skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microsoft warns users to update IE to avoid major security risk
Hey, please email me at yegg@duckduckgo.com if you don't mind -- I'm the founder. I'm interested why you're so negative on us. Here are our real traffic #s btw: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html
Good point I wasn't thinking about the account creation part when I read the article. I have only posted once on CL and didn't create an account.
Why should there be a low barrier to entry when your entire business model is relying on moving money? If you screw up, you're going to screw a LOT more people than any standard startup. The potential for fraud is incredibly high here, which means that a high barrier to entry significantly reduces the potential loss.

The entire point of bills like the California one is to reduce the public's responsibility for when these kinds of startups go belly up and cannot pay out what they owe to all their customers.
Similar experiences here. In one case I even got corrected by a bot... I don't know if all the millions Wikipedia slurps up from their donations go to AI research, but I actually think the bot was wrong.
Congress will soon pass a law that makes it illegal for consumers to get brain damage from cell phones.
Elon Musk Anticipates Third IPO in Three Years With SpaceX
Except Dropbox is multiplatform, which is essential to its success imo.
So, yes, these are amazing times, Wikipedia is impressive, all glory to the hypnotoad, etc. Not arguing that.

There is no reason to go to all the effort of forking Wikipedia just to prove a point, and asking me to do so is absurd.

Let's ignore hosting. Let's ignore bandwidth. Let's ignore the amount of time it would take to duplicate that information. Let's ignore several "easy" (read: inconvenient to your argument that "you can just magically fork the datas!") issues I would encounter pursuing your suggested course of action.

From a practical standpoint, Wikipedia has become the place where normal people get information. It is the cache of human knowledge that is first hit when somebody wants to learn something new. I'm not talking about where you turn, or where I turn--I'm talking about Joe Blow. It seems to consistently be in the top few results for any search on a topic.

Ignore the encyclopedia bit. Ignore what it claims to be. Ignore even what it is. Pay attention to how it is used.

The de facto use of Wikipedia goes something like:

1. Person wants to know about concept X.

2. Person searches for X, probably gets a Wikipedia article.

3. Person reads article on X on Wikipedia.

So, it would seem that currently Wikipedia's use is to provide knowledge about X. The end user doesn't give two shits about the process that put that information there; or how reliable it is; or whether it is sourced primarily, secondarily, or made up entirely.

The end user just wants knowledge.

So, either one believes that Wikipedia has perfected the accomplishment of that mission (in which case I think you are obviously wrong), or one believes that Wikipedia has the capacity to be improved to meet that goal.

Are you going to take a hard line that Wikipedia is perfect in its accomplishment of its de facto use case? Are you going to argue that good is good enough?

EDIT: I'm not going to launch into how wasteful it would be to split up mindspace/SEOspace by creating another wiki. Suffice it to say that a mree policy change on Wikipedia could accomplish all this, while in the forking case you'd have all those "easy" problems to solve, plus promotion to get people (and lots of them!) involved, plus making sure people don't just default to Wikipedia anyways, etc.
I doubt that's even possible. US airports don't have much to say in terms of TSA presence.

US security services have shown very poor judgment on multiple occasions, in Canada now you're a child pornography supporter if you don't like internet surveillance and in UK you get extradited to US like a terrorist if you link to pirated content.

My advice: Steer away from Anglo-Saxon countries. Continental Europe and Brazil are the only reasonable places if you want to live in a civilized world.
Funny – if I see an Android app requesting a permission that I'm not comfortable with, I just don't install it.

How do you expect this to work otherwise?
Well, it is no good mandating citizens only have computers which respect the grand unified provenance management system and then allowing the gaping loophole of unauthorized computer repair. So yeah, not too far from that.
That's pretty much it.

I got a nice piece of paper, but it's not like my day to day job involves much of what I learned during school.
I really want to avoid falling down this rabbit hole, but sources 1 and 2 pinged my crackpot-detector. That doesn't mean they necessarily are, but I am not willing to accept the notion, at face value, that Gwen Gale is the problem.
The Ultimate Steve Jobs Collection
>Am I allowed to call MY company an "entrepreneur" and thereby not be required to submit to strict scrutiny and regulation?

Scale is crucial. I think MtGox had market depth >0.5M$ on the bid side. That's one modestly wealthy client account in a bank. No way could you register a bank with that kind of capital, heck even 100x that. If it grows then you can argue about regulation, but if you're going to require everyone to have >0.5M$/year legal teams to enter the market then yes there's going to be very little competition from the small/disruptive innovators and it's using regulation to keeping the competition out. (Not that I think BitCoin is competition but other services could be).
Bill Gates Supports Controversial Climate Change Plan
A group of climate scientists, supported by Bill Gates, are advocating for the use of geoengineering as a way to prevent catastrophic climate change.
Regarding dynamic linking being permitted: you're thinking of LGPL. Not that static vs dynamic linking in the strictest sense is terribly helpful in the context of scripting languages. Note that the text of the GPL does not mention "linking" at all. The relevant section instead says this:

These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.

