skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
okay, first of all you're getting awfully defensive and I did qualify my first reply with "This is purely anecdotal..."

So I'm open to being wrong about Croatia's attitude to having a immigrant community of muslims - it's just not what I saw.

"Its true that most refugees are trying to make it to Germany - but if Germany closes its doors, they wouldn't get stuck in the immediate neighbouring countries "

No, the Germans would never close the door per se, they'd just stall and delay things till the bordering countries end up having huge camps while the famous EU bureaucracy does it's thing. Macedonia was clever and quickly managed to get them all across the country and dump it off on the next guy. Croatia pulled off something similar.

And ofcourse Croatians aren't painting all muslims with the same brush - sorry if I gave that impression. But one group, the one they seemingly don't want, comes from a land of boogeymen full of religious extremism Al Qaeda and the IS while the other is their war-buddies/neighbors (and as far as I know hasn't yielded a single terrorist - though with all the money coming from Saudi and Turkey that may change..)
Bitcoin venture capital has all but dried up
Edit: Discussing mistakes and how to avoid them has a very useful place in a wise person's life. I ask everyone to understand that speaking about your recent successes is well and good under an appropriate context. For this particular thread, it would be most beneficial if we focus on any big mistakes we have made in 2015. Success stories are easy to find, so let us focus on the other side of the spectrum so that we can learn from one another's experiences, hopefully gaining a little bit of wisdom in the process. The value of security and risk avoidance is often elusive, but the collective value is real nevertheless.
You are totally right and i'm against patenting such obvious design choices like Apple's patent for "slide to unlock" and "glass with rounded corners". I'm not defending MS, just trying to explain the rationale behind this situation because the article is pretty shallow.
RIP Lemmy ...

Those kind of people don't die. They ascend. We have a new god of cigars and whiskey in the pantheon.
I would imagine that, if this starts becoming common knowledge, "regular" viruses will happily start exploiting the hell of this free elevator to SYSTEM privilege, as part of many other tools those malwares unfortunately have at their disposal.

The "anti-virus virus" could very well become the painfully ironic norm.
Why Some Physicists Are Saying Consciousness Is a State of Matter (2014)
This is a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10784861.
I can't sound it out. I'm used to a phonemic orthography.
I am not so sure. Do well as an undergrad, and then go and get a PhD at (1) a place with a respected name, (should have good quality staff and resources by default) or (2) someone at a lesser school, but is well respected in the discipline. I struggle to think of anyone I know that did not get a scholarship to fund their PhD. i.e. if you have to pay for it, perhaps you are doing it wrong...

I don't think where you did undergrad makes a whole lot of difference, if you are talented and motivated to pursue research. Where you go as an undergrad will dictate how much research you are exposed to during your degree however.
I agree good UI design offers utility, but often those "forced to come up with their own designs" are simply forced to kludge together a workaround rather than do what would come naturally. This hardship may sometimes spark innovation, true, but in other cases the effort and frustration might have been better spent pushing the envelope elsewhere.

And if the "invention" is obvious, developers (and users) really shouldn't have to pay the cost to license it.
Some Countries See Migrants as an Economic Boon, Not a Burden
Completely agree.

The "wealthiest" person alive today is some happy accountant in middle America with a great salary, good health, and happy family. Stable and well compensated work with plenty of leisure time and zero want for basic necessities.

And on top of all that, you have these crazily ambitious weirdos absolutely killing themselves to deliver to you all these cool toys and convenient services just to capture outsized economic surplus. Pretty sweet deal if you ask me.
Which is exactly my point. What's the point of making consumers wait that long?
> It's a tragic topic to put to a referendum though

How one can reach such conclusion is beyond me. People will discuss the question, and democratically decide. You'd be surprise the fierce debates that erupts among citizens when a serious question is on the table, and how everyone makes oneself enlightened before vote. This is what actual democracy is. This is how it should work everywhere for any serious issue.

Designating a cherry-picked representative who carries exactly zero obligation to hold his promises is NOT democracy, but elective oligarchy. Almost all countries calling themselves democracies certainly don't deserve the name.
Internet of Things Search Engine
"If The Big Short, Adam McKay’s adaptation of Michael Lewis’s book about the 2008 financial crisis and the subject of last month’s Vulture cover story, got you all worked up over the holidays, you’re probably wondering what Michael Burry, the economic soothsayer portrayed by Christian Bale who’s always just a few steps ahead of everyone else, is up to these days"

Wow, use some periods maybe?
"Swiss population would like money to be produced and distributed solely by a public organisation working for the common good, such as the National Bank." This is where the biggest fallacy lies.
American parents have become obsessed with their children being good at sports
Some things cannot be taught in what we consider a classroom.

