skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Following the recent discussion on slashdot, an attempt to assess the Google EULA accompanying Chrome in more detail. In summary, it is probably intended to be benign but it actually opens up some fairly nasty options which you are agreeing that Google can take up at their leisure.
> curious aspect of science fiction before the mid-1980s,

Star Trek TOS had computers galore. Tricorders, medical bays, the ships main talking computer, I'd argue all those screens and buttons and that thingy Spock looked into were all computers. Not to mention all the computer antagonists and various backdrop pieces.

They also had cell phones.
No! Apple and Sun. Then it could be S'napple!
"On Friday, Fox News entertainment columnist Roger Friedman watched and reviewed one of the pirated copies of Wolverine floating around the Web."
Linux Servers Take Bigger Hit
This sort of mirrors my question about the legality of a TOS on the internet: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=548002

With no canonical examples of 'who was first', and bytes being bytes and therefore editable (ie. timestamps on files count for nothing whatsoever), it's impossible without some sort of trusted 3rd party in which to vouch for this guys story.

Even if the author has paper sketches, they in turn mean nothing as there is no proof as to /when/ they were created.
"You (or at least I, rather) want the competition to be in brain power or behavior rather than just gimmicky hardware."

To be honest, I don't really care. They need to embrace the fact that it's a show, an artificial competition where rule #1 is "the fights must be interesting to human beings" and #2 is "the fight must be fair in the sense that everybody knew this year's rules at the same time and everybody is working under the same rules". How they get there is up to them.

I think to fit into their original niche, they need to be real, physical robots for most people to care, and unfortunately given the nature of the competition it seems unlikely that autonomous logic is going to play a big role.

Although one thought did occur to me that I feel stupid for not realizing before. I am very skeptical of the ability of complicated circuitry to survive on the robot itself, but of course there's no reason not to put the logic up there with the human, getting remote sensor data and issuing commands. Duh! Now we're cooking with fire. Full autonomy still seems like asking for trouble but I often thought some computer-aided targeting assistance could have been helpful.
Well, if the genes regulating sleep patterns are half as tedious as the gc params for the 1.4.2 JVM, I wouldn't want to consider every possibility either:P
Why? The bar scene, it's you unmediated. Even if you adopt a different persona while you're out, you have to work to keep it going the whole time. Rejection is immediate and in your face, oftentimes cold. If you're not in a huge city, you always risk running into someone you know.

On the web, you can construct whatever reality you want, and you don't have to throw your whole self into it while you do so. You can put up fake pictures, you can flirt from the comfort of your bathrobe. You can keep your anonymity until the actual moment of interaction, and you know the groundrules going in.
Does anyone else hate Stranger in a Strange Land, and Robert Heinlein in general?

I find that whole era/style of sci-fi silly, dated, and Heinlein in particular to be a chauvinist pig. These writers, many of them (wannabe)scientists, believed in and wrote about scientist super men. Lone men(always men) of bulky IQ and suave manners. Who save the world/universe/multiverse/timeline/whatever and get a girl as reward in the end.

Basically whatever would appeal(read sell books) to pubescent teenage nerds and adults who never grew out of that phase.
Wrong Bruce.
It would be different in the same way hn is different from reddit. It's the job of the moderators to maintain a good balance.
Um, there is no indication of quantum mathematics being used here, instead the article just says this method was used in studying quantum related data sets and "The new method gauges the importance of words in a document based on where they appear, rather than simply on how often they occur."

I've seen that sentence almost verbatim in a dozen different search engine proposals recently.
Mac, Linux skills grab higher salaries than Windows
Well, 100 1U servers is about 33 per rack if you have 3 racks; switches should not be more than 2U or 4U on top of that, and they do not use a lot of power.

Not sure exactly how much power, but 2x 30A power feeds will give 48A usable power, which is just about 1.5 amps per system. Whether that is enough for 8 cores (2x quad core), I don't know; will depend on amount of memory and disks.
I'd much prefer that everyone get a proper primary education than a few people struggle through a secondary education to bet on their children.
If you are dealing with the INS, chances are you are not a citizen. Therefore, congressmen and senators are much less likely to be concerned about your welfare.
Facebook's photo storage rewrite
It always astounds me when these film companies promote theft, even glorify it (the italian job, gone in 60 seconds, the oceans 11 series etc) and then get annoyed when someone goes ahead and pirates a film.

Here's a thought - stop with the ludicrous distribution agreements and make it easier for someone to pay for a film at home than it is to click "download this torrent" on your favourite torrent sites.

I've said it before and I will say it again, there is something seriously wrong with the system when the path of least resistance is unlawful, especially for those people who WANT to do the right thing and pay for that privilege.

There will always be people who wont pay for content, so why not focus on making it easy and convenient for those people who do?
Wow, I thought there would be more discussion here.

