skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Silicon Valley has a weird relationship to capitalism. They sometimes like to pretend to themselves that work isn't about money, and the laws of supply and demand shouldn't apply to labor.

What's amusing is that SV is also a place bankrolled by VC, and the VC firms don't buy into that stuff at all. They have no problem paying huge bonuses to lure people away Morgan Stanley, Goldman, etc. But you'll rarely hear them espouse for engineers the mantras they believe for financial professionals: you gotta pay those big bonuses if you want to get the "top talent."
Magic? Some of these complaints are idiotic.

"Why does my RSS reader need access to the webpage to add the RSS feed for that webpage?"
What's wrong with paying for a service that you find useful?
I wouldn't wait until it closes, but I am more than happy to wait until others run around testing out these other services, and we see what comes out of that.
Ironically, Advanced Wars and Fire Emblem, Nintendo's tactical RPG entires, can go on touchscreen just fine. A few others (such as Elite Beat Agents) would arguably do better on the Smartphone platform.

But this is definitely the minority of the games that Nintendo makes. The thought of playing something moderately fast-pace like "Mario Tennis" on a touch screen scares me. There isn't enough precision, and no touch screen is as responsive as a controller yet.

The major brands: Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Kid Icarus, Donkey Kong require speed and precision beyond that of the touchscreen. Let alone the issue of blocking the screen as you play the game.
Trie - D3.js - GAE
> even a billion-dollar business is simply a distraction to Google

Google can keep its Glasses, its self-driving Cars, its whatever. In the world of Internet's haves and have-nots, the average user would survive even if he has to with Made in China products.
Consider everything short of a "yes" as a "no"
> In this example, we can be sure there are very few assets left in jmanga.com and it's entirely possible their liabilities will exceed those after they wind down their business.

But perhaps the court could at least issue an injuction requiring them to unlock the DRM, or find some alternative way of ensuring continued access to the goods they paid for irrespective of whether or not the company stays in business.
How about offering Google Reader as a feature in another product like Google+? If you think about it both Facebook and Twitter already do this, so why can't Google pull it off? It shows a lack of empathy for your most loyal users, but then again empathy is something you don't get when you're the "gifted kid".
Show HN: My first jQuery plugin: easy data tables using a django-tastypie api
The Xbox 360 has games people want to play. The Wii U is currently lacking in that department.

Every major game console for ~10 years has had this issue, and they never seem to learn, and it is actually really relatable in the HN tetchy startup side of things : if you don't have a killer app, you won't drive adoption. Like how Halo is the Xbox killer app, Mario is the Wii killer app, etc. Same with the 3ds and Pokemon. If you want a new console launch to look spectacular, launch it with a platform exclusive of your killer franchise. If the Wii U, for example, launched with the next Zelda game on release, it would have probably crushed Wii sales.
You're really selling this bro
Install WordPress on your website and self host it.
because it would allow spam houses to train their software to avoid the Google spam filter. No feedback loop makes it harder to train (not impossible, just harder)
I'm looking forward to constructive feedback, but please be gentle, it is my first jQuery plugin :) Thanks!
Pebble Watch SDK Coming in April
Imglocker · Password Protected Image Hosting
Thanks for your nice comment, I think you know our situation exactly!
Hang on, let me put my Miyamoto fanboy hat on...there.

