skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think you're a hopeless idealist. In fact, I'm with you. I fully believe that we're headed toward a world in which most people are sitting around all day doing the equivalent of playing World of Warcraft. But that's not a bad thing. Where others might see freeloaders and parasites, I see potential. Give everyone the opportunity to do something meaningful and some of them will. And some of those meaningful contributions might not be anything any of us ever dreamed of paying for.

The point of automation is to take care of the easy stuff, which allows us to focus on the cool stuff. I know for a fact that there are individuals out there who, even if their livelihood is taken care of, will still want to push the human race forward.

No nasty conclusions. =)
Government bans creationist schools
It's not a container at all. We leverage a plugin that provides a JSON representation of the Wordpress site content.

We consume the JSON to display the Wordpress content within a fully native UI and give access to all the speed, features, and benefits that a fully native app has to offer over web or hybrid apps.
In case anyone from outside the UK is thinking "Wow, those brits are doing really well here, I wish my country could take such a sensible approach to computing education", well you're kind of right, it's an enormous improvement, but I feel it needs to be made clear just how bad the situation is right now, before the changes come into effect.

I'm a geek who now has a degree in CS, and at school IT lessons were pretty much my least favourite lesson apart from Games. We didn't learn anything. That's not hyperbole, I really doubt anyone learned anything in those lessons. And it wasn't like I was so amazing I knew it all already, everyone knew it all already. I've been in lessons where I already know the content, and what happens is people get stuck and you can help them out. That never happened, everyone already knew what they were doing, because we already wrote our essays in Word, did our class presentations in Powerpoint and our experimental data collation in Excel. We knew it already and the exercises were just asinine.

Everything I knew about CS before I started my degree, I taught myself.

Also, the school I was at was officially an "IT/Maths specialist school" or something like that (edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_and_Computing_Coll...), and in the year I graduated it won The Sunday Times' State School of the Year award.
Linux is hella predictable -- darned near real time -- if all it runs is your stack and especially if you set the process priority high enough.

Next time start with a minimal system and build up, rather than starting with a fully-loaded system and trying to isolate and remove which of over 9000 processes kicked in to plage you with that slowdown.

PROTIP: /sbin/init can be whatever the hell you want. Symlink it to /usr/bin/emacs and you have a poor man's Lisp machine.

Oh, and uhh -- turn off swap.

One of the reasons why I left Debian was that it takes a very kitchen-sink-included approach to a base system -- including, as I found out the hard way, things with unpleasant exploitable vulnerabilities. And it's hard for a person of ordinary Unix skills, not versed in Debian arcana, to pare it back to a manageable state.

I'm an Arch man to this day for this reason.
Thanks. Did you change your standard of living to to follow your dream? If so, to what extent? Are you now eating raman? Also, do you have any dependents (wife, children)? Oh, and how old are you?

Sorry, I know you are really interested in sharing your product but many of us want to know what people are willing to give up to chase their dreams.

Thanks again.
The Cognitive Startup
I'm not sure I see the benefit of converting a website into a pseudo-app, then charging for that app. Users would effectively be paying for the wrapper when the same content is available without charge via a browser. I realize this happens all the time and there are a plethora of site shortcuts-as-apps in the app store, but the fact that they are abundant doesn't make the practice any better.

I'm honestly curious about the use cases for this and what extra value this provides for the user over using the website in a browser.
Adding to that, he's not saying he'll only license it for $6,000+, just not for free or for "credit" or exposure.

As for only charging for your expertise, use of equipment/software, and time are also things businesses legitimately charge for, so it's fair to factor those into your value as well. It may not be the best way to assess the worth of your work, but it is a part of it.
True, but at the same time you shouldn't be hosting your pictures on the internet where anyone can copy it if you want to charge money for it. And you shouldn't let your customers either.

