skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I took a PR course in undergrad school and I'm still glad all these years later that I did. It also helps that I've been on the internet since the beginning in the early nineties, so that has helped my understanding of self-promotion as well. I agree with the sentiment of doing your own PR as a startup.

But not everyone has the skill set or desire to do this, so I agree that a good PR firm could be beneficial. This might also be the case for a startup that has grown into a full blown company and the owner no longer has the time to do PR.
OMG, it's the ultimate mechanical_fish pet peeve collection! TL;DR: I rant.

ONE: I can't find the citation of the scientific paper on ExtremeTech. (Let alone a link. Who would dare to dream of a link?) They do refer obliquely to "the paper" once. (What paper?)

And they link to MIT's press office, whose brand is really solid, so everything they write is almost like science! And there you can skim the article twice and finally spot the citation:

Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at MIT and lead author of the study reported online today in the journal Nature.

Okay, gotta go find an online Nature subscription to find out what's going on. There's an hour of my day spoken for. At least they're trying to ensure I get some exercise.

Why is the actual journal article important? Just look at this thread here on HN. We have people doubting all sorts of things, but these may well be things that are addressed in the actual work. The content of the popular articles means very little: They leave out most of the details. The details matter. The whole point of this study is to try and tease out more details.)

TWO: But, wait, there's more. I first tried to read ExtremeTech on an iPad (original edition). The article popped up in one of those insufferable iPad-only JS-powered "mobile editions" with Swiping Action. Unfortunately, there was only the first page of the article. It cut off in midsentence. I tried pressing the giant button marked "Next" on the right side of the screen. I got a big white screen. I flailed around with my fingers. A completely different article eventually rendered itself. I flailed around with my fingers some more. Eventually the original article reappeared, still incomplete. Fortunately, one more roundtrip to the next article and back and I finally got the whole thing to render.

Then I pressed the back button and everything seemed to hang. I closed the browser window and thanked the gods for my escape.

Why on earth do publications use these broken things, when simple web pages render so nicely on the iPad? The site does have something like a dozen tracking cookies on it; does this imply that they have data showing that swipability is so important that it doesn't even have to work in order to attract more ad impressions/clicks/Tweets/whatever? Or does it merely suggest that they are so busy struggling with glass-cockpit syndrome that they can't perceive that their site is broken on the iPad?
Pinterest design spreading like a virus, because it works
Show HN : like techmeme - for Microsoft
I've been working on a simple blog tracking page focused on Microsoft stories.
I use Python the most but Higher Order Perl changed my life. Voted for Perl.
>Because Python and Ruby sites are built properly.

Are you implying that there's not a single bad Python or Ruby programmer?You can dislike PHP all you want, but don't pretend that a website can't be written poorly using Python or Ruby. The programmer is the one who makes it after all, not the language.

>In fact, their urls don't even map to actual files to begin with.

I take it you've never looked into Cakephp.
I'm really not a fan of the UI on speaker deck presentations. Clicking seems to advance or retreat somewhat randomly (I guess based on which side), the buttons are non standard and tiny and close together, etc. A regular PDF or video or keynote/ppt is much easier.
Facebook: Legal action against employers asking for your password
Dude, have you ever worked on sites with integrated payments? That too of Flipkart's scale?

Processing 100s of transactions and dealing with Indian payment gateways requires some kickass technology. They have scores of engineers working on the site's backend.
THere was a superbowl commercial of giant carrier pigeons used for package delivery. Lovely example of the risks.
Next time you see an amazing video, your doubt will be that little bit more compounded thanks to 'Human Birdwings'

Honestly, I'm not sure this is a Bad Thing. Too many people seem prone to believe things that are presented to them in the media. A little more critical thinking/critical analysis skills in the general population wouldn't be the worst thing...
> "He wanted to make us dream"

Last I checked the dream of personal human flight is well-entrenched. There's no shortage of interest in jetpacks, personal helicopter backpacks and even that water-powered 'jetpack' thing; to say nothing of the legit powered-glider sorts of projects.

I'm pretty sure no-one needed this hoax to 'dream'.

Trying to drape a hoax in a desire to 'inspire' rings hollow to me. It sounds like more shameless self-promotion from someone who set out to get nothing but attention.
AliceML and Mozart/Oz.
Cool Effects with Custom Shaders in OpenGL ES 2.0 and Cocos2D
> The question now, though, is how memories are actually encoded — can we programmatically create new memories and thus learn entire subjects by inserting a laser into our brain?

