skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, I do need a scientific study. When Napster came out my friends and I finally had access to hard-to-find singles and b-sides that were not available anywhere else. We also still bought tons of records. I'm looking at Napster now - it feels a lot like Pandora and Spotify. I can't take an anecdotal story from a company ('the story of Napster') and treat that as hard evidence in a fact-based argument, sorry.
Not really, though I'd say it's smaller than Mapnik. TileMill (backed by Mapnik) is an amazing GUI for styling maps, and TileStache is an awesome caching server. But, really at it's heart all SimpleTiles does is convert spatial data into an image, and does that by relying on GDAL and Cairo as much as possible.
Thanks jseims. I will take a look. Most likely I will revisit the thread once I have done more homework
Project Launch and Lessons Learned
There is a problem with online communities. Let's call it the problem of "false association". Humans have been forming communities for millennia. Inevitably, in these communities, there are bad apples. However, if there is a child molester that lives in my town, that fact does not (on its own) reflect poorly on me. Even if that molester was my next door neighbor, there may be a bit more suspicion ("how could you not know that was going on next door?"), but I am confident that 9 times out of 10 I would come away with my reputation unblemished.

Of course, before the internet, communities were a more-or-less involuntary phenomenon. They were defined by geography, history, a common resource, or a common industry. Contrast that to online communities that are largely viewed as self-directed, voluntary organizations. This is the view, I think, that will eventually have to change.

This view is poisonous for two reasons. First, as we see here, if anyone, anywhere in an online community (no matter how large) does something offensive, objectionable, or illegal, the knee-jerk reaction of society today is to allow that bad apple to spoil the bunch. Second, this makes it very difficult to form heterogeneous communities online. If I associate with people randomly online, I am a Google search away from being associated with a potential thief/pervert/whatever. The end result is that online communities become insular, or they can only function well under a banner of anonymity, but anonymity has its own problems.

Reddit, it seems to me, struck a useful middle ground: partial anonymity with history (I can create an identity that does not lead back to my real life identity, but can still build up a reputation). Unfortunately, Reddit is still a business. It seems to me that something like Reddit, but based on a distributed model, is what we need.

Let's call it...usenet
After 4 pages of unrelated marketing research questions I've closed the page.
Apple Shares Climb Above $500
> Back when there was usenet

NNTP is still alive. : )
I hope the furor over this causes other companies to pay more attention their users' data and privacy. More importantly, to treat their users as people instead of end products.
I reckon it will make at least 100 millionaires, but they are technically already millionaires on paper.
"Never give up" attitude can be pretty devastating, I would honestly never recommend that to anyone.

Moreover, most startups never become Google or Facebook. They are extreme cases and hence should be seen as such.
First sentence: "OK, I suppose I really haven’t left Perl"

It's a couple thousand word memoir, about 1/2 comprised of reasons he's not using to "leave Perl," before telling us that it's Perl people who bug him. He needs to get together with that "no semicolons in Javascript" guy in another HN post.
You've touched upon an incredibly grey area. Most forums will ban trolls, but therein lies the problem: define "troll".

I don't know what you said, where, and in what context... but I don't give benefit of doubt on this. Nor do I think you're guilty either... all I do know is that running a community is hard, and one of the things that the people of the community look to moderators to do is to keep the peace.

A difference of opinion can be minor, or major. And depending on the topic it can be quite offensive to some.

Have you considered that within a particular subreddit that the moderators were just trying to keep the peace? Has anything stopped you from starting your own subreddit to voice your opinion?
Totally. If you had to pick one.. what then? :)
The higher up someone is in a company, the less offended they tend to be by "fuck". We've all heard the word before. They even say it on TV now.

(At my last job, people were always worried I would get into trouble with my "open source, fuck yeah" laptop sticker. But nobody actually cares.)
I don't think that blog posts about how one fixed a single environment setup problem is HN worthy material ...
When are you hoping to launch?

Have you begun building this, or are you just gauging interest?
His brilliant idea for infinite platformer levels came in 2009.. 3 years after Notch released an infinite Mario Bros level generator as public domain and numerous competitions had already sprung up around the idea.

Also the video shows elements that are way too close to existing Nintendo properties for my liking and probably the liking of MS or Valve's lawyers. I mean, taking ideas from other games is fine, by why are your fireball sticks fireball sticks? I can't think of anything other than Super Mario Bros. when I see that.

You can pay homage without ripping off (see, for example, what Jon Blow did with Braid while also creating an actually unique game idea, in his own time, without funding and without coming off an 8th grade misogynist in his pre-release blog posts).
One point the author may be missing, is that smart people do not learn to ask question. Instead, asking questions is a side-effect of being extremely curious, which is a core characteristic of smart people.

