skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The page http://www.kickstarter.com/year/2012#category might be confusing

Kickstarter (KS) always defined on their pages that a successful project is a "successfully funded" project.

It’s hard to know how KS can calculate a successful project by the way we understand it : a project that have at least delivered all its rewards and "shipped" the product advertised.

"KS's terms of use require creators to fulfill all rewards of their project or refund any backer whose reward they do not or cannot fulfill."
But KS do not track those data. They are the responsibility of the creator.

Hence the column "successful" just mean "successfully funded". And the column Launched just mean "launched on KS and asking for funding".
Yes, judging platforms by how many people are paid to work on them instead of track record or other verifiable merits is totally the best way to go.
I think you mean, July of last year.
Certainly many of the licenses must have been sold to businesses. I wouldn't expect most businesses to buy software through the app store.

For that matter I wouldn't expect individuals to use the app store much either. I use both Windows 8 and Mac OS, but have never bought anything on the Windows app store, and have only "bought" (for $0) XCode from the Mac app store. The low app-to-OS-license ratio may indicate that the App store isn't doing well, not that the license numbers are inflated.
Pretty sure this gets me downvoted to hell, but...

Things are worse than you say!

Everything is not just abstracted, but most things are abstracted half-assedly. And we've raised a generation of people where the majority (though not all) have learned only the half-ass abstractions.

The end result of all of this is personified in things like serious discussions about JavaScript being the "assembly language of the web".

ohgodwhy?
THe government is not using eminent domain, as it is not appopriating any private tangible property. Moreover, it is a simple matter to evade copyright by simply changing the language in whatever laws are adopted. Finally, if any organization were to attempt to demand compensation for its "standards" it would quickly find itself ignored and its standard would be worth less than the electricity used to render them.

In other words, the standards body would not be entitled to any compensation, nor should it expect any compensation if it has any hope of its "standards" becoming law.
Please read the other comments in this thread with regards to the closing tag nonsense.

As for the "I don't work with bad code because I wrote it myself or in this particular small environment" comment, that's great. I have worked in many countries, so I have a fairly broad experience, and IMHO much of the webcode industry to be pretty fire-and-forget vs. other areas of programming.
This is great until you depend on anything you actually have to fetch from Github. Bundling project dependencies from git comes to mind
I pity your co-workers.

What is the "assumption" I'm making? That my .php files will only have php code? YES! That's correct! Because we're not co-mingling PHP and HTML like it's 1999.

There is absolutely zero valid reason to have a PHP closing tag at the end of a PHP-only script.

Zero.

End of discussion.
This post is a bit all-over-the-place, but I'll bite. I used to share this belief once. The only gains to be had from intimately understanding underlying structures are to be found in performance optimizations. You don't model a problem space by thinking in terms of what values go into what registers. If that were the case, we'd all be writing web applications in Assembly. Abstractions help us to reason out a solution without getting lost in implementation details. As Dijkstra puts it [0], "In this connection it might be worth-while to point out that the purpose of abstracting is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise." This is why the whole idea of Domain Specific Languages is so interesting. Any loss in flexibility is more than compensated for by the gains made in expressiveness when you can treat low level entities as black boxes.

[0] "The Humble Programmer" - http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340....
Has S&F been heard in any upper court? They're distinct from Terry Stops, right, because they don't require an articulable concern for officer safety.
In Designing Virtual Worlds, Richard Bartle explicitly advises that developers who intend to masquerade as players be very careful not to give themselves away, and offers a nice list of things to pay attention to.
You don't have to keep buying the HIPAA standard from them. It is freely available by FOIA request.

What you are buying is an edited guide that includes the latest version of the standards compiled into a single document, rather than a collection of separate documents and their amendments that you must piece together yourself into a single coherent document.
The question whether the government actions in this case were legal or not is up to the court for decide. But if you accept the premise that some voluntary contracts can be not OK despite their being voluntary, you can not object to AIG's claim that they were wronged by saying "but it was voluntary!". You know already being voluntary is not enough - either you have to abandon this notion or you have to abandon your objections to AIG.

>>>> Legality aside, the actual advantage the US government had was that no one else wanted to loan AIG money. That's a pretty good reason to give them tough terms.

Do you always accept this premise? Say, nobody would be willing to lend you money - because of recent bankruptcy. Would it be OK for some shady outfit to offer you a 30% a day loan, and have you agree that if you don't return it all they get to beat you up at their heart's content? If you're hungry enough you may voluntarily agree, would it make you OK? Would it make it OK if you were sick and nobody would agree to treat you without upfront payment, but one establishment would agree if you promise to give them 95% of all your future income - would it be fine then? Or is it fine only when done to other people, especially ones investing in an evil corporation?

