skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lobby. Really.
Be the guy who writes letters to his congress person and senator. All the time, every time.
Form groups.
Stop complaining about it on an internet forum, get together in real life, and talk to people. Not "random like-minded techies". Go meet with your senators or congressmen. They take meetings from constituents. You'll probably end up talking to an LA or something, but if you all do it, it'll start to have an impact. Tell them exactly how much money you are spending, and how much time you are wasting, worrying about this stuff. Form lobbying groups, and advocate.

There are other effective things than the above, it's just an example.

One of the reasons I became a lawyer, instead of just a software engineer, is because it was clear to me, even 15 years ago, that patents were going to destroy our industry.

It was also clear that the majority of software engineers would do one of three things:

1. Pretend it did not matter.

2. Dismiss the threat until it became huge.

3. Complain about it on Usenet (now "random blogs, internet forums, and social media sites").

It took a long time to get to the point it is now.
It will, realistically, take a long time to get to a better point. Yes, everyone has a quick fix solution, like "ban software patents" or "pray the federal circuit/supreme court saves us from years of bad policy and legal decisions". These are all long shots. They may happen. But it's all short term plays. You need the long term play as well, in the background, in case these don't work out.

People have this weird idea that the content industry/etc simply backed up a truck of money to congress people and got the laws they wanted. Instead, they spend 20+ years meeting with politicians, advocating their position, forming lobbying groups, and slowly winning politicians over. They showed (mostly fake) economic benefit, had studies done, kept harping them over and over. Certainly they donated, but if you think it was simply because they gave some congressman some money, you don't understand how things get done.

If you want to stop software patents, you need to take this long term approach as well. Don't get me wrong, I hope the supreme court reigns in the federal circuit as well.
But if you want real change, it often takes time. At least in the current world, there is a 0% chance this change will happen if the only action is to write comments about news stories on internet sites.
Ok, sysprogs is clearly an account created just to spam HN with this link, (guess they win, it made it to the front page) but really? This seems very out of sync with both the Raspberry Pi goals, and the world in general. How about 'vi hello.c; make hello; ./hello' ? Pretty simple yes? Woohoo my first RaspPi "app"! But this crappy toolchain? Really?

Ok so perhaps I'm too harsh here but I think the nice thing about the RasPi is that you get to actually talk to the machine and experience "real" programming. This seems to be a parody of everything that is wrong with development today.
Github: Your Single Point Of Failure
I'd argue that by buying insurance, I'm not betting that my house will burn down soon - I'm betting that were it to burn down, I'd be proper fucked without insurance.

Probability works in the long run. If I bet you a dollar on a coin flip, my expected return is $0.50, but I will not get $0.50 - I will either get $1.00, or zilch.

Besides, when the insurance company loses the house-on-fire bet, they lose some money. When I lose the house-on-fire bet, I lose everything I own if I'm lucky.
It has no benefit, it's just behavior. Maybe it has something to do with your blood pressure / flow that will make your nose itch?
These days I'd argue to a client to spend their money hiring PR people. PR people obtain high quality backlinks the legit, organic way.
YAML Vulnerability with Rails 2.3 and 3.0 (Remote Code Execution and DOS)
The about and FAQ links are both dead on my Nexus 7.
Totally with you. I was enjoying the amusing tone of the piece but he lost my sympathy at:

"Before, SEO was the game of really skilled people, you know like professional poker players. You had to know the game, know when to raise, and when to bluff."

Then with the "Maybe I should find another job?" I thought this has got to be satire. Well played, sir.

The way the piece is framed, the writing style, surely a work of humour?
Show HN: Lechat – team chat for developers
Search eBay Feedback by item name
gaming the system is blackhat SEO. There's also supposed to be the SEO business where you actually improve the site's quality, indexability and speed.
Ruby on Rails vulnerable to mass assignment and SQL injection
> Average anything is a terrible way to track anything.

