skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The US has a peculiar attachment to its current constitution and it's founding fathers. There seems to be a semi religious adherence to that one document and those original people, as if the US constitution is the first and only document that can grantee liberty and freedom. Many arguments in the US seem to be around "what did the founding fathers really mean?" The hell what they meant, they were wrong!
F# is a great language, and Petricek's enthusiasm for it is really inspiring. However, my major problem with the foundation in its current form is that they appear to be at least informally very closely tied to Microsoft. And I don't mean the cool people from MSR who developed the language in the first place.

For example, the official MS party-line has been to withhold releasing standalone compilers unless they are bundled with some "free" visual studio crap. Compiling the compiler from source every time I want to check something on another machine is simply not an option and it's one of the primary reasons I haven't moved to the new 3.0 version.

That's precisely the kind of problem a truly independent foundation could easily solve, but so far they haven't demonstrated any willingness to move in a way that could be considered competing with Microsoft's own products.
It isn't nice to pretend you could overthrow your government, yeah, is nice as "religion" nice, as "delusional but thankfully uncheckable" nice.
The frog is already being boiled. And it's drugged by FUD of media and propaganda.
"Quite the contrary, there aren't enough guns"

I struggle to find an example of a country with more guns and lower murder rate. Care to help?
"Published August 15, 2008"

Therefore, this is not in response to the recent CT shootings as the "will" part in the title suggests.
Consider if you've been living the high life based on borrowed money. At some point, you decide to go on an "austerity" program, and cut back the spending so you are no longer borrowing.

In order to pay back the debt, your standard of living is going to necessarily drop below that of what it would be if you'd never started the borrow and spend, and certainly would be far less than it was when you were living on borrowed money.

Does that mean your austerity program is a failure?
You're inferring that mass shootings are carried out exclusively by the sort of person who would sell the government his weapon under a buy-back program. (Otherwise there still would have been shootings, even if fewer, with guns bought before the new regulations on sales) Just how realistic do you think that is?
While miasma theory has been falsified, it was based on phenomena which were real and would have been stupid to deny.

If you can 'preserve the phenomena' that cause almost every serious producer of software to use version control, by some mechanism other than version control, with any kind of advantage whatsoever, everyone will be extremely interested because you are in a position to revolutionize the way software is made.

In reality the alternative to version control, particularly with multiple people touching the same files, is an insane mess, which is the reason we stick to these tools. This isn't to say that empirical evidence is not required, rather that the phenomena are so obvious and omnipresent that any idiot can gather them easily.
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Ha- sorry you mean you guys haven't handed Xero over to the American gov yet!? ;)

(I've removed xero from the db)
You don't think the Magratheans build their planets by hand, do you?
There's a huge number of possible ways to offer help to people. A million things can be done, but what everyone does is pretending the problem doesn't exist.
You could probably start with a simple filter. Blacklist certain words and websites for a start. If the cruft is truly repetitive, it shouldn't be particularly difficult to filter it out.
I'd wonder how many films Depardieu got famous for haven't benefited any tax money from public financing. And how many would have been possible at all without it.
You should be a bit clearer about what you mean. There's a big difference between advocating that the government ignore the Constitution, and advocating a constitutional amendment. Your last sentence hints at the latter, which is hopefully your position, but "obsession with the Constitution" would by definition include the willingness to amend it, since the amendment process is itself contained in the Constitution.
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Mobile malware predicted to get worse, not better in 2013
"If you're a user of Google's mobile operating system Android and concerned about your smartphone's security, expect to worry more in the coming months."
You're avoiding discussing action by discussing reaction.

Of course grabbing a knife is not good, but that if all his bizzare reactions are due to kinds of nonsense?
That's not cool.
Consider you have a business selling widgets for $.90. They cost you $1.00. You receive a government subsidy of $.20, meaning you make a profit of $.10 per widget.

Government austerity begins, and your subsidy gets cut off. You are now losing $.10 per widget, so you close your business. The GDP drops $1.00.

Is this austerity a failure? Or was the prosperity resulting from that subsidy a false prosperity?
Is "Hacker News" a good place for the links to "economist.com"?
Let's discuss the situation of Venezuela here also.
During his lifetime he paid almost 150 million euros in taxes, so more than most of us will ever pay - so I think he can go wherever he pleases. And yes, even as a completely non-rich person, I think that the French 75% tax is absurd by every possible measure.
The OP considers versioning files but does not address collaborative sharing, branching, merging, etc at all. Dropbox and the other alternatives suggested in the post do not simply offer anything for merging or dealing with conflicts (or do they? what about versioning filesystems?).

