skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So the solution is to create a secondary judicial system with no oversight so that anyone the government doesn't like can be punished for something they haven't actually done?

Look, you're reducing a very complicated issue with a huge amount of nuances and details to an easily refutable straw man argument. Life in a modern society requires recognition of different types of law violations, different types of punishments, and different acceptable response times. In order to operate in fair and effective manner, all of these require a different standard of proof. Putting a person in prison requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Having a person compensate someone financially requires 50% + 1 of the jury. A parking ticket requires a quick decision from a bench judge. You could set up a system where a parking ticket could be contested by a trial by jury, but this cannot be practically implemented without a huge strain on the legal system.

TSA agents have to make a simple decision - whether to do a detailed search or not. This cannot be done to every passenger, the decision must be made fast, and it can affect other people's lives. It is not in any way a "punishment", only a minor inconvenience. In this case suspicious activity is a reasonable standard of proof for a detailed search. If you want off the watchlist, you should be able to have a hearing to clear your name, you should be notified that you've been added to such a list (barring some exceptions that should require judicial oversight), etc. Nobody is talking about a secondary judicial system with no oversight. You're picking the worst possible implementation and shooting it down - this really isn't productive.

Why wouldn't someone on the watchlist not just pay someone not on the watchlist to carry the bomb through security then?

For any possible security measure you could come up with a countermeasure that would theoretically render it ineffective, but that doesn't mean that we should sit back and do nothing. It does mean that we should attempt to find a systematic, scientific way of measuring cost vs. benefit of any proposed measure, but this is a difficult, time consuming problem. Until we do, we should implement security measures that appear reasonable. To give a counterargument to your specific complaint, a watchlist significantly complicates the job of a potential terrorist. The more people know about the job, the higher the probability of a leak. I will conjecture that the probability of a leak with respect to the number of people that know about the job isn't a linear function, it's likely closer to exponential, which means forcing a potential terrorist to recruit someone not on the watchlist might be a cheap and effective way to ensure that a leak happens. I don't know how effective it is in practice (I'd be interested in seeing large scale studies), but until we find out, intuitively it seems like a good idea.
I saw these guys present a few years ago when they were a subscription service for corporate R&D groups. They would send a regular shipment of materials, tagged with very simple descriptions ("this could be good for..."), and longer data sheets.

The idea was that they wanted to put the material in someone's hands in order to spark creativity.

Since then I've wanted to see a similar service for software. There's a lot of friction in evaluating new technologies--money and trust. On the trust angle, it's hard to trust the documenation and claims, and it's hard to trust that the installation experience is going to be easy. But you could package things up on a Knoppix DVD with everything pre-installed, with sample code, and with simple exercises to get you going.

For example, I'm aware that there's a lot going on in NoSQL technologies, but I don't have any pressing needs forcing me to understand them. But the right presentation could probably spark my imagination.

I think this would be a really fun company because it's basically all learning and brainstorming.
cocos2D is pyglet + bells and whistles. Pyglet is in a transitional period, particularly for the Mac port, which is in the process of being converted to Cocoa rather than Carbon. This is because the Carbon version won't run in the Python that comes with OS X 10.6.

In conclusion, while I think that pyglet's API is superior to PyGame's, for compatibility reasons I wouldn't use pyglet for a new project, at least not until we get the port finished.
Yann Malet: Add bpython to django's shell management command
Cool... but does it have to reload the page for each image? You would think Wired could do better.
Microsoft's system was pretty nice. Once you tell the bug database which commit(s) fix a bug (sometimes backed by a set of uploaded crash dumps), it keeps track of which branches the fix has been merged into, so when QA deploys a build they know what is now available to regress. They licensed Perforce for source control (rather than SourceSafe, which they long since stopped recommending anyone use, look directly into, or feed after midnight) but don't use its "job" features for this.

Though it sounds like they're going to replace all this with Visual Studio Extra Crispy Team System for Epic Workgroups Prime. Best of luck prying everyone I met off vim and build.exe, guys.
Give a try on CurdBee - http://curdbee.com.

We currently do support Paypal, Google Checkout, 2Checkout and Authorize.net. We do have plans to add support to other gateways including Moneybookers.
In addition to the good concerns about exactly who has the power to run privileged code on your computer, I will also point out that:

A: If you are serious about 'mandating', you just toasted alternative operating systems, and have grotesquely complicated server operators lives, among others; the world is full of more situations than could even begin to be covered by such a policy.

B: What you want won't work anyhow, as your first premise is false: "virus scanners prevent computers from being infected from this stuff". They aren't perfect. Mandating a monoculture of security software simply means that people have to use hacks that work against the current software. (Or a de facto monoculture brought on by a small set of legal choices, or a de facto monoculture brought on by a wide array of choices but one "default" choice. Note that "allowing people to opt out" is simply recreating the current situation, only with a lot more government for no apparent reason.)

