skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would say this is how you would like to write HN comments, and these are the comments you personally would like to read. Which is fine, bless you and I hope you find more of what you seek on HN in 2012!

As for me, I have different tastes. I like reading questions that lead in fruitful directions. Many questions are annoying noise, but as Sturgeon notes, "90% of everything is crud."

For example, I think a legitimate response to my opinion about questions is to ask, "So, what distinguishes a good question from a bad one in an HN comment?"

Next: This comment has a lot of "I" in it. I write in first person, and I like other people doing the same. The whole third-person thing strikes me as faux-academic, as if we're writing dissertations instead of humans communicating with each other.

That's fine when the topic is suitably bloodless, but startups and hacking is actually very much about people and emotions and opinions. Startups are not an empirical science. Programming is not an empirical science. As I write this, the top post on the front page is about "trust."

We can write third-person comments about how the marketplace might respond to a company's behaviour, but we can also talk about our own personal reactions and opinions. I welcome comments that are written by living, emotional, chaotic, and messy-minded humans. It's actually why I like HN!

That being said, there's a lot of bad first-personal stuff. I can't give an objective metric for it, but I can say that one 'comment smell' is making it personal or taking it personally.

I'm not sure how to pull it off gracefully, but a great first-person discussion communicates how people feel without insulting each other or getting angry about the disagreement.

The two acronyms that come to mind are "JM2C" and "YMMV." They indicate that we all have personal viewpoints, and that we accept the possibility that others have valid perspectives. So I'll end with them:

JM2C, YMMV.
And therein is the moderation ;)
What additional screening do you put your system administrators through? Are we talking security clearances and background checks? Definitely curious to hear the specifics.
How about showing up instant results (if possible) to make it more interesting?
A problem with the term, programming languages
I think it would be much more useful for us Canucks to focus on the legal landscape up here. No doubt there is pressure on the Canadian govt from the US, to implement similar laws up here in some form. That is its own story, and its a battle we have better chances of making a difference in.
I know there's a lot of cynicism about whether SOPA law is really being abandoned, or whether it's just being temporarily shelved, but I'm really excited about how opponents have banded together, and how organizations like Reddit and Wikipedia have been willing to sacrifice page views and revenue to show their support and to increase public awareness.

In the future, when someone advocates opposing an unjust law and someone else responds that opposition is futile, the anti-SOPA efforts will serve as a compelling and encouraging counterargument.
first, ask an accountant. about everything there.

second, some friendly advice: my approach would be to register them for PAYE even if they're only close to the threshold; this means they are future proofed if they step up hours / get a bar job. I know economists will tell you effort up front is worth more than cheaper effort in the future, but that's only one opinion!

finally, I believe that EU citizens are treated exactly the same once issued an NI number - but see my first comment about all matters of tax law!
40 Fascinating Illustration Designs and Photo Manipulations #3
Of course. The war is far from over.
I think that it's crazy that all of this effort is going into opposing SOPA. It seems that there should be a bill/effort drafted to codify the freedom of the internet, and making DNS blocking illegal.
Writing in the first person is fine, if used to communicate your experience, rather than to pass judgment. It's more honest than trying to render an objective perspective of your experience, passing it off as common knowledge or group consensus.
Though Andrew is not a perfect minimalist, there are things that we can learn from him. He has a angle on using minimal stuff and they are pretty much valid. Shopping for fun is a plague in US and increasingly so in the rest of the world too.

Here in the bay area, we were given free BART tickets [at the BART stations!] to shop during the holiday season. The kind of minimalism that Andrew has written about needs to be approached from that angle. Of course there is travel, non vegetarian food, use-n-throw things and so on that we need to fix. But this is a step in the right direction.

