skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
TeX (PlainTeX) doesn't have support for optional arguments or named parameters (perhaps in some primitives, but they are very different of the optional arguments in LaTeX).

But TeX has a extremely flexible macro system, so it is possible to fake optional arguments. That's what LaTeX do. LaTeX defines a standard way to have optional parameters and make easy to define and use them. It has some strange optional parameters like in \newtheorem, because they are really fake optional parameters. The starred versions of the command also are fake, and have to be defined using a trick. But if you are lucky and don't look under the hood everything works quite well.

I don't know enough about ConTeXt, but I hope that it has a better system for optional arguments.

In some way, this is similar to what happens with some features of high level languages and assembler. For example, the exceptions in C# or Java are translated sooner or later to assembler, but assembler doesn't have exceptions.
Well put. The title is indeed completely factual! Including '23 lines' was just to let people know at first glance that the solution is simple.

> If you had to write the un-swirling, gray-scaling, Sobel filtering and summation code in Python you'd be looking at a much larger pile-o-code

I would also like to point out these are also all very simple operations, which would only take a few lines of Python/C/whatever to do. Python just happens to have a pre-written libraries to save reinventing the wheel.
Accountable for what exactly?
Very entertaining and interesting article.

One peculiar thing I noticed: Did Sophie photoshop this picture of hers? https://93fd9190-a-62cb3a1a-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/so...
Not many lynch mobs care about human rights. Sheesh.
If what they're doing is illegal, they have a right not to have their property taken without the protections of being a criminal defendant.

If what they're doing isn't illegal, the state and city governments have the power to pass a law against it that actually gives them fair warning as opposed to nonspecific threats.

If what they're doing isn't illegal and the state and city governments don't want to pass a law against it, there's no reason to substitute the US Attorney's judgement for that of the people whose job it is to enforce the law.

The US attorney's office shouldn't have standing to sue on behalf of the neighborhood. The neighbors might. If it's for some reason in the national interest to make sure that this particular flop-house changes its address, I suppose they could fund the case.

In other words, it is a textbook case of CAF abuse: avoiding criminal trials to get a plaintiff-friendly civil trial, stretching jurisdiction limits, bypassing separation of powers by enshrining prosecutors as policymakers, the whole deal.
What is a civil suit heard in front of an impartial judge if not "due process of law"? Read _Democracy and Distrust_ for a careful accounting of what the Constitution means by "due process".
> This of course still doesn't solve anything about synchronization or inaccurate system clocks but it would be better than Unix times.

One of the solutions used in various systems from cash machines to databases is to use GPS time. All GPS satellites carry atomic clocks, and when positioning the receiver also determines local time at accuracy up to 10 nanoseconds.

GPS time does not have leap seconds, and is always at a 19 second offset from TAI. It's available without a network, and without synchronization between computers.
Hmmm... interesting use of a domain hack.

mega.co.nz = "mega conz"
Oh please. Wanting someone held accountable for their negligence and overreach is not a "lynch mob".
I think that perspective is shortsighted. It isn't that people want to carry over bad decisions. It's that everybody needs to follow the same standard, and it takes a while to get consensus among the many parties involved.

When Microsoft goes and pulls a Microsoft and completely ignores the W3C to implement their own standards, we are heading in the wrong direction. Only recently (IE 9+) did Microsoft start adhering to web standards and its been a relief.

This feels like they are abandoning that, and it's going to give me nightmares.
Man, you don't understand. They're like, "the establishment" man! You have to oppose everything they're in favor of. And be in favor of everything they oppose. Fight the power!
The docket on this case was posted downthread by 'thinkcomp.
I feel like I'm being Dale Gribbled while everyone else thinks they're being Hank Hilled by me. I think I'll take a break and make some parsnip soup.
>Google has failed

You say that as if the competition was a specific event with a discrete ending time, rather than continuously ongoing process that ever ends.
It's a ridiculous assertion to imply that government employees are so scared of losing their jobs, that they would spend copious amounts of their free time posting pro-government messages on random internet websites.

