skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I posted this elsewhere, but I think it got buried. IMO it is worth reposting here:

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".
I wish posts had a native language the are posted in, since I have friends in Mexico that post things both in English and Spanish, I have no desire to grok their Spanish posts, so the ability to filter circles or the main stream based on certain things is something Google+ as a whole needs.
The point he's making, largely, is that Google going out is a bad thing because people use internet searches as a replacement for common sense. That's not Google's fault.
GrubWithUs Goes Mobile With A (Really Pretty) iPhone App
Wasn't this exactly the point of the other author's article? He was irate with people saying they would like to take the photo for free in exchange for promises of "exposure" or because taking photos are something anyone can do these days. What isn't being addressed is those asking him weren't copying the photo for the love of photography; they were suggesting they take the photo for free and to print it in a magazine or advertising which does make those producers money. Is that a fair exchange? Do we as creative people on HN value this exchange?

We can argue the merits of making a living off being a photographer, but photographs are a creative work like any other. In the world of easy digital duplication, we are fast approaching the inability to produce creative works except with the support of patrons. I worry that this leaves creativity at a social disadvantage to physical commodities, selling Coke or furniture or razors or stocks, which are jobs that provide a steady salary that help people live. That these jobs are entitled to pay money and creative works are expected to be free except for the generosity of their consumers seems like strange social values.

Louis CK had the benefit of one large social push and it remains to be seen if he makes the same amount off a second album; Radiohead didn't give away their next album King of Limbs; and Humble Indie Bundle makes money consistently, but that money goes to charity. I want to be convinced that it is sustainable to produce creative works for free and survive on donations, but I simply think the evidence is too weak so far to support this conclusion just yet.
"Most of all, I have realized a long time ago that in a world where everyone has a camera, a lot of free time and fantastic tools to publish stuff, there is not a lot of money to be made anymore by taking pictures."

For me that is the best rejoinder to the somewhat whiny tone of the "this photo is not free" post. The author has missed the point that certain types of photos are accurately valued at "free for credit", because it is easy to obtain them at that cost. His real beef should be with this fact, not the fact that people are asking him for photos at market prices.

We would all like to be able to charge money for things we would do anyway, but reality does not always oblige us. When my neighbor asked me for my grass clippings to add to his compost pile, I told him sure, but only if I could charge him $1000, based on the cost of my lawnmower, gas, and labor. After all, he will be able to use that compost as fertilizer eventually, and why should he profit from my hard work without compensating me? Sadly, my neighbor did not buy my argument, because grass clippings, like certain photos, are neither rare nor hard to come by.
Money and The App Store: A Few Figures That Might Help an Indie Developer
I believe Facebook is the least one willing to stand up for civil rights - as long as not about some 3rd world dictatorship. With their ongoing questionable practice in regards to privacy they are certainly going to duck and cover as soon as something controversial comes up. Google and especially Twitter are from my view substantially more supportive to causes like these.
Samsung is more likely to be the next Sony rather than the next Apple.
I still don't see the point. Are you arguing whether the author could ask for payments for copies? Sure he could. Even if there were no copyright laws. But only because of the copyright laws he can demand to be paid. Or you're arguing that "demand" doesn't necessary mean "ask for what is due, legally"? In this case I think what I meant was clear enough, since you seem to recognize that there's a nuance. If every word had only one strictly clear meaning, we wouldn't have numbered lists in dictionaries. (By the way, in my first sentence, by "point" I didn't mean a punctuation mark, nor did I mean an indefinitely small space.)
Exactly. The first thing I though when trying to return from the Rails, RVM, RSpec & Jenkins presentation this morning was "What an asshole. Why didn't he just use impress.js so I wouldn't have to hit the back button 20 times?"

If you're going to port an application to your own flavor of X, which people are wont to do, please don't miss the most important points. Some of which are easily discernible.
What's an "extraordinary claim"? And also, why do claims that are "historically dubious" automatically fall into the category of "extraordinary"?

In Bayesian terms, it sounds like you are merely stating that you assign a very small prior to the "natural reasons" hypothesis. I.e., you are claiming that before looking at the evidence, you believe "natural reasons" has a 1 in 1 million (or some similarly large number) chance of being true. Is this correct?
Being able to weigh results by G+ posts has made discovering new and interesting things inevitable, not just easy. Sometimes I find new and interesting things that aren't even related to what I was searching for. It's like StumbleUpon in the early days.

