skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
tl;dr: waffle waffle waffle romantic nostalgia waffle waffle highlighter waffle waffle DRM waffle waffle.

The "store it on a 5.25 inch floppy" strawman was particularly pathetic. If you care about saving something, you'll keep up with the times in terms of storage. Furthermore, the more people who have a copy, the less likely the work is to be lost.

- DRM will fail eventually, like it did with music.

- Storage formats will evolve, but there will always be programs to convert to the latest format.

- Resale will become less of an issue as price comes down. We're seeing the same thing with video games and music.

- Rare works won't slowly disappear over time like they do with paper books.

With the advent of ebooks, distribution of knowledge is becoming less and less restricted. There will, however, be those who cling to the old technology out of nostalgia. They'll be forgotten in a generation or two; it was the same way with scrolls.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdkucf6wxU4
The left and right arrows feel too low. I expected them to be more in line with the Feedback tab on the right.
If I had to fly to America these days, I would not take my laptop unless absolutely necessary. I would also do a fresh install of Cyanogenmod on my phone and configure it up only after crossing the border.

There was a time that I wanted to live and work in America. These days, I don't even want to visit for a holiday.
...You're being way too reductionist, buying the anti-regulation propaganda. To be sure, there's plenty of bad things to be said about regulations. But it's tremendously naive to believe that a lack of regulations - a case which we have recently experienced with the deregulation of the finance markets and of Wall Street, and the subsequent financial melt-down - will cure our ills.

There is ample evidence of corporate fraud in recent years, not the least of which is around the mortgage securitization processes.

We need a level playing field, with known, equitable rules, and with enforcement, and with judicial review.

Commit to regulation and a pro-governance model? Lose.

Commit to a corporate model and a pro-corporate model? Lose.

It's about balance.
great article. its really hard to focus in on learning first and coding third as a technical co-founder. I love the last three questions - they forced me to focus on an even more minimal landing page as "MVP 0".
It's simpler than this or the post describes.

Every "benefit" has an associated dollar value. That's it. Total them up.

Oddly, salary is a holy cow whereas beenefits are not.

Having worked as an "employee" for 13 years before going freelance, the trend I see is this: employers generally feel its AOK to reduce/remove/substitute lesser benefits to save them money. The same cannot be said for salary reductions.

This is a large part of what led me to go freelance. I control my benefits. I negotiate my rate. I get paid based on those and how hard I work.

At the end of the day, it's still a lot like being an employee but, for me, with far less a feeling of being victimized.
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Very cool, mate.

I have done something similar but based on Vista : vidshome.com
Except that in this case Mega Conspiracy (the company behind MegaUpload) is being held liable for their own behavior. I'm used to Reddit being ill-informed but I was not expecting to see this attitude being so prevalent on HN!

Just in the comment thread for this post I've seen assertions that the U.S. avoided extradition treaties (untrue) and that MegaUpload was shut down just because of what their users were doing (also untrue).

Just as an example of things from the indictment (which you should really at least read a summary of):

* MegaConspiracy employees were discussing a way to avoid reposts of child porn by killing any video with a matching md5sum of movies which were deemed by MegaConspiracy to be child porn, but did not employ that same tactic for files uploaded that infringed copyright. Now you and I know that it's trivial to make the md5sum change without making the video look any different, but why does MegaConspiracy 'try harder' for some categories of illegal material and not others that just conveniently happen to make them more money?

* MegaConspiracy seeded their own website with videos copied straight from YouTube (thing wget --mirror) without so much as bothering to verify the license of those videos. This wouldn't be acceptable with open source software, why should this be acceptable for Mega Upload?

* MegaConspiracy distributed known infringing videos internally to staff (so it's not "just the users" doing it)

* MegaConspiracy rewarded uploaders monetarily for uploading popular videos despite the lack of authorization on the part of those users to redistribute the video (so it's not "just the users" asking for it)

So while I certainly appreciate that the movie/music industry are hopelessly out-of-tune with digital distribution, that doesn't make MegaConspiracy a bunch of good guys, and it doesn't make their behavior defensible.
Multiply the value by their average. It boosts overall submission quality automatically by giving better commenters more chances for a front page article.

edit: Though the value would need to be much lower than 20 per karma with that modifier. My average of 2.73 with 2011 karma would let me post as much as I want.

karma * 3.7 * average would come to around 20,000 for me. That would let me submit an article every 18 hours.
> Each time you use a credit card, each time you read your bank statement, all of your IP information and your search history will be required by your ISP to be stored for 18 months at all times.

Where did the author get that idea? I just read the bill, and the only part relating to ISP record-keeping is the section requiring ISPs to keep a log of what IP address is assigned to a customer. There's nothing about tracking searches or financial transactions, or any traffic monitoring at all.
I would expect that if the US government is requiring this, they'd also be able to get at least a few US based certificate authorities to play along.
"After the bean-counter moment it was all dry cereal and prepackaged snacks."

