skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Article I of the US Constitution deals with Congress. Section 1 is a introduction and establishes the House and the Seante. Sections 2-6 deal with how to elect congressman and the "floor rules" basically. Section 7 is how a bill becomes a law.

Section 8 specifically lists the powers reserved to Congress. Neither the Executive branch nor the Supreme Court is given this treatment. (Side note: patents are specifically listed here: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;")

Section 9 deals with a few other things such as immigration, ex post facto laws, taxes and spending money. Section 10 is rules on what states can't do.

Furthermore, Amendment 10 reads:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The government does have power to step out of this specific list, due to the "necessary and proper" clause, but in general this used to be considered a clause where the government can do whatever is "necessary and proper" to exercise their duty to govern within their enumerated powers. This is spelled out by Justice Marshall in McCulloch vs. Maryland: "If the end be legitimate, and within the scope of the Constitution, all the means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, and which are not prohibited, may constitutionally be employed to carry it into effect."

However, later on in his opinion he also states: "This Government is acknowledged by all to be one of enumerated powers. The principle that it can exercise only the powers granted to it would seem too apparent to have required to be enforced by all those arguments which its enlightened friends, while it was depending before the people, found it necessary to urge; that principle is now universally admitted. But the question respecting the extent of the powers actually granted is perpetually arising, and will probably continue to arise so long as our system shall exist."

This has always been a tricky question. There is a limit on Congress' power. While it is not limited simply to those listed in the Constitution, everybody that I know thinks Congress has overstepped their boundaries countless times.

The trouble is that we the people are no longer invested in our government and don't properly hold them to account. We elect people who benefit me the most, as opposed to the country. This is normal, but when you couple that with a court system that is overloaded and an executive branch that is, frankly, out of control and insanely drunk with power, bad government happens.
Website you can only browse with the Internet disconnected
We're working on writing the best browser-agnostic documentation on the Open Web
People are building the Atlantic Fibre Optic Cable connecting Europe to the US, in part to reduce latency. The obvious question is, is someone willing to pay a LOT of money for a low-latency, low-bandwidth connection from Sydney to NYC? The Great Circle minimum time of light in fiber is 74.6ms, while neutrinos (which travel at almost the speed of light) going through the Earth's diameter take 42ms.

Thus, you could cut the time in half if you could use neutrinos.
I think you meant to comment on Gruber's site. Pointless inaccurate fawning belongs there, not here.
It does harm because it's illegal. If it were legal, people wouldn't need to buy it from Mexican gangsters. Notice how Chicago isn't filled with people massacring each other with tommy guns since alcohol prohibition ended.
> I'm really sick of writing checks whether my function got values of the correct types, and unittests testing if a class's/function's signature changed in an unexpected way.

Sorry to be blunt, but if every one of your Python functions and methods begins with isinstance() checks for every parameter, you just missed the point of the entire language. Python was built on a foundation of ducktyping, with the mantra that "it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission" (EAFP).

Just use your parameters in whatever way you expect them to be, and either catch the rare Exception there or allow them to bubble up. Here's some suggested reading on the subject:

http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/isinstance/

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6092992/why-is-it-easier-...
I was just going to comment that at least Python has yield (generators) which helps to avoid callback spaghetti¹, but Javascript seems to have got it too in 1.7².

[1] http://www.tornadoweb.org/documentation/gen.html

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en/New_in_JavaScript_1.7#Gener...
Game theory doesn't require that people be selfish bastards. For example, in the Prisoner's Dilemma, it's perfectly fine to assume that each prisoner places a high value on the other person remaining free. That changes the payoff matrix, and the resulting matrix can still be analyzed by game theory (which will then predict that the prisoners will cooperate, since in game theory terms it won't be the "prisoner's dilemma" anymore).
I've been involved in two types of usability studies. The first are academic, rigorous, well-designed experiments testing readability, visual search, or other issues in web site design. These were designed to provide statistically significant results. The second are small focus groups used to test, predominantly, GUI design elements.

This article claims the second kind of test is worthless and misleading, but I think that's ignoring obvious benefits. No, you don't get statistically significant results, but in most cases you're not aiming for some result like "85% of users prefer the blue button". More often, you want to watch a handful of people use your interface and a result like "2 out of 5 were really confused by the menu structure, so we should rethink that". That is, your useful data comes from watching the process, not recording the result.

