skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, but you seem to be poo poo-ing this effort because it won't directly get us from point A to point Z.

If it gets us to point B, C, or D, though, at least more people will understand the difficulties and challenges of getting to Z. Maybe some people will start to ask "Why is this so difficult?" "Does it need to be so difficult?" "What are the forces that make this so difficult and how can we circumvent them or remove them?"

As a software developer, our laws look like the worst form of spaghetti code. They're such a mess that if this were a software product, I would be a strong advocate of doing a complete rewrite. While we're in there doing that rewrite, I want there to be an update to our change control management.

> many parliaments vote on single articles (or single modification proposals) and the complete act is never voted.

Sounds like a flaw in change control management. That would be like a software developer who checked in code without being responsible for having the automated tests succeed. Any such process that didn't hold the software developer who checked in the code accountable for fixing how it breaks the rest of the application is fundamentally flawed.

Rather than being apologists for the current system(s) of law making and governing, why don't we think big and figure out a way to really re-invent them?

Step one is shining more light on the current system by getting more people in lots of disciplines looking at it. Software design is fundamentally based upon the careful application of specific sets of rules. We've made huge steps in solving problems that lawmakers just accept as the "way things are". We can do better.
Besides the salt point others have made, I've also read (on HN) that rainbow tables aren't much use anymore because the speed/storage equation has changed. If your hashing mechanism is dumb enough not to use salts, it is also fast enough to calculate that there's no point doing it in advance.
People who disagree with a submission are more likely to respond to it than people who agree..it's human nature. Its not malicious, it's not specific to HN or the tech industry.
Datomic (http://datomic.com) is also built on an immutable, append-only, lock-free design.
Agree, it should be more.
"Member of the PayPal MAFIA launches a ROCKET directly at the International Space Station. More at 11."
The FDA can also go overboard. Recently (~1.5 years ago) they seized 'birthing pools' as 'untested medical devices.' These are basically inflatable pools for women that want to have water births. To give some context, the operating table in a hospital does not qualify as a medical device (and therefore no FDA testing), but apparently inflatable pools that women give birth in require FDA testing.
Oops, I Ruined the Facebook IPO
Who said anything about a car? I read that as "essentially being [orbital spacecraft] parking".
Spare me your puny little Coding Contest, earthling
Opera Software also owns Fastmail.fm and AdMarvel. It would be kind of sad to see Fastmail go to Facebook.

Though I doubt there's much truth to this rumor.
I think geon knows this, but is saying that Facebook could just build their own Webkit browser for free rather than having to buy a layout engine.
It's incredibly difficult to overstate the importance of this moment for science and humanity as a whole. The commercialization of space travel is the only way that we will ever see the stars, as no longer are we at the mercy of the fluctuating interest in space travel from the already over-extended tax payers of certain nations. This is a beautiful moment for humanity, and a damn awesome way to start the weekend!
Editura Adenium | Aparitii Recente
Smashing Conference – September 17-19, 2012
It's not just Retina horizontal and vertical. It's high and low pixel density, grey scale rendering, clear type.... etc etc
Countries only vote in the semifinal in which they qualify (except the automatic qualifiers, who are assigned a semifinal to vote in). There probably is a systematic difference between the semifinals and the finals though.
"This is not a design deficiency of the typeface. It was simply not designed to work as an end table."
Everything that's wrong with Yahoo, summed up in an IPv6 readiness test
Is China in a Recession Right Now?
The same could be said about Chrome. As long as there’s Operium to Google’s Chromium, I see absolutely no problem.
I bet something similar is going to happen sooner than later.

But what is stopping Facebook from forking Chromium(/Webkit) for their own use? Or for that matter even Mozilla might be open for partnership.
That works for the trivial case of the 3rd column, but not for everything ls can produce. There's no way to make sort work on dates as formatted by ls (which may or may not have years or hours, depending on how old) or sizes (which you may want to pretty print as human readable.)