Similarly, how can someone learn to ask questions without being sufficiently curious, or at least sufficiently motivated to learn about a particular subject? I guess the answer is: with a lot of work.
The importance of maintenance during development
It's definitely possible but it might be a bit tough. I'd say Electromagnetism will probably be much more important than linear algebra. You can check out 8.02 on OCW (http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-02-electricity-and-magn...) which covers basically the same material as AP Physics but with more calculus and a higher level of difficulty of course. Good luck!
Recruiters and job sites encourage it indirectly. More acronyms = more matches = more interviews, based on their algorithms.
Not having to use semicolons sounds nice, but in practice it can have terrible effects. E.g.:

var x = function() {
// something
}

// avoid polluting global scope:
(function() {
// Some initialization.
})()

This will call the function x with the anonymous function as its argument, and then call the result of that.

There are more examples to that point, and many of them really aren't all that straightforward. So don't rely on automatic semicolons.
>It's preventing the trade of child pornography. How on earth do you not see this as exploitative?

Production of child pornography is exploitative for sure. Trade? Not really, but I accept it should be illegal because it provides incentive for production. However this is not about explicit child pornography, which was never allowed on reddit and was being removed as soon as someone noticed it. Nothing changed there - it will still be banned as soon as someone will notice it. No gain from the change of stance.
What has changed, however, is the banning of content that is not illegal, but that some people find disgusting/creepy.
A Look Inside LEGO’s Design Offices
Presenter remotes - the good the bad and the ugly
But that doesn't prevent = NULL from parsing into an AST containing the "IS NULL" opcode. It's syntax sugar.
What are you talking about? Reddit had a very strong stance aginst CP already.

And there's a lot of rules broken on /r/trees so it's far from safe. Like meetups to exchange or people giving tips. That's not legal in US and happens quite often there.

Same with /r/atheism, a lot of their content can be labeled hate speech under US law. (IANAL)
When you're banned from a subreddit, that's the decision of the moderators of that subreddit, not the administration of the site. You're blaming the wrong people.
A few years ago there was a mario competition to generate levels. When the contest was over I downloaded the entries and tried out some of them. Quickly I found that while they had successfully generated a lot of levels the levels were not very fun.

A few years ago I started playing a lot of mario style platformers writing down notes including what I found "fun" (for the day I would get around to making my own platformer).

http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2010/04/what-makes-fun-ma...

Skip down to the "What is fun" section and you will find the first two items pretty much say when you die it is not fun. Skill level doesn't necessarily equal fun in a platformer game. That block that almost kills you and scared you? Turnes out it was scripted and there was no way you could have died no matter what your skill level was.

There are a handful of platformers on Linux and they all have the problem of being too hard. The games in the first few levels are so hard that the player quits before they can explore what the engine can even do or find the "fun" in the game.

Maybe difficulty is simply the easiest nob to twist when designing platforms which is why so many first time platform developer turn that first, but I would have to think that the fun found in a platformer is not from the difficulty, but in other aspects. No one would dare say that Mario 2 (japan version) is better than Mario3 because it was more difficult.
Researchers Suggest BitTorrent Has No Effect on U.S. Box Office Sales
We're definitely trying to build an instagram-like app, in that people will just share things they like in their daily life (people, places, things - not necessarily just businesses) through cheers, and push them to Facebook/Twitter/other networks for their existing social networks to see.

Bootstrapping an app like this without your friends in the system is definitely tough, but we've tried to encourage a model where people will interact with other strangers in the system by trading 'likes' (we call it 'cheering on') on each other's content. You can give 'cheerfluence' to other users by just interacting with their content.

This turns out to work fairly well - lots of people in the system are following other people in the system, not necessarily those who they need, who just happen to be in the system and are putting content in.
Ask HN: Who wants an HTML5 mobile webapp?
I've got some spare time in the evenings - does anybody want an HTML5 mobile webapp (HTML5 + Javascript + CSS3) made?

I have lots of experience with jquery mobile and jq.mobi from my day job.

Will work for cheap / free, am really looking for a challenge. My email is in my profile!
using kde, xrandr magic is automatic.
including the mode that integrates all screens into one, regardless of the resolution (unify screens)
Some people, myself included, object to banning "kiddie-fiddler fiction", no matter how disgusting it is. The law should not make judgments of literary quality, and literary quality is the only grounds for treating Lolita differently from some (but perhaps not all) of the amateur stuff.

