skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So many intelligent replies here. And to think some of the best coders do not live in the US - think of Skype (Estonia), Tim-Berners Lee, Linus Torvalds, etc... Their contributions tower above anything done by any one person on Wall Street. Yet Wall Street has only contributed to the common good by paying taxes. Even then they seek to game the system and have also managed to get the government to give them more than they ever paid (think bailout). Their scrooge-like aversion to philanthropy, charity, education, or any research to help the human condition is what annoys. Certainly those of you who code for the street have food in your belly, but when will you decide to fix your monstrous employer? They don't even have to know.
Vijay Eswaran in Forbes Philanthropy Heroes list 
Malaysian entrepreneur and Executive Chairman of the QI Group Vijay Eswaran features among the top 48 philanthropists in Forbes Asia's annual list of Heroes of Philanthropy in the region.
Technically it's a diaeresis, not an umlaut. It indicates the syllable break in the word "cooperate". It's not a common thing in written English, but the New Yorker has a certain writing style that calls for that sort of thing.
Did you know that apple give you that option?

->Worthless illusion of security.
There already are penalties for breaking the rules (ruined reputation), and probably far worse ones from a violator's perspective than even an ideal government regulatory fiefdom would provide. The government certainly ain't gonna be throwing people in jail for failing to back up some data, and it sure would be scary if they started. Instead...fines! ? Goverment and big, well-connected businesses have done a wonderful job of convincing people that regulations are what prevent companies from screwing people over, when they are merely a way for major corporations to keep out competition by making it harder small businesses to compete.
News International in crisis as Trojan horse computer hacking allegations emerge
HSBC IT staff at risk as bank announces 30,000 job cuts
I have some pretty strong feelings about IP (I oppose software patents and I think copyright terms are too long) but I suspect that IP will become more sophisticated and pervasive. Robin Hansson has a post about what he calls "IP+" (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/07/ip-like-barbed-wire.ht...). I don't like the future he paints but it is better than today's setup.

A large (and growing) part of the world's population will want some kind of guarantee that they'll be compensated for their time and they'll be pushing for some kind of IP. Whether or not this will be better or worse for society, only data can tell us. But regardless of that, people want to optimize for what they think is best for themselves and their offspring and will vote on the basis of that.
How are they useful? Why would anyone care about how you developed a single bugfix or a feature?

In your model, often the commits are not even sequential in the log because you might find a mistake only after committing several other changes. I can't see how not rebasing makes commit history better in any way at all. I would like to hear your reasoning.

The way I see it, instead of a series of commits that implement something, you could have a single patch (commit) that implements something, making it much easier to

0) find all the code that implements a certain feature, because it's a self-contained commit,

1) find bugs via bisection,

2) port to other versions via cherry-picking and

3) read the changelog and figure out what the hell is actually happening because there are no trash commits around obscuring things.

EDIT:

Just to clarify, I do not think that this is a matter of opinion or preference. That would imply that both approaches are equally valid.

I consider rebasing a tool that enables a vastly superior workflow. I have given a few reasons why I think it is superior and I am interested in counterarguments or at least reasoning as to why not making perfect commits (to the best of your ability) is preferable or even acceptable at all.
And also the present, right? It's interesting how things are always changing.
From the article:
"They observed that residents of the compound burned their trash, instead of putting it out for collection, and concluded that the compound lacked a phone or an Internet connection."

How do you go from burning trash to lack of phone or internet?
A simple solution I think would be to change the "Spam" button to instead read "I didn't sign up for this". That would be much less open to interpretation based on the user's own personl definition of "spam".
yEnc or Base64-encoded JPEG image?
Ask HN: Has the scoring system for articles changed recently?
This is probably completely coincidental, but I've noticed several posts with three or four points that are nearly an hour old or older on the front page. Is this normally how the scoring system works?
"...marking stuff [as spam that] you did opt in to receive is the digital equivalent of hanging up on your best friend when he calls to see if you'd like to go for your usual weekly coffee."

I call shenanigans.
Bad analogy, a better one would go like this;
Your friend calls you asking if you want to go out for coffee, and you say no. 5 minutes later, he calls back asking again if you want to go out for coffee, and you say 'no, stop calling me'. Again 5 minutes later he calls you back, so you block his number.

You've tried to tell them you don't want them to contact you anymore, yet they persist. That my friend is spam, and I will mark it appropriately.
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Why we should embrace constraints
.net Awards 2011: the top 10 young developers of the year
The situation is horrendous, and panders to the non-USAian's belief that the USA legal system is horribly broken beyond repair, and that justice is frequently seen not to be done.

