skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Really? An "'I hate white people' t-shirt" parallel?

Don't even get me started on that atrocious "we don't need to see this" line of argumentation. If the Google+ is going to censor (let's call things by their proper names) pictures that "people don't need to see", where's the goddamned line?

Imbecile.

That such a poorly constructed argument makes its way to the Hacker News homepage is worrisome. I had the hope that people who use logic for a living would have higher standards.
According to the linked complaint by MG, he is not whining about the policy so much as about the deletion without warning:

> My problem isn’t so much with the fact that I couldn’t have a profile picture of myself giving everyone the finger — which I can and do on Twitter and elsewhere — it’s that no one bothered to tell me or warn me before they just went into my account and deleted the picture.

he does also take issue with the policy itself, but as an aside not as his main point:

> Bigger picture: this seems like a ridiculous thing for Google to be policing. [...]

> This also seems like a slippery slope. In certain cultures, various hand gestures mean different things. Is Google also going to delete my profile picture if I have my fingers up to my chin, for example?
...and, to add to your point, as a not-public organization they build this product for company benefit. They let you do things on it that they benefit from. Why on earth would they be required to let you do things that are bad for their business?
Go Daddy: Never Mind That SOPA Thing, Look at Naked Danica Patrick
Forgetting is Key to a Healthy Mind
People seem to forget that the software you write has to run somewhere, on a machine, maintained by someone.

It's not that it's overly expensive to buy the Microsoft software, it's not free, but it's also not completely unreasonable. However, if you're able to find a good .Net developer, very often that same person isn't a good Windows Server administrator. Developers who know their way around languages like PHP, Perl or Python are also often more than capable of deploying the servers that are required to run the code later on.

A good Windows administrator cost money, a lot of money. A decent Linux administrator often comes bundled with the developer.

Of cause this isn't always the case that .Net developers are not qualified to run the servers, but I do run into them rather often. I'm meet excellent .Net developers that are completely incapable of configuring IIS, but I've never see a PHP programmer that couldn't setup Apache or a Python developer that couldn't deploy a wsgi application and fire up nginx.

That being said, culture might be the biggest factor of them all.
Correct... That isn't being disputed. The comment was:

"While Android would definitely exist (it predates the iPhone's unveiling by years) it would be a very, very different beast."

The "controversy" is around the claim of Android existing before iOS. That claim wasn't even made though if you read that comment correctly and notice the word "unveiling"
A look at the average Android user [infographic]
I know this is a meta-comment but I thought this was a wonderful exchange - a misunderstanding was explained clearly and respectfully and then acknowledged accordingly. A great example of the maturity of the readership here, which is refreshing to see for someone relatively new to HN. Kudos to you both.
That sort of thing is strongly discouraged in the US by teacher pay structures.
Ministry of Defence forced to update its war games for Xbox generation
What I hear you saying is: "There could/should be a better way to do it". Adding ", hmmmmmmmmmmmmm...." to the end of that statement may be of some use to you or others, financially.
I've been playing with moai with much fun the past few weeks, and I have to commend you on a job well done. You've given a lot of love to the use of Lua to properly solve the platform problem, and its a joy to use moai to quickly get stuff done.
BizSpark is free only if you expect to not be around in 3 years.

That's not really the point of BizSpark. It's to get you to the point where SW licenses aren't a huge expenditure. At my company we have a general policy on SW "If it will make you more productive -- buy it." No questions asked.

We spend over $200k/year on each developer. Almost no developer purchases $10k/year in SW, but if they did, it's really not that big of a cost for us. And if there's a small improvement in productivity it's worth it.

But for companies where everyone eats ramen, but only when on sale, the cost of licenses is a big deal. I've seen startups where they require each dev to buy their own machines. I've seen other startups that pay half their annual salary for the first year and then will double your salary the next year -- as a way to get out the gate with lower costs.

If MS SW has no value then it has no value if its free. But if it does have value then the license costs really aren't that substantial.
For what I do today, nothing on the horizon as of today could replace the bulk of our work. I work on industrial stuff where almost everything is metal. We do almost exclusively low volume work so the rapid prototyping is key to our design process, but very little of what we do can be done in plastics of any kind. And I think that extends to a lot of industries.

Certainly if you are designing a new phone and you want to 'feel' a bunch of cases, 3D printing is a dream come true.

