skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Automatic rifles have been illegal for a long time. It might have been "assault" rifles, which are semi-automatic, that were the subject of debate. To answer your question, the everyday life justification for firearm ownership is recreational use on a shooting range or in unpopulated wilderness where it is permitted. They are also useful in exceptional circumstances (like a fire extinguisher is useful despite having a fire department), and some people just collect them as a hobby, like any other collection (like this dentist I knew once whose collection was kept in a code-locked room in his house).

I think a more interesting question is why there is so much focus on attacking rifles, when the vast majority of gun crimes are committed with handguns.
It's not like it's a hidden conspiracy. Gun control activists have explicitly stated that they need to take advantage of the emotion following the shootings to push their agenda. And yes, the goal of many of them (including the author of the assault weapons ban currently proposed) is confiscation. She said it herself.
At the same time nobody else agrees on this language and currently only a branch of chromium supports the VM.

This is rather political - everyone want to have controls over the next language of the web, and nobody would want to adapt one made by others.

What even worse is that we all know it's almost impossible to create a good language without some dictatorship at the beginning.
I can see how that reasoning is an argument for gun ownership.

How does it apply to carrying guns in public, especially concealed guns?
I don't think anyone here will disagree with you on that point, but many will say they don't believe the trade-off is worth it.
And why should those be the only options?

Of course our options needn't keep state and citizenry separate - in fact, "quite a few" states do place themselves in the middle of the continuum: democratic systems, in theory, join the state and citizenry at the hip and provide the luxury of dealing in a pragmatic manner with the problem of making something so abstract as "freedom" manifest - as-you-go, considerate of subtly different definitions of freedom. Real life doesn't necessarily live up to this ideal; but some of the heights of American legislation do show what is possible.
...Christian’s experience when he attempted to use only a laptop for a full week!

Only a tablet?
"Orchestrated" may be too strong a word; it's like there is emergent, independent behavior from a large minority of people who share the same views and all saw the same opportunity.
> To address your other points - you can get a recursive reference by simply assigning your function to a variable, `var f = function(){ f(); }`. There's no need for named functions for that.

> (I don't consider hoisting a benefit - I prefer to have my functions declared before they're used)

> As for call stacks and debug messages - that was true some time ago, but modern debugging tools can figure out the function name pretty good even if it isn't a named function.

All of these ignore the fact that functions are not simply declared once in Javascript and then used later, like in C. It's a dynamic language with first-class functions and function literals. You could assign to a variable in this case, but that's needlessly restricting:

asyncFunc(function cb(result) { print(result); });

As for IE and memory leaks, I already acquiesced to the need to support it in some cases. Still, for many people it is acceptable to drop support for IE8 despite its general market share, and this leak may not be an issue if the function in question is not related to repeating code. Certainly you should not ignore the issue.
The article true Scotsmanned the Xbox approach and the above comment rightly describes this with the phrase "not count". The article's arguments are severely undermined by the Xbox ecosystem and its dismissal by the author is intellectually lazy and his dismissive claim is unsupported within the piece.
The U.S. is at historically low point in violence, concurrently there is a historically high percentage of gun ownership in the U.S.
Did they plug the ears/control for hearing of the test subjects too?

By hearing alone I can sense almost any human or sufficiently strong electrical presence, especially indoors.
Just because the 4th amendment isn't being upheld to a standard that it ought to be is no reason to endorse the trampling of other civil liberties.
App stores, yes, but how difficult/expensive is it to get your code onto the console?
The Nazis overran nation states with mobilized armies. A small segment of the populace with guns would have been irrelevant.
Do you have statistics to back that claim up? Are mass stabbings included in your argument as well?
Mouse & Touch Events Done Right
Game makers care because if the game experience suffers because of cheaters, griefers and so forth, the customers won't come back. If you want to sell things to players in the game, the players have to want to play.

Anti-cheat is a big deal.

So I would say that undetectable debug features, ones that can be turned on without indicating this to the title (or cheat detection code on the platform) are bad for game economies.

Since card makers want to sell graphics cards, they have the same goal as the title developers. Not surprising they'd turn these off (or at least make them very visible).
Cool one with readily usable code snippets & data, esp if you are logged in: https://apidocs.chargebee.com/docs/api/subscriptions?lang=cu...
Exactly, a common belief is that a semi-automatic is automatically inferior. In actuality, Soldiers are trained to shoot their M16/M4s in semi-auto most of the time, because unless you are pretty close or extraordinarily talented, burst fire or full is just going to be a waste of ammunition. The reason machineguns (m249, m60, etc..) are usually shot in full auto, is because they are primarily designed as a supressive weapon system.
Agreed, but the mass murders that we've seen in the past several years do not typically (I'm not aware of any cases at least) involve lock circumvention.

