skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For a more critical and very thoughtful (if somewhat vengeful) look at peak oil and what it implies, see The Long Emergency and A World Made by Hand, both by James Kunstler.

His book on suburban blight, The Geography of Nowhere, is also fascinating.

http://kunstler.com/
This is great stuff--bringing OS X's Core Animation technology to web apps.

Apple is betting both on the desktop and on the (open standards) web, and letting both compete freely.

Microsoft seems to want to cripple IE to prevent web apps from overtaking the desktop (or else they've got some other wierd motivation that cripples its forward motion in areas like CSS standards, 2d/3d canvas, Javascript features/performance; or perhaps they're hoping to make their proprietary Silverlight the chosen method for delivering desktop-like apps.)

(Sorry, don't mean to be a fanboi--lots to criticize about Apple's overall behavior, but at least in this area they seem to be thinking right.)
Just wrote about this on TC, I think it's a great idea.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/awesome-the-game-crafte...

To give credit where credit is due, I found it here. Would link to this thread but there's the whole HN secrecy thing (is that still enforced?). Feel free to bash TC below :)
Choosing the right credit card for you
There are a number of different types of credit cards available on today’s market, each bearing its own advantages and disadvantages.
Or how about half of the east coast being considered "north west"?
If you do decide to start a startup we'd be happy to hear from you (http://news.ycombinator.com/apply).
Cars?

At least the body design, even if they're built on common platforms.
Ask HN: Why did the TC wall of shame link get pulled?
Some sort of official reason for why this article got pulled would be nice.

Original thread here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=709111

It seems a bit hypocritical that HN can link to TCs articles exposing Twitters internal documents while it cannot link to something exposing public relationships of TC.

The original link : http://soundkeeper.com/
Ask HN: Live Chat Support?
What do you guys use or plan to use for providing live support/chat for your website visitors?
What's Wrong with Copy Protection
Yes, please post those numbers tomorrow. I'd be very interested to see them. Also, congrats!
I think it depends. LLVM is a very large project which adds a significant overhead to your footprint. LLVM also historically has focused on "normal" (i.e. AOT) compilation so is more concerned about generating good code even if it takes a while (which isn't the main focus for MS CLR, or Mono's JIT). LLVM have improved their x86 -O0 perf, but it's still not as fast as the fast path on JIT-focused backends.

So, yeah, there's a cost. Depends what the end user is using Mono for as to whether it's worth it or not I guess.
The article is a tad long, but it has some great points about how technology is eliminating scarcity and the problems with trying to keep scarcity through law and copy protection.
I use CABTAB (code a bit, test a bit). I've tried TDD to learn it, but I find I end up bogged down in tests and end up losing all interest in the project I was originally working on.
One of the key insights of the Austrian school is that historical mathematical analysis while useful for entrepreneurs is not economic law and is merely a forecast. You cannot predict accurately what lowering the interest rate will do, you can say that printing money causes inflation, but cannot specify how prices will actually change.
I'm surprised you're marketing it as a wizard thing. Maybe the audio should use a gravelly voice to say: "Gooooood" or "Something something something darksiiide. Something something something COMB-plete."

Also... this is a nitpick, but I must ask you to rethink the ComicSans font. Just a suggestion.
Throughout the 1980s, Sierra sold a ton of games with horrible EGA craphics, but which were basically cinematic games with fairly simple decision-tree gameplay.

This has always struck me as one of the most interesting aspects of computer game history.

Back in the old days, adventure games were all about the story and experience, not the gameplay. This even continued into the 90s in some cases, with games like Planescape Torment, which contained over 800,000 words of text, and the ill-fated (but brilliant) Last Express, a game whose graphics was made by rotoscoping tens of thousands of scenes made by professional actors!

These games weren't about brilliant game mechanics, in-depth strategy, or competitive experience. But few deny that they were great games. Of course, the genre basically died towards the end of the 90s--and many claim that it killed itself ( see http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html ).

Interestingly enough though, I've noticed that despite the proliferation of seemingly mindless entertainment these days, there has been somewhat of a revival of the genre of "games with lots of text". The genre of visual novels, once just an offshoot of silly Japanese dating sims, has begun to turn out some seriously impressive material. The most impressive to date, IMO, has been Umineko no Naku Koro ni ("When the Seagulls Cry"), a murder mystery reminiscent of a cross between The Last Express, The Usual Suspects, and Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. Even more unusually, it has no decision tree at all: it is completely linear. The "gameplay" is the author's challenge to the players--to solve his mystery before he reveals the true answer in the final episodes of the game.