When working alone on a fairly straightforward, linear project, you might actually get away using Dropbox. Try to work in a team of any substantial size and there will be trouble.
It's an issue of having more data / insight into your codebase.

Ideally your software has a fitness function that it must pass or which it is compared with other iterations of your software. With each change made to the software it ideally becomes more fit, however we know that some changes cause bugs, reduce fitness, etc.

Source control allows regular human beings to revert to an earlier more fit stage and progress from there.

If it were possible to write a correct version of a program on the first try and never would the fitness function change then there would be no use in source control.

Frequently small programs will be created with out source control. Like a script to print the numbers 1 to 100, Fizzbuzz, etc. These kinds of software generally don't benefit from source control and thus it is not used. Software of simple complexity usually can be written correctly in a few iterations.

When working with multiple programmers the primary added benefit is file syncing and visibility into who made what change so it can be inquired as to the purpose/impact of the change.

In short if someone isn't using source control tell them that the prototype they showed you last week was perfect for a new client, you need what was built last week in the next 15 minutes to demo for a client, but the menu color should be blue instead of red.

OT:
I've been trying to figure out a way to auto-create commits everytime a file is saved, then quickly quash those commits into a single new commit when substantial changes have been made. Anyone know of a readymade solution?
You're right, distributing them with wild abandon is working perfectly.

As you were.
The Linux kernel is a public example of a LARGE software project being maintained for a long time (Several years) without any source control, then migrating to BitKeeper, and seeing a large increase in development rate as a result of this.

BitKeeper pressrelease on the subject:
http://www.bitkeeper.com/press/2004-03-17.html

Also the discussion and article at LWN as the kernel moves _away_ from BitKeeper may be interesting:
https://lwn.net/Articles/130746/

If you look at fex. ChangeLogs for the Linux kernel before and after, and also, after the git change, you can see the rate of development increasing quite a lot with the assistance of proper tooling.
The Internet Archive is trying to raise funds to buy 3 petabytes of storage
Sounds like Foursquare?
You don't answer my point - which is that the high taxes helped him get rich in the first place.
That was a really interesting article. I've been praised for my knowledge but was always a slacker in school. It seems that praising effort has a great impact on motivation.
Guns are tools that kill. They have no other purpose. How anyone can defend the concept of gun ownership in a civilised society is genuinely beyond me.
Quintus - An Easy, Fun HTML5 Game Engine For Mobile, Desktop and Beyond
If there are more roadblocks to the process of acquiring an assault rifle, wouldn't it be worth it even if it saved a single life?

How can we know if it would save even a single life? How would we even know if it was worth it?

You attempt to simplify far too much. In a country of 300 million, can you say with certainty it would not (for example) cost even a single life?
Sorry typo. 7M hits per day. It was tested with 250 concurrent users, and page load times consistently stayed below 300ms (measured end-to-end).

Andrew is right, we set up three different apps and so each is free.
There's an Israeli saying that encapsulates this effect exactly (if somewhat abrasively): "Whoever asks, is stupid for a moment; whoever doesn't ask, stays stupid forever."
If you're on OSX, my fork of homebrew has some patches to make threading et al work.

https://github.com/richo/homebrew/blob/master/Library/Formul...
Perhaps we should also contemplate how much return on investment would have France seen on the public money had Depardieu not starred in those films.
If you combine average people with lots of guns and then say 'people are the problem, not guns', you're missing out on an important fact.

People are not a constant. They're not #defines, they may be sane today, insane tomorrow and sane the day after that.

They are impulsive, prone to error and there are a thousand circumstances in life where otherwise perfectly normal people do things that we later label insane.

Temporary insanity is a plea that is heard sometimes in the courts. The basic idea is that during the act the person was insane but is now sane.

This is usually to either get a reduced sentence or none at all. The concept hinges on the fact that we are prone to mood swings, sometimes extreme ones. And that in a fit of anger or worse than that someone can do things that they would normally not do.

And that's the sane people, claiming that. Imagine those that are not 100%. So if you mix a large number of guns with a large number of people without much training, oversight, discipline or checks you're asking for trouble. Some of them are bound to be unstable, and even they don't know about it, yet. But you'll read about it in the paper when they do find out.

The 'right to carry arms' is a card played by people that are afraid they will no longer be a allowed to play with their toys, and cynically used by politicians to get them to vote against their own best interests.

