skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought so too until I read the last 3 paragraphs. "Those numbers check out" is totally valid. But concluding with the relevance of the measure of gun harm is an observation about reality, not Statistics, which is debatable, but has no relevance to what was previously mentioned.

We haven't yet defined the goals. Unless "Minimum amount of gun-related deaths" is the goal (clearly, it isn't that simple in this country), in which case his highlighted claim is definitely false - we don't know much about effective metrics. Are the psychological effects of a mass shooting similar to a snowball effect? Maybe in the long run? There's a lot more to research before saying 'insignificant', especially if you don't describe the model.

One more thought: could you define 'mass shooting'? Usually the media is responsible for that definition, whereas a random murder isn't called that.
No, there are a lot of shortcuts and beautiful one-liners in Python. However, Pythonic code always focuses on being the simplest and cleanest as opposed to being the shortest. I suspect it's the author's way of imposing some good python coding standards at the same time.
I don't buy this explanation over the alternatives. It's logically sound but is based on the assumption that spree shooters do so in large part to gain infamy and notoriety.

Given what we know of spree shooters around the world and in the US, they strike me as predominantly desperate, mentally ill people. We had the Columbine shooters who seemed to be more vengeful than fame-seeking. We had the Aurora shooter who didn't do any grandstanding when apprehended, or in fact talk to the media at all. And of course, we had the Newtown shooter who didn't leave behind any notes, manifestos, or in fact any evidence that he wanted to be infamous (even if posthumously).

These don't strike me as people who are driven by the ensuing media coverage.

Don't get me wrong - I've been appalled by the news media surrounding the Newtown shooting, particularly CNN's journalistically abhorrent fingering of an innocent individual, but I don't think the coverage is really the crux of it, and I don't think taking it away will stop them.
This covers a good part of it I think:

http://silicongenesis.stanford.edu/transcripts/hailey.htm
You too! :)
It is fixed in WP8 with a new feature called fast app resume. Apps have to opt into it, but it does make the experience much better.
So... What's the app? We need to support or fellow HNers.
Thought for a second that somebody had invented a Python library with functions that work identically with their PHP counterparts. Like php.js [1].

Turns out it's much more than that. Rather than handing out ready-made functions to make Python behave like PHP, this site actually teaches you how to write Python like a real Pythonista. For example, str[2:5] instead of substr(str, 2, 3). Well done!

[1] http://phpjs.org/
I think you're right and wrong.

Coming up with awesome new SDR waveforms is something someone who is already funded can do, or something someone can do for fun (I'll probably enter). In this contest, the cost to enter is really low, and you'll get radio hackers who are interested in the problem. DARPA wins if it gets a few marginal people interested in the problem, not just if they come up with a new production waveform.

Contests work well if they're easy to enter or if winning brings you notoriety beyond the prize. Otherwise, you'd have to set an absurdly high prize to make it a high enough expectation to facilitate raising money for each of the teams, enough to have real competition -- like offering $1t for 51% of Osama Bin Laden in 2001, or $20t for a successful Mars colony for 100 users, etc.
How many AWS outages has Netflix survived?
Tell HN//Pg: The alternate red and green is annoying
As a user of this community, and as a designer, I would with all due respect like to point out that the alternate red and green colors are annoying, if not provide a poor user-experience. When I first logged in today, at first I thought the red ones are something important, only after a few minutes did I discover that it was actually simply alternating. It would be great if you could use the red color for the top-stories alone, for example the ones that have got >200 points or so. Just a small feedback :)
me.country = "HELL";
I wish everyone hated PHP. Then one one would write it.
You forgot to mention one thing..it will be slower than a regular software, but imagine this.

To be able to get 1000 users to crack password, you need to install a software on 1000 computers.

With your javascript breaker, you can load it in frame on your webpage, and have thousands of your users cracking it.
The conclusion about the relevance of the measure of gun harm seems to me the "mass shootings in 1 year does not necessarily signal a significant change from the past 30 years" part. It means that discussions along the line of "Why the change?", or "How can we go back to the way it was before?" are premature, though it does not say anything at all about discussions along the line of "How do we reduce mass shootings?".

Mother Jones probably did a pretty decent job of defining 'mass shooting', I assume they errored on the side of inclusion (I only recall 2 this year). The authors analysis seems to make it pretty clear it is only considering that definition.

I'm really not reading this as an attack on discussions of gun violence in general, as it seems you are.
Did you just compare node.js to assembly? :)
You'd get weird mixture model type systems. There are certain subclasses: school-based vs non-school-based. You'd have to control for this since school-based shootings are highly temporally correlated. But then maybe there's crossover too. Like everything, estimating these things with more complex models is hard to do right, and findings are usually overstated.
I don't hate PHP, so you are wrong.
Why is my rhetoric so offensive, but not your own?

