skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, the fact that people are attempting to argue that, as a lady, I am somehow 'naturally' unfit for intellectual/mathematical/logical tasks is pretty insulting. I know that you (general) are not talking about me (specifically), but it's pretty hard not to take it a little personally.

Then there is the tone of "No, there could not possibly be a problem with US" that permeates so many comments on this thread. There are very few voices that are even willing to entertain the idea that there is an aspect of this culture that is unwelcoming or hostile to women.

And finally, there are all the comments that seem to be saying that who cares why there is a strong gender imbalance in this field, they don't see a problem with the status quo, and that including more women in the field is completely unnecessary and not worth considering, much less actually doing anything about.

So yeah. Not feeling like I could ask any of these people and a question about something I'm studying or make a comment about something technical without getting either a lot of "pat pat little girl" or otherwise insulting and unhelpful reactions.
For this reason I would say you need to automate as much as possible. Maintaining quality documentation is expensive, and although much of it requires a human eye there should be plenty of opportunity for machie verification too.

For instance, code examples (snippets or sample projects) should be actually compiled and tested, automatically, every time the docs or the API itself changes. Think of it as CI for your documentation.
> To be perfectly honest, that's a great way of describing how he feels about homosexuals ...

That he is fearful? That he feels the same emotion that one might experience from a giant hairy spider, or cancer, or a bottle of nitroglycerin? Not liking something, or not wanting it to be public policy, does not make someone fearful.

> the fact that OSC has some incredibly harmful views on society that should not be tolerated.

It's a fact that a lot of the homosexual leadership leads lives of debauchery and wanton disregard for consequences. It is not harmful to suggest that perhaps they should not be given free reign to rewrite family and marriage law, nor indoctrinate schoolchildren.

Now this is being discussed in the context of a religious leader (Card) rallying the troops (Mormons). The Mormons are a religion with a fanatical devotion to procreation, children, and families. When a bunch of slick Hollywood queers try to move marriage in the direction of being a frivolous indulgence, the internal Mormon rhetoric is naturally going to run towards the revolutionary. (And it is not idle talk. In a fantasy world where the lunatic wing of the queer movement gets their wishes on marriage laws, Utah probably would secede from the U.S.)
I keep hearing this argument. But physically traveling there is pretty stupid if you think about it. It's much simpler to set up a communication channel.

Sure it'll have a 50 year latency, but we could easily stream all of youtube (or the entire internet really) to them, and so could they. Assuming they're more advanced and their cameras capture the environment in spherical 3D, we could recreate what it's like to stand on their soil pretty accurately from home.

Besides just browsing their extranet would be amazing in itself.
I certainly am not giddy about reddit being down for a day, or the thought that HN, Google or Facebook would follow suit. For me, it's desperation.
That's never been the issue. When people claim that "SOPA breaks DNSSEC" (note they don't say the reverse) they mean that a SOPA blockage looks the same as a MITM attack from the client's perspective. As I've explained earlier, ISPs can choose to make it look like a DNS server outage instead of an MITM; this might produce fewer misleading errors in the browser. SOPA works fine as written, it just makes DNS debugging harder. "Users running secure applications have a need to distinguish between policy-based failures and failures caused, for example, by the presence of an attack or a hostile network, or else downgrade attacks would likely be prolific." http://www.circleid.com/pdf/PROTECT-IP-Technical-Whitepaper-...
If Google wanted to do something visible they just have to flip the search page to a black background. Doesn't affect access to products but people will certainly notice.
Very reminiscent of David Thorne from 27b/6.. http://www.27bslash6.com/overdue.html
First steps with Scala, say goodbye to bash scripts…
Playframework 2.0 is right around the corner, and it’s core is programmed in Scala, so it’s a wonderful opportunity to give this object-oriented / functional hybrid beast a try…
Like many others, I will pick a very simple script to give my first steps…
Refusing REFUSED
These are the same people who think all digital content should be free - music, movies, games, apps, etc. No matter how technically advanced our society becomes, one axiom will always remain true - there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
I really doubt Google would do this, not just because of potential contracts or even the lost revenue but mainly because of how tentative their market share is.

The only thing locking most people into Google search is habit. If Google were to not work for a day, a ton of people would start using Bing and friends; a significant proportion of these would indubitably continue using them forever. Most people don't really care about which engine they use--until it fails. Once it fails, they'll flail around for a bit then use somebody else.

