skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why don't you quit reading Hacker News? There's no need for it. In fact, there's no need for using the Internet at all. Hell, why are you even on a computer? All you really need is a warm fur coat and a hatchet. What are you, some kind of hedonist?
What you just clarified is a big improvement. "Would commercial support for Redis be useful to you?"
Don't a lot of those companies hire professional astro-turfers to do their dirty work anyway?

Besides, how hard is it to point to a proxy that forwards to the spam site?
I understand that drones make aerial surveillance much cheaper and easier, but why specify drone surveillance and not aerial surveillance in general?

It bothers me that there is such a fear around drones. Please remember that many people would like to use them for far less nefarious purposes - real estate photography, farming, etc.
...and all this could have been avoided if the moderators used any common sense in editing titles, rather than silently editing so many to be useless and never responding to comments about it. You had plenty of chances before this blew up. Great job.
Bah. The site's owners can bite my shiny /etc/hosts file. I'm sure they won't miss me at all.
That is properly why YCs rejection letter are so nice. Otherwise too many people would get that bit of extra fuck you moral boost (and as PG keeps pointing, start ups are run on morale).
Why can't they do both and offer a physical product (e.g. envelope with CD key inside) with a "free" digital download option?
There is very little conditional code in the Lua sources, we do set a different theme as needed for Retina though, and yes .. at this point, we're building the MOAI host and integrating sources essentially at the push of a button - our buildserver checks out the Lua project, bundles it into .apk / .ipa files, and off it goes. It really is genius.

We've had to extend the host a bit, too. Its not too hard to do that, and in fact the point is that if you've implemented a certain feature natively, already, for either Android or iOS targets, then you can easily do the same for the MOAI host and then expose it to the Lua VM layer for ease of development within the Lua-side of the MOAI framework. I think this is a really nice, comfortable way to solve the platform issues - at least, for certain classes of application. It remains to be seen, yet, whether MOAI can do utility apps or is relegated to a game eco-system, but in fact there are interesting developments occurring in the realm of using MOAI for GUI-style development. This is really exciting.
Quite possibly you're right on both accounts. The interesting thing to me is that drones on domestic soil (and the TSA, another one of Rand's issues) has been around for years. Any politician could have made it an issue and introduced legislation along these lines at any point in time, and would have raised their profile in doing so.

But they didn't. They've been silent. Where's the legislation to repeal the PATRIOT ACT? I didn't see any, but instead its been expanded and extended.

Why isn't [pick-your-favorite-politician] vowing to take a stand against these evil things?

I wish Rand doing this were not at all news because there were 200+ people on capital hill raising similar issues and taking a stand against violations of people's rights.
Just curious -- is the ban on meta-discussion spelled out anywhere? I didn't see it in a cursory glance at the guidelines. It seems slightly ironic to me that a site originated by a LISP hacker would ban meta-anything. ;)
I actually like this decision, as far as I can tell the extent of it.

It absolutely destroys the incentive to game the system, at least most of the current methods of cheating.

It could sparks some interesting offensive spamming of competitor's sites though.
me and my friends used to play the game a lot which meant that we were much more skilled than the average player. The result of this was that admins would often accuse us of cheating (we weren't) simply because our kill/death ratio was so much better than anybody elses

I have a few friends who were often accused of cheating in Counter Strike Source and Call of Duty even though they definitely weren't.
Are open APIs overtaking open source?
I'm curious how long some of you have been around for, when you're saying things like "discussion of HN isn't allowed".

There are usually lengthy discussions about stuff every time something about the site changes.

There was a lot of discussion about comment vote counts, for instance. That is "discussing the community".
Personally I've never understood the "if you don't like it you can fk off!" response to constructive criticism.
Thanks :-). What can we do to make Olark even better for you?
I do all of this with just vim and some tools, and I do it with any language, any text, anywhere on any machine in and OS without having to buy anything from anyone and I can change how all of it works any time.
Data-mining survey responses: how do people tend to usually answer questions?
Looks great! Somewhat similar to what intercom.io is doing, but I think Olark is further ahead on the chat technology. I'll be interesting to see how this sector plays out!
> One issue though: You had better keep that SSD backed up! 'cause if the machine goes south, you have no way of accessing your data unless someone comes out with a apple propretary card egd to sata adapter.

Target Disk mode to the rescue [1]. Firewire not needed, thunderbolt is supported now (so you'll need a t-bolt enabled enclosure or drive).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_Disk_Mode
I think that is a given: Once you've done something, you intrinsically know how to do it.

