skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Links, not tweets
This is beyond unethical, what is Jack Dorsey's and Square's board's response? In my opinion Jack and his board needs to either prove this guy wrong or part ways with Visa.

Winning at the startup game is fun and all, but standing up for what you believe in is far more important in the long run.

Am I wrong? Is there something I am missing?

- http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/27/visa-makes-a-strategic-inve...
Sure you can. As long as more of us start doing it. When all the talent requires $SPECIFIC_COMPENSATION, then the employers provide it or do without talent.
Apple licensed their OS in the past. It nearly bankrupted the company.

And Flash is one of the buggiest, most insecure pieces of software in computing history. It is also proprietary hence runs counter to your whole argument. It needs to die.
Yep, if anyone is using legal battles to determine what they should/shouldn't buy, you're going to be drastically disappointed.

As an Apple fan, I hope Google gets their way in the courts if not for a while. Why? Well if not only to get the Android people off their high horses in regards to legal issues and the companies behind them, but it would be the perfect way for an actual debate over software patents to be brought the forefront of public debate.

Reform on patents will only ever happen if people here feel the pain of the process. As it is we're too far removed still.
I think it's also important to distinguish "negative" from "critical thinking".

While we can probably mostly agree that sniping (especially personal attacks) are rotten, I suspect useful insights, that are critical in nature, often get thrown in with the dirty laundry, and labelled as "negative". "Awesome site dude!! SO happy for you :) :)" and a whole bunch of potentially fake, shiny superlatives can also become a turnoff.

Quite likely this is a minority viewpoint.
Show HN. Love seeing / sharing / things we build, gives me a good feeling :)
Practically none of my friends are interested in tech/startups and I don't have co-workers. HN is one of the only place where I feel amongst my peers in that respect.
This, and many of the suggestions in the original thread, and pg's default response, are all falling into the same trap: they are attempting to fix a people problem using technical solutions.

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Except, that isn't even close to the actual quote: "Okay, so, ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking, okay?"
The article states that many of the sperm donors are IDF soldiers. I'd imagine their exposure to DU is a bit more intense than environmental background noise.
I've found that a 10" tablet (a Touchpad in my case, though I imagine the experience with an iPad is equivalent) it pretty tough to beat for reference material. Doesn't have the navigation issues that the eink readers do, but it also allows me to make searchable annotations and highlights as I read.
Some of the lawmakers wouldn't overhaul patent law even if you had a global supply of universal replicators that were powered only by the sound of happy laughter.
Resin Java Web Server Outperforms C-based Nginx
The fundamental problem is that people like reading things that are written by people that have a slightly higher IQ than them (at least for people this side of 100).

The reason that this is a problem is that the average person has more friends closer to the median IQ than they do further away. So when people share new sites with one another they are generally sharing it more often with lower IQ people than they are with higher IQ people. These people come, love the content, stay, and repeat the cycle.

Countermeasures are just fighting this effect. It happened to Reddit, Fark, etc. One countermeasure is smart-flight evidenced by people fleeing to other subreddits like "TrueReddit" or making nearly identical subreddits "CanadianPolitics" vs "Canada". Or "LibertarianDebates" vs "Libertarian". It's like "white flight" only the division isn't racial, it's cognitive.

In my opinion HN suffers far less than it reasonably should, given its popularity and influence. Probably due to good attention, moderation, and direct involvement by pg. It's likely that when I joined HN I knew far less about the world and tech; upvoting the 500 mile email posting or a basic article on split testing. But I've grown and the community probably became a bit more mainstream and less intelligent.

The only community I haven't really seen it happen to so far is Less Wrong, but over there they are absolutely fanatical about keeping out poor discussion. I don't know if that is worth the effort.

