skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The movie and music companies aren't suffering, artists aren't suffering (in fact, in can be argued that artists embracing the new media world are flourishing), software companies and developers aren't suffering. There is more music, movies and software than ever before.

The whole piracy issue is overblown."

In real world economics, you argument actually supports the exact opposite. When supply increases and demand decreases, the ability for an artist to sell enough music to live on gets exponentially harder.

When a few people buy the music, then spread it by piracy means its not just the artist and music companies who are losing money. It's the producers, the mixers and dozens of other technical people not making a million dollars when Jay-Z's new album sells 10K copies in the first week.

The piracy issue is overblown only to those who have never experienced it first hand. It's not just the artist and the big music companies you're hurting, there's a ton of lower level people who work in the industry who are suffering because of piracy.
Some people may not be familiar with C macros, and an example could help grasp the problem you're talking about.

You could have pointed out all the things that are done in the C obfuscation code contests, to illustrate your point, but maybe this is silly. Also, you start your point from the spaghetti code hell that C macros let people fall into (I guess you where thinking about #ifdef conditionals), but I don't see how annotations could generate that problem. Imho, your point is flawed.

C macros are useful, and when not misleadingly used, very effective at abstracting things in order to get the important structures apparent. That is what annotations attempt to provide. Regarding PHP annotations, the problem here is that it's difficult and time consuming to parse a PHP script, whereas comments are an easy target. SensioLabs went the easy road, perhaps also in the hope that someday annotations would find their way in PHP, and people would just have to remove the comments around them to be compliant.
I thought this was very interesting. I found the point on pitching one feature at a time to be particularly worthwhile.

Thanks for posting.
NIP Tip – Add a Separator Between Terminal Commands
I worked at a company where the employees were careful to separate recyclable waste from regular garbage, and then the weekly cleaning crew would toss both into the same garbage bags. So much for good intentions.
Just searched for it myself in the UK, Armageddon came up first.
Ask HN: How will the Geosocial mobile proximity app/network nut be cracked?
IMO, an existing user base needs to be co-opted with a compelling value proposition that creates a community around that brand/location(s).
Keys To A Great 3 Minute Startup Pitch
I don't see how this proves the premise that 'radical christian' ethics are unique compared to non-christian or, presumably, non-radical christian ethics. In my opinion, this seems to undermine its own validity by invoking the ideals of a pagan philosopher to express the idea.

edit: sorry, just realized it might not be your site being linked to so I rephrased my comment.
Hindsight is 20/20, but I think a lot of people looked at Color with very skeptical eyes. It seemed like a really strange concept (to me, at least, and I'm sure others) at the time that garnered a great deal of attention out of nowhere (not to mention an enviable amount of cash). I think some people wanted to believe it would be the next big "social thing", and they looked at the folks behind it and thought "Well, there's no way people wont eat this up!".

I mean, they made headlines by blowing a ridiculous amount of cash on a domain name. Why weren't they making headlines with how solid of a concept they had?

Why were we talking about their valuation, and how seemingly overblown it was, instead of how revolutionary their product was going to be, and how it was going to change / disrupt / whatever some existing market or industry?

Having an amazing set of people at the helm of a ship that no one seems interested in boarding doesn't do you much good.
What are you referring to here? /r/creepshots had nothing to do with compromising photos of children.

At a stretch, /r/jailbait and the associated subreddits may have, but reddit took the decision to ban those a long time ago.

It makes perfect sense. Both posting photos of people in public on the Internet and 'doxxing' someone who does this are legal. However, the former is in compliance with Internet culture (the free sharing of information, no matter how controversial) and the latter is not. The latter is an attack on the Internet.
I tend to say "I don't know" around these malevolent personality types more often. If people are looking for ammunition to use against you, the less words you use the better. These types of people will find plenty of things to mock you and challenge you in a long truthful explanation if they really want to. When around these people, I keep my responses to a minimum, and try to turn their questions back on them and keep them talking instead of me.
I went and "starred" and "watched" Pyramid so that it could join the cool club, not really sure what either feature does though.
I think the basis for evaluating the quality of a community lies in the discourse and communication. Submissions are a part of that, but the discussion that follows (i.e. comments) is the most important indicator of change. Personally, there seems to be an influx of reddit-style comments (little substance, meme-oriented) this year, but that could be a general evolution of the English language given the heavy influence of the internet.

That said, evaluating change in the number of comments along with comment upvotes vs. sentiment analysis seems like the only logical way to demonstrate any sort of quality meta analysis. I'm not really versed in qualitative research, so here's my ASK HN: is this even possible?
People have been able to track people and locations surprisingly little information.

