skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Actually it is not excessive. It is legal for CSIS to monitor non-citizens and it is even legal for them to investigate citizens if they may be assisting foreigners that Canada disapproves of.

Just because something is legal doesn't mean its not excessive. Just because the government does something, doesn't make it right.
I strongly suggest you take a week off - don't expend valuable energyon trying to control the things that are stressing you. Check in and say hi to friends on Twitter (or suchlike) by all means, so that nobody has to worry about you, but don't put pressure on yourself to get to the bottom of this or resolve it within a certain timeframe. You haven't done anything wrong that I can see so there's no particular reason you should knock yourself out trying to untangle the situation.

Watch some movies, catch your regular classes (or skip a couple if you can), read that fat sci-fi novel - fill in the blank. FI anyone you don't know calls you on the phone just tell them you're not interested, goodbye, and take a rest from the internet. After a week, chat to a lawyer and work on the fact that someone is harrassing you - might be an intelligence service, might be criminals, but make it your lawyer's problem. The best thing for you right now is to recharge your batteries and that putting some distance between yourself and the source of your stress. The best way to deal with your computer being hacked is to leave it switched off; not least because your lawyer might advise handing it over to a forensic analyst for an audit.

But primarily, take it easy and be good to yourself. Nothing obliges you to wear yourself out responding to the behavior of others if it is making you stressed or unhappy.
How the heck do I close a Metro application? Do I even? Am I not really supposed to? Is this a computer or a phone-like thing? This is a Surface Pro; am I a professional or not? Do professionals close applications? Professional! (Turns out I just mash function-alt-F4, which seems to do the trick, if a little clumsily.)

Just slide the screen with a finger from top to bottom to close an application.
I don't know if my experiment is valid but looking at the collected business cards (~1200) from the past years. 90% of the business cards with Ing, Prof titles and alike are mainly from Germany. Looking at the German wikipedia page about Academic degrees http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademischer_Grad compared to the other languages. I don't know if they run for its status but at least they showed those titles on their business cards.

It might be interresting for Ken Robinson to make some seminar in Germany about his point regarding academicism.
You don't patent things, you patent methods. Monsanto has patented a method of inserting and manipulating certain gene sequences in soybeans. Growing offspring of existing modified beans is not the same as performing the modification.

If they wanted their seeds to have an expiration date they should have engineered that in there too. Soybean replicants.
I appreciate your detailed answer, but I don't understand the distinction - it feels almost like a form of solipsism to me.

Say I'm a traveler exploring the programming language universe, and I land on a programming language planet. I wish to determine whether said planet has functions that "you can call in order to get a string from stdin", or whether it "sets up the dominoes in an elaborate arrangement" and "lets the runtime system knock them down". What experiment could I perform? What program could I write that would illustrate the difference?
Mining tweets to determine global reaction to a stadium power outage is far more interesting, of course.
Libreoffice 4 released
Well, I'm living in Germany and I'm inclined to side with the NYT on this.
For those interested in thinking about issues of a future society where most humans do not work, I'd highly recommend reading "Limes Inferior" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limes_inferior), a thought-provoking book where many of these issues are raised.

The idea of paying people a basic wage even if they do not perform any useful work is not a new one.
Ngx_pagespeed
I've tried asking people about adding new features to the Play 1.2.x code, but the developers have firmly said that they would no longer add features to the 1.x line :(
Yeah, this wasn’t really about her title. I’m not even aware of her ever using it in public, the media certainly didn’t.

That said, the German system is broken and needs to be fixed. I think that part of the discussion is probably the most useful one - but I don’t see it going anywhere.
My guess is that they probably didn't go that deep because of the network not wanting to get too controversial for the sake of the viewers? idk, something around that area pobably, otherwise Maher would have asked all kinds of things, I mean he's that kind of person.
Those patents are on identifying, isolating, and extracting those sequences. Making a new copy of them in your body (or in the case of soybeans, growing the plant, which obviously involves DNA replication) isn't infringing, but doing anything else useful with them is.
There is a huge difference: null/nil is a valid value for a pointer, but Option[string] is not a valid value for a string argument, so the compiler forces you to deal with it.

How is that any different from always checking it? When you program in C, you essentially always have to check it, when you program in Scala/Haskell/etc you only have to check it once.
The Team Leader Manifesto
In saying 'email doesn't scale well' I think you're really saying 'I don't scale well' (as you hint in mentioning a personal assistant) - in reality the problem is that email scales so well as a flexible and quick communication medium that people simply can't keep up - if you used any other form of communicating with these people who want some of your time (telephone, face-to-face etc) it would be even more cumbersome. Is it even possible to give a slice of your time to hundreds of people a day and still lead a productive and happy life? Should we try, or should we cut down the number of people we give this privileged access to? Our time is finite after all, and reading or answering email from people we don't know is not necessarily a good use of it.

