skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not as simple as just "stupid", yes. But it's not too complicated, either, is it?

These guys got punished for making fun of the general stupidity of others. It would be okay if the people weren't so ignorant (or conditioned) that they'd be terrified so easily.

If you think about it, it's not too different from people being afraid of making certain kinds of cartoons out of fear of offending certain groups of people. Think about it.

Punishing them was a simple and convenient knee-jerk response. It should've been used as an opportunity for education instead.

It's funny and sad how often we struggle to educate people on a day to day basis, yet we throw away fantastic educational opportunities like this one. It's not everyday you have everybody's attention. And what do we choose to do with that attention? "Look at this fearmongerer, mocking you people! We shall punish them."

Few politicians have the guts to tell the electorate that they're dumb. THAT'S where it's "not so simple". We perpetuate and participate a system where we will never tell the electorate that they're stupid, uninformed.

It's not as simple as just stupid- it's intelligence being punished for having fun with stupidity, and representatives choosing to ingratiate themselves to the stupids because they're dependent on them for their livelihood.

Sigh
I suppose, but the number of people leaving the country that that requires is fairly small, unless you're talking about spreading a cultural hegemony. I think it's likely just irrational.
There are no answer imo. If you or you're team know PHP - PHP is the best in this case. You will spend lots of time to learn and then do something with new language.
My sad, sad guess is... about 10% of dihydrogen monoxide.
You can access global variables as normal, but you can't implicitly declare them by doing `myGlobaVar = 5` - you have to use `window.myGlobalVar`.
"If people Googled before believing what they see or hear, I wouldn't have so many quotes misattributed to me." - Albert Einstein
Seems that a lot of the advantages cited as coming from the co-founders having overlapping skills in this post could just as easily (and better) be explained as deriving from all the experiences of past startup failures the author mentions.

Maybe I'm just missing something, but something critical like keeping strategic conversations focused, intellectually honest, and positive seems to have less to do with the founder skill sets (and the amount of overlap in them) than it has to do with personality, previous startup experience, and having pre-aligned expectations.
Runtime system.
Repost from 7 hours ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5506093
Georgia, eastern Europe. Never had a chance to experience a failing of a chip though.
As an Australian, all I can say is "Stop being a racist European". Thanks.
Oh yes, we're past the initial contact phase. They know we're going to make them an offer. I'd like to just make the best offer possible.
You also give money to kill people (You do pay taxes, right?). How come you are not bothered about that also?

It's pointless to think about the impact of a micro action on a macro event. Especially macro things such as war. There are so many different factors that culminate in a war.

And about the good/evilness of war, that has a been a debate since ages. One can never win this argument.
Having done a significant amount of assembly language programming in the past, understanding bit-wise operations is required. In my first job out of college, I was parsing bytes of data where each bit represented a multiple choice answer to a question. So, yea I'm tight with bit-wise operations. And, I'm glad that I have this knowledge, because a good deal of Raspberry Pi projects, where I'm parsing data from a chip on the i2c bus, require it.
Well, here is my stole and recovered story.

I was tending to my front garden one day when I see this massive shirtless guy walking up the road with a huge pot plant. It was a weird scene so stuck with me.

Later that day two Thai guys walk up the road and ask me if I had seen anyone with a pot plant. I tell them that I had, they tell me they own the local Thai restaurant down the road, and someone has stolen the big pot plants from out the front. I gave them a description of the guy, but I told hem I didn't know where he went.

Anyway, next morning I get up, and one of my pot plants is missing. After cursing for a while, I sat staring out the back window musing on life. When I realize what I am looking at is my pot plant in the back window of an apartment three buildings away. A very low rent building known to house questionable types (the local nickname was junkie towers)

So I got out the zoom lens, took a a couple of pictures and hunted through my garden photos until I found a picture of the said pot plant. I went down to the police station with the photos and told the my story. Well, the police like nothing more than an open-and -shut case. So they got a warrant, and went around and knocked on the door that afternoon. What they found was a veritable treasure chest of goods taken from around the neighborhood, with pot plants being a particular specialty. The police told me tehy're easy to sell at markets and don't have serial numbers etc. but there were bikes, lawn furniture, you name it, anything that could be stolen without breaking and entering.

The guy turned out to have a warrant for his arrest for an assault charge, and a couple of other things. The detective eventually asked if I woid testify at a hearing against him, which I agreed to, despite being a bit nervous of the size of the guy and his previous assault charge.

The big day in court came and the defending attorney made a big song and dance and tried to suggest that the fact that his client had an identical pot plant to mine was mere coincidence. I suggested that the amount of combinations of pot plants was a very high number of permutations, to which he triumphantly declared that given there were possibly thousands like it, it coudld be merely similar and not exactly the same. I countered with the fact that the odds of a similar pot plant showing up at the exact same time as mine went missing were too high to be mere chance.

