skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The biggest indictment of Branch to me is that since they alpha/beta/gamma/episilon-launched months and months ago, no one I come across in my Twitter feed, Tumblr feed, RSS nor anywhere else uses it; it's something that seems deeply embedded in a Valley bubble. I am also dead-tired of promotional videos that in vague terms and promises make it sound like we're curing cancer.

The number of tools intended to "enhance conversation" are a dime a dozen, but fair or not, I think there is something to be said for traction and widespread use, even though it may seem like a chicken-and-egg problem.

If blogs and online publishers wanted to use the format, they would want to put it on their website directly for the ads, hits, and audience interaction, but Storify already accomplishes this to a large extent (barring any shut-down by Twitter).

It reminds me of the whole ~~social media~~ web 2.0 craze way back when.

There is also something weird about inviting people to listen in on a pseudo-private conversation. It makes it very artificial and staged somehow.

But hey, the logo is pretty cool. Probably one of my favourites out there.

+++

EDIT: If I were Branch, instead of promoting it as something generally applicable, which it is not, I would promote it as something targeting more niche purposes where it makes sense to use it and grow it from there and let people discover utilities slowly.

Another way to promote and develop it is as a GroupMe for Twitter, which by now is its own type of communication. As an addition to DMs and @mentions in your Twitter bar, you now have branches of conversations defined by the topic or group of people.

That kind of integration would probably lead to a Twitter acquisition, but that can't be the worst thing to happen to a company anyway ...

---

The impression their website leaves users with is that this is something aimed specifically at self-important boffins and "thought leaders" - bloggers in realms Apple, tech, and Awl-ish dabblings. Exclusive online punditry circlejerk, essentially. The Davos of social media.

It just reinforces the idea that I am never going to use this, because let's be honest, I am not important/well-connected enough to get asked to join anyone's conversation - and I don't want to spam people just to try the thing out. It's as if it is a recursive start-up which has created a tool designed to let users talk about the start-up.

They should call themselves Recursive Corp instead of Obvious Corp, because it seems to have based its entire philosophy on its Valley-esque self-importance and -indulgence.
This is quite different form the Python frameworks ecosystem: here most "beginners" already know Python, or at least they already know how to program having experience in something like Java, C# or C++. And because they already have this knowledge, they usually ending up doing things "their own way", or they already know what each piece is supposed to do before starting to play with a framework that has all the pieces in it.

And "being explicit" rather than "convention over configuration" really helps people make their own choices. When people bump into the limits of Django's ORM, for example they quickly replace it with SQL Alchemy, when they do something in Flask, they already know what the pieces they are putting together do.

Rails culture seems very "top down", i.e. people start learning and doing things by learning the stack as a whole and then about the options for individual components. This leads to "elegant solutions", but tons of pains for beginners that need to "swallow it whole".

I don't know which way is better, but I've always been attracted to the Python ecosystem because I like learning things "bottom up", e.g. playing with all the different pieces and then assemble them into a whole once I'm confident I understand them.
On the Quakecon where he talks about static code analysis, he mentions that ML languages are too much for games developers, given the usual skill set.
The top 10 Hacker News posts as a bubble chart
No, this is useless. A heart rate/blood oxygen level sensor should attach to your finger or wrist so you can keep it on while you're doing things. Most sensors do that, but this one doesn't, and the form factor means it can't. Making it plug into an iPhone docking port adds some novelty features, but they compromised core functionality to enable it.
I think it's petty to think as such. Aaron Swartz has been a major topic of discussion on the HN Front Page for a couple of days now, hence it could very well have been instantly submitted to HN by some over-zealous HN reader as well. (Do remember that a sizable number of new users have joined since the initial news about Aaron's death.)

Just in this case, I'd suggest giving them the benefit of doubt.
Are you guys blogging? Start writing posts about what the celebrity is wearing and maybe talk about the dress and the call to action at the bottom can be to go to buy the dress.
Thanks for bringing back memories of ski vacations in the French Alps. We couldn't understand most of the stuff on TV but loved this show.
I don't think this is their "official" obit for Swartz. This article was published under one of their online blogs, not their printed obits section.

However I suspect that within a few weeks such an article will appear.

http://www.economist.com/obituaries
And in a few days we'll figure that every site The Man does not like is considered a porn site. And is "protected" from you.

Pirate Bay and other trackers, for example.
My comment based on the cited refutation is exactly related to what Professor Kerr was addressing. While technology law is very undeveloped and much of the penal code can theoretically reach into civil territory -- a small tweak of the facts and the entire matter becomes civil rather than penal. For example if Mr. Swartz had performed a buffer overflow exploit to gain access to JSTOR we'd both agree this was a criminal matter. If we're talking about violation of the private TOS of JSTOR, including circumventing their IP bans by using another public and legally available IP at MIT then we're dealing with a civil matter. These are the kinds of murky waters we have to deal with in our generation, but I think the distinction is pretty clear.
Thanks for the feedback. Will definitely do that the next time.
FYI, Interesting bit from the PACER TOU:

>"The per page charge applies to the number of pages that results from any search, including a search that yields no matches with a one page charge for no matches. The charge applies whether or not pages are printed, viewed, or downloaded. There is a maximum charge of $3.00 for electronic access to any single document."