Rigorously-designed experiments which provide the potential for statistically significant results are great and they definitely have a place. But they're not the only tool in the box.
How do you include "serendipity"?

I subscribe to "One Story" on Kindle. I read a short story by Caitlin Horrocks. I would never have picked her book up, but because of that short story I bought her book of shorts. It's one of the best books I've read in the past few years. I have no idea if it would have been picked up by your algorithm.

I do know that "Amazon recommends" has got much less useful.

(http://www.caitlinhorrocks.com/prose.htm)

(The story was “Life Among the Terranauts”.)
Breaking down the new Facebook Insights
Or you could deliver your JSVM bytecode as binary files (which reveals a new set of drawbacks)
I strongly disagree that any of those things is necessarily the case.

Licensing models tend to be complicated for enterprise software, but it's usually complicated for a fairly decent reason.

I can't possibly expect somebody to understand how Sun Access Manager (now defunct) is going to work when they buy it without talking to us first. Even those people who understand the product well enough are going to need support from the mothership, and the high touch process gives us the ability to plan for that, to your benefit.

Depending on the features you need, it might entail wrapping in five or six different products. Some of those products might be given to you for free (if they're only there to fit a requirement of another product, and aren't going to be used, otherwise) -- some of those products will be discounted based on expected use, or the expected benefit to your organization. Some of those products might have different requirements. In large software companies, it's entirely common for two companion products to support different databases, or different message buses, etc. You need to know that before you buy.

My company currently sells software that costs $3million a year or more, and involves weeks of professional services to get up and running, training on how to use the produt, etc.

You really expect us to let you just buy this on the internet?

Instead, just call us. Pretty please.
Forget about Yahoo's dumb patent trolling decision for a second...

If you're still working at Yahoo today that sends a clear message to me about how you value innovation, product quality, thought leadership, and other important assets. As an employee you're making an explicit choice that the company you work for merits spending your most valuable asset: your time.

I have been wary of anyone with Yahoo on their resume for the past two years, and will be more wary going forward. This patent troll mess is just another data point in that calculus.
The NGO Monitor aims to undermine non-violent actions against the Israeli occupation in order to maintain it. It tries to cut funding to peaceful NGOs because they don't align with Zionist values.

NGO Monitor is pro-occupation and pro-Israeli settlers.

So your response seems to be out of place. I criticize A, you say "but B" which is unrelated to A as a counter argument.
A beta has been running for a few months already (edit: since September 2011). You can sign-up for it (although I assume it is way too late for that now) on your battle.net settings page.
Live Nation launches LN Labs Fund
I disagree that it doesn't have content. It's an article oriented to relating to non-programmers what it is like to learn to program, and for that audience I think it does it's job well.

edit: also I am curious how you can decide an article that you haven't read has no content.
Web Application development and Mobile Application development
ZIMO iTS provides services in Web application development, Mobile application development, Web games, Html 5 development, Facebook game development, Facebook page development, Android application development and Iphone application development
You're unwilling to make a phone call because you find payroll services pretty boring. But nonetheless it is entirely possible you've found the thing the whole industry is missing.

On the contraty, I assume they're good at their jobs, and therefore way better at negotiation than me, and therefore whatever price they come up with will extract nearly all the consumer surplus.
I think you're arguing a bit of a strawman when you mention viewing page sources: the discussion is about replacing JavaScript, not HTML. In any case, the fact that (non-web) applications are compiled into binaries hasn't stopped open source from flourishing.
Technology Bracketology
Vote in an NCAA-style tournament with 64 top technologies. Will a lower-seed newcomer pick off the iPad juggernaut?
Yep! And as a couple of other folks have noted, a lot of that is because you're often not just buying COTS software. You're purchasing/licensing an entire solution to one or multiple business problems that involves software but probably also interfaces & integrations and possibly also custom development of new features. If you consider payroll systems and you're a large enterprise, the odds are high that you have multiple payroll systems globally (by country, usually), and they all need to talk to your HR systems, and they probably also need to talk to your ERP (or whatever your employee data system of record is). This is not trivial.

The same is true of many other enterprisey systems: CRM, ERP, MRP, factory operations, industrial controls, ....