>>>> The US would just be making a sweetheart deal with AIG otherwise.

There's a lot of way between unfair deal and sweetheart deal. Most deals fall into the spectrum between them.
Back in the day, when Ruby was almost inoperable with UTF8, you could basically just run strings through PHP's normal functions and all would work well. So, code just worked. Even with MySQL, if you had utf8 tables. The only time you needed 'mb_' IIRC was for regex or unicode character based length checking.

In hindsight I think having this just work for a lot of people is where PHP trumped perl and ruby in a way.
which makes me wonder if there is a simple java package to do that - probably not much to write a simple curl / wget for java so that on any machine with a JVM you can just lein your way to clojure...
TCF Bank notifies Iranian students of account closures
It is possible to install apps on Windows 8 computers separately from the app store, so the app attachment rate is meaningless.

It is different for Windows 8 Phones and RT, the Windows 8 in the article includes all forms of Windows 8.
Followed by the linguistic anonymity arms race!
To me, the "Stop & Frisk" practice taking place in NY represents a compromise between enforcing Fourth Amendment rights and reduce gang violence. I have no doubts that “Stop & Frisk” violates the Fourth Amendment and unfairly targets minorities for the potential embarrassment, harassment, intimidation, etc. of an unwarranted search, but I also believe that it reduces gang-related homicides, which are heavily skewed towards minority victims.

It's worth noting that in briefly detaining someone without probable cause, the NYPD is relying on a supreme court ruling from 1968 [0], but only recently have they fully utilized these rights.

NYC requires a permit for carrying a handgun, and part of the permit process is to pass a background check. I can’t think of any good reasons why someone would be carrying an unlicensed handgun in NYC, unless they’re a gang-member.

I support the "Stop & Frisk" practice for finding concealed weapons on individuals that shouldn't have them, for all other cases (drugs, etc.) it is not in society's best interest.

[0] http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0392...
> But in spite of this, presumably most cops are good cops.

It feels that is a strenuous assumption we make to still feel good about our police force. "Surely most cops are good...? They, must be, right, ... right?"

Now think of it this way. Would you consider a doctor a "good doctor" if he sees his colleagues during surgery do something dangerous, such us leaving instruments in people abdomens, or re-using scalpels without sterilizing them? I wouldn't. Would you consider a real estate agent, a good real estate agent if he doesn't say anything when he sees his co-worker in cahoots with a house inspector and a loan officer at a bank making shady deals? I wouldn't.

Why are the cops who don't say anything when their co-workers abuse citizens and inflict material damage different? Everyone one of them who doesn't say anything is not a "good cop".
That's why the idea he seems to be settling on is exactly that: a problem that he has. (quote from the post: "It solves a problem I have, so I want someone to build this software.") Not only coming up with a problem is easier when you have it yourself, but also execution, making key decisions and keeping up the motivation will be easier.
Only one way to make trillions of dollars, be born into the Rothschild family or marry into them. They are worth trillions and own banks and own a lot of nations' debts. Because they own a lot of debt, they charge huge interest rates on them, and profit from them a lot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothschild_family
There is a difference, of course. However, if you accept the voluntary deal can be unfair, then only consistent way to treat it would be that any voluntary deal could be unfair. Otherwise you are basically saying "it's unfair only if I don't like the guy who's benefitting, but if I don't like the guy who's getting the short end of it, that's fine". You can not bring voluntarity as objection and at the same time accept that some voluntary deals can be unfair.

>>>> In order for them to agree to take on that risk, they needed a suitable interest rate in return.

Of course. Nobody doubts that and nobody claims the money should have been provided for free. What is argued is the conditions were unfairly onerous. This may be pure bullshit and conditions might have been just fine, but voluntarity does not prove or disprove it, it is irrelevant once you accept, as US law does, that voluntary deals can be not OK. You can not have one without the other.
This is obviously ridiculous. HIPAA Privacy rules are so narrowly applicable that HHS publishes diagrams showing how not encumbered you are by these rules:

http://www.cms.gov/Regulations-and-Guidance/HIPAA-Administra...

This really isn't news. Most jurisdictions actively don't want citizens recording cops. They come up with all sorts of looney ways to suppress recordings. The courts toss them. Under Holder's DoJ, the administration has been publishing memos to state AG's urging them to stop moving forward with these prosecutions.

But now I ask: what does this story have to do with HN? Nothing. It has nothing to do with HN. It's a story for a political site. And so I flagged it, and you should too.
Is this an automated status page ? The messages are so ... focused.
If yes, I love it. Need to build one too.
"One of the best" != "the best."

I wouldn't in a heartbeat trade my life now for what I had then. But looking back, if life is a series of ups and downs then my university years would definitely fall under the "ups" column.

