skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A wide range of approaches is also important to be able to understand HTML, or any subject for that matter.

I personally learned from video series from multiple sources. Videos are becoming widely popular since more people prefer watching over reading.

The New Boston (http://www.thenewboston.com), PHP Academy (http://www.youtube.com/phpacademy) - search for their CSS playlist, and Treehouse (http://www.youtube.com/gotreehouse or http://www.teamtreehouse.com)

For an interactive learning source, I recommend Code Academy (http://www.codeacademy.com).
Fair enough, thanks for explaining that. Seems like the EC2-like route makes the most sense if you're most budget and manpower constrained, even though the performance will be comparatively pretty abysmal.
The KA folks were playing this in the office a few weeks back, James wanted to make a good AI for it, spent a weekend or so on it, and discovered the Perfect Bot in the process. My sole contribution to this program (in addition to moral support!) was creating a copy that's set to Perfect Bot by default for y'all's convenience, but his original has all sorts of crazy config.
Most restrictions on classified information are enforceable because those with access to the information have voluntarily surrended their first amendment rights in respect of classified information as part of the agreement they entered into when they obtained a security clearance.

It's much less clear when you are talking about someone who hasn't agreed to the clearance process. In 1979 the Department of Energy tried to prevent The Progressive magazine from publishing an article by Howard Morland describing the design of the Hydrogen Bomb. The article was derived from unclassified sources, but the government argued that information about atomic weapon design is "born classified". There was no conclusive judgement, as the government eventually dropped the case and the article was published.
Bank of America’s practice is to string homeowners along with no apparent intention of providing the permanent loan modifications it promises

Slightly start-up relevant: the same practice is often used by evil acquiring companies. They will target a start-up that is close to running out of cash, string it along with everything looking rosy, then pull the rug out at the last minute, and buy up the assets they want for pennies on the dollar in the bankruptcy liquidation.
Isn't object recognition in a not-distorted environment relatively easy? Click-and-drag is something UI automation does all the time, so that's not the hard part, either.

A couple more thoughts:
This requires a huge, human-written database (or it requires an algorithm ... and, oh wait, we already decided that if an algorithm can do it, then it's not really worth of being a captcha)

Also, a few of the images, especially the coffee mug ones, look like they could be solved by selecting the whole image.
(in case it's unclear, several screen grabs of the same single prompt at various scroll positions)
You might consider using photos that have more than the target object in them. It is easy as heck for a computer to determine the bounds of an object in a photo, and increasingly easy for it to know what that object is. It's certainly no challenge to a bot to determine the bounds of the "coffeemug" when it is the only object in the photo.

Also, CAPTCHA of any sort just sucks. As a user, I only will bother with a site that uses CAPTCHA if it is providing something I absolutely must have. If it's something I may or may not use, and I'm presented with a CAPTCHA (of any kind), I leave.
Here i am thinking it's the best language I've ever written in :-) I guess that's not really incompatible with still being "not a well designed language." When we're comparing ourselves to platonic ideals I guess the real thing can only pale in comparison. I just don't perceive the compromises.

For me, attaining a factor of 5 lines to 1 line code shrinkage translating from a legacy (though still imperative) codebase is amazing, and must point to an excellent language design. Of course I realize I could probably achieve the same thing with a number of other functional languages of which i have limited experience
I found the quotes appalling, though I was not surprised that one of them was from Michelle Bachmann.
Your "understanding" of PRISM is wrong.
Most systems will not have any sort of external media - no floppy drives, no removable hard disks, no cd burners. USB ports will be filled with epoxy and any peripherals will also be physically secured to their ports. Wherever possible drivers for external media will simply be removed from the OS installation image for those systems.

That will leave a handful of system that do have external media. Those will have extreme access restrictions - at a minimum account restrictions and audit logs that will be regularly correlated with a hand-written log that contains timestamps and signatures of both people. They may even put the system in a room with keycard access that requires two different keycards and associated PINs to be entered before the door opens.
That's a fair point. However, I still see the contraction of skills being greater as the web caters to those without them, and people's skill atrophying.

