skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> manages to triple revenue this quarter

Quarter revenue was tripled on a year-to-year basis (2011 Q4 versus 2010 Q4).

> if they wanted to lower expenses they could cut the writing staff pretty significantly

Based on the earnings call, staff expenses are actually about to increase as GRPN will start to hire more tech on its payroll (Silicon Valley software engineers).
Yes, 100% please use twitter bootstrap, it is becoming the standard for rapid app development here on HN.
Apologist much? The NYT posted the PDF on their own servers, not merely a link. The quality of the scan is immaterial. An entire article, without commentary or any other contribution, is exactly what fair use isn't. While _we_ may take an enlightened approach to republishing out-of-print materials, the thrust of the Phoenix's response is that the NYT hypocritically opposes reasonable approaches to copyright.
Is this the most responsive photo slideshow?
It's also an great website to visit you happen to like contemporary photography.
Tim Berners-Lee Takes the Stand to Keep the Web Free
The situation is analogous to the difference between the immune system of someone with limited exposure to all the normal diseases of western civ (f.ex. theo-facists, nazis, white supremacists) and someone brought up with sterilized everything and an instant antibiotics cure if he sniffs once.

EDIT: Not saying that murderous leftist radicals can't do damage, but the west's left has mellowed.
Are you sure it wouldn't affect you as a user? If product A's affiliate program has a better percentage payout than competing product B does, then they could easily benefit from promoting company A over product B.

Would you trust them not to?

Soon they're approaching companies and selling placement, charging listing fees, etc.

It's a business and their entitled to do this. As a user I'm entitled to ignore their offerings on the grounds that the way they ultimately profit is at my (the user's) expense. Eventually they're just internet noise with a slick interface.
Two things.

Are you sure all the people in your address book are as careless about that data? The friend with the restraining out against their ex? The minor celebrity with the unlisted phone number?

Are you happy with the possibility that a connection between you and someone else might be implied without being true? What if a known drug dealer* had your phone number in their address book? (Perhaps via a room mate or child using the landline to have called them once? Or through reuse of an expired disposable cellphone number?)

* or child pornographer, or political dissident, or terrorist, or…
I wonder whether the inability to measure repeat visitors is just because they haven't figured out how to offer it yet, or whether it's intentional because they know it will reveal damaging information to merchants (that running one doesn't make long-term sense). Unclear what the answer is here...
When you first announced gumroad I had already built something similar, can I ask if you looked for investment or they came to you?

My system allows the users to use their own stripe account keys, so we dont take a % or 30c.
It's also a great place to go if you happen to like contemporary photography.
> The only offense so far is: the PDF was hosted on Times servers

This is the entire offence. We're not talking about lifting a few paragraphs here, it's a pixel-perfect reproduction of a document with multiple overlapping copyrights, none of which the Times had permission to use.
I think there are problems with many of your points.

> Camels are much vulnerable from enemy fire than metal&plastic.
Disagree. I'm quite sure if you shot one of these robots, it would stop working.

> It is much harder to silence a Camel.
Disagree; under normal circumstances a camel makes about as much noise as a soldier walking, whereas this thing makes much more noise via its gas generator. This can only be silenced by going all electric, which given the poor energy density of current battery technology, is not feasible.

> Camels can't negotiate rough terrain.
I am not a camel expert but I believe they can walk over terrain at least as rough as this robot.

> Camels need to be fed. Military logistics is tuned around delivering fuel, ammo and parts, not hay.

Military logistics is also tuned around delivering provisions, which are pretty similar to hay. Anyway, a cubic meter is a cubic meter.

> Camels get sick, scared, injured, run away, etc.
This is the strongest advantage over a camel: precise control. You can't program a camel. However, the other points are not really big wins for the robot.
in the long run, we're all dead - so better we go ahead and die now?
+1 for twitter bootstrap, thanks for the excellent book.
Exactly. I was always under the (apparently totally mistaken) assumption that Apple's approval process was there to catch exactly this kind of behaviour. It's supposed one of the reasons why an Android-style permissions system is not necessary on iOS devices.

