skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting comment:

What's amazing to me isn't that /. has carried on this long, but rather that the comment quality on here hasn't gone the way of most social new sites. It seems that in general as a social news site ages, matures, and grows, the comment quality follows an inverse pattern. Or more simply, as the number of users approaches infinity, the comment quality approaches 4chan. Digg used to be a decent site for discussion; now you'd be laughed at for even suggesting that the comments might be notable. Reddit is quickly getting there. Slashdot though seems to best this pattern. While I'm well aware that someone will reply to this with "In soviet russia 4chan approaches you!" or something similar in a successful attempt to disprove my point, but I think it still holds true in some respect. Kudos slashdot, keep it up. You keep trying to make UI (un)improvements and we'll still be here to comment without RTFA - and we'll both be thankful for it.

http://meta.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1475404&cid=304...
s3sync is great. I'm using it for automated backups for a number of work projects. Thank you for writing it and sharing it.
> Not all unions are like that.

How about 3 examples that are more than 30 years old. (Unions tend to last as long as the host, which is a problem for the UAW.)
I'm always a bit surprised whenever I hear that /. is still running. I'm sure they're still a very successful site, but it's been like, forever. Aren't they bored?
No need to scrape: http://twitter.com/<USERNAME>?format=json
This is a problem with the twitter api, which makes it easy to use twitter screen names, which are not permanent, and not twitter user ids, which are permanent.
I used QueryPath for a recent project and really liked it. Its selectors are almost identical to jQuery's so the learning curve was shallow. Two thing QueryPath does that this library doesn't seem to is work w/ XML and allow for chainable method calls. See this IBM Developer Work's article http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-...
AskHn:Why hasn't a text-to-mediawiki converter been created?
I'm wondering if there is some deep technical reason why a text-to-mediawiki markup converter hasn't been created...yet.

Or a conversion extension that sits "inside" mediawiki so to speak and lets users type using a WYSIWYG window and then does the conversion after the user hits submit.

I was watching a video at the singularity university website and the the person giving the talk challenged anyone to create this in passing.

I know there is a mediawiki "usability" initiative but the editor is still a stretch away from people using microsoft word or other similar programs they are accustomed to
No it's not.

It should be. It might even be in some of the plans. But most of the time it doesn't happen.
> If deliberate, humorous exaggeration in argument is wrong, I'm in some great company! e.g. Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, yaddayadda.

Are you trying to do what they did? If not....
Fake Steve Rails at AT&T
Not sure about the patents but your link says:

the Apple patent proposes interweaving photo sensors alongside each pixel projector

whereas the linked video shows photo sensors around the edge of the screen, which they claim is superior to photo sensors between pixels. A subtle difference, so not sure if Apple's patent applies.
Pretty on point.

"There was this weird lump in my throat, this tightness in my chest. I had this vision of the future — a ruined empire, run by number crunchers, squalid and stupid and puffed up with phony patriotism, settling for a long slow decline."
Jamie Zawinski said to shut up, stop what you're doing and make a back-up. Jeff simply spread Jamie's message to a wider audience, rather than claiming it as his own.
Perhaps someone with more knowledge of them can speak to this, but I know in some circles there is a belief that unions tend to commoditize their workers, practice if not in theory.

I do not know if that is true, but I do know that I absolutely do not want my services to be a commodity. I work hard to try to get into the upper echelons of a highly differentiated field, and I would seek to either differentiate myself or change fields to a more differentiated one if it began to appear that my services could easily be commoditized.
> will recognize that functions in JScript are fundamentally the Lambda Calculus

i would have thought you could say that about functions in any language...
LINQ is nice and if it helps db4o which is GPL has Java and .NET languages support.
"... What's amazing to me isn't that /. has carried on this long, but rather that the comment quality on here hasn't gone the way of most social new sites. ..."

I am surprised /. has survived. The place pretty much as it was back when it started in '97.

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This is my first post [0] for a couple of years. But there was a time when I lived here. I remember when /. was sold & CmdrTaco said all he wanted to do was run it I'm sure I for one didn't believe he'd still be at it now. The sig/noise is still bad if you trawl below the +2 level. But at +5 it's readable. I think the combination of moderation, ability to filter comments (text, best comments at top), culture and relationships have helped shape the site into something still readable. HackerNews exhibits all of the same sorts of growing pains /. had to go through.