What sort option puts 1.0K, 1.0M, and 1.0G in the right order?
What hashing algorithm is good for uniqueness and speed?
Cops: Tech Exec Built Stolen ‘Legoland’ in $2M Home
Improving the Digital Reading Experience | Information Architects
Nope, because financial people are set in their ways. :) MM isn't going away any time soon.
I find these icons particularly bad, but I guess they met their goal:

"We finally landed on the forms you see below. These icons are bright and bold. We love this and pushed it as hard as we could. If you see just one or two, they stick out a bit, but when lined up chromatically (as so many of us like to do), they own the dock… or any other context."

Owning the dock shouldn't have been the goal. They should have a nice, non-distracting icon that tells me which program is which.
A Note on the Type (on Knuth's MetaFont)
Having been team lead/manager on several helpdesks, I know it costs $1,000-$2,000 per month for space & supplies for one employee (probably more if food is involved). Sure, it's a drop in the bucket for AOL, but just because they're a big company doesn't make trespassing and theft OK.
I wish the whole thing were tossed out and rewritten. The algorithms TeX uses are amazing and the output is phenomenal (especially using ConTeXt), but TeX itself is an abomination and LaTeX somehow manages to be worse.
It's not necessarily a case of "keeping the patent system ensures jobs for lawyers." It's probably more a case of, "if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
Good job !! Consistent coding convention :)

As a constructive note, think about reversing your conditions (check if something NOT happened) and break huge chunks of code into functions. This will guarantee a 'sane' amount of nested 'ifs' and improve code readability.
Ex:

for (int i = dn - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
if (!has_child(dlist[i]->d_name)) {
if ((fp = fopen(path, "r")) != NULL) {
.............
} else {
slog(LOG_ERR, "Can't read %s: %m", path);
}
}
}

Notice how the error message is 20 lines far from the actual condition. You can rework that as:

if ((fp = fopen(path, "r")) != NULL) {
do_some_work_with(fp);
} else {
slog(LOG_ERR, "Can't read %s: %m", path);
}

or

if (!(fp = fopen(path, "r")) {
slog(LOG_ERR, "Can't read %s: %m", path);
continue;
}
//removed 1 nesting level
........
Proof Theirs A Geek In All Of Us
I sued a telemarketer and got $4,000
I think this is a more astute observation than people are giving you credit for.

UNIX grew to the complexity it has because it was meant to be used. Plan 9 is not used because it was not allowed to acquire useful constructs.

This parting ways with "the UNIX way" was necessary and complete in order for the system to become what it is today. Some things could be improved and made more proper and UNIXy, but for the most part it's an incredibly useful and functional system. The OP article is spot-on with this realization.

In other words, the ideal UNIX (for example, Plan 9) can't compete in the real world, because the concepts behind it (the UNIX way) don't actually compete in the real world. It's based on a set of very interesting, very elegant, and mostly false precepts.
Love the website design.

I really appreciate their attention to details. iA writer is a good example. Simple and flawless, however, I cannot recommend it to hackers since the functionalities are quite limited. Sometimes I use it for taking quick notes and that is it.
It would be strategically important to their growth. Opera Mini is the #1 browser in many developing countries, particularly in Africa and South East Asia. These are the regions that are also showing the most growth (and have the most potential) of new people coming online. If facebook dominates both the mobile browser and the top site in all of these countries, then for newly arriving users, facebook will be the internet. It will be their first experience, and it's where they will feel most comfortable (like AOL was back in the day).

Facebook understands the importance of mobile. If you view fb timeline on your phone, it looks great. Facebook have made the transition to the mobile web already - because mobile will be the dominant entertainment consuming screen in the future.
Where humans go, human concerns will follow. The sole, singular, and only alternative is for humans not to go.

