skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Must we really go around calling a bunch of random people 'douche bags' for behavior that in some cases, isn't even remotely problematic?

One of the most astute VCs I know and have worked with came from money and knows his way around a regatta. Hell, I've even seen him with a pastel sweater around his shoulders.

According to this random CFO guy I've never heard of, that makes my VC a 'douche bag' - but if I was raising money again, I would have that VC involved again in a second.

Sometimes criticism teaches you more about the criticizer.
Thanks for the comments! We are currently running many experiments with vastly different homepage variations, so it might be a bad time to comment on that. Some are short, some long. Some have "more information" links visible right away, some only in the footer. Happy to share our findings later on.
That may've been TTL-dependent -- though the record was only restored a minute or two ago. Educause is the EDU authoritative host.
> AT&T's intent isn't really relevant.

That's definitely not legally true.
While I don't really approve defacement, that was not the point in my comment. If the defacement would have been done to DOJ (or whatever front the prosecutors have) website, I might have disapproved but still at least I would have found the target appropriate.

As you self say, it is the government that was "overstepping the mark". Attack them instead of MIT which was pretty much the least evil party in the whole case best to my knowledge.
We're hard at work on it but can't give you a release date yet. You can login to the website from the Android browser though.
SendHub doesn't support MMS either. :(
I went through a bout with severe Periodontitis.

Just in case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodontitis
"Periodontitis involves progressive loss of the alveolar bone around the teeth, and if left untreated, can lead to the loosening and subsequent loss of teeth."

My case was pretty severe. Mainly from drinking WAY too much pop and not brushing and flossing on a regular basis. It is true flossing helps your gums in a lot of ways and considering they're the main support structure for your teeth, you really should take care of them.

And even if there isn't any scientific data showing dental care and other diseases aren't related, shouldn't you just error on the safe side anyways?
Wow. This feels vastly faster and more responsive than the PS3 YouTube webapp, perhaps by an order of magnitude.
Agree with you on the Google not caring about the product at all. I am so dependent on Google Voice right now to the extent that I don't even know my real number. But Google's approach to Voice is scaring me more with every passing month and year. I even switched to Sprint because they have carrier integration with Voice but even that is a half-hearted integration:
- Text messages arrive after random delays.
- My outgoing number switches to the Sprint number if I am on call roaming.
- When I am logged in to gmail on my computer, it is always unpredictable where it is going to route my incoming call - to my phone or to gmail.
- Some services don't consider the Google Voice number to be a valid number (for e.g. I had problems recently trying to get FiOS to recognize my Google Voice number)
By custom only. There is literally no law.
Bravo to VMWare for doing the right thing in the end.
Show HN: Great NetArt Project
That is some awesome shit!
My forever project: http://popped.at.

Real-time streaming photos shared on Twitter.
Yes. We wrote a webapp in PHP. It has actual paying customers, and handles billing and invoices for real money. As is so common with PHP projects, as we needed to keep adding features, changing functionality, etc it got difficult to maintain, and hard to make changes without adding bugs.

So, we re-wrote it in scala using lift. We were not pleased with the results. So we re-wrote it in scala using play. We were even less pleased. So we re-wrote it in haskell using snap. We were finally happy. That version is now in production, and the type safety of haskell makes doing changes far safer. The maintenance burden is much smaller now.
Make BYOD easier with the help of these five apps
The rogue DNS servers are reporting MIT's main web server IP for all DNS name queries (other than for the main web server's name) to people that are off campus. So, to someone outside MIT (depending on DNS caching), it looks like everything is down.

