skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I personally tend to have a lot of underlying "social abnormality," including being a chronic grouch, but not laughing at stuff is actually not a problem I have, surprisingly enough.

Do you think this is related to some other aspect(s) of your personality? If so, what? (if you don't mind sharing)
I gave in and signed up last week when I wanted to post a review to the Android Market warning users about a trojan.
If it wasn't a rubyism, why is there syntax sugar for passing a hash as the last positional parameter?
Facebook has a profit motive and are answerable only to their own management and shareholders.

If their board decided they could increase profit by x% by deleting all privacy controls tomorrow then all privacy controls could be removed tomorrow.

In theory at least a democratic government has no particular interest in sharing your data with anybody apart from maybe a few intelligence and law enforcement officials who want to check that you're not actually trying to kill anyone. They also have to vote on any major legislation changes, enough unfavourable bills and they risk getting thrown out at the next election.
It's a back of the envelope estimate: the US has about a 10,000/year murder rate, about half of those are in the family. The targeted killings program doesn't exactly advertise but it's known to be well more than one so I'm guessing it's in the tens per year of people who could be described as westerners. YMMV.
I have "insider info": I went through very public withdrawal online from prescription medication. So I have been the person who couldn't manage to stop being inflammatory, no matter how hard I tried. It didn't matter how much I apologized and explained, it still created problems. In fact, my sincere apologies ultimately turned me into the group scapegoat. I could say something completely uninflammatory, someone else could overreact in an asinine way and the group response was "there she goes again". I ultimately quit taking their shit, for which I was thrown off one list.

I see no reason to suggest that subjecting losethos to a similar debacle would benefit anyone. I wish it weren't so, but the reality is that most "normal" people just aren't as nice as they would like to believe they are and they don't hesitate to do truly gruesome things as long as they can find a way to pretend it isn't really their fault (distinguishing between "IRL" and virtual interaction is a convenient way many people justify being assholes online).

An entire forum ganging up on one vulnerable individual and blaming the victim for it is an all too common testament to this ugly underbelly of humanity. The people in charge here are wise to not allow a situation which would actively foster such ugliness. In the abscence of a better answer, the current solution errs on the side of at least not sending the message that lynchmobs are welcome here. The ugliness would not stop with losethos. It would spread and soon no one would be safe here.
Maybe some social-media marketers have taken "any publicity is good publicity" a little too seriously and decided that bashing G+ is easier than praising it. ;)
> cloud-sync

Except if I'm in a developing nation where I'm not guaranteed connectivity. (Don't scoff yet, because I'd say the US is in this category.)
Basically we (Milky Way) are going to slam into the Andomeda galaxy. Original hubblesite link : http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2012/20/vi...
How To Engage Employees
Here's a cached version: http://www.readability.com/articles/aobhl7io
HN can actually be a really great resource for learning, inspiration, comraderie, etc. And that includes actually contributing to the discussion, as SonicSoul was.
^ Sorry, the hyperlink got truncated for some reason, here it is:

[0] http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/views-executions?order=exec_...
Oh really? I always thought SS7 was the first switch to move to out of band.

What's the last blueBox-able switch?
Am i missing the joke? Whats sci-fi about this? And how many industries are like this? Meat, diary, cars, arms, power, oil, medical, prisons. And these are just the ones that come to read from stories I have read recently.
Except they have, in search
Make Me
It sounds like it is the standard Ubuntu userland, but I am not sure if that is a guarantee for root access. If most of Ubuntu is still under GPLv2 (or other non DRM restricting licenses), then there is nothing stopping the manufactoring from locking down the phone. If enough of Ubuntu is under GPLv3, then I think that the manufacturer would need to replace those pieces in order to lock down the phone.
Are you guys hiring outside of the UK? Specifically, are you hiring from the US?
it would be nice if I could give it a jsonp URL and a callback function name
I live in a metric country so I agree with everything you say, though a metric only tape measure is possibly less important. Actually I have two tape measures handy, one is metric only and the other has metric and imperial units. I think you'd expect to see both units for quite some time after conversion. Interestingly the one that is metric only is a style that tradesmen often have. I gather if you are measuring things all the time, you'd only want to deal with one set of units. So perhaps the option of having a metric only tape measure is still useful.
That method predates the "Forum.where(:url => ...)" syntax of xentronium's demo code. Previously it looked like this: "Forum.find(:first, :conditions => {:url => ...})". Dynamic finders were really sugar over this form, which was always kind of an eyesore.
http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/transportation/stories/solved-...