What if those photos do leak information that could enable real-life harassement (like EXIF metadata, street sign, etc) . Can we trust the submitter to guarantee it never will? If it happens, who's to blame?
[Not sure whether the question is directed to the author or to my comment but I'll answer anyway :) ]

Basically, there are 3 notions

1) the buffer (byte[] or whatever) containing the data, immutable at least while the data is being accessed by a given thread

2) the Struct object: defines the structure of a message (field length, offset, arrays etc.)

3) the Message (aka the flyweight) that points to a given offset in buffer and is bound to a Struct instance

The buffer and the message are normally accessed by only one thread, but several threads can share Struct instances (i.e. the dictionary).

Each field (even deep in the field hierarchy) knows its offset relative to the beginning of the message, so values can be accessed like eg.

int foo = struct.foo.getInt(msg);

The only complicated thing is when dealing with arrays (especially when nested in other arrays). The message does the bookkeeping necessary to safely access elements, ie. the mutable state is stored in the flyweight.
Banks have "shreddable" bins for sensitive documents, the shredded bits get recycled.
I feel like an easy way to win any argument involving the Internet is to just draw a line around your side of the argument, label the inside of that line "the Internet", and call the opposing argument an "attack on the Internet". I disagree that your argument makes perfect sense, but prefer not to repeat my argument.
Not really politics. Those rockets didn't work very well. (did the N1 ever have a successful flight?)

Russia had plenty of stuff that DID work well, and managed to make a business out of selling launch services.
Twilio’s Client Product Now Supports WebRTC
It is a real argument. Are you suggesting that you can't find "intellectual clarity" from the list of reddit rules?
Haha, I'd never considered this benefit. I'm one of those morning people whose energy flags in the mid-afternoon, and this is definitely one way to get the juices flowing again (quite literally).
The concept itself is pretty great, though I'm not sure if something like this has ever been implemented before. It seems like such an "of course" product that you'd expect it to already exist (though perhaps not as a really simple API).

Aside from the concept, the page design could use a little work. Here are 3 suggestions that'll improve your landing page big time.

1. You're doing a good job by sticking to (what seems to be) a grid, but you need to tighten the grid up. The last row is just hanging there, and you could definitely benefit from bringing more attention to it.

2. Designers would refer to this kind of padding and spacing as claustrophobic. You should consider padding things out a little more and adding breathing room. In the header area, try padding out above and below the headline. In the lower section with each feature callout, give it some top-padding.

3. Try reducing the contrast of the body text in the features section, as well as lowering the font size by 1px and increasing the line-height by 2px. For example: http://imgur.com/tw8QT

4. Be sure to vertically center the icons with the h3 text. They're off a little. It's nitpicking, but it counts.

5. The 45deg line in the header background is working against you. Your product is dead simple, your landing page is stripped to the bone. Keep with it — don't add needless textures.

Hope this was helpful and constructive.
/r/creepshots was almost exclusively photos of women, very few of whom were obviously underage, in public places.

The extent to which these photos were "sexually suggestive" was largely in control of the women concerned. If you're going to wear low-cut tops, yoga pants, etc. then a photo of yourself taken in public may be interpreted as sexually suggestive.

Contributors to the subreddit were just posting things they had seen in public. What's wrong with that?
No, that's not my argument. The creepiness of these particular photos was his assertion, and I suggested that he interrogate his assertion about why they were creepy (and "wrong") to help see why these photos are in particular problematic.

I was specifically not litigating the enforceability of "creepiness" standards.

For what it's worth: Watching anime isn't creepy. Two males kissing isn't creepy.
Isn't that just a simulation, not for real?
Google isn't a common carrier - the internet is a common carrier.

Having an account on one website linking to content is the same as having an account on another website linking to content.

I'd argue that the content on Reddit is, by percentage, less "distasteful" than what is on Google, but distasteful is a subjective term.
Could we be really living in the Matrix?  Science says: Maybe.
You're right; that was probably the investor perspective, plus a slick sales job with a handwavey Big Idea (local! mobile! social!) and some hockey-stick curves. Pattern-matching and all that. But it's a little depressing that people will hand over $40m for that.

The core hypotheses could have been tested for far less. Indeed, the co-founders had enough dough that they could have tested them without VC involvement at all. There was no need to take investor money until they needed to scale.

Seems like a classic example of the Silicon Valley hype cycle, and the sort of idiocy that was a big feature in Bubble 1.0. "Internet! Shopping! Groceries! Can't miss!" And then we got WebVan. But I suppose Color should get some credit; they only blew tens of millions of dollars, not the $1 billion WebVan pissed away.
I didn't realize you used the exact same slogan previously!

While there are many other Chrome extensions on Hacker News, I spent three weeks perfecting the three main features (banning domains, user profile overlay, subdomains) as well as allowing the users to disable any of them.