Also, ASP/SAAS companies in the .edu space often use a DNS name that is part of the school's domain in their model.
Interestingly the walkthrough or some other service description being visible right away has lowered the conversion, both into registered users (you might argue they register because they don't understand what the service is about) as well as engaged (and later paid) users. But your criticism is valid and I agree with a lot of what you said.
Being poly-operating-system also gives you a unique viewpoint and can be an advantage in most things, provided you're using each OS for what they are best at and not just trying to emulate a different OS.
From talking to users, we find people prefer SendHub because of the reliability and customer support. Also, SendHub has a free plan and for businesses we make it easy to get control of your employees communication, while keeping costs down.
I shouldn't have to learn what parser combinators are to just rip a few things out of a tree of XML.
To understand Aaron Swartz's contributions, look beyond the headlines
This is great. Featured on The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/shortcuts/2013/jan/22/u...
Ask HN: How to backup all your online accounts with NO SUBSCRIPTION?
Would you pay for a service like this http://unbouncepages.com/save-my-life-online/ ?

There are other services that do the same thing but they charge monthly. I hate subscriptions and want to simply download a desktop app that I pay ONCE for and have it backup my facebook, twitter, basecamp, wordpress, etc...

How much would you pay for this? $25? $50? $75?

PS: please tweet or g+ to get the word out. I want to see if there is enough demand before I start cranking out code. Thanks.
Coming soon, the problem is that MMS is not really standard and a lot of platform providers don't support, so it's a little more complex than it seems.
Did you read the post? First, it covers both default isolation and maximum available. Second, note that many databases (like Oracle 11g) don't actually give you serializable semantics at ANY setting. Third, most of these products are not distributed systems. Fourth, ACID is not a spectrum for distributed systems; it is basically impossible to apply without sacrificing availability. But that's perhaps not a big deal if our non-distributed DBs don't provide real ACID anyway.

The real issue here is that the database world is a cargo cult where ignorant people scream ACID to denigrate new technologies without noticing that most production databases aren't running with anything close to ACID and that major database vendors can't even support ACID.
For more information, see the blog post that details what we're planning on doing this time around: http://www.opensourcerails.com/relaunch/
I'm sure she is, to you. But this wasn't done by a 10 year old, and using your daughter as a metaphor is completely inaccurate and irrelevant.

It was a stupid, childish stunt designed to show off. This does nothing to change anything. MIT's involvement is unchallenged, all this does is inconvenience MIT students and makes the person/people responsible for the hack look childish and callous for using Aaron's tragedy to garner publicity and stroke their ego.

If the hacking community really wants to get behind this MIT bashing, how about we all boycott any software under MIT license for a while?? It's easy defacing a website, but I bet nobody is willing to give up their MIT software.

It also further tarnishes the "hacker" image as a bunch of pimply teenage boys trying to wave their disco sticks around in the only way they know how.

It's just plain embarrassing.
The one alternative you cite, Evernote, is something very different. Project information will mostly be unstructured. It will hold data but it won't send emails about TODOs with helpful subject lines. If better task tracking increases productivity, and it does IME, it will pay its $25 easily.
I like this article, but I disagree with one point about task assignment.

Good engineering decisions are always based on the big picture like long/short term goal, budget and deadline. By keeping those in mind, an engineer can then go and understand task priority, and decide which solution might be best for each task.

If an engineer team understands the bigger picture, they can in most part self-manage and figure out what to do to achieve the end goal.

However if a manager or PM shields engineers from those bigger pictures, it becomes much harder to make informed engineering decisions on individual tasks, or how to allocate time among those tasks, causing slipped deadline and over budget. This reinforces the impression that managers should provide closer guidance on what to do.

In my experience, most technical manager/project manager will only talk about the bigger picture when pressed, and only some are able to describe it clearly.
You're right, I forgot.

I don't like First Person Shooters (even the original Wolfenstein gave me motion sickness, and I don't have great motor skills), that's why I forgot about those.

I've always liked turn-based strategy games, or real time strategy games (at medium or slow speeds, I get destroyed on online matches), puzzle games, point-and-click graphic adventure games, etc... and I distinctly remember searching for those and not finding much back then.