More interestingly, to what degree does our knowledge play on our ability to see new ideas? Do our brains ignore the seemingly impossible because it seems impossible? Could someone have imagined Facebook before computers and the internet were invented, for example? Do the ideas come first, and then one set out to figure out how to make it work, like as it appears to happen in science fiction? Or are those ideas already based on working knowledge of what is reasonably possible with not-so-far-off technology?
I don't know the status of the legislation but I heard that a bill was introduced (and possibly passed) that criminalized use of drones by private entities, allowing only government to use them.

So, the political position seems to be that its ok for spying, but not ok for mapping farmland or photography.
CSS Piffle Pitchdeck
I really hope you see the irony at some point that you're complaining about social elements in an inherently social page element: the comments section.

And I didn't downvote your original comment, so I have no idea what you're talking about. Then again, I don't understand why people are sensitive about fake internet points to begin with.
That wasn't even the first post attempting to discuss it. In an earlier one (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4102907) PG posted a reason for the ban (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4103210), then the thread he posted it on was killed.
FYI, the "immature moderator" you are referring to was apparently pg himself. I'm also a bit surprised at his behavior.
> Many have speculated that Rand is angling for the VP nomination by positioning himself as Romney's biggest competitor for 2016 (if Romney wins)

Who are these "Many" and what meds are they on? These people are suggesting that if Romney wins in 2012 and doesn't choose Rand Paul as VP then Rand Paul is going to run against him in 2016... and be a serious threat?
Anyone else notice that this post was dead for a few minutes, just a few minutes ago? Seems it is back now...

Ok, and now it's dead again. Looks like it only came back for a few minutes and in those few minutes PG posted...
Is this just proactive chat which snapengage already offers?
Is it just me or did this get post just get banned for a few minutes and then return?! Admins can't make up their minds now? Regardless, glad to see it back.

Update: Yup, had the dead one in another tab still and now it's back. For now...

Update 2: It's now dead again. It looks like it only came back for about five minutes.

Update 3: And it's back again. Really wish I had put times on my updates now. Oh well. I wonder how long it will take until it gets pulled yet again.
I'm talking about the appstores/repo's as technical features of an installed operating system base. We in Linux have had the ability to easily access app-store catalogs for years; Apple have built theirs relatively recently in comparison.

And the fact that there has been free as in beer, and open source 'walled gardens' is exactly the point I'm making: Sharp could've had an app store in the 90's, they already had the repository and just needed to add a customer element; this is the only new thing Apple has added to the game. Repo's were old hat until it morphed into Appstores.
The current problem with hacker news is that every fucking discussion becomes meta and normal comments are buried. I'd be happy if there were a couple "Discuss HN" threads around, because then it would be less prone to leak out across the rest of the site.

We need a pressure release valve somewhere.
I remember that that discussion was initiated by pg, so it was an implicitly "ok" thing to discuss. Double standard?
Flawed logic again. They have not given away their time, they get paid for their time, like every other business out there. The more it sells, the better they get paid. They are not performing community service, they SELL stuff. SELLING stuff is not philanthropy, no matter how useful the product is.

Sure, they could go on vacation 200 days a year but the fact that some don't doesn't mean that they are philanthropic, it just means that they like their work or they get off on running a big company, or some other reason.

Sorry, you still have not managed to prove Jobs was a philanthropist, and you will not be able to to so by using sophisms. Try again.
I only banned him while I was waiting for a reply to the email I sent him. In fact I thought I'd already unbanned him, though I noticed just now that he was still banned. What a tempest in a teapot.

Incidentally, this post and its predecessors illustrate perfectly why the site guidelines ask users to contact us about problems with moderation rather than posting on the site about them. Though nearly empty of content, they get upvoted faster than anything else.
It will be flagged, therefore deleted, I bet, due to people disliking its tone.

It's the community doing it though, not pg.
What does success look like, really?
Basically, this is why automatic matchmaking such as what we find in CS:GO is better than a server browser.
To be very clear rhe one on the left defines, the one on the right uses.
I tend to post to reddit from my website once every few weeks when the article is specifically good and "redditable". I would hope that is not a potential ban target.

What probably is happening is that theatlantic / businessweek had a group of up voters that they paid (staff) that would constantly manipulate the voting.
For instance, Paul Graham personally hellbanned Maciej Ceglowski for calling Sebastian Marshall a "prolix douchebag".

No I didn't. If I had, his comments after that would be dead.

Edit: tptacek points out that he was briefly banned, though not long enough to cause any of his comments to be killed.
If it's not a community then it shouldn't have usernames, a comments section, or trackable karma. Just reduce it to submitting and voting on links.
Are you sure? That's what I thought at first, but was the .where form even available in versions before 3.0?
confirmed and +1. During my ban emailing info@ did not help. Emailing PG did.
It warms my heart to hear that :) Chat has built so many relationships for us too, and you just get much richer feedback (or praise!) from a "real" back-and-forth discussion with a customer.
Huh, I'll have to check the licenses on some of the software included, and see if they allow for the code to be sold as part of a package.
If we're not a community, why not remove the ability to comment altogether?
Agreed, we are embedding chromium in our desktop apps. Here we can depend fully on the features this particular browser version supports.