HN is supposed to be a place that encourages intelligent conversation and freedom of thought. We as a community are supposed to be mature enough to understand that not everyone is going to see things the same way.

The problem is, a lot of left-leaning people are so completely certain that their views are correct, and their correctness seems so obvious to them that they can't imagine how any logical person doesn't perceive reality in the same way. Just as many Conservatives feel the exact same way.

What gets lost in all of the petty arguments is the fact that there is plenty of room in the middle for people who agree with Republicans on some issues, and Democrats on others.

One of the dumbest fucking things our nation has ever done, is allow the formation of distinct political parties. The governance of the United States, or any other country for that matter, should not be conducted like a fucking football game.
I suggest you find a job in the market you want to enter. After a few years you should know what their pain is.
I added the `http://` to the developer's url and it's fine!

About Development Environment - yeah, it's displaying error messages instead of error page.

I'm using Capistrano for deployment! May be I had previously enabled error reporting during testing and forgot to turn it off in production environment. I'm checking into that.
What you're describing is called vesting and is hopefully used by anybody doling out equity of their company.

The options for a developer in today's marketplace are such:

1. Technical founders who can offer equity only

2. Technical founders who can offer equity and money

3. Technical founders who can offer money only.

4. Non-technical founders who can offer equity only.

5. Non-technical founders who can offer equity and money.

6. Non-technical founders who can offer money only.

In either type of founder, the best option for a developer is equity+money, if they can afford a full-time commitment.

If the founder can only offer equity, this raises the stakes significantly and is a problem. Especially if the founder has overlapping skills with the developer. But the overlap of skills also breeds a certain camaraderie that is not to be ignored.

If the founder can only offer money, that makes it a clean [probably ongoing] contracting job with the flexibility to work on separate projects and whatnot.

The real problem with equity+money is that you are roped in full-time and tied down for an extended period of time. The reason I personally got into freelancing instead of having a normal job is that it gives me the freedom to change projects frequently - every couple of months. I advance quicker as a developer, grow my network quicker and my life is more interesting.

Knowing that I will spend the next 2 years working on a specific project is a very big commitment indeed and I want to be damn sure it's something I am extremely passionate about. (hint: this is usually reserved for my own ideas)

Perhaps it's just a sign of the times that I am happy taking on clients with no more than a few months' commitment and be certain that my bandwidth will always be filled to the brim for the foreseeable future anyway. In fact I am strongly thinking about expanding myself into a small team just to keep up with demand.

PS: there's also likely a bunch of legal and tax hassle in having my consulting company or myself be part owner of a bunch of other companies.
A word of warning to those upgrading. If you upgrade from a 32-bit version of Windows you are forced to upgrade to 32-bit Windows 8 with no access to the 64-bit edition.

Annoyingly, some manufacturers (in my case Dell) shipped 32-bit versions of Vista and Windows 7 on 64-bit processors, presumably to save costs.
Enlightened surveillance?
Hi guys, I'm the "someone lucky". :)

Great definition, because it was mostly luck that I fell in with id, 3DRealms, and the rest of the FPS crowd. John knew I was into NeXT stuff (my father worked for Steve Jobs as head of Developer Relations at NeXT, so I hung out there pretty much every waking moment when I was a kid) and so when id no longer needed the gear, he offered them to me.

We'd known each other a few years (and I'd been trusted with other id secrets including early software), so I don't think there was a trust issue and he felt fine with my promise that I wouldn't pass along anything I found on the disks. I still haven't, and I wouldn't without his permission. It has been a long time, so if there is anything of archival value that he'd be fine releasing, I'll leave that up to him.

I've kept them safe & sound all these years, but haven't done anything really useful with them. They really belong in a museum, or in a collector's hands, who will cherish them more than I would. I'd like to auction some/all of them off with the proceeds going to Child's Play, but if the Computer History Museum wants one or something, that'd be awesome too. Mostly, I don't want them to still gather dust at my house - they should be helping someone if they can.