There is no way that an armed revolution will be initiated by them, or if it were initiated would be won by those with their guns. Even a large number of them vs the military is a foregone conclusion. If that were the case it should have happened when that was still possible. Now it's just a relic, a symbol of a nation born from violence unable to let go of its past. The only way to win a conflict like that is to get the military to side with you, or to fracture it to an extent that the outcome is no longer a certainty.

And every year a hundred or so (or even a few thousand if you count the injured) people will die because of this stupidity.

In incidents of 1 or 2, or 28.

In a civilized country individuals do not need guns, should not need guns and should not have guns. If you do insist on that then you should also take responsibility for every time an insane person managed to get hold of one (note that the kid that did this didn't use his own guns but the guns legally owned by his mother, now murdered with her own weapon).

edit: this thread has already been flagged off the homepage.
That's what me too have observed. In the application forms they have a special option to choose if u have a US visa
So you see that even when you had no idea of what was version control you invented a rudimentary form of it?

That's the thing, that is so basic people invent it if they don't have it.

I did similar things, though not on an Amstrad ;)
So true. Most of the democracies/republics in human history were destroyed by power concentration in the hands of a few.
via: http://www.functionn.in/2012/12/quintus-easy-to-learn-fun-to...

The front-page of Quintus contains a simple demo written in approx. 60 lines of JavaScript code which implements a simple Super Mario-like game which you can test for yourself. You can play around with the code and check out the changes you make by yourself.

Documentation is not yet up to scratch, but it looks like a promising game engine.

Check out www.functionn.in for more web resources to keep you functionn.in'.
Isn't this more of a consequence of the US not changing their money for a very long time.

I remember as a kid in Italy that the smallest bill wash 1000 ITL (about 50 eurocents) and now the smallest bill is 5 euros, and that is less than the inflation over the 12 years we've had the euro.

So by that logic, bank robberies have become more profitable here as of late.
When a country is still spending more money than it earnes, can we call it "austerity"? I mean, if you have a salary of $100000, even if spend only $130000 instead of the usual $160000 you are still living above your means.
I don't think that gives the French goverment the right to tax the 75% of his income
If customers don't care (and I think you're right), why ALL manufacturers spend so much money to make custom UI, especially as that prevent quicker system update (or any update at all sometimes) ?
I think it's all about easy access.

All shooters of shooting incidents I can think of had easy access to guns. The only exception is Breivik. But he was planning his attacks for years.
I've abused it in the past when an application depended on a library that was not installed under the system path.

I'd agree with the people who warn against using it when not absolutely necessary.
Don't they say the analogy between a person's and a government's debt doesn't work ?
> Anyone who thinks they can overthrow the USA government from inside is delusional, before there is even 1000 people organized all forms of communication would be shout down; even internet.

"Overthrowing the government" makes it sound like an offensive operation, which is indeed fairly impractical. However, the real value of a large armed population is that it makes martial law and military occupation extremely difficult. It's a defensive advantage against an oppressive government. Look at the difficulty the US military has faced in its attempts to occupy Iraq, with a much smaller, poorer, and less sophisticated armed population. If the US government wanted to simply commit genocide against its population, sure, it could use chemical or nuclear weapons with little chance of civilian resistance, but there's not a huge advantage for even the most insane oppressive regime to do that.

> Then change the constitution and proclaim nobody should have guns except the police/military and some special cases (some bodyguards, bank guards).

Constitution or not, this is a deeply disturbing recommendation for many reasons, the most obvious of which is the fact that many people use guns for subsistence or income supplementation.
"While miasma theory has been falsified, it was based on phenomena which were real and would have been stupid to deny."

Exactly!

Miasma theory is incorrect, but it doesn't mean you can stand around sick people and won't get sick.

"ather that the phenomena are so obvious and omnipresent that any idiot can gather them easily."

Thank you.
That's a lovely notion, but time and time again, harm minimisation has been the only successful method to deal with issues like this (eg needle exchanges for IV drug users, allowing abortion to prevent women dying awful deaths from botched backyard attempts).

I'm happy for you to start a worldwide movement to end violence and abolish mental illness, but until then, I would rather that nobody has the ability to murder large numbers of people when they feel like it.

And seriously, how many people can successfully weaponise anthrax?
Discussing whether or not technology (guns, in this case) can be considered morally neutral? Whether freedom to own and operate any technology of your choice is a fundamental right? What kind of hacker isn't interested in those questions?
The point needs to be made that 3D printing as "StarTrek replicator" is going to take many many decades. The real big deal is that 3D printing is leading the acceleration of digital manufacturing methods in general (CNC milling, etc.). 3DP is just a good gateway drug for a far larger movement that's beginning to take shape in non-SciFi ways.
I'm not a big proponent of guns as home defense, I was just listing the arguments as you asked for them.

