skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems pretty obvious that Twitter is trying to become a business and these alienating changes are part of the strategy but the unfortunate part is that they seemingly have picked the completely wrong strategy around what their business should be.

Twitter really from a tech prospective is a protocol and it seemed that Twitter as a business was in line with what they were providing. Twitter.com acted as the centralized hub and the developers were invited to build upon and enrich the Twitter protocol. The goal was the more tweets and users the better no matter where they were coming from.

Then they realized they need to start making money.

It seems that from the business folks the reaction has been to strong arm users back to using Twitter controlled products with the assumption that they can start to serve ads. I don't blame them necessarily in that this is the standard business model for a social network but I think it will fail specifically for Twitter. In my opinion advertising will cannabalize their business - they should be looking to sell analytics and insights - thats where their value is. Yes its harder, less proven but they are just destroying themselves with their current strategy. Im sure nobody wants to see ads on Twitter and I wouldn't be surprised if nobody really wants to serve ads in that Twitter is exceptionally noisy and the functionality is very streamlined. On the other hand the value of real-time trends or the licensing to do so is exceptionally valuable to just about every company. Perhaps its not as easy of a business model as ads but at least its seemingly more scalable with their ecosystem.
Are you suggesting that we cannot debate this issue unless we are female? Because, if so, then you need to copy and paste your comment on 90% of the comments in this thread including your own. (I assume you are not a women because you said "Can WE please let the women speak for themselves?")

Or are you suggesting that us males are only not allowed to debate when we believe that special treatment of women is actually detrimental to them and everyone else?
This, incidentally, makes for fun conversations with phone support.
This attack may have been one of the problems, but there is some indication that BitInstant has deeper financial issues than this post would indicate. Perhaps a $12K hit would make a site like Bitinstant go silent and not process most transactions for weeks on end, but if that is the case then they are woefully underfunded.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=128314.1380

At various points in this thread, people posted saying the company even admitted privately to them that they did not have funds to process orders. FYI their most popular feature, Cash to Bitcoin Address, is still offline - presumably because they have no Bitcoins to deliver. The only indication that they have any funds at all is on the home page of Btc-e.com, which indicates (as of right now) that they have a $475 reserve at the site.
If you bring an iPod or mp3 player, use the ear phones only in private. The hordes of people I see wandering exotic locales with their earphones in baffles me! They may see the sites, but they totally miss the total experience which includes the sounds of speech, nature, traffic, people, or even local cops trying to stop you.

Also, in SE Asia, for some reason many expats seem to slowly descend into some sort of hippy state of clothing and hair styles, complete with dreds and such. This appearance may signify to like-minded expats how cool or laid back you are, but to the nationals there it is more evidence of how different you are, resulting in less interaction with the real scene. There are always nationals ready to accommodate these types of expats, but overall this scene is a very small part of any country/city/culture.

As someone else here suggested about listening more, then talk; watch more, then do likewise. This goes for physical appearance.
If that is the CEO of Site5, I would never use that company again, and I publicly laugh at their audacity in denying their team's incompetence.

Yes. Not using true information is a good practice for security questions. If the CEO of a technical company thinks so, as well, then don't fscking ask me for my mum's maiden name!

1) Ask for a backup password and specify it should be kept offline.

2) Tell users to lie on the maiden name question.

Do NOT point the finger after a breach at your company to one of your customers. Terrible practice.
I think it's definitely not you that is the problem :) Even the latest releases love to hog all the memory (even when idle) and mine creates zombie processes every time I run the simulator. It's the single crashiest piece of software my computer runs (multiple times daily).

Sometimes it cannot even copy files right; drag and drop, oops it failed, drag and drop again, oops it already copied the files to the folder but didn't add them to the project, now it will neither copy nor add them, you have to go delete them yourself.
* I'm using a static template from theme forrest and Octopress[1] for my blogging software. I love Octopress so far and plan to go full Octo soon to make things simpler.

* I'm hosting with a VPS on Dreamhost[2] at $9.95/month which I find very expensive for such a completely mediocre service. I'm bothered by hosts trying to simplify the hosting process with endless panels and management tools that contort the hosting process into something more confusing instead of making it simpler. I've been using Heroku for projects and would like to use it for my personal site but I'm not sure if that is what Heroku was designed for really.

* I'm operating almost entirely from my OS X laptop now and FTP files to my server through FTPzilla. It works but every time I fire up FTPzilla I can't help but feel like there is an easier and smarter way to do all of this.

* I'm using Namecheap[3] for domains and like it mainly because using GoDaddy in the past has made anything better feel like a god send. A friend started managing a few domains with me on DNSimple[4] recently and I think its a great resource.