Came here to say exactly this. And averages are especially insidious when used for data that doesn't have a symmetric distribution, like most latencies.
I think your singular focus on executing with Price Intelligently is something (IF MAINTAINED) you will thank yourself for doing for a very long time.
I'm glad it's not a Mordekaiser circle jerk.
my team has made a ton of contributions to hermes - it's a pretty solid library. that said, i'm happy to see more traction for clojure + titan, especially from the clojurewerks crew.
Plus one. SEO is absolutely annoying. If a site is built correctly and there is interest in the service or topic the site provides, then the product will be found. Stuffing keywords into title and heading tags along with other grey area SEO techniques really devalues the internet. I see SEO along the same lines as buying domains that you think may have value and sitting on them. Games like this hinder progress and real utilization of the resources at our disposal.
I'm glad somebody here posted the link to the docs page because the framework looks good. But calling people lazy - that's the type of attitude when you ask for user feedback and then argue with them that they're wrong.

Look at the home page as a casual browser would. The first page has tons of screenshots... of grids. Click on "Features"... more grids. Click on "Add Ons"... more grids. Click on "Docs"... no screenshots! If I'm just casually glancing around, I feel like hitting every 1st level page is fair. All I saw was grids. Why would anybody be confused that a visitor might think this is a CSS layout/grid framework?

Perhaps bootstrap cheats by putting their components onto one long scrolling page, but it does get 1st level nav and I see what it's about pretty quickly.
Overview of the real science behind placebos
>Perfect linkbait title. Well done. I'm sure the spike of trafic thanks to HN has been noticeable.

Simon and James are both best selling authors and have been blogging about economics and finance for years. Simon was the economic head hauncho at the IMF and is a professor at MIT.

I'm sure they are concerned about the traffic spike from HN...
No they aren't. The carrier is requiring that the customer purchase a very high interest rate loan in order to use their cell service.

This situation is not unlike a credit card issuer requiring that you don't lend out the books you bought with their credit card.
I think discouraging SEOs was the whole point. Find a new way to make money without improving anything.
Apple iPhone and iPad iOS 6 network problems linger on
Just launched and would love your feedback (mobile site too). Free to use. Please share your thoughts.
I was wondering if it was satire... especially once I got to the designer watch bit. If it is, it's really dry.
> It is interesting to note that 100% of the apps listed are games with wakelocks. While some may argue that this is necessary for games, I counter that your game should pause after a period of inactivity and allow the device to sleep.

Fucking meh. Seriously. They list a bunch of games which keep all the most power-consuming subsystems running full tilt (including radio for some), here's why they drain the battery: they're being used and doing their job.

Seriously, this list is idiotic, you've got complex games, you're playing them, it's going to drain the battery when you use them. Period. That's been pretty much a constant of my 6 or 7 years of using smartphones. Users using their phone will play, and when they don't play they'll quit the game or manually lock the phone.

Some of them do have issues ("Hill Climb Racing" seems to be a good example there, keeping radios running when in the background) but aside from this hint you have to hunt for the list is utterly worthless.
I upvoted it before I'd read all the way through.

I thought the guy was complaining that he had to jump through Google's hoops to get his product in front of his users.

Now that I know he's complaining that Google are making it harder for him to game the system, I'd retract and reverse my upvote if I could.
I'll be straight with you, first prize isn't even that good of a prize. I'm going to guess this was put on by some marketing person.
"SEO should not have ever become a "thing" if Google did its job right."

SEO will always be a "thing" as long as people are not always interested in providing relevant information. It will always be an asymmetric battle between people who want to prioritize their noise over useful signal.
SDN: LineRate System acquired by F5 Networks
Anybody know how big robots.txt can be and if anyone has ever given a spider grief by screwing with the size or download rate of robots.txt?
I think those are an interesting set of questions, but for the most part easily answered by "What does the law currently say?"

