skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I actually really wanted to cater to personal use, but I've been having a hard time figuring out the best way to do it. I could make a plan limited to one user and maybe like 2,000 items, a minimal amount of storage, and all for $10 a month. Does that sound reasonable to you?
I can't believe more people don't do this. It seems like such a no-brainer when I'm writing. Not only for others, but for myself as well.
Ummm... might be my mistake, but I can't spot any indication of how long your book is.

I did quickly look through the sample and the book seems to be very useful, but I'd like some indication of how much of it there is. ;)
An article and personal experience of learning Ruby and Rails
I think the issue here was that it was for a final exam.
I'm the same way. I use a txt file that I keep on my desktop. It does the job.
I find 80 a bit cramped myself. There are a lot of lovely one-line idioms, like postfix if and iterator blocks, which feel constrained at 80 characters. Worse of all, I spend time worrying about line width.

In principle, having a line width limit is a worthwhile idea. 120 rarely gives me problems, and I can fit 240 characters wide in any case.
As I've said on HN before, Wikipedia is a lie.

The façade says "come and contribute!"

The actual operation of the site is no longer like that. There has been a total inversion of the premise.

Wikipedia should have an anti-deletion bias.

There. I said it.

It should take a massive number of people to delete a page. Hundreds. Thousands maybe. Some particular amount of registered users (5% say, or double the square root. Whatever).
I'm quite a fan of Asana. It's free and a very simple task management system. If you ever bring another person on board it's easy to reassign tasks.
We should! You can reach me at chris@flextory.com.
my bad... sorry for posting without giving much thought to the blog post..
Fictional Arpanet Dialog
Why is the #1 query never something I ever type?
The book itself is 154 pages.
Member for: today

Hmmmmmmmmm
There is no silver bullet for stopping web scrapers. If you just try to block User Agents or IPs, all you are doing is putting a small hurdle in their way. You have to employ a lot of different tools to be able to make the wall high enough that they actually stop trying to scrape you. Some of the key things you need to do are:

behavioral modeling - rate limiting, bandwidth restrictions, etc

identity verifications - make sure they are running the browser they say they are, allow google and other search engins by whitelisting their IPs, block others that are pretending to be google, etc

code obfuscation - make it hard for them to scrape your code. Change up the CSS, etc.

OR you can use an automated service to do all this for you. Check out www.distil.it.
Full disclosure, I'm the CEO of Distil.
Used to make me want to tear my hair out... But I've moved to using linqpad and writing the queries in linq now, and it's not too bad.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7303333/are-adhoc-queries...
The best part is that the student edited the question and replaced it with a bunch of garbage characters, and then an admin rolled back the edit, ~2 hours before the professor's comment.
How a handful of unsupervised MIT economists run the world
It's not wrong to ask for help or advice, but this wasn't even that in the slightest; The question is just posted verbatim, without even any evidence of attempting to understand or tackle the question on it's own.
I mostly use hosted issue trackers (both GitHub's and Bitbucket's are fine), e.g. https://github.com/mvasilkov/game-off-2012/issues

Tracking progress helps motivation.
Again, it isn't a question of like, it is a question of productivity. Open offices lower productivity, even for those people who like them. When I mention "read peopleware" I mean "read peopleware", not "repeat the same statement that was already addressed".
Reading your comment, I asked myself "There was a sample?"

Another design issue of note, I had skimmed past that portion during the scroll down because it was not highlighted. There should be some sort of color change.
Is this hacker news?
Oliver Sacks: Seeing God in the Third Millenium
We have a subculture of anti-intellectualism and cottling our kids that is perhaps a little less prominent in the countries that out-perform us? Fitting in socially is also heavily emphasized in the US system, so early advancement for high performers is generally frowned upon.
Freaking IE. I hate that damn browser
while I'd like the "everything inside wikipedia" approach to work, the problem with it is that every new page makes it less maintainable, disambiguation pages grow larger, category listings grow larger, search results and suggestions multiply etc.

