skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps silly, but let me explain a little more. Here's the scenario I envisioned after reading your original comment:

Say you have 10 people who have committed a crime and under the current system 9 get convicted and go to jail for 10 years and and 1 gets off on a technicality. So, there's collectively 90 years of prison time being served.

Now imagine we introduce plea bargaining and offer 5 years to all those accused and all 10 take it. The conviction rate goes up, but the total amount of jail time being served is drastically down.

Now I don't know what kind of "discounts" plea deals usually offer, or what it increase the conviction rate to, but I doubt it's an "obvious" win if you're counting by the number of years convicted offenders are removed from society.

Reading your silly answer, I think you're arguing something even less "obvious", which is that willingness to commit a crime is a direct function of age. And if that's the case, and if we're measuring benefit by a decrease in one's willingness to commit a crime, well then your system makes sense because any jail time is essentially better than none because the majority of the decrease in willingness to commit a crime happens at the front end of the sentence anyways. But I think that requires a broad assumption about the correlation of age and crime.
Did you consider ClojureScript and V8? Are there downsides to ClojureScript that would lead you to use Clojure instead?
StackCity - my first rails app eaten by FBSearch?
It seems odd that you would have to ask, but yes, there are people with more flexibility than you.
5) Take a random sample of 50,000 records and get 90% of the business intelligence value in about 2 seconds.

If you're fitting a model with only 70 degrees of freedom then analyzing 150M records is a complete waste of time.
I think Google is cleaning it up. (shows only 13 results for me)
As far as I know this problem has been around for years. If you want to dive deeper into this, i recommend you visit Shodan (http://www.shodanhq.com/)
Nostalgia Scam Time:

Back in the late 90s there was a common scam run against big-ish offices.

A caller would call asking to talk to the person in charge of printers, typically either IT or Facilities.

Once connected they would say that they are sending out the recipients free gift, which was some lame piece of electronics - often a small television. They would get the work address and confirmation to ship the free gift. They would claim that along with the free gift - they would send a sample toner cartridge that had "super fine toner in it, certified by HP to last 3 times as long as other toner cartridges"

Then, along with the free gift, a PALLET of toner cartridges would be sent - along with an invoice for some ridiculous amount.

When I got my first call about these "super fine toner cartridges" - I got suspicious and contacted HP. They told me about the scam - but that it was hard to find the people. They asked me to get as much info as I could from them if they called again. I got a call again, got as much info as I could without accepting the offer for the free gift - but they wound up sending it to me, along with the pallet of cartridges as well.

HP came to my office and picked it all up after contacting them again.

Over the years - I received more of these calls - and as soon as they brought up toner and free gifts, I tol them I knew the scam they were running - and they would promptly hang up on me...
SCADA lovers releases password brute-force tool for Siemens S7 PLCs
WMS
WMS, beneficii warehouse management systems, sistem WMS pentru gestiunea depozitului, receptii, compunere comenzi, inventare, organizare spatii depozitare, identificare pe baza cod bare, soft depozitare, gestiune depozit, warehouse management, soft intrari iesiri depozit.
You're really stretching the meaning of, "They want our software to tell them what to do. Period." In the real world, as you mention, it makes sense to tell people what to do, because humans usually make better and cheaper robots than robots do, but in computing you only need humans for two things: physically interacting with hardware, and human judgment. In my admittedly limited experience in this domain, what people wanted was alerts that indicated that human investigation and judgment were needed. The systems I worked on only ever told humans to do one thing: "Look! Look at this!" If the system knew more, it did it. (A nice feature of one system I worked with was that it automated the routine aspects of investigation, so when an alert was generated, relevant information for the type of alert such as traceroute output and previous alerts related to a host was gathered and attached.)

Bottom line: you never intentionally waste a human's time on things that don't require human judgment, and when human judgment comes into play, people want context. Good software helps people establish context for the decisions they make. The bike barometer, for example, doesn't actually tell you whether to bike or not. It just lets you know how a couple of factors balance against each other. The person reading the barometer will factor in other context such as how they feel that morning, whether they want some exercise that morning or would rather read a book on the tube, whether the bike is in good working condition, and so on.

Granted, the systems I worked with were mostly used by full-time operations personnel. If you're talking about a system for non-specialists who may need prompting and guidance along the lines of, "It looks like you're trying to handle more load than usual. Would you like to spin up a few more servers?" then I guess I can see people wanting the software to give them explicit orders.
Gold is shiny, the paper is bendy and has a picture of some dude on it.

In the absence of other people and their ideas of value,
given enough cotton paper I could make clothing or a fire. Given enough gold I could probably make a bludgeoning weapon...

Both have fairly minor value in the absence of shared delusion. And even beyond that, what the hell is 'intrinsic' value? Has the universe decreed that there is a property of matter called 'value'? Like particle spin, or atomic number?
I doubt whether they followed through on it more than once or twice.