Finally, someone in mainstream acknowledging the problem with piracy is that it's the most convenient, most consumer friendly option available.
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Viruses Make A Battery
The weather is as bad as you've heard -- worse because the three monthes of sunshine a year are the three monthes you won't be there.

FWIW, RIT is the exact same way. Not that I go there, even though I was accepted. I go to the state school down the road — cost of 4 years here is a year and a half at RIT. And it's undergrad. It amounts to the same things being taught in similar manners regardless of where you (or I) happen to be.
A legal fund should be started for him and a badge for contributing to that fund should be prominently displayed on his blog.
1) I would choose between UMass Amherst and Tufts. If you want to start your own business, not having to pay loans while in college, or after, will be of great help. On top of that, your living expenses are paid for.

2) It's possible that despite your grades, MIT and other schools decided your passion for starting up would be too much in conflict with what other students typically look for in MIT, and that either the course load would make you unhappy, or your startup ambitions could affect your progress (I'm just guessing here.)

You were honest with the colleges, and they were honest with you back. This isn't necessarily a bad thing: would it have been better if you lied that you wanted to be a professor, and gotten in because of that? Instead of worrying about being rejected from a fancy college, realize that your essay probably had the most impact, and the admissions officers are helping you make your decision. If you try to do a startup for a year, fail, and change your mind, you could always reapply and they will likely take you this time around.

3) If one wanted to finish school as fast as possible and without debt, they could do the following.

UMass Amherst requires 45 credits in residence to earn a degree (outside of Engineering). I can imagine one could take all non-General Education classes over their first three semesters; somebody from my high school completed the non-General Education requirements by the end of Sophomore year.

I can imagine you could then reside anywhere you like, completing your General Education Requirements with classes over the Internet, and occasionally some classes at whatever school is nearby and transferring them over.

Sure, if you moved somewhere else and completed the non-CS requirements online, you would miss out on some student interaction, but you would be 19, so it wouldn't be too bad.

If you don't accelerate your pace, UMass Amherst may feel like a "gap year" anyway, and you would be able to do whatever other side projects you had in mind while maintaining good grades. UMass Amherst is also a top 20 CS grad school, and you could take grad school classes if you wished.
Kamikaze means divine wind. They were dying for the emperor who ruled by divine right. There was more religion in that fanaticism than you might think.
In contrast, in the U.S., "people have to even clean their own toilets,"

You know, I could easily afford to have someone clean my toilet. In fact, our receptionist offered to be my housekeeper, at good terms. But...I don't know...I just don't want 3rd parties involved in the matter. I guess it's my lower-middle class heritage thing.
I find it shocking that some Indian men have such attitudes, despite having spent time in places like the US.

<quote>
Given the difficulty in finding matches for Indians abroad, some matchmakers are now charging them more. Mr. Dave of Klassic Match charges a minimum fee of $100, versus $50 for candidates living in India. He charges more for specific requirements. For instance, he says some overseas Indians want a bride who is smart, fluent in English, and "simultaneously, docile in the house." He says such women are now harder to find, so he bumps up his fees for some searches.
</quote>
I lack warm and fuzzy feeling for all of the above, then!
Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory
Maybe it is because they have spent time in the US that they want such women?
I think you may be referring to Amherst College (https://www.amherst.edu/academiclife/departments/computer_sc...)

Umass Amherst has a rather substantial CS dept including many well known researchers
(http://www.cs.umass.edu/faculty/faculty-directory)
You could trademark it and then license the trademark to companies that you want to allow to use it. This is pretty common. Some reasons I can think of for this kind of arrangement:

* Parent companies licensing their trademarks to subsidiaries.

* Unrelated companies using similar names who enter into an arrangement where one owns the trademark and the other licenses it. E.g. Tyco International/Tyco Toys, ITT Corp/ITT Tech, Apple Inc/Apple Corps (after Feb 2007).

* Certification, compatibility, or similar logos can be trademarked and licensed to authorized users so the owner can protect against the logo being used in an unauthorized or misleading fashion. E.g. UL Listed logo, Orthodox Union kosher symbol, Windows compatibility stickers.

* Franchising and similar situations. E.g. car dealers, fast-food restaurants, co-ops like IGA and Ace Hardware.

* Avoiding legal hassles that might ensue if the name/logo were not trademarked. E.g. Linux.
"This is the best the Ruby community can do to answer Alex's argument?"

One of the more annoying aspects of this debate is how often it is portrayed as happening on behalf of some imaginary unified "Ruby community."

There is no Ruby community. There are numerous cliques and clusters and crowds.

The individuals speaking up are just that, they are not members of some special Ruby Community Leader cadre or any other such nonsense.
India has some weird cultural aspects that I do not find appealing personally.