As anyone on Hacker News who's ever released a product can relate, I was confused that 1) someone used mine for many months, and then uninstalled it without realizing they could disable a feature, and 2) the same person who used mine for many months didn't know the difference between my plugin and yours, and then 3) they posted on my favorite tech site about it. :)

Looks like they remembered the slogan from my web site, "Save Time on Hacker News", but not the web site url, or the screenshot showing that you can go the standard Chrome Options to disable a feature. Given that I only submitted Autobahn once to the Chrome Store and Hacker News and haven't had a bug to force releasing a new update since launch, I guess I have to start writing blog posts, marketing, and work up the branding a bit when I release version 2. :)

Both of us obviously developed and use our own plugin for our own needs, and I hope we continue to share our improvements to the site with the Hacker News crowd! :)

Finally, I also want to thank Alex for making me consider adding a specific icon to the username for loading the user profile normally, and will follow-up with him about why he didn't like the feature after using it for many months.
You realize that this argument about the implied consent to sexualize someone based on their attire is extremely fraught, right?
Translation for those that missed it: This post is a (very good) sales pitch.
Your description of v1 sounds exactly like meeting strangers; am I missing something?

Yeah, v2 was about a different non-problem (normal people broadcasting their everyday lives).
I agree with many of your points, but want to point out that Apple's goal was not to introduce the iPhone and then continue to innovate it, it was to perfect it; which they are very close too. Furthermore, Techies want innovation, general consumers want design and function that works and looks good, period. They don't give a crap that you can touch your phones together and transfer a playlist, or "innovation" as some would call it. My prediction is Apple's next innovation will not be in the phone or music industry and it may not come for a while.
> Hindsight is 20/20

IMHO that's somewhat dismissive. I, for one, was pessimistic on the outcome of Color ever since I heard of it and I don't think I was alone and I"m sure I'm not particularly prophetic.

While your list of things are all good things to have (from an investor's point of view), at some point it doesn't add up and it just smells bad. Startups that make a big splash with little substance getting lots of attention at SXSW, lots of press on TC, etc tend to burn out rapidly.

Compare this to the likes of SpaceX (which, at this point, may well be one of the most important companies of the 21st century), Square (massive potential), Pinterest (despite the buzz dying down here I still think this one may well have legs), Instagram (which had a massive userbase), etc.

The things you listed come largely down to social proof. I get that they're important and why investors don't focus too much on the idea, given the likelihood of a pivot, but that doesn't mean you can look solely at social proof.

EDIT: to clarify, SXSW was an example of startups making a big splash, not specifically Color.
Ask HN: When do you use SQL vs NoSQL?
Some people like SQL, some like NoSQL.. some have used PostgreSQL and moved to MongoDB, and some vice versa. But at the end of the day, it usually comes down to "use whatever you're comfortable with"..

So I'm wondering, what data patterns are more appropriate to SQL vs NoSQL datastores? Can such a decision even be simplified to 'data pattern'?
Ask HN: Coroutines in php?
It's not a YC startup and it's wildly successful.
This is a nice looking design, but seems a lot less intuitive than the current version. I use instacart all the time and have zero confusion about what to do next. The added color in the redesign is interesting, but I think it has the effect of not knowing what to focus on. It took me awhile to notice the bottom nav. Regardless, I enjoy these redesigns, since it makes you rethink how you approach things.
The point about using separate storage is reasonable. Leaving aside the issue of locking binary files, having to potentially use multiple systems or repositories is partly my stumbling block when it comes to any serious replacement to perforce. There are real benefits to having just one system, and having absolutely everything in just one place. One set of revision numbers, one client program. And, most importantly, no need to think about what to do if you have something you want to keep (aside from putting it in an appropriate folder, as you rightly point out). If you want to keep it, it goes in perforce. Doesn't matter what it is, or how much of it there is, perforce will take it. And that's that.

I've seen the annoyances of using multiple depots/databases/repos/etc. with Alien Brain in the past, and that was just one system. Now I'm working on a smaller project that uses both git and SVN, and even though it's a smaller project, it's still annoying today. Being able to have just one system, that can swallow absolutely everything without a fuss (while not being especially annoying to use, like Alien Brain was), is a big advantage.
The site is quite attractive, and the product looks compelling. I can think of at least two places where I'd use it off the bat (and the pricing is right as well).

I'm guessing that since the beta isn't ready yet, that's why you don't currently have a demo, but I'd rather like to see a demo or have a trial period before purchasing.
That's why meetups work; they are planned in advance, built around a common interest, with sane expectations and boundaries.
IBM's Watson Is Learning Its Way To Saving Lives
I think that's exactly what I was told about. Thanks for the details.
I am drawing the line at compromising (sexualized, objectified, or deliberately embarrassing) photos of minors.

So again, I don't see the equivalence.
> The future of our species is at stake here and we are trying to paint a bright future for your great grandchildren.