Anyway, the guy went to jail, I forget how long now. Th detective told me it was some of the best civilian witness testimony he had seen (I'm sure he says that to everyone). I got my pot plant back, complete with evidence tag that I left on for fun until it disintegrated.

I must say, being in the witness stand was quite harrowing, having to point to someone in court and argue you're not a liar. I had shaky and sweaty hands afterwards, a combination of nerves and adrenalin. All that over a $20 pot plant, but a principle was at stake and was not going to let this creep get away with it.
It was something facetious and intended as an "is your refrigerator running"-style prank. I am sure that most recipients of that call did in fact have refrigerators that were running, too. As a waste of government resources, such pranks are a problem. That line is intended as an emergency number. Chemical spills and biological contamination in water supplies is not a joke. These people just thought they were being clever.
Yup, in Georgia.
Appreciate the reminder from you and others re: books by/about Kranz. Back in the 60s (I was 16 when Apollo 11 landed) I would not have cared for his no-compromise/no-bullshit approach. These days, that's exactly what I would appreciate about him, since it was necessary.
Since when is American a race?
> It's not as simple as just "stupid". It never is.

You are of course correct. It is not "stupid" but it is "ignorant" (both of the chemical terms used in the prank and of the critical thinking skills necessary to work out that "dihydrogen monoxide" is just "water")
Technology is not neutral. Technologies are designed for discrete purposes. A hammer is designed for, among other things, hammering nails, not eating. And as it has been said, "When all you have is a hammer, all your problems look like nails." A CIA drone is not a neutral technology.

Kevin Kelly (a former editor of Wired) wrote a book called "What Technology Wants." He reminds us that technology does have a purpose, does influence human behavior, and may in fact be changing human nature.

Kudos to the OP for taking a reflective, responsible, and principled stance. We should all be so discriminating.
I don't know about google - all the PL people I know who went to google no longer work on PL stuff, though I don't know if that's because of working at offices where PL work is not supported rather than a lack of company-wide freedom.

From conversations with hiring managers at each, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, NVidia, and Adobe all have far more positions than they can fill for people with PhD-level VM/compiler writing skills. Heck, we can't turn out experienced _undergrads_ fast enough for their tastes. I assume there would also be stuff in embedded systems, particularly FPGA compiler-related, though I don't personally know hiring managers at the big firms in that area.
Fine, jingoist or elitist... whatever.
It's a similar experience in Java-land when you throw out the frameworks and all the servlet container bullshit and just start up an embedded Jetty. It's easy, lightweight, fast, you can do anything you want without crapping out mountains of XML configuration, or layer upon layer upon layer of introspecting, byte-code engineering, dynamic code-rewriting-where-the-hell-did-THIS-code-come-from annotations. You have control, in the place where it matters - the source code. You can write end-to-end tests that developers will actually run, because they don't need to spin up JBoss for 5 minutes before they're ready to go.

Frameworks have got a lot to answer for; it's very rare that a large project actually gets to use the flexibility that a modern framework provides. Who the hell actually swaps out their ORM or their database for a different one in a production system? Sure, the lead architect was sold on the idea that they wouldn't be tied to a particular implementation, but when the shit hits the fan the business will deem it "too risky - find another solution".

Thus we advance to the third level of professional software development, the Sarcophagus model - wherein it's simply too risky to actually CHANGE any part of a (now-legacy) production system, but we CAN build a sarcophagus around the toxic core such that no more careers need be sacrificed to trying to maintain it. I have some great examples of this, but professionalism forbids me from relating them. Perhaps when I finally decide that keeping sheep on a remote island is preferable to being a software "engineer", I'll start writing about them.
A better example is the one that was used on github, war.
There will always be justifications that a war is needed because of this oppressor or that incursion or this unforgivable action.

Licensing it differently is one option, but either they wont care or they will just copy the intent and make their own version.

This is a problem without a good solution at this point except to have a frank and adult understanding of the consequences of your actions, and to be politically active so that you may contribute you part to preventing your government from the continuous war.
Talking to your parents and showing that what you are doing is likely to be beneficial. Probably you can shows the codes posted at github and then show where the coder is working--running their own show or running the show at some big company etc. If they see that what you are doing is what guys much older to you are doing and is likely to help you, probably your problem may get solved.
Thanks for that. I am wondering, I am a pretty regular HN reader, and still I missed that previous post (because I was asleep at the time it was posted, and it vanished too quickly). Any ideas how to fix that problem?
Another example of chemophobia in the general public. The perception that all chemicals are bad for you is commonly accepted, although far from the truth.

