skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey, who keeps submitting my articles to HN? >=)

This one jumped the gun a bit.. I just got control of the WebP2P.org domain name and this evening I was going to put up a real website with actually useful information rather than that crappy blog post.. oh well, internet moves too fast for me!

Seriously, you should join the list if you're interested! Please introduce yourself if you do! There's tons of great people on there already and things are starting to heat up.
Just to be clear, when he says "nonfree" he means free as in speech, not free as in beer, right?
I agree with you. A good example of this is what we experience when driving. If someone cuts me off, my instinctive reaction is to think, "What a moron!" Which is unfair, of course: it may have been a one-time stupid mistake.

Even if you think you see a pattern, someone who seems stupid at something may just be outside of their comfort zone/talent area. In another field, they may be quite smart.
We certainly know he doesn't think adviceonly is stupid :)
I think we'd be better served using such styles in scientific journals more often.

As an example, here's a wonderfully written article by the late statistician, Jacob Cohen: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~sternh/courses/210/cohen94_pval.pdf
None of the locking options work for concurrent bulk inserts if there's an index on the table. Trying to do so invites a mess of deadlocking.
Realistically, a few static PNGs would exceed 100KB in a lot of cases. Any image-heavy page is going to have a few hundred KB of data. I wouldn't hold it against them.
the title is very inaccurate.. this app may have a higher monthly usage time per user for its very small user base, so you can't compare it to Facebook's in any way..
in related news, my new startup with 50 users surpasses TextPlus and Facebook combined in monthly usage time per user* (*= user base is 1/100000000 that of Facebook). utterly useless headline!
Actually there's interesting research on this.. I wish I could remember where I read it - I think a Malcolm Gladwell book.

In general, we only need to see someone being smart once and then we will forever label them as smart. It's as if being smart is an achievement and they've proven they're capable.

However, in general we only need to see someone being evil once, and we will forever label them as evil. It's as if that's their true self, and all the other instances of them being good are a ruse.
Javascript hotline
This is absolute BS. Odds are that the all of the people from the article, and the author, are relatively stupid. Maybe one or more of them isn't, but the odds are against them - that is just how it works.
Reciprocate.  Don't Pump and Dump.
Oh dear. 100kb is bad for this sort of thing? Does anyone know if that's a commonly held view?

I've been working on a Canvas library for full-powered diagramming for a year and a half and it currently weighs in at 597kb minified. (private alpha going on right now, so its nearing final size)

It's super awesome and covers an enormous amount of enterprise diagramming needs like customizable nodes, links, layouts, an undo manager, data binding, models, overviews, events, commands, tools, you get the idea.

But do you think people will reject it based on the size? Do you think not having a slimmer version would be a deal breaker?
Neither did XHTML.

Web Standards work requires you put up with a ton of really stupid things that people have been doing for a long time.
In my experience, I think smart people often think others are smart. And that's sometimes a problem-- because they believe that others are smart as well, they should think everything through the way they do (Also, I'd really like to say we here, but pride is never good karma :-))

Then you start wondering why they are doing something so obviously unwise, and then tend to rationalize it with some enormously complicated theory. Perhaps, this is the reason why Hanlon's razor is useful and recognized-- without it smart people are kinda lost.
Excel Software Adds Integrated Order Processing with Safe Activation Service 3
I'm very familiar with the TPC-C spec and the problem can't be brushed off with "concurrency!". There are multi-second waits in a large percentage of transactions. Nobody does this in any performant OLTP system today, but sure, concurrency! Except the benchmark limits how many of these transactions can be concurrently operating on a warehouse, one of its core models. So the only way to scale throughput is to add warehouses. You end up simulating a company with a million warehouses, each with a fairly small load. Furthermore, to run a million transactions a second, you'll need several million open transactions. That's why you see armies of client nodes in the spec of the systems on the leaderboards. The append-only data model is also difficult. If you removed waits and allowed old data to be pruned, the benchmark would be much more useful.

