skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"They don't just ban people and walk away unless you plain didn't read the TOS and are breaking big rules like clicking your own ads, doing shady stuff, etc."

Simply not true. I was banned from adsense for "manipulating ads" or some such thing. I of course had never done this, and had actually put a LOT of effort into making sure that there was no way I could be flagged for click fraud. I actively told any family or friends that knew about my project to NEVER click on an ad on my site. It just wasn't worth the risk of getting banned from adsense, since most other networks pay significantly less for significantly more headaches. I had a high traffic site that was bringing in a lot of money without any need to cheat (so why risk everything for a few bucks?).

Well I ended up getting banned regardless for who knows why, maybe someone had it out for me and committed click fraud on the site through a bunch of proxy servers, I have no idea. Google refused to give me any information whatsoever. They did allow me to "appeal" to them, but it was clear in their automated response that no human read my appeal.

Anyways, I'll never trust Google again for anything business critical. By which I mean any project that relies heavily on Google in some way is very high risk. If something goes wrong (ie they shut down a service you rely on etc) they won't care to work with you in the slightest (unless you already have SV connections like rap genius).

On a side note, I did have a Google sales team reach out and contact me about a year later asking if I wanted to get involved in some new ad product they were working on. It was quite a slap in the face when I had to tell them that I was actually banned from adsense. Of course they responded by telling me there was nothing they could do to help overturn my ban. I guess even people who work at Google can't get actual feedback from Google.
Thanks for the feedback! My question was too vague about the goals of naming. I was thinking that it might be a security issue to have your name out in the open.
Tools of the trade: Vi Plugins, Powerline
> an idle brain is useful for creative thinking and problem solving.

This is a more reasonable argument, and I agree. It is often useful to have quiet space to think. That said, I prefer to put the dishwasher on, and go for a walk outside for 15minutes, than to stay inside doing the dishes. The dishes themselves are not in and of themselves important. In the case of the streetlight, many people may be too busy navigating the streets to relax properly into a good idle state, or they may be pissed off and want some light-hearted fun; we should not make value judgments on them for that.

> it [is] important to unplug from technology on a regular basis

Whilst I might not necessarily disagree with you on this point, people often make this claim with no actual evidence or reasoning. Why is it important to unplug? In some situations, I can clearly see a benefit - for example, eating dinner with friends, pulling out a phone to check social media disrupts your ability to connect with your friends, makes you seem rude, and will likely reduce the quality of your interaction. When I'm on the train to work in the morning, listening to music and reading web articles on my phone seems like a net benefit.

There can be benefits to avoiding technology and to doing things properly and in-person - but those should be evaluated on an individual basis with logic, rather than with a general appeal to puritan work-ethics and ascetism.
Doctors and auto mechanics routinely use tools and abstractions that they don't fully understand. (Not sure about plumbers.)

For example how many doctors know how a CAT scan works? They trust that the machine is doing its job correctly, and focus their expertise on interpreting the results. And a lot of auto mechanic work today involves reading codes off the car's electronics and looking up the fix. Do you really think every auto mechanic understands the full hardware/software stack of all the cars they fix?

Abstraction is not a problem; it is a productivity multiplier. But only if it is done right.

The biggest problem with software abstractions these days is that their quality is so low that they can't be trusted. Imagine if CAT scan machines were built to the quality standards of Django or RoR. People wouldn't stand for it.
BuzzFeed's investigative unit coming together
'productive' parsed for me as 'beneficial to the project'; OSM doesn't have to do anything. Notably, they don't have to garner any usage or mindshare.
There was recently a commercially produced pop song about thrift stores in the charts, so you can rest assured that they've been cool again for at least ten years.
I've never seen a bootcamp/code school that doesn't require payment up front or at least in installments that finish before the course does.
Current discusión: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7171115 (29 points, 58 minutes, 16 comments)
I've been meaning to try ActorDB out for a while now to see how well it performs on large data sets. IIRC, the basic premise is that every actor is a sqlite instance which causes some interesting limitations that might even have more interesting workarounds.
We could already have maybe 10,000 Zelda games out by all kinds of creative publishers. Think about the amount of choice you could have if we had this rule in place. Zelda games could be a buck each.
NullCrew seem to have a problem differentiating between an exploit that is specific to MS SQL Server 2008 R2 and a generic SQL injection attack.
Swallow This 'Password' Pill to Unlock Your Digital Devices
Well I think that a beginner should try to do this by hand at first. Not necessarily in a production application, but to learn how it works.

The difference between Web development and desktop development is the HTTP protocol which is responsible for security issues and other behaviors (sessions, cookies) that you need to understand if you want to build solid applications.

Just the difference between client and server side validation is often not understood by beginners, which is a big problem.

