skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unreal's Kismet (http://www.unrealengine.com/features/kismet/) has been quite successful. There are a lot of little bits of scripting that go into a game where this kind of language makes perfect sense.

Make a whole game with a visual language? No thanks! Give game designers the ability to just drag stuff around when they need to tweak behaviors? Yes, please!

A note about "game designers" might be in order: a game designer can be someone with little technical experience. "Game designer" is a broad spectrum of people from almost-artists (some kinds of level design for example) through full fledged programmers (sometimes titled "Technical designers").
Yea so? I'll see your anecdote with the dozen or so unexpected deliveries I've received in the past few months.

How do you reasonably protect yourself from an expected package that turns out to be contraband?

Anway, that was some horrific police work (and don't get me started on cops busting into a home and shooting pets). Your article speaks way more to the need for police accountability and the need to end our ridiculous war on plants than anything else.
I've heard a similar story about a guy who was drunk and pissed in a playground in the middle of the night.
Presumably the standard would be, as with pornography, that the media in question must have some literary or cultural value apart from its illegal content.
When I and others say, "The quality of discussion at HN has diminished of late", and others respond, "I don't see it," I will refer them to your comment history and the fact that you have positive karma for it.
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Perhaps I missed it, but that was missing the answer I would have given, which is "No - Because I don't trust any company to give them that much access to me, even if I do like their service". The closest thing was "No - I'm afraid of scams"; but I'm not really afraid of scams as much as lost/misplaced data, company policies changing with respect to my privacy, etc.
Why do they even need a $20/mo cellphone? They can just get basic metered service on a landline for $7-8/mo from the local telco.

Of course, having a phone number is a luxury, too. There's certainly no mandate to have one, but let's say that $7-8/mo is allowable. They're in debt. They can get an answering machine from somewhere and take the calls at home.

With that $12 they save, and directly applied as payments to principal, they should be able to save half a payment off a 20 year student loan.

Not bad.
Thank you for this additional information about specifics of the United States. The described case with accidentally recording and realizing you accidentally recorded still makes you culpable under the "knowingly", though.

Cheers,
Rick
I think the next step will be proctored exams, like edX just introduced. With proctored exams, the student can prove that s(he) really did succeed. After that, all that's needed is time. As with any cultural shift, newer generations are comfortable with things the previous generation wouldn't even dream of.
That would solve half the problems overnight.
> Yes, there may be instances where a jury foreman misinterprets the law, but that can happen anyway, so why attempt to enforce the unenforceable and pretend domain knowledge isn't important or useful?

The point of forbidding juror's own personal ideas about the law from the jury room, as you suggest people must do, is to reduce the likelihood that people screw it up. So there are less instances of this happening.

You're somehow arguing that the foreman's error, based on his own beliefs, is evidence of what already happens anyway (we can't do any better) and thus extrapolating that people should use their beliefs more.

Why don't we spend a little more energy and time teaching jurors how to read jury instructions? Teaching them to be confident enough with that reading to challenge bullshit like the foreman here presented? Make them better jurors, not just throw our hands up and say "use whatever you want when you deliberate, the trial was just for fun anyway."
Quality. Followed by quantity.

There is a huge difference between taping lectures and 'throwing them on youtube' and offering a comprehensive package that is specifically tailored for online learning use only. And that is definitely the direction we seem to be in now, and I for one am very exited about.

I think the big next question is how this will affect the institutions as we know it. We are already borderline on accepting certificates from these courses.

As the quality and the number of courses increases you get an incentive not to enroll in an expensive program, or competition from more people who got a similar education for free.

I can see the khan angle to better the world for everybody, but I wouldn't be surprised if the next coursera generation costs money.
I imagine a few of us STL-based HN'ers would be interested in this, and would help promote it too. Shoot me a message if this becomes official, I'll try and help get the word out. d@dylanized.com
I didn't do anything- maybe it's smaller in Monaco?
Al Jazeera SMS service Hacked, Fake messages spread by Hackers
You mean like walking by and making sure everyone has their kindles off?
"So imagine a scenario ten years down the road, as you’re taking a stroll in the park." .... "WHAM. You are now a criminal, guilty of recording, distributing, and possessing child pornography."

I find this highly implausible. Hypotheticals like this damage the argument. Crimes are caught on camera everyday. Seems to me the crime here (aside form the rape) is to knowingly destroy evidence of the crime, which the innocent strollers in this scenario are supposedly encouraged to do out fear for themselves. I have not thought about this enough to have a strong opinion other than simple gut reaction, but it seems more evidence to support this idea in particular is needed.
There's a lot of food for thought here, and important points. But in one area, the author completely glosses over a crucial distinction:

> why is it only documentation of sex crimes against minors that are being banned in this way? The lawmen are perfectly fine with a video documenting how a teenager is being stabbed with a screwdriver in both eyes, then murdered. ... why is the ban just related to anything sexual, and not to the bodily harm itself...?