[0] http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1475404&cid=30409194
JRuby, Duby, and Surinx: Building a Better Ruby
the f & t commands are more useful if they are composed with action commands. say, for example, I have used the method getNewObject, but then I realize that it's really supposed to be createObject. If my cursor is on the g, I can say ctOcreate<esc> (change the text between the cursor up to the character before the next O to read "create"). outside of vim, I have to move my cursor over to the O, backspace out the "getNew" and then type "create".

a nine character difference (or three if you have a delete-character command) doesn't sound like much, but it adds up & also breaks you out of your flow a little bit. I find myself doing refactorings other people wouldn't do, just because I know how to do them very quickly in vim, while others would be arrow-keying and back-spacing around forever.
I'd love one actually --> austin (at) beatnex (dot) com
The question this brings up is whether /. is turning into Hacker News.
I can't because I don't know enough about all the diff types of unions. In any case, that's irrelevant. What you're suggesting is that having an ideal and working towards it is a waste of time.
Must have Extensions for Chrome Users.
Because the currency economy is mostly a zero-sum game in the sense of total money ownership (barring inflation),

This statement is true in its literal sense but very misleading. Holding currency is close to a zero sum game, holding wealth is nowhere near that.

If someone were to, say, sell me a pound of gold for $1, he would win in terms of pure currency. He would have one more dollar, and I would have one less, but I think I would come out ahead.

Similarly, if someone sold me a tool I needed to do my job, he would clearly win in terms of money in that transaction, but I could turn around and use that tool to create new things that never existed before and create more value in the world.

Paul Graham talks about this in more detail and more eloquently than I can hope to at http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

(Edited to add a small comment).
Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more: if you have nothing to hide...
This pretty much answers all other questions.
It's not like I was using some third party facebook app, afaik it's twitter's official FB app. And they should definitly use some kind of UID.
Making sure inventors get rich is not the aim of the patent-system. Most people work hard every day and there isn't a system in place to make sure they will all profit from that real big one day. So yes - there are people which profit from the patent-system, as there are always people which profit from a monopoly. And exceptionally one of those people profiting from it is even the one who put most work in it. So it might be a slightly better system than a pure lottery. Except that I'm not forced to play lottery, while I'm forced to partake in the patent-system. I would prefer not doing so. Make it an open-choice and I'm fine with it, because then I will avoid taking part in the patent-lottery as much as I avoid taking part in any other lottery. And don't worry, that won't stop me from inventing, actually it will make working for me on new stuff a lot easier.
And here I was thinking I had a pretty neat rig here...
ooo nice - thanks.

in the post above did you mean to link to this - http://jeffwinkler.net/2006/08/11/firefox-search-plugins-scr...

i just used that page to add scroogle to firefox.
Which I did, but the fact is that I didn't realize this before a stranger updated my FB status, which could have had some consequences if it happened on a "professional" FB account.
It will start out slow. As founders are making deals, they'll say to each other, "Document well, we don't want another CrunchPad here". Others will overhear and pick it up. "It was a total crunchpad." Then it will achieve meme status and people who have no idea where it came from will just post, CRUNCHPAD! in every thread detailing a startups failure. Divorced from the device, it evokes nice fail imagery. Launchpads -> Rockets ->failure ->crunch and dare I say it, Jar-Jar Binks.

I was getting tired of FAIL! anyway.
Your points are good ones, and I agree that tangible and intangible property are different and should be treated differently under the law.

The element of commonality that I was stressing had to do with the idea that each form of property was subject to a bundle of rights - granted, to a different bundle in each case but nonetheless to some grouping of special rights that are divisible and that can be used, transferred, etc. in various ways to advance legitimate commercial purposes. Thus, at that level, the law approaches both forms of property in a similar way and (in my view) that is the key level upon which to focus in analyzing the benefits/detriments resulting from IP protection.

Thus, anyone can have knowledge of information but if one's information is not known generally to the world and gives one's company a significant competitive advantage, then it should be capable of having the force of law behind it to enable those who first derived to keep it confidential and to use it for competitive advantage. In this sense, based on a social policy judgment (that protecting proprietary information of this type will facilitate the growth of enterprise and the betterment of society), such information is entitled to special legal protection even though it means that others are thereby excluded from using it for certain purposes.

Again, I don't get into the patent issue and do acknowledge that the questions there are dicier and more subject to debate.
I tried (not very hard) to report it. But wasn't able to find an contact email.
Except languages where you can't pass functions as arguments or return them as results.
You are right - I remember hearing/reading that one now too, but I can't remember who said it. (It may have even been Churchill or Oscar Wilde.)
"... whether /. is turning into Hacker News ..."

HN is to Startups what /. is/(was) to Linux.
Levels of understanding
This is an interesting angle that I had never heard before. I'm not sure that I agree with the specifics but I do know that I grew up reading and enjoying Von Mises over many years for the rigor of his thinking and for his courage in standing up for unpopular views. I will look into it.
Sroogle is specially useful when googling via TOR. Otherwise google (and others) block queries thinking you're a bot (or maybe not because of that...) and ask to fill a captcha over and over again.
SSL FTW!

https://ssl.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbwssl.cgi?Gw=google
dougwt added simple RSS functionality:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/BrecksBlog

or

http://breckyunits.com/feed
For several years he made this post every working day:

<p>inane comment showing <b>strong naivete</b></p>
<blockquote>copypasta</blockquote>
<img src=macro.jpeg>
<blockquote>copypasta</blockquote>
<p>Confident summary with <b>conclusive statement</b>
displaying no comprehension of the quoted text
</p>
<p>Buy a Visual Studio Plugin from my sponsor!</p>
The permanent loss of the images makes it a greater tragedy since half the content in any given post of his consists of images.
"Why do stimulants like Ritalin turn ADHD kids normal but turn normal kids into hopped-up screaming meamies?"

