skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Where are you getting that definition from?

I have used Wikipedia for the definition of how one proves libel:

There are several ways a person must go about proving that libel has taken place. For example, in the United States, first, the person must prove that the statement was false. Second, the person must prove that the statement caused harm. Third, the person must prove that the statement was made without adequate research into the truthfulness of the statement. These steps are for an ordinary citizen.

Of course, there is no citation. I just added the {{fact}} tag. But does anyone know if this is true or not?
The New BGR
I agree, I have no idea why they keep wanting to cling to the "Windows" branding even though Windows has never exactly been considered a cool brand.

Perhaps it is easier to sell something called "Windows" to enterprise customers?
Do they really have abandoned the desktop? Not so sure about that. Also read discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4660072. Is Windows 8 really that bad? Not sure either.. Opinions are at least mixed, so let's not start calling things a fact yet, for something that not even has been widely adopted.
Ask HN: Which DRM-free ebook reader to buy?
Given that Amazon can remotely wipe your Kindle and revoke your access to your "bought" books (see e.g. http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/), which ebook reader should one buy?

Must haves:

- some kind of e-paper
- no remote wipe capability
- can read DRM free books

Nice to have:

- possible to install free/libre firmware
- seller doesn't sell DRM'ed books
Addressing both issues this week - thanks for the feedback.
Rising up from 38 Studios’ ashes
Really? I was just at the mail the other day, and I didn't see one iPad being used as a cash register.

The only place I see people using their iPads to cash out are at the farmers market. And that makes sense since you are outside and need something portable.

But I do agree, businesses are buying less PC's but not because they are replacing them with iPads. Because they aren't spending the money. The glut in the PC market is that everyone has one. It's saturated (I'm talking the Western World here, not developing countries). Now you buy one as a upgrade. And businesses only upgrade when they must.

MS's job is to provide a compelling reason to upgrade. Time will tell if Windows 8 does this (I doubt it actually. Maybe when more apps are built for it).
Sure, but this approach is going to be much more complicated and less predictable than the "switch the docroot to a completely different directory" model. (e.g. you need to distinguish between asset and non-asset directories, and make a decision about how long to keep "old" assets around.) With some effort these problems can be solved, I'm just pointing out that even with a completely static site, and perfectly atomic docroot switching, you can still end up with clients in an inconsistent state.
PhantomLobe replied to this comment:

Wat? I've bought in .com, .ca, .co.uk, .fr and .es with (both) France and Spain based credit cards with no problems whatsoever.

PhantomLobe, you were hellbanned* for making a comment that didn't fit the the community guidelines:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Looking at your comment history, you don't seem to be a spammer or a troll, I think it is more that your second comment didn't fit the guidelines and because you didn't have enough karma your account went under water, never to be seen again.

I don't know if it was by a mod, or by a robot, but to keep commenting with our PhantomLobe account is an effort in futility and a waste of your time.

I recommend that you review the guidelines doc above and avoid making comments that may be seen as not adding to the discussion. Also, start spelling words correctly. Wot is not a word and won't win you friends here.

On a related note: I wish HN would would stop hellbanning users for making comments that are not constructive. That's what downvotes are for! I have been seeing far too many people wasting so much time because they don't know they are hellbanned. Hellbanning should be reserved to obvious trolls and spammers, not people getting used to the standards of these discussions.

*http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-h...
Japanese court rejects two of Samsung's patent infringement claims against Apple
Hey look on the bright side at least they wont brick your device and steal content you paid for (See topic)
Fish can become invisible to predators
Instead of randomized hill-climbing (genetic programming's search algo) why not try a little A*?
While I certainly agree as such, have you considered that perhaps they tried and Metro AG didn't want to license the name? Metro AG is a pretty huge company with annual revenues that easily match Microsoft's so it's not like MS could just simply buy them off.
I liked William Vambenepe's comment on that -- "Are you the dumb money in the Cloud?" http://stage.vambenepe.com/archives/2061
Yes, or something very close to that.
> Microsoft needs to focus on what it is good at, and stop chasing Apple just because it wants to be good at what Apple is good at.

But the author spent the first half of the essay arguing that the market Microsoft is good at is going away. If that's correct (and it's a big if), Microsoft has no choice but to learn to be good at different things. You can criticize how effectively Microsoft has done this - and that critique consumes the latter half of the essay - but you can't simultaneously argue that Microsoft needs to change what it does and that Microsoft needs to keep doing what it's good at.
"Really? I was just at the mail the other day, and I didn't see one iPad being used as a cash register."

the comment above you also talks about 'tablets', not 'ipads'. Tablet-style things (ie rather small devices with a touch screen) have been used for cash registers and as controls in the industry for quite some time. A lot of them were merely PC's, running some sort of Windows. This might start changing now since tablets are getting more widespread, hardware getting cheaper etc.
Facebook and Google Login OAuth System for Your Website.
I think MS's most reliable market is Microsoft certified IT professionals. I believe these professionals have also historically determined technology purchasing decisions for companies. It'll be interesting to see how things turn out in the next 5 years.
Scalr scales its cloud management services outside of the US
Christmas Present. ☺

Also, not all books on Amazon's Kindle store have DRM. I can buy them.
There's plenty of database systems that either don't support SQL at all, or support it with a range of other languages.