I'm positive Romero (we still stay fairly close) would like this stuff, but it was Carmack I made the promise too, so I wouldn't give the data to Romero without Carmack's ok.

Happy to answer any other questions if people have them. They're pretty unique pieces of hardware, especially considering what NeXTStep has turned into (Mac OS X and iOS - you can still find NeXT strings in them) and what they built (DOOM and Quake) and what other famous NeXTs have done (created the web).

Also happy to take suggestions on good homes for them, if you have any.
Again, you confuse cause for the government to act against a defendent with choice of defendent, and also options of remedy with choice of remedy

In this case it is shown that a similar rate of crime occurred at the Motel 6 but the government did NOT choose to pursue that party. Instead they chose Motel Cass. similarly they had non-seizurre remedies but did not pursue those remedies.

Simply having the right to pursue an extreme option against any party they could choose did not make it right to pursue that option against this party. this is what people mean when they say "prosecutorial discretion" and why people are so incensed by the discretion shown here... and over and over by this DA.
Action | GamesBook.Info - Free Flash Games Online
Shortest Sudoku Solver in Python - How does it work?
If you read Reason (to steal a line from you), you know that laws prohibiting narcotics and prostitution are unethical and cause both activities to be more dangerous by forcing them underground.

It is beyond the power of U.S. attorneys to legalize either activity, but they are not beyond blame for enforcing unethical laws, and it is clearly baseless to blame private business for not helping them do so.
Oh man. You could've at least checked the YouTube video before venturing into accusations of incompetence. I mean, what the BALLS, dude? I'm supposed to keep my cool in communities like this? What is this baseless and graceless intellectual bravado? And I'm the bad guy because I use an intimate style and diction... Eesh, what I've been responding to in this thread, with this particular user, I think it is absolutely fair to say, has just been careless hubris. After I respond with, roughly: mitigating "div-itis and non-semantic classes" he rails me with "I don't think you know what X and Y are". He might as well have added "bro." Again, [BALLS](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C8GWIV4jzA).

You haven't even tested it, nor do you even really know what Stylish is, it seems, and you're arguing with conviction.

What am I doing here?
I would remove "i"/"I", or 1. I would similarly remove one of zero and the letter-o.

These can be confusing to people, depending on fonts.
Allow a 2 sentence summary to be displayed below the headline. With cryptic headlines it easy to click on headlines without really knowing whether the story might interest you.
Internet, HTTP, TCP/IP Concepts
I noticed that and wondered the same thing.
For now, upload doesn't work.
Agreed. It was the very first thing I looked for.

Even if there aren't enough ratings to be meaningful, seeing movies higher up or lower down than fans think they should be will encourage them to jump in and 'fix' things. :)
As someone who worked for one of the online poker sites doing bot detection and collusion investigation, I find your optimism amusing. It is certainly not over.
maybe they store a hash along your strongly encrypted file. this way they could go after copy-righted files accross the system once reported at the cost of quasi-decrypting some of your files. your really unique files would still be save although you might not want them to be able to timestamp proof your possession of these neither.
A pragmatic approach to dealing with interruptions whilst you are developing
Alright, as I had guessed, the case is against the real estate itself - not "the owners of the property".

"United States v. 434 Main Street, Tewksbury, Massachusetts"
You must try this if you like parsnips: https://gist.github.com/4575875 (replace the turnip with parsnip or use both)
It would be one thing perhaps if it was people selling weed out of their room but meth labs are actively dangerous. Crack dealers are not "nice people", they are generally well-armed and their customers are not always white Wall St. execs, they often are criminals (other-than-drug) themselves and that can endanger other motel guests, neighboring homes and businesses, and more.

