skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> When you consider the ways in which, say, the introduction of the telephone changed society, Facebook just looks silly.

Or maybe just less elegant. Part of the problem is there's not really an obvious problem to solve. In the case of the telephone it was like: "what if you could talk to someone instantly across hundreds or thousands of miles, without a telegraph operator!". Then they did a lot of hard work to build a network to meet this end goal, which only does one thing with a dead-simple interface, and it changed the world.

With Facebook and Twitter it's a little trickier because what's the universal goal? We already had email, newsgroups, chat rooms, blogs, etc. So the premise is something like: "what if you could broadcast your thoughts and digital content instantly to thousands of friends and followers?". Right away it's sort of a head scratcher. If you think about it you come up with lots of little niches where it's handy, but nothing that strictly couldn't be done before. The secret sauce is that it's engaging and people like using it so you have a powerful network effect. But at the end of the day it becomes a type of noisy commons; It's heaps better than the truly public internet cesspools like YouTube, but it is increasingly inadequate for individual needs.
It wasn't grandfathered in; it's unconstitutional, in the U.S., to ban Lolita.

It would be pretty unfortunate if literature couldn't even seriously deal with the subject! (Incidentally, it's pretty hard to read Lolita as being pro-pedophilia; if anything, it's an extended, mostly negative investigation into the protagonist's psyche, although many pages in literary journals have been spent arguing over how to interpret it.)
Startups are about creating narratives, not consuming them.

What he seems to miss here is that some of the best businesses produce a consumable product after experiencing a problem first-hand and then deciding to go build a solution. If the narrative is clear from the beginning, then the part where "it actually starts working" will come much sooner.
It's interesting, I think, how much sheer emotion there is behind these child protection issues. Is there anything more emotionally provocative than the thought of harm to your children? Your own flesh and blood, who you've raised from before they could crawl. The amount of emotional and physical pain you've gone through (and willingly continue to go through) for your children far surpasses any other possible source.

Of course, people do overreact sometimes, but I think this is our instinct for a very good reason.
Ever felt a little crazy?
India's love affair with gold
Reddit isn't one community, it's sort of like usenet, there are lots of sub-communities that can easily be oblivious and invisible to one another.
Life is a Laughing Matter
I loved Blaster Master. Though it's only half platformer, and that half didn't seem to be the hard part...
You could have a software to simulate lab exercises.

But I'm curious how they'll solve the "mechanisms for identity checks". What could they do? If they wanna do real lab exercises and not software simulation, then both are similar problems. I can imagine either using a camera, like you said, or partnering with local schools around the world.

Both have many flaws, let's see what they come up with.
Hey all,

We've been working on this app for the last few months as a pivot on top of our last app idea (gri.pe). We distilled out just the positive aspects of the good/bad reviews of places, and added the ability to "cheer on" random things and people you know on top of places.

On top of that, we focused on building out a social network inside the app, and building in a really simple user score called "cheerfluence". People can build cheerfluence by either posting in the system, or can increase someone else's cheerfluence by clicking the "cheer" button on someone else's cheer. This works really well to motivate people to connect to other people and interact with their content in the system.

I'm really proud of how the app turned out, and we've got some excited users in the system. I'd love to hear what the HN folks think too.
Because I can still make a lot of money as an employee, participate in the company stock purchase plan (shares that have an actual $ value), take advantage of the generous medical/dental benefits package and work on my own business on evenings and weekends. Mmmm. Having cake and eating it. Or maybe I'm wrong and the only way to be successful these days is to be self employed? I mean absolutely no disrespect to entrepreneurs, it certainly is an awesome path to success, but it's not the only one.
Perhaps after 175 additional years, they would come to an agreement on delimiters... but perhaps not.
Awesome 8-Bitty iPhone controller sells out within hours
"There will always be people with more time than money" - doesn't that mean "so-called pirates will always exist"?

If that's the case, why should the rest of us pay money for enforcement actions (in the form of taxes) and why should the rest of us allow a few Giant Immoral Corporations to distort our society and culture? Shouldn't our elected representatives patiently explain the economics to the crybaby corporations, and then politely tell them to go pound sand?

This is a control issue, plain and simple. The market for "content" is changing from a very cozy oligopoly to a one where no single firm or cartel has very much monopoly power. It's our sacred duty as Americans and Free Market Advocates to cause a transition to a market that can better serve the needs of consumers. Mercantilism in the form of "DRM" or "Intellectual Property" must not stand!
I don't defend Lolita in particular, but there is clearly a difference between child porn and fiction about the boring, sad life of a real pedophile. One is meant to arouse and the other to show a truth.
Facebook is obviously thriving as a business but arousing indignation and ire over their policies, which ban breastfeeding photos but allow hate speech.

