skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, there are some deep issues here, right?

I very much agree that participating in the system is essential. I vote early and often, as the saying goes, and bug friends about issues.

In some sense, yeah, we've failed the system. Then again, the address to that is really uncomfortable: the system was designed to deal with people who actually were (nominally) fit to govern themselves. I would posit the (loathsome) idea that most of the population functions mainly to consume services and act selfishly. They have no great intellect, ambition, desire, or goal beyond feeling good and being happy. There is nothing "wrong" with this, but that's the way it is--consider the evolution of the computers and programming away from terminal-driven computation devices to slick advertising delivery systems. There is a lot to unpack, but it isn't productive to do that here.

As for your algorithm, it's crap. Here's why.

First, the system technically functions based solely on votes, but these votes can be changed by gerrymandering, hacking voting machines, rigging elections, etc. Don't pretend like your vote is some assured method of sending an impulse (however small) to the system. Note also that once candidates are in office, the system responds to their whims, and in turn many whims can be affected by extortion, blackmail, bribery, corruption, or whatever else.

Second, you assert that you still vote when the incumbent isn't working out--you just vote against them. This is wrong, because the information you want to convey--"The candidate in office is not one I want"--is now altered to something else--"I want this particular candidate in office". You've given away the ability to say "None of these candidates are worth a damn, give us new ones".

Any system that will seriously allow the election of dead men into office in preference to a living being, no matter who despicable, is failed.

The system is very much failing us. That said, it's near impossible to fix it--there is a lot of inertia, and we can't exactly bring it down for three months for a refactor, now can we?
Oh thank God somebody in authority is calling this bean bull_hit what it is.

After reading the Eiffel book and thinking about things like programming by contract and class invariants, the bean pattern which constructs empty, initially useless (or at least unreliable) objects seemed like a huge step back.
You should consider trying this (paid) video course by the author of LPTHW: http://www.udemy.com/learn-python-the-hard-way/
The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. No big laboratory is needed in which to think. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born. That is why many of the earthly miracles have had their genesis in humble surroundings.

-Nikola Tesla
Jeff Fortenberry, R-Nebraska. Thank you for asking.
Show HN: Spades card game written in javascript
aren't headlines always in the present tense though, with very rare exceptions?
Case in point: Sen. Mike Lee's (R-Utah) office contacted me to point to a press release in which Lee stated that he would vote against the bill unless it were changed. I previously listed him as a "Supporter" because he was part of the unanimous vote to move it out of committee. He's now "Unsupportive" as opposed to being an "Opponent"
http://projects.propublica.org/sopa/L000577

Depending on your level of opposition to the bill, you might declare him as good as a "Yea" vote if you feel that the changes he wants are largely nominal. Others would disagree. So, all in all, a moving target depending on what happens before the actual floor vote.
I'm sitting here in one of these "cool startup" offices right now. I absolutely hate it. No place to stack anything, no walls to hang whiteboards, calendars, pictures. No DOOR to close when I just want to get something done.

I have noise everywhere that headphones can't drown out. I have people tapping me on the back constantly because, apparently, having headphones on isn't a big enough signal that I'm trying to shut out the world. Yeah yeah, I know, sit people down and tell them. People forget. Just give me a door I can LOCK and that will work just fine.

I'm a few hours away from commandeering an unused storage room and making it the new Software Lab.
MPAA attempted to shut down website over a publicity stunt
What's the point of the non-SSL link for Wikipedia? I can't imagine someone who knows what SSL is actively clicking it.
I think it comes down to where the United States chooses to spend its money. I'm not saying the country should feel obligated to be caretakers of the world, but your defense budget is objectively out of control. There are a number of more worthy on which some of that money could be spent.
"Hold Only That Pair of 2s?" Studying a Video Poker Hand with R
Forgive the plug:

http://www.memrise.com/item/3190/impecunious/
I wonder if we'll see candlelit vigils and bunches of flowers outside MS stores when Bill Gates finally kicks it? He's long been the opposite of "cool" and certainly hasn't always been an honest competitor in the past but his altruism now should surely make up for that.
Secure Cross-Domain Communication in the Browser
This is interesting, but I'm not certain there need be an institution with just a heavy interest on software engineering. The article suggests that there are those who may not be proficient at other academic pursuits, but may have a keen interest in software engineering.
To be honest, most of those kids are the types who will start coding/hacking on their own, not sure if a special school is needed for this.
Plus there are added benefits to learning english, the arts, maybe a foreign language - I feel all of these have an impact on the type of person you become, perhaps even the type of software engineer you become. Just like it is with medical school - in many countries you go to medical school straight from high school, but here you complete 4 years of college first. In those four years you learn certain things which med school won't cover and which you may never be able to learn at any point again - but they could have a significant impact on the type of doctor you become, esp in how you interact with your patients.
I feel the same applies to any career choice, including software engineering.
Sorry for not seeing this before!

