skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are violent video games everywhere where kids are wealthy enough to buy them. While games are blamed everywhere some societies are more violent than others. Why isn't any discussion about violent video games international?

Also, gun violence actually decreased in the US since the late 80s, before the release of Wolfenstein and Doom so
BNFC is a compiler front end generator for labeled bnf grammars that can generate parsers and traversers for various languages. It uses Labaled BNF grammar. I'm not sure what the difference to regular grammars is since I only used this and it was a while ago. Some added expressiveness anyway:

http://bnfc.digitalgrammars.com/
Show HN: Video For Our New Startup, Listnerd.com
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clT3eaRXnH8

Hey guys, we just finished the video for our new startup, Listnerd.com - and we'd love your take on it.

Listnerd is a startup that grew out of our passion for everything lists. At Listnerd, you can create interactive lists that you can share with your friends.

Anyhoo, video above. Any and all criticism greatly welcome!
This article treats dating culture of people my age as if it is something that needs fixing. The happiest people I know met by "hanging out."
I'm glad you like the concept. The requests you get, what kind of solutions are they usually looking for? Or more precisely, what are their pain points?

As for more info, I'm starting with CentOS/RHEL 5 and 6 on AWS hardened to comply as much as possible with the US government accreditation policies (DISA STIG's for starters). As RHEL is the most common Linux OS for companies that have explicit security requirements, I figured I'd start there. They also have good support from projects like OpenSCAP and Aqueduct.

I likely wont start with any stack hardening so no apache/nginx hardening mostly because its not what I'm best at.

Every image will have complete documentation as to every configuration change available on the website for free to anyone.

I'm not planning on being in the system maintenance side of things (partially because I don't want to be liable for someone getting hacked) so I'm currently tossing around the pricing as a one time cost for initial configuration and then additional options for support (and consulting with those who want it).

If you have any requests/recommendations/suggestions/feedback, I'd love to hear them.
Clickable link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clT3eaRXnH8
For those interested, the "application_nginx" cookbook for Chef does just this. It can configure upstream servers based on role very easily.
I find it odd that everyone here is pointing fingers at edw519 for his 1 comment on that thread, when there were several comments from tptacek that I think did far more to sway public opinion at the time.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529706
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529716
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529781
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529799
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529809
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529855
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529883
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529965

In the abstract he had very valid points, but in the context of that specific thread I think he did a pretty effective job at convincing people that

* Aaron did something wrong
* JSTOR backing out doesn't really mean anything
* the prosecution is justified in trying to make an example of him
* Aaron probably won't serve serious time, this is just a scare tactic
Is there any precedent to bar certain types of criminal investigations due to civil liberty concerns? I can imagine implementing stricter requirements but I'm at a loss completely barring certain investigations.
> But the breadth and vagueness of the existing law...

My point is this: of necessity, most laws are broad and vague, and it relies on judges to build the necessary case law to interpret it.

The current law absolutely needs to be addressed, but 'computer law' will always be 10 steps behind the technology. The much bigger issue is the fundamentally flawed, inhumane and insanely expensive US justice system.
Not to mention it was the top comment

You say this as if it was the fault of the poster. Why did HN in general not upvote another, more positive comment? WTF kind of witch hunt is this even? I don't like the comment either, but cut it out, all of you.
Great stuff, ta for the link. This bit is amazing:

"It happens that the appointed lawyer was someone of considerable reputation and experience, but the feds neutralized the appointed lawyer’s skill by pouring more than 360,000 pages of disorganized documents onto him"
I'm actually curious, I'm not just trying to market whatever this is. No one knows?
Computers, communications, and various corrupting incentives have made it easy and painless for government organizations to hammer the protruding nail.
I'm not sure, at least in Swartz's case, you can fault the judiciary for not exercising it's ultimate discretion over punishment when no judge ever got to make that call.
>But what really put a crimp in Dell has been their dependence on Microsoft and Intel.

