skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well said -- I think of the same topics every time I hear someone heaping scorn on XML for its wordy serialization output and complex spec (specifically as compared to JSON). All the other tooling around XML is so much richer and more mature... that said, the learning curve for XML and XSLT is certainly much longer and steeper than recent fads like moustache.js.
Perhaps introducing a pay for private page feature would be a nice thing to have to bring in some revenue.
Agreed. Man page for rsync is another one done quite well.
They want more and more engagement, to gain more page views to become another successful website of daily use.

Thats the reason they initiated Quora Credits, based on the Variable Rewards http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/25/want-to-hook-your-users-dri...
Create your garage sales in 3 mins.
I'm a little mystified by this idea, can you help me out?

When you filter "all startups" by "the sort of startups I am likely to start", that search query doesn't terminate at a factory in China, or negotiating to buy a hundred racks at Rackspace. It terminates with three software developers in the spare bedroom for a quarter, at which point ideally a continuous revenue stream has been generated that can fund the next project.

By analogy, the fact that most furniture purchased in America is mass-produced is not really relevant to a master woodworker, if demand for his work far exceeds supply. You can make the argument that he is "at odds with measurable features of the material world", but I believe a fairer characterization would be that his value system is just different than IKEA's, that they exist in different markets.
There is so much that is subjective about gamedev that automated tests don't really work the same way.

How do you define a test for something as subjective as the "look and feel" of an interactive experience?

How do you automate this process?

1 Move the bounding box on the tree a few pixels.

2 Load the game

3 Move towards the tree until collision.

4 GOTO 1 UNLESS it "feels right"

Maybe regression testing, once you get things working, to prevent new bugs from popping up, or unit tests for game logic, but I don't know of many gamedevs doing full TDD.
For whatever it's worth, after having read the full indictment against Kim Schmitz and his partners, particularly their excerpted intra-company emails, I am now presuming the government has an especially good case, is likely to win, and is generally serving the public good by pursuing the case.

(It is thus a good thing that I am not the trial judge overseeing the case.)
>Framing someone (or hiding your crimes) is harder than it sounds.

Is that why ~30-40% of murders in the USA are unresolved (IIRC) ? I'd say that unless you are a known criminal being monitored or an obvious suspect you will get away with it just fine, without thinking too much about CSI show style clues.
One object to rule them all - Cloud Python Objects
Prepared to give Adwords Display Advertising Exam - Refer this
Your logic thus presumes that it's perfectly reasonable for the law to allow a bank robber to transfer the still bound packets of stolen bills to their attorney. Ok? I guess there's a reasonable case to be made there, but I don't agree with it, don't think it's unreasonable to disagree with it, and again note that it conflicts with the law of the land as established by the Supreme Court, which considered this issue directly.

I think I'd have been more comfortable with a 7-0 unanimous verdict that set up a series of tests for when the government can/can't withhold assets from legal defense teams than I am with the 5-4 outcome that gives prosecutors blanket discretion to confiscate criminal proceeds. But I'd be equally uncomfortable with a 5-4 Blackmun opinion saying that the right to fund attorneys is inviolate, as that produces an incentive to double down on criminal enterprises to build warchests of legal defense funds.

Generally, I want criminal conspiracies to be shut down. I think that's the reasonable-people consensus.
On-computer and off-computer time are equally (un)productive. I like to spend a long time thinking about a problem without writing any code, then get it all out in one go as a foundation to build on; something like the Feynman Algorithm. And time spent socialising is only wasted if you don’t make the most of it. Like you said, it’s important to enjoy yourself and maintain a good work–life balance—otherwise you’ll just be unproductive and depressed.
This will never happen, but...

1. Rewrite all the laws in Prolog/a dedicated expert system. The interesting part is defining all the input variables, hence creating a new way of "legal structuring" data that would be reused in nearly all software and eg terms of services.