Btw,

Why do we need to be hyper critics here on HN?
The blog was posted on his own site. Not directly on HN. There is no attention seeking in it. I learn a lot from the comments of each post in HN. The information is great and often eye-opening. I just hope the tone of a comment doesn't fend off its readers.
A few of his observations, don't make much sense. "Don’t write in first person" Huh? There's no reason why I shouldn't write in the first person, especially if I'm speaking from my own experience. "Questions are rarely points therefore good commentors rarely ask questions" I'm not sure exactly what this means (Questions are rarely points?) An interesting question can be as valuable as an interesting answer (although I do agree that we shouldn't ask banal or easily googled questions).
People have been using Avid long before FCP started to take market share, and I guess there will be a resurgence now.
With the demise of SimpleGeo this is a welcome addition, look forward to trying it out
Many battles unions claim to have "won" were already transformation that were happening that they took credit for.

Also unions in the US have reprehensible tactics such as advocating - card checks for voting (intimidation), unfunded pensions, forcing nonunion members to pay dues, having closed shops, etc.

As for the conditions at Foxconn, I feel for the people - but often it's the best option that people have; i.e. it's better to work at Foxconn than be a subsistence farmer. The suicide rate there is 13.9 which is lower than Finland & Switzerland among many others http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra...
and much lower than US armed forces @ 20.2 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2c662840-9b74-11df-8239-00144feab4...

In general, as a community gets richer work conditions improve. When a community first starts working it doesn't have access to the intangible wealth that richer communies have and thus they need to work more hours to make up for this deficiency. As time progresses the accumulate wealth - build roads, infrastructure, housing, stores, have savings. And so can afford to work less, as they work less they start sending children to school instead of the factory (housing and food can be earned by the parents), which then increases the wealth as they are able to work on tasks that require more specialized labor. The better working conditions achieved in America vs China are the result of capital investment and not unions.

Often times unions use their power to cement the position in industry, and use labor law to decrease competition (think of it as regulatory capture). For example there is the case of LOCHNER v. PEOPLE OF STATE OF NEW YORK:

"The true origins of the Bakeshop Act lie in an economic conflict between unionized New York bakers, who labored in large shops and lobbied relentlessly in favor of the law, and their nonunionized, mostly Jewish and Italian immigrant competitors, who tended to work longer hours in small, old-fashioned bakeries. “A ten-hour day would not only aid those unionized bakeries who had not successfully demanded that their hours be reduced,” Bernstein observes, “but would also drive out of business many old-fashioned bakeries that depended on flexible labor schedules.” The large corporate bakeries joined the union in supporting the Bakeshop Act. After all, it was in their economic interest to favor regulations that crippled the competition." (http://reason.com/archives/2011/09/14/lochner-isnt-a-dirty-w...)

Now this isn't to say that unions didn't accomplish anything or to say that they didn't have a positive impact in some ways; I just think that 1. unions get a lot of credit for things they have a mild impact on 2. people ignore all of the horrible things that they do
Black text on green background? Zee goggles, they do nothing!

I always use http://instantdomainsearch.com

I have no time waiting around for POST results.

Consider AJAX as the next item on the TODO list.
Personally, I prefer REST interfaces, because it always seems like vendor libraries have just enough suck in them to make me want to use my own.
For those who cannot access outside of USA - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...
Much appreciated. Email is queued up, so expect it shortly. FWIW noone is automatically moved over; it's your choice to opt-in, but we are providing a "skip the line" feature for all Tinyproj users who do want to transition.
Sounds good. I suppose you're talking about constitutional amendment.
The only thing that might help is a constitutional amendment. A law can easily be overwritten. An amendment at least gets some oversight from the Supreme Court.
PIPA is still moving forward:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120116/02442717414/harry-...
Static analysis in Ruby
You got it! No storage costs. We have a soft limit of 20k per object, but I doubt many people are going to come close to brushing that. And it's all free right now anyway.

Someone just tweeted at us earlier about GeoJSON (http://geojson.org/) which looks pretty awesome for storing polygon data. It sparked a conversation internally about a feature like that, especially since SimpleGeo (which offered that, I believe) is gone.

