skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sorry, but this has to be said:

The White House doesn't owe you shit.

They set up this petition system to expand the illusion that somehow the system is working for its constituents. It is not, and it was not designed to. The system makes decisions so you don't have to. It's better this way.

The fact of the matter is that these prosecutors were doing their job, which is to apply as much pressure as needed to achieve a negotiated prison term (a win), and they did it a little too well for our comfort. The White House will not speak against these actions because these actions benefit the White House in the vast majority of cases.

If you want things to change, change the system. Lobby against the CFAA. Lobby for rules to enforce ethical use of prosecutorial discretion. Protest. Volunteer for candidates that oppose these practices. Don't think that clicking a "Like" button is going to change anything, because if the White House petition system actually changed anything, it wouldn't exist.

If you want to change the system, don't ask the system to change. Change it yourself.
Let's make a map with leaflet and D3
This is kind of sad (a friend of mine contracts there). I was always a bit wary, since it seemed like "fun project" vs. "commercial company", but it was a fun project working on amazingly awesome stuff, using cool technology.
Here's a thought:

Stereotyping in broad strokes, men tend to be more "competition oriented" than women.

Men are already well-represented in hacking and tech.

Therefore, the more aggressive and competitive sex is also likely to be more numerous at this event.

So how is this likely to "encourage" females to participate in technology? If anything, it draws more attention to their sex and their "odd man out" status. This is not necessarily a good thing.
Bruce, what is your association with OpenDylan? (It feels odd referring to a language that shares my name, ha).

What are Dylan's strengths and weaknesses?

And what you say about Scheme is believable, though I wouldn't use Scheme personally as I prefer Lisp if I'm going to be in that family.
> I didn't make a moral judgement on improving baseline humans

I meant more, when someone has cancer, that's bad and you pity them. Cancer is an Evil that we should Fight. Whereas we don't tend to think this about nearsightedness. It is, like you say, "part of being human." It's just a screwed-up part of being human that we universally reject and patch over without thinking too much about it. Like having worms[1].

The reason I wouldn't compare it to having robot parts, is that I don't want people to associate it with having robot parts. Because some people don't think we need robot parts.

Imagine if glasses didn't exist, and we had just invented them--with everyone already being as nearsighted as they are. There are some people who would insist--in the mode of thinking of glasses as an "enhancement"--that people should just "learn to cope" with their nearsightedness, and "use their willpower" (that is, squint).

It seems pretty clear to me that there is a distinction between "things people deserve to have to make them functional" (like glasses) and "things people could use to make them even better" (like, say, a Google Glass headset.) I want to be clear that ADD/ADHD medication should be thought of as the former, not the latter.

(And I didn't vote you down, if you're curious.)

1: http://www.radiolab.org/2009/sep/07/sculptors-of-monumental-...
My jerk-ometer is pretty good, but I have to disagree with you here. I read his history too and I don't see jerk behaviour.
I have contacts within the company and they are in fact fucked/shutting down. It's up in the air how orderly it will be.

(let the feeding frenzy begin -- there are some amazing people there. I wish I had the funding in the bank to hire some of them today.)
False choice. I think that the best choice is neither. Unadorned 'Profile' is better than 'My Profile' or 'Your Profile.'

I think there is a decent analog here with unadorned naming being like flat design and my/your being like skeuomorphism.
Something like Adlens adjustable-prescriptions glasses would be a valuable trading item.

