skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I must assume you're retracting your earlier statements, then

No. The reason it is reasonable to be wary of law enforcement is because the police don't care if you're guilty. Let me be more precise about what I mean by that. It may well be that most individual police officers really do care if you're innocent. But on a systemic level they do not care. They are trained not to care. Their job (they are told) is not to determine guilt or innocence. That (they are told) is the prosecutor's job. (And the prosecutors usually pass the buck to the jury.) The police are not rewarded for letting innocent people go, they are rewarded for making arrests on probable cause. (And prosecutors are not rewarded for letting innocent people go either, they are rewarded for securing convictions.)

I did not mean to cast aspersions on individual law enforcement officers. I'm sure most of them are fine upstanding people. They work hard. They put their lives on the line. They deal with the scumbags of the world so the rest of us don't have to. I respect them and I'm grateful that they are there.

But the police (and prosecutors) work within a system that actively discourages them from thinking about whether you are actually innocent (except insofar as your actual innocence might prevent them from convicting you) and encourages them to think instead only in terms of whether they can collect enough evidence to prove your guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in the mind of a jury, or to present to you a sufficiently credible threat of being able to convince a jury so that you'll accept a plea bargain. Your actual guilt is (and by their training ought to be) irrelevant to them.

BTW, there's a defensible argument that the system ought to be this way, which is that determining actual guilt or innocence is really, really hard, and individuals are easily swayed by emotions and other irrational factors (in both directions BTW) and this system is designed so that no one individual's irrationality can affect the outcome too much. Flawed as it is, it is arguable that it's the best we can do given human nature.

Postscript (since I just saw your edit): a 0.5% false conviction rate is very high. There are about 8 million convicts in the U.S. At 0.5%, that would be 40,000 wrongly convicted. That's about 500 years worth of lightning strike casualties.

> the vast majority of law enforcement are not conspiring to convict everyone and anyone for a crime

Clearly. But a conspiracy is not the only way to produce bad outcomes.
Cool app, I checked it out on the app store from my phone. I like those kinds of apps, it's kind of like "Eatery" where you post pictures of things you've eaten and vote on others photos (healthy or unhealthy). The data is cool at the end, I just can't get myself to be that active with those between Foursquare, Alfred, and yes, Facebook...
Clojure has excellent concurrency support.

Clojure has a focus on functional programming, immutable data[1] and the sequence abstraction[2].

Clojure is a Lisp and has most[3] of the super-powerful metaprogramming facilities that you would expect from a Lisp. This means you can, with enough effort, mold the language to suit your needs, even turning it into a completely different language should you wish to do so.

Clojure is not object oriented, though it does allow you to instantiate and create Java objects for the purpose of interacting with Java libraries. Clojure does support OO-like code through its Records/Protocol system.

Clojure has out-of-the-box support for multimethods.

Clojure runs on the JVM and therefore has access to the many many libraries written in Java or other JVM languages.

Pure Clojure code is, as far as I can tell, higher performance than pure CPython code.

PS: Just for the record, I love Python and use it a lot (and have actually been out of touch with Clojure for almost nine months now, sadly). The above are reasons why you may want to learn Clojure - not reasons to drop Python.

[1] The benefits on pure-functional code and immutable data are that it makes concurrency easier and safer and that it makes code easier to reason about as you do not need to consider that 1) side-effects are happening behind your back and 2) the data is being changed elsewhere (which is also why it makes concurrency easier).

[2] Similar idea to Pythons iterables, except IMHO Clojure's sequences are much more a part of the core language than iterables in Python, in that in Clojure most things are sequences, while in Python this isn't the case (though a lot of things are iterables).

