skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> and that the negativity associated now associated with the term "in the west" was created as part of the struggle of one religion to dominate over another

Many things that the west considers evil in that way comes from other religions (mainly the large number of "nature" religions that get lumped under the banner of "pagan") and is that way from the early days of Christianity as it marched through Europe.

The cloven feet of the devil and other spawn of hell, as commonly depicted, are thought to originally have been a reference to Pan by the Christian artists of the day.

It isn't just evil: even more friendly imaginary come from similar backgrounds: the Easter bunny and hunting eggs at Easter are references back to "Pagan" rituals/gods - as groups converted to Christianity they kept some of their old festivals and such (in a more and more bastardised form as time passed).

Most of what we in the west do at the back end of December has (or had originally) very little to do with Christianity (even ignoring the fair chunk of it came about in the last century or two). There were many "pagan" festivals around that time, mostly of the form of some sort of thanks giving (thanking their Gods or other forces for allowing them to survive past the shortest days of the year, or congratulating themselves for the same), but until 800-and-something AD the Christians didn't mark the birth of Christ at that time. The ceremonies at Easter were (and largely still are) far far more important to them.
The real Filter Bubble debate
Somebody should write a "stuff that will make you SUPER BALLER" list.
Curly quotes are problematic on low PPI screens. They tend to just become unidentifiable clumps. The features that make them distinct become unidentifiable, they only look slightly odd and uneven.

I do, however, think that as we are moving to higher PPI screens curly quotes do look better (and, as you can see from my German example, some languages require you to put quotes in places where you cannot put straight quotes). I, for example, really don’t think straight quotes look any good in print which is high resolution. In print all the small features of quotes are always clearly identifiable.

I actually think that Georgia has nice curly quotes but they do clump up below 12px or so font sizes. I think no font is free of that problem. I still like to use curly quotes, well, just because. I certainly can understand why you wouldn’t want to use them at small font sizes on the screen.

(There is one exception. I like to use Letter Gothic for my snail mail correspondence. Letter Gothic is a great monospaced typewriter font and to preserve that typewriter vibe I like to use straight quotes.)
Not having a link to the Free plan was a conscious decision. In fact, once we made that decision, revenues increased.
First step for anyone who actually WANTS to be a skilled programmer is, in my opinion, find a mentor who:
1). is really really good at programming;
2). is even better at teaching complex matters in understandable ways.

Made all the difference for me.
If you haven't tried Arch Linux before, I highly recommend it. The configuration system is excellent, package management is both sane and fast, and the community is amazing (take a look at the Arch Wiki sometime, it is chock-full of good information).

The resulting system you get after setting up Arch is zippy, since you know what's running and what's installed. Compare that to Ubuntu, where there are any number of mysterious background processes happening--it's getting as bad as Windows these days.
That is orthogonal to the issue of sovereignty; in fact, many of the framers firmly believed at all political power is derived from the consent of the governed, regardless of the form of government. They wanted to build a government where that consent is given through ballots rather than taken through coercion.

The states are sovereign entities, and one of the most important features of the Constitution is that it preserved their sovereignty even as it subsumed them into a single nation. That is what the word "federal" means: a single nation made up of many sovereign states.
TFA: [Google] has been accused by competitors of favoring its own services over rivals in its search results

This is what is wrong with antitrust laws. The definition is so vague that anything can be construed as anti-competitive. Hopefully they don't dismantle Google like they dismantled ALCOLA

http://reason.com/archives/2001/11/01/antitrusts-greatest-hi...
Taking the opportunity to show off some of the profiling tools and walk through the process of optimizing the program is a classy way to respond, first of all, and secondly I didn't know those tools existed. Very cool.
Which of several Stanley Kubricks made these demands?
Questioning specific advice is part of the learning, I believe.
> when I have my software company that builds web apps hat on, I assume that if there's a rendering problem with a new browser, it's our problem

I used to assume that, but I've spent so much time in the past few months fixing silly bugs that really were regressions in mainstream browsers that my default is now to assume that if something works in two or three browsers but not another then they really have broken something. This is why I have been so critical of the rapid updates policy in various recent discussions.
Is there some other way download the game other than stream? With 16Mit connection, i can download only 17KB/second and it suspends all the time... Such times, i think that who designed and/or coded such a system/program should stop working on IT subject... I can understand low download speed (server load, too many downloads etc), but why suspend the download ? and why not f*ckin' auto-resume ?
I actually suspect this will be the first use; real cruise control where you safely drive yourself onto the highway and then activate the automatic driver.
Knowing how modern operating systems work is crucial to the study of many CS topics. At the end of the day, a CS major must understand the workings of all systems (because they can often be generalized). Hands-on experience is one of the best ways to achieve that clarity.
Why is the rule restricted to LAMP? And why should the P = PHP & Python? What makes these special? Both are poorly designed languages (since I assume we're not talking Python 3k here)?

