skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What you're saying makes perfect sense when applied to technical/non-fiction, but as Stross is writing sci-fi/horror, I'm -- to be honest -- a bit irritated by your use of "quaint." What does multiple releases have to do with a mystery novel? "The killer was Dr. Melville in v1, but I fixed that in v2"? And in anticipation, multiple releases != releasing a chapter at a time. That's a serial, and goes back at least to Dickens. I'm pretty sure that Stephen King tried out a "pay-per-chapter" novel once, but believe it wasn't finished. And even in the case of serials, for most authors, that's just the path to complete mediocrity; unless you know exactly where the story is going and how you're going to get there, an editor is still essential. Are you going to pull the previous three chapter releases because you've decided to put them in the middle of the book? Or refund people for the second chapter because you've decided to drop the character that it introduced?

Will there be a lot of self-published ebooks in 5 years? Yeah, maybe; but the idea that publishing houses is going the way of the dodo, that they deliver no value to the consumer, is best confined to a specific set of genres.
The "Highest Quality" Android Tablet
Warning, OT: none of the apps you mention actually synchronise anything. Apart from Google+ Messaging, all of the apps you mention access a single (central) source of content.

Google+ Messaging, on the other hand, creates content locally, rather than centrally. Syncing content implies sharing it between each device that needs it. That may or may not include a central server.
Gosh, so true! I am the 3% :)
That game is a testament to the immortality of well-done software. I still play it today, and it's still scary doing those first night missions against the sectoids.

On a related note...do any of us care what language or environment those games were implemented in? The software rocks. That's good enough. :)
I agree with him when he says that it is mostly how hard you work, dedication, and ambition. But wouldn't we just be fooling ourselves when we say it's not genetic? Maybe I'm wrong but, there are such things as kids that knowledge comes easier to, and kids that they simply can't understand something.

Also, for example, a kid with ADHD is woefully behind on the "being able to sit and work" ability. I think it's nice that we say "everyone is equal and let's hold hands" But I personally don't understand that.
http://www.craigryder.com/linux-ubuntudebetc/x11-forwarding-...
I have 3 friends who went to MIT, and they are all retarded. I'm not kidding at all. Every person I have ever met from Stanford is incredibly good looking, smart, and generally awesome.
For which program?

Or is Stanford just the best school in absolutely everything?
The idea of rhythmic code is blowing my mind a little bit. Perhaps when executed it outputs the MIDI for a back-beat?
I'm with you on this. On my previous company, they had this no-target no-commission sales policy and it did hurt them. When one smart sales head realized, the company grown up 20-times with target and commission based structure.
I agree with you that biology has a definite effect. However, every time I express an opinion here on HN, I get down voted into oblivion.
Spotify's Daniel Ek: The Most Important Man In Music
If you're willing to make the investment, VMWare Fusion is great for that. Though of course you still have to obtain a copy of Windows afterwards. I've addressed this by taking my ancient, ancient Windows laptop and running a program provided by VMWare that creates an image from your physical machine. (I've forgotten its name at present).

To make the creation process go faster, I usually restore the machine to factory defaults. That way, the registry is smaller and everything is much smoother.
L’Alpe d’Huez fait sa comédie à partir du 17 janvier
One game that I've searched high and low for is Hyperspeed by Microprose. Few people seem to have played it but it was one of the best strategy games ever made.
Don't take the bait.
Still waiting for the rise of Kodacell...
It's not about internet freedom it's about freedom. If you live in a free country, free and unimpeded access to the internet will come naturally as the populace is set free.
Not sure this really needs another "me too", but these aren't actually new in the US either. It used to be (circa 2000) that photo requirements for the US greencard required a mugshot at an odd angle, such that a given % of ear (yes, really) was visible.

Most passport photo places were terrible at this single requirement, but the chaps that ran the parking lot beside the INS office in Detroit certainly had it figured out.