Of course, quite a lot of those hacks will involve forging the presence of the software, making it look like the anti-virus is still running when it actually isn't. A task that is very difficult today, you made easy by "mandating" which software it needs to be, which is whatever the gov provides by default.

Even beyond the legitimate concerns expressed by the other posters, your idea is worthless from a security point of view. Security problems go well beyond "not everybody is running a virus scanner", or any other set of defined software, and you would actually make things worse, not better.

Of course you will disagree, because in your head security software is perfect and you can't perceive the massive problems that would result from your suggestion, since you're working with mental ideation primitives that don't correspond to anything that exists in the real world. There isn't much I can do about that, other than point it out.
Keyboard Manufacturers Are All Slackers
It seems logical to believe that one will produce a lot of mediocre work while on the (most likely long and arduous) journey to become a passionate "master".

Consistently mediocre work -- now that would be a crushing shame indeed.
Uh, this was killed a few minutes ago. Why re-post?

(And also, why was it killed?)

Original:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1020054
5 years review of Google Apple & Micro$0ft
Dear Mr. Steve Ballmer,

Just for your information, supporting open source projects, opening your own projects to the public, complying with open standards and not doing evil generates loads of money much more than one can make selling broken versions of wind0w$ vi$ta
Should Old Articles Be Forgot
Indian domains are becoming popular. I would have expected LinkedIn to go with one.
Brains, Vats, And Skeptics: The Matrix Question Revisited
Oasis Villas website - Mauritius
10 FICTIONAL books that will f**k up your reality (and make you smarter).
A5/1 has been publically known broken for _years_. I am struggling to see what is new in this story at all.
15 years ago you could say the same thing about different newspapers instead of sites.

That is true, but it didn't matter than because the publishing technology for newspapers limits them to a small geographic area. So old-style newspapers only compete (and have to differentiate themselves with) other newspapers in the area, not all newspapers in the country. This is what kept them going. It's no longer true today, which is what made news a commodity.
Possibly some sort of Yahoo integration instead, not as popular but good enough.
Top patent applications of 2009
Like building a business model on top of Twitter or Facebook, you are at the whim of another entity, for your financial security, and not for something easily replaceable, but you actual audience and/or content. Your options are either to diversify or develop actual contractual agreements with the company in question so you can't be just tossed out with a change of the terms of service.
This is why I like Clojure's pragmatic approach. FP doesn't solve every problem easily, but often your core challenge is handling state transitions. Clojure attacks mutable state better than most languages out there, lets you get functional when you want to, but still allows for reasonably easy imperative code for things like Java interop.
There's a remarkable amount of stupidity in the world when it comes to computers.

Governments seem to attract a particularly high density of computer-illiterate people. I wish I could understand why, but it truly boggles my mind.
There was an interesting discussion forming on the other submission that was killed.
Wow, this is easily among the top ten pages with the worst content / flashy distraction site of the year.
Right click on a tab, and select "Pin tab". It collapses the tab to just a favicon, and persists it across sessions.
There are keyboards out there that support more than 3 keys at once (for example the Gigabyte GK-K8000 which has support for 'n-key rollover').

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollover_(key)

http://www.gigabyte-usa.com/Products/Keyboard/Products_Overv...
I almost didn't realize that this is the Dadgum guy. (The original URL for this post is http://prog21.dadgum.com/54.html, and it's easier to read to boot.) He has vast experience and his articles tend to be excellent. If he has misgivings about FP they are worth taking seriously. Edit: it's clear in context that his misgivings are about 100% pure FP, and he still favors a nearly-entirely-functional style.
I think it works both ways.

There are inherently some changes that are extremely hard to make to a well-constructed functional program, and there are equally some changes that are hard to make to a well-constructed procedural program.

I would hypothesize there is no language paradigm in existence that provides optimal efficiency for implementing all possible types of architecture changes.
If you've designed something well, then all changes can be easily accommodated.

But to "design something well" requires omniscience, because it depends on understanding the problem, and in what ways that problem will likely change in future. It's a question of fact about the world, not an intellectual, mathematical or computational truth. When you are very familiar with a problem, you acquire this domain knowledge, much of it informally and unconsciously, and then you can design well... or, well enough for practical purposes.

