skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I run a website that tracks watchers on GitHub projects, http://gitego.com.

What I see is that it is incredibly rare for a project to lose watchers. It seems that people are using GitHub's watch feature as a bookmarking service.

On a side note, GitEgo tracks two[1,2] of paulasmuth's GitHub repositories, and neither of them has "lost lost around 30 watchers by the evening." He may be referring to other projects on GitHub, but even Twitter Bootstrap[3] (the most popular GitHub project), almost never loses watchers. Granted, these projects could all be gaining just a few more watchers than they are losing per hour, but the net effect is almost always a gain each day.

I think the real problem is that watching a repository doesn't engage a user in its contents. Watching commit messages fly by isn't as entertaining as reading 140 characters someone groomed for public consumption.

[1]: http://gitego.com/paulasmuth/fnordmetric#watchers?interval=b...

[2]: http://gitego.com/paulasmuth/recommendify#watchers?interval=...

[3]: http://gitego.com/twitter/bootstrap#watchers?interval=by_hou...
I'd be really curious to know what the working environment is like in a warehouse that has the Kiva Systems robots. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/01/retailrobots/
How To Sue AT&T for throttling your ‘unlimited’ data in 5 steps
Words to hack by:

I made games.
I didn’t ask for anyone’s permission.
If you have the love and the drive, you can walk through that door on your own.

I will say some of my best and most popular/successful work was inspired when someone pissed me right the fuck off.
I think I’d be a crappier designer if I were male ... because I would have been exposed to fewer stupid assumptions about who I was and what I could do, which means I would have been less angry and less inspired as a result.
>not the only use case for DNS //

Of course. But I think that's exclusively the use case that OpenDNS target in their consideration of non-resolving domains.
There should be punitive punishment for filing inaccurate takedown notices, and instead there is immunity.
It's basically as advertised, RoR for Node.js. This means it has an ORM, has scaffolding, etc. Looks like it takes advantage of express.js and is an abstraction over it.

Personally, this was how I was creating sites 3 years ago. I made my own framework that does pretty much the exact same thing.

I've completely dropped this in favor of using bidirectional message passing, because imo that's what Node really excels at and it's not something you can get with RoR. If you are using Node.js, it's a good thing to have a framework that does bidirectional real-time communication out of the box. I'm not sure if tower.js supports this or not.

At a very basic level, this is all I need to think about in terms of the API to get some data passed around in my current workflow. I've yet to find something more suitable for myself personally.

CLIENT (mobile or web)

// request data

request = messenger.request('get me a list of things', message);

request.success (response)->

// listen for events from server

messenger.on('someone got something', (message)->

SERVER

// listen for data

messenger.on('get me a list of things', (message)->
message.reply(data)

// emit data

messenger.send('someone got something', data)
I've been a Prime member for about five or six years, and for a while I shopped there the same way you did (sat down and spent time on a "shopping trip" to pile up the cart to make it "worth it").

The tipping point for me was in early '09 or so when Amazon introduced their iPhone app. At that point if it came to my mind that there was something I needed, I'd just pull out the phone and buy it immediately on Amazon.

That changed my habits too when browsing their normal desktop site. From then on, the vast majority of my Amazon purchases have been one-off purchases where I knew what I wanted, spent two or three minutes searching, bought it, and got out. And I do it often; between me and my wife's purchases there's an Amazon box on the front doorstep 2-3 times a week.
A Swedish Company Claims it Owns a Swipe Patent That is Used by Apple
In other words, get out of programming and go into sales. I've been saying this for a long time.
> This is why blogs with no comments annoy me - how is the author supposed to find out that he made an obvious mistake?

Email? His site-wide byline is a mailto.
Bah. What a horrible patent of an obvious idea. At least it's an old bad patent: the one linked to in a cousin post was filed in 1995, so its twenty years are over in 2015. I guess there will still be loading screens in 2015.
Totally agree. My workaround for this at the moment is to use Yahoo Pipes (http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/) and filter my GiHub feed which I then read with an RSS reader. Not ideal, but it gets the job done.
Funny how quickly things can change. I remember candidate Bush talking about how opposed he was to secret evidence, in front of a Muslim crowd in Dearborn, MI.
I don't agree entirely with this line of thinking. The concept of protecting workers from abuses by corporations is not in and of itself undesirable. As we have seen all throughout human history those who wield power usually abuse it.

The issue with unions, as most people in America view them, is that they became to powerful themselves. This allowed them to make demands that would ultimately lead to their organizations becoming hamstrung and unable to rapidly adjust. Hence business look at them as the plague.