It's a niche brokerage company. All of the above would be firing offences in a major bank.

Other random items from their company:

- The CEO insists on being called "The Captain", and once told potential investors that he gets his secretary to roll his spliffs for him

- Traders who fall asleep at the desk after a night on the town are normally awoken via having their bin or chair set on fire
etc etc
Open Access Made Easy. Starring Bertrand Russell and friends.
You Get Out What You Put In
Thanks, I've just added that to all Google searches. Brilliant!
Definitely better, although there's no obvious way to map on to English. Using morae works OK, but most non-linguists don't even know what that means, much less how to count the morae in English phrases.
I was surprised by that too. Maybe they allowed free-form answers.
Similar discussion is going on here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5116093
"I don't understand how concealment comes into play"

Many people choose handles that make obvious their gender. Not deliberately so; people often choose handles based on their names and names are, as a general rule, indications of gender.

Many women go on to chose handles for themselves online that deliberately obscure their gender in such forums. Someone who would be, for example, JennyKibble in many places becomes JKibble. This is how concealment comes into play.

"I no more conceal my gender"

The vast majority of the world's population is not you.
But what if it spins around like a propeller?
I mean come on.
Until Apple starts to make televisions. Then that factory where your telly was made turns into "Apples factory" and every minor problem there ends up in NY Times first page. Every time.
Judging from those results I think that the original question was more "what if" rather than "what is" - particularly in the salary area.

In 10 years here in the Washington DC area I've never seen salaries that high, or employers that can actually deliver that.
It's a brilliant solution - it's a lottery ticket for everyone who slips through their suppliers' defenses.

Either someone does or does not have official and legitimate paperwork saying they're an adult, and they're tall enough and developed enough that it's most likely true, or don't hire them.

When the law catches up it will just be illegal and the consequences will be much harsher I'm sure.
:-) Someone should do similar for the leather trench coats people started wearing after The Matrix.
I wrote a scriptable "chooser" when I was at Apple -- it let you programmatically find and select a printer to print to.

I enumerated every printer on campus (about 900 of them at the time, I think), and came /this close/ to printing a snarky page -- a fake version of the "Five Star News" internal company news -- on each one of them. Decided not to; probably a good career move that I resisted that urge.
Depends if you're a children's entertainer or not.
Ad Blocking: Theft Or Fair Use?
There's some law against postal fraud that says whatever they send you though the post is yours (to avoid exactly this kind of scam)

You can try not paying the invoice and see what happens.
Some good answers already but I'll add this despite some overlap:

Likely a lot more approaches than I can think of are available to an entity with hundreds of millions of dollars with which to place a bet. I don't know the specific marketplace and id's when you start to get into products like credit-default swaps, but in general the derivative market allows two parties with opposing views of the future to bet against each other.

Suffice to say that you would create a position with a "short" effect for yourself on the soon-to-be-declining securities: through buying puts (pay now, get cash at expiration if the security's price drops), selling calls (get cash now, bear risk of the security price going up until expiration), shorting a security ("borrow" it now and plan to buy it back at a lower price later if you win, or a higher price if you lose) or sell a put + buy a call (same risk as shorting only no need to borrow the security and lower cost than simply buying a put, and more upside than selling a call).

The difference between institutions and mortals like us is that they are allowed to carry relatively massive positions compared to their capital, presumably because they are supposed to know what they're doing. So a player with $100M could probably take a $2B short position because of the leverage he's allowed, say 20:1 (probably conservative - I've heard of firms reaching 100:1). The effect is that a 5% move in the right direction doubles that $100M, and a 5% move in the wrong direction wipes out the player.

At least in theory said player's PhD quants in the "risk management" department minimize the daily volatility of the net effect of all of the bets placed by different specialists within the organization by placing still more bets. We've all seen stories of traders taking positions though that somehow didn't get flagged or adequately hedged by risk management.

Aside from the rare rogue trader, this obviously doesn't always work and companies "blow up" by accruing a loss larger than their capital. (unless say they're selected to be "bailed out" with extra capital) A "blow up" can cascade because of counter-party risk, meaning that firms on the other side of these trades won't get paid. That's why we had AIG get massively bailed out.

Due to SEC regulations however, we mortals are limited to about 2:1 leverage (or 4:1 intraday) for securities. Options and futures can effect a higher ratio though. If a retail investor gets squeezed, he must immediately deposit more cash or the brokerage will liquidate it for him involuntarily. If he still owes, it becomes a debt like any other.
You said:

> The issue is that it's 5-10 minutes to scan each man page every single time I want to use sed, find, xargs, etc."

Which means you could put in a one time investment, write a wrapper shell script, and be done.