How so? Nos.1 (HP) and 2 (Lenovo) are both basically 'Wintel' shops. Their dependence on Windows and Intel hasn't crimped them.
Funny. Due to a CDN error yesterday I was forced to use GMail on HTML mode.

Guess what? Even after the problem has been fixed I'm still on HTML mode. It is so much faster, and more responsive than the javascript version.

Why people make complex javascript frontends, I will never understand.
Vindictive prosecutions intended to "set an example" or "send a message" are simply cloaked ambition. And end up destroying lives.
Ya, grammar only describes the syntax of a language. You still have the semantics and pragmatics to consider!

I'm not even sure if a XBNF is the best way to describe or reason about language syntax. Precedence grammars (with hacks to handle braces) are quite interesting for robust error tolerant parsing, and might more closely mirror how we internal grammars in our head.
irony much?
You're too emotional to ration with. I hope you stop displacing anger in every which way.
It's possible to believe you're doing something right and still be acting against the rules.

Let's just imagine -- completely hypothetically, of course -- that I recently wrote a crawler specifically designed to rescue client websites from a terrible DIY website service (which might or might not be Jimdo). Let's imagine it was tuned to load Jimdo-related assets (or the assets of a similar service), fix broken code, etc.; I'm pretty sure this would have been against Jimdo's rules (or the rules of a related service, if I had done such a thing, which, surely, I did not), but let's say I did it anyway because I think it's reprehensible that they don't provide a way for their customers to export their websites.

It's possible that I could have found myself on the pointy end of an expensive lawsuit over something like this. It's possible that I would have broken some laws that I am unaware of, had I done that -- and, had I done that, it would only weaken my case further to claim foreknowledge of the laws being broken. It's likely that there are laws which could be loosely enough interpreted to make me guilty of some form of "hacking". (And it would be most certainly utterly stupid to even consider leaving a comment like this under my regular username -- if, of course, I had done such a thing. Fortunately, as HN occasionally reminds me, I'm not competent enough to have done something like this.)

But there's no way I'd ever say that I did something "wrong", and there's no way I would have asked for Jimdo's permission to do something like that. I simply knew what the rules were, and I believed it was the rules, not I, that were wrong.
Office Hours for Startups with Stanford Behavioral Scientist
I would have actually appreciated more your comment above, then that cold press release.
This is true (especially: breaking vectorization). But premature optimization is not a good idea, and if you are doing real optimization, you are going to rewrite that piece of code 10 times anyway, so it is in a different class of problem and the putty stuff I was saying before does not apply (i.e. this code is in the 1% or so of the codebase that is highly performance-sensitive).

Optimized code is just a different thing from general code (if one is a productive programmer).
Yes. This is just a fragment of a much larger problem.
Are you trying to build 1984 society here?
you can't change anything without critical mass. it usually takes a national disaster or profound fear of something to mobilize support for popular change. depending on your point of view, that's either a feature or fault of our society.
I don't think we're actually in disagreement. The point I'm trying to make is that the risk and timescale are more important factors than the yield. You chose the highest yield investment you could find with the liquidity and stability you needed. The yield was not your primary concern--it almost never is.
No, but it's reasonable to assume those details, while secret, were plausible in a system that has time and again proved itself irrational and unfair.

You are asking people to not jump to conclusions about people who jumped to conclusions.
My best guess is that it may be to avoid polluting a future jury.
Michael Arrington has written his share of trollish articles, but this is just mean spirited. I have a hard time remembering anything so hypocritical and hindsight-biased written after someone's death.

I will do my best to avoid reading anything written by Arrington from now on.
I think many people in power got scared by the power he wielded in the SOPA/PIPA debate, which put a lot of pressure on getting him out of the scene. The AG was all too happy to acquiesce.
Was using Dropmark for sharing designs, but after seeing Flatsies I'm tempted to switch.
And yet it had already cost him 2 years of his life and millions of dollars.