To the first part of your question: You're absolutely correct, good humanities PhD programs typically admit only 10-15 students per year, all of them fully funded. My question about your friend would be what program was he in (schools in themselves aren't indicative of much)? It sounds like it might be a niche program. I'd be stunned if an Ivy had unfunded PhDs in English, History, Philosophy, etc.

The thing about humanities programs is that they're funded de facto because graduate students do most of the teaching. If you look at the class schedule for a given term, for example, you're likely to see more basic writing classes than all other English classes combined (or math classes, or...). This is because writing is the only class in the US system that virtually every college student will have to take. The result is ample funding for humanities PhDs and, in many cases, MAs.

Don't get me wrong, though. Humanities PhDs face a whole host of other problems later on, like poor job prospects, mediocre pay, and politicking like you thought only existed in the Dune novels!
The DNS provision was NOT pulled.

Smith has simply chosen to delay its implementation. It's still in there, it just won't come into effect until "after a study has been done on its effects."
Why does everything have a getter/setter by default?
That is a pretty horrible anti-pattern, is it something to do with being able to serialise the state (including internal state) of the whole object?
It isn't as fully featured, but is a great, simple alternative that works well on mobile also.
So we will no longer break DNSSEC, but we'll still have guilty until proven innocent, massively increased legal costs, and government/corporate censorship without oversight?

Yeah, sorry, no thanks. Washington's offering us a pile of steaming turds. Taking one of the turds away does not make us more likely to accept the pile.
Absolutely! Definitely inspired by all the Bootstrap activity I've been seeing here lately. Here's another one - a form builder based on Bootstrap and jquery:

http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3442883
The Flip Side of a Big Audience
Internet fame: be careful what you wish for.
BTW:

http://www.mat.unb.br/clausahm/area/AnAlg-07.2d/Referencias/...
No whiteboards? What kind of startup doesn't have loads of whiteboards? You should go buy a load of that paint you can use to turn walls into whiteboards and paint your desk and cupboards and floor - www.ideapaint.com
What year did you graduate?

I was class of 2006 and we had AP Computer Science (which was Java at this point), computer architecture, networking, A+, some sort of PHP/MySQL web development class but it was mostly useless
> My bigoted preconception [...]

Well, I would have called you on this, but I guess I don't have to.

> The abstraction is just barely enough to get the job done [...]

Or, in other words, the perfect amount...
I wish I could read "statement on security" but it leads to http://www.viamall.com/security.html which is, obviously, not working any more.
If you apply Gauss' Law and define a boundary around US for money, you can argue that it's not Gates' money that's leaving the country, its the money that people gave to him, i.e. it's still US originated money.
As a person who usually doesn't finish the full course of antibiotics if they're feeling healthy: Why does it matter?
Ha, Darius from colourlovers was one of the first people I tested the idea out on over breakfast a few weeks back and he really warmed up to it, especially considering the ambitious marketplace he's building now:

http://creativemarket.com

And subtlepatterns kicks ass, it's been my secret designer weapon ever since it came out.
Hanselminutes Talks Kendo UI and HTML5
1. The constitutional role of the federal government does not mention anything about foreign aid, and rightly so.

2. Surely this doesn't count the billions the Federal Government gives in military aid.
No, we have whiteboards. They're just across the room on the outer walls where I can't reach them easily. We also went cheap and bought melamine bathroom panels that are impossible to erase.
Twitter Just Changed Canadian Politics Forever
Sculpteo aims to be the Etsy of the 3D printing world
Unfortunately no, not yet, I'm still abstracting out the themes from a few recent side projects and wanted to clean things up before posting anywhere.
I wasn't aware what a PCR machine does and the website assumes you already know! PCR is a technique that allows scientists to create a vast quantity of a specific sequence of DNA (via http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091226132510AA...).
The scam was going on for months. It's not something that some employee did without telling anyone, hidden away in some office. You can't possibly contact all those businesses during work hours at google without some boss asking you what you are working on and what you are doing. And if that is possible inside google, imho something is very wrong.
With certainty, no. So what? The right question to ask is this: Is P(need subject X) x (cost of not knowing X) < (cost of learning X)?

Since the cost of learning X tends to be high (at least if you learn it in school), and the cost of not knowing it is very often nothing but the cost of learning it + cost of delays, this inequality is very often not satisfied.
Source Code would be nice. I wish to hack it a bit.
How did you manage to remember single unused word for the 14 years? What learning technique did you use?
Open-Source Biology Evolves
Vaccines and antibiotics are not the only ways, and certainly not the most effective ways, to fight bacterial infections.

What we should be focusing on is developing bacteriophage technology (namely phage lysins).

