skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>>Also, how would you know your product you wanted to release was going to displace everyone in the market? Does this apply only to large companies or is it small shops as well?

This is a funny question because I thought I was very clear in my original post. I said with great power comes great responsibility. The kind of great power I am talking about here is the kind Google has as one of the world's largest (read: richest) and most influential tech giants.

>>Google shutting down Reader might make them tools, but the precedence you're trying to establish with ideology like this is far worse than that.

This is ironic, because Google Reader was shut down not because it cost Google any noticeable amount of money to operate, but because it didn't fit some Google exec's ideological vision. The precedence I'm trying to establish is at least ethical in the sense that it puts the well-being of users first.
Entitlement. I has it.

Sorry, that's a cheap shot. This isn't about entitlement or whether services are free or paid, or even about Google reader specifically, and it's certainly not related to entitled users on HN.

From the article:
That world formed the web’s foundations — without that world to build on, Google, Facebook, and Twitter couldn’t exist. But they’ve now grown so large that everything from that web-native world is now a threat to them, and they want to shut it down. “Sunset” it. “Clean it up.” “Retire” it. Get it out of the way so they can get even bigger and build even bigger proprietary barriers to anyone trying to claim their territory.

He's talking about whether we should accept the ongoing corralling of the web into walled gardens where there is one gatekeeper and landowner, and everyone else producing goods for the public is a sharecropper, and the public can only buy what's on offer - take it or leave it. There's a real danger in building or living inside the walls of these corporate communities (twitter, Facebook, Google+, whatever Apple's equivalent to eWorld is called these days). The tension between large corporations and their users (free or not) is of course as old as the hills, but that doesn't mean we should give in to their latest attempts to lock users into one ecosystem that they control.

This instinct is why Apple prevents Amazon from selling on its iOS platform, why Amazon wants to be the world marketplace for everything, why Facebook encourages people to put their online lives exclusively behind a FB login, and why Google wants to channel everything through G+ and require an account for any activity on the web. It's a natural instinct for corporations, but not one we should accept or buy into.

There is something to your last statement, in that this behaviour seems to be tied to the size of a corporation - once it grows to a certain size, priorities inevitably change, the staff changes, and the drive to seek rent from customers and partners becomes overwhelming. So in a sense this is a natural cycle that it's difficult or impossible for companies to avoid. That doesn't meant that we as customers and developers should acquiesce to the brave new world, and start building our products or lives around services like reader - as many have found out this week, that's a bad strategy, because large corporations don't really care about the service, or the value to users, all they care about is the lock-in.

That means we can happily use these services, but should always remember they may be withdrawn by fiat, and never build a business on them - for example if you build your company dependent on a twitter, FB or G+ login, don't be surprised in a few years when they start to charge for the privilege of growing on their land. The open web is a better place to build in my opinion, it's hard to get started, but infinitely more rewarding to have your own space, as a reader or as a developer.
It breaks email search and context sensitive ads.
Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery
Actually:

Cutting / pasting content from CL: bad.

Cutting / pasting a post URL from CL: good.
craigslist is far from profit maximizing. That's part of why craigslist's users tend to love it.
ah, i totally agree.. my anecdote was meant in support of your experience.
A whiff of those advertising dollars and the "care" flies out of the window. Also, search would not be possible.
I think a lot of people think of the benefits of AWS is that it is the cloud and therefore infinascale. The thing that I see most frequently is that there are generally a minimum number of servers that always need to be on, then if needed, spin up some temporary servers to fill the short term spike. It is not trivial to write this kind of automated autoscaling, and I would wager that a lot of companies that have not heavily invested in their dynamic resource allocation scripts are not really benefiting from AWS the way they think they should.

While it is cool that AWS has a ton of services they offer, I do not like the vendor lockin that comes with AWS services. I think it is generally a better strategy to go with something OpenStack based. That way you can use your own hardware and dynamically provision new nodes in "the cloud" with companies like HP, RackSpace, and others. With modern day virtualization, running your own hardware can often be much cheaper and much more performant than AWS.
The European Union Explained
The internet's official explainer of things that need explaining C.G.P. Grey tries to make the asterisk-filled European Union a little less confusing.
i don't see any mention of uwsgi or gevent in these benchmarks. Deploying Python apps without properly configuring the container/webserver will skew the results considerably (probably applicable to a couple of other entries as well).
Reminds a bit of an Instagram for text, nice styles!

On a related note, I find myself reading and saying it more as "Noteography" than "Notegraphy". Not sure why..
The massive amount of computing power needed to encrypt that much data is hard to buy, unless you are the NSA.
The best way to ensure Goliath is tested is to submit a pull request.