A lot of people (including me) are waiting for Pikmin 3 before buying a Wii U. I think that game will open the floodgates.
Cesium: WebGL Virtual Globe and Map Engine
A great alternative to socket.io is sock.js http://sockjs.org
I've been using it in production now for a few weeks on http://worldofcardgames.com with no issues.
Oh, you know. Writing HN comments.
One good reason is that the RSS reader landscape is going to change drastically in the coming months as other developers jump to fill the hole left by Reader. The app you end up using may not even exist yet. Sure, the cost of switching is low, but it still seems like a waste of time to start searching now when so much will change in the next 3 months.
A lot of things were tried in the past, but they fail for a variety of reasons. Some are picked up later and work because the fatal problems were addressed. I couldn't find much on ANDF. Can you be more specific about why it failed?
bookmarks dont update themselves automatically when new articles are available ,dont tell you what you've already read or not and are not an open protocol to share information across websites.
It's interesting to see how different people's opinions can be. Feedly, for me, was a headache wrapped in CSS. The whole thing actually made me ridiculously angry (yes, really, and I'm normally a veeery calm guy)... so for me the search continues. I'm glad it's not quite as difficult for other people to find a suitable replacement. :)
We're working to prepare the next version for iPad and other touch devices also.
I don't have any method of paying online, well, there is, but it takes too much of effort doing the paperwork in bank that it's not even worth it. I don't live in first world country.
Interesting idea! I would love to see how this works.
To clarify, Dart VM is not a bytecode VM: http://www.dartlang.org/articles/why-not-bytecode/
> So, you are implying that businesses should not fire under-performers...

Not at all. All I'm saying is, once you've hired people, you have a responsibility towards them. You are quite literally in a relationship with them, a relationship that cannot be taken lightly. At the very least, termination should be a very painful process for both parties.

And yes, management that treats people as a commodity is a bunch of douchebags that, in a more just and virtuous society, would have some or most of their teeth knocked out.
The elephant in the room that CNN doesn't want to talk about or admit to is that much of the problem lies in Big Media (of which CNN is obviously a part).

US/Western media companies are more aligned with the government of China than any notion of freedom when it comes to the interests they pour money into (as opposed to platitudes they might espouse).

The push to lock down computers and make it hard/impossible to buy one that doesn't clearly identify you - so that you cannot "steal" big media content - is exactly what makes it hard/impossible to prevent yourself being tracked and surveilled.

Can knowledgeable hackers beat the system...? Sure, somewhat, and increasingly this is harder and harder to do. But society is lost in the middle not on the fringes.

We live in the Panopticon [1] and this is a problem for many reasons. When a small elite can strengthen its ability to pull the levers of power decision making is concentrated in a smaller and smaller group. Small groups make worse decisions than large scale collective "marketplaces" of ideas and thought. This is what allowed the US and the West to flourish for so long. But it's easily lost. We are moving to a world where elections lead to less and less change, where major problems are going unresolved and punted to a future on the assumption that exponentially growing challenges can be out-waited. The only hope is in the increased connectivity of the Internet, access to information, and ability to share dissenting views. As this is taken away, to preserve Hollywood profits, and in the name of "security", we run further and further off the cliff.

Even Wylie Coyote has to look down eventually and see that it's time to fall to the canyon floor.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
Sounds like a http://highscalability.com/ post to me!
A Python library to import contacts from Gmail, Yahoo and Live accounts
dude you must be on good kush ...
The sense I get from reader being discontinued is that it was being kept alive as a best effort, and the effort was becoming too complex, too difficult to take on without real staffing. I suspect "leaving the servers running" was what they were doing for the last few years, and it wasn't working anymore.

Makes sense, until you realize that Google makes $10+ Billion in profit, and almost all of it it's because of the trust and goodwill factor from the online crowd. Once you start to maximize everything and refuse to leave a penny on the table, that trust goes
I looked at 10 or 15 readers and am using Feedly at the moment. I tweaked it a little to get a minimal and compact layout.

http://wp.me/aseR-cs

I added an extension [1] to open articles in a background tab (their keyboard shortcut foregrounds the new tab).

I made a simple new style in Stylish [2] to streamline the UI:

#feedlyTitleBar {display:none !important;}
#feedlyPageHeader {display:none !important;}
#systemBar {display:none !important;}

So far this works for me.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/feedly-will-open-e...

[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmke...
As the OP, I agree it's sad that decentralized standards haven't "won" in the way they were expected to 10 years ago; it's the reason we now have Facebook, Twitter, and Google connect buttons instead of just Open ID.