> It's intellectually dishonest and a cheap ploy to avoid saying "well, let them die".

Claiming libertarians are against welfare because they secretly enjoy watching poor people die is intellectually dishonest. If you can't see the irony in this..
I haven't tried this yet, but the promise is fantastic! Can't wait to download the videos I've bookmarked so I can watch them through XBMC.
This seems like a non-sequitur. The gp's criticism was that the article doesn't cite any evidence for the model, which he does.

Besides, he doesn't "fudge" V. He shows evidence: that violent crime decreased over the relevant period and argues that less violent crime implies lower average tendency to violence (V).
I have the receipt in hand, and at the very top it says "Microsoft Store." I'd say my purchase was in fact from MS.
It took me no time at all to recognize the intent, I thought it was cute.
Now do Netflix! ;)
flame away :)
In the immoral words of Paul Graham, "will you two please stop?" It's Christmas.
SAMS, Cue, Cybex, Wrox: the doorstop publishers!
Middle ground on what? Libertarians love charity. You should give until it hurts. I just don't believe in forcing you to give, and I don't think you should force me to give. Maybe I'm stuck in "treat others the way you want to be treated" mode. Do you have a better principle? How much welfare is enough? What's the objective? How is it measured?

Edit: I don't mean to sound like I'm attacking you, just genuinely curious about your first principles.
I think a better methodology would be using linear time clusters and measuring the possible impact of the Werther Effect.

Look at the regional areas where the news may not have spread out.

Look at the attempts that were stopped and see if they clustered. The stopped attempts are probably a better indicator as people, after hearing the news, are naturally more alert to the indicators that something may happen.

The other problem with the data is that there is no way, from looking at the graph, if an event happening in December affected an event happening in January, thus delimiting by years is arbitrary.
I'm surprised there are no Zilog (Z80) chips in this collection. They were an 8080 clone, massively popular, with a very useful set of extended instructions including block copies and an extended register set.
Yet, this has happened before. "NoSQL Doesn’t Mean No SQL Injection"[1] You also need to worry about escaping $ operators in your query documents[2].

[1]: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/09/22/security-lessons-learned...

[2]: http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/faq/developers/#dollar-sign-o...
I don't think they're doing it consciously to become famous, but out of feelings of inadequacy/lack of agency/bitterness/etc., which subconsciously turns into fame-seeking to try to resolve that. But I have no deep psychological insights here; I've thought about the tactical and trauma care side, but treating the incidents as random events works perfectly well for that.

However, pro for your argument, there is some reporting bias -- we hear about school shootings for days, but we rarely hear about suicides, or murder/suicides, which are far more common; even things like the Sikh temple murders went out of the news in a day or two. Schools are just particularly likely to get coverage and stay in the news.

But if ending the media deification of spree killers converts some of them back into simple suicides, that's a win, really. On the other hand, it seems to have channeled them into a local maximum of "pretend like you're playing Call of Duty, without any real skill or training" -- I'd be a lot more afraid of a halfway competent chemist with no tactical experience deciding to go the full McVeigh, vs. trying to play soldier. I'm personally pretty comfortable with a rifle, but if my goal were mass casualties, it'd be bombs or other technology based attacks for sure.
New York is a city in which the very rich enjoy some of the best living in the world because it is the largest and wealthiest city in the United States. The city has enormous areas that are simply terrible to live in, but people like Koch are shielded from it. I understand that Koch, like most rational people, uses tax reduction strategies, so his tax rate is probably less than that of many ordinary people in the city.

I do not think the fact that rich people cluster in cities commends high rates of taxation in cities when so many citizens of them suffer poorer housing, worse schools, worse crime and general higher cost of living in addition to not having the benefits of living in a more spacious, green area.
Ok. So we have computers now, a truly new technology. And thus we will soon collectively decide that writing backwards is better because then we can look at the world above our screen better.

Yes, on second thought this is absolutely comparable to the invention of horseless carriage and makes perfect sense.
The question probably requires a more detailed treatment.

For example, even the distribution of killings by frequency looked poisson, if the number were uniformly increasing year by year, it would look like a trend.
Pretty sure the folks at the MS store that sold you the thing didn't know the WP8 announcement would end support for new features for your device. In fact, I'd bet that very few folks at AT&T or HTC knew. If you expect that level of "every device gets every new feature", you probably will be happier on iOS.
I think in some cases, it would be better to explain why the PHP function was a bad idea to begin with, rather than letting people bring it's mess over to Python. For example, Python doesn't need dumb shit like nl2br() [1].

[1] http://www.php2python.com/wiki/function.nl2br/
They don't put acetaminophen in opiates to poison people, they put it in because it's an effective painkiller and the natural check for abuse makes the powerful opiate more easily available than it otherwise would be.

"Make all cars disable driver-side airbags once you go, say, 15% over the national speed limit."