In a sense, we've come full circle: we began with simple mostly-linear adventure games, gone to complex, branching plots, and now we're back to simple, mostly-linear adventure games.
We haven't "gone dark". We answer support emails.
There is no pulling on HN, only flagging, so you're not going to get an 'official reason'. Apparently enough people thought it was offtopic.
I think your comment is better than the actual article. Perhaps the lesson is one that Hollywood has learned repeatedly as well. Simply having a budget doesn't give you a good product. As far as the Wired article goes:

>> The only trouble is that nobody can accurately formulate sure-fire game hits on a consistent basis.

I'd say that Tim Schafer has done a pretty incredible job on this front. Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, Psychonauts.... presumably the fact he isn't a millionaire suggests something about the size of the market.
This is one case where I really prefer C#'s approach; it supports a shortcut syntax (works on anything which implements IEnumerable and has a public Add method):

List<int> intList = new List<int>() { 1, 2, 3 };

which involves no anonymous classes or anything of the sort. The compiler merely "expands" it into the following before producing the bytecode:

List<int> intList = new List<int>();
intList.Add(1);
intList.Add(2);
intList.Add(3);

Which is, really, about what I'd expect such a shortcut syntax to do.
... but it did prevent the speculative losses from being socialized while keeping gains private. Only people who bought tulips lost money.

It's also widely thought today that the tulip mania was brought on in part by a parliamentary decree that weakened contractual protections on tulip contracts -- making it easy to speculate on inflated tulip prices without a correspondingly strong fear of loss.

There is also a strong case to be made that, similar to the current situation, the tulip mania was prompted or sustained by a sudden increase in the monetary base. Apparently the balance sheet of the Bank of Amsterdam was surging during this period.
It was probably flagged because it's a little ridiculous. Those companies are not Michael Arrington's bosses. They are advertisers trying to reach a certain market, the type of market that reads TechCrunch.

I don't think it's fair to shame these people for conducting business and attempting to bring in customers. Are they suppose to pull their advertising every time TC posts a controversial article? They're ads would barely show up at all.
Even if it was initially on-topic, a critical mass of people might decide -- "this is sending attention and discussion in degrading directions" -- and flag. I have flagged things at times only after seeing the discussion.

I am distressed by the (seemingly new) policy where no comments are allowed on [dead] topics. Even if something's kill-worthy, interested people should be able to finish conversations. Also, as some topics go back and forth between [dead], there needs to be some way to discuss borderline cases. On the topic itself is better than followup stories (like this one).
Fwiw the demo runs great on the iPhone 3GS. Looks like it's at least running at 15fps.
Over 2 Billion cellphones in the world - according to WolframAlpha (http://www06.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=cellphones+worldwide)
I don't think that's true. An editor can kill any submission they want, AFAIK.
I may be wrong, but I believe the page is not suggesting a temporary TechCrunch boycott by advertisers. While I agree that advertisers are not Arrington's boss, they do have more leverage than your average commenter (as the linked page says, "A note to the people paying Techcrunch's bills can make a big difference. They care what their customers think."). The attention-grabbing "wall of shame" phrasing makes this a little hard to parse.

For people upset about the Twitter leak, convincing the advertisers to support their idea doesn't sound crazy. So, I disagree that the page is ridiculous.

I'm a big fan of not seeing stories if HN's users don't think they are interesting (go social web!), and I don't think the original link was interesting.
In the book The Human Zoo, Desmond Morris states that you see very little masturbation or other weird sex in wild animals, but you often see it in zoos and other captive/domesticated animals.

He puts it down to dealing with being in an unnatural environment and makes parallels with people living in cities.
Of course. It has been a constant topic of geek conversation ever since Dawkins's seminal work: "Spanking the monkey: masturbation's role in evolution".

Subsequently rms retorted that only Free animals masturbate, while Linus weighed saying the ideals of masturbation didn't matter, just the pragmatism of cranking one off to avoid blue balls.

Edit: whoa there is a strange suicidal gene in this post's ancestry. I was replying comment on whether http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=708679 was relevant
TechCrunch Wall Of Shame
Those are three of very many issues: you failed to mention trade barriers, taxes, spending, government debt, regulations, price controls, rent controls, minimum wage, subsidies, and welfare.

All issues which Chicago School economists agree with Austrians, and which a surprising number of other neoclassicals agree too.
Yes, because that is exactly how the 1st Amendment works. In NYT, the Federal Government tried to abridge the freedom of press. That triggered the 1st Amendment protections. Here, with TechCrunch, neither the Federal Government or any State Government are trying to prevent TC from printing the information. Therefore, the 1st Amendment does not apply.

I admit that I have zero knowledge of journalism practices. But my legal knowledge is much greater; I am just over one semester away from graduating from law school.

I am neutral on Twitter. They are a company that I neither like nor dislike and I do not use their product.
One bug to rule them all
It would never happen -- selective journalism and all -- but if those documents leaked were from an advertiser, I wonder if TechCrunch would have posted them.
I don't think it's crazy, and I don't think it's completely ridiculous either. The shaming part is what bothered me. The idea that these companies belong on wall of shame is (just a little) ridiculous.