I have met some very close friends during that time that I still keep in contact with 10 years after graduating (I just flew out to SF to meet one such friend's new baby last month), and the circumstances under which I met those friends were all very positive.
All Dashboards Should be Feeds
>Who cares if they deliver or not //

The investors?
A Patel Motel Cartel? [1999]
WMV to Flash Converter for Mac Convert WMV to Flash on Mac 
WMV to Flash for Mac tool can convert Windows Media WMV video files to Flash FLV/SWF with a generated html code and flash player on Mac OS X.
Why the Web is going to win Mobile
As somebody who creates web pages, I would feel very guilty if I caught myself getting huffy because somebody used an alternative stylesheet on my site. I would like for people to view my layout the way I made it, but at the same time, I don't hate deaf people or people on cheap phones. The Web just isn't the place for you if you can't bear the thought of your work being viewed in unexpected ways.
Facebook is maybe not the best example. Remember, they did end up writing about 3 different implementations of PHP because of their scale. If anything, their case shows that they threw enough money at it to make it work.
The first two paragraphs of this article are crap, typical of the "journalism" of today.

A groundbreaking study ... has pinpointed a small group of
drivers making Bay Area freeways miserable for the rest of
us...

You mean the other drivers, incremental vehicles coming from other sources, are simply not contributing to traffic misery? Who knew?! At least the solution is both obvious and simple: the "small group of drivers" should clearly be "gotten rid of" so the misery of the virtuous is removed. Line 'em up against the wall...

...they come from a few outlying neighborhoods and travel
long distances together in the same direction like schools
of fish -- clogging up not only the roads they drive on,
but also everyone else's.

You mean, they're "everyone else's" roads, and these cheeky interlopers are taking what rightfully belongs (only) to "everyone else"? And the other commuter vehicles are not traveling together "like schools of fish"?

Why do the (government) planning departments bear NO responsibility for the results of _their_ decisions? Specifically, they have the final say regarding where houses, apartments, roads, shopping centers, ad infinitum, are built. Yet the ultimate fault is with people who simply chose to live in certain locations, rather than bad capacity planning prior to their homes being approved to be built?
OK, this is a semi-valid train of thought. It certainly beats the "in case of extra whitespace!" line.

And, on the face of it, it seems logical.

Unfortunately, it's not very good practice, for the reasons I have already outlined around relying on assumptions. (Edit: Oh, you missed the assumption - that the PHP interpreter will deal with your laziness)

For just one example, assume I have one file that produces a header, one file with some static content, and one file that produces a footer. For some reason, I want to refactor them in to a single file.

With explicit close, I can just concatenate the files. With the leave it out method (or, "look mom I saved two keystrokes after my MegaSillyStupidIndentFactoryClassMethod!"), you wind up with parser issues.

In short: If you want files with just PHP code in them, write files with just PHP code in them, and feed them to the PHP interpreter. If you want files with open tags in them, then use close tags.

"zero end of discussion i win mirror haha". Child.
Static Sites with Heroku
Maybe the licenses were sold to vendors to pre-install on hardware?
Thanks for the comment. I initially did a bit of advertising (Adwords as well as paid Stumbles) for the extremely limited amount of money spent they did OK but nothing tremendous. Because it is bootstrapped I am conflicted with how much to invest at this point.
Speeddating.vim - Use CTRL-A/X to increment dates, times, and more
God, that testimonial scroller is brutal.

If you absolutely must use a scroller, scroll down from top and show the testimonials for at least 5 seconds.
Build A Product: Day 8 Brain's Connectome
Microryza https://www.microryza.com/ is doing some great stuff in the science space.
How is the GPL enforcable? If you download code from Github, the copyright holder can restrict your usage, up to and including prohibiting anyone from using it. It's silly to conflate digital works with physical media, copyright properly refers to a creator's right to control and potentially profit from their intellectual property.

edit: I find it funny that on one hand, when 'stealing' comes up, people who reject IP law say 'but it's not like physical objects, they still have it'. Then when licenses come up, it's like 'finding a book on a bus'.
I am a Canadian who has lived for several years in the U.S., and I now live in Australia. I can say unequivocally that despite its problems, socialized medicine (the Canadian system) is far superior to what I experienced in the U.S.. In Canada, I need health services, I go get it. Period. In the U.S., I have to make sure I go to the right doctor, deal with the insurance company, worry about weather the insurance company will actually pay, pick the right health plan in advance when I have little idea what I will need, et cetera. All of this when I am sick or injured and have bigger things to be worrying about.