And if you insist on disagreeing still, then that's fine, but the this whole point was brought about in response to:

> I've used CLI tools for years, and it would probably take me 5-10 minutes of scanning the man pages to reproduce all but the simplest of those snippets.
Explaining Erlang actors in Elixir
iTunes Match: A Tale of Missing Artwork
Learn from the masters.

Martin Scorcese.
Yeah - this was in 1997...
Gamification at Jimmy John’s. An innovative twist on a loyalty program
add a number to the search term, e.g. "123"...
I did that.
But it got stolen.
I'm never getting into Zion now.
Any suggestions on how to improve this? I have plans for getting a more robust system of inter-linking similar libraries (i.e. jquery <-> mootools <-> zepto etc). Would love to hear what you guys think!
Federal Loans are basically unlimited to anyone without an adverse credit history (so 18-24 year olds with no credit qualify). That is the definition of bad lending. There is no linkage between likelihood of making the investment back and size of the loan.
Economist David Friedman has a good take on it. Athenian justice had a way to deal with this issue.

http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2013/01/overcharging-aaro...
Surprising results from Obama campaign's A/B testing
Your argument depends upon omniscience. It's not silly. It's absurd.
Yeah, SF should be able to do better with rail than Chicago, just because their geography and density are perfect for it. Execution matters.
Dear Bloggers.
Make your brainstorming better.
This is great. Good way to show relevant articles because someone actually went through the effort of bookmarking it hence its usually useful/interesting.
But not a quality regulation.
+1. I faced this writing software in Python that was meant to be fast and interactive and collected data about just how few operations you can do in 16 ms. A blog post containing timing information for common operations in Python is available at http://blog.enthought.com/general/what-is-your-python-budget... . (Disclaimer: I am the author of the blog post).

Some things surprised me when I first did the timing -

1) Turns out that a function call plus an empty loop over a million items is ~16 ms in Python.

2) Turns out that on a pretty high end machine you get about 174k function calls in 16 ms. On a Core 2 duo laptop you get about 80k function calls in 16 ms. (In both cases the function takes no parameters and has a no-op body)

For getting timing information on your own machine you can run the code from https://github.com/deepankarsharma/cost-of-python
This is actually one of the earliest searches that was used on the Shodan search engine! Shodan specializes in finding all devices connected to the Internet (including Telnet, SSH, FTP, SNMP etc.):

http://www.shodanhq.com/search?q=hp+jetdirect
http://www.shodanhq.com/search?q=laserjet
http://www.shodanhq.com/search?q=HP-ChaiSOE
Better materials, electronics, etc. available now?
Google has also indexed thousands of publicly accessible Panasonic webcams
These appear to mostly be in China.

I haven't updated the list of cameras in awhile (and I seem to have lost my script to do it)
This statement is completely false. All _required_ aspects of fuel reprocessing have been demonstrated. And it has been demonstrated in two reactors with all three fissile fuels the LFTR cores are inherently stable. We have over two full-power years of experience with a LFTR core over a ~five year period
The supposed mean part of the answer:

Learn to write Python code properly according to the style guide – PEP-8 filter highlights only bad code and in your case the whole file is badly written.

I am a male. This does not strike me as mean. I'm thinking now though... are you maybe just an emotionally sensitive person? The response is maybe bluntly put, but it is probably sincere and hastily said. Which makes it easier to construe it non-personally -- it's just a guy on the Internet who said it, he probably doesn't even know your gender. And you know what -- as weird as it may sound, I wish I had received this kind of criticism when I was younger. Too often I was showered with positive comments that I became afraid of non-positive criticism to the point that I stopped taking risks that would endanger my reputation or feelings. It took me some time to learn to just take all criticism and make the best of it: detach the person-element, and just take from it what is truly useful to me, but I'm glad I did.

Edit: I'm thinking 'are you maybe just an emotionally sensitive person' may have come off as offensive? Sorry if it did, I'm not sure how else to phrase it, you probably know what I mean here.
I do not understand why this would possibly be a concern.

You do realize that there is no cost to memory mapping a very large file, right? You still are going to end up with only a single VMA ("virtual memory area", one of the more insidious costs of memory maps) in your memory map, and only pages you use will get paged in; if you wanted to memory map a 1GB large file, the only pain would be the loss of address space, and you have 2-3GB of that available.

Additionally, you aren't even correct that you have to memory map the entire file: as you have a file descriptor for the file and know the offset you want into the file, you can memory map just the part of the file you need. Both the C-level mmap API and the Java-level FileChannel.map API allow you to provide a specific offset and length for the region you want to map from the file.
chrome://flags

enable webgl
Avoiding Peter Pan Syndrome
Translating “I wish I could…” into actual results
Tim Berners-Lee Dreams of a "More Open Web"
I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Business / or "IT" as you call often has DB + server-side + client-side. The server-side has been taken over mostly everywhere by either Java or its younger cousin C# and you go to any big company and you'll find one of these two languages heavily used.