For example, I needed a Top Posts plugin for WordPress. I drowned in a sea of plugins, spam, and blog posts with the default search. Social weighting put the perfect plugin right on top. And it's been the same for every query I've tried so far.
Not just angry-old-guy, but angry-obtuse-old-guy. The facts are not in question, just the reasons and the result. The fact that there are fewer women in computing than there are in the general population does not imply that women are ill-suited for the profession or even that there is a correlation between women's capabilities/inclinations and their representation in computing, because the facts about abilities/inclination have not been established. Fowler, in fact, said he doesn't know what the reason is. And by the way, the word is 'audacity', not 'audaciousness'. Use in a sentence: I am struck by the audacity of ranting on at length arguing with things Fowler didn't actually say.
Thank you very much for this link. I enjoyed it enormously, for some reason.
New DNA reader - "1,000$ genome" in a day
Designing Great API Docs
Premature optimization heaven!!

But seriously, I'm going to crawl through this and see if there is anything that can speed up some drawing code I have. Very nice!
WPtouch == 90% bang for $0 bucks + 1 minute time investment.
TheAppifier's nativization of blogs has its niche:
- for blogs that has large, religious, passionate following.
- for marketing departments who love to announce "immediate availability of mobile app".

It does not add any "native" functionality though - just save people from typing URL in mobile browsers.
True/false?
except if you update the Hacker News circle, you'll need to remove them again.
I was thinking the same thing... It is the next Sony, or worse the next Dell of consumer electronics.
Calling string manipulation functions buggy and broken because they fail when you don't pass them a string is both wrong and silly.
I feel for you. Let's say that I am on the same boat right now and on the same stage of life. I am also looking for answers on the same question.

That said, I cannot give a good advice per se. But let me say this. Keep at it. Get involved with the developer community.

In fact, there is the SoCal Code Camp on January 28-29, 2012 at Cal State Fullerton. Check it out http://www.socalcodecamp.com/ . I will be there.
I really don't see how a law like that would ever get past the Supreme Court, seeing as how it's a major restriction of 1st Amendment rights.

It would also be a major signal to every web app out there that this is the wrong country to be in.

edit: wrong institution.
Of course you're also misrepresenting the other guy's argument: he wasn't arguing against "intellectual property theft" (what a loaded term!); rather, he was arguing against people's asking for the photograph for free. Moreover, his particular argument (ignoring the larger issue) was fairly obviously flawed and overbearing.
Looks like you're coming into the same space that OnSwipe is in.
Building an audience that is interested in content I can automatically generate/link to. Figure out related content I can put in that pays too or get some type of commission from from content sources.
The iFlash: finally, a flash option for iPhone.
Yes, they took user behavior into account and realized that it didn't matter because they have to get into the social space. Remember, social media success is tied into all Google employee bonuses. They are willing to make search worse in order to make G+ better.

Yes, relevance is everything. When I search for something in a search engine 95 times out of 100 I am searching for something new. Occasionally I am searching for something that I already found when searching before. I am never looking for photos of myself. I mean please.

This is corporate spin and you are eating it up! :)
"TL;DR: We at StreetEasy decided to build our own maps using, among other tools, OpenStreetMap, TileMill, MapBox and Leaflet, instead of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to Google. And yes, the money pushed us into doing it, but we're happier with the result because we now control the contents of our maps."
This isn't going to be popular on this board, but::

Your statement is why the writers of the US constitution mandated creative protection[0]. To prevent instances of piracy because users don't feel like they should pay for something made that could be duplicated.

Your argument goes back to mine-- by pirating works, you're making the decision for the owner/creator whether to release that work freely or to charge. That's not your right, no matter what economic model you believe.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause
In answer to "What's wrong with OpenID," I will defer to HN's own patio11: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=by%3Apatio1...
Matthew 6:1-4
> There are artificial barriers, based on gender/race/class/whatever that make it marginally harder for some people to contribute.

Can you provide an example of the barriers of which you speak? I find that a lot of the time I'm told about how people with qualities distinct from mine should be cut some slack or given extra incentives to get into industry to correct some sort of imbalance, and that the imbalance is somehow evidence of barriers that we can't see, and that incentivising these groups (and in effect putting barriers up against people like me) is the way forward.

To me, discrimination is discrimination, regardless. I don't take issue with any qualities of anyone - the right person for the job is the right person for the job. Perhaps historically barriers meant that the right person for the job was a white male (bearing in mind societal pressures, the availability of education and options etc.) and the prevalence of white males is a hangover, if so like all hangovers it will die down.