Maybe they could start a new kind of school. A place with some enhanced programs that set you up for years of sleep deprivation and stressful situations to prepare for years of the same kind of lifestyle.

Then they would actually be teaching what it's like to start a company.
I see, good point.

I was saying in general, if something is released as open source, that doesn't usually come with a default immunity from patent litigation.
I didn't realize at first that the Physics arXiv blog was the author of this post. Here's the link to the abstract: http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219
Just go for a few years and get your degree in europe. Education in most countries is almost free of charge (between 100€ and 500€ a year)

So you can get a degree for 7k€ (if you live relatively well if you are thrifty it will be less than that. this without working part time, this includes living expenses) per year. So in total 21k€ max. That is 23k USD(Jan, 2016 rate). That is what you would pay in 1 year in a low level college in the US, without the living expenses! (All this even if you are a foreigner)

Why pay that when you can study in the Sorbonne or in the Freie Universität Berlin? There are even degrees in English.

Admittedly one needs to talk the language (french, german) but it is definitely worth it. Not to talk about the experience you get for the money.

PS: This is what I did, currently doing my masters degree in Engineering in France.
There's a bit more safety than that. When you enter the country on an H1b, you get an I94 that is valid until your visa expires. If you then lose your visa (because you've left the company or got fired), you can still legally stay in the country until your I94 expires. The caveat is, an immigration officer can take away your I94 at any time, at which point you would be forced to leave. However, as long as you avoid immigration officers, you are not breaking any laws by staying and looking for another job.
Meet the customers you don’t want to love your product
Seems crazy that it's not being open sourced even though they make sure to state they use open source tools on their site.
> The idea usually is that the presence of an H1B means that someone local does not exist to do the job, which means that a company would otherwise have to pay more than the going rate to poach someone else from another company. Then the company losing the employee has to pay more to poach from somewhere else, and so on, until eventually everyone who is suitable for such a position is making more.

In simple economic terms, yes, supply and demand exist, and if you reduce the supply of software engineers their salary will go up. However, canning the H1-B program is only one way to reduce supply. One could also limit the number of computer science degrees granted by US universities, and that would increase software engineer wages too. Is such protectionism justified? Probably not. But a lot of people seem to take an "ends justifies the means" approach when arguing against immigration.
That's what I have been thinking how the system should be.

Just print eg 3% more money each year. Give eg 30% of the new money to the state for its expenses, give the rest equally divided to all the population. End of story.

No need for IRS, no need for filling taxes, layers, tax accountants, tax checks. The amount would be insignificant (as a percent) for the rich, significant for the poor, thus helping them more. The only tax would be the specifc controlled inflation.

Looks to me as a very simple, nice system. ..Any thoughts anyone, why this would or wouldn't be a good idea, and / or how it could possibly be improved?
Not only that, but it makes the stupid assumption that a cure will be just one or a few doses. The cure could very well mean taking a pill for the rest of your life.

Hell, if you told cancer patients "we can control it, but it involves taking a pill once a day for the rest of your life. The cancer will not shrink, but it will never metastasize to other sites and you will not die from it as long as you take the pill." -- they will KILL to get ahold of it.

That would be the way for an evil company to extract maximum profit. And that's assuming there's a monopoly or a collusion between pharma companies (in reality, there is big competition).

Until that becomes a reality (if ever), people should shut up about cancer conspiracy theories.
It could. Not a bad thing, the HotSpot VM in OpenJDK is incredibly fast.
Yeah, the green card process is hopelessly bureaucratic. Even an employee moving within the same company from San Francisco to Silicon Valley requires restarting the process from scratch.
I mostly work on security or network stuff, and mostly in areas that are broken. D3 is one of few projects I've encountered which actually makes me happy software exists -- it makes beautiful and useful things, easily, for a lot of people. Thanks for your work in creating it!
Campaign to make CA politicians wear their donors' logos
There are people who actually enjoy working 12 hour days. My brother is like that. Not working makes him miserable. If he's not bashing his head against some difficult problem, he isn't happy.
Interesting coincidence: I just got my first LCD monitor this week.
It's totally unfair and undemocratic for some people to be able to print money and for the rest to not be able to. Gives the former huge advantage, and creates economic inequality.
In 1982 a new color console TV cost more than a decent used car. Well worth repairing.
crdb: are you my separated-at-birth twin? I've been looking for you all my life.

These are my thoughts exactly, down to my favorite Dickensian analogy.

Everybody's favorite pastime, pointing fingers on China on everything from "freedoms" to the environment, is really more of a reflection on the commentators' astonishing lack of historical perspective.

