skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks EwanToo - that makes perfect sense. A combination of some security monitoring system that notifies you of the vulnerabilities along with someone to update your system is needed. But what if the updates have dependencies, for instance, incompatible Ruby gems or so. At that point, do you have to make the tradeoff of security risk vs time to update all gems/resolve incompatibility issues/deal with bugs in latest release?
Some Thoughts On Functional JavaScript
Thanks for the recommendation. A video has been in the works so I'm excited to get one up soon. :)
Judging by some of the changes they have made recently I don't think they have even seen a Linux user (outside of their own UI design team) interact with a computer before.
When Larry met Sergey.
Congrats on the launch but to me it appears to be just another elance.

What makes you different?

As a freelancer who charges a lot more than $10/h and isn't interested in $200 projects why should I join?
Flat Roofing: Preventing Winter Damage in Commercial Roofs | NJ Roofing Blog
Interesting theory, which fits nicely with this:

“Did you really think we want those laws observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Reardon, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

The well-connected didn't want the competition, found a suitable offense, and pulled strings to have the competition shut down on before the pretext was eliminated.
Google's Python class
Except for the people who believe paper is magical, that reading off a screen isn't actually reading.

No, I don't understand them either.
what is it really? it took me some good effort to figure out what it was.. i still like pastebin more. Minimalism is apparently not always a good thing.
Good article. Nothing unexpected for me but a good, calm summary of the matter. I appreciated the distinct lack of "us vs them" jingoism - it comes down to the numbers, nothing more.

One thing that bothered me was the attitude of "Maddie", though, towards her lot in life. I've seen it before and it baffles me:

> “If you don’t know jack about computers and electronics, then you don’t have anything in this life anymore. One day, they’re not going to need people; the machines will take over. People like me, we’re not going to be around forever.”

I just cannot fathom this blithe indifference to her fate, and this assumption that, as someone who doesn't "know jack about computers and electronics" she is basically doomed. Why doesn't she instead feel like she might want to start reading up on these critical topics? The article doesn't paint her as lazy or unwilling to learn. It just doesn't seem to occur to her, for whatever reason, that the option of self-study is open to her. I can't figure it out.
Ask HN: I'm profiting from free labor, mostly from minors. Is this wrong?
I founded a website (http://animalcrossingcommunity.com, ACC for short) about 10 years ago, and was the sole developer until recently (I did have a creative designer who was responsible for the original graphics/layout, but he's long been completely uninvolved).

Since about 8 years ago, it's been earning revenue mostly through ads, and is supplemented by donations.

My participation -- both on the site and developing new functionality -- has been in a decline over the past several years, and has pretty much come to a halt, mostly due to lack of time and a shift in priorities.

Growing irritated in my lack of participation, some of the staff (moderators, site operators, and other volunteers) approached me, asking that I renew my participation. I was honest with them, and told them that my priorities have changed, and I no longer intend on furthering development of the site. I told them that I am working on other projects that I hope will yield more long-term revenue for me, and that my goal was to someday hire developer(s) to work on ACC, once I was able to sustain that.

Their response was that out of love for the site and the community, they would be willing to help me -- for free. I originally rejected the idea for multiple reasons, but finally came around and agreed.

Now, for about a year, I am overseeing a team of young volunteers developing the site. They use a private repo on Github, and use the ACC forums and tools that I built to manage most of the development process. The team consists roughly of eight developers, two of which are the "team leads" responsible for owning and managing the dev servers and the repos. The whole team is headed by a non-technical project manager.

Again, all of this is volunteer -- nobody makes one penny, except for me.

I do try to see it as giving them experience, and a good opportunity for them to learn and grow in their skills. But part of me still feels like I shouldn't be benefiting from their volunteer time.

Should I be compensating these volunteers, and if so, how would I go about? If not, is there anything else I can/should do to compensate them other than direct payment?

How would you handle this situation?
This: Second System Effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_seco...
The last section is really important. If you don't need the full duplex communication of WebSockets, Server-Sent Events are a much better choice. If you can get away with using AJAX to update the server from the client, do it.
Random question -- does any operating system or application, having noticed you did something the hard way, say, "hey, next time, hit Ctrl-% when you want to do that?"
Announcing RED Lounge in Austin, TX
> especially the average Mac user to secure their machine’s audio input in the first place.

The average user of any machine doesn't need to worry about this. Much ado about nothing.
Sabrina (who put the site up, and who I'm married to) reports that we think that's fixed, and thanks you for telling her.

I'll say this: Linode rocks. It's getting battered here and seems to be barely breaking sweat.

Action count just hit 14,000 since last night at 10pm local time.
Perl 6 is still "Perlish", in the sense of TIMTOWTDI and DWIMmy-ness. However, after playing around with Perl 6 a little bit, I'm not convinced that it keeps Perl 5's practical simplicity.

