skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These things are dead.

Stories didn't save them. Stories won't save us. Stories won't save you.*

This is not the route to follow. We're not into
science fiction because it's good literature, we're into
it because it's weird. Follow your weird, ladies and
gentlemen. Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your
geekdom. Embrace your nerditude. In the immortal words
of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose
work is still in print after a hundred years, "woo the
muse of the odd." A good science fiction story is not a
"good story" with a polite whiff of rocket fuel in it. A
good science fiction story is something that knows it is
science fiction and plunges through that and comes roaring
out of the other side. Computer entertainment should not
be more like movies, it shouldn't be more like books, it
should be more like computer entertainment, SO MUCH MORE
LIKE COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT THAT IT RIPS THROUGH THE
LIMITS AND IS SIMPLY IMPOSSIBLE TO IGNORE!

Can someone get Square-Enix on the line? Because all they've done in the last decade and a half is try to make their games more and more movie-like.
First I have to say that this is very cool indeed!

Practically speaking, however, I'm not sure that it would have any advantages over the flashlights that you crank for a while. Though perhaps those crank flashlights use a rechargeable battery that degrades over time, and this new flashlight would have a longer shelf-life? Though I should think a good capacitor instead of a battery would solve that potential problem with the crank flashlights.
JRuby is a very mature and widely used implementation by now. Granted, it's a bit isolated from the world of MRI libraries with compiled extensions, but compatibility story is getting better with every day. Besides, you are within arm's reach from the java library world.
perhaps aiming abilities decreased? due to drugs?
Americans have apparently been so succesful in exporting their culture that they've managed to export american hypocrisy as well ;)
Yeah, except that, you know, our government is supposed to be us.

But, you can be forgiven for forgetting that fact. It's really hard to remember these days.

Still, for the record, we should all be suspicious of anyone who seeks to disempower the government in a country wherein self-rule is supposed to be the law. There is a third option, and that is restoring the spirit of our government.
“Practical Artificial Intelligence Programming With Java” by Mark Watson
What is the hypothesis? As a science fair project, while this is novel as far as most "I made a volcano using baking soda and vinegar" projects are, I'm missing the scientific method in what I've read so far.
A friend of mine is a specialist trauma doctor in NYC and claims to only work 1.5 hours per day because hardly anything happens.
>Seebeck is incredibly inefficient

Yep, I was going to try to use that (peltier) in conjunction with a small array of solar panels to cool my car because summer afternoons can get incredibly hot - outside temperature reaches 45C, so I'm reasonably sure the car's interior would reach 55-60 easy. Alas! running some back of the envelope calculations (before jumping into the whole thing) I quickly discovered that I'm better off trying to find an efficient and tiny compressor, and large secondary battery to charge off the solar panels.

This problem still remains unsolved and no, remote start is not an option. I'm trying to craft something that is completely independent of the gas in the tank and preferably self sufficient.
If you save down one of the images and up the gamma a little, you can see a tremendous amount of detail. Far more than could practically be done by hand, and afaict, more than PyEphem has in its catalogue of "bright stars".

I suspect he used something like Stellarium and then ran the images though some filters.
> that platform doesn't have an snprintf (yay mainframes!)

One trick I did once when I wrote code somewhere that didn't have snprintf: create a pipe, fprintf into it, and only read at most N bytes back.

It worked and was portable but I'm sure the performance was horrible; this wasn't anything professional, I was just messing around as a kid (back when it was more common to come across platforms that hadn't gotten to SUSv2 or C99 yet). Probably a better solution would be to steal an implementation from an open source libc.
Well, Enlightenment ideals that were still based in semi-religious terminology aside, "their Creator" does not necessarily require an appeal to the supernatural.

