skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> AMZN has repeatedly communicated their purpose of maximizing long-term shareholder value

Even that doesn't pin them down. Amazon can easily say they believe it is in their own long term interests to campaign against patent laws and therefore sacrificing a small short term profit from the one-click patent is a logically correct way to maximize long term shareholder value. The argument that a company "has to do evil thing X" to maximize shareholder value is pretty much always just an excuse for avoiding argument about whether "thing X" is evil or not.
There's actually a book that covers some of the old contest winners:

Obfuscated C And Other Mysteries by Don Libes

http://www.amazon.com/Obfuscated-Other-Mysteries-Don-Libes/d...
But why? Do I misunderstand that these annotations change the meaning of the code? Why would you want something that's still valid PHP without them, but means something else?
Having worked on the vendor side of things, every hospital IT department is different, does different things to their systems, and half of them are incompetant. Forbidding IT from touching your recording devices is a necessary step for sanity - it's IT's job to know what's best for the infrastructure, but it's unrealistic for them to know the requirements of custom medical devices, of which there are hundreds of different types in any hospital.
Surely vendors could choose to make it optional unless you have the correct permissions, could they not?
Good hydraulic lift; custom manufacturing; extensive safety testing (what happens if the lift fails?); cost of building a product for a bureaucracy (paperwork, adherence to regulations, extension of development timeline); R&D and payback on loans or other capital outlay; profit.
SF hackers: A hackathon to fix the muni system
PHP Performance Benchmarks
> the ability for an artist to sell enough music to live on gets exponentially harder.

For that argument to make sense, you have to assume that an artist has a right to make a living selling music. If you believe that then the status quo ante was failing miserably (because almost all artists were never signed by a label with the marketing power to make them economically viable).
That was ages ago at least with Fedora. I used to disable it as well, but I stopped doing this about 3 years ago.
You can no longer talk about your job, your education, your friends, your health, religion, politics, etc

You can still talk about all of those things (I do, all the time) but what you can't do is talk about those things without consequences.

I'm starting to think that the "never use your real name online" wisdom from 20 years ago has done our culture a huge disservice. The message I'm teaching my kids is "only post things online that you would be comfortable seeing on the front page of the newspaper"

Then I had to explain what a newspaper was.
Awesome to hear, fourstar! Figure you were at Matt Kelly's talk at HTML5 Dev Conf. :)
Let me start by saying that I like Rap Genius and use it pretty frequently. They've done a great job creating an annotation system for rap lyrics, and I think that it could scale well to other genres of music and certain kinds of poetry. Their public personas may or may not hurt adoption outside of the hip-hop community, but it's too early to tell[1].

I think a bigger challenge will be overcoming the natural constraints of the format. If the goal is to become the Internet Talmud, they will need deeper levels of commentary. You can see the strain when you look at the Rap Genius page for Ben Horowitz's latest essay[2]. The annotations were split evenly between useful links, jokes (which were decent, admittedly), and fairly pointless "explanations" that just repeat what the essay said in a way that's drier and harder to understand. A better set of annotations would consist of comments from other domain experts either agreeing with Ben's conclusions and adding more evidence, or disagreeing and explaining why[3]. There could also be factual notes explaining the context (digging into the history of Opsware, for instance). But Ben's essay is written in plain language and doesn't rely on many external references, so the Spot the Allusion style of annotation doesn't really work there.

To take a couple of examples from poetry, Spot the Allusion goes a long way towards explaining poems like The Wasteland[4]. But how would Rap Genius go about annotating William Carlos Williams? Well, we can actually look and see. If you look at The Red Wheelbarrow[5], you can see the format breaking down. There is no one true exegesis of a line from that poem, but Rap Genius isn't built to handle the kind of commentary the poem needs.

I'm sure this has already crossed their minds, so I'm interested in seeing how they deal with the problem.

--

[1] For me, at least, it comes across as unnatural posturing and rubs me the wrong way. That's just my gut reaction. I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually led to a backlash within the rap community, too.

[2] http://rapgenius.com/B-horowitz-making-yourself-a-ceo-lyrics

[3] The comments wouldn't have to come from the experts themselves; amateurs could add links to things they've written and said elsewhere.

[4] http://rapgenius.com/Ts-eliot-the-waste-land-lyrics

[5] http://rapgenius.com/William-carlos-williams-the-red-wheelba...
> Does it matter who's the messenger if the message rings true?