Cross browser support is not always necessary.
Micropayments do not scale.

The cost of my deciding whether or not an article is worth whatever the cost of reading it is, let alone the huge privacy invasion that per-article pricing implies (tying information content and payment to a single user) is a non-starter for all but a very few sites.

That leaves us with accompanying advertising, patronage, syndication, content-as-promotion (propaganda/advertising), and self-publishing.

"Accompanying advertising" is the existing model of display or other ads accompanying content. This works for some sites, but not particularly well, and there are concerns in the mobile space.

"Patronage" is essentially sponsorship of work, as fine art patronage was fairly common in the past.

"Syndication" would require a model of mechanical payments and essentially a tax-like funding stream (part of your monthly data plan) from which content providers are paid.

"Content-as-promotion" is where the initiative for creating content is its own utility in promoting the commercial or ideological goals of the author. Bands promoting live acts, political or religious organizations.

"Self-publishing" is essentially vanity publishing -- where many blogs are (possibly a special case of content as promotion).

Of this list, the syndication model is the only one I see as having strong viable economic potential for general works, though it requires the creation of a syndicate. Small-scale syndicates, in the form of paywall/paygate operators could be the start of this -- major periodical publishers (NY Times, Murdoch/Dow Jones), Apple, Amazon, eBay. But for general content, I'd see a mix of a mechanical reproduction right, a flat (or very simply tiered) level of content payments, and what would amount to an all-you-can-eat or bandwidth-based scheme through a data service provider or independent syndicate provider. It's a leaky system, but might just work.
Rand did give a pretty good speech against the renewal of the PATRIOT ACT the last time it was up for a vote. I think it was about two years ago.
Telling people like you your faults is like talking to a brick wall. Why bother? I don't blame them for lying.
What does it tell you? I am trying to understand what you mean. Do you believe every person the author met over the age of 50 is in fact capable of building compelling social products, and that the author has misjudged them?
Good question! We already had a feature called "greeter" that was on par with snapengage's proactive chat. Targeting is something bigger.

Targeted chat lets you take a variety of actions other than just automatically starting conversations (label visitor, hide chatbox, show chatbox, route to operator/group) based on a wider variety of conditions about the user (too many to list here).

Take it for a spin and let me know if you have any more questions! Always happy to help.
Using the Deviare hook engine to control the speed of web and desktop videos
> It's hard to distinguish conservative cheaters from good players.

True, but getting the flagrant ones is usually enough so that in any given game the average player does not have to deal with cheating.
The response makes perfect sense when the constructive criticism will never be taken into account.
Do you have any references for that? That sounds rather weird since I know in university back in 2006/2007 probably about 90% of the student population had macs. Coffee shops have similarly been dominated by them for at least 5 years now.
I'm a big fan of intuitive learning and have mixed feelings too (downloading the game now to try it out). Some thoughts

1) Certain basics skills ("spelling and grammar") are needed to express/understand higher-level ideas (literature, poetry). Games help practice them. (Fear: gamification hurts internal motivation)

2) Fear: Assumption that "algebra-like" lessons automatically help algebra understanding. Does typing help piano playing? It's easy to assume both "use your fingers" and must correlate.

3) Fear: Reinforcement that math is about moving symbols around. We're trying to express ideas, symbols are their serialization. There's a "rule" that the same card must be added to both sides. We know it's to balance the equation. Does the kid know? What if the rule was to add the card twice to one side, and 0 times to the other? Why does one rule but not the other make sense?

I'm excited that this helps practice basic skills, but am afraid of ending up with a Chinese-room situation where we can manipulate symbols but intuit nothing. We already have hordes of calculus "graduates" who vaguely remember "x^n... drop the n, make the exponent n-1"... and what of it? Did it shift their perspective?

Update: After thinking more, I think the game is a good thing overall. For a young child (5, etc.) this game is giving them a new mental model of the world. Later on, when they learn arithmetic, and so on, it can be shown how this mental model corresponds to the rules. Giving children new analogies to work with is a good thing.
Best of luck to him, but this really isn't Hacker News (flagged).
It's an elegant solution. In 1998, as a freshman in college, we kicked a lot of ass on Tribes. By my sophomore year, the hacks had completely ruined the game. Frankly, it inspired one of my teammates to go into CS so that he could "hack back."
Uh, no. Actually at least one of those discussions where initiated by me.
This actually exists, sort of: http://pyrasite.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html

I've done this manually a few times, but with foresight attaching signal handlers that open up a port or dump stack (a la `jstack`) is usually less finicky.
How to handle applying for one position, while getting an alternative offer
I wish they gave more information.

