skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many people feel that compulsory voting is immoral.

However, insofar as the legitimacy of the system of government depends on the franchise, it follows that a more thorough exercise of the franchise increases the legitimacy of the outcome[1].

There are however perfectly practical reasons to have compulsory voting. The biggest is that it dampens oscillations and creates pressure on the whole political system to focus on the median voter.

If you gave me a dictatorial remit to reform the US electoral system, compulsory voting would be one of the policy options I would choose. The others would be instant runoff voting, possibly the abolishment of the electoral college, holding elections on a Saturday and creating an independent electoral commission.

[1] Sophistry, of course. You can counter-argue that only willing exercise of the franchise grants legitimacy. But of course, it is economically irrational for any voter to turn out; just as it is irrational to pay taxes voluntarily. For any such system to work, compulsion is a necessity. You cannot make it go away, only decide where it is most required.
"Anyway, this gets used lots of times by my algorithm"

You've got a missing class. The fact you're so concerned with testing it highlights this.

The fact it's private I should be free to rename, add or remove parameters. If I did this to your private method, I'd break unit tests, despite the code being private.

For the null reference problem, it depends on your language. But the point remains the same. For public API's, e.g something you let the outside world consume, checking for null etc.. will be required. For internal code, don't bother. Go as high as you can in the stack and fix the root cause of the null reference in the first place.
Are you an IT pro? It's no longer safe to bet your career on Microsoft
Society would certainly be better without payroll taxes. I'm willing to concede that consumption based taxes would be a necessary evil.
@JohnLBevan this was not a DNS problem, but a BGP problem

NB Cannot reply under his post
ARM And Imagination Technologies Buy MIPS Technologies
Probably licensing. This one's public domain.

It is indeed extremely incomplete.
I like the new page with the ordering and all, but the old one was way better in giving more information about the addon!

Also, finally they have Addon Search! :D
Agree about the article.

Learning other languages and thinking differently gives you entirely new ways to solve problems, and can't really be encouraged enough. Beyond that, there's the analogy of the carpenter. If someone working at a carpenter only has one tool (a hammer) how effective can they really be? They might be able to do beautiful work, but just think how much more they could do if they only had a saw.
I think you would be very surprised. As a non-US citizen i know almost as much about US politics as my own country's. People around the world have an interest in US politics, it is nothing like asking someone about Japanese or German politics. My guess is that many countries have a proportion of informed people that is not massively far off the US.
Displays: iPad mini vs. Nexus 7 vs. Kindle Fire HD
The suggestion that Jobs was not answerable to Wall Street is false. Successful share price growth kept Wall Street from asking a lot of questions for a long time. Had there been less success, history might have repeated itself.

Even had he lived, Wall Street would have gotten the dividends they demanded. This in no way makes his success less impressive, but it is perhaps foolish to mythologize it.
And cut all backwards compatibility in doing so? Risky move indeed. Not so sure the benefits would make up for it.
And if you don't feel represented, why not still go along but spoil your ballot? This way your dissatisfaction with the process will be recorded, and your vote won't be confused with that of someone who just couldn't be bothered to turn up.
In what way are these results different to if there was no HN customisation and a user searched for "hn startup ideas"? I see there is Honduras news in there with the plugin.
Voting: The Seen and the Unseen
I played Elite on the PC and still rate it as one of the best games I ever played. It stands second to no other game in terms of sheer fun, challenge and playability, not to mention, also being absolutely cutting edge for its time.
Nonsense, only in California are there more than 10 million voters. In Virginia, there are 3.8M, 1.9M per party. If the candidates are 2% apart, there's about a 1/100K chance of casting a deciding vote.

Also: http://what-if.xkcd.com/19/
I think it's good to qualify your opinion with your level of expertise. There's no rule that says HN should only be for discussion by experts (hopefully there never will be), and if you don't know something for sure it's best to say so that others don't take your word as gospel. That said, I'm no expert ;).
Why is it so hard to give good directions?
Dont be a polyglot, it is read to hell! Learn only two languages which are stable, use similar stack and complement each other (C and Lua; C++ and Python; Java and Clojure). And become _best_ at those two.
Why dont you use http://www.hnsearch.com/ ?
There are some other ways to fix the problem.

Last time with the Youtube problem, they advertised more specific routes. If Pakistan was advertising a /24 network (255 IP addresses) Youtube started advertising two /25 networks (2x 128 addresses). Since they are more specific, they are preferred over the more broad routes. This prevents lack of cooperation, but not malicious behavior. As well, it ends somewhere because many networks will not pass routes smaller than say /24 or /28.

