skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
that's why I put not-immediate-money driven in the "writers" section, not the ycombinator/startup section. reading?

Yes journalism and creative writing are not the same - so why did the article refer to them as "New Yorker style"? My goal in my comment was to point out that for many New Yorker style pieces of writing, journalism and creative writing blends and cross polinates at that level - for example, Ernest Hemmingway is probably one of the best know "creative writing" novelists - but he is also a journalist for the Toronto Star churning out war stories day in day out. Why does the New Yorker always seem to have the most well written articles and a more nuanced team of editors? Perhaps because the editors don't treat journalism and creative writing any different from the viewpoint of standards.

Any good piece of publishable journalism must stand on its own as a piece of creative non-fiction as well. The writer must be writing creatively, as well as journalistically. We're not trying to fill an about.com article here, neither are we writing a blurb that will go in tomorrow's paper.

That's how you get Pulitzer winning articles. And that's what's missing in the popular debate about long-form journalism.

Everyone talks about journalism, the gathering of news, the interviews. No one talks about advancing the state of writing, using a new point of view in writing about the news, using different words, tenses, perspectives, metaphors and writing techniques. Even though many people want to divorce the two, they go together, hand in hand.

Textual journalism without the skill of writing is boring. And we have a lot of boring writers out there.

Sara's article just pointed that out. She should learn to write better :)
Not confusing it at all. This last year, we've broken records for warmth, as witnessed by millennial ice formations melting. This is as fast as you can get. Blame anyone you like, but its useless denying we're in a shockingly abrupt warm period.
What it (kind of, the focal length of the camera notwithstanding) looked like from up there: http://twitter.com/57UN/status/257547773975601152/photo/1/la...
"We are not talking about a situation in which they are not being paid."

Actually, we are.

When you bought a copy, that copy came with certain limitations. One of those included a limitation against doing exactly what happened here (synching sound to picture to create a derivate work available to the general public). You may think a limited transfer of rights is stupid or unfair, but that's a separate issue. The issue before the court is whether the purchaser of the recording gets synch rights with that recording (she doesn't) and whether additional payment is due if the music is used in this fashion (it is).

The fact that she wasn't billed is, from the perspective of the publisher, an act of restraint and generosity on their part.

The broader point is this: you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. This doesn't mean that you're stupid. It just means your ignorant. You simply don't understand - even on the most the basic level - how copyrights, licenses, and limited rights in IP work. Nor, it appears, have you ever taken the time to find out.

Believe me, there's a lot to criticize in these systems. I say that as someone who has dealt with them on a professional basis for over a decade. And as I've said it before and will say it again, I am NOT defending the status quo. But I am saying that if you want to change it, you really do need to understand what it is that you're trying to change.
Ironically, EA will probably try to claim the "success" of the promo by using numbers for all the games claimed as if they were all discrete individuals.

While at the same time trying to claw back the licenses.
I'm not sure of the precise representation on HN, but I would say that statement is consistent with the modal line of thought in my engineering school.
If you've ever gone skydiving, you'll know that once you have trust in the technology that deploys the canopy, you can get fairly blase about the exit. Also, the height becomes sort of abstract above a certain level - even at 3000 feet, the world below doesn't look particularly real, it looks like a very detailed model with cute little moving cars and stuff.
I'm not one of the authors, but the code in question is all in one file: https://github.com/clips/pattern/blob/master/pattern/web/__i...

It would be fairly straightforward to add your own class.
I doubt there would be chargebacks since a valid credit card was not even asked for during the process of entering the code.
Yes and yes. Valve has been known to remove games from Steam accounts in cases of abuse, e.g. credit-card fraud or stolen license keys.
You write "true value" and "whatever particular aims" in the same sentence. That seems like a contradiction to me.

I agree that you can define things to measure objectively about books. However, I submit that in the end judgment of quality will always remain a subjective matter.
SEO Thoughts
Given that the iPod nano has 16GB, and last gen iPod touch starts at 16GB, I can't see Apple introducing an 8GB tablet, and even doubt they'll do a 16GB one (note the new gen touch starts at 32GB).
When your main feature works.
But presumably you have to have a credit card associated with your account, right?
What.. is it? I'm not sure how it relates to my app. Seems to be a teaser for a movie coming out in 2013. Do you just mean the feeling you get from it?
I've been in free fall around the sun for about 30 years now, doing around 60,000 mph the whole time. Where's my prize?
Well I think it's implicit that one of the things he thinks makes Shakespeare great is this engagement of 'poetry and patter' and he thinks Joyce also does this. It's not really an appeal to authority to say 'if you like Shakespeare, you'll this...'; and also implicit that the book is widely understood to be good, just difficult/inaccessible (but the digital age can solve that problem. Like, if ever there was a good time to read Ulysses, it's now).
So are we again talking about scientists encouraging young people to drop acid?
Work-efficiency recipe
Well not really that giant leap, since Joseph Kittinger basically did the same jump 50 years ago [1].