Tangentially related, as the state of H1-B visas seems to come up a lot lately; I just checked Google Maps to make sure my memory wasn't fooling me (check out the crosswalk at 339 Mount Elliot Street, Detroit), and I noticed the INS office there is now marked "US Detention & Deportation". This shift speaks volumes about problems most skilled workers have getting into the US now. The INS under the DoJ, was "the letting people department, under the justice umbrella". USCIS under the DHS is now the "keeping people out department, under the fatherland umbrella".

While picking at the naming is exceptionally petty, the nuance will sound very familiar to anyone who's delt with the INS/USCIS in the last 10 years.
It doesn't work the second time. It does capture the bug and mark it though. The system is stable and up - it just doesn't work.
The thing that bothers me is that everyone just accepts that the initial problem -- lack of printers or whatever at the government office -- won't get solved in that office.

I think everyone's premise is that the bureaucracy is unchangeable and unfixable, which in the short term and for an individual or small group is a realistic and practical perspective, but a longer-term responsible view for society is that the initial problem should be resolved.

First of all, its not _impossible_ to improve a bureaucracy. However, it is quite difficult, and therefore I think that in most cases bureaucracy needs to be replaced by a much more functional and responsive model.

Speaking of government versus private in general, we have two modes: 1) a private mode which has a profit motivation but no legal or ethical motivation but which is (supposedly) restricted in its capacity for monopoly and has (supposedly) highly restricted authority for force, and 2) a government mode has ultimate legal and ethical motivation and responsibility and total monopoly on force authorization and the domains of government.

I think we should be able to formulate another mode of operation that works better.
A new unique way to sell on Internet
For example, your right not to be murdered and my right to "freedom" are not in contradiction if my right to freedom is constrained to apply only to those actions of mine which have nil or negligible impact on others.

This is what I mean by conflicting rights: when they conflict, we constrain them. There are situations where it's murkier. Instead of "negative" rights and corresponding obligations (I have a right not to be murdered, so you have an obligation not to murder me) into "positive" ones (I have a right to life, you have an obligation to feed me if I'm starving and you have food). Suddenly you're constrained in a fundamental sense if I have a right to life: your doing anything other than feeding me has a horrible impact on me. Where do we draw the line at how much I can expect from you? To the point at which your not sacrificing other rights (this is Peter Singer's argument[1]), or do we just ignore positive rights/obligations altogether? Gets murky.

And when it gets that murky, it's silly to try to divide things we want/need into categories of "IsAHumanRight" and "IsNotAHumanRight".

-----

Cerf writes:

Yet all these philosophical arguments overlook a more fundamental issue: the responsibility of technology creators themselves to support human and civil rights.

If then said "so it doesn't matter if the internet's a human right, let's just help people use it for the betterment of the world, etc." then I'd be all on board. Instead he makes a big deal about not putting the internet into the sacred but ill-defined category of "IsAHumanRight", all the way up to making that his title, when it should be (IMHO) "Stop worrying about rights, help the Internet help people."

[1] http://www.amazon.com/World-Globalization-Professor-Peter-Si...
Listia, Jig, Craigslist
Same old nature vs nurture discussion. It's like with the text editors flames.
I imagine he wants company name/links to job postings.
You might want to check out Riak. It is brain dead simple to deploy on one to many machines, very fault tolerant, and the API is simple HTTP.
I downloaded this a while ago with the intention of installing a few games and then got sidetracked with work (or perhaps unsidetracked) and forgot all about it. Thanks for the reminder! It does indeed look nicely done.

Rest well this night, for tomorrow you sail for the kingdom of Daggerfall.
Why People Getting Obsessed with Facebook Support  
Don’t get puzzled when you have too many Facebook phone numbers, have a sense of what their existing customers have to say about the company and its services.
It has been done already:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/24/michelle-obama-phot...