Most service providers also do 'inbound route filtering' to filter out any routes that they do not own. This isn't a simple process, which is why PCCW does not do it. Maybe a few more of these incidents and they will.

There's also AS Path filtering. This allows networks to be more granular in which paths they trust, by inspecting which AS's a route has gone through. If certain AS or AS path combinations become problematic, the internet at large could blackhole them or do manual route filtering. This would be laborious, but possible.

That said if someone can maliciously peer with an active BGP router, the damage to be done is significant. I haven't seen any outage reports from this type of attack, but I'm surprised by that.
>Then vote for someone who wants to remove all forms of taxation?

It's not about who you vote for, it's about voting. You basically sign an unmarked contract where the name is left blank, and filled in after the election, and you put in your preference on the contract for who should fill that in.

If your ideal is that you don't want to be restrained by such contract, you wouldn't sign the damn thing, putting your preference as someone who "might" not use the contract to restrain you.
I would tentatively agree but would say the pace is important. Otherwise you end up a jack of all trades and master of none. My goal is to learn one new language every year as well as to deepen my knowledge of the languages that I use regularly.
EVE is not a bad take on Elite with one huge show-stopper, EVE is all about coop and team playing. In EVE you cannot dominate without huge corp backing, Elite was all about the single player.
DISQUS is down
Seems like DISQUS are having some issues with their servers today. All sites that are using their commenting system, you comments aren't not working (From CNN to small bloggers).
Why is this called a plugin? As far as I can see it's just an additonal search term (hn).

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=hn+startup+ideas

Compare with DDG's existing bang code for HN: !hn + startup + ideas

That searches hnsearch.com directly, and gives good results on hnsearch for the search terms.

The "plugin" search from the post has an hnsearch box at the top of DDG's results page, but when you follow the hnsearch link, those results are not as good as the !hn search (IMO).

The nice thing about the "plugin" search is that there are results from the rest of the web. But that's normal.

Am I missing something?
I don't think you're being silly.

For me, learning a new programming language is an opportunity to see how different languages implement different features. For instance, JavaScript, lua and C# all have different ways of implementing inheritance. Understanding the pros/cons of prototypal inheritance vs. classical inheritance makes me a better developer.
Cleaning up? By spending spending and more spending? And increasing the wars and death tolls? hmmmm... Not quite sure how that's helping things.
PhotoShop ACO Palette to UIColor list
Handy for getting the right colors direct from a designer.
Only worth learning language that are dissimilar, or otherwise you end up learning yet another dialect of C.
I don't agree that having only bad candidates is "an edge case which only happens in thought experiments". It's easy to get blinded by the all-to-common sports team approach to party politics (My team good! Other team bad!), but issue for issue, there just isn't any appreciable difference in the candidates.

So what is the "key difference" between the parties? Rhetoric. When Republicans advocate a small contraction of the welfare state, Democrats claim that Republicans totally oppose the welfare state. And many Republicans oblige them by standing up for "liberty" and "responsibility." Similarly, when Democrats advocate a small expansion in the welfare state, Republican claim that Democrats oppose free markets. And many Democrats oblige them by saying things like "markets only benefit the rich."

This rhetorical illusion is so powerful that when a Democrat like Clinton adopts many pro-market reforms, Republicans still hate him as a 60s radical. And when Bush II sharply expands the welfare state, Democrats still hate him as a billionaire's lackey.

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/09/how_dems_and_re....
How private forms of several of the things you mentioned can work:

"The Machinery of Freedom" by David Friedman
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTYkdEU_B4o
Pro-tip: that's not a patent. It's a patent application.

But because that stupid site doesn't tell you the publication number, it's impossible to know (without doing some searching) what's happened in the meantime. Maybe it's issued as a patent, maybe it's still pending, maybe it's been abandoned. Also, no mention of the claims? Amateur hour.
For me, having learnt to program in multiple different languages means I've learnt that being a programmer is more than syntax and given I've programmed from C++ to Ruby to Node.js that I've usually got (some) insight into the best language to tackle a particular problem.

Whether or not I'm correctly attributing this to having programmed in multiple languages I'm not sure, but it's certainly nice to be able to jump between things with a slightly smaller learning curve.
For me, being a polyglot programmer is about being able to sit down and get comfortable usage from any language or framework.

I started out with VB.Net in University, during my second year started using C# on my own. Next came Ruby with it's elegance. Followed by PHP for it's commercial potential (lots of people pay for this), followed by Ruby on Rails, followed by CakePHP, followed by ASP.Net, followed by ASP.Net MVC.