We'd rather test Rails 4 than obsolete versions of Rails: https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/issues/35...
are you going to include gevent (I.e. bottle/flask + gunicorn with gevent workers, and uwsgi + gevent workers) ?
Did you mean the high end, or the low end?

A college dropout can make a killing in Silicon Valley, if they are also: a talented software developer.

OTOH, some of the other dropouts might end up working as BART train operators, who seem to make between 12 and 15k/yr, which is likely for full time, in a city where it costs about 1/4 of that just to scrape by on a monthly basis.

It is not right to employ people at a wage that they cannot possibly subsist on. These people all ended up as bart train operators for one reason or another. Maybe they were lazy. Maybe they got shafted in life. Maybe they're dumb. But does that mean they should be paid a substandard living wage? No.

Meanwhile the luckier, more industrious, or combination thereof, are making over 10x the amount of the lowest paid workers.

Min wage needs to be raised, a lot. Look at Australia.
Gravitations - A free space puzzle game built around user generated content
Yea I just got it from there. I thought it would be useful to some people in CSV format.
But that's not how your body works, is it?

Do you have to think consciously to yourself about moving your legs when you are walking? Even when you are running or dodging around complicated obstacles? Do you have to think about breathing? When you read are you thinking about the form of each letter and mentally going "ok, that's a T, oh, and that's an H, and hey here's an E, and then a space, that must be the word 'THE', ok, moving on..."? No, parts of your brain seamlessly and automatically do all that work for you, even though sometimes it can be complex work requiring your higher cognitive abilities. For example, if you are reading a hand written note and there is a word that is hard to read your brain fills in a huge amount of context and filters out and in potential possibilities and you can even consciously make a choice on which word is the most likely, but it can all happen quickly and smoothly with the workings that happen automatically doing so without you even being aware of them or how they operate.

That's how your brain works. It's not a matter of a simple machine with a little homunculus pulling at levers, it's a conscious part married to a whole lot of little unconscious parts. In order to learn something (like typing or reading or walking or rock climbing or driving or baseball) you need to use repetition to train up the unconscious parts.

Incidentally, it's also why techniques such as meditation are so powerful, because they allow you a degree of meta-control over your mind. Because not only are actions like walking or typing mostly unconscious so are things like mood and state of mind. But you can train yourself to control those aspects just as you can train yourself to walk a different way.
You can play it on the web as well at: http://gravitationsapp.com

Gameplay Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZQIodj8bTE

Gravitations was made mostly in my spare time until I needed to bring it to the company I work for to get the Art done for it. My motivation for building it was so I can see what people will do with the tools that I build for them. I know that I will never be able to think of all the ways you can make missions or solve them and each time that someone does something that I never thought of it will make Gravitations a success.

Gameplay will be free as long as I have control over it. I want as many people to play as possible.

All types of feedback are always appreciated.
Buy Matthew Broderick’s old movie computer and possibly impress Ally Sheedy
The type of interactions that Facebook focused on are naturally inclined to be closed. You need to manage who sees what. BTW this was a revolution that got the late adopters online and got people comfortable using their own names.

Anyway, my point is that this isn't a conspiracy. Google+ might have all sorts of potential for moneymaking but its not google's main business at this point. This trend towards more closed systems is largely emergent. These closed environments are we're people like to interact.
Call notification has always been broken for me. Most of the day I need to have the phone set to silent and I seldom notice the vibrator. A stronger vibrator won't cover the situation where the phone is in my jacket hanging on the wall or in another room.

However, since getting a Pebble I have reduced my missed call rate to 0%.
Types of Railway
Something like this was missing since they removed the uploads [1].

Basically a release bundle may not be exactly the same stuff you have in your source code repository. You may need to generate documentation, configure files, run setup.py sdist or whatever, so a release may not be exactly a snapshot of your git repo.

So this is perfect. Great feature GitHub, thanks!

It would be nice that tags != releases though, because I can think of scenarios where you may add a tag that is not meant to be a release (ie. security update, you may want to tag the commit with a CVE).

Also it would be great if you could just link or display the changelog, CHANGES or NEWS instead of writing a text describing the release. That's for projects that already have a release procedure, but for the rest this is HUGE change because GitHub just improved their project management! I love it!

[1]: https://github.com/blog/1302-goodbye-uploads
> they would stoke rumors of their ferocity by claiming responsibility for the otherwise-natural deaths of political contrarians

[citation needed]
They misinterpreted the word 'hop'. Obviously, it refers to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humulus_lupulus
This is just mean. Why don't you put your own name and salary up there for us to see, mariusz331?

