skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's an interesting strategy (attempting to enrage those whose help you are asking): for my part I can say with utter certainly that I bend over backwards to help people who send me the kind requests, and stick to "no, we do not offer that service" for anyone who skirts the "this is making my day unpleasant, I would rather be doing anything but this e-mail" category. :(

However, I am concerned that now in having worded the two responses along the kind/mean access, I have also ruined them as examples of the thing I was actually hoping to demonstrate.

I also get perfectly nice requests from people who still believe that I can help them. I got an incredibly kind e-mail today, for example, from someone asking me to remove software they had previously posted to Cydia (as they were now selling something similar somewhere and didn't want the free version to undercut them).

This request was all-sorts-of-hedged against things that didn't even matter, such as that they had released it under CC and therefore knew I was not legally required to do so, and that they knew I was busy working on other things they appreciated, and that maybe we simply never removed things at all, etc. etc..

However, the real core of the issue is that I do not host their package at all, nor was I even the person they had originally given the package to: they needed to contact the site they were hosting the package with (as Cydia is pretty much just a web browser of third-party content), a repository I happened to know would honor the request immediately.

I was in a similar situation to this recently: I was trying to register my company for physical sales taxes in my county, and figured I needed to contact someone somewhere at the town hall, county center, what-have-you. I went to each of these places, and stated "I am not certain if you are even the person who would be in charge of this, but maybe you will be able to direct me to where I should go" before asking them my question.

I personally believe that that difference is important: I knew that I didn't really know whether what I was doing made any sense, and that I was honest with the people whom I was interacting with that I had no clue about anything related to selling physical products.

I feel like, once you admit that to yourself it becomes much easier to problem solve and work your way into a state of "knowing": in these cases, maybe asking yourself "is this in fact the person I should contact? why am I choosing to contact this person? will I make that person feel awkward if I assume they are in charge of something they are not? who else might I contact in addition to or instead of them?".

I might then go even further and posit that the people who are trying to "reassure themselves" that I or you are to blame are in essence somehow feeling that "not knowing" something makes them powerless somehow, and that they therefore need to be overly confident to "reassure themselves" that they in fact know what is happening.

So, interesting: thanks for responding to my comment! I will think about this more (as I continue to drudge through the last week of hate-mail, which I've been doing ever since I woke up). ;P
No sorry, I've scraped Crunchbase and built my own analytics tool for the data for my own analyses hence me being able to pull the city counts.
Probably the biggest issue off the top of my head is that if you pay a monthly fee for laundry service, and the machines break, the tenants are losing money every second that ticks by and the machines are broken. Another way of looking at is is that the landlord all of a sudden has a lot more pressure to deal with when one of his machines break.

Contrast that to the per-use fee structure, in which case you don't lose any money when you go down to the laundry room and see the machines are broken - you haven't put your money in the machine yet.
Great! Looking forward to seeing your improvements!
You should consider adding badges. For example: wasted 4+ hours on 9gag/facebook in one day.
If you wait until oceans were going up 10m in a week, you're going to have a lot of people panicking and fighting over boats.

In order to avoid panic, you have to prepare well ahead of time. Airlines tell you what to do in an emergency when the flight starts, they don't wait until the plane hits the water.
Have you considered using a cloud platform such as AWS with a load-balancer? Then, if your site is being hammered, you can simply spawn a new instance.

Of course, this is quite a heavy-handed approach. I imagine the best course of action would be to first of all look into tuning Wordpress performance (and that of your database). If you don't need the full power of Wordpress, why not look for something a bit more light-weight (or even code it yourself - it'll be fun!).

I have no experience with getting performance from Wordpress so I can't really comment in that area, however I think that should be your first bet (or consider a platform which does the scaling for you - maybe Automattic's offering?)
Given Canada's record on freedom of speech in general, I imagine this is far more likely to pass than the American bill.
Apple Buy Hollywood? That’s A Terrible Idea
Though I agree with your core point, "settled science" is a contradiction in terms.
I think DHH did it the wrong way, it is such an arrogant reaction. it is not like Curebit is a concurrent or something like that so they could have just sent an email asking remove the elements.

That's been said, but if this embarrassing event help someone to never ever steal elements again then it's is a goo thing.
Great point. One of the more confusing things about looking at the upstream logs when not using rebase is that they are (by default) in chronological order. It does seem like it would be more useful to have commits upstream show in the order they were merged in.
FutureMark's plans for 2012
I don't see anything wrong with the following scenario:

- Hey, what should we do for this page?
- What do you think of this 37signals page?
- Yeah, that'd be great, throw up something like that, we'll polish it later.

However, that's not really the scenario here. There's a big difference between ripping off a style and layout (which is only declasse if people notice its a ripoff) and taking the actual code.
Similarly, I have nightmares of working with a second rate designer who has drank too much Apple Kool Aid. DESIGN UBER ALLES! Stop being so pessimistic, codemonkey!
I found that statement interesting as well. Anything can be a pollutant given the right concentration.