I'll suggest a better analogy. People have to wear seatbelts/motorcycle helmets. Unfortunately this does kill some people but on the whole it does far more good than harm.
I think this is an awesome idea and I'm willing to test it.

How well does it handle image files?

Is there any icons or logos that I can use and do I get a link or something to make it easy for my site readers to grab the files?

EDIT: I can't log in for some reason and I guess I can't get a password reset?
I've gotten very little junk mail of any kind since opting out via the DMA choice link, but maybe they just haven't found me yet.
You can forge messages from others:

rawSend(JSON.stringify({ _event: "chat", country: "US", name: "Any Guy", message: "expletive deleted" }));
First, we have tons of fiber. Tons.

Second, are coaxial lines really that bad? You do need literally bundles of fiber for backbone activity, but last-mile? DOCSIS 3.0 is 42Mbit/channel, with as many channels as the endpoints can support. Comcast has already offered 305Mbit. We will need fiber last-mile one day, but not nearly any time soon.

I suspect the real limitation is a grab-bag of things like:

- Increasing speeds highlights damaged coax, which would then require repair

- Slowing the growth in speed means they can continue to charge a lot for service that is easy to provide

- The true bottleneck is probably somewhere in the ISP, for example routing infrastructure, which would need to be upgraded
I was thinking more US tests on prisoners [1] not the Nazis.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/02/health/research/02infect.h...
I'd say if you are going to learn about or do any kind of serious science, resist putting labels left and right just because you are tired, on this site and elsewhere. There's nothing wrong with humanities in terms of being able to benefit from applying CS to them.
I want to point out that people should be wary of this recent wave of press surrounding "neural" computing. A lot of this involves trying to emulate biophysical properties of neurons we observe in the brain, but it is not clear how these properties affect function or if they are even necessary for the types of computations we are interested in emulating in silicon.

That being said, memristors are a fascinating piece of technology and we need to make progress on all fronts if neurally-inspired computing is to become a reality. This latest development (capturing the nonlinear properties of sodium and potassium channels in a microelectronic device) is quite interesting, as these properties are crucial for reproducing the spiking behavior of real neurons. All I'm saying is take these results with a grain of salt, there is still a lot of work to do!
Ask HN: Good rails book that does not use TDD
TDD is great and all, but I'm not personally a fan of it. Are there any good alternative books, all the ones I've seen are based on TDD.
It uses Mozilla Persona -- were you able to sign in using your Persona/BrowserID account? (https://login.persona.org/) If you don't already have a Persona account, you should be able to create one using the login dialog itself. If you're still having trouble, let me know.

It fetches all images and inserts them accordingly, so images should be handled appropriately. I haven't figured out a good way to handle video embeds, but I'm looking for a good way to fetch standardized thumbnails in place of videos.
It has enjoyed relative political stability but it's not as safe as you think. My exes father lived there for many years. One night his compound was raided, his guard killed and he and his family were trapped in the house. In the morning the raiders left but he still shudders when he thinks about it.
I find it that people in Business have not embraced the "open" culture of technology and Silicon Valley.
Oh, I didn't realize they did that now. Sorry.
Fremont, CA contains a shopping center I like to call "Furniture Hell." The shops in this center are all zombies, each and every one converted to retailers for imported Chinese furniture. All of them claim to be near-death, going out of business, and yet live on for years. Their banners reach out at you, groaning "SAAAALE."

The most uncanny of the stores, what I like to think of as the Zombie Leader, calls itself the "Furniture Depot," and as you may have guessed is built in the corpse of a Home Depot. The new residents only fill a small part of the cavernous building. The disused portion has all of its aisles removed and its lights turned off, and so it stretches backwards seemingly forever, disappearing into the darkness. Home Depots are huge.
Karateka in the App Store
Fancy a space-invaders t-shirt?
I just found that Intel is about to release a server-version of the Atom, codenamed Centerton, based on a 32nm process. These will be 64-bit processors and support Intel's virtualization extensions.

Next year there will be a 22nm version of Centerton, Avoton, with a 14nm processor following the year after. Centerton, and possibly Avoton, will be out before the first 64-bit ARM chips.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6509/intel-launches-centerton-...

It looks like Intel is taking the Atom's intended market serious enough to extend their tick-tock cadence to it.
Would the benefit of doing it the author's way be that you can check out new versions from git without having to move the python script to /bin every or /usr/local/bin every time you get a new version.
But then they wouldn't look christmassy.
That guy has written more than 40 books according to Wikipedia - quantity over quality, I suppose. I wonder how he justifies having 9 editions for "Let Us C". It's almost as if he is doing solely to be able to force students to buy the new version (as opposed to the used version in the university bookstore).
I think it is a cool idea, I suggest you negotiate with a blog owner and create example files from their blog which potential users could see.