If anything, I'd say, "Do the systems engineer job application challenge at Square in 2 languages of your choice, one of which should be Valley mainstream. Keep Python or Ruby in slot one, and aim for a big-iron language for #2, like maybe Scala or C++ or OCaml or Haskell.
> At least today's undocumented immigrants live in peace.

Did you RTA? The whole article was about how he lives in constant fear. OTOH, my parents were legal immigrants and have no guilt over the british colonists who took this land over from the native americans. Same goes for me.

You can stick your head in the sand but, at the end of the day, you still have to obey the laws of the country you're in. Even if you join a cult or live in the remote mountains of Montana, you're still bound by law. This is true for you and for people who come here illegally.
AVM trying to spread FUD about the Cybits case
The Way to Will Power - Henry Hazlitt
Building your own computer or your own operating system very rarely help, in my opinion, because the real systems you work on are so much more complex than the pretend stuff you build that you miss massive layers of complexity. It's far better to have a good knowledge of how modern systems work than waste years attempting to build such a system.

Similarly, I have no idea why you would build your own programming language. You're very rarely likely to run into a problem with closure conversion in a programming language you wrote, but you might run into a problem with peephole optimization that you would never get to implementing unless you have a PhD in PL.
Take some math courses at a community college or online and boost your math grades, then reapply.
I wish the government would stay out of these matters. If you don't want to use a single Google product you as a consumer don't have to. Google provides a very high quality product and competitors don't like it. I don't like it when my competition is better than me either but I don't think to file lawsuits about it.

I think these cases is about making a statement rather than improving anything for consumers. The attitude of consumers is pretty clear given that most everyone uses Google. If I felt like I was being deprived of good search results I would switch.

How many people here on HN have wondered if Google is in decline anyway? I know it's occurred to me. What is the government hoping to do with this case?
This is essentially the same advice I give to people when they ask me. A great way to become a self-sufficient developer is to try coordinating a group of machines all running software you've written. Bonus points if someone actually uses it.
As an application developer this story makes me wish I had taken a few industrial design courses back in college.
> Someone correct me if I'm entirely wrong

I'm afraid you are indeed entirely wrong. The rules are not specific to third party cookies. There are some very tight exemptions for cookies or similar technologies where their use is genuinely necessary to provide a requested service, such as for remembering that someone is logged in or the contents of a shopping cart. Anything outside that scope, including using the same cookies for tracking/advertising purposes, is against the rules without explicit user consent.
I think the last paragraph is the most interesting. There is nothing that AVM can gain through this lawsuit. If they win, then it'll revoke the GPL and they no longer have a license to the Linux kernel and won't be able to ship their own product.
We don't have good programs in systems administration and network engineering, but we should. (Any major university starting one?)

In the meantime, a good CS program is a perfectly reasonable foundation for a career in systems and networks. I ran through the gamut of logic, basic logic circuits, assembly, algorithms, data structures, complexity and then features of various languages, operating system structures, and finally graphs, automata, networks and projects in all of the above. All of that is a solid base. As with anything else worth doing, you then need to build on that base with the tools of the day.

I suspect the overall high failure rate of IT projects is attributable to "people with two year associates degrees in information systems or something". I'd rather hire an autodidact with a degree in math, physics or engineering.
Devil's advocate here. What about all the content producers and services that rely on advertisements for the bulk of their income? I'm afraid the result of this law will be a drop in online advertising, or at least a drastically lower price due to less demographic information about visitors. Less advertising money means more incentive for content producers and service providers to charge users directly, instead of charging advertisers. As much as I value my privacy, I don't want the rest of the web to follow the example set by The New York Times. I realize we'll have to see how things play out, but I don't think my fears are baseless, and I certainly don't think a law is the answer to this problem.
>It's well-worth giving it a try if you're lucky enough to live in the few places in the US where you can easily and reliably get a hold of it.

