skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"push the boundaries of game development on all platforms."

- funny thing for Microsoft to say, no? I thought they were scared of denting Windows' relevance. Anyone know what their strategy is with this?
Pull request to remove sexist remark from CodeIgniter generates controversy.
I don't think the concern is that they've gone ad-crazy to date, it's that going ad-crazy appears to be the direction they're moving in going forward. Hence the need to push out third-party clients -- for ads to work, they need the only portal you view Twitter through to be owned by Twitter. (A third party can just strip out the ads.)
Yeah, that sounds like a fair strategy, except that lots of nice things using KVO are now really hard because if you go online/offline you would be switching between different NSManagedObjects in different contexts. (In practice, we rarely use NSFetchRequests because our usage patterns fit well into the object graph, thus we use lots of KVO).

The two solutions would be A) make a NSManagedObject proxy class that actually proxies between the two NSManagedObject instances in different contexts (and maybe handle the replication here as well), or B) use two different NSPersistantStores in one context - but I cannot, for the life of me figure out how CoreData resolves conflicts between different Stores (network and sqlite) in the same Coordinator (NSMergeConflict doesn't seem to discuss this case).

Does anyone have experience using multiple stores and actually understand how NSPersistentStoreCoordinator handles conflicts?
It was fairly plainly stated in the article:

So what is Amazon's secret weapon in the smartphone battle? I'm betting it will be Jeff Bezos' favorite play: miniscule margins + massive patience.

Apple makes most of their money from the consumer at the time of device purchase; their media and app businesses are low-margin service lines that feed and sustain their high-margin device sales.

They way they see it, if they hold on to that customer relationship long enough, they'll always make up the lost margin in customer lifetime value.
psql -h ec2-107-22-171-68.compute-1.amazonaws.com -p 5732 -U u1npugarlguimh -d ddbs2kvmqeieon

Since DEBUG=True, finding the password is left as a trivial exercise for the reader. I wouldn't trust the service until they fix the issue.
Wow, you ordered something from ebay, and they shipped it to your apartment, and you replaced it, and all of this- from the moment you started looking at the auction, to completing the repair - was less than 5 hours?!

Amazing! Well, if that's the case, you've certainly made your point!
I expect the endgame to be similar. In some number of years, there will be "legitimate" ways of doing this, that let the governments take taxes easily and provide some sort of baseline regulation/dispute-settling/insurance, like how the Napsters and Kazaas paved the way and eventually led to services that work more inside the system instead of usurping the system. The under-the-table versions will never go away entirely, but if you can give me a basically hassle-free way of doing the same thing in a sanctioned manner (were I looking to rent out some space of my own, I'd greatly prefer a service that took care of the insurance, liability, and legality issues for me), I'm going to choose that. The question I'd love to know the answer to is just how much AirBNB plans on working with governments and insurers.
WebGL can also render twice as fast as canvas 2D for 2D games. So it's a nice perf boost even for 2D. Not to mention shaders.
One thing I never understood about Digg is why at one point they had around 300 employees and an incredible burn rate- only do less successfully and less efficiently do what Reddit was able to do with 5-10 employees.
This is why I don't pay for access to the NYT.

Brooks is comparing the best elements of the old elites to the worst elements of the new elite. There's certainly a leadership ethos among the new elites. Try walking around an Ivy Leagure campus without being reminded of some politically correct "cause." Even top ranked business schools eagerly embrace "corporate social responsibility" and other concepts implying a sense of "stewardship." They do use the same old-timey language Brooks would prefer, but the basic ethos is still there.

Ignore Brooks's arguments, the book he refers to actually sounds like the real deal. I've long thought that meritocracy has some inherent problems. That's not to say we should throw it out, but rather that we should be aware of the practical and moral limitations of meritocracy.
Social news curation, at least we believe so at Lynk.ly - http://lynk.ly :)
This makes no sense, it's like the State of New Jersey saying that the new murder law will "roll out gradually". Only some convicted offenders will be sentenced under the new law, while we work out the kinks. Eventually, all convicted murderers will be subject to the same law. That's a recipe for massive discontent, mainly because it's so unfair to those getting penalized first.

It's also very "corporate IT". "The VP wants us to phase in the new credit card processing system, because he doesn't want to lose the revenue if it crashes". The ISPs in question decided to do "pilot roll-outs" of what the techies know will be massively unpopular with the users.
Revoke application access here: https://accounts.google.com/b/0/IssuedAuthSubTokens?hl=en
There is no legitimate justification to infringe on a contract between a willing buyer and a willing seller

this was a common refrain of slave holders - it was a pure market mechanism, the buyer and seller agreed on a price, why does the govt care?
No. The full amount of time that passed was maybe a week. But it took no more than an hour of attention. Luckily, I had other things in life to do other than look at my broken laptop.
Exactly, there's laws in place that already prohibit running a business out of a home. Specific business types and activities apply, for instance, you cannot start a farm unless it has been zoned accordingly. In addition some cities have limits on what type, and how many animals you keep on premises. On the contrary, it is typically acceptable to have a garden and sell your crop or have a chicken and sell it's eggs (say, at a farmers market).
I worry that this is one of those market sectors where the price customers are willing to pay to use a service is dwarfed by the price advertisers are willing to pay for access to the users --- and so the ad-supported version is (a) free, (b) more attractive to users, and (c) more lucrative.