Another approach to the problem of huge volumes of mail is to classify your senders at the point of contact by giving them different email addresses. That lets you check one mail address frequently (for close and valuable contacts only), and one email address every few days (for casual contacts, website contact, mailing lists etc), and only give out the important email to those whom you trust to use it appropriately (i.e. never publish it). This helps considerably to cut down volume which you see every day.

Email's strength is that it is a distributed free-form medium which can contain any sort of content. Trying to enforce structuring content with simplistic templates like this is just wasting the sender's time instead of yours - why give them the email address in the first place if you don't have time to read and respond properly? Why not have a web form which imposes structure and emails you the result, or an FAQ on a website?

While I agree there are huge problems with email as it stands, I'd say they're more to do with identity and sufficiently sophisticated semantic processing of incoming mail for those who receive a lot of it, not with the structure of email itself (which is admirably simple and has served remarkably well), or lack of hints as to contents (NB any such hints in the control of senders will be abused mercilessly by spammers).
Monthly standing orders in computer systems go back at least to the early 90s.

How does this patent get granted in light of prior art and obviousness?
It would be fun to try it with SCIgen (http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/)!
How do you suggest we finance lighthouses without arresting people and putting them in prison for the crime of walking down a road that happens to be in line of sight of a lighthouse while not wearing a company-approved blindfold?

As a libertarian I think we should seek a smaller role for government in people's lives. But I also think if something is in fact a function of government, we would be better off to admit it and formally finance it as such, than bring it in the back door by dishonest means.
Angel at a Glance: Charles C. Smith
All new ChocolateyGUI
Yes it is. You need a license for public performances of copyrighted works; in America this is governed by Title 17 of the United States Code.
> Oracle Corporation decided to sacrifice the integrity of Java

Java having integrity. Good joke.
In the past month, I have run wire for a bedroom in my basement, replaced a kitchen faucet, replaced a garbage disposal, replace an exterior mirror on a car (teenagers and garages don't go well together :) and replaced the ice maker in my freezer. In the past, I've replaced almost every piece of my nearly 20 year old dryer and some of the pieces of the matching washing machine.

With all that, I still feel like I haven't go a clue what I'm doing, but it sure feels good when you get something completed.

These things are really not that hard. They just take some tools and some time.
What Does Good Internet Privacy Mean to You?
> His money hasn't been taken; they just won't disburse it until he does his free paperwork, as required by the US Government. That's entirely legitimate.

Half of it will be taken by the U.S government, that's likely the reason his paypal account got locked.

There is nothing legitimate about theft, whether its paypal or the IRS stealing his money.

> Yeah, they did. Maybe you should read the user agreement of a system before using it to collect nearly a quarter million dollars internationally. It's only three pages.
There is a point at which OP had a responsibility, too.

He earned that quarter million dollars providing a service other people found useful. There is no justification for any organization or government to take any of it away from him.
Symbian was a microkernel?
Theorems that are 'obvious' but hard to prove
Setting Up a Local Development Environment in Chrome OS
Mega.co.nz: 1st week report of vulnerability reward program
While you certainly can close Metro apps manually, there's no direct need in terms of resources to do so. Metro apps will be suspended when not on the foreground and removed from memory when free memory gets tight. When switching back, the app is resurrected from the grave.

Such Jesus apps do depend on the developer not being lazy / retard. While MS checks apps during the winstore certification process, sometimes apps slip through that do not react to such events correctly. Using those apps is pretty annoying.
Seriously? He has perfectly valid concerns and you call him paranoid? I guess we know who the CSIS agents are.
I hope everyone realizes this is the beginning of the end of the practice of allowing doctors to offer their own diagnoses. Doctors already cannot offer treatments they invented themselves (the evidence-based revolution in medical practice now only allows treatments vetted by clinical research), but computer-based "expert systems" appear to be able to offer more reliable diagnoses, given a clearly expressed set of symptoms. And Watson wasn't the first expert system to show this ability -- an expert system named MYCIN (early 1970s) performed better than clinicians with whom its results were compared:

http://www.it.bton.ac.uk/staff/lp22/CS237/CS237MedicalXSys.h...

It is important to add that, notwithstanding MYCIN's demonstrated abilities, it was never used in actual clinical practice:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin

A quote: "MYCIN was never actually used in practice but research indicated that it proposed an acceptable therapy in about 69% of cases, which was better than the performance of infectious disease experts who were judged using the same criteria."
So here's what I gather, after having read the lower court opinion and several of the briefs.

