skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe so, but the government likes to label all animal rights activists as terrorists. Even groups like ADL whose expressed mandate is to promote animal rights via legal means.

My point wasn't that all animal rights activists are angels, but moreso that there is a bias against them from government/law enforcement. Some anti-abortion activists have bombed abortion clinics, but you don't see the anti-abortion movement labelled as a bunch of terrorists.
On the other hand, if on 9/11 somebody had acted on their unsettling response to the suicide hijackers, it would have come out differently. The final filter for good security is a person looking at a person and deciding. I recall a post citing this as the best-performing filter.

Unfortunately it ends in profiling. So, profiling, or mass death?
I prefer TotalFinder as well, along with Divvy with a shortcut to quickly resize. I hit Command-T to create a new tab, then Command-G to connect them together. It's now just muscle memory for me, I don't even think about it.
Thoughts on the 2013 Big DiFizen of the Year Award...
I think the point of the article is that the "Bush cuts" arrived because they promised more and better jobs. Yet 99% of that went to the corporations' own profit and to the top guys there. It kills the illusion that wealth people and corporations are "job creators" so we need to cut their taxes more.
> If the web property is successful enough, you can ditch IE support and they'll come with something else. Or you'll get new users to replace them eventually.

You're not a business person are you? No manager or CEO is going to take that approach if they can make more money off having some IE users (and a more complex/harder to maintain web app) than no IE users.
Wasn't right to throw them off the plane, but what were they hoping to accomplish oversheltering their kids like that?
There not inflation adjusted as the real GDP has not quite tripled since 1972. http://www.multpl.com/us-gdp-inflation-adjusted/table Adjust for a 50% population growth over that time period and real per capita GDP is hardly moving.

US Real GDP
Dec 31, 2012	13.67 trillion (43,600 per person)
Dec 31, 1972	4.75 trillion (23,750 per person)

Add to that the increasing wealth inequality and the bottom 75% are not doing much better now vs 1972. Congressional Budget Office report indicating that between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted income for the middle of the income distribution rose 21%, while for the top 0.1% it rose by 400%.

PS: The problem with looking at the stock market value is it responds to far more than just the expected future dividends. When bonds are paying 1% a dividend stock returning 3$ a share is worth a lot more than that same stock when bonds are paying 4%. Dividends are a much more useful when doing economic analysis.
They have done upgrades past IE6, even for XP. These are installed automatically if you have automatic updates turned on. The problem is people who turn off automatic updates, or enterprise organizations who use Group Policy to block browser updates.
Once you start stringing along your employer, just pushing buttons and not giving them some of your best work hours - then yes I agree it is frustrating, but I don't believe this is the case with the majority of engineers/others who work on side projects.

Oh, that definitely happens. I've been there. What I question is whether or not it's a big deal, like the author of TFA seems to think. He seems to have some pretty weird ideas about things. Like, the idea that you're not committed to your startup if you aren't working on it full-time? WTF? How does that even start to make sense? Are you not committed to your wife if you don't spend 24 hours a day, 7 day a week with her? Are you not committed to your kids if you leave them for a few hours a day to go to work? Sheesh... commitment and time allocation are not the same thing!

And as for the effect on the present dayjob employer... who cares? As you say "(they) can receive stern talks and/or let go if they are really not worth their salary?" Yes, exactly. I've been there before. And you know what? It was a shittily run company, pumping out a shitty product, none of the other engineers were even slightly engaged or interested in what we were doing, and every single one of us was just punching the clock and collecting our paychecks. That I was working on a startup on the side is what kept me sane through all that. I don't feel even a pinch guilty that I reserved most of my mental and creative energy for the startup during that time. I did what they paid me to do, and if they had wanted more, they had the option to attempt to find a way to tap into the energy and drive I'm able to channel into something that actually matters. But they never took any initiative to try and connect with or understand their employees, so "tough shit" as far as I'm concerned.
United Airlines are already on my 'no-fly' list ;-)
I learned hg before git and the experience of switching to git was shockingly bad. I'm comfortable in both now and the big thing I'd miss if I went back to hg would be git stash (and I'm sure there's a hg plugin for it).
The US supreme court doesn't like facial constitutional challenges (IE challenging statutes as unconstitutional on their face with no actual injured person orset of facts)
There is actually a mildly good reason for this, which is that facial challenges basically have no fact records, and involve a lot of speculation. One of the principles of judicial restraint is:

Courts should neither "anticipate a question of
constitutional law in advance of the necessity of deciding
it" nor " formulate a rule of constitutional law broader
than is required by the precise facts to which it is to be
applied."
Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Authority, 297 U.S. 288, 347 (1936) (Brandeis, J.)