There's no shortage of fifty-year-olds around China today (say, about a population of Sweden's worth) that will tell you how they were plucked out of the university and sent to work the fields for years during the Cultural Revolution, and point out the exact level -- somewhere between knee- and waist-deep in shit -- that the country was at prior to Deng Xiaoping. I'm sure anybody that witnessed the change from then to now would have a richer and more nuanced opinion on China's government.
I had a recent conversation with a McAfee engineer regarding the use of MD5 in the whitelisting system. If it has "seen" an executable before, it assumes it clean and doesn't scan it, based on a hash.

He absolutely promised me that:

* No stronger hash exists
* MD5 collisions are literally impossible

I pointed him to a paper his own research department released, referring to the Flame malware utilising an MD5 collision, and he informed me he had previously looked at it, and it was a "typo" that he would get fixed.

This is a senior developer responsible for many of the design decisions in the product. It's frightening.
> I don't think you should be able to patent designs which are just basic compositions of symbols/motifs which have existed for thousands of years.

I don't think you should be able to patent anything which is written in english, as it is a basic composition of letters which have existed for thousands of years.
Is that why the shape of the fake pen for that Bimoji Kanji Writing NDS video game shaped like a brush?
Thank you for your reply, Aloha. Just to clarify, I didn't say the Democrat party was the only one perpetuating the notion of victimhood. Other organizations do as well, but the Democrat party are the biggest, in my opinion. Here's why I feel that way:

The Democrats like to hoist around this big banner of Civil Rights and claim that it was them who brought equality to America in 1964, but this is a lie. The Democrats set civil rights back by almost 100 years. During the Reconstruction era, it was Republicans (Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner, in particular) who steamrolled Democrat president Andrew Johnson and got huge civil rights bills and the 14th Amendment passed over Johnson's veto. These Republicans granted the freedmen citizenship and the right to vote, much to the chagrin of the Democratic party. They also outlawed segregation, made it illegal to deny public services and amenities to the freedmen, and attempted to pay restitution to the freedmen in the form of 40 acres of land and enough money to build a house. The Democrats blocked that from happening though. Basically, the freed slaves were given every civil right that black people enjoy today back in the 1800s, but when the Republicans lost power in Congress, the Democrats took it all away.

Some like to distance themselves from this history and claim that during the early 20th Century that the Democrats and Republicans switched roles, but this is also an attempt to rewrite the facts. In truth, Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, did sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but the Democrats didn't want it, and it was only because of the Republicans in Congress that the act passed and became law. Ever since then, especially right before an election, you'll notice that it is the Democrats who race-bait and try to get everyone all stirred up again. It is Democrats who preach the false narrative that Republicans hate black people. In other words, they are using, as they always have, racial prejudices, or at least the illusion of such, to get votes. I was born in the 1960s, and I've seen a lot of Democrat candidates promise the moon to black voters, but I've never really seen them deliver. The state of equality between blacks and whites has largely gone unchanged. In my opinion, The Democrat party uses and abuses black people to get power.

Please don't misunderstand. I know that Republicans have screwed things up too, and I know that there are segments of the nation where racial prejudices are still thriving. I'm simply giving my reasoning for calling out the Democrat party in my original post. If you'd like to discuss that further, or point out where I'm wrong, I'd be happy to have that discussion. The entire purpose of my original post was to open up a dialogue and offer some things to think about.
The problem with this particular algorithm is that I needed to have a lot of data to make it sort of work. I'm not sure how your AI was trained to play that game, sounds like a difficult problem-
Technically the FDA is not responsible for seizures, but they do deal with infringements. Sure you can get things in that should not come in (after all cocaine and other drugs get in). It is still not a wise idea to start doing this.
Slack and HipChat Are on the Verge of Launching Chat Wars
Your plans suddenly change, and a flight must be switched. Soon you are paying a flight-change fee of $200 or so.

(I really hate being a defender of the airline industry, but here we go anyway)

If you're not sure about your plans you have three options:

You can wait until you're sure to buy a ticket

You can buy a ticket at a higher priced, refundable fare

You buy a cheap non-refundable ticket and risk losing on it if you can't take the flight, or need to change it

Flying, overall, got so incredible cheap. I read (meaning I can't give you a source, but it sounds realistic) that taking a flight from Europe to Australia 40 years ago required 8 average monthly salaries. Today it's less than half an average monthly salary.

Sure the perks got less and less and while flying may have been a glamourous, champagne drenched affair then those times are certainly gone; at least in cattle class.

I'm always bugged by whiners complaining that they bought a return flight from New York to London for 399$ and then complain that they can't change it, because they just don't seem to grasp the concept of non-refundable. If you want refundable, that can be had. For 4x the price.

There are a lot of valid gripes about the industry. From penny pinching, to ridiculous fees (like 10EUR to have your boarding pass printed) to rotten "customer service", etc.

