skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You make some great arguments, even as devil's advocate, so I feel the need to offer as much of a rebuttal as I can.

linking health care to your job means that productive citizens are being taken care of

Assuming productivity is related to the selling of your time to another actor is outdated 20th century thinking. People can and are becoming increasingly productive without having "jobs" that fit a definition. Entrepreneurs, contractors, part-time workers, stay at home parents, students... all of these people are outside of the employer/employee equation and thus don't have access to health care because of it.

Tell me, who's more valuable to society, employee #992232 of big corp the next Richard Branson? Tying health care to employment ensures the former, not the latter is given incentive. This is precisely what we don't want.

If the US government is going to take on Health Care that money needs to come from funds already in the budget.

This is a much more practical argument and it is difficult to rebut directly. Essentially though, you are correct: something else would need to be sacrificed. There is, of course, an obvious target: http://armscontrolcenter.org/issues/securityspending/article...

In addition to that though, spending on Medicaid and Medicare within the current system is hugely inflated, from what I can see. US per capita administrative costs are triple that of Canada: http://pweb1.rwjf.org/reports/grr/036617.htm

So, even without a military cut back, the money is already being spent, just on HMO's instead of actual health care.
The Facebook effect
There have been a few other articles on the hardware and software behind EVE over the years [0][1][2]. Python, Infiniband, interesting stuff.

0: http://www.slideshare.net/Arbow/stackless-python-in-eve

1: http://massively.joystiq.com/2008/09/28/eve-evolved-eve-onli...

2: http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/planning-for-war-how-...
Skype supports call forwarding which by necessity negates the end to end encryption. It could be that to tap a Skype users calls they modify the users on-line address book to make it appears to their client that all of their contacts have call forwarding set up. All voice data then gets sent to Skype HQ, decrypted and stored, before being forwarded on to the interned recipient.
Forget the web/web page, it's only a means, a tool for a higher purpose. It's no end in itself.
How did you do these measurements? I would be shocked if the entire gmail webapp is 7.2KB.

Just looking at the Network tab in Chrome's inspector, I see a lot more than 7KB being transferred. It seems the main page on gmail is just loading the other j.s. files.
I'm looking forward to tiny nanotech robots that can be deployed on search and destroy missions.
I didn't mean to imply that, say, the Brayton cycle was an absolute physical limit to aerospace vehicle performance that cannot be worked around. Of course, you can switch from jet engines to scramjets, you can switch from optical lithography to x-ray lithography, you can avoid the realities of supersonic drag by going into space, etc.

But: a) all that is risky and extremely expensive (and as the semiconductor example shows us, often exponentially so); and b) whatever technology you use, you will always be pushing up against physical limits--that's just the nature of the physical engineering disciplines.

These are novel concepts in a world where we see "technological progress" as the evolution of the internet from AOL in 1995 to Facebook in 2010 and wonder why other areas don't improve so fast.

PS) I'd be quite interested to see any specific papers you had in mind vis-a-vis alternative cycles for jet engines.
He only had access to a small envelope.
I think the author clearly states: "Think about the words first, than the rest".

I didn't read it as a call to minimalism, more so as "It does not matter how flashy your site is, if in the end you have really nothing to say."

It's hard to disagree, honestly (it's also plain common sense, nothing groundbreaking, although the minimalist presentation really helps driving home the point).
There is a large base of research on this problem for the US military (and CCCP etc). i.e. How to discern effective killers within troops, how to shape them and how to 'uplift' the usual grunts to effectively kill.

I suggest you research "natural killers" from 1946 onwards (famous paper starts the ball rolling there - Combat Neuroses / Fatigue is a tip). Their percentage increase in producing effective killers is impressive. I won't link to specific papers, since it's outside the remit of H.N., however a lot of hard science & tech has been brought to bear on the issue.

The flip-side of this, the mirror to a sociopath (let's call it "the empathetically linked / driven") makes just as an effective killer for the record. If not better.

Tl;dr

You're about 70 years too late to pioneer this field. However, in looking @ the current trend to map Autism onto AI networks as a model, I'd suggest you'd probably have more joy looking at the empathetically linked individuals to see how their strong network connections / protective instincts are harnessed if I were to build a neural Map (weak) AI.
This was a bit of an obsession of mine ever since I saw Coding Horror a few years ago. I had seen a lot of extremely minimalist designs, but they were all doing things to accomplish that minimalism. As a developer though, you have a nagging feeling in the back of your brain saying "that's a lie, it's not simple, it's very complicated, it just looks simple." Coding Horror is complex, but it was plain enough for me to imagine it with even less structure.

I decided to stick as close to plain HTML for my personal website as possible. The problem is, plain HTML is ugly. So instead, I tried to imagine what the default style of HTML would be if it was created today.

