skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, I am not the author, but dropping the author an email and asking couldn't hurt - hamids[at]axosoft[dot]com
I'd probably disagree, and I'll try give you two points to support my position:

POINT ONE

45 years ago, right at the end of the six day war, when Israel took control over the West Bank, the UN security council passed resolution 242, which required:

(i) Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict;

(ii) Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force."

At the time, as far as I know, Arab states lobbied heavily to include the world 'all' before 'territories' in point (i), and the wording was not accepted by the Security Council. Furthermore, point (ii) can be (and often has been) read to mean that Israel has serious and legitimate concerns which need to be addressed, and that any withdrawal should only happen within a peace agreement which deals with these legitimate concerns. After all, 20 years earlier, Israel's neighbors tried to destroy it, although Israel claimed sovereignty over solely those territories deemed acceptable by the UN partition plan of 1947.

I think another important point is, that the ambiguity in language of the resolution is by design. You could imagine a much clearer resolution, a resolution with unequivocally deems the occupation illegal and calls for immediate withdrawal. Something which would read like a judge's ideas on what needs to be done, for example, with money a thief robbed from a bank ("give it back right now, no ifs buts and whens").

POINT TWO

Even the resolution you quote, 446, as far as I can tell, does not deal with the illegality of an Israeli military presence in the territories, but with the illegality of the treatment of civillian populations. Check out this part of 446:

2. [The resolution] Strongly deplores the failure of Israel to abide by Security Council resolutions 237, 252 and 298...

Now think about this. Twelve years had passed since the 1967 war, and Israel had still not withdrawn from the territories. The above part of the resolution, very conspicuously, is missing a reference to resolution 242, which I discussed above. The UN security council then, twelve years after the 1967 war, with Israel still present in the West Bank, could not agree that 242 was violated, and, as far as I know, has not deemed 242 violated since. If I'm right on this point, it would seem to strongly support the view that 242 (and the UN security council since then) did not, and does not deem Israeli military presence in the entire West Bank illegal, and does not support the view that Israel needs to unilaterally withdraw to 1967 lines, but rather, that Israel still has legitimate concerns which need to be addressed, and rights to at least part of the territory.

Your thoughts?
JavaScript User Groups & Conferences
I got downvoted into oblivion (deservedly so) because of my snark. But this is essentially the point I was trying to make. Rails is good at ruby. It was never good at javascript. Remember rjs? Remember inlining ajax handlers?
Now we have default coffee script and sass file _per_ view. I know they mean well but javascript is its own beast! I really don't want to have to consciously disable all these things that are supposed to "be convenient" just because I know my way around javascript enough to not co-mangle it in with ruby.
You should make the freeways a different color from the rest of the roads. I just tried to zoom into my house, and I discovered that when looking at the city-wide view, I use the freeways as a high-level roadmap. When everything's the same color (gray!) it's hard to locate yourself.

I hope you've all seen this article, about subtle design changes they made at google. Attention to detail is really critical:

http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/10/evolving-look-of-...
Haha - I know what you mean. I feel like if you have TOO much of these qualities you become un-hireable because you're probably a closet entrepreneur and many companies don't like that.
Can you give us some obvious smells apart from "too eager to close"?
WikiLeaks + Anonymous = A powerful partnership?
Having use flot for stuff like this, what do you see as the main benefits for your library? Looking over the docs, I'd guess "simplicity" since it seems pretty easy to get going.

Similarly, are there many plans for enhancements, or is that really a question of which patches start rolling in?

Thanks!
Actually no. Trigram analysis is the best way to solve simple substitution ciphers. Most common trigram is nearly always "THE" with a much higher probability than single-letter trials will get you.

Sure, some trial and error will probably yield results, but what he's describing is (part of the) systematic approach, not "overthinking".
the news feed should just bundle together news from one user.
I know this guy's being downvoted here, but he's got a point. I find people on nice, big cinema displays tend to make choices on colors and labeling that people with shittier monitors wouldn't make. Eg, colors that are very close, tinier labels, etc.
It's z16 globally - as soon as this is solidly out in the wild, we'll be working hard on getting deeper zoom levels. Each zoom level is exponentially larger than the last, so it's a significant challenge.
Keep in mind that it could be a violation of both sites' ToS to do this.
3ds Max Programming Contest Announced with Top Prize of $1000
I regularly buy one sub $15 item via Amazon Prime, rather than schelp down to the store. I would have never done this before Prime. Actually Amazon Prime makes not owning a car in a midwest city quite a bit more realistic, for me.
For those who enjoy this sort of thing, check out the challenges at 3564020356. First one's a simple substitution cipher (plus links to tutorials on it--though the links are dead probably, so that's another challenge)
At that point I'd think the "problem" was me keeping my info on their site, easy enough to correct.
Alternative Path to Every Kid with an iPad..
+1 And these companies have big hockey stick curves and the right amount of funding

It is a high risk trajectory.
This was designed primarily on a MacBook Pro running Linux, so the colors were oddly calibrated. We tested it on several other calibrated monitors, and a few other devices (iPhone/Pad/Android).