2. Because laws are somewhat deeply correlated, I would not try to version control parts of the law. One law change/batch of laws changes (1 per day ?) = one new global revision (you can diff, and with the law there is normally no reverting involved)

That would be fun for jurists and lawyers, playing the "what if" game with instant proved results :)
One word: focus.

When you're on the internet, you're engaging in bite-size activities and constant task switching. Quick, how many tabs do you have open right now?

Until about 1999 or 2000, I accomplished at least four times as much per year as I do today. Before that time, there either was no Web to putter around on, or it existed but without the speed and content it has had since then.

Have you ever noticed that your best ideas come when you're in the shower, or maybe on a long drive alone? It's down to focus, and lack of distractions.

Even if you think you're reading long-form journalism or other content online, you're most likely doing it in a window of a browser, with visual clutter all around, from UI elements to menu items to the dock at the bottom of the screen. They're all subtle cues to your mind to stay alert for extra input, and not get too zoned in on whatever you're reading. Not to mention the amazing amount of visual crap most webpages surround their content with.

There's value to the vast amount of information available online, but you have to be discerning. Information for the sake of information is not always worth the mental and time tradeoffs we make for it.
I prefer streamingsoundtracks.com - with soundtracks, I only get jewelry done! ;)
I once dealt with a sophisticated investor, though with no experience in tech investments. The idea of a convertible note was foreign to him and thus unacceptable. He wanted to own preferred shares right away, but I wanted to avoid lengthy and costly negotiations and giving away control at that point.

We then discussed a middle ground between the two: the investor gets common stocks without any special rights except anti-dilution and an option to convert them to preferred at the time of the series A round. This way we could achieve many of the benefits of a convertible note, such as reduced legal costs and the ability to close faster. Eventually we didn't close that deal, but it seems that it could have been an interesting middle ground.

Has anyone ever done something like that? Is it common? I'm interested to know how it turned out and if you'd do it again.
Storm is built in clojure -- https://github.com/nathanmarz/storm
I think you and I have very similar situations. My time wasted online is often for the exact same reasons.

Before the internet was such a large part of my life, that time was spent writing in my notebook or reading books (somehow watching TV just made me feel even worse). A lot of that time was also "wasted," but some of it was really valuable time that I spent getting to know myself and my own thoughts better.

One thing wasting time online has never done for me is lift my depression. The only thing that ever does that for me is getting out of my environment and wandering around outside.
I'm not a fan of the TSA, but this isn't exactly fair. To put into perspective that a lot of people here might understand:

Hey, Sysadmin person, prove why we should keep paying you! You sit here all day doing things, and yet nothing has happened to our servers since you got here. Why do we need you?
Hey, so do I! In fact I went to the London part of the tour where it was recorded live.

Trance.fm is also pretty good source, they play non stop trance with no interruptions. Great for coding against as long as it isn't too loud!
Text Message Spam, Difficult to Stop, Is a Growing Menace
True but:
- You have to have money for lawyerS, and lots of it. Most people are already deep in debt and if they don't work for a few months they are out of their apartments. Now imagine having to come up with, say $50K cash, within a week, while in jail. And $50k is nothing. If the court appoints you one, he'll probably push to make a deal so you serve 12 instead of the gazillion years all the charges end up to. The deal of the century. He has another 11 defendants to defend this month.

- You are in the defendant's chair, and for every juror that takes the oath and presumption of innocence seriously there is another one that assumes you did something ("Why else would they pick on him?")

- Prosecutors, police, detectives and jurors are people, full of human faults. To go home in time for Easter one might be persuaded to vote guilty instead of holding up. It's not unheard for the cops and prosecutors to want 'someone' in jail for X crime, keeps the public reassured and helps their career.