Additionally the process of circumventing a lock requires time, effort, at least a little practice and familiarity with the tools, which most of these guys do not invest into their murder sprees. Whether a lock can be broken is a different matter from whether a lock will slow down an assailant unless the lock offers no resistance.
What happens when you include stabbings and beatings?
"But when you've got an App Stores, you've got a race to the bottom."

Are game developers on i* competing on price in the same way? Or is the pricing model different? I would claim that the console games' revenues are front-loaded while i* games are back-loaded (many games include DLC for free, whereas apple games end up monetizing through lots of DLC)
I think it's more of a control and quality issue. Steam also has lots of AAA titles and no problem with race to the bottom pricing. Maybe it indeed is a hardware profit issue, but then valve would have similar problems. I honestly don't understand why they don't go full force on app stores, it would change the game and imo is their only chance to survive vs Valve and Apple.
I used that as an example, because it is a very famous lie that they told.

Parent comment didn't even bother giving any examples.

Would you like to write up an encyclopedia of lies that Microsoft has told, or should I use your logic to assume that they must be more honest than Apple?

Personally I don't think either of them are trustworthy.
If massacres of children in school and young students in college aren't examples of few oppressing many then I don't know what is.
It looks like there is some sort of plan in place as I received a "SourceForge Project Upgrade Notification" a few days ago letting me know that they've upgraded an old project of mine to the new platform. My project is small, really old, and unmaintained so maybe they're starting with low visibility/impact projects.
This is a really poor argument. First, what's "tyrannical" to you? There are various degrees of "tyrannical", just as there are various degrees of terrorism. Can you expect the entire country of gun owners to react all at once? Because I have some evidence that suggests otherwise.

You're hoping for some "flipped switch" type of tyranny that never happens. Even Hitler's madness took place in phases and wasn't universally recognized as a threat.

This idea of immediate revolt is a fairy tale. One that other gun-less countries watch in awe. Don't you think its time to move on and concentrate on more important issues?
"Given the massive mismatch of firepower, training and numbers between the government and the very best armed/trained groups "

~700,000 cops, 1.4 million active duty military and ~200 million gun owners (many of whom have had military training) is quite a mismatch, all right, but not in quite the way you think.
I'm not convinced locks are a sufficient deterrent in stopping people bent on mass murder. What if the attacker simply waited for a class period to end and pick people off walking between buildings? What if they were a student with authorized access to the building? What would prevent an unauthorized person from tailcoating an authorized individual into a building when it is busy?

You offer up locks as a solution to this problem and I'm merely pointing out that I think they are grossly inadequate.
Except that violent crime in America has actually been decreasing steadily since the 90s:

http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/29/justice/us-violent-crime
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States

Weird that we have we're getting more fearful and selfish, and more and more violent, and yet violent crime is going down. (Weird how these finger in the wind takes of the zeitgeist work...)
Melbourne, Aus.
Over time Nintendo will probably sell all their classics on other platforms app stores, eventually just that like how sega have transformed into content only.
No. As a society, we became numb to gun violence to the point where the media stopped reporting it on the news. The Newtown shootings reminded us that the problem is real and pervasive enough that it demands a solution. Stories of gun violence are rightly reassuming a place at the top of the hour because of the horrible, devastating tragedies that they are.

This isn't about a liberal agenda in conflict with a conservative conspiracy. I fully believe in and support the 2nd amendment, and strongly feel that any new legislation must comply with it. But this right comes with responsibility. You don't get to shoot through your door because someone turned the knob without ringing your doorbell and hide behind it being an act of self-defense. You don't get to prove your bravery by firing into a group of innocent students from a rival high school. You don't take psychologically troubled individuals to the firing range for therapy and teach them to be efficient killing machines. And if you own guns, you don't leave them on the kitchen table so your seven-year-old can grab it on his way to school for show-and-tell.

This isn't political. We need to shame the idiots who abuse their rights to the detriment of the rights of others. We need to express a sense of outrage when this happens, loud enough for our families and friends to hear it. If that means a continuous stream of these stories on the news, stories of actual life-changing events, is what it takes, then so be it. It's about time the media did its job and reported real news instead of tie-ins to the latest blockbuster the parent company just released.
The definition of freedom in catholic countries is that men are free to choose between good and evil, but precisely because they are able to make a choice, they often choose evil, so true freedom can only be achieved repressing evil. It's hard to sell them the idea that letting everyone have guns (or letting investors do whatever they want) can create a virtuous society.
This is an excellent, level-headed, clear and persuasive comment that outlines a side of the argument that I previously failed to grasp. Thank you!
Wrong.