I had an Indian friend on a H1-B who talked a lot about getting a wife that cooked and cleaned and stuff and I always asked him, "Why not just hire a maid? Probably be cheaper." He could never come up with a good response.

I guess these attitudes come from being raised in a culture where it's the norm. I've got another few friends who are first generation and they never talked about anything like that at all. Makes me wonder what fundamental change in Indian society will disrupt those attitudes; will a simple increase in per capita income and an equalization of the labor pool do it, or is it at a more ingrained level?
Another explanation could be that the Indians in the US are mostly engineers, who skew towards being introverted. I'm guessing wildly here, but my point is that it could be more than cultural factors at play.
Pixar’s Latest Film Has Wall Street on Edge
I dont know about that. Why is that?

I would be willing to give the benefit of the doubt to somebody who has lived in a conservative, patriarchal, rural/small-town middle class environment in India.

If you are an Indian male in the US as described in the article, chances are you come from an urban background, went to college, and have had ample opportunity to be exposed to more liberal attitudes. In that case, this sort of expectation is downright shameful and disgusting.
Kinda related — does anyone know the best/cheapest online broker in the UK? TradeKing looks awesome at $4.95/trade, but the best I've found so far are around $20/trade! :(
Agreed, seems like a non-story. Lots of people with an interest in the field have ideas like this all the time. And it has barely been tested or compared.

I'm trying not to be too snarky, as it is interesting, and I enjoy all innovation (especially cross-pollination), but the only reason this was written is because the writer was able to shoe-horn 'quantum' into the story.
Partially a cultural thing, too. Americans don't do "servants", for certain values of "servant".

Similarly, if you come to Japan and try to explain babysitting, you get looks of total horror.

"Yes, I think its perfectly normal to talk to a mother I know, get the name of a 13 year old girl who lives in the neighborhood, pay her $20 so that I can have an evening out with my wife, and entrust my home and infant child to her within 5 minutes of meeting her. You find this odd?"
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"You don't litter up a program in a dynamic language with manually written type checks. If you're reinventing a static type system, you're doing something wrong"

Yes: using a dynamic language
How cares if they are an easy target? They are still the ones who are enforcing an unjust law against you.
Most people don't want to have kids with their maid. Indians in this scenario prefer to marry people at the same socioeconomic level
Or, maybe, here's a radical thought--the next time one of these men meets someone he likes, he could ask her out.

The whole arranged marriage nonsense is a blight on the Indian community. Needless to say, it often leads to loveless marriages; further, the fact that you're making life decisions based on scant information results in bizarre situations like the consultant in the article who can't find a wife because they all think consultant means unemployed.

I can only welcome any development that forces people to change.

//Indian person. Fortunately distanced from the absurdity.
I wonder if it could possibly have escaped your notice that Donald Knuth, Djikstra, Peter Norvig, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, Linus Torvalds and Guido Van Rossum all possess Masters degrees and above. And these are only luminaries in the field of computer science. It seems to me that the smartest and most productive people on the planet tend to have undergone higher education. I can only conclude that your experience with Masters and PhDs has been strangely skewed.
Organize your life with Noter2
Please resist the temptation to generalize based on one experience. There are indeed cultural factors at play, but that is not enough to swipe a brush and paint all the Indians in the US in the same color.

I am an Indian living in the US myself. I married my (then) girlfriend because SHE got a job here and eventually it is me who is doing the "cooking and cleaning" because of being on a non-working visa :). I have plenty of Indian friends in the US who dont hold such narrow-minded views of getting a wife just to cook and clean for them.
Yes, users care about latency, but less efficiency doesn't necessarily lead to higher latency. (I have no idea what "worse servers" means.)

As long as Google can afford to provide decent anwers with acceptable latency, it will have users.

I think that efficiency is like programming effort, algorithms, and programming languages in that users don't care. They only care about results and the costs that affect them.
> Stability and Scalability are properties of architectures

But the architecture starts at the virtual machine level. Without a decent VM you'll have to put more effort into building a scalable architecture.

True story: the team working on Photoshop Express tried Rails for displaying a 404 Not Found page (containing some dynamic content). Because the interface was already in tests by a lot of people, they couldn't even display a static rhtml template ... Mongrel was segfaulting because of the high loads. Now, this may be an incident that got fixed since then (last Summer), I wouldn't know since I'm not working with Rails ... but it surely sends shivers down my spine.
I think the comment is at least halfway tongue-in-cheek. The meaning is that there are certain disadvantages to marrying a strong-willed American woman...
I almost clicked on the title, realized it was probably linkbait, noticed it was New Scientist, then clicked the comments link fully expecting someone to have debunked it. I was not disappointed.
I guess these attitudes come from being raised in a culture where it's the norm.

