skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have we ever had a single era in history without violent entertainment? The most enduring sports in human history are various forms of fighting. The world's literature has always portrayed violence, war, and death.

Violence is also a constant presence in world history. No society has ever fully eradicated violent crime, and no era has ever fully eradicated warfare.

The news media is popular entertainment. Yellow journalism has also been a constant. It's far more cost-effective than honest journalism.

As I've gotten older I've found it's nice from time to time to disengage from the darker parts of reality and enjoy innocent things. But the appeal of violence is an essential part of the human condition.
Huh, a second ago there was a comment here asking how this article was on the front page... then it was disappeared. Call Alex Jones.

I wanted to voice my thought anyway... this article prominently features the information that the mainly cited study showing that national debt is bad is no longer valid. Those wanting to fight for higher debt levels are absolutely ecstatic and will up-vote any article that even tangentially mentions the Reinhart/Rogoff failure.
He gets and is due some credit. To insinuate that Jobs had nothing to do with Pixar's success is wide of the mark.

If what Jobs achieved is so easy, go and do it...
I think this kind of reference is useful just to remember what can be done "out of the box" with the language, especially for polyglot developers.

I've definitely written my own Python hex string -> binary data conversion function, before I knew some of these tricks. If you spend part of your time working in JavaScript or PHP, it's easy to forget that you don't have to reinvent the wheel with Python.
142 characters is a headline. Often it includes a link to a supporting article and discussion. Sometimes your non-journalism is arranged on a page in a list. Sometimes with sorted and scored with points assigned by the site's users, sometimes not.

This is a bizarre comment to read on a news aggregation and discussion site.
I'd say Excel is superior to those systems for any one-person project. Especially monsters like Bugzilla, which shine for huge projects but impose a lot of overhead on tiny projects.
In bioinformatics work, Excel auto-formatting can screw up genomic data http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/gene-name-errors-a... . The problem with it is that formatting will modify entered text by default, and the user has to be actively aware of this behavior to undo it. Regardless, spreadsheets are invaluable for visualizing and processing tabular data -- but default behavior and user-end awareness are the lessons here.
I'm not sure I understand why it is easier with SQL than Excel. Both seem to offer similar roadblocks and both seem to offer similar solutions.

I think we're thinking there is a technological solution to a human problem, and personally I don't think there is or could ever be.

This is a process problem. And by process I mean the process of building complex datasets, validating them for "correctness," and judging the quality/correctness of different data sets.

Unit tests are a massive asset to programmers. I wonder if unit tests (i.e. "sanity checks") would also help in this situation? I mean you would have to force people to write them and monitor them, but once they've been created they pay for themselves by picking up unexpected errors.
"Too flexible" sounds like someone implemented all the requirements. A programming language is too flexible too. That's not really the problem, which is more about the opaqueness and lack of DRY.
My team uses text files for bug and issue tracking, which are just fine for modest teams.

Excel is quite sufficient for many tasks.
The Internet Discussion is broken
Oh yeah, if the Reinhardt-Rogoff spreadsheet had been correct all of our economic problems would be non-existent. Damn you, Excel!
I worry a lot about what my kid will learn, but exposure to violent video games is really low on the list. Much more worried that he will be lied to and exploited by "the system", for example schools only teaching how to be a docile wage slave.

I am not keen on violence in games, but sometimes I think there also is some honesty in those games. The world can be a cruel place.
It's why I start all my pet projects at 192.0.1.
I got screwed again by my damn notepad. I needed a quart of buttermilk for a recipe, but wrote a pint instead on the memo pad.

If only I had used a recipe management package that would have automatically told me that I wouldn't have enough buttermilk to make waffles for 5 kids.
This comment makes it sound like you think the problem with the games sector is that it's dominated by companies like EA. That's a problem, but it's dwarfed by the real problem, which is supply and demand.

If you want to see a really "fucked up" industry, try being a tool and die engineer.
A tweet over a £146 invoice. The reply? A libel suit costing £120k
Recent versions of excel do warn you if formulas omit adjacent cells. I agree with your sentiment to some extent but with excel 2011/2013 you have to actively suppress these warnings.
Big explosions aren't a spectacle anymore. They haven't been for years.

Great art design is what makes for spectacle in a modern movie.
This is the only thing where I fully support the policy of the Green parties worldwide.

Overusing antibiotics and other medicine, just to be able to grow up more animals in the same space, is plain greed and animal cruelty.

The state should set a fixed minimum for meat prices (under which no product may be sold) and at the same time impose minimum levels of animal rights (roaming space, food variety, no declawing/tail cutting etc.). I know many will shoot me for advocating state regulation, but the free market most obviously has FAILED here.
How to win at poker: A handy tip - Keeping a straight face is not enough
Really useful, thanks for making this!