I should amend the comment to read "justice system", but judges are ultimately responsible for the fair and equitable operation of their courts.

That is clearly not happening.
Yup. Male privilege exists and is real (and unfair), yet it is also true that gender norms can harm men. It's a shame so many folks act like the truth of one of those statements disproves the other. I guess the combined statement is too subtle to fit in a sound bite or rallying cry.
> "Please remember that there are sources of help if you’re troubled including Reddit..."

ಠ_ಠ
That perspective is only relevant if you've already decided that skill and intelligence trump the legal and ethical implications of your behavior.
I don't. If you get that correlation, and it is helping you with your branding, then I guess good for you. I just feel that this article is off topic for HN.
Why not adding a comment to make that clear?
Killer office space 2 blocks from BART, need to rent it out
Hello HN,

2600hz is moving to a new office and our office is going up on the market. We're going to be taking a larger space in the same building, but our landlord wants us to fil our old space as a condition of the move.

Our office is 2 blocks from Montgomery BART (just off new montgomery) and we currently have about 25 people in there. Rent is insanely cheap for the space ($4k per month) and the location can't be beat.

If this sounds like something you're interested in you can reach me at pr@2600hz.com. We'd love to bring some more hackers to SF!!

Email me for more info!! Thanks and happy hacking!

-Josh
/r/suicidewatch can actually be a great resource. Of course, the danger with Reddit is that you get lost on the way there.
dalke mentioned some good examples.

In our case, the most annoying problem we had was that the entire run would sometimes just hang. I'm not aware that the problem was tracked down, but the author suspected some race condition in the MPI library that caused some message to get lost and thus some task to wait indefinitely.
I've never liked this argument. "Fuzzy" always helps prosecutors (unless the defense can argue that it's so fuzzy it's unconstitutional, which is pretty hard), because the prosecutor gets to choose who goes to court in criminal cases of first impression. They find someone with insufficient resources to mount a vigorous defense who happens to be wildly unsympathetic and the judge and the jury will make the contortions necessary to put them in prison -- and then that precedent sets the stage for the next prosecution.

Make the law clear and some defendant will get off on a technicality, but only once, then you fix the loophole. Over time the law evolves to more accurately reflect congressional intent as they pass patches to fix bugs, instead of leaving it to the courts and the biases (like prosecutors choosing who to prosecute when they want a precedent) that come along with that.
What Should We Be Worried About? History And Contingency
Aaron Swartz's crime and the business of breaking the law
The idea of criminalizing "computer fraud" (i.e. breaking into Amazon's servers to have it mail you expensive products without paying or to steal credit card numbers) is not objectionable.

What I don't understand is why we need a separate law against "computer fraud", when we already have laws against, well, fraud. In the scenario you describe, in a sane legal system, the person who broke into Amazon's servers would be prosecuted for fraud, period. The fact that the fraud was committed using computers would merely be one of the facts of the case, not a reason for an additional charge.
This looks really slick. Probably worth thinking about building some kind of tour, or explanation of how it works. The screenshot is beautiful, but may be insufficient to get people to sign up just to learn more.
Parse is looking for a Designer to build beautiful interfaces
The store in Windows 8 isn't only for Metro apps, it has desktop apps too, the only difference is the store handles the discovery but doesn't handle the install of the desktop apps.
I'll be honest, I thought the same thing as Ed originally.

It's a tragic story and I'm sure there is much to learn but let the family grieve rather than make click bait and throw people to the wolves ( ironically what this article is commenting on)
They don't fade away in Chrome because he's using a pseudo-element in the form of content: attr(title). Gecko supports transitions on generated content and WebKit does not.

