

3. I find your use of "pavlovian reflex" wrong. It has a negative connotation, but is all reflexive action "pavlovian". If so, all of my command line use is pavlovian because I do it reflexively without conscious thought. With that in mind, the military style is perfect because it's designed to train people to do things reflexively when the time comes.

4. basic training teaches many great things. You're dismissal of it as teaching people to "run below a shower of bombs" is wrong. I learned CPR amongst many other good things in basic. Things that again require one to do them almost reflexively, just like I use the command line.

In short, you are wrong.
Project Follow Through contained several major problems, but it doesn't take a researcher to recognize the biggest problems of Direct Instruction.

Scripted curriculum might sound good to some people, but it has two major flaws: first, it destroys any possibility of differentiated instruction. Secondly (and related), it insures mediocre performance by students.

Scripted curriculum tells teachers exactly what to do during every moment of the day, from hand gestures to exact words. In most places that implement this, any deviance from the script is grounds for reprimand.

How many HN users would like to learn in this environment? How many of you think you could learn like this? I'm willing to wager that many of you would answer 'no' to both of these questions.
For Zynga CEO, Cash Came Early - Yahoo Finance
Here's a poll asking people about tags on HN:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2367949

To consolidate topics, I see a "Consolidation Node (CN)" being defined by anyone with enough karma. Topics can then be attached as children of that. Any submission that's a child of a CN gets a parent tag, and the CN has as its "thread" the children, sorted as the existing algorithm sorts.

When a CN gets at least (configurable) number of children, the children are removed from the listing of submissions and the CN is listed instead. Ranking algorithm to be determined, perhaps the CN inherits the highest ranking from its children.

Attaching a child to a CN can be flagged if it seems inappropriate.

Just an example re-using existing ideas. No doubt there are half a dozen reasons why it wouldn't work, but it would make more space on the front page for fresh news, and link together existing discussions and reports from different angles.
>Apple doesn't want high ebook pricing, because Apple is a hardware manufacturer.

But Apple did want higher ebook pricing than $9.99, because Amazon was selling some (many?) ebooks for below cost and Apple didn't want to do that. They want the lowest price that they can comfortably take their 30% profit from.

>Apple just wanted the iBookstore to be competitive and offer low prices.

And if it hurt the consumers, well, fuck 'em. And Apple didn't even end up being very successful with iBooks. So everyone lost except the publishers. But at least it wasn't Apple's fault, right?
This is a tangent, but I have yet to work at a company where the review process had anything to do with performance, and even less to do with adjusting pay based on that review. And managers seem to love saying "Yeah, I thought you did really well, and I can give my input, but it's [VP three layers up the chain] who has the final say in these decisions." Thanks, boss.
I believe what happened was that some hackers went to known locations on the planet, listened to the signal, then used these pairings to reverse engineer it.

Eventually it was simply declassified.
I'm a PPSEL also, training for my IR right now. We had some icing on my last flight that caused some pitot/static issues, fairly quickly solved by flipping on the pitot heat and climbing out of the clouds. Very interesting psychological experience; I had to use a good deal of mental energy to shunt the terror out of the way and used what little was left over to fly the airplane.

I've come to the conclusion that dealing with those situations is analogous to lifting weights: when you start out your ability is weak. Experience and training increase your strength but there is an upper limit. You just gotta hope you don't have to press something that's beyond your max. The likelihood can be mitigated against but not completely eliminated.
Jailbreakers use Apple crash reports to 'free' iPhones
Thanks for the reference to Trello. That looks interesting and I'm trying it out now.

I think that one of the challenges in the business proposition you make is the translation from paper to screen, somewhere between Gawande and Tufte.
OP here. I just threw this together to have a little fun on a Friday morning. I knew I wasn't alone, but it's still nice when you guys remind me how much I'm not. It seems like there are two worlds for programmers these days: never having enough time to crank out that which must be built and dealing with alternate human reality in some institution.

These were just the tip of the iceberg. I'll probably have a bunch more next week.