That's a pretty scary area of technology. I hope that as a civilization we will become responsible enough to use that before we discover how.
Especially when that slogan is grammatically incorrect.
I've been a fan of Chocolat lately. Simple, straightforward and easy on the eyes.

http://chocolatapp.com/
Eight months of work to produce an obviously fake/impossible low quality video? It's surprising that it took so long.
The whole "bird man" incident does a lot to illustrate why The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths by Michael Shermer

http://www.amazon.com/Believing-Brain-Conspiracies-How-Const...

may be the most important new book published in the last year. I had just finished reading the book when the "bird man" story broke, and what did I see on Hacker News threads but many people saying that they believed the story because they wanted to believe it, and they would believe a single, otherwise unevidenced claim in a self-produced video rather than the whole body of tested theory from currrent physical science. This is the usual observation of human behavior: people form beliefs first, for largely self-reassuring reasons, and then strive mightily to hunt up rationales for maintaining those beliefs, despite contrary evidence. Really, to raise the quality of discussion here on Hacker News, we all ought to read The Believing Brain at our earliest opportunity and think about all the threads we have seen here where participants conclude first and ask questions later.
Help Identity the reference Android devices Netflix tests with
> PHP is the training wheels of the server-side language world. You can pick it up and almost immediately see results on any number of popular hosting providers that provide support out of the box for it.

yes that makes sense. But i wonder, does that imply python or ruby are more difficult to understand than php? I believe they must be on the same level of sophistication and understandability.

And if python, (or ruby) for example, was "better" (as in gets more developer love) then shouldn't it's availability on hosting services increase? Its not like either of php or python is new and needs time to settle down. If availability on hosting providers were to increase, it would have increased long ago.

and as for file extensions, as i noted in another comment in this thread, file extension is just a part of my observation. It also includes tutorials, how-tos, questions/answers on stack overflow-like sites, etc. all of these are more for php than any other language.
Ex-Google employees embark on mission to stop Google from tracking users
>>>your phone will be locked to one network

This is exactly what happened with the original analog and CDMA networks. Most carriers these days have converged on the HSPA and LTE standards which thankfully support SIM cards.

There's no technical reason why CDMA networks couldn't have supported SIM cards in their phones, but it was just never done. As evidenced by the overwhelming popularity of SIM cards, this particular battle has been won by almost unanimous decision in favour of the cards.

Only a few bastions of the original CDMA networks still don't natively support SIM cards (e.g. South Korea). But on the whole, it was already decided that SIM cards are here to stay since carriers demonstrated that without them, they are more prone to higher switching costs.
His and chaoslawful's github projects are worth taking a look at. I slapped on a Lua scripted cache layer on top of Nginx, which ended up boosting a response into low ms.
1. Not at all up in arms, just this this is a little hypocritical of the HN community.

2. I disagree, he's directly taken the fruits of someone elses' labour and given them away without permission. Copying the functionality and idea, I'm fine with, but he didn't "remake" the design like he did the functionality, he just remade the scripting aspect of it. The benefits you mention are functional benefits, and these could have been brought to the public without the near pixel perfect design.

3. I somewhat agree, however I could remake the design of any website without copying and pasting in a short time. It would take a short time because all the time that was spent designing it has been done by someone else.

4. Maybe slightly, but he took what someone else had produced without permission, at best this is a slightly scummy thing to do. He tweeted Dustin to let him know that he had done it, he could have just as easily asked. If Dustin had refused then he'd be free to make something which fulfils the same function, but isn't a clone.

For the record, I'm not sure exactly where I stand regarding IP, but I'm not talking from a legal perspective, just an ethical one, and I don't think this is ethical nor HN's praise of it.

I live in China, a country mocked for its cloning. If the Chinese had hand written the GroupOn site, for example, rather than copy/pasting it, most people who still think it's low. It seems to me more that people think that a) Dustin is a bit of a dick and b) open sourcing something means you can do whatever you like because it's for the good of humanity.
It's not being first that I think conveys some right to recompense but being original.

If something is inevitable or trivial (slide to unlock, one-click checkout), I don't think there should be any protection at all.

But the more original something is, the more the creator has actually added to society by creating it. And yes, copying it can add to society as well by making it universal, but I think some kind of monetary incentive is a great way to get people to work on original ideas.

Would Apple be so creative if they weren't so profitable? Isn't it their profitability which gives them the ability to spend time and money on R&D? If you take away the profit, don't you take away the opportunity to do R&D?

I think this is why patents were introduced in the first place. I don't think patents work for software, but I think the idea is the same. For the greatest good for society, we want lots and lots of universally applied creative ideas. But there's a trade-off between encouraging new ideas and encouraging mass distribution of ideas. "IP" laws encourage new ideas but discourage sharing. "Piracy" encourages sharing but discourages new ideas.

I just think that there needs to be a balance, and that "thanks for doing the hard work, I'll take it from here" isn't it.