The companies maintain that this practice was legal. Another company, Northern Biodiesel, appears to have been put out of business by the practice.

The EPA has investigated several other cases of RIN fraud, including one against Jeffrey David Gunselman, the CEO of Absolute Fuels who was arrested in July, accused of selling more than $50 million in fake RIN credits.

So yeah, keep telling yourself that this is another case of the dum dum gubmint who needs to stay out of our way and how no one ever goes bankrupt after defrauding the gubmint because I mean, it all sounded great when Rush said it right?
He mentions macros briefly, but they are certainly worth noting more prominently.

FWIW, the AS2 target is also quite solid. I did a lot of haxe programming targeting AS2 when I was working for chumby and we were using AS2 long after the rest of the Flash-using world had moved on to AS3. haxe was a lifesaver because AS2 was a lot more terrible than AS3 (IMO).

I had a very complete reactive UI layout and data binding system similar to the one in Flex but written in haxe, mostly using macros.

The UI was described in XML like:

<Panel id="rootPanel">
<Panel id="header"
width="{rootPanel.width}"
height="{rootPanel.height * 0.1}">

... (bunch of header controls described here) ...

</Panel>
<Panel id="content"
width="{rootPanel.width}"
height="{rootPanel.height - header.height}"
y="{header.height}">

... (bunch of content controls described here) ...

</Panel>
<Code>

... (bunch of arbitrary haxe code pulled into the class the XML is describing) ...

</Code>
</Panel>

The macro system would, at project build time, pull in all the XML files, look at the attributes, figure out which ones had dynamic data binding and would set up closures for them which would register to be called if any of the data items they depended upon were changed. Since all of this was set up at compile time using the haxe macro system, the app developer didn't have to worry about it when dependent properties changed, it just worked like magic. (Though it also did have a runtime API so the developer could register a closure to be called if particularly object properties were modified).

This is of course all very similar to what Flex did with code generation and data binding but the system was much lighter-weight as it was implemented in haxe itself and the macro system allowed it to do a lot of fancy type determination that kept the overall logic quite simple.

It could target AS3 or AS2 prior to the end of working on it since we did eventually ship a beta firmware for chumby devices to run ActionScript3/FlashLite4 code.

I haven't really had occasion to use haxe since, but I highly recommend it to anyone who would otherwise be stuck using the 'native' languages of a runtime like Flash or JavaScript.
Happy Birthday internet
How different is the Android kernel from mainline? If it is just a case of drivers shouldn't they be able to easily merge them back to mainline as modules?
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE how HTML5/JS/CSS is now a full application environment. We desperately needed networked applications, but now we have them. It is a great way of creating an interface for users.

But we still need application protocols to allow our apps to communicate with each other, and protocols for such have withered as of late. There are a few patterns most APIs need to re-implement:

- Authentication for actions on behalf of users (user XYZ, who I represent, says this..)

- Rich content format

- Content posting (send a link to somebody)

- Simple feedback (like/follow/upvote/downvote)

For these common inter-application actions, HTTP+HTML falls short.
Where on earth do you get the idea that the drone strikes are killing a non-zero number of westerners?!
I was only replying specifically to the two claims that you made.

The first of which was exactly the same in the US (and possibly less justified; given it's size, the US could have absorbed Jewish refugees much more easily than the Swiss).

