skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to think like that when I was a CS student back in 2000; “You can't beat Microsoft; their stuff is the best and you would be mad not to join their camp.”, all the while scoffing at those who used alternative OSes and browsers. At some point though I started to grasp the bigger context of software and the social impact it has, and started doubting my youthful sycophantic zeal. Then I switched to Phoenix (Firefox's forefather) and started delving into that Linux thing people were talking about soon after. Now as an adult software developer I do take the ethical side of the equation into account, and I can't imagine ever relinquishing what little control I have over my data and my computers to mega-corporations without a fight.

I don't know what the best way forward is, but as long as Firefox is a decent browser (and it is) I'm doing my part by simply using it, recommending it to those who would benefit from it, and helping out here and there by submitting bugs and helping people fix their websites. I do know that giving in is not constructive.
I can't download the posts of forums like comp.lang.lisp, and I can't disable javascript in firefox with one click, so forget about any applaud from me. The browser I would like is nothing like this and I want a javascript free browsing experience in which content is important and display not so much, sorry css fans. Today web is about selling things and propagating noise and today browsers are a perfect tool to propagate more noise, linkbaits are the norm. The pityful technical enhacements of noise propagators is not what I am interested about. To be somewhat positive, anything Ungoogled sound to be a good thing, I am expecting the next interesting post to be about a very small company building the new web with a small browser whose code you can trust and check.
Yeah, SEO "experts" would jump on that!
I assure you we have stupidity here too, it's a global trait. While this one makes sense, there's also a proposed "Chemicals tax" for 2017, taxing electronics (phones/tablets/games consoles/etc) per weight, regardless of contents. So what we waste the most (phones/tablets) will barely pay for anything, while TV's which can last 5-10 years will get more expensive.
Ah, that is very interesting. I am not knowledgable about Japanese culture, so my answer was addressing "why pay with Bitcoin" generally.
Heaps of old stuff is broken because of planned obsolescence. Is it not a waste trying to repair that rubbish that was originally designed to break soon and hard and expensive to repair? Lowering tax for companies that produce sustainable products seems more efficient to me.
This isn't going to defend content that threatens the "national security", age of consent, and copyright laws of the States. So isn't it just a declaration that Google wants to be the imperialist content police of the internet, spun under a more benevolent-seeming light?
Finally a way to get the dark web marketplaces incomes flowing back into the economy!
Technically, Chromium is open source, but Chrome isn’t.
Does your programming language or framework not offer an unaccent (aka ASCII fold) function?
Me too.

Took 9 years, and 4 doctors till someone went, "Huh... Let's get you an MRI."

Still not 100% diagnosed, but its in the fibro family. Which has its own issues with doctors disbelieving its existence.

I struggle, looking at the medical world.

Psychology is a really young science. Yet, a lot of the unknowns get passed to it, rather than an admittal that "we don't know".

It might be fear, (getting sued), or arrogance (we know just about everything), or another reason.

The result is the same.

You have victims who don't have the knowledge required to advocate for themselves, and a tendency for the industry to place the entirety of the responsibility on them. [0].

Its hard. So hard.

Where to draw the line, of whose responsible, and what ethical considerations a researcher should take into account, is a hard task. One that I am certainly not capable of... But it needs greater thought.

[0] That is my experience, in my town, in my nation. Its anecdotal, and should be taken with a grain of salt.
I use TeXStudio.

Currently, I am working on my undergraduate thesis book. TeXStudio is like an IDE. It supports syntax highlighting, code completion, source code and PDF synchronizing. Beside that, you can even paste your external image file that to be included in your LaTeX document (TeXStudio will help you to generate the graphic syntax with additional parameterms, like width and height).