But the message doesn't ring true if the messenger's actions contradict the message. If I come to you and yell "the building is burning down!!!" and then sit quietly at my desk to continue coding, do you seriously tell me that my actions do not affect how you interpret my message? Bezos could announce he is relinquishing and freely licensing the one-click patent today if he really believes patents hinder innovation and that is bad for society. Then his message would be consistent with his actions. If you don't like this as logic, consider it as an unavoidable fact of human psychology.
JSQL Injection v 2.0 released
What I see here are two larger issues at work of which "Piracy" and TPB happens to be the battleground. The first is the level of control large media conglomerates have over both culture and government. This concept is a dead horse, so I won't beat it here. The other, in more generic terms, is the interesting fight between a service that wants to exist (and the people who want it to exist) and those entities that want that service destroyed.

On a more generic level, the fight between governments and media corporations and the Pirate Bay are interesting from a technological and ideological standpoint; How does a service stay operational against a large and well financed fight that wants to shut it down?

While "Piracy" is the very visible fight, this question is likewise relevant to activists and protesters as well as free speech in repressive governments. It is also relevant to providers that are attacked by malcontents, black hat organizations, and less-than-egalitarian governments that are attempting to disrupt their services.

Whatever you think of TPB, you have to give them credit for being both nimble and technologically savvy in solving a problem of service disruption against what many would see as long odds. They give us an interesting case study of how to deal with service disruption and how it can be dealt with. All the companies that pass through HN have to deal with the problems of Uptime, especially in the case of adversarial situations that are beyond our control.

This particular case is interesting because the service is dealing with a well organized and deliberate attack against it as well as it's users. Downtime due to malicious hackers and automated attacks is a thorny problem. It becomes trickier when we want to protect sensitive customer data.

While I don't expect a detailed technical breakdown of their systems, I would love to read their whitepaper.
Genuine question:

In what use cases does mongo kick mysql's ass?

I've used it a couple of times in hobby projects and enjoyed not maintaining a schema. I read so many of these 'gotcha' style articles and for example one commenter here wants to have a manual "recently dirty" flag to combat the master / slave lag mentioned in the article. I know it's faster (tm) but once you have to take in to account all this low level stuff you have to worry about yourself wouldn't it just be better to rent/buy another rack of mysql servers and not worry about it?

Look forward to learning something...
By your own definition it isn't hypocrisy. You are confusing virtues, morals, principles, and beliefs with rules. They aren't the same thing and shouldn't be conflated.

The argument could be made that patents are not a moral issue but an issue concerning efficient economics. Under that argument reforming patents is about making an industry more productive and useful. This can happen in two dimensions. A single business could benefit. An entire economy could benefit. A leader of a company could view the patent system like this:

My company right now can make the most money currently by registering, buying, and enforcing patents. However if the patent system were reformed we could reduce costs, legal risks and make even more money than we do now. Therefore I will lobby for patent reform. While still doing what I need to be successful as a company now.
Eh, not to be negative but their hardest work is still ahead. This reminds me an awful lot of Quora early days. Hyper growth because they tapped into a chatty community with both passion and technical knowledge. They even got some fringe no-tech questions answered (both Quora and RG) in spaces that were universally debated and ubiquitous.

Unfortunately when they (Quora) started to try to scale new verticals the growth rate was significantly reduced and panic set in on both the leadership front as well as the investment front. The act of debating is what drives annotation, not the act of annotating itself.

I'm not saying that the can't do it, in-fact they seem like some ballin' ass hustlers, but they have in fact not yet solidified a product to market fit that can scale universally.
It seems like a good way to improve the public transit.

"reroute/sf is a hackathon on October 19-21, 2012 to improve transportation in San Francisco with technological innovation. Engine Advocacy, Hattery, Mozilla, Google Maps, the Mayor's Office, General Assembly and the SFMTA are calling all engineers, designers, and business folk to join us at The Hattery (414 Brannan) to make San Francisco a better place. The top teams will receive a total of over $10,000 in prizes, and work with the City to make their innovations real."
Pixelapse is where your designs live
The logical fallacy is still relevant. The idea that only the sinless should cast stones against the patent system is limiting and flawed. Indeed, the fact that someone who has used the patent system to their advantage (fairly or otherwise) and yet still calls for massive changes to the system is, I think, even more important than someone "outside" the patent system calling for changes.
A good first read of Ulysses can be done via the librivox version of this book. At first blush the beginning chapters seem amateurishly read, however you soon realize that this was done on purpose in keeping with the tone of the work. Once you are in on the joke, you can see how this haphazard narrative adds to the experience.
"Hiring a slapper off Craigslist" has quite a different meaning in British English...
Urban Prototyping festival — 30+ cool urban hacks in downtown SF Saturday
Full disclosure: I'm an employee of GAFFTA, one of the organizations putting this festival on.

The PPlanter is one of my favorite projects, but the rest of them are awesome too.