This is sufficiently vague to cause some confusion. When distributing GPL-licensed works alongside non-GPL-licensed ones, I would probably err on the side of making your intentions as to what is considered part of the GPL distribution, and what is not, abundantly clear.

I am, of course, not a lawyer, etc. etc.
Ubuntu Installer via Android
Sue them for what? What damages have you suffered here? And why would you sue Apple instead of the developers?
Can you point out to me how the rest of the book demonstrates the truth about the origins of OSX? My impression is that Isaacson just got this wrong. The quote is just part of that. Let a random person read the last few pages of chapter 28, and I'd think that they would draw the same conclusion.

I'd recommend just listening to Siracusas podcast to get all the details on what he got wrong, from small nitpicks to big issues.
For which business chatwindow or hireplug? What is your background? Try here on HN, attend seminar's and hackathons etc.
I want free tickets :)

https://github.com/gone

I've contributed to brubeck, dictshield, and created a few django projects
It's interesting because it's all over the torrent networks (Louis's $5 comedy special).

It shows you that it's not about: price, protection, or availability. Many times it's just because people want it for free and are not willing to part with their hard-earned money.

I also think that most people bought this only because they wanted to prove to the world that it would work (DRM-less and cheap media).

When it becomes a popular thing to do, artists will see the reason why you need to charge a little more+have some sort of protection in the first place. DRM and other protection schemes were invented after the result of mass piracy.

The problem is that whatever the reason is, there isn't any way to stop it (without taking away too many freedoms). It's too late. So, the answer for software is to only make services (and charge a monthly fee) and other industries need to figure out ways to change their business models and use the fact that people will pirate it to their advantage.
That description is almost but not quite entirely unlike what actually happened. They were using the widget with permission, and suddenly they changed their minds and wanted to start charging for it, but without doing anything to enforce that.
what if somebody starts with some other language such as Java or Python. Is mastering in C must to be a good programmer?
That’s not perfect either.

It’s granular from the developer point of view, but it’s not for the user: when you install an app you either grant it all the permissions it requires (before you have a chance to actually run the app and see what it does) or you don’t install it at all.

With the iOS model (asking permissions when the app uses them) I can install an app, deny it permission to use my location and it will still work for everything else.

Also, how would that solve the problem if the Android developers forgot to add the ”read contacts” permission in the SDK? They would still have to update the software to add it.
Library.nu: Rest in Peace
Do you have a book recommendation to help someone read papers. I spent an couple evenings going over MIT course notes on discrete mathematics to attempt to read a paper on Conflict-free Replicated Data Types <http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/55/55/88/PDF/techrep...;

What I would give for a book at that time that would help me translate the following:

merge (X, Y ) : payload Z
let ∀i ∈ [0, n − 1] : Z.P[i] = max(X.P[i], Y.P[i])

Into

def merge(X, Y):
Z = ... new object ...
for i in range(len(X.P) - 1):
Z.P[i] = max(X.P[i], Y.P[i])
return Z

I eventually figured it out but it was a bit rough trying to figure out what all the symbols meant.
We are putting up a pretty good fight here in Canada to keep it 'civilized', though there is some nasty lawful access legislation being discussed.
How do you think a member of Congress, accustomed to getting what he wants, is going to feel about getting blown off? It's easier to respond and do a better job of regulating yourself than it is to have Congress regulate for you. These people are completely out of touch with reality and are clueless when it comes to technology.

Besides, what Waxman is asking for isn't unreasonable nor is it anything many users aren't also asking for. Apple will let this bozo have his little moment, make some changes, send a letter back and he'll buzz off. There's no point in drawing the ire of lawmakers when it's not even something worth fighting over.
Lawmakers ask Apple to explain iPhone app privacy policies
In the wake of the Path address book debacle, Rep. Henry Waxman sends letter to Apple asking for explanation of its iOS app policies.
I didn't say start-ups shouldn't comply with regulation, but that the cost shouldn't so high as to keep out new-comers. What exactly does minimizing competition do to keep customers safer? I would argue the contrary.
Wow. This is what Chill is all about, huh?
How To Crash A Party
Harcore Conversion Rate Optimization Tips From Anne Holland of WhichTestWon
Anne Holland is the publisher of WhichTestWon.com, a great resource for learning about how hundreds of different A/B tests performed across industries. She shows the actual landing pages and email campaigns, and provides detailed data about how each version performed. Anne is a 25 year veteran of direct response marketing, and has previously been interviewed by Andrew Warner of Mixergy, so check out the interview transcript at my blog. It's a goldmine!
On iOS if you want to use Facebook but don’t want to grant it permission to access your location, you can still install and use the app and just deny it when the permission is requested.
I have to disagree with The Little Schemer, despite the fact that I took freshman CS with Matthias Felleisen (one of the two authors), thought his course was brilliant, and absolutely swore by Scheme by the time I was done.