If somebody rely on the framework to do all the job, he's going to have security issues in his applications and other weird behaviors (double submit when refreshing a page, etc.)
Granted, I've never used it in a hurry. Also, my previous experience with maps was Garmin's City Navigator, which I thought was okay, but it was much worse than OsmAnd. I actually still use have it as a backup because it can run continuously for two days on two AA batteries.
I understand that distinction, but my point is that for automation like running jslint or minify, the dependencies aren't that necessary. Those commands don't take very long, and often don't have long dependency chains.

Make basically adds a very small "declarative" dependency layer, and then reimplements the shell poorly:

- variables (from the environment)
- command tokenization
- escaping rules
- functions
- if statements
- include
- globbing (in the target line)
- various magic $ variables
- process substitution
- eval
... etc.

That is, it's a full fledged programming language with different syntax than shell, but mostly the same features. I guess what might do in some cases is have a very simple "actions.sh" shell script, and then a Makefile which ONLY has simple command lines calling into actions.sh. Any functions would be in bash rather than make.

This is actually nice because there is an "upgrade path". For most simple things, you can just stick with shell. But when you need the power of make, you can upgrade without rewriting anything -- just adding a short/readable makefile.
komoot (http://en.komoot.de/) is quite popular in Germany.
Huh. I thought this was actually "Why Games Should Enter The Public Domain" for a while (though of course I should have known better because of HN's headline policy). If it were, it would be a wonderful argument in it's simplicity; as is, it's a concrete example.
Needs a subtitle: "Among our users which mostly come from the enterprise world."
Just take away the ball pits, then they may get something done.
How is it a surprise that with high unemployment and low wages retail markets are suffering? Corporations' focus on short-term profits have predictable consequences.
This idea is floated quite often in reformist discussions of copyright, but I think it would be a huge headache.

I have worked with public domain material quite a bit. Currently, anything published in the United States prior to 1923 is in the public domain in the United States [1][2]. Some works published after 1923 are also in the public domain if they meet certain conditions (e.g. a work published in 1925 with a copyright notice where the copyright was never renewed), but it can be an extreme headache to work out which post-1923 works are in copyright and which are not.

Although I am in no way a fan of the current system, it at least has the advantage of clarity for pre-1923 works.

In a proposed system of copyright extension, renewal or terms that are in other ways modifiable on a per-work basis, establishing whether or not works are still in copyright would become an absolute nightmare. Consider that, in the US, copyright applies to any eligible creative work at the moment it is "created and fixed in a tangible form" [3]. In the internet age, millions or billions or works are created each day that are protected by copyright. Most of these works do not have a title and will never be registered anywhere, but copyright applies none the less. A central registry of copyrighted works is impossible, much less a registry that records the specific extensions or renewal term on a per-work basis.

In my opinion, the only possible system that can work is one based on fixed lengths of time. If copyright is extendable, the large majority of works will fall into a legal grey area where it is unclear whether or not the copyright has been extended and almost impossible to find out. Under such a system, the only safe approach to handling copyrighted works would be to assume each work had had its copyright extended to the maximum term possible under law, unless it was provable that was not the case (which, as I have argued, would be extremely difficult).

Under a fixed-term system, it is simple to work out whether or not most works are still copyrighted, even in cases where the title, author of record or copyright holder are not identifiable.

[1] There may be some obscure exceptions to this rule, but it holds broadly enough that I have never encountered any in practice.

[2] http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm

[3] http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html
Have you read The Trial? Josef K was arrested basically without trial, as well.

In fact, I read this article and I see many parallels to the novel by Franz Kafka.

The reason I quoted it was because the following (from the article) reminded me of it:

"Latif sank deeper into depression and hopelessness as the futility of the legal efforts towards winning his freedom became clear. In one of his last letters to his lawyer he tells him: 'Do whatever you wish to do, the issue [of my defence] is over', and includes with it a message of farewell written both to him personally as well to the world at large: 'With all my pains, I say goodbye to you and the cry of death should be enough for you. A world power failed to safeguard peace and human rights and from saving me. I will do whatever I am able to do to rid myself of the imposed death on me at any moment of this prison... the soul that insists to end it all and leave this life which is no longer anymore a life'".

Josef K thought the law was accessible and would protect him, because he was innocent--so there is nothing to fear, right? Wrong. The excerpt from above is taken from a central piece of The Trial--the parable "Before the Law", which was a conversation Josef K had with the priest.

Franz Kafka studied law. He thought it was made to confuse the layman and that the law was not blind and balanced, as the statue so famously demonstrates, but rather has wings and shifts.

Though The Trial is a work of fiction and Latif is a real man, when I first read this book, it helped me realise and gain more compassion towards those who have been treated unfairly by the law.
I wonder if this could work for games in the same way it does for music. With music there is a significant "brand" around the artist to the point where the success of some artists seems to be more down to their image and persona than their actual music.