I live in the boonies and I've bought it a couple of times from the corner liquor store, so I don't think you have to be all that lucky to get a hold of it. They don't always have it in stock (is it seasonal? I'll have to ask about it next time I'm in there), but I'm not in the mood for it that often, either. I like it, but I have to be in a particular mood to really enjoy it. To me, it tasted almost like a cross between mead and beer.
I'd go so far as to say that I've never read a job description that was looking for a CS major and didn't expect them to know how to do these things.
It isn't quite a barley wine, at least it doesn't taste like any barley wine I've had before. It has some hints of mead, but the grape is what makes it different. If you live in the SF Bay area, you can definitely find this at either City Beer Store or Healthy Spirits.
This is the pinprick in the balloon: the rules relate to storing information on your visitor's system, not to anything they send you anyway that you keep on your own server. Given that (for reasons I've never understood) most browsers are quite happy to send a near-unique set of data every time they request a page, I expect a whole bunch of tools will rapidly rise to prominence over the next few months for precisely this purpose.

Edit: Also, the law does not make cookies illegal. There is way too much FUD in the discussions of this topic. The rules are about restricting cookie use (a) without explicit user consent and (b) to do things that aren't necessary to provide a service the user has requested.

The basic position is not unreasonable, they're just perhaps not going about it in the most helpful way. But most of the vehement criticism is coming either from people who don't understand or from people who have built a business model by doing unsavoury things and don't like that they just got spanked for it.
If you were to pick one language to learn...
Say you were an aspiring programmer considering starting his own little start-up in next 3-4 years time; and say you could pick one new programming language to learn in that time frame. What would be the most useful language, according to you, and why?
This is an absolutely brilliant idea. I'm from The Netherlands, I've swam in all kinds of waters, and if I ever had the chance I would probably go swimming in the Hudson because I really just don't care, and it can't be all bad, it is a flowing river.

But if this allows a community to be built around it, and brings people together I am all for it, I love swimming and the more people that know how to swim the better =)
How Facebook’s New iPad App is Going to Finally (Help) Kill Flash
Facebook’s new HTML5 based web application for the iPad will get developers to make HTML5 apps instead of their current Flash versions, giving a bigger incentive to companies to just forsake Flash entirely.
You could ask the same question to people who are convinced that the Mayan calendar indicates that 2012 is "the end of the world".
If there's ever a program that should fall under a polytechnic or college umbrella rather than the university umbrella, systems administration and network maintenance is one.
This is a great way to promote your product. I love that the creators are not only giving you useful information for your own work, but subtly offering up their theme as an option. It'd be nice to see other products/services marketed like this. It's subtle and smart.
Grinnit = grin+innit, innit?
I find it hard to believe Valve has any debt whatsoever.
Winklevoss twins push another suit against Facebook
http://cowbirdsinlove.com/43
really dude? After reading that earnest post, your only issue was with the URL? What a trivial matter
Wow, that's interesting, but unfortunately it's not true. Maybe you got an error message because an error occurred? ;)
It's worth noting that the US is so significantly larger than France that it's not really directly analogous to compare Nevada with something like Lorraine in France. California + Texas together have about the same population as France, the two combined have a significantly higher GDP than France, and Texas alone is more land area than all of France.

I suspect that it would actually be harder for something like Marijuana legalization to actually occur in California and Texas than it would be for it to occur in France, because the lumbering Federal government exists where there isn't really a close analogous overriding body in France (perhaps the EU to some extent).
Your analogy to an online store breaks down as well ... you have a users IP address, and what part they accessed, thus you have logged this user.

What supermarkets don't do and what cookies do allow now is for you to track said user over multiple visits. If I go to a supermarket and buy food and pay with cash, they don't have a record of me having come in three days ago to purchase the exact same items. With a cookie that is set for 12 years in the future you will know it is me visiting again, and again, and again.
What's HubSpot's next move?
I had a chance to ask CEO and Found Halligan what's coming next for HubSpot.
I would love it if people would share their real world experiences with either (or both) Puppet and Chef in dynamic environments that needed more than a few servers to be maintained. In particular, polyglot persistent environments that aren't necessarily tied to a particular framework requirement.
There is less risk in being honest when I'm online. If I voice an opinion around my coworkers or family that they strongly disagree with[1], there is a chance that could change my relationship with them for the worse. Some people hold grudges for a very long time over minor things.

On irc, if someone decided to hold a grudge I can simply add them to the short list of people I've put on permanent /ignore. In real life I have to deal with them on a daily basis.

There is also the added benefit of irc having scroll back and delays in communication. I can read what I've said before so I don't forget what I'm talking about. I can also walk away for 5 minutes to grab a drink and cool off if the debate gets heated. It would be very difficult to do either gracefully in a live conversation.

1: Example topic: The death penalty.

One of my coworkers has voiced a strong opinion on putting to death anyone that kills another human being except in a clear cut case of self-defense. I disagree with his opinion in the strongest way but I keep my mouth shut because inviting a civilized debate over that topic is a good way to ruin an otherwise enjoyable lunchbreak. On IRC, I would be happy to invite debate because the cost of the debate going bad is far less.
You're totally right.

