skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Were you hoping for a refund of your $0?

How about an apology? Even just "we are sorry for any confusion we may have caused", anything to indicate they are remotely aware of the gravity of wtf they just did?

It was online for all of three hours.

During which all negative comments except one were censored, while the votes spoke very clearly what the silenced majority was thinking. And that thing shouldn't have been online for even 5 minutes.

They pulled it because of the backlash. That ain't enough. Every slimy scumbag sociopath understands punishment and eats chalk in response.. so?

You're going to have to lower that bar if you expect anyone to get over it.

Right, I totally forgot that everybody, and every body of people I trust and respect, occasionally slips up and supports Scientology while engaging in censorship, for "just a few hours". I guess I'll just have to be a hermite now :( Oh well, I'll take consolation in the fact that Scientology won't get me either. Nor will any of the complacent, spineless twats who just shrug it off when an organization which holds so many people hostage in such a cynical way gets an advertisement by a (former) newspaper. If this shit doesn't make you angry then you know what, fuck you as well.. as you can see, my bar is even higher than you thought, hah.
Go for go.

Go is actually fast, not just fast in theory or fast when speed isn't important, or whatever other weasel words you care to choose. Goroutines and channels give you the scalability advantages of async programming, without leaving behind readable code. Deployment is super simple because it produces a compiled binary.

Go has a solid foundation, including things like real support for integers, real support for threads, a runtime that was really developed for servers, and a well-thought-out type system. Some people have compared it to static duck typiing.
I can't stand two spaces after periods. It gives me a weird twitch. I sometimes do a find-replace before even reading a document. It is a superfluous keystroke, but I think what really bothers me is that it just looks ugly and uneven to me.
I don't understand why the system works this way. Shouldn't the goal be to achieve justice? I.e. if someone committed a crime that actually deserves 20 years in prison, why should the government settle for only 2 years? And if the person is innocent of any real crime, why should he do any time?

Instead it's based around some kind of competition of prosecution vs. defense, so they can compromise on smaller prison terms. It probably save everyone lots of money, but I don't see the where the justice is. Maybe if they had a simpler and less money-dominated legal system (with less lawyers), they could try to achieve real justice.
Because the author of the post probably has a very narrow vision of what the term "hacker" means. And putting "every" and "should" in the same sentence makes it sound like it's some kind of universal advice worth gold or something.

I know 2 of the books mentioned and they are great books, but the poster should mention that the Design of Everyday Things is starting to be seriously dated. At least for the examples exposed - the principles do not age.
Man, good load testing never gets any respect.
Real Estate Locals - Relocals.com
Let's not be hyperbolic. Carmen Ortiz does not have it out for people; it's incredibly likely she legitimately thought Aaron WAS hacking and simply thought it was right to make an example of him. This probably doesn't even violate JSTOR's EULA- people have the right to view the article, they aren't scraping the site, and it's not like the bookmarklets are going to drive people to the site any more than people already are.

EDIT: Apparently the TOS (not EULA) is vague enough that this might actually violate the TOS- but the creators are very explicit about this and clearly tell the user that if they violate the TOS it's their own damn fault. The only thing I could think of is that the creators could be hit with DMCA violations for circumventing the 'DRM' of the site, EVEN if they never actually use it on anything copyrighted.
Microsoft Surface Estimate Cut in Half to 1 Million Units at UBS
There was his blog. Alas I did not frequent the right part of the internet to have fixed him to mind but those who read his blog should have seen someone who has for sometime struggled with his state.
Never say never. This only applies to WYSIWG. When writing in plain text source formats, the two spaces enable tools to distinguish the end of a sentence from abbreviations and other uses of the period. For example, emacs uses this distinction for column filling and other text manipulations.

Using a single space is ambiguous; ambiguous is bad. Therefore two spaces is best in place text.
Why are bulk downloads prevented when S3 Requestor-Pays buckets could deliver public domain content at $0.12/GiB? Why does a one-time salvage operation require a watermark - are they asserting a copyright?
This was a much more telling article than the culties would ever want to admit. Read it. Carefully. Notice how they ever talk about buildings, and never people. Were this legitimate growth, we'd see much more information on the numbers, and of the people, filling these rooms. We'd see them announcing from the rooftops the number of "clears" they've made over the past five years. Instead, it's the same old story, of hollow husks of buildings constructed. of Miscavige in photo after photo looking exactly the same.

The deletion of critical comments was equally telling of how desperate The Atlantic was in making sure the church got their squeaky image. From the story being told, giving the sales department editorial control over these comments is just wrong headed and asinine. Which leads to the scarier question -- exactly how high up the chain was this decision made? Forcing community content moderators to eschew their standards in order to make a few bucks makes me question any desire to read the Atlantic in the future, regardless of if they pulled the content or not.
Without nofollow, the Atlantic is effectively telling Google that the links in this paid advertisement are as authoritative as their organic links by objective journalists.