Recently it seems it's been coming to light that their curation process is not nearly as thorough as they would have us believe.
Maybe it's my American 1st amendment ideals but I'm almost more disturbed by the tone of the report than the troll (who is obviously a huge douchecanoe).

First of all, how did they track this guy down? Sure, there are legal ways of doing it if the guy is sloppy. But how does a report on the ethics of the Internet perpetrate a huge invasion of privacy without so much as passing comment on it? Disturbing implications for what actions are justified when directed at people with the "wrong" ideas.

Second, notice the reporter's repeated emphasis on the illegality of racist speech. He's not just shaming this guy. He's beating the drum of state censorship. Again maybe it's just my ideals but this is just obviously disturbing, maybe even moreso than trolls themselves.

I am not able to watch the whole program but judging from the synopsis it doesn't sound like it entails any substantive discussion of the ethics of privacy and censorship on the Internet, e.g. interviews with civil libertarians, which is what any serious report on trolling should include. As it stands it reeks of sensationalism.
But what about hundreds of thousands with Nginx? Would love to see a benchmark or hear from someone who has achieved this on one machine (of any size).
How does that apparent belief square with their actions though? If they really believed that you should have control over your personal information, and that your trust mattered, they would never have uploaded it without user consent.

It's not a "great save", it's a piece of PR flak arse-covering.
Washington State Lawmakers Pass Gay-Marriage Bill
I haven't used R, but I've heard good things about it. Why isn't it for "hackers"?

If anything, it seems like a language more suited for hackers than Python for tasks involving math--it looks like it has a more integrated environment for fast iteration , particularly for generating nice plots of the data you're working with. It also seems like a language designed and optimized exactly for this sort of activity.
Discuss: How Path et al should do contact discovery
This seems to be a simple problem, and I think a simple solution. I haven't worked on a system needing such a thing, but I figured we could have a discussion here so in the future when I/we need to, there won't be a problem.

Goals: Provide a mechanism to determine if any of a users contacts is already a member of given service.

Requirements: Personal identifying information should not be transmitted across the wire. Data transmitted across the wire should not be susceptible to MITM attacks. Any data stored should be useless if compromised.

Proposed Solution: Data transmitted should use any available encryption scheme built into the protocol (SSL). Personally identifying information (phone numbers) should be encrypted using asymmetrical encryption before being transmitted. If this data is stored it should be encrypted using a different encryption mechanism, such as bcrypt. Any lookups performed will use this same mechanism to generate the lookup key.

Incomplete. Lets discuss any holes and improvements.
Sound pressure levels fall off as the square of distance. You might be surprised how quickly a gas engine fades into background noise. Of course, that presumes background noise, which may not be present in pristine Afghan wilderness.
Might be worth pointing out that presumably Path's business model is still to collect as much data about their users as possible and sell it to advertisers.
Do Your Users Get You? Test Them With Solidify
Bootstrap! Maybe the developer version.
I agree with everyone else on using bootstrap. Besides becoming the norm there are a couple of steps using available gems that could make a beginner have an easier time setting it up. It could be a difference maker with someone's time.

Also, huge fan of this tutorial. It got me started with Rails a year ago. Best resource I used to learn rails.
KeyDrive Acquires Moniker and SnapNames from Oversee.net
most importantly, Sahil went to Singapore American School.
Even as early as 2003:

<b>Although PHP is universally thought of as implying Linux, Apache and MySQL, nearly 7% of PHP sites [when counting by ip address] run on Windows. This has doubled over the last year</b> (from Netcraft: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/08/30/php_growing_sur... ).

PHP on Windows grew much more later on, what with Microsoft even making several specific changes to IIS et all to accommodate it better.
"If you accept and later decide you would like to revoke this access, please send an email to service@path.com and we will promptly see to it that your contact information is removed."

