skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the code example. I've tracked down where Firefox puts this, and I've realised that the original piece of work will carry on working when saved locally. Quite interesting...
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4959314

Any limitation you can think of, lawyers are going to bring to your employment contract, EULA or copyright provision.

Because for them it never makes sense not to.

So, EULAs, frivolous copyright provisions and employment contracts should be outlawed or severely limited. As in: there should be a white list of what you can put there.
Think about it from first principles. What is money? Money is nothing more than a proxy for goods and services. So, how much money do you need in an economy? Well if money is a proxy for goods and services, it is no good for the supply of money to stay fixed while the amount of goods and services expands. Indeed, the money supply has to not only expand with the present volume of goods and services, but also with peoples' willingness to enter into contracts to trade goods and services over some future time frame (i.e. loans).

So the money supply must generally keep growing in a growing economy. How should that be effectuated? For a long time, we tied expansion of the money supply into how quickly we could mine gold and put it into vaults. Given the exponential growth of the economy, and the distinctly non-exponential nature of gold production, it's obvious that wasn't going to work for long. So we have what we have now, with a central bank controlling the money supply.

That's the justification for the existing system. Are there alternative mechanisms that don't involve someone with their hands on the big money supply dial? Maybe, but I haven't seen any convincing ones yet.
I mean, it's now considered normal (and even a human right by some) to take 2-3 weeks vacation every year.

Feudal peasants didn't work for months at a time each year.
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They are about to launch a video-on-demand service in the nordic countries, but with 12 months commitment and 3 months notice, so they seem quite capable of screwing up themselves.
There are huge consequences to the common denominator in most transactions going up and down, but you don't dodge them by not having a central bank.

There are economists out there who hate the idea of having a central bank control everything--they tend to argue for rule-targeting central banks. Examples include the inflation+unemployment target (the Taylor rule) or rules based on the circulating quantity of money (NGDP targeting). So some people think there are ways to have a currency that is simultaneously economically good and manipulation-proof.
"support a national intelligence agency monitoring the non-violent"

What's wrong with "monitoring"? It sounds bad, but from the article, it seems like they are just keeping their eyes on a potential problem. Given that OWS was a public protest movement, monitoring it is hardly an unreasonable search.

So, does this article offer new evidence that some unreasonable searches, seizures, or harassment took place? If not, then I don't see what it has to offer.

And no, I don't care whether they "monitor" the ELF, or the Tea Party, or the libertarian party rallies, or Ron Paul, or Richard Stallman; except to the extent it wastes the FBI's time (which we all pay for).
> You realize in the US 30% of the population is obese and almost 10% of us have diabetes, right?

Those people are probably going to die at 60-70 y/o anyway.

And besides, that's self-inflicted. Once people realize that it's preventing them from reaching their full lifespan, they'll change if they want to. And if they don't, well, I'm not gonna complain if I get better retirement benefits as a result.

> Right, because sitting at a desk for forty years is the key to good health.

Once again, this is largely self-inflicted. You can stay relatively healthy while working a desk job. Stop buying junk food and get a gym membership. Try getting up and walking a bit during your workday - take a stroll outside during lunch. You can certainly be healthier than people were 50 years ago working at a car factory.

> And again, there's no reason to believe this is true.

There's no reason to believe it isn't true. Society has just accepted that people have to stop working at 65. Why not try increasing the retirement age gradually and see what happens? People don't suddenly lose the ability to work when they turn 65.
Actually the only answer to feature creep regardless of project size is "we'll get back to you with a new quote". Simply because you dont know how much effort is involved on the spot.

People who buy things from you know how to screw things out of you as a rule and this is a well known tactic usually disguised as ignorance.
I'm flattered. And thankful to have my essay be voted to #3 on Hacker News.

I'm speaking at SXSW 2013 about "the best interface is not interface." This is an evolving idea, and I hope to have some gaps filled by the time I speak in March. So thank you all for your feedback.

I'm collecting more examples at nointerface.tumblr.com. It's meant to be an inspiration site for people interested in this movement. It's an idea Tumblr. And starting mid-January, I'm hoping to have two new posts a week, but that's mostly dependent on finding great examples. So, please tweet any to @goldenkrishna...Il give credit, of course.
While you wait for confirmation that studying and practicing increases your changes of becoming Great at what you do, I'm just gonna go practice, expecting to race way ahead of you. I don't need an academic study to confirm the obvious: practice makes perfect.