One would, I think, be justified interpreting that to mean the physical processes of the Universe from which humankind arose (justified in interpreting the meaning of 'their Creator', not necessarily possessed of an easily established and defended position regarding how rights themselves rose from the primordial soup (which I must admit would make for an entertaining read)). Science had yet to provide an explanation for the origin of life, as I'm sure you know, and we can safely dispense with the defense that these rights come from a god. To suggest they come from the Universe is equally silly, but it's a hell of a lot better than the supernatural.

One would, I think, be more justified interpreting it properly just as you said--the Creator is humankind itself, like everything else in society. All (nearly all?) notable political theorists have built their analyses of social states on the premise that there are fundamental rights agreed to be important for all persons, for which humankind organizes governments/societies to protect and guarantee in the pursuit of justice. (I can't think of a notable theorist who has argued otherwise, but would be interested in knowing of one.)

Their appeals to the supernatural aside, the founders are certainly the creators of the rights of which we still believe we are endowed.
>We need to remind them of that fact.

“That is all very well, but who is to bell the Cat?”
-Belling the Cat, Aesop's Fables
>So far, they are a much less attractive target to malware authors than web browsers are. That alone makes me prefer them over web browsers, no matter what their theoretical vulnerabilities may be.

I sympathise but find it quite contrary that you prefer to download standalone engines over something sandboxed in the browser. Although I believe there is some unknown percentage of users who won't turn on Javascript for this game, I can only imagine that a vanishingly small percentage of those might take a stance similar to yours.

The other obvious flip-side of your argument is: Javascript has a much bigger potential audience than IF engines these days. That alone makes Javascript preferable to develop for. The security and privacy issues do not make enough of a dent in Javascript's userbase to make this a serious consideration for developers.
They must have been removed. The 8 comments that are there are quite benign
Were they ever actually an innovator, or was that just clever marketing? Either way, they have definitely gotten worse as far as tastelessly copying whatever is taking off or seems like it has potential.
What are the burgernomics of fancy fast food?
Please make a proper argument, nobody is going to read through all of that.
It's not rising as much as become a drone assimilated by the Oracle collective -- sorry, I won't use a language who's parent company packages the runtime with crapware toolbars.

Partially joking of course -- however my experience with Oracle has not been pleasant (with the exception of VirtualBox).
Responsive text + natural language processing
So if she is using the power of the human body to power a flashlight when she is 15, does that mean she'll design the technical foundation of the Matrix when she is 30? (which had the purpose to harvest the human energy)

Sorry, could not resist. Great to see our youth being creative.
Microsoft account passwords can contain up to 16 characters.
http://i.imgur.com/yJfhAqY.png

I tried to login to my Microsoft account today from my mobile phone. My password is longer than 16 characters and I received this error. It's worked in the past, but not now.

This worries me, how could entering the first 16 characters work? Wouldn't that mean the password is stored unencrypted. Besides that, why the heck are they limiting to only 16 characters? Seems like a bad security policy IMO.
> google is faster

I wonder if DDG slowness is due to its sudden popularity in the light or PRISM. I have tried to use DDG several times in the past, I went back to google because I found the results to be more relevant, but speed seemed to be an issue in pre-PRISM days.
We got Clinkle's APK and dumped it - part 1 of our teardown
Technically, we imported that from England, and just rebranded it.

We're really good at that sort of thing.
You're probably just the only two who read the comments...
> To suggest they come from the Universe is equally silly, but it's a hell of a lot better than the supernatural.

No, it's equally supernatural.

> One would, I think, be more justified interpreting it properly just as you said--the Creator is humankind itself, like everything else in society.

Rights come from your neighbors willing to fight to protect your "rights" whether its your right to life or your right to property.

