skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a matter of degree. It's somewhat similar to the GoDaddy support of SOPA/PIPA and reversing their position after the online protests. On one hand they reversed their position but on the other they supported the shitty legislation in the first place.

How should GoDaddy be treated?
Stephen Lavelle's Platonic Archetypes of Dice is a Pokemon-style Flash game based on this Rock-Paper-Scissors-like quality of differently distributed dice.

http://www.increpare.com/2009/11/platonic-archetypes-of-dice...
ALL EARS Men's iPhone Case
Works pretty well in Python

But xrange() in python is just a roundabout way to get back to having a regular for loop.

for x in xrange(0,100)
for(x=0, x<100, x++)
doesn't do them much good when potential customers Google them, expecting to read reviews only to read about their theft.
30% of Americans have passports [1]. And :

"Despite the climbing number of American passports in circulation, 30% is still low compared to Canada's 60% and the United Kingdom's 75%."

[1] : http://articles.cnn.com/2011-02-04/travel/americans.travel.d...
"We could easily pull down real ads."

Please do. I agree with other commenters that a lot of your examples are people using more software, not actually programming.
Not to diminish this problem, but do the people upvoting this realize how pwned they are by these journalists? The journalists know (1) HN is a giant pipe of page views, and (2) any story they write with new revelations about some misdeed by Curebit will be reflexively upvoted by enough users to rise high on the frontpage. And so they write said story, people upvote it as predicted, and this fluff is our news for the day.

I usually err on the side of not killing stories criticizing startups we'd funded, but if this was about a startup we didn't fund I'd kill it in a second. (Though of course I wouldn't have to, because few would upvote such a story, which means no journalist would bother writing it.) So I'm going to bury it. I'd rather seem like I'm censoring bad news about startups we funded than let Venturebeat fill HN with crap like this.
Considering ALL the trade-offs, which places are really, truly plainly better places to live than the United States?

My sister left Minnesota for Australia 7 years ago and lives down the street from the beach, it's sunny 300 days a year, temp never below 50 degrees. She makes 2.5x what she did in the USA for the same job, only has to work 4 days a week, husband makes six figures as a tradesmen, family gets paid $5K whenever she has a kid, mandated 18 weeks of maternity and PATERNITY leave, government supported superannuation retirement fund, free health care, and savings accounts are getting 6%. Politics are mainly an afterthought, taking up little time on the news and almost never a divisive topic in daily conversation. There's very little religious influence; you're never in a situation where "because the bible said so" is considered a serious argument. She's surrounded by "mate-y" people who take friendship seriously and invite neighbors over for BBQ, and you can get an excellent cappuccino even from the guy in the trailer set up next to the construction site.
Midem Music Machine
The key here is the "accredited" investor restriction for funds that invest in anything other than the most vanilla of securities (i.e. stocks and bonds). This is also why most of us cannot invest in hedge funds or private equity funds.

In protecting people from themselves, the government is limiting participation in a potentially very lucrative area of investment to only those with money (the rich get richer). I don't believe that everyone is equipped with the financial knowledge to deal with the risk associated with participating in alternative investment funds, but I'd much rather that everyone have the opportunities to take the risks that they choose. Casinos are legal in many areas, strip clubs are legal in even more areas, and shopping malls are everywhere - all of these cause people to take arguably unnecessary risks with their financial health (and some would say even greater than investing). Particularly with the plethora of financial information available on the Internet, the everyday Joe has more resources than ever.

I'd love to see Congress eliminate the "accredited investor" requirement for investing in alternative funds so that everyone can have the same access to investing in startups, private companies, etc. I'm sure more than enough funds will spring up to meet investor demand, this being a capitalistic sociey and all.

Finally, startups can choose to avoid the problem of many small direct investments by ordinary investors (i.e. too many people to report to). by accepting money only from the investment funds or from few large investors, if such sources are available and willing. If such sources are not available to a startup, then you have to go with the options you have, (e.g. many small direct investors, self-funding, fail), as has always been the case.
A new way for web designers to stay up to date
Steven Bristol hates Ruby, not REST - REST is a series of observations about the effect the http protocol has on the communications carried out with it.

There are many ways of designing systems with the REST observations in mind, but unless you are using a different protocol (webSockets ftw!) or you've noticed something about http nobody else has, the concerns are always there, like it or not.
I'd be interested in understanding why someone would vote this down. I know it's tangential to the discussion, but it's a really glaring hypocrisy. To call it "copyright infringement" in the context of digital media and "stealing" in the context of website design strikes me as disingenuous, at best. I tend to be obtuse when it comes to these matters, however. I'd love to hear some more subtle commentary on the matter.
License Agreement (Comic)
OwnCloud 3 Release Announcement
How to speed up download in Android
I've heard these numbers from multiple sources and I believe they are correct.

