skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But if we refuse to be terrorized, the terrorists have already won!
Startup Videos: A Mashup
This has always been one of my biggest issues with "counter-terrorism". If the costs of fighting terrorism outweigh the damage that a genuine terrorist group could inflict... who really wins?

As a US citizen, I don't doubt that some of our spending has directly stopped particular terrorist plots. However, my point for the past ~10 years has been: they [terrorists] are tricking us into burning money chasing them around the world. If we had invested a fraction of this to take care of people who have suffered from non-terrorist causes we would result with a net benefit.[1]

I want to reiterate that there undoubtedly threats to be addressed, but sometime I wish that politicians (and a fair amount of the general population) would leave the whack-a-mole terrorism game alone, take their (our) coin home and find something better to do.

[1]
Admit, this is an assumption. But I don't think it's a huge leap.
Here's a free software replacement for last.fm scrobbling: http://libre.fm/

I still use last.fm myself though.
Farenheit's "body temperature" was the axillary (armpit) temperature, and he set it to 96 degrees (on average) when creating his scale. And yes, your supposition about the divisibility of key numbers is right.
so you wouldn't worry about lightning storms in your sleep, but if you are out in the field during one you'll probably take some precautions? maybe get out from under the tallest tree? You probably wouldn't completely ignore it.
After I read that I was hoping to discover the post date was April 1st - that is really scary stuff.
I did not tick the word, but I know Terpsichore is a muse. Do the other eight also have english adjectives?
HN Space "experts: What equipment is necessary to setup a colony on Mars?
I look forward to his follow-up piece, "How to Cure Human Nature".
Percona's MySQL Performance Blog is down
ACCESS - ACCESS
Nice flamebait. I'll resist the urge to resort to profanities.

You seem to be very much stuck in an "us" and "them" mindset. You also seem to be missing several things. No one said anything about bending over backwards. As for negotiating, who exactly is there to negotiate with in the first place? You seem to be under the mistaken impression that there's some kind of top secret terrorist government hiding somewhere, and that "they" are secretly hatching evil plots to destroy "America". (Because apparently America is the only country that's ever been targetted by terrorists? Get over yourself.)

And who suggested making the US a "Muslim country"? The very notion is ridiculous. The US claims to be a "free" country after all, with freedom of religion. There's nothing stopping Muslims from worshipping Allah as much as they please in the US. Nor should there be. And there sure as hell shouldn't be anything to stop "them" from getting on planes, looking at their watches, praying, growing big beards or walking around in whatever outfits they damn well please.
Research reveals dynamics behind magical thinking and charismatic leadership
The rugged individualism of Americans is amusing sometimes.
The difference that humidity makes cannot be overstated. When it's hot but not humid, sitting in the shade makes a big difference. When it's hot and humid, sitting in the shade just means its not as bright.
Bookmarks: https://www.google.com/bookmarks/l#!threadID=GTRKru1BUmU0%2F...

If you 'follow' a bookmarks list, and you're logged in to Google search, and you include relevant terms, I believe Google will suggest bookmarks at the top of the SERP. Handier than a spreadsheet of spreadsheets.
1) Does a gray linen cloth background tile qualify for copyright protection?

2) This is not the exact same image as the iPad background; I looked at them side by side. They're both dark gray linen cloth, but not the same. How would Apple know this one was derived from the iPad's image and not from some other photo of linen cloth?
But who are you targeting as your audience? Just HN? Really??

The comments clearly show that even a portion of HN is offended. And doesn't every single startup want the largest audience possible?

It seems horribly short-sighted to make decisions based on what HN thinks.
Smell test for the validity of software patents
While HN seems primarily negative on software patents, all of the recent patent-related stories here have brought out more patent supporters than I would have expected. Some of them are legally or business minded folk rather than technical, others seem to be caught up in a sort of 'fanboi' mentality of defending their favorite company.

To those who are pro-software patent (and understand at least the basics of software development), I would ask if they honestly think one or more people could sit down to write a complete software application for any device that performed at least one practically useful function without (knowingly or unknowingly) violating at least one existing patent (valid in the USA)? Because I honestly don't think it is possible to do that at this point in time and would bet a significant (to me) amount of money that it couldn't be done even if you were specifically trying to do it.

Despite all the talk of "innovation", so much of what is core to the fundamentals of computer science has been swept up in currently active patents that it doesn't matter if you innovate or not, you're absolutely going to violate other people's patents when you write any significant amount of code. It is just a matter or whether they notice and persue the matter legally or not.