But think of all the things it doesn't touch at all.
-All chemical processes, from oil refineries to pharmaceuticals
-Web processes like making paper and fabric (and even solar panels these days)
-Everything related to ICs and circuit boards
-Anything made of metal which extends from giant cranes and ships all the way down to bent sheet metal computer cases
-Anything that is high volume
-Biomedical devices and medical supplies

I think it gets a lot of press because the largest impact will be on the most visible type of product - the mass produced consumer plastic product. Today these all have to be identical copies because the fixed costs are so high (molds) and the per unit costs are so low (plastic). In the future maybe we will see more variety there, but I think fundamentally people don't like choice in products in practice as much as they do in principle (thats just my opinion, but look at what has happened with the consolidation of Linux distros over time). But I think the majority of manufacturing is not doing that stuff.
> If you decide to change to another version of the software or different software entirely, you just do that.

I think this is the main point here. Especially in startups, parts get written and rewritten many times. Ruby backend too slow? Rewrite in Scala/Java/C++. Relational database doesn't quite fit? Extract a part of it into MongoDB etc. Besides, the community behind all these tools is healthy and responsive. Example: we had a stupid problem with Redis, asked on the forum and the guy who wrote Redis responded in matter of hours. Hell, maybe he even reads these words right now (hi!).

Call it cultural, call it technological, but there is quite a difference between two worlds.
Free implementation of Heroes of the Might and Magic II engine with source code
I am not sure why companies charge for online payments. If anything they should provide a discount!
removing offensive photos

It's not offensive to me. I'm all grown up now.
What Google bought in 2005 was not much more than a white paper and a team.
Is Puppet actually "winning" the DevOps battle for server deployment? Just curious as I was under the impression that both Chef and Puppet were top-tier, and you really couldn't go wrong either way.
My question to you is why all of this should be attributed to Android and not to the open source movement as a whole? That Google has contributed immensely, more so than any other company of a comparable size, to the open source community is undeniable. However, I would like to believe that the open source community is larger than just Google. Call it Android, call it Linux, call it what you like...just don't get into the mentality that "without Google we wouldn't have all this". That sort of thinking can lead to a dangerous over-reliance on a single, corporate, profit driven entity.
So much for "no bullshit."
I'm not trying to discredit the merits of watching independent films, but I think that they are disproportionately popular on netflix because netflix's streaming selection is terrible to begin with.

People don't care if a movie is domestic or foreign, so long as it is well done. I think the popularity of independent films is due to the fact that a higher percentage of the best independent films show up on netflix vs the percentage of popular Hollywood movies.

Its obviously going to be much easier to negotiate a contract with an independent studio that needs the money than it will be to do the same with a movie studio executive that hates the fact that your business even exists.
Google+ Censoring Borderline Offensive Profile Images
FYI once you have the token you can ask for the last 4 digits using the API. There's no need to move that around either.
The Rialto in El Cerrito serves beer and will bring food in to you.. It's quite a fun experience!
Ask HN: Recommended "read-later" service?
Like Readability, Instapaper, etc. Please mention your experiences (pros/cons) or link to previous discussion on HN.
"If you ask me, customers don't care what you code in. Only that you solve a need they have."

Bullshit. Many (mostly larger) customers, do care. They may have security, regulatory or other needs that you must fulfill.
Anyone know what the latest maximum penalty in USA to send three wedding photos from grandmother without a copyright release from the wedding photographer? In other words, the penalties for sharing memories with your family.

tl;dr: USA's Penalty of non-commercial infringement.

In Australia, it's $93,500 per infringement and up to 5 years jail time. So all up, $280,500 and 15 years jail for the grandmother here.
The difference is that the insurance company was lying to the surgeons in order to exploit them for profit.
My goodness.

So someone tell me, which registrar then actually has sensible terms & policies?
Help Startup Genome project collect facts & data on women-founded startups
How to Survive Your First Year As An Entrepreneur
Nailed it. Composite resources and good use of caching with fine-grained resources can go a long way.

HTTP is a pretty sophisticated protocol, when all is said and done. That means there is a learning curve in using it effectively. However, a good BaaS takes care of that for you, including providing default client libraries that know how to take advantage of the API properly.

(Full-disclosure: my company, spire.io, has recently launched a REST API BaaS that attempts to address exactly these concerns.)
Thanks, I appreciate the info, it is an area of computing that I just have not had time to get into. I have used Cassandra before, but never taken the time to look at the other offerings.
That's like saying that deregulated financial instruments made it easier for us to out-engineer the market. It looked like it worked, for a while, but it turned out there were... downsides. When a worldwide monoculture crashes, it's going to be more difficult to effect a food bailout.
The problem is that this is really an internal problem at Microsoft. They have so many licensing programs targeted at different industries that even trying to figure out who you need to be talking to can be a nightmare. Sometimes you'll be directed to a program like BizSpark, sometimes you have to go through a reseller like CDW, some industries have specific third-party programs that make the most sense, e.g. TechSoup for non-profits.

