skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would compare a website to an answering machine; it is a lot closer to what is happening. I dial your number, I get your answering machine, and now I can interact with that answering machine. Same with a website -- I direct my browser to it, and I get to ask it for information, and it is your responsibility to ensure that nothing I send will cause information to be leaked.

See, the problem with laws like CFAA is that they are based on the premise that there is "nothing" a bank could do to prevent hackers from accessing their computers without permission. At no point did anyone stop to say, "Maybe computers that process billions of dollars in transactions every day should not be plugged into the public phone network or Internet until we have some good reason to think those computers cannot be manipulated by hackers;" instead, the thinking was, "Hackers are evil wizards, nobody could possibly protect themselves from hackers, so we should make a law that allows us to throw the evil wizards in prison!" The idea that AT&T should be blamed for leaving customer data out in the open like that is not even on the table (strangely, if AT&T left a binder full of personal information unattended on a table in a public park, and labeled the binder "DO NOT OPEN," they would probably be the target of a successful lawsuit).
^this

There's bad indentation e.g. a for block not indented, and a mixture of C and Java style indentation. I recommend following the standard Microsoft style indentation which is place the opening brace on a new line on its own.

Also, "it will compile and run, then ask the user to press a key go back". One missing 'to' doesn't seem so bad but the accumulation of these little details really adds up.

Really nice though, I like taking the user back to the console and command line and walking them through everything. Best of luck.
That explains it all.
Whether and how it will happen is a different question from whether it could and should happen. Most legal rules could be vastly improved by reducing them to principles that are combined in a framework of cost/benefit analysis. One of the main reasons that hard cases frequently come up is because the law is, in software terms, extremely buggy. Those "corner cases" are mainly a problem because the law attempts to solve so many problems by partitioning into ad hoc cases.

The law (meaning the courts and the legislative process, as well) is so completely broken that it's hard to imagine a fix actually happening in the US.
Yes because if they imaged the laptop that would make it all better.

9 year old girl downloading music -> payup and shutup or be taken away. Is the Mafia minus the class. It's damn scary.

I couldn't find a youtube clip of Christian Rock Hard by South Park
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3dHKtpxyfw&feature=relat...
Pypy 2.0 beta-1 release with ARM support and cffi.
Sept. 7 2010, according to their slideshare link.

http://www.slideshare.net/zeeg/djangocon-2010-scaling-disqus...
How to Bind ListView Data for devices running on Windows platform
They go after downloaders do <10 seconds of Googleing to see.
I'm wondering if the backlash might actually be a good thing. If this sort of backlash becomes common, there will be a disincentive for artists to sign up with records who indulge in such nonsense. Perhaps the system will adapt such that prosecutions like this would be eliminated.
It isn't about human apathy, it's about not fixing what isn't broken. You sometimes come across stories of a windows 3.1 machine controlling a critical piece of machinery for a business.

As for C and C++, the bugs that prevent a program going from 32-bit to 64-bit is making assumptions about the sizes of datatypes, and these days is usually seen as bad programming. They are just tools though, and have their uses, even in a multi-threaded world.
I am owed over $1000 by some companies in US and UK for freelance work. Over 6 months ago now.
What do you suggest? Forget about it? Debt collection? Contact spouse via Facebook?!
What I don't understand is why people don't get ready to take the hit; use a cached static version, use varnish, get more instances; just don't let it go down.
Web design and marketing companies that specialise in online stuff.

They often have more design and campaign work than development, so they will regularly bring on freelance developers to help with projects.
How interesting I grew up colored in the US also and experience racism everyday from white people. Please let me know which part of the US you are living in. I would love to live there and not have to worry about people giving me a hard time because of the color of my skin.
Vision Without Execution Is Hallucination
This is talking specially about 64-bit on windows, related to windows-specific problems. Linux and osx have fully-functioning 64-bit versions, so this won't hinder ARM 64-bit.
A Few New Things Coming To JavaScript
> Most legal rules could be vastly improved by reducing them to principles that are combined in a framework of cost/benefit analysis.

Lawyers already do this. The world is still too complex to reduce to a single, central set of uniform principles. Instead you have lots of little pockets of temporary uniformity.

What happens is:

1. Lots of disconnected cases.

2. One day, a lawyer or judge notices a pattern.

3. A new principle is expounded in a case.

4. Other judges might pick it up and it becomes the common law. Or they don't, and it doesn't.

5. If it's widely accepted, the new principle begins to accrete exceptions, odd outliers, dusty corners and so on.

6. One day, a lawyer or judge notices a pattern ...

You need to stop thinking of law as a product and think of it as a process. It is not a static, manufactured good. It is a procedure for discovery.
Am bit cautious on taking the leap, as there seems to be lot of ambiguity over the earning potential of a freelancer.
The privacy problem is imaginary because (a) only a puny fraction of users care, and (b) thanks to the "patriot" act, our ISPs are storing our search history anyway.