To me, the best thing to do is to just leave once it gets bad enough and a better alternative pops up. Something else will come along. Maybe a secretive invite only HN, or something that customizes which articles you see based on what you upvote. The problem with the former is that secret societies are generally self-important and word always gets out (remember fight club anyone?). The problem with the latter is that it absolutely ruins a feeling of community. So those probably won't happen, it will probably just be a new community, much like this one, but with a clean slate.
Given their resources, they could try creating non-shit games. Why not try and create an awesome console/PC title? I just don't get why they insist on making the same uninspired games over and over again. They had a good run, it's not working anymore. Time to move on.
In this case I suspect it's dealing with compiler optimizations. The first one is being optimized out since it produces no side effects and the return isn't used anywhere. How to work around this I have no idea.
Actually can we change this to:

Why does this surprise anyone? Did anyone really think a company built on selling illegal scams[1], and using the psychology of addiction to inform game design with a leader who stole stock from employees and treated them horribly was a great long-term bet?

I bet on companies that are honest, admirable and treat their employees well.

[1] "More than $200 was illegally charged to Swift's credit card over several months, the lawsuit alleges. It seeks compensation from Facebook and Zynga for Swift and thousands of others, says attorney John Parker, who represents the plaintiff." - http://www.usatoday.com/tech/gaming/2009-12-07-games07_ST_N....
https://github.com/klepas/open-baskerville
Metafilter's $5 entrance fee and active human moderation contributes to it being a polite and intelligent community.
> Now that Google has acquired Motorola, they have the patents to go after anybody they want and that's exactly what they are doing.

Let's be clear: They've sued Apple, the one person who's been unwilling to cross-license their patents. They aren't suing Microsoft. They aren't suing Oracle. They aren't suing anyone else at this point.

Apple, on the other hand, has been suing every Android manufacturer under the sun with the full intention of destroying Android.

Is there any evidence to suggest that Google is unwilling to end this silliness, or are you just conjecturing based on their willingness to strike back while Apple remains unwilling?
Not only does this seem like an excellent replacement for curses, this overview/readme is a really great example of exactly how to detail a library/component's capabilities and how to use them. I've bookmarked this to use as a reference when writing my own documentation.
More likely, this is a cunning plan by tech giants who are tired of wasting money on patent nonsense to get everyone to realize how messed up it is!

*I can dream, can't I?
The tactics of the Putin regime are getting more concerning every day. In case anyone is curious, here's the backstory on the protest Kasparov was attending at the time: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/aug/17/pussy-riot-sente...

[EDIT] Here's a link to the BBC for background, for those that don't like the Guardian: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-19302986
Note that none of the patents they are suing over this time are FRAND patents.
While I would obviously prefer to see no patent lawsuits, Motorola's lawsuit here is very different from Apple's against Samsung.

Apple refuses to license their patents - Samsung et. al. went to Apple and said "won't you please allow us to pay you to use your technology?" to which Apple emphatically answered "NO!". Here, Apple is using Motorola's technology and Motorola said "Apple, will you please pay us if you're going to use our technology?" and Apple's reply was the same: "NO!"

Apple is essentially doing the same thing that they're accusing Samsung of, except that Samsung really wanted to pay Apple, whereas Apple emphatically does not want to pay Motorola.
Thats like asking "Given {insert name of rich scam artist here}'s resources why doesn't he actually sell real paintings. Dishonest people [1] like to run dishonest companies, would be my guess.

[1] http://www.usatoday.com/tech/gaming/2009-12-07-games07_ST_N....
Anyone taking reduced pay at a startup should have a fairly detailed contract that their lawyer is reviewing already.

Is it really that hard to write "=> also make sure I don't get OnLive'd" when you route the draft to your lawyer?
Islam and technology: the online ummah
This would force a settlement. Which would be bad because no actual patent reform would actually be achieved and a few large tech companies would be able to lock-out new entrants into the field.
Predictability. Not a lot of randomness. I don't have to worry about being sucker punched with porn etc.
Besides people have proved that they like Apple's approach to design. Whatever the philosophy is, if it has succeeded in the marketplace isn't it superior?
Sorry, but why is it taken for granted that The Guardian is telling the truth about everything?
Go fuck yourself.