With that in mind, I don't see how any rational person could conclude anything other than the fact that software patents are insanely out of control right now and need a seriously overhaul if not a complete tear-down.
Permissions requested when you sign into gplus.to
"Rather be safe than sorry" is not a very useful statement. Any time you step out of the house you're taking some sort of risk. Each person has their own tradeoff between reducing risk and living life, but except for a very few people (who are universally considered to be mentally ill), nobody sets that tradeoff at zero risk and zero life. To imply that you would want to take any measure to make travel safer no matter how small the risk already is makes no sense. If you are that sensitive to risk, you shouldn't be traveling at all.
Things I've Learned While Writing a Technical Book for O'Reilly
"Password must contain only letters, numbers, and underscores"

Could you fix that please? There is no reason to restrict what a password may contain.
Find the Google+ profile of people you follow on Twitter
Point him at Project Euler.

Books: (remembered fondly from my childhood & adolescence)

The World of Mathematics (ed. Newman)

Symbolic Logic by Suzanne Langer

How to Solve it by Polya

One, Two, Three, Infinity by Gamow

What is Mathematics by Courant & Robbins.
You'd have even less of a chance of dying if you just stayed home all day. If you really believed in that "sliver of probability" stuff, you'd never go outside. By placing disproportionate emphasis on terrorism you're actually making yourself less safe, because it takes attention away from things which actually have a decent chance of killing you.
The problem is similar blood tests. Even a seeming small false-positive rate can result in massive disruption to the lives of many people. Run a "99.9%" accurate test on a million-person database - if a false-positive isn't just an annoyance but screws up a person's life, you've screwed up the lives of 1,000 people.
The US is a more aware society. Just because they are talked about in the news, doesn't make someone afraid, just more aware of the dangers in society.

"fear of walking the streets alone at night"

It depends on where you live. If I'm in Detroit, then yes, I will be a little more apprehensive about walking on the streets alone at night. It's just common sense.

"Fear of someone spiking your Tylenol"

If someone hacked into your servers and destroyed data through a weakness, would you fix the weakness or just restore the data and go on with your day? The Tylenol weakness has been fixed. It's the smart thing to do.

"Uncontrollable fear of a country across the ocean maybe having WMD's."

I love how you slipped this one in here. I actually would love for the US to stop all military actions and then have a major terrorist attack. I know I would be the first to blame all of the people who said we were too "paranoid".

It's funny because the reason people can sit and talk about all of these things we don't need is because all of the precautions we have in place are working. Kind of like the person that's bi-polar that stops taking their meds because "I feel fine, why should I keep taking them"?

"Until we learn to control that basic fear response, the TSA will still be around and people will still be scared of sitting next to a dark-skinned man kneeling in prayer."

Until the people in the middle east get their shit together, we will need it. We don't know how many attacks have been prevented because of high security (IE: not even bothering to try).
A single successful attack causes Billions of dollars in losses. Look at load factors after September 11th. Planes were empty for months.
Yeah, forgot that. US medical system is our best tool in fighting income disparity.
Is it possible to detect absolute position of a polygon? It looks like polygon.pos gives position relative to where it was created (and therefore polygon.pos.{x, y, height} are sort of broken).
Yes, that is a great suggestion.
What does it mean to “do what comes naturally”?
Byte Retracts "A Sobering Look At Apple"
Do you have a mobile app or a mobile-optimized interface? If so, you should mention it on the front page. I use Anki for studying vocabulary, and for reviewing I use the iPhone app exclusively. I only use the web interface for managing my lists. If you want to make a few bucks, you'll have no problem getting your users to cough up money for a mobile app, because of how handy it is to review in odd moments.

(I just checked Anki in the app store, and it's priced at $25 [1]. For the record, I paid less than that when I bought it, but I would have gladly paid $25.)

Also, make sure you test and advertise your support for non-ASCII characters and non-English dictionaries.

[1] http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ankisrs/id373493387?mt=8
The fact that the formula is a secret makes it more valuable. I better make a bookmark of this website.
So, your point is that your decisions are driven by what your friends might think, rather than what _you_ think?
"Nice flamebait. I'll resist the urge to resort to profanities."

Nice way to get out of a discussion.

"As for negotiating, who exactly is there to negotiate with in the first place?"

You said we should try to figure out why they are angry with us..as if it's the fault of the US for getting attacked (blaming the victim).

"You seem to be under the mistaken impression that there's some kind of top secret terrorist government hiding somewhere, and that "they" are secretly hatching evil plots to destroy "America". (Because apparently America is the only country that's ever been targetted by terrorists? Get over yourself.)"

Nice flamebait. In Many other countries, they have full-on profiling with armed guards on each plane. It seems to work pretty well on the middle east.

