skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is awesome news, and is really going to enable some powerful stuff (and it'll be cheap! SIP/VoIP is far cheaper than using your minutes on a traditional phone plan). For folks who haven't worked with Twilio before, one of the slightly obnoxious parts is TwiML, their proprietary markup language that describes how to make, route, and respond to telephony events. It's not difficult to work with, but it's nonportable and irrelevant if you're not using Twilio.

But now, by exposing the underlying SIP streams, Twilio is opening the doors to a broader range of applications (commercial PBXs, enterprisey telephony folks, etc.). Unfortunately, it looks like you still have to use TwiML to get the job done, but all the custom stuff can be done on your side instead of having to port that to TwiML.
I don't what kind of Mac you've got but I have been running Earth & Beyond (an MMO from 10 years ago) at high framerates in Virtualbox on my 2011 iMac. I did have to enable experimental D3D support.
So the most likely route for a case like this to SCOTUS would be split circuit? I doubt this is the last CFAA case.
Awesome idea. The Firebase guys keep making really interesting ways to use realtime data.
> "They are not even in the same ballpark as 'raking in' the amounts of money content creators charge."

What does the magnitude of TPB's profit have to do with anything? The morality of an action is determined by how much the offender profits monetarily?

The content creators invest effort, money, and years of their lives to produce the content. A typical movie, for instance, represents the collective work of hundreds of people spanning several years. Of course they'll need to charge more to generate a profit. And TPB only needs banner ads to generate the profit. What's your point?

> "...rapidshare, that you can make a good argument are taking money from content producers."

You seem to have bought into this farce that people who download pirated content are categorically unwilling to pay money for non-pirated content. This is complete bs.

My nephews and his friends don't spend money on music, since they can easily get it for free online and it lets them spend their money on other stuff. Are you claiming that if these kids grew up in the 70s or 80s, none of them would listen to music because they'd all be against spending their money on it? BS.

"Taking money from content producers" doesn't just mean I've taken ten dollars out of some musician's wallet and put that same ten dollars into my wallet. It could mean taking ten dollars out of a musician's wallet, putting a dollar into mine, and burning the rest. Or burning it all. From the perspective of the musician, the result is the same.

> "Banner ads are key to allowing this: NO"

My argument was that, based on their actions and words, profit or notoriety are more likely their motivations than a principled stand on freedom of speech, as many here want to attribute to TPB. The Westboro Baptist Church is also defended by the freedom of speech. That doesn't mean we should hold up the Westboro Baptist Church as noble crusaders in a fight for our freedoms. That gives them way too much credit.
>What's wrong with giving users options?

What's wrong with it is that it adds a hidden cost to the software that makes it harder to develop. Every option splits your application into at least two possible states. If you have 1000 options, that's 2^1000 different states that you have to support.

Every feature added has to make sure it doesn't break one of these states, making it harder and harder to develop for.

Making something an option should not be the default behavior.
Why should your workflow be prioritised over other peoples?

Why should other people, who don't know much, have to go get an extension while you, who does know enough to go get an extension, get to use the product as-is?
Yea, if you venture outside the HN/500startups tech ecosystem, you notice that there are many, many companies working on the same problems that YC companies are attempting to solve. They just don't get any recognition on HN, which is a little dangerous for HNers.
My $.02: Let Firefox continue to be feature-packed.

IMHO, this depends on the features.

For example, I don't know what they were thinking when they decided to introduce an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Adobe Reader, but I wish they hadn't. I frequently use on-line services that provide PDFs for various reasons, and after the first 48 hours I had to Google the settings to make Firefox just shut up and let Adobe Reader do its job, because too much functionality was badly presented or simply didn't work at all. Now I've just got all that extra code I'm never going to use bloating my browser.

