skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hate to stray so far from the main thread, but anyone who finds E-Prime interesting might enjoy reading about Evidentiality[1]. Some languages allow encoding the nature of evidence in verb forms, with the most cited example (Pomo) having forms to distinguish direct evidence (visual and nonvisual), circumstantial evidence, and hearsay. Somewhat esoteric but pretty cool. Make the observations and give the facts to the listener and let them reach a conclusion - contrast with American English where it is incredibly common to qualify the confidence we have in our own judgement ("It must.." "I suppose.." "I think.." "It probably", and of course all forms of "to be") rather than qualifying the confidence of your knowledge in an objective way.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality
Let me introduce you to Amanda Palmer - The Art of Asking: http://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_palmer_the_art_of_asking.htm...

She got money to the tune of 6-figures by asking people to buy her music if they liked it.
Yes, real world calling.

The Yuan is not pegged to the dollar. The dollar peg was lifted in 2005.

What you mean is, it has appreciated by 15% over just the last 5 years. That's a significant value increase.

There has been dramatic inflation. Which is why a normal price for oil, despite plenty of supply, is now $85 to $90. Also why gold is now $1500 as normal. And also why grocery prices are at all time highs. And why housing prices, even in the supposedly destroyed markets, are up 50% to 100% over 15 years - drastic by any historical norm, particularly so in an economy with 14% real unemployment.

The Federal Government is borrowing at near zero because the global reserve currency is temporarily the US Dollar, and the Fed is buying about 85% to 90% of all new US Government debt because nobody else wants to touch it as they know the disaster that is coming. If you think borrowing rates for the US Govt. are going to stay this cheap for the next two decades, I'll take you up on that bet.
I also do not buy the whole "shopping around" thing, even if it worked. The idea that patient should know almost nothing about costs is a right one. The current implementation of this idea suffers from various problems, but as more people get health insurance under Obamacare, things will get better. Ideally, under single payer system, patient gets no bills at all, because all of the providers are "in network", as there is only one network.
This Person is taking a Harvard Class with his Six-Year-Old
As crazy things go, this actually seems quite plausible. If you're ok with potentially dying with higher odds than the Shuttle or ISS, and the mission is scoped to just be a fly-by, you should be able to build a suitable mission out of technology we have now.

The big pain is that you only get one launch window, so there's no chance of sending an unmanned version first, etc. And the timescale is compressed (although that also limits the budget helpfully -- it might be less efficient from an engineering perspective, but a 5y drop dead launch date means there will be less bureaucracy and inefficiency...).

I'd still prefer robots which stay and build stuff, and then send humans in force later to colonize, but this can be done now and for low-single digit billions, I don't see why not to do it.
Harlemify: Make Any Website Dance The Harlem Shake
dude, that is awesome!

(although, I will now spend a good few hours working out how on earth you get the 16 bar repeats, with variations, and indeed the kick, from some crazy bitshift magic.)
Why is it called Slaughter? Seems not as inviting.
>I simply cannot agree to these alleged redefinitions.

How about the most blatant redefinition -- from "a guy hacking trees with an axe"?

>HN as a community is the last place I would like to see wholeheartedly accepting casual things as hacking.

Well, Paul Graham might have been a great hacker (and Robert Morris!), but HN was built more around an entrepreneurial community (YC et al).

As such, a lot of people here don't do deep hacking stuff. They do simple web services (and sometimes, reading some articles they make it sound like they're doing rocket science). Even the most celebrated of them, Facebook, Instragram, Groupon or what have you, are dead simple stuff, CS wise. There might have been some difficulty in handling their scaling, but that too is hardly a hard problem. (Stuff like what Google and Orbitz do are another matter entirely).

So, seeing that HN has tons of introductory or trivial Node, Mongo and similar articles, why should you expect to see the "old meaning" of hacker here? It's not like it's Lambda the Ultimate.
Thank you very much for such an elaborate reply!

Cheers
> Who would have more than one material to print with? Well, probably everyone.

Currently the number of materials you'd need to stock in your home to be able to print various kinds of products would be quite large (20 or more). That doesn't make sense from an economic perspective.

Let's image, then, that we'll see products made from fewer raw materials because the design changes to accomodate printers. What reason would designers/manufacturers have to do that when they know they won't be able to make a living when their products get pirated?
Honestly, I doubt that much has changed except that there are more kids online. It's always been the adults who primarily paid for stuff. Even back then, there were probably lots of kids who used his software for free.

Take home message: if you want to build consumer products and make money, target adults, not teenagers.
disappearing stack trace

In many (most?) OO-languages it takes a surprising amount of gymnastics to properly chain exceptions. Especially if you're a library-author depending on other libraries.

The blame goes squarely to the language designers here. This feature should be baked into the core of every language because adding it with a 3rd party library is far from trivial in most.