If all survivors did A and none did not do A, then A is likely to be at least a precondition. But more than that: the number of people that choose to spend time deliberately studying and practicing is already so small that there is room for them all to be Great. I am convinced that nearly every single person that deliberately studies and practices to become better at what he does will become Great at what he does, because 'Great' is a relative concept and most people are easily contented.
I recommend Sky+ to you.
Silencing the Science on Gun Research
"trade-off between civil liberty and security"

What specific civil liberties were being violated, that were not known before these documents were revealed by the FOIA request? I don't even really see what the trade-off is here.
Kind of puts the 'make better content and people will pay for it' argument to bed.
That is an impression of legal departments informed by what tends to be poor staffing of such departments and/or poor management scapegoating the legal department.

I used to have a very poor opinion of legal departments until I had the opportunity to work with legal departments staffed seemingly exclusively with people who were at least as sharp as the folks in engineering. Turns out, good legal departments are as interested in solving problems as good engineering departments.
Hum I guess that the easiest way is to use an electrolytic cell, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolytic_cell and put graphite (the black thing inside your pencile) to both electrodes... Put an acid solution water and ammoniac will be fine...

I am trying right now... The water is getting less limpid and gasses (I guess O2 and H2) are coming out. I am using a 9 Volts battery.
WiFi your Raspberry Pi
Did the FBI and DOJ jail MLK?
When I was consulting as a contract cto for a startup they were pushing to hire a us consultancy that was outsourcing to China. So I had the meeting with the rep from the consultancy. Being a technical person that codes I wanted to be able to work directly with the developers. The sales weasel from this firm told me with a straight face that we could not do that for our own protection. Then said weasel proceeded to describe a waterfall dev process and told me that they were a agile shop.

I strongly recommended to this firm not to hire them and had a lot of long frustrating conversations about why. The kicker was that the snake oil salesman was trying to get the sale by offering a moneyback guarantee. The price he was too low and too good to be true. In the end I fired this customer.

At the end of the day you need to know enough to know what is happening. If you are in a startup you need to be able to communicate your vision to your developers. And if you pay peanuts you get monkeys.
There are an infinite number of ways of solving the same problem. I have dozens of tools with which I can solve most of my problems; and I can choose to do it in many ways. Sure, there are only so many ways you can write binary search, in a given language. But that doesn't mean there is only one way to solve an actual problem.

For example, if your problem is looking up elements in a dictionary (key-value) structure, there are many ways to do it. A hash table? Binary tree? B-tree? Sorted array? Trie? Patricia trie? Linear search in a linked list? Linear search in an array? Are the arrays fixed sized, or variable sized vectors? All of these solutions may be correct, depending on other factors, and all of them have many variants.

And that, of course, assumes that you know that a dictionary structure is what you need. Maybe your problem actually would call better for a table with GiST indexes, or a quadree dividing up a two-dimensional space.

Above that level, even if your data structure needs are fairly simple or fairly well determined, there's how you structure and organize your code to minimize the chance of bugs, make it extensible, and make it understandable to future programmers. Most of my work isn't writing fresh code. It's finding and fixing bugs in existing code, and extending it to do new things it was never intended to do. Depending on how well organized it is, and how expressive the code is of its intent, that job can be much more difficult or much easier.

That's where a lot of the creativity comes in. Finding the write way to structure and express your code to fit the problem at hand. Writing code that will be adaptable to the future, easy to extend without introducing new bugs, easy to fix bugs in, but without including a lot of extra machinery for features that you will never need. It is easy to write code that does a single task, but will be fragile if someone ever tries to extend it to do something else. It is also easy to spend all of your time writing AbstractFactoryIteratorFunctionFactoryAbastractGenerators which are infinitely modular and extensible but don't actually solve any problems.

Great code is code which solves a real problem, and can be used tomorrow to solve five more problems that you didn't even know about today, but which doesn't suffer under the weight of being designed to be extended in ways that you thought might be useful later, but wind up never being so. And writing such software, and modifying in those five ways, takes a substantial amount of creativity.
Will a jury of your peers convict you for one of these things that supposedly everyone is violating?
Everyone. Just ping who you want. Force yourself in. There are no rules.
Gnome Ubuntu Remix with Firefox, and no sound anyway. Same with Opera. Epiphany browser (the 'official' Gnome web browser) does play the sound. This is probably a Linux thing, not your app.

