skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How is it a good thing in general that you got an infringing site taken down based on your word without it going through some sort of public oversight before removal?

This kind of thing makes the US horribly dangerous to internet businesses and now that you have done it to a much bigger shark than yourself, they will be gunning for you.

Imagine it the other way around, perhaps on something much more innocuous that is easy to miss. Would you rather a court case to decide an appropriate action against you, or your site ripped off the net, requiring you to then go to court to get it reinstated?

The speed that was so helpful to you as a startup in this instance is what will leave you dead in the water if you mess up, even accidentally, in the future (I am not suggesting that what was done to you was accidental, although many of their management may not have understood the details).
I feel it more a mutualistic (symbiotic?) relationship. If it were not, I believe people would abandon the platform --which they may, at soem point when something else proves more beneficial to them. Kind of like gut fauna --but more optional than gut fauna.

Parasitic, seems a bit strong --but I guess, to make a point, the analogy kind of works --just not for me.
The ensuing discussion is good.

I recommend you all read this reply; I laughed pretty hard https://lists.csail.mit.edu/pipermail/csail-related/2012-Jan....
Open University attracts 1M active subscribers in 90 days
Ah, yes, missed that. Nothing a GC can do about code like that. At least it remains true that this can only happen in Go if you explicitly import "unsafe".
The Phoronix editor just recorded and uploaded video of the talk; that's original content.
The military spending has been long gone out of control. Funding of actually useful civilian projects lacks money. Instead DARPA invests into more weapons. We have already enough weapons.
Interpretation: We have an evolutionarily advantageous instinct to maximize short term gains; our reason, however, can override this when we A) view other things as more important (e.g. honesty), and B) give it time to do its job.

Amusingly, phrasing it this way and combining it with the language in the article, we have 'original sin' arising from evolution. The religious imagery comes not from nowhere, but explains the biology in the best terms it could find. Protoscience.
Doesn't iOS currently restrict WebGL to iAds? I was surprised to see it above 0% on iOS.
I didn't miss it; it was part of a different sentence and it honestly didn't sound like it still applied once you got going.

I'm glad that I was correct to assume the best, though.
Dunno what is the point of this article, but I definitely agree with what he says.. did the OP post this to embarrass this dude? it did the opposite for me.
I just thought Facebook was a way for millennials to share photos online. It is likely riding on a wave of "easy enough for anyone" that technology provides. Nevertheless, it is a company out to make a profit, so it does provide lessons for people who use this site. Anyway, that's me defending Facebook for the day. Have a good one ;)
Previously:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=623754

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1398283

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3338845 <- Some comments
The D of DARPA is for 'Defense'. It used to be ARPA, but the D was put in front to remind people that it is actually military research.

If you want non-military research, give it to other agencies instead: NSF, ...
A Hitchhiker's Guide To Packaging (python)
Came back from a talk by a Facebook Data Team member a little while ago. Don't have time to look it up now, but he cited Bakshy et al 2012 as a paper describing Facebook research in which a proportion of "Likes" from friends were censored for selected users in order to gather information on a social science question. The talk was pretty incoherent on what question they were investigating; I get the impression that it was pretty innocuous, something like "more activity in your feed makes you share more," maybe. Still, it makes me wonder why people are signing up for this fishbowl.
I agree with many of Stallman's views to some extent, but it's very hard to ignore that he is willing to sacrifice anything and everything for what are essentially minor decisions.

It's good that we have him around to consider the utopian extremist viewpoint, even if it's rarely the favorable option. We aren't all made of money... the benefits outweigh the risks for most services where we pay with our ad-viewing, closed platforms, and information gathering. People can volunteer time and effort into building free systems, but nobody is going to donate data centers and storage space. I think there are limitations to the free mentality for widely adopted services.
Not at all. I sympathize with what rms is saying, and hoped it would provoke discussion about the daily tradeoffs of using Facebook.
Vendor Abandonment: Dealing With The End-Of-Life Blues
Are there any companies which are providing expertise in using the JOBS Act to help startups?
Crosby, Stills & Nash - Southern Cross
Apparently the Stack Overflow questions are already rolling in: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/dcpu-16

I imagine this must be slightly entertaining to witness for Notch.
That's what I've thought for a long time too, until I realized that the person writing http://www.osnews.com/story/25469/Richard_Stallman_Was_Right... has a point.
> In other words, the question of comparing the good of these projects against the harm of Facebook arises because someone made an snap choice.