Here's an example of such a library (ruby): https://github.com/pangloss/nested_exceptions

Use it!
What? Just say no when prompted by the dialog. It then says they are considering other options and asks you which you'd prefer. There is no lying involved.

Edit: To clarify, I'm not saying Youtube's dialog is a good thing. I'm just saying there is no lying involved and it's rather trivial (albeit annoying) to dismiss it without having to lie or use your real name.
This article is completely at odds with Time's article [1] from a few days ago, that showed that out of pocket payers must pay the hospital's chargemaster prices, which are set at ridiculously high levels to act as an anchor in negotiations with insurance companies. If you're not an insurance company, you pay that inflated rate. If you are, you have negotiated it down to as low as 20% of that rate.

I think I trust the Time article a lot more than this linkbait.

[1] http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-why-medica...
If you read the article, you'll see they aren't deploying OpenBSD to their users as a general desktop, but as an Appliance Environment - which makes total sense. Call Centers, Transaction Centers, NOCs, etc... - Anywhere you have a pre-set configuration/applications, OpenBSD is a great choice. Rock Solid stability and super secure. This is also an area where ChromeBooks will do well.

By "Desktop" - though, I mean users who are planning on downloading/installing various productivity utilities, applications, etc... to do their job. Creating Reports, Slide Decks, PDFs, Spreadsheets, charts, diagrams, IM apps, Skype - whatever random app they want to use to do their Job.

I've never seen an OpenBSD user in 20+ years of supporting Desktops in Engineering and Corporate environments - Windows obviously, but lots of Macintosh OS, A nice run of NextOS, Lots of FreeBSD, umpteen distros of Linux (for a while, that's all people seemed to be running), many versions of Solaris, tons of Irix, a handful of HPUX users, and even a couple AIX users.

But, in that same time - I've seen OpenBSD squirreled away in all sorts of Appliance/Network/Firewall duties.
Maybe you are right, but in the "business to business" world it is still as the old times, businesses are going to pay $20 per month if you provide some real value.
At a former company (which has since gone out of business) I met some people who loved Evernote.

One was an administrator who cheerfully kept confidential details about the security of our corporate network in it without once reading the Evernote TOS or considering the consequences if those TOS changed.

Even after I explained that those TOS clearly violated several parts of his employment agreements, he continued to use it. He didn't think there was anything wrong since our CFO also kept a lot of sensitive information in it...
Infographic: Small Business Social Cheat Sheet
Icelandic Law - Network Analysis with d3.js
Click a node to see references to/from other nodes. Double click to see the underlying text.
At the time the project was envisaged the name was chosen because it sorta-rhymed with the word "auto" - as in "automation".

(It helps if you have a Scottish accent.)
Everything I Missed in "Vim After 11 Years"
"We want to be ninjas" lol

A ninja coder is a coder with experience in liquidation of companies. I can claim, that I'm a ninja, because I liquidated 3 different companies in the last 20 years.

Of course the main work of a ninja starts, after you fired everybody. You need skills to hack into computers, accounts, databases, retrieve source code, and try to get a sense of what was going on in a company, without allowing anybody of the former employed to access any computer.
I don't know about selling, but I had a hobby project, my first in Pascal, that would translate ProBoard (ProBBS, or a PcBoard door program that did fancy things) to and from RBBS (the other open source board software). I uploaded it to a couple of boards, some of which were FidoNet connected. Anyway, a few months later got a call I think from someone somewhere in the Navy that wanted to use it, and asked if I had any improvements planned. I didn't as I had already moved on to other things (probably Lemmings), but let them know they were free to use it as they see fit. As an 8 or 9 year old kid, I was amazed at the reach of technology, so it was very encouraging, and helped me to pursue a career in IT.
As a journalist, I am biased, and I agree with the parent comment.

But the more significant problem is the demise of journalistically savvy publishers. Content is not a priority, period. Unless, of course, you're talking about 'content marketing,' which is essentially advertising in disguise.

Journos will have to ignore the traditional glass wall between editorial/advertising to make a living. And there's always been some push from the top in terms of promoting favored advertisers or even squelching a negative story. But of the last three publishing groups I've worked for, two were run by glorified ad execs who considered editorial staff as a cost drain, and who were constantly trying to find ways for the department to 'earn its keep.'

The best was a newspaper group still managed by the founders, admittedly a labor of love but profitable, until health issues prompted the sale. Now the product is hardly recognizable. Remote bureaus were quickly closed, and the chain of "hometown" papers no longer have offices in the communities whose names are on the banners.

Hyperlocal websites are trying to fill the void, and doing a reasonable job with no resources in many places. But it just ain't the same as developing local knowledge and journalistic skills over a career with the same publication.
You might also be interested in recline.js (http://okfnlabs.org/recline/), a fork of Google refine, initially created by @maxogden, now maintained by the Open Knowledge Foundation (okfn).