Short story is that it could be much bolder and more colorful, at the cost of aesthetics. A growing number of users have good screens - sometimes excellent screens like most mobile devices.
apparently Im still learning HN. any idea why I got downvoted here?
Stratfor CEO Resignation forged
Do you use html5 for playing the music, or do you need flash? That's kind of my only big negative for google music, apart from the upload instead of indexing, it relies on flash for playing the music even though it is a html5-site.
You can never know! That's what I'm saying. it's not like learning a new programming paradigm (like functional) that will take days or weeks, it will take 10 minutes reading www.coffeescript.org front page to see if my career advice is right or wrong. You can't call yourself a nerd without knowing the most thriving dialect of that language... Specially if you're young and reading a hacker website.

I realy don't want to get into a virtual pointless argument, but just out of curiosity: do you know CoffeeScript? Because it's very strange to me that someone might be against using CoffeeScript and condemning it like that (its debugging is worse than JS, but on every other front it's the clear winner). if you're not familiar with it, I suggest you take a look at CoffeeScript.org to see how and why it differs from JavaScript.
Well, there is a GUI option for that: http://i.imgur.com/ENMmC.png
As much stealing as if the waiter borrowing your credit-card at a restaurant decided to clean your bank account instead of charging for your meal.

But anyway, that is besides the point. The point is that google forces me to trust the waiter when there is no reason for it.
Looks great for what it was designed to do! One question I'm trying to answer is how the overlays are generated. You mention they refer to an element tag, but that still leaves me confused. Is there a template that is filled in with values? Is it a DOM element that I can add event handlers to?

Have you thought about making more powerful features, say, realtime adjustment of the axes, zooming, etc?

Personally I'm interested in having things like this for analytics. One thing I'd like to see is some kind of interaction with D3.js in case i wanted to visualize the data in other ways. Any ideas on integrating this with that library?
Well, when the BSA^wRIAA auditors come to your door, you'll just have to show them your CD collection! If you don't have any pirated material, then you have nothing to hide!
you know JavaScript well and haven't bothered to "learn" the second-most-popular dialect?

Come on, what kind of percentage are we talking about here? Tiny. Absolutely tiny.

Take ten minutes right now and read through the CoffeeScript reference-- poof, you learned it. It is just JavaScript.

Well, you haven't learned it unless you memorised absolutely every aspect of it, which you're unlikely to do on a first read. And it isn't "just" JavaScript- it has significant whitespace, different object notation, etc. etc.

Don't get me wrong, I've started using CoffeeScript and I like it. But it's a tiny, tiny minority language. There are a ton of JavaScripters out there that haven't learnt it because they don't need or want it. That's their choice.
Relevant: http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/progressbars/ProgBarHa...
Then why sell?
I have been interested in learning Clojure for some time (spent many years as a Java dev, and intrigued by the chance to develop again on the JVM and learn a Lisp style language). This is a resource I have bookmarked as potentially helpful when I get around to learning: http://blackstag.com/blog.posting?id=5

I haven't had the chance to check it out yet so can't vouch for quality. But it seemed that a few people on the thread are considering getting into Clojure, so I thought I'd share.
Kudos to the entrepreneur, but of course it would be more interesting and informative if the company was not anonymous, with no mention of the details around their business or the potential buyer.
The Personal Computer Still Isn’t Personal
Did I miss an email from you?

I get quite a bit of email, some related to OSS and much not. Triage is generally customers first, everybody else as time permits. I star things in Gmail if I can't get to them immediately, but some starred things never get answered.

I would like for that to never happen, but there exist other things in life that I like more.

If a hypothetical person absolutely needs responses from me in a particular timeframe, I'm not adverse to talking retainers or SLAs.

And again, if you think an email list for A/Bingo users would increase world happiness, nihil obstat.
Journey – The Unofficial Path Client for OS X
HTML5 when available, Flash otherwise. It depends on the source audio format, and the browser you're using. http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/ drives our playback on the website for most cases.
Here's the research mentioned in the article: http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/progressbars/ProgBarHa...

Briefly, they took a process that proceeded linearly, applied an arbitrary function to the current progress, and displayed the result in the progress bar.

The conclusion is that time taken is perceived as less when the progress appears to start slowly and then accelerate, even when the actual total time taken is the same.
It sounds like the codebreaker in the article only took a few hours to break it (but maybe something got lost in the writing), that's not a huge allocation of resources in a case involving assault and such.