[1] - http://octopress.org/

[2] - http://dreamhost.com/

[3] - http://www.namecheap.com/

[4] - https://dnsimple.com/
I agree with what you're saying, but you really don't have to "jump through hoops" to get ad-block software. It takes about 30 seconds to install an ad-blocking extension.

I think the better argument is that most people don't know/care for ad-blocking software. I think AdBlock and its alternatives are prevalent in the tech community, but we're just a small part of total users.
I was also the 314th person to watch it so google must be freezing the view count.
ipairs is deprecated in 5.2, no? What is the alternative?
Ask HN: Would an accelerator program ever accept another social networking site?
I originally did not plan to end up building a social networking site. I tried to focus on a very small niche but I realized that my "concept" would be applied much better to a site where people can share photos. As a result, I ended up changing things around and now I'm going to end up with another social networking site like everyone else. I really want to apply to some accelerator programs because I feel that I could gain a lot of experience and mentorship throughout 3 months. Would an accelerator program ever be interested in a social networking site and how can I market this most effectively for a successful application?
In SICP's stop-and-copy garbage collector that was the tag on a forwarding pointer from the from-space to the to-space. Since this was written after SICP 1st edition came out, I'd guess that's the source.
To paraphrase: the question 'What is your mother's maiden name?' is intrinsically insecure as a security measure; instead of answering it directly, make up some unguessable string that has nothing to do with the question.

Sound advice, but... but... but.....

This is his own website using this as a security question!
> We don't need anything more than perseverance and pragmatism to revolutionize access to orbit, and thankfully some companies are doing that.

Jerry Pournelle and many, many others had been saying that for decades. Just keep on building rockets, do it a lot, with the principle that "practice makes perfect" in mind. Instead, governments were just paying contractors to mostly do the same thing for cost-plus, with only relatively slow progress over time to show for it.
Some years ago I used to be a intern at the bank I work now, back them I was part of the frumkeit (I was a practicing Orthodox Jew) I got no problem not going work on on a Yom Tov (specific days within holidays in Judaism), I also left early on Fridays.
Sad that Mr. Connare feels the need to defend the creation of one of the most popular typefaces of all time. I can't help but feel like some point has been missed.

When I think about all the serious thought and energy that went into the fonts available to us, and the ratio by which the average person chooses comic sans or papyrus after scrolling through their long, user-hostile list of typefaces, I feel like a market is underserved.
You are hypothesizing that someone whose language before C was IBM PL/1 is unfamiliar with assembly languages. This seems like an extremely improbable hypothesis; I suggest you seek another explanation for his or her dissatisfaction.
>So your dichotomy about "meritocracy" is short-sighted. There is nothing "meritocratic" about indulging male culture to keep a field male-dominated. Indeed, that's anti-meritocratic

I don't see how a blind meritocracy is indulging male culture. Isn't the whole point of a meritocracy the idea that the only thing it cares about is performance?
I am suggesting we not make self-serving assertions about how women should feel. There is debating and then there is putting words in other people's mouths that are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves. If women themselves are not making this type of argument, men have no place in making it on their behalf.
Just for reference, I didn't actually write that code--whoever commented on GitHub did.

There's one very important note to add: monads are much more general than just this particular example. A monad is any type with certain operations; it can encode different behaviors. In this case, the type (Map [Char] Integer -> a) is a monad, representing a value reading from the Map. However, you can also have other monads like Maybe a, which represents a value that may not exist.

I don't think I can really describe monads completely here, so you'll have to look up some resources elsewhere. It's just very important to realize that monads are much more general than this specific example.
There is nothing wrong with Comic Sans, it's the overuse and inappropriate use that is the problem.
Someone in the world are always unsatisfied for everything, yes, everything, no matter what you changed, no matter what you improved, they always always can point something out there to complain about. Example!? Right here!
I agree. I've been teaching my 7-year old son to code and Lua has been a great choice for him so far. After having him play around with Scratch and learn some javascript with Code Monster, we got him going with some game development in Lua with the Corona SDK. It's proven to be pretty intuitive for him and he's having a lot of fun. He was super stoked when we first put his "game" on an iPad and play around with it. I'd definitely recommend it to other parents looking for something to start their kids on.
10 Google products you (probably) never knew existed
Using a socio-economic standard you abstract away the race issue and give an advantage to those who have less money which has a stronger correlation to actually having less opportunity.

The problem wrt to race and using a socio-economic standard is that there are almost as many whites in poverty as there are black people in total in the USA (~33 million vs ~38 million according to wiki). There is also the issue that even when accounting for socio-economic status, there is still real discrimination (Pager's
Discrimination in a Low-Wage Labor Market points out that a white job applicant with a criminal record is more likely to get a job call back than a black job applicant without a criminal record even when qualifications are normalized).