Deliberate or not, I think it conflicts with Google's feelings about paid link placement.
Addendum: That top comment was deleted after a while, too, leaving only the obviously pro Scientology comments
So bogus. There would be no lawsuit, at least no sane one, if a vision was clearly communicated. As for going private, what does Dell now have that puts them in any position for long term upside? If they go private the company will be chopped up. Given all the acquisitions that's for the best.
Your base font size is at 12px. I think that's really, really small. I find it much easier to read when it's at 18px instead. Here's a comparison: http://imgur.com/O7F5N,zCyyz#0

Now, anyone can zoom in with their browser... but your entire layout changes width when I do that: http://i.imgur.com/U96Py.png
Why I Said Goodbye to Facebook
If there is a law that can possibly be unreasonably used to frighten someone, it needs to be clarified and explained and quantified and whatever else so that this kind of thing doesn't happen again. Needs to be given more thought before someone can use it in this manner at the very least
This is not a generic claim on all to withhold comment pending details. Nothing so general. What I am saying is if someone asks for help, particularly in so public a manner, it would be useful to assume by default that things are more complex than they seem.
Aaron Swartz: happiness₀ vs. happiness₁
That's a rather gross mischaracterization of what he was accused of. There's a good description here: http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
"all those abstractions and magic make you dumber"

It was the opposite for me. I had been doing java and php web dev for a few years before rails was created. The first time I used rails (before the 1.0 release), all those abstractions were a revelation. I realized, oh, I've never seen software structured this well before, and it immediately expanded my understanding of how code should be structured.

"the monolithic approach is so 2005 and I realize nowadays that I just want to start quickly something without an ORM, Coffee, etc. and decide later if I add those amenities"

Software isn't fashion. First, in rails you can start quickly and not use an ORM or coffee. I've written a whole lot of web apps in ruby over the years. Many in rails and many in sinatra. In my experience, most of the times I used sinatra I eventually wished I had just used rails because I nearly always wanted many of the rails features over time and putting all the pieces together myself was not the best use of my time. There has only been one case where a rails app I wrote should have been a sinatra app.
Have you read them?

I've read 2 of them and they have may be relevant. The ideas in them go past visual design and through to communication of ideas etc.
nice one. done.
Um, yes, this was definitely not an attempt to do an evenhanded or professional job of reporting on the Church of Scientology. You are right.
"The Design of Everyday Things" has been sitting on my desk for months. I really need to get around to reading it.
I was quoting from a book that I read 8 years and 2 moves ago. But the best that Google turned up is the very dated http://www.amptoons.com/blog/files/Massachusetts_Gender_Bias... that found that when fathers choose to contest custody, 70% of the time they win sole or joint custody.

I have found elsewhere a claim that usually this is joint, so women are still coming out better. This seems believable, but that claim was not sourced.

Several places I found the claim that women receive sole custody about 70% of the time, joint custody 20% and men get sole custody a bit under 10%. But also the majority of custody cases are not settled by a judge, so that proportion does not speak to what happens when a judge makes the choice.

So I should put a question mark next to the specific claim that men who contest, have a good chance of getting custody. Because I don't have good sources to back it up.
JSTOR is a public domain exploiter. They milk it for money. Once we get a copy of the papers, we could distribute them free of charge. I'd like a more altruistic host for this content.
Is there an edition of Grid Systems with just English for, uh, half the price? I don't think I need a copy in German as well.
I also found it interesting that they pick the women's salaries from statistical averages, but don't do the same for men, but just extrapolate based on some hand waving guess of a multiplier.
Can we be a little nicer?

There were nasty comments about Aaron in that HN post, which got nasty replies.

There were nasty comments about Ed in this thread, which got nasty replies.

There were nasty comments about Michael in the linked post, which got nasty replies.

We can say the most criticizing things in a way that is not nasty, how? but putting question marks instead of exclamation points. By talking about facts and not opinions. By being aware that the persona we are taking about is also a person, by always thinking what if I was on the other end of that comment.

Is there any drawback in being nicer? I can't think of any.
Is there any benefit for being nasty? I can't think of any either.
http://nevertakeaplea.org/

I have been a proponent of this since before the Aaron Swartz case. Plea bargains are used because the system would completely grind to a halt otherwise. And it should. The machine eats people's lives.

Never take a plea.
> less than death

How is this relevant? I wasn't aware that "wire fraud" was a capital crime now.
My city's main newspaper has been using more noticeably vague titles in their social media posts, presumably to gain more ad views. They have also been forced to stop publishing a paper on Sundays. Very sad.
Summary of the article's reasons to use one space between sentences:

1. Typographers and style manuals tell you to.

2. Two spaces were necessary when using monospace fonts; but now that everyone uses proportional fonts, it's no longer necessary.