But if you buy a cheap ticket, which is sold with restrictions that are communicated up-front then stop whining.
I agree with the idea that postgres should have better clients for Windows. It's the major reason I never used it for anything serious. Even commercial tools lack behind.

What I mostly miss is a good tool focused on writing SQL like Management Studio from MS SQL Server. Something that allows me to easily open complex large scripts in a full editor, execute parts or all of it easily and get results back. Not much gui, not many wizards, but a good experience. Most tools I find for pg are either full console or full guis with too much focus on wizards. It's like the people using it are uncomfortable with SQL for some reason.

But having followed pg for 15 years or so, I don't think they want or need to be the most popular database. They just want to be a damn good database server, and they are.
Maybe this can be another machine learning problem.
Rainforest QA (YC S12) Is Hiring US/International Remote or SF-Based Engineers
Pi-Forall: How to use and implement a dependently-typed language [video]
You don't sound negative, you sound very reasonable that's why I deleted the parent comment, happy new year!
It's blue, uses tabbed toolbars, and gel effects. None of those things are new (though Microsoft really, really wants to pretend it invented tabbed toolbars).

Yes, they look the same, and Corel is certainly making the same UI choices Microsoft did so their users coming from Microsoft platforms feel more familiar. Do we want to stop companies from doing that?
Initialize.css – A complete and customizable collection of CSS best practices
> There were holdouts in Europe originally, some central banks were slow to adopt fractional reserves. They were trounced by the economies of other European nations and their superior access to liquid capital.

Which countries were these?
Of course, when all else fails, you can always fallback to SQLDeveloper http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/sql-develo..., install the postgres jdbc driver https://jdbc.postgresql.org/download.html and ease into Postgres with your usual Oracle client.

It's especially useful if you're already using it on your day/consulting job as it naturally blends into the environment.
"Dreams up" sounds a lot like modern "handcrafted with love" marketing.
An acquaintance of mine was recently arrested on suspicion of stealing a double bass from in front of a conservatory of music. Evidently, a bass was reported as stolen, and a complete description of the instrument was provided to police. Surveillance footage showed him leaving the conservatory carrying a bass, and that was sufficient to obtain a search warrant for his home. Never mind that he's a bassist, and the footage showed him carrying his own instrument. There can clearly be only one bass in existence, and the one on the surveillance tape must be it.

Upon searching his apartment, the police found not one, but two double basses in his possession. Never mind that he had documentation to show that they both belonged to him, and never mind that neither one fit the description of the instrument that had been stolen. There can clearly be only one bass in existence, and these ... two ... basses, somehow, are ... it? I dunno, these aren't the same maker, and they don't have the same identifying marks, but hey, they have four strings! The one that's missing has four strings! Good enough, he must have just hidden the stolen bass under a rug or something. (They're easy to hide, right?) Let's just make an arrest and go home.

So they arrested him, and (again, despite having conclusive proof that neither was the instrument in question) seized both basses, along with his cell phone, and held him on $100,000 bail.

Astonishingly, charges were ultimately dropped for lack of evidence.

This was in San Francisco -- about as un-podunk, un-middle-America, and un-Republican as you can get without showing a passport. Lazy police work is everywhere. It has nothing to do with politics or ignorance, and it doesn't really even have to do particularly with the war on drugs (although that certainly gives the police more opportunities to brandish their laziness publicly). It's a combination of pressure to show action by making arrests and an utter lack of accountability when those arrests turn out to be specious, and those two factors exist everywhere in this country.
Absolutely. I was hoping for some actual information, not speculation. My eldest step daughter uses duolingo all the time and loves it, but she's a language nerd. I do wonder if it's having as much effect as it could do, and that article didn't answer the question.
There were certainly strong contacts between the Scandinavians and the Kievan Rus, however the exact relationship between them aren't known.
Free Basics protects net neutrality
Google.com gets 64/100 on PageSpeed
Going to be picky here and clarify that Microsoft - and the small niche of people who run wikipedia - want people to call it ribbon. But anyone who's used major software from Lotus or KDE knows that tabbed toolbars are tabbed toolbars and Microsoft didn't invent them in 2007.
The loans are easy to come by because the fractional reserve requirements allow the banks to create money which they use to provide loans.

When the government creates the same amount of money and directly spends it on infrastructure as opposed to loaning it to infrastructure providers... what changes other than the fact that the infrastructure becomes cheaper to the public since the provider does not need to pay back the loan?
I don't find it that hard to believe. All companies I ever saw using postgres are using windows for development.

Note that I'm not from the US, I'm from Brazil. Here windows pretty much dominates the landscape.

But this is also important: while the US is currently quite apple-centric, most countries are not. And although the US concentrates a lot of tech companies, it's still only 4% of the world.
You can't patent written things, that's copyrights.