skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The other day I watched Superman Returns and Man of Steel back to back. Spoilers follow, but I think I have a point.

The symbolism in Superman Returns was pretty obvious. In addition to the patriotism carried by the colours of his costume, he's obviously a kind of modern-day Superjesus: he's a superhuman only son sent to Earth to protect (save) all of mankind. There's even the entire death and rebirth aspect: he is beaten, then stabbed as the final blow with a lethal weapon (like the spear of destiny), he falls (in a posture reminiscent of Jesus on the cross) and (nearly) dies before being rescued. Then he dies again, staying in coma (for days?) before rising again.

The symbolism is there, it's easy to spot if you are looking for it but it blends in nicely enough that you can watch the film without paying any attention to it. It's subtle enough that you can argue whether it's symbolic or not and what is or isn't intended to carry a metaphor. After all the film is intentionally corny and mostly sees itself as a sequel to the famous Superman series that preceded it by a few decades.

Then there's Man of Steel. It doesn't even try to hide its symbolism. Kal-El asks a priest in a church for guidance whether to surrender himself in front of a stained glass window showing Jesus asking Yahweh for guidance whether to surrender himself. Kal-El drops out of the spaceship to save mankind in a static Jesus pose. His father's hologram ("His" "Spirit") says that he sent his only son to save mankind. And so on and so forth. Not to mention the facepalm-inducing moments where Kal-El points out how all-American he is despite being an (immigrant) space alien. The American/Christian symbolism is so obtuse it was even used to market the film to Christian audiences. It's less of a hidden allegory and more of a religious pamphlet.

What I'm trying to get at (other than Superman Returns clearly being the superior, if underrated, Superman movie and Man of Steel being a US-Christian circle jerk) is that there is a range. Some works of literature go out of their way to rub their symbolism in your face. In others it is present but more nuanced. In some it is subtle put still easy to find if you look for it. And in some any symbolism is merely a projection of what you are trying to find in it.

I would agree that most of the symbolism students of literary criticism tend to spend their energy on falls in the last category where you can show a work to handful of critics and get a lifetime's worth of different interpretations.

But as much as I personally despise the field as a whole, some works do carry intentional symbolism. And some works unintentionally provide symbolism when read in certain contexts.

When you look at "old" literature (i.e. literature that has long outlived its authors), most of the literature that has survived to the modern day is literature that provided meaning across the various generations. It's a legitimate question to ask "why" and "how" -- even if literary studies as a field tends to be more obsessed with the "what".
The 6502 Gets Microprogrammable Instructions (1980)
This is not just a blog post. Users can help create the general specs for this idea.
tablefunc() :-)
Do you also take offence to the term "The South" being used in the US to refer to places which are not, in global terms, very far south?
Here's the thing, a client who doesn't intend to pay won't care about the discount, and discounting rates is a tell that the client doesn't need to pay you your full rates regardless. The problem isn't affordable rates, it's non-payment. In my experience, lower rates tend to correlate with non-payment because it allows the rationalization "He didn't expect to be paid everything he asked for anyway."

Not discounting and retainers as standard terms of service are filters for bad clients.
So the idea is that if I'm an early-stage startup, I can set up a PFS cluster early on, store my logs there, and then I'll still be happy with that infrastructure 3 years later? Like the data pipelines that I write early on will still work, but so will the ones I add that join logs data with CRM records, experiment data, etc?

How hard is the extra step of setting up a PFS cluster? How much harder is it (how much code does it add) to append to a log in PFS than to a log in S3?
The problem is, if Blizzard knows of an infringement and fails to attempt enforcement, anyone can come along and legally claim "Hey, they didn't hassle this (small time) guy, so they have no right to hassle us". So the well-meaning hacker guy with a cool prototype opens the door for Zynga to come in and make StarCraftVille, which I'm fairly sure would be not so well received.
As the comic is clearly about literary studies in particular, I wonder whether the number is intentional.
Great news. I've been running RC1 with no issues whatsoever for a while.