One of SQL's remaining powers over most other options is the ability of non-expert users to construct their own ad-hoc reports. This is a big part of why Hadoop has Hive, which incorporates a very SQL-like language, and most other "big data" tools have something similar.
Apple somehow got the more distinctive name iPhone even though there was a voip phone with that exact name (owned by a very big company), yet somehow a grocery store has claimed ownership of a common word in all markets and industries?
That would've been exactly the right strategy in this situation, and the right answer to disruptions. You build something new to compete toe-on-toe with the new disruptive technology, you don't refit the old technology and brand for the new disruptive market, while pissing off all your old customers in the same time. That's always the wrong strategy, and it's just how Nokia tried to refit Symbian for the touch world for 4 years after the iPhone appeared, with no success.

They should've left the PC OS alone, and build a different one for tablets and smartphones. Then whoever wants a phone or tablet with Microsoft's OS could've gotten that, and whoever still wanted a PC (the vast majority of people right now) would've gotten an OS made specifically for PC's.

But of course they would've needed to charge more reasonable prices for these licenses, too, not the ridiculous $100 amount they charge for a Windows RT license right now. And Microsoft has always been afraid of cannibalizing itself with a cheaper product of their own, even if that product would ultimately be part of a much larger, higher volume market.

Either way, they can't go around charging $100-$200 for OS licenses anymore, when there's a vast market of Android devices out there that come with a virtually free OS, and with the increasingly popular Macs that require only $29 for the new version of Mac OS X.
Unless a judge decides that due to the manner in which it's sold, that it constitutes a sale under the law, and hence all your normal "I've bought a thing" rights come into play. Anything in the T&Cs that takes away the rights the law gives is hence null and invalid.
Surface is one particular device; Dell won't release anything with the Surface name, so this would have been just as confusing.
You use the validation set precisely to avoid overfitting. I agree that a 90/10 split would be more reasonable.
This was incredibly helpful to our team about a month ago when a client wanted people to be able to email the art project they built on their site, including the state of multiple canvasses. The library was really easy to use and the output was way better than I expected.
Yes. At the very least he would be less easily dismissed.

I very much agree with his ideals, but his insistence on living completely outside the system diminishes his effectiveness in changing it.
God, it's infuriating. "Let's not have a discussion about the actual article, let's just argue bullshit semantics about the definition of PC."
is duct tape an acceptable facilitator of purr programming? great post... hilarious!
There Are Only Two Roles of Code
Localhost based cryptography: better solution?
you mean something like http://tuebl.com ?
Depends. In the EU, companies are legally required to store personal data accurately. It doesn't matter if they don't tell anyone (in fact often they cannot tell people, privacy and all that). If you tell them that personal data they have one you is incorrect, they are legally required to correct it. So yes, if the data is wrong, they might be breaking the law.
Nice Script It is useful for many
I guess foundation zurb is better or just the pain sass
What's the joke about WebOS?
It's funny that then people give out about small countries that have lower coporation tax (e.g. Ireland). If companies in "non-low-tax" countries like UK don't pay any tax, why give out to low-tax countries?
of course if everyone chose existing runtimes, there would be no new ones ;)

From the blog

"So if I were insane enough to create a programming language for use by others, I would, without hesitation pick one of the following hosts:

Factor: the concatenative programming language has a stunning compiler and runtime
GHC: the Haskell compiler and extensions with the appropriate runtime libraries
Java Virtual Machine: world-beating megatech
JavaScript itself or a specific JavaScript targets like Node.js or V8
Erlang’s virtual machine
A Common Lisp implementation
Racket via its #lang feature

"

Fair enough, but...

if all those "hosts" had also made the decision to 'build on top of existing runtimes' they wouldn't be potential " plug and play" hosts today for others to target ;)

We these choices today, only because some people who ignored the 'build on an existing language's runtime vs creating your own' idea.

V8 is (relatively) very new but they didn't choose to build on top of the JVM, say. As a result we have new and exciting technology vs being locked into an aging, sorry, "mature" JVM.

"Moving into the future I believe one would need to be gutsy, ill-informed or insane (or a mix of the three) to create a language runtime from scratch."

You always needed to be gutsy, well informed and knowledgable, and yes just a little insane, to build a language runtime from scratch.I hope we get more and not less of these types of people. There is a lot of research that hasn't made it into runtimes yet.