He actually was in freefall longer (4min and 36 seconds), which hence is still the world record. Since Felix "only" fell for 4min and 22 seconds.

Also, as Neil deGrasse Tyson funnily put it: «I'm told somebody's jumping out of a perfectly good balloon from 23-miles up. The theory of gravity no longer needs to be tested in this way» [2]

But still, cool video and congrats to Felix and the Rebull Stratos team.

[1]:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Kittinger
[2]: https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/255691761341587456
Ubuntu 12.10 Review by The Linux Action Show
Google Maps for iOS in Alpha Testing, Partial Screenshots and Details
Riposte: A Trace-Driven Compiler and Parallel VM for Vector Code in R
"a fast interpreter and JIT for R" - see https://github.com/jtalbot/riposte
Two funny insights from Neil deGrasse Tysons twitter:

«The "Edge of Space" jump: A corresponding fall to a schoolroom globe begins 1 millimeter above its surface. I'm just saying.» [1]

«I'm told somebody's jumping out of a perfectly good balloon from 23-miles up. The theory of gravity no longer needs to be tested in this way»[2]

Congrats to Felix and his team anyways - great endurance and a great show.

[1]: https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/257591067833139200
[2]: https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/255691761341587456
Having two separate websites is bad for user experience no matter how you look at it. I approach it to having a flash website and an html one. Same concept. Plus mobile detection is not future proof.
Yeah...emmm...nobody uses the center tag anymore.
Audiograph by Yohannes Kifle
This is slightly misleading. There is wave drag, which is caused by the formation of shocks. This happens when the plane/body is nearing the speed of the pressure wave it creates ahead of itself. The air no longer has sufficient time to flow around the body in a smooth (or even turbulent) way. Instead it piles up into sharp discontinuities called shocks, with very low pressure regions behind the shocks. This produces a lot of drag, several times more than that due to viscous drag alone. That's where the concept of a 'sound barrier' came from. People weren't sure what the maximum drag would be, or if we could build engines powerful enough to overcome it. Obviously we can and did.

But in the case of free fall from space or near space, the air is so thin that these effects are minimal. Also his starting velocity moving through the thin air is much lower than say a reentering space craft, so the whole thing is much more mild and manageable. By the time the air gets thick enough to worry about, he'll have shed enough speed to even the slight early drag to be at a reasonable terminal velocity. (This is the same concept used by SpaceShipOne's 'shuttlecock' re-entry).
Ask HN: Before you launch a site, what are final actions you take?
I'm putting together a new project that will document tasks we do as we wrap up development before we launch a site - things like final SEO optimization, optimizing HTML, JS, CSS, images, etc.

So what things do you do to your server, code, etc. to make sure it's prepped and ready to launch?
I do enjoy some literature. Huck Finn, 1984 and Animal Farm, Brave New World, Jane Eyre, Lord of the Rings come to mind. Didn't care for the Iliad, but I enjoyed Plato.

But you mention enjoying words. Now that I think of it, I don't typically enjoy words. I enjoy the ideas that words convey, so I happily read a ton of books, but when the writing is not straightforward I quickly lose interest.

And I do theoretical math and try to persuade calculus students that it's a fantastic subject, so I certainly can't accuse anyone of being pretentious when they enjoy something I don't!
I grew up in Dublin, and lived in Chapelizod - close to where Joyce did - and always felt a weak pressure to read Ulysses. It's talked about so much it almost becomes a nuisance not to have read it.

Like you, I could never get past a few chapters ... but it all clicked for me when I read the final chapter first. The final chapter is very readable, very fun, and very risque ... and to me it was a surprising read, it's not what I expected at all from an Edwardian Dubliner.

Having read the final chapter, I was much more motivated to read the rest ... I wanted to read more of what this writer was up to.
Show HN: Just Write, a "weekend" project in time for NaNoWriMo
How I became a vim addict
thanks for posting this. i felt it was necessary. but i can see where you come from.
It's their trademark, that they probably didn't want to protect in many different languages.
At work, we recently put out a press release on some technology we had developed. I got to witness first-hand how so much of the online publishing world is just a slightly rearranged copy of the press release. Depressing.
There were three HD cameras on the capsule, streaming video down to ground control, and from there onto YouTube and millions of viewers.

It's the fucking future, and noone is appreciating it.
Good point. Not all literature depends on a love of language in the way that Joyce and Nabokov do. That might be the key distinction.
I think private databases will be the biggest risk over time. Private entities share private formation across national boundaries.

