skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I actually know someone who works for DOJ and isn't insane.

The problem with prosecutors is that they'd better know where that line between 'appropriate' and 'inappropriate' is, and if they're looking for magic words in poorly-worded statutes for their Trump Card, they've failed in their duty.

Until the public is willing to call foul on these people, this practice will continue. Until the Congress (and state legislatures, who are somewhat less competent on the whole0 can get THEIR acts together, they need to look at everything they right from the perspective of a rogue prosecutor.

That's tough, but, crap, you take a government job, you get saddled with some hard work from time to time.
What kind of unreal world are you living in? Do you deal with normal programmers, you know, the kind who don't read HN and are more interested in their paycheck? The kind that are normal employees and not geeky?

For them, Git is a mystery that just doesn't seem to be able to be mastered, no matter how much reading, training and practice you get them to do. I spend my life consulting with such firms and I've introduced Git to each, but only at one have they managed to keep using it without screwups.

Anything that would simplify Git for the ordinary mortal human being, who wants to use it for team collaboration and to have a change history and a branching/merging model that works (unlike SVN), would be greatly welcomed. As it stands it's great for uber-coders/HN readers (those it was designed for), but for normal people...
I know, did this at home and started yelling at my laptop shortly after. Got better, am using the keys nowadays, when using vim.

But non the less, the logic didn't register with me. (something like clockwise/counter-clockwise, or anything remotely recognizable ;-) )
"This type of software should never be used without prior permission of the system administrator, because it can cause a system to crash."

Remind me to never, ever use Omnivox, or any Skytech software, ever.
The Silicon Valley Elite Need A Culture Of Duty
She is a type or a personification of craziness and out of control incentives and culture that has been going on at the DOJ. I don't have a problems mentioning her name over and over, firing her, whatever it takes in the hopes that the issue will get a bigger attention.
Brewster Kahle was at MIT in 1982. I get the impression that MIT was gradually locked down. For example, prof Jerry Lettvin said, "Up to about 1950's there was a kind of freedom in the scientific world — certainly at MIT — that allowed you to play games of all sorts. As two or three decades went by MIT was taken over by managers." (http://www.tengerresearch.com/learn/interviews/jeromelettvin...)

And as the internet became important to business interests, it's not that surprising that these crimes became more harshly punished. (Though there's the argument that these punishments should be relaxed in some cases because elite CEOs and technologists have been guilty of them as part of their educations. Like Steve Jobs, Tufte, etc. Not unlike presidents getting away with drug use. And there's a conflict between businesses about intellectual property; Google probably would be happy if they could open up books.)
Maybe the right response would be to legally punish - by fine - both parties.

After all, there is private data insufficiently safeguarded. Some poor girl could end up getting stalked if the right kind of sleeze came across this.
On a side note, stackexchange is getting pretty impressive.

http://stackexchange.com/sites
Yes, as someone who really likes Ruby, this is probably my least favourite thing about it — the messy profusion of subtly-different functiony things (Procs, blocks, methods, ...).
It's worse than that, because in regular civil case, the burden of proof is lower, but still the plaintiff has to initiate the proceedings and bring proof. With civil forfeiture, pretty much all police needs is a suspicion, and it can be as much as "he has too much cash, it's suspicious" or "you lent a car to a person we suspected in a crime" - and the cash or the car is forfeited. And then you need to initiate proceedings and pay the lawyers - and if you fail to jump through all the hoops, they keep the property by default. It is nothing short of legal robbery.
Kickstarter loves films. Seriously, just look at these ridiculous numbers
Auto-Forwarding Carousels and Accordions Annoy Users and Reduce Visibility
The irony is that they're excellent for preventing aerosol droplets filled with virus from the wearer. Wearing one when infected is therefore responsible.
If it was just her, she would have already been assassinated; the cops would have shook their heads and turned a blind eye because hey, she did need killin'.