In a network-effect dominated business, this doesn't seem like a recipe for success.
Hey Dalton & crew – congrats on this launch. I think that technologically, it's mostly clear what you want to build, but the thing that might be confusing is just that it is only described as "a real-time feed and API." Although you mention it's "Twitter-like," there still feels like there's some ambiguity in what type of content this feed is used for, especially since it's a paid service with the name App.net. For example, I don't know if I'm signing up to have a new social service, or a service that I'll mostly utilize in conjunction with app development, etc.
if you actually read all the rules of the municipality...every single person in town is guilty of something. It's just a way to enforce rules without looking authoritative.

We aren't telling you that you can't do X...but Article 294-984b, section 49a states that doing X is a $50,000 fine.
Patent Troll sues Facebook, Amazon and others for using Hadoop
You're right that short term renters change the value of a property, but you still have all your work ahead of you to show why it should actually be illegal (having the police come raid people).

What you described is handled quite well by regular contracts between tenants/landlords. If a tenant signs a lease where short term rentals aren't allowed and violates it then they can be evicted, lose their deposit, etc. Similarly, landlords who don't allow it could face slightly lower rents by losing tenants who want more flexibility. In other words, it reaches a balance as people negotiate contracts.

There is a big difference between violating a lease and making something illegal.
How Young Entrepreneurs Turned a Tweet from Richard Branson into $1 Million
Looks like this app is getting lots of traffic. FATAL errors abound.

Looking forward to this. Anyone know a reason it can't support offline editing?
For my friend's wedding, we stayed at such a place. I had a long conversation with the owner, who lived in a side room. It looked like an extension he built on the house.

He told me he was running into issues with the city. Not from hotels or what not, but complaints from neighbors. They did not like the fact that strangers were constantly going in and out. BUT he said that he had heard hotels and motels were not happy about the popularity, especially from other short-term vacation home owners.

It's going to be a two front battle, one side from big business, and the other from neighbors. In the end my guess is that the city will license it, and heavily tax it, in other words the cities win.
Your quote is unfairly taken out of context. Here is the full quote:

Costolo: We’re not a media company. We’re in the media business. We distribute traffic. We’re one of the largest drivers of traffic to all sorts of other media property.

Dick Costolo seems to understand that driving traffic - perhaps from ads - is where Twitter makes money
Seems to me that 'ad supported' is always going to be more attractive to funders/investors, because the potential is effectively unlimited (certainly by comparison with paid-for services).

With pay-for services, there's a much smaller number of people who are going to (or be able to) pay, and when you start looking at those numbers, it's never the fabled 'hockey stick to heaven' that people dream of.

What if twitter just sold access to their stream, and a few million orgs (companies, individuals) were paying, oh, say, $20/month. And let's say... 2 million - why, that's only $480/million per year maximum! Gosh - who would ever want to invest in that? Instead, by going with 'ads', there's always the promise of some big change that could explode the revenue down the line.
Guest stays free = okay.
Guest pays you = not okay.

The average person can understand that. In fact, most people do. The "benefits" of AirBNB are usually lost on the average person, who cannot understand why someone would rent out their house directly to total strangers.
Im getting

OperationalError at /v1/complete/google-oauth2/
FATAL: too many connections for role "ruwdncbzdkulsh"

Request Method:	GET
Request URL:	http://api.collections.me/v1/complete/google-oauth2/?code=4/...
Django Version:	1.4
Exception Type:	OperationalError
Exception Value:
FATAL: too many connections for role "ruwdncbzdkulsh"

Seems django debug is ON
So, your argument is that no one should open bars ever? Unless the neighbors get to vote and agree on it? Who counts as a neighbor? (I understand "the city" represents the neighbors and passes zoning laws, etc. That this is currently the case doesn't make it right.)

Yes, someone should be able to operate a brothel or bar on their own property. I don't see why this is even controversial, but for some reason it is incredibly so.

If the neighbors don't like it, they can move. As long as the owner isn't physically harming anyone, they should be left alone on their own property.