There it is. If you have a button that stores all contact information, Why can't you add a button that says remove all my contact information ? Ofcourse, then more people will click it. Just a stunt, nothing more.
Apple wants to rewrite European Patent Laws
I think think it make sense.
I will definitly downvote someone who publish craps even if i also loose a point when it make sense.
I don't like my last post
I only have anecdotal evidence but my observation has been that the set of things people decide to share is motivated by the facade they want to create. Once all that stuff gets analyzed in the aggregate, future historians will be able to paint a more complete picture of people's lives. My prediction depends on how ugly that picture turns out to be.
I'm very reminded of this paper on LtU: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4444

We're also discussing it desultorily at http://arclanguage.org/item?id=15696

(Here's what I think of the API problem: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3550270)
http://semilshah.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/tomorrow-is-a-big-...

> He asked for some help around meeting investors. I was very happy to do this. I sent a few intro emails that were really short — “hey, you gotta meet this kid, kick ass front end engineer and designer with a lot of ambition, ready to go out on his own.” My emails were returned within hours, and in a few weeks, he had his pick of some of the best early-stage and VC investors in the area.
This tutorial was my first exposure to Ruby and Rails. It is amazingly comprehensive and comprehendible for newbies. I'm so glad to see it being regularly updated.

Thanks Michael for you contribution!
Well, as long as we're picking on semantics, that's not what amoral means. Amoral means lacking _regard for_ morality. You use it to describe a person or other entity that is unconcerned with the morality of their actions. Which fits Path pretty well.
Hello, I am an author of the scrape. I did it more to try it, but who knows, maybe it will be useful to someone.

I went trough the description pages like http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/$i by increasing the $i and saving the magnet if pirate bay didn't return 404 error. I went trough the pages as unlogged user, though, so that might be the reason why I got only 1.5m torrents.

I didn't know pirate bay has hidden porn torrents; there is TONS of porn in the scrape already.

The script is in perl, I will post it to pastebin in a moment.

edit:
allright, the script itself is here
http://pastebin.com/8RXXthXB

as you can see, it's not very complicated.
Is this in response to:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3564397 ?
Saints Row Dev: Used Game Ban 'Fantastic', Consumers 'will grow to understand'
The magnets in the archive are already just the hashes to make it smaller.
>5. The only offense so far is: the PDF was hosted on Times servers

The only offense by the pirate bay is hosting hash values of indexes of servers hosting content (magnet links).
Ok no problem. I'll keep that in mind. Do you have a mail address I should reply to? Thanks!
Kudos Sahil!
Excellent point that most people have missed (I've actually brought it up in a few threads now). They are taking data that others have entrusted you with which is the worst part of this. If there servers were compromised not only would my data be stolen but the data of all my friends, family, and colleagues.
My mom's company knows when she logs back in after signing off for the day on her remote workstation. A big no-no, and grounds for termination or losing your telecommute privs. It's a big insurance company, go fig. The point is, you think the Collective doesn't know when a drone is put into stasis? The Collective would be like, "Whoa, drone 0x1ffe5ac3409f just went offline, hostiles encountered, last known location Sector X Quadrant Y. WTF? Imma send a squad cube on over to check that shit out." Congratulations, you're dead.
Ask HN: would you hire a Code Academy grad?
Code Academy (3 month intensive training in RoR).
Is that enough time to develop an employable skill set?
The NASA breakthrough that could save millions of lives
>when is an MP3 file "the same" as a copyrighted song?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
Long story short: The original story was actually written by a freelancer that sold the story to a newspaper which The Phoenix gobbled up. The freelancer may have retained the copyrights to the story, except for the serial publication rights actually exercised by the original newspaper (but in either case, not the Phoenix). The Phoenix did not keep records or archives of its stories, and did not even know this story still existed...until the NY Times posted a copy of it.