"There's nothing stopping Muslims from worshipping Allah as much as they please in the US. Nor should there be. And there sure as hell shouldn't be anything to stop "them" from getting on planes, looking at their watches, praying, growing big beards or walking around in whatever outfits they damn well please."

I never said they shouldn't be stopped. However, if there are a high number of attempted attacks and the description of the attackers match the type of people coming onto the plain, the TSA should be allowed to question/detain those people.

It's this type of thinking that stops a newspaper from putting a description of a criminal because it's not politically correct.
Is there a public-domain dictionary that sites such as this use?
If I am not misinterpreting the article and, "his driving privileges were returned...after 10 days..." is the time between receiving the letter and having his name cleared, I am impressed that the government moved that quickly. Most of the interactions I've witnessed with the DMV, albiet not nearly as serious, have taken an order of magnitude longer to clear up.

That being said, it is ridiculous for the state to revoke a drivers license with no warning. This situation could have been avoided if the state merely gave the alleged fraudsters a few weeks to present the required documentation before revoking the license.

Overall, I found this to be the most concerning quote in the article:

“A driver’s license is not a matter of civil rights. It’s not a right. It’s a privilege," she said. “Yes, it is an inconvenience [to have to clear your name], but lots of people have their identities stolen, and that’s an inconvenience, too."

With this mentality, who knows what future "inconveniences" await Pennsylvania residents in the name of security...
Could just say Ken Arnolds.
I agree on you regarding a full stack web framework with it's own community such as Django but a lightweight, minimal web framework would be a useful addition to the standard library, surely?
Can passive cooling remove moisture from the air? That's essential for anything that wants to replace powered cooling in the southern US.
The first group of individuals who are always employed is skilled employees.

Uh really? This absurd absolute kind of lost me.

My guess is that given the recession, some portion of the employed want to create a psychologically appealing barrier between themselves and the unemployed. Making a claim that there's some certain path that will guarantee employment would seem to a fine way to do this, however crudely broad-brush the argument turns out to be.
I'm going to side-step the generational flame-war and point out a few things.

First of all, we don't live in a culture that values hard work. To be fair, maybe it shouldn't. Hard work at something pointless is just wasted effort. But we should toss the hypocrisy by which we claim to value "hard work" when what we really value (as a culture) in people is the resources they already have. The Randists and conservatives and big-business lapdogs dress corporate executives up as "society's most creative and productive individuals" but this isn't true. As a society-- we worship consumption, in the guise of jet-set executives who consume the earth's resources and in that of celebrities who consume others' attention-- and production and hard work really aren't major concerns.

Consider the celebrity cult (the hatred and envy included, because the baseless hatred of him is as execrable as the pointless veneration) around a rather bland executive-- neither deserving of much admiration nor dislike-- of a rather boring but important and successful upstart company, a cult existing mainly because he's a billionaire in his 20s. No one know or cares if he worked hard to achieve what he did (I think it's obvious that he did, although he had ridiculously lucky breaks) but because he's rich, he's important.

"Millennials" don't see people who are rewarded or even respected for working hard. They see a culture of rent-seekers, lucky bandits, and celebrity that is based on celebrity alone. And if people are going to pin our cultural degeneracy on the Baby Boomers (a reasonable contention) it should not be based on what they said as parents but what they did in the marketplace.
It amazes me that people freak out
when they see "Muslim-looking" people on flights.

I may not be flying often enough, but I am flying both in the USA and International, and I have never seen this happening. (Maybe someone was freaking out quietly and I have not noticed.)

Is this your experience, or are you extrapolating from what you have read about it?
>they [terrorists] are tricking us into burning money chasing them around the world

The terrorists are not the ones gaining financially and they are not the ones tricking us.
Wow, HN just combined two of my loves: computers and philosophy. How many others are interested in philosophy on HN?
You got downvoted because you did the statistical equivalent of begging the question. Assuming that you are going to be attacked and killed by terrorists, the odds of you dying via terrorist attack are 100%. P(A|A) = 1. (I know you didn't go to this extreme, but you did the same basic thing.) This is not an interesting result.
It's an interesting dynamic. I'm going through a similar thought process except one level of abstraction higher (at the pseudo-CMS level on top of Django). I'm sure similar debates happen at lower levels of abstraction too.

You've got to decide for yourself where your 'reinventing the wheel' cutoff point is. For some people it's flipping binary bits, for others, anything lower level than configuring Drupal modules is just a waste of time.
When it comes to sharing things with my friends en masse? Definitely.
Hi Neoveller,

I gave the talk and I agree the political risks comment was misplaced. I didn't think it was worth it to shut the person down though as it's my personal philosophy never to embarrass anyone if possible.