Just looking at socio-economic characteristics doesn't solve the problem.
The potential big advantage of this construct is that you can use it in switch() statements, which you can't do with strings. But it's probably better to use enum values, because the implementation-definedness removes the potential great advantage of this technique (that you can serialize these multicharacter literals nicely; consider SMTP implementations looking for 'HELO', 'MAIL', etc.).
>Or are you saying that these programs need to scientifically prove their value before existing in order to exist?

Your wording is disingenuous. It is possible to run a case study and study on a limited scale a program that would be deployed at a much larger scale.

Your statement implies the idea is tautologically false, which it is not.
SID Music
> Because it's sometimes better than Times New Roman, that's why.

Isn't this why most things exist? Because sometimes they are better than other similar thing?
On a side note, Comic Sans was used in the (possibly early) Samsung Galaxy phones for quite a while in their UI (Settings etc.)
Is racism just about white privilege, though? In America, ethnic Indians and east Asians outperform all other ethnic groups on a host of metrics - income, criminality, education, and etc. Isn't there a huge Asian privilege in America that nobody is talking about? Why don't we talk about the Asian/White achievement gap?
People do not want want to be segregated, even if it is, supposedly, for a good cause.

Really? Because self-segregation is pretty obvious in any number of contexts.
And here I thought it was just to piss off pretentious typography fascists and give self-righteous design snobs something to huff about.

Really, I've always been a defender of comic sans as appropriate where the intent is to be casual or personal.

One critical comment by a BBC article reader:

"The main problem I have with Comic Sans is that it makes everything written in it look like a parish newsletter pinned to a noticeboard outside the local church."

Exactly. Isn't that the point?

Criticizing this font is like criticizing a 5 year old child's handwriting on a birthday card, and asking why he didn't have professionally calligraphy.
How to make a million dollars from a hot dog cart
Comic Sans as a font needs no defense.

Just like a good band with bad fans, we don't balk at Comic Sans, we balk at the people who use comic sans for inappropriate things. (Or to use a more computery analogy, there's nothing wrong with capital letters or all-caps, but some users use them inappropriately).

City memo minutes should not be distributed in Comic Sans. Wedding invitations should probably not be in Comic Sans. The Surrey police should not have released a memo on rape and sexual assault in Comic Sans[1].

There are times when you do not want to be unserious and insincere, and some people are, and its embarrassing. Comic Sans is just a vector for that, but if you find fault with it, its still the people who are at fault.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/C6QY1yp.jpg

(The Surrey Police strike again! http://i.imgur.com/Kn68ubk.jpg)

(the compulsive designers in us will notice the logo at the top of that one is off-center, too)
>The difference is that girls have an immediate re-enforcing explanation for that sense of being out of place: you don't belong because you're a woman

How is this different from guys who go, "They're so ahead of me. I'm out of place, because they are all smarter than me"?
> Bash is more or less the only scripting language I know/use

I feel sorry for you.

Try Python, especially if you're doing anything involving string processing.
Fuck the Corporate Cloud
That is a bit too one sided for my tastes. Concerte example time:

If you're a hiring manager and have 4 white males on a team, do you really need another white male? Probably not, is it morally wrong to want a female on the team or say a non white male? I cannot see why it would be. Especially when we now know based on current research that even if the candidate is technically worse than another, the overall team benefits from the different viewpoints more than a "star" developer.

Again, I am not in agreement this is at all a moral decision from a hiring point of view or overall as a community/CS viewpoint. Why is it wrong to hire for better performance? Why is it wrong to want more females in CS? Most importantly, how does that conflate to being a morality tale? The latter question would be aided here in you explaining your philosophical underpinnings of why a single gender meetup to get more of that underrepresented gender in the community as being morally wrong.

The slave analogy is off base for this particular situation.
The only question I'd have is whether Twitter would be interested in purchasing it to run themselves as a paid premium service.
Yay, more crowd-sourced content. Can't wait for the slideshows.
Well perhaps, at the moment, she is only interested in it because it is what you do and is using the argument that it is a boy's thing to convey that to you.
ridiculo
I read it as, "I'm not sure this is the best way to solve the problem," which is a very different thing to "there isn't a problem," or "the problem isn't all that important."
I'm wondering how much electricity and mainteinance they will need to keep sim city working on the first years?

I guess every time a customer buys a game, they are basically signing a contract to keep that infrastructure runing for an unlimited amount of time...

Is not like Xbox that you have to pay your membership every month...
The latter. I'll check that out, thanks.