Also, looking at the ::selection example, it should mentioned that it's not safe to group vendor prefixes in the selector portion of a declaration block, as, unlike with properties, the whole block will be skipped if an unrecognized selector is encountered by a UA's CSS parser.
> In the Wake of Aaron Swartz's Death, Let's Fix Draconian Computer Crime Law

I think this is an unfortunate attitude to have. When such an event happens, it's easy to become blinded by emotions - and makes it more difficult to make rational, reasonable decisions.

Let's think about this calmly, logically, and with a level-head. Let's not have the reputation of making decisions that are emotionally driven.
> I suspect you may have meant that edw519 is at fault for his specific action (commenting that he thought Aaron should accept the consequences) not for thinking that Aaron should have accepted the consequences?

Yes, exactly, with the caveat that I'm absolutely not putting Ed "at fault" for anything here -- I'm talking about comments like that one, in general.

Everybody judges things, we on HN perhaps most of all. That's fine, it's part of our nature. However, we really need to think it over before we declare our judgement in a comment on a public forum, especially when it's likely that we aren't fully aware of the situation we're judging.

> If that's the case then my comment will not have been particularly relevant, sorry about that.

Hey man, no worries. Glad we got it sorted.
Yes, true. Why not?
Great! Next step, programming in the Diwali style of Arabic script[1]. This is one of the amazing forms of Arabic calligraphy that often graces classical Arabic architecture and other works of art. Because really, don't we all want software that looks like this[2]? ;-)

Unfortunately, I understand that Diwali takes sufficient liberties with the forms of written Arabic that it's often very hard to comprehend even for those highly literate in Arabic.

[1] http://islamic-arts.org/2012/arabic-calligraphy-and-type-des...
[2] http://www.typotheque.com/images/articles/thuraya/02.jpg
She needs to be removed. There was no proportionality to he actions.
Been there, tried that. Dinnae work.
Articles have never been downvotable, only flaggable.
Well, any time you have conflicting libraries, you have a potential monkeypatching conflict, but depending on the case, you might want to implement a method, but only if it hasn't been implemented yet. For example, consider that we have our application, and it uses the "foo" library (which provides a "bar") method, but it might also use the "baz" library (which provides an optimized "bar") if baz is installed.

Currently, you have to attempt to load baz before you load foo, and then not load foo's implementation of bar, if baz loaded successfully. In the future, you could just prepend foo, and so if baz was already loaded, it doesn't overwrite its optimized implementation. If baz wasn't loaded, then when it does load, it would overwrite the prepended implementation properly.

This just frees you up from having to worry so much about load order. It's not a huge feature, but it's a nice little quality-of-life change.
I think this is a bummer: the case was dismissed, it seems, because he died. This seems to leave his good name in limbo. I was really hoping to read that the case had been dismissed based on further review of the evidence, was found to be without ground, or whatever legal speak that said the case was invalid, was withdrawn or thrown out, and cleared his name.

Instead we get a the-courts-are-clearing-the-docket dismissal. I understand that, in the view of the courts, this is a routine matter. And that's a bummer.
Please taste your own medicine.

Your comment is way more aggressive than the comments tptacek and edw519 made 119 days ago.

What if your comment gets upvoted and then tptacek or edw519 end up with suicide -- who would you be then?
Of course, and that starting point encapsulates much that is good (easy to extend HTML by mixing in some code, quick to get started, zero deployment hassles) and bad (easy to mix content and code, easy to start without thinking about the bigger picture or planning your app, easy to make mistakes like exposing your db password to the world because of a permissions issue say) about PHP.
Agreed, this is part of why we have judges! Besides, if you think law is a tortured convoluted process today- just wait until we try to write it to explicitly handle every possible corner case.

The reason our laws have held up fairly well thus far is because they are vague. For example, the "reasonable person" clauses. What is considered reasonable changes with time. Do you really want to have to re-write all the laws centered around "reasonable person" every couple decades?