The question is, when you say "it's time", how do you make it happen? Google tried to make it happen with standards like OpenSocial, but the trade-off for increased flexibility was often poorer UX, and meanwhile they watched developers jump onto standards that were more closed, but had many more users.

There's certainly a sweet spot where open standards meet a mainstream user base; the web and HTML5 overall continue to do fine, notwithstanding heavy competition from the more closed native platforms. This is very much due to the great amount of innovation amongst browsers and web apps, both of which touch the user directly, and less because users care about open for open's sake.

So my suggestion is if you want to encourage open standards, focus on the user first.
From God's mouth to yours, brother. If there is a shortage on the labor market, let prices rise and quantities-sold drop, same as anything else!
Yeah correct, there's a problem when you resize the browser. In the next versions I calculate all box(s) position again to keep focus element helper layer updated.
How to read excel file in Python
Sorry, I can't resist. And, I'll preface this by saying OF COURSE I AM JOKING. Here it goes:

I've clashed many times with folks here on HN who are super-pro-government liberals. They take every opportunity to point out how government has built everything of value to us and how government has wisely invested in infrastructure and other projects that make our lives possible. The implication, of course, is that we should be pro-government, pay more taxes and be thankful we are allowed to flourish under such a system.

One of their favorite things to say is "government created the Internet".

Fantastic! Let's take the good with the bad. If government is going to be credited with the good then we credit them with the bad as well. They created such a shitty system that we are all under surveillance, like it or not.

Not so you say? Well, this kind of thing was nearly impossible before our government created the Internet. They must have had ulterior motives and knew it could be used for this.

Why didn't they protect us with regulations BEFORE the Facebook's and Google's of the 'net were even up and running? They knew what they were creating.

Anyhow. I am not much of a comedian but there's a joke in there somewhere. The point is that government is an ass. They fuck-up nearly everything they do.

This "internet == surveillance state" thing is very real and it is something governments (PLURAL) are benefiting from immensely. Never before in the history of humanity has it been possible to spy on individual human beings with this degree of granularity. And it won't get any better for probably another five to ten years, if ever.
Yeah, Red Hat does have solutions for that. And no, the distribution itself is free but it doesn't have any of their tools. You pay for them and for the yearly support.
Build something good is no longer an acceptable USP for a startup. Any tech of value can be copied fast.

The tech innovator has been replaced at the head of the table by the hustler. Someone who can network, cut deals, bring in the $ is more valuable to a startup this cycle. It's no longer value being traded, it's expected value.

This is what the 07-13 spin of the wheel is all about.

Hustle or die.
SSL libraries seem to treat CNs as fully-qualified, even without the dot. Do we really want a global ssl PKI where non-fqdn CNs are allowed? If not, why should anyone care about trailing dots for ssl cert validation purposes?
Ask HN: Two cool startupers looking for a roommates/housing
Two of us are looking at having a startup house with a few more folks who would like to build stuff and have lots of fun in the summer. If anybody is looking for people to join them in a house, we can do that too.

We are going to be working in Mountain View and Palo Alto so we are hoping to find people for these locations.
Segmented stacks will take much more space. One of the reasons I went with stack copy is because it allows me to create a million lthreads if I wanted without worrying about memory.

Lthread is in C, an environment where you control/manage your memory. Using slab allocators and high performance malloc like jemalloc, you can avoid allocating a lot of your variables on the stack and the stack copy will become minimal. In most of the production code I have running using lthread, stack copying is on the average of 300 bytes.
I can just imagine the court case. how does a GEMA lawyer (€500/hr) prove that in fact the visiting DJ copied the file in his hotel rather than before getting on the EasyJet from London ?

did they get a judge to authorize seizure of the USB stick to perform forensic evidence ? are the Berliner cops going to come into the club to enforce the seizure ? or extradite the DJ with his USB stick from London ?

this same copy law was implemented in the UK in 2006 and is almost universally ignored and will probably be repealed soon.