Who says it was a snap choice? For X project that needs viral promotion to achieve critical mass (either in support--like a donation drive--or just participation--like a vote), you can rank places to put that mechanism by how viral and well-connected the networks that "flow through" that place are. Facebook frequently tops such rankings, if there isn't a specific niche hang-out available where you can target all the "super-connector" nodes at once.
The caption on the page linking to it makes it even funnier. Still, I don't think this has anything to do with the thread.
See http://www.dol.gov/compliance/topics/posters.htm (among many other examples).
Spot on. You stated this much better than I could.
Even in these neighborhoods in LA, you never have to travel to an area where the road signs are printed exclusively in the language of a foreign culture or the money is printed in another currency (something Europe is getting on board with at the advent of the Euro).
It's probably the same psychology that drives many sales ("buy now and get double your offer!"). Force action before higher reasoning can take hold.

Imagine if they modified slot machines to worsen your odds if you didn't put in another quarter within n seconds.
Some perspective (that I learned at a "young faculty workshop" recently): DARPA funding is $3B, NSF is $7B, and NIH is $32B. I was surprised.
Difficult to say exactly what is going on here without more information, but it seems that the issue here is less about the mistake made, but more along the lines of how the mistake was made. In other words, the mistake happened in such a way to call into question these scientist's competence in the eyes of their colleagues. There is a subtle difference. It's one thing to get something wrong, it's another thing to get something wrong by what appears to be "a rookie mistake".

We cannot forget that science is still a human process, one that relies so much on trust.
215,835 .XXX Domains Registered in 3 Months
I know someone who has worked on similar experiments, and he was able to predict the fault that caused this problem upon first hearing about it, and a fair number of similar people were able to do the same. Someone who is too anxious to announce a major result without having checked common faults that could explain away the result first shouldn't be in charge of a major experiment.
Now that you got your ad hominem out of the way, maybe you could focus on the issues RMS brings up.
This was a big thing in the 1990s. A lot of people walked around with heads up displays attached to their glasses. I'm sure technology has gotten smaller, but I've not seen anything indicating that google has made a break thru. The google promo video is very much like the kinds of promo videos people made in the 1990s.

Here's a picture of what they looked like back then:
http://www.sciencephoto.com/media/349371/enlarge
I agree that Facebook login should not be mandatory, but I do like the option to not have to create another account with every site just to leave a comment or try their service. Facebook and OpenID should be standard options, as well as local accounts.

Although I dislike some of Facebook's policies, I don't hate them.
I had the same reaction (though I can sympathetic to some of rms' opinions). It's a false dichotomy to say "do you hate Facebook more than you care about $fixing_some_big_global_problem? I reckon if your cause really, really wants to recruit people, they would look beyond Facebook.
The comments claiming that getting BTC is difficult or dangerous are absolutely incorrect.

Do some work and accept payment in BTC. It's a currency implementation, not a stock.
Well, that's kind of the point. It seems that enough of their coworkers believe that this wasn't even a glorious failure. It was a dumb failure (in their eyes).
Thanks for the downvotes, everyone.

My point was that even though he happens to be spot-on in his very pithy remark about the disease that is Facebook, if you know anything at all about RMS -- or have interacted with him personally, for a minute or two -- you'll know that he's so far off the page from the vast bulk of humanity (in terms of how he communicates) that it's difficult to take anything he says about the pros and cons of social media very seriously.
I'd say that its not a constant fear to most people, it is more of a aggravation or annoyance. In my experience most people don't share too many personal details online even with their closest friend network.

I do have one question, why does the author use BOLD text in the article in such a haphazard manner?
It is possible to artificially fool any GC into leaking memory, only question is whatever it happens in practice.

In practice the Go GC never leaks memory on 64bit systems and for most programs never on 32bit systems either.
> The most oppressive and authoritarian thing about it is, at root, that most people appear to enjoy it and not see any problems with it, while you view it as this heinous violation of your freedom and imposition on your private space.

While many of my friends enjoy Facebook and I'm still to lazy to upload a profile image and mainly use it to find out where the next birthday party is located, I really can't say that I am feeling oppressed.

Some people just like camp.
None of my colleagues have Facebook. They have fine lives. They don't give a shit about Facebook, it doesn't have to be part of your life at all.
Ask HN: How do I delete my HN account?
Is there someone I can email to do this? I'd like it gone and all data associated with it. Thanks.
Check out Move the Turtle. Programming for kids
Dave is attentive and useful as an investor, even with 250 investments to date. He's created a brand for himself and 500 that is awesome to be a part of. It's great to be a part of the 500 family/mafia and I encourage anyone who has the opportunity to do so to go for it.

As for 500s strategy, they have money for follow-on investments. They were in our convertible note but then doubled-down in our seed round. They invest 50k in each of their accelerator companies but also do follow-on in the ones that show the most promise. The strategy makes sense to me... too early to tell because none of the exits have been smashing home runs, but I certainly expect some of them to have huge returns.
Ask HN: Social bookmarking for comments
Any HNers know of a social bookmarking website that lets you submit a comment instead of a headline, and then have that comment link over to the parent article?

