skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks, I really appreciate the comment - I wrote it as a parable and only added the context link after my father emailed me in a tiff asking if it was autobiographical and I had secretly been bullied in high-school.

The goal was to simplify the discussion and throw some culpability on the reader to make them a little uncomfortable, but as I only usually write about tech stuff this was new ground for me and I had no idea if people would "get" the intent or if it would just feel like a one-sided condemnation.
I disagree. I thought the last paragraph was great. Life is never a single event. Round 1 to Lala and their engineers. Round 2 to Apple. There'll be Round 3's!
Harper's publisher says Google's 'toddler gibberish' is driving us insane
I am concerned that people think the number of lawyers you hire should affect the outcome. Does that sound like a fair justice system?
Locks in themselves are quite interesting mechanisms, and I'm not surprised that people find breaking them exciting. I bought a lockpicking set a few years ago, and the first thing I do whenever I move into a new house/apartment is pick my own locks.

Keys are able to open tumbler locks almost because of the imperfection of the lock itself, and lock picks just exploit that fact. I don't know - I think the whole concept is very beautiful.

As for usefulness, I've saved several friends a couple hundred dollars by opening their doors when they're locked out. :)
>> But simply cutting cable TV and a few lattes would instantly boost their savings to 15%, allowing them to retire 8 years earlier!! Are cable TV and Starbucks worth having two income earners each work an extra eight years for???<<

> Again, mathematically accurate, but not helpful

Is extremely helpful to those that have the willpower and motivation for early retirement. I personally think about this kind of tradeoff/decision every single day of my life, and as a result, I'm saving an enormous amount of my paycheck and will "retire" before I'm 35.

Of course, it's not helpful advice for lazy, unmotivated people who are stuck in a rut, but what advice is?

> Then, when he inevitably heads to starbucks he thinks he's failed.

I personally approach the whole thing like I approach my gym routine and healthy eating. When I have a "bad" or cheat day, I don't focus on that. I like McDonald's. I just look ahead to tomorrow and say that's OK, I can get back on track. It's not about focusing on what you did wrong, focus on trying to do a little better tomorrow.

> Finally, this quote is complete nonsense:

>> The reason is that every permanent drop in your spending has a double effect:(1) it increases the amount of money you have left over to save each month, and (2) it permanently decreases the amount you’ll need every month for the rest of your life.<<

Actually, I think that's the best piece of advice I've ever received in my entire life.
When you open a retirement plan at a bank, the adviser won't even blink when they say "The average person needs 70% of their pre retirement income when they are retired."
Let's think about that for a second - by very definition that's saying the more I earn the more I'll need to spend - FOREVER. That's saying that when I have my Ford Focus paid off, I will buy a BMW, then a Mercedes, Then a Porsche, then....

In my last job I wasn't even earning 70% of what I am now, was still saving tons, and yet people plan my retirement saying I'm going to need that much when I'm retired?!?!?!!? It's any wonder my "planned" retirement was at 65 years old.

I absolutely promise you from the bottom of my heart, you absolutely can train yourself to be extremely happy while spending less money, and the more years you do it for, the better you will get.
I will never have a TV, cell phone or new car for the rest of my life, I'm extremely happy about that, and it means I can have 50 years of my life to do exactly what I want every day.
In case you didn't notice,I quoted text from the Linux Mint wikipedia page which you said it indicated it's a fork.Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks it's not.

Forking Ubuntu and rebasing code every single release on a new Ubuntu release are two different things.

Examples of forks:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI1N...
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTgxM...
http://www.osnews.com/story/24957/Plan_9_Forked_Continues_as...

Linux Mint is not a Ubuntu fork neither are other distributions that are based on Ubuntu.Same thing goes for Debian or Chromium.They are just spin-offs (excluding the Ubuntu-Debain relationship of course)

Also the default meaning of "it's not a fork" is "it's not a fork".
I think the big barrier for building a multiplayer RTS in the browser would be the lack of UDP sockets.

You could certainly do something with websockets but it may involve making substantial compromises.

With TVs you have the added issue that people probably don't want to replace their whole TV every couple of years just to upgrade the graphics or whatever.
Ask HN: How to choose a laptop for running linux?
I'm planning to buy a new laptop, where I want to install some flavour of Linux (Ubuntu probably because my lack of experience with Linux).

The only thing that I worry about it is drivers and hardware support.

What brands do you recommend for Linux?
Do you have any special consideration when buying hardware for Linux?

Thanks HNers!
I assume you're talking about the Nikkei and WSJ stories, but those came after the share price was already down to about $520. To the extent those explain the slide, they can only explain a very small, late portion of it.

With all due respect, it seems like you have a mental narrative about Apple and you're just going to stick to it without regard to the details of this specific situation. You didn't even know the stock pays a dividend.