(And for those inclined to take that as their cue to strike the fashionable misanthropic pose where they claim that would be a good thing, remember: The moon is a dead, sterile rock. The Moon has no copyright law because there is no creative activity of any kind there taking place that could be copyrighted. There is nothing there to abuse, no "environment" to foul, no natives to exploit, nothing, not even bacteria. The alternative to humans going there is death, forever. And not "human" death, either, but total death. No life. Deader than the worst possible nuclear holocaust could ever make Earth. If that is truly your position, fine, but I hope I can at least remove the fashionableness from your pose.)
Clothing manufacturers, cotton producers, and even fast food chains are included in these totals. It is simply an attempt to make people think that the movie and music industries contribute jobs when that is simply not the case. Even I depend on IP if you consider that I offer a product that can be pirated, but it does not strengthen their position unless you believe their lies. The values may be accurate, but they are not revealing the true source of the revenue and are simply lumping in everything they can to this total to justify their attempts at supression.
Dawkins doesn't have religious views. He has views on religions.
Impatient acquisitions when stressed to try and fix numbers/strategy can make any issues 10x worse down the line.

Better to do nothing for 3 months. Take some time out of the office and do some deep thinking.
F18 Carrier Landing (iOS) is a Boatload of Fun
Apple Introduces 'Free App of the Week'
Very interesting. From the article:

>I am not aware of another agency that was banned by Google for this practice.

Isn't it possible that Google caught iAcquire buying links (or engaging in some other form of SEO spam) for their own domain, and that's why it was delisted? If they were willing to do it for clients, certainly they were willing to do it for themselves.

On an unrelated note: check out the first comment thread on that article. Each response gets thinner and thinner until it is finally just a single character on each line. That's fun.
My speculation/dream: they port Enyo to Dart and make it the default language/framework for Android development. It also still works (where browsers support necessarily features) on the web and has PhoneGap-like functionality for iOS, et al.

I know Dart doesn't get much love here but the prospect of doing "native" mobile, web, mobile web and server side code in the same language (that isn't JS) and codebase brings a tear to my eye.
You are right. We added empathy to the description.
Re literate programming. A scientist friend of mine likes to build his articles so that the graphs in a TeX are generated from an R script. Makes it easy to change some variables or try different input. sweave is another solution http://www.statistik.lmu.de/~leisch/Sweave/
Not docked yet.
Video is now online.
Therefore they would have to go open source first. I have my doubts that Facebook would pay top dollar just to open source the software. On the other hand that might be a move to put the current user base in a merciful mood, as the userbase is probably the least likely aspect they are interested in for that takeover.
One small step for man,
One giant leap for private enterprise.
It is part of the DRM scheme. DRM requires end-to-end encryption to be effective. In this case it has nothing to do with a vendor lock-in. Using DRM is part of the deal with media partners and not Apple's decision.
We've had a similar experience. It was a good experiment, but our marketing is driven more by trying to connect with individuals and turn them into ambassadors. Rather than blanket the web with ads, I try to find influential people who I think will love our products, and send them an unsolicited sample. Besides, what's more fun than mailing out free polka dot socks?!
This explanation helps more than the link does to tell me what this application does.

So, it's a photo and status slideshow mashup? Why not advertise it as such?

The buddhist(?) jargon makes this extremely unapproachable to people not versed in this terminology. I hear "lessons in compassion" and imagine a religious lecture over war orphan pictures or something equally unappealing.
I believe I speak for every web surfer when I read this headline and say "NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
I think part of the problem is that we're willing to accept bad behavior when it's done on behalf of the team we agree with.

If something is bad, then it's bad even when it's done by your team.

The end does not justify the means.
Makes sense. Facebook’s next expansion is going to be developing markets. These are heavily invested in mobile internet, and the way you access the internet on low-end mobiles is Opera Mini. They have a very large group of potential customers and the wherewithal to buy access to them.
I hate the splashes...they look like kids' costumes: busy and over-saturated. Icons are boring and unimaginative too. Pity because I think Aobe did a great job with what matters, the UIs (pretty challenging if you think of how many products CS6 has and how each one does things a little differently). The splashes IMO look really unprofessional compared to the pro and subdued look of the new UIs. I really hope Adobe changes the splashes (and the icons) for the next release. In fact, I'm thinking of writing to Adobe to provide an update to change at least the splashes even for this version...they're really an eyesore that I have to endure each time I start an app.
I didn't see any purchase price mentioned, but would you be surprised? Billion is the new Million!
Cisco all but kills Cius tablet
Never mind I appear to be mistaken, the company only sold 18 billion dollars in stock, the insiders sold off 57%.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4023751
Then those Indie Devs need to re-evaluate their position. There are other platforms out there.
Yep happened once in 50 years of space travel.