I recommend everyone who has time to tinker and who has a supported device to upgrade their router to OpenWRT - it's so much better than any stock firmware I've used.

Minor caveat - some 1Gb hardware routing backplanes might be faster with the original firmware if OpenWRT doesn't support them; However, unless you're routing 1Gb/s between e.g. LAN and WAN, you should be fine.

Thanks, OpenWRT team.
I was referring to the NCAA athletes :)
Yup. I remember a few years back when the Mississippi flooded again, there was a news helicopter video shot of the inundated farmland.

What stood out, literally, was one farm house high and dry that had been built on a bulldozed mound.
Perhaps... but it's also psychological science. People routinely play out that exact pattern.
Not sure if it's the same one, but there is a SDL-based port that is up-to-date. There's also native mac ports in various levels of completeness.

Casey recently added a github repo (with auth) and so it's a lot easier to keep up with the changes.
> but what if you need to do anything to the tablet (updates, new app, etc)?

Usb mouse and keyboard.
I think the idea is the machine only allows one keyboard and one mouse, and if you insert another input device you have to explicitly enable it. This would probably stop 90% of attacks.
This is an often-seen case, I think. People have a concept in their head they want to see attached to a popular saying and when along comes something that kind of fits the bill, it gets used as the bearer of the message, regardless of its actual original intent. More mutated examples are proverbs like "the proof is in the pudding" and "the exception that proves the rule", which express concepts people want expressed and attached to easily recognizable sentences. Nobody really reads the poem, they just hear the words and the popular concept attached to them. You can probably find a lot more examples like that.
Sorry for the confusion; like jtr1, I was referring to a broader tendency, and not you in specific. I shouldn't have quoted you directly there.
The manuals built in to Emacs are good, check M-x info.
> There was never any evidence that a few decorative pixels hurt the user.

Is there any evidence that removing them does?

> The HIG wasn’t about aesthetics, it was about interaction.

> It was based on research, not trends.

It's not about interaction now? It's not about research now? In which ways isn't it?

I believe skeumorphism is just about aesthetics and trends. Well, actually I don't, I'm not sure what I should think I'm not aware of any research and can't make a good argument either way. Unlike the author I don't pretend I can though.

There might be a problem, it might just be a figment of the authors imagination. In either case articles like this one certainly are a problem.
Came here to mention this. Aside from now()/transaction_timestamp() and clock_timestamp() there's also statement_timestamp() that returns the start time of the current statement.
How to Create an Online Form That Customers Will Want to Fill Out
My experience with literary studies can be summarized with a single anecdote:

My highest scoring exam in literary studies was about a book of which I had only read the plot summary on Wikipedia. I scored higher by literally making things up than by trying to apply logic.
I wouldn't, but I expect many New Yorkers might take issue with being called southerners. And southerners might take issue with a "Hack the South" name on an event held in Vermont.
> Would a HackAfrica event having nothing to do with African problems be appropriate?

Yeah I would imagine that would just be a hackathon taking place in Africa.

Unfortunately, I think you're just causing a stink for no reason, and you're not too familiar with the undergrad 'hacker' culture.

Take a look at these names and tell me which ones you don't like: https://mlh.io/seasons/f2015/events

Something tells me it will be a lot of them.
Deconditioning Stickers
"so apple legal call was not a threat. it was a request. b.c. jony ive was personally offended by our soundboard. what world do i live in?"[1] - by the author Amy Hoy

[1]: https://twitter.com/amyhoy/status/642446087802982400
No, she doesn't. She uses the train to wander between several free crash pads. Not really the same thing as "living" on a train.
Yeah, it wasn't written clearly. I think what was meant was "A major monthly fashion magazine has 100 people on staff. I am the only staff member for my fashion magazine."
Small Pleasures [inspirational – short movie] (2008)
DeepMind: Continuous control with deep reinforcement learning
Looking back through Github's DMCA history, Tecnick.com has sent a fair number of DMCA takedown notices in the last couple months. Looks like they're in crackdown mode.
would kickstarter itself be exposed to any liability in cases like this?