I hope you found the others parts of the talk more useful.
These sound all nice and friendly, but they're not feasible for me. If you've paid me, use the service for a time, then ask me to delete all data associated with your account, I've got nothing to fight a chargeback with.

Shutting down after losing a patent (or other) lawsuit, then open sourcing the aplicable software seems wrought of peril.

6 months notice is feasible for a paid service, but not so much for a free one.
9/11 still happened with people that didn't appear "normal"

Actually, they did appear normal. USA is a very multinational country, and these guys would not look much different from the rest of the passengers. Especially in international airports of large cities of the Eastern shore where they boarded the planes.

(Mohammed Atta could be an exception. Not by the looks, but by his facial expression. I believe I saw him with a few of his co-conspirators several months before 9/11, and he did stand out.)
But part of the advantage with jQuery being single-file there is ease of deployment. Python isn't quite as handicapped in this areas as Javascript is. A single line in requirements.txt can add something as complex a complex library to your project without a second thought.
There are some people building on top of WebSockets with an eye towards security. Check out http://pusher.com/ for example, they designed system to account for 100% untrusted client.
I am appalled that my fellow citizens demand this abasement.

Many demand the opposite, but there is no political mechanism that would listen to them specifically. They need to convince the rest first, then it can be done.
I used this thing in a desktop app that consumed a RESTful API service and received notifications (HTTP POSTs) from the API service.

At a high rate, bottle just dies. So if you have a situation where you are making many requests to it, be careful; your mileage may vary.
Isaac Asimov: The Relativity of Wrong
Unobfuscated non-Libyan link: http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=2332#comments
So while it appears Massachusetts does collect fingerprints, from this article it would seem that the software does not or is not very effective at cross referencing them with photographs.

Similar case from 1903: http://www.futilitycloset.com/2011/04/29/mistaken-identity-2...
which "became a strong argument in favor of the new science of fingerprinting."
Once Firefox supports SSE I agree that it would be easier to implement in many use cases. Although it doesn't have the same sort of fallback mechanisms available to it that WebSockets have (ActionScript sockets).

Here is some additional information about it that I found at stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5195452/websockets-vs-ser...
Does everybody know his name more than his work, or do you just have good Google skills?
This looks nice. I'm always excited to see higher level languages being used for scripting games. Lua is awesome at what it does but I've never really liked the syntax and lack of real objects. Building objects on top of Lua tables has always felt like such a hack to me personally.

The one thing that always concerns me with Ruby engines, however, is distributing the un-obfuscated ruby files with a game. In a single player game, with no online leader-boards or other concerns of cheating it's fine. But in a game where someone might be tempted to cheat this just makes it too easy. I know obfuscating / compiling code isn't very strong security against cheating but it's a huge step up from distributing source files ready to be edited.

Engines like Love2D (maybe other Lua based engines too, I haven't tried) allow you to compile your lua scripts and distribute the compiled versions.

With Ruby I guess the options would be to make a Java game engine with JRuby then you're just distributing JVM bytecode. Or maybe building a native engine in c (like this one) but including Rubinius to run compiled Ruby code. Rubinius has a blog post suggesting that this should be possible (http://rubini.us/2011/03/17/running-ruby-with-no-ruby/)

I'd love to see a game engine on Ruby with code obfuscation built in.
The thing that has always puzzled me is if one's opinion on "talent vs hard work" is actually correlated to one's amount of talent. You can often hear very gifted people say things like "it's hard work that actually matters". At the same time, underperformers' claims that it's the talent that does the thing maybe treated as rationalizations ("I'm lazy, so, yeah, let's blame that on lack of talent, not work"). I don't see any easy way of studying this, though looking for such correlations might prove interesting.
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"watch horrible bosses online free megavideo
The main reason this film is a desire to kill three terrible bossaffecting their way of life in our key figures. It will continue the battle for the variety of comedy and want celebrity Jennifer Aniston and Colin Farrell"
Here's a useless oneliner:
The American Dream is now the American Nightmare
:)
Haven't talked to potential advertisers yet.

I hear you on the fact that users may ignore ads if they are not in any context. So I was thinking that maybe I can implement a mechanism where users have to reply back with something that was embedded in the ad to prove that they have read it.
I'm with you on this, but there's no need to even do it with vmare. Development boxes don't get slammed like servers, you can throw CentOS or whatever on a headless "junk" PC you found while dumpster diving, and upload your code to it for testing/development.

Hell, that's what I do and my main Desktop does run Linux, but I devel on a junk machine running Apache/PHP, PostgreSQL.
Yes, since the entire point of sharing something with them would be that I think it's something they might enjoy.

It would be completely valid in this case to consider what they might think.