Some specific feedback:

georgemcbay: When different stakeholders don't agree, I've learned 3 things: 1. You rarely make progress. 2. The only way to get them to agree is to put them in a room together and don't leave until they do agree (That's one time when you DO need a meeting). 3. My boss rarely understood (1) or (2). He was just worrying about his personal likes/dislikes. It's tough enough to convey this in a serious piece, but obviously a lot tougher in a light piece. Thanks for the feedback.

RyanMcGreal: I enjoyed Dilbert until the stories started striking too close to home. They became too real to be funny. Sad but true.

veyron: Actually, this company used 6 digit Ticket numbers. I shortened them for clarity. Remember it's a sequential numbering system, so that's the number of tickets since the beginning of time, not currently open tickets. Sadly, a typical meeting:

Joe: How are we doing on 112182?
Fred: I don't have that Ticket.
Joe: Oh, maybe it should be 112128.
Mary: No, that's in Ron's group.
Fred: I must have written it down wrong. I mean the MJC Project.
John: The MJC Project is on hold.
Joe: Sorry, the MCJ Project.
Mary: Who brought a laptop?
Sue: I did. I'll search for MCJ.
Fred: No, you'll get 500 tickets. Search for Joe Smith, open.
Sue: OK, here it is. Ticket #118128.
edw519: Kill me now.

EDIT: I am NOT making this up. Five minutes ago:

Customer: I called you 10 minutes ago but you didn't answer.
Me: I was here. Sometimes the IP phone doesn't ring.
Customer: Why? Is it raining there?
Lots of good posts there. Very mixed reviews on Amazon(.co.uk) of the book he recommends tho'[1] has anyone else got any opinions on it?

[1] http://solarianprogrammer.com/2011/10/07/great-book-about-c1...
Without a doubt. It's especially true with something like SQL Server though, where it's sheer scale brings it close to something of an operating system on its own. I find myself scratching my head because of it on a weekly basis; of course 99% of the time its more from my own ignorance than any fault of SS (and I'm sure most Oracle/MySQL/Postresql users all feel the same way).
LibrePlanet 2012 conference announced: March 24th-25th
How to stop SOPA: Don't build it.
First let me say that I'm a "content creator" (I've had a book published). I'm also a huge consumer of e-books (bought about 100 last year).

The instant that I start getting sticker shock when looking at the price of ebooks, I'll do what I've been doing for years. I'll pirate the material.

This battle was lost a long time ago, but these guys just keep trying to fight it. I thought it was proven by now, with the latest example being Louis CK, that people will pay for media if the price is right. Meanwhile, it will always be free for those who really want it. I'm not going to argue about the moral implications of piracy, but it is a fact that it exists and isn't going anywhere.

When will these people learn that all their "Gotcha!" distribution and sales mechanisms are working against them?
I think you mean the pronunciation; it is basically the same as how some Germans say it (or sometimes? actually I don't know whether it's regionally or what, as I'm from Switzerland where you don't hear it pronounced that way).
You could use emacs for everything under Chrome. I don't use emacs, and probably won't because I don't feel like learning new keybindings for everything, but I hope to mess around with the org-mode clones for vim soon.
Senator Franken Troubled by Responses to Carrier IQ Questions
This "paradox" is no paradox at all, and has a ridiculously easy and obvious resolution.

As a teacher:

1) you CAN guarantee for your students that there will be a pop quiz Monday through Friday of next week.

2) You CANNOT ALSO guarantee for them that they will be surprised that day. (i.e. that they won't be sure, on that day, that it's that day).

This is because if it hasn't happened by the last day it can happen, it will happen the last day it can happen.

This obviously makes sense. There's no paradox. There's nothing difficult.

You simply cannot GUARANTEE them surprise, since out of whatever possible space of days it can happen, on the last day it won't be a surprise.

Whether that space is 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 days, on the last of that day it is not a surprise.