So I woud say they have decided to live woth a certain ongoing level of shitstorming as a cost of doing buiness.
My biggest concern over all this is that the policy change came so quickly after the SA thread (similar timeframe as the Anderson Cooper clip). Even though startups and usually praised for moving quickly, I agree complete with the OP that this can be a major directional change (positive or negative) for Reddit overall. This kind of stuff should be thought over long and hard, rather than come down from their parent company. Reactionary policies that sprouts from avoiding bad PR will be good for the short term, I just hope they thought it all out what they will do in the long term.
How much better will the iPad 3 be?
Reddit is changing. It's currently in a renewed and stronger Eternal September. Bastion subreddits like /r/AskScience and /r/Truereddit are reduced to junk and fads. The hope for the group of moderated subreddits (Republic of Reddit) didn't really take off, it's just a handful of submitters.

The top voted comments on threads about censorship are mostly 1 to 3 months old users. And now reddit (had to) surrender to a decadent SOPA-supporting forum and a bunch of trolls from /r/ShitRedditSays (wich starts to look like a *chan long troll instead of a bunch of ultra-feminists).

Sure, a lot of questionable/creepy subreddits shouldn't be there. But where's the line? And who draws it? Also, isn't this an ongoing process? Those subreddits can reopen in minutes with more subtle names. The censorship whack-a-mole is pointless.

It's weird how reddit was a bastion for resisting SOPA/ACTA but fear mongering in US can take over a site. It seems that's the real frontier and we are losing. Next up /r/trees and /r/atheism.

Like so many times before it's time to move on. I wish the best to the owners/admins, they were cornered and probably had a tough choice. And I sincerely hope the new users enjoy this new reddit.
>those in favor of this inconsistency probably ought to examine why they like _Lolita_.

There is a lot of fiction from the perspective of non-sympathetic characters. If doesn't mean that those who appreciate the insight the fiction provides into the character, or the character's circumstance, are advocates of the character or the circumstance itself.
> The overall effect is individuals become progressively more far-sighted.

What does this mean for nearsighted people? Does it have a correcting affect or do objects at any distance become blurry?
Well, that's database dependent -- for Postgres there's no real performance difference: http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/FAQ#What_is_the_difference_b...

It's CHAR that pads with spaces, not VARCHAR.
Ask HN: Where do you take your dog(s) for exercise?
Interested to know which parks are best for off-leash fun and/or socializing.

I just launched a meetup group for Bay Area Startup & Dog Enthusiasts, and am in need of future meetup locations, preferably a mix of some in San Francisco & others on the Peninsula. Would love to know where people already go.

http://www.meetup.com/Bay-Area-Startup-Dog-Enthusiasts/
I pity you.
Apache Subversion 1.7.3 has now been released.
I second webfaction too. I have been using them for more than 5 years now and am happy with their pricing & most importantly support. They see to it that the tickets are resolved quickly.
Awesome thanks! Ya I am just using the default buttons from jQuery theme so the buttons and everything are small.

Thanks for the input. I have not worked on a logo as of yet. Busy right now with finals, but after I am hoping to track down someone to help with a design.
Is there an issue with mitm attacks at hostile wifi points of access? Dns pointing to a bunk certificate authority maybe? I am not fully versed on this though so I don't know how possible this attack is.
I would also like to see some proof that piracy is a huge problem. Files being available and free for download on the 'black market' does not mean that people who would pirate said files would otherwise pay for those files. It would be nice if someone did a scientific study...
Google Connecting the Dots Between Symptoms and Conditions
At least in Windows, the Firefox menu is on top of the tabs. So it cannot take horizontal space away from them.
there is an easy way to fix this you know

(the easy way is to find a job in a cool place)

(hth)
The problem is that the 'community' is now so large that you have a subset that considers things appropriate that the wider group doesn't.

So either the small group gets to do things that may damage the larger site (and be illegal), or the larger group squelches the smaller group's freedom by singling them out. It's a lose-lose situation from a purely community standpoint.

Realistically, I support the message that they're sending - That child sexualization is blanket banned because it's too resource intensive to define and monitor shades of gray, and it's a unique issue. The very active marijuana, racism, or even black hat netsec communities may support illegal/gray-area things, but are far less likely to get the site branded as a kiddie-porn hive, which would basically be a death-penalty to the community, or attacked various governments.

Sometimes admins just have to make some executive calls to protect their business, even if they're hypocritical from a strict standpoint. I'd say reddit's defacto bill of rights is still pretty strong for a web community.
I was just reading up on the Graph API Facebook uses and its pattern is just api.test.com/1234/students. There seems to be very little standardization. The tutorial I'm reading right now wants me to pass the id in as a parameter. Weird.
Yes - good insight.