Just because you believe there's nothing wrong with using drugs doesn't mean that current drug dealers are perfectly savory characters.
Senator Cornyn: Did Carmen Ortiz Aim To ‘Make An Example’ Of Aaron Swartz?
Videoclip for Hackers - Motion Tracking - Mind Tagging - Secret QR Codes
Civil forfeiture isn't even in the top 100 worst laws in widespread use. The laws that put millions of Americans in prison for insanely long prison terms, giving it the highest current incarceration rate of any modern country (slightly beating out the previous record holder, Stalin-era USSR) are much bigger problems than property seizure. I'd much rather have my car seized for stupid reasons, than be thrown in jail for stupid reasons.
None. But until Swartz committed suicide, I couldn't have named him either.
Visiting North Korea as a tourist is immoral. North Korea is one of the most brutal, repressive regimes in the history of the world. Inhumane conditions abound for the average North Korean and supporting such a vile regime is disgusting. Tourists who go there ought to be ashamed of themselves.
At this point, I trust the reporting of a local newspaper more than the claims of the US Attorney in Massachusetts. I'm glad that btilly pointed out your contradiction of TFA is based entirely on that latter, discredited source.
I've still got a NeXTStation Turbo Color and a NeXT Laser Printer as well; they both still work, although the disk in the Turbo Color is no longer bootable. So I'd love to take one of the systems off your hands, and it'd be really helpful if you've got a bootable drive so I could get mine running again. I used to own a Cube but sold that to another NeXT lover years ago. Would love to add another system to my collection.
It took them 6 years to release it. "Rush" may not be the proper term.
Title is a little misleading, as far as I can tell there are no aspect of this site that verify the users are scientists at all. If only there was a dating site that did, that let me filter my potential mates by how prestigious an institution they got their PhD from =)
The Changing Of The Enterprise Guard
I would have been generally inclined to agree with your view except for the closing line, which is why I quoted it. I don't know of any place in the world where $500k/year in profit with zero employees would be viewed as a modest goal.

He asks "what will people pay for?" Maybe just poor construction of an ESL speaker, but the title and other details look to me like he wants some easy answer handed to him. Even his earlier methodology was to email people he presumably felt should be in the know and ask for "pain points". If you can find one, yes, sometimes people manage to get big returns. But if finding a "pain point" and, moreover, good solution for it were as easy asking, I imagine we would all be millionaires.

Further, I don't know what difference you think there is between "needs some motivation" and "lazy". I don't get your point B at all.
"Little to no commercial value?"

This is one thing is was absolutely correct: those articles had almost no chance of being sold at $20 a piece. In fact, the commercial value has little to do with the articles themselves, since JSTOR and journal publishers make the bulk of their money from subscriptions, which libraries will pay for regardless of the availability of articles by other means, and by offering search services, which Aaron was not preparing to offer. The claim that Aaron's plan would have caused any measurable harm to JSTOR or any of the publishers it contracts is dubious.

It is also worth noting that the government is not supposed to be in the business of indiscriminately protecting commercial interests. Even if we assume that sharing these articles via BitTorrent would have damaged JSTOR's business, so what? The purpose of academic publishers in our society is to make knowledge available on a widespread basis, and if BitTorrent does a better job we should have switched to BitTorrent long ago. Academic publishers are not like the RIAA or MPAA; where the music and movie businesses can claim that their profits pay for the entertainment they release, journal publishers cannot make such a claim, because the research they publish is paid for by someone else, the peer review process is voluntary, and many journals even have volunteer editors.