The complexity of an enterprise business systems + IT environment makes most startups look like a piece of cake. The lifestyle and type of challenges aren't for everyone, especially most entrepreneurial types, but don't just poo poo big business.

p.s. I have grown accustomed to having to speak to a sales person to get quotes, but what bugs me more than anything is the cold calls I get from IT outsourcing companies, especially the ones that have a token sales office in the US but are 100% located offshore and try to hide that fact.
Arch has the best documentation.
Newspapers Are America's Fastest Shrinking Industry
Typing skills.
Betas (open, and closed too, to a degree) these days seem more like, "let's subtly have people try our product for free, get hooked and generate buzz while at it". It's the same as a free trial (although calling it like this has less positive response, it seems). Just another marketing stunt, long gone are the days where beta was used strictly for testing.

On the Web 2.0 environment, who started this? Was it Google with Gmail, or was there something else before?

Also, lately, at least in the MMO scene, going gold doesn't mean that the game is polished and ready for release, it just means that you're ready to charge customers.
The mistake here is that what you're describing is a functional test, not a unit test.

A unit test for a piece of code like this might be "Given that the time signature for the music is 3:4, the software puts 3:4 in the appropriate place on each line of output".

You then might write a variety of cases testing that it deals correctly with (say) a changing time signature at some point in the piece.

The upside of this is when you try and fix another bug which has a knock on effect on this bit of code, lots of your tests are going to fail- immediately identifying where the problem is (or at least letting you know there is one!)
I don't like the full body scanners either, but you take on a significantly larger dose of radiation by simply looking out the window of the plane while flying than you do walking through the scanner.

There are lots of things wrong with the scanner...radiation is a very small part of it.
Screenshot: http://d.pr/XXCj
Who is "they" in this case? Because what we have now is one half of the government trying to make healthcare more equitable, and the other half vehemently fighting that.
As a journalist, I think it would have been irresponsible not to inform _why of the article and not to try to interview him.

Your repeated emails and messages left for him obviously informed him. We’ll have to agree to disagree about what constitutes responsible journalism with respect to “trying to interview him.”

Once he’s aware that you want to interview him and chooses not to respond, I’d say you tried. Your actions seem to suggest that “responsible journalism” consists of going further and pressing yourself on people who have already made their feelings about the matter clear.

I don’t wish to single you out, so I will say the next thing in a general way. I have trouble with flinging the words “public figure” around. There was a man. He constructed a persona. That persona was public. The man was private. The man worked very hard to separate the two. Compare and contrast to hollywood stars of both sexes who practically invite the world into their bedrooms.

I think reporting about _why is fair game, _why was a public figure. I think hunting down the man who created _why is intrusive and is at the level of a paparazzo, invading the privacy of a person who from the outset was clear about separating the two.

I have a public persona, “raganwald.” I don’t try to hide the man Reg Braithwaite behind the persona. But I don’t think that blogging or speaking at conferences or commenting here somehow invites the world to call me at work if I don’t answer emails, or to hunt down my cellphone records or to waylay me in the street or to take pictures of my children. I am not a public figure in the way that a politician is a public figure.

I likewise believe that the man behind _why is not a public figure. _why? Public. Pictures of _why in character? Public. The man who walked away from creating and maintaining _why? Entitled to privacy and to not worrying about people calling him when he chooses to ignore their emails and entitled to have his friends and associates left alone.

p.s. As I noted, however, I liked almost everything I read in the article.
And that's how google broke search in my eyes.
the answer to "how much" is aways "it depends".

* tech stacks evolve changing the amount of testing that is needed => most of the stacks allow to only focus on the "meat" of the logic, rather than things like integration (Spring Integration / Camel), network (Netty), cache (Redis) or even data structures (various language built ins).

* human is getting better with years of coding => I spot flaws and mistakes during code reviews N times faster than I did 10 years ago. I code in little pieces (usually functions), which "talk" back to me immediately even before they are finished.

* REPL is getting really good => Clojure, Scala, Ruby, Groovy, etc.. REPLs save lots of time and prevents mistakes: where a 5 minutes REPLay session reveals a nice and polished approach a lot quicker than a "let's try this / now rerun the test" formula.

* Domain knowledge and "'ve done this exact thing before" greatly impact amount of testing needed => e.g. deeper domain knowledge allows for [better] tests, while no domain knowledge requires lots of prototyping (even if you think it is the "real thing" at first, it is not, it's a prototype), and would greatly suffer from a large number of tests, as most of the time will be spent rewriting test instead of learning the domain.