So yes, technically Oracle Exadata OLTP Clustering has multiple CPUs connected by an high speed interconnect. Cluster.

My dual socket commodity Dell server also has multiple CPUs connected by a high speed interconnect. Cluster?

My point was not to argue about a word, just that Exadata is not what some typically think of as a cluster in modern distributed systems. They've moved some smart filtering into a SAN and plugged that into RAC and shipped it all in a big hot tower-thingy. It's not bad in any way, it's just closer to SMP than other kinds of network-based parallelism.
yes, you can basically always assume that with stallman
Right on, couldn't have said it better. Thanks.
Does this account for the changes in how spending is reported?

Is all defense spending under defense? or is there a lot hidden under education and health?

I have played with too many budgets to accept things like this at face value.
Fundamental attribution error from social psychology - you tend to attribute errors by others to their intrinsic flaws (stupidity, poor judgment, clumsiness) but your own errors to circumstances (I was tired, they tricked me, it was slippery).
Activision and EA settle Infinity Ward lawsuit
While I understand this concept, is it not another consideration that people should receive compensation for their work? In most areas these two goals don't seem to conflict with one another, but in software they seem to, at least a bit, and I don't think I've ever seen something from rms or the fsf addressing this notion. Even if RMS's position is "Freedom is _absolutely_ uncompromisable in any form whatsoever, and the need for freedom takes complete precedence over the ability for people to receive payment for software", I'd like to hear him say that (unless he has and I've never come across it).

I don't think Valve is being unethical in protecting their games. They're not controlling their products because "fuck you consumers, we are evil and wish to suppress your rights", they're doing it (at least I presume) because if they didn't, no one would buy their games and they wouldn't be able to operate. A food vendor can't make a similar claim (well, at least not in as strong a way -- though I guess there are things like secret recipes) to justify hiding things from consumers.
Not being allowed to visit your hometown or college buddies might also be rather inconvenient.
This is one of the reasons that I don't like graphs of governments spending shown as percentages. There is an inherent spin in the chart. If federal spending increases relative to GDP, but the constituent components of the chart remain relatively flat percentage-wise, then it misleads people to interpret the spending as flat, when it isn't.
Because economic power and political power are strongly correlated, and always have been. It's the difference between the typical rich person having 100x more political power and influence in government than the average citizen, and the same wealthy individual having 10,000x more.

Massive gaping holes in income distribution are inherently anti-democratic. That might offend a person's capitalist sensibilities but it doesn't make it any less true.
Nope!

WebRTC has ICE/STUN built into it, which can suffice for traversing most domestic NATs.

It's really cool stuff - join the list!
it spent me 10 minutes to find out how to make link clickable, and finally I found the discouraging result that it's only available in comments. :(
For the curious, I recently took some simple examples I'd seen in node.js

https://github.com/semmypurewal/node-talk-examples/

and translated them to Perl.

https://github.com/sciurus/anyevent-plack-examples

If you're interested in functional programming, I've learned a lot from the parts I've read of Higher-Order Perl.

http://hop.perl.plover.com/
MAO-A Activity Benefits in Autism Treatment
Biomedical autism intervention specialist physician, Dr. Kurt Woeller, talks about Respen-A and its active ingredient Reserpine serving as an MAO-A agonist which is important for the metabolism of certain neurotransmitters.
they won't launch Adsense killer. Don't have stats with me, but seen it yesterday that CPM clickthrough Google vs Fb is 2:1. AdSense is very well positioned since ever. I don't think you could convince an average website owner to switch to FB Ads for 50% less in profits.
WordPress Options Passed To JavaScript #1
Out of curiosity, how were you running PHP?
All due respect to Google, but I give primary credit for this to Danny Hillis. He was gathering and processing the data for this project years before going public with it and before merging with Google. It's yet another Google acquisition that is probably going to be viewed by many Google users as another amazing Google innovation.