We'll just have to wait and see what the earnings report looks like. If it is satisfactory or good, as I expect, then I think it's likely the stock will be back over $600 within a couple months, and likely even higher by the summer.
> It was not at all realistic to think a 35 year sentence would have been handed down for downloading scientific papers, even in America.

A few months ago some pretty damn prominent community members here were telling us how there was no way in hell Aaron would ever serve any jail time. Turns out he was going to even if he accepted the plea bargain.
Well, what I meant is - this is not like I was sitting and hacking a network or something. This qualifies as a hack because I had to overcome a significant hurdle.

If you continue to imagine that hacks can be performed only on computers and networks. Then this may not make sense as a hack. Hacks can be social and/or real-world hacks too.
Woz is the only one of the three whose situation and mindset compares closely to Aaron.

I think one thing worth learning is that it is really hard to find absolutes in justice. There is no absolutely "good" act or absolutely "harsh" penalty. The discussion about how many people basically ignored Aaron's fundraising attempt on HN showed that not everyone thought his motives and acts were noble.

Steve Woz has only luck to thank for why he didn't spend a good amount of time in jail. Not for the blue box stuff, but for putting a fake ticking bomb in his high school locker and causing a scare. If that had happened today, he'd likely get more than just a temporary suspension, and no one would really care because he'd just seem like another stupid kid who needed to be smacked down. It's just a tragedy that Aaron did not have that same luck.
Surprisingly sexy results from the WH's medical records redesign contest
The Winners and Losers of Social Media in 2012 [Infographic]
Just because you can't prove it doesn't mean it's not true.

I use a serif font on my Kindle. I recently bought a book that was somehow locked to only use sans-serif. I got a few pages in, and had to stop, it was terrible. I wrote the author, who apologized and claimed he was trying to fix it.

There are going to be some sans-serif fonts that are more readable than some serifs, but in my 25 years as an amateur fontophile, that is a rare exception.

The author rightly asserts that legibility is a very difficult metric to evaluate, and there are a large number of other factors in play here like conditioning, but I think the market is evidence enough that serif fonts are still the choice of book designers and typesetters long after the initial technical reasons for doing so have become obsolete.
What is Digital Sharecropping?
This is quite awesome. It's the next logical step from all the custom phone case services out there (mostly for iDevices, it seems).
What (and in what context) do you mean by "binding the function?"
I'm surprised how many people are agitated by the article suggesting that they can stop working earlier if they save more money.

As the article stated: "The only reason Mustachians will remain a rare breed, is because this article will never appear in USA Today. (Or if it does, people will be too busy complaining about how it can’t be done, rather than figuring out how to do it)"
Assessing the impact of academic software on GitHub
'I Have a Dream' Posted in Defiance of Copyright for Internet Freedom Day
This is a great post. I've been down a similar path. Exhausting myself financially via my first attempt at business . Learned a ton, and realized that I needed time to get somethings in order and returned to working a 9-5 only to return to solo (for the most part) consulting and working on my product.

Good luck and keep us posted!
I thought I heard that Mega was going to be partially funded by browser extensions that replace ads on third-party sites with Mega-affiliated ads. Is that not actually going to happen? It was the one part of the new Mega that sounded really shady.
Even a 3 second interruption can have consequences: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/01/study-a-3-...
Facebook has said clearly that the only information that will be searchable is that which is entered into Facebook and it will be displayed in accordance with whatever the original privacy setting was.

The people who shows up for "pr0n" wrote it as one of their interests on their profile and set that to public "friends" or "friends or friends".
thanks for adding that - i read through it three times trying to find a link to page 2 or something. :)
Like I said, I haven't had any issues with lack of customer service. They did make an error and not post a $100 transfer from another of my institutions. It was fixed quick. They also are very communicative when I have asked questions.

I dont think you are being a dick. You are entitled to your opinion and you have obviously had a different experience than I have with them.

So please dont hold it against me that I like Bank Simple and they have done right by me the whole time I have been using them.. :-)
Not for nationally/internationally priced products it won't. Being able to save 20% of $2k/m isn't as good as being able to save 5% of $20k/m.
That chart takes away inflation. When people say the expect 7%/year they are not including inflation. 7% a year pre inflation and taxes is likely roughtly 3.5-4%, which is grey on that chart.
I suppose it depends on your airport; my local one is a tiny regional airport with a bar but not many opportunities to score some silverware. In the end, if your evil plot requires silverware, I suppose you would just go to a larger airport; the nearest international airport is only 2 hours away from here.
The Quiet Place
I don't think the article was saying that sans-serif is more legible than serif, but that the studies showing the serif is more readable have issues with methodology and their results are not valid.

