skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unlike many successful startups* (Zynga, Facebook, etc) I turn down ads for weight-loss scams, mesothelioma, etc all the time. It sucks because there are a lot of them willing to pay. But years from now, I won't remember the cash. I will remember that I contributed to the victimization/extortion of others.

As an aside, I see no problem with payday loans, arms dealing, or the like - there is nothing inherently unethical about the businesses. They both offer ample opportunity to cross ethical lines, but that is a choice, not something that is inherent in the business model. It's like Experian - there is nothing wrong with their business - except that they rely on trickery to get people to sign up. There is a difference between an unethical business and a business that is operated in an unethical manner.

*Note: I don't believe that the choice to engage in scam advertising is what made these companies successful. I think it is a rationalization of poor behavior on their part.
There are some general trends that are worth noting.

The right seems to generally want to support a new military-industrial complex focused more on immigration and monitoring the population and less on building aircraft carriers. The left seems fine with this, although they'd never openly admit it, aside from a bunch of pundits complaining, as long as they keep and energize their voter base with their issues.

The left seems to generally want to support a class warfare us-versus-the-corporations narrative which seeks to make more and more laws about all companies, 10 employees or a 1000. The right seems fine with this, although they'd never openly admit it, aside from a bunch of pundits complaining, as long as they keep and energize their voter base with their issues.

The political debate itself seems to be in a spot where the trick is not to get holding the bag. Do only as much as it takes for voters not to blame you. It's much more crisis-driven than it ever has been.

These trends don't look well for conducting international business. I don't think there's any disaster coming, but I think the complex social and political systems we've created will actually become less and less stable the more we try to over-manage them.

Right now my money is on "friendly for business" but the situation is slowly and inexorably changing for the worse. So if I were a foreigner looking do do a startup, I'd probably be in the states -- and probably would not plan on staying there. (insert long discussion about qualifiers that might change that plan, such as requiring a large, trained workforce or special infrastructure issues.)

EDIT: This "instability in complex systems" I brought up is exactly illustrated in the JotForms case. The law over-allocates power to an agency, registrars bend over backward to comply with whatever the agency wants (lest they get on the shit list too.), then some pencil-pusher kills several man-years of work. Not out of malice or evilness -- just by simply not being aware of the implications of her actions. The most frustrating thing is that there are no nazis or evil political parties required here. For the most part it's just good, smart, clever, and responsible people all acting as best they can. That's the real tragedy. It's not some kind of comic book, good-guy-versus-bad-guy situation. It's a bad system created by a bad dynamic, and it looks to get even more bad as that dynamic keeps reinforcing itself.
The excessively verbose collection syntax is my #1 pain point with Obj-C. Looking forward to kicking the tires on this one.
All my work on Mechanical Turk is to feed the data into a machine learning process that automates the task. Some tasks are easy to automate (any classification task), some others are harder (anything related to content generation, or vision).

I have to say though that there is a pattern: Once you solve and automate a process, people want more, and push you into doing a task that cannot be easily automated. Then you try to automate it, and the cycle continues...
I have a question that suits the context.

How can I get syntax highlighting on Bash while in interactive mode of interpreted languages like Python.
Also applies to Standard-ML prompt.
It's not as simple as that when you're planning for the long term. Firstly you need to examine the changes and make sure that they aren't going to create any compatability problems, of the type "if you activate this option, then you can no longer link to libraries that don't use this option". Garbage collection in particular had a lot of those sorts of problems.

But even if you can convince yourself that it is just syntactic sugar, you have to have a long hard think about whether or not you are going to adopt the style. Adopting means going back and changing the code you have already written. Not adopting the style is not tenable in the long term - the new syntax is clearly superior to the old syntax, so there will be a lot of pressure to code the new way. This is particularly true when playing in Apple's backyard, as they have a habit of taking a nice new technology that is optional in one release, and then building on that optional feature for a next release.

For me, in this one particular case, I'll probably go with the new syntax, going back through modules that are already written and redoing them with the new syntax each time I have to touch one for a bug fix/feature.

I'm just getting frustrated because my project started about 18 months ago - I work on it nights and weekends, and I have to keep stopping work on the project and spending time adapting to new tools. The last 18 months or so have been particularly tumultuous. XCode 4 was a big change compared to its predecessors. I started using the garbage collector just to have it more or less replaced by ARC.