Or on a one-way trip to mars.
No need for a table lookup. There is a closed form formula. Of course this is only as accurate as your float precision. You can get out pretty far, though, with some clever rounding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number#Closed-form_ex...
I find it amazing how when you throw out exploding millenia old dead plants in a box suddenly your motor and power train are about as complex as a RC matchbox car. Sure, replacing batteries is absurdly expensive, but that really is it. If you can just get the cost of the battery replacements down, you don't have to worry about belts or mufflers or the gear shift breaking due to complex machinery going on the fritz.
Bill Gates' AMA
You could do that with any car with a pressure sensor on the gas intake. Though thumbs up for Tesla adding that feature.
Am I the only one that was reminded of The Last Starfighter?
R packages I wish I'd known about earlier
Yeah, but the problem is similar to the "subverting natural selection" argument against health insurance. You're not just accepting historical accident, you're actively taking away the incentives for acting sanely. I can understand the historical imperative, but that's not all you're doing by switching the costs to the government : you're changing the incentives for individuals. The short-term advantages of locating in a specific location (including short-term savings of not securing against acts of God at all) are allocated to individuals, the costs are carried by the whole.

In this case that means building a lot of houses that will predictably suffer massive damage due to floods and/or other "acts of God" that are actually reasonably predictable (when may be unpredictable, but you the odds are 1000:1 that it will happen at some point in the next, say, 10 years).

In the health care that means having habits that are will predictably lead to health problems (take your pick what you consider worse: expensive health problems or fatal health problems or health problems that are likely to spread). Whether we're talking eating fat, smoking, carelessness around animals, not cleaning living places or promiscuity : all will result in steadily building likelihood of serious health consequences.

The issue is that this leads to an exponentially rising cost (you can prove that given reasonable assumptions the consequences' cost and seriousness will rise along with population size or faster), even in the face of efficiency improvements. This is because exponentially rising costs versus exponentially diminishing efficiency improvements : there is no question which will win, there's only a question of when.

The problem is that in the short term efficiency improvements are likely to win, which is then of course used as an argument to state "see ? We can handle it". The truth is, obviously, that there is no way to handle the exponential rise that doesn't violate the laws of physics.

So the real question is : Why build systems that common sense says :
1) must fail, no matter how many resources are comitted to make them work
2) are very likely to cause enormous damage just before they fail completely
Yeah I'm afraid this may just go the way of several other petitions regarding judicial cases, in which the response was basically "here is why we aren't going to respond".

In this case I feel some sort of real response is deserved even if I think it is highly unlikely that they can or will do anything as serious as firing people.
Why does a UI have to have personality? Why can't it just look good and be easy to use? Does anyone actually care if an application is "speaking" as if it is a conscious entity?
Ask HN: What should the curriculum be for a Computer Science high school?
My dad has been asked to design the curriculum for a new high school that is geared towards Computer Science. I'm trying to help him so that the kids can get a solid foundation while still being exposed to a bunch of cool areas, and hopefully some modern technologies.

Here is what I have in mind right now:

Freshman year:
Intro to Programming with Python (or Java, since that's what the AP is).

Sophomore year:
AP Computer Science A.
Introduction to Web Programming.

Junior year:
Data Structures

Senior year:
Have the kids work on their own projects mostly, but also hold one-off informational classes on various topics ie. Machine Learning, Computational Theory, Computer Architecture, maybe intros to various other languages.

There could be also some cool electives they can take their senior year, like game programming.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.
I don't think saying "120v isn't enough, you need to rewire your entire house" is really accurate either. Most water heaters, stoves, and some central heaters run off a merged breaker for 240v. You can easily use one of those lines for the car if you don't plan on taxing the thing the entire time (though I figure if you have 50k for a car you have 1k to add an extra circuit and wire your garage up for it).

Yes, although at least in my view part of the selling point is that we have plugs everywhere, so you have electricity anywhere right? Well, hunting around for a 240V plug is a big harder than 120V.

Also, even though 99% (???) of the world is on 240V, I think the current rating on those circuits still limits power to around 2kW sustained.
Sounds like Les Revenants: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0378661/
Have you tried editing the the bin/idea.exe.vmoptions file to set -Xmx higher?
If only all such lists could include example code and visualizations, very nicely done. Thanks!
Why do we deserve a response from the White House? What can the White House possibly say to appease us if they cannot or will not do what we ask?
Indeed. He's telling us much more about himself than he is anything relevant to the article.