However, this, while newsworthy, doesn't seem to have any particular relevance to HN. It's not about hacking, or CS, or entrepreneurship, or startups. It's not even something that's "deeply interesting."

I'm willing to listen to anyone who can argue a case for this belonging here on HN, but it seems to fall foul of http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html where it says:

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or
sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting
new phenomenon. ... If they'd cover it on TV news,
it's probably off-topic.
> the incentive to save/hoard that is typically associated with deflationary monetary systems may be weaker with BTC.

I don't see how that is possible. The coins may undergo a process similar to a stock split but any holders of the coins end up with equal purchasing power. The incentive to hoard does not go away if the currency is deflationary.
Hacking Education One Video at a Time
Great question. Fundamentally I would be sincerely interested in his take on the whole situation but given the contrversy & ongoing investigation I think it will be highly unlikely that he will make his position known any time soon and I can't blame him.
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Probably because he's being torn a new one further up the thread. Welcome to HN.
One thing about Less.js 
If you're looking to familiarize yourself with CSS pre-processors but don't want to add additional complexity to your stack then maybe this one feature of Less.js is what you've looking for.
You mean like most people do on communities like AirBnB and CouchSurfing?
People in those areas using IE6 do pay for services. I know. We were debating this very question, and decided to look at our paid users browser choices, and IE6 was, while not the majority, not the least of our concerns, either. Furthermore, the net loss of loosing IE6 users would have been the salary of a number of people.

Finally, we can support IE6 without losing out on the benefits of newer browsers.

Arguing for or against IE6 using made up fanciful arguments (people using IE6 aren't going to buy your product) is silly. Look at your own numbers. If your first suggestion isn't that, you're ignorant of the realities of web development.
Here is where the coders of Wall street can help us understand--making their efforts more transparent. They dont have to reveal details of their code--but a few blogs about what they are doing, what they are achieving, and they aim for would be nice
Great article. I'd classify this approach as "streaming" rather than "long polling" though - in long polling, a browser opens a connection to the site which stays open until an event occurs, at which point it closes. As far as the browser is concerned, the request just took a few seconds to return - so the technique often bypasses dubious proxies and other issues (browsers have been really good at dealing with slow loading connections since the modem era).

Streaming is when the connection stays open and multiple messages are sent down the single pipe. It's faster and more responsive (and easier to scale since you don't have to deal with lots of connections being closed and reopened all the time) but is tricker to get working.

Of course, WebSockets make everything work sensibly hence avoiding the need for crazy hacks.

Here's a deck from a talk I gave on Comet back in 2008 which touches on some of this stuff http://lanyrd.com/2008/skillswap-goes-javascript/skq/
Sencha have a product called Sencha Animator: http://www.sencha.com/products/animator/
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Daily Mail's Liz Jones NHS-bashing article dissected
Do pirates matter? I don't think they'd have bought the game if they couldn't get it illegally, although I guess one could argue that converting even a fraction of them counts.
"I can't remember the last time I accidentally rolled back into an incremental commit."

I can't remember the last time I had a heart attack and died, but that doesn't mean it isn't going to happen in the future to me or to someone else. It sounds like it's just good practice for a public repository too, since your not the only one with access to it.
I can't make all possible 256x256 images, but I COULD describe the space with an algorithm that would make them all. If I walk into the patent office with the algorithm, and tell them that if a new person comes into the patent office, you have to run my algorithm to see if my algorithm hasn't already defined the picture, obviously of which it has. then I can sue them, and take them to court for infringing on my inventions.

Brilliant! Someone do this please.
"For God and country-Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo."

"We should all go to Mass tonight," he said.

That definitely ruins it for me.
tl;dr : a quantum computer could create every single pixel permutation of an image, which you could then claim copyright for.

However, fundamental difference: in a qc this data is represented by a super-position of states. Which is fine, but I would argue each image has not been individually created. And to write out 9.2 x 10^600,000 images is going to take a fair amount of disk space (and time). Which is what I'd imagine you'd have to do to claim copyright over them all.
Cutting Corners or Putting Holes in Things
Anonymous and LulzSec suspect 'Topiary' charged over DDOS attacks
I haven't looked at the browser support for Edge animations, but I'm guessing they're supporting earlier IEs, which limits what they can do.

It would be cool if they had a switch to render for only modern browsers.
Sorta like http://www.driver-ratings.com/ ?