There's a very important reason only documentation of sex crimes against minors is banned -- there isn't a big market for watching videos of murders. Virtually no one is going to go out and film themselves murdering people in order to satisfy a market for those videos.

But the reasoning goes that if child porn is legal, then this will actively encourage more child rape, etc., so that it can be filmed and distributed. Plus, even if we're really good against preventing the actual acts in the US, we're still creating markets for it in other countries, especially third-world ones. So children suffer.

But then there's another argument, that having child porn around is actually better than the alternative -- because potential molesters/rapists are able to satisfy their desire with existing videos. If they don't have the videos, then they go out and commit horrible acts. So, better to stick to the videos.

There are no easy answers.
> I'm not saying that it's inappropriate for HN. I flagged it...

But that's what flagging IS. Flagging an article means: this article is inappropriate and should be removed. See http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link."
An example of this is the Finish child pornography filter. If you look at the list of blocked sites you will note that most of the sites are regular porn sites (mostly gay porn), and some are not porn at all. Some people seem to be abusing the filter to block what they personally find to be disgusting with little or no investigation from the Finish police. If these porn sites really hosted child pronography should the Finish police not just inform the authorities of the country where the site is hosted?

Wikipedia article about the website of the guy who started research into the child pron filter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapsiporno.info

His website was later blocked by the filter despite the filter only being intended to be used against foreign websites.
No... one is abhorrent and takes a significant toll on someone too young to know what is even happening.

The other is sex between to consenting, able-minded people.

Conflating the two is dangerous, offensive, and just plain stupid.
One path is people working , that need to learn something(say machine learning) for their jobs, and doing so online with the knowledge of their workplace.

If the result is good , it'll warm some workplaces to online courses.

Another path is using the fact that graduates of online courses can achieve a specific learning goal much cheaper and much shorter(in some jobs people don't need a full degree , only some courses). This opens a path for cheaper employees for companies and a solution for the talent crunch. Maybe some more venturesome companies will start using it. And the word will get out and it will become more common.
McDonalds can certainly refuse to sell to groups like lawyers if they have a persistent high cost from such a self-selecting group. I have no problem with this.
We'll have to agree to disagree. The songwriting aspect, while critical, imo isn't enough. The fact that they were both (all?) charismatic, good looking, and good singers is inextricably tied up in their success, along with the songwriting. Even in the early days, their covers became their own because of their vocals and playing abilities.

And while I agree that most of their characteristics come under scrutiny, the ability for 3/4ths of the band to function as competent singer is something which is still rarely even attempted in most bands.
Why does it need to be C?

Why not python or javascript?
Thank you for the feedback Juan. I actually specialise in niche apps rather than 'startups'. Perhaps I could ask for your email or twitter to drop you a couple of questions?
It said pretty clearly in a couple of places that it was a survey of internet users.
You said that you used "a small '$'". How's it any smaller than usual?
Hrm. I usually use flagging these days to mark spam or a very heavy form of disapproval. However you're right, I was wrong, so I unflagged it.
Wow, great job! For me, it's the video that hooked me. I see the OP and comments focusing around the audio mashup, which is really good. But, the video is what gives the mashup viral legs.

Without the high quality and polished video, there is no LMFAO tweet. There's no buzzfeed. There is no radio airplay. Without the video, the song is confined to SoundCloud and small audiences.

The probable virality of Steve's song increased exponentially because of the video. The video is what is being linked to, around the web. From forums, to feeds, to tweets, to DJs.

So to Steve, I say thank you for the video. The effort you made in making a front end to your song made me watch it again and again. The polish of your video gave me the desire and confidence to share it with my friends. The video is the reason I downloaded your MP3 and M4A versions, and will be enjoying this song for a long time. (thanks for that).

In conclusion: because the backend (audio mashup) is well engineered, it has the potential to scale. Without the frontend (video), the backend goes unnoticed by the masses, save for a few backend junkies. The magic happens because the high quality frontend (video) gives the engineered-to-scale backend (audio mashup) a linkable, shareable, visual interface.