I suspect that there's a whole crowd of Perl 5 lovers who just want something practical and simple -- they want a cleaned-up Perl 5 -- and they're scratching their heads wondering why the 6ers are spending so much time working on advanced features.
The only application I've ever seen that does this is Emacs. I wish it were in more programs.
This is very regional. Hiring a plumber to fix your plumbing is not how those guys get paid, but they do appreciate the money. The steady work for them is new housing developments, which if you are in Nevada, Florida, Arizona and most of the southern US is at excess capacity.

I have friend who are master electricians doing stage and club lighting, cable and satellite installations, etc. Before 2008 they were making $150k+ annually from the construction market, now its anything to keep the lights on at home.
Alt+Click is such a bad idea. How is a new user ever going to discover that? I am probably using Unity wrong (only occasionally on my old notebook), but I frequently am only able to do taks because I now they existed from previous versions. For example launch the upgrade manager.
What's the best online BS in Computer Science program?
After twenty years working as a hardware/software engineer in various fields I am thinking about completing a degree. I never finished mine. I originally went for a EE. Took most of the science, math, physics and a couple of programming courses. Got bored.

By the time I was done with my second semester in college I had designed and built my own robots (as in: machine the parts and assemble, no kits) and all of the computers and electronics to drive them. I implemented all of the low-level code in FORTH (which I wrote from scratch) and wrote the high level operating software to run on a PC. This project became the subject of a paper I presented at an international conference on the subject. Again, school was like being in a slow-motion scene in a movie. I had to move faster.

I was designing and programming my own computers from scratch. By that I mean, wire-wrapping chips and writing the BIOS in assembler, implementing FORTH from scratch, designing my own floppy disk controllers from scratch and implementing drivers, etc. School felt very slow and painful, I was learning at a much faster pace on my own.

Later-on I got in to FPGA's and went on to design boards to do real-time image processing in hardware. Again, I did the hardware, all the firmware and real-time OS for an embedded micro that ran the whole thing.

In all I accumulated experience programming in Assembler (various), C, C++, Forth, Lisp, Visual Basic, Objective-C, PHP, Javascript/jQuery, Verilog and probably a few more languages.

Now, years later, I am thinking about the idea of completing a bachelors in CS degree online. The motivations are many. From personal accomplishment to the idea of going further and opening the doors to get into research in a field I love, robotics. I am fascinated by humanoid robotics and want to contribute, but, despite my accomplishments, the lack of degrees stands in the way of participating in that field.

I'm wondering what HN members think about the various programs now available. I've looked at University of Illinois and a few others. Not sure how they all rank.

I am also very interested in the possibility of receiving credit for some of what I've done over the years. I mean, I could probably teach some of these courses with some prep. I wonder if these programs allow one to take a test and bypass the class altogether.

BTW, I posted a much shorter version of this from my phone last night but it didn't show-up. My apologies if it ends-up double-posted.
The tight relationship between Obama and RIAA
This looks like a cool idea, but a search-centric menu system doesn't allow for "discovery" of the item you might be looking for. Sometimes at the end of a long day I might be burnt out and not have in my head exactly what the item I need is called, but my fingers remember how to get to it. This system kind of makes that scenario a bit more difficult.
> The plain fact is that if you look at the richest countries in the world, with the best standards of living, they have huge governments that provide their citizens with a host of services without profit, such as healthcare.

You seem to be trying to imply a cause and effect relationship here, without actually saying that. I'm sure we can find examples of rich countries with small governments, and poor countries with large governments.

Also, for rich countries with large governments, which came first? Did they become rich, then grow large governments, or did they get a large government, and then become rich? I would guess that the former is more typical than the latter.
This is very interesting- I am developing a webapp that allows you to track other people's taxi journeys, and right now I'm AJAX polling every 30 seconds becuase I figured WebSockets would be too intensive on a phone (open connection = drained battery).

Does anyone know if this would also end up with an open connection the whole time?
Can Normal Companies Provide Good Jobs? Yes.
Note, I'm not the creator. I found it here: http://www.reddit.com/r/vim/comments/otdx3/vivify_now_with_4...
In my experience with these minutiae, there is usually additional hidden overhead. Not only do I have a client that requires time recorded daily in 15-minute increments, but they are locked into a system (Deltek) that is incompatible with Google Chrome, forcing ~1/3 of users to switch browsers for this already annoying task. And users must enter login information twice -- once to login to the portal, another for the timekeeping system. And it's been that way for over two years.

There is an opportunity here for those who can break into the consciousness of enterprise Accounting people.
The big difference between installing an iPhone jailbreak and CyanogenMOD is that once on Cyanogen you stay there. With a jailbroken iPhone you often have to choose whether to stay with the jailbreak or upgrade, and many choose the upgrade.