You must be going to different MKs than I do. My experience is the MKs have always had (at least since Dec 2008, when I started) plenty of seasonal fresh fruit, pre-made salads and sandwiches in addition to the dried cereals and pre-packaged snacks. <shrug>

The perks are nice but are far from the top of the list of things that I would miss about working here - working with world class people, the opportunity to work on huge problems at scale, the amount that's invested in internal tools and processes, a culture that allows and even encourages you to question management - those are the types of things that I would miss.

The perks are just nice extras.
Coming from a country with proportional voting (Norway), I can't say I agree it makes people toe the party line - in Norway all the big parties have factions with varying level of parliamentary support.

But even if it did, it makes it sufficiently easy to establish new parties and get representation in parliament that the parties are careful about not letting too big conflicts arise these days (one of the current coalition partners in government, for example, started out as a large chunk of the youth organization of the other, which broke away as they were far more left wing than the parent party)

Norway has regularly had 10+ parties represented in parliament (with 169 seats).

If done well, this results in an environment where everyone are interested in compromises because it's the only way of getting anything done - anyone who just tries being obstructionist like the current crop of Republicns would end up with no influence, as it just makes the other parties go elsewhere to find someone to cooperate with to establish majorities.

The current government is a coalition of three parties, and coalition governments have become the rule rather than the exception in Norway over the last few decades.
GML: Graffiti Markup Language
Rails: Using names to declare routes. Worth building?
it's tremendously naive to believe that a lack of regulations ... will cure our ills. ... It's about balance.

You'll have to first account for two words: "regulatory capture".

Until you can find a miracle to get around that problem, regulation is in the long run destined to be turned inside-out and used to sustain the industries. Look no farther than the current debates about various IP problems for an example.
I'd tend to think the "toeing the party line" would tend to be a feature rather than a bug, to the extent that most people inform themselves about politics simply by watching the national news. If parties are more homogeneous people can make meaningful votes without having to know who in particular is representing their district. I do agree about compulsory voting, though.
Unfortunately this isn't really an article about workflow; it's an article about the author's favorite tools. I agree with the premise that more needs to be written about web development workflow, I just don't find this to be engaging in that.
Your ignoring 1/2 of Social Security and Medicare taxes. And also not plotting the tax rate of the top 1% or 0.1% both of which are dramatically lower due to not paying Social Security on income over 120k or Medicare on investment income.

The bottom quintile pays over 20% if they have a job. Medicare alone is 15.3%.

Also, corporate income taxes only apply to US investments, which is rarely 100% of any sane persons investments. To top that off if you actually buy stock from a large company their tax rate is often below 5%.
Hmm. Is the Disqus plugin capable of automatically falling back to native Wordpress commenting in the case of Disqus down? If so, the authors need not panic even if Disqus down.
Hmm, are this photos the article mentions available to the general public?
You think it will be approved? Doesn't this app somehow encourages damaging your phone?
I think this is all that it's it, but this is a very good job.
Scaling a PHP MySQL Web Application
Rereading Darwin
MS Office comparison is weak. You pay for MS Office to own the output. iBooks Author is free. You pay Apple only when you produce something out of it and sell it for profit. It is absurd to expect proprietary software to be free.

Based on the past and recent history [think of all the products that Google shutdown recently], it sounds to me that it is much reliable for users, especially if you are going to put your career into it, that the company developing the software is making money from it.
"there is change afoot; whoever can make the awesomest, most loved art / entertainment of the next wave will win big"

I think the reason this ycomb call to action is going to fizzle out is because all you excited engineers keep using this language - "art" or "entertainment."

Hollywood doesn't produce entertainment. It tells stories. It's an industry of stories. Stories are deep and primal. Entertainment is distraction.

Despite having terrible profit margins (4-9%), six companies have had a lock-down on narrative film production for nearly 100 years. It's one of the most stable industries in the country. The initial ycomb call to action is probably the most misguided thing I've seen them release. Trying to beat back the most efficient and long lasting storytelling machine of all time with "entertainment" is like trying to dam the colorado river with a cheese cloth.
If they did, we'd get versions of Firefox and Chromium at least with the US certificate authorities root certs yanked out within a day, and companies scrambling to replace their SSL certs with certs that'd still be trusted by users.

Unless they made it illegal to, I'm sure we'd see all the major browsers work to deprecate those certificate authorities pretty quickly - not doing so would make SSL useless.
The site seems to be down for me. Here is the a google cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JmMIBrO...
It's worth keeping in mind that The Wire is a product of HBO, and cable TV. They are now well established, but they were once upstarts in their own way.