edit: I can't find the original court complaint so I can't find if it names Kickstarter in addition to Altius.
Straightening Loops: How to Vectorize Data Aggregation with Pandas and NumPy
Except not, because satellites are now hardened against this kind of radiation as a side effect of hardening against cosmic rays, etc.

source: the article
Show HN: Instacreep – View the main Instagram feed as someone you’re following
The more faithful comment would read:

And here I am at the beginning of a 278 comments thread where they are all alike. And although they do seem to be saying the same thing, it appears they get the same amount of upvotes. Anyhow, when I'm finished, I will give a sigh and say I, I read and spent my attention better because the other unread comment was not read by me and that made all the difference.
Oracle customer explains audit threats
Sure. But they are few and far between and absolutely do not have the same SLAs as someone like an Oracle, NEC, IBM etc. They are generally mom+pop shops. It doesn't really cut it for enterprises which is generally where you are finding Oracle instances.
That is not the case, and I apologize for the lack of clarity. I am not totally opposed to patents, and I think your examples undermine your argument since they describe innovations that are clearly patentable (whereas my mention of Uber applying for a patent on surge pricing is highly questionable under the Prior Art standard).

My main problem is the use of capital to establish market dominance by indirectly buying out the public commons. Taxpayers arguably subsidized the development of Cornell's robotics department, with the benefits of their research being available across the whole economy (possibly through patent licensing), but by hiring away all the staff at once Uber has indirectly appropriated a chunk of that public subsidy.

Now all the individual scientists who worked there are independent agents who presumably liked the terms of the offers they received and also wanted to continue working with each other. One could say that the human capital in the lab was undervalued by the public funding option, but one could equally argue that Uber has helped itself to a large consumer surplus (qua hoarding the supply of available robotics scientists) with the joint effect of denying their availability to competitors, and increasing the price the public will have to pay to re-establish a comepetitive department, if it can do so at all.

There is no guarantee that this will result in an increase in robotics innovation from the private sector. It might suit Uber equally well to pay the robotics scientists to sit around and do nothing or otherwise fritter away the investment, as long as the scientists' absence from the marketplace of ideas disadvantages Uber's competitors. In other words, you don't need your own robot car, you just need to make it harder for anyone else to build robot cars that could compete with you.

I do not want to suggest that Uber has evil motives here, by the way - I have no idea what the firm's plans or goals are. I'm just pointing out that acquisition of a resource does not automatically lead to greater economic efficiency. We've all seen examples of ;arge firms buying up potentially disruptive competitors in order to bury them.
Array are very useful in ad-hoc queries since you can create arrays with the array_agg() aggregate function and then use those arrays for lot's of handy things.
I don't think it was kept secret to diminish embarrassment or save face. The impact on satellites was an outcome of the test. It was part of the weapon's overall effectiveness. How well your weapons work on specific targets, even those outside the test area, is exactly the type of information you try to keep out of enemy hands.
I would be interested to find out what the product was and how it evolved over time.
Xah Lee has trolled Lisp groups for years. It's well known that much of his 'advice' is useless. The number of bullshit posts by him is a bignum. His comp.lang.lisp trolling is legendary.

Nothing 'ad homenim' or mean - just saying how it is.
AppDynamics which I know very well is used by web shops. Very few of those are using Oracle and it wouldn't surprise me at all if they were moving to something else.

The majority of Oracle instances however are in the back rooms of enterprises.
The original Unix init system (1972)
Online as in "hlp file that's shown when you press F1". At the time online meant "not printed" :-)
Ask HN: Programming for non-programmers?
I would like to teach some friends how to use scripting to speed up basic tasks. I regularly write scripts to do stuff like bulk download photos, downsize MP3s for copying to my phone, renaming files, etc. Sometimes a non-programmer friend will talk about some mundane task he spent a lot of time on, and I cringe and think, if only you knew how to script!

