skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suppose they're "non-free" in the sense that very few websites provide access to their server-side source & dbs. However, the are a couple of caveats that make them free (in a sense) in my opinion.

1. All final content is free (images, videos, html, css, js/json), an anology would be if in a closed src game you had access to use/download all the 3D models, music, dialogs, voice overs etc.

2. For the vast majority of websites, all the server-side stuff (the "non-free") is built on free / open source technologies, i.e. Apache, postgres, redis, java, ruby, all the frameworks, etc.

3. Information about the web / its technologies on the web is ridiculously ubiqitous, the amount of open/free knowledge, documentation, and resources is for all practical purposes limitless.

so this makes reverse engineering or understanding virtually any website a much simpler task than non web based software, for instance, ERP systems such as SAP which are closed source and fully proprietary. So you are right, however, there's a lot of openess and freedom in the majority "non-free" medium of web software.
The Only Good Ad Is One You Don't Have To See
you need to log on to read this article?
#fail
sorry typo, "you need to log in to read this article"
still a #fail
Here was me thinking the title implied the article was going to be about the dangers of leaking information such as the device used to post on a certain network.

The other day I got twitter spam directed to my account that was designed to be run on android but not display anything on a pc :(
I think you missed your parent's point. I don't think his comment was a knock against the OP at all or even that he implied that Joel's list was some kind of self help advice along the lines of those "6 essential things to make you happy" type books. It seems that Joel's post only reminded him of such nonsense and he commented about that and not the actual post.

I know where he's coming from too. I really liked this post and enjoy all of Joel's writing but every now and then I see enough happiness advice on the front page that I get burnout from it and am reminded of all the crappy, empty advice there is.
What I like about this article is that it is a good example of how to think about how the stock market evaluates tech stocks.
Design analysis of BERG’s Little Printer
for fucks sake can we try and worry about solving real world issues instead of this crap
According to the hedonistic view:
"Happiness, understood as enjoyment is indeed a good candidate for an intrinsic value. ... It's worth pursuing for its own sake, it's valuable in its own right."

But happiness doesn't equal good life, there'are many different approaches to achieving it. I think "The fundamentals of Ethics" by R. Shafer Landau summarizes best the most important ethical theories.
I had a calculus professor do this at the University of Maryland. Her book was awful. Her teaching method was standing in front of the class, and reading from her book. During one class, someone asked her to explain something a different way, and she explained that the way she was explaining it was the best way it could be explained, which is why she wrote it that way. The worst part is, the next year I had another math course where the professor literally did not speak English, and I couldn't understand anything he was trying to communicate, so she wasn't actually the worst professor I had there.
>Well the fees are actually not really "kickbacks" but really just normal fees

They aren't normal though. Air fares exempted, I can't think of many goods and service that have so many extra fees tacked on to the advertised price.

It's also not "normal" to charge a customer more when they are in fact costing you less (ie. print at home tickets). This may be legal and permitted but it sure as heck isn't "normal" or ethical business practice.

>Your only real right as a consumer is to buy or not buy.

I think most here would agreed it should be your right as a consumer to know the real price upfront. Not much to ask.
I'm actually not sure whether to flag, upvote, or answer this post.
I find it somewhat interesting how often people profess that their key to happiness essentially boils down to living the sort of "good life" that in many ways is the Christian ideal, regardless of whether or not they are personally religious.

Although there are habits and rituals that can lead to a more positive outlook, such as exercising regularly, there are deeper aspects to this way of life. This includes helping others, which is featured in this article, but also includes dealing with others fairly and honestly (aka the Golden Rule), being willing to put others above yourself (at least part of the time), optimizing for long-term gain (the religious may be looking beyond death but there's also value in a somewhat shorter view), and so on.

Add in hard work and self-betterment ("Learn new skills") and it's not just a Christian outlook, it's downright Protestant.

But given the complexity of human nature, surely there are other ways to be happy. One option, generally only successfully exercised by the very rich, is to engage in constant luxurious pleasure. In spite of the fact that a majority of the planet's humans likely would be happy to adopt this way of life, we're told that the individuals who do are not actually happy and would be better off living like hard-working American Protestants.