By getting mad at her personally, you are in effect becoming Timothy McVeigh. He took out an entire building full of feds and nothing happened. I'm not even sure that carpet nuking Washington, D.C. would put a dent in federal overreach. It's a mass social movement, not a breakdown of part of the system.
This is one of the think that makes my blood boil, when I imagine taxpayer-paid functionary whose whole job is to look for citizens that can be legally robbed by the government. Overzealously prosecuting is one thing, that at least can be considered as wanting to do the right thing and going too far. But this is evil, plain and simple.
The problem with Gladwell is that many or most of the anecdotes he uses have been used by others to draw different conclusions (how many times have you read about the Tenerife disaster for example?)

I don't think Gladwell pretends to be doing science, but what he does is worse than "non-science", it's a kind of charlatanism. He builds a thesis and then hand-picks anecdotes to fit his preconceived narrative.

That's how chain-letters are made. (And his talent as a writer makes it worse.)
How many Rust libraries are there for various tasks? What IDE supports Rust? What tutorials, books and conferences exist that teach and distribute the state of the art in development techniques? What example projects have been build in it to demonstrate its feasibility for large projects? What tools support Rust (continuous integration, code formatting/checking, build tools, ...)?
When I first heard about Carmen Ortiz, I realised there was very, very little I could do about it, given I am not a U.S. citizen.

A few days later, more out of frustration, I created the following meme:

http://memecrunch.com/meme/DV7N/carmen-ortiz-for-great-justi...

Image is here:

http://memecrunch.com/meme/DV7N/carmen-ortiz-for-great-justi...

Hopefully someone here finds it darkly amusing.
I liked how you put your perception about HN and in particular this part of your post -

In my opinion, it’s not the fact that people here are
skilled enough to comment on the various topics that
makes it special. That people here have the ability to
think in more creative and vivid ways and have diverse
opinions (some not always correct, as seen in the case of
'misfits') makes Hacker News an interesting place.

I also think you are quite mature to play "I'm a Kid" card (take this as a compliment). Good luck!
Thanks! This is excellent and I'm now a follower!
Is there are a more extensive article around somewhere, which describes the advantages of Leiningen? Looking at the documentation it does not look that great.
RubyJS creator here. I was just missing so many (native) methods in javascript. i liked the standard library of javascript and there is an extensive public ruby testsuite that i could use to test my implementation against. Plus i liked the idea of taking something that already works elsewhere and translate it JS, instead of coming up with my own API. IMO it's the same as using underscore/lodash, stringjs, etc, just all in the same library with the same coding standards and interoperability between classes.
While marketing/buzz might be one of the motivations, another factor could simply be Brin wanting a first-hand look at what every day, quick to quip, New Yorkers think of his new accoutrement. This research might be something he could delegate to others, but I respect that he doesn't.
> The president of the company is the one who allegedly intimidated the student into signing a NDA

Missed that part - now it makes me think back on my suggestion. Probably, he should just look around on HN. :-)
They are surgical masks worn as a courtesy by people who have a cold, so as not to infect others around them. In that sense they do work effectively...
The guy talks about himself in the same breathless manner as Apple's marketing. Hubris comes to mind ...
In my experience NFS is fine as long as the traffic does not need to traverse a WAN link. The problem, as I see it, is that once something is available via NFS everyone wants to mount it from everywhere. NFS simply does not deal well with high RTT connections.
Yes, Finland.

Maybe it's because all of our schools are public?
For example higher ed. providers are funded based on enrollment and rate of graduation. If someone does not graduate, significant chunk (20-30%) of money won't be paid at all. This creates some incentive for the institution to actually guide and see that people don't fall through all kinds of cracks. I guess it's necessary when there is no ordinary paying customer relationship involved.
> "My friend Dudley Wright suggested ‘Au Fait,’ which means ‘It is done’ in French."

Hum... no, it doesn't.

(For one, it should be spelled "Au fait" -- you don't capitalize every word in French, even in a title).

And it either means "by the way" if used at the beginning of a sentence, or "let's get to the point" if used in "venons-en au fait" (the "fait" is the "point"). This is sometimes shortened as "au fait!", said in an imperative tone.