It is also interesting to note that pricing is decoupled from actual bandwidth usage, or any other metric that could be correlated directly with the cost of providing the service.:

>1. We use a formula to determine the number of pages for an HTML formatted report.

>2. Any information extracted from the CM/ECF database, such as the data used to create a docket sheet, is billed using a formula based on the number of bytes extracted (4320 Bytes equals one page).

>3. For a PDF document, the actual number of pages are counted to determine the number of billable pages.
Interesting is only one criterion for hacker news.
I've you're looking to build something custom from primitives and you need ie support I would definitely recommend Raphael.js [http://raphaeljs.com/] They claim ie6+ support and in my own experience this has been true. Granted I was just making little dynamic pie charts, but they looked fantastic in IE6 (I'm actually surprised it isn't in more common usage by designers to certain visual bugs in IE6).

Raphael.js is really just a nice way to handle svg, and so it lacks some of the niceties of d3 as far directly tying your visualization to the data. But it's still a great tool.
Interesting observations. I tried to get back into Rails last year with version 3.1/3.2 after being "away" since sometime when it was still at version 1, and while I've been somewhat successful at it, the choices -- not just between the stacks but between the myriad of different "standard" gems -- can be somewhat paralyzing. Do I use a a Twitter Bootstrap gem that will be easier to manage but might be less customizable than using "pure" Bootstrap? If I switch from ERB to Haml, do I worry about generator gems? Do I want to use Devise for authorization or just use the built-in has_secure_password? Do we love factories now, or hate them? I'm building a CMS-ish sort of thing and it'd be nice to have an automatic admin system like Django does. RailsAdmin or ActiveAdmin? Wait, these expect that I'm using Devise, unless I change something somewhere? Argh.

All of this is pretty simple once you have preferences established, but figuring out those preferences can be enough to drive you back to something that, well, has less choices. (Like the aforementioned Django, although it has its own issues with setup and documentation.)
Please let us know in a year how the Civil War is going.
Dirt cheap earnings yield, high return on cap, decent balance sheet, revenue chugging along at a decent clip, and cheap on a FCF basis.

http://www.gurufocus.com/financials.php?symbol=dell

Smart financial move by Dell. He will rake in cash on Dell as a private buiness, and he will have the increased autonomy he needs to run it.

I guess he's not a multibillionaire for nothing.
Look to the Tunisian fruit merchant who self-immolated. Suicide as protest is with us today.
It's amazing for newcomers who like elegant code that can't be shipped. I'm that way. Or, rather, I was, and I look back on that time fondly.

Other people who get into web development aren't impressed by such things, and would rather see something like rails or WordPress which is shippable right away and then can be built on top of.

Some programmers, especially the kind to hang around on HN, would rather not work with people who don't understand the entire system they use. I often hear people say they wouldn't touch WordPress with a 10-foot pole. They are avoiding a huge part of the web development industry. This is a valid choice, but some people don't even realize they're making this choice, and I wish they would realize it so they could make sure that it's really what they want.
Ask HN: are there any more Aaron Swartzs in trouble because of such things?
We already have lost one and we should not lose more of such souls. What can we do to prevent such a thing?

Shouldn't there be blanket rules for incriminating some individual for such frauds in which nobody is physically hurt. I think what Aaron did, didn't hurt anyone physically (and even emotionally). If DOJ even has a possible way of putting up 35 years for such a thing, the system is definitely faulty.

I think DOJ needs some blanket restrictions on such things like the sentence can never be more than 4-5 years in the worst case.
Incoming Transmission
"I mistrusted templates for many years, and still use them with restraint, but I eventually decided I liked strong typing more than I disliked weird code in headers."

I never liked templates myself, and still avoid them almost completely. Even if my reasons are ridiculous, here they are:

1) I typically don't use anything where I don't understand its inner workings (i.e. how it manages memory, how the compiler is likely to optimize it). This does not mean the entity in question is bad, it just means I'm too lazy to learn about it on a deeper level.

2) In most cases where I need to handle a diverse amount of operations and a diverse amount of data types, it is not CPU-critical and I can resort to a higher level scripting language that is much better suited for the purpose.

3) Template syntax does not sit well with me. This is really just an OCD on my end.