Thanks.
// response : http response stream
// filename : the static file we want to serve

response.writeHead(200 /, ...set http header info (mime, length etc).../ );
stream = fs.createReadStream(
filename,
{ flags: 'r',
start: start,
end: end });
stream.pipe(response);
Phoronix is disappointing in many ways, but I have to give them some credit- they're the only ones trawling the mailing lists and commit logs for linux graphics news. If they had an RSS feed that only syndicated those stories, I would read them.
This is the most salient explanation that I have seen on HN, although some points need rebutting. For instance

>If the effort it takes to secure a number of the size required to represent a 3 minute song becomes a burden on society, then I do not think they have a right to be successful in doing so.

That is only true after the law has been changed, at least from a legal standpoint.

> If my securing it from copying that I do not approve of becomes a burden on society, then I do not have a right to be successful in securing it.

Same as above.

Most responses on HN have been something like "if you want to make money from your creation you should use kickstarter and give it away after that". This is a very foolish attitude both realistically and philosophically. I have every right to use the current laws to my advantage and an obligation to my investors to do exactly that.

I have no problem with flouting laws if they are truly unjust, but I have no sympathy for piracy profiteers like Kim Dotcom because he knew very well what he was doing. Copying between friends can never be stopped but if you make enough money from it you are a valid target.
Heh, my site posted here :) sweet.
According to this (dated) study, Facebook has a fair share of Gen X'ers.

http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/16/study-ages-of-social-net...
Many of Stallman's complaints about Facebook ( http://stallman.org/facebook.html ) apply equally to Google.

Does anyone know whether he regards them in the same light?
I don't think any of the bosses I've ever had would realize that there's a difference. Maybe 1 in 100 would even think to find out why the letter is different. I would probably notice and there's a slim chance I'd ask what's different about it out of curiosity but it wouldn't make much of a difference to me. The fact that you're the kind of person that even knows the difference would be more important to me.
Hey Tweetdeck: Stop Hurting My Browser
I love rms, but he needs to learn to spend his time speaking for things and not against things.

How'd the campaign against Apple go, rms?
I can't quite see what's funny about the response.
> Please do not require me to log in to it for your cause.

The worst part about it is oftentimes it makes the most sense to require Facebook for login. The gains are: 1) development and maintenance of only one login system. and 2) Easy integrated sharing/liking to expand support for your cause.

You can't really expect to win a rational argument with a site owner who sees how the benefits of requiring Facebook outweigh the perceived costs.
I've considered how best to represent the visitor inequality in browsers/oses. Best thing I've come up with yet is to show percentages relative to the selection, not relative to everything. So if you choose "all" you get the brunt of the dev-centric browser distribution. But if you choose IE, you don't. Let me know if you've got a better idea how to handle it.
I was an outspoken Facebook-hater for a long time. Perhaps my most quotable moment on HN to date was saying "I have no love for their product or their business model, but their engineering is diesel."

My wife recently convinced me to give it another try. I didn't use my complete name, and was judicious about the information I associated with my profile. And yet, I proceeded to connect in a deep and healthy way with some people that I'd fallen out of touch with, and nurtured some newer relationships.

It's a tool that has a Tendency to be dangerous, prying, and abusive to its members. But even as a field of vast moral hazard, I've come to view it as "navigable and worth the risks."

Perhaps not the most glowing endorsement, but if they can convince me they're more valuable than they are dangerous, they've really done some things right in the last few years.
It's (a lot) more work, but there's a C interface to Cocoa (just use objc_message_send). I know that this is how Clozure Common Lisp interfaces with Cocoa.
The old (late 70s/early 80s) IBM 5211 Terminal used to include a large solenoid in the keyboard that fired a metal rod into the metal base of the keyboard as a mechanical "clicker". Holding down the spacebar was very akin to the sound of a machine gun!
If they're screwing people over, sounds like it's time for a lawsuit, not yearning for a startup white knight to ride to the rescue.
Although I wonder if being explicitly told to take your time for such a trivial task would make you more conscious of being observed.
I never tried any unusual sleep schedule, but I have worked third shift while trying to keep a social life.

It does get hard, even on a third shift schedule that millions of normal people deal with, to tell the days apart. When the day switches in the middle of your work shift, when it's light out all "night", even a normal third shift schedule makes the days run together. I did it for a year, and not a single day went by when it didn't feel like I took a short nap through the day then worked the rest of the time. Even when I got 8 hours of sleep.

I started drinking. I started smoking. I got short with my friends. I had to quit, because when there are no "days", life became meaningless to me. It was just one long night that lasted for a year. Things that happened ten minutes ago went into my memory as happening yesterday. When I quit my job and went back to sleeping normal, I stopped my self destructive habits literally overnight.