OTOH, pretty much the only time Cyanogen gets replaced with stock firmware is when you're prepping a phone for resale or warranty work. Otherwise pretty much the only thing that people replace Cyanogen with are other MOD's.

What I'm saying is that 1 million number is firm -- always a consideration when targeting a market.

The other consideration is that a lot of the people jailbreaking their iPhone are doing it to pirate apps. (Although tethering is probably also popular). OTOH, many of the 1 million installing Cyanogen are tinkerers. So apps targeting those tinkerers may sell well. Targeting pirates is harder.
Oh, good question! Hopefully we get an answer. As someone planning to launch this year I'm eager to learn from someone doing it now.
What a horrible idea. What happened to thinking about international users, for whom typing is a hassle? Learn from Japan, where Yahoo is more preferable over Google because you can find what you want rather than type it out...
I don't think anyone will sign up unless they can see what they're signing up for first.
Beginning Ember.js on Rails: Part 1
He touches on those points in his final paragraph.
The ability to switch between input and output suggests it's not a dedicated input port.
The "Creative America" video linked in the article (http://vimeo.com/32592166) is straight propaganda. Creepy.
You don't need a hacker to upgrade and maintain CyanogenMOD. You might need one to install it, but once it's on there it's simple to upgrade & maintain.
The death of online piracy: the end of the Internet as we know it
I also sidegraded to mint 11 last year, and I tried upgrading to mint 12 but I didn't like the extra fluff they added, so I'm sticking with mint 11 for now. At some point I might just do a headless install of Ubuntu 11.10 and then install the LXDE and a few choice apps from there. We'll see, I'm open to trying something new, but I prefer minimalism.
I should have said "aren't" instead of "won't be". I can't make an argument that this is rent seeking, because I don't believe that it is. I believe, like you, that the MPAA/RIAA are acting in their own interest. Understanding their viewpoint is necessary to hold a productive conversation with them.

>I truly do not understand how you come to the conclusion that under an Objectivist world view, it would be the RIAA/MPAA who are the looters, rather than those who wish to take the intellectual property of others without the creator's consent, and I would be interested in seeing a further developed argument to that effect.

I'm not describing my own view. I'm stating my view of what's driving this theory. It's the framing of this particular theory that has overtones of Atlas Shrugged, in my view. The claim is that the MPAA/RIAA leveraged the government to shut down a potential competitor. This isn't rent seeking by the strict definition, but I never claimed that it was. Rent seeking is only one form of "looter" behavior.

I'd much rather focus on the two fundamental questions. It is not enough to say "we need strong intellectual property laws". That is a very broad statement. We're currently seeing an erosion of fair use, and I think that is a bad thing. We're also seeing an erosion of the protections afforded to the press (whereby "press" includes website operators). I also see this as a bad thing.

I don't want to see website operators acting as enforcers of copyright. That is the government's job. The DMCA already provides the ability for copyright holders to issue take-down notices. Further legislation is pushing the balance too far in favor of rights-holders. I do believe in copyright, and I don't believe "fair use" should include the ability to do what you like with others' work, but website operators ought not be treated as conscripts in the enforcement of intellectual property rights.

EDIT: As I was posting this, someone literally quoted a passage from Atlas Shrugged:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3505458
The Real Reasons Google Killed SOPA/PIPA
Pirate Bay to allow real-object downloads
I'm Xposting this from his blog... don't think it will make it past moderation:

Looks intriguing but be very careful with your credibility; a freelancing site that’s considered untrustworthy is a failed freelancing site. I say this because I saw your post about “Launched yesterday” then on your site I see the testimonial “Freelancify helped us find a great designer to get our blog launched. -GrowNasheville” Wait- the site launched yesterday and someone has already taken a transaction from idea to proposal to bidding to work to review to launch & payment? huh? That doesn’t exactly add up… maybe there was a private beta launch with a few dozen vendors and a couple clients…?

Who is this “GrowNasheville”, anyway? GrowNasheville.com/blog/about : “GrowNashville was created and organized by James Fend [the founder of freelancify.com]…” ahh… I see.

You will have testimonials soon enough, I’m sure; having them now is not worth risking your credibility. [EDIT: At the risk of stating the obvious: you can't write your own testimonials.]

Good luck!
That's not 10x cheaper. Blockbuster or any other brick and mortar video rental shop have similar pricing. Buying a movie and renting a movie are different things.
I suspected it might be something like that. Thanks for clarifying.
I would imagine it is using stream sockets , so yes (unless it's really just doing polling in the background).

What we really need is some way of doing UDP via javascript, this would enable many things.