The highest costs per click listed in the infographic are for specific, long-tail keyword phrases (three or four words long). These keywords can convert at an absurdly high rate, which means that advertisers can spend a lot of money on clicks and still make a profit. And since Adwords works on a bidding system, the costs per click can get driven up pretty high in a competitive niche.

If you look at the keywords that have a cheaper cost per click, the keywords are fairly generic. That's because the conversion rate is lower for these keywords, so advertisers have to adjust their bids per click downward in order to make a profit. If the infographic showed keywords that are even more generic (e.g., one-word keyword phrases), you would see even lower costs per click.
Usually its the 3TF list, of Tibet, Taiwan, Tiananmen and Falun Gong. There are other occasional topical words that are added, such as early last year Jasmine, including Jasmine tea being banned and just before that in late 2010, references to the Nobel Peace Prize.
Take a picture of a Linux kernel panic and Google Goggles will show you the fix
Stylus is an excellent contender.
http://learnboost.github.com/stylus/

I'd vouch it makes haml look like someone took stylus code and spat random characters all over it. It's even got its own compass equivalent, nib: https://github.com/visionmedia/nib
Keeping encrypted data in the US is increasingly futile - see http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/judge-fifth-... .

Steganography is a good idea, though.

(edited: corrected stenography -> steganography per too-aggressive spellchecker usage)
I don't know anything about Kickstarter. But:

has ks been around long enough to attract / surface fraud?

incentives for fraud go up at stakes of 1 - 2mm

public investment models anticipate social disconnection bw funder and funder -- if ks depends on verification through social network linkage, that's an element potentially missing from the proposal. again, not for _you_, for the sort of people targetted by predators
Yeah, I think Steve Jobs was the one that put in "fashion" the paranoidal "paradigm".
I think its a "well played" move on both ends, this guarantees apple that their projects will be kept hidden until they find "trustable employees" within their ranks and also every time they are about to release something new they create such "drama" that people get interested months before the release.

I have a friend that works at an Apple Store and yeah, they keep thinks really hidden and secured until the release data.
can we please stop having this conversation every time a plain text password is mentioned, its a bad idea to have a recoverable password, in any form, the end.

http://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/
Air Dock for Macbook Air [Macworld 2012]
Background here: creativejs.com/2012/01/hacking-music-with-javascript/
For those of you who think people are piling on, understand that things could be much worse. They are company operating USA where copyright infringement is illegal, punishable by a fine and/or jail time. They can also be sued in court and cost the investors
thousands on dollars. An internet mob lashing is not their biggest problem, a lack of integrity is.
Encryption is not so foolproof. A judge in Colorado has ordered a women to decrypt her laptop. The authorities will find ways to plug the loopholes that technology creates. If they can't break mathematics, they can break your will.
Something more interesting to me is how do you convince a company to build out a true data science. Every company can use one but very few have one. Has anyone had any experience convincing management of the value?
Being a mechanic might make you a better driver, and will certainly make you less reliant on mechanics...

Neither of these things are always true. This is something that tinkerers often struggle to grok.

Consider that the safest way to travel from one place to another is probably on a plane: The vehicle which you are least likely to understand. Moreover, even if you do understand modern jet aircraft and the airlines that fly them, that knowledge won't do you much good, because you have very few knobs which you're empowered to turn. But they constitute a very highly-designed system involving reliable avionics backed-up by redundant highly trained and well-rehearsed pilots with their lives on the line. And the statistics show that you're not going to improve on that. So sit back and have a ginger ale and wait for the plane to land.

As with travel, so with many things in our modern world. Does knowing something about cryptography (a) make you significantly less reliant on professional cryptographers, or (b) make your software more secure? According to security experts I've read, the answers are (a) no, unless you want your software to be less secure and (b) perhaps, but only if you fully appreciate the answer to (a). If knowing a few things about crypto tempts you to deploy crypto that you implemented yourself, it's actually counterproductive if the goal is to produce secure production software.

(As a hobby or an educational toy, of course, I'm obviously a big fan of tinkering. But not everyone needs to have the same hobby.)
Is it legal to stop people from selling their used games?
As I understand it, pre 9/11 air travel domestically in the USA was like hopping on a bus.

Europe had terrorist incidents involving planes long before 9/11. As a consequence air travel (domestic or international) had greater security checks but nowhere near the level we see now in America.

Here is the problem, no amount of security checks can guarantee that there will not be a terrorist incident on a plane.

Even accounting for 9/11, other terrorist incidents on airplanes and plane crashes, the likelihood of you being killed in one is very small.

But the politicians are faced with a decision, respect civil liberties and relax security to common sense levels or ratchet up security to ridiculous levels. If they do the first and a terrorist attack occurs they will get the blame.

