skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is a wrong question. The premise is that by picking and choosing which stories to cover you can make the world better for your world view. From this sort of logic you can make the case that Google shouldn't support all possible queries -- what if some of the people using Google use the results to cause harm?

This is a wrong way of looking at things because although some of the help Google provides people will cause the world to be a worse place, the vast majority of its effects are positive... for every person who looks up movie showtimes so they can go shoot people hundreds of millions of people are using google to have a fun family afternoon. Just because a tool can be used poorly doesn't mean it is wrong that it exists.

WikiLeaks is a tool for whistle blowers. It's a tool for people with access to information they feel a moral obligation to share with the world. It's designed to let them do that without throwing their life away in the process. Some of these whistle blowers will be doing things you or I disagree with, some will be doing things we do agree with. That, in balance, this is a good tool to have exist seems straightforward to me.

As for conflict vs non-conflict, I think that conflict often is the first step toward long term improvement. If your government has been lying to you about why it's doing what it's doing, telling everyone the truth is virtually guaranteed to create conflict. Conflict of this sort is good. Look at the huge escalation of conflict in the middle east brought about by the cable leaks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring is the least biased link I can find, and a reasonable place to start). I completely agree that there are a lot of bad outcomes from these conflicts so far (60,000 deaths in the Syrian civil war, etc)... I'm just optimistic that we'll get some real governmental reforms in the long run (either from successful revolutions, or from other dictators being wary of betraying their people).
You can be critical without being outright hostile. If this is how you would phrase your criticism to magikarp's face, you are not very courteous.
MIT Research Shows New Magnetic State That Could Aid Quantum Computing
Well I don't know your method of valuing something but if farmers want to pay for it (or "steal" it) I would probably say it brings some value to them.

Which point of the parent comment am I supporting exactly?
We both agreed these technologies shouldn't be developed for profit, I'd love to see some international organization doing the research and giving the results for free.
Actually I think it already exists, I can't remember exactly which organization but there are some non-profit groups researching better crops.
Beautiful UX design app
I don't know. My personal feeling is all this patent stuff sounds horribly wrong, be it software or living organisms.
So we should inhibit a free train app because someone has a commercial train app?

There's lots of data that's commercially valuable that's been given away for free for a long time, like unemployment and inflation numbers. Transparency creates extra value.
https://xkcd.com/605/

The fact that machines have been gaining a lot of capabilities doesn't mean they'll catch up to us, much less any time soon. While I hope for the "singularity" much more than I fear it, we might remain in an intermediate state for a long time.
Computer automation doesn't replace knowledge workers, yet, but computer augmentation and computer assisted outsourcing means businesses need fewer and fewer of them, paid less and less.
Just curious how you are so certain that the servers were CSIS servers?

Pretty sure you would never be able to trace back a CSIS or CSE ip.
The issue here is not primarily that the minister for education and science should have a PhD.

The scandal here is that Annette Schavan claims that she did not plagiarize when it is obvious that she did. When the university rescinded her doctorate, she announced to sue it.
A minister who is unable to accept a university's (rightful) decision undermines their independence.

For me, the most egregious part of this affair was that several officials of big research organizations - who get a majority of their budget from the federal ministry - defended Schavan and attacked the university.
It is not title fetishism, it is quality control and it is very good. This means that when you want to have someone working for you, you can be ensured the person as the adequate formation. I am French, having spent a couple of years now in Germany, some in Denmark and before some times in the US, I can tell you this is wonderful. If you need someone to fix something in your house, you can be sure he knows about it. Not like in the US where the guy was turning steaks at McDo before and just happen to now do plumbing for a small company because "He did well at the interview".

This level of "quality control" is everywhere in the German society.

For the titles themselves, this comes from the general German culture, I heavily recommend "The German Genius" by Peter Watson to understand it a bit more:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/books/review/Ladd-t.html?p...

http://www.amazon.de/German-Genius-Renaissance-Scientific-Re...
Tweetdeck for Games. Never be bored again
Ok, to explain in the least charged way as possible.

First, I will tell there are "groups", mind you, I only mean a collective of individuals and organisations, that many times are fighting amont themselves, also individually they may have different aims and purposes, but the "group" thing simplify the things.

Second, the subject is very ancient, so I will try to talk only about the last 100 years, because otherwise it will become a too complex thing to write about in a short post.

Also, I will not name the groups, because whatever name I use for each of them, have different meanings and charges to each person, resulting in a flamewar (and the reason people think I am crazy).

I will list the groups in order of theoretical and legal (not necessarily de facto) power.

Group A: This group is in power in several states, run some huge international organisations, and wants more power centralisation, individuals within it want more power to themselves.

The Group A is very much against cryptography technology leaking (the weapons of choice of Group E), Group A also tend to help Group C if they think it will be a blow to Group B or E, otherwise they currently use Group C as scapegoat and target to fool their subjects in giving them more power.