At the other extreme is asceticism, which supposedly can lead to a life of satisfaction and contentment, if not happiness, but it generally seems to be a case of extreme long-term optimization, with little if anything in the way of short-term rewards. In any case, it's not a realistic life choice for me, since I have a family and no desire to leave them behind to live in a desert monastery.

So besides living the life of a monk, living the Protestant work ethic, and living the life of a dissolute jetsetter, what else is there that seems to offer a convincing chance at happiness?
There is no such thing as "consistently happy." If you're interested in the subject, I recommend paying attention to Daniel Kahneman's work instead of vapid self-helpy blog posts.

http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_exper...

http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/...
This the kind of thing Scott McKain writes about all the time:
http://mckainviewpoint.com/

Remember the recent story of United losing the kid? No big picture there, either!
Show HN: Tubalr - A way to listen to music on YouTube, that I made 2 years go.
> I even knew some college students that looked "down" on buying used books, like you were buying someone's used underwear.

For what it's worth, I did not know anyone with this attitude. Everyone bought either used or international versions off of Amazon.
Looks Great - your UX needs a lot of work though, It took me a long time to figure out what to click
How Tax Evasion in Greece is Hurting Your Economy
It's funny, stories like this actually give me the impression that the iPad is not yet ready to take over general-purpose computing tasks like this. Because, if it were, then why bother writing about it? You'd just switch devices and go about your life. It's kind of like the idea that any danger you see on the news must be rare, because otherwise it wouldn't be newsworthy.
It's not really a queue then, is it?
It looks like it's not actually a design community, contrary to what the title here says. They say on their site: "Search by tag(s) through many tutorials, tools, and assets for developers and designers"

Then they have postings on things such as Vim and programming tutorials.

All told, covers a pretty broad base with some interesting stuff - ColorHexa[1] immediately stuck out to me.

[1]: http://www.colorhexa.com/
I found it particularly ironic that the author considered this a 'single transaction' from the eatery's side, but a 'lifelong' transaction from his side. If you're really not worried about single transactions, pay up today, and get the discount next time. Extrapolated out, you make the loss of an amazing $1.25 - instead of wasting your own time and causing a scene.
Here's a proposed solution: Do away with textbooks. Have tax payer money go to a national comittee of member professors who work on updating the standard curricula (with good version control), any time there's a change or new hotspot in the area of say cell biology, they can review/update and "push" their changes to the master for merging. Then the teachers can just "pull" the updated version to their pc's in the classroom, students could do the same. Have the same thing at the college level. If a student for some reason has no internet access (shouldn't internet access be a right by now, try functioning without it), he can receive a printed version. There are so many positives to this (environmental, educational), but I suppose the interest groups involved who profit from "learning" (which should be the most important free/open thing we promote), would never let this happen ...
Well, of course there's going to be a backlash. Pretty much the only people who are even likely to notice this are the people who do actually use the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, and since Google presumably intends this to be noticed I'm guessing that any disruption those users experience is totally intentional. In fact, arguably they might be the main target of this.
Hey, thanks for this. There are corner cases where custom editions make sense, but overall they cause far more harm than good.

-The biggest issue is that custom editions segment the global secondary market for a given textbook into slivers of useless fragments. Instead of Campbell Biology, Regular Edition being bought and sold between Stanford students and students at every other college in the country (this significant supply drives the price down), Campbell Biology, Stanford Custom Edition is only ever going to be bought/sold by Stanford students. This hurts students in multiple ways: 1) the bookstore is the only place they can BUY the book from. Period. 2) the bookstore is the only place they can SELL the book too. Custom editions are a perfect storm for bookstores/publishers.

-Custom editions are cheaper than what the regular edition costs in terms of what the bookstore would charge for each, but if you compare prices on the regular edition online, there are usually significantly cheaper prices out there than what the custom is being sold for at the bookstore.

-In the rare case where a custom edition is being used, but a regular edition is acceptable - the bookstore presenting both options and telling you to pick one will almost never result in you considering that the regular edition would be cheaper online. By adding this extra noise, they artificially make custom books look more affordable.

I agree - there are tons of professors that are on the right side of this fight. Textbooks SHOULD be free. And the fact that custom editions are even adopted is proof that professors care about students. They're just a terribly poor solution which reinforces the problem instead of solving it.