If I was to place some proprietary code on a public git, or just display it on my public webpage, should I get angry if people take it and don't pay me for it? Same with music, if you place it on the internet expect it to be out there. That's the nature of the medium. And trying to fight that is stupid, even if you are deserving of compensation.
I'm really glad for this post. I'm the organizer of LA Hacker News ( http://www.meetup.com/Los-Angeles-Hacker-News/ ), and I've found that posts for upcoming metups just don't make it to the frontpage anymore.

Luckily, we built up traction in the past while we could.
Maybe it just boots up a small script that books 1TB in cloud storage somewhere :-)
Works of art can have a monetary value - there is something called art market.
The value is determined by how much buyers are willing to pay as well as how much the sellers are willing to sell.
The monetary value of a copy of this low resolution jpeg file can only be determined by the market value.
You can't use replacement value to charge theft, because when someone "steal" it from the internet, they always copy it, you don't lose your origin one and thus no replacement is needed.
Looking at the TOCs they seem quite different. Pretty natural since the pdf is from 2003 and the book is from '08.
this from the man who won't describe xargs to newbies because he doesn't understand it.

blargh
For the site, I would advise you use a larger, bolder font, to make the charges seem more glaring.
There also needs to be additional information, such as the name of the officer involved.
Corruption in India is so widespread that it's become a lifestyle - it's simply understood that you will have to pay to get certain things done. But that doesn't mean it cannot change, I believe there are people in the government who really want to crack down, and I applaud efforts like this.
The US Italian mafia has been effectively been neutered since Gotti. Most of the modern powerful people got busted by RICO. In the US today, the most powerful are the Italians, Russians and the Mexican 'mafias'. The most influential may be from Mexico because the wars have spilled over across the border and they are the largest supplier of marijuana.

The truth is, at least with the Italian mafia, that the greatest success of the Italian mafia occurred during WWII. The CIA depended on them to provide them with information regarding Italy because Mussolini worked against mafia interests and Allies. It wasn't until the Kennedys took office that they heavily went after the mafia.

During wars it is known, at least in the US at that time and probably today, that it creates a healthy economy.

The reason why you see the economic downturns of today is because most Congressmen pass laws with loopholes. There was a time when a CEO didn't live in a lavish mansion over his employees. They managed their selfishness better back then. Today, most live in secluded areas so they don't have to deal with that harsh reality.
This reminds me of a rant by Harlan Ellison I saw at http://quotevadis.com/post/5897791429/does-your-boss-get-a-p...
Why did you choose to form an LLC instead of a C-Corporation?
Is it mismanagement?

The medium term outlook of the pharma industry is not that good. This is true for various reasons - a lot of low hanging fruit has been plucked, regulatory requirements are becoming more burdensome, political risk is high, and older (read: out of patent) drugs are increasingly competing with newer drugs.

Under these circumstances, it just seems like a good idea to cut back on R&D and focus on exploiting existing revenue streams. I've advocated that a lot of other companies in other industries should do this as well (e.g., MS should scrap Bing, pay dividends, and shareholders can spend the dividends on GOOG if they want a long position in search).
I'm sure I'll be downvoted, but C is not Java.

From what I can tell, the "it's time for C to go" comes from a generation raised on Java.

C still has its place.
Plenty, a government is granted a monopoly on violence in order to block other players from getting into (or at least flexing their muscles in) the violence game.
You say 'hackers' like it's a bad thing. As a reminder, this is "Hacker News".
Facebook now acknowledges what we said for a long time and they didnt acknowledge, that every single photograph uploaded to Facebook is put through facial recognition software they call PhotoDNA which is used to find people for whom any law enforcement agency in the world is looking.

How true is this?
cool idea, looks nice, thanks for sharing
Thanks dholowiski!