HBO got its start showing rewarmed mainstream Hollywood movies, months or more after their theatrical releasee. This though was enough to make them one of the few bright spots on the vast wasteland of Gilligan's Island and Bewitched reruns that was cable TV. For that, cable operators were able to extract a premium. From there, they branched out into various bits of original programming.

Then came original programming like Oz, Sopranos, the Wire. This was TV that people regarded as art, and as art, superior to anything on network television and hollywood movies.

Other examples to consider, early Miramax and Merchant/Ivory.
Well that's human nature people get far more upset about losing something losing $20 a day in free food feels much worse than gaining the same amount in pay.
In fairness, I think its because Hacker News is mostly about things that are matters of opinion, or at least worthy of four pages on the subject. Stack Overflow aims to be about one or two definitively correct, short and usable answers to specific, well-bounded, problems.
Image manipulation + storage + CDN is a very interesting combination, especially if images can be uploaded straight from the browser, without travelling through the application server.

But for a service with large amount of user uploaded images (like we plan to have at http://pllop.it) pricing is the major issue. At $0.50 per GB you would be around 5 x more expensive than CloudFront and even they are expensive compared to other options.

If the price would be on the level of CloudFront with 10-30% premium for taking care of image manipulation, we would consider using such service.
It bugs me that this is labeled "in CSS3". The only CSS3 here is some gradients and transitions. It uses plenty of images and Javascript.
I wonder if it would be possible to get the American Medical Association (and whatever the lawyers' equivalent is) to fight against this ridiculous policy. Or would they just shrug and say that doctors shouldn't put confidential data on portable computers?
Open Letter to the .NET community (on open-sourcing a niche .NET product)
Are this the same scientist who thinks the U.S. shot down the last Russian mars probe?
There has always been life on venus under the clouds. Search for valiant thor.
Solutions to 5 Major Problems in Physics
Another good option is to take a 32-gig SD card, and re-label it as a 1 gig. Then fill the card with random output, reset the number of cylinders in Fdisk to match 1 gig, format a 1 gig partition and fill it with pictures of scenery. Put you encrypted data at some point after 1 gig on the raw device. To anyone looking at it casually, it will appear to be just a 1 gig card. Even if they see the empty space afterwards, with good encryption it should be indistinguishable from random noise.

Bonus points for modifying the firmware on the SD card so that it looks like 1 gig at the low level.
Go got exceptions right
While I appreciate the concern over ACTA, this is a wikipedia article.

The particular section cites: a) a Vancouver Sun article from 2008; b) a blog post from 2009; c) a Globe and Mail article from 2008; and d) a Washington Post article from 2008. All of these are somewhat speculative. It also cites a Customs and Border Patrol policy paper which affirms that customs has the right to search people as they enter the country.

Also part of the wikipedia entry is a quote from a European Commission fact sheet that directly counters the notion that ACTA will lead to the wide-spread searching of iPods of consumers.

If you want to argue that something is draconian and will force (not merely allow) searches, then at least come up with something more substantial than wikipedia.
#OpGlobalBlackout Threat To Shutdown YT Facebook Twitter UN
A simple template to help you prioritize ideas
Well, purely on aesthetic terms paper books win hands down.

eBooks suffer from no hyphenation, no widow and orphan control, no good math markup, huge rivers of loose lines, etc. The list of typographic atrocities is endless.

I liked my Kindle at first (especially for the convenience of having lots of titles on one device) but the reading experience is not good. Paper is definitely the winner still even though it is heavy.
"...a massive ecological disaster..."

Indeed, but it will take much more to change China's ways. Until pollution becomes a risk to human life that takes an obviously shocking immediate toll the Chinese will not do anything about their pollution. Even then, given their huge population, problems are more likely to be swept under the rug (employees sent home to die, etc.).

So change due to environmental concerns is a long way off.
This is selective historical memory; society was in many ways less civil in the past. We had vice presidents and cabinet secretaries shooting each other with actual guns, newspapermen starting wars, etc.
I think 3 weeks is not enough. It took me ~4 months before noticing significant efficiency gains.
CSS animations and graphic jobs can be hardware accelerated, so it's way faster and doesn't affect the performance of the browser. There was an article posted here on HN about this exact topic, comparing animations in JavaScript vs CSS. I'm sorry I can't find it :(
The problem is the combination of this evil clause and Apple's general attitude and evilness.

First on the EULA: even if you used a program to do a formatting, said formatting is still your work, and the EULA recognize that by using the term work, so Apple is basically saying: if you use our "free" tool you have to give us a part of your work. So how exactly is that free? i don't know.

Then what happens if you use something else to do the formatting then just convert using Apple program (if that is possible)? Or if you can't convert redo exactly the same formatting, or something really near. Apple risk to argue that you breached the agreement even if you technically might not have.