Your guess is correct.
A rant about Chromepackages and versionnumbers
The various tradeoffs between try-finally, RAII, and scope guard is discussed here:

http://www.d-programming-language.org/exception-safe.html

Scope guard has a number of distinct advantages.
regardless of where you sit on that discussion, he was addressing a specific student who was one grade away from valedictorian and discouraged about not getting into MIT. That being said I think the advice is solid for anyone; there's only one way to find your true limit.
Ephemeral voting noise is not going down the tubes.
Just as a funny observation: If email is the universal platform, why is the "Call us"-link more prominent than the email contact? :)
Bitlynews was a contestant in the bitly API contest. They take the most popular shorturls and display it using an interface similar to Hackernews.
I wanted to cry, somebody replied: "if you could share us some of those skills."

If it was possible we would and we could all just sit back and crib each other's notes on life. But this has to come from within you. You cannot share willpower, dedication and ambition.

There's nothing else to it: it's not as if the knowledge isn't on the internet or in books for cheap...

You can mould yourself a more conscientious personality through your own ambition and the willpower you had to start with.
That's not what he said at all.

I don't use couchdb either but I do follow the nosql space a little and what I read was that he's creating an all-new project.

Couchdb is an Apache foundation-led project and will continue on its own path. Couchbase is an all-new project that will solve some of the same use-cases but be better at scaling. It's not a fork at all.
My first thought: There's already DOSBox (which I bet was already ported to Mac), what's the point?

>It's powered by DOSBox.

My second thought after reading that: DOSBox is GPL'd, where's the source of Boxers?

>Clicking through a few links: https://github.com/alunbestor/Boxer

Well, okay, I really don't get the point of this "App" but I guess as long as it's free software...
Internet is nothing but Expression. Free expression should be human right and so should be Internet. No less.
SOPA is throwing the baby out with the bath water.

(And you never throw the baby out with the bath water!)
That's one of those facts that is probably true, but not useful (at least to an individual plotting their own course.) If you feel stupid, what's the more likely thing? That you are up against a fundamental barrier, or that you haven't worked hard enough? What's the better outcome, that you knuckle down or give up?

Knowing the genetic basis for intelligence is kinda like knowing about obscure diseases. When you have the sniffles, it's probably just a cold, not lupus. When you're finding something beyond your grasp, you're probably not working hard enough, or working smart enough.

Sure, if you're a policy maker allocating budgets and looking at the population in aggregate, it makes sense to have a deep understanding of all the problems that may not be fixable. But if you're deciding what to do with yourself, why give yourself the excuse?
well, at first glance pull seems much safer:
All the machines can log in as special (non-root) user at _one_ server and fetch commands to run.

If the master server is compromised, all the other servers might* be as well, but at least you're not spreading root@ ssh keys around.

* Maybe it's possible to predefine functions on the client and only ever run those. In practice that probably won't work because those functions will be either not powerful enough, or easy to misuse.
If I move to DNSimple now, will it be easy to move to your news registry later?

I don't mind paying some, but just need it to be ultra easy :)
Slightly off topic, but I'm sick of post titles that start with "A Redditor's ...". A title like that is just going to encourage comments and culture from reddit which is usually inappropriate here. "Redditors" are mostly normal people, "An insightful message for discouraged students" would have been a perfectly good title to this.
(Apologies to non-US hackers, the following reply is couched entirely in the context of the Constitution, however I think the thrust is relevant in general)

So, all the other replies so far note the explicit mention of "the press".

I'll first note that we certainly no longer talk about "the press" in reference to physical presses, and I'd naïvely hazard that the framers of the constitution didn't mean it that way either. In that regard I think it's a bit of a red-herring to talk about.

The critical point really is whether we as free people have the freedom to communicate and associate.

The reason why the internet is interesting is because it's the confluence of two of our existing rights. Sure the internet can be used for the purpose of mass media publishing, in a manner that would be analogous/familiar to the framers. But i would argue that the internet's facility for real time communications has done something unique. The internet as a communications technology has enabled communities to form that, while not without precedent[1], would not otherwise exist.