Here's a few ways that we stand out:
* Our apps can be distributed on the app store like all other native iOS apps. You can even charge for these apps and we won't take a penny.
* We support push notifications. You can send messages to users of an app as long as they have it installed on their phone.
* All content is available offline, even when the phone is in airplane mode.
* Our architechture opens up the possibility of more interesting native features (text-to-speech among other things)
* You can preview your app on your phone and get a really good feel for how it will look and operate once deployed.
* When your app is deployed, you can change its parameters and branding at any time. Changes are updated across your installed base instantly.
UK Startups - Lets Work Together To Force Change
Tell Us What You're Doing For Micro Enterprises Not For 'SMEs' is an e-petition started by no other than Tony Robinson OBE (http://www.tonyrobinsonobe.co.uk/). I have no affiliation with Tony or his companies, but I admire his work to help get the door of discussion open in helping micro enterprises find a voice in parliament.

Please Note: I only came across this whilst looking for epetitions related to start-up tax breaks and found it quite fitting that Tony is still championing UK Entrepreneurs
Bad site doesn't give any useful information.
And worse toenail clippers.
Join this startup competition (Seattle)
Taking BBEdit Seriously
Did facebook just become like an ad-supported forum with google ads in the thread?
Show HN: Delicious Spy is broken, so I built a new one
Romanian Developer Brings Android FaceUnlock To iPhone
Kudos to you for following your dream, but I do have to say I'm fully against making it easier for people to move that which should stay on the web to native apps. We have web browsers for a reason.
Genius, I'd invest all my money into this idea. From a marketing perspective:

1. big market (a lot of wordpress sites run by small & medium businesses that would love an easy and cheap app)
2. practically sells itself (costs, ease of use, service)
3. if possible try to roll it out both ways (drupal and android)

Questions:

1. What about more complex and altered WP sites?
2. What will your to-market strategy be? More specifically: target customer

Again, a great idea and a very good feel for what the market needs. Congratulations!
The site owner wouldn't have to charge for the app (unless I missed something). They just now have a native app for their website. Native app interaction speed and offline use are obvious advantages over using the blog in the mobile browser, so there's definitely value here. And the number of WordPress sites is so huge (over 70 million) that there's undoubtedly a market for this.
I really enjoyed reading this perspective. It reminds me of something Feynman described (can't find the link), wherein some military general asked scientists to develop a tank which would convert rocks and sand into fuel as it drove across the terrain. And Babbage before that - "I cannot comprehend the confusion of ideas..."

If we want to frame SOPA in the context of these kinds of incidents, one optimistic view would be that, as has happened in the past, science - if we can agree that determining whether or not a copyrighted work is stolen - will prevail.
LAST DAY: AppSumo MacBook Air 13' Giveaway
Selling Design – an online reading list
I guess WP is the first step, I'd love to see this also for Other blogging engines like blogger, posterous or tumblr.
Are We Becoming Hyper-Connected Robots? | Joanna Ciolek
While I'm slowly transitioning to pinboard.io, because delicious is dropping the ball, I built this for old time's sake to replace the (now defunct it seems) http://www.ajaxonomy.com/deliciousspy/

It's fairly basic, but functional.
Any improvement suggestions are welcome.
But (nearly) everyone who reads reddit is already aware of the problem and many have already complained. The point in turning off the big sites is to get a lot of angry constituents from apparently "mainstream" demographics (i.e., not "a bunch of nerds") calling and freaking out because they can't get to Facebook.

I know, for instance, that my mom would be seriously flipping out if Facebook were blacked out for her. If they asked her to make a call to get through, she would call immediately and yell at the people for making Facebook not work. This would happen millions upon millions of times over, which is why people want major sites like Facebook to participate.

I find it both scary and intriguing that a small handful of companies could have such a significant effect on the legislative process merely by presenting something in a negative light to their users, and requiring some action to affirm that viewpoint before allowing the user to access the service.

Taking Facebook down completely seems extremely counter-productive for everyone. Just a button that says "I called, let me through" should be good enough, there would be plenty of people who have an aversion to clicking through that without actually placing the call, and then Facebook (and its dependents, Zynga et al) doesn't lose 12-24 solid hours of ad revenue.