And that's why rights are not universal. I'll take up arms to defend my neighbors, but not people in China or Russia.
You non-americans are hypocrites! Why, the hell, should americans think about your problems, you only think about yourselves, bla, bla, bla >:-)
Ask HN: Why is ⌥  the option key symbol?
As far as I can tell, the last time Apple manufactured a keyboard with this symbol on it was 2007 with the A1243.
Does anyone know why this is the symbol, and why Mac OSX consistently shows a symbol which appears nowhere on any of their (recent) keyboards?
Slightly off topic, but everytime I use Java I start to get this dull, drained feeling and my brain begins to slow down. And no matter how far and wide I look, applications written in Java frequently end up being slow or need many servers to perform. This is amazing to me. A verbose, mind-numbing, slow language touted as clear, compact, and fast.

I don't know how it happens, but somehow, even though it's compiled into a faster-executed runtime, many Java applications end up slow anyway.

"Powerful" language.
Apprentice.io provides devs w\ apprenticeship and connect them w\ employers
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/java/horstmann-19...

Horstmann wrote "Scala for the Impatient" (great book) and presents the issues around the language and tooling pretty fairly
I used the definition of "hacker" the creator of this site gives: http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html
This looks like it would make an excellent spying tool, if there isn't already a similar device available.
Fighting is funny - it's beneficial to keep all old weapons with you, then you can attack with 2 swords, shoot rifle and laser and use bayonet before the first sword timout finishes.

Very addictive game.
But to follow that completely, you've also made no contract by your consent to give your government the power to arrest, prosecute, or employ various armed agents to use against another who has not so consented to your government.

Treaties are an implicit social contract. The parties to a treaty are contracting binding social obligations and permissible and expected behaviors. If they were not a social contract, they would have no binding power. They may usefully be understood as a constitution of sorts between foreign powers.

Violating a treaty is violating a social contract. A social contract does not equal a constitution alone.
They say that the problem was the number of items in one queue. If this is the issue, and they have a way to handle a large number of small full queues but not a single huge one, what comes to mind is linking some "virtual queues" so that a queue is stored in many small queues, stored on different servers. Instering an item would put it in the first queue until that reaches the limit, then switch to a new one, on another server.
Now that you've brought up the subject of illusions, let's discuss some of the bigger illusions we currently agree to en masse:

1) the 30+ year war on drugs, still in effect because the masses believe the illusion that being excessively tough on crime makes for a better society.

2) 12 USC being modified by the Trading With the Enemies Act of 1917 to include "United States Citizen" [1].

3) House Joint Resolution 192 of June 5th 1933 banning gold and silver as currency, ushering in a bankruptcy with the trimmings of Keynesian Economics [2].

4) "9/11 changed everything".

5) Most relevant, NSPD-51 pulling all branches of government under the Executive during Bush II [3], and none of us caring.

Every one of the above is an illusion; handwaving by bureaucrats, that were integral for bringing us to where we are today. Why do you choose to accept/live by the above illusions? because everyone else is?

(Additionally, you may be making an Appeal to Incredulity [4], if you weren't already aware.)

[1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/12/95a

[2] http://www.focusoncommerce.net/index_htm_files/LAW%20-%20Hou...

[3] https://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nspd/nspd-51.htm

[4] http://www.rationalresponders.com/logical_fallacy_lesson_11_...
I have never heard of the movie Safe House. But you're right about that plot type. I stand corrected.
Agreed on the 'search vs id check' distinction. The case law you mention involved someone taking it up all the way to the Supreme Court, a luxury not many have.

The reality is that these border patrol checks do happen, often well outside any reasonable range of an actual border and that they tend to be aggressive and searchy and done by people and to people who most likely did not take a close reading of Almeida-Sanchez v. US.
FWIW, Even if you're using Play! from Java, the Scala compiler etc. are still being pulled in, even if it's just for compiling the routes file.
What the hell was this zeroed for? There is absolutely nothing in this post that is factually incorrect or presented in an offensive manner.