So, to me, access to the internet is relevant both to the freedom of the press and the freedom to associate mentioned in the constitution. It becomes problematic to say that government or corporations can stand in the way of my intent or desire to communicate with whom i wish.

I'd like to flip this on it's head. The United States Postal Service is explicitly established in the Constitution (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Clause and note particularly that infrastructure was an important point of discussion/controversy that is essentially a footnote/non-issue now).

So, Why isn't internet access guaranteed by the US government in a similar fashion?

[1] Organizations which communicate primarily on the basis of correspondance have existed for centuries, but i'd argue the majority of them have been niche and primarily affluent, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society or more recently science fiction fan zines.
8th-grader killed by Texas police had pellet gun
Edit: It seems backticks (``) don't indicate code, so the following is shown as `/test/`:

`/*test*/`

(End edit.)

I personally prefer something like

// In some entry point, sticking DEBUG on the global object or outermost scope
var DEBUG = true; // Somehow don't minify this

if (DEBUG) {
// arbitrary JavaScript
}

with `sed s/DEBUG/false/g` (simplified) or inserting `var DEBUG = false;` somewhere* to strip debug blocks from the source when compiling minified/release versions. Dead code elimination throws away debug blocks, and this method doesn't require you to pass your code through a tool every time you develop (so line numbers, etc. always match).

Yes, it's not robust, and I realize this solution is. But modifying something like Uglify or Google Closure Compiler to replace DEBUG's value wouldn't be a bad idea, I think, if you really care about strings and such not being replaced.

Something similar can be accomplished (though it's a bit more limiting) if you replace special comment tokens. For example:

/*DEBUG*/ {
// Debug code here
}

I would see the use if this tool did more than replacement magic. For example, I could specify `/profile/` somewhere inside a function and it would automatically be instrumented for profiling. Or, `/count/` could increment some global variable (unique to each `/count/` instance) easily accessible and useable from a JavaScript console (perhaps based upon the containing function's name or line number?), or `/count-print/` could do the same but printing every second or every 100 calls. But even for these cases, I see myself manually instrumenting these instead of configuring a tool and sticking it in my development workflow.

*Sometimes, `var` statements (even with a constant) are not inlined by Google Closure Compiler (only minifier I am aware of which performs inlining).
From context, I'd guess that "scrunched" means trashed/junked/lost/broken. As in, "And then the source code got trashed and I didn't have a complete listing."
Schema injection coming to a NoSQL site near you
The Objective C runtime on MacOS 10.7 also does this for NSNumber objects.
ReviMax
Appear younger and youthful even with aging with this awesome revitalizing product named Revi Max. It will put an end to all your aging woes and will make you youthful and charming for the rest of your life. Grab this now and take the most of it.
Ask HN: What are your favourite subreddits?
Not only does PageRank not directly affect search results, but subdomains are seen as entirely different domains.
No human is perfect. The only way to expand your pool of correct knowledge is to spend time seeing things from competing perspectives, allow the possibility of being wrong, and to evaluate ideas based on evidence.
Current gen mobile phones are already more powerful than my first Windows XP desktop. I don't think computing resources are a limiting factor here.
Ah, well, if you're arguing from that perspective then no, these things are not human rights.
RequireJS 1.0.4 released
I think people with disabilities or disadvantages in whatever capacity have the ability to hack the system and find the power to overcome these issues but maybe just in a different way than someone without these problems would solve this problem. I guarantee you, there are kids like me who've gotten fantastic grades at University levels without the scholarly understanding, effort, and aptitude that other people exhibit--but we find a way (and I mean more in taking advantage of the system rather than crossing the line to cheating).

Still looking at genetics, look at height--then look at all of the athletes who've defied "sports logic" and excelled in their sport despite the naysayers and their "disadvantage"-- Muggsy Bogues, Doug Flutie, and Martin St. Louis to name a few.