There are 20,000 clubbing tourists coming into Berlin every weekend. They are doing drugs. No club raids. A huge amount of the Berlin economy comes directly or indirectly from club income.

I am a DJ and I live in Berlin. we've been following every detail since the beginning of GEMAs clueless war on club culture. trust me, nobody is going to pay GEMA anything for a copy fee. its a total joke.
FYI: There's 1400+ votes on a feature request for getting rid of the extension https://feedly.uservoice.com/forums/192636-suggestions/sugge...

Vote for it if you want to hammer the point in. The extension is probably for that irritating button that's on all pages until you disable it (preferences at the bottom of the folder list).
How to scrape an ImageBam gallery for images with 30 lines of Python
I have a friend who's an O'Reilly author. Granted, he's not the author of, say, the book on Bash, or Git, but it's a current book. He likes to joke around about how little money he makes on the book (now in second edition): "I make hundreds of dollars. Hundreds!"
How to Watch Netflix in Ubuntu Linux
So much relative effort and baggage compared to how Reader works. Reader's death continues to sadden me.
Tardis #1 – Computer Science
It is free---it's OSS. But you can pay him to host your feeds for you.
GCC 4.8 release
Ruby is not, in fact, slow. This myth has been debunked so many times that I'll just leave the googling to you as an exercise.
"You venture to call Ferdinand a wise ruler," he said to his courtiers—"he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine!"
yes,and i dont care the author tweeting about his daughter ,his car or his vacation. with a rss reader, noise => trashcan.
Nested classes, with autorouting
Well yeah, but don't you see, workers and founders behaving rationally ruins the romantic hero-story investors tell themselves to justify their place in the world!

Someone shove these people into a Davos Parallax VR already....
TBH that sounds like a bad idea for any number of reasons.

Presumably you have some kind of credit history, why not just get a loan for a couple of grand to cover you for a few months until you get funding (or borrow it off a friend) ?
CSS3 is bringing Web 2.0 back like a boss
I don't think the typical user thinks he's got nothing to hide.

More probably, he doesn't realize just how much he's spied on or by whom. Nor does he realize how the information these spies gather on him could be or is being used to his detriment.

He also probably doesn't know about any privacy-respecting alternatives, or if he does, he finds them too much of a pain to use, or doesn't want to sacrifice his Facebook friends or his nifty smartphone.

Fortunately, the masses are slowly becoming educated, more computer literate, and more privacy/security aware overall. It is heartening to see stories about online privacy on mainstream news sites like CNN. Being a victim of identity theft, stalking, or harrassment can also be an unfortunate but powerful wake up call to the need for privacy.

It's a slow process, but the more people become aware of their vulnerability and victimization by the surveillance state, the more they will try to seek alternatives and call for positive change. I just hope by then it won't be too late.
Not to mention torture, outsourced, contracted out or otherwise, and Guantanamo Bay. It's an unfortunate fact that however inalienable human rights are supposed to be, democratic government are only interested in their citizens'.
To summarize: Google killed off Google Reader because it no longer makes sense for their business.

Rather begs the question, doesn't it?
Great read, but I wish he hadn't glossed over the part about not being something the free market can fix; and explained why only strong government will can.

He admits that governments are partaking in the frenzy at least as much as are companies, but doesn't explain why it would be easier to get a government to change, than to change a company, or start a new one.
I agree with both parent comments.

The reason walking around is a good source of ideas is basically mindfulness/Zen/whatever you want to call it - put your brain in a bath of non-problem stimuli and stop verbalising your thoughts, and you can actually hear your brain generating new ideas. Of course it doesn't mean you'll get something useful straight away, or even in an hour, but you'll get new spontaneous thoughts and that's a good start.