(I borrowed this cite from wikipedia, so i didn't check it, but it looks rights at a glance).

A good explanation of the list is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashwander_rules

However, in practice, IMHO, this excuse is used to punt cases more than really viewed as a valid principle
Since everyone's already mentioned Rich Hickey's talks, I loved Bjarne Stroustrup's talk on C++11 style: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/GoingNative-2012... . He provides a crystal clear view of what he thinks C++ could do better and what steps are being taken to move in that direction. Also, I think he has a cool accent.
33 EUR / 20k GBP about 8 years ago. I think the exchange rate was around 1.3 or 1.4 then.

But different countries so no comparision.
2.2, 1 year
Twitter account proves mathematical theorems in 140 characters or less
Back in my journalism school days, ABC v. Food Lion was referenced as the precedent for undercover reporting. In this case, Two ABC reporters got jobs working at a Food Lion in North Carolina and taped footage of the store selling spoiled meat.

Food Lion sued for unfair trade practices, fraud, breach of contract, etc. ABC was fined $5.5 million, but that was later reduced to about $300,000, according to a quick Google search.

This was used to illustrate why journalists must disclose that they are journalists and should avoid undercover methods, as written in the journalism code of ethics.

Sources:

http://lawclassolemiss.wordpress.com/2010/04/05/food-lion-in...

http://www.poynter.org/uncategorized/2125/abc-and-food-lion-...

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/09/arts/beyond-abc-v-food-lio...

http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp

Edit: Also interesting, but not quite as relevant, is the Chiquita/Cincinnati Enquirer scandal that happened around the same time.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/07/chiqu...
What does "large" in this case mean? Are we talking about factory farm style CAFO? What I've read, which may admittedly be outdated, is that these kinds of farms are where the majority of meat, dairy and eggs comes from (in the US).
Then you've never seen it happen. I've seen it happen lots. It's horrible. Absolutely horrible. :) I won't pretend I knew why those apps broke in IE6.
A major reason that people do only what's required to get by in their "day job" and tool away on startups is that the promotion is dead. You don't advance in the workplace by any means except changing jobs or doing your own thing. Companies don't promote on merit anymore. So if you pour your heart into your job, you get nothing for it. You're better off pouring your heart into side projects-- even if they don't turn into actual businesses, they act as portfolio projects that might help you to make that next hop between jobs with an accompanying raise.

The MBAs have made this bed via all this "money doesn't really motivate people, here's how to hack motivation..." BS, and now they have to lie in it. If they want employees' full attention, they have to compensate it. People have to have a stake-- either stock or the real possibility of a meaningful promotion. You get what you pay for.
Being unhappy at work can be one of the motivation. For certain there are many others (wish to learn something else, wish to become the next big entrepreneur, wish to go solo). Many people can't just leave what they have, and they have a skillset that may get them to create a business, but not the required resources / contacts. A side project may be one of the way to start.

Agree on your second point - it should be called a side project. It's a startup / business from the day it actually _does become_ a business.
Scott Aaronson: Quantum Computing since Democritus
Finding such clips is vital to YouTube's business. Detecting use of steganography isn't vital to Facebook so unless it becomes a very public issue (e.g. is widely used by terrorists) they are highly unlikely to integrate detectors for it.

Either way, this is a marked improvement over sending private messages on the Facebook or unencrypted emails (and sending encrypted emails is a very fast way to get noticed).
While I agree, and I think the treatment of the passengers in question was idiotic, keep in mind that he did not talk to the passenger in question directly.

He was forwarded the request by a flight attendant or possibly the purser. The purser might have been forwarded part of what he said indirectly as well, from the flight attendant, and both might very well have exaggerated the story in part to explain why they haven't just dealt with it, but are coming to the captain with it.

It's perfectly possible that what the pilot hear from the purser was: "Some passengers are getting irate [he got others to speak up in support] because of the movie choice and has been pestering the flight attendants about it and won't give up. He's getting angry, and wanted to talk to you."

Might still be an overreaction, but a very different scenario than what the passenger claims (whether or not the passengers description is correct).

I'm sure the airline have "had a chat", but I also think they'd rather take the occasional cost of
a diversion like this than risk having a captain be too cautious in a situation where there's a genuine risk.
Someplace like Northern California?
The Slow Death of the American Author
The old Tim Thumb is vulnerable. The writer of tim thumb fixed that security hole though after the issue from what I read.
I'm on Windows 7... So at least the bugs are cross-platform.
This the classic argument for a police state. Increased police powers, surveillance, suspicion, etc. are virtually guaranteed to reduce crime. Does that make them a good idea? How many false positives are you willing to endure to avoid a false negative?