The NY Times had no ability to get permission from the original copyright holder because no one knew who that was. They republished the original article as an appendix/supplementary item to another article published in the physical paper (available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/opinion/nocera-the-cost-of...).

This is the textbook definition of "fair use": providing a copy of an out-of-print, otherwise unavailable news article, for the purposes of supplementing a published news article. (Fair use is a multi-factor test with no fixed requirements...it's basically whatever use is "fair" in the context of the actual use.)
checkout www.swaptree.com
The video makes this seem really awesome, I can't wait to get home and try it. Thanks for sharing.
Oh no. the carriers aren't getting as big of a profit margin as they "deserve". Please. The prices and fees that the carries charge you to do anything are more than enough to get them through this difficult time when their margins are dropping but their subscriber rates are soaring and data profits are through the roof.
What would it take, specifically, to bring about meaningful patent reform? I hear about the need for it almost daily, but I'm not sure how this sort of highly convoluted problem can be fixed.

Are there any existing bills or proposals that have put forward a viable solution to this issue?
A simple substitution cipher is of course a good guess, but I suspect a homophonic one is more likely if the author knew anything about cryptography and thought it might come under attack. It's simple enough to come up with a number of homophones to complicate frequency analysis.
Any plan on tutorial of RoR in depth?

Well, this tutorial already weighs in at more than 500 pages. That's pretty in-depth if you ask me. :-) But producing more advanced content in the future is definitely a possibility.
So now that the drilling hole is flushed of antifreeze and its filled with prehistoric lake water... what's to stop it from freezing and closing off the hole again?
Game Developer Sentenced to Death in Iran Asks Obama for Intervention
What's the developer version? I was thinking about using the less-rails-bootstrap gem.
Uncovering the True Differentiation in #BPM Products
Dear Path, go FK yourself. BYE.
Hey, I just started a thread [1] offering detailed feedback on projects. If it's helpful I can write up some thoughts on Junto & mail them across to you.

[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3568752
67.8 MB with 7-zip LZMA2 64MB dict, 273 word size, 8 threads
"interesting how the concept of theft seems meaningless when applied to copyrighted material, but meaningful when applied to private data."

Not all that interesting.

Theft of personal data can cause real loss and harm if misused.

"Theft" of songs/movies does not cause any direct loss or harm, as no otherwise confidential information was exposed and the only "loss" is theoretical and hyper-inflated loss-of-potential-sales.

The issue here is one of violation of privacy and of confidentiality (if I was a journalist my contacts may be highly sensitive information), not of theft.
For starters, there are restrictions on the use of the Double Irish structure that generally limit the benefits to IP-based companies (i.e., technology, media, etc.), which is why most of the companies structured this way are technology companies.

Manufacturing companies would derive little if any benefit from the Double Irish structure, though this depends on the circumstances of their businesses.

Also, in regards to Iraq and Afghanistan, Ireland does not maintain treaties with either nation, so there is no special low rate that would shield such income.

(Sorry for the late reply; I don't read HN every day.)
Hmm... very interesting, but I don't think this would compete against Lendsit seeing as how swaptree has so many sects within the idea of swapping.
Works fine for me on Chrome Stable x64.
Well that's weird that nothing shows up! It should redirect you to the signup page, so that's good! You should be seeing a little blurb about the idea and a place to input your email. Why don't you try once again and see if it works.

Thanks for the response! I really appreciate it.
Alex
Fear is outdated, highly inefficient and afflictive. Yeah, it comes with the machine, just like Internet Explorer or Safari. But there are way better alternatives. Chrome or Firefox are much more efficient and less likely to leave you open to harm. Logic is much more effective and efficient than fear, and it won't ever make you soil yourself.
Doing it my way cuts down on time wasted by at least 60 seconds.
Great: light gray text on a whtite background, that gives an excellent reading experience (not!). On the content side, this article warns us of the scaremongering in advertisements, goes on to call it propaganda, and advises us to ignore it.
I'm about half way through the new tutorial, and I started using bootstrap already. This would be a welcome addition!
Yes, that would pose a problem for my idea, but do you think Lendsit would be able to compete since it's completely user-based? It would be more of a platform/forum where students could just type in the book they wanted and check to see if we had it.