I think the damage to Google's reputation and market share would be too big for them to consider killing search for a day. I could see them doing a doodle or something though.
I'm normally not the type of person to dis articles, but I just read nearly 900 words and learned nothing. The tl;dr is obvious to any professional programmer: there are short-term costs but long-term rewards to code maintainability. Unfortunately, he doesn't argue this point at all (I want to see data or an least an anecdote), or even tell what is healthy code. Instead, he opts for an extended analogy to a factually questionable "healthy eating continuum".
The prop desk I worked for a few years ago built a TeX-based report generator. The graphs were created with gnuplot. It all worked very well.
They will not get shut down but they will certainly be affected by this in a real and massive way. A non trivial amount(no citation) of their ad revenue comes from the marginal sites that could be shut down by a SOPA intervention. This will affect their bottom line. It makes good business sense to do something about it now instead of later.
Reinventing Yourself
Where is PG in all of this?
I am having a real hard time committing to joining Google+ because of the sad state of my Google accounts. I have a half dozen of them connected to a dozen different services and devices and it seems impossible to consolidate them in any way without losing settings and history at one site or another.
I would find having my time wasted pretty insulting.
Especially since basically zero major label music or Hollywood movies are legally available for free, so if Google detects such a file it's presumptively infringing. (Oops, is that something you can't say?)
Facebook/Google engineers who dont demand a 1/18 SOPA blackout should be ashamed
Please, add commenting and voting features so we could vote for top 30 sites HS should watch :))
YouTube isn't the Internet, BTW. I know people have forgotten how to do this, but it is possible to host videos on your own Web site. In that case you probably would have been left alone, or you might have received a DMCA takedown which you could easily defuse with a counter-notice.
This is retarded. You go dark to make users who would otherwise not know about SOPA realize how bad an idea it is.

No one using hackernews fits that description.

I am in favor of a wikipedia or perhaps even a google blackout. HN needs a blackout about as much as an anti-SOPA blog.
View -> Source on this page. Just do it.
Some have theorized that the reason we are even talking about this is because we are _not_ in a cluster. We are pretty isolated, life ending events are pretty rare, every 60 million years?
I believe the US hands out penalties to american based business if they are found to have given bribes even if its customary or pressured in the country where it gave the bribes.
Ironically, the reason this won't work is the same reason SOPA won't: proxies. HN is one of the largest gatherings of hackers anywhere; give us a break.

That's in addition to the fact that it's consensus that emails aren't worth a damn here.

And also the fact that it would take significant wasted effort to implement.

If PG did something like this, I'd lose all respect.
The right is not the same thing as the ability. Since rights are enforced by a civil authority, it would suggest to me the only "natural" rights are the ones granted by said authority.
HN stories get copied everywhere, with HN dark, how will the other tech blogs know which sites are going dark?

Maybe HN can just invert the colors on the site.
Vancouver custom boxes
Speaking of Diablo... Diablo 3 will have a new in-game marketplace which some people think is a step closer to gambling. The reason being that you can actually earn money playing the game now. Put enough hours into it and you can make a few bucks in the market.

I guess the connection is, you buy some loot to get better at the game to play against random monsters to hopefully make some cash from the stuff you find.
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Good read, thanks for that. I agree with the conclusion: there is no one-size-fits-all rule for interoperability.

The way I see it, it's ultimately about tradeoffs. I can only imagine what things would be like today if web browsers implemented a strict parsing of HTML and refused to render invalid pages. One possibility is hindered adoption of HTML by the masses. Another is that two vendors would disagree about the HTML spec and cause pages to be browser-specific. (Turns out this happened anyway :-))

Is the HTML5 spec better in terms of interop and compatibility than the previous ones? http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/02/15/HTML5
Again, you are not looking at the big picture.

If you physically stole cars but left the complete per-unit cost in cash there, then you wouldn't have done anything wrong, right? Alternatively, you have a machine that makes perfect copies. Both work the same for this purpose.

Because you only focus on the per-unit cost. But even cars have fixed, one-time R&D costs that are distributed on each sold car totally arbitrarily just as the fixed costs for producing digital goods area distributed totally arbitrarily on each download/CD/whatever. The only difference is that digital goods have virtually no per unit-costs to go along with it. Still, in both cases, you need frameworks to reward creative/R&D work if you want it to happen (especially in a competitive way).

If you copy all music and all cars, then everybody has a car and music, but what is the incentive to produce better cars and new music later? That is the big picture.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if they come out with windows phone 8 based on windows 8 and not windows mobile. That way they could have one os for phones/tablets/pc's/ect. They could use their market/repository as a way to force people to modify uis. Since all of the 3rd party apps are written in a version of silverlight(they haven't dropped this restriction yet right?) it should have few incompatibilities.
I say come january 18th HN should either black out, or focus discussion on SOPA entirely in solidarity with reddit.

HN is a niche community with members who have a much greater capacity to influence the outcome of SOPA than a general populace. In some sense, a black out would inhibit the community's ability to affect change with respect to the issue.

If every active member of HN pledged to spend their available resources on the 18th towards working on SOPA, I suspect the outcome could have effects reaching further than even the championed reddit black out.