I kind of wish it hadn't been flagged too. I didn't catch it until this second posting. Now that I look back at the HN post, it looks like I'm rehashing some of that conversation.
One step closer to being able to produce my game, Settlers of Canton.
Makefile HowTo
LLVM is not able to support some of the features that Mono needs, so in those cases the JIT compiler will still fall back to Mono's JIT engine (methods that contain try/catch clauses or methods that do interface calls).

Who uses exceptions, anyway?
> while cool kids were coding C on Windows or playing with Linux. Yes, Microsoft was fun back then:
it felt young, modern and innovative

Ah those where the days, I remember them fondly :)
It's strange, the ZSCL post from yesterday got flagged/removed too, after it had 100+ upvotes!
>There is nothing in there that says companies (ex. TechCrunch) have a right to print whatever they want, whether by free speech or by free press.

Right, there are narrow restrictions for e.g. libel. In that example those restrictions apply to congress's ability to regulate libel, and it has been in the past been a constitutional question.

How would you hypothesize that Twitter could go after TechCrunch without invoking a law at either the federal or state level?
Thanks for the suggestions. The app was originally inspired by the Youtube Ogre battle video, which had a fantasy theme. I didn't want to get into any issues with trademarks or ip, hence no SW theme.

Re: the font. Hmm. Well, there's a few other higher priority graphical updates on my plate right now, but I'll keep that in mind. Can you suggest another free font?
Cars too, a start up called Local Motors (http://www.local-motors.com) is trying to do a custom/crowdsourced car company. I think it is more conceptual at this point though. The capital requirements are crazy and I think we'll see more innovation in this area from companies like Toyota.
The TechCrunch story is fascinating and relevant to this community on so many levels. It's made me actually check their blog, which I haven't read in awhile otherwise.

It's fascinating from the standpoint of ethics and journalism. Internet journalism to boot. It's fascinating from an IP law perspective, something people here tend to deal with a lot. It's fascinating from the computer security/social engineering perspective. And it's just a fascinating look into Twitter's deepest darkest secrets. It's possibly unethical (I don't think so, but that one's above my pay grade) but even if so it's still very interesting.

The wall of shame link is just a political rant reducing a complex First Amendment issue to a diatribe. It's mean-spirited (though perhaps warranted, depending on your viewpoint, but that's irrelevant here). It's not more interesting or relevant than if it were asking us to boycott Rush Limbaugh's advertisers. It's unlikely to be fruitful. And it's not in any way relevant to the tech topics usually discussed here.
I have never understood why some developers find make files hard to use and understand.

As the link shows, there is nothing to them.
Why are NewYork etc marked as "NorthWest"?
Video presentations from the latest TC Lispers meeting
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Just deal with it.

If you hang around long enough, you're going to get articles flagged and marked dead. If enough people in the community flag an article, because they think it's off topic, it disappears.

I didn't flag it, but I think it was off topic, because it's advocacy and not necessarily hacker interest. It causes drama and doesn't really contribute to the conversation.

By the way, I think this post itself is off topic. From the HN Guidelines: Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. source: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There is really no need to pick a fight between the Austrians and the Chicago School. Austrians are sympathetic to the Chicago School, particularly as they have adopted many Austrian insights. In fact, many of today's Austrians come from a monetarist background (Friedman as a gateway drug?), but later came to see how it is misguided and incongruous to oppose price controls on rent but support them on capital (interest rates).

The real conflict today is between free market supporters (Austrians and most monetarists) and the supporters of big government (Keynesians and the mercantilist-style neoclassicals). Unfortunately the latter have been commanding government policy for some time.
Gamecrafter: design and publish your own boardgame
For your website you'll want to pick something that users will be able to display and have installed by default.

HN primarily uses Verdana. Google primarily uses Arial. 37signals uses a combo of Helvetica (generic sans-serif if not present) and Georgia.
Talk about being before his time.

I wonder if he even thought about it when that whole Napster thing fired up?
We really don't anymore. When we started and had just 3 employees and < 250 customers, we had someone on an AIM account during business hours. Customers liked it but it just didn't scale well for us. We're now at 8 employees and 5000+ customers.

Most support is now dome through our ticket system. Our support team replies usually within 30 mins during sane hours. We get raves about our fast CS replies so I think dropping chat/IM support has actually helped us.

Asynchronous support just scales better IMO.
Think of free speech as a noun. Perhaps it should be written as free-speech. What this means is that 1st Amendment protections don't apply to all forms of speech, only free-speech. Examples of things that are not considered free-speech are trade secrets, hate speech, and libelous/slanderous speech. Congress and the States can regulate and pass statutes on those as they wish. They are not afforded Constitutional protection.