If you see nothing but a huge waste of time in this post, you're probably on the wrong site. HN in its prime would have really pissed you off, no doubt...
In Japanese, besides there being a lot of different levels of politeness, using "you" is still considered too direct in general. In conversation, it is to be avoided in almost all cases. It's common to refer to people by name, or by omitting/implying the subject instead of saying 'you'.

There are really interesting problems that you come across when you build multi-lingual interfaces.
You miss the point: the White House isn't going to govern by petition, but the petition provides a useful organizing nexus. And these petitions have, if nothing else, put a serious damper on the prosecutors' professional goals and potential political aspirations.

Not nearly enough, but I don't think anyone's argument is that "all we need to do is get one or two prosecutors fired and then we're done." The only question is, what's next?
In general, I think avoiding either My or Your is better. However, there could be situations in the UI that you may want to separate My Stuff vs Other's Stuff. E.g. a shared folder with a header "My Files" vs "Others". In this case, I think using "My" is stronger. There other other cases like "Your files have been fetched" that sounds more right. I think in general, if you are labeling something, My is ok. If you are communicating a message (e.g. through a notification), Your is better.
Fuck. I hope the Open robotics initiative keeps ROS alive. I frickin love that framework.
I spose nobody actually bought the PR2
Or do what Western Europe did : FIX the country layout so the danger zones stop being danger zones.

We do actually have the ability to prevent a lot of this. Flood zones, dams, flood plans, ...
Teaching my daughter the preamble - It feels so hollow now.
Sorry, but this misses the point entirely.

The White House does in fact owe a response to the petition. That's the deal they set up themselves. They owe it to the people to live up to it.
As someone who went through a bitter, totally unfair, divorce - I agree that lawyers can be POS in these situations.

I was belittled, laughed at, threatened and completely farked over by my ex's lawyer. They drew out the process an incredible amount. Why? Because I was paying all of her legal fees.

Every single court appearance they had a different attorney show up - if they bothered to show up. I am still extremely bitter over the whole process and pray I never run into any of those lawyers in person on the street.

Nothing has made me so close to extreme actions as has those complete thieves. I still hold a special place in my heart for revenge against that company.
Well, no, of course not! If you look above, I asked a question. In case you are wondering, it wasn't a rhetorical question.

My estimated likelihood that you pose questions in order to make subliminal rhetorical points and so tend to readily project that behavior onto others would have increased, but one anecdote isn't usable data.

EDIT: Also, I see I forgot the question mark, which may have caused confusion.
Yes, came here to say this. Article is sensationalist.
Gotta say, it really bugs me to know that people would willingly download a script they don't understand and run it against their private data.

Sure the javascript is open source, but how many people will actually read and understand it before running it?

Not saying that this specific script or post has any nefarious intent, but it's obvious how easy it would be to trick a bunch of otherwise intelligent people to give away access to their facebook account by posting something that claims to protect privacy.
Best IRC / Group Chat Service for Developers
Our dev team is looking at using a group chat service and is leaning towards a hosted solution. I wanted to push for an ejabberd server, as I've used openfire in the past and it has a lot of stability issues.

As far as the hosted services here is my take:

Campfire: very feature rich. incredibly proprietary. works well by iteself, but wont work with adium or limechat without shitty bridges, adapters, electrical tape.

Grove: Simple, good. Crap support. Going out of business. Next.

Flowdock: Google wave take 2. Next!

Do you agree / disagree? Are there any better alternatives?
Uh, we deserve a response because they agreed to give us one?

I am not expecting a response that pleases me. We nevertheless deserve what they have agreed to give.
Lots of German sites use the familiar form, perhaps most notably Apple's. But also IKEA, Qype, my local football club, and various shops.