- Unless you're mega-wealthy you're outmatched. The state uses virtually unlimited amount of your tax dollars to hire the best DNA experts and pathologists and you, John Q, can't match them. On the stand detectives have perfected how to testify and use anything to fit their agenda: "he cried /he didn't cry /he cried too little /he cried hysterically (sounded fake) or his cries were too perfect, as if calculated to deceive..." That huge fight with your wife will be told as a possible motive but no one is there to tell about the hugs and kisses 15 minutes after. Oh, you've been "poking" your high school sweetheart of FB and been talking about the "good old times"?

So yes, our justice system is relatively fair but if you get screwed the stats mean nothing, you're toast.
If you're just making this for yourself, you might be better off emailing your provider's email-to-SMS gateway rather than using a service like this.
I wish you, the author, and everyone else happiness. I am really not trying to convince you of the moral righteousness of the VC value system, which I don't participate in directly. I'm just trying to explain accurately how it actually functions: anyone who says that VCs are aiming for acqu-hire exits is mistaken. Don't believe it, don't repeat it, don't make consequential decisions based on it: it will not end well!
In Online Dating, Taking a Chance on Love and Algorithms
Many software distributions are deprecating tcp-wrapper which denyhosts depends on.

I've migrated to fail2ban which supports iptables and can monitor services other than ssh.
I'm not sure what the kinds of startups you're likely to start has to do with the structure of funds at venture capital firms. VC's don't just have a history of screwing founders into turning down lifechanging money; they also adopt industrywide standard deal terms designed exactly to prevent things like acqui-hires, such as 1+Nx liquidation preferences.
Since leaving home to go to University I've completely stopped watching TV and that has increased my free time by quite a bit. Unfortunately, I would have a pretty hard time living somewhere without internet, mostly because I don't own a phone (cell phone or landline) so email and Skype are the only methods I have for communicating with the outside world.
I'd be more than willing to pay a fair price for good network service at hotels.

By "fair price", I mean a similar cost per megabyte transferred to what I could reasonably expect to pay for home or business internet service in that area. They can meter it and add it to my bill. So I can go nuts on bittorrent, but at a fair price. If I don't go nuts on bittorrent, I'd expect that the total should be very cheap for a typical hotel visit, especially compared to the rest of the bill.

By "good network service" I mean comparable in bandwidth and latency to residential or business service offered by ISPs in the area (e.g. cable or DSL), with good wifi coverage, and no port blocking or any other kind of filtering or traffic shaping beyond what's necessary to fight spam and provide good service to all the guests using the network.

Also, please don't restrict the number of devices. I've had hotels insist on one device to a room, or demand unreasonable feeds for extra devices. If each person has a phone, a tablet and a laptop, that's pretty inconvenient. Please bill for total bytes transferred instead.
Perhaps I'm just bad at doing things, but I noticed this way before the internet. Something like this random-walk path: reading a semi-scholarly book, run into an endnote, turn to the end of the book to read it, find a concept I don't know, open up my dead-tree World Book encyclopedia to find it, follow up some cross-references there, eventually remember to go back to the book, try to remember what endnote I was reading and where I got there from, restart. The internet makes it easier, but the pattern doesn't seem new!

It's even worse in university libraries, where you can actually follow up all the references by grabbing them off the shelf. The number of books piled up around you with post-it notes marking pages is roughly like the number-of-tabs metric...
Thanks fumar. Based on today's feedback we plan on supporting more media and content type.
The iPhone UI is a consumerized, touchscreenized version of the OLPC UI.

Think about it: a home screen with icons for activities ("apps"), that dominate the screen and can be started and stopped without losing their state; an eschewing of the file system for activity-specific storage; etc.