I felt the book paled in comparison with his lectures. The book is, in some sense, too short; it doesn't have enough examples, and it also doesn't discuss essential language features such as let/local. Also, it has a shortage of long examples (pretty much everything there consists of a single function).

Also the book is ridiculously easy for the entire first half (approximately), and then suddenly dumps you into the deep end (they present the Y combinator).
The SEO implications of relaxing Wikipedia policies is a can of worms that I have mercifully kept sealed on this thread; take my word for it that Google's deference to Wikipedia is a far bigger burden to the project than a boon.

Late: I modded you up from grey; couldn't disagree with you more, but that doesn't make you crazy.
Are TSA security services free[1]? Or does the airport pay for the government presence, too?

[1] That is, does a TSA airport pay out of pocket specifically for the TSA staff, or is it a service of Homeland Security (and funded by tax dollars, exclusively)?
One cool thing I learned while researching this is that
Emacs-style keybindings work in TextEdit or any native
OS X text area.

This is from OSX's NeXT legacy. This was not the case prior to OSX.
No, not necessarily, but do you think Android or PalmOS both fit the description "a warmed-over Linux distro"? The fact that they both run Linux is not what makes any of them unique or interesting.
I really like GitHub for browsing and reading code, something that you don't get with self-hosted repositories. That's really the feature that I was thinking of. Obviously there is a great deal more to GitHub than that.
Surprisingly, yes. I remember it was part of the Windows 95 folklore back in the day. It only worked on the earlier versions, as I recall, as the newer builds fixed it.
The Little Schemer made me understand programming in a functional style much better than I did before reading it. It also solidified my opinion that I really would not like working in that style at all.
"These days, disabling your cookies would make it nearly impossible to use any web application. I’m not sure if people are still out there browsing the web with disabled cookies, but if you are, my hat’s off to you! :)"

I use Firefox + Cookie Monster, which allows me to enable temporary cookies for the sites that I'm just browsing and permanent cookies for my webmail and social networking sites.

The only site which sits in the middle of these -- it breaks without cookies but I don't use it enough to justify cookies -- is scribd. It's gotten to the point where I actively cringe whenever I see the word "scribd" anywhere. Basically they show you a perfectly working presentation for about ten seconds and then suddenly send you on an infinite redirect loop which simply says "optimizing your Scribd experience", and once you temporarily enable cookies they dump you on an index page having nothing to do with the presentation you just started reading.

I might shift them to a "store cookies permanently" exception, but it still bugs me. You should never require cookies for content which can be read by solely clicking "Temporarily Allow Cookies for this domain name." Cookies don't do anything if you delete them immediately after the transaction is over. (I am looking especially at you, New York Times: you are guilty, guilty, guilty of this.)
The Humble Hacker Keyboard
Whitehouse.gov petition to eliminate the penny
Louis CK paid like $30k to setup his site for streaming his special. Gaffigan will probably pay some similarly absurd amount.

What HNer is going to setup the simple solution for all the comedians that want to copy Louis CK but don't want to figure it out and spend $30k?

Transcoding + S3 + Stripe + Reporting dashboard + handholding with a flat 5%-20% fee or something.

It could even be an iTunes-like competitor. Web-based, video content, DRM-free. Enter your credit card once and you can easily buy all the different specials. Maybe the price tag would be a good angle: justfive.com, afiver.com, etc. Then again maybe they'd want it to be purely white label.

Would be cool if the next guy said: "Alright, I saw what Louis CK and Gaffigan did. I'm going to put my new special up on justfive.com"

Someone do it!
Very good collection here, missing a few of the early keynote clips, but worth a bookmark. His Stanford address is still top 5 best speeches of all time for me.
What Lies Beneath: The Linguistic Traces of Deception in Online Dating Profiles
Cisco to challenge Microsoft Skype deal at EU court
It's election season and it's a win-win. No one is going to lambast you for trying to protect constituents' privacy (at least not when the government isn't the one snooping).
I don't know but I very much doubt that airports pay for TSA staff. At worst, airports provide electricity for all the equipment, like scanners, and don't make any money off the space used up by TSA (screening rooms, etc).
I would suggest the following book as a precursor to all of these books: Code by Charles Petzold.

It is genuinely one of the best books I have ever read.
I think you should re-read the post with the mindset that he is, after all, a comedian. Sure, this is an issue we all care about here, but there's no need to be overly serious about the tone of Jim's post. He's trying to come off as funny.
His comments are always quite informative wrt this particular topic. Everyone has a coat rack. If I recall you're always close at hand at any discussion of cryptography. Why is that? I certainly don't have a problem with that, especially since your comments are always informative on that topic.