This whole argument is disingenuous, however, since the people complaining aren't neighbors, but hotels pissed off at having competition.
yeah if they only cared about protecting consumers, instead of fines, they'd let you pay a few bucks to get your house inspected.
I appreciate the need for vagueness in your answer to the question of "What exactly are you building?" I'm sure in many ways you and your team don't know exactly how it's going to grow and change, and I for one would rather have the team making this thing be flexible and reactive as opposed to building to a spec that was promised to customers.

I think you would be able to reach more people more powerfully if you spent more time talking about your vision for what Twitter could have been had they not gone the ad route. As a designer working in the web industry, I am just as excited as you are about the potential for this thing, but I think most people need it explained a bit further to really get on board.

Perhaps you could highlight some of the really cool stuff that was built with the Twitter API that they then squashed. Talk about the potential OUTCOMES of this system, not just the origins of it. Hell, maybe even take some proposals from excited designers/developers for what they would do with said API, then use those proposals as a demonstration of the system's potential.

You've got my money.
All true, but the power of persistent online reputations can mitigate these negatives better than inflexible 20th-century-style regulations.
> people own their stuff and they're damn well liable to do what they want to with it.

You own your car. You are not allowed to set up as a cab service without some kind of insurance and registration.

You own your home; you own the kitchen. You could not set up as a restaurant without a bunch of paperwork.

> Laws which were used to increase the quality of hotel stays back in 1890 have extremely little applicability today.

I want there to be an effective fire escape in case the building burns down. Is that law irrelevant?

I want the hotel to have a clean kitchen. Is that law irrelevant?

I would agree that perhaps there's too much paperwork for businesses.

(http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/02/confiscating-your-ice-cream-...)
and in any case you are not even legally a owner

you are a TENANT.

before downvoting me, go and look at your deed. find the term "owner" anywhere on it.

yes folks, the county has permitted you to enter into an agreement to make improvements on the land and resell that right to others. the county "owns" the land. most first-time home buyers are surprised to find out that they actually are only considered tenants
My belief is that this sort of service will enable new/interesting applications and real value that could have been unlocked if Twitter took a different direction: http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been
What you say is true and there are competing interests to be balanced. Still, it seems the pressure to disallow short term renting is coming from business interests rather than neighbor complaints.
How about each Google app I install? Or any app that has Dropbox integration? Or Trello. Pretty much every app is an island and doesn't know that you have already entered your username and password numerous times in other apps.
If you own a single-family detached home, this is not likely to be the case (if there is no HOA).
Are there any decent photoshop plugins that will achieve a similar result to this? Would love to have this in my workflow.
You've never met the guy then.
Holy lack of reading comprehension, batman!

Chris says how it'll work in big bold letters:
So what is Amazon's secret weapon in the smartphone battle? I'm betting it will be Jeff Bezos' favorite play: miniscule margins + massive patience.

Summary of how he says it could work: by taking the device and carrier selection out of the equation, Apple is cut off at the knees (for everybody who doesn't care about their phone). It gobbles up anything non-Amazon Android related, because those people are just getting free or cheap phones anyway.
I'd like to focus solely on the issue of "your neighbours didn't sign up for you opening a hotel". Of course my neighbors have a right to not be unreasonably disturbed by my own existence. Most communities have noise violation laws and other citations for creating an undesirable atmosphere.

The folks offering short-term rents are not excused from such laws. Why do we need new laws? If your neighbor's short-term tennats are loud assholes, make a noise complaint.
The more savvy users will just sign-up for VPN or Usenet service. One 1TB of SSL encrypted Usenet transfer from NewsgroupDirect for $40 is more than enough for most people. Couple that with SABnzbd and NZBMatrix and you have a very usable service out of the reach of the latest anti-piracy scheme. Amazing how much of our rapid loss of liberties are attributed to the same 4 categories: child pornography, terrorism, file-sharing, and organized crime.
they don't "own" the property and the word "owner" does not appear on anyone's deed (don't believe me? go read your own)

you are a tenant on the land, and your deed says this. the county is the owner.
I agree. But please don't post HN on that reddit thread! ;-)
In some vacation spots the law is even tougher. Long Beach, NY is worried about people renting a house and having all their friends stay:

Not more than two (2) persons not related to each other by blood, adoption or marriage, living and cooking together in a single dwelling unit.

A lot of towns also expect you to get a rental permit too.
I foresee a social-media thingamajig that lets you stay with friends [of friends]*, and the stayovers being arranged similar to how linkedin introductions work.
Dur.... everybody should revoke their OAuth tokens immediately if you've used this app
Well, the bar example is fairly interesting: in lots of localities, that's exactly how things work. This is one thing that leads to bar or nightlife districts in cities, as no other residential areas want to deal with the issues caused by bars.