The second half of this, that normal kids on Ritalin and Adderall will be overstimulated and unable to concentrate, is just plain false. Both have been shown to improve concentration in healthy controls (with the notable exceptions of people with anxiety, OCD, or other hyperglutamatergic problems, and especially not people with schizophrenia). That's why it's prescribed to pretty much everyone: because it works for pretty much everyone.

Some studies:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=R...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18522689
Matt Haughey selling PVRblog.com on Ebay w/ no reserve
You have good habits, and that's sincerely commendable.

However, it really isn't fair to blame this kind of problem on the end user.

Are website developers also expected to keep the servers secure? If Apache isn't patched and up to date, is that the website admin's fault?

Service providers are paid to do a job. This one failed tremendously, and should lose a large chunk of business for it. I think Atwood is being far too kind in accepting 50% of the responsibility for the data loss.

To put it another way: the only reason to maintain your own backups of your site data -- aside from healthy paranoia -- is because you expect your service provider to fail at doing their job. And if that's the case, shouldn't you be finding a service provider that does it better?
Pretty funny. I lol'ed the whole way through.

All joke aside though, what kind of company makes a move like that to f*ck their early adopters? That can't be good for business, not matter WHAT the numbers look like.
Would only "geeks" use this?
I am in the energy space and saw this today. I've thought this very idea in the past, but was worried that only a small set subset of individuals (i.e. "geeks" like us) would use it. What do you think? Would it have a broader application?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/10/wattvision/
Square footage of office space is a step function. You have to move office space whenever you outgrow your current office space. It's the move out and move in process that is expensive.

That's usually why companies jam employees together. The space starts at 8x8 for each employee and shrinks over the years because the company can afford the incremental cost of adding headcount but can't afford the big cost of moving to a new space.
UCLA researchers engineer a bacteria to turn CO2 into the liquid fuel isobutanol
EGether: Social Network For Pitching And Getting Pitched, Without Email Overload
It's important to NOT use scp to copy the backup from the backed-up machine to the backup destination. The only safe route is for you to get the backup destination to "pull" from your server using scp with RSA keys. This is to prevent hackers from compromising your backups, because they have no access to them if you don't store the authentication information on the server.
So we can get another set of bureaucrats to annoy us?

Anyway if you have tried for several years to get better medical insurance, you might want to change tactics and/or jobs.
I work out twice a day. It's the best way I've found to keep myself sane and productive. I've never taken any drugs but I'll sleep 10+ hours a day or get ridiculously jittery if I don't.

And I've also found that I am most productive if I have a coffee exactly at 6AM and 3PM.

I have spreadsheets to track my sleep and caffeine consumption with respect to productivity. Classic signs of ADHD.
I really hope that was intended to be sarcastic.
Hey folks - as people have pointed out, this is actually just a hoax. Facebook is not launching a "Pro" version.

This blog's author has a page at http://cd34.com/facebook/ which explains that the idea is a joke to get media attention:
"Please set your profile picture active prior to 9am EST December 11th so that I can do a quick check and submit the article to the 'news media'."

For information about Facebook product launches, you can follow our official blog at http://blog.facebook.com/.

Matt

Facebook Security
>In the IT world, a union could only be used for collective agreements so that the contracts don't include unacceptable clauses.

Unacceptable to whom?
Menu Mind Games: Menu Tricks
It's probably because there is so much traffic coming from the Tor exit node. Google just sees it as a huge amount of traffic coming from a single source.

At work, once every month or two someone in the building must be doing something that is really hitting Google because every Google search will require a Captcha for a couple of hours.
Idea: While-you-type Searching (ubiquitous auto-suggest)
story, not comment
Do not use SSH with Expect.
Do not use them here or there.
You will not use them anywhere.

Not just because of how much expect sucks: SSH tools leave out a --password option for a reason! Use passphrase-less RSA keys with a restricted account.
Yep, fun book. (I was way to cheap to buy it; ILL FTW!)
A call for focus from the open standards community
CEO of AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets calls blogger re: post on "data hogs"
Persistent Folders: Or, why ideas don’t matter, and execution does
If watching an interview is the best hour you spend per day, consider doing different things during the rest of the hours.
If I was in his shoes, yeah I'd be freaking out too and trying to get everything recovered ASAP. Then again my blog pays more than my (startup) job so that's why I care about it.
Now that you say it, it does happens once in a while at work for me too.
And I agree with you about the exit nodes, I should have thought of that :P .

