skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While that's definitely true, Facebook is of course not lacking in free capital to throw at this problem.

They had $4 billion in cash before the IPO. They'll have $9 billion after it.
SHRDLU stopped with blocks; it'd be interesting to see how other AI projects deal with similar generic / specific terms that the OP mentions.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU)
On a loosely similar note, many (some?) countries can prosecute their citizens if they break law outside of the country, despite "it" being legal there. So in theory, you can be put to jail for possessing marijuana when visiting Netherlands. The "in theory" is important as there is no one that could report it back to your home country. I believe this exists to prevent from import of polygamy and such, but it's still interesting.
> I wonder if consumers (as opposed to power users) would still pirate.

The practise will just move back into the physical world more. The people in a social group who have the know-how and access will pass the resulting content further into the group. Once it is a file on a local disk it can spread by the old fashioned methods rather easily. The base consumers that want to won't obtain the material directly, but they'll get access easily enough indirectly and after that they'll be able to pass it on the low-tech way too.

It'll be less convenient for them, but far from impractical. It might reduce casual/opportunistic piracy (oh, it's free?, go on then) but not anything that affects bottom lines: those that want the content but don't want to pay will still find a way not to pay.
I am a human, a male, an American, a Caucasian, a PhD, a statistician, and a Risk Management Quantitative Analyst (level II), in broadly-decreasing levels of specificity. The term "programmer" is ridiculously broad, the same way that "weight lifter" is ridiculously broad. No one uses the term to mean anything more than it's broad definition nowadays. You don't see job advertisements for a "programmer" without further clarification as to what type of programming. Usually the term is qualified as "C++ programmer", or "SAS programmer", or "AMD chipset programmer". As the OP correctly noted, academic postings are typically referred to as "computer scientists", and even then the job posting will specify whether they're looking for an algorithms specialist or FPGA experts.

We use the term "programmer" as a simple way to classify. People are typically able to quickly determine whether an article/job/discussion is appropriate for their programming skills, so I don't see any particular problem with the continued use of the word.
Ask HN: Where do you find current blogging platforms lacking as a developer?
The big-name blogging platforms currently on the market aren't catered to the needs of hackers.

- I don't know of any blogging software that provides built-in integration for your GitHub account.
- Current blogging software has too many options. All I need to do is post my article, possibly give it a thumbnail, and maybe add a few tags for easier browsing.

Where do you find current blogging platforms lacking, as a developer? If you were going to hack together your own blogging software, what would you include?
Honest question: aren't ACTA and the like all about cross-border copyright enforcement? I can't say I'm an expert, but...

Note that it's your friend claiming copyright infringement, with an exclusive license in hand. Legally, the question is whether you can actually give an exclusive license after uploading a photo to Facebook (the ToS has been challenged and changed on similar issues), but that is not between your friend and Facebook.

Google "facebook dmca": Facebook will happily take pretty much any page down (e.g. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101007/01244411320/facebo...). Do you really think that Facebook is going to risk a court case where it has to prove (on its own dime!) that you actually did have copyright on the image when you uploaded it, risking its DMCA safe harbor status?
This makes a nice follow-up to the article I wrote last week: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3528940

EDIT: Reading the comments here (and over there) reaffirms the correctness of my decision not to get into definitions about "what is a programmer" with technical folks! Lots of great ideas, very little organization.

The funny thing is, it's possible to do a post about what really makes a programmer -- but nobody would read it. People would happily read articles about the importance of programming, the importance of programmers, etc, Emotional, take-a-stand articles are fun to read and comment on, even (or especially) if the definition of the thing discussed is so vague!

I'm not sure if that is a bug of human nature or a feature.
Ask HN: Advice on going from shared to dedicated server?
Hey Hackers,

I've finally built my base of hosting clients up enough to require a good, dedicated environment. I was on a reseller account which was cheap and good enough to build basic things. Just looking forward to the power of having a LAMP server of my own. Any advice?

Overview: Sounds like my new host includes a cPanel license, Centos install and remote reboot tools but it is self-managed with no uptime guarantee. Any red flags here?
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Occasionally, I have an irresistible urge to strangle everyone who uses Unicode and UTF-8 (or other UTF encodings) interchangeably.

UNICODE is a good thing because it provides a codepoint for every character that we care about, instead of having a 256-character subset for every groups of languages and needing complicated software to puzzle out how to convert from one subset to the other. Unicode allows fantastic stuff such as upper/lowercasing text including all the weird letters that you previously had to special-case.

ASCII used to be a good thing because it allowed people to ship around basic English and Cobol code without any worries, but is actually pretty evil because people from Anglosaxon countries assume that every other bit of text is composed of English and Cobol.