- Public health care has absolutely no say on the speed with which a doctor can decide whether life saving surgery is required. In fact I would imagine that knowing that the surgery will be paid for regardless of whether the patient has a job or not might make this decision faster.

- The government pays for top end mathematical talent in other sectors (security) so it stands to reason that if it were necessary, they could in health care as well. Again though, removing the private insurance part of the equation would probably remove the need.

- Obviously yes, just like any other person who requires surgery to live.

- Again, obviously yes. Current laws allowing abortions make this a non-issue. I understand some people are morally or religiously opposed to abortion, but we are governed by the laws of the society we live in. If that is a problem the answer is to change those laws, not to ignore them.

-There are any number of taxing schemes that could subsidize public healthcare but I have never seen one that introduced a progressive tax based on health history (kinda defeats the point?). I would imagine that if the majority of the other countries in the first world can figure this one out, the US probably could too.

I think questions like these are intentionally meant to bring up emotional responses and generate controversy around what could be a really simple decision (either way).
From his twitter postings, I don't believe this is fake.
I think the general contention is that the process you describe is just using someone who's going to write sensible HTML not SEO. The shady side of actually modifying code not for easy-to-read, browser-efficiency, etc. is SEO.
I'd like to hear more about this argument. Can you develop it further?
This is really nice! And attractive.

One of the reasons I'll probably stick with ColorBrewer palettes for now is that I can easily find color schemes that are safe for people with colorblindness or for display in particular environments.
More specifically, \A and \z are "start of string" and "end of string" respectively.

Why not \Z, you ask? \Z will match to the end of the string but ignore a trailing newline.

irb(main):001:0> !!("hello\n" =~ /\Ahello\z/)
=> false
irb(main):002:0> !!("hello\n" =~ /\Ahello\Z/)
=> true
SEO has made a lot of damage to the Internet. 10 years ago links really expressed people preferences, and it was easy to get linked and ranked high when you've published useful stuff.

Today, almost all large sites that people use to share links to original content use nofollow links. Because of this, it is common that when you Google for some original content, you will find links to aggregators (Stack Overflow, Reddit, HN, etc.) but the original page will be very far on the result list.
Not a mod, but looking at the discussion it generated, it seemed more like Reddit than HN.
> most people are really bad at calculating their own risk vs. reward.

Considering how easy it is, that's unlikely. After all, consider:

* If you can afford to lose the insured item, and

* If a mortgage lender doesn't require you to carry insurance, and

* If an insurance company wants to sell you a policy,

* Then you're better off self-insuring.

This is not rocket science.

> You are why universal healthcare is so essential

I agree that universal health care is essential, simply because of where we are, not on basic principles. But it's equally true that health insurance is the reason why health costs are spiraling out of control -- people aren't bargaining for good deals in that "market" because the insurance company is paying. If we were required to pay out of pocket for each health expenditure, we would see a big decline in costs.

The evidence? Many doctors and dentists have two price lists -- one for the insured and one for the uninsured. The uninsured pay less.

I emphasize that we definitely need universal health care, and the sooner the better. Nothing I say should be interpreted as doubting this necessity. But this is only because we've painted ourselves into a corner.
I've used something similar in matlab, which I though worked a little better. It started out with red green blue, colors frequently considered maximally distinct, at least on color monitors for the non-colorblind. Then it just found maximally distant points in the color cube. I found it worked nicely and you could also seed it with your own starting color(s).

Edit: found out it is based on Lab color space.
We've had medical technology for longer than we've had either of those, and health care has gotten more expensive, not less. What does the price of commodity items have to do with the price of life saving services?
Three new Rails security patches today
Hi,

I do when I browse Java and Scala code.

I'm not sure what problem you mean, but I have to run `wmname LG3D`
before running idea, otherwise the fonts are not displayed at all.

With that, it runs fine; the only (minor) problem is that switching to
another window and back to idea makes the cursor disappear and some
point-related shortcuts stop working until I open any menu/window
within idea.