I strongly agree that if Google "blacks out" anything, they should restrict it to search only. Email and other essential services must remain accessible.
I've always distrusted the black box model of object oriented programming. It sounds good in theory but in practice you hardly ever get it right the first or the fifth time.

Consider a complex component like an ftp library. There are so many quirks with hosting OS'es (e.g. VAX) that connecting to a new system may cause something completely unexpected to happen. Unless the component author is very good at predicting failure conditions and passing meaningful error messages to the client, you may be completely stuck. You cannot tell if it's a configuration issue, a library issue or if it's an issue in your code and the way you call the library.

The ability to inspect (and fix) source code is invaluable. Even Microsoft let's you at least look at the source code for .NET now.
Go Daddy Bets on Windfall From Web-Address Expansion Beyond .Com
I agree on the scale, but then you really need to put a table comparing with other countries. What happens if I say Italians eat 100 M tonnes of ice scream per year? Is it a lot? A lot compared to what?

I don't agree on the influence and power and that's exactly the point. If you sum up all the US criminals, you get a raw index of criminality in the country, not how much power few criminals have over US people. If all US criminals where part of the same organization, the infamous US mob, that would be a huge problem then. But US mob does not exist, the same as Mafia does not rule all criminality in Italy.
Thanks for taking the time to write that - it is extremely useful!
JQuery.font()
I thought blue and gray bar graph was awesome. It took me just a second to figure out what the two colors represented. I also love the fact he didn't put a facebook link.
Clean water is not fundamentally a scarce resource. Almost nothing is. The only actually scarce resource, and the one everything depends on, is energy. Given enough energy, we can clean all the water we want and distribute it anywhere we want. Given enough energy, we could recycle everything down to the smallest granule of rare earth metals. We would only get into trouble once we would be using all of the stuff at the same time, but then, given enough energy, we could mine the moon, asteroids, other planets. Given enough energy, everyone would be warm and fed, without any ecological problems, because we could clean all waste and recycle everything.

In the end, it all comes down to energy. If some countries would spend even a fraction of their defense budgets on solar, water, wind or fusion power research, we would be there in a jiffy. We could have had more energy than we could ever use by now. Our progress is much slower than it could be, because energy is kept scarce.
Yeah, I'm well aware of the reasoning, and I'm scrupulously careful about how often I take it, and have essentially given up alcohol for the last year or more out of paranoia (erm, justified caution). Dying slowly of liver failure over several weeks doesn't sound like my idea of fun.

That fatality reduction sounds incredible though. Since just about every corner shop sells the stuff, I'm surprised it cut the suicide rate by that much - I'd have thought it more likely the aforementioned idiots who think OTC means it's harmless, and a handful is just the thing for yesterdays hangover before hitting the pub tonight.

Out of curiosity, do you have a reference? I'm wondering if it breaks down the figures for the "nuke-your-liver trying to get high on codeine" crowd against the others as well.
Let me compare with the 1980s in England, because that's what I know ...

I sat 'O' levels (now replaced by GCSEs in 1981 and 'A' levels in 1983. There was no IT teaching in my school at that time. A computer lab was installed in 1980, and they began running the 'O' level computer science exams in 1983 (too late for me) although I got to use the lab's Apple IIs and Systime 525 minicomputer during my 'A' level in general studies. Teaching focused on programming; there were no office apps on those computers. The 'O' level in CS was recognizably about computer science, albeit at an embryonic level, in those days.

In 1987 I began studying for an 'A' level in computer science at evening classes (I'd been at university from 1983-86). The focus was fairly hardcore programming, with some assembly language plus BBC Basic, plus boolean logic, binary and hexadecimal arithmetic, basic data structures (linked lists, trees, hash tables). Applications barely got a look in.