Give the publishers credit - custom editions are a genius business move.
in addition to that, all the big players KNOW that, like google, facebook etc.
we wrote a paper about nosql-thingies... they're developed EXACTLY for this usage scenario - just store temporary non-over-the-ages-important data on some cheap maschines...
if the data is lost, okay, the data is lost - shit on acid, shit on persistency, shit on consistency, but all the "un-interesting data" should be served fast -- this was the DoB of nosql.

can YOU imagine, that any big newspaper or library will store the (maybe) really important things on this systems - or ANYTHING else outside the blog-sharosphere? (sharophere should get the right buzzword for this activism)
no... not really...

imho and like "mechanical_fish" mentioned, all people think, that their data, blog-entries, pictures or even JOKES are so important (funny/cool/needed), that should be shared all over the world...
i'm not an anti-share-man in contrast to that, i REALLY use twitter, facebook etc., but the "hype" on blogging is too much for me.

let me clarify this a little bit and maybe from a technical point of view:
in the last years, since ANYBODY thinks, that their mini-uncomplicated solution for $this problem in $that language that this should be shared, because it's "really important", the web is full of trash and blog-entries, where the question is searched an answer to, is just rewritten, WITHOUT an answer.
any of you should now the problem, that you REALLY have to investigate now, to get a solution for a more complex problem or EVEN an academic paper/research-website...
the web is full of junk and i'm not feeling lucky about that.

what do you mean?
This experiment is something I've been curious about for awhile. Tablets are so much easier and cheaper than traditional PC's that is hard to imagine normal consumers buying PC's in the future. However normal consumers still need to type. The obvious answer is buying a keyboard for your tablet, but this has not caught on. Maybe Siegler is the start of a trend?
I think the first thing that should be done is to look at the person's physical health.

I've had down times, but the ones that have persisted have had (strong) underlying physical components.

This is pure anecdote, of course. But I've seldom heard of a psychologist or psychiatrist prescribing and discussing a thorough physical. (I am familiar with the "you should get some exercise" mantra; however, if there is a physical component including one that gets in the way of this, it seems this can all too readily turn into a guilt trip for the patient.)

Maybe it's different in other countries. I hope so.
Claire McCaskill Responds to Todd Akin's 'Legitimate Rape'
I remember hearing a businessman say "The customer is not always right. The customer has a right to be heard".
When people make these arguments about poor working conditions for third world workers in internationally owned factories, what do they think these workers would be doing if the factory wasn't there? If Apple was going to pay through the nose for menial labor, then why would they do it in Asia instead of the USA?
As unhappy as I am with the publishers, I agree that custom textbooks are a brilliant business move. It's no wonder why they send in sales teams - it's very lucrative!
The difference is being the customer vs being the service provider. As the customer I have options, I can go elsewhere. I pay for food service because I get service, I can get food anywhere. When I stop getting service, I stop paying. Do I really care about the $10? No, but it makes a great point for a blog post.
> 23.8% Of My Ticket Price Were Charges & Fees

23.8% of the cost of your Big Mac is also charges and fees.

The fact is, people don't like transparency when it comes to pricing. You'd rather not know how much the wholesale price is when paying retail.

I believe artists & venues force TicketMaster to show you the wholesale price. TicketMaster would likely prefer you didn't know their profit margin, like almost every other company you buy things from.
The iPad is already more than ready for general-purpose computing, which is leisure web browsing, purchasing stuff online, writing a blog or using social media. The kind of stuff my mom does or my friends from outside IT industry do using their computers.

This post was about iPad being (almost) ready to be the primary computer in some professional tasks and this is worth noticing and mentioning.
That's interesting, but brings up two more points:

First, which price do they state up front when you buy online? If it's the base price, then it's still wrong. My grocery store wouldn't be able to get away with advertising $1/pound at the location where I shop, charging me $2/pound, and saying that they do offer $1/pound as long as I travel to one of their other stores that offers it.