How is the "three and a half" part implemented? Is that just a set of regexes looking for a couple of common patterns? For example, can it parse something like "three and three thirds"?
I put his sources on Github. Since there are no modifications, it does not violate the license.

[1]: https://github.com/ysangkok/linux-on-an-8-bit-microcontrolle...
I don't understand. If this virtual machine:

- Downloads dying web pages, and

- Uploads them to the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive,

That means I'm not saving the Internet Archive any bandwidth at all, and this is no more efficient than them just downloading the site themselves.

The virtual machine itself is 174MB. This times however many volunteers means distributing the virtual machine is probably more stressful than the actual archiving operation.
I'm not quite sure why it is surprising to people that Apple keep Siri data - how else are they supposed to use the massive amounts of data to improve?

It sounds like it's not even voice data, but the questions and the answers given. This would probably be useful for optimising for things people are asking that siri is getting wrong?
Although there may be altruistic or political reasons for preferring MIT/BSD/Apache style licenses over the GPL, I believe that the choice of license must be closely related to the type of project you are creating. If the project is a library or a piece of code that is intended for use by other developers, you will greatly increase the potential audience for your project by using a license like the MIT/BSD or Apache license.

If however, your project is a complete application (say a code editor, browser, or a game), whose primary audience consists of non-developers, then a GPL can be a good license, as it maximizes reach to your intended audience, while still allowing developers to contribute the project, and most importantly preventing free-riding by potential competitors.
A bad mechanic will always blame his tools. Having extensively used Excel once upon a time there is nothing like it out there, period. If you want a powerful spreadsheet, Excel is your goto guy. Just because people are misusing Excel does not make it bad.
For that you have UZIX (http://uzix.sourceforge.net/) or the predecessor UZI.
Why don't we have more food irradiation?
PyExcelerate - Accelerated Excel XLSX Writing Library for Python 2/3
The Brothers Tsarnaev
FBI Interviewed Boston Bombing Suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev Two Years Ago
Agreed 100%. I hope this whole super-bug thing has a silver lining, in that it results in better treatment for animals bred for slaughter.
There is an error in their reporting. The paper calling Reinhart-Rogoff into question came out of UMass Amherst, not Amherst (which implies Amherst College). Very different.

One is a large state school, the other an elite liberal arts school. UMass Amherst has a notoriously leftist econ program, Amherst College your typical neo-liberal.
The program is only as good as the input it gets. Garbage in, Garbage out. Lazy and incompetent people would misuse any tool no matter how good it was.
Yeah, whatever. The only thing worse than Excel is the typical corporate-developed big Java application produced by a bloated team of mediocre programmers grown to further some middle manager's empire-building desire rather than to produce quality software. I'm not surprised that people doing organizationally key work give up on interfacing with little wannabe-CIOs counting subordinates and just get the work done with a spreadsheet.

Not to mention Excel often ends up having better performance than most home-grown solutions, especially now its core functions are properly multithreaded.
Screenshots for the lazy?
Google Classic
Back in the time, there were even hacks to run Windows 95 in safe mode on 286 machines. 386 with 4 megs was the official minimal requirement.
Exactly! GPL levelled the field. BSD has been around for much longer than Linux and is very widely used. All commercial Unices and even Windows contain code from BSD but the *BSDs are still lacking contributions and funding. People always complain about RMS' decision to make GCC a complex interconnected bundle. Sure right now it's a stupid decision and the GCC folks have to work on breaking it up. But the decision has to bee seen with the historic context.

But there are simply many people here who think of themselves as hotshot entrepreneurs and take plenty of code without contributing back. I know I know ... they released their implementation of the x hundred nodejs logging library under MIT license. What a huge contribution to society! ...
If he was in the movie industry would he refuse to work on anything that wasn't G rated(and even a good number of those) because it would be inappropriate to show to 4 year olds?

Most of the movies on the AFI 100 Years 100 Movies list would be tough for an editor to explain to his kid if they were sitting there while he was cutting, splicing, and reviewing. Does that somehow make them unethical?
That's a not-completely-unreasonable caricature of life in Italy, and believe me, it's anything but efficient.
I was thinking about this just the other day. The whole CipherCloud situation got a bit out of hand, I think the company are doing themselves more harm than good as that discussion about their encryption was speculation and interpretation based on publicly available information they had on their site. I don't really see any links disappear from the site, a few changed titles here and there though. Would be great to know if anyone has, especially in regards to the CipherCloud fiasco.
.. and also require the same standards of any imported meat.
One of the big problems with science is the proliferation of Excel "databases". It is very easy to look at a lot of numbers and make quick calculations with them. However, when you start getting into extremely large datasets, your propensity to make mistakes increases. A2:A10 here, B3:B11 there, etc... This is one reason why recent versions of Excel warn you when your formulas aren't in sync.