The issue as I see it is that business, labor, and consumers need to understand the concept of "moderation". Consumers do not need an abundance of cheap crap. Businesses shouldn't focus solely on short term profits. Unions should seek to protect their workers and not pry as much money as they possibly can out of their employer.
70% of VC Rounds were Up Rounds in 4Q 2011
Oh, come on. How can you be at all familiar with JS and not be able to figure out what a CoffeeScript snippet is doing? It's not quite the difference between C and assembly.
They should put it on the App Store as a monthly magazine using iBooks Author. Believe me when I say it is really easy to do and the user experience is worth every penny.

I know Lim can do it himself in his sleep but if a helping hand is needed just let me know.
Real World Ocaml announced
You make a good argument for states figuring out how to strictly enforce the sales tax on Amazon purchases. As Amazon cannibalizes local retail (similar to what Walmart has done but without even the crappy jobs) the tax base will erode further.
Don't forget that the IRS has been doing this for some time too...
I tend to take everything Linus says with a grain of salt. Not because he's wrong, or because he doesn't know what he's talking about, but there's enough of the puckish troll in him that I tend to read his posts more with an eye to their intended effect, than to what he's actually saying.

There are plenty of applications for which c++ is a perfectly sensible language choice. Git isn't one of them.
This.

From the article:

>Eventually I noticed, that it would only create an update for each push, not for each commit. So I began to aggregate my commits into batches to push in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, that really slows me down.

He's doing what the Facebook news aggregator does by default. All pushes/commits can generate only one news feed item for a certain time frame: "Author made N changes/updates/commits"

To play the devil's advocate, though, perhaps this should be a part of the learning process of using Github. It would be instructive to all watchers to see what kinds of mistakes a good dev makes (or just be reminded that a good dev makes mistakes as well).
> This is really a problem with Github's news feed, rather than the watch button.

yep. the same on BitBucket.
A friend of mine was intering at Apple this summer and during the last week he went to a talk regarding this topic. The rational is that they've always needed a lot of cash on hand because Apple takes a lot big risks with its products and that lot of the cash is acquired overseas so its expensive to bring it back to the US. Just some food for thought.
No. I watch projects i find interesting. I usually dont look at the noise in my feed or something. I rarely visit github, only if i get linked to it or for browsing code. So, its totally fine (for me).
One of the issues with Google Music, and this is something that I have seen increasingly over the past year or so, is that it seems that I can often roll my own, better solution to problems that these services claim to solve. In this specific case, running MPD into an Icecast stream means that I have remote access to my music library from anywhere, and using flacsync to make lossy copies of my FLAC files means that it's easy for me to manually manage the library on my MP3 player. All this without the pain of having to deal with the issues that this article talks about.

Obviously this setup is rather technical, and requires a nontrivial bit of setup work, but the fact that it is often easy to have ideas for substantial life improvements and then implement them well, with free software, has left me a bit disenchanted with the offerings from large, generally innovative companies like Google and Apple (a similar hack for streaming music to an AirPort Express from MPD can be had with the raop-play module for PulseAudio, for example).
I worked in a call center for two summers to pay for college. It was actually not that bad. I was certainly tracked, monitored, and given aggressive performance targets, but as an inbound CSR you don't have many calls that make you cry.

They offered us shifts in the warehouse when we didn't need 100% utilization on the phones. I never took them up on that, despite that juicy extra quarter an hour.
Linus is probably the %1 of people in the world who actually needs to get the performance gain that C has over C++ - as for the rest of us? Probably doesn't matter.
It's already been mentioned but this use case for watching a project is called a bookmark.

I watch projects where I actually care about and want to see the changes. Because I'm doing actual useful things and the social aspects of github help me do that.

I'm not on github to engage in some kind of social network circle jerk popularity contest to collect the most "watchers". I know a lot of people are and it makes them feel really important to follow a bunch of projects and pretend they're "in the know" or part of the project just because they clicked the watch button.

But every site doesn't need it's own different kind of bookmarks, that's a stupid waste of time. Other startups do it to drive viral growth or to "increase engagement" or some other BS reason. Github drives growth by being useful to developers and other collaborators. As soon as they start sacrificing power for people collaborating on code projects in order to satisfy the fanboys they risk losing their primary draw, the good projects that use github because it's useful.

I doubt this will happen, although I can definitely see why they would add an in-site bookmark to appease this crowd since they apparently don't know how to use client side bookmarks.
I'm not a big fan of unions in general (especially with regards to years = seniority in pay & firing), but on ergonomics I'm with them. It doesn't cost much to implement the warehouse in an ergonomic way, but clearly this company and many like it aren't doing that at all. That has a really important effect on the difficulty of the job.
It would probably have to be Facebook, because they have most of the photos.

But picture this:

"Hello [name]! All non facebook-photos of you ever are all here: [link]! Sign up for our brand new social network today to 'organize' them."