I don't care to spend the time to dress up my reply as you seem to do. All your comments can be succinctly stated as, "Go fuck yourself." But you feel the need to apply some pseudo-intellectualism/cleverness to prove your point. You're not better than everyone else. You're not smarter than everyone else. And you don't know better than everyone else. And before you say, "Well I never said that." Your attitude just screams of this kind of arrogance/know-it-all-ness.

So really, go fuck yourself. Maybe that'll unearth whatever stick is shoved up your ass.
What makes you think Windows is all business? In fact it's the most social phone out there.
Regarding ordering. Relations are defined to not be in a meaningful order. This doesn't mean you couldn't define some derivative that is ordered or that the relations might not be ordered in some way that is ignored by the relational math.

Suppose we have a relation R. We may order this relation physically in order to help the computer retrieve data faster, clustering on an index for example. However, clustering on an index does not mean that we are guaranteed to get the same order back when we do a select * from.... (we probably will but we aren't guaranteed to). And if we add a join or other relational transformation, the order will probably not be the same. In other words, ordering is outside the scope of relational math per se.

However that doesn't mean you can't have pre-ordered relations. It just means the ordering is meaningless as far as the math goes. The ordering may however be of great practical importance as the computer goes about grabbing the relevant tuples from the relation.

Similarly I don't see a reason why ordering can't happen after the relational math is done either, in this case for humans.

What this tells me is that the relational model is not entirely complete in itself in that ordering is an orthogonal consideration largely ignored which means there are certain questions you cannot answer directly with relational math (such select from R a relation L such that it includes the tuples with the five highest values of R(2) lower than 25. I think that's mostly what you are getting at. But that's a matter of relational math being incomplete for real-world scenarios, not SQL (since SQL implementations do provide for ordering).
My tiny company's been around for 13 years now, so it doesn't qualify as a startup. My Perl 5 scripts are very important to my business, and I've even got a couple of Perl 6 scripts helping out these days.
The key part of my analogy is "that I knew would burgle it". It's exactly like being an accessory to a crime. Drive a getaway car and you're not going to be able to use "hey, driving is completely legal, you can't charge me!"

.torrents themselves are perfectly fine, just like knives. I'm not making the argument that the object should be banned. But if a frothing hooligan runs up and asks for your knife because he's going to stab that guy over there, it's pretty clear that if you hand it over you've facilitated a crime.

So it's not the innate nature of the .torrents themselves, but the use of them as a nexus to set people up with illegal content. Like being a middleman selling stolen property, perhaps. You didn't steal it, but you did make it available.
I think the article concludes with a pointer to the metro or whatever its called today UI that Microsoft introduced with Windows 8. That is the remedy you are looking for.
I read this article and I instantly thought of patio11 banging his drum and telling people about "pathological customers." This article reads to me like a validation of his viewpoint: building your business model on deal-seeking customers, especially in the small, in the "save $5 to $20" space, is a recipe for disaster.
> Don't be evil means use your patents as a defense not to sue others. It means amass a big enough trove that others feel that suing you is going to be futile.

Well, when a company is suing all of the companies that use your software over your software, but don't come after you, what are you supposed to do to protect them? Because obviously the "trove" wasn't "big enough".