Slate magazine did an excellent teardown on this issue, I share this link frequently:

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa...
Chris Hedges - A pillar of reason
The big issue here is not that "the public can't even understand a basic chemical formula"--it's that so many people are willing to take something they hear in a morning radio show at face value (and panickedly call up the local utility, rather than search online for verification).
Askfmwander
I think Seth Godin's book Linchpin talks about this - but I've only skimmed it.
The not-so-funny part is water quality around the US really is rapidly diminishing.

So they will call in about the water but will say "oh well" to pollution that doesn't immediately affect their morning.
This logic seems like quite a stretch. I'd imagine the person who designed a hammer or a screwdriver isn't preoccupied with the fact that it might be used in helping to build a bomb factory.
Plenty of people refuse to pay taxes for precisely this reason, or deliberately seek lower salaries that do not pay federal taxes.

They believe, correctly, that macro-events are the culmination of micro-events, and that change begins on the personal level. It takes just a handful of dedicated people to start revolutions. Startups should know that.
This reminds me of something my assembly instructor said in class once (paraphrased):

"Once, I was interested in finding out how a C compiler would handle the div instruction. So, I opened up my editor, and wrote this C program:

void main () {
printf("%f", 14.0 / 3.0);
}

I compiled it, and took a look at the generated assembly. How many div instructions do you think it used?

[Various guesses, mostly "one."]

The correct answer is "zero." The compiler figured it out at compile time, and put a constant in instead. So, I decided to put it in a function:

float divide (float a, float b) {
return a / b;
}

void main () {
printf("%f", divide(a, b));
}

Guess what happened next.

[Various guesses.]

The f--king compiler optimized it out again!"
a) Learn this pair of amazon keywords: "dover physics" and "dover math".

b) Buy this book to get going: http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Simple-Matrix-Physic...

c) Then buy this one to scare professors: http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Classical-Quantum-Physics-...
If Europeans could just get over the chip on their shoulder maybe they could actually do something besides whine about Americans.
don't sleep so much ;-)
> God forbid other "bro types" enjoy games too.

Being a bro isn't, like, something you're born into. It's a certain mentality, a certain way of approaching the world. And while I like many facets of bro-dom, and enjoy the hell out of sitting down for some Smash with a couple of friends and a six-pack of Yuengling, there are some bothersome things about bro culture which that particular category of game emphasizes.

I mean, I'm critical of the FPS as a genre to some extent. It's fun as hell, but the nature of how the genre's set up has given it some kind of crappy limitations that no game I know of yet has managed to overcome. Even the best ones, like the Half-Life franchise, are limited in ways that bother me. I'm also not super fond of hardcore gaming: it's cool to watch from afar, but it's not an especially inclusive culture, and I fear that games like Starcraft and League of Legends help to scare away a broader variety of players. I'm not trying to say that gaming was perfect before Halo came out; I do think, however, that Halo helped to push a wave of bright designers in some shitty directions, and that game design has suffered as a result.

I'm critical of "games that attract waves of bros", if the bros seem to be the majority of person attracted to a game, in the same way that I'm critical of movies that attract that sort of person. Adam Sandler movies, for instance. I'm not saying everybody who likes Adam Sandler is a bad person, but I do feel that Sandler movies are kind of puerile and limited in a way that appeals to a particular type of person, and that, to the extent that they influence other creators, they do some damage to our culture. Adam Sandler's influence on movie-making has been less impactful than Halo's influence on game design, so the mentality described in the OP does bother me somewhat. To hear a guy working at Microsoft say "my company specifically tried to manufacture this kind of experience to reach this kind of audience" pisses me off.
Perl is like records on vinyl. There are a small group of people who swear it sounds better, but as a commercial artist you definitely wouldn't release anything new on it.
Is that code formatting automatic? if yes, how did you do?
(comma, variable number of spaces, key, value)

{
orientation : 'vertical'
, animate : true
, value : 100 * radii[ ix + 1 ]
, slide : onChange
, change : onChange
, step : .01
}
"If the public can't even understand a basic chemical formula, then it's probably hopeless to think they'll understand the more complex issues that are typically involved in public health, like complex dose effects and ambiguous epidemiology."

The general public doesn't understand any complex subjects, wether it's chemistry, health, technology or politics (just to name a few). This is why anyone in a suit or lab coat can use field specific terms to assure the public to keep calm and carry on - or panic.

The mainstream media acts as a catalyst to this problem by also not having experts in the required fields reporting on the subjects. And who is to point out the flaws in the those media stories? Blogspot? Twitter? Facebook? Good luck getting anyone to read those that aren't already following of the subject.
Why not to make a simple, useful CRUD app for your parents to show then that what actually you do ??
Ask HN
quero hackear um ask.fm , esse aq ó http://ask.fm/cuidaminhavida ajuda ?
You seem to be missing a whole slew of games here, and most importantly, you don't seem to understand just how gritty, dark, and realistic Wolfenstein was for its time.