Besides, no actual child was abused in the production of these works, unlike with films and pictures with actual underage models; and potential harm to future children is a rather shaky basis to justify flushing the First Amendment down the drain. That's the argument that ACLU's Nadine Strossen used two decades ago against censorship of (non-child) pornography. I see no reason why the same argument won't apply to child pornographic literature.

But private websites are a different matter, and there's nothing wrong with a moderator who chooses whether or not to discriminate on the basis of perceived literary quality on his or her own site. Many forums ban discussions about religion and politics altogether, but that doesn't infringe anybody's Constitutional rights.
I do believe the use of # urls has just passed its limit.
the quiche is a lie...
I've been told, by a drunken reddit admin in a late night talk, that no one likes my opinions and I should just go away. True to form, callow youth are generally the most sure of their own views while also being sure that everyone else is wrong.

> Reddit is a private organization, and they don't have to give a damn about freedom of speech.

Agreed. They should stop acting like they care when they don't.
First, let me say that I know nothing about the authors. I'm just arguing the principle here.

Yea, why hate on people who take advantage of and mislead uninformed newcomers to the Rails community by selling them existing free software that is trivial to set up, all the while passing it off as their own?

Hmm ... I didn't get the impression that they had written Bootstrap, Stripe, or Kissmetrics. Clearly what they're selling is a tested Rails app that integrates the Stripe and Kissmetrics API libraries and provides a baseline UI based off Bootstrap.

Maybe because some people believe in honest businesses, and not ripping off end users for a quick buck.

That's where this gets destructive. Just because it's not worth the price to you doesn't mean that these people are running a dishonest, rip-off business. You ought not attack people's ethics because you don't like the value proposition of their business.

Moreover, your argument is predicated on the idea that time is worth nothing. Back in my consulting days, even if the integration of all of these things at production quality would take only one billable hour (which, incidentally, it wouldn't), the $149 would save me money.

Maybe you're a faster developer than I am or maybe you just don't bill enough. Either way, just because the price isn't justified for you, doesn't mean it couldn't be a lifesaver for someone else. Certainly doesn't mean the business is dishonest.

That said, I think I will take you up on that replicating challenge.

Awesome.
"Part of the problem is there's not really an obvious problem to solve."

Isn't that just a nice way of saying that Facebook isn't useful?

I think the interesting take-away from this article is not so much that Facebook has changed the context by adding features that include a larger network of people, but rather that perhaps Facebook is most useful when you use it exclusively with a small network of people with whom you have very real, close relationships. Suppose Facebook had exactly the same features that it has now but was limited to college campuses where connections could be made only with close friends and classmates. Would the experience really be any worse than it was when the functionality was more limited?

When the author was in college and he had just recently joined Facebook (and presumably most people he had ever met were just starting to use it) his network was necessarily small and limited to those people whom he had recently met and socialized with. As the years went by, more and more people joined his network. But few, if any left.

The problem is that that is not an accurate reflection of real-world relationships. Over time people prune relationships, either consciously or subconsciously, but the point is that in the real world, relationships evolve and end, but Facebook doesn't do a great job of evolving with those relationships. Recently I find myself using Twitter more and more to the exclusion of Facebook because on Facebook I get inundated with a mixture of every kind of update, a very small percentage of which I care anything about. I don't de-friend people because that is considered rude and what if I do want to reconnect with that person someday?

With Twitter there are definitely times that I get inundated with annoying tweets, but because I can quickly and easily stop following somebody, it is very simple to maintain my network and keep the information presented to me relevant.
Will this work as a drop-in replacement for express?
That's what I learned it as years ago, in hindsight it is an odd phrase.

Wiki calls them 'Conditional or questionable fallacies', which is a bit less punchy. Do you have a better name?
JQuery : Exploring Deferred and Promise methods
The True Cost of Free: A Knife in the Back
I've found several columns using floating point to store monetary amounts in the system I'm working on. It makes for some real problems down the line.
This shit killed Usenet. Not just child porn, but that and a lot of things like it.

(I ran a Freenix-competitive server in the '90s and hacked on INN).

(Disclosure: it's sad it took Reddit this long to apply this rule, and more than a little repulsive to see people up in arms about it.)
If it goes away completely, smart keywords provide similar functionality:

http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/Smart%20keywords
But you can use a slippery slope argument that begins with 'you can post whatever is legally allowed', and trends towards 'you cannot post anything that the majority finds disturbing'. Which is what is happening here - no one argues for allowing already illegal content.
Jury Decides Against U. of California over the Interactive Web
You really need a privacy policy linked from the front page. I hope it goes without saying that if someone wants to follow news about medical_condition_x, people are going to be sensitive about who has access to the data linking their email (and, by proxy, identity) to that condition.
Show HN: I made a GitHub Flavored Markdown API
tl;dr: My first Ruby project: https://github.com/symkat/GFM-Service

Something I have wanted for a long time, has been to use GitHub Flavored Markdown in projects. Since those projects haven't been Ruby, using the awesome libraries GitHub's released has been a non-started.