"Standing on the shoulders of giants"

Do they still use that slogan?
BSA Puts Out Its Yearly Propaganda About Software Piracy
Well, I'm of course a programming 'Ninja', 'Rocktsa' and 'Gangsta' .. ;-)
I am a back-end developer but I found this tool very helpful if I need to develop any iphone app in the future. Great work!

I am also planning to develop some rails app and thinking if I should be using spinejs or not. Could you give some detail as how long it took to develop this app? How big is the team?

Thanks.
That surprised me as well, I'm sure I've heard him say before that nonfree software is 100% unethical even on a free platform.

Perhaps he realises that having steam + valve games would be a huge net win for desktop linux use.

Even if you had mainly nonfree software , in theory desktop linux would still be quite a free system in the sense that there would be a level playing field amongst software devs.
Regarding the food comparison: Coca Cola is not behaving unethically by protecting their secret recipe. They have a responsibility to share allergen and nutritional information, but they have no obligation to provide sufficient information to reproduce their product.

Extending the analogy to software, if your program accesses personal information, contacts remote servers, inserts itself into the kernel, etc. then you have an ethical obligation to publish that behavior. But there's no ethical obligation to provide the source code, and indeed, providing the source code wouldn't be sufficient to satisfy your other obligations (because it wouldn't be accessible to 99% of users).
"I'm on it, riffraff." "I've found the cheapest flight between lisbon and kiev. Booking is possible thru ryanair.com . I've filled in all necessary details for you, however there is a captcha I can't wrap my cpu around. Also, there are some privacy agreements I'm not authorized to make for you. Could you take over from here?"

Imagine an integrated Siri with those kind of capabilities. It doesn't have to be fully automatic. Letting a secretary do stuff also isn't fully automatic, (s)he's there to optimize your time into doing only the important decisions (sign on agreements, clicking confirm after having seen the price..).
Wow! Looks great for Gridspy ( see http://your.gridspy.co.nz/demo/ )

We need to visualise power usage data in the browser. The more tools we have the better. We're currently using dygraph but this looks much more flexible. I hope that the browser support is good.
Watch Battleship
Film making of Watch Battleship is by Tobias A. Schliessler which is edited by Colby Parker Jr., Billy Rich, and Paul Rubell. This motion picture is distributed by Universal Pictures under Hasbro, Bluegrass Films, and Film 44 which is due to be launch in cinemas on the 3rd of April, 2012 in Tokyo, 11th of April in United Kingdom, and May 18, 2012 in United States.
Electric Imp Inc. has developed a Wi-Fi node in a memory card
[video] Paralysed woman moves robot with her mind - by Nature Video
As Google Tweaks Searches, Some Get Lost in the Web
Oh, I realize it's grown overall, just somehow I had thought it grew as a percentage of the budget as well, which seems not to (yet) be the case. Looks like healthcare spending (Medicare+Medicaid) is the main thing that's been gobbling up a bigger percentage.
Where in that did you see him advocating preventing the user from installing Steam? He's just saying that installing proprietary, DRM'd software reduces your freedom; so if you want to promote freedom, you shouldn't install that software on your computer.

One thing to keep in mind is that most of the time, he doesn't want to force anyone to do anything (other than make sure that code free if it was written under the GPL, even when modifications are made). He just suggests that people who value freedom do or don't do certain things.
Some Random JavaScript Coding Tidbits
The FSF does not dictate what you can and cannot install on your system! They really do "let the user decide".

However, just because you are free to do something does not mean you should. All the FSF is doing is presenting a clear, well-argued and rather balanced argument about whether you should support non-free games on Linux or not.

This is a complex issue and it is treated as a complex issue; all they do is provide their views on what would further free software most.

