skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The biggest problem with Reddit right now is that not enough people downvote weak content

IMO the biggest problem with Reddit is that too many people downvote well-supported arguments because it goes against their belief system which really stymies the conversation. I'd like to see downvotes haves some 'cost' associated with them so they are used sparingly and on content that really deserves to be downvoted.
Programmer Sentenced To Death In Iran For Upload Software
Go with Beanstream as the payment gateway, and either Chargify or Recurly for the recurring payments. I've personally had no problem with this combination on many projects, and all of my clients are canadian companies.
Mobile Payment Solutions in Latin America
Any one know how active Mobile Payment Solutions Business in Latin American Countries ?
A data-mining project, for example: Given a data set, what can you conclude from it? What's your evidence, what are the potential pitfalls with your evidence, how would you present the results?
The methodology is different, but in terms of general approach and the subjectiveness of grading, that felt very similar to me to a philosophy course project, one of which was: develop and argue a case for or against the possibility that machines could produce "creative" output.

I actually think that supports my idea here -- that a competently trained engineer should be able to operate competently in a traditionally liberal arts field -- because a competently trained engineer has to learn both skill sets. Upper level courses like Data Mining require both the engineering bits, and the art bits of the liberal arts.

Interpreting the results of a Data Mining algorithm requires a similar critical analysis and writeup of any upper level Lit coursework. The demonstration of how the student wrote their analysis is as important as their conclusions.

This is different than say "write a paper detailing the differences and similarities between decision trees and neural networks", which is akin to "write a paper about the goals and purposes of the Paris Commune -- and why it failed".

The differences then between an engineer and a English major, in the field of English, is not a matter of skill, but a matter of exposure. An engineer is less likely to have studied in depth the brief life of the Paris Commune, but should be able to competently write about it once they know the material. What makes Engineering hard as a discipline is that the Engineer must not only have memorized the material, and be able to competently write about it, they must also apply it and show it working. That 3rd bit is why people drop from engineering programs and where the right/wrong objective evaluation brutalizes the unprepared student who was expecting subjective evaluation of their work.
I've been saying for a long time that MySpace could still be successful in the right hands. While it is laughed at as a social network, people still remember it as a great place for music.

I don't think anyone has come close to replicating this since. I'd love to see someone take MySpace, wipe the slate 95% clean and make it deeply artist-centric. Hell, integrate it with Facebook. But make it the central hub for a musician to post news, videos, music, etc.

I thought that this would happen when the group including Justin Timberlake took it over, but so far no dice...
Megaupload.com Goes Down - FBI Takeover
That's part of the issue.

But this application proposal - and many peoples' workflows for everything from day-to-day email to customer support treat their inboxes as to-do lists. It's a bad habit, one I had myself and had to work HARD to break. An email interface that trains people out of that habit, or keeps people from forming it, would improve productivity for a lot of people without them even realizing it.
This isn't some search for objective truth. It's me sharing my opinions and the supporting rationale in the hopes that somebody might find them useful when they run into this situation in the future.
I'm not quite sure how they work, but one example of a better way to do movies might be the "Wreck a Movie" people. That Iron Sky movie they've been working on for a while is coming out early this year apparently.
SOPA Is Defeated, But New Internet Bill Gains Critics
Ask HN: How to change SMTP banner to match rDNS?
I am getting this error message that is preventing my email recipients from receiving my emails. The SMTP banner doesn't match the reverse DNS.

I have been searching for a solution on Google for this for hours and to no avail. Does anyone know where the SMTP banner is, how to access it and change it?
//Also, I'm unsurprised that HTML5 developers are well-represented at hackathons,//

The pattern I observed in the internal hackathons, of the company I work for, was the dominance of web developers participating/winning over c++/Java developers.

As you said, the main reason for this was web developers were able to produce something that the audience can 'see' and in short amount of time.

Also, I've been thinking a lot about the survival of C++/Java developers in web company - because of the introduction of technologies, like Node.js. Because, now it is possible that a JavaScript programmer could do both back-end and front-end stuffs.
Well were do you draw the line? Do 100% of open jobs have to be affected, 90%, 80%?

Pragmatically, I think Apple and Google are both big enough that collusion between them is going to have an effect on the market, even if no one else is "in on it". Idealistically, I don't like a companies of any size colluding. It seems to undermine principals of the open market.
The idea of corporations being people goes back to Rome when someone decided that the laws regarding disputes between persons could be applied to an organization as well. Corpus == body, the body of people being treated as a person in considering the accusation. That said, governments have always been able to regulate what corporations can do until the Citizens United decision of 2010. Corporations used to be chartered by the government to meet a specific objective and were only allowed to spend money towards that objective; government regulatory policy was deny-by-default. Aaron Burr's Manhattan Company in 1799 was the first modern corporation in the US that was allowed to spend its money freely.
When all is said and done, more is said than done.
>A boycott is not denying anyone any right as there is no 'right' that people are compelled to buy the product you are offering.