Group B is very much alike Group A, but with fundamentally different economic beliefs, Group B realised it cannot beat Group A directly, so they right now work by mostly promoting ideologies and morals that will undermine Group A centralisation of power and capacity to react, Group B also don't like Group E, and don't like crypto on Group E hands, but sometimes they might allow Group E to get that tech if it means improving their own to use against Group A.

Group C currently is like Group A and B, but based on religion, also Group C recently took over 4 countries, with great help of Group E and Group A, much to the regret of Group E that only now realised it was against their interests to this happen.

Group D only want to be left alone, but are frequently caught in the crossfire.

Group E are the opposite of Group A, they want more freedom, more decentralisation, and of course, more power to themselves too, but not in a hierarchy, and more splintered. Group E loves cryptography, and the reason OP is being hunted, is because he is helping Group E (on purpose or not).
IOS 6.1 battery problems may be related to Exchange bug
You're confusing copyright law with patent law.
Blogs sell display ads which are part of the big 41% slice of the pie chart. The smaller ones sell space entirely through AdWords--I think that's in the 41% as well, but I'm not sure.

What I don't know is what constitutes blog spending under the category of social media. Running your own company's blog? Outreach and free stuff aimed at influential bloggers? Astroturfing?
52520- Google Chrom 98.2 00:15.20 6/1 2 114 296 22M 74M 60M 107M 873M 799 799 running 501 30984

98.2%! Silly background animation. Looks cool, but clearly totally inefficient.
I have Play! running on my Raspberry Pi with a total of 232 MB RAM and it runs fine, although it's a bit slow. Play!
itself uses about 55 MB, so it might get a bit tight if you plan to run some other software too.
The grammar and sentence structure of this letter indicate to me that this student could greatly benefit fm a little bit of humility. Sure the student is smart. Sure the student is wasting some time at school. I don't think this is entirely the school's fault. If the student had paid a little more attention, I would assume he would be able to construct more intelligible sentences.
33 expert tips and tricks for iOS 6
As a customer, sometimes I need the guy who can do a cheap job on an easy task. Sometimes I'll spend more to get someone with a more proven record (i.e. from a rating service or an agency or recommendations) for the more critical tasks.

As a worker, I would like the opportunity to switch careers/find my way without having to take multi-year training courses for every possible job.

Same about products: sometimes all I need is a cheap drill from Walmart and not an expensive Bosch one that would last me a lifetime.

I can't read the articles right now, but I've seen the book in Germany and it did look interesting! :-)
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator_Technology

Because some stakeholders expressed concerns that this technology might lead to dependence for small farmers, Monsanto Company, an agricultural products company and the world's biggest seed supplier, pledged not to commercialize the technology in 1999.[2] Customers who buy patented transgenic seeds from Monsanto must sign a contract not to save or sell the seeds from their harvest,[3] which preempts the need for a "terminator gene".
Even the first fact is a bit biased. In controlled experiments that rarely go beyond changing names on resumes, you observe bias against women.

When you observe actual practice (with official and unofficial AA, hiring committees, and of course various statistical problems), you tend to observe bias in favor of women.

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12062&page=R1

The picture of what real life looks like is far from clear.
Wow. Cool anecdote!

I briefly interacted with Kirsty during this year's Startup School: you really feel she WANTS to help you (which is an amazing experience!)

Then we exchanged a couple of emails and she was more than courteous. Really, really nice person.
Well, all I'm saying is if it were easy to do, Monsanto probably would have done it already to protect their business model. Unfortunately modifying DNA is not quite as easy as setting compiler flags.
Swedish tech start-ups outdoing European rivals
I don't get how you making a mistake (pressing the wrong button) is the problem of the Operating System. It's just you doing the wrong thing.
Joebonsai Bonsai Pruning Compound - Cut Paste Kiyonal
I think different folks have different learning styles. For me books don't really help. I learn programming by programming. Often a well written blog post that I find on HN, or a tutorial that I find from google teaches me something I didn't know before. After a while you get a sense of the quality of a source... After learning like this for a few years, I started to learn a lot by reading the annotated source of libraries I use (underscore, jQuery... etc). I just wanted to throw in that I don't think books are for everyone.
Docracy’s Terms of Service Tracker
I'm sorry you think it's ridiculous but it's just my opinion, after all. Feel free to ignore it. Can you give us an example of runtime generated code that is easy to debug?
You might be interested that 'Derailing for Dummies' is nothing but a rhetorical escape hatch, used mainly to declare victory without actually making a logical argument.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Escape_hatch
That's what I mean, going to school for a secretarial job while not getting paid/having a very limited pay for a part time job in the background. Same with other low tire positions - beginning sales person, etc.