What is changing now is that people / employees have realized that it's convenient to be able to use any browser, from any device (desktop / laptop / tablet / smartphone), from any OS (iOS, Linux / Android, OS X, Windows) on the client-side.

And the one indisputed king inside the browser to code the client-side is JavaScript.

IMHO It's not exactly as if monothreaded JavaScript engines are going to displace server-side Java / C# anytime soon.

Webapps are accessed from clients using JavaScript. But Webapps themselves, at least for many "enterprisey" stuff are very often coded in Java or C# (or at least virtually always in languages targetting either the JVM or .Net).
Webcams too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5116676
That's with similar entries omitted. You need to go to the second page and have it repeat the search with those entries included.
Ask HN: How often do you use/encounter a QR Code?
I suppose this is a tangent, but a lot of this refactoring strikes me as obfuscation. Defining methods named `multiple_of_3` and `multiple_of_5` just to encapsulate a mod? I'd rather just read `x % 3 == 0` and `x % 5 == 0` than look up a method definition.

And then he makes it worse by throwing those out, defining `multiple_of`, and using method_missing to make `multiple_of_{3,5}` still work. A big part of reading unfamiliar code is looking up the implementation of things, and this is just making it more laborious and confusing.
It's pretty fallacious to claim that the lines in NYC were built by private companies. They were built by the government and leased to private companies for administration.

I suspect the same is true for your other examples as well.. how do you "private sector" build something like a subway? The closest you could conceivably get would still be quasi-public, once you get done with all the right-of-way and eminent domain concerns.
That's a fair point. I would argue that we're not trying to optimize time in prison but benefit to society. Your argument relies on a linear(ish) relationship between the two.
This would actually be tremendously handy for my geographically-distributed extended family.

For example:

* My mother could see all the pictures we've taken of her grandchild.

* My sister would know that all her PhD research is backup on a computer half-way across the country.

* I don't have to email my wife documents she asks me to scan, because she has everything I scan in her folder, even if she's out of town.

I love Dropbox, but being able to roll my own solution with my own family is great.
I see these games as proofs of concept.

Is there any inherent reason why you couldn't write a performant game in ClojureScript, if you took the time and energy to focus on performance and polish as much as with other games?

I don't think the point of these articles is "if you want to write a game better do it in Clojure with CES" but "look at this interesting programming concept"
If you apply for a loan and misrepresent your financial situation, this is not fraud (which is a crime) it's a lie, and lying is NOT a crime.

Lying is absolutely a crime if it's considered perjury, and many (all?) loan applications require you to certify the accuracy of statements under penalty of perjury.
This infuriates me to no end. No rail on Van Ness or Geary Blvd. And only half of Ocean/Geneva have rail.

I can only dream of the day they put some modern monorail there, but it's not going to happen in SF.
Code editor, modifiable at runtime, built on a dialect of Lisp...

;-)

I'm a fan of Light Table. Just had to point it out.
Screw replaceable, just throw an e-ink screen in there. Seems like an ideal application for e-ink - super-long "refresh" interval, no need for color, and ambient light.
Lenovo Removing Thinkpad Trackpoint Buttons
I noticed with myself that I feel intensely awkward dining alone. But if I'm travelling for business, it doesn't bother me: at that point, I have a totally legit reason to be eating by myself.

Then I realized that other diners, strangers, have no way of knowing whether or not I'm out on business or in my own city. After that, I got a lot more comfortable eating alone wherever I am: for all these people know, I could be a travelling businessman or have any of a dozen other "legitimate" reasons to eat alone.

Of course, in actuality, no one there even cares or notices me. But I found having the right mental frame helped it not bother me.

I've also found I get pretty awesome service when I eat by myself, and I get to focus on the food more which is nice. It's peaceful.
In other words, Apple drops below Exxon.
How to test localhost from any device on your network
Block Viewer: Visualize the Bitcoin block chain
PxLoader - JavaScript Preloader for HTML5 Apps, and Games
White House Petition Demands Cellphone Unlocking Remain Legal
And never wear a white dinner jacket unless you wish to be mistaken for a waiter.
Ketamine for rapid treatment of bipolar and depression: a literature review
? I always thought Muni metro was exceedingly productive. It has the 3rd highest lightrail ridership per mile in the United States (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_light_rai...).

As any rider can attest, it gets pretty busy. Perhaps you are thinking of SF's southern neighbor, San Jose, as an example of a highly underutilized light rail system?

Also, a lot of muni metro is underground, which is essential for keeping in fast beneath the high traffic volumes above.
It is not dead, and Yehuda talked about it at Rubyconf:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iv3Gk95-v0

https://twitter.com/wycats/statuses/293594028518277120
That's why the question is silly. The absurd answer illustrates a point. Fiction can illustrate a philosophy.