"First, Dvorak is very good at keeping fingers on home row - 71% of keystrokes land there (compare this with 34% for QWERTY). This alone is worth the price of admission. Dvorak bottom row usage is very low at 9% (15% for QWERTY). Dvorak favours the right hand by 14% (QWERTY favours left by 15%). Dvorak has more uniform finger usage and makes greater use of the pinky (18% vs QWERTY's 10%). The cumulative run statistics illustrate Dvorak's strength in alternating hands. 62% of successive keystrokes on Dvorak do not use the same hand (rh(0)) and 88% of adjacent keystrokes use the same hand at most once (rh(1)). In contrast, with QWERTY only 51% of successive keystrokes do not use the same hand and only 76% use the same hand at most once. QWERTY forces the typist to use the same hand repeatedly, which limits the amount of rest and increases effort. Dvorak's preference for the use of the right-hand give it longer right hand runs with only 47% of keystrokes that use the right hand being followed by use of the left hand (61% for QWERTY). The corresponding statistic for the left hand is reversed, with Dvorak at 76% and QWERTY at 42%."[1]

The authors of the Reason Magazine article from 1996 that you linked to stated that "Ergonomic studies also confirm that the advantages of Dvorak are either small or nonexistent." But the authors cited only one nameless, undated study. This promotion of QWERTY isn't surprising seeing as how Reason Magazine is written by ideologues whose goals include the promotion of the idea that the invisible hand of the market is never wrong.

You should consider getting your information from specialists who are active researchers rather than the writings of non-specialists from previous decades.

[1] http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?dvorak
As an ex-EA employee, I think I know the real reasons. They're Target, Walmart and Carrefour. The packaged game industry is still beholden to retailers.
"hat's all well and good, except no gun you have is going to make a difference. If you're worried about a tyrannical government, you better start investing in drones, nukes, tanks"

Nukes and tanks are useless in a guerrilla war.
How do revolutions happen even in countries without mass individual gun ownership then?

Remember that we're not talking about merely an insurgency here, we're talking about an insurgency with massive popular support, against a government that has turned tyrannical. In such a situation there is no technological or firepower advantage that guarantees victory to the state, even nuclear weapons. There are always points of weakness, which can be exploited best by folks backed by extensive popular support locally. An uprising of ubiquitously armed civilians would be able to quickly overpower police forces, and they'd also be able to take over some military bases, gaining access to more powerful weapons. There would also likely be defections from military forces.

Look at Syria as an example, the regime there is ruthless and willing even to use mass carpet bombing and shelling on civilian targets, and there is no right to private gun ownership there, and yet somehow the rebels have managed to arm themselves not just with small arms but also RPGs, mortars, and tanks. Facilitating the early stages of a rebellion vastly accelerates all of the later stages. Moreover, mass civilian ownership of firearms means that the ability of police and armed forces to attack the public without fear of injury becomes much diminished, which provides a deterrent effect against such attacks.
To be fair to splat, he didn't mention tyranny himself.
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree that only being able to upload vga video is a violation of basic human rights.

Internet access is a basic human right not because of long-distance communication with family (that's a luxury), but because, like telephones, you need it to access basic services. An increasing number only have online offerings now, or require you to jump through online hoops.
I dunno what to say to that, other than "wow." That is just a shocking amount of honesty.
Xbox 360 was a great step in the right direction with easy access to XNA and the ability to publish to xbox live.

A number of friends who I thought would never get into game design managed to push games back in 07/08.
I don't understand this argument. There are not numerous cases in the US where people were trying defend themselves with good intentions, but due to their lack of government approved firearms training, they injured someone else. Do you feel threatened by your neighbor's lack of gun training? They are just going to start shooting randomly at the darkness and hit you?
This would solve a real problem in New York City... pedestrians so wrapped up in their smartphones that they walk right into traffic signs, other people and even into moving traffic!
$> whois cappuccino.org

...

Registrant ID:mmr-117754

Registrant Name:Domain Administrator

Registrant Organization:Motorola Trademark Holdings, LLC

Registrant Street1:600 North US Highway 45

Registrant Street2:Attn: Law Department

...

When 280North sold to Motorola, they got the domain too.
It's really not too strong. From a Brady Campaign press release: https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2012/12/15-1

"We have to take terrible moments like this and use it as a catalyst to demand the sensible change in our nation that is too long overdue."

That was a major talking point for similarly minded groups in the time immediately following the shooting.
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM

How many people need to die before people everywhere realize that giving too much power to governments is not a good idea?
You can thank the media for that. Its not that the violence is increasing. As you say, it is the opposite in fact. But the amount we HEAR about violence is skyrocketing.