I was wondering what ideas other HN'ers have for essential programming things non-programmers should learn. Also, are there any good books or resources on pragmatic/applied programming?
That's an interesting argument. I haven't read the essay, so I don't have an informed opinion, but it doesn't especially convince me. The argument that the Wikipedia page mentions, for example (the one about Balzac), says that we can never know what Balzac intended. That's not the same as Balzac not knowing what he intended, so that argument is fallacious.
Flat design looks nice, but provides less affordances.

In practice, flat designs have less detail, so convey less information. This leads to uncertainty/doubt/cognitive load where there was none before.

Compare flat to skeumorphic designs:

* What gestures can I perform on this UI element?

* Where is the button/what can I click on?

-or better yet-

* What state is the iOS keyboard's shift key in (activated, deactivated, capslocked)?

Apple isn't the only culprit, Android/Material design is similarly flat and less usable.
This. Downplaying the importance of ideas is a popular sentiment and is true to a large extent but there is a devilish side to it. Saying that execution is all that matters feels good to a professional engineer because this is what he does all day and what he is good at. Sadly, unused idea-generation skills slowly deteriorate (arguably this process begins in school when you are handed your first homework). So it is important to exercise these skills now and then by generating some ideas (however small) which are your own and not handed to you by some "idea guy"! (and of course execute them to the point when they come into contact with reality)
I guess you better let everyone know that their web platform isn't secure unless they are using a SQL database with stored procedures. Which would make PSN, Steam, iCloud, Office365, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter all insecure right ?

Generally if you have exposed your db credentials it's because something has gone very wrong i.e. your entire host has been compromised in which case stored procedures aren't going to save you.
what a malicious lie. I have written some 10 packages, at least hundred thousand lines of emacs lisp since 2005, all public in github or on my website.
http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/xah_emacs_modes.html

the only borrowed code i can think of now, now named xah-extend-selection in xah-fly-keys, by Nikolaj Schumacher, fully credited in the inline doc still. (and that function is also in ergoemacs-mode, fully credited still, now lead by Matt F.)

Any code, that possibly may be considered borrowed, i'm painstaking to give credit, often taking sometimes a hour to find the person's REAL NAME correctly (as opposed to nicknames) (if public), personal site url or blog url or social network url if any, to link to, painstakingly ask the which url he prefers, and often ask permission too when it is clearly not necessary. One can find lots of “i learned this from xyz” in my website.

I learned emacs lisp, starting in 2005, the first 5 years with much help from comp.emacs or gnu.emacs.help newsgroup, and freenode's irc emacs channel, and emacs wiki. This is also fully credited.
Xah's Emacs Tutorial: Acknowledgment
http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/thanks.html
linked at the bottom of my emacs tutorial.

I know lisp before. Read entire Scheme r4rs and 75% of SICP in 1998, 1999. These can be verified in newsgroup. I coded Wolfram Language for 6 years before 1999, and worked at Wolfram Research for half a year.
I have several eassys documentinging these facts. For example:
Xah Lee's Computing Experience (Impression Of Lisp from Mathematica)
http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/Personal_dir/xah_comp_exp.html

personally, i generally don't borrow code, because i'm rather one of those weird or aloof guy with meticulous control of things, down to every character placement. In my elisp life since 2005 to today, i must have stolen ideas, concepts. I can't recall explicitly which at the moment, but i can say in good faith that any non-trivial concepts i've used in my project i've given acknowledgement.