This means that a cover version of a song performed by some tribute band is not really a substitute in any way for a performance by the real artist even if the cover band can reproduce the original with very high accuracy.

Game developers don't really have the same halo and fame surrounding them, so perhaps customers would be happy with a cheaper clone of a game provided that the assets etc were of at least a similar quality to the original even if not identical.
These days, B&M retail stores that hope to survive need to rely on creative layouts, exciting experiences, or extreme price/value ratios.

A lot of folks are mentioning the Apple stores, which I'd certainly describe as creative and exciting. The article references H&M, which is more of a price/value play. Uniqlo probably touches on all of these things, though from anecdotal observation, it tends to skew a little older than teenagers. But have you ever been inside a Uniqlo that wasn't as packed and chaotic as a Disneyland ride? Say what you will about the shopping experience, but it's a pretty successful one. You wait in line for about 2 hours…but that's because there's an enormous line in the first place.
Jack Bauer
> California is full of people who are structurally unemployed

Do you have a cite for that? Nationwide there's very little evidence of structural unemployment, and I'd be surprised to find that California (which is a state people tend to be interested in living in) has an unusual problem with finding skilled workers.
In parts of the world, bollards are much more common. But in New York City, they are much more rare:
http://www.streetsblog.org/2005/10/14/making-nycs-streets-sa...

There have been a significant number of cases where cars end up sidewalks near where I live. It's not just drunk drivers; it's often distracted drivers who are texting or using an app.

Bollards are a great and fairly cheap solution, but many bureaucrats are pro-car and oppose them for the danger they might pose to drivers.

<< [O]ne of the downsides to bollards is that while protecting human beings, they can do damage to automobiles. John Kaehny, the former executive director of Transportation Alternatives was a big fan of bollards and often pushed the city to install them at dangerous locations. DOT traffic engineers consistently opposed his efforts telling him that bollards were no good because they did damage to cars or that bollards struck at high speed could "become dislodged and become dangerous projectiles that might kill or injure pedestrians." These are the kinds of stories that makes one think New York City traffic engineers empathize more with automobiles than people. >>
This is very cool. Algorithm trading design is a side hobby of mine, and see the value in this. Good luck with the project.

If you get in touch tyler [at] codenvy.com, we'd like to offer you a special integration for free that can help your developer-users.
SF is better for early start up success than Silicon Valley
This is very long and I made it only a third of the way. Does it say anything more substantial than. "I would like to play old games for free?" I did enjoy the pictures.
Yes, I wasn't arguing for a stronger copyright - I'm very much on the other side of things. I'm just trying to be sure our discussion is informed by all the relevant facts (in this case, that overwhelmingly franchises do not endure but some do).
Yep. The users with names like that in channels I'm in are actual users.
Objective-C is less popular than Haskell? Java is less popular than Python?

Doesn't pass the smell test: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=java%2Cpython%2Cobjective-...
I think what you're describing is a "scamble" crosswalk.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrian_scramble

They're a nice way of balancing foot traffic with the need for vehicles to turn at a light. I'm not sure why they're not more popular around the world.
Austin fund offers $150k per startup
Passengers win ruling in fight over Gogo's in-flight WiFi "monopoly"
This is a direct copy of http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2014/01/Large_Europe...
Coca-Cola Superbowl Ad brings out the real America
Ask HN: Why can WhatsApp handle so much load when Twitter struggled?
For years, Twitter struggled with the amount of traffic they had (e.g. Fail Whale) when WhatsApps hasn't been and they have a lot more traffic.

Why, especially given that they both have similar problems sets (sending messages).

To give some stats, WhatsApps is processing 50B msg / DAY and sustaining 580k msg/sec[1].

Twitter is at best is 143k msg/sec, and that's note even sustained [2].

Furthermore, WhatsApp is achieving 2M tcp connections on a single node and 200k msg/sec. [4]

Can anyone explain why WhatsApp has been able to be so performant in comparison to Twitter?

[1] https://twitter.com/WhatsApp/status/286591302185938946

[2] https://blog.twitter.com/2013/new-tweets-per-second-record-and-how

[3] http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2012/01/1-million-is-so-2011/

[4]slide 16 http://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/558/efsf2012-whatsapp-scaling.pdf
What are you basing that on? They have python as #1 by a large margin, when literally every other language popularity measure has it somewhere down the list below java, C++, PHP, etc. If it were skewed towards "enterprise" users wouldn't we expect to see java, C# and C++ getting boosts rather than python?
Wasn't one of Bjarne Stroustrup's reasons for building c++ to make the network simulations he was working on more tractable?
Well, you can't just take your app as is and move it elsewhere, can you?
What was the specific reason for using sqlite? Why not Postgres or MariaDB or whatever?
You're confusing "innocent until proven guilty" with a constitutional law question. There is no "presumption" that the executive branch is operating lawfully.
>However, others (and I include myself in this camp), are completionists. Abstraction is an annoyance, and not knowing is like an itch that needs to be scratched.