Meaning, the debate is still ongoing.
Why shouldn't media be taxed based on its content?
Some people feel stylish with their $5 coffee. It's not all about the taste.
Fair point, conceded.
Which sets do you recommend to open various types of locks?
Basically: Adverb, In the most essential respects; fundamentally: "a basically simple idea".

Example usages: in this document: "Ctrl-F basically"

"Basically lying" is not the same as "lying", as commonly used in American English. Feel free to contrast this with "technically lying".

If you want to lawyer Carmen's words, then Linus get's to lawyer his.
No back button issues here. I'm running Chromium Version 25.0.1323.1 on Ubuntu 12.10.
It looks like and unexciting competitor for Google Drive, and Google Drive work pretty, pretty well. Sure, it doesn't have the client-side data encryption and the price per GB is higher, but I doubt the Mega email/apps can stand a round vs Gmail/Apps.
OK Go, Doc Searls, Edward Tufte to honor Aaron Swartz at NYC memorial
I know people like that, too, but that's not the same thing as saying someone like that is more likely to shoot a child because of being "deep enough in their fantasies".
If robert dint do what he has done, then microsoft wouldn't be what it is today. Hackers fine holes that needs to be filled. Companies patch those and then they file a complaint against hackers.
So, unacceptable.

Some news here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...
I think the author has a different definition of "free" in mind than FOSS and free culture advocates do. The "free" kindle book still requires a closed source (non-free) program and an Amazon account.

If that's the kind of "internet freedom" he's advocating for, then I don't want any part of it.
Winning the startup lottery would be awesome but probably requires some amount of luck. If you save (for example) 80% of your savings you can retire after 5 years and never have to work again. Its not for everyone but you might be surprised at how little suffering is required. There is a community of "early retirement extremists". Try MrMoneyMustache or the Networthify blog if you are interested:

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-simple-math-behind-early-retirement/
http://blog.networthify.com

Travel is cheapest when you live abroad rather than taking short trips and staying in hotels. I'm from Minnesota and I've lived and worked in Beijing, Singapore, and London.

Disclaimer: Networthify is my side project and my savings rate is not 80% but its a lot higher than 25%.
Yes, something like that in combination with carrying over the existing list data with an retained fragment.
And never have to work another day in your life, don't forget.
How Aaron Swartz Joined The Fight Against SOPA
He ripped nobody off, he sold a company in the exact way you're supposed to sell a company or for that matter the exact way you sell anything with a limited supply. Heck thats how you sell a house.

Step 1. Find interested parties,
Step 2. Get Bids.
Step 3. Allow other interested parties to counter.

Thats it there's no scam here. Its not even genius its company selling 101. Everyone involved had the opportunity to do their due diligence. Instagram did the exact same thing turning a $500M Twitter offer into a $1B offer from Facebook.
I await the moment they prohibit passengers to bring lithium ion batteries on board, because ... you know ... they ARE small bombs.
Hi, just wanted to let you know we've increased the trial to 30 days.
I'm thinking of an effect that is specific to programming languages.
Children’s A.D.D. Drugs Don’t Work Long-Term
It would be great if there was a new notification introduced: "Joe decided to eat at Ray's Pizza after seeing you liked it." #notgonnahappen
Introduction to Kendo UI - Part 1
The concept of the nation-state was created at the treaty of Westphalia to solve some very specific problems and is a lot better than what came before.

It's easy to knock things if you ignore why they were created or what existed before them. Also, you can't abolish something if you don't have anything to replace it with.
> It's documentation - that can be checked by the compiler for correctness.

Exactly. This was a convention used by Smalltalk shops. It came about because of the appearance of the Refactoring Browser, which caused a 10X increase in the rate and ease of refactoring. Before, Smalltalkers used to put snippets of code in comments with the exhortation to "run this" or "debug this" to clarify how a certain part of the API worked. The problem arose that refactorings would often break those snippets. However,

false ifTrue:
["Debug this"
myObj := MyClass new.
myObj myWonderfulMethod.].

...was very fast (it was a jump on many VMs) and would never break even if refactorings hit it.
Why would you believe a press release from somebody's office over something they said in person?
One may be dismayed to find out that most things in design haven't been proved conclusively (in a scientific way). There are many reasons for this, but I think it all boils down to the difficulty of measuring how the human mind reacts when interacting with something.

What we have nailed down is the effects of those interactions: clickthroughs, purchases, and such. So, when you try to perform an experiment about legibility you usually apply a comprehension test and measure the speed at which the text was read.

In science you should isolate as many variables as possible, but I think in the case of typography there's just too many factors at play: the content, the medium and the reader introduce too much noise into the experiments.

I think that in the future brain imaging will advance enough to study how much people are able to concentrate with different typefaces. A researcher might give you an essay written in Comic Sans and see your mind wander more often than other subjects reading the same essay in Times.
mega.co.nz is showing 'access denied' when I tried accessing the site.