HN really should show who's voting on posts.
It's a switch. I always thought it was one of the more elegant pictograms Apple used.
Evernote's 5 Year Anniversary
I think this one hit home. Judging from what I can see right now, these revelations have stirred up some unrest among EU politicians[1], most noticeably among the generally US-friendly right. Probably the most significant consequence of this is that it will now definitely be a hot issue for the German election, which is held in autumn. There are three likely outcomes:

One possibility is that German politicians take a stand against surveillance while campaigning, making promises, thus causing Germany to become more of a pro-privacy hardliner. This would be a good outcome.

Another possibility is that mainstream politicians fail to do so, but the Pirate Party will manage to get the 5% necessary to enter parliament, thus needling them for years to come. This would also be good.

The third possibility is that mainstream politicians will ignore it and the Pirate Party will fail, causing the political leadership to see the "privacy vote" as negligible. This would be bad for both Germany and Europe.

[1] http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=...
My MacBook Air (2012) and Apple Wireless Keyboard do, in fact, have this symbol right below the "alt" label so I wouldn't say they "appear nowhere on any of Apple's recent keyboards."
The meme generator is beyond epic
Why would you think it is stored in plain text? I imagine they were probably only using the first 16 characters and silently discarding the rest.
Very accurate title. About 40 links, some you really should read, and some you maybe be aware of...

this also, re fogus' blog

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2979458

http://blog.fogus.me/2011/09/08/10-technical-papers-every-pr...
Wow, I am actually very impressed with that Gov.uk page: it was easy to follow, clear and seemed to have the right amount of detail to cover most questions without overwhelming me. It also had links to relevant outside resources.

On top of this, it actually looks pretty good--far better than I would expect a government website to look!
Why should tutorials cater to a spec which was ratified over twenty years ago and has been superseded by two subsequent standards? Sure, VS only supports C89... but anyone writing serious applications in C avoids VS if at all possible anyway.

As an aside, even VS allows // comments.
Speculation: it comes from the symbol of (electric) changeover switches: the user can choose whether current goes up or down.

Source: http://www.quora.com/Computer-Keyboards/What-is-the-origin-o...
You can use PayPal as a backend processor https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/paypal-payments-pro

No need to redirect users.
NASA's Voyager 1 Explores Final Frontier of Our 'Solar Bubble'
Ask HN: Can I DMCA my personal info from sites like RapLeaf?
"JS probably has support for better graphics assets than a regular text game interpreter."

This game was billed as a "minimalist text-based game", for which any of the standard Interactive Fiction interpreters would have been more than adequate.

Incidentally, many of these IF interpreters are able to display graphics, and sometimes even sound -- though the usefulness or appropriateness of those features in the context of IF is debatable.
What nation needed to capitulate for the previous military force authorizations against pirates on the high seas? Non-state actors are not a new development.

Personally I would say the AUMF should go away after the withdrawal from Afghanistan but let's not act like there's some magical international legal shield over AQ because they haven't taken over any other national governments.
True, the only reason Putin and China oppose intervention in Syria is because they have already fought civil wars to crush dissent in their own countries and are worried what kinds of precedents may be set if they allow Assad to be overthrown through foreign intervention. If China can't roll into Tibet with tanks and destroy separatists and if Russia can't bomb the caucuses into federal submission because the UN prevents it their own dictatorships could be screwed.

Putin also said something interesting after that high profile US/Russia intel agent prisoner exchange happened. He was asked if he thought any of the Russian agents had cooperated with the US and leaked information to them, his response was basically they wouldn't be alive if they had.

That said I do enjoy the antics of Russia Today offering Assange a F/T show and Snowden drama in order to punch the US in the balls repeatedly and politically humiliate the current administration over their declining empire and worldwide influence. The US increasingly is becoming all bark and no bite. Countries can now openly defy their bullying and demands without much consequences whereas in 2001 that was a different story.
The cameras are operated by cops. Therefore there is still abuse.
You missed the point. If WW3 in planned by those who profit from war, Syria is just the proxy state through which it may begin. It's nothing to do with the domestic affairs of Syria.
I believe it was more of a comment on why we shouldn't surprised rather than a justification of the actions.
The Spread of Link Rot.
Somehow you ended up at AskHN instead of Ask Jeeves. Did you bother to search for this before asking HN?