None of this is insurmountable, but as a one person, part-time shop with a fairly ambitious project, this is really starting to become painful for me, which is the point I was trying to get across, and I suspect that I'm not the only one to be feeling the pain. Perhaps I would feel better about deciding not to follow Apple on this one if I could be sure that that decision wouldn't mean me finding myself with a big code base on my hands that is unable to take advantage of the new hotness in the next version of Objective-C because I decided to skip this version's changes...
Good idea. I've also thought about this for data entry/analysis type tasks. It is fully expected that a worker on any level won't be perfect, especially on these types of services. An approach I've considered is to have have 3 workers do the same task then compare results and take the majority answer which should be close to if not 100% accurate. Overtime you could even rate workers for accuracy and recruit/pay more if possible.
As I say, this plugin bring some images functions to the web, no need to PS :)
10.04? No. But this PPA seems to have the up-to-date package for 11.10: https://launchpad.net/~n-muench/+archive/vlc
High-wage skills, or why you might want to learn Clojure if you're not a lawyer
Always the Facebook Page. Domains can change; likely your brand will not (and even if it does, you can update your Facebook page info).
I work on memcache at Facebook, and cache invalidation is a hard, hard problem. It's easy to think that we just overlooked this trivial fix, but the reality is that this just doesn't solve all possible cache consistency problems. Namely, how do you deal with racing writes where the clocks are skewed? How do you deal with multiple copies of the same data in different caches (different data centers, for example). What about axe-murdering your top level db because that data is inherently uncacheable using this scheme?

I'm not trying to hate on the post at all, I think it's awesome that product people are thinking about this problem, and the more of them that do the better the world is going to be for guys like me. I just want them to continue to think hard about it :)
I think if you want to point out the flaw in someones argument you could do better than to go down the exact same road they took.

You effectively claim that the US does not need the EU and that you could afford to drive the EU 'into a ditch' out of spite, when in fact the economies are now so interlinked that if the one suffers the other suffers right along with it. The current crisis is a nice example of that.

Effectively it is a single giant economy with lots of subtle and not well understood dependencies, wrecking one on purpose will likely wreck the other one as well.

Besides that, you are painting all Europeans with the same brush and that is just as stupid as those that like to paint all of the US with one brush.

America is not 'the evil empire' (and neither is Europe), but on both sides of the Atlantic there is plenty of stuff going on that does not have the interests of the general public at heart. I don't mind those that expose those things, and I don't mind people trying to avoid making past mistakes again. They're braver than me in many respects.

We're moving into uncharted territory with respect to the amount of impact surveillance technology and anti-terrorism measures have on the lives of ordinary citizens. It remains to be seen if the net result of that is beneficial or not (I'm skeptical and I think that it will be a net negative). The United States seems to me to be the party pushing most aggressively to achieve this with the EU following along and sometimes trying to outdo its counterparts.

What bugs me is that there is no - or very little - accountability on this front and the extent to which commercial interests and political interests are entwined. It may take a lot of work to undo the damage that we're doing to ourselves and our societies. To polarize that into a US vs Europe debate is silly at best and 'batshit crazy' at worst. Please don't add fuel to that particular fire.
For those wondering: Xcode 4.3 is what currently ships, 4.4 Developer Preview ships with the Mountain Lion per-release, so it only is available to those in Apple's Developer Program.
The US is supposed to be a shining beacon of hope. I'm not quite sure what the UK is supposed to be.
ARC is not really 'needed' for anything, it's just a very nice way to prevent memory leaks and pruning lots of retain/release statements from your code.

I would not re-factor existing code without ARC if it was properly debugged for memory leaks and working perfectly, but for all new projects I have it enabled.
Having been a teaching assistant for intro programming classes targeted at non-CS majors, I disagree. You don't need to understand what a 'stack' or 'heap' is to understand what's going on and for this to be useful.

And even if it's too complicated to be useful for people on their own, being able to use something like this as a teaching aid would be very helpful. The number of people who have trouble grasping even what most of us consider very basic concepts like iteration over a list is astonishing. Trying to explain something you find trivially easy to someone who doesn't understand it at all is an exercise in frustration for both people. I usually resorted to doing a manual step-through on a whiteboard or piece of paper, but this is much nicer.

I would discourage people from using this constantly, just because I think having a step-through debugger handy constantly will prevent you from developing necessary debugging skills. (The concept of wrapping something in print statements is another thing I take for granted that's not obvious to some people.) But I still don't see how something like this could be anything but a net positive.
+1 more for that awesome ReadMe. The project looks clean and simple.
I understand what you mean; but in this case, I think it's fairly easy to adopt new syntax in all of you code base. Just search for NSArray arrayWithObjects:, NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjects: and NSNumber numberWithChar: and replace them with new syntax. It wouldn't be this easy if it was a major change (like ARC).
Interestingly it is hosted on Dropbox and asks me to buy it. I think you should take this more seriously and seem like one. I'd consider using this on my social network where picture is an important component. Bookmarked, thanks!
@-prefixed literals for collections are definitely welcome (I won't miss those nested 'dictionaryWith...' calls for sure).