I definitely need to give Linux another try, but I don't manage to convince myself to set aside the time (it might be a good investment, though :) )
Yeah, you are likely to find it unconvincing if you are hoping to be convinced about something the author isn't talking about. Perhaps the issue is your expectations, and your unwillingness to take the writing for what it says rather than what you want it to say.
Thanks! I did write it, and I think I've also seen somebody else's "wget.py" in some other python project before, though I can't recall where. At any rate, I've found it an extremely useful tool in a multitude of different contexts.

Here is a link to my latest version of it:

https://gist.github.com/4596861

At this point it has become less simple and more versatile.

Enjoy!

-Jay
That is incorrect based on PACER's own words. PACER has a free version, but the free version limits your ability to transfer to other bodies. Although I'm sure that gets people freaking out, that's hardly RECAP being "prohibited."

But, really, even with a 100% populated RECAP, all lawyers use PACER for their real work. The fact that any joker in the world can upload documents to RECAP makes it unsuitable for anything you are going to put before a judge. RECAP is fine for bloggers, though.
If someone's labor cannot sustain their life, then it's perfectly sensible that they become a ward of their family or civil society or the state.
Where is the link for proposal submission?
The Magic of Macros: Lighting-Fast Templating in ClojureScript
>You have the exact same problems with CPAN

I don't use Perl and that's a crock anyway. I've used Leiningen on Clojure, easy_install/pip on Python and the Golang stack happily with no trouble. I don't like XML or Java, but you'd have a hard time arguing Maven "doesn't work". It's what Leiningen is built upon anyway. Rubygems, rbenv, and bundler aren't perfect but they do largely work for everybody in the Ruby community. Quicklisp has done a lot to improve the state of affairs in Common Lisp and made it pretty easy to use arbitrary libraries.

It's ghc-pkg/cabal on Haskell that have been a pain in the ass. Even sbt on Scala is better and that sucks too.

Cut the tu quoque bullshit, not everybody has a crappy ecosystem. Those that don't, don't because they didn't project a reality distortion field so they could pretend everything was hunky-dory.

Python used to have serious packaging problems. It got over them and eventually became a smooth experience because people recognized the problem and worked on it.

Clojure without Leiningen was horrific. Hagelberg's work there was amazing.

The Golang team has taken things like this seriously all along and since 1.0 a lot of things have been standardized.

Stop denying there's a problem. I'm far from the first person to mention the Haskell ecosystem need works.

The REAL irritation isn't with just ghc-pkg and cabal, but rather that I keep running into crazed partisans like you that won't admit there's a problem. You're the problem.
Were they ever doing the wrong thing? The idea that the IP and full control of the project could just walk over to Redhat with the developer when he took a new job to work on it there after VMware initially funded it all seems incredibly naive at best.
No, the max you can text is 5 on GV, on SendHub you can text any number of people you want.
Audio is the worse way to consume content, why not just use Evernote or whatever and read what you've missed? Then you can continue to listen to music and catch up with what you've missed while you're on the train.
Amazing! Wish it was a bit more smooth but heck, still acceptable!

Now I can code as well as listening Hacker News.
Geeks, Freaks, Nerds, & Programmers
It's rarely painful these days because you've spent 5 years learning it.
When did they take that down? Thankfully I got the material for the course I was working through downloaded. Why would they do that?
I've yet to hear why the nominal 10c/pp charge is too onerous. If this information was truly no cost, it will likely become subject to abuse.

I went through personal bankruptcy in 2009 and my personal history is available through pacer. I'm not proud of what I went through, and it was my own fault, but I at least take some solace in knowing that in order for scammers to access my information, they will have had to cull through many thousands of other cases at a cost of hundreds of dollars.

Perhaps the answer then is to allow PACER access at public libraries without cost - having the access based on a physical location may help reduce the speed with which $criminal_element can build their portfolio.
Political concern troll detected and downvoted.

Method of detection: use of the term "free market" as a non-contextualized, noncomparative term.
So the numbers "If you earn 100.000 Euro/year, you pay 30%"
are not wrong for a single man?
I've been using Windows 8 on a gaming PC I built myself for the first time in 6 years (I've been using Macs for work since), so I completely missed all versions of Windows between XP and now.