As opposed to labor where you have a right to compel any company to hire you ?
Reddit is a spiritual successor to Usenet, with all the good and bad that entails.
Delivery date of June, 2012?

I know you probably think 4 months is a long time, but it is a probably not near long enough to develop something this complex.

Be prepared for that schedule to slip.
All Stanford Online courses delayed until further notice.
A problem I've noticed with every comment/article voting system, including HN, is that a single downvote shouldn't have any effect. Here on HN one downvote turns the comment dark which is to encourage "pile-on" voting. Any vote up or down should not be visible to other users until X votes have been cast.
Google's privacy policy states, "...or to delete such data at your request if it is not otherwise required to be retained by law or for legitimate business purposes."[1]

Of course the key phrase is "legitimate business purposes" but Google wouldn't have included the "right to be forgotten" phrasing into their privacy policy if they weren't willing to make a good faith effort to remove information upon request. Otherwise it just puts them at risk of a lawsuit.

http://www.google.com/privacy/privacy-policy.html
Russia's Top Web Startups of 2011 Mostly Rip Off U.S.'s
> Should the MPAA be disallowed to make a political commercial and pay for its broadcast?

The MPAA has been known to make Dem-friendly movies. How do you distinguish between that and a commercial?

Note that Citizens United was about a movie, not a commercial.
You're ignoring the fact that the $35,000 they're trying to raise is listed as being for exactly that:

> Where the money will go... Hosting. We need some serious hosting space to deploy our storage-intensive services.
41% Of Teens Experience Cyber-Bullying On Their Cellies
And that is illegal and when DMCA complaints are filed access to the content is removed.
There is a famous rejection, not in CS but in econ, that I know of: Milton Friedman, one of the most influential economists of the 21st century, winner of the John Bates Clark ('51) and Nobel ('76), and preeminent monetarist was fired by the econ department at the University of Wisconsin Madison for being jewish and too data driven. They did not advertise this fact at the department when I was there =P He went 90 minutes south to Chicago and it seemed to work out for him. It would be nice of UW econ apologized though, even if a bit late.
Joss Whedon's Plan to Monetize Internet Content (Watch Out, Hollywood) (2009)
Google Shut-Downs & the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
Beware the Python generators
This post on Google+ statistics is a billion* times better than any other post
I don't believe corporate persons should have the same rights as natural persons and I'm not alone in that belief.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Elec...
What version of IOS are you running?
Info-starved no more--home energy gadget clues you in
It's an interesting perspective. In a way, I think that it may result in a revamping of the current content distribution system as we know it. Think of it this way - right now, we've got production companies who funnel their stuff to network conglomerates who, in turn, market, negotiate and distribute their content over their portals - cable or otherwise.

The biggest barrier to entry here is the market penetration of these networks and strength of buck behind them. I think, though, with a lot of different operators in a marketplace, your message becomes a bit watered down. What if the development here was more of a marketplace for these sites to funnel their content towards - which would in turn do the groundwork, the lobbying, the push and pull of negotiating deals with your digital distribution platforms (set top box manufacturers and the like)?

I worked in digital licensing for a major television network in NY. It was my dream to get back there. Now it's my dream to turn it on it's head.
Collusion is bad even for free markets (let alone other economic models), but rather than enter that lengthy argument, I'll point out one thing: they did this in secret.

I'd be somewhat more understanding of your argument, if the companies had publicly declared they were colluding to keep wages down and prevent employee mobility amongst themselves.

How do you figure prospective employees would have reacted to that?
Anyone know the story behind this delay?
Apple schools us on the next wave of textbooks
> In my view, the only answer to all of this is 100% publicly funded elections.

And what are you going to do about newspapers that promote candidates?

How about movies that promote a candidate or party?

Can I make a sign and put it in my front yard with my money? How about if my neighbor and I decide to put up a bigger sign across the border between our lawns?

Yes, I know, to make an omelet, you've got to break a few eggs. However, breaking eggs doesn't mean that there's going to be an omelet.
DIY smart meter - How to get electricity meter data online
Wreck a Movie: Collaborative film making in practice.
X-ray artist's amazing images reveal hidden beauty
Hands-on with the Alienware x51
'Star Trek' door chime sounds like the future
I'm not ignoring that. If they only raise $35,000 then they'd fall into category A. The cost of hosting is ongoing as long as a service is being used, therefore they will need more than $35,000 if they plan to be around for any length of time, hence subscriptions.
With all the talk about alternative models to Hollywood, I was reminded of the Wreck a Movie project. They're already up and running, I think the upsurge in interest in the idea could mean it is really the time to shine for concepts like this.
That presentation wouldn't even have worked in the latest edition of Firefox.