Considering the amount of daily queries scroogle handles it would be interesting to know how they handle that issue.
I think you're saying, then, that starting from the question of "are there rights to intellectual property" is the wrong way to go about things; trying to make an argument that "you can't have rights to intellectual property because of X," as many people try to do, is rather myopic since it's demonstrably clear that you can indeed assign rights to IP, since the law does in fact do that, and is able to do so in a way that has a lot in common with other sorts of property rights.

I definitely agree, and that implies that the right question to ask is not "should there be IP rights?" but rather "what rights should be associated with IP?" How you answer those questions depends on your perspective and probably the origin of your country's IP laws (are they explicitly pragmatic, as in the US, or rooted in a theory of natural/inherent rights, as in other countries?), but will undoubtedly involve questions about pragmatism (what's the cost/benefit to society of having a particular type of right) and about fairness or ethics in general.

Starting from that perspective and then arguing why particular rights are either unethical or harmful to society makes for a much more compelling argument than just railing against all IP, as (unfortunately) some activists or commentators tend to do.
www.yauba.com
Writing User Friendly Content
Buffett: Best investments may be those he didn't do
Yes, it's written in Arc. All YC's code is.
Reason 1: I pay for my bank account one way or another. It's bank's responsibility to keep the system running and secure, not mine. Sometimes we just can't do everything ourselves and have to rely on others.

You are responsible for reading your statement and ensuring that all activity is valid, much in the same way that you are responsible for ensuring the viability of your recovery strategy.

Reason 2: Many of us host something somewhere. How many do backups?

Anyone who wants to keep their data badly enough to pay (time, money) to do so. Coding Horror is a popular technology blog, and there's a significant cost in traffic and credibility when it fails.

Jeff Atwood lacked cognizance of the risks and made an incredibly poor technical and business decision in failing to validate correctness of his backups and implement a suitable recovery strategy.
Relatively minor?! They failed to do what they said they would. They destroyed data and borked up the backups.

If it wasn't Jeff Atwood but me, would it be more their fault? Or would I just be less disingenuous?

Nobody's calling them names, or threatening to take business elsewhere or anything. But it's good to get sunlight in there, show them consequences, when they fail you. When a company providing you with service fails, you're allowed to scream it from the rooftops if you feel like it.
I don't think /.'s comments have degraded over time, but I never thought they were particularly revelatory either. While they aren't very trollish, they tend to be pretty biased. That might not be surprising given the community's propensity toward Linux and OSS, but it hardly makes the comment quality high.

HN has a bias too, toward startups. But I think the comments here are more centered because opinions on startups don't really become religious, whereas any discussion on operating systems in general and OSS quickly turns into a flamewar.

Also, YMMV, but the one-liners get really old, especially since they've hardly changed. I remember the "in soviet russia" crap from over five years ago on /.
What about interest and electronically created debt? It doesn't depend on the Fed printing anything.
I sent jeff tarballs from blekko's webcrawl for www.codinghorror.com, blog.stackoverflow.com, www.fakeplasticrock.com and haacked.com - about 6300 pages overall. He's got Coding Horror back up from the basic html.

Unfortunately we don't have the images, but it looks like most of the site is back up at least. It will probably be more work for him to re-integrate it into the cms though.
Can you name 3 profitable, growing, unionized industries?

Not to mention the paternalistic relationship it implies. If I don't care for the terms of an employment contract, I won't work under it. If no business in my industry offers terms I consider favorable, I can start my own business. If that's impractical, or I'm unwilling to do it, I should change professions entirely.
tl;dr, when accompanied with any further text, means not "it was too long; I didn't read it," but rather "for the benefit of those who thought it was too long, and thus didn't read it:"
Good post. Ideas are a dime a dozen - there was a post a while back that listed 99 ideas...

Reminded me of a couple of good quotes:

"A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week."
George S. Patton

"A fool with a plan can outsmart a genius with no plan." T. Boone Pickens
To put it another way: the only reason to maintain your own backups of your site data -- aside from healthy paranoia -- is because you expect your service provider to fail at doing their job. And if that's the case, shouldn't you be finding a service provider that does it better?

If you don't expect your service provider to fail, you don't know anything about service providers.

Everybody fails.

Our colocation facility has redundant generator systems. They're tested regularly, and have handled failures previously. Yet, when the power went out, three of the backup generators failed, and our site (as well as Craigslist, Yelp, and others) was out for 45 minutes.

The cause? A bug in the backup generator's software: http://365main.com/status_update.html

Shit happens. Sometimes it's not your fault. You still need to prepare for it.