> Evil is attacking the opponent with the new patents you just "bought" not even developed in-house

So now companies aren't allowed to use the patents of the companies they've purchased? Should patents be invalidated once the original company is acquired? I'm against software patents in general, but to argue, under the existing system, that one of your subsidiary's shouldn't be allowed to use the patents they developed because you acquired them seems absurd.
Quite splendidly some one has edited - http://www.crunchbase.com/person/steve-perlman his middle name as (The DICK)

Revision history here
http://www.crunchbase.com/person/steve-perlman/diff/8/9 at 4:59pm by 24.6.50.198
The LAPD will treat you like a King.
Pretty sure it was revealed recently that Apple approached Samsung and gave them the opportunity to license a bunch of stuff. That is pretty rare, Samsung refused and Apple sued.
Kasparov's political role is interesting. He's been a thorn in the regime's side for some years now, but has only been moderately harassed. Not entirely sure why; perhaps the cost/benefit analysis of how much they fear him (probably not greatly) versus how much negative PR they get from going after him.
Too much of this debate is around how to define 'theft'. Really the issue is that folks are accessing a service providing entertainment (movie, tv show, game, music) without paying the requested fee by those who provided it. Whether or not it fits into the various definitions of theft people throw around is largely immaterial.
"New" members shouldn't downvote because they might not downvote the right things, or for the right reasons. I do not consider lurkers "new members."

I also disagree with the idea of karma-driven downvote system. However, I wrote the above with the assumption that those who can downvote know HN values and enforce them. As you pointed out, yes the karma-downvote thing doesn't quite accomplish it's goal (assuming the goal is to allow senior members to act as enforcers). It should change. However that wasn't quite the point of my post.

My original point is: if you gonna say smack, gimme a damn good reason why.
I find that paradoxically, the biggest problem with Hacker News right now is the hot algorithm we use. It's great for bringing good stories to the attention of the community and having a burst of short lived discussion over those stories, and then dying out. What it's not great for is long term discussions.

For example, with Quora, when someone answers a question, or posts a comment, you never care how long ago it was posted, because there are notifications, and the front page is based on what you follow, not how popular the questions are.

This is a hard problem to fix, but a couple suggestions I have are to improve the threads feature, such that it resembles a real notification bar. Secondly, I think a new page should help, a mixture between the front page, and the saved stories, which shows active discussions, and an emphasis on one's that you have upvoted.

I think those might help reduce the ephemerality of the discussions here.
Rakudo Perl 6 runs on Parrot, which is written in C. Niecza Perl 6 runs on .NET/mono, and its libraries are a mix of Perl 6 and C# code.
>they are attempting to fix a people problem using technical solutions

That's catchy but isn't that what a large handful of pg's startups are doing?

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad we're not throwing "technology" at the problem. But I'm glad for a selfish reason. I think adding features and modernizing the site would draw attention and users, probably the "wrong" kind.
Do you have any suspicions about this particular article, or is it just a generic/offtopic attack on a newspaper you don't like? It seems to just be reporting fairly basic facts.
The fundamental problem is that people like reading things that are written by people that have a slightly higher IQ than them (at least for people this side of 100).

What is your evidence for this factual assertion? (I have done a huge amount of research on IQ testing, and I have never seen a trace of a finding like this in any of the research literature.)

But I've grown and the community probably became a bit more mainstream and less intelligent.

How would we assess the "intelligence" of an online community?

Why not rather just help everyone acculturate?
Yup, that's a sure-fire way to get me to immediately close the tab.
That's true, it's not in their DNA. On the other hand they could just buy a promising indie developer, throw money at them and get out of the way.
> Now that they're equally evil

nuance at its finest
IAmA Reverse engineer who broke millions of hotel locks. AMA
I'm not trying to suggest that Google has nothing to do with this, they obviously do, but I think saying that Motorola is suing them using Motorola patents is more accurate. Anyone paying attention to this field would know that Motorola is a Google subsidiary these days, and the verge even states that in the article.

Anyways, the "Google sues Apple" headline just seemed picked because it would draw more clicks rather than for accuracy.
The (Odd) State of Node.JS and its Frameworks
I think that's exactly what's going on. They were hoping if they just ignored him people would eventually lose interest. Since that hasn't happened it's on to plan B.
Let's keep this on topic: in what specific ways has postgresql been more open, and how does that lead to a better developer community and greater value for users?