I think this a common fallacy that many developers fall victim to. Our entire modern lives consist of using things we don't understand, by this logic you should also not fly in a modern aircraft because I am sure you don't fully understand how they work. Better yet, you should refuse to drive your car.

>Super duper high levels of abstraction is a real problem.

Not at all. If an abstraction saves you a ton of time, you should accept it by all means. If you are your boss whose money is being wasted because someone refuses to use a time saving abstraction, I am sure that person would not be your employee for long.
It sounded less like being interrupted with questions, more so with accusations that what the lawyer intended to argue was unrealistic, because the agency (that has been shown to work outside of the bounds of their intended mission spying on personal interests/lying to congress/etc) would only do what was morally right, and within the intended (but unwritten) letter of the law.

But you are right in that he probably should have been prepared for this as well. Its not unthinkable that judges would be adversarial to this sort of defense/line of thinking.
There's a program like that here in Portland that makes claims on its website about Rails developers being able to immediately earn upwards of $80k a year. Maybe in the Bay Area, but definitely not in Portland. And they charge up front, no placement guarantees.
I am not a lawyer, but I am fairly confident that trademark law would apply even where copyright did not. That is, because Mario's likeness is a trademark of Nintendo, you might not be able to use that likeness in a video game, even if the underlying assets themselves are not protected by copyright.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain#Trademarks

http://www.publicdomainsherpa.com/trademark.html
20 years EVERYTHING. Even for something like Photoshop, imagine the amount of choice a consumer would have if there were a thousand Photoshops out there by different companies. Microsoft could even make a Photoshop. It would be ridiculous but kind of awesome.

The same is true if we had maybe 10,000 Zelda games on the market. Imagining that is kind of weird. But the result is just awesome.
Here is a similar analysis on Top 10 programming language (based on Hacker News Poll, 2 years ago) : http://blog.sudobits.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/popular-...

(full article here : http://blog.sudobits.com/2012/03/28/top-10-most-popular-prog...)
Industry loves frameworks, because it speeds the commoditization of developers.

> The projects I know that were developed 'without a framework' are more often than not poorly structured...

So why not teach developers how to structure code properly? Teach them about coupling, cohesion, benefits of immutability and layering. Make them feel when modules should be broken up, and how they should do it. Expose them to different architecture patterns used in larger applications. This allows developers to make better decisions about code, both as they write and refactor it.

It seems that so much of modern day pop-programmer culture is what framework they should know, rather than how to build/choose the correct framework for their needs. Perhaps this is yet another triumph of shiny over time-tested wisdom.

People have been thinking for a long time about how to build large applications that aren't horrible to maintain. Don't ignore it because kids on the Internet are excited about ultracool.js.
You seem to have defined rationality to mean 'a person who cares solely about the present, with no value put on the future'.

Because a person who rationally cares about great map data for their whole lives, and also cares about other things (like liberty) might well prefer the growing pains of being an earlier adopter to the instant convenience of using Google Maps.

I understand that you, like many people, have decided that the attributes you care about are the only ones that are rational to care about. But that is a gross mistake, and that mistake undermines the entire premise of your rant.
pretty standard "teenager with too much time" behaviour.
> "What we need, Karpinski realized after struggling to build his network simulation tool, is a single language that does everything well."

and later:

> "Bezanson says it’s not exactly ideal for building desktop applications or operating systems, and though you can use it for web programming, it’s better suited to technical computing."

So, Julia is not what we need? ;)

Besides this contradiction I'm not entirely convinced that we need one language to rule them all. I'm not even sure I want multi-paradigm languages (C++ anyone?).

Aren't the problems explained in the introduction of this article not caused by the tools instead of the programming languages? I don't see how using multiple languages complicates patching (unless the article is talking about monkey patching which I doubt), but I would understand how going through 4 different debuggers could drive you crazy.

Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with Julia and I will not judge it based on a Wired article.
Yeah, I was not expecting that. Kind of offended. (a) I'm at work and (b) was not aware of the "splintered and social-mediafied porno-world" nor all its categories.

But props to a pun-intended use of the word "spent".
Upgraded Self – Benefits of Ketogenic Nutriton
Why is it impossible? If they're paying for a copyright extension, shouldn't it be clear which works they are paying for? Anything not in the registry would fall under the shorter term.
300 companies pledge to help long-term unemployed