When I searched google the first link is:

http://www.quora.com/Computer-Keyboards/What-is-the-origin-o...

You can probably find some more links here:

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=what+is+the+origin+of+apple%27s+option+...
The Play Framework at LinkedIn: Productivity and Performance at Scale
https://marakana.com/s/post/1498/the_play_framework_at_linkedin_productivity_and_performance_at_scale
>In Cory Doctorow's book...

This is a really cool concept. You have just sold me to read this book man, I'd been putting it off for so long.
That simulated rain doesn't get anyone wet is an old saw. But it's a straw man, no one would claim otherwise. Simulated rain on a computer is just bits of electricity coursing through wires, where rain is droplets of H20 free falling and slamming into our physical bodies. But now imagine a virtual human sharing a simulation with that simulated rain. He would get wet, he would feel the rain as much as he can feel anything. So does he feel anything?

Consider Bostrom's simulation hypothesis[1]. If our universe is a simulation, would that suddenly mean that we aren't conscious, that we don't feel our rain when it hits us? Our own perceived consciousness does not prove our universe is real. It is not sufficient to say "I feel therefore I am real". A detailed simulated brain would be exactly as conscious as ours is, which is not proof either is actually conscious, but proof they are equivalent.

The confusion is the simulated brain would be part of it's world not our world. We can tie the two together with sensors and actuators, giving the virtual brain a physical presence in our world. Then it could feel our rain. Or the reverse, we could feel a simulated rain if we had a device that stimulated our skin in just the right way.

Imagine the extreme opposite of an embodied brains, a little black cube that contains a detailed virtual human with no input or output to the real world. Does it feel? Do the same experiment in reverse, imagine our world is a simulation but no one is watching it, no one is interacting, no one cares. If a virtual human stubs his toe and no one is watching, does it hurt?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis
>Except, you know, all the movies where the antagonist is actually given a backstory or character development.

The problem is that it's still oversimplifying. In movies like that the government agents become the wooden bad guys who can do no right, and then the general rule is that by the end of the movie they'll either be killed or arrested and everything will be right with the world once again.

In reality the world is not so black and white. Government agents invading privacy or otherwise breaking the law can have led long and distinguished careers and have caught legitimate bad guys. They may or not be corrupt or have illegitimate motives -- no doubt there are government officials who sincerely believe that dragnet surveillance is a good thing. You can have normal people who do bad things for good reasons, and it's still wrong and has to be stopped.

The Dark Knight kind of exemplifies the problem. Even when they're trying to give a justifiable treatment to the surveillance issue, at the end of the day the hero builds and uses the unreasonably invasive tools to save the day and is never brought to account for it by anyone. Because it allows them to be mealy mouthed pandering marketing trolls: The gung ho surveillance advocates get to see their arguments justified in fiction because the surveillance is necessary for the good guys to win while the anti-surveillance crowd gets to see the machine destroyed at the end. So Hollywood gets to avoid alienating any of the viewers by taking any kind of a real stand rather than making the hero face the hard choice and then do the right thing and catch the bad guys the right way instead of breaking the rules for expediency.
EcmaScript Discuss Archives
This product appears to be decently-executed, but the same can be said about most RSS readers. Frankly, this looks identical in both aesthetic and functionality to the dozens of other services that are attempting to supplant Reader. Feedly and Digg reader already offer this product for free. Fever, Feedspot et al. offer novel idiosyncrasies that cater to niche markets. (And "we want to be sustainable" is not a unique justification. There are a myriad of other services offering the same appeal.)

You've made a great product, but so has everyone else. Why is kouio unique, and why does it warrant $5 per month?
So "protection money", counter-assholery, or lawyers to file a nuisance suit against someone for doing a perfectly legal construction job? What a wonderful world that must be...