I've am still far from that ideal, but it is a work in progress: http://rkuykendall.com/
Lync as well, like it quite a bit. Big company (100000+) and Outlook/Lync is a given.
I'm rather surprised this hasn't already been mentioned, but if you want to read more on this thread of thought written by an economist, check out the ebook, "The Great Stagnation" by Tyler Cowen. Alternatively, watch his Tedx talk.
The real hard part is that so many of us grew up on a: Moore's Law, and b: science fiction. We want to believe Moore's Law applies to everything, because it fits the mythos and the observed behavior of the world we grew up in.

Sadly, nothing but computers are subject to Moore's Law. And even there, it'll run out sooner or later.
The old php mysql_* functions have become notorious for their vulnerability to SQL injection[1].

In no small part because novice developers also have a tendency to build queries directly out of $_GET parameters.

While PDO and parameterized queries aren't a silver bullet, simple strings as queries are just a nightmare to do properly.[2]

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/60174/how-to-prevent-sql-...
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4dJ7hdA8fs
Eclipse is a tool that was wholly developed by IBM before it was spun off as an independent foundation. Even then, IBM was the largest contributor to its development. Regardless of the fact that IBM was using Eclipse to advance its corporate interests (to provide a tool suite to replace Visual Age and support Websphere), the IDE is still useful.

You see, it's possible to separate the product from its origin.

A language has even less to do with advancing corporate interests (other than Google's professed goal to "make the web faster"), since it's an agnostic platform rather than a product designed to further a specific goal.
Coder caves; no lights, especially not natural; time of day or passing is not in your peripheral.
Did rapper M.I.A. predict PRISM?
It's very fishy to me that the three comments about keys are all from new users with this being their first post. Not to mention the extra excitement in the form of an exclamation point.
The update hasn't reached the server around me, so I can't verify - are the filters really just the photo filters but on video? If so, I'm massively disappointed - they have a whole new dimension of data and they're doing nothing with it!

Yes, video filters are hard. That makes them worth doing.
But the eventual SCOTUS decision did determine that it's not covered by the Interstate Commerce Clause. So your explanation of Pelosi's laugh may illustrate what was going on in her mind (as well as most other legal scholars at that date), but it also shows that they were wrong in the final analysis.

The reason that ObamaCare survived wasn't because of the Interstate Commerce loophole. It was because SCOTUS determined that it's a tax, and thus came in through the power of Congress to levy taxes.
Alternatively, Instagram didn't think their messaging through. 15 seconds is a long time.
I've seen this misconception twice on the thread now, so I'm calling it out: IQ is not normally distributed. It has fat tails: the extreme ends of the distribution are much more common than a normal distribution would suggest. Some quick Googling indicated that Terman's data on high-IQ people (1921) showed IQs at 4 SDs (160ish) are about 15x more common than a Gaussian would predict, while at 5+ SDs (175-200ish) they can be up to 1000x more common than a Gaussian.
Sure, that page is just text. But I found it via hackernews. If hackernews looked like that, I wouldn't visit it every day.
Would the bullet really kill microscopic cancer cells? Or just push them around? Do individual cells die from the pressure waves at that scale?
> a system that is designed to never crash

I'm pretty sure no self-respecting engineer would ever attempt to design such a thing (although many might be deluded into thinking that e.g. advanced type systems might help achieve that goal).

> choice of using C++

Almost certainly not a good indicator.. much of those LOC are likely integrations from other projects. Who is to say the alternative didn't involve rewriting some more sensitive, costly-to-produce code in Ada?
Can we have a get-rid-of-medium-link-bait club?
I don't have a problem with it, but it was funny to me that when I viewed the source the first thing that I saw was some javascript.
OK, good. I think these are excellent books on SEM:

"Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day"
by Jennifer Grappone

"Getting Noticed on Google"
by Ben Norman

And if it isn't measured, it isn't managed:

"Scientific Advertising"
Claude C. Hopkins
Or Luma?
Announcing Insetlabs beta, Signup and get AWS gift cards
Neat, and I like what you're saying. However, although words are important, and longer lasting, looks are perhaps equally as important to an individual in the present. Always were, always will be. People care about looking good. People are attracted to good looking things. Great words might improve the legacy of your ideas, but great looks will improve the legacy of you. Both are justifiably important to people.

Also, often a great picture is greater than many words. And the web is equally powerful for that.
The SaaS article uses mysql_query() and the top 10 framework post has an annoying Facebook modal and offers very little content.

I don't normally look at most of the articles, but the ones I do read are usually decent!
Don't you think Hacker News does look like that?