If this site doesn't grow faster than Pinterest, I don't know what will.
I agree. The timeline is useless. But not that watch button, because i do have all projects i find interesting in one place. Thats absolutely ok for me and works fine.
Has anyone really not seen this in the last two years?

Anyway, Linus may be a very experienced C programmer, but that doesn't mean his opinion on C++ carries much weight... I'd be more interested on what someone who actually has a lot of experience in using C++ says. Especially with modern C++ and recent tools, libraries etc, which are very different from what was around five or ten years ago.

I suppose it is nice for a change for someone bagging out C++ (however inaccurately) to be advocating C instead of a managed or interpreted language though!
> costs of corporate capitalism

But under non-capitalist systems such as in the USSR you were machine gunned or bayoneted for refusing to work (starting with the Kronstadt Rebellion and ending with Solidarity), and had no option to quit or leave the country.

Capitalism hasn't yet completely eradicated all drudgery from the world, but Mother Jones isn't about to acknowledge that it's better that 4000 marginal workers have jobs than not. It is horribly oppressive for a software engineer to imagine a job where you have to come in on time, but now remember your frustration at closed stores or unavailable phone support/customer service. For stores to be open at normal hours, for people to pick up the phone, for emergency rooms to be open when you need them, somebody has to care about punctuality.
Creators need an immediate connection to what they create
I think you are overthinking it. We don't need a fancy AI solution to the relatively simple problem of "busy" projects drowning out quieter ones. I don't think it would work very well and, anyway, we have different ideas about what's important in an update.

Just collapsing updates from busy projects by showing the few most recent updates and then cutting it off with a message like "(+ 12 other commits and 3 issues; click here to expand)" would get it most of the way there.
It always comes down to price. The vast majority of people in the world aren't so self-righteous that they'll pay $10 more for something that was produced "the right way."

This has always been the nature of these kinds of businesses, and until robots and technology take those jobs away completely (which opens up a whole other can of worms), it will just keep happening
>Temporary staffers aren't legally entitled to decent health care because they are just short-term "contractors" no matter how long they keep the same job.

This to me actually sounds illegal. I've worked in other industries where significant hoops were jumped through to make it possible to call workers contractors. If I recall one test often used is whether the worker is on a set schedule, which the situation described would utterly fail.

IANAL
Just because it's hard to monetize and profit from concepts like the health and well-being of employees doesn't mean that we as a society should put that value at zero.

The "competitiveness of a company on the global market" isn't the be-all, end-all. The phrase itself belies your point: if we as a society wanted to, we could place tariffs equivalent to the cost of providing a humane workplace for packaging workers, while also requiring our own companies to do so. This would eliminate the competitive edge issue, while also allowing other countries to engage in free trade with us if they pass laws protecting their own laborers from workspace exploitation.

We simply choose not to, for certain values of we (read: members of the finance capital rentier class that dominates American political discourse).
Another less extreme alternative to soviet communism is a unionized workforce similar to what we had in the US 30 years ago before Democrats gave up the fight and American capitalists started shipping jobs overseas in order to break up unions.
I'm building a repo bookmarking tool as a google chrome extension (for github). It's in early alpha at the moment as I only really get to work on it on the weekends, but it'll be ready for a public beta in 2-3 weeks.

In the mean time you can checkout the video of it working or if you're feeling brave download the alpha version of the extension.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/110983919160550210204/11098391... [video & download links]
Cool beans. I'm still learning more about custom media types at the moment and this is useful info. Thanks.
Which things? IQ and eugenics? Or low IQ scores and not having English as a first language (as IQ was measured in the 30's)? Or IQ and immigration quotas that favored Northern Europe over Southern Europe?
> A regular paycheck is like crack.

> the cycle you get stuck in

Is a behavior being "self-reinforcing" or "addictive" a sufficient definition that allows us to distinguish between things considered slavery, and things not considered slavery? Should screenwriters of dramatic television employing cliff hangers, alcohol brewers, and coffee shop owners, be considered slave-holders? Would you hold that waking at a set hour of the day, and sleeping at a set hour of the day constitutes slavery, due to its cyclic nature?

What term would you use to describe situations involving claims of ownership over the production of others coerced to produce against their will under threat of violence or legal sanction?
I'd agree that I find the inheritance model JS's primary faltering. I really wish they had decided to follow the same ECMAScript standard that Actionscript 3 followed in that I find AS3 to essentially just be Javascript with some simple and sane OOP constructs.
Ultimately, in a free society people need to be allowed the right to cooperate. And we also need to acknowledge that the management in a company invariably enjoys collective bargaining rights, and that basic human decency demands that we allow non-management employees to have similar rights.