I don't know where you live but the "woman as homekeeper" thing is the norm in most Western societies too. Women have, of course, worked throughout history but, culturally, it's been more the norm so far that women have taken housemaker and child raising roles. My mom left her job when she met my father and she has never been employed since. The same applies for about half, I'd say, of my friends' family situations.

It is not unrealistic or old fashioned for people who agree on their roles to settle into those roles. There is nothing wrong with anyone looking for someone who complements them as long as the intentions are good. Indeed, finding someone who doesn't complement you is more likely to result in disastrous relations.
This is getting silly, and even more annoying than it already was.
Ya, I guessed that much! Just took the opportunity to clarify my stand a bit more.
Removed the reliance on expensive proprietary solutions, but how many non-standard custom tools needed to be written (and thus maintained) to verify, backup and access stuff? All that "extra" POSIX stuff could be avoided with a DOS formatted file system, or one of the many filesystems designed for small embedded storage systems (read and append only). Sites with the scalability and size of Facebook or Flickr ("...Facebook's effort to design a more cost-effective and high-performance storage system for their unique needs") may have a use for this, but the majority of smaller sites would most likely be best served by a direct filesystem store which has known semantics, easy access, and proven history.

I'd really like to see some performance numbers that shows which parts of their old storage system started breaking down at which levels of scale.
> They already do, of course. Heard of the WTO?

The fact that something exists doesn't make it desirable.

> The arguments you make against global police are generalisable to local police, too.

Yup, but the scope of local police is limited, which limits the problems that bad ones can cause.

> Yes, corruption is a danger. With good governance this is manageable.

You don't get to assume unobtanium. Good governance decreases with organization size.

> The WTO, which has, as far as I can see, been a smashing success.

Tell that to the folks whose economies are crippled by agricultural subsidies by the EU and the US.

> "Isolationism" has not been practised by the USA for a century.

So? We don't have the supranationals that you favor, yet that's no obstacle to you proposing them, so how is the lack of isolationism today an obstacle?

> I would be a lot more persuaded by your points about an evil supranational if we didn't see so much evil perpetrated by mere nations all around us.

How does getting a bunch of evil together in the same room produce good?

The existence of a problem does not imply that there's a solution, let alone a solution of a given form.

> Think "WTO with morals". Does that really sound so bad?

Since I don't think that the WTO has especially good morals, it's unclear why I should think that it's good.

And, WTO pretty close to the best of the bunch. (The folks who allocate radio spectrum are arguably better.) The vast majority of supranationals are a disaster.

Yes, there's a chance that a new supranational would be good, but the odds are that it won't be.
I'd love to see what'd happen if Apple opened OSX up to non-Apple hardware, or competed on a price level with mid-range PCs. Personally I think the biggest thing holding OSX back is the hardware price; even Microsoft know that I think…instead of staying on the software level with their new ads, they had to talk about the price of the hardware (not even the hardware itself — the second ad even said how nice the Mac hardware is!)

Hopefully Apple fights back, it's about time they did! I love unicorn tears, I just wish they were cheaper... (it's strange they've kept Macs as nearly a 'designer' product, cause they know first hand what happens when you make something mainstream; i.e. iPod/iPhone)
> For instance, in 2004 the EU expanded its territory by over 20% without firing a single shot ;-)

Annexing people who want to be annexed isn't a demonstration of muscle or pursuasion.

Pursuasion is getting someone to do something that they don't want to do.
"I had an Indian friend on a H1-B who talked a lot about getting a wife that cooked and cleaned and stuff "

you had one Indian friend who said something stupid and you generalized from that to "India has some weird cultural aspects "

Sure, that sounds like a good generalization :-)

PS: I am not disputing "India has some weird cultural aspects " only your process of inference. "X has some weird cultural aspects" for any country = X.
Bah...that should read: "is warning against closed standards"
Logos are copyrightable, a trademark is stronger -- But of course, you can copyright a logo it's just an image after all and those are very easily copyrightable.
That's an amazing quote. Thanks.
If you're evaluating Scarry's thought, before dismissing her as utopian (not that that's what you're doing) it's worth reading The Body in Pain as well which is about the grounding of political and other varieties of authority in the physical destruction of the body. It's a deep and serious book.

On Beauty, on the other hand, is definitely utopian. It's a poetic invocation of the power of beauty to connect us to the world. That's specifically why I thought it would be a good recommendation for programmers. As Scarry so eloquently outlines in this book, the ethical power of beauty specifically transforms aesthetics from something that's 'just a matter of subjective taste' to something core to the importance and meaning of what we do.
This may be a bit.. off-topic for HN: But this article sounds like it's describing a very primitive version of the memory manipulation technology featured prominently in the TV show Dollhouse. I always find it fascinating when science fiction begins to intersect with reality.
I think this is really frightening. Can this really happen?
Does anyone know the subject well (a lawyer maybe) and can give a definite response?