Whether your employer is the government or a private entity and whether or not you participate in a strike you don't deserve to have your financial data exposed.
I know, how dare they not always follow convention and go out and create things like xml requests/ajax, etc.
I think the type of entitlement the OP is talking about goes far beyond your examples. It's one think to dislike a company and criticize its decisions, but it's another thing entirely to say they have an "ethical responsibility" to keep old products alive, which some in this thread are doing. Google owes you nothing as a user and your more then welcome to leave their platform as I'm sure a statistically insignificant amount of people did after Reader got shut down.
Huawei W1 first Windows Phone 8 JailBreaked
Or if by vertical he means running face first into a wall...

Upvotes for both though...
You guys should just try the game. There have been a few articles that highlight the difficulty of the game but that is only in comparison to modern console games targeted at soda guzzling teens with a one second attention span.

You can grok the basics of the game in an hour or so by following a beginner tutorial. During your first few hours you will fail your first few fortresses.

After your first session, you should have a grasp of things and the next time you should be able to just pick up the game and get back to it.

I think the time suck aspect of this game is exaggerated a lot. You can pause and save the game at any point and get back to it later.

There's one thing that some of the tutorials and introductions don't make clear: you control the fortress, not the individual dwarfs.
You didn't really read the OP, did you? =]

Edit: If you did, and that's your takeaway, I think you started with a predefined notion about its content. Please read it again and try to forget about reader. Reader is not the point. (I'm not the author btw ;)
I wouldn't pick the median of the dominant class for the BG, but rather from the borders (even though this could work)

for 4 you want that, picking from one of the colors of the album or a contrasting color if this is not available from the album
Some are explicitly called "intern" or "PT" (part time), some very much look like probable contractors, but I don't know how contractors end up with contributions to insurance/pension/etc, and others I see no obvious reason for such numbers at all.

Conceivably some of it could be attributable to oddities of recently-retired/fired/resigned employees, but I'm sure not all of it.

I think this dataset is impossible to make meaningful sense of without much more information on BART's employment practices, possibly wider laws/regulations on California public employees, and more specific information about individuals.
Pitchfork gave us a 5.3
They're public employees, their salaries have been public information for a long time.

Mean or nice doesn't have anything to do with it.
Windows 8.1 and VS2013 bring GPU computing updates to Direct3D and C++ AMP
Yes one thing that always amused me at microsoft was how often they would talk about how much better their tooling experience is. It's not. Being able to go into roo or ror or whatever else and generate huge amounts of scaffolding and get tons of upfront work down with out only a few keystrokes beats the socks off of an obtuse and clunky sql and ide interface where some portions work well and some portions look like remnants of the early nineties.
Yeah, from what I understand a lot of providers in America charge extra for tethering (Which is absolutely ridiculous since you're just using data). I'm quite happy with tethering my 1GB for EUR 10/month myself.
I didn't realise you couldn't download and use the data from Internet Archive. If not, that's pretty silly to back up the feeds to them, and I'm a bit annoyed to have contributed. I'd like to make them available to everyone to download, analyse, plug into their reader etc etc etc...
Thats awful, one can only assume this affects MBP as well. I think I'll now only turn DB on whenever I'm on A/C.
I'd wager they've a dinky device that snaps onto a fibre (once it's unshielded), bends it a few degrees just enough that it leaks light ever so slightly, and have a photodiode within the device to amplify and relay the intercepted light down a parasite.
We the People pay and employ public workers. Ergo, We the People are entitled to see their salaries, and in this particular case, how badly they're "ripping off" the Public in general.
Speaking of the history of roguelikes, I've been pretty impressed by Nicolas Casalini, aka Darkgod. I'm not sure exactly how long he's been involved in the scene, but he's been developing since at least Pernband back in the late 90s.

His Tome2, in the early part of the last decade, was arguably the pinnacle of old-school band style roguelikes (as opposed to the hack style popularized by nethack, or more modern, user-friendly ones that have been cropping up the past couple years). The current Tales of Maj'Eyal is one of the most polished, engaging roguelikes I've come across.
Enetfix - Online Computer support, Antivirus Support
>>The precedence I'm trying to establish is at least ethical in the sense that it puts the well-being of users first.

Companies have a responsibility to put the desires of their owners first, and as a public company that generally means profits. This is hardly an ideological vision, but more of a long term business plan, and even if reader was costing them nothing to maintain it still doesn't fit that plan.
Since the polite version didn't work, here's the scoop:

The CEO[1] of this start-up has a long back ground in the Advertising and Media Relations industry[2] and still works in his this field on current projects[3].

In this light, asking if this was viral marketing was entirely valid, and could have brought him work. Instead, abuse of the "down vote" system occurs (my second post removed this complaint, as the FAQ stated it shouldn't be referenced: however, I feel it should be acceptable to do so now).

shrug I'll ask a third time: is this really a product, or is this viral marketing?