Remember, the legal system is not a computer. It doesn't necessarily make sense to approach it like one. Many of us here are programmers, and sometimes it shows.
Does anyone know of a quality basics guide for HAProxy?
Thanks, yes you're definitely right. I'm going to do a short video tour at some point.
Fair enough, thanks for you're follow-up!
Cool project,

one nit in the description:
"The name قلب is pronounced 'alb "

in standard arabic, it is actually "qalb", some dialects happen to drop the q sound
But if Obama claims the law prohibiting drugs is unconstitutionally broad and shouldn't be enforced, he couldn't justify prosecuting the Mexican drug cartels for selling drugs either. And I don't think he wants to go that far toward drug legalization, given what his position has been on this subject so far (he's waged the "war on drugs" as actively as his predecessors have).
I'm not even clear that it's clear I didn't understand your point. I guess I have trouble communicating effectively. I thought your point was that flexible control flow structures like if-else allow you to change code quickly and more easily in the future. Wasn't that the point?

Assuming I have understood your preference for flexible code, I am simply stating my belief that it is useful to balance this with rigid code. Sometimes the flexible code is simpler, easier to read and write, and more maintainable, sometimes the rigid code is simpler, easier to read and write, and more maintainable. It depends on what you are trying to do. In this particular case I prefer the ?:.

The assembly argument was based on a notion I had that any time you use something more complicated than test and branch for control flow you are introducing rigidity into your code. Often this lets you be productive too; switch statements are a good example.

And lastly, let's assume I am 14 years old. Is that really the way a wise teacher talks to the young and inexperienced? My favorite teachers ask questions to check and help deepen my understanding, and sometimes it's revealed that they're learning something too.
Will this work at full resolution on Macbook Air 2012?
The irony is that whilst they're best known for protecting the President and other dignitaries, that they do so is the historical quirk and has nothing to do with what they were originally set up to do. From what I can tell, even today, their primary focus in terms of manpower is on fraud and counterfeiting, even if it's not their most visible side.
Maybe you have heard of The Underground Railroad? Or "Separate but equal" policies and the movements which nonviolently opposed them? Or the United States of America, which was born of disagreement with the rules of the time?

Laws and rules are written by humans. Sometimes other humans don't agree with the rules as they are currently and try to make the world a better place. Sometimes they succeed. Sometimes they fail.
CryptoSeal (YC S11) Offers VPN As A Service
I'm not sure I get it... analytics for server side?
Well, hopefully the next time that you feel like making a 'meh' comment, you will at least consider whether you're making a positive contribution.

Ed made a comment that was pretty harsh, although true given the information available at the time, and is now being singled out by Techcrunch and the rest of the HN community. Of course, in fine HN tradition everybody is now jumping on Ed in exactly the same way that he jumped on Aaron at the time.

I keep remembering Tim Bray's adage that "A change in perspective is worth 40 IQ points." The average HN user has 40 IQ points more now than Ed when he wrote that comment - I don't think they have more than 40 over the current Ed.

Also note that tptacek seems to have been driven away too - hopefully not permanently.
In all sincerity, "number of Acts passed" is a terrible metric. Like measuring the success of a new plane design by how many tons are being added per year.

2011 and 2012 are outliers for a simple reason: the Carbon tax was being first passed into law and then frequently amended.

The Australian Constitution requires that legislation dealing with appropriations / taxation only deal with that subject. Historical judgements by the High Court mean that every new tax is broken down into lots of little interlocking Acts with very narrow purposes, to prevent a whole scheme being knocked out in a High Court ruling.

You'll find a bump in 1999 Acts because of the GST, for example.
Very cool, how did you get the list of all the school names? Very impressive as a student myself.
Pinch this picture on your iPad, I double dare you
how is this innovative? It's like 2D pixelart Portal...
Apologize for what?

These were balanced comments, considering information available at the time.
US justice system ‘overreach’ blamed in suicide of Internet freedom activist
In normal conditions, I agree with you. but if you see this tool as an ability to improve the UX, it's a miracle. I can't imagine a better way to find out design problems.