skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tech Karaoke says goodbye to SXSW Interactive forever
Prepared to disrupt and file!
If you do end up deciding to use LaTeX, please consider http://SpanDeX.io! Not sure when you intend to start writing but in the next month we plan to push out some really robust reviewing/editing features. I don't think we've had anyone write a book on our platform yet so it'd be interesting to see how that goes. Anyway, if you end up going this route feel free to reach out to me if you have any feedback!
Levitt addressed your argument all the way back in 2005:

http://www.freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-wh...
I would suggest pecuniary rather than moral reasoning, and a sense of duty to the job rather than the civilization.

I don't think that many "academics" (quotes do to the varied nature of the groups under that label) feel a particularly strong duty to "do the right thing" about spreading knowledge especially if it may cost them their funding or job.
There's no incentive to try new services and give feedback if the very next day you are left with nothing, just as there is no incentive to try a service if it is forcing me to pay before so much as a demo or trial period.

The point I'm making isn't that free should stay free, but that if you know that something is going to happen to the service, your users deserve as much of an exit strategy as you do. I knew those surveys I took meant something, whether the site would be shut down or that they were using this data in meetings with potential investors. In one I wrote that I wanted to know whether or not I should be concerned and if I should be looking elsewhere.

As someone that used the site multiple times a day and relied on it only because the userbase was growing (evident by the number of people following me increasing exponentially each week), I didn't expect to be left out in the cold. If traction had slowed, I would have gotten the hint, but things seemed to be going somewhere and they were still actively working on it.

This seems similar to EveryBlock's situation in that the problem wasn't that it wasn't useful and growing, just that it wasn't in line with the parent company's vision. Selling it would have made more sense, just as with Snip.it, telling users the site would be shutting down at the end of February would have made a lot more sense than just putting up a static page apologizing and offering very little in the way of "moving on".
I do realize that the parts Everyblock codebase were released some time ago prior to the MSNBC acquisition:

https://code.google.com/p/ebcode/

But the last update was June 2009, nearly three years ago.

It would also be a shame for the user content to be lost forever. Some of us poured tens or hundreds of hours of our lives into community discussions. It should be a part of the public record.
> $ meteor add email

> This package is automatically configured to send emails (up to 300 per day) through Mailgun

I'm not sure I like having 'email' linked to a specific service. But maybe that's the Meteor way?
Because career advancement requires publication in peer-reviewed, quality journals in a relevant field. The people at the top aren't generally keen to delegitimize the reason they are at the top. :) It's hard to fight that battle on top of all the other maneuvering and petty bullshit an academic already has to put up with.

This is why open-access tend to be sudden revolts of entire subfields. Everyone gets together and says, fuck it, we know how to judge ourselves, so let's stop signing over copyright.
So glad this incubator for intolerance and racism has been shut down. I am sure the community will find another place to talk about EveryBlack they see in their neighborhood
> Occam's razor doesn't apply when we are choosing between different theories that lead to different predictions.

Of course it does. If there are two or more possible outcomes, and one of them has a higher likelihood or represents a simpler solution, it's favored by the thinking behind Occam's razor. This can't be used to prove anything and it's only conjecture, but it's useful for sorting out questions that involve imperfect information.
$ curl https://install.meteor.com | sh

I really wish people would stop giving instructions like this. Despite all the focus on web security and sandboxing, we continue to instruct people to run arbitrary code on their user account.

People should at least give any shell script they download from the internet a cursory look to see if it's doing what it should be doing instead of blindly executing the response from an HTTP request.
This is hurting us all: It's time to stop
Whose interest do you think was served by inadequate battery testing?

I'm pretty sure Boeing isn't laughing all the way to the bank right now.
15 Amazing Android Icon Packs - Part 3
From what I understand cgo doesn't currently support static linking like this.
The smartest guys in the same damn room
Byrne seems to have not groked that Swartz had access to JSTOR legally, although from a different institution (Harvard, not MIT) and could have downloaded everything legally if he wanted to. The thinking is he went to MIT to make the act illegal; to make a statement. To be civilly disobedient.

The problem is we now have a DOJ that has been corrupted by the PATRIOT act and its kin; with memos legalizing all kinds of state-sponsored acts that were unthinkable before 9/11. It's a different atmosphere than when the Pentagon Papers were leaked. We are moving swiftly towards a predator state; like China or Brazil. Swartz was probably reacting to that.
The data store on the client side isn't the whole data store, it's the things you've published and subscribed to, which can change easily based on authentication, your userId, or however else you program it.