Great job! Great lesson! Hope you do more!
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"success of Entrepenures, Inventors and Business People" -> success of Entrepreneurs, Inventors and Business People
The incident could have happened in another jurisdiction.
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The Economist had an article about this a while back. Pretty eye opening when I first read it: http://www.economist.com/node/14164614
In this case both destroying the evidence and possessing the evidence are crimes. What are you supposed to do?
Yep, as you point out these violations of principle always seem to happen with things that are emotionally outraging to folks and always at some extreme numbers.

Once the new principle has been established, however, then the system can slowly clamp down until more and more people are involved -- all without any political input at all. So that's how we end up in a security state and there really isn't anybody accountable for how we got here. Lots of little changes around the edges.

We've ended up in a spot where, if you ask a constitutional scholar, they can explain to you how it all works and makes sense. But if you ask the average guy on the street, he'll tell you the system is spinning out of control. There's a serious structural problem when the system has become so byzantine that it requires 6 years of study to understand it all. And most of those guys don't believe that it is fair or correct. We seem to have been overwhelmed by edge cases.
Because you said the article was 'wrong' and that you stopped reading, without actually doing anything to counter the point in the article.

That's a bad way to contribute to a discussion.

I didn't even realize your point was solely about the example. I thought you were objecting to the entire argument. Bad examples are more common than termites in a snowstorm and you should focus on the meat of the article.
I found [LabVIEW] easier to work with than java

This is what we call "damning with faint praise".

I agree that the de-emphasis of state and the stream-based programming model are wins for LabVIEW. (Though the real win is: It seems to support every piece of lab hardware by one means or another. This is a difficult feature to give up.) It's the mere mechanics of LabVIEW programming - the need to massage a layout of wires that were difficult to draw, read, print out, diff, or version-control - that used to drive me crazy.

Though the last time this came up on HN a National Instruments employee turned up to say that things have improved since last I used LabVIEW. Apparently they've lavished attention on the design problem of virtual-wire layout and tracking.
Do you realize you've just suggested banning 90% of all tv shows, films, books, plays?
I personally feel the parent of my comment is the most balanced view on the page currently.

For all I am liberal, or at least centre left, and a free speech advocate, I cannot see any benefit to the existance of child porn.

I would however like to see a reclassification (reduced scope) of what is and is not child pornography, and also introduce a requirement to prove willingness on the possessors part.

I can happily skip the strict black and white view of the world promoted in some of the top comments in this case. I am completely at ease with the idea of promoting free speech whilst going against free speech in the event of something which is harmful (I am referring to real child pornography not what the law currently classifies) and with no merit, not even the wildest interpretations of educational or artistic merit can redeem the need for child pornography to exist.
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I don't agree with all of his assertions nor all of his reasoning, primarily because I think he completely glosses over any reasonable opinion that is contrary to the viewpoint he wants to present (for example, the relationship between child pornography and child molestation[1]). I think completely glossing over these items is disingenuous and hurts his cause.

This is a difference in degree, only, though, because, even if everything else he said was wrong, this part was not:

Child pornography is horrible and awful from every angle and in every aspect. But it is not dangerous to the fabric of society. Censorship and electronic book burning, however, is.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_between_child_por...
>But then there's another argument, that having child porn around is actually better than the alternative -- because potential molesters/rapists are able to satisfy their desire with existing videos.

In Japan, "lolicon" and "shotacon" (referring to (sometimes animated) pornography of underage (often pre-pubescent) females and males respectively) seem to be widely available, so that would be interesting to look into. I don't know if rates of child molestation are higher or lower, there.
Slightly off topic, but am I the only person who cringes when people complain about duplicate posts?

Can't think of another issue where the angst is so disproportionate to the underlying problem.

I know, duplicate posts take up system resources, and we all remember when Technet and Usenet were DoSed by one too many duplicate posts (or did that not ever happen?). But duplicate posts also make common issues /usability problems more visible, and illustrate how terrible every forum's search is.

And besides, we've been trying to stop duplicate questions in tech forums since what, the first BBSes in the 70s? It hasn't worked, the fight is not worth fighting.
But it would spend a very tiny amount of time at full load?

My i3 desktop is almost always at a low of 80watts (with monitor, router, cablemodem, UPS) - full load at 150watts only happens when I fire up something with graphics (early model without GPU acceleration) and even then settles down.
Let's say that learning how to use an API for a specific purpose takes 8 hours of reading badly written docs and experimentation. Let's also say that you did an initial search and found no immediately usable solutions. It would take hours of sifting through garbage to fish something working out of the Internet.

You know the API is popular and you know for sure that someone already did exactly what you want to do. You do not intend to use the API in the future.