The Factor runtime for e.g is quite different from the GHC runtime and both teach different lessons and embody different design decisions. We need more of these, not less, till there is some solid math/theory on what makes a good runtime.

In any case, if a language is good enough on its native runtime, it will probably get ported to the JVM or whatever the latest 'mature' runtime is.
> We know how cancers work to a pretty good level of detail.

IIRC, Steve Jobs was survived with alternative medicine for sometime than surgery. So, I'm more interested to know any research conducted on alternative medicines (to prove that they're wrong and ineffective). As it seems to work for Indians this can better be tried like yoga
Even if Amazon is completely justified in the actions they took, their complete lack of transparency or accountability to the customer is worrying to me.
I really agree with this. Go with the programming language that you enjoy the most.

Why? Because its going to get very hard down the road.

For me, I'm toiling on a project that is taking longer than I though. The bills are piling higher. I'm short on rent this month. I'm starting to get doubts. However, I remind myself that I would rather do this than anything else, and it helps anchor me.

If you enjoy it most of the time, you'll see it through when times get tough - and they will.
non-paywall link:

http://www.google.is/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s...
put.io is the best start-up which I have joined as a customer. Cheap, fast and simple service. Also, put.io accepts free users for 1G. Everybody must try.
Looks like the database is down. Here's the cached version:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&outpu...
I don't understand these services. If I'm going to have to download the thing anyway, why put another layer in the middle? It's always going to take less time to download directly.
Not just in Europe - Australia has similar privacy legislation also. If a company is storing incorrect information about you, you can request to see your record and then have them correct that record. If they won't, the Privacy Commissioner can investigate and order them to do so.
Hear, hear. I've been watching for hell-banned users for a few weeks now and from a random sample, some of the bannings are a little harsh.

Maybe there should be a stage before hell-banning?
Windows NT stood for "New Technology".

Whenever I see Windows RT, I think "Reduced Technology".
IANAL Fair use usually applies to copying the work or publishing it, or making a dervied work from it (y'know all the thing that the copyright holder usually only has legal rights to do).

Merely transforming the work yourself and keeping it yourself, wouldn't really count as anything that copyright law has any say over. Since it's not explicitly illegal, it's legal. You don't need 'fair use rights' when you tear up a book in frustration, or your kid scribbles on it. Likewise you can copy your file locally and mangle it if you want.

Copyright law only gives the copyright holder some rights to some things. It's not like they own every single copy of the book/film/file completely.

This is why there was a new law in the USA (the DMCA) which explicitly criminalized breaking DRM. They needed a new law for it.

(However you may enter the territory of hacking a computer system (which is broadly "doing something to a computer that the owner doesn't want").
I'd enjoy a week with some tools to make visualizations like this. Looks cool, but what is it telling me?

- Why is there blue space between segments?

- Why do the colored (non-blue) segments crawl around instead of growing/shrinking?

- If any segment actually changes size, I can't tell because of the crawl

- If the crawling is due to "continental drift," there's not an obvious path that the flow takes. I can see that it starts in the upper left corner, but when I notice that the path squiggles around, I have to study it for far too long to figure out where the bits are headed.
AppHarbor.

Any other questions?
So you want to be a Rock Star Developer? Maybe you should reconsider.
It's not a grocery store, it's a €67 billion a year wholesale and retail group with 6 different store chains under its belt including wholesale warehouses, grocery stores, department stores and -- most importantly -- two consumer electronics chains. You could have a Metro-owned store with Metro signs over Android tablets next to a Microsoft store with Metro signs over Surface tablets. The likelihood of confusion that'd create is the very definition of trademark infringement.
There's irony: Amazon would try to stop information that would prove that her account is linked to another account by arguing that it would infringe a completely different person's privacy if it disclosed any information about the linked account that caused the original notification.

That's quite an interesting legal tactic they've got going there!
If she has made any recent purchases, doing a chargeback would be an option.
Piracy for books is quite interesting. There is already a lot of infastructure for sharing files (torrent sites et al.), but the new thing is how small books are. 1,000 books could be about the size of one standard def film (~ 1 GB). A lot of people are going to have a lot of books.
Yes, no question about it.

(I used to think this didn't matter, either. Turns out that I'm far more pleasant to be around if I don't have a beard. So I haven't had one in 20 years).

Welcome to the world of effective interpersonal interaction. We're primates, get used to it :-)
Wow, wish my bank could tell me the reasoning for credit decisions !
"Will I see Java being used when I am grandfather? (I am 17 right now.)"