As every human (a eukaryote) is prone to certain viruses (which can act only on eukaryotes), every bacteria (a prokaryote), this includes strep throat, TB, etc., is vulnerable to certain viruses (which can only work prokaryotes). These viruses are so specific that they only work on one type of bacteria, and they evolve at nearly the same rate as a bacteria evolves (which is how TB has become antibiotic resistant).

http://www.rockefeller.edu/vaf/phage.php
I guess this is more of a bug report than a feature request, but it's related to several feature requests involving subdomains, so I figured I might as well post it here:

I noticed that the Kenyan TLD uses a similar approach to that of the UK where there is a controlled secondary domain (.co.ke) under which all commercial sites are kept. This is not visible on the front page. I noticed this on this item: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460033

Expected outcome: show one level more for the Kenyan .*.ke domain space.
Because some of the bacteria remain. Not enough to make you feel unhealthy. Enough to breed and spread. These survivors are the ones that were most resistant to the antibiotics. Now they have less competition. They will breed more bacteria. More bacteria who inherit their improved resistance to antibiotics.

Some of their children will be even more resistant. Some of their children will end up in someone else who, just like you, did not finish the course of antibiotics and, just like you, ended up being an incubator for a hardier, more antibiotic resistant strain.

Eventually, the children are completely resistant and they laugh in the face of antibiotics, and then people start dying. People you never met. People who might be generations down the line from you infected with a super-resistant strain that can be traced back to you and others like you.
Using Rails and Twitter Bootstrap? Check out this extraction I put together from a personal project that makes it super easy to generate Bootstrap-style forms: https://github.com/potenza/form-bootstrap
Ha! Hmmm... crap. Am I passionate about things but in denial about it???

But I did pick that handle a looong time ago... when I was younger and crazier...
Is apple any more of an honest competitor with all of its patent trolling, closed platforms, and hardware lock-in?
Per Steve Johnson's TED Talk:

"Chance favors the connected mind."
I think there are two important facts to keep in perspective here.

First, polls have shown that U.S. citizens drastically overestimate the amount of the federal budget allocated to foreign aid. As I recall, the average estimate is 25%; the reality is less than 0.1%.

The comparison holds mainly not because Bill Gates is so rich, or because the U.S. is indebted, but because federal budget priorities drastically favor items that are not foreign aid. Those priorities are formed in part because citizens believe that the budget is already giving away huge quantities of money, making proposals to increase foreign aid unpopular.

Second, the amount of money spent is not necessarily a good measure of the amount of aid given. On the one hand, sometimes more money doesn't help; to use an analogy that people here might understand, after a certain point in increasing your budget for paying software developers, you are limited by your ability to find good people, not by your ability to pay them. Likewise, some foreign aid projects - such as HIV eradication in certain African nations - have reached the point where the amount of monetary aid given already exceeds the capacity of local infrastructure to use the resources wisely, and any more would just sit in a bank account somewhere until someone blew it on a useless boondoggle.

On the other hand, some forms of aid or assistance given by the U.S. to friends or allies do not have monetary value, such as military assistance, diplomatic cover, or political advice... and there are material goods that are, for whatever reason, more valuable to the people who receive them than the items would be priced in the U.S. market where they were paid for.

So although this is a true and revealing fact, it's best to not misinterpret it. The reasons for the foreign aid budget being lower than Bill Gates's charity contributions are political, not fiscal; but it's likely that the more important question about foreign aid is the nature and quality of the aid, not the U.S. dollar value for which it was purchased.
"Does anybody know if Notch is self taught? I thought he had a CS Degree from somewhere?"

The two are not mutually exclusive.

I was talking with a friend recently who's working on her Ph.D, observing that everyone who thought I was so smart in college is now better educated, officially, than me. She was like "You're basically self-taught, but with a piece of paper that says you were willing to stick around in college for 4 years. Even in college you were self-taught."

One of my teammates at work recently said I should become a professor. I was like "Don't I need a Ph.D for that?" All my other teammates were like "Naw, man, visiting lecturer!"

If you're actually self-taught, you can treat formal education options as a menu that you might or might not choose to sample, depending on your goals at the moment. You don't have to define yourself as one or the other.
He may not have taste as some would say, but he's been hacking real world problems lately. Good job.
Let's Talk About Innovation
Because you are increasing the likelihood of giving rise to drug resistant variants of the life-form those antibiotics are directed towards. There is a whole field of investigation into this phenomenon. A good (technical) starting point if you are interested in more is: http://www.drug-resistance.org/

Please, for the sake of society at large, complete any and all antibiotic/antiviral drug courses you are prescribed by your physician.
Just because you feel "healthy" doesn't mean that all the bacteria has been killed. If you stop taking the antibiotics before the bacteria is thoroughly eradicated, the bacteria may develop a resistance to the antibiotics you took.

The antibiotics that you took are useless against this new bacteria. You will have to seek other antibiotics.