Contact us at info@urbanprototyping.org if you want to bring UP to your city.
Did he invent Binary Lambda Calculus as well?!?
I also appreciate how he pointed out positive things that he just wasn't aware of initially.
Depends on the hospital, but when it's bad, it's bad. Where I worked, the typist's printer went down due to a network error. An urgent job ticket was raised (by phone, I believe) as this was a room of eight typists who typed up dictated reports - important function. I was fished out from between patients to try and fix the issue and was successful. Six months later, an IT tech fronts up to the desk to ask where the printer was that needed fixing.

Same department had a tech that would only come down to look at the computers if our pretty staffer was there. When she left, he refused to come down.
This article is really worth your time.
Thanks Patrick :).
I've been thinking about starting more as a service, I have no problem with this. Also, it helps build community.
IMO there is no rational explanation to this phenomena other than: people are different. Some get bored with stored procs and want same hassle but in another form.
Also, what age is considered young? I'm not relatively young but not old.
This seems really great until you realize peeing on a tree is about exactly the same thing.
Acapela ELAN TTS / Nicolai / 16 kHz / 5.1 » СКАЧАТЬ БЕСПЛАТНО
Meteor releases authentication, accounts system, and new screencast
If the content is illegal, then remove it. If it is not, then it stays

Then you're OK with this completely legal statement "The real name of Violentacrez is Michael Brutsch"?
Facebook's New Translated & Localized Pages Could Lure International Marketing $
Ettercap 0.7.5 released - codename "Assimilation"
The currently installed public urinals of San Francisco cost $300,000.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/us/17toilets.html
If you look at the graphs, the first two days and the 7th day of the month are higher than average. Same for the second week; the 8th & 9th and the 14th days of the month are higher than average.

Also, the 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th days are all above average.
Hopefully you used it as an example of an overhyped bubble, in which case your review is even more relevant. If not, oh well, you live and learn.
Will Draconian Controls Drive Bitcoin Adoption?
First part of the post is a song about wanting a big booty ho. :-/
An Extensive Examination of Data Structures
Hey all. I work for GAFFTA, one of the organizations putting on the UP festival, and I'm super excited to see this on Hacker News. Here's where you can see the rest of the UP projects:

http://sf.urbanprototyping.org/projects
These are the projects chosen from our Open Call several months ago — they're longer term with bigger budgets.

http://sf.urbanprototyping.org/makeathon/projects
These were chosen from our Makeathon a few weeks ago.

It's going to be awesome. If you're in SF this weekend, come down to 5th and Mission and check it out.
Is it supposed to be Kyubey? I pulled it up in vim, but the syntax highlighting didn't expose anything for me.
@Jack's article was in the context of Square. At Square, the merchants are the customers, and the merchant's customers are probably classified as the users. In that context, referring to merchants as users might be less precise.

When talking about twitter, I'm absolutely not their customer. I'm their user, and totally agree with your assessment.

One thing absent from @jack's article was a definition of customer:

cus·tom·er/ˈkəstəmər/
Noun:	A person or organization that buys goods or services from a store or other business.
A $20 Bike Made Of Cardboard Is Headed To Market
Ah, the ambiguities of the English tongue and the unaware non-native speakers that get ensnared by them!

Anyway, I hope the intended meaning gets through and it was also a case of "shit, people, we need to be on this thing!". So they made us support new services as gas makes a car run, and they also made us do it as a madman makes Sandra Bullock go over 50 mph.

Disclaimer(s): I wrote the original post and I had some beers.
The 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th days are all above average.
Meteor ver 0.5.0 is out, adds Authentication/User Account support
My experience working on a Ph.D. in mathematics was that the people who say, "I don't know." without any embarrassment are the smart people. They are the ones who know their stuff. My experiences since graduate have enforced this belief of mine.

Smart people are more aware of the things they don't know. They are not ashamed of saying so. There are exceptions of course but generally I've found this to be true.
The reason you do it is because you rightfully fear that the system will punish him for it.

I was not motivated by an abstract fear of consequences that he might face some day. I was motivated by the consequences that I saw him actually experiencing.

That said, while I do not personally value spelling, I do think it is valuable for him to understand the power of regular review for establishing mastery of material.
Methane is about half-way between Kerosene and Hydrogen in terms of Isp but it's far closer to Kerosene in density, which is critically important for overall achievable rocket stage performance (weight ratios). Liquid methane has about half the density of Kerosene but liquid Hydrogen has about 1/12th the density. Moreover, liquid Hydrogen is a super cryogen whereas liquid methane has a higher boiling point than LOX so handling, materials, and insulation requirements for LCH4 are comparable to LOX.
I know you weren't going for helpful, but you also failed to get to either funny or factually correct. We can do better than that, here.
'Project Eternity' raises $3.9 million, sets Kickstarter record
The inconsistent reads in replica sets is something we've come across with MySQL read slaves as well. I think it's a gotcha of that whole model of replication, rather than a MongoDB-specific issue.
Office envy and YouTube's new home
Not very relevant, but gee, wouldn't it be nice if spoken and written words were isomorphic? Think of all the frustration we could spare children if every time they heard a word, they could figure out exactly how to spell it. Once they master the individual letters, spelling becomes all but trivial.