Anyone know how the []-access will work? Is this going to be a special case for NSArray/NSDictionary synthesized in by the compiler, or is there going to be runtime support for a []-operator message a la Ruby, or maybe something related to key-value coding?

I hope this is done coherently, anyway. I worry that too many special cases to overcome problems like verbose collection access could snowball.
Nice example, this is what I mean by "I make the contents of an image change for really!!" ..
First off, VLC is awesome, and VLC team are heroes, imho.

I ended up having to go back to 1.11, as it ended up choking on the 1080p60 files my vidcam produces, though at first, for a minute or two, it worked better than 1.11 win32 (where i have to slow it down to 67% speed to get smooth playback).

The u.i. changes (removal of slow down and speed back, and see playback speed) threw me for a moment, but then I saw I could customize the u.i. really easily, which was great.

Can't wait til the day it can tap into my Nvidia GPU (460), but i know that's a non-trivial problem.

Anyhow, overall, congrats to the team, and I look forward to some additional upgrades so I can tap into the new features.

-a
>It's easy to sell products that benefit people, and things that make the world a better place do that.

I know this is kind of a YC mantra, but I can't help but suspect it of being a matter of faith, more than a matter of fact. Is Groupon (val. ~12bn) really helping the world 24x more than, say, Atlassian (val. ~500mm)?

If you're up for it - time for an even more contrived scenario.

You are heading a successful start-up. You've proven your concept and it's time for your Series A. You sit down with your angel who has some introductions lined up for you.

S.P.E.C.T.R.E. VC Inc. has a proven track record helping companies to record breaking public offerings in record time. ALL of their portfolio companies has so far successfully completed a "let-it-rain" IPO. Some also went bankrupt not so long after that. Some people accuse the company of using "dirty tricks" to obtain their goals. They also seem like total assholes when you meet them.

H.E.R.O. & Partners VC on the other hand, seem like nice guys you could hang out with in private. They are a successful VC company in their own right, but their investments are a bit more hit-and-miss, and they've only been part in one moderately successful IPO.

Both seem professional. Both have the tools to help your company. Who do you choose?
Inside the Eastern Rise of Weibo, China’s Twitter
> ...so it only is available to those in Apple's Developer Program.

correction: Apple's Mac developer program. I'm an iOS developer and I don't see Xcode 4.4 in my dashboard.
Riot police guard Greek assembly as protesters gather
Ask HN: isn't naming a company the same as its product a mistake today?
I mean, knowing the lifespan of products today, most companies will have to conceive other products to survive more than ten or twenty years, no? Remember Apple Computer.
This whole discussion is political. Downvoting mickey7's comments for that is extremely hypocritical, unless you downvote all comments and flag the submission.
Oh, my mistake was misinterpreting the puzzle as one where you had to draw, not cross, each line in the shape.
When I click new or hot I get a trackback error
The Creator of Braid on: Truth in Game Design
Ask HN: Books that explains algorithms with code instead of math?
Yes as the title says.
I am looking for books about algorithms that explain the algorithms with code instead of math. The reason being, I understand code better than sometimes foreign to me math symbols and formulas.

So what type of algorithms am I looking for? Graphics and machine learning mostly, but also the usual suspects, sorting, data structures, etc.

Big plus if the book is explaining things on a very understandable level, so that any average developer can grasp the concepts without too much hassle.

So, what are the best books that fall in this category?
40/60 and 50/50 if it's hard to deploy technically
>But years from now, I won't remember the cash. I will remember that I contributed to the victimization/extortion of others.

I'd like to think that it is far more important to invest in a wealth of _experiences_ rather than pure financial wealth, for that same reason. But I guess it's just as valid to say that this is just another post-hoc rationalization of a poor financial choice :)
This isn't very surprising to see Nokia being a big seller in their home country.

I'm curious to see how the Nokia brand performs in the US over the next quarter.
The silent contributor to your results
Depends on what you want to know of course but I'm more interested in what people would prefer to use. I'd imagine that many people are still using Java and I wonder how many would prefer to switch.

For me, I use Scala at work now but I'd prefer to use Clojure. Probably an even better poll would be what do you use and what would you prefer to use.
Oh man, this is just awesome. Thanks so much for making this open source - it's great to be able to pick apart the internals of something like this.
The problem I have with government provided food, shelter, and to a large extent medical care is that they are charities, only benefit a small subset of the population, while encouraging self destructive behavior in some cases (they are easy systems to exploit and are regularly exploited). This makes them expensive and inequitable. I have no problem with charity and there is a ligitimate place for it within a community, but I disagree that governments are effecient at running them.