The second was almost certainly done at a smaller scale by US banks, and is mostly just because the US didn't have the opportunity since fewer Holocaust victims had their Gold in American banks than Swiss banks. It's ridiculous to think that Americans were so much more moral than the Swiss just because they had fewer opportunities to steal.

If there are other things that the Swiss did that were so shameful, I am interested in knowing.
How four immigrant students won an underwater robotics competition [2005]
The joke is that there is nothing sci-fi about this :)
Show HN: Turn any blog into a podcast using text-to-speech
It is a common Americanism to talk like we singlehandedly defeated the Nazis, as if no other nation really contributed. I've discussed it with a few foreign friends. I am not in any shape to discuss it intelligently at the moment. Just thought I would note that this egomaniacal hero complex is one of this nation's foibles.
I think the occasional HackerNews posts are the only times I have ever ended up on a G+ page, in all honesty.
Font Awesome 3.0 Released
New IE Zero-Day Attack Bypasses Key Microsoft Security Measures
FBI, Working With Banks, Chose Not To Inform Occupy Of Assassination Plot
Mind you, this question wasn't even posted on SO. It was posted on programmers.stackexchange.com which begs the question, on which stackexchange site, if any, would this be a valid question?
Would they be addressed if patents didn't exist? I doubt it.
Is The U.S. Really Losing Its Innovative Edge?
Does knowing your exploiting the system count? There is no way this wasn't intentional.
1. Quora is trash.

2. http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/ is a terrific discussion forum for for all programming-related topics.
yeah xerox parc is exactly what i was thinking when i first saw microsoft research a while back. huge funding wonderful projects, but the products that microsoft hugely pushes in the enterprise and tries to make money with is their utterly shitty enterprise stack.

meet dynamics crm, sharepoint, biztalk et al. (and f*in shoot yourself)
Government is accountable to "the people"? That's just a platitude. The government is beholden to many special interests. The bailouts, the wars--home & abroad--, the TSA, etc. are all egregious examples.

Facebook is accountable to shareholders, true, but no one is holding you hostage, making you share information on Facebook. You could change your privacy settings, go to another social network(s), or stop sharing altogether.
He's bitter about corn subsidies in the US.

"sweeteners, fuels, and plastics" -- high fructose corn syrup, corn ethanol, corn ethanol-derived polyethylene

"price manipulation and straight forward mandate from their "Environmental" agency." -- corn ethanol subsidies, corn ethanol mandates

etc.
Really? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4982462

You're submitting the same story twice?
Assuming the lens works the same way as on the desktop, there have to be some command-line utilities installed, because the search lenses are using some very large python and whatever scripts to fetch and parse the data.

They also said that you could plug your phone into a TV and would get a full Ubuntu desktop with all the stuff you're used to.

So it seems to be basically a pretty standard Ubuntu with just a phone-interface.
It tells you to do that in the "Workarounds" section when talking about how the vulnerability can be mitigated. At no point do they tell you not to pass user provided data to this method.

The problem is an argument parsing bug that leads to user provided data being used as programmer provided data. Rails does not force SQL sanity off on the developer.
How does Obvious relate to Hexagonal Architecture (AKA Ports-and-Adapters, http://alistair.cockburn.us/Hexagonal+architecture)?
I'd like to suggest that it's not bad, but others have found the right answer already. Or does Hexagonal leave some important problems unsolved?
Whats even more clever is that the 9.6 Billion only actually "cost" 4.8 Billion (R&D Classified Work is a 50% tax deduction)
I don't think so, according to alexa, qq.com is the second most visited website in South Korea.
"If so, this is a significant step up in terms of hackability than iOS or Android."

You can ssh into iOS and have all the Unix utilities and full root control for quite some time.
Who are they selling 'search' to? Didn't think they had a big market in corporate intranet search....?
Am i missing the joke?