[3] I say most because Clojure does not have reader macros
It comes down to resources and throwing them at the highest return. For all the people complaining about typography in ebooks, if they were indeed hand set for the new format, you'd have people complaining that certain books aren't available in an electronic format fast enough. It's impossible to please everyone.
Seeking advice from HN members:

My spouse is under depression and has such symptoms. Yet, I do not think I'll be able to convince her of undergoing such training. She refuses to believe she is under depression, which is due to an ego issue from being a meditation practitioner / counselor herself. Yet she has exactly the symptoms described -- over-generalization of any small negative thing to ultimately falling into an infinite loop about all the problems she has and shouting at me or my kid for several hours straight. This happens about twice a week.

Could I be doing something that can help? Thanks for any advice.

Apologies if this does not belong to the HN forum.
Nothing too fancy, but makes my own Google Reader experience a lot better.
Scandal-hit Microsoft admits blow to morale
In 30 languages: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Sudoku
4 Landing Page Tips To Increase Conversion On your B2B Website
ML-class does not necessarily apply to all other 10 courses offered by Stanford. I would not be surprised if they weren't given for the entrepreneurial classes offered.
I use node for new cutting edge things which Django and Python can handle, but not as easily as node.

Like what?
You're probably justified in your complaints about prices; Norway has higher prices than almost anywhere in Europe.
And the related planet money podcast:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/08/26/139972557/the-frid...
This "error in logic" is also known as "Occam's razor."

Entities should not be multiplied divergently. A sufficient explanation for the fact that Y Combinator winners are mostly white is the fact that YC applicants are mostly white. As shown by the similar Ruby-enthusiast pool, which has clearly been filtered by the same phenomenon (ie, the vast racist conspiracy - known to some as "The Plan.")

Therefore, it is unnecessary to postulate the additional cause: that YC itself is in on "The Plan." Alas, when tinfoil hats go mainstream, Occam himself is powerless.
Too bad. This would have been enough for me to reactivate my Netflix account here in Canada, but instead I'll just get it via btjunkie and Transmission.
RawTherapee : RAW File processing for free (as in beer)
Netflix bought House of Cards back in March bidding against HBO and AMC [1]. Less than a week later CBS, parent company of Showtime, announced it would pull Showtime content from Netflix even though the contract wasn't going to expire until the summer [2]. No negotiation or warning to Netflix, just "FYI, we're out, thanks." HBO just flat out refuses to license any of its content to Netflix or anyone else for that matter.

And it's not like Netflix isn't willing to pay. Netflix paid $30 million per movie for exclusive early access with Dreamworks. Previously HBO held the contract for only $20 million per movie [3].

Media companies are just telling Netflix to flat out screw off or at best pay a ridiculous sum that nobody else would be expected to pay. Each one has a different threshold. HBO has zero tolerance. Starz had quite a bit up to a point. But eventually they all put on the brakes to keep Netflix in check.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2011/03/netflix-locks-down...

[2] http://www.bgr.com/2011/03/23/cbs-will-remove-some-showtime-...

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/business/media/netflix-sec...
Minimalist Suite for Google Chrome
That's really interesting and it seems, according to ml-class videos already online, that there are also subtitles available (it surely helps people like me that are not native english speaker)
Unlicensed Book Downloads and the Writer
It is just a different direction toward energy independence which could evolve in to something bigger.
getting better code density/more productivity

Its not so much about brevity or productivity as it is about correctness. Functional programming and immutable data makes it easier to reason about code and to prevent bugs/errors, especially in the context of concurrent/multicore code.
Some have coined the term "hatefacts" for these biased facts.
To deal with this issue I've taken a few Gutenberg texts, converted them to LaTex and then rendered then into PDFs designed for my reader (nook Simple Touch). It's laborious, but it looks great.
I'm on 15.0.874.120 (and it works), if that helps at all.
While I'd agree Python 2.5 to 2.7 doesn't bring a swath of language features with it... it's a good sign of Jython's slowing/sluggish growth/development.

Personally, I want to use a language implementation that will be around and (well!) supported for many years.
Thanks. I had to do that recently because of issues with the prepared statement pool in 3.1 + Passenger. But I can segfault in 1.9.2 just by loading a console or running tests. It doesn't instill a grand sense of stability.