That point aside, geofencing queries are coming soon. That means that instead of just giving a center point and radius in your query, you can query with a polygon defined by arbitrary points and we will return your objects that exist inside that shape. Perhaps that could hold you over for the time being?
well, it appears that i'm out a $1.00 :D

EDIT: downvoted for pledging $1 to wiki for blackout? interesting.
Last week I said I would donate money to wikipedia if they did this. I just donated $50 just now via credit card through the main page.
Call me cynical, but having all of this disclosure up front leaves me trusting her objectivity a lot more than the seemingly obvious alternative where unknown back room deals leave you wondering.
This is a welcome addition to java but I wish they had chosen a slightly different syntax. My main gripe is that its not clear what the lexical scoping rules are. Most likely the variable declared in the try is only available in the body of the try, not in the catch but its an extra thing to know. As opposed to

InputStream in;
try(in = new FileInputStream()){
...
} catch (...){
...
}

Now there are no new lexical scoping rules to understand. A lesser point is that I find the try(x = e) syntax ugly. It reminds me of the C-ism where a variable is set and tested in an if statement.

if (x = getline()){
...
}

Control flow and side effects should not be mixed, IMO.
Can you actually make that work for a collaborative app?

User A uploads file_a.txt and you want to encrypt it. What key do you use for that? It can't be attached to User A (e.g. their password or password hash) only otherwise User B won't be able to decrypt it. How would you set that up in a way that's still reasonable considering Basecamp use-case? (meaning: one of their goals is to make project collaboration simple)
Not only do they not provide enough information, the information they do provide is contradictory...

The homepage says:

We believe our customers should use Cherry 100%
worry-free. So, we’re introducing the Cherry Guarantee:

Accidents happen. But when you use Cherry, we’re
accountable for those accidents, not you. We cover
any scratch or ding and replace anything broken in
or stolen from your car.

But the terms say:

THE COMPANY OFFERS INFORMATION AND A METHOD TO OBTAIN
SUCH THIRD PARTY CARWASH SERVICES, BUT DOES NOT AND
DOES NOT INTEND TO PROVIDE CARWASH SERVICES OR ACT
IN ANY WAY AS A CARWASH PROVIDER, AND HAS NO
RESPONSIBILITY OR LIABILITY FOR ANY CARWASH
SERVICES PROVIDED TO YOU BY SUCH THIRD PARTIES.
Silicon Valley SOPA/PIPA Protest... It's on
Where's the subtle flaw in this suggestion?
Unfortunately, when around 1 in 3 sysadmins spy on their own colleagues (depending on whose report you read), it's apparent that not everyone has your moral fibre and something more than simply "trust the individual to do the job professionally" is called for.
Hey,

Added two filter options for ya'll: alphabetical and by length.
I don't know, but I think it needs to. Some part of me thinks this is just a trick to get the heat off of them.
Thanks, that is an excellent article! One of my customers uses Clojure and HBase a lot, but that is not part of the project that I touch much. When I have time, I am going to try working through this example running HBase and Hadoop on my laptop in developer mode. Most of my experience is running in developer mode and then using Elastic Map Reduce but I have read through 'HBase the Definitive Guide' and I am now feeling like kicking it up a notch and better learn how to run a cluster myself.
"Websites like that and tumblr revolve around anyone who can provide aesthetic beauty"

enough said dude.
What Is Your Favorite Deep, Elegant, Or Beautiful Explanation?
I think the issue is access control. Clearly they can and do look at their customers personal data. Thats not very funny - even if it happens to be a picture of a cat.
Numerous, good arguments have been made that these are not (at least and particularly with respect to the Internet) really "piracy" bills. They are censorship bills.

I would prefer to see that reflected in e.g. news headlines. Start calling them "censorship" bills, and the stories might get a bit more attention. And outrage.