You cherry-pick robo-Hitler in order to paint Wolfenstein as a fun and happy game - but the fact of the matter is that when it was released, it was the most realistic game ever made (give or take), in which you killed nazis. Nothing but nazis. In a first-person perspective, in a dark and gritty environment, in what was seen as very realistic. The policor backlash to the game's realism and grittiness - and the nazi-aspect - was huge. Wolfenstein was far, far more realistic and gritty than Halo has ever been, when put in historical perspective.

Then there's the fact that other realistic console shooters existed long before Halo came out. Take Goldeneye 007 and Perfect Dark for the N64, for instance. Two highly-realistic first person shooters, accompanied by successful multiplayer elements. Or Medal of Honor for the PS1. On the PC, too - take Rise of the Triad, one of the most violent games I can think of. Its multiplayer was simplistic, straightforward, and incredibly violent and gory.

I know it's all the rage to talk down on console gaming and games like Halo in particular, but the fact of the matter is that this kind of gaming didn't start with Halo, and had been around for a long, long time before it. Games like this have always existed alongside deeper and richer games, and that's a good thing - I like more intelligent and rewarding experiences, but after a long day or a stressful week, I just want to get some friends together and shoot zombies in Left 4 Dead 1/2 - just as I don't want every movie I see to be Philadelphia. Sometimes, I just want Armageddon or Die Hard, and there's nothing wrong with that.
H twenty?
How You Can Do Cool Image Effects Using HTML5 Canvas
Check out Stanford's Encylopedia of Philosophy entry on double-effect: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/.

Essentially, double-effect means that your good actions can have unintended yet foreseen evil consequences. If you make a hunting rifle, and someone uses that to shoot children at a school, are you responsible? Not an easy question to answer.
Best ultrabook for linux? [April 2013 edition]
What would you recommend? What do you use? Do you know of something interesting about to be released?

Please, do not recommend me to use Windows or Mac OS, we are not discussing this right now. I am specifically interested to find a nice ultrabook to use for programming on linux.

Yes, I am aware of the most popular things like the Dell Linux Ultrabook and the Chromebook Pixel (and I might choose one of them). But yet, someone might know of something better.

So here are the rules:

1. It's OK if it comes with another OS, as long as it's not very hard to install linux. The hardware must work well with linux. Some minor exceptions are acceptable (eg - not working fingerprint reader)

2. Full HD or better.

3. SSD

4. Keyboard of great quality.

5. Good battery life.
lol you want an 'let me Google that' achievement?
It's still difficult to beat perl in a production Unix environment to fix a hot issue, especially if you know your way around regular expressions. When I hear comments like "now you have two problems", or "it's harder to read than to write", or references to the P in LAMP being Python or PHP, I chuckle to myself.

Here's an example of how I use perl, off the cuff, in day to day production life: http://cautery.blogspot.com/2010/09/concise-perl.html
Such people are hypocrites at best. Don't they use roads for their commute. Dont' their kids go to public schools. Don't they visit national parks etc. If they do all these things, aren't they ashamed of living off the money of the rest of the society that diligently pays taxes, and not contributing/pitching their share towards these common societal support structures?
Updated Jaybird – Firebird JDBC driver Roadmap
The problem with that statement for me is that I can't very well imagine a moderate to good coder to lead the technical part of a web startup and who hasn't had exposure to more than one language and framework.
This is a question of the type "give me the problem scope first". Each language has its own strengths and weaknesses:

1) Developers: Finding a PHP dev is easy. Nearly everyone doing web development speaks PHP. The problem is the quality. NodeJS is a damn new technology, but as it's JS, you have a wide pool of talent there. RoR/Python are still rather "exotic", and the competition is high for employers.

2) Scope of the project: Web-based project with most stuff done in backend? Go for PHP. Web-based project with loads of small backend stuff? Frontend HTML+JS, backend NodeJS. Web-based and desktop-based? Go for Python. Want to have your server hacked? Get Ruby. (Disclaimer: PHP+Python fanboy speaking)

3) Cost of hiring, cost of maintenance, server cost: If you have loads of money for servers, add the memory hog Java to your list. If you're short on money, there's only PHP as any cheap-ass or freehoster will have it. Once more, take the question "What do I want to achieve?" into hand.

Without knowing what you want to do, we can not give you a clear advice.
To the European - I previously visited Europe and one thing I remember is the Europeans love to smoke cigarettes. If Europeans are so clearly educated in chemistry they would clearly not inhale something that contains formaldehyde (used in rat poison and bug spray) and other toxic chemicals.

Also, I suggest asking your father or mother if they understand what "Dihydrogen Monoxide" actually is. The article does not mention the age of the callers...I'm willing to bet they are elderly people.