Second, why do people complain about TicketMaster so much if it's this easy to bypass? Is there some kind of hidden catch, or do all of these people hate these hidden fees enough to blog about them but not enough to go buy the tickets in person?
I'm doing this with a class I'm teaching, but I think it works better for small research/discussion-oriented seminars than larger introductory courses, where recent papers are most relevant. For intro courses, coming up with good intro materials is a fairly hard problem. If I were teaching an intro course on theory of computation, for example, I would probably still use Michael Sipser's Theory of Computation, because it's good, and I don't think I would be likely able to put together an equally good replacement out of freely available materials. I would, though, try to make sure that the course didn't prevent students from using the previous edition (which is now available cheaply).
Penny-sized rocket thruster invented at MIT
Ask HN: Accepting credit cards as freelancer?
I'm considering starting a freelancing business on the side sometime in the next year, and Stripe has me interested in the possibility of accepting credit card payments. I briefly worked as a subcontractor, and the company head took issue with a client who wanted to pay with a credit card, presumably because of the risk of a chargeback. Is it best to stick to a "checks only" policy, or is the additional risk worth the convenience to clients?
I'll agree with you here. It's news that it's working for the author, but that style certainly won't "work" for many others. I consider myself in the "others" category, since I need my keyboard and platform-specific tools.
Or as The Zen of Pythons says, explicit is better than implicit. Thanks for clearing things up for me.
It took me three years to realize that I didn't actually need textbooks. My senior year, I didn't buy a single book, just the course packs put together by my professors (if they had them).

The course packs were either all original material, or an original composition of parts of case studies, essays, and text books; they were almost always under $50 (except in the case where licensing the copied portions drove the cost higher).

If a professor is actually just teaching out of a standard text book, all the relevant information is taught in lecture. If there is an express need for a textbook, it's on reserve at the school library.

I would urge every student to only consider purchasing a textbook if they really think they need it two weeks into class. Textbooks are overpriced, only a small amount of the information is relevant to the class, and the information is often redundant and can be found in lectures/slides. (if the idea of coming to class without a book is scary, check your school book store's policy on returning books)
What other service do you buy tickets for?
I can SSH from my iPad. I can remote in. I have a bluetooth keyboard. I love the Verizon 3G. I have taken it on trips solo.

The 11" MBA, on the other hand, is available with 8GB RAM and a high-speed SSD that basically destroys the performance of most laptops with spindle hard-drives.

Ever since I got the 11" MBA, I have not once reached for my iPad. I even toss the MBA into my go bag and tether to my iPhone for light work on-the-go.
Hey, I love tubalr. Thanks for making it.
Also depends on your car. If you are looking for a straightaway for outright speed, Big Willow lets some cars get up to about 160 or so.
Paul Ryan: A Big Spending Conservative
Well, its quite obvious isn't it? A holodeck.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodeck
This post was about iPad being (almost) ready to be the primary computer in some professional tasks

Writing, which is in many ways the lowest common denominator of all computing devices.
Gruber explicitly stated that it was "free-of-charge" full stop, and a lot of people at the time chose to believe him over the information on the Apple website that said paid membership in the Apple developer program was required and the other reports correctly saying the same thing.
I too was skeptical about iPad and its usefulness for me (for the first 6 or 7 months after I bought an iPad 2), but right now I do "absolutely" everything I do (except writing code, which admittedly is a big part of my daily life, but not as big as I initially thought) on my iPad.

"Everything" includes all email, web browsing (and reading online tutorials and articles), listening to audiobooks (to be honest I do it more on my iPhone than iPad), managing tasks (OmniFocus is just fantastic), reading books that I would've never read on my MacBook (books like 'JavaScript: The Good Parts', 'Git Pro', 'Head-First C', 'Node: Up and Running' and many chapters of other books).

How do I know that I wouldn't have read these books if it wasn't for the iPad? Because I wanted to read all of these books (or similar books) for the past several years but never got to do so because reading PDFs on a computer is really boring. I was content with blog articles and online tutorials and thought books were something of the past; but I was really wrong. The quality of these books are stunning and I've learned so much that my only regret is why I didn't use my iPad more in the first 5 months (it used to sit on my desk all day long).

Last year I would've recommended the iPad to novice, incompetent PC users. Now, I recommend iPad to everyone. Well, maybe except those who can't live without having direct access to the machine's gut. But even those people can "jailbreak" (or get an Android tablet) and live a happy life.
You couldn't even click the button anyway! As soon as you start typing, Google Instant kicks in and takes you to search results. So there is no use case for the button anymore.
I for one don't begrudge these fees at all. What's the alternative? Go down to the venue (driving, parking) and stand in line at the box office? My time is worth something.... I think these fees are more than fair. It's not really about what it costs TicketMaster to do this stuff, it's about what it's worth to the buyer.