Meteor has an "insecure" mode that is active by default where everything is published. Don't use that in production.
Landing Page Optimization Case Studies With Tim Ash
Show HN: Analytics Academy
Yah didn't move quick enough. It took 2 years. Would you wait?
You spout your answer like its the obvious and "derrr" response

You make a good point, and I did not mean that as the "obvious" response, I meant it as a simple counter-response. As I kind of mentioned in my other comment, I think there can be many cases where the startup that is shutting down is going to be unable to afford a graceful wind-down, for various reasons.

Startups and Users are basically at-will employers and employees in a sense. Either can leave the other unexpectedly at any time, and I think it would be wise to approach things with the understanding that neither should expect the other to "just be there".
Oh, three years changes my "argument" somewhat. But good to read too, and more a matter of curiosity, than accusatory.
Why We Shut Down Charm on the Eve of Public Launch, at $48k/Year and Growing
Just curious, how does Meteor deal with concurrency issues where multiple clients are making changes to the same objects? Does last update win? How does this get reflected back to the UI?

Brief example: A grocery list that both my wife and I are editing, deleting, adding, and re-arranging at the same time.
Show HN: Application to keep your home organized
How Virtual Fences Will Transform Rural America
SB Nation’s Super Bowl Sunday comments map
You misunderstand me. I understand why they did it. I don't care. I'm a consumer here, not a developer, and I want to be the guy who has a phone with an upgrade path. If I can't get updates to my phone for at least a couple years--and save the "but but WP7.8," I do define "updates" as latest-and-greatest, and that's WP8--I consider it abandonment. Samsung does it. LG does it. HTC does it. Google's Nexus devices don't, and neither does Apple, and that's why they're on my radar and the others are not. WP7.8 is a joke for PR purposes--they are leaving people out in the cold because they can't get WP8. That's the important upgrade. Not WP7.8. And people who got on board with Windows Phone, the early adopters who Microsoft should be thanking their lucky stars doesn't consider them a joke (or didn't, maybe they do now!), are the ones getting burned. That's unacceptable behavior and I won't reward it with my money.

I have no assurances, none whatsoever, that WP9 won't leave me with an un-upgradeable doorstop even if there isn't a kernel transition. They've showed that they'll be assholes even to their early adopters, so why wouldn't they be an asshole to me? And Microsoft's word is dirt to me, so I don't even believe them if they say it's the case. If they release WP9 and WP10 without fucking over their customers, I will consider them no longer radioactive. Until then, I refuse to be make P.T. Barnum more correct.

(Microsoft's penchant for abandoning technology is also why I won't write code for Microsoft platforms anymore except for ports of my C++ games because that's still where a worthwhile percentage of the market is and I can't not target it. Which sucks, because I really like C#, but they made that bed, not me.)
You can use other things, but if you want to use one instantly with zero configuration, there's this.
Really great points. This is also not just restricted to small companies either - most large companies have HR departments with so many levels and decades old procedures that they have literal armies of drones filling in useless paperwork put in place by numerous HR directors over the years. Some companies have HR departments collect dossiers on employees, including fingerprints, history of photos, all medical conditions, all leave dates and vacation destinations, financial history, etc. This is expensive to maintain and nearly always useless in the extreme.

HR in general needs a major reworking.
I'm having problems thinking of a scenario where this could happen with unary "-". Could you give some example where both preprocessing results are valid, but have different meaning?
So how do you guys solve the issue of most "enterprise social software" being nothing but a fairly shallow replacement for / complement to, email?

(Disclaimer: I'm the founder of a startup that's also playing in this space (depending on how broadly you define "this space"), and I don't really know if we're competitors or not!)
This is quite amazing, and frankly quite an eyeopener in the way large clojure projects can be organized. Just curious though: does Graph handle cycles?
I can't tell if this is a joke or not. You don't think exploiting a monopoly position on a good whose value is defined by someone else's trademark is "unfair"? It's the very definition of unfair, sorry. The real world, and the law, recognize that. I'm disturbed that you don't.

The prank is acceptable. The ransom is not.
Philosophy grad here, so bear with me. Byrne's point about "where one draws the line with 'higher morality' used as a justification for breaking the law" is deeply fucked up. He seems to be saying that civil disobedience is right if and only if the public sees an act of disobedience as a good cause. Quoth David Byrne: "In civil disobedience actions it’s critical how the acts play out in public—that the perception be that they have done good, not harm."

That's messed up, yo, for a few reasons. But mostly: The public is a multi-faceted organism. Is 'the public' meant to be the majority? A consensus? The intelligentsia? Whatever answer you come up with, you end up with this: morality is dictated by 'the public.' Laws and actions therefore don't have any moral standing outside of the social context they're in. Morality isn't objective.

That sends us down the path to moral relativism, which you may or may not have a problem with. However, if you're someone who supports the idea of civil disobedience, like David Byrne says he is, you should worry. If it turns out that what is moral is dependent on what is accepted by the public, then different groups have different moralities. You have no way of adjudicating between which group is right - you just say: "shit, you believe different things. I guess your beliefs are just as morally right as mine."