Now, running this and using HTTP and JSON from any language lets me use GitHub Flavored Markdown in my projects.
Does it hurt to have extra semi-colons? Maybe you have some empty statements. Does it hurt to have too few? Well, if you either do not know what you're doing, or someone maintaining doesn't understand what you did, etc., then yes.
There is a difference between subreddit admins banning you from a particular subreddit, and Reddit admins banning entire subreddits. Each subreddit is administered by different admins, and each subreddit may have different policies for what is acceptable content or not.

The difference here is that now Reddit has banned subreddits for encouraging people to post "creepy," though not necessarily illegal, content. It's always been the case that subreddit admins could ban you for whatever they wanted.
There's no such thing as "hate speech" under US law. You can, for instance, proudly march down the streets of Skokie in Klan regalia bellowing about the need to "exterminate the Jews", safe in the knowledge that the First Amendment implications of doing so have already been litigated.

There are (dubiously) "hate crime" laws, but they pertain to violent crime.

In a similar vein, I'm not so sure about your legal analysis about "arranging meetups" and "providing tips" on marijuana forums. The reason mj forums don't want people arranging meetups probably has more to do with not creating an easy venue for sting operations.

(Disclosure: it's sad it took Reddit this long to apply this rule, and more than a little repulsive to see people up in arms about it.)
My condolences.

I try to consistently remind myself, it is the journey, and not the destination.
The whole point of this policy shift is that it's no longer about child pornography, just like the jailbait banning wasn't about child porn. The post makes it clear that they've always followed the law regarding child pornography, but that they're now voluntarily banning all suggestive or sexual content involving minors (so, not just child porn). Their main excuse is that they don't have the resources to moderate on a case-by-case basis, and I guess they think a subreddit-by-subreddit basis will require less manpower.

Still, I strongly suspect this isn't purely about legality. Reddit has come under fire (first, in the press regarding jailbait, and more recently by somethingawful users) for having content that's not necessarily illegal, but rather just creepy. Most of the top comments on this post share this interpretation, and most seem to approve of banning creepy content. If other commenters are to be believed, it also appears that many of the banned subreddits contained fairly "standard" pornography and either had strict "no minor" or "no nudity/sex" policies.
I don't see what you mean by "designed to discourage speaking with 'strangers'", it seems to me that the interest tags that Facebook has implemented and the stream of people it suggests for you to be "friends" with encourages exactly the opposite behaviour.
There may be some lip service to online safety, but everything else points to pushing users to expand their networks.

As unintuitive as it seems to me, a sizable minority of people use Facebook as a way to meet others, either for dating (read: hooking up with your friends hot friends), shared interest, or just adding another source to the stream. Perhaps this is what keeps others active on the network? The few who activity seek out new connections keep everyone else just engaged enough to keep posting pictures and a few lines about their life.
Sorry about that, and thanks for letting me know. I messed up our SSL settings at 3AM. New personal rule: no mucking about with crucial settings when exhausted.

It's fixed now.
I really wish people would stop calling Java "JAVA".
I'm not saying you hate your mother, but...
Out of curiosity, how are you getting all of the content from the App Store?
"now the masses (and/or governments) dictate the content you are allowed to post"

Isn't this an exaggeration? There is a lot of room between "everything goes" and North Korea. Stopping exploitation of kids is one notch up from "everything goes".
I actually got the idea right (taxing capital gains as ordinary income is a bad idea) and some of the reasoning wrong: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/02/div... :

President Obama wants to tax dividends at ordinary income rates. These results, from Marcus and Martin Jacob, should not come as a huge surprise:

We compile a comprehensive international dividend and capital gains tax data set to study tax explanations of corporate payouts for a panel of 6,416 firms from 25 countries for 1990-2008. We find robust evidence that the tax penalty on dividends versus capital gains is statistically significant and negatively related to firms’ propensity to pay dividends, initiate such payments, and the amount of dividends paid. Our analysis further reveals that an increase in the dividend tax penalty raises firms’ likelihood to repurchase shares, initiate such repurchases, and the amount of shares repurchased. This is strong confirming evidence that when listed industrial firms globally design their payout policies, they take into careful consideration the relative tax implications of their payout choices.*
Hey, this is great stuff. I love how you matched the theme of your app to your maps; I haven't really seen that before.