I have worked on search (see my background), and doing search well is massively difficult. The problem has deep necessary complexity, and Google has invested thousands of PhD years against that already. If Google were incompetent, maybe I could see it. But they're damned smart and their product is extremely good.

Data is also a problem - Microsoft has been collecting all your google searches since IE8, and can probably just clone Google's search results for the top few million queries. But even given that, Bing is a massive undertaking.

Since nobody uses DDG, Google can't be expected to make them a default search choice in Chrome. Accusing Google of some malfeasance is just childish and silly.

Finally, the name DDG is atrocious. Really bad in more ways than I have time to list.
"Side Note: if we end up never putting anything in this variable the compiler will spit back an error. It’s ok to initialize with nothing as long as you populate it later."

You mean if we end up /using/ it before we put anything in it we'll get an error. If we never put a value in it, the compiler will spit back a warning.

"Then we will break out of the loop and move on."

What loop?
You're talking about morally wrong.

I'm talking about legally, technically, wrong.
"It's on Google Earth and other maps so we went to check and there was no island."
(Scientists)

"The world is a constantly changing place, and keeping on top of these changes is a never-ending endeavour."
(Google spokesperson)

"...though it cannot hope to be useful or informative on all matters, it does make the reassuring claim that where it is inaccurate, it is at least definitively inaccurate. In cases of major discrepancy it was always reality that's got it wrong."
(Douglas Adams)
My theory is, it was a weather balloon.
In the description, I don't think "juxtapose" is the word you want to describe the relationship between the words. I am not a native speaker, but when I hear juxtapose, I think of things that are compared to each other, but with distance in mind, not closeness.
> civil law systems have already codified everything,

No, they have not, because "everything" is constantly changing.
Firefox is natively 64bit on Linux and OSX already.
The relation between IQ tests and intelligence aside, I thought that the "downward slide" argument was at odds with the Flynn effect (a significant, upward trend in IQ scores over the past century or so):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
Customers will rarely go looking for a shopping of skills such as JSP, automation testing, Java, Oracle etc.

Instead, they'll say 'I want a website to do X' or 'I want an application to do Y'.

A lot of the time, they didn't even care what you use or how you do it.

Your set of published apps in the relatively hot mobile space puts you in a good situation in this regard.

The first step would be to build a portfolio of your work.
Cool thanks.

Isn't this ability a bit dangerous or worrisome? It means that for every Scala package you use you need to review the code. It does make a good prank though :)
As others have said, this is a powerful reminder of how close these historic moments are to our current time. We're still human, and we make the same sort of mistakes today. Mistakes that, alone, seem harmless enough, but when combined, lead us back into hell. Let's be vigilant and remember the price paid by those before us! (Full disclaimer: I watched Sarah's Key last night, so I'm a bit fired-up)
The FF window.navigator.onLine event fires when you click the "Work offline" option in the menu, at least I think it used to. Just tried that and it didn't work either.

I have been looking for a X-browser way to do this myself and the best I cam up with so far was to ping google.com with a XHR OPTIONS type request. Pretty ugly, but it works.
did anyone else read this as '... because I am shit at my job'?

I'd accept an argument against poor, or draconian standards, but actually standards can stop people from doing dumbass stuff or hitting subtle gotchas - esp. useful for junior developers who might not understand the intricacies of static initialisation order or memory alignment in C struct layout...
While having a 64-bit OS is useful, the majority of apps I work on never use anywhere near 4GB. Firefox has distributed 64-bit builds, so it is not the case that they aren't willing to put the work in. However, there turns out to be basically no advantage to running a 64-bit web browser.
Whole contracts can be, and are, copyrighted.
"My big question is, will I be a fool to try freelancing at this stage and with my experience?"

No, at least not based on the tech experience - you've done a hell of a lot more than some people I've sub-contracted work out to.

The bigger issue will be your attitude and approach. Treat 'freelancing' as professionally as any other engagement and you'll be fine.
It may not be 100% reliable, but coupled with other techniques (catching error 404s etc) this provides a nice way to inform the user that their connection to our application may be gone.

For single page apps that use browser storage and sync to the remote periodically it is great to be able to inform the user that "Hey you're offline. You can keep using it, but your changes won't be available for others to see until you re-connect".
The start may be expensive, but currently Pioneer 10 moves at over 10 km/s on about 100W of power. That is over 360,000 km on a kWh, and that mostly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly) is not spent for propulsion.
huh. thanks. so i guess this is obvious, given the context, but that sounds like an earthquake (a decent sized one) feels, if you see what i mean...