Monsanto owns a patent on certain soybean seeds. They sell 1G seeds to farmers, allowing the farmers to grow them into 2G seeds. The farmers are not licensed to plant the 2G seeds. Bowman bought some 2G seeds and planted them, and Monsanto sued.

Bowman says that the planting of 2G seeds is permitted under the doctrine of "patent exhaustion." According to that doctrine, if a patented physical object is sold under proper license, then a patent lawsuit involving that same physical object is not permitted, even if the object is sold to someone else.

The lower court said that patent exhaustion doesn't apply to the 2G seeds, because Monsanto only granted a license on the 1G seeds. The 1G seeds are not the same physical object as the 2G seeds.

At first I thought this was a simple case, but Bowman is making a very interesting argument in the Supreme Court. It is based on an old case called Quanta.

In Quanta, the patent was directed to a certain computer process, and the patent owner sold computer chips with circuitry for performing that process. The chips themselves were useless, of course, but they just needed to be combined with some standard hardware and turned on to work. Did this mean that, by adding the extra hardware, a new physical object had been made that could be the subject of a lawsuit? The Supreme Court said no: because the chips "embodied" the patented invention and only required standard hardware to be added, the chips invoked patent exhaustion, so lawsuits based on their further use were barred.

Bowman's argument: the 1G seeds "embody" the invention (by having the DNA and biological machinery to produce 2G seeds), and only "standard hardware" (soil, watering, etc.) needs to be added to get the working invention (the 2G seeds), so therefore the 2G seeds fall under patent exhaustion.

The main counterargument is that in Quanta, the original computer chips were still present and intact, whereas the 2G seeds do not include the 1G seeds intact. This requires a narrower interpretation of Quanta, and I could see the Supreme Court going with either this narrower reading or Bowman's broader one.

(For fun, you can try to come up with hypothetical cases that are in between: what if the patentee in Quanta had sold semiconductor masks for making chips?)
Single page:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/0...
Every system is flawed; the ones after high-school as well.

I'd suggest following hkmurakami's advice and figure out a way to bend the system to your will. It's a much more valuable lesson in the longrun.
thanks for this book.
just completed ch-1. :)

thanks again.
1. Once Germany was a leading intellectual, scientific, and engineering powerhouse. Academic titles still have some cultural significance. It might be a kind of a relict.

2. It's worse in Austria.
It still means you grew up when pixel art was well past it's heyday. Yes, I'm sure you've seen lots of it, but when you give examples like Monkey Island as an example of "old adventure games" (which as a genre in itself is a bad place to look at to learn about pixel art), to me that explains why you do not appreciate it.

Monkey Island is cartoon-art constrained by low resolution, but with weak enough constraints that the art did not have to be tailored to the medium all that much any more. We saw that transition begin with the advent of the 16-bit machines, where though there are some outstanding examples of pixel art, is also a lot "just plain art" that just happens to be pixelated - the visual quality had gotten to a stage where a lot of art was no longer specifically made to exploit the constraints of the resolution and colour constraints.

And this is what pixel art is about, like chip tunes and 1K demos and what-not: Making art to constraints. A lot of art is made to artificial constraints, some more stringent than others.

Bach spent a huge amount of time and effort composing within the heavily stylized and specific constraints of the fugue, for example. Not because he had to, but because he wanted to: The constraints guides you towards certain types of solutions that you generally would not pick otherwise.

A lot of famous painters have done many of their most famous works within the confines of specific constraints (some defined by themselves, some by others) of style and form.

Pixel art is a form of art very distinct from "just" low resolution bitmap graphics.

It is generally easy to pick out vs. images that originated without the typical resolution and colour space constraints of the medium, and has been scaled down etc . Of course there is a blurry line in art made in low resolution, but straddling the line towards "just art" by not making use of the older techniques.

For many types of pixel art you can even identify the platform it originated on by visual cues that go beyond basic technical constraints like colour choices, constraints on colour changes and into indirect constraints such as specific shading techniques and archetypes that occur in the images because they work well within those constraints.
Here's something I don't understand: it can't be that ask.com pays Oracle that much money for that. How is it worth to Oracle to tarnish their image and piss off their enterprise clients for that? It's not like they are so desperate for money they are grasping at straws, are they? What's next, would they propose Java users to introduce them to a certain Nigerian prince that is looking for business partners?
Your first one is way to specific to be signaled by some kind of flags, the recipient might as well just read the subject line of your email if its well written.