Edit: Looks like the article mentioned that on the last paragraph. It has to do with early access protection.
The Copyfight's Next Stage: We All Speak Up Together
> Did you know you can buy an entire house for less than $5,000?

Sounds like a line from an infomercial, but you've definitely piqued my interest.

Can you point me to any resources where I can read up on this?
Even in terms of conversion rates. Talk to anyone with a good, optimized email marketing campaign. You'll hear that email out performs every other type of traffic. Yeah, maybe some of these companies aren't doing it right, but it seems like the author was just pissed she couldn't unsubscribe.
> I think the big barrier for building a multiplayer RTS in the browser would be the lack of UDP sockets.

This is brought up often but it appears some basic multiplayer is possible over websockets (I've written a very simple game using them). If UDP is that necessary, people will push for it and we'll eventually see it (or something equivalent) in the browser.

> With TVs you have the added issue that people probably don't want to replace their whole TV every couple of years just to upgrade the graphics or whatever.

This is turning out to be less of the case though as older PC hardware can still run newer games. The need for graphics is no longer growing faster than the resources to power them. This is especially noticable in the indie game market where rather simple graphics games have become very popular. Even high-end games don't "need" new power as much as they once did, the PS3 is what, 7 years old now?
Aren't we talking a lot about freemium models here? This thing is going to implode, there is no way it will ever break-even.

There are three requirements any freemium model needs to meet to be successful.

1.) Large addressable market

2.) Minimal marginal costs per free user

3.) Enough features in premium tier to convert sizable portion of free users

I think the only point 1 is met.

Giving 50 GB of free storage to free users is going to cost up to $5 per user per month. That's insane. The cost should be no more than a few cents.

And how many users will ever need more than 50 GB? 0.1%? therefore point 3.) is broken too. Not to mention premium tier pricing is too cheap to make it profitable even without free users.

Mega will shut the door as soon as it runs out of investor's money.
You're failing to exercise your imagination; perhaps look at the recent difficulties the US military has had in the Middle East with adversaries who had no interest in playing by the former's rules.
Very exciting concept for Nokia to come up with. Although, I'm not sure it's any more likely to make me buy a Nokia 820 even though I do own a 3D printer.
They spend half their $ on support and admin people. I can't honestly fathom how a site like arXiv could require 3 full time user support people with part time students helping...

They have 1.5 FTE listed as devops for arXiv proper, the extra 0.75 in 2013 appears to be dedicated to this: http://invenio-software.org/

The actual cost to 'run the servers' appears to be around $200,000 - $250,000.

The rest is going into support and I guess a full time person to just 'manage', whatever that means for a project of this type/scope...fund raise I guess? I would think that you'd have volunteer advisers helping with that given the nature of the project.
That presupposes I understand them :-)

My coding followed a specific talk which didn't go at all into why these particular gates are useful.

Once I grok that, I'll improve the code.
No, what he means is that the author should have said: "It is a myth without proof" but not "a myth which is not true", which is what the last sentence says.

Myths can be true, like, you know, the existence of Nineveh (yes, it was a "Myth" and then it was proved true).
Hi Michael, we've since simplified pricing so there are now only two options - https://www.draftapp.co/plans

For an individual there is a Solo plan at $10 per month. This gets you 5 projects, unlimited storage.

For teams there is a Team plan at $25 per month. This gets you unlimited projects, unlimited storage.

Again, thanks for the comment.
Unfortunately I agree. It's such a shame to see what was once the most dominant mobile phone company reduced to becoming yet a another Microsoft OEM :(
Just because you can't prove it doesn't mean it's not true.

No, but the body of evidence suggesting that there is little if any difference might. The best starting point I know if you want to explore it is Alex Poole's site[1], which cites a large number of sources and some critical commentary similar to the blog post introducing this HN discussion but with much more material.

[1] http://alexpoole.info/blog/which-are-more-legible-serif-or-s...

... I think the market is evidence enough that ...

The "market" used to think the world was flat and if you didn't drown you were a witch. Common perception is a lousy substitute for properly conducted experiments, particularly in any usability-related field, where it's been found time and again that self-reported preferences don't necessarily correlate with measured performance.
Ogden and Halliday are both names from the book Ready Player One (http://goo.gl/f3OUa). Is this just a coincidence?
This is exactly the reason we started PlayCanvas [http://playcanvas.com]. I don't think it will be long before there is a modern browser in every TV, phone and tablet, in addition to every desktop machine.
Hoe kies je de beste stofzuiger?
What function does a half baked google docs clone serve here?
Hi, we've since simplified pricing so there are now only two options - https://www.draftapp.co/plans

For an individual there is a Solo plan at $10 per month. This gets you 5 projects, unlimited storage.

For teams there is a Team plan at $25 per month. This gets you unlimited projects, unlimited storage.

Again, thanks for the comment.