Having a notion of ENCODINGS is useful if you occasionally get bits of text that are neither English nor Cobol. You still needed different encodings for different groups of languages, and arcane mechanisms to provide hints on which encoding is meant, at least if you got non-English bits of text. The very notion of an Encoding scares the people who used to think the world consists of English and Cobol.

UTF-8 is a very reasonable encoding that can be used to represent all of Unicode while being Ascii-compatible. Hence it is a sane choice as a default encoding for people who are scared of having to think about encodings. Because UTF-8 is not the only encoding out there, Unicode-compatible programs accept Unicode text in many other encodings, including those that cannot represent the full range of Unicode and are only a good choice for some people but not others.

tl;dr: non-UTF-8 text can (and should) still be read as unicode codepoints. Ignoring the >=40% of texts out there or saying that they're "not Unicode" doesn't help anybody.
As others have pointed out elsewhere, Facebook is in it's 8th year, Google was in it's 5th year. Google has a much faster growth attributable to larger revenues in the beginning than Facebook, percentage growth seems to be the same.

(Update) I found the growth graph interesting:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/05/facebook-pre-ipo-google/
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Before I strap electrodes to my skull, I am going to need more convincing than "An article online said...". I am surprised at how many smart people are willing to try this despite the lack of evidence / research.

If I wanted to increase my productivity, I would start by not surfing hackernews. Eventually, I might move on to "home made electric chair I bought off ebay", but I think I will exhaust other possibilities first.

But, hey, that's me. :-)
I'm also not an expert, but we've had cross border copyright enforcement for over 100 years with the Bern Convention. The UK will recognise and enforce USA copyright that happens in the UK.

Facebook has to take down DMCA requests to stay with the DMCA and the safe harbour rules. However that's a US law. I don't know if non-USA people can invoke it.
I wonder how much of the documented improvement is placebo effect?

Even if it didn't directly improve focus it seems like it would be a great placebo. Nine volt batteries are probably commonly perceived as being powerful. They are used in stun guns, for example. You also experience unusual side effects after it's applied, further removing any doubt that something unique is happening to you.
The great thing is that one now only has to explain to people to use UTF-8 in all cases, which is preferable to having to fool around with a lot of language-specific encodings.

And it helps that almost all editors, these days, also default to UTF-8 encoding. So you can just copy/paste special characters and it works...
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> As for what broke the author's disk, I don't know but I always considered the "long track"-trick a bit of a fragile beast, but that can very well just be in my head.

It could just be the magnetic data on the floppy disk decaying. I had many old games on 720k disk that I found had corrupted data when I tried them 15 years later.
If you buy a Microsoft mouse, it comes with a driver that will make the mouse behave like it does in Windows.
One thing that you can always depend on the HN crowd to do when considering Khan Academy is to only consider how it works for them personally.

The HN crowd is made up of intelligent people who tend to learn things on their own. We're autodidacts. For people like us, Kahn Academy is wonderful. As a general educational solution, it's going to fail just as badly as every other general educational solution out there.

It's not because it's a bad idea. It's because there is no generalizable educational solution. Until we're comfortable with the idea that education is personal and we allow everyone to gain that personalized education, we're going to continue waffle around with solutions that provide some hope and excitement for a year or two before burning out.
Newish Mac user here. The "feel" of mouse cursor movement is one of the few areas were Windows is superior. Years ago something like this was a big issue in Linux/X.org aswell but recently it has been fixed, atleast it feels like it for me.

I have noticed this "lag" with my magic mouse. Until now I have assumed there is something wrong with the hardware in it. Or that the bluetooth connection was breaking up. When I use the build in trackpad I have never noticed any lag.

Since Apple normally pay attention to details like this, im suprised that they have ignored this issue for so long.

If you use it for a while you might become blind to it?
Show HN: Doing a Startup is hard, here is Our Story
The author says that the bug is in the OS X kernel, not in any driver, so if he's right, changing a driver would not fix it, which is a pity.

I've also had Windows friends complain about mouse lag on my OS X. I've always thought it was due to the different acceleration curves, but disabling OS X mouse acceleration never seemed to fix it.
This has not been fixed since OS X Tiger. In fact, they even removed functionality that mitigated that problem. I used to run a small application that would patch the acceleration curves but that API has vanished since Leopard. :-(
Microsoft used to provide a Mac driver for their Intellimouse range that seemed to fix this and changed the acceleration curve to match Windows which felt much more natural to me. Unfortunately since switching to a Magic Mouse I can't use it anymore.
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No different from C / Java / most others.
http://blog.receipt-bank.com/?p=428 quote HMRC as saying

"Records may be preserved on optical imaging systems, and the originals discarded, provided that what is retained in digital form represents a complete and unaltered image of the underlying paper document."

giving the reference as http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110720224136/htt...
No pardon for Turing
> I wonder how many of these sites are just reporting UTF-8 or something because their web server defaults to it, and not actually encoding special characters properly?