As for shotguns, while I'm partial to breech loaders, I imagine pump-loaders would be nice when bird hunting- you have literally seconds to take your shots. 12 gauge is popular for hunting, particularly when using a shotgun as a poor man's deer rifle (buckshot or slugs). Anyway, don't worry about shotguns so much. They aren't used much in crime, and I gather they are pretty survivable at all but very close range.

If you want to save lives, forget shotguns, forget rifles, forget even assault rifles- while mass shootings are big news, from a pure numbers point of view handguns are the biggest nail to pound down. More people in rural California in 2010 were killed with handguns than the count for the Connecticut shooting:

http://oag.ca.gov/sites/all/files/pdfs/publications/Firearms...

It's actually quite an interesting document if we're comparing types of firearms.
One of the latest releases was iTunes 11, and I'd say pretty good things are going on in the heads of Apple devs.
My perspective is different since I come from a country with a different culture. Here in Australia there is essentially zero gun ownership by private citizens. We also had a gun buyback (1996) and changes in legislation after the Port Arthur massacre[1]. Basically, I would feel really nervous just being in the same room as a gun.

So from my perspective statements such as 'Guns are a tool' just don't wash. They are the only tool that comes to mind that are specifically designed to kill humans. There is no other use (besides sport shooting) that I can think of for a handgun. The same goes for high powered fully automatic military style rifles. Zero use for hunting an animal, perfectly tailored for hunting humans. That's disturbing to me, and I wouldn't want to live in a society that vehemently fights for the right to bear these arms.

Of course it is better to fix the root cause (mental illness, lack of empathy, education etc). Fighting the root is really hard and will take America generations of effort. Removing semi and full auto weapons can be done over night (the actual effectiveness could be argued ad nauseam, but at least the laws could be in place and some claw back of the 300 million odd weapons could begin).

Psychos would still rampage, but there's a lot less damage you can do if you only have a knife, or you have to reload after each shot.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Australia#The_P...

PS: I'd be happy to be corrected, but from the little I know about the issue, the meaning of 'right to bear arms' in the US constitution has been twisted away from the original intent of organised and well disciplined militias, to: hey look ma I bought a M16 from Walmart today hur hur
this looks pretty great... I have been wanted to dabble in html5 games - might take Quintus it for a spin!
F# transfers a few interesting ideas from OCaml and has some language-constructs I really like.

But when it comes to using F# in the past, I always ended up spending too much time assisting the language in inferring my types.

It became a chore to write properly generic code and reusable functions in F#. Maybe I didn't follow some convention or did things in an un-idiomatic fashion. I don't know. But it always ended up more work than I assumed it would be.

These days, if I need my functional kick, I'll go to clojure. And clojure seems to have a much more healthy ecosystem and third party support.

As much as I like F#, especially as a .NET developer, I'm sorry, but I just don't find myself using it very much.
If the government can print money, then yes, it is different, but only in that the government can keep printing more money rather than needing to convince lenders to loan it more.

It can't change the fact that if you live beyond your means long enough, you run out of means one way or another.
De-stressing Santa
I disagree, in that I think that use of rich visuals can be really captivating; but your way can work too.

One thing that can be really effective is to use blank, black slides when you want the audience back. It's amazing how completely that switches everyone's attention back to the speaker.
Not specifically re Instagram but in general -- yep -- I have seen certain buyers walk from acquisition discussions when a process opened up. It's a tricky process, and the devil's in the details.
In my opinion, no guns definitely will mean gun-related criminal cases will be lesser, but this doesn't make it safer to stay. Take Malaysia for example, a country that I am quite familiar with. In Malaysia, guns are banned, however, machet-wielding robbers and windshield-crashing bad guys abound. Violence is so common that newer houses are built gated-and-guarded (G&G) where locals literally live in cages in certain areas in central and south. Those who are interested about this and would like to see real-life examples could search YouTube for 'robbery in Malaysia'. The OP takes the relatively low crime-rate of UK to 'prove' no gun is a good choice. My opinion would be it holds true so long the overall crime rate isn't high. When the crime rate shoots up and more crazy/violent people go around the neighborhood, I would bet having fire-arms would be a good idea.
the demo looks pretty awesome - esp. the no. of line of code vs the result produced. Tinkering with it myself. Promising.
But that subsidy must come from somewhere. For every $.20 the widget company gets, some other company is taxed $.20

And GDP is a joke. If I buy your laptop for $1 bln, and you buy it back from me for $1 bln, nothing will change for us, but it will look very good on the GDP.