For instance, Facebook messaging vs instant messaging. For most standard users I know, they have literally lost any reason to use an alternate client, and many of them will probably never become familiar with one as a result.

Anyway, its a wait and see situation, hopefully we are both around to see!
VirtualBox...
In order to query the databases, analysts have to write down an 'articulate suspicion' about the person (i.e. not just "this guy has a funny name" , but a real suspicion). If suddenly one end of the convo. is in the US, you also have to have substantial proof (beyond first-ammendment speech, but actual suspicions of conspiring).

This isn't suspicionless searches. At least the querying of the data isn't.

The biggest question here is whether having the info but not looking at it is the same as not having it for the courts. That'll make or break this program.
Quick sincere question. I build HPC in the cloud tooling with AWS, MIT Starcluster, IPython, etc for a living. I'd like to give Wakari a try, but could the Terms compromise my ability to offer a product in the future that could be construed as a competitor?
Members of the Scala community are generally quite mature, and this reflects in their attitude and response when it comes to legitimate criticism of Scala.

To most of these people, Scala is merely a tool, often just one among many others. They fully realize that it has flaws, and are very willing to acknowledge the existence of these flaws. They don't take it personally when somebody points out such problems. This is quite evident after reading through the discussion in this case.

This does differ from how members of the the Ruby and JavaScript communities take criticism of those languages, for example. Such people do tend to be much more emotionally attached to those programming languages, for whatever reason. They react with hostility and denial when they encounter legitimate criticism.

Technological improvement happens best when criticism can flow freely. The people involved are focused on acknowledging and accepting that flaws exist, and then proceed to try to fix them. On the other hand, when legitimate criticism is shunned or blindly denied, like in the JavaScript community, technological progress proceeds at a much slower pace. More effort is placed on defending and maintaining the status quo, even when this is the most ineffectual and non-beneficial thing to be doing, than is expended on improving the situation.
That's exactly what they describe as the cause of the bug. They intended for the function to be idempotent but it wasn't because of a misunderstanding with the Python library spec.
Prolly the biggest advantage of the JVM in my opinion was pointed out by "iv...@ivan.net.nz":

> The one thing I like about the jvm is that I can compile
> and package code on one platform and deploy to another
> without worrying about anything but the fact that the jvm
> is installed.

Solves so many headaches!
I absolutely agree (although for smaller projects I enjoy Haskell more).

Tony Morris (the person who started the conversation) is a pretty devoted Scala-er. But it is definitely recognised by Scala experts (especially people who are arms deep in the compiler) that the JVM is a very limiting factor in the design of the language.
Rust is the anti-JVM.

- Proper task isolation with pointer ownership.

- No global GC. Task-local GC when needed, and explicit ownership otherwise.

- Mozilla.

- No NullPointerExceptions. Unsafe code is convenient when you need it.
That's an over-simplification that obscures the important issues. What matters is in what way their interests diverge - espionage and whistle-blowing are of no more interest to a contract employer than to the government itself because the contract employer is answerable to the government. Most contract employers live and die at the whim of their single customer.
There are two questions in play: can we do it, and should we do it. The empirical usefulness of surveillance is relevant to both.

Re: "can we do it" --

The 4th amendment protects the right to be free against "unreasonable searches and seizures." Not all searches, not monitoring, not tracking. Unreasonable searches. To a lawyer (like 30-35 of 55 framers of the Constitution), "reasonable" is a signal to balance competing interests. That's what it signals now, that's what it signaled 200+ years ago when the Constitution was written.

So in the context of the 4th amendment, that is exactly the right argument to have. Whether a law enforcement tool is effective and necessary is a fundamental question you have to ask in balancing the competing interests of law enforcement and privacy. And that balancing is inherent in deciding whether a search is an "unreasonable" one.