I believe they are also selling the data to insurance companies.
Credit checks are great for verifying that someone pays their bills, which is an important part of commercial transactions. It also indicates responsibility and the ability to fulfill obligations.
I don't understand the point of this when there are plenty of tools out there (such as http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/) to do the job - with any USB stick - for you?
Stop alienating users. This is the kind of thing that makes me leave a website, or use the google cache.
How America Could Collapse
Ermm, at Google? Seems a simple enough sentence construction to me.
AT&T will throttle “unlimited” cellular data plans on October 1st
This actually seems like a reasonable approach to me. WSGI isn't really friendly to application developers (because it's not the API they expect when they naively approach the problem) so mostly it's been wrapped by the various frameworks. Armin's article seemed to be saying "Stop bitching that you can't use WSGI because it's more complex than you think. Here's why. Just pick a framework."

This approach seems to take care of the 90% problem while leaving the full power of WSGI exposed if you want/need it. It's like a minimalist web framework to do just the smoothing over of the WSGI API and nothing else.

The backwards compatability is key: It can be adopted by application developers, and doesn't depend on server developers.

It may not have sprung into existence in a perfect form but I think it is definitely worth exploring this approach.
some bank sunk millions (and maybe billions) into infrastructure just to run that crap even moderately fast

Why, were they running Ruby on Rails? </snark>
1. How do you know that "real universes are not cheap"? Are you an expert on the universe-making process?

2. The "universes" that appear in MWI are simply parts into which the universal wavefunction gets decomposed. Getting rid of them would require some sort of wavefunction-pruning process. You might equally say "Destroying universes is not cheap", a statement for which I think I have every bit as much evidence as you have for yours.

(Of course non-MW interpretations of QM do have a wavefunction-pruning process. They don't generally have much to say about how it happens, and they tend to require ridiculous things like building the notion of "observer" into the fundamental equations of physics. Or, as in the case of Bohmian QM, they include all the same mechanics as MWI plus a bit extra and then claim to be more parsimonious simply because they attach the label "real" to a different subset of what the theory talks about.)
Noting that the IT staff might get cut seems like a desperate attempt to make the news relevant to tech sites.
‘Operation UnManifest’ - Let Anders Behring Breivik become a joke
You're not joking, here's an extract from the Wikipedia entry [1]:

"Nowadays in English, the diaeresis is normally left out (cooperate), except by The New Yorker, or a hyphen is used (co-operate). It is, however, still common in loanwords such as naïve and Noël."

This made me smile. Thanks! :)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiatus_(linguistics)
Or maybe they aren't. Despite his reply to me, I -did- read the whole thing. It doesn't change the fact that the statement that Ruby will meet my needs is not always right. I have yet to find the language that can be put into that statement and always end up correct, no matter the situation.

We get his point. Not all Ruby is created equal. But that doesn't mean that one of them will meet our needs.
"Apple has yet to reciprocate our devotion to them."

What fantasy world are they living in?
I liked this dissection of the Daily Mail article, but disagree with the trend for not linking to things you disagree with.
Anything simple out there to make it available to the masses?
> I think presenting that theory once is more than enough

It's the first time I read it.

> you don't have to reply to everybody with your theory.

And you didn't have to post this reply. But you did. It's almost like we can comment on things, and reply to them.

If you think he's spamming, flag it. Otherwise, enjoy that his comments are at least contributing to the overall discussion, and not worthless comments bitching about constructive comments.

Oh, the irony.
What Airbnb should've and should still do
This should really be required reading. Far too often geeks try to classify legal issues using technical classifiers, or even worse, to solve them with technical means. Arguments that make the assumption that the same bits produced in different ways should have identical legal status are very flawed!
12 organizations say WebM infringes their patents
Normally, Airbnb hosts exchange their property (plus a little house work) for some cash.

I doubt pg needs it.
presumably useful for older BIOSs that can't boot from USB?

but other than that, yeah... kinda redundant.
historious cache, because it's intermittently dropping for me:

http://cache.historious.net/cached/1369875/
Google doesn't support IE6 (even if it may work on some of their site without directed effort). Your business makes less money than Google. Applying the transitive property we find...
If you create a 500x500 pixel image on your computer, you own the copyright on that image. But copyright isn't like patents or trademarks with "prior art": If I also make an image through some means (take a photograph, paint a picture, etc) that ends up being identical at 500x500 pixels, you don't own the copyright on my image.
Google won't touch or integrate anything that is GPL licensed into their own products - especially AGPL. the linux kernel in android is the only GPL code you will find from Google, and even then they got a lot of criticism from FSF folks for deciding to license modules under a more liberal license

So if you are a developer and want to see your own library and code used by corporates such as Google and many others, a more liberal license is the only way to go.