Give the guy a break. This particular topic is important to the success of his business.
Doesn't the fact that companies like Path are exploiting people's address book information illustrate that we do need such strict guidelines?

So Apple didn't make enough rules. That doesn't mean that the existing rules were ineffective. I just don't understand your criticism here.
My experiences at the San Francisco airport were no different than at any other airport I've ever been to. It's not like the TSA is alone in making poor hiring decisions.
Funniest piece of geek humor I've seen in a while…
In browsing on an android device and its incredibly responsive for me. Much more than other sites ive browsed on this phone today.
Politics doesn't appear to work that way. People trying to push unfavorable policies do their best to get the support of whoever is popular at the time.

As long as our choices are defined for us, our choices will suck.
The main conclusion of this article: Network Manager is utterly broken. I concur. It's quite good for laptops and basic desktop, and absolutely unusable for any development desktop or server.

The main and gravest sin of Network Manager is that is absolutely ignores what's in /etc/network/interfaces (or similar configuration files for other distros AFAIK), and makes most usual stuff (bonding, bridging, vpns, etc) nigh to impossible. It may be relatively easy to fix, dunno.

Fortunately from my experience, you can simply remove it altogether without any problem, at least under "reasonable" distros such as debian.
So Inspiring. So thorough.
Ask HN: Do you recommend compressing js files to remove extra whitespace?
I feel like I am using a lot of javascript on my new project and I am wondering if it's a good idea to run my JS files through a service like 'jscompress.com' to speed up execution time.
These compression services mostly strip out "extra whitespace" and "comments" to speed up execution times, but compressing makes the file look messy.

These online compression services allow you to do a couple of things, but I am not sure which is more beneficial (if at all).

Option #1: Upload and combine js files to consolidate and compress.

Option #2: Just compress files keeping them separate.

If anyone has a recommendation please share. Thanks fellow hackers.
Airports can opt out of TSA services if they hire private security. Wikipedia link from the article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_Security_Adminis...
That's a bit hyperbolic. My android apps don't ask for permissions they don't need nor do many others.

I think the android permission system is sane and reasonably functional. It's the users responsibility to read the requested permissions at install time and make a call.

There could be improvements here of course. I'd like to see a two tiered approach where developers could mark which permissions are optional and users could decide which to grant the on the first or each time these permissions are used in addition to the current method. I'd also like to see a requirement for devs to provide an explination of what each requested permission is needed for that could display on the market.

Hopefully these types of controls will continue to evolve on all platforms.
Well… it depends on the paper! Some stuff might need more than a single course of background to fully understand.

For more rudimentary papers, any undergrad course on discrete mathematics should get you started. I personally was forced to read http://www.amazon.com/Discrete-Mathematics-Applications-Susa... - and it's pretty decent.
Win a Limited Edition JustDecompile T-Shirt
What I got out of The Little Schemer wasn't really how to write Scheme but more how to solve problems recursively.

At least for me it excelled in that aspect. As a method for teaching Scheme, I am certain it leaves much to be desired.
And that was only true if you were using the version of OSS included in Linux.

The commercial version of OSS supported software-based mixing when the hardware didn't support it.

Same as the version of OSS found in Solaris today.
Walks And Walking - Hertfordshire Walks St Albans Walking Route
This is my experience as well. These private companies are drawing from a pool of people who are willing to do a wretched job for not very much money, so it's not surprising that they'd be largely indistinguishable from federal employees. Too, it's not the TSA employees who are the fundamental problem; it's the organization as a whole.
Mastering Algorithms in C will go down in history as one of the most horribly formatted books ever. The code samples in this book are positively unreadable due to comments that go on for pages. To be fair, the content is good. But the formatting is so annoying that it's hard to sink into that content.
Joe Rogan said he'd do the same on his podcast, which would be great. More artists should do this, in all mediums.
Thoughtful Consumption of Information - One Man's Take
Good points, especially about no longer being able to log into the account with old password because of a forced password change.
Isn't this something that gumroad does? (https://gumroad.com/)
I mostly agree. This writer went about it the wrong way. Just because this author had personally determined that history books were wrong doesn't give him the right to unilaterally change Wikipedia. He needs to gather academic weight on his side. If he's correct then it should be fairly easy to accomplish.

Of course the Wikipedia admins were buttheads and weren't constructive at all.
> What I got out of The Little Schemer wasn't really how to write Scheme but more how to solve problems recursively.

They do explicitly claim in the book that that is their goal!
What are people's experiences in writing such dense functional code in a production environment? What does maintainability/debug-ability/bringing other functional folks up to speed like?
Decorator-driven command line parser for Python
I like the overall design. What's the business model?
Get Paid to Work on The Freenet Project