skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Totally agreed. Also, even if you don't agree with Ron Paul, how can you not applaud a Congressperson who clearly outlines their thinking on federal issues? I wish that all Congresspeople would consider this criteria before voting on federal legislation:

1. Is this a core function of the federal government?

2. Does it execute Constitutionally defined duties?

3. Does it protect Constitutionally defined rights?

4. Does it protect property rights?

5. Does it protect individual rights?

6. If the federal government does not do this, will others?

7. Will this policy or regulation allow the market to decide outcomes or will it distort themarket for political ends?

8. Is this policy or regulation clear and specific, with defined metrics and limitations?
I don't think briandear was suggesting that he discovered something that Kim Dotcom or his council missed. I'm sure they understand what's going on... but much of the commentary about this case seems to be based on the misunderstanding that Kim Dotcom's guilt or innocence is currently being evaluated by the court.
There are a number of things you can do (which most other posts are covering) but there is one I want to focus on: internships.

If you are in the financial situation to do so (especially if you are still in school) find an (people won't like me saying this) unpaid internship. At 17, in high school, living in the middle of nowhere, I put up my resume (with very little web development skills) on HackerNews saying I would work for free, remotely, about 8 hours a week. I got 10 responses. I took one doing Ruby on Rails with an organization that did pair programming exclusively and I learned more than I did in years of Java classes. With this training, I was able to find a two month paid internship in Ruby on Rails this summer, and hopefully this chain will continue upward into jobs. I cannot explain the value of on-the-job learning and experience, and if an unpaid internship is what it takes to get you there, I really recommend it.

In the meantime:
-Learn git inside and out if you don't know it
-Pursue a web development framework
-If you have programmer friends, get together and code with them. Productive people make you more productive.
-Whatever you do, put yourself out there. The more you are out there, the more opportunities will come your way.
To what degree have they secured even the initial $6 billion?
I would be just as impressed with a project that aimed to establish a similar colony on the moon, and far less skeptical.
I'm not sure that protection an individuals freedom to express themselves necessarily entails protection of the transport of encodings of that expression - I would rather see that latter protection made explicit.
How a bathroom usability post got written without a reference to three seashells, I'll never know.
Bootstrapping isn’t for the faint of heart
This is an important question for software development in general. I find it interesting to see just how much simple tasks (say parsing data and combining it with other data) results in significant improvements in user experience.

I am not in the "everyone should learn to code" camp, but I sometimes think that everyone should know a few standard Unix command line tools.

Maybe the link between effort and economic gain will balance back out sometime. Maybe right now is just one of those boom times in history and useful tool creators are in position to reap the benefits.
Looks very interesting - but please, some audio, anything. I hope this isn't the final cut.
Doing it Wrong - What Real Hacker Hostels Would Look Like
It is nice to see a new analogy regarding the social issues of starting a social site. Not so happy with the conclusion. Not convinced he has the problem space figured out, thus not convinced he knows yet how to solve it. Still, planning on sending the link to myself.
This looks pretty scary on Windows Phone 7. Anybody else getting chunks of video memory all over the page? (HTC Arrive).
Stunning Progress in Technology Brings The Death of Unskilled Labor
That show is awesome, be warned if you download it you will spend the weekend glued to the computer watching it :) I wish there was something more recent in the same vein.
The Science of Compassion
Octave core developer here.

It is true that we have a lot of trouble attracting new contributors. Most of our users keep demanding features that seem to us unimportant but to them are all the world: a GUI ("whatever for?", we think. "Use a real text editor!"), a JIT compiler ("here's a nickle, get better vectorised code, kid"), perfect Matlab compatibility (a never-ending chase, not very fun, in which we must always be behind).

Of these, we're finally slowly listening to our users. Two of our current three GSoC students are working on a GUI and a JIT compiler respectively. I have wild hope that this will attract more users and developers. I'm also currently hosting an Octave conference in a few days towards this goal:

http://www.octave.org/wiki/index.php?title=OctConf_2012

By the way, Octave is GNU (so is R, supposedly), so we're not really open source; we're free. ;-)

I don't know why Octave hasn't been able to replicate R's success. I don't know if R's not really being GNU despite in name has something to it (R developers routinely try to find new ways to get around the GPL and link R to non-free code, and I don't doubt that this linking to Oracle's database is another example of that). I don't know if it's just that a lot of people with big money care more about statistics and R than they care about Octave (banks and brokers for R, electrical and civil engineers for Otave). Maybe our code sucks more than R's.

Do you have any suggestion how to make Octave the standard instead of Matlab? The recent gratis classes that emerged from Stanford gave Octave a lot of publicity. Do you have any suggestion of what else we might do?
One distinction philosophers make is "positive" (freedom of) vs. "negative" (freedom from) liberty.