One can dream... http://www.lojban.org
Definitely not active. Can't be. I signed up. Used it 5 times to get a prize from some contest (never got it) then never used it again. I mean, the idea is cool but it doesn't seem like there's much interest in real time broadcasting. There's too much information flying at us and we're all too busy to remember to tune in to our friends' video streams live or even stumble across them by accident.

I don't really like Color just because its just not my thing but I don't quite get why everyone here hates them so much. There's a lot of vitriol spraying all over the place around here. Is it because they're super hyped and overvalued? I hate to break it to everyone if it is but most startups we read about here are overhyped and over valued. I don't get it. Seriously, I mean I get why people don't like Color but why does it seem everyone just hates them pretty severely around here?
Modern cartography: Why map styling matters
A cynical but insightful description of many kinds of progress and change. ;)
We hope you enjoy the 21st IOCCC results - we enjoyed judging the entries.

If you have any feedback on the competition for the Judges, please contact us using the details at http://www.ioccc.org/contact.html

Thanks. SimonC.
While it's interesting to read about the individual cases of unofficial quotas, it'd be much more interesting to see a larger study done on multiple police forces over a significant amount of time to see how widespread the practice is. I only say this as this thread is full of anecdotal evidence, and the skeptics question's responses seems to be much the same.
What I mean by not being able to talk about them is that you can't express your honest opinions.

Most people probably think their boss is a jerk, that their colleagues are incompetent, that their company rips off their clients, so on and so forth. You can't say any of that with your name, and by extension that of your employer, attached to it.

The same applies to education. Teachers can no longer discuss teaching methods or lesson plans online, lest their pupils find out their teacher doesn't have a clue what they're teaching. Pupils can no longer criticise their schools online, or seek help with bullying.

The list of topics that people are willing to talk about pseudo-anonymously but not with their real name attached to their comments is endless.

> The message I'm teaching my kids is "only post things online that you would be comfortable seeing on the front page of the newspaper"

That's precisely the attitude I subscribe to, and it's why I don't have much sympathy for the teenagers who take photos of themselves scantily clad, put them on Facebook, only to have them end up on places like /r/jailbait.
"they don't really solve the problem that's in education right now, because they don't make it possible for regular people to be the creators of content"

So what's the problem exactly?
One way to resolve it is to mark that user or session (or even just request) "sticky to the master" for long enough to cover your normal replication delay.

When we saw it before, ensuring that a given request which issued a write also read from the master was sufficient. (sub-second replication delay).
DSploit v1.0.23b -- Android network penetration suite
> Engineers naturally seek improvement; MBAs seek profit.

Even if this is taken as a fact, I don't see how it explains why American car companies level off. It's not like potential profit is bounded but potential improvement isn't.
To be fair, he used it in a review, not an actual book. I think he has a point despite being a little off topic possibly.
Thousands of people, referred to in documents as "customers", are alleged to be directly funding the suspicious private activities of a Jack Dorsey and his co-conspirators at a little-known pseudobank called Square.
Here is the facebook invite: http://www.facebook.com/events/306073629499817/
"Users" is a powerful word. It reflects the things that matter to those who use the tools we create: usefulness, usability, and most of all -- the simple fact that what we create is used by people to do something.

To eliminate the word "user", I have to say "the people formerly known as users but who will now be known as the people who use our app." I cannot call them "people", because our users are a specific subset of people... they are people in context that matters, deeply. The context of using something we made.

I have always agreed with those who say that if you have a problem with employees dissing users, the problem does not live in the word "users". If they don't think of users as people, fix that first. I am more concerned that the word customer puts the focus on people-who-pay vs. people-who-use.

I think the problem is precisely the opposite: not enough people think of their customers as users. For example, we tell our authors to think of their readers as users, not just readers. They're not buying our books to be exposed to our prose... They're trying to use what's in there to do something they care about.
FCC says Big Cable can now encrypt TV signals to halt "service theft"
There are the CODiE awards

http://www.siia.net/codies/2013/

I built a pruduct that was nominated in the educational category several years ago. The awards event was really fun but otherwise I don't see it as a way to attract more CS/SE students.
Not very effective security considering the R2 unit rolling past him.
Mongo isn't so important to this question as ODB vs RDBMS. Here's some light reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-relational_impedance_mis...

MongoDB is just ODB, and MySQL is just RDB.

Besides, postgres is the real future!
Hacked Iranian Nuclear Plants Play Heavy Metal Music by AC/DC