Re: "should we do it -- it is self evident that a determination of whether a technique is effective and useful is instrumental in deciding whether we should use it.
A few issues,

1. Not going to work for those with sight impairments.
2. Not going to work on mobile (in current form).
3. Its not any harder to break in an automated way then most other CAPTCHA's

I hate CAPTCHA's. With a passion. I even write automated CAPTCHA decoders for fun http://wausita.com/captcha/

If there is one thing the world does not need its another CAPTCHA. If you have something to protect all the CAPTCHA's in the world are not going to stop those who want to exploit it. They can be automated or outsourced (easily and for peanuts). CAPTCHA's should only be considered suitable for keeping random spam bots off your site, and even then adding a honeypot field is a safer bet.

If you are being targeted a CAPTCHA is next to useless.
Seems like the Pauls, father and son, have ideologies that are positive for the tech industry.

Maybe. As a "tech" kind of guy, I'm not quite ready to vote for a medical doctor who denies human evolution.
I'd be interested in a Mac app as well. I just signed up for the iPhone mailing list :)
F# and the CLR aren't proprietary?
Hiring for a startup = = Building a tribe
Show HN: Playable Ultimate Tic Tac Toe
Hopefully DotCloud isn't following the same pattern
I know for a fact that this is how Microsoft gets all of their office furniture.
I am sort of upset with Google. Why didn't they do this in the first place? Honestly, seems like they are back pedaling to save face.
Ask HN: has anyone else found it hard to get attention for their new startup?
Anyone got any inspirational stories to share about how it was hard to get any attention or traffic for your new startup, and hopefully you overcame this and found an audience and users?
In an imaginary world where an unconstitutional privacy infraction could be demonstrably proven to prevent a million deaths per year, the Constitution would be amended.
In 1936 Soviet scientist Lukyanov built an analog water computer
Internationalizing 99designs
> Not being able to relicense under a more restrictive license is actually the main element of copyleft.

Not being able to relicense under a license not acceptable to the authors of the particular copyleft license at issue is a main element of copyleft, but copyleft licenses often allow redistributing under more restrictive licenses that remain acceptable to the copyleft license author (e.g., the FSF encourages the use of "or any later version" language in GPL licenses, and GPLv3 is in many respects more restrictive than GPLv2; further, GPLv3 allows relicensing with specified kinds of additional terms that may in some ways be more restrictive.)
Inspired by the recent Hacker News post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5898506) and my desire to tinker with HTML5 a bit :) I was trying to make a nice "color pencil" effect, but still have some work to do.
There's some generic advice, but perhaps it would be more constructive to post about what your startup does / who your target market is, since that will often change the strategy significantly.
Wikipedia's article on Ohm actually covers this!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohm#Ohm_symbol

"Unicode encodes the symbol as U+2126 Ω ohm sign, distinct from Greek omega among letterlike symbols, but it is only included for backwards compatibility and the Greek uppercase omega character U+03A9 Ω greek capital letter omega (HTML: &#937; &Omega;) is preferred."

And from the Unicode Standards doc that is the source for that section:

"Greek Letters as Symbols: The use of Greek letters for mathematical variables and operators is well established. Characters from the Greek block may be used for these symbols.

For compatibility purposes, a few Greek letters are separately encoded as symbols in other character blocks. Examples include U+00B5 µ n the Latin-1 Supplement character block and U+2126 Ω in the Letterlike Symbols character block. The ohm sign is canonically equivalent to the capital omega, and normalization would remove any
distinction. Its use is therefore discouraged in favor of capital omega. The same equivalence does not exist between micro sign and mu, and use of either character as micro sign is common; for Greek text, only the mu should be used."
Sun Grid Engine used to be open source, but now Oracle Grid Engine isn't. But what's far worse, in my opinion as a user, is that Oracle made many of the existing documentation and community support resources hosted by Sun disappear.
Using the Ohm symbol is actually discouraged. The only reason it's there is for round trip conversion to other character sets.
This is a really fun way to explore unicode, thanks.
Simon Ochsenreither has been investing a fair amount of resources into Avian[1], an alternative JVM with support for tailcalls and various other useful toys.