Ultimately it is a risk problem, and it is the voters that need to tell those in charge that they understand the risk and won't blame the government for "not protecting them" if something bad happens to them.
Infographic at FastCoDesign: Pasta, not Bacon Makes you Fat
37signals Still Happily Scaling On Moore RAM And SSDs
Zendesk releases a free plan
Most of the new projects we see on HN will help other programmers. This sucks. The first advice to writers is write what you know about, and it applies to innovation - fire fighters that know a little about programming will be able to innovate in their field much better than I can. They will be able to detect and solve their hard problems faster then I could because they have actual experience in their field.
It's weird that it's news, though; if "startup didn't license music for their demo video" was news, we'd have these stories every week. I've even seen one with a Michael Jackson backing track, which I'm guessing they didn't license from the Jackson estate...
Throwing everyone in a same pool could be a problem. One lottery cannot cross state-lines. Also, It would get complicated to claim the prize when 100's of people are involved.
Mark Cuban just invested $25k in this guy...
An entire category of work has been left out of this discussion, Sales & Marketing. I would argue that sales people & marketers do not need to learn how to program in order to ply their trades. In fact, adding a technological layer between a sales person & the client/prospect would be detrimental. This doesn't mean there won't be sales people & marketers who will learn to program or experiment with new methods of interacting with client/prospects, but it is not necessary for these professionals to learn how to program.

There are other service professions that do not need to know how to program as well(all sorts of entertainers, personal services [trainers, masseuses, barbers/hair stylists, etc.])
So during the SOPA protests the HN comment threads had a lot of people stating that copyright should be abolished, or that IP theft is a market failure, torrenting should be legal, etc, etc, etc...

I'm guessing those people are also against Curebit doing what it's done? Is there a rallying cry of "HTML is easy to steal and therefore it's a market problem and not Curebit's fault since it is so easy"?

I'm not saying it's a 100% parallel, but you see can see it. One one hand we have "IP theft is ok" and on the other "IP thieves! Get them!"

I know the difference is Curebit's potential profit motivations vs. "I'm a movie collector who wouldn't have bought these overpriced DVDs", but the irony is still present given the close timing between the two events.
I'd say udemy (www.udemy.com - no affiliation) is the closest to the site you're looking for.
NASA launches multi-player Facebook game
Why is this a story? 4 clicks, and the artist can report the video on Youtube. Flagged.
One of the issues in the AT&T versus UC BSD lawsuit was that AT&T forgot to copyright many of their files. (This was before automatic copyright.) So they probably over-reacted and went out of the way to label everything.
MongoDB: Embedded Documents vs Multiple Collections
It seems entirely unreasonable to manage a bunch of "tiny" investments. It just sounds like a legal nightmare.

I think you'd have to pool all of the tiny investments into one large investment, and then that investment would have to have one person (or a small few) handle all interactions between the investment block and the startup. You'd essentially be creating a fund, in which investors of the fund would have a wall between their investment and the funds ultimate investment.

Even with all that, it seems like a very easy way for a person to lose their money. Startups are very risky investments and the people who succeed at investing are the ones who have developed a strategy for picking winners. Even if smart people decide that their strategy will be piggybacking off of more experienced investors' decisions, the market would still be ripe for drawing in lots of suckers to make really stupid investment decisions, though there are already lots of currently legal alternatives for that.

Financial literacy is already bad enough in this country, does it make sense to make learning it even harder?
So what you are saying is you have no issue with diluting the content quality of HN for your own short term gains? Not only that...you are also eager to show others how doing the same can help them and their product?
Show HN: commentto, "Pinterest for text"
Hello everyone at HN,

I'd like to show HN my startup, commentto. Using commentto, you can comment-to, bookmark and save webpages and also parts of webpages, called excerpts.

How it works: user signs up, downloads extension (available for Chrome and Firefox) and starts using commentto right away. To use it, the user just selects some content on a page, and saves it to commentto.

Problems commentto solves:
1. Commenting - using commentto, a user can comment anywhere.
2. Bookmarking - bookmarks can be imported and organized right in commentto. Excerpts can be easily created using the commentto addons.
3. Saving information - when a user finds some information to save, he/she can just select it, and "Save" it.

This quick how-to videos shows how commentto works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSwsHDWabJ8

You can try it out by going to commentto.com.

I'd love to know what you think. Thank you for your feedback.

Please upvote the clickable links if you can, thanks!

:)
In an ideal world I'd like non-JS fallbacks but I'm torn as to whether I'm being too 'old school' or stuck in a 'progressive enhancement' approach more suited to a web site rather than a web app.

I suspect it comes down to the project and the trade offs therein. I'm no code zealot.

I'm presuming you're serving just desktop interface to start as well? No responsive or mobile at launch?
One advantage that YC-funded startups have over everyone else starting businesses on the side is the coverage. Lots of eyeballs to admire and try out your work, give feedback, etc, without having to spam your twitter feed or beg family to try out your prototype yet again.