I have been wondering about this too. For my 15 years, I've only ever worked for software companies doing new product development. So, there's a disconnect when I'm talking to people who come from IT backgrounds. Developing new products requires different skills, and knowing intimate details of specific tools isn't as useful as knowing the full capabilities of what that tool can do.

The worst part of my background, and for these types of interviews, is that I typically switch stacks every couple years. Generally, every time I start a project, I have to re-evaluate the stack. And, choosing one depends on so many variables.

In the past I've spent spent probably 50+ months killing it on SQL Server, but sadly all those details have been wiped from my working memory, because I haven't touched it in 12 months. But, that doesn't mean I'm not effective. It just takes me a week to re-engage and get effective. But, there's never been a job where I didn't become one of the top performers in just a few weeks.

My brain just works differently.
Pinterest’s first satire account raises the ire of Mitt Romney’s campaign
Why I Left Perl
Improve Visual Studio with JQuery Intellisense and Code Outlining
Remember that only part of the narrative, the end, is known by folks who are in the fix-my-own-pain game. The part about finding the business, the experience of using the service, etc -- all of that is yet to be invented. And the front-end of the business, the marketing/sales/delivery channel, is usually the hardest. Businesses are not simply products. (Although many certainly start from them.)
Yeah - I thought we had agreed that we don't want to see that kind of jokes in presentations anymore.
This isn't a workable solution without more massive changes to the way reddit works.

Instant account creation, plus complete anonymity, plus groupthink inside of subreddits...

The first "community police action" of reddit would probably be all the Battlefield 3 fans removing all the Call of Duty subreddits.
In a place where I wouldn't want my boss's boss to see me reading a site with the word in 60pt type, yes.
Erlang is a hoarder
I keep hoping to see more PATCH support in REST frameworks like this, but it doesn't seem to be getting much traction. Perhaps we need to include it with the CRUD operations... CRUPD?
The mad dash to remove something before the deadline
25+ Examples of Subtle Textures and Patterns in Web Design
Hence, there are many reasons of using the subtle textures and patterns in web design. It may be used to create some extra visual effect or may be used to make the theme more real.
Aaron Swartz Hacks the Attention Economy
Show HN: What Word? Taboo-like Party Game for iOS
Youtube handles it via whack-a-mole. A friend of mine used to work in their community dept, and would tell horror stories about the things she'd see people put up.
The First Amendment is pretty clear that freedom of speech/press is protected only from Congress and legislation: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."

Companies and/or websites can ban almost any speech or writing they would like. It's not unconstitutional, because corporations aren't considered a governmental/Congressional body.
Also wanted to ask you if you don't mind: how was Amy workshop?
MapReduce & Hadoop API revised
Introducing Simple Tiles: ProPublica's new Mapping Library
It's simple, shutdown anything criminal and keep the rest open.
Finish Weekend Ann Arbor
Old school trolling is awesome.

"Everyone working at LucasFilm is a Real Programmer. (It would be crazy to turn down the money of fifty million Star Trek fans.)"
This is the reason I scoff when people try to describe an average "Redditor". With the sheer amount of traffic coming through their site it's impossible to come up with an accurate generalization of what the community as a whole feels, even with the small percentage of traffic actually commenting and voting.

I would like to see a lot more emphasis be put on the decision between serving the will of the users, establishing a set of ideals that Reddit chooses to run things by, or a mixture of the two.
The world’s biggest startup
As someone who administers a lot of Macs and a few LInux machines, package management on Macs is simply indefensibly bad. There is no getting around it. Apple chose not to provide this as a service to their users.

I use a Mac laptop and would never have written this post. But I don't have to pretend that the package installation setup on OSX is remotely acceptable. It is horrible. Stuff breaks or won't install all the time. On mainstream Linux distros, stuff generally Just Works.
My stance on JVM languages
> So why the heck I use Mac still? Because of the driver support is still far better than Linux.

I feel like this is a stereotype that just won't die.

Yes, up till a few years ago you might have to do some poking in /etc to get things working, but as long as you spend a few minutes looking up basic background info before you buy those problems just don't happen these days. I haven't had to edit a config file to get hardware working since 2007.
Thanks for the suggestion! I'm not entirely sure about the learning curve of either but I will definitely look into both sometime this week and pick a language to stick with.

Great advice on picking a project. I had a few in mind but you reminded me of some Excel macros I'd like to make.

"I will make sure you get it done" - And this is why I love this community.I'll make a list and definitely check out swym.me when I've made a decision on what I want to start with.
http://themeforest.net/item/land-ahoy-a-responsive-landing-p...
Remember, slippery slope is a fallacy.

I think the admins are sending the right message - This subject is blanket banned because it's too hard to sort out the shades of gray, and it brings a unique risk to the community that other things (drugs, racism, etc) just don't.