I think this is possibly where languages like Scala may lead, potentially forking a JVM and refitting it to their own needs.

[1] - https://github.com/ReadyTalk/avian/
There are really several layers of issues to deal with in regards to the JVM.

First, the JVM really IS NOT a great choice to build other languages on. It wasn't designed for it; In fact before invokedynamic, it was nearly impossible. For all intents, building other languages on the JVM is a bad hack, regardless of how elegant ( or not ) the language syntax is. The amount of fuckery required is nearly unbelievable.

Second, the JVM is owned by Oracle. It is technically 'open source' but Oracle has proven time and again to not only be against open source, but one could even support the position that they're actively hostile towards it.

Ideally, the solution would be to invest engineering mind-share into creating a REAL VM that was designed to host many programming languages. Regardless of what you think of Microsoft, they got .Net correct in that their tooling infrastructure was built from the beginning with multiple programming languages sitting on top of the CLR ( and later the DLR ). The LLVM folks have been making some progress in this regard by way of VMKit, but personally I cannot understand why this issue doesn't get more mind-share. Python, Scala, Ruby, Clojure, Lua, etc would all benefit in the end.
While it's not the same thing, 'go' can compile for multiple platforms, and then you can deploy appropriate binaries on another OS as long as 'go' is installed.
CAPTCHAs were broken a long time ago when spammers hired real people to enter their values instead of relying on bots. In short, testing to see if the visitor is a human is protecting against spamming tactics from 2008.
The comment or the language?

All kidding aside, one- or two-word comments are quite uninformative. Just because the original article with its "Scala is not a well-designed language" statement doesn't bother backing up bold claims with arguments, we should not fall into the same trap here on HN.

It's worth talking about Clojure as an alternative to Scala. They're both targetting the JVM, and they're both still on their way out of a niche. But just throwing out the name of an alternative programming language doesn't make a useful comment yet, nor does the "too succinct" reply.
Huawei Ascend P6 Smartphone Is The World's Slimmest Smartphone
Yes, and for how good Haskell is as a LANGUAGE, it sucks at this very important feature (assuming you want to use a 3rd party library).
What if you played it where the square selected is the direction you move to go to the next board. If the player selects the center square on a board, that board must be played again. If the player selects the left square, the board to the left must be played next. If a corner square is picked, you play the board to that diagonal direction.

If the corner is not attached to a board, you roll the board around as though the ends are connected (or as though it's an infinitely repeating tiling of the same game). For example, the bottom right square on the bottom right board makes the next board the top left.

The center-right square on the center-right board would result in the next board being the center-left board, and so on.

Would there be a gambit in this ruleset?

edit:
So, it looks like the same gambit applies, instead of selecting the center piece you just pick the one pointing toward the center every time.
I don't get it when people keep repeating something like this. Google pushed a lot for adding TSL/SSL encryption between Google's servers and the client, to the point of inventing several performance improvements in TSL start-up. However they sure don't encrypt inside the client [note] and then sends it as a blob to server to storage, mostly because that's not really how webapps can work (for practical "can work" values). For example this wouldn't allow you to full-text-search all your own emails in gmail.
Moreover this would mean significant performance regression every time you would open up any Google web app, because the client would have to decrypt all data, without much help from indexes.
[note] Even encrypting and decrypting in the client would only help so much. It is likely they could be ordered to splice they data while in the client for any person of interest.
Cloud web apps simply requires a legal system that respects peoples' data.
How cash secretly rules surveillance policy
Any details on the car crash?
Please herewith be guided thereto accordingly,

Very truly yours,

Richard D. Trenk, Township Attorney
Kamcord (YC S12) shares its startup story: finding co-founders
If it's turtles all the way up then it's turtles all the way down.