Posting a request for the solution on some forum or mailing list takes two minutes. Posting the response also takes couple of minutes, because the knowledgeable responder has the exact solution and doesn't need to search anything. Moreover, once the response is posted, it will become publicly visible and searchable by other people who are solving a similar problem.

Should you post the request for the solution? If your answer is "no", you should not work in engineering.

And if you spend hours of your personal time to scout message boards only to post a bunch crap that boils down to "use the search, ha-ha", the Internet will be a better place without you.

Nobody owes you anything just because you think of yourself as some kind of guru. Not even people who ask questions or request easily digestible solutions. This is not academia. You're not a professor, who can ask his students to demonstrate "effort".

You don't want to answer basic question? Don't answer them. Ignore them. It's easy. It takes much less time than whining about this imaginary problem.
>>> Did you even read the article? Not everything that would be called child pornography in court is molestation of prepubescent children. One of the main points of the article is that it might be consensual sex between, say, two sixteen year olds. Or it could be kids putting it online themselves (remember Jessi Slaughter?). <<<

Yes, I did and I was talking about the specific kind of pornography these laws were trying to ban. I wanted to raise the point that there are other concerns over here as well including the fact that it isn't a victimless crime.

>>> Not to mention that you imply there's a causal link between people watching child pornography and people making more. That seems very far fetched. I doubt child molesters molest because they want more viewers on whatever site they're on, I'd think they take pleasure in molesting children. <<<

Arousal and sexuality is quite a complex thing. It's not as clear cut as we would like to believe. I've tried to find case papers and references for this and failed, but I recall reading a fascinating account by a neuro-psychiatrist on how sex offenders often get aroused while reciting their tales. In some cases documentation and distribution of the act was a part of their ritual and it aroused them as well, so it's not as far fetched as you think.
I agree with J45, but if you really want to get press, here are some strategies that we used early on.

1. Do searches on Google News for topics or companies you compete with. See who has covered them and create a spreadsheet with their names, contact info, etc -- This tells you they might be interested in what you have

2. Reach out and personalize -- Show them you've seen and taken time to understand their perspective on the industry or competitor. In a nice way, suggest an angle that you feel is more interesting or which often gets overlooked which hopefully dovetails with your product and piques their interest. This helps the blogger/journalist think about the storyline and whether readers would find it interesting quickly and not your X, Y, Z feature which only you care about.

3. The angle should ideally be something you have unique insight into. It might be directly related to your product or just something you have data on because of your product.

4. Use data as possible. There are lots of unsubstantiated claims out there so journalists/data appreciate useful facts supported by data. Warning: Don't make data/facts up or don't try to draw inane trends from 2 data points as smart journalists/bloggers will see through that. Yes, hack doesn't mean being dishonest. You're trying to build a relationship based on trust so don't be short-term greedy and try to kickstart things on a lie.

There are some downsides to this. The biggest being that your data might get featured and not your company. This may not be what you want. But, at the same time, you may become a resource for the journalist which means mentions over time, they may come back to you for additional data and you get mentions. This has happened for us. We're a data company so we might not be apples to apples for you, but we're a go to resource for journos/bloggers and see mentions 1-2 per week in a slow week in major media because of early legwork we did (note: our press page is hopelessly outdated so don't judge us based on that)

Hope this helps. Good luck.
Actually, he oversaw the worst-managed large-scale programming project in history, and instead of saying "I/we screwed up", he decided to write a book proclaiming that no one could have possibly succeeded, implying he was not to blame.

A pretty stupid conclusion after exactly one attempt at large-scale programming, and IMO at least, it's set the industry back horribly. Everyone now just assumes we can't fly, and focuses on making horses run faster.

</rant>
I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm saying that the risk-reward ratio is way too skewed for me to give it a second thought.
As amazing as writing an application relying on a UIWebView for its core functionality, it still crashes when you scroll for long periods of time, and instacrashes when you attempt to look at your likes.

I am admittedly on v.3.0.x, but the version previous behaved the same way, so I have little hope for future versions.

I must admit, the Tumblr app is one of the few apps that make me want to throw my phone against a brick wall.
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ABC Conjecture: A proposed proof by mathematician S. Mochizuki
Second party are the people with whom you're interacting, that is, the people you send emails to.
I think a bash script and wget will be your best bet there. I looked too and couldn't find a way. If I end up getting some shell script working I'll post it here for you.
My problem is often in the other extreme. I tell myself "I don't want to bother so and so, I still haven't tried x." But there's a point at which you should ask for help if you're no longer making progress. Especially if your question is expected to have a relatively quick answer ("take a look at y and do z") that you just don't happen to know yet.