EDIT: I would appreciate an explanation of why people feel I am not contributing.
> I'm pretty certain there'll be many an unexpected incident when/if people start up something like Tacocopter.

so what? there are thousands of car accidents and deaths every year that doesnt stop majority from riding. What OP did is open my eyes on something I didnt think of before. Imagine a crowded city, like NY where 5 feet above your head there are hundreds of drones like bees flying everywhere and delivering goods: food, small mail, lighweight groceries, etc. That would be great win for problems with traffic in big cities. Mother Earth would appreciate that too. Awesome idea OP.

EDIT: you could also have personal delivery done this way, something like "electronic mail pigeon". You attach your lighweight package and you send it across the city. Of course we would need to minimum probability of accidents. Most likely software used would have to be governmet-approved/tested and you would have to have a license to be a part of "lightweight transportation channel" that flows above the city. But this is totally doable!
Lawmakers ask app makers for privacy information
Sorry, but my primary complaints of PHP are in no way related to anything that I've "brought to it." These are all default behavior out of the box:

- Error messages that are often nowhere near where the problem is, and sometimes contain no stacktrace

- PHP-provided function names are inconsistent and follow no set convention, mostly because the language was built without Objects or Namespaces

- The arguments to PHP-provided functions are arbitrarily ordered (such as array manipulations, and string searching). I have to look them up every... single... time.

- Core features of basically every other popular dynamic language took years to arrive in PHP. Hell, it didn't even get a real shorthand array syntax until a few months ago.

- Backwards design decisions, such as having sort-related functions modify data structures in-place.

- Completely insecure on a default install. No directory traversal protection, combined with having urls map directly to on-system files, is a recipe for disaster.

- No isolation or easy support for simultaneous PHP working copies. If I want to work locally on 2 separate PHP projects, each requiring different PHP versions and different (often conflicting) libraries, I have to pollute my entire global workspace.

I could go on, but it's making my blood boil recalling the times I had to deal with this foul stain of a language. There is no reason for a self-respecting developer to ever choose it, especially when alternatives like Python or Ruby exist. Period.
Maybe this means we can finally build a machine like the one in the matrix that lets us bootstrap our brains with kungfu.

But more importantly, I think the most significant result of this research, should even a bit of it prove to be true, is the possibility that it could help us understand, and maybe even prevent dementia. That's exciting!
I too use Python for my various noodlings where I don't have a pressing need to use some other language... or even if I do, I'll draft it in Python first to get my head around the problem space then think about porting it later.

Some unusual stuff I've done in Python that I happen to have online:

https://gitorious.org/bdflib is a library for working with bitmap fonts in the "BDF" file-format, one of the traditional X11 font formats. Among other things, given a font with some base glyphs and some combining glyphs, it can automatically generate all the pre-composed glyphs Unicode defines.

https://gitorious.org/macfontextractor is a library for extracting FONT and NFNT resources from Mac OS Classic resource forks. It loads them into the data structures defined by bdflib above, so you can save them out to BDF files. Currently it only supports resource forks in MacBinary-encoded files, but it shouldn't be too hard to extend it to work with AppleSingle, AppleDouble and native resource-fork support.

https://gitorious.org/python-blip (now renamed Python BPS, I couldn't change the URL) is a diff/patch tool for arbitrary binary files; a bit like bsdiff or xdelta. It produces less space-efficient diffs than bsdiff, and it's much slower than xdelta, but the BPS file-format is vastly easier to implement than either of those.
This reminded me a little bit of Stephen Potter's "Gamesmanship" advice on how to become known as a master chess player: start with an arbitrary 4, 5 moves and then resign.

Before resigning, spend a lot of time muttering things like "I could go there, but of course he'd get me 10 moves later", etc.

It will seem that you are a genius, able to look far ahead into the game, processing a multitude of scenarios.
If there are cycles in neuron graph (and I'm pretty sure there are), then you cannot be sure that removing one neuron and triggering all the neurons it was connected to in correct way is the same - you'd need to also simulate reaction of that neuron you removed to possible feedback it takes after the first stimulation, maybe cycling in such loop many times.
New filing shows Zynga to sell 43M shares, Pincus unloads 15% stake
... and that is fine as long you let people know that it not an original van Gogh.

Unfortunately, you picked a bad example: a painting is a finite resource -- there is only one physical painting painted by the original artist. A painting cannot be "copied" with the same veracity as software can be (bitwise, which in the case of software becomes piracy) and any attempt to pass a "copy" of a painting as an original is forgery.

Classifying any work (art/software) as a rip-off requires defining the very fine line between fair-use and unfair forgery. When it comes to artistic endeavors (as in "design"), you'll have more luck defining the position and velocity of an electron around a nucleus than delineating that fair/unfair boundary.
Thanks again! stuck in the reading queue for the weekend. (Phear my curiosity, people waiting for a table in my café!)
Sure, I was just explaining that particular observation.