The 1st Amendment doesn't grant me the right to write what I want on this forum, even if it would fit in the free-speech classification. Paul Graham can take down whatever he wants, whenever he wants. If Paul Graham became governor of California, he couldn't pass a statute that banned talking about Twitter and TC in online forums. That would run afoul of the 1st Amendment.

I am not sure that I understand your question on how Twitter could go after TC. How would anyone go after another entity without Federal or State law? I doubt there is a local ordinance about this wherever those two companies are located, and I doubt International Law would apply.

If Twitter wanted some sort of non-legal recourse, they could 1) talk it out with TC, 2) reach an out of court settlement, or 3) start the first SMS-organized boycott of a web site.
Are there some interesting engaging books that I can read to honestly learn about economics without having to pick a side or hold political beliefs? (something that will be really useful for me to understand the world better... not something that will attempt to convert me...)
I agree. Just take a look at every Twitter-related TC post up until this debacle. The first few commenters are always complaining about the excessive reporting on Twitter. Now randoms are coming out of the woodwork to thrash TC over this. Even HN seems to have a more positive outlook on Twitter now (namely because TC is the bad guy). Seems like a win for Twitter to me...

Either way, I don't think these leaks can be considered trade secrets. What would a competitor really have to gain that would outweigh the massive amount of attention Twitter is getting right now? Notes from Twitter strategy meetings sound like they wouldn't be useful for much more than rough drafts of Gossip Girl scripts anyway. From everyone's reaction, you would think TC published the President's security detail's shift schedule and itinerary...
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We were honored to be given a pre-released copy of Nmap 5.0 by the inventor, Fyodor, and wrote a review based on first hand experience.

We should all do our part to promote open source tools, each in our own constructive way.
Are we really debating this with 23 points?

It wasn't exposing anything at all. You can go to techcrunch.com and find the advertisers. It amazes me how fast all of you criticize TechCrunch as being a piece of shit, yet it is the top domain here which everyone constantly upvotes: http://top.searchyc.com/domains . Feel free to criticize what they did with the twitter docs, but people are justifying it with silly comments like "TC is Perezhilton" or "Fuck techcrunch". It's also a site that most startups here would love to get on. Lastly, as a whole I'm quite sure TechCrunch has made the startup world a better place, and we'd rather have it than not have it.

Hacker News isn't a place to bitch and whine about things, especially those with minimal merit. I enjoy coming here because there's tons of intelligent conversation and amazing information to consume. That article brings none of that to the table.
Probably not. Since they're journalists, the "Chinese wall" could/should apply:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall#Journalism
Ah, you mean the website, not the app options screen. Okay, that's been annoying me too. Priority just got bumped up.
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Why Michael Arrington Should Post Twitter Docs
While I generally agree that an idea is not worth the paper used to write it down, there is also a certain level of domain expertise that a coder will lack which an "idea person" can supply if they have the right sort of experience. You may be a rails "rock star", but if you don't know dick about the widget* supply business then your widget management app is not going to go anywhere.

*I do hate how useless wen plugins have appropriated a nice generic term...
Sourceforge relaunches, now using TurboGears 2 and MongoDB
Google Wants You To Know A Google Docs Redesign Is Coming (I Wonder Why)
dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=708528
I'd say that aggressive flagging and downvoting are the price of HN not becoming like Digg and Reddit. I'm really happy to pay that price, even when I get downvoted.
Yammer Completely Reworks Its Desktop Client.
Mostly tangential, but I have to code in MFC at the day job (legacy code base). God, the winapi guys must have had a sadistic sense of humor when they designed it. My guess is they were so used to low level programming that they saw object orientation as a crutch for the infirm. I imagine them shoving random subroutines into objects while laughing maniacally to themselves: "let's see these pansies make sense of DDX controls! muahaaha!"
The reason the article exists is that the "holy grail" is tedious.
they haven't given TechChrunch a green light to publish anything

That's what they want the thief to believe. He needs to be satisfied that he's done the damage to Twitter that he set out to do.
Steve Blank mentioned this:

http://steveblank.com/2009/03/23/if-i-told-you-i%E2%80%99d-h...
The most insidious form of conversion is when you don't even realize a viewpoint is being advanced on you, instead believing it to be 'objective.' Every model of the world has certain assumptions, certain axioms, built into it. To maintain the ability to think for yourself, the best material to read are those works that are very clear and honest about their axioms. In a very real sense, those are the most 'scientific' works. But those same works will often appear more partisan as well, in the same way that a research paper is both more scientific and more focused on one model of the world than is a generic textbook.

I recommend starting with Murray Rothbard's For a New Liberty, which takes a very bottom-up approach to economic principles:

http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp

There are plenty of other excellent books and materials available freely from the Mises Institute as well:

http://mises.org/literature.aspx

http://mises.org/media.aspx