If you're viewing content that's based on HTML and comes embedded in a web page, like images or HTML5 videos, sure, make the browser handle it. But you can download many kinds of data over the Internet, and the idea that a browser should become some sort of all-inclusive operating system/distro bundle that can interpret them all itself feels very unhealthy to me. What happened to using one tool for one job, and making each tool a specialist that does its job well?
Over 80 per cent of the world's commercial gold deposits formed in an earthquake
Phil Libin's long term plan for Evernote[1] is precisely what this sort of application requires, and is at total odds with Google's product release/discontinue approach.

Google Notebook was "discontinued" only a few years ago - and the kinds of consumers who would be interested Keep almost certainly share a significant overlap with those who two years ago were interested/used Notebook, and therefore have literally been bitten by Google in this exact space in the last few years.

[1] http://vator.tv/news/2013-01-17-phil-libin-on-an-evernote-ip...
An awareness campaign to poke fun at awareness campaigns
Simple Active Record Query Debugging in the Rails Console
The worst new game for DOS.
Would http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzYCZm-ces0 be of any help to you? I'm not familiar with how iPhones open various URLs, but I can open that in the YouTube app on my Android.
Sounds like a bunch of victim blaming to me. So the guy is an idiot, is that enough to go to prison now?
Any RAD tool with layout managers

Give some examples, please. As someone who actually used pretty much every "RAD" tool (most of which dissolved and disappeared because they were anything but RAD), I call bullshit. Inventing competitors that didn't actually exist doesn't bolster your garbage, Luddite arguments.

Instead we have layers of broken abstractions trying to bend HTML into something it was never intended to be.

And processors were built to process punchcards. Your argument is absolutely nonsensical, and it only plays in venues full of angry, fearful-of-change contrarians.
Direct link to export your Reader subscriptions as OPML
Mobile Engineer? Want to disrupt the Telecoms industry?
SendHub (YC W12) is looking for iOS and Android Developers. We have users and 6 figures of revenue.

About us:
We’re making it faster and simpler for professionals to communicate.

Founded to help educators reach students and parents in under resourced communities, we’re taking on the Telecom giants. Hate your phone carrier? Us too. Telecommunications is a duopoly dominated industry, which has systematically suppressed competition over its 150 year history, in order to keep prices unfairly high. We’re going to change this, starting with business phone service.

SendHub has over 90k customers across the US in business, politics, faith groups, sports, education and many more; making hundreds of thousands of calls and sending millions of texts each month.

The Role:
You’ll be involved in every part of the software life cycle from specs discussion to implementation to testing and releasing. You’ll work on challenging problems that require deep knowledge of the tech stack and work with fun technologies such as VoIP and Bluetooth.

Our Philosophy:
We believe in building a wonderful product and taking care of our people. We understand the importance of personal growth so you’ll get autonomy, recognition and regular feedback. We move quickly. Working in short iteration cycles, we release our apps to market at least once a week. We expect a lot of each other but we wouldn't want it any other way.

Benefits:
Health, dental, meals and we don’t track vacation days.

We're based in downtown Menlo Park, CA (very close to the caltrain station). If you're interested, please drop us a line: jobs [at] sendhub [dot] com.
Yeah, I have a sudden mistrust of anything Google creates after they fked us with Reader.
Using wget.
HackerNews is the best example for me. In firefox, I can type in y, and it will know that I want news.ycombinator.com. In Chrome, the only way to have it autocomplete (at least the last time I tried it) was to start with n.
Google Alerts should do this.
Firebug:

-is slower

-has more glitches (things doing plain weird or not working sometimes)

-requires "activation" of each panel and reloading of the page

-sometimes suddenly opens for no reason when you visit a webpage without the intention to debug it

-is impossible to use if you want to debug a project with hundreds of js files (e.g. uncompiled JS of a large project) because it has a bad type of dropdown for selecting the JS file

-generally just requires more clicks and more frustration to get things done

The one in Chrome:

-is faster

-has a better console (easier to type commands, inspect variables, etc...)