Give it a try!
platform: Enable support for Pi2+
Edward Snowden Warns, Whatever You Do, Don't Use Google Allo
As I have only just learned higher up on this page, FF has an Android button in the URL bar to switch from, for example, a Youtube page to the Youtube native application. I was missing this too!
Question: In this future without Firefox, what becomes the default browser in Linux distributions? I won't claim that I know what every distro uses, but every one I've ever installed has had Firefox or some derivative of it included.
It looks like a new Raspberry Pi 2+ is coming soon; maybe for industrial uses and supply chain reasons.
It has always been called hash in some regions/contexts. I'm pretty sure the shape itself (i.e. regardless of context) is called an octothorpe. So no it's not at all like that.
Gnome Web works great on Linux+Wayland now, apart from lack of 1080p on youtube. Meanwhile Firefox still does not work on Wayland and is generally slow on Linux and one has to enable multi-process flags to speed it up. And even then its speed barely compares to speed of Chromium or Gnome Web.

Given that this performance disadvantage is not new it is clearly caused by lack of focus and manpower. As a result Firefox usage continues to decline and they cannot compete with fast moving competitors like Chrome or Webkit. Mozilla should discontinue 32 bit, Windows XP+Vista, ESR releases, Flash/GTK2 support, other side projects like the HTML editor. That should free up enough focus/developer time for Mozilla to improve their core product.
The latter - and you expressed it a lot better than I did.
The GoToMeeting web client works in Chromium on Arch for me. Perhaps it's worth another go?
Java as a language is producing more value to actual businesses than most other popular languages. Where you see an over engineered mess, others see valuable abstractions, extensibility, compatibility and self documentation. Unfortunately, understanding this so called mess requires knowledge of the lingua franca of object oriented design which has fallen out of favour by the new generation.

I'm not saying that there are no unjustifiable over engineered java libraries, but the current hype cycle of web frameworks seem to indicate the burden of proof of good design should lie with current technologies as well as previous.
Do you have a will? Issues such as who will inherit copyright ownership of your work should be handled there.

As for passwords, keys and so on, you can put all that into a single archive. (eg. regularly export your password manager, put any private keys you want to pass on, instructions for how to use them, etc)

Encrypt the tarball/zip file with a symmetric key.

Then you can use Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme to split up the key so that a certain threshold of key holders is required to access the data (eg. Any 2 of 4): http://point-at-infinity.org/ssss/

Distribute the parts of the key to your heirs.

Leave instructions in your will so your heirs can locate the encrypted file when the time comes.
To all the Firefox apologists.

I'm a front end dev. I run linux. I also run chromium because it is a superior product to Firefox. The market agrees. Wake up. Want to win me back? Make Firefox better.
That is utterly infuriating. Stuff like this really shakes my faith in capitalism.

To think that someone in charge at Bosch has actively decided to 1. Screw over the customer 2. Impose a massive external cost on society and the ecosystem. I honestly wonder how they sleep at night.

The market clearly can't fix this issue, so regulation must be the only option.
> which listen to my microphone without my permission

This part is inaccurate. See: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=500922...

> You don't have to take my word for it. Starting and stopping the hotword module is controlled by some open source code in Chromium itself [3], so while you cannot see the code inside the module, you can trust that it is not actually going to run unless you opt in.

Also:

> I hope this explanation is satisfactory. I am closing this as WontFix because it is already an opt-in feature, and Debian has already removed the component in their distribution of Chromium [2].

I've read the comments on that bug thread and I really struggle to see anything sinister that doesn't require several visits to the tinfoil haberdashery. There are problems around governance, communication and lack of respect for the priorities of the OSS community - but to see this as a failed attempt to listen to the conversations of Chromium users without their consent strikes me as verging on conspiracy thinking.
My understanding is that Intel has a service called Intel Custom Foundry that gives smaller partner companies access to Intel's fabrication pipeline. Altera was a client of Intel Custom Foundry, and the two companies started to build some FPGA-accelerated x86 products together, so it was a pretty natural acquisition versus a potential Xilinx deal.
This is why you should run your own mail server. Email, along with the web, is the last part of the decentralised internet to exist. Don't let it die.
Then maybe integration is not the answer.
Yes I can largely confirm this experience:

When you're pre-revenue/pre-traction it's very hard to acquire funding, and even after you made initial sales the VCs are quite reluctant. Honestly, in Germany it's probably better to rely on government-funded investment programs, as paradoxically those tend to take on more risk than most VCs in Germany, at least if you're building something innovative and not just do another copycat of a US/Chinese startup.
Implementing an object using swift closures and tuples
I just published a post that explains how to use closures and their contexts to imitate an object. In this post I try to show how the closure captured context can be used to imitate an instance variable in a oo class.

http://nsomar.com/implementing-an-object-using-swift-closures-and-tuples/
That's true. Although institutions deal with that kind of moral hazard in insurance all the time, so perhaps similar mechanisms could be applied here.

Perhaps sites uprated for having been DDOSed could be marked as such. We already have to make many decisions about the trustworthiness of news sources, so maybe it's just another factor.

I can also see why Google would just like to make DDOSing very hard and make the whole problem go away, rather than the mechanism I'm proposing.

That said, I think there's something gratifying about using an attacker's willingness and ability to commit resource to removing information as a signal about the value of that information. Judo chop!
What did cause you to switch?

What follows here are my observations on what are the advantages/disadvantages of the two browsers:

The biggest advantage to Chrome that I can think of is it has its own implementation of Flash in it, rather than using the Flash plugin. This allows Chrome to not have another container process, unlike in Firefox which does spawn a container process for Flash, which uses a ton more CPU cycles for the inter-process communication. This makes some sites crawl because of all the junk that is added to them, probably for advertisement networks.

Other than that, Firefox seems to give you more freedom with what extensions can be installed on it and allows a larger variety of addons that is available at the main addons site, third party sites can be used, although that is going to get more difficult in the future. But it is better than Chrome with from what I understand is going to disallow extensions from anywhere other than the Chrome store. An example of what will not be on the Chrome store is 'Cleaner for Facebook', which I remember because the story was so recent. Here is the story 'How Google obliterated my 4 year old Chrome extension featuring 24k+ users' at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12442048 .
I think you're missing the point. There's the shape and there's the symbol.

An octagon is a shape. A stop sign is a symbol that happens to be an octagon. Inversely, an octagon in the context of street signs represents "stop."

The octothorpe, used in music, represents "sharp." In front of a number it represents "pound." In front of a string on twitter it represents "hashtag."

AFAIK the typographical/visual differences are basically irrelevant. It's just a different symbol with a different meaning in different contexts, all represented with the same shape.
Trademark versus copyright.

Also, my guess is that a court would reject the idea that you could trademark as common a word as "scrolls," and Mojang simply conceded to avoid a costly legal battle.
Major Market Movers That Could Impact Your Investments in the Week Ahead
“Finland could employ some 2000-3000 developers immediately”
I love the Firefox extensions! (I hope they will stay for a while, using tons of quite old extensions)

Extensions that have no even chrome extension:

- tree style tab: nested tabs on the side of the screen

- Imagus: elaborate image preview on mouse-over

- FF Rocker: click right+left for history back and the other way around for forward (there is a chrome extension, but it's no fun)

- grab and drag: I hold right click to scroll as if I was dragging the scroll bar handle (only works for single-core FF :/) (there is a chrome extension, but it's no fun)

- All-in-Sidebar: bookmarks, downloads etc in a sidebar

- tab grenade: store all open tabs in a link list and close them (might have a chrome equivalent)

- Link Alert: hover to see if you are going to an external page or pdf or image (might have a chrome equivalent)

- Vimperator/Pentadactyl: vim style shortcuts for everything, no more clicking. Currently both projects struggle to stay compatible with recent FF versions, can't recommend to switch to it now :/
So the originators name Satoshi Nakamoto hasn't inspired more bitcoin adoption in Japan than elsewhere?
I used SQLite for teaching last year because it was the only thing that I could get IT to install between when I took over the databases unit and the start of term.