That means that the South of 1830, where slavery was popular, was a fine and dandy and moral place. See how this looks like a load of shit now?

The project of civil disobedience, then, stops being about actually doing what's right. It's about changing group attitudes towards X. Like gay marriage: if you want gay marriage to be moral, you change the beliefs of 'the public.' You stop fighting for what's moral - instead, you end up fighting for what your group says is moral. No one has the moral high ground; the winning group just ends up yelling louder.

But that's completely backwards. People fight for gay marriage (or to stop abortion) because they believe those things are right. If they are right - that is to say, they're moral actions or whatever - then their rightness is what supports your beliefs.

It may even turn out that you're wrong: you may have believed something because you thought it was moral, when in reality it was not. That happens. But what we should shrink from saying is that the public determines rightness. Because then there's no real way to be civilly disobedient. There's no point. You're not fighting for a good cause. You're just fighting, and there will never be a day when you can say that we now live in a more moral world.
Please cut out the CL evangelizing. Go play with your muddle of Turing tarpits made of conses.
The whole free/not-free/kinda-free issue is raised in a couple of ways in this thread. NBC mentioned the challenge of creating a business model (caveat recent advertising efforts)

The question I have been following (and Dan Gillmor as well) is this, "Is there a 'self supporting' model for local journalism?"

For that to work the revenues generated have to cover the cost of running the site. And my experience is that this has to mean both keeping the cost of running the site as low as possible as well as finding revenue. We can see by example that without such a model these sites disappear.

Three possible models come to mind, although I'm sure there must be more;

1) Visitors to the site pay for access. Historically this is challenging, but with the experience of 'free' sites vanishing due to money problems perhaps there is a core set of consumers who could create a viable market for this.

2) Advertisers on the site share the costs of operating it amongst themselves. This is the current model for free 'weeklys' where advertising funds are the largest revenue model. The 'value' of net advertising however is much lower than paper advertising thanks in part to Google and others. So this is made harder by that and people more easily avoiding the advertisements.

3) A civic fund, basically spending some of the community's tax dollars on funding a local news portal/site.

Given the way that everyblock got created perhaps a migration where its tax funded at first, then advertising funded later? Sort of a private/public partnership. Clearly every city has communication issues with their citizens so they could use this sort of channel to reach out to folks who don't keep flyers around (Sunnyvale for example has a flyer which says which days of the year are free for bringing in hazardous waste to the dump)

I certainly agree with the general sentiment that this is a useful service.
And what do you mean "depriving someone of the productive use of that domain"?

Well, if I have a company that, I don't know, sells milk, well I may just have a use for that domain in promoting my product. Maybe I have some startup that deals in milk. That would be a good domain to have. But unfortunately I cannot use that domain to host my website, or web application.
Someone decided to lease that domain for what is likely a measly $20 USD per year, and thinks a reasonable price to transfer that lease to me is about $10.000.000 USD.

Instead this fine gentleman decided to purchase the domain and thinks acting like a child on a playground by going "Nanananana, you can't have it".
Have you seen powerpivot for excel? Bit off topic for this thread but allows you to work with biggish (>2m row) data sets through excel pivot tables
Mailbox for iOS
That's correct. Here is a quote from the meteor blog announcing this feature: "
But there's more than just an API. We've partnered with Rackspace's Mailgun team so that every app deployed with $ meteor deploy can send email right away, without any annoying configuration process. These automatic accounts are capped at 200 messages a day, but of course you're not tied to them. You can use any SMTP server (your own box, a paid Mailgun account, or anything else) just by setting the $MAIL_URL environment variables, whether you're using our deploy servers or running your own bundles."
There has been book recommendation threads around here at times, search probably would find them. The recommendations/reviews/comments probably are still mostly valid.
Hi,

I do have some questions; would you mind shooting me an email? (you don't have any contact info on your profile.)
I've never wanted stuff, just tools, but not necessarily super functional ones. For instance, I'd love to be able to buy and run a music venue and get loads of awesome bands to play and things. Or tape a £20 to the pavement, or get a hot tub and hold amazing parties. Or just ridiculous things, like hiring a load of escorts and having a Tekken tournament. Then there's using the money to invest in people and things that could become awesome, like the local music scene or impoverished charities (like rape crisis centres and anything related to the homeless). Or, fuck it, setting up your own charity to help people sort their lives out.

Just buying material goods and status symbols is never going to make you happy. Doing cool shit on the down-low is a much better goal IMHO.
Who said you can't sue the government?
This is true currently but both the inlining and the garbage collector have improved tremendously over the past year and should continue to get better.