While I love the initial Metro start screen experience, two things really drive me crazy:

1. Metro just seems tacked on. Why can't I stay within that experience all the time? Instead I'm ejected to the normal Windows desktop that is essentially what I was using on Windows XP years ago. It's like they didn't have the balls to go all the way, and coming from Apple that drives me crazy.

2. It's very easy to get lost in Metro once you start clicking around. There is generally never an obvious way to get back to where you were previously due to the absence of any depth, breadcrumbs, or even just a "back" button. Hell, you can't even right click and go back.
Huh?

"any joker in the world can upload documents to RECAP makes it unsuitable for anything you are going to put before a judge" == FALSE

For those documents that have been uploaded, RECAP's database contains bit for bit the same exact documents that are on PACER and nothing more.

It's verified using an SHA1 hash. For example, see the document entries for http://ia700504.us.archive.org/29/items/gov.uscourts.mad.137.... PACER does not provide hashes, but if you are worried that a document might have been compromised you can always download it from PACER and run the hash yourself.
"Turns MS around" into what? Failure?

Microsoft seems like a successful company to me. I don't get it.
I wish that there was calendar access; if I can't access to do items via an iPhone app or through google calendar, then due dates are a bit useless. I tried running my classes and homework through base camp, but now use asana because it has a calendar feed I can see on my phone, there is an iPhone app, and it auto-promotes tasks based on due date. The latter-most feature is important because I just put in a semester's worth of reading and it trickles assignments onto my daily to-do list as the deadlines approach.
I would have said it's a case where the zoning system breaks. You get "grim expanses of McMansions" because some city planner ruled by decree that this area over here is "residential" and can't have little corner bodegas mixed in, while that area over there is "commercial" and can't include housing. In those few parts of the US that don't have zoning laws, you get lots of mixed use.

Heck even if a neighborhood was originally all just houses when it was first built, unless some bureaucracy is actively preventing it some people will want to work out of their home and provide services for their neighbors.
Come Hack in Medellin, Colombia: Feb 2013
We have an open room for a cool hacker in an awesome apartment in Medellin, Colombia. Our 5th person dropped out at the last minute due to an emergency, and we're looking for a cool replacement.
It is for 1 month starting Feb 4 and ending Mar 6. Right now, flights from the US are as cheap as 330 bucks from Washington DC, LA, NYC, and Chicago. Rent will be $800.

A little bit about us:

Eric L, founder of rocketlease.com, online rental applications for landlords
Sean C, founder of havemyshift.com, shift swapping for hourly workers (Techstars)
Alex P, founder of thehoth.com, link building for digital agencies
Clayton J, founder of thehoth.com, link building for digital agencies

A little bit about Medellin:
Awesome city, you'll be living in the safest, best neighborhood in town, and there's a large and growing startup culture.

Here is a photo album of the place you'll be living: https://plus.google.com/115675522907727282422/posts/QgWoK89FZCT

Obviously we're intersted in filling the place, but it's equally important to us that we think it'll be a good personally fit and that you'll be fun to be around.

If you are interested, available, and able to make a decision quickly on this matter, please get in touch!

email: eric@rocketlease.com
As if no other software has 0days.
Nice job. Looks better and easier to browse than the old site.
Currently it's just a webpage, because you can't actually buy the developer preview phone yet. It will be a phone, but it isn't yet.
I go to meetings so my team doesn't have to.

As an engineering-driven company, both daily tactical decisions and our overall strategic decisions are (usually!) based on technical data. This requires our management team to understand enough of the technical details in order to make sane decisions around product, forecasting, marketing, technical partnerships, etc.

It's important to note that I don't necessarily view the above tasks as more "important" than engineering. They're simply other business functions that need to happen for the business to work, and it's more efficient if I do it in my role rather than taking time away from actual development to provide the data we need for those functions.