I think knowledge does come easier to some kids, but there are always people with the drive, ambition, and passion that find a way to persevere despite their issue. I know it's cliche but, those that want it, find a way.
Bank PINs aren't really about password strength though. To prevent brute force, they simply block access after n tries (usually n = 3). They are just a way of preventing access to the card in case of loss or theft. So as long as there are enough combinations to make the chance of a successful brute force after three tries small enough, it doesn't really matter how strong the password is.

For online banking, there are usually added security schemes and the PIN isn't used at all.
So you mean starting couch.io was a big mistake ? Could you elaborate on that statement, would be interesting to hear what you learned!
So, would any book on studying do, or any search for "skills to do well at school"? I, as a struggling student, too would like to know what R. said to him and what he in turn said to those he tutored.
On Android there is an app called "Hide it Pro" [1] (aka Audio Manager) that allows you to hide pictures and videos. The app disguises itself as an audio manager in the app drawer. To access the hidden files you have to type a PIN code. There is also an escape PIN if you get caught hiding files. Clever idea.

[1] https://market.android.com/details?id=com.smartanuj.hideitpr...
This is overly complicating a correct and basically simple issue.

In my view, a human right is something that, all things being equal, a human being would be able to provide by him or herself, and which can be restrained by another human. So there is a right to live, to eat, to speak freely etc.

Therefore, Internet access is not a basic human right, as it has to be provided by someone and isn't available to a naked human in the middle of nowhere, as we all once were.
Focus - like a one eye'd dog in a meat factory
I think dropbox would benefit greatly from acquiring Ifttt. Think about it, It seems to align with the whole filesystem of the internet thing incredibly. I have files on widgetA, whenever somebody shares files on widgetA with me, push it to my dropbox.
Oh, and as a matter of personal investment, i am, in quite a number of ways, a personal beneficiary of the communities that the internet enabled.

Without the internet and the freedom to associate, I would not have met my wife, a number of good friends, some of whom I been hired by, and in other cases hired, etc., etc.

This is also why things like SOPA/PIPA and net neutrality are both such fraught topics and also vitally important discussions to engage in.
couchbase seems like riak with the memcache protocol bolted on. most everything that differentiated the two products has been relegated to 'unsupported' in couchbase.
The visualization of a designer's life: The Feltron Annual Report
SoLoMoClo in 2012: Social, Local, Mobile, Cloud
Chrome installs app(s) without your knowledge
Algorithm Measures Human Pecking Order
It's hard to really track, define (or even understand) the consumed time on innovative projects. Because time is not the essence.

When I make something really new, I don't consume time, I consume a mix of energy, enthusiasm, slowly built mind patterns and ideas, diverse epiphanies and cultural chocks, all of which took much more time to grow that the hours or days that I spent typing.

Most of my interesting software were born from a few weeks of unfocalized and undedicated thinking, a few hours (usually at nights) of precise writing in my head, followed by days or weeks (sometimes months of a 5 devs teams) of coding which, while it was hard work, seemed to be simply the transfer of an initially complete program from head to disk.

Of course this is somewhat an excessive view but it's really hard to link time (especially "working" time) to the produced software. I'm sure a lot of people here were sometimes in the impression that there were a few hours or days in their coding life that were worth years.
I've used Wine.app for that and it worked great. VirtualBox is another free choice, but it requires a windows license.
Forex Analysis-Is There Going to Be a Fresh Bearish Run in the EUR/USD?
Ask HN: How do you spend your quality time with your Family.
Fellow hackers, You are always occupied with your coding,designing, startup launches, marketing, Pitching to VCs etc. Then, how do you spend quality time with your family and kids in particular? They need to be nurtured well and your presence is a must. How do you balance both worlds?
The shoplifting metaphor might be simple and relatable, but it's inaccurate because it's not just someone stealing in your store, it's other people putting stolen merchandise in your store to be re-stolen by someone else.

The real metaphor is, "If you own a pawn shop and let obviously dirt broke people come in and sell you stolen Rolexes all the time, you may be shut down."
The same in Australia, Malaysia & Singapore.