I bailed on the CS 'A' level as too pedestrian and instead went into a graduate-entry conversion degree in 1989. The then CS 'A' level was, I will concede, useful preparation for a CS degree back then.

The point is, the 1980s syllabi had zero content on application usage -- it was all about data processing and programming and the structure of computing machinery. The trend towards teaching IT seems to have cut in some time after 1988, and gone way too far ...
Do you know what they ended up settling on?
Yes, and the flight-friendly knife body comes with ear plugs and special container for Xanax pills.
> REP. MARINO: I only have a limited amount of time here and I appreciate your answer. But we have the technology, Google has the technology, we have the brainpower in this country, we certainly can figure it out.

Wow that is infuriating; ignorance masquerading as arrogance.
I would happily accept that limitation if O'Reilly made all its books available with the local library's eBook lending system. The local library system takes its limited funding and prioritizes variety over recency.

It's great if you're doing a research paper on something non-technical, but not so great if you want a current book on anything relating to computers. Even quantity-limited eBooks would solve that.
Comments Commentary
Do you anyone i could pay to develop a Spotify App?
Assuming this spreads, I believe a potential ramification of major sites blacking out would be new laws that would attempt to make such black outs illegal.

It could be seen as equivalent to strikes in essential service industries like transportation. Such strikes are semi-regulated and governments can and have ordered strikers back on the job to maintain public order. I see this possibility as a potentially major unintended consequence of putting Facebook "on strike".
SOPA is actually a perfect example of how programmers have very little clout at all. Basically the entire internet industry has relentlessly and loudly pointed out what a terrible idea it is on so many levels, and yet the people in Congress who support the bill are saying it has only a few opponents. I really don't think they're scared at all.
Personal Search Service CloudMagic Mobile Arrives: Fast Aggreg. Search
Oh if only it was just free loading at large companies!

The reality is much more complicated. I worked with some great people at a huge company, a lot of them had families, one had a child with very severe asthma, and one time only a helicopter could get to the hospital fast enough.

Others had perfectly healthy children... in college, and a huge mortgage on the family home.

They all engaged in counter productive job preservation strategies. The easiest of which is simply to not aggressively share knowledge. At very large companies you really have to actively push your knowledge onto people or a shared knowledge repo.

The next level is to put a very small bit of effort into actively avoiding the sharing of knowledge. Give less than the best answers you can give when asked for information. You don't have to lie or hide, just don't be quite as eloquent as you could be.

At yet another level are things like writing custom wrappers around things that didn't need wrappers, or that already were wrappers themselves.

People were doing this because if they lost their jobs they would lose their homes, the children's heath insurance which can pay for things like helicopters, etc.

Then there's personality conflicts. At very large companies you work with a lot of people and this increases the probability you'll meet your worst match. That is the personality that just happens to clash with your personality. The most common I've seen is very confrontational vs. very passive. The very passive then often becomes as passive aggressive as the other is openly aggressive. And boy can smart people like hackers be incredibly good at passive aggression.
The point here is that either of those people would be good on their own. It's the combination that's toxic for them and anyone caught up with them.

And then there's anything other than stellar management. Organizing any large group of people so that communication is effective is not easy. If that large group is programmers and the information is highly complex... you don't have to be bad to mess it up, just not being a great manager is enough.

And there's even more, I could write a large book about this.
The money figure doesn't matter. We could quibble over the dollar amount or the fact that even if I had all that great equipment I couldn't reproduce the photo myself. All of those pedantic arguments don't matter. The Intellectual Property value of the photo does.

I think we've reached(-ing) the point where freedom for all to publish isn't as magical as it was 5 or 10 years ago. Democracy of publishing is giving away to Capitalism of publishing. The new killer app isn't enabling people to publish or get exposure. It's a platform for getting people paid for their time and skills.
Panasonic Shows Cloud-Based “Smart Vegetable Garden” Device For Homes
TiVo Research Claims Only 38 Percent Of Users Watch Live TV