I am not absolutely certain that socialized medicine is better than free market medicine, but the U.S. does not have a free market, they have a complex socialized system run by private insurance companies. The easiest thing to do would be to cut out the insurance companies and fund health care on a state or federal level (i.e. make a state run insurance company the single payer). Yes, taxes will go up, but again, in my experience, the percentage of my paycheque that was withheld was exactly the same in Canada and the U.S.. In Canada, it was called taxes while in the U.S., it was called an insurance premium. There was effectively no difference. Now, I know this solution is politically difficult as it puts private companies out of business, but it is far better for the people both individually and collectively to just plain not have to worry about healthcare.
Hmm... I don't know what ruby and perl did, but "not barfing at 8bit characters" means something completely different for me than "unicode support". The second would know about various encodings, normalisation, sane comparisons, etc. Depends on your use case I guess.
Unless you need to run a bundle install (or npm install, or whatever) and have github urls in your Gemfile.
Consumerism dominates our culture. I used to think that pertained to the United States the most, but it is a global issue.

I have not had a job since March of 2012. You could say I lost my consumer power. I have made very few purchases outside of utilities, food, and other basics. It has been an eye opening experience to my own habits.

At first, I felt lost and out of touch with society. I could not make purchases like my friends and family. I did not have any new toys to show off or new clothing to wear this year. This past holiday season was the worst. As much as I disliked the holiday spending spree every year, being left out feels strange. The feeling that arises from lack of consumption is strange. It is as if society fixates on purchases and those purchases define your life(create milestone). I have not had any of those recently.

Today, I feel normal. Sometimes, I lust for new gadgets. But, most of the time, I never think about buying "stuff." If I was not in a committed relationship, I would be happy not being an avid consumer.

Maybe, it is just my brain adapting to the circumstances.

*My girlfriend, buys lots of things, she works in retail. I am not completely out of the consumption sphere.
Why can you not run Chrome portable or Firefox portable from a USB flash drive?
tpope's .vimrc
You can tar a whole language as bad because some of it's users use it to write bad code, otherwise you'd be talking about all languages.
You mean http://hn.gethifi.com/ or some other site? There is no official mobile version afaik.
Early on, you want to hire people with common perspectives and goals who are all pulling in the same direction. (Note: this does not mean want you want clones or group think).

That's EXACTLY what it means.
Someone following these ideas will end up hiring sheep.
What a stupid article.
How do you afford your utilities, food and other basics without a job? Freelance?
I have two installations on Chrome, with a different Trello account signed in on each one.

On mobile I have two different browsers signed into two different Trello accounts.
Does Bundler allow for multiple gem sources to be specified (on a gem by gem basis)?
Sorry you feel this way, pswenson. Are you still experiencing the slowness on Sprint.ly? Please email me at justin@sprint.ly and I'm happy to help as I can.
"I guess the point I am getting at with all of this, is that perhaps we should all try a bit harder to try to understand what's really going on when we use those libraries and abstractions we have come to embrace so much."

The answer to the question is "follow the money".

People don't get paid to learn the inner workings of something. They get paid to do stuff that produces results even if they do it in the worst possible way. Except for a rare few companies (who usually are very good at what they do but are rare), the incentive to make things better does not exist.

The short and even medium term payout of deeply learning the inner workings of something is very small. The people who decided that are the ones with the cash and cash is what most people follow.
The Paradox of the Unpaid Internship
That doesn't sound like a good work environment.
Utter nonsense.
I used to work for an "evil" financial firm in Manhattan and almost every executive I knew that had a family lived outside the city.
100m radius of two end points on a simple trip would narrow it down a lot and would in many cases allow you to identify an individual.

If additional journeys are also linked to the same phone identifying individuals can get even easier.
Investment idea for 2013: put money into middle-income countries
homogeneity or heterogeneity

You don't need a scientific test, you can just observe what kind of organizations you get on different points of that scale.

homogeneity = The Army

heterogeneity = University Science Research Lab
Qualcomm CES 2013 Keynote Video
Two big events happened before I left my job. My car was taken from me, insurance labeled it a total loss. I received money from that. I was also hit by a car while riding my bike. This also provided me with some money. This money, has run out at this point.

I have done some freelancing for people, graphic design. I also help my girlfriend run her dog treat business. Arrfscarf.com

But most importantly, now that I have no income, she has been a huge help.

Even, when I go back to having spending power. Being jobless for over 8 months has given me a different perspective on consumption.
Heroku apps rely on Heroku's version of Rails gems (right?), so how does one tell if Heroku has patched these vulnerabilities yet?
Sweet! I can use this to infiltrate my main competitor's site, just need to install a backdoor before he upgrades...
Would developers have to buy a Ford Car to test Apps on the device ?
Can't seem to get it installed either via brew, pip or python setup.py install on osx 10.8.2

Bummer. It looks really cool.
Reservationist.py, a tool for EC2 reserved instances on consolidated billing