And the notability argument is that you can already post an article about that tree, on the larger internet.
There are lots of ways that artists could hypothetically be compensated and things will probably change a lot over the next 5-10 years. Right now, though, pretend buying overpriced t-shirts is one way to get money to musicians without going to concerts. Free idea for musicians: I'd pay to subscribe to webcasts of practice sessions.
No, it's not the standard world wide. For the simple reason that consuming that much water and energy (to heat the water) costs a lot of money. And most people in the world don't have that much money.
The real issue is that he spits the homework (or take home exam) question as-is on math.stackexchange and has others solve it.

Asking a concrete, directed question meant to understand part of the problem and get him "unstuck" would probably have been fine and expected.
Every time this comes up I'm reminded of a very simple idea: fork Wikipedia, in a way that articles still get synced from the original but at the same time deleted articles just stay in the database. If you want to make it really fancy, put in some code that tries to detect whether parts of an article have been deleted and, when in doubt, keep the old version it live. Maybe there could even be some neat UI that makes it easy to navigate different versions of articles (no, the Wikipedia UI isn't it). I think in time a project like that could become very successful. Keep using Wikipedia as a source, but give new life to the underlying idea that is no longer being taken seriously over there.
After 3 years of catching up, Windows is losing webservers to Unix-like systems
The pyramids were not built by slaves (at least there's no real proof of it). A lot of the workers who died during the construction where buried in decorated tombs which says something about their wealth, which probably says they couldn't be slaves.
Immutant, OpenShift, PostgreSQL and Poorsmatic
Part of their business model is that you will willingly watch ads, signup for things, and do other kinds of stunts to earn more free bandwidth per month.

But I hear you. 1GB for a family DSL is just way too little data and I think most people will end up paying something over the $0 price. I think our household uses around 1GB of data a day, and we hardly use Youtube and don't have Netflix.
PG has stated that it is done this way because it was easiest/fastest/most elegant way to do it from a programming point of view. He acknowledges that it is not very efficient or enjoyable from a user's point of view.

It's also been like this for years, so presumably PG doesn't care enough about the usability to change it.

This type of thread comes up every month or two, someone explains how/why it happens and then we go back to having the same, broken interface. I doubt it will ever be fixed.
I liked the use of progressive responsiveness!

0. http://responsiveurl.co.uk/while/were/making/every/damn/thing/responsive/lets/not/forget/about/the/url/
1. http://responsiveurl.co.uk/while/were/making/everything/responsive/lets/not/forget/the/url/
2. http://responsiveurl.co.uk/while/were/making/everything/responsive/dont/forget/the/url/
3. http://responsiveurl.co.uk/were/making/everything/responsive/dont/forget/the/url/
4. http://responsiveurl.co.uk/making/everything/responsive/dont/forget/the/url/
5. http://responsiveurl.co.uk/making/everything/responsive/dont/forget/url/
6. http://responsiveurl.co.uk/making/responsive/dont/forget/url/
7. http://responsiveurl.co.uk/responsive/dont/forget/url/
8. http://responsiveurl.co.uk/responsive/url/
9. http://responsiveurl.co.uk/rspnsv/url/
10. http://responsiveurl.co.uk/
11. http://rspnsvurl.co.uk/
I'm sure he didn't even read the article.
> You're mostly out of luck if you don't have the exact amount of money to ride a bus. Machines don't give change. Probably because everybody has a pre-paid ticket and tourists are expected to take a cab or rent a car.

This is actually a theft deterrent. Bus drivers can't get at the money to give change, so they can't be held up either.

> Probably that's why people look at you very suspiciously when you approach them on the street to ask for a direction.

That's part of it, but Americans are deeply distrustful of strangers. It probably plays along the same lines as our finding suburbs safer than inner cities.

> Tipping baseline is very high. Although I'm a capitalist, I consider this practice to have nothing to do with capitalism.