While it was broadly a success, I consider the following major problems when teaching to beginners:

* very loose syntax. CREATE TABLE PERSON ( ID BANANA BANANA BANANA ); is legal :)

* no type-checking: you can insert strings into an INTEGER column and vice versa - while you're trying with a straight face to teach students that one of the advantages of a proper database is that it can enforce some consistency on your data.

* in the same vein - foreign key constraints are NOT enforced by default.

* misusing GROUP BY produces results, but not the ones you want. I'd much rather any use of aggregates that is forbidden by the standard also gave an error, to discourage students from thinking "it produces numbers, therefore it must be ok".

This year, I'll try with MariaDB. I consider SQLite an excellent product for many things and use it extensively myself, but as a teaching tool its liberal approach to typing is a drawback.
I use SQLite to store all of my simulation data (~10s of GBs). It's remarkably versatile and the fact that there are good libraries for Python and C++ to interface with and query SQLite dbs makes it a synch to use for data analysis.

I've seen so many people struggle with custom binary formats; I imagine there are countless research hours lost in figuring out how to work with these obscure formats. I've advocated to all students I work with to make use of SQLite to store simulation data for their thesis projects and my experience is that they're quick to pick it up and figure out how to do some pretty complex querying.

It's one of those things that I don't understand about academia: there are so many standards and well-established tools in the tech/IT sector that we don't take advantage of. SQLite and JSON are the two that I constantly advocate to everyone I work with.
I sincerely think we just started getting philosophical and forgot we were talking about Eich.
Which type of founder would voluntarily resign from the CEO position at his own company? (esp. a project like Mozilla)
Eich resigned under huge pressure after the media broke the story and ran with it for days.

I started an internship at Mozilla right when Eich got fired, and the vast majority of people I talked had the same reaction: "Yeah, his donation isn't bad in itself, but the way he dealt with this polemic shows he's a bad as a CEO" (which does not convince me at all... since, you know, nobody is ready to deal with that type of pressure from the media, unless you're a politician with a PR team).

Bottom-line: As a CTO, he had a lot of engineers reporting to him, many of which were LGBTQ, and Mozilla is known for being one of the most pro-LGBTQ companies out there. He would have most likely been a great CEO to Mozilla, and a donation done personally cannot possibly be a valid reason for asking him to resign (the media, a tiny minority of people at Mozilla).
Sweden already has a Value Added Tax (somewhat equivalent to Sales Tax) of 25%
You are just too far away. Swedish politics is as sick a joke as in Italy.

- The school and high school results are in a state of implosion. No real political reaction.

- Because of internal political manoeuvres, the immigration policies were done so it will cost multiple times of the defence spending the coming years -- and risk a Spanish style housing crash.

- Putin acts more or less like Hitler in the mid 1930s. The defence is a joke, despite the politicians knowing this for a long time.

- For political reasons, there has been almost no building of housing over the last 20 years. During the same time, the population has increased by at least 10-15% because of political decisions...

- The trains are a joke because of bad upkeep. The problem seems to be that increased repairs won't make them work better until after the next election, so all governments spend the money in ways that buy votes better.

- And so on.
So fixing it means replacing the entire assembly, costing 2/3 of a new machine and with a four week delivery time for the part. I learned this is only done to screw consumers over, and that all manufacturers do it now. The drum still has all the mounting tabs for being screwed together, so they're literally just saving $0.30 on screws.