Thanks for the feedback though. I find it helpful to do periodic sanity checks.
I've come across a number of Kindle eBooks with numerous typos or other errors. It's like they simply OCR'd a printed book and didn't bother to check for issues ('Too Big to Fail' by Andrew Ross Sorkin is the most egregious I've bought).

Many of these books are eventually corrected and Amazon will email letting you know this so you can get an updated copy, but this has generally been months, or years[1], after I've put up with the problems and finished reading the book.

And it would be nice if pictures were handled better. I think ideally they should all be put at the end of the eBook but have links in the text that take you to the relevant picture, so you can quickly look at it and hit "back" to go back to the text where you left of.

[1]: Just this morning, I got an email from Amazon telling me a book I purchased in May 2009 has been updated with corrections.
Netflix Streaming Selection Available on Android Tablets - iPad Coming Soon
According to the Netflix Official Blog (November 15, 2011) , a free app is now available for all Android tablets, as well as Kindle Fire and Nook. The new interface is reported to display double the titles in both the movies and TV shows categories as before. "In the last 12 months we have seen a threefold increase in how long Netflix members are watching on their tablets," says Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt of Netflix. "We're happy to debut a new user experience coinciding with the release of the next generation of devices from industry leaders. The new Netflix interface offers a significant improvement in browsing and searching for TV shows and movies to instantly watch." This increase in Netflix Streaming Selection is good news indeed!
A nice halfway house: http://gitorious.org/evil/pages/Home
Nonsense. It is months between when the physical book is typeset and it hits the stores. Plenty of time to tweak the ebook version.
Woz is on the dark side of the force… | Where Am I?
Land exploration lead to having many different kingdoms, which scaled wars up from inter-tribal wars to inter-kingdom wars. Later, world wars.

Space exploration will scale wars up from inter-continental world wars, to inter-world wars, which are much more massive.
Mesmira - An Interest Conversation Network
There are a lot of investment groups which have been, ahem, inspired by the YC model. I'm totally agnostic on what degree of success any particular one or the field in general will have, but in 2022, we'll have trivially checkable empirical evidence on whether there needed to be more seed stage funding than YC was doing for itself.

long odds of being successful

Do you realize that, if you believe the odds are long against this strategy succeeding, you have to be taking the position that this isn't a serious problem in the status quo? And vice versa? I mean, you're not going to give long odds against gravity or penicillin winning, right? They're going to ROFLstomp the alternatives. If diversity is not ROFLstomping the alternatives, then we did not have a diversity problem.
Android's malware problem is growing exponentially - Fortune Tech
Opposed to how pleasepoachme works; here is a free experimental web site we created; http://www.jobrupt.com. Jobrupt is for job seekers to initiate a job application by asking publicly the companies to create or open a job position for them by telling how they can add value and why they are the best candidate. Could anyone provide me with some hints or ideas if jobrupt would help anyone? Or is the idea too unrealistic?
Like massive concurrency? Websockets?
Clickable link for the doc: http://phzbox.com/moka/index.html

Moka is still in an alpha stage; but that being said, I'd love to hear some feedback. Feel free to browse the code, it should be pretty straightforward to any python dev.
Using unmanned drone to film riots in Warsaw, Poland [video]
Why not just use Twisted? It's a lot more mature and complete than node, and you don't have to deal with JavaScript either.
It's too late to edit my post, but I located the group responsible for this research:

http://cobweb.ecn.purdue.edu/~prints
Right, that's why most servers nowadays are written in this mystery platform that you failed to mention.
A Scala Tutorial for C# Programmers
Yawn, this old saw? Despite the fact that every person who cares about this has a blog where they complain about it, the market is indicating pretty clearly that this is not so important that it needs to be solved today. I'm sure this will get better over time and I suppose posts from people like this will help motivate it, but don't we all get it by now?