What I do know is that in my profession (technical infosec) there's a hard time finding talent, but that's because your average graduate student won't cut it. So we're stuck in a pool where you have a subset of CS grads, with some security interest and experience, subset of which have a particular mindset and abilities, and in turn a subset of which won't run away at the prospect of learning a staggering amount of information about systems, programs and all kinds of stuff are what you're after. Then on top of that I get told that because there's a skew further up the chain that I should incentivise particular groups to 'correct an imbalance' I have no direct control over.
If you have the savings to live comfortably I would suggest you avoid a job. In almost all cases the ratio of awesome learning to repitition and compromise is tiny and it sounds like you want to learn how to do this profession well.

So some of the best practitioners do this for free - in open source development. Find a couple of established projects (mYbe in a domain you understand like film blender3d comes to mind) and join in. Progress from just compiling and testing the code others write to fixing one or two bugs (the time you are ready to contribute a bug fix is the time you look at a bug and say I know where that is failing)

from there most non-poinsonous projects will take you on -find a mentor in the project- does not have to be very formal - do things their way, their setup their indentation style, until you know why you will do it differently.

On the side set up and administer a real live service that has real live people using it. Could be a start up. Could be a saas for a local charity. The main thing is to get a feel for the problems of running a live service.

Do this for 6 months - year. Also exercise and eat well, you may as well. Check back here every few months and after six months, go look for jobs. You will be amazed how much less daunting that whiteboard.

Free advice - worth every Penny
WP Engine's Infrastructure
Actually, I think the programming field is actually more lucrative these days. The difference is that where the photographer in question expects to be paid for work he's already done, most people going into programming are either paid a salary up-front or have a fairly involved business plan (startups and the like). App developers do seem to be doing relatively poorly, but they are a minority.
This is not entirely accurate. The original "this photograph is not free" article wasn't an attempt to prevent his own images from being copied. It was an attempt to influence OTHER photographers not to give away their photos for free.

I've worked for a long time in the photography industry. In my experience there are two things that justifiably piss photographers off in a very major way:

1. Getting their photo ripped off without permission, because it loses them money.

2. Seeing a publication use another photographer's photo for free (even with permission), because it loses EVERYBODY money.

If good photographers are constantly giving photos away and not charging, professional photography prices and value naturally goes down. It's kind of a tragedy of the commons - photographers who DO give away work get more recognition, but they lower the overall value of their industry.
Ask HN: Buffer based Markdown parser
Hi all,

Does anyone know of a C (preferably) Markdown parser that can be called repeatedly as buffers become available to render a single document?
It roughly translated into ‘the sound of the guitar mixed with the tree imagery is too nostalgic-sounding’. I’m still scratching my head on that one.

A really good translator might have written that as "Your artistic choices are dated", which is probably what the original author meant to convey. The word invariably translated as "nostalgic" is natuskashii (懐かしい) and it conveys an impression of times-gone-by, which is sometimes not a good thing.

(I once read a delightfully poisonous review of UI decisions by our senior engineer, beginning with "The new interface to the web app reminds me of my childhood experience working with mainframe terminals, except without the complex functionality.")
"We all know what that powerful 'jQuery' keyword does for a JavaScript project."

Could you please elaborate on this?
lolololololol

To me, the articles main support for the rise of Intel as a mobile chip competitor are:
1). Motorola made a deal
2). Intel can leverage their own manufacturing process/plants

The first is stupid. Considering how much Motorola bent over for Microsoft, this is probably more Microsoft doing Intel a solid to get into the market rather than a purely "logical" financial long-term decision by Motorola.

The second I can't really argue about with any real knowledge. However, upgrading plants is fucking expensive. By ARM separating themselves from that portion of the chip business, they have basically enabled a secondary competitive market of improving ARM designs. Intel has locked themselves into the position of Overseer of all-best-designs, and whether or not this is true, it will lead to comparative stagnation in innovation.

I'm might be wrong, but I honestly think that Intel will lose simply because their mentality depends too much on an idea of limited competition. They are too used to AMD and legacy slaves; the switch to open-source and web-based systems will lead to insane competition and crunch their profit margins like a nutcracker.
I feel that any sense of smugness in this article is more than outshone by the sense of entitlement in the original. The second post acknowledges reality (that many good quality photos are available for free) while the first post seems to whine about the consequences of that reality (when free photos are so widely available, why should you be surprised/angry when someone asks you for your photos for free?)
Hi, first of all, I sympathize and understand exactly where you are coming from...actually in more ways than you may imagine. I have to agree that the major is not always the end-all. In fact, many programmers I know tell me that school taught them nothing. It was self-teaching and tutorials that helped them learn what they needed to. College these days is about connections, alma mater, and if you are really dedicated you can learn a lot.