I like the drawings very much, though.
You're arguing a straw man here. bcoates is saying, and I agree, that the usual examples being given on how horrible C++ is, are not idiomatic C++ and are used only by people who don't have any experience using C++. Of course it's easy to come up with examples of when things might go wrong. C++ is a powerful language, and with great power comes great responsibility, pardon the pompousness of that phrasing. C++ isn't perfect by a long shot, but the reasons brought forth in the OP and most of this discussion are not examples of real problems.
Laces.js - Provides the M in MVC, while you tie the rest
Vikings Navigated With Translucent Crystals?
Apple iPhone Math rumored to be revealed in June with a 4.8-inch display
Gamma-ray burst 'hit Earth in 8th Century'
Too small; didn't read.

Raganwald needs to forget the font-size attribute.
HTTP calls for client side validation? That's a great idea!
Crazy Blind Daters' Identities are Not So Hidden
That is not dead which can eternal lie
And with strange aeons even death may die
It is spam. This is a community site. You've made an account and within the first hour started promoting yourself without engaging in the community as a whole. The only reason you posted was to get hits. Ergo, spam.

Looking through your submissions the only submission you've had is for your game. The only thread you've participated in any discussion in is this one. You deliberately used your age as linkbait.

Try interacting with the community in a genuine way first before promoting yourself and I won't accuse you of spamming or being a spammer.
Why in god's name would Google index a site if there was no benefit in it for them? The whole point of the relationship between search engines and sites that allow indexing is that it's mutually strictly beneficial (otherwise one party would pull out of the transaction since neither party is forced to remain in the relationship). I'm a little flabbergasted that it's necessary to describe how a transaction works in an HN thread, given that it's probably the single most fundamental unit of even the most basic economics. The "shade of grey" you're referring to is forcing Google to index the site and forcing them to pay to do so (in essence, mandating that a private corporation enter into a transaction against their will).

"So basically your position is binary: Either don't license your movie's streaming rights to Netflix, or accept that they're going to profit from it."

You may want to think through your statements a step or two further before throwing around accusations of ignorance.
The only one who should be allowed to be too big to fail is the government itself. The logical conclusion is that everything which should be really big should be owned by the government. Then win and loss is for the society as a whole.
Installing a 10” Touch Screen on the Raspberry
That's fair, but it's still not a $100 million investment.
> I am never going to play the "I'm-a-kid" card, because in my opinion my work (not just articles from my blog, I also develop software that I like to show around on HN) are a result of my hardwork, and I think they deserve competing with set standards, and it'd be belittling to have them receive positive feedback just because they were submitted by a "kid"

Brilliant. I've just come from the linkbait thread where a 14 year old who's never been part of the HN community and is still only posting in that thread is playing the just a kid card pretty hard.
AWS Command Line Interface (Developer Preview)
So I'm guessing it's the one about an iPhone app?
Because sometimes for loops are useful. It's no use trying to list up all use cases of for that are safe and/or useful, and prohibit those that aren't. There is a trade off between designing all sorts of safety checks into a language and raw power, and C++ mostly errs on the side of raw power. Which is largely why it's so prevalent and dominant.

I own a pneumatic nail gun that has two rather rudimentary safety features in the form of a trigger lock and a switch near the end of the 'barrel' the prevents it from being activated without the barrel pressing against something (in normal use, the wood you're nailing). It's rudimentary and still accidents happen with nail guns. I sometimes purposely circumvent the safety measures to get something done, e.g. when I'm shooting nails under a weird angle. It would be possible to think of many more safety features - allowing the gun to be operated only when activated with two hands (preventing one from shooting in one's hand), having all sorts of electronics that detect the surface that is being shot into, etc. Not a single one of guns would get sold because they cripple the way you work too much to be convenient.
I think the college administrators are bullying this student because they are embarrassed.

The threats by the Skytech CEO Edouard Taza; the college not allowing the professors to hear the student before voting; his transcripts vandalized with zeroes so he cannot continue his studies elsewhere... What exactly is the relationship between Skytech and this college?

