skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't really understand the app development Kickstarters.

Especially if there is already two apps in the store and this is a sequel to a long series. If you're making more, isn't the economic incentive of having the app in the store enough for you to invest? Did you not make enough from the first two to get started on this?

I just seems to be a case where they'd like the money up front AND the money from the store. But Kickstarter page is a good way to get a bunch of cash at a premium (or even kicked in donations that don't want anything in return).
Comments like this are a waste of my time... Cum Dumpsters like this guy shouldn't post on HN.
Are there any startups in the legal / judicial reform space?
I'm one who would like to combine my passion with my work, wondering if anyone knows of any startups, or really any web-related companies, in the legal / judicial system reform space? I've been searching but haven't come up with much so far
Asking coders to increase social skills is asking them to dilute who they are. Like many actors and singers, they lose who they are because they become mixed up with everyone else. Some don't, I don't imagine seeing Johnny Depp schmoozing in a totally social scene, maybe with a few carefully chosen people he trusts and in a quiet location.
This is awesome. It's showing how more and more of today's society is moving to niche marketplaces. Roughly 30-35% of Leah's "Cloud" living was simply offloaded to marketplaces that perform a niche service.

Of course, I realize I might be using the word marketplaces loosely.
No, all of those have in-arrows: Sather 0.1 has one from Eiffel 2, Icon has one from SL5, and BASIC has one from FORTRAN II and one from ALGOL 60.
Thanks fogus. FWIW awesome work by you, the Clojure and the ClojureScript team this year. Kudos! Looking forward to more informative posts in 2012
The most telling comment is this one:

"Beyond was always a tremendously grand ambition as the advances required by the record labels and music publishers were substantial"

.. because there were no tech advances required; the only 'grand ambition' was getting the record labels to listen to reason - which they apparently didn't
A lot of people wanted it is Lua is quite widely used as a code generation target, and generating gotos is useful often to match other language constructs.
I think that's a brilliant observation and accurate.
Ask HN: How many domains do you have?
I realized that I have this bad habit where I order domain(s) as soon as I have an idea, even if I know I might not have any will/energy to actually execute on any of those ideas. But I keep doing it.

So I counted and found out that I have around 49 domains, which is probably not so bad. But it got me thinking how common this disease might be.

So I'm wondering. How many people on HN collect domains and how many domains do you have?
Silicon Valley's greatest asset
A label is visible in the entire block where it is defined (including nested blocks, but not nested functions).

A goto may jump to any visible label as long as it does not enter into the scope of a local variable.

This can be determined statically.
Maciej Fijalkowski's view on PyPy's future
Applications are not limited to Metro on Windows 8, nor is it locked down in the way you suggest.
I can sorta go with a tablet being a general purpose computer, but my phone has to be a phone first. I really cannot have it not work as a phone. One too many ND winters as a youth being stupid and stuck in a car waiting for someone to drive by taught me that.
It's a pity that Google+ is not designed for this use case. Facebook and Friendfeed have groups that people can join with no hassle.
Oh, I agree -- I had taken social skills to mean "plays well with others."

Awkward is just fine. Someone who is mean or lazy is another story.
You're right, and they are improving. I mainly hit issues in smaller stores (e.g tesco express) where the staff are more confused by the automated checkout than I am.
I suspect the brakes are off on Wii piracy at least. I've no idea how it's done, but I've seen a Wii hooked up to a network or hard drive that had every published Wii game on it.

Personally, I'd rather not break the law, I have about 15 games on my Wii, and one or two get played a few times a year, so my itch to play Super Mario occasionally, gets scratched just fine.
Maybe especially because you spend time in front of computers? I do like to avoid computers in my off work time, so prefer human cashiers (as well as film cameras not digital etc).
If I want to use the new API which should be the go forward API of WinRT and Metro, then it is locked down to only the app store apps on Windows 8.