The one really innovative thing that Apple (and Android) didn't integrate was the concept of the Journal. I love the idea of a log of what you did, that you could scroll through and instantly resume prior work with.
And my point is that the sexism in the workplace doesn't matter at all for what the analogy was saying. Ideally what would have happened is that they made the bot, then she asked for them to stop, and then they would have stopped. I mean, if someone emails the entire company an anti-semitic joke, that's bad. The response shouldn't be to send the entire company an email about the plight of the Jews in the holocaust. If a group of people are watching the sports illustrated swimsuit model thing in the break room, the appropriate response isn't to turn on a documentary of the women's civil rights movement up to the same volume in the same room to drown it out. My whole point is that while the original thing is wrong because it's offensive to people, the response is wrong too because it's childish.
This is true, but the founders of startups absolutely do tend to be shooting for acquisitions, and capable founders of those kinds of companies clearly do make it through the YC filter. So it's not surprising that people perceive that this is the overall goal of the valley.

The difference in incentives between YC and "real" VC funds seems like it would be interesting to study.
Agreed. Putzing around online is a symptom of an underlying problem, and I know it’s time to get up, make a sandwich, take a walk, whatever. Knowing that, lately it’s been a lot easier to stay motivated.
What's so bad about his programming?
Bear in mind that he is doing everything pretty much himself.

I have never thought of minecraft as an especially buggy game after the 1.0 release.
You should still delete it from the main database, even if you defer it for a week via deleted=1 for performance reasons.

And then it's easy to purge ALL user data backups more than X months old.
Hide your Social Reading Activities on Facebook
Minecraft didn't have levels and the entire game was essentially a level editor - so this might be the actual game. Moving and reshaping objects instead of smashing and placing blocks.
Well, first of all, I wouldn't, because Congress would insist on using Microsoft Source Safe, backed up to Zip drives. Talk about a corrupt Congress ...
Yeah, totally agree. Great work couchdb team on this release!
Certainly. Especially when something comparable to the IT revolution (in its combined soft- and hardware aspects) rears its head. But, as inconceivable as the IT rev. was... so is "the next big thing".
Yes, yes, YES! XSLT was the primary driver that led me to create Windward Reports. There are a few who do find it sensible but for the majority of programmers it is both painful and obtuse.
Quora.com has slightly higher link authority than 'new to the internet' site X, so putting as many links to X in Quora boards is a form of search engine optimization (SEO).
I don't know, it sounds like "I don't have home internet" is more of a stand-in for "I don't have self control."

If you want to read a book, just get off the computer and read a book.
Ah, now how does one find the sweet spot between this and say Stack Exchange? Many times, I have heard users complain about the barrier for Stack Exchange and overzealous moderators. There is not really a way to please everyone.

I never really understood how moderation works on Quora so I assumed there was none. Not to say that I hate Quora (I like it a lot), I just feel there is nothing preventing it from becoming Yahoo Answers in a couple years time. No barrier, no moderation.
To me, the Netflix price is as much about marketing as it is about the quality of the algorithm: Netflix was ahead of the pack (i.e. Blockbuster) even before, but after spreading the word that it takes rocket scientists to even slightly improve the existing algorithm, who would even think twice about testing a DVD/ streaming provider other than Netflix?
Nanostars Deliver Cancer Drugs Direct To Nucleus
I think this overlooks the classic technique of reverse engineers all over, IDA Pro!
It reflects the lack of content in the article, which boils down to, "things changed so I'm leaving." Lincoln isn't claiming that Quora is doing fine. (At least not in this comment.)

I find it useful to be reminded that as a species mankind hasn't figured out how to grow things without changing them (and so exposing them to the possibility of decline).
A key tool for your cognitive kit: Recursive Structure
There seems to be an over-active "troll" patrol on Quora as well.

If you ask a question or present a point of view that's outside of conventional thinking, its common to see those views lambasted in the comments. Quora is definitely not a place for "things you can't say" (http://paulgraham.com/say.html).
You're right, what I should have said is: fabricating evidence is harder than it sounds.
I prefer python or javascript, but really, just pick one. Chances are you will have occasion to learn them all to some extent. I would shy away from perl personally. Although it has a huge install base and CPAN is expansive. It doesn't seem as popular these days and you'll likely have a hard time finding as many up-to-date examples for current use cases.
That prolog idea was fashionable around the late 1970s or early to mid 1980s, briefly. It was one of the real-world case studies that helped people figure out, back then, that it could never even begin to work at all well and, in fact, the thinking of AI researchers at the time was correspondingly not specifically good.