Where are you going with this? Just plain and simple for actual 'stream of consciousness' writing or the full skeuomorphic invocation of the manual typewriter, like

http://www.masswerk.at/google60/

did for the card punch? Either is fine by me!
Congratulations, you have the Orwellian language down cold. Things done in other countries are a threat to "national security", if I as a citizen, taxpayer and voter want to go to a park and protest the TARP taxpayer bank bailouts, I'm a potential "threat to civil order".

Also thanks for telling us all the FBI does is sit by and meekly "monitor" groups that "might present some kind of threat to civil order". After Nixon had a bunch of burglars break into the Democratic parties headquarters at the Watergate hotel as part of a much larger spying operation, his FBI appointee, L. Patrick Gray participated in the coverup by destroying documents given to him by John Dean and Ehrlichman - as well as working to dampen the entire Watergate investigation within the FBI. You can't blame a subordinate - the head of the FBI took an active role in secretly sabotaging efforts of the Democratic party.

We don't even have to go into civil rights and peace groups which were part of the Democratic party milieu. The FBI took an active role in this. Hoover sent a memo in 1967 "The purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, distrupt, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate-type organizations". What were the "targets" listen in the memo? Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and SNCC, which organized college student protests against segregation.

I am acquainted with a programmer who worked at Columbia University until he retired recently. In the 1960s he went to Bard College and became involved in the opposition to the war in Vietnam. He also worked as a programmer, and I believe a database administrator at that time for various corporations. The FBI secretly sent letters "misaddressed" to his bosses, trying to defame him and get him fired. This was found out in a lawsuit later.

The court, documentary etc. evidence of FBI abuse is enormous. In fact, the surest way of getting flagged by the FBI - is to attack the FBI. This post is certainly being flagged by the FBI, what I'm typing right now. People criticizing the FBI was one of the top things flagged by the FBI from the 1950s to the 1970s, and why should anything have changed?

Of course the above posted who describes himself as a "libertarian" and people like him seem fine with this, and call this active interference by a political police as "monitoring".
> I think that any funny clauses in the contracts should be abolished and the worker/employer relations should only be regulated by law.

That tends to work well in a one-size-fits-all well established world, but tends to work particularly poorly in new and emerging industries.
Open Source spacecraft
While looking cool, it seems to me like this catches a pedestrian's attention more than the one of the drivers. If pedestrians are distracted from traffic right before crossing, this would make crosswalks less safe.

It should be more useful (but more expensive) to lighten up the actual crosswalk signs on the road as soon as pedestrians are approaching.
Exactly - every week some douche is writing shit all over the place. Unless they talk about the product this is just pointless information people have to know.
The ceiling doesn't need to be equal for them all to be in the top 0.1% called 'Great'.
Err, THQ is going bankrupt, not HI.
Entirely anecdotal, but I was told that there are some commercial patents regarding air circulation (keeping a stable chamber is absolutely necessary for high-resolution) that are blocking some of the open projects as well.
If the original author is going down that road, how about 'hiding' the counts and then a mouse hover brings them up? Minimal working area but accoutrements a mouse gesture away.
Over 20 years ago I was standing in line at a bookstore (younger ones might not have heard of these things we used to have called bookstores back in the old days) and spotted an anti-lending clause in the copyright page of a book I was about to buy. I exited the line and returned the book to the shelf.

I don't always check for these anti-lending clauses but sometimes I do. In my opinion it's not legally enforceable because it violates first sale doctrine. But I don't like to support corporations whose lawyers have this attitude, so it always generates a 'no-sale'. They are not new clauses in 2013, but they seemed pretty new when I first saw them and I don't think they existed in books 30 years ago as opposed to 20.

I have similar feelings about the non-transferability of DRM digital books, albums and mobile apps. On those they make the argument that since the product is intangible there is no sale and it is not sold but a licensing fee is being charged for access to a bitstream, an access license which can be revoked at will by the licensor and without recourse by the licensee. Since these products are not being sold I am not sure the words books or albums really apply, they are more bitstream consumption allocation contracts. Not anything I am all that interesting in licensing, I'd rather buy real albums and books, and I do.
Not sure what "settings" have to do with this. The point being made in the post is that if trivial, "expected" features are missing, users wont even bother to look further.
Without ever using those terms, this article was a great commentary on the difference between "smart money" and "dumb money." Not to say that the investors snapping up YC companies at big valuations were necessarily dumb; but that the author optimized his fundraising for the smartest of the smart. A good way to position your company for long-term growth.
I totally agree with everything you wrote, but since it is going to be a while yet before the industry learns any of these lessons...