It's mostly a matter of deciding to place our money where our mouths are and collaborating effectively.
Ok, cool. I'll try that. Thanks
>basically zero major label music or Hollywood movies are legally available for free

only because its not true?>
Comparative advantage is actually even more subtle than that. Even if we're both better at photos than widgets, it's still beneficial for me to produce the one I'm better at relative to you (say photos), and for you to produce widgets. Then we can trade with each other and both gain from trade.
This. The only regret I had about switching from Firefox to Chromium is the lack of RequestPolicy. Apparently the hooks aren't there, as with AdBlockPlus.

In fact, just thinking about it now ... why did I switch? I should try Firefox again.
If HN went dark, it would be an example of preaching to the choir. same goes for redit goin' dark.
lol...good one.
I totally agree. Blacking out is just stupid. Raising awareness via splash page or messaging is effective and important.

Please, let's not be retarded. If things black out one day, it'll just piss people off and the next day it'll be back to normal.

Let's encourage Google / Facebook / Twitter to use their huge audiences to spread awareness of the issue. When the public hears what SOPA is, they will reject it. The only way this thing will pass is if its sneaks in by the special interests.

Stop the blackout talk though
Oh, I was certain that Kink.com (NSFW) was going to be on there. Back when I worked there, it was always fun to look at how many .gov email addresses had accounts on their system. I guess they didn't mean that kind of monitoring. ;-)
I think not allowing SOPA and PIPA to pass, by itself defines neutrality. They just want the Internet the remain like it's always been - unaffected by politics.
> With the music industry, artists can move from selling CDs to doing more live tours. Not sure that's something photographers can really do.

And even that is not a good solution. It is a workaround for those bands that happen to be good live bands. It is like moving from singleplayer (easy to copy) to hosted multiplayer games. It is good for the industry, but it still killed off whole genres just for the sake of not being copyable.
I guess the problem is that you added a bunch of strangers to Google+. That's not what Google+ is for.

I've kept my Google+ account limited to just friends and family, and I've found it amazingly helpful for them to be added to chat. I used to use irssi+bitlbee, but now I find it easier to just open Google+ and find people to talk to.

Ultimately, I think your Google+ experience is going to be a product of your expectations. I've talked to my family members that aren't computer programmers, and they like all the defaults for Google+. You might not, for the same reason that I run my own mail server -- we're weird, and we're the 0.00001% that doesn't matter to anyone trying to make a product for hundreds of millions of users. (It's why we read HN instead of Reddit or Slashdot: mostly to be different.)

(Another problem might be apathy. Internally at Google, our software is so integrated that it would make Apple cry. Unfortunately, it's all geeky stuff that 99.999% of the world doesn't even know exists. Because we have it so good, we might not even consider the fact that our users aren't as lucky.)
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Proposal infographic
I'm 26 and I make 160k in financial services. Its enough for me and a girlfriend to afford a 600 sqft loft.

80k will get you 5 roommates and bedroom with a curtain.

In San Francisco 250k to 300k/y is high paid. 100k-150k is making it, 80k would be in the low paid arena.
So, it's Kickstarter with media hosting?
Early on at Amazon, the forms you got with your order was generated with TeX ( LaTeX? )

It was probably installed by ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Davis_%28programmer%29 ), but he was gone by that point.

The system was running on a couple of the Sparcstations and at that time (97) the zon was switching to Alpha.

I remember looking at that the build system and thought that it was "unsupportable" by myself or any other systems admin there at that time.

Recently, I've wrote some docs in LaTeX and was told to convert it to Word/Confluence.
I see, thanks for the feedback. If I ever make it to Dumaguete I'll drop you a line to see if your up for a beer.
Most of the time it is because the existing functions are inadequate, so people end up adding new ones in VBA. StringConcat, for example, is far more powerful than the regular concatenate function.

http://www.cpearson.com/excel/stringconcatenation.aspx
The belief that morality and practicability are the same thing just scares me, really. Individual humans become more powerful all the time. We need to respect arbitrary, consentual rules to keep the world going instead of going back to "strong eats weak, bad luck".
People will sue Google anyway. They get sued over indexing embarrassing things that people have inadvertently published all the time.
My father's lecture on inventing and entrepreneurship
Once you know a language that well, why is time to switch to a new language? Why not leverage that expertise and use it to write (more) great software?
I don't think that's just about preventing copying. Recurring billing is profitable.
SEEKING FREELANCER - Seattle (or its Eastside)

Looking for tutor(s) for any of these:

- iOS

- Distributed databases (e.g. NoSQL) and cross-system messaging (e.g. ZeroMQ), especially for:

- High performance Rails

Don't need to be brilliant, just need to be able to explain topics clearly and patiently. (I'm a competent-enough Python/PHP guy crash coursing into these other technologies.)