Along the way, in the process of acquiring this domain knowledge, you will make mistakes, and you will need to change things. Fred Brooks: Build one to throw away. You will anyway. Oh, and then you get the second system effect, when you try to correct all the mistakes of the first disaster.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you like learning), most of us move on to new projects and new domains so quickly, that we never acquire that level of mastery of a problem domain. How many people have written the same kind of application three times from scratch?
Save for web in Photoshop is Command + Option + Shift + S, and I do it dozens of times a day. Every Mac I have ever used has been able to do this :)
You could compile to bytecodes using luac, if that is a concern.
Do I need to save their return values to avoid calling them too many times? Am I reusing a stale value where I should have called it again, and how should I know that without calling too many times? Do these hidden states need to be visible across multiple cores, and if so how do I do that without imposing a memory fence and a pipeline stall on every call? How does every unit test rewind all these hidden states back to their initial values, so they don't pollute each others' results? This change should be large and even painful, because you're inherently making the program harder to reason about and probably breaking a lot of code without knowing it.
Tell/Ask HN: My Location is different on iPod touch vs Laptop Google Map
I used the "Show my Location" feature to find out my current location using my laptop and my iPOD touch device's built in Maps. Apparently, the iPOD touch is showing that I am about 1 mile away. (It used to show the accurate location before)

I am using the same WiFi network for both(my home Comcast cable) and they are in the same internal private subnet effectively having the same public facing IP. I am curious how this is possible as I thought the IP is resolved to the location.
Somehow, the links in the article do not work for me (they all link back to the same article, and searching with various techniques for those links) does not result in anything useful.

But, overall I guess some FunctionalWeenie learnt about NoSilverBullet, to put it into C2-wiki terms (so don't take the mild burn too serious :) ).
My initial reaction was also "why would you". Take the "two most isolated functions in the entire codebase" and make them dependent on each other? OK, assuming there is a good reason (not given in the example) to do this, I'd say you achieve this by passing whatever bit of state data you need to drive the behavior in the various calls to functions A and B. No need for global variables to achieve this, nor is it really any easier or cleaner to use them.
Completely with you there. Safari was my primary browser (and has been for about a year) until a friend mentioned that Firefox 3.6b5 had some major retooling with respect to perceived performance (esp. in the address bar and page compositing engine).

I'm really enjoying it so far, but had to switch to the GrApple Yummy theme at the above link. The base Firelight treatment feels so bulbous with a lot of wasted vertical space and unnecessary large rounded elements.

I love this UI concept series, though - the proposed Windows design is gorgeous. I'm jealous of how beautiful Chrome and the new Firefox 4 concepts look with Aero compared to their bulgy gray counterparts on OS X.

Never thought I'd say that :-/
Your latter point is often ignored as inflation numbers are often taken as undisputed (or at least "what can you do about it") figures. There is tremendous bias in the calculation of inflation, although the BLS has done a great job of fixing this in the last decade or so. Unfortunately historical data will be incomparable because of these frequent revisions. See the Boskin Report for more details.
No. This guy is the real thing. He has been doing hard-core game programming since the early 80s and serious Erlang hacking since 1999 (!), and has a long record of thinking deeply about programming and writing about it. This is one of the few programming bloggers worth taking seriously.

Oh, and the links work fine in the original post (http://prog21.dadgum.com/54.html).
Livförsäkring
Skandias barnförsäkring finns i två olika varianter. Du väljer vilken som passar dig bäst. Båda försäkringarna täcker sjukdom och olycksfall. Med en barnförsäkring får du och ditt barn trygghet om någonting skulle hända.
To me YC is more of a first stringer compared to Techstars. They've proven their stuff. They've had plenty of exits. You know they can get stuff done.

Take techcrunch for example, a ton of YC startups get their own stories. Meanwhile Techstars just gets a single big "here are some techstar companies" with a list of their top 5 companies.

Given the choice, go for YC.

Think of Techstars as your safety school. It's a great school, but deep down you know that the only reason you are going there is because you got rejected by the school of your dreams.
It has to do with the in hardware device key mapping.

Most keyboards use resistance circuits to tell which key has been depressed. When you depress more than 1 key most of these designs cannot tell between the values.

Modifier Keys like shift, control are mostly separately monitored and thus independent.

See the matrix on this page:: http://www.instructables.com/id/Make-your-own-Roll-Up-Keyboa...
Functional Programming Doesn't Work (and what to do about it)
Same for me on windows -and I've done this on many machines and keyboards. there seems to be more to this than the article let's on.
I really don't like Wikipedia's mode of governance and I really don't trust Jimbo.

It's been a good experiment but I think that it's time to move to something that applies the lessons we've learned from WP.

WP is all under territorial control by posses and gangs of "watchers", who hawk over their pet articles and pounce on anyone who attempts to add something they'd rather not have appear.

Look at the recent backlash over the Sean Hannity waterboarding thing. They threatened the original participants, attempted to intimidate, invoked all sorts of inappropriate and backward rule applications, even had the page protected because the side that wanted the snippet included promised to see that it was included.