I happen to think the postgres docs are great, and they are open and free unlike the MySQL docs. I have tried following one MySQL doc, only to see it change later and have no way to see the old version. Not a problem for postgres.

If you have some suggestions for the docs please submit them to the docs mailing list.

Postgres also has 15+ years of history in git, which is extremely helpful.

Honestly, I don't know where to start. Postgres is an open community project to the core and benefits from that in so many ways.
Because there is a disclaimer, you are disregarding a thoroughly tested product that solves your exact problem? One which is released by one of the premier MySQL consultancies with the author of "the" MySQL book as the designer?
For a fresh-platform approach, MobileWorks: www.mobileworks.com

For something that runs as a layer on Turk, Houdini: www.houdiniapi.com
Looks beautiful on a Retina screen.

What is the color scheme you're using, by the way?
The Usenet readers had kill file's. That is the only solution which will have an overall improvement with no downside.
"Name something you use that you think doesn't have a vi-like interface."

- XCode

- Chrome

- Filthy XCode
I'm sorry, what? saurik's response was concise, to the point, technically sound, and backed up with relevant details. Why in the world would you attack someone taking the time to answer your question?

Maybe you didn't quite understand saurik's response. There was nothing asshole about it. S/He conveyed three basic points:

1) There are well-regarded hashing algorithm that impose a limit on the input (bcrypt)
2) In any case, the length-limit does not imply that passwords are stored in clear text
3) An argument for why the length-limit might actually be a good thing (protecting the user from a false sense of security)

Now, I happen to absolutely agree on points #1 and #2, but disagree with #3.

It is not true that passwords longer than the hash output are 'totally useless'. To find an arbitrary input which produces a specific hash requires 2^(bit-1) guesses on average. 'Attacking the hash' is simply not possible for a 256-bit hash. The only possible attack vector is to 'attack the password'. Therefore passwords longer than 32 chars are still useful.

A 12-character truly random password taken from the full character set would take the #2 super-computer on the planet approximately 8000 days to crack in 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKNW5AUo-dM&t=43m50s

Add a couple more characters and you're into 'galactic years' to measure how long it would take. So clearly we don't need anywhere near 32 chars if the alphabet is large and symbols are picked at RANDOM.

But if you want any hope of being able to REMEMBER the password, then a better option may be trying to get equivalent entropy using a long pass-phrase; it could possibly require more than 32 characters to make it long and fun enough to be memorable.
Probably the one he lists in his profile ...
Good point about the karma limit. I was writing under a different assumption.

What I was proposing in my earlier post was exactly as you say: explain the downvote.

Maybe let everyone downvote, but have tiny radio buttons with reasons next to them. :-)
Many venture capital firms have done crap things many of times and have had no problems getting deals again and again.
I know a lot of people believe Putin saved Russia, but I gotta say, having the same people in power for too long is never a good thing: they get comfortable, they lose their focus, things get stagnant and everything goes downhill from there.

There's a reason why the US does not allow the same person to be president more than twice in their life (although that doesn't stop them from putting someone they trust in power).
approximately a couple of thousand dollars.

while that's true (re: scalability), it's not what we did, and would be hard to scale.
I'll accept that there's a lot to be learned from stool, but I don't think this explanation has much to do with it:

“Have you ever figured how information-rich your stool is?,” Larry asks me with a wide smile, his gray-green eyes intent behind rimless glasses. “There are about 100 billion bacteria per gram. Each bacterium has DNA whose length is typically one to 10 megabases—call it 1 million bytes of information. This means human stool has a data capacity of 100,000 terabytes of information stored per gram. That’s many orders of magnitude more information density than, say, in a chip in your smartphone or your personal computer. So your stool is far more interesting than a computer.”
Yep, MAD only works until the first guy pulls the trigger.
Are we supposed to see bar charts? It's all blank here, just numbers floating around (Chrome 21b).