Recalibrate your expectations a little - buying an ebook is a lot like buying a physical book, but it's not the same thing. Maybe I should start blogging about how unhappy I am with the portability of physical books or how I was in an airport and wanted to rip the first chapter out of a book in the store to read on the plane but the store owner TOTALLY wouldn't let me!
I don't have a Kindle or other ebook reader, so I can't speak from experience but are some publishers better than others?

I mean, there are many very bad physical book publishers out there that don't (or minimally) edit the copy sent to them before sending it to the presses. That translates into the digital realm too, but there is a much lower barrier for entry for bad publishers and it's hard to differentiate between bad and good publishers in these early days.

If no publisher out there is doing a good job, it might be something to invest time into and maybe make some money.
I agree, it is super polarizing. The fact that it was ranked at #1 at HN for quite a while is proof of it. I am excited, that someone tries to tackle the passive job seeking market. The market for active seekers with indeed.com, simplyhired.com, monster.com, careerbuilder.com etc. is already pretty crowded, but nobody has really cracked the passive job seeking market. Granted that it's current form has its flaws (I assume it is just a first version), but this could be huge.
Show HN: Krate
I'm just now at the point where I refuse resumes and calls from recruiters.

It'd be better to figure out companies you want to work for and figure out how to get in touch.
Don't get me wrong, I use and love emacs, but I think it's a little silly to learn a new editor just because Steve Yegge says that all the "world changing" developers use it. As with any tool, pick the editor that that
1) is suitable for your task
2) you are comfortable with.
Doesn't get any simpler than that.
Hah, I've even heard people complaining about the weather here in the Silicon Valley. That and real estate prices, but the latter complaints are warranted.
"From Norway, even Sweden now looks gritty and hardscrabble, like something out of a Stieg Larsson novel."

Now, this is a case of national pride of course, but it really sounds like the author has heard just one side of a story here. My impression is that Sweden and Norway (like the other Scandinavian countries) are about equal in most aspects. That's not wrong, is it?
I am part of this team. We are already funded and building the product right now. I understand the concerns about just testing out an idea. But we will be rolling out the launch in the next couple of months.
http://timelessrepo.com/json-isnt-a-javascript-subset

Also see my other reply.
What a weird way to start off an article.

He tells the beginning of an interesting story not related to the article title, cuts it off, switches to the main topic, and then ends the article saying the original story is for another time.
Python looks like a lot less typing.
We'll see. I think it's going to be a pretty huge deal once it happens.
We would love if you could also give some hints about www.jobrupt.com; a free web tool - in beta, for people to initiate job applications. (pls excuses for the design and language)
Every language has it's own WTFs. Many of the ones in Javascript are shared with Ruby, Python and other interpreted languages. They hardly bite anyone in a real project.
I realize that that is the conclusion if you believe that it is inevitable that a free market will capitalize on every opportunity.

I do not believe that this is so. I mentioned a few of the things which might prolong or even prevent such a thing from being successful even if there is sufficient opportunity for it.

I might be willing to change my position if there were a much greater number of people with the resources necessary to launch YC-like companies.
Not using the side by side format, sorry.

http://www.nevercertain.com/2011/08/17/scala-ruby-rosetta.ht...
I'm not sure if this article is trying to say that those small differences account for the differences between the percentage of men and women in YC, or if it's just disproving the mathematical aspect of the TechCrunch article.

I'm not saying either of those articles is right, but clearly none have shown why that difference exist.
http://timelessrepo.com/json-isnt-a-javascript-subset

JSON isn't a strict subset of JS. Moreover, no, you should never eval() things which are untrusted. Do you really trust everything the browser tells you? No? Then why trust JSON?

I'm not anti-JSON, I'm anti-JS. Browsers don't support other languages (except for VB, which bites, and Fx nightly support for Python, which I wish would become more widespread) so there's no choice in a browser. On the server side, though, you have a chance to use real languages, so you really should.