I use a tiling window manager; I wonder if it claches with the Java UI
library somehow.
So you're saying that patents can be destructive to markets???

Man, I wish someone in the US government agreed with you on thatOH WAIT http://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/more/2012-035

Not that a single report means anything for policy, I just saw this on HN a few days ago and thought it was relevant to that point.
The 10 Best Arnold Schwarzenegger Films
Hundreds of Companies have moved from India to Silicon Valley in last 6 months
I don't think your extremely harsh assessment is warranted at all. There's nothing really tangible in your post besides minor things you have to get used to like pressing Cmd+Down to open a file instead of Return.

Why exactly do you feel every interaction with Finder deletes your data? You can't just state something like that without giving examples. It's _the_ worst critique you can give a file manager.

Also, where do you even find those endless preferences you talk about? There's only a handful checkboxes in the Finder > Preferences window. (Compare this to the clusterfuck that is Windows: http://i.imgur.com/2ZcsX7w.png). The only commandline setting I've used is the hidden files toggle which I try to avoid anyway because of all the dotfiles in my home directory. What are all these "iconoglyphs" you talk about? Can we see a screenshot of your Finder window? Something tells me you have configured it wrong by trying to use some obscure commandline settings.
Sir, you are a natural, we need to get you into law school ASAP.
We have a various clients using Titan in production. Of course, like any project, there are always more desired features. The Titan/Faunus roadmap is greatly influenced by our clients.
Like the pricing page. Simple.
Rails 3.2.12, 3.1.11, and 2.3.17 have been released
I read it as a joke by the end but, worryingly, didn't automatically recontextualise it as racist in light of that. Which, I think I agree with you, it is, if it's a joke and all the East Africa stuff is made up for "comedy value".
I haven't seen any problems in Reeder, which uses Google Reader as a back-end server for feeds and "read/unread" state.

Perhaps this is just a problem in the web client code?
Isn't it just February? What if a company announces quantum teleportation in November 2013? What list is it going to make?

Sheesh, I bet the authors of this article drive model 2014 cars already...
I think you are right as there are ways to mitigate natural disasters. The question is whether or not there is political will to pay for the mitigation measures until the disaster happens. Winnipeg had been flooded severely several times in the last hundred years until the 1970s when a giant floodway was created which could divert a river's worth of water around the city. Since then the floodway has saved the city from numerous large floods and has just recently been expanded to provide protection for a 1 in 700 year flood.

It seems unfortunate the city was catastrophically flooded several times before that monetary expenditure was politically acceptable.
Your way has been tried, by not one but two companies. Their browsers were called IE4 and NS4, and the blame for the Web "not being up to the task" is pretty much entirely theirs.
IPv6: A new opportunity for business (HP Blogs)
Right, but in being right you point out the absolute wasteland of our government in that when a citizen cries "unconstitutional" he's ignored because of a technicality.

He, and I, don't support this law. Further, we don't support those who passed this law either knowing its abuses, or not caring to investigate. None of the "too busy, had to do something" excuses count because we, the people, supposedly to root of power in this country, were systematically ignored and silenced by government action when we spoke out against this type of law. A government that passes these laws is a government directly acting outside the powers granted by the people.

When we say unconstitutional we mean against the founding spirit of this country, that government is limited and responsible to the people.