It's strictly a cultural thing. I'm given to understand that in Hawai'i tipping used to be considered insulting, and perhaps that's still the case in places (I've never been). Also, in different parts of the country tips are compulsory for different occupations. In the Southwest, restaurant service is about the only thing you tip for. In New England it's a different story.
Google’s Venice Update—The Forgotten Local Update
Silicon Valley has so many tiger moms. Yet I bet that the Americans who succeed here, on any measure of success including just plain fun, were raised in America's lax educational system. I'd be surprised if anyone showed a correlation between standardized test scores and life success; in fact, I'd be surprised if people actually tried to look for such a correlation, instead of worrying that it is an important indicator.
ECT - Fastest JavaScript template engine with embedded CoffeeScript syntax
Yeah, let's post the questions to our take home final to the internet. No one will notice. Honest.
I find it pointless. If you want to write SQL queries just use a relational database, if you want to use Mongo learn to use it.
What is one thing you wish you had known at 21?
Sheer size has to play a major factor here. Comparing the US to city-states like Hong Kong and Singapore or relatively tiny countries like Finland is really suspect because there is so much difficulty in the managing and improving an education system as large and diverse as the US has.

Unfortunately, there isn't a great country to compare to: the countries with the closest populations are Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, etc. and comparisons there have other problems. I'm guessing the best possibly comparisons are probably Brazil or China.
I'm guessing VM is a common typo for GM?
Why everyone loves the iPad mini (even though the screen sucks)
> 3) Report addresses to Amazon. I really don't know if they'd take action.

They take action. I've seen it done.
Show HN: Platform to deploy from GitHub to AWS
Hello Folks, We have just released CloudMunch Developer Edition. This is a platform to deploy your application from a GitHub repo to AWS to get quick feedback on your application. Provides an abstraction layer on top of AWS. We would appreciate your thoughts and feedback. Thank you.

Links: http://www.cloudmunch.com/developers
A well written scraper looks like normal traffic in the same way that a well written pseudo random number generator looks like a random number generator. It'll fool your eye but not statistical analysis.

Think about the goal of a scraper, it needs to actually walk through all the content. That doesn't look like a normal user at all. An individual request might look ok, but in aggregate the pattern of a robot pops out.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity12/pubcrawl-...
The biggest surprise was the 5% increase for breaking the steps - seems little - when compared to the copy and imagery change (massive 19% and 21%).

That's kinda insane! Love the report, thanks.
Why care to participate if contributions can be deleted at any moment?

In WikiMedia's "Movement Strategic Plan Summary" they have an interesting graph to show.

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strate...

So something must have happend around '07. What was it?
Scraping, in itself, is often not prohibited, wrong, illegal, or against most sites' TOS. Your site would allow me, for example, to scrape all your content for my own personal use, but I couldn't re-publish or re-sell the info.

It seems hard to limit legitimate uses of a free resource without changing the requirements on how users access the site (require account signup, use CAPTCHAs, use CSS/JS to only display properly in a browser).

As one who does a lot of scraping, I have encountered few barriers that can't be (legally) overcome with a reasonable amount of effort.
Being sarcastic is puerile?
Just mentioning in case anyone cares, that hacker also released xnomad, which adds dwm-like window management to OS X. It's a bit buggy, but it works the vast majority of the time and rarely screws up……it just ignores things more than I would like and doesn't work well with multiple spaces.
Gogo seeks to dismiss class-action lawsuit alleging airline Wi-Fi monopoly
Yep, those are the two arguments for notability criteria I found most convincing. Anybody arguing for total inclusionism will have have to provide answers to those. And if you're not arguing for total inclusionism, you need to provide better notability criteria that work with all the edge cases. That's also really really hard.
I'm not sure what you expect when it's a take home final, however.
The Ruby programming language needs a design process
Monopolies over the creations.

Thomas Jefferson's proposal for the Amendment that granted copyright and patents was:

Art. 9. Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions
in literature and their own inventions in the arts for a term
not exceeding — years but for no longer term and no other purpose.