I built a basic app with web.py that I'm trying to make pretty. I'm thinking I'll need to add some CSS, but I just have no idea where to start.
* Teaching, especially at the elementary-school level and younger, nursing, HR, administrative assistants, and others. Why is there no effort to bring more men into these fields?*

There are efforts:
http://www.menteach.org/
http://www.malenursemagazine.com/
http://www.minoritynurse.com/men-nursing/recruiting-men-nurs...

You're not looking hard enough.

(this was by no means a comprehensive search, the above links were found with ~45 secs of Googling).
Manic Pixie Dream Girls and the Codependents Who Love Them
So the GP's argument is wrong because you assume the poster is part of a over-represented demographic?

If I've understood your implication correctly, then it's an ad hominem of the genetic fallacy variety.
where'd you get that from? it's not deprecated: http://www.lua.org/manual/5.2/manual.html#8.2
Retinal vascular biomarkers for Alzheimer’s detection [pdf]
How about we argue instead that discriminating is wrong, and we shouldn't actively promote it.
One of the reasons people don't like Comic Sans is because it was overused, largely thanks to being included with a bunch of default Microsoft tools. It was also use in the wrong contexts.

Amusingly, I think the same holds true of the typeface that sparked the whole thing: Time New Roman. Far too many people use it for far too much, sometimes in the wrong context. So maybe we should all use Times less too! (I tend to use Palatino or Garamond myself.)

I'm tired of seeing the same few fonts everywhere. For whatever reason Times and Comic Sans really stand out, but this really holds for all the "web-safe" fonts--which also happen to be the fonts everyone used to flock to in Microsoft Word.

Please consider branching out and using something else for your next document.
Yes but there is a difference between forced segregation and self-segregation.
Amusing: one (pidgin) interpretation of "Comic Sans" is "without humour."
I could see it working as someone who called themselves something like a product/ market fit or pivot consultant.

You could come in on a big hourly rate and review startups products and the market, advising them whether to continue with the current idea or if not what kind of pivots would best fit the assets and skills they have built up.
With regards to affirmative action, the GP said:

> I suspect the opinion people have on this issue largely mirrors their view on affirmative action.

Which merely suggests that one's view of affirmative action tends to predict one's view of these gender bias issues.

> The problem is that you a have bunch of horny teenage boys with underdeveloped social skills

And females just aren't cut out for hard technical work. /s
Mad props for creating one of the most recognized and discussed fonts.
I just wish free to play games were a little more balanced. It shouldn't be almost impossible to play/finish the game without buying stuff in it. I think at least 30% of the people playing it should be able to do that given they put enough effort into it. If I get a game and notice I can't even pass level 5 without paying for stuff, even after multiple tries, then I'll be uninstalling it.

The game should be balanced in such a way that people who really don't want to pay for it, can finish it, while people who are "lazier" could pay for some stuff to get them over some levels. But even then it shouldn't be like $99 for a game, except maybe for 0.1% or less of the players. For the vast majority of those who play, it shouldn't cost them more than $5-$10.

I think this way you get a game that is very popular in downloads due to it being free to try and play, and it should also make at least as much money as if costing $5-$10, but because it's free to try, and it could get addicting, and also because some players may spend tens of dollars on it, then it also has the potential to make a lot more. Just don't make it so anyone who wants to finish it must spend tens of dollars on it.
Very nice. I wonder if they finally upgraded openssl to 1.0.1

Anyone know the kernel version bump? It's always hard to figure with the backporting.

Okay tried it on one box

2.6.32-358.0.1.el6

Looks like there are some reports of problems with xen with the update.
What I find frustrating is that twitter has ignored /really obvious/ opportunities to monetize in a natural way, in favour of this strategy that involves backtracking on the things that makes twitter /twitter/. Opportunities that I see:

-- Charge celebrities and companies for the capability of having huge numbers of followers. Remember Ashton Kutcher's race to be the first twitter user with 1 million followers? Yeah. Having that many followers is valuable to the person with the followers, and caused actual strain on twitter's infrastructure. Why didn't they charge money for that?

-- Charge third party developers for increased API capacity. It's obvious that this is a pain point. Why not just provide the option to pay to remove this pain point? Maybe they are planning to? who knows

-- Charge users for special account abilities- like, perhaps, many of the features offered by tweet deck.

And yet we have them pursuing this artificial advertising strategy. sigh.

I can only think that the strategy they are pursuing is that they see twitter as a passive medium for celebrities to transmit messages to their fans. Like it's a text based TV, that they can run ads next to. Perhaps they have the user demographics to back this up. Us weirdo geeks that use it as a a many-to-many communications medium are the vast minority.