Alternative: gain valuable job experience from day 1 (ok, maybe week 2 after a short local training) and be fired after 3 months if you're unsuccessful and showing no potential. Unheard of in (non-Eastern) Europe.

[/rant] :)
Could you shed some light on what sets this apart from some of the other server monitoring platforms?
Auto Car Scoop
AutoCarScoop.com is a website created for fans of the automotive world especially cars. Here Auto Car Scoop provides information about new cars, car specifications, car prices along with photos, reviews of auto shows, tuning cars, supercars, muscle cars, exotic cars and everyday cars.
16 Things You Should Never Buy on Craigslist
Nil pointers are #1 on that list. Tony Hoare called them a "billion dollar mistake"[1].

In fact, Go made nil pointers even worse, since nil may not be nil: http://play.golang.org/p/fIde3QZt9m

Every interface is stored as a tuple of a type (pointer) and a value (pointer). The interface tuple returned by a() is ([]int, nil), comparing this to nil, which is a (nil,nil) returns false(!).

So, Go doesn't only have null pointers, it has null-pointers which sometimes has a 'hidden' type, which does not compare to the literal nil.
The odd thing that presentation doesn't cover is that if Oracle was really only about making money, they would be less evil. Oracle inflicts many, many wounds on itself, at the expense of their bottom line, because of an OCD-like compulsion to deny their customers what they want. Every product they have has less marketshare and revenue than it could bring in if they actually managed it in a way that is less hostile to their own customers.
Http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&username=beetodp
Microsoft said to be considering a native version of Office for Linux
Stripe Releases Library To Help Developers Build Sleeker Credit Card Forms;..
Well, 'package' system is a big word. It does not have versioning, checksums, or signatures. An import of a package may bring in (1) a version that is API-incompatible; (2) a version that is API compatible but has new bugs; and (3) a version that has been trojaned/backdoored/whatever.

The only solutions is doing your own package management in $GOPATH, tracking a bunch of Git/Mercurial repositories and finding out by hand which commits are sane and which are not.

It's a disaster in the making, really.
We're talking about a company more aggressive and protective of its patents than Apple or any tech company anyone has ever seen before.
Not that I condone Monsantos actions, but they kinda have to be: their inventions replicate quite freely, lowering the bar on infringement to entirely new levels (basically to infringe you have to do what your standard-issue caveman was already capable of...) - it raises the question of how to finance crop research when you can only take money for the first generation of seeds you sell.
Looking like a great resource, nice work. +1 on the suggestions to link to npm and cdnsjs.

I did spot that searching for 'require' did not find 'requirejs' (searching 'requirejs' finds it).
Could Netflix’s programming strategy kill the golden age of TV?
Will HTML5 Kill the Native App?
Strictly speaking, it's not. You can write your PhD in your passport (only in the long form, like "Dr. med.") in a separate field, but you don't have to, and it won't be part of your name anyway.

Source: http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/pa_g_1986/__4.html [Law in German]
> Beware the grass-is-greener trap.

Please don't confuse my views for a grass-is-greener view. I live in one of the most expansive surveillance states in the world (the UK) and generally what happens in the US tends to come over here eventually.

However, I do have the option to travel or not to travel to the US, and as long as the US Government treats visitors and it's own citizens in this way, I choose not to. For what it's worth, I also choose not to go to Israel and some other countries for a whole load of other reasons. I was simply stating my view on the USA's zany policies.

> You can certainly be searched without a warrant all throughout Europe.

I can't speak for all of Europe but we certainly have Section 44 (of the Terrorism Act 2000) Stop and Search in the UK which has been routinely abused.
- Without the need to be forced through employment-preparation school, rather than study what takes their fancy and learn at a natural speed,

- without the need to pick a higher education on the basis of practicalities like earning potential,

- without the burden of a day job and the constant distraction of making ends meet,

... this would not be a society of couch potatoes. It would be a society of vocations and learning. In school did you really want to be a concert pianist, but had to settle for grinding out C# in a bank? In this society you'd get to be a concert pianist.

A couch potato is what you get if you sap someone's energy and available time with a 9-to-5 and then offer them broadcast entertainment produced by a small class of specialists.
Wiki: "In 2012, the FBI attempted to entrap Kobeissi using Sabu"

http://log.nadim.cc/?p=65

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/a-hacker-charms-and...

Fuckers. (sorry, I couldn't resist)
Microsoft's 'Scroogled' Campaign Attacks Google's Gmail Ad Policies
No one runs confusing ads against my site, so there's no confusion when someone searches for it. As for the meta description, what you put there is up to you. Hire a copywriter if you can't come up with something. I can recommend a few.
Monsanto's inventions are non-trivial

well... the fact is that a seed is not trivial also, and was not trivially changed in thousands of years by a lot of farmers and other people. Then you change one or a few parts in this seed and you can claim that all the "seed software" is yours. Even if you changed a single line.