-works immediately as soon as you open it (no "this panel was inactive during page load")

-has more features

Note that I was talking about Firebug here. Firefox also has its own dev tools, at least an "Inspect Element", with even a 3D view of a page allowing to see divs outside of it and so on, and that one is awesome!

I'm curious from your side (maybe also to learn a thing or two about Firebug): How would you compare it to Chrome? What features make Firebug stand out?

Thanks.

EDIT: Why do I need to add multiple newlines between the "-" to make Hacker News post them as newlines?
Okay, then we only kill the predatores that don't kill cleanly, according to our ethical standards.
you dont see a mass exodus from gmail ...
What a horribly screwed up system that seeks maximum penalty for a guy who wanted the public to be able to see the research they actually pay for but charge rapists as juveniles as if rape is less evil if you're less than 18 when you commit it.
Reader lasted longer than almost all of the (major) RSS readers combined. What makes you think EverNote is going to be around forever?

Honestly, I don't understand the stance of using an inferior product (this assumes you believe Keep will be superior to EverNote, if not, then why even comment?) because you fear the superior one will be shut off. I rather use a product from a company that has a history of providing mechanisms to take out my data if/when they shut the product down instead of a startup/small company that will probably lose all my data when they go bankrupt or get acqui-hired.
I wonder if he's going to become a modern Ned Kelly. I'd hope not, I'm sure there's better folk heroes for us.

He remained unrepentant, he said next time he'd go the harsher route, rather than detecting the flaw and reporting it they'd made sure to collate a lot of information from the leak and according to weev reported it before approaching Gawker.

I think the sentence is out of line with his crime, but he was never going to get a slap on the wrist and told to go his merry way. They've probably done their homework and found he's been up to merry hijinks with computers for longer than most people have known how to email.

Maybe slightly cynically of me I wonder if this his act of ultimate trolling, to force the courts to go for a harsh sentencing and to get a wave of sympathy that leads to people DDoSing .gov pages.
This was inspired by the alt-text from last week's "Ineffective Sorts" xkcd (http://xkcd.com/1185/).

It tries to sort a list or JSON by fetching code from StackOverflow until it properly sorts the input.
"in my head I went, this is why the whole ms enterprise stack sucks balls."

Brilliant. So, if some random programmer built some way-over-complicated Javascript solution, would you think that the entire web platform "sucks balls"?

"the sad part is that they actually think it's good to abstract away something really simple."

Who is they? Microsoft, this random c# guy or all c# programmers? If you answer anything but "random c# guy", I'd like your evidence please.

Also, let's see some of your code please. Not fizzbuzz. I wanna see some of your real life code.
This is my day job in a nutshell. Somewhere around the 5th folder click I couldn't decide if I wanted to laugh or cry.
This was live for a little bit last night. Here are some screenshots: http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/03/17/google-keep-is-live-...
Screenshots from Androidpolice they took while Keep was up for a short time:
http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/03/17/google-keep-is-live-...
Excellent observation. In many ways, mathematization has killed many branches of not just academic economics, but practical economics as well. Just look at how many failed policies in the past were driven by the false assumption that if we change X by so many units, such and such economic indicator will move by Y.
I love this. I just wish it was a joke. This is a daily reality for so many of us.
Announcing: Lean Ratings - Measure your abilities
That depends on what the condition is, how trustworthy the anecdotes are and how much someone was trying to charge me for it.

For instance in the case of terminal cancer, some people get ripped off by charlatans to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The anecdotal data around these assholes is all overwhelmingly positive and claims no side effects, because people who are ripped off and then die tend not to talk about it but the very few who survive for reasons unknown shout a lot. The reason you might not try it is because you'd be bankrupting the family you're going to leave behind, or funneling good-will donations to a conman.

There are numerous examples of alt-med 'cures' that are dreadfully harmful (black salve, sodium hypochlorite enemas). This idea that CAM is fine to try if you're out of options because it has no side effects is itself very dodgy. Hell, even acupuncture carries some elevated risk of infection because you're pushing needles through the skin.