Currently: facebook, telecommunication companies, Skype, gmail. Scary: Data aggregation services. Near future: face and iris databases.
Even if that's the case, it would be unwise for EA to pursue this money. All anyone would have to do is issue a chargeback - which by the way incurs penalty fees for EA. More than that, it costs $25 for EA to file a challenge to a chargeback, making it completely not worthwhile.

Going after this money would be a PR disaster, a legal quagmire, financially negative in all likelihood, and permanently damage their relationship with their payment processors.

I would instead invest more money in hiring proper architects.
Does anyone know what a good long-form writer gets paid?
I subscribe to Danto's 'post-historical' description of PoMo (though it's fallen somewhat out of favor). He claims that, with the end of modernism came the end of rules and sweeping movements -- it was no longer possible to distinguish, on physical examination, between art and non-art. So everyone started making art in ten thousand different ways.

By that measure, all writers writing today are, technically, postmodern; but even among those writers who are writing difficult, academic, contemporary literature, there are stuffy pompous ones and funny snarky ones and everything in between.

It's hard to think of it, because we don't consider the books we like as literature. Vonnegut, certainly by Timequake, is deeply postmodern. Murakami undoubtedly is, and is often very funny; Jasper Fforde tickles; hell, a very strong case could be made for Douglas Adams as a leading Postmodern humourist.
I actually started working on it for last year's NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month; http://nanowrimo.org) but life happened and it got shelved so I pulled it out again today and got it into somewhat usable shape.

Sorry about the FB login, I know I will get shit for that but I need it because I eventually want to add social features :)
No, you won't orbit just by going high enough. To orbit you need to going fast enough horizontally that as you fall you never hit the body you're orbiting.

If you just keep going straight up you'll eventually fall back to Earth, or be on your own independent orbit around the Sun.
Stephen Colbert Interviews Neil deGrasse Tyson (2010)
> a river has memory

Nice point... well, I'm all ears for a better definition :)
Don’t Wait For Motivation, Take it.
This is a very long interview but seriously worth it. Entertaining and enlightening.
First Man in Space - Skydiving From The Edge Of The World
http://vimeo.com/9980332
Perhaps the model of full-time fact checking needs to change?

I've been a fact checker at a magazine. My job consisted of calling sources up, and asking them each line of identifiable facts - to see if they actually said this, or whether this person's birth date is actually x month, y day, z year. Whether the moon really was waxing on this time of this month like the writer said in the article. Whether Nasa did publish this photo on this day, and where?

I'd say make mandatory fact checking a prerequisite of the writer's submission. All forms of public/recordable and fact-checkable (inventing a new word here) resource must be recorded, logged, delivered in electronic form for searching and listening.

For those cases where you can't keep these records, you won't be able to "fact-check" them anyway.

For actual facts and events, historical records, etc - I'd say we have a whole internet that is waiting to connect us with the actual people who it happened to. Use skype to call direct contacts, heck, I'd even support the New York Times creating their own verified wiki. Fork wikipedia and create a journalism-standard wiki.

I can't believe that the NYT hasn't actually done this yet. It's so obvious - they have teams of people on fact-checking duty. Create places where these facts that are gathered don't just disappear into the air after this issue is printed. Keep everything. With the cost of electronic storage so cheap, I highly believe that we can keep every single fact that we check, together with references and probabilities of accuracy and correctness (ie this factoid came from a scientist, maybe it's true. But now, I have found this paper that shows these equations and has been peer reviewed by these additional scientists and debated by these media and these researchers, then perhaps I can rate this to be more believable than just what the scientist said.)

These are all doable things with the amount of resources we have.

Just missed opportunities.
That looks like an interesting picture, but the text in the way is driving me crazy. Why can't they just link to a JPEG?
I think it's strange the App Store download button leads to a popup for my email address. I would have gone the LaunchRock route for something really quick and to the point.

Also if this is your official landing page for the app, I would do something much larger. Add more screenshots and detail on what the app does...you have to lure people in and convince them they should waste 5 minutes of their time installing your app.

Otherwise, cool idea if it hasn't already been done ;)
To orbit, he'd need horizontal velocity. I'm pretty sure you could, in theory, fall to Earth from anywhere short of Sun-Earth L1 (about 1.5 million! km) if you had zero velocity relative to Earth, and if you made sure to miss the Moon on the way down.
Unique promo codes have to be generated somehow. Integrating that generation into probably outsourced survey mechanism is likely not exactly trivial and may (if not done right) open ways for anyone to generate any amount of promo codes they want.