Note: i've been considered a troll in comp.lang.lisp and other newsgroups from about 2000 to 2010. There were many heated arguments, and there are some who will say negative things about me wherever my name is mentioned. I do not think of myself as a troll, and have written many essays on this.
Netiquette Anthropology: a Tale of Tech Geekers
http://xahlee.info/Netiquette_dir/troll.html

PS unrelated but instead of a separate post: I want to thank many people who have helped a year ago. That was a big help. Thank you. I do dish-washing part-time, and am ok.
It's interesting that Chariot can sell a bus ride for barely more than the (heavily subsidised) MUNI costs.

In my limited experience though, it seems that when I ride the MUNI I'm the only person actually paying a fare. Everybody else either has some kind of pass or is fare evading.
Meet the Man NASA Paid $18,000 to Lie in Bed for 70 Days Straight
Show HN: JSON-Schema validator Ajv – the fastest and the most compliant
Thank you :-)

Convincing people has not been a problem so far. Because its usually the entrepreneurs whom we have worked with that refer us to their friends.

Also, you don't have to pay 9k at once, its usually milestone based or weekly. There is no lock-in. The entrepreneur can leave whenever they want if they don't like the program.

Btw, I really appreciate your questions and suggestions. Is it ok, if I put these questions on ideatostartup?

Thanks.
It's 1.6 times faster than the second place (is-my-json-valid) according to this benchmark: https://github.com/ebdrup/json-schema-benchmark
If I knew someone was deploying from one of my repos, changing my code to make their site ALL PONIES ALL THE TIME U GUISE would honestly occur to me.

It would occur to me, and I might not be strong enough to resist.

PONIES!
> Google has a big automatic driving research operation, but to make money from it, they will have to get into the auto business in a big way. That's a huge, risky investment. Also, making cars has lower margins than search ads, which means Google's stock would go down if they did that.

This argument assumes that Google would want to generate from the sale of the car itself. Such a scenario seems unlikely to me. The car is simply a new platform - like the web and mobile devices - for Google to deploy their service layer on top of and collect more user data and deliver more ads.
One+Of+Best+Affiliate+Programs+75%+Payout
Actually no. HackTheNorth is unique on that list. Every other one seems, to me, accurate in terms of geography. All but a couple are named after the unique place where they are being held. Those with regional descriptors (Desert Hacks) seem accurate. But only the waterloo event uses both "Hack" as a verb and addresses a region totally outside of its location. It is also the only one to include "the", suggesting that the thought process behind the name was slightly different.
very cool.

practically thinking, why not buy a large touch screen and use some sort of stylus instead of this white board?

in both cases, the user needs to buy special hardware. so i would think the costs would be comparable.

genuine question, not diminishing your work
[A store owner says] “I would say it like this, man: If you talk to anyone who owns an adult novelty shop, they will tell you they’ve been taxed out the ass double or triple before any other business[...]”

It's like a new genre coming into exitence before our very eyes...seriously though, the reporter is right in observing that this could have complex and far-reaching consequences, eg leading to the classification of goods by the identity of the seller rather than any inherent qualia of the goods themselves, a principle which could be generalized into other fields - like the unforseen consequence of operator overloading in OOP, for example.

It's not an obvious HN story, but I think it is of interest due to these potential second-order effects.
Setting Up a Data Warehouse with AWS Redshift and Ruby
After reading this, my guess would be that someone in marketing probably bought these from some vendor without understanding them very well or understanding why people would be freaked out by that.

It appears to be a keyboard emulator that simply types winkey+R http://[some URL]

It's (sadly) a well-known fact that all unknown USB devices should be considered malicious unless proven otherwise. This is why there are so many things like http://www.umbrellausb.com/
Interesting read. This re-enforces the theory that don't start a company just because.. The writer stated they didn't have any clear idea as to what they wanted to work on. why did they choose that particular idea? A bit of an insight into the thought process as to how they arrived at that conclusion would have been good.
That's good to know. Thanks for the information.

(c) The person who posted this does a lot of blogging / public speaking about software. He tweeted that he published this. He posted 2 of the links you posted. See: https://twitter.com/@searls
Macworld UK Ends Print Magazine