An interesting game to play with the H20 "non pollutant" is to see how much of it you can consume before you become ill.
Whenever I see C code like this:

#define CHUNK(multiplier, z) \
{ \
uint64 old_a = a; \
a = Rotate(b, 41 ^ z) * multiplier + Fetch64(s); \
b = Rotate(c, 27 ^ z) * multiplier + Fetch64(s + 8); \
c = Rotate(d, 41 ^ z) * multiplier + Fetch64(s + 16); \
... etc

I wonder: isn't this the kind of thing that's better handled by creating a function, and maybe explicitly telling the compiler to inline it? I mean, you can do this (from here: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Inline.html ):

inline void foo (const char) __attribute__((always_inline));

or you could simply let your optimizer take care of it. It may be faster to not inline it in some circumstances, but you've gone out of your way to prevent it from being able to make that decision, and to make your code harder to read and more prone to problems due to macro expansion.

Why? Is it habit? Or is there a good reason? (currently. historical reasons are not good reasons to continue doing things.)
If it's only thought-recording, then it's fine. But the reason I wanted to blog in the first place was to make a kind of online notebook where code snippets, useful videos/audio, progress history etc. are online and easily searchable. Kind of an personal online reference, but accessible by the public. It's just too much work. It's a good idea for a startup though - User friendly online notebook.
I'm as disturbed as you are.

Having seen the shenanigans of a bunch of Bay Area startups, and based on the tone of the responses in this thread, I'd gather that this quote from the article is a bit off base:

> "Your conversion rates or, you know, your credibility and integrity and the ability to have lunch in Silicon Valley ever again."

It would seem that, based on the tone here on HN, that these people will be able to have many, many more lunches in Silicon Valley. Hopefully they won't dine and dash.
Can someone explain why this is such a big deal? Genuinely curious. It seems the HN hivemind has a much stronger response to someone stealing a web designer's work vs, say stealing a Hollywood studio's work and hiding behind DMCA safe harbor.
Do I detect a pattern? After every controversial frontpage story, someone posts a response/counterargument/moral-of-the-story blog post. But i suspect the main purpose of the post is to indirectly benefit said blogger's startup from the sure-to-follow exposure.
What Curebit did was more like, taking the new Mission Impossible movie by Paramount Pictures, renaming it and changing the credits. Then releasing it as their original production.
Yuri Milner: "stick with the founders as long as they’re pushing the envelope"
All computing is an exercise is caching.
ECMAScript 5 Objects and Properties
I left out the full conversation, but I did tell the CEO he was making a mistake by attempting to low-ball the candidate. To no avail, though -- it was simply the CEO's chosen way of doing business. Very strange, as my negotiation had been quite easy.

Your take is right -- the CEO was merely trying to exert some level of influence, for reasons I fail to understand to this day.

I'm now in an engineering-centric organization, and comp negotiations are the least of my concerns. Finding the best people continues to be the hardest to do.
As serial failed blogger (3-4 "dead" blogs) let me ask you "pro" bloggers this:

- how do you stay motivated over time and don't get sidetracked

- how do you keep a focus on the blog i.e. that it doesn't turn into some random rantings about daily politics etc.

- how to you keep pushing for that blogging thing over other similar "productive" tasks (i.e. reading/writing articles, conference papers etc)
This is where a market based system comes a bit short. Fossil fuel prices are going to continue rising. As they rise, they'll put pressure on everything. They are a pillar of our modern economy. Our ability to do large scale investment and infrastructure change is reliant on our ability to redirect the outputs of our economy, and abundant energy.

In other words, the best time to invest in new massive sources of wind and solar is when you still have cheap fossil fuels, not when your economy is staggering from oil shocks, and your cost of construction has risen by like 20% due to energy costs.
Occam tells you nothing of truth. It simply says that your knowledge of a situation may be limited. Which seems as close to truism as any aphorism could get.

I'll say it again: Occam's Razor (as told by Ponce at least) has nothing to say on whether one knows the truth. Neither whether one has simplified sufficiently nor if one has failed to add a necessary entity.

You appear to say here that the ability to calculate the Kolmogorov complexity, K, is necessary to establish the simplicity of a given form/function/algorithm/state and so is an entity essential to applying Occam's razor. However, we know that we can't calculate K in all situations and so, it seems, Occam's razor as modified by your requirement to determine the simplest explanation is itself insufficient.

>When you have zero knowledge, starting with probabilities "inversely proportional" to Kolmogorov complexity seems the most reasonable thing to do.