How their data processing features differ from openRefine is not clear to me though...
Monads are actually a very simple concept. They're really hard to understand at first because of how much knowledge is prerequisite. I found that by teaching myself Haskell incrementally, in small steps, I was able to understand monads just as easily as anything else. For me, it was simply resolving the following dependency graph:

Algebraic data types -> type classes -> functors -> applicative functors -> monoids -> monads.

I need to emphasise that understanding of each stage is predicated on understanding of the previous stage. Trying to learn monads without understanding these other concepts is like trying to learn Maxwell's equations without an understanding of calculus and physics.

Lippert states: "Plenty of developers have used the monad pattern entirely by accident, not realizing that they're re-inventing something that already has a name.". This is completely true. For instance, watch this video on refactoring by Ben Orenstein [1]. He 'destroy[s] conditionals with a NullObject'. This is exactly how the maybe monad works.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DC-pQPq0acs
People are happy to pay for things that are good. Don’t be afraid to charge for your services.

"would pay", 5,200 results

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22would+pay%22+site:news.yc...

"wouldn't pay", 38,000 results

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22wouldn%27t+pay%22+site:ne...

(OK, so it's kind of a joke response, but the abundance of free software and services has really driven down the expectations around reasonable payment compared to box software's heyday, even for software developers themselves).
Who has already spent more time in space than virtually anyone else who could bankroll this kind of thing (unless Richard Garriott decides to throw down), too.
> Such bloatware needs at least one dedicated and interested developer on each target OS.

That's correct. Although I'm one of the few who actually seems to care about portability as a good practice I don't have the time to run 5 different OS'es to verify each of my volunteered contributions works on every feasible POSIX platform.

In the end someone who is interested in each of those platforms needs to help take on the task of ensuring that the software they use works on the platform they use (that is, if they wish for the software to work). This can be as simple as reporting bugs, helping with integration into platform-specific libraries (which KDE is usually very good about using through adapter libraries to ensure portability), reporting platform-specific bugs that need worked around, etc.

Some projects are already taking a WONTFIX attitude to portability bugs. I will push where I can to make sure that KDE isn't one of them, but I can't change the number of hours in a day... non-Linux developers need to contribute too if they want a great KDE on that platform.
There's definitely some truth to your supply and demand argument. IMHO there is a major issue with working out a platform for payment. My Grandpa read the New York Times all the way through every day – having a single subscription worked. I skip around to at 20+ news sites and blogs on a weekly basis. There's no way that I would pay a typical newspaper subscription rate to each of them.

I don't think there's an easy solution. A pay-per-click system probably would just invite sensationalism. Personally, I think that the solution is partly to innovate up. Provide interactive content and go beyond and electronic copy of what could have been printed on paper.
Answering the questions facing security professionals today
How about making dreams come true?
We've created PeekStories (http//www.peekstories.com) with one unique goal: Relate inspiring stories from people achieving projects to help others achieve theirs.

Here is a little background on the project:

- the idea started a year ago when discovering I hadn't fulfill any of my dreams (Backpack in Patagonia, Visit the Everglade, Swim with a dolphin) created 2 years ago, I started to wonder "why"?

- Why I haven't done anything before? Money, time, family and mostly fear of uncertainty and future.

- I thought that I might not be the only one on earth not achieving the things I care to do.

- That's probably something interesting to work on: Helping people achieve the things they care about by connecting them to the relevant information broadcasted by inspiring "achievers".

- A year later we launched PeekStories, a social tool to easily save, build and share personal projects.

How do you do to achieve your project in life? Aren't you sometimes dropping out on your project because you think they are unreachable? What would you need to get inspired and make your project come true?

What do you think of such a project?
Seconded! The library used in this game (rot.js) is the perfect platform for a 7DRL game as well. I've been using it quite extensively (via coffeescript) and it handles a lot of the hard stuff (FOV, lighting) very well, which frees one up to work on more interesting things: setting, gameplay, etc.
RoughDraft.vc students make their first investment in a student startup
I thought about that being what he was alluding to, but that's not just a Gingerbread phenomenon so it had me think he was talking about native apps. Even on Android 4.0, the stock browser remains static unless there's an OS upgrade. It would just be kind of cherry picking to just pick on Android 2.3 in that case when every Android OS version's stock browser (outside of those that come with Chrome), is dependent on the OS version. Just a bad idea that left it dependent on the OS after seeing how that went with IE. If he's referring to Chrome only working on ICS+, that's true, but not every ICS+ device comes with it (very few do), so most people won't bother getting it any more than they would look for an alternative browser on Android 2.3.

I haven't used iOS enough to say for sure, but isn't Mobile Safari also tied to the OS version in a similar way and can't get updates without the OS being updated?
Also note that all the watermarks on the images are papyrus
Amsterdam startups openly sharing knowledge at Pitchrs6
They've given a specific list of reasons.