I know you want to remain anonymous in your public post on HN, but if you want someone to talk to, send me an email (in profile). Best regards whatever you decide to do. Number one thing is to not worry about the future. Under no circumstances can worrying help you. Make daily goals, attain them, and before you know it you will be successful.
I had a long post written but I think for brevity sake I'll only include what I thought is relevant.

> In fact, to make it personal: I'm an aspiring writer. I write on my blog and I just got a couple of pieces published in the Atlantic Tech blog. I don't get paid for any of that writing. If I tried to charge for it, no one would pay me. So I give it away for free while I hone my skills and build my (freely available) ouevre, in the hope that eventually the quality of my work will be such that I will be able to fund the production of the work, not the distribution of copies. (I.e. in the hope that I'll get hired by a web site or magazine to write on staff full-time.) So my money is actually located exactly where my mouth is.

Who's to say he hasn't already paid his dues? Maybe he did do sample work when he was just starting out and he's now at the phase where he's monetizing his skill set by selling good photos. He doesn't have a problem with companies that don't want to pay, he just says that what he does isn't cheap or free to do so pay him some money for his time and effort or just don't use the picture. If some website asks you to write full-time but they can't pay you anything other than exposure, are you going to take it? No, because you have a valuable skill that should be paid.

But let's try to keep it in the context of the post. He has a picture, apparently companies _want_ this picture so he has something that they cannot get just by grabbing an amateur's version of the photograph. These companies also have large ad and marketing budgets so money shouldn't be an issue yet somehow it is. I think in this case he has a right to be mad. He can't work for free, and since he took it and owns the rights to it he should be able to tell those companies to piss off. If there is a demand for his photo to be used then he should get paid.
I'd be more worried about the Sandbox app getting pulled. It basically presents as its own app environment, which is a huge no-no with Apple and I'm surprised it even was approved.
Charging is good since it keeps the product around, but Google's prices seem ramp up suddenly from free to way too high suddenly. First Appspot and now this, looks like their pricing is too out of line for small to medium companies. They need a flatter pricing curve.
Kindness and the Sexual Mating of Ideas
Can you point to some great artists and writers who studied art history or literature? I agree that formal study and practice of music (not the same as studying music history btw) has lead to a lot of great music.
It is your own feeling of inadequacy that prevents you from contributing. That's also likely a major contributing factor to why you feel the author is being smug.

The only thing preventing you from excellence is your fear. You don't have to be "worthy" to make something good; you just need the ambition to set high goals, the drive and tenacity to meet those goals, and the thick skin to shrug off the inevitable judgments of others. All great men are called crazy at one point or another, and all great men have doubted themselves. Why should you be any different?
11 Books Every Leader Should Read
ICT is learning how to use computers efficiently, how to do a non-computer job like accounting on computers., basically how to use Office. Computer Science is different, and now that home computers are common enough could easily be done at the same time (school years) as ICT. This divide of using or creating goes on forever, my options of courses for next year are Business IT (supporting those people who are just using Office) or Programming (making programs, though possibly only in Java).
site is slammed, cache

http://google.com/search?q=cache:http://standblog.org/blog/p...
In our economy value is not based on cost but on supply and demand...
Writing correct software is so close to impossible that we would actually be be better off without a large majority of the people who are already charging big money for utter crap. I don't see how we can expect more meaningful contributions from anyone who isn't irrestibly drawn to this Sisyphean work.
Agreed. They effectively pushed my startup from Appspot to Heroku.
Seems like a case of mentioning Apple to get people reading. Samsung isn't as sexy so they ride the Apple story trend. It's fun to see reporting that mentions Apple evolve. First it was cool to say Apple is dead, then it was cool to root for them as the underdog, and now it's cool to try to tear them down again. There's never a middle ground. It's always about handing out heaping helpings of praise to a company or tearing them apart when it's a TC article.
Why Do Women Round Down When Men Round Up?
Hi there. I'm part of the (very small) team that designed and developed the iPhone app. We're glad it's finally out in the wild, and we'd love to answer any questions from HN folks about the development process.
Utilities cannot "go dark". The power company couldn't go dark to make a political point. The water and gas companies couldn't either.

Google has acquired (for better or worse) utility status. Interrupting service to make a political point would do unbelievable damage to Google itself.

Better to just outspend Hollywood, if Google has the will to defeat SOPA.
Their standards are different.

Also, they're being slightly disingenuous by omitting the time it took to fabricate all of the various parts that they then assemble on site.

Still, it probably comes down more to standards. I really like this article from the Atlantic comparing Japanese and Chinese methodologies for filling a plane with fuel:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2007/11/-quot-...

A Way vs. The Way.
ACK! Fixed it, thanks for the heads up