I think they are measuring the encoding that is picked before adding a page to the index. Which would be a combination of explicit information (headers, xml and html metadata) and heuristics (which may fail, but are useful when the explicit information is missing or — even though ignoring explicit metadata is bad — obviously incorrect).

It also seems they are looking for a subset encoding once they have the metadata; the posts describe explicitly labelling ASCII when the contents are within that subset.

But their methodology has changed from the previous two posts: latin above ascii in 2008 didn't exist in http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/unicode-nearing-50-of... or http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/moving-to-unicode-51.... .
Agreed that a VP of PM (or whatever title) should report directly to CEO, though having engineering report to CEO directly as well makes sense. As a PM, I've always felt that the tension between PM and engineering is a good thing. It leads to some healthy conflicts instead of hierarchical subservience.

Though marketing reporting into a PM organisation sounds like a fantastic idea... :-)
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Longtime Mac user here... for what it's worth, I don't know what the OP is referring to. I use both Mac and Windows regularly (home vs work), and I don't see a noticeable difference. Maybe I've just gotten used to it. Definitely isn't a problem for me.
thanks,going to look at these now.
We have had an unequivocal apology, made on national television by the Prime Minister himself, saying that the conviction was "horrifying" and "utterly unfair". I think that counts as "an acknowledgement that the laws of the time were injust".

A pardon is a separate and distinct legal action, which is unwarranted.
Yeah, I know how to build a GitHub URL, but I meant the link should be on the webpage...
That is an incredible increase in a short amount of time, especially to pass 60% with no sign yet of even a decreasing slope. The post offers no explanation for the sudden surge, and I am too ignorant on this topic to speculate. Was there a sudden change in the defaults of operating systems / languages / etc? (Without details that's the only thing that seems generally plausible to me)
Am I the only person that loves the mouse/trackpad feel in OS X? Maybe it's because I've gotten too used to it, but I find it somewhat annoying to switch to Win or Ubuntu because of the different feel they have. I was using Ubuntu for about 6 months last year and never quite got used to how jumpy it felt (and yes, I did play with the mouse settings).
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Straight talking drinking hole finder.
Not so: Gordon Brown's letter admits and apologises for the mistake that was made.
Words like "poisonous nonsense", "appeals to authority", "known falsehoods", "provably bad sources" are polemic.

In fact, the book of Proverbs is as sure in history as the Greek classics. There is wisdom to be found in both. You would be better arguing in terms of textual criticism, historicity of events, than polemic.

This kind of liberalist thinking that we are free to say anything so long as it is liberal not does not seem very liberal to me.

If you are into Christopher Hitchens, you may also enjoy his brother, Peter Hitchens, also a journalist and a former atheist. He has what looks to be a good book out: "The Rage Against God". He warns against the kind of atheistic state that his brother advocated, drawing on recent history: Stalin, Hitler, Mao. That is the kind of state that uses words like "poisonous nonsense".
Most bodyshops due hard-line negotiations with the employees.

One particularly nasty one that I ran into would arbitrarily delay payment to employees for 90 or 120 days, unless the employees agreed to pay 10% for a weekly paycheck. The bad ones are even nastier to folks on temporary work visas.

If they are a good place, they will pay people whatever the fully-loaded cost of an employee is. Contractors aren't getting rich.
For Fox News, this article is pretty in-depth and factual. It makes me wonder if this isn't a press release in the guise of a news article.

>In the end, technology is agnostic, Enderle said, and a company that makes a new technology is rarely liable for how it is used.

I've never heard Fox News make this much sense. That being said, the technology does work, but is no more advanced than AGPS that we've had for years. I had a Motorola Q that had "GPS" in that it used cell towers to triangulate your location. There was even a web service I remember using (but can't remember the name) that would pay you money to drive around with AGPS running so it could find all the towers around you and better its location services.
The problem here is that it's called "gamification." This view is an impoverished view of gaming that leaves out it's most important component: gaming is play.

Gamification of education would be wonderful. The thing is, it wouldn't consist of adding things like leaderboards and achievements. As people have pointed out, we already have those. Gamification should really be about the return of play to the primary role in learning.
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It's awesome how they are trying to enforce laws that don't exist: it half seems like the point is demonizing the Pirate Bay ("sharing couldn't possibly be legitimate!") Hobbyist 3D printing thus far has only taken off to the extent it has because the designs are available for free and in a format where it is possible to tweak the source.
Early programs weren't protected either: the very lack of protection creates a more vibrant user community. It may be that someday 3D printing decides to pivot, that the early adopters aren't needed any more, but the very nature of it may instead imply that such a pivot isn't necessary: the act of creating the printing pattern seems pretty transformative.