3. It's ugly.

---

I don't find these arguments very persuasive. I have my own aesthetic sense, and I don't need some authority to tell me what's ugly or not. I can tell that for myself, thank you very much. To me, two spaces between sentences look just fine.

Second, I find it easier to tell where one sentence ends and another sentence begins when they're separated by two spaces. A single space and a little tiny period is just not enough.. especially when reading at high speed, and when there are really long sentences.

If only one space separates sentences, and I want to skip to the next sentence, I'll have to read a lot more carefully than if there are two spaces -- when it becomes much more obvious where the separation is. Using one space in between sentences makes paragraphs look like one long run-on sentence.
> JSTOR just asks you to pay a fee for their service. Who is the bad guy here?

Yes, 34$ for a 20 page PDF. I could get printed books with collections of 15-20 hand picked articles for less. The obscenity is related to the huge & itemized price.

Also, if you are not a student at one of the affiliated universities (which is a rare case, probably less than 1% of the population) then you get no good options. How is that for advancing the arts and sciences?

How about we get all that has been funded by the public back to the public, and stop this madness.

Another problem is lack of access to the text for machine learning, NLP purposes.

In conclusion, I get they invested some money. They should just be nationalized. Pay them a compensation fee and just cut them out of the loop. They are an obstacle to progress.

It is one of those times when public good trumps individual property rights. Back in the time when they were building railroads in USA, it was necessary to solve a similar problem - how could they pass the railroad through the maze of public properties. The solution is simple - expropriation + fair compensation. Public good must be met first.
Start-Up Investors Grow Wary of Tech Ventures After Facebook’s I.P.O.
Petition to remove DA Ortiz reaches 25,000 signatures
The petition to the President to remove Carmen Ortiz from the position of District Attorney for the state of Massachusetts has reached the number of signatures that is supposed to deserve a response from the Whitehouse.

This does not mean the campaign is over; but it does mean we are off to a good start. The next step is for you. Yes, you. To write or call your US Representative, and both of your Senators, ask them to help bring proportionality, reason and mercy back to our justice system; ask them to further the cause of open knowledge, and ask them to hold the president to account for the actions of Ms. Ortiz and Mr. Heymann.

Thank you for your help.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-states-district-attorney-carmen-ortiz-office-overreach-case-aaron-swartz/RQNrG1Ck
I didn't know about alt-click, but it still isn't permanent. I did this instead: http://osxdaily.com/2012/08/06/disable-notification-center-r...

A rather clean way to disable the notification center. Now I have shut up all applications at once, with the downside of relying on my phone for iCal reminders.
I think that the qualifier "At the start" is important, here. I've known many good leaders who, at some point, got frustrated and took charge. I've also known a lot of jerks who wanted to be in charge of things as soon as they heard that there was going to be something to be in charge of.
A huge amount of the money it "costs" to be single they get from splitting living costs. Turns out single people can and do have roommates.

The next biggest chunk is from taxes saved by being married, using contrived earnings. Turns out, that it varies wildly depending on how much each person makes. There are certainly some amounts of money where you pay less taxes being married, but there are quite a few others where it costs far more. It just depends on where you fall in the tax bracket. (Generally if both spouses make a similar amount of money the tax code hurts them, if one makes significantly more it helps.)
300 million speakers, rather.
Is there a difference between the two? I always assumed that I could ignore all the web articles and assume it would magically appear on my Kindle when the new edition came out.
Is having a boost the wrong thing to do? In any case, it strengthens the country's economy, if spent correctly.
Without national requirements we would end up with half a generation that has never been taught evolution as fact, and a lot who had to pay every day. Trust is only good when it is warranted.
>>If you look at divorce statistics, for all that men feel that they get screwed, after a divorce the ex-husband usually has a significantly better standard of living, and the ex-wife and kids wind up worse off.

In all fairness, comparative troubles hardly make any sense.

The fact of the matter is, Alimony is a huge demotivating factor when it comes to marriage. No ones likes to part away with what they have earned because a relationship ended, the best protection against that at this time is to somehow stop getting into a relationship at the first place.

This makes problems more worse for most women.

Contrary to whatever is going around in the name of freedom, marriage is a really an amazing institution for many societies around the world. When it comes financial security, physical security and center of responsibility in most cases marriage works like magic. And alimony sort of becomes a very demotivating factor to get married.

In process what happens is alimony protects a few women, much of the alimony system is abused. And the side effect is most women suffer because of it.
There is not. And honestly I don't think it's a must have. It's certainly a beautiful book, but you can learn most of what you need to know about grids just by Googling around. Typography is a comparatively much more complex topic, warranting the purchase of a book, and there's more to layout than grids and Swiss-German design.