If you have a better term than unconstitutional, suggest it, but we aren't discussing some technical quirk of this system as if we cared about the justifications others have made - we're discussing that it's poisoned and not serving those who feed it.
The underlying question of your comment is whether this is a stable business model. You already indicate that Twitter has the ability to disrupt/shutdown your service, which puts you in a difficult situation to build something of value. If you are ever wildly successful and dependent on one platform, then that platform will extract value from you or replace you. Consider this a rule, not a guideline, because it always makes business sense for the platform to do that. Recent examples include Zynga paying the Facebook "tax," Craigslist effectively shutting down PadMapper, and the slew of Twitter 3rd party apps that have been crippled by limited/revoked access.
He should do an AMA here!
Looks clean and simple. What's your backend infrastructure? Didn't see much technical detail in the FAQ :)
Why startups will disintermediate CRE Brokers...eventually
That benchmark is for algorithms implemented in pure Python and in pure Go. But for real projects, a Python programmer might use several libraries which are written in C.
One of the things I like best about computers and the internet is race is not brought into the mix.
Some details on how this can be exploited:

http://www.zweitag.de/en/blog/ruby-on-rails-vulnerable-to-ma...
Not true, the open source version of vanilla does not contain all the features. Certain features are pay only.
First week at MEGA Bounty Program, paid out thousands of dollars for seven Bugs
Not to be pedantic, but there's an... unfortunate... typo in the thread title.
tl;df. I guess the point was that he couldn't assimilate into civilian life and the military didn't help him after an otherwise glorious end to a career he can't talk about. There you go now you don't have to read the wall of text.

This story seemed overly dramatic about the fallen hero angle. I don't doubt civilian life is difficult to adapt to. I've seen it first hand. But, it seems more like society is more in love with seeing their military heros fall from grace rather than succeed, and that's probably what we really need to fix. It still feels like we're haunted by the ugly perceptions we developed about our vets during Vietnam.
Great tool, it heavily uses chroma.js

http://vis4.net/blog/posts/avoid-equidistant-hsv-colors/

https://github.com/gka/chroma.js

The HCL color space is also available in this d3 module:
https://github.com/d3/d3-plugins/tree/master/cie
For those who don't have 'showdead' turned on, here's math0ne's post:

"I like the detailed text formatting especially the fraud page: https://www.gittip.com/about/fraud/2012-11-05.html

math0ne: you've been hellbanned for the last 5 years. I have no clue why. (More on hellbans on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3477488)
Thanks! Erlang + websockets + Postgres
Nice. I was at first very confused about the support room chat, thought it was just a page to help you get started. Turns out it's a support chat for the app.

Very nice though.
Your life is not a statistic. You are not the average. If I gave you $20 to play russian roulette, would you do it? It's only a 1/6 chance of death. On average you'll be up $20, right?

I'm guessing most people would not do it. The risk of death is simply not worth the reward.

You keep talking about "things you can afford to lose". Houses NEVER fall into that category. So why do you keep bringing it up? We're talking about houses, not the DVD player you buy at Best Buy.
You're absolutely right, and people are being very hyperbolic. However: Obama's power to launch a targeted strike against an American citizen does not exactly "derive from the AUMF." It derives from the Obama administration's interpretation of the AUMF (and other law). That interpretation may or may not be constitutionally correct, and at no point was this administration forced to argue the constitutionality of the strike before carrying it out. Even if we accept that the AUMF granted Obama the right to kill an American citizen abroad, Obama is making constitutionally controversial decisions without oversight.

Although the white paper justifying the Aulaqi assassination did not argue that the assassination of non-Al-Qaeda citizens within the U.S. would be justified, many people are concerned that this sort of oversight-free executive decision-making sets a bad precedent, and that eventually some president might use similar arguments to justify drone strikes against American citizens.
Consumer Isn't Dead and Enterprise Isn't Hot
This isn't about the complexity of the game or how much battery it drains while playing. This is about you setting your tablet down for half an hour with the game paused, then coming back to find it has drained half your battery unnecessarily. Or you switch out to check your email, get distracted, and find that the running game has drained half your battery unnecessarily.

Android has an Activity lifecycle for a reason, and these games do not respect that. Users should not be worrying themselves with managing resources. If your game gets shoved out of the foreground, it should have the good graces to save its state and allow the device to sleep, like every other app on the system.
Here some facts and numbers about Google's VRP:

http://www.nilsjuenemann.de/2012/12/news-about-googles-vulne...