And then what happens if they recognize that you used another tool to publish on other platform, but the too version are still too close to their taste? That's when Apple's general attitude and evilness will enter the game. They will say: I don't publish you, and I don't have to give any reason for that. You might say, yeah it is the game, it is their right. Except two things: the kind of people who object that typically also fake a taste for liberalism and free markets and so on (they are more probably thinking about something anarcho-capitalism style and how it could be great to make a lot of money fucking people all around you just because you can). I recognize that given the current laws, it is not obvious that Apple's don't have the right to do that, they even might have. But I found this way of doing business highly disgusting. The second thing is that a numerical publisher in Apple style has nothing in common with a real publisher. Their marginal cost for publishing you is absurdly low, their margins guaranteed, and they don't help you with you work (well yeah they kind of help you by "giving" you a program, ok in that case i suppose buying a fancy pen gives the builder some right on the story you wrote with? -- in any case this "help" as nothing in common with the help of a real publisher).

It all can be summarized with: Apple is constructing a giant monopolistic market, because well it is obvious that monopolies works and brings an absurd amount of money. And now every other giant multinationals find how brilliant this is and are trying to do the same, even for PC. They might even say it is not monopolies because they are multiple of those, and if they turn their sentence to say that "well" people might even believe them.

If this is the kind of world you want and like to live in, good for you. On my side, it makes me vomit.
Films aren't entertainment. Films are stories, and stories are primal.

Farmville is entertainment. Memes are entertainment. Entertainment is distraction.

Trying to fight stories with entertainment is a losing battle. There's a reason that despite terrible profit margins (4-9%) six studios have had a lock down on narrative filmmaking for nearly a century. It's an incredibly stable industry, and the stories of its death have been greatly exaggerated.

Of course, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe if you conjure up the right form of short-term brain crack, you'll be able to "destroy hollywood." If you really think that the secret to sniping the Big Six is building a better, faster Nyan Cat, well then . . . be my guest.
Bare bones or packages - what's better when writing TeX
“Let’s boldly suggest that the objects’ morphological features would allow us to say that they are living.”

I would have liked a more in-depth explanation and some photos indicating the morphological features.

This is the only photo I could dig up:
http://i.imgur.com/dfv0m.jpg
What are your thoughts on allowing people to downvote posts (akin to how comments can be downvoted)?
A graduated tax system where higher incomes are charged at higher marginal rates is no easier to cheat than a flat tax system. The existence of loopholes is the consequence of poor policy design rather than the tendency of taxation to be progressive.

A revenue-neutral flat tax system would ultimately require the majority of people to pay higher marginal tax rates than they do at present, and its inevitable negative effects on the quality of life of the middle classes (even if their basic needs were covered) wouldn't be balanced out by a positive impact on the quality of life of the smaller numbers of people wealthy enough to never consider budget constraints when making spending decisions.
Sure.

And those other 3 guys arrested a year ago were just "hiking". Because that's what people from 10,000 miles away normally do for fun: hike in the Iran-Iraq borders.

TL;DR: don't believe everything you read in the papers/net, Iranian or otherwise.
It's a fantastic movement, and the feminist in me is very happy to see the profession moving away from such a male focus. My only concern with articles like this (and female friends who participate in similar learning) is that learning HTML hardly makes you employable as a hot-shot startup whizz. In fact, it's arguable that HTML isn't even programming, it's really just basic computer use skills these days. I suppose we all have to start somewhere (I started with HTML too), but I hope these "ladies" don't stop with HTML.
How often do scientists fabricate data?
Lesson from the fall of Kodak: Don’t be afraid to cannibalize yourself
I would love to see a follow-up article that goes into more depth about actual workflow, especially regarding how the author co-develops the sites for mobile.
I don't think you understand the point of his post. You certainly missed the last section, titled "Ebooks are inevitable," where he admits that e-books are already better in many ways and are very far from fulfilling their potential. With ebooks, we're still looking at the equivalent of the day after Gutenberg printed his first Bible. His "spec" comparison (like most spec comparisons) is meant to point out where e-readers are deficient, because he wants e-reader development to focus on those deficiencies. We need to decide which paper book "specs" are important and ensure that they get recreated in our new digital world.

The "store it on a 5.25 inch floppy" strawman was particularly pathetic. If you care about saving something, you'll keep up with the times in terms of storage.

By the "long view" he's talking about world history, not rereading a book he bought twenty years ago. Most of the texts we have from over a millennium ago had to survive through centuries when nobody cared about them.

Also, I don't want to be rude, but when you follow "tl;dr" with a putative summary, it means you've read the whole thing yourself and want to save other people the trouble of reading it. If you decide something isn't worth reading straight through and just skim it instead, say "tl;dr" and leave the summarizing to people who actually read it.