If you take this as the former, then perhaps I agree. But I suspect this was intended to be the latter -- i.e. freedom from ignorance.
Fwiw: I am on an android and can't get it to play, which is a shame because I would really like to see it. My mom sews beautifully. I have an aunt who crochets, etc. I would love to see this.
Show HN: Facebook Messenger for OSX [Open source]
just an article of "One Ring to rule them all" phenomenon. Entire app industry contains lots of different usage scenarios. It is literally impossible for a platform/library to fit all type of requirements.
I have a hard time seeing any benefit to colonizing Mars without coupling it with a large-scale attempt at terraforming. If we're going to just put a domed colony somewhere, the moon makes far more sense.

I'm much more optimistic about putting more robots in space, such as Planetary Resources is working towards. As it becomes easier and cheaper to extend our virtual fingers outside our gravity well, we can eventually create places that are truly habitable for humans, and which sustainably scale.
Unofficial Y Combinator Company List
Context: I just open sourced this. I was working on this some months ago but since I started another project I have no time right now to be very active with this project. Feel free to do whatever you want. It's not finished AT ALL
If the government gives up any and all control over the internet, then they simply cede it to the ISPs and carriers; they win by default simply because our access must go through them.

I don't want to be paying extra to access certain popular services, or to be rate-limited while accessing a service that my own ISP owns an alternative to. And that's only the tip of the iceberg.

That said, I can benefit in some areas that would no longer exist with government-enforced net neutrality. For example, here in the UK BT offers an unlimited broadband deal with 'exclusions' -- without them I suspect there would have to be bandwidth caps:

"We want to give everyone the best possible speeds at all times, so we only manage speeds on P2P (peer-to-peer) file sharing networks at peak times. All other broadband use isn't affected – and there's no limit to how much you can download." -- from the products and services page on BT.com.
Yeah, I've taken that tack "the more sensational the title, the better I'm off reading the commentary to the submission to satisfy my curiosity rather than clicking through the link and rewarding a hypeman/bullshitter."
You're talking about the supply side of the supply/demand equation. Essentially, the greater the supply of something, the lower the price one can charge for it. Reducing the cost of production effectively increases the supply, so it ultimately reduces the price as well.

Ultimately, what this means is that the competition will be harsher and that will drive the prices down. This won't drive down the value of the mobile market in general, just the prices of individual apps (though they are already fairly low.) In fact, generally when the supply goes up, the total income of the industry as a whole goes up as well because marginal consumers will now participate due to lower prices.
I would primarily use imap, but good to know. thanks!
How does a hard freeze force you to rebuild your dev env?
Tiny Wings 2 Teaser Video
"And my point is that it doesn't sound like it was a really major failure. The way the article is written sounds like emo drama making a mountain of a molehill."

I think I do understand your point of view, could be wrong, but in summary it sounds like "hey things could be way worse, get over it."

The challenge I have is that while it is true that this particular problem for the OP was less 'problem' than say 'losing your hands in a freak wood chipper accident', the author was still trying to glean some life lessons from it. The particular lesson they were focused on was the need to have priorities come from inside rather than outside.

You've had a harder time of it than the OP, but that doesn't change the lesson that they learned, or the significance of learning it.
I suspect it's an ancient instinct. There is evolutionary utility in joining whatever one perceives as the winning side, and adapting yourself to the tribe.
Any chance of getting a version that recognizes a url, email, twitter handle, etc. and makes them clickable? Goodbye QR codes!
Something constructive I'd like to hear from Netflix is a bit about what it is all those cloud instances actually do :-)

My understanding: Streaming is offloaded to a CDN. The content & user databases change very slowly and thus are very amenable to caching. 'Current position' syncing is very non-critical and so can be done with e.g. writes to independent Redis instances (or even memcache - it really isn't very important!) Ratings, recommendations and the queue seem like the tricky ones, and while I don't think the throughput is particularly high, because they are all per-user this is "trivially shardable" if you do outgrow a single SQL database.

The big question for me is understanding why streaming breaks, because that should all be served from systems that use read-only data? (where read-only = cacheable for at least a day without significant negative consequences)

I think a better understanding of Netflix's technical challenges would serve everyone well here!
Revision Control Systems, Part 2: Working with Subversion 
Subversion is one of the most popular revision control software systems that is widely used among commercial and open-source software developers today. In this tutorial, Jordan Dimov explains the basics of working with SVN and gives pointers to additional resources.
On the other hand, last I heard, porn tends to make money no matter how badly/quickly done. But perhaps that has changed in the years since I took economic geography.
Founder Resentment: How to Avoid It
As someone who was once banned from the Internet by the US gov't[1], I actually agree with you. People throw around terms like "human right" without knowing what it means. If access to the Internet is a human right, that means every human in the world should be able to demand access to the Internet?