That's part of why you don't program in Common Lisp all the time.
...and Ask MetaFilter quietly carries on being fantastic.
I think the one half of the problem is: is freezing, confiscating funds considered a fine, a penalty, a sentence? In my non-lawyer opinion, I think so.

The other half is: can the accused still have a fair trial without the funds? Given that there are assigned counsel, the answer to that question is 'yes'. But as a non-lawyer, I also know that for one, the outcome of a trial can very much depend on your counsel, and two, big-money counsel are better than those assigned.
Security Awareness Posters for Free
Medical tourism, from the States to elsewhere, has been a "thing" for some time, maybe a decade(?). I'm sure it's been done individually by out of the box thinkers well before that.

It's great that businesses like in the article are making this a bit more accessible and known, it will put some cost pressure on Stateside providers. Also help people save some money by going outside the States, or even get care that just would not happen otherwise.
sorry, reading what I wrote I can see I didn't phrase my pedantic point correctly - I included it for just such a comment as yours!

What I meant to say is that he doesn't endorse non-Free OSS. But he does end up "promoting" it however (not purposefully), DESPITE being stricter/more to the left than it.

I guess rather than promote I should have said help or aid. If he didn't do what he did the open source movement wouldn't be as strong. He's insane and too left, but his being there helps the whole floss movement, even the parts he disagrees with on principle.
Quora was mentioned in an LA Times piece[1] today as one of the new FB mafia offspring along with Asana and Path.

[1] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-facebook-friends-20120...
Ex-Facebook insiders building next wave of Silicon Valley firms
Plus the payment processor's cut. Another 5%.
Exactly how much power to you think a tesla coil uses...? O.o

Also, the primary reasons you cannot run (most kinds) of nuclear reactors in your garage have nothing to do with your power company (this said, if you do want to run your own powerplant and sell power back to the grid, you are more than free to do so... If you don't care about plugging yourself into the grid then you are even more free to do so). Similarly, FCC regulations on transmitter power are also questionably related.

"We're not even discussing the issue of free software anymore"

Thanks to your confused analogies, and what I'm not perceiving as some pretty fundamental misconceptions about basic electronics, yes... If you are going to attempt to argue your point with an analogy, and your analogy is broken, expect to be called out. That is just common sense.
A Means to Many Ends: 10+ Years of Haskell at Galois (Lang.NEXT 2012)
Laptop vs Mobile
Follow-up to "Why Linux on the Desktop is Alive"
Display tweet walls and conduct live polls from your iPad on any projector or TV
While I agree with you, the sysadmin would be able to provide evidence of specific actions that prevented something bad happening. TSA has made zero arrest related to terrorism so far.

Plus quoting the end of the article :

He said that the laptop rule is about appearances, giving people a sense that something is being done to protect them. “Security theater,” he called it.
It's really interesting how calculator technology has stagnated over the years. I'm in a BC Calc class now where we are still using 89s. My teacher is aware of the nspire calculators and he frequently uses WolframAlpha but hardware wise, he still teaches off of the 89.
I'm interested in specific examples or theoretical concerns, rather than "I said so." This is HN, not Reddit.
Show HN: My afternoon project - Pink Noise mp3.
But not all of the money seized was gotten illegally. In fact noone except MU knows that for sure at the moment, but what we can be sure of, is that the amount is less than 100%.

In the robbed bank case, you know exactly how much was stolen and you can prove it, so seize the $100,000 - but should you seize his car and house too, before he has even been tried?
Aren't the links nofollowed, though?
You remind me of how the teaser trailer for The Social Network is a sequence of happy Facebook photos set to Radiohead's Creep.