As to who cares: anybody who supports freedom of software cares. And, while such people are in the minority here (going off the OS poll I saw a while back), they still make up a significant percentage of the audience.
The killer app of Google's knowledge graph is mobile
Mike graduated with an EE degree in 1964. He worked his way up from an entry level job on Wall St to overseeing equity trading / running information systems at Salomon. There was never any reason for him to code given the programmers working for him. It was a way less accessible skill in the 80s.
I am not a big fan of the list archives. It makes reading long threads tough. And its awful when a reply is not quoted properly...
The Pros and Cons of Using Royalty-Free Images
Royalty-free image use in web design and logo design is a commonplace practice these days. However, royalty-free image does not mean it’s 100% free. It simply means that you pay just once for the graphic or photo then you are free to make use of it for as long as you’d like.
A Useful String Manipulation Extension for JavaScript
Why should it be possible to write it all off? These systems seem to be completely in disagreement with each other? Why not keep it less than 50%, just make it harder to write things off O.o
Why Chrome for iOS is a waste of Google's time
people who don't understand what a string is don't read blog posts like this. they'll see the extra info on the side in their search results and say "oh, that's cool", or "change is scary".
And here's another graph of government spending effectiveness:

cato.org/images/testimony/coulson-2-9-11-2.jpg

Imagine if that were

- Price vs. Hard Drive space, OR

- Price vs. Computer Chip

We would be paying more for slower computers!

Yet when the government spends, and produces outcomes like these, the cry is always for "more funding."

To make this concrete, many people on HN are involved in startups.

If you showed prospective investors numbers like the kind in that graph -- for something you produced -- you would be walking away without a check.
Responsive Design = W*nker Design
Actually, that does seem to fit with the rational behind the LGPL. If you're going to write free software that replicates a proprietary program or library's functionality without adding anything new, rms believes you should make it available to the widest possible audience with the hope that more contributions will trickle back. However, I'm also sure I've heard him say that nonfree software is unequivocally unethical even on a free platform. Hell, didn't he say recently something about not being able to justify using proprietary medical equipment to save his life unless he immediately would embark on a quest to produce a free equivalent? Maybe he makes a distinction between trying to free future adopters from total proprietariness (i.e. in the case of games and LGPL'd libraries) versus trying to make people who have already taken the red pill 100% free.
I got a letter from them about "cheap new data plans" that I could get but I didn't open it. But now I know what it really was :(.
India's proposal for government control of Internet to be discussed in Geneva
How to Start Programming - Episode 31 of the Talentopoly Podcast
I think the term for that is Diagnosis Bias.

http://psychcentral.com/lib/2008/sway-the-irresistible-pull-...
That's not really a fair assessment. When people are on facebook they are there to be on facebook. When people are on google they are specifically looking to go somewhere else. Of course they are going to have a higher click-through.

When you are talking about another website, we get to a middle ground that might be looking for something specific and might just be browsing. Having all of facebooks data about someone and giving them targeted ads could very well work better than google at that point on the spectrum.

I'm not saying it will be better, but it's certainly possible, and comparing google's clicks to facebook is comparing apples to oranges. As someone who has several websites using adsense I would certainly be willing to give facebook a trial run and do some A/B testing.
You can do non-blocking I/O without the nested callbacks you have to use for everything in Node. You just fire off a block to a goroutine and then code sequentially there.
Wikipedia Warns Users About Malware Injecting Ads Into Its Pages
Whenever rms has been asked this question he has 2 answers.

1) Custom software development (i.e bespoke client work)
and
2) Crowdsourcing

The custom software argument seems odd, even though the main user (the client) would get the source code and freedom in that instance not only does it promote keeping software locked away as trade secrets, in most cases the actual end users will not get freedom with the software it will really just be senior management.
It's frustrating to see so many disparate efforts.

For example, there's the Peer to Peer Streaming Protocol[1] work occurring in the IETF. Really fantastic stuff! (they basically took Bittorrent, stripped the cruft, and used a Merkle Tree to enable streaming.)

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/ppsp/
Sorry, my post wasn't meant to be an attack on the FSF at all, I assure you.