I think the Internet absolutely should receive First Amendment protection in the US (and the US Supreme Court agrees), but calling it a human right doesn't seem to agree with the definition[2]. I'd love to hear arguments for the other side.

Note that this doesn't mean I think governments should be able to actively deny individuals access to the Internet, but a Constitutional right is not the same as a human right.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lamprecht

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights
Pretty awesome. I can see this technology displacing CDNs in the future... everybody is a edge node!

The plugin downloader is still a large barrier to entry, though.What I'd really like to see is a parallel protocol to BitTorrent that's basically BitTorrent over WebSockets. Consider an update to Vuze, uTorrent, Transmission, and all the other clients, that added a simple WebSocket server. Now, Alice's web browser will never be able to connect to Bob's web browser directly (at least in the foreseeable future), but they could conceivably both connect to Charlie's full client if Charlie was running this server. And the trackers would need to be updated to serve Charlie's address to Alice and Bob (or HTTP proxies to the trackers would need to be developed), but then Alice and Bob could start building the DHT in their LocalStorages. I'm sure I'm missing a lot of technical challenges, but I think this might be feasible.
Are you running that on a single server? Care to share the specs?
The concept reminds me of Platypus, a side scroller from olden days.

The author all the elements from modeling clay, aka plasticine, but lost most of his clay in an apartment fire and ended up mushing all the colors together in one ugly grey blob to make enough to make one model at a time, photograph it, and the color it in software.

As time consuming as that sounds, I'm sure my children and I spent more time enjoying it.

Some pictures: http://www.officialplatypusgame.co.uk/media.asp

The story of the fire: http://www.squashysoftware.com/makingplatypus2.php
For better or worse, there are employers and fields where obtaining a certification is an important signalling mechanism.

Carefully consider whether or not a Linux administration gig is one of those - I personally don't know. I know in a search for a senior Linux sysadmin at my workplace, certification has not been mentioned at all.

In other areas, particularly high-end customer support gigs in network hardware (e.g., supporting Cisco and/or Juniper gear), certifications like the CCIE are a de-facto requirement for many. Oracle work used to be this way, especially for consultants, but I don't know if that is still true.

In a more general sense, self-study and the time investment in getting certifications has intrinsic worth. Just don't think magically adding a cert tag to your resume will result in a magic increase in professional opportunities and pay.

Work on building your experience portfolio. If you want to use a certification as part of that, I don't think anyone should tell you not to.
DARPA, NSF and to a lesser extent, CERN and the governments of Britain and France.

It is hard to identify significant influences on the Internet by entrepreneurs or private firms (excepting work done on government contracts) before 1992. The most influential one I can think of is the decision by Sun Microsystems in the mid-1980s to include a TCP/IP stack and basic internet client software with every workstation at no extra charge -- which was probably responsible for the biggest increase in the number of people with access to email in the 1980s -- but even there, doing so would not have occurred to Sun if the US government had not contracted with UC Berkeley to add those things to BSD.

Summary: although entrepreneurs and the market had dramatic effects on the internet after 1992, the internet of 1992 was the result mainly of substantial spending by the US government every year for thirty years leading up to 1992.

And the internet of 1992 was already very compelling and useful to those willing to master the "text-mode" (no graphical UIs) software used to access it.
I wrote up a little explanation of how it works here https://gist.github.com/3039247
Gitter: Toward Twitter on Git(hub)
> Spy.prototype = new Person();

Don't do it that way. If the Person constructor assigns any data, for example an array, that data will be shared with all instances of Spy. Most likely you don't want that. Instead call the Person constructor within the Spy constructor:

function Spy() {
Person.apply(this, arguments);
}

Spy.prototype = Person.prototype;
Spy.prototype.constructor = Spy;
Thunderbird: Stability and Community Innovation
Anyone knows how Parse's server side is done ? By looking at their API i would say something like AWS + MongoDB, but they don't seem to have known the same kind of problems as Heroku when Amazon went down the other day. So maybe they're using else. Anyone ?
The thing is, even the ESR is only supported for about a year before being completely cut off in favour of a new ESR that has only been available for about 6-12 weeks at that point.

There are some large businesses out there who run the same software foundation for a decade or more, not least because just evaluating a new version of something critical like an operating system or web browser can be a huge exercise if you're running hundreds of in-house tools on top of them.

While I think it's unrealistic to expect an OSS browser to provide ongoing support for that long, if Mozilla want their product to be taken seriously by enterprise customers then I suspect they're going to need a lot more than a year of security fixes and a lot more than 6-12 weeks of overlap when they want to force an upgrade. It would be interesting to know whether in reality they have gained much from offering the first ESR (which is already coming to end-of-life) in terms of acceptance of the rapid release schedule in larger organisations. Maybe there is a certain size of organisation that is flexible enough to take advantage of a yearly update but can't take the overheads of stuff breaking every six weeks.
Just who is going to use violence against whom so that whose rights are not violated?
Right, totally. If it looks and feels good, it doesn't matter if it never turns a profit for me. It'd be great, mind you, but it's more important to me as a demonstration of what I can do rather than a means to generate income.
Don't study/do either of those, but was thinking the same thing. Keyboard nav would be great.
"If you need a paycheck to not starve, then your job should be pretty darn important to you whether you like it or not."