In the end, the rule of thumb I always use is "do whatever makes sense". I don't buy TDD, ADD and other DDs. They are fun to read about, but they are too removed from the "real thing". If any DD term is needed, what I use is MSDD => "Making Sense Driven Development"
Misleading headline. No one is thinking seriously about building a neutrino network. As the article mentions at the end, the detector has to be massive and the transmitter uses a great deal of power.

There would need to be an extraordinary breakthrough in our ability to detect neutrinos before something like this would be practical.

Neat trick and impressive that they could make it work at all, though.
Are there any news on bringing it to consoles? Wikipedia[0] just says they are probably still working on it but there are no confirmations one way or the other...

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_3#Console_development
exactly. the best blackjack dealers (for the house) are those that can keep you distracted.
Note that I praised the parts I liked. I have a strict “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” policy. If a post or article has 99 things I dislike and one that I learn from, it’s a good thing to read, no?
Sights of the world: wikipedia, panoramio and foursquare merged on Google maps
there are different philosophies on when to kill a project... and imho, this was way too quick. By way of personal example, it took us 2 years to build BizRate.com into something that could even get funded, another 5 years before it started making money as Shopzilla, and 9 years total before we had our "overnight success" -- Many points along the way we could easily have pulled the plug. Persistence / sticking to your vision is something that is sorely lacking these days. (Another more obvious example: How long did it take for Apple's design+hardware+software philosophy to strike a mainstream cord?)

Timing aside, this method of "putting a bullet in its head" (which is not even a good expression to use colloquially), was a terribly callous way to treat their current users too... Especially given the fact that for a few thousand dollars a month (max) they could have kept the system rolling in the cloud indefinitely, without investing any time in it. They then could have put out feelers to find it's users / content a new home... (For example, our new start-up chee.rs would gladly have welcomed oink users -- in fact we're working on a quick oink importer as I write this. :)

Or, even if they weren't interested in transitioning users to someone else, they could have kept things running at least until their next big idea came along to announce to their users: "Hey we've got this new great thing, come on over and now that we have it, we've decided to finally and reluctantly shutter Oink, because we hadn't seen it gain much traction. Sorry about letting you down... blah blah blah."

Much better for PR than "We put a bullet in your head and moved on... But, we hope you'll join us again for another round as soon as your headache subsides."
Anonymous Claim That Anonymous-OS is Fake
Propose it:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/qwv9g/im_seth_shostak_...
Test-Driven Emergent Design vs. Analysis
This isn't the first time this has been thought of. A particle physicist had suggested nuclear submarines be laced with scintillators so the could receive messages sent by neutrinos a while back, which seems like a somewhat feasible, practical use of this technology.
Your argument requires one to summarily reject all of Yahoo's claims based on a preexisting ideological stance in regards to software patents.

For the sake of argument, let's assume Facebook is utilizing Yahoo's legitimate and innovative intellectual property. Then it's Facebook which is stifling innovation with IP theft.

In the history of Lockean property rights - from the settlement of North America to file sharing, the first step toward the appropriation of the property of others is invariably to claim that they have no legitimate ownership claim.
Why hasn't Video Mail taken off as a communication mode?
Ideally speaking video mail or video messaging should be a great medium for communicating with friends and family. It provides an extra element of emotion, which is clearly absent from text based messaging, which would be great for personal conversations.

However we still don't see many people using it. Wondering if this is an execution/technology challenge or a use case no one wants...
Since I learned about openCV (and python), I don't get why people still use MATLAB for computer vision.

I believe MATLAB is probably very useful for control systems (with Simulink) or signal processing or any very special case for which there is a unique MATLAB toolbox.

Why is it still so much used in universities?
Does Numpy/Scipy cover MATLAB scientific/numerical computing?
I think there's a kind of agreement amongst those of us who look up to _why — and we are not all Ruby programmers — that although it is quite easy to discover _why's true identity, we'd rather just think of him as why the lucky stiff. That said, when he disappeared I read chapter 6 of the Poignant Guide, and his blog, and I feared the worst. When I looked into it and discovered that he was still alive it made me feel a lot less worried. So I'm glad it's made clear that he's really okay.

I'm less sure about broadcasting his real name, but it's been done before and it'll be done again. To me he's just _why.
A robo-glove for auto workers might be a great glove for astronauts