I'd say the difference is that PHP, due to being easier to get into - you don't need a framework, understand OOP, etc - is used both by amateurs and professionals, while Ruby and Python tend to be mostly used by the latter.
Hence, you get vocal opposition in communities composed of such professionals, while others don't really care enough about the languages and the craft to participate in them.

(Note: nowhere did I criticize PHP or all PHP developers)
Nagios/ Monitoramento Eficaz de Redes e Servidores
I would be nice to have a conventional Javascript utility for these kinds of app-pages, or browser plugin to make something like ctrl-back go the most recent history page not on the same page (or maybe even not on the same site, for #! Twitter)
How to think better about code and be more effective
Carl Masak describes a way to mass-produce “anti-confusion particles”, bringing more clarity into the process of reporting bugs, unit testing, or tracking down surprising behaviors in code.
One of the most basic safety measures cars take is to reboot critical systems several times an hour and have mechanical backups so the breaks both work and can overpower the engine. You can't exactly do that with a drone.
Sorry if I missed it, but it looks like the real victim of plagiarism would be: http://drawar.com/

Honestly, nothing about the design or user experience of Svbtle was unique. There have to be more examples, at least by coincidence, of other designs that show prior use of similar typography and layout.

So really, this whole debate of originality seems moot.
Ironically, the SIM card is exactly the technology that enables the scenario the author describes, and it exists today (maybe not so much in the US).

"Select from this list to send your payment information to an unknown carrier" is not exactly a realistic scenario. Instead, you have an agreement with an organization (let's call it "your carrier") who handles your payment information/billing, then that organization makes arrangements with other carriers to allow you to roam on their networks. The SIM is your account identifier, and most (GSM) phones allow you to select among available networks. Anyone who has used their GSM phone abroad has probably experienced this.

The only thing preventing the scenario he describes from being more common today is the reality of capital expenditure required to build a network and the consolidation of carriers (aka botched deregulation), making it uncommon in the US to have any real choice.
TypeButter - Improve Typography using "Optical Kerning"
Why I use Git 
Git, if you haven't come accross it yet, is a version control system. Developed
by Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, Git has taken the version control system by
storm in recent years - and with good reason. Distributed, with outstanding branch
and merge capabilities and just plain fast, Git enables developers who master
it to work more productively.
What is your favorite C programming trick?
Ask HN : Dynamic type languages - history and philosophy 
Today, I was talking to one of the person, I really appreciate him for his technical as well as mathematical skills. In our conversation, We reached at a point where we were talking about python and other dynamic languages. I said that I love dynamic types of those language very much, you can extend any object the way you like or the way it progress over time. However, This argument just brought his programmer in front that said it is hell lot of pain, if you don't knew the type you are dealing with.

I was simply clueless about why these dynamic type languages even exist? I knew this is natural way of progression, more freedom of expression and extension but why these languages even exists what is the philosophy behind these dynamic languages?
Measuring against yourself
> And because this poll is about your favorite language, not the language you use the most.

yes, that's what i am wondering, why isn't php Favorited more often.

> Because not everyone is writing code for the web.

php can also be used for native stuff (IIRC). And both ruby and python are as suited for native development as php is.
How do you not see the irony here?

"They're drunken twenty-something white guys whose primary concern is..." <--- Stereotyping. Generalizations. Right here. In your comment.

There are fraternities and sororities whose members are not all "twenty-something white guys" and whose efforts are worthwhile. Do a smattering of research and you'll discover this.
Fix your browser/OS default font settings. This page have 0 styling and page with 0 styling should look perfect on your screen if you have everything configured correctly.
The Supreme Court’s Bad Precedent for Innovation
Seaweed toast is same as half an hour on treadmill
No, I'm not implying that. Of course it's possible for a poorly written site to be built with Python or Ruby. But I've never seen a single one expose its implementation details through filename extensions, or map urls directly to files on disk: both things that PHP does by default.

Yes, I've used Cakephp. It's a slight improvement.
Have a different experience will help you have a different outlook.

Think different
Google users sue over changes to privacy policy
Nice one jtauber... :-)
Entitlements in Business Should Never Replace Merit
I wish I could block all extremetech stories from My HN feed. The are universally overhyped, never the original source, often draw unjustified conclusions, and are a pain to read (at least on an iPad - they use a non standard interface and pop overs).
I was an Exploration Product Manager for a mining company.

There are many developer jobs in banking (I sure they are lame) all over the world.
Nice, the intellectual failure of the "must die" meme in the headline correctly predicted the intellectual failure of the article. SIM cards solve a real problem for the consumer in a convenient way. Better to replace a 5 dollar card than a 500 dollar phone when I travel, and lucky to be able to transfer phones easily.
0 Digital Product Marketing: Five More Strategies to Market Web Sales