For example, take the current situation with particle physics. It looks like particle soup, very complex, varied interactions. But more knowledge - perhaps entities which currently appear unnecessary to create a working theory - could well precipitate a far simpler theoretical model that revolutionised the analysis of particles and their interactions (a fully working unifying string theory maybe).

To recapitulate, Kolmogrov complexity appears to assume that you know everything and therefore are certain that you're providing the best simplification. You don't and you're not. Occam's Razor has no truth generating/revealing ability.

As I'm sure is clear I've not studied Kolmogorov or BLC before. WRT Occam's Prior how do you judge the K of different entity types (like are more spatial dimensions somehow less complex than more axiomatic constants).
> It's not illegal, or even particularly immoral

Are you sure it's not illegal? From the bottom of the copied page:

"All text and design is copyright ©1999-2012 37signals, LLC. All rights reserved."
Ditch Wordpress.

Did your site make it to the front page?

My website made it to #2 on HN front page yesterday : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3521309

I logged about 7k visits with ~200 peak concurrent visits. I wouldn't say that's server-stalling level traffic but the thing is my site is hosted on GitHub Pages so it's entirely static.

I don't mean to troll, I think there's a Wordpress plugin called supercache or something (google wordpress caching) .

But I do want to officially advocate that you rethink whether or not you _really_ need a mysql database, x plugins, and PHP to run a blog
Cosmology and Fundamental Physics, by Pope John Paul II
The markup is defined in RFC 2629.

Actually I think that the CSS is what is appealing, not the source marked up file.

If you want, you can convert Markdown into RFC 2629 documents with <https://github.com/cabo/kramdown-rfc2629>.
Curebit Apologizes for Copying 37Signals
Poop is not a pollutant. It's a substance that sustains life and is a key component of the biosphere's life cycle.

Thus, there's no point in controlling it, or making sure it doesn't accumulate.

(The next time a person in Congress tries the "CO2 is natural etc" gambit, I'd love someone to stand up and ask if that person has stopped wiping their ass.)
As far as I'm aware, there is (indirect) data on that.
In fact I believe part of the concern is that the data suggests that when the planet was in fact 2 or 3 degress off, it was a rather less hospitable planet.

Regarding your stock analogy: People make real money decisions based on ten minutes of stock price movement and historical daily stock prices.
Apple made more money than...
What if Hollywood had to use tech like we have to watch movies?
That's probably the role of politicians or activists, not scientists directly.

The problem is that while science is content to sit and collect data, people need to decide what to do, and can't afford wait to see how it turns out. We don't know if anything bad is going to happen, but we should be prepared for the possibility.

People like the WSJ op-ed writer might as well be telling people not to save for retirement or carry insurance. You might die young, so why waste money on a 401k. You might never get in a car accident, or get sick, or have your house be flooded. So why waste money on insurance?
Re-reading, it looks like you're right; I withdraw the comment.
Politics doesn't happen in a vaccuum: it can and does involve issues that intertwine with real life, of which SOPA was just one. Ecology underlies both economics and tech; Earth's ecosystem is the ultimate platform.
Congrats! I know how tough it can be to get that first app out there. Keep up the great work.
It'd be interesting to compare the CTR to the scan-through-rate(% of people that scan the actual QR code).

I'd imagine that quirkiness of a QR code to the average user would pop-out of the page quicker and catch their attention faster than a normal image would.
As a Canadian, I also fought against SOPA and PIPA. I brought down my site and attempted to raise awareness to all I knew.

This bill is no different. We should fight not for just our own countries, but for a free and open internet.
Technically, no. They are linking to an image on another server. It's akin to me linking to someones article. In one case, the visitors browser automatically fetches the image. In the other, the visitors browser fetches it at the users request.

Don't misunderstand me, I'm not defending the action. But no, it's not stealing. Defining it as such is just as wrong as defining copyright infringement as stealing.
I feel like a big part of the reason this will pass in Canada is because they don't have as many large tech companies vocally opposed to said bill.
I did ask that and, while they obviously didn't give figures for either, did say that by CTR they were judging actual clicks - i.e. yes, it was a case of having a QR code making people click it, not that it was making people scan it.

(They were also tracking QR scans seperately, but didn't say how well that was going.)
Why do we tolerate this behavior from people in our 'community' (or anyone really)? It's comically childish and infuriating to see it get a pass because 'oh, that's just their thing'.
The very idea of "settled science" is antithetical to the scientific method. Science is not a popularity contest. Nor is it a matter of dogma vs. heresy. It is a matter of evidence and theories that are either backed up by evidence or refuted by it. Discussing science on any other level is counterproductive.
They're sitting around and one of them reads the 37 signals blog post about A/B testing and conversion rates. He says "Dude, do you think their landing page will actually convert better than our current one?"
"I don't know, lets try it."

So one of them snags the source from Highrise and changes some images around. I'm sure he previewed it, it looked fine and he published it. He probably forgot to change out the button images because they looked fine.