A lot of people (below) have commented that they like HN because it is just text and links on a page.
YCHC;NY
Your site looks great. I especially like your logo.
'SuperTicket' for seeing movie at theater, home
i think it is a safe bet that you can plan on your instagram feed filling up with terrible videos :)
Agreed. It may be smarter at this point to buy Bitcoins with you USD balance and sell them for EUR, GBP or JPY. The volumes are smaller but it is possible.
Can you elaborate on what you think they Gould be doing with this re dimension of data in video?

Personally, I think everything around how Facebook does groups is broken.

Get out of the single-vertical-column shackles.
I saw nothing to convince me this is a true statement:

'allows you to send "read only once" emails'
Looks like PMT is an mREIT (mortgage REIT), so instead of physical properties they buy mortgage loans. Different ballgame in the same stadium, so to speak. There are others: AGNC yields 20%, CYS 16%. I used to have an ETF that holds a portfolio of these (REM), which might be a good way to diversify as they all have slightly different strategies for investing and hedging. I got out recently, it's just too unpredictable. These funds achieve their high yield by being leveraged 10x-20x, so any impact from external factors like interest rate spread and policy changes is highly amplified.

Though I still have some exposure to the sector through other funds like AWP and SDIV.
Hey Joebo, I think they were friends that were excited for us. Some friends have been waiting for this for a while and want to help, so I don't mind!!
Show HN: Nipple - iPod inspired Mobile Finger Nav (Mobile Only)
Nope. SSL MITM via CA.
Singapore's record-breaking smog is so bad, birds are falling from the sky
Which one? Adjusting algorithms or start using it little bit more? In both cases all they need are some good arguments but you already see they even have, so called, arguments for current situation. At the end they are here to save You! P.S. ofc, if you can, please join the army. Forget the truth, there's a war out there, I tell you :-)
So how do you mean "incentivize"? Financial renumeration can often be had, by getting hired by a company that benefits from your open source project (this probably covers thousands of open source developers today).

But money isn't why people start open source projects, for the most part. What's their motivation? Pride? Political freedom? Helping the world? Depends on the person. Incentives need to be aligned with the individual being incentivized. But honestly, money isn't a good open source motivator. If someone wants to get rich, there are usually better ways via closed source.
I had no idea about this issue, thanks for the link! Looks like the FISC overruled the executive branch's argument about classifying the ruling. Kudos to the EFF.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/public-first-secret-co...

Honestly, what does the executive branch hope to accomplish by classifying the ruling that it was illegal? It sounds like everyone already knows what the ruling was even if the documents themselves are classified. Seems like a weak measure that makes them look worse, that they are willing to exercise the power to hide things (a power one would hope would be used responsibly) even in cases where it doesn't seem to help their goals in a meaningful way? Am I missing something here?
Aside from the actual product announcement... I'm interested to see that they created an Android and iOS version at the same time. For the past several years, Android apps were typically pushed off a month (or years, in Instagram's case).

I wonder if their Android app drove much of their adoption in the past year or so, and as such, they decided to make sure they could launch feature-complete apps on both platforms on day one?

If so - will Android finally start getting apps on pace with iOS?
> system that is designed to never crash

Oh, they crash. Software on currently fielded jets crash all the time, pilots call them "software anomalies."

Systems are designed to fail softly and reboot quickly (~1 minute) and sometimes do so automatically without physically crashing the jet. Sometimes the pilot won't even notice.
Semicolons are used in two ways, to separate related independent clauses: "I entered the room; it stank." and as a kind of "super comma" when separating lists of items that themselves contain commas: spam; eggs and spam; spam, egg, sausage, and spam; and spam, spam, spam, eggs, and spam.

The use here is the first case, and it's incorrect because (as another respondent has pointed out) the first clause is not independent (i.e. cannot stand on its own).
You make some very good points, but if the theoretical limits are less clear cut in sofware (apart from very simple tasks like sorting), wouldn't it be all the more rational to pursue longer term research in this field?

We have no idea where the theoretical limit is in automatic natuaral language understanding for instance. Yet the rewards of any breakthroughs there would be enormous.

But I'm actually not so sure if hardware and software are really that different in terms of theoretical limits. The incentive to optimize existing approaches instead of exploring completely new directions in hardware may be be a result of much higher capital requirements for anything physical.
Right, but couldn't they expand the pane but leave the text at the same ratio? The way it is now, the right-hand scrollbar leaves the right side of the window[1], which is kind of weird. Adding whitespace on the sides might be a better way to achieve the same goal.

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/doaiMyc.jpg
Thinking about it, we should maybe be incentivizing existing businesses to support on-the-clock open source work by their own staff.
>> But the most powerful tool on the web is still words.

No. YouTube comments are words. They're also terrible. Also, images can be as powerful (or more so) than words.