Get paid for a couple hours of your time per week chilling in a coffee shop answering my questions and demonstrating techniques. It'll be fun.

No resume necessary, though hella bonus points for blogs/docs/code demonstrating your ability to teach those fields above.

Email: elliot.hn@fastmail.fm.

Thanks!
So let's say say we have essential work for 50% of all available manhours. Why, then, is it not a great thing that the other 50% can be paid even when they are just producing digital, intangible goods? I think rising productivity is actually a great argument in favor of copyright laws.
Some people use LaTeX on multi-institution research proposals.

The usual competing tool for this is Word. But coordination of multiple contributions in Word docs can be a hassle, even with the tracking features of Word.

But you can use LaTeX and a good VCS to track and merge changes. Kind of slick. Works best with academic or quasi-academic collaborators, of course.

Most of the automation-type applications mentioned in the thread probably could also use HTML+CSS, which is what I prefer for this stuff now.

I don't know anyone who has used HTML+CSS in a research proposal.
I just got around to uploading this lecture my father gave at the University of Waterloo. My father, Evan Koslow, is a very successful serial entrepreneur who has started dozens of businesses. I've always found his teachings to be pretty educational and inspiring. Even though it isn't the best quality video, if you have the time I would give it a watch.
Embrace failure. Get out and Do Something.
> Also the gov't is never going to shut down Google.

Also the CHINESE gov't is never going to shut down Google.

Just adding a little perspective...
Building construction is one of the few industries that I do NOT want to ever act like a US web startup. Along with airplane construction and medical devices.
Irish Government sued for not having blocking laws on the books
turtles, all the way
Try changing "atoms" to "molecules".
I readily concede that the situation is more nuanced than "software patents are bad". However, I think we are coming at it from two different perspectives. You seem to be suggesting that ideas are innately deserving of protection. I don't share that point of view.

For fear of beating a dead horse, let me put it this way: (should I be made King) I would do away with patents altogether if that didn't mean removing all incentive for innovation. For physical inventions, patents foster innovation by ensuring that the inventor will have time to bring their invention to market before a competitor. (I mean no snark at all, but I believe the previous sentence to be generally true whether you buy it or not.) For software, the market does a great job of fostering innovation and so I don't see the advantage of software patents (and that is obviously where our views differ). If a person or a corporation believe that a certain software method offers them a particular advantage, they will retain it as a trade secret regardless.
Windows Phone 2011 Retrospective [Infographic]
The information about how old a person looks exists in the image itself. You can compare the size and proportions of a person's features to known examples. No one is going to mistake a four-year-old for a grandmother. The information about whether or not someone has permission to copy something does not exist in the file: the infringing copy and the legitimate copy are bit-for-bit identical. You have to get the data on who has permission to do what from somewhere else. The Viacom v. YouTube case proved that even expensive lawyers spending hours doing research can't manage to get even 99% accuracy. They had to remove things that Viacom itself had uploaded (or authorized to be uploaded) from that case. Twice.

Now suppose we have a magic system that's better than expensive copyright lawyers that can manage 99% accuracy (which they didn't) and that we operate at internet scale on the roughly 60 billion web pages Google indexes. Then assume that no less than 20% of the internet is pirated material. Does that sound too high? Good. Your numbers will look even worse if it's lower. Now we do a little math:

0.2 * 0.99 = 19.8% are pirate pages correctly blocked
0.8 * 0.99 = 79.2% are innocent pages correctly allowed
0.2 * 0.01 = 0.2% are pirate pages mistakenly allowed
0.8 * 0.01 = 0.8% are innocent pages mistakenly blocked

So we've just censored four innocent pages for every one containing pirated material and there would be 120,000,000 pirate pages (0.2% of 60 billion) out there that aren't blocked. Feel free to work out the math, but if you want to say that 20% is too high a proportion, you'll have even more false positives, so even more innocent pages are censored for every pirate blocked.

And this assumes that we have something better than ~$300/hr copyright lawyers screening all 60 billion web pages. Any computer program we make won't even be this good.
Communication Can Make You A Good Listener Too
a monetary payout to stop SOPA doesn't really work in the long run. It promotes the behavior we have today where the most money wins (usually), and doesn't disincentivize future attempts.

I agree more with the doodle idea, or that every click to a search result brings up a modal dialog with a "contact your congress members" button.
Popular Science? Seems out of place. I'd love to hear the rationale behind that one.
The netherlands is a different beast when it comes to Geocoding since each postcode only corresponds with around 10 buildings all very close to each other. Most other systems cover larger delivery areas. My complete amateur comment is that you need different algorithms for different countries.
Top 20 Anticipated Films of 2012, 20-16