"Dowrkin revealed that Metro apps will only be available through the new store" http://www.winrumors.com/microsoft-details-and-demos-the-win...
Time travel from whose perspective? To you what seems like ten-thousands of years will seem to a traveler going at relativistic speeds like hundreds of years.
I'd like to mention the need to use caution if using Haystack with Solr for large indexes and relatively high rates of change. The default behaviour of Haystack is geared towards getting up and running with search quickly, I've had to tweak a lot of the Solr backend to make it not fall over with our index of 9m products.

Solr is incredibly easy to work with directly, so if you know you're going to be using it as a core part of your site functionality, you might want to consider skipping Haystack entirely (the 2.0 version is a big improvement but it's not released yet).

A few examples:

- The default behaviour of Haystack is to commit on every update. Say you're doing batches of 1000, if you've optimised your indexing database queries well, you might be able to issue an update every 10 seconds or so. The problem is that issuing a commit against an index of 9m every 10 seconds (more frequently if using multiple processes or threads) or so is going to eat up memory and disk space fast. So if you have this scenario, make sure you disable the default commit behaviour and issue manual commits instead (we're doing it every 200k documents).

- Faceting by Author was a key feature, and we had about 500k of them. Haystack's faceting functionality didn't provide any mechanism to limit the number of facet choices returned, or to limit them to just those with a count > 0. It was an easy fix, but you might miss it if you're not careful.

- We only had a few fields we were interested in searching over, but had about 50 that were candidates for faceting. The Solr schema generated by haystack assumes you're going to want to search over every field, which means there's a lot of unnecessary overhead. Make sure you look over every field and think about how you're going to use it and turn off as much as possible. From what I can recall, using omitNorms and omitTermFreqAndPositions appropriately ended up saving us 2GB of otherwise wasted RAM. Some wise guy on my project decided to try and be helpful and run the manage.py command for generating the schema before they committed :)

Haystack is an excellent piece of work, but in this project (E-Comm site with 9m products) it ended up costing more time than it saved. Admittedly, this was the first time I'd worked with a catalogue of this scale, so I shoulder a lot of the blame. So I just wanted to highlight some of the problems I've faced.
Not my experience (I shop in Sainsbury's mostly). I get the "unexpected item" problem almost every single time. Cashiers in my town are so used to it, they don't even look at the baskets anymore - I actually got confused and packed one item without scanning one day - approved with no questions asked (I scanned it later, got another weight error, approved again). Those are becoming as useful as SSL warnings or UAC - just click ok, because in 99% of cases, it's bogus. That's pretty much all they do - almost all the time they're near checkouts, they're busy accepting errors.

There are also products which do change weight. Electronic protection on clothes or wine bottles weight enough to confuse the scales sometimes. Condoms are packed in a plastic container which is taken off after purchase, but the weight is set for the condom pack only. I also get the error quite often because I'm thirsty/hungry and empty half of the bottle, or half a pack of brioches while shopping. (yes, that's my fault but I don't see any reasonable automated solution for it)

Then again, even with all those issues, I can still self checkout faster when doing small shopping alone (15+ items usually means some repacking so I think it's faster only when I'm there with my gf).
Sweet, I've been looking for some MongoDB/Node.js paired with Backbone projects. Thanks!
This illogical thinking is blowing my mind. Shouldn't MS be sued because the computers Bin Laden used had Windows installed? Or perhaps Dell for selling computers. The US government for funding the invention of the internet? Cell phone providers for creating communication links?

Nokia for giving Iran the software to block peaceful protests?