We can still "see" (if we try hard enough) COBOL being used. Have no fear, Java (and even the JVM, but to a lesser extent) will be safely oboloscent by the time your grandchildren are programming. We are still very much in the Bronze Age of programming languages and environments. We have a very long way to go.
Maybe HN should reveal who the hell banners are?
You let the service download the slow torrent over night and then use a fast download from their servers to transfer it to your computer. This way you don't have to have a running computer in your room all that time.
Slightly off-topic: I was surprised to see a ".it" domain that was actually Italian.
Problems with Ubuntu’s new shopping lens
Interesting Facts about Microsoft Windows and Bill Gates - New
It's fair use in the States, too, when the result is exercise of fair use. The fact that provisions in the DMCA could allow someone to go after a linux user using mplayer to play his DVDs doesn't mean that someone will pursue that case - it would create a serious risk of getting provisions of the law stricken by the courts.
I'm very happy with my Pocketbook Touch (http://www.pocketbook-int.com/us/products/pocketbook-touch). It seems quite hackable, the vendor is responsive (some employees hang out on www.mobileread.com pretty regularly). The touchscreen works well and the buttons for paging are great.

I've bought one or two books off Amazon and used de De-DRM tools available to put them on there, though it even supports the Adobe DRM (not Amazon's, though). It does have some annoyances but I haven't hit any major snags in several months of use.
Could you ever imagine a local retailer in your area breaking and entering into your home, taking away all your books, and then not giving you a straightforward explanation as to why they did so? Me neither. Breaking and entering into someone else's physical property, and talking away their physical possessions without explanation is so obviously wrong and illegal!

Yet that's pretty much what Amazon did to this poor woman, except in the digital realm: Amazon 'broke and entered' into her Kindle, took away all her books, and then did not give her a straightforward explanation as to why they did so.

More alarmingly, Amazon did this with impunity, because this woman never really owned "her" books or, for that matter, anything else she "purchased" on "her" Kindle. In the digital realm, what Amazon did to this woman is perfectly legal.

Legal or not, this looks, smells, and feels so obviously wrong, it ought to be illegal.
JRuby DSL and Integration for Storm here: https://github.com/colinsurprenant/redstorm
Hmm, I forgot that not all people have a computer running 24/7. I haven't seen many slow torrents, but I guess they exist. Thanks for the explanation!
Not to be insensitive (I've had a few encounters with cancer myself, from both the p.o.v. of a healthcare professional and from that of a relative/friend of a patient), but WHY is this on the front page of HN?! The story is (unfortunately) very typical and repeats time and time again in all parts of the world... but this type of description really brings no new information to "the anti-cancer game"... I know it touches everybody's emotions and stuff, but is this really the place to have these conversations?
Too many social networks
Er... this is now giving a 404?
Dropbox’s Mental Models Are Broken
Show HN: Realtime Audience Feedback
Here's the full review of the Dublin Web Summit you were looking for..
I've been using a Kobo for around a year now.

Plusses:

* They're cheaper than Kindle to buy

* The Kobo store is well stocked and competitively priced

* You can upload your own books easily by dragging and dropping the files as if it's a thumb drive or by using Calibre (see calibre-ebook.com).

* The screen looks just as good as my partner's Kindle.
Images are actually larger (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4681670), but scaled down on website, so that may make them look as if they had the quality they don't have. Though the big versions don't look that bad either.
Most systems that are physically available with local users (e.g. libraries, college computer labs, etc.) will have booting from anything other than the hard drive disabled, and the BIOS password protected. You'd need to open up the machine and reset the CMOS to use this approach.
I'm talking about the feeling more than anything else. Having a song or a book on my computer/device doesn't feel like ownership to me so I don't treat it like ownership. A book on my kobo feels no different to a podcast on my phone. I don't think about my relationship with it.

Part of that is probably because I already treat physical copies of music/books as temporary things. I abandoned all my CDs & books during my last move. I don't really care about owning this stuff. I just want to listen to music read books and watch shows.

Another part is probably because I think whatever the system is now for owning, distributing & acculating digital property will be moot anyway within the next 10-20 years.

Basically, I don't expect my grandchildren to inherit my "cloud." They'll have access to all that stuff one way or another anyway.
"Michael Murphy" may actually be a fictional identity though. Companies sometimes do that to give people the feeling of dealing with a real person while in reality it's just whoever is free in the department that deals with it. Certainly if my job was to tell people that we weren't giving them their account of any of their purchases back, I wouldn't want them to have any of my personal details.
We’ve Broken This Startup Thing
Javascript code performance review
The creator here.

You can find the source at: https://github.com/dfjones/Feedback

The app is built using NodeJS with express and socket.io.

I hacked this together in a matter of hours, so there are definitely things that could be done much better. However, I think this is a great proof-of-concept.
If you're a "normal" UK taxpayer, you shouldn't have to remember anything for any tax return - just tick the box and give them your name and address (so that they can verify you are in fact a UK taxpayer).

If you're not paying UK income tax, you're not supposed to be able to gift aid it, that's kind of the point.

I can imagine it might be awkward if you're self-employed in the UK or something like that; they don't bother streamlining that case.