If the police were in the habit of decoding simple ciphers like this, they could have put it in front of somebody that wouldn't describe this code breaking process as painstaking.
Maybe you should be able to subscribe to certain types of commits, like a tag, merge, or branch operation.
And, showing that the more things change, the more they stay the same, half a century later:

"It’s not the consumers’ job to figure out what they want." Steve Jobs
Apple says at http://www.apple.com/itunes/itunes-match/ that iTM is a streaming service, though I've not used it so can't personally confirm.

"Does iTunes Match stream or download songs?
On a computer, any songs stored in iCloud will stream over the air when played, though you can download them at any time by clicking the iCloud download button. iOS devices will start playing tracks from iCloud as they download and will store them so that you can listen to them later even if you don’t have a network connection. Apple TV only streams songs."
Not sure I agree completely, "watch" is when you're actually interested in what's going on in the project. "Fork" is when you want to contribute with code changes. Maybe a "Like" button to show your appreciation would be nice?
Doesn't D3, the very awesome data graphing toolkit for JS, already use Census data for its map stuff?
Why do you care so much about how many watchers you have? I don't understand the point, certainly not to go as far as bunching commits and pushing at night to keep the watchers happy...
Rails Console on Cloud Foundry: A Closer Look
New Tools Bring Machine Learning to the Masses
The solution is pretty simple: GitHub needs a "Fav" or "Star" button. Basically just a bookmark.

There's a lot of projects I want to remember but don't necessarily care about the daily activity.

And no, browser bookmarks aren't good enough. A nice faved/starred page would show stats and maybe last commit/activity. That's it.
Another approach is doing away with the progress bar altogether. :-) Apple used to have a boot progress bar. At one point, it worked by keeping how long the _previous_ boot took, then on the next boot it just scaled the progress bar to complete in the same amount of time.

With respect to download progress bars, one approach is to use an exponential moving average:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/933242/smart-progress-bar...
Ok, but have you tested it on the absolute worst your users will be using?

What does it look like on grandma's 17 inch crt from 2002?
I guess we should define failure here. Is it basically bankruptcy, where the startup couldn't survive(or could barely survive) even after several rounds of funding? Or are we talking about situations where the startup is bought out, but just continues to lose money for the new parent company?

Digg comes pretty close to the first definition. They had around that number of monthly uniques, and have pretty much lots most of the visitors(and therefore ad revenue) in the last few years. They hemorrhaged money and weren't able to find a buyer.

It hasn't completely failed, especially after the reorg they did a couple of years ago, but it's definitely a shadow of it's former self.

As for the second, I guess Youtube around 2009 might count, considering that they were still losing money for Google at that point(Credit Suisse's analysis said that they were losing around $475 million, and RampRate's analysis said $174 million). However, this is pretty much only a business failure, not mindshare, and Google was still willing to drop money into them to get them to profitability.
The Bright Future of Car Sharing
This behavior is not limited to Amazon. Big-box retailers and department stores also ban people who abuse the return policy. And, as an honest shopper who likes being able to return things from time to time, I'm glad for it.
I wish I'd found this a long time ago. It took me forever to discover the totally un-googlable but super useful bash variable $?

Dumb, I know, but sometimes the obvious beginner stuff is easy to overlook.
ok duck, since there are some profits involved, just wondering here when/if HN can go against you and ask you to cease your activity. I am not sure so maybe someone here can answer, but isnt it that HN website owns some sort of copyrights to their website's content even if it was created by other (users)
I think "wrong" is a good word for it. Users typing things into an address field in a Web browser is not the only use case for DNS, but this breaks DNS for the whole system, which is the wrong solution. Correcting mistakes in the address field is something browsers should take care of. Firefox and Chrome both do — I know Safari doesn't, and I can't remember what IE does. In fact, Chrome has to employ a rather ugly hack to work around this behavior from noncompliant DNS servers.
This might be the present I ask for on my upcoming birthday. Yep, I know what I want.
Styles were available well before 2007. But hardly anyone knew about or used them until the arrival of the ribbon.
Fair enough. There probably isn't a 100% perfect way of detecting unlicensed content in every case. But that wasn't the question. (The methods for detecting copyrighted content in YouTube videos are obviously quite far from 100% and yet they routinely ruin people's day.)
Simplicity was definitely the prime motivator when I chose to write the graphing code from scratch for howmanyleft.co.uk (instead of using flot or similar). I also wanted something that worked reasonably well on mobile and desktop. Morris.js scales relatively well to small screens, and it also supports touch events.

Immediate improvements are likely to be better date handling and x-axis labelling (really they're both fixes rather than enhancements). Development so far's been driven by my rather specific requirements for howmanyleft.