Do you think a normal person is going to last through all of that, wait until all of the things process on the other side, and then edit the page again to have their section re-added and go through all of that again? WP's content is determined by whichever group has enough time and connections to intimidate the other group into submission.

WP is supposed to be "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit". Let me just say that there's a reason WP is so populated with self-diagnosed "Aspies"; you have to be absolutely obsessed to get anywhere, and you have to be willing to tolerate lots of bureaucracy and useless crap. Most normal people are not going to play that.

EDIT: Bummed out to be getting downvotes. Downvotes are not "agree/disagree" buttons.
Must be Box2d. It's the only decent 2d physics engine available for as3, unless they used Haxe to built the swf and and accompany physics engine (http://haxe.org/com/libs/physaxe).
Assuming 350m users & $7.5m annual costs, Wikipedia 0nly requires $0.021 per person. Not much.
Privacy of 3.5 Billion Cellphone Users Compromised – GSM Code is Broken
Yes, I am reading the original posts now and he is right, the preceding posts are posts I remember reading and they do change the light shed by the articles.
Yes. From the end of the post:

"I contacted Hunter. I contacted Kuan. I contacted Stephanie. I even sent an e-mail to legal@google.com

"Stephanie "can't remember exactly" what the reason for the delay was. Her "memory is hazy". These are direct quotes in case you wondered. Kuan won't answer a simple question regarding his own I/O presentation. I guess he doesn't want to lie. If replying, Hunter emits random legal verbiage. The person who actually made the decisions is courageously hiding behind them."

This is not effective communication.
I think what you're saying here is close to what the OP is arguing. The title obscures this a little bit, but it's clear from the second paragraph that he's arguing against purely functional programming.
You are correct about how it works. Companies have (or buy) geo-ip data to correlate ip addresses with real world locations. These databases change frequently (IP's bought and sold, people's residential IP's changing).

There's a couple possibilities about why it is different. Maybe the maps app actually goes through Apple first, and there is a slight flaw in the most recent version of Apple's geo-IP database. Even if they both query Google for the location, it's possible that different sets of servers serve the mobile maps versus the web maps, and they are slightly out of sync with which databases they use.
I'm not sure this is a rebuttal, but...

No one disputes that sometimes imperative styles of programming are clearer, or more efficient. Efficient functional programming is a new topic that is growing in importance as it becomes clear that the future is rooted in highly parallel programming.

But these specific complaints mounted at Erlang don't really ring true to me. For one, it's idiomatic to pass state along in functions, and it's not difficult at all to write branching logic based on a variety of cases in state. Now, if you have hundreds of fields in your state you will surely find Erlang to be more awkward than other functional languages, because you can't do things like pattern match and run guards into dictionary structures. But this isn't a failure of "functional programming", it's probably more of the nature of Erlang. Erlang just isn't optimal for that kind of work.

It seems to me like the author's complaint is more "Erlang wasn't the best for my projects and programming style" rather than "Functional programming has failed." Erlang is written by engineers who understood their target domain very well and wrote a very elegant system for wrangling it. Game development wasn't exactly on that list of things Erlang was meant to do well. :)
Ask HN: The future of HN
Since (at least) the beginning of the Internet, a pattern has repeated: A group forms and has a culture. Over time, others join and the culture drifts to encompass the larger group. Some original members resent the drift. This happened when the net grew outside of universities and government and when AOL 'newbies' joined who didn't understand netiquette. It's happening now with HN, evidenced by a wider range of stories, more aggressive comments and periodic discussions about what to do about it.

The forces seem to be:

1) A growing community will increasingly post (and upvote) stories about a wider array of interests.

2) The new non-hacker visitor will increasingly enjoy front-page stories and become part of the community, to post and upvote.

3) This has to result in a dilution of the site focus to 'general interest' with a slight hacker tinge.

Counterforces could include an aggressive policing of stories and aggression. This would have a diluted effect over time as new users outnumber the old, unless the votes of older members count more. It's also counter to the spirit of the net to police too aggressively.

The site could be categorised into hacker/business/general interest/etc.

The hacker community (or YC-funded core) could up-and-move to another site, possibly with an invite-only rule to block TC.

What say you? What other scenarios are there?
I think that 99% of articles are not disputed, and those that are, it's just a part of the article.

And that's par for the course: there are things happening right now and people have different views on them. Might as well let the people who really care about the article fight over it. Do you have a better idea for who ought to have editorial control?

Also, I don't think we have reason not to trust Wikipedia's mode of governance and its founder. Until we have reason not to trust, we should trust, because so far, the results have been wonderful: all things considered, nobody thought Wikipedia could ever be nearly as great as it has turned out to be.