I've signed the petition to reinstate Hamed:

http://www.hamedhelped.com/petition/

Hamed, stick to your guns. You did the right thing.
Evidently the corollary to Arthur C Clarke's famous quote on technology and magic is that those who create it are witches and wizards.

You like the magic and you need a few practitioners but when things start getting weird, it's pitchfork o'clock.
The Windows interface used to be clean and usable. Then they saw Mac OS X's Aqua and panicked, scrambled and came up with the turd that's XP, losing the "clean"; kept polishing that turd and came up with Aero in Vista, losing the "usable". It's a cautionary tale. With Metro Microsoft is at least getting the "clean" back, maybe the next iteration will bring back "usable". One can always hope.
I also know who drew the linked comic: Simon Peyton Jones, the only person on planet Earth who still makes use of the Comic Sans font in 2013.
One of my favorite Help-desk anecdote is the one with the user complaining about hard drive being full because there isn't any space left. On the screen that is. I really love the interpretation.

Personally I don't think folders are good, they're 'early-on' categorization that scales badly. Somewhere down the road you'll wanna have easy access to a diagonal query against all things of date D, type T, name 'N'. Nowadays tags should be the main interaction point, folders being an predefined and indexed query. Additional queries allowed(), and maybe suggested based on navigation patterns.

() Microsoft tried 'virtual' folders, but I never got them to work ~_~;
Yup. And it's been that way since the '80s. Welcome to the drug war.

Today's quiz in remedial civics: what happens when law enforcement gains the power to control their own funding depending on the way they enforce the law.

P.S. If you'd like a bit of disheartening theater, read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_v._$124,700
Does your Sun keyboard have a "Stop" key? I seem to remember that for about 99% of the Sun machines I encountered hitting "Stop A" was pretty obnoxious.
A good read for sure. It's not just a style, in order to differentiate themselves from Apple, MS and Google went with the 'digital' or 'flat' design. We can argue if they ever even could, were it not for Apple and the iPhone, but 'flat dsign' works really well! The biggest winner is the user. We're seeing a "maturing" of mobile design. I can't wait to see Apple's response.
Oh, nonsense. It's entirely about the argument's validity, and this bit about the source's trustworthiness is a red herring. Is this "source" claiming to reveal secret information about Google's being a big ad business we can't verify for ourselves and that would change our minds if we decide that he can be trusted?

Nothing of the sort. He's expressing an opinion about things that nobody disputes. Calling him a hypocrite means you don't like his opinion and think that calling him names is a good way to weaken his argument. Of course it's meaningless and defending such silliness on the grounds that this is all about the credibility of an information source is beyond silly.
The App Store Needs a Spam Button on Reviews
So use Firefox then. You don't have to run IE on Windows XP.
And of course, there's not a lot of warranty your JVM/Python/Ruby/Other VM doesn't suffer from any of the quoted C/C++ issues
I hardly think this is a crisis.

Support it or piss off your userbase. That's your call.

In our case, becaues we're a corporate provider, 65% of our userbase is on IE8 still and will be for the forseeable future.

Do we have a problem? No.

Why? Because we're not fickle when it comes to technology. We're not obsessed with the latest thing. We're not going to throw this policy away and it's not a crisis.

Compatibility is something which people have stopped valuing, which is bad.
Good write-up of a lot of key issues facing corporates and thus by implication all ISVs.

Minor quibble - the Compaq iPaq had supplanted the Palm offerings as the "cutting edge" with colour, great sound quality and a lot of (admittedly battery emptying) performance. I was writing code for both platforms in that year.
Digging Through iOS Graphical Ressources
Github blocked from China
You're being incredibly rude and unfair. The guy wrote a blog post on his personal blog. It gets posted to HN and gets massive criticism. And now you're complaining that he posted a response to that in the comments? If you don't like the voting behavior, add something valuable to the discussion rather than slinging empty complaints and repeating ad hominems. e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5090255 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5089296
> Like you, I prefer the jacketless waistcoat look.