I didn't know being able to watch Game of Thrones 30 minutes after it airs on HBO via your computer without paying was such a dire thing.
How cute, the same guy who wrote a programming language in order to solve a trivial problem is going to be chairman of the App Developers Alliance.

See: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/has-joel-spolsky-ju...

I don't think that I'll ever be able to take this guy seriously.
I have to wonder if this is a full-circle hack to deal with a poor architecture decision in committing to MongoDB.
It would be pretty nice if PHP somehow slowly morphed into being about elegance, rather than becoming more and more horrible over time.
I liked the old design with search first and foremost. They should bring that back.
I wonder how many of those 440,000 "Active" users were a result of their partnership with Verizon to install Color on a bunch of their phones.

Also, does "active" mean # of installs in this case?
Proof read before you send something like that out:

"Particularly because I think a two articles you wrote a few years ago did an amazing job summarizing the industry"
i appreciate the feedback a ton, i'm going to see if i can get a few of those changes in here soon! i always enjoy hearing from someone with a better design eye :)

as to the product idea, there are a few places that have pulled it off in niche places (postcards for instance), and few high profile (similar) attempts in the late 90's (Royal Mail & MSFT via 'RelayOne'). we're out to make it easy for other devs to leverage our printing infrastructure with a no-bull approach to this :)
One problem I see with this design is that it's now hard to tell which size product you're picking. Is that a small bag of kettle chips or a big one? I can't tell.
Have you read: http://www.kiva.org/about/how/even-more

They aren't charging any interest rates at all, and all interest rates are set by the field programs.

Obviously, in developing countries they are taking on significant risk, so that is passed on to borrowers. If they didn't do this, many would go bankrupt.
Some dude once said that it can be preferable to invest in a company solely based on its founders, and that ideas aren't always a requirement.
Hello, I'd like to get in touch with you. Would you be OK with sharing your email address please?

Cheers.
The company as it is may get shut down, but with the leftover cash it could easily rebrand under another name and a new product.
I told you why I don't think it's a real argument, and you responded by repeating yourself without acknowledging my point.
So now you have a system for putting quotation marks inside your strings? Are you going to eventually start putting escaped-quotation marks inside your escaped-quotes, and inventing escaped-escaped-quotation marks so you can quote the quoted-quotation marks?

In other words, there is no need for some kind of elaborate escapes-upon-escapes method here, all you have to do is not start a comment line with *@.
Why So Cheap? The Amazon Business Model
The point is (or should be) to learn how socket programming works so you know what's going on under all that abstraction and why. That's also why we catch all those exceptions: so we understand why something failed, and how to deal with it in the future. It's also really fun to write complex networking apps from scratch =)
They should just retitle this article "Jeff Bezos finally realizes he's next"
Isn't this article from The Sun plain wrong about our future?
"You'll have smaller brains, more wrinkles and fewer teeth"

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/4575024/Youll-have-smaller-brains-more-wrinkles-and-fewer-teeth.html

This piece basically says that our needs being different than before because of modern medicine and new technologies (among others), our bodies will adapt to these very same needs.

I'm no expert in evolution, but from what I understand:

- In the past, we evolved thanks to natural selection

- We're still evolving (random mutations haven't stopped appearing), but no more natural selection

- Most mutations thus get passed along generations

So yes, we will keep evolving, but we won't "adapt" to this new lifestyle; our evolution is, has always been and always will be tied to "chance".

At least that's my (again, limited) understanding. What's yours?
I remember reading those threads and you're right. The positive spin was built around

1) That it was an interesting idea.

or

2) That it was a talented team which justified the funding.

or

3) That being a "fat" start-up they had plenty of chances to get it right.

I don't remember many (any?) people saying it was a good idea that would succeed on its own merits.
The first step to learning something new is admitting you don't know it yet?
Newspapers and the Long-Term Implications of Hyperlinking
Kaspersky Lab Developing Secure Operating System for SCADA
Great point. The times I've pretended usually come back to bite me and are eventually more embarrassing than just saying "I don't know". Now, when I'm tempted to pretend, I think about the embarrassment that will probably result, which gives me the courage to say "I don't know."
On a related note, I was once in a meeting with a couple brilliant NASA scientists, and was surprised how often they admitted they did not know something. There were a couple of the smartest guys I've ever met, and the had no qualms about admitting things they didn't know. That helped me to start saying "I don't know" more often as well.
> Your system would have him spending 33x as much effort maintaining that knowledge as what we're currently doing. A factor of 33 is worth some bookkeeping on my part.

I will grant you that. We only used this strategy for the times tables up to 12x12, which has a finite set of cards (144 if I remember my facts correctly :) ).

If I wanted to do an ever growing set, I might consider this method.

> And, according to the research, long-term retention is worse.

Can you point me at some good research on this area? I believe you, I'd just like to read more, as someone who is interested in this sort of thing.