Madison, on the other hand, wrote:

Monopolies, though in certain cases useful, ought to be granted with caution,
and guarded with strictness against abuse. The Constitution of the United
States has limited them to two cases--the authors of books, and of useful
inventions (...)
Boring things are what make the world go round.

Unfortunately, many of these awesome things will never have the impact that something like a web form for building permit requests might have, outside of the greatly limited tech sphere.
In fact, I might go so far as to say that this was never intended to be merged. I'll assume whoever did this wants their message heard, and while it will never show up on CoderDojo, the hodgepodge of coding styles ensures that the "pull request" will go viral, thus possibly reaching a far greater number of people than it would have otherwise.

/tinfoil
Evidently a take-home exam, which by its nature would have different expectations wrt assistance vs. an in-class exam.
Indeed, it's exactly the same on developer forums and the like: spit out a homework/exam question and you'll deservedly get slammed. Show you've been working on it but you got stuck, you'll likely get people to give you pointers.
Like others have already noted don't put too much thought into how to organize things. Keep it as simple as possible. This way you'll spent most of your time doing fun stuff (at least for me that would be writing code).

I'll host all my side projects on github. To keep track of bugs and new features I use github's issue tracker. Besides that I carry around a programmer's journal (some small paper notebook) where I write down new ideas, code snippets or concepts.
"Social hacking": the next big thing.
I'm at Basho (we make the Riak database) in a non-security role, and I pay attention to CVE-IDs. They'll stick with me and make me remember a resume better, and improve somebody's chances of advancing to an interview, and give me something to ask about during an interview.
Is there any way to be absolutely certain that "John Paul" is really John Paul?

Otherwise this does not mean anything more than "somebody better be confessing, but I am not sure who".

(The fact that there was a an attempt on the question does not bode well for this guy, but again, that could be faked too... right?)
There are detachable shower heads in homes in the US.
Its a trap. A written confession may result in serious consequences; without that, prof can't prove John is John...
I'm sure I did, but couldn't resist being a smartass
I agree. Both the orientation and placement of the logos highly suggest that they have a strong connection to the product being sold. Intentional or not, I do not think it qualifies as something dishonest but it is quite sneaky :)

Edit Question: On second thought, Is it really a bad thing? The logos do have their purpose (examples of webapps) and there was never mention of any connections with the companies displayed. The false conclusion that an average skimming reader arrives upon seeing the logos comes from "unwritten norms" of the web, and thereafter, the feeling of being misled.
Is this averaging the education system as a whole? If so, then that is a ridiculous way of studying how well the US education system is doing. It's already been pointed out that MA outperforms most of the world. How are you going to compare an education system for 100MM people to the education system of Singapore, Hong Kong, and "the Flemish region of Belgium"?

The US is huge and disparate; the fact that the country that has HONEY BOO BOO is in the top 15 should point out that by and large the US has a decent educational system.
> "can keep your hands off your partner in public, don't routinely get obscenely drunk and don't do drugs (many, many people fall into this bucket without giving up any quality of life)"

In my experience, the number of people who actually live this lifestyle without giving up any quality of life is a far, far, far smaller number than the number of people who apparently live this lifestyle without giving up any quality of life.

The greatest myth of modern Western society is that freaks are actually uncommon.
John.mcafee.win32 being removed from quarantine soon
Show HN: Interlocked - 500k Downloads in 5 days since it's Free
while I'd like the "everything inside wikipedia" approach to work, the problem with it is that every new page makes it less maintainable, disambiguation pages grow larger, category listings grow larger, search results and suggestions multiply etc.

This argument doesn't seem helpful. All of those problems will continue to exist regardless of whether some articles pass the "Notability" requirement or not.
It would be very interesting to see forking become a core feature of Wikipedia.

That way groups with different ideas about how to make the better encyclopedia could directly share the least controversial parts of the thing.

(I do think there is quite some chance that nothing much would come of it)
Evernote is almost certainly the right choice for organizing your thoughts. Other options are too heavyweight or inflexible. Just create a notebook with a few notes and write down everything.