What is your business model with respect to the book after it is created? Is it a 'percentage of sales', 'one time fee' ? Your terms document wasn't very clear :-)

And what is your position on someone using the URL/RSS of a blog they haven't written. So lets say someone puts the RSS link for Ars Technica in there, sort an instapaper on steroids, and then downloads the epub, how does that work?
Ah, just close the window, wait 10 minutes, and come back.

I tried to add my "blog" to it:

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, root@localhost and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Apache/2.2.22 (Amazon) Server at www.ebookglue.com Port 80

I'll look into it in another few days and try it again. There's some bugs here, but it seems like it worth checking out.
> The mobile device market is far too large to be constrained to two choices.

That's why we need Jolla's Sailfish OS and Samsung's Tizen to start competing for third place already.
OK, those are arguments in favor of strong-typing, early-binding and compile-time checks. Java arguments, in other words.

I think, looking at sources of arc.arc or news.arc, that it is, how to say, over-hyped.
Our ELB endpoints have been down for over 9 hours. Luckily we were able to failover to an alternative solution in under 5 minutes, but that is pretty mean downtime.
There is xmlrpclib inlcuded per default and it does all the XML stuff, so i think you can easily get away far more readable then what is shown in the python reimplementation of the PHP function. http://docs.python.org/2/library/xmlrpclib.html#example-of-c...

It just doesn't have xmlrpc_encode_request() with the exact method signature.

P.S.:
I am wondering if it is normal to have functions marked as EXPERIMENTAL with a biiiig warning sign for 11 years in the language? That really scares me.
This function has been introduced in PHP 4.1.0 which was releases in 10-Dec-2001... That's just...

edit: removed rant about xmlrpc_encode_request being built-in. It's a non-default extension, apparently..
Followup -

I've read through a lot of this thread, and I'd like to follow up with a few thoughts.

First of all, just to make it clear: Dropbox support has been GREAT. Though it took a few days because this happened on the weekend, Dropbox support did contact my colleague shortly after, and have made it clear that they will work hard to make sure everything that can be is restored. The problems with realising what is left to restore seem to be technical (again, I'm unsure of details). The support staff themselves have helped a lot. In addition, someone has reached out to me from Dropbox support because of this thread, to try and find the root cause of the problem - I hope we managed to help Dropbox find whatever it was that caused this to happen, so it doesn't happen to anyone else.

Another misconception I saw, about "Dropbox is not a backup solution":

My colleague and I both realize Dropbox is not for backup. The most important files were backed up, at least to some degree. Having said that, Dropbox is used by myself and many others as a semi-backup solution. My personal strategy is to backup the whole Dropbox folder to an external disk every few weeks, but rely on Dropbox for everything else. This is not a good backup solution, but realise that for most people, it's not "Dropbox vs. a real solution", it's "Dropbox vs. no solution at all".

I'll close with the same message I give to most people - Dropbox is brilliant, most of the time. It's not a great backup solution, but it's better than what most people do. If you're not using anything else, Dropbox is a life-changer in terms of ease-of-accessing-your-files-anywhere, and feeling secure that everything is probably backed up.
I'm the OP. Thought it also good to add the other (preceding) blog post on the "making of" - very nice:

http://jordanmechner.com/blog/2012/12/making-and-remaking-ka...
Where are you trying to get to?

Why is the choice between C# and Javascript? (Other programming languages are available, as the BBC would say.)
Thank you for these links :)
Thanks! I'll take a look. Try adding http:// to the url. I'll fix that in a little bit and make sure it fails more gracefully :-)
Yeah, I'll definitely be doing that next time. Thanks for the tip.
#2 is a super common alternative. A colleague of mine was suffering from late-stage lupus and was told he had X years to live. Well, X+10 years later and he continues to live (though dementia continued to get worse and he became less and less able to tackle basic life tasks), so he attributes these things to the Reiki healing techniques he's applied in his life despite being a normally very scientific person.

I can't begrudge a guy like that - whatever brings him comfort as he nears the end of his life is fine with me.
Correct. And the general misconception among students is that the newer editions contains contain updated stuff.

The gross thing is that the content is toatally based on Turbo C/C++ compiler for windows and is full of errors, with no attention paid to standards
I've replied to this elsewhere, but let me reiterate here:

sean_lynch is not kidding about Dropbox's support staff. They are great, very helpful, and according to my colleague, are very serious about trying to restore everything. The issue he had was a software bug, and apparently some things are problematic to restore because of other technical reasons, but Dropbox has been very helpful.

And to make this clear - they were very helpful when this happened last week, before this thread - you don't need to write a blog post to get their help and attention.
African Men vs. Hollywood Stereotypes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSElmEmEjb4
Bah! Humbug!
If you actually understood how a Poisson process works and how a hypothesis test works you would understand that his conclusions are very, very much important.
Xiph & Mozilla working on video codec with "performance superior to h.265"