4) I often prefer using uber-types (all-encompassing) to many different types -- within reason. I don't like to extend classes for this reason (particularly when you get into extension-hell with 5 different sub types).
Having done distributed systems for many years the only thing I would like to add is that all systems are not equal so some of the things mentioned in this article might not work. It was my experience that the real key to making a distributed system work was to identify the critical paths and segment and encapsulate the functionality of different components into the smallest possible implementations. Then define robust messaging between the components to allow for coordination. In my case we were making control systems for Naval systems so we had a much different set of requirements then websites, but it was a massively distributed system ( over 10K nodes ) with a strong requirement for redundancy and latency ( no ethernet here just field bus networks ). I even wrote and published a paper on it some time back. Point is this is not the only path there are other ways to implement distributed systems and there is still much to be discovered in the field.
I dont want to steer you in the wrong direction and say yes and then all of a sudden there's a change in AUP/TOS and your account gets flagged.

With something like that you are usually best of running on dedicated hardware just to ensure everything is segmented. That's just based on what we've seen in the real world from customer usage.
How do we know that the prosecution felt a 6-7 year outcome was reasonable?

Otherwise we're in violent agreement.
PlantLink: A Kickstarter project that may stop me from killing again
Here is the HN thread from back then. Some of it makes for pretty uncomfortable reading right now.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529484
Betteridges's "Law" doesn't apply to stories like this for all the reasons you stated. I referenced it because all the critiques of writing that Betteridge's Law implies apply here.

I think the misunderstanding here is that you are looking Betteridge's Law as more of a pseudo-law that has specific constraints and I'm looking at is as shorthand for a specific critique of bad writing, which I think does apply here even though, as you stated, it was not created to apply to personal writing.

The difference is that most of the examples you are giving of personal writing are subjective and/or value judgements that have no factual answer to the headline question. This one does have an answer, the answer is "no" and the author knew the answer was "no".

Anyway, clearly a better comment for me to have made would have been "Although it doesn't apply here this post makes me think of Betteridge's Law!" but it's much less pithy.
Probably why I haven't delved into RSpec yet.

"it should send message to owner and shave whiskers from monkey. also, make my a latte."

That DSL seems like a bit much and I don't feel comfortable letting it do black magic things behings my back.
Bummed to see this thing dropping like a rock off the main page.

24 points in 26 minutes should have this article in the #2 slot, not #26. Is HN downmodding because it doesn't like the mirror?

#pts hr min
130 2 0
382 6 0
146 3 0
24 1 0
20 0 56
120 4 0
165 5 0
57 2 0
82 4 0
52 3 0
165 6 0
15 1 0
65 3 0
93 5 0
26 2 0
232 10 0
35 3 0
171 8 0
26 3 0
73 6 0
24 3 0
20 2 0
68 6 0
24 0 26
194 11 0
28 4 0
115 9 0

edit: something changed - now it's at #3... sufficiently many upvotes?
Not really. Diatoms are tiny, and under the pressure of successive layers of sedimentation, silica (of which diatoms are largely comprised) will recrystallise at that scale, making detection of fossils difficult, if not impossible.

I believe there are Precambrian diatom candidates, but unlike bacteria, which form colonies and therefore can still be found from ~3.5Ga (stromatolites and friends), diatoms are free-floating, and therefore easily lost in sediment.
Kartograph(.js/.py) - A simple framework for building interactive maps
Where does discretion fit into that?

Or, to be clear, do you think the correct amount of discretion was exercised when they went after Aaron with over a dozen felonies?

Is 35+ years in prison an ethical punishment for what he did, or isn't it? Is that what he deserved?
Y U No Kickstarter? An evolution of crowdsourcing
Michael Dell himself has already diversified his assets away from Dell stock - he's pretty rich.
well it read more like an ad for Dish than anything else.
__attribute__
I was thrown off by Might stating that "a grammar defines a language," which is not nearly as useful or factual as saying that it "describes" a language, the wording that he relies on throughout the rest of the article. That is the difference between me being able to make a dog or identify a dog based on a set of characteristics.

Grammars are only one part of understanding a language, hardly the "language of languages". In natural languages, grammars are one subset of linguistics. It would be just as valid to say vocabularies or phonology are the language of languages as it would be to say grammars are.

Other than these overly broad arguments and attempts to define natural languages in the same way that formal languages can be defined, this is a nice general introduction to some specific notation techniques for computer languages.

Of course, I might not have read it at all if it were titled "An Introduction to Backus-Naur Form, Extendend BNF, and Augmented BNF Notation Techniques".
Those waters were murky from the beginning. Always have been, always will be.

Also, "illegal" is not a constant, often arbitrary and usually serves only the interests of those that want to maintain the status quo.

If curiosity and creativity was constrained by what happens to be illegal at any given time, our society would look a lot different, and not for the better.
I dont know about england, but where I come from (denmark) if you win a criminal case you dont have to pay anything.