Also, for what it's worth, the false positives (profiling) are much more "mass" in nature than the false negatives (death).
I agree with both sentences, but don't see the connection between the two. Are you arguing for how the law currently works, or how you would like it to work?

Currently, there is no such thing as a journalism license in the US.
No, that's complete nonsense. Only some individuals represent bitcoin with a stroke.

Bitcoin surprisingly doesn't have a standard in its logo and symbol usage. Everybody said BTC for bitcoin though.
Presumably they want MS-DOS and Win16 to die, too, but they still ship versions of those with every copy of Windows, and will continue to indefinitely. They're just very, very sandboxed :)
I don't think "commitment" means what you think it does. I could not possibly be more committed to the startup I'm working on now... it's basically my life. If I were married, I'd be less committed to my wife than to this startup (which may be a reason I'm not married, now that I think about it).

But, realistically, I don't have the capital reserves to just quit, and work on it full-time, so that simply is not an option. No amount of philosophizing, or Monday morning quarterbacking or commentary from the peanut gallery can change that. But if anybody thinks I'm not committed to this, I have two words for them...

I am not saying you should raise money. I bootstrapped my company and am very proud of it.

And if you aren't sitting on a big pile of capital already, you have two choices: Go out and raise a round, or fund via your salary. And going out and raising money has a lot of disadvantages, not the least of which is that every minute you spend chasing investors is a minute you're not working on the product, talking to customers, doing market research, writing marketing content, looking for partners and affiliates, or any of a zillion other things you could be doing to advance your cause.

It is hard to argue that spending 40+ hours in a week on something other than you startup shows you are committed to your startup. You are committed to making money and then working on your startup.

First of all, I don't need to "show" anybody that I'm committed to my startup. All this back and forth banter is amusing, but in the end, the only opinions that matter are those of myself and my cofounder, and the people we are selling to.

And who are you to tell somebody else what they are committed to? Fuck that... I'm committed to paying my rent, and putting food on the table, just because those are prerequisites to everything else. Beyond that, my dayjob salary is just seed funding for the startup.
If we jailed the supporters of the bill for knowingly trying to pass unconstitutional law it might even happen less.

But unless we do that they'll just have passed another corrupt law by the time this one gets overturned.
My fear is Assange's possible election could see our delicate constitutional and electoral mechanisms exploited for base political purposes.

Says the newspaper ran by Rupert Murdoch.
Ask HN: Is contacting a startup's users for feedback impressive or creepy?
A few weeks ago, I decided to start emailing users of our app for feedback with a personal message from me (the founder of our little startup). By and large, the feedback has been very useful; many people are impressed at the personal attention. However, this morning, I received the first bit of negative feedback about this practice, calling it "creepy."

Do you think that such personal emailing is a good or bad practice? Are there better ways to engage users in a dialogue? We all know how hard it is to get real, honest information from users when we have such a small sample size.
APIdays Mediterranea.Submission of sessions.
One Thing Well: The command of all these seemingly different action is the same, because all of these seemingly different actions are actually the same.

The Long and the Short of It: -h is not a valid argument. Passing -h therefore results in providing usage information.
A lot of these are just plain wrong though or have a good reason and it makes me sad because I know Steve Losh uses a lot of Mercurial which I think has a much worse UI.

1. Silence: you can't alias built-in commands — for good reason. You don't change the defaults of commands, that's just going to cause problems with scripts. Why is it ignored silently? For starters because new git versions can add a command that would conflict with your config that came from an older version. You can trivially see that an alias is ignored by just adding ``--help`` to the command and it won't show you the alias.

2. One Thing Well: I fail to see the problem with that? All of these do the same thing. They check out a revision. With the exception of branch creation which is actually not a feature of `git checkout` but `git branch`. There is just a convenience operation on `git checkout` that also changes branches. The better question is why branches in mercurial are called bookmarks :P

3. Only the Gods: thankfully you don't know which branch something came from. Mercurial fucked me over more than once where I accidentally pulled a patch that came from a named branch that was conflicting with one I already had (you would not believe how many people name their branches "bugfix"). Mercurial's named branches are among the stupidest idea in software maintenance.

4. The Hobgoblin: these are all different commands. "How can I view a list of all tags": that's not what all tags is, that is "what's the list of tags I know locally". In mercurial you can't even figure that out properly because depending on the branch you're on you get different defined tags since tags are stored in the tree. Git's tag system is much superior to that.

"How can I view a list of all branches": that's a question you will never ask because it's the wrong question. A branch could show up multiple times. The correct question to ask is "How can I view a list of all local branches?" `git branch`, the second question is "how can I view a list of all remote branches?" And for that the answer is `git branch -r` or `git branch --remote` which makes a lot of sense in my mind.