I do wish Go supported an explicit inline modifier that worked like haxe's though (unlike the C/C++ one which is more of a suggestion).
At least it's https; I've seen sites on HN recently[1] that suggest you run code pulled over plain http, as if that wasn't an even more horrible security risk than just blindly running a script from the Internet.

[1] http://chocolatey.org/
App Data Crash-Off: Android Jelly Bean Vs. iOS6
"Real-Time Yammer", social intranet... The enterprise jargon in this article makes it almost impossible to understand that Hall seems to be just another group chat tool for companies similar to Hipchat and Flowdock.
I specified that #2 is sometimes necessary for a specific end (distinctive design). You seem to be arguing that one should never seek that end. I disagree, but that's an entirely different argument.
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Did you see the light turn yellow?
How long does this light stay yellow?
Is this the first of a sequence of timed lights?
Is the intersection photo-enforced?
Can you enter the intersection before the light turns red?
Will speeding up get you into the intersection
before the light turns red, or after?
Do you carry comprehensive insurance?
If a collision ensues, will you be at fault?

I doubt you will find a mathematical proof that is usable in actual
traffic, but a statistical approach might be usefully informative.

Have you measured the total possible minimum and maximum wait times
for all light combinations over some of your usual trips?
(Hint: get your friends to do the field work.) How do the "all red"
and "all green" times compare proportional to the total trip time?
What are the chances that waiting for one yellow light will increase
the typical total trip time?

If none of that convinces you to wait for traffic lights, then take
the MSF (Motorcycle Safety Foundation) course, buy a small
motorcycle, and report back after a year of riding in traffic.
The experience may give you a different perspective.
Those are my feelings exactly. I'm not as familiar with companies over ten employees -- I've never been in an environment any bigger -- but I'm sure that if we're having issues at ten then companies of one hundred, five hundred, and thousand+ are having any even worse time keeping track of everything.
wut

You can choose almost any color in the visible spectrum.

You can also source a color and paste it has hex.
You said any designer who chooses a body text font (something designers have been doing for hundreds of years, incidentally) is guilty of "self-obsessed wankery." The difference between that and telling people what they can or can't include is pretty slim.
That backed up my argument - the half-life is nowhere near 15 hours unless pregnancy or other drugs are involved.
The Adobe suite on IRIX/Solaris used a really clumsy macintosh-to-motif auto-port system. The resulting ports were really bad.

Before Photoshop on Macintosh, the normal way to do that type of work on a computer was to buy a turnkey system from BarcoColor or similar. Yes, the bundled UNIX workstation might run IRIX, but it was turnkey -- the end user just wanted to run Barco.

Photoshop on a Mac IIfx cost about 1/10th as much and was at least half as good. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the bottom dropped out of the turnkey market for photoshop-type tasks.

(For video, it stayed alive and well for many more years: discreet was selling IRIX turnkey up until 2004 or so)
Free Month of Treehouse
I don't mean to be a grumpy old man, but this seems even more pointless than usual.

To disagree with mmakunas, I don't think people care about the privacy angle so much- I think it's about creating something entirely disposable, and the freedom that gives you. It's like an anti-Instagram- no filters and perfectly positioned shots, just point, shoot, send.

I'm not sure what the exactly psychology of it is or whether it even matters that the photos disappear but a lot of teens use Snapchat. Just take a look at the demographics of a Twitter search:

https://twitter.com/search?q=snapchat%20me&src=typd

Even if Snapchat doesn't do anything that normal messaging can't, they've clearly packaged it in such a way that it's tremendously popular. After all, if it was possible with normal messaging, why wasn't anyone doing it until Snapchat came about?
These two are great examples of why i think "overloading" syntax symbols sucks. Problem is, nearly every language does that, and in many cases it makes some expressions ambiguous (not to the parsers, as they have those corner-cases defined, but ambiguous to the programmers):

- in JavaScript braces are used both as block delimiters and object literal delimiters
- in CoffeeScript, which prevents that particular grammar ambiguity from JS, whitespace is used for many different things: scope/block delimiting, object literals, even function calls (optional parentheses)
- Python uses parentheses both for expression grouping (precedence), function calls AND tuples
- square brackets are used in many languages to both denote literal lists/arrays and element access ([] operator)
- etc, etc, etc

There are very few languages that i know about don't do this kind of lexical-token overloading. Smalltalk is an example: square brackets are always blocks, parentheses are only used to group expressions, dots are always statement terminators, etc. I think Haskell is another example of a straightforward syntax, but don't quote me on that.

Is there any formal name for these kinds of non-overloaded/simple syntaxes? If there is a formalism for those, why is it that "overloaded" syntaxes are preferred most of the time, or why are they so prevalent?
I might actually do that. Thanks for the tip.