I have about 2 months of CakePHP experience - and I have a full time job using it at a Senior Position. It's about being able to somewhat "bs" your way into a job but NOT suck at it, because you are used to change. You can adapt and roll with the punches. Paradigms, toolchains, dev ops, are secondary - your real concern should be:

CAN I ADAPT EASILY TO ANY ENVIRONMENT?
If a boat is loose and being pulled out by the tide, everyone on the beach pulls on the rope. One individual on the rope doesn't make a difference, but if no one pulls, the boat is lost. So we all pull.
If you by YCer mean Hacker news member, then yes. We haven't joined YC (got into 500 startups, though).

Thanks!
I have what may be a silly (or just uninformed) question:

This, d3, etc. all look extremely cool and like great ways to do procedural graphics creation / animation.

Has there emerged yet a Flash Builder-like tool for Canvas-based web graphics yet? I feel like there's a fundamental limit to how widespread procedural graphics production will be since many designers/animators/game developers a just don't work that way -- they need visual tools. Or so I assume.
Look into "Platform as a Service".
Pakistan null routed YouTube and accidentally took a big chunk down around the world in 2007.
It's not clear that he is making an Anarchistic argument (as you suggest) or just complaining about the status-quo of politicians.

Either way, as of today, voting third party means you won't be 'voting them in' (NB: it does not follow that your vote will not have any impact).
GameMaxx Hydrating Game Controller is Hilariously Ludicrous
I've got a missing class, for a 5 line function called from one place? I suppose I can see your point of view, but I'm not sure I agree.

On your second point, I do disagree. I like to view all functions, even internals one, as having a documented API, covering things like bad inputs. This means that all functions (in debugging/assertion mode at least) promise to sanity-check their inputs for null pointers, etc.

In C++ at least I find this a necessity, as a single wrong pointer can cause horrible memory corruption all over my code. The whole point of these assertions is to allow me to find the place in the stack where the null pointers are coming from without pulling all my hair out in the process!
I am not from the US, so I have to draw my "Sorry, I don't know" card here, but I really cannot believe that there were only bad candidates - It isn't impossible, but without proof it seems highly unlikely, i.e. an edge case.
That may change, if the two parties continue to do nothing but spit at each other.
Since I use DuckDuckGo for searches, I probably wouldn't notice this. Not receiving Gmail for a while wouldn't be noteworthy (at least for the first half hour or so).

I'm confused about the times the author gives, though. The article is dated today (11/6) and he says this happened 'today' at 6:24pm PST / 02:24 UTC. But unless I'm mistaken, that is a time currently in the future (http://time.gov/timezone.cgi?Pacific/d/-8/java). I guess he meant yesterday?
Tesla reports great Q3 results, expects to be cash flow positive by Q4
I'm pretty sure at least P:E had a video.
> When I finished the course I really liked Haskell and functional programming because of its clarity, readability and the fact that I could write a very compact code. But I had no practical use for it. It did not change my Programming style but made me look for a more pure and “nicer” language to learn.

Why did it not change your OO style to be more functional? Static methods, no mutation, etc etc?
I built the ReMeme app for iOS and Android using Kendo Mobile.
Good. Now go build some product and stop reading HN. :)
That's what https is for. It should prevent them from doing anything useful with the packets.
You're talking of Twitter Bootstrap and the likes, so... yes. There are many others too (Zurb Foundation and Skeleton) that are very good.

Here's a good comparison between some of the most known ones to help you out: http://responsive.vermilion.com/compare.php

It would help to have an understanding of how these work behind the scenes though. Best of luck!
I'm in this camp. To me, 'literally' has only one meaning. If it doesn't, the word loses all utility. He could say 'is essentially the glue', I suppose.
Voting is not a contract. See Lysander Spooner's No Treason: http://jim.com/treason.htm

Specifically:

"In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having even been asked a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practice this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further, that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self- defence, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man takes the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. Neither in contests with the ballot — which is a mere substitute for a bullet — because, as his only chance of self- preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered; that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, in an exigency into which he had been forced by others, and in which no other means of self-defence offered, he, as a matter of necessity, used the only one that was left to him.

"Doubtless the most miserable of men, under the most oppressive government in the world, if allowed the ballot, would use it, if they could see any chance of thereby meliorating their condition. But it would not, therefore, be a legitimate inference that the government itself, that crushes them, was one which they had voluntarily set up, or even consented to.
Then they shall thank us for sending them there so soon.
The economics of side projects really underscores the hypocrisy of the corporate ruling class.

First, what is the first thing that a person learns about being wealthy? Diversify. That's one of the most basic principles of financial common sense. Yet it's extremely frowned upon for working people to do the same with their time. If your primary asset is money, you're allowed to diversify. If your primary asset is time and you try to diversify and get caught having a side project, you're "not a team player".