I agree that they'll be playing 'ban the sub' whack a mole, but that will happen to any UGC site of scale, the important thing is (ironically) not to let a community coalesce around the subject that's big enough to get reddit targeted by the media or some zealous prosecutor trying to score political points (See craiglist's adult section...)

It would be nice to see them lay down some firm rules that say "OK: These things are blanket banned, these things are fair game just don't break US laws; these things are open season". It would be doable to segregate Jailbait / Trees / Atheism along those lines and remove some fears.

* Edited for grammar, typos, wording of first sentence.
Except that it wouldn't be a loan, rather it'd be a scholarship or fund. The student should not be expected to pay it back, so I guess it would be someone like 'ChipIn' in that regards. If the site were built similarly to KickStarter, where the student posted a video and could post their grades, they could more easily solicit donations from friends and family. The organization could send the money to the university as a grant rather than to the student directly to lower the chance of the system being used for fraud.
I'm surprised he didn't go through the minecraft or kickstarter routes. The game looks good enough now to sell.
What is BSG?
Starting in Symfony2 - Episode 2
I guess he knows for sure that his upcoming pitch meeting won't involve any women, especially ones that aren't a size-2.
Using social media for forensic investigation
Not when the window is maximized: http://i.imgur.com/pMOLX.png
Other cities coming soon too! Stay tuned.
Very similar to my thoughts. Plus, I have some other experiences to compare to, and FB doesn't come out very well in those comparisons.

Some websites allow you meet new people and to get to know them better over the years. You'd think "social" networks should do that as well, but they aren't. In fact, Facebook sort of works in the opposite way. For the most part, it's a collection of people whom you used to know, but whom you know less and less as the time goes. It doesn't allow for much real communication (which is essential in preserving any kind of meaningful relationships) and it's designed to discourage speaking with "strangers". (Remember all those warnings about not friending people you don't know?)

What irritates me to no end is that there are lots of people who seem to be (socially) incapable of using email, IM or phone to share the same information they share on Facebook.
It's actually a big man.
The comment about "everything that's happened, has also already happened on LiveJournal" really rings true for me. Recent instance: the breast-feeding protesters recently descended on Facebook, which is mostly amusing to me in that they had waited so long. It would be interesting to construct a "here are the trials any internet community is likely to go through" handbook distilling these experiences.
You really need scientific study? Just look at Napster. When something is easily available for free, the masses will choose it over paying for the exact same thing. Wouldn't you?
I'm tempted to agree with the first sentence, but Firefox itself did start improving very rapidly the last year. It's very hard to say, even in retrospect, if the add-ons debacle was worth it or not.

As for "too little too late": I presume you're talking about winning back people that went to Chrome because of the add-on and updates situation? This might be true, if those people are happy with Chrome, then Firefox will have to draw them back by executing better on other features.
I felt uncomfortable with it as a male hacker as well, though the story is actually interesting.

Either he's actually naïve enough not to know that he's being offensive or he's devious enough to be using it as troll bait.
What's an empowered consumer?
I bought a domain using this tool.

Any numbers on the total affiliate revenue generated?
I think you misread that. The girl in the first picture is his girlfriend but he is referring to the second picture of the girl in the red dress when he says, "has no idea who it is."
Oh for crying out loud...

The stuff that was allowed on reddit would get you an instant, permanent ban on pretty much every website on the internet.

Do you even know what SOPA, PIPA or ACTA do? Reddit has voluntarily taken the stance they won't allow the trade and index of child pornography on their website.

That has got nothing to do with DNS takedowns for linking to copyrighted material. It was a private decision made by a private company.

And good. The idea that people would support the exploitation of children because they have somehow wrapped it up inside of "free speech" is completely disgusting and embarrassing. Yes, you have the right to free speech, so long as it does not infringe on the liberties of others.
As a guy who opened this at work, lol. Not sure if he intended it to have a sexist vibe, I got the impression he was single and poking fun at himself. The game I will never play because I don't hate myself, but entertaining post for sure.
The update payload itself is signed with a private key controlled directly by Mozilla, to avoid vulnerability to CA compromises [1]. The connection to the update server performs additional checks to ensure not only that the SSL certificate is valid, but that it matches one of a small list of known certs or issuers, so that a fraudulent CA can't hijack the connection with a forged certificate [2][3].

[1]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Reviews/Firefox10/SilentUp...

[2]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=544442#c24

[3]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=583678

(As a side note, the fact that this is necessary points out some of the major risks in the current CA system, which will hopefully be addressed in whatever eventually replaces it...)
Facebook really needs a 'friend clean up' tool ASAP. The problem of having irrelevant friends is huge.