But basically every e-mail client implements some kind of Priority/Importance header, that solves your problem. Nobody uses it though, and the few times someone decides to set "high priority" it might be in their opinion but not in mine. A more complex system won't see more adoption.
I can only repeat what I said on one of the many previous occasions this has been mentioned:

Dreadful - absolutely dreadful. It starts so well, then just turns into a thinly veiled rant/diatribe/spiel about an overly optimistic forecast of what the future could, but won't, be like.

Bad writing, bad philosophy, bad predictions. Just awful.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2828736
Based on your logic, a 1 px font would be the best as it conveys the highest density of information. However, that is wrong.
Gender Bias 101 For Mathematicians
I don't know enough about Go, but Goroutines and Channels sound quite similar to F# agents and mailboxprocessor concepts, which as I understand is not quite the same as TPL. The former tackles concurrency, while the latter is about parallelism. C# 5 is getting there with async/await concepts I guess.

Here's a dining philosophers implementation in F# and Go (among other languages)

http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Dining_philosophers
Symbian ran on EKA2[1], which was a micro-kernel, although since Symbian included device drivers it wasn't technically a true microkernel[2].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EKA2

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian#Symbian_kernel
Thats a different thing. The Apprenticeship programs in germany are very popular in the whole range of sectors. You basically train on the job in a company for 3 years earning a minimum wage and have to go to school for about 1/3rd of that time. At the end your company might offer you a full time job.
However this kind of education is very practical, not too much theory, so the guys at mercedes for example are more like mechanics that assemble the cars. Its still a very good and highly regarded education, but the real engineers at mercedes have studied Engineering and have university degree.

Same goes for IT, you can do basic apprenticeships for programming or system administration, but its far less theoretical than studying computer science at the university. Still many people do it, because for being a programmer its mostly enough basic knowledge and you learn the rest on the job and with experience anyway. But these people will probably not tacke the hardest problems of computer science.
Facebook seems to be making it more and more difficult for a user to see just "a feed" with all their friends' activity; instead they optimize things like this and show users only what they think they want to see, and hide everything else.
Re: "Hacking Back"

I heard that Canadian sysops are the ones that apologise when you hack them. ;-)
Have you considered that you might not have the social skills yet to make them willing to make such deals with you?

I was in a very similar position as you and looking back what got me those breaks were the teachers that liked me, that liked what they saw in me and who wanted to support me.

Everything I got, I was granted. Just like in real life.
Reminds me of the MIT Dean of Admissions scandal (she faked a degree on her resume): http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2007/4/26/mit-admissions-d...
> How is it worth to Oracle to tarnish their image and piss off their enterprise clients for that?

Well, since Oracle is doing it and accepting the pubic outcry, it must be that they have no image to tarnish. Also, we don't know how much ask.com is paying for this deal, but given that the Java downloads are free, any payment deal with ask.com represents an infinite increase in profitability.

> It's not like they are so desperate for money they are grasping at straws, are they?

I see you haven't talked to any stockholders lately. Most only care about profits and don't ask where they come from.
Is ECC more secure than regular consumer grade memory?
From what you wrote, it sounds like what Haskell buys you is a layer of indirection - the proper analogy is not between a Haskell program and a C program, but instead between a Haskell program and a C compiler. A C compiler does not care in what order it outputs code, so long as it all gets output by the time it finishes.

If I understand this, Haskell "compiles" pure code into a sequence of side effects, and then the RTS executes them. So say I wrote a C compiler, that, given a source code, outputs a subcompiler that compiles the source code and then executes it. My C code does the same thing as it would under a traditional compiler, except more slowly - why should I want this?
Do you really believe some college courses and YC contacts are what's standing between someone and making a Google Fiber ISP?

There's a reason there's only one, and it's Google Fiber, and not Bob's Fiber of Main Street.
Or that her competitive edge would be lost. If anything, she'd be more valuable, as (many) of the startups would know what she wants them to be doing, and investors will know what to expect.
It could go the other way: being able to live and be human without wages.
It seem strange that you should select Delaware as your standard, given that you require your companies to be in California -- incorporating in Delaware is dishonest when you are not actually there.
So what would you recommend people to you for secure communications?
Bottom right corner has a submenu for background animation (confusingly says 'normal' by default).
That is provided patent terms won't be extended - to promote even more Useful Arts. Because, you know, there's never enough Useful Arts, and if patents help promoting them - why not extend them for longer terms? Look what is happening to copyrights - once Public Domain advancement line hits Mickey Mouse, it stops dead. Why patents shouldn't work this way too? After all, people seem to be fine living with this broken system and writing this kind of patents and pay millions to lawyers to sue each other over such un-trivial questions as who invented linked lists and who invented delivery schedules.