(also, you can hear it with decent speakers - no sub-woofer. it's audible with BW 602s (large monitors) for example)
The Shipyard - When launching, webapps are like chocolate bars
I think it may be worth looking at just how non-optimal the current system is: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110411/full/news.2011.227.ht...

People are emotional and subjective by their very nature. It is not possible to be objective - one can only tend towards objectivity by applying constant introspection and reassessing one's world view. Nonetheless, an Ape is not capable of being a Vulcan. It is, frankly, a travesty that people's fates are being decided by other people's stomachs.
I'd say it's true that there is now less selective pressure on the human species than there used to be, but 3,000 years is a short period of time on the evolutionary scale. Doubtful that any significant effects have resulted yet.
Though it would be hard to attribute that to natural selection.
Thanks very much coob. It still needs a little more work doing to it before I'm happy with it.

At the moment I've got my friends alpha testing it, and have got some good feedback. Hopefully I'll be confident enough to post a SHOW HN soon.
Apple ordered to share HTC deal details with Samsung
Nick Bostrom Looks At The Intelligence Explosion Hypothesis
The big question is, why won't 64 bit catch on?

I suppose the obvious response is “Why should it?”

It makes a lot of sense to have a 64-bit operating system if we have, for example, more than 4GB of memory to work with. However, unless a single process needs access to the same scale of resources all on its own, there isn’t necessarily any advantage to writing things like application code the same way.

Moreover, moving to 64-bit pointers means more memory is required for data structures and for assembly level instructions that use indirection. In both cases, there is the potential for a significant performance hit, for example if less information fits into a cache.

OK, what about using 64-bit instructions that let us calculate with larger values? Again, that might be useful in some contexts, but on PC processors we’ve had specialist instructions for things like double-precision floating point calculations or operating over multiple bundled values simultaneously for a long time, so there are only limited benefits to be had.

Of course, set against all of these ambiguous benefits is the fact that porting to 64-bit can take a lot of work if the original code, data structures, file formats and so on were not designed with portability in mind. And once you’ve ported, if you’re also running a 32-bit version, now you have more testing to do, any related software might have to speak two protocols/APIs to remain compatible with both, etc. (This seems to be one of the main underlying points in the cited article.)

Looking at the astronomical memory requirements for something like browsers opening multiple tabs these days, perhaps in the case of Firefox there really is an argument for supporting more than 4GB of RAM. On the other hand, even modern web pages full of large images and multimedia wizardry usually only come in at ~100kB or maybe ~1MB, so even with dozens of tabs open, you need to be doing an awful lot behind the scenes to be in any danger of hitting a 4GB limit. Presumably the Mozilla folks don’t expect this to be a problem.
I'm stating that with such a large amount of media and public present at the embassy police presence was required, due to the large crowds.
I took a quick look at the spec:

> The navigator.onLine attribute must return false if the user agent will not contact the network when the user follows links or when a script requests a remote page (or knows that such an attempt would fail), and must return true otherwise.

So, strictly speaking, if you have a network connection and no internet connectivity (and the browser is not aware of the latter), this should return true - because clicking a link will result in the browser contacting the network.

What would be really interesting to see is how this works with various browsers in Windows, because Windows does test connections for internet connectivity.
I more read it as "stop wasting time arguing over tiny details and code", rather than "I'm bad at coding and don't like being told what to do".

Things like the two you mentioned are useful as a code standard, but they're also things that junior devs should be learning from senior devs in the process of work anyway. There's no point slavishly following a standard if you're going to never learn from it.
In the newer (2011) slides they mention growth by ~100 Million comments in 6 months. Most comments are tiny, I'd be surprised if this whole dataset was much larger then ~100GB.

I don't really understand why Disqus and Reddit for that matter don't just switch to redis. There has got to be a good reason because I can't think of one. Sounds like you could run the whole thing from just one box and only have slaves for redundancy.

Why isn't vertical scaling more in vogue?
Yeah there is. Preventing bugs due to coder inexperience is valuable in its own right.
PyPy Status Blog: PyPy 2.0 beta 1
What does that imply? We can always alter the rules of an expert system or add new rules.

[Edit:] i am referring to civil law legal systems, not civil law in common law systems. Precedents count very little in the former.
Yes, it's always seemed odd to me, from a moral point of view, that it's perfectly fine for them to copy music easily (and hence make huge profits) but it's not ok for us to copy music.

If you look at the history of the music business, musicians used to not make very much money and only got paid for gigs. If you were good you could ask for more from your punters per gig, and if you were REALLY good you could hold concerts and get paid much more. Seems we should go back to that model - musicians and the music industry get rewarded far beyond what they're worth in my opinion.
It really depends on what the startup is doing. PhDs in Machine learning (probably) aren't gonna know a thing about sales. General intelligence is useful, sure, but being a successful entrepreneur isn't about being smart, it's about finding an opportunity and putting in the hard work to take advantage of it.
I would guess that they seized all of the computers in the house. Where I live (the UK), that seems to be SOP for crimes involving computers - they take your computers, gaming consoles, ipods...