Maybe we need a GPL for living creatures?
If we want to take a look at the big picture, lets do that then.

Whats the cost-benefit of having patents on GMO seeds? Whats the increased cost to society vs disclosure of information? Patents are an barging, where the state gives a state protected monopoly in return for disclosure of information. Lets make a cost-benefit analyze and see where it points (hint, not even with imaginary numbers would patents on GMO seeds ever come up on top).

> no future agriculture company will ever spend money on GMO research

What a lie. Sorry, but I am going to call it what it is. A lie or a serious form of disillusioning. If you can create a better method to farm: vegetable oils, soy, rapeseed, jatropha, mahua, mustard, flax, sunflower, palm oil, hemp, field pennycress, Pongamia pinnata, or algae, you are going to earn serious money. The military would very much like to be able to producer cheaper biofuel, as would a never ending list of companies. Corn is an other, where a better seed would easy earn you billions if sold to the highest bidder.

Sure, you can't go around suing farmers who never heard of your company, but that is a good thing.
Pasting the Web
Google pr is doing a great job with the go language. Every day 2-3 stories is always highly rated on a language not many people outside google cares about. Time to hellban som accounts maybe?
Java Platform Remains Number One Choice Despite Security Concenrs..
It depends if they made your child pesticide-resistant or not
Rails Girls rolls into Dublin to teach women to code
Is ‘Pirate DRM’ Really the Best Response to Bulk DMCA Takedowns?
The only one i think i can't figure out is Group D.
Also, if my guesses are right, the economic beliefs of Group B are not so different from Group A anymore.
>Your anecdotes about Germany vs Uganda are a big part of the reason the average German is 30 times richer and can expect to live nearly 30 years longer than a Ugandan. Ask anyone where they'd rather live and they'll pick Germany

I'd pick Uganda. And when a had a similar choice to make in real life, I picked the poorer country.

Screw efficiency and screw societies where people live like robots and survive on weekend alcoholic binges, while f*ing poorer countries over to maintain their wealth and superiority (sometimes literally: from colonialism and interventions to Nazi Germany and the extermination of the "undesirables").
QUnit Javascript Unit Tester Released
But I like Haskell more.
(and for those who were wondering, a function which may error out but has no "value" to return, such as a print, will just return the atom `ok` in case of successful execution)
There is an old proverb for this approach: penny wise, pound foolish.
You don't want be disturbed. Don't Disturb for Android
While Apple focuses on China, everyone forgot about India
Hackable Infra-red RC Tank Teardown
Ask HN: List of hacking schools?
Has anyone compiled a list of hacking schools like http://hackreactor.com/ or https://www.hackerschool.com/
It's worth noting that Watson didn't beat the Jeopardy grandmasters with accuracy, but with speed - not that that isn't useful in healthcare, given sufficient accuracy.
>Well, if no one has any jobs how can they afford to buy all of that sophisticated junk?

They don't. They are supposed to starve to death, or make some alternative trade economy in vast ghettos.

The rich people, the people who control and own the factories and make the decisions will live in closed patrolled communities, and they won't need those people for anything at all. Maybe as sex workers, but at some point they could just generate genetically-designed people for that.

It would be like feudal kindgoms all over again, with the difference that the people outside the closed walls of the palace/city are not needed at all (whereas in the feudal kingdoms they were the basis for the wealth of the royals, with their agricultural work).
yes, Go is kind of unbeatable at writing servers and backend systems.
Solving Apple's Innovation Problem
this is seriously cool.
Angel Developers - putting the Start in Startups...
Microsoft-Owned Yammer Hit With Small Round Of Layoffs
-- strict adherence to rules and procedures in aspects of life that most cultures don't care about (clear your sidewalk of snow and ride your bicycle only on the correct side of the sidewalk, for example).

Not very good examples:

--When someone falls in front of your house it is your responsibility (not an 'act of god' as it says in english law) - you can get sued for that.

--As an adult you can't ride on the sidewalks - if you want to, that particular piece of sidewalk has to be marked as a bicycle path (which makes sense considering the high difference in speed between pedestrians and cyclists). In reality nobody cares about bicycle paths so you get an obstacle course of trash cans, cars (and their doors) and pedestrians...
I'm actually very grateful that background was there and running - because it reminded me I'd turned my NoScript off yesterday to deal with a particularly recalcitrant payments site...
Former Apple Human Interface Developer Speculates on Future 'iWatch'
The article is a lil dated, but I presume the principles still hold true?
Memo to the Mind: Don’t Wander, Be Happy
Still in closed beta so the stats are based on all my test mails. As I keep a bunch of them in Yes/No to play with sorting this screws up the current stats. Should be more reliable when actively used…