[1]http://fr.linkedin.com/in/gnadaud/en

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BETC

[3]http://vimeo.com/37597427
Your wording is... Odd. BBC Future is just owned, and commercially run, by BBC Worldwide. Nothing to do with agent locations in the URL.
Ok, so it's just if Google does it then, because they are the only ones with "great power?" Although "with great power comes great responsibility" is a cool catch line, it's extremely nebulous, especially as presented. What you are saying is that if any company provides a widely used product, say like Instapaper, they are ethical mandated to continue providing it, etc. Why would I create something for fun then, if I'm morally obligated to dedicate to it in the off chance it becomes popular? When can products close down?

Also, your solution is hardly more ethical than theirs, even if it puts the "well-being" of users first. It's just more binding than what already exists. In my opinion, it was perfectly ethical that Google gave its users a good head's up to the situation and that they even provide a way to find other services that might replace Reader. It's not like it randomly stopped existing one day or like they promised it would always be there. No moral code was broken and no ethics or rights were trampled on. It just sucks and you have every right to be upset. To be a proponent of "you either support it forever in some way or you're (ethically? morally?) evil" isn't really helping though.
"It's not like people see our $50,000 a year and think 'Hey, I want a piece of that pie.' They'd much rather look towards things like Minecraft, where there are hundreds of millions of dollars."

The brothers have this massive, massive blindspot regarding the importance of the UI. That $50,000 cap they perceive is barely scratching the surface of what would be possible for them if they made the damn thing a bit more accessible to the average person. It's great that their small niche base loves ASCII art and doesn't mind fumbling their way through a hostile interface in order to play the game, but that is the primary reason the game stays confined within a tiny niche corner of the gaming market.

They have the real possibility that if they did that seed work, even just on exposing an API into the game, as opposed to venturing into a full-on UI overhaul, that enough new people would be introduced to the game that they could hire a third developer to focus specifically on the API and UI aspects of the game, leaving them free to keep working on the bits they love.
So there's a void in the market ready to be filled?
Wow. Lesson number one from this list is that if you want to make a boatload working for the government, be a cop. Aside from top administrators, the top ranks of the list are dominated by regular transit cops.

Usually the very, very generous retirement benefits drive high police compensation. Well paid overtime helps, too.
How Do I Know the Usefulness of Amazon's "Frequently Bought Together" Feature?
Somewhere towards the bottom of a given book's info on Amazon, they usually put a "Frequently bought together" list of books, often a two or three book combo of the book in question plus another one or two.
Just as their other algorithmic recommendations, these "crowdsourced" recommendations are also usually good. My issue with them is that they may well be a self-fulfilling prophecy if I don't know what the lower numerical bound for "Frequently" is, be it a number, a percentage, etc. Theoretically, you could use an otherwise statistically unacceptable number of bought togethers to "seed" the frequently bought together criteria, and from then on it simply gets reinforced by subsequent buyers who take that recommendation at face value.
The reason this is an "itch" for me is that I have a long wish list on Amazon, using Amazon as I do as a bookmark of sorts for books I want to buy at some undefined point in the future. I'd want to trust the FBT thing enough to add the other books, other than the one I wanted, to o wish list as well without having to read their profiles, reader reviews and so on. But I can't trust it if I don't know precisely what "frequently bought together" really means.
Any thoughts?
I have contacted them on a number of occasions and while problems often get fixed, including some particularly annoying ones I never get a reply. Not from mails, not from forms.

I strongly dislike this silence but I guess it is effective in reducing feedback.
It's also hilariously outdated, to the point that the game had a whole dimension less than it does now.

Still a great read though
> "If we want an open web, we'll have to (continue to) build it."

That should be totally obvious to everyone. The web was nice and open when ads ruled the world, but now companies -- the same ones that pay our salaries either directly or by proxy -- have to make money to pay those salaries in ways that aren't display ads.

Google/FB/Twitter/etc have plenty of ways to get data out of their systems via API. If you don't want to use a proprietary API to get the data out then don't put the data in proprietary systems.

You want an open web? Great. I'll make a response that's common in f/oss: submit a patch. It takes a lot of volunteer hours to do. I don't mean to be too snarky, but stuff like this grinds my gears:

> That world formed the web’s foundations — without that world to build on, Google, Facebook, and Twitter couldn’t exist. But they’ve now grown so large that everything from that web-native world is now a threat to them...

Right, right, they stood on the shoulders of giants and whatever. But guess what, your curated news feeds and carefully cultivated twitter feeds and everything else -- they all cost someone somewhere something to build, money or time or both, and without that world to build on, you wouldn't have them.

I forgot what my point was. Rant /off.