Yep.
That's exactly how the company got started. They sold DOS before they even owned it.
Computational Journalism Publishers Workbench 1.2.0 Released
In case you still want to play poker online, you can with bitcoins.
I don't think you need a new department for that. Take the tax code. Who knows how to exploit the tax code the best? The accountants at the IRS. Have the IRS give an employee a bonus each time they find an exploit and write a report on how it works and recommendations on fixing it. It shouldn't be that different from the way major software vendors pay rewards for reported bugs/exploits.

You could provide similar incentives for reports on efficiency improvements (and to prevent exploitation of a system like this, you could have the bonus provided only if the improvement/fix is actually implemented, or based on how significant it is, or something.) Prize and crowd-sourcing systems have worked pretty well when it comes to a lot of things, so why not apply them to improving government bureaucracy?

As it stands, our system does the opposite - it rewards people for finding and abusing exploits in the system instead of fixing them (see - every corporate scandal and stock market crash ever.)
> user-provided data is being used to compose a SQL statement that is being passed to the server. Escaped or otherwise, that's a recipe for an injection attack

How do you implement authentication if you can't check an email (user provided data) matches a password (user provided data, probably hashed but still)? How do you look up blog posts by a user-provided tag, without using that tag in query composition? How do you save any user provided information at all without somehow including that information in an SQL query?

You have to use escaped user provided data all the time in a real application. Any actual web developer would know that.
Ask HN: What is the status of FPGA usage in Financial world?
I am trying to understand how much room there is for usage FPGAs in financial applications. I am concerned that general purpose CPUs are catching up for parallel applications...so are there any areas where we can still use FPGAs?
Having just finished upgrading my production rails because of today's news I thought I would pass along a how-to for rails 3.x

update your Gemfile and set the version you want. In my case:

gem 'rails', '3.2.10'

locally, run

'bundle update rails'
which will update your Gemfile.lock

check-in and deploy your code. If you are using capistranso, the default 'deploy' task should handle everything for you. Otherwise, run 'bundle update rails' on your production server.
That's what I need clarification on. the dynamic keyword wasn't provided by any 3rd party library (it's part of the C# language specification)... how is System.DynamicObject and IDynamicMetaObjectProvider different then System.Object? All poco's inherit System.Object. Do you consider System.Object as 3rd party? True, by default poco's don't inherit from System.DynamiObject. Does that make it not 'natively supported'?
> Also, who do you think will be interested in having a common protocol? I think the answer will be "those with little data of their own". Big players do not want you to build tools that work together with 'their' data (clear example: Twitter: open while small, but now closing down its API)

This is some scary logic. By that logic, why would great open protocols like HTTP or email have ever gained popularity over proprietary solutions? Do you really think those two protocols are the only perfect and final solutions which will win?

Couldn't you at least try to have a democratic mindset? This is the web, how do you think Twitter ever came to "own" all that data in the first place?
I thought it would be great to have one device as well, but then I realized that sometimes I want to use my phone while watching TV or using the laptop, so they can't really be one device, unless I wear a wireless headset, which I don't really want to carry around along with my phone (another thing to charge, another thing to lose).
I'm sorry, but this is so stupid that you have to be a troll.
For the IdM side of things, there is SCIM:

http://www.simplecloud.info/

It started as Simple Cloud Identity Management, but once it got to IETF, it was changed to "System for Cross-domain Identity Management". This initiative has been backed by Google, Ping Identity, Salesforce, Cisco, SailPoint, UnboundID, and others. You can see some of these names on one of the RFCs:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-scim-core-schema-00

This API is just for identity management, and it has taken years to get to this point. I think it would take many more to get to a common API for everything else.
Astronaut Sunita Williams gives a tour of the ISS (video)
>"some fly-by-night swindlers who nobody will remember in five years"

People have been saying this for the last 5 years.

I think it's time to reiterate a point that was made here a couple days ago that I think really outlines the reason that Facebook WILL be around for a while.