I care too. But I'm not every user and I'm not prescribing something for someone else. I'm all in favor of (the FSF) informing people and empowering people to choose free software free of DRM, but I'm also not going to imply that using a free OS means forgoing games or other things that might require DRM because developers (think they) need it to protect their IP and make a profit.
The real business of the DIY movement
Ah, cool! I knew he'd gone off to build something new but hadn't realize it was Erlang based. Thanks.
Suspend Background Tabs add-on
I prefer the format at http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616. It has links and it also represents the precise original spec. The version here omits several sections and looks too dense. The link pane on the left is good.
Human brain capabilities differ, just like computer processors. Failing to realize that is stupid.
Please Learn Quantum Mechanics.  
After reading Jeff Atwood Post "Please Don't Learn to Code" @ http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/ I concluded everyone should learn "Quantum Mechanics".

http://www.pbs.org/transistor/science/info/quantum.html

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_quantum_mechanics
Isn't this the crux of infamous "ad hominem" argument: attacking the person instead of their reasoning?

Even smart people sometimes make stupid arguments.

And good arguments can be made by anyone.

It's very difficult to be right 100% of the time.

It's also quite unusual to be wrong 100% of the time.

Evaluate the reasoning, not the author.

Stupid argument, not stupid person.

Look at what Alsup said to Boies.

Still, this is easier said than done.
Infographic: A Mobile Storm in the Cloud
you mean smart people are more open to be proven wrong?
Meet the ‘worst’ 8th grade math teacher in NYC
It's funny, but I've actually used the opposite idea: approaching the grammar of foreign languages like a programming language. Most programming languages are just historic collections of arbitrary rules, most of which make some amount of sense. Most natural languages are the same thing on a much grander scale. Thinking about grammar like this helped me learn it properly.
Twitter, please add support for OAuth2
Could someone please explain to me what uwsgi does? Looking at the main page, it does ... everything! It's a wsgi server, but it looks like the default configuration is still to put it behind another server like nginx or cherokee. Also, nginx for example, has its own mod_wsgi. After reading the docs, I still don't quite understand why I'd want that extra layer between my server and my code.
Oh yeah. I enjoy the work actually as the potential could be rather cute. Ever come across that youuuuuuutuuuuuuubeee site that does a filmstrip-esque effect to the youtube video? Might be neat to add that to this in some genres. edit: http://www.yooouuutuuube.com/v/?width=72&height=72&y...
Slight correction: Microsoft acquired Powerset in 2008.
Lame, that sites doesn't even have your standard Cat Response Codes http://www.flickr.com/photos/girliemac/sets/7215762840946712...
I'd feel better about that graph if it wasn't so horribly spun. The vertical scale is showing a delta from the original value, not the value. It looks like an exponential explosion in spending when it's actually about 3.5x since 1970.

Honestly, if I were an investor and a startup tried to sell me that chart, I'd walk out of the room.

The broader point is valid, though. Education policy in the US sucks. But the details matter a whole lot -- we're spending on the wrong things (tests, security) and not on the things that are known to make a difference (e.g. teacher salary -- make it competetive with other professions and you'll get better teachers). It's far more complicated than the libertarian "Gov'mnt spending bad, hur, hur, hur." line.
Well done, will likely use.

My only criticism right now is that your demo site breaks back button functionality (click on a chart on the landing page and then hit back to see what I mean).
Thank you! I was trying to remember the name but couldn't.
Give it a shot. Look at bignoggins advice above. Go for smaller niches instead of trying to be angry birds. There are lots of very useful things that can be done on a phone or tablet. Make something useful that somebody is likely to type into the search on the app store. It can definitely be repeated.

Also, don't worry about there already being an app that does that. There are 600k+ apps. It's been done. But you can find a niche where the best app isn't that great, or at least where you can do it a little better. Make a great app, and make it look great. Don't try submitting things that look terrible. They will get lost in the noise at this point.
From his book Blink probably.
Isn't it great to have so many wireless carrier choices? :-/