I'd not initially intended to release it, but several requests from other interested developers prompted me to stick it up on github with a quickly hacked-together project page. I'm keen to see what other devs would like to do with it!
still the same problem with the OSM renderer :
http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/mapbox.mapbox-streets.html#10.0...
there are more than 6 cities in this area, why so few labels ? (look at gmaps: http://maps.google.fr/?ll=47.38834,6.678009&spn=0.65269,... ).

and I think there are not enough details for a medieval city :
http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/mapbox.mapbox-streets.html#16.0...

but I think the color scheme is pleasant.
what works rather well is google reverse image search. While it doesn't seem to do face recognition, if the image is a resized version of one on facebook, as they often are, it'll straight to the user's facebook profile.
Helping Improve the Mobile Web
It's just too buggy for me. I've had issues with the music manager not uploading new music, the Android app screwing up album sorting/track numbers, to long (5 minute+) delays in starting the streaming, tons of problems with artwork, etc. Nice idea but it just didn't seem to actually work very well for me. I've had much better results with Subsonic. It's not the same type of service as Google Music (you host the server on your own computer / connection) but it offers a lot of advantages. Pretty easy to install too. As long as you have a machine available 24x7 and a halfway decent Internet connection it works fantastically well.
In the short term, the answer is "more better internet". It’s entrenched, so it must improve while maintaining compatibility.

what replaces cars on roads? – this is another entrenched set of interlocking technologies, so there’s a lot of value in improving the cars and the roads. Even electric cars on smart roads isn't a breaking change.

Likewise, HTML5 over SPDY over 4G mobile isn't a breaking change to the whole idea of "internet", which was once NNTP, POP and HTML1-over-HTTP, all over ethernet cable, it's just a set of evolutionary upgrades.
That is completely awesome! Very cool.
Square adds geofencing to Card Case app
CoffeeScript Examples from Rosetta Code
This was a great article considering the issues I've been having with my fellow co-founders.

It's become clear I'm not respected, and get that 'just a developer' treatment. Perhaps thats my fault for not being more outspoken and critical of others. Either way, if there isn't mutual respect and trust, it ain't worth it. Its going to make you miserable.

Another point is that the CEO can't bring down the pressure on the slackers. The slackers can't directly admit to being slackers. And the CEO is taking 51% and not in favor of investors (wants to self-fund).

This has been a nightmare. Hopefully not having assigned my software over will protect me.

I've learned the hard way the consequences of jumping in bed with co-founders without making sure that there is alignment on many of the points in the article.
Its good to see some decent visual rendering of OSM data. I appreciate your choice in not colouring the roads in, (for some reason people always do this - maybe they don't realise that users don't use online maps to drive a car!). Visually, it is quite clear in most cases, which is nice (despite, as always having some difficulty with overground/underground objects in the same location).

Have you considered doing different map renderings for different purposes? (this very brown-grey theme might not work well for dark-background websites, and some people might want extra data such as train stations added)?
It seems that you can't zoom in as far as Google Maps?
Sadly, this isn't true of international shipping. Depending on where you are in Australia it's entirely hit-and-miss.
Right, but the music pirates don't write their own encoders. They are likely using software like LAME, EAC, and FLAC when ripping. Therefore, as long as someone uses the same settings, they could end up with an exact duplicate rip.
They surrendered control of the time frame, chiefly by ceding exclusivity but also with the technical due diligence. It's reasonable for a buyer to seek assurances their interest isn't being leveraged to other buyers, but it's too much to expect the seller to close down talks or let the phone ring on new interest.

That leads to stuff like "we'll discuss at the next scheduled board meeting". I don't know practices for this space, but a CEO can convey a meeting on a conference call for something he wants. Once they know they can wait that long, they'll think about whether they really want this -- the excitement cools down, they see other options, they move on.

People are asking how buyers can sense they're in control. One chief thing is the seller's neglect of their own inconvenient but reasonable interests. If a seller is making unreciprocated compromises of their interests to make things easier for the buyer, that says a lot.
Currently, this is true. We'll be adding more zoom levels in the coming weeks.
AT&T plans "toll-free" data usage in apps
Or you could drink tea, which is tasty, and then you also get both caffeine and theanine.
What about only publishing notifications for tags? Most people only use them to tag releases (or RCs) so the creation of a new tag might be the sort of thing people would be interested in knowing about.
The only thing they could make a claim about is trademark infringement of "Hacker News". Everything else is content from various authors around the web, which have freely given their permission to allow reprints.

All in all, a pretty awesome success story!
Yeah, agreed. I thought for a while that the Watch button would be a good way to keep track of what's going with open source projects I care about. But I've found I pretty much ignore the news feed completely, there's just way too much noise there.
Comments like this are why I love HN. It's absolutely no surprise to me that your account is as old as it is.