The comment that I'm referring to suggested that there's a "point-of-no-return" for a service where people are too deeply invested in it for any competing service to have a REAL fighting chance. That point of no return is when you have grandmas and grandpas, as well as little kids, and non-tech-savvy folks in general using the service (in this case FB) consistently and constantly.

To give you a personal example, my parents are the LAST people who I would expect to create a Facebook account. They are very technically unsavvy, but on top of that they're pretty skeptical people too. However, they finally got a Facebook account, and I think that highlights why Facebook WILL be around for many more years.

If you're going to use Myspace as an example, then don't, because Myspace NEVER reached the tipping point of Grandmas and Grandpas trying to use it. I think this goes for any service, not just a social network like Facebook. Take the iPhone and iPad for example. Same thing with that. You have grandmas, grandpas, and little children using iOS, so you know it's ingrained across multiple generations.

Now I'm not saying I'm 100% sure they're a rock-solid company, but I don't think people give them enough credit. It's far more popular to say "oh they'll be gone in a few years" than to actually understand and analyze the situation.
Similar project: https://github.com/LearnBoost/tobi
A gas turbine compresses air and burns it so that explosively shoots out the back

The high-bypass turbofans used on jet airliners produce most of their thrust by using shaft power to drive a fan that directly accelerates the air. Thrust from the engine exhaust itself contributes a smaller fraction.

With electric ducted fans, presumably you would have a higher number of smaller-diameter fans.

(That's not to say that I think that large electric passenger aircraft are going to be feasible anytime soon - I don't).
Things could have happened differently, but the war was more or less unavoidable due to the Versaille treaty.

Had the Versailles treaty actually been enforced, had the winning powers actually declared war on Germany early in the 1930's when Germany violated the treaty, and before Germany had significantly rearmed, Hitler would have been quickly defeated.

Hilter was just one man -- millions of Germans wanted "war" and were enraged with the treaty even before Hitler became known.

Yes, but Hitler was a genius at using that hate and at giving the Germans a renewed sense of their latent power. The desire to rearm and invade eastern europe to steel their land was the great brainchild of Hitler, no other German leaders at the time had anything close Hitler's level of megalomania.

What? This is extremely condescending to the German people.

To be clear, it was not just Americans who rebuilt the education system. It was the Americans in conjunction with the leaders of the German resistance (who were now promoted into power) and the general population who were disillusioned with war. The prestige of victory is such that the Americans did need to use all that repressive methods to wipe out Nazi ideology.

You really believe that they needed ...Americans to instill a "moral system" onto them?!!!

Well, the Germans sure did not do it themselves in the 1930's before the American occupation! Germans had an ethical system then, but it was the ethics of Jenger's Storm of Steel - "Time only strengthens my conviction that it was a good and strenuous life, and that the war, for all its destructiveness, was an incomparable schooling of the heart..". The American victory taught Germans that the way of evil conquest was not an acceptable path, that it led only to ruin. The Nuremberg trials, the new German constitution, de-Nazification, a rebuilt education systen, etc, all ensured that German morals would be much more pacifist in the future.

As if Americans are ...morally superior people?!!!

The Americans of 1940 were morally superior to the Germans of 1940. Is there really any argument about this? Now, whether the Americans of 1835 were more moral than the Germans of 1940 is a different question. (It is striking how similar the concept of Lebensraum is to the concept of Manifest Destiny)
I don't understand what you are saying (aside from trolling, which is heavily frowned upon). It reads to me like the government is either creating perverse incentives, failing to implement correctly or failing to monitor. If it is the first, we'd be better off without the interference. If it is the second, what is wrong with the government that it can't implement it's policies correctly (perhaps too complex)? If it is the last, then why is the government not policing the policies better?

And finally, do RIN credits provide better incentives than no credits? That is the real question that should be asked with regard to the government being involved. The government's track-record isn't great.
Canonical Unveils Strategy Of Reminding People Of Apple In Everything They Do