But if it was something minor, cheap and there really were no side effects, sure - why not?

--edit--
But telling if there really are no side effects does require some basis in provable fact, or you're just necking unknown quantities of unknown stuff, which may not be a great plan.
Reading Into the End of Google Reader
Where's the build script?
Is this a joke? A product with less than 1-2 million active users can't honestly be considered a "core Google offering".
IFTTT launches ESPN channel to help you track sports, teams, scores and more
Isn't the logical conclusion of this kind of reasoning that everyone should become a programmer and browsers should be supplied in source form only, so everyone can customise any tiny detail they want to? That's not exactly a realistic prospect for most non-geeks.

User interface development for mainstream software is invariably a balance between presenting something accessible to novice/occasional users and presenting something powerful to expert/frequent users. You can go a long way to helping both groups with a thoughtful design, but there's always going to be someone who wants something slightly (or completely) different.

For mainstream software, trying to please everyone all the time is a fool's game. That's what bespoke development is for.
Yeah, the article was over-simplifying a bit.

I doubt that Wired thinks I can buy a copy of their (print) magazine and then, since I own it, I can do whatever I want with it (like scanning it and putting it online).
Go Nuts - centralized repository for versioned Go packages
That is fallacy. Carriers are oligopoly with high cost of entrance. So if all carriers provide only locked phones there may not be enough devices on the market.

There should be laws preventing forced vertical integration. If you sell hardware you cannot restrict the os(you are free to provide os, but locking of the bootloader should be left to the user). If you sell OS you cannot limit what applications the user can run and from where to obtain them etc ...
This, for me, is the money quote:

Of course, my surprise and sense of outrage is misplaced. Google is a business, and it's participating in a trend toward facilitated helplessness, giving us walled gardens in which we can relax and easily share information among a socially similar circle, where our likes and dislikes and interrelationships can be coaxed into view, recorded, and monetized and where the information environment is shaped to fit our profile rather than our curiosity.

[F]acilitated helplessness is the enemy we need to watch for and fight.
do you put .java. in your package names? That one stood out as really strange (others were par for the course)
There's definitely a "being an ass" component to this, no doubt... but one could argue that presenting two records to a journalist implies a small security hole. 100k of them is a giant security hole.
All I want is a build-in user-agent over-ride option in the web or dev console. Let me specify pre-bundled popular UA's in drop-drown or custom UA string.
Show HN: Gauge of the World's Faith in Humanity
A lot of people will try to argue on the JavaScript part because of accessibility, but even in that case, WebAIM's screen reader results seem to indicate that 98% have JS turned on http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey4/#javascript
Try making an honest comparison instead. This photo was taken at a restaurant, from the outside looking in, before it opened for the day:

http://www.blogto.com/upload/2008/02/20080215_rats.jpg

The restauranteurs were not informed about it; it went straight to the media and to the city health department. The restaurant was shut down later that day for health violations.

Has a crime been committed? Did the photographer have a moral, ethical, or legal duty to attempt to quietly inform the restaurant that they have a rat problem? Should the photographer have been prosecuted for interfering in the business operations of the restaurant? Suppose we know the photographer is an asshole. Does that change the calculus?
I'm torn on the issue of buying locked vs unlocked. I have a family to support, so I don't have $500 or more to spend on an unlocked iPhone. Even if I had the money, I live in the US, and I haven't traveled outside of the country in over 10 years. Finally, there is no monthly discount on service if you bring an unlocked phone to a carrier, so that's the third strike. I'll continue to buy a new locked device every couple of years and take the subsidy, thanks. I'll also be having my 4S unlocked when this contract is up.