However, all of this is fixed when you are using SQL to properly query a database. Why? Because you are forced to write a SQL statement that details exactly what you want done. With Excel it can all be hidden away behind the cells. With SQL, it's out in front, so it's easier to check.

People like to use Excel because they can get an answer quickly without all that "programming". The problems start to arise when you need better tools, but only know Excel. So, in this case, it's not a matter of a craftsman blaming their tools, it's closer to an amateur trying to pretend to be a professional.

Excel is a wonderful spreadsheet. It is a horrible database.
It's exactly like I thought from the title: The author lives with good and bad documentation every day so he can say clearly the requirements of a good documentation and what he's missing. The problem is that the topic says "this is a how to do it better" and that is not done by saying the requirements.

Of course it's hard to say how to do it better, which is exactly the reason why most people don't do it better: the good people often can't say why they are doing it better, just that they are doing it better. So what the author wants to teach here is something the author needs to learn first himself.

I feel a little disappointed for not getting that how to but wish good luck to the author, because he seems to be on the right path.
Well, one thing the big Java apps have going for them is that they might have unit tests :)
Thanks for the kind words, Yehuda! We're also working on a Chrome app that will make the experience even better on Chromebooks, stay tuned! Also, if you need an invite, let us know: hello (at) nitrous (dot) io
In theory, I agree with this -- in practice, I suspect you have to do a bit of subjective triage, particularly once you get past a certain volume level (which is itself subjective). The key is "upset by specific features/aspects."

Bob writes to you, "Hey, I really like this app, but feature X is very important to me." Sam writes to you and says, "Your app is a useless piece of shit." Writing back to Bob to say, "Thanks for your feedback, I'll consider that for the next version" -- or even to say, "Thanks for your feedback, but I'm sorry to say that feature X isn't on our roadmap" -- may well be worth your time. (Especially since your time, in this case, is probably about two minutes, less if you set up a couple Text Expander snippets for this.)

But is writing back to Sam worth your time? It may be that Sam feels the same way that Bob does, that he mostly likes your app but considers feature X a critical omission. But you have to get him to stop flinging flaming poop at you and actually explain what his dilemma is. And he may just hate your app, full stop. He may be too inarticulate to explain what he needs from your app. He may just like flinging flaming poop.
It's not surprising to me that they keep it, but they do not need to keep personally identifying information for six months in order to do that. Seems a little improper, and also unnecessary, for employees to have access to that kind of thing if they're working on improving Siri.
I learned that catering to everyone leads to mediocrity while in the restaurant business. One chef I worked with was not afraid to tell people where the door was. He had one of the top kitchens in Vancouver BC because of it.

Listen to your customers, but know that in the end, you are responsible for and the sole guardian of quality. If you don't know what quality is in your area in business, move to somewhere you do.
Kinda sorta, not entirely.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/supreme-court/2010/06/supre...

"The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that a criminal suspect must explicitly invoke the right to remain silent during a police interrogation, a decision that dissenting liberal justices said turns the protections of a Miranda warning “upside down.”"
It would actually be pretty nice if this:

26.5 meters + 56.3 dollars

failed to compile.

In Scala one can certainly build this. You could certainly do it in Haskell, though it wouldn't be as nice syntactically.
The trick with Excel is knowing when you've crossed that inflection point where you need something better. Unfortunately most people can't see that inflection since they only know Excel. And for others, it might be hard to transition away because they have all of their data in Excel.
Design trends my friend. Parallax scrolling, large HTML5 looping video and imagery, unnecessary loading screens, horizontal scrolling and my favourite of this whole unusable design trend of late: parallax layer slideshows (where pieces fly in independently to form a slides contents).

As a developer I completely agree with you. Making a site useful versus making a site that crams as much design fodder in as possible shouldn't be a hard decision to choose between, but here we are. The theme marketplace Themeforest are BIG perpetrators of these aforementioned trends, you won't get a theme approved for sale if you don't incorporate these, "features"
Antibiotics probably improve yield throughout the process, not just after processing.
Apple is one of the few companies left where I don't mind them collecting my data, because it's only going to be used for their own products and services.
Yeah. That is really fancy. I'll have to start doing that too.
Federal terrorism charges are almost assuredly going to be filed, too.
If diluted quality and deluge quantity--firehouse, ahem--is what this thread is about, those are the points I speak to.

Trivial information can be shared in 142 characters. Sure, T is used by some as an aggregator/reader/chat tool, but then what are we doing talking tech here at HN instead of on T? The format and structure just isn't optimal for these functions. It's breadth and no depth with that format and structure.