But it is important to understand that you need an uptodate browser to view webpages today. Gracefully handling obsolete browsers is what got us into this mess in the first place (actually it was allowing anything less than completely correct pages -- you can't have syntax errors in your c code and expect it to compile, why should your HTML be any different).
They cite administrative reasons in the email but no professor or teaching staff has said anything in the open.
The twitter accounts of the classes did not say anything clear regarding the reasons.
This is exactly the sort of clever hackery that coders think is a loophole but judges think is contempt of court and obstruction of justice.
Yeah. Is this the monetization strategy for Quora? Somehow it feels like the people who turn the Wikipedia articles into PDF and sell them on Amazon. At least in this case they mention in the article clearly where it comes from, but it still feels "funny"
Watch the EU.
Absolutely agree.

This comment may make it sound like the Pirate Bay inspired the Pirate Party. The reality was a little more complicated, given that it involved a third entity, the Swedish "Piratbyrån" think tank. I just thought I should point that out so as not to be reductive.
Chuck Moore on the Lost Art of Keeping It Simple
So 3 years ago I had exactly the same idea. I executed on it, built an email client and it was basically a commercial failure (although we ended up licensing some of our stuff).

So here is my advice: don't even bother unless you want to build a small lifestyle business (and don't even bother dreaming of a subscription model).

Email has been around for 20 something years and the usage patterns are so engraved in users mindsets there is no way you can get them out of that experience. The whole idea around productivity will only appeal to a small set of power users.

If you really are set on building this thing then here is a howto:
1. go here: https://github.com/waseems/inbox2_desktop
2. fork the code
3. add a todo list
4. compile and profit (well probably not)

Sorry for being so cynical but I have been there :-)
Shopify's 2011 in review
Can't find the button for getting it to use the custom algorithm...
Neither German nor US government have the right do define or power to define language beyond its use in government affairs. In the English language shared by millions of people, Kim is in fact a convicted criminal.
I don't think it's going to help public perception of the MPAA, though...
That is a simple but wrong approach, a next generation system would have to be better at creating wealth than capitalism, not worse (you can't have google at that size, nor Intel, nor Amazon).
It seems to me that the issue with this is the potential deception. If you know that two companies have this agreement, and you work for one of them, you will know that trying to switch between them won't get you anything good, so you'll look elsewhere instead. What if these agreements were allowed, but had to be shared with employees? Would such a requirement be legitimate and sufficient?
People pay you to see movies. You pay other people to watch commercials.
Sans actors, pixar is essentially like this.
Megaupload operated in the US (servers and users). It is only the physical location of the proprietors that was non-US.
Do you really not see the difference between "companies not being allowed to conspire to not hire certain people" and "compelling a company to hire you"?
For an interesting twist on the tired old communism vs capitalism debate, read Michel Bauwens of the p2p foundation philosophize on how aspects of Marxism were 'ill-conceived' while alternativley, the thriving p2p economy is a viable successor to capitalism.

https://snuproject.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/and-the-debate-b...
> But Hollywood shouldn’t care (if the MPAA had a clue) because it offers something YouTube can’t: An experience that you will get in a car, drive to, and pay $12 for.

The article lost me right here. Every year this is less and less true for people in my generation. It doesn't take long for even the blockbusters to show up for rental.

I'm not even sure what the article is trying to say. What is 'good'?
Man and van
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Not necessarily -- he may have a defense against the inevitable slide into corruptness that happened in those places.

Of course this all depends on who gets to choose to exile members, and getting it to scale.
The stupidity of ideas like this is they are counterproductive. If your employees are 'shopping around' or seriously entertaining recruitment offers it likely means they are unhappy in your employ. In this case it is best for everyone for them to go elsewhere. You know how you retain good employees? By giving them challenging work, minimizing stupid bureaucratic taxes, avoiding silly office politics, paying them fairly and treating them with basic dignity and respect. What a concept.

It's probably not insightful to frame this problem, as you seem to have done, in terms of the naive "markets are always best" argument, especially when that model seems to imply that employees should always be "shopping around," by definition. You say that "it is best for everyone for [dissatisfied employees] to go elsewhere." Where to begin? Specific persons in your employ aren't fungible. They've accumulated training and product knowledge that you might direly need in order to meet a deadline or bring a product to market before a competitor, to cite the most obvious objection. In other words, the cost/benefit ratio of retaining a given employee is dominated by factors external to the labor market.