IMO his thesis would be better stated as:

"But the most powerful tool on the web is still a compelling piece of content (words, image, video)"
I can pay my bills online, shop online, transfer funds between accounts, invest, watch videos, listen to music, share pictures, reserve hotel rooms, flights and rental cars, see maps of the world and my own city.

The web is also expanding every day to include more capabilities.

It is about way more than words. Let's not oversimplify it just because we think minimalism is cute.
I could have sworn they invented web pages for that.
"At it's heart, web design should be about words."

No.

The web is not just a place for text / words, that is not its heart and soul, and therefore neither is that the case for web design. It really never has been. I see no great argument in favor of words being the core over any other form of expression. Today's bandwidth more than allows for beautiful video, animation, high quality graphics and photos, etc. Or low key graphics, subtle interactivity, and so on. It's absurd to argue that such a rich medium should always be focused on words.

Text does not have to be the focus. It depends on what the purpose to be achieved is.
Most of the web is awash in ugly junk. Whenever I go to a machine that doesn't have adblock, Ghostery etc., I am increasingly horrified. It's like a highway with so many billboards that you can't see the direction signs, never mind enjoy the view. That or some sort of infinite supermarket magazine rack.

I HATE the way web design has evolved. I want to make the design choices at my end, not have them imposed on me or consuming a ridiculous amount of bandwidth. Most of the design on the web is no good.
#restorethefourth pick a city near you and go protest. It's time you did something real. restorethefourth.net
;) I'm working on it!
Thanks for making this viable for noobs like me.
Flowdock. Holy moly Flowdock is slow. Have to restart it a couple times every day. SO ANNOYING
Hey Bichiliad, I think it's friends trying to help us out since they've been waiting for this.

Yes, would work great on a bike if you could hide it well. Don't put it in a bike's frame though. Would block the RF. Under the seat would work.
I'm not sure how this is at all relevant to the NSA spying - the NSA are gathering details from content providers (like Facebook, Google, Skype), so if you use the VPN to access any of them you are still at risk, or if you communicate using with anyone using one of those services.
I would imagine it would at least kill the ones it hit directly, but otherwise... interesting question. Someone should test that, for science.
Two Sample Chapters from "Tame the Flow"
The rants will stop showing up when PHP's language design and runtime behaviour becomes consistent and predictable.
Just an amusing note: a useful fusion power plant on Earth would probably require conditions many times more extreme than those inside the Sun.

"The power production density of the core overall is similar to the metabolic production density of a reptile. The peak power production in the Sun's center, per volume, has been compared to the volumetric heat generated in an active compost heap. The tremendous power output of the Sun is due not to its high power per volume, but rather to its gigantic size." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_core
"Accountability". A conspicuously heroic effort (likely counterproductive long-run), because their +$6 billion drip is threatened by lawmakers who don't think they're taking this whole thing seriously.

For the sake of whatever competent programmers were already working on the system, I hope this is mostly PR noise.
> The cost of postage and the check along with all the processing costs are covered from the money generated from sales of valuable crap. Remember: one man’s crap is another man’s treasure.

And yet, Goodwill doesn't hand out $10 checks for every donation.

I suspect that the money earned from selling "another man's treasure" will rapidly decline.

At first, you'll have the type of people we imagine other HN readers sending things in - nice books, perhaps art, a few desktop toys and things like that. But after a few months, you'll start receiving things that I'd send in - desk lamps that are 99% functional, but don't quite bend in the angle that you want. Paperbacks that have been dropped into a puddle one too many times. An old thermos.
> At least adopting PSR-0 would have been a great step towards that.

PSR-0 is broken on machines using filesystems that aren't completely case-sensitive.

Implementing PSR-0 also takes about five lines of code. Sure, it's more boilerplate, but it's not something that needs to be in core.
I wish there were a lot more client-side design tools. I liked the idea of building something that was like your own daily newspaper, but that's not practical when every article is trying to differentiate itself visually (frequently to obscure the fact that the textual content is largely churn).
CBO score of the immigration bill and its effects on the deficit
I think the word "sociopath", like "nihilist" and to a lesser extent "traitor", never had much meaning outside of "someone whose characteristics or actions I do not like".

So I question the basis on which Mr. Adams -- whose works some might consider a sociopathic attack on American business practices, and by extension, capitalism -- thinks content analysis is a good idea.
GitHub links are broken. (18:39 GMT)
I thought OdinMonkey was a new JIT (because it's a new monkey), so this provided some useful if long-winded clarification.
Kind of disingenuous of them to claim, "we had to re-use the servers". They could have just pulled the HDDs for the MEGA storage servers and re-purposed the servers to paying customers. This would still have been expensive of course.