Oh, and you don't get them back.
Tell HN: We just raised GBP 50,000 using Seedrs.com
And you know what... I just wanted to tell some people who might appreciate it.

http://seedrs.com/browse_startups/1217

The pitch is for new discussion forums: Like tumblr, for forums.

Raising the money isn't wholly a surprise or shock, we have extremely passionate users who have been bugging me for a good chunk of this year that they'd like to be investors at some level. So when we got rejected for YC we determined whether the users were truly interested, and then completed a Seedrs proposal, emailed our users... and within 15 hours we hit our £50k target.

Of course, there's little time for celebration and champagne, Sublime Text 2 welcomed me this morning, and now getting something out there fast is what matters.

I'm stoked though, and want to say thanks to people on here for sharing so much as although there are bad moments, by and large being on here is a great thing and exposes one to a lot of other people's experiences and stories... and there's mine, we made the hurdle that was in front of us and can look forward to the next one.
Ask HN: Click through licences
Most open source Windows installers will present the licence to you, and make you accept it before installing.

But you can install most software from a Linux distribution without even viewing the licence.

Is either in a better position legally?
Can we buck the trend and not make our Windows users click "I accept"?
I believe that this is a side effect of the corporatist political system we find ourselves in.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism

Some interesting quotes on the subject - http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/corporatism
Is Microsoft really developing or simply trying to get some patent to fight with google?
I Wrote An eBook In A Week
Should be http://floating-point-gui.de - sorry for that
Correction: a) when DuckDuckGo is the selected search engine. Changing the default search engine (from Firefox's perspective, not what the user thinks it is) apparently requires fiddling with about:config.
Mozilla seems, at least to me, to be becoming more and more like the GNOME project. It's projecting a constant stream of unusual, if not outright bad, ideas and actions.

The Firefox version numbering debacle, including the constant problems it caused for extensions, was just plain silly.

Then there's Firefox Mobile. I've always found it very inferior to the other commonly-available mobile browsers. Aside from trying it out briefly, there was no reason to continue using it. This is probably the same for others, and likely why its uptake basically hasn't happened at all.

Earlier this year they seem to have withdrawn their interest in Thunderbird, which is by far one of their better offerings.

More recently, there's been a lot said about Firefox OS. There's a very good chance that this will become an unused, uninspiring, generally-ignored product, much like Firefox Mobile.

And now there's this decision.

Redirecting effort away from applications that are actually used, like Firefox and Thunderbird, toward things that clearly have little to no future, like Firefox Mobile or Firefox OS, just doesn't make sense.
The Linux's perception of my neighbours
Earlier post linking to a better source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4818006
I suggest that we as a community (in unison) immediately and consistently begin downmodding this sort of negative and unproductive metadiscussion on HN whenever it appears.

Atwood (I believe it was, or maybe Spolsky) has already written about what a cancer community metadiscussion can be. It would be a valuable addition to our unwritten community standards to actively discourage it on HN.

This isn't fucking Reddit. I haven't seen this before. If you personally have, move on to the next link and stop ruining the SNR for other users of this site. If it was relevant to HN then, it may well be relevant to HN now.
Magic PNG thumbnails
Even apart from the rape allegations, I have lost all respect for him because of this "hiding in the embassy" thing. He can't go to Sweden because he "might" be extradited to the US? Even if he is extradited, he still has access to the US judicial system and as an Australian citizen can count on some basic diplomatic support, furthermore the attention of the international media...

There are thousands of political activists in third world countries, who take much greater risk of bodily harm for themselves and their families every single day, without the perks like having a platform to portray themselves as a "civil rights hero" in the world media, or receiving donations for "legal defense and bail money", or being able to sleep with several groupies on a short Sweden trip.

Grandstanding speeches in the media combined with cowardly behavior is not something I can admire...
No, you won't be a fool if you try.

You have an application with more than a million downloads in the Android market. And your Juicy Fun game looks very nice. I'd say you have a fairly solid portfolio.

Do you write all these applications all by yourself?
During school days, many times it used to happen with me. I used struggle for solving some problem for many hours then used to sleep. And after waking up, I used to solve them immediately.
Very interesting - so having a large body may actually save energy via the increasing mass-to-surface ratio, and of course it's much easier to keep a large body mobile underwater thean on land.

So there is hope for finding some Great Old Ones after all!
Hm, I clicked 'work offline' in firefox and didn't see the demo page do anything - maybe I'm missing something.
The big data disaster