The flipside of starting a business under the limelight is the tabloid-like press that you get, which seems to intensify if you're YC, because a lot of people with seriously great hacker cred have basically personally endorsed your company and its people.

This is a good thing; it gives folks the chance to be a business on a hill and display exemplary ethical practices.

It is not okay for any business entity to break copyright law, and if one has found themselves to be in error (people make mistakes) then one must immediately remedy the situation. This applies to all businesses, and YC companies happen to be under the microscope.

So take advantage of the enviable perks of having press and use the limelight as an opportunity to show stellar maturity and ethical behavior!
WTF. C++ constructors. Wade not in unknown waters.
Hi guys, this is my first open-source contribution. Your comments are very welcome. Thanks!
This looks like a fantastic premise, but could where can I get more details about how it's implemented?

I work at an ad agency, and every single client we have wants a fancy email signature, but it's always a huge pain in the ass to get it implemented in a way that works properly company-wide, and looks good across multiple email clients.
MDY is syntactically correct English: January 30th, 2012. Or in older form (where it would have come from): "Dated: January the 30th, in the year of our Lord 2012." Even the US Constitution is dated this way. I strongly prefer this way because it makes the most sense in the English language.

For programmatic sorting YMD makes sense because is automatically sorts by Y, M, D, if compared as a string. (EG: on a filesystem.)
You're right, better and more convenient service would erode piracy, but it would also erode profits and destroy the core business. The core business of a media company isn't simply to deliver content, but rather it is to leverage that content as a mediation tool.

Media companies mediate; they push consumer convenience just as far as they can in return for advertising and distribution dollars.

Examples;

* Cable companies know just how much money the market will bear for channels they don't even want, for the ones that they do.

* Television companies know just how many ads you can tolerate, before time-shifting dominates.

* Hollywood knows just how long it can make international markets wait for releases, in return for cheaper distribution and marketing (a global launch would make a publicity tour very hard).

* The music industry knows how to set prices so that you'll buy the same piece of music over and over again in different formats.

* TV and Movie content gets sold 4 or 5 times over, in theaters, on television, DVDs/blu-ray, online rental, subscription streaming. Only delays and segmentation (both inconvenient for consumers) make this possible.

Media companies are the middle-men, the grand-bargain makers, with their desirable content on one side of the scales, and inconveniences like ads, delays, prices and draconian punitive laws on the other side. Media companies don't mind being hated, that usually means they're doing a good job, as long as you love some of their content - the system still works.

This is why the convenience represented by technology presents such a threat, it dramatically alters the bargaining positions of both the content owners and the distributors.

That middle-man business must be nearing its end, so the question is; can consumer convenient technological distribution get more return for the content creators, the financiers and backers?
Not saying there isn't waste in nature, but in your A,B,C example, at least there are three more things were nature could break something if necessary. It can not only change the input to A, it can also change if A: B = true to if A: B = false, likewise for if B: C = true.

Just saying, that kind of redundancy might be an advantage for evolution, smoothing it's path.
Travis CI Status in Shell Prompt
I have a problem finding your URL. You post a QR Code. Now I have 2 problems:
"One reader points out that this story is from the Daily Mail, and that it's prudent to wait for some more reputable news source to report the story"
or just don't host in the USA, since apparently now you can be forced to decrypt. I wouldn't trust the UK, EU, Singapore, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand etc. either - which rules out most countries that have decent peering and colocation infrastructure.

Can anybody suggest a country/host that is cheap, fast and outside of the reach or co-operation of a US federal investigation?
Wisestamp much?
Educating the Next Generation on Big Data
Your One-Stop Shop for OAuth Tutorials
Grass is Greener Syndrome can be tough to handle. I struggle with it myself.

Strategies that I find helpful include:

- Cut back on the tech-news. The actionable Signal:Noise is terrible, even here on HN. Too easy to get distracted by the shiny new tech or worked up over some injustice. Try setting Noprocrast in your profile or adopting one of the many distraction-blockers out there.

- Chunk project time into blocks (eg. 1 calendar month) and commit to a given project for the entire chunk. Each month return the current project to the pool, then pick one thing to work on for another month.

- Three strike rule. Any project you switch away from three times is clearly not that interesting. Archive all the work, remove it from the pool, and stop thinking about it. Maybe revisit in a year to see if it's worth giving it another chance.

- Toss the stale stuff. Anything in the pool for more than, say, 6 months, isn't interesting enough (or you would have worked on it). Exception: if you've been focused on a single project the whole time... in which case, why do you even need a pool?
Megaupload Content Could be Removed
According to AssociatedPress, the web hosting website Megaupload will have it's content removed later this week.