This is why, when you do take a break, it is essential not to occupy your "doing" mind - by reading HN/twitter or playing Skyrim, my weaknesses - and just relax.
If it is as you imply, that's a pretty serious Theory of Mind failure on their part.
I saw this and for a while I thought "Oh yeah, that's pretty cool, but why isn't the lua community into it?"
Then I really looked into luasocket[1], which uses a this api called ltn12, based around dataflow programming concepts. In most respects this is a much much more elegant way of doing network programming than the node.js way. This is the sort of thing you would want to implement on top of node.js to make the callback hell easier to deal with- and compared to luasocket, luvit is a step backward. But this is the standard way of doing networking in lua.

[1]: http://w3.impa.br/~diego/software/luasocket/
There is a privacy ecosystem that is rising from it all.
There are ways. the TOR network allows you to anonymize your dealings from your ISP. Some sites are now advertising the anonymity and encryption they are using for their services (MEGA). Bitcoin has seen a stellar growth (and still poised to) due to its uncontrollable nature, and can be tweaked to achieve pseudo anonimity through enough shuffling of the coins. Assange puts it best by saying that "The universe believes in Encryption - [it] is the ultimate form of direct non-violent action." What WE can do, is help put the blocks in place...
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1303.2807.pdf

Went to the Arxiv into the Algebraic Topology category. Any comments?
MIT is hiring devs to build a game to map the brain
How much does it costs to file a patent in the US?
This is typical when employees try to shake down their employer. They exaggerate their working conditions, and ignore the financial circumstances behind a companies actions.
Actually I had to make the same changes to Reader.
Install a LAMP/WAMP thing (+ python) and run NewsBlur locally. You could even make a local edition where people can pay you in person.
That is what I am doing right now, thanks.
You got lucky 13 times in a row. It happens. And since you were only playing with "a couple hundred bucks" you were probably at a $5 or $10 limit table. The casino wasn't worried that you were going to break the bank, it's more likely you were asked to leave because of your behavior.
The numbers on the wheel don't correlate to the numbers on the table, so there is no betting strategy where you can make multiple multi-number bet combinations to offset any risk. Not even with a single zero wheel. Did you consider a win as one of your numbers hitting or an actual net gain? Run your strategy over 5000 or 10,000 spins and you'll see it doesn't work. You got lucky in the short term and it wasn't due to skill. Put the money in your pocket and walk away, because streaks like that are rare.
Your math is a bit wonky and you are missing some aspects of the traditional publishing contract.

The traditional publishing deal involves the author getting an advance (cash up front) which they do not have to pay back unless they fail to deliver the manuscript. So the publisher takes on the risk that the book won't cover it's advance. The publisher also manages book production and distribution and publicity, to do those things the publisher keeps staff on hand in some fairly expensive office space ( publishing happens in Manhattan, or used to ). All of which add up to a pretty good deal for authors whose work is salable.

With Amazon or Apple, the author takes on the risk, and all the costs of production ( poorly edited ebook only editions aren't going to sell as well as actual books ) and all the costs of marketing and promoting their work. The only thing that's taken care of is distribution; for which they give up 30%, not the actual cost of distribution.

So the new deal is riskier and less certain ( if you pay an editor, a book designer, a publicist etc. ) you might wind up losing money.
Facebook doesn't care about exact name and personal information except to target their Ads effectively. Its no big deal if you don't tell them your real name, they will jump over to the next field. Sooner or later they're going to connect the dots to provide you effective advertisements. It starts with them tracking your location via IP address.

The original opinion piece of this thread notwithstanding, but for the majority of the Internet users, the issue is not if and why the state is tracking you (because people at the large scale are not criminals trying to hide from the state), but the issue is whether we should give up liberties in order for the corporations to serve us effective advertisements. The old fashioned TV box was effective only because it had no competitor. The same is not the case on the Internet.

PS: the only reason Facebook requires real name (or the reason it has built its social network as a walled-garden) so each person stays unique and does not infiltrate or corrupt the data by signing up multiple times via pseudo-identities. Again, look at it from the advertising perspective. Do we think advertising works effectively if one person shows up as multiple? It doesn't.