Which is not to say that all unions are well-behaved. My time as a Teamster was both instructive and discouraging. They had secured a lot of provisions that I don't think should have been allowed to stand. For one, joining the union was a condition of employment. If that requirement didn't violate the principle of free labor markets, it at least cut close to the line. And they eradicated all traces of meritocracy; the only thing that could ever be rewarded was seniority. That was deeply discouraging for a new employee, and from the company's perspective it ensured that the highest-paid employees were also the least productive, by virtue of having spent the most time observing that hard work would never be met with any reward aside from itself.

However, we should not throw the baby out with the bath-water. Unions should be allowed to exist; history is rife with practical examples what happens if you don't do so.

And frankly, the potential problems posed by unions can naturally be addressed by the free market itself, if only we'd let it. If a company's compensation structure becomes unsustainable due to more efficient competition from another company, then it is absolutely OK to simply let its more efficient competitors out-compete it. That remains the case regardless of the cause of the unsustainable compensation structure.
It already exists: http://www.theipatch.com/

Have to be honest, though, I don't fully understand the concern. Is it that malware will secretly snap photos of you?
only for certain values of "real"
There are provisions for this type of thing in the DMCA. I'm not sure to what extent these damages have been enforced, but it appears that the company that submitted these DMCA requests to Google has committed perjury by doing so in bad faith.
My journey though open-source and fun JSON tricks
I covered the top 5 mistakes people make with co-founders in my talk at the Startup Conference Seattle earlier this month: someone was kind enough to almost write down everything: http://www.authenticwritingprovokes.com/inspiredwriting/2012...
Except that tea tastes terrible, and adding creamer and saccharine doesn't improve it as much as it does coffee. ;)
Erick Schonfeld steps down as editor in chief at TechCrunch
most sites that use HN content does not generate profits, at least not so obviously.

now, don't get me wrong -- huge kudos to author for pulling this off but me and sure other users here had the similar idea long time ago: a nice, polished thick and colorful catalog full of the 1st page articles even with printed Hackernes comments. The major thing that stopped me, for example, was the thought that if this will get a traction and will bring some profits, most likely HN will come after me to either option A (95% probability) shut this down, or option B (5%) - to work out some sort of a deal.

Major reason why HN, Facebook, Youtube, etc etc does not care about someone infringing is because there is no business behind what they do. So most likely they can only "spread the word" which is a good thing. Now, when it comes to generating some profits off of someone else thats a different story.

once again to underline this: huge kudos for great idea and awesome execution!
Can OpenGeocoder Fill the Platform Gap Left by Google Maps?
Why hasn't this idea become more mainstream? It seems to me like many, many people would benefit from more visual editors like the ones that Bret gave demos of.
Show HN: Help us curate the web’s best content for learning programming & design
Link here: http://beta.whatispolymath.com

Despite all the educational material on the web, I found it pretty hard to learn how to code and design. I had trouble finding high-quality content, figuring out what to learn next, and staying motivated without easy ways to track my progress. So, my co-founder and I built Polymath.

Our MVP is pretty simple right now: you can find & submit good content, bookmark & track your progress across different resources, and rate/comment on the material. We’re trying to build a really fun online learning community, and we’ve got some more cool features in the works.

We're really excited about going live, and we'd love your feedback & comments.
We're just getting started with this, so please add any great content you think should be on the site -- help us make this the web’s best open resource for learning programming/design!

Note: We currently require Facebook for login, with more options to sign up coming soon. Sorry about that-- we hope you'll still give us a shot even if you feel strongly about that :)
Haven't seen it. I've seen many other examples of Torvalds being an ass, but I don't bother to keep track really.

It does make me wonder though how he's able to get away with responses like that, when most other "founders" (not sure what the proper term here really is) would have the majority of their users/supporters just go elsewhere.

EDIT: ... Let alone have supporters who get defensive enough to start downvoting someone who stated the obvious (he did act like an ass), while asking a reasonable question too.
"I'd be more interested on what someone who actually has a lot of experience in using C++ says."

I have considerable experience with C++, going back to when it was called C with Classes and you used a preprocessor to convert C with Classes code to C and then compiled the C.

What Linus says is pretty much true. I don't expect it to matter though since when people say "I'd be more interested on what someone who actually has a lot of experience in using C++ says." they don't really mean it.

There is another guy I know of with considerable experience in C++, Yossi Kreinin, who knows more about C++ than Stroustrop. He has a very nice web site that is one of the best references in C++ I have seen, going far deeper than others. Yossi is the number one expert on C++ in the world today. I recommend his insights to all: http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/
Absolutely agree. I used to work in Vegas. An engineer colleague of mine specifically took a job there because (at that time?) Nevada was the only state, or one of very few, where an employer could not lay claim to his side projects - and he had at least one patent that I know of.
Smithsonian Aims to Make All Objects In Museum Collection 3-D-Printable