The hypocrisy is killing me.
Good points... I think its a social problem that we in the US have been failing at especially during the last few decades. Right now we have this dynamic in society where the all the spoils go to the 'winners' even though everyone is contributing in some form (usually by means of competition). This ends up encouraging somewhat of a macro-trend where everyone works very very hard to beat off others to get a piece of the pie but most inevitably end up failing to get wealthy and live 'luxuriously'. As a result of this feast or famine attitude, people end up getting over devoted to work and labor while ignoring many other very important aspects of life (in the sense of actually living)... culture, child-rearing, fun, relaxation, etc. (- note that these are the descriptors of 'luxury')

I think as a society we shouldn't be looking at automation as "Oh my god that machine is going to eat those people's jobs" - we should be looking at it as "Wow, we collectively don't have to do that crap anymore" Similarly to how somebody looks at a Roomba and says goodbye to pushing a vacuum around for an hour. But what fucks this all up - the distribution of money. Because the way distribution of money works in America, we look at it as those cashiers are now going to starve and die.

MBA thinking has morphed us into thinking life is about production and consumption (full stop). Its not (full stop). The majority of the population is relatively starved of the 'other things' in life and we should be reevaluating how automation can help us all focus on the things that make real life a better experience. Unfortunately were too busy all miserably hoarding money from each other like a bunch of dumb apes.

So back to your question about excess creative production - we shouldn't care about who consumes it in an idealistic scenario. If people genuinely enjoy the creative process, they should be doing it because they enjoy it and hopefully that can be more afforded by automation.
> If Photoshop were under the GNU, there would be a ton of free versions out there for anyone to download. Same thing with Windows or any other high-profile proprietary app.

The BSD license doesn't mitigate against this at all, so here you're arguing in general against open source. But more importantly, there are already a ton of free versions of Photoshop and Windows and Rosetta Code and any other popular application, regardless of their level of sophisticated DRM, just a few clicks away on your-favorite-torrent/filedump-site. The legality of this doesn't scare people. The binaries are free for them, yet somehow these companies are still in business...
Awesome technically. Horrible in design.
Given the choices - either stick with the aisle full of Star Wars, ninjas, and pretty much all gun-based LEGO sets aimed purely at boys (the company admitted it was focusing solely on boys in mid-2000's), OR add some girl-focused sets with things like tree-houses and an invention factory and a veterinarian office and yes some "girly stuff" like a salon?

Seriously? You don't want your girls to have an option that doesn't involve clone troopers?

I have a girl, and I am very happy by this new option for girls to choose from.
LROC Image Browser - M175569775
Finding the right headline for your site
This image shows a section that's about 2 miles high by 15 miles long. You can zoom in to about 15 meters.[1]

[1] sorry for garbled meaning here.
I found this. Kind of related: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1830444

And I didn't know about this: http://hntrades.com/
Yeah i tried to disclaim it with "it is supposed" because the rulings have been all over the board. I agree that the claim/counterclaim should be used properly but, for me personally if I where Apple I would arbitrate to CYA alone. It's a small price to pay, to be able to prove you exhausted all means to arbitrate the dispute as a third party. I think most would rule out liability on Apples part if they did so.
Final Blog Post of 2012: "Profile of a Starter"
I did the same thing but without Require.js:

Code: https://github.com/ccarpenterg/todolist

Wiki: https://github.com/ccarpenterg/todolist/wiki

Demo: http://todolist-app.appspot.com/
The Munchkin case was a travesty. It had significant differences from Pac-Man, both cosmetic and functional. By the same standard, almost all current video games would be illegal, as would most works in any creative medium that fell into an existing genre. But I suspect the court, at the time, didn't appreciate video games as a medium that could have genres. Atari initially lost the case but then won on appeal, apparently to everyone's great surprise.

EDIT: I read the appellate court decision and discovered some things.

First, this only got as far as a preliminary injunction, as far as I can tell. I haven't found anything about an actual trial happening. So, the legal decision was simply that Atari had a decent chance of winning at trial, and the potential harm to them justified an injunction, not that there was definitely any infringement.