The Supreme Court has already ruled that metadata is not warrant-protected, so I'd be highly leery of equating data with metadata. (edit: spelling fix)
It would be great if the ycombinator RSS feed worked. https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
Not even close.

The letter À (A grave) can be written as the UTF-8 bytestream 0xC3 0x80 (i.e. a single "character"), or as À - i.e. a letter A, then a combining grave character i.e. 0x41 0xCC 0x80.

The two are identical. Except they have different byte representations. If you don't normalize your unicode you will run into major problems.
Mono isn't proprietary.
The Pakistanis must authorize, allow, and support US drone operations in their airspace. This is the only plausible explanation for the US drone airfields within Pakistan, which were visible for some time on Google Earth, (though I have not checked recently).
Even if you're not explicitly taking advantage of new platform, supporting iOS 5 increases your testing burden. For an indie dev (or a pair of developers), this can be a significant burden for minimal payoff, given how few users are on older versions of iOS.
There are only 7 billion human mouths on the planet. Perhaps 3 billion belong to humans with enough money to talk on phones, which is also a good filter for basic capacity to make trouble. Capture all of that, and it will cost less than a fraction to process and store it compared to doing it the hard way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signals_intelligence_operationa...

There's some expensive stuff in there.
Confiscating your cash would need to be done with some kinda of judicial order, so it's not up to the president or someone who you "pissed off"

The drone killing is a seriously disturbing precedent, but with the backlash that's happened I think you won't be seeing that again (at least I hope).

The rest of your examples are definitely tools at the disposal of the executive branch, but they're on the same order of being put on the no fly list (the no-fly-list was more of an illustrative example than a definitive list of what the government can do). Annoying, but not at all equivalent at all to being jailed (as the parent comment stated).
The problem I have with the "duplicate the Internet" theory is that it favors the hard solution vs the easy solution.

The hard solution is to secretly duplicate traffic from every data center operated by each of these companies, reverse engineer every HTTP request that goes back and forth so that the data can be parsed, maintain it for every product change that happens at these companies, circumvent HTTPS by compromising the certificate authorities, store it all, and still maintain a massive analytics tool that can make sense of the astounding amount of data coming through.

The easy solution is to avoid all of the technical ugliness of acquiring the data, and just legally make the companies give you the relevant information, neatly structured and packaged. NSLs are the ultimate hack.
Been there and done that. However, designing languages to push the state of affairs forward is more my cup of tea (working on Scala helped with a lot of ideas though).

Writing tooling is incredibly difficult, especially when Eclipse isn't really designed to support new JVM languages. It is easier to write an IDE for your language than to plug into Eclipes.
Vine Will Survive
"A better solution is to stop making your country one people want to escape from."

Damn right. What an insane situation. My (Soviet) Russian-born wife keeps saying, 'yeah, that's what they did in the USSR'
Open source that I know of:

OpenSolaris - OpenIndiana

OpenOffice - LibreOffice

Ksplice - Discontinued support for non Oracle linux

MySql - MariaDB
I used to work for Oracle. Something I heard several times around different parts of the company was that Larry believed that open source was a good way to build products, not businesses. He was more than happy to take advantage of open source, but not willing to contribute to it.
Oracle's attitude toward open source was one of many reasons I left, and one of the reasons I gave for why I was leaving.
> They react with hostility and denial when they encounter legitimate criticism.

Citation needed, Rubyists in particular have been whining (and rightfully so) about MRI's poor concurrency support for the past year or two. That's just one counterexample.

Everyone that I know that's good at Ruby has their own favorite wart where it does something they hate.
Oh hey tptacek it looks like you've shifted your opinion on this whole NSA scandal a bit over the past couple days to be less skeptical and more in line with the rest of HN. Was there any particular story that made you change your mind?