I never said gossip is of zero value, but I did say 142 characters will never be journalism. The legacy media structure is precisely why the world is in such a bad spot today. That you jest about journalism is just an example of the systemic problem in society writ large. What you should be complaining about is quality, not the function itself.

"Information is the currency of democracy." -JT
File-Sharers Sued For Wrong Movie Title, Producer Outraged
Yahoo and others either rate limit or do temporary IP bans if you access too many pages too quickly. Distributing the tools through a VM distributes the workload in a pretty easy-to-setup way.
Why I am angry at my competitors (Extended Warranties)
Late yesterday evening as the entire event was winding to a close, I sat on @BostonGlobe's twitter page while listening to the audio stream. Every tweet they put out was nearly identical to what was coming from the scanner audio, prefixed with "A source says ...". The reason it was only "a source" was because no one except the dispatcher and other cops on scene knew exactly who was saying what. It's just some voice coming over the radio who is assumed to be a cop.
Montreal's daily La Presse trumps paywall trend with a gorgeous iPad app
Hazarding a guess, history associated with a user could help accuracy or determine usage that causes problems? I mean, sure, don't keep the user data forever (and I imagine you can't, depending on local laws), but as long as it's useful? Six months seems a reasonable timescale if you have to identify, track, test and implement problems, and six months per user probably doesn't give you a whole load of statistics on it's own.
Best part:

When evaluating complaints, we need to consider whether the complainer is credible, whether they have reasonable expectations, and whether a significant number of others have made similar complaints or are likely to have experienced similar problems. For many complaints, a reasonable outcome isn’t possible or pragmatic, and the best solution is to ignore them.
Presumptuous. You make execution/implementation sound so easy.

I find your stance confusing (JD not floating your boat? I see you aren't an academic).

I'm actually in a PhD program at a top 3 engineering school and I'm frustrated as hell by what I encounter.
How many DMCA cases are actually pursued? It seems like most DMCA requests are simply scare letters. You could almost ignore all of them and never run into any trouble.
Once again: this business with Excel mistakes seems like a red herring. The bigger problem is that the Reinhart-Rogoff result never made much sense to begin with. Correlation isn't causation; in fact, there's a strong intuitive case that it's the reverse with debt and growth.
They basically just turned this into a huge experiment in price discrimination for those customers who genuinely feel bad for what happened.

Those customers who feel bad and were originally willing to pay the full price savings will likely cancel and reorder. Those customers who feel bad and genuinely could not pay the full price, will keep their discounted orders, and the company will get to keep those people as customers well into the future.

I'm curious how transparent they'll be with how many canceled their orders when the dust settles - would be a good case study for other companies in this boat who want to trust their customers to do the right thing for themselves.
Much of the value present now will be lost in not too near time. Wallets get stolen (and the thieves don't dare use them, because BTC is not as anonymous as most people think), wallets get lost (mindwallet password forgotten, disk crashes and no backups), people just forget about their Bitcoins like many of the early "adopters" did whose bitcoins are now rotting... so this will be a good adjustment for Bitcoin value, when the "divide" happens or earlier.
But why buy meat at all? In terms of efficiency and "feeding the world" the cow lags behind quite seriously compared to that other GMO soya
While it's clear the author didn't understand the subject, it looks like that claim comes directly from Runescape.

It sounds like their new engine has better graphics, and, for whatever reason, they're attributing this to HTML5.

In the video[1] embedded on the page[2] linked from the article, Runescape devs claim:

> The technology behind HTML 5 has allowed us to really push the boundaries.
> You can see the engine at work when we compare Runescape to Runescape 3.
> Here we can see Canafis. In current Runescape the fog is pulled way in
> you can't see what's in the distance,
> you have to rely on that little signpost in the front.
> In HTML 5 the signpost is still there but you can also see the town,
> this is there to guide you it just looks much more beautiful.
> With all that extra draw distance we can now do proper skies and weather effects.
...
> You can also see the colour palette at work here which really helps to brighten
> the place up.
> So here we are just outside Falador, we have duller colours the greens and browns
> that's all we really have in variation,
> this is the same area in HTML 5 and you can see that variety just come to life.
> We've yellows and greens, blues are deeper. We have the whites we have the sun
> shining off those whites to really brighten them up.

[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...
[2]: http://services.runescape.com/m=news/behind-the-scenes-video...
Well, I think it was killed because there was another earlier submission already on HN frontpage with more upvotes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5579538
> I don't know if I fully agree with this post. I mean its true you don't need every customer but if someone uses your product or service and is upset by specific features/aspects, its important to make them feel heard by acknowledging their sentiment.

No, you don't. Just as one shouldn't try to please everyone and be understanding to all in their personal life. This is toxic.
if they are valid DMCA notices and you are under the jurisdiction of the US... pretty sure that's illegal.