Oh, and also, you do know that XML-RPC, bless its ill-specified heart, is still around, right? There's a whole world of enterprise that isn't prepared to accept JSON-RPC.
It wasn't an unprecedented decision. Mount Weather in Virginia (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Weather_Emergency_Operati...) was an even bigger project designed to house and protect the executive branch, but it was compromised through sheer bad luck when in 1974 a TWA flight happened to crash into it. Reporters came to report on the crash and were surprised to find this huge, massively secure, fenced-off Federal installation in the middle of nowhere.

Mount Weather wasn't shut down after that, but its role as a key relocation point was scaled back considerably. The problem with Mount Weather after 1974 was the same problem as the Greenbrier bunker had after 1992 -- the entire value of a facility like that is dependent on the Soviets not knowing it exists, because hydrogen bombs are so powerful that it's pretty much impossible to build anything that can survive a direct hit. The only way facilities like the Greenbrier, or Mount Weather, or even Cheyenne Mountain could hope to survive in a full-out nuclear war would be if they were secret enough so that the enemy wouldn't target them directly.

Thankfully the prospects of full-out nuclear war aren't as bad as they used to be, so the investment in most of these facilities isn't totally wasted; many government leaders were relocated to Mount Weather on 9/11, for instance, when it wasn't clear if more terrorist attacks were imminent, and Dick Cheney is said to have worked for a time in the days after 9/11 out of Raven Rock. Neither facility would survive a direct hit from an ICBM, but when your enemies don't have ICBMs they're pretty much as secure as you can get.
Typesetting a longish (~800k plain text) novel using XeLaTeX and the microtype package takes my 2Ghz CPU about 30 seconds, and produces a 1.8MB PDF.

Current tablets should be able to re-render an individual chapter in a second or two, and it would not be any trouble for ebook distributors like B&N and Amazon to pre-render portrait and landscape versions at several different type sizes.

Fixing the abysmal typography of ebooks really wouldn't take much work, and would probably be the best thing ebook publishers could do to woo serious book-lovers who aren't also geeks. Why aren't they even trying?
I think the author was dead on despite some confused points - the number of problems that node is the best solution for is a fraction of what its currently being used for. It seems obvious that it's popularity is tied to server side javascript.
The problem with that logic is that the best tools also tend to be the ones that take a bit of effort to become comfortable with. If you always go with what you're already familiar with, you'll never get anywhere.

Also, it's pretty hard to judge how suitable a tool as versatile as Emacs is to your task without already being at least familiar with it.

Ultimately, I'm a big fan of trying to use new stuff "just because". I've found some of my favorite tools this way: Haskell, Emacs and even Linux.
Square Payments used by Salvation Army when Accepting Donations
two small suggestions: change .saving() to .mutable() and .rem() to .remove() (or filter(), reversing the semantics, since that is already in python) (every other method is a full word).

also, maybe .mutable() would be better as a flag in the constructor. it makes no sense to use it in a chain (in fact, that could be confusing) and is the kind of thing you should probably fix on construction rather than changing later.

ps. it's not clear to me that this is better than list comprehensions, which already do much of what you have.
It's fairly new but feel free to browse the code; it should be pretty straightforward to you. I've tried to provide good examples to make it easy to learn/use on phzbox.com/moka/.
I agree. For some things, like more mathy things that only perform one function, it seems like functional programming is the way to go. However, for HUGE programs based on data and complex interactions between and extensions of objects, it seems like a more object-oriented style would be better... all about the right tool for the job, I guess.
Did you miss the very last line of his comment?

"Knowing that they exist can help us make better decisions."

He's making this admission with the expressed desire of changing, not trying to justify or excuse it.
Ok, then i guess i have to take it now. Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean no one's out to get you.
I'm a backend engineer. Have been for years.

Node.js works for me.

I don't think much else needs to be said.
Is this launchrock thing the reason their signup page has some meta crud and a little bit of javascript but no actual content? Either way, exceptionally poor web authoring on somebody's part.
They meddle. The only reason I ever know what somebody is is because they told me (annoyed me), or otherwise made their issue my own.

I don't hate buddhists. Do you know why? Because they don't go out of their way to bug me regularly.