More business-y sites tend to use the formal "Sie" though, including most ISPs and telecoms.
And that response will be as meaningless as most of the responses they've given. So what? What will it do or change? Will this response prevent another Aaron Swartz incident?
A Rare Opportunity To Explore Venture Capital
As mentioned in the article, these projects don't "belong" to Willow Garage anymore, anyway.

OpenCV is being overseen by Itseez, and ROS is being overseen by the Open Source Robotics Foundation. More to the point, all of Willow Garage's code that they've been key contributors/supporters to (ROS, PCL, OpenCV, etc.) are all currently being used as the official software platform for the DARPA Robotics Challenge, which is only 4 months in to a potential 3 year long competition. None of these projects are going anywhere.
I guess Windows 2000 was the high point then...
There's a simple solution to that: use Ackermann instead.

It measures the same thing and is a function of its own time complexity to boot.
Not just Linux: Windows can 'brick' Samsung laptops too
Then why not skip the farce and actually organize a movement? You know, like they used to do when "separate but equal" was a thing?
I should have known better than to respond to someone who literally Godwinned the thread right off the bat.
Just an issue I have regarding the first question you asked in that post: "Which one of these two calculators feature a skeuomorphic design?"

The answer you present is both, but in that case, the question is misleading and prompts a response picking only ONE of the two calculators.

The text under those 2 images seem to be a more accurate question: "Which of these two apps is skeuomorphic?"
Anyone else find themselves trying to use Ctrl-w in other contexts? Always disappointing when it doesn't work!
In depth look at Metro design.

http://www.riagenic.com/archives/487

http://www.riagenic.com/archives/493
Why would a computer use the familiar form? It seems to me that I would uncomfortable if a computer, or worse, a web interface actively maintained by team of strangers, started to address in language that suggested a certain level of intimacy.
ROS is under the governance of the OSRF, has been since October when the DARPA Robotics Challenge started. ROS will be fine.
Bike couriers and hipsters will have an advantage in the post-apocalyptic future, as fixed gear bikes have fewer complex moving parts and break down less often.
"What happened was a tragedy. We cannot comment further as the investigation into the incident is ongoing."

There, I saved you all the anguish and the time wasted writing up Forbes articles on how we deserve a "response" from the White House. Now what?
As opposed to discussing an article it seems that normality amongst HN is to now debate the choice of title.
Wow that's a great point! Good attention to details, I just fixed it.
Stefan, do you mind telling me what your programming background is? What languages did you come from before working on Julia?

I'm going to look more into the documentation for it now.
The White House says they established this petition system to increase the level of communication between them and the public. Shouldn't we take them at their word? If they fail to come through, then call them out on it (as some other threshold-breaching petitions already have).

Now, they've said that they are swamped with petitions and so have increased the threshold to 100,000. That's not an impossible number, it just requires a broader base of participation - more than say, just the readership of HN and Reddit.

I realize this petition system is widely seen as a gimmick, but it's a public gimmick. As the WH fails to properly respond per its own rules, the independent (and perhaps, foreign, but probably not mass-) media can easily write obnoxious stories calling them out.

As for the other calls to action: certainly.
Thanks. I'm not surprised that it exists, I just think the media likes showing the clips where Steve is busting Bill's balls over Windows supposed inferiority.

I'm going go finish the video now. I appreciate it.
yeah, makes me think they saw this coming and decided to protect ROS by spinning it out.
I'm delighted! That probably means SKF is back to working too :)

Edit: Hmm, apparently not — I must be cutting a corner of the ELF spec that teensy isn't, since teensy works for me too. I'm on 3.2.0-35 here.
Nice job, HN. The one person who gives a realistic, grounded response gets downvoted.
Vivaldi KDE open source Linux tablet gets new hardware, could launch this spring
It might just be my youngness and general disapproval of the polite form speaking here. I really think English has gone in the right direction by removing their polite form in favour of being polite without senseless grammatical contortions.
> I think marketeers leveraging "my" tend to envision that we will come to think of their product as like some treasured childhood teddy bear that we hug firmly to our bosoms each night.