I agree that the characterization of Aaron's behavior as a "college prank" is unrealistic; a better characterization would have been "heroic."
This is an interesting video with an alternate explanation - the pressure required to get water to the top of the tree. Normally you can only suck a water column up 10 meters, and that's using a perfect vacuum - but trees can grow higher than that. The secret sauce is that in a liquid rather than a gas, you can have a negative pressure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BickMFHAZR0
No problem. It's great to get your opinion from a brand new user's perspective. We don't want to build a product we think people will want. Instead we want to help businesses be more profitable and improve their processes. To do this we really need to userstand our markets and messages. Our plan is to review all the feedback, implement and then post on Hacker News when the next iteration that addresses some of the comments is available.
They are not law enforcement. There is nothing reasonable they could do to enforce the law on their property that is by its very nature open to anyone in the public. If law enforcement knew of drug activity, why weren't they able to stop it? The owners of the motel have much less legal recourse than the police do.

More generally, a "service provider" (taken loosely) has no obligation to act as law enforcement of its service. An ISP knows illegal activity happens over its lines, and it profits from it. They have no obligation, nor the power, to police their lines in a manner that would make them immune from this sort of forfeiture.
"There are places like this all over America and they're all neighborhood blights that need to be shut down"

In NYC, it's the Hotel Carter:

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgBE1L8_WUs

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCQ8_LkkaW0
> As a good parallel, see Firefox's incompatible Audio Data API, produced just as the Webkit-born Web Audio API was picking up steam.

Wait, what? Audio Data was implemented in mid 2010 - way, way before Web Audio existed. Links:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Audio_Data_API
http://www.w3.org/standards/history/webaudio

Is there something incorrect in either of those, or some prior history to WebAudio I am not aware of?
Ding, Ding, Ding.

I was enraged at first but when I had this same thought, it changed my mind.

Truth is, it would be bad for business if Caswell took an activist approach towards cleaning up his property. Or at the very least, he believes it would be bad or else you'd think he'd have done it by now. He does, after all, live on the premises.

All this "behind closed doors." Sure, wink wink, nod nod.

Perhaps the gov't needs to build more of a paper-trail (assuming the news article I read was correct that this guy has not had any formal issues renewing various licenses and such) but yeah, you don't get to profit off of criminal activity and not expect the public to do something about it.
Yes we have an API on our roadmap but no exact date of release yet I'm afraid. Still fixing some fundamentals :-) I'm keen to keep abreast of your tool too.
It filters by whether or not you want to date a scientist ... should be sufficient.
I do read reason. I think marijuana should be completely legalized and sold like liquor is. I think we may end up having to regulate narcotics instead of criminalizing them. I think total bans on prostitution don't make much sense.

But I also think that meth labs, street-level hand-to-hand narcotics trading, and street-level prostitution are illegal for good reason.
Encrypting files at rest means nothing if the data and keys aren't separate. It's just compliance/PR fluff.
Speaking of discredited sources, the local newspaper is just reprinting a slight gloss on a press release from a group with a clear political axe to grind (a Koch-funded libertarian advocacy group representing the motel owners). I guess the judge hearing the case will have to sort out which side's version is more accurate.
I'm curious about the 'made in new zealand' line in the footer. Was there an NZ dev team involved? I'd love to know who.
Since apparently I can't reply at that depth:

10th: there is no Federal interest here. Any assertion of justification by nexus would be laughable: these crimes are by users and end-sellers. If the US attorney had evidence of an ongoing interstate operation then they ought to bust that, not the hotel.

5th: I find it hard to describe "heads I win, tails you lose" as due process. If they had not gained outside support, fighting this suit would bankrupt them. I realize that there is no ideal solution to that quandary, but as a result we must prosecutorial discretion to a very high standard.
why do you think it should be illegal for the US
Attorney's office to file a civil suit against the
owners of a property that appears to be instrumental
in the narcotics and vice trade of a whole township?

How does the US Attorney get standing here? All other issues aside, shouldn't it be the MA Attorney General suing?
In fact reverse engineering is probably a strategic mission for them so I wouldn't expect China to criminalize it or anything close.

The Soviets were famous for cloning a WWII bomber (B-29) based on just 3 samples that had emergency landed in Soviet territory during WWII.
US law seems absolutely insane.
It looks very long. 522 pages. I wish there is a smaller one.Any suggestions?