Reasons that mean nothing to those of us that don't understand display servers and/or composting.

If you're going to complain about it, at least refute their specific technical reasons if you want your complaint to have any credibility.

I can't, and I don't think any of us meaningfully can unless there are some X, Wayland or Mir developers lurking around HN.

But I think the Wayland dev's google plus post [3] mailing list post [2] and IRC log [1] all give the impression that that list of reasons offered up by Ubuntu is, at least in part, bunk or could be addressed upstream in wayland. An upstream project that Ubuntu was already involved in for years and had the power to shape but never actually voiced their concerns when wayland's architecture didn't meet ubuntu's requirements. Ubuntu is free not to reveal the real reasons behind their decision, but unless they do the whole thing is dripping in Not Invented Here syndrome.

In fact, it seems like from the Wayland community, the problem isn't that Ubuntu is striking it out on their own, its that they're distributing a bunch of miss-understanding about Wayland in the process.

01:16 <RAOF [Ubuntu dev]> We're not forking wayland; that's part of what krh [Wayland lead] is annoyed with?
01:17 <Prf_Jakob> RAOF: he said he was annoyed with you having a wiki page full of missunderstandings of how wayland work.

[1] http://pastebin.com/KjRm3be1

[2] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-Mar...

[3] https://plus.google.com/100409717163242445476/posts
Just so every one knows, the guy that made this started learning to code from nothing about a month ago. Great job, man. I'm impressed that you conceived of, built, and then launched something in your first month.
I get concerned about usages of big data that concentrate on "'discovery' of reliable relationships in the data."

The problem being that as we add more data, the chances of spurious relationships increase dramatically, and the human brain is incredibly good at finding a causal explanation for those relationships, even if none exists. This can quickly turn Big Data into a noise-generating rabbit-hole, leading us down blind alleys, and wasting our time.

I love that it keeps getting easier to test our hypotheses, but a search that begins without a logical and reasoned hypothesis is a dangerous beast.
They did, check out the watermarks on every image haha
For a Vatican site I found it to be actually quite constrained and subdued.

What "hip" designers don't get is something very simple: Modernism is Protestant, Baroque is Catholic.

Do you want simplicity, cleanness and functionality? Go look for Bauhaus, Ikea and industrial revolution in Northern Europe. Catholicism belongs to another world. It belongs to the aesthetics of excess, over decoration, big European cathedrals, ostentation, Michelangelo and Handel. In case of doubt look at the pictures on that site: gold, purples, reds, churches full of Carrara marble. Like Hindus and Muslims, Catholics preach humbleness but what they find beautiful is actually excess and ostentation.

There is a reason why Italy succeeds on luxury goods (Armani, Ferrari, Murano crystals, etc): they know that bling sparkles and that sparkles fascinate people.
The most likely outcome is the Canonical toils away themselves on Mir, and everyone else works on Wayland/Weston. Maybe at some point Canonical decides that it's better to just use Wayland, but that's about it.

Wayland is already at 1.0, and has support from Valve, Nvidia, and AMD behind it. I don't see it disappearing soon. Especially since the implementation of Mir isn't even usable yet (while Wayland is).
Why can't Intel kill x86?
Disruption for Mutual Benefit
Does Google actually ask for validation of user names? I prefer real names for aesthetic reasons, but if someone chooses to make up a false name, i wouldn't bother.
Compare with laser printers. Similar objections.
I imagine when the 'printer head' becomes an integrated circuit, and the materials become the equivalent of toner cartridges, we'll see rapid adoption.
"you cannot deduct any insurance costs for any months you were eligible to participate in a subsidized group health insurance plan through your or your spouse's employer"
Show HN: Our Equity Crowdfunding Platform Is Officially Live
Is it possible to short bitcoins?
How Populr Got .me Employed
Interractive and realistic 3D clouds
Interractive and realistic 3D clouds by Jaume Sánchez.
CopyrightX course from Harvard Law School covering copyright, reform
It is incredibly easy to have a buildfarm (entirely made up of virtual machines even) that can build and test your software across dozens of operating systems. When I install a large software package like KDE, and see that there are glaringly obvious bugs, I assume it is because the developers do not care enough to do the most trivial automated testing. So I simply uninstall it and use software that works. When you create an impression of "we don't care about you", people are much less likely to bother reporting issues.
I don't think it's an insult to anyone that the meaning of the word has changed. People call themselves hackers in admiration of the kind of hacking you point to. Also, as another commenter pointed out, programmers call themselves hackers to speak to say "I would be programming even if it didn't pay the bills."

If anything I'd say your reverence for the term itself is dangerously close to hero worship, if not outright hero worship. Identifying with the culture of the hackers you're referring to helps us keep our sights on being our best selves and serves as a reminder what kind of work is top notch.