I'd also be interested to hear, in detail, how your particular arrangement of challenging work, bureaucracy, office politics, fair pay, and dignity and respect programs both reaches a maximum of employee satisfaction and functions in even one competitive company. And then I'd like to hear how that generalizes, from first principles, to all technology companies everywhere. For example, how are you going to stop office politics from coming in to play during the distribution of challenging work, say in one of the "schlep" companies that pg wants to fund, all while minimizing "stupid bureaucratic taxes." And, which of bureaucracy or politics is going to be more generally erosive of "basic dignity and respect," if you have to choose between them?

I mean, it sounds nice, from an employee's or prospective employee's perspective, to just say, "Employers should just do only amazing things to me, or I'm within my rights to throw a fit and leave to go work for an obviously smarter employer," but that doesn't mean you've actually got a workable hypothesis.
I don't believe we can blame the politicians for campaign finance corruption. It is our own complacency that has allowed this system to take a firm root in our government. How can you blame or get mad at one of our representatives for playing the game we make/allow them to play. I guess what I am saying is if you can't get elected unless you use the corrupt campaign financing system that we allow to be in place how can we be upset when our elected officials are a pawn to the system?
Good list, every time I look at other configurations or options for Emacs I learn something new :). Does anyone know if there's been any news on Emacs and Guile?
I think both your two points here are interesting:

Re: Heidegger: To counter, there's a fairly accepted concept in the sciences that there is a loose hierarchy of the sciences. e.g. Biology is just a subset of Chemistry is just the study of a part of Physics, which is a study of applied Math, which is a subset of Mathematics, which is just a specialization of a subset of Philosophy.

It reminds me of this http://flowingdata.com/2011/06/08/all-roads-lead-to-philosop...

Re: Engineer's proclivity towards right-wrong answers in their work. I agree, and it may be a function of the kind of thinking style that lends itself well to engineering disciplines. The curricula I looked at for Engineers seemed to express an intense desire on the part of the schools to break their engineers out of this kind of mental slavery and to grok softer subjects as valid. Many people who want to become engineers do so because they've mentally dismissed the validity of subjects with non-binary outcomes. I think their is a need to put engineers through a well rounded curriculum that includes exposure to the arts. I think this is very important.

But it means as a side effect that they receive a non-trivial portion of a standard liberal arts education on top of the study of their own field. (In my opinion schools that don't provide this kind of education to their engineers are doing their students a great disservice.)
Probably worth noting that the inflation-adjusted list, while more accurate than a non-adjusted one, is only the American domestic gross. It's quite plausible that the international gross would look different - one might expect that the trend there for Gone With The Wind would look a bit different to Avatar.
Right now http://machinima.com/ is killing it. Their monthly stats for video game play views (ya just people watching videos of people play video games) is better than any TV ever was. Lost only had a small percentage of what Machinima can field for audiences.
Did Kim own the hosting companies too? That would be a textbook example of laundering.
I've said this before (for which I've been roundly criticized), and I'll say it again.

The reason there is no good alternative to PayPal, and especially an alternative that works internationally, is the regulatory environment around money transmission in the United States. If startups expect to solve this problem, there needs to be a coordinated effort to change that environment just as there was a coordinated effort to combat SOPA.

Exhibit A - http://www.thinkcomputer.com/corporate/whitepapers/heldhosta...

Exhibit B - http://www.plainsite.org/flashlight/case.html?id=716056

Exhibit C - http://www.plainsite.org/issues/index.html?id=1

Exhibit D - http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=fin...

To head off the most common objections: PayPal is grandfathered in at this point. You can only get away with breaking the law and hoping no one will notice for so long. The penalties for violation are criminal (federal felony), not civil. And yes, I'm biased as the head of a payments company affected by the law, but I'm not the only one, and I'm not wrong.
Since you mention recurring payments as a priority, I'd recommend Chargify. They give a list of gateway options here: http://chargify.com/payment-gateways/

One of my businesses is an online retailer. We use PayPal Standard (but don't require a PP account) simply because the UI for generating postage and tracking shipments is very easy. USPS has an open API, but I've yet to find a payment processor that integrates shipping.
> I'd like to see the copyright terms be reduced to the original 14 years, too, but I'm not sure that's possible without changing the copyright laws first.

The duration of copyright is defined by copyright law, so yes, reducing the length to 14 years will require a change to copyright law.

I think that Lessig had a more politically viable solution - you can have a long time but you have to pay a nominal fee every so often. For example, you can have 100 years, but you have to pay $1 per work at 20, 40, 60, and 80 years (not Lessig's exact proposal). Note that this also addresses the "who owns it" and "what is protected" issues.

We might see it as a revenue proposal though.
If you edit the algorithm in the textarea, it will automatically refresh the visualization.

Edit: I added a checkbox to control the auto-refresh behavior.