Personally, I find TDD is a helpful design aid for tricky bits of code. I don't bother when it's trivial, but when creating major systems or components, it helps to focus my design and enforce encapsulation.
Hi, this is not my app. It's my cofounder's app. He's been hell banned and refuses to post here.
a killer feature for me would be coloring text in articles by its age. under the assumption that old = unchanged = good. might be interesting.
I never said Ravi Shankar was 'just' lucky, did I?

But frankly this is survivor ship bias at its very best. Looking at it from my very own parents stand point. What are the odds that somebody like me was going to be the next Zakir Hussain[Who himself happens to be the son of a very famous Tabla player]?

So there you see the problem. If there isn't a way to make good money doing music. People are not going to be taking it up as a full time profession.
I tried Basecamp and some iOS todo list tools, but in the end, I have one Google Doc with lists of tasks. I should dump Google for Evernote (better mobile support and less connection issues) but I once had a sync issue on Evernote and lost some text, so I don't trust it. I might go with just a text file in Dropbox or use Gina's http://todotxt.com/

I keep shuffling how I organize tasks. There's by-project, where I list all the things that need to be done to complete something. But I also have to keep some context lists like "next time I'm working on the website" or "next time I feel like doing a bunch of Photoshop work" for those tasks that keep getting put off.

I also keep a wall calendar (just a big sheet of white paper) with post-its for each deliverable. They keep slipping, but at least I can see how many weeks are left until external events.

When things get really unproductive, I walk away from the computer and sit down with a notebook or stack of index cards/post-its and dump everything that needs to be done. For tasks that are stuck, I try to apply Merlin's idea of visualizing what it will feel like to have it done: http://www.43folders.com/2005/10/16/43f-podcast-the-to-have-...
Urban Americans are the most distrustful of strangers though. Also, (white) Americans moved to suburbs because of a combination of cheap availability of gasoline and racism ("white flight").
How to Deploy Pebble to Jelastic Cloud
Please GitHub, implement the evil bit [1] on pull requests so we can filter out defacing attempts when merging.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_bit
It's been years since I did AfD, but there were always more than 3 people involved. It's quite easy to participate, incidently, I encourage people to try it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion

People re-submitting articles in AfD until they get their way is a problem. I think either articles should be banned from AfD after being kept, or resubmissions should go through mandatory arbitration process with more eyeballs and longer times to make a decision. Admin power abuse was also a small problem when I did AfD (again, years ago), ie. admins deleting articles when there was no clear consensus or the 7 days weren't over.
Not all scrapers spider a site's contents. Sometimes they are going after something specific.
The anatomy of a great landing page
What Is HN So Tired Of?
Is this the HN, constructive approach to discussion?
Marc Andreessen Avoids Green Room Scotch, Rags on English Majors Sober
Yeah, it sounds so obvious and self-evident. But when you have competing interests, it can be hard in practice.
AdBlock blocks requests by URL matching and hides DOM nodes based on a handful of selectors. Whether this blocking and hiding is targeted towards ads or not is incidental.
Volkswagen probably.
The author of the article runs an archive service. He might be happy to do it for free and send you a copy?
Maybe a backoff schedule.

First failed AfD: no returns for 3 months.

Then 6. Then 12. Then 24 ...
So, would that detection mechanism be able to deal with a number of coordinated scrapers rotating through lists of proxies, using different User-Agent strings, making requests with (pseudo-)random delays between requests?
I disagree. Port scanning, even externally, can be messy and still raise flags. Most are done as a single nmap shotgun effect. It is better to obfuscate better than i've seen most do. (eg: I'ts better to do common normal port ranges (and smart variants), distributed network, over a long period time).

I think it's kind of messy, and firewalls definitely can flag it. And I think over the next year as things like Storm will be more tightly wrapped into log analysis and firewalls for real time processing. (Think smarter honey pots and smarter / real time customized pattern recognition).
comment on the linked blog or mail Jason directly, he'll get you sorted.
How about signing up under someone else's name and asking questions.