The potential for infringement was based not on similar game mechanics, but rather on the more superficial similarities between the characters and aesthetics. In other words, it would be ok to make a maze-eating-chasing game that played just like Pac-Man, but featured squirrels eating nuts and being chased by dogs. It was decided that K.C. Munchkin needlessly copied some small details from Pac-man, like the ghosts and the "gobbler". This was compared to a playwrite copying specific characters and settings rather than re-telling a story in an original way. (That playwrites are not limited to 8x8 pixels and two colors when creating their characters is not touched upon in the decision.)
The only place I've seen this is Fresh and Easy stores, other stores have automated check out but still have the ones with cashiers too. I think it works great at Fresh and Easy, they have an attendant who goes around, as needed, to check Id's for alcohol purchases, etc. I've never had to wait in line at one of these stores, they aren't all that crowded but I still think it definitely makes things go faster.
Beautiful OMAN
078 TMTC Chris Mattmann - OODT/NASA
DBM: Depressions only occur because "jewish" bankers mess with the $$$ supply.
Best App relesed by Google in 2011
Scribr makes me think of Scribd. Otherwise great idea. I thought of this a few years ago, but never followed through with it. Glad to see someone is doing it! Left my email.
55 Actions you can't afford in 2012
A Happy, Flourishing City With No Outdoor Advertising
The Geography of the Year in Music
Any assignment that expects footnotes probably ought to have graders who scan the footnotes, and I find it particularly funny, in a grim and ghastly way, that no one tripped over the jests concentrated there. Bollock & Maidenhead _The Interminable History of English Law_ was mentioned in the original post. And _From Magna Carta ..._ (i.e., 1215) _... to Domesday Book_ (i.e., 1085)? Or D. Rumsfeld _Killing Will Make You Free_?
Thanks. I'll have a look into this book.

Also, the 2 books that I mentioned are updated for Xcode 4.2 and iOS5.
You are right. Life is easier for large companies.
I was only focusing on what I perceived as a slight bias in the reporting (both summary and link to what is one side's presentation of the facts).

Put it differently: everyone is a rightsholder. Imagine an hypothetical HN story about a California-based indie developer who witnesses his iOS game ripped off and cloned to the point of consumer confusion by Chinese development workshops as soon as he has a little bit of success. I may assume that the HN consensus would be that Apple shouldn't force him to go to court before removing the offending copycats from the app store, and that Apple would not be removing them quickly enough.

Justice is not about rooting for the guy that most resembles you.
Not all programming positions require the same amount of social skills. Some jobs are just fine for the "antisocial software genius" type. Just don't make me work with those guys.
Hopefully I can set up a cron job or something to automatically post an updated list here:

https://plus.google.com/116088562611144379106/posts
Thanks for your response.

I have already started watching some of the lectures and doing some of the assignments.
I still don't see what makes it revolutionary, I'm not sure what price point an android capable handset adresses that a 3GS doesn't. There is honestly very little difference on pricing, if you can afford a droid you can afford a 3GS or 4. It's a few percent difference not a an order of magnitude. Beating a competitors price by a few dollars is hardly what I'd call a revolution. iOS is just as accessible to starving African children as android. What matters far more than a few dollars for a phone is the kleptocratic governance in those countries. A real revolution would be governance open to doing business and enriching the populace.
The 10 Dumbest Tech Moves of 2011
They built a new Walmart here about 7 yeas ago. Going with the current trend, it was about 60% self checkout. Same with the three local Albertsons supermarkets. All of them have now removed their self checkout stations, and replaced them with cashiers. I've heard it was due to rampant theft.
It's actually a lot more complicated than that. The record labels listened -- there were multiple news reports of them signing deals with the labels... the labels were actually excited at the idea. The problem was that not only did they have to deal with the labels, but they had to deal with the publishers, each individually. And there's a lot of freaking publishers. To top it off, they also had to convince a carrier to purchase the product, which would mean either they lose revenue or pass the extra $60 on to the consumer, risking lost sales.

They had to change/convince multiple businesses to conform to this new business model, and that's why it was such a grand task -- each one had its own, different risks, and it was up to Beyond Oblivion to convince them the model would work (which it would). The labels themselves were just a small piece of that very large puzzle.