P.S. I'm not criticizing this HN post's title: Policy is to cite the article's title. Rather, an observation on all the use of "piracy" terminology surrounding this. (In good part defined by the selection of the title/name for H.R. 3261 -- nice trick, that.)
Moreover, if you are not attractive, people won't value you on the basis of your appearance, hence you are less likely to care about it.
15 Good Examples of Website Redesign
Website redesigning is more complex than braining a new one, as there are certain unavoidable norms related to redesigning. However, redesigning is not all about giving a new-look to an existing site.
Success! A new protest has arrived! http://www.hackersandfounders.com/events/48317262/?eventId=4...

PIPA-supporting Senators, meet the job-creators and innovators of California.
I personally use WebEngage in my blog - it turns out that its a real delight to use it as an admin when it comes to feedback & creating those small relevant timebound surveys on the fly. So would definitely recco it if you're looking for a real delightful product.
In OSX it's not too hard to set up with orgmode. This will allow you to easily link to mail:

(require 'org-mac-message)

(global-set-key (read-kbd-macro "C-c C-x m") 'org-mac-message-insert-selected)

I find that the easiest way to categorize email, especially when I need to generate a todo item from it (to be later ignored among way too many todo items), is to link to it from an org-mode buffer.

There are tools for referencing directly to whatever is in your browser, check out org-mac-protocol (https://github.com/claviclaws/org-mac-protocol).

There's also an iphone app that allows input from your iphone and easy syncing with emacs and orgmode, http://mobileorg.ncogni.to/.
IPad 3 Production Begins, Report Says
This reminds me when a few months ago Wikipedia shut down in Italy to protest against a similar case regarding censorship.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3072800
I think the point is that there is some ambiguity, and that it's a fairly easy to solve problem. Yeah, I understand it's not the end of the world or really likely to cause serious confusion, but I don't see any downside in showing the subdomain either.
Actually, the OP provides a fairly insightful definition of "item":

I count my things as resellable items I would be pissed if someone took.

By this definition an "item" is "one emotional connection to an object", not merely an object itself.

Yes, this means that the guy carries around many more physical objects than he counts as "items". This seems emotionally healthy, though, if one can afford it. And affording it is easier than ever: This is not the 18th century, and underwear is so cheap that, were a pair to be stolen, you're out the cost of a cup of coffee.

(By his own definition, I wonder whether the OP really "owns" a toiletry kit. Even a moderately fancy toiletry kit is worth maybe twenty bucks and can be replaced in ten minutes at any drugstore. And they're certainly not resellable. So I tend to suspect the OP's toiletry kit appears in this list mainly for branding purposes: He doesn't want to give readers the impression that his style of minimalism involves never taking a bath. ;) And he doesn't want to get into a lengthy debate over underwear and soap: As he makes clear in the rest of the post, his goal in life is not to ever think or worry about underwear or soap.)
Thanks Sampad for those kind words.
Surely "very minimalist" would entail foregoing coffee altogether. It's a luxury, not a requirement, and not having coffee means that nobody needs the means to produce coffee at all.

If you prefer to buy your coffee pre-made, that's fine by me, but describing it as "minimalist" makes no sense to me at all.
Is this US only, or is this going to take it offline for the whole internet? The article doesn't specify, but last I checked there was strong support for a US only blackout.
AT&T's new Cloud API Platform
This and the cheezeburger network will put it in the eyes of people who wouldn't have seen it otherwise. Sites like reddit already preach to the choir! Go team internet!
Domai.nr is a similar example
This is awesome, Giving an option to add custom strings to all searches would be cool.

Eg: current searches doesn't append the word "get" before domain string. But, I sometimes do that, while I search for a domain.

So it would be nice to have an option where users can add optional strings they want.
tl;dr -- Parent said, essentially "I could own 15 things too if I were allowed to go shopping once a week (because of a vast, costly infrastructure in place to support that)", and that this is not Minimalism but merely shifting the impact of your demand. You responded to none of that.

The parent comment made some really good points. You papered over them with a straw man argument about the "immigrant army," then you shrugged your shoulders and said "meh", and there's also a hint of New Age silliness in there (Questioning a person's sense of "what is possible" is a silly way to claim the moral high ground. It's the New Age way to say "oh, you must not understand art".)