Having said that, I agree that it should be easier to unlock phones in the US, even if it's just for international coverage (which would be something).
Yea, I think that sentiment is being felt by quite a few. I'm in the process of doing a little spring cleaning myself.
This is not true. History does not come with your Reader export. Old archived stories will be lost forever.
I've been waiting for this for a long time. Twilio Client ( http://www.twilio.com/client ) has been extremely glitchy and of course lacks a lot of features that SIP clients can offer.

The best alternatives I can find are far more expensive. OnSIP runs about $30/month, Line2 is about $10/month (and isn't even SIP), and RingCentral is about $20/month. If I used 400 minutes per month here, I'd be paying $2 for the minutes, and $1 for the phone number.
Hope they add native binaries for windows soon
Your comment offends me, but on a light note, for every 1 developer doing the enterprise overengineering crap, there is a dozen of us C# guys who are doing the opposite where I work.
This is obviously bogus. Where are the XML configuration files?
Imgembed helps photographers profit from and protect their work
The problem isn't random programmers, it is a culture and tool ecosystem which says that this is the right way to do things. If it were just one random programmer, there would be nothing to complain about.

If some guy decides to write his website in his own dialect of Visual Basic, that isn't really being inflicted on anyone but his employees. The deeply-nested StrategyFactory stuff is an infection which worst affects languages like Java and C# (recruiters call it "OOP") because those communities do not strongly reject it.
Well, it's called Google Talk and you got it wrong, so it might not be that well known.
"Available scientific evidence does not support claims that naturopathic medicine is effective for most health problems."

I wouldn't call that supporting evidence that CAM works, in fact I'd say that whole page doesn't give it any support at all, nor does it excuse naturopathy from having harmful effects -

"Substances used in alternative medical practices may have not been thoroughly tested to find out how they interact with medicines, foods, or dietary supplements. Even though some reports of interactions and harmful effects may be published, full studies of interactions and effects are not often available. There may also be lesser-known methods used, other than the ones discussed here, which could potentially cause harm. Because of these limitations, any information on ill effects below should be considered incomplete."
Is it advisable to raise a seed round from a very big and popular VC?
so overcomplicated javascript is not overcomplicated?

i just started working on microsoft enterprise garbage. ever had to deal with sharepoint, dynamics?

even microsoft developers say you're doomed when you're being put on a sharepoint project.

I just codereviewed code for 2 different dynamics contractors. Both highly recommended by microsoft. both of them had high levels of abstractions, but the end result was tightly coupled anyway.

Their javascript was written the same way. The real joke of it was that I had never done anything of the likes.

Want some of my real code from many years ago? go through mplayer/ffmpeg

edit: as pekk said the problem is cultural
Review: Absolut Amber – Oak Aged Vodka | Drink Spirits
How valuable are symbolic gestures? Pretty damn valuable - humans are emotional beasts, and a lot of the time its just as important to get them to feel than to think.
...you did read the bit where I said "the sentence is absolutely disproportionate"? I think you can be a victim and a bit of an idiot at the same time. I'm trying to point out that in terms of changing the law so this sort of thing doesn't happen again he's hardly a fantastic poster child.
Sorry google but you can fuck off this week.
Or https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435013 for another example why managing certificates might be necessary if you are a Linksys router owner.

My 2 major problems with moving things to add-ons:
- they might not exist yet so I get buggered
- I need to trust 3rd party where previously I didn't have to

I often wish that developers would more often travel around the world so they would notice there are a bit more than 2% of people using crappy connections where disabling images is one of the first things to do.
But negotiating a deal at acquisition is slightly different. The terms of the deal are largely going to be held secret and the CEO will tell you anything to keep you on board (they don't want a mass exodus and have the deal sink).

They may even defer revealing the deal terms until AFTER the acquisition has occurred.

If you see this happening, more than likely you're going to get a shit deal, and the only leverage you have is to WALK.

If they don't give a counter offer, you were going to get a shit deal anyways so it doesn't matter. If they do give a counter offer, then you know you were integral to a successful deal and now you have some negotiation leverage.