Another function I serve on my team is technical tiebreaker. I work hand-in-hand with my tech lead, delegating most of the daily responsibilities to him, but when the team is mired in debate, I either cast a tiebreaker vote or if I don't know enough about $TOPIC, I can at least ask some questions to get them to consider the issue from different perspectives, which is enough to make progress in the debate..

Again, I note that the fulfilling the above job function doesn't mean I'm smarter than my tech lead (I'm not). But engineering isn't as black and white as we want it to be, and ofttimes we just need to make a decision, else the team wastes too much time bike-shedding.

A good manager is like a good IT guy. If he/she is doing the job properly, the team is only ever rarely aware of it. And that's just the way I like it.
Ping Fu on resilience & entrepreneurship (Audio interview)
Here, in PACER's own words.
http://www.pacer.gov/announcements/general/exemptnotice.html
"A fee exemption applies only for limited purposes. Any transfer of data obtained as the result of a fee exemption is prohibited unless expressly authorized by the court. Therefore, fee exempt PACER users must refrain from the use of RECAP. The prohibition on transfer of information received without fee is not intended to bar a quote or reference to information received as a result of a fee exemption in a scholarly or other similar work. "
Our company uses both Scala and Haskell for revenue-producing projects. There's a lot that goes into choosing a language for such projects. I think it's fair to say that Scala is not really a beginner friendly language, nor do I think it is meant to be. Odersky's Coursera course is pretty heavily inspired by SICP (see 'Scala by Example' for an earlier manifestation of this material). And SICP was definitely designed to be used as an intro to programming. But as anyone who has gone through SICP can attest, it's probably not the best choice for a lot of people. But the Coursera Scala course is good in much the same way that SICP is. It is deep and well designed. Just not for everyone.

Haskell has relatively simple syntax and coherent semantics (being unencumbered by a 'foreign' VM eco-system, such as the JVM). As such, it is somewhat easier to get into. But to quote Gerry Sussman (co-author of SICP and Scheme), 'Haskell is the most advanced of the obsolete languages'. It gets deep pretty fast. You don't learn Haskell, so much as get initiated into it. It's an ongoing process. This can be said of Scala as well. Neither are particularly small languages when you consider their entire respective eco-systems.

In general, if you are already competent in a mainstream, dynamic language, and want to get your feet wet in functional language concepts, diving into Haskell is not a bad idea; but you are not likely to stick with it. I would recommend Clojure for such people. However, if you are already a Java programmer (and don't completely hate it), then the transition to Scala will be tough, but somewhat gradual. It is designed to be. But I would also say that the Scala world (not so much the language itself) is easier to grok if you know Haskell to at least an intermediate level. I think it is worth the time to learn Haskell and build something useful with it. It does not need to precede learning Scala, however.
Coding hardware with Ruby + Phidgets
Career advice
Not sure making everything accessible via a Google search is liberating. People should have a right to move on, not have everything they did or said a few decades ago in depositions, lawsuits, bankruptcy, divorce or whatever on top of a Google search. Imagine your prospective employer searching for "your name" and reading what your ex-wife, landlord...said about you in a court case.
Graffiti prevents you from looking at the bleak, clean surface. And this has already been cleared up, while graffiti often requires more then a few keystrokes. Graffiti can really destroy surfaces, and they will never be as before. Then there's tagging, which is just the equivalent of dogs peeing everywhere; as opposed to people actually trying to make a statement... to the law that distinction doesn't even exist, to me it does, and it does make a difference.

This is criminal vandalism

Graffiti isn't exactly lawful, so that's quite redundant? Unless of course you wanted to stress that your outrage is completely guided by "is it lawful", as opposed to, say, "is it good".

Oh, and unless you're a student of MIT, or anyone who was actually inconvenienced by this, or at least know someone who was, I really wonder where this is coming from, and where it's supposed to go. I mean sure, by all means criminally persecute a bunch of "children", that surely must be the ticket, that's the lesson here. Lock them away!