Michael Robertson (mp3.com guy) recently posted a great article (although I can't find it) about the challenges of an online streaming service which summarizes the above a lot better than I said it, plus goes into further detail.

EDIT: Found it. http://gigaom.com/2011/12/11/why-spotify-can-never-be-profit...
Yes! If I were to be a remote worker, I would make a co-working space a requirement.
'Move Your Domain' Campaign Against GoDaddy Flops
A good year end wrap-up, but, it caused me to order more books from Amazon. Does Michael own Amazon stock? :-)
Installing DjangoCMS on dotCloud in 12 easy steps
Driving has lost its cool for young Americans
> It doesn't work that way at all. Most of the really cool things that happen with teams can't be predicted ahead of time. You just put some really smart people together in a room, throw a tough problem at them, get out of the way, and watch the magic happen.

This seems to imply that remote teams don't interact with each other as much. I've found in my experience that pair programming on a remote team is actually a lot more important than locally precisely because it enables this kind of "magic". If you've got the right (free) tools, it's easy to set up an environment where you spend all your time on voip collaborating directly with teammates over SSH and tmux.

Sure you don't see the other guy's face and can't have lunch with him (which is why as dhh mentions below that periodic team summits are also important) but the claim that you can't have the same level of focused communication is silly. There will be less cross-pair communication obviously, but it's easy enough to rotate up the pairs.
happy new year.
Can you try to address my point instead of just repeating "freedom freedom freedom"?

I understand that Ron Paul believes that the ideal world is not to have government licensing of marriages at all. I get it, and might even agree with it. Okay?

What I've said is that Paul supports a discriminatory status quo over fixing the discriminatory status quo. This is true, and this makes him a supporter of homophobic discrimination, even if he has some theoretical plan that will never come to a vote that would be equitable. Remove your finger from the "auto downvote any critic of Paul" mode for a second and stop to understand this point: Ron Paul is supporting anti-gay discrimination.

Answer me this: suppose we lived in a world where black people were banned from going onto public roads. There were multiple votes to make it legal for black people to use public roads. Ron Paul voted against those attempts multiple times, saying "I'm not racist, but I believe that public roads shouldn't exist as they're an inappropriate use of public funds." So the status quo remains indefinitely, as there's no actual chance that public roads will be abolished altogether.

I argue that I get his position, but that it's still immoral to discriminate against black people, and so in the short term he should vote to make the situation equitable . And then you come along, and say, "your view on morality is your view, and that's all there is to it" and "attempting to push this on other people by mandating in law is the worst form of bigotry." That's narrow-minded and pigheaded, no?

Ron Paul's the bad guy here, even if he has some idealistic long-term view of the perfect solution that one of the victims of his votes might even agree with. You say "we can believe opposite things, and still accept each other as we are": well, you can get legally married, get benefits from my tax money, and get special rights from the government, while I can't. That's shitty, and Ron Paul prefers to posture for his ideology over actually considering the day-to-day suffering of regular people resulting from that shittiness.
Right. Thank you. I wasn't targeting any language really. I just happened to remember some instances of Ruby hipsters who laughed at people using anything else and used it as an example. The language or whatever technology doesn't really matter, you can swap out Ruby for anything (literally anything), because the hipsters exist in every camp. Some languages are more well known for their hipsters but I wasn't trying to single out any one group so I'm sorry if I offended anyone.
This page consumed all the resources on my Late 2010 MBA pretty quickly. Not that the real minecraft runs well, but it's far more playable than this version.

Whether that's WebGL or the programming is something I don't know.
Counterpoint: Automated checkouts suck balls.

A significant portion of the time I attempt to use one of these, the machine gets stuck in some kind of nonsense about putting merchandise in the bagging area, or explicitly asks me to see a clerk or something for assistance, or otherwise basically does not work. I only use these now if there is a big line at the humans. I'm sure this all sounds like I'm just an incompetent checkout user. FWIW, I worked for a summer as an actual human cashier at a grocery store. I think I did a reasonably competent job at it.