You can pretty easily turn any set of gloves into touch-capable gloves using a small amount of conductive thread and sewing it through the pad area on the primary finger you use for touch.
"Gnome is the new GNU" is an analogy, not a mathematical formula.
I really love AGOT, and the only reason that I'm pirating it is because it's basically the only way to view it in my country. I'd love to watch it on the television the same day it is released in the US, but that's not gonna happen. Other countries are always later.

The second reason is that torrents just work really good and are very fast.
Demonstrably untrue and profoundly disturbed.
"Creating a file"

This is not a problem.

"You are both missing the plethora of articles about how every breaks at least 3 federal laws a day (unknowingly)."

Citation needed.

However, it's a general problem anyway. I agree that laws should be simpler, fewer in number, and more evenly enforced. But I don't see what this has to do with the article in question, which doesn't offer much.
Settings on a microwave are, I think, a terrible example. Most microwaves I've used are horribly over-encumbered.

I expect two dials on any microwave I use: Time, Power. Maybe a control to set the time, if it has a clock.

I don't disagree with your general point about tools being able to be reprogrammed, though. One of the reasons I loved Autocad as a tool is the Lisp interpreter that allows you to script and extend it. I think that's a perfect example of a professional, mainstream tool with a good API that non-programmers find useful (if only to run scripts they find).
I hope there are better arguments for the deflationary nature of Bitcoin than this article.

The author uses the utterly senseless definition of deflation as a change in the total money supply, instead of per capita money supply. If Bitcoin becomes more popular, its asset value increases because demand for it has increased, not due to "political numéraires" (whatever those are). Increasing the population but keeping the money supply fixed is fundamentally deflationary, and Bitcoin's "population" has the potential for large growth.

Second, it's astonishing that the author would approvingly quote a passage like this:

Deflation rewards the prudent saver and punishes the profligate borrower. The way a society, like an individual, becomes wealthy is by producing more than it consumes. In other words, by saving, not borrowing.

This is naive bullionism taken to a whole new level of insanity, with physical gold replaced by numbers in a file. Saving is equated with producing, as if putting my bitcoin wallet on a thumb drive and stuffing it under my mattress starts up a factory. Entirely absent from this morality play is the prudent investor, who borrows or spends out of savings to buy capital goods with the hope of increasing production, and is punished.
Many judges will not allow mention of jury nullification[1] in court. The jury is instructed at as long as you broke the law, they must find you in violation.

There's also the fact that you went through a trial that counts against you, even if it shouldn't count against you. Even being accused of a crime is a crime in and of itself in the court of public opinion. Being accused of paedophilia is an extreme example of this (i.e. doesn't matter if you are or not, the claim makes you 'tainted' and people will always wonder).

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
While this case is particularly egregious, you are still accepting data from an untrusted remote client.
Deflation is a disaster for anyone with debts as the value of them grows rather than being inflated away. So while it may be OK in the bit coin world (as I don't believe there are any significant bit coin denominated debts) deflation would cause massive economic contraction in the real world as debts would grow reducing spending and there is reason to believe it would not converge rapidly to an equilibrium (certainly not one that people would like).

http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs
http://www.complexity.org.au/ci/vol06/keen/keen.html
Higher resolution requires better materials - but most additive 3D printing has a max resolution of a few fractions of millimeters (hundreds of microns). A good record has a groove resolution on the order of single micron units - if not smaller. That's actually quite a ways to go. Even conceptually, it's not easy to deposit and solidify something with single micron precision without a well-regulated chamber, a very precise (and probably slow) nozzle. Even the expensive commercial units still have only sub-mm resolution.
Ozone Widget Framework developed by the NSA
Ozone Widget Framework developed by the NSA finally released
Another "good reason" for piracy is being able to participate in the discussion going on in the US when its actually hapenning, instead of whenever the show appears on the rest of the world.
I hear you. While living at my prior location, I was always integrating plausible deniability into my business plans and their initial implementations, besides keeping my work super secret. Now I don't worry about the secrecy, and feel more relaxed about deniability. (Not that I've been doing anything seriously since I moved here --- I like my team, and I would like to accomplish big things with them.)
For those interested, Debian is planning on releasing a Hurd variant just like they did with kFreeBSD.
http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/index
Maybe this is naive, but what's wrong with just putting `UserMailer.welcome_email(user).deliver` in the controller, right after the user is created? In my mind, delegating an email to be sent should be a job for the controller.

IIRC, the Rails ideology says that "Models should not know about any part of the application except for their own datastore." Even though the :after_create hook is the "Rails way", doesn't this violate their own practices?