Alternatively, it's telling you to cut it open and screw it back together. If they really didn't want you to repair it, they'd omit the mounting tabs entirely. This sort of arrangement is not uncommon in the automotive world, where the factory will glue/weld something shut but still leave provisions for you to reassemble with different fasteners. The fact that official service manuals will show the procedures for doing this mean it's not that they want you to replace the whole part.
Japanese culture is so hard to predict when it comes to tech uptake - you see an 80-year old man play with his Nintendo DS at the bus stop, Kyoto City is covered by free Wifi, Internet is fast and cheap, but the ATM closes down at 6pm and your hotel room advertises free fax (which you may actually end up needing)
Apples and oranges, I'm not sure people who enjoy Mini Metro would automatically take to TTD. Mini Metro is a fun little abstract puzzler, wheras TTD is a fairly complex simulation.
I can't quite remember when we Germans transitioned from "Klammeraffe" (lit. "spider monkey") to "at" when spelling out email addresses...
It used to be fairly common in manufacturing and retail, where you might have a line on an invoice stating:

12 widgets @ £12ea

Having seen that usage (coming from a family that ran a small business), the email address notation made sense straight away.

On the other hand, I probably pronounced the dot in ".com" as "point" at least once, before hearing it read aloud by someone else.
> More over, as labor is highly taxed in Sweden, it makes local repairing disproportionally more expensive compared to the manufacturing in a country with smaller labor costs.

Sounds like a very clear flaw in their economic and taxation model.
https://vimeo.com/154959544

My uncle used to run this back in 1993 in Helsinki. Good times. Love the hair styles and the jungle soundtrack. Coming from BBS's, the web and IRC blew my mind.

I wish I could find my old geocities page now. I'm sure it had a few transparent gif explosions on it.
It would be convenient if you have an income [...] in Bitcoin.

Miners, drug dealers, and who else exactly?
They rip the poles out, and replace them with fewer new poles (taller, wider spaced, with brighter lamps).

This makes the installation cost more attractive to the city.

The electricity bill is (potentially) lower if you replace very old lamps with LEDs at the same brightness.

The best sodium lamps are quite efficient though, so LEDs have only marginal advantage compared to replacing the old lamps with newer sodium lamps. If you make the LEDs dramatically brighter, then they actually end up using more electricity.

I haven’t seen any especially convincing numbers about an LED lamp project that saved on electricity bills. I’m not an expert in the subject though, and I haven’t looked too deeply into digging up data.
When the AI ends up showing me a Google search, it's kind of disappointing. If I wanted to do a Google search, I'd do it myself instead of adding the step of asking the AI to search it for me.
This is not correct. Picture a caterpiller eating all the leaves on a branch -- the only home it has ever known.

That animal is eating it's environment and we might consider that irrational and unsustainable -- right up until the moment where it emerges from a cocoon and flies away to a new world.
Tahoe-LAFS: a Free and Open decentralized cloud storage system
Those things aren't lightweight only in the matter of resources used - they're also lightweight in how much attention they demand when interacting with them. Some people just want a simpler flow with less overhead.
What vi-mode extension would you recommend? Vimperator always seemed worse than Vimium (on Chrome), mainly because the scrolling is jittery.
Any Open Source OTP Hardware Token?
I am looking for something like this:
https://www.vasco.com/products/two-factor-authenticators/hardware/one-button/digipass-go-6.html

that doesn't require paying high fees for the authentication server.

Google provides an open source authenticator server, I am looking for the client part implemented in hardware that works with it.
https://github.com/google/google-authenticator

I know about Yubico but their tokens don't come with a led display, you need to plug them to a USB port which it's an issue if you want to log in from your phone.
Robin Sloan (Author of Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore, Julie Rubicon[1]) built something like you describe using a corpus of old sci fi stories ("If I had to offer an extravagant analogy (and I do) I’d say it’s like writing with a deranged but very well-read parrot on your shoulder"):

https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/writing-with-the-machine/

[1] https://m.facebook.com/notes/robin-sloan/julie-rubicon/98569...
I'll take a trustless payment system any day, to hell with plastic.
Descendants of Newfoundland’s “extinct” Beothuk Live on in Iceland (2011)