Ugh, we get it, everyone thinks they're being cute and its a way to mock US units. Yes, yes, this isn't getting incredibly tiresome.
The "insiders"(who are these people?) selling off shares isn't that much of an issue. It's simply good investing.

The IPO was the big chance for people with equity in Facebook to finally cash out and actually make some money off of the company.
It is referred to as VS.Net 2002 after VS.Net 2003 came out with .Net 1.1 if you want to be pendantic.

If you really want to be pedantic, Visual Studio .Net 7.0.

It's not just today - it's been 10 years of hell. Unfortunately it pays the bills (just about).

It's not venerable tool. It's like sitting in front of a pressing machine that pokes you in the eye once an hour, but not quite enough to do you serious damage.

I've been poked in the eye 18,000 times.
With Chrome Google added some real value to Webkit (V8, sandboxing, etc.), and in the process they created a unique product.

Just forking Chromium will make it look like Oracle’s Unbreakable Enterprise Linux, i.e. a cheap knockoff of Redhat.

If Facebook wants to enter the game they need something more. At that point doing new frontend for Webkit from scratch is probably not going to be any cheaper than buying Opera. And they’d need to hire people to do that, which buying Opera would also solve.
The idea of the app is not to communicate with people directly, but to see them from a different perspective - as human beings, equal to ourselves, deserving our affection and respect.

The app is based on Buddhist approach to developing love and compassion.

Would love to debug the Facebook connect issue. Feel free to contact me on matjaz [at] humane-tehnologije.si
Apple has a dominance in iOS, since it is their OS, but they don't have a monopoly in the world since only about 30% of mobile devices are iOS devices.

Thus no special case required. When iTunes was around there were other options for purchasing music, hence no monopoly.
"Yes, the passwords are converted to uppercase before hashing. That's probably a bad idea - especially in the modern world - but it really dates back to their first Battle.net game - Diablo - from 1996."

Yup, that's probably a bad idea. Thank goodness you didn't disagree that it's probably a bad idea, like I've seen a ton of nut-jobs do.

That said, I think it's only "probably a bad idea" in terms of protecting people who use the same password on multiple sites, which is "without question a bad idea."
I've become a loyal fan of DuckDuckGo. In November of 2011, just for the heck of it, I decided to e-mail support@duckduckgo.com about an issue (the difficulty of performing academic searches). I was extremely impressed when I received a response from Gabriel Weinberg himself. I have been using DuckDuckGo exclusively ever since.

At first, I had a lot of reservations about switching and found myself using g! quite often. Then I realized that I wasn't necessary more impressed with Google results, I was just __used__ to it. For instance, I hated DDG's zero-click info sources, because I would mentally ignore it. It seemed like a waste of space. Now it's the first thing I look at when the search results show up -- and it's generally what I want.
You're right. My opinion has changed. Apple vs. HTC is a net good too, at least in the sense that it brings us closer to some level of regulatory relief.
Achieving More Isolated Unit Testing
Smart move. My biggest lesson from the dot.com boom days was sell all vested options on the first day you are legally allowed to do so.
Shareware is what made windows what it is (the good bits that is).