"And how can I view the current branch": Same way you show all branches, just `git branch`. Shows you your current branch as well as all other branches and neatly colorizes it. `git rev-parse` is a command you really never have to use unless you script something.

Yeah, some could probably more consistent. The odd one out are `git submodule` and `git remote` which are sub commands instead of using parameters to remove/modify them. That being said, you rarely need to use those.

In direct comparison with hg, git's UI and functionality is a present from god. I'm pretty sure hg only has a better UI reputation because git's UI used to be pretty bad. Now however? Pretty sure it wins over hg hands down.
That one at&t hacker guy high on acid talking about tor hidden services.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7nfN4bOOQI
That sure sounds like you're saying, "My customer can't use my product. I know, let's blame him instead of doing something about it." :-P
talk about abusing a platform
I'm using hg even with github. The hg-git extension from the github guys works surprisingly well for me. The only downsides I've found that push/pull of very large repos tends to be a bit slow and the conversion to/from git will clobber file move histories in hg, since git doesn't track file moves.
On the topic of languages and static analysis:

You can do some static-analysis on languages like Ruby/Python but their lack of rigorous typing makes that job quite hard, actually.

Then you have other languages, king of the hill being Haskell - where practically all of these tools exist (minus the web-browsable/social aspect) because they are straight-forward (not easy, but straight-forward) to build as the language's type system is much deeper and it also encourages the programmer to be more thorough with their program.

Could you imagine having static-analysis built into your linter, where it gives you recommendations, optimizations, and warnings WHILE you are writing code? Yes, thank you Haskell. The best part about it too is the people contributing to that eco-system aren't average programmers, they are typically PhD holding industry programmers or academics (who contribute for free because there's no economic incentive to hide your work) that know far more than I do; all I have to do is be smart enough to use what they build.

On the topic of these "engineering" tools available for devs:

It's funny because engineering (if you can even call it that) for web applications only recently became a big juicy market [for engineers]. Most of the "engineers" were working on software for embedded systems or really big systems that were rarely ever end-user consumed as web applications are today. So tooling for engineers has actually been around; very good tooling in fact.

It's just that we now have a slew of people writing software in a very big market using languages that ARE NOT SAFE to program in! That's the story though, these languages {python | ruby | php | perl} are much easier to learn and "get going" in than something like Haskell, O'Caml, Mercury, Scala, Erlang, C++ &c... By being easier to pick up, [the languages] CREATED the market we are all now participating in. The downside though, is we have a sewer of code floating around because humans by nature, are terrible engineers. Our #1 priority SHOULD BE building tools to check and verify our end product. Some teams go so far as to have teams that are dedicated to writing that software and another team dedicated to writing the software that verifies the verification software! (this is typically when lives are at stake though - side-thought: with the bitcoin thefts and loss of identity on the net now though; one could argue that "lives" are at stake in an existential sense)

I consider Haskell itself to be top of the line tooling for engineerings - of all sorts, even web! Aside from the static analysis tools outside of the language, the language itself is a dream-come-true for real-world programmers such as myself. I fuck up my programs all the time, and my Python programs are ugly and if my tests don't catch an error in my programming my users end up catching it. With Haskell the only thing my users EVER catch are business logic bugs and not programmer error.
I subscribe to Blackstone's formulation[1] that "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer". However, I can imagine someone with young kids might have a different outlook. Profiling or mass death is a difficult question.

I am not a psychopath. I refuse to hurt one person to save the lives of a hundred.

Edit: I fully support the stance of the airline and its employees in this case. Why should they go through the trouble to turn the movie off just because I made some bs rules on what my brats can or cannot watch? Blindfold them if you must. This shows how customer demands go beyond absurd.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstones_formulation
Large IT departments are really conservative for good reason. Hypothetically, consider that a company maintained a web app that accountants used to track revenue. Now, consider that the accountants needed to input interest earned from investments. Let's say there was a Regex bug in parsing the interest rate, and all values were interpreted to be NaN or 0 on non-IE6 browsers due to an implementation quirk. This would have disastrous consequences for a large company: they might face shareholder suits, government investigations, etc. And of course, the people maintaining the system would likely lose their jobs.

There are so many downsides, but what's the upside? So that FB loads a little faster? The incentives are stacked against adopting new technology. Any new browser has to be thoroughly tested against every one of the company's apps to make sure that nothing breaks. As anyone who's done QA before will tell you, that's a tall order.

I agree that the probability of such an incident is small. However, given the disastrous consequences that would happen for a large organization should such a bug occur, it's hard to make the case that an upgrade is a good idea for the sake of "better technology."
It's infeasible for the browser to know "what you see" in the general case. What if the text was in position, but very small and almost the same color as the background? Does the browser need to know if you're red-green colour blind? If you're farsighted?