Millions of normal healthy people do it every day. But beware of forcing yourself into sleep schedules that you are not mentally prepared to handle. Know when to throw in the towel.
You can ask pg.

But it's a strange request.

Your account and the data associated with it aren't yours. Your posts are part of conversations that are not yours alone. And they'll never disappear, even if pg removes them from this particular copy. Other copies of HN's content exist online.
As much as I agree with ALL the criticisms of Facebook, the dependency on the platform isn't due to stupidity or ignorance... the dependency is by design. There isn't much freedom to leave the network, due to the lack of worthwhile alternatives, the useful features that it provides people, functional user lock-in, and the strength of the social ties between people. Some of the features are so useful to people that citizens are protesting the government to reverse privacy laws that are there to protect them.

Google had a huge shot at making an alternative, and although the G+ community is vibrant, the product has failed to reach the potential that it had. And there are many privacy concerns with that platform as well, because every massive social network needs revenue.
The finance industry tends to offer way more for people with a strong technical background to do quantitative analysis work.

To use real world examples, no amount of money you offer Salman Khan now would pull him away from his non-profit Khan academy to go back to the hedge fund industry.

If you're going to point to your step 2, then that sounds like a tautology. "Attract good people who would make a move for more money. Offer them more money"
Facebook, Dropbox app security holes are shocking in their stupidity
Here's a good counterargument, entitled "In Defense of Negativity": http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/20110903-00
I've never met one as well, and it always struck me as odd that a really good programmer could also be a brogrammer. Becoming a good programmer requires incredible patience, reasoning, self-learning, and solitude (among others). Those qualities seem to undermine the image of a brogrammer.
I wonder why Wordpress does not enter the ad game. A wordpress only marketplace that sells ad space on the wp-powered blogs/websites. Put it there in the installations, if a user wants to monetize his/her blog, it's there at the touch of a button.
Every social group is different.
Doesn't the evidence that fraudulent takedown notices are still issued, even in bulk and via automated systems clearly indicate this isn't a significant enough disincentive?

For example, according to <http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090315/2033134126.shtml&#..., Google has stated that 37% of the takedown requests they receive are fraudulent.

edit: Why does Hacker News not support <scheme://path> (with brackets) syntax? It's nothing new.
1) So what about the (I would think fairly common case) of loops where the variable is first initialized in the loop. On one path, it's null, on the other, it's a typed value. Can you optimize that?

2) Cool! phc went the route of really advanced, context sensitive analysis, and the result was massive memory use and huge compile times for even simple programs (if using optimization).

3) Have you read IBM's POPL 2010 paper on it? Interesting stuff, though maybe not actionable. They argue (there's that word again!) that PHP's copy-on-write is flawed for arrays containing references - the reference can lose it's reference-ness when the array gets altered and copied. They have an implementation which fixes this for a relatively small slowdown. Interesting paper as I recall.

FWIW, I think it's allowable to change the output of var_dump. Optimizing reference counts kinda requires it, and I know Hiphop isn't in the business of strict conformance to PHP semantics.
AT&T to start unlocking off-contract iPhones
I'm also 28 and have left my work to form a startup. Money is not a motivation for me but I've been doing this for 8 months now and it is a big factor. If someone offered $5 million dollars to me right now and buy my company I would definitely say yes.

The reason is that it would give me the freedom to do whatever I want for a long time. I wouldn't start buying expensive things because I was able to do that when I was working as a senior software engineer anyway. There are so many projects I'd love to be able to do for the sake of learning something new which I am not able to do right now. I have to focus on earning money as my funds will eventually run out.
I didn't understand that comment, either. Was your argument "he's right, but nobody agrees with him, so he's wrong"?
Compare RMS' achievements in the social field (you know, like starting the social movement to popularize free software) with, well, just about anyone else on this planet before judging his social skills as poor.
Using Facebook as a platform for international development projects is actually abhorrent. If you do then you are requiring people who need your help, or that you want to work with, to enter into an entirely unnecessary secondary contractual agreement with an intrusive marketing company, for no reason other than sheer lazyness.
I can relate to his feelings. Socializing does come easy to scientists. Yet, even with all its shortcomings, I guess Facebook makes us waist less time in trivial social interactions with distant friends while still keeping in touch.

Stallman is almost always polarizing, but there's something here. Does FB make society less or more efficient? Where's the proof?
The minute your project proves be remotely successful this will be true. There's no escaping it. Don't let it keep you up at night, just keep plugging away. Most of the time when it comes to a good idea there's enough money and demand for it that more than one company can live in the space.
Blueprints specify the fabric of the building. All Google needs is a symbolic layout which is just a subset of that.