Is the effect reversible? How long does it take for a persons stroke risk to go back to normal if they start sleeping more? What if I get 5 hours of sleep five nights a week, but 10 hours each of the other two nights?
They could just pass a bill saying the Government is not allowed to use drone surveillance, and they can't get private companies to do it for them either.

Otherwise companies (and people?) are allowed to use drones.
Right at four years ago this week: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=219081. The best part is this meta discussion was a top five item for the week. Times change though...
Why Instagram Took Off and Your Startup Hasn’t
I actually know that Cheong fellow and have visited him and his family in Asia.

I know exactly what sort of work he does, and frankly, I'm not sure what he did wrong.
You just fill in your address information in your publisher profile, and they'll mail you a check by the end of July.
Heh... hopefully you got the spirit of my reply, unlike some people in this thread.
The single most common complaint on Reddit about Reddit is its lack of original content. "Repost!" would be the rallying cry of Redditors, if ever there was one. This move takes those people who do create original content, and throws them out on their collective asses.

Rather than throw out OC, why not throw out the actual rule breakers? Those who manipulate Reddit by illicitly acquiring votes should be the target of anti-spam measures, not simply those who submit their own content.
Right, because every startup is Worth It (TM l'Oreal). :P

Of course, you're also right - I don't think this guy is a very effective VC at this point. Some of his points seemed completely disconnected.
But a person hand-waving or getting nervous on an important topic is a great flag to look for, don't you think?
Heh. I did none of the bizdev, which really made the difference with getting hipmunk off the ground (and is a unique startup proposition). If you wanna know about my marketing/PR brandbuilding, just watch my class on Making Something People Love: http://generalassemb.ly/start/fundamentals-of-entrepreneursh...
>CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly suggested that the higher resolution Retina displays of the new iPad and forthcoming Macbook Pro computers would increase consumption of network bandwidth, thus slowing performance of corporate networks. Higher resolution screens do not in and of themselves consume more network bandwidth. Some analysts have suggested that owners of devices with high-resolution screens will likely consume more video and HD video, which would result in higher bandwidth consumption. This article has been modified to reflect this change.

Still a stretch in my opinion.
What's your business and what kind of chats are you having?
Tom Duff on shared libraries
Ok, so here's the poll created by PG 1.5 years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039

If you have a submission that's earlier than that, then I'm wrong.
And suddenly the formal "UX research" is out of the picture - now that was quick.

irony ... complaining about social elements in an inherently social page element: the comments section.

That statement makes no sense. So you wouldn't mind HN adding all sorts of widgets, because it was social to begin with?

Further if you read the thread again you'll notice that nowhere did I complain about social elements per se.
Ask HN: Python as a Trading Platform
Anyone here have experience using Python to develop, simulate, and run trading strategies? I am currently an R user that uses a third party software to interact with different exchanges.
Scaling is the issue I have with things like Olark. One-to-one chat is an expensive way to get customers. Does anyone have experiences on the effectiveness and cost of customer acquisition using something like Olark?

[Let me say I love the concept of Olark. I'm just not sure how it plays out in practice.]
BusinessWeek.com, Phys.org, ScienceDaily.com, TheAtlantic.com are all banned sitewide?

The Atlantic is a pretty well-respected publication, as is BusinessWeek. Why a content aggregator would ban actual content is beyond me.
It may sound foolish, but I'm not too worried about that.
The Retina MacBook Pro as seen by a lifelong Windows PC user
Are you a Heroku customer? I am, and I understand everything they said, and I appreciate that they went into detail about what happened.
I am not happy with the situation either, but pg states he banned him only temporarily while awaiting an email reply:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108293
Financial Strategies for Lean Startups from Superangel Boris Wertz
I can only say the same. Bought a mighty expensive Sony netbook only to figure out that this integrated PowerVR graphics chip is a total disaster. In Windows and much more in Linux, where it is 1. a pain to even bring to work and 2. so slow that it's barely usable.

I must say i am really disappointed by Intel, which (in my oppinion) had and have great Linux support in their products. But not in this one.

Stay away from Atoms with non-Intel Graphics.
The difference is that manned aerial surveillance (i.e. police helicopters and the occasional plane) is sufficiently expensive that they only do it occasionally. If there's a police helicopter in the air it's probably doing some specific task.

The fear is that drone surveillance could become sufficiently cheap that the police could have a constant fleet of drones circling over the city and capable of looking at anything at a moment's notice.
He's completely right.