Thanks for the response!
Alex
Good point. Writers are paid around $37k/yr according to Gawker, whereas an engineer is at least 2x that.

http://gawker.com/5806961/groupon-simply-cant-afford-to-pay-...
Hm, I agree about having benchmarks with memory impact is more compelling, but wouldn't it be at least interesting to show the memory impact as it is right now? (i.e., how much more memory does PyPy need?)
Would it make sense to only give patents to companies that are actively developing something and marketing a product?

On that note, although this wouldn't work for ebooks, how about restrictive copyright for readers is only present while the book is still being published and sold?
Hi, we would love some feedback on (http://diglig.com)
Statuscode first issue
DS9 Had several episodes that explicitly follow the civilian lifestyle of Sikso's father. The major plot point is about the strife between ordinary citizens being subjected to security tests who are not part of Starfleet.
Chrome on windows. This happens in every comment thread with very long strings of text.
You should lose the -project part of the URL, and maybe brush up the UI for the webpage a bit. Other than that, sounds like an awesome app for writers.
> I would posit that the world of Star Trek eliminates the alienation of everyday life on Earth that leads one to social networking in the first place.

This kind of discussion always makes me think of how in the Star Trek universe, Baseball is no longer a professional sport, the final World Series being played in 2042[1] due to a lack of interest from the public.

So what kind of social changes could possibly have the by-product of turning Baseball into a niche, amateur sport? I don't know, but I'd wager the changes would have to be pretty sweeping. And from there, would it be such a leap to think that perhaps similar sweeping changes might also massively alter the trajectory of social media and/or other apparently 'too big to fail' juggernauts in this fictionalised and hypothetical future?

Disclaimer: I'm not a rabid trekker trying to retcon so that my fondly remembered childhood reality can remain intact. I just like to think about this stuff sometimes because I was/am just a trekker.

1. http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Baseball
Apologist much?

Apologist: a person who makes a defense in speech or writing of a belief, idea, etc.

Yes, I guess so.

I think rprasad said it best:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3569201

To quote:

This is the textbook definition of "fair use":
providing a copy of an out-of-print, otherwise
unavailable news article, for the purposes of
supplementing a published news article. (Fair
use is a multi-factor test with no fixed
requirements...it's basically whatever use
is "fair" in the context of the actual use.)
Thanks for your response! I really appreciate it. And your ideas are extremely valid, I was thinking that I could maybe target universities in which your login would consist of your school email address, this way they could first search for a book within their own school's ecosystem and then if they can't find it... move on to the rest of the country. Would word of mouth be enough to gain popularity?

Thanks again,
Alex
Ok, I laughed out loud here.

Allow me to relate a bit of personal history. I'm kind of a nerd, shocking I know, but its true. And have a fairly large number of toys around the house and have lived the 'hacking' lifestyle for my whole life. When my daughter was 9 [1] she was part of a team I put together to compete on the short lived 'Robotica' series. When she was 10 and wanted a computer for her room I gave her a VAX running NetBSD. (and VMS although NetBSD was much more approachable). She went to Reed College as an art major! (although when she graduates her degree will be in physics, go figure).

The point though (besides being able to brag about my kids, another sin I'm guilty of) is that if your parents did work at JPL and do rocket science there is no guarantees that you would be interested in rockets. As a parent all we can do is try to expose the kids to as many things as possible in an effort to allow them to discover their passions earlier rather than later. It is tremendously challenging as a parent to help your kids discover these things, but it is so valuable to them later on.

[1] http://www.mcmanis.com/chuck/robotics/killerB.html
What the Dickens? Accidental Empires Rebooted