The original comment was that you are able to maintain a footprint of the same magnitude as you had before by simply living life "on demand" as it were, instead of storing stuff. If you really want to tout this lifestyle as minimalist, post your credit card statement so someone can fairly consider the actual cost of living this way.

In fact, parent alluded to another point that I would enunciate here: from the definition of Minimalism that says you actually have to reduce your impact -- a person who owns all of those things you don't, but doesn't eat meat, is more of a Minimalist than what you've laid out here.

Sorry to be harsh, I often don't take the time to clean up my comments after I've written them, to filter the wrath.
Apple's next market: Textbooks?
my cynical answer: better/more coverage of the startups they fund?
Hello all

I'm the author of this post. There are some suggestions for Javascript-based alternatives. A well-implemented Javascript overlay for the blackout message is a valid option, but keep in mind the following when thinking about it:

1. Googlebot does run some types of Javascript. We blogged about this recently: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/11/get-post-...

This means that the content included via Javascript may be indexed until the next time we crawl and process the page and find it's gone.

2. Consider how the JS will affect your pages' instant previews. Overlays are likely to show up in the previews, and these will take some time to update as we re-generate the previews.

3. Consider your users. Some webmasters are suggesting keeping the blackout overlay visible without any means of hiding it. That may not be the best user experience, and may be annoying to your non-US based users.

I'm happy to answer any other questions.

Thanks,
Pierre
If this is the attitude you have going into a union negotiation, you're not going to reach an agreement. When I'm negotiating with someone, I want them to be amicable and not accuse me of being "the man with a gun".
They should capitalize on the momentum and create an organization that can get everyone mobilized quickly in the future.

Politicians kiss up to tiny groups just because they are somewhat influential...think of billions going to subsidies for farmers or even tiny 1 issue groups. Surely together, the tech community is much more influential than them.
Mr. ERE got a job as a finance quant recently. He's still financially independent.

http://earlyretirementextreme.com/so-long-and-thanks-for-all...
Thinking of Sponsoring a Hackathon?
Looks interesting, good design, didn't try it because it requires a login that gives a scary "THIS APPLICATION WANTS TO READ YOUR EMAIL ON GMAIL OH NOOOEESSSSS" login.
Ah, I think more explanation is in order.

Aside from the plugins, the structure of Vesper is just Sinatra, Rack and Rake (/public, /views, config.ru, Gemfile, Rakefile, etc.) plus application and config directories. When the app is run, it does all the normal rackup stuff, and loads everything in /config and /application. There wasn't a need to do anything more.

That's where this whole thing started. I got tired of the routes file in Rails (my biggest Rails complaint), so I switched to Sinatra, and this is how I ended up writing a lot of apps.

Sidenote: /data and /tests are both generated by default plugins.

By unstructured, I just meant the MVC thing. Most frameworks I've used start off with the assumption that I want to use MVC directories. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. Most of the time I want to use the concept of models and controllers, but instead of separating them into different directories and files, I want to group related models and controllers together - i.e. a users.rb file with the User class and the associated routes for sign in, profile editing, etc.

The plugins were extracted from code I use in a lot of apps, but not all. That's why a plugin is so similar to a full project, with a few extras thrown in, like hooks (they just run code are certain times during loading). I'm mixed as to polluting the main project with assets, so I just did both. A plugin's /application, gemfile and /tasks don't get moved into the main project. But sometimes it makes sense, such as DataMapper and a /data folder, and MiniTest and a /tests folder. It's really optional.

Now for gems: There's nothing stopping anyone from adding gems to a project. They should work just fine, and I do it all the time. But at the same time, I work with a lot of designers and just-getting-started programmers who have no idea how to write a gem, but still have code they reuse a lot. The 'plugins-as-a-repo-in-a-live-folder' allow for that, while not stopping them from using gems if they fit the bill. A few of the plugins are nothing more than wrappers for gems with a little config pre-written.
Behind the scenes of Arduino manufacturing