That's hard to pull off (but not impossible). Most waistcoats are meant to be worn with jackets.
Try a Note 2.
It doesn't come much as a surprise to me that Omnivox has at least a few security flaws. I had to use it during my CEGEP years in Montreal and it's a huge piece of garbage.
One of the points of the post was that switching from IE to FireFox is not a straightforward option. There is a lot of code running that depends upon features, functionality (and perhaps the idiosyncrasies) of IE.
For those who would like to read more about the design philosophy of Metro, I would recommend "Brave NUI World" (Wixon).

Another book "The Mobile Frontier"(Hinman) briefly summarizes NUIs in Chapter 2, and concludes with an excellent interview with Mike Kruzeniski (Creative director at Microsoft in the Windows Phone Design Studio).

Hinman describes our current situation as being stuck in a chasm between GUIs and NUIs, with designers taking entrenched metaphors from GUIs and attempting to apply them to gestural interfaces and NUIs.

Hinman, Wixon, and Kruzeniski argue that skeuomorphic designs are insufficient for ephemeral and networked information.

Essentially, "Authentically Digital" means "content is the interface". Its a shift to focusing on the interaction, not the interface. Kruzeniski cites Photosynth's UI as an example of where mobile UIs are going.

As an Android developer since 2009, Windows Phone has me pretty excited from a technological standpoint. Android and iOS are essentially WIMPs with desktop metaphors. Maybe iOS has more skeuomorphism. But I see Android's Holo as simply a theme, not a fundamental difference in the UI of the system. Just lipstick on a pig, err WIMP, essentially.
How A Little Known Japanese SaaS Startup Is Shaking Up The Global Music Industry
Fun spoiler: do NOT look at the image SRC. I liked the game, but I did what any idiot would when they see such pages - Inspect Element. Damn!
The petition asking for Heymann firing still lacks 15.000 votes. From what I read he was more instrumental than Ortiz in the aggressiveness the prosecution.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/fire-assistant-us-....

Sorry for insisting, but I think it's important. I'm not a US citizen, and I can't vote, the only thing I can do is trumpet it.

Not that the witch hunt is very useful in itself, but it keeps people involved and the more shit we stir, the most likely things will move.
The administration of Dawson College clearly saw things differently, proceeding to expel Mr. Al-Khabaz for a “serious professional conduct issue.”

He is a student, how can be have a "Professional conduct issue"
La 22e édition du Festival Son d’Hiver est prévue du 1er au 23 février
Le Festival Son d’Hiver est l’événement phare de la musique non synthétisée. Il se tiendra en Val de Marne et à Paris du premier jusqu’au 23 février.
Any details? I actually found it quite readable.
> With SELinux root can build systems which are so secure that root himself cannot hack them.

Sounds like your administrator would be well served to spend more time studying real-world vulnerabilities and less time focusing on SELinux :)

See eg. http://grsecurity.net/~spender/exploits/exploit2.txt
Sex, lies and videotapes: A year in Chinese microblogs
If they cannot prove it then there is no merit in releasing this "news".

Which brings me back to my "Jump on the news bandwagon" last line.
Sure. It goes both ways. As the interviewee, it's your job to ask your interviewer questions that will help you learn whether or not you'll like the team.
When Haskell Is Not faster than C
Was Python your first programming language, and now you're a paid programmer?
I've heard and read from many sources that say Python is an excellent first programming language.

I'm curious to know the following:

1. Was Python your first programming language?
2. Are you a professional (paid) programmer now, as a result?
3. How did you get your job?
4. Have you stuck with Python, or did it help you learn another language you're using now?
I don't agree with this. A simple nmap is enough to find the SSH port. This will get you in trouble when you're on a network which blocks port. The ssh port is often open (at least if it's an establishment where programmers work) and a port like 2022 is not.
How smart can the guy be if he can't even express himself without using a word that is still considered by most people to be vulgar and unfit for public use?

"Vulgarity is no substitute for wit"
One div – The single element HTML/CSS icon database
Just like print design