If you loose you have to pay for your own lawyers and any technical inquiries. You never have to pay for the prosecutions lawyers.
Yeah, the bookmarklet does all the work.
I am a human, machine apologist.
With Walmart's hiring practices, I highly doubt I'll be leaving my child in their care.
GMails keeps your spam for two weeks. You can check the Spam folder regularly to check for false positives.

> I've not found Gmail or Outlook filters to be different to each other in any significant way.

Recently, GMail has introduced statistical filters for some predefined categories. Like Notifications, Social Updates, and a few more.
Microsoft Security Bulletin MS13-008 - Critical
Until you experience the unrelenting hunger for your data by the gnawing mouths of the multitudes, it is hard to understand what a big job it is to hold them back. I have almost had panic attacks from (comparatively) much smaller user-bases than that.

Also, that was perhaps the biggest apologetic act I have ever witnessed...good job.
You can unflag it if you want to.
Ouch, some heavy-weight posters there that would probably like to rephrase their opinions in light of current events.
This is great but this will just continue to happen. Whether it's CBS, Fox, ABC, NBC, Viacom, Comcast. They all do it. It's unfair but there's very little anyone can do to stop it. I'm glad someone stepped up but there's just no way to keep this from happening. The point is, the Hopper is probably a great product. It doesn't need a mediocre award for people to figure that out. A good product stands on its own merits.
Bear in mind that the person making the comments you quoted is not actually John Carmack, who I will agree is a "guru". Carmack's own comments later indicate that the style represented in Doom 3 is an intermediate point in his personal evolution. Indeed, this style was a common one 10+ years ago and may have been appropriate for the less reliable compilers and buggier STL implementations of the day. It's certainly still popular with many programmers, though, as you imply in your last sentence...
Google is bringing voice control to Chrome
I'd say 1-3 are perfectly reasonable. If you want to get good, put in the time and you will be rewarded, but that's really a choice.

#4... I think that might make a lot of sense with a weak or dynamic type system, but with a static type system there is a lot of benefit to having a different type anytime the behaviour is different. Of course, that can be tedious unless you have templates or at least generics...
I read through that thread for about an hour before seeing this here and I agree with your assessment, another one that I've read was this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4528083
Hackathons is about as much about coding as clubbing is about dancing. People don't go to hackathons primarily to code (which they can do at home just as well), but to meet people.
Why it’s time to learn CoffeeScript (and that other new fancy technology)
Something particularly bugs me about edw519's comments in the thread you linked to and the recent one about the tragedy -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5047571. It's an odd contrast.
Maybe generating the broad ideas with speech-to-text and then editing it into something intelligent with a keyboard?

(The danger is that lots of people will skip the second step...)
Hi Neil,

It's a tough thing sometimes to find partners. I think for me...and perhaps other designers, is that to partner with someone and make that level of time commitment requires a good bit of trust. The easiest way to develop that is out of an existing work or social relationship. If you don't have that then I would recommend hitting up some design meetups. You'd be surprised how many designers have ideas for apps or startups and would love to connect with a developer to work on their ideas as well. I'd also hit up designers on dribbble.com, you might very well find someone that is interested in working with you.

I think no matter where you find them....you have to be able to present your idea and proposal well. In this question posted here you haven't really mentioned much about what it is you want to build. You need to find someone who not only will work with you on something...but will develop a passion for it just as you have. But to do that you need to do a good job of selling it to them. Show them why it is cool, innovative, and profitable. You'll be much more likely to get a true partner vs someone just doing some mockups for the hell of it.

Whatever you do...don't present it as an option to "build their portfolio" or "gain experience." While that can be beneficial to some young designers....you probably also don't want a very young designer that doesn't have the needed experience to help you design and develop a viable product. Remember, a good designer is going to do more than just make it look pretty. They are going to be designing a brand, a tone, and a good user interface for the product. And a great designer will be working hand in hand with you on the user experience, marketing, and front end implementation. That sort of experience and expertise would normally cost you good money...just as your development experience is worth the money. So instead find a different way to frame it other than a "portfolio piece" or the promise of future revenue or "future paid work." There are too many of those kinds of project requests nagging designers all the time. (not saying you are doing that) I get emails or calls like that every week with people wanting their logo or website for free or a hundred bucks.

So how do you propose it? Figure out what it is about the app that drives your desire...chances are a designer can relate to that as well and perhaps might share the passion. If it is going to make something easier for consumers or disrupt an industry you will probably find others interested in doing that same thing for the same reason as you.

Also, make sure you present your own skills, credentials and accomplishments...just like you'll be looking at the portfolios and past work of a designer when trying to find and screen a partner...they too need to see what you are capable of. What apps have you created so far...as side projects or for your day job? Show them why you are worth working with.

Good Luck!
As the OP of the HN thread in question, the response then saddened me. But that pales in comparison to the grief I feel now. I hope HN takes this as an opportunity to reflect and introspect.