Besides, we all know the only DRM that works is to never give the consumer the data in the first place. 3D printers sold by Apple will have access to an App store and only properly-approved patterns will run. If Star Wars were realistic, they'd have had Replicators As A Service.
No, you're not the only one. There's simply more switchers than ever before, and they're vocal about their complaints.
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Samsung’s quad-core Galaxy S III reportedly just 7mm thick, set to launch in May
Sounds like an affiliate program, with sponsored payments to the affiliates. Affiliate programs can work, and are apparently a pain to get right.

However, I don't really see why Amazon et al. would be happy to sponsor such a program; and anyway, 100 (ad-free) Kindles plus 20 iPads for 300 users seems ridiculously high, ~$70/user at retail prices. (Amazon's own affiliate program pays out ~8% to its more successful affiliates, which would imply that Amazon expects to derive value equivalent to a ~$875 purchase from your customers.)
I don't think we really disagree that much.

I admit that last phrase was a bit over the top. But, I do believe that long term industrial education will slowly die out. Probably a lot slower than I think. There's nothing that special about my thinking really.

Google, Facebook, Apple, Intel, etc all hire the best. I don't know THAT much about their hiring policy or practice, but there are people just by sheer numbers (on either side of spectra) who are more than qualified.

In fact you can go to college and get stuff done. It's one of the best ways to go because you can use loans and scholarships to fund yourself getting stuff done. It's the degree so much that I don't care about. And to be really honest, it's probably easier to get stuff done in the right college setting than it is to get it done almost anywhere else in the world.

All I'm really saying is that I have a strong preference for self learners and people who have done more than get a degree.

Am I missing something?
The article is from 2009. The graph shows online ad rates halving over 2008. How much of that is a long term trend, and how much of that is because of the recession?

(Though this doesn't detract from the rest of the article, which covers alternate business models.)
Why You Are Your Company's Best Marketer
SEO and Social: It Isn’t One or the Other
I've seen this model work well with charity fundraising.

Usually the prizes on offer are 'money can't buy' type prizes, lunch with a well known person, a trip to hangout at a famous location etc.

That way it's easier for the prize-givers to offer repeatedly and it's a unique experience for the winner.

If it was on behalf of for-profit companies, you need to examine the motivation of prize givers. Why would they want to give away those prizes?

Alternatively you could flip the idea on it's head and instead of expecting sponsor companies to donate prizes, just set up a really solid referral system, This process is pretty tricky using existing methods.

So a company that wants users starts a campaign. Your site generates a unique url for each promoter so that they can tweet/share. The company then tracks the signups through your leaderboard and rewards each promoter per sale, perhaps with a bonus for the top performer.

Nothing motivates like helping others to earn money. I guess it's similar to how Clickbank works in a way.
I noticed the exact opposite to be true. I regularly use Windows, Linux and OSX, and OSX seems to be the only OS that gets mouse movement right.
The cursor moves (at least subjectively) exactly like my fingers on the trackpad. On Windows/Linux it always seems either too slow or too fast.
Who Should Take an SEO Training Course?
The only reason this demo uses a lot of CPU is because it uses a lot of tricks to stay under 1K. Any JS guy could get the same result with far less CPU usage. Also, HTML5 has nothing to do with CPU usage. JavaScript performance (which is quite a bit better than Flash, even with SVG and/or Canvas manipulations) is the thing that actually uses CPU.
From the arty: When you include ASCII, nearly 80 percent of web documents are in Unicode (UTF-8).

...which indicates that nearly all unicode is UTF-8.
Same here, only Mac though. I don't game and haven't noticed this "lag". I currently have a MacBook Pro, and an iMac with a Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad. Don't see it anywhere.
Umm, shouldn't you be focusing on something like revenue per click/CPC? Also, a less-broad demographic may work better...
Actually, it's very easy to 'take' courses (technical engineering or otherwise) in University/College. Just show up. Attendance is rarely enforced.
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Obviously the biggest abuse would be someone "borrowing" your phone and opting you in without your knowledge. That's actually more frightening than losing your phone because you would never know, and it adds another incentive to locking your phone. Like other "agnostic" technological advances that can be used for good or evil, I think it would be misguided and useless to fight this technology, but I hope equal advances are made to prevent unwitting "opt-ins".
NPD: iPhone dominated in Q4, Android popularity grows among first-time buyers