Navigating MS licensing is the software equivalent of navigating the US tax code. Why would you willfully subject yourself to that when you could be getting things done?
The Little Schemer has got to be one of the most annoying books ever written. The tone makes it sound like they're talking to a 5-year old, and the repetition and glacially slow pace makes for incredibly boring and frustrating reading.
The FCC doesn't really care if you can stab yourself with your phone. They do require that phones stay below a certain level of radiation output (which given root access, it's possible to muck with), thus a disclaimer is necessary to make it clear the user's the one screwing up the radio, not HTC's unlocker.
Off Topic

I will not go on to discuss this article. But I want to express a point of view that I have. I am starting to learn programming and for a lot of reasons, I think I rather learn an Open Source technology than a Microsoft one. Microsoft technologies are meant to work together and this will inevitably lead to you getting locked in, in a Microsoft environment. With Open Source technologies you always have options since they are platform agnostic even though they work better in UNIX-like environments. You can run any of the popular programming languages (Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc) that are used in UNIX-like systems on Windows, and the server software used in UNIX-like systems is also available in Windows, but Microsoft technologies are Windows only. Other important difference is that Open Source technologies can be extended by their users, you don't have to beg anyone to extend the features of an Open Source technology.

At this moment my only computing device is an Android smartphone, you can't do much with it right, right. Ha, but guess what you can install Lua, Perl, Python & JRuby. With JRuby you can even access the full Android API. So I am learning Ruby from and with my Android smartphone. I bet I can't do this with Microsoft technologies.

http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/
This is the case that is always mentioned, but the facts in the case are overwhelmingly in Monsanto's favor. If this is the only case detractors have, then, yes, I'd say that "The neighboring farmer bs is just a smokescreen."

I am unaware of any case in which an innocent farmer was a legitimate victim of accidental transfer. Can you please cite another source?

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeis...

Edit: Please also read ahelwer's comment further down.
A fine Reddit Politics post, which is to say, not germane to HN.

Flagged.
Concerts maybe not, but watching sporting events at home can usually be a better view and watching experience. Yes, the atmosphere of a home game for a passionate fan base cannot be replicated, but for casual fans who just want to watch the game in comfort, HD TV, comfy couches, and regularly priced food and drink is an attractive alternative compared to going to the stadium.
This is huge. The doors are now open for individuals to write their own little custom automata. Even if you can just write your own app and install the APK automatically, I get the feeling that having to adopt the Java paradigm and scaffolding is a big barrier for many who want to automate small tasks for themselves.
Goverment won't listen if only .0014 percent of domains leave Godaddy
Thanks sontek xamarin sounds pretty interesting
So I don't really work at a start-up in a meaningful sense anymore (Fog Creek is a decade old), but my team is just a few people, and we develop in a start-up-like mode for Kiln, which is written almost entirely on a WISC stack.

I really, really like .NET, ASP.NET MVC, and C#. And I even have grown to appreciate IIS 7 and SQL Server. But if I left this company and did a start-up project all over again, there is no way in hell I'd pick .NET for the kinds of things I find interesting.

Here's the rub: whenever we're doing something in Kiln that Microsoft anticipated, the environment is among the best I could possibly imagine. There is something they already wrote that works, makes sense, runs quickly, and is flexible without taking you into IoC debugging hell. If you want to take on something that is not using cutting-edge web technologies (i.e., you're not using WebSockets, or working with big file uploads, or doing strange routing, or what have you), you're probably in great shape.

But when we do something that Microsoft did not anticipate, it's nothing but pain. Take allowing you to push Mercurial requests through HTTP: we still get into fights with IIS, two years down the line, because we keep encountering limits that Microsoft set that make absolutely no sense if you're not a vanilla CRUD app, and whose removal is poorly documented. For example, IIS limits the amount of headers you can have. This setting isn't actually even set in IIS proper; it's set in the generic HTTP layer of Windows, which can only be altered with a full-blown machine reboot. So when one of our customers dutifully managed to craft a Mercurial request that was over 8k or whatever the limit was, we had to go reboot every last fricking production web server during our peak load time so that they could actually get their changesets through.

Or take streaming requests: ASP.NET is so insanely aggressive about not allowing you to stream in requests that we had to replace swaths the official framework with our home-grown solutions before ASP.NET finally relented and quit trying to suck multi-gigabyte requests into RAM.

Or take LINQ to SQL. LINQ to SQL is great. Usually. If you're using it exactly as they intended. When we wanted to make some of our models automatically supply some query parameters, though...well, let's just say there was a lot of T4 templating involved to get around sealed classes, and leave it there.

I think the successful start-ups are the ones that are most likely to be doing something "weird." And when you're doing something weird, I think that Microsoft is the wrong stack to use.