If you want to buy a beautiful multi-lingual design book from that era, Emil Ruder's Typographie is the better buy: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/3721200438/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
Surprised nobody here has mentioned Google Web Toolkit yet. It's the tool Google uses to build interfaces like Gmail and (I believe) Docs. Freely available: https://developers.google.com/web-toolkit/
That said, it's not something I would want to use myself (not a Java fan).

It's also worth noting that Gmail especially appears to rely very heavily on Javascript for positioning and styling, rather than pure CSS. Many elements have, eg; `style="width: 123px"`. This is a practice I strive to avoid, so it's interesting to me that Google makes such use of it.
Developing an app and looking to hire backend engineer
We're a team of 3, working on building an iPhone app as a side project. We've got the concept, design and UX, and many of the front-end elements constructed but are now seeking to add a back-end engineer. We are looking for someone available immediately who'd like to help a small team finish their pet project. We can pay a modest hourly wage plus generous equity. We're especially looking for a reliable individual who is able to tackle this project immediately and can give us a good 10-20 hours a week. Preference given to engineers who have worked on mobile development, experience with large datasets, and is an excellent communicator and works well in a group setting.. Email for more information, including the app idea, current mockups, and to ask any questions! We're a cool group of guys and would love your help.

contact pete@appkick.me for info!
"Silicon Valley as we know it is dead" (or something of that nature). That's what he said last year, only to have everybody in the tech community pounce on him, including the great Marc Andressen. I believe he definitely made some solid points that entrepreneurs need to look outside the "normal" realm. Just saw him on Bloomberg West today and he mentioned Uber as a perfect example. Who would've ever thought that the Taxi business could be packaged as an Internet venture.
> Why are bulk downloads prevented when S3 Requestor-Pays buckets could deliver public domain content at $0.12/GiB?

Because a) they need ammo against people like, well, Aaron Swartz, and b) doesn't take many people bulk downloading the DDOS the sucker.

> Why does a one-time salvage operation require a watermark - are they asserting a copyright?

They probably don't distinguish between public domain and copyrighted in document production. TBH I doubt that most documents people access are public domain, so it probably hasn't been an issue until now. Even in fields that are really old (e.g. classics) the vast majority of work is recent and copyrighted.

Besides, if I were to scan these things in, I would want people to know I did it. Do you know how much effort goes into the process? Even when things are completely automated (which is expensive) there's a lot of manual labor in operating the machine, editing, and cleaning stuff up. What do you do with figures? How about typeset math? Glyphs not in unicode?

Not saying I agree with their tactics, but I understand them and I don't think it makes them an immoral/bad organization.
good article about body text size here: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/10/07/16-pixels-body-co...
I really like the diversification of focus for VPN services. I haven't seen Evolve nor Cloak before, but both are great ideas. My friends used to like Hamachi, but recently have been crazy about Tunngle -- based more around gaming with random internet strangers, it uses the 7.x.x.x block.

---

These solutions are amazingly better than trying to host a VPN from DDWRT on a low-powered router -- when the game host isn't on the router's LAN, there's a massive bandwidth penalty. It's worst on RTS and MOBA games, especially Demigod, where clients synchronize gamestate not just with the server, but with all peers. This isn't immediately obvious when hosting games, but every 100ms, each of the 6 clients are sending the checksum of ~1.2gb to 6 other clients, through your router. Twice.
I guess it's time to go for quality of Go web frameworks, not quantity. Authors, work together, please.
After it's latest re-api-design I think it looks quite nice and simple. Although some of it is a tiny (why bother) layer ontop of net/http.
While useful for the non-designer, Don't Make Me Think is a relatively shallow book compared with those recommended here.
Atlantic going from sponsored to censored. I sure hope it was some kind of night mod that did that. http://www.scribd.com/doc/120420141/The-Atlantic-14-January-...
JSTOR does distribute the public-domain papers free of charge. It's the post-1923 papers, which are copyrighted and which JSTOR doesn't own the copyright to, which are paywalled. I do think they could be more aggressively pro-access, but they're slowly moving in the right direction.

That's not to say there can't be other scanning projects that aim to do a superior job, and I'd probably volunteer if there were a way I could be useful to such a project (I've spent some time at Distributed Proofreaders). But I don't see JSTOR as exceptionally evil, at least any more than Google Books is. Both are bringing more content online, in ways that are partly good and partly flawed.
Because it's cheating the system if people can collect public assistance while simultaneously being supported by their spouse.
Thanks for the tip; I'll definitely check it out. I have an HP TouchPad (running Cyanogen Mod) that those might be readable on (still not the e-Ink, full-sunlight-readable experience that I truly crave, but it would still be a step in the right direction ^_^)
California to Give Web Courses a Big Trial
This guy spent a long time building up a logical argument against using two spaces, then threw all his work out the window in the final paragraphs by concluding that the "aesthetics" of two spaces were too ugly for common use.