This is one kind of problems you get when you start separating different functionality into separate applications that don't known about other parts.
I recommend Nigel Warburton's "Philosophy: Basic Readings". It's a collection of short selections and essays (5-30 pages each) from different philosophers, writers, political activists, and more. Every essay contains some interesting core idea, which you can use as a springboard to explore the subject or writer in more detail. There is very little philosophical lingo (at least relative to a typical full philosophy text).
I'd play with the typography a little - if you want to stay sans-serif, why not slot in some Open-Sans? Just use Google Web Fonts loader and it'll take you two minutes. http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Open+Sans

Also, a little border-radius on the container might make the app come across as more friendly.
"pretty embarrassing for an exploit that causes a significant amount of lost revenue"

I doubt much revenue was lost. How many of these people were going to buy the game in the first place? None of them were hot new games, were they?
Just a tiny thing: you definitely want a favicon. One of those little things that makes a website seem more "legit"
Do you have a link to the earlier reddit thread?
Awesome Java Podcast Episode 5 - Syntax and Tools
There is? What about all those lengthy "first posts" published in the same minute as the story, which are curiously always advocating the same companies against others?

Though, I'm still not sure if it's shilling or subtle trolling.
"a whole blog post on the presumption"

There are always these blog posts that follow the same format:

"this happened to me, it means this, let me post, discuss on HN, I'm doing this to warn others"

I'm a little bothered in this particular post with the "private" email. Where is communication with a rep ever private and why should it be? You can disclose the exact email text w/o disclosing the rep name and email if you want.

Many of these posts also share another thing in common. Nobody ever takes the time to even verify any of the info given. I'm certainly not claiming it's (entirely) made up. But everybody seems to assume for the sake of discussion that it is entirely correct as long as nobody is able to refute it on HN. I also never see most of the people that make these complaints ever raise their complaints to a higher level. Not that they have to. But why not spend $5 and send a certified postal letter to Lew Moorman of Rackspace and then at least you can show some verification that you tried real hard to correct the problem.
Is it me or does the author of this article, and the abusers of the exploits he writes about, land on the wrong side of both the law and common morality?

Surely EA being a "terrible company" has nothing to do with whether it is okay to steal their products? Moreover, just because there was a coding error/oversight, again doesn't mean it is okay to steal their products? If you have a complaint about a company or discover an exploit, surely there are other more ethical channels to pursue the matters?

For the record, I dislike some of EA's conduct as much as the next person.
Modern and Post-, Explained with Puppets
Btw, even though the current Redactor editor isn't open source, one of the older versions is. It should be in Github
From the page, I don't see what the app lets me do. (My guess: Directions to places of interest? That would be google maps. Clearly you're hiding something more interesting)
i wonder what the final price tag on this was? has anyone seen a number put on it?
Really cool library. I'm excited to take it for a spin! I liked that there was some work done already for Wikipedia. But as a note to people who want to work with Wikipedia data, it's not very hard to abstract your stuff to work with most wikis based on the MediaWiki platform. I've added a pull request to this project that also supports using the hundreds of thousands of wikis on Wikia. ( https://github.com/clips/pattern/pull/17 )
You app looks like it might be really neat, but your landing page needs to explain it a bit more clearly - I'm still not sure if its a tour guide app, a location discovery thing, some kind of social meetup organizer, or what?

When would I use it? What would I use it for? Why would I use it instead of any other alternative? Answer those in one or two sentences...

"Wanderous turns trips into adventures by using your friend's recommendations to identify attractions, restaurants and more that you're sure to love."

When: when you take a trip somewhere,
What: things to do, place to eat,
Why: friend's recommendations make for better picks

I don't know if any of the above applies to Wanderous, but you get the idea...
Can this really be considered lost revenue? It's unlikely that all 1,000's of the "free" games were going to be purchased at the current price. You run in to the same questions with piracy. Were the pirates really going to pay if they couldn't pirate?

The lost revenue should really only come from customers who would have paid the asking price but managed to get an illegitimate deal, plus whatever support and overhead costs can be applied to the game downloads.
The way we will mitigate this is expanding things like Teach for America. Basically, the gov't will start canceling student loan debt based on years of service. You can imagine a scale from 2-10 years. They already do this for the medical research field. That's the only way. It will be a "hidden" indirect cost.
Thanks for the feedback!

Yah, the email popup is just placeholder until Wednesday since I can't link to the App Store page until its live. Once it's live I'll just flip it over to the App Store.

I'm working on getting a Press page together with a full set of screen shots. My thinking was to keep this page sparse with a prominent App Store button. Since everyone knows you can see screenshots on the App Store, this might increase the number of users who click through. I'll definitely think about what you said though... I don't want people to lose interest and hit "back" rather than clicking through.
Consider the risk of having the balloon go pop while he was still in the capsule.

Mission shot to hell with no chance of recovery all for going beyond the design parameters of the balloon.

They did well by playing it safe and not letting the ascent get out of control or too much above the target. Better to have 3 records set than an uncontrolled ascent with a small possibility of higher records (but not more of them) and a significant chance of disaster.
Hmmm... is this a good thing, or a bad thing?