That would be like going into McDonalds and shooting everyone but the cleaners.
So when I upload a bot now, I get a 504 gateway timeout, but it does eventually seem to work. But then my games played resets to 88 instead of 0.
On the other hand, the submission headline here is simply the original article headline, "Africa developing its first supercomputer outside South Africa," with its subtitle (too long to be added to a headline on HN by the eighty-character rule) "The first 24-node HPC cluster should launch at iHub in Nairobi this summer." That is consistent with the Hacker News guidelines,

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

which say, "You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it." I generally find it is helpful for submitters on HN to submit original article titles. Then if we disagree with the original article title, as you evidently do here, we can agree to hold the person who kindly submitted the article harmless, and blame the editors of Ars Technica this time for a less than ideal title.

(For what it's worth, I have observed one case where an HN submitter submitted an original article title, which was then changed by the curators when commenters howled about it. The title changed from

http://independentsciencenews.org/news/23andme-disproves-its...

to

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813270

I still think it was correct for the article to be submitted here on HN with the original title that time and this time, even if the title is subject to legitimate disagreement.)

I agree with your basic geographic point, hence an upvote from me for your comment.
That's a valid point. We are thinking about letting users submit their profile into the global pool of people. With that the practice would not only cover friends but also people we don't know.
Personally my view is the exact opposite. Privatizing space travel will never bring us to the stars. It will get us into orbit for very high fees but e.g. deep space exploration? Too expensive, too low likelyhood of payoff. But for the really long term survival of humanity, it's a must.
that's easy: whichever company can shoot down all other companies ships, and still manage to land and mine said asteroids, wins.

the name of this game? "king of the asteroid"
A short demo video is now online. Hope it helps.
Absinthe 2.0 Provides Untethered Jailbreak for iOS 5.1.1
Is any of this actually bad for Facebook? Ok so lots of suddenly-very-rich people might leave - but as far as the company's concerned the IPO raised an enormous amount of money. So what if the market's perception of the company goes down? It's bad for the rest of us (and our pensions), but why should Mark care about Facebook's stock price?
Do you realize how absurd and contradictory you are being right now? NeXT was an actual company and didn't get any funding while complete hacks like the one in the article got millions and didn't even have a product.

A NeXT was used by TimBL to create the Web! Carmack used one to code DOOM, do you even understand how prestigious this is?

And don't talk about NeXT as if Jobs was just an employee, it was HIS company, he started it practically alone with money off his own pocket.

100 millions=insane? AAPL was a 4 billion company, and NeXT was full of former AAPL employees, how is 100 million insane?

Right now you have startups with no strategy getting more funding and higher valuations than NeXT because the founder is from Facebook or Google.

Again, when Jobs was fired he had already lost all momentum, where have you seen a public company whose shares go up after firing a founder? That's how bad Jobs' image in the Valley was.
I'm a little shocked at the negativity towards, of all things, an icon and a splash screen.

That said, I'm a little more shocked that people are reacting more negatively to the splashes that are a bit more expressive. The past couple CS releases have been, from that perspective, plain and boring.
>> Simple and flawless, however, I cannot recommend it to hackers since the functionalities are quite limited. Sometimes I use it for taking quick notes and that is it.

The "flawless" sounds a bit contradictory seeing how you follow up the statement with some arguable flaws.

I've always thought iA writer's simplicity was a gimmick. The whole notion of "distraction free writing" as a quick cure for the user's inability to focus is a hard promise to deliver on.
No way I'd renew my paid Fastmail.fm account if Facebook buys the company.
Show HN: Transparent Metrics during Product Launch
How do you feel about opening up launch metrics for a product launch? Not just visits, etc. but also revenue, costs, servers, follows, subscribes, conversion data, etc. I'm giving this a try for the first time with http://www.foundermeals.com

But I would love to see examples of others who have tried this (with success OR failure), and also if there is a service that simplifies the process.

I'm currently using MixPanel for analytics and it is working well so far. I'm still not 100% sure how I'm going to go about keeping the analytics updating constantly.

Thank you for your help!
I agree. If this is true, hopefully they leave Fastmail alone.
Students will be tracked via chips in IDs
I didn't know that this had something to do with Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I honestly thought it was about Towelie from South Park.