Who knows if this is how it happened, but it really seems like it could have been an honest (but definitely pretty stupid) mistake.
I don't know if these fit the criteria of "community" or "like HN" that you're looking for, but:

Mostly IRC channels like #openbox, #debian and #debian-next on OFTC and #vim on freenode.

http://planet.filibeto.org/

http://planet.debian.org/

And as I've mentioned in a previous comment:

/r/linux

/r/raspberry_pi

/r/commandline

/r/perl

/r/bash

/r/debian (low volume of traffic/posters)

/r/solaris (very low volume of traffic/posters)

/r/openbox (very low volume of traffic/posters)

...and of course raspberrypi.org/forum
Don't think the blog said phone unlocking is not permitted.

But really, what's going on is Canadians having absolutely no confidence in our government not caving into pressure with regards to copyright laws, both from entertainment industry (foreign and domestic), as well as the American government. And we do so cause we have absolutely no reason to have confidence in them. So when we hear that industry wants X, Y and Z added, and oh ho, there happens to be some rumblings of American government pressure, we just assume the worse (and I really think we should), and flip our shit.

The C-11 as is really just the same copyright reform act that died the last few times as elections rolled around. As is, it contains some needed reform, and overall, if not for the absolutely forbidden nature of removing DRM, wouldn't actually be that bad.

But we're easily startled now. And so it is.
Look at what's been going on with the "faster than light neutrinos".

That would really overturn settled science. But to do so is going to require more than 16 people writing an op/ed saying that the results were correct and the effect was real. It's going to require more than articles in newsmagazines.

The scientists behind the original results have examined their work for mistakes, and rerun the experiment controlling for possible confounding issues. The apparent effect remained.

Now other labs are going to try to produce a similar result.

If you want to overturn "settled science", you need data to clearly back up your claim. It's not enough to have a contrary interpretation of existing data. You need more data to support your interpretation as the correct one.
How I improved my life with a PS3 controller
D-Dalus: the re-invention of powered flight
The left side of your chin's shading is too drastically different from your neck, which messes with the perception of a light source, causing
Attributing that much mojo to people who create new languages seems broken to me. I'd rather see the people who know better than to write yet another programming language and instead produce useful things with the glut of things we already have.
Not as much of a joke as pinning your whole argument on an outlier.
You only need the ability to write to a file in your home directory. In the case of a VPS you could do that before editing the sshd config (in large environments this is trivially automated as part of your install process, which is why e.g. Ubuntu EC2 images ship with public-key-only SSH by default).

In the case of a shared server you can't disable password auth, which is a powerful argument for using a unique password since that system is far more likely to be compromised.
How about using some common sense? Megaupload was primarily focused on enabling, and even incentivizing, piracy. Although bashing on the government is popular in our community, I don't think there is very much precedent that would indicate they would close something like Dropbox out of the blue.
(Disclaimer: Google employee, speaking for myself, not the company.)

The point of "Don't be evil" is to hold ourselves to a higher standard, and not less us take the easy way out. That, IMHO, is what made Google great in the first place.

I'm not going to comment on the specific case here - I don't know the facts - but the reason for "Don't be evil" is as much motivational as moral.
The piece is not designed to be credible to you and me. Its simply so that Fox News can report "New evidence that global warming is a myth is being reported today by a respected newspaper."
> Who concluded that copyright infringement is not stealing?

You've got that question backwards. Whose concluded that copyright infringement is stealing?

> Opposition to SOPA etc does not necessarily mean people don't believe in copyright.

That has absolutely nothing to do with what I said. You clearly don't understand what I'm saying. I oppose SOPA and absolutely support copyright. And that doesn't contradict anything I've said.

> There is a very broad range of views on that particular question.

Broad range? I figure there are 2 views: those that want frame copyright infringement as stealing, and those that understand the difference.
Wordpress is fine so long as you have a decent host. (See not super shared hosting like godaddy dreamhost etc)

The main thing you need to do is add caching to wordpress (both w3tc and supercache work fine) and if there is still a problem you are probably on the wrong host and should upgrade to either something like linode or a mediatemple grid server or webfaction basic plan.

If you're on a VPS and have caching enabled and still can't manage the traffic I'd say something is wrong with your configuration but just looking at your site I see no caching from either of the plugins I listed.
I see what I said as corollary, rather than representing Kopimi.

What you say about (b) only follows from current social norms, which can change and I believe will change over time. I understand what you mean about attribution, but it is also difficult to give attribution to certain copyrighted works in today's climate without admitting "guilt".

As per (c), have you ever run Firebug against Facebook's site to see how they do things? If you haven't, you're missing out. :)
I answered it by pointing out that it's objectively unanswerable.
We have no leverage AND intolerance is the only thing that is socially acceptable to correct.