EDIT: Why would I want someone else able to track my taxi journey?
I was irked by her insisting how smart she is at the outset of the article. In my experience, people who think this don't see the need to learn anything new, or to change themselves in any way because they're just fine the way they are. All I can think is, Well, enjoy that smartness on your way to the dustbin of history.
I've never understood the citation of proverb in lieue of argument
Coming from India, I would see lobbying as an essential part of democracy. At the end of the day, businesses need a way to get to law makers and get laws passed that favor them. The alternative is in India. There are no real lobbyists like you have in America. Companies find it hard to run perfectly legal businesses in a left leaning country. They resort to bribing even to get things done, something that would be trivial in US. Here in US, you have law makers like Gingrich who take up a job as a lobbyist/consultant for companies while taking a break from their day job. In India they take bribes and continue to work as law makers to perform the same thing. I would take lobbying any day vs. bribing. I think of it like this. Left leaning parties oppose lobbying and eventually end up taking bribes. Right leaning parties OK lobbying and play it by the rules by setting up lobbying companies and declaring themselves as lobbyists.
The Power of Introverts
OS X has had this since Snow Leopard -- you can go to any application's help menu, and begin typing the name of a menu item, even if it's nested. Using the arrow keys, you can navigate down the list of results, and as you select each item, the menus expand to show you the location of the item with a large, blue arrow next to it. You can then either click the item next to said arrow, activating it -- or simply press enter.

Apple had this years ago; they just made a conscious decision to keep using menus.
Graphics card drivers, one of the most awful areas of software engineering
Fired? Who really cares? But investigated for congressional bribery? Definitely.
Tell HN NYC: Hackers & Founders NYC Meetup #27
Looks useful. As another option for generating Vim color schemes, I like Palette — a Ruby gem that provides a nice dsl:

https://github.com/joshuaclayton/palette
The million dollar question: are people expecting to print assembled cars?

It seems infinitely more feasible if you print the car part-by-part, but that kind of kills it for anybody unprepared to assemble a car!

(I know, I know, taking it far too seriously)
Very cool, are you an experienced game developer or is this your first game?
Ironically, your comment just inspired me to try out Mongrel2. Even during its initial buzz, I never looked into Mongrel2 at all because I simply had no need for a new web server. Well, after finally looking at it... it looks fricking sweet and I can't wait to play around with it.
Online Gamers Achieve First Crowd-Sourced Redesign of Protein
I tried out the chairs at a local furniture shop (must do before you buy!) in Toronto called Design Within Reach http://www.dwr.com/category/workspace/task-chairs.do?nType=2. It looks like you can buy online, but if you live in the states might as well order directly from the manufacturer.

I'm getting the Aeron
http://www.hermanmiller.com/Products/Aeron-Chairs

I liked the Embody a bit more, but was out of my price range. Favorite feature was the adjustable seat edge, which removes pressure points from your thy.
http://www.hermanmiller.com/Products/Embody-Chairs

Some people like the Mirra. I didn't find anything good about it.
http://www.hermanmiller.com/Products/Mirra-Chairs

Humanscale makes comfortable seats, but don't feel as nice as the Herman Miller when reclined.

My favorite Humanscale chair
http://www.humanscale.com/products/product_detail.cfm?group=...

Freedom Chair was the one the founder have the TED talk about.
http://www.humanscale.com/products/product_detail.cfm?group=...

I haven't decided on a keyboard tray or monitor arm yet. Both companies carry both products.

People seem to recommend the http://www.geekdesk.com/ for motorized desks. Not a high priority for me.

Also, checkout the video on Humanscale to see what a complete system looks like set up.
http://www.humanscale.com/products/workstation_video.cfm
Fully five top DOJ officials are former RIAA lawyers. You think they will treat MegaUpload in a "fair and balanced" way?

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/04/obama-taps-fift/
How Slice, backed by Eric Schmidt, helps users track online purchases
Blender actually has a HUD-like feature already. You can just hit space to bring up a searchable list of every command in the program. As a new user, I found it a lot easier to find things with the HUD than with the enormous menu and panel system.
As a holder of two math degrees, I have exactly one thing to say to you: if you want to get a job when you are done, do an internship or three. If you get a couple of decent internships, demonstrating your CS skills becomes irrelevant, because you'll have already done it on the job.
Actually, it solves quite big problems, people are using Node, Tornado etc for nowadays, and it also uses them in a uniform way with more traditional problems, and with far more flexibility and agnosticity (language, network, etc).

The problem is it doesn't have enough "marketing" behind it, for many reasons: it's not dead easy to setup yet, it doesn't use a language du jour like Javascript, it's not related to Rails...
Since our respect for cartoons is so great, some of it ought to wear off on "books", which apparently inspired them?