Carry this on with multiple types of antibiotics, and you have a Big Problem.

Edit: Amazing that there are four responses to this question, all within a minute of each other!
Because you may have killed most of the bacteria but left a few with some resistance to that type of antibiotic. In classical evolutionary terms, you’ve thinned the herd to the strongest members. These surviving somewhat resistant bacteria, even if they aren’t making you noticeably sick, may then spread those genes into the general population.

It’s important not to use antibiotics if you don’t need them, and to complete the course if you do need them. Otherwise you’re selecting for strains of disease that are hard to cure.
Mozilla: Going to Grab More Data About You, But Here's How We'll Keep It Safe
I believe bootstrap will be adding a responsive grid with bootstrap 2.0, currently being developed in the 2.0-wip branch.

http://bootstrap.io/Demo/Scaffolding
in contrast, Steve Jobs decided the money was his to keep, even after death. lives NOT saved: 5,812,000 and counting.
They probably didn't mean that they "know everything there is to know" unless they are very arrogant.

Perhaps they meant that they knew the syntax to at least one programming language and where at a point where they felt it would be easy to learn more if needed but they no longer felt the need to study it as an end in itself for their purposes.

having said that it's easy to overestimate your level of knowledge when you haven't been introduced to anything more difficult.

You may believe for example that you can easily solve say traveling salesman because you figured out how to write the naive n! solution and tested it with 5 nodes on a fast computer and it worked fine.
If you never have to test it with 1000+ nodes then you may never find the performance inadequate so will never have to open the dynamic programming rabbit hole.
The Rise of the Praetorian Class
I'm pretty certain I would go to jail.

I'll take the other side of that bet. Do you know how much money it costs to send someone to prison? Quite a lot. And that doesn't include how much it costs to keep them there.
Good, because that was not the case when they first took away my beloved Ubuntu Netbook Remix and replaced it with Unity.
This is true, but there's a lot to be said for native libraries which can be used more naturally. More important for things like frameworks, etc. than algorithms / highly technical code. e.g. using the Python wrapper for OpenCV is fine -- a little bit jenky but it works, and I definitely don't want to write those myself if I'm focusing on a product. On the other hand, would you want to use a wrapper for a web framework written in C? Probably not.
Seattle Against SOPA Event
Hands-on the Intel-powered Lenovo K800 smartphone
They have a nice interactive Flash demo which explains what PCR is and how to use the machine: http://openpcr.org/use-it/.
So Nelson Mattos (http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/people/per...) confirms that what Mocality diagnosed is correct:

- there are people inside of Google, working for Google, that manually accessed web data of Mocality and then phoned Mocality clients making fraudulent claims about Mocality and practically trying to extort the money from the clients. Note that those in Google can't be "just some local Kenyans" as Mocality recored systematic access from Google India after access from Kenya stopped:

http://blog.mocality.co.ke/files/2012/01/both.png

Note also what Mocality logged:

- "8 different user agents mostly running Chrome on Linux"

It's so cries "Google" and it can be much more than eight people doing this, as, for example, all machines where hard disks are duplicated or are simply similarly configured would have the same user agent.

Mocality also estimates that

- "this team were calling 20-25 Mocality business per hour" (http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-t...)

This is SOO BIG.
Your assumption that self taught programmers (ie one that did not get a "formal" education) do not understand fundamentals is utter bullshit. You could reverse your statements and they both still work. I've worked with people that have a masters in CS and in general it matters about 1% of the time.

A programmer today has a wealth of information they can pull from that does not require a single ounce of formal education. It takes dedication to the craft not bucket loads of money.
Taking responsibility for something stupid your employees do, sure. Equating that stupid thing with a sanctioned corporate action is ridiculous.
Google is not 100% perfect. If things aren't broken, you're not trying hard enough to push the envelope. The cost of innovation is failure.

In other words, this doesn't surprise me. And it doesn't bother me, either.
Nice feature, would be awesome to see other JVM languages too
Yes, I realize that and was sort-of pushing for this reply... in a way you can apply that to hackers and sysadmins too because just turn off a couple of mail servers or routers and people's lives will get worse quickly as well. The point is, while most of us won't be a Henry Ford, we still contribute in our own way - OP seems to not value or count that.

And I absolutely agree with your last paragraph. Too many places they are still being looked down upon...
Yeah, I couldn't think of any other's. Phrasal verbs are tricky like that.
> It's not something that some employee did without telling anyone, hidden away in some office.

Awesome; since you seem to have more facts than anyone else in this emotion-laden thread, please lay them out for us. Perhaps you're right; I simply don't know, but since you seem to have evidence of this, I'm sure Google legal would love to see it.
My guess would be that there is an indexer on a cron job that hasn't fired.
If we're talking about repetition, check out Slim http://slim-lang.com/

It has even less repetition than Haml.