This is what I suspected you meant by "importance". Something that you are forced to make important, not important by choice.
And regarding my work, there's no reason for me to look for other work. I love my job. And also love some other activities I do during my day. But my job is not more important.

I know its hard to change a point of view. I just wanted to know where you are coming from. And regarding bowing out, all you need to do is stop responding.
As far as I am concerned, I saw a comment, was curious about the why, and prodded a little. It was a good discussion. Thanks for that and good luck.
The Importance of Right-Left-Up-Down Standards in Product Design
I dont work for WP.

I bought a pair of WP glasses and my wife purchased a pair of sunglasses. Great glasses, price and service. Very satisfied.
They even have a one year return policy if they get scratched. They fit well and are stylish. The lenses have scratch protection and UV protection.
For $95 I might even buy a new pair though I dont need them.
They are high quality frames and lenses like designer level. Given we were about to pay 300-500 for new glasses we feel like we won the lottery.

I highly recommend WP it is a steal.
Critical to your argument is the idea that standing in line is a service someone can charge for. It makes no sense when tickets are sold online 24/7 rather than out a window at a particular physical location. There is no line and no inconvenience to pay someone else to endure.
The Business Insider can be a bit on the sensationalist side. I don't want to say tabloid but they're around TechCrunch levels of overexaggeration.
No, that isn't my attitude at all. But he compares himself to Ghandi and, in comparison, finds himself a failure for attending a meeting. If he learned something, good for him. But I doubt the time he took away from his family really was as significant as he is making it out to be. I wonder if he could have made up for the hour or more loss by, say, writing one less blog post. And I wonder did he really truly learn his lesson or is this overdramatization of the event a continuation of his bad habit.

But have an upvote for attempting to genuinely engage me in conversation in spite of your unfortunate impression that my attitude about this is somehow an ugly thing.
Indeed, I ship internationally!

`:e` and `:E` are separate commands; `;e` stands for `:edit` and only opens a directory explorer if you pass it a directory. Otherwise it just opens the file.
The problem with your suggestion is that they will have to maintain two codebases and support releases for the classic Firefox by proving security patches to them.

Not to mention more headaches for web developers as yet another browser shows up with its own bugs, differing support for standards like HTML5 and CSS3 etc.
`let` is drafted for ECMAScript 6.
On net neutrality, this isn't surprising and is in my view quite respectable. In Washington DC, where the legislators Paul operate, calls for 'net neutrality' typically mean putting some federal agency (like the FCC) in charge of what's truly 'neutral' and allowed.

The FCC manages licenses for the exercise of free speech over broadcast media. It fines disapproved speech. It dictates that telecom equipment be wiretap-friendly. It's a board of 5 political appointees not apportioned by vote or region, but split between the two national political parties. The FCC could never be a friend of true 'neutrality', but rather what the national political establishment finds helpful.

Even if initially adopted in the spirit of the 'nondiscriminatory transit' principle, after a few years you should expect 'network neutrality' to mean 'safe for children', 'copyright-protecting', 'wiretap-friendly', 'with set-asides for underrepresented viewpoints', and 'in compliance with campaign finance laws'. After all, it's not a 'neutral' net if it's filled with piracy, pornography, untappable criminal chat, ethnic/gender-insensitivity, and unregistered political activity. That's downright hostile to law-abiding Americans and their bipartisan protectors at the FCC!

There's one small, vague and convoluted mention in the Paul statement about the 'public domain'. It reads roughly:

According to them [government attempts to control and regulate competition, infrastructure, privacy and intellectual property]...
Private property rights on the Internet should exist in limited fashion or not at all, and what is considered to be in the public domain should be greatly expanded.

That mention isn't even necessarily referring to the rigorous intellectual property notion of 'public domain' (meaning non-copyrighted). It seems more the colloquial notion of 'public domain' as 'that which the government manages, like parks and roads and government buildings'. In order to ridicule this, Doctorow has to spin Masnick, who is himself heavily spinning the Pauls. So that one vague mention becomes instead...

• for Masnick, "The Public Domain [is really an] Evil Collectivist Plot"

• for Doctorow, "Rand and Ron Paul denounce... the public domain"

This is a signature move of politics and click-grabbing headline-escalation. Create the an unfair, unfavorable, heavily-spun summarization of someone's views. Credit that summarization to the original source as if they'd said exactly that. Publicize to get a reaction. Collect the traffic-boosting glory!