If you ask me, that's why start-ups tend not to use .NET.
Right you get to their passion immediately and can figure out if they are just slinging code or if they really love what they are doing. If I have to choose between passion and skill, I will chose passion every time, due to the fact that unless they are completely incompetent they can pick up skills.
Android is a linux clone which itself is a unix clone. It features an iphone clone ui layer and a java clone application framework. There's was a lot of great execution in Android but very little that was revolutionary.

If Microsoft buys Android instead of Google and keeps it proprietary the third world still gets cheap linux-based smartphones.

If Apple doesn't release the iPhone real webkit browsers still make it into phones based on linux (and Opera Mobile's compressed web is probably superior for many third world data rates anyway). Maybe it takes a bit longer for touch ui to popularize but that's not indispensable to accessing the web knowledge base.
The link in the article to the most poachable players sure is an interesting one... never seen names and numbers called out so bluntly - their employers must thrilled. (Oh well I guess thats part of the game...)

http://www.betabeat.com/2011/11/17/new-york-techs-20-most-po...
Dropbox: the new file system of the web
Thank for chiming in @jbigelow
I am on Pluralsight and that is a great resource indeed.
However, since I do not have any VB programming experience should I start learning VB first and then get into ASP.NET ?
Yes, I can see why some people use Flash as a sort of poor man's DRM.
Not quite. It a pretty good list of things that don't affect HNers as much as HNers think they might. What HNers learn about Angel investors prior to trying to raise doesn't help that much when it's actually time to raise. Jailed devices affect developers, and are important to factor into decisions, but jailbreaking itself is a distraction for the vast majority of developers who do it. Worrying about government regulations is a waste, instead we should build things that will make it difficult for regulators to stop things they don't like without also stopping things that they need.
I'm meet excellent .Net developers that are completely incapable of configuring IIS, but I've never see a PHP programmer that couldn't setup Apache or a Python developer that couldn't deploy a wsgi application and fire up nginx.

Almost all PHP devs are webdevs. Only a small subset of .NET devs are webdevs. It's probably better to compare ASP.NET devs to PHP devs. And most ASP.NET devs can configure IIS.
Jesus Christ. Can't a guy do anything without a corresponding pseudoscientific (actually, wholly arbitrary) blog post about "$anything considered harmful"?

The thread through all these stories is an author's dissatisfaction with their own life. "I found myself reading/working/eating too much. And I didn't like it. So Everyone Else in the world ought to stop reading/working/eating so much." Next week it'll be about how too much focus on creation makes one a narcissist. Or something. There's always something you can point to for making your life bland and unfulfilling. If you find yourself stuck in that loop, consider meditation instead of heroically "creating" a pile of unsubstantiated pontificating.
While I think paring has some value, someone is not going to be productive in an environment that they just came into, tribal knowledge such as business intelligence has not set in and there are acronyms, business realities and other common knowledge elements that this person will be just exposed to and have to deal with. Some of that information is garnered over the course of months so depending on the problem domain, a single afternoon could tell you very little about the candidate. I contend that with today's reality (2.7% tech unemployment) that it is more expensive to accidentally pass on a good developer due to bad interviewing techniques than it is to hire a bad developer. A bad developer is spotted within a week on the job, a good developer can easily be passed over in an interview, it may be a long time before another good developer comes through the door. Especially considering that good developers usually have groups of peers, that probably will not interview with a company if they pass on one a peer that they respect.
The line is where they, as a company, decide to put it. I would not go to a social networking site that had gore or porn polluting my feeds. Similarly, you might not go to a website that disallows any content. That's our prerogative. It's facile to paint it as a free speech argument.
How we track API requests with MixPanel and Gearman
if you can't find it and you need it. ...MAKE it! ,or pay some one to make it and monetize it. anyway the links given should be good.
check out url2png
Or, in other words, for a family of four who would have ordinarily gone to the movies every other weekend, the cost of 2 years worth of movie tickets before concessions.

In return:

* They have a massively improved home viewing experience, which is something they were doing already with television.

* They have a massive improvement in convenience (they don't have to leave the house to see it).

* They have a "good enough" (still "very good" overall) AV quality experience.

This is how displacement by substitutes works. It's hard to see it coming, because it's hard to know where to draw the line for "good enough". But we've probably crossed it for movies.
SL4A has been around for a number of years. It was previously called Android Scripting Environment until the name change a few years ago.

It's indeed neat, but releases and progress has been slow-going. The last releases were in early 2011. I don't know of anyone else who uses it, besides myself, but it's cool.
just like quora, this is pretty much the same thing as stackoverflow... watch out!