So everyone, do yourselves a favor; STOP WATCHING THE NEWS! Stop reading it! It doesn't benefit you. Take it from a recovering news junkie. You won't miss it. You won't feel less informed. The important stuff will always make it to your eyes and ears. The rest is just going to make you more anxious than you reasonably need to be.
Ask HN: Would this phone-to-email idea be useful? Also, a meta question.
My wife commented this morning that she wanted to send a friend an email but she only had the friend's phone number. There's always SMS, but it is limited in various ways, especially if you want to send long messages, links, or attachments. On the other hand, sometimes you have someone's email address but not their phone number and you wish to, from your phone perhaps, send them a long voice message or just get their attention fast.

My idea is a website that associates phone & email. You would use the site directly to send messages or you could email an address in the form of, say, [phonenumber]@exampledomain.com

If the receiver is not using the site, they get a one time SMS (or automated voice message) with a preview of the message and instructions on how to access the site. They verify that they own both the email address and the phone number through a combination of a confirmation link and a PIN.

If the receiver is already using the site, they get the entire message without the sender being aware of their email address. I'll skip explaining how the reverse process would work unless you're curious.

Would this be useful to you or people you know?

[The meta question] I feel guilty even asking HN when there are supposed to be easier ways to validate ideas. But I have not had good success with landing pages; basically, I have no idea how you are supposed to market them: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5093633 Is there a better way to validate these things without:
a) an already working product
b) a huge marketing effort
c) exhausting your social network by spamming all your friends for input/sign ups
The claim I am making is not that locked doors will stop a shooter from shooting anyone. I am saying that locked doors will make him less effective at shooting many people.

Once someone decides they're going to take a gun and start killing people, it's non-trivial to stop them. That doesn't mean that we can't reduce the number of people they can shoot at and kill. That's where closing off the avenues that a shooter can take is effective.

And even if someone did wait for classes to let out, firing a gun and killing people at a distance is not easy. You start shooting at people, and presumably they'll scatter.
A popular misconception is that England has just as much violent crime as America but it's redistributed across other weapons, the reality is that every country counts violent crime differently. If someone were to break into my apartment in England while I was out that is a counted as a violent crime, whereas in America it wouldn't be counted. The only fair way to compare countries is to compare specific crimes (eg: Murder, Robbery) comparing "Violent Crime" doesn't work.

For 2011/2012 there were 549 homicides in England[1], for the same period there was ~14,000 in the US[2]. The population of the UK is 62 million, the population of the US is 313 million. There are 6x more people in the US but 28x more homicides, most of which are firearm related. If you remove the firearm homicides from the America figures they become almost the same as the UK figures (in per 100,000 people).

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jul/14/crime-st...
[2] http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/11/us-usa-crime-stats...
I mean this just doesn't add up. There's some reason you have police, military, para-military and federal agencies so that citizens don't have to handle this aspect of security.

The original purpose of the right to bear arms in america was to give ordinary citizens the ability to stand up to police, military, para-military, and federal agencies should the government go off the deep end. It can be debated whether that is still a necessity today. However if that is the purpose of the right to bear arms then it hardly serves that purpose if you aren't allowed to bear weaponry that is sufficient to actually stand up to those groups.

The authors of the amendment meant it as just another part of the balance of power.
> orchestrated attempt to [...] confiscate all firearms

Are there people out there who can read this and not think that this person is mental?

I can't see a difference between this conspiracy theory and all the others: chemtrails, fluoride, mind control, FEMA camps, Time Cube.
Aaaaand .. does it work?
When I hear college, body armor and "rifle", I think paintball.
Thanks for the encouragement! And yes, it might need a tweak :)
You should take a look at the research behind Colemak (and a less known layout named Workman), to see that Dvorak is a subpar layout, with misguided reasoning and poor optimisations.
edit: PS3 devkit is 1,700 Euros. There's also this: https://psm.playstation.net/portal/en/index.html#register http://www.playstation.com/pss/index_e.html
I think that's actually more of an artifact of the nature of introduction of tablets than a fundamental limitation. Over time tablets will become much, much more powerful and standard peripherals (such as external keyboards) will become more refined and more commonplace. I don't see anything particularly odd about the notion that someone in, say, 2023 might use a stylus with a tablet to produce various graphic arts, or sit at a desk with a tablet on a stand and type on a keyboard to write, or code, or do any sort of creative endeavor that is now possible with a PC.
Works for you because you always carry a bag. If you don't, pocketable smartphone can't be beat.
About a year ago, a student's umbrella was mistaken for an assault rifle at the university where I work and we were on lock down for hours. http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/10387437/
Really?

Because I can think of two off hand that made the news since Newtown.

http://cjonline.com/news/2013-01-08/man-accidentally-shoots-...

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/boy-3-killed-playin...