If it is a javascript library or a web application, again, a more liberal license is the way to go since the FSF insist that a script include means your entire app must be GPL.

Using copyright law to force corporations and developers to become contributors and active participants in your software project is, to me, a ridiculous notion.
There is an interesting IP minefield in the fledgling area of procedural generation. That is, if you can define a procedural texture that looks the same as another procedural texture (but different generating rules), are you breaking copyright? Can you patent the algorithm that generates a tree?
I agree, I am very liberal with the "mark as spam" button.

Even if I opt out and they say, "might take two weeks to propagate changes."

That's weird; it only took you two minutes to propagate changes enough to start sending mail.

If I am unable to opt out without logging in, or if I opt out and more come I just mark it spam.
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The article doesn't do a very good job of explaining "Bandit algorithms". The closest s/he comes is this, but that really doesn't enlighten me:

So, what is the bandit problem? You have a set of choices you can make. On the web these could be different images to display, or different wordings for a button, and so on. Each time you make a choice you get a reward. For example, you might get a reward of 1 if a button is clicked, and reward of 0 otherwise. Your goal is to maximise your total reward over time. This clearly fits the content optimisation problem.

Edit: Anyone have better pointers? (Other than the UU article referenced in the post)
If they avoid it, it's because they are not ready to share the code. Thus their using the code is pretty much useless in the first place...
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As my old boss used to say when sending me on WTF consulting missions, "putting a server in a room doesn't mean you have a server room".
Ignoring the technology bit, the legal side of the article is naive speculation.
well, both sides claim to protect their own land and people from invasive other. I don't think there is any religion/ideology that discourage things like "defending property and people".
Tradewinds: Discounts on Infosec Training and Certification
Author here. We have a beta implementation of the idea available. Drop me a line (noel at untyped dot com) if you're interested in trying it out.
Satawat Kaisee
You can't do ultra low latency trading on IB or any of the discount brokerage houses. Essentially, your order goes through their system before it goes out on the broad market, and that (time) cost is orders of magnitude larger than the internal system cost. Also, the (economic) costs of doing business with that type of broker are comparable to to the profits.

There are difficulties with simulating at this level, and I will go into this later, because the quality breaks down. Many ultra low latency trades involve some sort of rebate capture (profiting off of the fact that the exchange gives you money if you provide liquidity to the markets), and that requires some sort of model for how the rest of the market would react to the presence of your extra liquidity.
There are a bunch of papers I can point you to. Is that what you're looking for?
It sounds exactly like A/B testing, but using a specific algorithm to determine the winner.

It talks about comparing the current situation to the best situation... But in most A/B testing, A would be the current 'best' and B would be the challenger. Same thing.

It also talks about a reward for certain button-presses, but that isn't actually what you want to optimize. You want to optimize revenue. So it's possible this could send you down the wrong path.

And if it's saying you should pit the current site against the best the site has done historically, that's ridiculous. You couldn't possibly put controls on all of the factors involved. That's why A/B testing is special: All the other factors are guaranteed to be as identical as possible.
I'm correcting you, that's all. How can you say you're neutral and then present only one side?
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Makes sense, I'm sure you're right - which further invalidates the article's supposition!
So basically you reject a powerful tool out of idealism ("must never ever edit history") and fix your commits manually, also forgoing the possibility of fixing earlier unpublished commits.

Instead you could code and commit (you know, use the VCS :P) without worry in a private branch, checking for problems afterwards and fixing them using rebase prior to merging the commits into the main branch. (where "must never ever edit history" actually applies)

Sorry if I sound snarky, but that's what this seems like to me.
The Law isn't just going to roll over and admit defeat. Copyright will continue to exist so long as the minority it serves is louder than the majority it hurts. If we want to protect our tubes, at some point we in the Internet industry are going to have to get our hands dirty in DC. The only way to beat them is to out-lobby them, and that's a long game. Google's taken a few tentative steps, but it will be at least a decade before the tech lobby is anywhere near as powerful as the entertainment lobby. Even then, we have to ask ourselves: Is it worth it? Do we really want tech lobbyists writing laws? Do we want Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Oracle deciding what's best for tech and encoding that in law? Or are we better off, in the long run, simply staying faster than the law and letting them legislate against whatever we were doing a year ago?