For any space of days in which the exam can happen, the last day would not be a surprise;

therefore, you cannot guarantee them both that there will be a space of days in which it can happen, and also GUARANTEE them that it will be a surprise. (in every eventuality. You can make them an 80% guarantee that it's a surprise, while making them a 100% guarantee that it's a quiz between monday and friday of next week. if you can increase the number of days you can increase your guarantee further and further. if I guarantee you a quiz on one of the next 100 days, I can also 99% guarantee you that you won't be sure you're having it that day -- i.e. will be 'surprised' -- on the day that I give it.)

prior probability. pick a day monday to friday. quiz time comes. monday to thursday they're surprised; if it's on friday, they're not surprised.

why you would think you could also surprise them after giving them a chance to "open" every day up to then is beyond me.

THis is like giving you a guarantee: here are five envelopes, one has a heart in it. I guarantee you will be surprised when you open the one with a heart in it, even if you've opened four of the five envelopes already and found them empty.

um....no... you can't guarantee that. it makes perfect sense, and there's no paradox or worth wasting any breath over.
I'm very cool and I don't use Facebook
I dislike parts of javascript and moan about it, doesn't mean I shouldn't be a programmer.

I've been a manager before and didn't have constant meetings. Most decisions actually get made in hallways or between a couple of you casually chatting after everyone else has gone home in my experience. I avoided meetings when I feasibly could and tacitly approved of the same attitude in my team too.
There are other languages where the result is the expected, like Smalltalk/X: http://i.imgur.com/5pKAt.png
the fact that someone else made an oversimplification isn't really a great justification to do it yourself.

That's not what I intended to convey. I'm trying to say that, when you've only got two choices, the resolution of your choices is horrendously coarse. In the end, the system as it exists today forces us to look through lenses that oversimplify like this.

I don't think that the two oversimplifications are on the same level. But you'd be very hard pressed to find many "liberal" politicians who are against property rights.

On the contrary. Most controversially, it seems to me at least that most of the cards that the Democratic party is playing these days are in the "class struggle" suit. Beyond that, though, I'd say that the very fact that you're not noticing it demonstrates how ingrained it has become. For example, consider the way that environmental legislation takes away a person's rights to his property without any compensation[1].

Also, no one has commented on the personal sovereignty aspect of civil liberties. This is the idea that each of us has different priorities, and we should be allowed (without endangering others) to maximize those values. "Nanny state" laws like smoking bans, mandates for motorcycle helmets, and yesterday's calls by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) to ban flavored cigars [1] clearly curtail my civil libeties, and it seems to me that these tend to be championed by the left.

[1] I was once advised to chop down a tree on my property because it was expected to show up on the list of endangered species; once it was there, I wouldn't be allowed to do anything to develop my property.
"pricing agreement among publishers effectively prevents retailers from discounting e-books without a publisher's permission"

IANAL, but I deal with a lot of OEM and reseller agreements, and this exits the sniff test with the "Almost Certainly Illegal" bit set.
Well as someone who has done a lot of reviews, i had my guidelines to follow for raises and bonuses, if a member of my team wanted more, they was nothing i was able to do other than bring it up the ladder and put a good word for the guy if i think he deserves it.
This will simply lead to more piracy of content... there is no way to justify that an e-book should cost more than a physical one, under ANY circumstance... there are no printing, distribution or sales costs involved... I expect this will just lead to increased piracy of content. So sad.
I've actually gone by this system for my ebooks, where if I think the price is just too ridiculous (or it's not even offered in my region, what?) I will just go ahead and pirate it.

I buy tons of ebooks for my long commute, and if they're going to make it hard for me to keep buying them, well... I just won't.

You'd think they'd learn, but nope.
"We'd rather have you as a fan tomorrow than have a little of your money today"
I think Chomsky follows the definition of socialism as you, "collective ownership of the means of production," but where he differs is that his definition doesn't include "government ownership of the means of production." To anarchists, like Chomsky, if any hierarchical structure controls the means of production, it is not truly collectively-owned. He and other anarchists use the term "state capitalism" to describe the USSR, since it's capitalism where one hierarchy (the state) controls capital, instead of private entities as in liberal capitalism.

I haven't seen the video yet, but you don't quote him as saying that the USSR wasn't Marxist, just that it wasn't socialist. A huge historical difference between Marxists and socialists is how to transition from capitalism to socialism. Marx believed that a "worker's state/council" would be needed, whereas the anarchists predicted that a "red bureaucracy" would only be worse than the one it replaced.