Public education is also important, but I would hardly say its a model social program. Everyone benefits from an educated population, again, in an optimal case, there is little conflict of interest, and in general, it elevates the lives of those using the service. At the same time, it's something that could be done privately in the home or without any government intervention - and for most of history it was. It's also a bloated beauracratic mess, a representation of just how inefficient government programs can be. There are fantastic people in the trenches in schools being led by goons and politicians with little interest or knowledge about what is good for developing kids.
> When you don't need to cross that line, it is firm. If an opportunity comes up that is on the wrong side of the line but you really need it, your line moves. That is human nature.

Very insightful in my opinion.
I think this author fails to understand the business model of selling the user data to marketing companies.

That 'like' is a data-point about that user which which adds to the mass of data that FB sells. Also, the 'like' promotes that product within the system providing content for FB visitors to feed on. It isn't even a loss leader, it's a part of building their content.

The off-site 'like' has as much value to FB as the YouTube player adds to YouTube, and is a small percentage of the value that AdWords (or have I got the wrong product) provides to Google.
On a completely unrelated note, I'm curious if anyone has tried odesk from a developer point of view? Freelance websites like elance seem to play host to a pretty poor type of client, so I've stayed away. Curious if odesk is any bettering that way?
By default, the free service that anyone can use, they redirect nonexistent domains to a search page they control. If you pay (and register your IP address), you can turn that off. But the main reason for paying is to control which domains are blocked. You can choose categories, and/or maintain your own white or black list. http://www.opendns.com/web-filtering/ and http://www.opendns.com/internet-security/
I wish I had the time to add polygons to the library. That said, you can create composite shapes.
Interesting article. The MAU number which Barry comes up with (161 million) seems to be more line with what Quantcast says Facebook MAU is (142 million).
Our unrealistic views of death, through a doctor’s eyes
My initial feeling was 'how smart can it be if a mac needs windows management', but this is actually a nice solution. Isn't this also where windows started?

I am not a huge fan of the way this works though. Windows 7 has the 'side-by-side' view which unfortunately doesn't work very well. Defining hot-spots of dragging windows to one of the corners, or to one of the sides would have been a much nicer UX in my opinion. The challenge to get over is how do you make it NOT jump to the re size or position when the user was just moving the window and didn't want to actually re size it.
An overview of upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin)
Xtend and Ceylon faring extremely badly, Kotlin only slightly better. Looks like a 2 horse race with Scala and Clojure in front.
4 Things Startups should Learn from Moneyball
The virgin father
So my anecdotal impression is that the most successful freelancers learn to get very picky about who they work with---they want to see a verified payment method (esp. if the client is proposing a fixed-price contract), a history of hires and successful projects at reasonable wages and a good job description.
How much press did you manage to get for SkyChalk?
There's a couple gems that help with this in ruby.

Coolline[1] colors syntax in the readline as you type. There's a gem[2] that integrates this with Pry[3] (an alternative to irb). For colored output in Pry's REPL, awesome_print[4] can be integrated[5] using pry's .pryrc files.

[1]https://github.com/Mon-Ouie/coolline
[2]https://github.com/pry/pry-coolline
[3]https://github.com/pry/pry
[4]https://github.com/michaeldv/awesome_print
[5]https://gist.github.com/004b0cdfccf0e29d83e3
Yup; I think most HN folks will have enough experience to know naming is crucial, and have lots of opinions about how to do it well (I know I do). Looking forward to the followup, then!

Once you have some examples and strategies -- where people can agree with some, disagree with others... that gets the conversation going.
Thanks for the offer. I have a decently long experience with MTurk to know how to get things done.

My point is that microtask work is not necessarily the optimal setting for tasks that are expected to last for longer periods of time. It is often beneficial to train and give people meaningful pieces of work instead of converting real work into micro-work and assume that workers are not intelligent enough to get things done properly.
According to Wikipedia work on Nice slowed around 6 years ago...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nice_(programming_language)
It seems like there should be at least some manual override (assuming there isn't one already - I didn't check the details much beyond the article provided) to set your 'my DNS is NX-LYING' flag manually. For machines that are permanently emplaced in a broken DNS network, it can just be turned on and left.

A flag wouldn't be enough, because Chrome also learns what records it returns when it lies, so it can recognize other lies.
You're over your Google API quota. Also, we can see the error traceback - is that supposed to happen? Anyway, this is really good that you're trying awesome stuff like this and you're 11. At your age I was still writing noughts and crosses XD
What is this pinterest you speak of? Pinspire is the Internet.

http://www.Pinspire.com
On a very selfish note, take a look at these:

http://qmturk.appspot.com/
http://code.google.com/p/get-another-label/

You may find the code useful for what you are trying to do.
Apologies if I'm missing this in the article, but it doesn't seem to take into account the level of demand for those skills. It's all very well having a skill that demands $50/hr, if openings for that skill only come up once in a blue moon.