We were going to call it http://trololololololololololo.com/ but that was already taken.

Wish you were there when we were working on the backup name, sounds like you would have been very helpful
-- When we arrived at the filtering problem, we realized that we had solved the collaboration problem. --

True to any consumer-facing startup. When you successfully scale up, you have to somehow keep the quality.

Note to self : think about this "beforehand" ...
I appreciate this post but I disagree with it. I started my company in 2003. There were hundreds of times that we should have "folded." Last year we did $500k. This year we will do $1M. Turns out we were just too early, but because we were too early we made all of our mistakes before the market caught up to us. It was a tough road but now we are sitting in the catbird seat.

My advice to others is: never give up.
Thanks. After reading the ICO's guidance, so it seems. I was, in fact entirely wrong.

As someone elsethread pointed out, if this is taken seriously, people will just start browser fingerprinting. That at least means that the information is stored server-side rather than client-side, which the new directive seems particularly concerned about.
Python Plugin for GCC introspection
Here's the post for a frontend developer http://jobs.github.com/positions/428478e4-9d61-11e0-9d99-5cb...
I offer you a few gateway drugs:

— The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by E. R. Tufte;

— The Elements of Typographic Design by R. Bringhurst;

— The Design of Everyday Things by D. Norman;

— Don't Make Me Think! by S. Krug.

Beware of Tufte. Using charts to abduct engineers into the world of design is just dirty.
If you have to travel in/out of the U.S. or another jurisdiction known for aggressive examination/confiscation, all the more so.

Or, just have what you need on a server, buy a netbook at the destination, wipe it and give it to someone when you depart. (Be mindful of the limitations of particularly but not only SSD wipes. Better to start off use with encryption in place; any sacrificed blocks will be useless without the key.) When the prices are low enough, this can be affordable, if not enjoyable.

I don't have particular secrets to hide, myself, but I don't like the idea of "gubmint" freely rummaging through whatever it will. And when are data are aggregated, we all have secrets. (E.g. insurance coverage or employment denial because of family medical history or crazy Uncle Joey or whatever.)
iPod Hi-Fi, buttonless iPod Shuffle. But that's a pretty good track record.
"..a bit of handwaving..."

legal disclaimers and marketing?
What an excellent idea. Looks like Notch (minecraft) just doanted a lump sum also (reading tweets).

I just donated, everyone should.. the princess is always in another castle.
I absolutely agree. Many would scoff at the prospect of writing a barebones OS for educational purposes, claiming that they would never have to use that knowledge in the real world. While they will not be given such a task by an employer, realistically, the vast insight gained from the project about process scheduling, interrupts, memory protection, hardware interaction, etc. is incredibly valuable.

Programmers not at least familiar with low-level concepts are not grounded in reality. Their solutions to problems and code may be of worse quality than those of more well-rounded programmers.

I probably sound like quite a snob, but I'm the kind of guy who reads Understanding the Linux Kernel before bed and reverses parts of the stage 2 iPhone bootloader for fun, so put what I say into perspective.
There's nothing wrong with using Flash unless you happen to be on iPhone/iPad and let Jobs make decisions for you. The rest of the internet and mobile & tablet has an ok-to-great (and gradually improving) chance of being able to access that content.

It's no less of a crime then javascript abuse [1], css abuse [2] and image abuse [3] - the other Flash charts show there's just 1.51 average flash files averaging a mere 60 kilobytes.

The problem isn't Flash it's that anyone can create a page on the internet, so they do, and the results do any and every technology they use an injustice. But the flip side of that is it's also a big reason our startups exist.

[1] http://httparchive.org/interesting.php#mostjs average 131kb average js, sites with over a megabyte of js!!

[2] http://httparchive.org/interesting.php#mostcss sites with over 1/2 a meg of css (that's just wow)

[3] http://httparchive.org/interesting.php#mostimages average 51 images!!
From the site:

An example of using the plugin is a static analysis tool
I’m working on which checks the C source of CPython
extension modules for common coding errors.

This code is under heavy development, and is not yet ready
to be used.

This was one of my main motivations for writing the GCC
plugin, and I often need to extend the plugin to support
this use case.

For this reason, the checker is embedded within the
gcc-python source tree itself for now:
Skype options turn out to be worthless
Am I the only one who finds this pretty shocking?
Interesting.. And frustrating! I haven't had that experience so far; got any tips on what to avoid right now?
Conan O'Brien makes fun of Final Cut Pro X