I'm not sure if it is as pronounced anywhere else, but my area has a lot of shops that use the prefix in their name.

My Chemist

My Hairdresser

My Bookstore

My House

All places I walk past regularly, and they're all equally as awkward. Same goes for interfaces trying to emulate the same thing.
Quick run down:

* Dylan was designed at Apple and then later a partnership of Apple, CMU and Harlequin in the 1990s

* Harlequin's implementation of Dylan was spun off to another company when they failed. It was then called Functional Developer.

* Functional Developer was open sourced in 2004 as Open Dylan.

Since then, the development was moving rather slowly, the documentation was still in the 1996-era Framemaker documents, etc.

I decided to help really revive it and we've since done the 2011.1 and 2012.1 releases and are working on the 2013.1 release now. The documentation has been brought forward into the modern era, the website updated, new libraries are being written, etc. I've spent a large amount of time over the past 15 months or so to make a lot of that happen.

As for strengths:

* A pretty great compiler that can do a lot of optimizations.

* Multiple dispatch. As StefanKarpinski says in another comment, it is a great thing.

* A condition system like Common Lisp.

* Everything is an object, so multiple dispatch integrates very cleanly.

* I like the macro system. It is more like syntax-case than full macros, but I find it pretty useful.

* Everything is pretty clean and consistent. There aren't a lot of strange edge cases and the code is really pretty readable.

* Multiple return values, keyword arguments, 'rest' arguments.

* Compilation to an efficient executable.

* The compilation model lets a lot of existing tools work with the compiled code. I'm able to use Instruments on OS X, perf on Linux, etc to analyze performance and so on.

* We have a lot of documentation as a result of having formerly been an expensive commercial product.

Weaknesses:

* Small community.

* Some things are still written with 1990s expectations and need some love, like atomic operations and some aspects of the numerical model.

* Some other nits that would get ironed out pretty quickly with a larger community.

* Marketing hangover from the 1990s in terms of people thinking Dylan is old, dead, etc. We've contemplated just changing the name on a future release to make it more clear that we're moving forward.

As for Lisps ... SBCL and Clozure CL are great implementations. :)
If they can afford a crash pad in new york city, then a little extra in property taxes is probably not gonna break the bank.

Another way to look at the issue, is to evaluate the 'tax collection opportunity costs' of the absentee owners. For every condo that gets bought by an absentee owner (as opposed to a local owner), NYC loses income tax, sales tax, and general economic activity (these are wealthy individuals, there spending is a boost to the local economy). By increasing the property taxes, NYC would shift the cost-benefit ratio towards those that are actually going to utilize the property (thus resulting in more income and sales taxes), while also bringing in more property taxes

Finally, if these wealthy individuals were so concerned about only paying for what they "use", then it would make a lot more sense if they just got a nice hotel room for the days/weeks per year that they are in NYC, rather than buying a condo that sits empty most of the time.
I realize you're annoyed by what you perceive as a farce, but it's already had an important effect: some politicians are moving to tap into a fresh source of voters by proposing legislation to "get tough" on a heretofore unrecognized group of offenders, namely prosecutors.
Routh Horwitz lets you design feedback gains.

God says...

1:18 Now the rest of the acts of Ahaziah which he did, are they not
written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel? 2:1 And
it came to pass, when the LORD would take up Elijah into heaven by a
whirlwind, that Elijah went with Elisha from Gilgal.

2:2 And Elijah said unto Elisha, Tarry here, I pray thee; for the LORD
hath sent me to Bethel. And Elisha said unto him, As the LORD liveth,
and as thy soul liveth, I will not leave thee. So they went down to
Bethel.

2:3 And the sons of the prophets that were at Bethel came forth to
Elisha, and said unto him, Knowest thou that the LORD will take away
thy master from thy head to day? And he said, Yea, I know it; hold ye
your peace.
What's the potential civil disobedience movement? Refusing to participate in the federal court system?