It is hotels complaining, for now, and I don't think anyone is taking the POV that we should respect their legally privileged position just because they already have it. But a lot of these and similar laws have existed for awhile, because various bad actors have abused short term renting in the past. And if Airbnb and similar setups become more widespread (as they're bound to do), we do want to have some legal framework to deal with issues as they arise.
While not always perfectly implemented, the government acts as representatives of the buyers in that transaction.
Yeah, I found a gem or two in there the first time I went through it. I didn't take notes though, so I'm planning to go back through again when I can focus on it (I was listening at work at the $dayjob first time around) and take some notes.
Yeah, and in fact the fact that it looks crisper can be misleading. You can't rely on a detail that a method like this infers from the low resolution image. Look at the green tiles on the kitchen floor in the 6th example. The "Our SR Result" image looks fantastic, but it's obvious that it's false, because the tiles end up misshapen and unevenly spaced. You really wouldn't want to convict someone of murder based on this type of enhancement.
I hate to be old school media here...but I wish this was announced on Monday or any other time besides Friday afternoon, when it will get less notice. Because it's a great announcement.
Hi Mike, I went to your talk at CocoaHeads a month or so ago - I'm a big fan.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but, a big part of the point of NSIncrementalStore is that you don't need the entire database locally to perform queries against it (hence, Incremental and not Atomic). If somebody wanted to go parading around someone else's data (imagine clicking around through a bunch of YouTube videos) that would require interfacing with Simperium's query API's on other people's buckets, and then maybe saving that to your own local CoreData store, right? As I understand it Simperium hooks into context change notifications to figure out locally performed OT and then periodically pulls from the network to find OT on the bucket performed elsewhere. Maybe a good next step for you guys would be to build in a NSIncrementalStore for querying outside of the synchronized bucket to other people's stuff.
So much text, so little substance. Let's sum up your arguments for why this is good.

1) HN wouldn't understand because they're young men

2) Value of property in an area can go down

3) Property can suffer damages

4) Rentals may inconvenience neighbors

All these points can be overcome without eroding our property rights. While values of homes can go down, they can also go up. Property can be damaged, but it can also be insured. Rentals may inconvenience neighbors, but disturbing the peace is already a crime.
The competition is not homeowners. As noted many times by others, the competition is "home owners" who use AirBNB to run undeclared hotels out of their buildings, evading the costs and taxes associated with a declared hotel. This obviously hurts other hotels, who cannot compete with such costs. Over time, this can (but not necessarily will) drive down hotel investment in upgrades and maintenance, making the city less attractive to visitors.

This also hurts renters--rooms that would otherwise be rented out to long-term tenants (monthly or longer) are now instead "rented" out to transient visitors. This decreases the available supply of units to renters, driving up prices across the board.
What's wrong with just saying "We are a media company" if you are a media company. The definition of a media company is fairly well understood, right? Why insist that you occupy some slightly semantically different space?
The melancholic nature of the article and the easy going attitude of the author really made the article different and original for me. I really liked reading and thinking about the points raised in it. But really, all it was, was revealing the one obvious aspect of human nature: how we react to objects. Here its a computer.

When someone had your password, it’s not just that they could access any information, but that they could become you.

When people send you an email, there is an expectation of privacy.

But most of the emails were from reporters and journalists. I wrote a form response and started replying to everyone, letting them know the EFF had encouraged me not to talk about it. This was a really difficult moment. I felt like everything was arranged in a way to keep discussion limited, to keep people working against each other instead of working together.

Hundreds and hundreds of comments, on dozens of major blogs. I’m no stranger to publicity, but this was on a completely different scale. Everyone had an opinion and wanted to argue with each other. Yet I had to remain completely silent.

The above quotes when left to ponder are really profound. Pointing the easy to notice things are indeed the easy to ignore.

In the other comments, I started to notice a trend: people were trying to establish definitions. They were arguing about ethics and ontology (even though no one called it that). The project hit a nerve that made people uncomfortable enough that they had to share their opinions and argue their positions. If you’re at school studying art, philosophy, or politics, this isn’t a big deal. These discussions happen over lunch, or in the hallways. But this was happening on the internet.

Everything and anything happens on the internet, and if there is no identity attached to the actions, the truer they become of the person, than in real life where people are bound to act by social commonsense.

With “People Staring at Computers,” I saw something new: a massive audience engaged in a collective decision-making about the culture they wanted to adopt, in realtime, via comment threads strewn across blog posts and news articles

Its not new. It started right when internet started. If some other way to mass communicate was possible before, it would have started then as well.
ever heard of astroturfing? after working on a listings site, i automatically assume 80% of ratings and reviews and astroturfed
Nth'ing the "I don't know what this is" crowd. To the majority of the population, "Twitter before it became a media company" is still just today's Twitter. Most people don't care about ads, unfortunately, and only a relatively tiny group of developers care about the growing restrictions.

Take off the developer hat for a moment; how would App.net improve my life? I read a great piece of marketing advice recently: in one sentence, create a problem, then tell me how your product solves it.