For most corporate jobs, the work itself could be accomplished in 2 to 3 hours per day. People simply don't have enough productive time to fill a corporate workday, a schedule that is based more on availability (often, availability for low-margin uses like worthless meetings) than productivity.

The corporate workday is an international plane ride (8 to 12 hours, mostly sequestered in one location) five times a week. Is this about productivity? No. It's about required loyalty. Even though people only have 3-4 hours of productive time per day, the purpose of the midday plane ride is to dominate so much of someone's time as to maximize the probability of capturing those hours. It's to make it so that the person's side efforts are unlikely to be able to compete, so that diversification isn't (for most people) an option.
> If you don't tell them what you're building, then they won't know until you've built it.

In my experience, they'll usually not listen until it's built. They'll not even test it until they need for real work. At that point, they'll get stuck and their customers will get angry. And then, should I feel guilty?
Psychology for Technical Leaders
Getting Started with Knockout.js
Sounds to good to be true, there any other confirmations on this?
Sympl - The no bullshit HTML5/CSS framework.
I've only found quotes, and no mirrors.
Prismatic is what I use. It's fairly good; I hope they come up with an iPad app though. :)
Pizzahut.com.au hacked -- 240k AUS credit cards stolen
All of these languages are mostly imperative. The author recommended, and I concur, getting some hands-on with other paradigms (Functional, Logic, etc).
Server seems to be struggling, google cache here

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...

I'd definitely like to see some other sources on this one!
You're counting across the dateline, so for you it was 11/5.
Application Scalability Has Evolved
This would be more interesting if it included the official country codes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code
Cortex-A15 and Apple A6 are the high-end now. Cortex-A9's are so small and (relatively) cheap that they throw 4 of them on $20 tablet SoCs even for applications that don't really benefit from many cores.
Which languages have you studied? What makes you say that?
Although only a vanishingly small percentage of Google users can call and complain. Blog or tweet or post to HN and hope Matt Cutts sees it and notifies the right team, maybe.
Seems to be up and down, but it redirects you to here: http://pastehtml.com/view/chfqrjo1j.html and states the following:

Dear Pizzahut

It has come to my attention that we have

It has come to my attention that we have absolutely
ripped apart your internal security systems

Do you want to know what we took?

~240,000 Australian Credit Cards.

~60,000 Australian Members

Your dignity.

Woopsies :c
Show HN: Cork - A digital cork board, demo
Hello HN!

Today we'd like to share with you a demo of the web app we've been working on for the past few weeks. We call it Cork.

Cork is a digital cork board that you can drop, paste, or type, URLs and text into. After adding an item you can organize it by dragging it around the screen.

Our goal is to provide a better way to visualize, organize, and share, content-rich items on the web. We think that current bookmarking system don't do justice to the full spectrum of media online, and we'd like to change that.

Please let us know what you think! What do you like? What don't you like?

Be harsh if you want to, we can take it. We know that with continued feedback we can make something people love to use.

Thanks for your time!

http://cork.io
Here is (imo) THE strongest reason you have to vote..

If your demographic votes, *all* politicians care about it.

Why do you think medicare is untouchable? (cf. 'obamacare').
What percentages are you seeing of business users still being forced on IE7? I recently worked with a large bank and they are under almost all the way off of it having everyone on IE8-9 and FF ESR Channel. Like always I hope people are using some form of data analysis to determine if supporting the old browsers are really needed.
It doesn't decide the president - but it influences which positions the 2 major parties have to cover. Lets say for example democrats are losing because they lost massively votes to the green party - then in the next race they will certainly consider how to get those votes back and might have a greener agenda.
> If you are a consumer hardware company, yes.

No I was referring to enterprise, and when it comes down to it, pretty much all VC funded operations. The nuts and bolts of the way VC funds are structured make it necessary to pretty much have the company investment resolved in about 8 years. (Typical funds are LLCs limited to 10 year frames.) Each round should last 1.5-2 yrs. If you are at D with no product, then your A round is up a creek.
Maybe the headline should be "Why were 2 men arrested and convicted for tweeting in the UK?"
Learning different programming paradigms is of course a great practice however I'm not sure we can attribute that to learning different languages. I think for a good programmer choice of a programming language does not matter.
Who's Best For President If Zombies Invade?
Why Can’t Silicon Valley Take a Joke?
That is more or less the definition of a man in the middle attack. Hopefully if the website does something important(online banks, shopping, etc.), they have done something to mitigate that possibility.
The site seems like a joke. Take a look at some of the other articles (might have to prefix the URLs with 'cache:' to get Google's copy). Lets just flag this and move on.

https://twitter.com/p4rgaming